Artikel van Michaël Torfs  

Al lang op voorhand konden we met zekerheid zeggen dat 2023 het warmste jaar ooit zou worden. Als een wielrenner die zo'n grote voorsprong heeft dat hij nog lang voor de aankomst al zegezeker is. Alleen is het in dit geval iets wat we liever niet zien.

"We hebben heel wat extreme situaties meegemaakt in 2023", weet klimatoloog Niels Souverijns (VITO). "De vingerafdruk van de klimaatopwarming wordt steeds duidelijker. Het is iets wat we misschien normaal gaan vinden, maar we moeten ons heel goed realiseren dat dit niet normaal is." 

"We wisten dat dit rapport geen goed nieuws zou brengen", zegt Mauro Facchini van het klimaatobservatorium van de Europese Unie daarover. "De EU wil tegen 2030 55% minder broeikasgassen uitstoten. We weten wat ons te doen staat." 

Als het gaat over de marges van het klimaat wereldwijd, rekenen we doorgaans met tienden van een graad of minder. In 2023 werden er verschillende nieuwe mijlpalen gezet met behoorlijk grote marges. In het jaarrapport staan heel wat details over 2023, dat op klimaatvlak een heel bewogen jaar was mede door het weerfenomeen El Niño. Wij pikken er 6 voor je uit. 

1. Net geen anderhalve graad extra (maar het komt eraan)

2023 bleek uiteindelijk 1,48 graden Celsius warmer dan het gemiddelde van 1850-1900, de referentieperiode voor de VN-klimaatconferentie en het VN-klimaatpanel IPCC. Het was 0,17 graden warmer dan het vorige warmste jaar uit onze moderne geschiedenis, 2016. 

Vorig jaar was het 12 maanden na elkaar dus net geen anderhalve graad warmer, maar eind januari of eind februari kunnen we wél aan 12 opeenvolgende maanden zitten die de drempel overschrijden.

Dat ligt symbolisch gevoelig, want de wereldleiders houden op de klimaatconferenties nog altijd vast aan een beperking van de opwarming tot die anderhalve graad - het gaat dan over een structurele opwarming op langere termijn (over verschillende jaren).

Door de opwarming onder anderhalve graad te houden, kunnen we de ergste gevolgen van de klimaatverandering proberen te voorkomen. 

2. Twee dagen naar 2 graden extra (en dat is ongezien)

Vorig jaar was het op ongeveer de helft van de dagen minstens anderhalve graad warmer. Midden november waren er 2 dagen waarop het meer dan 2 graden warmer was. Dat is nog nooit eerder gebeurd en opnieuw een alarmsignaal.

Hoe meer de planeet opwarmt, hoe groter de weersextremen kunnen zijn - denk aan hevige regen, stormweer, of grote hitte met lange droge periodes.

Het hele jaar door kregen we berichten over hittegolven, overstromingen, droogtes en bosbranden uit verschillende hoeken. In Canada waren er grootscheepse en aanhoudende bosbranden. De CO₂-uitstoot door bosbranden lag vorig jaar 30 procent hoger dan het jaar daarvoor. Dat komt onder meer door de ongeziene natuurbranden in Canada waar het "worstcasescenario overtroffen werd".  

Bovenstaande grafiek toont hoeveel warmer elke dag in 2023 verliep tegenover de pre-industriële referentieperiode. Tijdens de tweede helft van het jaar zaten we gemiddeld bijna constant boven de anderhalve graad (zie de iets donkerder band in het midden). In november waren er zelfs twee pieken boven de 2 graden.

© VRTNWS

"Die anderhalve graad die we in 2023 hadden en die enkele dagen met 2 graden zijn symbolische grenzen, omdat het drempels zijn die zijn afgesproken in het klimaatakkoord van Parijs, met de bedoeling om daaronder te blijven", zegt klimatoloog Niels Souverijns. 

3. Tweede jaarhelft brak alle records, maand na maand (en dat kan blijven duren)

Vooral de tweede helft van het jaar brak alle records, mede door het losbreken van het weerfenomeen El Niño. Vanaf juni werd er elke maand opnieuw een warmterecord gevestigd.

De maanden september en oktober sprongen eruit met een bijzonder grote afwijking. Klimatoloog Wim Thiery (VUB) maakte voor oktober (+0,40 graden warmer dan warmste oktober voorheen) de vergelijking met de sprint in de atletiek, "alsof het wereldrecord op de 100 meter ineens met een volle seconde gebroken zou worden". 

De voorbije maand december was ook weer de warmste ooit gemeten. De maand bleek maar liefst 1,78 graden Celsius warmer dan een gemiddelde december 150 jaar geleden. 

Klimatologen verwachten dat El Niño zich nog zal doorzetten tot het einde van de lente, waardoor 2024 nog warmer zou kunnen uitvallen dan het voorbije jaar en een nieuw record zou kunnen vestigen. "2024 gaat zeker geen afkoeling kennen tegenover vorig jaar. De trend gaat zich doorzetten, en we mogen dus nog meer extremen en nog meer records verwachten", schetst Souverijns. 

4. Oceanen waren nooit warmer (en dat heeft grote gevolgen)

Grote delen van de oceanen waren nooit warmer dan vorig jaar. Ook dat is een teken van de verdere opwarming. "We zien al een paar jaar een trend naar warmere oceanen, en dit jaar heeft het weerfenomeen El Niño (waarbij een deel van de Stille Oceaan warmer is dan anders, red.) er zeker niet bij geholpen", zegt Souverijns. 

Oceanen slaan een groot deel van de extra warmte van de klimaatopwarming op, maar dat blijft niet zonder gevolgen. Boven de oceaan kunnen intense stormdepressies ontstaan. Warmer zeewater kan ook een intensere regenval veroorzaken, zoals vorige week nog bleek tijdens de overstromingen in ons land. 

Dat het zeewater nooit zo warm was, bleek ook uit de verschillende mariene hittegolven in o.a. de Middellandse Zee, de Golf van Mexico en het Caraïbische gebied, de Indische Oceaan, het noorden van de Stille Oceaan en het noordelijke deel van Atlantische Oceaan.

"In Libië hadden we zware schade als gevolg van de "medicane" (de plaatselijke cycloon boven de Middellandse Zee, gevoed door het ware zeewater daar, red.) en bij ons hadden we de zware neerslaghoeveelheden van de voorbije twee maanden", zegt Souverijns.

Uit een studie in Nature bleek onlangs dat het aantal mensen dat is blootgesteld aan tropische cyclonen, zowat verdubbeld is tussen 2002 en 2019 (van 408 miljoen naar 792 miljoen). Dat komt voor het grootste deel door de klimaatverandering. Het gaat om 6 tot 12 procent van de wereldbevolking, onder meer in China, Japan, de Filipijnen, Taiwan en de VS. 

De Duitse herverzekeraar Munich Re liet vandaag weten dat de schade door onweders in de Verenigde Staten vorig jaar op 66 miljard dollar ligt (ongeveer 60 miljard euro). In Europa ging het om 10 miljard dollar. Telkens gaat het om een absoluut record. 

5. Nooit was het zee-ijs op Antarctica er zo slecht aan toe

De gevolgen van de opwarming zien we ook in de omvang van het zee-ijs aan de Zuidpool. Tijdens 8 verschillende maanden bereikte de omvang van het zee-ijs een laagterecord voor de tijd van het jaar.

In februari (na de zomer op het zuidelijk halfrond) stond de oppervlakte zee-ijs zelfs op een historisch minimum. Ook aan de noordpool gaat het smeltproces snel, al zijn daar geen absolute diepterecords gevestigd. 

6. Nooit hadden we meer broeikasgassen in de atmosfeer

Die warmterecords hebben alles te maken met de aanwezigheid van broeikasgassen in onze atmosfeer, zoals CO₂ en methaan. In beide gevallen gaat het om de hoogste waarden in onze moderne geschiedenis.

De CO₂ blijft zich opstapelen in de lucht door de hoge menselijke uitstoot, en is nu naar 419 ppm (deeltjes per miljoen) geklommen, wat de steile klim van de vorige decennia bevestigt.

Voor methaan kwamen er 11 ppb (deeltjes per miljard) bij tot 1.902 ppb. Die stijging is hoog maar ligt iets lager dan de voorbije jaren. Methaan is een sterker broeikasgas dan CO₂, maar CO₂ blijft dan weer veel langer hangen en doorwerken, tot honderden jaren en meer.  

De broeikasgassen: hoogste waarde in 800.000 / 2 miljoen jaar

Ook de concentratie van broeikasgassen in de wereldwijde atmosfeer bleef stijgen. Het gehalte aan CO₂ (koolstofdioxide) steeg verder door met 2,1 ppm (parts per million of deeltjes per miljoen). Het jaargemiddelde voor CO₂ (los van de seizoensvariaties) in de atmosfeer bedraagt nu 417 ppm. Dat is het hoogste niveau ooit gemeten door de mens en het is volgens Copernicus het hoogste in ruim 2 miljoen jaar tijd. De stijging tijdens het voorbije jaar ligt ongeveer op de gemiddelde koers, terwijl ze eigenlijk zou moeten afnemen als we de klimaatopwarming willen afremmen. 

Onderstaande balkjes tonen hoe de gemiddelde jaartemperatuur op aarde in de voorbije 60 jaar afweek van het gemiddelde tussen 1850 en 1900 - de graad van opwarming valt op de verticale as aan de linkerkant af te lezen. Daar waar we rond het jaar 2000 nog aan een opwarming zaten van 0,6 tot 0,8 graden, was dat vorig jaar dus ongeveer 1,2 graden. (data Copernicus) 

Noot: als we het hebben over de klimaatopwarming, kijken we naar een periode van 20 tot 30 jaar, omdat klimaat nu eenmaal een foto is van de langere termijn. Daarom spreken we van een klimaatopwarming van 1,1 graden Celsius momenteel, hoewel de realiteit van de voorbije vijf jaar toont dat we (voor die vijf jaar gemiddeld) al aan ongeveer 1,2 graden extra zitten.

{ https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/ }

09-01-2024 om 18:24 geschreven door peter  

United States government has UFOs of 'non-human origin' in its possession - whistleblower

Rachel Sadler

{ https://www.newshub.co.nz/home.html }

09-01-2024 om 17:58 geschreven door peter  

Pilot Reports Mysterious Triangle UFO Fly Past Him in Audio Recording

A flight recording apparently capturing a pilot reporting a UFO to air-traffic controllers has captured the public's imagination after it was shared on an aviation social-media channel.

The audio clip was published on a YouTube account called You Can See ATC, which uploads videos featuring pilots' accounts of emergencies or unusual situations during flights, such as equipment failures or fights on board. Most of the channel's viewers seem to be those working in the industry. However, a video published on the site two weeks ago has received more than 22,000 views so far, as a pilot describes seeing a 30-foot triangular object moving at speed from his cockpit window as he flew about 50 miles northwest of Frederick, Maryland, on December 20.

The topic of UFOs has been in the news recently as a Pentagon report released in October 2023 detailed a list of all the sightings of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) from 2022 to 2023, while two 'alien' corpses were displayed to Mexico's Congress in September.

Just last week, the Miami Police Department was forced to release a video statement to reassure residents that an alien invasion was not underway after aerial footage of a crime scene went viral online. Some viewers said it showed a 10 foot-tall gray alien walking past squad cars.

The video currently garnering thousands of views on YouTube shows a graphic of the flight path of a private Piper Cherokee Arrow (P28R) aircraft, registration N30024, en route from Pittsburgh's Allegheny County Airport, Pennsylvania, to Maryland's Frederick Municipal Airport.

"NO25, was it moving at a fast pace?" the controller replies.

"It was moving away, affirmative, for 30024," says the pilot.

The pair then begin to discuss the plane's scheduled descent, before the official asks: "Arrow 024, what does the object look like?"

The pilot replies: "Er, it's kind of hard to describe. It was just tall and, er, pointy."

"Like a triangle?"

