Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS NEARLY 13 YEARS AND 4 MONTH.
ON /30/09/2024 MORE THAN 2.230.520
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
31-07-2018
Ze vlogen razendsnel voorbij! Zwerm onbekende objecten vastgelegd boven Amsterdam tijdens maansverduistering
Ze vlogen razendsnel voorbij! Zwerm onbekende objecten vastgelegd boven Amsterdam tijdens maansverduistering
Tijdens de maansverduistering zijn boven Amsterdam een aantal onverklaarbare blauwe lichten in de lucht gezien. Uit verschillende delen van de stad kwamen meldingen binnen.
“Rond half 11 ’s avonds zag ik een grote formatie lichten, soort van sterren, snel door de lucht vliegen,” zei Tim, die op dat moment in Amsterdam-Oost naar de bloedmaan stond te kijken.
“Het was een heel indrukwekkend verschijnsel wat moeilijk te verklaren was,” voegde hij toe.
Te snel
“Het konden geen wensballonnen zijn omdat ze te snel bewogen,” aldus Tim. “Ze veranderden tijdens de vlucht van formatie.”
Op de website van UFO Meldpunt Nederland maakte hij melding van de lichten, waarna hij reacties kreeg van andere Amsterdammers die hetzelfde hadden gezien.
“Ik zag ze ook in Noord,” schreef Zeola. “Ik rende naar binnen om mijn kind te halen en die zag ze ook. Ze vlogen razendsnel!”
Ik dacht dat ik gek werd
“Ook gezien, ik dacht dat ik gek werd,” reageerde Lisa. “Ik heb ook nooit eerder op een site als deze gezeten. Ik was zo gefrustreerd dat ik [hierover] niks las op het internet. Blij dat ik niet de enige ben!”
Sterrenkundige Lucas Ellerbroek dacht dat het satellieten waren, terwijl iemand anders erop wees dat bij een trouwerij ballonnen met lichtjes waren opgelaten.
Most Russians believe NASA’s lunar missions were fake
Most Russians believe NASA’s lunar missions were fake
Over a half of all Russians believe that US astronauts have never been on the Moon and that the US authorities and NASA covered up this fact by forging proof of moon landings, a new poll shows.
In the recent survey titled “Science and society: authority and trust” experts of the Russian state-run public opinion research center VTSIOM wrote that 57 percent of Russians currently think that the US claims of successful manned Moon missions are lies and that the documented proof of these missions was forged. Only 24 percent of respondents said that they believed that the manned Moon missions were real.
Researchers also specified that 65 percent of those who think that the US authorities are lying about the moon landings have secondary education.
However, Russians are not only suspicious about the NASA moon missions. 59 percent of the poll participants share the opinion that “scientists conceal the truth from common people.” Even among Russians with higher education the proportion was extremely high – at 45 percent.
When facing the question if the scientists possessed some “objective knowledge” about the reality the Russian public again split into almost equal parts: 42 percent agreed that this was true while 41 percent said that in their opinion the scientists who claimed this weren’t telling the truth, albeit in good faith.
In the same poll, three percent of Russians said that they personally supported the flat Earth theory. 93 percent said that they shared the traditional opinion of Earth being a ball-shaped planet and four percent found it too difficult to answer the question.
As far as space aliens are concerned, 45 percent of the poll participants said that they believed in the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and 42 percent think that aliens either don’t exist or for some reason prefer not to visit Earth and contact humans. 18 percent of respondents said that in their opinion the authorities were hiding proof of alien visits from the general public.
Russen geloven niet dat we op de maan zijn geweest. Bekijk de verrassende uitkomsten van deze peiling
Russen geloven niet dat we op de maan zijn geweest. Bekijk de verrassende uitkomsten van deze peiling
Meer dan de helft van de Russen is van mening dat Amerikaanse astronauten nooit op de maan zijn geweest en dat de Amerikaanse overheid en de NASA de maanlandingen in scène hebben gezet. Dat blijkt uit een nieuwe peiling.
Uit onderzoek van de Russische opiniepeiler VTsIOM blijkt dat 57 procent van de Russen denkt dat de succesvolle Amerikaanse maanmissies berusten op leugens en dat het bewijs voor deze missies is vervalst.
Minder dan een kwart (24 procent) gelooft dat we echt op de maan zijn geland.
Waarheid verborgen houden
De Russische bevolking is niet alleen sceptisch over de maanmissies. Bijna twee derde (59 procent) stelt dat ‘wetenschappers de waarheid verborgen houden voor het volk’.
Opvallend is dat ook bijna de helft (45 procent) van de hoogopgeleiden deze mening is toegedaan.
Op de vraag of wetenschappers objectieve kennis hebben over de realiteit, antwoordde 41 procent ontkennend. Dit deel zei dat de wetenschappers niet de waarheid vertellen.
Buitenaardse beschavingen
Drie procent van de Russen gelooft in de platte aarde-theorie, terwijl 93 procent zei dat aarde bolvormig is.
Er werden ook vragen gesteld over ruimtewezens. Bijna de helft van de ondervraagden (45 procent) zei te geloven in het bestaan van buitenaardse beschavingen.
Bewijs voor buitenaards bezoek
42 procent zei te denken dat aliens niet bestaan of om de één of andere reden geen contact willen maken met mensen of de aarde niet willen bezoeken.
Bijna een vijfde (18 procent) zei dat de overheid bewijs voor buitenaards bezoek achterhoudt voor de bevolking.
The Great Pyramid of Giza remains one of the world’s most enduring sources of mystery. For thousands of years, the Great Pyramid has stood in the desert of what is now El Giza, Egypt to serve as a monument to the ingenuity and technical prowess of its builders. After its construction, the Great Pyramid bore the distinction of the world’s tallest man-made structure for close to 4,000 years. Not bad for an oversized mortuary.
One of the reasons the pyramids remain mysterious is the fact that there is still significant disagreement over how the pyramids could have been constructed with the materials and methods available at the time. Aside from the mystery over how the pyramids at Giza were built, there is the longstanding suspicion that the pyramids might have some unknown purpose or function which has been lost to history. Hidden structures and voids continue to be discovered within the pyramids, leading some to speculate that perhaps the pyramids still might contain more than meets the eye despite the countless research projects and excavations conducted on them over the years.
To build on that speculation, a new study conducted by an international team of physicists has concluded that the chambers inside the Great Pyramid might actually be capable of capturing and focusing electromagnetic energy. According to the authors, their research has “revealed that the Pyramid’s chambers can collect and concentrate electromagnetic energy for the both surrounding conditions” and “shown that basically the Pyramid scatters the electromagnetic waves and focuses them.” The study has been published in the Journal of Applied Physics.
While this study sounds like it might hint at further high strangeness surrounding the ancient Egyptians, researchers found that only electromagnetic radiation within a specific, narrow wavelength has the ability to resonate within the Pyramid. Furthermore, this discovery is purely theoretical, having been discovered through the use of advanced simulations. As scientific supervisor and coordinator of the research Dr. Andrey Evlyukhin points out in a press release, “due to the lack of information about the physical properties of the pyramid, we had to use some assumptions.” Still, he notes that “with these assumptions made, we obtained interesting results that can find important practical applications.”
It remains unknown if the ancient Egyptians who built the Great Pyramid were aware of this unique feature – or even if they knew what electromagnetic radiation was at all. While theories alleging the ancient Egyptians possessed technology or scientific knowledge far more advanced than what we know are often thrown around, we’ve yet to discover any concrete evidence supporting such claims. Could it be possible that ancient cultures possessed technology as advanced or even more advanced than our own? Who knows what we might find in the ground if we dig deep enough.
All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.
The world around us is not as it appears to be. In fact, far from it. As we go about our daily business, working, and living our lives, behind the scenes something dark and dangerous is taking place. And it has been going on since the dawn of civilization. Most people remain oblivious to the truth and don’t even realize it. Now and again, however, someone will stumble upon the startling reality that, potentially, affects and dictates the lives of just about all of us. What am I talking about?
Nothing less than a monstrous collection of supernatural entities that terrify and torment us, and have done so for millennia. They do far more than that, however: they feed upon us. Like bloated, paranormal leeches, they suck us dry as they seek to fuel themselves with our psychic energy, high states of emotion, sexual energy, and the human life-force. They hate and despise us, but, paradoxically, they cannot live without us.
Have you ever woken up, drained and utterly exhausted, from a terrifying nightmare that didn’t seem like just another, regular dream? If the answer is “Yes,” then you may have been “fed” upon by these infernal things. When we sleep, we are at our most vulnerable. And that’s exactly how they want us. A dream is not always a dream, as strange as that might sound. Sometimes it’s an indication that, as you sleep, and as your guard is down, these voraciously hungry monsters are, in essence, eating you.
Among these creatures are the Shadow People: hostile things that typically manifest between 1:00 A.M. and 4:00 A.M. and who have the ability paralyze us and drain our bodies of energy in much the same way that the vampires of folklore would drain people of blood. In fact, and as the book shows, such distorted tales of vampirism almost certainly had their origins in the worlds, and actions, of these multi-dimensional things.
In a paper prepared for me a few years ago, Jason Offutt wrote, in part: “Like the Men in Black, the Hat Man has floated in the periphery of our lives for decades, observing our movements, occasionally interacting with us, but always threatening. Charles was 13 years old in 1949 and lived with his mother, brother and grandmother in San Jose, California, when the Hat Man crept into his life. He lay in bed with his brother, talking before they drifted off to sleep, when the window sash moved. ‘A dark figure dressed in a black cloak and wearing a black hat with a wide brim appeared in the window,’ Charles said. ‘No facial features were discernible on this person, but I took it to be a man.’ This Hat Man opened the window and reached through with both hands. ‘I thought he was going to climb in,’ Charles said. ‘At that moment I started yelling my head off.’ As Charles’s young voice pierced the night, the Hat Man closed the window, turned and disappeared from sight. The next morning, Charles saw the window was locked from the inside. ‘I saw something,’ Charles said. ‘What in the hell was it?'”
Equally dangerous are what can accurately be termed supernatural seducers: dangerous entities that thrive on sexual energy are also part of the equation. A highly-charged, sexual dream may be deliberately initiated by such things, which, over the centuries, have been referred to as Incubus, Succubus, Lilith, and the Old Hag. Also relevant to this angle is the reason why so many supernatural encounters occur at so-called “Lovers Lane” locations. In these cases, voyeurism and sexual emotion lead to feeding. Indeed, at such Lovers Lane’s we can find numerous encounters with the likes off Bigfoot, Mothman, Goat-Men, and aliens.
Poltergeists – violent entities that can cause chaos in the home and who delight in tormenting us as much as they are energized by us – are also part of the equation, as are thought-forms and Tulpas; creatures created within the human mind and the depths of our imaginations, but which can be externalized and given a strange form of life in the real world. Key to the survival of Tulpas and thought-forms is that we believe in them. The stronger our belief, the greater the ability of the Tulpas to live. In other words, they feed on – and coldly and carefully nurture – our belief-systems.
Then, there is the Slenderman: a sinister figure which started out as an Internet experiment, but which has mutated drastically in the last few years, to the extent that numerous people report having seen the Slenderman in the real world. It’s a perfect example of a modern day Tulpa / thought-form running wild in our reality. Witnesses describe seeing the scrawny, black-suited figure looming over their beds in the dead of night, extracting energy and dining in a fashion that we don’t even want to think about.
The Men in Black fall into this category, too: those who have had UFO encounters and who have been visited by the pale-faced ghouls known as the MIB state that while being threatened and intimidated by the Men in Black they have felt cold, clammy, weak, and light-headed. As many of the unfortunate witnesses have stated, it’s as if the MIB are draining them in the same way that a flashlight drains a battery. And, using the same analogy, when the light finally goes out, we do, too. To slightly alter the words of Charles Fort: The stark and terrifying truth is that our planet may well be one big farm. And, for these energy-based entities, we are the cattle.
Something BIG spotted traveling through Solar System going behind Jupiter!
Something BIG spotted traveling through Solar System going behind Jupiter!
A sky watcher has captured an unknown object traveling through our solar system and going behind Jupiter.
It is difficult to say whether it is a huge alien spacecraft or something else, like a meteor, asteroid or eventually a satellite speeding through our solar system.
MrMB333 talks about Jupiter but is it really Jupiter or could it be another planet, anyway an interesting footage and if you look closely, it looks like the object has even disturbed the planet.
Ancient monuments deep under water. A once-thriving metropolis now half a mile under the sea. Lost cities submerged for thousands of years. All over the world, there are sunken cities.
There are more than 200 known sunken cities in the Mediterranean alone. What we’re looking at are the remains of cities at a time when mainstream archaeology tells us there were no cities, uh, anywhere in the world.
Are underwater monuments examples of mankind’s earliest civilizations?
Or is there evidence of skills far beyond that of primitive man? And if so, where did it come from?
The native legends are very clear that something or someone landed, and then, knowledge, all of a sudden, spread. There are many, many legends with lights coming from under the water.
You start to get the idea that there’s some kind of ancient alien underwater base Millions of people around the world believe we have been visited in the past by extraterrestrial beings. What if it were true? Did ancient aliens really help to shape our history? If so, what evidence lies deep underwater? Covering more than oceans are a vast and largely unexplored mystery.
For most of recorded history, mankind could only guess at what lay beneath the ocean’s surface. But new technologies are reaching new depths.
Researchers around the world are finding the unexpected underwater complexes and sophisticated monuments that defy the conventional historical record.
There are remains of urban civilizations on parts of the Earth that were exposed on land 10,000 and more years ago. Possible.
Scientific theory suggests that during Earth’s last Ice Age, ocean levels were once much lower than they are today. You have to envisage a world in which there are two-mile-deep ice caps sitting on top of northern Europe and North America, in which are accumulated enormous quantities of water.
And we know that this water began to melt about 21,000 years ago, and finished melting about 10,000 years ago.
As a result, rich coastal lands were slowly submerged by rising sea levels.
Ten million square miles of land was flooded all around the world. That’s roughly the size of Europe and China added together were just rubbed from the record.
They just disappear from the story.
And in my opinion, archeology is not doing enough work to investigate those lost and submerged lands.
While much of the ocean’s floor remains unexplored, for thousands of years, philosophers and scientists have been drawn to one of the greatest mysteries of the sea, the legend of the lost city of Atlantis.
It’s been said that more books have been written about Atlantis than any other subject.
But most of what we know comes from the Greek philosopher Plato, who wrote two books about Atlantis, the Timaeus and the Critias.
It’s stated that Atlantis had huge naval forces, which it used to conquer other parts of the world. It was an urban civilization.
According to the ancient Greek texts, Atlantis was connected with extraterrestrials from the beginning.
It was founded by the Greek god Poseidon.
Poseidon can be regarded as an extraterrestrial in the sense of not being of this Earth. Poseidon, one of the extraterrestrials, found a pretty, wonderful, young woman-girl on Earth. And he took this woman-girl, and he impregnated her.
And to protect his new family, he founded Atlantis.
According to the legend, after a failed attempt to invade Athens, disaster struck the island. According to Plato, Atlantis was destroyed in a day and a night a cataclysmic destruction that sank the entire island and its capital city.
Some researchers believe that the Atlantians somehow destroyed themselves.
An artists illustration of what Atlantis may have looked like.
According to Plato, Atlantis was located in front of the Pillars of Hercules, a location beyond what some scholars attribute to modern Gibraltar. And to the ancients, as they left the Mediterranean Sea to go into the larger Atlantic Ocean, this was where they went beyond the Pillars of Hercules between Spain and Morocco.
Across the Atlantic lies the island chain of the Bahamas, just southeast of Florida. Here in 1968, archaeologist J.Manson Valentine believed he found part of Atlantis when he discovered an unusual rock formation off the coast of North Bimini Island.
It’s only in about 12 to 18 feet of water, so you can, uh, view it easily. At first, scientists thought this was just beach rock, but then several other scientists exploring the Bimini Road noticed that the beach rock was on top of other beach rock, with balancing stones wedged in between.
And nature doesn’t do that; man does. And they realized this is a harbor, a breakwater for a harbor.
From the shallow edges of Bimini all the way to the Gulf Stream in 300 feet of water, we have found many fascinating complexities that look like remnants of ancient cities or structures roads, pathways, structures covered in coral.
Remarkably, they were over a half mile down. Divers cannot do this kind of, uh, investigation, so we have to use a remote operating vehicle. And this vehicle is equipped with video cameras and manipulators. And it controlled, uh, from the deck of the ship.
The expedition was also armed with side-scan sonar equipment used to create images of large areas of the sea floor and underwater objects. I was in the control room on board the ship, and we were receiving that image coming from side-scan.
And this is just one of the many other images that we were obtaining of, the 80, uh, structures made of large stones placed one on top of another.
Well, what do they end up with?
It is an image that shows these rectangular 90-degree angles, over and over and over, on very large structures that seemed to have wide avenues.
The exploration found huge stone blocks in pyramid shapes, others more circular. Most were gigantic, reaching 16 feet in height and weighing several tons.
30 geometric structures emerged, appearing to be the remains of streets, buildings, tunnels and pyramids, all at a depth of 2,200 feet below the surface of the water.
We might well have here the evidence of a prehistoric culture that would probably go back tens of thousands of years, and that’s very exciting indeed.
Using dating techniques based on the presence of nearby volcanic ash, geologists estimated the underwater city sank over 6,000 years ago.
Could this be, a half mile down, some part of the sunken Atlantis from 9,000, 10,000 yrs ago that Plato talked about? Well, the Atlantis myth is integrally related with the area of the Caribbean and the Bahamas, in particular, Cuba.
Plato talks about an island empire.
He’s probably talking about dozens of different islands of different sizes, not just in the western Atlantic, but probably stretching out right into the central Atlantic area.
Both the Cuban and the Bahaman ruins lie on the western edge of the Bermuda Triangle, an area of ocean covering over 500,000 square miles, known for magnetic anomalies, extraterrestrial sightings and unexplained disappearances of aircraft and ships.
Could there be a connection between Atlantis and the area known as the Devil’s Triangle?
On the edge of the Bermuda Triangle, there are underwater ruins of the ancient city of Atlantis, the prehistoric city of Atlantis.
So, yes, there is a theory that Atlantis lies, not near Greece, but in the Bermuda Triangle. If Plato’s texts are true, then other Greek myths may provide a hint of the true fate of Atlantis.
One myth tells of the Titan goddess named Asteria, who fell from the sky and became an island.
In ancient Greece, we have a number of myths which describe islands bronze, gleaming islands that fell from the sky and landed in the water.
I don’t think that Atlantis, therefore, was an actual stationary, physical island. Atlantis, according to Plato, disappeared in one night with a lot of fire and a lot of smoke.
See, I don’t think that Atlantis sank. I think Atlantis lifted off. Was Atlantis a safe haven for ancient aliens before the end of Earth’s last Ice Age? And if so, could there be other alien cities submerged deep underwater?
Yonaguni, Japan.
This small island is at the westernmost tip of the Japanese archipelago. Scholars believe the first inhabitants migrated here from Southeast Asia during prehistoric times.
In 1987, in nearby waters, dive tour orator Kihachiro Aratake made a shocking discovery. A massive complex of stone formations lay hidden a mere 60 feet beneath the ocean surface.
Experts call it one of the greatest discoveries in the history of underwater archeology.
There are several reasons why I think this is not a natural formation. Some tools and engraved stones are found at the site.
Because of these things, there is no doubt that this is made artificially.
Submerged beneath largest of the underwater formations resemble a massive, five-layered stepped pyramid, the size of two football fields.
You see unambiguous carvings that clearly are geometric in nature, tons of right angles. We see channels that you can walk through with stairwells at the end that are perfectly rectangular in shape.
There are places where you find megaliths piled on top of one another to create a tunnel through which you can swim. There is a set of megaliths positioned side by side against the side of the cliff. There’s a gigantic human face carved underwater.
There is a stone that inscribes a big face, about seven meters in height. Our first impression was that it looked a lot like the Moai on Easter Island.
Then we began to realize that it strongly resembled the sphinx which guarded the pyramids, and we wondered, “Is that the function the face is serving “here?”
It’s the whole combination of all these structures together which convinced me that we’re looking at a at a ceremonial complex.
The mystery surrounding the Yonaguni underwater structure is, when did it go underwater? The geological evidence is that it was submerged during the meltdown of the last Ice Age.
All around the world, whether it is France, India or Japan, there are man-made structures that lie underwater.
Two ways how our ancestors could have done this. Either they had scuba gear I don’t think so or this stuff was built when the ocean levels were lower, and that was over 14,000 years ago, and 14,000 years ago, according to mainstream archeology, we were just dwelling in caves, hunter-gatherers.
Could the Yonaguni structures have been built by such primitive people?
And what evidence exists of the people who inhabited this island?
Human fossils were found, so I’m sure there were people living on the island, but I’m not sure if they had the technology to create structures or anything like this.
It’s not so much the question of could the stone have been chipped away and removed. It’s a question of the vision, of the scale of the complex, of thinking in those kinds of terms.
And we know of no other, uh, Stone Age culture that thought in those kinds of terms, of creating a gigantic, seemingly ceremonial complex.
If, according to scholars, the ancient Japanese people could not have built this monument, who did?
And how did it get here?
The speculation is that extraterrestrials created the Yonaguni monument.
The engineering is just beyond the capacity of Stone Age civilizations.
Ancient astronaut theorists also believe the key to the Yonaguni mystery is found in its global positioning.
Strangely, the complex lies within an area of the Pacific long suspected of extraterrestrial activity.
It’s called the Dragon’s Triangle.
Just south of Japan, you have a mysterious area called the Dragon’s Triangle, which is very similar to the Bermuda Triangle, because you have planes that have disappeared from the air, ships that have disappeared from the ocean.
In fact, Japan had declared this a disaster area. Don’t sail through it. Don’t fly through it.
Stay the heck away, because if you go in there, terrible things can happen to you.
In ancient Japan, and even into the relatively modern era, there are stories about the Dragon Sea, in which objects rise out of the water and sail through the air. In ancient Japan, these were winged monsters breathing fire.
In more modern times, these took on the appearance of actual machines.
When you compare those descriptions of these devices with the description that Columbus gave of a craft nearing the Bermuda Triangle actually rising out of the water, a light that followed the ship, you realize there’s a similarity in both of these locations to things, objects, that are in the water and rise out of the water and fly through the air.
But why are the two submerged structures found within the perimeter of these strange regions of the planet where so much unusual activity occurs?
Is it a coincidence that the Earth’s 25th parallel north cuts through both the Bermuda Triangle and the Dragon’s Triangle?
They lie on a plane along the same line, and both of them have the same magnetic phenomena, in which compass bearings are lost and instruments go down.
People wonder if there’s a real, strange UFO connection. If UFO’s and flying saucers do exist, then we should suspect that they could originally come from an ancient super civilization.
It makes you wonder if flying saucers, UFO’s, whatever you want to call them, actually use the area of the Triangle as their major base, and perhaps are even coming back to the remnants of a civilization that they were familiar with.
What if the sunken monuments at Yonaguni and near Cuba had alien origins?
Might they have been used as alien bases?
And if we believe extraterrestrials functioned on land, could they have also functioned underwater?
Could there be more evidence lying in the vast Pacific?
As an island nation, it should come as no mystery that much of Japan’s rich history is tied to the waters of the Pacific Ocean. But although many of Japan’s legends are largely unknown to the West, some are drawing the attention of ancient astronaut theorists.
One such legend dates back to a beach north of Tokyo. Allegedly, a craft that was quite large in size washed up on the shore in Japan. A strange round ship drifted ashore in this area.
The woman did not speak any language they could identify. There were written inscriptions inside her craft that they could not identify, and she’s clutching this box that she didn’t want anybody to touch.
Known as the legend of the Utsuro Bune, or “hollow ship,” the details of the story have puzzled historians for centuries.
Where, for example, did the mysterious hollow ship come from? Could it have come from the area of the submerged Yonaguni monument? Who was the strange woman? And what were the contents of the box she guarded so carefully?
Was it a human head? Or was it, as some ancient astronaut theorists believe, a type of brain or other forms of extraterrestrial intelligence?
If so, could it have been intended as a gift to the early Japanese by an ancient space traveler? There are five different drawings that have survived from completely different regions of Japan. They’re almost identical to modern UFO reports.
As evidence to support their claims, ancient astronaut theorists point to early Japanese carvings and statuary, each suggesting a variety of extraterrestrial encounters. This is a Dogu figure, and it comes from Japan.
And even to the untrained eye, you look at this, and it’s as if this being is wearing some type of a suit with a helmet, some goggles, on the back, there are all these weird buckles and circles, you know, straps.
Very similar to a modern-day space suit.
In my opinion, this is a likeness of a possible extraterrestrial that visited Earth thousands of years ago.
Dogū, Ebisuda Site in Tajiri, Miyagi Prefecture, 1000–400 BC.
But could, as ancient astronaut theorists believe, these strange Dogu figures really be a primitive interpretation of a pressurized space suit or diving apparel?
The story behind those Dogu figures is very clear, and anyone can go and read translations of the ancient texts that the Dogu, a long time ago, descended from the sky and taught the first Japanese people in various disciplines.
And the whole Japanese culture, including the kimono, the tea ceremony, the use of wasabi and ginger for eating sushi, the way that they build their architecture, their written language, everything they say came from these visitors, from these gods, from the universe.
The pictures show beings who look like astronauts. They are dressed like an astronaut. They have the helmet as an astronaut. They have some strange tools in their hands, tools which we do not understand. Now, there is a link. The Japanese call it “Dogus.”
In North America, we have still the Hopi tribe, in Arizona, and the Hopi Indians are still making today kachina dolls. Kachina dolls look similar to the Japanese Dogu figures. Further back, in the Sahara Desert, Africa, we found cave paintings.
When you see the picture, you see definitely an astronaut suit. No doubt. Absolutely.
Now, you compare these cave paintings with the kachina dolls of the Hopi, and with the Dogu of Japan. You have one line.
Do the mysterious Dogu figures provide tangible evidence of extraterrestrial encounters in Japan’s ancient past?
And does the legend of the Utsuro Bune suggest that the Earth’s oceans may be hiding even more proof of alien contact?
Perhaps the answer can be found deep in the waters off the coast of India.
In 2001, researchers from India’s Oceanic Institute detected anomalies on the bottom of the Gulf of Khambhat, seven miles from shore.
They had been commissioned by the Indian government to do a survey of pollution in the Gulf of Khambhat up in the northwest of India. And they were not expecting to find anything except a mess down there.
But suddenly, their side-scan sonar started returning images of regular structures. The images revealed an enormous network of stone buildings, now shrouded in mud and sand, and covering a distance of five square miles.
What we’re looking at in the Gulf of Khambhat are the remains of cities. There’s actually two of them.
And it turns out that they are positioned on the side of ancient river channels. They look lime cities that have been submerged for a very long time, at a time when mainstream archeology tells us there were no cities anywhere in the world.
Powerful crosscurrents made it nearly impossible to dive the 170 feet to the bottom. Still, scientists retrieved dozens of artifacts, including wood and pottery shards.
Some of the dates on some of the human artifacts that were brought up extended as far back as 32,000 years. But the oceanographers concluded that the area had been covered by water about 9,000 years ago.
So this city had apparently existed from 32,000 to about Mainstream scholars today claim that ancient Indian civilization only goes back 4,000 or 5,000 years. Yet, Hindu scholars themselves say that Hindu civilization is going back, uh, many tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years.
Might the ruins below the Gulf of Khambhat prove the Hindu scholars, right? Another recent discovery may support their claims.
The modern city of Dwaraka.
Featured Image Credit: Pinterest
Archaeologists digging deep under the city found signs of a settlement once inundated by the sea. Inspired by this clue, they began searching for more ruins in waters just off the coast.
Ancient Hindu texts explain that the legendary city of Dwaraka was said to be the dwelling place of Lord Krishna, a deity worshipped across many traditions of Hinduism.
Imagine what it would mean for the Christian world to all of a sudden discover the actual Holy Grail, the actual Ark of the Covenant. That would be akin, for the Indian population, to discover an actual Dwaraka. This was a very powerful city, which was ruled by Lord Krishna. And Krishna is still revered until today. He’s one of the highest gods that we have in Hindu culture.
Hindu texts explain that a king named Salwa attacked Lord Krishna in the mythical Dwaraka. Ancient astronaut theorists believe the descriptions of the battle suggest the use of alien technology and even spacecraft.
According to the ancient Sanskrit texts, with this spacecraft, Salwa attacked the city, raining down energy weapons that resemble lightning. He destroyed large parts of the city in this way When this happened, the king of the city, the god Krishna, responded by firing weapons at this spacecraft.
The weapons are described as arrows, but they’re not ordinary arrows. It’s said that they roared like thunder when they were launched, and resembled bolts of lightning or rays of the sun.
In response, it is said that the spacecraft began to appear in different places simultaneously. It appeared to be moving in ways that resemble modern descriptions of UFOs.
So what I find interesting about this account is, there’s a spacecraft made of metal that is firing down weapons on a city on Earth. The legend says that Krishna eventually departed Earth, and the ocean consumed his city of Dwaraka.
For many people, the description of fabulous ancient cities in the Sanskrit writings of India were simply mythology, but with the discovery of the remains of a sunken city off the coast of India in the location of Dwaraka, all that has changed.
People are beginning to look at these ancient writings in a new light, and see them not simply as mythology, but actual historical records.
Did India’s ancestors witness a war between extraterrestrial entities?
If the mythical city cited in the Hindu texts turned out to be real, could there also be evidence of Krishna and his supernatural powers?
Ancient alien theorists believe a link between the submerged ruins and extraterrestrials can be found in another set of texts known as India’s Sangam literature. Sangams were assemblies of sages.
It says that the first two Sangams took place on a sunken landmass called Kumari Kandam. This area was once above water thousands of years ago, according to the accounts, but it’s now underwater.
It’s also interesting that these assemblies of sages included extraterrestrial beings, as well. And this fits in with evidence discovered in the Gulf of Cambay, and off the coast of the present city of Dwaraka.
Are the interpretations of India’s ancient texts proof of alien contact in Earth’s past?
And are the descriptions of gods actually descriptions of extraterrestrials?
Perhaps another discovery one beneath a mysterious lake will yield even more evidence of alien visitors in the remote past.
The Andes Mountains, Peru.
Here, at an elevation of 12,500 feet, lie the dark waters of Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable body of water in the world.
In August of 2000, an Italian team of divers and archaeologists launched an underwater investigation of the legendary lake.
There, submerged under 100 feet of water, the team uncovered traces of a paved road, a stone terrace, and a wall nearly a half mile long.
For centuries, local legends have spoken of a lost underwater city called Wanaku.
Could these ruins provide proof that such a city did, in fact, exist?
Then, another shocking discovery. Lying on the lake bed was a large, sculptured stone head.
Could this ancient relic offer a clue to the origins of this incredible archaeological find? Comparisons were quickly made to similar stonework found at the nearby ancient city of Tiahuana, just 12 miles south of Lake Titicaca a city long thought by ancient astronaut theorists to have extraterrestrial origins.
When the early conquistadors talked to the local Aymara Indians they were told that-that giants at the beginning of creation had created Tiahuanaco. The Spanish, too, were amazed by the gigantic blocks of stone. They felt that the devil had built this building.
If you look at some of the rock cut on megalithic structures at the site of Tiahuanaco, I personally believe very strongly that we are looking at an older episode of construction and the traces of a forgotten episode in the human story.
The Gate of the Sun at Tiahuanaco. Image credit: Shutterstock.
But if the ruins found at the bottom of Lake Titicaca are from the legendary lost city of Wanaku, what happened to it?
Did it fall prey to a major earthquake or another natural disaster?
Or was the city, as some ancient astronaut theorists believe, deliberately flooded?
The more you know about Lake Titicaca, the stranger it gets. Archeologists have problems in really explaining why there are sunken ruins there because they’re saying that the ruins aren’t that old. They’re only 1,500 years old.
And that would mean that Lake Titicaca has gone through a number of major changes in that period. And it’s possible that somehow the lake itself and the shorelines were manipulated so that certain areas of Lake Titicaca were flooded in a sort of artificial way.
There is a type of seahorse that lives in Lake Titicaca. And seahorses are coming from saltwater and oceans, yet these seahorses are living at nearly 13,000 feet in the Andes.
But just how could an ancient people have artificially created South America’s largest lake?
A lake that is 118 miles long and 50 miles wide? When you ask the local population, “How did all of this come into being?” the Aymara Indians will tell you that all of this has existed since before the beginning of time.
In the Aymara legends, the lake is like the place of Genesis, the place where it starts all the civilizations in our continent.
We have these very, very, very old roots. I mean, we’re not talking only about this civilization, this humanity. We are talking about our seeds, the roots of the stars.
Some people believe that the extraterrestrial built, but what I believe is that the space brothers help us, direct us, teach us, because they had the experience in many ways.
The legend says that once the space brothers came to this planet to live with us, they were very important in our lives and they used to be very powerful people.
But is it possible that the lost city of Wanaku was really built, or inhabited, by the ancient ancestors of the indigenous Aymara people?
And if so, could it have been deliberately flooded to avoid detection from the outside world?
The elders, they used to talk about the underwater city.
They talk about the lights like stars connecting with the lake.
The stars, when they come down to the lake, there are changes in the temperatures.
There are many legends with lights coming from the underground of the lake.
It seems they come, they go and they return in different moments.
You start to get the idea that there is some kind of ancient alien underwater base. And it’s possible that some of these sunken ruins are, uh, somehow part of that base.
Could the ancient city of Wanaku really have been built by alien visitors?
And if so, why?
What was their purpose?
Could the discovery of this and other sunken cities pride the evidence that mankind has been seeking for centuries evidence that proves that we are not alone?
These mysterious underwater structures really don’t have any context or any background; they just seem to come from nowhere.
They seem to stand out as being out of place in time, so there’s some question marks, some mystery surrounding them that might shed new light on human history.
Atlantis, Lake Titicaca, Dwaraka. All those ancient mystery places always have had a connection to the gods.
The gods who, in the ancient astronaut opinion, were flesh and blood extraterrestrials.
And in the end, the ancient astronaut theory will be proven right.
NOTE: This article is an edited version of episode three, season two, of the TV Series Ancient Aliens. Our editors worked hard to correct out any mistakes, and arrange the context so that our readers can enjoy reading through the episodes, without having to watch them. I believe that when you read through these episodes, you can imagine (reconstruct) what the participants of the Series were trying to say in a much more efficient, a much richer way.
Leaked video shows Russian "Doomsday Device" capable of triggering tsunamis of up to 300-feet.
Following President Trump's contentious meeting with Vladimir Putin, the Russian governmenthas released a series of videos showcasing an array of new nuclear weapons. One video, in particular, is most disconcerting. It is rumored to be a giant torpedo purpose-built to avoid US defenses. One expert has nicknamed it a "Doomsday Machine."
Putin himself has addressed the weapon on March 1st. According to a Kremlin translation of Putin's remarks, the weapon is said to be remotely-controlled, allowing for no Russian casualties, be able to hold masses of nuclear power, as well as have few vulnerabilities. "It is really fantastic," said Putin, "there is really nothing in the world capable of withstanding them".
A torpedo-shaped device called 'Poseidon' featured on the Russian Ministry of Defenses' YouTube account on July 19th. The new clips show real-world footage of a prototype warhead. Defense analyst H.I. Sutton believes Poseidon could measure in at about 2 meters (6.5 feet) wide and 20 meters (66 feet) long rendering capable of holding great nuclear power.
Why is this new weapon so terrifying?
In 2015 the Russian government released diagrams of weapon that looks eerily similar to Poseidon which suggested the weapon would be capable of carrying a 50-megaton nuclear bomb which is about as powerful as Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear device ever donated.
US nuclear tests of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, including the underwater operations Crossroads Baker and Hardtack I Wahoo, illustrated why bombs detonated underwater could be so devastating. Warships were staged around the explosions to test the effect of the bombs, which were roughly as energetic as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki on August 1945. Some warships were vaporized, others were flipped and sunk, while only a few sustained cracked hulls and damaged engines.
However, experts have questioned the purpose and effectiveness of Putin's device. While it could potentially create a Tsunami, if detonated above ground the effects could be far more destructive and widespread. There is also no guarantee the Tsunami would occur, especially as the bomb would be detonated miles from shore and waves lose energy as they approach land meaning it would be a waste of a nuclear bomb and a significant amount of money for Russia.
Why Would Russia Develop Such A Weapon?
While the reports and leaked videos/images portray a terrifying 'Doomsday Machine', it is still unconfirmed whether Putin has developed this weapon of mass destruction or not.
In 2015, Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on nuclear policy at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, wrote an article saying there wasn't speculation that the underwater bomb might be "salted", or surrounded with metals like cobalt, which would drastically increase the radius of fatal radiation levels from fallout for at least several months, or possibly even decades. However, if detonated underwater, the vast majority of the fallout or 'source term' will never escape the water as airborne particles.
Whereas, if it was dropped on land, almost 100% of the source term would end up on the land and so the devastation from a "salted" weapon detonated on land would be far worse than that of a weapon detonated below the water, salted or not.
To Lewis and many other nuclear experts, it doesn't really matter whether the rumors are real or not and Russia really has this kind of weaponry:
"Simply announcing to the world that you find this to be a reasonable approach to [nuclear] deterrence should be enough to mark you out as a dangerous creep, "Lewis said.
To conclude, this is certainly a worrying development emerging from one of the most powerful countries in the world, and we should all be wary indeed.
The Notorious 'Hangar 18' Has Now Been Off Limits For Over 40 Years
The Notorious 'Hangar 18' Has Now Been Off Limits For Over 40 Years
Whether this history channel show is authentic or total intentional disinfo - it's a great overview starting with the handling of Roswell, evidence collection, press, Project Moondust, Declassified docs and deep underground chambers DUMBs.
Interviews with nuclear physicists, military officials, retired employees, pilots, historians, avid international aeronautic researchers, politicians, a family of deceased veterans etc. It is well done and aired on quasi MSM-history channel-so it's not too fringe.
Asteroid on a collision course with Earth? These astronomers will likely see it first. NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies – now entering its 3rd decade – makes over 90 percent of near-Earth asteroid and comet discoveries. Here’s how and why they do their work.
View full video. | This NASA animation depicts a mapping of the positions of known near-Earth objects (NEOs) at points in time over the past 20 years. It finishes with a map of all known asteroids as of January 2018. There are now over 18,000 known NEOs and the discovery rate averages about 40 per week.
On March 11, 1998, asteroid astronomers around the world received an ominous message: new observational data on the recently discovered asteroid 1997 XF11 suggested there was a chance that the half-mile-wide (nearly one km wide) object could hit Earth in 2028.
The message came from the Minor Planet Center, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the worldwide repository for such observations and initial determination of asteroid orbits. And although it was intended to alert only the very small astronomical community that hunts and tracks asteroids to call for more observations, the news spread quickly.
The animation depicts a mapping of the positions of known near-Earth objects (NEOs) at points in time over the past 20 years, and finishes with a map of all known asteroids as of January 2018. Asteroid search teams supported by NASA's NEO Observations Program have found over 95 percent of near-Earth asteroids currently known. There are now over 18,000 known NEOs and the discovery rate averages about 40 per week.
Most media outlets did not know what to make of the announcement, and mistakenly highlighted the prospect that Earth was doomed.
Fortunately, it turned out that Earth was never in danger from 1997 XF11. After performing a more thorough orbit analysis with the available asteroid observations, Don Yeomans, then the leader of the Solar System Dynamics group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, along with his colleague Paul Chodas, concluded otherwise. Chodas, who is now director of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), located at JPL, said:
The 2028 impact was essentially impossible.
To this day we still get queries on the chances of XF11 impacting in 2028. There is simply no chance of XF11 impacting our planet that year, or for the next 200 years.
Chodas knows this thanks to CNEOS’ precise orbit calculations using observation data submitted to the Minor Planet Center by observatories all over the world that detect and track the motion of asteroids and comets. For the past two decades, CNEOS calculations have enabled NASA to become the world leader in these efforts, keeping close watch on all nearby asteroids and comets – especially those that can cross Earth’s orbit. Chodas said:
We compute high-precision orbits for all asteroids and comets and map their positions in the solar system, both forward in time to detect potential impacts, and backward to see where they’ve been in the sky. We provide the best map of orbits for all known small bodies in the solar system.
The chart depicts the cumulative number of known Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) versus time. The area in red depicts the number of known NEAs larger than 0.6 miles (1 km). The area in orange depicts the quantity of known NEAs larger than 460 feet (140 meters). The area in blue depicts the number of known NEAs in all sizes.
Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are asteroids and comets in orbits that bring them into the inner solar system, within 121 million miles (195 million km) of the sun, and also within roughly 30 million miles (50 million km) of Earth’s orbit around the sun.
The media frenzy around NEO 1997 XF11 demonstrated the need for clarity and precision in communicating with the public about the close passes by Earth of these objects, as well as, Chodas said:
… the importance of peer review before public statements like these are made.
NASA’s original intent was to fulfill a 1998 Congressional request to detect and catalog at least 90 percent of all NEOs larger than one kilometer in size (roughly two-thirds of a mile) within 10 years. To help reach the Congressional goal, NASA Headquarters requested that JPL establish a new office to work with the data provided by the Minor Planet Center for submission of all observations of asteroids and comets. The new office would also coordinate with observatories operated by academic institutions around the United States, as well as U.S. Air Force space surveillance assets.
In the summer of 1998, NASA established the Near-Earth Object Observations Program, and JPL became the home for the agency’s research data and analysis on NEOs, then called the Near-Earth Object Program Office.
In 2016, the office was renamed the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) in conjunction with the establishment of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
For about 20 years, CNEOS has been NASA’s central hub for accurately mapping the orbits of all the known NEOs, predicting their upcoming close approaches, reliably assessing their chances of impact to our planet, and delivering that information to both astronomers worldwide and the general public.
Predicting Close Approaches and Impacts: Sentry and Scout
The first and most important step in assessing the impact risk of an asteroid or comet is to determine whether any given object’s orbit will cross Earth’s orbit – and then how close it will actually get to our planet. JPL was determining high-precision orbits for a few NEOs even before NASA launched its NEO Observations Program, and has since upgraded its orbit models to provide the most accurate assessment available for asteroid positions and orbits.
Observatories around the world take digital images of the sky to detect moving points of light (the asteroid or comet) over days, weeks, months and even decades. They then report the positions of these moving objects relative to the static background of stars to the International Astronomical Union-sanctioned Minor Planet Center (for more details, see How a Speck of Light Becomes an Asteroid). The CNEOS scientists then use all this observation data to more precisely calculate an NEO’s orbit and predict its motion forward in time for many years, looking for close approaches and potential impacts to the Earth, its moon, and other planets.
A CNEOS system called Sentry searches ahead for all potential future Earth impact possibilities over the next 100 years – for every known NEO. Sentry’s impact monitoring runs continually using the latest CNEOS-generated orbit models, and the results are stored online. In most cases so far, the probabilities of any potential impacts are extremely small, and in other cases, the objects themselves are so small – less than 20 meters in size, or nearly 66 feet – that they would almost certainly disintegrate even if they did enter Earth’s atmosphere. Steve Chesley of JPL, a member of the CNEOS team who was the main developer of the Sentry system, said:
If Sentry finds potential impacts for an object, we add it to our online ‘impact risk’ table, and asteroid observers can then prioritize that object for further observation. The more measurements made of the object’s position over time, the better we can predict its future path.
In most cases, the new measurements mean the object can be removed from the risk list because the uncertainties in the orbital path are reduced and the possibility of impact is ruled out.
More recently, CNEOS also developed a system called Scout to provide more immediate and automatic trajectory analyses for the most recently discovered objects, even before independent observatories confirm their discovery. Operating around the clock, the Scout system not only notifies observers of the highest priority objects to observe at any given time, it also immediately alerts the Planetary Defense Coordination Office of any possible imminent impacts within the next few hours or days. A recent example is the Scout-predicted impact of the small asteroid 2018 LA over Botswana, Africa.
More Hunting to Do
With the addition of more capable NASA-funded asteroid surveys over the years, NASA’s NEO Observations Program is responsible for over 90 percent of near-Earth asteroid and comet discoveries. There are now over 18,000 known NEOs and the discovery rate averages about 40 per week.
Although the original Congressional goal from 1998 has been exceeded and much progress has been made in asteroid discovery and tracking over the past two decades, the work isn’t over. In 2005, Congress established a new, much more ambitious goal for the NEO Observations Program – to discover 90 percent of the NEOs down to the much smaller size of 450 feet (140 meters), and to do so by the year 2020.
These smaller asteroids may not present a threat of global catastrophe if they impact Earth, but they could still cause massive regional devastation and loss of life, especially if they occur near a metropolitan area. CNEOS continues to make improvements to its orbital analysis tools, image and graphic presentation capabilities, and updates of its websites to quickly and accurately provide the very latest information on NEOs to the Planetary Defense Coordination Office, the astronomical community and the public.
Bottom line: Asteroid heading toward Earth? NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies – now entering its 3rd decade – makes over 90 percent of near-Earth asteroid and comet discoveries.
More information about CNEOS, asteroids and near-Earth objects can be found at:
Strange Golden Lights Captured on Camera in Northwoods Wisconsin
Strange Golden Lights Captured on Camera in Northwoods Wisconsin
A man camping with his family on private land in northern Wisconsin reported seeing a floating cloud of glowing golden lights at approximately 3 a.m. on July 28th.
The man told the Singular Fortean Society that he had awoken from a "dead sleep" and saw the lights hovering next to a lantern.
He managed to take a video with his cellphone camera, which captured some of the golden lights floating near the blue-white light of the lantern.
"[The lights] had a lot of smaller spots that floated around, zig zagged, and left glowing lines in the air inside this aura of gold color," he said. "And then larger brighter golden lights that winked in and out, and sort of moved around but slower, which is about all you can see in the video,"
The unusual aerial display lasted for around 15 minutes, at which time the lights disappeared.
"They winked out in the same place, the smaller ones first and then the big ones," the witness said. "Since they were appearing and disappearing it was more like they just went out one by one and didn't come back. Then the entire golden aura/blob went out that contained the lights."
The area in which the lights appeared was northeast of their campsite, and a hill obscures the only house in that area, which stands about 1/2 mile from the site--meaning the lights could not have come as a result of distorted houselights. Otherwise, the campsite exists within nothing but hundreds of acres of woods and water.
Historical weather data from the date and location of the sighting shows that the temperature at the time was hovering near 47 degrees, which is much cooler than fireflies prefer, making it unlikely that the glowing insects were responsible for the sighting. Fireflies prefer warm, humid air, and are significantly less active when the temperature dips below 60 degrees; they also don't often swarm in such tight, cloud-like formations.
"[There were] no insects really," he reported. "Normal flies during the day, but no biters and almost no skeeters. Then at night, nothing."
Other natural phenomena like ball lighting and swamp gas can likely be ruled out, since they do not appear as dozens of tiny individual glowing lights, but rather as a single object.
The witness and his family do stay regularly at the site, and he has promised to investigate the phenomenon should he see it again.
"If I see it again I'll hit it with a high powered flash light," he said. "But I had that sitting on my truck."
"Believe it or not getting out in the woods with 'something' isn't really an attractive thing when you're there."
Obscured by thick clouds of absorbing dust, the closest supermassive black hole to the Earth lies 26,000 light-years away at the centre of the Milky Way. This gravitational monster, which has a mass four million times that of the Sun, is surrounded by a small group of stars orbiting around it at high speed.This extreme environment - the strongest gravitational field in our galaxy - makes it the perfect place to explore gravitational physics, and particularly to test Einstein's general theory of relativity. New infrared observations from the exquisitely sensitive GRAVITY, SINFONI and NACO instruments, developed under the lead of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), have now allowed astronomers to follow one of these stars, called S2, as it passed very close to the black hole during May 2018. At the closest point this star was at a distance of less than 20 billion kilometres from the black hole and moving at a speed in excess of 25 million kilometres per hour - almost three percent of the speed of light.
The team compared the position and velocity measurements from GRAVITY and SINFONI respectively, along with previous observations of S2 using other instruments, with the predictions of Newtonian gravity, general relativity and other theories of gravity. The new results are inconsistent with Newtonian predictions and in excellent agreement with the predictions of general relativity.
These extremely precise measurements were made by an international team led by Reinhard Genzel (MPE) in Garching, Germany, in conjunction with collaborators around the world, at the Paris Observatory-PSL, the Universite Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, the University of Cologne, the Portuguese CENTRA (Centro de Astro?sica e Gravitacao) and ESO. The observations are the culmination of a 26-year series of ever-more-precise observations of the centre of the Milky Way using ESO instruments.
"This is the second time that we have observed the close passage of S2 around the black hole in our galactic centre. But this time, because of much improved instrumentation, we were able to observe the star with unprecedented resolution," explains Genzel. "We have been preparing intensely for this event over several years, as we wanted to make the most of this unique opportunity to observe general relativistic effects."
The new measurements clearly reveal an effect called gravitational redshift. Light from the star is stretched to longer wavelengths by the very strong gravitational field of the black hole. And the change in the wavelength of light from S2 agrees precisely with that predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity. This is the first time that this deviation from the predictions of the simpler Newtonian theory of gravity has been observed in the motion of a star around a supermassive black hole.
The team used SINFONI to measure the velocity of S2 towards and away from Earth and the GRAVITY instrument in the VLT Interferometer (VLTI) to make extraordinarily precise measurements of the changing position of S2 in order to define the shape of its orbit. GRAVITY creates such sharp images that it can reveal the motion of the star from night to night as it passes close to the black hole - 26,000 light-years from Earth.
"Our first observations of S2 with GRAVITY, about two years ago, already showed that we would have the ideal black hole laboratory," adds Frank Eisenhauer (MPE), principal investigator of GRAVITY and the SINFONI spectrograph.
"During the close passage, we could even detect the faint glow around the black hole on most of the images, which allowed us to precisely follow the star on its orbit, ultimately leading to the detection of the gravitational redshift in the spectrum of S2."
More than one hundred years after he published his paper setting out the equations of general relativity, Einstein has been proved right once more - in a much more extreme laboratory than he could have possibly imagined!
"Due to the extremely strong gravitational field we expect to see the effects of general relativity - but only if we can look close enough," says Stefan Gillessen, "This is why we needed to push the technology. With SINFONI we can measure the radial velocity of stars very accurately and GRAVITY gives us extremely sharp images and accurate positions."
Continuing observations are expected to reveal another relativistic effect very soon - a small rotation of the star's orbit, known as Schwarzschild precession - as S2 moves away from the black hole.
Xavier Barcons, ESO's Director General, concludes: "ESO has worked with Reinhard Genzel and his team and collaborators in the ESO Member States for over a quarter of a century. It was a huge challenge to develop the uniquely powerful instruments needed to make these very delicate measurements and to deploy them at the VLT in Paranal. The discovery announced is the very exciting result of a remarkable partnership."
Clean rooms are the final line of defense in extraterrestrial exploration: Spacecraft departing for other worlds are stripped of any biological contaminants there, and samples returning from space, such as the Apollo moon rocks, are stored in pristine conditions to be studied later. But a new study suggests that a clean room storing meteorite samples at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, may not be quite so clean, after all. It’s contaminated with an abundance of terrestrial fungus. The microbes—most from the common genus Penicillium—could confound the search for life in off-world specimens, just as the lab is preparing to receive samples from Mars and the carbon-rich asteroid Bennu.
“I’d characterize it as eye-opening,” says spectroscopist Marc Fries, who curates the cosmic dust collection at JSC but was not involved in the new work. “It drives home this point that fungi are an important part of microbial contamination.”
The results aren’t entirely shocking—the room in question was designed to be what’s known as ISO class 6, an international standard running from class 1 to class 9, in which class 1 is the cleanest—but they still mean that researchers need to be on their toes when curating future samples, says geomicrobiologist Aaron Regberg of JSC, who presented the findings this week at the 2018 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.
As part of a series of in-depth evaluations at JSC, Regberg and his colleagues swabbed the floor, table, and workbench of the lab where Antarctic meteorites are stored and processed for research. The meteorites, which blasted from the surface of other worlds before landing on Earth, are kept in cabinets pumped full of nitrogen at above-atmospheric pressures to help prevent material from entering the sealed environments. The researchers found between four and 28 viable cells per passport photo–size unit of area—similar to those in clean rooms at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida where spacecraft are assembled. Much higher contaminant counts were detected inside the air filter for the nitrogen gas—installed in 1979 and not opened for nearly 40 years—but Regberg says the bugs were growing on the filter’s outer parts and multiple additional lines of defense separated this fungi from the actual samples.
Although most microbes in the other facilities were bacteria, between 83% and 97% of the microbes at the meteorite lab were fungus. That’s alarming because fungi can easily penetrate samples and grow branching filaments that chemically alter rocks. Some fungi also produce the amino acids α-aminoisobutyric acid and isovaline, which are rare on Earth but often found in carbon-containing asteroids. Were such earthly impurities to find their way into extraterrestrial samples, they could skew results, Regberg says.
In fact, the findings have already caused astrobiologist Daniel Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, to rethink his own research on lunar soils stored at NASA’s Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation office, which had detected some α-aminoisobutryic acid. He originally suspected that the amino acid came from meteorites crashing into the moon, but now he wonders whether it might have a more terrestrial origin story.
Exactly why the researchers found more fungi than in previous tests is unclear. It’s possible that the low-nutrient environment at the curation office somehow favored fungal growth, but Regberg suspects that it’s because prior analyses failed to include the right mix of food and incubations times and temperatures in the growth media they used to cultivate the samples. “I wonder if we’ve not found fungi in other locations because we weren’t looking for them,” he says.
The remarkable electromagnetic properties of the Great Pyramid of Giza could soon inspire nanoparticle designs for highly-efficient sensors and solar cells.
Scientists have discovered the famous pyramid concentrates electric and magnetic energy into its internal chambers and below its base, creating pockets of higher energy.
If this concentrating effect is able to be recreated on a nanoscale size, it could lead to a wave of new, more efficient sensors and solar cells, the researchers claim.
While the 481-foot pyramid constructed thousands of years ago for Pharaoh Khufu has long drawn intrigue for its purported mythical qualities, the study is among a growing body of research that attempts to finally get to the bottom of its physical properties.
Scroll down for video
Scientists have found that the famous Great Pyramid of Giza can concentrate electric and magnetic energy in its chambers and below its base, giving rise to distinct pockets of higher energy
‘Egyptian pyramids have always attracted great attention,’ says Dr Andrey Evlyukhin, scientific supervisor and coordinator of the research.
‘We as scientists were interested in them as well, so we decided to look at the Great Pyramid as a particle dissipating radio waves resonantly.’
The international research team looked into the relationship between the shape of the Great Pyramid of Giza and its ability to focus electromagnetic energy.
To do this, the team led by ITMO University in Saint Petersburg, Russia, created a model of the pyriadmid, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, to accurately measure it electromagnetic response.
The researchers used the model to see how wave energy is scattered or absorbed by the pyramid. They tested the interactions with waves of resonant length, ranging from 200 to 600 metres (656ft to 1,968ft).
However, due to the lack of reliable information about the properties of the pyramid, the team was forced to fill-in the blanks for some factors of their model.
‘We had to use some assumptions,’ Evlyukhin admitted. ‘For example, we assumed that there are no unknown cavities inside, and the building material with the properties of an ordinary limestone is evenly distributed in and out of the pyramid.
‘With these assumptions made, we obtained interesting results that can find important practical applications.’
Scientists used multipole analysis – a method widely-used in physics to study the interaction between a complex object and electromagnetic field – to reveal how the pyramid concentrates electromagnetic energy into in its underground chambers.
A multipole analysis shows the pyramid concentrates electromagnetic energy in its hidden chambers. The distributions of electric (a)–(e) and magnetic (f)–(j) field magnitude in the Pyramid and its supporting substrate is shown above
This includes the two chambers believed to have contained the remains of Pharaoh Khufu and his wife, as well as the third unfinished chamber buried beneath the base.
The Ancient Egyptians that built the pyramids more than 4,400 years ago were not aware of this quirk of design.
However, researchers now believe the relationship between the design of the pyramid and its ability to focus wave energy through to its core could play a hugely-important for nanoparticle research in the future.
When considering the pyramid on a substrate – such as the limestone plateau – the researchers say it focuses the energy through the empty spaces to the substrate.
‘In the case of the Pyramid on the substrate, at the shorter wavelengths, the electromagnetic energy accumulates in the chambers providing local spectral maxima for electric and magnetic fields,’ the researchers wrote in the study.
‘It is shown that basically the Pyramid scatters the electromagnetic waves and focuses them in to the substrate region.’
A multipole analysis shows the pyramid concentrates electromagnetic energy in its hidden chambers. Distributions of electric (top row) and magnetic (bottom row) field magnitudes in the free space are shown
While the 481-foot pyramid built thousands of years ago for Pharaoh Khufu has long drawn intrigue for its purported mythical qualities, the study is among a growing body of research attempting to finally get to the bottom of its physical properties
THE PYRAMID OF GIZA
The Great Pyramid, also known as Khufu's Pyramid, is the sole survivor of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World
For more than 4,500 years, Egypt's pyramids have kept their secrets hidden deep within the labyrinth of passages and chambers that lie inside their towering stone structures.
But the long-running row over whether the Great Pyramid of Giza is hiding a network of previously undiscovered tunnels behind its stone walls has now been answered.
The researchers confirmed the find using cosmic particles known as muons to scan the Great Pyramid of Giza.
They used the scans to create maps to reveal the internal structure of the 479 feet (146m) high pyramid.
Last year thermal scanning identified a major anomaly in the Great Pyramid, the largest and oldest of the pyramids at Giza and one of the seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Those scans identified three adjacent stones at its base which registered higher temperatures than others.
Those scans identified three adjacent stones at its base which registered higher temperatures than others.
This led to theories that they may be hiding a secret chamber that had yet to be discovered.
A team of experts then set up the ScanPyramid's project to use muons, tiny subatomic particle that are typically produced by cosmic rays smash into atoms on Earth, to peer through the pyramid's huge stone blocks, some of which weight up to 15 tons.
Dr Hawass has in the past been sceptical of the usefulness of conducting such scans.
He recently clashed publicly with British Egyptologists over their theory that a secret burial chamber may be hidden behind the walls of Tutankhamun's tomb in his pyramid in the Valley of the Kings.'
Although this research seems unconventional, modern physical approaches have been previously used to study the Great Pyramid, and led to a discovery of a completely new structure,' said Antonija Grubisic-Cabo, a physicist from Monash University who was not involved in the research.
'As this research is completely theoretical, it is difficult to say what we can expect it to lead to, or if it is even possible to do this in real life.'
However, the researchers behind the study are confident that the manner in which electromagnetic energy distribute in the pyramid could help scientists create efficient nanoparticle designs in the future.
That depends on whether the researchers are able to recreate the concentrating effect observed in the Great Pyramid of Giza on a nanoscale size.
Dr Polina Kapitainova, of the Faculty of Physics and Technology of ITMO University, said: 'Choosing a material with suitable electromagnetic properties, we can obtain pyramidal nanoparticles with a promise for practical application in nanosensors and effective solar cells.'
Scan the Pyramid project uncovering secrets of Egypt's wonders
Share or comment on this article:
Great Pyramid of Giza can focus energy through its chambers
On July 18, 2018 a passenger flying to LAX noticed the bright lights out the window. He did a second take because he first thought it must be a reflection.
Passenger: Used my Iphone 10 to record it and could tell almost immediately it was in fact an actual object(s).
The lights would go in and out of the clouds, change elevation and location from my particular viewpoint.
I’m assuming it took place over Nevada based on the time. If you look closely, a white blinking light appears randomly both in front and behind the object.
This object when viewed by human eyes was white and glowing. Lost sight of it after 5 or 6 minutes as it slowly went behind the wing.
In a commercial airline so was traveling at least 500mph. I felt beyond excited because I knew then I was seeing something strange and was grateful to have the foresight to record it. I have submitted the footage to Mufon.
But could this footage be the evidence UFO hunters need to finally settle the debate on whether alien visitors to Earth exist or not?
It is extremely unlikely the lunar photos have anything to do with aliens but both MIDAS and the ESA agree the flashes were very much extraterrestrial in origin.
The ESA said: “On July 17, 2018, an ancient lump from space thwacked into the Moon with enough energy to produce a brilliant flash of light.
“With another rock seemingly in pursuit, a second flash lit up a different region of the Moon almost exactly 24 hours later.”
Despite the force of impact, current estimates suggest the foreign impactors were no larger than the average walnut.
UFO news: Two flashes of light were spotted on the surface of the Moon
(Image: ESA/MIDAS)
The flashing lights were spotted from observatories in Spain
(Image: ESA/MIDAS)
Space rocks of this size dubbed meteoroids are typically remnants of bigger asteroids and comets drifting aimlessly through space.
On July 17, 2018, an ancient lump from space thwacked into the Moon
European Space Agency (ESA)
The flashing meteoroids in question most likely originated from the dusty comet trail left behind in the wake of the Alpha Capricornids meteor shower.
The Alpha Capricornids shower usually starts as early as July 15 and continues until mid-August.
The ESA said: “For at least a thousand years people have claimed to witness short-lived phenomena on the face of the Moon.
“By definition these transient flashes are hard to study, and determining their cause remains a challenge.”
The flashing lights were not UFOs but small meteor hitting the Moon
(Image: ESA/MIDAS)
Three astronomical observatories in Spain scan the Moon for the transient flashes on behalf of the MIDAS project.
The observatories use powerful telescopes and CCD cameras to detect and identify the various impacts that rock the glowing orb.
Jose Maria Madiedo, MIDAS, said better understanding these lunar impacts can help better protect Earth from similar dangers.
The space expert said: “By studying meteoroids on the Moon we can determine how many rocks impact it and how often, and from this we can infer the chances of impact on Earth.”
A filmed version of Hamilton, starring the 2016 cast, could be headed to movie theatres or a streaming service soon: “According to The Wall Street Journal, multiple studios are currently bidding on the rights to the recording, as is Netflix, which would likely host the film on its streaming service.”
Priests and UFOs: “Michael Burke-Gaffney, S.J., a Canadian priest who is an astronomer and professor at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, had an extensive personal interest in U.F.O.s—even covertly investigating them for Canada’s National Research Council and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In 1966, after the noted astronomer and ufologist J. Allen Hynek penned an infamous letter to Science magazine offering seven reasons why U.F.O.s merited scientific study, Father Burke-Gaffney responded with his own letter. He takes a more cautionary tone. Until we identify mysterious ‘atmospheric phenomena,’ he asks, should not scientists strive ‘(i) to exhort people to have patience, and (ii) to remind them that, up to the present, U.F.O.s have furnished no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, and (iii) to point out that the existence of extraterrestrial little green men is no more firmly established than that of leprechauns?’ There is no official Vatican position on U.F.O.s and aliens, although in 2014 the Vatican Observatory co-hosted a conference on the subject with the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, called ‘The Search for Life Beyond the Solar System: Exoplanets, Biosignature and Instruments.’ The next year, Pope Francis gave an interesting response to a question about extraterrestrial life: ‘In every case I think that we should stick to what the scientists tell us, still aware that the Creator is infinitely greater than our knowledge.’”
Anna Aslanyan reviews a film of a country that does not exist: “A young man stares into the camera, blinking, then turns his head away. His name is Kolya, and he was born in 1990 in what was then the USSR. Later that year, his native Transnistria broke away from the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic and proclaimed itself an independent state; today, it remains unrecognized by most countries and the UN. To Kolya, ‘it’s not important whether it’s recognized or not’. He has a Russian passport, but he doesn’t see himself as a Russian citizen; nor can he quite verbalize what connects him to this narrow strip of undistinguished land between the Dniester river and Ukraine. Extinction, directed by the Portuguese filmmaker Salomé Lamas, and screened this week at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, is a black-and-white portrait of a country that exists largely in the minds of its inhabitants.”
What is secularism?
It is the belief that “the things of this life and of the next cannot only be distinguished but also divided—what is more, that they ought to be.” Is this the best way to organize modern societies?
Essay of the Day:
What can Russian populism in the late nineteenth century teach us today?Gary Saul Morson explains:
“Populism fed on guilt, and everything about Likharev, down to his very gestures, expressed a consciousness of guilt about something. The populist ideologists insisted that all high culture depends on wealth stolen from the common people and is therefore tainted by a sort of original sin. As Russia’s greatest autobiographer Alexander Herzen lamented, ‘All our education, our literary and scientific development, our love of beauty, our occupations, presuppose an environment constantly swept and tended by others . . . somebody’s labor is essential in order to provide us with the leisure necessary for our mental development.’ Shame and guilt over unearned privilege shaped a generation of the ‘repentant nobleman.’ Pyotr Lavrov’s Historical Letters (1868-69), the populist bible, put it this way: ‘Mankind has paid dearly so that a few thinkers sitting in their studies could discuss its progress.’
“Perhaps high culture should be abolished altogether? This urgent question came to be called ‘the justification of culture,’ with many writers contending that justification was impossible. Since the symbol of Russian culture was Pushkin, critics, most notably the nihilist Dmitri Pisarev, insisted that any pair of boots is worth more than all of Pushkin’s verse. The nihilists at least worshiped science—like Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, who dissects a frog to show that people are nothing but complex amphibians—but the populists rejected science as well. A story about the writer Vsevolod Garshin as a boy tells how he too dissected a frog, only to take pity on it, sew it up, and let it go. Not knowledge but pity became the moral touchstone. The populist argument about ‘the justification of culture’ became part of what philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev called “the Russian Idea” and, so far as I know, marks Russian culture as unique. (To be sure, it is common today to convict the Western tradition as the product of imperialism and dead white males, but that is still different from rejecting high culture per se.)”
How to Grow Crops on Mars Before Humans Colonize the Red Planet
How to Grow Crops on Mars Before Humans Colonize the Red Planet
What exactly will humans eat on Mars?
By Briardo Llorente, The Conversation
Preparations are already underway for missions that will land humans on Mars in a decade or so. But what would people eat if these missions eventually lead to the permanent colonization of the red planet?
Once (if) humans do make it to Mars, a major challenge for any colony will be to generate a stable supply of food. The enormous costs of launching and resupplying resources from Earth will make that impractical.
Humans on Mars will need to move away from complete reliance on shipped cargo, and achieve a high level of self-sufficient and sustainable agriculture.
The recent discovery of liquid water on Mars — which adds new information to the question of whether we will find life on the planet — does raise the possibility of using such supplies to help grow food.
But water is only one of many things we will need if we’re to grow enough food on Mars.
What Sort of Food?
Previous work has suggested the use of microbes as a source of food on Mars. The use of hydroponic greenhouses and controlled environmental systems, similar to one being tested onboard the International Space Station to grow crops, is another option.
This month, in the journal Genes, we provide a new perspective based on the use of advanced synthetic biology to improve the potential performance of plant life on Mars.
Synthetic biology is a fast-growing field. It combines principles from engineering, DNA science, and computer science (among many other disciplines) to impart new and improved functions to living organisms.
Not only can we read DNA, but we can also design biological systems, test them, and even engineer whole organisms. Yeast is just one example of an industrial workhorse microbe whose whole genome is currently being re-engineered by an international consortium.
The technology has progressed so far that precision genetic engineering and automation can now be merged into automated robotic facilities, known as biofoundries.
These biofoundries can test millions of DNA designs in parallel to find the organisms with the qualities that we are looking for.
Mars and Earth still differ in many ways.
Mars: Earth-Like but Not Earth
Although Mars is the most Earth-like of our neighbouring planets, Mars and Earth differ in many ways.
The gravity on Mars is around a third of that on Earth. Mars receives about half of the sunlight we get on Earth, but much higher levels of harmful ultraviolet (UV) and cosmic rays. The surface temperature of Mars is about -60 degrees Celsius, and it has a thin atmosphere primarily made of carbon dioxide.
Unlike Earth’s soil, which is humid and rich in nutrients and microorganisms that support plant growth, Mars is covered with regolith. This is an arid material that contains perchlorate chemicals that are toxic to humans.
Also — despite the latest sub-surface lake find — water on Mars mostly exists in the form of ice, and the low atmospheric pressure of the planet makes liquid water boil at around 5 degrees Celsius.
Plants on Earth have evolved for hundreds of millions of years and are adapted to terrestrial conditions, but they will not grow well on Mars.
This means that substantial resources that would be scarce and priceless for humans on Mars, like liquid water and energy, would need to be allocated to achieve efficient farming by artificially creating optimal plant growth conditions.
Adapting Plants to Mars
A more rational alternative is to use synthetic biology to develop crops specifically for Mars. This formidable challenge can be tackled and fast-tracked by building a plant-focused Mars Biofoundry.
Such an automated facility would be capable of expediting the engineering of biological designs and testing of their performance under simulated Martian conditions.
With adequate funding and active international collaboration, such an advanced facility could improve many of the traits required for making crops thrive on Mars within a decade.
This includes improving photosynthesis and photoprotection (to help protect plants from sunlight and UV rays), as well as drought and cold tolerance in plants, and engineering high-yield functional crops. We also need to modify microbes to detoxify and improve the Martian soil quality.
These are all challenges that are within the capability of modern synthetic biology.
Benefits for Earth
Developing the next generation of crops required for sustaining humans on Mars would also have great benefits for people on Earth.
The growing global population is increasing the demand for food. To meet this demand we must increase agricultural productivity, but we have to do so without negatively impacting our environment.
The best way to achieve these goals would be to improve the crops that are already widely used. Setting up facilities such as the proposed Mars Biofoundry would bring immense benefit to the turnaround time of plant research with implications for food security and environmental protection.
So, ultimately, the main beneficiary of efforts to develop crops for Mars would be Earth.
Aztec Ball Court Discovered Beneath Mexico City Streets
Aztec Ball Court Discovered Beneath Mexico City Streets
Written byReuben Westmaas
One of the great travesties of the European invasion of the Americas—if you can set aside the genocide, the chattel slavery, and other war crimes—was the destruction of history. Across the continent, invaders burned books, wiped out languages, and replaced ancient cities with their own settlements. That's what happened in Mexico City, built on the ruins of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. But now, the excavation of an Aztec temple and a ceremonial ball court in the city itself has revealed that history can look strangely familiar to modern eyes.
Because so many great indigenous cities were destroyed, it's easy to slip into the assumption that they were small, or primitive, or ephemeral by design. But Tenochtitlan was an undisputed architectural marvel. Using advanced draining and construction techniques, the city of stone seemed to rest on the surface of Lake Texcoco, and used freshwater springs that fed the lake as a constant source of drinking water. In the words of conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo, "We were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments... on account of the great towers and cues and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream."
The discovery of this 15th-century ball court and temple has already revealed much about the customs of the Aztecs before the Spanish invasion. The temple was devoted to Ehecatl, a god of the wind, and its prominent, half-circle design would have stood in stark contrast to the angular buildings that made up the rest of Tenochtitlan. The ballcourt may be the more significant discovery, however, because of the role the Mesoamerican ball game played in cultures as far north as Arizona to Nicaragua. The game wasn't just a national pastime, and that's putting it mildly. Besides the play area at this particular court, for example, archaeologists unearthed no fewer than 32 severed neck vertebrae—likely belonging to the losing teams. So what was this game that would inspire players to literally risk their necks?
It's hard to overstate the importance of the Mesoamerican ball game to indigenous cultures across the Americas. It's one of the oldest sports in the world, and the first we know of to have used a rubber ball—examples of these balls have been dated to 1600 B.C.E. The game changed a lot as it slowly migrated north over its long history, but some rules remained constant in pretty much every iteration. Like racquetball, the goal is to keep the ball in play, and points can be scored when the opposing team knocks it out of bounds. In most versions, players can only knock the ball around with their hips—hands and feet are off limits. Later versions added the great stone-walled courts, which were then further modified with vertical hoops that players could bounce the ball through in order to score bonus points.
But as you might have guessed by that pile of vertebrae, winning the game wasn't just a matter of hometown pride. In the Mayan version of the game, opposing city-states might choose to settle their differences on the ballcourt instead of on the battlefield, and also used the game as a means of foretelling the future. By the time the Aztecs adopted it, the ritual decapitation of the losing team was as much a part of the game as the pop-up fly rule is in baseball—though probably not as controversial.
Believe it or not, the Mesoamerican ball game isn't just one of the oldest known sports, it's one of the oldest that's been continuously played up to this day. Called ulama, the modern-day version of the game features substantially less decapitation than its predecessor. It survived in remote communities, and in recent years, a new generation of the descendents of Mesoamerican peoples have found a new fascination with the game. In 2017, hundreds of people from various Latin American countries visited the ancient city of Teotihuacán for the first international ulamatournament. If it's true that ulama can be used to tell the future, then maybe the game is on the cusp of a new revival.
Watch And Learn: How Long Have They Been Making Rubber Balls In Mexico?
Rubber Balls in Mexico: A Long History and a Mayan Tradition
Nothing changed with our atmosphere — just our calculations and assumptions have gotten better.
Image credits NASA.
A new research paper proposes that we are all one step closer to space than we assumed. If the calculations are proven correct, we might, in fact, be a full 12 miles closer. The exact altitude of this boundary — the plane where the laws that order airspace get superseded by those governing outer space — is an important piece of information in world politics, the authors note.
The recalculated frontier
“The argument about where the atmosphere ends and space begins predates the launch of the first Sputnik,” wrote Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and sole author of the new paper. “The most widely accepted boundary is the so-called Karman Line, nowadays usually set to be 62 miles altitude.”
The boundary between atmosphere and space is known as the Kármán line after its discoverer, aerodynamics researcher, and engineer Theodore von Kármán. In 1963, when the line was proposed, von Kármán suggested that the speed needed to lift an object into the atmosphere is the same as the speed needed to keep it in orbit around the Earth. He also believed that the horizontal movement of the object on orbit would counteract the effects of gravity. According to McDowell, however, this just isn’t true. The position of the line was therefore calculated based on a faulty assumption and without any real means of testing — this was a time before real-life orbital readings could be performed.
For his study, McDowell drew on North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) data detailing the orbital comings and goings of over 43,000 satellites. Most of these orbited far above the Karman line, so McDowell removed their paths from the study. About 50 satellites, however, were used in the calculations.
What set these 50 apart is that they all performed at least full rotations around the planet at low altitude (below 100km / 63 miles) as they re-entered the atmosphere at the end of their missions. The Soviet satellite Elektron-4, for example, performed ten full rotations around the planet at around 83 km (52 miles) before it burned up in the atmosphere in 1997. In other words, these cases revealed that satellites could still behave as if they were in outer space below the Karman line — which raises the possibility that the altitude line itself is overestimated.
McDowell used a mathematical model to find the altitude at which the orbits of these satellites finally started to degrade and they dropped back into the atmosphere — he found that these events occurred between 70 to 82 kilometers (41 to 55 miles) high. However, for most satellites, the 80-kilometer (50-mile) mark seems to be the lowest possible stable orbit. So McDowell proposes this altitude as the new accepted boundary between our atmosphere and outer space.
The suggestion may actually get some traction in the scientific community. The 80-kilometer mark fits with what we know of the atmosphere’s structure. The mesopause, stretching roughly between 83 and 100 kilometers high, is an area where the air’s chemical composition changes dramatically and charged particles become more abundant — which harkens more to the state of gases in outer space than those in our atmosphere. Below the lower edge of the mesopause, Earth’s atmosphere becomes a stronger force for airborne objects to reckon with, McDowell wrote.
