Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 13 YEARS AND 2 MONTH.
ON 06/08/2024 MORE THAN 2.161.100
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
12-09-2022
If Jupiter's Orbit got Weirder, it Would Actually Make Earth More Habitable
If Jupiter's Orbit got Weirder, it Would Actually Make Earth More Habitable
Earth is not just habitable, it’s unusually habitable. It’s rather wet for a planet so close to its Sun, it’s geologically active, and it has a stable orbit, all of which are necessary for life as we know it. But there are also secondary advantages, such as not being constantly bombarded by large asteroids, and having a rotational axis that is fairly stable. This is due in part thanks to the planet Jupiter. The giant planet has helped clear the solar system of asteroid debris and may have helped stabilize the orbits of the inner planets. So life is good. But a new study shows that if Jupiter had a different orbit, life could be even better.
The study looked at the way Jupiter affects Earth’s orbit and axial tilt over time. Both of these are important factors in our weather and climate. For example, Earth has a very circular orbit. In mathematical terms, the shape of an orbit is measured by its eccentricity. At e = 0, the orbit is a perfect circle, and the more elliptical an orbit is, the closer e gets to 1. Earth’s orbit has an e = 0.017. This means Earth is slightly closer to the Sun for a bit less than half the year, and slightly farther away for a bit more than half. This is because the Earth moves slightly faster in its orbit when closer to the Sun rather than farther.
The eccentricity of different orbits. Credit: Wikipedia user Phoenix7777
At this point, astute readers will be eager to point out that this eccentricity is not why we have seasons, and they’d be mostly right. Our regular seasons are caused by the axial tilt of the Earth, which is currently about 23.4 degrees. Because of this tilt, the Sun is higher during the Summer, and lower in the sky during Winter. And, of course, when it’s Summer in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s Winter in the Southern Hemisphere.
Interestingly, for the Northern Hemisphere, it is Summer when the Earth is a bit farther from the Sun, and that means Northern Summers are just slightly longer than Southern Summers. Since more of the land mass on Earth is in the Northern Hemisphere, that means Earth is a bit more habitable than it would be if we had a circular orbit. It doesn’t affect our daily lives, but it does come into play on geological scales.
How orbital eccentricity and axial tilt affect seasons. Credit: Vervoort, et al
Over time the axial tilt of Earth changes slightly, giving more extreme or mild Winters. Earth’s axis also precesses over time, meaning that its orientation relative to the elliptical shape of Earth’s orbit also shifts. All of these factors underly what is known as the Milankovitch cycle. This is a measure of how much overall heat Earth’s terrestrial surface receives, known as insolation. It varies over thousands of years. Twelve thousand years ago, at the dawn of human civilization, insulation was very high, giving us a particularly pleasant world. Currently, it’s somewhat lower, and without the effects of global warming, we would be in a cool period.
Changes in insolation due to the Milankovitch cycles. Credit: Wikipedia
Part of the Milankovitch cycle is due to the slight gravitational tug of Jupiter. But since Jupiter also has a circular orbit (e = 0.048), this isn’t a significant factor. In this recent study, the team created simulated solar systems where Jupiter’s orbit had a higher eccentricity. They thought a more eccentric Jupiter would make Earth less habitable, but they were surprised to find it actually made things better. With an increased gravitational effect from Jupiter, the Earth would have better insolation over its surface, so that even more of Earth’s land masses would be within a temperate range.
This has big implications for potentially habitable worlds in other star systems. Although we tend to focus on whether a world is within the habitable zone, that’s only the first requirement for a truly habitable world. Other factors such as insolation depend on the presence of other planets in the system. There’s a gravitational dance between worlds that can make or break a planet’s chances for life.
How much of planet Earth is made of water? Very little, actually. Although oceans of water cover about 70 percent of Earth's surface, these oceans are shallow compared to the Earth's radius. The featured illustration shows what would happen if all of the water on or near the surface of the Earth were bunched up into a ball.
The radius of this ball would be only about 700 kilometers, less than half the radius of the Earth's Moon, but slightly larger than Saturn's moon Rhea which, like many moons in our outer Solar System, is mostly water ice. How even this much water came to be on the Earth and whether any significant amount is trapped far beneath Earth's surface remain topics of research.
Illustration Credit & Copyright: Jack Cook, Adam Nieman, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Howard Perlman, USGS
Detailed Description
This image shows blue spheres representing relative amounts of Earth's water in comparison to the size of the Earth. Are you surprised that these water spheres look so small? They are only small in relation to the size of the Earth. These images attempt to show three dimensions, so each sphere represents "volume." They show that in comparison to the volume of the globe, the amount of water on the planet is very small. Oceans account for only a "thin film" of water on the surface.
Spheres representing all of Earth's water, Earth's liquid fresh water, and water in lakes and rivers
The largest sphere represents all of Earth's water. Its diameter is about 860 miles (the distance from Salt Lake City, Utah, to Topeka, Kansas) and has a volume of about 332,500,000 cubic miles (mi3) (1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers (km3)). This sphere includes all of the water in the oceans, ice caps, lakes, rivers, groundwater, atmospheric water, and even the water in you, your dog, and your tomato plant.
Liquid fresh water
How much of the total water is fresh water, which people and many other life forms need to survive? The blue sphere over Kentucky represents the world's liquid fresh water (groundwater, lakes, swamp water, and rivers). The volume comes to about 2,551,100 mi3 (10,633,450 km3), of which 99 percent is groundwater, much of which is not accessible to humans. The diameter of this sphere is about 169.5 miles (272.8 kilometers).
Water in lakes and rivers
Do you notice the "tiny" bubble over Atlanta, Georgia? That one represents fresh water in all the lakes and rivers on the planet. Most of the water people and life of earth need every day comes from these surface-water sources. The volume of this sphere is about 22,339 mi3 (93,113 km3). The diameter of this sphere is about 34.9 miles (56.2 kilometers). Yes, Lake Michigan looks way bigger than this sphere, but you have to try to imagine a bubble almost 35 miles high—whereas the average depth of Lake Michigan is less than 300 feet (91 meters).
Strange activity over Venice Beach You be the Judge.
Scientists Terrifying New Discovery of Ancient Aliens Base Under Ocean
Mystery holes have been spotted on the ocean floor, which is baffling scientists.
These holes were discovered by oceanographers earlier this year, and they have no idea what made them, or how they came about. However, UFO experts are certain the strange markings are proof of alien visits.
Here’s one interesting UFO footage of a two huge solid UFOs flying across the sky above Scotland city East Kilride. This happened on 9th September 2022.
Witness report:
I recorded this on my Sony Xperia 5, in East Kilbride, Scotland on 10th of September 2022 at 8pm. There are two objects in the sky, moving at a steady speed.
They were not massive, I reckon about the size of a jeep, maybe twice that size at most. Definitely smaller than a plane and alot bigger than a Drone. They had no lights, no wings, no windows and no propellers. They also were completely silent. The objects looked alot bigger in real life. In the video the objects appear to be black but in real life they had a similar color to a cloud, not quite white but not quite grey. They looked to have a sphere or tic tac shape. They looked solid and metallic. They seemed to have some smoke coming out of them sometimes but was hard to know if it was just them moving through clouds, causing an effect that looked like smoke.
In terms of height, they were flying about twice the height of a typical city building, definitely lower than a plane would travel in.
Bright UFO flying over Sacramento, California YESTERDAY
Bright UFO flying over Sacramento, California YESTERDAY
This UFO sighting was just submitted to me and it happened over Sacramento, California on 9th September 2022.
Witness report:
I was about to smoke a cigarette in my backyard when I looked up and saw this light standing still then it started moving so I took out my phone and captured what I could
A lot of things viewed as unusual by the people from the present day used to take place in ancient Egypt. While some of these aspects are fascinating, others can be simply regarded as odd. Going beyond this, ancient Egypt has proven to be a fantastic civilization which continues to inspire individuals even today. Out of the countless lesser-known aspects regarding ancient Egypt, some interesting ones are revealed here.
1. World's First Known Female Pharaoh
Ancient Egypt gave the world the first female pharaoh who is still known in the present day. Her name was Merneith. She lived around 5000 years ago, belonging to the First Dynasty. She died around 2950 BC, after ascending to the throne once her husband, Pharaoh Djet, died. The son of the couple, Den, should have become pharaoh, but he was too young. So, around 2990 BC, his mother's reign began. Merneith (who had royal blood, being a descendant of Pharaoh Narmer who had unified Egypt and started the First Dynasty in the past) took care of state matters. Even though not much is really known about her, one thing remains certain: during her administration the ancient Egyptian economy thrived and, later on, thanks to his mother's guidance, Den came to be regarded as the greatest pharaoh of the First Dynasty.
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The tomb of the female pharaoh was discovered at Abydos. It was very unusual for the tomb of a woman, being identical to other tombs that had been constructed for great male pharaohs. It included 40 sacrificed servants, many sacrificed animals, and a boat on which the soul of the female pharaoh could sail in the afterlife to meet the Sun god, Ra. In this way, Merneith set the ground for other great female pharaohs who are probably a little more well-known such as Hatshepsut and Cleopatra. However, the reality of female pharaohs is not the only fascinating and lesser-known fact about ancient Egypt. So, let the adventure into the old world of gods and mummies begin!
2. Tutankhamun’s Beard
In ancient Egypt, having hair on one's body was seen as dirty and a sign one was lacking in personal hygiene. Because of this, both men and women shaved off all the hair from their bodies. This included shaving their heads. After doing this, women would wear beautifully adorned wigs with complex designs according to the fashion of the times. In the case of the pharaoh, the beard was a symbol of masculinity and power. But, obviously, the pharaoh could not grow a beard because hair on the body implied uncleanliness. So, an artificial beard would be attached to the pharaoh's face using strings to keep it in place. The funerary gold mask of Pharaoh Tutankhamun presents an example of such a beard.
In the case of the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, Carter and his team had not been the best archaeologists. Instead, they were much closer to the image of treasure hunters. As a result, while handling the solid gold funerary mask they managed to break off the beard. Unable to use the same method applied by the ancient Egyptians who had crafted the mask, around the year 1944 the beard was fixed back onto the mask using a piece of wood. That was how the relic was displayed until August 2014 when the beard was accidentally broken off again by some Egyptian employees from the museum. Obviously, these museographers realized the gravity of the situation, so they decided to hide their mistake by gluing the beard back on using adhesive. To make it look even better, they removed the visible remains of the adhesive substance by using some metal tools to scrape them off. Ultimately, the mask ended up looking really bad.
To fix the relic, a restoration commission from Germany showed up. They worked for nine weeks just to remove the adhesive substance. They masked the scratches and reattached the beard using beeswax, the exact substance that had originally been used in this regard by the ancient Egyptians. The eight museographers, including the museum's director, were sent to trial and they will have to pay a large fine.
The famous burial mask of King Tutankhamun on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Egypt
On the 24th of November 1922, Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. This was thought to have been sealed and untouched, the only tomb of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh that had escaped the action of tomb raiders. Wrong!