"It was in the shape of a triangle. It was bottom and flat on top. I'm not sure what it is. I do have a picture of it. And 30024 did not appear to be any danger," the pilot says.

"Cherokee 024, and that object was about 300 feet from you?"

"It was pretty far away form us. Just noticeable enough for caution to other aircraft," the pilot says.

The controller then asks for the pilot's number so he can ask his supervisor to call him if necessary, before giving the pilot his supervisor's number instead. Later, he comes back on the radio to say: "NO24, yeah, my supervisor said [inaudible] talk to you. Just wanna make sure everything is safe up there for future aircraft flying through that. So give him a call once you're on the ground safely please."

"Roger, will do, thanks, 30024," the pilot replies.

The video sparked plenty of discussion among the viewers of the YouTube channel.

Some were sceptical, with one saying: "If you saw it you should be able to describe it."

Given the timing—the audio was reportedly from December 20, and it was published on the site on Christmas Eve—several people wrote that it was more likely to have been Santa Claus rather than aliens.

Others offered more mundane ideas for what the triangle could have been. One viewer wrote, "Haha. I live right near there. I see Canadian geese all the time," with another agreeing that "flocks of geese are triangle in shape."

Some thought, "30 feet tall and pointy at the bottom is a helium balloon," with several also saying that they thought it could have been a weather balloon.

Others posted that it could have been another plane, such a new model being tested by the military. One wrote: "I'm old enough to remember when the stealth fighter was still a secret and there was all sorts of UFO reports due to it's funky shape."

Steven Greer, ufologist, makes a speech under an artist's rendering of an alleged UFO incident, during a press conference on June 12, 2023, in Washington, DC. An audio clip purporting to be of a pilot describing a UFO he saw mid-flight has captured the public's imagination over the past two weeks.

KEVIN DIETSCH/GETTY IMAGES

{ https://www.newsweek.com/ }

09-01-2024 om 17:29 geschreven door peter  

Combination of Two Minerals Can Explain Mysterious UV Absorber in Clouds of Venus

by Enrico de Lazaro

The clouds of Venus are believed to be composed of sulfuric acid and minor constituents including iron-bearing compounds. Respective concentrations of these compounds vary with height in the thick atmosphere of our neighboring planet. In a new study, researchers at the University of Cambridge synthesized iron-bearing sulfate minerals that are stable under the harsh chemical conditions in the Venusian clouds. Their spectroscopic analysis revealed that a combination of two minerals, rhomboclase and acid ferric sulfate, can explain the mysterious ultraviolet (UV) absorption feature in the Venusian atmosphere.

Jiang et al. hypothesize a rich and largely unexplored heterogeneous chemistry in the cloud droplets of Venus that has a large effect on the optical properties of the clouds and the behavior of trace gas species throughout Venusian atmosphere.

Image credit: Mattias Malmer / NASA.

The clouds of Venus hold several mysteries. They extend from 48 km to roughly 65 km and provide a transition region between the lower atmosphere (<48 km) that is dominated by thermochemistry and dynamics and the upper atmosphere (>65 km), for which photochemistry and dynamics are relevant.

To understand the chemical cycles between the Venusian atmosphere and its volcanic surface, and to correctly interpret potential biosignatures, an increasing research effort has been dedicated to generating a complete model framework of Venusian atmosphere.

“The only available data for the composition of the clouds were collected by probes and revealed strange properties of the clouds that so far we have been unable to fully explain,” said Dr. Paul Rimmer, a researcher with Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge.

“In particular, when examined under UV light, the Venusian clouds featured a specific UV absorption pattern.”

“What elements, compounds, or minerals are responsible for such observation?”

Formulated on the basis of Venusian atmospheric chemistry, Dr. Rimmer and colleagues synthesized several iron-bearing sulfate minerals in an aqueous geochemistry lab.

By suspending the synthesized materials in varying concentrations of sulfuric acid and monitor the chemical and mineralogical changes, they narrowed down the candidate minerals to rhomboclase and acid ferric sulfate, of which the spectroscopic features were examined under light sources specifically designed to mimic the spectrum of solar flares.

In an attempt to mimic the even more extreme Venusian clouds, the authors measured the UV absorbance patterns of ferric sulfate under extreme acidic conditions.

“The patterns and level of absorption shown by the combination of these two mineral phases are consistent with the dark UV-patches observed in Venusian clouds,” said Dr. Clancy Zhijian Jiang, a researcher at the University of Cambridge.

“These targeted experiments revealed the intricate chemical network within the atmosphere, and shed light on the elemental cycling on the Venusian surface.”

“Venus is our nearest neighbor, but it remains a mystery,” Dr. Rimmer said.

“We will have a chance to learn much more about this planet in the coming years with future NASA and ESA missions set to explore its atmosphere, clouds and surface.”

“This study prepares the grounds for these future explorations.”

• The team’s paper appears in the journal Science Advances.
• Clancy Zhijian Jiang et al. 2024. Iron-sulfur chemistry can explain the ultraviolet absorber in the clouds of Venus. Science Advances 10 (1); doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adg8826

{ https://www.sci.news/ }

09-01-2024 om 16:56 geschreven door peter  

Tucker Carlson’s Claim Of ‘Troops Dying From UFO Encounters’ Corroborates With Other Stories That Show Dark & Disturbing Elements Of UAPs

When we jump into phenomena like UFOs, NHI, or E.T., it suggests that humanity is on the brink of self-destruction, and time is running out. This chilling and unsettling aspect of the UFO issue is deeply concerning. Former CIA John Ramirez claimed that the government is aware of an impending event in 2027 that will reveal something quite significant, so people are being prepared. He has been stating that there is a presence on Earth (which he refers demonic) who are just projecting their belief systems to make us disbelieve in what we believe.

Clayton Morris, a former Fox News host, along with Tucker, hinted at possessing knowledge about a similar UFO-related story. They mentioned that this particular story is something they have not discussed with their families. “It’s so unsettling. I haven’t even shared it with my wife,” Tucker remarked. “And this isn’t merely something I stumbled upon online; it’s profoundly disturbing information.”

A while back, on the “Full Send” podcast, former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson recounted a study conducted by a Stanford professor 11 years ago. Interestingly, the US Defense Department tasked Dr. Garry Nolan (which he publicly confirmed) with investigating numerous cases where pilots’ brains were seriously damaged after encountering UFOs. However, Dr. Nolan never publicly said whether these injuries led to fatalities. Tucker said that hundreds of servicemen had been killed.

According to Tucker, “[In] several cases, these unidentified objects have landed on military bases. Servicemen who approached them either suffered traumatic brain injuries or were killed. I wonder, why isn’t this making headlines in the New York Times. I don’t know.”

Later, Susan Gough, a Defense Department spokesperson, told Military Times that the story was false and the Pentagon declined to comment further. (Source)

Tucker did not stop there and raised a sensitive issue about the potential harm or killing of individuals connected to the U.S. government’s UFO programs during his interview with David Grusch. He specifically asked Grusch if he had a reason to believe that the government had hurt or killed anyone, particularly American citizens, in connection to these programs. (Click here to read the full article)

Grusch responded by acknowledging concerns that were raised by individuals who approached him, expressing worries about potential harm. He emphasized that he took those concerns seriously and reported them to the Inspector General of the intelligence community, directing the individuals to law enforcement.

Tucker pushed further, specifically mentioning the allegation of murder, to which Grusch confirmed that the concerns included both murder and physical harm. However, he refrained from providing specific details due to the ongoing investigation and potential risks to his safety.

Grusch disclosed that he felt his life was in jeopardy, and he reported the threats and surveillance to a counterintelligence element and law enforcement. He revealed that the threats not only affected him but also impacted his wife. He stated that he did not know the identity of those involved, ruling out the possibility of it being a foreign entity.

Do fatalities occur in the UFO subject?

Many UFO researchers investigating these incidents have uncovered truly disturbing information from witnesses and victims about their UFO encounters.

Stefan Michalak’s case is the most discussed UFO encounter that happened in 1967 near the famous Falcon Lake in the Canadian province of Manitoba. Not only are we talking about seeing an extraterrestrial flying craft but also about contact made between the victim and the craft that resulted in serious burns.

A picture below shows severe burns on his chest after encountering a UFO near Falcon Lake, Canada. At first, he thought that the object was an American experimental test vehicle, so he sarcastically said: “Okay, Yankee boys, having trouble? Come on out and we’ll see what we can do about it.” Having received no answer, he tried greeting in different languages but still got no response. Therefore, without any second thought, he put his head into the half-open hatch and saw something like a dashboard and a huge number of glowing lights.

Stefan Michalak with burns on his chest after encountering UFO near Falcon Lake, Canada

 Stefan’s clothes that were burnt during his contact with the UFO

As Michalak was examining quartz rocks, fortunately, he was wearing safety goggles so that the bright light could not blind him. But then, the hatch suddenly closed again, and he quickly recoiled not to be pinched. At the same time, he touched the outer surface of the mysterious spaceship which burned his glove, so he received a burn on his hand. After that, the craft changed its position and a gridlike exhaust vent was facing toward him. A hot gaseous substance was thrown out of it in his direction. His clothes immediately caught fire, and only with great difficulty, he managed to extinguish the fire. The UFO flew into the air and disappeared, leaving Michalak alone with severe pain and nausea.

“I’m not so close-minded that I can’t entertain the possibility that it’s otherworldly. I can’t discount that. But without specific evidence to show me that it is, I don’t know. What I can tell you is that I’m an aviation fanatic, a huge aviation buff, and I am very familiar with how aviation technology has advanced in the past 50 years. And there was nothing even close to that in the works anywhere at that time,” Michalak said.

During a subsequent medical examination, doctors found burns on his chest in the form of a mesh pattern, which fully corresponded to his story. In the following months, he had to contend with health problems such as loss of appetite, weight loss, swelling, and fainting. Michalak died in 1999 at the age of 83.

Stefan Michalak and his alleged encounter with the alien craft at Lake Falcon have been the subject of big research, and Canadian UFO researcher Chris Rutkowski, who co-authored the book “When They Appeared” with him, spent many years studying and collecting countless documents, statements, photographs and personal belongings of Michalak.

Rutkowski told the reporters that Michalak had been treated at the Misericordia Hospital, where he was examined by doctors for the first time. Then he was transferred to the Mayo Clinic. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Royal Canadian Air Force, who were investigating, admitted that they had no explanation for what had happened.

During the investigation, Michalak’s welding gloves and shirt were examined but nothing could be found in the analysis. A circle of 4.5 meters was left at the landing site and the area was declared radioactive. More than 50 years after the incident, Rutkowski transferred all documents and items related to this case to the archives of the University of Manitoba.

What is also interesting to note about the UFO phenomenon is that we see critical instrumentation failure of our aircraft when in the vicinity of some of these objects.

The former CIA director R. James Woolsey, who ran the agency from 1993 to 1995, has recently spoken about the most classified cases in the history of the United States. In an interview with the Black Vault, Woosley said that a lot of examination is going on the UFOs over the years. He also shared one incident that happened to one of his friends, when his aircraft paused at 40,000 feet and stopped operating as a normal machine.

“But there was one case in which a friend of mine was able to have his aircraft stop at 40,000 feet or so and not continue operating as a normal aircraft,” Woolsey said. He was invited by the host of Black Vault on his YouTube channel, where he discussed the instances from his newly released book “Operation Dragon: Inside the Kremlin’s Secret War on America.” He talked about the Russian involvement in the continuation of the Cold War, then he was asked about the assassination of JFK, and also discussed the UFOs.

“I’m not as skeptical as I was a few years ago, to put it mildly. But something is going on that is surprising to a series of intelligent aircraft, experienced pilots,” he said. “And we will just have to see what it is.” (Source)

Next, we have the case of the Tordesillas boys, which is not well-known outside Spain. It is a perfect example of the consequences of the UFO’s interaction with the human body. Martin Rodríguez witnessed how a beam of light, arising from a UFO, pierced his chest and supposed numerous neurological operations.

