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...
12-12-2024
NJ State Senator Jon Bramnick calls for a state of emergency to ban all drones over NJ temporarily. UFO Sighting News.
NJ State Senator Jon Bramnick calls for a state of emergency to ban all drones over NJ temporarily. UFO Sighting News.
NJ State Senator Jon Bramnick calls for a state of emergency to ban all drones over NJ temporarily. This comes after state and federal agencies still have no answers about the mysterious car size drones/UFO's flying over the tri-state area for the last 3 weeks. UFO UAP sighting news. And I really feel that aliens are using colorful lights to allow humans to see them, so that they can gently reveal themselves, more and more. Can't wait to get some close up photos of these alien craft.
They are some of the universe's most unusual and fascinating objects.
And now a study suggests that black holes might be even stranger than we thought.
NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory has captured vast plasma jets from a supermassive black hole slamming into a mysterious object.
The researchers who made this bizarre discovery say they have no idea what this galactic speedbump might be or why it seems to act so strangely.
The hidden object lurks within the galaxy Centaurus A, an irregular swirl of gas and dust approximately 12 million light-years from Earth.
What makes Centaurus A so special is the supermassive black hole at its heart which shoots radiation and matter 40,000 light-years across the entire width of the galaxy.
Using the deepest X-ray images ever taken of the galaxy, the researchers found a V-shaped patch of bright emissions caused by the collision of these jets and some unknown object.
NASA says: 'While the researchers have ideas about what is happening, the identity of the object being blasted is a mystery because it is too distant for its details to be seen, even in images from the current most powerful telescopes.'
Scientists have made a baffling discovery as they spot an unknown object being battered by the plasma jet of a supermassive black hole (pictured)
As black holes gather matter into an accretion disk, some of this is accelerated and shot out into space in the form of a vast beam of plasma and radiation (artist's impression)
When a star more than 20 times the size of our sun dies and explodes in a supernova, the remaining matter collapses down into an extremely dense object called a black hole.
These mysterious voids exert such a strong gravitational force that nothing, not even light, can escape their pull.
As matter and light fall into the black hole like water circling a plug hole, they form an enormous swirling ring called an accretion disk.
However, not all of that matter ends up falling beyond the point of no return known as the event horizon.
Instead, some of the matter gets accelerated along the black holes' powerful magnetic field lines and shot out of the poles and incredible speeds.
While scientists know roughly why these jets form, their near-relativistic speed and intense forces make much of their true nature a mystery.
Located relatively close to Earth, Centaurus A has long been the ideal place to observe these mysterious jets in action.
In previous studies, NASA has spotted a series of 'jet knots' within Centaurus A's massive plumes.
The galaxy Centaurus A (pictured) is 12 million light-years from Earth and is notable for the supermassive black hole at its heart which generated a 40,000-light-year plume of plasma
Scientists have previously spotted 'jet knots) which show up as bright spots of X-ray radiation in images
Centaurus A: Key Facts
Size:60,000 light-years in diameter
Mass: 1,000 billion solar masses
Distance from Earth: 12 million light-years
Discovered: 1826
It is notable for its huge belt of dust and the supermassive black hole at its core which produces huge radiation jets.
Centaurus A is the fifth brightest galaxy in the sky which makes it a great target for amateur astronomers.
These are massive areas of turbulence which showed up as bright spots in the X-ray spectrum.
But, in this latest study Dr David Bogensberger, an astrophysicist from the University of Michigan, and his co-authors found a knot which didn't match any of the usual patterns.
Dr Bogensberger and his co-authors write: 'Near the counterjet axis, we detected a source with an unusual morphology. We label it as C4.'
'It appears to have two streams of matter trailing away from it at two distinct angles, forming a ‘V’-like shape behind it.'
The arms of the V are at least about 700 light-years long - 140 times the distance from Earth to the nearest neighbouring star.
The V of strong X-ray radiation traily behind C4 are unusual since all other obstacles in the jet’s path only produce elliptical blobs.
NASA suggests that the mysterious object at the heart of this cosmic wake could be a massive star, either on its own or with a companion star.
The researchers believe that particles in the black hole jet could be colliding with the strong solar winds emitted by this star.
If this were the case, the resulting turbulence would increase the density of the gas in the jet, igniting the X-ray emission seen within the Chandra images.
However, C4's unique structure raises some problems for this relatively simple explanation.
This study found an object known as C4 which had an unusual V-shaped wake stretching out behind it. This is totally different to the elliptical patterns usually produced by objects caught in a black hole's jet
Scientists think that C4's unique shape might be the product of a massive star. As particles in the jet collide with solar wind from the star, this compresses the jet and ignites the bright X-ray radiation seen in these images
If there were an object in the jet, astronomers would expect to see an X-ray trail running roughly parallel to the jet's direction like the wake around a boat moving upstream.
The bottom arm of the V does match this picture, but the top arm is harder to explain since it is at a much larger angle to the jet.
That means, whatever this object is, it may have some very unusual properties which astronomers haven't spotted anywhere else in the universe.
NASA says: 'Astronomers are trying to determine why C4 has this different post-contact appearance, but it could be related to the type of object that the jet is striking or how directly the jet is striking it.'
However, for now at least, the identity of this strange object will remain stubbornly mysterious.
Black holes are so dense and their gravitational pull is so strong that no form of radiation can escape them - not even light.
They act as intense sources of gravity which hoover up dust and gas around them. Their intense gravitational pull is thought to be what stars in galaxies orbit around.
How they are formed is still poorly understood. Astronomers believe they may form when a large cloud of gas up to 100,000 times bigger than the sun, collapses into a black hole.
Many of these black hole seeds then merge to form much larger supermassive black holes, which are found at the centre of every known massive galaxy.
Alternatively, a supermassive black hole seed could come from a giant star, about 100 times the sun's mass, that ultimately forms into a black hole after it runs out of fuel and collapses.
When these giant stars die, they also go 'supernova', a huge explosion that expels the matter from the outer layers of the star into deep space.
Black hole blasting powerful jet directly imaged for the first-time ever!
Mysterieuze drones zo groot als auto’s houden VS in de ban: “Zelfs verontruste FBI weet niet wat er gaande is”
Ze zoemen rond. Ze vliegen rond. En doen dat duidelijk in formatie. De inwoners van New York City, New Jersey en delen van Pennsylvania maken zich zorgen over mysterieuze drones die steeds weer opduiken. Duizenden meldingen zijn er al over binnengekomen. De toestellen lijken bovendien traditionele detectiemethoden te omzeilen. Wat de drones exact doen, wie ze bestuurt en waar ze vandaan komen, blijft vooralsnog een raadsel. De FBI onderzoekt de waarnemingen, maar slaagt er voorlopig niet in om de bevolking gerust te stellen.
Unknown drones flew over a US Air Force base for 17 days straight in restricted air space
Volgens de Republikeinse politica Dawn Fantasia hebben de drones een diameter tot 1,80 meter en vliegen ze soms met hun lichten uit. “Het zijn geen hobby-drones”, benadrukt ze.
“Het griezeligste is dat het niet gewoon drones zijn, maar dat ze zo groot zijn”, vertelt ooggetuige Melissa Koscielniak. “Ze lijken op een kleine auto”, beaamt Mark Taylor, burgemeester van Florham Park (New Jersey).
Gevoelige locaties
De waarnemingen hebben geleid tot groeiende onrust. Veel drones werden gesignaleerd nabij gevoelige locaties, zoals Picatinny Arsenal, een militaire onderzoeksfaciliteit, en boven het golfterrein van gekozen president Donald Trump in Bedminster in New Jersey.
Hoewel drones legaal zijn in New Jersey voor recreatief en commercieel gebruik, zijn ze gebonden aan strikte voorschriften. De meeste gespotte drones zijn groter dan de modellen die doorgaans door amateurs worden bestuurd.
Verbod
Het aantal meldingen is de afgelopen dagen toegenomen, maar de autoriteiten benadrukken dat sommige objecten mogelijk vliegtuigen zijn in plaats van drones. Ook is het mogelijk dat dezelfde drone meerdere keren is gespot. “We nemen dit bloedserieus”, zei gouverneur Phil Murphy van de staat New Jersey. Hij suste tegelijkertijd door te stellen dat er geen aanwijzingen zijn dat de drones een directe bedreiging vormen. Sommige lokale besturen pleiten voor strengere regels en een tijdelijk verbod op het gebruik van drones.
Tijdens een incident afgelopen weekend achtervolgden twaalf laagvliegende drones een gemotoriseerde reddingsboot van de kustwacht nabij Barnegat Light en Island Beach State Park. Volgens luitenant Luke Pinneo werden de toestellen niet als een onmiddellijke bedreiging gezien en verstoorden ze de operaties niet. De kustwacht assisteert de FBI en staatsinstanties bij het onderzoek.
“Uit de lucht schieten”
Twee Republikeinse congresleden, Chris Smith en Jeff Van Drew, hebben het leger opgeroepen om de drones neer te halen. Smith drong in een brief aan de Amerikaanse minister van Defensie, Lloyd Austin, aan op militaire ondersteuning om ongeautoriseerde onbemande luchtvaartsystemen te identificeren en uit te schakelen.
Iran
Een Republikeins congreslid suggereerde dat Iran hierachter zou zitten, maar dat wordt ontkend door Defensie. “Daar is niets van waar. Er ligt geen Iraans schip voor de kust van de Verenigde Staten en er is geen zogenaamd ‘moederschip’ dat drones lanceert in de richting van de Verenigde Staten”, zei Pentagon-woordvoerster Sabrina Singh woensdag aan journalisten. “Onze eerste beoordeling hier is dat dit geen drones of activiteiten zijn die afkomstig zijn van een buitenlandse entiteit of vijand”,
De FBI onderzoekt de waarnemingen en roept bewoners op om beeldmateriaal of andere informatie te delen. Toen aan de FBI werd gevraagd of de publieke veiligheid in gevaar was, slaagde Robert Wheeler, vicedirecteur van de dienst kritieke incidenten, er niet bepaald in om een geruststellende boodschap te verspreiden. “Er is niets bekend waardoor ik dat zou kunnen zeggen”, verklaarde hij. “Maar we weten het gewoon niet en dat is het verontrustende.”
Het Witte Huis zei dat president Biden op de hoogte is van het mysterie, maar ook daar hebben ze geen antwoorden.
Mystery drones emerging from the ocean and they are not from USA or any other country
Mystery drones emerging from the ocean and they are not from USA or any other country
The ongoing mystery and debate surrounding UFO and drone sightings across the U.S. continue to captivate public attention. The lack of transparency and definitive answers from government agencies combined with the apparent absence of military action against these drones, has fueled speculation about possible cover-ups or incompetence.
Local, county, and state governments seem to have no knowledge of who is operating these drones, where they originate, or their purpose. Despite this, officials confidently assert that "there is no credible threat." This raises the question: how can they be so certain? The reality suggests they cannot.
Recently, the Pentagon issued a statement following claims by a New Jersey congressman that Iran had deployed a "mothership" off the U.S. East Coast, launching drones. The Pentagon denied any military origin for the drones and ruled out links to known foreign entities, but questions persist about whether critical information is being withheld.
If these drones are not linked to Iran, the U.S., Russia, China, or any other nation, some experts propose they may be part of clandestine "deep state" programs. These programs could involve advanced aerospace technologies being tested by private companies under classified initiatives.
Witness accounts, including those from a New Jersey sheriff and Coast Guard officials, suggest the drones exhibit highly unusual behaviors. These include emerging from the ocean and performing movements like abrupt 90-degree turns—characteristics that could imply the use of advanced propulsion systems not publicly known.
Another theory posits that the drones may not be physical objects at all but rather holographic projections, akin to the controversial "Project Blue Beam" concept. If true, this would explain why attempts to intercept them could fail—they might not physically exist.
The sheer number, endurance, and sophistication of these drones hint at a coordinated operation. Some theorists believe this might be part of a psychological operation designed to distract from pressing political, economic, or social issues. The timing of such events often appears suspiciously aligned with periods of public, economic unrest or uncertainty.
In the event that the "deep state" is orchestrating these phenomena, some fear it could be a prelude to a false flag operation, with motives and consequences yet to be revealed.
The situation remains shrouded in speculation, leaving the public to grapple with more questions than answers.
Amazing Encounters with Strange, Mysterious, and Mystical Lost Tribe
Brent Swancer
History holds many oddities that we may never fully understand, either through incomplete documentation, disinterest at the time, or simply a big question mark that hangs over all. Among these are mysterious lost tribes of people that have been encountered and confronted in all corners of the globe, often vanishing before we really understand them or only known from sparse accounts, and leaving us perplexed at just who they were or where their origins lie. Here we will look at mysterious lost tribes of ape-men, blue-eyed Indians, mystical tribes with telepathic powers, and more.
The remote jungles of South America have long been the source of tales of strange creatures and legends, and among these are numerous sightings of a tribe of large, ape-like beings living in the wilderness. The descriptions of these creatures often vary, with sizes ranging from a diminutive 3 feet tall all the way up to hulking, 12-foot-tall hairy giants, and are often claimed by the natives of the region and witnesses to live in villages of their own, to use tools and primitive bows and arrows, and to have a language of grunts and whistles. Although regional names may vary, they are now mostly filed under the blanket name Maricoxi, and they are for the most part more or less a complete enigma.
Perhaps one of the most well-documented and harrowing encounters with these mysterious creatures was detailed by the famed British explorer Colonel Percival H. Fawcett, more often called Percy Fawcett, who vanished into the jungle during an ill-fated expedition to find a mysterious lost city he called simply Z. Fawcett was known to write extensive journals of his travels, many of which would later be compiled into books by his son Brian Fawcett. In one of these books, called Lost Trails, Lost Cities, there is to be found within its pages a rather curious and spectacular tale of encountering the Maricoxi.
Percy Fawcett
The encounter supposedly happened in 1914, as Fawcett was on an expedition to map out the uncharted southwestern region of an area called Matto Grosso. From Bolivia they penetrated the dark jungle up the Guapore River, and already they had become well acquainted by local tribes with the bizarre stories of hairy man-beasts said to dwell out there in that sea of trees, and although it seemed rather fantastical it was enough to keep them wary of their surroundings and what they would find out there on their journey. Ivan Sanderson wrote of the stories Fawcett heard in his 1967 book Things, in which he writes:
“These creatures were apparently called Maricoxis by the Maxubis. They dwelt to their northeast. Due east there were said to be another group of short, black people, covered with hair, who were truly cannibalistic and hunted humans for food, cooking the bodies over a fire on a bamboo spit and tearing off the meat. These the Maxubis regarded as merely loathsome and lowly people. On a later trip, Colonel Fawcett was told of an "ape-people" who lived in holes in the ground, were also covered with dark hair, and were nocturnal, so that they were known in surrounding areas as the Morcegos or Bat-People. These types are called Cabelludos or "Hairy People" by the Spanish-speaking, and Tatus, or armadillos, by several Amerindian groups because they live in holes like those animals. Fawcett also records forest Amerinds as telling him that the Morcegos have an incredibly well-developed sense of smell which prompts even these acute hunters to suggest that they have some "sixth sense.”"
They nevertheless bravely ventured out along the river, coming across some oddities along the way. The first interesting discovery was a previously unknown Amerindian tribe, who identified themselves as the Maxubis and displayed some curious traits, such as their religion of worshiping the Sun and demonstrating an inexplicable knowledge of the planets of the solar system, which they could draw out with rather shocking accuracy. This would have been interesting to have studied further, but Fawcett and company were not there to do anthropological work, and after staying with the tribe for a few days they headed back out into the mist-shrouded jungle once more, leaving these fascinating people behind to the mist of history and crossing over into a region that was completely unseen by outsiders and ws so remote and alien it may as well have been the surface of some alien planet.
After several days of dealing with the numerous perils of this untamed land, the expedition found themselves faced with a mysterious trail out there in the middle of nowhere, which they presumed to be one used by the Natives of the region. As they stood there deciding whether to follow the trail or not and which way to go, Fawcett writes that they saw two figures moving about 100 yards away, apparently chattering away in some unknown language and carrying bows and arrows. Although they were at first presumed to be from a local tribe, closer inspection showed them to be decidedly odder, and Fawcett described them:
“We could not see them clearly for the shadows dappling their bodies, but it seemed to me they were large, hairy men, with exceptionally long arms, and with foreheads sloping back from pronounced eye ridges, men of a very primitive kind, in fact, and stark naked. Suddenly they turned and made off into the undergrowth, and we, knowing it was useless to follow, started up the north leg of the trail.”
It seems quite obvious by this point that Fawcett did not regard what he had glimpsed as completely human beings. This was perhaps all odd enough as it was, but it got even more bizarre that evening at dusk when the forest suddenly came alive with the sound of what seemed to be braying horns from out in the distant dark. The expedition members were immediately on alert, as they instinctively knew that this was an aggressive sound issued forth with the promise of threat. Fawcett would write of these horns and what followed:
“In the subdued light of evening, beneath the high vault of branches in this forest untrodden by civilized man, the sound was as eerie as the opening notes of some fantastic opera. We knew the savages made it, and that those savages were now on our trail. Soon we could hear shouts and jabbering to the accompaniment of the rough horn calls--a barbarous, merciless din, in marked contrast to the stealth of the ordinary savage.
