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...
A NASA image shows 9 of the 13 cubesats originally planned to fly on the Artemis 1 mission installed in their payload adapters. At least one cubesat will not be ready in time for the mission. Credit: NASA/Cory Huston
COLORADO SPRINGS — While most of the cubesats manifested to launch as secondary payloads on the first Space Launch System mission have arrived, at least one of them will miss its flight.
NASA selected 13 cubesats several years ago to fly as secondary payloads on the Artemis 1 mission, launching no earlier than November. The cubesats, each six units in size, come from a mix of NASA, international and academic developers.
NASA released an image Aug. 11 showing the Orion stage adapter, the component that links the Orion spacecraft to the SLS second stage and which hosts the cubesats that will be deployed during the mission. The image shows nine cubesats installed on the adapter and the other four slots still unoccupied.
One of those four slots will be filled by BioSentinel, a NASA cubesat that will study the long-term effects of radiation in deep space on organisms, in this case yeast. That spacecraft has arrived at the Kennedy Space Center, NASA spokesperson Shannon Segovia said Aug. 19, but will be installed on the adapter last to preserve the biological samples onboard.
Two of the other three cubesats are part of NASA’s Cube Quest Challenge, a competition held by the agency’s Centennial Challenges prize program. NASA spokesperson Molly Porter said that one of them, CU-3E from the University of Colorado Boulder, is still expected to arrive in time for the Artemis 1 launch, but that the other, Cislunar Explorers from Cornell University, will not be ready for the flight. A third Cube Quest cubesat, Team Miles, has been installed on the stage adapter.
The other cubesat is Lunar Flashlight, being developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to look for water ice deposits on the moon using lasers. That spacecraft is in danger of missing the Artemis 1 because of delays in the development of its propulsion system, JPL spokesperson Ian O’Neill said Aug. 20.
“Due to significant issues during testing of the originally procured Lunar Flashlight propulsion system, the mission switched to development of an alternative. This change occurred late in the project and delayed mission readiness,” NASA said in a statement about the cubesat. The pandemic then slowed development of the new propulsion system, which uses a “green” nontoxic propellant, by a group led by the Georgia Institute of Technology.
JPL has received the propulsion system, but O’Neill said it wasn’t clear that the system would be fully integrated and tested in time to launch on Artemis 1. “NASA is also exploring several near-term commercial launch opportunities for Lunar Flashlight in case it does not make Artemis 1,” the agency stated.
Exactly how much time CU-3E and Lunar Flashlight have to make Artemis 1 isn’t clear. Segovia said the cubesats must arrive in time to be installed on the Orion stage adapter before that adapter is installed on the SLS. NASA KSC spokesperson Tiffany Fairley said that installation is currently scheduled for early fall.
During a panel discussion at the AIAA Propulsion and Energy Forum Aug. 10, David Reynolds of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center said that the pandemic had caused some of the secondary payloads to fall behind schedule. “We’re trying to give them some opportunity to get caught up,” he said.
NASA is doing so by delaying the installation of the Orion stage adapter for as long as possible, using a mass simulator in its place for tests inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at KSC. “That will allow them to load in some of those secondary payloads for another month and a half,” he said.
Reynolds noted that the current planning date for the Artemis 1 launch is Nov. 26. “I wouldn’t book nonrefundable flights just yet,” he added.
HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - The Mars 2020 Perseverance rover has been exploring new frontiers for science since it landed on the Red Planet in February in an area called Jezero crater.
“The main goal of the mission is to seek out the signs of ancient life ― life that once existed on Mars. We’re talking about microbial life, very small basic life,” researcher Sarah Fagents said.
Fagents is with the University of Hawaii’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. She’s on the team of about of about 30 scientists, engineers and graduate students that controls the rover’s Mastcam-Z.
The imaging system captures high-resolution photographs and video of the Martian landscape.
UH doctoral student Eleni Ravanis is also a team member.
“We’re looking at places that scientists have been looking at from orbit for a long time. It’s really exciting to get up close and test some of the hypotheses that people have come up with,” she said.
The work is rewarding and a challenge logistically. The Mastcam team is spread out all over the world and a Martian day is 40 minutes longer than an Earth day. Team members work round-the-clock to send Rover work orders that it receives during the Martian night.
“When the Rover wakes up in the morning, during the Martian day, it can do everything we told it to do,” Fagents said.
The Mastcam is one of seven instruments on the rover. They have their own teams of scientists who assigned specific tasks that include collecting samples of rocks and soil.
Eventually, Perserverance wlll move to another part of the Jezero crater.
“It used to have a lake in it. We can tell that from the types of deposits that we can see in there from orbit,” Fagents said.
The spacecraft will operate until it dies. The goal is to get the samples back to earth.
“There’s a lot more work that we can do in a big specialist laboratory that we have on earth compared to what we can do at Mars,” Ravanis said.
Other mission scientists with UH ties include Jim Bell, the principal investigator of the Mastcam-Z instrument, and Shiv Sharma who is the co-investigator on the Supercam instrument.
Fagents said she’s thrilled to be working on the Mars project.
“It’s the next best thing to being their with your own boots on the ground.”
If all goes well, in 2023, Perseverance will climb out of the crater to explore more of the Red Planet.
Copyright 2021 Hawaii News Now. All rights reserved.
FORTY YEARS AGO, NASA SCIENTIST LINDA SPILKER started sleeping at the office. It was her first job out of college, but she wasn’t camping out because she was over-worked and chained to her desk. Instead, she was waiting for an exquisite moment in human history: The first time Voyager 2 would fly by Saturn and its moons, and, critically, the images it would return to Earth of the distinctive ringed planet.
“I’d bring my sleeping bag into my office, and I’d have like a timeline of when the pictures would come back to the Earth,” she recalls for Inverse. “A lot of people did this, so you could sometimes go into somebody’s office, and you might see a pair of feet sticking out from under the desk.”
Voyager 2’s flyby wasn’t the first time a spacecraft gave scientists a close-up view of the gas giant and its moons — that privilege went to its sister spacecraft Voyager 1, which entered the Saturn system on November 12, 1980.
But the flyby, which took place on August 26, 1981, provided scientists here on Earth with important observations that, combined with those of Voyager 1, have informed every NASA mission to the Saturn system since.
“WE COULD GO IN AND TWEAK THE DESIGNS AND THE OBSERVATIONS FOR VOYAGER 2.”
NASA’s Cassini, Huygens, and, importantly, the upcoming Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan to search for signs of life all owe a debt to this moment in history.
WHAT VOYAGER 2 DISCOVERED AROUND SATURN
When Spilker graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physics and went to work for NASA in 1977, they gave her a choice of missions., including a brand new mission set to launch that year — Voyager.
“When they told me that Voyager was headed to Jupiter and Saturn, and possibly onto Uranus, and Neptune, I said, ‘Sign me up,’” she says.
Spilker watched Voyager 2 launch in August of 1977 and then settled into her role on the science team for both space probes until they reached the Saturn system. Voyager 1 made it on November 12, 1980, and just a little shy of one year later, Voyager 2 entered the Saturn system on August 26, 1981.
“The first flyby was unique in that we found so many interesting new things. We got to see the detailed structure, for instance, in Saturn’s rings,” Spilker says. With these data in hand, the scientists on the ground could plan for the next flyby — and what they wanted to find.
“We could go in and tweak the designs and the observations for Voyager 2,” Spilker says.
Voyager 2 took a closer look at Saturn’s rings, particularly the narrow, outermost “F” ring.
“We saw a lot of changes in that ring, in particular, these sorts of kinks and braids that we could see in that ring,” Spilker says.
Voyager 2 revealed that Saturn’s rings are anything but “bland sheets of material,” but rather intricate, detailed, and dynamic structures. Spilker would later use Voyager 2’s stellar and radio occultation data — measurements of how starlight and radio waves were influenced by the rings while passing through them — to complete her Ph.D. in geophysics and space physics.
“The way the waves damp out tell you something about the surface mass density and about the densities of particles,” she says.
“WE SAW EVIDENCE OF TECTONIC FRACTURES, SOFTENED CRATERS.”
“I was always a big fan of the rings after having used so much ring data for my thesis.”
IDENTIFYING HABITABLE WORLDS
Less visually beautiful, but perhaps more intellectually curious, were the observations collected by Voyager 2 of two of Saturn’s moons, Titan and Enceladus. These data would inform both later NASA missions and the scientific search for alien life.
Enceladus is now known to harbor a global liquid water ocean beneath its icy crust, making it a prime candidate target to search for extraterrestrial life. But before the Voyager craft made it to Saturn, scientists were not even sure the small, 500-kilometer diameter world was geologically active — a key ingredient for life.
“What was really astonishing was to see Enceladus and just how bright and pristine this world looked,” Spilker says.
“We saw evidence of tectonic fractures, softened craters,” she recalls.
Saturn’s moon Enceladus as captured by Voyager 2. NASA
NASA’s 2005 Cassini mission conducted multiple flybys of the little moon and took images of geysers erupting from Enceladus’s southern polar region. Cassini even flew through the geysers’ plumes, sampling what is believed to be water spewing up from the subsurface ocean.
Meanwhile, the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, remained obscured by haze during the Voyager missions. But the data Voyager 1 and 2 collected was then used to better equip the Cassini spacecraft and the Huygens lander, which separated from Cassini to land on Titan on January 14, 2005.
Saturn’s largest moon Titan as imaged by Voyager 2. NASA
Together, they revealed a world of hydrocarbon lakes and water ice. Titan, scientists confirmed, was another intriguing candidate for hosting extraterrestrial life.
“All the things we learned with Voyager informed us and helped us build the Huygens probe,” Spilker says. She would know, as she joined the Cassini team in 1988.
“Had we not had that information from Voyager, it might have been much harder to put together.”
HOW VOYAGER 2 STILL INFLUENCES NASA MISSIONS TO SATURN
Voyager to Cassini and Huygens — each science mission informs the next, according to Planetary Scientist Elizabeth Turtle. Turtle is the primary investigator on the upcoming Dragonfly mission to Titan set to launch in the mid-2030s.
“TITAN HAS BEEN DOING PREBIOTIC CHEMISTRY EXPERIMENTS FOR US.”
“Each mission provides information that is the basis for future missions,” she says. “But each mission also raises questions, and those become the questions the next missions try to tackle.”
One of the big mysteries about Titan following the Voyager mission’s flyby was what lay on the moon’s surface. Cassini and Huygens answered that question, making observations that revealed a dense atmosphere rich in complex carbon molecules and a surface made of water ice. Turtle says these could include the ingredients necessary for the chemical reactions that could lead to the genesis of life.
Dragonfly on Titan, as imagined by an artist.NASA/JHU-APL
Now it’s Dragonfly’s turn to answer the follow-up question as to whether or not those ingredients are indicative of signs of life on Titan.
An octocopter drone, Dragonfly will fly from place to place to sample the surface of Titan.
“Titan has been doing prebiotic chemistry experiments for us,” Turtle says. “What dragonfly is designed to do is to get there and pick up the results of those experiments and tell us whether there are biologically relevant compounds on the surface of Titan.”