“It is noteworthy that meteors (traveling much more quickly) usually disintegrate in the 43 to 62 miles altitude range, adding to the evidence that this is the region where the atmosphere becomes important,” he adds.
While most outer space operations, such as rocket launches, should remain relatively unchanged if the new boundary is adopted, McDowell wrote, it could raise some important political and territorial issues
The airspace above each country is generally considered to be part of that country — but outer space isn’t owned by anyone. If the limit of space is set at 100 kilometers high, for example, and an unauthorized satellite passes at 80 kilometers high, it could be rightfully considered an act of military aggression between states. Seeing as satellites tend to sometimes wobble up and down along their orbits, a lower limit of the atmosphere might help ease tensions.
The paper “The edge of space: Revisiting the Karman Line” will be published in the October issue of the journal Acta Astronautica.
German Television Station Program Shows a Mysterious UFO
German Television Station Program Shows a Mysterious UFO
Conspiracy theory YouTube channel ‘mavi777’ seemingly shows an unidentified flying object (UFO) in a German TV station program. Soon after the video was uploaded, it became the hottest debating point among alien enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists. The incident took place over a month back, revealed the YouTube channel.
The clip shows a UFO in the backdrop of a TV studio. The strange object emanates light at times. It seems to appear and vanish rhythmically, which rules out a meteor.
The UFO sighting video soon went viral, and multiple conspiracy theorists began suggesting that this event captured on camera is authentic evidence of space alien existence. These theorists also criticized the government for staying mum about the incident. They believe governments are aware of these extraterrestrial visitors, but they are covering up the facts to prevent public panic.
A few days back, another UFO sighting was recorded on video during a weather program Skywatch7. WKBW-TV, an ABC affiliated TV station, released the strange sighting showing a blinking UFO in the skies during the live show.
The show’s newscaster was also seen pointing her fingers at the object. She then suggested that it could be a drone. However, conspiracy theorists said that a human-made drone could not travel at such astonishing speed across the skies.
Some conspiracy theorists think that Nibiru’s approach towards Earth causes the increasing number of anomalies in the skies. According to these theorists, Nibiru is a killer planet and now in its collision course with the Earth, and when this happens, devastating catastrophes will destroy the entire world.
Jupiter’s moon Europa is a promising place to search for evidence of alien life. New research provides insights on what might be the best – and easiest – way to search.
Artist’s concept of a plume from Europa’s subsurface ocean. Radiation from space has the potential to destroy organic molecules that have made their way via plumes like this one to the surface of Europa. New research now shows scientists where to look for such organics.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.
When it comes to the question of what places in the solar system would be the best to search for alien life, Europa immediately comes to mind. This small moon of Jupiter seems to have everything necessary – a global subsurface ocean and likely sources of heat and chemical nutrients on the ocean floor. But looking for evidence isn’t easy; the ocean lies beneath a fairly thick crust of ice, making it difficult to access. That would require drilling through many meters or even several kilometers of ice, depending on the location.
But there may be ways around that problem. It is almost certain now that plumes of water vapor can erupt from the surface, originating from the ocean below, where they could be sampled and analyzed by a flyby or orbiting probe. And now there is another potential solution – a new study, described in Space.com on July 23, 2018, shows that a lander on Europa (now in preliminary concept studies) might only have to dig a few inches/centimeters into the ice to search for evidence of active or past biology, such as amino acids.
It all depends on radiation, which Europa receives a lot of, from Jupiter. The study, led by NASA scientist Tom Nordheim, modeled the radiation environment on Europa in detail, showing how it varies from location to location. That data was then combined with other data from laboratory experiments documenting how quickly various radiation doses destroy amino acids.
Europa as seen by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute.
The results, published in a new paper in Nature Astronomy, showed that equatorial regions receive about 10 times more radiation dosage than middle or high latitudes. The harshest radiation zones appear as oval-shaped regions, connected at the narrow ends, that cover more than half of Europa.
According to Chris Paranicas, a paper co-author from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland:
This is the first prediction of radiation levels at each point on Europa’s surface and is important information for future Europa missions.
The good news from this is that a lander in the least-radiated locations would only have to dig about 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) into the ice to find viable amino acids. In more radiated areas, the lander would need to dig about 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 cm). Even if any organisms were dead, the amino acids would still be recognizable. As Nordheim told Space.com:
Even in the harshest radiation zones on Europa, you really don’t have to do more than scratch beneath the surface to find material that isn’t heavily modified or damaged by radiation.
Artist’s concept of a future lander on Europa.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.
As Nordheim also noted:
If we want to understand what’s going on at the surface of Europa and how that links to the ocean underneath, we need to understand the radiation. When we examine materials that have come up from the subsurface, what are we looking at? Does this tell us what is in the ocean, or is this what happened to the materials after they have been radiated?
Kevin Hand, another co-author of the new research and project scientist for the potential Europa lander mission, elaborated a bit more:
The radiation that bombards Europa’s surface leaves a fingerprint. If we know what that fingerprint looks like, we can better understand the nature of any organics and possible biosignatures that might be detected with future missions, be they spacecraft that fly by or land on Europa.
Europa Clipper’s mission team is examining possible orbit paths, and proposed routes pass over many regions of Europa that experience lower levels of radiation. That’s good news for looking at potentially fresh ocean material that has not been heavily modified by the fingerprint of radiation.
Data from the Hubble Space Telescope in 2013 showing the location of a water vapor plume.
Image via NASA/ESA/L. Roth/SWRI/University of Cologne.
Nordheim and his team used data from the old Galileo mission (1995-2003) and electron measurements from the even older Voyager 1 mission (Jupiter flyby in 1979).
Since material from the subsurface ocean is thought to be able to come up to the surface through cracks or weaker areas of ice, it should be possible to sample it right on the surface without needing to drill. That would be a huge advantage, and it would be possible to send a lander to a location where there is a relatively fresh deposit not yet completely degraded by radiation. Right now, the images of Europa’s surface are not high enough resolution, but the ones from the upcoming Europa Clipper mission will be. As noted by Nordheim:
When we get the Clipper reconnaissance, the high-resolution images – it’s just going to be a completely different picture. That Clipper reconnaissance is really key.
Artist’s concept of the Europa Clipper mission at Europa.
Image via NASA.
Europa Clipper is tentatively scheduled to launch sometime in the early 2020s, and will be the first mission back to Europa since Galileo. It will perform dozens of close flybys of the moon, studying both the surface and the ocean below. Mission concepts for the lander to follow Europa Clipper are also being devised, using data from Clipper to select a landing spot. Both missions should be able to bring us closer to knowing if any kind of life exists in Europa’s dark ocean.
Bottom line: Europa’s subsurface ocean offers the tantalizing possibility of alien life elsewhere in our solar system. Drilling through the thick ice crust on top of it for a sample would be difficult though. But now new research shows that a future lander might only have to “scratch the surface” to access any organic molecules deposited from the ocean below, in areas where there is less radiation exposure. Looking for life on Europa may actually be easier than we thought.
It seems aliens, in the eyes of UFO hunters at least, aren't content with just building on Mars.
Recently published images of Venus appear to show ‘huge cities, artificial structures and all kinds of elements’, according to one researcher.
He says the buildings were created by some kind of alien race.
Scroll down for video
Recently published images of Venus appear to show ‘huge cities, artificial structures and all kinds of elements’ that some say aren’t natural to the planet Martian researchers believe these buildings were created by some kind of alien race, making Venus the second planet in our solar system to be colonized
WHAT MAKES VENUS INTERESTING?
Venus is the second planet from the sun, orbiting at a distance of about 67 million miles (108 million km).
One Venus year lasts longer than a day on Venus.
A year lasts 225 Earth days and the planet spins so slowly that its day lasts as 243 Earth days.
It is a dim, but hot and volcanically active planet and it spins in the opposite direction of most planets.
YouTube and alien hunter mundodesconocido put a video together explaining the large cities he claims he found while analyzing the collection of photos.
He even created 3D models of the structures.
‘Artificial bizarre shapes appear to be cities and seem to have elements that emit light,’ he said in the video.
Mundodesconocido takes viewers on a tour through the 'great city' on Venus, showing raised structures all over the planet that could be alien apartment complexes or just craters on the surface.
These images came from the Magellan probe that was shipped off to Venus in 1989, which arrived a little over a year later to collect data.
Its mission was study land forms and tectonics, impact processes, erosion, deposition, chemical processes and the planets interior.
At least 85 percent of the surface was found to be covered with volcanic flows, which could explain the protruding structures referred to as ‘huge cities’ in YouTube clip.
Scott C. Waring of UFO Sightings Daily, published the YouTube video on his blog to share with these findings his followers.
The Venus map used by the researchers: To see an interactive version of it click here
Pictured is the image of which the YouTuber found the alien cities. He shows others how to locate the cities using the map and easily accessible software
Mundodesconocido takes viewers on a tour through the great city on Venus, showing raised structures all over the planet that could be alien apartment complexes or just craters on the surface. These images came from the Magellan probe that was shipped off to Venues in 1989
‘Wow! This person not only found these structures, but made a CGI duplicate so we can see what it truly looks like,’ he shared.
‘Note, the entire…and I mean entire, surface of Venus is covered in structures.’
POLES ON VENUS ARE COLDER THAN ANYWHERE ON EARTH
Venus is the second planet from the sun, orbiting at a distance of about 67 million miles (108 million km).
It is a sad reality that some spacecraft like Nasa's Philae lander don't last as long as they should, while others such as Esa's Venus Express continue to surprise us.
As part of its recent swansong, as the probe plummeted toward the planet, the Express gathered new and unexpected information about the planet's polar atmosphere.
This data has now been studied and reveals the poles are colder than any place on Earth.
They are also covered with rippling atmospheric waves.
Venus Express arrived at Venus in 2006.
It spent eight years orbiting the planet, greatly exceeding the mission's planned duration of 500 days, before it ran out of fuel.
The probe then began its descent into Venus' atmosphere, before the mission lost contact with Earth in November 2014 and officially ended the following month.
Before it plummeted down through the planet's atmosphere, the probe's measurements showed it to be rippling with atmospheric waves and, at an average temperature of -157°C (114K), is colder than anywhere on Earth.
These recent observations show the planet's atmosphere is much more interesting than first thought.
During the final months of its mission, Venus Express orbited the planet low enough to measure drag from the atmosphere.
Our previous understanding of Venus' polar atmosphere was based on observations gathered by Nasa's Pioneer Venus probe in the late 1970s.
These were of other parts of Venus' atmosphere, near the equator, but extrapolated to the poles to form a complete atmospheric reference model.
Its mission was study land forms and tectonics, impact processes, erosion, deposition, chemical processes and the planets interior. At least 85 percent of the surface was found to be covered with volcanic flows, which could explain the protruding structures referred to as ‘huge cities’ in YouTube clip
Mundodesconocido shows viewers different areas of Venus and and shows other conspiracy theorists how to find the structures on their own. These images were taken from the Magellan probe that studied land forms and tectonics, impact processes, erosion, deposition, chemical processes and the planets interior
Some of the other structures spotted on the surface of Venus.
Has the legendary Mothman returned to West Virginia? One might think so with the amount of attention being given to photographs taken in Crum, West Virginia, less than two hours from Point Pleasant, which show an unidentified flying object that could (and apparently do) appear to some to be a flying winged humanoid similar to Mothman. Is it the real deal? Why has one photo gotten so much attention when a similar flying humanoid picture just a few weeks earlier in the same city seems to be ignored? Is Crum becoming a new Mothman or UFO hotspot in West Virginia?
“Was cutting grass in my yard today. Saw a really pretty cloud. Took two pictures of the cloud. Didn’t see anything but the cloud when I was taking the pictures! Afterwards when I noticed the strange black object in both of the pictures!”
That’s the report to MUFON accompanying two photos (see them on MUFON here (upper left, top of cloud) and here(closeup)) taken on the evening of July 25, 2018. The magnified version looks more like an object than a flying humanoid, prompting comments on some sites showing it that it resembles a ship, a kite, a drone or a balloon. On the flying humanoid side, there’s suggestions of Mothman or a human in a flying suit, glider wing or parachute.
Easy to identify close up and in daylight, but can it be mistaken for Mothman at night?
“I was taking pictures of the clouds and sunset in Crum West Virginia around 5:30 pm June 15, 2018. At the time of the photo there was no birds of any kind flying. I didn’t even notice it until later when I was checking my photos. I took dozens of photos that day. And this was the only image with this strange dark looking object in it.”
This photo (see it here) looks more like a flying human but could also be a large bird or a camera anomaly, especially since it reportedly only appeared in one of a series of photos. That could explain why it hasn’t received as much attention as the later photograph.
Why Crum? The southwestern West Virginia town is tiny (population around 182), close to the borders of Ohio and Kentucky and about 100 miles from Point Pleasant. Prior this, its claim to fame is “Crum: The Novel,” a fictional account of life in Crum written by a former resident (Lee Maynard) who was accused of basing it too closely on real people.
Easy to identify close up and in daylight, but can it be mistaken for Mothman at night?
The speculations that these photos might be humans in flying suits or parachutes comes on the heels of an article by Nick Redfern in Mysterious Universe which details how some people believed at least some of the 1966 Point Pleasant Mothman sightings were actually Green Beret parachutists wearing luminous paint in secret training exercises before being sent to Vietnam. Parachuting, parasailing, personal gliders, jet wings and jet packs have come a long way since 1966. Could these new sightings in Crum be something similar?
Crum residents would be wise to keep their eyes on the skies if they want to prove that Mothman or some other flying entity has moved in and they want to capture it, get rid of it or turn it into an annual festival.
One of the most popular destinations in the state of Arizona is the town of Sedona, which over the years has accrued a reputation as quite the mecca for New Agers and paranormal researchers from all over the country as well as droves of tourists every year. Arizona, and in particular this area is rather well-known for a high concentration of UFO sightings and for the mysterious energy vortices said to dot the landscape here, where earth energies crackle and which are believed to confer all manner of health benefits, as well as said to aid in meditation and self reflection. It is largely because of these alleged magical vortices that a bustling business of spiritual healing tours and metaphysical medicine outfits have sprung up here, and one can already see that Sedona is already a rather strange and unique place in an already rather unique and strange state. However Sedona is also the home to a very unusual patch of land where there have long been reported all manner of high strangeness, from UFOs, to ghosts, to dinosaurs, and more.
Go off the beaten path for while, off down a remote unpaved, rough dirt road just 12 miles outside Sedona in the Verde Valley, and you will be met with the site of a rather large, abandoned ranch, now inaccessible and blocked of by an intimidating gate plastered with signs from the U.S. Forest Service warning away trespassers. The desert scrub and wilderness area around the ranch is as remote and uninhabited as you can get, and the now uninhabited ranch itself has devolved into a feral place overgrown with weeds and partially devoured by the landscape. It was obviously once an expansive and successful ranch, so what is this place and why is it just sitting out there forgotten to be slowly reclaimed by the ravenous wilderness around it? For that we have to go back to the beginning, back to 1945.
Sedona, Arizona
It was in 1945 that a Hollywood stuntman and actor named Bob Bradshaw moved out to the Sedona area, where he opened a modest business in the form of a photography shop. With his Hollywood connections, Bradshaw also had a hand in many of the Westerns that were en vogue at the time and which favored the deserts and canyons of the area for sets, with over 50 full length features made in this vicinity over the years, and which helped to revitalize the area. With his new found influx of cash and good-standing amongst the locals, in 1960 Bradshaw purchased a 140-acre parcel of land out in the Verde Valley at a place that was then known as Bitter Creek, and this ranch and its old adobe house would also go on to become a popular place to shoot movies, such as the 1967 Elvis Presley film Stay Away Joe and others.
In the 1990s, Bradshaw’s son, John Bradshaw, turned the land into a more functional, actual working ranch, and it also became popular as a recreation spot for camping, horseback riding, and other outdoor activities. At the time this was a secluded place of natural beauty, with a veneer of Hollywood laid over it, but things would begin to take a turn for the strange beginning from 1992, when a series of escalating strange phenomena began to creep across the ranch.
Bradshaw Ranch
It supposedly began with John Bradshaw’s wife, Linda, who claimed to begin seeing mysterious orbs of light in the sky over the ranch, as well as sudden bright flashes with no discernible cause and streaking mystery lights. This was perhaps to be expected because the region was already long known as a hotspot for UFO sightings, but things would escalate quickly and further branch out into the weird. As if UFOs and anomalous lights in the sky were not odd enough, Linda claimed that odd comets would move across the property shooting beams of light, and that the place was crawling with barely glimpsed shadow people and other entities. Her and her son would also claim to have had a rather far-out encounter with actual aliens on the property, which she would see outside of her window one evening and describe thus:
Strolling past the window were four short-statured aliens wearing tight-fitting one-piece uniforms of a light tan color. They were what are typically called the Zeta Reticuli (also known as the Grays), only these appeared to be a bit more ashen-colored, almost white. Once the beings were out of sight and the witnesses recomposed themselves, the three of them jumped into their car and sped to the house where I was sleeping. I remember so vividly how my son vigorously shook my arm to wake me up. I can still hear the trepidation in his voice as he said, “Mom, wake up. They’re here!” I raised up and said, “Who’s here?” He exclaimed, “The aliens, Mom.”
The next day she allegedly went out to investigate the area where the entities had been seen and found tiny footprints in the ground, which they took video footage of. On top of aliens there were also sighings made of large, hairy Bigfoot-like creatures on the property, in particular one Linda nicknamed “Big Girl,” which was seen frequently, and other less discernible creatures. Even stranger than these sightings were accounts of spotting what were described as actual dinosaurs at the ranch, with Linda herself claiming one time to have seen a 5-foot-tall bipedal lizard with a long tail standing on a dirt path one evening. These apparent “dinosaurs,” purportedly left large, reptilian tracks that were sometimes found on the property as well.
Linda recorded these and all manner of other strangeness at the ranch, such as livestock and other animals falling ill for no apparent reason or the manes of her horses torn off, and after several years of this in 1995 compiled it all into a book called Merging Dimensions: The Opening Portals of Sedona, along with UFOlogist Tom Dongo. The book also features numerous photos that were captured at the ranch, with many of the strange phenomena not seen until the film was developed. UFOs, aliens, Bigfoot, Shadow People, living dinosaurs, what in the world is going on here? Linda Bradshaw believes that all of these disparate phenomena are the result of some sort of inter-dimensional doorway that has for whatever reason opened up at the ranch, and through which spew all manner of entities. She would say of her theory:
I believe these openings have always been on our plane and they’ve perhaps been the portals to allow others in, but if one were to ask my opinion of my experiences regarding this magical place, I would say that not only are they being allowed in, but they are coming in in great numbers. I would also love to say that only compassionate beings of light are scooting through these portals, but this does not always seem to be the case. I have come face to face with a few decidedly nasty beings.
The ranch subsequently became a haven for paranormal researchers, and it was featured on numerous TV programs, with orb and UFO activity commonly caught on film at the location. Readings taken at the ranch also showed the anomaly that it had a much stronger magnetic field than the surrounding area, by some estimates around 500 times greater, although why this is or what connection it has to the purported phenomena no one knows.
In May 2003 the mystery was deepened and conspiracy theories were spawned when the U.S. government suddenly and without explanation purchased the ranch and quickly had it locked off from the rest of the world. Locals claimed that there were frequently military personnel seen around the area, and in addition to the signs keeping people out were also armed guards said to patrol the area and turn people away in no uncertain terms. Unverified reports exist of hikers being confronted and turned away by heavily armed guards with no visible identification or insignia, or even more ominously chased off the property by either guards of all terrain vehicles that are all black with no noticeable markings. Dongo said of this in his book Mysterious Sedona:
A machine gun, usually an M-16 (or in some cases semi-automatic pistols) is then leveled at the hikers. By the tone of the voice of the “soldiers” the hiker(s) is left with no doubt that he will be shot on the spot if he does not turn around, retrace his steps, and rapidly leave the area. Those looking for hard evidence of these claims won’t find it. There are plenty of stories of suspicious activity, missing persons, and aliens and UFOs spotted in conjunction with soldiers, but no substantiated evidence exists to prove these theories. Military activity in the area could very well be routine training exercises and those hikers asked to turn around may be done for their own safety.
It seems odd for this to be the case with just a ranch out in the middle of nowhere, so why is this? Well, that depends on who you ask. For some it is because the U.S. Forest Service is looking to preserve valuable Native American archeological sites in the area, but of course considering all of the strange phenomena reported from here and the rumors of portals and vortices, there are others who think that the government confiscated the land in order to cover it all up.
It is hard to say just what is going on with all of this, but Bradshaw Ranch has continued to be a hotspot for the paranormal nevertheless, with hikers and tours that skirt the property often coming back with myriad tales of the weird. A very strange experience supposedly happened during the filming of a 2013 episode of Discovery Channel’s show Uncovering Aliens, with this episode focused on the ranch. According to the report, at some point a man named Steven Jones wandered away from the crew and onto the actual property of the ranch. When he returned half and hour later he was apparently in a daze, and he claimed that he had heard disembodied voices all around him and that he had missing time, and making it all the more bizarre was that his watch had reportedly stopped working. This was not put in the final episode, but it probably should have been. What happened to him out there? No one knows, and it just adds to the rest of the lore on this very strange location.
What is going on at Bradshaw Ranch? Is this all just kooky conspiracy tales, tall tales, and fiction? If any of it is real, then is it as Linda Bradshaw says, and there is perhaps some sort of interdimensional phenomenon at work here? If so, then why does it congregate to this one place? It is interesting to note the extremely wide range of different types of phenomena reported from here. Orbs, spook lights, UFOs, Bigfoot, aliens, dinosaurs, and others, all of them coexisting in this one patch of high strangeness, gravitating to this place for inscrutable reasons. Why should that be? Also worthy of note is that although the ranch had been there for years before Bradshaw even came along, why is it that the disturbances did not begin until 1992? What activated it, if any of it even exists at all? Why did the governement buy up the land and then prohibit access? Whether this is all urban legend, conspiracies, interdimensional portals, or something even stranger, Bradshaw Ranch certainly inhabits its own little corner of the strange in a state already steeped in the bizarre.
SCIENTISTS SAY—AT LEAST ONE ADVANCED ALIEN CIVILIZATION MAY EXIST IN THE MILKY WAY
SCIENTISTS SAY—AT LEAST ONE ADVANCED ALIEN CIVILIZATION MAY EXIST IN THE MILKY WAY
Based on their research, scientists have demonstrated the possibility that at a galactic scale there is at least ONE extraterrestrial civilization that has the necessary means of communication with Earth in our galaxy—the Milky way. Controversy or not but… American scientists Luis A. Anchordoqui, Susanna Weber and Jorge F. Soriano demonstrated the possibility that an alien civilization capable of communicating with humans exists in the Milky Way Galaxy, according to an article published on the website of the University of Cornell.
Image Credit
Experts based their research on the Drake formula in order to estimate the number of civilizations in our galaxy—the Milky Way—likely to possess technology that could intercept or transmit radio emissions.
According to their calculations, at a galactic scale, there is at least ONE extraterrestrial civilization that has the necessary means of communication with Earth.
Furthermore, scientists compare the number of planets where there could be advanced civilizations capable of contact with the rate of birth of celestial bodies that are within the habitable zone around their star. However, scientists note that powerful gamma ray bursts could endanger the existence of alien life. According to experts, the TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and JWST (James Webb Space Telescope), which are preparing for a historic launch, will allow them to verify the results of their work
And while scientists say that at least one alien civilization may exist out there, they have explained that the fact that the percentage of intelligent alien civilizations in the Milky Way is extremely small—about 0.5% when compared to the total number of alien civilizations that may exist in the Universe, which is something that significantly complicates their search for our cosmic neighbors.
This fact, according to them, is one of the reasons why we have not yet found aliens to this day. Searching for clues leading to the discovery of other civilizations, according to Soriano and his colleagues, will only be possible in the future when scientists discover more of Earth’s “twin” planets.
“A new arsenal of data will certainly provide an ideal testing ground to improve our understanding about: (i) the occurrence of exoplanets in the habitable zone, (ii) the early star formation rate models, and (iii) the GRB phenomenology. The past few years have witnessed the discovery of more and more rocky planets that are larger and heftier than Earth.”
“Finding the Earth-twins is a higher order challenge, because these smaller planets produce fainter signals and hence only a few have been discovered. Technology to detect and image Earth-like planets has been developed for use of the next generation space telescopes. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is NASA’s next step in the search for planets outside of our solar system, including those that could support life.”
“The NASA roadmap will subsequently continue with the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and perhaps the proposed Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope – Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets (WFIRST-AFTA) early in the next decade. The ability to detect alien life may still be years or more away, but the quest is underway.”
In 2016, scientists adapted the Drake Equation with data from NASA’s Kepler satellite on habitable planets in the cosmos. Researchers modified the Drake Equation from detailing the number of extraterrestrial civilizations that exist now, to about the chance of our civilization being the only one ever existed.
The research indicates that unless the odds of intelligent life forms evolving on habitable planets are extremely low, life on Earth is not the only one that evolved to an advanced stage. Scientists explain that the chance of an advanced civilization developing would need to be less tan one in 10 trillion, for our civilization to be the only intelligent one in the known universe.
Hugh Ross thinks so. From Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media:
On Wednesday, media outlets breathlessly reported that scientists have discovered a “lake of liquid water” on Mars. Fox News called it a “game changer” in the search for alien life, and Yahoo News reported something similar. The New York Times headline spelled out the implications: “Raising the Potential for Alien Life.”
Ph.D. astronomer Hugh Ross told PJ Media that these reports twisted the truth. In reality, the scientists found what could be a lake, but Ross noted that it certainly does not contain life. The peer-reviewed study published in the journal Science reported on findings from 22 planetary astronomers in Italy working on data from the MARSIS (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding). The word “lake” is a gross mischaracterization of their tenuous discovery.
"What we found is some kind of sludge, or it could be localized brine pools," the astronomer Ross,president and founderof Christian apologetics group Reasons to Believe, told PJ Media on Thursday, elaborating onhis own article. "That's a whole lot different than you can take a speedboat on."
The astronomers used radio waves to discover a small, very bright echo suggesting something underneath Mars' south polar ice cap. The echo was consistent with the radar reflectivity of liquid water.
Here's the catch: the "lake" was buried under 1.5 kilometers of ice, the thickest part of the south polar ice cap. The pressure from this ice actually raises the temperature of the likely liquid water layer — to -68°Celsius (-90°Fahrenheit). That's right, this "water" is liquid at a point far below freezing. "The only way it remains liquid is if it's super-saturated with perchloric salts," Ross explained.
"This is not a possible site for life, it's way too cold and way too salty," the astronomer told PJ Media. "Even the most extreme forms of life on Earth are not able to handle this much salt and cold."
That's not to say the discovery isn't remarkable. Ross explained that the radar "found a spot that was too bright to be ice or rock — only liquid water would reflect atthhat surface." The researchers admitted this is an estimate, however — "we can't prove for sure it's water."
As for life on Mars, Ross said scientists will certainly find fossils, but that these fossils and other life remains will be from Earth, not Mars.
"I've been on written record since the 1980s," the astronomer explained. "If we look hard enough, we will find remains of life on Mars. We know that Earth life has been deposited on Mars through meteorite transport." How does it get there? Meteoroids hitting Earth would dislodge soil, and quite a few of them would have made it all the way to Mars.
But life — at least life like it is on Earth — cannot have ever thrived on Mars, he insisted. While Mars was "much warmer than it is today and much wetter than it is today" back about 4 billion years ago, any liquid water was "ephemeral."
Ross explained that Mars experienced a "carbonate catastrophe" that destroyed water on Mars. In his book "More than a Theory: Revealing a Testable Model for Creation," Ross wrote that "the Late Heavy Bombardment 3.85 billion years ago brought a lot of water and carbon dioxide to Mars," which reacted with Mars's surface rocks, depleting the Martian atmosphere of carbon dioxide and water. "Thus Mars was swiftly and permanently transformed into a dry, cold wasteland."
Mars also has an unstable rotation axis, unlike Earth. "If you've got a liquid drop of water on the surface of Mars, it evaporates because the freezing point and the boiling point on Mars are the same temperature," Ross explained. The boiling point of water drops even on high mountains on Earth. "Mars has such a thin atmosphere that water cannot be stable on the surface."
Even though liquid water may exist on Mars, Ross argued that the search for extraterrestrial life needs to involve more factors. "Water is only one of many requirements for life to be possible. Given how much water there is in the universe, that's not a good strategy," he explained. Furthermore, "too much water and too much carbon are a problem for life."
Earth, which Ross described as a kind of "goldilocks planet," has about 1200 times less carbon than what is typical for rocky planets of its size.
While Christians mostly doubt the possibility of extraterrestrial life, Ross argued that Bible believers have options on the subject, while atheists do not. "If you come from a perspective that God loves to create and He's compulsively creative, then aliens are possible. If you take the position that God' doesn't waste miracles, this is the only planet."
"From an atheistic perspective, however, you've only got one option — life has got to be everywhere," Ross quipped.
Ross, who has posited a "testable creation model," melding scientific theory with Bible interpretation, urged NASA to return to the moon. Referencing the human life remains that made it to Mars, he added, "We know that the moon has received 100 times as much as Mars has."
"We need to go back to the moon because the moon has the fossils of Earth's first life," the astronomer urged. "We can go to the moon and determine who got the life model right: theists or non-theists."
"That could be a real coup for NASA if they were able to prove who got the origin of life model right," Ross declared. "I think every taxpayer should be excited about that."
The news copy around life on Mars generally sounds as though it is written for people who have an emotional need to believe that there is life on Mars, whether there is or not. Call it a specialized version of the Drake Equation. The last place to look for reasonable skepticism often turns out to be science writing.
See also: But if we don’t find life on either Mars or Europa… … are we justified in drawing the conclusion that life is just not very common in the galaxy and that we are special? As opposed to They Must Be Out There Somewhere, experienced as an act of faith? What makes that act of faith “science”?
If we are alone in the universe, shouldn’t that make us feel more special? Instead of meaningless? How exactly did we get from “alone” to “meaningless” via eloquence from tenured pundits? Where do we buy return tickets?
Part 1. Assuming Mars was WAY more Earthlike a couple billion years ago, Mars had the same problems as Earth in developing (being GIVEN?) primitive life.
Part 2. Without useful van Allen Belts, Mars was then stripped of its atmosphere. Without a protective atmosphere to form the Biosphere, whatever simple, primitive Life that may have developed as pond scum in tidal pools would have died a thousand deaths from galactic radiation, hurricane force winds, and cold deep enough to freeze any surface water.
So that pretty much leaves us with the freaks that on Earth are called Exremophiles. And as on Earth, Extremophiles are an END STATE, not a development path. That is, surface life deforms itself to invade environments in which life was not intended to live.
This means that Mars is to be considered MUCH more dangerously INFECTED with nasty little bugs than The Moon. This is just another reason Earthlings should never ever set foot on Mars. And never ever bring back any Mars rocks for direct analysis here on Mother Earth. But humans are smart little critters, and sending REALLY sophisticated MACHINES to locate and analyze really interesting Mars rocks on Mars is clearly cheaper, faster, and MUCH less dangerous than sending humans with specimen bags.
How people would react to first contact with aliens?
How people would react to first contact with aliens?
If you haven't seen the movie Arrival 2016, it's really worth watching multiple times. The plot's a little weird for the first time. But the film really strikes you once watched a couple of times IMHO.
One of the things I like about the film is the way the whole world reacts to the first contact with aliens.
I think it really is an accurate representation of how human beings would react as a group.
The Sun Pyramid in Bosnia - Knowledge about the mysterious place of power
The Sun Pyramid in Bosnia - Knowledge about the mysterious place of power
The "Sun Pyramid" is probably the most impressive appearance of the pyramid complex in Bosnia.
Situated on the edge of the city of Visoko, it towers above the landscape. Visoko, a city with more than 20,000 inhabitants - Location: 30 km in the north of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia.
In its size and monumental splendor, the Pyramid of the Sun - or Sun pyramid - far surpasses the impression that the Great Pyramid of Giza leaves on the viewer in Egypt. The Pyramid of the Sun, a hill with regular pyramidal geometry, with a cover of artificially produced concrete.
In April 2005 the pyramids were discovered in Bosnia by Dr. Sam Osmanagich, a world-famous pyramid researcher. Shortly afterward, scientists began non-invasive archaeological research. Field inspections, aerial photo reconnaissance and the study of historical documents and maps as well as modern topographic visualizations.
The sun pyramid impresses with a height of 220 meters and is thus a third higher than the large pyramid of Giza. This makes it one of the highest pyramids on earth today! According to the discoverer, the Pyramid of the Sun was built by a tribe of pre-Illyrians, which was only documented in the Balkans since the 6th century B.C. but was said to have lived there well before 12,000 B.C. - before the end of the last ice age.
Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun is one of the largest ancient structures on Earth
The latest research and scientific laboratory tests revealed a date of origin around 28,000 B.C. This is proven by a radio-carbon study of a found enclosed leaf, which was carried out in 2010 in several laboratory studies in various countries in Europe. They all came to the same conclusion. Already at the beginning of May 2006 the customer of the sensational pyramid finds reached the experts in Egypt. PyAly Abd Alla Barakat, one of Egypt's best-known pyramid experts, traveled to Visoko to explore - what these discoveries are all about.
The then President Sulejman Tihic also visited this "new discovery" - he was accompanied by 15 researchers from many countries - among them representatives from Peru, Egypt and China.
The excavation started in 2008 and revealed fantastic archaeological finds! Discoveries: Hewn stones, wondrous ceramic cast megalith formations weighing tons and widely ramified tunnel systems. All pyramids are connected by this underground tunnel system.
A tunnel system whose meaning and purpose can only be guessed today. Inside the tunnel system, there are several large megaliths weighing tons. The megaliths contain characters and symbols whose meaning has not yet been fully or at least partially discovered.
Again, there are clear indications that an exclusive natural or only human creation of the pyramids in Bosnia was highly unlikely, if not impossible.
All signs suggest that in prehistoric times there was a high culture there, which had excellent possibilities to produce materials whose quality today can only be reached or surpassed by modern production processes in a few very highly civilized regions of the world.
A prime example of this is the material that makes up the main large geometrically shaped blocks of the solar pyramid. Cemented geopolymer concrete, which in its density has almost already achieved the best quality concrete that can be produced worldwide today. And this 28,000 years ago! It thus exhibits extremely high compressive strength and stability.
Prof Dr. Joseph Davidovits, the founder of the French Institute of Polymers, prepared an electron microscopic analysis back in 2008: "The chemical composition of ancient cement is based on a lime/potassium geopolymer concrete."
Prof. Davidovits is considered THE expert in materials science and holds more than 50 patents in this field. His expert status is complemented by other award-winning books on the construction of pyramids in Egypt. Fact: The builders of these ancient buildings at that time used a gravel conglomerate as the base material. This is identical to the material used in the construction of the tunnel facilities (Ravne Tunnel).
Later tests brought this connection. Gravel conglomerate" mixed on site with water, an excellently composed binder, and gravel mass. This liquid porridge was poured directly at the place of use at the solar pyramid - in sandstone molds under the influence of high heat and pressure. Numerous well-known international and national scientific institutes confirm the presumed production and composition of these finds in a highly precise manner.
The foundation structure of the solar pyramid - geopolymer cement blocks. A cover/cover made of geopolymer plates. These panels are joined/glued together with a binder that withstands the harshest loads. Highly visible to the naked eye. Modern cameras precisely document these fine white splices.
Energetic characteristics
The Solar Pyramid - an energy-producing prehistoric building! An extremely strong energy beam emerges from the solar pyramid. Surprisingly, with increasing distance to the solar pyramid, this energy beam does not become weaker - as one might actually expect - but becomes many times stronger and more intense on its way.
The exit point of this mysterious energy was located by measurements of anthropologist Prof. Paolo Debertolis in 2010 at a depth of 2440 meters below the solar pyramid. The radius of the energy beam is as much as 4.5 meters - that is a measurable 9 meters in diameter. Consistent energy emissions - for over 28,000 years.
In the search for the source of this energy, it was discovered that the source of the frequency was probably a metallic, parabolically shaped "plate" with a diameter of 800 meters. According to Prof. Debertolis, this enigmatic object generates electromagnetic waves of exactly 28,300 Hz, a uniform sinusoidal curve that produces longitudinal electromagnetic waves concentrated 15 meters above the top of the solar pyramid.
The findings and research results were largely confirmed by the investigations of the Croatian physicist Dr. Slobodan Mizdrak - however, in his opinion, the origin can only be assumed.
Dr. Debertolis assumes that a prehistoric civilization could have created the inexplicable "energy machine" under the mountain. Several finds from the tunnel system suggest that the builders of the corridors had an immense knowledge about the functioning of pyramids.
For the discoverer of the "Valley of the Bosnian Pyramids" archaeologist Dr. Semir Osmanagich, the amazing energy phenomenon is the first proof of extraterrestrial technology on our planet.
It seems that the pyramid builders created a perpetuum mobile a long time ago and that this "energy machine" is still working. The extremely hard, ancient concrete blocks, which weigh millions of tons and cover the pyramids, serve among other things to focus the energy generated.
The pyramid of the sun works like a huge generator. A Free Energy Machine! The measurable 9 m diameter beam directly at the top of the summit plateau represents the discharge of the produced energy. This energy beam is topographically measured slightly different from the actual center of the pyramidal building.
Current measurements of further experts speak of energy vortexes, which move continuously in a spiral form from the bottom upwards and move in their locations or cannot always be measured at the same location.
Spiritual
The emergence of the "Bosnian pyramids" solely by man or nature is more than unlikely in view of the possibilities available at that time and on the other hand by the laws of nature. A hybrid project with guidance and monitoring through extraterrestrial influence, help, and support would be conceivable and more obvious. With what intention, however, that is still unexplored, although several theories are being discussed.
Even if it may seem like a science fiction story at first... many science fiction elements of the 70s are now part of our everyday life reality. The results of many other researchers clearly show that the solar pyramid has a special and remarkably strong electromagnetic field which differs significantly in its strength from the other hills around it. The solar pyramid pulsates and is acting like a living being.
The well-known English physicist Dr. Harry Oldfield took fascinating energy photos with a special camera, which clearly and credibly prove that the solar pyramid continuously builds up a strong energy in its interior, further amplifies it and radiates this energy vertically upwards at the saturation point. The pictures of the neighboring hills, on the other hand, show horizontal, uniform energy radiation throughout.
Local connoisseurs of the excavation sites lead us enthusiastically to a "healing stone". A large excavation site, a ca. 150 sqm exposed part of the cover of the Pyramid of the Sun. Easily accessible via 200 steps. Many visitors there feel the very special energy. It is good if they settle down on these surfaces and spend some time in meditation and silence.
Gentle pulsation, female energy, deep calmness and inner peace - release from inner pressure, so tensions and consequently, also pain can be released. Many visitors report very impressive experiences.
The special energy and frequency capabilities of the solar pyramid support our systems very competently here. From the cell frequency, over the heart rate - up to the brain frequency - liberating and energizing.
The 28 kHz beam at the top of the solar pyramid, a widespread energy spiral network that moves in and around the solar pyramid in vortexes, natural beings and orbs that are perceived by clairvoyant and clairvoyant visitors and that are present in particularly large numbers in these fantastic light fields - all this inspires energy-sensitive visitors from all over the world, who now flock there in droves to experience the places of power, to experience transformation - and to return home inspired as a "new human being" with a changed, finer perception. Whoever meditated for several hours up there on the top of the solar pyramid in the energy ray knows how fine and very special a healing change can occur.
Pre-History and Pre-Astronautics
For some time now, border science areas have been investigating phenomena on this earth for which the technical materialistic view of the world provides little or no explanation. Or even deliberately misinformed. Thus, there are numerous books and specialist publications on the market that report very special contexts of phenomena that cannot be explained normally (Mann, who built a gold-plated replica of the Great Pyramid, reveals mysterious energy (videos)).
Among other things about the topics of extraterrestrial influence on the emergence of mankind and our planet. The global pyramid system, in particular, stimulates the imagination and also the intention of research into these special structural structures.
And often the connection with UFOs, intelligent star races and their existence and work on this planet earth emerges. Also in the area of the solar pyramid - many cameras of my seminar participants show unknown phenomena, well photographable unknown flying objects, just - UFOs. Sensitively gifted people with a high level of visual perception explore the "moving" airspace with enthusiasm, as even simple locals confirm.
Conclusion: For Dr. Sam Osmanagich, the solar pyramid is an ingenious energy generator - built by a sophisticated civilization. The use of "free energy" (see Nikolas Tesla and others) is the best-kept secret on our planet.
And this secret must be rediscovered and solved by the right people so that we can finally stop our self-destructive energy production. We can take the first step on this path by already using these energies - at least spiritually - for our spiritual and spiritual development.
Why the Private Spaceflight Industry Needs More Lawyers (Op-Ed)
Why the Private Spaceflight Industry Needs More Lawyers (Op-Ed)
By Michael D. Shaw, Space.com Contributor
Artist's concept of a possible colony on the moon.
Credit: NASA
Michael D. Shaw is a biochemist and freelance writer. A graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles and a protégé of the late Willard Libby, winner of the 1960 Nobel Prize in chemistry, Shaw also did postgraduate work at MIT. Based in Virginia, he covers technology, health care and entrepreneurship, among other issues.
If private companies are going to start exploring and settling the final frontier — building human outposts on the moon and Mars, launching tourists into space or even building luxury space hotels in orbit — the world will need clearer laws to govern the commercial use of space and more specialized attorneys to understand and interpret those laws.
The world already has several treaties that govern what government entities can and cannot do in space, like the United Nations' Outer Space Treaty. However, private companies don't necessarily have to abide by the same rules.
We need law schools to prepare students for this infinite realm of property law regarding physical property, like the construction and use of spacecraft, space stations and even to attempts to colonize the moon and Mars. That preparation also extends to the vast universe of intellectual property. Law students also need to learn the mechanics of laws governing aviation and space travel, as well as personal liability and insurance. And existing lawyers need to expand their knowledge of these subjects, lest the commercial quest for space have nowhere to go because too many questions go unanswered. [Now Boarding: The Top 10 Private Spaceships]
Thus, for every scientist who seeks answers about the mysteries of the universe, there should be clear answers about the laws involving what we can do in space. If confusion persists, lawsuits may increase, and the cost of exploring space may become too costly a proposition for even NASA to pursue.
According to Wayne R. Cohen, a professor at The George Washington University School of Law in Washington, D.C., and a partner at Cohen & Cohen, P.C., the space race may induce a need for more office space. "Legal specialization may coincide with a rise in the number of professionals who specialize in some aspect of the space program," Cohen said in a phone interview. "In turn, there is — or will be — a demand for lawyers regarding everything from workplace safety to workers' rights in general."
The challenge for lawyers is to determine what laws already apply to private spaceflight. For example, there are international treaties about what the signatories promise their respective nations will not do in space, but there is little or no common law about what private companies can do in space. The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairshas a detailed code involving space law, and this code covers everything from liability for damages involving space objects to the use of space-related technologies.
Prior to entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, countries did what no one had the wealth or the will to do alone — launch the first rockets into space — paving the way for private companies to eventually build and launch their own rockets. Advances in technology and access to space require similar achievements within the legal profession.
Lawyers need to better educate the public about space law. They need to promote a discussion of this discipline, at home and abroad. The more aware people are of this subject, the more attentive legislators, news outlets and private companies will be, too.
The lawyer who understands this impulse — and offers judicious counsel without judgment, speaking to the needs of his or her clients — is an expert of insight and value.
(Natural News) NASA announced recently that it discovered organic molecules on Mars. In a press release, the agency said that the Curiosity rover discovered new evidence in rocks suggesting the planet may have supported ancient life, along with new evidence in the planet’s atmosphere related to the search to find current life on the planet.
The findings include organic molecules in sedimentary rocks that are billions of years old found near the planet’s surface, and they also discovered seasonal variations in atmospheric methane levels.
Although it’s being touted as a “new” discovery, Mike Adams says NASA had proof there was microbial life on Mars as far back as 1976, when the Viking mission found it with mass spec equipment.
On that occasion, Gilbert Levin, who was tasked with heading the mission’s life detection experiment, said that space probes found signs of life on Mars but it was covered up. The scientist has been critical of NASA ever since. He theorized that microorganisms may have made their way to Mars in a frozen and dried state after being injected into space from meteor strikes. Carl Sagan even reportedly congratulated this scientist on what many considered one of the greatest discoveries in science history, but it was quickly covered up.
In a video posted to the free speech platform REAL.video, Mike Adams talks about how NASA covered that up for political reasons, which begs the question of what else they might be covering up. He also talks about why carbon in the atmosphere is essential to life rather than the pollutant that the global warming camp would have you believe.
Adams believes that NASA preferred to slowly leak out the possibility of life on Mars discovered in the 1970s rather than catching the public off guard with the finding because they feared global chaos across various religions.
Organic molecules contain carbon, like the molecules in our body. Organic molecules are generally created by living organisms, such as plants. Adams points out that what they found were bigger molecules, which does support the idea that life is or was on Mars. All organic molecules can break down over time due to exposure to heat, radiation, and other conditions, which means what they found could, in theory, have been created fairly recently.
Getting closer to the truth
Could life even be there right now creating these molecules?
It’s not impossible when you consider the presence of water under the ice caps on Mars. Scientists reported in a study released this week in the journal Science that they found a lake under the surface of an ice cap situated at Mars’ south pole. The lake, which spans 12.5 miles, was found using the MARSIS radar and is believed to be a legitimate body of water rather than mere runoff from ice.
Scientists say that it could be our best clue at the possibility of life on Mars. Unlike the planet’s surface, which is considered inhospitable to life, the lake could well prove to be a good environment for microbial life to thrive. A similar lake found below the ice in East Antarctica on Earth, Lake Vostok, is home to thousands of species of fungi and bacteria.
The lead scientist of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, Michael Meyer, said: “Are there signs of life on Mars? We don’t know, but these results tell us we are on the right track.”
NASA verdoezelt de waarheid over leven op Mars. Bekijk deze video
NASA verdoezelt de waarheid over leven op Mars. Bekijk deze video
De Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA kondigde onlangs aan organische moleculen te hebben ontdekt op Mars.
Marsrover Curiosity heeft materiaal gevonden dat het bestaan van leven op de rode planeet, in ieder geval in een ver verleden, aannemelijk maakt.
Hoewel wordt gesproken van een ‘nieuwe’ ontdekking, stelt Mike Adams van Natural News dat de NASA al in 1976 bewijs voor microbieel leven op Mars heeft ontdekt, met de onbemande Vikingsondes.
Politieke redenen
Hoofdonderzoeker van de Vikingmissie Gilbert Levin stelde dat de ruimtesondes bewijs voor leven hadden gevonden op Mars, maar dat het in de doofpot werd gestopt.
Hij theoretiseerde dat micro-organismen mogelijk via meteorieten op de planeet waren aanbeland.
Volgens Adams verdoezelde de NASA de waarheid om politieke redenen. Je kunt je afvragen wat het agentschap nog meer voor ons verborgen houdt.
Wereldwijde chaos en paniek
Adams meent dat NASA het publiek in de jaren zeventig niet wilde vertellen dat er leven op Mars was gevonden omdat men bang was dat het zou leiden tot wereldwijde chaos en paniek.
De kans is groot dat er ook nu nog levensvormen zijn die organische moleculen achterlaten. Wetenschappers hebben namelijk een enorm ondergronds meer ontdekt op Mars.
Een soortgelijk meer is ontdekt onder Antarctica en daar bevinden zich duizenden soorten schimmels en bacteriën.
ER GEBEUREN LANGZAMERHAND TE VEEL KRANKZINNIGE DINGEN OP AARDE ( VIDEO )
ER GEBEUREN LANGZAMERHAND TE VEEL KRANKZINNIGE DINGEN OP AARDE ( VIDEO )
De bewoners van een kustplaats in de Amerikaanse staat North Carolina gaan ’s avonds slapen en wanneer ze wakker worden is het strand compleet verdwenen.
En een 80-jarige Chinees gaat voor een wandeling en verdwijnt van het ene op het andere moment in de grond.
Wanneer je verbanden gaat leggen tussen vreemde gebeurtenissen die zich wereldwijd voordoen, dan krijg je een compleet ander beeld van de wereld dan wanneer je naar iedere gebeurtenis afzonderlijk kijkt.
En dat laatste is wat er in het algemeen gebeurt en dus kijkt bijna niemand naar het grotere beeld.
Zoals bijvoorbeeld wat er enkele dagen geleden gebeurde in de Amerikaanse staat North Carolina, waar van de ene op de andere dag een compleet strand verdween. De ene dag was het er nog gewoon, de andere dag worden mensen wakker en wrijven zich vol verbazing in de ogen.
De “experts” zijn er uiteraard als de kippen bij om met een “logische verklaring” te komen, zoals de wind die uit een bepaalde hoek komt, maar voor de lokale bewoners klinkt dat als een vreemd en ongeloofwaardig verhaal als het strand van het ene op het andere moment is verdwenen.
In de volgende video van Secureteam wordt daar aandacht aan besteed, maar ook aan vergelijkbare situaties elders. Gebieden waar in één klap de zee zich zover teru trekt dat er enorme droge vlaktes ontstaan waar heel kort geleden de zee was.
En wanneer je al die gebeurtenissen op een rij zet, dan zie je duidelijk dat er “iets” aan de hand is, waardoor al dit soort dingen wordt veroorzaakt.
Tyler van Secureteam staat wel open voor veel dingen, maar is toch ook een vrij nuchtere man die niet zomaar wat uitkraamt.
Maar, ook hij begint nu toch enigszins bezorgd te klinken over zaken zoals de enorme scheuren die in de grond verschijnen, de vreemde geluiden in de lucht en de verdwijnende zee of stranden.
Ook hij vraagt zich nu hardop af of er niet bepaalde krachten inwerken op onze planeet die dit veroorzaken en dat er een verband moet zijn tussen al die vreemde dingen die nu plaatsvinden.
Dingen die 20 jaar geleden niet of nauwelijks voorkwamen, maar nu al worden beschouwd als een normaal onderdeel van ons leven. Zoals de bekende sinkholes die overal op aarde spontaan ontstaan en die we nu al eigenlijk heel gewoon vinden. Als je 20 jaar geleden iemand had gevraagd wat een sinkhole was, dan hadden ze je heel verbaasd aangekeken.
Iedere dag opnieuw verschijnen er vreemde beelden van onze lucht. Beelden die dingen laten zien die voor ons normale mensen absoluut niet gewoon zijn.
Zoals onlangs te zien was bij Mr. MB333 die een foto kreeg opgestuurd van een abonnee uit Australië. De foto is gemaakt in de staat Victoria en liet de volgende bizarre lucht zien. En nee, dit is geen jet hole zoals "experts" dan weer roepen.
Enkele dagen geleden verscheen er in de buurt van de plaats Nizhny Novgoro in Rusland een enorme sinkhole van het ene op het andere moment.
Een gat met een doorsnede van 32 en een diepte van 50 meter. Zoals gewoonlijk heeft men geen idee wat dit veroorzaakt.
Of wat te denken van het volgende:
Je rijdt rustig over de weg in je Toyota SUV in Sheridan, een voorstad van Denver in Colorado, en het volgende moment verdwijn je met auto en al in een sinkhole.
Gelukkig is de vrouwelijke bestuurder er dit keer goed vanaf gekomen en kon ze zelf weer naar boven klauteren.
Of je bent een 80-jarige Chinees die voor een wandeling gaat en vervolgens in de grond verdwijnt.
Wanneer men in de mainstream wereld eindelijk eens wereldwijd verbanden zou gaan leggen tussen gebeurtenissen, dan zou er waarschijnlijk spontaan totale paniek uitbreken op onze planeet. En aangezien dat soort dingen de voorbereidingen van de elite op de komende dingen zou verstoren, zal dat absoluut niet gebeuren.
Bij alle onzekere tijden is het in ieder geval zaak om goed gezond te blijven:
Iets dat daarbij uitstekend bij kan helpen is chlorella zoals de biochlorella van Orjana die door Mike Adams van Natural News na tests is uitgeroepen tot beste ter wereld.
Vanwege de vakantie kunnen de Niburlezers de komende week deze biochlorella va uitzonderlijk kwaliteit kopen met tien procent korting. Voer tijdens het afrekenen de code "zomeralg" in en ontvang de korting. Actie geldig tot en met woensdag 1 augustus.
After being defrosted, worms “nematodes” frozen in permafrost for up to 42,000 years showed signs of life, they started moving an eating since the Pleistocene said a report from Yakutia, the area were the worms were found.
Credit image: Siberiantimes.
The roundworms from two areas of Siberia came back to life in Petri dishes, says a new scientific study.
We have obtained the first data demonstrating the capability of multicellular organisms for longerterm cyrobiosis in permafrost desposits of the arctic; states a report from Russian scientist from our institutions in collaboration with Princetown University.
Some 300 prehistoric worms were analyzed and two were shown to contain viablenematodes.
One worm came from an ancient squirrel burrow in a permafrost wall of the Duvanny Yar outcrop in the lower reaches of the Kolyma River – close to the site of Pleistocene Park which is seeking to recreate the Arctic habitat of the extinct woolly mammoth.This is around 32,000 years old.
Credit image: Siberiantimes - Image left variable nematodes.
Currently the nematodes are the oldest living animals on the planet. They are both believed to be female.
The worms came back to life in a laboratory at the Institute of Physico-Chemical and Biological Problems of Soil Science in Moscow.
Our data demonstrate the ability of multicellular organisms to survive long-term (tens of thousands of years) crybiosis under the conditions of natural cryoconservation, scientists said to siberiantimes.
Video: Worms frozen in Siberian permafrost come back to life
Worms frozen in permafrost have come back to life after up to 42,000 years, say scientists. Two nematodes from Siberia are moving and eating again for the first time since the Pleistocene age, it is reported.
En de oude ruimtelescoop levert ook een familieportret af van Saturnus en zijn manen.
In de afgelopen maanden waren de planeten Mars en Saturnus beiden in oppositie met de aarde – Saturnus op 27 juni en mars op 27 juli. Tijdens deze gebeurtenis zijn de planeten relatief dichtbij de aarde, waardoor astronomen ze in detail kunnen observeren. Hubble maakte goed gebruik van deze situatie en legde beide planeten prachtig vast.
Een oppositie vindt plaats wanneer de zon, de aarde en een buitenplaneet in één rij staan, met de aarde precies tussen de zon en de planeet in. Tijdens deze gebeurtenis wordt de planeet – vanaf de aarde gezien – volledig verlicht door de zon. Dit markeert tegelijkertijd het moment dat de planeet het dichtste bij de aarde staat.
Mars Op 18 juli schoot Hubble een prachtig portret van planeet Mars, dertien dagen voordat Mars de aarde het dichtste naderde. Dit jaar zal de rode planeet op slechts 57,6 miljoen kilometer van de aarde vandaan langskomen. Dit is de dichtste benadering sinds 2003, toen Mars dichterbij ons in de buurt kwam in bijna 60.000 jaar tijd.
Zandstorm Hoewel andere foto’s van Mars vaak gedetailleerde oppervlaktekenmerken laten zien, wordt dit nieuwe beeld vooral gedomineerd door de enorme zandstorm die al enige tijd op de planeet woedt. Wel zijn nog steeds de witte poolkappen, Terra Meridiani, de Schiaperelli-krater en de Hellas-bekken zichtbaar, al zijn ook deze enigszins vervaagd door het stof.
Deze afbeelding laat de delen op de rode planeet zien die ondanks de hevige zandstorm zichtbaar waren.
Afbeelding: NASA, ESA, and STScI
Saturnus Ook nam Hubble een paar prachtige kiekjes van de planeet Saturnus. Op het moment van de foto was Saturnus zo’n 1,4 miljard kilometer van de aarde verwijderd. De afbeeldingen laten het prachtige ringsysteem van de planeet goed uitkomen. Hoewel alle gasreuzen ringen hebben, is die van Saturnus toch wel het grootst en spectaculairst. Deze strekt zich uit tot wel acht keer de straal van de planeet.
Manen Tijdens de observatie van de planeet slaagde Hubble er ook in om op beeld zes van Saturnus manen vast te leggen, als een heus familieportret. Tot nu toe zijn er 62 manen van de planeet bekend. De manen die Hubble heeft weten vast te leggen zijn Dione, Enceladus, Tethys, Janus, Epimetheus, en Mimas. Wetenschappers speculeren dat een soortgelijke maan zo’n 200 miljoen jaar geleden uiteenviel en het ringsysteem om Saturnus vormde.
Je vraagt je misschien af wat er eigenlijk gedaan wordt met alle foto’s die om de haverklap worden gemaakt? Astronomen vergelijken de nieuwe beelden van Mars en Saturnus met oudere gegevens. Hierdoor kunnen ze onderzoeken hoe wolkenpatronen en grootschalige structuren op andere planeten in ons zonnestelsel in de loop van de tijd veranderen.
Japanse ruimtesonde Hayabusa2 maakt prachtige close-upfoto van planetoïde
Japanse ruimtesonde Hayabusa2 maakt prachtige close-upfoto van planetoïde
Vivian Lammerse
Het kiekje is van slechts zes kilometer(!) afstand genomen.
De Japanse ruimtesonde Hayabusa2 heeft een prachtig plaatje geschoten van planetoïde Ryugu. De ruimtesonde zweefde in eerste instantie zo’n 20 kilometer boven het oppervlak van de planetoïde. Uiteindelijk legde hij Ryugu op beeld vast op slechts zes kilometer afstand.
De planetoïde Ryugu vanaf een hoogte van 6 kilometer. 1 pixel komt overeen met ongeveer 60 cm.
Afbeelding: JAXA, University of Tokyo, Kochi University, Rikkyo University, Nagoya University, Chiba Institute of Technology, Meiji University, University of Aizu, AIST
Resolutie De resolutie van de foto is waanzinnig, zo is deze 3,4 keer zo hoog als de beelden die tot nu toe van de planetoïde zijn gemaakt. De grootste krater op het oppervlak van Ryugu bevindt zich ongeveer in het midden van de foto. Daarnaast is goed te zien dat de planetoïde bedekt is met een groot aantal rotspartijen.
Ryugu Ruimtesonde Hayabusa2 reisde zo’n 3,2 miljard kilometer om de planetoïde Ryugu te ontmoeten. Na 1300 dagen was het moment aldaar en zeiden ze op 27 juni gedag op zo’n 280 miljoen kilometer afstand van de aarde. Tot nu toe stelt Ryugu allesbehalve teleur. Zo heeft de planetoïde de vorm van een tol, beschikt over meerdere kraters en heeft een soort gebergte op de evenaar.
Landing De onderzoekers zijn van plan om in augustus de afstand nog meer te verkleinen en is het de bedoeling dat de ruimtesonde op ongeveer een kilometer afstand een aantal zwaartekrachtsmetingen gaat doen. Als er genoeg informatie over de planetoïde verzameld is, kiezen de onderzoekers vervolgens de meest geschikte landingsplek voor Hayabusa2. De nieuw gemaakte foto geeft op dit moment al belangrijke informatie over enkele mogelijkheden.
Maar het wordt allemaal nog bonter! Want uiteindelijk is het de bedoeling dat de ruimtesonde Ryugu gaat bombarderen. Zo willen de onderzoekers in 2019 een object op de planetoïde gooien om een krater te generen. Het is de taak van de ruimtesonde om vervolgens wat materiaal uit deze krater te halen en aan boord op te slaan. Als de ruimtesonde vervolgens een jaar later heelhuids terug is gekeerd op aarde, wordt dit materiaal aan een grondige inspectie onderworpen.
There's still no life on the moon, but there's a lake on Mars, stolen electrons, and a supermassive way to confirm Einstein's theory of general relativity — it's Space.com's best news stories of the week.
Photo Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser
1. Monster confirms relativity
For the first time ever, scientists have confirmed Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity with the movement of a star near the monster black hole at the Milky Way's core.
Photo Credit: Dan Gallagher/NASA/MAVEN/Goddard Space Flight Center
3. Stolen electrons
A new type of aurora has been observed on Mars. Researchers think that it may be caused by streams of particles from the solar wind "stealing" electrons.
Photo Credit: ESA, INAF. Graphic rendering by Davide Coero Borga, Media INAF
4. A lake … on Mars
Scientists have discovered what they believe is a lake on Mars. They think that it's about 12 miles across and hidden below a thick sheet of ice on Mars' south pole.
Friday, July 27, Mars will be reach opposition, meaning it will pass directly between Earth and the sun. Also at this time will be the longest lunar eclipse of this century. This weekend will have spectacular Mars views leading to its closest approach to Earth on Tuesday, July 31.
According to a new study, the edge of space got about 12 miles closer to Earth. Nothing moved, but the boundary between airspace and orbital space might be closer than we previously thought.
A collaborative team has taken the audio tapes from NASA's Apollo 11 mission and digitized and transcribed them. The 19,000 hours of audio are now readily and publicly available.
HOW CAN YOU TELL IF THAT ET STORY IS REAL? SCIENTISTS REVISE THE RIO SCALE FOR ALIEN ENCOUNTERS
HOW CAN YOU TELL IF THAT ET STORY IS REAL? SCIENTISTS REVISE THE RIO SCALE FOR ALIEN ENCOUNTERS
A team of international researchers, led by scientists from the University of St Andrews and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, redefines alien detection scale.
What are the consequences for the human race if we encountered extraterrestrial intelligence? If you see a story about aliens on TV or online, how excited should you be? A new study, published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, revamps a long-used tool for classifying potential signals from extraterrestrial intelligence, making it fit for the modern world of news and social media.
First developed in 2001, the Rio Scale is a tool used by astronomers searching for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) to help communicate to the public ‘how excited’ they should be about what has been observed. The Scale measures the consequences for humans if the signal is from aliens, as well as the probability that the signal really is from aliens, and not a natural phenomenon or human-made. The scale gives a score between zero and ten, so that the public can quickly see how important a signal really is.
“The whole world knows about the Richter Scale for quantifying the severity of an earthquake; that number is reported immediately following a quake and subsequently refined as more data are consolidated,” said Jill Tarter, co-founder of the SETI Institute. “The SETI community is attempting to create a scale that can accompany reports of any claims of the detection of extraterrestrial intelligence and be refined over time as more data become available. This scale should convey both the significance and credibility of the claimed detection. Rio 2.0 is an attempt to update the scale to make it more useful and compatible with current modes of information dissemination, as well as providing means for the public to become familiar with the scale.”
There have been many dubious signals reported as ‘aliens’ in recent years, and learning the truth about these stories is increasingly difficult. As such, an updated Rio Scale is required.
The new study, led by Dr. Duncan Forgan at the University’s Centre for Exoplanet Science, highlights the changing nature of news media, the growth of 24-hour news and the new landscape of social media. Coupled with an increase in efforts to detect ETI by teams around the world, the Rio Scale is needed more than ever, and it must remain relevant when communicating to the public about ‘alien signals’.
The international team of researchers’ revision of the Rio Scale (Rio 2.0) aims to bring consensus across academic disciplines, when classifying signals potentially indicating the existence of advanced extraterrestrial life. Rio 2.0 can quickly calibrate the public expectations of a reported signal, and educate them as to how SETI scientists actually evaluate a signal, from its initial detection through the various verification stages needed to determine if a signal is credibly from ETI.
Key to the research is also the development of a single set of consistent terminology for discussing signals, both among researchers and in the media.
The team has published an online Rio Scale Calculator, an interactive tool for scientists and science communicators to evaluate signals and give advice on how to use it for better reporting of ETI in the media.
Lead researcher, Dr. Duncan Forgan, Centre for Exoplanet Science, University of St Andrews, said: “It’s absolutely crucial that when we talk about something so hugely significant as the discovery of intelligent life beyond the Earth, we do it clearly and carefully. Having Rio 2.0 allows us to rank a signal quickly in a way that the general public can easily understand, and helps us keep their trust in a world filled with fake news.”
The new Rio Scale has now been submitted to the International Academy of Astronautics Permanent Committee on SETI for official ratification.
Using observations spanning a period of four years, a team of researchers from Italy found evidence of a large lake of salty water, buried one mile beneath Mars’ southern polar cap. That lake is at least 12 miles across, and seems to be a permanent feature.
More than droplets
The reason people are excited about this discovery is because on Earth, everywhere you find liquid water, you find life. NASA has long espoused a philosophy of “follow the water” in its program of astrobiological research—trying to answer the question “are we alone?”
Over the past two decades, we have seen mission after mission travel to Mars. Some, like Mars Express, are orbiters, whereas others (such as the incredible Spirit and Opportunity) are rovers. A unifying theme across those missions has been their attempts to see whether Mars once had the right conditions for life to exist and thrive.
The latest observations reveal something remarkable: a salty lake buried deep beneath the ice, which seems to be a permanent feature rather than a transient phenomenon.
Perhaps the most famous is Lake Vostok—one of the world’s largest lakes, buried and hidden away. But the one to which I want to draw your attention is named Lake Whillans.
In other words, the best Earth-based analogues for the newly discovered Martian lake are not just habitable, they are inhabited. Where there’s water, there’s life.
Is there life on Mars?
Finding this new lake, buried beneath Mars’ south pole, is another exciting step on our journey of discovery of the red planet. Could there be life there, beneath the ice?
The short answer is that we still don’t know. But it seems like the ideal place to look. What we doknow is:
Mars was once warm and wet, potentially with oceans, lakes, and rivers
On Earth, where you find water, you find life
The transition from warm, wet Mars to the cold and barren Mars we see today occurred over millions of years
Life adapts to changing environments, so long as that change is not too fast or dramatic.
So what do you get if you put all that together? Well, this is where things get speculative.
Once life is established, it is amazingly hard to get rid of. Over millions of years, Mars cooled and its water became locked in permafrost. Its atmosphere thinned and it became the red planet we see today.
But maybe, just maybe, that life would have been able to follow the water—to move underground, where it might have found a niche, in a dark salty lake, buried beneath the ice of Mars’ southern polar cap.
That’s all well and good, but what next?
That’s all speculation, but it shows the kind of thought processes that have driven our ongoing exploration of Mars for the past couple of decades.
Now that we know for sure that there is a reservoir of liquid water just beneath the planet’s surface, astronomers around the globe will be thinking of ways to get down to that water to see what’s there.
That is easier said than done. Landing on Mars is challenging at the best of times, and the great majority of missions to date have landed within about 30° latitude of Mars’ equator. The two exceptions are the Viking 2 and Phoenix landers, both of which landed in Mars’ northern lowlands.
The locations on Mars’ surface visited by landers to date. It is far easier to land near Mars’ equator than its poles.
JPL-CALTECH/NASA
In addition, landing on Mars’ southern hemisphere is harder still. The north is the lowlands and the atmosphere there is markedly thicker, and the surface smoother (as befits, potentially, the floor of an ancient ocean).
To the south, you have less atmosphere to slow your descent and a rougher surface to make your landing harder.
But, while tricky, it is not impossible. And now we have a huge motivation to try.
It would not surprise me if, within a decade, we see missions being designed to visit Mars’ south pole and drill down to this great lake, to see what lurks within.
Forget Alien Megastructures, New Observations Explain Tabby’s Star With Dust Alone
Artist’s concept of KIC 8462852, which has experienced unusual changes in luminosity over the past few years.(NASA / JPL-CALTECH)
Forget Alien Megastructures, New Observations Explain Tabby’s Star With Dust Alone
The most unusual star known has finally had its dimming scientifically explained. Here’s the unusual, dusty resolution.
The science of planet-hunting has truly taken off in the 21st century, with the transit method leading the way. When a planet passes in front of its parent star, relative to our line-of-sight, some of the star’s light will disappear for a short while. These transits are a prolific method for exoplanet hunters to search for worlds around other stars. As of today, we know of thousands of stars with worlds around them, and most of them were discovered by transit.
When you design a mission optimized to look for planets, you expect that the technique is going to uncover a few oddities. But nothing prepared astronomers for the oddball that is Tabby’s star, whose flux dims by a tremendous amount, without any regularly repeating signals. After years of speculation involving scenarios ranging from comet storms to alien megastructures, scientists have finally solved the mystery. Dust, in an entirely new way, looks to be the culprit.
The infrared (L) and ultraviolet (R) emissions from Tabby’s star: KIC 8462852. They show no evidence of a great many of the natural explanations for the flux dips observed. (INFRARED: IPAC/NASA (2MASS), AT LEFT; ULTRAVIOLET: STSCI (GALEX), AT RIGHT)
NASA’s Kepler mission changed the game, surveying over 100,000 stars for a period of many years. Of the hundreds of thousands of stars that NASA’s Kepler spacecraft observed, one stands out as the most unusual. KIC 8462852 — known colloquially as either Tabby’s/Boyajian’s star (after the discoverer of its interesting behavior, Tabetha Boyajian) or the WTF? (for where’s the flux?) star — has a combination of properties that make it entirely unique. All at once, it:
exhibits huge drops in its flux, by up to 22% (while most planets cause <1% dips),
where the overall brightness fluctuates around the dips (rather than the smooth decrease-and-increase seen for planets),
but with no infrared emission (which all other stars with large flux dips possess).
This created a huge puzzle.
A large number of protoplanetary systems have been imaged, but the state-of-the-art infrared imager designed for exoplanet disk pictures is SPHERE, which routinely obtains resolutions of ~10", or less than 0.003 degrees per pixel. KIC 8462852 does not have these properties or this infrared emission. (SHINE (SPHERE INFRARED SURVEY FOR EXOPLANETS) COLLABORATION / ARTHUR VIGAN)
It couldn’t be planets, because no planet is large enough to block that much light from its star. Even if you envision a planet with an enormous ringed system, like a super-Saturn, those flux dips would be both periodic and exhibit a smooth pattern with a plateau. This contradicts the available data.
Artist’s conception of the extrasolar ring system circling the young giant planet or brown dwarf J1407b. Worlds with extraordinary ringed systems could produce large flux dips, but those dips would be periodic and contain a planet-like component, which is not observed.(RON MILLER)
This could have been a very young star, with planetesimals, a proto-planetary disk, and an extremely dusty environment. We’ve seen stars with large flux dips around them, and they’ve all fallen into this category.
But Boyajian’s star is much too old to have a protoplanetary disk: many hundreds of millions of years too old. It also, most importantly, doesn’t exhibit the infrared flux emission that a star with a protoplanetary disk ought to have. This is why the star was originally named the “WTF?” (for where’s the flux?) star.
Artist’s impression of a young star surrounded by a protoplanetary disk. There are many unknown properties about protoplanetary disks around Sun-like stars, but they all exhibit infrared radiation. Tabby’s star has none.(ESO/L. CALÇADA)
It could be a series of cometary events, where they emit large amounts of dust being kicked up as they infall onto the inner portion of the solar system in question. This could, as was shown relatively recently, explain the short-term flux dips that have been seen.
An illustration of a storm of comets around a star near our own, called Eta Corvi. The comet scenario is one explanation for the dimming around Tabby’s star, one that a high-quality astronomical spectrum has now ruled out. (NASA / JPL-CALTECH)
But there’s another phenomenon that this proposed solution cannot account for: the long-term dimming of the star. This star isn’t called “Tabby’s star” or “Boyajian’s star” because it was discovered by that particular scientist; only because she led the scientific investigation concerning the interesting and important new behavior.
But this star has been known for over a century, and observations indicate a long-term fading, which this model cannot account for. Cometary dust gets blown off on the timescales of months; it would take a near-continuous bombardment of comets to sustain a reduced flux over the timescale of over a century. Many comets in a similar orbit would be required, which is not something we know how to obtain.
The Harvard light curve of star KIC 8462852, along with two other stars whose flux hasn’t changed. (BRADLEY E. SCHAEFER, VIA ARXIV.ORG/ABS/1601.03256)
So, what possible explanations remained? One popular idea that was advanced was that of alien megastructures: that a civilization far ahead of humanity, technologically, was constructing an apparatus that periodically (or aperiodically) blocked a large percentage of the star’s light. As the structure became more and more complete, that would increase the amount of light that was blocked. Over the past century, the fact that the light from this star had dimmed by such a significant amount could be explained by an advance in how completed the structure would be.
It’s a compelling, if out-of-the-box, idea.
A partially-obscured star could be due to an alien megastructure that is not yet complete, and could potentially be detectable by the Gaia spacecraft. However, that is not what’s occurring around KIC 8462852. The spectral evidence rules that out. (KEVIN MCGILL / FLICKR)
But thanks to a myriad of follow-up observations, we know that it’s wrong. The reason? An object like an alien megastructure would be completely opaque to light: it would be unable to pass through it. This is equally true of things like planets, moons, or any other “solid” objects you can imagine.
From over 19000 images taken over the past three years, in four different wavelength bands from blue light all the way to infrared light, we’ve learned that blue light is preferentially blocked in all dimming events: from the short-term flux dips to the long-term fading of the star. There’s one thing known that can cause bluer light to be blocked while redder light is preferentially transmitted: dust particles that go down to at least a certain, minimal size.
Visible (left) and infrared (right) views of the dust-rich Bok globule, Barnard 68. The infrared light is not blocked nearly as much, as the smaller-sized dust grains are too little to interact with the long-wavelength light. (ESO)
It must, therefore, be dust. Whatever is causing the flux dips, as well as whatever’s causing the long-term fading, must both have a dusty origin. The Kepler dips and the “secular dimming” are caused by the same phenomenon. According to the new paper itself:
This chromatic extinction implies dust particle sizes going down to ~0.1 micron, suggesting that this dust will be rapidly blown away by stellar radiation pressure, so the dust clouds must have formed within months. The modern infrared observations were taken at a time when there was at least 12.4% ± 1.3% dust coverage (as part of the secular dimming), and this is consistent with dimming originating in circumstellar dust.
This is where the evidence points: to dust. But this is still a bit mysterious.
An illustration of a complex, dusty region around a star, superimposed with recent data from Tabetha Boyajian (2018, via Twitter) showing some recent flux dips. The dust could not be on the surface of the star, as illustrated here. KIC 8462852, an F-class star, is too hot for this to be plausible. (T. BOYAJIAN / TWITTER)
After all, Boyajian’s star is a combination of things that we wouldn’t expect to find together.
It’s consistent with having a large amount of circumstellar dust, which normally indicates an extremely young star still in the formative stages.
The star itself is brighter, hotter, and more massive than the Sun: it gives off more than four times the amount of light our Sun does.
The star is old: hundred of millions of years old, burning stably on the main sequence by all accounts.
In other words, the dust we see should last only months given the properties of the star itself. There must be some way for the star to replenish its dust. As far as we know, there are two possibilities that make sense: either there’s an external dust ring that has dense dust clouds in it or infalling bombardment events, or there’s something external to the star that leads to this blocking of the starlight.
The leading idea, at present, is that a disk of dusty debris should exist around this star. If so, it’s incredibly serendipitous that the plane is so perfectly aligned with our line-of-sight, a remarkable and unlikely occurrence if true. Even if the odds are as great as 1%, it would be a puzzle that we haven’t seen other, similar stars (the 99%) without such an alignment. (NASA / JPL-CALTECH)
The declining brightness that’s been observed since 1890 appears to continue through the current 2018 data, but it’s not steady. In addition, there are long-period dips lasting months, and shorter dips lasting a day or less superimposed on top of them. It’s definitely due to dust particles, down to maybe about 100 nanometers in size. The ratio of how the light dims in different wavelengths/colorsdemonstrates that and rules out other hypotheses.