It happened on the evening of October 1, 1977, on the outskirts of the city of Tordesillas, Spain. Martin Rodríguez and some friends were playing hide-and-seek in a vacant lot near the road and next to abandoned farm buildings.

At some point, Martin and Fernando Caravelos (both 7 years old) decided to hide somewhere so that no one could find them. The two boys ran to an abandoned corral that stood far away from the place where the children were playing. The boys knew that vagrants took shelter in that corral, so they decided to first check if there were any strangers inside.

Martin took the rock and threw it through the broken window, only to hear a loud metallic clang as if the rock hit what looked like a huge steel cauldron. The sound sparked their curiosity, as they had climbed inside the corral several times before and knew that there was nothing that could emit that sound. So, the two went in to investigate.

Inside the old corral, they were amazed at the sight of a strange metal object standing in the corner. It was shaped like a drop of water and stood on three supports. It was about 3 meters high and 2 meters wide with three circular windows as if they were intended for portholes.

A few moments later, the boys got closer to the object and it began to vibrate and rise. The first instinct of safety worked for Fernando, he jumped back and grabbed Martin’s arm to pull him away from the object. But it was too late, Martin stood frozen as if paralyzed, and a strange glow of light came out of the object and ended up hitting Martin’s chest.

The studies carried out concluded that the soil samples collected that day were subjected to a temperature of approximately 600°C. These studies were conducted by a local journalist and UFO researcher Iker Jimenez, 20 years after the event. Meanwhile, Jimenez published a book called “Enigmas Sin Resolver,” where he presented these facts. Martin also appeared on an episode of a TV show hosted by Jimenez, Cuarto Milenio.

In the following years, Martin Rodriguez, who had always been in good health, began to suffer from stomach pains, vomiting, dizziness, and loss of vision. He was admitted to the Redondo Onésimo Hospital in the city of Valladolid, and from that moment on, he underwent 14 surgeries.

Over the years, Martin suffered numerous relapses that led to routine comas, and many of his family and friends thought he could die at any time. But Martin’s life continued more or less normal, despite his illness and suffering from the operations performed. Martin’s case is considered one of the most important ufological cases in Spain, both for the witnesses who saw the object flying and for the consequences that such interaction had on Martin.

The Varginha case revolves around a reported crashed UFO in Varginha, Brazil that happened in 1996, where many locals claimed to have seen two alien creatures, captured by the Brazilian military. According to Investigative journalist Lelsie Kean, one creature was dead while the other one was still alive. (Click here to read the full article)

According to the report, the encounter involved two military police officers, who came across a creature running in front of their vehicle. One of the officers, Marco Chereze, supposedly captured the creature with his bare hands but later suffered from an infection that turned out to be fatal.

Kean revealed that she spoke with the doctors who had treated the police officer before his tragic demise. She said: “The circumstances of his death are shocking. He had this little cut on his shoulder from having grabbed this entity when it was alive, and it cut him. Then he got a horrific infection, and no antibiotics would work.” The veteran Brazilian doctor she spoke to, known for his expertise in autopsies, had never encountered anything like that, indicating the severity and uniqueness of the situation.

These are some of the known incidents where life-threatening injuries occurred, as well as fatalities in rare cases, during the UAP phenomena. So, when Tucker Carlson says the UFO truth is dark, could these cases be the reason behind it, or is there something more sinister?

{ https://www.howandwhys.com/ }

09-01-2024 om 16:46 geschreven door peter  

Alien Structures on Moons Southern Pole, Jan 8, 2024, UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: Jan 8, 2024

Location of discovery: Earths Moon, South Pole

Source photo: 

• https://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/lunar-south-pole-atlas/

Here are a few alien structures that I found on the south polar region of our moon. The structures are hidden within craters and each structure is truly alien in design. We as humans assume structures have to look a certain way, however, we develop this from our past experience...on Earth, where aliens past experiences are much different and from a different planet or planets. Thus, structures are often bewildering in design and hard to interpret its usage. The question is not...are alien structures on the moon, because of course we know there are many. The pertinent question is...are those structures still inhabited by the aliens who built them or moved into them? 

 

Now for the size, the top screenshot shows a structure in a crater, that crater being close to 8 miles across, making the structure 4 miles long. 

Scott C. Waring 

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

09-01-2024 om 16:13 geschreven door peter  

In 2018, a peculiar event over the skies of Iraq captured the attention of UFO enthusiasts and experts alike. Dubbed the “Jellyfish UFO,” this incident stands out not just for its intriguing visual characteristics but also for the numerous questions it raises about our understanding of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs). This article delves into the details of this extraordinary sighting, exploring the aspects that make it a standout case in UAP studies.

The Thermal Anomaly

At the heart of this encounter is the manner in which the Jellyfish UFO was captured – through thermal imaging on a military-grade weapons platform. Unlike standard visual recordings, this thermal footage revealed a fascinating play of temperature changes, with the object fluctuating between stark white and deep black. This alternating thermal signature suggests that the UFO was undergoing rapid heat variations, a feature not typically associated with conventional aircraft or known natural phenomena.

Optical Jamming: A Technological Conundrum

One of the most baffling aspects of the Jellyfish UFO sighting was its apparent ability to jam the optics of a highly sophisticated targeting system. These systems, designed for precision operations such as hitting a target several miles away, were rendered ineffective in locking onto this enigmatic object. This disruption of advanced military technology points to either an unknown natural phenomenon or a technological capability far beyond our current understanding.

Physical Characteristics: Beyond the Ordinary

Witnesses and analysts have described the Jellyfish UFO as having stiff, unmoving appendages with a geometric, scale-like appearance, akin to armor. This description deviates significantly from the typical disc-shaped or spherical UFOs often reported. The distinct physical structure of this object adds a layer of complexity to its analysis, prompting questions about its origin and purpose.

Invisible to Night Vision, Visible in Thermal Spectrum

Intriguingly, the Jellyfish UFO was not detectable through standard night vision equipment, yet it was clearly visible in the thermal spectrum. This selective visibility challenges our perception of UAPs and suggests that the object may operate using a form of energy or technology that is detectable only through specific wavelengths.

International Response and Secrecy

The incident reportedly involved responses from multiple nations, and the abrupt shutdown of surveillance feeds points to a high level of concern and secrecy surrounding the encounter. This international involvement and the subsequent suppression of information hint at the potential significance of the sighting on a global scale.

Water Interaction and Nuclear Facility Link

Perhaps one of the most startling characteristics of the Jellyfish UFO was its interaction with water. Described as stopping abruptly over a body of water, descending into it, and then re-emerging to shoot off at an angle, this behavior is reminiscent of other UAP sightings near nuclear facilities, raising questions about the object’s intentions and capabilities.

The Quest for Understanding

The Jellyfish UFO case, with its unique characteristics and elusive nature, continues to be a subject of fascination and investigation. The involvement of military and intelligence agencies, coupled with eyewitness accounts and thermal imaging evidence, provides a compelling narrative that challenges our understanding of what may be traversing our skies.

VIDEO by Jeremy Corbell:

The Jellyfish UFO sighting over Iraq in 2018 remains an enigmatic event in the annals of UAP research. Its distinct features and the questions it raises about technology, surveillance, and international security continue to intrigue both the scientific community and the public. As we strive to understand these unexplained phenomena, cases like the Jellyfish UFO serve as a reminder of the vast unknowns that still await our exploration.

{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

09-01-2024 om 15:53 geschreven door peter  

'1.000 mensen leven als zwevende kolonie op venus in 2050'

'1.000 mensen leven als zwevende kolonie op venus in 2050'

© Pixabay

De medeoprichter van OceanGate wil tegen het jaar 2050 zo'n 1.000 mensen naar een drijvende kolonie op Venus sturen en zegt dat we absoluut niet moeten stoppen met het verleggen van de grenzen van innovatie.

Guillermo Söhnlein is onverwachts in de schijnwerpers gezet in de nasleep van de ramp met de onderzeeër Titan. De mede-oprichter van OceanGate Expeditions worstelt met heel wat vragen over de noodlottige reis van het bedrijf naar het scheepswrak van de Titanic op 18 juni, waarbij vijf mensen om het leven kwamen, onder wie voormalig collega en vriend Stockton Rush. Er wordt aangenomen dat de onderzeeër binnen enkele uren na zijn afdaling is geïmplodeerd. Dat zorgt alvast voor heel wat bezorgdheid omtrent OceanGate's benadering van innovatie en veiligheid.

Maar OceanGate is niet de enige onderneming van Söhnlein. De zakenman wil immers tegen 2050 zo'n 1.000 mensen naar de atmosfeer van Venus sturen. Hij beweert dat zijn plan niet zo gek is als het lijkt. "Ik denk dat het minder ambitieus is dan tegen 2050 een miljoen mensen op het oppervlak van Mars te hebben", zei hij tegen Insider.

Mensen naar de boosaardige tweeling van de aarde sturen

Hoewel venus vaak "de tweeling van de aarde" wordt genoemd, lijkt Venus niet de ideale plek voor mensen om te gedijen. Zelfs Söhnlein is het daarmee eens. "Je hebt helemaal gelijk dat als je het over Venus hebt, de wenkbrauwen gaan fronsen buiten de ruimtevaartindustrie. En het doet zelfs wenkbrauwen fronsen binnen de ruimtevaartindustrie", zei hij.

Venus is immers de warmste planeet in het zonnestelsel. De atmosfeer zit boordevol koolstofdioxide, de oppervlaktetemperatuur zou lood kunnen doen smelten en zwavelzuur regent uit de wolken. De atmosferische druk is verpletterend - meer dan 90 keer die van de aarde, volgens NASA.

Desondanks ziet Söhnlein niet in waarom de mensheid niet zou moeten proberen op de planeet te leven. Hij wijst op onderzoek dat suggereert dat er een strook van de Venusiaanse atmosfeer ongeveer 30 mijl van het oppervlak is waar mensen theoretisch zouden kunnen overleven omdat de temperaturen er lager zijn en de druk minder intens.

Als een ruimtestation ontworpen zou kunnen worden om het zwavelzuur in de wolken te weerstaan, zegt Söhnlein, zouden er op een dag honderden tot duizenden mensen in de atmosfeer van Venus kunnen leven.

Hij zegt dat een drijvende kolonie tegen 2050 1.000 mensen in de Venusiaanse atmosfeer zou kunnen doen leven. Hoe hij dit precies ziet, is nog niet geheel duidelijk.

Wordt ongetwijfeld vervolgd!

• Skwadra by Tagtik
• Source: Business Insider/Illustration picture: Pixabay)

09-01-2024 om 14:49 geschreven door peter  

Ex-NASA Engineer: There Is Extraterrestrial Activity In Saturn’s Rings, Earth-Size UFO Spotted

Dr. Bergun is the author of the books “Ringmakers of Saturn” and “Tomorrows Technology Today,” which document the existence of extraterrestrial vehicles of immense power. A scientist who pioneered the methodology of thermal ice prevention design, he is also credited with roll-stability laws for airplanes and missiles.

Dr. Bergrun was manager of test planning and analysis for the Polaris Underwater Launch Missile System and evaluated satellite system applications. Also a director of Information Systems, he founded his own company in 1971 and is cited in “Who’s Who in the World” and other reference works. He was an alumnus of Ames Research Laboratory, NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), predecessor of Ames Research Center, NASA where he worked for 12 years as a research scientist.

There has been a theory that NASA employees cannot talk too much. A few former NASA employees shared some details that they could not have given out because of the confidentiality agreement. Dr. Bergrun said that it is Saturn that can be the refuge of an alien civilization, and NASA just hide their evidence, using it for their own purposes.

Read also:

• Italian Astronaut Screams In Fear In Live ISS Video Seeing Two UFOs, Said “Almost Alien
• Blue-Skinned E.T. From Andromeda Told US Army Personnel Origin Of Humanity
• Former Pentagon Officer: UFOs Burned US Pilots & There Are Unpublished UFO Videos
• ‘Grey’ Aliens Are Made From Human DNA, Says Pennsylvania Ufologist Professor

Dr. Norman Bergrun played a key role in the Voyager missions, the probes that were sent out and tasked with photographing Saturn, its rings and moons. There is a photo shown below from that mission he was able to obtain from the agency of a large unidentified flying object hovering just outside Saturn’s rings. It is huge, approximately the size of Earth, and is published in his book, “Ringmakers of Saturn.”