Darkness, still distant above the treetops, was settling rapidly down here in the depths of the wood, so we looked about us for a camping site which offered some measure of safety from attack, and finally took refuge in a tacuara thicket. Here the naked savages would not dare to follow because of the wicked, inch-long thorns. As we slung our hammocks inside the natural stockade we could hear the savages jabbering excitedly all around, but not daring to enter. Then, as the last light went, they left us, and we heard no more of them.”
It is an eerie image to be sure, this solitary camp of bedraggled explorers terrified by the sight of hairy men and now harassed by these mysterious horns in the night, punctuated by the chattering of some rough, alien language, and it was still not over for them. The next morning the team warily checked their surroundings and could find no sign of any of the “savages” having intruded into the vicinity. They continued along one of the well-delineated trails they were finding and camped once again that evening without incident. The next morning, they struck out from the camp and within just about a mile stumbled across what seemed to have been the actual village of the strange tribe, populated by creatures who were obviously not exactly human. Fawcett rather spectacularly describes what happened:
“In the morning we went on, and within a quarter of a mile came to a sort of palm-leaf sentry-box, then another. Then all of a sudden we reached open forest. The undergrowth fell away, disclosing between the tree boles a village of primitive shelters, where squatted some of the most villainous savages I have ever seen. Some were engaged in making arrows, others just idled--great apelike brutes who looked as if they had scarcely evolved beyond the level of beasts.
I whistled, and an enormous creature, hairy as a dog, leapt to his feet in the nearest shelter, fitted an arrow to his bow in a flash, and came up dancing from one leg to the other till he was only four yards away. Emitting grunts that sounded like 'Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!' he remained there dancing, and suddenly the whole forest around us was alive with these hideous ape-men, all grunting 'Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!' and dancing from leg to leg in the same way as they strung arrows to their bows. It looked like a very delicate situation for us, and I wondered if it was the end. I made friendly overtures in Maxubi, but they paid no attention. It was as though human speech were beyond their powers of comprehension.
The creature in front of me ceased his dance, stood for a moment perfectly still, and then drew his bowstring back till it was level with his ear, at the same time raising the barbed point of the six-foot arrow to the height of my chest. I looked straight into the pig-like eyes half hidden under the overhanging brows, and knew that he was not going to loose that arrow yet. As deliberately as he had raised it, he now lowered the bow, and commenced once more the slow dance, and the 'Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!’"
This brutish ape-man allegedly continued to do this several more times, aiming the bow only to continue with his odd, disjointed dance and then aim it again. However, Fawcett seemed to know that at any point that arrow could unleash, and his hand was firmly kept upon the butt of his pistol as he took in the whole outlandish scene. At some point Fawcett says he began to seriously fear for his life and decided to try scaring it off with his sidearm, shooting off a round that pinged the earth by the beast’s feet and sent a thunderous boom echoing through the jungle. He says of this sequence of events:
“I drew out a Mauser pistol I had on my hip. It was a big, clumsy thing, of a caliber unsuitable to forest use, but I had brought it because by clipping the wooden holster to the pistol-butt it became a carbine, and was lighter to carry than a true rifle. It used .38 black powder shells, which made a din out of all proportion to their size. I never raised it; I just pulled the trigger and banged it off into the ground at the ape-man's feet.
The effect was instantaneous. A look of complete amazement came into the hideous face, and the little eyes opened wide. He dropped his bow and arrow and sprang away as quickly as a cat to vanish behind a tree. Then the arrows began to fly. We shot off a few rounds into the branches, hoping the noise would scare the savages into a more receptive frame of mind, but they seemed in no way disposed to accept us, and before anyone was hurt we gave it up as hopeless and retreated down the trail till the camp was out of sight. We were not followed, but the clamor in the village continued for a long time as we struck off northwards, and we fancied we still heard the 'Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!' of the enraged braves.”
This account may seem to be completely sensational to the point that it might be easy for the more skeptical-minded to dismiss it out of hand, but there are a few reasons why it has warrant and deserves consideration, the first being that this was likely not some fictional story Fawcett was telling. It was part of his very serious and typically meticulous notes on his expedition and sitting right there amongst more mundane observations of the wildlife and region’s various peoples. He was a consummate professional and member of the Royal Geographical Society, as well as a very respected, experienced explorer and surveyor, and there is no rational reason at all for why he should want to concoct such a story to drop in the middle of his otherwise meticulous journal. Why would he do that and risk his reputation? To what ends? It also means he would not likely have made misidentifications of local tribes or wildlife, as he was as familiar with these jungles as one could possibly be in the era.
Fawcett has also been accused of having perhaps exaggerated his dealings with the Natives and in this case, made them out to be hairy brutes out of some racist agenda, but if that were the case then why are there other records of his dealings with locals that are completely accurate in their depiction of their appearances and behavior? It is somewhat true that Fawcett was known to have some strong opinions on the more primitive tribes, but he seems to have never let it compromise the matter-of-fact way in which he recorded the people themselves. Sanderson has much to say about this aspect of the journal entries, writing:
“He (Fawcett) was not an ethnologist, anthropologist, or archaeologist but it was with these disciplines that he clashed, and it was towards the protagonists of the first that he most often expressed himself as feeling most bitter. In his extensive travels through hitherto unexplored territories he discovered many groups of people for the first time, lived with them, often acquired not a little of their language, recorded what of their customs he could, and attempted some classification of their origins. Much of all of this conflicted with established beliefs among ethnologists, and Fawcett's historical theories were at complete variance with what was then, and still is, accepted. Yet, while those theories were strongly criticized, the veracity of the facts he collected were never questioned. It was his assessment of them that was considered invalid.
This puts his account of the hairy Maricoxis in an entirely different light, quite apart from the fact that his word was never doubted, that he had two reliable witnesses, and that what he saw was both before and afterwards confirmed by others, in that reports relayed to him by several people described exactly what he had seen without the relaters knowing anything of what he did see. We are therefore compelled to accept this report in toto; and this means simply that, in the year 1914, there were living to the northeast of the Parecis Range in the Matto Grosso, what were apparently tribal groups of fully-haired hominids of grossly primitive aspect, and in no possible way descended from or related to the Amerindian aborigines of the Americas.”
While Sanderson may seem perhaps too quick to buy the whole tale, it certainly is an account that stands out among Fawcett’s writings, and which ultimately leaves more questions than answers. What did Fawcett and his fellow expedition members encounter out there in that jungle? Were these indeed the legendary Maricoxi or something else? It is truly unfortunate that considering that Fawcett was not particularly interested in following up on it, and seems to have considered it mostly an obstacle and oddity, he never did make any effort to find out what they were, and the creatures of his account just sort of fade into the background to remain perplexing enigmas. Did this tribe of hairy ape-men really exist the way Fawcett described them, and if so what were they and how did they fit into the Maricoxi legend? The answer may forever remain hidden out there in that forbidden jungle lair.
Besides tribes of man-like apes, one persistent legend that has been around since 16th-century Spanish missionaries came to the Amazon region is that of tribes of tall, fair-skinned, blonde, blue-eyed, decidedly Caucasian-looking natives living out in the most remote and inaccessible areas of the jungle. One of the earlier accounts of encountering these mysterious people was made by the Spanish Dominican missionary Gaspar de Carvajal, who wrote in 1542 of coming across a group of very tall, very white, European-looking tribal women who wore their long, light hair braided and wound about their heads. The account was included in his book Account of the Recent Discovery of the Famous Grand River.
Supposed photo of "white natives" taken in the Amazon
Another popular account of these white Amazonians comes from the American explorer Alexander Hamilton Rice, Jr., who journeyed into the Amazon for a 1924-1925 expedition. Upon returning from the perilous expedition, Rice told of one of the expedition members, a Lieutenant Hinton, who had spied a tribe of white Indians while making a flight over the headwaters of the Parima River. Intrigued, Rice organized a trip by canoe up the river in order to try and find out where the mysterious white natives came from. Eventually, they located a hut that was believed to belong to the white Indians, and they then heard a series of shrieking yells which scared some of the expedition members off and put the remaining group on edge, reaching for their weapons. It was then that two of the white natives came out of the forest, apparently in peace.
These white-skinned natives were described as having pigment painted across their faces that obscured their features, but they were said to be “undeniably white.” The two were said to look undersized and undernourished, wore no clothing, and carried with them bows with poison-tipped arrows. They spoke in a unique language not known to be spoken by any other tribe, which made communication difficult. When the expedition members offered beads and handkerchiefs as gifts, the two tribesmen reportedly called out into the jungle, which brought more of the fair-skinned natives out of hiding.
These odd, white tribespeople were offered food, but it was declined, and it seemed that they preferred to eat plantains which had curiously been garnished with cocaine, although it was unclear where they had acquired the drug. Throughout the encounter, the strange tribe showed no particular interest in or awe of the Westerners’ clothes, equipment, guns, or hydroplane. The expedition made further efforts to try and communicate with the tribe, but the language barrier made it difficult, and after a while the white Indians melted away back into the forest, moving “between the trees like jaguars without making a sound or causing a rustle of the leaves.”
The 1920s were indeed a period of many sightings of these white-skinned natives, and feature heavily in accounts from the explorer Percy Fawcett, who was convinced that these people were denizens of a mystical lost city deep in the jungle, which he called simply “Z.” So convinced was he that this mystical city and its people existed that they would inevitably lead him to obsession and lure him to his final, ill-fated expedition in search of the city of Z in 1925. Fawcett would journey out into uncharted jungle in search of his fabled city and seemingly step off the face of the earth. No trace of him or his expedition was ever found.
Accounts and sightings of the white natives continued sporadically into the 1940s, and in 1945 the British Journalist Harold T. Wilkins took it upon himself to compile a variety of reports stretching back to the 16th century in his book Mysteries of Ancient South America. Even in modern times, there have been accounts of coming across these enigmatic people. In 1977 one joint British/ Brazilian expedition reported being surrounded by a tribe of uncommonly tall, blonde natives with blue eyes and strikingly white pigmentation, some of who had thick beards and all of who were naked. The strange white tribesmen allegedly spoke a dialect that no expert had ever heard before. These people were called the Acurinis and were again encountered by another expedition to the same region in 1979. In this case, the mysterious tribesmen were seen only briefly before vanishing into the underbrush.
Theories abound over what could be behind these accounts. One is that they are the descendants of shipwrecked sailors, Vikings, lost explorers, or even missionaries or other Westerners who willingly left civilization behind to live amongst the natives, where they invariably intermingled. Indeed there are theories that Percy Fawcett himself did this and that the descendants of both him and his expedition members may be behind some of these encounters with fair-skinned natives. In recent years there has been one tribe called the Aché, who are known for having light skin, hair, eye color, and thick beards, and although it has been shown that they show no genetic evidence of having ever mixed with Europeans, their unique appearance could make it possible that they might be the source of at least some of the accounts. It is unlikely we will ever know for sure the precise origins of these stories.
One very odd account that comes from the Amazon wilds is that of an intrepid explorer who came here looking for mysteries and would soon get more than he bargained for, embarking on a quest that would include lost, uncontacted tribes and strange powers of the mind. Loren McIntyre was a seasoned explorer, photojournalist, and writer for such esteemed publications as National Geographic, Time, Life, Smithsonian, GEO, Audubon, and South American Explorer, and was in many ways a sort of real-life Indiana Jones figure, spending much of his life doggedly exploring the forbidding, uncharted, and most impenetrable reaches of the Amazon rainforest of South America. Indeed, it was he who would be the first one to discover the source of the mighty Amazon River, when he made an expedition in search of it in 1971. He would make history when he found that the largest, longest, and most powerful river in the world began with a runoff of snow at a mountain in the Andes called Mismi, some 6,400 kilometers from the Atlantic Ocean, which trickled down to pond now called Laguna McIntyre, which in turn emptied into a brook named Carhuasanta, in Peru, after which it began its inexorable growth and meandering journey through some of the most remote wilds on earth. Yet, although this is McIntyre’s most famous discovery it certainly wasn’t his only one, and he would have a very mysterious encounter out in those jungles that he would keep to himself for years.
In 1969, McIntyre embarked on an excursion into the unexplored depths of the Amazon jungle of Brazil. His target was the little-known Mayoruna tribe, also called the Matsés, who were so elusive that they had never been successfully contacted by outsiders and were known as “The Cat People,” due to the arrays of imposing spikes that they wore implanted into their faces. Next to nothing was known about this enigmatic tribe, and they were only ever fleetingly glimpsed. They were like ghosts, and McIntyre had little to go on when he was dumped off on the shores of the Amazon River in a place called the Javari valley, on the border between Brazil and Peru, and left to continue on his own, penetrating dense jungle that no outsider had ever set eyes on in an attempt to find these mysterious people. Little did he know that it would be they who found him.
As the brave, seasoned explorer made his way through a mosquito-infested jungle he got perhaps too focused on finding the lost tribe, and soon realized that he was hopelessly lost. His journey then turned into aimlessly wandering through the perilous wilderness, and it became obvious that he was not going to be in time for his scheduled pick-up at the point where he had been dropped off. He began to resign himself to the fact that he just might end up another mysterious lost explorer, like his childhood idol Percy Fawcett before him, a fellow explorer who had mysteriously vanished while looking for his mythical city “Z.” Making this trek more ominous was when at some point McIntyre would stumble across a clearing littered with the bodies of what appeared to be four lumberjacks, half devoured by ants and with arrows sticking out from their silent corpses.
This grim discovery had the explorer watching the trees carefully as he aimlessly wandered around half expecting death to come for him at any moment through the shadows, and more sure than ever that he would not see civilization again. It was as he was in this fog of panic and fear that some figures crept out of the forest before him, spikes embedded into their faces, necklaces made of bones, possibly human, around their necks, and looking upon him with a mixture of apprehension and surprise, but not aggressiveness. These were the Mayoruna, and this was the closest any outsider had ever gotten to them. At least any who were still alive.
The frightened explorer immediately and very slowly pulled out some gifts that he had brought in the event that he actually made contact. From his bag, he produced some cloth and mirrors, which he dropped before the tribesmen as they looked on with inscrutable expressions on their pierced faces. They stepped closer to accept the gifts and then seemed to beckon for him to follow them as they began to melt back into the forest. The weary McIntyre stumbled after them, barely able to keep up with their nimble navigation of the jungle, and so would begin the next chapter of his strange adventure.
They arrived at what seemed to be a makeshift camp full of other members of the tribe, and they seemed to show a strange mixture of curiosity and aggression toward him. Upon examining his tennis shoes they went about burning them to ashes, and his watch they found fascinating, but they destroyed that too. Indeed, most of his possessions would be either stolen from him or destroyed, and even his camera, which they oddly showed no interest in, was broken when a monkey descended from the trees to take it from him. Although there was no outright aggression against him, there were some grim reminders that he was very much in danger. He would claim that they possessed trinkets made of human bone and that they drank out of hollowed-out skulls. They were also very well armed and never far from their bows, and one tribesman with red face paint, who he called “Red Cheeks,” took to menacing him and scowling at him.
McIntyre would end up staying with this lost tribe for two months, and during this time made many observations. He noticed that they were constantly on the move, perpetually moving to a new camp, sometimes suddenly and without warning, and they clearly had a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They also seemed to have no concept of individual possessions, freely sharing everything with each other and taking or using whatever they liked without repercussions. Even odder still, he noticed that these people often moved quite bizarrely in sync, knowing what the others would do or acting in precise tandem without speaking to each other. For some time, he pondered this anomaly, but he would soon learn that the explanation was far odder than anything that he had ever guessed at.
One day he was approached by the one he took to be the chief of the tribe, an ancient-looking, sinewy and grizzled tree trunk of a man, covered in warty growths that would earn him McIntyre’s nickname “Barnacle.” When the chief approached he spoke to McIntyre, and the explorer found that bizarrely, after weeks of being unable to understand anything any of them had said, he clearly comprehended what Barnacle had to say. This utterly perplexed him, but he soon realized that this chief was not moving his mouth when he spoke, and that he was talking directly into his mind, using a sort of telepathy that McIntyre would later call “beaming,” and which Barnacle called “the other language.”
Barnacle explained that the tribe existed as a sort of hive mind consciousness and that their thoughts were all linked to each other, although only the tribal elders were proficient at focusing this telepathic power and truly using it to its full potential. Here he learned that there was no real “self” as Westerners would think of it and that to them the concept of an individual “self” made little sense. The chief also telepathically explained that they were under constant threat from loggers and other outsiders and that the reason the tribe moved so often was that they were on a spiritual journey to what he called “The Beginning,” or the literal beginning of time, where they hoped to be beyond the reach of the intruding outside world. Indeed, the tribe seemed to have a very strange grasp of how time worked that was rather alien to anything the explorer was familiar with. A 1991 article in The Los Angeles Times about McIntyre’s bizarre experience explains the tribe’s philosophy on time as follows:
“The main feature of time, by western definition, is its passage. But for the Mayoruna, time is at once mobile and static. It moved with man, stopped with him, advanced and retreated with him. It is not the implacable judge, condemning man to a tragically brief life. Time is a shelter, an escape into safety and regeneration, a repository whose chief function is not piling up the past, intact yet dead, but rather keeping it alive and available. And, in the face of violent encroachment on their land by white settlers, that past assisted them with an alternative to a menacing present.”
