UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

On November 16, 1974 SETI researchers at the Arecibo radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, beamed a message into space. They fired it toward Messier 13, a globular cluster in the Hercules constellation, which rests 25,000 light years away.

The message composed by Dr. Frank Drake, Carl Sagan, and other scientists, was conveyed using frequency modulated radio waves, converting it into a three minute binary transmission consisting of roughly 210 bytes.

The transmission produced an image and when decoded, the message provides the following information:

Numbers from 1 to 10

The atomic numbers of the elements that form deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)

The formulas for the sugars and bases in the nucleotides of DNA

The number of nucleotides in DNA, and the double helix structure

A human figure, the physical dimensions of an average man, and the human population of Earth

A representation of the Solar System

A graphic of the Arecibo radio telescope and the dimensions of the transmitting antenna dish

The signal was a million times stronger than the typical TV transmission. 27 years later in 2001, we did receive a response!

On August 21, 2001 two crop circles popped up near the Chilbolton Observatory in Hampshire, UK.

One resembled a human face but the other has since dubbed the "Arecibo Answer," as it contains a format nearly identical to the original 1974 transmission, albeit with a few changes.

Crop circle: "Arecibo Answer"

The response, when decoded, leaves us with several differences.

Most interestingly, however, is another message encoded within a crop circle (known as the Crabwood formation) that appeared in 2002, also in Hampshire, UK. This particular crop circle contains the image of an extraterrestrial along with a circle, or disc, containing yet another binary message. The message decoded using 8-bit binary ASCII code.

When you open up Johns Hopkins University Professor Brice Ménard's "map of the observable universe," you're met with a geometric diagram overflowing with thousands of rainbow freckles, each neatly organized by color. At the bottom of this diagram lies an unnerving phrase.

"You are here."

One negligible, barely visible dot on this graph represents our entire Milky Way galaxy -- a realm with billions of stars besides our own sun, and one we occupy such a small percentage of I don't even want to attempt writing it out.

With a single pixel, Ménard stunningly puts into perspective the cosmic brevity of everything we've ever truly known as human beings.

"This map, representing galaxies just as little dots, allows the viewer to basically understand different scales at the same time," Ménard said in an overview of the interactive mechanism. "Seeing the vastness of the universe -- it's quite inspiring."

Scrolling around the 200,000 galaxies in the map -- placed in accurate, relative positions to one another -- is calming because it reframes how inconsequential the footprint we place in the universe is. It's disturbing for precisely the same reason.

It draws a distinct parallel with Carl Sagan's famous quote about Voyager 1's breathtaking image of Earth from 1990, "Pale Blue Dot."

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us," Sagan said. "On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there -- on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

Voyager 1's 1990

A 2020 remaster of Voyager 1's 1990 "pale blue dot" image showing Earth as tiny speck in space.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Though if you're blown away by the deceptively concise magnitude of Ménard's map, consider how it doesn't even account for every galaxy in the universe. In reality, NASA estimates there are something like a hundred billion galaxies unfolding eternities beyond our own.

We'd need an unfathomable level of observable universe cartography to encapsulate the full breadth of the cosmos.

Slice of our universe

Along with a cadre of scientists, Ménard used data mined over two decades by what's known as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

"Astrophysicists around the world have been analyzing this data for years, leading to thousands of scientific papers and discoveries," Ménard said. "But nobody took the time to create a map that is beautiful, scientifically accurate, and accessible to people who are not scientists. Our goal here is to show everybody what the universe really looks like."

Once you click "explore the map" under the Milky Way galaxy label, you arrive at a screen prompting you to "scroll up to travel through the universe." That such a sentence even exists underscores just how far technology has come.

"From this speck at the bottom," Ménard said, "we are able to map out galaxies across the entire universe, and that says something about the power of science."

Different colored dots overflow on this diagram, each representing a galaxy in our universe.

A slice of our universe as seen with Ménard's interactive map.

