Wat ontdekte NASA's New Horizon bij Pluto?

In 2015 zoefde NASA's ruimtesonde "New Horizons" langs Pluto. Nu heeft het alle gegevens teruggestuurd, wat is er gezien en ontdekt? https://brilliant.org/astrum/

In deze video laat ik de reis zien die New Horizons heeft gemaakt om Pluto, de manen, de geologische kenmerken en de atmosfeer te kunnen zien.

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

04-07-2021 om 17:15 geschreven door peter  

The topic: ‘Methane on mars’ has gathered scientists’ interest, as its presence may indicate the presence of . Although methane has nothing to do with microbes, it is produced by the geological processes that involve the interaction of rocks, water, and heat.

Methane on Earth is special. Of the 1,750 parts per billion by volume (ppbv) of methane in Earth’s atmosphere, 90 to 95 percent is biological in origin

On Mars, instruments like NASA’s Curiosity rover have detected the methane gas right above the surface of Gale Crater. However, another instrument like ESA’s (the European Space Agency) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter hasn’t detected any methane higher in the Martian atmosphere.

Why does this happen? Why some instruments detect the gas while others don’t?

In 2016, Tunable Laser Spectrometer (TLS) on NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover was expected to report about the presence of a small amount of methane everywhere on Mars. The TLS has estimated less than a one-half part per billion in the volume of methane on average in Gale Crater. These estimations have been accentuated by baffling spikes of up to 20 sections for every billion in volume.

On the other hand, ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter was designed to measure methane and other gases over the whole planet. At the same time, Curiosity’s TLS is so precise, but it was quite surprising to know that ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter detects no methane.

Jolted by European orbiter findings, scientists immediately decided to study the TLS measurements on Mars.

According to some experts, the Mars rover itself was releasing the gas. Hence, scientists detected the correlations with the pointing of the rover, the ground, the crushing of rocks, the wheel degradation – you name it.

Planetary scientist John E. Moores from York University in Toronto published an intriguing prediction in 2019. “I took what some of my colleagues are calling a very Canadian view of this, in the sense that I asked the question: ‘What if Curiosity and the Trace Gas Orbiter are both right?'”

Along with Moores, other Curiosity team members studying wind patterns in Gale Crater suggested that the difference between methane measurements arose due to the time of day they’re taken.

TLS needs a lot of power to operate, especially at night, when no other Curiosity instruments work.

Moores noted, “The Martian atmosphere is calm at night, so the methane seeping from the ground builds up near the surface where Curiosity can detect it.”

“The Trace Gas Orbiter requires sunlight to pinpoint methane about 3 miles, or 5 kilometers, above the surface. Any atmosphere near a planet’s surface goes through a cycle during the day. The heat from the Sun churns the atmosphere as warm air rises and cool air sinks. Thus, the methane that is confined near the surface at night is mixed into the broader atmosphere during the day, which dilutes it to undetectable levels.”

“So I realized no instrument, especially an orbiting one, would see anything.”

Immediately, the Curiosity team decided to test Moores’ prediction by collecting the first high-precision daytime measurements. TLS measured methane consecutively over one Martian day, bracketing one nighttime measurement with two daytime ones.

With each experiment, SAM sucked in Martian air for two hours, continuously removing the carbon dioxide, which makes up 95% of the planet’s atmosphere. This left a concentrated sample of methane that TLS could easily measure by passing an infrared laser beam through it many times, one that’s tuned to use a precise wavelength of light that is absorbed by methane.

Paul Mahaffy, the principal investigator of SAM, who’s based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said, “John predicted that methane should effectively go down to zero during the day, and our two daytime measurements confirmed that. TLS’s nighttime measurement fit neatly within the average the team had already established. “So that’s one way of putting to bed this big discrepancy.”

While this study suggests that methane concentrations rise and fall throughout the day at the surface of Gale Crater, scientists have yet to solve the global methane mystery on Mars.

Experiments are underway to test whether very low-level electric discharges induced by dust in the Martian atmosphere could destroy methane or whether abundant oxygen at the Martian surface quickly destroys methane before it can reach the upper atmosphere.

Journal Reference:

1. Christopher R. Webster et al. Day-night differences in Mars methane suggest nighttime containment at Gale crater. DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202040030

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{ https://www.techexplorist.com/ }

04-07-2021 om 16:51 geschreven door peter  

Exclusive: Filmmakers hunt for the truth in new documentary trailer for 'On the Trail of UFOs: Dark Sky'

04-07-2021 om 15:58 geschreven door peter  

The UFO phenomena and its alien abduction cases go way back. In the late 1800s, a strange series of events would begin to play out across the skies of the United States, in such far-flung places as of Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Missouri, California and Arizona. People were seeing bizarre airships of some sort, usually described as massive, anywhere between 30 to 200 feet long and moving at speeds of roughly 135 to 150 mph, far beyond the dimensions and capabilities of anything at the time. One of the first sightings of these mysterious ships had been a mass sighting in November of 1896 at Sacramento, California, with hundreds of witnesses describing a giant cigar-shaped body with wheels at the sides, some calling it an “electric arc lamp propelled by some mysterious force,” with two human-looking figures seated upon an apparatus. Sightings would pour in after this, moving steadily eastward as far as Chicago, and it would reach peak weirdness with an alleged attempted alien abduction by the pilots of these mysterious vessels.

From between November 1896 and April 1897 there were thousands of reports from across a vast area of 18 states of these strange, cigar-shaped airships that resembled a flying dirigible of some sort, in some cases described as having revolving wheels, rudders, motors, sails, and a powerful beam they could project in front of them or towards the ground. In some cases, the pilots of the vessels were seen and even heard talking, although it could never be made out what they were actually saying. Some were described as having wings, others with propellers, some with no noticeable form of propulsion at all. Strange intricate machinery and contraptions were often mentioned, and all of them were completely bizarre things that no one had ever seen before, which served to sow fear in the regions where they appeared. People were truly baffled because this was an era when airships and blimps were still very rudimentary and primitive, and the Wright Brothers were years away from their flight of the Kitty Hawk. One report printed in the Quincy Morning Whig of April 1897 described a sighting at Quincy Illinois as follows:

At times it did not appear to be more than 400 or 500 feet above the ground. Men who saw the thing describe it as a long, slender body shaped like a cigar, and made of some bright metal. On either side of the hull extending outwards and upwards were what appeared to be wings. At the front end of the thing was a headlight similar to the searchlights used on steamboats.

As all of this was going on there was plenty of speculation on what was going on, ranging from the rational to the outlandish. Meteorites, Venus or other planets, stars, kites, floating Chinese lanterns, birds, and atmospheric phenomena were all mentioned, as was as pranksters and the idea that there may have been some mad inventor at work designing advanced flying machines. It got to the point that even the famous inventor Thomas Edison was questioned on his possible involvement, to which he laughed and said “I prefer to devote my time to objects which have some commercial value. At best, airships would only be toys.” Another idea was that they were aliens, “Martians” as people liked to call them at the time, and there would be at least one bizarre report that would suggest this was the case.

The very strange account was given in 1896, when a Colonel H.G. Shaw was travelling with a companion by the name of Camille Spooner in a horse and carriage in Lodi, California when the horse stopped in abject terror and refused to continue on. In a report on the incident in the Stockton Evening Mail of November 25th, 1896, Shaw would say of what happened next:

Looking up we beheld three strange beings. They resembled humans in many respects, but still they were not like anything I had ever seen. They were nearly or quite seven feet high and very slender. We were both somewhat startled, as you may readily imagine, and the first impulse was to drive on. The horse, however, refused to budge, and when we saw that we were being regarded more with an air of curiosity than anything else, we concluded to get out and investigate. I walked up to where the strange looking persons were and addressed them. I asked where they were from. They seemed not to understand me, but began – well, “warbling” expresses it better than talking. Their remarks, if such you would call them, were addressed to each other, and sounded like a monotonous chant, inclined to be guttural. I saw it was no use to attempt a conversation, so I satisfied myself with watching and examining them. They seemed to take great interest in ourselves, the horse and buggy, and scrutinized everything very carefully.

