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 2 MONTH.
ON 06/08/2024 MORE THAN 2.161.100
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...
08-08-2021
Major General John A. Samford On UFO And “Flying Saucers”, Pentagon, Washington, DC, 07/31/1952
Major General John A. Samford On UFO And “Flying Saucers”, Pentagon, Washington, DC, 07/31/1952
The first featured film was shot four months after the genesis of Project Blue Book, and two days after a press conference held by the Air Force to address a rash of UFO sightings over Washington, D.C. In this interview, Major General John A. Samford explains the Air Force’s mandate to identify and analyze potential threats that come by air, while also assuring the citizenry that there was no known threat. Also present in this film to offer a differing opinion is Major Donald Keyhoe. Keyhoe was a vocal believer in the existence of extraterrestrial visitors. His book, The Flying Saucers are Real, is referenced in this interview.
The Real Story of the ‘Bearded God’ Named Quetzalcoatl
The Real Story of the ‘Bearded God’ Named Quetzalcoatl
Many myths have cropped up in the centuries since Columbus landed upon the shores of Hispaniola. While some of these myths have come to be seen for what they are, many more persist in the zeitgeist as fact. One such myth is that the Aztecs believed that Hernan Cortes, the leader of a band of conquistadors, was in fact a reincarnated deity by the name of Quetzalcoatl.
As the story goes, the Aztec believed in a white, bearded god named Quetzalcoatl, who, long ago, had disappeared into the east. Before he left, however, he promised to return. When Cortes and his crew of Spaniards came ashore in Mexico in 1519, many thought they were gods.
And when their march inland took them to the Aztec emperor’s doorstep, he recognized who Cortes truly was. A pious man, Montezuma proclaimed Cortes was in fact Quetzalcoatl himself, come to fulfill the prophecy. He then graciously handed over the keys to his empire to the bearded, white god.
This tale has become so pervasive in the modern ethos that I even learned it in my 9th grade world history class. Told by our teacher that this story was historical fact, I went on believing the myth for years. It wasn’t until graduate school, when I became more interested in the history of the Atlantic World and the colonial societies it produced, that I learned that the story of a white bearded god named Quetzalcoatl was a myth.
In this article, I’d like to explore this myth, examining why it’s untrue, how it came about, and why both European and Indigenous people of post-Conquest Mexico came to believe in it. But first, let’s quickly delve into the history of the real Quetzalcoatl and his theological origins in Mesoamerica.
The Real Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent
The Plumed Serpent made his first appearance in the archaeological record over 2,000 years ago. In the heartland of the Olmec civilization, at a site known as La Venta in the present-day state of Tabasco, Mexico, archaeologists discovered a carving of a snake sporting a beak and feathered crest, with birds (or quetzal in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs ) on either side. Under the Olmecs, La Venta flourished from 900 BC to somewhere between 300 and 200 BC. Credited as the mother of civilization in Mesoamerica, the Olmec spread their culture throughout the region, including their belief in the Plumed Serpent deity.
A photo of La Venta Stela 19, the earliest known representation of the Feathered Serpent in Mesoamerica.
The next great civilization that left signs of worshiping Quetzalcoatl was Teotihuacan. While scholars do not know who built and inhabited this magnificent ancient city, its people etched their reverence for Quetzalcoatl into stone. The site contains three large pyramids: the Pyramid of the Sun, the Citadel, and the Temple of Feathered Serpent.
Built around 150 AD, the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, also known as the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, was the third largest pyramid in the city. Made up of seven tiers, the facade of the pyramid swarms with carvings of snakes. The symbolism of Quetzalcoatl here is intriguing.
Archaeologists have argued that the ornate headdresses found on the serpents represent time. This suggests the people of Teotihuacan gave Quetzalcoatl a role in the creation of the calendar, a role he would continue to play in later civilizations. Though Teotihuacan lay abandoned by 750 AD, it represents an important point in the evolution of Quetzalcoatl in Mesoamerican thought.
By the time the Aztecs emerged on the scene in fourteenth-century Mesoamerica, Quetzalcoatl had become an important god for many peoples of the region. And during the centuries of the Aztecs’ rise to power, the god came to play a variety of roles in Aztec belief .
For one, they credited him with the creation of the universe, humanity, the calendar, and their most important crop, corn. The Aztecs also drew upon long standing traditions that associated Quetzalcoatl with science, arts, and learning, as well as the planet Venus. And, as if this were not enough, he was also closely associated with rain.
Despite the various roles and deeds ascribed to Quetzalcoatl in Aztec theology, he was not the most important god worshipped in Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire. Indeed, nowhere in the traditions of the Aztec, or the Olmec, Toltec, Maya, or numerous other cultures for that matter, did the Plumed Serpent god disappear, promising one day to return.
So how did this myth come about? As with most historical phenomena, many events fed into the Cortes-as-Quetzalcoatl legend, like tributaries into a river. Perhaps one of the first to occur, chronologically, was a simple matter of mistranslation.
When the Spanish arrived on the Mexican coast in 1519, they were a complete unknown in the Mesoamerican world. Thus, as the Spanish made their way inland, the towns they passed, and sometimes destroyed, had no idea what to call them.
In sixteenth-century Mesoamerica, part of a person’s identity was their city of origin or the social role they filled. Eventually, Nahuatl speakers denoted the Spaniards as Caxtilteca, or people of Castile; but that was years in the future. For now, no one knew from whence the Spanish had come, and so could not label them in traditional fashion.
It seems, however, that many people in the region were impressed with Spanish guns and horses. After all, nothing like this existed in Mexico at the time. When the Spanish recorded the interactions they had with the various peoples of central Mexico, they noted that these people called them ‘teotl.’ In Nahuatl, teotl can mean god, and this was the translation the Spaniards latched onto.
But, teotl had other meanings as well. As historian Matthew Restall explains, “it could be combined with other words… to qualify them not as specifically godly or godlike, but as fine, fancy, large, powerful, and so on.”
Impressed by the horses and goods the Spanish brought with them, the people who met Cortes on his march inland surmised the Europeans were important people. And, lacking any other way to distinguish them in speech, used the word ‘teotl’ to denote this, which later Spanish chroniclers misinterpreted as ‘god.’
Not So Reverent Actions
If the Aztecs had truly believed that Cortes was a god, Cortes himself would certainly have made note of it. But in all the letters he wrote to King Charles V in which he attempted to establish political and moral legitimacy for the war he started, he never mentions it. Even when describing his first encounter with Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, Cortes portrays Montezuma as recognizing the Spaniard’s humanity. In a letter to Charles V, Cortes recounted how Montezuma told him, “See that I am of flesh and blood like you and all other men, and I am mortal and substantial.”
Whether or not Montezuma ever actually spoke those words, we can never know. But, if the Aztec emperor had proclaimed Cortes’s divinity, why did the conquistador leave it out of his letter? Surely, such a thing would have gone far in his attempts to justify the conquests he sought in the New World.
Additionally, in the midst of the battle for that conquest, the Aztec did not sit passively by and watch the Spanish take their capital of Tenochtitlan. While they found Spanish horses and guns rather fascinating, the Spaniards themselves had quickly worn out their welcome.
In traditional Aztec warfare, soldiers captured enemies for sacrifice, which was thought to be an honorable death. In their war against the conquistadors, however, Aztec warriors delivered a devastating blow to the back of their opponent’s head whenever they could. In pre-conquest Tenochtitlan, such a death had been reserved for the city’s criminals.
Through the re-examination of the word ‘teotl’ and closer look at the actions we know the Aztecs took in regards to the Spanish presence , we can say with certainty they did not view Cortes as a god. To get a better understanding of how this myth came to permeate both European and Mesoamerican histories of the conquest, we need to examine the works of prominent thinkers in post-conquest Mexico.
Planting the Seeds of a Myth
One of the most prominent of these thinkers is the Franciscan friar Toribio de Benavente, known to history as Motolinía. While in the decades following the Aztec-Spanish War, many Spanish chroniclers made mention of the variant forms of teotl used to identify the conquistadors, most left it at that. They simply observed its use, telling their readers it translated as ‘god’ or ‘gods’ and moved on. But Motolinía took it a step further.
He saw this mistranslation as evidence of God’s approval. Writing about the conquest and post-conquest era while living in the Valley of Mexico as a missionary, Motolinía noted that the Nahua people “called the Castilians teteuh, which is to say gods, and the Castilians, corrupting the word, said teules.” For Motolinía, the use of this word denoted that the Mesoamericans had been awaiting the Spanish arrival. As Restall notes, this “anticipation… proved the Conquest was part of God’s plan for the Americas.”
Some 30 years after Motolinía scribbled those words, the Cortes-as-Quetzalcoatl myth reached its penultimate form in the work of Bernardino de Sahagún. Known as the Florentine Codex , this gargantuan work comprised 12 books that took around 45 years to compile.
Spaniards disposing of the bodies of Moctezuma and Itzquauhtzin in the Florentine Codex.
An intelligent man with an aptitude for languages, Sahagún travelled to Mexico as part of the Franciscan order’s attempts to convert the Indigenous populations to Christianity. During his time there, Sahagún learned to speak Nahuatl.
With his newly earned Nahuatl skills, Sahagún recruited the children of Nahua elites to work with him on creating the Codex. With Sahagún essentially filling the role of project manager, his Nahua assistants wrote most of the Florentine Codex .
This gave the Codex a decidedly Indigenous point-of-view on the conquest of Mexico. Yet, in this text composed by young Aztec scholars in the decades following the conquest, we see the following depiction of Montezuma preparing for Cortes’s arrival:
“When Moteucçoma heard the news, he immediately sent people for the reception of Quetzalcoatl, because they thought it was him who was coming, because they were expecting him daily.”
Even though the form of the Cortes-as-Quetzalcoatl myth so many of us were taught as children didn’t come about until the 1560s, some forty years following the fall of the Aztec empire, both European and Nahua populations had reason to buy into it.
By the time the Florentine Codex was published, the days of the conquistadors were long gone and Spain’s New World empire established. For some Europeans, the notion of Indigenous inferiority sufficed as an explanation for the success of the Spanish conquistadors. Other Spaniards who immigrated to the colony built on the ruins of the Aztec empire, known as New Spain, undoubtedly observed the unjust treatment the Indigenous populations faced at the hands of the Spanish empire.
Luckily, the Cortes-as-Quetzalcoatl myth helped to assuage, at least in part, whatever guilt colonists may have felt. As historian Camilla Townsend put it, the myth showed that “the Europeans had not only been welcomed, they had been worshipped.”
The Nahua had the opposite question to answer: How did we fall from power? The Nahua who helped Sahagún create the Florentine Codex knew the Indigenous populations of the New World were not inferior to the Europeans. After all, their ancestors had built the most sophisticated city in the world, Tenochtitlan, and the Aztec empire had never before known defeat. And on top of that, they had personal memories of fathers and grandfathers who had fought against Cortes and his conquistadors.
To account for the fall of the Aztec from power, the Nahua writers of the Florentine Codex ascribed a generally positive attribute, piety, to their ancestors, rather than the negative attribute used by some Europeans, inferiority. By explaining the Aztec loss through this positive lens, the Nahua of post-conquest Mexico could remain confident in their ancestor’s strength and intelligence, while also accounting for their defeat in the Aztec-Spanish War. Could Montezuma and his empire be blamed for losing if they had been stunned, even just temporarily, by overwhelming reverence to their gods?
The Cortes-as-Quetzalcoatl myth had been building steam for a few decades before work on the Florentine Codex began. By the 1560s, it had reached its final form, the one that survives to this day. In order to truly understand what happened in the years of the Spanish invasion and conquest of Mexico, indeed to understand the history of European colonization in general, we must expose this myth, and others like it, as falsehood.
Myths like this deny agency to the colonized, cause European victory to seem inevitable when it was not, and keep us from knowing the true, much more interesting story.
Top Image:Quetzalcoatl, detail. Source: Manzanedo/ Deviant Art
Meet our sun's 'solar twin': NASA discovers a nearby star that may be just 600million-years-old and looks like a young version of the sun… and it could shed light on how life formed on Earth
Meet our sun's 'solar twin': NASA discovers a nearby star that may be just 600million-years-old and looks like a young version of the sun… and it could shed light on how life formed on Earth
NASA astronomers used multiple observations to study a nearby young star
Kappa 1 Ceti has a similar mass, radius, temperature and brightness to the sun
The star is much younger than the sun at just 600 to 750 million years-old
This means astronomers can use it as an analogue for a young solar system
In a NASA study they looked at the likely power of stellar winds from the star
A nearby star that looks like a young version of the sun has been discovered by NASA astronomers, and it could shed light on how life on Earth first formed.
The star, Kappa 1 Ceti has a similar mass and surface temperature to our sun, is about 30 light years away, the team from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland said, adding it is just 600 to 750 million-years-old.
The sun is considered middle-aged, at 4.6 billion-years-old, so finding a similar star in its younger years can help understand conditions in the early solar system.
'The work allows scientists to better understand how [the sun] may have shaped the atmosphere of our planet and the development of life on Earth,' said NASA.