Dr. Bergrun said: “What I found out is, these things inhabit Saturn, that’s where I first discovered them, and they’re proliferating. You can find them around Uranus and Jupiter. Wherever you see some rings, that’s where I see the aircraft, I call them a ring maker. I say that it is electromagnetic because I can identify streamline patterns with respect to it that I knew were what we called ‘potential lines’ and that says it was electrical.”

In that book, Dr. Bergrun analyzed photographs of Saturn’s rings taken by the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1980 and 1981. He detailed his theory that the rings were formed by giant Electro-Magnetic Vehicles (EVMs), which are possibly being controlled by intelligent beings. He stated that the 7000-mile-long elliptical ships are currently orbiting Saturn within the rings and emitting visible exhaust. Later, analysis by Bergrun and others suggested the same or similar ships are in orbit around the Sun, Jupiter and Uranus.

Dr. Bergun claimed that he had to go through a lot of trouble in publishing his book, according to retired U.S. Army Command Sergeant Major Bob Dean. Below is the transcription of the interview between Kerry Cassidy of Project Camelot and Dr. Bergun:

Kerry Cassidy: “Have you heard that NASA alters their footage, coming from the moon, etc?

Bergrun: “I know some of the things they do with it, yeah”

Kerry: “Okay, so even their footage is not always dependable right, although I guess it’s dependable to begin with, it’s just that they start altering it later?”

Dr. Bergun: “I have been told by a very reliable source, he asked me, what camera did I get that image from on the moon, I said ‘Hasselblad,’ and he said, ‘That’s right.’ He says, ‘I thought we darkened that enough that you wouldn’t find it.’”

Kerry: “So you were finding things they thought they covered up? Incredible.”

Dr. Bergun: “Yeah, and this guy says, ‘Well I suppose you want me to go out and tell everybody about that?’ I said ‘No, I don’t want to embarrass you, that doesn’t make any difference to me, whatever you want to do is fine with me, I’m just saying I found what you saw.’ “

He died on July 1, 2018, at Tracy Nursing and Rehabilitation Center at the age of 96. Unfortunately, Dr. Bergun was just another name on the list of NASA whistleblowers who is forgotten and ignored due to a lack of followers and media attention.

{ https://www.howandwhys.com/ }

09-01-2024 om 00:53 geschreven door peter  

Photo taken by Perseverance on July 12 shows Martian “string”

Image Credit NASA/JPL-CalTech

Photo taken by Perseverance on July 16 reveals the “string” has disappeared.

Image Credit NASA/JPL-CalTech

Since landing on the red planet, humanity’s various rovers have made a habit of taking odd, unusual, often perplexing photos. In some cases, like the “flower” or recently discussed “door” on Mars, the photos ultimately proved to be natural formations instead of foreign objects.

Of course, Martian rovers bring their own junk with them. And many of the more infamous photos sent back from those rovers are of their own pieces of human-made debris.

NASA’s experts told the media the recent photograph is likely something artificial and not a natural formation masquerading as a manufactured object. However, rather than a remnant of a kite flown by E.T. on his Martian holiday, the same experts say this string was also probably a piece of material from the rover’s landing rocket.

“The string could be from the rover or its descent stage, a component similar to a rocket-powered jet pack used to lower the rover to the planet’s surface safely,” a Perseverance mission spokesperson at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told CNN.

The same spokesperson concedes that the string was photographed in an area not previously visited by Perseverance but guessed that the string likely blew there on its own.

Either that. Or it has a completely different origin.

Adding more mystery to the mystery, when the rover passed over the same spot on July 16^th, the string had magically disappeared. Once again, most suggest that the string left the same way it arrived, on a gust of wind.

Still, given the incredibly thin Martian atmosphere and the great lengths designers had to go through just to get the Ingenuity helicopter to grasp that atmosphere and take flight, it would take some mighty gusts of wind to send that string into and out of the same spot within a four day period. So, for now, at least, the mystery of the Martian string remains.

• Follow and Connect with Author Christopher Plain on Twitter @plain_fiction

 { https://thedebrief.org/ }

09-01-2024 om 00:30 geschreven door peter  

What Voyager 2 Saw at the Ice Giants

The Voyager 2 spacecraft whizzed past Uranus and Neptune in 1986 and 1989, respectively. It was on a lightning-fast visit to each planet. Both close approaches lasted less than a day apiece. That gave the spacecraft a finite amount of time to gather as much information as possible. To get good pictures of the planets, Voyager’s cameras took images through different filters. The imaging team was under tremendous time constraints, with press conferences to prepare for nearly every day. They combined the single-color images and processed them to make the “press release” views we all know and love.

Think of it like taking a landscape image with your smartphone in black-and-white mode. Then you take the same one with different-colored filters. After that, you’d drag them into an image-processing software package and combine them. Depending on how they look, you might tweak them a bit in the contrast. Or you could enhance some colors to bring out specific features.

That’s what the Voyager imaging team did. For Neptune, they cranked up the image contrast to bring out specific clouds, cloud bands, and storms. That meant applying a bit more blue to increase the contrast. The resulting image was pretty and certainly did showcase those odd features—which caught everyone’s attention during the flybys. But, did the images reflect reality?

The same question gets asked about Uranus’s color, especially since its appearance has changed slightly from the canonical Voyager 2 image in the intervening decades. The Voyager 2 mission took spectra of Uranus as it flew by and confirmed that the planet’s atmosphere is mainly hydrogen and helium, with a small amount of methane. That composition was well-known from ground-based observations and spectra since the early part of the 20th century.

Determining True Planetary Colors of Uranus and Neptune

Professor Patrick Irwin and a team of scientists at Oxford University in the UK set out to answer questions about the actual colors of Uranus and Neptune. They analyzed the Voyager 2 images, plus studies made by the Hubble Space Telescope, ESO’s Very Large Telescope, and others, to come up with a model of the planets’ actual colors.

“Although the familiar Voyager 2 images of Uranus were published in a form closer to “true” color, those of Neptune were, in fact, stretched and enhanced, and therefore made artificially too blue,” said Irwin. “Even though the artificially saturated color was known at the time amongst planetary scientists – and the images were released with captions explaining it – that distinction had become lost over time. Applying our model to the original data, we have been able to reconstitute the most accurate representation yet of the color of both Neptune and Uranus.”

Essentially, the team “rebalanced” the colors of both planets. The result is that both are similar shades of greenish-blue, although Neptune still has a bit more blue to it than Uranus does. However, Uranus sometimes develops a bit more green over its poles.

These colors seem to better match long-stand observations of both planets made at Lowell Observatory between 1950 and 2016. According to Heidi Hammel, a scientist who has studied the two planets for years, rebalancing the colors in Uranus and Neptune imagery is a good thing. “The misperception of Neptune’s color, as well as the unusual color changes of Uranus, have bedeviled us for decades,” she said. “This comprehensive study should finally put both issues to rest.”

What Causes Color Changes on Uranus?

Scientists may be happy with the colors of these ice giants now, although they do still note some slight seasonal color shifts in both planets throughout their orbits. In particular, the changing appearance of Uranus over time remains something of a mystery to be solved. For example, the Lowell observations show something intriguing: Uranus appears a little greener at its winter and summer solstices. That’s the point in its orbit when one of the planet’s poles is pointed towards our star. Things change during the equinoxes when the Sun is over the equator. Then, it has a somewhat bluer tinge.

Part of that change is due to Uranus’s unusual spin. It rolls around the Sun on its side, pointing one or the other of its poles at the Sun during the solstices. (Recently, JWST took advantage of that positioning to grab a look at its northern polar region.) The “tipped” position of Uranus likely forces some changes in its reflectivity at those times, making it look brighter to us here on Earth. Now the big question is, do those changes indicate something else happening in the atmosphere?

In the paper they published about this work, Irwin and the team suggest that the changes that Lowell Observatory saw could be caused by Uranus’s distance from the Sun. That affects the production of a dark haze—a sort of “polar hood”. It settles over the upper atmosphere at the poles. Production would be more intense when Uranus is closest to the Sun. That would explain a change in reflectivity and brightness. The team modeled a hood that produced a steadily thickening haze, probably consisting mostly of methane ice. The model simulation showed that the ice particles increased reflection at green and red wavelengths at the poles. That could explain the greenish tint astronomers see at solstice.

Tracking Changes on Uranus

The modeling and re-jiggering of imagery of Uranus, in particular, go a long way toward explaining Uranus’s color changes. “This is the first study to match a quantitative model to imaging data to explain why the color of Uranus changes during its orbit,” said Irwin.

At the moment, Uranus is heading into its high summer season. That should cause its northern polar hood to thicken and grow. It may end up looking more like the hood seen in the Voyager 2 images and the team’s model. Irwin suggests that the Hubble Space Telescope and the Very Large Telescope should focus on spectroscopic studies of the planet to watch it change. Future Hubble observations should also use filtering methods that correlate with the Voyager imaging system filters to make better comparisons. It’s likely that future studies should be able to replicate the work Irwin and his team have done, and do more to explain the changes that Uranus’s atmosphere appears to experience as it moves through its seasons.

For More Information

• New Images Reveal What Neptune and Uranus Really Look Like
• Modelling the Seasonal Cycle of Uranus’s Colour and Magnitude, and Comparison with Neptune
• Voyager 2

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

09-01-2024 om 00:19 geschreven door peter  

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

08-01-2024 om 22:37 geschreven door peter  

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

08-01-2024 om 22:26 geschreven door peter  

“XRISM will provide the international science community with a new glimpse of the hidden X-ray sky,” said Richard Kelley, the U.S. principal investigator for XRISM at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We’ll not only see X-ray images of these sources but also study their compositions, motions, and physical states.”

Some new images from the telescope show just how powerful this ”stop-gap’ observatory is.

XRISM has two instruments: Resolve and Xtend. Resolve is a microcalorimeter spectrometer, a cryogenic instrument that’s kept at barely above absolute zero. When a photon hits it, it warms the detector by a specific amount related to its energy. “By measuring each individual X-ray’s energy, the instrument provides information previously unavailable about the source,” NASA explains.

Xtend is an X-ray CCD camera with a higher resolution than its predecessor on the failed Hitomi observatory.

The first image from XRISM at the top of the page is of a supernova remnant (SNR) in the Large Magellanic Cloud called N132D. The remnant is almost unseeable in the optical light image but is bright in X-rays. XRISM is a spectrometer and it created the most detailed X-ray spectrum of N132D ever.

The progenitor star was about 15 times as massive as the Sun and exploded when it depleted its hydrogen and collapsed in on itself. The wreckage, the supernova remnant, is about 3,000 years old and is still expanding. These remnants are important because they spread heavy elements throughout the galaxy, heat the interstellar medium, and accelerate cosmic rays. Their shockwaves can even compress nearby gas and trigger new star formation.

Brian Williams, NASA’s XRISM project scientist at Goddard, explained how XRISM will help us understand SNRs.

“These elements were forged in the original star and then blasted away when it exploded as a supernova,” said Williams. “Resolve will allow us to see the shapes of these lines in a way never possible before, letting us determine not only the abundances of the various elements present but also their temperatures, densities, and directions of motion at unprecedented levels of precision. From there, we can piece together information about the original star and the explosion.”

Measuring the chemical composition of objects is important in astrophysics, and XRISM is proving to be even better than expected at that task.

“Even before the end of the commissioning process, Resolve is already exceeding our expectations,” said Lillian Reichenthal, NASA’s XRISM project manager at Goddard. “Our goal was to achieve a spectral resolution of 7 electron volts with the instrument, but now that it’s in orbit, we’re achieving 5. What that means is we’ll get even more detailed chemical maps with each spectrum XRISM captures.”