Carter understood that others had entered the place before him. Officially, he promised that the tomb would only be unsealed and opened in the presence of Egyptian officials. So, of course, he illegally entered the tomb the night before the grand event. This was no big deal, because others had been there before him, twice actually. The proof of this was a large crack in the exterior door. This had been sealed back up. Also, the pharaoh's belongings from the antechamber were found in disorder, as the tomb raiders had robbed the place in haste. This had happened shortly after the pharaoh's burial. These thieves had been interested in jewelry and precious metal items. Also, they had come for the things which had to be stolen immediately. This refers to perfumes, precious oils, and clothing items. These could not last for years inside the tomb, so if the thieves wanted to sell them for profit, they had to remove them quickly.
Other cracks on the doors of the tomb clearly suggested the second tomb raiding event. The first grave robbers had only broken into the antechamber. The second ones had a larger team and they had been better organized. Their purpose was to access all of the funerary chambers. There was a written inventory detailing everything that had been placed inside the tomb. Carter discovered it. After consulting it, he understood that, in 1922, less than half off all the jewelry and precious metal items originally deposited inside the tomb had remained. This suggests that the tomb raiders had to get out of there quickly, only taking what they could carry.
Not even the seal on the tomb had been the original one. Instead, this had been replaced by the one of Horemheb. This pharaoh had received the throne from Ay (the vizier who had succeeded Pharaoh Tutankhamun). To hide all of this, repairs were made, and the cracks were covered. However, everything had to be done in great haste due to the lack of time, just as the tomb raiders had previously operated. After the second grave robbing event, the tombs of Ramesses II and Ramesses IV were built close to the tomb of Tutankhamun. Tutankhamun was thought to lack importance as a pharaoh, so his tomb no longer attracted interest. Also, the entry to the tomb was covered by sand and, in time, the place was forgotten. The grave robbers switched their attention towards the tombs of other more important pharaohs which had more to offer.
A lot has been discussed about the process of mummification and its stages. However, fewer people have knowledge regarding the costs of this process. It is obvious that nobody got mummified for free in ancient Egypt. Also, it must be mentioned that ancient Egyptians did not use money. The first coins from the area were introduced around 360 BC, but, despite this, ancient Egyptian priests were highly aware of the value of luxury goods and precious metals. These priests were actually the inventors of the mummification business. Their purpose was to obtain profit, as every person had to be mummified after death if he or she wanted to even have an afterlife.
According to Herodotus, Egyptian priests had come up with three main types of mummification. The first was meant for the rich who had to pay what would be equal to about 20,000 euros today for a premium mummification process. The brain was taken out through the nose, the corpse was eviscerated, bathed in expensive wines, spices and oils, kept with salt for around 70 days, the eyes were replaced with two onions and the organs were nicely placed in specialized canopic jars. After the corpse dried up, it would be wrapped in expensive cloth along with specific amulets and sealed with wax and resin. The mummy was given to the family who also had to pay for a sarcophagus, a pyramid or a tomb, some slaves to kill for the mummy to have servants in the afterlife and a few mummified animals. With a relatively decent sarcophagus costing around five goats or a slave, this entire luxury mummification package proved to be really costly.
The type of mummification meant for the middle-class cost around half the price of the luxury package. In this case, the body was not eviscerated. It was just injected with a certain cedar oil which had the effect of dissolving the internal organs. Because this could get messy, a stopper was introduced in the anus of the corpse until the liquefaction was complete. After that, the stopper was removed and all the liquid allowed to flow out of the corpse which was afterwards kept with salt for 70 days. The mummy was then given to the living family members who took it to a common cemetery. The last type of mummification was reserved for the poor and it was paid by the state. The guts were removed, the corpse was washed and kept with salt for 70 days. After this, it was taken out to the desert and buried there without any amulets on it.
Criminals in ancient Egypt were always burned at the stake to prevent them from having an afterlife. As for nobles who had committed crimes during life, they were allowed to kill themselves and their corpses underwent a simple mummification procedure. The major blasphemers were mummified in goat skin, so that the gods from the world beyond could know of their actions. As for pets, animal mummification cost between 1000 and 5000 euros in today’s money. Those who wanted to impress others would mummify larger animals such as crocodiles or bulls.
Corruption has always existed, and even ancient Egypt had to confront this reality. Horemheb ruled Egypt as a pharaoh between the years 1319/1306 and 1292 BC. He was the first ancient Egyptian ruler who led a serious fight against corruption. During the reign ofAkhenatenand that of his son, Tutankhamun, corruption had increased and gotten out of control. Starting as a commoner, Horemheb managed to become a general and, later on, he sat on the throne as pharaoh.
Tutankhamun had died at the age of 18 in suspicious circumstances. He was succeeded by the vizier Ay who was murdered. Horemheb did not want to share their fate. As a pharaoh, he issued drastic laws and worked hard to eradicate corruption. To be sure he was in control, he personally replaced all judges and state officials. He also made bribery punishable by death. This had never been applied before in this regard, the harshest punishment for bribery until the time of Horemheb was a threat that the god Anubis would be very upset with the individual in the afterlife. As he thought Anubis had more important issues to attend to, Horemheb radically changed the system and dealt with punishments personally.
Death was the sentence given to thieves. Mutilation was inflicted upon those who committed fraud and those who set taxes too high for the population. The mutilation referred to here consisted of cutting off the nose and the ears of the trespasser. The person would then be exiled to Tharu, a region ancient Greeks began to refer to as Rhinocolura, because a lot of people who lived there had no noses.
Detail of a statue of Horemheb, at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
To a certain extent, the fight against corruption undergone by Pharaoh Horemheb proved successful for a time. The ancient Egyptian ruler actually died a natural death, but, afterwards, his example was no longer followed.
Top image: Ancient columns at the Temple of Horus at Edfu, Egypt.
The ancient city of Lacedaemon – is it the legendary Atlantis?
The ancient city of Lacedaemon – is it the legendary Atlantis?
Artist’s depiction of Atlantis. Credit: BigStockPhoto
The name Lacedaemon is derived from the verb, λαγχάνω (lachano), to assign somebody something by lot, and δαίμων (daemon), which means God in ancient Greek. Lacedaemon therefore denotes the divine lot, a piece of the world given to the God Poseidon, according to Plato, who identifies Lacedaemon with Atlantis.
I consider it worthwile to mention a remark by J. Spanuth in his book, ‘ Atlantis: Heimat, Reich and Schicksal der Germanen ’, (Tuebingen 1965), that Atlantis is “the oldest, most disputed, most hazardous and clearly most thankless, but still the most rewarding and most intriguing matter that Antiquity has bequeathed to us”.
There is a vast bibliography about Atlantis, but the modern scholarship concluded that to locate Atlantis and to prove the validity of its identification, four points of agreement must be met and generally accepted. (See E.Bloedow. ‘ Fire and Flood from Heaven: Was Atlantis at Troy ?’ La Parola del Passato 48, 1993, pp.109-160.
Atlantis was an island.
It lay beyond the “Pillars of Hercules”.
It was larger than Asia and Libya together.
Its destruction (sinking) produced a barrier of impassable mud.
These four prerequisites are completely fulfilled in the case of Lacedaemon.
The name, features, and location of Lacedaemon have been hotly debated from Antiquity to modern times. Lacedaemon was mentioned for the first time in the second Book of Iliad, in the so-called Catalogue of the Ships, verse 581, as the first city of the Kingdom of Menelaos in Lakonia – “Οι δ’ είχον κοίλην Λακεδαίμονα κητώεσσαν” (‘E de ichon kili Lacedaemon kitoesan’). Κοίλη (‘kili’) and κητώεσσα (‘kitoesan’) are the two traditional epithets steadily connected with Lacedaemon. ‘Κili’ means hollow, everybody agrees on that, but the epithet ‘kitoesan’ has been variously interpreted. It might refer either to its geological formation and identity – that it is full of ravines and subterranean caustic splits – or to its island nature, in this case abounded with κήτη (‘kiti’), sea monsters or big fish (dolphins, turtles, whales, seals etc.).
The Iliad by Homer.
Credit: BigStockPhoto
Taking for granted that in northern Lakonia there once existed a huge lake from the Pleiocene period, measuring 35 square kilometres, the epithet ‘kitoesan’ may well fit the geology of the site of Lacedaemon. The lake is now dry and contains big deposits of lignite layers, similar to those in the adjacent plain of Megalopolis. The date of dessication or draining of the lake in the area of mount Taygetos is of paramount importance for the history of Lacedaemon, its identity, and identification with Atlantis.
Plato, in Timaeus and Critias, describes Atlantis as an island in what he calls a ‘Pontos’, a word meaning Sea or Sea-lake (Timaius 24E Critias 113-114 B). The other geological and geographical coordinate of the area is the Πέλαγος (‘Pelagos’), erroneously interpreted by Atlantologists as ‘Ocean’. Pelagos in Greek signifies a large and extensive area, such as the Aegean Pelagos or the Ionian Pelagos. Pontos was the huge lake of Lacedaemon, Pelagos was the large and navigable river Eurotas.
The inhabitants of Atlantis, known by various names, like Hyperboreans, Phaeakes, Phoinikes, Atlantes, Minyans etc, were thought to live in a remote area, safe in their natural environment, reluctant to be visited by other people. There they lived a whole millenium, eternally young, and they were beloved to the Gods. Tyndareos, the father of Helen and the divine Twins Kastor and Polydeukes lived where Lakonia ended, very close to Arcadia - “εν τοις εσχάτοις της Λακεδαιμονίας” (‘En tis eshatis tis Lacedaemonias’).
We have reasons to suppose that the area of the lake was covered by small islands, some natural, others artificial, founded upon wooden tree trunks, taken from the densely forested mount Taygetos, an activity described by Plato in reference with the works of the Atlantians in the main island in the Pontos. The work and the plan may be paralleled with the miraculous achievements of the Venetians in the large Lagoon in the Adriatic. This “Civitas Serenissima” was built entirely upon wooden trunks and was composed of numerous islands, constructed densely to each other.
The city of Venice was built on wooden foundations.
Plato himself speaks of other islands, besides Atlantis, in the same Pontos. Atlantis lay at the eastern fringes of the sea, near the exit of the river, beyond the Pillars of Hercules and was surrounded by islands, which were approached from Atlantis both by sea and land (Timaeus: “εξ ης επιβατόν επί τας άλλας νήσους τοις τότε εγένετο πορευομένοις”). Plato seems to know well not only the geophysical conditions of the area of Lacedaemon, he also knew the geography of the island group and most probably the names of the islands, at least of some of them.
Taking that into consideration, we may come to the solution of the most difficult of the Platonic references to Atlantis, which is described by Plato as being larger than Asia and Libya together. What was known as ‘Asia’ and ‘Libya’ at the time were small islands in the lake of Lacedaemon, and we know that Asia and Libya were Laconian toponymics (see my book LACEDAEMON, volume II, p. 399 ff).
