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
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Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
08-03-2022
Advances in flow cytometry drive small bioparticle research
Advances in flow cytometry drive small bioparticle research
For researchers exploring the nature of small bioparticles, like extracellular vesicles or artificial nanoparticles, flow cytometry has largely been out of reach. No longer.
During the process of exocytosis, cells release membrane-bound vesicles (shown) into the extracellular space. Such bioparticles facilitate cell-to-cell signalling.
Credit: Meletios Verras/Shutterstock
In science, some of the most valuable discoveries hide in plain sight. Such was the case for extracellular vesicles (EVs). The small lipid-bilayer compartments are released from cells and contain nucleic acids, proteins and lipids. For decades, most researchers considered them insignificant. Many referred to them simply as platelet dust1.
In 2006, a series of published papers detailed the roles of EVs in intracellular communication. The findings spurred a wave of research. Between 2010 and 2019, the published mentions of EVs grew by 10 times from around 400 to more than 50002. Researchers now believe that EVs, which can be characterized into distinct subtypes, are vital in cell-to-cell signaling, and could serve as drug-delivery vectors and disease biomarkers.
“Extracellular vesicles are a really hot area of research right now,” says Stephanie Brunelle, a molecular biologist, and senior product manager for flow cytometry at the biotechnology company, Luminex in Seattle. “Many think they could be the next big biomarker.”
The challenge, Brunelle says, is analyzing and quantifying them.
While a number of methods exist, one of the most logical ones, flow cytometry, was until recently out of reach3. Flow cytometry is a bench-standard technique for cell sorting and quantification, and lends itself to high-throughput methods. But it was not sensitive enough to assess EVs or any other small bioparticles, whether artificial nanoparticles or small bacterial cells. Advances in imaging, assays and software are now enabling small-particle flow cytometry, and will almost certainly drive an even bigger wave of published EV research in the years ahead.
A better flow
Researchers have long used flow cytometry to count and characterize cells as microfluidics guide them over a detector. But human cells can be relatively large, up to 150 micrometres in diameter. EVs are decidedly smaller. One particularly interesting subtype of EVs, exosomes, have diameters between 30 to 100 nanometres, three orders of magnitude smaller than the average cell4.
Particles that small often emit signals too dim for standard flow cytometers to reliably detect, pushing researchers and companies to improve them. For example, flow cytometers traditionally used a photomultiplier tube as a sensor, but more modern devices incorporate more sensitive avalanche photodiodes or even CCD cameras, which can be five to 10 times as sensitive as PMTs. Luminex, for instance, makes a camera-based system.
“This technology is really great for detecting small particles,” Brunelle says.
Likewise researchers have developed improved assays and detection algorithms and their efforts have made the latest flow cytometers and techniques well suited to analysing and quantifying bioparticles.
Work is now ongoing to detect even dimmer signals. Many researchers are now interested in specific molecules inside EVs or carried on their surface, which can yield important clues about EVs’ purpose and mechanisms. But signals from those molecules can be between 10,000 and one million times dimmer than standard cells.
“This is the crux of why it's been hard to apply flow cytometry, which works so well in cells, for these small particles,” says John Nolan, a biochemist at the Scintillon Institute, a research organization in San Diego, California, and CEO of Cellarcus Biosciences. At Cellarcus, Nolan and others have developed a membrane stain that causes EVs to fluoresce brightly enough for a camera to detect5. The company also uses fluorescent-tagged antibodies, which they validate to make sure they’re selectively binding to the desired surface molecules.
While researchers could develop similar tools themselves, the availability of a simple kit can be a force multiplier for research. “It’s a hard measurement to make, and you have to do about a dozen things correctly,” Nolan says. “You don’t want it to be a physics project. You want it to be a clinical test at some point.”
The right signal
Gains in the sensitivity of flow cytometry are welcome, but they also can increase noise, whether from debris in the sample, autofluorescence in the buffer, or other factors. Researchers need to manage that risk to get reproducible results.
Perhaps the most important consideration, Brunelle says, is to run controls to calibrate the equipment, as well as to validate the EV sample. Researchers need to look at the buffer solution first by itself and then with fluorescent stain or antibodies added in order to calibrate their equipment. That way, when they make measurements on actual samples, those will be comparable to measurements made at a different time or on a different sample.
Likewise, Brunelle recommends performing incremental dilutions on a sample. By gradually reducing the concentration, researchers can determine which mixtures emit too much signal, saturating the detector, and which yield too little to be seen.
Using established standards and protocols is also important. Because small particle flow cytometry is still new, not all the standards have been set. But the International Society for Extracellular Vesicles publishes a series of guidelines laying out the controls and protocols scientists should follow to make sure they have a well validated particle population.
“Not all researchers are aware of this because EV research is still a little bit like the wild west, where people are kind of doing whatever they want,” Brunelle says. “But how can you be so sure that what you're seeing is true and real without using all the proper controls, especially something that's so technically challenging because it's so small?” Software, too, can help reduce noise by picking out weak signals. Luminex has an algorithm that can determine that a dim streak across the field of view of the camera is a signal from a single particle moving across the detector. It will then integrate that into a stronger signal.
More work remains. Nolan acknowledges that some of the smallest particles are still at the edge of reliable detection for flow cytometry. Also, researchers have found a surprising heterogeneity in EVs. It would be useful to sort small particles into different subgroups as they pass through the flow cytometer, as is done commonly with cell types. That could help researchers pair their work with further analysis, such as mass spectrometry. One possibility, Nolan says, could be to attach magnetic beads to antibodies, but those would then need to be removed somehow, and unlike cells, which can proliferate after sorting, it’s not clear how to get a large enough volume of EVs.
Almost certainly, these incremental improvements will come. “This is building on 20, 25 years of quantitative flow cytometry, and these concepts are well established for quantitative cell analysis,” Nolan says. “We are largely just adapting it down to this new, dim regime.”
To learn more about flow cytometry instruments and assays suitable for small bioparticle research, visit our website.
References
Hargett LA, Bauer NN. On the origin of microparticles: From "platelet dust" to mediators of intercellular communication. Pulm Circ. 2013;3(2):329-340. doi:10.4103/2045-8932.114760
Veziroglu Eren M., Mias George I. Characterizing Extracellular Vesicles and Their Diverse RNA Contents. Front. Genet. (11) 700 2020 https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2020.00700
Welsh, Joshua A, et al MIFlowCty-EV: A framework for standard reporting of extracellular flow cytometry experiments. Journal of Extracellular Vesicles. 9:1, 2020 https://doi.org/10.1080/20013078.2020.1713526
van Niel, G., D'Angelo, G. & Raposo, G. Shedding light on the cell biology of extracellular vesicles. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol 19, 213–228 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrm.2017.125
Crooks ET, et al. Engineering well-expressed, V2-immunofocusing HIV-1 envelope glycoprotein membrane trimers for use in heterologous prime-boost vaccine regimens. PLoS Pathog 17(10): e1009807. (2021) https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1009807
Scientists Create “Strange Metal” Packed With Entangled Electrons
Scientists Create “Strange Metal” Packed With Entangled Electrons
This could be the key to creating quantum technologies.
Image by Ahmed Neutron/Victor Tangermann
An international team of researchers has created what’s called a “strange metal” — and they say it could help harness the potential of the quantum world in a practical way.
Specifically, the metal provides evidence for the quantum entanglement nature of quantum criticality. But that’s a lot to unpack, so let’s start with something most of us probably learned about in elementary school: phase transitions.
We see evidence of classical phase transitions all the time — the ice in our drinks melts into a liquid at a certain temperature, for example, while the water we boil evaporates into a gas at another.
Simple enough.
Well, materials in the quantum world also undergo phase transitions under the right conditions, and when a quantum material is capable of transitioning from one phase to another, it’s called a state of “quantum criticality” — which brings us back to this new study, published this week in the journal Science.
Researchers Create "Strange Metal" Packed With Entangled Electrons
The researchers used the elements ytterbium, rhodium, and silicon to create a “strange metal,” a type of metal in which the electrons act as a unit rather than independently like they would in a regular metal, such as copper or gold.
When at the lowest temperature theoretically possible — absolute zero, or -273.15 degrees Celsius (-459.67 degrees Fahrenheit) — the team’s strange metal undergoes a transition from a quantum phase, in which it forms a magnetic order, to another phase in which is doesn’t.
While conducting experiments on ultrapure films made from the metal, the team noticed quantum entanglement among billions of billions of electrons in it.
So, why is this observation important? It could help in our efforts to create quantum technologies.
“Quantum entanglement is the basis for storage and processing of quantum information,” researcher Qimiao Si of Rice University said in a press release. “At the same time, quantum criticality is believed to drive high-temperature superconductivity. So our findings suggest that the same underlying physics — quantum criticality — can lead to a platform for both quantum information and high-temperature superconductivity.”
“When one contemplates that possibility,” he added, “one cannot help but marvel at the wonder of nature.”
In Oregon, a man said his health deteriorated after a glowing blue orb passed through his body. A family in California reported strange lights and a gray figure with spindly legs in their orchard. A werewolf-like creature allegedly prowled around homes in suburban Virginia.
All three incidents were probed as part of a secret Pentagon program investigating UFOs. The program, contracted by the Defense Intelligence Agency, plumbed the connection between the flying objects and the paranormal for two years, according to the men who ran it.
It was the beginning of a years-long effort by UFO advocates that eventually led to Congress passing legislation in December 2021 ordering the Pentagon to spend the next four years investigating unidentified flying objects.
The Pentagon's new office for what has been rebranded as unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, has deep roots in the paranormal. Underneath the Washington defense talk about threats from China and Russia, there is a conviction among advocates that the strange objects glimpsed by troops and military equipment are part of a mysterious phenomenon that stretches back decades or, perhaps, throughout human history.
As the stigma over flying saucer talk lifts, and the military connection has taken UFOs mainstream, some have become more open about those beliefs.
"People say, 'Well, we're only going to look at the nuts-and-bolts machines.' Well, you better come up with a lot of physics. It's far more advanced than we're capable of now," said James Lacatski, a now-retired DIA intelligence officer who set up the UFO program that ran from 2008 to 2010. "And then there's others who say, 'Well, they're nothing more than ghosts. Part of the paranormal world.'
"No, they're a hybrid of both," he said.
Lacatski, a bespectacled man whom a colleague described as looking like a rocket scientist, started research right out of college on missiles and directed energy weapons such as lasers.In the early 2000s, he headed up the DIA annual missile threat assessment. He originally started the research out of concern that UFOs could pose a national security threat, specifically to U.S. missile defense systems.
"You know what was on the internet at the time, it just sounded like advanced technology to me," Lacatski said. "I said, 'I'm interested. We need to do something about this if it's true.' And I spoke to my management, and it started from there."
Lacatski's later work unearthed the case of Navy fighter pilots with the USS Nimitz strike group who saw a mysterious flying "Tic Tac"-shaped object zip away while training in the Pacific. The incident and witness testimony became key evidence after it was leaked in 2017, used by former Pentagon and CIA officials to prod the government into taking UFOs seriously.
