One of the more commonly accepted theories among space scientists speculating on how the Earth’s moon was formed is that a young planet about the size of Mars – now called Theia — collided with our young planet, breaking itself  into two pieces with one hurling into space to become our satellite while the rest melded into Earth. That’s a pretty clean collision-and-result for two space bodies of that size, and a new study proposes that the birth of the Moon was more like a space demolition derby, with Theia bouncing off of Earth and taking a damaged trip around the solar system racetrack before coming back for a second knockout collision that created the Moon … and may have been part of the reason why Earth has a Moon and Venus doesn’t.

“In the canonical model of Moon formation, a Mars-sized protoplanet “Theia” collides with proto-Earth at close to their mutual escape velocity vesc and a common impact angle ∼45°. The “graze-and-merge” collision strands a fraction of Theia’s mantle into orbit, while Earth accretes most of Theia and its momentum. Simulations show that this produces a hot, high angular momentum, silicate-dominated protolunar system, in substantial agreement with lunar geology, geochemistry, and dynamics.”

The study, published in The Planetary Science Journal, is technical and math-laden. Fortunately, Sky and Telescope brings it down a few pay grades. The accepted Theia/Earth collision model worked well – until astronauts brought back Moon rocks showing that the Moon’s composition is much more like Earth than a foreign planet. Creating other models by adjusting Theia’s impact speed either destroyed both planets or didn’t create enough velocity to do both the merge and kick-out. Erik Asphaug, lead author and planetary science professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at University of Arizona, come up with a model that was more like a hit-and-run accident – Theia hit Earth at a high speed, glanced off and went back out at a lower speed. The second time it came around – making this more like a hit-and-run-and-come-back-to-check-the-damage – Theia was traveling slow enough to knock out the chunk that became the Moon and then meld into Earth.

“I first thought maybe there was a mistake.”

Asphaug’s model also showed Earth passing other hit-and-run planetoids and space rocks to Venus, which absorbed then rather than passing them to the next in line. That explains why Venus’ composition resembles that of outer solar system material. It also may explain why Venus has no Moon — either it never got hit by another planet or the amount of impacts it received from both space and Earth’s deflections obliterated it.

Venus

“Getting samples from Venus is the key to answering all these questions.”

This is all still theoretical and Asphaug admits they can only be resolved with a trip to Venus to gather rocks and return them to Earth.

Wouldn’t that be a more beneficial use of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin than sending actors into near space?

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It’s hardly surprising that 1997 was the year in which the Roswell “crashed UFO” affair reached its absolute pinnacle. It was, after all, nothing less than the 50^th anniversary of the mysterious event. Just about everyone who was anyone in Ufology was commenting on, or writing about, the case – mostly from the perspective of promoting and championing the alien angle. That was not the case for exactly everyone, however. Certainly, I wasn’t impressed by the E.T. angle. I’m still not impressed today, in 2021. Three years after the 1994 “Mogul Report” was published, the Air Force made a surprising acknowledgement that the reported sightings of strange bodies at Roswell did have a basis in fact, after all. Not only that: so compelled by then was the Air Force to address the bodies issue that it authorized the release of yet another report on Roswell. The last word, lo and behold, was not the last word. The last word was not even anywhere in sight. Entitled The Roswell Report: Case Closed, it did very little – if anything at all – to dampen the ever-present notoriety surrounding the case, however. In fact, the question of why the Air Force had concluded there was a pressing need on its part to explain the reports of unusual bodies found in New Mexico (when it could quite easily have summarily dismissed them as hoaxes or modern-day folklore), arguably only heightened the interest in what did or did not occur.