But where does that dust come from? To help narrow this down, the scientists involved calculated how much dust must be involved to explain the past 100+ years of dimming and dipping events. For what’s merely in the transiting plane defined by our point-of-view alone, we need to have an amount of dust equal to about the mass of the Moon.
Originally, a scenario of a shattered comet was considered to explain Tabby’s star. Instead, a series of long-period comet-like objects with massive dust halos could cause these temporary, transient flux dips, but a very large amount of mass, that isn’t in the form of opaque objects, must exist to do it. (NASA/JPL-CALTECH)
This could either replace or be in addition to the circumstellar dust’s presence. As far as a disk of material around the star goes, the disk is a bare minimum. There could be a large amount of dust that isn’t just in the plane we observe, but also outside of it: in perhaps a halo. We simply don’t know, but we do know that if it does exist, it cannot be close enough to emit infrared radiation. Comets, too, should create infrared radiation; the James Webb Space Telescope should be able to tell, when the flux dips occur, whether the comet hypothesis is in or out.
A dusty debris disk either around the star itself or the planets that orbit it close in would emit infrared radiation, where none is seen. If there is a dust ring (or halo) farther out, however, that could explain these observations. (ESA, NASA, AND L. CALCADA (ESO FOR STSCI))
And finally, there’s a curious candidate explanation that’s been proposed: this dust could be the result of a case of stellar indigestion.
If a gas giant planet — say, the size of Uranus — were devoured by this star, it could be the culprit. An inspiral of a planet or a series of planetary bodies a long time ago, perhaps centuries or even many millenia ago, could have caused a temporary brightening, from which the star is now returning to its original, stable state. The flux dips we observe, then, could be due to planetary debris from an earlier disruption, or evaporation and outgassing of smaller bodies.
An artist’s impression of HD 189733 b, a Hot Jupiter so close to its host that its atmosphere is being boiled off into space. If a gas giant was recently swallowed by KIC 8462852, it could potentially be ‘belching’ dust particles that might cause the observed dimming.(NASA / GSFC)
Regardless of the mechanism in question, we can be certain of one conclusion: the reason for the dimming of Boyajian’s star is due to dust. This is normal, particulate dust, containing particle sizes down to about 100 nanometers, or smaller than the wavelength of visible light. The same dust that causes short, day-or-less dips also causes dips that last many months, and also cause the decline that’s lasted more than a century. It’s all due to plain, normal dust.
The big, open question that now remains is where this dust came from? It’s not because the star is young or still forming, and there are incredible constraints on the star having an unseen companion. It cannot all come from interstellar dust. Was a planet devoured? Is there something even more unusual afoot? The only way to know will be with more — and better — science on this object. But one thing’s for certain: even if alien megastructures exist somewhere, they aren’t here.
Dust that ‘killed’ Nasa Opportunity Rover came from mysterious alien volcanoes, scientists discover
Dust that ‘killed’ Nasa Opportunity Rover came from mysterious alien volcanoes, scientists discover
Jasper Hamill
Hope must be running out among the Nasa scientists battling to get in touch with a Mars exploration robot that’s feared to have been killed during a huge dust storm.
But now scientists think they know where the murder weapon came from – a gigantic volcanic deposit identified as the source of most of the fine particles that coat the Red Planet.
Nasa’s Opportunity Rover was only designed to survive for 90 days on the surface of Mars but has kept on trundling for 15 years.
The source of a fine powder found everywhere on the Red Planet has been a mystery until now
(Photo: Nasa)
Sadly, the plucky machine has now been lost and is feared dead after being battered by one of the most intense dust storms ever observed on the Martian surface.
The powder floats in the atmosphere and is made from sulphur and chlorine.
On Earth, dust is separated from soft rock by natural processes such as wind or water erosion, volcanic eruptions or even asteroid impacts.
Illustration of the Nasa Mars rover ‘Opportunity’ (Picture: Nasa)
The dust storm can be seen in the background of these striking shots taken by Curiosity, Nasa’s other operational Mars Rover (NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS / Seán Doran)
‘How does Mars make so much dust, because none of these processes are active on Mars?’ asked Lujendra Ojha, a co-author of a study which traces ‘the single largest source of dust on Mars’.
He traced the dust back to a volcanic deposit called the Medusae Fossae Formation that’s near the Martian equator and about half as big as the continental United States.
It’s believed to have been produced by volcanic eruptions which took place over an interval of 500 million years.
' Analysis showed the area had a very similar chemical composition to the dust in the atmosphere of Mars, suggesting it has been eroded over billions of years and is the source of the tiny particles.
‘Mars wouldn’t be nearly this dusty if it wasn’t for this one enormous deposit that is gradually eroding over time and polluting the planet, essentially,’ said Kevin Lewis, an assistant professor of Earth and planetary science at the Johns Hopkins University and co-author of the research paper.
A portion of the Medusae Fossae Formation on Mars showing the effect of billions of years of erosion
(Picture: Nasa)
Unfortunately, this information will not help the Opportunity Rover, which was solar-powered and could not keep itself going when a dust storm enveloped the entire planet.
Nasa last heard from Opportunity on June 18. There is a chance it could come back to life once the dust settles and begins to fall off its solar panels, but this depends on powerful the storm was.
In The Martian, a dust storm sparks a series of nightmarish events that leaves Matt Damon stranded on Mars.
Let’s hope there’s a similarly happy ending to the story of Opportunity.
On Wednesday, media outlets breathlessly reported that scientists have discovered a "lake of liquid water" on Mars. Fox News called it a "game changer" in the search for alien life, and Yahoo News reported something similar. The New York Timesheadline spelled out the implications: "Raising the Potential for Alien Life."
Ph.D. astronomer Hugh Ross told PJ Media that these reports twisted the truth. In reality, the scientists found what could be a lake, but Ross noted that it certainly does not contain life. The peer-reviewed study published in the journal Science reported on findings from 22 planetary astronomers in Italy working on data from the MARSIS (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding). The word "lake" is a gross mischaracterization of their tenuous discovery.
"What we found is some kind of sludge, or it could be localized brine pools," the astronomer Ross, president and founder of Christian apologetics group Reasons to Believe, told PJ Media on Thursday, elaborating on his own article. "That's a whole lot different than you can take a speedboat on."
The astronomers used radio waves to discover a small, very bright echo suggesting something underneath Mars's south polar ice cap. The echo was consistent with the radar reflectivity of liquid water.
Here's the catch: the "lake" was buried under 1.5 kilometers of ice, the thickest part of the south polar ice cap. The pressure from this ice actually raises the temperature of the likely liquid water layer — to -68°Celsius (-90°Fahrenheit). That's right, this "water" is liquid at a point far below freezing. "The only way it remains liquid is if it's super-saturated with perchloric salts," Ross explained.
"This is not a possible site for life, it's way too cold and way too salty," the astronomer told PJ Media. "Even the most extreme forms of life on Earth are not able to handle this much salt and cold."
That's not to say the discovery isn't remarkable. Ross explained that the radar "found a spot that was too bright to be ice or rock — only liquid water would reflect atthhat surface." The researchers admitted this is an estimate, however — "we can't prove for sure it's water."
As for life on Mars, Ross said scientists will certainly find fossils, but that these fossils and other life remains will be from Earth, not Mars.
"I've been on written record since the 1980s," the astronomer explained. "If we look hard enough, we will find remains of life on Mars. We know that Earth life has been deposited on Mars through meteorite transport." How does it get there? Meteoroids hitting Earth would dislodge soil, and quite a few of them would have made it all the way to Mars.
But life — at least life like it is on Earth — cannot have ever thrived on Mars, he insisted. While Mars was "much warmer than it is today and much wetter than it is today" back about 4 billion years ago, any liquid water was "ephemeral."
Ross explained that Mars experienced a "carbonate catastrophe" that destroyed water on Mars. In his book "More than a Theory: Revealing a Testable Model for Creation," Ross wrote that "the Late Heavy Bombardment 3.85 billion years ago brought a lot of water and carbon dioxide to Mars," which reacted with Mars's surface rocks, depleting the Martian atmosphere of carbon dioxide and water. "Thus Mars was swiftly and permanently transformed into a dry, cold wasteland."
Mars also has an unstable rotation axis, unlike Earth. "If you've got a liquid drop of water on the surface of Mars, it evaporates because the freezing point and the boiling point on Mars are the same temperature," Ross explained. The boiling point of water drops even on high mountains on Earth. "Mars has such a thin atmosphere that water cannot be stable on the surface."
Even though liquid water may exist on Mars, Ross argued that the search for extraterrestrial life needs to involve more factors. "Water is only one of many requirements for life to be possible. Given how much water there is in the universe, that's not a good strategy," he explained. Furthermore, "too much water and too much carbon are a problem for life."
Earth, which Ross described as a kind of "goldilocks planet," has about 1200 times less carbon than what is typical for rocky planets of its size.
While Christians mostly doubt the possibility of extraterrestrial life, Ross argued that Bible believers have options on the subject, while atheists do not. "If you come from a perspective that God loves to create and He's compulsively creative, then aliens are possible. If you take the position that God' doesn't waste miracles, this is the only planet."
"From an atheistic perspective, however, you've only got one option — life has got to be everywhere," Ross quipped.
Ross, who has posited a "testable creation model," melding scientific theory with Bible interpretation, urged NASA to return to the moon. Referencing the human life remains that made it to Mars, he added, "We know that the moon has received 100 times as much as Mars has."
"We need to go back to the moon because the moon has the fossils of Earth's first life," the astronomer urged. "We can go to the moon and determine who got the life model right: theists or non-theists."
"That could be a real coup for NASA if they were able to prove who got the origin of life model right," Ross declared. "I think every taxpayer should be excited about that."
There's something you're not being told about Earth...
There's something you're not being told about Earth...
Last night, whilst trawling through YouTube I came across an interesting 44m video that I think deserves a rational debate.
Through the ages of modern civilisation, mankind has become divided on the subject of Planet Earth.
Flat
Hollow
Round
Holographic
Most open-minded intelligent people know that there is something about Earth that we aren't being told. Due to this, there is a growing mistrust between Citizens, Governments and Corporations, which leave many to believe in alternative narratives.
The Government's & Corporations will not admit, (or deny) with full transparency, or disclose anything but the 'official' narrative it developed itself - on a need to know basis, which amounts to confusion and conspiracies both from far-fetched to plausible.
For arguments sake, I'm going to go ahead and say that the Earth isn't F... Shhh. Calm down already. OK fine. Let's pretend the Earth isn't flat because everything points to it being round. OK? Just watch the damn video.
The video is about Antarctica, Agartha, and Admiral Bird.
Cover-Up?! Underground City of Giants at the Grand Canyon
Cover-Up?! Underground City of Giants at the Grand Canyon
At the beginning of the 20th century by chance, an underground city of giants was discovered in the Grand Canyon.
According to an April 5, 1999 article published in La Gazeta, Arizona the Grand Canyon was the home of a civilization of cyclopean proportions. Only some structures were left as a testimony of its existence.
Smithsonian hides all traces of giants.
The things still kept hidden from humanity have the power to change the world and how we view it. Secrecy is paramount and keeps mankind shackled i ignorance. Cut off their funding.
The entire government, all of its branches, and every country besides Iran cover up the truth.
Another Smithsonian cover-up. I wonder how different the world would be if they would just tell us the truth. Truth is a radical concept.
Smithsonian is a part of many cover-ups.
The Anak in scripture are the Anunaki the demigods that Egypt worshiped, they drew them holding lions like house cats in their hydroglyps. Genesis 6:4 in the bible tells how the fallen angels took human wives and had children with them they bore Giants (Nephilim and the Rephaim) mighty men of old men of renoun. Every culture speaks of them. All through Exodus, numbers, Duet God used Jacob (house of Israel) to wipe them out, women, children and animals, because the fallen also mingled with strange flesh (animals) that's why God flooded the earth and how he explained why he saved Noah and his family because they were pure, their genetic gene code had not been tampered with.
Theres a story where they sent spies to spy out the land of Canaan before God sent them in to conquer it. But they reported back that there was cities fortified to the heavens and men so great they looked like grasshoppers to them. Now when these beings died there was no place for them in heaven because they were not of Gods creation, so they were destined to roam the earth until judgement day. Hence your Ghost and bad spirits. God said the end will be like the days of Noah when the son of man returns. Aliens sister are fallen angels they are not from outer space they live in the oceans and earth, aka Sheoul the underworld. What did Satan say to the Lord when he asked him where he had been? That's a clue! This will be the coming alien deception or disclosure whatever you choose to call it! Hence Trumps space force. Do not believe for a min that they are aliens! Seek a relationship with Christ we will all need him. God bless you.
Similar places and giant remains have been found around the globe. However, for unknown reasons, it appears the authorities and museums appear to be making every effort to cover them up.
Vliegtuigbouwers als Lockheed Martin gebruiken buitenaardse technologieën. Professor trekt gordijn weg
Vliegtuigbouwers als Lockheed Martin gebruiken buitenaardse technologieën. Professor trekt gordijn weg
Meerdere mensen hebben gezegd dat veel van de technologieën die worden gebruikt door vliegtuigbouwers als Lockheed Martin niet afkomstig zijn van onze aarde.
Eén van die mensen is professor Heather Sartain van de University of Houston-Downtown.
Haar vader Edward Glen Sartain, die enkele jaren geleden overleed, was als ingenieur werkzaam bij Lockheed Martin. Hij vertelde haar over buitenaardse vaartuigen en technologieën die niet op aarde konden worden bewaard.
Aliens
Haar vader was naar eigen zeggen betrokken bij verschillende geheime ruimteprogramma’s. Hij begon bij de luchtmacht, werkte daarna voor de NASA en eindigde bij Lockheed, waar hij werkte als ruimtevaartingenieur.
Toen Sartain 13 jaar oud was begon ze vragen te stellen aan haar vader over een UFO die haar moeder en haar zus in 1966 hadden gezien.
“Was die UFO echt of was het iets van het leger?” vroeg ze. “Het was een echte,” antwoordde haar vader, toevoegende dat ze aliens in het vaartuig konden zien ziten.
Greys
In de UFO, die in de buurt van het Johnson Space Center verscheen, zagen haar moeder en zus tenminste drie kleine wezens.
Haar vader zei: “Dat waren de greys. Het zijn robots die geprogrammeerd zijn door een hogere intelligentie, een oudere beschaving, en die geregeld in onze atmosfeer komen.”
Hij vertelde haar dat er verschillende groepen op onze planeet zijn die onder ons leven en dat ze dat al doen sinds de oudheid.
Reverse engineering
Sartain merkte op dat haar vaders collega’s, ook ruimtevaartingenieurs, vaak bij haar over de vloer kwamen en gesprekken voerden over aliens.
Ze spraken ook over het manipuleren van energie, hoe je de rotatie van de planeet met behulp van mentale krachten kunt beïnvloeden en hoe je de atmosfeer kunt beïnvloeden.
Ze hadden het ook over technologieën die de overheid uit gecrashte UFO’s wilde halen met behulp van reverse engineering, aldus de professor.
Another biblical story becomes closer to reality as archeologists digging on the shore of the Sea of Galilee found a giant stone block with depressions carved into which may have, based on the location of the discovery, contained the remains of apostles Peter, Philip and Andrew. This may also be proof that the area where it was found is the location of the biblical Roman city of Bethsaida (or Bethsaida Julius), which the gospel of John says is the birthplace of these three apostles.
Philip, like Andrew and Peter, was from the town of Bethsaida. John 1:44
They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, with a request. “Sir,” they said, “we would like to see Jesus. John 12:21
The story begins in the Hebrew Bible at the sea of Kinneret or Kinnerot, the freshwater lake in modern Israel that also was referred to in the Old and New Testaments and other biblical era writings as the Lake of Gennesaret, Sea of Ginosar, the Sea of Galilee and the Sea of Tiberias.
Sea of Galilea
While the sea, whichever name you use, is easy to find today, Bethsaida Julius is not. Archeologists and historians have long thought that et-Tell, a site (Jordan Park) near where the Jordan River flows into the lake, is the location of the lost Bethsaida. However, Haaretz reports that Professor Mordechai Aviam of the Kinneret Academic College discovered a Roman-style bathhouse in August 2017 that is 2 km (1,25 miles) south of et-Tell in el-Araj that be believed at the time that this was the true location of ancient Bethsaida. Now he may have the proof. (See the photos here.)
Before finding the relic-holding stone, Aviam found the remains of “a richly endowed Byzantine-era church.” Even today, Byzantine churches contain elaborate reliquaries – containers built to hold the relics of saints or other holy people that are generally placed on the floor underneath the altar. Anaim believed the church was possibly the Church of the Apostles mentioned in Huneberc of Heidenheim: the Hodoeporicon of St. Willibald (or Willibrord), an eighth century Byzantine pilgrim St. Willibald, who wrote:
“Then they went to Bethsaida, the native place of Peter and Andrew. A church now occupies the site where their home once stood.”
What happened to Philip? St. Willibald doesn’t say, nor does Aviam. But the professor admits that the basalt reliquary with the three carved depressions was not found among the remains of the church but very close by.
“It was found in the debris of an Ottoman-era, two-story house built by a rich man from Damascus, who owned all the land locally in the late 19th century.”
It was close enough for Avaim to connect both the dots and the spots and declare that the reliquary with the three carved depressions was from the Church of the Apostles and makes it highly probable that el-Araj is the site of the biblical Bethsaida. To strengthen his theory, Aviam points to artifacts which indicate that el-Araj began in the first century BCE as a fishing village (the apostles were fishermen) and grew into a Roman urban center by the fourth century. At that point it was abandoned, possibly due to rising waters from the Sea of Galilee. Now, due to drought, the body of water is back to those ancient low levels and exposing the biblical sites once located around it.
Simon Peter with Andrew (Phillip Medhurst collection)
Proof positive that the big basalt stone with three depressions was the reliquary of apostles Peter, Philip and Andrew? Not quite. Proof that el-Araj is the location of the biblical city of Bethsaida and the Church of the Apostles? Possibly.
An interesting set of discoveries that brings the tales of ancient religious books closer to reality? Definitely.
Near Surface Red Colored Light Anomaly Total Lunar Eclipse
Near Surface Red Colored Light Anomaly Total Lunar Eclipse
During the lunar eclipse SplendidDragon1 has filmed a strange near-surface red colored light anomaly that first appears at 8:30 and then is either replicated or moved to the 9:00 position.
SplendidDragon1: First three items are still photos of the blood moon followed by an eclipse taken from Germany between 10:30 p.m. and midnight.
This is followed by short video clips showing some eclipse progression.
The last few clips focus on a (red-colored) near-surface anomaly that first appears at 8:30 and then is either replicated or moved to the 9:00 position.
A bit uncharacteristic of a UFO (but then what isn't), but baffling.
Three UFOs Seen By Eyewitness From Passenger Jet, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Three UFOs Seen By Eyewitness From Passenger Jet, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: 7-9-2018 Location of sighting: LAX, USA This is a fantastic recording of several white craft seen following a passenger jet over LAX. Its amazing at how close UFOs come and how frequently they are seen. This video is going to blow your mind. Absolutely incredible evidence. Scott C. Waring Video states:
New York - 07-09-18 - Flying to LAX, I noticed the bright lights out the window. Did a second take cause I first thought it must be a reflection. Used my Iphone 10 to record it and could tell almost immediately it was in fact an actual object(s). The lights would go in and out of the clouds, change elevation and location from my particular viewpoint. I’m assuming it took place over Nevada based on the time. If you look closely, a white blinking light appears randomly both in front and behind the object. This object when viewed by human eyes was white and glowing. Lost sight of it after 5 or 6 minutes as it slowly went behind the wing. In a commercial airline so was traveling at least 500mph. I felt beyond excited because I knew then I was seeing something strange and was grateful to have the foresight to record it.
Did this plane hit an alien drone over Siberia, July 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Did this plane hit an alien drone over Siberia, July 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: July 2018 Location of sighting: Siberia Did this aircraft over Siberia hit an alien orb that shot past too close? It appears it did and if this can happen once, then it could happen more often that ever believed. This frightening occurrence shows how close UFOs come and how outdated radar systems are that cannot see and warn pilots about these high tech stealth craft. Scott C. Waring
International UFO Congress Researcher of the Year Cheryl Costa has found the average annual UFO sighting in the country are now 7,837 on average, a 41 percent drop from the three-year peak average years.
Costa explained that UFO sightings rise to a peak during the cycles, decline back toward the baseline, and rise again to initiate a new cycle.
Costa wrote that the US had a peak average of 13,500 yearly UFO sightings between 2012 and 2014, citing National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) and Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) data.
In 2015, however, the sightings fell 11 percent to 11,.975 and 21 percent to 10,602 in 2016.
Danish UFO
The significant drop in sightings have puzzled UFO researchers, including Costa but she speculated that it had to do with broadband Internet access.
Costa wrote that they see relatively flat sighting report numbers from 2001 to 2006. She explained that the flatness is an artefact of reporting as broadband Internet access was still growing in most places. Access to broadband is a primary reason people having routine use of NUFORC and MUFON as well as other web reporting services.
Costa noted that the state of New York rose to the fourth-most likely area to see an unidentified flying object during 2016 and 2017, but significantly decreased from its peak average at 325 sightings seen in 2017, down from 577 average sightings seen between 2012 and 2014.
She wrote that New York state and national charts show the classic rise and fall pattern from 2006 to 2010 and the rise starts again in 2011.
The spike in 2012 could be because of the Mayan calendar media ballyhoo. With that into consideration, the classic UFO cycle is seen clearly from 2011 to 2017.
The Galileo spacecraft surveyed the moon on Dec. 7, 1992, on its way to explore the Jupiter system in 1995-1997. Photo credit: NASA/JPL/USGS
By Will Ferguson, WSU News
While the moon is uninhabitable today, there could have been life on its surface in the distant past.
In fact, there may have been two early windows of habitability for Earth’s moon, according to a study online today in the journal Astrobiology by Dirk Schulze-Makuch, a Washington State University astrobiologist.
Schulze-Makuch and Ian Crawford, a professor of planetary science and astrobiology at the University of London, say conditions on the lunar surface were sufficient to support simple lifeforms shortly after the moon formed from a debris disk 4 billion years ago and again during a peak in lunar volcanic activity around 3.5 billion years ago.
During both periods, planetary scientists think the moon was spewing out large quantities of superheated volatile gases, including water vapor, from its interior.
Schulze-Makuch
Schulze-Makuch and Crawford write that this outgassing could have formed pools of liquid water on the lunar surface and an atmosphere dense enough to keep it there for millions of years.
“If liquid water and a significant atmosphere were present on the early moon for long periods of time, we think the lunar surface would have been at least transiently habitable,” Schulze-Makuch said.
Ingredients for life
Schulze-Makuch and Crawford’s work draws on results from recent space missions and sensitive analyses of lunar rock and soil samples that show the moon is not as dry as previously thought.
In 2009-2010, an international team of scientists discovered hundreds of millions of metric tons of water ice on the moon. Additionally, there is strong evidence of a large amount of water in the lunar mantle that is thought to have been deposited very early on in the moon’s formation.
The early moon is also likely to have been protected by a magnetic field that could have shielded lifeforms on the surface from deadly solar winds.
Space-travelling microbes
Life on the moon could have originated much as it did on Earth, but the more likely scenario is that it would have been brought in by a meteorite, Schulze-Makuch said.
The earliest evidence for life on Earth comes from fossilized cyanobacteria that are 3.5-3.8 billion years old. During this time, the solar system was dominated by frequent and giant meteorite impacts. It is possible that meteorites containing simple organisms like cyanobacteria could have been blasted off the surface of the Earth and landed on the moon.
“It looks very much like the moon was habitable at this time,” Schulze-Makuch said. “There could have actually been microbes thriving in water pools on the moon until the surface became dry and dead.”
Lunar simulations
Schulze-Makuch acknowledges that determining if life arose on the moon or was transported from elsewhere “can only be addressed by an aggressive future program of lunar exploration.”
One promising line of inquiry for any future space missions would be to obtain samples from deposits from the period of heightened volcanic activity to see if they contained water or other possible markers of life.
In addition, experiments could be conducted in simulated lunar environments on Earth and on the International Space Station to see if microorganisms can survive under the environmental conditions predicted to have existed on the early moon.
Aardbewoners koloniseerden de maan mogelijk 3,5 miljard jaar geleden al
Aardbewoners koloniseerden de maan mogelijk 3,5 miljard jaar geleden al
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Nieuw onderzoek onthult dat de maan mogelijk ooit leefbaar is geweest en weggeslingerde aardbewoners onderdak heeft geboden.
In de geschiedenis van de maan zijn maar liefst twee perioden aan te wijzen waarin deze wellicht leefbaar is geweest, zo schrijven onderzoekers in het blad Astrobiology. Kort nadat de maan tot stand kwam – oftewel zo’n vier miljard jaar geleden – zouden de omstandigheden op het oppervlak van onze natuurlijke satelliet gunstig zijn geweest voor het ontstaan van leven. En grofweg een half miljard jaar later zou er weer een periode zijn geweest waarin de maan leven kan hebben geherbergd. In die tijd was er op de maan sprake van verhoogde vulkanische activiteit.
Vloeibaar water en een atmosfeer Wat beide perioden gemeen hebben, is dat er vanuit het binnenste van de maan grote hoeveelheden superhete vluchtige gassen – waaronder waterstof – kwamen zetten. En zo kan de maan een dichte atmosfeer hebben verkregen die miljoenen jaren op rij standhield. Bovendien kunnen op het oppervlak van de maan poeltjes vloeibaar water zijn ontstaan. “Wij denken dat als vloeibaar water en een significante atmosfeer gedurende langere perioden aanwezig waren op de jonge maan, het oppervlak in ieder geval kortstondig leefbaar moet zijn geweest,” aldus onderzoeker Dirk Schulze-Makuch.
Water De onderzoekers baseren hun conclusies onder meer op recent onderzoek dat aantoont dat de maan niet zo droog is als lang werd gedacht. Zo weten we dat er grote hoeveelheden waterijs op de maan te vinden zijn. Ook zijn er sterke aanwijzingen dat de mantel van de maan waterrijk is. Bovendien is het niet onaannemelijk dat de jonge maan – en eventuele levensvormen op het oppervlak – onder meer tegen de zonnewind beschermd werden door een magnetisch veld.
“ER KUNNEN MICROBEN ZIJN GEWEEST DIE IN WATERPOELTJES OP HET OPPERVLAK VAN DE MAAN GEDIJDEN TOT HET OPPERVLAK DROOG EN DOODS WERD”
Aardbewoners Er zijn dus verschillende aanwijzingen dat de maan ooit – in ieder geval kortstondig – leefbaar is geweest. In die ‘leefbare perioden’ kan het leven op de maan ontstaan zijn zoals het op aarde is ontstaan. Maar volgens de onderzoekers is het aannemelijker dat meteorieten levensvormen op de maan hebben afgezet. Die levensvormen zouden afkomstig kunnen zijn geweest van de aarde. Het oudste bewijs voor leven op aarde, wordt gevormd door gefossiliseerde cyanobacteriën en is tussen de 3,5 en 3,8 miljard jaar oud. In de periode waarin de cyanobacteriën op aarde gedijden, kreeg het zonnestelsel zeer frequent enorme meteorietinslagen te verduren. Het is goed mogelijk dat tijdens zo’n inslag op aarde allerlei puin met daarin simpele organismen de ruimte in werd geslingerd en op de maan is geland. “Het lijkt er sterk op dat de maan in deze periode leefbaar was,” aldus Schulze-Makuch. “Er kunnen microben zijn geweest die in waterpoeltjes op het oppervlak van de maan gedijden tot het oppervlak droog en doods werd.”
De grote uitdaging is nu om op het maanoppervlak op zoek te gaan naar sporen van eventueel leven. Zo zouden er maanlanders of -rovers naar gebieden kunnen worden gestuurd waarin miljarden jaren geleden sprake was van verhoogde vulkanische activiteit. Onderzoek zal dan uit moeten wijzen of op die plekken verzamelde monsters daadwerkelijk rijk zijn aan water of biomarkers. Daarnaast zouden er ook experimenten kunnen worden opgezet op aarde of in het internationale ruimtestation waarbij wordt gekeken of micro-organismen kunnen overleven onder de omstandigheden waar – voor zover we nu weten – op de jonge maan sprake van was.
UFO alert: Letter to President Jefferson may be earliest recorded visit of ALIENS (Image: GETTY)
A tavern keeper in Portsmouth, Virginia, and a friend visiting from Baltimore believe they saw a UFO in the sky.
The two men, barkeeper Edward Hansford and Baltimore’s John Clarke, describe in their letter to President Jefferson how they saw a meteor-like object in the sky.
However, this object in the sky began to change shape, first taking on the form of a turtle “which also appeared to be much agitated and as frequently obscured by a similar smoke.”
The UFO then apparently “assumed the shape of a human skeleton” which ascended and descended quickly, according to the mail which was reprinted in 2010 in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series.
The letter reads: ““We the subscribers most earnestly solicit, that your honour will give us your opinion on the following extraordinary phenomenon.
“We saw in the South a Ball of fire full as large as the sun at Maridian which was frequently obscured within the space of ten minutes by a smoke emitted from its own body, but ultimately retained its brilliancy, and form during that period, but with apparent agitation.
“It then assumed the form of a Turtle which also appeared to be much agitated and as frequently obscured by a similar smoke.
It then assumed the shape of a human skeleton which was frequently obscured by a like smoke and as frequently descended and ascended—It then assumed the form of a Scotch Highlander arrayed for battle and extremely agitated, and ultimately passed to the West and disappeared in its own smoke.”
It is unclear whether President Jefferson ever responded, but according to the website Monticello, it “is perhaps the earliest recorded observation of a UFO.”
State Route 375 is a barren stretch of Nevada highway that runs near the top-secret U.S. Air Force installation commonly known as Area 51—a facility believed to be used for experimental aircraft testing, with a busy side hustle spawning theories about aliens, UFOs, and extraterrestrial technology. Rachel, a town on the highway with a population of just 54, manages to do brisk business, too. The Little A’Le’Inn there, according to one of its managers, feeds thousands of (human) visitors a year along what has become known as the Extraterrestrial Highway. The mythology surrounding secret government programs and alleged alien crash sites has created a landscape unlike any other, studded with landmarks and roadside attractions that have become part of the lore of the desert.
“[UFO sightings] have transformed cities and roads, turning the legend into part of everyday life,” says Javier Arcenillas, a Spanish photographer who documented UFO culture and sighting locations in the American West for his new photo book, UFO Presences.
Extraterrestrial Highway, Nevada.
Places such as the Extraterrestrial Highway and Roswell, New Mexico, about 1,000 miles to the east, have become beacons to an entire community. Roswell, according to a representative for the city, averages 226,000 visitors each year—and embraces its place in the mythos, despite the fact that it is easy to see the whole thing as a joke.
“Ridicule is pockmarked throughout the entire phenomenon,” says Greg Eghigian, a historian at Penn State University and author of multiple research papers on the history of UFO sightings and alien contact. But he sees a deeper meaning in the way people connect with these sites. “What I consistently see across the board generally are people who are trying to find meaning,” he adds. “I think human beings are essentially meaning-makers and one of the ways, in fact, maybe the key way we often do that, is through stories. Stories bring meaning to our lives.
UFO sighting location, Nevada.
“The desert is this place that, because it’s so empty, because there are so few people around … you can write something about your own life or about the meaning of bigger, more cosmic kinds of things,” he adds. Against that backdrop, he explains, people have created landmarks and elevated the locations of sightings to provide them with spaces to focus their energies. Ultimately, they’re grappling with some big existential questions in the otherwise stark desert landscape.
Scientists sure are good at making us constantly feel like we’re in the opening scenes of a horror movie. The latest case of science toeing the line between being really cool and going too far comes out of Siberia, because of course it does. According to the Siberian Times, Russian scientists have successfully resurrected two roundworms—nematodes— that were frozen in the Siberian permafrost since the Pleistocene era. For context, when these worms were frozen, woolly mammoths were stomping around Siberia. The two nematodes are 32,000 and 40,000 years old, approximately, and now that they’ve woken from their slumber are the two oldest living animals on earth.
Nematodes (Representational picture)YouTube grab/ The Soil Association VideosScientists say that this is a major breakthrough and could pave the way for human cryonics—the ability to freeze a person for long periods of time and bring them back, for applications like long term space travel or the arrogant quest for immortality. According to the scientists:
“Our data demonstrate the ability of multicellular organisms to survive long-term (tens of thousands of years) cryobiosis under the conditions of natural cryoconservation.
It is obvious that this ability suggests that the Pleistocene nematodes have some adaptive mechanisms that may be of scientific and practical importance for the related fields of science, such as cryomedicine, cryobiology, and astrobiology.”
This is a frozen nematode.
Russian scientists at the Institute of Physico-Chemical and Biological Problems of Soil Science, working in collaboration with scientists at Princeton University in the U.S., collected samples of frozen nematodes from the Yakutia region of Siberia, the coldest part of Russia. This is close to the proposed “Pleistocene Park” which would recreate the habitat of woolly mammoths. All in all 300 samples of frozen nematodes were taken. Only two were actually brought back to life, so don’t go taking a nap in the walk-in freezer just yet.
According to the research once the worms were defrosted in petri dishes, they began showing signs of life, moving and eating food, as if they hadn’t just slept for all of recorded history.
If you’ve spent at least a decade or two on this planet you’ve heard of cryonics or cryogenic freezing. The plot of the show Futurama is based on a 21st century man accidentally freezing himself and getting defrosted in the far future. Then there’s the persistent—and likely false—rumor of Walt Disney having his body frozen so he might get resurrected when they found a cure for cancer.
This is not Walt Disney.
Cryonics holds a lot of promise to a lot of people. Apart from the medical applications, the other use is in space travel. Assuming we don’t develop faster than light travel, the only way to get a space exploration team farther into deep space than the human lifespan will allow is to freeze them. The basic premise is this: it should be possible to lower a persons body temperature enough so that there is no deterioration, even after centuries (or millennia) spent frozen. The second part is harder: bringing them back. Thawing out two worms is definitely a far cry from freezing the crew of a space ship and bringing them back a century a century or more later in the middle of deep space, but at least it’s a start.
Unless these worms keep eating and growing until they’re the size of school buses and then we have that problem to deal with. Be careful when you jump into sci-fi territory, people, you never know which version of the future you’re going to get.
Virgin Galactic's newest space plane took to the skies again today (July 26) for its third rocket-powered test flight, reaching higher in the atmosphere than the company had previously.
The VSS Unity is a SpaceShipTwo vehicle designed to carry six commercial passengers and two pilots into space, where they will experience 5 minutes of weightlessness before gliding back down to Earth.
"It was a thrill from start to finish," the craft's chief pilot, Dave Mackay, said in a statement about today's flight. "Unity's rocket motor performed magnificently again, and Sooch [co-pilot Mike Masucci] pulled off a smooth landing. This was a new altitude record for both of us in the cockpit, not to mention our mannequin in the back, and the views of Earth from the black sky were magnificent." [Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity Spaceliner in Pictures]
Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft (also known as VMS Eve) took off at approximately 11:45 a.m. EDT (1545 GMT), according to a tweet from the company, and raised the space plane to an altitude of 46,500 feet (14,000 meters) before releasing it to fly on its own.
Virgin Galactic's suborbital space plane, the VSS Unity, completed its 14th test flight on July 26, 2018.
"There she goes! #VMSEve & #VSSUnity have taken to the skies," Virgin Galactic tweeted. About an hour later, VSS Unity had separated from VMS Eve and was soaring toward space, the company tweeted. After separating, the VSS Unity fired its engines for 42 seconds, shifted to a nearly vertical angle and accelerated to 2.47 times the speed of sound.
After gliding back down to Earth, the space plane touched down safely at Mojave Air and Space Port in California shortly before 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT).
Virgin Galactic✔@virgingalactic
Touch down. Another successful test flight for VSS Unity. Congratulations to our pilots Dave Mackay and Mike 'Sooch' Masucci #SpaceshipTwo
This was the first time the space plane had reached a region of Earth's atmosphere called the mesosphere, Virgin Galactic representatives said.
"The planned 42-second rocket burn took pilots and [the] spaceship through the Stratosphere and, at an apogee of 170,800 ft [52,000 m], into the Mesosphere for the first time," Virgin Galactic representatives said in the statement. "This region, often referred to by scientists as the 'Ignorosphere,' is an under-studied atmospheric layer because it is above the range of balloon flight, and in the future is an area we can help the research community explore further."
Today's flight marked the third powered flight for VSS Unity in less than four months, and it was the 14th flight overall. Since its first test flight on Sept. 8, 2016, the VSS Unity has completed seven "captive-carry" flights — in which it remains attached to the VMS Eve — and seven unpowered glide test flights.
VSS Unity completed its first powered test flight on April 5 of this year, followed by a second powered flight on May 29. All three powered flights have been piloted, but without passengers on board.
As with previous flights, today's test flight was designed in part to gather additional data about conditions in the cabin during flight, according to the company's statement. Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson said the company could launch space tourists aboard the VSS Unity by the end of 2018, and tickets are already on sale for $250,000 apiece.
Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or followher @hannekescience.
Secret Documents On Pentagon UFO Project Released: Invisibility Cloaks And Wormholes
Secret Documents On Pentagon UFO Project Released: Invisibility Cloaks And Wormholes
Secret UFO Pentagon papers released.
Shockwaves went through the UFO research community last December when it was revealed that the Pentagon had been conducted research into UFOs under the auspices of the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP). Now, two documents relating to the program had been released to the public shining some light on the elusive and mysterious project.
Documents Shine Light On Mysterious Object
The first document is a letter written back in 2009 by the now-retired Senator Harry Reid to the Secretary of Defence in which he outlines the aims of the program and encourages the Department of Defence to carry on funding the project. While Reid did not make any overt references to UFOs, he did write that the staffers working on the program had made significant progress "with the identification of several highly sensitive, unconventional aerospace-related findings."
Invisibility Cloaks, Wormholes, And Brain-Machine Interfaces
The second document is perhaps even more significant. It contains a list of scientific studies conducted within the AATIP and some of them have sparked extraordinary excitement online. According to the document, the AATIP was working on a number of fascinating projects including invisibility cloaks, wormholes, and brain-machine interfaces.
It also appears that the researchers were attempting to identify and track UFOs with a project aimed at detecting and following ‘hypersonic velocities’. There was also a reference to improving the statistical approach to the Drake Equation which quite certainly is a reference to communication with extra-terrestrial life.
Last Project On The List Redacted
As though this incredible list of projects hadn’t given UFO researchers enough to talk about, the last project on the list is tantalizingly redacted. Given the extraordinary nature of the projects that the AATIP have admitted to having conducted it is presumed that this particular set of experiments must have been something truly sensational.
UFO researchers have waited for years to discover what the United States government were investigating in the skies. Given that these extraordinary documents are now being released into the public domain and whistleblowers seem keen to offer up further information it is hoped that whatever has been kept under wraps will be public knowledge before long.
Another Amazing Yet Complex Crop Circle Emerges In Cley Hill, England
Another Amazing Yet Complex Crop Circle Emerges In Cley Hill, England
Less than a year ago, a fascinating crop circle has emerged in a barley area in Cley Hill measuring about over 300 feet in diameter.
The amazing formation depicts curled edges with two arcs containing bends at each side of the scalloped top. What makes it even more breathtaking is its inner cube with 12 radiating triangles.
But the real mystery that troubles everyone is how this crop circle appeared here?
Such stunning formations emerge all the time bringing mystery for everyone including the scientific community. All in all, crop circles are definitely something intriguing enough worth our attention.
“Some of these formations are so immense and complex as to defy reason. And after all these decades, none of the perpetrators have been caught in the act of making any of the truly extraordinary formations.” – Richard Dolan, historian, author and a UFO researcher. (source)
If you start digging up deeper into the reality of the crop circles, you will soon realize that they are more fascinating than you have imagined.
Even though the scientists believe these formations are artificial, many times, they are tongue-tied when it comes to their appearance.
Richard Taylor, a physicist at the University of Oregon, issued a paper in 2011 regarding this strange phenomenon.
“Crop circle arts are not going to give up their secrets easily. This summer, unknown artists will venture into the countryside close to your homes and carry out their craft, safe in the knowledge that they are continuing the legacy of the most science-oriented art movement in history,” he stated in his work.
Down below we present you some pictures from the amazing crop circle. (source)
However, as you may already guess, this is not the first crop circle that ever appeared on our planet.
Below we have a picture of yet another one that emerged in Wiltshire, England in 2001. Back then, its amazing but complex looks gave rise to a lot of confusion.
The structure contained 409 circles that form a Triskelion which is known as the ancient symbol of Sicily.
Richard Taylor, the previously mentioned scientist dedicated a lot of studies on these circles. According to his beliefs, this was one of the greatest art revolutions in history.
He studied the grass involved in the act in his lab and came to a conclusion that the ones who create a crop circle must be using GPS devices, lasers and microwaves in order to create such design.
Earth flew between the sun and Mars this week, so, during yesterday’s total lunar eclipse, the moon and Mars were close. Photos from the EarthSky community here.
Prabhakaran A wrote from Trichy, India: “The full moon on the night of July 27-28, 2018 presented the longest and darkest total lunar eclipse of the 21st century. Totality spanned 1 hour 42 minutes and 57 seconds. The most distant and smallest full moon of the year passed through the center of the Earth’s dark umbral shadow which reached its maximum length and width for the year. This beautiful eclipse happened on the same night of Mars opposition.”
Nurul Fathin wrote, “An optical effect called the ‘Japanese Lantern’. This image was taken during the eclipse of July 28, 2018 at about 3:24 a.m. at the Telok Kemang Observatory in Port Dickson, Malaysia.”
Lunar eclipse and Mars from Italy. Photo via Alessandra Cailotto.
Tracey Slaven captured the moon and Mars from Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Canon 600D 600 Tamron lens.
Lunar eclipse over Mitre Rock near Natimuk, Australia on July 28, 2018, by Lynton Brown.
Henrique Feliciano Silva in Lisbon, Portugal caught a commercial airplane crossing the moon during the July 27 eclipse. Note that Mars – below the eclipsed moon – is shining more brightly than the moon.
Full moon eclipse with Mars nearby, a view from the Rheinwiesen in Düsseldorf, Germany from Radhika Mohan.
Total lunar eclipse as seen from jaipur, India from Priyanka Chobey.
July 27, 2018 total eclipse of the moon over the Sacra di San Michele, Piemonte, Italy, from Gabriella Milani.
Total lunar eclipse and Mole antonelliana (Turin, Italy) from Stefano De Rosa.
Tom Thrasher wrote: “Shot from my level 4 floor balcony which is looking west out over the Indian Ocean ‘towards South Africa,’ as we say. Had to be very patient for clouds to pass over, but then sky opened up very clear. I cropped out Mars as it was so bright in photo and therefore appear blurred. Fantastic early morning experience. I read EarthSky every day and look up info using Star Walk 2 or Solar Walk 2.” That’s a great way to use EarthSky, Tom! We also hear good things about the online planetarium software Stellarium.
Stages of the lunar eclipse from Abhishek Bethanabotla in Hyderabad, India.
Stages of the lunar eclipse from Matthew Chin in Hong Kong. Looks like Matthew had some thin clouds …
Helio C. Vital in Saquarema, Brazil saw the eclipse at moonrise, when the moon was still low in the sky. Hewrote: “The moon was very low during totality (9 degrees above the horizon only at U3)! I first spotted the moon some 25 minutes after its rise as I had predicted. Such delay was due to the fact it was thousand of times dimmer than the usual full moon when it crossed the horizon. The moon was many times darker than Mars when I first glanced it, only 5 degrees above the horizon at 17:48 (UTC-3h). It was a therefore a dark eclipse not due to recent major volcanic eruptions, but due to the fact the moon crossed the center of Earth`s shadow where the shadow is very dark. What a nice show the totally eclipsed moon and Mars in opposition (only 7 degrees apart) put on over Saquarema! Nikon CoolPix P900 camera using its Moon Mode.”
Bottom line:Photos of the total lunar eclipse of July 27, 2018 – longest lunar eclipse of the 21st century – from the EarthSky community. During this eclipse, the planet Mars was near the moon and brighter than it had been since 2003.
The third season of the epic Cosmos series will present what is possible for the future of our planet and potentially habitable worlds elsewhere. According to producers of the show, science hinges on truth, and in a time in which the public struggles with both of these concepts, Cosmos is in a unique position to shed light on how important both are to our existence.
The new season is titled Cosmos: Possible Worlds. National Geographic promoted the show at this year’s Comic-Con, where Den of Geek was able to interview the show’s host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, as well as some of the producers.
“[Cosmos: Possible Worlds] is a voyage in space and time into the distant future to various exoplanets, the stars, other suns as well as a trip into the future of this planet that I think will captivate and inspire,” says producer Ann Druyan.
Druyan co-wrote the original Cosmos series in 1980 with show host Carl Sagan and Steven Soter. She went on to marry Sagan and remained married to him until his death in 1996. Druyan created the second Cosmosseries which aired in 2014 and is now an executive producer and writer for Cosmos: Possible Worlds set to air in early 2019.
Druyan said Cosmos is important because science is important. She also makes the point that the bedrock of science is truth.
“Science requires of us that we actually be truthful,” Druyan says. “Science says it matters what’s true, unlike so much of our existence. And so, if we are going to survive and if we are going to explore the universe, you cannot B.S. your way to Mars.”
“And so, I say,” Duyan continued, “We have to reintroduce into our public lives and our personal lives that belief at the core of science that makes science so much more effective than anything else we do. Which is that it matters what is true.”
Producer Jason Clark echoed the sentiment that the story of Cosmos is bound by truth.
“We have to be sure everything we do is accurate and truthful,” Clark says. ‘In today’s world where there are so many alternate facts, it’s great that we get to employ the scientific method to tell our story.”
Clark stresses that Cosmos: Possible Worlds is not a negative story about the possibility of a “dystopic kind of future.” Instead, it is a “positive vision of what is the future, how fast thing can change, and how much opportunity we have.”
Tyson is also excited to bring science to the public and says with Cosmosthey attempt to present science in a way that is more acceptable to general audiences. He says when we teach science, it is often, "here is this body of knowledge, learn it." High school and college students “slug through it” and then continue with their lives.
“You give your textbook back, and then you are done,” Tyson explains. “So, we are not trained to think of science as a fundamental aspect of what it is to be alive.”
“So what Cosmos has done in all three incarnations, what he have done is present science in all the ways that you see that it matters,” Tyson continues. “Not only to you, and understanding your place in the universe, but also to what role it can play in survival. What role it can play as informing us as shepherds of our own civilization as well as the ecosystem that sustains it.”
When it comes to science, “rather than beat people over the head, ‘you must listen,’ that’s not the right way to do it I don’t think, you offer it,” says Tyson. “[Cosmos] is an offering that will empower people to recognize and embrace what role science plays in their lives.“
It is a formula that seems to work. When Cosmos: A Spacetime Odysseywas released in 2014, Clark says over 135 million people watched it. According to National Geographic, it was their most watched series ever internationally.
The original, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, also set records when it aired in 1980. At the time it set the record for the most watched program on public television in history. It held that record for a decade.
Tyson credits Sagan for paving the way to enable scientists to participate in educating the public on the fruits of their efforts on television.
“He pioneered this enterprise if you will,” Tyson says. “The idea that you would make a career, a big part of what your career would represent, is bringing hard-earned research to the public.”
Tyson says Sagan faced resistance from colleagues who were taken aback by Sagan leaving the laboratory to bring science to television. But now it is a function of what some scientist, like Tyson, strive to incorporate into their career.
“It is a privilege to do so,” says Tyson “It is an honor to do so, and Cosmosis probably the most expressive evidence of this activity that we have today, and most impactful I would say as well.”
Why so few arrests for Crop Circles makers? Is there microwave evidence?
Why so few arrests for Crop Circles makers? Is there microwave evidence?
There have been hundreds if not thousands of Crop Circles popping up mysteriously for decades and some historical records that indicate they might have been happening for centuries. When they first drew attention as possibly being related to UFOs they were still limited to simple circles. Then they started becoming more complex and there was no doubt that hey could be an unexplained natural phenomena.
This was first explained away years ago as hoaxer when Doug Bower and Dave Chorleyconfessed to doing it for years as a hoax. They claimed they were responsible for crop Circles dating back decades. The circles have been appearing all over the world and there is no way that just these two could have done it, but there have been more people saying they're creating the hoaxes. They were eventually paid £10,000 for their exclusive interview, which means that if they were telling the truth they were satisfied with their hoaxes for decades without any compensation or attention doing an enormous amount of work and never getting caught or telling anyone.
This is the accepted explanation for the skeptic community.
Police Make First Arrest Over Crop Circles, (By Cahal Milmo 11/04/2000) when they arrested Matthew Williams after photos were sent to them anonymously. According to an article The Anatomy of Deception another group of hoaxers trying to prove that it can be done without getting caught were paid to do at least one Crop Circle shaped like a van over the course of two days with police protection before trying to do one without getting caught at night, and they were caught almost immediately. Supposedly they were unable to reproduce any of the unusual biophysical and electromagnetic features including blown out nodes that are supposedly done as a result of microwaves according to some research.
A quick search of the internet turns up an article supporting Team Satan and one with additional criticism. The supporters "A Circular State of Mind" wrote Crop Circle Challenge 2013: Team Satan Respond, which seems to satirize it more than address any of the details.
The additional criticism was included in Nancy Talbott's Letter to National Geographic TV's Mr. Sydney Suissa about an offer to participate in another TV show, where she claims that Team Satan was involved in additional scams including taking credit for a circle that had already been created as part of their debunking efforts. This letter also includes criticism about bias on the part of National Geographic which seems to be a pattern with traditional media outlets covering Crop Circles, or many other subjects, for that matter. She also claims that they haven't been able to reproduce the blown out nodes which she believes may have been created as a result of microwaves.
Nancy Talbott and several other researchers have all claimed that these are common in Crop Circles and can't be replicated by using the simple planks and ropes that most hoaxers claim to use. From what I've seen the skeptics don't refute this; instead they ignore it when possible or try to distract people from it or use ridicule. On at least one show about Crop Circles someone speculated that may be the ones with the blown out nodes caused by microwaves are just the simple circles caused by an unusual phenomena that they haven't discovered yet and the designs that are clearly done with intent are the hoaxers. They did no obvious follow up on this speculation like checking to see if the facts confirm this; instead they threw it out there, perhaps expecting some to accept this as a possible explanation. However Nancy Talbott's website, BLT Research crop circles sites numerous examples that indicates it isn't the case. Most people that get their information from traditional media might not be aware of this or many of her other claims.
About thirteen years ago the Discovery Channel did a show that attempted to explain how these blown out nodes might have been created. After the show aired there were several articles on the internet claiming there were problems with it, however like most other people that watched it at the time I wasn't aware of this so I'll get back to it. Several MIT students had a microwave generator of some kind which was more difficult to carry in and out of fields than the simple planks of wood other alleged circle makers claim to use. They also had to wear protective clothing made out of lead or something similar since the microwaves could be harmful to people. Part of the show included some clowning around which might serve well for entertainment purposes. This isn't uncommon in UFO shows or many other shows but it distracts from the issue.
After some troubles they claimed that they were able to replicate the unexplained characteristics although there was some indication that they might not be fully convinced. There was no discussion about whether other circle makers might have known this decades earlier or why they would go to such extreme measures to create hoaxes. Nor was there any discussion about the possibility that if hoaxer had been using this for a large number of circles over decades that they almost certainly would have had some kind of accident with this kind of equipment and gotten caught or that the microwaves would inevitably cause health problems.
Even if this really was possible and they could work out the problems it seemed highly unlikely that this experiment could have explained all these crop circles and how the nodes were blown out. that was basically my impression even before I heard about concerns expressed by Nancy Talbott, who was cited in the show implying her approval. Searching the internet for this show no longer turns it up or anything from the Discovery Channel that I can find but there are plenty of articles exposing it as a fraud including one by Nancy Talbott, M.I.T. Kids' Crop Circle Attempt Yields an Interesting (And Totally Inadvertent) Result. She claims that even with all their work they still weren't able to replicate the blown out nodes among other things.
This means that even though they cheated they still weren't able to explain how the Crop Circles are made, which actually fits a pattern for several other unexplained phenomena including how ancient megaliths were moved and how ancient civilizations were able to do enormous volumes of carved sculptures that are difficult if not impossible to replicate by technology allegedly known to people in those times, and even now in some cases.
I went into this more on 107 Wonders of the Ancient World and an old string discussing Megalith moving experiments which failed to move many if any megaliths above ten tons without cheating. The biggest experiments they tried that I know of were 25 and 40 tons and as far as I can tell they cheated and still only had a very limited success. Further explanation is in the two sources cited. this isn't adequate to prove that the megaliths were moved with influence from an unknown intelligence that causes UFOs, assuming a natural explanation can't be found for the UFOs; however it is adequate to indicate that there are major unsolved mysteries and from a scientific point of view it isn't unreasonable to develop theories then try to either confirm or refute them.
I have found that most of the research presented by the media about UFOs is full of incompetent claims from both sides and an enormous amount of their claims are so easy to discredit that I can't help but wonder if they're trying to do an honest job at all. Many of thees mistakes are too easy to recognize so I strongly suspect that they're intentionally doing more to confuse the issue than educate the public. If that is their objective it is successful; however if people take enough time to look at it, with rational skepticism, not to be confused with pseudo-skepticism, then they can find plenty of legitimate unsolved mysteries, even if they can't provide conclusive evidence to fully explain one theory or another. And the one presented by the traditional media always seem to have a large number of flaws that can rule them out to rational skeptics. Which means that sincere rational skeptics might do better to come up with their own theories.
This is why I suspect the government just might have decided to "Recruit a group of crackpots" (further discussion in ATS string about MJ-12) as the semi-fictional Roswell movie speculated about. Whether this is true or not the vast majority of information from the traditional media about this subject, and most others, is very poorly done; and the most reliable information comes from sorting through alternative media outlets. However in this case even most alternative media outlets on the subject also have their problems, and most theories will almost certainly fall apart, although claims that there are no unsolved mysteries also fall apart.
This is why it might help to have hard facts to fall back on when bizarre theories fall apart and the megaliths and crop circles provide that. Megaliths provide rock solid evidence that activities that can't be replicated took place thousands of years ago and if Nancy Talbott is right then crop circles indicate that other unexplained phenomena still occur. It is hard to tell whatetails without additional back up information is speculative and rational skepticism should be mto conclude from this but the crop circles continue happening so if researchers are sincere they might be able to narrow things down. This could be potential evidence of an unknown advanced intelligence that has been on or near Earth for thousands of years; however filling in the daintained.
One claim that people should be especially skeptical of is the assumption that this unknown advanced intelligence might be benevolent, or the most extreme malicious claims. If they were inclined to invade like the war of the worlds, and they've been here for decades, if not thousands of years they would have already done so, and if they were benevolent there would be no need for secrecy. One example of that recently is ‘Aliens prevented nuclear war on Earth’: Edgar Mitchell Former NASA astronaut makes unexpected claim. (08/13/2015) If aliens were benevolent they almost certainly would have opened up a line of honest communication relatively shortly after they arrived, if it was possible.
Shortly after this story came out Edgar Mitchell claimed he was misquoted in another article, The UFOs Didn't Come In Peace! Astronaut Sets Record Straight On ET Nuclear War. 08/27/2015this is typical of the information available about UFOs which often turns into bickering but Edgar Mitchell has still been claiming for years that he believes that UFOs are real and that they may involve alien intelligence.
The appropriate way to earn trust requires an open line of honest communication. If these aliens really were benevolent and they arrived thousands of years ago they could have provided advise that could have dramatically reduced wars and other atrocities that have taken place since then.
Instead, if they influenced cult structures that may have been associated with the megaliths and religion they might have inspired the religions that helped prop up the authority of many tyrants and maintain a steady state of war, often based on religious beliefs.
Some of the theories about obtaining technology from aliens include assisting with moving the megaliths and more recently according to Philip Corso's book "The Day After Roswell" they reverse engineered alien technology to create some of the scientific advances over the past 6 decades. Bob Lazar also makes similar claims but both of them have credibility problems so their claims can't be entirely true. However if they're party true then this technology is being used primarily to benefit those that control it and a lot of it is being used to increase their control of the public and maintain a permanent state of war. Corso's claims also include sharing technology with companies like Monsanto, which implies the possibility that we're being used as research subjects as part of a genetically engineered development of crops which are fed to people. If this technology isn't from aliens the research is still going on for other reasons so there should still be demands for disclosure, at a minimum.
If people take this hypothesis seriously then the aliens wouldn't be benevolent since they're giving tacit approval, at best, by remaining silent and allowing their technology to be used in such a foolish and authoritarian manner.
This hypothesis may sound a lot like the Ancient Aliens series that has been on the History Channel for the past five or six years. This series has an enormous amount of blunders like in the introductory two hour show one of the leading theorists, Giorgio Tsoukalos, says that when he went into the tunnel of an ancient Egyptian tomb his lighter didn't work because there wasn't enough oxygen; however if this was the case then he shouldn't have been able to breath there clearly indicating his conclusion makes no sense at all. The series is full of one blunder after another. Many of them were addressed in Ancient Aliens Debunked; however even though these skeptics are far more rational than the high profile Ancient Aliens theorists they still don't explain how some of the giant megaliths were moved or some other ancient mysteries.
This would fit in with the "Recruit a group of crackpots" hypothesis; however consideration should be given to other explanations why there are so many blunders from both the theorists and the so-called skeptics, who are often as manipulative as the theorists.
Edgar Mitchell is just one many other astronauts or other government employees including military members that have come out with disclosures about UFOs. the strong implication is that either there is a conspiracy to cover up UFOs or there is a conspiracy to make it seem like UFOs exists and are controlled by aliens. Also It is hard to imagine hoe this could come about without a conspiracy one way or another but I'm sure some skeptics will come up with their ideas.
No doubt this all sounds absurd, and it is. However there are an enormous number of absurd things that actually are happening. It is hard to look at the political discussion that is now typical without thinking it is absurd; yet no one is claiming that their clownish behavior isn't happening.
The truth is as absurd as many bizarre conspiracy theories.
The following related articles include some crop circles that are relatively new; looking in Google news typically turns up more; and the first two sites include crop circles that have been compiled over several decades.
AFPDe bloedmaan gisteravond tussen standbeelden van de Griekse goden Hera en Apollo in het centrum van Athene.
Heeft u ook kunnen meegenieten van de totale maansverduistering? Het bijzonder uniek spektakel van vrijdagavond was meteen de langste van de eeuw. Tussen 22.22 uur en 23.15 uur stond de maan volledig in de schaduw van de aarde staan en kleurde ze bloedrood. Dat leverde prachtige beelden op.
De maansverduistering bereikte haar hoogtepunt om 22.22 uur. Ze was minstens gedeeltelijk te bewonderen in Europa, het Midden-Oosten, Afrika, Australië en het grootste deel van Azië en Zuid-Amerika. Van overal werd het spektakel met grote belangstelling gevolgd, met prachtige foto’s als resultaat.
Het was een uitzonderlijk lange maansverduistering: ze was slechts vier minuten korter dan wat astronomisch mogelijk is.
REUTERSCaïro, Egypte.
REUTERSDe tempel van Poseidon bij Athene (Griekenland).
Lang wachten
Op sommige plaatsen was het spijtig genoeg lang wachten tot de bloedmaan kwam piepen van achter het wolkendek. Bij de volkssterrenwacht Mira in Grimbergen bijvoorbeeld, waar verschillende honderden bezoekers waren opgedaagd om met behulp van telescopen de volledige maansverduistering van nabij te zien, moesten de aanwezigen tot 23.30 uur wachten om het fenomeen te aanschouwen.
Didier LebrunBij de sterrenwacht van Grimbergen maakten jong en oud zich op om de eclips te bewonderen.
Tussen 21.30 en 23.15 uur was er een totale maansverduistering, maar die is in Grimbergen niet te zien geweest. “Op het ogenblik dat de maan door de wolken brak was de verduistering al wat aan het afnemen en was deze nog enkel aan de linkerkant van het hemellichaam te zien”, aldus Mollet.
Maar vanwege de regen die rond 23 uur in Grimbergen neerviel, had de volksterrenwacht op dit ogenblik al haar telescopen weer moeten binnenhalen en bedekken.
NORTHERN VIRGINIA — If evidence proving that extraterrestrials visited Earth has been squirreled away behind locked doors in Nevada, a former Pentagon official is calling for a big reveal.
Retired Air Force colonel talks UFOs, government investigations
“Show it to the National Academy of Sciences. Don’t hide it. Show it! We’ve been waiting for it! We’ve been waiting for it forever,” retired Air Force Col. David Shea said, raising his voice. “But so far, that hasn’t happened, and I don’t know why.”
Shea, 80, was the Air Force’s press spokesman on UFOs at the Pentagon from 1967 to 1971. He considers himself an “agnostic” when it comes to whether some unidentified flying objects are ships piloted by intelligent beings from faraway worlds.
“I would believe if I saw some evidence that showed we were visited by alien spacecraft, but there hasn’t been evidence to my mind of such,” he said in an interview at his Northern Virginia home.
In 1969, Shea wrote the news release that announced the end of Project Blue Book, an Air Force investigation of more than 12,000 UFO reports.
It concluded that there was no threat to national security, no sign of advanced technology and no evidence that UFOs are extraterrestrial.
And with that, it appeared to the public that the government had washed its hands of UFOs.
But in December, almost 50 years after Project Blue Book ended, came explosive news.
The New York Times reported that Bigelow Aerospace had been storing material recovered from “unidentified aerial phenomena” in its buildings in Las Vegas as part of a secret Pentagon UFO investigation project called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).
Shea was not surprised by news of the project’s existence, but he thinks if more people were aware of the government’s history with UFOs, they would better understand why, in his opinion, the government should not get involved again.
“The UFOs never seem to go away,” he said.
Government investigations and scientific studies
What is considered the modern UFO era began as Americans’ Cold War fears of the Soviet Union were heating up.
In 1947, a veteran pilot flying near Mt. Rainier in Washington reported seeing nine strange objects flying in formation at incredible speeds.
The sighting made national news, and the same year, the Air Force (still the Army Air Forces at the time) began investigating — with intelligence officers in charge — reports of UFOs.
“They really weren’t sure what was going on. But by the end of ’49 they quickly became convinced that there was no threat, and there was no visitation, there was no advanced technology, and that was a good time to get out of the business, but they didn’t,” Shea said.
The work went on under several code names including “Project Sign,” “Project Grudge” and “Project Blue Book.”
Retired Air Force Col. David Shea was the Air Force’s press spokesman on UFOs at the Pentagon from 1967 until 1971. (WTOP/Michelle Basch)
Shea holds a comical sign that used to hang in his office. It was given to him by journalist and UFO skeptic Phil Klass. (WTOP/Michelle Basch)
The inscriptions on the back of that sign show how it was initially given to Klass, and then passed along to Shea. (WTOP/Michelle Basch)
Shea wrote the news release in 1969 that announced the end of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book. It studied more than 12,000 UFO reports, and is now the basis of an upcoming History Channel drama series. (WTOP/Michelle Basch)
Shea holds a photo of himself from his time in the Air Force. (WTOP/Ginger Whitaker)
Scientists were asked to evaluate if the work should continue, first by the CIA in 1952 and then by the Air Force in 1966.
The latter study was led by physicist Edward Condon of the University of Colorado. “He concluded that the continuation of Project Blue Book is of dubious value,” said Shea.
In all, Project Blue Book examined 12,618 sightings reported between 1952 and 1969. Over 5 percent of those sightings — 701 — remain unidentified. “Does that mean they were spacecraft from another civilization? No, not necessarily. It just means there was not enough data to verify what they were. So that’s the problem,” Shea said.
“It would appear that it will be more fiction than fact,” Shea said after reviewing promotional materials.
The History Channel describes the series as “based on the true, top-secret investigations into Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) and related phenomena conducted by the United States Air Force.” It also says a central figure in the series, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, “is recruited by the U.S. Air Force to spearhead a clandestine operation called Project Blue Book.”
Shea said that Project Blue Book investigations were never top secret, and that in real life, Hynek was hired by the Air Force as a special consultant on UFOs, not to “spearhead” Project Blue Book.
Missteps and misunderstandings
Shea is a public relations pro who spent 29 years with the Air Force and another 20-plus years working for Hughes Aircraft and, later, Raytheon. To complete his master’s degree in mass communication from the University of Denver in 1972, he wrote his thesis about how, from a PR perspective, the Air Force handled reports of unidentified flying objects.
“The story of the Air Force and UFOs is essentially a tale of a credibility gap wider than the Grand Canyon,” Shea wrote. “During its more-than-20-year history of investigating flying saucers, the Air Force has been accused of almost every conceivable sin, and had been guilty of most.”
In the 1940s and ’50s, UFO sightings that got press attention would prompt a quick explanation from the Air Force. “In those early days, any explanation of a sensational case seemed preferable to the Air Force than simply saying, ‘We don’t know at this point, the case is still under investigation,'” wrote Shea.
And because Air Force intelligence was kept in charge of the investigations, Shea said, there was unnecessary secrecy. “You know the intelligence people won’t tell their mother anything. They keep things close to the vest,” he said.
Of course, the Air Force’s actions led to questions and skepticism.
“What was initially an intelligence matter quickly evolved into a PR problem of the greatest magnitude,” Shea wrote. “The Air Force, ignoring public opinion on the subject, failed to communicate its conviction that UFOs were no cause for alarm and consequently was unable to convince the American public that what it was saying about UFOs was true. As a result the Air Force’s integrity and credibility as a fighting force was seriously questioned.”
Asked if, to his knowledge, the government covered up evidence of alien visitation in the past, Shea answered: “Absolutely not. It would be impossible to do so in our environment of leakers and whistleblowers.”
In its defense, Shea points out that the Air Force was placed in the impossible position of trying to prove that aliens are not whizzing around above Earth. “You can’t prove that something doesn’t exist. Why doesn’t the other guy prove that it does exist?” he said.
He also thinks the Air Force has been misunderstood. “The Air Force has never said that UFOs aren’t spacecraft from another civilization. What the Air Force has said is that there’s no convincing evidence that they present a threat, or they advance scientific knowledge, or that they are alien spacecraft. Convincing evidence is the key, and that’s what we don’t have,” said Shea.
What evidence would convince him that extraterrestrials have visited this planet?
“It would be great if an alien were to knock on the door of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., but I don’t expect that to happen,” Shea said. “I would be convinced of extraterrestrial visitation should someone or some organization present to the National Academy of Sciences an ET piece of hardware that the NAS declares not of earthly origin.”
Should investigations continue?
Despite what he called “exhaustive” investigations and studies of UFOs, Shea said, the government has come up with nothing. “No eureka moment. No threat. No advanced technology. No alien spacecraft,” he said.
According to the Department of Defense, AATIP ended in 2012, but journalist Leslie Kean reports there’s evidence that the program is continuing without federal funding.
Shea doesn’t think that’s a good idea. “Why would the government want to do that again?” He asked. “We’ve been there, done that.”
Some argue that UFOs determined by Project Blue Book to be unexplained should be reinvestigated. “I submit it wouldn’t reveal anything new. There’s not enough data there to analyze and determine causes,” said Shea.
Regarding videos of UFOs apparently taken from military planes and reportedly studied as part of AATIP, Shea said: “What did they see? Who knows what they saw? Am I impugning their integrity? No. Not at all. They saw something, but we don’t know what it is, and we don’t have the evidence to suggest what it may be. So again, it comes back to the word ‘evidence.'”
Just because a military pilot spots or chases a UFO doesn’t mean the unidentified object should be considered a threat to national security, said Shea. “I would say we would be concerned if they were fired upon. We would be concerned if they started bombing our bases. None of that has happened, so whatever they’re seeing doesn’t seem to be hostile in nature. Not to worry, is what I would say.”
To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science — a public benefit corporation co-founded by musician Tom DeLonge and launched last year — is pursuing its own UFO research. It includes several former government higher-ups and is accepting money from investors.
“More power to them, I think they’re on a wild ghost chase. But I think we need to have some interest in that,” said Shea. “If they come up with something that the government hasn’t, great.”
Asked if he’s ever seen a UFO, Shea said no.
“You’d think with all my interest or experience in this, a friendly visitor would come visit me. Hasn’t happened,” Shea said, laughing.
Breng bewijs voor buitenaards bezoek nu naar buiten. Voormalig Pentagon-functionaris doet oproep aan overheid
Breng bewijs voor buitenaards bezoek nu naar buiten. Voormalig Pentagon-functionaris doet oproep aan overheid
Als de overheid bewijs heeft dat de aarde is bezocht door buitenaardsen, moet dat nu naar buiten worden gebracht. Dat heeft de voormalige woordvoerder van Project Blue Book gezegd.
“Laat het zien aan de nationale academie van wetenschappen. Verberg het niet langer. Laat het zien! We zitten erop wachten! We wachten al veel te lang!” zei de gepensioneerde kolonel David Shea tegen zender WTOP.
“Tot nu toe is het nog niet gebeurd en ik weet niet waarom,” vervolgde hij.
Klopt niet
In 1969 kondigde Shea aan dat Project Blue Book en daarmee het onderzoek van de Amerikaanse overheid naar UFO’s was beëindigd, maar afgelopen december onthulde de New York Times dat het onder een andere naam werd voortgezet en tot op zijn minst 2012 nog actief was.
Het hoofd van dit nieuwe project, Luis Elizondo, zei dat ook dit onderzoek nooit is beëindigd en dat hij nog tot oktober vorig jaar voor het Pentagon onderzoek deed naar UFO’s.
Wat de overheid zegt klopt niet en Shea wil antwoorden.
Onopgelost
“Het Pentagon heeft met verschillende UFO-projecten door de jaren heen tienduizenden cases verzameld, en hoewel de meeste daarvan verklaarbaar zijn, blijft vijf procent onopgelost,” zei hij.
“Betekent dat dat het ruimteschepen van andere beschavingen zijn? Nee, niet noodzakelijkerwijs,” vervolgde hij.
Overtuigend bewijs
“Het betekent dat er niet genoeg gegevens waren om te kunnen bepalen wat het was,” aldus Shea. “Dus dat is het probleem.”
Elizondo zei in oktober vorig jaar tegen CNN dat er ‘zeer overtuigend bewijs is dat we niet alleen zijn’.
One eagle-eyed Google Earth user has spotted an ‘unidentified submerged object’ ( USO ) off the coast of Greece, and no-one can work out what it is.
The user, called Underbelly, posted a video about the object on Disclose.tv .
He wrote: “This USO was spotted in The Aegean Sea off the coast of Greece and here are the Coordinates 40°27'4.62" 22°51'39.78" so you guys can check it out for yourself.
“I did also take some measurements using the ruler on google earth and this object is of 220 feet long.”
It's not far from the coast(Image: Google Earth)
The object was discovered just off the coast of Kalamaria(Image: Google Maps)
The object is circular, with a small inner circle, and almost looks like a nipple.
Many viewers were conflicted about what they thought the object could be.
Several suggested that it’s likely to be a volcanic cone - a triangle-shaped hill formed as material from volcanic eruptions piles up around the vent.
But others had slightly more bizarre theories.
One user commented: “I think it looks like an old light house - former foundations etc.. - on the coast as well sooooo.”
And rather hilariously, another suggested that it could be a ‘very large, freshly popped zit.’
Mysterieus cirkelvormig object gespot op Google Earth voor kust van Griekenland. Niemand weet wat dit is
Mysterieus cirkelvormig object gespot op Google Earth voor kust van Griekenland. Niemand weet wat dit is
Op Google Earth is voor de kust van Griekenland een ongeïdentificeerd object gespot. En niemand weet wat het is.
Een filmpje over het object werd enkele dagen geleden op YouTube geplaatst. De USO (unidentified submerged object) is ontdekt in de Egeïsche Zee.
Geschat wordt dat het object een lengte heeft van zo’n 67 meter. Het is cirkelvormig en bevat in het midden nog een kleine cirkel.
Moeilijk
Sommigen suggereerden dat het waarschijnlijk een vulkanische kegel is, bestaande uit vulkanisch materiaal dat zich ophoopt rond een vulkaanopening.
Eén iemand dacht aan de fundering van een oude vuurtoren.
Schrijver Nigel Watson zei tegen Mirror Online: “Sommigen denken vanwege de vorm aan een vliegende schotel onder het wateroppervlak. Waarschijnlijk is het een natuurlijke formatie.”
Hij merkte op dat het moeilijk met zekerheid te zeggen is.
Baltische Zee
Het doet denken aan het ondefinieerbare object dat in 2011 op de bodem van de Baltische Zee werd ontdekt.
Tijdens de zoektocht naar een gezonken Duitse onderzeeboot uit de Eerste Wereldoorlog, werd daar een cirkelvormig object gevonden met een omtrek van 90 meter.
Het vreemde object op de bodem van de Oostzee verstoorde de elektronische apparatuur van de duikers die het wilden onderzoeken.
Bekijk het filmpje van het Griekse object hieronder:
There are some places in this world that are ancient, mysterious, and forbidden, closed off from the world for centuries or even millennia, and holding within them enigmas that we have yet to see. Many such locales come in the form of ancient tombs, sealed and buried since time unremembered, often with no intention of them ever being opened. There has been much news lately about the now famous black sarcophagus of Alexandria, but this is far from the only such place in the world, and there are numerous forgotten, unopened, unexplored tombs out there every bit as mysterious and much grander in scale. One of the largest tombs ever crafted by humankind lies in China, an ancient subterranean city possessing a vast unopened underground mausoleum which could hold enormous riches, incredible artifacts, deadly traps, and perhaps even a curse.
The story of one of the largest, most historically important, and indeed most mysterious tombs in Chinese history begins way back in 260 BC, when China was a place torn by civil war raged for centuries between no fewer than six different major feudal kingdoms, all of whom sought to be the one true ruler of the land. Rising up amongst these warring factions was the powerful state of Qin, which was briefly under control of a King Zhuangxiang, who died after 3 years on the throne to leave his kingdom to his first son, Ying Zheng, who ascended the throne in 246 BC at the tender age of 13.
Ying Zheng
Despite his young age, he proved to be a bold and fearless leader, fiercely fighting and winning campaign after campaign to dominate the region and defeat all other warring states, going on to manage something no one else had, the unification of China, so creating the first Empire of China in 221 BC and making Ying Zheng the first Chinese emperor. Under his rule his empire saw great strides in the sciences and in the development of roads, infrastructure, and notably the Great Wall of China, all while dodging numerous assassination attempts and grabs for power. It seems that this certainly went to the young ruler’s head, as he would go on to proclaim that he was fated to rule, renaming himself “Qin Shi Huang,” loosely “The Son of Heaven,” and declaring himself a veritable god, imbued with divine power and who would rule forever from the center of the universe.