Their effort pushed the UFO issue in crucial ways that eventually convinced lawmakers something needed to be done.
"I don't care what anybody says, it is the story of the millennia and it needs to be talked about," said Jim Semivan, a retired operations officer in the CIA's Directorate of Operations who co-founded To the Stars Inc., a group that helped expose and publicize the three Navy videos in 2017 that helped drive the response in Washington.
In an image from video provided by the Department of Defense labelled Gimbal, from 2015, an unexplained object is seen at center as it is tracked as it soars high along the clouds, traveling against the wind. (Department of Defense via AP)
In the Beginning
The Pentagon's unusual UFO program echoed classified DIA and CIA programs in the 1970s and 1980s that explored whether human psychics could use the power of their minds, called remote viewing, to spy on the Soviets and other foreign adversaries from far away.
The earlier programs spanned 25 years and were featured in the nonfiction book "The Men Who Stare at Goats," which was made into a fictionalized movie in 2009. The programs were ultimately terminated in 1995 and deemed ineffective for intelligence operations, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
For the UFO program, Lacatski would work closely with Colm Kelleher, a contractor who ran its daily operations.
Kelleher was trained in Ireland as a biochemist and cancer researcher and speaks with the remnants of an Irish lilt. He had spent years working for Robert Bigelow, a wealthy Las Vegas real estate mogul and aerospace company owner with a deep interest in UFOs and the afterlife. Kelleher and Bigelow already had a history of investigating UFOs and paranormal phenomena, and Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies was the lead contractor on the DIA program, formally called the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, or AAWSAP.
Lacatski and Kelleher recounted their work in interviews with Military.com, having previously published a book about the program, “Skinwalkers at the Pentagon,” that was cleared for release by the Defense Department.
The two men were fans of the remote viewing program, using a pseudonym in their book that was a nod to one of that group's psychics.
In a stroke of happenstance, one of the biggest UFO cases in history literally walked through the door in the first days of the new UFO initiative. The existence of the program, funded with off-the-books money authorized by the late Sen. Harry Reid, was first reported by The New York Times in 2017, though the paper largely left out the paranormal research and conflated the DIA work with a later program.
It was in early 2008, just as the AAWSAP was getting off the ground, and Kelleher was interviewing program manager candidates in a Las Vegas office. A Marine CorpsF/A-18 Hornet fighter pilot who was looking for a job shared an incredible story.
"At the very end of the interview, he drops this bombshell on me that actually he had been part of the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group," Kelleher said. "And of course, I immediately perked up because I mean, this was pretty interesting."
The Marine pilot's story is now widely known. Pilots and crew reported tracking unusual objects on radar in a military training area off the coast of California in 2004. An infrared video purports to show one shoot quickly out of view.
Cmdr. Dave Fravor, a Navy pilot who publicly described the episodes in 2017, said he was scrambled to investigate and encountered an oblong white object that flew without any visible propulsion system or wings. It mirrored his flying before disappearing before his eyes. Part of his account was backed up by Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich, a junior pilot at the time who said she witnessed the object for about 10 seconds.
Fravor said in interviews he believed the object was "not from this world," further fueling speculation.
"Some of the pilots involved in this were actually briefing Senate Armed Services Committee members and staffers, and Senate Intelligence Committee members and staffers," Kelleher said about the impact the Nimitz incident would have years later. "So, it was considered sort of a sentinel case where the credibility of the so-called UFO phenomenon was introduced at a very high level to Capitol Hill."
In early 2009, Lacatski and Kelleher sent a sailor whom they described as a senior engineer in naval intelligence, on a four-and-a-half month investigation of witnesses and evidence in the Nimitz case. That work would remain secret for years before being leaked by others.
After the Nimitz investigation, the sailor and two Marines were sent to a Utah property known as Skinwalker Ranch, where Bigelow, the owner, had funded his own private research of UFO and paranormal activity over the previous decade.
Skinwalker sits on just over 500 acres of steppe land near the town of Ballard in northeastern Utah. It has long been an alleged epicenter of strange happenings, dating back to tales from the Native American Ute tribe and Navajo people, who believe in malevolent witches called skinwalkers who can transform into animal-like creatures.
The ranch would later be the subject of a paranormal reality TV show under another owner.
A gate to Skinwalker Ranch in 2009 during the Pentagon’s UFO program. (Courtesy of George Knapp)
The three active-duty service members, whose identities have been concealed by the researchers and the Defense Department, allegedly witnessed a black void on the land that filled them with fear. Lacatski and Kelleher claim the men experienced paranormal activity after leaving the ranch and returning to homes in the Washington, D.C., area, such as orbs, dark figures in bedrooms at night, and strange noises.
The wife and two teen children of the sailor who investigated the Nimitz incident claimed to have seen a wolf-like creature that walked on two hind legs staring into their Virginia home on two occasions.
Military.com asked the Pentagon whether it could confirm the paranormal research. "No," was the one-word response from Sue Gough, the department's spokesperson on UFOs. She pointed to the boilerplate disclaimer on the Lacatski and Kelleher book, which says the department's clearance for publication does not imply factual accuracy.
Going Public
Lue Elizondo, an Army veteran and former counterintelligence special agent with a high-and-tight haircut and rectangular strip of goatee, loved his "smoke and mirrors" work in places like the Middle East and Afghanistan. His father, a Cuban exile, participated in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
In 2008, Lacatski met with Elizondo in an office in Rosslyn, just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. The DIA analyst had identified Elizondo as a potential recruit into the DIA program.
"He looked at me very seriously and he said, 'So, what do you think about UFOs?'" Elizondo said in an interview with Military.com. "I told the truth. I said I don't think about it. He said, 'What do you mean, you don't believe in them?' I said, 'I didn't say that. What I said is I don't think about them.'"
Elizondo didn't end up joining with Lacatski. But he did go on to run the Pentagon's smaller in-house UFO program created when the DIA program ended.
"It wasn't involved at all with Skinwalker, and that was a conscious decision to do that," Elizondo said. "It was a decision we had to make because there were some 'antibodies' in the Department of Defense that were starting to become concerned about the focus of AAWSAP and what it was doing."
The Nimitz 'Tic Tac' investigation done by Lacatski's team was transferred to Elizondo, who was then running what was called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP.
Working with a "very, very small cadre of people in the Pentagon," Elizondo uncovered another series of military experiences with UFOs that would form the second piece of crucial evidence leading to the legislation in December.
Pilots training with the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt in the Atlantic between 2014 and 2015 reported picking up -- and sometimes seeing visually -- objects on a daily basis that appeared to travel at extremely high speeds and high altitudes. In a near midair collision, a pilot reported seeing what looked like a sphere with a cube inside, according to The New York Times.
By 2017, Elizondo said he was trying to brief then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis personally about the incidents and having no luck. He kept briefing Mattis' staff and brought in the pilots and radar operators.
"The problem was, nobody wanted to tell the boss, and I think, hindsight being 20/20, the rationale was that this is a man who's highly respected, this is a man who everybody trusts," he said. "If we briefed him on the fact that there are these things called UAP, or in the vernacular UFOs, if he's asked [about it] by a member of the press, he'd have to say yes, and that could hurt his credibility."
Despite the compiled accounts and videos, UFOs remained a taboo topic for many within the Pentagon.
So instead, Elizondo worked to get infrared cockpit videos of the Navy encounters cleared for public release. Then, he quit the Pentagon in protest and emerged in public as a whistleblower in 2017. The three videos were leaked to Chris Mellon, a former deputy secretary of defense for intelligence, in the Pentagon parking lot.
The New York Times broke the story that the Pentagon had a UFO program in December 2017, with Elizondo and Mellon as key sources. At the same time, both men joined the To the Stars company, which jointly published the Nimitz and Roosevelt Navy videos with the newspaper -- causing a global sensation that hasn't abated.
What's Belief Got to Do with It
To the Stars was a new company formed with the hopes of publicizing the belief that UFOs are an age-old phenomenon that could hold profound meaning for the human race. It was co-founded by Semivan, the CIA operations officer, and Tom DeLonge, a rock musician and former front man for the band Blink-182.
Elizondo and Mellon were original members, along with Hal Puthoff, a physicist who worked on the DIA and CIA psychic remote viewing programs of the 1970s and 1980s.
"We all knew that this did not belong to the military, that this phenomenon and these UAPs are appearing everywhere," said Semivan, who also did consulting work for Elizondo when he headed the Pentagon AATIP program. "They're appearing over military sites, nuclear sites, over carrier task force groups and things along this line, but they're also appearing all over the United States and all over the world in general."
DeLonge, who spent decades researching UFO lore before forming the company, has been public about his beliefs in the paranormal aspects of the alleged encounters and that a nonhuman intelligence has been influencing people throughout history. He's also indicated the military may have recovered parts of UFOs and be secretly working to understand them.
"If something's been here for a long period of time, and it really is showing up in people's bedrooms, or in front of an F-18, or on a petroglyph wall, or in an ancient text down in the archive of the Vatican, or whatever it might be, it's obviously doing something and it's obviously having an influence," DeLonge said in a YouTube video posted in December.
The belief that UFOs are a mysterious phenomenon -- possibly moving through dimensions or consciousness -- that has affected people's minds and bodies throughout history was popularized decades ago by authors such as Jacques Vallee, a prominent UFO researcher who was portrayed by the French New Wave director Francois Truffaut in the 1977 movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
Semivan described Vallee as a kind of patron saint to his company.
Elizondo, who left the company around the end of 2020, has since become a kind of celebrity in the UFO community, a group of people around the world who have banded together on social media sites such as Twitter and Reddit, and created podcasts and YouTube shows dedicated to the topic. Both Elizondo and Mellon, along with other members of the To the Stars company, starred in a History Channel series called "Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation."
"You know when we describe a white flying Tic Tac in 2004, it was described in the '60s as a white flying throat lozenge, what was described in the '50s as a white flying butane tank," Elizondo said in the interview with Military.com, claiming that solid government evidence exists of UFO encounters going back decades.
Pickaway County Deputy Sheriff John Wolford supervises the loading of a part from an Air Force balloon that descended from the sky in south central Ohio farmland, April 19, 1966. (AP Photo)
In scores of interviews and appearances in recent years, the former counterintelligence agent always appears to measure his words carefully. He has compared UFOs to ancient beliefs in sea monsters that turned out to be sharks and whales, pointed to ancient Roman accounts of "flaming shields" in the sky, and suggested the human race may be headed for a profound paradigm shift in understanding reality.
In his interview with Military.com, he declined to elaborate on what he meant by the comments or his beliefs in UFOs.
"Belief really doesn't have any play in this field, and this is part of the problem because people have made this topic about belief. It's a very emotional topic for some people," Elizondo said. "This topic cannot be about belief. It must be about facts."
Selling the UFO Idea
Mellon, the former Pentagon official who helped make the 2017 Nimitz videos public, brushed off questions about the earlier DIA research in an interview with Military.com. A descendant of the wealthy Mellon family of Pittsburgh, he said his family name has led many to assume he grew up wealthy, but that he was actually raised in inner-city Chicago under difficult circumstances.