While they were thus engaged, I was enabled to inspect them as well. As I have already stated, they were seven feet in height and very slender. I noticed, further, that their hands were quite small and delicate, and that their fingers were without nails. Their feet, however, were nearly twice as long as those of an ordinary man, though they were narrow, and the toes were also long and slender. I noticed, too, that they were able to use their feet and toes much the same as a monkey; in fact, they appeared to have much better use of their feet than their hands. I presently discovered that this was probably a provision of nature. As one of then came close to me I reached out to touch him, and placing my hand under his elbow pressed gently upward, and lo and behold I lifted him from the ground with scarcely an effort. I should judge that the specific gravity of the creature was less than an ounce. It was then that I observed him try to grasp the earth with his toes to prevent my lifting him. You can readily understand that their slight weight made such a provision necessary, or they might be blown away.

They were without any sort of clothing, but were covered with a natural growth hard to describe; it was not hair, neither was it like feathers, but it was as soft as silk to the touch, and their skin was like velvet. Their faces and heads were without hair, the ears were very small, and the nose had the appearance of polished ivory, while the eyes were large and lustrous. The mouth, however, was small, and it seemed to me that they were without teeth. That and other things led me to believe that they neither ate nor drank, and that life was sustained by some sort of gas. Each of them had swung under the left arm a bag to which was attached a nozzle, and every little while one or the other would place the nozzle on his mouth, at which time I heard a sound of escaping gas. It was much the same sound as is produced by a person blowing up a football. From the description I give I do not want you to get the idea that these creatures were hideous. In appearance they were markedly the contrary. They were possessed of a strange and indescribable beauty. I can express myself in no other way. They were graceful to a degree, and more divinely beautiful than anything I ever beheld.

Shaw also made mention of very strange tools the creatures held, the size of a “hen’s egg,” and which could project “the most remarkable, intense and penetrating light one can imagine.” The mysterious beings apparently examined the horse and buggy with great interest, but this was apparently only the beginning of the weirdness, and it would soon escalate into what sems to have been a very early account of alien abduction. Shaw would say in the newspaper account of this:

Finally, they became tired of examining us and our horse and buggy, and then one of them, at a signal from one who appeared to be the leader, attempted to lift me, probably with the intention of carrying me away. Although I made not the slightest resistance, he could not move me, and finally the three of them tried it without the slightest success. They appeared to have no muscular power outside of being able to move their own limbs. Well, after trying in vain to move either of us they turned in the direction of the Woodbridge canal, near which we were, and as they flashed their lights towards the bridge we beheld a startling sight.

There, resting in the air about twenty feet above the water, was an immense airship. It was 150 feet in length at least, though probably not over twenty feet in diameter at the widest part. It was pointed at both ends, and outside of a large rudder there was no visible machinery. The three walked rapidly toward the ship, not as you or I walk, but with a swaying motion, their feet only touching the ground at intervals of about fifteen feet. We followed them as rapidly as possible, and reached the bridge as they were about to embark. With a little spring they rose to the machine, opened a door in the side, and disappeared within. I do not know of what the affair was built, but just before it started, I struck it with a rock and it gave no sound. It went through the air very rapidly and expanded and contracted with a muscular motion, and was soon out of sight. I have a theory, which, of course, is only a theory, that those we beheld were inhabitants of Mars, who have been sent to the earth for the purpose of securing one of its inhabitants.

What had gone on to be called the “Great Airship Mystery of 1896-97” would continue on after this, generating thousands of sightings of these aircraft but no further attempted abduction accounts, not even any detailed descriptions of the shadowy figures often reportedly standing atop them. It has all been written off as the product of some sort of collective delusion or mass hysteria, but does this really explain the myriad sightings made across many states? What are we to think of Shaw’s bizarre account, and how does it fit in to the larger mystery that was going on at the time? There is no way to know, and it remains a curious and very odd historical oddity.

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{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

04-07-2021 om 15:39 geschreven door peter  

China’s Zhurong rover returns landing footage and sounds from Mars

by Andrew Jones

{ https://spacenews.com/ }

04-07-2021 om 15:25 geschreven door peter  

Was President Roosevelt In Possession Of Extraterrestrial Technology?

Investigators reveal the secret history of several U.S. Presidents and their connection to the UFO phenomenon. Starting with FDR, researchers examine the startling discoveries of unidentified flying craft facing a president preoccupied by WWII.

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

04-07-2021 om 14:45 geschreven door peter  

'Truth embargo': UFOs are suddenly all the talk in Washington

After 75 years of taboo and ridicule, serious people can finally discuss the mysterious flying objects, and even skeptics say that's a good thing.

Chelsea Stahl / NBC News; Getty Images

WASHINGTON — Stephen Bassett and Mick West don’t agree on much. Bassett has devoted much of his adult life to proving UFOs are helmed by aliens, and West has devoted much of his to proving they are not.

But they both agree on one thing: It’s good that, after nearly 75 years of taboo and ridicule going back to Roswell, New Mexico, serious people are finally talking seriously about the unidentified flying objects people see in the skies.

“If you look at the level of public interest, then I think it becomes important to actually look into these things,” said West, a former video game programmer turned UFO debunker. “Right now, there is a lot of suspicion that the government is hiding evidence of UFOs, which is quite understandable because there's this wall of secrecy. It leads to suspicion and distrust of the government, which, as we’ve seen, can be quite dangerous.”

Upcoming Pentagon report sparks UFO talk in Washington, D.C.

JUNE 14, 202104:49

Later this month, the Pentagon is expected to deliver a report to Congress from a task force it established last year to collect information about what officials now call "unexplained aerial phenomena," or UAPs, from across the government after pilots came forward with captivating videos that appear to show objects moving in ways that defy known laws of physics.

While those who dabble in the unknowns of outer space are hoping for alien evidence, many others in government hope the report will settle whether the objects might be spy operations from neighbors on Earth, like the Chinese or Russians.

The highly anticipated report is expected to settle little, finding no evidence of extraterrestrial activity while not ruling it out either, according to officials, but it will jumpstart a long-suppressed conversation and open new possibilities for research and discovery and perhaps defense contracts.

“If you step back and look at the larger context of how we've learned stuff about the larger nature of reality, some of it does come from studying things that might seem ridiculous or unbelievable,” Caleb Scharf, an astronomer who runs the Astrobiology Center at Columbia University.

Suddenly, senators and scientists, the Pentagon and presidents, former CIA directors and NASA officials, Wall Street executives and Silicon Valley investors are starting to talk openly about an issue that would previously be discussed only in whispers, if at all.

“What is true, and I'm actually being serious here, is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are," former President Barack Obama told late-night TV host James Corden.

The omertà has been broken thanks to a new generation of more professional activists with more compelling evidence, a few key allies in government and the lack of compelling national security justification for maintaining the official silence, which has failed to tamp down interest in UFOs.

In a deeply polarized country where conspiracy theories have ripped apart American politics, belief in a UFO coverup seems relatively quaint and apolitical.

'Truth embargo'

Interest in UFOs waxes and wanes in American culture, but millions have questions and about one-third of Americans think we have been visited by alien spacecraft, according to Gallup.

But those questions have been met with silence or laughter from authorities and the academy, leaving a vacuum that has been filled by conspiracy theorists, hoaxsters and amateur investigators.

West, the skeptic, thinks the recent videos that kicked off the latest UFO craze, including three published by the New York Times and CBS’ “60 Minutes,” can be explained by optical camera effects. But he would like to see the U.S. government thoroughly investigate and explain UFOs.

The government has examined UFOs in the past but often in secret or narrow ways, and the current Pentagon task force is thought to be relatively limited in its mission and resources.

West pointed to models from other countries like Argentina, where an official government agency investigates sightings and publishes its findings, the overwhelming majority of which are traced to unusual weather, human objects like planes or optical effects.

“This is something that we could do here,” West said. “But right now we're left with people like me, who are just enthusiasts.”

John Podesta, a Democratic poobah who has held top jobs in several White Houses, has called on President Joe Biden’s White House to establish a new dedicated office in the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, which would help get the issue out of the shadows of the military and intelligence community.