U.S. Air Force

The Air Force report focused practically all of its 231 pages on the alleged recovery of the strange bodies and asserted that: “‘Aliens’ observed in the New Mexico desert were probably anthropomorphic test dummies that were carried aloft by U.S. Air Force high altitude balloons for scientific research. The ‘unusual’ military activities in the New Mexico desert were high altitude research balloon launch and recovery operations. The reports of military units that always seemed to arrive shortly after the crash of a flying saucer to retrieve the saucer and ‘crew,’ were actually accurate descriptions of Air Force personnel engaged in anthropomorphic dummy recovery operations.” There is no doubt (it is, actually, a matter of historical record) that the Air Force conducted a wide array of tests using crash test dummies in New Mexico and that at least some of these tests did occur in the vicinities of both the White Sands Proving Ground and the town of Roswell. But were those same tests responsible – either in part or in whole – for the stories concerning highly unusual-looking bodies recovered by the military during the summer of 1947?

(Nick Redfern)

At the time of its release, the conclusions of the Air Force’s latest (final…?) report provoked a furor of controversy. While there is absolutely no doubt that tests utilizing anthropomorphic dummies were widespread in New Mexico, the Air Force’s report largely and very carefully glosses over the fact that these particular tests did not even commence until the early 1950s. This was an issue not lost on the mainstream media during the Air Force’s press conference at the Pentagon, which accompanied the release of the report in July 1997. A reporter asked, “How do you square the UFO enthusiasts saying that they’re talking about 1947, and you’re talking about dummies used in the 50’s, almost a decade later?” An Air Force spokesman replied, slightly and noticeably awkwardly: “Well, I’m afraid that’s a problem that we have with time compression. I don’t know what they saw in ‘47, but I’m quite sure it probably was Project Mogul. But I think if you find that people talk about things over a period of time, they begin to lose exactly when the date was.” For the record, “time compression” was the 1990s equivalent of what we now know and utterly loathe as, ahem, “alternative facts.”

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The Earth didn’t physically stand still in “The Day the Earth Stood Still” but it did spin backwards when Superman reversed time. Those are both fiction, but scientists now have solid evidence that the Earth flipped on its side and then flipped back into place at least once. We’re still here so it didn’t destroy the planet, but the event left physical evidence and a team of researchers finally found and identified it.

“Imagine looking at Earth from space. True polar wander would look like the Earth tipping on its side, and what’s actually happening is that the whole rocky shell of the planet—the solid mantle and crust—is rotating around the liquid outer core.”

There has been news the past few years of the Earth’s magnetic pole moving somewhat rapidly south – it’s now in Siberia – but a new study in Nature Communications, “A Late Cretaceous true polar wander oscillation,” reveals details on true polar wander (TPW), which is the “reorientation of a planet or moon in order to align the body’s greatest nonhydrostatic principal axis of inertia with the spin axis.” On Earth, this happens when the Earth’s mantle and crust rotate around the liquid outer core. Study co-author and Tokyo Institute of Technology’s Principle Investigator Joseph Kirschvink explains in a press release that TPW has been hotly debated in scientific circles because of the lack of physical evidence. He led a team to search for it, estimating that the last time this happened was in the Cretaceous period between about 145.5 and 65.5 million years ago. Co-author Prof. Ross Mitchell at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics in Beijing knew exactly where to look – in the Apennine Mountains of central Italy.

“These Italian sedimentary rocks turn out to be special and very reliable because the magnetic minerals are actually fossils of bacteria that formed chains of the mineral magnetite.”

Co-author and geobiologist at Dartmouth College explains why these rocks were the perfect ‘images’ of Earth in the Cretaceous period. Many rocks record the direction of the local magnetic field as they form – tiny crystals of the mineral magnetite produced by some bacteria line up like compass needles pointing to the magnetic poles. That direction is preserved when the rock solidifies and identifies where it came from – a rock with a vertical direction came from the pole, horizontal from the Equator. Any angle in between can be used to calculate their place of birth. By checking the magnetic direction of the rocks found in the Apennine over a period of 80 million years, the researchers pinpointed when the Earth flipped over and when it righted itself.

“Kirschvink and colleagues found, as the true polar wander hypothesis predicted, the Italian data indicate an ~12˚ tilt of the planet 84 million years ago. The team also found that Earth appears to have corrected itself—after tipping on its side, Earth reversed course and rotated right back, for a total excursion of nearly 25˚ of arc in about five million years.”

