The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
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Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
01-02-2024
Breathtaking Footage of 1,000 Lego Astronauts Flying to Space
Breathtaking Footage of 1,000 Lego Astronauts Flying to Space
Two cameras captured 1,000 Lego astronauts flying to the edge of space on a 3D-printed mini space shuttle.
The voyage was powered by a stratospheric balloon that burst after taking the Legonauts 22 miles above the Earth’s surface when they safely landed back on terra firma with the help of a parachute.
Lego sent 1,000 mini-astronauts on a trip to near space.
(Image credit: LEGO/Kreativ Gang)
A Kreativ Gang team member with the 3D-printed space shuttle made for Legonauts.
The stratospheric balloon popping 21 miles above the Earth’s surface on the edge of space.
The 3D-printed space shuttle was made from a lightweight carbon composite material, built by a team of space architects and engineers from Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
There were three separate space flights with roughly 330 Legonauts going up each time and the team from Kreativ Gang, a marketing agency producing a Lego campaign, had to ensure none of the astronauts fell off the open-air shuttle.
The Legonauts being taken up to space by the stratospheric balloon.
“To make the figures stay on the space shuttle after the balloon burst was a major challenge,” says Dominik Matusinsky, an executive at Kreativ Gang, tells Space.com.
“We wanted the figures to be exposed directly to space, not to be stored inside anything. But during the free fall stage [before the parachute opened], they experienced speeds of up to 300 kilometers per hour [186 miles per hour], so that was a challenge.”
In an Instagram post, the Kreativ gang explained that the Legonauts flew from Malé Bielice Airport near Partizánské in Slovakia on Saturday, May 20 on a shuttle made of carbon fiber and 3D-printed stainless steel.
“They have landed in three different places and are ready to end their journey on your nightstand,” the team jokes.
“This space feat of ours was captured by two cameras during the entire ride. One monitored the space with the mini-crew from the cockpit, and the other, attached to the shoulder, took a view of the entire platform.
“In the photos and videos, you can see breathtaking shots of the Earth as well as figures who are fully enjoying their flight into space.”
The stunt was a promotional campaign for Lego. Anyone who buys a new Lego set and registers it could win the Lego astronauts as a prize. More details are avaialbe on Kreativ Gang’s website.
According to Dominik Matusinsky, an executive at marketing agency Kreativ Gang that produced the campaign for Lego, the team had to make sure that none of the astronauts fell off the open-air shuttle during the early stages of the platform's descent.
"To make the [Lego] figures stay on the space shuttle after the balloon burst was a major challenge," Matusinky told Space.com in an email. "We wanted [the figures] to be exposed directly to space, not to be stored inside anything. But during the free fall stage [before the parachute opened], they experienced speeds of up to 300 km/h [186 mph], so that was a challenge."
For the balloons to comfortably lift off, the whole platform including its passengers had to weigh no more than 6 pounds (2.7 kilograms).
"The challenge was to build the space shuttle as lightweight as possible," added Rousek. "We ended up making it from carbon fiber, 3D printed stainless steel and plastic."
Two cameras filmed the rides: One monitoring the crew compartment;, the other attached to a boom filming a view of the entire platform.
The Lego astronauts will now be put up as a prize in a drawing in the Czech Republic and Slovakia for anyone who buys and registers a new Lego set.
Several pilots recently reported seeing UFOs in Canada, describing “multiple lights sometimes in a triangle formation” to air traffic control.
“I’m certainly no expert, but they’re moving side-to-side and then going away from each other and then forming triangles. That doesn’t really seem like they’re in any type of orbit. But I mean, I’m no expert,” an Air Canada pilot from Seattle to Winnipeg said while flying over Saskatchewan in audio obtained by CTV News from two feeds at LiveATC.net.
“Yeah, it’s quite bizarre,” echoed a pilot on a Flair Airlines flight from Vancouver to Toronto. “There’s around six of them just randomly in formation flying at a high altitude at 12 o’clock.”
“Definitely not satellites,” said another pilot on a Morningstar Air Express cargo flight from Calgary to Toronto. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen in the 15 years of night flying that I’ve done.”
“There’s no active airspace, military airspace, anything like that we’re aware of,” an air traffic controller told the pilots. “I honestly have no idea what that might be.”
The total audio of the conversations between the pilots and air traffic control in Canada discussing the mysterious lights was originally 2.5 hours long, but has been condensed down to a 13-minute video.
At least four different pilots reported seeing the strange lights of these UFOs on Jan. 19, with some appearing as high as 100,000 feet in the sky.
Daniel Otis, who reported about the UFO sightings for CTV News, also wrote on YouTube, “Their reports appeared in Transport Canada’s online aviation incident database on Jan. 23. NORAD was also notified of the incident, which occurred over Saskatchewan and Manitoba.”
The Canadian Air Defence was also notified about the UFOs, according to the Civil Aviation Daily Occurrence Reporting System (CADORS) report.
“Reports of unidentified objects can rarely be followed up on as they are as the title implies, unidentified,” a Transport Canada spokesperson told CTV News. “The department is reviewing the circumstances of this incident and will take appropriate action if non-compliance with the regulations is identified.”
A Canadian NORAD and Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) spokesperson told CTV News, “NORAD detects radar tracks and if required, provides a threat assessment of those tracks based on a variety of factors. For operational security reasons, we do not discuss how NORAD assesses threats.”
Before settling down at BroBible, Douglas Charles, a graduate of the University of Iowa (Go Hawks), owned and operated a wide assortment of websites. He is also one of the few White Sox fans out there and thinks Michael Jordan is, hands down, the GOAT.
Ufology: Why Scientists Are Finally Turning UFO Sightings Into Serious Research
Ufology: Why Scientists Are Finally Turning UFO Sightings Into Serious Research
For decades, academic researchers have dismissed the study of UFOs as pseudoscience. But as the evidence becomes harder and harder to ignore, some organizations are taking steps to make the field legitimate.
For as long as humans have claimed they’ve seen UFOs—and it’s been a long, long time—the established scientific community has more or less considered them to be nonsense. While that hasn’t changed much, even as we’re in the midst of a modern ufological renaissance, some renegade scientists are fighting to bring academic rigor toUFO research.
Take Richard Hoffman, an information technology expert with over 25 years of experience, formerly contracted with the U.S. Army’s Materiel Command at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. As a senior lead architect, he kept the Army’s digital infrastructure running and safe from attack.
He’s also a UFO researcher.
“The scientific community still has to deal with the decades of stigma associated with what they see as pseudoscience or fringe science,” Hoffman tells Popular Mechanics. “Many scientists do have interests in the phenomena, but are most often discouraged by others to embrace it so they hide it.”
Hoffman is one of three executive board members who run a nonprofit scientific organization known as the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU).
✅ Unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) is the current rebranding of unidentified flying objects (UFO), a term that many believe to carry too much cultural baggage.
“There are very few UFO organizations remaining today,” Hoffman says. “Of the few that do remain, they each have their unique contributions to the phenomena, but most are in data collection roles versus long-term scientific study of cases.”
The difference with the SCU—and it’s a big one—is that it collects data that can be analyzed and studied by scientific experts, subsequently generating peer-reviewed papers published in journals and on websites, says Hoffman. The SCU doesn’t collect day-to-day UAP sighting reports, but rather digs into the more complex cases where multiple sensory data, like radar tracks and video, may exist.
Getty Images
An Objective of Legitimacy
The SCU played a significant role in studying the 2004 Nimitz UFO Encounter, when the organization released a nearly 300-page report on the incident. In 2017, the story hit the mainstream when the New York Times published a groundbreaking story about the Navy pilots who intercepted a strange object off the coast of San Diego in November 2004, and captured video of the object with their F-18’s gun camera.
In 2019, Popular Mechanics published a story about several other military personnel who also witnessed the Nimitz encounter on their radar systems and over their ship’s video system.
The SCU paper examined the available public data and testimony regarding the case, concluding that the “results suggest that given the available information, the AAV’s capabilities are beyond any known technology.”
To be clear, the SCU hasn’t concluded that some non-human intelligence is responsible. Fully aware of the significant gaps in data, the organization has suggested that “the public release of all Navy records associated with this incident to enable a full, scientific and open investigation is strongly recommended.”
The UFO research community is used to having scant data on UFO incidents; the vast majority of cases are purely anecdotal. When physical evidence or data is available, the well-established ufological conspiracy and myth-making machines begin to put that data into jeopardy.
“To date, there hasn’t been an extensive and well-funded scientific investigation of these phenomena using state-of-the-art investigative tools and a dedicated investigative team,” Robert Powell, an SCU executive board member and device physics expert, tells Popular Mechanics. The SCU is aiming to change that. Membership in the organization requires a resume submission, and a committee meets to thoroughly vet each new member.
So who makes up the 120+ members of the SCU, exactly? Mostly scientists, former military officers, and former law enforcement personnel with technical experience and investigative backgrounds, Powell says. While SCU encourages all UAP scientists to publish their work through peer-reviewed journals, and SCU members have been authors in peer-reviewed journals, a stigma still exists about UAP research. “This prevents quality papers from being published in mainstream journals simply because the topic is UAP. Therefore, SCU also provides a peer-review process for UAP papers submitted to SCU for publication,” Powell says.
To begin bridging the gap between the UFO research community and the scientific community, the SCU formed its own open-access peer-reviewed academic journal, Limina. “Anyone wishing to submit a paper to the journal should contact SCU,” Powell says.
Bettmann//Getty Images
Fighting the Stigma
Yet for all the promising progress, the SCU and similar organizations are still facing an uphill battle. The decades-long taboo surrounding UFOs and their study is thoroughly entrenched in established scientific and academic communities. They are, in essence, a dirty subject that can kill a professional career.
In 1953, the Robertson Panel was formed to look at UFO reports at the behest of the government due to a string of odd aerial objects being spotted over Washington, D.C. the previous year. The panel concluded in its classified report that UFOs posed no risk to national security, and proposed that the National Security Council actively debunk UFO reports with the intention to ideologically inoculate the public to ensure UFOs would become the subject of ridicule. The Panel even recommended that UFO investigative and research groups be monitored by intelligence agencies for subversive activity.
Seventeen years later, the infamous Condon Report, which was a product of the U.S. Air Force and the University of Colorado, was responsible for the death of the Air Force’s UFO study, Project Blue Book. The report became embroiled in controversy when a memorandum was released, explaining that the report itself had to “trick” the public into thinking the study was objective, but would ensure that the final and official position is that all UFO incidents were hoaxes, delusion, and human error.
“The wind is changing on this, just like it is on a lot of things.”
Officially, UFOs became the subject of ridicule. Tie that in with the rise of new-age UFO prophets and cults, stories of space men from Venus, alien bases in Antarctica, and the merging of UFO and conspiracy cultures, and those who used empirical data or maintained a rational and logical research approach became lumped into the same subculture as people claiming to be alien channelers or time-traveling alien ambassadors who often use people’s gullibility to earn a living.
It’s no wonder academics, professionals, and scientists publicly shy away from the subject. In research for this article, one physicist from a university in New York expressed their discomfort and asked that their name not be used because they were still trying to get tenure.
“I don’t get the sense the scientific community is any more interested or open than it was before,” Alexander Wendt, Ph.D., a political science professor at the Ohio State University, tells Popular Mechanics. “But what has changed, I think, is the politics. I think that the wind is changing on this, just like it is on a lot of things. And it’s probably young people in particular who are driving the change and are more open.”
Geography Photos//Getty Images
Forging a Scientific Future
Wendt, who has done academic work on the UFO question and presented a lecture at TEDx Columbus on the science of UFOs, sits on the board of UFOData, a project designed to create high-tech observation systems to monitor the skies and track anomalous phenomena. He knows that the taboo exists surrounding UFO research, and getting any grant money to study UFOs is still practically impossible. According to Wendt, neither the government nor any established scientific organizations are going to fund UFO research. The solution seems to be crowdfunding or finding private donors who will invest in these projects.
UFOData isn’t the only group engaged in observational studies. For three decades, Project Hessdalen, a small observatory station that monitors a valley in Norway subject to strange light phenomena, has been jointly funded by the Østfold University College and personal donations. Another organization, the UFO Data Acquisition Project (UFODAP), is also building small computer units designed to monitor and track aerial oddities. Using multiple sensors, the UFO Data Acquisition Unit is designed to record and track UAP, as well as provide metadata which can be analyzed.
Hoffman recognizes that contemporary ufology still makes academics and scientists nervous. Even with the 2019 Navy announcement that UAPs do violate American airspace and that the Pentagon was running the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, people are starting to ask more questions and some scientists are starting to participate.
“We are encouraged by this and believe it will continue to advance, however, the UFO community itself is composed of factions which continue to make scientists cringe,” Hoffman says. “SCU is attempting to support scientists and serious researchers by focusing on what science can do to advance their interests. They see us as being a safe place where conspiracy theories are non-existent and scientific methodologies win.”
So while the existence of UFOs is no longer up for debate, their source very much is. The UFO community has always been comprised of cultural and social renegades who haunt the fringes of mainstream culture, subjects of ridicule more than respect. While some still smirk at the thought of anomalous aerial objects occupying our skies, the information slowly coming out into the public domain is starting to prove that these objects may not be a laughing matter.
Whether the source of some of these data-rich UFO incidents is secret government technology, an alien nonhuman intelligence, or something fundamentally beyond our physical and philosophical understanding, we’re left to wonder, as countless thinkers and, yes, even scientists, have before: “What if?”
Editor’s Note: This story was originally published on July 2, 2020.
Area 51 Insider Witnesses: Disc-Shaped UFOs and Extraterrestrial Encounters
Area 51 Insider Witnesses: Disc-Shaped UFOs and Extraterrestrial Encounters
Nestled within the Nevada desert, Area 51 has long been a focal point of intrigue and speculation for enthusiasts of the unexplained and scholars of extraterrestrial phenomena alike. This highly classified military base, officially acknowledged by the U.S. government only in recent years, remains shrouded in secrecy, fueling theories about alien spacecraft, extraterrestrial encounters, and advanced technology far beyond human capabilities.