Podesta, who has harbored an interest in UFOs since at least his days as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, recently told Politico, “It was kind of career-ending to basically talk about this subject. That has clearly switched, and that's a good thing.”

Believers are unsurprisingly thrilled by the culture shift.

“The ‘truth embargo’ is coming to an end now,” said Bassett, the executive director of Paradigm Research Group and the only registered lobbyist in Washington dedicated to UFO disclosure. “I am elated to finally see this movement achieving its moment.”

Bassett is convinced the government is covering up proof of extraterrestrial life and that everything happening now is elaborate political theater to make that information public in the least disruptive way possible — a view, of course, not supported by evidence or most experts.

“This is the most profound event in human history that's about to be taking place,” he said.

But you don’t have to be a believer to believe that poorly understood things should be investigated, not ignored.

"We don't know if it's extraterrestrial. We don't know if it's an enemy. We don't know if it's an optical phenomenon," said new NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, a former astronaut and Florida senator, in a recent CNN interview. “And so the bottom line is, we want to know."

Two former CIA directors — John Brennan, who served under Obama, and James Woolsey, who served under Clinton — recently said in separate podcast interviews that they’ve seen evidence of aerial phenomena they can’t explain. John Ratcliffe, who was the director of national intelligence under then-President Donald Trump, told Fox News in March there were “a lot more sightings than have been made public.”

Cold War and fish farts

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, pushed the government to conduct the UFO report. For him, it’s a question of national security and understanding whether rivals like China or Russia have developed advanced technology we don’t know about.

“I want us to take it seriously and have a process to take it seriously,” Rubio told “60 Minutes.”

For others, like Ravi Kopparapu, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and Jacob Haqq-Misra, a research scientist with the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, it’s about discovery.

"For too long, the scientific study of unidentified flying objects and aerial phenomena — UFOs and UAPs, in the shorthand — has been taboo," they wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. "If we want to understand what UAP are, then we need to engage the mainstream scientific community in a concerted effort to study them."

Scharf looks for life on other planets and is a bit tired of people asking him if alien life has visited us on ours, but he said looking more at the skies could yield information about how our own world works.

“Stuff like this has a scientific interest not because we're necessarily thinking we're going to find aliens, but maybe there's an unknown phenomenon or a collection of phenomena that are giving rise to some of these sightings,” he said. “There's never been a systematic effort to categorize and catalog stuff that people see, and from the past, we know that some of this stuff sometimes turns out to be interesting.”

The history of science is filled with accidental discoveries and incidents where the hubris of religious or scientific authorities dismissed something as ridiculous that later proved true. Scientists didn’t believe meteorites really came from space until the early 1800s, for instance.

Government secrecy can lead to confusion and misunderstanding that might be cleared up with the help of a wider circle of experts and investigators.

Sweden spent years futilely chasing what it thought were Russian submarines off its coast. But when the navy let civilian researchers listen to a recording of the alleged submarine, they figured out it was actually the sound of schools of fish farting.

Important people have had an interest in UFOs for a long time; they just didn’t really talk about it.

Former President Jimmy Carter claimed to have seen a UFO while he was governor of Georgia and even filed two formal reports of his observations. Former President Ronald Reagan allegedly told people he saw one too while riding in a small plane, according to the pilot, who was quoted in a book by John Alexander, the former Army colonel whose paranormal investigations were featured in the book and movie “The Men Who Stare at Goats.”

As the Cold War intensified in the 1950s, U.S. officials worried the Soviet Union would use a UFO hoax to drum up fear in the American public. Civilians started seeing what they believed were UFOs but were actually secret spy planes, like the U-2, so the government settled on a policy of silence and denial.

''Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights,” according to a secret CIA study that was declassified in the late 1990s, The New York Times reported then. ''This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.''

The very real government stonewalling fed bogus conspiracy theories, which came to dominate the study of UFOs and made the topic even more off-putting to serious scholars.

A new generation

In recent years, though, a newer generation of activists has been at center of recent high-profile disclosures thanks to a more professional, careful and credible approach. They include people with serious national security credentials like Christopher Mellon, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, and Luis Elizondo, the former Army counterintelligence special agent who led an earlier Pentagon team to investigate UFOs.

The budget for Elizondo’s team — a modest $22 million in the scheme of defense spending — was secured by former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, a powerful ally who has helped drive the resurgence of interest in UFOs.

The newer activists have worked with mainstream news outlets to deliver evidence and eye witnesses that meet their high editorial standards and are careful when speaking to general audiences to avoid talking about aliens — though Mellon and Elizondo have appeared on controversial podcaster Joe Rogan’s show as well as "Coast to Coast A.M.," a long-running radio program devoted to conspiracies and the paranormal.

Both the skeptics and the believers don’t expect the Pentagon report to settle anything. Instead, they hope it will start something new.

“The idea of some super powerful aliens coming to visit us is a very compelling story,” West said. “So if you get even a tiny little taste of something like that, it really spices up the story.”

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{ https://www.nbcnews.com/ }

04-07-2021 om 00:33 geschreven door peter  

Aliens who have been rescued from crashed UFOs reveal what they want from us (video)

The tragic events of September 11th are not to be laughed at. The lives lost on that day will be remembered forever, and we will never trivialize the case.

But, as well-known as this tragedy is, did you know it wasn’t the only tragic occurrence to occur during that time period?

About two days before the crisis on 9/9, a UFO from the future landed on Earth, and when the aliens descended from their spacecraft, they started showing us what they had been trying to teach us all along.

Since the video was leaked, don’t expect it to be in flawless condition. Former President Jimmy Carter was the one who first released it, and he said that it is top-secret video that could never have been made public.

{ https://mysteriousthing.com/ }

04-07-2021 om 00:12 geschreven door peter  

Earth’s Largest-Ever Lake Engulfed Europe and Asia 12 Million Years Ago

In-depth research has shed new light on the astonishing and awe-inspiring history of the Paratethys Sea. This 12-milion-year-old megalake was formed in Eurasia by the same tectonic shifts that created many European and Asian mountain ranges. It was the Earth’s largest lake, covering more area than the modern-day Mediterranean Sea .

Until now, not much was known about the lake’s geological history, or about its relationship to the surrounding environment. But two new studies have revealed some fascinating information about how the Paratethys Sea was created, how it disappeared, and how its fluctuations in size and shape ultimately influenced the evolution of modern animal species.

Chart showing the comparison between the water volume of the Paratethys Sea and that of other water bodies. 

Utrecht University )

The Rise and Fall of the Earth’s Largest Lake

Under the leadership of paleo-oceanographer Dan Palcu from the University of São Paulo in Brazil, an international team of geologists, geographers, and evolutionary biologists performed a detailed analysis of fossils and geological samples taken from the area that was once covered by the Paratethys Sea. They recently disclosed their mind-blowing discoveries in the journal Scientific Reports , and it seems their work has solved many of the mysteries involving the life and death of this massive inland body of water.

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At its peak size, the Paratethys Sea covered an area of approximately 1.7 million square miles (2.8 million square kilometers), the researchers report. It bisected the Eurasian continental mass, flooding the lands of what is now Central Europe and creating a watery border that separated northern from southern Asia. Before climate change caused it to shrink, the Paratethys Sea extended from the eastern Alps to what is now the nation of Kazakhstan.

The Paratethys Sea was created through the collisions of moving tectonic plates, explains Sid Perkins in Science. These movements created huge mountains that thrust up and through the existing prehistoric ocean and enclosed one section of it, trapping a massive quantity of ocean water inland. The researchers estimate that the lake’s volume surpassed the astonishing figure of 1.1 cubic miles (1.77 cubic kilometers), which is 10 times more than the volume of water held in all of today’s fresh and saltwater lakes combined.

The remnants of the Earth’s largest lake include Bulgaria’s Cape Kaliakra cliffs (above) overlooking the Black Sea.

( ValentinValkov / Adobe Stock)

How Climate Change Affected the World’s Largest Lake

During the Miocene Epoch, which lasted from 23 million years ago to about five million years ago, the Eurasian climate gradually became dryer. Rainfall levels fell, and the Paratethys Sea was significantly affected by the ongoing climate change. This drying of the climate was not steady, but was instead marked by a series of long-term droughts.