HOW VOYAGER 2 KEEPS ON KEEPING ON
As for Voyager and Spilker, they have both left planetary science far behind. Earlier this year, Spilker rejoined the Voyager 2 mission as its deputy project scientist. Only now, instead of studying Saturn's rings, she’s studying the interstellar medium 150 astronomical units from the Sun: Voyager 2 officially left the Solar System on November 5, 2018.
“I think the goal is to keep taking as much science data for as long as we can,” Spilker says of the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which is now in its 44th year of operations.
“It’s gonna be a long time until we ever get another mission as far from the Sun as Voyager.”
Spilker recalls a statement made by Richard Laeser, then the Voyager project manager, after the Saturn flyby. “Voyager is in its post-retirement years,” Laeser said, and “is very healthy for its age.”
“I just had to chuckle,” Spilker says, “Because that was in 1985, and here we are in 2021, and the Voyagers — both of them are still going strong.”
We’veWe’ve been destroying the earth for a long time, and because sci-fi cinema has distilled and explored those concerns for decades (from Soylent Green to Waterworld to WALL-E to Snowpiercer), the genre has become a kind of echo chamber. Our planet becomes uninhabitable. Humanity travels elsewhere to start again. Were we the problem all along? The repetitive setup of these concerns, and a lack of creativity in considering them, results in films like director and co-writer Tim Fehlbaum’s The Colony.
Visually gorgeous but narratively inert, The Colony tips its hat toward fellow genre classics like Aliens and Children of Men with questions about reproduction, colonialism, and communal responsibility. Its protagonist, Blake (Nora Arnezeder), evokes Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley with her physical strength, her steely stare, and her tenderness toward children. The film’s characters are divided into warring factions fighting over who should control the planet’s scant resources, with Earth’s natives being dismissed as backward and unsophisticated. The allure of space, and the potential it holds, is discussed at length. But for all the time The Colony spends on wistful, melancholy rumination over these ideas, it falls short of offering a singular perspective about any of them.
Intertitles inform us that because of climate change, pandemics, and war, “the ruling elite” escaped Earth to settle on the distant planet Kepler 209. But the planet isn’t perfect: There are no large bodies of water, but there is widespread radioactivity, making survival difficult. Most importantly, people are losing the ability to naturally conceive. With the potential end of humanity looming, the Kepler-ians begin an astronaut program to return to Earth. The first spaceship they send back, Ulysses 1, disappears without ever sending back a return transmission. A generation later, Kepler launches Ulysses 2, and puts all their hope on the shoulders of this three-person crew, including Blake.
Photo: Saban Films
Can you recognize a place where you’ve never lived? Does that kind of knowledge exist as an existential inheritance? As Blake wanders around a humid, foggy beach, lifting up horseshoe crabs and poking at jellyfish, Arnezeder exudes both confusion and familiarity. Her expressive face reflects those conflicting emotions well, and her lithe physicality captures a warrior and explorer accustomed to tension and trained to analyze the unknown. But even with all that preparation, Blake is caught off guard when ambushed by the planet’s survivors, led by a woman named Narvik (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina). They speak in a mishmash of languages, they carry weapons and live nomadically, and unlike the humans on Kepler, they have children. Among the youngsters is a girl named Maila (Bella Bading), whom Blake befriends — and who is kidnapped when this group of survivors is attacked by another heavily armed group who takes what they want, including all the female children.
Blake’s primary mission is to send a message back to Kepler to let them know that reproduction still works on Earth, but when Maila is taken, her Aliens-style protectiveness kicks in. When she follows that second group of survivors to their enclave of gigantic, abandoned cargo ships and aircraft carriers caught on the beach, Fehlbaum gets another chance to show off visually. But when he shifts the film into action mode, The Colony becomes reactive rather than proactive. And while the secrets Blake learns from Gibson (Iain Glen), the second community’s leader, connect to her childhood back on Kepler and provide some solid character development, The Colony then follows a fairly predictable path regarding what Blake chooses to do now that she’s on Earth.
In its early scenes, The Colony works as a plaintive visual exploration of what survival might look like if we continue on our ruinous climate path: constant flooding and swirling waters, movable cities built on rickety ships, nomadic people wrapped in outfits that protect them from the elements and allow for ease of movement. Cinematographer Markus Förderer and production designer Julian R. Wagner create a haunting world, but The Colony is sometimes too literal. Fehlbaum’s presentation of loneliness is packed with thuddingly obvious imagery (Blake alone on the beach, Blake alone in a well flooding with tidewater), but its first 20 or so minutes are a disquieting visualization of loss.
But The Colony isn’t nearly as thoughtful in its character development, and it doesn’t push far enough. So much remains unexplored: How long have the different groups of survivors been at war? What effect does the return of people from Kepler have? How does Blake feel about the societal demand of reproduction? What is the rest of Earth like? Why is a science fiction film, supposedly about exploring a possible future, so incurious about the details?
Photo: Saban Films
The film’s offhanded descriptions of death, like “Flood took him” in describing a missing character, suggest a life of endless hardship. But because The Colony sticks so firmly with Blake’s perspective, it doesn’t make much space for anyone else. The film suggests a class analysis with that “ruling elite” intertitle, but does nothing with it. And while Arnezeder and Boussnina have unbelievable chemistry, The Colony doesn’t allow for any queer subtext, and isn’t actually interested in person-to-person human emotions like romantic love.
Its considerations are loftier: Is world peace realistic between people who were able to leave a dying planet, and those forced to stay behind? What about “coming home” could spark physical changes? Especially recently, as we sail past the deadline for preventive action to combat climate change — with the August 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report describing climate change as “widespread, rapid, and intensifying” — nearly every sci-fi film seems to be revisiting the end of Earth as we know it. But similar to Chaos Walking, Settlers, and Voyagers, The Colony sidesteps the hard work needed to fix or reverse the devastation we have wrought. These characters move in a world that is stunningly visualized but superficially conceived, and The Colony embodies a genre that seems — perhaps like humanity itself — unable to take a step forward in imagining a different future.
The Colony opens on August 27 in theaters, on VOD, and on digital rental platforms like Amazon and Vudu.
The strange vehicle was reportedly seen on Florida Turnpike, with at least one social media user joking that “even a UFO can’t afford the Sunpass toll.”
A video showing what looks like a flying saucer-shaped vehicle cruising along a road in Florida emerged on social media this week.
The footage, posted on Instagram by a media company called Only in Dade, was apparently recorded by a driver who passed the "UFO."
According to Fox News, Only in Dade told them in an email: "It was on the Florida Turnpike and no it wasn’t photoshopped."
At least one social media user who commented on the video suggested that “people will say it's photo shopped.”
Others seemed more amused than perplexed by the spectacle, with one netizen jokingly inquiring “Where is Marvin the Martian?” while another mused that “even a UFO can’t afford the Sunpass toll.”
This UFO sighting video was just submitted to me through our Facebook page. It happened just a few hours ago (29th August 2021) over Carson, a city in Los Angeles County, California in the south bay region of Los Angeles.
Photographic evidence of UFOs has always been pretty shaky at best. Among all of the videos and photos of supposed UFOs there are the hoaxes and fakes, and this has only become more pronounced in recent years with the advent of advanced means to fake photos such as Photoshop. Yet controversial photos and video footage of UFOs go way back in time, to the days before Photoshop and computer manipulation, back to the simpler times of the 1950s.
By far the most famous and iconic purported UFO photos from the 1950s were taken by a couple by the name of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Trent, in rural McMinnville, Oregon. On May 11, 1950, Mrs. Trent was out on their farm when she allegedly noticed a strange, disc-like object flying out over their property. She immediately called out in a panic to her husband, who ran over to see it as well, managing to take two photographs of it before it shot off. These photos would hit the media, including Life Magazine and create quite the stir at the time. They were the clearest photographs ever seen of a “flying saucer,” which was a concept that was at the time just starting to really take off in the mainstream. For a long time, these photographs were widely discussed and debated, going on to become iconic in the UFO field, but it wasn’t until nearly two decades later that the Trent photographs would be subjected to any detailed analysis, by an astronomer from the University of Arizona, William K. Hartmann. After performing a painstakingly meticulous investigation of the photos, using various scientific photographic analysis techniques and photometric measurements with the original negatives, he came to the conclusion that they were the real deal, saying:
It appears significant that the simplest most direct interpretation of the photographs confirms precisely what the witnesses said they saw. To the extent that the photometric analysis is reliable, (and the measurements appear to be consistent), the photographs indicate an object with a bright shiny surface at considerable distance and on the order of tens of meters in diameter. While it would be exaggerating to say that we have positively ruled out a fabrication, it appears significant that the simplest most direct interpretation of the photographs confirms precisely what the witnesses said they saw, and that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disc-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within sight of [the] two witnesses.
One of the Trent photos
Of course, not everyone agreed, with more skeptical photographic analyses coming to the conclusion that the UFO was faked, which is not really hard to guess since looking back on the photos now they are obviously a hoax. However, experts continued to defend them as genuine, including optical physicist Dr. Bruce Maccabee, who did his own analysis and insisted that it was an object “over 1 kilometer away, and about 30 meters in diameter and 4 meters thick,” while also debunking many of the skeptical arguments. The Trent photographs are now widely considered to be faked, but they are an interesting case of early UFO photographs astounding everyone when they were first released.
Another set of photos that made waves in their day were taken in 1952, in Barra da Tijuca, Brazil. On May 7, 1952, press photographer Ed Keffel and reporter Joao Martins were in the area on an assignment when they spotted a strange object in the sky moving very fast at approximately 4:30 p.m. They at first thought it was a plane, but soon realized that this was something else, as it was flying too fast and in a very odd manner. It looked like some sort of flying disc, and Keffel was able to shake off his astonishment enough to take a series of five photographs of the object before it disappeared. These photos would later appear in O Cruzeiro magazine in its May 24, 1952 issue, where they immediately earned wide acclaim for being among the best photographic evidence of UFOs ever taken. The Brazilian Air Force would even conduct a full analysis of the photos and deem them to be genuine, but of course skeptics say it is all a hoax, citing inconsistencies in the lighting and shadows that contradict the witness claims, but Keffel and Martins have always defended the photographs, with Marin saying:
I herewith confirm that in May 1952, I saw an “unidentified aerial object” at Barra da Tijuca, as was published, with every detail, in the review [magazine] 0 Cruzeiro at the time. Together with me was the photographer-reporter Ed Keffel, an exemplary professional, well-succeeded and well-respected for his honesty and seriousness, who obtained a series of photos of the above-referred object. These photos were also published by the above-mentioned review, for which both of us worked at the time. Besides being a journalist, I am also an engineer; and I also have a large experience and knowledge of meteorological, astronomical, and optical phenomena. I have experience of all known types of aircraft and can state that the referred object cannot be framed in any natural phenomena or aircraft of my knowledge.
Neither I nor Ed Keffel tried to derive any financial profit from the fact. We were at the time exclusively contracted by that review [0 Cruzeiro], and there we handed in our report and the photos, without receiving any extra bonus for either. Neither did we receive-nor did we wish to-any payment from anybody, either for the account or for the photos or for the appearances we were practically obliged to make on different occasions on television… I narrated the fact in free talks to military authorities and university auditoriums. I do not know what that object was, and because of this, I classified it in the category of “unidentified flying object”, commonly called a “flying saucer.” The incident, besides the annoyances it entailed, contrived to call my attention on the subject as an only advantage, and consequently I have done research on the subject with the greatest detachment, both in sightings here in Brazil and abroad.