Johns Hopkins University

Even more impressive is how, as you follow the prompt, a ticker at the bottom left of the screen shows you how many billions of years back in time you've scrolled. Meanwhile, the dots go from gradients of pale blues to yellows to oranges to reds, ultimately retreating to a cool midnight hue.

"Each dot is a galaxy shown with its apparent color," the page reads. "Spiral galaxies are faint and blue. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a blue spiral."

Elliptical galaxies are shown as yellowish and brighter, while reddened speckles indicate realms that have grown distant enough for the light they emanate to stretch and appear to us on Earth as crimson blurs.

Here's an illustration showing what redshift basically does to the light coming from galaxies moving away from Earth.

NASA/JPL-Caltech//R. Hurt (Caltech-IPAC)

Further back 9 billion years, the map exhibits vivid blue spots to represent quasars rather than galaxies. These are extreme jets of light spewing out from the guts of black holes sitting at the center of certain galaxies.

Basically, it's really hard to see galaxies from this era of cosmic history, reddened to the point of near-invisibility, but quasars are bright enough to act like flashlights. Their brilliance shines across the universe, revealing scenes otherwise shielded by darkness and softened with distance.

But beyond even those quasars lies a splotch of blackness -- evocative of the mysteries lurking beyond the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum. Infrared waters.

"We encounter an epoch during which the universe is filled with hydrogen gas that prevents the propagation of visible light we could observe today. This epoch is called the "dark ages,'" the page reads.

NASA's magnificent James Webb Space Telescope is such a big deal because it's built to find secrets hidden in this region invisible to human eyes. Constructed with an army of high-tech infrared sensors, it's working on detecting galaxies from near the beginning of time stuck in a limbo we cannot see with our minds or machines.

With each Webb discovery, hopefully maps like this one will become populated where their empty spaces currently sit.

And at the very, very top of the page, a marbled photo of the edge of the observable universe. The first flash of light emitted post-Big Bang, nearly 14 billion years ago. The Cosmic Microwave Background.

"We cannot see anything beyond this point," the map concludes after you scroll back to the beginning of existence. "The light travel time to us is greater than the age of the universe."

UFOs seem to show up in all areas of the world, and one intriguing area whre they seem to constantly orbit is military air bases. It is not really known why this should be, but air bases all over the world have reported all manner of strange things in the sky. Here we will look at a selection of such cases that went on over the country of Japan.

One early series of reports come from the year 1947, where two air bases in Japan had several incidents, beginning with one on July 1, 1947, at Chitose AAB, on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. One this day, radar operators picked up what was indicated as two very fast moving objects that were similar in size to a fighter plane. The objects at one point seemed to merge into one, after which they broke apart into separate objects once again. It was also noted that the speed was beyond what one would expect from a conventional aircraft. A report from James F. Olive, Colonel, G.S.C. and Chief, Air Intelligence Division would say of the objects and their movements in a memorandum:

A target was picked up 16 miles north of the base on a course of 180 degrees. (Point A’). The GCA unit immediately called the tower and asked if any aircraft were operating north of the field. At this instant of this radio transmission, the target reversed course to 360 degrees and was tracked out to a range of 28 miles (Point 3′). The target then changed course to 240 degrees arid was tracked out 6 miles. (Point C’) where it again reversed course to 060 degrees and returned to the original point 28 miles north of the base (Point 3′). The target then changed course to 360 degrees and faded out of range.

The speed indicated in the report seems unreasonable for piloted aircraft since it was well into the supersonic range. The target, if an aircraft, would require an extremely large fuel supply for this speed. If rocket propelled, it is hard to visualize its operation for a long enough period of time to enable it to return to its base. The cable report of this last sighting indicated that further details, including weather, would follow. Upon receipt of this information a better evaluation may be possible. Present information does not permit a definite evaluation that the objects reported were either aircraft or airborne missiles but does support the conclusion that they were not natural phenomena.