Over a course of just 5 million years, the Earth tilted over 12 degrees and then righted itself back to normal. This era of the Late Cretaceous Period was before the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction caused by the Chicxulub impact, so there were plenty of large dinosaurs around to experience it. how did it affect the T. rexes and their contemporaries? That’s food for another study. However, this research will help find smaller tilts which many research suspect have occurred in more recent times.

Did you just feel a sudden lean?

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Four hundred ancient rock-cut chamber tombs that contained paintings and treasures were discovered by archaeologists in Turkey. The chamber tombs, which date back about 1,800 years, are part of one of the world’s biggest rock-cut chamber tomb necropolises (it was built into the slopes of a canyon). They were located in the ancient city of Blaundos (it can also be spelled Blaundus) which is approximately 110 miles (177 kilometers) east of the Aegean Sea.

Many of the sarcophagi-filled tombs contain more than one deceased person which seems to indicate that several generations of the same family were buried together and that “…the tombs were reopened for each deceased family member, and a burial ceremony was held and closed again,” Birol Can, who is an archaeologist at Uşak University in Turkey and head of the Blaundos Excavation Project, explained to Live Science in an email.

(Not any of the chamber tombs mentioned in this article.)

While grave robbers already took some of the treasures throughout the years, archaeologists did find several important items such as coins and pieces of pottery dating back to the Roman Period. “In addition, the technique of the wall paintings covering the walls, vaults and ceilings of the tombs and the style of the vegetal and figurative scenes depicted on them show Roman characteristics,” Can noted.

The paintings contained geometric, floral, and figurative depictions. “Vines, flowers of various colors, wreaths, garlands, geometric panels are the most frequently used motifs,” Can explained, adding, “In addition to these, mythological figures — such as Hermes (Mercury), Eros (Cupid) [and] Medusa — and animals such as birds and dogs are included in the wide panels.”

Other items found in the chambers included diadems, bracelets, rings, mirrors, hairpins, belts, medical instruments, oil lamps, and drinking cups. While the items give a clue as to the sex, time of burial, occupation, and habits of the individuals, experts are still planning on conducting DNA and chemical analysis on the remains in order to find out more information about the deceased.

(Not any of the chamber tombs mentioned in this article.)

Besides the rock-cut chamber tombs, archaeologists have identified two temples, a theater, a gymnasium, a basilica, city walls and a gate, a public bath, aqueducts, and a shrine that was dedicated to an ancient Roman or Greek hero (this is called a heroon). “Apart from these, we know that there are many religious, public and civil structures still under the ground,” Can revealed.

Pictures of some of the rock chamber tombs and paintings can be seen here.

Unexplained aerial phenomena represent a mystery that has occurred throughout time, and one which remains as difficult to define today as it likely was for ancient observers.

To qualify this statement right here at the outset, by “unexplained aerial phenomena” I don’t necessarily mean only what the United States Air Force began calling unidentified flying objects (UFOs) during the 1950s, based on sightings that Americans and others around the world began to report during and after World War II, and which the Navy is currently tasked with evaluating.

To the contrary, mysterious aerial phenomena have a variety of different possible sources. Whatever these sources may be, the human experience of observing things in the sky that we can’t explain is a time-honored tradition, with historical roots going back to antiquity; but we’ll come back around to that aspect of the mystery shortly.

Modern sightings of odd aerial phenomena, while often having prosaic explanations, nonetheless do appear to sometimes involve structured, technological devices that are apparently under intelligent control. When modern proponents of UFO or UAP studies talk about unexplained aerial phenomena, generally most accept this to be referencing these purported aerial objects, which, although still unexplained, are often taken as possible evidence of extraterrestrial visitation.

This extraterrestrial hypothesis has certain merits, and even since the early days of the “modern” UFO era (beginning sometime between around 1943 and 1947), there have been several studies by both government and civilian groups that have left open the possibility that some of the aerial phenomena in question might belong to extraterrestrials. This has remained a problem for scientists though, who often evoke the ire of UFO proponents for taking the position—and rightly so—that there is not yet enough evidence to support such conclusions.