The Brazil photo
Also from 1952 is an actual color film taken of a supposed UFO in the U.S. state of Utah. On this occasion, Warrant Officer D.C. Newhouse was out with his wife in the vicinity of Tremonton, Utah, when they witnessed a formation of flat and circular disc-shaped flying craft flying across the sky in broad daylight. Newhouse happened to have a 16mm color camera with a 3-inch telephoto lens, with which he was able to film the mysterious objects as they traversed the sky. The excited Newhouse would perhaps foolishly submit the film to the Air force, who later returned the film with sections and frames mysteriously missing. The Air Force concluded that the film was of out of focus seagulls, but if this were the case, then why had portions of the film been removed? This was never explained. Other experts who looked at the film debunked the seabird theory, such as Dr. Robert M.L. Baker, Jr., Douglas Aircraft Corporation, who said:
The motion of the objects is not exactly what one would expect from a flock of soaring birds, not the slightest indication of a decrease in brightness due to periodic turning with the wind or flapping. The evidence remains rather contradictory and no single hypothesis of a natural phenomenon yet suggested seems to completely account for the UFO involved.
What did Newhouse film out there? You can see the footage here and decide for yourself. Another photo of a UFO from the same year comes to us from the country of Peru, where on the afternoon of July 19 of that year a Sr. Domingo Troncoso, then with the Peruvian Customs Office at Puerto Maldonado on the jungle choked Bolivian border, saw a gigantic cigar-shaped object soaring over the rainforest leaving a trail of smoke or mist behind it. Troncoso was able to take a single photo of the object before it shot off out of sight. Apparently at the same time, other witnesses in the region had seen it as well, and one Peruvian UFO researcher would tell the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) of this:
In Lima I met Senior Pedro Bardi, who is an agricultural engineer. On July 19, 1952, while on a farm in the Madre de Dios section of Peru, he and others saw a saucer. It was about 4.30 p.m. and they were talking to Lima by radio. Suddenly, according to Bardi, the radio went dead. They looked out the window and saw a round object going by at high speed. (The witnesses included Pedro Arellano, owner of the farm). The object had passed; it was at an estimated 100 meters altitude and was a little smaller than a DC-3, according to Bardi. It made a buzzing sound as it went by.
The object’s speed was determined by a report that it was seen four minutes later near Porto Maldonado, 120 kilometers distant. This speed was computed at 1117 miles per hour. The photograph was secured from a customs administrator named Domingo Troncosco, who said he had taken it as the object flew near the port. Though the photo shows a cigar-shaped object instead of the round shape Bardi described, this could possibly have been due to an elongated effect caused by speed. It seems obvious to me that the photo is genuine. Incidentally, I strongly doubt if this particular saucer was anything but earth-made. The object traveled from left to right at about airplane speed. When the trail settled to ground it turned out to be a mass of thin fibrous threads.
Troncoso’s photograph
Moving ahead to 1957, there is a curious set of photographs taken from the British ship S.S. Ramsay by a radio officer named Thad Fogl. At the time, the ship was near the coast of California when Fogle was called to the deck by the excited 2nd Officer at around 2:30 p.m. When he arrived on deck, he found other crew members staring in awe at a massive disc hanging in the sky. He would later tell Flying Saucer Review Magazine of what happened next:
Without being told twice, I grabbed my Yashica C reflex camera from my wardrobe and dashed on the side of the bridge. Sure enough, there was a queer looking object hovering in the distance. It was suitable for a shot so I waited. In the meantime, I tried to keep under control my shaking knees and hands, and watched the disc. It made no noise and was not more than a mile away. It was silver and black. There was no smoke or any gases coming from it. However, under the disc, a red light pulsated.
We thought it tried to signal, so the 2nd Officer grabbed the Aldis and flicked back, but there was no response. At last the disc came down near enough and I got one shot. Then it turned and I shot again. The disc was rather thick, and had a flat dome. There were no ports. However, there were some black marks, and I wonder if they were not some sort of exhausts. Then we noticed a ladder! Whether it really was a ladder I can’t say. It could be some depression in the craft. The object moved very slowly and stayed with us for a few minutes. Then it shot with quick acceleration towards a rugged mountain, and the desert coast of sun-baked California.
One of Fogle’s photographs
The photographs would turn out to be incredibly clear and showed something that seemed decidedly otherworldly. These photos would be published in several high-profile publications, including The London Illustrated News and Life magazine, earning Fogle much unwanted publicity, much of it negative. His photos were widely derided as clear fakes, and seeking to avoid any more embarrassment, he would say that he had indeed hoaxed them, although he would later claim that this was just to dispel all of the negative publicity being aimed at him and to get everyone off his back. After that he refused to talk on the matter anymore, even though there were plenty of believers who suspected that the photos were actually real. Indeed, we are left to ask if any of these could possibly be real, but real or not, they form the first stirrings of a wave of the proposed photographic UFO evidence that was to come, and have their own place within the world of Ufology.
New Crop Circle Found At Little Nutford, Dorset, England ( August 23, 2021 )
Another Crop Circle was reported in Little Nutford, near Blandford Forum, Dorset, England on August 23, 2021.
These mysterious patterns in fields crop up overnight.
Credit : Stonehenge Dronescapes
RELATED VIDEOs
UFO Fleet Sighted Over Chicago ( July 9, 2021 )
Unquestionable and undisputed record of a fleet of UFOs in Chicago Columbus (Christopher) Park, on July 9, 2021. : It's over 30 UFOs!
Description:
′′ I had a once in a lifetime experience. Leaving Expressway 290 Austin Avenue saw UFOs from my sunroof at Austin traffic light and Jackson-Columbus park. I stopped and filmed an unquestionable proof that the UFO phenomenon is real! You will see over 30 UFOs in heaven. A jet goes flying too. These objects are stationary and move in pairs.
MUFON CASE : 117571 Snoqualmie Pass, Washington ( August 27, 2021)
Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : Something seemed to be hovering and darting across a mountain lake.
Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117571
I hiked up to Granite Mountain Firelookout near Snoqualmie Pass and before leaving the area. I decided to walk to a view point overlooking 2 lakes North of the Firelookout. One of the two lakes caught my attention, the one nearest to me. The one in question is named Crystal Lake. I wouldn't know how far this lake was from where I stood but it was far but close enough that I could see something darting back and fourth across the surface of the lake. My phone has decent zoom and I was able to capture 3 videos of this object. Because of the distance and quality of the zoomed in video its hard to say if it was some kind of UFO or an entity of some type... whatever the case. This object moved nothing like an animal or man made craft. When I 1st spotted this object it was moving erratically above the surface of the lake and it sure seemed like it spotted me. Realizing it was being watched it slowed down and started to move in a straight line towards me but still seemingly hovering above the water. That is when I started to record the 2nd video.( the 1st video I took unknowingly before I spotted it over the lake) I only recorded for 13 seconds when I decided to switch to camera mode because in that mode I would be able to zoom in a little bit more. I took a series of photos where this object without a doubt moved with intention. It made its way towards a dark spot in the lake and as it got closer to this spot a white tail like protrusion appears out of nowhere. It seems like this object lands on this black spot and that's when I switch back to video mode and record 42 seconds of it making its way towards the shoreline very slowly. As I watch and rewatch these videos I am able to zoom in even more to the object and there are some distinct shapes this object forms. From wing like features to a circle, dome like structure. At one point it looks like a stingray gliding/hovering above the surface of the lake.
Date Submitted : 2021-08-27 Date of Event : 2021-08-26 MUFON SUBMITTER FILES :
PENTAGON DOCUMENT TELLS HOW TO ANSWER QUESTIONS ABOUT “EXTRATERRESTRIAL TECHNOLOGY”
PENTAGON DOCUMENT TELLS HOW TO ANSWER QUESTIONS ABOUT “EXTRATERRESTRIAL TECHNOLOGY”
HERE’S EXACTLY WHAT’S IN IT.
Talking Points
The Department of Defense (DOD) has released a document of talking points for how government officials should respond to questions about UFOs.
The document — known as a “briefing card” — was obtained via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by The Black Vault, an online database of declassified government documents. The briefing card itself is filled with messaging and talking points to help public affairs officials navigate tricky questions such as “Has the Department found any evidence of extraterrestrial technology?” and “Why can’t you tell us anything about UAPs or what the [UAP Task Force] is doing?”
You can check out the entire three-page memo below:
Top Line Messages
The Office of the Secretary of Defense’s public affairs received the card on May 17, in anticipation of the (frankly disappointing) UFO report to Congress that came out the next month. It shows that the Pentagon was — at the very least — keenly aware of public interest in the report and the government’s knowledge of UFOs in general.
There’s not a whole lot of new information to be gleaned from the document as it sticks to what we’ve already heard from the Pentagon in the past regarding UFOs. However, the fact that they created the briefing card at all is a testament to how much they wanted to control the messaging surrounding the topic.
This summer’s blockbuster read was a congressionally mandated government reportfrom the Office of the Director of National Intelligence titled Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.
It had a little something for the UFO believer and nonbeliever alike — a minimal something, but something nonetheless.
The U.S. government has spent decades scoffing at UFO reports, often dismissing them as hoaxes, spoofs, or optical illusions.
The Pentagon even renamed UFOs as UAPs, “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” to indicate the uncertainly about whether what people were seeing were actually “objects” that were “flying” or simply something that looked like a flying object.
The nine-page declassified report to Congress examined 144 documented reports since 2004, mostly from U.S. military pilots, and concluded that at least 80 of the sightings, including three recorded on cockpit videos by Navy pilots “probably do represent physical objects,” noting that they “registered across multiple sensors,” including radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapon seekers, and visual observation.
And in 18 cases, the objects also appeared to “exhibit unusual flight characteristics” with the ability to “maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion.”
In other words, they’re real, but real what?
Aside from that singular, albeit significant finding, the report reached no definitive conclusions and included numerous caveats that undercut the certainty of its judgments.
For instance, it noted the targeting sensors on fighter aircraft “are not generally suited for identifying UAP” and that the appearance of objects moving in ways that defy known technology “could be the result of sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misperception.”
And while the review found no evidence flying objects were attributable to secret programs by either the U.S. or its adversaries, it didn’t rule out that Russia orChina could be working on some “breakthrough or disruptive technology.”
In fact, the report didn’t rule out any plausible explanation, including birds, balloons, recreational drones, plastic bags, or natural atmospheric phenomena such as ice crystals, moisture, and thermal fluctuations.
And it solved only a single case, tracing the sighting to a deflating balloon.
The report also makes no mention of the most popular and widely held belief among UFO enthusiasts that some UFOs could be alien spacecraft.
“If and when individual UAP incidents are resolved, they will fall into one of five potential explanatory categories: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, USG or industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a catchall ‘other’ bin,” the report concludes.
It's that “catchall ‘other’ bin” that has UFOlogists intrigued.