The chief invited McIntyre to come along with them on their journey to “The Beginning,” and for the next few weeks he followed them on their mystical quest and engaged in their rituals, often taking psychoactive jungle concoctions that warped his perceptions. He found that if he concentrated he could pick up on a sort of static fuzz that contained the interlinked thoughts of all of the tribe members, through processes he could never hope to fathom. However, he knew at some point he would have to part ways with them and try to leave this land of jungle, telepathy, and time travel behind him to get back to the civilization that was no doubt convinced he had vanished. The only problem was that he had no idea where he was, and on top of this, although he had been invited and was not physically threatened by the Mayoruna in any way, he had no illusions that he was anything other than their prisoner and wondered what they would do if he tried to flee. However, in the end, the decision was made for him, a flood swept through during a torrential rain, and McIntyre was whisked away as he clung to a balsa raft, emptied into the river and incredibly found the next day by a pilot flying over.
Upon getting back to civilization, McIntyre would keep what had happened to him a secret for years, and it is quite likely that the whole fantastical tale would have died with him in 2003 if it hadn’t been for a Romanian-American writer, director and movie producer, by the name of Petru Popescu. In 1987 Popescu met McIntyre by chance while on a riverboat trip up the Amazon River. The two men hit it off, and for some reason McIntyre confided to him about what had happened all of those years ago with the mysterious Mayoruna tribe. It was all rather amazing, and when Popescu asked why he had never told anyone about it, McIntyre said that he didn’t think anyone would ever believe him, and he had been worried about maintaining his reputation as a respected explorer, writer, and photographer. He would say of this:
“I’m pretty reluctant to voice very much about the beaming experience because I didn’t want my friends to think I’d gone around the bend. ‘What is this? The guy’s hallucinating?’”
Popescu would finally manage to convince McIntyre to let him write a book on his adventures, and in 1991 released The Encounter: Amazon Beaming. The explorer would claim that in his dealings with dozens of other tribes in the same region he had never before or since experienced anything like he did during his time with the Mayoruna, and he did not know what became of them. We are left to wonder just how much of this account is true, and if it is just what was going on with these elusive people of the jungle. The tribe itself has sort of disappeared, they have never been formally studied, and since McIntyre passed away in 2003, we are left only with Popescu’s book as a window into this strange tribe and their world and ways. One wonders if they are still out there, or if they managed to make that journey to “The Beginning,” finally at peace and forevermore out of our reach.
The Amazon is not the only place for such stories, and one tale of a mysterious lost race comes to us from the Appalachian Mountains of the United States, it tells of a strange race of albino, sun-fearing pygmies who supposedly roamed this land long before even the Natives arrived. In the untamed wildernesses along the Southern Appalachian Mountains of the United States, the Native Cherokee people have long told of a strange race of beings they call “The Moon-Eyed People.” This mysterious tribe was supposedly smaller than average humans, almost dwarfish in nature, very pale skinned, like pure white alabaster, with shocking white hair, generous beards and body hair, and inhumanly large blue eyes, sensitive to light to the point that they were said to be unable to see in the daytime, hence their name. These Moon-Eyed people were purportedly completely nocturnal, hiding in dank caves and underground caverns during the day only to come out at night when the sun had retreated, and indeed sunlight was said to be enough to kill them if they ever got caught out in the open during daylight hours.
These strange, diminutive nocturnal denizens of the land were said to have been here long before the first Native peoples had settled the area, and according to most legends, they were eventually expelled by local Natives, although what form this expulsion takes varies from tradition to tradition. In some tales, it was the Creek people from the south who cast them out, whereas in others it was the Cherokees themselves who waged a relentless campaign and full-out war against these pale-skinned creatures to drive them to other lands. The American botanist, naturalist, and physician, Benjamin Smith Barton, wrote of these people and their downfall back in 1797, in his book New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America, thus:
“The Cheerake tell us, that when they first arrived in the country which they inhabit, they found it possessed by certain 'moon-eyed-people,' who could not see in the day-time. These wretches they expelled.”
Whatever happened to this enigmatic race, their legacy has supposedly remained behind in the ancient rock structures and mysterious pre-Columbian mounds and ruins that dot the landscape along the Appalachians from North Carolina all the way down through Georgia and Alabama, all said to have been erected by the Moon-Eyed People. Perhaps the most famous of these is an 850-foot-long stone wall dated to 400 - 500 C.E., which meanders through Fort Mountain State Park, just over the North Carolina border in Georgia, and is said to be a vestige of the bloody war between the mysterious Moon-Eyed People and the native Cherokee. There are countless other crude rock structures, walls, mounds and forts scattered throughout the Appalachians, as well as anomalous carvings, figurines, and a soapstone carving of conjoined figures now on display at the Cherokee County Historical Museum, said to be of these strange people, and no one really knows who made any of them except for the Cherokee themselves, who say it was the work of the Moon-Eyed People.
Whoever built such structures has long remained a mystery, and when Europeans first came to the region the Natives, who were not known for making such fort-like structures themselves, claimed that they had always been there, saying that they were constructions of the Moon-Eyed People. Interestingly, while Cherokee folklore has many tales of supernatural beings and various spirits, the Moon-Eyed People are never spoken of in such a manner, rather being described matter-of-factly as physically another race inhabiting the same lands.
Of course, with such an oddity as a cryptic tribe of bizarre dwarf subterranean albino people, almost like vampires in their intolerance for sunlight, and who predated the native peoples and constructed their mysterious mounds and forts, there is bound to be theorizing as to who or what they may have been. One of the most popular ideas is that they are evidence of Native contact with European explorers who had made it to the New World long before history says they did, possibly connected to the legend of the “Welsh Speaking Indians.”
The story of white-skinned, Welsh-speaking Indians in the New World originates with a 16th-century manuscript published by Welsh antiquarian Humphrey Llwyd, in which he writes of Welsh settlers coming to these shores in the 12th century, in particular a Prince Madoc, who along with his followers was said to have emigrated to America from Wales in about 1170, landing somewhere in the vicinity of Mobile Bay, Alabama. Madoc would supposedly end up shipping over hundreds of his followers to the New World, where they would disappear into the wilderness, never to return. In the following centuries, there were many stories of fair-skinned, blue-eyed natives who spoke a form of Welsh from the area, and these have been speculated to have been the descendants of these settlers.
Another idea put forth by Benjamin Smith Barton is that they were out-of-place descendants of members of the Guna people of Panama, who have such an uncommonly high rate of albinism that they were once referred to as the “White Indians,” and who were also reportedly able to see better at night. Another theory is that, rather than go to war, the Natives of the land actually integrated with the Moon-Eyed People and absorbed them. Still other more far-out theories are that these were some other species of human, a new race, or even ancient astronauts from another world.
It is still unclear who or what the Moon-Eyed people may have been, and they remain a distinctly enigmatic lost civilization if they ever even existed at all. Who were these albino, sun-fearing people? Were they some lost race, descendants of pre-Columbian explorers, or even a new species or alien interlopers? Or were these just a figment of folklore and myth? The answers to such questions remain obscure, but the tales of the Moon-Eyed People have persisted for over a millennium, and the idea that such a race of lost humanoids has been lost to history captures the imagination.
Another such “blue-eyed tribe” appeared to explorers as something quite European in nature, although their ways and beginnings have always been cloaked in shadows. Known mostly from historical accounts, their origins remain murky, their lineage uncertain, and they are a historical curiosity we may never fully understand. During the era of early European contact, the native peoples of North America held many curiosities for explorers and settlers coming to this new, wild land. These tribes were numerous and displayed rich variety between different cultures, as well as myriad languages, customs, and traditions that inspired awe, wonder, curiosity, bafflement, and even fear in the European adventurers who bravely delved into this uncharted new world and tried to tame it. Yet as fascinating as these new peoples were, perhaps the most interesting was an alleged tribe of natives who were said to look decidedly Caucasian in nature.
The first reports of what would come to be known as the Mandan tribe began to trickle out from French explorers in the region of the Missouri River in present-day North and South Dakota in the early 1700s. These natives were said to have rather fair skin and to have red or blonde hair and blue or grey eyes, and indeed especially the women were purportedly so Nordic in appearance that if it were not for their clothing they were said to be nearly indistinguishable from whites. In 1738, the French Canadian trader Sieur de la Verendrye made the first official outside contact with the Mandan and described them as living in 9 villages at a tributary of the Missouri River called the Heart River, and noted that they also exhibited customs that were decidedly more European than the neighboring tribes.
By 1784 the word had gotten out on this mysterious tribe of blue-eyed Indians, and they were featured in the media, with the August 24, 1784 edition of the Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser proclaiming that a new tribe of white people had been discovered and that they were “acquainted with the principles of the Christian religion" and "extremely courteous and civilized.” Perhaps one of the more famous of the explorers to come across the Mandan was none other than Lewis and Clark, who visited the tribe in 1804 and described them as “half-white,” as well as peaceful, civilized, courteous, and polite. They also noted that the tribe’s numbers had dwindled significantly due to the frequent smallpox epidemics that terrorized them, as well as attacks against them by neighboring tribes, namely the Assiniboine, Lakota, Arikara and the Sioux.
Of course, this all led to intense speculation as to what the origins were of this bizarre tribe, and one of the earliest ideas put forward was that they were the descendants of pre-Columbian explorers to the New World. For instance, there were many legends from various regions of the present-day United States of Welsh-speaking natives, perhaps descended from Welsh settlers coming to these shores in the 12th century, in particular a Prince Madoc, who along with his followers was said to have emigrated to America from Wales in about 1170. One Welsh explorer by the name of John Evans became so convinced that this was the case with the Mandan that he launched an expedition up the Missouri River in 1796 to search for them and prove that their language was derived from Welsh and contained Welsh vocabulary. Evans would trek up the river in the winter of 1796 and he could find no evidence whatsoever of the Welsh influence he had been so sure he would find, forcing him to concede that this was not where the Mandan origins lay. Indeed, he became extremely skeptical that there were any of these legendary “Welsh Indians” at all, saying in a letter to Dr. Samuel Jones:
“Thus having explored and charted the Missurie for 1,800 miles and by my Communications with the Indians this side of the Pacific Ocean from 35 to 49 degrees of Latitude, I am able to inform you that there is no such People as the Welsh Indians.”
Mandan tribe members
Another explorer who believed that the Mandan had European roots, perhaps even Welsh, was the frontiersman and pictorial historian George Catlin, who spent several months with the tribe in North Dakota, living amongst and drawing and painting them in 1832. One of the things that first struck him about these mysterious people was just how European they looked, describing that many of them were nearly white and had light hair and blue eyes, and he also noticed that they had more advanced techniques for manufacturing goods and dwellings, customs, traditions, town layouts, and language vastly different from neighboring tribes. Caitlin would say of the Mandan:
“They are a very interesting and pleasing people in their personal appearance and manners, differing in many respects, both in looks and customs, from all the other tribes I have seen. So forcibly have I been struck with the peculiar ease and elegance of these people, together with their diversity of complexions, the various colours of their hair and eyes; the singularity of their language, and their peculiar and unaccountable customs, that I am fully convinced that they have sprung from some other origin than that of the other North American Tribes, or that they are an amalgam of natives with some civilized race.”
Even some of the legends of the Mandan people themselves expressly mentioned that they had been descended from a strange white man who had appeared to them aboard a canoe in ancient times after an enormous flood had wiped out everything in sight. They claimed that this stranger had taught them about medicine and had influenced their religion, which oddly featured many of the same beats as Christianity, such as a great flood, a virgin birth, and a child born who could work magical miracles, among others. This was noticed by other later expeditions as well, such as an 1833-34 expedition led by German naturalist A.P. Maximilian, who felt that the similarities between Christianity and the Mandan religion were too close to be mere coincidence. Caitlin would write of this:
“It would seem that these people must have had some proximity to some part of the civilized world; or that missionaries or others have been formerly among them, inculcating the Christian religion and the Mosaic account of the Flood.”
Another idea on the Mandan origins is that they came from pre-Columbian visitations by Viking explorers. The first official European to ever officially make contact with the Mandan tribe, Sieur de la Verendrye, claimed that at the time he had found a strange runestone with Nordic inscriptions on a riverside near the village. The stone was allegedly sent to France to be studied but it is unclear what happened to the “Verendrye Runestone” after that, and indeed it is uncertain if it ever really existed at all. Unless the stone ever turns up again it remains just as mysterious as the Mandan.
The idea of Vikings in the New World before the days of Columbus has been talked about for some time, with one prevalent and somewhat controversial theory having to do with Eric Thorwaldsson, also more famously known as "The Red," who established two colonies on the coast of Greenland in 986. The story goes that Eric The Red then abandoned these outposts when the wild, rugged land proved to be too cold and forbidding, and made his way to North America along with the colonists. The theory then claims that the King of Norway is then said to have sent an expedition to the New World to find out what had happened to them, and that this expedition made their way up the rivers to end up in the Dakotas and other areas, after which they became stranded and then assimilated into the native tribes, giving them their Nordic genes.
However, there is very little evidence to prove that Vikings ever actually reached North America. The Verendrye Runestone vanished without a trace and then there is the hotly debated Kensington Runestone, which was a giant slab covered in runes allegedly found by Swedish immigrant Olof Ohman in Minnesota in 1898. In this case, the inscriptions claimed that the runes had been created by 14th-century Scandinavian explorers, and although the authenticity of the runestone is still debated it has mostly been classified as a hoax by the scientific community.
Regardless of where the Mandan really came from, the fact is that we will probably never know for sure. In 1838 the tribe was hit by a devastating smallpox epidemic, and although this was a specter they had been haunted by for centuries, this time it was absolutely catastrophic, wiping them out at such a rate that after only a few months there were only an estimated 30 to 140 of them left. With the Mandan teetering on the edge of extinction, enemy tribes swept in and took them as slaves, after which they were assimilated and absorbed. Consequent intermarriage and interbreeding meant that any unique genetic heritage they may have had was quickly erased, and the last known full-blooded Mandan was Mattie Grinnell, who died in 1971. Since there are no more full-blooded Mandan left and only an estimated 8 speakers of its language left today, it is difficult to get a grip on their heritage, even with our advanced DNA testing techniques, and their origins and history will likely forever remain shrouded in mystery, leaving us to merely speculate and debate on it.
It is somewhat sad that this tribe disappeared before we were ever able to really comprehend who they were. In all of the cases we have looked at here, all we are left with is the tales and accounts from explorers, but other than that their legacies have evaporated into the tides of history. They are seemingly vanished peoples who sowed bafflement and wonder, but ultimately left numerous questions swirling about them, doomed to a limbo of superstition, speculation, and rumor. Who were these people? Why did they look and act so differently, and what was the meaning behind their strange ways? To the alien explorers just starting to penetrate this wilderness at the time they may have seemed to be baffling anomalies, and interestingly they still are.
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Early Earth's Oceans of Magma Accelerated the Moon's Departure
The Earth and Moon have been locked in a gravitational dance for billions of years. Each day, as the Earth turns, the Moon tugs upon the oceans of the world, causing the rise and fall of tides. As a result, the Earth’s day gets a little bit longer, and the Moon gets a little more distant. The effect is small, but over geologic time it adds up. About 620 million years ago, a day on Earth was only 22 hours long, and the Moon was at least 10,000 km closer than it is now.
Evidence for this evolving dance in the geological record only goes back about two billion years. Beyond that, the Earth was so very different that there simply isn’t enough evidence to gather. So, instead, we must rely on computational models and our understanding of dynamics. We know that when the Earth formed, it had no large moon. Then, about 4.4 billion years ago, a Mars-sized protoplanet named Theia collided with our world to create the Earth-Moon system. What’s interesting is that most of the computer simulations for this collision generate a Moon that is much closer to the Earth than we’d expect. Early Earth didn’t have vast oceans, so there were no water tides to drive the Moon to a larger orbit. So how did the Moon get to its present distance?
The potential structure of a lava planet. Credit: Farhat, et al
A new study argues that back then the Earth did have tides, but they were made of lava, not water. Just after the Great Collision, Earth would have been covered in an ocean of hot lava. With the Moon so near, the lava would have experienced strong tides. Since lava is much denser than water, the effects of the tide would have been much greater. The Earth’s rotation would have slowed down much faster, and the Moon would quickly become more distant. Based on their simulations, the authors argue that the Moon’s distance would have increased by 25 Earth-radii in just 10,000 to 100,000 years. This would explain how the Moon moved towards its present distance range rather quickly.
The idea of tides on an ocean world also has implications for planets around other stars. Planets that form very close to their sun would be extremely hot, and many of them could have lava oceans for a billion years or more. Simulations of such worlds show that lava tides would accelerate the spin dynamics of such a world and could cause them to become tidally locked on a million-year timescale instead of a billion-year timescale. If this model is correct, it would have a significant impact on potentially habitable worlds. Most exoplanets orbit red dwarf stars, since red dwarfs make up about 75% of the stars in our galaxy. The habitable zone of red dwarfs is very close to the star, meaning that many of them would have begun as lava worlds. This would mean most potentially habitable worlds would have one side always facing the sun, while the other side is forever in the cold. Life on these worlds would be very different from what we see on Earth.