That same year there was a series of similar incidents, this time at the MEW Radar Station, in Fukuoka, Japan. The first was on August 28, 1947, when radar picked up a high-speed unidentified target that made several sharp turns and aerial maneuvers before suddenly climbing at a rapid pace and disappearing. The following month, on September 16 another such object was picked up speeding in on an incoming course, after which it did a sharp turn and “faded out.” It was suggested at the time that this all may have just been misidentified weather phenomena, but General Olive would remark in his memorandum:

Preliminary conclusions based on the above information indicates that great stress was given by the reporting agency to the high degree of proficiency of the radar operators and controllers in each case. An operator of even moderate proficiency would have no trouble in differentiating between a target and weather phenomena. Frontal activity as seen on a radar screen would show depth while the reflection from a meteor exists for such a short period of time that it would probably not be distinguishable from static interference. Therefore, it appears that the incidents are not due to natural phenomena.

What was going on here? Were these misidentified conventional aircraft, weather phenomena, or something else? On August 5, 1952, there was a strange incident at the Haneda US Air Force Base. At just before midnight on this evening, two Air Force control tower operators at the base noticed a very brilliant bright light in the sky that approached the base slowly and hovered, plainly visible from the control tower. It was noted that behind the almost blinding brilliance of the light there could be seen “a dark circular shape four times the light’s diameter.” This object then performed several curves and aerial maneuvers, all while being tracked by ground radar. It was strange enough that an F-94 interceptor was scrambled, piloted by a 1st Lieutenant W.R. Holder. The fighter chased the UFO while ground radar kept tracking it, and the object went into a series of circular maneuvers, at one point putting on a burst of speed clocked at 300 knots (about 345 mph), before dividing into three separate objects and speeding off. The incident was witnessed by numerous base personnel, as well as local residents, but an investigation into the UFO phenomena called the Condon Report, came to the conclusion that it was merely a star and an anomalous radar propagation. Ufologists have long disagreed with this official explanation, and ufologist Patrick Gross has said of it:

Project Blue Book, the official public UFO study by the US Air Force concluded that the UFO belongs to the category “unknown,” the euphemism that meant that it could not be anything common. The UFO maneuvers were so clearly under intelligent control that Major Dewey Fournet, the representative of Project Blue Book at the Pentagon, elected it one of the example that would prove that UFOs are spaceships from some other planet. Subsequently the study of UFO maneuvers to prove they are spaceships was simply dropped. Later, the Colorado Project, a skeptical UFO study effort conducted for the USAF that did not want to deal with the UFO problem anymore, minimized the details of the sighting. The visual UFO was reduced to “a light that looked like a star” and the radar track which was obviously the track of an intelligent controlled craft was reduced to “false radar echoes caused by a temperature inversion layer. Professor James McDonald, a world famous specialist of meteorology and atmospheric physics, who disagreed with the handling of UFO cases by the Condon Report, re-evaluated and re-investigated the case and demonstrated how erroneous the Condon Report conclusion on this case – and on many other cases – was.

Another case comes to us from Naha Air Base at Naha, on the Japanese island of Okinawa. On June 26, 1963, two base personnel were on watch duty and were looking up at the stars when their typical boring night got interested when they sighted something very strange in the sky. One of the witnesses would say of it:

It looked like nothing we had ever seen before. I positioned my binoculars for a better look. We did not use the term “UFO” at that point, but we knew the craft we saw did not match anything in the Air Force’s aircraft inventory. We saw a large, slow-moving disk traveling in a steady northerly direction–right smack over our base. We did not see the usual flashing navigation lights or red and green wing-tip lights. All pilots who fly at night must have their aircraft’s navigation lights turned on. It was not just an unusual cloud formation, flares or a weather balloon. In the Air Force, working as communications specialists at control towers and around busy flight lines, Frank and I became knowledgeable about most types of aircraft in the military inventory. It traveled at an estimated speed of one hundred knots. The craft held a steady altitude of three or four thousand feet. It had a diameter of about seventy-five feet. We saw no antennae, dome, windows or markings. It was silent and produced no engine noise. Having a disk shape, it looked as flat as a quarter. The craft’s outer surface appeared smooth, constructed of a dull, yet reflective metallic material. Its outer edges appeared razor thin.