"They think I grew up in a nice home in the countryside with a limo or something, and that was anything but the case," Mellon said.
He served in the Pentagon under President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and worked on Capitol Hill for more than a decade, eventually rising to minority staff director on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
His knowledge of the national security apparatus and facility with the language of the Pentagon, Congress and Washington, D.C., quickly elevated him as a top expert, who was loudly blowing a national security klaxon. He compares the overall Pentagon response to UFO reports to missing radar indications of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
"I found out that this had been going on not just for months, but for years in dozens and dozens of incidents off the coast, including a near midair collision," Mellon said. "And the secretary doesn't know. Congress doesn't know, senior officials don't know. I mean are you kidding me? This is such a grotesque failure of imagination, of curiosity and of the system."
In 2017, Mellon began his effort to convince members of Congress to act, though he said he avoided any mention to lawmakers of the earlier research by Lacatski and Kelleher, or the beliefs of the founding members of To the Stars.
Those topics would have been counterproductive, he said.
"You had to provide some political cover for these people, some legitimate basis on national security grounds for them to engage and say, 'OK, I'm willing to take a brief or I'm willing to look at this,'" Mellon said. "You don't go in there and say, 'Oh, we've got little green men or people coming out of interplanetary portals; or, you know, woo-woo kind of stuff. You wouldn't get to first base."
The coverage of the UFO story by The New York Times, the paper of record, had also done a lot to legitimize the issue among Congress and the public, since many of the paranormal aspects weren't included. Thousands of other news stories would follow.
"I want you to put aside all that stuff that people talk about, extraterrestrials and all that," Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a 2020 interview broadcast by a local news station. "This is a very simple equation for me -- there are things flying over our military installations. We don't know what they are or where they are from."
Meanwhile, many in the public mistook the military's acknowledgment that the Navy videos are authentic as an admission that UFOs exist.
A Tale of Two Programs
The 2008-2010 DIA program had sent out teams of investigators to UFO sightings, such as the members who staked out the California orchard with night-vision goggles. It followed tips from the Mutual UFO Network, a U.S. grassroots organization that has recorded and cataloged sightings since 1969. The group bills itself as the world's largest and oldest civilian UFO organization, with its own lab to analyze mysterious metals and a research group focusing on people who claim to have been abducted by alien craft.
The program produced a raft of theoretical papers attempting to imagine and explain highly advanced future technologies it believed could be related to UFOs.
The legislation passed in December ordering a new Pentagon office to investigate UFOs has no stated connection to the paranormal, but it mirrors some aspects of the earlier DIA program. President Joe Biden signed the legislation, part of the must-pass annual defense authorization bill, on Dec. 27, ordering Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to set up an office to "synchronize and standardize" the reporting, collection and analysis of the unidentified aerial phenomena across the military and intelligence community.
Both the older DIA program and the new initiative have investigative teams that deploy to UFO sightings to collect data and witness accounts, and science teams to analyze data on the objects. Both programs have a focus on the medical and health effects of UFO encounters. Both include theoretical descriptions of how UFOs may work.
The Pentagon's UFO science plan should seek to explain UFOs "that exceed the known state of the art in science or technology," and start the process of trying to replicate those capabilities, according to the law. Congress has ordered annual reports on what the Pentagon finds, with the first due this October.
A lot of the law's language "seemed to come right out" of the earlier DIA program, Kelleher said.
But the research by Lacatski and Kelleher would remain largely out of public sight through much of the UFO debate in Washington. The outstanding questions about UFO sightings were nonetheless convincing to those on the Hill.
"There are too many things that are unexplained that we just need an explanation for," said Emily Harding, the deputy director and senior fellow in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
Harding was the deputy staff director on the Senate Intelligence Committee as it worked on the issue. She said Rubio took the lead and was able to approach it with an open mind. The reports from pilots and military personnel raised serious security issues -- and highlighted a real lack of data that made any conclusions about the incidents impossible.
Some of the information provided to lawmakers was given in classified briefings, though it's unclear whether there was much beyond the public Navy videos and witnesses. The committee believed the first step was getting better data from the Pentagon and intelligence community.
"Maybe the explanation is that an adversary has come up with a new technology that we definitely need to understand. Maybe the answer is that our sensors are giving us readings that are confusing us," Harding said. "And if that's the case, then that's something that definitely needs to be fixed before we find ourselves in something like a great power competition."
Despite the positive reception in Congress, there are still some pushing back against the mainstreaming of UFO research.
Mick West has become famous like Elizondo in UFO circles, but for the opposite reason. He's skeptical. The former video game designer and founder of the website Metabunk, has spent years using science, math and data mining to debunk conspiracy theories claiming airplane contrails are chemical agents, or chemtrails; the 9/11 attacks were faked; and mass shootings are false flag operations.
Over the past few years, he's turned his investigative skills on the UFO claims behind the new Pentagon program. A British transplant to California, his dry delivery of theories and almost Vulcan-like logic have frustrated many believers. What he sees are adherents to the paranormal UFO theories of Jacques Vallee using inconclusive evidence to push their agenda.
"They've got to kind of phrase their arguments to the congressmen and the senators in terms of things like national defense, which is a very physical thing," West said in an interview. "In reality, they believe in this weird extra-dimensional nonhuman intelligence E.T. hypothesis, and yet they've toned it down so they can get this stuff passed by their lobbying efforts."
West has published detailed examinations of the three Navy UFO videos, which he says likely have mundane explanations such as exhaust glare, loss of camera lock, and misperception.
In 2017, the Chilean government released similar infrared military footage of what it claimed was a genuine UFO. Within a few days, West, with the help of other web sleuths, identified the object as a scheduled passenger plane departing a nearby airport.
The Navy and Pentagon have only confirmed the U.S. videos were recorded by the military, but have never described what they show.
An initial report on the military UFO situation, ordered by Congress and released in June 2021 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, provided some context and left many questions unanswered. The investigation was "largely inconclusive," with 144 cases of objects reported since 2004 that couldn't be identified, and 18 that seemed to include unusual flight, such as moving against the wind or at high speeds without visible means of propulsion.
There were likely multiple explanations, including airborne clutter and foreign systems, the report found.
"But of course there's always the question of is there something else that we simply do not understand that might come extraterrestrially," Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, said at a public event in November.4
Travis Tritten can be reached at travis.tritten@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Tritten.
SCIENTISTS JUST DISCOVERED A PLANET THAT’S NOT A SPHERE
SCIENTISTS JUST DISCOVERED A PLANET THAT’S NOT A SPHERE
IT'S THE FIRST EXOPLANET SHAPED LIKE THIS.
ESA
Rugby Planet
Turns out not all planets are nice and spherical like Earth.
The European Space Agency (ESA) says it’s found a planet shaped like a rugby ball in the constellation Hercules, according to a blog post from the agency. Dubbed WASP-103b, the planet appears to be deformed due to enormous tidal forces caused by its host star.
Much like how the Moon’s gravity pulls on Earth, WASP-103b’s host star is so close to the planet that it exerts a staggering tidal force. This has resulted in the planet taking on a rugby ball shape — and, tantalizingly, it’s the first time such a deformity has been detected in an exoplanet.
Slap CHEOP
The discovery was made by the ESA’s CHEOPS space telescope, and built off data gathered by the Hubble Telescope and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.
Specifically, CHEOPS was able to detect very specific light signatures made by the planet as it transited its host star. Using this data, astronomers were able to suss out its exact tidal deformation.
“It’s incredible that CHEOPS was actually able to reveal this tiny deformation,” Jacques Laskar, researcher director at the French National Center for Scientific Research and co-author of a paper about the discovery in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, said in the blog post.
“This is the first time such analysis has been made, and we can hope that observing over a longer time interval will strengthen this observation and lead to better knowledge of the planet’s internal structure,” he added.
The researchers now hope that future observations by the newly-launched James Webb Space Telescope will uncover more insights about the exact nature of the strange planet’s deformation — along with the rest of the universe.
Wetenschappers ontdekken dat brein van ex-coronapatiënten is gekrompen
Wie besmet raakte met het coronavirus, blijkt nadien meer tekenen van hersenveroudering te vertonen dan mensen die geen corona hebben gehad of die een andere luchtweginfectie doormaakten. Dat hebben onderzoekers aan de universiteit van Oxford ontdekt. Het brein van ex-coronapatiënten is een klein beetje gekrompen en toont vooral beschadigingen in hersengebieden die verbonden zijn met het reukcentrum.
De wetenschappers delen hun bevindingen in het wetenschappelijk vakblad Nature. Wie corona doormaakte blijkt gemiddeld ook iets langer te doen over een simpel puzzelspelletje als ‘verbind de punten’. “Dat zegt iets over de verwerkingssnelheid en uitvoerende functies van het brein, oftewel iemands vermogen om een complexe taak uit te voeren”, zegt professor Gwenaëlle Douaud van de faculteit neurowetenschap aan de Oxford Universiteit.
Douaud en haar team bestudeerden de hersenscans van ongeveer achthonderd Britten tussen 50 en 80 jaar oud die meedoen aan een al lopend langdurig medisch volgonderzoek. De helft had tussendoor corona gehad, de andere helft niet, waardoor de onderzoekers goed de situatie voor en na de infectie konden vergelijken.
Het gaat om zeer subtiele verschillen, die bovendien per persoon verschillen, benadrukt de wetenschapper. Gemiddeld werd tijdens de studie 0,2 tot 2 procentpunt extra verval boven op de schade die mensen sowieso met de jaren oplopen vastgesteld. Over het algemeen zijn de door het coronavirus aangetaste hersengebieden zo’n tien jaar ‘ouder’ dan ze anders waren geweest, stelt het onderzoek. Het is nog niet duidelijk of dit verlies aan hersenmassa weer bijtrekt. “Dat is nu een van de grote vragen”, aldus Douaud.
Opmerkelijk is dat de verschillen ook zichtbaar zijn bij patiënten die thuis konden uitzieken. Bij de meeste andere studies naar de langetermijneffecten van corona gaat om patiënten die zwaar ziek in het ziekenhuis lagen.
Reukverlies
De wetenschappers vermoeden dat de schade te maken heeft met het reukverlies dat tot voor kort een kenmerkend symptoom was van corona – bij de omikronvariant komen reukstoornissen minder vaak voor. Wellicht komt het virus zelf via het reukcentrum het brein binnen, maar de schade kan ook het gevolg zijn van een ontstekingsreactie. Een andere mogelijkheid is dat de schade gewoon komt doordat patiënten een tijd hun reukcentrum niet gebruikten: in het brein beginnen ongebruikte gebiedjes vaak vanzelf te krimpen.
Marsrover Curiosity deelt nieuwe foto van ‘Martiaans bloemetje’
Op de foto ziet het er behoorlijk indrukwekkend uit, in werkelijkheid is het kleiner dan een klein muntstuk. Wat we precies zien? “Een martiaans bloemetje”, zo schrijft het Amerikaanse ruimtevaartagentschap NASA. Dat ‘bloemetje’ is een piepkleine minerale formatie.