Palcu and his team identified four separate drying events that caused the Paratethys Sea to shrink in size, with the most dramatic shift occurring in the period between 7.9 and 7.65 million years ago. Over this time span the lake lost one-third of its volume and two-thirds of its surface area, with water levels falling by up to 250 meters (820 ft) at areas of greatest depth.

These catastrophic changes caused the salinity of the lake to increase dramatically. This decimated many of the unique species that had evolved there over the nearly five million years the lake had been separated from the world’s larger oceanic ecosystem. "It must have been a post-apocalyptic prehistoric world, an aquatic version of the wastelands from Mad Max," explained Wout Krijgsman, a geologist and study co-author in a Utrecht University press release .

Smaller versions of dolphins, seals, and whales were among the creatures known to have lived in the Paratethys Sea. Spikes in salinity caused these mammals to go extinct, creating evolutionary dead ends. Only a few of the hardiest species (like certain types of mollusks) were able to survive the changes the lake underwent as its size decreased.

The end came for the Paratethys Sea between 6.9 and 6.7 million years ago. Erosion caused a massive breach in its southwest coastline, forming a rampaging river that eventually drained the lake’s remaining water into the Mediterranean.

Based on the fossil record, scientists know know that the Paratethys Sea was once home to unique species, such as the Cetotherium riabinini, the smallest known whale on record.

( Pavel Gol’Din / Lena Godlevska )

How the Paratethys Sea Shaped the Evolution of African Wildlife

Research by another team of scientists, published in May 2021 in  Communications Earth & Environment , has helped publicize the surprising connection between the Paratethys Sea and the evolution and eventual migration of African wildlife.

Fossil finds have shown that the ancestors of giraffes, elephants, and other large mammals that reside on the African savannah originally lived along the southern shores of the Paratethys Sea. They survived by grazing on the grasslands that were formed when the lake’s water levels declined, carving out a niche in a unique ecosystem.

At some point, these large mammals left the area and migrated to the southwest. They eventually settled in Africa and evolved into their modern forms after that. The reason why this migration took place has never been clear, and that motivated evolutionary biologist Madelaine Böhme, from the University of Tübingen in Germany, to launch a study designed to solve this enduring mystery.

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

03-07-2021 om 23:54 geschreven door peter  

The Nine Unknown Men: An Ancient Indian Secret Society

There is a pervasive legend in India of a secret organization that allegedly has a vast amount of advanced knowledge in their possession. Believed to have been formed over 2000 years ago, the Nine Unknown Men is widely suspected of manipulating political and societal trends in order to further the personal goals of the Nine. But is such a secret organization a reality or is it merely the stuff of legend?

An Origin Story Like No Other…

The society of the Nine Unknown Men was formed shortly after 226 BC by Emperor Ashoka. Grandson of the legendary Emperor who unified the Indian subcontinent, Chandragupta, Ashoka was anxious to uphold his grandfather’s legacy and maintain the empire. In the region between Calcutta and Madras, the Kalingan’s resisted the imperial rule, leading to an all-out war.

Ashoka’s vastly superior forces are said to have killed over 100,000 of Kalinga’s warriors and deported over 150,000 of the region’s villagers. Even though he had won the war, Ashoka was aghast at the carnage such a victory entailed. From then on, he swore off violence forever.

Relief from Sanchi showing Ashoka on his chariot. First century BC.

(Photo Dharma/ CC BY 2.0 )

Emperor Ashoka is best known for his conversion to Buddhism and his efforts to spread the peaceful religion throughout India as well as Malaya, Ceylon, and Indonesia. His efforts contributed to Buddhism’s later rise in China, Nepal, Tibet, and Mongolia. Ashoka was a sworn vegetarian but did not force others to do likewise. Indeed, he was incredibly tolerant of other religious sects. He did, however, prohibit the consumption of alcohol.

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Most importantly, “he renounced the idea of trying to integrate the rebellious people, declaring that the only true conquest was to win men’s hearts by observance of the laws of duty and piety, because the Sacred Majesty desired that all living creatures should enjoy security, peace, and happiness and be free to live as they pleased” (Pauwels and Bergier). So committed was the Emperor to this mission that he sought to prevent his fellow man from putting their intelligence towards perpetrating evil, particularly the evil involved with warfare.

King Ashoka.

(Prarthana1830590/ CC BY-SA 4.0 )

The task of collecting, preserving, and containing all knowledge was too great for one emperor to do alone, not the least because of the other duties required in ruling an empire. So Ashoka summoned nine of the most brilliant minds in India at the time. For security purposes, the identity of these men was never made public. Together, these geniuses formed a secret society that came to be known as the Nine Unknown Men.

What Did The Nine Unknown Men Study?

The organization set up accumulating all the scientific knowledge they could, from natural science to psychology to the composition of matter. Fearing that if ordinary men were given scientific knowledge they would use it for destruction, only the Nine Men were allowed to study and develop scientific theories and technology. To better accomplish this daunting task, each of the nine was charged with a specific book that he was to update, revise, and ultimately perfect the knowledge therein.

When one of the nine could no longer complete the task – whether from the wish to retire, fading health, or death - the obligation was passed to a chosen successor. The number of members in the society was always to be nine. Thus the society of the Nine Unknown Men has allegedly lived on for over 2000 years.

Portrait of a young Indian scholar, Mughal miniature by Mir Sayyid Ali, circa 1550 AD. ( Public Domain )

Speculation about the contents of each of the nine books varies widely. Talbot Mundy, an English writer, published a book entitled The Nine Unknown Men in 1923, which contained a list of the nine books. This list has come to be generally accepted.

• “Propaganda: The first book dealt with techniques of propaganda and psychological warfare. “The most dangerous of all sciences is that of molding mass opinion, because it would enable anyone to govern the whole world,” according to Mundy.
• Physiology: The second book discussed physiology and explains how to kill a person simply by touching him or her, known as the “the touch of death,” simply by the reversal of a nerve impulse. It is said that the martial art of Judo is a result of “leakages” from the second book.
• Microbiology: The third volume focused on microbiology and biotechnology.
• Alchemy: The fourth dealt with alchemy and transmutation of metals. According to another legend, in times of severe drought, temples and religious relief organizations received large quantities of gold from “a secret source.”
• Communication: The fifth book contained a study of all means of communication, terrestrial and extraterrestrial. Alluding then that the Nine Unknown Men were aware of alien presence.
• Gravity: The sixth book focused on the secrets of gravitation and actual instructions on how to make the ancient Vedic Vimana, (like Vaiminika Shastra on aerospace technology).
• Cosmogony: The seventh contained cosmogony and matters of the universe.
• Light: The eighth dealt with light, including the speed and how to use it as a weapon.
• Sociology: The ninth and final book discussed sociology. It included rules for the evolution of societies and the means of foretelling their decline.” (Mundy paraphrased by Ancient Explorers)

Is the Secret Society Fact or Myth?

But were the Nine Unknown Men real? Ashoka may very well have asked nine men of unknown identity to gather scientific knowledge, particularly with regards to its application to warfare. This was a very fractious time and other Emperors have been known to order similar initiatives. These men may have explored different empires’ battle tactics and training, weapons manufacturing, horse/elephant handling, and maybe even gunpowder usage.

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However, an ancient group living on in secrecy for over 2000 years, controlling global events from the remote jungles of India with not a hint of modern equipment, infrastructure, or technology is hard to believe. For many, the legend is most likely just a legend.

Has the ancient group of the Nine Unknown Men been working in secrecy for over 2000 years?

( Jakub Krechowicz /Adobe Stock )

• Top Image: What’s the true story behind the Nine Unknown Men? Source: Jakub Krechowicz /Adobe Stock

By Kerry Sullivan

Updated on June 9, 2021.

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{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

03-07-2021 om 23:37 geschreven door peter  

NASA’S MARS ROVER JUST REACHED A NEW AREA AND IT’S BEAUTIFUL

THE SANDY DUNES OF MARS NEVER LOOKED THIS GOOD.