For while there is no evidence whatsoever that the unexplained aerial objects are extraterrestrial, in the absence of disproving evidence, one could argue, however unlikely, anything is possible.
Or, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes put it, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
The truth may be out there, but the truth is that nobody knows what it is.
Meanwhile, the intelligence report is helping to change the culture of ridicule for “out there” theories, with senior members of the scientific, policy, military, and intelligence communities beginning to take the topic more seriously.
“We don’t know what these things are. We have no evidence to suggest that they are from outer space, but at the same time, we have no evidence to suggest that they’re not,” said Luis Elizondo, the former director of the Pentagon’s once-secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, in a recent online discussion .
“We are quite convinced that we’re dealing with a technology that is multigenerational, several generations ahead of what we consider next-generation technology … something that could be anywhere between 50 to 1,000 years ahead of us.”
It’s this area of exploration that has captured the interest of the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, which said it intends to focus future analysis on the small number of cases in which UAPs “appeared to display unusual flight characteristics.”
As for what the Tic Tac-shaped objects might be, Elizondo said he has a pretty open mind.
“There’s a lot of options out there. This could be something that is extrahyperdimensional. Now, I don’t mean extradimensional in a woo-woo sense. I mean extradimensional in a quantum physics sense,” Elizondo said, expanding on theories about alternate universes.
“If we already know that 99% of the universe we cannot perceive or interact with, then there may be other options here,” he suggested. “This may not necessarily be something from outer space. In fact, this could be something as natural to our very own planet as us; we’re just now at a point we’re beginning to technologically be able to interact and collect data.”
While it’s true that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, it is not evidence of presence, either.
“If anything is possible, then nothing is disprovable. And if it ain’t disprovable, it’s arguably at the very outer limits of what science can deal with,” said Joel Achenbach, science writer for the Washington Post and author of the 1999 book Captured by Aliens.
“The alien explanation for UFOs requires a massive infrastructure of presumptions, not least of which is that the aliens, whatever their motivation, have found a way to get here,” Achenbach wrote in a recent essay in the WashingtonPost magazine.
“The nearest star is about 25 trillion miles away, and although this sounds like hyperbole, it is, in fact, the correct number. So, to do space travel, you really need warp drive. And there is no such thing as warp drive.”
“We're still living in a sort of atmosphere of ambiguity,” said Greg Eghigian, a professor of history at Pennsylvania State University who is writing a book on the history of UFO sightings and claims of alien contact.
“This is also the nature of this phenomenon, right?” Eghigian said at an online event sponsored by the Washington Post.
“Is it an ‘it’? Is it a ‘they’? Is it some ‘thing’? It's always been and, I think will be, shrouded in deep ideas and notions of mystery.”
Still, any claim that UFOs are interstellar visitors from across the galaxy will have to meet what’s known as the "Sagan standard," named for the late astronomer Carl Sagan, who famously said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
Far from being a throw-away genre trope, the unresolved puzzle of extra-terrestrial visitors gives us unique insights into the nature of thought, communication and memory.
Vintage colour photograph of a flying saucer. Credit: Found Image Holdings/Corbis via Getty Images
The much–anticipated release earlier this summer of a US government report about unidentified flying objects – or ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’ (UAPs), as they are termed in the publication – may have, on the surface at least, brought UFOs out of the realm of science-fiction and into the arena of mainstream science.
As well as the report, ordered by Congress, military films of various incidents of UAPs were released. The report concludes that while objects have been seen, there is no evidence for (nor against) these being of extra-terrestrial provenance. This combination of elements – aerial sightings, political interest for defence reasons, the possibility of unearthly origins, raised but neither endorsed nor quashed – has been repeated at intervals during the last seventy years. The pattern remains remarkably constant, both in the form of the question – are these UFOs from another planet? – and in the lack of any clear answer, for there is no incontrovertible evidence on either side of the debate.
In an unresolved puzzle of this enduring kind, we might ask about the categories in which the question is posed: what kind of thinking allows the problem to be termed in the way it has, and when did it come into existence? What allows us to think in terms of UFOs and their possibility or impossibility?
The media revolution
The crux lies in the changes associated with new forms of media. A series of new technologies, dating from the end of the nineteenth century and extending to the present, have permitted new experiences and new forms of imagination. The gramophone, for example, allows the experience of being addressed directly by an absent person, even a dead person. Radio, a later development, though not by much, permits us to hear disembodied voices from far away. Both, initially, had an uncanny quality; they abolished differences of time and space. Photographs, likewise, made present images of elsewhere, never encountered in experience, or brought before us images of people we may have known, even loved, but who had lives in other places. And motion pictures multiply novelties of these kinds: they not only present records of stretches of other times and places, but – through recording and replaying – create new perspectives and new angles on scenes, not only allowing new things to be seen but fresh details to emerge, reframing incidents, calling attention to hitherto unperceived moments of significance, and presenting short sequences that may alter the meaning of an encounter. In short, we might say that new media create new kinds of experience and possibilities, and turn our lives into new sorts of narrative.
New media have always had this kind of effect. But the means of recording, storage and replaying developed from the 1880s on were particularly striking both in their effects and in the widespread nature of their impact, touching not simply an elite few, but almost everyone, through radio and cinema, altering the nature of experience and memory, creating new shared ways of being in the world. As a population, we perceive everyday life in categories that derive from these experiences, these vivid enactments of things that are not there. The world in which we live has changed, and these new ways of grasping life as it is lived operate at several levels. For instance, we anticipate the sudden presence of minds from elsewhere; we can receive direct communication from absent friends; we can conceive of new perspectives on situations, modelled often on shots from above that reveal patterns of behaviour or shots from below that reveal relations of power, and, most of all, we can conceive of ourselves as caught up in stories, or being touched by other stories, unknown to us but going on in the same space. Our life is, to a degree, cinematic, shaped by audio-visual images. And once collectively we have glimpsed the power of media in this regard, we can conceive of the world as being ordered by codes, and can imagine it is constructed by invisible means and controlled by unknown people whose intentions are hidden from us. A world shaped by experience of film is also, potentially, a paranoid world.
Flying saucers arrive
Flying saucers are a small feature of the imaginative space created within these new technological frames. They can be dated quite precisely: spaceships appear in fiction contemporary with the development of radio and, like radio waves, travel through space, hiding their origin. The motives behind the appearance of spaceships are also often hidden – they make unexpected contact, and convey messages with implications that are hard to evaluate. These ideas were elaborated in early science fiction, a branch of pulp publishing popularised in the first half of the twentieth century, which drew on theosophical speculations for many of its details, describing spirit forms travelling between planets, organising cosmic evolution, and aiding the development of the human race. These works offered a meditation on the contemporary human condition, confronted with the expansion of scientific knowledge and of the technology that accompanied it, and laid down most of the ground rules that apply in modern UFO sightings. In this fashion, science fiction provided content for a form arising independently.
But flying saucers only became a reality in the context of the Second World War and its transmutation into the Cold War; they co-existed with the extraordinary acceleration of technological development associated with the notion of ‘total war,’ with the invention of atomic weapons, rocketry and supersonic flight, together with a range of other industries, including those concerned with communications – radio, radar, and the rapid transmission and analysis of information through what became known as information technology. Weapons and communications form a single complex and define the modern world we still precariously inhabit.
When they first appeared in the late 1940s, flying saucers were an amalgam of characteristics drawn from contemporary research projects – silent flight, radical circular designs, alternative power sources – and exhibited powers of manoeuvrability, acceleration and hovering that resembled images on screen, and showed evidence of interest in human military and industrial sites, with sightings concentrated around military testing grounds, nuclear stations, electrical plants and so forth. They were of interest to military intelligence and, since many of the sightings of daytime objects or night-time lights were by United States Air Force pilots, a unit was set up by the Air Force (newly separated from the Army) in 1947, a small part of the intelligence operation concerned with the properties of new enemy aircraft. This unit had a varied history, only being reabsorbed into other projects in 1968. Its concerns were precisely those of the recent report to Congress.
Going supersonic
The report looks at recent sightings of UAPs – fast moving objects filmed by aircraft or from naval vessels, objects which show extraordinary manoeuvrability and which exhibit intelligent behaviour, apparently investigating ships and accelerating away when approached by aircraft, shooting into the sky or, sometimes, plunging into the sea. The question of their origin is an important one: they might be supersonic weapons systems produced by other countries, yet their performance appears vastly advanced and beyond any known technology, with acceleration and deceleration powers that would destroy any human pilot. Discussions of the report have led to renewed theorising about potential interstellar origins, possible life-bearing planets in other solar systems, the conditions for development of other technological civilisations on such planets, and speculation concerning projects of observation and communication carried out by artificial intelligence – robots perhaps launched thousands of years ago but capable of undertaking research in our locality and in real time. The report, however, is far more circumspect, confining itself to reviewing the evidence but eschewing conclusions about extra-terrestrial origins.
All this discussion shows an underlying concern not only with technological innovation – the latest military hardware and developments in information technology, not to mention the findings of radio astronomy – but also with a certain conception of communication, understood as the central characteristic of intention and therefore of intelligent life, human or otherwise. Communication is understood in this sense: that ideas may be conveyed without distortion or interruption between minds – effectively, a bodiless voice speaking straight to the receiver’s ear, for which radio offers a model. This idea is far older than the Second World War, but it takes a new form in the late 1940s, linked with the appearance of the technical concept of ‘information’ emerging from considerations concerning transmission of signals and encrypting (and decoding) messages. In practice, conveying precise information in an undistorted form over distances is only a small part of complex common enterprises, whether in war or peacetime. But in the post-war period, the concept of information has come to be considered a sufficient key to describe all kinds of processes, in nature and in every aspect of human activity: not only genetics and cell biology, but economics, diplomacy, social life, personal relations and therapy have all been expressed in terms of the unimpeded exchange of information. And using this concept, the communication of information from one mind to another has been central to imagining the purposes and actions of visitors from other planets. Speculation concerning their aims in showing themselves, their possible agenda, what they might be seeking to exchange, and our anticipation of the appropriate forms of contact (the search for signals, construing and constructing alien languages), are all cast in terms of the exchange of information. Without the concept of information and the ambition of its pure (bodiless) communication, we would have no frame within which to make sense of our hopes of encounter.
Alien encounters
Although it appears to take us some way from the content of the recent Congress report – unidentified objects seen, defence concerns, the source(s) of the objects in question – it is worth adding that ‘information’, which is a structuring concern of the report, links up with a particular understanding of ‘memory.’ This is memory conceived as the retention of accurate information; the recovery of a particular significant encounter in the past and therefore an accurate record retained with all its significance intact, capable of being re-lived and explored in full. This is memory as film. This idea is vital for the potential memory recovery in alien abduction cases, but it is also needed to give character and purpose to the possible alien visitors, who may be future forms of life derived from the human race, bearing an understanding of the past (which for us, means our future history) and so are able to help guide us through threats and crises. Again, although the idea of memory has a long history, the concept only gained its present possibilities, that of access to accurate and complete records, recently, with new recording technologies and the focus on the ideal of transparent communication of information between minds. Hence the play with artificial intelligence in satellites, monitoring us and, perhaps, relaying information home.