Accordingly, we fix one of the four points of agreement posed by Atlantologists. Plato’s trustworthines is strengthened by the reference in ‘The Odyssey’ that Ithaca, the original homeland of Odysseus, lay in a similar landscape. It is described as “χθαμαλή εν αλί, πανυπερτάτη προς ζόφον”, i.e. hollow and the most remote to North-West, though many other islands that were close to each other, lay to the East and South (“νήσοι πολλαί, μάλα σχεδόν αλλήλησιν”, Odyssey, book 9, 22-3).
Arethusa fountain old view, Ithaca island, Greece. Created by Provost, published on L'Illustration. Credit: BigStockPhoto
Odysseus, the Argonaut, was at home in Lacedaemon, where he acquired the famous composite-bow of Iphitos and it was not a mere coincidence that his descendant Telemachos came to Lacedaemon many years or centuries thereafter to visit Menelaos and Helen in order to be informed about his farther’s return to Ithaca.
Featured image: Artist’s depiction of Atlantis. Credit: BigStockPhoto
UFO researchers and proponents for the search for intelligent life (SETI) are treated like rock stars these days – in fact, some like Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge ARE rock stars. However, they all owe a debt of gratitude to those who paved the way for them – making a path that was mostly rocky dirt roads filled with pothole and traps set by those who wished to disrupt or ridicule their quest to find or prove the existence of extraterrestrial life. One of those people is best known by his last name and a mathematical term that together have given hope to those on traveling on that path that has now become a highway paved and repaired with government support. We’re referring of course to the Drake Equation – a formula for estimating the number of active extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy – and Frank Drake, its inventor, whopassed away recently at the age of 92.
Arecibo Observatory
Frank Donald Drake was born on May 28, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois, and said he first considered the idea of life on other planets as an eight-year-old far beyond his years contemplating what it might mean if intelligent life was the result of chance. Drake studied astronomy at Cornell University while pursuing a degree in Engineering Physics, followed by graduate school at Harvard University where he received a M.S. and Ph.D. in Astronomy. From Harvard, Frank Drake moved to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, West Virginia, to a job in radio astronomical research. It was there he mapped the center of the Milky Way Galaxy for the first time and discovered the ionosphere and magnetosphere of Jupiter. It was also at NRAO that Drake first connected to another giant in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence – the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Like Drake, Arecibo was a giant in SETI for decades (the world's largest single-aperture telescope for 53 years) until breaks in cables forced it to be decommissioned and demolished in 2020.
“In 1960, radio astronomer Frank D. Drake, then at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, West Virginia, carried out humanity's first modern attempt to detect interstellar radio transmissions. Project Ozma was named after the queen of L. Frank Baum's imaginary land of Oz -- a place "very far away, difficult to reach, and populated by strange and exotic beings."”
To this day, not many people know about Project Ozma, but even fewer knew of it in 1960 because Drake and the project team at NRAO decided to keep it quiet for fear of being ridiculed by the science and astronomy communities and the general public. “Ozma” was the perfect name because L. Frank Baum, the Oz series author, claimed he communicated with Oz by radio to learn of the events taking place in The Emerald City. Drake used the NRAO’s 26-meter radio telescope to search for possible signals from the stars Tau Ceti (in the constellation Cetus) and Epsilon Eridani (in the constellation Eridanus) star systems – both are nearby and Sun-like.
“From April to July 1960, for six hours a day, the receiver on the 85-foot antenna was tuned to the frequency of the 21-centimeter emission line of interstellar hydrogen. The assumption was that this frequency, 1420 MHz, would be known by any technologically sophisticated society, and would constitute a universal “hailing frequency.”
The total cost of the project was about two thousand dollars.”
Compare that to today’s ‘rock star’ budgets and rock star publicity for SETI projects and you have some idea of how challenging Project Ozma was. Unfortunately, the six months of listening picked up no extraterrestrial signals and the project was terminated in July 1960. One benefit – the project intrigued Carl Sagan, then a graduate student, and he and Drake became lifelong friends and collaborators. A second benefit, pointed out by the SETI Institute website, was that Ozma inspired other searches for signals from other stars, prompting in 1961 the first scientific meeting at NRAO to discuss SETI searches … that meeting was where Frank Drake unveiled the equation that bears his name.
The Drake equation has been called “second most-famous equation in science (after E= mc2)” and, since it was developed for astronomers, is not an easy one to simplify. Per the SETI Institute (full explanation here), the first six terms, when multiplied together, yield the average number of new technologically transmitting societies that are formed in the Milky Way galaxy each year. When multiplied by the last term, L: the average lifetime they stay on the air, you get the average number of message-transmitting intelligent societies in the Milky Way Galaxy now. The higher that number, the better the chances of finding extraterrestrials.
At the time of the NRAO meeting in 1961, Drake was hoping the equation would stimulate conversations amongst the attendees, since only one of the variables was known at that time. Drake plugged in his own estimates for the variables and came up with an average of 10,000 intelligent civilizations per year. As expected, determining the probability of life being intelligent is the hardest to quantify. It is a credit to Frank Drake that, while his equation has been exercised and criticized for 60 years, no one has developed a better one.
Creating such a famous equation would be enough for many astronomers and scientists, but Frank Drake went on to teach and influence an army of followers as an astronomy professor at Cornell and the University of California, Santa Cruz. At Arecibo, he was involved in a project that beamed a radio message to a cluster of stars. He also directed the SETI Institute's Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe and chaired the institute's board of trustees. With Carl Sagan, he helped create two messages sent from humanity that were engraved on a plaque on the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes and on gold records placed on the Voyager 1 and 2 probes. Frank Drake continued to serve on the SETI Institute's board of trustees until he died on September 2, 2022, at his home in Aptos, California, from natural causes at the age of 92.
Thank you, Frank Drake, for your service to astronomy,science and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Throughout the field of the UFO phenomena there are those that study it, and those who seem to have actually become a part of it. In some cases we have the tales of what have come to be called "contactees," or those people who have met or even been abducted by these otherwordly entities. They almost always have rather strange stories to tell, and one of these is certainly the tale of a woman who seems to have been targeted by aliens from an early age and would become a mainstay on the UFO convention circuit along with her entourage of two of the most famous UFO researchers in the field at the time.
Barbara Hudson was initiated fairly early into the world of UFO weirdness. When she was just 15 years old she claims that she had been awoken one night by a tall man standing near her bed, his features indistinct in the shadows. Barbara thought at first it was a human intruder, but as she was about to scream out to her parents, the stranger released beams from his eyes that supposedly paralyzed her and held her in place, completely frozen. She also felt her mind become foggy, entering a sort of daze or trance, and when the man held his hand out and asked her to follow him she found that she was unable to resist. A grey mist then appeared, and within this mist was what looked like an elevator, which she was ushered into and then brought to a large room with screens on the wall showing the planet earth, as well as “many instruments and colored lights” and more of those strange tall beings. These figures gave her some fruit to eat, before taking her back into the elevator and into her room, leaving her there to lose consciousness.
For years Barbara would try to put this strange incident out of her mind and get on with her life. She would eventually move to New York City, marry and have a child, although she divorced, renting out an apartment in Manhattan where she lived with her parents. Life had seemed to have gotten somewhat back to normal, but just when she thought that she had seen the last of those tall strangers, her life would get weird again. One cold afternoon in February of 1960, Barbara was changing her baby’s diapers when the doorbell rang. It was a bit odd because she hadn’t been expecting anyone, but she didn’t think much of it at first and went to the door to see who it was. She opened the door on its chain just a crack, and there standing in the hall was a man she had never met and who had a demeanor of utter strangeness.
This stranger was described as standing around a bit over 6 feet in height and with a very slender, almost skeletal build, wearing an ill-fitting navy blue suit with a dark tie and a white shirt that all hung awkwardly off of his bony frame. His skin was dark, his eyes deeply set within his face beneath a mop of brown, wavy hair. For a moment he just stood there staring at her with a neutral look that was impossible to read, and just as Barbara was about to close the door in his face he spoke, telling her that he was the exterminator who had been sent by the management of the apartment to spray her apartment for bugs. Looking at his hands, she could see that he was indeed carrying an insect sprayer, as well as a black briefcase, but it was weird because no one had told her anything about an exterminator coming over. As odd as the situation was, Barbara nevertheless showed the man in, where he went to the kitchen and began spraying.
At some point, the man stopped and turned to Barbara, told her not to be afraid and that he meant her no harm, and then marched across the room to pick up a book on the bookshelf, specifically one called Flying Saucers Have Landed, by another alien contactee by the name of George Adamski. Oddly, the man had gone straight to the book and knew exactly where it was, and when he picked it up was described as fondling it lovingly with both hands. He then asked Barbara what she thought of the book, and whether she believed anything within its pages, to which she responded that she did. The man then asked her where she thought aliens came from, and she answered that they were probably from Mars or Venus. This elicited a smile from the stranger as he gently put the book back down and leaned forward to kiss Barbara on the cheek before heading towards the door.
Despite the sheer bizarreness of the situation, not only was Barbara completely calm throughout all of this, but she even went ahead to open the door for the stranger. The man quietly walked out and went down the stairs to the first floor, where he turned to face her again. This time the man spoke again, telling her that she was wrong and that he was in fact an alien but that he was not from Mars or Venus, but rather he was from Saturn, before telling her he would see her again and hurrying off. When he was gone, whatever spell he had placed on her wore off, and Barbara was hit with a sudden wave of fear and panic. She quickly closed the door and locked it, before hurrying to the window to look outside, but the man seems to have never come back out of the apartment as far as she could see, leaving her sitting there with a cold, wet feeling of dread. Unfortunately for her, this would not be the end of such strange incidents.
Later that same year, three tall, thin men in dark suits and with gaunt faces very similar to that of the “exterminator” she had met came to her apartment and once again she felt as if they had put her into a sort of hypnotic trance. The men told her they wanted her to join a secret organization they called simply “the group,” and that they had something to show her that concerned UFOs. They invited her to come out for a drive with them and she felt oddly compelled to do as they said, following them out to the street to a waiting dark sedan. They drove her out to a remote locale at Long Island, remaining silent the entire way, and when the car stopped they were at some sort of compound populated by both humans and aliens alike. The men with her explained that this was “the group,” and that they had been recruited from both Earth and around the galaxy for the purpose of letting the world know about aliens and UFOs. They then instructed her that she was to go to seminars being held by the author and UFO researcher James Willett Moseley at the series of Giant Rock Flying Saucer Conventions going on at the time so that she could “keep an eye on things.” Thus would begin the next strange chapter of her weird story.