Eyewitness Accounts and Whistleblower Testimonies
Among the myriad of tales surrounding Area 51, few are as compelling as the accounts of individuals who claim to have worked within its confines, witnessing the unimaginable. These whistleblowers speak of disc-shaped crafts and non-human entities, often referred to as “Greys,” housed within the depths of the facility. Such testimonies offer a tantalizing glimpse into a world where the lines between science fiction and reality blur.
One notable account comes from a supposed former sentry at S-4, a sector allegedly located near Area 51. This individual described observing multiple disc-shaped crafts, each with unique characteristics, some of which appeared capable of hovering and others that boasted sleek, aerodynamic designs reminiscent of descriptions in popular UFO lore. These crafts were said to be stored on platforms, suggesting they were either the subject of reverse engineering efforts or perhaps even ready for flight.
Government Secrecy and Surveillance
The veil of secrecy enveloping Area 51 extends beyond the base itself, encompassing alleged monitoring and intimidation tactics aimed at silencing those daring to reveal its secrets. Whistleblowers have reported experiences ranging from phone tapping and mail interception to outright threats, painting a picture of a government desperate to keep the lid on potentially Earth-shattering revelations. Such measures only serve to deepen the mystery and stoke the fires of speculation regarding the activities conducted far from the public eye.
VIDEO:
Eyewitness to disc-shaped craft and aliens at Area 51 discussed by UFO researcher Wendelle Stevens
The narrative surrounding Area 51 challenges us to question the boundaries of our understanding and the lengths to which governments might go to protect secrets of cosmic significance. It beckons the brave and the curious to look to the skies and ponder what might be, fueling a relentless quest for truth in a world brimming with mysteries yet to be unraveled.
As we stand on the precipice of discovery, the stories of Area 51 remind us that reality may indeed be stranger than fiction, urging us to keep our minds open to the infinite possibilities that lie beyond our current grasp. The journey into the unknown continues, with each whispered tale and leaked document adding a new piece to the ever-expanding puzzle of our universe.
Space.com caught up with Bill Diamond, President and CEO of the SETI Institute for an exclusive, mind-stretching close-encounter discussion regarding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
New Mexico’s Very Large Array (VLA) – on the SETI trail.
(Image credit: Bettymaya Foott, NRAO/AUI/NSF)
To spot potential intelligent life out there in the great beyond, first you must cast a net wide by using an array of techniques and technologies.
Any "fishing expedition" for E.T. includes close-in studies of life in extreme environments right here on Earth, to help us recognize any signatures we might find on Mars or deep diving through the icy shell of Jupiter's moon, Europa. The search can also blend in the use of space-based telescopes to inspect Earth-like planets circling their home stars. Then there's cupping a proverbial ear to the cosmos using radio telescopes to pick up any bustling interstellar civilization or perhaps look for far-off laser-pulsed communiqués from extraterrestrial homebodies.
These and other efforts are actively pursued by the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, right there in the high-tech heartbeat of Silicon Valley. More than a hundred institute scientists are busily carrying out research in astronomy and astrophysics, astrobiology, as well as exoplanets, climate and bio-geoscience and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
Space.com caught up with Bill Diamond, President and CEO of the SETI Institute for an exclusive, mind-stretching close-encounter discussion regarding the mounting evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Spoiler alert! It's not that old tried, true and tired query "are we alone?" Rather, it's more like "just how crowded is it?"
Early stages
There's a lot going on today in terms of searching for and trying to understand potential extraterrestrial life in the universe, Diamond said.
"Much of the first several decades of SETI, the effort has been quite minimal, looking with fairly 'insensitive' instruments in fairly narrow parts of the radio spectrum in random parts of the sky. So hardly anything that could be considered a comprehensive endeavor," said Diamond.
But even today, in many ways, SETI work is still in the early stages. However, more and more is taking place with an increasing number of instruments and technologies around the world. "There's an extensive and expanded effort ongoing now," Diamond said.
COSMIC collaboration
For example, there's the Commensal Open-Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — mercifully shortened to COSMIC SETI.
All 27 antennas that constitute the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico have been outfitted with new gear to perform 24/7 SETI observations under a collaboration between the SETI Institute and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the group that operates the VLA.
Yes, that's the same VLA showcased in the 1997 sci-fi film "Contact," replete with actress Jodie Foster adorned with a tight-fitting stereo headset. In reality, the VLA was never used for SETI, Diamond noted, but now it is.
SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array, situated northeast of San Francisco. This array has undergone high-tech upgrades. (Image credit: Simon Steel/SETI Institute)
Detectable signatures
"COSMIC is really the most comprehensive SETI search on a single instrument in history. That's very exciting," Diamond said, and gives the COSMIC effort access to a complete and independent copy of the data streams from the entire VLA.
COSMIC will analyze data for the possible presence of "technosignatures" - detectable signatures and signals that shout out the presence of distant advanced civilizations.
In scientific circles, technosignatures are viewed as a subset of the far more established search for "biosignatures" — evidence of microbial or other primitive life loitering on some of the billions of exoplanets we now know exist.
Newly augmented
"For classical radio SETI, there's more going on now around the world than there has ever been," Diamond said. That uptick also includes the SETI Institute's newly augmented Allen Telescope Array situated northeast of San Francisco. It was named after Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, given his generous financial backing of the facility in its early phases.
The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) has undergone antenna redesign and now is outfitted with high-end computers, signal processors, and other electronics making it far faster than ever before, Diamond adds. "The instrument is performing at a level that it has never performed at since it was built. All of that is fairly new in the two to three years."
One output from ATA has been its use by SETI Institute scientists to delve into powerful Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), a head-scratching phenomenon wanting of explanation.
Philanthropic gift
A passionate booster in ATA's overhaul was Franklin Antonio, a co-founder of Qualcomm, a communications chip company. Antonio's support as an institute technical advisor continues with his philanthropic gift to the SETI Institute of $200 million after his passing last May.
That bequest is sparking an action plan that will enhance the institute's multi-disciplinary, multi-center research, education and outreach make-up, Diamond said.
Also on the institute's agenda is taking in and evaluating ideas from SETI researchers anywhere in the world to tap into a pool of money for such things as technology, software, or to run an experiment.
"If we like what you're doing, we'll fund it," Diamond said. "We will kind of take the place of NASA for the time being as the only place in the world where you can submit a proposal to do SETI work."
Those three words
Roll back time to Columbus Day in 1992 when NASA initiated a formal, more intensive, SETI program. But less than a year later, Congress short-circuited the program.
Is it time for the government to re-embrace the search for extraterrestrial intelligence?
"Yes, absolutely," Diamond responded. NASA, he said, has a trio of science questions it's spearheading: How does the Universe work? How did we get here? Are we alone?
Almost every time NASA leadership publicly speaks, said Diamond, they invoke those three words — Are we alone?
"We all want to know. NASA clearly wants to know as it's one of their science priorities," Diamond said. "So isn't it time they get back in the business of trying to answer that question?"
Artistic view of the NASA data-gathering Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Scientists are now sifting through its findings for possible technosignatures indicating an extraterrestrial civilization. (Image credit: NASA)
Planets are everywhere
NASA's own Kepler space telescope served as the space agency's first planet-hunting mission. During nine years of deep space scoping, Diamond emphasized, it showed our galaxy contains billions of exoplanets. "It told us that planets are everywhere and a lot of them are potentially habitable."
NASA is starting to chip away at SETI work, Diamond noted. A NASA-funded grant to a SETI Institute scientist is using observations from the space agency's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The intent is to purge out of the TESS data possible technosignatures aided by artificial intelligence/machine learning tools.
"So yes, I think the winds of change are blowing a little bit in favor of the government getting back into this business. And, in my opinion, I think they should step up and do it," Diamond said
Launched on March 6, 2009, the Kepler space telescope became NASA's first mission to detect Earth-size planets in the habitable zones of their stars. (Image credit: NASA)
With all the in-motion SETI research underway, just how prepared are we for a confirmed, door-ringing neighborhood watch revelation?
"The straight answer to that question is no, we are not necessarily ready, although it depends on what the answer is," Diamond responded. It's only a matter of time before this question is answered, he added, at one level or another.
We should begin to think about how we convey this information, possible impacts to society, to religion, to politics, to technology, to governments, said Diamond.
"I do think that with all these technologies, modalities, instruments looking in different ways," Diamond concluded, "it's getting closer and closer for sure."
A new metamaterial that taps into the power of animals who camouflage themselves in nature has achieved the first successful multi-terrain invisibility, making it effectively invisible to visible, microwave, and thermal scanning techniques.
Dubbed Chimera after the multi-faceted monster of Greek mythology, the new material can achieve its previously impossible capabilities in a range of environments, much like the animals who inspired its development, offering significant potential for both scientific and military applications.
MULTI-TERRAIN INVISIBILITY INSPIRED BY UNIQUE CLASS OF ANIMAL
In nature, certain animals have adapted themselves to appear virtually invisible to both predators and prey. The most famous of these is the chameleon, which can adapt its outer appearance to match its environment almost perfectly.
However, the chameleon is not the only poikilotherm lauded for its ability to achieve a form of invisibility to aid its survival. For example, the bearded dragon is noted for its ability to conceal itself thermally by matching the temperature of its environment, while the glass frog can make itself transparent so that predators cannot see it directly.
Now, a team of researchers says they have combined the adaptive ability of all three animals to produce a metamaterial that is effectively invisible across microwave, visible, and infrared spectra to achieve previously impossible multi-terrain invisibility.
CHIMERA COMBINES ADAPTIVE ABILITIES OF THREE DIFFERENT POIKILOTHERMS
“Although camouflage technology has been a long-standing topic, the enthusiasm towards a practical[1]oriented invisibility has never weakened,” the researchers explain in the recently published research paper. “Past decades have witnessed a proliferation of metasurface-based invisibility owing to the advent of metasurfaces that can freely customize the electromagnetic waves. However, state-of-the-art works only achieve broadband invisibility in an individual terrain with its specific electromagnetic background.”
To surpass these limitations, the researchers studied the camouflage techniques used by animals that achieve some form of invisibility across a range of electromagnetic spectra, including microwave, visible, and thermal (infrared). Specifically, they studied how poikilotherms like the chameleon, the bearded dragon, and the glass frog can hide themselves and then incorporated all three abilities into one metamaterial they called Chimera.
Conceptual illustration of the Chimera metasurface with multi-terrain adaptive invisibility. The proposed metasurface, just like the Chimera made up of three animals in Greek mythology, incorporates the environment-adaptation traits of three poikilotherms. The photo of the bearded dragon is reproduced from previous literature (5). Chameleon, glass frog, and terrain photos are reproduced from Visual China Group Co., Ltd. All the photos are used with permission.
“In this study, we introduce a multi-terrain invisibility metasurface that integrates biomimetic camouflage strategies, enabling dynamic invisibility across diverse terrains characterized by varying electromagnetic properties,” they explain. “This innovation is designed to effectively counter advanced synthesized detection methods encompassing microwaves, infrared, and visible light.”
Their new material achieves three distinct methods of multi-terrain invisibility. According to the researchers, the first ability is a “chameleon-like broadband in situ tunable microwave reflection mimicry” of a wide spectrum of natural terrains across a range of 8 to 12 GHz, including a water’s surface, shoal, beach/desert, grassland, and frozen ground environments. The same material can remain as optically transparent as an “invisible glass frog” while also successfully mimicking the bearded dragon’s “electrothermal effect” that can decrease the maximum thermal imaging difference between it and its local environment down to a paltry 3.1 degrees Celsius. This tiny temperature difference, the researchers note, “cannot be recognized by human eyes.”
By understanding the mechanisms behind all of these capabilities, the researchers say they have created a three-tiered “Chimera” incorporating the natural camouflage capabilities of all three animals into one surface. So, while some previous methods that mimic one of these capabilities in a narrow range of environments have been shown to create a limited amount of invisibility, the researchers say that their breakthrough metamaterial can accomplish all three at the same time and operate effectively across a wide range of natural environments.
“Compared to previous tunable invisibility strategies, our demonstration artificially reconstructs the environment-adaptive behaviors of chameleons, bearded dragons, and glass frogs in an integrated manner with the outstanding camouflage properties of broad bandwidth, polarization insensitivity, and angular allowance,” they explain.
ACHIEVING MULTITERRAIN INVISIBILITY COULD HAVE SCIENTIFIC AND MILITARY APPLICATIONS
While the Jilin University researchers behind the new metamaterial say they are still in the laboratory stages, the potential uses for Chimera they identify include uses for scientists and researchers hoping to remain effectively invisible while studying animals in their natural habitat to potential military uses that involve hiding soldiers and their equipment from electromagnetic detection including microwave, optical and infrared scanning.
“Our work has potential practical applications,” they write. “On one hand, the continuous low-dispersion in-situ tunability between quasiperfect reflection and strong absorption provides an abundance of states to mimic the electromagnetic characteristics of various real-world terrains, thus avoiding recognition by microwave radars from natural surroundings. On the other hand, the proposed metasurface may also reduce the long-distance detected probability of infrared detectors and optical video equipment by reappearing the thermal regulation of bearded dragons and the self-transparency of glass frogs.”
Finally, they also note that their Chimera metasurface retains potential compatibility with currently available infrared and visible camouflage materials and equipment, which may accelerate their implementation.
“Our work extends the applicable range of camouflage techniques from the constrained scenario to more terrains and advances reconfigurable electromagnetic devices to a multistable and circuit-topology-dynamic stage,” they conclude.
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.
On the night of December 3, 1967, a young police officer in Ashland, Nebraska named Herbert Schirmer saw an alien spaceship and met with aliens in it. This encounter is one of the most discussed UFO cases among ufologists. It was around 2:30 a.m., and 22-year-old Herb Schirmer was driving his patrol car along U.S. Highway 6 toward Nebraska 63. Suddenly, he felt something unusual and got disoriented. Sometime before, at around 1 a.m. and 1:35 a.m., he had checked the local barn and found the cattle behaving strangely.
At around 2.30 a.m., Schirmer crossed Highway 6 after checking on some facilities and reached its intersection with Highway 63. He noticed some strange red lights on his right, hovering over the ground.
Police Officer Herb Schirmer drew the sketch of the UFO he had seen in Dec 1967 Image via THE WORLD-HERALD
Schirmer assumed that it was just a truck, so he passed the intersection, drove his car to the object, stopped at 40 feet, and switched on his cruiser’s headlights. He was totally amazed to see that the object was nothing like a truck. It was shining brightly and had a metallic body. The policeman also noticed that the blinking lights were coming from the saucer’s window.
