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 NEARLY 13 YEARS AND 4 MONTH.
ON /30/09/2024 MORE THAN 2.230.520
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...
30-12-2023
EXCLUSIVEA bird, plane... or a UFO? Woman spots illuminous 'Tic-Tac' shaped object from her kitchen in Stockport - but experts think there might be a simple explanation
EXCLUSIVE - A bird, plane... or a UFO? Woman spots illuminous 'Tic-Tac' shaped object from her kitchen in Stockport - but experts think there might be a simple explanation
Karen Brown, from Stockport, was looking out of her kitchen window when she spotted the unidentified flying object (UFO).
Her photos show the illuminous oblong object – which, at first glance, looks similar to the famous white breath mint – bobbing around over the trees at night in September.
Experts are intrigued by the presence of aerial entities that look like the original 'Tic Tac' UFO seen in 2004 – but there could be a simple explanation.
Karen Brown, from Stockport, was looking out of her kitchen window when she spotted the unidentified flying object (UFO)
Photos show the illuminous entity bobbing around over the trees in the suburb of Heaton Mersey at night time
The first, described as looking like a square or triangle, had a hazy appearance and was changing shape and 'darting around the sky'.
Meanwhile, the second object – a much brighter white in colour and 'shaped like a Tic Tac' – kept vanishing and reappearing.
It's unclear if the 'Tic Tac' sightings by two different people in the same town are of the same object.
Mrs Brown told MailOnline: 'It was very strange that a lady in Stockport saw something at the beginning of October and I saw a similar sighting the beginning of September.'
Its brilliant white colour made it stand out in the British night's sky. It comes nearly two decades after the original 'Tic Tac' UFO was spotted in the US
Mrs Brown said she was 'really intrigued' by the mysterious phenomena which she snapped in Heaton Mersey
Earlier in 2023, a 'concerned citizen' shared her encounter with two unidentified flying objects (UFOs) from her back garden in Stockport
A bizarre face-shaped object changed colour while in the sky
According to the Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) Committee, the matter falls under the remit of UK Space Command, who MailOnline has contacted for comment.
Nick Pope, a UFO expert formerly with the UK's Ministry of Defence, has called the presence of Tic Tac shaped objects in UK skies 'intriguing'.
'Any mention of a Tic Tac-shaped object performing unusual manoeuvres is particularly intriguing given the US Navy sightings of such objects,' he told MailOnline.
Another British UFO researcher, Philip Mantle, said: 'I see no reason why these photos are not of an aircraft or drone'.
'It's basically a light in the distance and the elongated shape is made by the unsteady hand of the photographer,' he told MailOnline.
'Why would two people in consecutive months spot the same thing? Well maybe aircraft are scheduled to take off at certain times and this is the flight path they take.'
When the original Tic Tac UFO was spotted nearly 20 years ago, it marked a seismic shift away from the entities being perceived as simply 'flying saucers'.
US Navy pilots were conducting a routine training mission with the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz off the Southern California coast in November 2004.
Aboard was US Navy Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich, who first noticed an unusual 'churning' of the ocean surface before seeing the Tic Tac UFO.
One of the most famous and unusual UFOs to date, spotted by the US Navy in 2004, was compared with the Tic Tac breath mint due to its white, oblong appearance (pictured)
The smooth, white oblong object flew at high speed over the water, maneuvering and accelerating in ways which seemed to defy the laws of physics.
'It appeared to respond in a way that we didn't recognise', Dietrich told Reuters in 2021, and seemed to lack 'any visible flight control surfaces or means of propulsion'.
'We don't know what it was, but it could have been a natural phenomenon in human activity,' she said. 'But the point was that it was weird, and we couldn't recognise it.'
US Department of Defense – otherwise known as the Pentagon – declined to comment on the recent Tic Tac images in the UK.
However, the usually secretive government branch has been more transparent about what it knows regarding UFOs in recent months.
A Pentagon document published in the summer revealed that the typical UFO has a round shape, usually spherical or an orb, with a white or silver colour.
The world's UFO hotspots are revealed - as Pentagon admits hundreds of objects have been spotted 'all over the world'
The US government is notoriously secretive when it comes to sharing what it knows about extraterrestrial life.
But in a possible bid for transparency, the Department of Defense has released a new document disclosing the 'world's UFO hotspots'.
It includes a map disclosing where the most sightings of unidentified objects have been recorded, based on reports between 1996 and 2023.
The map discloses where the most sightings have been recorded based on reports between 1996 and 2023 - naming Japan and the coasts of the US as particular hotspots
Among them Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan, the east and west coasts of the US including California, as well as parts of the Middle East.
Astronomers Find New Way to Detect Water Oceans and Alien Life on Rocky Exoplanets
Astronomers Find New Way to Detect Water Oceans and Alien Life on Rocky Exoplanets
Planets too close to their star are too hot (such as Venus), those too far, are too cold (like Mars), whereas planets in the habitable zone are just right. Whilst there has been much effort in identifying planets in the theoretical habitable zones of their stars, until now there was no way of knowing whether they truly have liquid water. Now, astronomers from the University of Birmingham, MIT and elsewhere have shown that if an exoplanet has a reduced amount of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere compared to neighboring planets, it suggests there is liquid water on that planet’s surface.
An artist’s impression of the super-Earth planet Ross 508b.
Image credit: Sci.News.
Astronomers have so far detected more than 5,200 extrasolar worlds. With current telescopes, they can directly measure a planet’s distance to its star and the time it takes it to complete an orbit.
Those measurements can help scientists infer whether a planet is within a habitable zone.
But there’s been no way to directly confirm whether a planet is indeed habitable, meaning that liquid water exists on its surface.
Across our own Solar System, astronomers can detect the presence of liquid oceans by observing glints — flashes of sunlight that reflect off liquid surfaces.
These glints, or specular reflections, have been observed, for instance, on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, which helped to confirm the moon’s large lakes.
Detecting a similar glimmer in far-off planets, however, is out of reach with current technologies.
But MIT astronomer Julien de Wit, University of Birmingham astronomer Amaury Triaud and their colleagues realized there’s another habitable feature close to home that could be detectable in distant worlds.
“An idea came to us, by looking at what’s going on with the terrestrial planets in our own system,” Dr. Triaud said.
Venus, Earth, and Mars share similarities, in that all three are rocky and inhabit a relatively temperate region with respect to the Sun.
Earth is the only planet among the trio that currently hosts liquid water. And the researchers noted another obvious distinction: Earth has significantly less carbon dioxide in its atmosphere.
“We assume that these planets were created in a similar fashion, and if we see one planet with much less carbon now, it must have gone somewhere,” Dr. Triaud said.
“The only process that could remove that much carbon from an atmosphere is a strong water cycle involving oceans of liquid water.”
Indeed, the Earth’s oceans have played a major and sustained role in absorbing carbon dioxide.
Over hundreds of millions of years, the oceans have taken up a huge amount of carbon dioxide, nearly equal to the amount that persists in the Venusian atmosphere today.
This planetary-scale effect has left Earth’s atmosphere significantly depleted of carbon dioxide compared to its planetary neighbors.
“On Earth, much of the atmospheric carbon dioxide has been sequestered in seawater and solid rock over geological timescales, which has helped to regulate climate and habitability for billions of years,” said Dr. Frieder Klein, a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
The astronomers reasoned that if a similar depletion of carbon dioxide were detected in a far-off planet, relative to its neighbors, this would be a reliable signal of liquid oceans and life on its surface.
“After reviewing extensively the literature of many fields from biology, to chemistry, and even carbon sequestration in the context of climate change, we believe that indeed if we detect carbon depletion, it has a good chance of being a strong sign of liquid water and/or life,” Dr. de Wit said.
In the study, the researchers lay out a strategy for detecting habitable planets by searching for a signature of depleted carbon dioxide.
Such a search would work best for ‘peas-in-a-pod’ systems, in which multiple terrestrial planets, all about the same size, orbit relatively close to each other, similar to our own Solar System.
The first step the scientists propose is to confirm that the planets have atmospheres, by simply looking for the presence of carbon dioxide, which is expected to dominate most planetary atmospheres.
“Carbon dioxide is a very strong absorber in the infrared, and can be easily detected in the atmospheres of exoplanets,” Dr. de Wit said.
“A signal of carbon dioxide can then reveal the presence of exoplanet atmospheres.”
Once astronomers determine that multiple planets in a system host atmospheres, they can move on to measure their carbon dioxide content, to see whether one planet has significantly less than the others.
If so, the planet is likely habitable, meaning that it hosts significant bodies of liquid water on its surface.
But habitable conditions don’t necessarily mean that a planet is inhabited. To see whether life might actually exist, the authors propose that astronomers look for another feature in a planet’s atmosphere: ozone.
On Earth, plants and some microbes contribute to drawing carbon dioxide, although not nearly as much as the oceans. Nevertheless, as part of this process, the lifeforms emit oxygen, which reacts with the Sun’s photons to transform into ozone, a molecule that is far easier to detect than oxygen itself.
If a planet’s atmosphere shows signs of both ozone and depleted carbon dioxide, it likely is a habitable, and inhabited world.
“If we see ozone, chances are pretty high that it’s connected to carbon dioxide being consumed by life,” Dr. Triaud said.
“And if it’s life, it’s glorious life. It would not be just a few bacteria. It would be a planetary-scale biomass that’s able to process a huge amount of carbon, and interact with it.”
The team estimates that the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope would be able to measure carbon dioxide, and possibly ozone, in nearby, multiplanet systems such as TRAPPIST-1, a seven-planet system that orbits a bright star, just 40 light-years from Earth.
“TRAPPIST-1 is one of only a handful of systems where we could do terrestrial atmospheric studies with Webb,” Dr. de Wit said.
“Now we have a roadmap for finding habitable planets. If we all work together, paradigm-shifting discoveries could be done within the next few years.”
The study was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
A.H.M.J. Triaud et al. Atmospheric carbon depletion as a tracer of water oceans and biomass on temperate terrestrial exoplanets. Nat Astron, published online December 28, 2023; doi: 10.1038/s41550-023-02157-9
UFO appears after plasma twister broke apart from the sun
UFO appears after plasma twister broke apart from the sun
A plasma twister in the sun's northern hemisphere broke apart on December 28, 2023 and hurled a spinning cloud of hot gas into space. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded its escape.
At first glance this tiny cloud may seem inconsequential. However, on its way out of the sun's atmosphere, it triggered magnetic instabilities that turned into a surprisingly large CME. The CME will not hit Earth.
Remarkable, right after the plasma twister's breakup, a substantial unidentified object emerged from the sun and shot into space.
Considering the history of similar objects passing near the sun, which were clearly not charged particles released from the sun we may wonder whether this object could be of extraterrestrial origin and if it could be linked to the earlier disintegration of the plasma twister from the sun?
Organic Molecules Come from the Universe’s Cold Places
Life, as we all know, is based on chemistry. Prebiotic chemical building blocks existed on our planet for a long time before life arose. Astrobiology and cosmochemistry focus on the formation of those building blocks. They also look at the role each played in creating all the life forms we know today.
For a long time, cosmo-chemists have known that organic molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are quite plentiful in the Universe. Scientists consider them plausible prebiotic building blocks that likely played an important role in the formation of life on Earth. What’s not as well understood is their origin story. For a long time, scientists suspected that they formed in regions where temperatures get to around 1000 K. That would supply energy to promote chemical activity to create PAHs, such as in star-forming molecular clouds or circumstellar disks. It’s also possible they form as part of the processing of carbon-rich dust grains by nearby energy sources (such as stars).
However, based on recent studies of an asteroid and meteorite, it turns out that some PAHs formed in cold regions of space, too. In those regions, the temperature does not get much higher than 100 K. That finding opens up new pathways for understanding life’s chemical journey on other planets and celestial bodies.
Understanding These Organic Molecules
According to Professor Kliti Grice, a researcher at the Western Australia Organic and Isotope Geochemistry Centre at Curtin University, understanding these materials is a big step. “PAHs are organic compounds made up of carbon and hydrogen that are common on Earth but are also found in celestial bodies like asteroids and meteorites,” said Grice.
They’re spread throughout the interstellar medium and detected in galaxies across the Universe. Generally, they’re used as a tracer of cold molecular gas, which is where stars—and planets—begin their formation journey.
An image of an interstellar nebula with some polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) molecular structures superimposed. These organic molecules exist throughout the Universe. Courtesy: NASA.
As such, scientists want to trace their path from space to Earth and compare space-based PAHs to Earth-based ones. That’s because PAHs are a very likely precursor to the kinds of materials that eventually lead to the formation of life. That makes their presence on other celestial bodies intriguing as scientists work to understand the formation and evolution of life.
Beyond Earth, PAHs account for about 30 percent of all carbon found in regions around stars, in molecular clouds, and on planets (and other bodies). On Earth, many PAHs exist in coal deposits and oil reservoirs. Plants burning (as in forest fires) also produce these compounds. They work their way into the soil and eventually end up in plants (among other things).
Organic Molecules and Rocky Bodies
Grice is part of an international research team that focused on pieces of asteroid Ryugu and the famous Murchison meteorite to figure out where their PAHs formed. The team started with an unusual chemistry project: burning plants. That’s because plants contain PAHs that form here on Earth. “We performed controlled burn experiments on Australian plants,” said Grice, “which were isotopically compared to PAHs from fragments of the Ryugu asteroid that were returned to Earth by a Japanese spacecraft in 2020, and the Murchison meteorite that landed in Australia in 1969. The bonds between light and heavy carbon isotopes in the PAHs were analyzed to reveal the temperature at which they were formed.”
The Murchison Meteorite, which fell to Earth in 1969. It contains organic molecules. Courtesy Basilicofresco, CC BY-SA 3.0
Using high-tech methods to study Ryugu and Murchison, the team found two sources of PAHs with slightly different characteristics. “The smaller ones likely formed in cold outer space, while bigger ones probably formed in warmer environments, like near a star or inside a celestial body,” according to Grice.
Ryugu is particularly interesting since it formed early in the Solar System’s history. A critical analysis of its chemistry found several PAHs. The team also detected organosulfides (compounds with sulfur). These all likely formed in very cold interstellar clouds. That means they predate the formation of the Solar System, making bits of Ryugu older than the Sun and planets.
PAHs on the Pathway of Life
Why are scientists interested in PAHs? Their role as precursor compounds for life is intriguing. The fact that they can exist out in space opens up avenues of research into life beyond Earth. In addition, their presence gives new insight into the bodies that contain them.
Research team member Dr. Alex Holman said that studying the isotopic composition of PAHs found in celestial bodies offers a glimpse of their formation conditions. “This research gives us valuable insights into how organic compounds form beyond Earth and where they come from in space,” Dr Holman said. Ultimately, in the search for life elsewhere in the Universe, understanding the chemical pathways it takes through different formation environments will be important information.
NASA Tests Out 3D-printed Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine!
Engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, conduct a successful, 251-second hot fire test of a full-scale Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine combustor in fall 2023, achieving more than 5,800 pounds of thrust. Credit: NASA
NASA Tests Out 3D-printed Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine!
Looking to the future, NASA is investigating several technologies that will allow it to accomplish some bold objectives. This includes returning to the Moon, creating the infrastructure that will let us stay there, sending the first crewed mission to Mars, exploring the outer Solar System, and more. This is particularly true of propulsion technologies beyond conventional chemical rockets and engines. One promising technology is the Rotating Detonation Engine(RDE), which relies on one or more detonations that continuously travel around an annular channel.
In a recent hot fire test at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, the agency achieved a new benchmark in developing RDE technology. On September 27th, engineers successfully tested a 3D-printed rotating detonation rocket engine (RDRE) for 251 seconds, producing more than 2,630 kg (5,800 lbs) of thrust. This sustained burn meets several mission requirements, such as deep-space burns and landing operations. NASA recently shared the footage of the RDRE hot fire test (see below) as it burned continuously on a test stand at NASA Marshall for over four minutes.
While RDEs have been developed and tested for many years, the technology has garnered much attention since NASA began researching it for its “Moon to Mars” mission architecture. Theoretically, the engine technology is more efficient than conventional propulsion and similar methods that rely on controlled detonations. The first hot fire test with the RDRE was performed at Marshall in the summer of 2022 in partnership with advanced propulsion developer In Space LLC and Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana.
During that test, the RDRE fired for nearly a minute and produced more than 1815 kg (4,000 lbs) of thrust. According to Thomas Teasley, who leads the RDRE test effort at NASA Marshall, the primary goal of the latest test is to understand better how they can scale the combustor to support different engine systems and maximize the variety of missions they could be used for. This ranges from landers and upper-stage engines to supersonic retropropulsion – a deceleration technique that could land heavy payloads and crewed missions on Mars. As Teasley said in a recent NASA press release:
“The RDRE enables a huge leap in design efficiency. It demonstrates we are closer to making lightweight propulsion systems that will allow us to send more mass and payload further into deep space, a critical component to NASA’s Moon to Mars vision.”
Meanwhile, engineers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center and Houston-based Venus Aerospace are working with NASA Marshall to identify ways to scale the technology for larger mission profiles.
The full, weird story of the quantum world is much too large for a single article, but the period from 1905, when Einstein first published his solution to the photoelectric puzzle, to the 1960’s, when a complete, well-tested, rigorous, and insanely complicated quantum theory of the subatomic world finally emerged, is quite the story.