At the convention, Barbara would meet Moseley, as well as the UFO author Gray Barker, who was perhaps most well-known for introducing the world to the notion of the Men in Black with his 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. The two researchers were fascinated by Barbara’s story, and from there her, Barker and Beckley seem to have become an inseparable trio, with them even inviting her along when they did an investigation into the Mothman sightings at Point Pleasant, West Virginia, with some of these activities being covered in Gray Barker’s The Silver Bridge (1970). Barbara became very involved with the UFO conference scene, often appearing with Moseley and Barker, and she started work on a book about her experiences, an excerpt of which would appear in Beckley’s UFO newsletter Saucer News, in an article entitled A Visitor From Saturn? Rather strangely, Barbara would allegedly send a rough draft of some of her writings to the writer George H. Smith, who was famous for adult-themed schlock with titles like Orgy Buyer and The Sex and Savagery of the Hells Angels, who used Hudson’s name as a pseudonym and whipped up her outline into a lurid, sex-soaked work of fiction called Those Sexy Saucer People (1967). As for Barbara’s own book, it never would be fully finished and would forever remain a work in progress.
Gray Barker
As for Moseley and Barker, they would claim that they fully believed Barbara’s story and found her to be very reliable, enthusiastically endorsing her weird story. They also gave other strange anecdotes about their time with her, telling of a time at Point Pleasant where she had met possibly one of her friends from Saturn in the form of a tall gaunt man she had seen weeping and whistling the theme of Gone With the Wind in the dark in the abandoned power-plant. On another occasion, Barker claimed to have seen Barbara’s doppelganger while at a separate convention across the country. Unfortunately, most of the information we have on Barbara Hudson and her experiences were related by Barker himself, and here is where we get into some problems.
Although he was a prolific author on UFOs and the paranormal and his books advocated the existence of UFOs and extraterrestrials, Barker himself was known to be privately a pretty hardcore skeptic. He mostly churned out his various UFO writings for money, but didn’t really believe in most of what he wrote, even telling friends and family that the subject matter was a joke and calling his own books “kookie books.” He was also known to intentionally greatly embellish facts in his books and omit certain things or play up certain angles in order to make the cases he covered seem more outlandish and mysterious. This personal disdain for the UFO field and for the true believers out there fueled a series of elaborate hoaxes he concocted to fool UFO enthusiasts, and he is known for having relentlessly pranked John Keel during his investigation into the Mothman phenomenon.
His partner in crime, Moseley, was no better. Also a private skeptic, Moseley went through great lengths to orchestrate elaborate hoaxes to discredit UFO believers. He did not do this necessarily out of spite or for kicks, but rather because he believed the UFO field was full of fakers, hoaxes and nonsense that muddied the waters because people were too quick to accept it as real. He believed that some of the UFO phenomena truly was unexplainable and mysterious, but that it was hard to get at the real truth, and that only after weeding out the hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and misidentifications could one truly get close to the truth. To him, his hoaxes were simply to prove that many in the UFO community were too quick to accept something as real and were a gullible lot.
James Moseley
Together, Moseley and Barker came up with some doozies. In one hoax, they faked a letter from the United States government and sent it to self-proclaimed alien contactee George Adamski. The letter stated that the United States Department of State was pleased with Adamski's research into UFOs, that the government knew that Adamski had actually spoken to extraterrestrials in a California desert in 1952, and that they had their own evidence bearing out his extraordinary claims. The letter was even printed on official State Department stationary and letterhead complete with white-seal, blue-embossed paper, the American eagle watermark and the Seal of State impressed upon it, and it was signed by a R.E. Straith. Barker would use the hoax in his 1967 book on Adamski, calling the letter "one of the great unsolved mysteries of the UFO field.” Adamski would swallow the bait hook, line, and sinker, widely publicizing the letter and using it as evidence to back his various bizarre claims on UFO contacts, exactly proving Moseley’s point. The letter would be debated within the UFO community for years as possibly real, and even when Moseley publicly admitted that it was all a hoax there have been those right up to the present day who still suspect it might be the real deal.
Another one of Barker and Moseley’s more infamous hoaxes was the so-called Lost Creek saucer video. In 1966, the two had the idea to create footage of a flying saucer they planned to present as real and see how far or how blindly people would believe it. To this end, they had an assistant hold a fake saucer on a fishing pole in front of a car as Moseley drove and Barker filmed. The resulting footage was presented as the real deal and made big waves at the time, inspiring a lot of discussion and with many in the UFO community hailing it as an amazing piece of genuine footage. Barker himself would carry it around to his lectures at UFO conventions before eventually admitting it was fake and explaining how he had done it.
Considering this ruthless trolling of the UFO community by Barker and Moseley, it is hard to know just what to make of the fact that they were such champions of Barbara Hudson’s story and made such a point of traveling around to conventions with her. It seems very likely that, while she likely believed what she was saying, Barker and Moseley almost certainly did not, and that she was just another one of their trolling runs. How much of what she said of her experiences was actually true and how much of it was fed to her, played up, or even fabricated by Barker and Moseley? They were such unrepentant hoaxers that it is really hard to say for sure, and we are left to wonder. Was Barbara Moseley the real deal? Was she just a delusional woman? Was she perhaps the victim of two of the most notorious hoaxers in the UFO field? Whatever the case may be, it sure is a strange tale of one of the weirder UFO contactees out there.
The U.S. Navy has released a new video from an incident that involved six unidentified drones flying over its most advanced surface combatant, the USS Zumwalt. The incident occurred in the waters off the coast of Southern California in April 2019.
The War Zone received the video via the Freedom of Information act as part of our ongoing investigation into reports of drone swarm incidents that occurred near Navy vessels intermittently throughout 2019 off Southern California. Our previous update in the investigation produced a number of briefing documents, including an unclassified video and photographs that provided a significant increase in detail about these strange incidents. While the bulk of the drone swarm events occurred in July of 2019, we learned of several new events that occurred earlier in the year. Among these was the incident involving the USS Zumwalt.
The incident occurred at approximately 8:30 PM Pacific Time on April 24th 2019, around 17 nautical miles from the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton in international waters. During the event, the USS Zumwalt reported that as many as six unknown unmanned aerial systems (UAS) were seen operating nearby at altitudes ranging from 300 to 1000 feet. At one point in the incident, the UAS reportedly crossed over the deck of the USS Zumwalt. As in similar past incidents, the drones were documented by the Ship Nautical Or Otherwise Photographic Interpretation and Exploitation team, or "SNOOPIE team." These sailors essentially act to document dangerous, uncertain, or unusual situations using a variety of commercial-grade cameras.
You can view the newly obtained footage from the incident and listen to a sailor’s accompanying narration here:
A briefing slide and photograph from the incident was previously published by The War Zone, and is shown again below:
US Navy via FOIA
It should be noted that the USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000) is a unique vessel as the lead ship in its class of controversial, but technologically advanced stealthy surface combatants. The ship'sstealth technology is designed to allow it to be more survivable than other destroyers, including being able to operate closer to enemy territory during certain operations.
Detailed analysis of the low-resolution video is difficult given that it was taken at night. While unclassified records released to the public tend to be underwhelming, it is likely that the USS Zumwalt had access to a range of sophisticated sensors during the incident.
The only clear feature in the video is a set of several lights in a rectangular formation. The lights appear to be white and green, with an intermittently blinking red light presumed to be in the center of the object. A sailor comments that the UASs do not appear to be armed in the narration.
For further analysis, we spoke with David Kovar, CEO of URSA Inc. Kovar’s firm specializes in drone security issues, including criminal investigations and UAV threat management. Kovar stated that “I’m unable to determine much of the configuration of the aircraft. It appears to have four regularly spaced running, or navigation lights.”
Kovar stated that given the context of the narration and the briefing slide, the object could be a “multi-rotor, likely a quad, UAV with running lights.” However, he noted that this assessment is based on a typical configuration of quadcopter lights. He stated that while the video could match other objects, as well, given the lack of detail in the video, it appears consistent with the description of a UAS in the narration and the briefing slide. Of course, other potential types exist, including smaller gasoline-powered fixed-wing types that pack long ranges or hybrid types that can takeoff and land vertically but are more efficient in forwarding flight with the help of a pusher propeller and wing-like appendages. The latter has become a favorite of the Chinese Navy.
A former drone industry analyst who declined to be named due to their current employment highlighted several other features of interest. The analyst commented that “while the video isn't of the best quality, I don't see anything on the drone that would make me think it's something that couldn't be purchased off the shelf from a current commercial drone manufacturer.” The analyst added, “the fact that the narrator said that there was a pattern of flight where there were no changes in altitude tells me that the drones were either programmed to fly a certain route or controlled from a distance while possibly on altitude hold, which to me isn't the hallmark of any advanced technology.”
They further commented, “what is interesting is that they reported 6 drones and they were 17 miles off the coast of Southern California. This tells me that these drones were likely launched from a boat and that this was likely a planned 'mission' because no one has 6 drones on a boat for recreational purposes.” The analyst further stated that physically capturing the drone “is really the only way a forensic assessment can be made to determine the origin and capabilities associated with an [unidentified] drone.”
The observation of bright lights on unidentified UAS has been a recurring feature in several of the other drone swarm incidents we have investigated. In a previous interview, DroneSec CEO Mike Monnik told The War Zone that his firm’s database of drone incidents has registered an uptick in swarm events, and that in some cases less capable drones are used as “canaries” that intentionally distract or probe the defense of a potential target. There is also a long Cold War history of technologies designed to intentionally stimulate air defense systems in order to capture valuable signals intelligence, which you can read more about here.
As in the other drone swarm cases from this general area and timeframe, several key questions remain unanswered. Based on the briefing slide above, we have reached out to Carrier Strike Group Nine to inquire if the operator of the drones was ever positively identified, or if any effort was made to track the drones to their ultimate destination. They have not responded at the time of writing. The Chief of Naval Operations Michael Gilday previously stated that the Navy did not get to the bottom of similar incidents that occurred in the same region later in the same year. In a congressional hearing earlier this year, representatives of the Navy and Department of Defense explained that several of the incidents were in fact related to drone swarms, but did not offer further details.
While details about these incidents have been difficult to come by, drone swarms are becoming a general area of increasing interest for the Navy. Just in the last month, the Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division ran an event called “Silent Swarm 22.” Conducted at ranges with the Michigan National Guard's National All-Domain Warfighting Center, this was a “large scale experimentation event” that brought together over 150 participants to focus on “Electromagnetic Warfare (EW) employed on small multi-domain unmanned systems (UxS).”
Notably, the logo, seen below, for the event depicts a warship surrounded by a web and a swarm of various fixed-wing and rotor-wing drones. Reflections of the drones can be seen in the water, perhaps a nod to the “multi-domain” reference and the more inclusive UxS acronym in the event’s description.
Michigan National Guard
This is just one of a number of major Navy exercises focusing on unmanned systems, and those efforts are only accelerating and have been for years
While the Navy focuses on forward-looking efforts to employ drone swarms, it is not the only player in this space. The string of drone swarm incidents throughout 2019 demonstrates that surveillance of key naval assets is being conducted in the areas where they train – often within miles of the American coast. Drone swarms are not a theoretical emerging technology threat, but rather a present tense reality. U.S. adversaries are openly developing and deploying these capabilities and all indications point to the fact that networked swarms of lower-end drones will be absolutely critical to prevailing in future high-end maritime conflicts.