In a report, he later wrote: “At 2:30 a.m. On December 3, 1967, I saw a UFO at the junction of (U.S. Highway) 6 and (Nebraska Highway) 63. Believe it or not.”
He described the object to be oval-shaped, 20 feet wide, and 15 feet tall. He also said that when he approached the UFO, it rose to 50 feet off the ground, emitted a loud beep sound, suddenly shot a light beam to the ground and vanished in the sky.
At that moment, Schirmer thought his encounter with the alien spacecraft was over. But when he returned to his station, it was 3 a.m., so he lost 20 minutes between the spacecraft’s disappearance and returning to his station.
The image of the road where Herb Schirmer had seen an alien spaceship
When he got home, Schirmer went to bed but could not fall asleep because of a severe headache. He found a red scar under his left ear.
Schirmer used to make notes in his log, and he wrote down everything about his UFO encounter.
As soon as the news hit the media, Schirmer’s phone was flooded with prank calls. One man called him and said he was from Mars. Once, he was flagged down by a local tire shop owner who said: “Herb, if you ever see another flying saucer, and it lands, you tell them (aliens) I want to sell ’em a set of tires.”
Schirmer joined the US navy at the age of 17 and also served in the Vietnam war although he had never supported the war. After the navy, he decided to join law enforcement.
The policeman struggled to remember what had happened to him in the 20 minutes following the UFO encounter. After several months in 1968, a psychologist from the University of Wyoming, Dr. Leo Sprinkle conducted a hypnosis session with him, during which it was possible to partially restore information erased from his memory. Those hypnotic sessions were conducted by the Condon Committee, a University of Colorado project, funded by the U.S. Air Force.
Schirmer said that the engine of his car stalled and the radio turned off. He saw something white, and a fuzzy figure that resembled a man came out of the spacecraft and approached his police cruiser.
Schirmer’s sketch of the alien
Schirmer replied, “Yes, sir,” and then the alien asked him to go with him.
The aliens told Herb that Earth was their energy source
The alien took him into his spacecraft which was full of lights, cables, and various instruments. The policeman met several aliens onboard who were smaller in size. They told him that there were other flying objects of the same kind, flying in the atmosphere of our planet.
He also said that aliens had bases in the United States, but they themselves came from the nearest galaxy and stayed on Venus for a while. The aliens said their propulsion system was based on reverse electromagnetism, and Earth was their energy source. Their goal was to prevent humanity from destroying the Earth.
After further investigation, which included hypnotic regression, Sprinkle, worried about a perceived bias on his part, wrote:
“The writer [Sprinkle] believes that there is sufficient empirical evidence to support the views that the following phenomena exist: hypnotic processes or varying levels of awareness; extra sensory perception and psychokenetic (sic) processes (ESP or psi processes); and spacecraft (“flying saucers”) from extraterrestrial sources which are controlled by intelligent beings who seem to be conducting an intensive survey of the earth.
Because these views are different from those of many persons in contemporary society, the writer [Sprinkle] offers his impressions with the recognition that other observers may have obtained different, and even conflicting, impressions of the interview with Sgt. Schmirer.”
The Condon Committee unanimously dismissed Schirmer’s message as sheer delusion and hallucination. Dr. Sprinkle had a different opinion but could not convince them. The state of mind of his patient was not brilliant.
“Evaluation of psychological assessment tests, the lack of any evidence, and interviews with the patrolman, left project staff with no confidence that the trooper’s reported UFO experience was physically real,” Condon Committee concluded.
However, the abduction story of Schirmer continued hitting the headlines throughout the 1970s. He left Ashland and settled in the Pacific Northwest.
Schirmer died in 2017, but before his death, Cartoonist Michael Jasorka released a graphic novel: “December 3, 1967: An Alien Encounter” at a launch party on Dec. 3, 2011, in Los Angeles. In the novel, he illustrated Schirmer’s story in black and white color. The artist, who also believes this story, dedicated the novel to Schirmer.
The case has been picked apart by UFO researchers ever since, and it is hard to know what to make of it all. It is certainly notable that Schirmer has always stuck by his story even in the face of ridicule and his own life falling apart around him, so is this perhaps indicative of him maybe telling the truth, or at least what he truly believes to be the truth? Or is this just the ramblings of someone who has lost their grip on reality? It is difficult to say for sure, and the case of Herbert Schirmer remains unsolved.
Last May, neurotech startup Neuralink received the federal green light to test its brain implant in human clinical trials. Now, less than a year later, Neuralink’s founder Elon Musk announced on X (formerly Twitter) that its brain-computer interface (or BCI) device was successfully placed in a human recipient.
“The first human received an implant from @Neuralink yesterday and is recovering well. Initial results show promising neuron spike detection,” Musk posted late Monday.
Dubbing the name for the brain implant “Telepathy,” Musk offered no other details or specifics on the participant or the procedure itself; Neuralink did not immediately respond to Inverse’s email requesting comment.
According to a company blog post, its clinical trials — described as part of Neuralink’s Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface (or PRIME) Study — involve placing and installing their quarter-sized N1 brain implant, using a robot along a region of the brain controlling movement intention. The chip is designed to pick up the user’s brain signals, which are used to control an external device.
“[Telepathy] [e]nables control of your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, just by thinking. Initial users will be those who have lost the use of their limbs,” Musk added in another post. “Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer. That is the goal.”
While this announcement is just the first step in Neuralink’s optimistic, if not lofty, ambitions for the reach of its neurotechnology (and likely Musk’s own personal goal for transhumanism), development has been undercut each step of the way by controversy and skepticism.
While Neuralink has received significant attention and spotlight for its brain microchip, the tech behind BCIs is anything but novel or revolutionary. Several other companies like Synchron, Precision Neuroscience, and Paradromics were already working in this space and conducting human clinical trials. Synchron, for example, was the first company to receive the federal go-ahead to test its brain implant in 2021. One of the first participants in Synchron’s in-human studies, Phillip O’Keefe of Melbourne, Australia, who has a progressive neurodegenerative disease, was able to send a tweet using his new brain implant. Precision Neuroscience, as well, began its first-in-human study this past summer.
ON APRIL 17, 2013, attendees at an independently organized TEDx event in Geneva, Switzerland, were offered a glimpse at a seemingly impossible future.
Presented under the theme of “eCulture 360° and Wikinomics”, the event offered something unique even to a gathering of some of the most renowned international speakers on science and technology: the organizers billed it as a “TEDx with the opportunity to meet Jacques Vallée, one of the founder[s] of ARPANET, the first version of the Internet.”
Vallée’s lecture at the event, titled “The Age of Impossible: Anticipating Discontinuous Futures,” dealt with how the speed at which modern technology accelerates has resulted in events that would have seemed impossible to many people only years before they transpired. With examples ranging from the collapse of General Motors in 2009 to Bernie Madoff’s role in the financial crisis of 2007-2008, Vallee presented what he called a “Typology of the Impossible” that hinged on four main kinds of scenarios: events that escalated too quickly, convergences of “low-p scenarios,” events that appear to violate current cultural norms, and finally, scenarios that involve the appearance of a “completely alien concept within a particular culture.”
“There are many things in our culture today that fit that model,” Vallée said at one point during the talk, as he described historical instances where things that seemed unimaginable at one time later became technological norms. Such things, Vallee said, “are possible, but we cannot imagine them. The public is not aware that they can be done. History provides many examples, and the internet itself is an example of something that was unimaginable.”
After discussing his own part in helping create ARPANET, Vallée went on to share several more examples from recent history where unforeseen scientific advancements occurred, seemingly out of the blue.
“And finally,” the scientist said, never evincing a change in his measured tone and demeanor, “the Pentagon could not imagine that fast, erratic, mobile, oval objects in the sky were anything other than mental illusions, and they…” After a brief pause, Vallée cryptically added, “and you can fill out the answers in the next few years.”
Despite his success as a venture capitalist and “co-creator of the Internet”, most of the attendees at the 2013 TEDx event in Geneva were likely aware of what Vallée is best known for: his decades of involvement with the study of unidentified aerial phenomena. As a young computer scientist and astronomer in the 1960s, Vallee not only worked alongside Northwestern University astronomer J. Allen Hynek, the official scientific advisor to the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book but also authored Anatomy of a Phenomenon, one of the earliest popular books written on the UFO subject by a professional scientist. Though he never uttered any of the popular names or abbreviations for the phenomenon, it was obvious what Vallee had been alluding to during this brief, passing reference to “oval objects” during his talk.
At least at that time, what had not been so obvious had been why Vallée specifically referenced the Pentagon’s relationship to UAP, nor why a series of seemingly impossible future events might come to pass involving this subject “in the next few years.”
THE CALL FROM DR. VALLÉE came through earlier than I expected.
The scientist’s voice, softened by age yet still resonant with the French he learned as a youth in Pontoise before emigrating to America many decades ago, was unmistakable to me, having heard it in many interviews and documentaries over the years. Vallée, now 83, is a man whose work in the study of unidentified aerial phenomena is only one finger on the glove of his impressive resume, spanning decades of work in astronomy, physics, computer science, and venture capitalism.
As evidenced by his billing at the TEDx event in 2013, one could indeed argue that Vallée is partly responsible for the creation of the Internet, although the affable Frenchman is modest on this point, nearly to a fault. This much was evident almost immediately as we began our discussion, and I wasted no time in bringing up the talk in Geneva and some of the intriguing hints he had dropped at that time.
“I’ve seen the development and the unfolding of a number of technologies,” Vallée told me during our call. “Very often what happens is that a discovery is made, and everyone agrees that it is important, and people write papers, and so on. And then it disappears.”
Vallée with collaborator and fellow author Chris Aubeck (Credit: Chris Aubeck)
Don’t miss Jacques Vallée’s recent interview on Rebelliously Curious with Chrissy Newton over on The Debrief’s YouTube Channel, and linked at the end of this article.
“You know, the Arpanet was essentially dead for a while,” Vallée recalls from his years working on the project decades ago. “Until [the] National Science Foundation picked up the funding, thinking that there would be several internets.” Initially a simple matter of accounting, the NSF initially believed it would be easier to fund three separate projects that looked at using networks through which computers could connect for purposes of communication.
“And then they picked it up from the DOD, and it became the Internet, as we know it now.”
Vallée offered several similar examples of predecessors to the Internet—not all of them American innovations—a point which Vallée emphasized as he shifted back to our subject of greater mutual interest: UAP.
“When I watched the meetings in Congress recently, all they talk about is American cases,” Vallee said. “And among American cases, all they talk about is military cases.”
“I can tell you, having developed a lot of databases over the years, the U.S. is less than 2% of the habitable surface of the Earth,” Vallée said.
“So, if this is extraterrestrial, what about the other 98%?”
THE PATH THAT BROUGHT
Vallée into the tempest that is the study of unidentified aerial phenomena is a long one, which stems back to his early years in Pontoise at an age when the world was still at war.
“There are things you don’t forget,” Vallée said during our call, describing his memories of seeing American aircraft being shot down over his town when he was five years old.
“I remember seeing the crew dropping out in parachutes and the Germans shooting at them.”
By 1945, the war had ended, although fears of a return to conflict lingered throughout parts of Europe. To the north, reports of ghostly “rockets” over countries like Sweden in the summer of 1946 kept many guessing whether the Soviets were conducting tests, perhaps with a form of secret new aerial weapon they had captured from the Germans. The following year, an all-new kind of paranoia would erupt across the Atlantic, as American newspapers were flooded with stories of “flying saucers” seen careening through the skies, especially in airspace around sites of importance to U.S. national security.
By the Autumn of 1954, as the wave of sightings of strange objects was cresting over North America, France was having its own torrent of reports of similar phenomena. Major newspapers like L’Aurore and France-Soir were carrying stories about unidentified flying objects almost daily, and Vallée began collecting clippings of stories like those of Marius Dewilde, a railroad worker who described his observation of a pair of diminutive “robots” next to a dark machine resting on the train tracks.
The reports seemed incredible, and very well might have remained so had it not been for what occurred the following year in May 1955, when Vallée had his own sighting.
“My mother saw it first,” he would later recall of the incident. She had been working in the garden when Vallée, sixteen at the time, heard her screaming for him and his father. Vallée made his way from the attic where his father’s woodworking shop was located, and down three flights of stairs just in time to observe a metallic disc-shaped object “with a clear bubble on top” as it hovered over the nearby church of Saint-Maclou.
A modern view of Pontoise with the Cathédrale Saint-Maclou visible in the distance (Credit: Rozinante/CC BY-SA 4.0).
The object reminded them of the parachutists the family had watched descending from the skies during the war. His mother, who continued watching it, recalled how it sped away, leaving only a few wisps of white vapor where the object had been. Vallée would later learn that a schoolmate nearby had also noticed the object, observing it through binoculars.
Despite his father’s disapproval, Vallée maintained his interest in these unusual aerial objects. “I realized,” he would later write in his journal, “that I would forever be ashamed of the human race if we simply ignored ‘their’ presence.” The young Frenchman began to educate himself on the topic by reading the works of Aimé Michel, one of the earliest serious French researchers to undertake the study of unusual aerial phenomena. It was an interest he maintained through his college years, completing his degree in mathematics at the University of Paris in 1959 and going on to receive his M.S. from the University of Lille Nord de France two years later. By 1961, Vallée was employed at the Paris Observatory as an astronomer with its artificial satellite service, tracking space objects through theodolites by night.
“Naively, I started work here with great enthusiasm, assuming that we would be engaged in genuine research,” Vallée would recall of his years at the observatory. “That is not what I found.” In July of 1961, he and the other astronomers recalled a few instances where they observed objects passing overhead that they could not identify. “The next morning,” he recalled of one incident, his superior “simply confiscated the tape and destroyed it.” Vallée inquired as to why they hadn’t sent this seemingly important information along with their normal Telex tape dispatches to U.S. Navy officials in Paris.
“The Americans would laugh at us,” his superior scoffed.