Part of the work involved studying coronal mass ejections and stellar winds flowing from the young star to see how the sun's expulsions may have impacted the Earth.
Illustration of what the sun may have been like four billion years ago, around the time life developed on Earth
An artist concept of a coronal mass ejection hitting young Earth's weak magnetosphere
HOW DO STARS FORM?
Stars form from dense molecular clouds - of dust and gas - in regions of interstellar space known as stellar nurseries.
A single molecular cloud, which primarily contains hydrogen atoms, can be thousands of times the mass of the sun.
They undergo turbulent motion with the gas and dust moving over time, disturbing the atoms and molecules causing some regions to have more matter than other parts.
If enough gas and dust come together in one area then it begins to collapse under the weight of its own gravity.
As it begins to collapse it slowly gets hotter and expands outwards, taking in more of the surrounding gas and dust.
At this point, when the region is about 900 billion miles across, it becomes a pre-stellar core and the starting process of becoming a star.
Then, over the next 50,000 years this will contract 92 billion miles across to become the inner core of a star.
The excess material is ejected out towards the poles of the star and a disc of gas and dust is formed around the star, forming a proto-star.
This is matter is then either incorporated into the star or expelled out into a wider disc that will lead to the formation of planets, moons, comets and asteroids.
It is impossible to go back billions of years to the early solar system and see what the sun was like when life first formed on planet Earth.
However, there are more than 100 billion stars within the Milky Way, with one in ten of which are of a similar size and luminosity to our own star.
Many of these stars are in the early stages of development.
'Imagine I want to reproduce a baby picture of an adult when they were one or two years old, and all of their pictures were erased or lost,' said study author Vladimir Airapetian from NASA.
'I would look at a photo of them now, and their close relatives' photos from around that age, and from there, reconstruct their baby photos,' he said.
'That's the sort of process we are following here – looking at characteristics of a young star similar to ours, to better understand what our own star was like in its youth, and what allowed it to foster life on one of its nearby planets.'
Kappa 1 Ceti is one such solar analogue star, within our stellar neighbourhood.
The star is located about 30 light-years away, which NASA says in space teerms is like living on the next street over.
Study second author, Meng Jin, a heliophysicist with the SETI Institute and the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in California said it is a 'twin' of the sun when it was young.
The team adapted existing models of the solar system to try and predict some of the more difficult to measure characteristics of Kappa 1 Ceti.
This includes the strength of stellar winds and coronal ejections coming from the star as they flow out towards any potential planets - yet to be formed or discovered - within the system.
They used data from a range of space telescopes include Hubble, TESS, NICER and the ESA XMM-Newton satellites.
Like human toddlers, young stars are known for their high bursts of energy and activity - released in the form of a stellar wind.
Stellar winds, like stars themselves, are mostly made up of a superhot gas known as plasma, created when particles in a gas have split into positively charged ions and negatively charged electrons.
The most energetic plasma, with the help of a star's magnetic field, can shoot off away from the outermost and hottest part of a star's atmosphere, the corona, in an eruption, or stream more steadily toward nearby planets as stellar wind.
'Stellar wind is continuously flowing out from a star toward its nearby planets, influencing those planets' environments,' Jin said.
Global structure of the stellar magnetic corona of 1 Ceti in 2012 (left) and 2013 (right panel), with the superimposed plasma pressure along the field lines specified by the colour bars.
KAPPA 1 CETI: A TWIN OF THE YOUNG SUN
Name: Kappa 1 Ceti Constellation: Cetus
Known planets: None
Spectral type: G5
RA: 03h 19m 21.6960s
DEC: +03° 22′ 12.712″
Distance: 29.81 light years
Mass: 1.037 solar masses
Radius: 0.95 solar radius
Luminosity: 0.85 times the sun
Temperature: 9,814 F
Age: 600-750 million years
Kappa 1 Ceti is a yellow dwarf star 30 light years away from the Earth in the constellation of Cetus.
It has a rapid rotation, once every nine Earth days and so far no exoplanets have been discovered.
It is regarded as a good candidate to host terrestrial planets similar to Earth.
It is about the mass of the sun, with a radius 95 per cent that of our own star, but is only 85 per cent as bright.
It is relatively young, at a few hundred million years old making it a good candidate to explore the sun's past. Younger stars tend to generate hotter, more vigorous stellar winds and more powerful plasma eruptions than older stars do.
Such outbursts can affect the atmosphere and chemistry of planets nearby, and possibly even catalyse the development of organic material – the building blocks for life – on those planets.
Stellar wind can have a significant impact on planets at any stage of life.
But the strong, highly dense stellar winds of young stars can compress the protective magnetic shields of surrounding planets, making them even more susceptible to the effects of the charged particles.
The sun is a perfect example of this process and how it changes over the lifetime of the star - from youth to middle-age.
Compared to now, in its toddlerhood, our sun likely rotated three times faster, had a stronger magnetic field, and shot out more intense high-energy radiation.
These days, for lucky spectators, the impact of these particles is sometimes visible near the planet's poles as aurora, or the Northern and Southern Lights.
Airapetian said that four billion years ago these lights would have been visible from many more different places around the globe than they are today.
That high level of activity in our sun's early years may have pushed back Earth's protective magnetosphere, and provided the planet with the right atmospheric chemistry for hte formation of the first biological molecules.
This wouldn't have happened for Venus, which was close enough to have its atmosphere torched, or Mars too far away for the radiation to reach at strength.
Similar processes could be unfolding in stellar systems across our galaxy and universe including in Kappa 1 Ceti.
'It's my dream to find a rocky exoplanet in the stage that our planet was in more than four billion years ago, being shaped by its young, active star and nearly ready to host life,' Airapetian said.
'Understanding what our sun was like just as life was beginning on Earth will help us to refine our search for stars with exoplanets that may eventually host life.'
The team used multiple instruments including Hubble and TESS to study the star to see how it compares to the young sun
THE SUN: YELLOW DWARF STAR IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM
Name: Sun Known planets: Eight Spectral type: G2 Distance: 2.7×10^17 km Mass: 1.9885×10^30 kg Radius: 696,342 km Luminosity: 3.828×10^26 W Temperature: 9,929 F Age: 4.6 billion years
The Sun is the star at the heart of the Solar System, it is a nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, radiating energy supporting life on Earth.
It has a diameter of 1.39 million km, and is 330 times the mass of the Earth.
Three quarters of the star is made of hydrogen, followed by helium, oxygen, carbon, neon and iron.
It is a G-type main sequence star and is sometimes called a yellow dwarf.
The Sun formed from the gravitational collapse of matter in a large molecular cloud that gathered in the centre.
The rest flattened into an orbiting disc that formed planets, moons, asteroids and comets.
Multiple agencies have sent instruments into space capable of measuring the stellar winds from the sun - but it is not yet possible to directly observe the stellar wind of other stars in our galaxy, like Kappa 1 Ceti, because they are too far away.
When scientists wish to study an event or phenomenon that they cannot directly observe, scientific modelling can help fill in the gaps.
While scientists have previously modelled the stellar wind from this star, Airapetian said they used more simplified assumptions than the new NASA study.
The basis for the new model of Kappa 1 Ceti is the Alfvén Wave Solar Model, which is within the Space Weather Modelling Framework, that works by inputting known information about a star, including its magnetic field and ultraviolet emission line data, to predict stellar wind activity.
When the model has been tested on our Sun, it has been validated and checked against observed data to verify that its predictions are accurate.
'It's capable of modelling our star's winds and corona with high fidelity,' Jin said.
'And it's a model we can use on other stars, too, to predict their stellar wind and thereby investigate habitability. That's what we did here.'
Previous studies have drawn on data gathered by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to identify Kappa 1 Ceti as a young solar proxy, and to gather the necessary inputs for the model, such as magnetic field and ultraviolet emission line data.
'Every model needs input to get output,' Airapetian said, adding that to get useful output the input needs to be from a solid data source, or multiple sources.
'We have all that data from Kappa 1 Ceti, but we really synthesised it in this predictive model to move past previous purely observational studies of the star.'
The team is now working on a project looking more closely at the particles that may have emerged from early solar flares, as well as prebiotic chemistry on Earth.
The researchers hope to use their model to map the environments of other Sun-like stars at various life stages.
Specifically, they have eyes on the infant star EK Dra – 111 light-years away and only 100 million years old – which is likely rotating three times faster and shooting off more flares and plasma than Kappa 1 Ceti.
Documenting how these similar stars of various ages differ from one another will help characterise the typical trajectory of a star's life.
Their work, Airapetian said, is all about 'looking at our own Sun, its past and its possible future, through the lens of other stars.'
Clouds of electrons blooming in deep space have been revealed in a whole new level of detail, showing cosmic phenomena unlike anything astronomers have seen before.
Resembling eerie dancing ghosts in space, these colossal specters could reveal new information about the behavior of supermassive black holes – and the complex environment between galaxies.
They are, astronomers discovered, being produced by winds from two active supermassive black holes at a distance of about a billion light-years. They have been named PKS 2130-538, and much about them remains mysterious.
While the 'ghosts' and the two radio galaxies thought responsible for their formation have been seen before, no previous observations have captured them in such glory.
The ghosts, and the galaxies making them.
(Norris et al., arXiv, 2021)
"When we first saw the 'dancing ghosts' we had no idea what they were," explained astrophysicist Ray Norris of Western Sydney University and CSIRO in Australia.
"After weeks of work, we figured out we were seeing two 'host' galaxies, about a billion light-years away. In their centers are two supermassive black holes, squirting out jets of electrons that are then bent into grotesque shapes by an intergalactic wind.
"New discoveries however always raise new questions and this one is no different. We still don't know where the wind is coming from? Why is it so tangled? And what is causing the streams of radio emission? It will probably take many more observations and modelling before we understand any of these things."
The peculiar objects were just one in a trove made by the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope array, as part of its Pilot Survey of the EMU (Evolutionary Map of the Universe) survey.
One of the most sensitive radio telescopes ever built, and the world's fastest survey radio telescope, ASKAP is designed to see deep into the radio Universe and reveal secrets we had no idea were out there.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No – it's an ORC!
(Norris et al., arXiv, 2021)
That's exactly what it's doing. Last year, the survey revealed the presence of what have been called Odd Radio Circles, or ORCs, which seem to be giant circles of radio emission a million light-years across, surrounding distant galaxies. We still don't know what they are.
To date, the EMU pilot survey has amassed a catalogue of around 220,000 sources of various sorts, many of which had never even been suspected.
"We are even finding surprises in places we thought we understood," Norris said.
"Next door to the well-studied galaxy IC5063, we found a giant radio galaxy, one of the largest known, whose existence had never even been suspected. Its supermassive black hole is generating jets of electrons nearly 5 million light-years long. ASKAP is the only telescope in the world that can see the total extent of this faint emission."
Giant, previously invisible galaxy plumes.
(Norris et al., arXiv, 2021)
Most known radio sources are from active supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies. This is because as these black holes devour matter, material is funneled around the outside of the event horizon along magnetic field lines and blasted away from the poles in the form of radio-loud jets.
These sources are the brightest in the radio sky, and therefore that's what radio telescopes tend to pick up. ASKAP is starting to show us the extent of the radio Universe – those fainter sources that we don't usually see, such as synchrotron emission from radio relics in galaxy clusters, and more mysterious objects, like ORCs and dancing ghosts.
And this is just the pilot survey. The EMU survey is expected to continue for years, peering deep into the night to uncover the mysteries in the dark.
"We are getting used to surprises as we scan the skies as part of the EMU Project, and probe deeper into the Universe than any previous telescope," Norris said. "When you boldly go where no telescope has gone before, you are likely to make new discoveries."
Commander assures that the US has the technology to teleport people
Commander assures that the US has the technology to teleport people
Teleportation, or teleportation, is the process of moving objects or particles from one place to another instantly.
Depending on the narrative in question, it may or may not be done using a machine or device. Literally it means “to move at a distance” , understood as a movement that occurs without the need to establish direct physical contact with the object for it to move.
For example, if we teleported the exact copy of a human being, we should destroy the original so that it is considered teleported and not cloned .. Or is it not entirely so?
Late last year, Lt. Gen. Steven L. Kwast, commander of the Education and Training Air Command at San Antonio-Randolph Base in Texas, revealed surprising classified information during a conference in Washington DC.
Kwast, who retired in 2019, believes advanced technology will determine who will lead the world in space. But at one point in the conference, he made a shocking revelation:
“The United States already has the ability to teleport humans anywhere on Earth using radically advanced technology.”
“The technology is in the engineering benches today,” said Lt. Gen. Kwast. “But most Americans and most members of Congress haven’t had time to really look at what’s going on here.”
“But I have had the benefit of 33 years of study and friendship with these scientists. This technology can be built today with non-development technology to take any human being from anywhere on planet Earth to any other place in less than an hour ”
According to the official, in addition to people, already existing advanced technologies can provide Wi-Fi and power from space, eliminating the need for mobile phone antennas and chargers, with the technology also applicable at a particular level.
“The power of space will change world power, and it doesn’t have to be a big country to do it,” the former officer emphasized.