How Molten Magma Helped Transform Our Planet | Ancient Earth | BBC Earth Science
Shadow Operations: Unveiling UFO Crash Retrievals and Government Secrets
Shadow Operations: Unveiling UFO Crash Retrievals and Government Secrets
Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), now often referred to as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs), have fascinated humanity for decades. Central to this mystery is the concept of crash retrievals and government cover-ups. The phenomenon involves alleged incidents where UFOs have crash-landed, and covert operations were conducted to recover the crafts, technology, and, in some cases, extraterrestrial beings. This article delves into the shadowy operations surrounding these events, featuring insights from military personnel, whistleblowers, and researchers like Michael Schratt and Leonard Stringfield.
The Reality of UFO Crash Retrievals
Research indicates there are over 200 documented UFO crash retrieval cases globally. These incidents are shrouded in secrecy, with covert agencies allegedly taking swift action to recover and conceal the crafts and any extraterrestrial evidence. Michael Schratt, a private pilot and military aerospace historian, has extensively documented these events, revealing a hidden world of black-budget programs and advanced technology development.
Schratt’s research highlights the existence of unacknowledged special access programs (USAPs) that operate without congressional oversight or public scrutiny. These programs reportedly fund the recovery and analysis of UFO debris and are instrumental in keeping this knowledge hidden. According to Schratt, the secrecy surrounding these programs is so stringent that even high-ranking officials, including U.S. presidents, may be denied access.
Leonard Stringfield: The Pioneer of Crash Retrieval Research
Leonard Stringfield is considered the “father of UFO crash retrieval investigations.” Over three decades, he collected firsthand accounts from military personnel who participated in the recovery of downed UFOs and alien bodies. These accounts include descriptions of advanced materials, such as indestructible metals and “memory metal” that returns to its original shape after being crumpled. Many witnesses also described alien bodies as small humanoids with oversized heads, large eyes, and thin, emaciated frames.
Stringfield’s work paved the way for understanding UFO crash retrievals. His reports documented meticulous details, such as the transportation of debris to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and autopsies conducted on extraterrestrial bodies. His dedication ensured these historical accounts were preserved for future analysis.
Arguably the most famous UFO crash retrieval case, the Roswell incident involved debris found near a ranch in New Mexico. Witnesses reported materials with properties unlike anything known to science, such as metal that was lightweight, indestructible, and capable of memory-like behavior. Reports of alien bodies and a subsequent military cover-up fueled public speculation.
2. The 1942 Georgia Army Base Case
This case involved a 15-foot-diameter craft with three levels, each containing advanced control systems and hieroglyphic-like inscriptions. Four alien beings were reportedly recovered alive but later died. This event underscores the recurring themes of secrecy and advanced technology in UFO retrievals.
3. The 1958 USS FDR Incident
Naval personnel aboard the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt reported seeing a cigar-shaped UFO emitting heat that could be felt on their faces. Witnesses claimed to observe humanoid figures inside the craft, one of whom waved at them. This incident, along with others involving military witnesses, lends credibility to claims of UFO interactions with the U.S. military.
4. The 1963 Marine Guard Incident
A marine tasked with guarding a UFO for two weeks in North Carolina described a polished, seamless craft with no visible means of propulsion. Efforts to breach the craft’s hull using diamond-tipped drill bits and other tools reportedly failed, showcasing the advanced nature of these objects.
Advanced Technology and Cover-Ups
One of the most pressing questions is why these advanced crafts crash. Some researchers believe Earth’s radar systems or directed energy weapons may interfere with their navigation. Historical accounts suggest that highly focused radar beams have caused crashes by disrupting a UFO’s electromagnetic systems.
The technological breakthroughs discovered in these crash retrievals have reportedly led to the reverse engineering of alien propulsion systems and materials. However, these advancements remain classified, controlled by defense contractors through proprietary rights. The implications of revealing such technology could revolutionize energy systems and propulsion, rendering fossil fuels and nuclear power obsolete.
The Role of the Military-Industrial Complex
Many UFO researchers argue that the military-industrial complex holds the keys to these secrets. Michael Schratt and other whistleblowers suggest that private defense contractors are now the custodians of UFO technology, operating outside traditional government oversight. This arrangement has allowed the secrecy to persist for decades, with enormous resources funneled into black-budget programs.
The Path Forward: Transparency and Accountability
Recent Congressional hearings on UAPs have brought this topic into mainstream discourse. However, as Schratt notes, without tangible evidence like recovered hardware, the public remains in the dark. The pursuit of transparency involves tracking down witnesses, accessing facilities, and uncovering physical evidence to verify these claims.
Leonard Stringfield’s legacy serves as a reminder of the importance of preserving historical accounts. His work has inspired a new generation of researchers dedicated to uncovering the truth behind UFO crash retrievals and the hidden history of advanced technology.
Shadow Operations | UFO Crash Retrievals and Cover-ups | J. Horton Films
The phenomena of UFO crash retrievals and government cover-ups represent a complex intersection of science, secrecy, and speculation. The accounts documented by Michael Schratt, Leonard Stringfield, and countless military witnesses reveal a hidden world where the boundaries of human understanding are continually challenged. As public interest grows, the demand for transparency and accountability may finally bring these shadow operations into the light, uncovering truths that could transform humanity’s future.
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UFO Crash Retrieval - The Kalahari UAP Incident // 3D CGI Animation / Unreal Engine 5.2
Ancient Aliens: TOP 3 UFO CRASH SITES
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Michael Schratt - UFO Crash Retrievals - Historical Overview
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11-12-2024
Incredible Details of the 26-Million-Year Cycle of Mass Extinctions Recorded in Ancient Vedic Texts
Incredible Details of the 26-Million-Year Cycle of Mass Extinctions Recorded in Ancient Vedic Texts
Bibhu Dev Misra
The idea that human civilization has been gradually evolving over time in a linear manner, is a relatively new concept that was formulated during the period of colonization. Nearly every ancient culture believed otherwise. They said that time moves in cycles, smaller and larger, and that our civilization has gone through innumerable ups and downs over eons. With the emergence of new scientific data, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the ancients knew what they were talking about, and we have been far too quick to denounce the collective wisdom of our ancestors as the flights of fancy of primitives.
The concept of the Yuga Cycle or the Great Year was known to most ancient cultures, and, as per this framework, we have devolved from an erstwhile Golden Age of illumination, harmony and abundance to the current age of greed and lies, discord and scarcity. The fundamental factor that differentiates a higher age from a lower one is the state of man’s consciousness. In a Golden Age, consciousness is so elevated and purified, that we can easily comprehend the mysteries of creation, and of our place in the wider scheme of things, and, thus, we are able to lead long lives in a state of joy, balance and harmony. Since the environment reflects our state of consciousness, there is fertility and abundance in the higher ages and a lack of diseases and natural disasters. But as we devolve along the descending arc of the Yuga Cycle or Great Year, we move from soul consciousness to ego consciousness, accompanied by a degradation in our physical size and the external environment, which gradually leads to a burgeoning of violence, misery and discontent in society.
What is really striking is that all of these claims are now being borne out by scientific findings from different disciplines. It turns out that, over the past 12,000 years of the descending arc of the Yuga Cycle, humans have shrunk in size by at least 10%, along with a corresponding decline in bone strength and athleticism. This has been accompanied by a 10% to 17% reduction in our cranial volume over the same period, which has not only diminished the average intellect but reduced our memory and atrophied our sense of judgment and morality, along with a host of subtle mental abilities such as foresight, telepathy etc. And to add to these surprising statistics, it turns out that, towards the end of the last Ice Age, there was no food scarcity or diseases, but as time went on, food sources became scarce, many kinds of diseases became endemic, and incidences of violent deaths increased substantially.
Everything that the ancients said about the Yuga Cycle or Great Year is now turning out to be facts, but why aren’t these statistics being discussed on mainstream media outlets? It’s because they run counter to the Darwinian myth of gradual evolution by natural selection that has been literally shoved down our throats and turned into an incontrovertible dogma. Very few scientists, academics or media channels will dare to question Darwinism, for fear of getting ridiculed, denied funds or promotions, or even hounded out of their profession. Do not question the science, is the current science. This, unfortunately, is the insidious manner in which things work in the Kali Yuga, the darkest age of human history.
In my book, Yuga Shift, I have presented what I believe is the original Yuga Cycle framework. It is of the same duration as the precessional cycle of the earth, i.e. 25,800 years, and comprises an ascending cycle of consciousness and a descending cycle of consciousness, which are separated by two extended periods of transition that the Greeks called Kataklysmos (meaning “Deluge”) or the “great winter” of the Great Year, and Ekpyrosis (meaning “Conflagration”) or the “great summer” of the Great Year.
It is the period of Ekpyrosis that we are heading towards, as the Kali Yuga and the entire descending cycle of consciousness come to an end in 2025.
The 25,800-year Yuga Cycle. The ascending and descending cycles are separated by two extended periods of transition, called Kataklysmos and Ekpyrosis. Credit: Bibhu Dev Misra.
A Day and Night of Brahma
One of the thoughts that come to mind when we think about the Yuga Cycle or the Cycle of the Ages is that, does it continue indefinitely, without any beginning or end, or is it part of an even larger cycle of time.
As per the ancient Vedic texts, there is an even longer cycle of time called the “Day and Night of Brahma”, which extends for a whopping 25.8 million years! It consists of a “Day of Brahma” which extends for a thousand Yuga half-cycles of 12,900 years each, adding up to 12.9 million years. A “Day of Brahma” is followed by a “Night of Brahma” of equal duration. This cycle has been described in a number of texts.
As per the Vishnu Purana, at the beginning of a “Day of Brahma”, the world is created from unmanifested matter by Brahma, who is the pure, eternal, formless, consciousness, seated at the navel of the world. At the end of a “Day of Brahma”, the entire creation is destroyed and turns into a mighty, formless ocean. This is followed by a “Night of Brahma” when no life forms exist. The creative process begins once again at the beginning of the next “Day of Brahma”.
“At the end of this day (i.e. “Day of Brahma”) a dissolution of the universe occurs, when all the three worlds, earth, and the regions of space, are consumed with fire…When the-three worlds are but one mighty ocean, Brahma…satiate with the demolition of the universe, sleeps upon his serpent-bed…for a night of equal duration with his day (i.e. Night of Brahma); at the close of which he creates anew.”[1]
In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna provides a specific value for the duration of the “Day and Night of Brahma”.
“Those who understand the cosmic laws know that the Day of Brahma ends after a thousand Yugas and the Night of Brahma ends after a thousand Yugas. When the Day of Brahma dawns, forms are brought forth from the Unmanifest; when the Night of Brahma comes, these forms merge in the Formless again. This multitude of beings is created and destroyed again and again in the succeeding days and nights of Brahma.”[2]
It should be remembered here that, when the Sanskrit texts talk of the Yuga Cycle, they mean the Yuga half-cycle, which goes from Satya Yuga -> Treta Yuga -> Dwapara Yuga -> Kali Yuga, including the periods of transition between them. A 1000 Yuga half-cycles is equivalent to 500 complete Yuga Cycles of 25,800 years each, which works out to 12.9 million years.
A “Day and Night of Brahma” spans 25.8 million years, and consists of a “Day of Brahma” of 12.9 million years and a “Night of Brahma” of equal duration. Credit: Bibhu Dev Misra.
A “Day of Brahma”, therefore, extends for 12.9 million years, during which time we experience a long sequence of 500 complete Yuga Cycles, and the earth is bustling with life and civilization. It is followed by a “Night of Brahma” of equal duration of 12.9 million years, when all life is snuffed out, and the entire world exits as a giant, formless, lifeless ocean. Thus, the “Day and Night of Brahma” is a grand cosmic cycle of creation and dissolution spanning over of 25.8 million years.
It is easy to see that the time period between two successive dissolution events in this cycle is 25.8 million years, which can be rounded off to 26 million years. Now, if a dissolution of life on a cosmic scale occurs every 26 million years, shouldn’t this fact be reflected in the fossil records of our planet?
Amazingly enough, this is exactly what has been indicated by recent paleontological evidence: every 26 million years there is a mass extinction of species on the earth!
Mass Extinction Cycle
Around 67 million years ago, the earth looked like a very different place. Enormous dinosaurs stalked the landscape, while massive avian reptiles patrolled the skies. But, then, something catastrophic happened, which changed things almost overnight. Nearly 66 million years ago the earth went through a period of rapid death, called a mass extinction, when more than 75% of all animal and plant species became extinct. Scientists now have evidence that the die-off was caused when an asteroid, about 10 kilometers in diameter, struck the earth at a speed of about 20 km/sec and created the 200-km wide Chicxulub Crater in southeastern Mexico, releasing a billion times more energy than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima.
The extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by an asteroid impact at the K-T boundary, nearly 66 million years ago. Source: Adobe Stock.
The impact generated hot winds and shock waves, and ejected a gigantic jet of molten material, several times hotter than the surface of the sun, which set fire to everything within a thousand miles. Measurements of the layer of ash and soot that eventually coated the Earth indicate that fires consumed about seventy percent of the world’s forests. The collision triggered powerful earthquakes and spawned mega tsunamis, hundreds of feet tall. A model of the impact event developed by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory shows,
“The dust and soot from the impact and the conflagrations prevented all sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface for months. Photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most of the plant life... After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze. Earth’s two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapsed. About seventy-five percent of all species went extinct. More than 99.9999 percent of all living organisms on Earth died, and the carbon cycle came to a halt.”[3]
It is to be noted here that the impact event at the K-T boundary effectively killed off all the living organisms on our planet, even though the species die-off is estimated at roughly 75%. This is because some of the species that existed at that time, re-appeared in the fossil records at a later date, and therefore, is not considered to have gone extinct.
The fiery cataclysm that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs is in perfect alignment with the description of the dissolution event that occurs at the end of a “Day of Brahma” when all life forms on the earth are destroyed, and, as the Vishnu Purana states, “all the three worlds, earth, and the regions of space are consumed with fire”. Admittedly, the ancient Vedic sages knew a thing or two about the true history of our planet.
The asteroid impact at the K-T boundary released a billion times more energy than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. Source: Adobe Stock.
Moreover, this is not the only mass extinction event that has occurred on our planet in the past. There are many more, and, quite surprisingly, they occur in a cyclical manner every 26 million years!
In 1984, paleontologists David Raup and Jack Sepkoski of the University of Chicago identified a 26-million-year periodicity in extinction rates over the past 250 million years.[4] As part of a broad study of the distribution of marine life through geologic time, Sepkoski had prepared a listing of about a quarter of a million species of sea-dwelling creatures, both extinct and current, noting the point in time where they appeared and became extinct. The study was confined to marine organisms since the chances of finding fossils are much higher under the sea. The oceans are areas of net sedimentation, whereas land is an area of net erosion.
David Raup, a senior colleague at the University of Chicago, suggested to Sepkoski that he examine the list for any evidence of a pattern in the timing of the mass extinctions. Sepkoski decided to concentrate on the last 250 million years of geologic time and throw out animals whose exact timing of appearance and disappearance were debated. He was left with about 500 of his original 3,500 marine families (250,000 species). Sepkoski put the data through a computer program and was surprised to find that life forms on Earth disappeared in great numbers every 26 million years. Both of them checked for errors and confirmed the pattern; life seemed to disappear drastically exactly every 26 million years. In their seminal paper, Raup and Sepkoski wrote:
“The temporal distribution of the major extinctions over the past 250 million years has been investigated statistically using various forms of time series analysis. The analyzed record is based on variation in extinction intensity for fossil families of marine vertebrates, invertebrates, and protozoans, and contains 12 extinction events. The 12 events show a statistically significant periodicity (P <0.01) with a mean interval between events of 26 million years. Two of the events coincide with extinctions that have been previously linked to meteorite impacts (terminal Cretaceous and late Eocene). Although the causes of the periodicity are unknown, it is possible that they are related to extraterrestrial forces (solar, solar system, or galactic.)”
The mass extinction data of the past 250 Myr shows that the extinction rate peaks every 26 million years. Source: Raup and Sepkoski (1984)
The mass extinction events are not selective at all, in the way Darwin had proposed. As per Darwinism, the evolutionary process is gradual, and life forms evolve slowly through a process of natural selection, in which the inferior life forms are eliminated since they are less suited to the struggle for existence. However, in case of a mass extinction, there is no way of knowing beforehand which species will survive the extinction event and which will die out. The process is entirely random. In a paper titled, “The Role of Extinction in Evolution” (1982), David Raup wrote,
“The largest mass extinctions produce major restructuring of the biosphere wherein some successful groups are eliminated, allowing previously minor groups to expand and diversify…There is little evidence that extinction is selective in the positive sense argued by Darwin. It has generally been impossible to predict, before the fact, which species will be victims of an extinction event.”[5]
The 26-million-year extinction cycle has, since then, been validated by a number of independent studies. In 2010, Adrian Melott and Richard Bambach identified a 27 Myr periodicity in the extinction data, extending over the past 500 million years. They wrote,
“We examined periodicities in extinction over the last 500 million years, and concluded that a signal detected by Raup & Sepkoski (1984) was present in better resolved, more extensive current data, over a longer time period than they had originally claimed, and at a higher level of significance. The claimed period grew from 26 to 27 Myr, and is also now observed to extend over the entire 500 million years interval rather than just the last 250 million years, due to revisions in the geological timescale since the 1980s.”[6]
Mass Extinctions and Impact Craters
It has become quite obvious over time that the primary triggers for the mass extinctions are impact events. In 1980, the father-son duo of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez and his son, the geologist Walter Alvarez, had inferred that the sudden extinction of dinosaurs at the K-T (Cretaceous–Tertiary) boundary, nearly 66 million years ago, was due to the impact of a large asteroid or comet.