The inherent difficulty of reliably detecting, tracking, and countering drones has created a unique challenge for the Pentagon in recent years. In fact, it is among the department’s biggest tactical and strategic concerns. The often ambiguous footage from incidents has led to an overlap of the drone issue with longstanding cultural interest in UFOs – a dilemma that The War Zone has reported on for some time. Disambiguating drone surveillance incidents from headier claims appears to be a priority of lawmakers, though it remains to be seen how the Department of Defense will make such distinctions in practice.
Perhaps more importantly, it remains to be seen how effective the Navy and Department of Defense will be in investigating and resolving these incidents in an era when once considered highly advanced drone technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated and accessible.
Update 9/1/22:
We reached out to DroneSec, a drone security intelligence firm based in Melbourne, for their comment on the video from the USS Zumwalt incident. Due to the time zone difference, we were not able to include their response before initial publication. DroneSec CEO Mike Monnik told us via email that “given the alleged unaltered speed and altitude, it was possibly on a preplanned route. Either this was enabled as the UAS approached the ship, or it was already conducting its preprogrammed route and the USS Zumwalt entered the area.” Monnik stated, “in our opinion, we don't believe it is a fixed-wing given the slight visibility of the cross-section.” He also told us that the DroneSec team found visual similarities with the DJI Inspire, which also has lights in a box shape and a comparable LED light sequence. A video of the DJI Inspire operating at night can be seen below:
Note that given the clarity of the video, this is not a positive identification, but rather an estimate of the general type of drone that may have been employed. While LED light sequences can be helpful in identifying drones in some cases, there are significant limitations in drawing inferences based on this alone. Monnik emphasized that “UAS can often modify their own light sequence by color, frequency and speed,” and that these features are readily available in some commercially available drones.
The USS Zumwalt is the most advanced United States Navy guided missile destroyer in existence today. Much larger than any other active destroyer or cruiser in the US Navy, the USS Zumwalt’s futuristic appearance is the result of a design that gives the ship stealth capabilities against radar detection and a wave-piercing tumblehome hull to dramatically reduce drag and increase fuel efficiency. Powered by an integrated electric propulsion (IEP) system and managed by a much smaller crew that previous warships, the USS Zumwalt was created to be the next generation in fighting ships and to strike fear in enemy navies. While that may be true, a recently released video shows that one enemy laughs in the pointed face of the USS Zumwalt -- drones. The video, released by the U.S. Navy, shows as many as six mysterious drones or unmanned aerial systems (UAS) swarming the USS Zumwalt in the waters off the coast of Southern California in April 2019. Who … or what … controls these mysterious aircraft that seem fearless against the latest and best of the U.S. Navy?
The USS Zumwalt
“The War Zone received the video via the Freedom of Information act as part of our ongoing investigation into reports of drone swarm incidents that occurred near Navy vessels intermittently throughout 2019 off Southern California.”
Credit for convincing the U.S. Navy to release the video goes to the intrepid team at The War Zone/The Drive, which has obtained a number of such videos, photos and data files via its relentless requests under the Freedom of Information Act. The War Zone is responsible for obtaining a number of videos of drone swarm events around naval warships off the coast of California in July of 2019, but the bulk of those have been around conventional warships and aircraft carriers … not the next generation in fighting vessels.
“The incident occurred at approximately 8:30 PM Pacific Time on April 24th 2019, around 17 nautical miles from the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton in international waters. During the event, the USS Zumwalt reported that as many as six unknown unmanned aerial systems (UAS) were seen operating nearby at altitudes ranging from 300 to 1000 feet.”
An altitude of 300 feet is a mere stone’s throw to a ship like the USS Zumwalt – almost within swatting distance. In fact, one of the drones was reported to have crossed directly over the deck of the USS Zumwalt. That should make them a piece of cake to identify, right? Well, take a look at the video yourself here and see if you can identify them. Finished?
What do you think? As The War Zone points out, all you can see in this nighttime, low-resolution video is a group of bright lights flying in a rectangular formation – the lights are green and white with an intermittently blinking red light in the center. That’s even worse than most UFO/UAP videos. Fortunately, the USS Zumwalt had a SNOOPIE Team -- Ship Nautical Or Otherwise Photographic Interpretation and Exploitation team – which immediately investigates and documents unusual UAS encounters such as this one. A chart showing the Zumwalt’s “Interaction with MULTIPLE UNK UAS” and a timeline of the events can be seen on The War Zone’s website. That chart includes another photo, a map showing the location of the USS Zumwalt at the time of the encounter, and a plot of the path of the drones superimposed on the path of the Zumwalt. All of this data adds up to what looks to be a very close encounter between the Navy’s latest warship and a swarm of unknown aerial phenomena.
“What is interesting is that they reported six drones, and they were 17 miles off the coast of Southern California. This tells me that these drones were likely launched from a boat and that this was a planned ‘mission’ because no one has six drones on a boat for recreational purposes.”
So, what did the USS Zumwalt encounter on the night of April 24th 2019? The War Zone asked an anonymous (by their request) drone analyst who suspected this was a military exercise using pre-programmed drones flying predetermined paths and hovering at selected locations. That did not impress the analyst as being the actions and maneuvers of “any advanced technology” – it could be done off-the-shelf, non-military, commercial drones. David Kovar, CEO of URSA Inc., a drone security company, agreed.
“Given the context of the narration and the briefing slide, the object could be a multi-rotor, likely a quad, UAV with running lights.”
While those analyses hint at ‘what’ these mysterious UAS are, they don’t indicate ‘whose’ they are. Earlier this year, the War Zone obtains photographs of UAP encounters in 2019 reported by the USS Kidd, USS Rafael Peralta, USS Russell, USS John Finn, and USS Paul Hamilton during weeks of maneuvers near California’s Channel Islands, and was able to identify the possible source of the swarms of drones – the Hong Kong-flagged bulk carrier MV Bass Strait. In that group of photos, one image was labeled “Quadcopter style UAS.” Could the drones harassing the USS Zumwalt have been from a Hong Kong carrier too?
“The Chief of Naval Operations Michael Gilday previously stated that the Navy did not get to the bottom of similar incidents that occurred in the same region later in the same year.”
The War Zone received no response to requests for information on the identity of the drones’ operators – noting that not all drone swarms were linked to the Honk Kong vessel or any other ship. It also noted that the Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division held an event in July 2022 called “Silent Swarm 22” at the Michigan National Guard's National All-Domain Warfighting Center which tested “Electromagnetic Warfare (EW) employed on small multi-domain unmanned systems (UxS).” The logo of the exercise (these days, you can’t have an exercise without a logo for a patch) shows drones flying around a ship and, interestingly, reflections of the drones on the surface of the water. The War Zone thinks this is a wink to the biggest concern of Pentagon’s new UAP investigation department – transmedium or multi-domain UAPs.
As of this writing, no other information is available about mysterious, unidentified UAPs swarming the USS Zumwalt, the U.S. Navy’s latest stealth flagship destroyer. Kudos as always to the team an The War Zone.
I figured that having just published an article on the mysteries of the planet Mars, I would now write one that focuses on our Moon. And, there are more than a few mysteries out there, to be sure! Our strange Moon story goes back to the 1970s, but it is still a fascinating story. According to the family of a Raymond Wallis, he was someone who, way back in 1975, took on the alias of a “Mr. Axelrod,” when a team of remote-viewers at Area 51 were focusing their attention not on the Russians or even the Chinese, but on the Moon itself. Something strange had caught the attention of those working on the program. Answers needed to be found. Reportedly, and incredibly, several of the remote-viewers had significant success in psychically uncovering evidence that there were several underground, alien bases on the Moon. So the story goes, the team hit a brick-wall because, in a rather sinister fashion, the aliens somehow knew when they were being watched. So, the team decided to do something that they rarely ever did. They decided to go outside of the box – or in their case a secure series of rooms at Area 51’s S-4 – and approach one of the leading figures in the field of remote-viewing, a man named Ingo Swann. Before we get directly to Swann, let's have a look at the phenomenon of Remote-Viewing.
(NASA) The surface of the Moon
Extra-sensory perception (ESP), clairvoyance, precognition, and astral-projection have all been utilized by the CIA, the KGB, and British Intelligence on more than a few occasions. As astonishing as it may sound, the world of psychic 007’s is all too real. It’s a subject that has been researched, with varying degrees of success, for decades. Remote Viewing is also a phenomenon that allows for travel into different realms of time. The earliest indication of serious interest on the part of the U.S. Government in the field of psychic phenomena can be found in a formerly classified CIA document written in 1977 by Dr. Kenneth A. Kress - then an engineer with the CIA’s Office of Technical Services - and titled Parapsychology in Intelligence. According to Kress: “Anecdotal reports of extrasensory perception capabilities have reached U.S. national security agencies at least since World War II, when Hitler was said to rely on astrologers and seers. Suggestions for military applications of ESP continued to be received after World War II.
In 1952, the Department of Defense was lectured on the possible usefulness of extrasensory perception in psychological warfare. “In 1961, the CIA’s Office of Technical Services became interested in the claims of ESP. Technical project officers soon contacted Stephen I. Abrams, the Director of the Parapsychological Laboratory, Oxford University, England. Under the auspices of Project ULTRA, Abrams prepared a review article which claimed ESP was demonstrated but not understood or controllable.” Kress added with these words: “The report was read with interest but produced no further action for another decade.” Indeed, it was in the early part of the 1970s that the research really took off. In April 1972, Dr. Russell Targ, a laser physicist with a personal interest in parapsychology and the power of the human mind, met with CIA personnel from the Office of Strategic Intelligence, specifically to discuss paranormal phenomena. Now, let us get back to our main character in this story, Ingo Swann.
(Nick Redfern) A Moon-Area 51 connection?
A secret, Area 51-based group interested in the mysteries of the Moon? It sounds wild. The possibility that the Moon could be home to a race of extraterrestrials that live deep below its surface? It sounds incredible, right? It is, however, amazing fact: Swann himself publicly confirmed the sensational story, which probably did not please the team at Area 51. Swann, who died in 2013, was considered to be one of the U.S. Government’s leading Remote-Viewers, those near-unique individuals whose psychic powers and extra-sensory perception (ESP) were harnessed, from the 1970s onwards, to spy on the former Soviet Union. Swann proved to be a highly-skilled remote-viewer, one whose talents were employed on a number of espionage-themed operations focusing on overseas targets that might have proven hostile to the United States. As a result, Swann came into contact with a variety of shadowy figures within the realm of government secrecy, and the world of intelligence-gathering, including a truly Machiavellian character known, very mysteriously, only by the name of Mr. Axelrod – seemingly a leading figure in this hidden, mysterious group.