This was a bold claim to make, and Qin Shi Huang became obsessed with the idea of immortality and making sure that he would live forever as he had said. To this effect, he issued an Imperial order for a search for an elixir of life, and forced scholars, alchemists, and magicians to work around the clock to somehow concoct a way to grant everlasting life. Various mysterious herbs and potions purportedly showed promise, but ultimately did little good, and Qin Shi Huang took to routinely drinking mercury, which he believed slowed the aging process. Realizing that his search for immortality was going nowhere, Qin Shi Huang also stepped up construction on a grand, opulent mausoleum that had been worked on since his first ascension to power, designed to resemble the capital of Qin, Xianyang, and to keep him comfortable and in power even in the afterlife.
He envisioned this sprawling tomb as a whole city unto itself, complete with its own army of warriors and everything he would ever need to rule forever, and it is said that he brought in 700,000 laborers and convicts to work on the vast structure. It indeed was an impressive and ambitious project, designed to be a full, working microcosm of the empire, and by the time it was finished, which would take 38 years and unfortunately not be completed until several years after his death, it was the most expansive tomb the world had ever seen.
According to records from Han dynasty historian, Sima Qian, included in the tomb were palaces and scenic towers, countless relics and priceless artifacts, streets and roads, and a vast ceiling painstakingly painted and inlaid with the stars and constellations of the heavens. Most bizarrely, there were also allegedly two rivers of mercury erected to flow through the mausoleum, meant to symbolize the great Yangtze and the Yellow Rivers and which were supposedly manipulated through wondrous mechanical devices to flow into the sea. Sima Qian would say of this place in his Records of the Grand Historian:
When the First Emperor first came to the throne, the digging and preparation work began at Mount Li. Later, when he had unified his empire, 700,000 men were sent there from all over his empire. They dug through three layers of groundwater, and poured in bronze for the outer coffin. Palaces and scenic towers for a hundred officials were constructed, and the tomb was filled with rare artifacts and wonderful treasure. Craftsmen were ordered to make crossbows and arrows primed to shoot at anyone who enters the tomb. Mercury was used to simulate the hundred rivers, the Yangtze and Yellow River, and the great sea, and set to flow mechanically. Above were representation of the heavenly constellations, below, the features of the land. Candles were made from fat of “man-fish”, which is calculated to burn and not extinguish for a long time.
There are also bronze cranes, swan and ducks with groups of musicians, bronze horses with full-sized chariots, numerous acrobats and other entertainers fashioned from terracotta, fully operational horse stables tended by terracotta caretakers, and even terracotta government officials. Most well-known and perhaps the most impressive of all was a full army of over 8000 life-sized terracotta warriors, with every single one painstakingly carved with incredibly intricate detail. Such is the detail that each warrior even has a different face, leading to speculation that each and every one of them may have been based on a real person. In addition to all of this, the entire complex consisted of an inner and outer city divided by walls, held at least 18 courtyard houses and a palace, and the whole thing in total measured a staggering 38 square miles (98 square kilometers) in area. All of this was reportedly loaded with treasure and set up with sophisticated traps designed to swiftly kill any trespassers, although what these entail remains a mystery.
The terracotta warriors
Ultimately, Qin Shi Huang could not cheat death, and he died in 210 BC at the age of 49, ironically from drinking the very mercury that he thought would keep him young, and an enormous funeral service was held. Upon the Emperor’s actual burial chamber, atop his thick bronze coffin, was supposedly built a hill which was planted with vegetation, and to keep the late Emperor company in the afterlife many of his concubines were killed and interred here as well. Many of the craftsmen were also callously locked away into the tomb complex when it was sealed, in order to make sure that none of the secrets of the complex or its inner workings would ever be revealed to the outside world. All of this was sealed shut, gated, and buried, and it would then disappear into the mists of time to lie forgotten for millennia.
It was not until March of 1974 that the first hints of this vast complex would be uncovered, when a local man named Yang Zhifa was out digging a well with his five brothers in Lintong county, at the village of Xiyang. As they were digging they came across terracotta fragments and bricks at a depth of around 6 feet, along with earthenware and bronze arrowheads. When archeologists arrived on the scene in May of that year they began excavations, which quickly started to uncover the mysterious terracotta army, and as the dig went on more and more of the complex was uncovered, with baffling new surprises popping up all of the time, and the excavation and nonstop discoveries have not stopped in the decades since, with the majority of this place still unexplored and unexcavated. Indeed, nothing like it has ever been seen before, and the necropolis of First Emperor Qin Shi Huang has gone on to become one of the most important archeological discoveries ever made.
As recently as 2012, one of the most striking and exciting discoveries was made when a massive Imperial Palace measuring 249 feet high (76-meters) and covering an area of 6,003,490 cubic feet (170,000 cubic meters) was discovered around 20-50 meters below the surface, holding an earthen pyramid at its center believed to be the tomb containing the actual bodies of the emperor and his concubines. This mega tomb has only been explored using 3-D imaging and ground penetrating radar, but as of yet it remains sealed down there in the bowels of the earth and unopened, inciting endless debate as to whether to open it and what treasures lie within it. As far as we know, no human eyes have seen this place in thousands of years, although it is unknown if has ever been looted in the past.
Location of the Qin Shi Huang mausoleum
There are many reasons that no one has tried to penetrate into this massive palace tomb. One is that we just don’t have the technology to conduct such a major archeological undertaking without irreparably damaging what lies within. Because it is so deep, to dig into there would be an invasive process, and there is simply no way to get into the chamber without seriously damaging the upper layer in order to get to the palace below it, as well as potentially causing landslides that could damage other areas of the tomb and the terracotta warriors.
There is also the fact that we lack the technology to preserve some of the irreplaceable cultural relics that might lie within the palace, and this has already been seen with damage to the terracotta figures caused by being exposed to the air and sunlight. Also, considering the vast size of the mausoleum it is all also an incredibly expensive proposition that could take several decades to carry out. In essence, to excavate such a vast tomb on such a sheer scale would be a prohibitively expensive, scarring and damaging procedure that could ultimately destroy this piece of history.
More mysterious is that we have no idea what sorts of dangers lie in wait down there in the dark. The written accounts speak of enormous rivers of mercury, and detection equipment has indeed picked up anomalously and dangerously high levels of mercury at the site, meaning that to open the complex could put many at risk of poisoning and also cause serious environmental pollution. There could also be potentially deadly bacteria living down there, and of course there are the traps. It is known that the burial palace was armed with intricate traps the nature of which we don’t have a clue. We also have no clue as to whether such traps would still be operational after millennia or not, so delving down into this subterranean realm could be a deadly proposition indeed. More paranormal-minded people have even suggested that the emperor had a curse placed over his burial chamber, although if it works as well as his immortality elixirs did then we’re probably safe on that front.
Statue of emperor Qin Shi Huang
The thing is, that tomb is seen as potentially holding incredible historical artifacts, vast treasures, and priceless cultural relics, to the point that many archeologists are fully prepared to risk the hurdles and potential dangers involved with getting to it. It could be the most important archeological find of the 20th century, or it may contain nothing but a looted chamber filled with skeletons and centuries of dust. There could be anything in there, we don’t know, and some think we need to find out. Others believe that it is best left alone, down there in that opulent city lair of the afterlife down in the depths of the earth just as the Emperor Qin Shi Huang originally intended, that we should not violate it and risk irrevocably damaging this ancient inner sanctum.
The debate rages, but for now that palace tomb remains quiet, free of the droves of tourists that flock through nearby to view the terracotta soldiers, and indeed free from human eyes altogether, perhaps to remain that way forever. That tomb lies there in the dark, still and silent as it has for millennia, perhaps with traps ready and poised to spring, flowing rivers of lethal mercury snaking around it and its many treasures. What lies there in the gloom of that massive ancient burial chamber? Does it hold cultural and literal riches beyond our wildest dreams? Does it carry within it the promise of learning more about that era and its people? Does it hold danger and death, traps, poison, and ancient curses? No one knows, and we won’t until it is finally opened.
The Mysterious Pyramids of the Amazon—Spotted by A NASA Satellite In 1976
The Mysterious Pyramids of the Amazon—Spotted by A NASA Satellite In 1976
In 1976, NASA’s Landsat Satellite was orbiting Earth when it photographed mysterious dots in southeast Peru, at 71 degrees, 30 minutes west longitude in the Madre de Dios region of the Amazon.
The satellite photograph, archived under number C-S11-32W071-03 showed a mysterious set of formations, in the middle of Peru’s southeastern jungle.
The satellite image revealed structures symmetrically spaced and uniform in shape, looking like a series of eight or more pyramids, in at least four rows of two.
The curious formation became known as the Pyramids of Paratoari, or as many authors would later call them, The Dots of Peru, or thePyramids of Pantiacolla.
The satellite image sent explorers, authors, and researchers into a frenzy as to what the curious structures are.
The ‘pyramids’ became quite popular, especially since it is believed that the lost city of Paititi was located somewhere in that area.
Image C-S11-32W071-03 photographed by NASA’s Landsat satellite. Image Credit: NASA
The president of the South American Explorers Club, Don Montague wrote about the enigmatic structures in an article published in the South American Explorer Journal, where he described them as nothing other than odd geological formations.
However, many people who saw the satellite image were not convinced by Montague’s writing.
Proponents of the theory that the structure are not geological formation but in fact, manmade structures argue that the Pyramids were most likely built by a long-lost ancient civilization that inhabited the Amazonian rainforest thousands of years ago. The alleged structure, many argue, have been devoured by the surrounding rainforest and are covered with thousands of years of vegetation.
Despite the fact that the alleged pyramids structures are located in a remote part of the Amazonian rainforest, a number of expeditions have been mounted to explore, not only the alleged pyramids but the region in search for the lost city of Paititi.
The Lost city of Paititi is a legendary ancient Incan metropolis, said to be located somewhere east of the Andes, within the dense and remote rainforests of southeast Peru, northern Bolivia or southwest Brazil.
Numerous expeditions to search for the lost city of Paititi were established, and some of them even searched for the alleged pyramids of Paratoari.
Between 1984-2011 various expeditions were led by Gregory Deyermenjian, member of the explorer’s club and a Peruvian explorer. These included the documentation of Incan remains in Mameria, the exploration and documentation of the petroglyphs at Pusharo, exploration, and documentation of Manu’s Pyramids of Paratoari, and others.
Pyramid pyramid complex ( Amazon Earth from Google Earth )
Deyermenjian had discovered plenty of evidence of ancient Inca inhabitance in the area, including petroglyphs, paved roads, platforms, and plazas, but he did not find conclusive evidence that the mysterious structures spotted by NASA’s Landsat satellite were man-made structures. Deyermenjian argued that the structures were natural sandstone formationsknown as truncated ridge spurs, which can take the form of natural pyramids. Deyermenjian has since, in 1999 and 2006, seen and photographed various very similar sites in the area of the Río Timpía, with intriguingly pyramidal-shaped huge natural formations.
“In 1996, still without helicopter, we again ensconced ourselves within the steamy lower jungles of Manu, in an area just to the south of Pusharo, to reach and make the first definitive examination of the “Pyramids of Paratoari,” eight apparently evenly spaced and unnaturally symmetrical hillocks which had caused a flurry of speculation as to their origin and relation to Paititi since having been spotted on a NASA satellite photograph twenty years before…” (Source)
You can read more about Deyermenjian expeditions, and the search for Paititi and the Lost Realm of the Inca’s, here and here.
But people were still amazed by the formations.
In 2001, French explorer Thierry Jamin investigated the site of Pantiacolla, and is said to have investigated the pyramids, concluding that they are in fact natural formations. However, Jamin discovered several Inca artifacts in the same area.
In 2011, a British expedition to investigate the Pyramids of Paratoari with Kenneth Gawne, Lewis Knight, Ken Halfpenny, I. Gardiner and Darwin Moscoso as part of the documentary “The Secret of the Incas” took place.
Pyramid- like structure in Visoko, Bisnia ( Photo Internet )
These Gun-Toting, Weight-Lifting Russian Robots Might Fly to Space in 2019
These Gun-Toting, Weight-Lifting Russian Robots Might Fly to Space in 2019
By Chelsea Gohd, Space.com Staff Writer
Testing the Russian humanoid rescue robot Fyodor created by the Russian Foundation for Advanced Research Projects by order of the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry, at the Android Technics Scientific Production Association. The robot can be remotely controlled by a person in a special suit or work autonomously performing voice commands.
Credit: Donat Sorokin/TASS/Getty
Will these sharpshooting, weight-lifting Russian androids fly to space next year?
An unnamed "source in the rocket and space industry" has told Russia's international news agency, RIA Novosti, that two androids, as part of Russia's robot platform FEDOR (Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research), will fly a crewless Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station in 2019.
These robots previously made headlines when it was announced that they are trained to shoot guns with both of their "hands." And, while few details about the bots and their mission have been revealed, their gun-wielding abilities forced Dmitry Rogozin, a former Russian deputy prime minister, to deny that the country was "creating a terminator," according to a report from The Independent. [Meet Robonaut 2, NASA's Space Droid (Infographic)]
The FEDOR program was created in 2014 with the goal of producing a robot that could replace humans in high-risk tasks and missions in space. Aside from shooting, these two androids are capable of driving, doing push-ups and lifting weights. It's unclear how these skills might assist them in space or what their specific mission might be. Rogozin has only stated that the robots would have "great practical significance in various fields," according to The Independent.
Sending robots to do jobs too dangerous for humans is not a new concept. NASA hopes that the agency’s robotic astronaut Robonaut 2, which is being repaired after its stint on the International Space Station, will work side by side with human crewmembers in space and complete tasks that are too high risk for humans.
Another space robot, CIMON — the first artificially intelligent assistance system designed for astronauts — is advancing robotic capabilities in space. CIMON, also known as a "flying brain," is not designed to navigate situations that might be dangerous for astronauts, but it is definitely pushing forward the performance of robots on the space station with human-like compatibility.
NASA's Robonaut program and Roscosmos' FEDOR program seem to share the goal of creating robots that make it safer for humans to accomplish things in space that otherwise would be too dangerous for humans to attempt. Still, the FEDOR androids' gun-wielding design might raise a few eyebrows.
Europa Lander May Not Have to Dig Deep to Find Signs of Life
Europa Lander May Not Have to Dig Deep to Find Signs of Life
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
Artist's illustration of a potential NASA lander on the surface of Jupiter's icy, ocean-harboring moon Europa.
Credit: NASA/JPL
If signs of life exist on Jupiter's icy moon Europa, they might not be as hard to find as scientists had thought, a new study reports.
The 1,900-mile-wide (3,100 kilometers) Europa harbors a huge ocean beneath its icy shell. What's more, astronomers think this water is in contact with the moon's rocky core, making a variety of complex and intriguing chemical reactions possible.
Researchers therefore regard Europa as one of the solar system's best bets to harbor alien life. Europa is also a geologically active world, so samples of the buried ocean may routinely make it to the surface — via localized upwelling of the ocean itself, for example, and/or through geyser-like outgassing, evidence of which has been spotted multiple times by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. [Photos: Europa, Mysterious Icy Moon of Jupiter]
NASA aims to hunt for such samples in the not-too-distant future. The agency is developing a flyby mission called Europa Clipper, which is scheduled to launch in the early 2020s. Clipper will study Europa up close during dozens of flybys, some of which might be able to zoom through the moon's suspected water-vapor plumes. And NASA is also working on a possible post-Clipper lander mission that would search for evidence of life at or near the Europan surface.
It's unclear, however, just how deep a Europa lander would need to dig to have a chance of finding anything. That's because Europa orbits within Jupiter's radiation belts and is bombarded by fast-moving charged particles, which can turn amino acids and other possible biosignatures into mush.
Jupiter's moon Europa, as imaged by NASA's Galileo spacecraft.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute
That's where the new study comes in.
NASA scientist Tom Nordheim and his colleagues modeled Europa's radiation environment in detail, laying out just how bad things get from place to place. They then combined these results with data from laboratory experiments documenting how quickly various radiation doses carve up amino acids (a stand-in here for complex biomolecules in general).
The researchers found significant variation, with some Europan locales (equatorial regions) getting about 10 times the radiation pounding of others (middle and high latitudes).
At the most benign spots, the team determined, a lander would likely have to dig just 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) or so into the ice to find recognizable amino acids. In the high-blast zones, the target depth would be on the order of 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 cm). (This is not to imply that potential Europan organisms would still be alive at such depths, however; doses there are high enough to cook even the hardiest Earth microbes, study team members said.)
That latter range is still quite manageable, said Nordheim, who's based at the California Institute of Technology and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, both of which are in Pasadena.
"Even in the harshest radiation zones on Europa, you really don't have to do more than scratch beneath the surface to find material that isn't heavily modified or damaged by radiation," he told Space.com.
That's good news for the potential lander mission, Nordheim added: With radiation exposure seemingly not a limiting factor, planners can feel free to target the areas of Europa most likely to harbor fresh ocean deposits — the fallout zone beneath a plume, for example — wherever they may lie.
Scientists still haven't identified any such promising touchdown areas; the Europa imagery captured to date just hasn't been sharp enough. But Europa Clipper's work should change things, Nordheim said.
"When we get the Clipper reconnaissance, the high-resolution images — it's just going to be a completely different picture," he said. "That Clipper reconnaissance is really key."
The new study was published online today (July 23) in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Transportation is about to get a technology-driven reboot. Recently, Akka Technologies, an innovative engineering and consulting company based in France, unveiled its mind-blowing Link & Fly aircraft design.
The new vehicle is both a flying train that can take to the air and a plane with a passenger pod and detachable wings that can travel on the ground via tracks. Akka’s Link & Fly concept craft will be 33.8 meters long and 8.2 meters high, with a 48.8-meter wingspan.
Akka’s chief executive officer, Maurice Ricci, said, “After cars go electric and autonomous, the next big disruption will be in airplanes.”
With Akka’s futuristic concept, when you need to fly, you will take a tube-shaped passenger train that will bring you straight to the airport. At the airport, the passenger pod will then roll onto the runway, where the pod will attach to the wings, which sit waiting with the engines on top.
Upon landing, the plane detaches from its wings and turns back into a train, which rolls on tracks to local train stations.
The craft is planned to have a maximum cruise altitude of 39,800 feet, a range of 2,200 kilometers, and a cruise speed of Mach 0.78 (around 600 miles per hour).
The test of extraterrestrial life could be found in the ice that covers the surface of Europe, according to NASA scientists.
The moon, the fourth largest in orbit around Jupiter, has long been considered the most likely place to house signs of extraterrestrial life in our Solar System.
Europe, which orbits around the largest planet in the Solar System, has no atmosphere and is constantly bombarded by the strong cosmic radiation of Jupiter and the sun, which makes it impossible for life to survive on its surface.
As a result of the strong radiation, the researchers believe that any living organism will be hidden in the depths of the planet, where it is believed that there is liquid water.
Nevertheless, New findings from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, California, evidence of life could be much closer to the surface than previously thought.
While scientists previously believed that future missions to Europe would have to dig several meters into the ice to find signs of life, the latest research suggests that microbial fossils are between one and three centimeters. [0.4 inches – 1.2 inches] under the ice
Scroll down to watch the video
The search for alien life on Jupiter's moon, Europa, continues as scientists discover that microbial life may be living just below its frozen surface. Europe has long been considered the most likely place, outside the Earth, to sustain life in our Solar System.
The latest research is a strong indicator that future missions to Europe will be able to find evidence of life on the moon.
Previous estimates stated that research crafts on the surface of Europe would have to dig a few meters to find any kind of evidence of life, which is impossible since no lander or spacecraft currently has the capacity to bury itself in that depth.
Dr. Tom Nordheim, icy-world habitability expert and researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, said: "These results indicate that future missions to the surface of Europe do not need to excavate material at great depths to investigate the composition of the material. and look for possible biofirms. & # 39;
NASA believes it will find evidence of extraterrestrial life in the next two decades.
The space agency is already planning two missions to Europe, including a flight called Europa Clipper, which will be launched in 2022 and will take images and measurements of the moon in its path.
This will be followed by a landing mission a few years later.
Previous research has found that Europe has a liquid ocean beneath its icy crust, which makes it a primary target in the search for extraterrestrial life within our Solar System.
NASA believes it will find extraterrestrial life in the next two decades and is already planning two missions to Europe (pictured). A flight called Europa Clipper could be launched in 2022, and be followed by a landing mission a few years later
NASA believes that microbial fossils of organisms that inhabit liquid water deep in the surface of the moon could survive up to 10 million years to less than three centimeters (1.18 inches) below the ice.
Dr. Nordheim and his team believe that they have identified the best place to look for evidence of life, which are regions in mid to high latitudes on the moon.
This is because Europe is immersed in hard radiation levels, sent from the sun and the large planets, including Jupiter. However, the largest doses come from galactic cosmic rays (GCR) that come from distant sources such as exploding stars.
Earth's atmosphere protects life from these rays, however, life in other worlds may not have been so fortunate.
WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT EUROPE AND WHY IS IT SO SPECIAL?
The icy moon of Europe, Jupiter, is slightly smaller than Earth's moon.
Europe orbits Jupiter every 3.5 days and is blocked by tides, just like the Earth's Moon, so the same side of Europe faces Jupiter at all times.
It is believed to have an iron core, a rocky mantle and a surface ocean of salt water, such as Earth.
Unlike Earth, however, this ocean is deep enough to cover the entire surface of Europe, and being far from the sun, the surface of the ocean is globally frozen.
Many experts believe that the hidden ocean that surrounds Europe, warmed by powerful tidal forces caused by the gravity of Jupiter, may have favorable conditions for life.
NASA scientists are about to explore the ocean moon of Jupiter, Europe, in search of signs of alien life.
Europe is our best option to find biological life in the solar system, researchers say.
The space agency is preparing two probes, including one that will land on its surface, to explore the distant moon in detail within the next decade, the agency says.
It is believed that Mars once had an atmosphere similar to Earth, but now it is thin. Meanwhile, Europe has practically none.
Both worlds are bombarded by high levels of radiation, which could condemn the destruction of fossils that once existed on the surfaces of worlds.
Dr. Nordheim modeled the effect of these particles on the surface of Europe.
The Jet Propulsion Lab team then compared these estimates with laboratory data on how quickly the radiation destroys amino acids, the building blocks of life.
Dr. Nordheim, who also works at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said: "At mid to high latitudes, amino acids could persist at detectable levels of just one or three centimeters. [0.4 inches – 1.2 inches] below the surface of Europe on a time scale of ten million years.
However, Dr. Nordheim added: "In the most irradiated equatorial regions, however, this depth increases to several tens of centimeters."
This would be too deep for the current generation technology to deepen in Europe.
Dr. Nordheim and his team, whose findings are published in Nature Astronomy, said a future mission in Europe will not have to dig too hard to find signs of life, as long as NASA knows exactly where to land.
Dr. Nordheim said: "Observations of the surface of Europe made with an orbiter or approach flybys, such as those of NASA's Europa Clipper mission, will be key to identifying such regions."
Previous research has discovered that this moon has a liquid ocean beneath the icy crust of Europe (in the image), which makes it a primary target in the search for alien life. Young regions in medium to high latitudes could be the best locations to look for such signatures
Clipper will carry a payload of nine instruments, including a camera that will represent most of the surface.
They will use spectrometers to scan their composition, an ice penetration radar to map the shell in 3-D and find liquid water and a magnetometer to characterize the ocean.
Dr. John Cooper of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland says that a lander should probe more than ten centimeters from where it falls or make shallower measurements at high-latitude sites.
Dr. Cooper, who was not involved in the study, said: "The lander would be the final judge of whether we were smart or were lucky enough to find a biofirm, perhaps one that takes shelter from radiation within reach of a small block of ice, a sign of life that we can probably recognize as coming from our closest extraterrestrial cousin in the Universe of life.
‘UFO or Kremlin’s secret weapon’. Russians baffled over daytime blackout over Yakutia
‘UFO or Kremlin’s secret weapon’. Russians baffled over daytime blackout over Yakutia
A black cloud came to north-east Siberia on Tuesday at about 11:30. The sudden darkness lasted over two hours.
As the defense and meteorological officials failed to comment on the phenomenon, locals and media outlets started developing conspiracy theories.
The only thing head of Verkhoyansk town Yevgeny Potapov said was ‘Something strange happened on that day’.
Local media were the first to cover the situation; then The Sun and Daily Maildirected their attention to the interesting fact, while nationwide media focused on the problem only recently.
According to the British tabloids, the local residents came up with different versions of its origin, including dust from a meteorite strike, a secret Kremlin weapon test, a UFO and even the ‘work of the devil’.
The cloud of darkness hit three vast districts in Yakutia region. No meteorite strikes, solar eclipse or weapon tests were reported.
“Day suddenly turned into a dark night,” Daily Mail quotes a local resident.
Some also feared possible radioactive contamination and poisonous dust.
“We took torches and went out. But now nobody wants to be on the street, because we were short of breath then,” another inhabitant said.
The locals doubt that the authorities will ever tell them the truth.
"Close Encounters of the Third Kind" Credit: Columbia Pictures
A team of international researchers, led by scientists from the University of St Andrews and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, redefines alien detection scale.
What are the consequences for the human race if we encountered extraterrestrial intelligence? If you see a story about aliens on TV or online, how excited should you be? A new study, published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, revamps a long-used tool for classifying potential signals from extraterrestrial intelligence, making it fit for the modern world of news and social media.
First developed in 2001, the Rio Scale is a tool used by astronomers searching for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) to help communicate to the public 'how excited' they should be about what has been observed. The Scale measures the consequences for humans if the signal is from aliens, as well as the probability that the signal really is from aliens, and not a natural phenomenon or human-made. The scale gives a score between zero and ten, so that the public can quickly see how important a signal really is.
"The whole world knows about the Richter Scale for quantifying the severity of an earthquake; that number is reported immediately following a quake and subsequently refined as more data are consolidated," said Jill Tarter, co-founder of the SETI Institute. "The SETI community is attempting to create a scale that can accompany reports of any claims of the detection of extraterrestrial intelligence and be refined over time as more data become available. This scale should convey both the significance and credibility of the claimed detection. Rio 2.0 is an attempt to update the scale to make it more useful and compatible with current modes of information dissemination, as well as providing means for the public to become familiar with the scale."
There have been many dubious signals reported as 'aliens' in recent years, and learning the truth about these stories is increasingly difficult. As such, an updated Rio Scale is required.
Rio Scale. Credit: University of St Andrews
The new study, led by Dr. Duncan Forgan at the University's Centre for Exoplanet Science, highlights the changing nature of news media, the growth of 24-hour news and the new landscape of social media. Coupled with an increase in efforts to detect ETI by teams around the world, the Rio Scale is needed more than ever, and it must remain relevant when communicating to the public about 'alien signals'.
The international team of researchers' revision of the Rio Scale (Rio 2.0) aims to bring consensus across academic disciplines, when classifying signals potentially indicating the existence of advanced extraterrestrial life. Rio 2.0 can quickly calibrate the public expectations of a reported signal, and educate them as to how SETI scientists actually evaluate a signal, from its initial detection through the various verification stages needed to determine if a signal is credibly from ETI.
Key to the research is also the development of a single set of consistent terminology for discussing signals, both among researchers and in the media.
The team has published an online Rio Scale Calculator, an interactive tool for scientists and science communicators to evaluate signals and give advice on how to use it for better reporting of ETI in the media.
Lead researcher, Dr. Duncan Forgan, Centre for Exoplanet Science, University of St Andrews, said: "It's absolutely crucial that when we talk about something so hugely significant as the discovery of intelligent life beyond the Earth, we do it clearly and carefully. Having Rio 2.0 allows us to rank a signal quickly in a way that the general public can easily understand, and helps us keep their trust in a world filled with fake news."
The new Rio Scale has now been submitted to the International Academy of Astronautics Permanent Committee on SETI for official ratification.
Artist’s impression showing the path of the star S2 as it passes very close to the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.Photograph: ESO/M. Kornmesser
The observations, made using the Very Large Telescope in Chile, tracked a star called S2 as it passed through the extreme gravitational field at the heart of our galaxy.
Tracking Stars Orbiting the Milky Way's Central Black Hole [720p]
As the star approached its nearest point to the black hole on 19 May, it was accelerated to mind-boggling speeds, causing it to be subject to effects predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
Astronomers had been tracking the star and preparing to make the observations for the past 16 years – the time taken for the star to complete a single elliptical orbit of the black hole.
“We have been preparing intensely for this event over several years, as we wanted to make the most of this unique opportunity to observe general relativistic effects,” said Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, Germany, who led the international team.
A major challenge was picking out the faint star 26,000 light years from Earth as it travelled in front of the black hole, which itself is surrounded by a halo of glowing dust and debris.
To achieve this required a telescope powerful enough to see a tennis ball on the moon from Earth and sophisticated systems to correct for vibrations of the telescope and interference from Earth’s atmosphere.
“We have put enormous effort into getting the instruments into good shape before the star approached the black hole,” said Thibaut Paumard, a researcher at the French National Research Institute, the CNRS, in Paris.
As the star made its closest approach to the black hole, at a distance about 120 times the distance between Earth and the sun, it reached a speed of 8,000km/s, or 2.7% of the speed of light.
As it got close to the black hole the star appeared redder as the light leaving it was stretched out by the gravitational pull of the massive object – as described by Einstein’s general relativity theory. The black hole at the centre of the galaxy is about 10 times the size of the sun in diameter, but has a mass of about 4m solar masses.
“It’s really the first time a [gravitational red shift] has been seen in such a clear fashion on an object that is moving,” said Paumard.
Closer analysis of the observations could reveal more about the distribution of stars and other objects close to the black hole.
Physicist and former NASA researcher Kevin Knuth argues that blanket skepticism about extraterrestrial craft is not sustainable.
US F/A-18 footage of a UFO (circled in red). Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
PARZIVAL191919
Are we alone? Unfortunately, neither of the answers feel satisfactory. To be alone in this vast universe is a lonely prospect. On the other hand, if we are not alone and there is someone or something more powerful out there, that too is terrifying.
As a NASA research scientist and now a professor of physics, I attended the 2002 NASA Contact Conference, which focused on serious speculation about extraterrestrials. During the meeting a concerned participant said loudly in a sinister tone, “You have absolutely no idea what is out there!” The silence was palpable as the truth of this statement sunk in. Humans are fearful of extraterrestrials visiting Earth. Perhaps fortunately, the distances between the stars are prohibitively vast. At least this is what we novices, who are just learning to travel into space, tell ourselves.
Cover of the October 1957 issue of pulp science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. This was a special edition devoted to ‘flying saucers,’ which became a national obsession after airline pilot Kenneth Arnold sighted a saucer-shaped flying objects in 1947.
I have always been interested in UFOs. Of course, there was the excitement that there could be aliens and other living worlds. But more exciting to me was the possibility that interstellar travel was technologically achievable. In 1988, during my second week of graduate school at Montana State University, several students and I were discussing a recent cattle mutilation that was associated with UFOs. A physics professor joined the conversation and told us that he had colleagues working at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, where they were having problems with UFOs shutting down nuclear missiles. At the time I thought this professor was talking nonsense. But 20 years later, I was stunned to see a recording of a press conference featuring several former US Air Force personnel, with a couple from Malmstrom AFB, describing similar occurrences in the 1960s. Clearly there must be something to this.
With July 2 being World UFO Day, it is a good time for society to address the unsettling and refreshing fact we may not be alone. I believe we need to face the possibility that some of the strange flying objects that outperform the best aircraft in our inventory and defy explanation may indeed be visitors from afar – and there’s plenty of evidence to support UFO sightings.
The Fermi paradox
The nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi was famous for posing thought provoking questions. In 1950, at Los Alamos National Laboratory after discussing UFOs over lunch, Fermi asked, “Where is everybody?” He estimated there were about 300 billion stars in the galaxy, many of them billions of years older than the sun, with a large percentage of them likely to host habitable planets. Even if intelligent life developed on a very small percentage of these planets, then there should be a number of intelligent civilisations in the galaxy. Depending on the assumptions, one should expect anywhere from tens to tens of thousands of civilisations.
With the rocket-based technologies that we have developed for space travel, it would take between 5 and 50 million years for a civilisation like ours to colonise our Milky Way galaxy. Since this should have happened several times already in the history of our galaxy, one should wonder where is the evidence of these civilisations? This discrepancy between the expectation that there should be evidence of alien civilisations or visitations and the presumption that no visitations have been observed has been dubbed the Fermi Paradox.
This photograph was taken in Wallonia, Belgium.
J.S. HENRARDI
Carl Sagan correctly summarised the situation by saying that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The problem is that there has been no single well-documented UFO encounter that would alone qualify as the smoking gun. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that many governments around the world have covered upand classifiedinformation aboutsuch encounters. But there are enough scraps of evidence that suggest that the problem needs to be open to scientific study.
UFOs, taboo for professional scientists
When it comes to science, the scientific method requires hypotheses to be testable so that inferences can be verified. UFO encounters are neither controllable nor repeatable, which makes their study extremely challenging. But the real problem, in my view, is that the UFO topic is taboo.
While the general public has been fascinated with UFOs for decades, our governments, scientists and media, have essentially declared that of all the UFO sightings are a result of weather phenomenon or human actions. None are actually extraterrestrial spacecraft. And no aliens have visited Earth. Essentially, we are told that the topic is nonsense. UFOs are off-limits to serious scientific study and rational discussion, which unfortunately leaves the topic in the domain of fringe and pseudoscientists, many of whom litter the field with conspiracy theories and wild speculation.
I think UFO skepticism has become something of a religion with an agenda, discounting the possibility of extraterrestrials without scientific evidence, while often providing silly hypotheses describing only one or two aspects of a UFO encounter reinforcing the popular belief that there is a conspiracy. A scientist must consider all of the possible hypotheses that explain all of the data, and since little is known, the extraterrestrial hypothesis cannot yet be ruled out. In the end, the skeptics often do science a disservice by providing a poor example of how science is to be conducted. The fact is that many of these encounters – still a very small percentage of the total – defy conventional explanation.
The media amplifies the skepticism by publishing information about UFOs when it is exciting, but always with a mocking or whimsical tone and reassuring the public that it can’t possibly be true. But there are credible witnesses and encounters.
Why don’t astronomers see UFOs?
I am often asked by friends and colleagues, “Why don’t astronomers see UFOs?” The fact is that they do. In 1977, Peter Sturrock, a professor of space science and astrophysics at Stanford University, mailed 2,611 questionnaires about UFO sightings to members of the American Astronomical Society. He received 1,356 responses from which 62 astronomers – 4.6 percent – reported witnessing or recording inexplicable aerial phenomena. This rate is similar to the approximately 5 percent of UFO sightings that are never explained.
As expected, Sturrock found that astronomers who witnessed UFOs were more likely to be night sky observers. Over 80 percent of Sturrock’s respondents were willing to study the UFO phenomenon if there was a way to do so. More than half of them felt that the topic deserves to be studied versus 20 percent who felt that it should not. The survey also revealed that younger scientists were more likely to support the study of UFOs.
UFOs have been observed through telescopes. I know of one telescope sighting by an experienced amateur astronomer in which he observed an object shaped like a guitar pick moving through the telescope’s field of view. Further sightings are documented in the book “Wonders in the Sky,” in which the authors compile numerous observations of unexplained aerial phenomena made by astronomers and published in scientific journals throughout the 1700s and 1800s.
Evidence from government and military officers
Some of the most convincing observations have come from government officials. In 1997, the Chilean government formed the organisation Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos, or CEFAA, to study UFOs. Last year, CEFAA released footage of a UFO taken with a helicopter-mounted Wescam infrared camera.
Declassified document describing a sighting of a UFO in December 1977, in Bahia, a state in northern Brazil.
ARQUIVO NACIONAL COLLECTION
The countries of Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom have been declassifying their UFO files since 2008. The French Committee for In-Depth Studies, or COMETA, was an unofficial UFO study group comprised of high-ranking scientists and military officials that studied UFOs in the late 1990s. They released the COMETA Report, which summarised their findings. They concluded that 5 percent of the encounters were reliable yet inexplicable: The best hypothesis available was that the observed craft were extraterrestrial. They also accused the United States of covering up evidence of UFOs. Iran has been concerned about spherical UFOs observed near nuclear power facilities that they call “CIA drones” which reportedly are about 30 feet in diameter, can achieve speeds up to Mach 10, and can leave the atmosphere. Such speeds are on par with the fastest experimental aircraft, but unthinkable for a sphere without lift surfaces or an obvious propulsion mechanism.
1948 Top Secret USAF UFO extraterrestrial document.
UNITED STATES AIR FORCE
In December 2017, The New York Times broke a story about the classified Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, which was a $22 million program run by the former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo and aimed at studying UFOs. Elizondo resigned from running the program protesting extreme secrecy and the lack of funding and support. Following his resignation Elizondo, along with several others from the defence and intelligence community, were recruited by the To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science, which was recently founded by Tom DeLonge to study UFOs and interstellar travel. In conjunction with the launch of the academy, the Pentagon declassified and released three videos of UFO encounters taken with forward looking infrared cameras mounted on F-18 fighter jets. While there is much excitement about such disclosures, I am reminded of a quote from Retired Army Colonel John Alexander: “Disclosure has happened. … I’ve got stacks of generals, including Soviet generals, who’ve come out and said UFOs are real. My point is, how many times do senior officials need to come forward and say that this is real?”
A topic worthy of serious study
There is a great deal of evidence that a small percentage of these UFO sightings are unidentified structured craft exhibiting flight capabilities beyond any known human technology. While there is no single case for which there exists evidence that would stand up to scientific rigour, there are cases with simultaneous observations by multiple reliable witnesses, along with radar returns and photographic evidence revealing patterns of activity that are compelling.
Declassified information from covert studies is interesting, but not scientifically helpful. This is a topic worthy of open scientific inquiry, until there is a scientific consensus based on evidence rather than prior expectation or belief. If there are indeed extraterrestrial craft visiting Earth, it would greatly benefit us to know about them, their nature and their intent. Moreover, this would present a great opportunity for mankind, promising to expand and advance our knowledge and technology, as well as reshaping our understanding of our place in the universe.
Despite thousands of filed Freedom of Information Act requests, documents or videos generated during the secret Pentagon UFO study have been scarce to non-existent. Investigative Reporter George Knapp has obtained key documents related to the UFO inquiry. Here they are, so you can see them first.
Senator Harry Reid initiated the Pentagon UFO study back in 2007 yet kept it secret. Since his role was revealed last year, he has had calls from many others in Congress and believes there have likely been classified briefings involving military eyewitnesses. Reid fought hard to keep AATIP going, as revealed in a 2009 letter obtained by George Knapp.
"It's about changing the paradigm in which our government can finally take this issue seriously without worrying about their political survival, right, allowing Congress to have a conversation in open or closed session saying, all right guys, gals, what do we do about this? What we can talk about now is, should this scientific study continue, that's already been started? That's huge, volumes and volumes of stuff, we now have the basis for doing it."
- Sen. Harry Reid, former Senate Majority Leader
Physicist Hal Puthoff recently made the first public presentation about the Pentagon UFO study. Puthoff was the chief scientist for BAASS (Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies), the Las Vegas company that won the Pentagon contract to study UFOs and related phenomenon. Puthoff said his group has studied unknown materials recovered from crash sites.
In Puthoff's presentation he listed subjects explored in the dozens of scientific studies initiated by BAASS. The titles and authors of these technical papers have not been released, that is until now. This list is being made public for the first time and includes subjects such as worm holes, warp drive, invisibility, antigravity, metamaterials and how to track hypersonic vehicles.
"You've got these advanced aerospace vehicles flying around, that we don't know where they come from, what the intent is, possibly off-world even."
- Dr. Hal Puthoff, physicist
The idea is that you can use this to find out more about the programs. Documents and descriptions below... happy hunting!
Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell Creator, Extraordinary Beliefs
Everything you need to know about the extraterrestrial hypothesis
Everything you need to know about the extraterrestrial hypothesis
In Brief
The Facts:
Richard Dolan, one of the world's leading researchers on the topic of UFOs, gives an excellent lecture below explaining multiple hypotheses for the UFO phenomenon.
Reflect On:
How this topic could be tied to other universes, multiple dimensions, new science, and more. There could be a combination of explanations for the UFO problem.
If, for instance, if it turns out that all physical evidence is consistent with a mundane interpretation of the causes of UFO reports, there will be little reason to continue to speculate about the role of extraterrestrial beings. If, on the other hand, the analysis of physical evidence turns up very strong evidence that objects related with UFO reports were manufactured outside the solar system, then one must obviously consider very seriously that the phenomenon involves not only extraterrestrial vehicles but probably also extraterrestrial beings.” – –Peter Andrew Sturrock(source)
What is the extraterrestrial hypothesis? (ETH) It’s one of the multiple hypotheses’ which exist in order to explain the UFO phenomenon. Yes, objects performing manoeuvres that defy our belief and understanding of physics have been spotted, filmed, and tracked on radar. With all of the UFO disclosure that’s happened over the past few years, a trend that doesn’t seem like it’s going to stop, the ETH is one that holds strong over multiple others, or as explained in the lecture below, a combination of others, to explain what is going on here. The lecture is given by Richard Dolan, historian and one of the world’s leading UFO researchers.
The ETH separates itself from the others for a couple of big reasons, one is the fact that multiple people from ‘within’ have come forward explaining that not only has there been a UFO cover-up, but an extraterrestrial cover-up as well. Secondly, the observed highly advanced, physics-physics manoeuvres these crafts that have been seen and filmed by people and military agencies are not produced by any nation on Earth. Lastly but not least, all of the supposed encounters between people and extraterrestrial beings, there is no shortage found within the lore.
There is abundant evidence that we are being contacted, . That civilizations have been monitoring us for a very long time and that their appearance is bizarre from any type of traditional materialistic Western point of view. – Dr. Brian O’Leary (Physics professor, NASA Astronaut)
At the same time, we have to think about extra dimensions, parallel universes, and more…There could be multiple explanations for the UFO phenomenon, and multiple cases that don’t actually represent the same thing.
There are many factors to consider here, and the lecture below is great for discussing that. I (the ETH) opens up new science, new paradigms, and leaves no aspect of humanity untouched. Science, history, technology, consciousness, and more will all be changed and transformed at a more rapid pace. This is one of the greatest stories in human history, and as independent media, we must keep talking about it because mainstream media always seems to have some sort of agenda, with all topics, from terrorism to UFOs and GMO’s and as I’m sure you know, much more.
We have, indeed, been contacted — perhaps even visited — by extraterrestrial beings, and the US government, in collusion with the other national powers of the Earth, is determined to keep this information from the general public.
-Victor Marchetti (Second Look, Volume 1, No 7, Washington, DC, May, 1979)
Worms frozen in permafrost for 42,000 years have sprung back to life, scientists say.
Experts managed to coax the two roundworms back to life after thawing the ice that had imprisoned them since the era of woolly mammoths.
The experiment could provide a breakthrough in the fields of astrobiology and cryonics, since it demonstrates the 'ability of multi-cellular organisms to survive long-term', the researchers claimed.
Cryonics, which bridges the gap between science-fiction and reality, is a field that hopes to suspend people in time by freezing their bodies for years.
The end goal is to keep people on ice for centuries at the time, long enough to allow for long-term interplanetary exploration.
Scroll down for video
Two nematodes from Siberia are moving and eating again for the first time since the Pleistocene age 42,000 years ago
The ancient roundworms - frozen since the era of woolly mammoths - started wriggling again in Petri dishes at a Russian institute (pictured)
The nematodes were coaxed back to life in a Petri dishes in a laboratory at the Institute of Physico-Chemical and Biological Problems of Soil Science, near Moscow.
Russian researchers team worked with geoscientists from Princeton University, New Jersey, USA to analyse more than 300 frozen worms to find suitable candidates.
According to researchers, only two ‘were shown to contain viable nematodes’.
One of these was found in permafrost near the Alazeya River back in 2015, and believed to be around 41,700 years old.
The other was taken in 2002 from an prehistoric squirrel burrow in Duvanny Yar outcrop in the lower reaches of the Kolyma River, and is around 32,000 years old.
This location is close to the site of Pleistocene Park, an experimental project seeking to recreate the Arctic habitat of the extinct woolly mammoth.
Both sites are in Yakutia, which is renown for being the coldest region of Russia.
The worms were coaxed back to life in Petri dishes in a laboratory at the Institute of Physico-Chemical and Biological Problems of Soil Science near Moscow. The breakthrough demonstrates the ability of multicellular organisms to survive long-term
Both specimens were found in the Yakutia region of Siberia, which is known to be the coldest region of the country
WHAT IS CRYONICS?
WHAT IS CRYONICS?
The deep freezing of a body to -196°C (-321°F).
Anti-freeze compounds are injected into the corpse to stop cells being damaged.
The hope is that medical science will advance enough to bring the patient back to life.
Two main US organisations carry out cryonics in the US: Alcor, in Arizona, and the Cryonics Institute, in Michigan.
Russian firm KrioRus is one of two facilities outside the US to offer the service, alongside Alcor's European laboratory in Portugal.
HOW IS IT MEANT TO WORK?
The process can only take place once the body has been declared legally dead.
Ideally, it begins within two minutes of the heart stopping and no more than 15.
The body must be packed in ice and injected with chemicals to reduce blood clotting.
At the cryonics facility, it is cooled to just above 0°C and the blood is replaced with a solution to preserve organs.
Cryonpreservation is the deep freezing of a body to - 196°C (-321°F). Anti-freeze compounds are injected into the corpse to stop cells being damaged
The body is injected with another solution to stop ice crystals forming in organs and tissues, then cooled to -130°C.
The final step is to place the body into a container which is lowered into a tank of liquid nitrogen at -196°C.
WHAT'S THE CHANCE OF SUCCESS?
Many experts say there is none.
Organs such as the heart and kidneys have never been successfully frozen and thawed.
It is even less likely a whole body, and the brain, could be without irreversible damage.
HOW MUCH DOES IT COST?
Charges at the Cryonics Institute start at around £28,000 ($35,000) to 'members' for whole-body cryopreservation.
Rival group Alcor charges £161,000 ($200,000) while KrioRus' procedure will set you back £29,200 ($37,600).
HOW LONG BEFORE PEOPLE CAN BE BROUGHT BACK TO LIFE?
Cryonics organisations claim it could be decades or even centuries.
However, medical experts say once cells are damaged during freezing and turned to 'mush' they cannot be converted back to living tissue, any more than you can turn a scrambled egg back into a raw egg.'
After being defrosted, the nematodes showed signs of life – they started moving and eating,' said another report on the findings cited by The Siberian Times. According to the international team of researchers, this latest breakthrough demonstrates 'the ability of multicellular organisms to survive long-term – tens of thousands of years' in a state of 'natural cryoconservation.'
'It is obvious that this ability suggests that the Pleistocene nematodes have some adaptive mechanisms that may be of scientific and practical importance for the related fields of science, such as cryomedicine, cryobiology, and astrobiology,' the researchers wrote in the report, published in journal Doklady Biological Sciences.
One of the worms was from a site near the Alazeya River (pictured), found in permafrost in 2015, and believed to be some 41,700 years old
A second worm was taken in 2002 from an prehistoric squirrel burrow in Duvanny Yar outcrop in the lower reaches of the Kolyma River (pictured), and is around 32,000 years old
WHAT ARE WOOLLY MAMMOTHS?
The woolly mammoth roamed the icy tundra of Europe and North America for 140,000 years, disappearing at the end of the Pleistocene period, 10,000 years ago.
They are one of the best understood prehistoric animals known to science because their remains are often not fossilised but frozen and preserved.
Males were around 12 feet (3.5m) tall, while the females were slightly smaller.
Curved tusks were up to 16 feet (5m) long and their underbellies boasted a coat of shaggy hair up to 3 feet (1m) long.
Tiny ears and short tails prevented vital body heat being lost.
Their trunks had 'two fingers' at the end to help them pluck grass, twigs and other vegetation.
They get their name from the Russian 'mammut', or earth mole, as it was believed the animals lived underground and died on contact with light – explaining why they were always found dead and half-buried.
Their bones were once believed to have belonged to extinct races of giants.
Woolly mammoths and modern-day elephants are closely related, sharing 99.4 per cent of their genes.
The two species took separate evolutionary paths six million years ago, at about the same time humans and chimpanzees went their own way.
Woolly mammoths co-existed with early humans, who hunted them for food and used their bones and tusks for making weapons and art.
These creatures have set a new record for cryogenic survival.
The nematodes isolated from permafrost deposits of the Kolyma River Lowland. Image credits: Shatilovich et al.
The Kolyma River in north-eastern Siberia flows along over 2,129 kilometers (1,323 miles) before ultimately emptying into a part of the Arctic Ocean. For the most part (about 250 days each year), the Kolyma is frozen to depths of several meters. Similarly, most of the path it flows along is surrounded by thick ice — after all, this is the permafrost land we’re talking about.
A while back, Russian biologists dug up more than 300 samples of frozen soil from the area. They found that the samples are teeming with microscopic life: single-celled cyanobacteria, green algae, and yeasts. But among these samples, they also found some macroscopic organisms — namely, some nematodes (Panagrolaimus aff. detritophagus and Plectus aff. parvus) — or, as most people would call them, roundworms.
Some were found in what was likely a ground squirrel burrow some 32,000 years ago, but had since caved in and frozen over. The others were found in a bore sample at a depth of around 3.5 meters (about 11.5 feet). They were carbon dated and found to be 42,000 years old. There’s still the off chance of contamination, but researchers have detailed their strict practices, and peer-review also confirmed the sterility procedures.
After identifying the worms, biologists placed them in a room kept at a mellow temperature of 20 degrees Celsius (68 Fahrenheit). It didn’t take long before they started showing signs of life. Within weeks, they were moving around and eating, setting a new record for how long animals can survive frozen in ice.
Two nematodes from Siberia are moving and eating again for the first time since the Pleistocene age 42,000 years ago
Longest survival
In 2000, scientists found bacteria spores inside 250 million-year-old salt crystals, and after careful processing, were able to bring them back to life.
However, it’s important to keep in mind that the tricks bacteria pull off to survive so long cannot be applied to macroscopic creatures, which are much more complex. Roundworms are remarkably sturdy creatures (related to tardigrades), but they don’t even come close to bacteria. Yet even tardigrades, these incredibly resilient creatures, have “only” been known to survive for decades after preservation.
The worms were coaxed back to life in Petri dishes in a laboratory at the Institute of Physico-Chemical and Biological Problems of Soil Science near Moscow. The breakthrough demonstrates the ability of multicellular organisms to survive long-term
Both specimens were found in the Yakutia region of Siberia, which is known to be the coldest region of the country
Aside from the main story, — that the creatures survived for 42,000 years, frozen — there are two ways to look at this. The first is optimistic and upbeat: by studying the mechanisms which allowed them to survive, we can learn more about cryomedicine and how creatures (potentially, alien creatures) survive in extreme environments.
“It is obvious that this ability suggests that the Pleistocene nematodes have some adaptive mechanisms that may be of scientific and practical importance for the related fields of science, such as cryomedicine, cryobiology, and astrobiology,” the researchers write in their study.
But there’s a darker side to the story. As global warming takes its course and much of the permafrost continues to melt, it could release a string of pathogens currently frozen. What the consequences will be is anyone’s guess.
With a bit of help from NASA, you can now hear the sun’s roar — and it’s glorious.
The Sun’s surface seen in ultraviolet light, colored by NASA. Image credits NASA Goddard.
Although you never hear it, the Sun is actually pretty loud. This massive body of superheated, fusing plasma, is rife with ripples and waves generated by the same processes that generate is light and heat — and where there’s motion, there’s sound. We never get to hear it, however, as the huge expanse of nothing between the Earth and the Sun acts as a perfect acoustic insulator.
With some of ESA (European Space Agency) data and a sprinkling of NASA’s magic, however, you can now hear the Sun churn in all of its (surprisingly tranquil) glory.
Hear me roar (softly)
“Waves are traveling and bouncing around inside the Sun, and if your eyes were sensitive enough they could actually see this,” says Alex Young, associate director for science in the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
What Young is referring to are seismic waves, a type of acoustic waves — the same kind of motion that causes earthquakes in rocky planets — that form and propagate inside the Sun. Hypothetically, if you were to look at the star with the naked eye, you could actually see these waves rippling through its body and surface.
Stars are formed of a much more fluid material than most planets, and so their bulk flows more readily under the sway of seismic waves — wiggling just like a poked block of Jell-O.
As most of us learned in early childhood, however, one cannot look directly into the Sun for long. Luckily for us, ESA recently embarked on a one-of-a-kind mission: they sent the Parker Solar Probe hurtling towards our star. Using its SOHO Michelson Dopler Imager (MDI) instrument, the probe recorded these motions inside the Sun. Researchers at NASA and the Stanford Experimental Physics Lab later processed into a soundtrack.
It’s not half-bad, as far as tunes go. I actually find it quite relaxing. Check it out:
Hear me roar
The sounds you hear in NASA’s clip are generated by the motions of plasma inside the Sun. These are the same processes that generate local magnetic fields inside the star and push matter towards the surface, causing sunspots, solar flares, or coronal mass ejections — the birthplace of space weather.
Space weather phenomena are associated with intense bursts of emitted radiation, to which complex technological systems are susceptible. So most of our infrastructure, from satellites — and with them, cell phone networks, GPS, and other types of communication — transportation, and power grids.
It took a great deal of work to turn the readings from Parker into something usable. Alexander Kosovichev, a physicist at the Stanford University lab, processed the raw SOHO MDI data by averaging Doppler velocity data over the solar disc and then only keeping low degree modes. These low degree modes are the only type of seismic waves whose behavior inside stars is known and accessible to helioseismologists. Afterward, he cut out any interference, such as sounds generating by whizzing of instruments inside the craft. He then filtered the data to end up with uninterrupted sound waves.
While scientists probably enjoy a groovy track just as much as the rest of us, the soundtrack actually has practical applications. By analyzing the sounds, researchers can get a very accurate picture of the churnings inside of our Sun — much more accurate than previous observations could provide.
“We don’t have straightforward ways to look inside the Sun,” Young explains. “We don’t have a microscope to zoom inside the Sun. So using a star or the Sun’s vibrations allows us to see inside of it.”
A more comprehensive understanding of the motions inside the Sun could allow researchers to better predict space weather events.
Our closest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, seems to like the taste of its brethren.
The Andromeda Galaxy imaged through a hydrogen-alpha filter. Image credits Adam Evans.
Researchers from the University of Michigan (UoM) report that the Andromeda galaxy smote and consumed one of its brethren some two billion years ago. Although its victim was shredded almost completely, the team pieced together evidence of the collision from the thin halo of stars that spans the gap between Andromeda and its enigmatic companion, Meiser 32 (M32).
The discovery helps further our understanding of how galaxies like the Milky Way evolve, and of their behavior during large mergers.
Family dinner
Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and our closest neighbor, Andromeda, are the two largest members of a group known as the Local Group (of galaxies). The extended family includes some 54 different galaxies — most of them dwarf galaxies acting as satellites for their larger relatives — all orbiting around a point roughly between Andromeda and the Milky Way.
It may sound idyllic, but researchers have found that at least one member of this group found its demise at the hands of Andromeda. This once-galaxy, christened M32p, was the third-largest member of the Local Group — a distinction that now falls on the galaxy Triangulum.
The team started their research using data pertaining to the halo of stars around Andromeda. It’s not a unique feature; many galaxies harbor such wispy-thin groupings of stars around their bulk, the final remnants of smaller galaxies that they absorbed over time. Since Andromeda is so large and rich in matter (it has over double the diameter of the Milky Way and double its number of stars), the researchers expected it to have consumed hundreds of smaller galaxies — which they thought would make it impossible to study a single such meal.
Size comparison between M32p and today’s M32. Image credits Richard D’Souza; for the image of M64: NOAO/AURA/NSF.
However, the team’s computer simulations revealed that although Andromeda did dine on many of its companion galaxies, most stars in the outer halo originate from a single, large galaxy. Piecing the evidence together to peer back in time, the team found that M32p would have been massive — likely the third-largest in the Local Group, after Andromeda and the Milky Way. The paper adds that M32p was at least 20 times larger than any galaxy the Milky Way ever merged with.
“The stars in Andromeda are very metal-rich and considerably young,” Richard D’Souza, lead author of the paper, explained in an e-mail. “In general, the larger the galaxy the more metal rich the stars are. We suspected that since the stars in the halo of Andromeda were so metal-rich, it must have come from a large metal-rich galaxy.”
One big bite
A metal-rich halo large enough to encompass a galaxy such as Andromeda could only be formed “through a single large merger,” he adds, noting that “there are not many smaller galaxies in the Universe to build up to the mass of the halo”.
“In terms of a business analogy, galaxies also grow through mergers and acquisitions. In order for a major company to grow at a very fast pace, it would need to acquire a similar large company into its business. Such was the case with Andromeda,” D’Souza adds.
The findings call into question our models of how mergers between two massive galaxies play out. Until now, astronomers believed that such an event would flatten the disk of a spiral galaxy into an elliptical one, but Andromeda’s disk evidently pulled through still very spiral-shaped. Some effects of this collision can still be seen, D’Souza told me. Among them are the thickness of Andromeda’s disk and the higher speeds its stars travel at (90 km/s compared to around 30 km/s in the Milky Way).
The process of shredding of the large galaxy M32p by the Andromeda (M31) galaxy which eventually resulted in M32 and a giant halo of stars. Image credits Richard D’Souza; M31, courtesy of Wei-Hao Wang; Stellar halo of M31: AAS/IOP.
Still, he admits that it came as “a major surprise” that Andromeda could retain its spiral shape following this collision. One explanation could be that the particular angle of the collision between the two galaxies helped keep Andromeda spiral-like, “but we need to run more computer simulations to see which set of orbits helps preserve the disk”.
Beyond this, it helps us better understand Andromeda’s evolution over time. The timing of the merger coincides with a burst of intense star formation in Andromeda two billion years ago. All this star-forming activity also suggests that M32p must have been gas-rich in order to supply enough building blocks.
Finally, the findings point to Andromeda’s mysterious, compact, and very dense, satellite galaxy M32 (the one today) as the last sliver of the once-mighty galaxy — the naked core. This piece of data could help explain why we see so few galaxies similar to M32 zipping around in the universe.
“M32 is a weirdo,” co-author Eric Bell, UoM professor of astronomy, said in a press release. “While it looks like a compact example of an old, elliptical galaxy, it actually has lots of young stars. It’s one of the most compact galaxies in the universe. There isn’t another galaxy like it.”
“Galaxies like M32 are considerably rare in the Universe,” D’Souza adds. “The term used for them in the literature is called ‘compact ellipticals’, and they are one of the most rarest galaxies in the Universe. We do know a dozen or so compact ellipticals in the nearby Universe, and we have inferred that further out (where we cannot resolve them), the number is equally low.”
As part of the paper, the team also found that the merger scenario could help explain the scarcity of M32-like objects. It seems the secret is not just in the merging process itself, but also in the particular makeup of the galaxies involved. “What one really needs is a galaxy with a high central surface density of stars comparable to M32,” D’Souza explains. It seems to be quite a rare occurrence — the team only identified 8 potential progenitors for M32-like objects.
Their study may alter the traditional understanding of how galaxies evolve, the researchers say. The realization that Andromeda’s disk survived an impact with a massive galaxy flies in the face of our current models, which suggests that such large interactions would destroy disks and form an elliptical galaxy.
It went so fundamentally against the grain of our understanding of galaxy-formation that, previously, we didn’t even consider the possibility that this scenario could have ever occurred.
“Astronomers have been studying the Local Group–the Milky Way, Andromeda and their companions–for so long. It was shocking to realize that the Milky Way had a large sibling, and we never knew about it,” Bell concludes.
Such investigative methods can be applied to other galaxies as well, the team explains, to help us tease out the merger history of other galaxies besides Andromeda.
The paper “The Andromeda galaxy’s most important merger about 2 billion years ago as M32’s likely progenitor” has been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
According to Greek mythos, Daedalus was an unrivaled Athenian craftsman — the Leonardo da Vinci of his day. To his great misfortune, he angered King Minos, the ruler of the island of Crete. Desperate to flee the island, Daedalus built two pairs of wings for himself and his son Icarus, which he fixed with wax. Icarus is warned, however, that he shouldn’t fly too high lest the sun melt the wax that holds his wings. Icarus heeded his father’s advice — but only for a bit before he got cocky. Daedalus’ son flew too high and, sure enough, his wings melted, plunging the boy into the sea where he drowned.
Fast forward to present reality and the Daedaluses of our time — NASA scientists, who are gearing up for one of the most anticipated and exciting launches of the year, that of a probe destined to ‘touch’ the sun. But unlike Icarus’ flimsy, wax-coated wings, NASA’s probe is more than well equipped to brave the sun’s corona, where temperatures can reach millions of degrees Celsius.
The Parker Solar Probe ought to launch no earlier than August 6, 2018, aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy that will light the sky above Cape Canaveral, Florida. Today, the mission’s scientists held a press conference detailing the probe’s science goals and the technology behind it.
“We’ve been studying the Sun for decades, and now we’re finally going to go where the action is,” said Alex Young, associate director for science in the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
There’s a lot of things we don’t know about the hot ball of glowing gases at the heart of our solar system. For one, the sun is dynamic, constantly belching magnetized material outward even as far as beyond Pluto’s orbit. The intensity and frequency of these ejections wax and wane according to a nearly periodical 11-year solar cycle. For instance, at the peak of the cycle, our star grows more sunspots and spews more solar flares, which can damage satellites in Earth’s orbit and even our electricity grids.
The influence of solar activity on Earth and other worlds is known as space weather. Now, scientists are looking to understand the sun and its weather activity by sending a probe in its midst, just like weather satellites in orbit that track Earth.
This mission has been in the making for the last 60 years, ever since physicist Eugene Parker published a groundbreaking scientific paper in 1958 theorizing the existence of the solar wind.
“The Sun’s energy is always flowing past our world,” said Nicky Fox, Parker Solar Probe’s project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. “And even though the solar wind is invisible, we can see it encircling the poles as the aurora, which are beautiful – but reveal the enormous amount of energy and particles that cascade into our atmosphere. We don’t have a strong understanding of the mechanisms that drive that wind toward us, and that’s what we’re heading out to discover.”
To undergo its mission, Parker carries a range of instruments that can study the sun both remotely and in situ (directly) — the kind of observations that might unravel some of the sun’s most well-kept secrets.
Of course, NASA has several specific questions it wants Parker to investigate. One of them has to do with the mystery of the acceleration of solar wind — the constant ejection of magnetized material from the sun. Somewhere, somehow this solar wind is accelerated to supersonic speeds.
Parker will fly straight through the corona — the sun’s atmosphere that extends millions of kilometers into outer space. The corona is scorching hot, reaching temperatures in the range of millions of degrees Celsius. However, the sun’s surface has a temperature of only about 6,000 degrees Celsius. This makes no sense at first glance: how is it possible that the surface of the sun is much less hot than its atmosphere? Well, scientists hope that Parker might come up with an answer to this counter-intuitive conundrum.
To answer these questions and more, Parker will rely on instruments such as the FIELDS suite which will capture the scale and shape of electric and magnetic fields in the Sun’s atmosphere. Of course, there will also be an imaging instrument — because how could a probe fly this close to the sun and not take awesome pictures. Called WISPR, short for Wide-Field Imager for Parker Solar Probe, the instrument is mainly designed to image coronal mass ejections (CMEs), jets and other solar ejecta. The SWEAP suite of instruments, short for Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons Investigation, will count the most abundant particles in the solar wind — electrons, protons and helium ions — and measure such properties as velocity, density, and temperature to improve our understanding of the solar wind and coronal plasma. Finally, ISʘIS suite – short for Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun, and including ʘ, the symbol for the Sun, in its acronym – measures particles across a wide range of energies in order to understand their life cycles — that is, where they came from, how they became accelerated and how they move out from the Sun through interplanetary space.
But how will Parker keep its ‘wings’ from melting? During its closest flyby, Parker will be only 6.1 million kilometers (3.8 million miles) from the sun’s surface, where temperatures can reach millions of degrees Celsius. But there’s a catch — just because the corona is that hot, that doesn’t mean that the probe will ‘feel’ that temperature due to the phenomenon of heat transfer. Simply put, some mediums conduct heat (energy) better than others.
For instance, if you stand on a bathroom’s tile floor you’ll feel cold but if you stand on a carpet your feet feel comfortably warm. However, both kinds of surfaces have the same temperature because they’ve had time to reach a thermal equilibrium — it’s just that the tile floor is a good heat conductor, which will make your feet seem cold because your body’s surface usually has a higher temperature than the ambient, whereas the carpet is a poor heat conductor and it would take you ages for your feet to match its lower temperature.
Bearing these physics in mind, we can now understand how Parker won’t get obliterated — even though the corona has a huge temperature, the sun’s outer atmosphere has a very low density and, hence, is a poor heat conductor. According to NASA, Parker’s sun-facing side will be heated to only about 1,644 degrees Kelvin (1,370 C° or 2,500 F°).
That’s still a lot, to be fair, which is why the Parker Solar Probe is equipped with a cutting-edge heat shield called the thermal protection system, or TPS. It’s a sandwich of carbon-carbon composite surrounding nearly 4.5 inches of carbon foam, which is about 97% air. Thanks to its lightweight materials, the TPS only weighs 72.5 kilograms (160 pounds) despite being nearly 2.4 meters (8 feet) in diameter. Strikingly, anything behind the shield shouldn’t heat to more than 300 Kelvin (30 C° or 85 F°)! A cooling system that runs on pressurized deionized water keep temperatures at manageable levels in the parts with Parker will be fully exposed to the sun.
The key is for the shield to be always facing the sun, but sometimes the probe will have to operate for long periods of time without being able to communicate with Earth. To solve this predicament, NASA engineers have designed a fault management system that self-corrects the probe’s course and direction facing the sun to ensure that the scientific instruments stay cool and functioning.
All in all, the Parker Solar Probe is a one-of-a-kind space mission that may not only unravel the sun’s mysteries but also those of the myriad of other stars that astronomers are eyeing.
“By studying our star, we can learn not only more about the Sun,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA HQ. “We can also learn more about all the other stars throughout the galaxy, the universe and even life’s beginnings.”
Flash, Bam, Alakazam: Lightning-Detecting Satellite Also Spots Meteors
Flash, Bam, Alakazam: Lightning-Detecting Satellite Also Spots Meteors
By Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Writer
An artist's depiction of the GOES-16 satellite in orbit.
Credit: NASA
There are plenty of phenomena that light up the night — and it turns out that the same type of detector fortuitously catches two very different types of celestial fireworks.
One of those phenomena is lightning: Because bolts can spark wildfires, scientists and engineers at NASA designed a satellite-mounted monitor that maps lightning strikes from space. But scientists who track how Earth's atmosphere destroys meteoroids have confirmed in new research that they can piggyback on those detectors.
Peter Jenniskens, an astronomer at NASA and the SETI Institute and lead author of a new paper describing the research, studies these dramatic explosions. "If you've ever seen one of these events, they are spectacular," he told Space.com. But he isn't just enjoying the light show; he's worried about planetary protection. That means he wants to know as much as possible about which asteroid characteristics trigger which impact characteristics. [Pieces of 'Fireball' Meteor Found in Botswana]
That requires studying as many impacts and their remains as possible, hence the appeal of a space-bound detector that could send scientists alerts about incoming asteroids. Such an alert system would improve the chances that researchers could gather impact debris for analysis, Jenniskens said.
That's still far in the future, but the new research suggests scientists have come a step closer, thanks to an instrument called the Global Lightning Mapper. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's GOES-16 and GOES-17 (formerly called GOES-R and GOES-S) weather-monitoring satellites each carry a GLM, and the technology is due to fly on the next two satellites in the series — which will eventually be called GOES-18 and GOES-19 and are scheduled to launch in the early 2020s, as well.
But the GLM is tailored to lightning strikes, measuring only a single wavelength of light that's produced by oxygen atoms during a strike, Jenniskens said. That means it can see lightning even during daylight, but at the cost of ignoring a ton of other data. So while scientists had hoped that the GLM would pick up meteoroid explosions, they couldn't be sure until they had some data to check. That became possible early this year, after GOES-16 had been watching the sky for almost a year and its observations could be compared with reports of incoming meteoroids from a network of Department of Defense satellites.
Jenniskens and his colleagues could identify the spectacular ends of 10 meteors in the GLM data. The system turns out to register impacts brighter than the full moon, which correlates to small asteroids between about 4 and 40 inches (10 centimeters to 1 meter) across. Those impacts are more dramatic than a meteor shower but much too small to cause significant damage.
Matching up those incidents proves that if scientists can make the most of the GLM data, they should eventually be able to identify otherwise-overlooked impacts in the lightning detector's observations, Jenniskens said.
"It will take a while to really dig in and try to see if we can actually identify the bolide [meteor] signatures from the lighting," he said. Incorporating other observations, like whether there are clouds in the region, may be key to making the system more powerful, he added.
And while they aren't new events, the GLM observations still offer scientists new information in the form of light curves for each impact, which trace how much light was produced over time. Jenniskens said he was particularly surprised that different impacts created different light shows — some with dramatic flaring and dimming, and others with much steadier burns. That's probably related to an asteroid's composition and structure, which would affect how it falls through the atmosphere, he said.
Those are difficult properties to measure in space, but tracking individual asteroids and their re-entry displays could help scientists begin to connect those dots. "Maybe we'll learn in time to predict how a particular asteroid would break apart in the atmosphere," Jenniskens said.
The results of the initial project are described in a paper published July 16 in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science.
HOE GAAT NASA DIT GEBOUW OP DE MAAN VERKLAREN? ( VIDEO )
HOE GAAT NASA DIT GEBOUW OP DE MAAN VERKLAREN? ( VIDEO )
Publiek geheim is dat voordat NASA foto’s online zet van opnames die gemaakt zijn op of van de maan, ze deze goed nakijken en waar nodig ongewenste realiteiten wegpoetsen.
Maar soms gaat het mis, zoals met een gebouw op slechts 50 kilometer afstand van de plek waar de Apollo 15 missie landde op de maan.
Voor mensen die veel geduld hebben valt er soms veel te ontdekken op door NASA gepubliceerde foto’s, want ook daar wordt de censuur gedaan door mensen en zij werken niet foutloos.
Apollo 15 was de vierde missie van het Apolloprogramma van de NASA, waarbij in de jaren 70 astronauten op de maan landden en deze verkenden. De landingsplek van de Apollo 15 op de maan heet Hadley Rille. De bemanning bestond uit David Scott (commandant), James Irwin (piloot van de maanlander) en Alfred Worden (piloot van de commando-module).
Bij deze missie werd voor het eerst een maanwagen meegenomen. Door dit voertuig kon een groter oppervlak worden verkend dan bij eerdere missies. Met de wagen is ruim 27 km afgelegd met een maximumsnelheid van rond de 13 km/h. Door de maanwagen en de bemanning werd Apollo 15 met 48 599 kg het zwaarste voorwerp dat de aarde verliet. Daardoor kwam Apollo 15 in een lagere baan om de aarde dan de vorige vluchten. De baan was onstabiel, maar liet wel toe om van daar naar de maan te vertrekken uit het zwaarteveld van de aarde.
We gaan er in dit verhaal even vanuit dat de maanlandingen echt waren ondanks dat daar gerede twijfel over is, en dat er daadwerkelijk mensen op de maan zijn geweest.
Nu is er iets bijzonders gebeurd, want op relatief korte afstand van de plek waar deze astronauten zijn geland, hebben internetspeurders op een NASA foto een gebouw ontdekt dat er als volgt uitziet:
Het is strategisch gebouwd bovenop een heuvel met vrij uitzicht over verschillende kraters. Dit gebouw bevindt zich op ongeveer 50 kilometer afstand van de landingsplek van de Apollo 15 module. Dit gebouw is echt, want je kunt de zwarte schaduw van de zon links en boven zien. Deze schaduw komt overeen met die die is waar te nemen bij andere dingen op de foto zoals heuveltjes.
Is er een speciale reden dat deze Apollo missie is geland vlakbij dit gebouw? Is het toeval dat deze Apollo missie karretjes aan boord had, waarmee astronauten zich konden voortbewegen over het maanoppervlak?
Dat NASA liegt over wat er werkelijk op de maan te vinden is, blijkt duidelijk uit de volgende foto die in 2009 is genomen van een aantal werknemers van NASA.
Op zich niets bijzonders totdat je goed kijkt op de foto onder de linkerarm van de man. Pas als je deze uitvergroot, zoals te zien op de tweede foto, dan zie je heel duidelijk een gebouw.
Al het bovenstaande en meer wordt behandeld in de onderstaande video van Secureteam, het Youtubekanaal waar vaak bijzondere dingen te vinden zijn. Tyler, de eigenaar, krijgt heel veel materiaal opgestuurd van zijn 1,7 miljoen abonnees en daarmee komen soms heel interessante dingen boven water.
Ancient Civilization Used Sound Energy to Levitate and Contact Aliens
Ancient Civilization Used Sound Energy to Levitate and Contact Aliens
(Patrick Knox)Archaeological findings suggest previous civilizations used circular structures as energy-generating devices to create man-made portals in time.
• Two years of research suggests that human beings from thousands of years ago produced natural sound harmonic frequencies produced from the surface of the Earth at frequencies of more than 380 gigahertz – much greater than any levels used today. • In the UFOmania YouTube channel video clip (below), the narrator explains that the Sumerian civilization (Iraq) may have inhabited parts of southern Africa thousands of years ago. The technology the Sumers used in 3,000BC is similar to the way we use laser technology today. • The discovery has left many confused as to what this previous society could possibly have done with the high-frequency sound energy they created. One YouTube comment reads: “Sound was used as energy to levitate objects in order to create the monuments that opened vortices which allowed spacecraft to come and go.” Another added: “…many ancient rock carvings showed a spiral, which could be some kind of sound wave. This is something they can only draw and couldn’t put into words.” • [Editor’s Note] As to the notion of a “bizarre new claim”, Michael Tellinger has been talking about these circular structures in southern Africa, such as Adam’s Calendar, for years. Also see a recent article in the ExoNews about recent developments in levitation technology.
Archaeological findings suggest previous civilizations used circular structures as energy-generating devices to create man-made portals in time, according to boffins online.
The research – which extended over a two-year period – suggested that human beings from thousands of years ago produced natural sound harmonic frequencies produced from the surface of the Earth.
In the video clip, the narrator explains that the Sumerian civilisation may have inhabited parts of southern Africa thousands of years ago. The Sumers are one of the earliest civilisations known to walk the Earth. They are said to date back to 3,000BC. The technology they apparently used is said to be similar to the way we use laser technology today.
Some of the frequencies recorded are believed to reach more than 380 gigahertz – much greater than any levels used today.
The discovery has left many confused as to what this previous society could possibly have done with the energy they created and whether they could have possibly known more about our planet than we do today.
The research – which extended over a two-year period – suggested that human beings from thousands of years ago produced natural sound harmonic frequencies produced from the surface of the Earth.
In the clip, the narrator explains that the Sumerian civilisation may have inhabited parts of southern Africa thousands of years ago.
The Sumers are one of the earliest known civilisations known to walk the Earth.
Shock claim that ancient civilisation used sound energy to contact aliensUFO MANIA - THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE ALIEN CONTACT: Could previous civilisations spoken with extraterrestrial beings
The technology they apparently used is said to be similar to the way we use laser technology today.