“It can be a small island country, let’s say New Zealand, because technology, if optimized, can change world power, and there is nothing you can do if you don’t have that power.”
“You have it and your values govern, or you don’t have it, and you must send it. We have seen it played over and over again in history, and now it is developing. “
Unfortunately Kwast did not specify what kind of technology the US supposedly has to teleport humans, but given the subject of his speech, dedicated especially to the US Space Force, the new branch of the US military.
Kwast, who retired from the Air Force in August, is known to have spoken and written on subjects deemed qualified despite having direct orders not to, and is an active advocate of military dominance in space.
Even The Drive magazine suggested that the retired officer could be chosen to lead the Space Force.
At the conference, Kwast warned that while the United States remained “dominant” in the space at this time, it had to act now to maintain this dominance, because America’s adversaries, particularly China, could “win this race” and then be a real danger in space.
The officer claimed that China is already building a space armada, including “battleships and destroyers” capable of maneuvering and destroying its adversaries, while the United States was not currently developing such ships.
Again a conspiracy theory comes true, and it has been shown that teleportation is not just fiction, it is a reality.
It also shows us how much governments hide, either for security or for following a dark agenda about the technology that exists today, which is much more advanced than we can imagine.
One weird feature of the world of UFOs and aliens is that of the phenomenon of cattle mutilations. This is when cattle or other livestock are found dead and in very strange circumstances. The carcasses are usually cut up, drained of blood, missing soft-tissue organs or other extremities, dismembered, or otherwise mutilated in a variety of ways, always showing a surgical precision to the cuts not consistent with the attack of a predator such as a coyote or mountain lion. There are typically other oddities as well, such as a lack of flies or strange substances seeping from the wounds, which are sometimes even cauterized. Dead, butchered cattle will be reported miles away from where they disappeared or in inaccessible places. There is never any sign of tracks of any perpetrator around the body, no scuff marks or sign of a struggle, and sometimes there aren’t even tracks from the dead animal, as if it has just materialized there or been carefully placed from the air. Usually there is no blood at all, and a distinct lack of decomposition or damage from scavengers. Even insects are usually said to shun these mystery corpses. This is all usually found after the fact, with no explanation, but one case of cattle mutilation going back all the way to the 19th features a witness who saw this happening, and which has remained a controversial case to this day.
One of the only known reports of someone actually witnessing a cow being abducted by aliens, and which would become a spooky case of cattle mutilation, supposedly happened all the way back in 1897, in the rural area of LeRoy, Kansas, in the United States. One evening in April of that year, a local cattle rancher by the name of Alexander Hamilton and his son were apparently woken up at around 10:30 PM by the sound of a “noise among the cattle.” It was at first thought that this was just their dog up to some prankish behavior with the cows outside, but when Hamilton went to the window to look outside, he was astonished by what he saw. He claimed that he witnessed a very strange-looking and enormous “airship” hovering above the cow lot around 600 feet away, with “strange beings” visible within it, and he would say of what happened:
Calling my tenant, Gid Heslip, and my son Wall, we seized some axes and ran to the corral. Meanwhile the ship had been gently descending until it was not more than thirty feet above the ground and we came within fifty yards of it. It consisted of a great cigar-shaped portion, possibly three hundred feet long, with a carriage underneath. The carriage was made of glass or some other transparent substance alternating with a narrow strip of some material. It was brightly lighted within and everything was plainly visible-it was occupied by six of the strangest beings I ever saw. They were jabbering together but we could not understand a word they said. Every part of the vessel which was not transparent was of a dark reddish color. We stood mute with wonder and fright. Then some noise attracted their attention and they turned a light directly upon us. Immediately on catching sight of us they turned on some unknown power, and a great turbine wheel, about thirty feet in diameter, which was revolving slowly below the craft, began to buzz and the vessel rose lightly as a bird.
As the three of them looked on in absolute astonishment, the flying craft seemed to have taken an interest in the cattle below it. In particular, it seemed to float over to and hover above a heifer that it seemed especially drawn to. Then, a very bizarre sequence of events would play out. Hamilton would say:
When about three hundred feet above us it seemed to pause and to hover directly above a two-year-old heifer which was bawling and jumping, apparently fast in the fence. Going to her, we found some material fastened in a slip knot around her neck and going up to the vessel from the heifer tangled in the wire fence. We tried to get it off but could not, so we cut the wire loose to see the ship, heifer and all, rise slowly, disappearing in the northwest.
The following day, Hamilton went out to look for the cow, but could find no trace of it, not even any tracks. There were signs that the animal had been at that spot, but after that it seems to have just evaporated into thin air. The baffled rancher went around to other ranchers in the area, but no one had seen the missing animal. However, he would soon find someone who had made a rather gruesome find a few miles away, of which Hamilton would say:
Coming back in the evening I found that Link Thomas, about three or four miles west of LeRoy, had found the hide, legs and head in his field that day. He, thinking that someone had butchered a stolen beast, had brought the hide to town for identification, but was greatly mystified in not being able to find any tracks in the soft ground. After identifying the hide by my brand, I went home. But every time I would drop to sleep, I would see the cursed thing, with its big lights and hideous people. I don’t know whether they are devils or angels or what; but we all saw them, and my whole family saw the ship, and I don’t want any more to do with them.
Rather eerily, it was reported that the remains had no footprints around them, no sign of predator activity, in fact no signs of any struggle, as if they had just been carefully placed there from above. The whole sensational account would be published in the Yates Center Farmers Advocate and once it was out in the wild become big local news. At the time, the region was in the throes of a series of mysterious sightings of strange airships, often described as highly advanced flying machines covered with electric lights and well ahead of anything available at the time, often seen manned by very strange looking humanoid occupants. Such mysterious airships had been sighted in such far-flung places as the Midwest, California, Texas, and Utah, so they were already making the rounds in the news at the time, but Hamilton’s report was especially amazing. When the odd news hit, there immediately came in a deluge of witnesses saying they had seen the same ship in the area where the cow abduction had occurred, and Hamilton even had over a dozen high-profile, well-respected citizens sign an affidavit vouching for his tale and his honesty, including several Sheriffs, pharmacists, attorneys, a banker, a doctor, the State Oil Inspector, the Justice of the Peace, the Postmaster, and the Register of Deeds. Considering that at the time Hamilton was a very respected, upstanding citizen, a stock dealer and successful businessman, most people believed his story and it generated a lot of excitement. One statement made of his impeccable character reads:
Hamilton’s popularity in the community is unmistakable not only on account of his fidelity to duty in public office, but also because of his honorable business career, his fidelity to manly principles and his reliability in private life. During the long years of his residence in Kansas he has left the impress of his individuality for good upon the communities with which he has been connected and he feels just pride in the splendid advancement made by his adopted state. We have never heard his word questioned and that we do verily believe his statement to be true and correct.
Despite how much it had been talked about, the Hamilton cow abduction story would eventually sort of fade away into obscurity until it was dug up again in the 1960s. Jacques Vallee would mention it in his book Anatomy of a Phenomenon (1965), and after that it would feature in a best-selling book by ufologist Frank Edwards in his book Flying Saucers—Serious Business in 1966, which really brought it into the limelight, after which it would be mentioned in various other books and magazine articles over the years. For a long time it was considered to be a very intriguing early UFO account and perhaps the only time a cattle mutilation had been actually witnessed by someone, but a 1977 article in Fate Magazine would take some of the wind out of its sails. Author Jerome Clark would uncover the fact that Hamiton had allegedly at the time been a member of a local “Liar’s Club,” in which prominent citizens would make up wild yarns to see which ones would make it into the news and fool people the most. Clark cited as evidence a 1943 article from a Kansas newspaper called The Buffalo Enterprise, which held the testimony on a Mrs. Donna Steeby of Wichita Kansas, who related how her 93-year-old mother, Ethel L Shaw, had know Hamilton, and that he had told her that it was all a big, wild yarn that had gotten out of hand. Shaw would apparently tell Clark of it all:
How well I remember that beautiful afternoon, almost as though it were yesterday. I, as a young girl about fourteen years old, was visiting in the Hamilton home with Mrs. Hamilton and their daughter Nell when Mr. Hamilton came home from town, put up his team and came into the sitting room where we were visiting. He pulled up a chair and almost immediately began relating this story by saying, ‘Ma, I fixed up quite a story and told the boys in town and it will come out in the Advocate this weekend.’
Not only that, but she also claimed that all of the ones who had signed the affidavit had been members of the very same Liar’s Club, and that he had hoaxed the other airship sightings in the area by using fake airships that he had crafted out of cleaning bags, candles and balsa wood. Clark also mentions the discovery of a Robert Schadewald, an American correspondent of the British publication Fortean Times, who in 1976 uncovered an article in the Buffalo Enterprise of January of 1943 an account by a man named Ed F. Hudson, who claimed that he had been the editor of the Yates Center Farmer’s Advocate and that Hamilton had admitted to faking the sighting and even claimed to have seen the workshop where he had been making his fake UFOs. Hudson would say of this:
I had just bought and installed a little gasoline engine, the first I believe to come to Yates Center, using it to run my machinery replacing the hand-power on the old County Campbell press and kicking the job presses. I invited many of my friends into the back shop to see the engine work. Hamilton was one of them. He exclaimed, ‘Now they can fly,’ hence the airship story that we made up. After we had published it, the story was copied in many of the largest newspapers in the country, England, France, and Germany, some illustrating it with pen-drawn imaginings by their staff artists. There were also hundreds of inquiries from every part of the globe. Soon afterwards there came the various experiments in flight, but I have always maintained that Alex Hamilton was the real inventor of human flight.
This all seems to be pretty damning, and the story has gone on to be seen as a big historical hoax largely thanks to Clark’s article, but there are those willing to defend Hamilton’s story and have raised some points in their defense over the years. For one, Hamilton never really publicly admitted to it all being bogus, and was long dead by that time and was in no position to defend himself. There also is the fact that this is a second-hand tale from an elderly lady, so who is to say that she really knows what she is talking about or is telling the truth herself? As for Hudson, how do we know we can believe him either? There is actually no hard evidence that Hamilton was a part of a Liar’s Club, or that the others who had vouched for him were, just these admissions uncovered long after the fact. Although the main consensus now is that Hamilton was indeed lying, what if he wasn’t? One argument from a defender of his was written by The Last Sisyphus on Medium, who says:
The vast majority of “experts” hold that it was a hoax. A couple thoughts on the issue. One reason “experts” disagree with Hamilton’s testimony is that he belonged to “The Liars Club.” There is no doubt that this was probably the case, but to suggest that Hamilton’s UFO testimony is an elaborate hoax because he was involved in a liar’s club raises questions. The first: Since he was a member of “The Liars Club,” we could, in theory, dismiss every word Hamilton ever said based on his involvement with the group. But that is not fair. Hamilton probably told the truth on a number of occasions despite being a part of a liars club. Why is it not possible that he told the truth about the UFO? (He is, after all, backed by [literally] countless UFO reports.) The second: Hamilton did not give the “hoax” up (if it was, indeed, a hoax). We have no evidence that he admitted his story was a hoax. Also: There were others who witnessed this phenomenon. Hamilton even signed an affidavit (which is not something to joke about — no matter how elaborate the prank) and was practicing law in Leroy, Kansas. The hyper-skeptics have no basis to dismiss this testimony. Nothing. The most radical position for them to hold — while maintaining consistency in their own logic and scientific worldview (ie we are not at the pinnacle of scientific discovery)— is to remain indifferent to Hamilton’s testimony. The wisest response for a skeptic is thus: “We simply do not have enough information to dismiss Mr. Hamilton’s testimony, therefore we must keep silent on the matter.”
While the Alexander Hamilton case has long been written off as a hoax, some people believe Clark’s debunking of it all, some people don’t. We are left to wonder, is this all just a ruse conjured up by the “Liar’s Club” or something more? It is all most certainly a hoax, but some people still seem to defend it, and it has taken on a life of its own and has made its mark. Whatever the case may be, it is still one of the earliest cattle mutilation reports on record, and the only one that seems to have been allegedly witnessed by someone, back in the day when UFOs weren’t really a thing, so true or not it is an intriguing case nonetheless.
Over the years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has very generously released into the public domain numerous pages of UFO-related files from its vaults. Those papers – made available through the terms of the Freedom of Information Act – involve files on more than a few of the Contactees of the 1950s, such as George Van Tassel, Truman Bethurum, George Adamski, Wayne Aho and George Hunt Williamson. Other files of the mysteriously UFO-tied kind, and that the FBI has declassified, include ones on cattle mutilations, extra-sensory perception, crashed UFOs, the controversial Majestic 12 documents, and much more. Although the FBI has declassified literally thousands of its pages on the Contactee movement of the 1950s and later, they have released just one document pertaining to the alien abduction issue. In all probability, of course, that’s because the FBI only ever received just one report from a U.S. citizen claiming to have been carried away by ETs! Nevertheless, that one document is well worth taking a look at. It dates from 1967 and tells – albeit briefly – what sounds very much like a classic alien abduction experience. Notably, the FBI shared the data, and the document, with an agency whose name has been deliberately blacked out in the relevant papers. The likelihood, however, is that that solitary sheet of paper reached the U.S. Air Force’s UFO program, Project Blue Book. The specific date is January 18, 1967 and is captioned as follows: “Unidentified Flying Object Allegedly Sighting [sic], January 17, 1967.”