It was in February 1975 that Swann was contacted out of the blue by what he personally described as a certain highly-placed figure in Washington, D.C., who guardedly advised Swann that he, Swann, would soon be receiving a telephone call from the aforementioned Mr. Axelrod. Swann’s source quietly advised him that while he could not offer much at that time by way of a meaningful explanation, Swann should be keenly aware that the call would concern a matter of great urgency and importance. A somewhat concerned Swann waited…and waited…and waited. You get the picture. Finally, roughly around four weeks later, a call arrived, and Swann was asked to make a cloak-and-dagger rendezvous, only mere hours later, at the National Museum of Natural History within the Smithsonian. Despite the somewhat fraught, last-minute nature of the conversation, Swann unhesitatingly agreed, and quickly – albeit with a degree of concern and trepidation – made his careful way to the meeting-place, where he was greeted by a man who Swann said "looked like a Marine." Although all the basic formalities were exchanged, Swann was hardly clear on what was afoot: he was driven by car to a second location, where nothing less than a helicopter was waiting to take him to a destination unknown. Such was the security and secrecy surrounding the journey Swann was blindfolded for the approximately thirty-minute flight. In other words, the experience was rapidly becoming one of near-007-like proportions.
On landing, Swann was then taken to an elevator that descended for an incredibly significant period of time – perhaps into the bowels of some secret, underground installation, Swann thought, and probably with a high degree of logical justification. With the blindfold finally removed, Swann gathered his bearings, and was then introduced to the enigmatic Mr. Axelrod (in reality, Raymond Wallis), who admitted this was not his real name, but suggested to Swann it was an identity that served the particular purposes of the meeting. Axelrod wasted no time, at all, and got straight to the absolute point, asking Swann a great deal of curious questions about the nature of remote-viewing. Axelrod also made it clear that he wished to make use of Swann’s skills – on what was clearly a secret operation – for a significant sum of money. It truly was one of those offers that one cannot refuse. And Swann, most assuredly, did not refuse it. Axelrod asked Swann, pointedly, what he knew about our Moon. Now, finally, the purpose of the strange meeting was becoming much clearer. Someone within officialdom was secretly looking to have the Moon remote-viewed – which is precisely what Swann went ahead and did.
By Swann’s own admission, he was utterly floored by what he found: during an initial targeting, his mind focused in on sensational imagery of what looked to be a huge tower, similar in size to the Secretariat Building at the United Nations, but one that soared upwards from the Moon’s surface. This was no human-made structure, Swann was told: it was the work of nothing less than mysterious extraterrestrials. In follow-up remote-viewing sessions, Swann was able to perceive on the surface of the Moon a wealth of domed structures, advanced machinery, additional tall towers, large cross-like structures, curious tubular constructions across the landscape, and even evidence of what looked like extensive mining operations. Someone, or something, had secretly constructed nothing less than a Moon-base.
Intriguingly, Swann was also able to focus his mind on what appeared to be a group of people – that appeared very human – housed in some sort of enclosure on the Moon, that were busily burrowing into the side of a cliff. The only oddity: they were all utterly naked. Rather ominously, and very quickly, at that point Axelrod terminated the experiment, amid dark and disturbing allusions to the possibility that the Moon-based entities were possibly acutely aware they were being spied upon via the means of astral-travel. It was even implied that Swann’s very actions might now place him in grave danger, if the beings decided to turn the tables and pay him a visit of a deadly, cosmic kind – which, very fortunately for Swann, they did not. Notably, Axelrod also inquired of Swann if he knew of a man named George Leonard. Swann replied that, no, he was not familiar with the name. It transpired that during that very same time frame that the shadowy Axelrod was employing Swann to seek out the mysteries of the Moon, Leonard, an author, was hard at work, toiling on a manuscript titled Somebody Else is on the Moon. In 1977, Leonard’s manuscript appeared in book form, and, to a significant degree, focused its attention upon the very matter about which Axelrod was so deeply troubled: namely, unusual, intelligently-designed structures, or installations, on the Moon.
Before we go any further in this strange saga, let's have a look at the Moon itself. As NASA says: "The brightest and largest object in our night sky, the Moon makes Earth a more livable planet by moderating our home planet's wobble on its axis, leading to a relatively stable climate. It also causes tides, creating a rhythm that has guided humans for thousands of years. The Moon was likely formed after a Mars-sized body collided with Earth. Earth's Moon is the fifth largest of the 200+ moons orbiting planets in our solar system. Earth's only natural satellite is simply called 'the Moon' because people didn't know other moons existed until Galileo Galilei discovered four moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610." Now, let us get back to the key parts of the story.
On one particular occasion Axelrod casually asked Swann if he had heard of a man named George Leonard. At the time, Swann had not heard of Leonard. He soon would, though. Axelrod told Swann, on a particular date in 1975 that Swann could not recall when he went public with the story, that Leonard was working on a book that was, said Axelrod, “of interest to us.” Not only that: the book would focus, in part, of some of the things that had concerned Axelrod and his team in 1975. The implication was that someone “on the inside” was secretly and constantly monitoring Leonard’s research and writing. Swann was amazed when, in 1976, he was provided – by Axelrod - with a then-newly-surfaced copy of Leonard’s book, Somebody Else is on the Moon, which was published by David McKay. Notably, the back-cover of the book details for the reader some of the highlights of the story: “Immense mechanical rigs, some over a mile;” “Strange geometric ground markings and symbols;” “constructions several times higher than anything built on Earth;” and “Somebody is doing something on our Moon – and doing it right now, on a stunningly massive scale!” To Swann, this sounded very much like what Axelrod knew back in 1975. And it most certainly mirrored what Swan had found for Axelrod.
The odd, near-Deep-Throat-like meetings between Swann and Axelrod / Wallis – on the nature of what was afoot on the Moon – continued until 1977, after which time they came to an abrupt end, with Swann, unsurprisingly, left scratching his head about the distinctly odd sequence of events. Had Swann really psychically accessed a fantastically-advanced base on the Moon that had been constructed by space-faring extraterrestrials? Or, does the fact that Swann recalled those working on the facility looked like everyday members of the Human Race – albeit naked ones! – mean that this was a secret installation of very terrestrial origins, one that Axelrod was trying to learn more about, due to being left out of a particular, highly classified governmental loop? Could there be sinister extraterrestrials below the surface of our Moon? Just maybe, there really could.
NOTE:
The photo of the Moon used in this article was taken by employees of NASA. Because NASA is an arm of the U.S. Government, the picture is considered public domain.
Check out this strange circular rainbow cloud spotted in China on August 21, 2022.
This is called a "scarf cloud", which occurs when a thunderstorm's updraft creates a pileus cloud and the sun's angle interacts with the ice crystals in the pileus cloud.
The scarf cloud is formed by the cooling and condensation of moist air forced up and over the peak. When the sunlight is at the right angle, the light diffracts between the droplets and the ice crystals in the cloud, creating a rainbow color.
Long cigar shaped UFO moving slowly over Orange Park, Florida 4-Sep-2022
Long cigar shaped UFO moving slowly over Orange Park, Florida 4-Sep-2022
This really long bright cigar-shaped UFO was seen and recorded in the sky above Orange Park, Florida on 4th September 2022.
Witness report:
Observed this long rectangular/cigar shaped might moving slowly from the northeast to east. I filmed it for about 10 seconds before it went behind the treeline. Estimate that it was probably 5 miles away and would have been in the vicinity of buckman bridge in Jacksonville.
Indonesia’s 31,000-year-old Amputee Shatters the History of Surgery
Indonesia’s 31,000-year-old Amputee Shatters the History of Surgery
Archaeologists in Borneo, Indonesia have unearthed the skeleton of a man who was an amputee, and he underwent his complicated medical procedure some 31,000 years ago!
Until now, all archaeological evidence has suggested the first medical procedures began when humans started inhabiting agricultural settlements during the so-called Neolithic Revolution, which began around 10,000 years ago. Historians of human physiological development generally agree that having bodies designed to walk over 20 miles (32.2 kilometers) a day, for foraging, hunting and fishing, would have been subjected to multiple medical issues when farming began.
Archaeologists in China and Egypt have discovered ancient remains with signs of amputated toes and fingers, with one prosthetic toe dating back 3,000 years . And in 2016 StatNews reported on the discovery of a 6th-century-AD skeleton found in a Frankish Empire-era cemetery in Austria. With an “iron-and-wood prosthetic foot,” this amputee represented the oldest skeleton found in Europe with a prosthetic limb.
Now, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature, a team of researchers has identified the oldest evidence of an amputee surgery, in Borneo, dating way back to 29000 BC.
Liang Tebo burial features of the 29000 BC amputee of Borneo, Indonesia: a) A single adult inhumation (TB1); the skull is to the right of the scale bar; b) in situ nodule of red ochre (a natural earth pigment) next to the mandible; c) Maxilla and mandible. Scale bar, 5 centimeters or 2 inches.
The Assumption That Farming Led to Amputee Tech is False
When humans first turned to agriculture around 10,000 years ago, no matter where on the globe or what type of crops were being grown, the height, strength and general health of the people rapidly declined. This demonstrable fact has led to the widely-accepted assumption that the onset of farming also brought about the necessity of more advanced surgical procedures.
In this new study, however, lead researcher and author, Professor Tim Ryan Maloney of Griffith University, Australia demonstrates that the “assumption” couldn’t have been further from the truth. His new study on the discovery of a 31,000-year-old amputee in Borneo demonstrates the origins of surgery began in prehistoric times, way before farming.
Legacy of Borneo’s 31,000-year-old Amputee Surgeons
The new paper focuses on a discovery made in 2020 on the Sangkulirang–Mangkalihat Peninsula of East Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo). Approximately 2.5 kilometers (15.53 miles) from the Marang River, a matrix of caves and rock shelters are peppered across the karst terrain. Excavations in the vast three-chambered Liang Tebo limestone cave revealed evidence of prehistoric human occupation, including rock art that was painted at least 40,000 years ago, representing some of the earliest rock art ever created.
In 2020, archaeologists dug a trench in which they discovered an adult skeleton (TB1) who had “the distal third of their left lower leg surgically amputated.” The scientists write in their paper that the amputation most probably occurred when the person was a child and that they lived for another 6–9 years after the operation. And dating to “at least 31,000 years ago” this find changes everything that was previously assumed about the origins of surgical procedures.
Surgically amputated site of the left tibia and fibula showing the evidence of amputation.
The Liang Tebo cave skeleton’s limb amputation suggests groups of modern humans foraging in Asia “had developed sophisticated medical knowledge and skills long before the Neolithic farming transition,” according to the new Nature study. The paper says the surgical amputation of TB1’s left lower leg 31,000 years ago “has important implications for our understanding of the evolution of pre-Holocene (the last 11,700 years) human medico-socio-cultural practices.” Until now, scientists generally assumed that complex surgical procedures like this were way beyond the capabilities of foraging cultures .
What is perhaps most interesting about this discovery is that until about 100 years ago in Western medicine, successful surgical amputations without antibiotics generally resulted in blood infections and often death. But in the 31,000-year-old case of TB1, the new study implies that “the Late Pleistocene ‘surgeon(s)’ who amputated this individual’s lower left leg must have possessed detailed knowledge “of limb anatomy and muscular and vascular systems to have prevented fatal blood loss and infection.”
Artist ‘s impression of Tebo1, the oldest amputee on record. The individual had their lower left leg amputated as a child and survived into early adulthood in an artistic community 31,000 years ago in Borneo, Indonesia.