Het plaatje dateert nog van 24 februari en werd gemaakt door de Mars hand Lens Imager aan boord van de Marsrover Curiosity. De camera bevindt zich aan het uiteinde van een van de robotarmen en kan sterk inzoomen.
Door het sterk ingezoomde effect lijken de structuren op de foto van aanzienlijke grootte, maar schijn bedriegt. In werkelijkheid zijn de vormpjes niet groter dan een muntstuk van een eurocent. De vormen zijn overigens minerale formaties, gemaakt van sulfaten. Zulke formaties werden al eerder gevonden op Mars.
Marsrover Curiosity ging in 2012 naar de rode planeet en heeft inmiddels ook een opvolger: Perseverance. Beide robots zijn onbemande voertuigen die onderzoek doen op Mars.
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Mysteries Discovered in the Wilderness
Mysteries Discovered in the Wilderness
Technological developments and human curiosity augmented by determination have led humans to explore various incredible parts of the globe. However, despite the technological advancement, there’s a lot we still haven’t found. Our planet is home to some mind boggling and mysterious places and phenomena’s no one has been able to explain, not even the genius scientists and academic of our time. Gaining access to these places may lead us to astonishing discoveries. These may include monsters hidden in the jungles and ancient cities lost in the Amazon Rainforest. Today, let’s venture into the wilderness and discover various unique aspects of life. While some of these will mesmerize you, others might creep you out, so sit tight and watch till the end.
Bigfoot Caught on Film in 1967 In a California Canyon!
The greatest and most-famous, Bigfoot incident of all time took place on October 20, 1967, along Bluff Creek, California, when Roger Patterson and Robert “Bob” Gimlin rode on horseback down into a canyon in a national forest, carrying a Cine-Kodak K-100 16mm film camera, at about 1:30 PM, in search of any of the Bigfeet sighted in that same area the previous year. They were both taken by surprise when they came upon a tall creature just 25 feet (7.6 meters) away, and Patterson dismounted and began filming for 59 seconds as the creature was 80 to 120 feet away.
They estimated the creature’s height at 6.5 to 7.5 feet (2 to 2.3 meters), and its weight at 350 pounds (159 kilograms), and later made two plaster casts of the 16-inch (41-cm) footprints. The creature had a 41-inch (104-centimeter) average stride, which increased to 65 inches (165 centimeters) as she sped up. By comparison, this author is 6 feet and one inch (1.85 meters) tall, has a 27-inch (69-centimeter) stride in normal walking, and a stride of 48 inches (122 centimeters), when I’m in a very big hurry. Gimlin later noted that, “ The horse never made tracks as deep as the creature did, so…she was a heavy, well-muscled creature.”
It’s an absolutely amazing film by any standard, depicting a very tall, very muscular, humanoid, female creature in full motion, walking briskly away from the camera and glancing back just once (most-famously at Frame 352, which is now in the public domain.) Both men have consistently denied any allegations of a hoax , and no one has ever been able to prove the film to have been faked in any manner.
“Toward a Resolution of the Bigfoot Phenomenon,” usually just called the NASI Report, used detailed, forensic, computer analysis to examine the Patterson-Gimlin film great detail.
The Patterson-Gimlin Film Was Analyzed In Every Way
In 1998, the North American Science Institute (NASI) of Hood River, Oregon, issued a formal report entitled, “Toward a Resolution of the Bigfoot Phenomenon,” usually just called the NASI Report, after having used detailed, forensic, computer analysis to examine the controversial film in great detail. They stated, “ The 1967 Patterson - Gimlin Film ( PGF )… converted to digital data via a film scanner so that the imagery could be processed by computer.The computed height of the subject in the film is 7’ 3 1/2”. If the subject was a person wearing a costume... a seam or interface in the costume would be detected. No seams or interfaces were detected .”
“Subject’s hand (and foot) appears to be between that of the gorilla and the human …The appearance and sophistication of musculature as seen in the Patterson-Gimlin film has not yet been reproduced in costumes for the entertainment industry…The film subject is not employing typical, human locomotion…while the stride can be duplicated, the continuous, forward motion seen in the film cannot…To date, the Patterson-Gimlin film has defied explanation…after three years of rigorous, forensic examination…(the) film is of an uncatalogued animal…the Patterson-Gimlin film cannot be demonstrated to be a forgery.”
Distinguished anthropologist Doctor Grover Krantz of Washington State University concluded in 1999 that, “I fully accept the Patterson film…consistent with a 500-pound biped. I’ve attempted to imitate it, and I really can’t do it…The (subject’s) knee is regularly bent at more than 90 degrees, while the human leg bends less than 70 degrees.” In fact, no human being has ever replicated this extreme, lower leg lift while maintaining the smoothness, posture, and stride length of the creature on the film.
Doctor Jeffrey Meldrum, Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology at Idaho State University, has also analyzed the Patterson Film: “The film subject possesses arms…disproportionately long for its stature… Anthropologists typically express limb proportions as an intermembral (IM) index…an IM index somewhere between 80 and 90 (actually, 84 for Bigfoot), intermediate between humans (72) and African apes (122)…is well beyond the mean for humans, and effectively rules out a man-in-a-suit explanation…Let there be no confusion about it. The PGF shows a real, giant ape-woman in the wild.”
Doctor Dmitry Donskoy, Chief of the Department of Biomechanics at the Russian Central Institute of Physical Culture, and later associated with Moscow’s Darwin Museum, concluded that the Patterson film creature was “a very massive animal that is definitely not a human being,” because its smooth gait cannot be replicated by any human.
Author Ivan T. Sanderson added that, “The Patterson film…is…the only footage I have ever seen with very real, flawless motion…beyond the level that Hollywood movie-makers were using at the time…to walk in such a way that to this day it cannot be replicated…Dale Sheets, head of the Documentary Film Department (at Universal Pictures)…(said) ‘Maybe if you allotted a couple of million bucks, we could try, but we’d have to invent a whole set of new, artificial muscles, get a gorilla’s skin, and train an actor to walk like that…it would be nearly impossible.’”
John Chambers, the Oscar-winning, costume designer for “Planet of the Apes,” filmed in 1968, later said of the PGF film: “If this is a suit, it is the finest ever devised, for it was beyond our capability in the 1960s. Every hair would have had to have been individually attached to the model for this to do what it does in the (PGF) film.”
In 1984, The Sasquatch and Other Unknown Hominoids was published, a 335-page compilation of scientific papers, edited by Yugoslavian-born, Russian hominologist Vladimir Markotić (with a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University, and Associate Professor Emeritus of Archaeology at the University of Calgary), with introductory comments by Doctor Grover Krantz. Chapter 5 (14 pages) is entitled, “Analysis of the Patterson-Gimlin Film: Why We Find It Authentic,” by Dmitri Bayanov, Doctor Igor Burtsev (Russia’s foremost authority on the Yeti), and René Dahinden, a world-renowned expert on Bigfoot/Sasquatch:
“We have subjected the film to systematic and many-sided analysis both in its technical and biological aspects…The film has passed all our tests and scrutinies…who other than God or natural selection is sufficiently conversant with anatomy and bio-mechanics to ‘design’ a body which is so perfectly harmonious in terms of structure and function? Here we confidently give this verdict: The Patterson-Gimlin movie is an authentic documentary of a genuine, female hominoid, popularly known as Sasquatch or Bigfoot.”
So, not only is the Patterson-Gimlin film definitely NOT a hoax, but virtually everyone, including the BBC in 1998, who have tried to demonstrate how it was done, have failed miserably, and BBC was forced to apologize to the Bigfoot Research Organization (BFRO.) On the contrary, EVERY SCIENTIST who has studied the Patterson Film has either stated that it shows a real, unclassified species, or that a conclusion cannot be made.
A huge hairy gorilla-like Bigfoot or Sasquatch glaring from a steamy forest.
In 2002, a severed hand was delivered anonymously to a police station in Butte, Montana. The local coroner took X-rays, examined it, and concluded that it was not human. The police took the hand to Bigfoot researcher Don Monroe of Spencer, Montana, who showed it to several scientists. No one could identify it as human. In 2006, Monroe gave it to Bigfoot researcher Tom Biscardi, who had it tested by the DNA Diagnostics Center of Fairfield, Ohio, in May 2006. The official result was: “Not human. Not any known primate. Not even in the system.” This was the first confirmed, DNA testing of any Bigfoot or Sasquatch forensic evidence.
On August 14, 2006, Scott Mosbeck discovered blood, tissue, strange hair, and a bloody, 18-inch (46-centimeter) footprint on a “screw board” (a nasty and illegal booby trap) outside his remote cabin at Snelgrove Lake, Canada, and he called Doctor Jeffrey Meldrum (Idaho State University) and Doctor Curt Nelson (University of Minnesota) to the scene. The hair appeared human, but had no medullas, and did not match any primate known to science, or any other known animal!
Doctor Nelson said that “The DNA says primate, but not quite human and not quite non-human (chimp/ape)…it was identical to human DNA (99.5-percent), except it had one nucleotide polymorphism…a difference that is shared with chimpanzees…I knew that I might be looking at the DNA of a Sasquatch.”
On October 8, 2010, Justin Smeja, age 25, of Sacramento, California, was hunting for black bear near Gold Lake. Instead, he shot and killed two large, hairy, upright creatures, an adult and a child, with his .25-06 rifle. Smeja did not believe in Bigfoot then. He does now.
His neighbor/driver was an eyewitness, and insists that the incident was horrible, disgusting, and true. Smeja kept a piece of the smaller, dead creature, and gave a sample of skin and dark, auburn hair to Doctor Melba S. Ketchum, DVM (a veterinarian), the director of DNA Diagnostics, Inc., of Timpson, Texas, for DNA analysis. Eight separate, DNA labs tested it: “Not human, not any known animal, an unknown primate.”
The evidence for Bigfoot comes in all forms from hair to DNA.
Doctor Ketchum made very exciting news three years later. On February 13, 2013, her groundbreaking, Bigfoot DNA study was finally released, entitled “Novel North American Hominins,” at 63 pages in length. Here are the DNA samples used in the astounding report:
Bigfoot samples submitted: Over 200.
Tested positive for “Unknown Primate” (Bigfoot): 111, tested at 34 different labs .
# of Bigfoot individuals represented: 20 to 28.
Tested positive for “Unknown Primate” (Yeti): 1.
# of Yeti individuals represented: 1.
Details of successful, Bigfoot samples:
5 hair samples from Golden Ears Provincial Park, BC, Canada, five separate creatures.
1 toenail from Larry Jenkins in the Grand Canyon area of Arizona.
1 blood sample from J.C. Johnson in the Four Corners area of New Mexico.
1 blood sample from Crittenden, Kentucky, gathered by the Erickson Project.
1 hair sample from Hoopa Valley, California.
1 hair sample from Larry Surface in southern Ohio.
1 hair sample from Joe Black in the Great Smoky Mountains, Eastern Tennessee.
1 slice of Bigfoot flesh from Sierra Buttes, California, shot dead by Justin Smeja.