It reads as follows:
What was I supposed to do?
“At 4:10 a.m., January 18, 1967, [deleted] advised that he desired to report that he had observed a large oblong-shaped object which alighted in the street in front of him when he was on his way home from his television repair shop, the [deleted], Chesapeake, Virginia. He believes that he was taken into this craft which he recalls as being made of a glass-like substance and being transparent. It was manned by several individuals who appeared to be undersized creatures similar to members of the human race, probably not more than 4 feet tall. They were allegedly wearing regular trouser pants and T-shirts. [deleted] believes that he was transported by this craft for an undetermined distance and returned to his point of take-off approximately one hour later. [Deleted] spoke in a coherent manner although he appeared to be under certain emotional strain. He claimed he had not been drinking any intoxicants but he was unable to account for the time between 8:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. he stated he was telephoning from his workshop but had no recollection of being elsewhere between 8:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m.”
And that’s where the document comes to its end. As you’ll see, the story that the FBI received was an intriguing one. In fact, it’s not very often that someone jumps in their car and chooses to head-off to the offices of the FBI after allegedly having being kidnapped by black-eyed aliens from another world. Or, even, from another galaxy. While the reference to the aliens allegedly wearing “regular” clothing is admittedly strange, there is no denying, at all, the fact that the experience closely mirrors so many of those accounts of latter day times. There was, for example, the fact that the aliens were “not more than 4 feet tall,” which is something that strongly suggests the man’s captors were of the Grey alien kind that are undeniably ingrained in our pop-culture of today. And, that the victim “was unable to account for the time between 8:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m.” is prime evidence of the phenomenon of what is famously known as “missing time.” Okay, it’s not the greatest report of the alien abduction variety; but, in many respects it’s unique, due to it having been handled and scrutinized by the FBI, no less. Who knows what J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI, at the time, thought of it all? Maybe, it didn’t reach him. After all, I’m sure that the FBI had much more to do on that 1967 night than chase down alien abductees. Or, maybe I’m wrong!
A new theory has emerged regarding the “Great Dimming” period of Betelgeuse. Known as one of the biggest and most luminous stars in the night sky (it is located in the Orion constellation), it is also very mysterious.
Between October 2019 and March 2020, this red supergiant star’s brightness dimmed 2.5 times which was the biggest drop in 50 years. Known as the “Great Dimming”, the decrease in brightness caused a drop in surface temperature of about 300 degrees Fahrenheit (149 degrees Celsius).
While scientists scrambled to figure out what was causing such a dim in the star, several theories emerged, such as a giant dust cloud that moved between Earth and Betelgeuse that temporarily blocked us from seeing the light; it was about to go supernova; and “cool star spots” that covered about 70% of the star’s surface. Even though the star’s luminosity had dipped dramatically, the theory of it going supernova was dismissed when it started brightening up again.
Betelgeuse
And now, there is a new theory that suggests a large dark spot is covering parts of the star’s surface. While this is another interesting hypothesis, experts can’t confirm or deny the idea as a large dark spot has never been directly observed on the star.
The research team studied Betelgeuse’s temperature by analyzing the high-resolution near-infrared spectra of the star on four specific dates — January 31, March 19, April 4, and April 6, 2020. These four dates coincide with the dimming and post-dimming phases of the star.
Dr. Sofya Alexeeva explained their research in further detail, “Our method is based on the measurement of titanium oxide (TiO) and cyanide (CN) molecular lines in stellar spectra.” “The cooler a star is, the more these molecules can form and survive in its atmosphere and the molecular lines are stronger in the stellar spectrum.” “In a hotter atmosphere, these molecules dissociate easily and do not survive.”
Since the decrease in brightness caused a surface temperature drop of about 300 degrees Fahrenheit, the researchers realized that the results of an earlier study predicting that 70% of the star’s surface was covered in spots was similar to their findings. However, they believe that it is just one gigantic dark spot that is actually quite common on red supergiants.
Spots on our sun captured by amateur astronomer Alan Friedman in July of 2012.
While this is just the most recent of several theories regarding Betelgeuse’s “Great Dimming” period, the mysterious red supergiant star will continue to amaze and baffle us at the same time. (More pictures of Betelgeuse can be seen here.)
The study was published in the journal Nature Communications where it can be read in full.
NASA's Perseverance tries to collect Mars rocks, fails
NASA's Perseverance tries to collect Mars rocks, fails
The Perseverance rover is on a mission to hunt for signs of past life on Mars. But something went wrong in its first attempt to gather rock samples.
Perseverance will explore Jezero Crater for at least one Martian year (687 Earth days)
NASA's Perseverance rover could not collect rock samples from Mars in its first attempt to do so, the US space agency said.
The Mars rover is on a mission to collect rock samples from the Red Planet that can be studied by scientists on Earth. Samples are to be encased in tubes that would be brought back to Earth at a later date.
But the data received by scientists showed that no sample was collected after the drilling process.
The rover is currently stationed on the surface of a large crater. Scientists believe the crater to be the site of a deep lake that existed 3.5 billion years ago. Researchers say it can provide clues about extraterrestrial life.
What did the rover do?
NASA released images of a small mound with a hole in its center next to the rover — the first dug into the planet by a robot.
The drilling process had been successful, scientists say. The engineers are now trying to discover why the rover failed to place a finger-sized rock sample in one of its titanium sample tubes.
"While this is not the 'hole-in-one' we hoped for, there is always risk with breaking new ground," Thomas Zubuchen, the associate administrator for NASA's science mission directorate, said in a statement.
NASA project scientist Ken Farley said the next step would be using a camera mounted on a robotic arm to inspect inside the hole. He said they might see the broken rock core, or might discover the sample had turned to sand.
"It's a bit deflating because this whole complicated piece of machinery worked fine, the engineering worked just fine, but it seems Mars didn't cooperate," Farley said.
"We will persevere," Farley added.
The whole sampling process takes up to 11 days.
What are Perseverance's tasks?
The Perseverance rover is on Mars to help NASA study Martian geology and past life.
NASA extracts oxygen from CO2 on Mars
It is currently stationed on the surface of Jezero Crater. It landed on Mars in February, following its seven-month journey from Earth that saw it fly about 300 million miles (480 million kilometers) before reaching its destination.
NASA plans to bring around 30 samples back to Earth in the 2030s.
UFO crosses the air route of a Lockheed C-130 Hercules ( July 27, 2021 )
Dark colored UFO crosses the air route of a Lockheed C-130 Hercules. A American four-engine turboprop military transport aircraft on 27/7/21: Here i present the video and in approach the original.
Every day they are closer and more evident
note : no audio
ORIGINAL VIDEO TITLED : queda de ufo ovni avião
ORIGINAL VIDEO OWNER : Arquivos do Mundo Sobrenatural
UFOs Sighted Over Baltimore, Maryland ( August 5, 2021 )
Strange UFO activity over Baltimore : UFOs were sighted over the night skies of Baltimore, Maryland by Jay Orr on August 5, 2021 : Here I present the original
Every day they are closer and more evident
credit : Jay Orr
Circle Shaped UFO Sighted Over Chile ( August 5, 2021 )
UFO / UAP Sighted Over Ventura, California ( July 31, 2021 )
Strange UFO / UAP or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena was sighted over Ventura, California on July 31, 2021
STATEMENT : VENTURA , CALIFORNIA - 31/07/2021
They're everywhere already
note : no audio : video looped at 16 second mark
credit : H.P.M.B
RELATED VIDEO
UFO Sighted Over Boston, Massachusetts ( August 2, 2021 )
Strange moving UFO was sighted over Boston, Massachusetts on August 2, 2021
STATEMENT : I saw this Tuesday night Here I present the original and in the wake with approach.
More evident every day
credit : Michael Hunter
Nazi Die Glocke Bel Type UFO Sighted Over Switzerland ( July 2, 2021 )
Is this the new Swiss Army Flying Vehicle resembling the Nazi Die Glocke Bell : Sighted over Solothurn Military Base STATEMENT :
The region is a hilly region, as can be seen, and that there are cave systems and some military facilities here. No one is allowed near these military areas, there are definitely some extraordinary things going on here and the army is aware of it. And they hide many things from us. That's why we are not even allowed to go to that area and take images from a distance.
MUFON CASE : 117180 Isla Cristina, Huelva, Spain ( August 5, 2021 )
Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : Objeto a gran velocidad : Object at high speed Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117180
Me encontraba en la sala manejando la cámara de seguridad con conexión Wifi previamente instalado en el tejado de la casa. Encendí lámpara de infrarrojo desde el portátil en el software del dispositivo unos minutos después contemple un objeto que pasaba a gran velocidad así que inicie la grabación del vídeo. Pude seguir la trayectoria del mismo mediante el control del software.
Long Description of Sighting Report Translated- Case 117180
I was in the living room managing the security camera with a Wi-Fi connection previously installed on the roof of the house. I turned on the infrared lamp from the laptop in the device software a few minutes later I saw an object
Date Submitted : 2021-08-05 Date of Event :2021-07-02 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : 117180_submitter_file1__Huelva001922001958.mp4 : no audio
Archaeologists have uncovered 2,640- to 2,550-year-old clay moulds for casting spade coins as well as fragments of finished spade coins at Guanzhuang in Xingyang, Henan province, China. The technical characteristics of the moulds demonstrate that the site — which was part of the Eastern Zhou period (770-220 BCE) bronze foundry — functioned as a mint for producing standardized coins.
Spatial distribution of the minting remains in the Guanzhuang foundry’s excavation area: red dots: deposit with clay moulds; green dots: deposits with fragments of finished spade coins.
Image credit: Z. Qu / H. Zhao.
“The origins of metal coinage and the monetization of ancient economies have long been a research focus in both archaeology and economic history,” said Dr. Hao Zhao from the School of History at Zhengzhou University and colleagues.
“The earliest coins are thought to have been minted in China, Lydia (in Western Asia Minor) and India.”
“Of these, the hollow-handle spade coin (kongshoubu) minted in China is a likely candidate for the first metal coinage.”
“The spade coin was an imitation of practical metal spades, but its thin blade and small size indicate that it had no utilitarian function.”
“The earlier spade coins had a fragile, hollow socket, reminiscent of a metal shovel. This socket was transformed into a thin, flat piece in later spade coins, and over time, characters were applied to the coins to mark their denominations.”
“Several versions of spade coins circulated across the Chinese Central Plains until their abolition by the First Emperor of Qin in 221 BCE.”
“Their origin and early history, and the social dynamics under which they were developed, however, remain controversial — a situation paralleled by the century-long debate over Lydian coins.”
Dr. Zhao and co-authors from Zhengzhou University and Peking University uncovered the ancient remains from different stages of the minting process at Guanzhuang in China’s Henan province.
The mint was part of a well-organized, integrated bronze foundry run under the auspices of the Zheng State.
“Guanzhuang is located in the Central Plains of China, some 12 km south of the Yellow River,” the archaeologists said.
“Continuous excavations since 2011 have revealed the general layout of a city, which consisted of two walled and moated enclosures.”
“The city was established in c. 800 BCE and abandoned after 450 BCE.”
“Excavations between 2015 and 2019 have revealed a large craft-production zone in the centre of the outer enclosure, immediately outside the southern gate of the inner city. This area included workshops involved in bronze, ceramic, jade and bone-artifact production.”
“The bronze foundry occupied the largest area. Its main features comprise more than 2,000 pits for dumping production waste, most between 1.5 and 3 m in diameter, with a depth of 1-2.5 m.”
“Alongside ceramic sherds, these pits contained abundant remains related to bronze-casting activities, including crucibles, ladles, bronze droplets, unfinished or broken bronze artifacts, clay moulds, charcoal, and furnace fragments.”
Spade coin SP-1 and its reconstruction; the outer mould (bottom left) is also used to reconstruct the spade coin.
Image credit: H. Zhao.
At the site, the researchers found two fragments of finished spade coins, dubbed SP-1 and SP-2.
“Coin SP-1 is so well preserved that its complete shape can be confidently reconstructed,” they said.
“This example is a typical pointed-shoulder spade coin, with a (restored) full length of 14.3 cm, a shoulder width of 6.35 cm and a maximum thickness of 0.9 mm. The weight of the extant coin is 27.1 g.”
“Reconstructing the volume of its missing feet at around 660 mm3 (4-5g), we estimate that the original weight of SP-1 was no less than 31 g, including the weight of the clay core inside the handle.”
As is typical of the earliest spade coins, there are no inscriptions indicating either the name of the locality where the coin was cast or its face value.
“Coin SP-2 was found in the context dated to the Eastern Han Dynasty (200 CE), and hence the coin must be considered a residual find, as spade coins had long been abolished by this time,” they said.