This quantum theory would come to provide, in its own way, its own complete and total revision of our understanding of light. In the quantum picture of the subatomic world, what we call the electromagnetic force is really the product of countless microscopic interactions, the work of indivisible photons, who interact in mysterious ways. As in, literally mysterious. The quantum framework provides no picture as to how subatomic interactions actually proceed. Rather, it merely gives us a mathematical toolset for calculating predictions. And so while we can only answer the question of how photons actually work with a beleaguered shrug, we are at least equipped with some predictive power, which helps assuage the pain of quantum incomprehensibility.
Doing the business of physics – that is, using mathematical models to make predictions to validate against experiment – is rather hard in quantum mechanics. And that’s because of the simple fact that quantum rules are not normal rules, and that in the subatomic realm all bets are off.
Interactions and processes at the subatomic level are not ruled by the predictability and reliability of macroscopic processes. In the macroscopic world, everything makes sense (largely because we’ve evolved to make sense of the world we live in). I can toss a ball enough times to a child that their brain can quickly pick up on the reliable pattern: the ball leaves my hand, the ball follows an arcing path, the ball moves forward and eventually falls to the ground. Sure, there are variations based on speed and angle and wind, but the basic gist of a tossed ball is the same, every single time.
Not so in the quantum world, where perfect prediction is impossible and reliable statements are lacking. At subatomic scales, probabilities rule the day – it’s impossible to say exactly what any given particle will do at any given moment. And this absence of predictability and reliability at first troubled, and then disgusted, Einstein, who would eventually leave the quantum world behind with nothing more than a regretful shake of his head at the misguided work of his colleagues. And so he continued his labors, attempting to find a unified approach to joining the two known forces of nature, electromagnetism and gravity, with an emphatically not quantum framework.
When two new forces were first proposed in the 1930’s to explain the deep workings of atomic nuclei – the strong and weak nuclear forces, respectively – this did not deter Einstein. Once electromagnetism and gravity were successfully united, it would not take much additional effort to work in new forces of nature. Meanwhile, his quantum-leaning contemporaries took to the new forces with gusto, eventually folding them into the quantum worldview and framework.
By the end of Einstein’s life, quantum mechanics could describe three forces of nature, while gravity stood alone, his general theory of relativity a monument to his intellect and creativity.
NASA Astronauts are Trying Out the Starship Lunar Elevator
Image of NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Doug “Wheels” Wheelock conducting recent training on a mock-up of the SpaceX human landing system (HLS) elevator system with the help of a technician.
NASA Astronauts are Trying Out the Starship Lunar Elevator
As NASA continues to ramp up efforts for its Artemis program, which has the goal of landing the first woman and person of color on the lunar surface, two NASA astronauts recently conducted training with a replica of SpaceX’s Starship human landing system (HLS), albeit on a much smaller scale. Given that Starship is 50 meters (160 feet) tall, and the crew quarters are located near the top of Starship, the HLS will need an elevator with a basket to transport crew and supplies from the crew quarters down to the surface. The purpose of this training is to familiarize astronauts with all aspects of this system, including elevator and gate controls and latches, along with how the astronauts perform these tasks in their bulky astronaut suits, which both astronauts wore during the training.
The two NASA astronauts who participated in the recent training are Nicole Mann and Doug “Wheels” Wheelock. NASA Astronaut Mann is a Colonel in the United States Marine Corps who was selected as a NASA astronaut in the 2013 NASA Group 21. Her spaceflight experience includes 157 days in space as part of Expedition 68 onboard the International Space Station (ISS) and being launched aboard the SpaceX Crew-5 mission. NASA Astronaut Wheelock is a Colonel in the United States Army who was selected as a NASA astronaut in the 1998 NASA Group. His spaceflight experience includes 178 days in space as part of STS-120 and later as part of Expedition 24/25 on the ISS and being launched aboard the Soyuz TMA-19.
As noted, Starship is 50 meters (160 feet) tall and 9 meters (30 feet) in diameter and capable of landing 100 tons (99,790 kilograms/220,000 pounds) on the lunar surface, which is in stark contrast to the Apollo lunar module that landed 12 men on the lunar surface during the Apollo program, which was only 5.5 meters (17.9 feet) tall and approximately 4.3 meters (14 feet) in diameter and a mass of 15,103 kilograms (33,296 pounds) with fuel.
Ironically, the original plan for landing astronauts on the Moon during the Apollo program was known as direct ascent that involved a single, large vehicle with a payload of 74,000 kilograms (163,000 pounds) landing on the lunar surface. While NASA was in favor of using the direct ascent method in early 1961 since spacecraft rendezvous and docking had not been performed in Earth orbit yet, this was later scrapped in favor of the lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR) mission mode that was advocated by NASA aerospace engineer, John Houbolt, who estimated this would significantly reduce the weight involved in such a landing approach. LOR not only successfully landed six Apollo missions on the Moon, but it was also responsible for saving the Apollo 13 crew when one of their oxygen tanks ruptured and the crew was able to use the lunar module as a lifeboat as they flew around the Moon and came back to Earth.
As NASA astronauts train for using the Starship HLS elevator someday, Starship has already conducted two flight tests—Ship 24 in April 2023 and Ship 25 in November 2023, respectively. While both flights ended in failure, Ship 25 officially passed the Karman Line, which is the traditional boundary of outer space. A third Starship test flight is currently scheduled to occur sometime in the first quarter of 2024, which also comes as the crewed Artemis II mission is gearing up for their 10-day mission orbiting the Moon in November 2024 and Artemis III currently scheduled to land astronauts near the lunar south pole sometime in 2025.
How will Starship HLS help future Artemis astronauts on the lunar surface in the next few years? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!
UFO Sightings and Nuclear Facilities: A Mysterious Intersection
Introduction:
Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) have long been a subject of fascination and controversy, sparking interest from conspiracy theorists, scientists, and governments alike. Among the myriad of reported sightings, one particularly intriguing pattern has emerged: the frequent association of UFOs with nuclear facilities. This article delves into the mysterious world of UFO sightings near nuclear installations, exploring incidents, implications, and the quest for understanding that continues to elude us.
Unraveling the Enigma: UFOs at the World’s Nuclear Doorstep
Historic Incidents: The Malmstrom AFB Encounter
In March 1967, an incident at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana sent shockwaves through the defense community. Robert Salas, a former U.S. Air Force officer, reported a UFO shutting down several Minuteman nuclear missiles. The object, described as a pulsating orange light, rendered ten ICBMs inoperative, a situation unprecedented in military history. This event is not an isolated case; it’s a scenario that has repeated itself at various nuclear sites worldwide, suggesting a deliberate pattern or message from an unknown origin.
A Global Phenomenon: From the US to the USSR
UFO sightings at nuclear facilities are not confined to the United States. Similar incidents have occurred globally, including a notable event in Ukraine in 1982, where a UFO reportedly initiated a missile launch sequence before abruptly stopping it. These recurring incidents across different nations and political climates indicate a global phenomenon that demands attention and understanding.
The Implications: Security, Technology, and Extraterrestrial Interest
National Security Concerns:
The presence of unidentified objects capable of disabling nuclear weapons systems raises profound security questions. If these objects are extraterrestrial or represent an unknown advanced technology, what are their intentions? Are they a threat, a warning, or a mere observation from a distant civilization?
Technological Marvels:
The technology implied by these sightings is far beyond human capabilities, particularly concerning speed, maneuverability, and the ability to interfere with electronic systems. Understanding this technology could leap forward in human scientific knowledge, potentially offering new energy sources, propulsion methods, or other revolutionary advancements.
Extraterrestrial Messaging:
Many, like Robert Salas, believe these incidents are a message about the dangers and moral implications of nuclear weapons. If an advanced civilization is monitoring us, it might be cautioning humanity about a path that could lead to destruction and urging a reevaluation of our most destructive technologies.
The Quest for Transparency and Understanding
Despite numerous credible reports and evidence, there remains a significant shroud of secrecy and dismissal around UFO sightings, especially those associated with nuclear facilities. Advocates for transparency, including military personnel and researchers, call for open investigations and government disclosure to understand the phenomena truly.
VIDEO:
Coast to Coast AM: UFOs and Nuclear Facilities: An Investigation into Sightings and Incidents
The intersection of UFO sightings and nuclear facilities presents a compelling narrative that challenges our understanding of technology, security, and the potential for extraterrestrial life. As we stand at this crossroads of mystery and discovery, the quest for answers continues. It’s a journey that requires an open mind, rigorous scientific inquiry, and perhaps most importantly, a global conversation about our place in the universe and the choices we make for our future.
Earlier this year, scientists with the U.S. Department of Energyrevealed that unusual infrasonic phenomena had been detected emanating from the Earth’s upper atmosphere during high-altitude experiments involving sonic devices carried aloft with balloons. The exact source of these mysterious sounds had been undetermined at the time, and seemingly remain so today.
“[In the stratosphere,] there are mysterious infrasound signals that occur a few times per hour, Daniel Bowman, a Principal Scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, said in May about the unusual discovery, adding that “the source of these is completely unknown.” Pending further data, Bowman’s findings were the focus of a presentation he gave at the 184th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Chicago
The unusual stratospheric mystery Bowman and his colleagues are investigating is just one of many varieties of unusual sonic enigmas that have long baffled scientists. Reports of mysterious sounds date back several centuries and involve phenomena compared to mysterious humming, odd noises likened to blaring trumpets, thunderous “booms,” and even loud metallic scraping, which have been reported coming from the sky, from below ground, and even from within the depths of our oceans over the decades.
Examples include those discovered by Dr. Gordon J. F. MacDonald, an American geophysicist and former charter member of the president’s three-man Council on Environmental Quality, who uncovered a letter from 1906 that documented reports of booms that occurred seemingly in conjunction with foreshocks that preceded the Great San Francisco Earthquake of that same year. More than two decades earlier, similar reports were documented in Charleston, S.C. in 1883, while across the globe, reports of loud noises were documented along with the rain of a strange, ash-like substance over Queenstown, South Africa.
Not unlike the high-altitude infrasonic events detected by Department of Energy scientists earlier this year, the cause underlying the mystery sounds of the late 19th and early 20th century also remained undetermined. Curiously, many of them have also persisted over the decades, occasionally arousing the attention of scientists due to their perplexing—and often explosive—nature.
THE MYSTERY BOOMS
Among the most intriguing and widely reported sounds of unknown origin are the so-called “mystery booms” that have been logged for many decades, with occasional waves of activity that have often garnered widespread attention from the media. Between 1977 and 1978, more than 600 reports of mystery booms were documented along the east coast of the United States, with several of the incidents centered around southern New Jersey.
Bell Island, Newfoundland, the location of a famous high-energy boom in April 1978 (CC 4.0)
The frequency of reports around that time led to speculation about whether some variety of aircraft or weapons tests might be underway. It was even considered whether the booms had been precursors to a famous mystery explosion that occurred on Bell Island off the Newfoundland coast on April 2, 1978. The incident, explored by Canadian journalist Rick Seaward in a CBC television documentary later that year, was later determined to have been detected by the U.S. government’s Vela Satellite array, used to monitor nuclear testing and compliance with the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty.
Although the unusually energetic boom over Bell Island remained an outlier, many of the thundering noises reported around the same time were mild by comparison and could have had more conventional explanations. It was the opinion of Jeremy Stone, former president of the Federation of American Scientists, that many of the booms reported during the late 1970s were sonic booms from aircraft. The sudden cause of these booms had been due to flight paths made by the Concorde, a turbojet-powered supersonic passenger jet airliner, which remained in service between 1976 and 2003. Expounding on this theory, some argued that combining the sonic booms with unusual jet stream configurations occurring at the time could explain the rash of reports.
However, the sonic boom theory didn’t find favor with all the experts who examined the 1977 mystery boom wave. In opposition to his colleagues who supported the manmade origin of the booms, Dr. Gordon MacDonald, based on his previous research into historic occurrences of these phenomena, maintained that as many as 181 of the incidents had been more likely to have natural causes related to upper atmospheric weather phenomena.
Another wave of mystery booms occurred in southern California between 1991 and 1993, prompting investigations by MIT’s Lincoln Labs and researchers at Caltech. A paper by researchers Joseph E. Cates and Bradford Sturtevant examined whether correlations existed between seismic events and the boom reports, but ultimately concluded that sonic booms propagated from offshore operations of military aircraft were a more likely cause. However, the Caltech researchers were unsuccessful at correlating the specific source of the booms with any known military or other aircraft activity in the region.
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Reports of mystery booms continue today, often occurring during colder weather periods (possibly in association with cryoseisms or “frost quakes”), and discussion surrounding the various underlying causes is as hotly debated now as in the past.
SUBTERRANEAN ORGAN-LIKE AND HORN-LIKE SOUNDS
In the 1970s, William R. Corliss, an American physicist known for his interest in reports of anomalous phenomena in virtually every branch of the sciences, began his Sourcebook Project, an effort that resulted in several catalogs featuring accounts of odd happenings harvested mainly from scientific literature and periodicals. Many of the subjects in Corliss’s work had been previously documented by Charles Fort, one of Corliss’s chief inspirations. The obvious similarity between Corliss and Fort’s interests had inspired Arthur C. Clarke to refer to Corliss as, “[Charles] Fort’s latter-day–and much more scientific–successor.”
Probing beyond the bombastic reports of mystery booms, Corliss was successful at uncovering accounts of far subtler sonic mysteries. An example had been a series of reports collected by M. von Humboldt that appeared in the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal in 1819, which described sounds emanating from rocks along the banks of the Orinoco River that resembled, of all things, pipe organ music.
The Orinoco River in Venezuela (Anagoria/ CC 3.0)
A similar phenomenon in Greenland, dubbed “Ton der Dove-Bai”, was reported in August of 1932 by a French Expedition exploring the Scoresby Sound. This sound resembled a massive foghorn and had previously been reported by an expedition group who heard it eight times, spanning five different locations, both during the day and after the polar nightfall. Like some “mystery booms,” this sound may very well be a description of a variety of cryoseism resulting from the movement of glaciers, an idea first proposed by A. Dauviller in his 1934 Nature article, “Strange Sounds from Inland Ice, Greenland”, who at that time, compared it with a similar phenomenon he had learned of:
“Is this vibrating sound really caused by the detachment of icebergs or is it similar to the ‘desert song’, that strange musical note produced by the sand?” Dauviller wrote. “In fact, there is a close analogy between the fields of powdery dry snow of the inland ice and the fields of sand of the Arabian Desert.”
MUSICAL SAND AND “DESERT SONG”
From the Outer Banks of North Carolina to Lake Seneca, New York, occurrences of loud booming sounds in various locales have led to popular legends about the so-called “Seneca Guns,” booming sands, and other names associated with sounds that occur where sand dunes are present.
“Under proper circumstances, sand dunes are capable of producing a variety of low-level whispering, whistling, singing, humming, or squeaking sounds, and less commonly, loud booming sounds,” wrote geologist David P. Hill with the U.S. Geological Survey. “The so-called ‘booming sands’ appear to be limited to large sand dunes with steep leeward faces in arid climates.”
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According to Hill, rumbling noises have been reported as far away as several kilometers from the locations associated with “booming sands” and lasting for durations up to 15 minutes. Sometimes these sounds are also associated with seismic phenomena. “To produce booming sounds evidently requires very low humidity and loosely packed, quasispherical sand grains with high surface smoothness, although details of the process by which the acoustic emissions are produced remain poorly understood,” Hill wrote.
NATURAL MELODY
Another of the odd sonic phenomena documented by William Corliss involved what he called “natural melody” which involves “the production of musical notes and combinations thereof by the action of wind upon passive natural and artificial structures.”
Sounds reminiscent of musical tones were reported in nature dating as far back as the 2nd century AD, as described in the writings of Pausanias and his descriptions of the “tuneful waves” of the Aegean Sea. Other localities where musical sounds have been reported include Germany’s Black Forest and Mount Renalux, the Spanish Pyrenees, and the communes within Haute Saône along the Saône River in France.
Drawing reports mostly from the stories of world travelers, Corliss complained about the lacking data in scientific literature that documented such phenomena. “It is difficult to separate some of the music-makers in this category from musical echoes or analyzed sound,” Corliss noted. “[T]he initial sounds may be nonmusical in the case of analyzed sound, but small reflecting surfaces nearby quickly convert it into more pleasing tones.”
UNDERWATER MUSICAL SOUNDS
Sounds emanating from bodies of water have also occasionally been reported in various parts of the world. These have often been likened to music, or sometimes rumbling sounds that are reminiscent of a locomotive engine, although one intriguing example that appeared in the journal Nature in 1870 described a reverberating noise likened to the singing of cicadas heard by passengers on board a boat navigating the Tavoy river:
“One moonlit night in 1854, on board a steamer anchored near the Tavoy river (Tenasserim) we were struck by an extraordinary noise which appeared to proceed from the shore about a quarter of a mile off, or from the water in that direction. It was something like the sound of a stocking loom, but shriller, and lasted perhaps five or six seconds, producing a sensible concussion on the ear like the piercing scream of the cicada; and this gave an impression as if the vessel itself were trembling, or reverberating from the sound.” One of two Burmans on board said simply, the noise was produced by ‘fishes,’ but of what kind they did not describe. It was repeated two or three times.”