The basic materials, then, for understanding the continuing life of sightings of unidentified flying objects are these. First, the close mutual implication of weapons technology and media images, together with the taking up in these images of theosophical ideas, transmitted through science fiction, of minds ‘out there’ concerned with human contributions to cosmic evolution. Then, an over-reliance on the ideal of direct communication between minds, taken up and elaborated in the idea that information constitutes a key to the intelligibility of the human and natural worlds alike. And last, a notion of memory as the recall of exact information. These three clusters of interrelated ideas have remained relatively constant, although developing, over the past eighty years. And once this complex was initiated, around the end of Second World War, it was inevitable that something like flying saucers would make an appearance in a world exhausted by warfare, dominated by security concerns, and obliged to place its hope of survival in the continuous development of new and extraordinary technologies. The categories still generate UFO sightings of the kind that prompt questions: ‘Are they true? Or error? Or fiction?’. This creates accompanying dilemmas for politicians and strategists responsible for national security; providing material for experts, commentators and amateur speculators.
The formula has been put to work by the wider population; it has become a key to popular thinking about the centrality of the military-industrial complex to American public life, whether in the ongoing role of media representations that simultaneously display some aspects of that centrality (NASA, for example,) and occlude others (such as DARPA), or, more generally, in the play of information, memory, and forgetting which appears both in widespread public distrust of the state and in a vast range of therapies, whether concerned with recovered memory or with clearing obstacles to communication with self or others. In short, this complex of ideas is well instantiated in the modern world, part of the fabric of our imagination, continually evolving, but with certain constant features.
We shall not, then, cease to be confronted with reports of UFOs (or UAPs) and their unresolvable dilemmas until a profound shift occurs in the way in which we make sense of novelties of many kinds. Turning the theory on its head, the continuing, if also mutating, life of flying saucers offers a reliable clue to central questions about the world in which we find ourselves.
August 27, 2021
Tim Jenkins
Tim Jenkins retired from the University of Cambridge, where he taught anthropology and religion, in October 2019. Since then, he has been writing a book on reports of flying saucer sightings, provisional title Images of Elsewhere, which is near completion. Previous publications include Religion in English Everyday Life (1999), The Life of Property (2010), and Of Flying Saucers and Social Scientists (2013). He lives in Cambridge.
Aphoto taken by the Mars Perseverance Sol 184: Right Mastcam-Z Camera on Aug. 26, 2021 reveals what looks like a mars rat sitting between rocks.
Recognizable are the eyes, nose, legs and it's long tail.
It is not the first time a mars rat or rodent has been found in a mars image. In a photo, taken by the Curiosity rover on Sept. 28, 2012 a mars rat or rodent can be seen sitting between small rocks.
Pareidolia? Or this is proof that there is life on Mars?
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
The Black Triangle Patent – US PATENT 20060145019A1
The Black Triangle Patent – US PATENT 20060145019A1
The whole patent and schematics are here. The designer is/was John Quincy St. Clair who was a very busy bee for a few years. There’s a list of his other patents here. This one was issued back in 2006.
The guy might have been eccentric. A crazy conspiracy idea I’ve just had is he could have been applying for the patents to see what response he got. For example, someone from the patent office saying the technology has already been patented would be fun.
1. A spacecraft comprised of the following components:
(a) a triangular hull in the form of an equilateral triangle;
(b) two copper plates attached on opposite vertical sides at each of the three corners of the hull (1a) such that a sharp vertical edge is formed where they come together;
(c) an electrostatic generator used to charge the back two copper-cladded corners (1b) to a high positive voltage, and the third forward copper-cladded corner to a high negative voltage;
(d) a horizontal slot antenna array mounted-on the sides of the hull; and (e) a frequency generator, antenna and coaxial cables to drive the antenna array (1d).
2. To create, by claims (1a, 1b, 1c), an intense vertical line charge at the corners (1b) and a horizontal electric field that that is parallel to the sides of the hull (1a);
3. To create, by claims (1d,1e), an electromagnetic wave with a vertically polarized electric field traveling outward from the side of the hull (1a); and
4. To create, by claims (2,3), an interaction of the electrostatic field (2) with the electromagnetic wave (3) such that a combined spacetime curvature pressure is generated on the hull in the upward and forward direction to produce lift and propulsion respectively.
Just when you think you haven’t heard of a mysterious cattle mutilation in a while, a mysterious case of cattle mutilations pops up in the current mutilation capitol of the U.S. – Oregon — and in Argentina, South America’s cattle mutilation hotspot. Are they related? Has anyone checked if their latitudes match?
Let’s start in Oregon, where the Thomas Angus Ranch reported finding a prize purebred Black Angus bull, valued at $4,500, dead and mutilated on Aug. 14 at the Greenbar Ranch in Wheeler County. As in most mutilation cases, the owner found the bull missing its nose, tongue, left cheek, ear, eye, reproductive organs and part of its tail – all removed with what appeared to be precise surgical cuts. A necropsy could not be performed because the bull was decomposed, having been dead for more than 24 hours.
Capital Press reports this is the fifth case of a cattle mutilation in Wheeler County in the past 20 months, while nearby Harney County has had five cases in the past four years, two this year in May and July, and adjoining Crook County had some in early 2021. The sheriff departments in all counties are sharing information, but Deputy Jeremiah Holmes of the Wheeler County Sheriff’s Office, who has investigated a number of them, says all ten cases in Wheeler and Harney counties are still open, and all ten are “eerily similar.” Before you ask, they’ve notified the FBI but have been disappointed in its prior responses.
This is making me very angry.
“In recent weeks, unusual occurrences of mutilated animals have appeared in the province. In Hasenkamp a producer found a heifer of about 400 kilos with strange mutilations, it was missing the udder, genitals, part of the jaw, tongue and eyes. Meanwhile in Isletas, Diamante department, a cattle family found one of their mutilated goats, only missing the complete tongue, two eyes, one ear and the jawbone. The teeth were bare, down to the bone.” (Google translation)
While Oregon is the Northern Hemisphere’s cattle mutilation hotspot, Argentina holds that dubious honor south of the equator. El Once reports on two recent occurrences in Entre Ríos Province in north-eastern Argentina with the same types of mutilations as seen in Oregon. While the Chupacabra is sometimes blamed for mutilations in Argentina, El Once contacted UFO investigator Andrea Pérez Simondini, who says mysterious lights are often seen around the time of these mutations and thinks they have a “direct relationship” to each other.
“50% of the complaints are accompanied by sightings of lights and physical alterations in the animal, lack of large volumes of water in the area, such as in Australian tanks, power outages and when we measure the time and shape, a kind of alteration in the ground with electrical conductivity. We are very interested in these types of cases, because we recognized a type of cut and it is called ‘sawn’; which is a kind of saw and thanks to the photos we were able to identify it in the goat’s jaw.” (Google translation)
Pérez Simondini says that type of saw is used in genetic research and has been trying to get authorities to look at these mutilations as possible alien genetic samplings for years.
As with cattle and livestock mutilations in general, it’s difficult to fathom why extraterrestrials would only sample cows, goats and other field animals, and not humans or other livestock or wildlife. There are many who believe this is secret genetic research done by humans, either in the massive and competitive cattle business or in government, where they might be doing undercover disease research.
How about teaching all cattle to do this?
On the latitude question, the Argentine mutilations were in the southern 32nd parallel while those in Oregon were in the northern 44th parallel. Some researchers in the U.S. plotted UFO sightings and cattle mutilations on a map and found a high concentration along the northern 37th parallel, which runs from California through Nevada, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky and across to Virginia, and includes Area 51 in Nevada, the alleged secret underground alien base at Dulce, New Mexico, as Taos, New Mexico, home of many mysteries including its famous hum. Is the UFO highway expanding beyond the 37th parallel and opening a southern corridor? Can it be blamed on climate change?
Cattle and livestock mutilations around the world look like a crime that should be easily solved. Why haven’t they been? The mystery continues.
Over the decades there have been all manner of reports of encounters with beings and entities from beyond our understanding. These have taken many forms, including the familiar “grey aliens,” more reptilian creatures, and even insectoids. Yet some reports get even weirder than these, way weirder in fact, completely evading all reason and classification. Here we will look at a selection of various encounters with alien entities that are just about the most bizarre and bonkers there have ever been.
Starting in the 1950s, we have a really weird account from 1954, at an unspecified location in the country of Canada. On July 2 of that year, a 23-year-old Canadian miner named Ennio La Sarza was out in the wilds when he saw a spherical object about 25-feet in diameter, and with a set of portholes around the edge and “pieces of landing gear and something like a retractable antenna on top of it” land in a nearby clearing to disgorge three completely bizarre entities. They were described as being 13 feet tall, with bluish-green skin and glowing bodies. Their heads held antennae on top and a single eye set within them, and had six evenly distributed sets of arms tipped with crab-like pincers that clattered open and shut. The leader of the group apparently rushed La Sarza and hit him with a “psychic blow” that knocked him to the ground, before they all got back into their craft and headed off at great speed.
From 1957 we have the strange case of a retired teacher Mrs. Mary M. Starr. She claims that on December 16, 1957, she was in her home near Old Saybrook, Connecticut, when she was woken at around 3 a.m. by a very bright light outside of her room. When she looked outside, she could see a large hovering craft with big square windows hovering over her clothesline, and as she looked on, she could see entities moving about within. These truly bizarre creatures were about 4 feet tall, with arms but no hands and transparent cubes for heads with some sort of red core ensconced within and rubbery bodies that surrounded them like skirts. The creatures ran about in front of the windows for a time waving about their handless arms, before the windows suddenly vanished as if never there and whole craft began to glow brightly and they silently shot off into the night to leave her standing there in awe.
The late author Brad Steiger covered in his book Strangers from the Skies the case of Hans Gustafsson and 30-year-old Stig Rydberg, who on December 20, 1958 were were on their way along Route 45 from Höganäs to Heisenberg in Sweden in the early morning hours along a foggy road that had such poor visibility that the two friends decided to pull over near the rural village of Domsten. As they walked about outside the vehicle, they soon noticed through the haze that there was some sort of glow emanating from the surrounding forest nearby. The two decided to hike off into the darkened, glow frosted trees to try and see where the light was coming from, and after penetrating around 150 feet into the woods they allegedly came across the source of the glow, which proved to be far more bizarre than they had anticipated. There before them was a disc-like object resting on two legs around two feet long, the whole of which cast a scintillating glow of ever-changing colors. Even odder than the sight of this apparent flying saucer was what could be seen cavorting about the vicinity, which were 3-foot-long amorphous blobs that Rydberg would describe as follows:
They were like protozoa, just a bit darker than most, sort of a bluish color, hopping and jumping around the saucer like globs of animated jelly.
Nowhere on the bodies were any visible limbs or sensory organs, nor any other discernible features, and it was as if they were just pulsating gobs of gelatinous goo that could somehow levitate over the ground. Things got rather tense very quickly when these unusual entities suddenly surrounded the two puzzled men and purportedly began to engulf their limbs within their throbbing masses, described as feeling like “magnetic dough,” while at the same time exuding a terrible stench like “ether and burnt sausage.” No matter how much the men kicked and lashed out at these mysterious entities, they were able to either dodge or absorb the blows to little effect, as if they were made of jelly. It seemed as if the blob-like creatures were trying to drag the increasingly terrified witnesses towards the glimmering disc, and no matter how hard the two witnesses fought back and struggled it did little good.