Having his fill of the prevailing attitudes in Paris, by 1962, Vallée had emigrated to the United States, first working at the University of Texas, Austin, as a research associate in astronomy, and thereafter for a short stint at the McDonald Observatory, where he helped to compile the first informational map of the planet Mars with fellow French astronomer Gérard de Vaucouleurs. However, by the summer of 1963, Vallée was looking ahead at new opportunities, one of which arrived following a meeting in September with astronomer J. Allen Hynek, chair of Northwestern University’s astronomy department, who helped the young scientist find work as a systems analyst on campus. Hynek, at the time the scientific advisor to the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book UFO investigation, was a natural ally; not only would he serve as a mentor to Vallée, who went on to receive his Ph.D. from the institution in 1967, but for years thereafter the two would remain close colleagues in the pursuit of their mutual interest.
An undated photo of astronomer J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallée
(public domain).
However, by the late 1960s, it seemed evident that scientific opinions on the UFO subject in the United States had finally begun to sour, despite the efforts of Hynek, Vallée, and a close network of like-minded scientists looking into the problem. By the end of 1968, the University of Colorado UFO Project, a U.S. Air Force-funded study headed by physicist Edward U. Condon, had delivered its findings; in an introductory summary to the lengthy report, Condon wrote that “nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge,” adding that “further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.”
Vallée, musing over the Condon study during our call, remembered his incredulity at the time he first heard about its conclusions.
“That’s an interesting chapter in science,” he said. “Or the failure of science.”
By then, Vallee had already returned to France. As he, his wife Janine, and their son, Oliver, were acclimating to life in Europe again, Vallée was quietly readjusting his approach to the UFO question.
“Once I was back in France, in a way, it served to give me the space to rethink what we had done,” Vallée told me. “I mean, I knew the Condon Committee was a joke… and that science was somewhere else. So it forced me to ask some fundamental questions that I would not have asked if I had stayed at Northwestern.”
“So I thought, where does all this come from, anyway?”
Vallée began haunting the old Paris bookshops, acquiring rare historical texts and early treatises on the sciences. An interesting question had begun to form in his mind, as he recorded in a journal entry on October 29, 1967: What about the forgotten accounts of Little People, of Elementals, of Leprechauns? If these beings are part of the same phenomenon we see now, what does that mean for their nature? Are we necessarily dealing with extraterrestrials?
“I found that the phenomenon has always been there,” Vallée says of his years spent mining observations of unusual aerial phenomena from texts that date back to classical antiquity. “Of course, they are describing it in the language of the time,” he notes, “but they are describing something that’s very, very much like what I get from witnesses today.”
The fruits of such musings culminated in Vallée’s seminal 1969 effort, Passport to Magonia, widely regarded as one of his most influential early works and, paradoxically, the effort that cast him as a pariah in the eyes of many of his ufological peers.
Mass market paperback edition of Passport to Magonia (Credit: Archives for the Unexplained).
“At first, it was completely rejected.” he says, recalling one UFO magazine that featured his likeness shortly after Magonia was published, accompanied by the headline, “Vallée has gone off the deep end.” Today, Vallée laughs about the chiding he received from his peers, and I note a hint of nostalgia about those early works behind the dry chuckle that emerges.
“Maybe the truth was in the deep end.”
OVER THE COURSE OF the ensuing decades, Vallée would continue to challenge the extraterrestrial hypothesis favored particularly among American UFO researchers. Parallel to this effort, his professional career brought him into work with the Institute for the Future in the mid-1970s, where he worked as principal investigator on the National Science Foundation computer networking project that gave rise to one of the earliest iterations of the ARPANET conferencing system. In the following decade, Vallée would become involved in venture capitalism, first as a partner at Sofinnova, then moving on to become a general partner in multiple different Silicon Valley funds, including his involvement in private investments today.
As his professional career flourished, Vallée never lost sight of his fascination with strange aerial phenomena. He authored a string of follow-ups to Magonia on the topic of UFOs throughout the 1970s and 80s, each continuing to build on the premise that the phenomenon could be far more complex than conventional opinions on UFOs would offer. His pioneering work continued to garner attention along the way, even serving as the inspiration for Claude Lacombe, a French scientist portrayed by actor François Truffaut in Stephen Spielberg’s classic film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Actor François Truffaut in Stephen Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (fair use).
In the 1990s, Vallée authored a trilogy of books that focused on the prospects of alien contact. However, he always maintained a healthy distance from drawing conclusions about what any exotic technologies behind UFOs might represent. It was also during this period that Vallée began working with real estate developer Robert Bigelow’s National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), a privately funded scientific research effort that looked at UFOs and related phenomena.
In July 2014, Vallée presented a paper at the GEIPAN International Workshop in Paris, France, titled “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena: A Strategy for Research,” offering both a snapshot of what he had learned about the complexities of the phenomenon over several decades of study, as well as what he believed might be a path toward more fruitful future research.
“After years of ideological arguments based on anecdotal data the field of UAP research appears ready to emerge into a more mature phase of reliable study,” Vallée wrote in the paper’s abstract. Citing the mounting scientific interest in UAP around the world, based in part on documents conveying an official military interest in these phenomena, the scientist argued that the path forward would require the analysis of hard data, paired with intelligently informed theoretical studies.
“Without pre-judging the origin and nature of the phenomena, a range of opportunities arise for investigation,” Vallée wrote, warning that “such projects need to generate new hypotheses and test them in a rigorous way against the accumulated reports of thousands of observers.”
The problem was that in 2014, despite the existence of several notable independent catalogs containing information on historical incidents, there was no single collection of reliable UAP reports—a centralized database, in other words—upon which such studies could rely. This had been part of what prompted Vallée to assemble such a database for NIDS, work that would later carry over as Bigelow’s efforts moved out of the private sector and into the official world as part of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program (AAWSAP).
(Credit: Jacques Vallée/fair use)
“In the United States the National Institute for Discovery Science (“NIDS”) and the Bigelow Aerospace Corporation have initiated a series of special catalogues to safeguard their own reports from public sources and from their staff,” Vallée wrote in his 2014 paper, adding that he had been asked to develop a UAP data warehouse containing 11 individual databases.
“The project is known as ‘Capella,’” it stated.
According to slides accompanying Vallée’s 2014 presentation, the Capella project focused on several areas that ranged from patterns emerging from UAP data to possible physics underlying the phenomenon and its impact on humans.
During our call, Vallée spoke candidly about the project and what he hopes it might still be used to achieve.
“There is such a database. It is the one we built as part of the AATIP/BAASS project in Las Vegas,” Vallée told me. Comprising roughly 260,000 cases from countries around the world, the scientist said during our call that the Capella database had been one of the major focal points of the program.
“Contrary to what people believe, [Capella] is the largest part of the budget that was spent on the classified project,” Vallée said. This included paying for translations of incident reports from Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, and several other languages into English, and providing funding for teams that conducted additional research on-site.
“It was a large effort for two years, Vallée said, though he added that in reality, “probably close to fifty or sixty years of work went into the database.” Although Capella constitutes what is arguably the most extensive database containing information on UAP ever built, don’t expect to see it any time soon; it remains classified as a part of the data developed under the DIA’s AAWSAP program managed by James Lackatski between 2008 and 2010.
“The database is still classified, to my knowledge,” Vallée said during our call, prompting me to ask whether such a vast amount of historical information on the UAP subject shouldn’t be made publicly available.
Speaking with The Debrief in December 2021, Mark Rodeghier, Ph.D., director of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies and a longtime colleague of Vallée, expressed frustration over previous statements made by Colm Kelleher, Ph.D., another of the scientists who worked on the AAWSAP program, who noted that much of the AAWSAP data will likely remain classified.
“I mean, isn’t that discouraging, disappointing, [and] ridiculous,” Rodeghier told The Debrief. “It’s not work on how we can get a hypersonic missile. It’s UFO investigations. How can that be classified at this point? And the answer, of course, is that it shouldn’t be classified now.”
During our call, Vallée expressed similar sentiments to Rodeghier’s, although he also defended Capella’s current classified status on account of some of the information it protects.
“You make a good point,” Vallée told me. “That’s the kind of thing that should be accessible to science,” although adding that “it will be accessible to very highly competent people who can continue to look at it under the proper classification.”
“I think it’s properly classified,” Vallée added, “because it contains a lot of medical data that should be private.” However, he said that he thinks that over time, perhaps portions can be “sanitized” for release to the public, “so that we don’t invade the privacy of individuals who have reported those things, especially their medical data.”
“It’s not classified for any military or intelligence reason as far as I know,” Vallée said. “But I’m not part of the project anymore.” Vallée noted that even he no longer has access to Capella, although several longtime colleagues of his who still work in government do.
“I’m very proud to have worked on that,” Vallée said. “It’s probably the high water mark in the computer study of UFOs so far.”
“But as we know, the high water mark is going to go even higher after this.”
DESPITE HIS OWN LEVEL of involvement with government UAP studies, as well as the level of interest generated by videos of unidentified objects collected by the U.S. military—the existence of which Vallée himself hinted at in Geneva as early as 2013—the 83-year-old scientist still doesn’t necessarily hold military UAP data in higher regard than that collected by civilians.
“The military cases in the databases I know of are less than ten percent in every country,” Vallee said during our call. “They are really good because the military has radar. They have, of course, planes that can chase the objects… pilots who are very well trained and very well positioned to give a description.”
“Those are excellent reports,” Vallée concedes. “But what about the farmer in the field, who sees [an object] close to him, and has traces, and has materials? Who has felt physiological reactions?”
“What about those cases?” he asks. “They are full of information.”
Vallée’s appreciation for UAP information collected from non-governmental sources is particularly evident in his latest book, Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret, coauthored with Italian journalist Paola Leopizzi Harris. In it, they unravel the story of two men, Jose Padilla and Reme Baca, who claim to have witnessed the crash of an unusual aircraft near San Antonito, New Mexico, in August 1945. Padilla, who went on to become a State Trooper in Rowland Heights, California, maintained that as children, he and Baca had seen a large, dull-gray avocado-shaped object—along with its frantic occupants—where it had apparently crashed near his family’s ranch. The object, they say, was later recovered by the military.
Vallée while conducting field research in New Mexico in advance of the publication of Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret(Credit: Jacques Vallée).
In a newly updated second edition of the book, Vallée and Harris present additional witness testimony they have gathered about the alleged incident, which includes an observation of the crash remembered by the family of Lt. Colonel William J. Brothy, who at the time had been piloting a B-25 on a training mission. According to Brothy, he and his crew had flown over the site and recalled, “There were a lot of pieces.”
In Trinity, Vallée emphasizes what he believes are undeniable similarities between descriptions of the 1945 incident and a UAP landing in New Mexico observed by police officer Lonnie Zamora in 1964. Then, the following year another strikingly similar incident occurred near Valensole, France, involving the close observation of a landed craft and its apparent pilot or occupant.
“There is a case in Valensole, in France, and the case in Socorro. The object is identical to the Trinity object,” Vallée said. “And the [occupants] are identical to the creatures that Mr. Padilla is describing to me at Trinity, that he saw.”
“I was involved in Socorro, and I was involved in Valensole. Those are cases I know very well,” Vallée said, adding that Trinity contains new information on the Socorro case, once referred to by Hector Quintanilla, director of the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book at the time of the incident, as being “the best documented case on record.”
Today, much of Vallée’s research is focused on the collection and study of material samples believed to have been collected from UAP. Compared with his earlier work, which challenged popular notions about extraterrestrials being associated with UAP, this might surprise longtime followers of the scientist’s work. For Vallée, however, it is only the next phase in the many decades he has spent working toward resolving the mystery.
“It’s all one thing,” Vallée said during our call. “The first book I wrote was Anatomy of a Phenomenon, which… I took as a study of extraterrestrial intelligence in general, and how it was I thought UFOs illustrated the idea of life elsewhere and intelligence elsewhere… that’s definitely the place from which we started.”
“Then, when I started working with Dr. Hynek, and I started working with—in those days, it was just called ‘computer catalogs,’ it wasn’t dignified as databases or data warehouses—but those catalogs held thousands of cases. My first complete catalog was donated to the Condon Committee at the University of Colorado, when they did the study funded by the Air Force.”
“Which,” Vallée notes, “to my surprise, concluded the problem didn’t exist. So, we’ve come a long way from that.”
Given his level of involvement in working to resolve the UAP question—an effort now spanning more than six decades, including his involvement in official government UAP investigations in several countries and having authored some of the most popular books ever written on the subject—perhaps the most surprising thing expressed by Vallée during our discussion had been his predictions about how he thinks his own work will be remembered by future generations.
“I think everything I’ve done, and everything my contemporaries have done, is going to be forgotten,” he said, mirroring his observations of the invention, and subsequent reinvention, of so many other innovations in science over time, not least among them the World Wide Web.
“And then in a few years, it’s going to be reinvented by, you know, great people at Stanford and Harvard in a new way,” he tells me, accompanied by the distinctive chuckle I had by now come to expect after one of his witty responses.
“That’s always the way science works.”
Micah Hanks is Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. Follow his work at micahhanks.com and on Twitter: @MicahHanks.
Verrassende feitjes over Adam en Eva Het verhaal van Adam en Eva is een van de bekendste bijbelverhalen en legde de basis voor de scheppingsleer. Bovendien is het het eerste verhaal waarin het concept van de erfzonde naar voren komt. Waar sommigen mensen het als fictie beschouwen, wat geldt voor veel Bijbelverhalen, zien anderen het als iets dat echt gebeurt is. Of je het nu wel of niet gelooft, in deze galerij kom je interessante en minder bekende feitjes tegen over Adam en Eva.
Er zijn meerdere verhalen over Adam en Eva Het verhaal van Adam en Eva komt inderdaad niet alleen in de bijbel voor. Er zijn soortgelijke scheppingsverhalen te vinden in andere culturen en religies.
Er zijn meerdere verhalen over Adam en Eva Chnemoe, de oude Egyptische god van de vruchtbaarheid, zou mensen uit klei hebben geschapen. Ook van Prometheus, de Griekse god van het vuur, wordt gezegd dat hij op die manier de mens heeft geschapen.
De herkomst traceren Het verhaal is zowel aan het Babylonische scheppingverhaal Enuma Elish ontleent als die van Gilgamesj, een epische held uit Mesopotamië. In het eerste verhaal wordt gezegd dat de mens geschapen zou zijn door het gebruik van stof.