A similar observation that occurred decades earlier 1824, later published in Popular Science Monthly in 1883, describes a deep, musical droning that had similarly been attributed to the movement of fish below a sailing vessel:
“Lieutenant White, of our Navy, relates that, when at the mouth of a river in Cambodia in 1824, he and the crew of his vessel were struck by hearing extraordinary sounds, like a mixture of the bass of an organ, the ringing of bells, the guttural cries of a frog, and the tones of an enormous harp, which they heard around the bottom of their vessel. The interpreter said they were produced by a troop of a kind of fish.”
Although the circumstances involving most of these sonic mysteries point to the likelihood of prosaic explanations, several of them do remain somewhat mysterious—even after several decades of investigations into their potential causes—and may offer fresh grounds for scientific exploration into some of the enigmas about our natural world that have lingered into the twenty-first century.
This is an updated version of an article by the author originally sourced from mysterybooms.com, portions of which have been reprinted here with permission.
Het klinkt misschien wat rigoureus, maar als de dreiging hoog is, moeten we toch actie ondernemen.
Astronomen hebben tot nu toe de meeste grote en potentieel gevaarlijke planetoïden opgespoord en geanalyseerd. En voorlopig lijkt er geen reden tot zorg te zijn. Uit hun bevindingen blijkt dat er op dit moment geen enkele bekende planetoïde is die in de komende 100 jaar een serieuze bedreiging voor de aarde vormt. Desalniettemin nemen onderzoekers geen risico’s en bestuderen manieren om onze planeet te beschermen tegen mogelijke inslagen van ruimtestenen. En ondanks de veelbelovende resultaten van de DART-missie, overwegen experts of een iets rigoureuzere ingreep met kernbom mogelijk een nog effectievere oplossing kan bieden.
Nucleaire explosie “Hoewel de kans op een grote planetoïde-inslag tijdens ons leven klein is, zouden de mogelijke gevolgen enorm verwoestend kunnen zijn,” zegt onderzoeker Bruck Syal. Daarom bestudeert hij samen met zijn collega’s of mogelijk een nucleaire explosie soelaas zou kunnen bieden. “Kernwapens hebben de grootste verhouding van energiedichtheid per massa van alle menselijke technologieën,” legt hoofdauteur Mary Burkey uit. “Hierdoor zijn ze uitermate waardevol bij het verminderen van dreigingen veroorzaakt door aardscheerders.”
Zo werkt het In een nieuwe studie hebben onderzoekers een model ontwikkeld waarmee ze kunnen bekijken of het mogelijk is om een kernwapen te gebruiken om de aarde te beschermen tegen allesverwoestende inslagen van planetoïden. En de bevindingen zijn veelbelovend. “Als we genoeg waarschuwingstijd hebben, kunnen we een kernwapen afvuren en het naar een planetoïde op miljoenen kilometers afstand sturen die onderweg is naar de aarde,” stelt Burkey. “Daarna zouden we het apparaat laten ontploffen, waardoor de planetoïde van koers verandert. Hierdoor zou de aardscheerder intact blijven, maar wel een gecontroleerde duw weg van de aarde krijgen. Een andere optie is om de planetoïde te verstoren, waardoor hij in kleine, snelbewegende stukken uit elkaar valt en onze planeet ook zou missen.”
Het model laat zien hoe een planetoïde uit elkaar ‘spat’ door een denkbeeldige kernbom die explodeert in de buurt van de aardscheerder. Afbeelding: Mary Burkey
DART Met dit model bouwen de wetenschappers voort op de lessen die zijn geleerd tijdens de recente DART-missie van NASA. Tijdens deze missie, die in september 2022 plaatsvond, werd bewust een ruimtesonde naar een planetoïde gestuurd om diens baan te wijzigen. Dankzij deze missie hebben we veel geleerd over wat er nodig is om een gevaarlijke planetoïde om te leiden. En hoewel de DART-missie succesvol was, heeft een dergelijke strategie ook enkele haken en ogen. We kunnen bijvoorbeeld maar een beperkte hoeveelheid massa de ruimte in sturen. Daarom kijken wetenschappers nog steeds naar het gebruik van nucleaire afbuiging als een mogelijk alternatief.
Meer over de DART-missie Als een planetoïde regelrecht op de aarde afstevent, geven wetenschappers de voorkeur aan een missie waarbij ze de baan van de planetoïde willen veranderen. Tijdens zo’n missie wordt de planetoïde voorzichtig aangeraakt, wat resulteert in een kleine wijziging van de baansnelheid. Hierdoor blijft het grootste deel van de planetoïde bij elkaar, maar wordt de baan voorzichtig afgebogen, zodat de planetoïde niet meer in botsing komt met de aarde. Deze aanpak werd getest tijdens de DART-missie, waarbij een ruimtevaartuig koers zette naar de planetoïde Didymos om te proberen de baan van het maantje Dimorphos te veranderen, door zich tegen de ruimtesteen te pletter te slaan. En met succes. Voorafgaand aan de inslag van DART voltooide het maantje Dimorphos elke 11 uur en 55 minuten een rondje rond zijn grotere moederlichaam Didymos. Maar nu cirkelt Dimorphos in 11 uur en 23 minuten rond Didymos. En dat betekent dat zijn omlooptijd met 32 minuten is verkort.
Met het nieuwe model kunnen de onderzoekers eigenlijk nabootsen wat er gebeurt als een nucleaire bom in de buurt van een planetoïde tot ontploffing wordt gebracht. Deze tool draagt bij aan een beter begrip van hoe de straling van een nucleaire explosie reageert op het oppervlak van een ruimtesteen en onderzoekt ook de schokgolfdynamiek die het binnenste van de steen kan beïnvloeden. Hierdoor begrijpen we beter hoe de straling werkt als we zo’n wapen gebruiken om de koers van een hemelobject te veranderen.
Simulaties Het artikel omvat een handige en precieze verzameling van informatie over hoe röntgenstralen worden geabsorbeerd door oppervlakken. Met zeer nauwkeurige simulaties werden fotonen gevolgd terwijl ze het oppervlak van asteroïde-achtige materialen, zoals steen, ijzer en ijs, binnendrongen. Het model houdt rekening met verschillende omstandigheden, zoals de samenstelling van de materialen, verschillende porositeit en de hoek waaronder de straling invalt. Hierdoor is het model bruikbaar voor verschillende mogelijke scenario’s.
De nieuwe simulaties bieden wetenschappers meer inzicht en meer keuzemogelijkheden mocht er onverhoopt toch een ruimterots op de aarde afstevenen. “Als er ooit een echte noodsituatie ontstaat waarbij de aarde moet worden verdedigd, is het van cruciaal belang om zeer nauwkeurige simulatiemodellen te hebben,” zegt onderzoeker Megan Bruck Syal. “Deze modellen kunnen besluitvormers voorzien van waardevolle informatie. Hiermee kunnen ze mogelijke inslagen van planetoïden voorkomen, essentiële infrastructuur beschermen en levens redden.”
A series of UFO incidents occurred between 2007 and 2009 in the town of Kumburgaz, situated near Istanbul, Turkey. The events stunned the media and UFO enthusiasts after the images and videos of the sightings went viral on the Internet. The video evidence of UFOs shared by a nightwatchman named Yalcin Yalman could be another strong evidence of non-human technology.
Back in 2008, Yalcin Yalman worked as a night watchman at the Yenikent facility from where he shot all these amazing videos of UFOs, hovering over the Marmara Sea near Kumburgaz. He even showed his second-hand camera to the media in a press conference held at the Dedeman Hotel in Istanbul.
Yalman said he started recording the strange crafts as a hobby to pass his time in the night. Due to the shaky videos, some skeptics claimed that the mysterious objects over the skies of Turkey could have been a US stealth drone or other aircraft. However, numerous experts confirmed that the videos were authentic. Besides, many people witnessed the same unknown crafts in the sky. The sightings gained attention from locals, national media, and even CNN. Several videos were recorded between June 8 and 12, 2009, showing mysterious objects and lights.
Originally, the video was analyzed and made public by the Sirius UFO Space Sciences Research Center led by researcher Haktan Akdoğan. Haktan said the UFOs were often seen by civilians and military pilots during an International UFO Congress in 2009. (Source)
Yalcin Yalman (Left) sitting next to Akdoğan (Right), showing his camera during a press conference in Istanbul in 2009
Dr. Leir told Knapp that he, Yalman and others went to Kumburgaz to film UFOs. The group stayed up from midnight to 4 o’clock in the morning to capture any possible sightings. The conditions were ideal, with clear skies and no obstructions. During the filming, they observed a bright object below the full moon, which initially appeared as a potential star or planet. As they focused on this object, they discovered a semi-circular craft with a multitude of lights, possibly shaped like a boomerang or a cylindrical saucer.
Dr. Leir said, “You’d think, ‘Well, gee, a bright sky, bright moon, you’re not going to see anything.’ But in this case, the moon was a big help. It essentially lit up the exterior portion of the craft, which initially, when we saw it, looked a bit like a boomerang because we weren’t seeing it straight on, so we couldn’t tell the exact shape of the craft. But then we went to full film on it, and we could see that it was either a boomerang, or we were looking at a certain portion of a cylindrical craft or a saucer.
Till this day, I don’t know, and I don’t know what the analysts said about the shape. But it was either one of the two: either a boomerang shape with a round front or a complete saucer. It did turn a couple of times, so we were able to see the side, and it looked like it could have been saucer-shaped. But then we got the biggest shock of our lives because we could see light that was emanating from the internal portion of the craft in three areas. One was directly in front, and one was on either side.
This was a full-on front view, and folks can look at the Coast website and they can not only see the video but please go to the Chilean analysis because there are some still photos there which show what we saw when we looked in the central portion. That was a big shock to look and see, not a Rorschach-type thing, but actual entities that were, whatever they were doing, looking out the front of the craft, just the same as we were looking at them.”
Video Observation
From 2007 to 2009, Yalman recorded approximately 30 videos. The footage was taken with a MiniDV Canon DM-GR1-A based on the NTSC system with a diaphragm set at a maximum of 1.8. It is a 3CCD 20x optic 100x with a teleconverter mounted on a 58 mm adapter. The tele-objective is a Sony VCL HGD 1758 model lens, x 1.7. [2007 to 2009 Original Raw Footage]
The videos were examined by two influential state-sponsored organizations in Turkey, “The Scientific and Technology Research Board of Turkey” and “The TUG National Observatory.” Their objective was to identify any evidence of forgery, but the results supported the authenticity of the videos. The original film cassettes were also studied by individuals from Japan, Chile, Brazil, and Russia, and despite several attempts, no one has been able to conclusively demonstrate evidence of a hoax, fraud, or manipulation, leaving the case unidentified.
Yalman’s camera was equipped with a zoom option which allowed him to even capture the pilots, sitting in one of the crafts. The image is shaky due to the hand movements while zooming. However, with the editing software, the video was stabilized, and the result shocked everyone. Two humanoid figures could be seen in the image with large black eyes and oversized heads.
Haktan Akdoğan noted that these are the most important images in Turkey and in the world, saying: “After doing all the necessary analysis which went on for several weeks, the board came to a definite conclusion with no doubt that these are 100% genuine videos. The objects sighted in the aforementioned footage that have a structure that is made of specific material are definitely not made up by any kind of computer animation nor are they any form of special effects used for simulation in a studio or for a video effect therefore in conclusion it was decided that the sightings were neither a mock up or hoax. It is concluded that these objects in the sightings that have physical and material structures do not belong in any category such as; planes, helicopters, meteors, Venus, Mars, satellites, fireballs, Chinese lanterns, fireballs, weather balloons, natural or atmospheric phenomenon etc. and but rather fall into the category of UFOs.”
“We see the heads of not only one UFO but also of two beings in the images. This is the first in the world.” He further added that those images would have a great impact on UFOlogy. He had been researching UFOs for 22 years and had never seen something like this. He stated: “These are the most remarkable images taken in Turkish history.”
[In translation] Akdoğan stated that “these beings are generally seen in areas rich with resources, volcanic areas, and historical places. They started to come more frequently after nuclear tests. Maybe the released radiation also harms the cosmic neighbors, we disrupt the balance in the universe. Maybe they observe this dangerous process.” (Source)
The images were recorded in digital NTSC format by the above-mentioned camera.
The date on the video indicates that the recordings were made during 2007, 2008, and 2009.
The footage images of the object that visibly have a certain configuration are not computer animations, special video effects or studio-re-created images or models. The footage is genuine.
The first observation made from the footage is that some of the images were recorded in the nighttime sky at a certain altitude from the horizon. The footage also covers images of the moon in some parts which proves that the video was shot in the nighttime and open air. But, the fact that digital date displays show AM in certain frames and PM in others, raises suspicion about the validity of the time in which the recordings were made.
Since in some parts, there is no other object that can be featured as a reference in the close-up frames and no observable differences were found on background examination, the actual location, distance, dimensions and nature of the objects could not have been determined.
Through the examination of shootings of multiple dates, it is a strong possibility that 2-3 different objects were captured. However, it is difficult to determine whether the objects are moving or not. Their movement is slow even if they do so.
The reflections of light on the objects are sometimes caused by the moon which was in a convenient location at that time, and sometimes produced by some other sources of light.
The light reflection from the left side of the object which is seen on the August 10th shootings is not produced by the moon. At that time, the moon was in a phase that was pretty close to the “new moon” phase and located approximately at a 10-degree proximity/angle to the horizon. Moreover, the image processing analysis conducted on some parts of the footage revealed that the center of the object has the same density as its background, namely is of a transparent nature.
Not Debunked
Adam Goldstack of UAP Media UK mentions that many debunkers try to explain the craft as cruise ships but according to former F-16 fighter pilot and researcher Chris Letho, it does not add up. Letho analyzed the videos and case and calculated the object’s size, horizon distance, plus visual angles from the Marmara Sea. He concluded the logistics of a cruise ship did not match the reported UAP. (Source)
Additionally, the triangulation of the UAP in most video cases was calculated to be too high to be a cruise ship or boat, by other researchers. Alternatively, in the fixed/stabilized camera videos (as shown below), we can see that the objects are motionless against a black background in the vast majority of videos. The motionless aspect of the UAP could also discount the “small-boat theory,” given that even on calm waters/oceans floating objects will still move and rock around slightly. Additionally, despite the mass mainstream media coverage in Turkey at the time, no person has ever come forward to state that the objects/boats belonged to them or that they were sailing off the coast in the middle of the night.
Goldstack writes, “From an analytical perspective, the Turkey Kumburgaz UFO case is unique with regards to the clear and multiple video footage obtained. Through this case, we also have sequential data that display behavioral patterns, times, and dates. We see all of the twenty-five video encounters/incidents at night-time/early morning (with one in the late evening), which is in keeping with the wider range of Ufology data that suggests UAP often appears at night-time.
We also see another significant pattern displaying the encounters around water – in this case, the Marmara Sea. The Sea of Marmara itself is a small sea with an area of 11,350 km2 (4,380 sq mi) and with dimensions of 280 km × 80 km (174 mi × 50 mi). The sea has a greatest depth of 1,370 m (4,490 ft). How significant the Sea of Marmara is to potential UAP has still not been explained. No connection to nuclear facilities or weapons has been linked in this case.”
Space travel is hard. From building the rockets to braving the vacuum, surviving the radiation, and safely returning to terra firma, there are few things about it that don’t have a high potential to fail spectacularly.
And yet when everything goes as planned — like when Curiosity touches down on Mars, the James Webb Space Telescope launches, or a spaceship grabs a sample of a hard-to-reach asteroid — space travel can seem easy, if not miraculous. But despite the best efforts of humans, the natural entropy of the space environment and the persnickety nature of rockets and software code still occasionally prevail. One in 25 NASA rockets have failed historically. In 2023, we’re not doing much better. Engineering bloopers abound: Some 50 percent of Space X’s Starship rockets blew up (but, hey, 50 percent didn’t!); researchers kept contact with Voyager 2 for the better part of 46 years (until that dropped call), and only one asteroid retrieval failed to deliver thanks to a canister that was screwed on just a bit too tight.
This is what science is all about, folks. Without further ado, here are the top eight Space Fails of 2023:
8. THE EUCLID SPACECRAFT MADE A COSMIC DOODLE
Euclid’s imperfect observation of a star field made a pretty picture in space.
The European Space Agency spent more than a decade developing the Euclid mission before it launched in July. A space telescope capable of making fine measurements of the shapes of galaxies up to 10 billion light years away and across a third of the sky, Euclid will serve as a window into the dark universe, dark matter, and dark energy. Invisible to any direct observation, Euclid will search for the gravitational influence of dark matter and dark energy on the shapes of galaxies and of space itself.
But while commissioning Euclid’s instruments, they ran into a problem: The Fine Guidance Sensor, designed to hold Euclid’s Visible Instrument on target when viewing a star field, wasn’t working properly. This caused the instrument to wobble while taking an image in October, resulting in an image of a star field with a bright, looping, lasso-like trail, the astrophotography equivalent of painting tracers for a camera with a sparkler. Only in this case, the camera was moving, and the sparkler was a distant sun. No stars or telescopes were harmed due to the failure, and a software update appears to have fixed the problem.
7. NASA IS STILL UNABLE TO OPEN THE OSIRIS-REX ASTEROID SAMPLE CONTAINER
Once they got the sample return capsule back to Johnson Space Center and carefully placed it in a sealed box filled with a neutral nitrogen atmosphere, they hit a snag: two of the 35 fasteners sealing the capsule shut couldn’t be removed.