By chance, Rydberg finally managed to tear himself free and run back towards their car with the alien blobs in hot pursuit. When he reached the vehicle he leaned heavily on the car’s horn, piercing the night with a wall of noise in an effort to draw anyone’s attention to their plight, but which also seemed to have the effect of startling the creatures enough to let go of Gustafsson. The blobs then huddled under their craft, filed inside it, and shot off away into the night sky, leaving behind a screeching whistling blare, that nauseating stink, and two very shaken men who found that they were covered in strange bruises and cuts.
Gustafsson and Rydberg perhaps understandably kept the story to themselves for some time, but when it finally came out it became a minor sensation in Sweden. The two witnesses were also interviewed by police, and although the story was without a doubt off-the-wall, they could find no sign of any hoaxing going on, and even when the two were secretly monitored when they thought they were alone, they did not let on that there was any lying or trickery going on. Gustafsson and Rydberg were also found to be in fine physical and psychological health, and in the end, police concluded that the men really seemed to have been traumatized by what they at least truly believed they had seen, whatever that was. It is difficult to ascertain just what it was that these two men saw, or at least thought they saw, and with no other accounts anywhere near it we will probably never know.
Moving into the next decade, we have the extremely weird encounter of an unidentified business man in France, who in November of 1962 was purportedly driving along a lonely rural road in the region of Var, France, when he had an amazing encounter that would change his life. At the tome it was allegedly raining profusely, when he saw something rather odd in the gloom ahead. There through the slashing rain he saw huddled in the road a group of figures that he at first took to be people, but which would soon prove to be far stranger. He would say of the encounter:
Rounding the bend, I saw, 80-meters [just over 260-feet] ahead, a group of figures clustered in the middle of the road. I slowed down to avoid the group, and at the same moment it split into two parts, suddenly and jerkily. My window was down and I leaned my head out slightly to see what was the matter; it was then that I saw beasts, some kind of bizarre animals, with the heads of birds, and covered with some sort of plumage, which were hurling themselves from two sides towards my car. Terrified, I wound up my window, accelerated like a mad man, and the stopped 150-meters [approximately 500-feet] further on. I turned round and saw these things, these beasts, these nightmarish sort of beings, which were heading, with a sort of flapping of wings, towards a luminous dark-blue object, which hung in the air over a field on the other side of the road.
As if all of this wasn’t odd enough, he would claim that as the menacing humanoids flew up towards the object they were literally “sucked up” into it “as if by a whirlwind,” after which the craft shot off at breathtaking speed. What was going on here? In 1965 we have the rather odd experience of 25 year-old Geoffrey Maskey, Mavis Fordyce and Michael Johnson, who on the evening of September 20, 1965 were driving along a remote road near Felixstowe, England when things would get truly weird, indeed. They apparently pulled over to the side of the road to have a chat, when Johnson suddenly and inexplicably got out of the car to go wandering off into the gloom. The others assumed he had just gone off to do nature’s business, but the two young men then heard a “high-pitched humming sound” coming from the surrounding wilderness. As they looked around for the source of the unsettling noise, they saw an oval-shaped UFO hovering about 90 feet over their car, surrounded by a creepy orange glow.
It would not be until the next day that Johnson would arrive and tell them of how the evening had gone. He would claim that he had been commanded by some unknown force to get out of the vehicle and go into those woods, and that when he had ventured out into the trees, he had encountered a strange creature that had large eyes and was “Engulfed by orange flames.” As soon as he had seen this flaming beast, he had blacked out completely. He would say that he had no memories of what had happened next, and had woken up the next day in a hospital bed, only to make his way back to his friends with his incredible story.
Perhaps even weirder than all of this is a story form the winter of 1967, when a farmer in Missouri had a rather harrowing and otherworldly experience with what he would call “Green Space Penguins.” 64-year-old Claude Edwards would claim that he had gotten up to do his farm work like any other day, when he walked across one of his fields and saw sitting there a “massive, grayish-green, mushroom- like object which was perched atop a circular tube.” As he stared on in awe, he noticed a group of diminutive figures waddling about below the object, and he noticed that all of this was seriously spooking his cows. For some reason, perhaps out of curiosity, Edwards started to approach the strange creatures, and he could see that they were 3 feet high, with grayish-green skin and no hands, tiny feet, and no necks. On their beaked heads they wore goggles of some type, and the whole of it caused him to describe them as little green penguins, which he said swarmed about the bottom of the UFO and seemed to ignore the farmer at first.
As he drew closer, Edwards claimed that he had picked up some rocks in a plan to lob them in their direction, but when he got within 15 feet, he was abruptly stopped by some sort of force field that prevented him from going any further. He even threw a rock at it, only to see it bounce off of some unseen barrier and drop uselessly to the ground. However, he could now see the mysterious flying object in more detail, describing it as having a smooth metallic texture like “shiny silk,” with no seams and with some oval portholes of some type with a surreal display of multi-colored lights playing out beyond them. He would say of this bizarre craft:
The object just looked like a big shell, grayish-green looking outfit. And underneath there were oblong holes where the lights were coming out. They were so bright you couldn’t see when you got up there… as if a color wheel was turning inside the thing. The whole thing took over five minutes, maybe ten. I have never seen anything like it. It looked like shiny silk or something. I couldn’t tell. I was going to tell though if I could have hit it with that rock.
Perhaps foolishly, Edwards threw another rock at it even harder than the first, and although this stone also bounced off, it managed to capture the attention of the “Space Penguins.” The creatures all looked to him in unison, before scurrying behind the craft and then enter the craft through a portal. The object then began to ascend into the air, shooting off at an amazing speed to vanish.
Another downright bizarre cases comes to us from the U.S. state of West Virginia, where in July of 1968 a local man by the name of Jennings Frederick was out bowhunting in the rural backwoods just outside outside of Fairmont, West Virginia. At some point he allegedly heard a high pitched, unearthly sound that he would describe as sounding like “a recording running at exaggerated speed.” Curious, Jennings searched about for the origin of this surreal noise, and this was when he would come across a very strange sight indeed. There in the brush stood a 7-foot tall, semi-humanoid entity, with an exceedingly thin, almost skeletal frame, long ears, and stalk-like arms that were almost like tendrils and which ended in slender, 7-inch long fingers tipped with some sort of needles or thorns, as well as suction cups. The whole of the anomalous creature was described as green and very plant-like in nature, as if it were part animal and part plant. The whole time Frederick watched it that incessant chattering sound reverberated around him, and he suddenly realized that he could make out words within the alien noise, like glimpses of meaning from white noise, which he took to say:
You need not fear me. I wish to communicate. I come as a friend. We know of you all. I come in peace. I wish medical assistance. I need your help.
As Frederick stood there wide-mouthed in bewilderment, the mysterious being purportedly suddenly lashed out with one of its stalk-like arms with blinding speed to wrap him in an iron grip. The needles or thorns on its fingers then apparently pierced the startled man’s skin and began to draw blood, but rather than the pain he found himself drawn to the thing’s eyes, which seemed to rapidly switch back and forth from red to yellow in a hypnotizing, oscillating cycle that held him in thrall and dulled his senses. After about two minutes of this, the otherworldly plant-monster reportedly let him go and took off in a sprint up a nearby embankment in great 25-foot long bounds, followed shortly after by a deep thrumming noise that Frederick would later speculate to have been the sound of the creature’s space ship. For years Frederick kept this undoubtedly absurd-sounding story to himself out of fear of ridicule, but in 1976 he would relate it to the paranormal researcher Gray Barker, who would then include it in his newsletter. The story would be brought to even greater attention when it was mentioned in the late Brad Steiger’s 1978 book Alien Meetings. Was this an alien, some sort of cryptid, or what? Whatever it was, the “Vegetable Man” of West Virginia is certainly one of the more bizarre encounters on record.
From 1974 we have the very weird story from Bald Mountain, in Washington state, in the United States, just about reportedly 20 miles east of Chehalis, Washington. On November 14th, 1974, a fiery object was witnessed to fall from the sky in the area, and after that several motorists started reporting seeing a very strange entity prowling about the region. Witnesses reported seeing a horse-sized beast with tentacles and an antenna and emanating a neon green glow, which would shamble about the wilderness and would be sighted on more than one occasion. One witness would say of it:
It was horse-sized, covered with scales and standing on four rubbery legs with suckers like octopus tentacles. Its head was football-shaped with an antenna sticking up…The thing gave off this green, iridescent light.
As reports like this came in and began to make the rounds in the news, Lewis County Sheriff William H. Wiester began an investigation to try to get to the bottom of it, but was allegedly stopped by shadowy individuals claiming to represent both NASA and the United States Air Force. These people, often dressed in dark suits, told the sheriff in no uncertain terms that he was to drop the investigation and that they had it under control. His own investigation team was then replaced by what he describes as “a special NASA team, including a heavily armed military unit wearing uniforms with no insignia.” After that, the case of what has been referred to as the Bald Mountain “Crazy Critter” just sort of faded away into obscurity. What was going on here and what was this thing? Had it somehow crashed in its ship and was now wandering around aimlessly trying to figure out what to do? There are no answers.
Moving along to yet another whacky case, we have a report from September 15, 1977, in the town of Paciencia, Brazil. On this day a bus driver by the name of Antonio La Rubia was allegedly walking to work when he spied a rather strange object shaped like an “enormous wide hat” sitting in a field, measuring an impressive 250 feet across. Soon after he noticed the giant mysterious craft, it lashed out with a thin, bright beam of light, which caught La Rubia and whisked him away to a room of pure white. Within this room were various mechanical-looking beings with bright scales and arms like tentacles, as well as egg-shaped bodies and heads adorned with what appeared to be antenna. Instead of legs, the strange creatures reportedly sat upon rigid pedestals of some sort.
After this initial meeting, the frightened La Rubia claims that he shouted at the creatures, which seemed to have the effect of making them cower in fear. He lost consciousness again, and when he awoke, he says that he was now subjected to a series of images projected onto the wall, including various surreal scenes such as a dog being melted and a train entering a tunnel, the meaning of which could not be discerned. At one point during this screening of oddities and grotesqueries one of the robot beings apparently reached out to draw blood from one of La Rubia’s fingers, after which it splashed it across a wall to form a pattern of three circles and an “L” shape. At this point, La Rubia claims he lost consciousness once more, and when he awoke, he was purportedly back in his car, vomiting and dizzy from the whole puzzling ordeal. He would later remember fighting back and actually knocking one of the creatures to the ground, allowing him to escape.