Some of the frequencies recorded are believed to reach more than 380 gigahertz – much greater than any levels used today.
The discovery has left many confused as to what this previous society could possibly have done with the energy they created and whether they could have possibly known more about our planet than we do today.
Lead researcher Dennis Voeten, from ESRF, said: "We immediately noticed that the bone walls of Archaeopteryx were much thinner than those of earthbound dinosaurs but looked a lot like conventional bird bones.
"Data analysis furthermore demonstrated that the bones of Archaeopteryx plot closest to those of birds like pheasants that occasionally use active flight to cross barriers or dodge predators, but not to those of gliding and soaring forms such as many birds of prey and some seabirds that are optimised for enduring flight."
The Archaeopteryx was a small dinosaur, comparable in size to a modern day magpie.
Scientists had originally thought that the small dino was actually one of the first birds, but it turned out to be a flying dinosaur.
PA
The fossil was analysed with powerful X-ray beams
Nor is it an ancestor of modern birds.
While birds are some of the closest living relatives to dinosaurs – for example a chicken is surprisingly one of the closest relatives to the fearsome tyrannosaurus rex – the Archaeopteryx actually represents a dead end in an evolutionary tree, meaning it was the last of its kind.
“Mars wouldn’t be nearly this dusty if it wasn’t for this one enormous deposit that is gradually eroding over time and polluting the planet, essentially.”
A portion of the Medusae Fossae Formation on Mars showing the effect of billions of years of erosion. The image comes from a camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Mars is currently experiencing a planet-wide dust storm. Seasonal dust storms happen every Martian year, but global dust storms like the current one happen about every 10 or so years.
Like in the movie “The Martian,” where a dust storm strands an astronaut played by actor Matt Damon, the current dust storm on Mars is causing severe problems for real missions – for example, the Opportunity rover, which has had to suspend science operations. The fine, powdery stuff can get into expensive instruments and obscure solar panels needed to power equipment.
So where does all this dust come from? A new study says that the dust that coats much of the Martian surface originates largely from a single 1,000-kilometer-long (600-mile-long) geological formation near the planet’s equator. The study, published July 20, 2018, in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications found a chemical match between dust in the Martian atmosphere and the surface feature, called the Medusae Fossae Formation.
Side-by-side movies shows how dust has enveloped the red planet, courtesy of the Mars Color Imager (MARCI) camera onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The view from May shows Valles Marineris chasms (left), Meridiani center, an autumn dust storm in Acidalia (top) and the early spring south polar cap (bottom). The view from July shows the same regions, but most of the surface was obscured by the planet-encircling dust cloud and haze.
Study co-author Kevin Lewis is an assistant professor of Earth and planetary science at the Johns Hopkins University. Lewis said in a statement:
Mars wouldn’t be nearly this dusty if it wasn’t for this one enormous deposit that is gradually eroding over time and polluting the planet, essentially.
The team studied data captured by the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, which has orbited the planet since 2001. They also looked at the Mars dust’s chemical composition. Landers and rovers far apart on the planet have all reported surprisingly similar data about the dust. Lujendra Ojha, the study lead author, said:
Dust everywhere on the planet is enriched in sulfur and chlorine and it has this very distinct sulfur-to-chlorine ratio.
The researchers were able to pinpoint the Medusae Fossae Formation region as having an abundance of sulfur and chlorine, as well as a match to the ratio of sulfur to chlorine in Mars dust.
Here on Earth, dust is separated from soft rock formations by forces of nature including wind, water, glaciers, volcanoes and meteor impacts. But on Mars, for more than 4 billion years, say the researchers, those forces have made only small contribution to the planet’s global dust reservoir. Ojha also said:
How does Mars make so much dust, because none of these processes are active on Mars?
Earlier findings suggest that the Medusae Fossae Formation had a volcanic origin. Once the size of half the continental United States, the wind has eroded it, leaving behind an area that’s now more like about 20 percent. Yet it is the largest known volcanic deposit in our solar system.
By calculating how much of the Medusae Fossae Formation has been lost over the past 3 billion years, the scientists could approximate the current quantity of dust on Mars, enough to form a 7 to 40 foot (2 to 12 meter) thick global layer.
Bottom line: A new study says that the dust that coats much of the surface of Mars originates largely from a single 1,000-kilometer-long (600-mile-long) geological formation near the planet’s equator called the Medusae Fossae Formation.
The full moon on the night of July 27-28, 2018, presents the longest total lunar eclipse of the 21st century (2001 to 2100). The total phase of the eclipse – called the totality – spans 1 hour 42 minutes and 57 seconds. That’s in contrast to the shortest total lunar eclipse of this century, which occurred on April 4, 2015, and lasted 4 minutes and 48 seconds. And it’s in contrast to 2018’s other total lunar eclipse – on January 31, 2018 – whose totality lasted 1 hour and 16 minutes.
A partial eclipse precedes and follows the total phase of the eclipse, each time lasting 1 hour and 6 minutes. So, from start to finish – on July 27-28, 2018 – the moon spends nearly 4 hours (3 hours and 55 minutes) crossing the Earth’s dark umbral shadow. Wow! That’s a long eclipse.
Adding to the excitement on eclipse night … this eclipse will happen on the same night that Earth is passing between the sun and Mars, placing Mars at opposition in our sky. In one of the sky’s wonderful coincidences, the Mars opposition happens on July 27, too. It’s not just any Mars opposition, but the best Mars opposition since 2003. Mars is very bright and red throughout July and August, 2018. But eclipse night will be a very special night. On July 27, the sun, Earth and moon are aligned – placing the moon opposite the sun in our sky – producing an eclipse as Earth’s shadow falls on the moon’s face. On the same night, the sun, Earth and Mars are also aligned, bringing Mars also opposite the sun in our sky, just like the full moon. That’s fun to think about, but there’s more for those who plan to observe the eclipse.
Picture it, if you will. During the long total phase of the July 27, 2018, lunar eclipse – the totality – the moon will turn red from sunlight filtering through Earth’s atmosphere onto the moon’s surface. And Mars will be near the moon, exceptionally bright – brighter than since 2003 – and red in color also.
Red moon, red Mars … does it get any better? Expect some great photos!
The eclipsed moon on July 27 will be close to the planet Mars, which – in July and August 2018 – is at the peak of its very special brightness as seen from Earth.
Clouded out on eclipse night, or on the wrong side of Earth? Never fear. The Virtual Telescope Project in Rome is offering a free live viewing. Click here for details. It starts at 18:30 UTC on July 27. That’s 2:30 p.m. EDT on July 27; translate UTC to your time.
Here’s another option for following the eclipse, live, free, online. This one offers a commentary in Spanish. The live broadcast of sky-live.tv starts at 18:20 UTC. It will cover both the partial and total eclipse with a commented-cam (in Spanish) and a sky-cam (only music), both located in Namibia (Africa). Click here for information.
Now for the bad news for us in North America. This lunar eclipse is primarily visible from the world’s Eastern Hemisphere (Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and New Zealand). South America, at least in part, can watch the final stages of the eclipse just after sunset July 27, whereas New Zealand will catch the beginning stages of the eclipse before sunrise July 28. North America, most of the Arctic and much of the Pacific Ocean will miss out entirely, as shown on the worldwide map below.
Worldwide map of the July 27, 2018, total lunar eclipse, via Fred Espenak’s EclipseWise.
The greatest eclipse (20:22 UTC) takes place at or around midnight for Madagascar and the Middle East. Europe and Africa view the greatest eclipse during the evening hours (sometime between sunset and midnight on July 27), whereas most of Asia, Indonesia and Australia view the greatest eclipse in the morning (sometime between midnight and sunrise on July 28).
We give you the eclipse times in Universal Time (UTC) below. You must convert these eclipse times from Universal Time into your local time. Here’s how. If it’s easier for you, the local times of the eclipse are available at TimeandDate.com (remember to put your place or country in the search box).
July 27, 2018
Partial eclipse begins: 18:24 (6:24 p.m.) UTC
Total eclipse begins: 19:30 (7:30 p.m.) UTC
Greatest eclipse: 20:22 (8:22 p.m.) UTC
Total eclipse ends: 21:13 (9:13 p.m.) UTC
Partial eclipse ends: 22:19 (10:19 p.m.) UTC
The moon crosses the Earth’s shadow from west to east, entering the dark umbra (inner shadow) at 18:24 UTC and leaving it at 22:19 UTC. The penumbra (outer shadow) is so faint that you may not notice any darkening of the moon while it’s in the penumbra.
Earth’s shadow has two parts: a dark inner umbra and lighter surrounding penumbra. When Earth’s penumbral shadow falls on the moon, it creates a very subtle eclipse – a shading on the moon’s surface. When the darker umbral shadow falls on the moon, it appears as if a “bite” has been taken from the moon’s face. Illustration via astro.washington.edu.
What causes a long-lasting total lunar eclipse?
For an especially long-lasting total lunar eclipse of 1 hour and 43 minutes to occur, the moon has to pass through the central part of the Earth’s shadow. The previous total lunar eclipse on January 31, 2018, didn’t last as long (1 hour and 16 minutes) because the moon passed to the south of the shadow’s center; and the next total lunar eclipse on January 21, 2019, won’t be as long either (1 hour and 2 minutes) because it’ll pass to the north of the shadow’s center.
In 2018, the July full moon and July lunar apogee – the moon’s most distant point from Earth in its monthly orbit – both fall on the same date: July 27, 2018. Therefore, the July 2018 full moon showcases the most distant and smallest full moon of the year. Sometimes called an apogean full moon (or micro-moon or mini-moon), this smaller and slower-moving full moon takes more time to cross the Earth’s shadow than does a full moon that’s closer to Earth and moving faster in orbit. That’s why a full moon at or near lunar apogee adds to the duration of a total lunar eclipse.
The longest possible total lunar eclipse is 1 hour and 47 minutes. In fact, the longest total eclipse of the 20th century (1901 to 2000) occurred on July 16, 2000, with a duration of 1 hour and 46.4 minutes. That’s because, at greatest eclipse, the center of the lunar disk aligned almost perfectly with the center of the Earth’s shadow.
It’s no coincidence, by the way, that the extra-long total lunar eclipses of July 16, 2000, and July 27, 2018, belong to the same Saros series and are separated by one Saros period (18.031 years).
The moon crosses the ecliptic (Earth’s orbital plane) from north to south. This descending node Saros series starts when the moon first clips the southernmost part (bottom) of Earth’s shadow and then migrates northward (upward) with each succeeding Saros period of 18.031 years. Midway through the Saros series, the full moon passes through the center of Earth’s shadow for a maximally long total lunar eclipse. Saros Series 129, of which the total lunar eclipse on July 27, 2018, is a part, lasts for a total of 1,262 years. Image via Matthew Zimmerman.
On July 27, 2018, the center of the lunar disk will swing a tiny bit north of the shadow’s center, so this total lunar eclipse with a duration of 1 hour and 43 minutes will be a few minutes shy of the maximum duration possible (1 hour and 47 minutes). Even so, this July 2018 total lunar eclipse counts as a whopper, giving us the longest total lunar eclipse of the 21st century.
The longest total lunar eclipses of the 20th and 21st centuries both take place in July, which is of consequence. That’s because yearly, in early July, the Earth swings out to aphelion – its farthest point from the sun for the year.
At aphelion, the Earth’s dark umbral shadow reaches its maximum length (and width) for the year. All else being equal (moon’s distance and centrality of eclipse), the greater width of the Earth’s umbra in July means a longer total lunar eclipse. Therefore, long-lasting total lunar eclipses tend to take place in a Northern Hemisphere summer (or Southern Hemisphere winter) because the umbra is wider at this time of year.
The full moon will plunge deeply into the Earth’s shadow on the night of July 27-28, 2018. Depending on atmospheric conditions, this could be an especially dark total eclipse, though you won’t know for sure unless you look!
During a total lunar eclipse, the moon always passes through Earth’s very light penumbral shadow before and after its journey through the dark umbra.
Bottom line: July 27, 2018, brings the longest total eclipse of the moon of the 21st century. It happens when the most distant and smallest full moon of the year passes through the center of the Earth’s shadow, which is at its widest in July. And it happens on a night when the moon is near Mars, which also comes to opposition on July 27. What a night!
Mars heeft enorm ondergronds waterreservoir. Wetenschappers bereiken grote doorbraak in zoektocht naar buitenaards leven
Mars heeft enorm ondergronds waterreservoir. Wetenschappers bereiken grote doorbraak in zoektocht naar buitenaards leven
Voor het eerst is op Mars een groot ondergronds meer gevonden en nooit eerder een vermoedelijk zo grote hoeveelheid vloeibaar water dat voor leven noodzakelijk is, zo hebben wetenschappers vandaag bekendgemaakt. Leven is nog niet ontdekt.
Het meer bevindt zich onder een ijslaag aan de zuidelijke pool van de rode planeet, strekt zich uit over een gebied van 20 kilometer en heeft een meter diepte, zo staat in een artikel in het wetenschappelijke vakblad Science.
Verbluffend resultaat
Het is de eerste keer dat zo een massa stabiel water op Mars is gevonden. Dit schept voorwaarden voor leven op langere termijn, zegt Alan Duffy van de Universiteit van Swinburn, die niet aan het onderzoek heeft deelgenomen.
Hij sprak van een ‘verbluffend resultaat’.
Onder leiding van Roberto Orosi van het Italiaanse Nationaal Instituut voor Astrofysica in Bologna onderzochten wetenschappers data van het radarinstrument die tussen mei 2012 en december 2015 zijn verzameld.
Komen overeen
De data komen overeen met die van meren van vloeibaar water onder de Zuidpool en de ijslaag op Groenland op onze planeet. Wetenschappers opperden dat daar microbiologisch leven kan zijn, en dus ook op Mars.
Mars is vroeger warm en vochtig geweest. Minstens 3,6 miljard jaar geleden moeten er een grote hoeveelheid vloeibaar water en meren aanwezig zijn geweest.
DE EFFECTEN VAN DE RODE DRAAK WORDEN STEEDS DUIDELIJKER
DE EFFECTEN VAN DE RODE DRAAK WORDEN STEEDS DUIDELIJKER
Enkele dagen geleden gebeurde er iets heel vreemds in het verre Siberië, waar het urenlang opeens donker werd.
Inwoners omschreven het alsof er iets zwaars op hun borst drukte en toen het weer licht werd, was alles bedekt met een laag stof.
De bijzondere gebeurtenis vond plaats in de Russische autonome republiek Jakoetië, een enorm groot gebied dat ongeveer 18 procent van de Russische Federatie vormt.
Wij praten in dit geval over het verre noorden van Jakoetië waar de inwoners vol verbazing naar de lucht keken.
Het bericht werd gepubliceerd afgelopen zaterdag, dus zal de gebeurtenis waarschijnlijk de dag ervoor hebben plaatsgevonden.
Rond elf uur ’s morgens werd het opeens donker in dat gebied, alsof er een soort zonsverduistering gaande was. Die was er niet en normaal gesproken heeft dat gebied rond deze tijd van het jaar ongeveer 24 uur per dag zonlicht. Het duurde tot rond een uur of twee in de middag tot de lucht weer enigszins begon op te klaren.
Op een gegeven moment werd het zo donker dat de mensen de lichten aan moesten doen en met een zaklantaarn over straat moeste lopen. Het gaf bij velen ook een heel vreemd gevoel, alsof er iets zwaars op de borst drukte. Toen het weer licht was, bleek alles bedekt met een dikke laag stof en niemand weet waar dit vandaan kwam.
Er wordt gesuggereerd dat het misschien as zou kunnen zijn van bosbranden, maar er waren geen bosbranden in de buurt en bovendien was het windstil.
Het bovenstaande doet heel erg denken aan een voorval eerder dit jaar, waar we toen het volgende over schreven:
Ze (Nancy Lieder) geeft nog een voorbeeld van de eerlijkheid van Poetin/Rusland en dat heeft te maken de vreemde landschappen die wintersporters onlangs zagen, onder andere in Rusland.
Bij ons wordt het uiteraard afgedaan als zand afkomstig van de Sahara, maar in Rusland is daar men niet zo zeker van.
De substantie die uit de lucht viel was vettig, olieachtig, rook vies en had een ijzerinhoud die vier keer groter is dan wat het had moeten zijn.
Weer een duidelijk teken dat we hier te maken hebben met de staart van Nibiru, die bekendstaat om het veroorzaken van dit soort effecten, zoals wij schreven in een eerder artikel:
Degene die al sinds het einde van de vorige eeuw zich bezighoudt met de planeet Nibiru of Planet X is Nancy Lieder van de website Zetatalk. Zij zegt in contact te staan met een buitenaardse beschaving, de Zeta's en van hen heel veel informatie te ontvangen omtrent het mysterieuze mini zonnestelsel.
Zo schreef zij met de informatie van de Zeta's in 1997 al over de manen van Nibiru en vergeleek zij deze met een parelsnoer en de reden daarvoor is omdat deze manen niet in een baan om de planeet draaien, maar achter elkaar als een soort slinger achter Nibiru aan zwieren.
Naast de manen bevindt zich achter de planeet een lang gestrekte roodachtige wolk bestaande uit ruimtepuin die er ook uitziet als de rode draak zoals die in de Chinese cultuur een prominente rol speelt en binnen allerlei profetieën ook wordt genoemd in relatie tot deze onbekende planeet.
At thetime of the great destruction of Earth, God caused a dragon from out of Heaven to come and encompass her about. The dragon was frightful to behold, it lashed its tail, it breathed out fire and hot coals, and a great catastrophe was inflicted upon mankind.
Indertijd gaf Nancy aan dat het er ongeveer als volgt uit zou zien:
Wanneer je de Kolbrin bijbel leest, dan zie je als het ware bovenstaande gebeurtenissen ook weer terug.
“De donkere dagen begonnen met het laatste bezoek van de Verwoester en dit werd voorspeld door vreemde tekenen aan de hemel. Alle mensen werden stil en liepen rond met een bleek gelaat.
Angst nam de bevolking in haar grip en vrouwen werden door die angst onvruchtbaar. Ze konden niet zwanger worden en degene die het wel werden verloren hun kind.
De dagen van stilte werden gevolgd door een tijd waarbij trompetgeschal en doordringende hoge tonen werden gehoord in de hemelen en de mensen werden net zo bang als een kudde zonder herder.
De doden waren niet langer heilig en werden in het water gegooid. De pakhuizen waren volgestouwd met graan en niemand verbouwde nog wat. Het vee werd alleen gelaten en zwierf rond en dwaalde naar vreemde weiden. Hun geblaat werd genegeerd en men slachtte het vee van de buurman.
Niemand bezat nog iets. De openbare registers werden heen en weer geschoven en vernietigd. En niemand wist meer wie er slaaf waren en wie meester. De plaag waarde door het land, de rivier was bloedrood en overal was bloed. Zij die dronken van de rivier moesten onmiddellijk overgeven. Het stof beet zich vast in de huid van zowel mens als dier.
Door de gloed van de Verwoester was de aarde gehuld in een roodachtig licht. Het land was platgeslagen en verwoest door enorme hagelstenen die neer beukten op alles wat stond. Ze kwamen naar beneden in hete buien en achter hen aan kwam een soort vreemd gloeiend vuur dat over de aarde liep.
De vis in de rivieren stierf, wormen, insecten en reptielen sprongen omhoog vanuit de aarde. De duisternis van een lange nacht spreidde een zwarte mantel over de aarde waardoor iedere lichtstraal werd gedoofd. Niemand wist wanneer het dag of wanneer het nacht was want de zon wierp geen schaduw".
Tales of what have infamously become known as “black helicopters” abound in the field of conspiracy-theorizing. Two of the biggest questions surrounding the phenomenon are: (a) who has the technology and power to fly such craft; and (b) from where do they operate? There are good reasons to believe that at least a part of the phenomenon had its origins at none other than Area 51 – the world’s most well-known “secret base.” Even elements of the government are puzzled by the controversy. Indeed, thanks to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, more than a few files have surface that are focused on these mysterious craft.
Official documentation on the encounters has surfaced from the Air Force, the FBI, and the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD). One particular document, titled Suspicious Unknown Air Activity, provides the following: “Since 28 Oct 75 numerous reports of suspicious objects have been received at the NORAD CC. Reliable military personnel at Loring AFB Maine, Wurtsmith AFB, Michigan, Malmstrom AFB, MT, Minot AFB, ND, and Canadian forces station Falconbridge, Ontario Canada have visually sighted suspicious objects. Objects at Loring and Wurtsmith were characterized to be helicopters[italics mine]. Missile site personnel, security alert teams and air defense personnel at Malmstrom, Montana report an object which sounded like a jet. FAA advised there were no jet aircraft in the vicinity. Malmstrom search and height finder radars carried the object between 9500 ft. and 15,000 ft. at a speed of seven knots.”
Of particular note is Unidentified Helicopter Sighted at Low Level Over Loring AFB, a file that adds further weight to the theory that there had been major, serious invasions of secure facilities – facilities that appeared to be not so secure, after all. Consider the following: “On 28 Oct 75, Lewis…advised that the a/c [aircraft] was first observed by Clifton W. Blakeslee, Sgt. [deleted] and William J. Long, SSgt., both assigned to the 42 SPS, who were on duty at the storage area. The initial sighting took place at approximately 1345. The a/c was observed approximately 1,000 meters north of LAFB. The a/c was subsequently observed by Lewis and others intermittently for the next hour and a half. Subsequent to the sighting by Long and Blakeslee, the a/c did not come nearer to the northern perimeter of LAFB than approximately 3 miles. Lewis observed a flashing white strobe light and red navigation lights on the a/c. The operator of the a/c either turned the lights off periodically or the a/c flew below a point from which the lights could be observed. The a/c disappeared from view and did not reappear. A search of the vicinity of the northern perimeter of LAFB by 42 SPS personnel met with negative results.”
In 1995, the U.S. magazine, Aviation Week and Space Technology, published an article (Vol. 142, No. 6) which, in part, stated that, “…the U.S. military has been working for years on at least two helicopter projects. The more recent is [the] development of a light, very quiet helicopter [italics mine] with a mast-mounted sight.”
One of those who had uncovered certain, classified data on this particular Nevada-based program was a conspiracy-theorist named Jim Keith, who died in 1999. The issue of the silent helicopters was one which particularly intrigued Keith. After all, helicopters are known for their deep, thump-thump sound. So, to encounter a helicopter that is near-silent – or, perhaps, even completely silent – would be amazing, indeed. In pursuing the tales of the silent copters, Keith found himself repeatedly pointed in the direction of Nevada. By now, you know the specific stretch of Nevada.
In February of 1995, the Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper ran an article titled “Ex-Worker Describes Stealth Copter.” It was written by a journalist named Susan Greene. Commenting on all of this, Keith said: “According to statements of a former worker at Groom Lake Air Force Base, a black budget stealth helicopter was being tested at this facility as early as 1990. The code name for the helicopter was ‘T.E.K,’ which stood for ‘Test and Evaluation Project K.’”
Keith continued as follows: “The former worker at Groom Lake reported that the chopper was olive drab, riveted, and angular, with gull wing doors. An account in the Vegas paper quotes experts as saying, ‘Light, quiet and stealthy helicopters could be used for clandestine ‘Rambo-type missions,’ quick-in, quick-out assignments without being noticed.”
Of course, the mysterious helicopters were seen long before the 1990s; something which suggests the programs operating out of Groom Lake have been going on for decades – and not just since the 1990s.
Filer’s Files #29 -2018 We Lost Planes to UFOs - PART I
Valencia Island Kerry, Eire -- on June 20, 2018.
Filer’s Files #29 -2018 We Lost Planes to UFOs - PART I
In special reports, this week’s files cover: General Chidlaw We Have Lost Planes to UFOs, Why don’t astronomers see UFOs? Black Holes, Megalithic Stones Communication, Omnec Onec and Venus, and High Speed Space Ship Earth.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, Nevada, Oregon, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Eire, Finland, Germany, and England in the United Kingdom.
Major George Filer Editor of The National UFO Center, would like to invite join him in Mt Shasta this summer July 27-29th 2018. He will present a wonderful program at the “From Venus with Love” conference.
The Filer Research Institute feels the scientific study of UFOs is for the benefit of humankind and is an important endeavor. The US Air Force investigated UFOs publicly for more than twenty years under Project Blue Book; and I continue this advanced research. I believe the God of the universe has spread life throughout the cosmos and UFO’s are visiting us in ever-increasing numbers.
Forward these files to your friends and neighbors.
Special Projects
General Chidlaw We Have Lost Planes to UFOs
“We have stacks of reports about flying saucers. We take them seriously when you consider we have lost many men and planes trying to intercept them.” General Benjamin Chidlaw – US Eastern Air Defense, Air Defense Command
If Moscow should decide some mid night to attack the U.S., 900 Soviet heavy bombers could be over North America by dawn. Some 300 Red planes, manned by elite crews and loaded with nuclear or thermonuclear bombs, would streak toward vital U.S. target areas. The others, carrying TNT and fire bombs, would serve to divert and confuse U.S. defenses.
Two score well-placed hydrogen bombs could kill one-fourth of the American people; conceivably, an all-out surprise attack could destroy the nation’s will to resist and power to strike back. Hundreds of missiles from all directions could hit the US with dozens coming from under the sea submarines that can hit coastal targets in a few minutes from launch. The US could launch a devastating counter attack. Both countries would suffer heavy causalities and major destruction….Time December. 20, 1954
During the summer of 1952, Americans reported a record amount of Ufo sightings to Project Blue Book. Frank Feschino, Jr. has written a book about the 1952 summer and America’s Ufo problem. He takes the reader on a journey through Blue Book’s “Unknown” cases and other Ufo reports. He focuses on the encounters between Us. fighter planes and UFO
s with an in-depth historical account of the United States military’s “shoot down” orders.
Timothy Good writes, “The destruction or disappearance of military aircraft during interceptions of UFOs continued apace.” As General Benjamin Chidlaw, former commanding general of Air (later Aerospace) Defense Command told Robert C. Gardener (ex USAF) in 1953: “We have stack of reports of flying saucers. We take them seriously, when you consider we have lost many men and planes trying to intercept them.” Leonard Stringfield, the former Air Force intelligence officer was told by a reliable source in the 1950s that the “Air Force was losing about a plane a day to the UFOs.” Stringfield was reliably informed. According to US Defense Department figures, from 1952 until the end of October 1956, there were 18,662 major accidents of military aircraft, broken down as follows:
Year -Air Force – Navy Losses
1952 2,274 2,086
1953 2,075 2,325
1954 1,873 1,911
1955 1,664 1,566
1956 1,530 1,358
Of this astonishing accident total, most involved fast new jets (such as those scrambled in UFO interceptions), of which 56.2 per cent were found to be caused by pilot error; 8.1 per cent by ground-crew or other personnel failure; 23.4 per cent by failure of parts and equipment in the aircraft; 2.8 per cent by various ‘unsafe conditions’, and –9.5 per cent (1,773) were due to ‘unknown factors’. Thanks to Timothy Good’ book, “Need to Know” P.172
Editor’s Comments: When I chased a UFO we exceeded the red lined aircraft air speed by 20 knots. In the excitement of the chase it is easy to exceed aircraft capabilities and often some part of the aircraft may fail. Many stories are told of firing missiles and making direct hits on the UFOs that were unharmed only to have them return the fire and destroy the interceptor.
Chidlaw entered the Air Corps Engineering School at Wright Field, Ohio, and later directed the development of the United States’ original jet engine and jet aircraft. He spent most of his career at Wright Field which established Chidlaw as an expert on materiel, especially aircraft. He became chief of the Experimental Engineering Branch, where he monitored the jet engine development. In March 1945, he took command of the Mediterranean Allied Tactical Air Forces and was promoted to major general.
Wright Field Air Force Museum
Chidlaw returned to Wright Field in July 1945 as deputy commanding general for operations of what became Air Materiel Command. He was flown to Roswell, New Mexico at the time of the UFO crash announcement in July of 1947, with General Twining. . On July 26, 1947, while aboard the presidential C-54 aircraft, Sacred Cow, President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947, officially establishing the United States Air Force as a separate service.
In October 1947, he became deputy commanding general of Air Materiel Command, with rank of lieutenant general, and promoted to commander on September 1, 1949. General Chidlaw was given the task to evaluate UFO sightings and his group agreed the phenomena was real and viable and should be researched. It is likely his team attempted to develop their own flying discs using the Roswell crash debris that were stored at Wright Field. On July 29, 1951, he received his fourth star and the command of Air Defense Command at Ent Air Force Base, Colorado. Most fighter interceptors were under his command and each Air Force base had a UFO Officer who could launch fighters if UFOs were in the area.
Why don’t astronomers see UFOs?
I am often asked by friends and colleagues, “Why don’t astronomers see UFOs?” The fact is that they do. In 1977, Peter Sturrock, a professor of space science and astrophysics at Stanford University, mailed 2,611 questionnaires about UFO sightings to members of the American Astronomical Society. He received 1,356 responses from which 62 astronomers – 4.6 percent – reported witnessing or recording inexplicable aerial phenomena. This rate is similar to the approximately 5 percent of UFO sightings that are never explained.
As expected, Peter Sturrock found that astronomers who witnessed UFOs were more likely to be night sky observers. Over 80 percent of Sturrock’s respondents were willing to study the UFO phenomenon if there was a way to do so. More than half of them felt that the topic deserves to be studied versus 20 percent who felt that it should not. The survey also revealed that younger scientists were more likely to support the study of UFOs.
UFOs have been observed through telescopes. I know of one telescope sighting by an experienced amateur astronomer in which he observed an object shaped like a guitar pick moving through the telescope’s field of view. Further sightings are documented in the book “Wonders in the Sky,” in which the authors compile numerous observations of unexplained aerial phenomena made by astronomers and published in scientific journals throughout the 1700s and 1800s.
Evidence from government and military officers
Some of the most convincing observations have come from government officials. In 1997, the Chilean government formed the organization Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos, or CEFAA, to study UFOs. Last year, CEFAA released footage of a UFO taken with a helicopter-mounted Wescam infrared camera. What is CEFAA? Why was the Committee created?
The reports of pilots, both military and commercial and private, regarding having witnessed anomalous aerial phenomena, as well as the cases denounced by the general public, created the need to know what was happening in the Chilean skies, being born in this way , the CEFAA.
The CEFAA was created in late 1997 and started operating in 1998.
What is your mission?
The mission of the committee is to carry out a scientific investigation of these anomalous aerial phenomena, characterized as unidentified flying objects, in order to verify if in any way they can affect the safety of air operations.
Where do you get the information to be analyzed?
USS Submarine takes photos in the Arctic Ocean in 1971
The main source of information of the CEFAA are the various reports of pilots flying in the airspace of approximately 32 million km2, controlled by the Chilean DGAC.
Pilots flying in Chilean airspace and their aircraft are controlled by the respective Control Centers throughout the country. These centers have radars that detect the exact position of the aircraft in flight. In addition, they have recording equipment that records communications between the pilots and the Air Traffic Controllers.
In this way, when an anomalous aerial phenomenon is detected, the recording is sent to the CEFAA, where a scientific investigation is initiated by the corresponding specialists.
The committee also receives information from the general public and reserves the right to select the material that can help in the investigation of the phenomenon.
The countries of Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom have been declassifying their UFO files since 2008. The French Committee for In-Depth Studies, or COMETA, was an unofficial UFO study group comprised of high-ranking scientists and military officials that studied UFOs in the late 1990s. They released the COMETA Report, which summarized their findings. They concluded that 5 percent of the encounters were reliable yet inexplicable: The best hypothesis available was that the observed craft were extraterrestrial.
They also accused the United States of covering up evidence of UFOs. Iran has been concerned about spherical UFOs observed near nuclear power facilities that they call “CIA drones” which reportedly are about 30 feet in diameter, can achieve speeds up to Mach 10, and can leave the atmosphere. Such speeds are on par with the fastest experimental aircraft, but unthinkable for a sphere without lift surfaces or an obvious propulsion mechanism.
In December 2017, The New York Times broke a story about the classified Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, which was a $22 million program run by the former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo and aimed at studying UFOs. Elizondo resigned from running the program protesting extreme secrecy and the lack of funding and support. Following his resignation Elizondo, along with several others from the defense and intelligence community, were recruited by the To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science, which was recently founded by Tom DeLonge to study UFOs and interstellar travel. In conjunction with the launch of the academy, the Pentagon declassified and released three videos of UFO encounters taken with forward looking infrared cameras mounted on F-18 fighter jets. While there is much excitement about such disclosures,
I am reminded of a quote from Retired Army Colonel John Alexander: “Disclosure has happened. … I’ve got stacks of generals, including Soviet generals, who’ve come out and said UFOs are real. My point is, how many times do senior officials need to come forward and say that this is real?”
Last month, scientists announced the discovery of thousands of black holes at the heart of our galaxy. Now, you can explore the monster black hole at the core of the Milky Way that’s surrounded by that black-hole swarm, thanks to a new virtual tour released by NASA.
The individual black holes are estimated to be five to 30 times the mass of our sun, and all were found within three light-years from the monster black hole, called Sagittarius A*.
“Researchers combed through data from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, looking for possible black holes in close orbit with a star,” researchers said in a new video posted on the Chandra website. “They found about a dozen strong black-hole candidates within a very short distance of the supermassive black hole at the galactic center. This implies the presence of other undetected stellar-mass black holes. Up to a thousand stellar-mass black holes could be present.”
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Black Hole
Some of the most monstrous black holes in the universe are growing faster than their host galaxies, new research suggests. Black holes are some of the strangest and most fascinating objects found in outer space. They are objects of extreme density, with such strong gravitational attraction that even light cannot escape from their grasp if it comes near enough.
Super massive black holes are believed to exist at the centers of most, if not all, large galaxies, where they feed on surrounding gas, dust and other material. Two new studies suggest that these massive Black Holes are much bigger than expected based on the rate at which surrounding stars are forming, the researchers said. In fact our Milky Way has one the largest Black Holes. It’s speculated the Black Holes eventually help form a Galaxy of stars as they spin around the Black Hole. Some are eventually captured within the Black holes but most develop into new suns and surrounding planets. It is now thought the black holes helped create our Galaxy on of the largest in the universe. In the past smaller Galaxy’s have been swelled up by our Milky Way Galaxy..,, observed X-ray radiation might be from rapidly rotating neutron stars that have strong magnetic fields, according to scientists at the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.
But if the observed sources are indeed black holes, scientists are particularly interested in those that have companion stars. One reason is that the discovery could help scientists better understand gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time caused by interactions between massive objects. The first confirmed detection of gravitational waves was in 2015, and observations continue with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory and Virgo interferometer collaborations. It appears the aliens understand UFOs and are able to use them for traveling between various places in the Galaxy.
A paper based on the new Chandra results was published April 5 in the journal Nature. The work was led by Charles J. Hailey, co-director of the Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory at Columbia University in New York.
Within the Galaxy there are millions of suns with millions of planets. If only one in the millions of planets has an intelligence civilization there are millions of civilized planets with intelligence life forms. Original article on Space.com.
Megalithic Stones Communication
It was the early 1970s. A zoologist had been studying bats during the night. And he was now on his way home, carrying his equipment with him. He happened to pass a group of ancient standing stones, just as the morning sun was beginning to strike the stones. To his utter surprise, the instruments started reacting. They were picking up a strong, regular and rapid pulse.
The zoologist told the story to an acquaintance whom he knew to be an investigator or earth mysteries. In turn, this man told someone at the institute of Archaeology at Oxford.
THE INVESTIGATION
As it turned out, at that time, a group of scientists and engineers was actively investigating megalithic sites across the British Isles. A research chemist named Don Robins, who was a member of that group got interested. In late October, 1978, he decided to run some tests himself.
Just before dawn, Robins picked up the group’s own broad-spectrum ultrasonic detector and took it to the
Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire. To his delight, just as the sun rose, his equipment picked up a regular rapid pulse around an isolated tall, upright standing stone (known as the king-stone) some distance from the circle proper.
Well, did this motivate the other project team members!
“Let’s scan other megalithic sites across the country,” they said. And they got busy. In fact, they kept doing this for four years.
They discovered that they were able to successfully broadcast ultra-Sonics. As time went on, they managed to acquire equipment that was capable of excluding radio interference and stray signals from local energy sources, including geological faults. The readings at the various old stone circles they now compared with readings taken at modern structures like streets and bridges, or areas of natural woodland.
They discovered that these modern structures showed no more than the expected random background noise. None of these showed anything remotely like the pulse effect of the ancient stone circles at the hour of dawn.
DELIBERATELY PLANNED?
They scratched their heads over this. Could it be that the ancient sites had actually been created specifically to generate the ultrasound? That is, was the pulse deliberately planned? For one thing, the pulse was quite independent of weather conditions. It could be measured at dawn on any day, rain or shine. Not only that, but the pulse transformed into an actual howling sound, which lasted for several hours on the mornings of the spring and autumn equinoxes.
They knew that this “no sound” result was an impossible reading, because open countryside always has a standard background of ultrasound. This is constantly generated (non-stop) by such things as the movement of grass, the rustle of leaves and even the movements of the team members themselves.
“Our equipment has surely malfunctioned,” said one of the team, to which the other members all agreed. So what did this “no ultra-sound” mean? Somehow, the great stone circle was generating an ultrasonic screen which left its interior totally silent.
Absolutely baffled by this, as well as intrigued, the team extended the scope of their measurements to include radioactivity. You see, any place in the country will produce a level of background radiation which is detectable by a Geiger counter. And the stone circles were no different. However, the stone circles were different in this respect – that they somehow generated ‘hot spots’ where the radiation was far higher than normal background radiation.
Yet when the Geiger counter was moved to the centre of the circle, the very reverse was found. ‘Cold spots’ were detected by the scientists, where the radiation dropped below normal background levels. Now engineer Charles Brooker extended the measurements still further. Back at the Rollrights circle he used a portable magnetometer. And what did this show? A seven-ring spiral of diminishing magnetic intensity. The circle was screening out electro-magnetic radiation.
These findings have not been widely publicized. However, they do suggest a sophisticated knowledge of ultrasound as well as a knowledge of various types of radiation in ancient times. It does appear that at least some of Britain’s ancient stone circles were constructed as radiation shelters – although for what purpose it is difficult to imagine.
Mile Long Cursus Carved into Ground
Editors’ Note. These ancient stone circles were built some 3,000 years ago along with Avebury hill and this cursus which matches the cylinder shape and size of the Mothership that I chased over the area while in the Air Force. The cursus is almost a mile long. The stone circles that match the smaller disk shape ships have the ability to communicate. Many of the circular burial mounds contain skeletons with exceptionally large heads thought to be non-human aliens.The ancient megalithic sites remain a mystery. I suggest space travelers visited Earth and encouraged the establishment of religion and science of the stars. The data is being hidden because they do not go along with evolution,,,they support the Bible Genesis 6:4 and other areas,,,where fallen angels or alien visitors came to Earth and mated with women and produced a hybrid offspring.These hybrids are the same as the demi-gods, Hercules, Thor, Atlas, ect… The Book of Enoch describes this account, names the fallen angels and what technology/information they revealed to man,,from aborting babies to metal working, astronomy, astrology, ect…
There has been many elongated skulls and full skeletons of these beings found,,pictures taken,,and some skulls are still in museums in Peru and England…/they do not appear human
For thousands of years Avebury’s landscape has been seen as a mysterious region. The land has a peculiar sanctity and mystical power that has attracted people for millennia.
As local authors, paranormal investigators, experienced dowsers and guides who work in conjunction with The Henge Shop, Avebury, offers you a unique insight into some of Avebury’s mysteries.
We have studied and understand the archaeology of Avebury; however archaeology alone can never fully answer why such magnificent sites as Avebury, Silbury Hill and Stonehenge were skilfully crafted by our ancient ancestors.
Omnec Onec and Venus
Omnec Onec claims to be a Venusian, Spiritual Teacher and the author of the autobiography of an extraterrestrial. “Ambassador from Venus.” Omnec Onec was born on the astral level of the planet Venus and came to Earth with her own physical body in 1955. In the Ninetees, she became publicly known with her autobiography The Venusian Trilogy.”. In this book, she portrays life on the astral level of Venus and describes why and how she was born there and why as a child she was given the opportunity to lower her vibrations, to manifest a physical body and to come to Earth at the age of seven in order to later in her life work as a spiritual teacher and fulfill her life cycles here on Earth. She is a speaker at Mt, Shasta, California Conference on July 27, 2018.
High Speed Space Ship Earth
Hold onto your chair Earth is a space ship orbiting the Sun at the speed of 108,000 km/h. 69,000 mph. The planet travels 940 million km or (584,088,920 miles during one orbit during each year. The Earth completes one orbit every 365.24 mean solar days (that might help explain the need for a leap year). The planet’s distance from the Sun varies as it orbits. Actually, the Earth is never the same distance from the Sun from day to day. When the Earth is closest to the Sun it is said to be
Earth at perihelion.
This occurs around January 3rd at a distance of 147,098,074 km. (91402505 miles) When it is at its furthest distance from the Sun, Earth is said to be at aphelion. That happens around July 4th at a distance of 152,097,701 km 94509129.8 miles.
That’s not all our wonderful Earth is now moving in six different directions with a combined speed of approximately 574,585 MPH.
69,361 MPH Spin and Orbit 43,200 MPH Towards the Lambda Herculis Constellation 15,624 MPH Solar system moving Perpendicular to Galactic
Milky Way Galaxy Plane shown in image. 446,400 MPH Orbiting the Galactic Center {or Galactic Spin Rate. ——————- 574,585 MPH Total Speed of Earth within Our Galaxy so hold on tight.
These movements suggest an intelligent universe that a supernatural God can provide life everlasting.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:FILER FILES - overzicht met foto's met dank aan Georges Filer en WWW.nationalUFOCenter.com (ENG)
Filer’s Files #29 -2018 We Lost Planes to UFOs - PART II
Filer’s Files #29 -2018 We Lost Planes to UFOs - PART II
UFO Sightings in the United States
California Object
Redwood — I was taking long exposure shots with my friends on June 23, 2018, around 9:00 pm, If you look at the photo, you can see a long constant stream of light with no blinking lights at the beginning and end. It’s almost like the light exploded into place. it looks extremely strange at the beginning and end of the line. This was a 30 second exposure, and one of my friends unfortunately stood in front of my camera a couple of times. This explains why there are two gaps in the constant line. I did not hear any noise. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Florida Object
Cudjoe Key — Hurricane IRMA passed through the Florida Keys 7 months ago.. My home there was ground zero. Devastation everywhere. I sat on my front deck about 10pm on September 23, 2017, facing North toward the Gulf of Mexico drinking a beer wondering how the hell I’m going to recover from this storm when suddenly I see a light out in the Gulf. Initially it looked like a blimp lit up from the inside. It started to get bigger and I realized it was coming toward me, as it got closer, I quickly realized this is not a blimp. OMG it’s a spaceship. A football field size tube with a half circle head on the leading edge. It’s low maybe 1000 feet up, self illuminated, coming straight for me. It’s covered in a thin layer of cloud which is rolling off the leading edge as it moves forward.. It comes right over.. I see a light in the half circle head. I think it was an energy source. It looks translucent and it’s coming to me at about 40 mph. ZERO sound. It flies into a single small cloud just above my home and doesn’t emerge. This was a mothership,
Later that night I went to sleep but woke with a splitting headache at 4:15am and from a very strange dream. I never get headaches. I get out of bed remembering the ship. I walk over to my French doors facing the Gulf and look up. There’s bright white light 50 feet up, just blinking. I freak the hell out. I bolt outside and it’s gone.. The next two nights I stand on my upper deck mentally ask them to come back. Each night a low flying V shaped craft (with no lights), looked like a v shaped boomerang flew over. I’ve had one session with a contactee psychic. She told me I was not abducted but instead Chipped. Supposedly it’s a chip for communicating. Which was why they came back the following two nights at my request. I am a retired engineer, this happened. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Georgia Object
Mount Airy – July 16, 2018, I saw an object that was moving very slow and then went in to the clouds. I came back outside and it was back. It got very close and it was still there when I went to bed. Yes, it was moving. This happened at 2:40 AM in Mount Airy, GA.
Note: It is difficult to identify this object. The photo has the appearance of a meteor, but the witness description does not suggest that it was a meteor. Thanks to William Puckett, Director Http://www.UFOsnw.com
Idaho Cylinder
Jerome— Myself and grandson going to work on a house on July 14, 2018. . Both of us spotted this weird cloud, a tall skinny serial cloud. A cloud like a pole made of cloud material. Angle at 3:30 pm. I took a picture with my phone. I was flabbergasted. I had never seen a cloud like that in my life. With no fires, or no other clouds anywhere It took a very long time to move away and didn’t lose shape . It was seemingly stationary for a long time. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Illinois Light
Springfield — Pamela Stark shot this photo on July 15, 2018.
8:55 pm Thanks to Pamela Stark
New Jersey Lights
Delanaco — I was talking to my cousin on the phone when I watched an object go by my bedroom window. It was traveling to my east heading north going slow right above the tree line. I jumped out of my chair and told my cousin I see a UFO. I pulled up my camera and got three photos of it with one of them zoomed in. It was an oval racetrack shape solid glow. What caught my attention is that I am a pilot and you never see that color glow. I’m personally positive this is a UFO.. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Nevada Light
Henderson — A large storm came through the Southeast side of Las Vegas on July 14th 2018 at 9:45pm My friend and I were outside on my patio smoking and we observed STRANGE lightning off in the distance. My friend, kept saying, “that’s some crazy War of the Worlds type stuff.” During almost the same time we both observed several flying things in the sky. One of which, was close enough for me to catch film of, quickly. It had red white and green lights. .. there were a total of 3 in the sky at the same time in different areas flying in different directions….. The one I recorded flew right over my building. My friend and I stayed on my patio for quite some time watching the storm and all the activity in the sky. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Oregon Light
Pendleton – I was talking with a veteran that lives on the street and we noticed something flashing way up away in the distance,
I looked back up and it was still in the same spot so I took my smart phone out and zoomed in and noticed it was hovering in one place. It was white and gleamed in the sun. The newspaper came up and took pictures. He was extremely excited as we all were. Another one just appeared out of nowhere and slowly descended. The one we were watching took off in a straight line for a few miles and faded away. A Vietnam vet who flew planes judged it at 250-300 feet in length. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Virginia Light
Woodridge— On July 10, 2018, my daughter, brother, mother, daughter’s friend and I have been taking numerous pictures of strange objects in the sky. On Friday night July 13, near Newington, VA we saw numerous objects in the air and took pictures.
Note: The photo sent by the witnesses is blurry making it difficult to interpret. I am assuming that the witnesses are referring to the circular blue object as “strange.” The witnesses did not provide descriptive information about the objects that they have been seeing. A request has been sent to obtain more information. Updates will be posted. Thanks to William Puckett, Director Http://www.UFOsnw.com
Washington Cylinder
Edmonds— I didn’t see the object in the sky until I looked at the photos I had taken from the window of a train while traveling north from Washington. We were approaching an area where ships were docked and I simply shot a photo of that scene.
When I looked at those images, this particular photo was very dark for some reason and so I almost deleted it, but then thought I should try to improve the contrast and brightness to see if it was worth saving. It was then that I noticed the rectangular, red-brown-amber ‘object’ in the sky directly above one of the ships and easily as large as the ship. I don’t think it’s a bird flying. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Wisconsin Object
Gays Mills— It was early in the morning about 2:45. AM, on July 7, 2018, when I saw a huge glowing gold star shaped thing above the treeline with an apricot colored haze. It appeared to be about the size of a full moon to me-so big that’s why I noticed and took a picture. it moved up and to the right a ways, then got half as small. It kept getting smaller and smaller/less bright so I then stopped looking. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Worldwide UFO Sightings
Australia Light
I was taking photos of Laneway Art with a friend and just happened to take a shot of the night sky on July 13, 2018 . Looking at the picture later I noticed this strange light and thought it was weird.
Melbourne — In Truganina-which is a suburb I was in the backyard having a smoke I looked up to see the sky at 7:55pm on 15 July 2018.. It’s a clear night and the stars were bright and visible. Then to the corner of my eye I see something moving, Was it a drone? As it flew under me, I saw that it had lights under. It was like a rectangular cigar shape. When I first observed it, it took a second to travel under me and then 6 to 8 seconds later it disappeared. It was travelling 3 times faster than a plane.. The object was flying at low altitude and I know it was a UFO. No human objects can move that fast. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Bulgaria Light
Varna— So I was testing my new phone camera and its effect to shoot 10 seconds of over exposed photos I snapped 20 photos and I didn’t see much at first. 1 day later I was admiring the ability of my phone to make so clear photos and I saw those cigar shaped ufo’s. It was so scary and the strange thing is when I was shooting the photos I was watching the sky and I didn’t see anything. Maybe they are camouflaged for our eyes and not for camera lens. I didn’t notice that I had captured four photos . This is not a plane since these objects have 7 lights on the outside. It’s not the iss because it is too fast. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Canada Sightings
Slave Lake— I was taking a break from drawing in my room, and I decided to look out the window — As I normally do. I noticed the littlest bit of movement behind some trees on March 13, 2017.
There’s a patch of trees in the middle of my U-shaped drive-way.
From that tree line, I saw it basically glide out silently into the open.Then it just stopped. It didn’t even slow down, it looked very odd.. There’s an airport near my house, and planes fly that close to my house all the time, and its rather loud and sometimes the sound waves vibrate everything. This object did none of that. It was only there for 5 or 7 seconds tops. The sun was setting, and it was getting dim out. I managed to see some indication of shadow from whatever patterns/structures were on it. Then, it just zipped away. It sounds, and it looked, like something fictional. Similar to when you see ships in Star Wars zip away.
Bloomfield, Ontario — I just arrived back from camp for five days. Lots of sun and clear night skies. Witnessed a few UFO ‘s at night and caught a interesting one on film early morning. On July 10, 2018, while camping in Prince Edward County near the Sandbanks Provincial Park I was relaxing admiring the stars.. Something caught my attention to the west over Lake Ontario. I could see a bright neon ‘green ‘ light high in the sky – very bright. I grabbed my camera and took a video clip on night shot. As well high 30 X zoom to capture this near stationary unknown object. Took three still shots and went to bed very tired. The footage was taken 2:46 am. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDW8O_j7f1g&feature=youtu.be
Eire Object
Valencia Island Kerry— I am a photographer that on June 20, 2018. recently returned from a visit to Ireland. Today I was going through photos that I took when I noticed what I thought was an odd sized bird way out in the distance below the clouds off the beach in my photograph. I digitally zoomed in to the “Bird” and was amazed to see a DISC shaped object. The details of this photo are: File: L Room 3563,Taken with a Nikon D500 Camera, F/Stop F/11, Exp Time 1/500sec, ISO 100, Exposure Bias 0 stop, Focal length 22mm, Max Aperture- 3.7, Metering-Pattern, 35 mm Focal Length. This was taken at 16.49 on the 20thJune, 2018. I am prepared to send my photograph to you should you require this. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Finland Object
Turku — Witness drove the car when saw an object flying high in the sky near the city of Turku in Southern Finland on June 29,2018 at about 8 p.m. when the sunlight was reflected brightly from an apparent metallic looking object flying perhaps at an altitude of about 10000 meters or about the height of passenger planes which the witness first thought the object was. He stopped the car and went outside trying to film and take photos with his cell phone. The object flew strait, then stopped, continued strait and after turning 90 degrees and flying strait stopped again continuing then strait again until it vanished over the clouds. The sighting lasted about four minutes. No condensation lines were seen nor any sound heard. The magnification of the picture taken by the witness shows a mushroom-shaped object. The object resembles in fact a “thick” saucer-like ufo. The local air-traffic control found nothing particular in their log books. He says he’s always believed in ufos and phoned immediately his son and sent a picture.. Thanks to MUFON CMS
France Object
Arcachon — I didn’t see anything myself on June 30, 2018
I just discovered a strange object on a holiday photo.
Where and when the photo has been taken: It was Saturday 30 of June 2018 in the evening around 20:15 on a boat in the “Bassin d’Arcachon” near in France.
Me and 3 of my friends (one of them shot the photo) were on a boat trip from Arcachon to Cap Ferret. Nobody remarked the object. Only on watching the photo I’ve seen it. I don’t know what it is. Nobody of my friends has an idea. Probably it’s nothing really strange but we can’t identify it so I thought I’ll send you the photo to verify. I’m curious Thanks to MUFON CMS
Germany Light
Dresden— I was going outside my apartment to smoke my last cigarette before bed on July 20, 2018‘ It disappears like in the video, just gone from a moment to another. Then I saw bright lights in the sky, brighter than the stars and much closer! I tried to figure out what it could be, It was much closer than a satellite and faster. I saw a bright light moving across the sky. All I was thinking was grab a camera to get proofs, Thanks to MUFON CMS
UK Englamd Orb
Herne Hill — I was filming the plane with a 90x zoom camcorder when reviewing it I spotted the object flying past it at great speed on July 9, 2018. I slowed the film and stabilized it for a better view. Objects, anomalies, metallic UFOs appear constantly above this area Second film shows a strange creature flying by another plane shot with the same 90x zoom. This time the creature was flying upwards at a lower height of perhaps 1.5 km. The object seems to have the head of a duck and tiny wings on a thin body. No idea what it is .CMS
Support Earth Changing Research
Please Help
Buy a Great DVD
I have put together a DVD of the last twenty years of Filer’s Files for you with hundreds of great photographs and UFO sightings that will explain the phenomena and the importance to your life and your family. Additionally, I have included my book within the DVD that includes George Ritter’s exciting abduction story told by Linda Moulton Howe. Broadcaster David E. Twichell joined me to write the book. We are asking for a donation of only $50 that includes next year’s subscription and our book. Please include your e-mail address and mailing address.
Our research is uncovering amazing truths by solving challenging projects deemed too difficult by other firms. We have had some success in finding missing persons. We could use your help in getting more results from our research. I have put together a DVD of the last seventeen years of Filer’s Files for you with hundreds of great photographs and UFO sightings. Additionally, I have decided to include my book within the DVD that includes George Ritter’s exciting abduction story told by Linda Moulton Howe. Broadcaster David E. Twichell joined me to write the book. We are asking for a donation of only $50 that includes next year’s subscription and our book. Please include your e-mail address and mailing address.
Have been digging through the giant DVD you sent recently. As a relatively recent joiner, I was unaware of the years’ worth of consistent reports of the same types of objects all over. This has been very educational. Just wanted to thank you for all you’ve done. Bruce W. Freeman Attorney at Law
Sign me up right now for Filer’s Files.
I have put together a DVD of the last seventeen years of Filer’s Files for you with hundreds of great photographs and UFO sightings that will explain the phenomena and the importance to your life and your family. Additionally, I have included my book within the DVD that includes George Ritter’s exciting abduction story told by Linda Moulton Howe. Broadcaster David E. Twichell joined me to write the book. We are asking for a donation of only $50 that includes next year’s subscription and our book. Please include your e-mail address and mailing address. Please use this link to receive this offer.
JOIN MUFON!
Become a MUFON member today! Benefits of membership include a subscription to the monthly UFO Journal that contains current investigations, sightings reports, articles by world-renowned researchers and more. To join now, click here JOIN NOW
WHAT LIES BENEATH There may be a 20-kilometer-wide lake hidden under Mars’ southern polar ice sheets, shown here in images from NASA’s Mars Orbiter Camera on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft.
GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION STUDIO MARS ORBITER CAMERA DATA/NASA
A Mars orbiter has detected a wide lake of liquid water hidden below the planet’s southern ice sheets. There have been much-debated hints of tiny, ephemeral amounts of water on Mars before. But if confirmed, this lake marks the first discovery of a long-lasting cache of the liquid.
“This is potentially a really big deal,” says planetary scientist Briony Horgan of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. “It’s another type of habitat in which life could be living on Mars today.”
The lake is about 20 kilometers across, planetary scientist Roberto Orosei of the National Institute of Astrophysics in Bologna, Italy and his colleagues report online July 25 in Science — but the water is buried beneath 1.5 kilometers of solid ice.
Orosei and colleagues spotted the lake by combining more than three years of observations from the European Space Agency’s orbiting Mars Express spacecraft. The craft’s MARSIS instrument, which stands for Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding, aimed radar waves at the planet to probe beneath its surface.
Radar runs
Repeated passes by ice-penetrating radar beamed down from the Mars Express orbiter reveal a hidden lake on Mars. The bluer the colors, the brighter the radar reflection from the material it bounced off. The blue triangle outlined in black in the middle is the purported lake.
R. OROSEI ET AL/SCIENCE 2018
Other lakes too small for Mars Express to see may also exist, perhaps forming a network of interconnected channels beneath the ice.
As those waves passed through the ice, they bounced off different materials embedded in the glaciers. The brightness of the reflection tells scientists about the material doing the reflecting — liquid water makes a brighter echo than either ice or rock.
Combining 29 radar observations taken from May 2012 to December 2015, MARSIS revealed a bright spot in the ice layers near Mars’ south pole, surrounded by much less reflective areas. Orosei and colleagues considered other explanations for the bright spot, such as radar bouncing off a hypothetical layer of carbon dioxide ice at the top of the sheet, but decided those options either wouldn’t produce the same radar signal or were too contrived to be physically likely.
That left one option: A lake of liquid water. Similar lakes beneath the ice in Antarctica and Greenland have been discovered in the same way (SN: 9/7/13, p. 26).
“On Earth, nobody would have been surprised to conclude that this was water,” Orosei says. “But to demonstrate the same on Mars was much more complicated.”
The lake is probably not pure water — temperatures at the bottom of the ice sheet are around –68° Celsius, and pure water would freeze there, even under the pressure of so much ice. But a lot of salt dissolved in the water could lower the freezing point. Salts of sodium, magnesium and calcium have been found elsewhere on Mars, and may be helping to keep this lake liquid (SN: 4/11/09, p. 12). The pool could also be more mud than water, but that could still be a habitable environment, Horgan says.
Previously, scientists have discovered extensive solid water ice sheets under the Martian dirt (SN Online: 1/11/18). There were also hints that liquid water flowed down cliff walls(SN: 10/31/15, p. 17), but those may turn out to be tiny dry avalanches. The Phoenix lander saw what looked like frozen water droplets at its site near the north pole in 2008, but that water may have been melted by the lander itself (SN Online: 9/9/10).
“If this [lake] is confirmed, it’s a substantial change in our understanding of the present-day habitability of Mars,” says Lisa Pratt, NASA’s planetary protection officer.
Though the newly discovered lake’s depth is unclear, its volume still dwarfs any previous signs of liquid water on Mars, Orosei says. The lake has to be at least 10 centimeters deep for MARSIS to have noticed it. That means it could contain at least 10 billion liters of liquid water.
“That’s big,” Horgan says. “When we’ve talked about water in other places, it’s in dribs and drabs.”
Under-ice lakes on Mars were first suggested in 1987, and the MARSIS team has been searching since Mars Express began orbiting the Red Planet in 2003. It took the team more than a decade to collect enough data to convince themselves the lake was real.
For the first several years of observations, limitations in the spacecraft’s onboard computer forced the team to average hundreds of radar pulses together before sending the data back to Earth. That strategy sometimes cancelled out the lake’s reflections, Orosei says — on some orbits, the bright spot was visible, on others, it wasn’t.
In the early 2010s, the team switched to a new technique that let them store the data and send it back to Earth more slowly. Then in August 2015, months before the end of the observing campaign, the experiment’s principal investigator, Giovanni Picardi of the University of Rome Sapienza, died unexpectedly.
“It was incredibly sad,” Orosei says. “We had all the data, but we had no leadership. The team was in disarray.”
Finally discovering the lake is “a testament to perseverance and longevity,” says planetary scientist Isaac Smith of the Planetary Science Institute, who is based in Lakewood, Colo. “Long after everyone else gave up looking, this team kept looking.”
But there is still room for doubt, says Smith, who works on a different radar experiment on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that has seen no sign of the lake, even in CT scan–like 3-D views of the poles. It could be that MRO’s radar is scattering off the ice in a different way, or that the wavelengths it uses don’t penetrate as deep into the ice. The MRO team will look again, and will also try to create a 3-D view from the MARSIS data. Having a specific spot to aim for is helpful, he says.
“I expect there will be debate,” Smith says. “They’ve done their homework. This paper is well earned. But we should do some more follow-up.”
By 2050, We Will Attend Ower Own Funerals... As Robots
By 2050, We Will Attend Ower Own Funerals... As Robots
Robotics along with virtual reality is said to be the way in the future.
This is good news for anyone who has ever wondered how many people will come to their funeral when they die as it has been said that by 2050 humans will be able to attend their own funeral in a robot body.
"If you're under 40 reading this article, you're probably not going to die unless you get a nasty disease"
Dr. Ian Pearson made the astonishing claim that by 2050 humans will be able to have their minds stored in a computer. This means that actual bodies will be made redundant. It also means that when the body dies, the brain will still live on inside a robot.
People Might Live Forever in Realistic Robotic Bodies
In the future, the brain of a person could be copied and put inside a robot that has a realistic looking face. Pearson also believes that in the future the brain will be connected to a computer. Instead of becoming just a copy of the human’s brain, it will actually be an extension of the mind.
The doctor said that when the human body dies the brain stops working. However, about 99% of the mind is fine, and it would be quite happy to continue running in the cloud, just as data does now. Pearson is under the impression that if people have saved enough data in their brain along with it being prepared, the brain could be connected up to an android, with the robot becoming the body of that person.
This essentially means that a person never dies; only the body does. It would also mean that the person would be able to go to his or her own funeral to say goodbye to their old body then continue life as before in the robotic body.
There are already super realistic faces along with bodies made from silicone on the market, some with robotics inside, sold in the sex doll market. Pearson said that the person would be the same inside, with the same thoughts, feelings, and personality, but their body would be upgraded, which means it would never get old. He said, "Still you, just with a younger, highly upgraded body."
Humans Might Live in the Real World in Robotic Bodies or in Virtual Reality
This is not the first time Dr. Pearson has made such an outlandish claim. In the past, he has talked about numerous ways of being able to beat death. These claims have included renewing body parts thanks to genetic engineering, putting humans into computers and robots, or transferring the brain of a human into a computer, allowing them to live in a virtual world.
Pearson did say that not everyone would be lucky enough to be able to live forever inside a robot. He said, "Some people may need to wait until 2060 or later until the android price falls enough for them to afford one." This means only the super-rich would be able to live on like a robot at first.
Companies Might Turn Robotic Humans into Slaves
There is also the issue of storing brains on computers. Pearson pointed this out in relation to how servers store brains along with the servers being in the hands of companies such as Facebook, Apple or Google. Pearson said, "The small print may give them some rights over replication, ownership, and license to your idea, who knows what?
"So although future electronic immortality has the advantage of offering a pretty attractive version of immortality at first glance, a closer reading of the 100 page T&Cs may well reveal some nasties.
"You may in fact no longer own your mind. Oh dear!"
There are worries that companies could copy the minds of people, then go on to sell them. A person’s brain might also be used as a worker mind, which would essentially turn the person into a slave, so it is not all good news.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
Aliens Take Disclosure Into Their Own Hands... With The Help Of Weather Cameras
Aliens Take Disclosure Into Their Own Hands... With The Help Of Weather Cameras
It seems that aliens and UFOs have taken a real liking to New York as a TV station in Buffalo has had the opportunity to capture a UFO on film for the second time this summer.
Last month the TV station showed a segment with Autumn Lewandowski showing the strange UFO in the sky in a video showing a time-lapse of the New York skyline. Viewers saw a strange glowing ball hovering around in the sky before it dipped down and then shot past the camera at high speed.
According to Coatstocoastam. com, one of the colleagues of the meteorologist for WKBW, the network channel lucky enough to catch the strange phenomenon, seemed to have trouble discerning objects in the sky as on the video they can be heard saying that there was another strange object in the video. However, this UFO was shot down fast, not literally, when Lewandowski quickly said that the object in question was a planet, not a UFO.
Could the UFO Have Been A Drone?
Lewandowski then said that perhaps the strange light in the sky had been a drone. Bear in mind that the object in the video is seen in time-lapse, which might have made it look like it was traveling at very high speed. The TV station did not show the original video so there is nothing to suggest how fast the object was actually flying.
Some UFO experts are not convinced that the object is a drone. When the object is enhanced there does not seem to be any wings or propellers on the craft, nor is there any identifiable lights, suggesting that it was a drone.
What many have found strange about the incident is that this is the second time a UFO has been captured by the TV station in two weeks. One week ago, an outdoor camera on the station captured another UFO flying around in the night sky over New York. This was an incident captured by Andy Parker for WKBW when he was presenting his weather forecast. In this instance, a light was seen to streak upwards in the sky before then curving. The weatherman was clearly shaken and asked if anyone else had seen it. He pointed out that perhaps it was a shooting star going the wrong way.
Not now, but billions of years ago, microbes might have thrived in water pools on the moon until its surface became dead and dry.
The moon as seen by the Galileo spacecraft en route to Jupiter, on December 7, 1992. A new study suggests the moon might have been a more habitable place a few billion years ago.
Image via NASA/JPL/USGS.
Could there have been life on the moon in the distant past? Our airless, mostly dry moon certainly isn’t the firstplace that comes to mind when it comes to searching for life elsewhere. Today, its radiation-blasted surface is inhospitable to life as we know it. Plus the moon has no air or liquid water. But what about a few billion years ago? An article published by scientists in the journal Astrobiology – and announced by Washington State University on July 23, 2018 – brings together the various lines of evidence for a once-habitable moon and concludes that there might have been not one but two habitable periods early in the moon’s history.
From the new paper:
Our moon is uninhabitable and lifeless today. It has no significant atmosphere, no liquid water on its surface, no magnetosphere to protect its surface from solar wind and cosmic radiation, no polymeric chemistry, and it is subject to large diurnal temperature variations. Thus, associating our moon with habitability seems outrageous, and certainly it would have been just a decade ago.
However, results from recent space missions, as well as sensitive analyses of lunar rock and soil samples, have indicated that the moon is not as dry as previously thought. In addition to the probable occurrence of water ice in permanently shadowed polar craters, spectroscopic studies also indicate the presence of hydrated surface materials at high, but not permanently shadowed, latitudes, with evidence for temporal variations over the course of a lunar day.
In addition, recent studies of the products of lunar volcanism indicate that the lunar interior also contains more water than was once appreciated and that the lunar mantle may even be as comparably water-rich as Earth’s upper mantle.
Illustration depicting the ancient moon with an atmosphere. The view overlooks the Imbrium Basin and shows volcanoes erupting and venting water vapor and other gases.
Image via NASA MSFC/Lunar and Planetary Institute.
Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Washington State University, led the study, along with Ian Crawford, a professor of planetary science and astrobiology at the University of London.
So just what does all this mean? Could there have once been some kind of simple life on the moon? This paper does not claim that, only that the moon may have once had habitable conditions.
Schulze-Makuch and Crawford describe the two potentially habitable periods, early on in the moon’s history. Their article says that microscopic lifeforms could have been possible on the moon not long after the moon formed from a debris disk 4 billion years ago and then again during a period where lunar volcanic activity was at a peak, around 3.5 billion years ago. It was during those two periods that scientists think there used to be a lot more water vapor, and other volatiles, being released from the moon’s interior. There may even have been transient liquid water on the moon’s surface.
If liquid water and a significant atmosphere were present on the early moon for long periods of time, we think the lunar surface would have been at least transiently habitable.
The idea is that outgassing of water vapor and other volatiles could have allowed for an atmosphere thick enough to keep liquid water on the moon’s surface for millions of years. It is also thought by scientists that the early moon had a magnetic field capable of shielding the surface from intense solar radiation and solar winds. As Schulze-Makuch said:
It looks very much like the moon was habitable at this time. There could have actually been microbes thriving in water pools on the moon until the surface became dry and dead.
If there ever was any life, did it evolve on the moon, or could it have come from Earth? At the time that the moon would have been habitable, Earth was teeming with microbes such as cyanobacteria, 3.5 to 3.8 billion years years ago. Meteorite impacts were more common then, so it is possible that some microbes could have been blasted into space and then fallen onto the moon.
The possibility of some kind of simple life on the early moon is an exciting one, although no direct evidence of it has yet been found. Searching for such evidence, with modern technology, would require returning to the moon and obtaining samples in areas where it might most likely be found, such as the subsurface ice deposits.
Early in the Earth’s history, when microbial life was just taking hold, impacts from meteorites could have ejected microbes into space, which then made their way to the moon.
Image via BBC/Solarseven.
Bottom line: The moon is airless and mostly dry now, but has water ice deposits in shadowed craters at its poles and below its surface. New research suggests more water on the moon billions of years ago and a possibly habitable moon, capable of supporting simple life forms, at that time. There’s no evidence yet that any such life existed, but the possibility that it could have is intriguing.
Did Ancient Mars Host an Alien Civilization? US Congressman Asks NASA Panel (Video)
Did Ancient Mars Host an Alien Civilization? US Congressman Asks NASA Panel (Video)
Is It Possible That Ancient Mars Was Host To An Alien Civilization?
This is exactly the question that Rep. Dana Rohrbacher, R-Calif., asked of a NASA panel of planetary scientists on July 18, 2017. To be clear, there is no official evidence that this is the case. Mars, as far as we know, did not host any alien civilization in the past.
Mars Was Very Different Billions of Years Ago
The Mars we know today is not the Mars of the past. Ancient Mars likely had rivers, lakes, and possibly oceans. It’s not an impossible scenario to believe that life, in some form, once existed there. That being said, the existence a full-blown intelligent civilization is another story. It took earth almost 3.8 billion years to develop intelligent life. Mars is only about 4.5 billion years old. Life would have had to begin very early in the planet’s history to have enough time to develop into something capable of meeting our definition of a ‘civilization’.
Based on what we know, ancient Mars could have looked something like this, especially if life had taken hold.
Ancient Martian Alien Civilization: Unlikely, But Not Impossible
As a rule of logic, it’s nearly impossible to disprove a negative. Though the panel of NASA scientists said it would be extremely unlikely, they didn’t quite say it was an impossibility. We understand a bit about Martian history, but our scope of research is obviously limited. If life on Mars had developed and then suffered some extinction event a few billion years ago, there would be very little evidence left today. There’s also the question as to whether humans would be able to recognize alien life at all.
What Convinced Congressman Rohrbacher to Ask This Question?
Judging from the reaction of the young man sitting behind the congressman when he finally asked the question, it’s likely that he was asking on his behalf. It’s no secret that Congressman Rohrbacher isn’t a scientist. He does, however, sit on the Committee on Science Space and Technology and has been consistently pro-NASA relative to his other Republican counterparts. He is also keen on having NASA send humans back to the moon.
The Video
You can see the congressman’s question in the video below as well as the response from NASA scientist Dr. Kenneth Farley. Farley is quick to correct Rohrbacher in that Mars was very different billions of years ago vs. thousands of years ago as the question was posed. A few billion years is a long time. If an alien civilization existed on Mars billions of years ago, the time has most likely wiped that slate clean.
Alien UFO Blog
Alien UFO Blog is dedicated to weeding out the tremendous amount of garbage on the Internet related to aliens & UFOs. Our goal is to provide open-ended opinions for truly mysterious phenomena while exposing the fakes and hoaxes.
Mars' South Pole May Hide a Large Underground Lake
Mars' South Pole May Hide a Large Underground Lake
By Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Writer
The Red Planet just got quite a bit bluer, with scientists announcing the discovery of what they believe is a lake that's about 12 miles across and hidden below a mile (1.6 kilometers) of ice at the south pole of Mars.
Scientists have previously offered much weaker evidence for such reservoirs, as well as strong evidence for smaller amounts of water on the planet. But the new findings are still sure to make a splash.
"It's always exciting when you talk about liquid water on present-day Mars," Ashwin Vasavada, project scientist at NASA for the Curiosity mission, told Space.com. However, he declined to say how confident he is in the study's claims, because he isn't an expert in the kind of radar imagery the team used. "It's exciting because of any implications it might have for the habitability of Mars." [Geometry Helps Solve the Mystery of Mars' Water]
And it's too early to say what precisely those implications may be. Scientists still need to confirm the discovery itself and understand precisely what characteristics that water may have, which will require missions that have yet to be designed, much less launched.
An artist's depiction of the Mars Express spacecraft orbiting Mars.
Credit: ESA
Water below the ice?
The new research builds on more than three decades of theorizing by scientists about the chances that water lurks below Mars' polar caps, just as it does here on Earth.
That idea was first proposed by Steve Clifford, now a planetary scientist specializing in water on Mars at the Planetary Science Institute based in Arizona, who was not involved in the new research. He was inspired by scientists' studies of lakes below the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets here on Earth, he told Space.com. Those lakes are created when heat from within the planet melts the glaciers in patches. He thought a similar scenario could be happening below the ice caps on Mars — we just didn't have any way to see below the ice.
The new research attempted to do just that using radar data gathered by an instrument called MARSIS, which uses pulses of radar to study the planet's ionosphere and interior structure. It has been orbiting the planet aboard Mars Express, a European spacecraft, since 2003.
An artist's depiction of Mars Express in orbit with the spacecraft's radar data on the left. The blue patch represents the team's evidence for subsurface liquid water.
Credit: ESA, INAF. Graphic rendering by Davide Coero Borga, Media INAF
The radar signals that MARSIS produces bounce back to Mars Express in different ways depending on what material they hit. And the team behind the new research said the signals MARSIS picked up over the south pole of Mars can be explained only by a large underground pool of liquid water.
"We discovered water on Mars," lead author Roberto Orosei, the co-investigator on MARSIS and a scientist at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy, said in a video released with the paper. "MARSIS was able to detect echoes from beneath the southern polar cap of Mars that were stronger than surface echoes. This condition on Earth happens only when you observe subglacial water like in Antarctica over places like Lake Vostok." And while the team only has evidence for the one location, they suspect it isn't the only such subglacial lake (Antarctica hides about 400 such features).
According to the radar echoes, the lake is no more than 12.5 miles (20 km) across and is buried about a mile below the surface of the ice cap. The scientists can't figure out precisely how deep the lake is, but they have confirmed that it is at least 3 feet (1 meter) deep. It must be rather salty, because the ice above it is quite clear and therefore quite cold — if there were pure water below that sort of ice, it would be frozen, the researchers said.
The team used data spanning three and a half years to make sure that their analysis included multiple passes over the same region. They also considered a couple other scenarios that might have explained the data they saw, including a layer of carbon dioxide ice hiding below the water ice. But the researchers said they came away unsatisfied with those explanations.
Other scientists may not agree. "I think it's a very, very persuasive argument, but it's not a conclusive or definitive argument," Clifford said. "There's always the possibility that conditions that we haven't foreseen exist at the base of the cap and are responsible for this bright reflection."
An artist's depiction of Mars Express over a patch of Planum Australe, with data from the study area superimposed on the planet's surface.
Credit: USGS Astrogeology Science Center, Arizona State University, ESA, INAF. Graphic rendering by Davide Coero Borga, Media INAF
Life means water, but water doesn't mean life
If future studies confirm that the mysterious layer below the ice is indeed water, scientists will have a host of further questions to tackle about the reservoir before they can make any predictions about what the discovery means for the possibility of life on Mars. [Curiosity Rover Finds Ancient 'Building Blocks for Life' on Mars]
"If you do have liquid water and you consider its relevance to life, then you also have to go beyond just the fact that it's liquid and ask the temperature that it's at and whether it's able to be used by life," Vasavada said. "Not all liquid water is equal in terms of life's ability to use it." In particular, he pointed to the high salt content that would be needed to keep water liquid at such low temperatures. This level might overwhelm even the most salt-loving life-forms, he suggested.