“Of this coin, only the handle and its clay core survive. They are of exactly the same shape and size as the corresponding portions of SP-1.”
The compositional analysis shows that the copper content of SP-1 and SP-2 is 62.5 and 76.46%, respectively.
“The existence of minting activity at Guanzhuang is further documented by numerous finds of clay cores and outer moulds for casting spade coins,” the scientists said.
“All the moulds are made of reddish fine silt, which was also the primary material for producing clay moulds to cast other types of bronze products at the Guanzhuang foundry.”
Combining the evidence from radiocarbon-dating, mould style and ceramic typology, they suggest that the Guanzhuang foundry was first established around 780 BCE.
During its initial phase of around 150 years, the foundry produced predominantly ritual vessels, weapons and chariot fittings — items used in ceremonies, warfare and other aspects of elite life.
Standardized minting started from the second phase of the Guanzhuang foundry, after c. 640 BCE and no later than 550 BCE, and it made use of the workshop’s existing bronze-production capacity.
“Currently, Guanzhuang is the earliest-known archaeological mint site dated by robust radiocarbon dates in the world, and coin SP-1 is the earliest spade coin — and, more generally, the earliest Chinese coin — recovered from a secure archaeological context,” the authors said.
“The minting techniques employed at Guanzhuang are characterized by batch production and a high degree of standardization and quality control, indicating that the production of spade coins was not a small-scale, sporadic experiment, but rather a well-planned and organised process in the heartland of the Central Plains of China.”
The team’s paper was published this week in the journal Antiquity.
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Hao Zhao et al. Radiocarbon-dating an early minting site: the emergence of standardised coinage in China. Antiquity, published online August 6, 2021; doi: 10.15184/aqy.2021.94
The Bridgewater Triangle, which is a 200-square-mile section of land in Eastern Massachusetts, is a reported hotbed of paranormal activity and unexplained occurrences. According to legend, the area, which is between Abington, Freetown, and Seekonk, attracts ghosts, UFOs, mythological creatures, and other unusual and unexplainable activities.
As reported by Boston.com, the epicenter of the Bridgewater Triangle is the Hockomock Swamp. In addition to being New England's largest swamp, Hockomock is known for its biological and geological diversity. The swamp is one of Massachusetts' most stunning landmarks. And, according to legend, it is also one of the most haunted.
The name Hockomock, which means "place where spirits dwell," was given to the swamp by the Wampanoag tribe. In later years, Colonial settlers referred to it as the "Devil's Swamp."
Roadtrippers reports the dense swampland is difficult to navigate, and it is easy to get lost in the nearly impenetrable brush. However, local folklore suggests the swamp is specifically dangerous because it is home to a creature called the "Thunderbird." According to legend, the Thunderbird is a massive prehistoric-like bird, which has a wingspan up to 12 feet.
Boston.com reports the swamp has also been a hotbed for Bigfoot sightings. According to local folklore, the creatures have been responsible for attacks on livestock, including pigs and sheep. After receiving a number of similar reports, authorities searched the Hockomock Swamp with the assistance of K-9 units. However, they did not find anything to suggest the swamp was inhabited by anything unusual.
REPORTEDLY HAUNTED SITES WITHIN THE BRIDGEWATER TRIANGLE
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Another supposedly haunted site within the Bridgewater Triangle is the abandoned Taunton State Hospital. As reported by Boston.com, the hospital has been closed for decades. However, people who have explored the deserted buildings reported "having their shoulders and legs touched and pulled" by unseen entities. According to local legend, the property was popular with satanic cults in the 1960s and 1970s, and the entities they disturbed are still present.
The Fall River-Freetown State Forest, which is also inside the Bridgewater Triangle, is another rumored site of satanic cult activity. However, unlike most of the other Bridgewater Triangle sites, a number of confirmed crimes have taken place in and around the forest. Boston.com reports the park is secluded but easily accessible. Therefore, it became a popular site for committing violent crime and even dumping bodies.
Although the location of The Fall River-Freetown State Forest likely contributed to the number of crimes committed there, paranormal investigators believe something far more sinister is to blame. According to legend, the site has an unusually strong negative energy, which draws people to the location and encourages them to commit violent crimes.
Other reportedly haunted sites within the Bridgewater Triangle include the Assonet Ledge, where people have reported seeing ghosts leaping from the cliffs, Copicut Road and Route 44, which reportedly have ghastly hitchhikers, and the Horbine School, where people have reported hearing unexplained voices.
People have also reported seeing UFOs and unexplained lights throughout the region.
THE BIZARRE TRUE STORY OF BIGFOOT, AMERICA'S MISSING APE
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BY NICHOLAS CONLEY
Every part of the world has its legends, whether they're elves, djinns, or green-suited little bearded men perched at the end of rainbows. In the United States and Canada, our local mythological figure is a bipedal, hairy primate that goes by the strange name "Bigfoot." When the big ol' ape isn't tromping around the woods with his size 30-something feet, he's getting his picture snapped by photographers, having his language secretly recorded, or starring in beef jerky commercials.
For as long as human beings have looked into the forest's shadows, they've speculated about whether Bigfoot is out there. Whether these creatures are real or not, people have been telling stories about Bigfoot encounters for centuries, across many cultures and regions, to the point where even the most fervent disbeliever has to at least raise an eyebrow. Either way, Bigfoot is one of North America's greatest icons. Here's the true story about how this big-soled gorilla-man became a big deal.
SASQ'ETS WAS AN IMPORTANT FIGURE IN NATIVE AMERICAN BELIEFS
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If Bigfoot is real, he didn't just traipse into the country sometime after the U.S. constitution was signed. One of the most fascinating parts of Bigfoot mythology is the fact that a tall, hairy, man-like figure plays a key role in the mythologies of numerous North American indigenous peoples, according to Native Languages. For example, the Sioux believed in a powerful, burly figure they called Chiye-Tanka, or "Big Elder Brother." The Cheynne tribe told tales of an aloof "Hairy Man" named "Maxemista," who may have played a key role in their creation story. Even the now-familiar term "sasquatch" is merely an Anglicization of the more Halkomelem name, "Sasq'ets."
Different tribes each had their own take on the Bigfoot figure, but for the most part, very few saw the creature as being monstrous, aggressive, or evil. Rather, as described by Indian Country Today, Bigfoot's place in many tribal mythologies was that of a gentle guardian, a protector, a "Keeper of the Earth." Over the centuries, as the Bigfoot legend has grown, the Oregon Historical Society states that Native Americans in Oregon have increasingly come to see Bigfoot as an important piece of their culture with great significance to their history.
BIGFOOT MEETS THE INVADERS
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As we know today, North America was fated to become the landing dock of countless European settlers. From the 1600s onward, these Europeans experienced their own alleged Bigfoot encounters, though the colonizers found the creatures a lot scarier than the native peoples usually did. One of the more popular historical writings among cryptozoology aficionados is a 1604 passage from French navigator Samuel de Champlain, who ominously described a "frightful monster, which the savages call Gougou." Though Champlain said Gougou was an enormous, feminine beast that devoured human beings and made horrible noises, his description was vague enough that, reading it today, Gougou could've been anything from Bigfoot to a swamp monster. Champlain decided that Gougou was an unholy devil of some sort, because ... well, that's what Europeans said about every weird phenomenon back then.
As the New World was increasingly colonized, reports of encounters with more distinctly Bigfoot-like creatures continued trickling in. In 1811, according to Rolling Stone, explorer David Thompson was hiking through the Rockies when he stumbled upon some seriously massive footprints, which he followed for nearly 100 yards before the trail went cold. One of the biggest stories appeared in the July 1884 edition of a British Columbia newspaper called the Daily Colonist, now archived online. The paper reported the capture of a young, gorilla-like primate called "Jacko." Was Jacko a young Bigfoot, a hoax, a stunt? You decide. Regardless, little Jacko was never reported on again.
THE 1924 BIGFOOT ATTACK IN APE CANYON
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According to Slate, it was a warm summer night in July 1924, and a group of five miners decided to call it a night in their little homemade cabin, perched up in what is now called "Ape Canyon," a narrow gorge found in the hike up Mount St. Helens in Washington. Allegedly, as the miners tried to get some sleep, a group of crazed, hairy "apemen" came screaming out of the hills and started launching heavy stones at their cabin. The creatures continued railing on the cabin all night, at one point even reaching inside through a gaping hole in the wall and attempting to steal an ax. The whole thing sounds like a real-life Evil Dead, but with Bigfoot instead of deadites.
Finally, the assault died down at daybreak, and the miners reemerged from the cabin. One miner, Fred Beck, reported that he saw an apeman standing in the distance, so he shot the creature, sending it tumbling down into the rocks. Years later, Beck went on to propose that the hostile animals he encountered were actually ghostly beings from another reality. On the other hand, many people have speculated that the "apemen" were just a gang of rowdy teenagers. Either way, it sounds like a scary night. As you've probably guessed, this incident is why this particular mountain gorge is now referred to as Ape Canyon.
THE FOOTPRINTS ARE FOUND, AND THE NAME "BIGFOOT" IS BORN
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According to Rolling Stone, American ape sightings continued coming in throughout the next few decades. In 1940, a Canadian family reported an 8-foot apeman had come out of the woods and broken into their shed, leaving 16-inch footprints in its wake. Then, on one October morning in Northern California in 1958, workers for the Granite Logging Company found a series of giant footprints — once again, 16 inches long — submerged in the damp bed of one of their newly built roads. Less than a week later, the workers spotted a creature in the woods that "ran upright like a man, swinging long hairy arms ... it looked ten feet tall." They found more footprints the next day. The local Humboldt Times picked up the story, publishing a photo of the megalithic footprint's cast, with journalist Andrew Genzoli lending the unknown creature a name that would soon become legendary: "Bigfoot."
The hubbub didn't stop there. At the construction site, footprints kept appearing. Equipment was flipped over. Workers reported feeling like something in the woods was watching them, and the paranoia grew so intense that 15 men quit. When Ray Wallace, a partner in the firm, was accused of perpetrating a hoax, he angrily retorted, "Who knows anyone foolish enough to ruin their own business?"
Anyhow, "Bigfoot" became big news. More tracks were discovered up in Washington, and spotting Bigfoot became a tradition as American as apple pie.
BUT HEY, WAIT, WERE THOSE BIG FEET A BIG HOAX?
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Ray Wallace made a good argument for why the footprints weren't a hoax (caused by him), but here's the thing. As any good prankster knows, if you get caught, you're left with two options: Give up or double down. Guess what Wallace chose?
In 2002, according to the New York Times, Wallace died at age 84. Once Wallace's children finished laying their father to rest, they finally came clean with the greatest joke that their "prank-loving pop" ever pulled on the world. Evidently, the famous "feet" were wood carvings, and Ray had slowly rolled along in a truck to create the massive gait between the tracks. Ray's son Michael told the Times, "It's weird because it was just a joke, and then it took on such a life of its own that even now, we can't stop it." You know, Ray would've pulled it off, too, if it wasn't for his meddling kids. Of course, he did pull it off for over half a century. Vote Ray Wallace for prankster king.
You'd think this postmortem revelation would've hit the sasquatch community like a baseball bat, but for the most part, believers were unfazed. That's because even though the Wallace tracks did launch a lot of the Bigfoot hubbub, major Bigfoot researchers had long suspected that the 1958 incident was a hoax. Besides, by 1967, those tracks were overshadowed by a far more dramatic piece of evidence...
THE BIGFOOT VIDEO YOU KNOW BY HEART
Maybe someday, a close-up Bigfoot selfie will be posted on Instagram. Until then, the Patterson-Gimlin footage remains the holy grail of Bigfoot evidence. Back in 1967, according to Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Roger Patterson approached his old rodeo buddy Bob Gimlin for the explicit purpose of finding Bigfoot after more giant tracks were found in Northern California. Patterson and Gimlin set out on horseback. Unlike almost every other Bigfoot expedition in history, the pair allegedly stumbled onto the legendary creature walking around the creek, just 30 meters away. Patterson, wielding the camera, jumped off his horse in an effort to get closer, accounting for the infamous shaky-cam effect.
So, was this Bigfoot, dubbed "Patty," the real deal? Over five decades later, Patterson's footage has become one of the most studied video clips in history, and it's never been summarily debunked. According to Oregon Public Broadcasting, anatomy professor Jeffery Meldrum strongly believes in the footage, theorizing that when compared to other primate special effects of the time — namely, Planet of the Apes — Patty's anatomical features are much too advanced to be a phony costume. Not everyone is convinced. In 2004, the Charlotte Observer reported that costume designer Philip Morris, then deceased, claimed to have sold a gorilla suit to Roger Patterson.
As for the men behind the video, Patterson died of cancer in 1972. Bob Gimlin maintains that the Bigfoot encounter truly happened, and says the decades of interrogation he received because of it "ruined his life."