Finally, and perhaps the weirdest of all, we come to a case from the year 2002, with a witness named Jean F. and Nelson C, of Villa San Rafael in Calama, Chile. This particular case starts out weird enough, and then goes off the deep end into the completely bonkers. On January 12, 2002, Nelson apparently lost his pet snake, a boa constrictor, and so he went out with a friend to go try and find it. As they looked around, the man’s two dogs started getting very agitated, barking and snarling uncontrollably. As the two men tried to figure out what was spooking the dogs, they then saw what they at first thought to be a stray dog on the trail before them. They shouted and threw some stones at it to scare it off, but the animal just stood there and did not react, its features still unclear. It then began to walk towards them even as they screamed at it, and as it did they could see that it was an otherworldly creature that resembled a “rugby football with legs,” and then it suddenly stood up to walk on two legs. The two men then felt an “energy” like “like an electrical shock in the stomach.” One of the witnesses would describe the completely outlandish creature:
Its head was like the one of a large dog and it had a flat nose like a bulldog. Its eyes were slanted and pale-red in color, which could only be seen when the creature turned its head from side to side like small lizards do. Its ears were flat, round and large. Its arms were short, they had elbows and the hands had three fingers. It had hair like the one on a wild pig. Its legs were like the ones from a goat. The feet had also three fingers and a membrane like ducks, but somewhat shorter.
The back of the beast was also covered with a mane of thick hair, and it had a short tail tipped in white. Most bizarrely of all, the thing suddenly stopped its advance, stared at them for a moment, and then gave them a powerful telepathic message that boomed through their minds and said, “don’t stare, just run away.” The two young men did exactly that, and the thing was never seen again. It is just one more case among many that really doesn’t seem to make sense, and defies normal categorization. Was it a cryptid, alien, a figment of the imagination? Who knows? These have been just a few cases among many others that really cause us to scratch our heads and wonder just what could possibly be going on here. These are all completely weird and one-off encounters, meaning these various monstrosities have only been witnessed in one specific time-frame and then never again. They exist as completely unique accounts, and that makes it hard to figure out how they fit into the world of UFOs or cryptozoology as a whole. What were these utterly bizarre entities? Were they aliens, some sort of interdimensional interlopers bleeding through some veil between realities, or something else? For now it is hard to say, and these baffling reports rank among the strangest of the strange,
Telescopen vangen signalen op van mysterieuze flitsen in ver sterrenstelsel
Twee Nederlandse radiotelescopen hebben tegelijkertijd signalen opgevangen van mysterieuze flitsen − een soort kosmische stroboscoop − in een ver sterrenstelsel, op bijna een half miljard lichtjaar afstand. Maar de nieuwe metingen, deze week gepubliceerd in Nature, lijken meer vragen op te werpen dan te beantwoorden, bericht De Volkskrant.
Eén populaire verklaring voor de raadselachtige bron van de repeterende radioflitsen kan in elk geval de prullenbak in, volgens Joeri van Leeuwen van Astron, het Nederlands instituut voor radioastronomie. “Het is een hele puzzel”, zegt hij.
‘Snelle radioflitsen’ werden in 2007 voor het eerst ontdekt. Ze duren maar een duizendste van een seconde, maar in die korte tijd komt evenveel energie vrij als de zon in een paar dagen produceert. Vermoedelijk zijn het explosies op zogeheten neutronensterren: enorm compacte sterretjes van nog geen 25 kilometer groot, maar zwaarder dan de zon, en met een gigantisch sterk magneetveld. Sterrenkundigen hopen dat onderzoek aan snelle radioflitsen meer inzicht oplevert in de meest extreme materievormen in de natuur.
Inmiddels zijn er honderden van die flitsen waargenomen, voornamelijk door de relatief nieuwe Chime-telescoop in Canada. De meeste flitsen zijn eenmalig, maar er zitten ook een aantal repeterende exemplaren tussen. En één daarvan, FRB20180916B geheten (FRB staat voor fast radio burst), vertoont een voorspelbare regelmaat: elke 16,3 dagen staat de ‘stroboscoop’ een paar dagen achtereen ‘aan’; tussendoor is er niets te zien.
‘Sterrenwind’
Volgens Inés Pastor-Marazuela, eerste auteur van het Nature-artikel, werd tot nu toe algemeen aangenomen dat de flitsende neutronenster vergezeld wordt door een gewone ster, die er eens in de 16,3 dagen omheen draait en die veel gas de ruimte in blaast. “Die ‘sterrenwind’ absorbeert de radiostraling, waardoor de flitsen alleen te zien zijn als de gewone ster zich – van ons uit gezien – achter de neutronenster bevindt”, legt ze uit.
Maar de nieuwe waarnemingen, simultaan verricht met de schotels van de Westerbork-radiotelescoop en de antennes van de Lofar-telescoop, zijn met dat model niet te verklaren. Lofar ‘kijkt’ op veel lagere frequenties dan Westerbork, en je zou verwachten dat die laagfrequente flitsen gedurende kortere tijd zichtbaar zijn dan de hoogfrequente, omdat ze sterker worden geabsorbeerd. Het tegenovergestelde blijkt echter het geval te zijn. Er zijn zelfs helemaal geen aanwijzingen voor absorberend gas in de omgeving. “Dat klopt dus allemaal niet met het dubbelster-model”, aldus Pastor-Marazuela.
“Heel raadselachtig”, zegt Victoria Kaspi, die snelle radioflitsen bestudeert met de Chime-telescoop. Kaspi heeft ook de Lofar-metingen van FRB20180916B bestudeerd, maar was niet betrokken bij de Westerbork-waarnemingen. Ze is er nog niet echt van overtuigd dat het dubbelster-idee helemaal heeft afgedaan, maar noemt de Nature-publicatie “een nieuw stukje in de puzzel. Bij snelle radioflitsen zijn er bijna evenveel verrassende twists als nieuwe resultaten.”
Kosmische flitspaal
Hoe is het regelmatige gedrag van de kosmische flitspaal dan wél te verklaren? Misschien gaat het om een eenzame neutronenster die eens in de 16,3 dagen om zijn as draait, zegt Pastor-Marazuela. Als de flitsen afkomstig zijn van een klein gebiedje op de ster, zien we ze alleen als hij ons de juiste kant toe keert. Probleem is wel dat de meeste neutronensterren tientallen, honderden of zelfs een paar duizend omwentelingen per minuut maken; een rotatieperiode van ruim twee weken is dan wel onwaarschijnlijk traag.
“Misschien is FRB20180916B wel een heel uitzonderlijk exemplaar”, zegt Van Leeuwen. “Maar ik vergelijk het met het werk van neuroloog Oliver Sacks: onderzoek aan heel bijzondere patiënten biedt veel algemene informatie over het menselijk brein. Zo kan dit object ons hopelijk ook veel leren over de minder opmerkelijke radioflitsen.”
Artistieke weergave van de zogeheten Superterp van LOFAR in Drenthe waar de lage radiogolven van de snelle radioflitser FRB20180916B werden opgevangen. De flitser bevindt zich in een spiraalvormig sterrenstelsel op 500 miljoen lichtjaar van de aarde.
(c) Daniëlle Futselaar/ASTRON/HST
Artistieke weergave van de Effelsbergtelescoop die zijn schotel richt op het sterrenstel op 500 miljoen lichtjaar van de aarde waar de beroemde snelle radioflitser FRB20180916B met regelmaat uitbarstingen van flitsen verstuurt.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:HLN.be - Het Laatste Nieuws ( NL)
The truth is out there! More than 40% of Americans now believe some UFO sightings are alien spacecraft - up from just a third of the country two years ago
The truth is out there! More than 40% of Americans now believe some UFO sightings are alien spacecraft - up from just a third of the country two years ago
Gallup survey says 41% of respondents believe some UFOs 'involve alien spacecraft,' up from 33% in 2019
College graduates are now more likely to believe in aliens than two years ago, at 37% compared to 27% in 2019
Those with 'some college education' also are more likely to believe in aliens, at 49% vs 40% in 2019
Men are more likely than women to believe there is life outside of Earth, at 44% of males compared to 38% for women
In June, the Pentagon report offered no explanation for 140 of the 144 UAP observations dating back to 2004
More than two-fifths of all Americans now believe that some UFOs are alien spacecraft, up significantly since 2019, according to a newly published poll.
According to a Gallup poll conducted between July 6-21, 41 percent of people now believe some UFOs 'involve alien spacecraft from other planets,' up from 33 percent in 2019.
Conversely, just half of all Americans, down from 60 percent in 2019, are skeptical, saying these unexplained sightings can be answered via human activity or natural phenomena.
Significantly more Americans now believe that some UFOs are spacecraft, up significantly since 2019, according to a new poll
According to a Gallup poll conducted between July 6-21, 41% of people now believe some UFOs 'involve alien spacecraft from other planets,' up from 33% in 2019
Those who had no opinion rose slightly to nine percent in 2021, compared to seven percent in 2019.
'With more mainstream news coverage of UFOs in recent years, and the government taking sightings more seriously, the idea that UFOs could be alien spacecraft doesn't seem as far-fetched to Americans as it did even two years ago,' Gallup wrote in the release.
'Meanwhile, the government seems more focused on determining if the threat is coming from foreign governments rather than other planets, and half of Americans continue to presume there is an Earth-based explanation for all such sightings.'
Breaking down the data further, 37% of college graduates believe that some UFOs are alien craft, up from 27% in 2019. Forty-nine percent of respondents with 'some college education' believe the objects are from another world, up from 40% and those with no college education rose four points to 39%
Gallup polled 1,007 US adults for the survey approximately two weeks after the Pentagon released its highly controversial report on unidentified aerial phenomena.
Breaking down the data further, college graduates - who used to be the most skeptical in believers of extraterrestrial life - want to believe.
Now, 37 percent of college graduates believe that some UFOs are alien craft, up from 27 percent in 2019.
Forty-nine percent of respondents with 'some college education' believe the objects are from another world, up from 40 percent two years ago.
Those with no college education rose four points to 39 percent, which Gallup said is 'not a statistically significant change.'
Men are becoming more likely than women to believe there is life outside of Earth, with 44 percent of males believing UFOs are alien craft, up from 34 percent in 2019.
Thirty-eight percent of women now believe UFOs are from another world, up from 33 percent in 2019.
Men are more likely than women to believe there is life outside of Earth, at 44% of males compared to 38% for women, the survey found
Amongst age groups, 18-34-year-olds and 35-54-year-olds are the most likely to believe Earth has been visited by an extraterrestrial craft, at 45 percent, up 13 percent since 2019.
Thirty-seven percent of those who are 55 and older believe the objects are alien in nature.
A similar survey published in July said two-thirds of all Americans believe extraterrestrial life exists, but almost 90 percent believe they are not a threat.
In June, Pentagon released its report on the subject of 'unidentified aerial phenomenon' (UAPs), however it offered no explanation for 140 of the 144 observations dating back to 2004.
The declassified June 25 report, which came from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, added that it lacks sufficient data to determine the nature of mysterious flying objects.
'In 18 incidents, described in 21 reports, observers reported unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics,' the report reads.
'Some UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion. In a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings.
'The UAPTF holds a small amount of data that appear to show UAP demonstrating acceleration or a degree of signature management. Additional rigorous analysis are necessary by multiple teams or groups of technical experts to determine the nature and validity of these data.
'We are conducting further analysis to determine if breakthrough technologies were demonstrated.'
The term UFO has been more recently replaced by unidentified aerial phenomenon, especially in light of the US Pentagon declassifying three videos in April 2020.
The footage had been previously acknowledged as real by the Navy, and captured what pilots recorded on their video sensors during training flights in 2004 and 2015.