Luis and Walter Alvarez had noticed that sedimentary layers all over the world at the K-T boundary contain a concentration of iridium many times greater than normal. Iridium is extremely rare in the Earth's crust but is abundant in chondritic meteorites and asteroids. Moreover, the isotopic ratio of iridium in asteroids is similar to that seen in the K–T boundary layer. Based on this, the Alvarez team suggested that the iridium spike at the K-T boundary was of extraterrestrial origin and had settled out of a global dust cloud triggered by the impact of an asteroid, at least 10 km in diameter.
While Alvarez’s theory was initially rejected by most paleontologists, the subsequent discovery and dating of the Chicxulub Crater in Mexico validated their findings and silenced the dissenters.
Since then, other scientists have found that the estimated ages of a number of impact craters coincide with the mass extinction events.
In the mid-1980s, cratering specialist Richard Grieve ran his list of well-dated impact craters through the computer at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and identified a crater periodicity of nearly 30 million years. Around the same time, Walter Alvarez and Richard Muller at UC Berkeley identified a 28 million-year cycle using a somewhat different set of craters.
An aerial photograph of the Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona, USA, which was created about 50,000 years ago. Credit: LarryBloom, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
In 2015, Michael Rampino and his student Ken Caldeira studied more impact craters with improved crater-age data, and “found that craters and extinctions both seem to occur with the same 26 million-year cycle”.[7] Crater formation rate peaks close to the time of an extinction event, and some of the largest impact craters were formed during an extinction event. Clearly, the 26 million-year extinction cycle is a significant geological signal, which some scientists call the “geological heartbeat” of our planet.
It is nothing short of astonishing that, such precise information about the 26-million-year mass extinction cycle has been specified in the Vedic texts. Of course, a couple of questions still need to be clarified. The Vedic doctrine claims that the earth remains entirely devoid of all life forms for the entire 12.9-million-year duration of the “Night of Brahma” that follows the extinction event. Do have any scientific evidence in support of this? As it turns out, there is. And more studies are arriving at the same conclusion.
Another image depicting the mass extinction event and rapid speciation event occurring in a “Day and Night of Brahma”. Credit: Bibhu Dev Misra
The Night of Brahma
In May 2012, an article in Nature Geoscience written by Dr. Zhong-Qiang Chen of the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan and Professor Michael Benton of the University of Bristol stated that it took nearly 10 million years for life forms to appear after the end-Permian mass extinction event 250 million years ago, which had wiped out nearly 90% of all living species.[8]
As per the scientists, two factors could have delayed the appearance of new life forms: 1) the sheer intensity of the crisis, and 2) the continuing grim conditions on earth after the first wave of extinction.[9] Professor Michael Benton wrote that “in this most devastating case, life did recover, after many millions of years, and new groups emerged. The event had re-set evolution.”[10]
Another study conducted in 2019 found that it takes at least ten million years before the diversity of a species achieves a similar level to that seen before the mass extinction event.[11] Dr. Lowery and Dr. Fraass studied foram fossils for a time period covering roughly 20 million years, from the end of the Cretaceous mass extinction (66 million years ago) and extending through the ensuing recovery, to determine how long it took these minibeasts to recover their species diversity. Dr. Lowery and Dr. Fraass concluded that it took at least ten million years for foram species diversity to recover.[12]
These studies confirm that, in general, it takes around 10 million years or more for life forms to emerge and global biodiversity to recover, after a mass extinction event. This confirms what Vedic sages said about the “Night of Brahma” being a time when the earth is devoid of life forms.
The other question that was on my mind is this: As per the Vedic doctrine, life forms arise very quickly after a “Night of Brahma” ends, and the next “Day of Brahma” begins. Now, does this really happen? Do we see a sudden emergence of life forms after a mass extinction event, or do they appear gradually through a process of natural selection extending over millions of years, as Darwin had proposed?
Punctuated Equilibrium
Darwin’s theory that new species arise by the slow and steady transformation of entire populations is not reflected in the fossil records. If this were true, then a continuous sequence of “intermediate forms”, showing incremental changes on the way to a new species, should have been found in the rock strata. Unfortunately, intermediate forms connecting species have never been identified. The absence of “missing links” had also concerned Darwin, who attributed it to the imperfections of the geological record. In the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote,
“Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.”[13]
“The geological record is extremely imperfect and this fact will to a large extent explain why we do not find interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps. He who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record will rightly reject my whole theory. ”[14]
In 1972, Harvard University paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge wrote their seminal paper titled, “Punctuated Equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism”, in which they argued that the fossil record is not imperfect, as claimed by Darwinists. The many breaks in the fossil records are real, and they express how evolution occurs. The absence of transitional forms implies that evolution does not occur by the slow and gradual transformation of a species.
“Under the influence of phyletic gradualism, the rarity of transitional series remains as our persistent bugbear…Many breaks in the fossil record are real; they express the way in which evolution occurs, not the fragments of an imperfect record. The sharp break in a local column accurately records what happened in that area through time.”[15]
“Although phyletic gradualism prevails as a picture for the origin of new species in paleontology, very few classic examples purport to document it. A few authors have offered a simple a literal interpretation of this situation: in-situ, gradual, progressive evolutionary change is a rare phenomenon. But we usually explain the paucity of cases by a nearly ritualized invocation of the inadequacy of the fossil record.”[16]
Gould and Eldredge proposed the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium to explain what is really happening in the fossil records. They said that the fossil records show long periods of stasis or equilibrium, extending for millions of years, during which time there is little or no evolutionary change, which are punctuated by rapid, episodic periods of speciation, occurring within the space of a few thousand years.
Gould provided further clarification in his article titled, “Evolution’s Erratic Pace (1977)”, in which he wrote that, in any local area, “a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and fully formed”[17]. Once a species appears, it undergoes very little or no evolutionary change for millions of years. Most species, “appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless.”[18]
Gould berated the paleontological community for being so heavily influenced by Darwin’s theory of gradual evolution, that they did not notice the obvious patterns in the fossil records.
“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology…Paleontologists have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.”[19]
Gould was one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. He wrote 300 popular essays in the Natural History magazine, for both specialists and non-specialists. In April 2000, the US Library of Congress named him a “Living Legend”. Throughout his career, Gould insisted that the gradualistic models of evolution are simply not reflected in the fossil records, and there is a strong tendency within the scientific community to restrict their thinking within certain belief systems.
In the essay, “Darwin's Untimely Burial” (1976), Gould gave vent to his frustration when he wrote, “I am a strong advocate of the general argument that “truth” as preached by scientists often turns out to be no more than prejudice inspired by prevailing social and political beliefs.”[20]
In “The Return of Hopeful Monsters” (1977), he wrote that, “all paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt.” Then, in the essay titled, “Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?” (1980), Gould reiterated the obvious flaws in the Darwinian model of evolution:
“The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.”[21]
The truth is that when we go purely by the fossil records – leaving aside all theories and speculations - what we see are rapid bursts of speciation and not the long-drawn-out gradual accumulation of small variations.
Gould’s Harvard colleague, Niles Eldredge, estimated that the rapid periods of evolutionary change, “took something between 5,000 and 50,000 years—a mere blink of an eye geologically speaking.”[22]
It is equally fascinating that this estimate is very close to the value mentioned in the Surya Siddhanta, which is the oldest astronomical treatise of India. The text states: “One hundred times four hundred and seventy-four years passed while the All-Wise was employed in creating the animate and inanimate creation, plants, stars, gods, demons and the rest.”[23] This means the entire creative process (possibly at the beginning of the current Day of Brahma) took 47,400 years, which falls in the range of values found by Eldredge i.e. between 5000 – 50,000 years.
Oscillations in Morphology
Once speciation is completed, every species remains amazingly stable for millions of years. That does not mean that they do not change at all. In his study of Devonian trilobites, which lived between 380-375 million years ago, Eldredge had found that, once a new species appeared, they persisted for millions of years with very little morphological change.
“There were some oscillations in morphology, so species weren’t completely invariant, but the net sum of any changes usually tended to cancel out, leading to no net change.”[24]
Gould, by the way, had also found very similar patterns in his studies that focused on fossil land snails from the genus Poecilozonites that lived a few hundred thousand years ago during the Pleistocene.[25]
I was amazed to know of these findings because this is precisely what I had discovered in course of my explorations into the Yuga Cycle. In Yuga Shift, I had proposed, based on ample data points, that, both human cranial volume as well as physical size fluctuates in a sinusoidal manner over a 25,800-year precession cycle, without a net increase or decrease in any direction. I had also written that this oscillation must have been going on over the past 2 million-odd years of human evolution.
The cranial volume of Homo sapiens fluctuates over the 25,800-year Yuga Cycle or precession cycle. Credit: Bibhu Dev Misra.
And now it turns out that the “oscillations in morphology” occur not only in case of humans, but is a characteristic feature of the entire animal kingdom! All species increase and decrease in size and cranial capacity in a sinusoidal manner over the entire “Day of Brahma” of 12.9 million years, spanning 500 complete Yuga Cycles! This is why the Ice Age megafauna were so much bigger than the animals of today. It’s a recurring pattern of nature.
Every assertion of the Vedic texts with respect to the “Day and Night of Brahma” has now been detected in the fossil records. It is not an approximate correlation, but an almost exact match. Let me recapitulate the important connections:
1. The fossil records show that a mass extinction of species occurs every 26 million years, while the Vedic texts claim that all life on the earth is extinguished at the end of a “Day of Brahma”, every 26 million years.
2. The fossil records show that it takes 10 million years or more for new life forms to emerge and for global biodiversity to recover, after a mass extinction event. The Vedic texts claim that the earth remains in a lifeless state during the “Night of Brahma”, which extends for 13 million years after an extinction event.
3. The fossil records show that new species appear in rapid, episodic bursts, in a fully formed state. The rapid speciation events are completed within 5,000 - 50,000 years. The Vedic texts claim that new life forms arise on the earth as soon as a new “Day of Brahma” dawns, and it takes nearly 47,400 years for all living entities to be created.
The fossil records are in perfect alignment with every element of the doctrine of the “Day and Night of Brahma”. This is yet another indication of the profound knowledge of the vast time cycles that our ancestors had possessed, and they passed them down to us in simple verses, although, sometimes they also employed metaphors and symbolic imageries to drive home the point and aid in memorization.
For instance, the events that occur in the course of a “Day and Night of Brahma” have also been metaphorically described as the “breathing in and out of Brahma”. When Brahma breathes out, life forms get dispersed across the cosmos, and when he breathes in, life forms return to the source and the cosmos becomes lifeless. In Yuga Shift, I have proposed that the unmanifested, creative principle, that the Vedic sages called Brahma, refers to the central black hole of the Milky Way galaxy, which, as most scientists agree, acts as the central engine of our galaxy.
When does the current Day of Brahma end?
In case you are wondering when the current “Day of Brahma” will come to a cataclysmic end, you can rest easy, for it is still a very long way off. The last mass extinction event was the “Middle Miocene Disruption” which occurred around 14.8 Mya (Million years ago). This means that the current “Day of Brahma” started 12.9 Myr later, at around 1.9 Mya.
Not surprisingly, the earliest fossil remains of the genus Homo (to which our own species Homo sapiens belongs) started appearing around the same time. The oldest hominin fossils are those of Homo habilis, dated to around 1.9 Mya. H. habilis cranial volume fluctuated between 500 cc – 800 cc over the course of its presence in the fossil records till around 1.5 Mya. The bipedal, erect walking, Homo erectus appears in the fossil records from 1.7 Mya till around 250,000 years ago. H. erectus shows a fluctuation in cranial volume between 850 – 1200 cc.
Since the current “Day of Brahma” started around 1.9 Mya, the next cosmic dissolution event is nearly 11.4 million years away. So we can safely take it off our calendar for now. It is not cosmic dissolution that should worry us, but the impending transition out of the Kali Yuga in 2025, which is likely to be very turbulent.
There is no doubt that our ancestors had a very sophisticated understanding of the vast cycles of time that regulate life and civilization on our planet. Unfortunately, this wisdom was gradually forgotten, as we devolved along the descending arc of the Yuga Cycle. The scientific advances of the past couple of centuries are now helping us to uncover the true significance of these ancient doctrines. However, in general, the attitude of scientists and academics towards the ancient cultures continues to remain dismissive. The problem is that, once we become indoctrinated with a specific belief system since childhood, it becomes extremely difficult to dislodge it, even with the aid of voluminous amounts of scientific data. Unless we adopt an attitude of respect towards the ancient civilizations, we will continue to remain oblivious to the grand stores of wisdom that have been encoded into their sacred texts, symbols and magnificent archaeological monuments.
References
[1] The Vishnu Purana 1.3, tr. by Horace Hayman Wilson, 1840, https://sacred-texts.com/hin/vp/vp037.htm [2] The Bhagavad Gita 8.17-8.20 tr. Eknath Easwaran, Penguin Books, 1996. [3] Douglas Preston, The Day the Dinosaurs Died, The New Yorker, 29 March 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died [4] Raup and Sepkoski, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 81(1984): 801-805 [5] D M Raup, “The role of extinction in evolution”, PNAS 91 (1994): 6758-6763. [6] Adrian L. Melott and Richard K. Bambach, "DO PERIODICITIES IN EXTINCTION—WITH POSSIBLE ASTRONOMICAL CONNECTIONS—SURVIVE A REVISION OF THE GEOLOGICAL TIMESCALE?", The Astrophysical Journal, 2013, Volume 773, Number 1 [7] Michael R. Rampino, "Dark matter’s shadowy effect on Earth", Astronomy.com July 31, 2019, https://astronomy.com/magazine/2019/07/dark-matters--shadowy-effect--on-earth [8] Zhong-Qiang Chen, Michael J. Benton, “The timing and pattern of biotic recovery following the end-Permian mass extinction” Nature Geoscience, 2012, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1475 [9] University of Bristol, “It took Earth ten million years to recover from greatest mass extinction” ScienceDaily, 27 May 2012, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120527153810.htm [10] Ibid [11] Christopher M. Lowery and Andrew J. Fraass, “Morphospace expansion paces taxonomic diversification after end Cretaceous mass extinction”, Nature Ecology & Evolution, 9 April 2019, DOI:10.1038/s41559-019-0835-0 [12] GrrlScientist, “Appearance Of New Species After Mass Extinction Has Evolutionary 'Speed Limit'”, Forbes Apr 13, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/grrlscientist/2019/04/13/appearance-of-new-species-after-mass-extinction-has-evolutionary-speed-limit/?sh=7a3c6dfa525b [13] Charles Darwin, Origin of Species (1859) 280 [14] Charles Darwin, Origin of Species (1859) 342 [15] Gould, S. J. and Eldredge, N., “Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism” Models in paleobiology ed. Schopf, TJM Freeman (San Francisco: Cooper & Co, 1972) pp. 82-115 [16] Ibid [17] Ibid [18] Gould, S.J, "Evolution's Erratic Pace", Natural History 86 (1977): 14 [19] Gould, S. J., 1977, “Evolution’s erratic pace” Natural History, 86(1977):14 [20] Stephen Jay Gould, "Darwin's Untimely Burial," Natural History 85 (1976): 24-30 [21] Gould, S. J , “Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?” Paleobiology 6 (1980):119–130. [22] Eldredge, N. The Early “Evolution” of “Punctuated Equilibria”. Evo Edu Outreach 1, 107–113 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12052-008-0032-0 [23] Surya-Siddhanta: A text-book of Hindu astronomy, trans. Ebenezer Burgess, Phanindralal Gangooly (Motilal Banarsidass Publ., 1989) chapter 1, p 13. [24] "Punctuated equilibrium and stasis", Digital Atlas of Ancient Life, Paleontological Research Institution, https://www.digitalatlasofancientlife.org/learn/evolution/punctuated-equilibrium-and-stasis/ [25] "Punctuated equilibrium and stasis", Digital Atlas of Ancient Life, Paleontological Research Institution, https://www.digitalatlasofancientlife.org/learn/evolution/punctuated-equilibrium-and-stasis/
5 Mass Extinctions, and We're Looking at the Sixth
Two 2001 images from the Mars Orbiter Camera on NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor orbiter show a dramatic change in the planet’s appearance when haze raised by dust-storm activity in the south became globally distributed (Figure 1). At left, an image from late June 2001 shows clear conditions over much of the planet, with regional dust-storm activity occurring in the Hellas basin (bright oval feature) near the edge of the south polar cap. At right, a July 2001 image from the same perspective shows the planet almost completely enveloped. Dust extends to altitudes of more than 60 kilometers (37 miles) during global-scale storms. — NASA Larger image
Today’s weather report on Mars: Windy with a chance of catastrophic dust storms blotting out the sky.
In a new study, planetary scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder have begun to unravel the factors that kick off major dust storms on Mars—weather events that sometimes engulf the entire planet in swirling grit. The team discovered that relatively warm and sunny days may help to trigger them.
Heshani Pieris, lead author of the study, said the findings are a first step toward forecasting extreme weather on Mars, just like scientists do on Earth.
“Dust storms have a significant effect on rovers and landers on Mars, not to mention what will happen during future crewed missions to Mars,” said Pieris, a graduate student at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at CU Boulder. “This dust is very light and sticks to everything.”