Scientists on Earth have drilled through glaciers to sample the water hiding below them and have found microbial life. So if there has ever been life on Mars, that life could theoretically have survived, hidden in this or similar lakes, Clifford suggested.
"There's no reason to expect that it wouldn't continue to the present day," he said of any ancient microbial life on Mars. "The subsurface is a very, very stable environment compared to the surface of a planet. It's protected from impacts. It's protected from climate change."
Artistic impression of the Mars Express spacecraft. Credit: ESA.
Today, there’s little doubt that Mars once had liquid water on its surface at some point in its history. For example, the Curiosity rover has provided evidence pointing to this conclusion by mineralogical studies of sediment samples collected and carried out at Gale Crater. But although contemporary Mars appears inhospitable and dry as a bone, scientists have recently announced that liquid water may be nestled in some pockets beneath the surface of the Red Planet. The latest findings reported by researchers at the Italian Space Agency suggest that a 20 kilometer-wide subglacial lake lies just 1.6 kilometers beneath the surface, near the south pole of Mars.
“This is just one small study area; it is an exciting prospect to think there could be more of these underground pockets of water elsewhere, yet to be discovered,” said lead-author Roberto Orosei in a statement.
The monumental discovery of subterranean liquid water was performed with ground-penetrating radar (GPR) on the Mars Express spacecraft, a European Space Agency (ESA) probe that has been orbiting Mars since 2003. GPR works by sending electromagnetic waves towards the ground and timing how long it takes for them to return. The travel time is dependant on the material through which it passes, so this way we can figure out what kind of materials lurk beneath a surface without viewing it directly. The technology was initially developed so the military could locate mines, but today, GPR is used in all sorts of applications, such as finding avalanche victims, micro-fissures in constructions, small archaeological objects — and, now, water on Mars!
To peer inside the Martian subsurface, Mars Express is equipped with the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS) instrument, which is comprised of two 20-meter radar booms. Between May 2012 and December 2015, MARSIS surveyed the Planum Australe region, which corresponds to the southern ice cap of Mars. Its radio pulses traveled through the Martian surface and polar ice caps, then reflected back to the spacecraft’s antenna. According to the Italian Space Agency, 29 sets of radar samples were recorded, which allowed researchers to create a subterranean map almost a mile below the surface of the studied region. The map stretches about 20 kilometers across and the features identified by the scientists look eerily similar to signals generated by lakes found beneath Greenland and Antarctica on Earth.
“We interpret this feature as a stable body of liquid water on Mars,” the authors wrote in the study.
Marsis data suggests that an area of high reflectivity (dark blue) is water.
Credit: USGS ASTROGEOLOGY SCIENCE CENTER, ARIZONA STATE UN.
Although the first study suggesting liquid water might be found at the base of Martian polar caps was published nearly 31 years ago, the new findings mark the first tangible evidence of the presence of liquid water on the Red Planet.
On Earth, lakes under the Antarctic ice sheet can stay liquid even though the mean temperature at the surface is around -24 degrees Celsius. The thick ice thermally insulates such lakes, although, to be fair, the temperatures of subglacial lakes can hover below the freezing point of water. This kind of lake stays liquid because the water mixes with salts like magnesium, calcium, and sodium to form a brine which lowers the water’s freezing point. The saltier the water, the colder it has to be to turn into ice. Scientists think that the lake they’ve identified under the Martian ice cap is also briny.
“The long duration of Mars Express, and the exhausting effort made by the radar team to overcome many analytical challenges, enabled this much-awaited result, demonstrating that the mission and its payload still have a great science potential,” Dmitri Titov, Mars Express project scientist, said in a statement. “This thrilling discovery is a highlight for planetary science and will contribute to our understanding of the evolution of Mars, the history of water on our neighbor planet and its habitability.”
So, what’s next? The measurements need to be repeated, hopefully by other instruments, such as the Shallow Radar (SHARAD) on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), in order to rule out all other explanations.
But what about life on Mars? It’s the most obvious question on everyone’s mind right now. Sheltered under more than a mile of ice, the newly identified glacial lake receives far less of the harmful radiation that strikes the Martian surface. Pressure and temperature are also at more favorable levels. Then, of course, there’s water, which by our Earthly standards is essential to life. However, no one is getting carried away right now. For instance, for the water to stay liquid, it might have to be extremely briny, which life finds challenging to cope with.
Needless to say, the findings reported by the MARSIS team are incredibly exciting, despite my cautious reporting. We’re living in very interesting times!
Filer’s Files # 28 – 2018 Astronauts Saw UFOs - PART I
Glowing Orange Lights over Jamestown, New York
Filer’s Files # 28 – 2018 Astronauts Saw UFOs - PART I
In special reports, this week’s files cover: Edwin Aldrin and Neil Armstrong and UFOs, Pentagon’s Secret UFO Study and Teleportation. Book of Enoch. Atlantic Ocean Ruins. Top Secret US Air Force Europe (USAFE) report November 4, 1948. Are We Alone. Possible Sphinx on Mars, and Scientists Theorize Sex on Mars May Create New Human Subspecies.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Arizona, California, Florida, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, and Virginia.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Australia, Canada, Crete, France, Guam, Lithuania, Panama, and England in the United Kingdom.
The Filer Research Institute feels the scientific study of UFOs is for the benefit of humankind and is an important endeavor. The US Air Force investigated UFOs publicly for more than twenty years under Project Blue Book; and I continue this advanced research. I believe the God of the universe has spread life throughout the cosmos and UFO’s are visiting us in ever-increasing numbers.
Major George Filer Editor of The National UFO Center, would like to invite join him in Mt Shasta this summer July 27-29th 2018. He will present a wonderful program at the “From Venus with Love” conference.
Forward these files to your friends and neighbors.
Special Projects
Edwin Aldrin and Neil Armstrong and UFOs
According to the NASA Astronaut Neil Armstrong, the Aliens have a base on the Moon and told us in no uncertain terms to get off and stay off the Moon. According to un-confirmed reports, both Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin saw UFOs shortly after that historic landing on the Moon in Apollo 11 on 21 July 1969. I remember hearing one of the astronauts refer to a “light” in or on a crater during the television transmission, followed by a request from mission control for further information. Nothing more was heard. According to a former NASA employee Otto Binder, unnamed radio hams with their own VHF receiving facilities that bypassed NASA’s broadcasting outlets picked up the following exchange:
NASA: Whets there? Mission Control calling Apollo 11…
Apollo11: These “Babies” are huge, Sir! Enormous! OH MY GOD! You wouldn’t believe it! I’m telling you there are other spacecraft out there, Lined up on the far side of the crater edge! They’re on the Moon watching us!
A certain professor, who wished to remain anonymous, was engaged in a discussion with Neil Armstrong during a NASA symposium. Professor: What REALLY happened out there with Apollo 11?
Armstrong: It was incredible, of course we had always known there was a possibility, the fact is, we were warned off! (by the Aliens). There was never any question then of a space station or a moon city.
Professor: How do you mean “warned off”?
Armstrong: I can’t go into details, except to say that their ships were far superior to ours both in size and technology – Boy, were they big! and menacing! No, there is no question of a space station.
Professor: But NASA had other missions after Apollo 11?
Armstrong: Naturally – NASA was committed at that time, and couldn’t risk panic on Earth. But it really was aquick scoop and back
In 1979 Maurice Chatelain, former chief of NASA Communications Systems again.
Maurice Chatelain confirmed that Armstrong had indeed reported seeing two UFOs on the rim of a crater. Chatelain believes that some UFOs may come from our own solar system, specifically Titan. “The encounter was common knowledge in NASA, but nobody has talked about it until now.” “…all Apollo and Gemini flights were followed, both at a distance and sometimes also quite closely, by space vehicles of it occurred, extraterrestrial origin – flying saucers, or UFOs, if you want to call them by that name. Every time the astronauts informed Mission Control, who then ordered absolute silence.” “I think that Walter Schirra aboard Mercury 8 was the first of the astronauts to use the code name ‘Santa Claus’ to indicate the presence of flying saucers next to space capsules. However, his announcements were barely noticed by the general public. It was a little different when James Lovell on board the Apollo 8 command module came out from behind the moon and said for everybody to hear: ‘PLEASE BE INFORMED THAT THERE IS A SANTA CLAUS.’ Even though this happened on Christmas Day 1968, many people sensed a hidden meaning in those words.” The rumors persist. NASA may well be a civilian agency, but many of its programs are funded by the defense budget and most of the astronauts are subject to military security regulations. Apart from the fact that the National Security Agency screens all films and probably radio communications as well. We have the statements by Otto Binder, Dr. Garry Henderson and Maurice Chatelain that the astronauts were under strict orders not to discuss their sightings. And Gordon Cooper has testified to a United Nations committee that one of the astronauts actually witnessed a UFO on the ground. If there is no secrecy, why has this sighting not been made public? According to a Dr. Vladimir Azhazha: “Neil Armstrong relayed the message to Mission Control that two large, mysterious objects were watching them after having landed near the moon module. But this message was never heard by the public – because NASA censored it.” According to a Dr. Aleksandr Kasantsev, Buzz Aldrin took color movie film of the UFOs from inside the module, and continued filming them after he and Armstrong went outside. Armstrong confirmed that the story was true but refused to go into further detail, beyond admitting that the CIA was behind the cover-up. http://www.syti.net/UFOSightings.html
Dr. Werner von Braun stated, “We find ourselves faced by powers which are far stronger than we had hitherto assumed, and whose base is at present unknown to us.
More I cannot say at present. We are now engaged in entering into closer contact with those powers, and in six or nine months time it may be possible to speak with some precision on the matter.” Dr. Werner von Braun (on the deflection from orbit of a United States satellite, 1959)
Pentagon’s Secret UFO Study and Teleportation
“ Recent revelations about the Pentagon’s secret UFO study have generated headlines, controversy, and questions. Joining George Knapp in the first half was Eric Davis (who worked on the study) and previously studied UFOs and related phenomena, including the Skinwalker Ranch, as part of Robert Bigelow’s National Institute for Discovery Science. He discussed his work analyzing UFO files, and the latest updates on the now infamous ‘Tic Tac’ UFO incident
Davis says that the efforts of Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) and the Pentagon UFO program that was recently revealed were honest and legitimate programs to use the observed properties of UFOs to determine if they could be used or back-engineered with present or near-future technology. In fact, Davis said that he and others were tasked with researching “white papers” to determine if in at least 50 years in the future, humans could produce aircraft that could perform the observed characteristics of UFOs, which he said appear to be “tech that is not made on earth by humans.” As for skeptics who say that Navy and other pilots are poor observers whose testimony cannot be trusted, Davis said that as combat experts, “these guys cannot afford to have poor observational skills.” Davis also emphasized more than once that “poltergeist or psychic phenomena are a major aspect” of UFO encounters.
Dr. Davis conducted an important Teleportation Physics Study
Abstract : This study was tasked with the purpose of collecting information describing the teleportation of material objects, providing a description of teleportation as it occurs in physics, its theoretical and experimental status, and a projection of potential applications. The study also consisted of a search for teleportation phenomena occurring naturally or under laboratory conditions that can be assembled into a model describing the conditions required to accomplish the transfer of objects. This included a review and documentation of quantum teleportation, its theoretical basis, technological development, and its potential applications. The characteristics of teleportation were defined and physical theories were evaluated in terms of their ability to completely describe the phenomena. Contemporary physics, as well as theories that presently challenge the current physics paradigm were investigated.
Dr. Davis identified and proposed two unique physics models for teleportation that are based on the manipulation of either the general relativistic spacetime metric or the spacetime vacuum electromagnetic (zero-point fluctuations) parameters. Naturally occurring anomalous teleportation phenomena that were previously studied by the United States and foreign governments were also documented in the study and are reviewed in the report. The author proposes an additional model for teleportation that is based on a combination of the experimental results from the previous government studies and advanced physics concepts. Numerous recommendations outlining proposals for further theoretical and experimental studies are given in the report. The report also includes an extensive teleportation bibliography.
The teleportation concept appeared in episodes of popular television SciFi anthology series such as The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. But the most widely recognized pop-culture awareness of the teleportation concept began with the numerous Star Trek television and theatrical movie series of the past 39 years (beginning in 1964 with the first TV series pilot episode, The Cage), which are now an international entertainment and product franchise that was originally spawned by the late genius television writer-producer Gene Roddenberry. Because of Star Trek everyone in the world is familiar with the “transporter” device, which is used to teleport personnel and material from starship to starship or from ship to planet and vice versa at the speed of light. People or inanimate objects would be positioned on the transporter pad and become completely disintegrated by a beam with their atoms being patterned in a computer buffer and later converted into a beam that is directed toward the destination, and then reintegrated back into their original form (all without error!). “Beam me up, Scotty” is a familiar automobile bumper sticker or cry of exasperation that were popularly adopted from the series.
Davis, E. W. (2004), “Teleportation Physics Study,” Final Report AFRL-PR-ED-TR-2003-0034, Air Force Research Laboratory, Air Force Materiel Command, Edwards AFB, CA.
There are many reports of Teleportation actually occurring particularly with the help of aliens. This study admits we are studying the problem.
An ancient source of UFOs is the Book of Enoch, that describes flying in the air, but also through outer space, including the relativistic effects mentioned—Enoch spent several days on a spacecraft, but when he returned to Earth, several centuries had passed by.
In the New Testament this Enoch prophesies “to” ungodly men, that God shall come with His holy ones to judge and convict them (Jude 1:14-15).
The two distinct paths Yahshua God described will each end at diametrically opposite destinations. One path leads to life everlasting, while the other path leads to destruction…We cannot follow both paths; we must make our selection. We must choose the right way even through it is very narrow and unpopular.
Enoch allegedly taught the sons of men the art of building cities, and enacted some admirable laws. He discovered the knowledge of the Zodiac, and the course of the Planets; and he pointed out that humans should worship God, that they should fast, that they should pray, and give offerings. Enoch writes a petition on behalf of the fallen angels, or fallen ones, to be given to a higher power for ultimate judgment.
Christianity adopted some ideas from Enoch, including the Final Judgment, the concept of demons, the origins of evil and the fallen angels, and the coming of a Messiah and ultimately, a Messianic kingdom.
. Enoch is taken up to Heaven and is appointed guardian of all the celestial treasures, chief of the archangels, and the immediate attendant on God’s throne. He is subsequently taught all secrets and mysteries and, with all the angels at his back, executes God’s decrees. Enoch was also seen as the inventor of writing, and teacher of astronomy and arithmetic, all three reflecting the interpretation of his name as meaning initiated.
The Book of Enoch answers several mysteries. The age old question “why didn’t the Gods leave evidence of their stay” is answered by the very policy of non-interference. The question of why certain knowledge is kept secret is answered by the “so that you can discover it out of your own power”. The book also somewhat confirms legends and tales of an advanced people that existed before a great flood that were destroyed because things went bad. Of course, the entire tale is indirectly confirmed by other ancient sources…Sumerian, Chinese and Pre-Columbian to name a few.
The first part of the Book of Enoch describes the fall of the Watchers, the angels who fathered the Nephilim. The remainder of the book describes Enoch’s visits to heaven in the form of travels, visions and dreams, and his revelations. The Book of Enoch was removed from the Bible perhaps it revealed too much.
The first part of the book is about “The Watchers”, a group of “angel’s sent to earth to watch over humans. 200 of those angels committed transgression by having sex with humans, creating a hybrid race called the Nephilim. Of the Nephilim it is said that they were giants and savages that endangered and pillaged humanity. It is said that the “Watchers” taught humans reading, writing, weaponry, cosmetics, sorcery, about the stars, meteorology, and many other arts and that this was problematic because it robbed humans the opportunity to discover the arts by themselves. They “revealed the eternal secrets which were preserved for heaven, which men were striving to learn.” the book says.
“The Gods” were not pleased about the intervention of “The Watchers” in human affairs. (The same story of interventionists vs. non-interventionists is told in Greek Mythology, Sumerian Mythology as well as various Asian myths about the old days of mankind). Apparently there were also experiments in cross-breeding between animals and humans going on.
“And they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, who had great height and consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind. And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another’s flesh, and drink the blood.”
And then Michael, Uriel, Raphael, and Gabriel looked down from heaven and saw much blood being shed upon the earth, and all lawlessness being wrought upon the earth having sex with humans and revealed to them all kinds of sins. And the women have borne giants, and the whole earth has thereby been filled with blood and unrighteousness.
Disgusted by all this, “the Gods” decided to have a Great Flood to rid the earth of the Nephilim and other ghastly creatures. The Bible says that the Nephilim are bound beneath the earth?- until Judgment day). Then said the Great One sent word to Noah and tell him the whole earth will be destroyed, and a deluge is about to come upon the whole earth, that he may escape and his seed may be preserved.”
Another book in which the angels, sent by God, are referred to as “The Watchers” is the “Book of Jubilees”, the biblical book of Daniel and throughout ancient Jewish legend and folklore.
In the Book of Enoch “The Watchers” only became fallen angels after mating with humans and teaching them forbidden and secret knowledge which they, according to Enoch, were not ready for.
In Genesis we read the following about the Nephilim:
The relevance of the first Book of Enoch was recently strengthened when, among the Dead Sea Scrolls the “Book of Giants” was found, dated to 200 B.C. and talking about a time before the great worldwide flood when giants and dragons fought each other.
So in summary a group of angels were sent to earth as watchers. Since they had sex with humans we must assume that they had bodies, that they were present in physical form. A part of those angels became “fallen angels” because they intermixed with humans..
As a result of the sins a race of savage cannibalistic beasts that ate flesh and drank blood arose and turned paradise into a nightmarish place. The creator decided to have Earth destroyed with a Giant Flood which only a few species should survive. Some beings fled or were locked into the “Underworld/hell.” Apparently humankind are like children that need to be watched over by “The Watchers” but without too much intervention because it would stifle their maturity. Astronomical Book of Enoch contains descriptions of the movement of heavenly bodies and of the firmament, as a knowledge revealed to Enoch in his trips to Heaven guided by Uriel, and it describes a Solar calendar of 364 days.
Atlantic Ocean Ruins
In 1985, several hundred miles east of the Azores, a Russian submarine under the command of Nikolai Seleznev, was filming the ocean floor with a special deep-diving camera, when, at a depth of 120 feet, they noticed a string of stone columns and then a massive dome-topped building.
“We couldn’t believe our eyes,” he said. “We were viewing an entire city with magnificent boulevards and avenues and they were lined with what looked like temples and halls, government buildings and homes.”
Suddenly their power flickered. The engines shut down on their own and then the needles on the instruments, including clocks, began to quiver and run backward. Many of the crew began to hallucinate.
The terrifying experience ended as suddenly as it began, after about 15 minutes. (Australasian post, January 30, 1986)
Top Secret US Air Force Europe (USAFE) report November 4, 1948
One of these objects was observed by a Swedish Technical expert near his home on the edge of a lake. The object crashed or landed in the lake and he carefully noted its azimuth from his point of observation. Swedish intelligence was confident in his observations that a naval salvage team was sent to the lake. Operations were underway during the visit USAF’s officers. Divers had observed a previously uncharted crater on the floor of the lake. No further information is available but the observation was reliable and they believe that the depression on the floor of the lake, which did not appear on current hydrographic charts, was in fact caused by a flying saucer,
Are We Alone
Kevin Knuth is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Physics University at Albany, Stare University of New York writes, Are we alone? Unfortunately, neither of the answers feel satisfactory. To be alone in this vast universe is a lonely prospect. On the other hand, if we are not alone and there is someone or something more powerful out there, that too is terrifying.
As a NASA research scientist and now a professor of physics, I attended the 2002 NASA Contact Conference, which focused on serious speculation about extraterrestrials. During the meeting a concerned participant said loudly in a sinister tone, “You have absolutely no idea what is out there!” The silence was palpable as the truth of this statement sunk in. Humans are fearful of extraterrestrials visiting Earth. Perhaps fortunately, the distances between the stars are vast. At least this is what we novices, who are just learning to travel into space, tell ourselves.
I have always been interested in UFOs. Of course, there was the excitement that there could be aliens and other living worlds. But more exciting to me was the possibility that interstellar travel was technologically achievable. In 1988, during my second week of graduate school at Montana State University, several students and I were discussing a recent cattle mutilation that was associated with UFOs. A physics professor joined the conversation and told us that he had colleagues working at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, where they were having problems with UFOs shutting down nuclear missiles. At the time I thought this professor was talking nonsense. But 20 years later, I was stunned to see a recording of a press conference featuring several former US Air Force personnel, with a couple from Malmstrom AFB, describing similar occurrences in the 1960s. Clearly there must be something to this.
With July 2 being World UFO Day, it is a good time for society to address the unsettling and refreshing fact we may not be alone. I believe we need to face the possibility that some of the strange flying objects that outperform the best aircraft in our inventory and defy explanation may indeed be visitors from afar – and there’s plenty of evidence to support UFO sightings.
The Fermi paradox
The nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi was famous for posing thought provoking questions. In 1950, at Los Alamos National Laboratory after discussing UFOs over lunch, Fermi asked, “Where is everybody?” He estimated there were about 300 billion stars in the galaxy, many of them billions of years older than the sun, with a large percentage of them likely to host habitable planets. Even if intelligent life developed on a very small percentage of these planets, then there should be a number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. Depending on the assumptions, one should expect anywhere from tens to tens of thousands of civilizations.
With the rocket-based technologies that we have developed for space travel, it would take between 5 and 50 million years for a civilization like ours to colonize our Milky Way galaxy. Since this should have happened several times already in the history of our galaxy, one should wonder where is the evidence of these civilizations? This discrepancy between the expectation that there should be evidence of alien civilizations or visitations and the presumption that no visitations have been observed has been dubbed the Fermi Paradox.
Carl Sagan correctly summarized the situation by saying that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The problem is that there has been no single well-documented UFO encounter that would alone qualify as the smoking gun. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that many governments around the world have covered upand classifiedinformation aboutsuch encounters. But there are enough scraps of evidence that suggest that the problem needs to be open to scientific study.
Cover of the October 1957 issue of pulp science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. This was a special edition devoted to ‘flying saucers,’ which became a national obsession after airline pilot Kenneth Arnold sighted a saucer-shaped flying objects in 1947.
UFOs, taboo for professional scientists
When it comes to science, the scientific method requires hypotheses to be testable so that inferences can be verified. UFO encounters are neither controllable nor repeatable, which makes their study extremely challenging. But the real problem, in my view, is that the UFO topic is taboo.
While the general public has been fascinated with UFOs for decades, our governments, scientists and media, have essentially declared that of all the UFO sightings are a result of weather phenomenon or human actions. None are actually extraterrestrial spacecraft. UFOs are off-limits to serious scientific study and rational discussion..
I think UFO skepticism has become something of a religion with an agenda, discounting the possibility of extraterrestrials without scientific evidence, while often providing silly hypotheses describing only one or two aspects of a UFO encounter reinforcing the popular belief that there is a conspiracy. A scientist must consider all of the possible hypotheses that explain all of the data, and since little is known, the extraterrestrial hypothesis cannot yet be ruled out. In the end, the skeptics often do science a disservice by providing a poor example of how science is to be conducted. The fact is that many of these encounters defy conventional explanation.
The media amplifies the skepticism by publishing information about UFOs when it is exciting, but always with a mocking or whimsical tone assuring the public that it can’t possibly be true. But there are credible witnesses and encounters. Kevin Knuth This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed
Possible Sphinx on Mars
NASA photographs of rock formations onMars have been interpreted as a 200 foot-tall Sphinx statue, possibly built by ancient alien civilizations, it has been spectacularly claimed. By Sebastian Kettley
Life on Mars: Did NASA capture a Sphinx photo on the surface of Mars
Online UFO hunter and self-appointed space journalist Joe White claims to have stumbled upon the crumbling remains of a long-forgotten alien Sphinx statue on Mars. Mr. White presented his bizarre claim to the public after combing through hundreds of NASA photos taken by the space agency’s Curiosity Rover. The bizarre rock formation in question at first glance appears to be reminiscent of an ancient Egyptian Sphinx statue, sparking fierce debate online. Mr. White shared the image online on his YouTube channel under the title “GIANT 200 ft SPHINX found on MARS”.
Scientists Theorize Sex on Mars May Create New Human Subspecies
Jen Krausz reports having sex on Mars could lead to a new human subspecies, an international team of scientists theorized in a new paper published in the journal Futures.
The paper found many problems with potential reproduction on Mars, the biggest being the low-gravity environment, which is about a third of Earth’s, the New York Post reported. Astronauts who have spent months or years in space have found muscles deteriorate rapidly and bone structure can be weakened without Earth’s heavier gravity.
While scientists have studied the impacts of low gravity on adult astronauts, they have never studied pregnant women or children before and don’t even know if it’s possible to carry a baby to term in low gravity.
Researchers from Poland, Brazil, and Florida contributed to the paper, noting that it may be important to reproduce on Mars to sustain a colony there.
“A manned mission to Mars and the establishment of the first human settlement in outer space was once a mere figment of science fiction, but is now being planned and expected to take place in the following 20 years,” the scientists wrote, The Sun reported.
Other potential problems with sex and reproduction on Mars include possible low sperm counts from increased radiation, a weakened immune response from lower gravity, and even erectile dysfunction from low blood pressure often experienced in low gravity conditions, The Sun reported.
Genetic engineering could resolve some of the issues surrounding sex and reproduction off-planet, but may render the offspring created incapable of life on Earth, the scientists theorized. With low gravity giants may be produced. Thanks to Newsmax
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:FILER FILES - overzicht met foto's met dank aan Georges Filer en WWW.nationalUFOCenter.com (ENG)
Filer’s Files # 28 – 2018 Astronauts Saw UFOs - PART II
Filer’s Files # 28 – 2018 Astronauts Saw UFOs - PART II
UFO Sightings in the United States
Arizona Lights
Gilbert — My wife was on the balcony saw something and called me outside on December 31. 2017. When I saw these orbs (4 to 7 at one time) hovering, then ascending, then descending etc.
I immediately got my phone and asked my wife to get hers. I knew these were orbs because of the way they moved. They danced in the night sky, one or two changed from white to reddish, then green, and back to bright white, then some faded away. The others then continued to change their position until at the end there were three left which lined up vertically over each other and merged into one. When it appeared to be just one it changed into many colors and drifted away.. These images show structure, shape, lights that were at first unseen. Thanks to MUFON CMS
California Object
Los Angeles — It was Wednesday, July 4, 2018, and we were sitting on the roof watching the fireworks in the Los Angeles area. We noticed a few drones flying around. When we turned to face west, we noticed 4 objects to be a larger than a drone off in the distance. Their movements also didn’t resemble that of a drone. They were moving in a back and forth pattern with one of the objects staying stationary far above the other. They left a trailing flame as they were moving and a few minutes the objects vanished. We looked online to see if anyone else had posted regarding that sighting that same day and we found one video from Los Angeles and two with the exact same patterns posted from Denver, CO and Bothell, WA. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Florida Orbs
Orlando— Taking the dog out and looking at clouds I see a white light blinking across sky slowly. When on camera you can only see white light but there was red too. I lost it going behind tree I felt lucky.
Later I looked at recording and saw little black things were zooming past. I had to slow it by frame then I saw this thing with red round front and black tail like. It went so fast it was only in 3 frames. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Montana Object
Helena — I was outside working in the yard and I lay down on the lawn and looked up at the sky on July 9, 2018. I noticed a white colored object almost directly overhead. I thought that it might be someone with a drone which concerned me as it would be directly in the flight path of the local regional airport. I decided to try to see it better by getting our old telescope I had in my garage. I was able to see that it wasn’t a drone as it was very stable and didn’t appear to be moving. The oval shaped object had a dozen bright white lights around one side. I watched it for awhile and noticed it was very slowly moving north. The lights would shift to a different location on the object. I tried to zoom in on it with my cell phone camera, but it only appeared as a white dot with little to no detail.
Note: Social media chatter has revealed that the object was a balloon used to reflect cell phone signals. It is not known if the balloon was experimental or operative. Thanks to William Puckett, Director Http://www.UFOsnw.com
New Jersey Lights
Totowa–My husband, sister and I were in my backyard on June 22, 2018, when suddenly my sister noticed these lights. We all looked up and started recording. At first I thought they were lanterns, but they were coming in the same perfect direction. One after another they came, sometimes right away, sometimes with a minute difference. They were moving to the left as another one would come, and move until we could not see them anymore. My son (15 years old) freaked out, But I knew it was not helicopters or drones because there was no noise. Thanks to MUFON CMS
New York Light
Glowing Orange Lights over Jamestown, New York
Jamestown — My wife and I were sitting out back of our house on July 9, 2018, and my wife exclaimed. “Wow Look at that glowing light” “Oh look there’s another!” I turned around and saw the second one clearly. It was an bright orange glowing orb moving rapidly north east. It was about the size of a softball, I grabbed my camera, came out the front door and captured a picture of the second translucent-colored orb. Ii was certainly very, very strange to see these bright orange glowing orbs 5 – 6 minutes. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Ohio Lights
Celina— Husband and I were sitting on porch in Hamilton Ohio and saw 2 large red orbs on July 7, 2018. They was no sound and they were floating in same direction one behind the other. We knew they were not planes or helicopters. Ten minutes later I got a message from my daughter in Celina Ohio freaking out that she just saw the same thing and got pics of them and sent them to me which is what I am reporting now. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Oregon Lights
Coos Bay— I was outside and decided to use snap chat to take a photo of the sky on July 1, 2018 7, 2018. There was nothing in the sky, before or after, but sure enough in the photo there was something. I love near an air port and coast guard, so all of the planes and helicopters fly relatively low, where as this was above where they fly. Thanks to MUFON CMS
TennesseeOrb
Oak Ridge — Me and a friend noticed some cool storm clouds with lightning so I pulled out my phone and started taking burst photos to capture the lightning bolts on March 17, 2018. Later upon review I noticed a disc-shaped object that was glowing white. The photos were taken in the Dick’s parking lot in Oak Ridge near Y-12 National Laboratory. I have the full burst set of photos to prove the legitimacy of my photos. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Virginia Orb
Roanoke— On July 5, 2018 I was hiking and taking pictures at the Blue Ridge Parkway near Roanoke Mountain, I did not notice the UFO until I was reviewed the photos I took that day. My take of the object on my picture I thought was a screen error or lens flare. The clouds were very low that day so I would not have directly seen the UFO because the lighting that day. Could be a light/lens flare, however if you look at the object it has light and shade characteristics. I used a Samsung Galaxy 6+ phone to take pictures. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Worldwide UFO Sightings
Australia Orb and Football
Kalamunda–I was sent the attached video by my friend who wanted to know if I knew what the blue object to the left of the sun was on May 23, 2018 at 11.54am in Western Australia. I watched the video and noticed a white object quickly move from top center of the frame down to the right passed the sun and it disappears out of frame at the bottom right of the frame. it appears in the video at about seven seconds and is gone again in less than a second. I have no idea what the object is.
Adelaide— Walking my dog at distance directly in front of me I saw a large football shape dark object slowly cruise west rapidly gained incredible speed on July 10, 2018. It changed direction south until out of view. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Canada Orb
Toronto— I was taking photos downtown and an object turned up on a photo on July 9, 2018.
Then a peculiar airplane flew over.
Thanks to MUFON CMS
Crete Orange Orb
Kalathas, Chania — My wife and I went for a night walk on the beach to watch the stars and look out for UFOs (if we’re lucky) as we often do. It was a windy night on July 10, 2018, so we decided to watch the waves from the car. We instantly spotted an orange orb just above the sea.! A ball of orange light was hovering and also moving to all directions around the same spot just on the horizon. Its light was slightly fading in and out until it completely disappeared about 5 minutes later. We both have seen UFOs before and we usually get crazy excited. This time it was as if it was an every day event, we didn’t feel the excitement we usually do. Thanks to MUFON CMS
France Lights
Lyaud— I went out to observe the moon on June 21, 2018. I decided to take a picture of it. I go get my camera and when I came out, barely a minute later.,
I see west of the moon, two “bright spots” that appeared meanwhile, I just had time to take a snapshot before they disappear.
Thanks to MUFON CMS
Guam Light Beam
Agana Springs— When I returned home . I noticed a weird nice pink cloud in the sky on September 9, 2018 so I broke out my iPhone and started taking pictures. When I got back in my house, in the first picture I noticed a BEAM coming from the sky to the roof of my nephews house!!! It was Blue Green, so I looked at the rest of the pics , and in 7-8 pics there’s 5-6 objects in the pink cloud. I know there genuine!! So you can put them through any test! I think these pics are important. I live RIGHT under the flight path of Guam’s major airport. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Lithuania Lights
Vilnius — Went to balcony for some reason, looked north and saw a red bright light 300 meters away.
I saw it shining for 2 seconds and then it just disappeared.
This sighting occurred on July 12, 2018,
Thanks to MUFON CMS
Panama Lights
David— It was Friday March 9th, 2018, when four of us gathered at the front terrace of our home at David, Province of Chiriqui, Panamá, It was 8:30 p.M, when one of the old ladies, suddenly, stopped her conversation and pointed her finger to the eastern black sky at the distance of 10 km, a brilliant light with strong red/orange and yellow lights. That thing was hovering for two minutes, then moves towards us, and then stopped, then quickly disappeared very fast to a southeast path. This situation is very strange because we live in the second city of importance in Panamá) and the airport is closed after 6:30 p.m. We heard no noise. Thanks to MUFON CMS
UK Triangle
Swansea == I take my dog’s on a short walk in the evenings around 10pm and in this particular evening on November 23, 2017, I was walking past the local catholic school and I looked up into the night sky and saw a sort of triangle shaped object. There were four white lights two on each side and there was a red light at the top of the object. There was no noise and as it passed over my head it changed course and flew away into the distance. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Support Earth Changing Research
Please Help
Buy a Great DVD
I have put together a DVD of the last twenty years of Filer’s Files for you with hundreds of great photographs and UFO sightings that will explain the phenomena and the importance to your life and your family. Additionally, I have included my book within the DVD that includes George Ritter’s exciting abduction story told by Linda Moulton Howe. Broadcaster David E. Twichell joined me to write the book. We are asking for a donation of only $50 that includes next year’s subscription and our book. Please include your e-mail address and mailing address.
Our research is uncovering amazing truths by solving challenging projects deemed too difficult by other firms. We have had some success in finding missing persons. We could use your help in getting more results from our research. I have put together a DVD of the last seventeen years of Filer’s Files for you with hundreds of great photographs and UFO sightings. Additionally, I have decided to include my book within the DVD that includes George Ritter’s exciting abduction story told by Linda Moulton Howe. Broadcaster David E. Twichell joined me to write the book. We are asking for a donation of only $50 that includes next year’s subscription and our book. Please include your e-mail address and mailing address.
Have been digging through the giant DVD you sent recently. As a relatively recent joiner, I was unaware of the years’ worth of consistent reports of the same types of objects all over. This has been very educational. Just wanted to thank you for all you’ve done. Bruce W. Freeman Attorney at Law
Sign me up right now for Filer’s Files.
I have put together a DVD of the last seventeen years of Filer’s Files for you with hundreds of great photographs and UFO sightings that will explain the phenomena and the importance to your life and your family. Additionally, I have included my book within the DVD that includes George Ritter’s exciting abduction story told by Linda Moulton Howe. Broadcaster David E. Twichell joined me to write the book. We are asking for a donation of only $50 that includes next year’s subscription and our book. Please include your e-mail address and mailing address. Please use this link to receive this offer.
JOIN MUFON!
Become a MUFON member today! Benefits of membership include a subscription to the monthly UFO Journal that contains current investigations, sightings reports, articles by world-renowned researchers and more. To join now, click here JOIN NOW
Yet another great plot for a science fiction novel is about to become reality instead. A renowned futurologist has laid out the plan for how robots will acquire human minds, then attend the funerals of the mind’s human body … by 2050. That means we’re a mere three decades away from immortality through robotics … well, those who will be able to afford it are. Should you wait to see how the novel ends before saving your money?
In a post on his Futurizon blog, Dr. Ian Pearson – former member of parliament, author, lecturer and creator of 1800+ inventions including text messaging and the active contact lens – gives his own somewhat dystopian views on the inevitable road to human androidization and beyond, which he sees occurring by 2050. He begins by predicting that we will arrive at the point with “99% of your mind is running on external IT rather than in the meat-ware in your head.” With your mind not in the clouds but in the ‘cloud’, the next step will then be easy:
“Assuming you saved enough and prepared well, you connect to an android to use as your body from now on, attend your funeral, and then carry on as before, still you, just with a younger, highly upgraded body.”
To brace readers for the big prediction/warning/plot-turn, Pearson first gives little warnings about how this will be expensive – while servers are cheap, robots are not.
“Some people may need to wait until 2060 or later until android price falls enough for them to afford one.”
Wait? Humans? Really? There must be a way to get our robotic containers for our human minds right away and at a reasonable price, right Dr. Pearson?
“Maybe your continued existence is paid for as part of an extended company medical plan.”
That’s one alternative Pearson proposes, assuming medical insurance is still around in 2050. However (there’s always a ‘however’), letting someone else own or lease your robotic body may allow them (read the fine print) to own, lease or at least access your mind, using it for good (allowing it to continue to write funny stuff for your readers) or bad (cloning an evil mind into millions of copies or adding it to a collective that will someday take over the world).
It gets worse. What if the medical plan goes bankrupt paying for replacement android bodies for millions of its immortal or vain clients? Perhaps you saw this coming and set up a fund for your children, grandchildren and beyond to pay for your upgrades and keep your robotic body in good working order. If they didn’t always listen to you when you were human, will they listen to your android self?
“After all, they know you know they have kids or grand-kids in school that need paid for, and homes don’t come cheap, and they really need that new kitchen.”
Grandpa, would you deprive your great-grandchildren of a new iPhone 500 UltraPlus just so you can have a titanium cranium?
But I “need” a titanium cranium!
OK, maybe letting a corporation specifically designed for the purpose of managing and upgrading cyborgs in return for using enough of your mind to pay for it isn’t such a bad idea. After all, businesses always have your best interests in mind, right?
“[Then] you could stay immortal, unable to die, stuck forever as just a corporate asset, a mere slave.”
Is this inevitable? Dr. Pearson claims to have an 85 percent accuracy record when looking 10 to 15 years into the future. Should we trust his predictions/warnings for 30?
Do we already know how this novel will end? Will it be worth attending your own funeral?
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
27-28 July 2018 – Longest Lunar Eclipse This Century
27-28 July 2018 – Longest Lunar Eclipse This Century
The longest "Blood Moon" eclipse this century will coincide with Mars' closest approach in 15 years to offer skygazers a thrilling astronomical double bill on Friday, astronomers say.
For about half the world, the moon will be partly or fully in Earth's shadow from 17.14 to 23.28 GMT - six hours and 14 minutes in all.
The period of complete eclipse, known as "totality", when the moon appears darkest will last from 19.30 to 21.13 GMT.
Totality will last for 103 minutes, making it the longest eclipse of the 21st century. At the same time, Mars will hover near the moon in the night sky, easily visible with the naked eye.
Our neighbouring planet will appear unusually large and bright, a mere 57.7 million kilometers (35.9 million miles) from Earth on its elliptical orbit around the sun.
"We have a rare and interesting conjunction of phenomena," Pascal Descamps, an astronomer with the Paris Observatory, told AFP.
"We should have a coppery red tint on the moon with Mars the 'Red Planet' just next to it, very bright and with a slight orange hue itself."
Amateur astronomers in the southern hemisphere will be best-placed to enjoy the spectacle, especially those in southern Africa, Australia, India and Madagascar, though it will also be visible in Europe and South America.
The long duration of this eclipse is partly due to the fact that the moon will make a near-central passage through Earth's umbra—the darkest, most central part of the shadow.
Our constant companion will also be at the farthest point on its orbit from Earth, making its movement across the sky slower from our perspective, thus spending longer in the dark.
In the middle of a lunar eclipse it can look as if a red planet has taken up residence near the Earth—they are both eerie and beautiful and I'll certainly be looking out for it, reports phys.org.
Io is small, but it’s the most volcanically active world in our solar system. It has hundreds of active volcanoes. Now the Juno spacecraft has found one more.
Image generated from data collected last December via NASA’s Juno spacecraft. It’s a new hot spot now thought to be a previously unknown volcano.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM.
When it comes to volcanoes, we naturally tend to think of big eruptions like the recent ones in Hawaii or Mount St. Helens in Washington state, best known for its major 1980 eruption. Earth is a volcanically active planet, but there is another place in the solar system even more active, and that is Jupiter’s moon Io. In fact, Io is the most volcanically active body in the whole solar system, as far as we know. Space scientists have discovered more than 400 volcanoes on Io so far, with about 150 erupting at any given time, and now scientists think they’ve discovered yet another one, announced on July 13, 2018.
The possible new volcano was found in data sent back by NASA’s Juno spacecraft, which is currently orbiting Jupiter. Although Juno’s mission focuses on Jupiter itself, it can sometimes observe some of the moons also, from a distance. On December 16, 2017, Juno’s Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument discovered a new heat source close to the south pole of Io that might be an undiscovered volcano. Juno was about 290,000 miles (470,000 km) away from Io at the time. As explained by Alessandro Mura, a Juno co-investigator from the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome:
The new Io hotspot JIRAM picked up is about 200 miles (300 km) from the nearest previously mapped hotspot. We are not ruling out movement or modification of a previously discovered hot spot, but it is difficult to imagine one could travel such a distance and still be considered the same feature.
Colorful Io as seen by the Galileo spacecraft in 1997.
Image via NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.
The Voyagers 1 and 2, Galileo, Cassini and New Horizons spacecraft, as well as ground-based observatories, all have seen Io’s volcanoes. Why is Io such a volcanically active world? According to NASA:
Io’s surface is covered by sulfur in different colorful forms. As Io travels in its slightly elliptical orbit, Jupiter’s immense gravity causes ‘tides’ in the solid surface that rise 300 feet (100 meters) high on Io, generating enough heat for volcanic activity and to drive off any water. Io’s volcanoes are driven by hot silicate magma.
In other words, Jupiter’s gravity squeezes Io – which is the innermost of the four large Galilean satellites – like a rubber ball. The squeezing results in volcanoes.
Even the New Horizons spacecraft, en route to Pluto, caught a glimpse of Io’s volcanoes. This image show a giant plume from the Tvashtar volcano.
Image via NASA.
Close-up view of one of Io’s volcanoes, as seen by the Galileo spacecraft on February 22, 2000. Image via NASA/JPL.
Mosaic of images from Voyager 1 showing Io’s south polar region.
Image via NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory/USGS.
Io’s sulfuric volcanic plumes can reach up to 250 miles (400 km) high or higher, putting on an incredible ongoing display. In contrast, the highest Mount St. Helens plume on May 18, 1980 reached about 19 miles (31 km), and the highest plume from Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines – known for its powerful 1991 eruption – got as far as 27 miles (45 km). So you see Io’s volcanoes really are explosive! Learn why at this article at Wired.
Io’s volcanic activity is so extensive that it can resurface the entire surface of this Jovian moon in only about a million years. The volcanic activity is the result of tidal heating, where the moon is “stretched” by Jupiter’s strong gravitational pull as well as the lesser gravitational effects of the other satellites. Io also has mountains, some of which are as tall as our earthly Mount Everest even though Io itself is a much smaller world than Earth.
In 2013, it was announced that Io’s volcanos are not concentrated where scientists thought they would be, and are shifted eastward for some reason. According to Christopher Hamilton of the University of Maryland, College Park, lead author of a paper about this research published January 1, 2013, in Earth and Planetary Science Letters:
Our analysis supports the prevailing view that most of the heat is generated in the asthenosphere, but we found that volcanic activity is located 30 to 60 degrees east from where we expect it to be. We performed the first rigorous statistical analysis of the distribution of volcanoes in the new global geologic map of Io. We found a systematic eastward offset between observed and predicted volcano locations that can’t be reconciled with any existing solid body tidal heating models.
Model of the possible interior composition of Io and various surface features.
Image via Wikipedia Commons/Kelvinsong.
Juno will continue to monitor Io periodically during the rest of its mission, until at least July 2021.
Bottom line: Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system, with over 400 volcanoes discovered so far and about 150 erupting at any given time. Now, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has discovered what appears to be yet another volcano on Io, with many more likely waiting to be found.
GOTCHA A new machine, shaped sort of like a five-fingered arcade claw, gently encloses soft-bodied sea creatures (like this cephalopod) to study before releasing them, unharmed, back into the ocean.
Like a submarine Poké Ball, a new robotic device gently captures and releases deep-sea creatures without a scratch. This critter catcher could be decked out with cameras and other sensors to give scientists an unprecedented view of life in one of Earth’s most mysterious environments.
The contraption, designed to be mounted on a remotely operated underwater vehicle, folds into a 12-sided box about 21 centimeters across. Using a joystick, an operator on board a nearby ship can carefully close this box around soft-bodied creatures, like jellies and cephalopods, that might be hurt or killed by other specimen-collection tools. Temporarily detaining creatures inside the enclosure, described online July 18 in Science Robotics, would create rare opportunities for closeup inspection of otherwise elusive deep-sea creatures.
Deep-sea free-floaters, including some jellyfish and their gelatinous ilk, are “sometimes considered the forgotten fauna,” says study coauthor David Gruber, a marine biologist at Baruch College, City University of New York. While many biologists survey the hustle and bustle of the seafloor, homing in on small creatures in open water is much more difficult, he says, so our understanding of these animals is “almost a blank slate.”
Researchers have a few tools in their arsenals for capturing open-water animals and bringing them to the surface for examination. Unfortunately, nets or suction devices well suited for nabbing sturdy deep-sea dwellers, like fish and crustaceans, can shred fragile life-forms like comb jellies and siphonophores (SN: 7/16/05, p. 46). The new creature-catching gadget offers “a really cool” way to handle the deep sea’s most delicate residents more gently, says Kelly Robinson, a biological oceanographer at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette not involved in the work.
CATCH AND RELEASE Watch how a new submarine “Poké Ball” nabs squishy sea creatures, like jellies and cephalopods, for examination before letting them go back into the ocean.
Zhi Ern Teoh, a mechanical engineer at Cooper Perkins Inc., an engineering firm based in Lexington, Mass., and colleagues tested their device in an underwater canyon in Monterey Bay off the coast of California. The researchers trapped and released jellyfish and squid up to 700 meters below the surface, but their machine is designed to work as deep as 11 kilometers.
Encasing animals inside this robotic box “is really the first step among many,” Gruber says. The team now hopes to rig the machine with 3-D cameras, DNA-swabbing technology and other sensors to gather information on specimens’ physiology. The chamber could also be equipped with instruments to tag animals before they’re released back into the ocean.
Using this technology to inspect deep-sea life on its home turf would be far less stressful for animals than bringing them up to the surface. At sea level, “you’ve got pressure changes, temperature changes, light changes and people staring at them,” says George Matsumoto, a marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, Calif., where Teoh and colleagues tested their device.
Observations of sea creatures in their element may reveal more about what they eat, where they travel, how they are reacting to changing climate conditions, as well as uncover new species. Given that we know “virtually nothing” about the deep sea, “almost anything we come up with is going to be useful information,” Matsumoto says.
Scientists have uncovered a "a stable body of liquid water" on Mars, in what some are calling a "game changer" in the search for alien life.
What is believed to be liquid water is sitting below Mars' southern polar ice cap and is described as a "well-defined, 20-kilometer-wide zone." 20 kilometers is roughly 12.5 miles.
The findings, which are published in the journal Science, were made possibly by Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS), an instrument that resides on the Mars Express spacecraft. MARSIS surveyed Mars' Planum Australe region between May 2012 and December 2015 and utilized radar pulses, sending them through the surface and the polar ice caps, ultimately measuring how the radio waves came back.
The pulses that came back created the aforementioned "well-defined, 20-kilometer-wide zone" and found that the radar reflected the brightness of the liquid water. The study's abstract notes that it is surrounded by "much less reflective areas," a sign that it is indeed water.
The team that wrote the study, including lead author Professor Roberto Orosei, have ruled out any other causes for the brightness.
Speaking with the BBC, Orosei said it probably isn't "a very large lake," but added that this is a body of water and not runoff from a glacier or something else.
"This really qualifies this as a body of water. A lake, not some kind of meltwater filling some space between rock and ice, as happens in certain glaciers on Earth," Orosei told the British media giant.
Following news of the findings, social media was understandably enthused, with some wondering what it might mean for the search for extraterrestrial life.
Miriam Kramer✔@mirikramer
·
A 12-mile, underground lake may have been found on Mars. What could live there?
The presence of liquid water at the bottom of the Martian polar ice caps was first theorized more than 30 years ago, the researchers said, but it had been "inconclusively debated ever since." With the stunning findings, that debate is likely to be put to bed.
The water is likely to be below the freezing point for water (32°F or 0°C) given its location beneath the ice cap, but the presence of minerals such as magnesium, calcium and sodium perchlorate in the soil of the northern plains of Mars, "support the presence of liquid water at the base of the polar deposits."
The presence of these minerals could help form a brine with the water, which would allow it to remain liquid, a reaction that already exists on Earth in areas like Antarctica.
Despite the obvious excitement surrounding the findings, Mars' surface is "inhospitable to life," according to the Open University's Dr. Manish Patel, and researchers are not any closer to finding life than they were prior to the announcement.
“This is just one small study area; it is an exciting prospect to think there could be more of these underground pockets of water elsewhere, yet to be discovered," Orosei said in a statement on the European Space Agency's website.
Nonetheless, Wednesday's announcement is garnering significant attention, something Dmitri Titov, ESA’s Mars Express project scientist, called a "much-awaited result."
“This thrilling discovery is a highlight for planetary science and will contribute to our understanding of the evolution of Mars, the history of water on our neighbor planet and its habitability,” Titov said.
LAS VEGAS - Those secret UFO files at the Pentagon are still secret, but not for a lack of trying.
Thousands of researchers have filed requests via the Freedom of Information Act, hoping to force the military to unleash documents or videos generated during the secret study. The main contractor for the Pentagon was a Las Vegas company.
So far, the Pentagon hasn't complied with any of the requests for more information. But now, the I-Team has obtained key documents related to the UFO inquiry.
The Pentagon's release last December of a 2004 encounter between pilots from the USS Nimitz and a mystery machine dubbed the Tic Tac UFO generated huge headlines and demands for more releases.
Two more followed. The Gimbal video from 2015 and another nicknamed Go Fast. As many as two dozen more videos are still in the Pentagon vaults, according to the man who ran the military's secret UFO study for years.
(This image is from U.S. military footage of the Gimbal)
"AATIP (Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program) did find a lot of stuff. This wasn't just a one-off looking at the Nimitz incident. There were many incidents we looked at, and we looked at them on a continuing basis," said Luis Elizondo.
During his time running the AATIP program, Elizondo set into motion the release of these and other videos. He doesn't know if the spigot has been turned off now that he is longer there. Since October, he's been working with To the Stars Academy to help change the perception of the UFO issue, particularly in Washington. And without revealing too much, Elizondo hints that progress is being made.
"It's about changing the paradigm in which our government can finally take this issue seriously without worrying about their political survival, right, allowing Congress to have a conversation in open or closed session saying, all right guys, gals, what do we do about this?"
"What we can talk about now is, should this scientific study continue, that's already been started? That's huge, volumes and volumes of stuff, we now have the basis for doing it," said Sen. Harry Reid, former Senate Majority Leader.
Reid instigated the Pentagon study back in 2007 but kept it secret. Since his role was revealed last year, he's had calls from many others in Congress and believes there have likely been classified briefings involving military eyewitnesses.
Reid fought hard to keep AATIP going, as revealed in a 2009 letter obtained by the I-Team. He also wants the study to be made public. The Pentagon has yet to release any files, but some information is dribbling out.
"You've got these advanced aerospace vehicles flying around, that we don't know where they come from, what the intent is, possibly off-world even," said Dr. Hal Puthoff, physicist.
In June, physicist Hal Puthoff made the first public presentation about the UFO study. He was the chief scientist for BAASS (Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies), the Las Vegas company which won a Pentagon contract to study UFOs and related mysteries.
In his presentation, Puthoff listed the subjects explored in dozens of scientific studies initiated by BAASS: Star Trek worthy topics -- warp drive, invisibility, metamaterials but the titles and authors have not been released -- until now. The list made public for the first time includes subjects such as worm holes, antigravity and how to track hypersonic vehicles, and more.
Puthoff said his group has studied unknown materials recovered from crash sites. Make of that what you will. Elizondo says TTSA (To the Stars Academy) is actively looking for unusual materials so they can be analyzed.
"You don't know when you pick up a piece or have delivered a piece of metallic slag, could it be from a vehicle we've never seen before or could it be part of an alternator from a 1984 Cadillac? You don't know. We have to be careful," Elizonda said.
He doesn't know if more UFO videos will be released but says there is big news coming about the ones already made public. The Gimbal video, for instance. He points out that the pilots didn't encounter just one UFO.
Mars en bloedmaan samen aan de hemel. Volgens onze voorouders was dit een teken van de apocalyps
Mars en bloedmaan samen aan de hemel. Volgens onze voorouders was dit een teken van de apocalyps
De bloedmaan komt eraan en wordt vergezeld door Mars, de god van de oorlog. Mars staat op vrijdag het dichtst bij de aarde in 15 jaar, wat ervoor zorgt dat de planeet zowel groot als helder aan de hemel staat. Dit is een ideaal moment om de rode planeet waar te nemen.
Mars is gemakkelijk met het blote oog te herkennen aan de hemel, als een heldere, roodachtige ‘ster’.
De laatste keer dat Mars groter en helderder was dan normaal, was in 2003. Gedurende twee weken zal de rode planeet zelfs nog helderder zijn dan Jupiter.
Brenger van doem
Daarnaast wordt vrijdag de langste maansverduistering van de eeuw verwacht. Dit fenomeen joeg onze voorouders schrik aan en wordt in sommige delen van de wereld nog steeds gezien als brenger van doem.
Het maximum van de totale maansverduistering vindt plaats om 22.22 uur. Vanuit Nederland en België is het grootste gedeelte van de eclips zichtbaar, maar het begin moeten wij missen.
Erg indrukwekkend
Een totale maansverduistering kan erg indrukwekkend zijn. Tijdens de totaliteit, die duurt van 21.31 uur tot 23.14 uur, valt er geen direct zonlicht meer op de maan.
Een klein beetje zonlicht valt nog op het maanoppervlak. Dit is met name rood licht, waardoor er een rode gloed over de maan komt. Deze fase wordt ook wel bloedmaan genoemd, en duurt ruim 1,5 uur.
Is Buffalo, New York, the new UFO hotspot of the U.S.? Does television station WKBW need to hire a reporter devoted to UFO sightings? Or does WKBW already have an on-the-UFO weathercaster trying to get a leg up on the competition with more accurate forecasts directly from outer space? Or is this just another ‘sweeps week’ promotion to compete with Shark Week? Whatever the reason, WKBW, ABC Channel 7 in Buffalo, has broadcast not one but two UFOs during weather reports just seven days apart. Is it time for meteorologist Autumn Lewandowski to frizz her hair and starting yelling “Aliens!”?
The first sighting occurred on June 14th during the late night news. Meteorologist Andy Parker was making his nighttime forecast when he and his viewing audience witnessed a fast-moving bright light zipping across the screen (around :07 on the video). Parker acknowledged it, wondered if it was a meteor and promised to put it on Facebook, where the comments ranged from aliens to bugs to meteors – in other words, no one, including Parker, knew exactly what they saw.
What most TV weather reporters really see.
That would have been the end of the story … except it happened again at the same station exactly one week later. This time it was an hour earlier and the meteorologist was Autumn Lewandowski, who did viewers a favor and stopped the video before the UFO whizzed by the Skywatch7 camera on the roof. Unlike Andy, she speculated this one was a drone, since it stayed low and parallel to the ground. However, it moved too fast to identify … unlike the stationary INMO (identified non-moving object) right behind it which Autumn correctly predicts with 100 percent certainty (highly unusual for a meteorologist) that it is a planet.
Buffalo as seen from a UFO
So, is Buffalo a new UFO hotspot or an old bug zapper or drone attractor? Sites like UFOStalker don’t seem to indicate that eastern Lake Erie or upstate New York have any more sightings than nearby locations. The two TV station sightings are different yet similar in that they only “kind of” look like meteors or drones. With cameras everywhere, UFO sightings SHOULD be more numerous and more easily identifiable.
And yet … they’re not. While it’s easy to poke fun (they’re meteorologists who look at the sky for a living – shouldn’t they know by now what they’re seeing?), the fact is that the skies are filling up with more objects that more cameras are recording. Those who want to believe or are convinced something is being hidden from us are being bombarded with more things to filter out. Is that intentional? Perhaps. By whom?
Maybe WKBW has its cameras pointing in the wrong direction.
The strange saga of Truman Bethurum – a man who, in the early 1950s, claimed flirty encounters with a hot space-babe named Aura Rhanes – is one which provokes either hoots of derision or deep intrigue. I have friends who fall into the former category and others who fall into the latter. A good case can be made, though, that Bethurum’s encounters were born out of a combination of sleep paralysis and a yearning for something beyond two failed marriages. But, according to Bethurum, it wasn’t all fun and flirty action.
On two occasions, Bethurum said, he encountered Aura Rhanesunder circumstances very different to those which occurred out in the desert, with Rhanes’ huge flying saucer and her crew of little men in view. These additional encounters saw Rhanes operating in what can only be termed disguise. There was nothing flirty or friendly about these close encounters, however: they were downright hostile. The first occurred around 3:00 a.m. – a time when a wealth of supernatural activity typically occurs – one August 1952 morning.
Bethurum and a work friend, “Whitey,” had just finished their shift and decided to head off in Whitey’s pick-up truck to a favorite, all-night diner in Glendale, Nevada. Whitey was someone who Bethurum had quietly confided in about his experiences with Aura Rhanes. He was also someone who, although fascinated by Bethurum’s claims, was somewhat skeptical of the story. That is, until they entered the diner. Any skepticism Whitey had was very soon to be wiped out. As the pair sat and drank coffee and ate pie, a noticeably quiet Whitey elbowed Bethurum in the ribs and motioned him to take a look at the end of the counter. Bethurum looked up. He was amazed and shocked to see Aura Rhanes, and an equally small male individual, standing there.
“It’s her, isn’t it?” asked Whitey. Bethurum nodded, pretty much in a state of near-shock. Both men watched carefully as Rhanes and her colleague took seats at a window table. In stark contrast to everyone else in the diner, Rhanes was dressed in black: black beret, wraparound black sunglasses, black velvet blouse, and black boots. The only thing that wasn’t black: a “glaring red” skirt.
A worried Whitey asked: “What are you going to do?” Bethurum knew exactly what he was going to do. He composed himself, and walk over and talk to them. Whitey, however, was having none of it. He quickly exited the diner, preferring to sit in his truck, in the overwhelming darkness of the desert, rather than confront creatures from another world.
Perhaps trying to be a gentleman and tactful at the same time, Bethurum asked: “I beg your pardon, lady, but haven’t we met before?”
Rhanes slowly looked up, glared at Bethurum with a wide-eyed and hostile stare, and uttered just one word: “No.” In private correspondence with fellow contactee, George Hunt Williamson, Bethurum said that Rhanes’ “no” was uttered in a chilling, “demonic” tone. Almost like a “deadly hiss,” to use Bethurum’s own words.
Bethurum wasn’t taking that for an answer: “You very closely resemble a lady I met some time ago out on Mormon Mesa.”
The only response was another “No” of a very threatening style. Bethurum evidently didn’t get the message. He blundered on with his line of questions. The answer was the same again and again. All the time, the weird little man with Aura Rhanes – who also sported dark sunglasses – said not even a single word. Bethurum clearly recognized this odd behavior (or, rather, non-behavior) on the part of Rhanes’ comrade: “The man did not give a hint that he either heard me or was even aware of my presence. He could have passed as a blind [and] deaf mute.”
As Bethurum walked away, and back to his table, the waitress came over – she just happened to be someone else that Bethurum had told of his otherworldly experiences. She said to him: “They are surely the saucer people you told us about.”
He replied: “I thought so, too. But it may not be. The lady has on dark glasses and the man had a scar on his face.”
The waitress gave a strange response: “I noticed that too, but it is not a scar. It is only penciled on.”
With that, the odd little man motioned for the check. In a few moments, it was paid and the pair headed for the door. The waitress raced over to Bethurum and said: “The lady told me to tell you that she knows you, and that she was sorry and ‘yes’ is the answer to some of your questions.”
It was then that something very strange happened, as Bethurum noted: “I saw them only a step from the door, before I turned to pay my check. When I turned back they were gone. I rushed outside, and there stood Whitey puffing nonchalantly on his cigarette.”
When a dumbfounded Bethurum asked where the pair was, Whitey replied: “They never came out. Honest, Tru; not a blessed soul passed through that door until you came out.”
Siberia is weird. Always has been, always will be. Siberia is one of the most sparsely populated areas on our planet, making it a perfect place for the Russian and/or Soviet government to hide all sorts of stuff: top-secret nuclear research facilities, closed cities, and things far stranger. On top of these man-made mysteries, Siberia has been the site of many strange and unexplained events in the sky including one of the world’s most anomalous natural phenomena: the Tunguska event of 1908.
Trees leveled after the Tunguska event.
Perhaps due to its sheer size, Siberia is no stranger to things exploding or appearing in its skies. Aside from the Tunguska event, strange glowing clouds which light up the night sky have been seen over Siberia before, but an odd cloud which enveloped several Siberian towns this week was significant for the opposite reason: turning day into night. Even stranger, local officials have offered either no explanation or a series of conflicting explanations which have led residents to believe that a full-blown government conspiracy or cover-up might be afoot. What exactly happened in Siberia?
According to eyewitness accounts, a strange fog, dust cloud, or mist appeared seemingly out of nowhere around noon on Friday, July 20th, completely blanketing several towns and villages in the Eveno-Bytantaisky and Zhigansky districts of Yakutia, a region of Siberia well-known to players of the Parker Bros. classic tabletop game Risk. The cloud – or whatever it was – completely blocked out the sun, forcing residents to use flashlights in the middle of the afternoon. Some residents reported that the cloud had a yellowish tinge, while others described it as red. Photos taken during the event show a strange twilight similar to that experienced during total solar eclipses.
As soon as the cloud appeared, speculation, rumors, and conspiracy theories immediately began to surface. Some residents accused the Russian government of carrying out undisclosed tests of missiles or explosives, some believed a meteorite exploded overhead, while others of course said “this can only be explained by a UFO.” A few eyewitnesses even reported seeing a flash of light shortly before the ‘cloud’ appeared.
That doesn’t sound good.
Konstantin Starostin, an official in the Nizhne-Bytantaisky settlement, said the anomalous event was unlike anything the village has witnessed before:
When the Sun vanished, people started calling us in the administration. Many got scared, especially elderly people. People who live here for many years said they had never witnessed anything like this. The darkness was pitch black. It didn’t come at once, but grew gradually.
The leading theory is that the darkness was caused by smokefrom a nearby wildfire, which are common in Siberia this time of year. However, locals doubt that explanation, as the air temperature did not change during the event and there were reportedly no airborne dusts or particulates accompanying the cloud. As of now, this anomalous event remains unexplained. Good old Siberia!
Bombshell Video Shows Police Helicopter Circling A UFO Above Los Angeles
Bombshell Video Shows Police Helicopter Circling A UFO Above Los Angeles
Footage surprisingly shows a police helicopter circling a UFO several times. The clip was reportedly recorded in Los Angeles, California, USA. A resident allegedly captured the video after he heard a loud sound outside his house. Videographer Tom revealed that he used his phone to record the UFO sighting. He described it as something unusual being tracked by the LAPD.
He said that the helicopter was circling non-stop for about 12 minutes.
Initially, he thought the helicopter was looking for someone but when he walked outside something stood out that it was circling.
The witness was not sure about the UFO, but it sounded ridiculous and looked like a craft with two windows on it.
One viewer commented that it was surprising the military did not show up or the government, but they know that many things were not being told to the citizens.
Another commenter speculated that the UFO was probably staying still because it was afraid of the helicopter.
UFO blasts across French sky and then mysteriously disappears
UFO blasts across French sky and then mysteriously disappears
Footage showing a UFO moving fast in the skies of France has brought speculations about global governments running secret projects. The camera appears to struggle to keep up with the unidentified flying object, which seems to have a U-shape body.
One commenter says "the object is like a shape of an alien craft from the movie Prometheus."
Another added: "Looks like something straight out a Sci-Fi movie."
And a third claimed: "It's the government's new secret weapon.
"They are experimenting on us for future use on war."
You know, you don’t have to go trawling around the controversial Wikileaks website to discover the truth behind closely-guarded government secrets.
In recent years the powers that be in the United Kingdom and the United States have declassified thousands of fascinating documents, which were kept secret from the public for decades.
In the UK, the National Archives website and the museum in London hold a treasure trove of information on wartime Britain and alien sightings, while various CIA releases document Cold War struggles, the Area 51 base and the Watergate scandal that donated its name to every half-cocked controversy ever since!
Here are some of our favourite subject matters we’re able to explore online.
Alien sightings – The Truth is Actually Out There
The National Archives have detailed reports of UFO sightings across the UK. The final papers were released in 2013 and covered sightings from 2007 to 2009, before the MoD’s UFO desk shut down.
Did you know the second highest number of sightings (748) recorded by the desk occurred in 2009? Of course, conspiracy theorists claimed this disclosure was just a cover-up story, to hide the real alien landings in the UK.
These documents, like the one chronicling Mork and Mindy’s alleged landing in East Dulwich in 2003, can each be viewed for a small fee (£3.30) on the National Archives website.
Another fascinating section of the brilliant Gov.UK website allows those with a morbid curiosity to read the wills of some of the most notable Brits ever.
These include Sir Winston Churchill, Alan Turing, Princess Diana, AA Milne and Beatrix Potter and 41 million others who’ve died in England and Wales since 1858. For example, Winnie The Pooh creator Milne, left his widow and literary agent a total of £64,173 13 shillings and 6 pence when he passed away on January 31 1956.
Last year, the CIA finally declassified its role in covertly publishing and distributing Boris Pasternak’s (above) banned novel Dr. Zhivago in Russia during the Cold War period.
“We have the opportunity to make Soviet citizens wonder what is wrong with their government when a fine literary work by the man acknowledged to be the greatest living Russian writer is not even available in his own country [and] in his own language for his people to read,” a senior CIA agent wrote in 1958.
You can read over 100 documents relating to this Cold War-era success at the CIA’s website.
The extent of Nazi plundering and allied restitution efforts
This fascinating section of the National Archives details the scale of the German Army’s looting of artwork, cultural artefacts and historic monuments across Europe prior to and during World War 2.
It also documents British-led Allied efforts “to do their utmost to defeat the methods of dispossession practised by the Axis Powers and their associates against countries and peoples whom they have so wantonly assaulted and despoiled”. The declaration focused on protecting historic monuments in war areas and investigating items already seized by the Germans.
Every scandal has the word “gate” annoyingly attached to it these days, but the original Watergate Scandal, from which the trend gets its name, shook the United States to its core in the 1970s.
The break-in at the Democratic National Convention and subsequent cover-up forced President Richard Nixon to resign in 1974 under threat of impeachment. Back in 2011, the Nixon Presidential Library opened files from the Watergate Special Prosecution Force including Nixon’s secret Grand Jury testimony, during which he answered questions about an infamous 18 ½ minute gap in a recording of a conversation in the Oval Office, believed to have been erased as part of the attempted cover-up.
The Cabinet Papers section of the National Archives holds some enthralling insights into the efforts of Churchill’s Cabinet to assess the threat of the “imminent” German invasion and strategies for the defence of the home front during and following the fall of France in 1940.
The documents include discussions of plans to evacuate children to the United States, the possibility of using gas on British beaches to thwart the invasion and the need for the United States to join the war effort as soon as possible.
While the UFO phenomena in the UK is detailed above, there’s no site conspiracy theorists take more interest in than the famous Area 51 military base in Nevada, USA. In 2013, the CIA officially acknowledged the base for the first time, releasing a 355-page document detailing its existence as a secret Cold War military base for testing spy planes. So, all those UFO sightings by commercial pilots were actually Lockheed Martin U-2 planes, which were eventually flown over Russia, Vietnam and Cuba at various points during the crisis.
George Gorman, left, discusses his flight over the skies of North Dakota Air National Guard Base at Hector Field with Dan Oxley and Duane Lund on October 2, 1948.
(Credit: Image Bank/Alamy)
In the words of Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, the man who investigated unidentified-flying-object reports for the U.S. Air Force in the early 1950s, the Gorman Dogfight remains one of the “classics” among UFO sightings.
The incident, which still lacks an airtight explanation, involved a 27-minute air encounter between a veteran World War II fighter pilot named George F. Gorman and a mysterious white orb at high altitude above Fargo, North Dakota. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Gorman told a local newspaper following the October 1, 1948 event. “If anyone else had reported such a thing I would have thought they were crazy.”
Captain Ruppelt operated Project Blue Book, which continued the work of Project Sign and Project Grudge, a series of hush-hush studies conducted by the U.S. Air Force between 1947 and 1969. His mission: to determine if UFOs were a threat to national security and to scientifically analyze UFO-related data.
What makes the Gorman Dogfight unique in the now-declassified pages of Project Blue Book is not only the length of the encounter, but that it was recorded both on the ground and in the sky by numerous reputable sources.
George Gorman’s depictions of his UFO encounter.
(Credit: The Project Blue Book Archive)
Chasing—and being chased by—a light
At the time of the incident, Gorman, a 25-year-old former fighter pilot, served as a second lieutenant in the North Dakota Air National Guard. It was this role that placed him behind the flight controls of a P-51 Mustang on Oct. 1, 1948, taking part in a cross-country flight alongside other National Guard airmen.
While the other pilots landed at Fargo’s Hector Airport, on that fateful evening Gorman stayed in the air in order to get in some night-flying time in the cloudless conditions. Having circled his P-51 over a lighted football stadium, he was preparing to land at about 9 P.M. Advised by the control tower that the only other plane in the vicinity was a Piper Cub (which Gorman could see about 500 feet below him), he witnessed what he believed to be the taillight of another craft passing on the right, though the tower had no other object on the radar.
Deciding to take a closer look at the unidentified object, Gorman pulled his plane up and closed to within about 1,000 yards. “It was about six to eight inches in diameter, clear white and completely without fuzz at the edges,” he said of the object in his report. “It was blinking on and off. As I approached, however, the light suddenly became steady and pulled into a sharp left bank. I thought it was making a pass at the tower.”
Deciding to follow, Gorman tried in vain to catch up with the object, reporting that he finally got behind it at around 7,000 feet, where it made a sharp turn and headed straight for the P-51. Almost at the point of collision Gorman dived and said the light passed over his canopy at about 500 feet before cutting sharply once more and heading back in his direction. Just as collision seemed imminent once again, Gorman said the object shot straight up in the air in a steep climb—so steep that when he tried to intercept, his plane stalled at about 14,000 feet. The object was not seen again, but according to Gorman he had been engaged in aerial maneuvers with it for 27 minutes by the time he brought his plane in to land.
‘Definitive thought behind its maneuvers’
Shaken by the encounter, the pilot went on to report he noticed no sound, exhaust trail or odor from the object. And while he had reached speeds of up to 400 m.p.h. while in pursuit—he couldn’t keep up with whatever it was.
“I am convinced that there was definite thought behind its maneuvers,” Gorman said in a sworn statement to his commander. “I am further convinced that the object was governed by the laws of inertia because its acceleration was rapid but not immediate; and although it was able to turn fairly tight at considerable speed, it still followed a natural curve.”
Gorman reported blacking out temporariliy due to the excessive speed he reached in attempting to turn with the object. “I am in fairly good physical condition and I do not believe that there are many, if any, pilots who could withstand the turn and speed effected by the object, and remain conscious,” he wrote. “The object was not only able to out-turn and out-speed my aircraft… but was able to attain a far steeper climb and was able to maintain a constant rate of climb far in excess of my aircraft.”
Three P-51 Mustangs circa 1945, the same aircraft George Gorman was flying during his UFO encounter.
(Credit: Toni Frissell/Interim Archives/Getty Images)
Other witnesses
Gorman wasn’t the only one to see the mysterious object that night. It was also witnessed by air-traffic controllers Lloyd D. Jensen and H.E. Johnson, who were manning the Hector Airport tower. According to Johnson, who reported seeing the Piper Cub and the UFO at the same time, the object was “travelling at a high rate of speed” and was “fast enough to increase the spacing between itself and [Gorman’s] fighter.” Johnson described the object as appearing to be “only a round light, perfectly formed, with no fuzzy edges or rays leaving its body.”
Dr. A. E. Cannon, the pilot of the Piper Cub, and his passenger also viewed the object—both in the sky and upon their return to the airport, where they immediately joined the traffic controllers in the tower. Cannon described the light as moving “very swiftly, much faster than the 51.” Two Civil Aeronautics Authority employees on the ground also reported seeing the object.
Exploring the options
Could it have simply been another aircraft? Taking the technology of the time into account, Dr Travis S. Taylor, aerospace engineer and author of Introduction to Rocket Science and Engineering, believes any other aircraft would have been apparent to Gorman.
Earlier that year, he points out, Chuck Yeager made his famous flight in the Bell X1 at record-breaking speed, in which he broke the sound barrier. “A craft like that would have been very obvious to a pilot in a P-51. [Gorman] would have known what he was looking at—the X1 looked like an airplane,” says Taylor. “If he was chasing something that didn’t look like a standard aircraft and he couldn’t keep up with it, either it was too far away, and he didn’t realize how far away it was, or it was moving faster than a P-51 could move.”
U.S. Air Force investigators from Project Sign (later to become Project Grudge and ultimately Project Blue Book) soon arrived in Fargo, where Geiger counter measurements of Gorman’s plane revealed heightened radioactivity, though this was later explained away as a side effect of the high-altitude flying that took place.
Was Gorman a kook, or maybe touched in the head by his war experiences? Government investigators found him to be a credible witness, noting that he “did not make the impression of being a dreamer. He reads little, and only serious literature. He spends 90 percent of his time hunting and fishing; drinks less than moderately; smokes normally; and does not do drugs. He appears to be a sincere and serious individual who was considerably puzzled by his experience and made no attempt to blow his story up.”
A model of a R-1, the first Soviet guided missile.
(Credit: Mikhail Dyuryagin/TASS/Getty Images)
What about Cold War testing?
One conspiracy theory speculated that Gorman’s encounter may have been with a top-secret test craft. With World War II a very recent memory, tensions in 1948 were heightened both in military and civilian circles. And as the Cold War tightened its grip on the American psyche, the U.S government sought to boost its scientific firepower with a clandestine initiative called Operation Paperclip, through which it recruited former Nazi scientists, engineers and technicians (including Wernher von Braun and his V-2 rocket team) to America, to boost the nation’s chances in the Cold War and looming space race.