Sandy Dunes

NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover is making another pit stop on its journey to probe the surrounding Jezero Crater for signs of ancient life.

“I’ve made it to my next lookout, overlooking a spot we’re calling ‘Séítah,'” the rover’s official account tweeted just now.

“It’s an area of dunes with some good science targets in and around it,” the rover added. “I’ll spy a few from here, doing science from afar, then circle around and keep exploring.”

As promised, the views are extraordinary, as seen in a panorama accompanying the update — a reminder of the countless landscapes we have yet to see for ourselves on the Red Planet and beyond.

Rover Journey

The six-wheeled rover officially kicked off its science phase on June 1, leaving the “Octavia E. Butler” landing site where it touched down earlier this year.

It has since covered roughly 0.57 miles, according to geolocation data, making several stops along the way to explore its surroundings.

The Séítah (“amidst the sand” in the Navajo language) geological unit is adjacent to the crater-filled floor of Jezero, dubbed the Crater Floor Fractured Rough. The Séítah area is filled with layered rocks and sand dunes.

“Starting with the Crater Floor Fractured Rough and Seitah geologic units allows us to start our exploration of Jezero at the very beginning,” said Kevin Hand, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a June 9 statement.

“This area was under at least 100 meters [328 feet] of water 3.8 billion years ago,” he added. “We don’t know what stories the rocks and layered outcrops will tell us, but we’re excited to get started.”

On Auto

Thanks to Perseverance’s sophisticated “AutoNav” mode, which essentially turns it into a self-driving car, the rover is about to really get going.

“I’m getting a good feel for driving, and starting to take charge more to find my own way,” the rover’s account tweeted today. “By mapping while I drive, I may be able to cover up to 5 or 6 times more distance in a day. Good, since there’s so much to get to!”

More on Perseverance: 

• NASA Releases Breathtaking Panorama From New Rover

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{ https://futurism.com/the-byte }

03-07-2021 om 23:13 geschreven door peter  

Most Americans think intelligent aliens exist, and half think they have visited Earth

03-07-2021 om 22:40 geschreven door peter  

Based on new analysis of data collected by the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (or MARSIS), Mars may have dozens of lakes hidden underneath the planet’s south pole.

We already know that Mars has water as data collected by Europe’s Mars Express spacecraft revealed evidence of a large subsurface lake around the south pole area back in 2018. It is located approximately a mile (1.6 kilometers) underneath the surface of the planet and measures about 12 miles in width (19.3 kilometers). The MARSIS instrument then detected three more underground lakes – all measuring around 6 miles in width (9.7 kilometers).

And now, new research has suggested that there may be much more water under the Red Planet’s south pole that experts previously didn’t know about. Aditya Khuller, who is an Arizona State University doctoral student, as well as Jeffrey Plaut from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California and MARSIS co-principal investigator, studied 44,000 observations of the planet’s south pole area that were collected by MARSIS over a time frame of 15 years.

They discovered dozens of radar reflections that looked like the previous four lakes found in the region. What’s even more incredible was that these signals were detected pretty close to the surface of the planet where the cold temperatures would make it impossible to have liquid water – at least that’s what was previously believed.

In a statement, Plaut described their findings, “We’re not certain whether these signals are liquid water or not, but they appear to be much more widespread than what the original paper found,” adding, “Either liquid water is common beneath Mars’ south pole, or these signals are indicative of something else.”

If these signals actually are liquid water, how is it possible that it hasn’t frozen over with the extremely cold temperatures? Mars has an average surface temperature of minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 62 degrees Celsius) which would certainly freeze water. One possibility (but highly unlikely) is volcanism as Khuller addressed in the same statement, “…we haven’t really seen any strong evidence for recent volcanism at the south pole, so it seems unlikely that volcanic activity would allow subsurface liquid water to be present throughout this region.”

How much water is actually on Mars?

While experts still aren’t exactly sure as to what the radar reflections were picking up, if it is liquid water located relatively close to the surface, this would be incredible news regarding how much water is on the Red Planet and if there could be any potential life. Their study was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters where it can be read in full.

Pictures taken of Mars’ south pole can be seen here.

The bright white region of this image, captured by Europe's Mars Express spacecraft in December 2012, shows the icy cap that covers Mars’ south pole, composed of frozen water and frozen carbon dioxide. 

(Image credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/Bill Dunford)

The colored dots represent sites where bright radar reflections have been spotted by ESA’s Mars Express orbiter at Mars’ south polar cap. Such reflections have previously been interpreted as subsurface liquid water, but their prevalence and proximity to the surface suggests they may be something else. 

Image credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech)

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

03-07-2021 om 22:18 geschreven door peter  

Meteor that blasted millions of trees in Siberia only 'grazed' Earth, new research says

By Mindy Weisberger - Senior Writer  

This destructive cosmic event has puzzled scientists for more than a century

A mysterious blast in 1908, thought to have been caused by a meteor, flattened a Siberian taiga forest. This photo was taken in 1938, during an expedition by Russian mineralogist Leonid Kulik, investigating the event. 

(Image credit: Sovfoto/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

A new explanation for a massive blast over a remote Siberian forest in 1908 is even stranger than the mysterious incident itself.

Known as the Tunguska event, the blast flattened more than 80 million trees in seconds, over an area spanning nearly 800 square miles (2,000 square kilometers) — but left no crater. A meteor that exploded before hitting the ground was thought by many to be the culprit. However, a comet or asteroid would likely have left behind rocky fragments after blowing up, and no "smoking gun" remnants of a cosmic visitor have ever been found. 

Now, a team of researchers has proposed a solution to this long-standing puzzle: A large iron meteor hurtled toward Earth and came just close enough to generate a tremendous shock wave. But the meteor then curved away from our planet without breaking up, its mass and momentum carrying it onward in its journey through space.

• Related: Crash! 10 biggest impact craters on Earth

On the morning of June 30, 1908, the sky above Siberia flared so bright and hot that a witness standing dozens of kilometers from the site thought that his shirt had caught fire, said Vladimir Pariev, co-author of the new Tunguska study and a researcher with the P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. 

Following the bright light, which lasted for about 1 minute, was an explosion that smashed windows and knocked people off their feet in a town more than 35 miles (60 km) away, the BBC reported. "The sky was split in two, and high above the forest the whole northern part of the sky appeared covered with fire," another witness said in a testimonial. Energy released by the blast was later estimated by scientists to be 185 times greater than that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, according to NASA.

Initial explanations for the blast included volcanic eruptions and mining accidents, according to NASA, but those claims were not supported by physical evidence. Other later suggestions were more far-fetched, such as a crashed UFO or a black hole collision with Earth — a study describing the black hole hypothesis was published in the journal Nature in 1973 (and was soundly debunked in another Nature study published just a few months later).

The most widely accepted scientific explanation is that a rocky asteroid or comet entered Earth's atmosphere and then disintegrated with a bang about 3 to 6 miles (5 to 10 km) above the ground, Pariev told Live Science in an email. But such an explosion should have strewn the ground with rocky debris, which no one has ever found. By comparison, a meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February 2013 broke into fragments that were discovered within a week, Pariev said.

What if, the researchers questioned, the Tunguska meteor were made of iron rather than rock? Could a massive iron meteor "graze" Earth's atmosphere, approaching close enough to generate a powerful shock wave, then yank free of the planet's gravitational pull and escape without fragmenting?

• Related: Top 10 ways to destroy Earth

To test that hypothesis, the scientists calculated meteor paths using computer models. They looked at objects that were as small as 164 feet (50 meters) across and as large as 656 feet (200 m) in diameter. Objects were made of rock, ice or iron, and approached in a trajectory that brought them within 6 to 10 miles (10 to 15 km) of Earth's surface. 

The scientists' calculations showed that space bodies made of rock and ice would completely disintegrate under the enormous pressures generated by their passage through the tropospheric altitudes. "Only asteroids made of iron larger than 100 m [328 feet] in diameter can survive and not get cracked and fragmented into many separate pieces," they said. 