Xtend, XRISM’s X-ray imager, plays an important role in the observations. Its large field of view means it can observe an area about 60% larger than the full Moon. The science team released an Xtend X-ray image of Abell 2319, a nearby galaxy cluster that’s the object of frequent study.

The purple in the image is gas that is leftover from billions of years of star birth and death. XRISM will tell astronomers what elements are present and how abundant they are, especially elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, called ‘metals’ in astronomy. These XRISM observations will help us understand how the Universe has become enriched in metals over its 13+ billion-year history.

Astronomers have observed Abell 2319 with the Chandra and identified different substructures in the intracluster medium (ICM.) They found cold fronts between masses of cooler and warmer gases and even finer substructures within the fronts. It all hints at more complexity than previously thought, triggered by mergers between galaxies and groups and interactions with the cluster’s AGN. Abell 2319 is currently undergoing a major merger event, and since XRISM is more powerful than Chandra, it should reveal even more details about the merger.

But alongside the success represented by these first images, XRISM is facing its first challenge. An aperture door that protects the Resolve detector before launch hasn’t opened. This means that photons below 1,700 electron volts can’t reach the detector. XRISM personnel have made several attempts to open it but haven’t yet been successful. If it remains closed, then the mission won’t detect photons below 1,700 electron volts, while it’s designed to measure photons as low as 300 electron volts. This problem, however, doesn’t affect Xtend, and the XRISM team is still working on a solution.

Though the XRISM mission is primarily a partnership between NASA and JAXA, the ESA and the Canadian Space Agency are also involved.

“It’s so exciting to see XRISM already carrying out such marvellous scientific observations, even though it is not yet fully calibrated,” says ESA Director of Science Carole Mundell. “It shows the potential this mission offers to our science communities for groundbreaking discoveries in the study of the most energetic phenomena in the Universe.”

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

08-01-2024 om 22:19 geschreven door peter  

In the shadowy corridors of Cold War espionage, where the United States and the Soviet Union vied for global supremacy, a lesser-known but equally intriguing battle was waged. This battle didn’t involve traditional weapons or soldiers but the human mind’s uncharted territories. Project 8200, a clandestine CIA initiative, epitomized this era’s peculiar mix of hard science and fringe exploration as it sought to employ psychic abilities to uncover alien bases purportedly hidden deep underground.

The Genesis of Psychic Spying

The 1970s marked a period when America, reeling from the cultural and political upheavals of the ’60s, was willing to explore unconventional military and intelligence tactics. The CIA, intrigued by reports of Soviet experiments in psychic espionage, initiated its own program to explore remote viewing — the practice of projecting one’s consciousness to remote locations to gather intelligence.

This initiative, which would later evolve into Project 8200, recruited individuals with purported psychic abilities. These individuals were tasked with using their powers to spy on Soviet installations and, quite accidentally, stumbled upon something even more extraordinary — alien bases concealed within Earth’s remote landscapes.

Mount Hayes: The Psychic Revelation

The turning point for Project 8200 came when one of the remote viewers, by a twist of fate, found himself projecting his consciousness to Mount Hayes in Alaska. This remote mountain, far from any civilization, was not just an ordinary peak but allegedly a covert extraterrestrial base. As the psychic delved deeper, he claimed to see non-human-built structures and sophisticated technology, far beyond human capabilities.

VIDEO:

• The Why Files – Project 8200 Exposed | CIA Psychics Find Alien Bases Underground
• https://youtu.be/XWqh9F4pjHg

This revelation was just the beginning. Further psychic investigations purportedly uncovered additional alien bases in Mount Perdido in Spain, Mount Inyangani in Zimbabwe, and Mount Ziel in Australia. These sites were described as hubs of high technology and energy, possibly serving as monitoring stations or relay points for an unknown extraterrestrial purpose.

The Science and Skepticism

Skeptics might dismiss Project 8200’s findings as fanciful at best. After all, remote viewing is a highly contested field, with many scientists questioning its validity. However, proponents argue that the consistency of psychic reports and the detailed descriptions of technology and locations lend some credence to the claims. Furthermore, the project’s existence reflects a period when the boundaries of science and pseudoscience were fluid, and the hunger for any strategic advantage in the Cold War led to some of the era’s most outlandish and fascinating explorations.

The Legacy of Project 8200

The supposed discovery of alien bases by CIA psychics is more than just a tale of Cold War eccentricity. It’s a narrative about the human quest for understanding, the desire to know what lies beyond our current capabilities, and the eternal question of whether we are alone in the universe. Project 8200 may not have provided definitive answers, but it certainly expanded the dialogue around these profound questions.

As we continue to explore space and the potential for extraterrestrial life, the legacy of Project 8200 reminds us that sometimes the search for the unknown takes us to the most unexpected places — even within the depths of our own minds. Whether or not alien bases exist tucked away in Earth’s remote landscapes, the very idea challenges us to keep an open mind about the possibilities of the universe and our place within it.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4AvcCAcs_k

{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

08-01-2024 om 20:41 geschreven door peter  

Five UFOs Over Area 51 Military Firing Range! Gov Release, UFO Sighting News. 👽👀🛸

If you ever see an airliner jet flying at this angle, get out of the way, its about to crash, these 5 UFOs identified by the US gov as passenger jets are not, I debunked the US gov theory. 

 

Date of recording: May 31, 2023

Location of sighting: Area 51 old military firing range

Gov Source: 

• https://www.aaro.mil/

Now this video release by the US gov just came out this week and it shows five cigar UFOs flying at the same angle, side by side in military formation over a western US military firing range, and guess what? The screams out Area 51! Thats right, it's the biggest and oldest firing range in that area. Also I believe that these UFOs are alien technology in the hands of the USAF. Why? Because Area S4 is within Area 51, and Area S4 is where they learn to use alien technology and scientist Bob Lazar said he saw 8 UFOs and he worked on one of them personally. Apparently some military person recorded this video and everyone else in the military tried to dismiss it as passenger jets. Guys, this is 100% proof that the USAF has whole fleets of alien built spaceships in that hands of USAF pilots. 

 

Scott C. Waring

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

08-01-2024 om 20:28 geschreven door peter  

Boffins have spent six years probing the sighting in the village of Brandon, northeast of Bishop Auckland, Co Durham with boffins labelling it an 'unidentified object of some sort'

By Isobel Dickinson

Boffins have spent six years probing the sighting 

(Image: Jam Press)

A UFO shaped like the Millennium Falcon could actually be from a galaxy far, far away, experts say.

They launched an investigation after Christine Iskander, 63, spotted the bright object and took a snap on her iPhone. Boffins have spent six years probing the sighting in the village of Brandon, north east of Bishop Auckland, Co Durham in 2017.

Philip Mantle, a former director of investigations for the British UFO Research Association, drafted in top experts to probe the sighting. He said: “Although on the surface this photo doesn’t look like much, when it has been enlarged it almost looks like the Millennium Falcon spaceship from Star Wars.

READ MORE: 

• Escaping charging T-Rex was possible using one key move – outrunning wasn't an option

“Add to this the witness’ description you have to label this as a genuine UFO.

Jason Gleaves, an ex-RAF and BAE Airbus division employee, who studied the photo in depth, said: “Upon analysing the original image, it appears to have defined structure.

“No known conventional aircraft can accelerate vertically from a standing hovering position without sound.”

Speaking at the time, Christine said: "It was blinding, looking at it directly. It looked like a very brilliant white star to the naked eye.

"I thought it may be a helicopter at first but there was no sound...Seconds after taking the photo the object shot straight up and then disappeared before I could get another photo.

"The picture shows something quite different to what my eyes saw."

To her amazement when she enlarged the picture, the object appeared to resemble Han Solo's famous smuggling starship from the hit Star Wars movies, starring Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill.

It first appeared in the original Star Wars film in 1977, and re-appeared in The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, The Force Awakens, and The Last Jedi.

READ NEXT:

• Brit UFO expert duplicates experiment that 'summoned' aliens to UK's Roswell
• Meteorite with glowing 'honeycomb crystals' found by hiker is 4.5billion years old
• Sick DeathList noting when celebrities may die has best prediction year since 2020
• Elon Musk's SpaceX launches Falcon Heavy rocket for mystery military mission
• Pilot kills 70 in fireball crash after 'betting he could land plane with his eyes closed'

{ https://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

07-01-2024 om 22:07 geschreven door peter  

Boffins have spent six years probing the sighting in the village of Brandon, northeast of Bishop Auckland, Co Durham with boffins labelling it an 'unidentified object of some sort'

By Isobel Dickinson

Boffins have spent six years probing the sighting 

(Image: Jam Press)

A UFO shaped like the Millennium Falcon could actually be from a galaxy far, far away, experts say.

They launched an investigation after Christine Iskander, 63, spotted the bright object and took a snap on her iPhone. Boffins have spent six years probing the sighting in the village of Brandon, north east of Bishop Auckland, Co Durham in 2017.

Philip Mantle, a former director of investigations for the British UFO Research Association, drafted in top experts to probe the sighting. He said: “Although on the surface this photo doesn’t look like much, when it has been enlarged it almost looks like the Millennium Falcon spaceship from Star Wars.

READ MORE: 

• Escaping charging T-Rex was possible using one key move – outrunning wasn't an option

“Add to this the witness’ description you have to label this as a genuine UFO.

Jason Gleaves, an ex-RAF and BAE Airbus division employee, who studied the photo in depth, said: “Upon analysing the original image, it appears to have defined structure.

“No known conventional aircraft can accelerate vertically from a standing hovering position without sound.”

Speaking at the time, Christine said: "It was blinding, looking at it directly. It looked like a very brilliant white star to the naked eye.

"I thought it may be a helicopter at first but there was no sound...Seconds after taking the photo the object shot straight up and then disappeared before I could get another photo.

"The picture shows something quite different to what my eyes saw."

To her amazement when she enlarged the picture, the object appeared to resemble Han Solo's famous smuggling starship from the hit Star Wars movies, starring Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill.

It first appeared in the original Star Wars film in 1977, and re-appeared in The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, The Force Awakens, and The Last Jedi.

READ NEXT:

• Brit UFO expert duplicates experiment that 'summoned' aliens to UK's Roswell
• Meteorite with glowing 'honeycomb crystals' found by hiker is 4.5billion years old
• Sick DeathList noting when celebrities may die has best prediction year since 2020
• Elon Musk's SpaceX launches Falcon Heavy rocket for mystery military mission
• Pilot kills 70 in fireball crash after 'betting he could land plane with his eyes closed'

{ https://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

07-01-2024 om 22:07 geschreven door peter  

Allow me to start with a confession: although the topic of UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, previously called UFOs) has always fascinated me, my reaction to confronting much of the related literature—beyond the safe harbour of a few serious authors—has been one of considered dismissiveness. In my view, a significant portion of the published material could benefit from greater rigor, empirical grounding, theoretical clarity, and logical reasoning. This field often appears to diverge from the standards of intellectual precision and level-headed analysis that hold in academia. However, recent developments over the past six or seven years invite us to re-examine the subject from a more open and inquisitive perspective.

Because there are so few—if any—consensus launchpads for such a polemical topic, I must explicitly justify each step of my thinking and, thus, cover a lot of ground in this long essay. I shall start, below, by motivating the validity of the mystery: UAPs are no longer just tall and questionable tales shared on social media, accompanied by grainy, out-of-focus cellular phone footage. Enough has been officially acknowledged since 2017 that the topic is now undoubtedly deserving of serious treatment. After laying foundations for my argument, I will then proceed to elaborate on what I currently consider to be the most level-headed and plausible account of the phenomenon. And to anticipate a question you are bound to be already asking, no, I don’t think it is aliens from Zeta Reticuli; the facts may be a lot more surprising and closer to home than that.

SURPRISINGLY MUCH HAS RECENTLY BEEN DISCLOSED

In 2017, several videos of UAPs—soon to become known as the ‘Pentagon UFO videos,’ as they were recorded by infrared cameras in military aircraft—were circulating widely on the Internet. At around the same time, the story behind the videos was covered in a now-seminal report by The New York Times.