Further afield, the Soviets had begun testing the R-1 Rocket (a Soviet version of the German V-2 of WWII) the same year as Gorman’s encounter, raising questions of whether the object he and the others saw could have been a Soviet craft or weapon. “The R-1 didn’t have the range to go from wherever their launch capability was in the Soviet Union to Fargo,” says Taylor. “It was a dumb rocket. All the rockets at that time were projectiles. They used aerodynamics mostly to guide them. They could do slow maneuvers, but if they did a fast maneuver they’d start tumbling apart.”
The weather-balloon theory
Back in Fargo, after the Air Weather Service revealed it had released a lighted weather balloon 10 minutes before Gorman first saw the object, investigators pounced, proclaiming the balloon the likeliest explanation for the object seen.
As for the seemingly incredible movements witnessed, the report said those were due to Gorman’s own maneuvers as he tried to chase the bright object. Essentially, investigators wrote, his high speed gave the balloon the appearance of moving in opposite directions as he passed by. Added to that theory, investigators noted the bright appearance of Jupiter on that date, hypothesizing that Gorman had been attempting to chase the bright dot of the planet at the same time the weather balloon was in range.
The lighted weather balloon would become the official cause of the encounter in the Project Blue Book file.
“We were doing Project Mogul at the time, which was high-altitude balloons [fitted with high-powered microphones] that we were trying to listen to see if the Soviets were doing above-ground nuclear testing,” says Taylor, who points out that the famous Roswell, New Mexico UFO sighting was explained away as a Project Mogul balloon.
Whether Gorman was happy with the official outcome remains unknown. Maintaining his silence, he returned to the Air Force full-time, eventually retiring at the rank of lieutenant colonel in 1969. He never spoke publicly about the encounter again, though according to The Bismarck Tribune, he did tell friends “he was never convinced that he had been dueling with a lighted balloon for 27 minutes.” Gorman died in 1982.
Taylor has his own theory: “Possibly somebody was playing around with rocketry.” But, he notes, there were no known test facilities or scientists in the Fargo area when the encounter took place. All the [Operation Paperclip] Germans were at the missile grounds in White Sands, New Mexico, while rocket guru Robert H. Goddard, had died in 1945. “It makes no sense,” says Taylor, “that there was anything there that was manmade that they were chasing.”
VIDEO: Comic-Con Trailer: Project Blue Book Watch an exclusive clip of the new series Project Blue Book, coming soon on HISTORY.
The Flatwoods Monster has not hissed at boys in the little village of Flatwoods, West Virginia, since Sept. 12, 1952.
People grin about it now—and take Monster souvenir money, from hundreds of Monster tourists every week. But it scared people plenty back then, including the eyewitnesses: six boys aged 10 to 17, a dog and a Mom.
“One of the boys peed his pants,” said John Gibson, a high-school freshman at the time, who knew them all. “Their dog (Rickie) ran with his tail between his legs.”
The encounter made the local and national news, scaring a wider swath of people. Then it prompted a U.S. Air Force UFO inquiry, part of a project called Project Blue Book that dispatched a handful of investigators around the country to look into such claims.
It also became a local legend, a Southern spook story that defined the tiny village of less than 300 people for more than six decades. To this day, tourists come out of their way to Flatwoods—secluded in the low, timbered Appalachian hills of central West Virginia—to visit its monster museum and buy Green Monster tchotchkes and T-shirts.
The original drawing of the Flatwoods Monster by a New York sketch artist.
(Credit: The Flatwoods Monster Museum
What they witnessed
It was dusk when they saw it. The May brothers Ed, 13, and Freddie, 12, had been playing in their schoolyard with their 10-year-old friend Tommy Hyer. After noticing a pulsing red light streak across the sky and crash on a nearby farm, the three youngsters ran to grab the Mays boys’ mother, then high-tailed it up that hill to check out where the light had landed. A few other boys, one with a dog, showed up too.
They ran back down—in sheer and credible terror.
“Seven Braxton County residents on Saturday reported seeing a 10-foot Frankenstein-like monster in the hills above Flatwoods,” a local newspaper reported afterward. “A National Guard member, [17-year-old] Gene Lemon, was leading the group when he saw what appeared to be a pair of bright eyes in a tree.”
Lemon screamed and fell backward, the news account said, “when he saw a 10-foot monster with a blood-red body and a green face that seemed to glow.” It may have had claws for hands. It was hard to tell because of the dense mist.
The story made the local news, then got picked up by national radio and big papers all over the country, said Andrew Smith, who runs the Flatwoods Monster Museum and the Braxton County Convention Visitors Bureau. “Mrs. May and the National Guard kid ended up going to New York to talk to CBS,” Gibson said.
Flatwoods residents Gene Lemon and Kathleen May, who claimed to have seen the monster and provided descriptions for the famous sketch.
(Credit: The Flatwoods Monster Museum)
Believers, doubters and cashers-in
“Those people were the most scared people I’ve ever seen,” said local newspaper publisher A. Lee Stewart, in that 1952 news story. Stewart himself had marched up that hill with a shotgun after witnesses told what they saw. “People don’t make up that kind of story that quickly,” Stewart said then.
Others doubted.
“State police laughed off the reports as hysteria,” the newspaper story said. “They said the so-called Monster had grown from seven to 17 feet in just 24 hours.”
Gibson doubted too, though he’s since sold 1,000 of his 12-inch-tall ceramic Green Monster figurines in just the last two years (at $30 apiece).
“I don’t believe in the Easter Bunny,” says Gibson, an insurance agent still working at 81. “I don’t believe in Santa. And I really don’t believe in the Flatwoods Monster. But I do want to boost our community.”
An era of bomb scares and demagogues
But rattled eyewitnesses weren’t the only reason the story took off.
Americans were truly frightened in 1952, made anxious by atomic bombs and what seemed like a new world made by mad scientists. Even LIFE magazine, probably the most popular publication in the nation at the time, had, just a few months earlier, published a seemingly credible trend story about flying saucers.
Spook stories sprout best when the seed lands in a bed fertile with anxiety, and that was 1952 Cold War America—a hothouse of anger, disillusionment and anxieties, made to order for conspiracy theorists, political demagogues and tellers of suspenseful tales.
The May brothers’ monster story hit just three years after the Soviet Union successfully tested an atomic bomb in 1949. The Air Force was scanning for bombers over our skies.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were awaiting execution for sending American nuclear-weapons designs to the Soviets—selling hellfire to our mortal enemies.
A political demagogue, Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Minnesota, had spent the previous two years stoking fears that communists had infiltrated not only the U.S. Department of State, but almost every industry and corner of the nation.
And communists had killed thousands of American soldiers in Korea by 1952, including four youngsters 21 or younger from Braxton County, West Virginia, who died just months before the Monster landed. One of those killed in action, U.S. Marine PFC Lantry R. Frame, age 20, had grown up in Sutton, only six miles from the May boys in Flatwoods.
Into that fertile American atmosphere of fear and death and demagoguery, LIFEdropped a bombshell headline:
“HAVE WE VISITORS FROM SPACE?”
“The Air Force is now ready to concede that many saucer and fireball sightings still defy explanation,” LIFE’s summary headline said. “LIFE offers some scientific evidence that there is a real case for interplanetary saucers.”
The story, filled with seemingly “credible” accounts, including from eyewitness Air Force pilots, appeared in April 1952—just five months before Ed and Freddie May climbed that hilltop.
A piece of wood that was taken from the once-standing tree where the Flatwoods sighting occured on September 12, 1952.
(Credit: The Flatwoods Monster Museum)
The hope of ‘something bigger’
How do these stories gain credence? It’s not necessarily that millions believe in UFOs, says behavioral psychologist Clay Routledge. Many UFO devotees usually don’t believe, he says. “But they are seduced by the story.”
Why? “There’s the hope that we are not just insignificant organisms walking around aimlessly on a rock floating in space,” says Routledge, who has studied brain science, UFO beliefs and culture. “There’s the hope that we’re part of something bigger.”
Call it “cosmic loneliness,” Routledge says.
That may be. But if the May brothers are familiar with that phrase, they are probably rolling their eyes. Freddie and Ed are still alive—and still standing by their story.
They are in their late 70s now. They are no longer talking to reporters.
“They got tired after 100,000 interviews,” Smith says.
But the brothers did appear in a recent documentary about the Flatwoods Phantom. And in the video trailer teasing to that show, Freddie looks calmly into the camera. “As far as for myself,” he says, “It doesn’t matter to me whether people believe, or don’t believe.”
One writer who stoked the story (a lot) was Gray Barker, a Braxton County native who investigated the Monster—and then became one of the more prominent UFO myth makers ever. It was Barker who wrote about Flatwoods, then introduced the mythology of government “Men in Black,” after he heard that two Air Force investigators had “reportedly” shown up in Flatwoods, posing as magazine writers.
But Barker’s friends later said he didn’t believe—and did the UFO writings cheerfully and for money.
To this day, locals still wonder.
“The universe is a mighty big place,” says Joan Bias, news editor at The Braxton Democrat, a local newspaper. “I can’t imagine we might be alone in it—though I’m a Baptist, so maybe I shouldn’t say that!”
There were fewer than 300 people Flatwoods in 1952, and a few less than that now.
“You could say that local embrace of the Monster was a little slow going,” Smith says.
(Credit: The Flatwoods Monster Museum)
Could it have been an owl?
The U.S. Air Force doubted too. They later revealed that they’d done UFO research and investigations since 1947, collecting thousands of stories, investigating some with a skeleton staff.
About this one, they concluded that bright but common meteors had streaked across the eastern U.S. at dusk that night, seen by many in Baltimore, among other places. And the monster with the claw-like arms? Likely an owl, they said.
Even if it’s just unproven folklore, the tourists seem to keep coming, so locals did that most Earthling of things: They made bumper stickers, shot glasses and giant monster-shaped chairs that whole families could get into and have their picture taken while sitting in the Monster’s scary, embracing arms. They created the Monster museum. They put up signs on highways: “Home of the Green Monster.”
And they learned, to their surprise, that people wanted to hand them money.
From spring to fall, peak tourist season, hundreds of people a week stop in the Spot, Flatwoods’ ice cream and sandwich eatery. They eat the Flatwoods Monster Burger (double burger, double cheese), and look at all the historic Monster photos and news clippings hanging on the wall. The Museum has artifacts, including a chunk of the oak tree that the Monster had floated out from behind.
And so the Flatwoods Monster, also known as the Green Monster, also known as the Phantom of Flatwoods, who was reportedly seven feet tall, or 10 feet tall, or 13 feet tall, or 17 feet tall, became that most peculiar American invention—a legend emblazoned on T-shirts.
“If you know how I could get a 26-foot fiberglass Green Monster statue made for Flatwoods, let me know,” Gibson said.
“That would be a big draw, don’t you think?”
VIDEO: Comic-Con Trailer: Project Blue Book Watch an exclusive clip of the new series Project Blue Book, coming soon on HISTORY.
An illustration featured on the cover of Gray Barker's book on men in black, "They knew too much about Flying Saucers."
(Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library/Everett)
It’s possible that the story of the Men in Black, the mysterious figures that would become the subject of fascination in UFO conspiracy circles and eventually break into mainstream popular culture, can be traced back to one day: June 27, 1947. It’s quite possible that it all started with a man, a boy and a dog on a boat.
As the story goes, Harold Dahl was on a conservation mission on the Puget Sound near the eastern shore of Washington’s Maury Island, gathering logs, when he saw six donut-shaped obstacles hovering about a half a mile above his boat. Before long, one of them fell nearly 1,500 feet, followed by raining, metallic debris, some of which hit Dahl’s son, Charles, on his arm, as well as the family dog, who didn’t survive the ordeal. Dahl was able to take some pictures of the aircraft with his camera, which he later showed to his supervisor, Fred Crisman. A skeptical Crisman went back to the scene to look for himself and saw a strange aircraft with his own eyes.
The following morning, Dahl was visited by a man in a black suit. They end up at a local diner, where the man was able to recount in extraordinary detail what Dahl had just experienced. “What I have said is proof to you that I know a great deal more about this experience of yours than you will want to believe,” the man said, according to author Gray Barker’s 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers.
Dahl was told not to speak of the incident. If he did, bad things would happen.
The Puget Sound in Washington state, where the Maury Island Incident occurred.
(Credit: Lowe Stock/Getty Images)
The supposed events of Maury Island have continued to fuel conspiracy theories to this day, even though a U.S. government investigation deemed it a hoax after Dahl and Crimson later admitted as much. In particular, the mention of the man in the black suit would evolve into a key obsession for UFO enthusiasts and spread into American popular culture, thanks to a comic-book series and a blockbuster movietrilogy.
In all of their different incarnations, the Men in Black (MIB) usually have one main purpose: to muzzle witnesses of strange, paranormal phenomena. They almost always wear black suits and hats with dark sunglasses, drive black cars and arrive in groups of two or three. Some describe them as one would an FBI agent, while others recall the MIB as having strange appearances, sometimes with supernatural features like glowing eyes and strange complexions.
So how did we get from Harold Dahl to Will Smith?
“The transformation of the story from a first press report to a folkloric tale to a comic book and now to a film illustrates how the myth is transformed,” wrote Phil Patton in The New York Times around the time the first Men in Black movie was released in 1997. “That process is not unlike the children’s game of ‘telephone’ or what the literary critic Harold Bloom calls ‘innovation by misinterpretation.’ ”
Sticking with the telephone analogy, the first call was made to Kenneth Arnold, a pilot who had his own alleged UFO sighting on June 24, 1947 near Mt. Rainier, Washington. Though it happened three days after the Maury Island incident, it was the first widely reported sighting and it “touched off the saucer sensation,” as was written in a 1949 government report on “Flying Saucers.”
Kenneth Arnold, center, looks at a photo of an unidentified flying object they sighted while en route to Seattle, Washington with (L-pilots E.J. Smith and Ralph E. Stevens.
(Credit: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
The report states that Dahl and Crimson reached out to a Chicago magazine in an attempt to sell their story, and the magazine editor then contacted Arnold, hoping he could help verify their account. Arnold then “summoned two officers of Army A-2 Intelligence to aid in the investigation of Dahl and Crisman’s claim,” according to the report.
In July 1947, two Army A-2 Intelligence officers came to investigate. After leaving in their B-25 the next day, the plane caught fire and crashed, killing both officers and doing nothing to quiet UFO conspiracists.
But the Maury Island story gained little notice in the UFO community until Barker’s 1956 book, in which he wrote of his “file on the Maury Island case” that largely consisted of the writings by Ray Palmer, the Chicago magazine editor referred to in the government’s report. Barker went on to connect the dots between “the man, who wore a back suit” who took Dahl to breakfast and three similarly dressed men who allegedly visited a young UFO enthusiast named Albert K. Bender in 1953.
It was Bender who “almost single-handedly ushered in the plague of the Men in Black—just as Arnold inaugurated the era of the UFO,” Ufologist Nick Redfernwrote in his book The Real Men in Black. But it was Barker’s book that told Bender’s story, thus introducing the concept of the MIB to a much wider audience.
(The telephone-game analogy is still holding.)
The cover of Gray Barker’s book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers.
(Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library/Everett)
“It still has an important legacy,” said Robert Sheaffer, a UFO researcher. “Before its publication, nobody outside a very narrow group of subscribers to flying-saucer newsletters had ever heard of Bender, or his MIB.”
Barker described Bender’s visitors as: “Three men in black suits with threatening expressions on their faces. Three men who walk in on you and make certain demands. Three men who know that you know what the saucers really are!”
Bender, in his own 1962 book Flying Saucers and the Three Men, described the MIB in much more frightening language.
“They floated about a foot off the floor… They looked like clergymen, but wore hats similar to Homburg style. The faces were not clearly discernible, for the hats partly hid and shaded them… The eyes of all three figures suddenly lit up like flashlight bulbs… They seemed to burn into my very soul as the pains above my eyes became almost unbearable,” wrote Bender.
Barker would go on to write several more books related to the paranormal and UFOs, including 1970’s The Silver Bridge, which helped spread the story of another popular paranormal figure, the creature known as Mothman. But how much of his writing was done in good faith has been called into question by many in the UFO-research community.
“Barker made it clear to me that he did not take the MIB or Mothman very seriously,” says Sheaffer, who corresponded with Barker on occasion. “However, he believed that there was still ‘something mysterious’ about the whole UFO and paranormal thing.”
Regardless of Barker’s motives, countless MIB encounters have been reported since They Knew Too Much was published nearly 60 years ago, and at least one more movie is on the way.
VIDEO: Comic-Con Trailer: Project Blue Book Watch an exclusive clip of the new series Project Blue Book, coming soon on HISTORY.
AHEAD of the Scottish UFO and Paranormal Conference 2018 in Glasgow next weekend (July 28), we recount some of the most intriguing unexplained cases of flying saucers, strange lights in the sky and alleged alien abductions.
Forestry worker Robert Taylor found himself at the centre of one of Scotland's most famous UFO mysteries when he stumbled across a "a huge flying dome" in a woodland clearing near Dechmont Law in Livingston on November 9, 1979.
Taylor was checking the progress of new saplings when he saw what he described as a large, circular sphere approximately seven yards (6.4 metres) in diameter, hovering above the forest floor.
He said the object was "a dark metallic material with a rough texture like sandpaper". The outer rim was "set with small propellers".
As he approached, two smaller spheres, each about three feet wide with protruding metal spikes "similar to sea mines", dropped down from the mother craft and rolled towards him. Taylor claimed to have experienced an acrid smell "like burning brakes" and the sensation of being dragged.
Taylor said he then lost consciousness and awoke to find the objects were gone. Head pounding and with a bitter taste in his mouth, Taylor was unable to walk or talk.
Eventually he managed to crawl to his van parked nearby but couldn't start it and had to walk the mile to his Livingston home.
Taylor's wife, shocked by his disorientated and dishevelled appearance, called the police and a doctor. There were grazes on Taylor's legs and chin, but no other signs of injury; although the heavy work trousers he had been wearing were ripped.
The police returned to the site with Taylor where they found "ladder-shaped marks" in the soil where the craft was said to have hovered, and further marks following the path of the mine-like objects.
The case remains unique in British history as the only example of a UFO sighting becoming the subject of a criminal investigation. Taylor, who died in 2007, never sought publicity or financial gain – and always stood by every word of his account.
There would later be suggestions that he had suffered an epileptic seizure, mini-stroke or hallucinated after ingesting deadly nightshade berries. Yet, Ron Halliday, co-organiser of the Scottish UFO and Paranormal Conference 2018, gives short shrift to such theories.
"There was no evidence that Bob had any illness before he had this encounter," says Halliday. "He was always personally convinced that he had seen something 'out of this world'. Everyone agreed that Bob was a sincere person. He hadn't made anything up. Something had happened to him.
"He definitely did see something 'out of this world' because I don't know what else can explain what he saw. There was physical evidence that something had been there and clearly something had happened to him.
"I would say that of all the Scottish cases it is the one that seems to me that gives the most direct evidence of contact from another world."
UFO capital: Bonnybridge and the 'Falkirk Triangle'
The phenomenon of the "Falkirk Triangle" – which includes Bonnybridge and Camelon – was first reported in 1992 and the area continues to register more UFO sightings, around 300 a year, than any other place on Earth.
Objects spotted range from "big, black and cigar-shaped" to "a bright light criss-crossed by stripes of different colours".
In October 1996, local man Barry MacDonald captured a video of an orange oval light in the skies above Falkirk which changed shape as he watched, becoming a white disc – the classic "flying saucer" shape. The clip went viral worldwide.
According to Halliday, the "Falkirk Triangle" continues to be a UFO hot spot. "What is interesting about this area is that there has been an accumulation of incidents stretching from the early 1990s right up until last year," he says.
"One theory is that there could be a window into another dimension, other worlds, the past or the future. These views are controversial – I understand that. There have been so many incidents reported that it's clear something strange has gone on in that area."
Sid and Gwen Freeman from Blairgowrie, Perthshire, experienced a series of odd incidents during April 1984 that included a UFO hovering over their garden and a visit from 12 men dressed in black.
Halliday believes the area surrounding the town is another hotbed of UFO activity, with reports of strange balls of light in the sky and the location of Scotland's first ever crop circle in 1990.
The most bizarre incident is what could be a UFO crash reported in the Annual Register of 1767. It described a pyramid-shaped object over the River Ericht that moved "with great speed and disappeared a little above Blairgowrie" leaving a trail of destruction in its wake including a partly destroyed house and bridge.
"You do find some areas seem to attract certain events and it is hard to explain precisely why," says Halliday. "But they do seem to be connected in some strange way."
West Lothian: The A70 Abduction
There have been many reports of glimmering discs, strange lights and bouncing balls of fire in West Lothian skies since Robert Taylor's 1979 encounter.
Garry Wood and Colin Wright had an unnerving experience on August 17, 1992, while travelling on the A70 near Harperrig Reservoir where they saw a two-tiered, disc-shaped object above the road.
Wood put his foot down on the accelerator to speed away, but as they passed beneath the UFO, it appeared to emit a "curtain of white light" and the pair reported being temporarily enveloped in a black void for what felt like 10-15 seconds.
The car began shuddering and they emerged to find themselves driving on the wrong side of the road. When Wood and Wright arrived in the South Lanarkshire village of Tarbrax, where they were due to drop off a satellite TV system, they discovered that several hours were unaccounted for.
Afterwards they underwent hypnosis sessions, with both men recalling an alien abduction scenario and being subjected to a medical-type examination.
"I have spoken to both Garry and Colin – in fact, I have spoken to Garry several times – and there is no doubt in my mind they're convinced that they had this strange encounter," says Halliday.
"The criticism in that case was that the story of the actual details of the encounter – the abduction – had only come out when they went under hypnosis. Hypnosis is quite controversial because of false memory syndrome.
"Interestingly, just a couple of years ago I was speaking to a chap who had no interest in UFOs, but he said to me quite spontaneously that he had been driving along the A70 and had come to this stretch of road and there was this huge bright light overhead which enveloped the car.
"That was very similar to what happened to Garry and Colin, but he didn't experience an abduction."
Forth Rail Bridge: A surprise centenary visitor
The centenary of the Forth Rail Bridge was celebrated on October 7, 1990, with a fireworks display. Watching the festivities was Lyn Livingston who caught sight of a circular object with a base made up of intermittent red, white and blue lights in the sky.
The UFO is said to have rotated and appeared to change shape, forming a projecting cone of white-coloured lights. It stayed in position for 15 minutes before drifting off towards the Fife coast.
"There was a number of witnesses to that," says Halliday. "The location is part of this triangle of incidents and activity, stretching over from West Lothian into Fife. It got a lot of publicity at the time because a few people claimed to have seen it."
Glasgow: The flying railway carriage
Tom Coventry* was waiting at a bus stop on Menock Road near King's Park, Glasgow, when he claims what looked like a railway carriage-shaped object passed 20ft above his head.
The incident took place in December 1983, with Coventry reporting being able to see three windows at the front and a glimpse of swirling yellow smoke inside.
"He had this experience, which has been reported in other UFO sightings, where he had a sense that everything had stood still," says Halliday.
"It was almost like he was in another world for a moment as he watched this object passing over. I spoke to him several times and queried it, but he remained convinced that he saw this object."
In the west end of Glasgow two UFO incidents – 21 years apart – were reported within the same, small geographic area. The first, in 1955, was at Belhaven Terrace where children playing outside were terrified by several entities floating above the ground dressed in long white clothes.
Another incident is reported to have happened in nearby Westbourne Gardens in 1976. "A chap saw this silver disc-shaped object coming towards his flat window," says Halliday.
"He was dumbstruck by it. He described it as hovering about 100ft above an open space opposite where he was standing. There were other witnesses in two nearby flats who also saw it."
Dunblane: UFOs in the hills
David Evans* claimed that UFOs regularly flew over his home and that they had a base inside hills near Dunblane. His experiences began in 1992.
"I visited his house at Kinbuck near Dunblane and there was a little hillock in his garden," says Halliday. "He had been standing there when he saw this UFO fly over the top of him.
"He also believed that he'd had some UFO interference in his house where something – he wasn't sure what – had come in and disturbed various things.
"The most curious part is that he said he saw these UFOs disappear into a hill. He pointed out these white things to me. It was quite a distance away, but I did see round, white objects on the hill. They were so far away, however, that exactly what they were I don't know."
*Some names have been changed
Inside track: Scotland's X-Files Investigator
RON Halliday has been fascinated by unexplained phenomena since he was a child. The retired assistant registrar from Bridge of Allan has written nine books covering subject matter from UFOs and ghosts to vampires, witches and other supernatural experiences.
Alongside fellow investigator and author Alyson Dunlop, Halliday is co-organiser of the Scottish UFO and Paranormal Conference 2018 which takes place in Glasgow on Saturday.
He will be giving a talk, Mysteries of the Scottish Landscape, unravelling secrets behind standing stones, crop circles and ley lines among others.
How did you first become drawn to this field?
My granny was a psychic and forever seeing spirits of the dead. I was a bit scared initially when she would talk about ghosts, but I got used to it and began to get interested. My dad was a scientist, so I come at it from that side too.
Later I became interested in UFOs and that expanded into what I would call "mysteries of the landscape" such as ley lines, crop circles, mystic sites and so on. I think it all could be connected in various ways that may not seem obvious at first.
Sometimes UFOs are described as having a ghostly appearance; they come and go. It is the same when people see ghosts that appear solid and then seem to vanish instantly.
One theory is that witnesses to these incidents could be seeing into another dimension, other worlds, the past or the future – almost like looking through a window.
Many people associate UFOs with little green men in flying saucers. What are your thoughts?
One of the puzzles of the whole UFO phenomenon is that people do report different shaped objects and types of aliens.
An interesting case involved a 10-year-old girl who went out into the woods in Meigle, Perthshire, and came across a group of small, blue beings. She was beamed up into what she presumed was a spacecraft and these aliens looked at her. Afterwards they beamed her back down.
She arrived home to discover she had been gone for hours and her parents were about to call the police. In Scotland, blue traditionally was the colour associated with the supernatural such as Blue Men of the Minch and the Blue Stane in St Andrews.
Why does Scotland have such a rich history in supernatural tales and paranormal experiences?
I wish I had an answer to that. People talk about Bonnybridge being the UFO capital of the world. We have some of the most famous monsters in the world at Loch Ness and Loch Morar. It is hard to explain precisely why this happens.
If I come back to this idea of opening up a window into different dimensions, then perhaps for some reason Scotland has a particular interaction and connection with other worlds.
The Scottish UFO and Paranormal Conference 2018 takes place at Queen Margaret Union, University of Glasgow, from 10am to 6pm, on July 28. Tickets cost £10. Visit scottishufoandparanormalconference.wordpress.com
UFO Scotland by Ron Halliday is published by Black & White and available on e-book.
Climate Change Strengthens Earth's 'Heartbeat' — and That's Bad News
Climate Change Strengthens Earth's 'Heartbeat' — and That's Bad News
By Chelsea Gohd, Space.com Staff Writer
Seasonal temperature variations and trends are visualized and depicted on NASA's "Blue Marble" image.
Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
It's no secret that human activity is changing the climate, and one new study shows how our influence is seriously affecting Earth's seasons and atmosphere.
Climate change is much more than rising temperatures and melting ice. In a new study, scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and five otherorganizations show that human action significantly affects the seasonal temperature cycle in the troposphere, or lowest layer of Earth's atmosphere — the layer that we live in where weather occurs.
These researchers used what is known as a "fingerprint" technique, in which they separated human influence from natural influence on climate. This allowed them to isolate human contributions and assess the specific effects of our species. And, while many fingerprint studies explore climate patterns over years and decades, this work shows how humans influence the changing seasons. [See the Effects of Climate Change Across Earth (Video)]
In this new study, scientists examined seasonal temperature cycles in the troposphere and observed the profound impact humans are having on the atmosphere and our seasons. Most notably, the researchers found that because of carbon dioxide emissions, Earth's seasonal "heartbeat," or the contrast between hot summers and cold winters, is becoming stronger.
The team used temperature measurements taken by satellites to study changes in the size of the seasonal temperature cycle in the troposphere at different points on the planet's surface. In this way, the researchers could see the difference between summer and winter temperatures and the difference between warm and cold seasons.
The investigators found that our summers are warming more rapidly than the other seasons as Earth's overall temperature rises, a phenomenon that is especially true in the Northern Hemisphere. Additionally, the measured temperatures in the troposphere are consistent with models that suggest a strengthening seasonal heartbeat.
"Our results suggest that attribution studies with the changing seasonal cycle provide powerful and novel evidence for a significant human effect on Earth's climate," Benjamin Santer, LLNL climate scientist and lead author on the new work, said in a statement.
Climate fingerprint research, which originated in the 1970's, studies climate patterns to find the source of large climate changes. It takes into account natural factors that contribute to climate like ocean heat, the water cycle, circulation in the atmosphere, sea ice, and extreme natural events, according to the statement. In this study, researchers studied model climate simulations driven by historical changes in human behavior.
The team found a highly significant "pattern match" between seasonal temperature trends and the human influence, or "fingerprint," on the troposphere, according to the statement. This shows that observed changes in our atmosphere and seasonal tropospheric temperature cycles are most likely caused by human action, the study said.
This is the first formal fingerprint study that has ever been conducted with the changing seasonal tropospheric temperature cycle, according to the statement.
Radiation mapping of Europa may lead to discovery of alien life
Radiation mapping of Europa may lead to discovery of alien life
A new extensive mapping of Jupiter moon Europa’s radiation pummeling has revealed to the researchers as to where they should look for and till what length they would have to dig deep when hunting for extraterrestrial life.
A new study conducted by a team of researchers represented an almost complete mapping and modeling of the radiation at Europa and provided major clues to the unsolved puzzled.
The study’s lead author, Tom Nordheim, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, said in a statement, “If we want to understand what’s going on at the surface of Europa and how that links to the ocean underneath, we need to understand the radiation.”
By making use of the information received 2 decades ago from the flybys of Galileo of Europa and electron measurements through the NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, the team of researchers closely analyzed the electrons that were blasting the lunar surface. They discovered that the doses of the radiation differ with respect to location. The regions surrounding the equator, get the most intense radiation whereas the regions near the poles, get the least radiation.
The co-author of the study, Chris Paranicas at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, said in a statement, “This is the first prediction of radiation levels at each point on Europa’s surface and is important information for future Europa missions.”
Further, the researchers gauged the depth till which the radiation tends to penetrate into the surface. They also designed Europa’s most extreme radiation’s 3D models. The result told the researchers how deep they have to dig for finding biosignatures that may be preserved.
The depth varied from four to eight inches in the extreme radiation area to around 0.4 inches in the regions surrounding the two poles of the moon.
For achieving that inference, the researchers examined the impact of the radiation on the amino acids that are the fundamental building blocks of proteins, for understanding how the radiation of Europa would affect the biosignatures.
The co-author of the study, Kevin Hand, a Project Scientist of the Europa Lander mission, said in a statement, “The radiation that bombards Europa’s surface leaves a fingerprint.” Further, Hand added, “If we know what that fingerprint looks like, we can better understand the nature of any organics and possible biosignatures that might be detected with future missions, be they spacecraft that fly by or land on Europa.”
See the Dramatic Increase in Near-Earth Asteroids NASA Has Discovered (Video)
See the Dramatic Increase in Near-Earth Asteroids NASA Has Discovered (Video)
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
Incredible NASA Video Shows All Known Asteroids in the Solar System
Scientists have taken much better stock of our neck of the cosmic woods over the past two decades, as a new NASA video makes clear.
The animation maps out all known near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) — space rocks that get within about 30 million miles (50 million kilometers) of our planet's orbit — from 1999 through January 2018, in roughly 10-year time steps.
The differences are stark. In 1999, identified NEAs speckled the inner solar system thinly, in a light dusting. Many more were discovered by 2009, and Earth's neighborhood looks absolutely swamped in the present-day portion of the video. [In Pictures: Potentially Dangerous Asteroids]
But even that last frame doesn't impart just how crowded near-Earth space actually is. Astronomers have detected just 18,000 near-Earth objects (NEOs, a classification that also includes comets) to date, out of a population thought to number in the millions.
There's good news, though: NASA scientists have found and tracked about 95 percent of the potential civilization-enders out there — rocks at least 0.6 miles (1 km) wide — and none of them pose a threat to Earth for the foreseeable future.
The space agency's NEO Observations Program is also working to discover and track 90 percent of the NEOs that are at least 450 feet (140 meters) wide by 2020 — a very ambitious goal laid out by Congress in 2005. It would take something of a miracle for NASA to do this on the prescribed timetable, however; scientists estimate that just one-third of the 450-footers out therehave been spotted to date.
The NEO Observations Program, which was created in 1998, is responsible for about 90 percent of all 18,000-odd NEO discoveries, NASA officials said.
The research and data-analysis hub of the program is the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), which is located at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. (CNEOS was originally known as the Near-Earth Object Program Office; the name was changed in 2016.)
"We compute high-precision orbits for all asteroids and comets and map their positions in the solar system, both forward in time to detect potential impacts, and backward to see where they've been in the sky," CNEOS Director Paul Chodas said in a statement Monday (July 23). "We provide the best map of orbits for all known small bodies in the solar system."
The newly released video also maps all of the known asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it's a sight to behold. The belt is home to the vast majority of all known space rocks, the current tally of which tops 780,000, according to NASA researchers.
According to a new study, there were two time periods in the history of the Earth’s Moon when it was likely to have had pools of water filled with living microbes that may have traveled there from Earth. Are we still related?
In the study, published in the journal Astrobiology and summarized in a press release, astrobiologists Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University and Ian Crawford from Birkbeck University of London admit that the Moon would have had to be much different than it is today to support life. Specifically, it would have needed water, an atmosphere and a magnetic field similar to the one Earth has that was capable of deflecting solar radiation. A good source for two of the three conditions is volcanic activity.
Using data from recent lunar missions which shows water ice on the Moon and evidence of mantle water early in its life, Schulze-Makuch and Crawford used simulations to identify two time periods with favorable conditions for volcanic activity — 4 billion years ago and 3.5 billion years ago. The first period was right after the creation of the Moon, when a much larger Earth collided with another planetary body, creating a cloud of vaporized rock and liquid that eventually became the Moon. That vaporized liquid could have formed both surface water and an atmosphere. About 500,000 years later, the study shows a high level of volcanic activity on the still-young Moon which would have spewed enough water vapor for an atmosphere and ground water.
What about the third condition – the magnetic field? Schulze-Makuch believes the Moon was created with one and lost it over time. Put the conditions together and the Moon was ready for life.
“We basically had what we would call habitable conditions,” he said. “Or at least the most basic parameters for that.”
Where did it come from? While it’s possible that underwater volcanic activity could have sparked a chemical reaction to create life, Schulze-Makuch points out that there was already life on Earth 3.7 billion years ago – right in between those periods of lunar volcanic activities, and it was “likely” that one of those life-changing asteroids that hit the Earth on a regular basis could have launched life forms — microbes, anaerobic bacteria, and photosynthesizing cyanobacteria — to the then-fertile surface of the Moon where it could breath a sigh of relief along with lunar air.
Is it time to break out the champagne and raise a toast to life on the Moon?
“Whether life ever arose on the Moon, or was transported to it from elsewhere, is of course highly speculative and can only be addressed by an aggressive future program of lunar exploration. An important aspect of such an exploration program would be obtaining samples from paleoregolith deposits dating from time of peak mare volcanism to determine if hydrated conditions (or other evidence for habitable conditions, including possible biomarkers) existed at that time.”
In other words, if we want to find out if we have long-lost Moon cousins, it’s time to crank up the lunar exploration programs and send rovers, robots and humans to the Moon for more samples.
Plotseling was het overdag urenlang donker in Siberië. Wat is hier gebeurd?
Plotseling was het overdag urenlang donker in Siberië. Wat is hier gebeurd?
In het uiterste noorden van de Russische autonome republiek Jakoetië was het overdag plotseling urenlang pikkedonker. Lokale bewoners richtten zich tot de media in de hoop het mysterie te kunnen ontrafelen.
De afgelegen regio werd plotseling urenlang in duisternis gedompeld, hoewel het er rond deze tijd van het jaar 24 uur per dag licht zou moeten zijn.
“De zon verdween rond 11.00 uur en kwam pas rond 14.00 uur weer terug,” zei een bewoner. “Ik zag geen hand voor ogen.”
Verduistering
“We gebruikten fakkels om buiten te kunnen zijn, maar niemand wilde de straat op omdat het voelde alsof er iets zwaars in de lucht hing dat op onze borst drukte,” klonk het.
Sommigen vroegen zich af of er sprake was van een verduistering. Normaal gesproken daalt de temperatuur voor een eclips en die ochtend was het inderdaad kouder dan normaal.
“Maar het is hier altijd nogal koud, dus daar keken we niet van op,” zei Maria uit één van de getroffen dorpen.
Ver verwijderd
Anderen vermoeden dat stof of as van bosbranden die al sinds begin deze maand woeden de oorzaak zijn van dit vreemde fenomeen.
Maar het getroffen gebied ligt ver verwijderd van de bosbranden en op de ochtend dat het gebeurde was het windstil.
The Siberian Times@siberian_times
Sun blanked out in Arctic Siberia. Locals in north of Yakutia said daylight was completely gone for several hours
Oh man, look at those cavemen go It’s the freakiest show
We’ve come a long way since one of our ape-like ancestors first threw a bone into the sky and apparently got the idea to someday build a space station. One of our Solar System’s most enduring mysteries might have just been solved – or at least gotten a lot closer to being solved. According to a new studypublished in Science, Mars might indeed be home to a massive body of liquid water under its southern ice cap. If confirmed, this would mark the discovery of the largest known body of liquid water on Mars. Even better, the discovery has given the astronomical community a huge boost in our search for life on Mars.
Mars’ south polar ice cap
This groundbreaking discovery is based on a new analysis of radar data gathered by the MARSIS (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding) instrument, a low-frequency radar sensor aboard the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft. The Mars Express has been in orbit around the Red Planet since December 2003, and spent 2012 to 2015 investigating the Planum Australe region of Mars’ southern ice cap.
The awesomely-named Mars Express
The radar profiles collected from that region indicate the presence of a lake of liquid water stretching 20 kilometers (12 miles) wide and over 1 meter in depth. Roberto Orosei, a scientist at Italy’s National Institute of Astrophysics who led the research, says these radar profiles are similar to those collected in studies of bodies of water hiding under ice caps here on Earth:
The reflections from the bottom are stronger than surface reflection. This is something that to us is the tell-tale sign of the presence of water. This condition on Earth happens only when you observe subglacial water, like in Antarctica. The radar data tell us that this water must contain a large amount of salts. This is because the ice above it is very transparent, and this would not be possible if the ice was too warm, too close to the melting point.
Scientists here on Earth have discovered evidence that there might be entirely undiscovered ecosystems in waters under the Antarctic ice sheet brimming with unknown forms of life. Could microbial Martians be hiding under Mars’ southern ice cap? Let’s just hope that water isn’t too salty to sustain life, which is of course a distinct possibility. As usual, this research is just the tip of the iceberg (or is it ice cap?) and much more data is needed to confirm the presence of this body of Martian water. If these findings are confirmed, though, it would greatly increase our chances of finally answering one of David Bowie’s lingering questions.
AFPµDe zuidelijke poolkap van Mars. Het is daar dat het meer met vloeibaar water zich zou bevinden.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETOp de planeet Mars is een groot meer met vloeibaar water gevonden. Dat hebben wetenschappers vandaag gemeld. Leven is voor alle duidelijkheid (nog) niet ontdekt.
Het meer zou zich vlakbij de ijskap aan de Zuidpool van Mars bevinden, op 1,5 kilometer onder de oppervlakte zitten en een diameter van ongeveer 20 kilometer hebben. De diepte van het meer kon nog niet bepaald worden, maar het onderzoeksteam schat die op minstens een meter. Het zou het allereerste effectieve bewijs zijn van vloeibaar water op de planeet.
Professor Roberto Orosei van het Italiaanse National Institute for Astrophysics leidde de studie, die gepubliceerd werd in het wetenschappelijke tijdschrift Science. “Dit is een plek op Mars waar leven mogelijk zou kúnnen zijn”, zegt hij. “Het is niet meteen de ideale vakantieplek, maar er zijn organismen op Aarde die overleven in vergelijkbare omstandigheden. Er zijn micro-organismen op Aarde die zelfs in ijs kunnen overleven.”
Hoe werd de ontdekking gedaan?
Met Marsis, een radar aan boord van de Mars Express-satelliet van de Europese ruimtevaartorganisatie ESA. Een dergelijk instrument onderzoekt het oppervlak van de planeet en de laag daar meteen onder door er een signaal naartoe te sturen en dan te kijken wat er terugkomt. (lees hieronder verder)
AFPOp deze foto kan je de radargegevens zien van de Mars Express. Het meer werd gevonden onder een dikke laag ijs aan de permanente ijskap op de Zuidpool van Mars.
Wat betekent het voor leven?
Nog niets. “We weten al lang dat de oppervlakte van Mars geen ideaal decor is voor leven zoals wij het kennen, vandaar dat de zoektocht zich concentreert op de lagen er meteen onder”, zegt dokter Manish Patel van de Open University. “Daar is voldoende bescherming voor schadelijke straling vanuit de ruimte en is er een iets gunstiger druk en temperatuur. En belangrijkst van al: water kan er bestaan in zijn vloeibare vorm. En dat laatste is essentieel voor leven.”
Volgens de nieuwe waarnemingen is er dus effectief water aanwezig op de rode planeet, maar een bewijs van leven is er (nog) niet. “We hebben nu wel een plaats waar we ernaar kunnen zoeken”, aldus nog Patel. “Een beetje als een schatkaart.”
Dokter Claire Cousins van de Britse University of St Andrews waarschuwt wel dat het water extreem koud zou kunnen zijn. “Dat zou ook een uitdaging zijn voor potentieel leven”, zegt ze. Om vloeibaar te blijven in ijskoude omstandigheden zoals op Mars zouden er bovendien veel zouten in het water zitten volgens de onderzoekers, die uitgaan van een watertemperatuur tussen -70 en -10 graden Celsius. (lees hieronder verder)
AFPHet Gorgonum Basin. Wetenschappers denken dat daar ooit een meer met vloeibaar water geweest moet zijn, toen Mars nog warmer en vochtiger was. Minstens 3,6 miljard jaar geleden moeten er een grote hoeveelheid vloeibaar water en meren aanwezig zijn geweest.
En nu?
Verder onderzoek. “De metingen moeten nu ook elders op Mars gedaan worden”, aldus dokter Matt Balme van de Open University. “En we moeten op zoek gaan naar soortgelijke waarnemingen. Als het mogelijk is moeten alternatieve verklaringen onderzocht worden en – hopelijk – uitgesloten. Misschien is dit een aanleiding om een nieuwe missie te ondernemen naar Mars en een boring te doen naar het water. Dat zou wel een zeer ambitieuze onderneming zijn.”
Dat wordt beaamd door professor Orosei. “Daar geraken en het ultieme bewijs bovenhalen zal geen eenvoudige opdracht zijn. We zullen er een robot voor naar Mars moeten voor sturen, die door 1,5 kilometer ijs kan boren. Dat zal technologische ontwikkelingen vergen die nu nog niet beschikbaar zijn.”
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:HLN.be - Het Laatste Nieuws ( NL)
UFO Researcher Finds Two Shipwrecks When Searching For Amelia Earhart Plane, July 25, 2018, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Researcher Finds Two Shipwrecks When Searching For Amelia Earhart Plane, July 25, 2018, UFO Sighting News.
Date of discovery: July 25, 2018 Google Earth coordinates: 3°35'41.48"S 174° 7'8.85"W Island name: Mckean Island I was looking for Amelia Earhart Electra silver plane on Google Earth map and accidentally came across two shipwrecks. I have found planes before and even found 65% of the Flight MH370 off Cape of Good Hope, South Africa last year, but no one took me seriously because I am just a blogger. Click here to see the Flight MH370 video post.
I have found several shipwrecks and made videos of three of them, but had found around 20 using Google Earth map, just not all were high enough quality to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt. I will keep searching for Amelia Earharts plane. Her achievements in history demand it. Scott C. Waring
White UFO Over Malaysia Frightens Eyewitness Enough To Delete Video, July 21, 2018, UFO Sighting News.
White UFO Over Malaysia Frightens Eyewitness Enough To Delete Video, July 21, 2018, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: July 21, 2018
Location of sighting: Malaysia
This white UFO was seen over Malaysia this week. The eyewitness uploaded the video, then became frightened and deleted it. Why? Because many who see a real UFO fear that the gov or MIB or any organisation that protects these craft will punish you for uploading the video. It happens a lot actually.
This UFO does have some similarities to the Canadian drone project CL-227/CL-327. I would say the UFO is 70% similar, but still it does not resemble it any more than that. The UFO has no blades, not landing legs. The top head of the UFO is flat, not round like the military drone. Also that drone was used back in 1975-1988 in Canada.
In conclusion this is clearly a UFO, its not a CL-227 drone.
Glowing UFO Over China During Sunset, July 18, 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News
Glowing UFO Over China During Sunset, July 18, 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News
Date of sighting: July 18, 2018
Location of sighting: Chongqing, China
This eyewitness caught a UFO over China last week. The UFOs you see in this video are actually just one craft. These glowing lights are part of its propulsion system. Bob Lazar said the smaller craft he worked on in Area S4 inside Area 51 had three main engines that glowed at certain times. Reminds me of the sighting over the Chinese airport years ago that shut down the airport.
Complete Mystery in Arctic Siberia as Day turns Into Night
Complete Mystery in Arctic Siberia as Day turns Into Night
No official explanations for darkness over swathes of Yakutia amid conspiracy theories of a UFO, new weapons tests, a meteorite, or pollution from wildfires.
The remote Eveno-Bytantaisky, Zhigansky, and Verkhozansky districts in Siberia, Russia saw their day turn into a 'complete darkness' for almost three hours on Friday, July 20, 2018.
Credit image: Siberiantimes.
Even though they should have 24 hour light at this time of year the region, larger than Italy, was hit by a mysterious phenomenon that turned the day into night.
No-one wanted to be on the street because the feeling was as if something heavy in the air was pressing on your chest", said one resident.
At first it looked like it was a strong thunderstorm coming, the sky went dark, and got darker and darker, but this time unlike anything else we have seen before the darkness had a rich yellow undertone, it was very unusual said another resident.
Credit image: Siberiantimes.
Officials expressed doubts over the theory that smoke from raging wildfires in other districts or a thick layer of dusk had blotted out the sun. Besides officials stated that there was no dust, reports Siberiantime.
Head of Verkhoyansk town Yevgeny Potapov said that the sun didn’t disappear in his area, but something strange happened on that day.
Credit image: Siberiantimes.
Coincidence or not but the phenomenon in Siberia appeared days before the Saturn-Moon conjunction and full moon near Mars while on July 27 the Moon will undergo an eclipse which will be the longest total lunar eclipse of the 21st century.
There is still no official explanation of the weird phenomenon in the sky over Siberia from meteorological, defense, or other deferral officials.
The real Project Blue Book, which ran from 1952 to 1969, and was an official U.S. Air Force program to investigate UFOs, is no longer active. However, for the upcoming History Channel TV series based on the real Project Blue Book, a Project Blue Book Headquarters was set up in the parking lot of San Diego’s Petco Park during Comic-Con. They were taking UFO sighting reports and having artists recreate them while also giving debriefings on UFOs.
History Channel’s Project Blue Book exhibit at Comic-Con.
(Image Credit: Alejandro Rojas)
I got a tour of Project Blue Book Headquarters for Den of Geek and will be writing more about it and the upcoming show on the Den of Geek website. However, I did tell Blue Book HQ about one of my UFO sightings, and it seems many of the people coming to check out the exhibit also had their own.
I have embedded the live stream from Facebook of my visit, and it includes the description of my sighting, but I recalled the event from my memory. Now that I am home in my HQ, I can look up details. I wrote an extensive report on the sighting for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), some of which can be read here in their case reports.
The sighting I described was my first. I have had a couple since, but less exciting than this one. This sighting took place at the UFO Watchtower in the San Luis Valley in Colorado. It took place on June 7, 2003. I would visit the valley quite a bit when I lived in Colorado. It is beautiful and is known as a place where strange things occur. That is why it has a UFO Watchtower.
UFO Watchtower outside of Hooper, Colorado in the San Luis Valley. This pictures is facing northwest. My UFO sighting took place as we stood outside the door in this picture. The door faces east.
The UFO Watchtower has an annual UFO event. I emceed and spoke there a couple of times. It also has a store. My sighting took place the first time I visited. The owner, Judy Messoline, and I hit it off quickly, and we talked for hours that night.
It was about 9 PM, at the end of a lovely sunset. Nothing happened immediately, and we ended up in the store. I knew we should be watching [the skies], but most of us were really into our discussions. Luckily some children and my sister were watching the skies outside. The children belonged to a Spanish speaking Mexican family. My sister’s boyfriend speaks Spanish, so we were able to communicate. BTW, they, living in the valley, had their own host of stories. My family camped a lot when I was young, and my sister and I loved staying up and spotting satellites, so I knew she was a pro. Not too long after, between 925 and 930 PM, my sister called us, saying she saw a satellite. When I saw it, my first comment was that was way too bright to be a satellite. It was directly out of the watchtower’s back door, which faced east over the rock garden. The object was at 10 o’clock, about 30-35 degrees off the horizon, above a mountain range. I am a bit color blind, so I am not sure of the exact color, but the color did seem to change. Others reported it being yellow and turning blue when it dimmed. It was over the Mountains, but seemed nearer, heading south, moving faster than a satellite, but not as fast as a shooting star. I would describe a satellite as typically dimmer than the brighter stars and move at a steady pace. Usually, spotted right above in the darkest part of the sky, and moving across the sky, and not along the horizon.
The report is cut off due to size, but what I remember is the object moved to the south, then began to dim, but not steadily. To me, it seemed to make a jerky motion as it dimmed, or perhaps blinked in and out as it dimmed. Then it disappeared.
At that point, we were super excited and were talking about what we saw. One person said she had trained her binoculars on the object and could see it change direction towards the ground once we lost sight of it.
The sighing itself was strange enough, but then it got a bit stranger. After a few minutes of excitedly talking about the event, it was pitch dark out. The night skies out there are amazing. I kept my eyes on the skies, and I noticed a satellite in the northwest moving to the southeast, towards us. I then saw another one to the southwest moving northeast, also towards us. They were about the same distance away, both moving towards us.
I call them satellites because they were single points of lights moving steadily, just as satellites do. However, mysteriously, they crossed right above the area we saw the object. Now the object we saw appeared over the mountains, and if these were satellites they were much higher, so they might not have crossed in that location, but that is how it looked from our vantage point. I mean, how weird is that? Just after our sighting, these “satellites” pass over the same area coming from opposite directions? Really friggin odd. This is the strangest sighting I have had, and it took place during my first visit to the UFO Watchtower.
It goes without saying, I am super excited to have this drawing of my sighting. Blue Book HQ did a great job. As I said, I will be writing more about the TV show for Den of Geek, but even without the cool drawing, I would say the show looks like it is going to be great!
LONDON: The Moon might once have been home to aliens. Extraterrestrial life might have made its way to our nearest neighbour after a meteorite blast, scientists have suggested. And when it did, the atmosphere might have been far more habitable than it is today, ready to support life, if only briefly.
That is according to two senior planetary researchers who found that the Moon might have had conditions to support simple lifeforms some four billion years ago. The same conditions might have arrived during a peak of volcanic activity 3.5 billion years ago, claim the researchers.
GETTY
MOON: Scientists believe Earth life might have been blasted into space – landing on the Moon
GETTY
LIFE IN SPACE: Could our nearest neighbour actually the hold the key to aliens?
During that time, the Moon was spewing out vast amounts of very hot gases, including water vapour. Those gases might have formed into liquid water on the surface as well as creating an atmosphere that could keep it there. “If liquid water and a significant atmosphere were present on the early Moon for long periods of time, we think the lunar surface would have been at least transiently habitable,” said Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Washington State University, who wrote the paper with Ian Crawford, a professor of planetary science and astrobiology at the University of London.
The Moon is also thought to have been wrapped in a magnetic field that would have kept any lifeforms who lived there safe from deadly solar winds. The earliest evidence of life on Earth comes from about 3.5 and 3.8 billion years old, in the form of cyanobacteria. During that time, the solar system was a violent place marked by frequent meteorite impacts — it is possible that some life could have been carried up to the moon in the wake of one of those blasts, the researchers suggest.
“It looks very much like the Moon was habitable at this time,” Mr Schulze-Makuch said. “There could have actually been microbes thriving in water pools on the Moon until the surface became dry and dead.”
“It looks very much like the Moon was habitable at this time”
Prof Schulze-Mach
The researchers now hope that the speculation will encourage Nasa and other space agencies to undertake an “aggressive future program of lunar exploration”. That could examine moon deposits from the period to find if they include signs of life, or simulating the conditions of the early Moon on Earth or the International Space Station, to see whether life could exist there. Post fetched from RSS feeds
These huge ground drawings located in the Sechura Desert south of the Peruvian Piura Region are believed to have been carved 200 years before Christ.
Outlandish conspiracy theories have claimed they were created by ancient aliens thousands of years ago.
The new video, recorded by Rafael Mercado of the Peruvian Association of Ufology, shows a hovering elongated object similar to a zeppelin or a flying saucer in the evening sky.
The footage was accompanied with the message: "Are we looking at a UFO over the Nazca Lines?
“Draw your own conclusions."
YOUTUBE/GETTY
ALIEN LIFE PROOF?: Footage captured a UFO over the Nazca lines
Social media users have debated the flying object's authenticity.
One suggested it was just “cloud” while another compared the object to an “unidentified flying sausage”.
But a user called 'RocioPeru' claimed to have seen “dozens of UFOs” in Nazca.
The Nazca Lines, a group of pre-Hispanic geoglyphs etched into the desert sands, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994.
Some geoglyphs are 30 metres (98 feet) wide and stretch over a nine-kilometre (5.6-mile) distance.
There are around 300 different figures which mostly depict plants and animals, including a hummingbird, monkeys and a 1,000-foot-long pelican.
Some archaeologists believe they date back to around 200 BC.
They were first spotted by Peruvian archaeologist Toribio Mejia Xesspe while he was hiking through the foothills.
Archaeologists have discovered scores of mammoth intricate drawings etched into southern Peru’s ancient desert.
The drawings include crude figures of a killer whale and a woman dancing, while some are more puzzling still, such as the 35m-long "Astronaut", which depicts a bizarre other-worldly figure.
Genetics research has transformed our understanding of human history, particularly in the Americas. The focus of the majority of high profile ancient DNA papers in recent years has been on addressing early events in the initial peopling of the Americas. This research has provided details of this early history that we couldn’t access though the archeological record.
Collectively, genetics studies have shown us that the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas are descended from a group that diverged from its Siberian ancestors beginning sometime around 23,000 years before present & remained isolated in Beringia (the region of land that once connected Siberia & North America) for an extended period of time. When the glaciers covering North America melted enough to make the Pacific coast navigable, southward travel became possible, & patterned genetic diversity across North & South America reflects these early movements.
Recent ancient DNA studies indicate that approximately 13,000 years ago, two clades (genetic groups) of peoples emerged; one exclusively consisting of northern Native Americans, & one consisting of peoples from North, Central, & South America, including the 12,800 year old Anzick child from a Clovis burial site in Montana. All genetics research to date has affirmed the shared ancestry of all ancient & contemporary indigenous peoples of the Americas, & refuted stories about the presence of “lost tribes”, ancient Europeans, & (I can’t believe that I actually have to say this) ancient aliens.
Events that occurred after people first entered the Americas – how they settled in different parts of the continents, adapted to local environments, interacted with each other, & were affected by European colonialism – have received somewhat less attention in the press, but as can be seen in the links above, there have been some very significant research papers published on these topics. One such paper that I’ve recently found very interesting (in fact, I wrote up a short article for Current Biology that discusses its significance), Genetic Discontinuity between the Maritime Archaic & Beothuk Populations in Newfoundland, Canada by Duggen et al. (2017), explores the genetic diversity within three different ancient groups who lived in Newfoundland & Labrador.
One reason this region is of particular interest is that it’s on the furthest northeastern margin of North America & so was one of the last areas in the Americas to be peopled. It appears to have been occupied successively by three culturally distinct groups beginning about 10,000 years before present (YBP) in Labrador & 6,000 YBP in Newfoundland: the Maritime Archaic, the Paleo-Inuit (also referred to as the Paleo-Eskimo), & the indigenous peoples that Europeans called the Beothuk. Today the region is home to several indigenous groups, including the Inuit, the Innu, the Mi’kmaq & the Southern Inuit of NunatuKavut.
The members of the Maritime Archaic tradition created the oldest known burial mounds in North America (dating to 7,714 YBP) & subsisted upon coastal marine resources. Approximately 3,400 YBP they seem to have abandoned Newfoundland, either in response to the appearance of Paleo-Inuit in the region or because of climate changes. The Paleo-Inuit’s presence on the island overlapped with the peoples referred to as the Beothuk beginning around 2000 YBP. The Beothuk encountered European settlers in 1500 AD, & in response to their presence gradually moved to the interior of the island, where their populations declined.
The last known Beothuk, Shanawdithit, died of tuberculosis in captivity in 1829. Although it remains possible that Beothuk traces of ancestry persist in contemporary residents of NL, including members of the Innu, Mi’kmaq, & European communities, it is generally accepted that the Beothuk became culturally extinct with the death of Shanawdithit.
By analyzing mitochondrial haplogroups (groups of closely related maternal lineages) present within individuals from all three populations, Dugan et al. addressed the question of whether they were genetically similar or whether all three groups were biologically as well as culturally distinct from each other. This happens to be one of the most fundamental questions that arises when studying the past: do cultural changes in the archaeological record of a region represent the arrival of new groups, or did one group of people living in the same region over time adopt new cultural practices & technologies from others?
In the case of Newfoundland, the three groups were genetically distinct; they do not share any maternal haplogroups except for haplogroup X2a, lineages of which were found in both the Maritime Archaic & Beothuk. (The presence of haplogroup X2a in North American populations has sometimes been cited as evidence for European ancestry in ancient Americans. If you’re interested in why I & most other geneticists specializing in Native American populations disagree with that, you can read about it here).
Apart from that single exception, the Maritime Archaic, Paleo-Inuit, & Beothuk are clearly genetically distinctive from one another. However, it’s important to note that this study was done on mitochondrial DNA, which is exclusively matrilineally inherited, & so we can only say that the three groups were not maternally related. While they indicate that the groups are genetically different from each other, does that mean that there was no shared ancestry between them at all? It’s unclear without looking at the rest of the genome whether, for example, there might have been any paternal lineages shared between the populations. I hope that the authors of this study will follow up with analyses of complete genomes from these ancient individuals, as there is a great deal more to be learned by looking more deeply at their ancestry.
As this study shows, we can learn a lot about the past by characterizing the genomes of ancient & contemporary peoples. This paper by Duggen et al. adds to decades of study of the genomes from ancient & contemporary peoples of the Americas, which reveals a nuanced picture of their complex & remarkable history of evolution, interaction, & resilience in the face of unbelievable oppression.
But it’s also important to understand what genetics can’t tell us. While writing up this article, I was appalled (although not surprised) that there is at least one personal ancestry testing company that has made the claim that they can help you determine whether or not you are Beothuk based on your DNA.
Let’s be clear: all claims that a person’s tribe or indigenous nationality can be determined from their genomes are scientifically inaccurate. First, this is because there simply are no currently known genetic markers that allow us to identify individual tribes or nations; although we see geographically patterned genetic variation throughout the Americas in ancient & contemporary populations which allows us to differentiate them (as done in this study), genetic lineages are not tribal or nation-specific.
More importantly, who is or is not a member of a particular community is determined by indigenous groups’ own standards of belonging, which are often just as much about relations & community ties as they are about biological descent. Geneticists can’t determine who is or is not authentically Beothuk, Cherokee, or anything else based on the percentage of “Native American DNA” they might have.
Ancient DNA Reveals a Completely Unknown Population of Native Americans
With a stark appearance dotted by thousands of craters and almost no atmosphere, the moon is perhaps one of the last places in the solar system you’d call ‘habitable’ — but that’s not to say it’s been like this forever. According to simulations run by astrobiologists at Washington State University and the University of London, the moon may have fostered the necessary conditions for life to survive on its surface during its distant past.
Lunar life?
Despite ambitions to one day colonize the moon, not much serious consideration has ever been given to the thought of a once habitable moon. Recent developments, however, have shown that there is much to learn about the bright white bulb that lights the night’s sky.
Until not too long ago, scientists used to think that the moon had virtually no atmosphere. However, recent studies have confirmed that our moon does indeed have an atmosphere, consisting of gases like sodium and potassium, which aren’t found in Earth’s atmosphere, or those of Mars or Venus, for that matter. It is true that it’s extremely thin — fewer than 1,000,000 moles can be found in each cubic centimeter of the lunar atmosphere, which is comparable to the density of the outermost fringes of Earth’s atmosphere, where the International Space Station orbits — but it’s still something.
Perhaps the most important revelation about the moon is the presence of water. Almost a decade ago, researchers reported that our moon holds at least hundreds of millions of metric tons of water ice on its surface. Far more water is thought to be present in the lunar mantle, trapped by minerals that formed very early in the moon’s history.
There is also reason to believe that an early moon may have been protected by a magnetic field, which could have shielded surface-dwelling life forms from the harmful touch of solar winds.
These sorts of developments — some backed by solid evidence, others more speculative — form the basis of a new study that examined the habitability potential during the moon’s geological history.
Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Washington State University, and Ian Crawford, a professor of planetary science and astrobiology at the University of London, performed simulations that suggest very simple lifeforms may have lived on the moon — and it could have happened twice in its distant past.
One habitable episode may have occurred shortly after the moon formed around four billion years ago from a debris disk. The second may have occurred around 3.5 billion years ago during a period of heightened lunar volcanic activity.
Outgassing in both periods may have formed pools of liquid water on the moon’s surface but also a thick atmosphere that could have been stable enough to last for millions of years.
“If liquid water and a significant atmosphere were present on the early Moon for long periods of time, we think the lunar surface would have been at least transiently habitable,” Schulze-Makuch said.
If the moon was indeed habitable at some point, what are the odds of life surfacing there? There’s really no way to tell, but if the moon ever had any life one of two things might have happened. Life could have spontaneously appeared from chemical building blocks under just the right conditions, as it could have on Earth. Alternatively, microorganisms like cyanobacteria may have been transported by meteorites. The early solar system used to be extremely chaotic and Earth was frequently bombarded by small and giant cosmic bodies alike. It’s possible that meteorites containing bacteria could have been blasted off the surface of Earth onto the moon.
A future program of lunar exploration might be able to determine just how likely it was for life to arrive on the moon. One line of inquiry would be obtaining samples from deposits that correspond to the period of heightened volcanic activity. In parallel, experiments that simulate early lunar environments on Earth and the International Space Station could study the survivability of microorganisms.
It sounds like a crime committed in a Greek candy shop, but it’s actually more like a horror movie created by astronomers. According to a new study, the Andromeda galaxy was once and possibly still is a cannibalistic star conglomeration that consumed a sibling of the Milky Way and some of its own smaller siblings … and could one day eat the Milky Way too. If there’s no sound in space, what’s that chomping, slurping and burping noise?
'CANNIBAL' Andromeda galaxy ATE Milky Way's big sibling according to SHOCKING new study
The terrifying report, published in Nature Astronomy, comes from University of Michigan astronomers Richard D’Souza and Eric Bell. They were studying the Local Group – the collection of at least 54 galaxies that lists the Milky Way and Andromeda as its largest and has its gravitational center right between the two of them. It’s predicted that the Local Group will someday – possibly 4 billion years from now – become the Local One as all of the members collapse into the center.
Collapse? Or should we say ‘are consumed by one giant cannibalistic galaxy that is probably Andromeda’?
Andromeda
That may be what the models developed by D’Souza and Bell are suggesting when they used them to analyze the faint halo of stars surrounding Andromeda. Once thought to be the crumbs of many small galaxies eaten by Andromeda, the simulations instead showed that the stars were potentially from a single large galaxy surpassed in size only by Andromeda and the Milky Way. Furthermore, that giant galaxy was most likely a fraternal twin of the Milky Way that astronomers never knew existed. The astronomers named it M32p after the M32 halo around Andromeda that’s the faint reminder of what it once was … and a faint predictor of what may happen to its surviving sibling.
But first, Andromeda would probably turn the Milky Way into a form of the mysterious M32 – a small, dense satellite galaxy made of both old and new stars that has long puzzled astronomers like Bell … until now.
“M32 is a weirdo. While it looks like a compact example of an old, elliptical galaxy, it actually has lots of young stars. It’s one of the most compact galaxies in the universe. There isn’t another galaxy like it.”
Milky Way
The model shows that this “weirdo” is actually the remaining center of Milky Way sibling M32p, likened to the nearly indestructible pit of a galactic peach sloppily chomped to near extinction by a cannibalistic celestial companion. While the pit remains whole, the rest of the M32 peach is now part of Andromeda’s huge galactic disc, which the simulation shows is sturdy enough to have survived many galactic collisions.
Will the Disc of Andromeda (a great name for a band) be all that’s left in four billion years when the Large Group becomes one? Will there be anyone left to sing along?
One of the worst threats to hang over the head of humankind in recent times is that of the grim specter of nuclear war, the effects of which we got a brief and tragic taste of back in World War II with the bombs dropped to horrific effect on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The thought that the whole world could be reduced to such devastation is a fear that constantly looms over us in this day and age, with good reason, but this must surely be a modern fear, right? After all, nuclear weapons are devices of sadistic human ingenuity that has only come about within the last century with the development of our macabre technology, are they not? However, according to ancient texts and some anomalous evidence, it has been alleged by certain conspiracy theorists that nuclear strikes were possibly carried out thousands of years ago, far back in the mists of time.
One of the main historical oddities that has been used to illustrate the possibility of an ancient nuclear war is supposedly contained within the 8th century Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, which chronicles the Kurukshetra War and battle between Rama and the demon Ravana. Within these pages are claimed to be references to some catastrophic event that in many ways sounds exactly like what one would expect a nuclear strike to look like, such as an annihilating explosion described as being “brighter than a thousand suns,” which caused all trees to instantly ignite into flame, and reduced everything in its path to ashes. Indian historian, Kisari Mohan Ganguli, has said of such weapons of mass destruction in old texts:
Indian sacred writings are full of such descriptions, which sound like an atomic blast as experienced in Hiroshima and Nagasaki… The passage tells of combat where explosions of final weapons decimate entire armies, causing crowds of warriors with steeds and elephants and weapons to be carried away as if they were dry leaves of trees.
Interestingly, the texts also mention that survivors of the catastrophe later fell down ill and lost their hair, which undeniably sounds very much like radiation sickness, thousands of years before they should have known what that was. According to one purported rough translation, one section reads:
A single projectile charged with all the power in the Universe…An incandescent column of smoke and flame as bright as 10,000 suns, rose in all its splendor…it was an unknown weapon, an iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death which reduced to ashes an entire race. The corpses were so burned as to be unrecognizable. Their hair and nails fell out, pottery broke without any apparent cause, and the birds turned white. After a few hours, all foodstuffs were infected. To escape from this fire, the soldiers threw themselves into the river.
Besides this text, there are various archeological sites throughout the region and indeed the world that supposedly hold evidence of such nuclear destruction in an era long before World War II. One is the site of the mysterious ancient city of Jodhpur, which lies along the edge of the great Thar desert in India, and is said to have long been plagued by unusually high levels of radiation since ancient times. Inhabitants here have long been said to have much higher incidences of cancer, birth defects, and other related complications than other areas, and radiation readings here have quite often gone off the charts. Why should that be?
Another is skeletons supposedly unearthed at the ancient ruins of the city of Mohenjo-Daro, Pakistan, in 1927, which are infused with high radiation levels and appear to have been people who dropped spontaneously where they stood to lie there in the streets, as if from some great weapon of mass destruction that struck them down instantly. Many of these skeletons, which are strangely devoid of the decay one would expect, were purportedly found lying face down right in the streets, in some cases still holding hands as if they had been anticipating the doom that was coming for them, and some of the rocks of these ruins seem to have been partially crystallized as if by some incredibly intense flash of heat. Indeed, British Indian researcher David Davenport claimed to have found rocks with evidence that they had been mysteriously fused and blasted into glass with heat as high as 1500°C. Something very unusual happened here in around 2,500 BCE, but what it was remains unclear.
Mohenjo-Daro
Speaking of anomalous fused glass, there are other sites around the world that exhibit the same phenomenon. In December of 1932, a surveyor from the Egyptian Geological Survey by the name of Patrick Clayton found a mysterious sheet of glass buried in the sands of the Great Sand Sea, near the Saad Plateau in Egypt. Such mysterious glass chunks have been found in such disparate places as the deserts of Libya, the Sahara, Mojave, and others. Experts who have looked at such unusual glass formations have often likened them to the sort of glass left behind by nuclear tests at places like the White Sands missile range, in southern New Mexico. Engineer Albion W. Hart famously once likened the glass left behind at the missile range to similar deposits he had personally witnessed in the deserts of Africa, but speculated that the ones he had seen would have had to have come from a blast roughly 10,000 times more powerful than the detonations at White Sands.
Some scientists have tried to explain these vast glass deposits as the result of some meteorite impact, but the lack of any crater makes such speculation problematic. There is also the high purity and transparency exhibited by much of this glass, which is not consistent with a meteorite strike. So what caused these weird glass deposits? No one really has a clue. Evidence such as this and the other accounts we have looked at have caused some theorists to proclaim that it all points to some sort of event or events involving nuclear weapons far in the past, although how this could have occurred is left to speculation, such as that it was due to time travelers, aliens, or both.
Whatever the cause may be, it on the surface seems when looking at these cases that at least the evidence for some sort of ancient nuclear apocalypse is rather solid and undeniable, but did any of this actually really happen? Unfortunately, there are many problems with this idea, not the least of which is that no official historical or archeological account gives any mention of such a cataclysm, and there has been much doubt cast upon the veracity of the claims of ancient texts describing such doomsday events. There has also been much criticism aimed at the methodologies used and the way the findings made at places like Mohenjo-Daro were analyzed and interpreted, with later studies showing that the bodies were not merely lying in the streets, but had actually merely been displaced from their original graves. Their bodies were also explained as being so well preserved due to the dry and hot climate of the region.
Other findings such as the fused glass and radiation have also been looked at with a skeptical eye, likely caused by rational reasons, and since the buildings themselves are mostly intact it seems odd to presume a nuclear blast should have swept through this site. The ancient texts describing some doomsday scenario have also been called into question, with Brian Dunning from the site Skeptoid perusing the translated version of the Mahabharata for any references to a nuclear war and finding none, leaving him forced to maintain that such tales are fabricated at best. You can read Dunning’s rather thorough deconstruction of the ancient nuclear war theory here.
Despite all of this debunking, the matter is not really settled for some, and many mysteries remain. There are certainly many conspiracy theorists who stand by the notion that such an ancient nuclear war really did happen, that the evidence proves it, and it seems that the debate will keep going on for some time. It is curious to wonder about how, if such an event ever really took place, did this all come to pass? Why would such sophisticated agents of destruction be available so many thousands of years ago and who would have been behind deploying them and for what reasons? We will never know either way, but we can hope that it never happens again.
WETENSCHAPDe maan was waarschijnlijk ooit de thuishaven van buitenaards leven. Dat is althans wat twee gerespecteerde astronomen beweren. Het zou wel al 4 miljard jaar geleden zijn dat de satelliet bewoond werd.
4 miljard jaar geleden zou er buitenaards leven aanwezig geweest zijn op onze maan. Dat beweren astrobiologen Dirk Schulze-Makuch en Ian Crawford in hun nieuwe paper. De twee onderzoekers zijn respectievelijk verbonden aan de Washington State University en de University of London, maar staken voor dit onderzoek de koppen samen.
In die periode zag onze maan er volledig anders uit. De satelliet was erg actief en spuwde een allegaartje aan gassen waaronder watergas. De onderzoekers vermoeden dat de gassen een atmosfeer vormden rond de maan. Die zou op zijn beurt het watergas binnenhouden waardoor het in vloeibare vorm op het oppervlak terecht kwam.
Microben in het water
“Als er voor lange tijd vloeibaar water en een significante atmosfeer aanwezig was, zou het een erg goede broedplaats zijn voor buitenaards leven”, zegt Schulze-Makuch. De kans dat er in die periode geen leven ontstond, is volgens hen dus erg klein. “Er zullen waarschijnlijk microben in het water hebben geleefd tot het oppervlak weer uitdroogde.”
Het tweetal hoopt dat NASA nu meer onderzoek gaan doen naar eventueel leven op de maan. Het oudste bewijs van leven op aarde stamt van 3,5 à 3,8 miljard jaar geleden. Toen bevolkte de cyanobacterie onze planeet.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:HLN.be - Het Laatste Nieuws ( NL)
UFO'S IN DE BUURT VAN VLIEGTUIGEN WORDEN STEEDS GEVAARLIJKER ( VIDEO )
UFO'S IN DE BUURT VAN VLIEGTUIGEN WORDEN STEEDS GEVAARLIJKER ( VIDEO )
Steeds vaker komen er berichten van vliegtuigbemanningen die vreemde voorwerpen vlak langs de cockpit zien vliegen.
Soms blijft het daar niet bij en slagen vliegtuigen er ternauwernood in te landen met schade aan de neus van het toestel zoals enkele dagen geleden in Rusland.
Er doen zich een aantal vreemde verschijnselen voor en één daarvan is dat er in het mainstream nieuws steeds vaker op wordt gehamerd dat we UFO’s nu toch echt een keer serieus moeten gaan nemen.
Zoals bijvoorbeeld in de volgende uitzending van Fox News, waar de Engelsman en ufoloog bij uitstek, Nick Pope, te gast is om te praten over het steeds groter wordende gevaar dat UFO’s opleveren voor de burgerluchtvaart.
In de uitzending wordt uiteraard ingespeeld op de eerdere vrijgave van ufobeelden en wordt enkele keren herhaald dat we, al was het alleen maar voor de veiligheid van het vliegverkeer, nu toch echt UFO’s serieus moeten gaan nemen.
Dit alles lijkt weer een beetje op het verdere hersenspoelen van de bevolking richting het in de nabije toekomst bekend maken van de geheime ruimtevloot.
En toch, er gebeuren regelmatig vreemde dingen met vliegtuigen.
Zoals afgelopen week toen een An-24 van Polar Airlines tijdens een vlucht boven het Russische Siberië volgens de officiële berichten letterlijk in zwaar weer terechtkwam.
Wat dat dan precies geweest zou zijn is niet duidelijk, maar wel dat dit vliegtuig met iets in aanraking is geweest tijdens de vlucht.
Het zag er als volgt uit na de landing.
Volgens Polar Airlines was het geen blikseminslag en zij suggereren dat het misschien hagel geweest zou kunnen zijn. Echter, er wordt nogal geheimzinnig gedaan en men zegt niet dat het toestel in een zware hagelbui terecht is gekomen, dus wie weet hebben we hier wel een aanvaring met een UFO.