Now that the “great assumption” about Neolithic tech has been shattered, some new assertions are being made based on the discovery of the 31,000-year-old amputee.
The ancient surgeons must have used plants (and perhaps maggots) to clean, dress and disinfect the man’s severed leg wound. They must also have administered some kind of pain relief while controlling their patient’s temperature, diet and recovery movements, to have prevented post-op infection.
Furthermore, the fact that the man recovered after the amputation in what is a very challenging karst stone terrain suggests a very caring community of people looked after him after the operation, and for the rest of his life.
The scientists concluded their paper by suggesting early human colonists in what are today the rainforests of Borneo were challenged by the warmer and much more humid climate. Experiencing an increase in wound infections the people responded by making rapid advances “in medical technology.” Thus, they must have developed new pharmaceuticals from the bountiful and biodiverse environment in which they lived as hunter-gatherers.
Top image:Left: Liang Tebo burial features of the 29000-BC amputee of Borneo, Indonesia: a) A single adult inhumation (TB1); the skull is to the right of the scale bar; Middle: Artist ‘s impression of Tebo1, the oldest amputee on record; Right: Surgically amputated site of the left tibia and fibula showing the evidence of amputation.
Source: Maloney, et al. / Nature; Jose Garcia ( Garciartist) and Griffith University / Nature; Maloney, et al. / Nature
MYTHISCH VERZONKEN EILANDENRIJK BIJ WALES BESTOND WELLICHT ECHT: OUDE LANDKAART KOMT OVEREEN MET BODEMVONDSTEN
MYTHISCH VERZONKEN EILANDENRIJK BIJ WALES BESTOND WELLICHT ECHT: OUDE LANDKAART KOMT OVEREEN MET BODEMVONDSTEN
Jeannette Kras
Verdwenen eilanden die in oude literatuur worden beschreven, spreken ook nu nog tot de verbeelding. Zo zijn er twee eilanden voor de westkust van Wales die op een belangrijke landkaart uit de Middeleeuwen zijn weergegeven en die opduiken in de lokale folklore en poëzie.
Het is heel aannemelijk dat deze eilanden echt hebben bestaan, maar door de zee zijn opgeslokt ergens rond de zestiende eeuw na Christus. Wetenschappers hebben nieuw bewijsmateriaal gevonden en dat aan elkaar gekoppeld. Daarmee wordt er meer bekend over de mogelijke evolutie van de kustlijn van West-Wales.
Op basis van geologische gegevens en een middeleeuwse landkaart maken onderzoekers van de Universiteit van Swansea en de Universiteit van Oxford een reconstructie van het ontstaan en de ondergang van de twee mythische eilanden die waarschijnlijk niet ver van de Britse kust af hebben gelegen en mogelijk generaties lang bewoond zijn door mensen. Er werd in de folklore gesproken over Cantre’r Gwaelod (‘The Lowland Hundred’), een gezonken koninkrijk.
De studie is geïnspireerd op de Gough Map, de oudste bewaard gebleven kaart van Groot-Brittannië. Deze bijzondere kaart vindt waarschijnlijk zijn oorsprong in de dertiende eeuw na Christus en wordt bewaard in de Bodleian Library van de Universiteit van Oxford.
Vergaan eilandrijk De middeleeuwse cartografen verantwoordelijk voor de Gough Map gingen uiterst zorgvuldig te werk. De kaart toont twee eilanden in Cardigan Bay in het westen van Wales, die niet meer bestaan. Elk eiland is afgebeeld op ongeveer een kwart van de grootte van het eiland Anglesey in Noord-Wales. De ene ligt tussen Aberystwyth en Aberdovey en de andere tussen Aberdovey en Barmouth in het noorden.
De studie, gepubliceerd in vakblad Atlantic Geoscience, onderzoekt cultuurhistorische bronnen en geologisch bewijs van de kustlijn en de zeebodem. Zo komen de wetenschappers tot een model van hoe de kust is geëvolueerd sinds de laatste ijstijd, die ongeveer tienduizend jaar geleden eindigde. Al met al biedt het team een plausibele verklaring voor de ‘verloren’ eilanden.
Gletsjerafzettingen en erosiekrachten De eilanden zouden de overblijfselen zijn geweest van laaggelegen land dat bedekt was met relatief zachte gletsjerafzettingen, die zijn ontstaan tijdens de laatste ijstijd. In de duizenden jaren daarna heeft erosie het land uitgesleten en bleven de eilanden over, waarna die rond de zestiende eeuw ook waren weggesleten en verdwenen.
Wanneer fijnere sedimenten van gletsjerafzettingen in de loop van de tijd door erosie verdwijnen, blijven het grovere grind en de keien op de zeebodem achter. De ligging van de eilanden valt samen met de locatie van onderzeese ophopingen van grind en keien, die lokaal ook wel ‘sarns’ worden genoemd.
Ptolemaeus “We weten dat de kust van West-Wales in de loop van de tijd aanzienlijk is veranderd. Bewijs van de Romeinse cartograaf Ptolemaeus suggereert dat de kustlijn tweeduizend jaar geleden misschien zo’n dertien kilometer verder in zee lag dan nu het geval is”, legt professor Simon Haslett van Swansea University uit. “De Gough Map is buitengewoon nauwkeurig als je bedenkt welke primitieve middelen de middeleeuwse cartografen slechts tot hun beschikking hadden. De makers hebben de twee eilanden duidelijk gemarkeerd op de landkaart.”
Eerste klimaatvluchtelingen “Dit onderzoek vergroot ons begrip van de mogelijke processen die langs de kust van Cardigan Bay plaatsvonden en die ertoe hebben geleid dat het er nu zo uitziet. Het kan ook helpen bij toekomstig onderzoek naar de postglaciale evolutie van vergelijkbare laaglanden in andere delen van Noordwest-Europa”, vertelt Haslett.
“Het begrijpen van de kustlijndynamiek is nog nooit zo belangrijk geweest. Sommige steden in het gebied dat we hebben bestudeerd, zijn extra kwetsbaar voor klimaatverandering. Het zou goed kunnen dat dit gaat leiden tot de eerste klimaatvluchtelingen in het Verenigd Koninkrijk”, aldus de onderzoeker.
The Lowland Hundred Onderzoeker professor David Willis van de Universiteit van Oxford voegt hier nog aan toe: “Ons bewijsmateriaal biedt een verklaring voor het ontstaan van het verhaal van Cantre’r Gwaelod (‘The Lowland Hundred’). Dit verloren land zou in een ver verleden verwoest zijn door een catastrofale overstroming. Er wordt in de middeleeuwse poëzie naar verwezen in het Black Book of Carmarthen en neemt ook in latere folklore een belangrijke plaats in.” Hoe bijzonder is het dat dit eilandenrijk niet alleen in sprookjes, maar wellicht ook in het echt heeft bestaan.
HET REGENT DIAMANTEN OP NEPTUNUS WAARDOOR NIEUWE IJSSOORT ONTSTAAT: HET BIZARRE SUPERHETE ZWARTE IJS
HET REGENT DIAMANTEN OP NEPTUNUS WAARDOOR NIEUWE IJSSOORT ONTSTAAT: HET BIZARRE SUPERHETE ZWARTE IJS
Jeannette Kras
Het regent diamanten, niet op aarde helaas, wel op Neptunus en Uranus. Volgens een nieuwe studie komen diamantregens zelfs nog vaker voor dan gedacht.
De wetenschappers ontdekten dat zuurstof de vorming van diamantregen stimuleert. Ook vonden ze bewijs dat door de diamanten een hele vreemde toestand van water zou kunnen ontstaan, die wordt omschreven als ‘superheet, zwart ijs’.
Dit superionische ijs ontstaat onder hoge druk en hoge temperaturen. Onder deze extreme omstandigheden breken watermoleculen uit elkaar en vormen zuurstofatomen een kristalrooster waarin de waterstofkernen vrij rondzweven. Omdat deze vrij zwevende kernen elektrisch geladen zijn, kan superionisch water elektrische stroom geleiden en de ongebruikelijke magnetische velden op Uranus en Neptunus verklaren.
Zwart, zwaar en superheet ijs Een zwart ijsblokje is vier keer zo zwaar als een gewoon ijsblokje en heeft een temperatuur van duizenden graden Celsius. Deze vorm van water is misschien wel een van de meest voorkomende in het universum. De kernen van ijsreuzen als Neptunus en soortgelijke exoplaneten zouden weleens vol kunnen zitten met het zwarte goedje.
De studie, die in Science Advances verscheen, simuleert de omstandigheden op ijsreuzen door in het laboratorium met een enorm sterke laser op een stuk PET-plastic te schieten. Wonderlijk genoeg lijken deze processen chemisch gezien erg op elkaar en ontstaan er op deze manier nanodiamantjes en superionisch ijs. De bevindingen vormen een basis voor een nieuwe manier om nanodiamanten te fabriceren, die nuttig zijn voor het toedienen van medicijnen, om medische sensoren te maken, voor niet-invasieve chirurgie, duurzame productie en kwantumelektronica.
Schieten op plastic In het vorige experiment bestudeerden de onderzoekers een plastic materiaal gemaakt van een mengsel van waterstof en koolstof, belangrijke componenten van de algehele chemische samenstelling van Neptunus en Uranus. Maar naast koolstof en waterstof bevatten de ijsreuzen ook andere elementen, zoals grote hoeveelheden zuurstof.
In het meer recente experiment gebruikten de onderzoekers PET-plastic – vaak gebruikt in voedselverpakkingen, plastic flessen en containers – om de samenstelling van deze planeten nauwkeuriger te reproduceren. “PET heeft een goede balans tussen koolstof, waterstof en zuurstof om de activiteit in ijsplaneten te simuleren”, zegt Dominik Kraus, professor aan de Universiteit van Rostock.
Schokgolf Er werd dus met een laser op een dun vel PET-plastic geschoten. De sterke laserflitsen die het folie-achtige materiaal raakten, verhitten het kort tot 6000 graden Celsius en genereerden zo een schokgolf die de materie gedurende enkele nanoseconden tot miljoenen keren de atmosferische druk comprimeerde. De wetenschappers konden vaststellen dat kleine diamanten, zogenaamde nanodiamanten, zich onder extreme druk vormden.
“Het effect van de zuurstof was een versnelling van de splitsing van koolstof en waterstof om zo de vorming van nanodiamanten te stimuleren”, zei Kraus. “Het betekende dat de koolstofatomen gemakkelijker konden combineren en diamanten konden vormen.”
De onderzoekers voorspellen dat diamanten op Neptunus en Uranus veel groter worden dan de nanodiamanten die in deze experimenten werden geproduceerd. In de loop van duizenden jaren zouden de diamanten langzaam door de ijslagen van de planeten kunnen zinken en samenkomen in een dikke laag rond de vaste planetaire kern. Het team vond ook bewijs dat zich in combinatie met de diamanten superionisch water zou kunnen vormen, ook wel ‘heet, zwart ijs’ genoemd.