Two of the clips were first published in 2017 by the New York Times and the third by the To The Stars Academy in 2018 - a group that specializes in unexplained phenomenon and was founded by Blink-182 guitarist Tom DeLonge.
Only one of 144 reports of UFOs - or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena as the government calls them - can be explained while the others can barely be classified
The government report says there are 144 reported UFOs - or UAPs - between 2004 and 2021.
These reports include a spherical flying object buzzing over Navy warships and disappearing into the Pacific ocean, a tic-tac shaped flying object mimicking Super Hornet pilots' maneuvers and pyramid-shaped flying objects.
The only one that can be explained with 'high confidence' is a deflated balloon.
Because the reported UAPs showed unusual flight characteristics and displayed a range of appearances and behaviors, the report groups the UAPs into five categories.
1. Airborne clutter - These objects include birds, balloons, recreational unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or airborne debris like plastic bags that muddle a scene and affect an operator’s ability to identify true targets, such as enemy aircraft.
2. Natural atmospheric phenomena - Natural atmospheric phenomena includes ice crystals, moisture and thermal fluctuations that may register on some infrared and radar systems.
3. USG or U.S. industry developmental programs - Some UAP observations could be attributable to developments and classified programs by U.S. entities. The report states, 'We were unable to confirm, however, that these systems accounted for any of the UAP reports we collected.'
4. Foreign adversary systems - Some UAP may be technologies deployed by China, Russia, another nation, or a non-governmental entity but the report says the US is unaware that any nation has technology that's been reported.
5. A catchall 'other' bin - Most of the UAP described in the dataset probably remain unidentified due to limited data or challenges to collection processing or analysis and may require additional scientific knowledge and advances to categorize them. 'The UAPTF intends to focus additional analysis on the small number of cases where a UAP appeared to display unusual flight characteristics or signature management,' according to the report.
13 strange things about the new tapejarid, ‘Tupandactylus navigans’ GP/2E 9266
13 strange things about the new tapejarid, ‘Tupandactylus navigans’ GP/2E 9266£
It’s always wonderful to see a new, complete pterosaur skeleton. This one comes with a backstory that is making the rounds. Here we’ll talk about the specimen itself, GP/2E 9266 (Beccari et al. 2021; Early Cretaceous; Figs. 1-5), presently assigned to the name Tupandactylus navigans, a putatitve relative of Tupandactylus imperator.
Figure 1. The new Tupandactylus compared to the old Tupandactylus to scale. Both are considered adults. Note the similarity between Brazilian and Chinese tapejarids.
The first strange thing about GP/2E 9266 is how much it resembles Tupandactylus (known from a partial skull only)… except for size (Fig. 1). The authors considered both to be adults. From the abstract: “The specimen can be assigned to Tupa. [= Tupandactylus] navigans due to its vertical supra-premaxillary bony process and short and rounded parietal crest.” Let’s stop assigning taxa based on a few traits. That’s “Pulling a Larry Martin“. Case in point: See the next paragraph.
The second strange thing about GP/2E 9266 is how it doesn’t nest with Tupandactylus in the Large Pterosaur Tree (LPT, 260 taxa). Instead it nests with a similarly-sized Chinese taxon, ZMNH M 8131 (Fig. 1), closer to the base of the Tapejaridae.
Figure 2. Tupandacatylus navigans (GP/2E 9266) in situ and µCT scans produced by Beccari et al. 2021. Note the lack of a prepubis and the extremely slender ventral process of the pubis, likely incapable of supporting a prepubis.
The third strange thing about GP/2E 9266 is that tall headcrest. It leans anteriorly, distinct from other, otherwise similar, crests. The authors found no posteriorly projecting process, but this is often broken off in fossils. There is an impression that matches the missing bone (Fig. 3). Speculative, but there it is, an impression.
Figure 3. Skull of Tupandactylus navigans (GP/2E 9266) from Beccari et al. 202. Colors added here. Compare to the original identity of skull bones by Beccari et al. in figure 2.
The fourth and fifth strange things about GP/2E 9266 is it has one parasagittally expanded neural spine. The authors report that five vertebrae form a notarium, different than any other tapejarid… and the medial scapula is not modified to articulate with it. Likewise the ventral coracoid is not expanded, as in related taxa.
The sixth and seventh strange thing about GP/2E 9266 is the lack of a prepubis… and the extremely slender ventral process of the pubis, likely incapable of supporting a prepubis.
Figure 4. The pes of the GP/2E 9266 specimen as originally figured by Beccari et al. 2021 and revised here. Comparison to the other metatarsus shows the correct lengths overlooked by Beccari et al. who also renamed the phalanges on toe 4, not realizing that two phalanges were fused to become one.
The eighth strange thing about GP/2E 9266 is the fusion of pedal phalanges 4.2 and 4.3 (Fig. 4). Beccari et al. also overlooked the fifth metatarsal and its two digits. The authors mistakenly wrote: “As in all later-diverging pterodactyloids, there are only four pedal digits.”
BTW, I’ve never seen distal tarsals on any tetrapod or pterosaurs like those shown in Beccari et al. (red elements in Fig. 4). Let’s leave those be for the time being.
Figure 5. Wing of the GP/2E 9266 specimen as originally illustrated by Beccari et al. (left) and repaired here (right).
The ninth strange thing about GP/2E 9266 is the authors flipped the wing finger upside-down with the leading edge trailing (Fig. 5). They also did not create horizontal stabilizers of the sprawling hind limbs (Fig. 6). Pterosaurs are such perfect natural inventions. Don’t leave the hind limbs dangling uselessly. Remember Sharovipteryx
Figure 6. The GP/2E 9266 specimen reconstructed in dorsal view by Beccari et al 2021 and modified here (top half) to reflect the sprawling femora.
The tenth strange thingabout GP/2E 9266 is the odd quadrupedal pose Beccari et al. put their reconstruction into (Fig. 7). Sure some pterosaurs walked around quadrupedally and left tracks. These were all beachcombers, seeking food in shallow waters. Tapedjarids are not members of those clades. Don’t generalize and make all pterosaurs awkward quadrupeds. Look at each one individually. Bipedal pterosaur ancestors were able to flap before they were pterosaurs. That was the initial attraction, together with crests.
Figure 7. Pterosaurs were like birds, right? Able to flap their forelimbs since before they were pterosaurs. A Tapejara prepubis is added here, but is not present in the GP/2E 9266 specimen.
The eleventh strange thing about GP/2E 9266 is the gracile pteroid. Really slender, more so than I’ve seen in pterosaurs.
The twelfth strange thng about GP/2E 9266 is the longer than typical phalanx 4.1, extending to the proximal ulna when the wing is folded (Fig. 7). Beccari et al. got things mixed up when they reported, “first wing phalanx length to metacarpal IV length in GP/ 2E 9266 = 0.58.”
The thirteenth strange thing about GP/2E 9266 is the tiny size of the foot.
Beccari et al. performed a phylogenetic analysis (unfortunately, derived from previous studies). The authors reported, “The holotype of Tupa. navigans SMNK PAL 2344 was initially coded as a separate OUT, but no character differed from the scoring of GP/2E 9266. Therefore, the phylogenetic position of Tupa. navigans was accessed through the scoring of GP/2E 9266 using the character-taxon matrix of, composed by 64 taxa (including the new specimen) and 150 discrete characters.” This is why convergence can be so difficult to deal with. What can be scored of the two skulls are virtually identical. In the Beccari et al. analysis the Huaxiapterus corollatus specimen ZMNH M8131 (Fig. 1) nests in a polytomy with other Chinese pterosaurs separate from a sister polytomy of Brazilian pterosaurs. Since no one in Beccari et al. published comparable reconstructions or figures of related taxa (as in Fig. 1), other than some colorful silhouettes, we can assume they did as they said they did: borrowed data, never traced taxa, trusted scores and taxon lists.
Beccari et al. have outdated notions regarding pterosaur ontogeny and bone fusion. They seek the fusion of elements as a ‘sign’ of maturity, as in the archosaurs and dinosaurs in their outdated cladogram. Adding taxa shows this notion is false. Fusion is entirely phylogenetic. When you look at enough taxa you learn that immature and late-stage embryo pterosaurs are identical to adults, except for an 8x difference in overall size, as in the lepidosaurs missing from the Beccari et al. cladogram.
Flight? The authors report, “The relatively longer forelimbs and the long cervical series may argue for a terrestrial foraging lifestyle.” “This could indicate that the aberrant crest may have restricted Tupa. navigans to short-distance flights, such as to flee from predators.” Sure the wing finger is skinny and phalanx 4.4 is short, but this taxon is far from flightless.
References
Beccari V, Pinheiro FL, Nunes I, Anelli LE, Mateus O and Costa FR 2021. Osteology of an exceptionally well-preserved tapejarid skeleton from Brazil: Revealing the anatomy of a curious pterodactyloid clade. PLoS ONE 16(8): e0254789. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254789
MUFON CASE : 117561 Pflugerville. Texas ( August 26, 2021 )
Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : Tumbling object flying in straight line. Second one came from above
Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117561
A fast moving, tumbling object, flying through the clouds. A second one came from above. Both made no noise and left no trail.
Date Submitted : 2021-08-28 Date of Event : 2021-08-28 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE :
trim.F1B503D59ED24AB48F52B45F11C6C08B.MOV : no audio
MUFON CASE : 117559 San Juan, Puerto Rico ( August 26, 2021 )
Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : White cylinder object that during early sunny morning traveled and crossed airplane route approaching SJU airport at about 2,000 ft altitude. Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117559
I was returning to work from a trip to the post office, I parked and when I start walking I notice this small but shiny object that seemed to reflect sunlight at certain points as if it were slowly spinning around its vertical axis. I took out my phone and took as many pictures as I could as it looked very weird. Its altitude was well below clouds but high enough to need to look carefully to find it when not reflecting. Seemed to reflect every 10-15 seconds. I also took videos but hard to point at since it was very small. Yet an airplane 4-5 miles away from landing passed by and the object kept its movement sort of linear but constant. The object moved further from my sight and the airplane flight pass was in front of the object when I took the pictures. Later on I went to Google earth as I know my location and I also used an Flight APP (Flight Radar 24) to know the plane flight route. with this information I calculate the object had to be taller than the airplane cabin, probably from 10-15 feet tall. It seemed to have an appendage dropping down from the main cylinder shape. I also drew all my calculations on the Google Earth map. I put all the info that is backed by these apps in order to reach my conclusions.
Date Submitted : 2021-08-26 Date of Event : 2021-08-17 MUFON SUBMITTER FILES :
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
Druk op onderstaande knop om je bestand , jouw artikel naar mij te verzenden. INDIEN HET DE MOEITE WAARD IS, PLAATS IK HET OP DE BLOG ONDER DIVERSEN MET JOUW NAAM...
Druk op onderstaande knop om een berichtje achter te laten in mijn gastenboek
Alvast bedankt voor al jouw bezoekjes en jouw reacties. Nog een prettige dag verder!!!
Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22810315/Colony3.jpeg)
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22810273/Colony2.jpeg)
Cane toad tadpoles have turned to CANNIBALISM in Australia...
Take two! NASA's Perseverance rover to make second attempt...