NASA
Imagine spending $1.16 billion on a jar of pasta sauce and then being unable to open the lid. It’s an absurd scenario, but then, that’s probably the only way to describe the frustration NASA’s science team must be feeling at the moment. The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer, OSIRIS-REx, was launched in 2016 with the expressed goal of rendezvousing with the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, grabbing a sample of the space rock, and bringing it back to Earth. It was a fantastically complex mission pulled off with precision, right down to the coordinated retrieval of the sample-containing capsule on September 24 after it reentered the Earth’s atmosphere and floated onto the Utah desert.
But once they got the sample return capsule back to Johnson Space Center and carefully placed it in a sealed box filled with a neutral nitrogen atmosphere, they hit a snag: two of the 35 fasteners sealing the capsule shut couldn’t be removed. And unlike a jar of marinara, they can’t just run it under some hot water, tap it on the counter, and twist it really hard with one of those rubber jar openers. NASA is currently working to develop entirely new tools to remove the obstinate fasteners. But at least in the meantime, they have plenty of Bennu material to work with — a surplus of the material coalesced on the outside of the capsule, more material, in fact, than the mission originally hoped to extract from Bennu altogether.
6. A PRIVATE SPACE TUG SPUN OUT OF CONTROL AFTER A RECENT SPACEX LAUNCH
After successfully reaching orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the SN3 began spinning uncontrollably, forcing Launcher to prematurely deploy its payloads.
LAUNCHER SPACE
Sometimes a space mission fails because a bolt won’t come out or an O-ring deteriorates. But sometimes, it fails because even mission-critical software can be buggy. That’s what happened after the June 12 launch of the Orbiter SN3, designed by the company Launcher to act as an orbital tugboat that could maneuver smaller satellites into their operational orbits. After successfully reaching orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the SN3 began spinning uncontrollably, forcing Launcher to prematurely deploy its payloads. One of those was Otter Pup, a spacecraft built by Starfish Space to service satellites in orbit. Starfish had hoped to demonstrate an on-orbit Rendezvous between Otter Pup and a satellite, but the spacecraft was also set to spinning by the SN3 failure, and in November, Starfish Space abandoned plans to attempt the mission. Launcher did apologize, at least.
5. TWO ASTRONAUTS LOST A TOOL BAG IN SPACE
On November 1, NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara spent more than six hours on a spacewalk to perform some maintenance on the International Space Station exterior, and as a NASA update put it, “during the activity, one tool bag was inadvertently lost.”
SHUTTERSTOCK
Anyone who has worked on their car or tried to fix a leaky sink has experienced that moment where they can’t find that wrench or screwdriver they were just using a minute ago. They put it down somewhere, but where is the question. It turns out astronauts are not immune to the syndrome, but of course, it gets much worse in an environment where things can actually float away when you’re not looking.
On November 1, NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara spent more than six hours on a spacewalk to perform some maintenance on the International Space Station exterior, and as a NASA update put it, “during the activity, one tool bag was inadvertently lost.”
That tool bag now joins the more than 36,000 pieces of space debris larger than 3.9 inches orbiting the Earth at more than 17,000 miles per hour. We hope it didn’t contain anyone’s favorite wrench.
4. VIRGIN ORBIT BLAMED ITS LAUNCH FAILURE ON UPPER-STAGE ANOMALY, FILED FOR BANKRUPTCY
After a Virgin Orbit rocket failed to reach orbit on January 9 due to an engine shutting down, the company pitched into a financial nosedive.
PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Virgin Orbit founder Richard Branson was one of the first billionaires to hop on the commercial space tourism bus when he founded Virgin Galactic in 2004, and the first billionaire to actually ride to space aboard his company’s spacecraft in July 2021. But he was late to the small satellite space launch game. Virgin Orbit was spun out of Virgin Galactic in 2017 with the intention of providing launch services for small payloads using a rocket that would be carried aloft by an aircraft, dropped, and then launched toward the heavens — a possible shortcut to reusability without having to engineer the sorts of self-recovering first stage rocket boosters SpaceX developed for it’s Falcon 9 rockets.
Instead, it was a shortcut to failure.
After a Virgin Orbit rocket failed to reach orbit on January 9 due to an engine shutting down, the company pitched into a financial nosedive. By March, the company had laid off 675 people and by April, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The bankruptcy was finalized in May, and what was left of the company was sold off for a fraction of its initial value.
3. VOYAGER 2’S DROPPED CALL
On July 21, the operators of the Voyager 2 space probe at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory accidentally sent a message that commanded the spacecraft to tilt its antenna two degrees away from Earth.
MPI/ARCHIVE PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES
It’s the second longest distance call you can make, and NASA almost hung up by accident. On July 21, the operators of the Voyager 2 space probe at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory accidentally sent a message that commanded the spacecraft to tilt its antenna two degrees away from Earth. Given that the spacecraft is now more than 12.3 billion miles away on a trajectory toward interstellar space, that meant Voyager wasn’t listening for NASA in the right part of the sky anymore. Was that it for the famous spacecraft launched 46 years ago in 1977? The probe that brought us our first close-up images of the ice giant planets Neptune and Uranus? The second further human emissary to the Cosmos, trailing only its twin spacecraft Voyager 1? On August 4, NASA announced they had been able to get Voyager 2’s attention with the equivalent of an interstellar “shout” using the radio antenna dishes making up the space agency’s Deep Space Network. Barring any other unexpected dropped calls, Voyager 2 will keep sending data home from outside our Solar System until 2035.
2. LUNA-25 — RUSSIA’S GLORIOUS RETURN TO THE MOON THAT WASN’T
Luna-25 launched on August 10 and would have beaten India’s Chandrayaan-3 lander to the Moon by just a few days.
On August 20, the Russian space agency Roscosmos’s hopes for a triumphant return “ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the Moon.” The Luna-25 lander launched on Aug. 10, but crash landed near the lunar south pole after a failed orbital maneuver, a blow to both the Russian space program and national pride at a time when the nation has become a pariah over its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Initially dubbed Luna-Glob, it was renamed Luna-25 in the tradition of the Soviet era Luna probes, which included the first soft landing on the Moon by Luna-9 in 1966. But it ultimately had more in common with the July 3, 1969 explosion of the Soviet N-1 rocket on the launchpad — the launch vehicle was meant to carry a Soviet crew to the Moon, and the USSR quietly abandoned the project following the US Apollo 11 mission later that month. Adding a historical echo to the Luna-25 failure, Russia was again surpassed by a foreign rival: India successfully landed its Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft near the lunar south pole on August 23.
1. SPACEX'S STARSHIP MAINTAINED A 100 PERCENT EXPLOSION RATE
The Super Heavy Booster, the launch vehicle’s main rocket stage, exploded shortly after it separated from the Starship spacecraft. The investigation is still ongoing, but SpaceX believes Starship exploded not long afterward, a self-destructive act by the spacecraft’s flight termination system, which blows the rocket up if it veers off course.
TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
On November 18, the second attempt at an uncrewed test flight of Starship and the Super Heavy Booster ended in a fiery explosion in the skies over Texas. The Super Heavy Booster, the launch vehicle’s main rocket stage, exploded shortly after it separated from the Starship spacecraft. The investigation is still ongoing, but SpaceX believes Starship exploded not long afterward, a self-destructive act by the spacecraft’s flight termination system, which blows the rocket up if it veers off course.
Not an ideal second outing for the world’s largest and most powerful rocket, which Musk hopes will take humans to Mars and a variant of which NASA hopes will land its astronauts on the Moon in 2025. But Starship did technically make it to space this time, flying for about eight minutes before blowing up — the first orbital Starship test flight in April ended in flames just moments after launch.
First contact with aliens could end in colonization and genocide if we don't learn from history
First contact with aliens could end in colonization and genocide if we don't learn from history
David Delgado Shorter, University of California, Los Angeles;
Kim TallBear, University of Alberta,
and
William Lempert, Bowdoin College
SETI has been listening for markers that may indicate alien life -- but is doing so ethical? Donald Giannati via Unsplash
We’re only halfway through 2023, and it feels already like the year of alien contact.
In February, President Joe Biden gave orders to shoot down three unidentified aerial phenomena – NASA’s title for UFOs. Then, the alleged leaked footage from a Navy pilot of a UFO, and then news of a whistleblower’s report on a possible U.S. government cover-up about UFO research. Most recently, an independent analysis published in June suggests that UFOs might have been collected by a clandestine agency of the U.S. government.
If any actual evidence of extraterrestrial life emerges, whether from whistleblower testimony or an admission of a cover-up, humans would face a historic paradigm shift.
As members of an Indigenous studies working group who were asked to lend our disciplinary expertise to a workshop affiliated with the Berkeley SETI Research Center, we have studied centuries of culture contacts and their outcomes from around the globe. Our collaborative preparations for the workshop drew from transdisciplinary research in Australia, New Zealand, Africa and across the Americas.
In its final form, our group statement illustrated the need for diverse perspectives on the ethics of listening for alien life and a broadening of what defines “intelligence” and “life.” Based on our findings, we consider first contact less as an event and more as a long process that has already begun.
Who’s in charge of first contact
The question of who is “in charge” of preparing for contact with alien life immediately comes to mind. The communities – and their interpretive lenses – most likely to engage in any contact scenario would be military, corporate and scientific.
By giving Americans the legal right to profit from space tourism and planetary resource extraction, the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 could mean that corporations will be the first to find signs of extraterrestrial societies. Otherwise, while detecting unidentified aerial phenomena is usually a military matter, and NASA takes the lead on sending messages from Earth, most activities around extraterrestrial communications and evidence fall to a program called SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
SETI investigators are virtually always STEM – science, technology, engineering and math – scholars. Few in the social science and humanities fields have been afforded opportunities to contribute to concepts of and preparations for contact.
In a promising act of disciplinary inclusion, the Berkeley SETI Research Center in 2018 invited working groups – including our Indigenous studies working group – from outside STEM fields to craft perspective papers for SETI scientists to consider.
Ethics of listening
Neither Breakthough Listen nor SETI’s site features a current statement of ethics beyond a commitment to transparency. Our working group was not the first to raise this issue. And while the SETI Institute and certain research centers have included ethics in their event programming, it seems relevant to ask who NASA and SETI answer to, and what ethical guidelines they’re following for a potential first contact scenario.
SETI’s Post-Detection Hub – another rare exception to SETI’s STEM-centrism – seems the most likely to develop a range of contact scenarios. The possible circumstances imagined include finding ET artifacts, detecting signals from thousands of light years away, dealing with linguistic incompatibility, finding microbial organisms in space or on other planets, and biological contamination of either their or our species. Whether the U.S. government or heads of military would heed these scenarios is another matter.
SETI-affiliated scholars tend to reassure critics that the intentions of those listening for technosignatures are benevolent, since “what harm could come from simply listening?” The chair emeritus of SETI Research, Jill Tarter, defended listening because any ET civilization would perceive our listening techniques as immature or elementary.
But our working group drew upon the history of colonial contacts to show the dangers of thinking that whole civilizations are comparatively advanced or intelligent. For example, when Christopher Columbus and other European explorers came to the Americas, those relationships were shaped by the preconceived notion that the “Indians” were less advanced due to their lack of writing. This led to decades of Indigenous servitude in the Americas.
This 16th century engraving shows Christopher Columbus landing in the Americas, where he and his explorers deemed the Indigenous people there as ‘primitive,’ as they had no writing system. Theodor de Bry/Wikimedia Commons
The working group statement also suggested that the act of listening is itself already within a “phase of contact.” Like colonialism itself, contact might best be thought of as a series of events that starts with planning, rather than a singular event. Seen this way, isn’t listening potentially without permission just another form of surveillance? To listen intently but indiscriminately seemed to our working group like a type of eavesdropping.
It seems contradictory that we begin our relations with aliens by listening in without their permission while actively working to stop other countries from listening to certain U.S. communications. If humans are initially perceived as disrespectful or careless, ET contact could more likely lead to their colonization of us.
Histories of contact
Throughout histories of Western colonization, even in those few cases when contactees were intended to be protected, contact has led to brutal violence, pandemics, enslavement and genocide.
James Cook’s 1768 voyage on the HMS Endeavor was initiated by the Royal Society. This prestigious British academic society charged him with calculating the solar distance between the Earth and the Sun by measuring the visible movement of Venus across the Sun from Tahiti. The society strictly forbade him from any colonial engagements.
Though he achieved his scientific goals, Cook also received orders from the Crown to map and claim as much territory as possible on the return voyage. Cook’s actions put into motion wide-scale colonization and Indigenous dispossession across Oceania, including the violent conquests of Australia and New Zealand.
The Royal Society gave Cook a “prime directive” of doing no harm and to only conduct research that would broadly benefit humanity. However, explorers are rarely independent from their funders, and their explorations reflect the political contexts of their time.
As scholars attuned to both research ethics and histories of colonialism, we wrote about Cook in our working group statement to showcase why SETI might want to explicitly disentangle their intentions from those of corporations, the military and the government.
Although separated by vast time and space, both Cook’s voyage and SETI share key qualities, including their appeal to celestial science in the service of all humanity. They also share a mismatch between their ethical protocols and the likely long-term impacts of their success.
The initial domino of a public ET message, or recovered bodies or ships, could initiate cascading events, including military actions, corporate resource mining and perhaps even geopolitical reorganizing. The history of imperialism and colonialism on Earth illustrates that not everyone benefits from colonization. No one can know for sure how engagement with extraterrestrials would go, though it’s better to consider cautionary tales from Earth’s own history sooner rather than later.
This article has been updated to correct the date of James Cook’s voyage.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world.The Conversation has a variety of fascinating free newsletters.
David Delgado Shorter has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the University of California, and the California Community Foundation.
William Lempert has received funding from Bowdoin College, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Fulbright IIE US Scholar Program, the Lois Roth Endowment, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Kim TallBear does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
A mother from Middleton, Leeds, “freaked out” in December as a UFO barreled over her home … again!
Kay Thorpe was pretty shaken after photographing a UFO she claims has been flying over her home for the last few years, according to The Mirror. The 36-year-old mother-of-three reportedly snapped the picture while in her back garden at some point in December, hoping she’d be able to zoom in and figure out what the thing she keeps seeing really is. But the results left her more confused than ever.
“Where I live, you don’t often see a lot of stars but this one particular star is above my house every night and every morning,” Thorpe explained to the outlet. “And I kept looking at it thinking ‘that can’t be a star’ because it’s always there but it doesn’t flicker like a star. It’s been there for years. It wasn’t twinkling and I thought what else could it be?”
But when she zoomed in, things became “distorted.” Eventually she was able to snap a more stable photograph. “My first thought was it could be some sort of extra terrestrial. I didn’t think it was a spaceship but when I saw the shape, I thought that’s not normal,” she continued. “When I looked at it, I was freaked out. I thought ‘am I safe?’ I thought, could it be the International Space Station?”
Thorpe reportedly posted the images to her social media accounts, with a handful of people replying that the thing looks like a “Tardis,” the infamous time-travel machine from hit sci-fi show “Doctor Who.”
Photographs taken by Thorpe have seemingly already been sold, which is a shame. But during my digging, I found a few other photographs shared online of a weird, Tardis-looking contraptions.
“I shared it online and everyone started saying it’s Doctor Who, it’s the TARDIS. I’m not a Doctor Who fan but I knew what people meant when they said it. A lot of people said TARDIS. I don’t believe we’re alone. I think there’s something out there — I don’t think we’re the only species,” Thorpe continued.
“The thought has dawned on me that something could be looking down on us,” Thorpe said. “Because it’s been there for that many years I know I must be safe. Unless I’ve been abducted and my memory’s been wiped! A couple of people said it’s heaven’s door and we’ve recently had a bereavement so I’d like to think it’s maybe that.”
Across the pond, we’re all still wondering when the government will stop lying to us about UFOs and finally release their data. My gut feeling says it’ll never happen, so perhaps whoever is watching us from our skies will come down and introduce themselves in 2024.
Fermi Produces Unique Time-Lapse Tour of Gamma-Ray Sky
Fermi Produces Unique Time-Lapse Tour of Gamma-Ray Sky
A new movie from NASA’s Fermi mission shows the intensity of gamma rays — the highest-energy form of light — with energies above 200 million electron volts (MeV) detected by Fermi’s Large Area Telescope between August 2008 and August 2022. For comparison, visible light has energies between 2 and 3 electron volts. Brighter colors mark the locations of more intense gamma-ray sources.
“The bright, steady gamma-ray glow of the Milky Way is punctuated by intense, days-long flares of near-light-speed jets powered by supermassive black holes in the cores of distant galaxies,” said Dr. Seth Digel, a senior staff scientist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
“These dramatic eruptions, which can appear anywhere in the sky, occurred millions to billions of years ago, and their light is just reaching Fermi as we watch.”
“One of the first things to strike your eye in the movie is a source that steadily arcs across the screen,” said Dr. Judy Racusin, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
“That’s our Sun, whose apparent movement reflects Earth’s yearly orbital motion around it.”
Most of the time, Fermi’s Large Area Telescope (LAT) detects the Sun faintly due to the impact of accelerated particles called cosmic rays. When they strike the Sun’s gas or even the light it emits, gamma rays result.
At times, though, the Sun suddenly brightens with powerful eruptions called solar flares, which can briefly make our star one of the sky’s brightest gamma-ray sources.
The Fermi team made an all-sky time-lapse movie using 14 years of data acquired by Fermi’s Large Area Telescope.
Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / DOE / LAT Collaboration.
“The new movie shows the sky in two different views,” the astronomers said.
“The rectangular view shows the entire sky with the center of our Galaxy in the middle.”
“This highlights the central plane of the Milky Way, which glows in gamma rays produced from cosmic rays striking interstellar gas and starlight.”
“It’s also flecked with many other sources, including neutron stars and supernova remnants.”
“Above and below this central band, we’re looking out of our Galaxy and into the wider Universe, peppered with bright, rapidly changing sources.”
“Most of these are actually distant galaxies, and they’re better seen in a different view centered on our Galaxy’s north and south poles.”
“Each of these galaxies, called blazars, hosts a central black hole with a mass of a million or more Suns.”
“Somehow, the black holes produce extremely fast-moving jets of matter, and with blazars we’re looking almost directly down one of these jets, a view that enhances their brightness and variability.”
“The variations tell us that something about these jets has changed,” Dr. Racusin said.
“We routinely watch these sources and alert other telescopes, in space and on the ground, when something interesting is going on.”
“We have to be quick to catch these flares before they fade away, and the more observations we can collect, the better we’ll be able to understand these events.”
Fermi plays a key role in the growing network of missions working together to capture these changes in the Universe as they unfold.
“Many of these galaxies are extremely far away,” the researchers said.
“For example, the light from a blazar known as 4C +21.35 has been traveling for 4.6 billion years, which means that a flare up we see today actually occurred as our Sun and Solar System were beginning to form.”
“Other bright blazars are more than twice as distant, and together provide striking snapshots of black hole activity throughout cosmic time.”
“Not seen in the time-lapse are many short-duration events that Fermi studies, such as gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful cosmic explosions.”
“This is a result of processing data across several days to sharpen the images.”
You wake up. Sleepiness fades as your eyes slowly open to a bright white light. And it feels warm and familiar; it feels like home. And your whole family is there to meet you.
Your entire life flashes before your eyes, like scenes from a movie. The good. The bad. Even the awful things you've done. But everything comes together. It all finally makes sense.
A familiar voice says: "We're happy you're here. We missed you. But - you can't stay." What? You just got here. You're getting kicked out already?
The voice says, "They need you. But we'll see you again when the time is right." And you know, somehow, the voice is telling the truth.
Suddenly, a burst of red-hot pain rips through your chest. It feels like every single cell in your body is on fire. You can't breathe.
A scream forces your eyes open. It's a blood-curdling scream, like an animal being eaten alive. Then you realize: the scream is coming from you.
You're in a hospital bed surrounded by doctors and nurses. They all take a step back. Stunned. They're staring at you. But why?
Well - you just came back from the dead.
The above story is one of many similar stories told by people who have had a near death experience where they witnessed and experienced the reality of another world.
Even after people have medically died scientists have discovered that awareness may continue which led to the assumption that death may not be as terminal as we think it is.
Professor Robert Lanza from Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina, claims the theory of biocentrism teaches that death as we know it is an illusion created by our consciousness.
From this perspective, our bodies function as mere living, breathing vessels. When the physical body succumbs to death, the spirit that once resided within the biological form departs, returning to the light or, one might say, transitioning to another higher dimension all the while, not only maintaining its awareness, but also capable of traveling through time and space, assuming any desired form it wishes.
Many spirits will return from this dimension to their original planet (reincarnation) or eventually embark on intergalactic journeys.
The Why Files discusses the various aspects that prove that there is an afterlife.
Officer Schirmer’s 1967 UFO Abduction and “Inside UFO” Encounter
Officer Schirmer’s 1967 UFO Abduction and “Inside UFO” Encounter
In the quiet town of Ashland, Nebraska, the cold winter air of December 3, 1967, was pierced by an event so bizarre it would etch itself into UFO lore forever. Police Officer Herbert Schirmer, a man sworn to protect and serve, found himself face-to-face not with a criminal, but with the unknown occupants of a UFO. His detailed account of abduction and otherworldly interaction presents a compelling case for one of the most fascinating UFO sightingsin history.
The Encounter Begins
Herbert Schirmer, while on routine patrol around 2:30 AM, noticed unusual flashing lights that he first mistook for a truck. As he approached, the lights transformed into a hovering, football-shaped craft emitting a red-orange glow. This was no truck; it was something far beyond his understanding.
Abducted by the Unknown
What followed was nothing short of cinematic. Schirmer described being pulled towards the craft, feeling stunned and terrified. As he got closer, the craft landed, revealing its intricate structure and otherworldly technology. A hatch opened, and beings resembling humans emerged. They approached Schirmer, one wielding a strange, pencil-like device, which he used to press against Schirmer’s neck, causing him pain and then an inexplicable calm.
Inside the UFO
Schirmer was then led inside the UFO, where he witnessed the wonders and horrors of alien technology. He described the interior as a hive of activity, with cylindrical structures, a spinning cocoon emitting rainbow colors, and a control room filled with panels and screens beyond human comprehension. The beings explained their propulsion system to him, a concept far ahead of our time, hinting at the advanced civilization they came from.
A Message for Mankind
During his time aboard, Schirmer received a cryptic message about the universe and the aliens’ interest in Earth’s electricity. The beings, while not overtly threatening, conveyed a sense of urgency and purpose in their actions. Schirmer, overwhelmed by the experience, was eventually returned to his patrol car, finding that time had inexplicably slipped away.
The Aftermath
The incident left Schirmer changed. He reported the incident, despite the potential ridicule, driven by a sense of duty and a need for answers. His story, scrutinized and studied by UFO researchers, stands as a detailed, first-hand account of human-alien interaction. Schirmer’s experience offers a glimpse into the possibility that we are not alone and that our understanding of the universe is just beginning.
VIDEO:
Police officer Herbert Schirmer describes the inside of a UFO after his abduction experience in 1967
Officer Herbert Schirmer’s encounter in 1967 remains one of the most detailed and compelling UFO sightings ever recorded. It challenges our perception of reality and forces us to consider the vast, unexplored cosmos. As we continue to search the skies for answers, Schirmer’s story stands as a testament to the human spirit’s unyielding quest for the truth about our place in the universe.
Some of the Weirdest Supposed Alien Artifacts Found on Earth - PART I
Throughout the history of ufology, the Holy Grail has always been some form of concrete evidence, something we can hold in our hand and verify as being from alien intelligences beyond our world. There have been plenty of stories of crashed UFOs and alien bodies over the years, none of which have come to provide the answers we are looking for. However, are there other forms of evidence of aliens visiting us across the sea of stars? Are there perhaps artifacts or objects they have left behind for whatever reasons? Here we will look at a selection of some of the more far out supposed alien objects ever found, which have mostly fueled more questions than answers.
In some cases, it seems as if possible alien intelligences have left behind artifacts far in the past or in certain far-off locations of this world for inscrutable reasons we cannot fathom and were perhaps not meant to. One of these is surely a strange structure found on the bottom of the Antarctica seas, in a place that is about as inhospitable to life as anywhere on the planet, where creatures eke by a living in the dark cold, and which was found by chance and which has incited discussion to this day.
In the 1960s, Antarctica might as well have been an alien world. It was a faraway, isolated, frigid land largely inhospitable to life as we know it, and although we still don’t know much about this continent today, at that time is was like another planet unto itself. In order to do research in the forbidding region, the National Science Foundation of the United States in 1962 created an elaborate, technologically advanced floating laboratory called the USNS Eltanin, which was the world's first dedicated Antarctic research vessel and tasked with exploring Antarctica and surrounding waters over a four-year period, at the time in waters just about uncharted as the furthest reaches of the solar system. While they made many findings and shed light on our knowledge of the region, they would also uncover things out there in those secluded depths that would go on to propel themselves into truly great mysteries.
On August 29, 1964, the USNS Eltanin was engaged in photographing the ocean floor 1,000 miles west of Cape Horn with a cable mounted camera at a depth of approximately 3,904 meters (13,500 feet) when they made a remarkable find. There along the mostly bleak and barren bottom they managed to snap pictures of a very strange structure, which stood upright at 2 feet high in the middle of nowhere on the lifeless seabed and with its symmetrical nodules, spokes and protrusions ending in a spherical top, it looked very much like an elaborate artificial radio antenna array. It was surely an unexpected thing to find down there, an anomaly, and when it the photographs were picked up and released by the New Zealand Herald on December 5, 1964, the puzzling images immediately caught the attention of UFOlogists and Fortean researchers, who would dub it “The Eltanin Antenna” and claim that it was an out of place alien artifact put there in that remote location for inscrutable purposes. The object would be excitedly discussed and debated for years, with famed paranormal writer Brad Steiger in 1968 calling it “an astonishing piece of machinery... very much like the cross between a TV antenna and a telemetry antenna.”
Theories swirled at the time, ranging that it was a piece that had simply fallen off a boat, to more conspiratorial theories such as that it was a secret Russian project, to more fringe ideas that it was the doing of aliens. Others suggested that it was perhaps some type of undiscovered plant life, but marine biologists were skeptical of this, as there was no sunlight down there to support it, and one biologist, a Dr. Thomas Hopkins, would say of it:
I wouldn’t like to say the thing is man-made because this brings up the problem of how one would get it there ... But it’s fairly symmetrical and the offshoots are all 90 degrees apart. This is why it has been argued over for so long.
In the end, no one knew, and since it was so far under the surface in one of the most hostile and inaccessible environments on earth there was no way to reach it again and no efforts made to try and relocate it. In the meantime, the bizarre object made the rounds in numerous UFO and paranormal publications, including SAGA Magazine, The INFO Journal, and Fortean Times, a habitat in which it often seemed to pick up added details and conjecture that really muddied the waters as to trying to figure out what was actually going on and what it really was. At the time it was aggressively pushed by many writers, in particular Steiger, as a true anomaly and possibly alien artifact, but in more recent years the story has picked up more mundane possibilities. One of the most popular of these was the suggestion that what is seen in the images is a type of deep sea carnivorous sponge called Cladorhiza concrescens, which was discovered in 1888 by Alexander Agassiz and was described in the initial report:
It somewhat resembles a space-age microwave antenna, with a long stem ending in ramifying roots, sunk deeply into the mud. The stem has nodes with four to six club-like appendages. They evidently cover like bushes extensive tracts of the bottom.
This seems like a very rational approach to the mystery, but there have been arguments against this idea. One is that the crew of the USNS Eltanin, with their crew of scientists and marine biologists, did not come to that conclusion on their own. Another is that this species of sponge is known to exist in large colonies, where as this object was solitary out on a desert of nothingness. There is also the fact that when compared to photos of Cladorhiza concrescens, the Eltanin Antenna does not seem to completely match, looking somewhat different, especially in that it is obviously more symmetrical, regimented, and even in form than one would expect one of these sponges to be. Details like this have made sure that the Eltanin Antenna has remained discussed and debated to this day, with many proponents of the idea that it is indeed an anomalous artifact placed there by either nefarious human organizations or aliens, for purposes ranging from measuring fault activity to mind control.
The mysterious antenna
There is really no way to know what this strange artifact was when looking at it based solely on a few photographs. It could really be anything, although no one explanation has really seemed to satisfy everyone at this point. Was this just some anomalous sea sponge that managed to find its way out there on its own? Or was it something else entirely? Whatever the case may be, no one has found the original Eltanin Antenna since, and we will probably never know the full answer.
Many supposed alien artifacts are linked to ancient civilizations, and truly one of the great lost and mysterious civilizations of the earth is the Inca Empire of the Andes Mountains of Peru. At its most powerful and illustrious during the 14th and 15th centuries, the Inca Empire at one point stretched over a vast area encompassing parts of Ecuador and as far south as Chile. For centuries this great civilization thrived, only to melt away into history with the coming of the gold-hungry Spanish conquistadors and fade away into the mists of time, leaving behind no record of their culture and way of life and making them one of the most enigmatic of ancient empires. Yet, for all of their mysteries some are more pronounced than others, with outlandish artifacts for with purposes unknown uncovered at times., and one of the more baffling of these is a monolithic stone which we are nowhere near figuring out.
Although the Incas left behind no written record for us to draw from, what they did leave are vast structures that remain standing strong centuries later. From temples, to citadels, to strongholds, massive walls, and roads, these ancient structures made use of enormous stones somehow moved to these locations and placed perfectly straight without any mortar and through methods we still don’t understand fully. In addition to these architectural mysteries the people of the Inca era also left behind other oddities that pop up from time to time, which serve to pose more questions than answers. One of these lies in the province Abancay in the region Apurímac in Peru, and has been wreathed in mystery ever since its discovery.
The site is called Sayhuite, thought to have perhaps once been the site of a grand gold covered temple devoted to the worship of water, and here is a rather bizarre artifact looking quite out of place. Called the Sayhuite Monolith, it is an enormous boulder measuring 6.5 feet long and about 13 feet wide, which sits atop a raised platform upon a terraced hill called the Concacha Hill, but more bizarre than its sheer size is what is engraved upon it. The entirety of the upper surface of the rock is adorned with over 200 carvings and engravings of various zoomorphic and geological figures, including reptiles, jaguars, monkeys, shellfish, frogs, crabs, birds, terraces, ponds, rivers, tunnels, streets, stairways, channels, buildings, and irrigation canals, and many others, as well as numerous geometric figures, all incredibly intricately crafted in painstaking detail.
It is a breathtaking piece of artistic mastery for its day, but the thing is we have no idea of what its purpose is, exactly where it originated, or even it was the Incas who made it at all. One of the problems is that there is very little else remaining from the Inca Empire at this particular site, no frame of reference to give it. We do know that it is not a natural outcropping, and it is made of material not sourced from the immediate area, but it is unclear where it was moved from or if this was even its original intended resting place. That is about all we know for sure, and no one is quite sure who made it or why.
As to the carvings, your guess is as good as anyone’s, and their significance depends largely on who you ask. One popular theory is that this was once an Inca temple devoted to the worship of water deities, which would have in its day been full of grand, gold coated columns and featuring the monolith as some sort of object of religious significance. However, this is far from the only idea floating around. Another theory is that the stone was used as a way of developing and testing the intricacies of water flow for public water projects and irrigation systems, supported somewhat by evidence that the engravings show signs of having been altered, modified, and updated over the centuries, perhaps to test out different water paths on the topographical model. Other ideas include that the monolith is a map to a lost city or even a map of the Inca Empire, a model of the universe, or even an alien artifact. In the ends no one knows, and although the site is popular with tourists, we are no closer to understanding it all, its history lost to time, just one more piece of the puzzle of a time long lost to us.
Sayhuite Monolith
Indeed, the ancient world very often seems to be almost something from an alien realm. Full of unanswered questions and inscrutable, indecipherable ruins, we are often left without answers to what these people were up to, our view to the past obscured and hazy. The ancients often left behind various enigmas that we struggle to understand and which seem to taunt us through the centuries, and another one of these is a mysterious disc uncovered in Greece, which is full of strange cryptic symbols and for which we have no answer, and which may be from powers beyond our world.
In July of 1908, an Italian archeologist by the name of Luigi Pernier was doing an excavation at the Old Palace of Minoan Phaistos, a mysterious Bronze Age archaeological site dating from 1900 to 1700 BC on the south coast of the island of the Greek island of Crete. There in the dank dark in an ancient basement of the palace he unearthed a small clay disc that had lain down in the dark for untold centuries, which upon inspection would capture the imagination and turn out to be one of the most mysterious and hotly debated archeological oddities ever uncovered in Greece.
Measuring from 15.8 to 16.5cm in diameter and 1.6 to 2.1cm in thickness, seemingly handmade from fired, baked clay, it is a truly curious little artifact. The disc holds etched upon both sides of it a spiral pattern of hand drawn lines within which a total of 45 different strange symbols are set in groups demarcated by vertical lines for a total of 242 symbols in all, each one apparently individually stamped into the clay before it was fired and in some cases showing evidence of having been erased and re-stamped. These symbols are largely pictographic in nature, featuring human figures, faces, animals such as fish, dolphins or cattle, boats, and plants and trees, as well as less discernible cryptic symbols. In addition to these symbols, there are what appear to be hand drawn dashes, slashes, and dotted bars throughout. Besides being an odd find, the thing about these various symbols is that, although they are all arranged as an obvious message, they represent no known language or writing system. It resembles none of the forms of writing found in Bronze Age Crete, called hieroglyphic, Linear A and Linear B, and archeologists have no idea what they say or why they were arranged in spirals on this lone disc.
Some things about what has come to be known as the Phaistos Disc are mostly largely agreed upon. It is mostly accepted as probably being Cretan in origin quite possibly a version of the Minoan language, and likely dates back to from 1850 to 1550 BC. It is also mostly believed that because many of the symbols seem to be arranged to face the right towards the outer edge of the disc, it is thought that it should be read clockwise from the center outwards. On the outer edge of the disc is a clearly delineated straight line marked with five or six points that is agreed by most to be the intended starting point for reading it all. That is pretty much where any agreement ends, and the disc, its origins, and the meaning of its enigmatic symbols have been discussed and debated ever since its discovery.
The Phaistos Disc
When trying to decipher the meaning of this oddity, there has been pointed out that the total number of different symbols are too few to represent a purely pictographic system of writing, that is in which one image is one word, but too many to be an alphabet system, meaning it is probably what is called a "syllabary." This would mean that each different symbol represents a separate syllable of the language, and each of the groups of symbols would make up one word. However, if this is the case it should be expected that there would be an even distribution of the symbols through the text, but there are wild imbalances between them on the disc, and also considering that the symbols are grouped in mostly groups of 3 to 7, it seems strange that the language would be so syllable heavy. This has led to another idea, which is that the mysterious writing system could be some combination of pictographs and syllabaries, but no one really knows for sure.