The videos seem to show airborne craft without wings or engines, flying and hovering deliberately, sometimes against high winds. They perform maneuvers despite the absence of flight control means—no rudder, elevators, ailerons, thrusters, etc.—and display surprisingly high acceleration with no detectable means of propulsion. The US Department of Defence later officially acknowledged the authenticity of the videos, as well as the fact that the objects visible in them remain unidentified.

Years later, in the summer of 2023, US Navy pilots involved in these incidents provided public testimony to Congress, under oath, adding detail and background to the odd images. Asked whether the UAP he saw with his own eyes moved in a way that defied the laws of physics, Commander David Fravor replied: “The way we understand them [i.e., the laws of physics], yes.” He then confirmed that the UAPs were not only captured on camera, but also tracked by radar from three different vessels: “The Princeton tracked it. The Nimitz tracked it. The E2 tracked it.” Asked to describe how the UAP maneuvered, CDR Fravor said, “Abruptly, very determinant. It knew exactly what it was doing. It was aware of our presence and it had acceleration rates—I mean, it went from zero to matching our speed in no time at all.” Finally, asked if any human technology could emulate the UAP’s flight characteristics he observed, he said: “No, not even close.” Navy F-18 pilot Ryan Graves—another military witness giving sworn testimony—described a UAP sighted from 50 feet away as “A dark gray or a black cube inside of a clear sphere,” something that cannot be conflated with a drone or ordinary aircraft.

Still in 2023, United States Air Force officer and former intelligence official David Grusch became a UAP whistle-blower. In interviews with various media outlets, he claimed that several defense officials had confirmed to him that the US government maintains a secretive UAP crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering program, and is in the possession of several technological craft with Non-Human Intelligence (NHI) provenance.

Mr. Grusch, too, provided sworn testimony during the congressional UAP hearing of July 2023. Asked whether the US has the bodies of the pilots of the recovered UAPs, he said: “As I have stated publicly already … biologics came with some of these recoveries.” Pressed on whether these “biologics” were nonhuman, he confirmed without ambiguity: “Nonhuman, and that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to that are currently still on the program.” Mr. Grusch understands that the penalty for lying under oath is jail, and offered several times during his testimony to confidentially—as required by law—provide specific details to lawmakers.

Mr. Grusch, Mr. Graves, and CDR Fravor are far from alone. In recent times, other individuals in a position to plausibly be privy to what the US government knows about the subject have come forward. For instance, oceanographer and retired US Navy Rear Admiral Timothy Cole Gallaudet has acknowledged having seen footage of UAPs while on active duty. Some of these UAPs have displayed the capability to go underwater (the so-called ‘transmedium’ capability described often in UAP reports). He has also expressed his belief that Mr. Grusch’s claims are true. Recently retired US Army Colonel Karl E. Nell—currently an aerospace executive—along with Christopher Mellon, who spent nearly twenty years in the US Intelligence Community and served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Intelligence, have lent credibility to the claim that there are active UAP crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering programs. Defence Intelligence Agency Programme Manager Dr. James T. Lacatski did the same, in a book officially cleared for publication by the Defence Office of Prepublication and Security Review of the US Department of Defence.

Up until 2017, the profitable UAP rumor mill was fed mainly by ‘anonymous sources,’ filmed with their faces and voices concealed, and telling vague stories largely impossible to verify independently. Even when one of those anonymous sources eventually identified himself—Mr. Robert Lazar—his credentials and even college education could never be verified. This has changed now: the names and credentials of the individuals mentioned above are not in doubt; they are who they say they are. And their ranks and roles put them in a position to plausibly know what they claim to know. These individuals are willing to testify under oath in public hearings and confidentially provide evidence to members of Congress. All this, while not proving that UAPs are of exotic origin, does lend credibility to UAP speculation. 

Even the former head of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office of the US Department of Defence—Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, a man widely reviled in the UAP community as a prejudiced gatekeeper working against UAP disclosure—has made very consequential revelations during an official NASA press briefing: there are seemingly metallic spheres out there that, somehow, move and maneuver without any signs of propulsion or flight control surfaces. He proceeded to show a declassified video of one such a sphere, as recorded by an MQ-9 ‘Reaper’ military drone, one of the most sophisticated sensor platforms in the world today. The sphere shown moves fast, in a controlled, non-ballistic trajectory. Dr. Kirkpatrick then stated that this is just “a typical example of the thing we see most of; we see these all over the world.” That the spheres are described as making “very interesting apparent maneuvers” is significant, as it rules out balloons and ordinary drones. That they are seen frequently and all over the world also rules out elaborate, expensive hoaxes.

Prejudiced gatekeeper or not, Dr. Kirkpatrick has thus officially acknowledged that there are concrete UAPs “all over the world,” for which there is no prosaic account thus far. They have been recorded by a variety of military-grade sensors, not just cell phones. That Dr. Kirkpatrick’s revelations have not become headline news in every mainstream media platform across the world is emblematic of the apathy and cynicism—the ‘don’t-look-up syndrome’—that has been assailing Western societies in recent years.

CROSSROADS

As a culture, we’ve thus reached an impasse. On the one hand, the meager amount of data that has been declassified or leaked isn’t enough for us to derive any firm conclusions regarding the nature of the phenomenon. On the other hand, enough has been begrudgingly but officially acknowledged that we can’t dismiss the phenomenon under prosaic accounts either. The best we can do is thus to take the data seriously, but not extrapolate from it without basis.

In this spirit, I submit to you that the following tentative premises are justifiable: firstly, there is an engineered technology in our skies and oceans that is not human. The counterargument to this is, of course, that UAPs may be top-secret but very human military devices, often called ‘black technology.’ Yet, this seems to contradict much of what has been disclosed since 2017. The following passage from the testimony of CDR Fravor to Congress illustrates the point: Representative Ms. Nancy Mace asked, “Many dismiss UAP reports as classified weapons testing by our own government. But in your experience as a pilot does our government typically test advanced weapons systems right next to multimillion-dollar jets without informing our pilots?” To which CDR Fravor responded: “No. We have test ranges for that.”

Moreover, if UAPs such as the metallic spheres were black technology the US Department of Defence were trying to keep secret, it is hard to imagine why Dr. Kirkpatrick—an official of that very department—would publicize their existence and even declassify a video showcasing their size, form, flight capabilities, etc. Also, the fact that UAPs often seem to defy our understanding of physics doesn’t line up with the black-technologies hypothesis, as it would require not only the engineering to be secret, but also the very advancement of the human understanding of physics. This isn’t impossible, but isn’t very plausible either. Finally, it is difficult to imagine why such game-changing black technologies—which would have to have been around for at least as long as the UAP phenomenon itself—were never used in large and conspicuous scales to advance the geopolitical interests of any nation.

Secondly, if there is non-human technology in our skies and oceans, then there must be Non-Human Intelligences (NHIs) active on our planet, engineering and controlling the UAPs. This does not imply that the NHIs are extra-terrestrial; it means simply that they aren’t human.

As implausible as these two premises may sound in this particular historical junction, the data, if taken seriously, does not seem to allow for prosaic alternatives. So whatever hypotheses we entertain, they will perforce stretch our credulity. Indeed, to insist on prosaic explanations we must disregard the data. The latter is not necessarily invalid—it isn’t incoherent to imagine that all the data are the spurious fabrications of some sprawling disinformation campaign stretching over decades—but it certainly doesn’t advance the discussion. It thus seems more productive, at this point, to bite the bullet of what the data suggests—at least hypothetically—and then check whether we can make sense of it in a manner that renders the data less vexing.

Before we can try that, however, we first need to understand the key characteristics of the phenomenon we are trying to account for.

THE HALLMARKS OF THE PHENOMENON

Although the disclosure process is relatively young, having publicly started only in 2017, the phenomenon itself seems to be at least as old as humanity. Ancient mythology, religious and otherwise, contains narratives largely consistent with today’s UAP observations. And serious researchers—the most prominent, competent, and reliable of which, in my view, is French astronomer and computer scientist Dr. Jacques Vallée—have been collecting data on it, applying statistical analyses to such data, and deriving conclusions from such analyses for decades now.

Two key conclusions from Dr. Vallée’s work are particularly pertinent to our challenge here. The first is that, based on countless witness reports, the phenomenon does not seem to make any distinction between physical and psychological effects; it produces both, as if they were mere facets of one and the same causative mechanisms. The boundaries we draw between the mental and the physical don’t seem to be observed by the phenomenon, which transits casually back and forth across the dividing line. Dr. Vallée acknowledges the undeniable physical aspect of the phenomenon—it can be filmed, tracked by radar and other sensors, emits measurable energy, often leaves physical footprints and vestiges behind, etc.—but adds that at least part of what the witnesses experience is “staged”: the UAP sometimes evokes archetypal, symbolic imagery directly in the witness’ mind to convey a feeling-laden metaphorical message, which transcends the objectively measurable characteristics of the phenomenon.

Though Dr. Vallée had already come to this conclusion decades ago, recent investigations into secret US Department of Defence programs on UAPs, by journalist Ross Coulthart, seem to confirm it (see pages 265-267 of Mr. Coulthart’s 2021 book, In Plain Sight). Stanford Professor Dr. Garry Nolan, perhaps the most respectable scientist to actively research the phenomenon, acknowledged Mr. Coulthart’s reporting on the matter. He went on to recount a specific UAP case that illustrates, perhaps better than any other, the UAPs’ ability to directly manipulate human perception: “[this is a] story that Jacques Vallée brought to me, of a family in France, driving down the highway. This was like in the last five or ten years [from June of 2022]. And they had a glass-topped car. They look up and they see a UFO, you know, basically paralleling them down the highway. The mother looks around and sees that no other individuals nearby are freaking out about this thing above them. The children in the back take out their cell phones, take a picture of it. They get home and they look at the pictures on their camera, and they don’t see an object [of the kind they thought they had witnessed]; they see a little star-shaped thing about thirty or so feet above, and I have the picture. That doesn’t look anything like a drone. … I think it has like seven spokes and a central hole of some sort. So, you’re left with this: they saw a giant craft, but the picture shows that it was nothing [like it] there. Nobody else could see it. So, even if it was an object that was there, others weren’t capable of seeing it, so it was manipulating vision” (my emphasis).

behavior of UAPs is not consistent with the extra-terrestrial hypothesis (see chapter 9 of his book, Dimensions). Dr. Vallée estimated that, in a period of just twenty years, there have been about three million UAP landings. This is not consistent with visitations by beings from another planet for the purposes of surveying the Earth or researching its inhabitants (orders of magnitude fewer visits would have sufficed for these purposes); instead, the UAPs’ behavior is precisely what one would expect if they were from here—and were simply going about their business. After all, there are many rare—and some not-so-rare—animal and plant species that human beings encounter a lot less frequently than 150.000 times per year, and they are undeniably terrestrial. In his interview with Mr. Coulthart, also Dr. Nolan expressed the view that UAPs are not extra-terrestrial.

TWO DISTINCT PHENOMENA?

Although the two characteristics discussed above generally apply to most of what we colloquially label ‘UAP,’ ‘UFO,’ or ‘alien’ encounters, there are reasons to entertain the possibility that we are dealing with at least two distinct phenomena here. If so, it is crucial that we do not conflate the two, otherwise, any viable account of one phenomenon may be discarded merely because it is not suitable for—or even contradicts—the other, leading to an insoluble impasse.

One clearly discernible class of observations, which I shall henceforth refer to as ‘nuts-and-bolts’ UAPs, entails physical craft that can not only consistently be seen, filmed, and tracked by radar, but also—if we are to believe Mr. Grusch’s informants and other sources in a position to plausibly know—stored in hangars for decades, drilled into, analyzed under a scanning electron microscope, etc. The bodies of their occupants can also—again, if we are to believe the sources—be kept in freezers and harvested for biochemical analysis. This means that the phenomenon in question has a physical aspect as consistent and stable as our own body and the car in our garage. Moreover, these ‘nuts-and-bolts’ UAPs are more frequently observed in the proximity of military exercises and installations, particularly nuclear installations (this has been the case for decades, the recent Pentagon UFO videos simply reiterating the pattern). They don’t seem to be interested in teaching us anything, but simply in monitoring human activity that could lead to large-scale destruction and compromise the planet’s habitability (incidentally, this is exactly what one would expect if the NHI in question is terrestrial).