1 large sample of saliva from the Olympic Project, Bigfoot licking a camera, 2009.
1 hair sample from SE Oklahoma collected by TEXLA Cryptozoological Research.
1 blood, tissue, and hair sample from “screw-board” trap at Snelgrove Lake, Canada.
These are only 15 of 111 successful, Bigfoot samples.
Details of successful, Yeti samples:
1 Yeti hair sample from “Destination Truth” TV series, collected in Bhutan.
The nuclear DNA of Bigfoot creatures is an evolutionary form somewhere between primates and humans.
Bigfoot DNA Reveals They Are Similar to Us But Not Much
The testing results, independently verified by 34 different laboratories , and utterly impossible to fake, showed that Bigfoot samples tested positive for a single, non-human polymorphism, and the default, genetic hair color was “red” (“auburn,” in current terminology.) The nuclear DNA results were “one-third of the way from a human to a chimp,” or even closer to human. The results did not appear in GenBank, the master, DNA database of all known animals. In other words, according to the Ketchum tests, Bigfoot/Sasquatch is at least 99.7-percent human!
This was fully supported by previous, DNA testing by Bigfoot researcher Richard Stubstad in June 2011, who wrote, “Sasquatch DNA…tested 100-percent Homo sapiens (human, on the mitochondrial side)…No current, GenBank Homo sapiens genomes perfectly match either sample…clearly and unequivocally from the ‘Franco-Cantabrian glacial refuge’…some 15,000 years ago…The only conceivable migration path was…towards the…Asian-North American land bridge…an approximately 99.98-percent mitochondrial DNA match…for both purported, Sasquatch specimens.”
The Franco-Cantabrian glacial refuge, from about 15,000 to 20,000 B.C., encompassed most of southern France and the snow-capped, Pyrenees Mountains. During my PowerPoint presentations on this subject, I used to joke at this point in the discussion, “No wonder Bigfeet are so standoffish and difficult to understand. They’re French!”
These DNA results should really not be too surprising, considering that Cornell University and other noted scientists state that there is only a one-percent difference in the DNA and overall genetic makeup of chimpanzees and humans. Bigfoot DNA samples so far contain only about 600 gene variations, versus 2,000 for chimpanzees, so they are genetically about 99.7-percent to 99.995-percent human! They even have an official, Latin name now, Homo sapiens hirsuti , meaning “hairy humans.”
Washington State animal bones were found with chewing marks that indicated Bigfoot teeth evidence, which left marks two times the size of human teeth.
Chew Marks Left On Animal Bones Are Twice Human Size Marks
Doctor/Professor Mitchel N. Townsend, a leading, Bigfoot expert, wrote for Ancient Origins on April 7, 2021, that, “Is Bigfoot Real? Let’s Look at Emerging, Scientific Evidence: (On) Mount Saint Helens in Washington State. In 2013 and 2014…I located three different, ungulate, rib prey bone assemblages (elk and deer rib bones) that had seemingly inexplicable, chewing marks left in them…Of the 25 total hominin incisor measurements taken from all three sites, 92 percent are…at least two times the size of modern humans. The evidence was clear and consistent across all three locations. After identifying the teeth marks as Hominin, we…were able to estimate mouth size, which again was over double the size of a modern human.
“(It) enable(s) the construction of a currently-unclassified, hominin profile…(with) hominin incisor measurements primarily outside the possibility of Homo sapiens …The conclusions are accurate, well supported, repeatable…of a currently-unclassified hominin living (Bigfoot) at Mount Saint Helens. Once again, we are faced with the central question of why mainstream science has failed to comprehensively examine the possible existence of what some people refer to as Bigfoot. Credible, multi-disciplinary evidence continues to emerge…of a giant, unclassified hominin living and thriving in the Pacific Northwest .
“At the end of the day, why are we still asking the same question: ‘Is Bigfoot real?’ We encourage the scientific community to move beyond their skepticism in order to conduct deep examination…in this emerging area of research. Science has an obligation by definition to explain the unexplained, whatever that may be.”
We are intrigued with the Yeti, both for its scientific importance and for what it says about our own human interests and biases. If the Yeti is an old human-like form that we have driven into the mountains, it seems our current goal is to display them in zoos . . .
Hopefully We Will Not Put Bigfoot On Display In A Zoo!
I’ll conclude this tale of nature, science, mystery, and intrigue with two great, thought-provoking quotes to consider. First, Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) wrote that, “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
Secondly, noted zoologist and explorer Edward W. Cronin, Jr., of Santa Barbara, California, wrote insightfully in his article, “The Yeti,” in The Atlantic magazine, November 1973 (page 53), that:
“Even though I am intrigued with the Yeti , both for its scientific importance and for what it says about our own interests and biases, I would be deeply saddened to have it discovered. If the Yeti is an old form that we have driven into the mountains, now we would be driving it into the zoos.”
“We would gain another possession, another ragged exhibit in the concrete world of the zoological park, another Latin name to enter on our scientific ledgers. But what about the wild creature that now roams free of man in the forests? Every time man asserts his mastery over nature, he gains something in knowledge, but loses something in spirit.”
Top image: A mysterious bigfoot figure walking through a remote, lush forest in North America.
In our oceans lie the biggest mysteries of our world. It’s one of the reasons why divers are fascinated with the bottom of the ocean. And it is due to their relentless submerging in the darkest depths of our seas that we have made some of the most bizarre discoveries. These span from shipwrecks that were deemed forever-gone, to entire submerged cities that we didn’t even know about. Stay close to explore with us the 10 most exciting discoveries made by deep-sea divers!
I have long wondered if aliens have ever introduced new species onto Earth. This creature brings back those thoughts. It looks like a snake, it has scales on its mouth area and a long forked tongue, but the resemblance ends there. I have never seen a snake with hair...this one seems to have long hair which is green from algae. This may be the first living proof that aliens are transplanting creatures on our planet. Of course a DNA analysis and hair analysis needs to be done. But...I ask you...have you ever seen a creature like it before in your life? I haven't.
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
News states:
A local named Tu, 49, first noticed the snake when it slowly moved in the dirty water near his house while he was walking. Amazed by the creature, he took home the snake and kept it in an earthen water jar before showing it to his equally-confused family members. They, too, were baffled by the dragon-like appearance of the animal.
Giant UFO arrives through a possible stargate on the sun
Giant UFO arrives through a possible stargate on the sun
NASA’s spacecraft SWAP 174 captured a huge cylindrical UFO which seemly coming out of the sun on 2022-02-20.
The appearance and disappearance of the UFO happened in just a split second.
NASA scientists explained that such objects are in fact compression artifacts but not everyone is convinced that these objects are just compression artifacts, they suggest that alien civilizations use giant interdimensional spacecraft, which access our solar system through a stargate on the sun.
They will explore Venus using a manta ray inspired spacecraft
They will explore Venus using a manta ray inspired spacecraft
Researchers are working on a concept that could change the way we explore the intense environment of Earth’s closest planetary neighbor.
Studying Venus will help us better understand why it harbors such an extreme environment and unlock the mysteries of how planets evolve, including Earth.
A network of tensioning cables are used to actuate the pectoral and pelvic fins (equivalent to wings and horizontal stabilizers of a fixed wing aircraft, respectively). They will furnish articulated flapping flight for achieving thrust, control, stability, and additional lift.
Furthermore, the same tensioning network may be used to provide the mechanical compression required for active buoyancy control. This makes BREEZE an ideal alternate approach to the Venus.
Actually it is a bit strange that they now want to explore Venus with such a manta ray craft, since they already sent in the late 80s and 90s the Magellan spacecraft to Venus which already collected an enormous amount of images that have finally been published by NASA in which huge cities, artificial structures and all kinds of elements that seem to obey constructions appear intelligent effected by some kind of alien race that inhabited or colonized the second planet in our solar system.
The I-Team caught up with polygraph expert Terry Tavernetti 30 years after KLAS featured him in an 8-part investigative series about the weird world of UFO conspiracies.
The Enigma of Prehistoric Skulls with Bullet-Like Holes
The Enigma of Prehistoric Skulls with Bullet-Like Holes
Nearly one century ago, a Swiss miner was searching for metal ore deposits in the limestone caves of Kabwe, Zambia, when he found a prehistoric skull that dated back between 125,000 and 300,000 years. It was the first fossil to be discovered in Africa with Homo sapiens characteristics.
But there was an even bigger surprise. The prehistoric skull had a small, circular shaped hole on the side, which forensic scientists say could only have been created by an extremely high-velocity projectile, such as that caused by a bullet. The mystery was compounded by the discovery of an ancient auroch skull with exactly the same feature. The discoveries have led to many wild and wonderful speculations, but we are really no closer to solving the puzzle.
Replica of the prehistoric Kabwe skull, housed in Mauer Museum, in Heidelberg, Germany.
Trying to Classify Prehistoric Skulls – The Case of the Kabwe Skull
The skull found in Kabwe (also known as Broken Hill) attracted a great deal of attention when it was first discovered. According to the Smithsonian Institution , it was initially believed that the Kabwe prehistoric skull was the first ever example of a new species of hominid called Homo rhodesiensis .
It was subsequently assigned the classification of Homo heidelbergensis , although more recent research has shown that several characteristics shown similarities to Homo erectus , Homo neanderthalensis , and modern Homo sapiens . Whoever the skull belonged to, it appears he or she may have been the product of interbreeding between different hominid species.
But its unique combination of features was not all that was unique about the Kabwe skull. It was also found to have a small, perfectly-round hole on the left side of the cranium, as well as a shattered parietal plate on the opposite side.
This suggests the projectile that entered on the left side, passed through the skull with such force that it completely shattered the right side. Strangely, the presence of these highly-unusual characteristics are missing from descriptions of the Kabwe skull on the Smithsonian Institution page, as well the Natural History Museum of London, although their photos clearly depict the hole in the skull.
A replica of the prehistoric Broken Hill or Kabwe skull from the Museum in Livingstone, Zambia, with the apparent bullet hole visible on the left.
What Could Have Caused the Hole in the Kabwe Skull?
While it is natural to assume that the hole may have been caused by a high-speed spear or javelin, investigations proved this was not possible. “When a skull is struck by a relatively low-velocity projectile – such as an arrow, or spear – it produces what are known as radial cracks or striations; that is, minute hairline fractures running away from the place of impact,” wrote The Shields Gazette . “As there were no radial fractures on the Neanderthal skull, it was unanimously concluded that the projectile must have had a far, far greater velocity than an arrow or spear.”
According to the book Technology of the Gods: The Incredible Sciences of the Ancients by David Hatcher Childress, a German forensics expert came to an even more radical conclusion: “the cranial damage to Rhodesian man’s skull could not have been caused by anything but a bullet.” Researcher Rene Noorbergen, who investigated the mystery in Secrets Of The Lost Races , concurred, saying that “this same feature is seen in modern victims of head wounds received from shots from a high-powered rifle.”
If this were true, it would mean that a) the skull is not as old as claimed, b) the ancient skull was shot in modern times, c) the ancient skull was shot in ancient times by a technologically advanced civilization. The first and second options are discounted by the fact that the skull was found 60 feet (18.2 m) below the surface, which confirms that it is at least several thousand years old.