De herkomst traceren In het tweede verhaal creëeren de goden een mannelijke metgezel voor Gilgamesj. De held verliest op een gegeven moment zijn onsterfelijkheid nadat hij voor de truc van een slang is gevallen. Dan stormt er een vrouw binnen die de mannen van een vredig bestaan weerhoudt. Klinkt dit jullie bekend?
Adam had twee vrouwen Adam had een eerdere vrouw genaamd Lilith, die uit de Hof van Eden werd verdreven omdat ze zich tegen haar man verzette. Lilith, een prominent figuur in de joodse mythologie, werd toen een demoon.
Adams tweede vrouw Pas toen werd Eva uit een van Adams botten geschapen. De interpretaties dit deel van het verhaal lopen uiteen. De meesten van ons geloven dat het om een rib ging, zo blijkt ook uit de vertaling van het Hebreeuws.
Het bot van Adam? De term die in de oorspronkelijke tekst wordt gebruikt, is 'tsela'. Hoewel het in de context van Eva's schepping gewoonlijk als 'rib' wordt vertaald, verwijst het in feite naar de zijkant of 'een deel dat uitsteekt ten opzichte van de verticale as van een menselijk lichaam'. Daarom is Eva wellicht geschapen uit een van Adams botten die in het buitenste deel van zijn lichaam zitten.
Het bot van Adam? Sommige onderzoekers wijzen op Adams baculum (penisbot) als oorzaak van de schepping. Zij stellen dat mensen, in tegenstelling tot veel andere zoogdieren, geen baculum hebben en dat Eva daaruit zou zijn geschapen. Als gevolg hiervan zouden volgende generaties mensen zonder baculum geboren worden.
Hadden Adam en Eva navels? Veel kunstenaars hebben er misschien niet bij stilgestaan (of misschien juist wel) dat Adam en Eva ontzettend vaak met navels worden afgebeeld.
Was het de duivel die Eva verleidde? In de joodse theologie bestond Satan aanvankelijk niet. Daardoor kwam de duivel in het oorspronkelijke verhaal niet voor. Het is echter mogelijk dat de slang later met de duivel in verband werd gebracht.
Was het de duivel die Eva verleidde? De islamitische versie van het verhaal is opvallend anders. Allah schepte Adam en beval de engelen om hem te vereren, maar Iblis (ook bekend als Satan) koos ervoor om niet naar hem te luisteren. Uit de Koran blijkt dat de slang inderdaad de belichaming van het kwaad is.
Wat was nou precies de verboden vrucht? De verboden vrucht wordt in de Bijbel niet expliciet beschreven als een appel, in tegenstelling tot wat vaak wordt gedacht.
Wat was nou precies de verboden vrucht? De vrucht wordt niet uitgebreid beschreven. De Hebreeuwse term 'peri' heeft meerdere betekenissen, waaronder vijgen, druiven en zelfs tarwe. Hierdoor zijn meerdere interpretaties mogelijk.
Waarom denken mensen dan dat het een appel was? Dit is te wijten aan een grappige woordspeling uit de 4e eeuw. Het Latijnse woord 'malus' lijkt een dubbele betekenis te hebben: 'kwaad' en 'appel'. Jerome, een geleerde die de bijbel in het Latijn heeft vertaald, gebruikte dit woord om de vrucht van de boom van de kennis van goed en kwaad te beschrijven.
Waarom denken mensen dan dat het een appel was? John Milton, een dichter uit de 17e eeuw, omschreef de verboden vrucht in zijn boek 'Paradise Lost' tweemaal als een appel, waardoor nog meer mensen hierin geloven.
Pijn bij de bevalling wordt toegeschreven aan Eva In Genesis 3:16 staat:"Ik zal uw moeite in uw zwangerschap zeer groot maken; met pijn zult u kinderen baren." Dit stuk uit de bijbel heeft de bevalling er voor vrouwen niet makkelijker op gemaakt.
Pijn bij de bevalling wordt toegeschreven aan Eva Hier zijn echter weer twijfels omtrent de vertaling. In alle andere voorbeelden van de Bijbel wordt de Hebreeuwse term etzev vertaald als 'arbeid', 'zwoegen' of 'werk'. In de context van een bevalling wordt het echter geïnterpreteerd als 'pijn' 'verdriet' of 'angst'.
Islamitische versie van Adam en Eva Zoals gezegd wordt het verhaal van Adam en Eva ook in de Koran beschreven. Er is echter een opmerkelijk verschil: zowel Adam als Eva worden verleid om een vrucht uit de boom te plukken. Daarnaast komt in de islamitische versie het idee van de erfzonde niet voor. Ze aten dus allebei van de boom en werden gestraft voor hun zonde, zonder dat de hele mensheid er voor altijd de dupe van was.
Islamitische versie van Adam en Eva Nadat ze uit het paradijs waren verdreven, brachten ze 200 jaar zonder elkaar door. Ze kwamen elkaar daarna echter weer tegen en kregen twee zonen samen, Qābīl en Hābīl. Net als in het verhaal van Kaïn en Abel vermoordt een van de broers op tragische wijze de ander. Adam en Eva kregen nog veel meer kinderen, twintig tweelingen zelfs!
De pre-adamitische theorie Volgens de theorie werd aangenomen dat niet ieder mens op aarde een nakomeling van Adam en Eva was. Degenen die niet als nakomelingen werden beschouwd, werden als minder belangrijk en gemakshalve als 'minder blank' gezien, wat leidde tot de grondgedachte die volgens sommige mensen slavernij rechtvaardigde.
De locatie van de Hof van Eden Waar de Hof van Eden zich bevindt is al lang een raadsel, waardoor veel mensen nieuwsgierig blijven. De bijbel geeft ons een paar hints.
De locatie van de Hof van Eden In Genesis 2:10 staat: "In de tuin van Eden was de bron van een rivier, die de tuin vochtig hield. Deze rivier splitst zich in vier andere rivieren" (afhankelijk van de vertaling). Dit zijn de rivieren Pison, Gichon, Tigris en de Eufraat.
De locatie van de Hof van Eden Er wordt gedacht dat de Hof van Eden zich mogelijk in Mesopotamië (het huidige Irak en Koeweit) of in het huidige Turkije of Armenië bevond. Waar hij precies lag blijft echter onbekend.
De genen van Adam en Eva Volgens een onderzoek bestond de mitochondriale Eva tussen 100.000 en 230.000 jaar geleden, terwijl de Y-chromosomale Adam ongeveer 75.000 jaar ouder was.
De genen van Adam en Eva Er wordt in dit onderzoek verwezen naar gemeenschappelijke mitochondriale voorouders van de mens van nu. Deze voorouders waren niet aan elkaar gekoppeld en waren ook niet de eerste mensen op aarde.
Atmosphere Pressure Changes Could Explain Mars Methane
One ongoing mystery on Mars is the sporadic detection of atmospheric methane. Since 1999 detections have been made by Earth-based observatories, orbital missions, and on the surface by the Curiosity Rover. However, other missions and observatories have not detected methane at all, and even when detected, the abundances appear to fluctuate seasonally or even daily.
So, where does this intermittent methane come from? A group of scientists have proposed an interesting theory: the methane is being sucked out of the ground by changes in pressure in the Martian atmosphere. The researchers simulated how methane moves underground on Mars through networks of underground fractures and found that seasonal changes can force the methane onto the surface for a short time.
“Our work suggests several key time windows for Curiosity to collect data,” said John Ortiz, a graduate student at Los Alamos National Laboratory who led the research team. “We think these offer the best chance of constraining the timing of methane fluctuations, and (hopefully) down the line bringing us closer to understanding where it comes from on Mars.”
The presence of methane (CH4) in the Martian atmosphere is of great interest to planetary scientists and exobiologists because it could indicate present or past microbial life. Or, it could also be related to nonbiological processes, such as volcanism or hydrothermal activity.
The problem with detecting methane is that it doesn’t last long. Once released into the atmosphere, it can be quickly destroyed by natural atmospheric processes. Therefore, any methane detected in Mars’ atmosphere means it must have been released recently, which only adds to the intrigue.
On Earth, most methane is produced by living creatures such as microorganisms in sedimentary strata, or in the guts of ruminants (cows, sheep, deer, etc.). For methane produced through abiotic or non-living processes, there is a high likelihood it could have been produced millions or even billions of years ago, lying trapped in underground rock formations.
But still, finding methane on Mars is a big deal because of the potential for biological sources, such as methanogenic microbes.
This graphic is the result of an analysis that gives a percentage chance of the methane originating in each grid square centered on Gale Crater. Image Credit: Giuranna et al. (2019)
In 2004, the Mars Express Orbiter (MEO) detected methane in the Martian atmosphere. In 2013 and 2014 Curiosity detected spikes in methane in the atmosphere at Gale Crater. Interestingly, MEO detected a methane spike again, at the same location that Curiosity did, only one day later.
Ortiz and his team wanted to better understand Mars’ methane levels, and used high-performance computing clusters to simulate how methane travels through networks of underground fractures, and then released into the atmosphere when driven by atmospheric pressure fluctuations. They also modeled how methane is adsorbed onto the pores of rocks, which is a temperature-dependent process that may contribute to the methane level fluctuations.
The team said their simulations predicted methane pulses from the ground surface into the atmosphere just before the Martian sunrise in the planet’s northern summer season, which just recently ended. This corroborates previous rover data suggesting that methane levels fluctuated not only seasonally, but also daily. With these insights, the Curiosity rover team can figure out when and where to look for methane, which could aid in the rover’s main goal, searching for signs of life.
“Understanding Mars’ methane variations has been highlighted by NASA’s Curiosity team as the next key step towards figuring out where it comes from,” Ortiz said. “There are several challenges associated with meeting that goal, and a big one is knowing what time of a given sol (Martian day) is best for Curiosity to perform an atmospheric sampling experiment.”
Astronomers spot 18 black holes gobbling up nearby stars
Astronomers spot 18 black holes gobbling up nearby stars
The detections more than double the number of known tidal disruption events in the nearby universe.
Jennifer Chu|MIT News
Star-shredding black holes are everywhere in the sky if you just know how to look for them. That’s one message from a new study by MIT scientists, appearing today in the Astrophysical Journal.
The study’s authors are reporting the discovery of 18 new tidal disruption events (TDEs) — extreme instances when a nearby star is tidally drawn into a black hole and ripped to shreds. As the black hole feasts, it gives off an enormous burst of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum.
Astronomers have detected previous tidal disruption events by looking for characteristic bursts in the optical and X-ray bands. To date, these searches have revealed about a dozen star-shredding events in the nearby universe. The MIT team’s new TDEs more than double the catalog of known TDEs in the universe.
The researchers spotted these previously “hidden” events by looking in an unconventional band: infrared. In addition to giving off optical and X-ray bursts, TDEs can generate infrared radiation, particularly in “dusty” galaxies, where a central black hole is enshrouded with galactic debris. The dust in these galaxies normally absorbs and obscures optical and X-ray light, and any sign of TDEs in these bands. In the process, the dust also heats up, producing infrared radiation that is detectable. The team found that infrared emissions, therefore, can serve as a sign of tidal disruption events.
By looking in the infrared band, the MIT team picked out many more TDEs, in galaxies where such events were previously hidden. The 18 new events occurred in different types of galaxies, scattered across the sky.
“The majority of these sources don’t show up in optical bands,” says lead author Megan Masterson, a graduate student in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “If you want to understand TDEs as a whole and use them to probe supermassive black hole demographics, you need to look in the infrared band.”
Other MIT authors include Kishalay De, Christos Panagiotou, Anna-Christina Eilers, Danielle Frostig, and Robert Simcoe, and MIT assistant professor of physics Erin Kara, along with collaborators from multiple institutions including the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.
Heat spike
The team recently detected the closest TDE yet, by searching through infrared observations. The discovery opened a new, infrared-based route by which astronomers can search for actively feeding black holes.
That first detection spurred the group to comb for more TDEs. For their new study, the researchers searched through archival observations taken by NEOWISE — the renewed version of NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. This satellite telescope launched in 2009 and after a brief hiatus has continued to scan the entire sky for infrared “transients,” or brief bursts.
The team looked through the mission’s archived observations using an algorithm developed by co-author Kishalay De. This algorithm picks out patterns in infrared emissions that are likely signs of a transient burst of infrared radiation. The team then cross-referenced the flagged transients with a catalog of all known nearby galaxies within 200 megaparsecs, or 600 million light years. They found that infrared transients could be traced to about 1,000 galaxies.
They then zoomed in on the signal of each galaxy’s infrared burst to determine whether the signal arose from a source other than a TDE, such as an active galactic nucleus or a supernova. After ruling out these possibilities, the team then analyzed the remaining signals, looking for an infrared pattern that is characteristic of a TDE — namely, a sharp spike followed by a gradual dip, reflecting a process by which a black hole, in ripping apart a star, suddenly heats up the surrounding dust to about 1,000 kelvins before gradually cooling down.
This analysis revealed 18 “clean” signals of tidal disruption events. The researchers took a survey of the galaxies in which each TDE was found, and saw that they occurred in a range of systems, including dusty galaxies, across the entire sky.
“If you looked up in the sky and saw a bunch of galaxies, the TDEs would occur representatively in all of them,” Masteron says. “It’s not that they’re only occurring in one type of galaxy, as people thought based only on optical and X-ray searches.”
“It is now possible to peer through the dust and complete the census of nearby TDEs,” says Edo Berger, professor of astronomy at Harvard University, who was not involved with the study. “A particularly exciting aspect of this work is the potential of follow-up studies with large infrared surveys, and I’m excited to see what discoveries they will yield.”
A dusty solution
The team’s discoveries help to resolve some major questions in the study of tidal disruption events. For instance, prior to this work, astronomers had mostly seen TDEs in one type of galaxy — a “post-starburst” system that had previously been a star-forming factory, but has since settled. This galaxy type is rare, and astronomers were puzzled as to why TDEs seemed to be popping up only in these rarer systems. It so happens that these systems are also relatively devoid of dust, making a TDE’s optical or X-ray emissions naturally easier to detect.
Now, by looking in the infrared band, astronomers are able to see TDEs in many more galaxies. The team’s new results show that black holes can devour stars in a range of galaxies, not only post-starburst systems.