The researchers estimated that the Tunguska meteor likely measured between 328 and 656 feet (100 and 200 m) in diameter, and hurtled through Earth's atmosphere at roughly 45,000 mph (72,000 km/h). During its fiery passage, the meteor would lose some of its mass. But iron shed by a meteor traveling at such speeds would have escaped as gas and plasma, oxidized in the atmosphere and then dispersed on the ground, becoming nearly indistinguishable from terrestrial iron oxides, according to the study.

Prior studies have calculated the power of shock waves produced by meteors based on the object entering Earth's atmosphere at a very steep angle "and either hitting the ground or exploding in midair," Pariev said. 

In the case of the Tunguska meteor, the iron-rich space object could have entered Earth's atmosphere at a very shallow angle — about 9 to 12 degrees tangential to the surface. It then would have grazed through the atmosphere, creating a shock wave at an altitude of around 6 to 10 miles (10 to 15 km) above the ground, capable of flattening trees for hundreds of kilometers and scorching the surface. But because of the meteor's mass and momentum, it didn't break up; it then exited the atmosphere and returned to space, the researchers reported.

• Related: Space-y Tales: The 5 strangest meteorites

However, some lingering questions about this scenario remain, said Mark Boslough, a research professor at the University of New Mexico and physicist with Los Alamos National Laboratory. 

Boslough, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email that if an object "skimmed through the atmosphere" and didn't blow up, the resulting shock wave would be significantly weaker than an explosion's blast wave.

"An object that survived such a transit through the atmosphere could not have descended close enough to the surface for a sonic boom to do the kind of damage that was observed at Tunguska," Boslough said. 

What's more, the pattern of felled trees at the site is radial — emanating from a single point of tremendous energy release, he said. That's something you'd expect to see after an explosion rather than a sonic boom, "even if it had been strong enough to blow trees over." Boslough added that eyewitness accounts at the time of the incident "are consistent with an object that was descending toward the surface before it exploded." 

While the study authors didn't numerically calculate the impact of a shock wave that a "grazing" iron meteor of this size could produce, their estimates still suggest that such a wave would be powerful enough to flatten trees and damage the ground as the Tunguska event did, Pariev said in the email.

"Detailed calculations of the shock waves from a grazing asteroid is the subject of our ongoing research," he added.

The findings were published online in the March issue of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

• Fallen stars: A gallery of famous meteorites
• In photos: The impact craters of North America
• When space attacks: The 6 craziest meteor impacts

Originally published on Live Science.

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{ https://www.livescience.com/ }

03-07-2021 om 21:32 geschreven door peter  

Japan is opening up a UFO lab near the Fukushima nuclear disaster to research the enigma after a flurry of local sightings of unidentified flying objects

• Japan is opening up a research lab dedicated to unexplained phenomena 

• The International UFO Laboratory opened on June 24, the day before the Pentagon released its 9-page report on unidentified aerial phenomena   

• The lab will 'strive to unravel the enigma' of UFOs 

• Its director is Takeharu Mikami, the editor-in-chief of Mu occult magazine

• The lab will look into various sightings, including the Mount Senganmori incident in the 1970s 

• It will be in Iiono, miles away from the Fukushima nuclear disaster 

By CHRIS CIACCIA FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

Nearly a year after it was reported the Japanese Defense Ministry would draw up plans for any potential encounters with UFOs, the country is opening up a research lab dedicated to unexplained phenomena near the site of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.   

According to Japanese news outlet The Mainichi, the International UFO Laboratory opened up on June 24, the day before the Pentagon released its 9-page report on unidentified aerial phenomena.

The lab, which is on the grounds of UFO Interactive Hall, will 'strive to unravel the enigma' of these objects and its director will be 51-year-old Takeharu Mikami, the editor-in-chief of Mu occult magazine.

'Until now, even if UFOs were discovered, the information was shared only on an individual level,' Mikami was quoted as saying by the news outlet. 

'I hope the research lab will serve as a base receiving information, and lead to new discoveries. I'd like to get to the bottom of their identity.'

Japan is opening up a research lab dedicated to unexplained phenomena near the site of the Fukushima nuclear disaster

Its director is Takeharu Mikami, the editor-in-chief of Mu occult magazine. The lab will look into various sightings, including the Mount Senganmori incident in the 1970s

The new lab is located in Iino, Fukushima Prefecture, just miles from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (Fukushima-1) in Okuma, Fukushima. 

The UFO lab will look into a number of sightings that have occurred near the district, which calls itself the 'hometown of UFOs.'

In the 1970s, a light-emitting cone-shaped object was witnessed near Mount Senganmori, which eventually became known as the Mount Senganmori incident.

Mikami wants residents of the area to share images with the laboratory.

'Particularly during quarantine, look up at the sky and see if you can see anything. I hope the research institute will be a base for receiving more information on UFOs so we can get to the bottom of what they are,' Mikami said in a translated article from Kyodo News.  

In May 2020, the Japanese Defense Ministry began to 'consider procedures to respond to, record and report encounters, but the unknown nature of such objects may confuse Self-Defense Forces pilots, including those of F-15 fighter jets,' according to Nippon News. 

The update from the Defense Ministry came just one week after the Pentagon officially released three videos of unidentified aerial phenomena taken by Navy aircraft which had circulated in the public for years. 

In April 2020, the Pentagon officially released three videos of unidentified aerial phenomena taken by Navy aircraft which had circulated in the public for years

On June 25, the long-awaited report from the Pentagon on the subject of 'unidentified aerial phenomenon' (UAPs) offered no explanation for 140 of the 144 observations dating back to 2004

Last week, the long-awaited report from the Pentagon on the subject of 'unidentified aerial phenomenon' (UAPs) offered no explanation for 140 of the 144 observations dating back to 2004.

The declassified June 25 report, which came from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, added that it lacks sufficient data to determine the nature of mysterious flying objects.

'In 18 incidents, described in 21 reports, observers reported unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics,' the report reads.

'Some UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion. In a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings.

'The UAPTF holds a small amount of data that appear to show UAP demonstrating acceleration or a degree of signature management. Additional rigorous analysis are necessary by multiple teams or groups of technical experts to determine the nature and validity of these data. 

'We are conducting further analysis to determine if breakthrough technologies were demonstrated.'  

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

03-07-2021 om 18:44 geschreven door peter  

Cheryl Teh 

International UFO Laboratory

• A UFO research lab has opened in Fukushima to study UFO encounters.

• The International UFO Laboratory is based in Iino, a rural town known for strange occurrences.

• The opening of the Fukushima facility comes amid a marked increase in interest in UFOs worldwide.

• Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Close encounters of the third kind, anyone? 

If you're tired of UFO research going nowhere in the US and inconclusive Pentagon reports, you're in luck. A lab in Japan is looking to dive deep into the enigmas of the universe.

The new UFO lab opened its doors last week in the rural town of Iino, Fukushima Prefecture, and its team plans to delve into the mysteries of the country's odd and inexplicable sightings. 

According to a report by local Japanese news outlet The Mainichi, the International UFO Lab opened on the premises of the UFO Interactive Hall, a facility filled with some 3,000 pieces of UFO-related materials and clues. The facility celebrated its opening on June 24, which was dubbed UFO Day after the first reported UFO sighting in the US. 

The research center will be headed by UFO enthusiast Takeharu Mikami, per the Japan Times. Mikami runs a monthly magazine called Mu, which explores a "wide range of themes such as UFOs, superscience, psychic powers, cryptids, and ancient civilizations."

While Mikami does not appear to have a professional background in science, he intends to work with the UFO museum's curator, Tsugio Kinoshita, to study these flying objects, per local news outlet Fukushima Minpo News. And according to the lab's website, they are looking for scientists — and the UFO-obsessed — alike to contribute to their records of UFO sightings. 

Mikami appealed to residents of the town to share materials like smartphone images with the center, wrote Kyodo News.

"Particularly during quarantine, look up at the sky and see if you can see anything. I hope the research institute will be a base for receiving more information on UFOs so we can get to the bottom of what they are," said Mikami to Kyodo News.