“That there is simply nothing else these objects could be other than ET is not evidence,” would be a statement along the lines of what many scientists have echoed in recent days. This, even amidst government assessments like the one delivered to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in June 2021 by the U.S. Navy’s UAP Task Force, which acknowledged that something which remains unidentified appears to be operating in our skies.

Several kinds of “somethings”, in fact. According to the UAP Task Force’s Preliminary Assessment, there are several categories the Task Force identifies as areas into which observations of what the military terms unexplained aerial phenomena, or UAP, fall. These range from “airborne clutter,” to technological devices that might belong to nations like Russia or China. Natural phenomena like plasmas, the likes of which a study carried out between 1997 and 2000 in the United Kingdom, Project Condign, determined UAP to be were also included in the UAP Task Force report. At no place in the brief document do words like “extraterrestrial,” “alien,” or “interplanetary” appear, although even the New York Times noted the fact that the report was worded vaguely enough that even their omission seemed to leave open for such possibilities.

To summarize, unexplained aerial phenomena have been studied seriously for decades, and we have been able to draw no significant, evidence-based conclusions about their nature and origins. Nonetheless, it appears that something exists in our skies, although it remains open to interpretation as far as determining what kind of phenomenon, or more likely, what varieties of phenomena, they might represent.

Looking further back in time, it seems likely that ancient observers throughout the world probably saw some of these objects too. From historical accounts, we can identify cases where it is likely that ancient recordings of marvels in the sky had simply been celestial phenomena like planetary convergences, the arrivals of comets, supernovae, and other occurrences witnessed by people in earlier cultures.

Modern astronomy software that allows us to calculate where celestial objects would have appeared in the sky at virtually any point throughout history are remarkably useful in unraveling the mystery behind some of these ancient cases. There are, however, also more curious sightings that have been logged since antiquity, which continue to baffle astronomers in search of celestial explanations. The next most likely culprits thereafter are meteorological or atmospheric occurrences, and engravings from the middle ages often depicted “wonders” that are obvious depictions of things like parhelion or “sun dogs”, or possible representations of things like ball lightning which remain little understood today.

An enhanced photo that may depict an anomalous light similar to ball lightning rising over Table Rock in the Linville Gorge Wilderness, North Carolina, taken in 2009 by researcher Bill Fox

(Credit: Bill Fox).

Nonetheless, there are accounts of things from prior to the modern UFO era that appear to describe aircraft or objects that don’t easily fall into known categories of natural phenomena, and yet which can’t be recognized as any known technologies of their period, either. Chief among these are the stories of airships that became prevalent during the 1890s over parts of America, with similar waves of sightings occurring over the United Kingdom, Australia, and other parts of the world in the decades that followed. Although newspaper hoaxes are known to have occurred during those days—the “fake news” of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries—many researchers find it difficult to imagine that all reports of what people called airships had been concocted by bored writers at the daily papers, who were either looking for laughs or simply desperate for generating attention among their readerships.

If he were alive today, another man of the aforementioned era, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, might have erred to the judgment of the great detective he created: Sherlock Holmes. “Once you eliminate the impossible,” Holmes is quoted saying in The Sign of Four (1890), “whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

Modern scientists would likely deem this statement tantamount to the logic behind supposing that UFOs are ET, “because there just isn’t any better explanation.” Still, there is wisdom in the words of Doyle’s great detective, and although the mystery of unexplained aerial phenomena and its many possible varieties still eludes us, it seems rather difficult to dismiss it completely out of hand… whether some of them are extraterrestrial or not.

What remains is that something is being seen in our skies, and has been for a long time. Unidentified aerial phenomena exist, in other words…  and however improbable that might seem to some, there is no extraordinary claim or wild supposition required in recognizing this fundamental fact as being the truth.

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It was previously reported that Earth’s most drought-tolerant microbes wouldn’t have a chance of surviving on Venus based on analysis of its atmosphere (some scientists claimed that there could have been microbial life in the clouds). And now, there’s even more bad news for our sister planet as a recent study claimed that there were probably never any oceans on Venus which means that it more than likely never had any life either.