It was not located near enough to ground level to have been accidently or intentionally shot in recent decades. Does that just leave us with the third option, or could there be other explanations in the mix?
Auroch skull with bullet-like hole in the forehead.
Before exploring other hypotheses, we must give consideration to another prehistoric skull discovery which further compounds the mystery. Thousands of miles away, along the Lena River in Russia, another ancient skull was discovered with the same clean, round hole.
The skull belonged to an auroch, an extinct species of wile cattle that lived between 2 million and 4,000 years ago. Like the Kabwe skull, the hole in the auroch skull is also missing radial cracks that would result from spear or arrow projectiles.
The prehistoric skull, which is now on display in Moscow’s Museum of Paleontology, could not have been struck by a bullet in more modern times because calcification around the bullet hole shows that the auroch survived the wound for some time afterwards.
The Kabwe skull, or Broken Hill skull, with its bullet-like hole clearly visible on the site, on display in the National History Museum in London.
All these pieces of the puzzle have really brought us no closer to learning the truth. Numerous hypotheses and speculations have surfaced, from radical theories, such as the idea proposed by The Shields Gazette that “someone from the future, carrying a firearm, travelled back into the past and engaged in some sort of trans-temporal hunting expedition,” to the slightly more plausible suggestion that the holes were caused by shrapnel from a small meteorite or something similar.
In alternative archaeology circles, the most popular perspective is that ancient man may have been technologically developed to a very high degree, before virtually all traces were lost. But could two separate societies, separated by thousands of years and a vast cultural gulf, have both invented weapons that just happened to fire small, cylindrical projectiles at high speed?
The only lukewarm attempt to debunk the alternative theories comes from the Bad Archaeology website, which denies the injuries to the right-side of the skull exist. Although they present no explanation or evidence, they claim that the bullet-like hole was caused by “a pathological, rather than a traumatic lesion, caused by an infection in the soft tissue over it.”
At this stage, none of the hypotheses are supported by adequate evidence or logic. Unless more prehistoric skulls or fossils are discovered with the same type of injuries, we may never hold the real answers to the Kabwe skull enigma.
Top image:The Kabwe Skull with bullet-like hole. prehistoric skulls.
WETENSCHAPPERS ONTHULLEN HET UNIEKE LOOPJE VAN HET GROOTSTE VLIEGENDE DIER DAT OOIT OP AARDE HEEFT GELEEFD
WETENSCHAPPERS ONTHULLEN HET UNIEKE LOOPJE VAN HET GROOTSTE VLIEGENDE DIER DAT OOIT OP AARDE HEEFT GELEEFD
Vivian Lammerse
Lopen met vleugels van 6 meter lang valt echt niet mee…
Als je vandaag de dag door moerassig gebied loopt, zie je hooguit één meter lange reigers in ondiep water waden, op zoek naar visjes, insecten of schaaldieren. Maar zo’n 70 miljoen jaar geleden zou je langs de Texaanse Rio Grande-rivier een indrukwekkender en enger wezen door de moerassen hebben zien struinen. Het gaat om een vrij angstaanjagende pterosauriër, bekend als Quetzalcoatlus. Dit beest, met een spanwijdte van bijna 12 meter, was het grootste vliegende dier dat ooit op aarde leefde. En in een nieuwe studie schetsen onderzoekers nu het meest complete beeld van dit gevreesde familielid van de dinosaurus.
Mysterie In de jaren zeventig van de vorige eeuw ontdekte wetenschappers in het Amerikaanse Big Bend National Park de gefossiliseerde botten van de pterosauriër. Eén van de mysteries is echter sindsdien geweest hoe een dier met zes meter lange vleugels rond kon lopen… De vleugels zouden zelfs opgevouwen de grond moeten hebben geraakt. Bovendien gingen er onder zijn enorme vleugels in verhouding vrij kleine beentjes schuil. En dus is het de vraag hoe Quetzalcoatlus het luchtruim koos. “Dit oude vliegende reptiel is legendarisch,” zegt onderzoeker Kevin Padian. “Maar dit is de eerste keer dat we een grondige blik werpen op het grootste dier dat ooit op aarde rondvloog.”
Studie De onderzoekers bogen zich over de gefossiliseerde botten en vergeleken deze met talrijkere exemplaren van een kleinere Quetzalcoatlus-soort om het vlieg-, loop- en lanceergedrag beter te begrijpen. En uiteindelijk slaagde het onderzoeksteam erin het unieke loopje van Quetzalcoatlus te onthullen.
Vleugels Het beeld dat het onderzoeksteam uiteindelijk schetst, is van een dier dat best wat weg heeft van hedendaagse reigers, gecombineerd met kenmerken van condors en gieren. “Pterosauriërs hebben enorme borstbeenderen – de plek waar de vliegspieren zich hechten – dus het lijdt geen twijfel dat het geweldige vliegers waren,” zegt Padian. “Hun opperarmbeen – de humerus – kenmerkt zich door enorme, benige toppen waar de spieren die ze gebruikten om te vliegen, worden verankerd. Deze zijn groter dan die van vogels en veel groter dan die van vleermuizen. De vleugels werkten in wezen hetzelfde als die van vogels en andere dinosauriërs, waaraan pterosauriërs het nauwst verwant zijn.”
Meer over Quetzalcoatlus De onderzoekers vermoeden dat Quetzalcoatlus geen veren had: zijn lichaam – inclusief vleugels – was bedekt met haar, zoals bij alle pterosauriërs. Net als dinosaurussen waren ze warmbloedig en actief. Quetzalcoatlus had geen staart, vermoedelijk om zo wendbaarder te zijn. Daarnaast leek hij een beetje op een uit de kluiten gewassen ooievaar. De pterosauriër hield er waarschijnlijk een gevarieerd dieet op na en zocht in de modder naar krabbetjes, wormen en kokkels, maar ook kleine visjes, insecten, slangen en hagedissen stonden geregeld op zijn menu.
Net als vogels, vleermuizen en zelfs mensen, hebben de voorpoten van pterosauriërs drie segmenten: de humerus, de onderarm en de pols- en handbotjes. Maar in tegenstelling tot vogels en vleermuizen, bestaat het buitenste deel van de pterosauriërvleugel uit een gigantische ‘vleugelvinger’. “Het is vergelijkbaar met een skistok die zich vanaf het begin van je vingers uitstrekt en 90 graden naar buiten buigt,” legt Padian uit.
Tweevoetig Quetzalcoatlus was tweevoetig, wat betekent dat hij op twee benen liep. Maar omdat de botten van de voorpoten zo langwerpig zijn, raakten zijn vleugels de grond wanneer ze opgevouwen waren. Dit deed sommigen vermoeden dat de pterosauriërs zich net als een vampiervleermuis voortbewogen; die gebruiken hun voorpoten om zichzelf op de grond voort te stuwen.
Een schets van de botten van Quetzalcoatlus northropi. Het dier hield er een uniek loopje op na, die duidelijk verschilde van die van een vampiervleermuis.
Afbeelding: John Conway
De onderzoekers komen nu echter tot de ontdekking dat Quetzalcoatlus hier waarschijnlijk niet toe in staat was: als hij op de grond stond, kon hij zijn vleugels alleen naar voren of opzij bewegen. “Eenmaal op de grond, kon hij zijn voorpoten niet terugdraaien om vooruit te komen,” zegt Padian. “Het bot in zijn schouder zat daarvoor in de weg.” Om toch op de grond vooruit te komen, hief de pterosauriër eerst zijn linkerarm op, zette vervolgens met zijn linkerbeen een stap en plaatste zijn linkerarm op de grond. Dit proces herhaalde hij aan de rechterkant. “Dit lijkt misschien wat omslachtig,” zegt Padian. “Maar het dier kon de gang snel en gemakkelijk uitvoeren.”
Opstijgen Hoe Quetzalcoatlus opsteeg? Omdat zijn poten korter waren dan zijn vleugels, kon hij niet simpelweg met zijn vleugels klapperen om zichzelf te lanceren. De onderzoekers vermoeden dan ook dat de pterosauriër zijn sterke achterpoten gebruikte om omhoog te springen. Vervolgens begon hij, zodra er enige ruimte onder hem was gekomen, met zijn vleugels te klapperen. Reigers en zilverreigers doen hetzelfde, hoewel ze aanzienlijk kleiner zijn dan Quetzalcoatlus.
Een stapsgewijze reconstructie van hoe Quetzalcoatlus opsteeg. De pterosauriër hurkt, springt en begint dan met zijn vleugels te klappen.
Afbeelding: Kevin Padian and John Conway
De bevindingen zijn revolutionair voor de studie naar pterosauriërs – de eerste dieren, na insecten, die ooit een gemotoriseerde vlucht ontwikkelden. Padian geeft toe dat er nog steeds enkele vragen over Quetzalcoatlus en pterosauriërs in het algemeen onbeantwoord blijven. Maar dankzij het omvangrijke onderzoek hebben we nu wel een veel beter beeld van hoe het grootste vliegende dier dat ooit op aarde leefde, zich – op vrij eigenaardige wijze – voortbewoog.
An unexplained object is seen at center of the image from video provided by the Department of Defense labelled Gimbal, from 2015. “There's a whole fleet of them,” one naval aviator tells another, though only one indistinct object is shown. “It's rotating."
(DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE/AP)
American officials and analysts globally are raising alarm about a new Defense Department office that will handle the U.S. government’s examination of unidentified flying objects, warning that the move indicates the military wants to end a brief spell of transparency and shove UFO reports back into a closet under lock and key.
The Pentagon quietly announced the Tuesday night before Thanksgiving that it had formed the esoteric-sounding Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group. Working with the intelligence agencies, it serves as the follow-on to a government-wide effort earlier this year to document and analyze reports of encounters with unidentified objects – “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” or UAPs in Pentagon jargon – predominantly from military pilots.
The new office, which reports to the undersecretary of defense for Intelligence and Security, will now oversee the entire government’s study of UFOs, focusing on sightings within restricted military airspace and will also “assess and mitigate any associated threats to safety of flight and national security,” a spokeswoman says.
The Defense Department has since justified the composition of the office as necessary to provide uniformity to the reporting process and subsequent analysis.
But some researchers characterize the Pentagon’s latest move as an “insulting” attempt to run around specific efforts by civilian organizations and leaders in Congress to exercise greater oversight over the government’s study of UFOs.
“It represents a brazen step towards completely stifling the burgeoning demand from both the public and Congress for increased UFO transparency,” says Peter Whitley, a researcher based in Japan and a member of the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, which considers itself one of the largest and oldest of its kind. “Clearly, the DOD is attempting to reverse course on this trend and shut the door on further disclosure of any kind.”
Others who follow the issue closely see it as nothing more than a play by the Pentagon to control a subject that should belong in the arena of scientific study – at the expense of proper oversight.
“It is clear that the Pentagon does not want any civilian interference in this,” says Clas Svahn, chairman for the Sweden-based Archives for the Unexplained, among the most comprehensive digital libraries for UFO sightings and investigations into them by governments worldwide. “This is a power struggle over who should have access to UAP information.”