The Institute was located there because the surrounding area is known for unexplainable aerial sightings since the 1970s, per a Yahoo! Japan report. One of these events included a bright cone-shaped object soaring above the town that was spotted in the 70s, according to Asahi News. 

There were so many weird events taking place in the town of Iino that the city became known as the "Home of UFOs." Alien enthusiasts also made their way to Mount Senganmori, a remote, pyramid-like hill known for UFO sightings, in the hope of getting a rare glimpse of a flying saucer.

{ https://www.insider.com/ }

03-07-2021 om 18:33 geschreven door peter  

On June 30, veteran UFO researcher Richard Dolan released a leaked summary of the classified version of the UAP report delivered to the US Senate five days earlier. The alleged summary asserts that members of Congress were informed of eight breakthrough propulsion technologies being studied and tested at Nevada’s Area 51 and Tonopah Test Range. None of the advanced propulsion technologies were deployed outside of these testing facilities, according to the summary, and therefore none of craft identified in the June 25 UAP report belong to the US.

This Exopolitics Today podcast examines competing claims over whether evidence exists that such craft have been successfully built and deployed by different branches of the US military.

Available on Rumble and YouTube

Podcast References

• Richard Dolan’s June 30 Podcast is available here.
• The leaked summary is available here.

Further Reading/Listening

• June UAP Report will Confirm UFOs are Real but Intel Community disagrees over their Origins
• Is Deep State silencing Insiders that threaten ‘UFOs are a National Security Threat’ Narrative?
• Tic Tac UFOs Revealed in 2005 Briefing to be Secret USAF Spacecraft
• Limited Hangout vs Full Disclosure of Reverse Engineered Alien Spacecraft
• U.S. Congress & Pentagon briefed that UFOs are not made on this earth
• US Congress asks for UFO Report from Intel Community in 180 days

The Untold History of America's Reverse Engineering of Alien Spacecraft from EXOPOLITICS.ORG

We are on the verge of an official report being delivered by the Intelligence Community to the US Senate acknowledging the reality of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs/UFOs) as an unknown national security threat. The Deep State will use all its political and media assets to perpetuate a major lie over the origin of these craft and the threat they pose. In fact, it is well known by many within the intelligence community that most of the UAPs/UFOs seen over the US and around the world are reverse engineered extraterrestrial spacecraft.

In the immediate post-World War II era, leaked documents reveal that the US military embarked on an ambitious research and development program aiming to reverse engineer recovered extraterrestrial spacecraft. Military laboratories, government funded think-tanks, scientific advisory groups, and leading aerospace corporations collaborated in trying to understand the highly advanced alien technologies, but their combined efforts resulted in limited progress. This is because most of the retrieved craft were Trojan horses, insofar as the technologies were too advanced for Earth’s scientific community, thereby luring US policy makers into seeking extraterrestrial assistance.

Technological breakthroughs only occurred with the assistance of German scientists brought into the US through Operation Paperclip with links to a breakaway German colony in Antarctica, and with extraterrestrial entities found at crash sites willing to assist. There appeared to be two distinct alien factions willing to share their technology secrets with the US military. Eventually, several agreements were reached during the Eisenhower administration which made reverse engineering possible, and major aerospace companies were enlisted for projects that received the highest security classification possible. These covert reverse engineering efforts led to the development of advanced technologies used in multiple secret space programs underway today.

In the meantime, the US intelligence community initiated a sophisticated psychological warfare operation to hide these reverse engineering programs, the reality of extraterrestrial life, and the existence of a German space program out of Antarctica. Today, we are on the verge of an official disclosure initiative that is best described as a Limited Hangout designed to deceive and mislead the public. It will depict UFOs as an unknown national security threat, requiring massive military investments and further, instigate new levels of public fear through controlled media manipulation.

In order to understand what is coming, everyone needs to know the historical background which illuminates many of the lies already being spun around disclosure. This is particularly the case when it comes to an emerging disclosure narrative that is likely to acknowledge the existence of recovered extraterrestrial craft, while depicting US reverse engineering efforts as historically unsuccessful.

In this webinar, Dr. Michael Salla, author of the best-selling Secret Space Programs series will reveal the full extent of the massive reverse engineering efforts set up in the US, and how this relates to the scheduled June 2021 Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon report to be delivered to the US Congress.

Pre-Order Now - Scheduled Release is June 21, 2021

{ https://exopolitics.org/ }

03-07-2021 om 18:18 geschreven door peter  

Livable Conditions

First, they suggest that Mars had large bodies of water on the surface. That’s already a pretty well-accepted hypothesis, though, as more and more evidence of ancient rivers and lakes has piled up in recent years. But beyond that, the researchers say in the paper that whenever this ancient lake was around, Mars must have also low, temperate temperatures so that the lake didn’t immediately freeze or evaporate away. And then in order to actually form these clay deposits, that time period must have lasted for millions of years.

Again, that’s not direct evidence that life exists or ever existed on Mars. But a temperate, aqueous era that lasted that long would have given any budding life forms enough time to emerge and proliferate before the Martian environment turned into the frozen hellscape it is today — and that’s intriguing.

• READ MORE: Glauconitic-like clay found on Mars suggests the planet once had habitable conditions [Phys.org]
• More on Martian lakes: The Lakes of Mars Likely Dried Up Multiple Times Before Vanishing

{ https://futurism.com/the-byte }

03-07-2021 om 18:00 geschreven door peter  

A new quantum paradox throws the foundations of observed reality into question

by Eric Cavalcanti, The Conversation

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Perhaps not, some say.

And if someone is there to hear it? If you think that means it obviously did make a sound, you might need to revise that opinion.

We have found a new paradox in quantum mechanics—one of our two most fundamental scientific theories, together with Einstein's theory of relativity—that throws doubt on some common-sense ideas about physical reality.

Quantum mechanics vs common sense

Take a look at these three statements:

1. When someone observes an event happening, it really happened.
2. It is possible to make free choices, or at least, statistically random choices.
3. A choice made in one place can't instantly affect a distant event. (Physicists call this "locality.")

These are all intuitive ideas, and widely believed even by physicists. But our research, published in Nature Physics, shows they cannot all be true—or quantum mechanics itself must break down at some level.

This is the strongest result yet in a long series of discoveries in quantum mechanics that have upended our ideas about reality. To understand why it's so important, let's look at this history.

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

The battle for reality

Quantum mechanics works extremely well to describe the behavior of tiny objects, such as atoms or particles of light (photons). But that behavior is … very odd.

In many cases, quantum theory doesn't give definite answers to questions such as "where is this particle right now?" Instead, it only provides probabilities for where the particle might be found when it is observed.

For Niels Bohr, one of the founders of the theory a century ago, that's not because we lack information, but because physical properties like "position" don't actually exist until they are measured.

And what's more, because some properties of a particle can't be perfectly observed simultaneously—such as position and velocity—they can't be real simultaneously.

No less a figure than Albert Einstein found this idea untenable. In a 1935 article with fellow theorists Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, he argued there must be more to reality than what quantum mechanics could describe.

The article considered a pair of distant particles in a special state now known as an "entangled" state. When the same property (say, position or velocity) is measured on both entangled particles, the result will be random—but there will be a correlation between the results from each particle.

For example, an observer measuring the position of the first particle could perfectly predict the result of measuring the position of the distant one, without even touching it. Or the observer could choose to predict the velocity instead. This had a natural explanation, they argued, if both properties existed before being measured, contrary to Bohr's interpretation.

However, in 1964 Northern Irish physicist John Bell found Einstein's argument broke down if you carried out a more complicated combination of different measurements on the two particles.

Bell showed that if the two observers randomly and independently choose between measuring one or another property of their particles, like position or velocity, the average results cannot be explained in any theory where both position and velocity were pre-existing local properties.

That sounds incredible, but experiments have now conclusively demonstrated Bell's correlations do occur. For many physicists, this is evidence that Bohr was right: physical properties don't exist until they are measured.

But that raises the crucial question: what is so special about a "measurement"?

The observer, observed

In 1961, the Hungarian-American theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner devised a thought experiment to show what's so tricky about the idea of measurement.