As to the significance of the disc, theories have varied considerably. Ideas include that it is a prayer, hymn or a religious chant, sacred text, magic inscription, a spell or curse, a simple letter, ritual, game, funerary record, almanac, court list, political treaty, a geometric theorem, list of soldiers, or even a nursery rhyme or musical notes, and of course that it was left by aliens. As you can see, no one really has a clue, and it could be anything. One idea that has been floated around is that the disc is not real at all, but rather a more modern forgery and hoax. It was for a while a subject of some debate, only fueled by the Greek Ministry of Culture refusal to let anyone test it because they deem it to be a national treasure that would be damaged if it were to be analyzed. If it is a forgery, then the main culprit is seen as probably being Luigi Pernier, in order to make a name for himself and step out from the shadows of other more famous archeologists also working in Crete at the time. After all, what better way to get the field’s attention than a mysterious disc with some inscrutable ancient language no one had ever seen before? However, it is common for governments to refuse to have artifacts tested out of fear of damaging them, and the majority of archeologists both in Greece and beyond are of the general consensus that it is authentic. What it actually is and what it signifies is another story altogether.
One of the most frustrating things is that since the symbols came from individual stamps, someone spent the time to make the actual die for each symbol, yet none of these die have been found. It would also imply that these discs were meant to be mass produced, yet as of yet, none other has been found. This is a problem, because without other similar examples of this mystery writing or a Rosetta Stone-type finding, there is simply not enough context to derive any meaning from it. There have been numerous claims over the years that the disc has been solved and translated, but these are unconfirmed, with little chance of a concrete confirmation in the absence of a comparison to other inscriptions. The fact is, despite the various claims of decoding the mysterious writing, it remains a perplexing unsolved mystery.
Equally as perplexing and controversial is a discovery allegedly made in 1938 in the Baian-Kara-ula mountains on the border of China and Tibet, by Chinese archeologist and professor Chi Pu Tei. His expedition purportedly came across an underground network of tunnels, caves, and caverns that seemed to have been artificially excavated, leaving smooth glazed walls suggesting some immense heat had been used. Tei claimed that within this strange subterranean world they had found pictograms carved into the walls, which depicted star systems, the sun, and the moon, and even more bizarrely graves that supposedly held the remains of tiny humanoids measuring about 4 feet tall and with outsized heads. Perhaps even stranger were the objects they found half buried in the earth all around them.
The Baian-Kara-ula mountains
The objects in question were a series of over 700 perfectly circular discs measuring up to a foot across, and which were said to have two grooves that emanated out from a perfectly round, 3/4" hole in the center to form a double spiral. Within the spirals were claimed to be minuscule hieroglyphics of an unknown type, so small that they were barely visible to the naked eye, and which required a magnifying glass to make out in any significant detail. Although this would have been seen as a monumental discovery, the discs allegedly found themselves locked away in storage at Beijing university for decades until 1962, when Chinese archeologist Tsum Um Nui supposedly took a look at them and the story would get even more bizarre still.
After careful analysis of the discs, this Tsum Um Nui claimed that he had actually managed to decipher them, and that they told an epic tale and often tragic tale of visitors from the stars. According to Nui, the discs spoke of a spaceship that had crashed into the mountains carrying a contingent of alien beings called the Dropa. The crash smashed the ship beyond their ability to repair, and so these mysterious beings had been forced to find refuge in the mountains and adapt to life on Earth, creating the tunnels and caverns in the process. The discs even supposedly give the harrowing account of some of these Dropa being mercilessly slaughtered by the Han Chinese.
It sounds completely absurd, and the general scientific community agreed, refusing to publish Nui’s paper on the matter and generally looking upon his claims with raised eyebrows and outright disdain. According to some accounts, the archeologist was even forbidden from even talking about the discs anymore after that, but the whole weird tale caught the attention of Russian scientist W. Saitsew, who apparently acquired some of the discs and studied them himself in 1968. Saitsew allegedly found the composition of the discs to be quite odd, comprised of a strange mix of cobalt and other metals that made the surface nearly impenetrably hard and deepening the mystery of the hieroglyphs etched upon them. He also claimed to have discovered that when placed on a specialized turntable the discs hummed and oscillated as if they had once held an electrical charge or served as conductors of some type.
It is unclear what happened to what have come to be known as the Dropa Discs after this, and Tsum Um Nui himself allegedly fled China to Japan, where he vanished into obscurity. We are left with very little to go on, and indeed there is much to cast doubt on whether the Dropa Discs ever even existed at all. For one there are no discs now to examine, with the estimated 712 discs all allegedly disappearing over the years. There is also rather suspiciously a lack of any photographic documentation of them at all. The only supposed photographs of the Dropa Discs were purportedly taken by the Austrian engineer Ernst Wegerer, who apparently located two of the discs during a visit to the Banpo Museum in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province in 1974. However, the photographs are fairly controversial and the discs themselves are obscured by camera flash.
Supposed photo of the Dropa Discs
Other damning evidence against the existence of the Dropa Discs is that there are no real official scientific papers written on them, with only the writings of Tsum Um Nui, the Russian scientists, and some second or third hand accounts to go on, and these are of questionable veracity at best. In fact, Tsum Um Nui appears to have no mention in any university or academic institution as an archeologist, and indeed it has been pointed out that Tsum Um Nui isn’t even a real Chinese name at all. There are likewise no official museum records to show that such discs were ever within their collections, nor is there any official documentation of the Chi Pu Tei expedition that supposedly found them in the first place, and indeed there is no way to know if it ever happened at all. Considering such a lack of any concrete evidence, if the Dropa Discs ever did exist then the Chinese have gone through great efforts to cover it all up. Perhaps more likely is that this is an intriguing archeological urban legend that has sort of taken up a life of its own. Regardless, these mysterious discs crafted by unknown hands have continued to be discussed and debated to this day.
More recently, in 1961 a group of friends in Olancha, California were looking for geodes when they found within one of them a modern spark of all things, and allegedly a geologist estimated the object as being 500,000 years old. In October of 1996 a group of researchers in the Kaluga region of western Russia located a screw complete with the fully formed head and nut embedded within rock that was found to be 300 to 350 million years old. Examination by various scientists showed that the object is most certainly artificial, but as to how it got into that rock no one knows. Was this an alien artifact, time travelers, or what, and perhaps more pressing, what would aliens need with spark plugs anyway? The answers remain vague.
Some other anomalous ancient artifacts are a little harder to adequately classify, and defy easy categorization. In 1885, a strange object was found by an iron smelter at a foundry in Vocklabruck, Austria. There, within a block of solid coal, was discovered a perfectly-formed cuboid object of what seemed to be iron or some other type of metal, measuring 2.64 by 2.64 by 1.85 inches and weighing 1.73 pounds, its purpose unknown. The outlandish cube-like object was sent to the Salzburg Museum, where it was analyzed by the Austrian physicist Karl Gurls and found to be made not of iron, but rather of a strange alloy composing steel and nickel, although it would later be deemed to be actually made of a forged iron.
Further analysis showed that the object, whatever it was, was too precise in shape and made of too refined a metal to have been caused by any known naturally occurring phenomenon such as a meteorite strike, and was most likely machine-tooled and even probably just a part of a larger device or mechanism, although what type no one knows. What has come to be known as the Salzburg Cube or the Wolfsegg Iron has apparently been studied by scientists at the Geological Institute of Austria, who have also come to the conclusion that it seems to indeed be indeed artificial, and the object has even been featured in an 1886 edition of the scientific journal Nature, as well as an 1887 issue of the French journal L’Astronomie.
What was this strange object and how did it get within a chunk of coal dating to tens of millions of years ago? Was it truly a manufactured object, and if so what sort of enigmatic mechanism did it once belong to? It is difficult to tell for sure, as the Salzburg Cube has since disappeared completely, leaving only these vague 19th century reports behind. It might have been lost, misplaced, mislabeled, or filed away in some darkened backroom of a museum collection somewhere gathering dust, perhaps even stolen for unknown reasons. We only know for sure that it did exist, but without modern scientific analysis we will probably never know for sure what it was. Mysterious technology of the ancients, aliens in prehistory, time travelers, or unknown natural phenomena? Who knows?
Other purported alien artifacts seem to have been dropped off or left behind during UFO encounters. On November 11, 1956, a Stig Ekberg and Harry Sjoberg were driving on the Island of Vaddo, Sweden, about 90 kilometers north-northwest of Stockholm, when they noticed up ahead a bright object that looked like a flattened sphere, measuring around 8 meters wide and 3 meters high. The object seemed as if it was about to fly past them, but it then suddenly made a sharp turned and headed directly towards them, and as it did their car’s engine mysteriously coughed, sputtered, and died. The object then came down to hover right near the road, and it was described as being so bright that “even a barn, half a kilometer away, was visible as if the sun was shining.” It then proceeded to maintain a position just one meter off of the ground, and as the frightened men looked on it started to glow brighter, and the air was filled with a smell like “ozone and smoldering insulation.”
After 10 minutes of this, the object lifted up and sped off in the direction from which it had come, and as it did the vehicle sprang back to life. The curious witnesses then went to where the thing had been hovering to find that the grass had been flattened and singed. Even weirder than this was that there was a shiny object on the ground that turned out to be a “three-sided piece of metal about the size of a matchbox,” and which was hot to the touch and heavier than it looked. The men collected the strange artifact and had it analyzed at the SAAB airline manufacturing company, who came to the conclusion that it was constructed of tungsten carbide and cobalt, and was definitely an artificially manufactured object and not some naturally occurring rock of any known kind, although it had no discernible conventional use. It is unclear what happened to this object after this, and we are left to wonder what it was. Was it something dropped by the UFO, and if so what was it? Who knows?
The following year, in September of 1957, Ibrahim Sued, a columnist for the Rio de Janeiro newspaper O Globo, received a letter from a witness who claimed to have seen a "flying disk" explode over the beach at Ubatuba, in Sao Paulo Province, Brazil, and that as it did it had “rained down” metal pieces. Within the envelope the letter came in were several strips of a dull gray metallic material which seemed to be scorched or oxidized somewhat, smooth but with a noticeable amount of wear and tear, and which were all dusted with a fine film of a powdered substance that somewhat resembled burnt charcoal residue, all of which had apparently been dropped by the UFO. The letter would read:
Dear Mr. Ibrahim Sued.
As a faithful reader of your column, and an admirer of yours, I wish to give you, as a newspaperman, a “scoop” concerning flying discs. If you believe that they are real, of course. I didn’t believe anything said or published about them. But just a few days ago I was forced to change my mind. I was fishing together with various friends, at a place close to the town of Ubatuba, Sao Paulo, when I sighted a flying disc! It approached the beach at unbelievable speed and an accident, in other words, a crash into the sea, seemed imminent. At the last moment, however, when it seemed it was almost striking the waters, it made a sharp turn upward and climbed rapidly on a fantastic impulse. Astonished, we followed the spectacle with our eyes, when we saw the disc explode in flames. It disintegrated into thousands of fiery fragments, which fell sparkling with magnificent brightness. They looked like fireworks, despite the time of the accident, at noon, that is, at midday. Most of the fragments, almost all, fell into the sea. But a number of small pieces fell close to the beach and we picked up a large amount of this material—which was light as paper. I am enclosing a sample of it. I don’t know anyone that could be trusted to whom I could send it for analysis. I never read about a flying disk being found, or about fragments or parts of a disk that had been picked up. Unless the finding was made by military authorities and the whole thing kept as a top-secret subject. I am certain the matter will be of great interest to the brilliant columnist and I am sending two copies of this letter—to the newspaper and to your home address.
Not knowing what to do with the letter and its mysterious samples, Sued merely printed the letter in the newspaper out of curiosity, then put the mysterious pieces of weird metal aside and sort of ignored them until he was contacted by a Olavo T. Fontes, a Rio physician and Brazilian representative of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (A.P.R.O), who had heard of the letter through its publication in the paper. Fontes came out to Brazil and took a closer look at the samples, coming to the initial conclusion that one was cracked and had fissures suggesting that it had been forcefully blown off of a larger object, and it was surmised that the whitish substance was the result of the pieces being subjected to an intense heat. Sued offered to release the strange pieces to Fontes, who took them off to be analyzed further at the Mineral Production Laboratory. Fontes himself would say of the objects in a report to the Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization (APRO) in Tucson, Arizona:
I saw the samples sent by the unidentified correspondent—three small pieces of a dull-gray solid substance that appeared to be a metal of some sort. Their surfaces were not smooth and polished, but quite irregular and apparently strongly oxidized. The surface of one of the samples was shot through with almost microscopic cracks. The surfaces of all samples were covered in scattered areas with a whitish material. These whitish smears of a powdered substance appeared as a thin layer. The fine, dry powder was adherent but could be displaced easily with the nail. Mr. Sued said the material appeared to be lead at first sight—because of the gray color—but I could see that it could not be lead … the material was light … almost as light as paper.
They were then sent through a battery of tests, where they were found to be composed of 99.99% pure magnesium. The Air Force allegedly received one of the samples, but it was unfortunately accidentally destroyed as it was being prepped for analysis. They requested another sample, but since one of the other pieces had also been destroyed by the testing done on it there was only one fragment left and they were unwilling to part with it, instead locking it away in a safe. In 1967, the A.P.R.O. grudgingly allowed the piece to be taken in for analysis, but this would prove to be inconclusive and produce conflicting results, with one lab saying that the magnesium was not as pure as originally claimed and “not as pure as magnesium specimens readily available in the 1950s,” whereas another stated that the piece was produced through a “process that was unknown when the fragments were recovered.” Ultimately the sample was just too small to really tell much, and it created more questions than answers, leaving it as an anomalous mystery. University of Arizona metallurgical engineer Walter W. Walker would say of the fragment:
All chemical analyses to date have not verified the extraterrestriality of the Ubatuba magnesium.... Considering the poor pedigree of the Ubatuba physical evidence, a hoax cannot be ruled out... [though] nothing unequivocally identifying the material as terrestrial was found either. If one accepts that it is possible that a flying saucer has a soft, weak, technically pure, unalloyed, cast magnesium fuselage, then the metallographic evidence is consistent. The surface scale, the oxide intrusion into the grain boundaries and, particularly, the subscale from internal oxidation all suggest that the magnesium was exposed to the Earth’s atmosphere at elevated temperatures. The white Mg(OH)2 coating is consistent with the burning fragments falling into the ocean.... In summary, after all these years, I consider the Ubatuba magnesium fragment as unusual material of still unknown origin.
The Ubatuba fragment
Unfortunately, further analysis has done little to shed any more light on the fragments, and have been unable to conclusively prove whether they were of extraterrestrial origins or proof of aliens, and the Journal of Scientific Exploration would say in an abstract on their paper on the matter:
A sample from the Ubatuba fragment collected in Brazil in 1957 was tested with the intent of examining the isotope ratios of its primary element, magnesium, and the trace elements strontium, barium, copper, and zinc. As background, the history of chemical testing of the Ubatuba fragments during the 1960s-1980s at multiple labs with varying capabilities is reviewed and then the remainder of the paper examines recent tests completed in 2017 and 2018 that for the first time used HR-ICPMS techniques to look at the isotopic ratios of the minor constituents as well as the primary magnesium component of the sample. The magnesium isotope ratios were found to fall within terrestrial limits while the results on the isotope ratios of the trace elements were inconclusive. Recommendations are made for improving the process of examining the trace elements.
We are left to wonder how much veracity the case has, and just what exactly those mysterious fragments were, if anything. What do the results mean? There is no way to really know, because there is nothing left to test that we know of. Who sent the letter and was he for real? Again, a mystery. In the end, with the inconsistency of the test results, the lack of any remaining fragments, and the completely anonymous identity of the writer of the letter there is no way to be sure, making it a case that will no doubt serve to fuel debate and speculation for some time to come.
In August of 1964, a Mr. Raimo Blomqvist was at his parents’ summer cottage at Kallavesi Lake, Finland, when he noticed a “strange, colorful light ball” come down from the clouds. As it drew nearer he could see that it was oval in shape, but it was glowing too brightly for him to see any real details to it. The strange anomalous object then hovered over some shallow water nearby and apparently dropped something, which made a sound like “hot metal touching cold water” when it hit the surface. The UFO then rose high into the air and shot off into the clouds. He then went to where the object had dropped and found an odd looking stone 3 or 4 cm in length and with five layers to it. When the strange artifact was analyzed by a lab, it was found to be mostly made of iron, but there were also small amounts of other materials such as copper, zinc, magnesium, mangan, zirkonium, vanadium, titanium and crom. They also determined that the stone had been in a temperature of 650-800 degrees Celsius for a long time. Once again, it is unclear what happened to this object. What was this thing?
From the 1970s is a case from Suonenjoki, in Central Finland, where on March 16 of that year a Mr. Reijo Kolehmainen made a stunning discovery near his property after witnessing UFO activity for several days, claiming that he had found several spots where the mysterious object had landed and left behind various artifacts. A report in the APRO Bulletin, Vol. 28, No. 5, Nov. 1979, says of what happened:
Three landing trace areas were found around Mr. Reijo Kolehmainen’s home in February, 1979. At 6:50 a.m. on February 2, 1979 a 2.5 meter crater was found in the snow at a distance of 5 meters from the house. The snow had melted all the way to the ground in the center of the crater. Strange red liquid, pieces of metal, and later a metallic cup were found within the crater. The red liquid smelled of vinegar. At 8:00 a.m. the police came. They photographed the area and took some samples.