She will present the results Tuesday, Dec. 10 at the 2024 meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington.
To put dust storms under the magnifying glass, the researchers drew on real observations from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite.
So far, they have identified weather patterns that may underly roughly two-thirds of the major dust storms on Mars. You won’t see Mars weather reporters standing in front of a green screen just yet, but it’s a step in the right direction, said study co-author Paul Hayne.
“We need to understand what causes some of the smaller or regional storms to grow into global-scale storms,” said Hayne, a researcher at LASP and associate professor at the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences. “We don’t even fully understand the basic physics of how dust storms start at the surface.”
This close-up image of a dust storm on Mars was acquired by the Mars Color Imager instrument on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Nov. 7, 2007, around 3 p.m. local time on Mars. Scientists working with NASA’s Curiosity rover, which is set to land on Mars on Aug. 5 PDT (Aug. 6 EDT), are monitoring Mars each day for similar small storms that could either drift over the landing site or stir up dust that moves as haze over the site. — NASA (larger image)
Dusty demise
Dust storms on Mars are something to behold.
Many begin as smaller storms that swirl around the ice caps at the planet’s north and south poles, usually during the second half of the Martian year. (A year on Mars lasts 687 Earth days). Those storms can grow at a furious pace, pressing toward the equator until they cover millions of square miles and last for days.
The 2015 film The Martian starring Matt Damon featured one such apocalyptic storm that knocked over a satellite dish and tossed around astronauts. The reality is less cinematic. Mars’ atmosphere is much thinner than Earth’s, so dust storms on the Red Planet can’t generate much force. But they can still be trouble.
In 2018, for example, a global dust storm buried the solar panels on NASA’s Opportunity rover under a layer of dust. The rover died not long after.
“Even though the wind pressure may not be enough to knock over equipment, these dust grains can build up a lot of speed and pelt astronauts and their equipment,” Hayne said.
Hot spells
In the current study, Pieris and Hayne set their sights on two weather patterns that tend to occur every year on Mars known as “A” and “C” storms.
The team pored over observations of Mars from the Mars Climate Sounder instrument aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter over eight Mars years (15 years on Earth). In particular, Pieris and Hayne looked for periods of unusual warmth—or weeks when more sunlight filtered through Mars’ thin atmosphere and baked the planet’s surface.
They discovered that roughly 68% of major storms on the planet were preceded by a sharp rise in temperatures at the surface. In other words, the planet heated up, then a few weeks later, conditions got dusty.
“It’s almost like Mars has to wait for the air to get clear enough to form a major dust storm,” Hayne said.
The team can’t prove that those balmy conditions actually cause the dust storms. But, Pieris said, similar phenomena trigger storms on Earth. During hot summers in Boulder, Colorado, for example, warm air near the ground can rise through the atmosphere, often forming those towering, gray clouds that signal rain.
“When you heat up the surface, the layer of atmosphere right above it becomes buoyant, and it can rise, taking dust with it,” Pieris said.
She and Hayne are now gathering observations from more recent years on Mars to continue to explore these explosive weather patterns. Eventually, they’d like to get to the point where they can look at live data coming from the Red Planet and predict what could happen in the weeks ahead.
“This study is not the end all be all of predicting storms on Mars,” Pieris said. “But we hope it’s a step in the right direction.”
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New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers has offered yet another conspiracy theory on the extra-terrestrial.
Now that the Jets are officially out of the playoffs with a 3-10 record, the 41-year-old has seemingly begun to divert his energy elsewhere.
After failing to end New York's 14-year playoff curse, Rodgers opted to debunk some conspiracy theories during his weekly Pat McAfee Show appearance instead.
The signal caller brought up some mysterious drone activity that has been occurring in the skies of New Jersey recently.
'Do you know what's been going on in New Jersey lately? And I'm not talking about the football. There's been some crazy things going on,' Rodgers began. 'There's been some drones in the sky in Jersey.'
McAfee then showed a clip on an unidentified large object hovering above Bedminster, New Jersey with blue, green and red flashing lights.
Aaron Rodgers has offered yet another conspiracy theory on the extra-terrestrial
The Jets quarterback discussed mysterious drone activity above New Jersey on Pat McAfee
What the hell is that?' Rodgers continued, before highlighting that the mysterious sighting came above Bedminster where both president-elect Donald Trump owns a golf course and Jets owner Woody Johnson lives.
The four-time MVP did admit it could be Trump flying in for a quick round of golf but, of course, it wouldn't be Aaron Rodgers without a conspiracy theory.
'Maybe it's some kids messing around…maybe not, though,' he hinted.
'I'm thinking about having a Friday night 5E experience,' he added, leaving the panel bewildered.
'It's where you have a big kind of meditation circle and then you call in the aliens and you use little green lasers to bring them in,' the NFL veteran explained.
During last season's 'Hard Knocks' series focusing on the Jets, Rodgers claimed he experienced a UFO sighting in 2005.
He said he was at former Cal teammate Steve Levy's house in New Jersey shortly before he was taken by the Green Bay Packers in the first round of the 2005 NFL Draft when the sighting occurred.
The 41-year-old has previously opened up on an experience with a UFO sighting
The Jets are officially out of the playoffs with a 3-10 record, following last week's slate
Rodgers, who has publicly admitted to using hallucinogen ayahuasca, said he was trying to sleep as he had a 5am wake up call the following day but was disturbed by an 'alarm going off in the distance.'
'It just didn't seem like normal, and I heard some rustling downstairs,' Rodgers said on the season finale of 'Hard Knocks.'
'So I got up, walk downstairs, it's a beautiful night, and [we] walked outside, and up in the clouds, we heard this sound, and we saw this tremendously large object moving through the sky. And it was like a scene out of "Independence Day" when the ships are coming into the atmosphere, and they're creating this, like, kind of explosion-type fire in the sky.
'We saw this incredibly large object and froze, as anybody would, because, you know, what the hell is going on? Eventually, it went out of sight, and nobody said a word. We just stood frozen.
'And about 30 seconds later we heard the real, recognizable sound of fighter jets that seemed to be chasing this object. Again, we just stood there in disbelief for another few minutes and nobody said a word. And we just looked at each other like, 'did we just see what we think we just saw?'
Rodgers said he checked the papers and watched the news in the following days but nothing was mentioned.
However, the experience piqued his interest in UFOs, leading him to do more research into them.
Rodgers later discovered that the siren was from a nuclear plant around nine miles away and claimed that UFOs are often linked to nuclear energy.
The Jets quarterback is known for his outlandish theories and techniques opening up on his use of ayahuasca at the start of last season, claiming it helped him to his back-to-back MVP seasons in 2020 and 2021.
He also underwent a darkness retreat shortly after the end of the 2022 season to contemplate his NFL future.
Manchester Airport UFO mystery solved as Brit ufologist admits his theory was wrong
Manchester Airport UFO mystery solved as Brit ufologist admits his theory was wrong
EXCLUSIVE: UFO expert Mark Christopher Lee has claimed to have solved the mystery of the 'car-sized' object that was spotted at Manchester Airport, but admits to previously getting it wrong
Mark Christopher Lee has claimed to have solved the mystery of the 'car-sized' object that was spotted at Manchester Airport
(Image: Twitter)
A British based ufologist says he has solved the mystery of the Manchester Airport UFO, while admitting he was previously wrong.
At the end of November, footage and images purported to have been taken at the airfield in June showed what many believed to have been unexplained aerial phenomenon (UAP). Social media channels Reddit and X (formerly Twitter) went into meltdown with wild speculation about what the 'car sized' spherical object might have been.
At one point the UAP was allegedly snapped just hovering above the tarmac on the runway, in the midst of a number of aircraft. Even we at the Daily Star came up with five suggestions as to what viewers were witnessing.
Lee has been investigating recent "drone" sightings at military bases in the UK, and was convinced this was yet another example of that.
However, he has now backtracked from any potential links to alien visitors, and come up with a much more down to earth theory.
He admitted: "I have previously investigated this case and thought it was linked to the orbs and drones that people are seeing around the world (US and UK especially) but after analysing various photos and videos posted I'm pretty confident that what we are actually seeing in Blue Chinese Lantern that has gone astray.
Footage of the object allegedly floating in the sky over the airport was also captured
There is a substantial Chinese population in Manchester and it even has it's own China Town so there may have been some celebration or event taking place in June that led to a large Blue Lantern being released.
Chinese Lanterns have caused a lot of previous UFO sightings in the past and I think this is the case again. I was initially drawn to the account told by UFO researcher Timothy Good about a similar type orb being captured in Australia but I now think that the Chinese Lantern is the most logical culprit.
He continued: "However, I do think that there is still a substantial mystery of what people are seeing in the US and the UK around military bases. These are still UFOs as are unidentified and they may turn out to be extra terrestrial scouting drones if they are not Chinese spy drones.
Manchester Airport with the UAP on the right side above the runway
(Image: Twitter)
"Indeed Republican Senator Tim Burchett who has been pushing for UFO disclosure in the US has suggested that the Chinese government has been recruiting hobbyists to test out drones to see how the US and UK military will react.
"What I do think is that the US and UK governments will want to see a lid on this dues to the embarrassment of not knowing what is invading their airspace."
Lee says his new film Rendelshan - The British Rowell - set to be released in January, looks into the cover up in the UK
Rep. Jeff Van Drew stunningly claimed Iran is behind the mysterious drones sighted flying over northern New Jersey as the FBI scrambles for answers.
The Republican lawmaker from New Jersey told Fox News that Iran has launched a 'mothership' about a month ago that contains the drones off the coast.
'These are from high sources,' he claimed. 'I don't say this lightly.' He added that they should be 'shot down.'
However, the Pentagon said on Wednesday that there is no evidence the drones are the work of an adversary and said there is no truth there's an Iranian ship off the coast of the U.S.
'There's no so called "mothership" launching drones toward the United States,' said Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh.
People have seen the unexplained cluster of what appear to be drones and a possible fixed wing aircraft for several weeks which are flying near sensitive locations including military instillations sparking concern.
While the FBI out of Newark and local partners are investigating, they have been unable to determine if it is the work of one person or group.
A top official with the FBI said they do not know if there is a reason to believe that Americans are at risk and that's concerning.
One of the reported drones, whose engines can be heard roaring from the ground, appeared to have a cluster of white lights on its underbelly with red lights blinking at its wingtips and tail (above)
House members held a hearing on Tuesday focused on the threats posed by unmanned aerial systems to the U.S.
'You're telling me we don't know what the hell these drones are, in New Jersey are?' Congressman Tony Gonzales asked.
'That's right,' responded Robert Wheeler, FBI Assistant Director of the Critical Incident Response Group.
'That's crazy! I mean that's crazy,' the Texas congressman pushed back.
'That's madness that we don't know what these drones are,' he added.
Gonzales argued not knowing what is flying in U.S. airspace is only the 'tip of the iceberg of what's to come' and warned it must be fixed.
Wheeler said they do not know exactly what type of drones the ones being reported are, but he noted some are believed to be bigger than those commercially available.
Swarms of drones have been spotted in the skies of New Jersey for weeks, sparking officials to call for a 'limited state of emergency'
Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) claimed on Fox News that Iran launched a 'mothership' with the drones after the FBI told lawmakers during a hearing it did not have information about who was behind the mysterious sightings. The Pentagon said there is no 'Iranian mothership' off the coast launching drones
Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) speaking during a hearing on unmanned aerial systems where he called the FBI not having more information about the mysterious drones over New Jersey 'madness'
When asked how much the budget is for FBI counter-drone technology, Wheeler revealed it was less than $500,000.
'No wonder we don't know what the hell is going on. $500,000?' Gonzales responded.
One of the challenges has been getting the authority to bring the drones down. Lawmakers urged officials to shoot one down to further examine it.
The FBI has been going through more than 3,000 tips submitted by the public. There have also been sightings from New York.
Congressman lashes out after FBI reveals counter-UAS budget
According to one NJ local, this image depicts roughly nine of the unidentified drones flying into New Jersey from the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday night, December 5
The sightings started mid-November with footage capturing 'car-sized' drones with flashing lights
The FBI has warned it has seen a concerning increase in use of drones to commit crimes and being flown over sensitive facilities.
On Sunday alone, there were 49 reported sightings according to New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy.
He noted that some are likely to have been repeat reports, but he does not blame people for being frustrated.
'We don't see any concern for public safety,' Murphy said. 'Having said that, it's really frustrating that we don't have more answers as to where they're coming from and why they're doing what they're doing.'
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said they are taking the drone investigation 'deadly seriously'
Murphy said he has been in contact with the FBI and Homeland Security and encouraged people to continue to report sightings to the FBI.
He described the drones as 'very sophisticated.'
'The minute you get eyes on them, they go dark,' Murphy said.
'We're obviously most concerned about sensitive targets and sensitive critical infrastructure,' he added.
Murphy noted the military facilities, utility assets and President-elect Donald Trump's New Jersey home are all in the area.
'This is something we're taking deadly seriously,' he said.
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A mysterious drone invasion in New Jersey has sparked calls for a 'state of emergency' as officials suggested they are coming from Iranian 'mothership' offshore.
Republican Rep Jeff Van Drew said Wednesday that Iran launched the vessel 'probably about a month ago' after making a deal with China 'to purchase drones, a mothership and other technologies.'
'These drones should be shot down,' he told FOX News, adding that 'the military is on full alert with this.'
During a Tuesday congressional hearing, Sen Jon Bramnick (R) said: 'The State of New Jersey should issue a limited state of emergency banning all drones until the public receives an explanation regarding these multiple sightings.'
Rep Chris Smith (R) also spoke during the meeting, revealing a report of 50 drones coming in off the ocean and have followed US Coast Guard boats.
The representative also noted that 'it could be Putin, Xi Jinping in China or the Middle East, we cannot rule any of that out.'
Swarms of drones have been spotted in the skies of New Jersey for weeks, sparking officials to call for a 'limited state of emergency'
Mayors in 21 towns across the state have now written a joint letter to New Jersey Gov Phil Murphy calling for statewide action.
The White House also addressed the drones Tuesday evening in a briefing.
Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that President Biden is aware of the matter and 'we are closely tracking the activity,' but noted she does not know when Biden was briefed.
'I cannot make any predictions kind of predictions,' she said in response to whether the drones are controlled by foreign entities conducting surveillance.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was first alerted about the strange activity around the military base on November 18, six days after the drones were spotted.
The first video footage showed drones with green and red lights on their wings and multiple eyewitnesses described them as large as a small car.
At the hearing, Robert Wheeler, assistant FBI director, said: 'There is nothing known that would lead me to say that, but we just don’t know and that’s the concerning part.
He told Congress that more than 3,000 sightings had been provided to the agency's tip line set up last week.
Drones have been reported in 12 counties: Sussex, Passaic, Bergen, Essex, Monmouth, Ocean, Camden, Burlington, Somerset, Hunterdon, Morris and Warren.
The sightings started mid-November with footage capturing 'car-sized' drones with flashing lights
The FBI has received more than 3,000 drone sightings in the last week. Pictured is a a drone captured in Lacey
The UFOs have been spotted over water reservoirs, electric transmission lines, rail stations, police departments and other military installations.
Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella also wrote a letter to the FAA and FBI earlier this month, requesting an investigation into the drone sightings on Staten Island, PIX 11 reported.
Wheeler was questioned about whether the public was at risk, to which he responded: 'Are we concerned there are nefarious intentions that could cause either an actual security or public safety incident?
'There’s nothing that is known that would lead me to say that, but we just don’t know. And that’s the concerning part of it.'
Resident John Mastrogiovanni shared: 'They are definitely coming in from the ocean, I live on the bay and can see them every night coming in from the ocean.
The flying objects are larger than drones used by hobbyists, raising questions about their proximity to those specific locations
Officials and residents have also seen drones coming in from the ocean
'10-15 at a time. Once they hit land, some will turn their lights off and go a different direction and some are low and some high. The ones I saw are low, pretty loud, and sound like an engine on it.
'They move slowly then speed up pretty quickly it's every night. They are 4-5' in size and use green and red lights.'
Kelly Ann from Osborne Island claimed to have seen the same sightings coming from the north as she looked out to Atlantic City.
'They follow each other like they are lined up 100 feet apart,' she said.
Murphy has said that the drones do not appear to pose a public safety risk but also noted that 'this is something we´re taking deadly seriously.
New Jersey drone sighting map
'I do not blame people for being frustrated,' Murphy added.
He said Monday that the minute 'you get eyes on them, they do dark,' calling the flying craft 'very sophisticated.
Murphy held a briefing call with the US homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas on Wednesday, as well as representatives in Congress and state police to discuss the drone reports.
The House Subcommittee on counterterrorism, law Enforcement and intelligence also held a hearing on the subject.
DailyMail.com has contacted the Department of Homeland Security for comment.
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The latest footage of bizarre drones in New Jersey captured several craft orbiting each other over Somerset County, while at least 12 counties have reported sightings.
The video, released this week, shows three 'mystery drones in the air' as two move extremely close as if they are interacting with each other and the third hovered for 'about 15 minutes.'
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said Monday night that the drones are 'very sophisticated, explaining: 'The minute we get eyes on them [the drones], they go dark.'
'I don't blame people for being frustrated,' Gov Murphy continued, adding that he had spent most of Sunday coordinating on the issue with both the White House and the US Department of Homeland Security in the hope of getting answers.