He considered a situation in which his friend goes into a tightly sealed lab and performs a measurement on a quantum particle—its position, say.

However, Wigner noticed that if he applied the equations of quantum mechanics to describe this situation from the outside, the result was quite different. Instead of the friend's measurement making the particle's position real, from Wigner's perspective the friend becomes entangled with the particle and infected with the uncertainty that surrounds it.

This is similar to Schrödinger's famous cat, a thought experiment in which the fate of a cat in a box becomes entangled with a random quantum event.

For Wigner, this was an absurd conclusion. Instead, he believed that once the consciousness of an observer becomes involved, the entanglement would "collapse" to make the friend's observation definite.

But what if Wigner was wrong?

Our experiment

In our research, we built on an extended version of the Wigner's friend paradox, first proposed by Časlav Brukner of the University of Vienna. In this scenario, there are two physicists—call them Alice and Bob—each with their own friends (Charlie and Debbie) in two distant labs.

There's another twist: Charlie and Debbie are now measuring a pair of entangled particles, like in the Bell experiments.

As in Wigner's argument, the equations of quantum mechanics tell us Charlie and Debbie should become entangled with their observed particles. But because those particles were already entangled with each other, Charlie and Debbie themselves should become entangled—in theory.

But what does that imply experimentally?

Our experiment goes like this: the friends enter their labs and measure their particles. Some time later, Alice and Bob each flip a coin. If it's heads, they open the door and ask their friend what they saw. If it's tails, they perform a different measurement.

This different measurement always gives a positive outcome for Alice if Charlie is entangled with his observed particle in the way calculated by Wigner. Likewise for Bob and Debbie.

In any realization of this measurement, however, any record of their friend's observation inside the lab is blocked from reaching the external world. Charlie or Debbie will not remember having seen anything inside the lab, as if waking up from total anesthesia.

But did it really happen, even if they don't remember it?

If the three intuitive ideas at the beginning of this article are correct, each friend saw a real and unique outcome for their measurement inside the lab, independent of whether or not Alice or Bob later decided to open their door. Also, what Alice and Charlie see should not depend on how Bob's distant coin lands, and vice versa.

We showed that if this were the case, there would be limits to the correlations Alice and Bob could expect to see between their results. We also showed that quantum mechanics predicts Alice and Bob will see correlations that go beyond those limits.

Next, we did an experiment to confirm the quantum mechanical predictions using pairs of entangled photons. The role of each friend's measurement was played by one of two paths each photon may take in the setup, depending on a property of the photon called "polarization." That is, the path "measures" the polarization.

Our experiment is only really a proof of principle, since the "friends" are very small and simple. But it opens the question whether the same results would hold with more complex observers.

We may never be able to do this experiment with real humans. But we argue that it may one day be possible to create a conclusive demonstration if the "friend" is a human-level artificial intelligence running in a massive quantum computer.

What does it all mean?

Although a conclusive test may be decades away, if the quantum mechanical predictions continue to hold, this has strong implications for our understanding of reality—even more so than the Bell correlations. For one, the correlations we discovered cannot be explained just by saying that physical properties don't exist until they are measured.

Now the absolute reality of measurement outcomes themselves is called into question.

Our results force physicists to deal with the measurement problem head on: either our experiment doesn't scale up, and quantum mechanics gives way to a so-called "objective collapse theory," or one of our three common-sense assumptions must be rejected.

There are theories, like de Broglie-Bohm, that postulate "action at a distance," in which actions can have instantaneous effects elsewhere in the universe. However, this is in direct conflict with Einstein's theory of relativity.

Some search for a theory that rejects freedom of choice, but they either require backwards causality, or a seemingly conspiratorial form of fatalism called "superdeterminism".

Another way to resolve the conflict could be to make Einstein's theory even more relative. For Einstein, different observers could disagree about when or where something happens—but what happens was an absolute fact.

However, in some interpretations, such as relational quantum mechanics, QBism, or the many-worlds interpretation, events themselves may occur only relative to one or more observers. A fallen tree observed by one may not be a fact for everyone else.

All of this does not imply that you can choose your own reality. Firstly, you can choose what questions you ask, but the answers are given by the world. And even in a relational world, when two observers communicate, their realities are entangled. In this way a shared reality can emerge.

Which means that if we both witness the same tree falling and you say you can't hear it, you might just need a hearing aid.

• Quantum physics: Our study suggests objective reality doesn't exist

{ https://phys.org/ }

03-07-2021 om 17:40 geschreven door peter  

For several decades—well over half a century, in fact—information has been collected about unidentified aerial phenomena.

That’s what they’re called in modern parlance, at least. Prior to the last few years, these mysteries of the skies were more commonly known as unidentified flying objects or UFOs. This had been the name given to them by Edward Ruppelt, the first director of Project Blue Book, the United States Air Force’s systematic study of anomalous aerial phenomena that ran from March 1952 until December 1969. The program was the successor to a pair of previous studies, Project Sign and Project Grudge, undertaken by the USAF beginning in the late 1940s.

Project Blue Book, although it had been the longest-running government study of UFOs to date, produced limited results regarding the potential that an unrecognized form of technology existed and operated in our skies. Among its primary findings had been three main points:

• “No UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force was ever an indication of threat to our national security.”
• “There was no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as ‘unidentified’ represented technological developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge.”
• “There was no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as ‘unidentified’ were extraterrestrial vehicles.”

This might all be news to anyone who hasn’t been following the UFO/UAP subject now for more than the last few years. In fact, it might also be news to the most recent government group that has been convened to analyze the problem, which appeared to frame its analysis of the issue within a narrow period spanning only the last few years.

Recently, a widely anticipated government report on UFOs was recently delivered to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence by the Navy’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF). In it, we learned that our government has been using a formalized method of collecting reports on UAP encountered by our military since early 2019, involving a refined mechanism for the collection of data on such reports that subsequently was adopted by the USAF in late 2020. Based on this, the Navy’s UAPTF has analyzed 144 incidents that have been logged since 2004, the majority of which occurred within the last two years.

To summarize their conclusions: all but one of these incidents remain unexplained, and the technology behind them could represent both a hazard to aviators, as well as a “challenge” to United States National Security.

Despite the merit of the Task Force’s analysis of recent reports involving UAP, it leaves much to be desired. For instance, the nine-page report—which also consists of a cover page, and appendixes at the back—leaves us with a total of just six pages that are actually related to the discussion of what the UAPTF learned from studying UAP reports during its short time in operation. What’s more, of the 144 reports that were logged, there were no details provided that gave any specific information about any of these incidents… not even one.

Indeed, the UAPTF report leaves much to be desired for longtime followers of the UFO topic. Also contained within the report are a few curiosities; take, for instance, the following excerpt regarding the USAF’s involvement, and its limited participation in the analysis of the phenomenon in question:

“Although USAF data collection has been limited historically the USAF began a six-month pilot program in November 2020 to collect in the most likely areas to encounter UAP and is evaluating how to normalize future collection, reporting, and analysis across the entire Air Force.”

Obviously, the report’s authors must have meant that the USAF has played a “limited” role in the recent collection of information on this topic, which the UAP Task Force relied upon for its analysis. However, many who read this when the report appeared online were no doubt aware of the irony in the statement: the one branch of the military that actually did undertake what remains the single longest study of unidentified flying objects in American history with Project Blue Book is now considered to have participated in “data collection [that] has been limited historically”?

Of course, there are other issues the public version of the UAPTF report presents, and we must recognize that this is also considered to be nothing more than a preliminary report, as its title aptly conveys. Nonetheless, many Americans and others around the world had probably been hoping for a bit more from our government about its involvement with the study of UAP.

Perhaps with time, there will be additional analysis and even portions of the classified version of the report that will be obtained and released by diligent transparency advocates who make frequent use of the Freedom of Information Act. However, for the time being, it appears that “what you see is what you get,” and in light of that, the American public has been left wanting on the subject of UFOs, or whatever else people may choose to call them.

It certainly isn’t the first time it has happened either… indeed, some things really don’t ever change, do they?

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

03-07-2021 om 17:19 geschreven door peter