Unlike the above, another class of observations entails encounters in one’s bedroom, at school, during one’s commute back from work, and other ordinary, random situations unrelated to military activity. These are the so-called ‘high strangeness’ events, encompassing the ‘alien contactee’ and ‘alien abduction’ cases. The craft and beings observed don’t have a consistent physical aspect but are, instead, elusive, appearing and disappearing, taking on an absurd variety of incongruous forms and behaviors. They leave either none or scarce, ambiguous physical traces, such as spontaneous nose bleeds, ordinary cysts found in places where the witness claims to have been implanted with alien technology, marks on the ground consistent with a variety of causes, and so on. This ambiguous physical evidence is better described as synchronistic—i.e., coincidental in a meaningful way—as opposed to causal. The observations are elusive, illogical, and shapeshifting like a dream. They seem focused on a form of deliberate, symbolic communication with the witness, aimed at conveying a teaching of some kind, as opposed to arising from chance encounters. Like a vision, they can’t be photographed.

I am not dismissive of this ‘high strangeness’ class of observations. As a matter of fact, I have written an entire book—Meaning in Absurdity—in which I try to account for it. I believe these visions are real as such; they are part of a natural feedback mechanism intrinsic to the human mind, which seeks to dislodge it from ossified worldviews that, despite having become stable, no longer serve the advancement of our understanding of ourselves and nature. The visions in question emerge from collective, phylogenetically ancient layers of the human mind shared by all of us, which, for being incapable of language and conceptual reasoning, communicate to the executive ego through dream-like, immersive metaphors. They should be taken seriously, just not literally.

But I do not think that the ‘high strangeness’ phenomenon is the same as the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ UAPs. Conflating the two, in my opinion, may make it impossible to account for either, as no one account will be consistent with the sometimes mutually contradictory characteristics of both. For this reason, and because I have explored the ‘high strangeness’ phenomenon in previous work, I shall henceforth exclusively discuss the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ UAP phenomenon.

IF TERRESTRIAL BUT NOT HUMAN, THEN WHO?

The idea that the intelligence behind the UAPs is terrestrial and ancient is itself not new. Dr. Hal Puthoff calls it the “ultra-terrestrial” hypothesis. He raises the possibility that remnants of a pre-Diluvial high-tech human civilization—think of the Atlantis myth—may have survived at the end of the last ice age and remain active today, though discreet in their activities.

The problem with this hypothesis is that any truly high-tech civilization—unless it has moved underground very early, which may not be plausible due to difficulties related to the space required for industrial and logistical infrastructure, difficulties with waste management and pollution, etc.—leaves vast and long-lasting footprints on the terrain and environment, such as mining holes, landfills, urban infrastructure, artificial pollutants such as microplastics, etc. These footprints, though degraded, would have remained conspicuous enough over the period of only several thousand years since the last ice age. Yet, we find no such traces predating our own civilization.

Because high technology development requires—at least at first—extensive industrial infrastructure, any ancient civilization capable of technology as advanced as that in UAPs will almost inevitably have had to go through steps of industrialization and resource extraction analogous to ours, and then some. It will have had to go through phases of urbanization, mining of metals and burning of hydrocarbons, the construction of vast industrial parks, logistical/transport infrastructure, and so on. If the intelligence behind UAPs is terrestrial, it will thus need to be ancient enough for the associated footprints to have been almost completely erased by natural weather and geological processes. Yet, it will also need to be recent enough to already have had access to fossil hydrocarbons to fuel the early stages of its industrialization process. Are these seemingly conflicting constraints reconcilable?

They are, as per the so-called “Silurian Hypothesis” first proposed by Gavin Schmidt and Adam Frank in a 2018 paper on the International Journal of Astrobiology. The idea is as follows: our planet has existed for about 4.5 billion years, with life on it for about 4 billion years. The genus Homo, to which we belong, has been around for less than 3 million of those 4 billion years; the blink of an eye in geological terms. And modern humans—Homo sapiens—for just 2 or 3 hundred thousand years. There is, thus, plenty of time and opportunity for other non-human species to have arisen on Earth, developed to a level of technology far beyond ours (imagine where our own science and technology will be in a mere thousand more years, if we don’t kill ourselves before that), and then to have effectively vanished due to one or more of the myriad possible civilisation-ending cataclysms that could end our own (climate change/collapse, comet/asteroid impact, pandemics, solar storms, thermonuclear war, etc.).

Any sign of abandoned urban and industrial infrastructure is unlikely to survive a period of only a few million years, due to weather erosion. Synthesized chemicals, alloys and other compounds, technological artifacts, as well as terrain signatures such as mining holes, are ultimately unlikely to survive the constant recycling of the Earth’s crust through plate tectonics. What is now the Earth’s crust will eventually sink into the molten asthenosphere and mantel beneath, where it will be reforged, just to eventually re-emerge through volcanic activity as a brand-new crust. As a rough estimate, if we assume an average plate movement of a few centimeters per year, it could take only tens of millions of years for large swathes of the Earth’s crust—especially the ocean crust but, to a more limited degree, also the continental crust—to be recycled in this manner. No conspicuous remnants of an ancient, technological, nonhuman civilization would likely survive all this.

The question now is, when were fossil hydrocarbons first available in large enough quantities to fuel the initial growth of an ancient industrial civilization? Dr. Schmidt and Dr. Frank estimate that this was already the case in the Carboniferous period, about 350 million years ago, which leaves us with a window of hundreds of millions of years for industrial NHIs—multiple different ones—to have developed on Earth.

Notice that my claim here is not that it is likely that high-tech nonhuman civilizations have emerged on Earth before us; I cannot evaluate the probabilities involved. My claim is that, based on what we know, such civilizations are not impossible or inconsistent with the geological record. On the contrary: as Dr. Schmidt and Dr. Frank point out, the record shows several periods of global warming consistent with large-scale industrialization.

Now, since we cannot visit an NHI city today, it is necessarily the case that, if such ancient terrestrial civilizations ever existed, they have largely died out—at least as far as the surface of the planet is concerned. This, however, is not implausible: as we know from our own case, civilizations can start, reach high-tech levels, and then be annihilated in a mere few thousand years. Indeed, although our civilization is still going, we are painfully aware of how easily and quickly it can be brought to a swift end tomorrow, in a thermonuclear war, asteroid impact, climate collapse, or a more deadly pandemic than the one we have just survived, etc.

Yet, it is unlikely that all members of our species would die in a planetary catastrophe. There is a good chance that few but enough of us would survive in shelters and preserve a minimum level of knowledge to keep some of our technology going, especially if we get some advance notice of the impending doom. In as little as a decade or two from now, for instance, we will likely have mastered the technology of small-scale, portable, clean nuclear reactors that can be buried in a backyard (or a cave) and provide effectively unlimited energy. Portable 3D printing technology is reducing our reliance on centralized, large-scale manufacturing facilities. Our computers, which were once the size of buildings, now live in our pockets. If we extrapolate these trends for another mere century or two, it is reasonable to imagine that technological miniaturization and portability will allow our civilization to survive at a reduced scale in, for instance, underground shelters. It is thus not unreasonable to imagine, purely speculatively, that the same could have been the case for ancient NHIs hypothetically behind today’s UAPs.

Any culture once exposed to the magnitude of a planetary catastrophe will have a historical trauma transmitted down the generations through myth and storytelling, similarly to—but much more acutely than—how flood stories have survived since the end of the last ice age. Such a culture will be wary of the planet’s surface, for the latter is a notoriously exposed and volatile region: it undergoes far more extreme temperature swings than, say, the deep oceans and underground caves; it is prone to severe weather that can ruin crops and flood entire cities; it is exposed to irradiation from solar storms and other cosmic events, which can ruin technology and life; it is extremely vulnerable to comet and asteroid impact, as the dinosaurs found out; etc. And since such a post-apocalyptic culture would have been reduced to relatively few members, their requirements for living space would also be relatively modest. Depending on the surviving level of their technology, they could have made a home for themselves underwater or underground. A few generations of (directed) adaption—genetic and cultural—to such an environment would render the planet’s surface perhaps as alien and inhospitable to them as the Mariana Trench is to us. They would be okay with allowing the monkeys to run amok on top of the roof (provided that the monkeys don’t start a thermonuclear war and compromise the entire house), but would rather stay safely indoors.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE WEIRD MIND MANIPULATION STUFF?

Science fiction has inculcated in our culture the notion that communication with another, completely different species is a matter of translation or word-swapping; something akin to what we do to convert Chinese text into English. Indeed, we now have a completely manufactured sense of the plausibility of such an idea. But it is naïve.

Ordinary translation presupposes two important things: a shared cognitive structure (templates of thinking) and shared empirical references. The latter is easy to see: if both you and I have already had the experience of seeing and driving a car, then to understand each other we just need to learn what word the other uses to denote that experience. However, things are more subtle when it comes to shared cognitive structures, as they operate based on abstractions, not direct empirical experiences. For instance, think of the concept of ‘flow’: it can be used to denote a concrete empirical experience, such as watching a river flow. But it is also used in much more abstract ways: we say that ‘time flows’ even though we can’t see time, let alone its flow; we speak of the ‘flow of ideas’; we say that ‘we are in the flow’; and so on. ‘Flow’ is an abstraction that refers to sequential, somewhat ordered changes of state, something entirely bound to our human mode of cognition. To understand ‘flow’ one needs to share the basic cognitive templates that gave rise to the concept in us to begin with. Without these shared templates, it is impossible to merely translate the word.

All humans share these basic cognitive templates by the mere fact of being members of the same species. In other words, we think alike because we are alike. Some linguists—such as Noam Chomsky—go as far as to say that the basic structure of all human languages, which he refers to as the ‘Universal Grammar,’ is biologically encoded in the human cognitive system. Although Chomsky’s opponents argue that language is merely invented and shared by convention, it is still necessarily the case that the underlying foundations of whatever is invented reflect cognitive modalities the inventor shares with all other members of their species. It is this commonality that enables what we call ‘translation’ across human languages, and we tend to take it entirely for granted.

But NHIs, by definition, don’t share such commonality with us. After all, they belong to a different species. Their cognition will almost certainly unfold with vastly different patterns and modalities. Even their logic may bear little resemblance to our own Aristotelian axioms. Moreover, their cultural context is bound to be entirely different from ours, leading to different empirical references: originally, they may not have had a cognitive category for, say, ‘car’ or understand the concept of a wheeled vehicle (for instance, if they are an aquatic species). It is naïve to expect that NHIs could learn our language as easily as a Chinese person can learn English. The underlying cognitive structures and references won’t line up; why should they?

Nonetheless, this doesn’t mean that we and NHIs can never communicate. What it does mean is that achieving this feat will require an effort to enter each other’s cognitive inner space—literally. In other words, before they could communicate with us, they would have to gain direct access to, and manipulate, our abstract mental processes. This is not something that can be casually achieved in the way I can pick up Italian during a holiday.

You will be closer to appreciating the difficulties if you think of whales: we know they have a language that scores higher in some relevant measures of complexity than our own. Yet, we can’t translate ‘Whalish’ into any human language, even though whales, just like us, are air-breathing, breast-feeding mammals.

To really appreciate the difficulties we have to go beyond whales—close relatives of ours—and imagine that, say, praying mantises—ancient insects much less related to us than whales—would have some form of language, and that we would try to communicate with them. Now we’re getting closer to the mark, for the cognitive templates and inner logic of insectoids are bound to be very largely incommensurable with ours. The challenge here is not mere translation; to speak ‘Insectoidish’ one would have to enter the cognitive space of insectoids—i.e., enter their mind.