On Monday, Picatinny Arsenal, the Army facility in Morris County, confirmed it has had 11 sightings of 'UFOs' over in its airspace in recent weeks.
The sightings, which began in November, have included reports of multiple craft flying over the same areas each night and reports of 'car-sized' drones, the kind not usually used by hobbyists, over some areas.
New Jersey state senator, Jon Bramnick (R-21), is now calling for a limited 'state of emergency' banning all drone usage authorities can determine who is responsible for the eerie night flights.
The latest footage coming out of New Jersey has only added more questionsl to this bizarre UFO wave. 'What in the world is happening?' the woman taping the display can be heard saying, as a pair of glowing red lights orbits comes close to a white UFO before drifting away
Edits in the 40-second video, which was also posted to Instagram, appear to reflect a montage of the event's most impactful moments. 'Update,' the videographer says in the clip's finale, 'that mystery drone up there is still there. It's been like maybe 10-15 minutes. It's still there'
'Guys, I just found three mystery drones in the air,' the woman filming the scene reports in the clip, posted to social site X.com by the account UAP Reporting Center.
'This is wild,' the woman says, as the two circling white lights disengage in midair, with one seeming to dart quickly to the right. 'That was moving quick.'
Edits in the 40-second video, which was also posted to Instagram via the account @ufo_life_, appear to reflect a montage of the event's most impactful moments.
'Update,' the videographer says in the clip's finale, 'that mystery drone up there is still there. It's been like maybe 10-15 minutes. It's still there.'
UAP Reporting Center is not affiliated with the similarly named nonprofit National UFO Reporting Center, which has coordinated on UFO case reports with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for decades.
Nevertheless, several more new videos taken in northwest NJ near the Pennsylvania border also show multi-color drone-like crafts — including one lit up like a Christmas tree with at least eight lights ranging from green, white, red and orange.
Posted by an auto tech to the Facebook community group 'New Jersey Mystery Drones - let's solve it,' the apparently fixed-wing drone was caught on tape last week above Pohatcong township in Warren County, NJ.
The witness also captured images of a stationary and hovering UFO with four bright green lights above the same northwest Jersey area.
Significantly, the fixed-wing mystery drones with red, white and green lights resemble craft witnessed over sensitive US military bases over the past several years
'I have about 15 minutes worth of different videos before I stopped recording and to my horror have counted AT LEAST 30,' the witness said in a Facebook post. 'in a complete radius approximately 10-15 miles away.'
The witness wrote that he saw at least five coming from Easton, Pennsylvania area to the northeast headed southeast towards the Flemington, NJ area.
One witness, also in the Pohatcong area, could not contain their alarm of what they were seeing late on Sunday, writing to the group: 'From the front and back yard of my house I saw dozens, maybe hundreds from my house through out the night.'
'These are not man made drones. These are huge,' the witness insisted. 'I feel like there’s nothing we can do [...] We are being watched and We are being invaded.'
'My opinion I guess but I know what I’ve been seeing,' this Pohatcong noted.
The witness's more practical description of Sunday's UFO drone swarm, included some craft 'just hovering bright white lights,' others that were 'silent and floating past,' and some that were 'very loud and look like a plane.'
The altitudes also varied, the witness said: 'There [were] lower and higher UFOs.'
Speaking at a bill-signing event in Princeton, NY, Gov Murphy hoped to allay concerns of witnesses fearing the worst from these unexplained sightings.
'Homeland Security, FBI, Secret Service, our State Police, authorities at all levels of government,' the governor said, 'we don't see any concern for public safety.'
'Having said that,' Gov Murphy admitted, 'it's really frustrating that we don't have more answers as to where they are coming from — and why they are doing what they are doing.'
'These are apparently, as I understand it, very sophisticated,' Gov Murphy said of the UFOs. 'The minute we get eyes on them [the drones], they go dark.' According to one NJ local, this above image depicts roughly nine of the drones flying in from the Atlantic Ocean on Dec 5th
Mysterious 'UFOs' spotted over Trump's New Jersey golf course
Significantly, the fixed-wing mystery drones with red, white and green lights resemble craft witnessed over sensitive US military bases over the past several years.
For at least 17 nights in December 2023, for example, swarms of noisy small UFOs were seen 'moving at rapid speeds' and displaying 'flashing red, green, and white lights' within the highly restricted airspace over Virginia's Joint Base Langley–Eustis.
Gov Murphy encouraged citizens to report their sightings to the FBI and expressed concern about the UFO drones potentially probing 'sensitive targets and sensitive critical infrastructure.'
'We've got military assets; we've got utility assets; we've got one of the president-elect's homes here,' he noted.
Murphy also asserted that reports of 'a couple of rumored downings' of the drones were unsubstantiated. One, he said, was a toy and the other was never located.
NJ state senators, the mayors of 21 local towns, and the state's representatives in Washington have been demanding more answers, more quickly.
NJ Congressman Chris Smith said he was on Long Beach Island this week investigating the mystery with Ocean County Sheriff Mike Mastronardy.
'The tepid response from our state and federal agencies so far is totally unacceptable,' Rep Smith said.
'The people of New Jersey deserve swift and bold action on the part of our state and federal agencies to investigate, assess, and address the situation immediately and to alleviate the growing concerns of our community.'
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Five UFO videos this week, are they alien, ai US drones or Chinese ai drones? UAP Sighting News.
Five UFO videos this week, are they alien, ai US drones or Chinese ai drones? UAP Sighting News.
Here are the top 5 most interesting videos of UFOs this week. Each are different, some with swarms, so watch and decide what is happening and can you predict the future outcomes of this?
I believe I may have discovered the purpose of the swarms of drones, God help us if I'm right. US Drone News.
Now I heard the swarms of drones were seen over Trumps favorite golf course for over three days and nights which makes me think...why? Who hates trump the most outside of the US? Easily one country over all does...the county he promised to put 25% taxes on all goods going out of China to US, and I believe the Chinese are behind these swarms. They must be radar resistant, which means they are plastic or 3d printed with some rubber radar resistant coating to absorb radar. They were seen over England, New York, Michigan, New Jersey and a few other locations. Read the tweet and tell me...am I wrong? Or...worse yet...am I right? If I'm right the virus could be waiting for a second drone spraying to become the catalyst of the virus, or the virus could have a built in genetic time to go off in 1 week, 1 month or even 1 years time. By then...everyone will forget about the drones. Because of a genetic timer, we cannot blame the drones, much like HAARP program that manipulates the weather and China uses it making it impossible to blame then on earthquakes (Japan-Chinas worst enemy at Fukushima), tidal waves, tornadoes, hurricanes and more. And China causes tens of billions of dollars in damage on such untraceable attacks. Ask yourself, what are the Chinese up to now?
China's Drone Show Sets Two Guinness World Records | WION
An Interstellar Visitor Helped Shape the Orbits of the Planets.
This artist’s impression illustrates an interstellar object rapidly approaching our Solar System. The object, ejected from its home planetary system long ago, traveled through interstellar space for billions of years before briefly passing through our cosmic neighborhood. Rubin Observatory will reveal many of these previously unknown interstellar visitors. Alt-Text: An artist’s impression of a small, rocky interstellar object hurtling from the upper right toward the inner Solar System. The orbits of the four inner planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars) are fully visible, drawn as teal concentric circles around the bright ball of the Sun at the center. We see the orbits from a slightly elevated angle, so that the circular paths appear oval. The black background is sprinkled with points of starlight. The interstellar object looks like an elongated potato above the Sun, streaming toward the Sun from the upper right, with a short tail of gas and dust trailing behind.
An Interstellar Visitor Helped Shape the Orbits of the Planets.
The orbits of the planets around the Sun have been the source for many a scientific debate. Their current orbital properties are well understood but the planetary orbits have evolved and changed since the formation of the Solar System. Planetary migrations have been the most prominent idea of recent decades suggesting that planetary interactions caused the young planets to migrate inwards or outwards from their original positions. Now a new theory suggests 2-50 Jupiter mass object passing through the Solar System could be the cause.
The evolution of the orbits of the planets is a complex process. Initially the planets formed out of a rotating disk of gas and dust around the young hot Sun. The phenomenon of the conservation of angular momentum caused the material to form a plane leading to orbits that were circular and in the same plane.
The latest view of Saturn from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captures exquisite details of the ring system — which looks like a phonograph record with grooves that represent detailed structure within the rings — and atmospheric details that once could only be captured by spacecraft visiting the distant world. Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 observed Saturn on June 20, 2019, as the planet made its closest approach to Earth, at about 845 million miles away. This image is the second in a yearly series of snapshots taken as part of the Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) project. OPAL is helping scientists understand the atmospheric dynamics and evolution of our solar system’s gas giant planets. In Saturn’s case, astronomers will be able to track shifting weather patterns and other changes to identify trends. Credits: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (GSFC), M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) and the OPAL Team
As the planets grew, interactions within the protoplanetary disk led to orbital migrations with planets moving inwards or outwards. There were gravitational interactions too that led to significant changes in the eccentricity and inclination, sometimes causing protoplanets to be ejected out of the solar system. Tidal forces from the Sun could also have altered the orbits.
While protoplanet ejections are thought to have been fairly common as the Solar System was forming, on occasions celestial objects visited us. These objects seem to have been rare and provide a valuable insight into distant planetary systems. Oumuamua, was discovered in 2017 and was the first confirmed interstellar visitor. It exhibited an elongated shape and unusual acceleration, probably caused by outgassing or other non-gravitational forces. A paper recently published has suggested such an interstellar visitor could have driven changes in the orbits of our planetary cousins.
An artist’s depiction of the interstellar comet ‘Oumuamua, as it warmed up in its approach to the sun and outgassed hydrogen (white mist), which slightly altered its orbit. The comet, which is most likely pancake-shaped, is the first known object other than dust grains to visit our solar system from another star. (Image credit: NASA, ESA and Joseph Olmsted and Frank Summers of STScI)
The paper was authored by a team of scientists led by Garett Brown University of Toronto. They explore the nature of the eccentricity of the gas giants suggesting it is unlikely the current theories can explain observations. Instead they demonstrate that an object with between 2 to 50 times the mass of Jupiter passing through the Solar System was a more likely cause. Their paper explains that an object passing through with a perihelion distance (closest distance from Sun) of less than 20 astronomical units and a hyperbolic excess velocity less than 6km/s-1 could explain observations.
Their calculations suggest there is a 1 in 100 chance that an interstellar visitor could produce the orbits we see today, chances that are far better than other theories. Using simulations and approximate values for the properties of the visitor, the team conclude that the theory is the most plausible to date.
Bill Cooper’s 1966 UFO Sighting: A Mind-Blowing Encounter with a Metallic Disc
Bill Cooper’s 1966 UFO Sighting: A Mind-Blowing Encounter with a Metallic Disc
Milton William “Bill” Cooper, a former U.S. Air Force and Navy serviceman, is renowned for his contributions to UFO lore and conspiracy theories. Among his most fascinating claims is his personal encounter with an unidentified flying object (UFO) or unidentified submerged object (USO) in 1966. This experience, as Cooper described it, was both life-changing and a pivotal moment in his understanding of extraterrestrial phenomena.
Bill Cooper talks about his sighting of a huge metallic UFO / USO going in & out of the water, 1966
From Skepticism to Belief
Before his encounter, Bill Cooper was a skeptic. During his time in the Air Force, he heard stories from seasoned servicemen about recovering crashed UFOs. However, these accounts were often shared under the influence of alcohol, leading Cooper to dismiss them as tall tales. He viewed the concept of UFOs as too far-fetched to take seriously—until he had his own experience that radically shifted his perspective.
The Sighting: A Metallic Disc Emerges from the Ocean
In 1966, while serving aboard the USS Tiru, a diesel-electric submarine, Cooper was acting as the port lookout during a transit near the Seattle-Portland area. It was during this routine duty that he witnessed an extraordinary event. A massive metallic disc, comparable in size to a Midway-class aircraft carrier, emerged from the ocean. The craft ascended into the air, tumbling on its axis before disappearing into the clouds.
Shortly after, the same craft—or a similar one—descended from the sky, repeated the tumbling maneuver, and re-entered the ocean. To Cooper’s astonishment, the water seemed to part seamlessly, allowing the craft to submerge without the violent splash one would expect. The water then closed behind it, creating a dramatic spray as it returned to normal.
Unbelievable Technology
The encounter left Cooper grappling with questions about the nature of the craft and its advanced technology. He noted its ability to seamlessly transition between air and water, perform high-speed maneuvers, and interact with the ocean in ways that defied known laws of physics. Cooper, who had experience with cutting-edge aviation technology and naval operations, recognized that no human-made craft at the time was capable of such feats.
The sighting was observed by multiple crew members, including the officer of the deck and another lookout. A chief quartermaster on board even took photographs of the event. Despite these corroborations, the nature of the craft remained a mystery.
Official Silence and a Culture of Secrecy
After the incident, the submarine docked at Pearl Harbor, where the crew was immediately debriefed by a commander from Naval Intelligence. Each crew member was instructed to maintain complete silence about what they had witnessed, under penalty of severe legal and financial consequences. They were warned that any discussion of the event could result in imprisonment, fines, and the loss of all pay and allowances.
The photographs taken during the sighting were confiscated, and the crew was not allowed to leave the submarine for shore leave. These measures underscored the seriousness with which the U.S. Navy handled the incident and reinforced Cooper’s belief in an active cover-up regarding UFOs and USOs.
A Turning Point in Belief
For Cooper, this encounter was transformative. It provided him with undeniable evidence of advanced technology that surpassed human capabilities and confirmed the existence of phenomena the military was actively suppressing. He later recounted this event as a key moment in his journey toward understanding the broader implications of extraterrestrial presence on Earth.
Legacy of the 1966 Sighting
Bill Cooper’s 1966 sighting is one of the most detailed and intriguing accounts in the annals of UFO and USO lore. His vivid descriptions of the craft and its movements offer a unique perspective on the capabilities of unidentified objects. Although the event remains shrouded in secrecy, it has fueled ongoing discussions about the possibility of extraterrestrial technology and the lengths governments might go to conceal it.
While skeptics question the validity of Cooper’s claims due to the lack of physical evidence, the story has become a cornerstone of UFO mythology. Cooper’s firsthand account not only highlights the mysteries of our universe but also the potential for human understanding to be challenged by encounters with the unknown.
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The family of Morris County locals said they were following one of these seemingly terrestrial UFOs in their vehicle, only to experience the odd effect on their car's electronics as the unexplained craft 'hovered above them.'
'The clock in their car changed time,' according to one Fox News reporter who spoke to the unnamed family. 'They say the clock went back to normal after they drove off.'
While local law enforcement in Morris County has issued a statement asserting that 'there is no known threat to public safety' at this time — the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has issued a ban on drone flights over sensitive areas in state.
Last Tuesday, the FBI described the sightings as only 'possible drones' and 'a possible fixed wing aircraft' in its efforts to get to the bottom of the night flights.
But residents within the eight-and-counting New Jersey counties where the strange craft have been sighted are also taking matters into their own hands with over 17,000 trading notes on the sightings in a dedicated Facebook group.
One local software engineer, who specializes in radio communications, believes the temporary alteration of the car's clock is a clue to the origin of these mystery drones.
'Many newer cars get their clock time from GPS satellites since that's one of the most accurate time signals you're going to get in a vehicle,' the engineer, Rich Dunajewski, posted to the Facebook group.
'If these are using GPS jamming or spoofing,' Dunajewski explained, 'then it's plausible the car would follow the signal and change the clock to match whatever signal is coming from the drone/plane.'
The flying objects are larger than drones used by hobbyists, raising questions about their proximity to specific locations - including to President-elect Donald Trump 's Bedminster golf course, US military research facility Picatinny Arsenal and critical infrastructure, police said
Residents within the eight-and-counting New Jersey counties where the strange craft have been sighted are also taking matters into their own hands with over 17,000 trading notes on the sightings in a dedicated Facebook group
'So don't think aliens,' the engineer continued, 'think foreign actors using electronic warfare methods.'
Dunajewski noted that GPS spoofing onboard these mysterious aircraft would also explain the car clock's return to normal time.
'Once you're out of range of the spoofed GPS signal, the clock will reacquire the real GPS signal with the correct time,' he said in his Facebook post.
While some locals are not buying it, with one saying, 'We need to accept that these are not just "drones," these are UFO/UAP,' other experts did agree with Dunajewski.
A contractor with the FAA's Office of Communications, David Lombardo, cosigned the 'radar jamming or GPS spoofing' theory, writing: 'It's very likely that these drones have some sort of electronic interference capabilities.'
While Lombardo said he did not believe that 'the FBI wouldn't get involved if a bunch of drones were just pissing people off,' the FAA contractor also confessed that he currently saw no evidence actual law-breaking yet.
'Nothing that these drones have done appears to be criminal or really against any rules, so far as I know. I mean, they're being weird... there's no crime in being weird.'
But retired police lieutenant Tim McMillan argued that the drones fit a pattern of Russian psychological warfare operations internationally.
Lt McMillan reported that both the mysterious drone flights over New Jersey mirror a 2022 incident in which drones flew over sensitive sites in Sweden just as the European nation was considering joining NATO.
'This recent drone wave is likely in response to the West green lighting Ukraine to use ATACMS inside Russia,' the retired police investigator posted to X.