So-called “ufologists” around the world expressed optimism this summer at the congressionally mandated effort led by the civilian Office of the Director of National Intelligence into the government’s handling of UFO sightings. It culminated in a report released in June that offered few exciting conclusions – no documentation of “little green men,” for example – but elevated the reputation of an often-ridiculed subject to one deserving of serious consideration among the world’s most powerful countries.
The Pentagon through the formation of the new office has begun to dash those hopes with what some consider a unilateral power grab. And, indeed, even some lawmakers have expressed concerns of their own.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has sponsored a pending bipartisan amendment to this year’s military budget bill that would ramp up government study of the issue and add more layers of oversight, in addition to determining whether any sighting amounts to a threat from unknown technologies fielded from Russia, China – or elsewhere. It calls for the creation of a new advisory committee composed of experts from civilian agencies such as NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration as well as from academia to strengthen public discourse over the findings.
“While we appreciate the DOD’s attention to the issue, the AOIMSG doesn’t go nearly far enough to help us better understand the data we are gathering on UAPs,” a spokeswoman for the New York Democrat, Lizzie Landau, tells U.S. News. The framework she has proposed “does much more to address the UAP issue while also maintaining public oversight.”
The Defense Department, however, has pushed back on the notion that its supremacy over the issue amounts to anything nefarious and says it can practice transparency on its own.
“This is a chance for us to be much more organized in the way we process these reports,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters this week. “And we will certainly continue to be as transparent as we can about these phenomena and the impact that they may or may not be having on our ability to operate.”
Kirby then tempered expectations about what the public may learn of the newly formed office’s findings.
“I don't want to leave you with the impression that there'll be sort of a regular drumbeat of, you know, of some kind of report that gets posted on a website, you know, every couple months,” he added.
The Pentagon’s approach has deeply frustrated those who have followed the issue closely, particularly after it finally acknowledged that for years it has neglected to adequately analyze its encounters with unknown objects in U.S. airspace.
“This is an end-around to cut the legs out from Sen. Gillibrand in her amendment to the next defense spending bill,” says Robert Spearing, MUFON’s director of international investigations, who is based in Costa Rica. “She wants a government office that utilizes input from civilian organizations. In essence, the Pentagon doesn’t want this.”
Two former defense officials who previously worked on UFO assessments told The Hill in an interview that the latest initiative is woefully underprepared to handle the issue.
“If we want 70 more years of secrecy on this topic, then [the undersecretary for intelligence’s office] is the perfect place to put it. They’ve had four years so far, and we have little in the way of efforts serving the public interest,” Luis Elizondo, the former head of an informal Defense Department unit that assessed military UFO reports, told the paper.
Elizondo isn’t the only expert to question the Defense Department’s assertions that it alone can determine what materials to make public.
“To be ‘as transparent as we can’ means nothing much,” Svahn says. The military’s approach is particularly frustrating “when it comes to observations and reports that are made by Air Force and Navy pilots inside restricted airspace, since they most certainly will be seen as something that could threaten national security.”
“Now,” he adds, “UAPs will only be seen as a threat – and treated as that.”
1952 was the year America caught flying-saucer fever.
So when a rash of strange sightings was reported in the skies over Washington D.C. that summer, the press and the public demanded answers. Were these unexplained radar blips, crafts that in some cases outran jets, part of a nuclear-armed Soviet invasion—a very real threat at the height of the Red Scare? Or were they evidence of something far more mysterious?
The Washington, D.C. sightings of July 1952, also known as “the Big Flap,” hold a special place in the history of unidentified flying objects. Major American newspapers were reporting multiple credible sightings by civilian and military radar operators and pilots—so many that a special intelligence unit of the U.S. Air Force was sent in to investigate. What they found—or didn’t find—along with the Air Force’s official explanation, fueled some of the earliest conspiracy theories about a government plot to hide evidence of alien life.
UFO mania takes hold
Pilots E.J. Smith, Kenneth Arnold, and Ralph E. Stevens look at a photo of an unidentified flying object which they sighted while en route to Seattle, Washington, 1947.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
It all started in 1947, when a search-and-rescue pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported nine "saucer-like things...flying like geese in a diagonal chainlike line" at speeds exceeding 1,000 m.p.h. near Mount Rainier in Washington State. Within weeks, “flying saucer” sightings had been reported in 40 other states.
In the name of national security, Air Force General Nathan Twining launched Project SIGN (originally named Project SAUCER) in 1948, the first official military-intelligence program to collect information on UFO sightings. Its investigators dismissed the vast majority as hoaxes or misidentifications of known aircraft or natural phenomena.
But a few cases remained “unexplained.”
By 1952, the UFO-investigation unit was called Project Blue Book, led by Captain Edward Ruppelt at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. Ruppelt and his team would probably have continued to investigate a couple dozen sightings a month if not for the April 1952 issue of LIFE magazine. Just above its knockout cover shot of Marilyn Monroe ran an equally eye-catching headline: “There is a Case for Interplanetary Saucers.”
The article, written with Ruppelt’s full cooperation, explained the Air Force’s national-security interest in UFOs. And it made a convincing case—through the colorful retelling of 10 unexplained UFO “incidents”—that these unidentified objects were extraterrestrial in origin. As one rocket scientist working on “secret” projects for the U.S. told LIFE: "I am completely convinced that they have an out-of-world basis."
According to The Washington Post, the number of UFO sightings reported to the Air Force jumped more than sixfold, from 23 in March 1952 to 148 in June. By July, the precise conditions were in place for a wildfire of UFO mania: widespread Cold War anxiety, mainstream press coverage of unexplained UFO incidents and a healthy dose of “midsummer madness.” All that was needed was a spark.
Mysterious radar blips buzzing over the White House
The Washington National Airport, 1953.
PhotoQuest/Getty Images
Shortly before midnight on Saturday, July 19, 1952, air-traffic controller Edward Nugent at Washington National Airport spotted seven slow-moving objects on his radar screen far from any known civilian or military flight paths. He called over his supervisor and joked about a “fleet of flying saucers.” At the same time, two more air-traffic controllers at National spotted a strange bright light hovering in the distance that suddenly zipped away at incredible speed.
At nearby Andrews Air Force Base, radar operators were getting the same unidentified blips—slow and clustered at first, then racing away at speeds exceeding 7,000 mph. Looking out his tower window, one Andrews controller saw what he described as an “orange ball of fire trailing a tail.” A commercial pilot, cruising over the Virginia and Washington, D.C. area, reported six streaking bright lights, “like falling stars without tails.”
When radar operators at National watched the objects buzz past the White House and Capitol building, the UFO jokes stopped. Two F-94 interceptor jets were scrambled, but each time they approached the locations appearing on the radar screens, the mysterious blips would disappear. By dawn of July 20, the objects were gone.
Nobody bothered to tell Ruppelt, the Air Force’s lead Project Blue Book investigator, about the sightings. He found out a few days later when he flew into Washington, D.C. and read news reports. Ruppelt tried to get out to National and Andrews to interview radar operators and air-traffic controllers, but was denied a government-issued car or even cab fare. Frustrated, he flew back to Ohio with nothing.
The very next Saturday, the UFOs were back over the nation’s capital. Again, Ruppelt found out through a phone call from a reporter, and immediately called on two Air Force colleagues to check out the situation at National. The same radar blips were back, and radar operators wondered out loud if the dozen or so objects on their screens couldn’t be caused by a temperature inversion, a common phenomenon in D.C.’s hot, muggy summer months.
A temperature inversion occurs when a layer of warm air forms in the low atmosphere, trapping cooler air beneath. Radar signals can bounce off this layer at shallow angles and mistakenly show near-ground objects as appearing in the sky. Ruppelt’s Air Force colleagues, however, were convinced that the objects on the radar screen weren’t mirages, but solid aircraft.
To be safe, two more F-94 jets were scrambled to chase down the unidentified targets appearing on radar screens at both National and Andrews. A game of high-speed Whack-a-Mole ensued, where the jets would race to a location targeted by radar, only for the blips to vanish. Finally, one of the jet pilots caught sight of a bright light in the distance and gave chase.
“I tried to make contact with the bogies below 1,000 feet,” the pilot later told reporters. “I saw several bright lights. I was at maximum speed, but even then I had no closing speed. I ceased chasing them because I saw no chance of overtaking them.”
Captain Edward Ruppelt, standing, and General John Samford, seated to the right of him, discussing the reports of unidentified flying objects with other Air Force officers at a 1952 news conference.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
The next day, newspaper headlines across America screamed “Saucers Swarm Over Capital” and “Jets Chase D.C. Sky Ghosts.” The publicity and public panic over the sightings were so great that President Harry Truman himself asked aides to get answers. When they called Ruppelt, he said it could have been caused by a temperature inversion, but more investigation was needed to fully explain both the radar images and credible eyewitness accounts.
But before such an in-depth investigation could take place, the Air Force called a press conference, the longest such news event since World War II. The Air Force brass had decided, without consulting Ruppelt or the Project Blue Book team, that the best response to the sightings was to feed the press and the public an easy-to-swallow explanation.
Dodging specific questions about what pilots and radar operators had seen in the skies over the Capitol, Major General John Samford came back again and again to the temperature-inversion theory. Never mind that Ruppelt had since come to the opposite conclusion.
“The investigators had ruled out the inversion,” says Alejandro Rojas, editor of the UFO news site OpenMinds. “They had examined that situation. The radar operators said, ‘Inversions happen. We know what inversions look like. This is not an inversion. This is not the same thing at all.’”
To Ruppelt’s disappointment, the Air Force’s press conference worked exactly as planned. The papers reported the temperature-inversion story and the public largely seemed to accept it. In his 1956 book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, Ruppelt reports that after the press conference, UFO sightings dropped from 50 a day to 10.
Skeptics, however, weren’t satisfied with the pat government response. Many accused Air Force and Project Blue Book investigators of devious behavior and secret knowledge. It wasn’t until Project Blue Book documents were made public in 1985 that UFO sleuths could see that the closest thing to a government cover-up of UFO sightings in the nation’s capital was actually a conspiracy of ignorance.
The Ateshgah Baku Fire Temple: Built On an Azerbaijan Natural Gas Vent
The Ateshgah Baku Fire Temple: Built On an Azerbaijan Natural Gas Vent
The Ateshgah Baku fire temple, located in the capital of Azerbaijan, was built over a natural gas vent, and constructed between the late 17th and early 18th centuries AD. There is evidence, however, that an older temple once stood at the site. One of the interesting features of the Ateshgah Baku fire temple are the inscriptions on the temple used by Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Sikhs. The Ateshgah has since lost its religious function and was converted into a museum during the 1970s.
Inscriptions in Arabic and Indian on the Ateshgah Baku fire temple, located in the suburb of Surakhany, Baku, Azerbaijan.