While the surface temperature on Venus today is around 880 degrees Fahrenheit (471 degrees Celsius), it was believed that it wasn’t always that way. It was previously thought that billions of years of mild weather on Venus could have supported large oceans in ancient times.

According to previous studies, when the planets were very young, Venus was exceptionally hot, but it was believed that it had cooled down enough that it could have supported liquid water – mostly because the clouds were thought to have blocked a lot of the sun’s radiation. And the fact that the sun was in its “faint young” stage, that would have been beneficial as well (its luminosity was only at 70% during that time).

However, a new study has claimed that our sister planet has always been way too hot to support any oceans. A team of scientists led by Martin Turbet, who is a postdoctoral researcher at the Geneva Astronomical Observatory in Switzerland, used a new model to simulate the climate on Venus in ancient times. They found that the clouds were located on whatever hemisphere was facing away from the sun; therefore, they wouldn’t have had any effect in blocking the radiation. In fact, it would have actually warmed the planet up. In short, this means that Venus was never cool enough for any rain to fall, so there wouldn’t have been any lakes, rivers, oceans, or even life.

There may have never been any oceans on Venus.

What is startling is that the same thing could have happened to Earth if the sun would have been any more luminous during ancient times. As a matter of fact, if the young sun would have had a luminosity of 92% instead of 70%, we’d be in the same situation as Venus.

We’re very lucky that our young sun wasn’t any hotter or else we probably wouldn’t be here today. The study was published in the journal Nature where it can be read in full.

Mention Planet Nine – the alleged large planet orbiting our Sun at such a great distance that it has never officially been seen – and the conversation quickly turns to Cat Tech astrophysicists and astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown. Brown is responsible for the alleged planet being ‘Nine’ rather than ‘Ten’ or X because it was his lobbying that helped demote Pluto to dwarf planet status. Brown and Batygin’s new cause is the hypothetical Planet Nine, whose existence would explain anomalies among objects in the remote Kuiper Belt. Brown and Batygin believe it’s highly likely Planet Nine exists and in August 2021 published a study about their computer model which points astronomers to a narrow swath of sky in the Taurus constellation to look for it. At that time, Brown and Batygin revealed they would join in the search of Taurus using the Subaru Telescope at the Mauna Kea Observatory on Hawaii. It’s been two months … time for an update.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Planet Nine has already been imaged in one of the large sky surveys currently underway, but, if not, it will be hard for it to hide from the Vera Rubin Observatory once it starts operations in a few years.”

Keep staring and don’t move!

In an interview with The Daily Galaxy, Michael Brown explains their models made Planet Nine both easier and harder to find – they show that the planet is closer to the Sun that they originally suspected, but smaller than they first thought, only about five times the size of Earth. Although the small gas planet will be faint, they believe it’s visible and Brown thinks it’s already been imaged – quite possibly by his own effort with the Subaru telescope. The challenge is to scan images of large pieces of the sky for long amounts of time to identify minute changes in the locations of faint objects and pinpoint the one on a bizarre track that only a Planet Nine could make.

“My favorite characteristic of the Planet Nine hypothesis is that it is observationally testable. The prospect of one day seeing real images of Planet Nine is absolutely electrifying. Although finding Planet Nine astronomically is a great challenge, I’m very optimistic that we will image it within the next decade.”

Konstantin Batygin is not quite as optimistic as Brown that images of Planet Nine already exist, but he confirms that it can and — in his estimation – will happen by the next decade, especially after the Vera Rubin Observatory is running in 2023. Yale astronomer Malena Rice tells The Daily Galaxy she’s on Brown’s side and may herself have the images in her possession via her use of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) spacecraft.

“Right now is a particularly exciting time for Planet Nine— the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) spacecraft is currently observing the exact part of the sky where recent models have predicted that Planet Nine is most likely to reside. Planet Nine, if it exists, should be in that dataset and should be recoverable; it’s just a matter of figuring out exactly where to look. Fortunately, the computational methods for this search already exist! The discovery of Planet Nine may be right at our fingertips.”