One of the UFO drones, whose engines can be heard roaring from the ground, appeared to have a cluster of white lights on its underbelly with red lights blinking at its wingtips and tail (above)
'Seems like they want them to be seen,' NJ native and TikTok creator @_bucky13 commented under his phone footage of the eerie drones (still image above), captioned 'Mysterious drones spotted all over New Jersey.' At least five drone-like UFOs are seen in his 50-second clip
Neither Moscow, nor local amateur drone pilots, nor any other actors terrestrial or extraterrestrial, has claimed credit for the unusual flights over New Jersey, however.
If proven to be a covert invasion of sorts, it would the first in this part of the Garden State since British troops sparred with American colonists over 240 years ago.
'I grew up in Morris County,' one local resident posted on X, 'and this is the most exciting event since the Revolutionary War.'
'Anyone wonder why New Jersey?' another resident asked. 'That in itself is a mystery. Why not another State?'
The anonymous family who reported their car clock's reaction to this eerie and unexplained aircraft were just some of the new witnesses to speak to Fox News about this ongoing wave of UFO sightings.
One eyewitness told the network that they saw a 'parade' of the drones, some as big as compact cars, roaring over the sky in procession.
'The drones just keep coming,' another witness said, 'one after another.'
While the FAA has taken the most direct action suggesting malicious intent, prohibiting drone flights over Trump's golf club until last Friday and above Picatinny Arsenal until December 26, other officials have been more cautious in their language.
According to one NJ local, this image depicts roughly nine of the unidentified drones flying in to the Garden State from the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday night, December 5
One UFO or drone in a recent Tik Tok video looks like it might have hovered stationary beyond the tree line, lit up with multiple lights that pulsed bright enough to produce a lens flare effect
Law enforcement officials in Morris and Somerset counties issued a joint statement describing the extent of their collaboration on this ongoing investigation.
'The subject County Prosecutor's, Sheriff's and Emergency Management Offices, our respective municipal police departments, working in close cooperation with the FBI-Newark, the New Jersey State Police and The New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness, seek to reassure the public that we will continue to monitor and investigate the drone activity,' the two county's Sheriff's Offices said.
Post to social media site X, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy echoed similar words to calm the public.
'I convened a briefing with [Biden's Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas] @SecMayorkas, senior officials from [the Department of Homeland Security] @DHSgov ... and members of our congressional delegation to discuss reported drone activity over parts of North and Central New Jersey,' he wrote.
'There is no known threat to the public at this time,' the governor said.
Nevertheless, New Jersey residents have been encouraged to report any sightings, videos or photos they may have of the UFO drone flights to the FBI, via phone at 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324) or online via tips@fbi.gov.
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NASA's most powerful telescope has spotted something unexpected which could overturn our basic assumptions about the universe.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists from Johns Hopkins University have taken extremely accurate measurements of the distances between galaxies.
These observations reveal that the universe is expanding eight to 12 per cent faster than our current best theories predict.
This suggests that there may be some unknown force which explains why the universe is expanding faster now than it was billions of years ago.
First spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1998, it was previously possible that this acceleration was caused by nothing more unusual than a telescope error.
However, using two years of JWST observations, the researchers have now shown that Hubble's shocking findings were not mistaken.
According to lead author and Nobel laureate Professor Adam Riess, this shows that our understanding of the birth of the universe could be totally wrong.
He says: 'It confirms the puzzling finding from the Hubble Space Telescope that we have been wrestling with for a decade - the universe is now expanding faster than our best theories can explain.'
Scientists have used the James Webb Space Telescope to confirm that the Universe really is accelerating up to 12 per cent faster than our best theories would suggest. Illustrated: the expansion of the Universe from the Big Bang (left) to the present day (right)
Scientists measured the distance between distant galaxies containing pulsing stars called Cepheid variables. Since these flash at a rate proportional to their brightness, they are considered the 'gold standard' for measuring interstellar distances. Pictured: NGC 5468, a galaxy located about 130 million light-years from Earth which is the furthest galaxy observed to contain Cepheid variables
Professor Riess initially used the Hubble Space Telescope to measure the distance between a set of different galaxies.
This revealed that the Universe's expansion was accelerating at a rate of 72.8 km per second per megaparsec, a distance equal to 3.26 million light-years.
What made this result so surprising is that the conventional wisdom about the evolution of the Universe suggested this figure should only be 67-68 km/s/Mpc.
This had the shocking implication that the standard model of cosmology might be missing out on something vitally important, creating what astronomers call the 'Hubble tension'.
More than 25 years later, Professor Riess has now used NASA's biggest and highest-performing telescope to prove that his Nobel Prize-winning discovery had not been an error.
Using the JWST Reiss and his co-authors focussed on a set of galaxies containing pulsing stars called Cepheid variables.
These unique stars flash at a rate which is proportional to their brightness, or luminosity, which makes them the 'gold standard' for measuring interstellar distances.
Using the well-studied galaxy NGC 4258 as a reference point, the study covered a third of the Hubble Telescope's original galaxy sample.
The new study covered roughly a third of Hubble's full galaxy sample, using the known distance to a galaxy called NGC 4258 (pictured) as a reference point. This allowed for extremely accurate measurements of the distance between galaxies
The first observations made by Hubble in 1998 showed that the galaxy's expansion was accelerating faster than the standard model would suggest. The standard model is the theory which explains the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background (pictured), and the early formation of galaxies
What is the standard model of cosmology?
The standard model of cosmology is the conventional wisdom about the underlying physics of the universe.
Often called the Lambda-CDM theory, this suggests the universe has three major components: matter, dark matter, and dark energy.
This explains the existence and pattern of the cosmic microwave background, the lingering echo of the Big Bang, and the distribution of galaxies.
However, it doesn't align with new observations of the Universe's rapidly accelerating expansion.
Although the sample size was smaller, the team managed to take measurements about four times as precise as the previous study.
In addition to Cepheid variables, the researchers also took measurements from carbon-rich stars and the brightest red supergiants across the same galaxies.
This allowed them to further cross-check their results to be absolutely certain their measurements were correct.
Spiral galaxy NGC 628, located 32 million light-years away from Earth, is seen in an undated image from the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Janice Lee (STScI), Thomas Williams (Oxford), and the PHANGS team/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
These new recordings revealed that the galaxies were accelerating away from each other at a rate of 72.6 km/s/Mpc - nearly identical to Hubble's measurements from the very same galaxies.
Professor Riess says: 'The discrepancy between the observed expansion rate of the universe and the predictions of the standard model suggests that our understanding of the universe may be incomplete.
'With two NASA flagship telescopes now confirming each other’s findings, we must take this [Hubble tension] problem very seriously—it’s a challenge but also an incredible opportunity to learn more about our universe.'
This implies that we might be missing something vitally important about the birth of the universe.
Siyang Li, a Johns Hopkins doctoral student and a study co-author says: 'The Webb results can be interpreted to suggest there may be a need to revise our model of the universe, although it is very difficult to pinpoint what this is at the moment.'
By measuring the same set of galaxies as Hubble (illustrated), the scientists confirmed that the universe was accelerating at a rate of 72.6 km per second per megaparsec, a distance equal to 3.26 million light-years. The standard model suggests an acceleration of just 67-68 km/s/Mpc
The standard model explains the evolution of galaxies, the cosmic microwave background from the Big Bang, the abundance of chemical elements in the universe, and many other key observations based on the known laws of physics.
However, nothing that scientists have been able to observe explains why the Universe should be accelerating at such a rapid rate.
Scientists believe the regular matter we can see and interact with makes up just 4 per cent of the total universe.
The remaining 96 per cent of the universe is made up of dark matter, which makes up the missing mass in some galaxies, and dark energy.
Dark energy could make up as much as 69 per cent of the universe and might provide the force responsible for space's expansion.
However, with the nature of dark energy remaining a mystery, scientists are still no closer to resolving the Hubble tension than they were back in 1998.
Professor Reiss says: 'Yes, it appears there is something missing in our understanding of the universe.
'Our understanding of the universe contains a lot of ignorance about two elements - dark matter and dark energy.
By combing observations from the JWST (left) and the Hubble Space Telescope (right), scientists have shown that there may be something missing from our best theories about the universe
'There are many hypotheses that involve dark matter, dark energy, dark radiation - for example, neutrinos (a type of ghostly subatomic particle) - or gravity itself having some exotic properties as possible explanations.'
In the future, Professor Reiss says scientists will need more observations to better understand this vital clue.
Eventually, that might help scientists propose a theory which explains why our predictions and observations about the universe don't line up.
He adds: 'Is the mismatch at the lower end, four to five per cent, or the higher end, 10 to 12 per cent, of what the current data allows? Over what range of cosmic time is it present? These will further inform ideas.'
Dark energy is a phrase used by physicists to describe a mysterious 'something' that is causing unusual things to happen in the universe.
The universe is full of matter and the attractive force of gravity pulls all matter together.
Then came 1998 and the Hubble Space Telescope observations of very distant supernovae that showed that, a long time ago, the universe was actually expanding more slowly than it is today.
The universe is not only expanding, but it is expanding faster and faster as time goes by,' Dr Kathy Romer, scientist at the Dark Energy Survey told MailOnline, as illustrated in this Nasa graphic
So the expansion of the universe has not been slowing due to gravity, as everyone thought, it has been accelerating.
No one expected this, no one knew how to explain it. But something was causing it.
'The universe is not only expanding, but it is expanding faster and faster as time goes by,' Dr Kathy Romer, scientist at the Dark Energy Survey told MailOnline.
'What we'd expect is that the expansion would get slower and slower as time goes by, because it has been nearly 14 billion years since the Big Bang.'
This illustration depicts NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope – the largest, most powerful, and most complex space science telescope ever built – fully unfolded in space.
(Credits: NASA/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez)
Depiction of Hubble Telescope in bright outer space. Elements of this image furnished by NASA.
The black-and-white images show ornately spiked 'cruciform' UFOs, boomerang-shaped flying wings, a floating 'hot' cube, traditional flying saucers and several other craft that look straight out of classic science fiction.
The screengrabs are said to be from infrared and thermal camera footage taken by military 'heads up displays,' but details were redacted to protect both sensitive US national security interests.
These unsettling depictions of highly varied craft were first made public by Nathan Latvaitis, who runs a YouTube channel called 'Strange Mysteries.'
'This person has asked me to redact their email address,' Latvaitis told his followers, 'although I can tell you that there is nothing identifiable in it.'
The sensational images have elicited heated debate among UFO believers and skeptics alike, however, with many on both sides questioning the leaker's story.
A 'creepy e-mail' containing weird, but compelling images allegedly from US military UFO sightings has been leaked by an anonymous source claiming classified access
The UFO stills are said to be screengrabs from infrared and thermal camera footage taken by US military sensors with key 'heads up display' details redacted (as seen above) to protect both sensitive America's national security interests as well as the leaker's identity
Over the course of two weeks of correspondence with the leaker, Latvaitis and his followers given tantalizing, but uncorroborated details on the craft depicted.
'The UAPs observed demonstrate capabilities far beyond conventional aerospace benchmarks,' the leaker said in a third update posted to YouTube on November 30th.
The so-called 'cruciform' (cross-shaped) entities, according to their account, exhibit aggressive maneuvers and high-energy emissions capable of disabling systems such as the EODAS' — a reference to the advanced sensors on the F-35 stealth fighter jet.
Short for 'Electro-Optical Distributed Aperture System,' EODAS is a sensor suite that give the F-35's stealth fighter pilots a 360-degree view for a 'quick, high-definition picture of everything around them,' according its manufacturer Raytheon.
Improved 'missile detection' is one key goal in making EODAS, even though it may prove helpless against these purported 'cruciform' UFOs.
'The 'cruciform' entity [shows] distinct behaviors indicating functional differences,' according to the self-described insider to the Immaculate Constellation program.
'Shape-shifting has been observed — possibly due to advanced cloaking or optical refraction — referred to as 'morphogenic behavior,' allowing for adaptation to environments or missions,' the leaker continued.
Details were scarce on some other craft shapes, though the leaker noted nearly all 'these crafts,' like the boomerang UFOs, squares, and classic saucers 'demonstrate trans-medium travel, non-ballistic motion, and localized gravity manipulation.'
Above, an ornately spiked 'cruciform' UFO, allegedly captured by a US military plane
The stunning, unusual images show ornately spiked 'cruciform' UFOs, boomerang-shaped flying wings, a floating 'hot' cube and several craft that looks straight out of science fiction
Above, another cruciform (cross-shaped) UFO from the leaker's email to Strange Mysteries
While many of these UFOs emit electromagnetic 'signatures that disrupt ISR [intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance] systems causing sensor malfunctions' on human-made systems, they said, one broad category was less disruptive.
''Orb'-class UAPs focus on surveillance with minimal EMF [electro-magnetic frequency] interference,' according to the leaker.
Speaking to NASA last year, ex-CIA physicist Dr Sean Kirkpatrick, then head of the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), said: 'We see these ['metallic orbs'] all over the world.'
Dr Kirkpatrick, a career laser and optical physicist, called these orbs the most commonly reported type of UFO to AARO's team.
'And we see these making very interesting apparent maneuvers,' he added.
But 'cruciform' UFO shapes were not called out by name in his report to NASA, which did note that seven percent of sightings fell into miscellaneous 'other' shapes.
In his email to Latvaitis, the leaker asserted that he selected the YouTuber over more mainstream journalism outlets specifically to avoid having to verify his own claims.
'Many traditional media outlets would require verification of my identity and credentials,' the leaker told Latvaitis in his email, shown in a Strange Mysteries video.
Dr. Kirkpatrick describes UAP observed in Middle East
Above a boomerang UFO included in the leaker's email to Strange Mysteries
Two cross-shaped UFOs as alleged by the leaker, in the crosshairs of a military aircraft
'This is not feasible due to the risks involved,' the leaked explained. '[Those news media] organizations, despite their best intentions, are not equipped to handle the level of secrecy and potential retaliation associated with this information.'
The leaker described their motives as desire to inform on important information that has been 'classified and intentionally withheld from the public regarding 'unidentified aerial phenomena' [UAP] and the ongoing covert operations surrounding them.'
'I was part of one of the legacy programs,' the leaker wrote. 'I know that's vague, but unfortunately that's all I can offer at this point.'
Multiple UFO 'true believers' on social media expressed doubt over the leakers story, particularly the unknown individuals response to that skepticism.
One UFO has been dubbed the ceiling fan, in part, by skeptics who believe that the image depicts a genuine household ceiling fan - and not a five-bladed advanced aerospace platform
Above, a strange 'hot cube' UFO image included in the leaker's email to Strange Mysteries
The mixed orientation of some images suggested 'they were probably scanned from a print out,' and the images varied in terms of their 'detailed sensor noise' and subtle software response to motion blur.
'In my opinion, this has the variety I would expect to see from a collection of images captured on different platforms over the years,' the user posted to Reddit's r/UFOs.
On the skeptics' forum Metabunk many dismissed the videos as too low information to properly vet or investigate, with some claiming it might have been release as a premeditated disinformation effort.
'Not worth wasting time on unless they can (and do!) back up their story,' one typical comment read.
'It takes seconds to make another picture and hours to try and debunk it.'
The 'Immaculate Constellation' program was discussed at a Congressional hearing about UAPs in mid-November 2024 and shortly after, Representative Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) made the 11-page document available to the public. Above a still from the alleged new leak
Michael Shellenberger, journalist and sworn witness at the hearing, told the House that Immaculate Constellation has thousands of 'high-resolution' images of UFOs (second at right)
But whistleblowers continue to claim that 'Immaculate Constellation' was, in fact, established to 'detect' and 'quarantine' the military's best UFO imagery, as well as its best videos, eyewitness testimonies and electronic sensor evidence.
This high quality, multi-sensor UFO data, according to a US official who confirmed the leak, is so tightly held that 'talking about it will put you in the danger zone.'
The quite literally 'above top secret' program allegedly sprang into action in the wake of the 2017 leak of three, still-as-yet unexplained US Navy infrared UFO videos, although it is still unconfirmed, resting the gray area of speculation.
The program was discussed at a Congressional hearing about UAPs in mid-November and shortly after, Representative Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) made the 11-page document available to the public.
Michael Shellenberger, journalist and sworn witness at the hearing, told the House that Immaculate Constellation has thousands of 'high-resolution' images of UFOs.
Above, two additional alleged UFO images that the leaker to Strange Mysteries said came from Immaculate Constellation
In one stunning case, detailed in the 11-page report, infrared satellites captured a massive saucer-shaped UFO emerging from within a dense cloud formation.
The saucer's circumference was estimated to be between 650 and 1,300 feet, which would place its diameter between roughly 200 and 400 feet.
It also 'displayed symmetrical concavities on the upper surface,' the report reads.
The saucer registered hot in the infrared footage, and created visible 'atmospheric disturbances.'
The object emerged from the cloud formation at a shallow angle and travelled upwards toward the outer atmosphere.
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.
!['These are apparently, as I understand it, very sophisticated,' Gov Murphy said of the UFOs. 'The minute we get eyes on them [the drones], they go dark.' According to one NJ local, this above image depicts roughly nine of the drones flying in from the Atlantic Ocean on Dec 5th](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/10/17/92881925-14178089-According_to_one_NJ_local_this_image_depicts_roughly_nine_of_the-a-8_1733851641609.jpg)