BIGFOOT BECOMES A POP CULTURE CELEBRITY
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Was the Patterson-Gimlin footage real or fake? We don't know, but either way, it set the stage for Bigfoot mania. Since then, enthusiasm for the hairy one has never really died down. Through the 1970s, after the Patterson-Gimlin footage went '70s viral, the public was bombed with Bigfoot TV specials, magazine articles, tourist traps, and more. Speculation over the creature's possible existence went rampant, a phenomenon that journalist Michael McLeod describes as "the first widely popularized example of pseudoscience in American culture." Bigfoot mania brought about plenty of other Bigfoot sightings, photos, and footprints. Who doesn't have at least one family member or friend who claims to have spotted Bigfoot in the woods?
In the latter half of the 20th century, Bigfoot grew into one of North America's most potent cultural icons. The wild apeman starred alongside John Lithgow in the 1987 film Harry and the Hendersons, is the focus of the Animal Planet series Finding Bigfoot, has a publishing company named after it, and became the mascot of Jack Link's beef jerky. Quickly being co-opted into pop culture and marketing? Now that's American.
WHAT BIGFOOT LANGUAGE SOUNDS LIKE: THE SIERRA SOUNDS
Despite the work of such organizations such as North America Bigfoot Search (NABS) and the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO), definitive proof of Bigfoot hasn't yet manifested. All the hair samples have ended up being bears, the bodies aren't real, Bigfoot feces never turns up in Old Man Jenkins' cow pasture — none of that. If sasquatches are real, the creatures cover their tracks really, really well. However, if Ron Morehead and Al Berry are to believed, we might have an idea of what Bigfoot sounds like. According to Scientific American, Morehead and Berry say they captured the so-called "Sierra Sounds" by dangling a microphone over a tree in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Though the "language" in the recordings is interesting and is broadcast in many Bigfoot TV specials, such human-sounding noises could also be a relatively easy hoax, so the Bigfoot community isn't exactly united in the call of the Bigfoot.
On the other hand, what if Bigfoot speaks without ever moving its mouth? There are some who believe Bigfoot possesses telepathic powers, but we won't delve into that. It's probably better to prove these creatures exist in the first place before we get all X-Men about it.
WHOA, THERE'S A BIGFOOT IN MY FREEZER!
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In 2008, according to CNN, two hikers named Rick Dyer and Matthew Whitton announced that they'd found the dead body of a nearly 8-foot "half-ape, half-human" in the Georgia wilderness. They brought the "carcass" home, stuffed it in a freezer, and shared photos online, hoping to make money from the marketing and promotion rights. The deception was short-lived. Testing soon proved that the "carcass" was just a rubber costume, and the duo publicly apologized.
However, Rick Dyer's Bigfoot fakery days were far from over. According to the Huffington Post, the Georgian man hit Bigfoot headlines again in 2012 when he claimed to have killed a Bigfoot in Texas, whom he then named "Hank." Dyer also claimed that tests run by a "university" (cough, cough) had proven that the corpse belonged to a previously unknown species. Dyer wanted to take the dead Bigfoot on a national tour and charge admission for anyone who wanted to see Hank. C'mon, what is this, the 1800s?
Not surprisingly, Dyer's efforts flopped again. In 2014, Dyer's second phony Bigfoot was outed to the public, and he re-apologized. Only time will tell if Dyer attempts the same stunt again in a few years.
THE DNA 'PROOF' AND THE CALL FOR TRIBAL RECOGNITION
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As the years go on, Bigfoot evidence gets weirder and weirder. In 2012, a veterinarian named Melba S. Ketchum brought Bigfoot back into the headlines, according to Live Science. Ketchum, citing prior experience in genetics research, claimed that after analyzing 100 DNA samples, she had uncovered genetic proof that sasquatch was real. Not only that, but Ketchum also determined that the cryptid's humanoid features were because an earlier species of primate had mated with Homo sapiens about 15,000 years ago, resulting in the Bigfoot we (sort of) know today. Ketchum argued fiercely on behalf of her work, even asking the U.S. government to recognize Bigfoot as "an indigenous people and immediately protect their human and constitutional rights," against potential hunters.
But then, the Houston Chronicle's Eric Berger took a closer look and found some holes. In addition to discovering Ketchum had self-published her work rather than sending it to a reputable scientific journal, Berger also had Ketchum's evidence tested by a distinguished geneticist in Texas, who wasn't impressed with the results. Berger admitted to feeling let down about the whole thing, saying, "I'm honestly really disappointed. A world with Bigfoot would be a little softer. A little more fun. But in my world science is the arbiter of reality." Nonetheless, Dr. Ketchum's efforts on the "Sasquatch Genome Project" continue to this day, and she still posts updates on Facebook.
BIGFOOT ISN'T THE ONLY APEMAN MYTH IN THE WORLD ... BUT MAYBE IT'S BECAUSE OF US?
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Legends of wild apemen are prevalent in cultures all over the globe, whether it's North America's Bigfoot, the Yeti that prowls the Himalayas, or Australia's Yowie. What is it that makes these half-man, half-apes so popular? Writing for The Atlantic, Edward Simon ponders if, perhaps, the widespread obsession with Bigfoot is due to a human fascination with the wilderness from which we came. A creature that is so similar to human beings, yet still so wild and free, piques our imagination — and makes us wonder, deep inside, if we're really so evolved from our prehistoric ancestors. Perhaps Bigfoot hearkens back to the ancient concept of an uncorrupted man — call him Adam, call him sasquatch, call him whatever — whose soul has not been torn asunder by the sins of humankind.
Of course, the truth might be simpler: A world with Bigfoot is way more exciting than a world where Bigfoot doesn't exist. Famous chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall once made the surprising confession to NPR that she believed in Bigfoot, but said, "Well, I'm a romantic, so I always wanted that." In this one line, Goodall captures the central truth of why, when it comes to Bigfoot, hope springs eternal. So for now, maybe we should just enjoy the myth, keep our eyes on the woods, and have fun telling stories to each other.
WHEN THE FBI TAKES YOUR BIGFOOT SAMPLE AND NEVER RETURNS IT
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If you read that a federal intelligence agency had investigated some Bigfoot shenanigans, you would probably assume you were reading the synopsis for a new Men in Black movie. But no, this happened in real life.
The Washington Post reports that back in the cryptozoology-crazed days of the '70s, a Bigfoot researcher named Peter Byrne sent a small hair sample ("about 15 hairs attached to a tiny piece of skin") to the FBI, writing that he had been unable to identify what creature they belonged to. The FBI did, surprisingly enough, agree to test the samples ... but then ghosted Byrne. What a bummer, right? (And not suspicious at all.) While you might imagine that the hairs were passed around the office as a joke, in reality, the agency actually took Byrne's request quite seriously. In 2019, a Freedom of Information Act request made the FBI's Bigfoot homework go public, and the documentation revealed that the FBI's tests — unfortunately for Byrne, who by this point was 93 years old — proved the furry stuff had belonged to a regular ol' deer rather than a North American ape-man. Poor guy. Nothing like bad news that gets delivered 40 years late, eh?
The Real UFOs: These Are the Secret Planes the U.S. Air Forces Tests in Area 51
The Real UFOs: These Are the Secret Planes the U.S. Air Forces Tests in Area 51
The Air Force test facility at Groom Lake, Nevada—better known as Area 51—has harbored a wide variety of experimental aircraft the Pentagon would rather keep away from the prying eyes of the public.
Here's What You Need To Remember: Area 51 might also be an attractive place to host new hypersonic glide vehicles, which the Pentagon is currently pouring a ton of research money into. Hypersonic weapons would combine the extreme speed of ballistic missiles with the flatter, harder-to-detect trajectory of a cruise-missile style weapon.
While fanciful stories of alien spaceships continue to captivate the public, as recent internet memes attest, there’s little doubt that Groom Lake’s actual activities are of considerable interest—sufficiently so that in April 2019 Russia even dispatched one of its treaty-authorized Tu-154M Open Skies surveillance planes to spy on the base.
The facility has considerably expanded from the small, remote landing field adjacent to a salt flat first used to test the Lockheed U-2 spy plane in 1955. Now it lies within a twenty-three by twenty-five-mile perimeter of restricted airspace located within the larger 4,500-square mile Nevada Training and Test Range. Other nearby bases include Nellis Air Force Base and Tonopah Test Range—the latter which also has hosted numerous “black project” programs.
While a companion piece looks at Area 51’s original role in developing the CIA’s U-2 and A-12 spy planes, here we’ll look at the “black projects” known to have been flown there in the 1970s, to those speculated to be there in the present day.
While the F-117 has been officially retired from the Air Force service, photos and video footage reveal that at least one or two of the venerable stealth jets continue to fly over Area 51 as of 2019—possibly used to test sensors and air-to-air tactics against stealth aircraft.
Soviet Warbirds
Air Force and Navy pilots suffered unexpected difficulties in the early years of the air war over Vietnam when confronted by agile Soviet-built MiG-17 and MiG-21 jets.
Conveniently, Israel acquired a MiG-21 from a defecting Iraqi pilot in 1966. Then in 1968, two Syrian MiG-17F pilots got lost and mistakenly landed in Israel. All three jets were shipped over to Groom Lake, where Air Force pilots extensively tested the planes in a series of head-to-head dogfights with a wide variety of U.S. jets. They came to an uncomfortable conclusion: they were evenly matched in a head-to-head fight even with more sophisticated F-4 Phantom jets, and the better-trained pilot was likely to win—a conclusion which led to the formation of the Navy’s Top Gun program.
Evaluations continued in the 1970s under a special unit of “Red Hats” known as the 6513th Test Squadron, who received their own section of the base aptly nicknamed “Red Square” which accumulated a growing collection of Soviet warbirds.
However in 1984, General Richard Bond, a fifty-four-year-old decorated combat pilot and retiring head of the Air Force systems command, decided to take a MiG-23BN “Flogger” swing-wing fighter out for a spin without thoroughly familiarizing himself with the infamously temperamental aircraft. While racing at twice the speed of sound, he lost control of the MiG as its afterburners became stuck in the active position and was killed attempting to eject—in fact, he was the second U.S. Air Force pilot to die piloting a MiG-23 in two years.
While the 6513th was long ago inactivated, photos and footage of MiG-29s and Su-27s flying over Area 51 reveal that Red Hats continue to test the limits of Russian engineering to this day. After an Air Force test pilot died in a crash in 2017, Aviation Week’s Guy Norris reported he had been flying a foreign-built airplane.
Missing In Action: the Mythical ‘Aurora’ Spyplane
During the 1990s, several respected aviation writers wrote of their conviction that the Air Force had sequestered in Groom Lake a top-secret Blackbird successor dubbed the “Aurora” that could attain hypersonic speeds, i.e. exceeding five times the speed of sound. Supposedly, the triangle-shaped Aurora was powered by either a scramjet or a “pumpkin seed” shock-wave pulse engine which used the flat airframe to “squeeze” the aircraft forward.
However, no concrete evidence ever emerged to confirm such a plane’s existence, nor the exotic propulsion systems it would have required. Thus, the veracity of the admittedly cool legend seems dubious in hindsight.
Boeing Bird-of-Prey
No, not the Klingon starships from Star Trek—but a prototype stealth jet that vaguely resembled one with its upward-swept wings. Like its science-fiction counterpart, the Boeing Bird-of-Prey may also have possessed an active camouflage “cloaking device” designed to minimize its shadow and blend it visual signature with the surrounding sky—a technology first deployed on ships and aircraft during World War II.
The jet, fashioned out of a single piece of composite material, also tested radar-stealth features such as shielded engine intakes and a tailless fuselage which remarkably did not require a fly-by-wire system to remain aerodynamically stable.
The demonstrator made thirty-nine test flights between 1996-1999 before being unveiled to the public in 2002, and is now on display at the U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio.
Lockheed P175 Polecat Stealth Drone
The “Polecat” was a 4.5-ton flying wing high-altitude stealth drone made of two hundred composite parts glued together. Resembling a miniature B-2 stealth bomber with wings 27 meters wide, the P175 was conceived of as a high-altitude surveillance and attack platform with a thousand-pound payload. The stealth UAV began testing in 2006, but that December a failure in its remote-control system reportedly caused it to self-destruct by crashing into the ground.
The Northrop-Grumman RQ-180? The Lockheed SR-72?
Area 51’s perimeter remains heavily guarded by security sensors and camouflaged civilian security contractors with guns. Gray, unmarked 737 airliners and Blackhawk helicopters can be observed delivering cargoes to the airfield.
However, it’s possible to examine satellite images and snap photos of the base from twenty-six miles away on Tikaboo Peak. These reveal that in 2017, a huge new hangar was sighted in Area 51 measuring 200 by 250 feet in size—slightly more square footage than a football field—which surely houses something of interest.
Some interpreted this spate of activity in 2017 as being related to the development of the B-21 stealth bomber, a successor to the B-2 Spirit, which it also very much resembles. Officially, however, the Air Force has announced that B-21s will be tested at Tinkers AFB in Oklahoma and Edwards AFB in California.
The smart money may instead be that hangar harbors advanced stealth drones.
One likely-seeming candidate is the Northrop-Grumman RQ-180, which according to a 2013 report inAviation Week, is a very large long-range and long-endurance drone with a powerful ground-scanning Active Electronically Scanned Array radar. The project had reportedly entered low-rate production, and was likely funded by a $2 billion allotment of black project money.