In another case from the 70s, late in the evening of February 5, 1979 the Kolehmainen family heard a shooting sound. One constable later revealed he had seen a strange light phenomenon at the same time. On the following morning a bigger crater was found in the snow at a distance of 10 meters from the house. Similar things were again found. Later the police came to have a new look at the area. The police suggested that perhaps someone had thrown a home-made bomb in the Kolehmainen yard. However, the Kolehmainens stated that nobody has any reason to throw bombs at them. On the morning of February 21, 1979 a third landing trace area was found. This time there were three holes in the yard. Red liquid and pieces of metal were once again found in the landing trace. However, no metallic cup was found this time. There was no snow on the electric wires above the holes, but there was lots of snow on similar wires elsewhere. The Kolehmainens didn’t want any publicity, but the news leaked to the press from acquaintances. About ten articles were published by the press about the events. The UFO was encountered by several other witnesses in the area over the course of several weeks, but this is the only report that mentions it leaving any sort of physical evidence behind. Very bizarre, indeed.
Perhaps one of the more well-known cases of an alleged alien artifact left behind supposedly occurred in 1985, in the area of Grand Junction, Colorado. One evening in 1985, a man named Bob White was driving with a friend on their way from Denver to Las Vegas. At the time, White was asleep and his friend at the wheel, watching the hypnotic lane lines flicker by as they meandered through the remote wasteland between Grand Junction, Colorado and the Utah border. Here was a place in which there was not another soul for miles around, a moonscape of rocky desert that expanded out past the illumination of the headlights in a vast expanse of nothingness, and it would have been a rather dull drive until a weird series of events began to play out that made the evening a bit more exciting.
At around 2:30 a.m., White was jolted awake by his friend. Wiping the sleepiness from his eyes and watching the nighttime desert streak by outside, he at first couldn’t figure out why his friend had woken him. It wasn’t his turn to be at the wheel and nothing at first seemed out of place, the car smoothly rolling along, but his friend was in a state of agitation. When White asked what was going on, his companion frantically pointed off towards the horizon, and it was then that he could see a strange light off in the distance, which did not look like an airplane. The light steadily grew in size and brightness until it was blinding, turning the desert night into day, and White would say of what happened:
The light was about the size of a full harvest moon. As we got closer, it grew larger. When we were a few hundred yards from it, I turned off the ignition and we coasted up close to it. It was huge, the size of a very big barn. I got out of the car for a better look. For some unknown reason, Jan turned on the headlights, and this light went up in the sky as fast as my eyes could follow it. What I saw, was not of this Earth. Then I saw another small light, bright orange with a tinge of yellow, white, and blue falling from it. After this, the larger object rose into the air rapidly, joined with an even larger object, a sort of "mother ship," and the whole of it shot off into the night, leaving the two frightened men there alone in the dark desert once again to try and process what they had just seen. Overcome with curiosity, White started hiking off through the scrub through the wilderness towards where he estimated the smaller object had fallen, making his way up an incline to find a groove in the ground, which he estimates as having been around 18 inches deep and 9 inches wide. Within this groove was a glowing object, about 7-1/2 inches long and shaped like a teardrop, still too hot to get anywhere near and apparently made of some kind of metal. White waited until it had cooled down enough to touch, and then brought it back to the car, stashing it into the trunk.
Colorado wilderness
White, who claims to have never believed in UFOs before this incident, was baffled as to what the object could possibly be, but did not know who to turn to for help or what to do with it. He kept it locked in a safe deposit box to keep it safe, and in the meantime travelled about trying to raise interest in his discovery, travelling to conferences and trying to get the object tested. He even opened his Museum of the Unexplained, which would hold the object high as its main attraction. In 1996, a small sample of the object was finally tested by the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, which didn’t come to any firm conclusions, but did have this to say:
The metallurgical analysis was pretty mundane. We didn't find any evidence that it was extraterrestrial. Now you can make the argument that we didn't spend $1 million and look at every conceivable option. We didn't cover every base.
A second laboratory came to a similar conclusion, deflating hope that this was an alien device or piece of spaceship. Undeterred and convinced of the object’s otherworldly nature, White decided to keep trying, sending in samples to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico Tech, and the Geosciences Research Division of the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California, for more thorough analyses. One of White’s partners, a Dr. Robert Gibbons, a former scientist with NASA, would say of the results of these further tests:
We recently came across scientific data that linked Bob's object with the planet Mars. Isotope abundance ratio tests were performed on Bob's object in May, 1999 in La Jolla, CA and the numbers are virtually the same as obtained from Martian meteorite samples. The ratio of isotopes of Strontium for the QUE 94201 meteorite found in Antarctica in 1994 was 0.701. The ratio of isotopes of Strontium for Bob's object was 0.712. The ratio of isotopes of Strontium for the Shergotty meteorite found India in 1865 was 0.723. Bob's object is right in the middle of two proven Martian meteorites!
So, what does this all mean? Well, the most rational explanation is that this is exactly what the object is: a meteorite. This could also explain the strange sighting the two men had had to some degree, although it doesn’t explain the presence of the massive UFO they had supposedly seen or the “mothership” it attached to before speeding off into the night. Other ideas are that they saw debris from a satellite falling, or some naturally occurring celestial phenomenon, and that the weird object he found was completely unrelated. Then there is the possibility that this is all just a hoax. All of these possibilities White strongly denied. He never tried to get rich off of his findings, and whatever he did find out there in the desert, he certainly seemed to have at least truly believed it was real, once saying of his crusade to get the object recognized:
This is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life. I'm 73 years old. I don't have much longer. What I'd like to see before I'm gone is the national media get their heads out of the sand. I'd like to see the national media and everybody else realize that what I have is real. I don't know what I have to do to prove this is the truth. You can't make this stuff up.
He would continue to adamantly stick to his story and defend his strange discovery all the way up to his death in 2009, but the object would stay locked away in his museum, where it remains to this day. What exactly did he find out there in the desert on that fateful night? Is this a piece of meteorite, space debris, just a weird-looking rock, a hoax, or something else? As of yet, there is no proof that the object is anything more mysterious than a rock or meteorite, but it is still a pretty odd story all the same, and managed to get a lot of attention in its time as a piece of possible physical evidence from a UFO.
Bob White and his alien fragment
In the meantime, the object is kept under carefully secured conditions, with motion detectors, closed-circuit TV, and window and door alarms protect it at all times, and the object never spends the night at the same place two nights in a row. Most skeptics say it is just a piece of space debris from a meteor or a satellite, but it has never been conclusively proven to be one thing or another. In the end, that is what we are let with on all of these cases, more questions than answers. Despite these supposed pieces of physical evidence of alien spacecraft, there just doesn't seem to be any way to completely verify any of it, with the samples either disappearing or producing mixed results, at best. What is going on here and why have these strange objects turned up? What does it all mean? We may never know for sure.
One very well-known account of such a bizarre object was found by chance in the U.S. State of Florida by an unsuspecting family. A perfect sphere with various unusual properties, it has gone on to fuel talk of all manner of UFO theories and conspiracy rumors, and remains an enigma to this day. On March 26,1974, a raging brush fire had swept through the 88-acre property of the Betz family, on Fort George Island, Florida, leaving a vast swath of burnt and blackened land behind. As Antoine and Jerri Betz, accompanied by their 21-year-old son Terry, surveyed the damage they came through a grove of trees that had been completely incinerated by the fire, yet sitting there in the middle of what would have been an inferno was a metallic sphere of some sort, approximately the size of a bowling ball, shining there in the sunlight and seemingly untouched and not affected in the least by the fire that had torn through. In fact, it was found to be completely smooth, polished, and without a single blemish upon it except for a small triangular shape carefully etched within the metal, and it was apparently without any scratch or scorch mark on it.
It was an incredibly odd thing to see sitting there all shiny and polished in the middle of all the charred and scorched earth, and the baffled family tried to figure out what it could possibly be. They considered that it may have been a downed satellite or something that had been dropped from a plane, but then why was there no sign of damage upon it at all? They then came to the conclusion that it was an old relic cannonball from some forgotten battle in centuries past, but the lack of any rust or signs of age didn’t seem to fit. Curious, they loaded it into their truck and hauled it back to their home to take a better look, and this is when things would get even more bizarre.
Some of the Weirdest Supposed Alien Artifacts Found on Earth - PART II
Throughout the history of ufology, the Holy Grail has always been some form of concrete evidence, something we can hold in our hand and verify as being from alien intelligences beyond our world. There have been plenty of stories of crashed UFOs and alien bodies over the years, none of which have come to provide the answers we are looking for. However, are there other forms of evidence of aliens visiting us across the sea of stars? Are there perhaps artifacts or objects they have left behind for whatever reasons? Here we will look at a selection of some of the more far out supposed alien objects ever found, which have mostly fueled more questions than answers.
It was an incredibly odd thing to see sitting there all shiny and polished in the middle of all the charred and scorched earth, and the baffled family tried to figure out what it could possibly be. They considered that it may have been a downed satellite or something that had been dropped from a plane, but then why was there no sign of damage upon it at all? They then came to the conclusion that it was an old relic cannonball from some forgotten battle in centuries past, but the lack of any rust or signs of age didn’t seem to fit. Curious, they loaded it into their truck and hauled it back to their home to take a better look, and this is when things would get even more bizarre.
The odd sphere was soon found to have some very peculiar properties. The first clue to this was when Terry was in the same room as the sphere one day while practicing the guitar. As he played he became aware that the metal sphere seemed to be reacting somehow to the music, throbbing in tune to the beat and emitting a vibrating sound not unlike a tuning fork. Even when the sounds stopped the family dog refused to go anywhere near it, suggesting that there were still sub-audible sounds emanating from within it. They decided to keep a closer eye on the sphere, and soon noticed that it seemed to occasionally emit these thrumming hums on its own, and that it was more active on sunny days, leading them to think that it was somehow solar powered. They also accidentally discovered that it could roll around on its own and guide itself, often turning around to make its way back to whoever pushed it and able to roll on without aid for long periods of time. It seemed to react to different situations and almost have a mind of its own, leaving the whole family and anyone they showed it to in awe. This was increasingly obviously no 16th century cannonball.
The mysterious sphere
Considering that the Betz family would supposedly often show off the sphere to family and neighbors, it is perhaps no surprise that word began to get out on its strange properties. Journalists began showing up to snoop around, and some of them were able to see some of the phenomena for themselves. One was a photographer from the Jacksonville Journal, who went to the residence and apparently saw the mysterious sphere in action, writing of it:
It rolled a ways then stopped. So what? She said, 'Just wait a minute.' It turned by itself and rolled to the right about four feet. It stopped. Then it turned again and rolled to the left about eight feet, made a big arc and came right back to my feet.
At around this time the sphere began to escalate its strange phenomena, causing other objects to move or doors to slam around the house, as well as producing loud music that sounded as if it were coming from an organ. More people came in to investigate, and before long it had even attracted the attention of government organizations such as NASA, the U.S. Navy, and the Arial Phenomena Research Organization. The Navy purportedly examined the sphere and did tests and X-rays on it, proclaiming that it was not anything they had ever seen before and that it seemed to be made of an incredibly dense, absurdly heat resistant form of stainless steel, with two other objects somewhere within its hollow frame surrounded by a halo made of material that had an unusual density, as well as a total of two negative and two positive poles. A researcher named Carl Wilson found that the ball exhibited strange magnetic characteristics and even seemed to be putting out some sort of signal, even going as far as to say that it possessed certain properties that seemed to defy physics and that it was not made of steel at all. Another named J. A. Harder concluded that there were elements within the sphere that were unknown.
After this the odd trajectory of the sphere becomes unclear, the story slowly fading away from the media blitz it had enjoyed and its location sinking into obscurity, and we are left with the question of what this ball was and what happened to it. There have been theories ranging from the rational to the more fringe. The rational explanation is that this was a misidentified component of a satellite or an otherwise manmade construction such as a piece of industrial machinery such as a ball valve, but how would this explain its strange behavior and properties? One ball valve manufacturer was nevertheless reasonably sure that it was just a ball valve, saying of the “Betz Sphere”:
I'm not saying that this thing didn't come from outer space because I've never seen it. All I'm saying is that the physical description of it matches exactly the type of ball we have in stock.
Others say that the analyses done would have immediately determined whether it was manmade or not, but that they failed to conclusively come to this conclusion, suggesting that it was something else, perhaps something alien in origin. Yet looking through the Navy records on the case it seems this may have been exaggerated somewhat by the media, as one Navy spokesman is on record having said of the ball’s purported strange ability to rove about on its own:
I believe it's because of the construction of the house... It's old and has uneven stone floors. The ball is almost perfectly balanced, and it takes just a little indentation to make it move or change direction.
So what are we to believe? What was this thing? It seems this story has been muddied, twisted, and warped through retellings and a clear lack of information, leaving us merely scratching or heads. Perhaps an even more important question we should be asking ourselves is just where did this thing go? It was all over the news for a time and then just disappears? How can that be? Conspiracy theories say that the military or NASA had it whisked away, while others say the family got tired of all of the attention and hid it away from the world, but we really have no idea what the truth is. In the end the only way to know whether this was truly some sort of alien probe or piece of technology would be to study that sphere, and that seems to not be happening any time soon. Whatever it was, the Betz Sphere will likely remain a mystery for a long time to come.
We are left to wonder. Have there been mysterious alien objects dropped off or left behind on Earth? Is the ultimate physical evidence out there somewhere, or is this all just smoke, mirrors, and hoaxes? At the moment there has been no known conclusive evidence that aliens have left anything behind here on our planet, but there continue to be stories such as these. What are we to make of them? Is there any truth to any of these or not? It remains unknown.
The Roswell "UFO"Affair: A Plausible Reason for a "Secret Experiment" and No Aliens Anywhwere
The Roswell "UFO"Affair: A Plausible Reason for a "Secret Experiment" and No Aliens Anywhwere
Nick Redfern
When it comes to the issue of what really happened on what was once known as the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico in early July 1947, there are things we know, things we suspect, and things we will probably never know. But, that something happened – something which caused the U.S. Air Force to offer multiple explanations for the event – is not a matter of any doubt at all. It was an incident that clearly concerned elements of not just the military, but the government, too, and to a highly significant degree. Eye-witnesses – both military and civilian – were warned not to talk about what they had seen and / or heard. More than a few of those warnings crossed the line and can only accurately be described as death threats. People were plunged into states of fear. Lives were changed forever; even scarred. Some lives may have ended; as in terminated.
It was on July 8, 1947 that the strange event surfaced publicly. Associated Press (among many other news outlets) reported on the startling, then-breaking news: “The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chavez County. “The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff’s office, who in turn notified Major Jesse A. Marcel of the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office. Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher’s home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.”
The whole world was watching.
The story was quickly picked up, not just across the United States, but across the planet, too. In barely no time at all, however, the flying disc angle was blown out of the sky: the whole thing was nothing but a huge, embarrassing mistake. The materials found on the massive ranch – by rancher William Ware “Mack” Brazel – were not the remains of a disc, after all. What had really been found, and subsequently collected and brought to the Roswell Army Air Field, was weather-balloon debris. Or, so the military was careful to try and assure everyone. With Brazel at the time of the discovery – which had actually occurred days earlier – was a young boy named Dee Proctor. He would go on to be one of the most important people in the Roswell story. We also know for sure that three, key military men, all of whom were destined to become part and parcel of the Roswell affair, were also present at the ranch – and specifically before a veritable battalion was on-site and ordered to recover the massive amount of whatever-it-was. They were Major Jesse Marcel, the intelligence-office of the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell; Captain Sheridan Cavitt, of the Counter-Intelligence Corps; and CIC Master Sergeant Lewis S. “Bill” Rickett. All three were at ground-zero. They all saw the wreckage. Years later Marcel would open up wide on the matter of the debris he saw and collected. Cavitt and Rickett may have seen more than debris. Way more. Possibly bodies, strange bodies. Brazel and little Dee may have seen one or more of those bodies, too.
When the media revealed the weather-balloon explanation, something amazing happened: Roswell was largely, and very quickly, forgotten. Granted, those implicated in the affair never forgot what they saw and experienced. But, the media certainly moved on to other things. Plus, back in 1947 there were no UFO research groups around to look into the case. The result? Aside from a few, occasional, brief references in books and magazines in the 1950s and 1960s, Roswell was for all intents and purposes dead and buried – which is precisely how those charged with keeping the disturbing secret wanted it. Things changed, however, in the mid-to-late 1970s. Both William Moore and Stanton Friedman were eagerly pursuing the Roswell story by then; it was a story that was slowly but surely destined to be resurrected. It was Friedman who found the now-elderly Jesse Marcel. The long-retired major had a most interesting story to tell:
“I saw a lot of wreckage but no complete machine. It had disintegrated before it hit the ground. The wreckage was scattered over an area about three quarters of a mile long and several hundred feet wide. I was pretty well acquainted with most everything that was in the air at that time, both ours and foreign. I was also acquainted with virtually every type of weather-balloon or radar-tracking device being used by either the civilians or the military. What it was we didn’t know. We just picked up the fragments…it certainly wasn’t anything built by us.”