The findings also resolve a “missing energy” problem. Physicists have theoreticially predicted that TDEs should radiate more energy than what has been actually observed. But the MIT team now say that dust may explain the discrepancy. They found that if a TDE occurs in a dusty galaxy, the dust itself could absorb not only optical and X-ray emissions but also extreme ultraviolet radiation, in an amount equivalent to the presumed “missing energy.”
The 18 new detections also are helping astronomers estimate the rate at which TDEs occur in a given galaxy. When they figure the new TDEs in with previous detections, they estimate a galaxy experiences a tidal disruption event once every 50,000 years. This rate comes closer to physicists’ theoretical predictions. With more infrared observations, the team hopes to resolve the rate of TDEs, and the properties of the black holes that power them.
“People were coming up with very exotic solutions to these puzzles, and now we’ve come to the point where we can resolve all of them,” Kara says. “This gives us confidence that we don’t need all this exotic physics to explain what we’re seeing. And we have a better handle on the mechanics behind how a star gets ripped apart and gobbled up by a black hole. We’re understanding these systems better.”
Astronomers Discover 18 New Tidal Disruption Events
Astronomers Discover 18 New Tidal Disruption Events
A tidal disruption event occurs when a star winds up so close to a supermassive black hole that the tidal forces exceed the star’s self-gravity and shred the star; as the black hole feasts, it gives off an enormous burst of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum.
Masterson et al. identified 18 new tidal disruption events — extreme instances when a nearby star is tidally drawn into a black hole and ripped to shreds.
Image credit: Masterson et al., doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/ad18bb.
“The majority of the new sources don’t show up in optical bands,” said Megan Masterson, a graduate student in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.
“If you want to understand tidal disruption events (TDEs) as a whole and use them to probe supermassive black hole demographics, you need to look in the infrared band.”
Masterson and her colleagues recently detected the closest TDE yet, by searching through infrared observations.
The discovery opened a new, infrared-based route by which astronomers can search for actively feeding black holes.
That first detection spurred the group to comb for more TDEs.
For their new study, the researchers searched through archival observations taken by NASA’s NEOWISE mission.
They looked through the mission’s archived observations using an algorithm that picks out patterns in infrared emissions — likely signs of a transient burst of infrared radiation.
They then cross-referenced the flagged transients with a catalog of all known nearby galaxies within 600 million light-years.
They found that infrared transients could be traced to about 1,000 galaxies.
The authors then zoomed in on the signal of each galaxy’s infrared burst to determine whether the signal arose from a source other than a TDE, such as an active galactic nucleus or a supernova.
After ruling out these possibilities, the team then analyzed the remaining signals, looking for an infrared pattern that is characteristic of a TDE — namely, a sharp spike followed by a gradual dip, reflecting a process by which a black hole, in ripping apart a star, suddenly heats up the surrounding dust to about 1,000 K before gradually cooling down.
The team’s analysis revealed 18 clean signals of tidal disruption events.
The authors took a survey of the galaxies in which each TDE was found, and saw that they occurred in a range of systems, including dusty galaxies, across the entire sky.
“If you looked up in the sky and saw a bunch of galaxies, the TDEs would occur representatively in all of them,” Masteron said.
“It’s not that they’re only occurring in one type of galaxy, as people thought based only on optical and X-ray searches.”
“It is now possible to peer through the dust and complete the census of nearby TDEs,” said Harvard University’s Professor Edo Berger.
“A particularly exciting aspect of this work is the potential of follow-up studies with large infrared surveys, and I’m excited to see what discoveries they will yield.”
The new discoveries help to resolve some major questions in the study of TDEs.
For instance, prior to this work, astronomers had mostly seen TDEs in one type of galaxy — a post-starburst system that had previously been a star-forming factory, but has since settled.
This galaxy type is rare, and astronomers were puzzled as to why TDEs seemed to be popping up only in these rarer systems.
It so happens that these systems are also relatively devoid of dust, making a TDE’s optical or X-ray emissions naturally easier to detect.
Now, by looking in the infrared band, astronomers are able to see TDEs in many more galaxies.
The team’s new results show that black holes can devour stars in a range of galaxies, not only post-starburst systems.
The findings also resolve a missing energy problem. Physicists have theoretically predicted that TDEs should radiate more energy than what has been actually observed.
But the authors now say that dust may explain the discrepancy. They found that if a TDE occurs in a dusty galaxy, the dust itself could absorb not only optical and X-ray emissions but also extreme ultraviolet radiation, in an amount equivalent to the presumed ‘missing energy.’
The 18 new detections also are helping astronomers estimate the rate at which TDEs occur in a given galaxy.
When they figure the new TDEs in with previous detections, they estimate a galaxy experiences a tidal disruption event once every 50,000 years.
This rate comes closer to physicists’ theoretical predictions. With more infrared observations, the team hopes to resolve the rate of TDEs, and the properties of the black holes that power them.
“People were coming up with very exotic solutions to these puzzles, and now we’ve come to the point where we can resolve all of them,” said MIT’s Dr. Erin Kara.
“This gives us confidence that we don’t need all this exotic physics to explain what we’re seeing.”
“And we have a better handle on the mechanics behind how a star gets ripped apart and gobbled up by a black hole. We’re understanding these systems better.”
The team’s paper was published in the Astrophysical Journal.
Megan Masterson et al. 2024. A New Population of Mid-infrared-selected Tidal Disruption Events: Implications for Tidal Disruption Event Rates and Host Galaxy Properties. ApJ 961, 211; doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/ad18bb
12 Archaeological Finds That Show the Bible is Real Over the centuries, archaeologists have made discoveries that confirm the historical accuracy of the Bible. From artifacts to cities, here are 12 remarkable finds that provide evidence for the Bible's reliability.
Seal of King Hezekiah Discovered in Jerusalem In 2009, archaeologists uncovered a seal belonging to King Hezekiah, who ruled Jerusalem in the 8th century BC. The artifact features his name and iconography, verifying the king's identity and reign as described in 2 Kings.
This rare discovery substantiates that Hezekiah was a real historical figure, confirming the Bible's account of his rule during a pivotal period. The artifact also validates the scripture's depiction of governmental practices at the time.
Ancient Biblical Scrolls Found Intact in Qumran Caves In 1947, Bedouin shepherds stumbled upon jars in Qumran housing incredibly preserved Dead Sea Scrolls. These manuscripts contain Hebrew texts of every Old Testament book except Esther, verifying the Bible's historical integrity.
The Dead Sea Scrolls provide tangible proof that biblical accounts were recorded accurately, remaining unchanged for over a thousand years. They also open a window into early Judaism and the roots of Christianity.
According to John 5:2-9, Jesus healed a paralyzed man by the pool with five porches in Bethesda. In the 19th century, archaeologists found this large reservoir near Jerusalem's Sheep Gate surrounded by four colonnaded porticoes. Coincidence? I think not.
This discovery of the rare pentagonal pool confirms the existence and recognition of Bethesda during the Second Temple times. It also verifies the setting of this Gospel narrative regarding one of Christ's miracles.
House of King David Reference Found on Ancient Inscription In 1993, archaeologists discovered the earliest extra-biblical reference to the dynasty of King David on the Tel Dan inscription. The fragment explicitly uses the phrase "House of David" validating the biblical King's line.
This artifact provides concrete evidence that David had a ruling family - a fact often disputed by a multitude of scholars worldwide. It confirms that the biblical account of a Davidic line of kings is factual, not mythical.
Ancient Remains of the Coastal City Tyre Unearthed In Ezekiel 26, the prophet predicts the destruction of Tyre at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar. Excavations have revealed sieges, collapsed walls, and ruins - evidence of this demise.
With ancient cities, absence of evidence doesn't mean evidence of absence. In Tyre's case, the unequaled, lasting ruins testify to the Bible's account coming true concerning the city's great collapse.
Siloam Pool Where Jesus Healed Blind Man Identified According to the Gospel of John, Jesus commanded a blind man to wash the mud from his eyes in the Pool of Siloam located southeast of Jerusalem.
In 2004, archaeologists uncovered the remains of this very pool dating back to the Second Temple Period, providing geographical context for the Gospel account.
Inscription Bearing Name of Pontius Pilate Found at Herod's Palace In 1961, Italian archaeologists excavating Herod's palace near Bethlehem uncovered a limestone block bearing the inscription "Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea" confirming he governed during the time of Jesus. This artifact cements Pilate as a verifiable biblical figure who sentenced Jesus to crucifixion. It also supports the historical accuracy of crucifixion as a punishment used by the Romans during that period.
This discovery verifies Caesarea as Pilate's center of administration, where he would travel from Jerusalem. As part of Herod the Great's coastal palace, the identification of this stone lintel definitively proves Pilate and Herod both occupied this complex. The artifact's origin from this important site also anchors the pivotal biblical moments between these two rulers in a real geographic location during a volatile political era in Judea's history.
Hometown Proof: Remains of Nazareth Houses Excavated Some historians questioned Nazareth's existence since the New Testament mentions it as Jesus' childhood town. However, house remains were uncovered in 2009 proving a small village existed there in Jesus' time.
This evidence categorically refutes skepticism over whether Nazareth was still inhabited between the 7th century BC and the late 1st century AD when Jesus lived there. It bolsters the scriptural authenticity regarding Christ's upbringing.
Western Wall Ruins Demonstrate Jewish Temple Destruction According to historical sources, the Second Temple fell in 70 AD after a Roman siege. The sole survivor - the Western Wall - still stands in Jerusalem's Old City testifying to this catastrophic biblical event.
The remains of Judaism's holiest site prove its documented destruction, providing visible confirmation regarding this pivotal moment. They also illustrate the Wailing Wall's enduring spiritual significance.
Seaside Town Capernaum is Confirmed as Jesus' Base In the Gospels, Capernaum by the Sea of Galilee serves as Jesus' home base during his ministry. In 1838, American explorer Edward Robinson pinpointed its location, with excavations uncovering fishing equipment, houses, and roads.
Archaeological evidence substantiates Capernaum as a fishing village inhabited from the 2nd century BC to the 11th century AD. This proves Jesus could have made it central for performing miracles and preaching to crowds as recounted in Gospel passages.
Rare Limestone Inscription Confirms Pontius Pilate's Role In 1961, archaeologists recovered a partial inscription bearing "Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea" who authorized Jesus' crucifixion per the Bible. This stone lintel was reused in Herod's palace near Bethlehem.
As the only non-biblical reference to Pilate, it puts to rest doubts over his existence and governance in Judea. It also supports the scriptural timeline, placing his rule from 26 to 36 AD aligning with Jesus' death.
Evidence of Christ's Path on Via Dolorosa Street Unearthed The winding Via Dolorosa through Jerusalem's Old City is believed to have been the route Jesus walked, carrying his cross. Excavations revealed flagged paving stones from Hadrian's time.
This discovery dates the pathway to the 1st century AD, coinciding with the Holy Week timeline. The unearthed street spans the entire Via Dolorosa, lending credence that Christ trod this path during his agonizing journey.
Nearby Garden Tomb Offers Evidence Supporting Christ's Burial Just outside Jerusalem's Old City walls, a rock-cut tomb reflecting the 1st-century burial style resides in a garden setting. This site's location and features suggest it is a strong candidate for Jesus' grave.
While its precise authenticity is debated, this tomb's characteristics match John's description. Nearby rock features also point to evidence of crucifixion taking place there, indicating the site's credible link to Jesus' death and burial.
Artifacts Support Biblical Exodus Account of Enslaved Israelites For years skeptics doubted the Biblical Exodus story due to the absence of artifacts in Egypt's archaeological records. However, evidence found confirms slavery practices, brick-making methods, and living conditions align with scriptural accounts.
These small fragments provide subtle clues that echo the biblical story of Hebrew enslavement by Egypt's pharaohs. They present strands in a complex historical tapestry that lends plausibility to the scriptural narrative.
Tangibility from Texts to Towns that Affirms Scripture Spanning thousands of years, these 12 archaeological discoveries shed light on biblical events and figures that reshaped spiritual history. The unearthed ruins, artifacts, and inscriptions make tangible what was once only ink on parchment.
From the monumental Jerusalem temple remains to a fragment bearing Pilate's name, the physical evidence paints a portrait aligned with scriptural accounts - affirming its historical authenticity through the ages.
The legend of Area 51—and why it still fascinates us
The legend of Area 51—and why it still fascinates us
Secluded in the Nevada desert, the military base has long been associated with alien and UFO sightings. Here's the real history behind the conspiracy theories.
UFO believers look for suspicious spacecraft during a UFO and Vortex Tour in Sedona, Arizona. This composite image is a combination of six photographs taken in 2017 through night vision goggles.
PHOTOGRAPH BY COMPOSITE JENNIFER EMERLING
Each year, Area 51’s mythology draws tourists from around the world. People come to the air base near Rachel, Nevada, in hopes to catch a glimpse of otherworldly spacecrafts.
The legend of Area 51 has been discredited for years—but some of its history is based on true events. Here’s what you need to know about Area 51.
Where is Area 51?
About 120 miles northwest of Las Vegas, somewhere between mile markers 29 and 30 along Nevada’s “Extraterrestrial Highway” (State Highway 375), lies an unmarked dirt road. Although no buildings are visible from the asphalt, the track leads to Groom Lake or Homey Airport—as it’s called on civilian aviation maps.
For those in the know, this road leads to a military base with many unofficial names: Paradise Ranch; Watertown; Dreamland Resort; Red Square; The Box; and The Ranch; Nevada Test and Training Range; Detachment 3, Air Force Flight Test Centre (Det. 3, AFFTC); and Area 51.
Earthlings are welcome at the restaurant and bar Little A’Le’Inn in Rachel, Nevada—a popular stop on the pilgrimage to Area 51.
The UFO Research Center library opened to the public in 1992 as part of the UFO Museum in Roswell, New Mexico. The library holds an extensive collection of reference materials on the history of extraterrestrial encounters and related phenomena.
The UFO Research Center library opened to the public in 1992 as part of the UFO Museum in Roswell, New Mexico. The library holds an extensive collection of reference materials on the history of extraterrestrial encounters and related phenomena.