The two witnesses were unsettled by the object, and feared that it might turn in their direction, yet despite how scared they were they had the strange compulsion to keep on watching it. The object ended up veering away from them, much to their relief, and they then climbed up the building’s fire ladder to gain access to the roof to get a better view of it. The witness explains of what happened next:

I had an eerie feeling that we were about to place ourselves in a vulnerable position on the roof. However, seeing it continued to move farther away from us, our first fear that alien creatures might spot us subsided. Raising my binoculars again, I noticed that it had reflected a noticeable degree of light coming from Naha City, found a few miles to the north of our base. We watched it until it faded away out of sight. The entire sighting lasted for about two and one-half minutes. “We’ve got to tell someone,” Frank said. After scrambling down the fire ladder, we sprinted to a staircase leading to the first floor. We reached the C.Q. or Charge of Quarters room to use the barracks phone. We had to tell someone in authority. By then, Frank had begun to hyperventilate. I told him to sit down in a chair and stay calm while I called the base control tower operator.

The minutes seemed like hours. We were dripping wet since the temperature inside barracks was at least ninety degrees and the humidity at ninety-eight percent. My imagination went into overdrive as I waited for Bernard to come back on the line. I thought that at any moment we would hear the roar of afterburners from our F-102 jet fighters as they went scrambling into the sky in pursuit of whatever it was that we reported. Perhaps the Base Commander would come on the line to ask us for more details about the sighting. We might soon hear the shrill of the base’s alert sirens followed by the sight of speeding trucks carrying frantic troops to their battle positions.

The radar operators would inform them that they had picked up nothing, and could not confirm that there was anything in the air at the time of the sighting. It was suggested to them that they file an Unidentified Aircraft Report, but the witnesses declined, wary of making such a report without any corroborating evidence to back it up. They sort of just tried to let it go and put it out of their minds, and in the meantime they took to watching the skies in the following weeks hoping to see whatever it was again. At fist there was nothing, but then it seems as if the strange object made a reappearance

My hopes of seeing it again began to fade after several weeks. However, just as I started to think the earlier sighting was just a onetime fly-by, I saw it again. Returning to my barracks from a second shift tour at the Communications Center, I decided to relax for a while. I sat in a chair on the second floor outside landing. Propping my feet up onto a railing, I began reminiscing about the first sighting. Since I was alone, the thought scared the hell out of me. Just before 1:00 a.m. I was about to call it a night when it reappeared. A craft similar to the type Frank and I saw one month earlier. In an instant, my mind switched from a relaxed state to one of “fight or flight.” My body froze and my adrenaline level skyrocketed. My hair hackled. My heart raced. I could not move my legs. My camera—I left it in my room. In my mind, I calculated the best course of action. There I was, sitting alone in the dark outside my barracks with no one else around, except–what? Common sense soon prevailed. No light beams were shooting down at me from the craft. It became clear that it took no notice of me and was moving northward away from my position. Thank God. After a few seconds, my brain regained control of my body and I was able to move my legs. I stood and took the next logical step, I ran like hell. Sprinting down the long hallway to the center of the barracks to get to the stairs, I thought it best not to look back. I did not.

He wasted no time at all in contacting the control tower, after which three different radar sites scanning the island’s airspace were checked. Once again, no radar confirmation could be obtained, and he was told that there had been nothing in the air as he had described. Once again he was told to fill out a report, and once again he declined to do so, thinking no one would believe him without proof. In the end, we are left without any real proof for any of them, and we are left to wonder. What was going on here? Why were these seemingly otherworldly forces drawn to these places? Is there anything to this at all, or is it all misunderstandings and figments of the imagination? It remains to be seen.