Veel ijsreuzen De bevindingen kunnen ook van invloed zijn op ons begrip van planeten in verre sterrenstelsels, te meer omdat wetenschappers nu denken dat ijsreuzen de meest voorkomende planeten buiten ons zonnestelsel zijn. “We weten dat de kern van de aarde voornamelijk uit ijzer bestaat, maar veel experimenten onderzoeken nog steeds hoe de aanwezigheid van lichtere elementen de omstandigheden van smelting en andere faseovergangen kan veranderen”, zegt onderzoeker Silvia Pandolfi. “Ons experiment laat zien hoe deze elementen de omstandigheden kunnen veranderen waarin diamanten zich vormen op ijsreuzen. Als we planeten nauwkeurig willen modelleren, moeten we zo dicht mogelijk bij de werkelijke samenstelling van de planeten komen.”
Ruwe diamanten Het onderzoek helpt ons niet alleen om andere planeten beter te begrijpen, het is ook een stap vooruit in de productie van nanodiamanten op aarde. “De manier waarop nanodiamanten momenteel worden gemaakt, is door een hoop koolstof of diamant te nemen en die op te blazen met explosieven”, zegt wetenschapper Benjamin Ofori-Okai. “Dit creëert nanodiamanten van verschillende groottes en vormen en is moeilijk te controleren. Wat we in dit experiment zien, is een andere reactiviteit van dezelfde soort diamant onder hoge temperatuur en druk. In sommige gevallen lijken de diamanten sneller gevormd te worden dan in andere gevallen, wat suggereert dat de aanwezigheid van de andere chemicaliën dit proces kan versnellen. Laserproductie zou een schonere en gemakkelijker gecontroleerde methode kunnen zijn om nanodiamanten te produceren. Als we manieren kunnen bedenken om sommige dingen aan de reactiviteit te veranderen, kunnen we ook veranderen hoe snel ze vorm krijgen en dus hoe groot ze worden.”
Ethanol Vervolgonderzoek is al in de maak: de onderzoekers willen soortgelijke experimenten uitvoeren met vloeibare monsters die ethanol, water en ammoniak bevatten – waar Uranus en Neptunus voor een groot gedeelte uit zijn opgebouwd – waardoor ze nog beter kunnen begrijpen hoe de diamantregen precies ontstaat op andere planeten.
Human and Neanderthal brains were roughly the same size.
Credit: Adapted from Alamy
More than 500,000 years ago, the ancestors of Neanderthals and modern humans were migrating around the world when a fateful genetic mutation caused some of their brains to suddenly improve. This mutation, researchers report in Science1,2, dramatically increased the number of brain cells in the hominins that preceded modern humans, probably giving them a cognitive advantage over their Neanderthal cousins.
“This is a surprisingly important gene,” says Arnold Kriegstein, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco. However, he expects that it will turn out to be one of many genetic tweaks that gave humans an evolutionary advantage over other hominins. “I think it sheds a whole new light on human evolution.”
When researchers first fully sequenced a Neanderthal genome in 20143, they identified 96 amino acids — the building blocks that make up proteins — that differ between Neanderthals and modern humans in addition to a number of other genetic tweaks. Scientists have been studying this list to learn which of these helped modern humans to outcompete Neanderthals and other hominins.
Cognitive advantage
To neuroscientists Anneline Pinson and Wieland Huttner at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, one gene stood out. The gene, TKTL1, encodes a protein that is made when a fetus’s brain is first developing. A single genetic mutation in the human version of TKTL1 changed one amino acid, resulting in a protein that is different from those found in hominin ancestors, Neanderthals and non-human primates.
The team suspected that this protein could be driving neural progenitor cells — which develop into neurons — to proliferate as the brain develops, specifically in an area called the neocortex, which is involved in cognitive function. That, they reasoned, could be a contributor to modern humans’ cognitive advantage over human ancestors.
To test this, Pinson and her team inserted either the human or ancestral version of TKTL1 into the brains of mouse and ferret embryos. The animals with the human gene developed significantly more neural progenitor cells. When the researchers engineered neocortex cells from a human fetus to produce the ancestral version, they found that the fetal tissue produced fewer progenitor cells and fewer neurons than it normally would. The same was true when they inserted the ancestral version of TKTL1 into brain organoids — mini-brain-like structures grown from human stem cells.
Brain size
Fossil records suggest that human and Neanderthal brains were roughly the same size, meaning that the neocortices of modern humans are either denser or take up a larger portion of the brain. Huttner and Pinson say that they were surprised that such a small genetic change could affect neocortex development so drastically. “It was a coincidental mutation that had enormous consequences,” Huttner says.
Neuroscientist Alysson Muotri at the University of California, San Diego, is more sceptical. He points out that different cell lines behave differently when made into organoids and would like to see the ancestral version of TKTL1 tested in more human cells. Furthermore, he says, the original Neanderthal genome was compared with that of a modern European — human populations in other parts of the world might share some genetic variants with Neanderthals.
Pinson says that the Neanderthal version of TKTL1 is very rare among modern humans, adding that it’s unknown whether it causes any disease or cognitive differences. The only way to prove that it has a role in cognitive function, Huttner says, would be to genetically engineer mice or ferrets that always have the human form of the gene and test their behaviour compared with animals that have the ancestral version. Pinson says she is now planning to look further into the mechanisms through which TKTKL1 drives the birth of brain cells.
Repair Work Underway, Preparations Continue for Next Launch Opportunity
Repair Work Underway, Preparations Continue for Next Launch Opportunity
NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket is seen at Launch Pad 39B Thursday, Sept. 8, 2022, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida as teams work to replace the seal on an interface, called the quick disconnect, between the liquid hydrogen fuel feed line on the mobile launcher and the rocket.
Photo Credit: (NASA/Chad Siwik)
Engineers are making progress repairing the area where a liquid hydrogen leak was detected during the Artemis I launch attempt Sept. 3, and NASA is preserving options for the next launch opportunity as early as Friday, Sept. 23.
Technicians constructed a tent-like enclosure around the work area to protect the hardware and teams from weather and other environmental conditions at Launch Pad 39B. They have disconnected the ground- and rocket-side plates on the interface, called a quick disconnect, for the liquid hydrogen fuel feed line, performed initial inspections, and began replacing two seals – one surrounding the 8-inch line used to fill and drain liquid hydrogen from the core stage, and another surrounding the 4-inch bleed line used to redirect some of the propellant during tanking operations. The SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft are in good condition while remaining at the launch pad.
Once the work is complete, engineers will reconnect the plates and perform initial tests to evaluate the new seals. Teams will check the new seals under cryogenic, or supercold, conditions no earlier than Sept. 17 in which the rocket’s core stage and interim cryogenic propulsion stage will be loaded with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen to validate the repair under the conditions it would experience on launch day. Engineers are in the process of developing a full plan for the checkouts.
NASA has submitted a request to the Eastern Range for an extension of the current testing requirement for the flight termination system. NASA is respecting the range’s processes for review of the request, and the agency continues to provide detailed information to support a range decision.
In the meantime, NASA is instructing the Artemis team to move forward with all preparations required for testing, followed by launch, including preparations to ensure adequate supplies of propellants and gases used in tanking operations, as well as flight operations planning for the mission. NASA has requested the following launch opportunities:
Sept 23: Two-hour launch window opens at 6:47 a.m. EDT; landing on Oct. 18
Sept. 27: 70-minute launch window opens at 11:37 a.m.; landing on Nov. 5
NASA’s teams internally are preparing to support additional dates in the event flexibility is required. The agency will evaluate and adjust launch opportunities and alternate dates based on progress at the pad and to align with other planned activities, including DART’s planned impact with an asteroid, the west coast launch of a government payload, and the launch of Crew-5 to the International Space Station.
Listen to a replay of today’s media teleconference on the status of the Artemis I mission. Artemis I is an uncrewed flight test to provide a foundation for human exploration in deep space and demonstrate our commitment and capability to extend human existence to the Moon and beyond.
Disk Shaped UFO Sighted Over Freeway In Los Angeles, California. September 3, 2022
This footage was captured while the witness was driving along the freeway and he took three quick videos and upload them to Instagram. In the footage we can see what looks like a disk shaped UFO just cruising along to the shock of the witness. This was sighted over Los Angeles, California on September 3, 2022 around 9:30am
Thanks to 19th Galaxy for allowing me the use of this footage and to view the original:
UFOs Sighted From The ISS, SpaceX & Bogotá, Colombia. As Seen On The Live Show. September 7, 2022
Guys, This video i did without me talking as these are some of the footages i've showed on my live show so if you would like to hear my opinions on the footages please check out the show:
Clip 1.This was sighted durning the Russian cosmonauts spacewalk on September 2, 2022 and in the footage this object comes into view with the camera operater asking "What is that object?" and following the UFO with the camera until it's out of view. Go to the 7.22.55 to 7.27.55 mark in the video to see and hear.
Clip 2.This object was spotted durning the SpaceX launch of 51 Starlink satellites Sunday, September 4, 2022 at 10:09 p.m. This UFO flies past the rocket but could this be more ice? Go to 22:44 mark in the video and have a look.
Strange UFO Seen in Shakopee, Minnesota, Sept 2022 👽
Video shared on Reddit by Smencil and filmed on September 3, 2022 at 5:46PM in Shakopee, Minnesota. There’s more to say, more to explore together and we invite you now to join this new journey with us on Section 51 ! Subscribe now !
New UFO Video allegedly declassified by the Pentagon
"The Pentagon has declassified a new video from 4/24/19 involving the USS Zumwalt, detecting six unidentified objects on it, including one crossed the deck according to the report. Spokeswoman Susan Gough announced that they have no information about its origin."
UFO Lights in Austria, Feb 2015
Video shared on Instagram and filmed in Gesause National Park in Austria in February 2015. No further information...
Strange Lights in the Sky, USA, July 2021
Video shared on Reddit by Shibby_Laterr187 and filmed in USA, uploaded on Odysee in July 2021. No further information...
The UFO Lie: Shocking truth of Pentagon AAWSAP program | The Basement Office
Everything you were told is wrong. In 2017, the New York Times released a bombshell story revealing AATIP, the Pentagon's "UFO program" and Lue Elizondo, the director of that program.
It proclaimed a shocking truth:
UFOs are real. Since then, that story has been reprinted hundreds and thousands of times across the world and Mr. Elizondo has reached the status of cultural icon. But we've since learned that the whole story... was wrong. In this episode, we reveal the real story of the Pentagon's AAWSAP program - led by scientist James Lacatski - and it's even crazier than you could possibly imagine: $22 million in taxpayer money spent on werewolves, ghosts, goblins, and "dinobeavers" at the infamous Skinwalker Ranch in Utah. But UFO advocates, who are currently lobbying Congress to spend money on UFO investigations, hope you never find out about that. | Season 3, Episode 1
Hi folks, I work hard to put these videos together everyday and all I ask is that you take a moment to "like", "share" and or "subscribe" to the channel. Thank you so much, UFO Video Addicts
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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 73 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.