Before World War II, the area near Groom Lake was used for silver and lead mining. Once the war began, the military took over the remote area and began conducting research: mainly nuclear and weapons testing.
Why build a secret base in the desert?
About 200,000 people visit the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico each year.
When the CIA started developing spy reconnaissance planes during the Cold War, then-CIA Director Richard Bissell, Jr. realised a private base was needed to build and test prototypes.
In 1955, he and Lockheed aircraft designer Kelly Johnson selected the secluded airfield at Groom Lake to be their headquarters. The Atomic Energy Commission added the base to the existing map of the Nevada Test Site and labeled the site Area 51.
Within eight months, engineers developed the U-2 plane, which could soar at an altitude of 70,000 feet—much higher than any other aircraft at the time. This allowed pilots to fly well above Soviet radar, missiles, and enemy aircraft.
After a U-2 was shot down by a Soviet anti-air missile in 1960, the CIA began developing the next generation of spy plane at Area 51: the titanium-bodied A-12. Nearly undetectable to radar, the A-12 could fly across the continental United States in 70 minutes at 2,200 miles an hour. The plane also was equipped with cameras that could, from an altitude of 90,000 feet, photograph objects just one-foot long on the ground.
Aliens and UFOs become part of Area 51 lore
Area 51 became forever associated with aliens in 1989 after a man claiming to have worked there, Robert Lazar, gave an interview with a Las Vegas news station. Lazar claimed that Area 51 housed and studied alien spacecraft and that his job was to recreate the technology for military use.
The world’s only spaceship-shaped McDonald’s attracts UFO tourists in Roswell, New Mexico.
However, Lazar’s credentials were soon discredited: according to school records Lazar never went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or California Institute of Technology, as he claimed. At the time though, engineers at Area 51 were studying and recreating advanced aircraft—just aircraft acquired from other countries, not from outer space.
Nevertheless, with all of the high-tech flights out of Area 51—including more than 2,850 takeoffs by the A-12—reports of unidentifiable flying objects skyrocketed in the area.
An alien face is woven into the chain link fence outside a shopping center in Roswell, New Mexico.
“The aircraft’s titanium body, moving as fast as a bullet, would reflect the sun’s rays in a way that could make anyone think, UFO,” sources told journalist Annie Jacobsen for her 2011 book on Area 51.
Is the truth out there?
The government formally acknowledged the existence of Area 51 for the first time in 2013 when the CIA declassified documents about the development of the U-2 and A-12. Previously, locals knew something odd was happening in the desert but details were scarce and hard to verify.
Area 51 is still an active base—but the purpose it has served since the 1970s is a top-secret mystery. It will be a few more decades, at least, until current work is declassified and available to the public.
Two humans and their backseat stowaway drive to Roswell, New Mexico, famous for a supposed alien spaceship crash in 1947. Some conspiracy theorists believe remains from the Roswell crash were taken to Area 51, a secret military base near Rachel, Nevada, to study.
The site continues to be a pillar of U.S. alien mythology. A 2019 interview with Lazar on a popular podcast inspired a “Storm Area 51” event, in which about 6,000 people showed up in the desert to look for evidence of aliens. (It ultimately morphed into a festival celebrating all things alien.)
Even today, Area 51 draws believers and skeptics who frequent the small but thriving trail of alien-themed museums, restaurants, motels, parades, and festivals—all in hopes of discovering that the truth really is out there.
Photographer Jennifer Emerling has spent time photographing UFO culture in the American West. See more photos from the project on her website Welcome, Earthlings and her Instagram.
Editor's note:This story was originally published on September 20, 2019. It has been updated.
Area 51: A Nexus of Modern Mythology and Advanced Technology
Area 51: A Nexus of Modern Mythology and Advanced Technology
In the heart of the Nevada desert lies a place shrouded in as much mystery as it is in secrecy: Area 51. This highly classified remote detachment of Edwards Air Force Base has been the focal point of numerous conspiracy theories, mainly concerning UFOs and extraterrestrial life. Among the most captivating figures in this saga is Bob Lazar, whose controversial claims have stirred public curiosity and skepticism alike.
The Allure of Area 51
Area 51’s mystique is not just a product of modern folklore; it is rooted in its clandestine history and groundbreaking technological developments. The base’s existence was unacknowledged by the U.S. government until 2013, fueling speculation about its purpose and contents. The secrecy surrounding Area 51 is primarily due to its role as a testing ground for advanced aircraft and surveillance technology during the Cold War.
Bob Lazar: Catalyst of the Area 51 Mythos
Bob Lazar catapulted Area 51 into the public eye in 1989 with his explosive claims. Lazar alleged that he was employed at a subsidiary site near Area 51, known as S-4, where he purportedly worked on reverse engineering extraterrestrial technology. He claimed this technology was harnessed from recovered alien spacecraft and mentioned the use of an element, Moscovium (Element 115), as a power source, an element that was not synthesized until 2003. Lazar’s descriptions of the aircraft’s interiors and his assertion of alien involvement in human affairs over millennia added layers to the Area 51 narrative.
Skepticism and Scrutiny
While Lazar’s assertions have been influential, they have not escaped scrutiny. Investigations into his educational and professional background raised questions, with no records supporting his claims of studying at MIT and Caltech. Lazar countered this by suggesting a government cover-up of his identity. Despite his story’s inconsistencies, he remains a prominent and divisive figure in the discussion of Area 51 and UFOs.
Area 51 in Popular Culture
Area 51’s intrigue has transcended into popular culture, notably depicted in films like “Independence Day.” The portrayal of Area 51 as a storage site for alien technology and spacecraft in the movie further entrenched its association with extraterrestrial phenomena in the public imagination.
Advanced Technology and Aircraft Testing
Beyond the tales of alien technology, Area 51’s true significance lies in its role as a testing site for groundbreaking aviation technology. Projects like the U-2 spy plane, A-12, and the F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter were all developed and tested here. The base has been pivotal in advancing the United States’ aerial and reconnaissance capabilities, particularly during the tense periods of the Cold War.
The Expansion of Area 51
Recent satellite imagery indicates that Area 51 has expanded since the end of the Cold War. This suggests its ongoing importance in military and aerospace development, likely focusing on new types of drone aircraft and possibly other advanced technologies.
VIDEO:
Area 51: Aliens, UFOs, Bob Lazar & Advanced Technology
Area 51 remains an enigmatic symbol at the intersection of fact and fiction. While it continues to be a hotbed for conspiracy theories and extraterrestrial folklore, its real contributions to technology and national security are undeniable. The base stands as a testament to human ingenuity and the endless pursuit of technological advancement, even as it keeps fueling our imagination about the unknown and the unexplained. As long as its full history and current operations remain concealed, Area 51 will continue to captivate and mystify as a true ‘Dreamland’.
Hoe veel verschillen wij van eerdere mensensoorten? Gefeliciteerd Homo sapiens! We zijn erin geslaagd om niet uit te sterven en hebben het goed gedaan, in tegenstelling tot andere archaïsche mensensoorten. In tegenstelling tot wat vaak wordt gedacht, verliep onze evolutie niet lineair. In feite leefden er in dezelfde periode andere mensensoorten naast ons. Wij Homo sapiens vermengden ons zelfs met sommigen van hen. Toch waren wij uiteindelijk de enige overlevenden.
Maar wat onderscheidt deze vroege mensensoorten van ons? Klik door de galerij om meer te ontdekken.
Australopithecus afarensis Het geslacht Australopithecus is een bekende voorouder van de moderne mens. Onder hen werd de soort Australopithecus afarensis beroemd toen Lucy werd ontdekt, een skelet dat werd gevonden in 1974. (afbeelding).
Australopithecus afarensis De Australopithecus afarensis leefde ongeveer 3 tot 3,7 miljoen jaar geleden in Oost-Afrika. Ze hadden een tenger postuur en kleine hersenen. Hun lengte varieerde van 96 cm tot 165 cm en hun gewicht van 25-64 kg.
Australopithecus afarensis Fossielen van de Australopithecus afarensis werden ontdekt in Kenia, Ethiopië en Tanzania. Deze soort was voornamelijk vegetariër.
Homo habilis De Homo habilis, de vroegste mensensoort die tot het geslacht "homo" behoort, stamt af van de Australopithecus. De Homo habilis kwam voor in Zuid- en Oost-Afrika en leefde ongeveer 1,4 tot 2,3 miljoen jaar geleden.
Homo habilis Vergeleken met de Australopithecus zagen ze er meer gepolijst en gebogen uit, maar toch bleven ze kleiner dan de huidige mens, met een gemiddeld gewicht van ongeveer 34 kg.
Homo habilis In tegenstelling tot hun voorgangers at de Homo habilis vlees. Ze kregen erkenning voor hun vaardigheden in het maken van gereedschap, waardoor ze hun naam kregen. Het betekent letterlijk "handige mens".
Homo rudolfensis Er werd slechts één schedel opgegraven in het Turkana-bekken in Kenia, en later een onderkaak in Malawi, beide zeldzame fossielen van deze oude mensensoort. De gevonden schedel levert het bewijs van grotere hersenen vergeleken met de Homo habilis.
Homo rudolfensis Er is nog steeds een wetenschappelijke discussie gaande over de classificatie van Homo rudolfensis binnen het homo genus. Sommigen beweren dat het een Australopithecus met grotere hersenen kan zijn geweest. Deze soort bestond ongeveer 1,7 miljoen jaar geleden en viel samen met Homo habilis en Homo erectus.
Homo erectus In tegenstelling tot het vorige voorbeeld zijn er veel fossielen van de Homo erectus, die dateren van 110.000 tot 1,89 miljoen jaar geleden. De Homo erectus was de mensensoort die het langst overleefde!
Homo erectus Ze hadden een groter lichaam en kleinere tanden dan de Homo habilis en leken meer op de moderne mens. Ze hadden echter langere benen en kortere armen dan wij.
Homo erectus De Homo erectus, die ongeveer 68 kg woog, was ongeveer net zo groot als wij en was tussen de 150 cm en 180 cm. Ze waren de eerste mens die zich buiten Afrika waagden.
Homo ergaster De Homo ergaster bewoonde Oost- en Zuidelijk Afrika van 1,4 tot 1,9 miljoen jaar geleden. Net als bij de Homo rudolfensis is er een voortdurende wetenschappelijke discussie gaande over de vraag of de Homo ergaster een aparte soort is of een ondersoort van de Homo erectus.
Homo ergaster Homo ergaster en Homo erectus leefden in dezelfde periode naast elkaar op aarde. De Homo ergaster had een magerder postuur dan de Homo erectus, maar ze aten hetzelfde, hadden dezelfde levensstijl en gebruikten allebei gereedschap.
Homo floresiensis De Homo floresiensis werd in 2003 door wetenschappers gevonden in de Liang Bua-grot op het eiland Flores, in Indonesië. Aangenomen wordt dat deze oude mensensoort ongeveer 50.000 tot 100.000 jaar geleden bestond.
Homo floresiensis Ze waren veel kleiner dan de huidige mens, maar toch waren het bekwame jagers. Archeologen ontdekten jachtgereedschap dat werd gebruikt om een uitgestorven olifantensoort, de stegodon, te vangen. Onderzoekers suggereren dat deze mensen, waarvan wordt aangenomen dat ze afstammen van de Homo erectus, zich hebben aangepast aan het leven op een eiland door tot dwergen te evolueren.
Homo heidelbergensis De Homo heidelbergensis bewoonde verschillende gebieden over de hele wereld van 200.000 tot 600.000 jaar geleden. Fossielen suggereren dat ze oostelijk en zuidelijk Afrika, Europa en mogelijk China hebben verkend.
Homo heidelbergensis Zij waren de eerste mensensoort die in staat was om in koudere omgevingen te leven. Ze hadden dan ook aanleg voor het maken van vuur, het ontdekken en bouwen van schuilplaatsen en het maken van gereedschap en wapens zoals speren.
Homo antecessor De eerste fossielen van de Homo antecessor werden tussen 1994 en 1996 opgegraven in Atapuerca, Spanje. Deskundigen hebben hun leeftijd vastgesteld op 800.000 tot 1,2 miljoen jaar.
Homo antecessor De Homo antecessor vertoonde, in tegenstelling tot andere voorouders, overeenkomsten met de moderne mens, zoals hun gezichtsstructuur en jachtgewoonten.
Homo naledi In 2015 werden in het grottenstelsel van Rising Star in Zuid-Afrika in totaal 1.550 fossielen ontdekt. Deze fossielen behoorden toe aan een soort die bekend staat als Homo naledi. Wetenschappers schatten dat deze soort tussen 236.000 en 335.000 jaar geleden bestond.
Homo neanderthalensis De Neanderthalers, mogelijk de bekendste oude mensensoort, leefden ongeveer 24.000 tot 200.000 jaar igeleden. Ze worden vaak afgeschilderd als "holbewoners" en er wordt aangenomen dat ze de meest verwante uitgestorven voorouders van onze soort zijn.
Homo neanderthalensis Neanderthalers waren kleiner dan de moderne mens, maar ze hadden een sterk postuur. Ze woonden in Eurazië tijdens de ijstijden en pasten zich aan het koude klimaat aan. Neanderthalers blonken uit in het maken van geavanceerde wapens, gereedschappen, kleding en het bouwen van schuilplaatsen.
Homo neanderthalensis Neanderthalers waren niet alleen intelligenter dan andere soorten, maar ze hadden ook grotere hersenen. Bovendien vertoonden ze culturele uitingen zoals rituele begrafenissen, kunst en muziekinstrumenten.
Homo neanderthalensis Hoewel de Neanderthalers uitgestorven zijn, bestaat hun genetisch materiaal nog steeds bij moderne niet-Afrikaanse mensen door kruisingen.
Denisovamens In 2010 werden de overblijfselen van deze bijzondere mensensoort ontdekt in een Siberische grot. Er wordt geschat dat ze ongeveer 400.000 jaar geleden leefden.
Denisovamens Er wordt gedacht dat de Denisovamens zich van de Neanderthalers hebben afgescheiden en niet naar Europa, maar naar Azië zijn gemigreerd. Ze vermengden zich ook met de huidige mens en zijn mogelijk de laatste archaïsche mensensoort die uitstierf.