Intellectual-level communication between more advanced terrestrial NHIs and us will require direct access to our cognitive processes. They will have to directly modulate our own abstract references and modes. In other words, they will have to convey their ideas to us by prompting our own mind to articulate those ideas to itself, using its own conceptual dictionary and grammatical structures. And because their message—a product of their own cognition, incommensurable with ours—is bound to not adequately line up with our grammar and conceptual menu, this articulation will perforce have to be symbolic, metaphorical; it will have to point to the intended meaning, as opposed to embodying the intended meaning directly, or literally.

There is plenty of clinical precedence for this in the literature of depth psychology. Analytical Psychology, for instance, maintains that the deeper, evolutionarily ancient, instinctive layer of our mind, for not having the language capabilities of the executive ego, speaks to us in dreams and visions through symbols, and metaphors. It can’t tell us in English, for instance, that time is flowing while we procrastinate, prompting us to act. So it may, instead, trigger and modulate a dream in which we, say, accidentally drop our backpack in a fast-flowing river and watch helplessly as it floats away. If the deeper layer of our mind, for being phylogenetically primitive, is incapable of articulating the conceptual abstractions ‘time,’ ‘flow,’ and ‘procrastination,’ it can still point symbolically to its intended meaning; it can still confront us with imagery that evokes the same underlying feeling—a sense of urgency—that would have been evoked by the statement, “time is flowing while you procrastinate.” This is what intellectual-level communication looks like when the interlocutors do not have commensurable cognitive structures. And this is how we may expect NHIs to communicate with us, if they have the technology required to reach directly into our minds and manipulate our cognitive inner space.

Notice the similarity between this and the ‘high strangeness’ class of observations: both entail symbolic communication by means of direct manipulation of our inner cognition. In the latter case, the communication is between deeper and shallower—primitive and modern, respectively—layers of our mind, taking place naturally and spontaneously. In the former case, the communication—likely mediated by technology—is between an NHI and a human, taking place in an artificial and deliberate manner. But both are metaphorical, akin to dreams and visions. This similarity is part of the reason why we feel tempted to conflate the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ and ‘high strangeness’ classes of observations.

In conclusion, I submit the hypothesis that, when UAPs manipulate our perceptions during an encounter, they are, in fact, attempting to communicate in the only way they can. Analogously, if you are hiking on a remote trail and come across a wild bear—another terrestrial species with a cognitive structure different from ours, which we encounter by chance as they go about their business in their own habitat—the bear, too, will communicate with you in the only way it can: through meaning-evoking body posture and sounds; and you will even understand it. The difference is that UAPs are better, more nuanced, and more sophisticated at the task.

HOW CAN WE CONFIRM THIS HYPOTHESIS?

For every useful, truly scientific hypothesis, there must be an experiment or a passive observation under controlled conditions that can either confirm or contradict it. As we’ve seen in the foregoing, the hypothesis in question is that the NHI—or NHIs—behind the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ UAP phenomenon is(are) ancient but terrestrial. We’ve discussed the characteristics of the phenomenon that motivated the hypothesis to begin with: (a) the frequency of UAP encounters, which suggests that they are from here and we meet them as they go about their business, just as we meet a bear in a trail; and (b) their interest in human activities that may jeopardize the habitability of this planet, such as nuclear installations and military exercises. But these characteristics aren’t conclusive. So just what could be conclusive?

If it is true, as Mr. Grusch claimed in his testimony to Congress in July 2023, that the US government has “biologics”—that is, the bodies of crashed UAP pilots—then a biochemical analysis of these biologics, if not conclusive, would at least be very indicative of whether they are terrestrial or not.

All terrestrial life we have studied in detail thus far, despite their drastic morphological differences—think of the differences between an amoeba, a praying mantis, and a cat—share the exact same biochemistry: they have two-stranded DNA with sugar-phosphate backbones and four nucleobasis (cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine) that form two possible base-pair configurations. Despite their extreme morphological differences, all terrestrial life thus looks the same when observed ‘under a microscope with sufficient magnification,’ so to speak.

Yet, the functions performed by this very specific biochemistry are multiple-realizable: there are many other conceivable ways in which these functions could be performed based on different biochemistry. The fact that all life we’ve studied thus far shares such specific biochemistry means simply that we all have a common ancestor dating back to an abiogenesis event: the rise of life from non-life. That event has defined the biochemistry we have all inherited. But it could just as well have been quite different; there is no a priori reason why biochemistry must be the way it is in us.

Indeed, a different event of abiogenesis—there is no a priori reason why life must have arisen from non-life only once on Earth either—could have set a different biochemistry; one still capable of storing the organism’s body plan, of constructing the organism’s building blocks (proteins, in our case), of metabolizing, and of passing the organism’s body-plan to the next generation via reproduction; yet one different from ours. This is acknowledged in biology in the hypothesis of a “shadow biosphere”: there may, in fact, be organisms on Earth with biochemistry different from ours, because they may be descendants from a different abiogenesis event; we haven’t detected them yet because we haven’t done a detailed biochemical analysis of most organisms on the planet.

If even terrestrial organisms, which arose and evolved on this very planet, could have biochemistry distinct from ours, it stands to reason that organisms evolved on another planet, with different environmental conditions and chemical composition, are very unlikely to have the exact same biochemistry we do. That would require an implausible coincidence of literally cosmic proportions, even under the assumption of convergent evolution at the level of the phenotype (i.e., body form).

Therefore, if the biologics in the freezers of the powers-that-be have the same biochemistry we do, I believe it is safe to assume that they are terrestrial; they are our older cousins—likely forever traumatized by earlier planetary cataclysms—and certainly not aliens.

Another prediction of the ‘ultra-terrestrial’ hypothesis is this: the materials—say, the metals—used in the UAP craft should have isotope ratios compatible with an earthly origin, as opposed to one outside the solar system. If the powers-that-be are in possession of such craft, this shouldn’t be a difficult test to perform.

Together, the two test results suggested above, if mutually consistent, should be conclusive.

CONCLUSIONS

The hypothesis I put forward is that, if the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ UAP phenomenon and the Non-Human Intelligence(s) behind it are real, they are unlikely to be extra-terrestrial. Instead, they may consist of remnants of industrial, technological NHIs that evolved on Earth up to 350 million years ago. We cannot find conspicuous archaeological or geological footprints of such civilizations because, according to the so-called ‘Silurian Hypothesis,’ not only weather erosion but also the regular recycling of the Earth’s crust through plate tectonics, erase them. The anthropocentric notion that nothing intelligent has arisen on our planet in the billions of years for which no conspicuous evidence would have remained on the geological record is unjustified. There has been plenty of time and opportunity for many technological, industrial, but non-human civilizations to have arisen and disappeared from the surface of the Earth.

Though I understand that many may consider this hypothesis disturbing at some level, it does not require anything fundamentally beyond natural processes we know to exist: we know that intelligent life can arise on this planet, given its environmental conditions; we know that industrial civilizations can arise, develop, and go extinct in a period no longer than a few thousand years, which is the blink of an eye at a geological scale; we know that our own technology today would have looked like magic to the Great Goethe, only 200 years ago; we know that intelligent species that evolved the ability to act according to an abstract ethical code can operate under a policy of non-interference towards less evolved life (just think of human wildlife researchers); and so on. The present hypothesis requires nothing more than the foregoing. As such, there is nothing unnatural or truly extraordinary about it. If it violates our sensitivities, then this informs us about our sensitivities, not about the plausibility of the hypothesis in a naturalist framework.

Notice, however, that the hypothesis proposed here presupposes the UAP data disclosed thus far to be authentic, and not the result of a sprawling disinformation campaign. In the latter case, the key motivations and empirical ground for the speculations in this essay would be void, and the hypothesis should be disregarded in its entirety.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

I am very grateful to Dr. Hal Puthoff, Dr. Garry Nolan, Rob van der Werf, and Paul Stuyvenberg for the generous feedback provided on earlier drafts of this essay. 

• Bernardo Kastrup is a Dutch philosopher, computer scientist, and the executive director of the Essentia Foundation. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy and another in computer engineering, and has worked as a scientist in some of the world’s foremost scientific laboratories. His main interests are metaphysics and philosophy of mind. He lives in Veldhoven, Netherlands. This essay originally appeared on Kastrup’s personal website. 

{ https://thedebrief.org/category/science/ }

07-01-2024 om 21:49 geschreven door peter  

Historic color photos of Uranus and Neptune are actually the wrong colors, and a recent study used new data and a lot of math to set the record straight.

In Voyager 2’s full-color photos of the ice giants, Uranus looks pale blue, while Neptune has a deeper, more vivid shade. That’s because Voyager 2’s cameras actually photographed each planet several times, each in a single color, and NASA teams here on Earth combined those single-color shots into the multi-hued composite images we see today. In the process, they enhanced the images to make certain features, like Neptune’s bands of clouds, stand out more. As useful as that was for planetary scientists, it also skewed our perception of what these two long-neglected worlds actually look like.

“Even though the artificially saturated color was known at the time among planetary scientists – and the images were released with captions explaining it — that distinction had come lost over time,” says Irwin in a recent statement to the press.

Irwin and his colleagues used data from Hubble and the VLT to correct the images — a little like space-age art restoration — and solve a decades-old mystery about why Uranus changes colors (stop laughing). They published their work in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

ICE GIANTS SHOW THEIR TRUE COLORS AT LAST

Irwin and his colleagues used data from a spectrograph (an instrument that splits light into the individual wavelengths that make it up) on the Hubble Space Telescope and one on the evocatively-named Very Large Telescope, perched on a mountaintop in Chile. The spectrograph data basically provided a list of which specific wavelengths, or colors, were present in every pixel of their images of Uranus and Neptune. By comparing that data to the [date] Voyager 2 images of the ice giants, the team managed to rebalance the historic images, creating versions that show the planets in more realistic colors.

The two worlds turn out to be close to the same color: a light greenish blue. Neptune has a slightly bluer tint thanks to a thinner layer of haze in its upper atmosphere, but not nearly as blue as it looks in the composite images from Voyager 2.

“Although the familiar Voyager 2 images of Uranus were published in a form closer to ‘true’ color, those of Neptune were, in fact, stretched and enhanced, and therefore made artificially too blue,” says Irwin.

When NASA crews processed the Voyager 2 data, they turned the contrast on Neptune’s image all the way up to make bands of clouds and storms easier to see. That’s a bit like turning up the contrast in a video game so you can see better in weird lighting; you spot details you might otherwise have missed, but you’re not seeing anything in its “true” color. In Neptune’s case, turning up the contrast also turned our image of the planet a deep, vivid blue. It’s a very pretty blue, but it’s not what Neptune would really look like if you were peering out the window of a passing spaceship.

WHY DOES URANUS TURN GREEN?

In the process of working out what color the ice giants actually were, Irwin and his colleagues also solved a decades-long mystery about Uranus. They now know why Uranus sometimes turns green (seriously, stop laughing; we mean it).

Earth’s axis is tilted at about a 23-degree angle, which is why we have seasons. Uranus, on the other hand, is at closer to a 90-degree angle; it’s basically lying on its side while it spins. The planet's 98-degree axial tilt means that each pole points directly at the Sun during its summer solstice and directly away from the Sun during its winter solstice (instead of just sort of leaning one way or the other, as our relatively well-behaved planet does).

At each solstice, Uranus looks greener than it does during the rest of its 84-Earth-year-long Uranian year. And for decades, planetary scientists have been trying to work out why.

Irwin and his colleagues noticed that, based on the spectra from Hubble and the VLT, there’s less methane in Uranus’s atmosphere at the poles than near the equator. But what methane is floating around at Uranus’s poles tends to be ice crystals, drifting in a chilly (and smelly) haze in the upper atmosphere. And those ice crystals reflect a lot of light, which accounts for the seasonal color change.

Methane absorbs red light and reflects blue-green light. So for the parts of the long Uranian year when one pole, swathed in sparkly methane ice clouds, is pointed at the Sun, the whole planet seems to sparkle with greenish reflected light.

And that’s why Uranus turns green (and smells like farts)

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

07-01-2024 om 21:14 geschreven door peter