Mack Brazel’s son, Bill, would later say that what was found on the Foster Ranch was “…something on the order of tinfoil except that [it] wouldn’t tear…You could wrinkle it and lay it back down and it immediately resumed its original shape. Quite pliable, but you couldn’t crease or bend it like ordinary metal. Almost like a plastic, but definitely metallic in nature.” When Friedman spoke with Bill Rickett, in 1985, the also-long-retired Counter-Intelligence Corps man revealed a few snippets of information on what happened, but practically froze like a deer caught in headlights when Friedman brought up the matter of bodies. It was clearly an issue Rickett had no intention of discussing – and he didn’t. As for Sheridan Cavitt, he proved to be one of the trickiest players in the entire story. He revealed very little of substance. On occasion, he even denied having ever been at Roswell or at the crash site. Cavitt may even have withheld what he knew of the incident when, in 1994, the Air Force came knocking on his front-door, wanting answers – as will become clear later on.
What was the real story?
Since the days of the late 1970s and the 1980s, Roswell has risen to stratospheric proportions. Researchers Kevin Randle, Don Schmitt, and Tom Carey have all investigated the mystery to significant degrees. They continue to do so. The Air Force and the Government Accountability Office have both published reports on the case. Numerous non-fiction books and novels, television documentaries, and a movie have been made on the world famous affair. The number of people who have spoken out about their knowledge of what happened – whether first-, second-, or third-hand – is now well into the hundreds. People talk of dead aliens, preserved corpses, the back-engineering of alien artifacts found on the Foster Ranch, secret files on the case, old B&W photographs taken at the crash site, and more – including even suspicious deaths. People murdered to keep the truth hidden? Maybe, yes. The stakes really could be that high – even decades later. The end for Roswell is nowhere in sight. Like fictional, Tokyo-trashing Godzilla, it’s an indestructible colossus. Or is it? Perhaps, Roswell is finally verging on collapse – at least, in terms of it being perceived as an extraterrestrial event. Welcome to the latest news on the Roswell-themed story that Ufology hates and which, back in 2005, made me public enemy number one.
Numerous pro-UFO books have been written on that certain, controversial incident which occurred on the Foster Ranch in early July 1947. It has become far better known as the Roswell UFO crash. Those aforementioned books include Roswell in the 21st Century by Kevin Randle, The Children of Roswell by Tom Carey and Don Schmitt, The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William Moore, The UFO Crash at Roswell by Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt, and Crash at Corona by Stanton Friedman and Don Berliner. As for the U.S. Air Force, it has now published two reports on Roswell – one in 1994 and the other in 1997. Neither report endorses the alien angle, which should surprise absolutely no-one. The conclusion of the USAF, today, is that the Roswell wreckage came not from a weather-balloon, as was claimed by the Air Force way back in July 1947, but from a huge “Mogul” balloon-array utilized to secretly monitor for Soviet atomic bomb tests in the latter part of the 1940s. As for the reports of alien bodies found at the crash site, it is the Air Force’s firm opinion that they were crash-test-dummies used in high-altitude parachute experiments. There is, however, another theory for what happened outside of Roswell in early July 1947. In some ways, it’s a theory that is more controversial than the idea that aliens crashed and died on the ranch.
In June 2005, Simon & Schuster published what is without doubt the most controversial book I have ever written. Its title: Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story. It’s a book which suggested that what crashed outside of Roswell, New Mexico in early July 1947 was not an alien spacecraft, after all, but one of a handful of definitively terrestrial vehicles which were secretly test-flown by the U.S. military, in various parts of New Mexico. And, all over the course of several, specific months in the year in which (a) the flying saucer was born, (b) the CIA was created, and (c) the passing of the National Security Act went ahead. We’re talking about 1947. All of the flights ended in disaster, and particularly so for the people on-board. This was something which ensured that the tales, revelations and rumors of more than a few “crashed flying saucers and dead aliens,” in the Land of Enchantment, and in the late-1940s, became intertwined and confused. To the extent that they are now popularly recognized under one banner, that of the “the Roswell incident.”
The overwhelming secrecy surrounding the flights was due to the fact that certain controversy-filled pacts had secretly been put into place. They were designed to allow a large number of German and Japanese scientists to avoid prosecution for their Second World War-era war-crimes. Instead, those scientists secretly went to work for the U.S. Government – and that included working on the craft that crashed to earth outside of Roswell, New Mexico and which led to the infamous legend of the UFO crash. Some of those craft were piloted. Others had human guinea-pigs on board – handicapped people – who were strapped into gondolas and lifted high into the sky by huge balloon arrays, chiefly to further expand the scope of controversial work in the field of high-altitude exposure and early rocketry.
In other words, had the truth of Roswell surfaced back then, the floodgates would almost certainly have opened wide, and the sinister treaty - with ardent Nazis and crazed Japanese scientists who had no qualms at all about using innocent people in nightmarish experiments - would have reared its ugly head. No-one in officialdom wanted that to happen, so it was a case of burying the dark and disturbing truth of the diabolical human experimentation among a mass of tales of aliens from other worlds, flying saucers, dummies, and spy-balloons. Destroy all of the records. Deny everything that needs denying. Silence those who know too much. Create as many false leads as possible. Couldn’t be done? As I write these words in 2017, I can say with confidence that that approach has worked all too well for the last seventy years. As for the timeline that my 2005 book described, it went like this:
(Nick Redfern) At the crash site of the Roswell event
During the latter stages of the Second World War, the Japanese military is working to perfect highly advanced balloons as weapons of war – to the extent that on June 4, 1945, a Japanese military spokesman states that their so-called Fugo balloon launches of the previous few months – balloons equipped with bombs and which result in a small number of fatalities on American soil - are merely the precursors for something far more dangerous, including large-scale attacks. The new balloons will be piloted by “death-defying” Japanese military personnel. The new balloons, American experts estimate, will be at least sixty feet in diameter and will be able to carry a pressurized gondola containing four relatively small men to a height of around 30,000 feet as the balloons travel upon their stratospheric, four-day flights across the Pacific to the United States. Similarly, declassified FBI, CIA, Air Force and British Government memoranda reveals that in the same time frame, the Germans are actively pursuing several new and novel aviation-based projects, including the construction of circular- and elliptical-shaped aircraft – a number of which are based upon the groundbreaking work of Walter and Reimar Horten, aviation geniuses who worked for the Nazis on a number of revolutionary aircraft designs.
In addition, extensive wartime research is conducted by the Japanese Government’s Unit 731 – which performed unforgivable medical atrocities on captured people - and by Nazi scientists in the extremely controversial area of human experimentation. A large body of that same experimentation is devoted to better understanding the effects of high-altitude exposure on human beings and is undertaken, in part, on physically handicapped individuals. At the close of hostilities, scientific, aviation and medical experts from Japan and Germany are secretly brought to the United States – via a secret project called Paperclip and its Japanese equivalent – where human experimentation and advanced aircraft research continues unabated and under just about the strictest security possible. President Clinton’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments notes in the 1990s: “At least 1,600 scientists and their dependents were recruited and brought to the United States by Paperclip and its successor projects through the early 1970s.”
“The ACHRE also notes with respect to the time period in question that a number of potentially important collections could not be located and were evidently lost or destroyed. Similarly, the Committee reveals, a number of those same document collections related to experiments undertaken in the fields of biomedicine, defense and space exploration; and in the great majority of these cases only fragmentary data remained. Where programs were legitimately kept secret for national security reasons, states the Committee, the government often did not create or maintain adequate records, thereby preventing the public, and those most at risk, from learning the facts in a timely and complete fashion.” In the aftermath of the War, a number of military research sites recruit Paperclip scientists with backgrounds in aero-medicine, radiobiology and ophthalmology. Those sites include the Air Force’s School of Aviation Medicine - from where experiments into total-body irradiation, space medicine, space biology and flash-blindness are undertaken - and the New Mexico-based White Sands Proving Ground. The latter becomes home to the V2 rockets developed by – and captured from - Nazi Germany during the War.
In addition, at the same time that the Paperclip personnel are actively being brought to the United States, the Air Force’s Aero Medical Center gives its top priority to the translation of manuscripts providing a complete picture of German aviation medicine. Further advances are made in the field of aviation in post-war America: the Air Force awards to the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation a contract that establishes Fairchild as the responsible agency of the NEPA nuclear aircraft project; and the Holloman Balloon Branch, Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico, eventually goes on to become a recognized component of the space-race, via its involvement in what is known as the Discoverer program. Then, on July 1, 1947 – just a couple of days before the Foster Ranch incident happened - Major Curtis E. LeMay, Major General, U.S. Army, Deputy Chief of Air Staff for Research and Development, orders that research into the biological effects of radiation on Japanese individuals should begin.
In the summer of 1947 and against this backdrop of (a) secret tests on human subjects, (b) revolutionary aircraft- and secret balloon-based programs, and (c) an influx of senior scientific, medical and aviation experts into the United States from Japan and Germany, a series of events and accidents occur on and near the White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, and which lead to the deliberate creation of cover-stories concerning crashed saucers and dead E.T.s. Witnesses at several crash sites report seeing the remains of unusual-looking aircraft and small bodies, some with enlarged, bald heads, and Asian or “Oriental”-like features. On August 19, 1947, FBI Special Agent S. W. Reynolds informs the Bureau’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, that in a meeting with a Lieutenant Colonel George D. Garrett, the latter expresses his firm belief that “the flying discs” originate with a highly classified experiment of the Army or Navy. Alien, they are not, the FBI is told.
In the immediate wake of the Roswell affair, Dr. Lincoln LaPaz of the University of New Mexico – and a wartime expert on the Fugo balloons, no less – becomes deeply embroiled in the Roswell controversy; the ramifications of the Nuremberg Code begin to reverberate and rumble within the United States; and, as the November 3, 1947 issue of the Biology Division Bulletin of the Clinton National Laboratory reveals, staff take an active interest in experimentation undertaken to determine the effect of radioactive iodine on dwarfs and those afflicted with Progeria - a syndrome that results in a small stature, an enlarged, bald-head and on occasion extra fingers and toes – go ahead. Add to that the testimony of a number of elderly whistleblowers who I interviewed extensively in the early 2000s, and who chose to reveal the absolute darkest side of post-war history and secrecy, and what you have is the story told in my book. Terrible and wholly unethical experiments, rather than the bad flying skills of extraterrestrials, were at the heart of what many believe to be the most important UFO case of all.
The interviews conducted with my elderly sources began sixteen years ago, and more than a decade has now gone by since the book was published. Those sources were Al Barker, Bill Salter (both of whom worked in the field of intelligence and espionage and who were in their early eighties when I spoke with them), a retired military man who I referred to as the Colonel, and an elderly woman I called the Black Widow, and who was in her late seventies when I interviewed her in the summer of 2001. In the period since Body Snatchers in the Desert surfaced and provoked a wealth of anger, dismay and even – in some quarters – shattered dreams and crushed hopes, far more relevant information has surfaced. The picture it paints is decidedly bleak. It adds significantly to what we know of Roswell and what occurred, rather than what so many want to believe or wish happened, on that famous day back in July 1947.
I didn’t just write this book to share with you the latest news on the story that suggests aliens didn’t crash at Roswell. I also wrote it to correct some significant misconceptions. For example, when Body Snatchers in the Desert surfaced, time and time again I saw it referred to as “Nick Redfern’s theory,” or as “Nick Redfern’s story.” The implication was that I was the only one who was looking into this particular angle – or who had ever looked into it. This was, however, a major misrepresentation of the facts. People still repeat that mistake today. Part of the reason why I have chosen to write the sequel to Body Snatchers in the Desert is to demonstrate that – contrary to what some might say - numerous people and sources within Ufology have uncovered near-identical data to that which I was exposed to. In that sense, I am far from being a lone wolf. There is an entire pack of us. Also,by now you may well think I am a UFO skeptic; I can totally see why you might think that. But, I’m not a UFO skeptic; not in the slightest. I have seen enough, heard enough, experienced enough, and investigated enough to know that there is a very real UFO phenomenon in our midst. It is a phenomenon that is deeply interested in us, as a species, but which is determined to remain steadfastly in the shadows. Yes, UFOs are real. I just don’t think one crashed in the U.S. southwest in the summer of 1947.
Moving into the 1970s and the 1980s, we have three very intriguing stories from John A. Price, of the Roswell-based UFO Enigma Museum, and the author of a 1997 non-fiction book, Roswell: A Quest for the Truth. On one particular day in 1978, Price – who was employed as a roofer at the time - was working outside on a particular property in Hagerman. It’s a town situated approximately twenty-four miles from Roswell. The property held a number of handicapped children – this much was clear to Price, as several such children exited the property and stood on the patio, watching him as he worked. He thought “this must be a home for the mentally impaired.” That was not all, however. Price had more to say: “Suddenly, I almost choked on my coffee as two more children, or at least I think they were children, walked out and stood behind the others.” According to Price, they were all around four- to four-and-a-half-feet in height. They had oversized, hairless heads, and their ears and noses were noticeably smaller than normal for a young child. Things came to a sudden end when, Price recalls, “a lady came to the door and ushered the kids back into the house.” He did not see them again.
More than a decade later, Price received a letter from “an acquaintance” who he had known for some time. Price said: “In the letter he told me that the aliens I was looking for were at Fort Stanton.” For those who may not know, Fort Stanton was an installation which, during the Second World War, held a number of Japanese “enemy aliens,” and which is barely spitting distance away from the Foster Ranch. We will learn a great deal more about Fort Stanton’s wartime Japanese connections in later chapters – as well as its links to Roswell. In the meantime, back to Price. Price’s source told him that at some undisclosed point, “There were some pretty deformed young men there, several of which could be of alien nature. We only went by what we were told; please don’t tell anyone. Mongoloid large heads, small ears, pin heads who could function and had shrill voices. They were supposed to be of incest, but from their looks – Outer-space.” Price took the story seriously, and mused on the possibility that the government may have grabbed handicapped people who had “no paper trail, no social security number, and no traceable family connections.”
Nightmarish? No doubt. Right on target? That depends on the extent of your “I want to believe” factor. Someone else who suspected that Roswell could be explained in down to earth – rather than alien – fashion was yet another acquaintance of Price. His name was Robert Betz, an engineer who, prior to his retirement, had been contracted to various corporations to perform certain, sensitive work. Price said, “Robert was convinced that the Roswell crash could be explained away as a top secret project of flying saucer design and that the bodies were midgets.”
The late Leonard Stringfield, who passed away in 1994, was a UFO researcher who firmly believed that, since the 1940s, the U.S. Government had secretly recovered a number of crashed UFOs and dead aliens, and which were stored and preserved a variety of military bases across the country – many at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. Stringfield, too, however, was given a number of accounts relative to the issue of secret and shocking human experimentation on handicapped people; experimentation that was tied in with the Roswell affair.
One of those stories came to Stringfield from a highly controversial figure in Ufology. His name was Timothy Cooper, a resident of Big Bear Lake, California and someone who exited the field of UFO research years ago. Far more than a few people in Ufology have very little time for Cooper, suspecting that many of the documents he supplied to the UFO community in the mid-1990s were bogus, rather than the highly classified papers that they were purported to be. They were bogus; there is no doubt about that. But, Cooper himself was not the forger. It’s the “pre-documents” era we have to take a look at, however. It paints a very different picture of Cooper to that which many ufologists have accepted.
Tim Cooper claimed to Stringfield in 1990 that he had numerous sources of the old-timer kind – some of who assured Cooper that, yes, aliens really did crash outside of Roswell in the summer of 1947. Others, however, quietly hinted to Cooper that the truth was far more controversial: a scenario involving human guinea-pigs – Japanese and handicapped individuals - and the creation of UFO-themed disinformation programs and faked, pro-UFO documents to hide the down-to-earth truth of the Roswell enigma. Also in 1990, Cooper supplied Stringfield one specific story which Stringfield decided to firmly keep under wraps until the following year, 1991, when he published it in a lengthy report on tales of crashed and secretly retrieved alien spacecraft. The story concerned a woman who Cooper first crossed paths with in 1989. He described her only as a nurse, and gave her the pseudonym of “Mary.” As you will soon see soon, that alias was not too far off from the real name of another nurse linked to the story. Decades ago, Cooper’s informant allegedly worked at what is, today, the New Mexico-based Los Alamos National Laboratory.
In Cooper’s own words of 1990, and which Stringfield published: “She casually mentioned to me over coffee that ‘bodies’ were being flown to Los Alamos periodically from late 1945 to sometime in 1947. I asked her if she had seen these ‘bodies’ and she said no, but others had. I asked her where these ‘bodies’ were coming from. She said she did not know but it was rumored that they were human experiments for biological and nuclear medicine research. She thought they may have come from Japan after the war. I asked her why she thought that. She said that they were small bodies with deformed heads and limbs. The eyes were abnormally big, she was told. She did have some view of them in the morgue very briefly for a few minutes at some distance. I asked her why she was allowed to be present at the autopsies. She told me that she was asked to assist in the preparation and cleanup. I asked her again about the bodies. She said they were being flown in on special transport planes equipped with refrigerator units to keep the bodies from decomposing. The flesh was badly burned and charred. There was no hair on the heads and had a grayish-yellow color. That’s all she knew.” But, I think I know: a secret military experiment that went disastrous. And it was all hidden under an "alien" angle
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
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