Find the needle and you will find Planet Nine.

“Planet Nine, if it exists, should be in that dataset.” That’s astronomer-talk for finding a planetary needle in a solar system haystack … or a tiny faint Waldo somewhere in an overhead shot of the crowd at a college football game. Throw Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb into the mix on the side of Brown, Batygin and Rice and you have a lot of scientific knowledge supporting the Planet Nine hypothesis.

If Michael Brown finds Planet Nine, will you forgive him for Pluto?

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Finally, on my fistful of Roswell articles for is week, I’m going to focus on the matter of certain “Roswell files” that have gone missing and that, potentially, could have provided at least some of the answers as to what happened at Roswell. Or, what didn’t happen. On July 28, 1995, the Government Accountability Office’s report on the Roswell affair surfaced from its National Security and International Affairs Division. The GAO’s report did not provide any smoking-guns – such as old B&W photos of dead bodies and wreckage at the crash-site on the Foster Ranch, New Mexico. The report did, however, provide something interesting and controversial. And it’s something that has been misinterpreted for years. During the course of their search for records to try and better understand what had taken place at Roswell in early July 1947, the GAO learned that the entire outgoing messages from the Roswell Army Air Field generated during the period that the event occurred were missing. Vanished. Gone. And under circumstances that could not be fully determined and proved. Nor could the year in which the files went missing be confirmed. Maybe the late-forties. Maybe the fifties. The seventies? Who knows?

(Nick Redfern)

Also back in 1995, the General Accounting Office (now titled the U.S. Government Accountability Office) said of the still-mysterious event of 1947, in relation to the GAO’s search to find relevant papers: “In addition to unit history reports, we also searched for other government records on the Roswell crash. In this regard, the Chief Archivist for the National Personnel Records Center provided us with documentation indicating that (1) RAAF records such as finance and accounting, supplies, buildings and grounds, and other general administrative matters from March 1945 through December 1949 and (2) RAAF outgoing messages from October 1946 through December 1949 were destroyed.”  When the GAO demanded to know the reasons behind this development, they got an answer, as GAO files note:” “According to this official [the Chief Archivist for the National Personnel Records Center], the document disposition form did not properly indicate the authority under which the disposal action was taken. The Center’s Chief Archivist stated that from his personal experience, many of the Air Force organizational records covering this time period were destroyed without entering a citation for the governing disposition authority. Our review of records control forms showing the destruction of other records – including outgoing RAAF messages for 1950 – supports the Chief Archivist’s viewpoint.”

(Nick Redfern)

There’s another angle to all of this, too: if UFO / Roswell researchers wish to maintain that the missing files from 1947 point to a specific cover-up of the Roswell event – and Roswell occurred out of the blue in July of that year – then they have to provide a viable reason as to why documentation dating back as far as March 1945 was pulled too, and why additional documentation remains missing from as late as 1950. Saying that “the outgoing Roswell messages from July 1947 are missing” is absolutely true, and it opens eyes and it catches the attention of ufologists and Roswell disciples everywhere. Noting that, in reality, the files actually cover 1945 to 1950, and also cover general administrative issues at the base, is far less attention-grabbing.

Ironically, the fact that the files that have vanished (files which still cannot be found) span 1945 to 1950, actually adds weight to the idea that Roswell was a military experiment. Just about everyone I spoke with while writing my Body Snatchers in the Desert book told me that the human experimentation began in 1945 and ended in the late 1940s – with a few additional tests having occurred in the early fifties. Pulling 1945-era files for a one-off event that didn’t occur until the summer of 1947 makes zero sense. Pulling certain 1945-era files that might have compromised the handful of pre-Roswell experiments – had they reached the public domain, of course – makes perfect sense. The same goes for the decision to make the 1948-1950 files vanish, too. The fact is that six years of files are missing, not just files from the time of the Roswell crash. This is indicative of a fairly lengthy series of ongoing tests that had to be hidden – not the out-of-the-blue crash of one solitary alien spacecraft midway through 1947.