The Baku Fire Temples: Already in Use in the 10th Century AD
The Ateshgah Baku fire temple is located in Surakhany, a suburb of Baku, Azerbaijan. Due to the many natural gas vents under the Absheron Peninsula (where Baku is situated), fire rituals have been carried out in the area since the 10th century AD. The natural gas vents provided fuel for flames that could burn perpetually, the so-called “eternal flames.” This natural phenomenon can also seen at Yanar Dag (meaning “Burning Mountain”) near Baku.
Baku was once on the famous Silk Road . In addition to goods, this trade route also allowed news to travel from East to West, and vice versa. It is thought that through the Silk Road, merchants in India heard of stories about the Absheron Peninsula and its eternal flames. As a result, pilgrims from India began to travel to Baku to worship the sacred flames. At the same time, they brought their own gods to this foreign land, and worshipped them alongside these flaming gas vents.
The current Ateshgah Baku fire temple was built between the late 17th and early 18th centuries AD. When renovations were carried out in 1969, part of an older structure was found beneath the current temple. This suggests that the site was already used for religious purposes prior to the 17th century. Although it is speculated that the older temple extended beyond the perimeter of the current temple, this may be impossible to ascertain, since the remains were probably destroyed from the 19th century onwards as the surrounding area was excavated for oil and gas.
An inscribed invocation to Lord Shiva of the Hindu religion written in Sanskrit at the Ateshgah Baku fire temple.
The current Ateshgah fire temple consists of a circuit of pentagonal walls surrounding a courtyard, in the middle of which is the altar. This altar takes the form of a pavilion and was built on top of a natural gas vent. Through the gases from this vent, the flame in the middle of the pavilion and four smaller ones on the rooftop corners are maintained. Within the courtyard, and around the altar, are small cells that provided accommodation for pilgrims and ascetics.
The architecture of the Ateshgah fire temple incorporates elements from both Zoroastrianism and Hinduism. It is still a matter of debate, however, whether the temple was originally founded as a Zoroastrian or Hindu place of worship. The current consensus is that whilst the Ateshgah was initially established as a Zoroastrian temple, it developed into a predominantly Hindu site over time.
In addition to the Hindu architectural elements, the other sign of the presence of Hindus at the Ateshgah is the inscriptions dedicated to the Hindu gods Ganesha and Shiva. Apart from these, there are also inscriptions dedicated by Sikh pilgrims who came to the Ateshgah to worship. Although Ateshgah is also associated with Zoroastrianism, there is in fact only a single Zoroastrian inscription at the temple. In any case, the inscriptions indicate that the sacred site was shared by the three different religions.
An engraving of the Ateshgah Baku fire temple of Azerbaijan showing pilgrims visiting the site.
It seems that by the late 19th century, the Ateshgah Baku fire temple was abandoned, possibly due to the decline in Azerbaijan’s Indian population. Nevertheless, even during that century, Parsis and Zoroastrians, who migrated to India following the Islamic conquest of Persia during the 7th century AD, continued to make pilgrimages to the site. Moreover, the site also became a tourist attraction for European tourists travelling in Azerbaijan.
As mentioned earlier, the Ateshgah Baku fire temple was renovated in 1969. Incidentally, in that same year, the eternal flame at the altar died, due to the intensive exploitation of the natural gas reserves on the Absheron Peninsula. Although the flame is still maintained today, its source of fuel is provided by Baku’s main gas supply.
In 1975, the Ateshgah was converted into a museum. The cells surrounding the altar, for instance, are used to tell the stories of the pilgrims who once travelled to the temple to worship.
As the Ateshgah fire temple is located in a suburb of Baku, it is not close to any of the city’s metro stations. Instead, there are buses that run from some of the stations to the site. Apart from that, one could also travel to the temple by taxi. The Ateshgah is open every day from 10:00 to 18:00, and tickets are required to enter the site.
Top image: The altar of the Ateshgah Baku fire temple in the capital of Azerbaijan. Source: vadim.nefedov / Adobe Stock
New Denisovan Fossils From Siberian Cave Are The Oldest Ever Found
New Denisovan Fossils From Siberian Cave Are The Oldest Ever Found
Researchers from the Max Planck Society and the Universities of Vienna and Tübingen have found new fossilized human-like remains mixed in an assortment of bone samples taken from Siberia’s famed Denisova Cave. This includes three fragments that belonged to actual Denisovans, the much-speculated-about species that gave the cave its name. These bones will be added to the growing collection of Denisovan fossils connected to the most intriguing of all the extinct human species, which lived on the Earth at the same time as Neanderthals and early modern humans yet left such a light footprint as to be virtually undetectable.
Remarkably, these Denisovan fossils were recovered from a deep excavation layer that dated to 200,000 years in the past. These are the earliest Denisovan remains ever found, and they prove that Denisova Cave was occupied by archaic humans more than 150,000 years before modern humans reached the Siberian region following their migrations out of Africa. The analysis results of the newly discovered Denisovan fossils have been published in a study in the Nature Ecology & Evolution journal.
The latest Denisovan fossils were found in a deep layer of Denisova Cave in Siberian Russia and proven to date back about 200,000 years, making them the oldest Denisovan remains ever found.
Evidence Found In a Haystack of Denisovan Fossil Fragments
Science first learned of the existence of the Denisovans in 2008. That’s when a small number of fossilized bones and teeth were recovered from an isolated cave in the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia.
Unfortunately, the Denisovan fossil fragments found at the Denisova Cave were few. They revealed scarce details about this long-lost Homo sapiens cousin, which is believed to have died out approximately 50,000 years ago. In the years that have passed since, archaeologists and anthropologists have been frantically searching for more remains left behind by this elusive species. They’ve been searching primarily in northern, central, and eastern Asia, where traces of their DNA have been found in indigenous residents.
Archaeologists and anthropologists have been optimistic about eventually finding Denisovan fossils in these other locations (a fossilized Denisovan jawbone found in a cave in Tibet generated much excitement). But many scientists have continued to focus their search on Siberia’s Denisova Cave, where the ancient Denisovan presence has been most firmly established.
In this extraordinarily successful new study, scientists working under team leader Katerina Douka, an assistant professor in the University of Vienna’s Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, spent several years analyzing ancient DNA samples and assorted proteins extracted from approximately 3,800 bone fragments taken from the cave. As they explain in a new article in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution , these bones included a diverse mixture of animal and human fossils, and it would have been impossible to identify anything visually.
Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry or ZooMS was used to analyze the recently discovered Denisovan fossils, which are now the oldest ever!
For a Positive ID Researchers Relied on Peptide Analysis
To make a positive ID, the researchers only option was to use a technology known as Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectroscopy, or ZooMS. This high-tech tool can identify peptides (strings of amino acids) that are found specifically in the human body, and in the body of human ancestor species as well.
With this reliable technology at their disposal, the scientists concentrated on fossils excavated from the cave’s most ancient layer, which had been dated back 200,000 years. The bones collected from this layer were truly a fragmented and haphazard jumble, and that’s why little work had been done on them in the past. But with ZooMS, there was an opportunity to search for Denisovan fossils in a collection of bones that had not been fully examined before.
Team member Samantha Brown, a doctoral student at the University of Tubingen, was assigned the task of performing the actual analysis of the approximately 3,800 previously unidentified bone fragments. The vast majority of these fossil bones had belonged to animals, making the search for human remains the equivalent of looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
With enough time and diligence, even the smallest needle can be found eventually, and Brown’s research ultimately proved successful. Aided by the precise ZooMS technology, she found five bones with collagen profiles that matched those of humans.
But which types of humans? Certainly not modern humans ( Homo sapiens ), which would not arrive in Siberia until much later. That left Neanderthals and Denisovans as the two possible candidates.
To solve this mystery, the scientists turned to another high-tech innovation that has revolutionized archaeological and anthropological practice: DNA analysis. Out of the five human bones Brown identified, four contained significant enough traces of genetic material to allow for a mitochondrial DNA reconstruction. These tests showed that one of the bone fragments had belonged to a Neanderthal, while the other three were all Denisovan.
At an age of 200,000 years, this DNA typing officially established the three bone samples as the oldest remains of Denisovans ever found.
"Denisova is an amazing place for DNA preservation, and we have now reconstructed genomes from some of the oldest and best-preserved human fossils," Dr. Diyendo Massilani, a genetic researcher from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, explained in an Institute press release announcing this amazing discovery.
The Denisova 3 fifth distal finger phalanx of 13.5-year adolescent Denisovan female, the first bone fossil uncovered at Denisova Cave in 2008.
Finding New Denisovan Fossil Bones and Lithic Stone Tools
There is no underestimating the impact and importance of this discovery. "We were extremely excited to identify three new Denisovan bones amongst the oldest layers of Denisova Cave," Katerina Douka told Live Science . "We specifically targeted these layers where no other human fossils were found before, and our strategy worked."
"Finding one new human bone would have been cool, but five? This exceeded my wildest dreams," Samantha Brown added.
The discovery of the age of the 200,00-year-old Denisovan bones was exciting. But there is another part to the story that is perhaps even more significant.
Inside the deep layer of the cave where the fossils were found, archaeologists also unearthed a large number of lithic stone artifacts dating to the same time period. These included several scaping tools, which presumably were used to process animal skins.
Notably, none of these tools were similar to any that had been found in central or northern Asia before.
"This is the first time we can be sure that Denisovans were the makers of the archaeological remains [the stone tools] we found associated with their bone fragments," Douka confirmed.
Previously discovered Denisovan fossils had either been found separate from artifacts, or alongside artifacts that were suspected to have been left by Neanderthals. The two ancient species frequently occupied the same caves and territories and were known to have interbred .
There were also thousands of pieces of animal bones found in the oldest layer of Denisova Cave. They have now been identified as belonging to such species as deer, wild horses, bison, gazelles, and wooly rhinoceroses, all of which could have been hunted by Denisovans 200,000 years ago. Many of the bones contained marks consistent with butchering, while others had been damaged by fire (meaning the flesh of the animals had been cooked).
"The site's strategic point in front of a water source and the entrance of a valley would have served as a great spot for hunting," Douka noted.
If Denisova Cave contains more Denisovan bones or artifacts, the researchers intend to find them. Katerina Douka confirms that her team is continuing its search at the cave, while also carrying out excavations at several other Asian sites where they are hopeful Denisovan fossil remains might be found.
Top image: Denisovan fossils look a bit unremarkable, but these bone fragments, mostly from animals, were perfect for Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectroscopy and DNA analysis, which were used in the recent study .
Watch: Mysterious Lights In The Sky Puzzle Residents In Punjab City
Watch: Mysterious Lights In The Sky Puzzle Residents In Punjab City
The phenomenon appeared in the sky for a few minutes shortly before 7 pm.
Residents described seeing a string of bright, white lights.
Chandigarh: A line of bright lights darting through the night sky in Punjab's Pathankot left residents confused on Friday evening.
The phenomenon appeared in the sky for a few minutes shortly before 7 pm.
"We saw the fast-moving object with bright lights, like a train. It looked just like a train at a distance. The light was very bright and white. It was the first time we saw something like this. We saw it for five whole minutes, after which it vanished," said one resident.
The unidentified object also sparked chatter on Twitter.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 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.