Though the RQ-180’s specs may resemble those of the RQ-4 Global Hawk, an airliner-sized drone envisioned as a modern successor to the U-2, the RQ-180 is also a stealth platform that can penetrate hostile airspace and possibly could be employed on attack missions. Furthermore, it reportedly exhibits broadband stealth, unlike most stealth fighters which tend to become visible to less-precise low-bandwidth radars.
The Pentagon unusually responded to the article by confirming the RQ-180’s existence—and has had no more to say about it since then.
A long-range penetrating stealth drone could have significant strategic applications as a “silver bullet” to monitor and possibly even attack nuclear assets during crisis, which may explain the secrecy surrounding the RQ-180.
Area 51 might also be an attractive place to host new hypersonic glide vehicles, which the Pentagon is currently pouring a ton of research money into. Hypersonic weapons would combine the extreme speed of ballistic missiles with the flatter, harder-to-detect trajectory of a cruise-missile style weapon.
Indeed, Lockheed-Martin has publicly hinted that it may or may not have developed an experimental hypersonic unmanned aircraft nicknamed the SR-72 (a clear nod to the SR-71 spy plane) intended for both surveillance and bombing roles. If such a demonstrator exists, Groom Lake would seem like a logical place to secret it.
Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring.
This piece first appeared in 2019 and is being reprinted due to reader interest.
Image: Reuters.
ALL RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011
An image of an area called Telegonus Mensa on Jupiter's moon Io, taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft on Oct. 16, 2001, reveals a huge cigar-shaped object that stands out in the surrounding landscape.
Aside from the possibility that the object could be an ordinary rock formation, it resembles a huge tower or obelisk.
Next to the huge obelisk, it looks like artificial structures have been built. Could it be that Jupiter's Moon LO was once inhabited by an intelligent race?
“I saw an alien get on the space shuttle,” says retired astronaut
“I saw an alien get on the space shuttle,” says retired astronaut
Astronaut Clark C. McClelland was fired from NASA, filed and sentenced with loss of all social privileges and pension for speaking openly about aliens and broadcasting censored videos of the missions in which he participated.
McClelland, a former astronaut and former member of the MUFON commission (in charge of collecting information about UFOs), revealed that he and NASA know that aliens exist and that during a space mission from their ship they were able to see a smart disk.
He told ‘The Canadian’ secret details of an astonishing incident that occurred during NASAA’s STS-80 mission aboard the shuttle Columbia.
What happened was confirmed by Dr. Franklin Story Musgrave (crew member of the STS-80 mission).
Then they saw that a disk-shaped object much larger than the shuttle suddenly appeared, while they were about 190 miles up (about 306 kilometers).
Musgrave admitted that he saw the object, but could not identify what it is. Unlike other objects he saw, this one seemed to come from “nowhere, it was very impressive,” he said.
Upon returning to Earth, Musgrave was questioned about the encounter and the scientist reviewed a video recording of the encounter between the Columbia and the UFO as they flew over Denver, Colorado.
He indicated that the object appeared to be controlled by an intelligence changing its flight vector. Most disconcerting was that it seemed to follow Columbia and its crew through space.
After the mission, the scientist became convinced not only of the existence of aliens, but that they are here. The astronaut decided to go on a personal discovery mission.
At a lecture on astronomy, Musgrave, at the end of his presentation, displayed images on a big screen, showing an artistic rendering of the evil gray aliens, and shook his audience by saying, “These guys are real, I guarantee it!” .
This testimony adds to another serious revelation made by retired United States military who ask the government not to continue hiding the truth and narrated how aliens interfered with nuclear bases.
Other members of NASA who have testified about aliens are Gordon Cooper , Donald Slayton, Gene Cernan, Frank Borman, Neil Armstrong, and Scott Carpenter, who insist that UFOs are real and that intelligent extraterrestrial beings exist.
Voyager’s views of Jupiter’s colorful cloud tops reminded many people of an impressionist painter’s canvas. Fine details in and around the Great Red Spot changed significantly in the four months between the Voyager 1 flyby and Voyager 2 (pictured).
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Until the mid-1990s, when planets were at last being discovered orbiting distant stars, Jupiter was the largest world known. Eleven times Earth’s diameter and 318 times our planet’s mass, Jupiter possesses more than twice the combined matter of all the other planets, moons, asteroids, and comets in the solar system. Made mostly of hydrogen (89.8 percent by volume) and helium (10.2 percent), Jupiter is essentially a bottomless atmosphere that, beneath the clouds, transitions into an exotic fluid. Its largest moons, so big they rival Mercury in size, appear to hold substantial amounts of liquid water and beckon scientists as potential abodes for life beyond Earth.
For centuries, humanity could view this giant world only through ground-based telescopes. But in 1973 and 1974, respectively, the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft raced past the planet, providing the first close-up images of its stormy atmosphere, probing its internal structure, and charting its intense radiation belts and magnetic field. The Pioneer probes blazed a trail for further exploration of the outer solar system. Even as scientists reveled in the data the probes returned, NASA already was working on a far more ambitious encore.
The huge, umbrella-shaped plume of the volcano Pele rises some 185 miles (300km) above Io’s surface. Ejecta from the massive eruption covers an area the size of Alaska.
NASA/JPL/USGS
The mission, originally called Mariner Jupiter-Saturn 1977, received a name change before launch to the one we know today: Voyager, the longest-running space mission in history. The twin Voyagers carried better cameras, more advanced instruments, and more computing power than the Pioneers. Both spacecraft launched in 1977 and are still returning data as they cruise away from our planetary system and journey into the unending night of interstellar space. Voyagers 1 and 2 are now so far away that their radio signals take more than 15 hours to reach us. The more distant probe, Voyager 1, has passed beyond the heliopause, a boundary separating the interstellar environment from charged particles and magnetic fields flowing from the Sun, known as the solar wind. Voyager 2 is cruising through the heliosheath, a zone where pressure from interstellar gas begins slowing the solar wind.
“It’s been a remarkable journey,” says Voyager project scientist Ed Stone at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “We keep discovering things nobody knew we were going to discover.” He says both spacecraft may be able to return measurements from a single science instrument until 2030 if their power sources — called radioisotope thermoelectric generators — hold out as expected.
Encounter with Jove
On January 6, 1979, Voyager 1 was 36 million miles (58 million kilometers) from Jupiter and two months from its closest approach. Views of the planet’s cloudy, banded disk already exceeded the best images from Earth. Among other assignments, the probe began accumulating a time-lapse movie by taking images every 10 hours, one for each Jupiter rotation.
By early February, the resolution and image quality were comparable to the best pictures returned by the Pioneers. From that point on, Jupiter would be seen as never before.
When viewed from Earth through a small telescope, the planet’s atmosphere shows alternating bright white zones and darker brown belts. These are the visible manifestations of east-west jet streams that alternate direction from the equator to the poles and carry oval-shaped weather systems of all sizes.
Voyager 1 captured this view of Jupiter on January 9, 1979. Even though the spacecraft was 34 million miles (54 million km) away, its camera captured details impossible to see from Earth.
NASA/JPL
The Voyager imaging team tracked a pair of similarly sized brown ovals, watching them merge, tumble, and eject a dark streamer. Atmospheric models had not predicted such strange behavior. Eddies, waves, and turbulent clouds churned everywhere. At a February 28 press briefing, imaging team leader Bradford Smith described his team as “happily bewildered” by what they were seeing. “Jupiter is far more complex in its atmospheric motions than we had ever imagined,” he said.
The planet’s largest feature, a vast southern storm called the Great Red Spot, had been observed continuously from Earth for 150 years. But now, for the first time, scientists could study its rotation and watch it interact with neighboring features. Large enough to hold a pair of Earth-sized planets, the Great Red Spot rolls between two jet streams and completes a rotation in about six days. It spins counterclockwise, the opposite direction as hurricanes in Earth’s Southern Hemisphere, classifying it as a high-pressure system. Its cloud tops extend nearly 5 miles (8km) above neighboring layers. Although winds whip around its periphery at 425 mph (680 km/h), the interior is calm. Its size and position vary slightly, and long-term ground-based monitoring shows that the longest-lived storm known to science is shrinking steadily.
Amy Simon at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, leads a team studying Jupiter with the Hubble Space Telescope. The observations show the storm’s long axis is half what was reported in the 1880s and about 30 percent smaller than during the Voyager flybys. And since 2014, the Great Red Spot has turned an unusually intense shade of orange.
Io (in front of the Great Red Spot) and Europa appear against Jupiter’s cloud tops in this Voyager 1 image from February 13, 1979. Io’s odd coloration already stands out from a distance of 12 million miles (20 million km).
NASA/JPL
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena have conducted laboratory experiments that suggest the storm’s color, which has ranged from pale orange to brick red, is a result of reddish coloring agents produced when ultraviolet (UV) sunlight breaks down ammonia and acetylene, gases common in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. The high clouds within the Great Red Spot and similar storms receive more solar UV, and the storms’ rotation helps retain colored particles that result in stronger shades. Scientists suspect these changes in color and size are related to storm strength, but they remain poorly understood.
In 1998, two of three 60-year-old white oval storms in a cloud band south of the Great Red Spot merged, and in early 2000, the third oval joined them. The resulting weather system, named Oval BA, is about half the size of the Great Red Spot and persists today. In August 2005, amateur astronomers noticed it was acquiring a reddish color. The hue gradually deepened; by 2006, the storm was nicknamed “the Little Red Spot” and “Red Spot Jr.”
Yet despite the Voyager probes and later missions, vital questions about Jupiter’s atmosphere remain. Why are the jet streams and large storms stable for so long? What’s the energy source for the jets? And do the winds continue into the planet’s interior?
Diving into Jupiter
The top of Jupiter’s atmosphere consists of haze layers formed by complex hydrocarbons like ethane, ethylene, and acetylene. These chemicals assemble from the fragments of methane molecules broken apart by solar UV, a process similar to how smog forms in Earth’s atmosphere. About 25 miles (40km) deeper, the pressure approaches 60 percent of that at Earth’s surface (1 bar), but the temperature is only –193° F (–125° C). A deck of bright white clouds formed by ammonia ice crystals occupies this level.
The Voyagers revealed several brown ovals in Jupiter’s atmosphere. These appear to be openings in the high-level clouds that give a peek to darker regions below. Note the high white cloud protruding over this oval’s northern edge.
NASA/JPL
Plunge deeper, to twice Earth’s surface pressure, and the temperature rises to –76° F (–60° C). Here we encounter a tawny, yellow-orange cloud deck built from droplets or crystals of ammonium hydrosulfide. Usually we cannot see past these clouds, but spacecraft measurements and models indicate that the next cloud layer — at pressures of about 3 to 7 bars and temperatures from freezing to about 60° F (16° C) — contains water ice crystals at the colder levels and water droplets lower down, just like clouds on Earth. Any familiarity pretty much ends there, though.
Minute frequency changes in spacecraft radio signals allow scientists to map the structure of Jupiter’s gravitational field; this enables them to develop models of what lies beneath the clouds. Pressures and temperatures increase steadily, but the hydrogen atmosphere simply grows denser and hotter with depth until, hundreds of miles beneath the clouds, molecular hydrogen starts to resemble a hot liquid. At depths 10 times greater, only 20 percent of the way to Jupiter’s center, pressures approach a million bars, and temperatures soar to 10,000° F (5,700° C) — nearly as hot as the Sun’s surface. Here the interior transforms into a more exotic substance called liquid metallic hydrogen, an electrically conductive soup of protons and electrons that makes up most of Jupiter’s mass.
Some 28,000 miles (45,000km) farther down, about 80 percent of the way to the planet’s center, the composition may change to a mix of water, methane, and ammonia at enormous temperatures and pressures. Another 4,400 miles (7,000km) down, and we’re 10 percent from the center; the pressure rises to around 40 million bars and the temperature to some 40,000° F (22,000° C). At this point, Jupiter’s composition may gradually morph into a dense core, perhaps containing up to 20 Earth masses in a mix of rock and iron that may also include water, methane, and ammonia.
At these pressures, dense materials may become soluble in liquid hydrogen, some scientists suggest. This means Jupiter’s original core may have dissolved partially or completely away, its high-density materials dispersed throughout a larger portion of the planet. One of the main goals of NASA’s Juno mission, which has been orbiting the planet since July 2016, is to answer the many remaining questions about how the solar system’s largest world is put together. (See “Under the veil,” above.)
Magnetic tango
Like Earth, Jupiter generates a magnetic field, which at the cloud tops is about 15 times stronger than our planet’s. The field traps, stores, and controls the flow of charged particles inside it, forming a vast, comet-shaped bubble — called a magnetosphere — that shields the planet from direct exposure to the solar wind. Pressure from the solar wind pushes the Sun-facing side into a rounded bow shock that slows and deflects most of the incoming charged particles in much the same way that water flows around the bow of a moving ship. The opposite side tapers into an immense magnetotail whose farthest portions wave and flap like the tattered end of a windsock.