Homo longi In 1933 werd in Harbin, in het noordoosten van China, een schedel ontdekt. Deze schedel, die bekend staat als de "Drakenman", was groter dan de moderne mens en had duidelijke kenmerken zoals vierkante oogkassen en prominente wenkbrauwranden.
Homo longi In 2021 erkenden wetenschappers het uiteindelijk als een afzonderlijke mensensoort. Het fossiel wordt geschat op ongeveer 146.000 jaar oud. De classificatie van Homo longi als soort is echter nog steeds omstreden, waarbij sommige wetenschappers suggereren dat hij tot de Denisovamens behoort.
Samengevat. Chinese wetenschappers hebben een nieuw materiaal gemaakt dat lijkt op de huid van drie dieren: de kameleon, glaskikker en baardagaam. Het materiaal dat de naam Chimera meekreeg, zou naar eigen zeggen dingen onzichtbaar maken voor bijvoorbeeld radar en camera’s.
Deze uitvinding kan gebruikt worden om dingen te verbergen in een militaire omgeving, of in de natuur om dieren te bestuderen zonder ze te storen. Het is een grote stap vooruit in het maken van dingen die onzichtbaar zijn.
In het nieuws. Onderzoekers van twee universiteiten in China hebben dit bedacht. Ze gebruikten ideeën van drie verschillende dieren, schrijft de South China Morning Post.
De onderzoekers schrijven over hun uitvinding in het vakblad Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Ze gebruikten speciale materialen die licht en warmte anders weerkaatsen.
Deze nieuwe uitvinding maakt gebruik van speciale stoffen die licht en warmte op een slimme manier kunnen sturen.
Zoom in. De uitvinding lijkt op de huid van de kameleon, glaskikker en baardagaam. Deze dieren kunnen van kleur veranderen, doorzichtig worden of hun warmte regelen.
Chimera was een mythisch beest dat drie verschillende dieren combineerde – een leeuw, een geit en een slang.
De uitvinders hebben ervoor gezorgd dat het materiaal bijna niet te zien is voor camera’s die warmte meten.
Een experimentele versie van de Chimera metasurface werd ontwikkeld in een proces van vijf stappen, waaronder het gebruik van plastic en metalen gaas.
Zoom out.Volgens de onderzoekers zijn de potentiële toepassingen van de technologie enorm, van militair gebruik tot natuurbehoud.
In het leger kan Chimera helpen om spullen of mensen onzichtbaar te maken in verschillende gebieden. Zo kunnen ze niet opgemerkt worden door radars, warmtecamera’s en gewone camera’s, zeggen de wetenschappers.
Deze uitvinding kan ook in de natuur worden aangewend. Bijvoorbeeld voor het bestuderen van dieren zonder ze te storen.
The James Webb Space Telescope caught Saturn's icy moon Enceladus spraying a 'huge plume' of watery vapor far into space — and that plume may contain chemical ingredients for life.
An illustration of NASA's Cassini orbiter soaring through a giant vapor jet over the moon Enceladus
(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Scientists caught Saturn's icy moon Enceladus spraying a "huge plume" of watery vapor far into space — and that plume likely contains many of the chemical ingredients for life.
Scientists detailed the eruption — glimpsed by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in November 2022 — at a conference at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore on May 17.
"It's immense," Sara Faggi, a planetary astronomer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said at the conference, according to Nature.com. According to Faggi, a full research paper on the massive plume is pending.
This isn't the first time scientists have seen Enceladus spout water, but the new telescope's wider perspective and higher sensitivity showed that the jets of vapor shoot much farther into space than previously realized — many times deeper, in fact, than the width of Enceladus itself. (Enceladus has a diameter of about 313 miles, or 504 kilometers.)
Scientists first learned of Enceladus' watery blasts in 2005, when NASA's Cassini spacecraft caught icy particles shooting up through large lunar cracks called "tiger stripes." The blasts are so powerful that their material forms one of Saturn's rings, according to NASA.
Analysis revealed that the jets contained methane, carbon dioxide and ammonia — organic molecules containing chemical building blocks necessary for the development of life. It's even possible that some of these gases were produced by life itself, burping out methane deep beneath the surface of Enceladus, an international team of researchers posited in research published last year in The Planetary Science Journal.
Water is another piece of evidence in the case for possible life on Enceladus. Enceladus is totally encrusted in a thick layer of water ice, but measurements of the moon's rotation suggest that a vast ocean is hidden beneath that frozen crust. Scientists think the spurts of water sensed by JWST and Cassini come from hydrothermal vents in the ocean floor — a hypothesis supported by the presence of silica, a common ingredient in planetary crusts, in the vapor plumes.
NASA scientists are discussing future return missions to seek out signs of life on Enceladus. The proposed Enceladus Orbilander would orbit the moon for about six months, flying through its watery plumes and collecting samples. Then, the spacecraft would convert into a lander, descending on the surface of the icy moon. Orbilander would carry instruments to weigh and analyze molecules, as well as a DNA sequencer and a microscope. Cameras, radio sounders and lasers would remotely scan the moon's surface, The Planetary Society reported.
Another proposed mission involves sending an autonomous "snake robot" into the watery depths below Enceladus' surface. The robot, dubbed the Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor, features cameras and lidar on its head to help it navigate the unknown environment of Enceladus' ocean floor.
UFO investigator and filmmaker Jeremy Corbell released another captivating footage for UFO enthusiasts. Along with investigative journalist George Knapp, Corbell claims to obtain spectacular footage of a UFO with five shiny lights in the V-formation as in the “Phoenix Lights,” hovering over a Marine base in the California desert.
Corbell has provided a detailed description of this incident and considered it a “Mass UFO sighting” as it involves a substantial amount of diverse documentation, including videos, photos, and recorded direct eyewitness testimonies from active military personnel. But still, it carries numerous doubts. Before discussing them, let us first take a look at the sighting details shared by Corbell.
According to Corbell, the incident occurred on the evening of April 20, 2021, at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms – Camp Wilson, a significant United States military base. The sighting lasted approximately 10 minutes and was witnessed by more than 50 people. They consistently reported observing a triangular-shaped craft during the encounter. It did not make any sound and was reported to be the size in the range from a football field to that of a three-bedroom, two-story house.
Corbell explained that he received a tip about the incident, prompting him to investigate further. Within a remarkable 36 hours after the event, he managed to connect with individuals who were present at the base during the sighting. He compared the sighting to the famous Phoenix Lights incident, citing the resemblance of a perfect V-shaped row of lights.
The craft was first observed at 8:20 pm PST and after a few minutes of observation, witnesses captured it on their iPhones. At 8:29 p.m., another remarkable occurrence took place. Illumination rounds were discharged into the night sky, above the UAP craft, leaving a visible trace and providing additional evidence of the incident. Astonishingly, at 8:30 pm, witnesses reported that the UAP seemingly “blinked out” or disappeared, just moments before the illumination rounds approached the vicinity of the unidentified craft.
Skeptical of military involvement, Corbell shared the first video of the sighting on his podcast “Weaponized” and discussed it in detail with Knapp. The footage captured the astonishment and confusion of witnesses as they saw the unidentified object in the sky. While the video did not clearly show the body of the craft, the audio and eyewitness accounts confirmed its presence.
Corbell shared the second video, which featured the reactions of U.S. Marines who were present. Their comments reflected a mix of bravado and genuine awe, acknowledging that something extraordinary was unfolding before their eyes, says Knapp. They ruled out the possibility of flares and recognized the uniqueness of the situation.
Corbell Rules Out Flares As An Explanation For UFO
Corbell debunks the theory that the sighting could be attributed to flares. He points out that the lights observed in the footage were a different color, more reddish, compared to the illuminating flares typically used, which are brighter and have a different hue. Flares also descend on parachutes, while the unidentified craft remained stationary for the duration of the sighting, with only slight forward movement at one point.
Although the triangle shape of the craft is not visible in the video, eyewitnesses on the ground reported seeing it. In a stroke of luck, another detachment of Marines shot up illuminating flares in an attempt to get a better look at the craft. The subsequent footage shows the descent of these flares onto the object, providing a side-by-side comparison between the appearance of flares and the lights observed on the craft.
Interestingly, as the flares descend, the lights on the craft appear to blink out in succession. However, according to eyewitnesses, the entire craft itself disappeared, as they could see more clearly than the footage captured.
Corbell raises an intriguing question about the behavior of the craft. If it is intelligently controlled, how might it react to the presence of flares being deployed above it to illuminate the area? This line of inquiry suggests that the craft’s response, or lack thereof, could indicate an advanced level of control and intelligence behind its movements.
Interview with Two US Marines who saw UFO
Corbell conducted a groundbreaking interview with two active-duty US Marines who witnessed this remarkable UFO sighting. The conversation, which was recorded and obtained by Corbell, provides a gripping firsthand account of the event, offering a glimpse into the experiences of these Marines during the encounter.
Taking place approximately 36 hours after the initial sighting, the interview captures the raw emotions and astonishment felt by the Marines as they recall the extraordinary incident. Both Marines, one serving as a mortar man and the other as artillery, share their perspectives on the sighting, revealing intriguing details about the event.
Corbell begins the conversation by asking for specific details, such as the location and time of the sighting. The Marines state that the event occurred around 8:25 pm near 29 Palms, California, adjacent to Camp Wilson, a Marine base. The Marines mention that the sighting attracted considerable attention, with over 50 people gradually gathering to witness the mysterious lights that seemed to appear out of nowhere.
Illumination rounds(Top) were fired to show a better view of the UFO (Below). Credit: Jeremy Corbell
When asked about people’s reactions to the sighting, the Marines explain that the majority of witnesses were unable to identify the object. They note that, despite being military personnel, the sighting was unprecedented for them and left everyone puzzled.
Corbell then inquires about the evidence the Marines captured, referring to the video and photo that were shared with him. The Marines confirm that the footage was indeed recorded by one of them, emphasizing that the lights remained stationary for a solid 10 minutes. They assert that the lights were not flares, as flares typically descend rather than stay in one spot for an extended period.
In response to Corbell’s question about their belief in the presence of a craft, one Marine confidently states that he would have to believe so, referencing a photo he took showing a black triangular shape beneath the lights. He dismisses the possibility of the object being flares or illumination rounds based on his experience working with artillery. The other Marine explains that the size, color, and behavior of the lights were unlike anything they had encountered before, drawing comparisons to their own illumination rounds.
Corbell seeks further clarification, asking if the craft was hovering silently. Both Marines affirm that there was absolutely no sound, emphasizing the stationary nature of the object. When pressed about the size, one Marine compares it to a stealth bomber, although acknowledging that a stealth bomber cannot hover. He suggests that the object might have been even larger than a stealth bomber.
As the conversation progresses, the Marines recount additional intriguing details. They describe objects that emerged from the craft and circled it shortly before it went dark. They explain that these objects were the orange lights seen in the footage, which were actually the illumination rounds discharged above the craft. After the lights disappeared, helicopters began rapidly approaching the area, circling it extensively. The Marines note the presence of a convoy of over 60 trucks that also headed towards the site.
Corbell concludes the interview by asking the Marines to reflect on their experience. One Marine admits that he cannot determine what exactly they witnessed, as it was unlike anything he or his comrades had ever seen before. However, he firmly states that it was not anything recognizable from the US military and believes it was a UFO. The other Marine expresses his curiosity, emphasizing that the event remains highly documented, yet its nature and origin remain a mystery.
Another explanation by John Greenewald, Jr.
Renowned researcher John Greenewald, Jr. offers an alternative explanation for the UFO sighting over Twentynine Palms. Drawing from his experience working on the television show UFO Hunters, Greenewald suggests that the event could be linked to military training exercises rather than an unidentified aerial phenomenon.
Greenewald recalls his time on the show, where they encountered numerous cases similar to this sighting. To provide context, he highlights the Weapons and Tactics Instructor (WTI) course 2-21 taking place at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center on the same date as the UFO sighting. He presents photographs released by the Department of Defense (DoD) that depict military aircraft on runways during the training exercise.
Greenewald refers to nighttime videos released by the DoD, recorded on April 20, 2021, which showcase the significant military activity in the area. He emphasizes that the DoD’s official release clearly indicates the date and location of the videos. Greenewald acknowledges the presence of live training ranges in the Twentynine Palms area but notes that there was no mention of the UFO event coinciding with the military training exercise in the podcast transcript he examined.
Drawing from his past experiences, Greenewald suggests that many incidents occurring over military training ranges are often misinterpreted as UFOs when they are more likely related to military activities. He recalls solving cases involving Air Force One sightings, military aircraft, and drones, which were initially thought to be UFOs. Greenewald explains that the extensive work done behind the scenes often reveals the true nature of such incidents.
To provide further evidence, Greenewald refers to the additional context provided by The Black Vault, sourced from submitted material. He mentions the presence of B-Roll footage showing five aircraft flares being shot in night vision, which resembles the lights observed in the “UAP” videos. Greenewald questions the coincidence of both the flares and the UFO event occurring on the same date.
Greenewald concludes by sharing the Department of Defense’s response to the claims. A spokesperson confirms the presence of military aviation assets and the ongoing Weapons and Tactics Instructor Course in Twentynine Palms at the time. However, they state that there is no record of communication or allocation of resources to investigate a UAP sighting, and the authenticity of the report cannot be verified.
While Greenewald’s explanation points to military training exercises as a plausible cause for the UFO sighting, further investigation and analysis are necessary to reach a definitive conclusion.
Both Jeremy Corbell and John Greenewald, Jr. present their respective explanations based on their knowledge and perspectives. Corbell highlights the firsthand accounts of eyewitnesses, including active military personnel, who describe a triangular craft with specific characteristics and behavior. He emphasizes the mass UFO sighting and the subsequent air and ground response, suggesting that the event warrants further investigation.
On the other hand, Greenewald provides an alternative perspective grounded in his experience working on UFO-related projects and analyzing military activities. He draws attention to the military training exercises taking place at the same time as the sighting and presents evidence, such as photographs and videos released by the Department of Defense, suggesting that the lights observed could be related to flares and other military operations.
Ultimately, it is up to us to evaluate the evidence and draw our own conclusions. Both Corbell and Greenewald contribute to the ongoing discussion surrounding UFO sightings, offering differing viewpoints that highlight the need for continued research and analysis in order to better understand these phenomena.
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