Sinuous rivers of lava flow down the flanks of Io’s volcano Ra Patera. The volcano’s vent measures about 19 miles (30km) across, while the lava flows extend up to 155 miles (250km) from there. The summit rises only about 0.6 mile (1km) above the surroundings.
NASA/JPL
Jupiter’s magnetosphere is the solar system’s largest planetary structure. “If you look up and identify Jupiter in the sky, its magnetosphere would be about the size of the Moon,” says Goddard’s John Connerney, deputy principal investigator for the Juno mission. Its bow shock typically lies about 40 Jupiter diameters sunward of the planet and its magnetotail stretches some 3,500 diameters behind it, nearly reaching Saturn’s orbit. We know this because as Voyager 2 approached Saturn in 1981, two years and 400 million miles (650 million km) after its Jupiter encounter, the spacecraft slipped in and out of Jupiter’s frayed magnetotail multiple times. (By comparison, Earth’s bow shock lies three to five Earth diameters toward the Sun, and its magnetotail may extend hundreds of diameters.)
Between February 28 and March 2, 1979, the magnetosphere seemed to be playing hard to get with the approaching Voyager 1. The solar wind was gusty, producing unusually strong and variable pressures that pushed the bow shock closer to the planet. When the wind eased, the bow shock re-expanded. Pioneers 10 and 11 made their crossings 50 diameters from Jupiter, but Voyager 1 crossed it five times, the last at scarcely half that range (28 diameters).
On March 5, the spacecraft made its closest approach, passing within 128,400 miles (206,700km) of Jupiter’s cloud tops, barely one-third the distance at which Voyager 2 would pass July 9. Scientists selected this path so they could measure a hypothesized electrical circuit connecting Jupiter and its moon Io, and it took Voyager 1 deep into the most hazardous radiation belts in the solar system. Based on measurements from the Pioneers, the Voyager design included shielding that hardened sensitive electronics to the bombardment of high-energy electrons, protons, and ions stored in Jupiter’s equivalent of Earth’s Van Allen Belts. But an unprotected human passenger riding aboard Voyager 1 during closest approach would have received a thousand times the lethal radiation dose.
Four new worlds
An extraordinary planet deserves extraordinary moons, and Jupiter’s four big satellites do not disappoint. Discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610, they are Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto (in order of distance from the planet). Ganymede, the largest and most massive moon in the solar system, is slightly bigger than Mercury, while Callisto is nearly the planet’s diameter. Both Io and Europa are roughly the size of Earth’s Moon.
The moons’ complexity and individuality, which scientists hardly suspected despite centuries of telescopic observations, proved a major surprise of the Voyager missions. Reporting their results in the journal Science three months after the Voyager 1 encounter, the imaging team noted that the large moons do not closely resemble either the planets in the inner solar system or one another. “The sense of novelty,” they wrote, “would probably not have been greater had we explored a different solar system.”
“They’re quite distinct,” says Stone, “and I think the one thing we have learned is that nature is remarkably diverse, and you don’t see replicas. Each body seems to have its own life history written on the surface and in its interior.”
There had long been hints that the big moons might be doing something interesting. Galileo’s 17th-century plots showed that Europa and Io always meet up on the side of Jupiter exactly opposite from where Europa and Ganymede do. In the 7.15 days it takes Ganymede to go around Jupiter once, Europa orbits twice and Io four times. This 1:2:4 resonance forces the moons’ orbits to maintain a slight eccentricity, which in turn causes their bodies to flex slightly due to tides raised by Jupiter’s gravity. Just as repeatedly bending a paper clip warms up the metal, this forced flexing warms the interiors of Jupiter’s big moons.
Giant Ganymede — larger than Mercury — sports two different types of terrain. The dark material is oldest, while the lighter bands cut by grooves and ridges are significantly younger. A relatively recent impact threw out the bright material at bottom.
NASA/JPL
Stanton Peale at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his colleagues first described the mechanism in a paper submitted to Science in January 1979. They presciently concluded: “Voyager images of Io may reveal evidence for a planetary structure and history dramatically different from any previously observed.” The paper was published March 2, three days before Voyager 1’s closest approach. By then, images of the weirdly colored moon, reminiscent of a cheese pizza, already were making headlines. Scientists had expected Io to resemble our Moon, but it lacked anything that looked like an impact crater and was coated with richly colored deposits that wouldn’t look out of place around active fumaroles on Earth.
On March 8, as Voyager 1 raced out of the Jupiter system, its camera captured a routine navigation image of a crescent Io as part of a program to refine knowledge of the spacecraft’s trajectory. The next day, JPL engineer Linda Morabito enhanced this image to locate background stars and uncovered another crescent shape on Io’s sunlit limb. It looked like the edge of another satellite peeking out from behind Io, but scientists determined that an unknown satellite so large would have been detectable from Earth. “No one understood what they were seeing, reinforcing the degree of difficulty associated with interpreting this image,” she later wrote.
The Voyagers revealed dark streaks crisscrossing the surface of Europa, the smallest of Jupiter’s Galilean moons. In some cases, the streaks stretch more than 1,000 miles (1,600km). Scientists later deduced that the streaks are cracks in the moon’s icy crust filled with material from its interior.
NASA/JPL/USGS
By March 12, the imaging team had confirmed the presence of active volcanoes. What Morabito had noticed was a plume of ejecta associated with a heart-shaped volcano now known as Pele. Remarkably, the same picture also held a second plume, one erupting from a feature now called Loki and catching sunlight as it rose high over Io’s night side.
Scientists now know of at least 150 active volcanoes on Io. Some of them blast umbrella-shaped plumes containing sodium, potassium, sulfur, sulfur dioxide, and more to altitudes as high as 310 miles (500km). Some of the ejecta falls back to paint Io’s terrain in garish hues, and the rest forms a thin, distended atmosphere around the moon. Particle interactions ionize some of these atoms, and they then become swept up in Jupiter’s fast-moving magnetic field, which rotates with the planet’s 10-hour rotation. “About a ton per second of that material is picked up by the jovian magnetic field, and that mass of stuff inflates the Jupiter magnetosphere to about twice the size it should be,” Stone says.
The ionized gas spreads along Io’s orbit to form a doughnut-shaped cloud called the Io plasma torus. Some of the heavy ions in the torus migrate outward, and their pressure supersizes the magnetosphere. As Io moves through the torus, it continuously generates an electrical current that flows along a conduit, called the Io flux tube, linked to Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. Two billion kilowatts flow through the flux tube, comparable to the average global power consumption on Earth. The Voyager 1 team deliberately tried to pass through the tube, but the material around Io shifted its position from what was expected, and the spacecraft instead flew alongside it.
While imaging from Earth in 1993, Connerney and his colleagues discovered a spot of infrared emission in Jupiter’s polar atmosphere. The glow tracked with Io in its orbit and arose from energy coursing down the flux tube. But Io isn’t alone in this regard. In 2002, Hubble imaged Io’s spot in the UV and found two more glows from Europa and Ganymede, showing they generate their own flux tubes. “The system is highly coupled and connected, where the magnetic fields and the particles are all interacting with the moons,” Stone says. And the phenomenon isn’t unique to Jupiter. In 2011, scientists identified a UV spot associated with the active moon Enceladus in images from the Cassini mission orbiting Saturn.
Voyager 1 discovered Jupiter’s faint, dusty rings during its flyby, and they posed for this Voyager 2 portrait once the probe passed into the planet’s shadow. The curved rings appear orange-red; Jupiter’s multicolored limb comes from the long exposure through two filters.
NASA/JPL
The outer trio
Europa, the next moon out from Jupiter, couldn’t be more different from its siblings. Low-resolution images from Voyager 1 showed a bright surface of frozen water with no discernible craters, along with hints of dark linear features. Voyager 2 passed much closer to Europa on July 9, and its images revealed frozen plains crisscrossed by dark streaks, giving it the look of a cracked egg. Europa’s surface is the smoothest in the solar system. Features display so little topographical relief that imaging team member Larry Soderblom compared the moon to a billiard ball. Later that year, the scientists who explained the heating of Io suggested that tidal flexing of Europa could provide enough heat to sustain an ocean beneath its icy shell, which is widely thought to be 10 to 15 miles (16 to 24km) thick. The ocean itself may be at least 30 miles (48km) deep, or more than 10 times the average depth of Earth’s seas.
In fact, several lines of evidence now support the presence of briny global oceans within Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, each containing more water than Earth’s seas. NASA’s Galileo spacecraft, which in 1995 became the first to orbit Jupiter, flew close to these moons and found that Jupiter’s rotating magnetic field induces currents in electrically conducting layers within them. These currents, in turn, generate secondary magnetic fields Galileo could detect. Europa’s induced response matches what researchers would expect for a salty subsurface ocean many miles thick. And different teams using Hubble in 2012 and 2016 discovered tantalizing evidence that Europa occasionally erupts plumes of water vapor reaching heights of 125 miles (200km), suggesting the icy shell may be quite thin in some locations.
The Juno spacecraft’s camera preferentially targets Jupiter’s poles. This view of the south pole reveals several oval cyclones up to 600 miles (1,000km) in diameter.
The first low-resolution glimpses of Ganymede revealed two starkly different terrain types. A dark material covers about 35 percent of the surface. Peppered with impact craters and their bright halos of icy ejecta, this is the moon’s geologically oldest surface. The rest of the moon features light materials crosscut by an intricate patchwork of grooves and ridges. Voyager 1 images showed that fault lines cut some of the light bands, which were then offset by surface movement. “There is transverse motion along these faults,” Soderblom said at a March 6 briefing. “Things get offset, apparently, for hundreds of kilometers.” This suggested that tidal heating had powered a brief period of intense tectonic activity in Ganymede’s icy crust early in its history.
The Galileo mission revealed in 1996 that Ganymede generates its own permanent magnetic field, the only moon in the solar system known to do so, and therefore makes its own miniature magnetosphere. This complicates the interpretation of its induced field, but recent models, as well as Hubble observations of Ganymede’s aurorae, suggest the interior contains shells of different phases of water ice separated by salty seas.
Callisto, the farthest of Jupiter’s big moons, hosts the solar system’s most heavily cratered and geologically ancient surface. Its terrain is nearly saturated with bright impact craters. The largest visible feature, named Valhalla, resembles a bull’s-eye about 2,200 miles (3,600km) across, the frozen remnant of a giant impact. Galileo spacecraft observations indicate the presence of a salty, subsurface global ocean despite little tidal heating at Callisto now. Perhaps ammonia and other contaminants lower the freezing point enough for a liquid layer to survive.
Opening act
The Jupiter flybys mark the first chapter in the Voyagers’ exploration of the outer solar system. They provided new views of an enormous, complex, and dynamic atmosphere that is still far from understood. They explored a vast magnetosphere loaded with particles from its moons, especially Io, and intimately connected to them. Close-ups of unique new worlds uncovered incredible properties, including the first example of active extraterrestrial volcanism and the first clues that frozen moons could sport internal seas. Further discoveries included a faint ring of dust extending 80,000 miles (129,000km) from the planet’s center, and two new moons, Metis and Adrastea, orbiting just beyond it. The probes also found a third satellite, Thebe, in a more distant orbit, though still well inside Io’s.
With Jupiter now in the rearview mirror, Voyager scientists could begin digging deeper into the data — and wondering what awaited them at their next destination, Saturn.
NASA's solar sail technology wants to power space exploration using sunlight
NASA's solar sail technology wants to power space exploration using sunlight
NASA has announced plans to test its updated solar sail technology in 2022. known as ACS3 (advanced composite solar sail system), the aim of the mission is to replace conventional rocket propellants by developing and testing solar sails using sunlight beams to move nanosatellites.
‘just as a sailboat is powered by wind in a sail, solar sails employ the pressure of sunlight for propulsion, eliminating the need for conventional rocket propellant,’NASA wrote in a june 23 statement.
the NASA solar sail propulsion systems have been designed for future small interplanetary spacecrafts destined for low-cost deep-space and science missions requiring long-duration and low-thrust propulsion.the benefit of nanosatellites with solar sails is a continuous thrust without using expending propellants, enabling orbits that are not possible with conventional propulsion systems.
‘the primary objective of the ACS3 mission is to demonstrate the successful deployment of the composite boom solar sail in low-earth orbit,’said NASA.‘after reaching space, the mission’s CubeSat spacecraft will deploy its solar power arrays and then begin unfurling its solar sail via four booms that span the diagonals of the square and unspool to reach 7 meters (about 23 feet) in length. after approximately 20 or 30 minutes when the solar sail is fully deployed, the square-shaped solar sail measures approximately 9 meters (about 30 feet) per side or about the size of a small apartment. a suite of onboard digital cameras will obtain images of the sail during and after deployment in order to assess its shape and alignment.’
interest in solar sailing as an alternative to chemical and electric propulsion systems continues to increase.using sunlight to propel small spacecraft in lieu of consumable propellants will be advantageous for many mission profiles and offers flexibility in spacecraft design to help NASA meet its missions’ objectives most efficiently.
project info:
name: advanced composite solar sail system (ACS3) initiator: NASA company:NanoAvionics
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Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
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