Dit is niet de eerste keer dat vliegtuigen aan de grond komen met dit soort schade. Wij hebben hier al vaker over geschreven en hier volgt een deel uit een eerder artikel waar wellicht ook sprake is van een botsing tussen een UFO en een vliegtuig:
Volgens de onderstaande video uit Zuid Amerika gaat het wel degelijk af en toe mis.
Zo vertellen ze het verhaal van wat er gebeurde op 15 mei 2015 met een Boeing 777 van Aeromexico.
Dit toestel vertrok die dag om half acht ’s avonds voor een vlucht naar Madrid in Spanje. Ongeveer anderhalf uur na vertrek besloot de bemanning onverwacht een noodlanding te maken in Cancun omdat ze zeiden dat er storingen optraden in het elektrische systeem.
Na de landing in Cancun nam een passagier een foto van het toestel dat er toen zo uit zag:
Volgens de onderstaande video heeft dit vliegtuig een botsing gehad met een onbekend vliegend object; een UFO dus.
De officiële versie van het verhaal is dat ze al direct na vertrek een blikseminslag hadden waardoor de schade ontstond en er eveneens problemen waren met het elektrische systeem. De botsing van de 777 met een onbekend object lijkt veel op die die een vliegtuig van Air China twee jaar geleden had en waar wij toen het volgende over schreven:
De vlucht was in de vroege ochtend van 4 juni vertrokken van Chengdu naar Guangzhou. Het vertrek van de Boeing 757 verliep zonder problemen. Twintig minuten na take-off, terwijl ze zich op een hoogte bevinden van 26.000 voet, krijgt de verkeersleiding een noodoproep van het toestel en wordt besloten een noodlanding te maken in Shunagliu.
Deze verliep zonder problemen en er werd de passagiers meegedeeld dat een en ander het gevolg was van een technisch mankement. Echter, direct na het incident had één van de passagiers de tegenwoordigheid van geest om enkele foto’s te maken.
De officiële verklaring kwam al vrij snel daarna: het was een vogel geweest. Als we dan kijken naar de grootte van de toegebrachte schade, dan moet het wel een enorme vogel zijn geweest. Een die bovendien iets van een soort verfstrepen heeft achtergelaten.
Een vogelaanvaring bij deze vlucht is uitgesloten omdat én het vliegtuig daarvoor te hoog vloog én omdat er geen sporen zijn gevonden op het vliegtuig zoals bloedspetters of veren.
Er zijn nog talloze verhalen over bijna botsingen tussen vliegtuigen en UFO’s. Hebben we hier daarom toch te maken met buitenaardsen die niet goed uitkijken met hun snelle UFO’s of is er een andere verklaring?
Mysteries and study of unknown has always intrigued humans. Search for truth has been mankind’s biggest motivator to move ahead. Here is a compilation of top 10 modern unsolved mysteries of the world. These mysteries are wide in scope and include mysteries from all over the world.
In the remote Qinghai Province there is a mystery that has yet to be satisfactorily explained, and is off limits by Chinese government. Near the summit of Mt. Baigong stands a 60 m pyramid. At the base of this pyramid are three caves. In these caves, elsewhere around the mountain and nearby Lake Toson run lines and lines of what look like old lead based pipes. Local countrymen have known about the pipes for centuries. Two of the three caves at the base of the pyramid have collapsed and are inaccessible. Only one cave now remains accessible. Oddly enough, on the roof of the cave a pipe 40 cm in diameter bumps out on an angle. Another pipe of the same diameter is seen on the floor of the cave, disappearing into the ground. There are more pipes outside the cave at ground level that range in 2 cm to 10 cm in diameter. More pipes are scattered around lake and on lake floor. Initial analysis of the pipe material found it to be indeed incredibly old, and consisting of iron oxide, silicon dioxide, calcium oxide and the other 8% of unidentifiable content. Similar pipe structures have been discovered in Louisiana. These are deemed to be naturally formed by some scientists. No more official information has been released on this subject by China.
9. Kryptos
Jim Sanborn designed the puzzling S-shaped Kryptos sculpture in 1989. It was later placed in the Courtyard plaza of the CIA in Langley, Virginia. There are four sections to the sculpture, each containing an encrypted message. Three of the four coded messages have been cracked. The fourth one has yet to be deciphered, and is considered one of the most famous unsolved codes in the world. Kryptos’ first three coded messages were cracked in 1999 by a computer scientist from southern California named James Gillogly. In 2005, Ms. Monet Friedrich, a computer engineer from Vancouver, British Columbia, discovered an error in earlier deciphers that was confirmed by Sanborn. The fourth coded message has yet to be solved. It is the hardest, arguably, because it is the shortest of the four messages, containing only 97 characters, so it is harder to find patterns. Recently, Sanborn revealed a clue to the New York Times: The characters that are the 64th through 69th in the final series on the sculpture read NYPVTT. When deciphered, they read BERLIN. There is an online community dedicate to solving this puzzle.
8. The Hum
The hum is a low-pitched sound heard in numerous places worldwide, especially in the USA, UK, and northern Europe. It is usually heard only in quiet environments, and is often described as sounding like a distant diesel engine. Since it has proven undetectable by microphones or VLF antennae, its source and nature is still a mystery. In 1997 Congress directed scientists and observers from some of the most prestigious research institutes in the nation to look into a strange low frequency noise heard by residents in and around the small town of Taos, New Mexico. Only a small percentage of the population has confirmed of hearing it. For years those who had heard the noise, often described by them as a “Taos hum”, had been looking for answers. To this day no one knows the cause of this hum.
7. The Hum
“Toynbee Tiles” are linoleum plaques which have been embedded in the asphalt roadways of about two dozen major cities of United States and four South American capitals. They were first photographed in late 1980s. They are written in English (often lacking proper grammar and syntax). They are fairly easy to access and they have attracted the attention of many puzzle enthusiasts. No one really knows who is behind this. They contain some variation on the following inscription, “TOYNBEE IDEA IN MOViE `2001 RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPITER. The tiles appear to be the work of a single person, initially thought to be James Morasco, a Philadelphia carpenter. Even after his death in 2003, new tiles continued appearing in Philadelphia. Tiles that are located in the middle of busy streets and highways tend to wear away quickly and hundreds have been destroyed declaring them be vandalism.
6. The Hessdalen Light
Hessdalen Light is an unexplained light phenomenon that occurs in Hessdalen valley of Norway. They were observed over 15 to 20 times per week from 1982 until 1984. Since then, the activity has decreased and now the lights are observed about 10 to 20 times per year. The Hessdalen light most often is a bright, white or yellow light of unknown origin floating above ground level lasting sometimes for more than an hour. Several other types of unexplained lights are observed in the Hessdalen valley. In spite of numerous working hypotheses, there is no convincing explanation to the origin of these lights.
5. Dyatlov Pass Incident
At the end of January 1959, a Russian cross-country ski team ventured into the Northern Ural Mountains. Intended expedition was a week-long skiing adventure to reach Oroten Mountain in Urals. They left Vizhai (the last inhabited settlement far north) on January 27th, but never came back alive. The trouble wasn’t that the team disappeared. It was the state they were in when they were found. The campsite was abandoned with tent torn from inside. Searchers followed the recent footprints that led to the edge of nearby woods where they discovered the remains of a fire and two dead bodies. The first two bodies discovered were found shoeless and only wearing their underwear. Nearby the searchers found three more bodies that appeared to have been trying to return to camp at that time. It wasn’t until two months later that authorities would find the remaining four bodies in a ravine under 4 m of snow quite a bit further from the camp. Two of the hikers had skull damage, two had major chest fractures, and one woman was missing her tongue. They had no external wounds or injuries. There were no foreign footprints and there was no sign of a struggle. What’s puzzling was that some of the victims were wearing each others’ clothes. Examination concluded six of the group members died of hypothermia and three of fatal injuries. Medical examiner finally concluded that the group members all died because of a “compelling unknown force.”
4. UVB-76 Radio Station
UVB-76 is a mysterious shortwave radio station that was first observed in 1982 and has transmitted 24×7 ever since. It broadcasts almost nothing but 21-34 buzzes per minute, each lasting roughly a second, 24 hours a day. Very rarely, perhaps once every few weeks, the monotony is broken by a male voice reciting brief sequences and strings of alphanumeric codes and Russian names. Despite much speculation, its actual purpose remains obscure to the public. On June 5, 2010, the buzzing ceased and there was only silence. The following day, the broadcast resumed. Presently, the station’s transmitter is believed to be near the town of Pskov in Russia. Today, the station’s fan base includes conspiracy theorists, anarchists, hackers, and Kremlinologists.
3. Mass Bird Suicides of Jatinga in India
The village of Jatinga in the Dima Hasao district of Assam in India has a population of around 2500. The village is world famous for its phenomenon of bird suicides. Most of the migratory birds visiting the area never leave the village and just drop to their death on the streets. The case gets even inscrutable in the sense that these birds plummet to their death precisely between 06:00 p.m. to 09:30 p.m. on the moonless nights of September and October. These mass suicides only occur on a specific 1 mile by 600 feet strip of land and this phenomenon is said to have occurred year after year without a break for more than a century. Many theories have been offered by scientists to explain this phenomenon, the most popular one being that these birds are attracted towards village lights that confuse them. Another theory that makes more sense is the presence of excessive magnetic field in the area that disorients them. Though more theories continue to arise, no one has yet been able to prove the exact explanation behind this phenomenon.
2. Wow! Signal
Jerry R. Ehman was a volunteer researcher for the Ohio State University. On August 15, 1977, he detected “Wow! Signal.” It was a strong narrowband radio signal. It was detected while he was working on a SETI project at the Big Ear radio telescope in Ohio. Back in those days, such information was fed into IBM mainframe computers, printed on to a perforated paper, and manually examined. On that fateful day something surprised Ehman. He spotted a vertical column of alphanumerical sequence “6EQUJ5,” around 10:00 p.m. He grabbed a red pen and circled the sequence. In the margin, he wrote “Wow!” The source of the signal was determined to be from stars somewhat closer to Sagittarius constellation. About 35 years later on August 17, 2012, a project directed by the National Geographic Channel and Arecibo Observatory beamed a package of digital data towards the source of the Wow! Signal. It consisted of Twitter messages from the public, submitted via the hashtag #ChasingUFOs, as well as videos from various celebrities.
1. The Valentich Disappearance
Frederick Valentich was a 20-year-old pilot who on October 21, 1978 disappeared with his light airplane. He was on his scheduled flight from Moorabbin Airport to King Island in Australia. He disappeared leaving no trace of him or his plane over Bass Strait. What intensifies the mystery is what Valentich reported seeing from his plane. Just minutes before going black, Valentich reported Melbourne air traffic control that he was being companioned by another aircraft 1,000 feet above him. He described some strange maneuvers and features of the aircraft. He said that his engine had begun running roughly, and finally reported that the “strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again. It is hovering and it’s not an aircraft.” He and his aircraft were never found. Finally after tedious investigation, Australian Department of Transport concluded that the reason behind his disappearance was inconclusive.
. These anomalous, usually low-frequency noises defy explanation and can sometimes go on for years. One of the more well-known hums, the Windsor Hum in Ontario, Canada, has been reported for nearly a decade. Other persistent hums can be found in Taos, New Mexico and Bristol, England.
The Taos Hum has never been fully explained.
Recently, additional mystery hums have popped up in some new locations. Residents of Rochester, New York have been plagued by an unexplained hum that is keeping many awake at night. Audio researchers now believe the Rochester Hum may be caused by two separate sources. Like in other instances of “The Hum,” industrial sources are suspected but cannot be definitively pinned down.
To make things worse for insomniacs, another hum has joined the global cacophony just this week. In the village of Barwell in Leicestershire, England, residents are struggling to sleep as a mysterious buzzing sound has surfaced. The sound has been described as a “low drone” similar to a vacuum cleaner or fan. Some residents say they’ve noticed it for a year now, but one resident told Leicestershire Live that the recent heat wave has made things worse due to forcing him to keep his windows open:
When it’s quiet at night it can keep me up, shutting the windows helps but when it’s hot, like it has been, it’s a pain. When the ambient noise of traffic dies down the sound can be heard from early evening all through the night.
Local councils are doing what local councils do best – shrugging – leaving residents to fend for themselves. The Barwell Buzz seems to be elusive, sounding quite loud in some locations and then quiet just a few feet away.
There is some data which supports the theory that deep-ocean waves rolling across the sea floor might generate low-frequency sound waves which travel up through the Earth’s crust.
The nearby town of Hinckley, Leicestershire is home to several major industrial plants, so of course they could have something to do with the buzz. However, industrial noise pollution has been ruled out in many other cases of mysterious noises, leaving explanations ranging from infrasound waves generated by deep-Earth seismic activity, mass hysteria, or even electromagnetic radiation from cell phone towers. Will we ever be able to pin down a definitive explanation for The Hum?
If Alien beings are Living on Earth, Why Haven’t They Announced Their Presence?
If Alien beings are Living on Earth, Why Haven’t They Announced Their Presence?
Many people in UFOlogy believes that aliens live amongst us. They could be your neighbour, spouse, paper boy, or coworker. You just know that your boss and sixth-grade teacher must have been an alien. No human could ever have that bad of breath. If they can pass for human are they humans? Are they hybrids an exotic mixture of off-world DNA and ours? Are they wearing holo-suits or some such advanced mirage designed to look like us? Or are they us? Are they home grown humans just tweaked a bit. All good questions.
If they are here why are they here? Is there an agenda that we do not know? Are they refugees from a planet even worse than our own? Is there many planet Earth’s that has been seeded from ours. If one of those other world humans comes home are they an alien, or a repatriated Earthican? Has disaster recovery plans were put in place to preserve the treasure trove of life on this pale blue dot.
There are many possibilities that could be entertained, which most people don’t seem to think about:
1) Aliens may not want to impinge upon the will, rights, or direction of this particular planet.
2) They could just be observing from a distance.
3) They might not want to alter Earth’s timeline (past, present or future).
4) They might be waiting for the “right” time they feel we are ready to be engaged.
5) They could be here to do experiments or to control the direction of our timeline (discreetly).
6) They are only here to watch over and/or to protect us.
7) They may not be able to survive for extended periods on the surface of this planet, and further, they may feel vulnerable in that regard.
8) They may not want to introduce new diseases to our immune systems, or vice versa to theirs.
9) There could be multiple races of aliens competing against each other for different reasons.
10) They may have tried in the past with but unintended or undesired results.
When conducting observational studies on less advanced life forms, it is of the utmost importance to not interfere and leave no trace in order to collect the most accurate data on specimens. For the visiting researcher to announce themselves would be to alter the behaviour of the studied subject, thus rendering any collected data to be corrupted, would it not? That pesky observer effect.
Consider Ms Dian Fossey’s groundbreaking investigations of primates. Dian Fossey was an American zoologist, primatologist, an anthropologist who undertook an extensive study of mountain gorilla groups over a period of 18 years. Her careful embedment after intense ‘stay away’ alarms and aggressive actions from the primitive gorillas is relative here. Note that ‘aggressiveness’ to strangers is a major trait of most apes, and is especially a factor to be kept in mind about humans by visiting extraterrestrials because we are weaponized beyond stones and sticks. But once embedded, Ms Fossey was able to even sit down in their midst and take notes, etc.
We use animal camouflage that to us appear silly and blatantly crude but many animals are OK with it and we are able to study them up close. I expect the same would happen from any extraterrestrials studying us. One might expect the camouflage issue to be a simple challenge as we as a species have lost so many of our ‘survival instincts and senses’.
What we humans have retained is an ability to selectively profile – so an ET with human exterior and basic movements would not be easily noticed.
I think it’s possible that aliens are among us because a number of alleged “abductees” have reported perceiving aliens who look like us. The most credible abductee, in my opinion, is Travis Walton, who was abducted on November 5, 1975. What makes Walton’s abduction different from others is the number of witnesses who saw the UFO that took Walton. Namely, six co-workers (loggers), who saw a UFO emit a beam of light that knocked Walton unconscious. His six co-workers fled the scene, returned 15 minutes later, and Walton and the UFO were gone. Walton was returned five days later, naked on a highway in Arizona. While this may sound absurd or humorous, there are no reasons that six working-class guys with no interest in UFOs would invent such a story. The men received no financial remuneration for their story, and if fact, the experience caused them huge trouble. They were ridiculed for their claim, and some of them left their hometown to seek anonymity following the events in 1975. It is notable that all six guys, aside from Walton, have not changed their story since 1975. One of them claims that infamous UFO sceptic and debunker Philip J. Klass offered him 10,000 dollars to change his story and claim the whole thing was a gag. He refused to do so.
Unlike many other individuals who claim to have been abducted, Walton has witnesses who last see him lying unconscious on the ground below a UFO. Although Walton was missing for five days, he can only remember a relatively short time frame of his experience – just a few hours, and really, only one hour of full and complete mental clarity. While he saw three aliens that looked like the so-called “greys” people talk about, he saw two individuals, a man and a woman, who looked totally human, and he thought they were human. He does not believe they were human, however, because they never spoke to him. Walton’s memories are “conscious” memories – he never underwent hypnosis to recall the events.
So, either some aliens look human, or we are the same species as aliens and were put here at some point, or aliens have the ability to appear human. We should not discount that possibility because many abductees have claimed that entities appear to them in forms that would not frighten them; people have claimed that entities appeared to them who look like Jesus, deceased relatives, fairies and in other forms.
I believe it is very much possible that aliens are among us. Temple University professor David Jacobs (I believe he is a historian) has done a lot of work with alleged abductees and has written a number of books on the subject. He learned how to do hypnosis and has “regressed” alleged abductees. He concludes, on the basis of hypnotic regressions with hundreds of alleged abductees, that aliens are living among us. Given that Professor Jacobs is a ration person, a professor with a PhD who applies a rigorous methodology to his work, I believe we need to seriously consider these claims, as fantastic as they sound. Professor Jacobs openly states that witness testimony given under hypnosis is not a particularly strong form of evidence, but in his words, “We have a lot of it (evidence)”. Jacobs also notes that many alleged abductees claim to have seen human-looking entities.
Let’s assume for a moment that aliens are among us, why would they not reveal themselves? We can only speculate. First, there is the question of method. How should they reveal themselves and to whom? They may be observing us and based on their observation, they may have concluded that civilizations divided into units called nation-states, each of which has its own leaders. If they are observing us, then they understand that our leaders are motivated not by wisdom – they do not have humanity’s best interest in mind, but serve the interests of economic elites. That is how our political system functions, in general. And I mean all countries on Earth.
They may understand that revealing themselves to us would constitute a profound shock. Our civilization is at an extremely early point of development. We have discovered more advanced technology only in the last 150 years or so – electricity etc.. and our technology is certainly very primitive. They may understand that for a civilization that is not aware of any other civilization, becoming aware of other intelligent life in the universe would come as a cultural paradigm shift. Nothing would ever be the same. That kind of revelation can be profoundly disruptive. They may, in fact, be revealing themselves slowly, to lessen the shock.
There is a third possibility, which is less pleasant and which is actually advocated by Professor David Jacobs – that aliens have a secret agenda, and that agenda may not be to our benefit. That is a scary thought. One might ask, would that agenda possibly be? This possibility might also explain why the US government is so adamant about keeping a lid on the subject – authorities may know something that we don’t, and when I saw “authorities” – I don’t mean the president of the United States, but some small group of people deep within the intelligence apparatus.
It is interesting to note that despite the large number of credible witnesses who have seen UFOs, or actually interacted with alien entities – despite the fact that some of those events have been witnessed by dozens of people, sometimes by several, or sometimes a few – and despite the fact that some of those witnesses are extremely credible (military officials, pilots, and otherwise sane people) the official opinion of authorities who define our worldview (government, academia, and media) is that no evidence of alien life exists. We are, according to the “official” view, still looking for evidence of alien life. At the same time, we have been inundated with countless reports of extraterrestrial sightings. Clearly, there is a huge gap between evidence and the claims of authorities.
I find it depressing that the vast majority of humanity forms its opinions based on nothing more than the opinions of “authority figures”. People believe whatever a man in a suit and tie on television tells them to believe. No matter how much evidence exists to support the view that “we are not alone”, people will not believe in the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence until someone announces it on television.
We must realize it is our differences which make us amazing, that each one of us has the right to all that should be available to every one of us, that we need to start educating everyone with facts and not our moronic superstitions, that we need to share our resources and help heal our planet, that we have to change our path from the ruinous and self-absorbed direction we are taking, that none of us is born with prejudice but each of us is born with a gift to help improve our planet’s well being, That we see each other as our best friends, that our little blue planet is a gift to cherish and enjoy its amazing beauty. When we have matured as the planets human population and can value ourselves as helpers rather than takers, then we might be ready for us to introduce ourselves, and share with you undreamt of technologies and approaches to life and living that would further advance our civilization to the point where we might be acceptable to the other populations in the area of space closest to us.
We are nowhere near that lofty high water mark yet. There is a good chance that we will never attain it and that is why we have not received an official invitation to all life on Earth to join the galactic pantheon of intelligences.
Someday the sheep will be separated from the wolves, and then you will know their name and see their many faces.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Right Again, Einstein: Special Relativity Works Even in Ghostly High-Energy Neutrinos
Right Again, Einstein: Special Relativity Works Even in Ghostly High-Energy Neutrinos
By Kimberly Hickok, Live Science Staff Writer
An artist's rendition of subatomic particle movement. Neutrino physicists examined neutrinos detected by the IceCube Observatory, and found that they adhere to Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.
Credit: Shutterstock
Once again, scientists have shown that Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity is right — this time, thanks to a particle detector buried deep beneath Antarctica.
Scientists from the 1-gigaton IceCube Neutrino Observatory examined subatomic particles called neutrinos: elusive, chargeless subatomic particles that are as small as electrons. The researchers wondered if these tiny, high-energy particles would deviate from the behavior predicted by the theory of special relativity. Specifically, they were testing Lorentz symmetry — the principle that the laws of physics are the same, whether you're an astronaut zooming through space at a million miles an hour or a snail inching along on Earth at a tiny fraction of that speed. [8 Ways You Can See Einstein's Theory of Relativity in Real Life]
Neutrinos are everywhere, but travel solo throughout the universe, rarely interacting with other matter. As neutrinos fly through space, they oscillate between the three different states, which physicists call flavors: electron, muon and tau. When neutrinos interact with the ice beneath the observatory they morph into muons, which are charged and can then be identified by the detector.
If the principle of Lorentz symmetry holds, a neutrino of a given mass should oscillate at a predictable rate — meaning a neutrino should travel a certain distance before transforming into a muon. Any deviation in that rate could be a sign that our universe doesn't work the way Einstein predicted.
This means neutrinos are "sensitive probes for looking at space-time effects," such as Lorentz violation, said lead author Carlos Argüelles, a particle physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
"Theories can break down, or they can have new effects when you're looking in new territories," Argüelles told Live Science.
Scientists have searched for evidence of Lorentz violation in numerous instances, from photons to gravity, but have always come up empty-handed. But with neutrinos, Argüelles said, scientists can "explore this new high-energy regime that was previously unexplored."
Argüelles and his colleagues reviewed two years' worth of neutrino data collected by the IceCube Observatory. Their search yielded no evidence of Lorentz violation in the realm of high-energy neutrinos. "This closes the book on the possibility of Lorentz violation for a range of high-energy neutrinos, for a very long time," study co-author Janet Conrad, a physicist at MIT, said in a statement. [Einstein Quiz: Test Your Knowledge on the Physics Genius]
This outcome allowed the researchers to calculate that anything that interreacts with neutrinos at an energy level greater than 10 raised to the minus 36 gigaelectron volts (GeV) squared, seems to obey the normal rules for neutrino oscillations — meaning that Lorentz symmetry still works as expected. To put that in perspective, infinitesimally small neutrinos interact with matter at an energy level of about 10 raised to the minus 5 GeV squared, which is still incredibly weak but is 10 nonillion times bigger than this new limit.
"We were able to set the most stringent limit yet on how strongly neutrinos may be affected by a Lorentz-violating field," said Conrad.
Neutrinos had not yet been discovered when Einstein died, but his theory still predicts their behavior, "which is amazing," said Argüelles. "So far, we have found no evidence that there is a problem with Einstein's theory of space-time relativity," he said.
Nonetheless, Argüelles and his colleagues plan to continue exploring higher-energy phenomena for instances of Lorentz violation. "As you explore new conditions, you may find things that were not important are now important," he said.
The team published their results today (July 16) in the journal Nature Physics.
Grand Discovery In Mexico Shows Strong Link Between Mayans And Extraterrestrials
Grand Discovery In Mexico Shows Strong Link Between Mayans And Extraterrestrials
The Maya civilization was a peaceful society that lived in Mesoamerica, somewhere before the 16th century. Their legacy is huge so as their popularity of their aim to foretell the end of time. However, the newest discovery links the Mayans and extraterrestrials.
The calendar of the Mayans scared the large public because it allegedly predicted the world will end in 2012. Since nothing happened, people declared the whole ‘prophecy’ is a hoax.
However, according to Mayan scholars, there is no proof that the Mayans themselves foreseen catastrophic event to happen once the calendar has ended.
They are one of the most breathtaking civilizations. The newest evidence just supports that fact and builds another, wider perspective over this group.
In the historically rich country of Mexico, researchers found a rock that is believed to be a humanoid with a creature that has a large head. This thing allegedly represents a Mayan being, most likely companion to an extraterrestrial.
The connection between the Mayans and the extraterrestrial this evidence alleges stuck theories about the truthfulness of alien existence.
So many statues, carvings, and artifacts from the Mayans allegedly show what appear to be aliens. It’s hard to state truly if all of them have rational explanations or are really extraterrestrial based.
The new rock found in the Mexican cave was acknowledged as accurate an artifact, which means the Mayans might have had contact with aliens.
The Mayans mysteriously disappeared without leaving a trace but leaving all their legacy untouched.
This raises many questions, such as if extraterrestrials lent hand in creating their famous calendar? Or the aliens weren’t their benevolent friends, but enemies that extinguished them?
It is also possible that the Mayans were space travelers and that, when they disappeared, they simply went back to their home planet?
In 2012, the Mexican government uncovered some Mayan artifacts documents found in the inside space of a temple in Mexico.
They claimed that the Mayans had had contact with extraterrestrials.
‘We believe for certain that aliens worked with the Mayans,’ said Luis Augusto Garcia Rosado, the minister of tourism for the Mexican state of Campeche.
Whatever these artifacts represent, if proved right, they sure are able to rewrite the whole Mexican history.
ESAEen conceptfoto van ExoMars, die volgens ESA een meer aantrekkelijke naam verdient.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET Wie mee Europese ruimtegeschiedenis wil schrijven, heeft nu de kans. Ruimtevaartorganisatie ESA is op zoek naar een naam voor de marsrobot die in 2020 naar de rode planeet vertrekt, en roept de hulp van het grote publiek in.
De robot op zes wielen heet voorlopig nog ExoMars, maar ESA zoekt een meer aantrekkelijke en inspirerende naam voor wanneer de robot in 2021 op Mars landt. Alle ideeën kunnen ingediend worden via een speciale website.
Grapjassen die hopen de robot, in navolging van Boaty McBoatface en vele afgeleiden, op te zadelen met een creatieve naam als Spacey McSpaceface of Marsy McMarsface, kunnen dat idee alvast opbergen. Alle ideeën zullen immers voorgelegd worden aan een jury, die de uiteindelijke keuze maakt.
Het toestel wordt op dit moment gebouwd in een fabriek van Airbus in het Engelse Stevenage. Zijn taak op Mars zal bestaan uit het zoeken naar tekenen van leven – nu of in een ver verleden. De robot krijgt daarvoor een breed scala aan werktuigen mee, waaronder een boor om tot twee meter diep in de grond te gaan zoeken naar microben.
Net daarom heeft de robot een treffende naam nodig, vindt astronaut Tim Peake, die de namenzoektocht leidt. “De vraag of er leven is buiten de aarde, is een fundamentele vraag”, zegt hij aan de BBC. “En deze robot gaat die vraag proberen te beantwoorden.”
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:HLN.be - Het Laatste Nieuws ( NL)
WEERVROUW ZIET UFO TIJDENS LIVE - TV UITZENDING ( VIDEO }
WEERVROUW ZIET UFO TIJDENS LIVE - TV UITZENDING ( VIDEO )
Soms kom je in een live televisie uitzending hele leuke dingen tegen, zoals een UFO verborgen in een wolk tijdens het weerbericht.
Wanneer dit object even later met een onvoorstelbaar hoge snelheid weg vliegt weet de weervrouw even niet wat ze moet zeggen.
Het volgende gebeurde tijdens een live uitzending van het weerbericht in de Amerikaanse staat New York.
Het televisiestation WKBW TV uit de stad Buffalo zond eind juni een weerbericht uit, waar de vrouwelijke presentator iets vreemds opmerkte in een wolk.
Ze wees het dan ook prompt aan tijdens de uitzending terwijl ze zich afvroeg wat het nu eigenlijk kon zijn.
Het vreemde object dat tevoorschijn kwam afkomstig van of achter een wolk bleef daar niet gewoon hangen, maar maakte zich los en schiet met een grote snelheid op de camera af.
Nu kan de snelheid een behoorlijke vertekening zijn omdat WKBW de opname laat zien als een timelapse, maar los daarvan is het overduidelijk een UFO.
De weervrouw probeert ook wanhopig met een verklaring te komen en omdat ze waarschijnlijk het woord UFO niet mag gebruiken in de uitzending, bombardeert ze het object maar tot drone.
De reden dat wij denken dat wij hier absoluut met een UFO te maken hebben is omdat de stad Buffalo aan de rand van het Eriemeer ligt. En dat is niet zomaar een meer, maar één met geweldig UFO verleden.
Hierna een deel uit een eerder artikel over de bijzondere dingen die er gebeuren rondom het Eriemeer.
Je hebt van die plaatsen op deze wereld waar meer UFO’s worden waargenomen dan op andere.
Lake Erie op de grens van Amerika en Canada is absluut één van die “hotspots”.
Lake Erie is één van de Great Lakes of Grote Meren op de grens tussen Amerika en Canada. Door de jaren heen zijn daar vele UFO’s gesignaleerd.
Veelal betreft het hier de witte of rood/oranje bollen zoals wij die ook op andere plaatsen regelmatig waarnemen en vaak veranderen ze van kleur, pulseren, vliegen in formatie of er verschijnen kleinere UFO’s vanuit de grotere.
Het is niet door één iemand waargenomen, talloze getuigen zijn er in geslaagd om beeldopnames te maken. Ook hier verschijnt er niets op de radarschermen. Ondertussen is er al zoveel beeldmateriaal onderzocht dat zaken zoals vliegtuigen, Thaise ballonen en dergelijken uitgesloten kunnen worden.
Inmiddels is het fenomeen zo bekend dat er ook al een aantal televisieprogramma’s aan gewijd zijn.
Een andere reden dat vliegtuigen kunnen worden uitgesloten is omdat dit gebied sinds de gebeurtenissen op 9/11 een no fly zone is omdat er een kerncentrale op één van de oevers staat. Misschien dan ook geen toeval dat veel van die UFO’s worden waargenomen in de buurt van die kerncentrale.
De onderstaande video laat bijna een uur lang beeldmateriaal zien en een aantal fragmenten uit televisieprogramma’s. Opnamen gemaakt op verschillende dagen en een verscheidenheid aan mensen.
Dat daar vreemde objecten rondvliegen, zoveel is zeker. Maar ook hier blijft men het antwoord schuldig betreffende wie, wat en waarom. Voor diegenen die nog weinig ervaring hebben met UFO waarnemingen of die denken dat het Thaise ballonnen zijn, is de onderstaande video een aanrader. Het laat de UFO’s zien in verschillende vormen en kleuren. Er zijn zelfs UFO’s die in het meer schijnen te verdwijnen en vervolgens weer vanuit het water opstijgen.
Lake Erie is eigenlijk één van de eerste plekken waar dit soort UFO’s massaal zijn waargenomen. Vooral ook het laatste jaar zijn ze massaal opgedoken in andere delen van de wereld, waaronder ons land.
Voorlopig blijft het raadsel nog even voortduren, maar vroeg of laat zal er ongetwijfeld een antwoord komen op wie of wat als het gaat over deze vliegende nu nog ongeïdentificeerde objecten.
Decades ago, scavengers rummaging through an abandoned church in a long-forgotten derelict mining town in Chile’s Atacama desert came across a gruesome and bizarre find: a tiny, seemingly anomalous skeleton. The entire skeleton can fit in a human hand, and is topped by an oversized skull with conspicuously large eye sockets. Naturally, the skeleton was accused of belonging to an extraterrestrial or ET-human hybrid and has since been the subject of speculation, rumor, and mystery.
Earlier this year, however, geneticists and immunologists from Stanford University obtained permission to perform genetic testing on the anomalous skeleton to conclusively identify who or what it may have once belonged to. According to their analysis, the skeleton is merely an unfortunate example of how there are both winners and losers in the gene pool lottery. Their study concluded that the Atacama skeleton belongs to either a six-to-eight year-old child who suffered from a host of rare and deformative genetic disorders, or to an unborn fetus with an advanced aging disorder. It’s never aliens.
Now, a new paper is calling that study into question – but not because there is evidence to suggest the Atacama skeleton might be anything more than it has already been determined to be. Instead, both the Chilean government and an international group of scientists and medical researchers are slamming the study for two reasons: one, an improper use of genomic testing; and two, ethics violations. Nerd fight!
On one hand, this new paper accuses the genetic testing of the Atacama skeleton, or Ata, of being improperly carried out:
Unfortunately, there was no scientific rationale to undertake genomic analyses of Ata because the skeleton is normal, the identified genetic mutations are possibly coincidental, and none of them are known to be strongly associated with skeletal dysplasias that would affect the phenotype at this young age.
These scientists believe “it is most likely a coincidence that the authors found this individual [the Atacama skeleton] had some mutations in genes” because the type of mutations found typically don’t have an effect on physiological until much later in fetal development.
More worryingly, the authors of this new paper accuse the analysis of Ata to be unethical. Once it was deemed that the skeleton belonged to a human and that the relatives or parents of the individual were likely still living, the authors write, the skeleton should have been immediately returned to Chile:
We caution DNA researchers about getting involved in cases that lack clear context and legality, or where the remains have resided in private collections. […] Had these researchers involved, from the beginning, a biological anthropologist who specialises in human remains, we are certain that ethical concerns would have been raised regarding the potentially living relatives of Ata.
This case, even though it deals with a recent specimenindividual, highlights one of the gruesome and dehumanizing side of archaeology. Think about it: all of those mummies and skeletons we dig up were once people who were carefully interred with intention and the belief that they would remain undisturbed in the ground. Who are we to dig up the bones of those who came before us in the name of “progress” or advancing knowledge? Is nothing – or no one – sacred? While it’s important to know where we came from, it’s just as important to hold some degree of reverence for the dead. At what point in history do we draw the line?
A common theme in science fiction is that of the portal through space, time, alternate dimensions, or all three. These strange doorways open up into realms unknown, providing a passage to the outer fringes of our reality and our understanding. Yet, by some accounts these openings through space and time are not merely the domain of science fiction, but actually do exist. One place where such outlandish portals seem to materialize quite often is up in the sky above our heads, and here in the heavens above we can find all manner of reports and even photographic evidence of what appears to be something straight out of a science fiction story.
Among the types of portals said to have opened up in the sky are those that seem to be undeniably linked to the UFO phenomenon, with these mysterious craft apparently utilizing these doorways for their own inscrutable purposes. One very interesting report of what is claimed to some sort of alien portal in the sky occurred in May of 2015, when an amateur nature photographer snapped a pic of something very strange in the skies over the province of Groningen in the Netherlands during a storm. As he was taking pictures of the ominous dark clouds gathering above he claims that he saw a bright flash in the sky, which he managed to capture on film, yet when the photo was developed it was found to show what appeared to be some sort of doorway up in the sky emitting vapor or disgorging something else. Is this just a camera trick? What is it?
An image of the strange portal
The following year, on October 1, 2016, a very unusual aerial phenomenon was observed over Bridge City, Texas. According to UFO investigation investigators SecureTeam 10, on this evening at around 11PM a point of white light appeared in the sky, which then steadily formed a streak across the sky, growing larger and brighter, as well as taking on an orange hue. Witnesses reported that it eventually took the form of a bright orange slit in the sky, which seemed to pulse in cycles, and looked like “some sort of portal.” One witness was able to catch footage of the strange sight on a cell phone, which you can see here.
The weird brightening and dimming portal reportedly stayed stationary for around 10 minutes before fading away to leave witnesses baffled. According to the reports, during this time numerous cars at nearby Port Arthur purportedly inexplicably died on the road, their engines stalling for no apparent reason, and SecureTeam 10’s Tyler Glockner claims that hundreds of motorists were effected by this anomaly, their cars stopping dead in their tracks while still in motion and in some cases causing them to careen right off the road. Many of the witnesses also reported hearing a high-pitched whine spew forth from their radios before the cars and all electrical equipment ceased to function, and it has been speculated this was all caused by some sort of electromagnetic pulse connected to the strange object in the sky. Glockner would say of the odd incident:
Now that seems to me like an EMP (electromagnetic) wave, something like that. Something was knocking out power systems along this area very close to where the mysterious streak of light was sighted.
Was this caused by a UFO utilizing some sort of ultra-dimensional portal or is there some rational explanation? Also in 2016 was a video that heavily made the rounds that was originally posted on You Tube by a user called “Myserio Canal.” In the footage can be seen some odd clouds that begin to swirl about to form some kind of vortex in the sky, and just when it seems things can’t get any odder a bright streak of light flies straight at the portal and enters it, much to the shock of those observing it. Shortly after this UFO speeds into this mass of rotating clouds the whole thing vanishes as if it was never there at all. The video, entitled Dimensional portal in the sky absorbs a UFO, was heavily viewed and discussed and debated. While there are those who truly embrace it as genuine, it has been widely denounced by many as a hoax, and it does not help that there is no time or location for the footage given. Alien portal or hot air? You can see it here and decide for yourself.
Yet another YouTube video purportedly showing a UFO using a mysterious portal has proven to be just as controversial and was released in 2018 by channel “MRMB333.” The footage was apparently taken in the skies of Alabama during an eerie looking storm, by a witness known simply as “Nicholas.” The video shows what looks like some kind of anomalous glow flickering in the clouds as a UFO hovers nearby. The video quickly racked up over 100,000 views and stirred up plenty of debate as to what it could be, with many suggesting it was an inter-dimensional portal that may have even caused the storm, and with of course many also crying “Fake!” Real or not, it certainly is a spooky sight either way. You can see it here.
A still from the Alabama portal footage
In 2018 another video came forward, this time from the country of Scotland. In this case there can be seen a bright circular blue light hovering in the sky over Midlothian, located near Edinburgh, which looks very much like a portal of some type. An unidentified object can then be seen passing very close to this “portal” before it blinks out of existence. Again, this video became a viral sensation at the time, and has been speculated as being everything from an inter-dimensional portal, to just a spotlight or the moon behind the clouds. What do you think it is? There are countless other very similar videos out there, and it all makes one wonder just what is going on.
Besides inter-dimensional portals apparently created by extraterrestrial intelligences, there are also plenty of reports of such doorways conjured up by secret government projects right here on Earth. By far the most notorious of these come from that wellspring of conspiracy theories, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), operated by The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN. The largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the LHC is located 300 feet underground directly below the the CERN Control Centre in Geneva, Switzerland, and is comprised of a vast loop stretching 27 kilometers (about 17 miles).
This loop is more or less used to hurl subatomic particles at extreme speeds in order to smash them into each other to test what will happen for the purpose of unlocking some of the secrets of our universe, including recreating the conditions of the Big Bang, to find out how our universe was create, and find dark matter, among others. Perhaps one of the most famous discoveries linked to the various experiments at the LHC was the observation of Higgs Boson particles, which give matter mass and up until then had been purely theoretical. In addition to the official explanation of this facility, there are many, many conspiracy theories about what “really goes on down there.”
The Large Hadron Collider
Indeed, the very presence of such a large scientific facility located deep underground, its innately somewhat scary-sounding premise of smashing particles together at the speed of light, and its being manned by scientists working on strange experiments down in the subterranean darkness, have all perhaps not surprisingly at all given the location a somewhat ominous reputation, causing quite a bit of concern among the public and spawning all sorts of wild theories about what is really going on there. In additions to alarm and fears that the LHC will create miniature black holes or undo reality itself are various ideas and rumors that CERN is up to all kinds of top-secret experiments and no goodery down there in the bowels of the earth. One of the more popular conspiracy theories is that the facility is actively engaged in opening rifts between dimensions in order to enable teleportation, form doorways to alternate realities, and facilitate travel through time and space.
Evidence for this sort of inter-dimensional activity is often offered in the form of the various strange things that have allegedly been photographed or filmed in the skies over CERN over the years, including UFOS, strange vortices, and other unexplained aerial phenomena. For instance, in December of 2015 footage was taken by some tourists of what seems to be an orb of some sort entering what appears to be some kind of portal or vortex, which vanishes as soon as the unidentified object enters it. Another similar video from May of 2016 supposedly shows some sort of portal in the clouds that appeared right after the power went out at CERN, an incident they claimed was caused by a weasel getting into some of the sensitive machinery.
Strange vortex over CERN
It is interesting to note that a lot of the anomalous events that have purportedly occurred at CERN seem to coincide with blackouts, such as an alleged ripple that was sent out from the facility in 2009 that purportedly disrupted the Earth’s magnetic field and distorted space and time, also right at the time of a blackout at the facility. A report from Russia claimed that this very same “time wave” had instantaneously teleported an Airbus on its way to Bolivia thousands of miles away to the Canary Islands, along with its 170 passengers. This time the blackout was blamed on a piece of bread that had fallen into the device after being dropped by a bird. One would hope that such an advanced scientific facility deep underground would be able to keep out all of the weasels, birds and bread that’ve seemingly been jamming their equipment.
One of the more recent such series of photographic oddness came in the wake of another ambitious project undertaken in recent years by CERN, which itself has already drawn a fair amount of conspiracy theories. The project is what CERN calls the Advanced Proton Driven Plasma Wakefield Acceleration Experiment, or AWAKE, which has the aim of accelerating super-charged particles by way of “plasma wakefields driven by a proton beam.” It is not necessary to really understand what all of that means, only that it sounds rather ominous, scary even, and this may be why it has been singled out as one of the experiments focused on opening portals between worlds.
On June 24, 2016, photographs of alarming, portal-shaped cloud formations were taken in the skies above CERN not long after the AWAKE project was off the ground and on the same day that an experiment was scheduled. The story was big news at the time, and in a video on the phenomenon entitled What Portal did CERN open now?, the narrator says of the strange sight:
This insane ball of energy was directly over the LHC. Some people reported seeing faces in it. It is amazing they keep messing with nature and denying it. What is in the cloud – some say it is lightning or a massive ball of energy. The amount of energy pulling from nature into the collider itself, you can actually see it. What portals are doors being opened in this cloud? Is it a coincidence they had just started the Awake experiment?
Photograph from the June, 2016 event taken by witness Dean Gill
While photographs and videos such as these could have a rational explanation in known phenomena or even be cleverly crafted CGI hoaxes, there are a fairly large number of people who insist that these are the result of CERN experiments pursuing the opening of inter-dimensional doorways. It is unclear whether the LHC is being used to open these portals, intentionally or otherwise, or not, but it does seem certain that conspiracy theories and fears will continue to swirl around it as long as it is in operation.
Here we have looked at just a selection of weird portals that seem to have opened up in the heavens for reasons that remain unknown and perhaps always will be. Are these hoaxes, misidentifications, or little understood natural phenomena in action? Or could it be that rifts in space and time have actually been created. If so, then where they lead or what purpose they serve no one really knows, but whether real or not, accounts such as we will look at here truly stir up the imagination for some time to come.
Time is weird. It’s a concept notoriously impossible define without circular logic. The operating definition of time in physics is simply “what a clock reads.” That’s it. Yet, we have ideas about time that are held as fundamental truths. The arrow of time is one, that’s the idea that time only moves in one direction. Simple enough right? Here’s another one: cause and effect, thing’s cause things to happen. Also pretty simple and just kind of self evident. Causality is one of the first concepts that infants learn, and it’s baked into everything we do. But for how basic and integral to our whole reality time is, we don’t really understand it or have a better definition than “what a clock reads.” Sometimes, discoveries are made that seem to fly in the face of our supposed understanding of time. That’s what happened this week, when a paper titled Cause and Effect in a Quantum World was published in the journal Physical Review X. According to the paper, quantum computers can ignore cause and effect when modeling systems, a discovery which may fundamentally alter our understanding and relationship with time itself.
OK, so two things need to be addressed before this makes sense. Just kidding, we’re talking about time and quantum physics. It’s not going to make sense, but we’re going to try anyway.
The first is cause and effect. Due to our ability to understand cause and effect we can predict things and model possible futures. If you see a person walking around with their shoes untied, you might make a prediction that they’re going to fall on their face. You could very well be right. Untied shoelaces cause a person to trip which causes the person to fall on their face. Computers can make these predictions too. However, it doesn’t work the other way. It’s exponentially harder and requires a great deal more memory and processing power, for both humans and computers, to model systems based on information interpreted in the wrong order. If you’re given the statement: “a person has fallen on their face” it’s a lot harder to figure out why. Another way to say it is: it’s easier to understand a movie if you watch it from beginning to end than if you watch it in reverse. This is called causal asymmetry and it seems like a basic idea.
The second is that the physical laws of nature don’t actually require time to move in one direction. We just sort of assume the arrow of time moves in one direction does because of our experience and perception. Addressing the question of why it takes so much more processing power and memory to figure out a cause from an effect than it does the other way around, paper co-author Mile Gu asks:
“When the physics does not impose any direction on time, where does causal asymmetry — the memory overhead needed to reverse cause and effect — come from?”
This guy thinks he’s late, but time is an illusion so he should probably just go home and take a nap.
To try to answer that question, scientists decided to force quantum computers to model systems backwards, essentially making them watch a movie in reverse and figure out how it all fits together. What they found is pretty ridiculous: quantum computers entirely ignore causal asymmetry when reading data in reverse. Cause and effect has no bearing on their ability to figure out systems. In fact, quantum computers model systems in reverse-time more efficiently than classical computers model systems in forward-time. Jayne Thompson, one of the co-authors of the paper explains the “profound implications” of this discovery:
“The most exciting thing for us is the possible connection with the arrow of time. If causal asymmetry is only found in classical models, it suggests our perception of cause and effect, and thus time, can emerge from enforcing a classical explanation on events in a fundamentally quantum world.”
So basically, we keep getting stumped by our need to make the universe conform to our preconceived notions of how things work, and time is still weird.
Just a couple of nights ago – while I was promoting my latest book, The Black Diary – I was asked by a caller to the radio show why I “insist” on stating that the Men in Black are supernatural in nature, rather than “accepting” that they are the secret agents of a clandestine agency within government. The answer to that question is very simple: it’s the witness testimony which makes me come to the supernatural conclusion. I have always said that the most important people in the collective field of Forteana are not the writers, the researchers, the radio-hosts, or the TV producers. It’s the witnesses who are the most important. Time and time again I am approached by people who have been terrorized by the MIB. On only a small number of occasions do the witnesses describe the MIB as looking human. For the most part, they look anything but human.
I know all too well why so many people assume that the MIB are agents of governments, of military agencies, and / or of clandestine projects buried deep within the world of officialdom. It largely comes from the Men in Black movies, starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. Yes, the trilogy makes for fun viewing. But, by presenting the MIB as the agents of a classified organization, the makers of the movies instilled in the minds of many the image of the Men in Black being “secret agents.” But, the Hollywood portrayal is actually very different to what the witnesses tell us – and that’s a very important issue to be aware of.
It’s worth noting that the man who largely began the whole MIB phenomenon in the early 1950s – Albert Bender, of Bridgeport, Connecticut – was confronted not by agents of the FBI, CIA, etc., but by grim-faced, shadow-like characters with shining eyes and who left behind them an odor of brimstone when they quite literally vanished. Bender’s strange story – which comes across like something akin to H.P. Lovecraft meets The X-Files– is told in Gray Barker’s 1956 book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers and in Bender’s own book, Flying Saucers and the Three Men.
When, from 1966 to 1967, John Keel immersed himself in the wave of sightings of what became known as “Mothman” in the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, he was flooded with accounts of local encounters with both MIB and Women in Black. They were often described as looking not quite human. Their skin resembled plastic. They wore wraparound sunglasses that often only partially masked their huge, oversized eyes. They were clearly unaware of our customs and manners. Some of them didn’t even know how to eat food or drink water – as bizarre as it certainly sounds.
Things get even more disturbing: people who have encountered the MIB have fallen sick – and quickly, too. A kind of paranormal infection, we might say. The MIB are able to place people under some form of mind-control, something which compels the targeted person to open the door and let them in, regardless of the time of day or night. Witnesses to UFO activity who have been visited by the MIB talk of poltergeist activity occurring in the home – and in the immediate aftermaths of the MIBs’ vanishing acts.
There are reports of people encountering the MIB while in altered states. In the late 1960s, voice-over actor Peter Beckman and a friend had a very sinister encounter with a pair of MIB while on mescaline – and while listening to the soundtrack to the movie, Rosemary’s Baby. Peter said of the MIB who quickly turned up and managed to get into the house: “They were dressed in square, Eisenhower-era cop-clothing, or FBI clothing – which in 1969, 1970 was not that unusual. They came in and sat on the couch. They were pale and sickly; their clothes hung real loose and they looked as though they might expire at any moment. They appeared to have either trouble breathing, or trouble even being. I don’t believe they said a thing. If they did, it has disappeared from memory. Very odd, indeed.”
Similarly, I have three cases where people encountered the MIB while on DMT. In one such case, the witness described how both MIB seemed “surprised” that the witness could see them. Not only that, the MIB seemingly have the ability to invade peoples’ dreams and turn them into definitive nightmares. The old black cars of the MIB vanish in the blink of an eye. There are even a few, very strange, stories of the MIB shapeshifting into the form of a large, black dog with glowing, red eyes.
So, that’s why I “insist” the Men in Black are not human: because the vast majority of all the witnesses to the MIB describe them as being non-human.
Fox News: UFOs frequently come close to hitting airliners on July 23, 2018
Fox News: UFOs frequently come close to hitting airliners
Britain's real-life 'Fox Mulder' says in recent years, governments have been taking UFOs more seriously and they need to become a national security issue.
Mulder interviews Nick Pope on this issue as well as they talk about that UFOs coming closer to hitting airliners.
The latest strange incident happened a few days ago when an Antonov aircraft flying over Siberia was hit by an unknown object with such a force that it caused a hole in the nose of the plane.
The plane flew through 'unfavorable weather conditions' en route from Olenyok to Yakutsk in the Sakha Republic - also known as Yakutia when something hit the An-24 twin turboprop. The pilot handed in regional capital Yakutsk without incident following the 1,070 km (665 mile) flight reports siberiantimes.
Polar Airlines has denied a lightning strike was responsible. Air safety watchdog Rosaviation has set up a commission to investigate the incident but it is far from clear what happened.
Rainbow UFO Recorded During Sunset In Dearborn Heights, MI Awesome Photos, UFO Sighting News.
Rainbow UFO Recorded During Sunset In Dearborn Heights, MI Awesome Photos, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Jan 26, 2018
Location of sighting: Dearborn Heights, MI, USA
Source: MUFON #93560
What we see before us is an alien craft that is cloaked, however during sunset, the angle of the sun and the eyewitness were at a 90 degree angle from the UFO. When this happens, any UFO in the area will be visible from a few seconds to a few minutes. Yes a cloak is just technology...and tech always has its flaws. If you look at the photo above where I added contrast only, you will notice the front part of a disk is visible.
Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
Photo taken in the sky, I did not encounter anything, beautiful rainbow looking thing.
Former NASA Scientist Says UFOs Are Real And Many Governments Cover Up Alien Life Existence
Former NASA Scientist Says UFOs Are Real And Many Governments Cover Up Alien Life Existence
There has been no concrete scientific evidence of aliens, but a physics professor and former NASA scientist believes the truth is out there and it should be studied scientifically.
A former NASA scientist published an article on June 28 calling for the scientific community to seriously look at evidence of the presence of UFOs on Earth. The article was posted a few days before World UFO Day on July 2.
A State University of New York physics professor Kevin Knuth describes two personal stories on the speculation of aliens. The first one came at NASA conference in 2002.
A participant said, “You have no idea what is out there!”
The second story took place in 1988 when Knuth was a graduate student. His physics professor back then said that UFOs were shooting down nuclear missiles from the Air Force. Knuth did not believe it, but he saw a recording of a press conference with officials from the Air Force describing events just like that years later.
Knuth believes there’s evidence to support the theory of the existence of aliens. He estimates that there could be tens of thousands of intelligent civilisations in the galaxy. He thinks many governments have been covering up the information and that there are pieces of evidence enough to open a scientific study.
Oumuamua arrived from out of our solar system, now there is a second object of this class
Oumuamua arrived from out of our solar system, now there is a second object of this class
The gas cloud around the comet's nucleus is about 4 arc minutes wide," says Jäger. That means the comet's atmosphere is 260,000 km in diameter, almost twice as wide as the planet Jupiter. Barely a week later, the comet fizzled, dimming almost as much as it had brightened. Then it exploded again, its green atmosphere ballooned in size, large enough to swallow Jupiter twice.
Brandweerman claimt engelen en aliens te hebben gezien. Dit maakte hij nog meer mee
Brandweerman claimt engelen en aliens te hebben gezien. Dit maakte hij nog meer mee
Een brandweerman van de FDNY, de New Yorkse brandweer, zegt dat hij geregeld contact heeft met buitenaardsen, UFO’s, overleden mensen en engelen, zelfs in de kazerne in Brooklyn.
“Ik heb engelen aan het werk gezien,” zei Andrew Radziewicz (38) in de radioshow Sacred Matrix. Hij zei ook vaak kleurrijke lichtbollen te zien.
Nadat hij in juni een ‘enorm’ schip had gezien, vroeg Radziewicz op Facebook om erkenning van onze sterrenfamilie.
Moederschip
De brandweerman begon zijn waarnemingen afgelopen zomer te documenteren. Hij deelde op Facebook allerlei foto’s en videobeelden, schrijft de New York Post.
De brandweerveteraan zegt ook beelden te hebben gemaakt van vier ‘lichtwezens’ die hem op 11 september vorig jaar wakker maakten.
Radziewicz claimt verder dat hij wordt gevolgd door een enorm ‘moederschip’ en dat de ziel van zijn overleden hond Odi hem vaak bezoekt aan boord van een ‘lichtschip’.
Onmogelijk
Hij heeft in interviews gezegd dat hij in 1999, toen hij als 19-jarige voor de Amerikaanse kustwacht werkte, voor het eerst een alien heeft gezien.
Hij zag naar eigen zeggen twee zilverkleurige objecten die dicht bij elkaar bleven. Zo’n 20 matrozen en anderen aan boord van het schip zagen de objecten, die niet op de radar verschenen.
“Toen ze elkaar aanraakten en versmolten, verdwenen ze,” zei hij. “Het is onmogelijk dat in zo’n soort vaartuig een mens zat.”
Telepathisch
Hij zei dat mensen hem plagen en belachelijke maken vanwege zijn berichten op internet, maar dat hij daar maling aan heeft.
“Er zijn andere mensen die zo bang zijn om hierover te praten omdat ze niet belachelijk gemaakt willen worden,” zei hij.
“We hebben gecommuniceerd met wezens van Sirius tot Andromeda en allerlei andere sterrenstelsels,” besloot Radziewicz. “Het is vooral telepathisch.”
The Gault site, located just outside of Austin, Texas, has been known to archaeologists for the better part of the last century. Discovered by Henry Gault, a landowner who worked as an archaeological informant in the early 1900s, the site was officially excavated for a period beginning in 1929, under the supervision of J.E. Pearce with the University of Texas. It was reportedly looted a number of times over the ensuing years, prior to new ownership of the property that led official test excavations that began in 1991. By the end of the decade, formal excavations that would continue well into the new millennium were underway.
Over the course of several dig seasons in recent years, Gault has become recognized by archaeologists as a site of particular significance, due to the number of complete lithic assemblages recovered there.
However, the number of artifacts found at the site is just one of the reasons it has American archaeologists so excited. Among the most recent discoveries at the site, new evidence of early occupation is pushing back the timescale on human arrivals in North America, lending further evidence toward the idea of earlier migrations into the western hemisphere than once believed.
Specifically, the Gault site has yielded intricate projectile points from its deepest strata that are well in advance of the Clovis culture. These artifacts not only count among several existing pre-Clovis discoveries in the Americas, but are accompanied by dates obtained via optically stimulated luminescence that suggest an age of 20,000 years or more, effectively placing them among the oldest of their kind found in North America to date.
Excavations at Gault over the years turned up numerous unique discoveries even before the discovery of its pre-Clovis assemblages. The site’s Clovis horizon, for instance, produced a number of fluted projectile points similar to those seen in the image at the top of this page (note that the points featured in the top image are associated with the Rummells-Maske Site in Cedar County, Iowa, rather than Gault, and are used here only for illustrative purposes).
Alongside these points was a fragmentary basal portion of a Clovis-like projectile, similar to what are identified as “Redstone” points in the Southeast (these are similar enough to a preexisting type of projectile point, called Gainey, that many experts consider the two types one and the same). Prior to its discovery amidst the Clovis assemblage at Gault, little data had been obtained for in situ discoveries of Redstone points; additionally, few–if any–had ever been documented in association with a site as far west as Gault. In total, more than 600,000 artifacts identified with the Clovis culture were recovered from the site.
Area 15 at the Gault site, as it appeared between 2007–2014 excavations
(Credit: Jillabus, Wikimedia Commons).
Subsequent dig seasons at Gault continued to produce surprises, and the latest paper published in Science Advances gives full details of the pre-Clovis discoveries, in addition to the dating methods used to determine their provenance.
Luminescence dating, a technique which relies on stimulation of minerals in various ways in order to discern when they were last exposed to sunlight or significant amounts of heat, was among the methods employed to date the pre-Clovis strata at Gault. Among the earliest dates recorded in association with artifacts was 21,700 years, with a standard deviation of ± 1.4 ka. “Significantly, this assemblage exhibits a previously unknown, early projectile point technology unrelated to Clovis,” the study’s authors wrote. “Within a wider context, this evidence suggests that Clovis technology spread across an already regionalized, indigenous population.”
As I noted recently in an article about the Gault discoveries, this is by no means the first time that evidence of a pre-Clovis presence, possibly dating as far back as 20,000 years, has been found in the Americas:
The Topper site in Allendale County, South Carolina, produced similar lithic evidence which dates back at least 20,000 years, though some artifacts recovered from deeper stratigraphic layers there are estimated to be as much as 50,000 years old. Similarly, radiocarbon dates in association with human artifacts at Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Washington County, Pennsylvania, are reliably dated to earlier than 16,000 BC, with one instance of carbonized bark-like material (possible basketry) with evidence of cutting marks dating to 21,070 BP ± 2400. Charcoal recovered elsewhere from Meadowcroft shows 14C dates in excess of 30,000 years (similar to dates retrieved from Monte Verde, Chile, during excavations by Tom Dillehay). According to J.M. Adovasio, who led excavations at Meadowcroft for a number of decades, the earlier dates are intriguing, but he and others generally work with the more likely nearer dates of around 16,000 years, which are still well in advance of Clovis.
The Science Advances paper can be read online here, which features a wealth of technical data and illustrations depicting the earliest artifacts recovered at the site. For more on the technical significance of these Gault pre-Clovis discoveries, along with an analysis of its impact in the context of advances in American archaeology, see my article “Gault Site in Texas Offers New Evidence of Human Habitation 16 to 20 Thousand Years Ago.”
As an addendum, I’ll note that many these days, in light of ongoing archaeological discoveries like those discussed here, have commented on how “things keep getting older.” That is to say, of course, that archaeologists continue to find more and more evidence for earlier occupations in the New World, as well as advanced behaviors and engineering among early cultures, and refinement of processes that include such things as crafting pottery, agriculture, fermentation, and a wealth of other innovations.
In equal measure to the idea that we’re constantly finding broad evidence for things that, at one time, might have seemed historically out of place, it is also important to make the observation that part of what has led to these new discoveries in the first place has been a fundamental change in thinking.
On a number of occasions at American dig sites I’ve visited where pre-Clovis artifacts ended up being recovered, archaeologists have expressed to me that while such discoveries had been there all along, they were essentially kept hidden for as long as they were by one simple fact: that there had been an expectation nothing would be found below the Clovis horizon. Once archaeologists began pressing on and exploring deeper strata, many were shocked to find evidence of much earlier occupations than previously expected; and inevitably, many were also criticized for presenting these discoveries, even when reliable scientific evidence to account for their provenance was offered.
People are often slow to accept new ideas, although that’s certainly not always a bad thing. Science relies on having waterproof arguments, and skepticism is the best defense against unintended leaks. However, with evidence forthcoming that is strongly in support of an idea that might have once seemed impossible, the necessity for acceptance of new data becomes paramount. Rather than to say that things “keep getting older,” I think it is important to recognize that we are learning–through science–things like how much earlier humans were traversing areas of the globe, utilizing certain technological innovations, and accomplishing things we simply hadn’t conceived they were capable of as recently as a few years ago.
Science is the ultimate tool of discovery, and as it has continued to show us new things about the ancient past, it underscores the same timeless ingenuity of the human spirit at work, both then and now.
Humanity has long wondered if life exists elsewhere beyond Earth. With the universe being so mind-numbingly vast, the very idea that our tiny, waterlogged rock should alone harbor life seems so…wasteful.
To sate our curiosity, NASA catalogs exoplanets orbiting Milky Way stars to look for potential cradles of extraterrestrial life, such as Kepler-186f, the first validated Earth-size planet orbiting in its star’s habitable zone. And the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute searches space for clues of alien civilizations by, for example, scanning for the residuals of communication technology like narrow-band radio transmissions.
But is it possible we’ve set our gaze too far to the horizon? Perhaps the greatest chance we have of finding life beyond Earth isn’t orbiting some distant star but can be found in our own solar backyard.
Independence Day, 1996, 20th Century Fox.
What we look for
When looking for suitable habitats for life, astrobiologists search first and foremost for water. Water is the cornerstone of life on Earth. Life needs solvents to perform biochemical processes, and water’s title as the universal solvent means that even the simplest of organisms can use it for their molecular interactions.1
Astrobiologists also look for ways energy may enter a system for metabolic processes. On Earth, this form of energy is typically the Sun; however, recent discoveries have led astrobiologists to search for alternative forms, such as geothermal energy.
Finally, they look for other environmental conditions that make life more or less likely: climate, pressure, temperature, atmospheric makeup, and so on.
We should take this moment to make an important distinction. While our solar system may harbor several havens for life, this life will likely not be the intelligent life that SETI searches for. Any neighborly E.T.s we encounter won’t be little grey men or green-skinned vixens so much as a small, microscopic, organisms. Think strange, exotic tardigrades. Well, stranger tardigrades.
Mars Attacks!, 1998, Warner Bros.
Mars
Ever since Percival Lowel mapped the “canals” of Mars, our ruddy neighbor has been the go-to planet for science fiction writers imagining extraterrestrial life — from H.G. Wells’s colonizing Martians to Ray Bradbury’s mystical natives3. The canals proved a trick of the eye, and theMars Science Laboratory Mission’s Curiosity rover has yet to find signs of civilization, but that doesn’t mean Mars is out of the extraterrestrial running.
Scientists have discovered dark, narrow streaks on the landscape most likely caused by flowing water. These streaks showed traces of hydrated salt, like what occurs after salt contacts water before it evaporates.
Given Mars’ dry, barren landscape and lack of atmosphere, how water got there remains a mystery, but the phenomenon points to the possibility of liquid water not trapped in the planet’s polar ice caps, providing a potential habitat for microbial life. Should water flow under the planet’s surface, any life could even be shielded from the sun’s radiation.
Adding to the intrigue, scientists think that water once covered roughly 20 percent of the surface before Mars’s atmospheric gases were stripped away, and the water evaporated into space. Scientists have also discoveredmeteorites from Mars that contained the remnants of organic material — suggesting the rusted planet once contained the ingredients for life.
The surface of Venus, c/o NASA
Venus
Like Mars, Venus likely enjoyed Earth-like conditions back in the day. Computer simulations of its early environment suggest the possibility of primordial oceans, moderate temperatures, and a habitable climate.
As David Grinspoon, of the Planetary Science Institute, told New Scientist: “Both planets probably enjoyed warm liquid water oceans in contact with rock and with organic molecules undergoing chemical evolutions in those oceans. As far as we understand at present, those are the requirements for the origin of life.”
If early life did form on Venus, most of it probably vanished 715 million years ago, along with those oceans. Today’s Venus sports an infernal landscape of volcanic activity, surface temperatures approaching 750 Kelvin, and a thick, noxious atmosphere of carbon dioxide with clouds of sulfuric acid.4,5
But it is that very toxic atmosphere that may have saved Venusian life. According to a paper in the journal Astrobiology, the atmosphere could provide a safe haven for microbial life. Using spectroscopic observations, researchers found “dark patches” in the atmosphere composed of “concentrated sulfuric acid and other unknown light-absorbing particles.”
While it is unknown if these patches are organic or not, they do have the same dimension as some Earth bacteria, and researchers think they could be the Venusian equivalent of algae blooms (like those that appear in our lakes and oceans).
The jets of Enceladus, c/o NAS
Enceladus and Europa
Moving away from Earth’s rocky neighbors, astrobiologists are also considering the possibility that life may exist on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter.
When the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft flew past Saturn’s sixth moon, Enceladus, it discovered hydrogen gas in an erupting plume of water.6 The eruption suggested hydrothermal activity may be taking place beneath Enceladus’ icy surface. If so, the moon would offer two important ingredients for life — water and energy for metabolic processes.
Europa’s surface is similarly covered in ice, with long streaks of “brown gunk.” But beneath that surface, scientist estimate that there could be twice as much water as on Earth. If this Jovian moon also produced hydrothermal activity within that ocean, it too could be a harbor for life.8 A study using computer models has even suggested that Europa may have hydrogen and oxygen in amounts comparable to Earth, even if the moon is lacking in volcanic activity.
NASA is planning to launch a Europa flyby mission in the early 2020s, and the agency’s SUBSEA project will be studying hydrothermal environments in the Lō`ihi seamount, off the coast of Hawaii’s Big Island, to learn how life can thrive on Earth in conditions similar to those possible on Enceladus and Europa.
This false-color rendering highlights differences in surface materials at Ceres. c/o NASA
Ceres
Our final candidate is Ceres, a dwarf planet and the largest object orbiting in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. A spherical clump of rock and ice, Ceres would be an unlikely contender for this list until last year, whenNASA’s Dawn mission detected organic material on its surface.
Originally, it was thought this organic material covered 6–10 percent of the spectral signature, but a recent analysis of the data suggests the amount of could be as high as 40–50 percent. Since carbon-based compounds are necessary for life, it makes for an exciting discovery that could change how we view objects in the asteroid belt.
With that said, this is a recent discovery and much remains unclear. It is possible the organics weren’t created on Ceres but planted there by comets, and even if they are native, organic compounds can come about from non-biological processes.
As Ralph Milliken, a professor at Brown University and one of the study’s co-authors said in a press release: “Ceres is clearly a fascinating object, and understanding the story and origin of organics in these spots and elsewhere on Ceres will likely require future missions that can analyze or return samples.”
The Fifth Wave, Columbia Pictures, 2016.
The end of life as we know it
So far, our solar search has focused on the conditions for life as we know it. But what about life as we don’t know it?
Bacteria recently discovered in Antarctica can survive off just the hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide they get from the air. These guys make breatharians look gluttonous by comparison and could lead the way to remove water as a prerequisite in our search for extraterrestrial life.
Additionally, Sara Seager, MIT physics professor, considered that alien life may evolve around different chemical combinations than life on Earth and used computer-generated models to devise a list of those possible combinations.
“The theory ended up being, we should maybe consider all potential molecules that would be in gas form,” Seager said. “Why not consider all of them? I just combined them in any way possible, like just taking letters in the alphabet and combining them in all ways.”
Could life possibly exist in Titan’s methane sea? Or could the seeds of life be floating on some yet undiscovered asteroid? The more we learn about life on Earth, the more we learn about the myriad of paths it has taken to thrive, opening avenues for us to find it in our solar system and beyond.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
They’re real and contain hidden messages, scientist says
They’re real and contain hidden messages, scientist says
IT all started with a UFO sighting.
Dr Horace Drew, 61, was just 10 years old when he allegedly saw an unidentified, silver, windowless craft hovering in the sky near his suburban home, in Jacksonville, Florida. The encounter lasted only moments but led to a lifelong fascination with the extraterrestrial.
“I saw a UFO, so I knew they were real from an early age,” Dr Drew told news.com.au.
The scientist, who holds a PhD in Chemistry from Caltech, the California Institute of Technology, and worked for CSIRO as a molecular biologist, has been researching crop circles and aliens for 20 years. Dr Drew relocated to Australia in the 1980s but most of his work has taken him overseas, predominantly to Europe.
“They’re quite rare in Australia,” he said.
He, along with many conspiracy theorists, believe crop circles are the work of aliens or human time travellers. Sceptics say most are probably man-made.
A crop circle is typically defined by standing wheat stems that have been flattened in the shape of a circle or more complex pattern. They tend to appear mainly in developed Western or secularised countries — including Japan.
The cause of many of the circles is unknown despite various natural and unorthodox explanations having been put forward. Some crop circles have been proven to be hoaxes.
But according to Dr Drew, a number are legitimate and contain puzzles that can be decoded and linked to time travel and alien life.
He told news.com.au he had visited about “two dozen crop circles” around the globe in his career. Typically, they were between 50-500m in length, he said.
“This has led to at least one major breakthrough the discovery of a more advanced binary code than our computers currently use.”
Dr Drew claimed that aliens or human time travellers have been leaving the crop circles on Earth as messages to “us or themselves”.
WHY ARE THERE CROP CIRCLES?
Dr Drew said he was one of a handful of scientists around the world who had worked to successfully decode some of the messages in crop circles.
According to him, some crop circles provide general descriptions of the future.
“Other crop (circles) show schematic images of the future for astronomical or human events,” he said.
He said some of the decoded messages read: ‘Much pain but still time. Believe. There is good out there’; ‘Beware the bearers of false gifts and their broken promises’; ‘We oppose deception. Conduit closing’.
Dr Drew has developed at least two theories as to the purpose of the circles by reading their “advanced (version of) binary codes”.
“One theory is that they are trying to introduce themselves to us peacefully, like we do using bubbles with dolphins,” he said.
“When (humans) want to talk with dolphins we put little bubble circles under the ocean with a generator. We watch the dolphins come up and play and investigate, and we study them.
“This is called the ‘dolphin communication project’.”
He said the dynamic between the way humans interact with dolphins and whales was likely comparable to how extraterrestrials communicate with us.
“Barack or Trump have never said to a dolphin: ‘take me to your leader I want to sign a treaty with you’,” he said.
“And (the extraterrestrials are) not interested in making a treaty with us.
“They are ahead of us like we are ahead of the dolphins and the whales.”
His second theory was that the messages “are not even for us”.
Dr Drew said human time travellers from the distant future could be creating the circles as directional markers, to help them navigate “in their distant past, which is our present”.
“There are definitely humans living there in about 5000 years with time travel capability,” he said.
“They’re coming back and flying all over Earth.
“They seem to just say ‘this is a certain day’ and mark it.
“So the trouble is we don’t know space time physics enough to understand what’s happening. It’s beyond our knowledge.
HOW ARE THEY MADE?
Dr Drew said the circles appeared to be created by an “unknown energy that heats the crops up”.
“It’s like microwave energy but is something beyond earth’s science,” he said.
“It can pattern the wheat.
“No one sees or hears anything and that's why its so hard to prove. If there’s a craft, it’s silent, noiseless.”
But there’s nothing to fear, according to him.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said.
REAL OR A HOAX?
Telling the difference between a real crop circle and a hoax is like differentiating between an original painting and a fake, according to Dr Drew.
“There are some things to look for,” he said.
Crops that are bent “halfway up” their stems, rather than on the ground ,is one telltale sign “cereologists”, or someone that advocates paranormal explanations of crop circles, look for to determine that it’s not a hoax.
“You can’t absolutely prove a crop circle wasn’t a hoax but you can give a high probability and judgment,” he said.
“If there’s a hoax the word of it gets around very fast, people are aware, people are not that easily fooled.”
In 1991, English pranksters Doug Bower and Dave Chorley took credit for most of the crop circles across southern England made since 1978. They were inspired by the Tully “saucer nest” case in Australia, where a farmer found a flattened circle of swamp reeds after observing a UFO.
Using basic tools including a plank of wood, rope, and a baseball cap fitted with a loop of wire to help them walk in a straight line, they said they made complex crop circles in England — which others then copied all over the world into the 1980s.
They made a circle for journalists, which was later declared authentic by a cereologist. They then revealed their hoax to the world, spurring on even more copycats.
Dr Drew said there was a lot of scientific evidence to show that some crop circles were made by human time travellers or extraterrestrial beings. “Laboratory results on plant or soil samples taken from a crop circle in Brazil in October of 2016 show that it was formed by unknown sterilising images,” he said.
The earliest mention of a crop circle dates back to the 1500s. A woodcut from the time showed a “mowing devil” making the pattern.µ
GOVERNMENT SECRETS?
Earlier this month, US TV host Jimmy Kimmel asked former US President George Bush if he went through “secret files, the UFO documents” when he was in office.
But instead of laughing off the question, the former commander in chief replied: “Maybe.”
Mr Kimmel then asked him if there were “any great secrets you know that you can’t share with people?”
“Yeah, there are,” Mr Bush said. “But I’m not telling you.”
Many conspiracy theorists and some scientists, including Dr Drew, argued that Mr Bush’s comments indicated the US government knows much more about extraterrestrial life than it has publicly revealed.
“The politicians are scared they'll lose votes if they talk about it,” Dr Drew said.
He said international media had also played a part in causing the public to doubt the legitimacy of crop circles and aliens.
But according to him, its important for humans to keep seeking answers.
“The ET visitors have technologies which would benefit us greatly, for example, how to make safe, clean energy without burning oil, coal or gas,” Dr Drew said.
“Ultra-fast propulsion systems, based on gravity and inertia, could carry us safely to distant planets or stars.
“We may also need to upgrade our planetary defences soon, to protect against ET’s who may not be friendly.”
There’s still a lot more to be understood but Dr Drew’s hope is that he one day gets a closer look at what was inside the UFO he believes he saw as a child.
“I’d like to meet (the extraterrestrials or human time travellers) in person,” he said.
“But I don’t think they're going to do that.
“Whichever scientific team is doing this I don’t think we’re supposed to have full knowledge of it because it will interrupt their program, whatever they're doing.”
Chandra May Have First Evidence of a Young Star Devouring a Planet
Chandra May Have First Evidence of a Young Star Devouring a Planet
Chandra data indicates that a young star has likely destroyed and consumed an infant planet.
If confirmed, this would be the first time that astronomers have witnessed such an event.
The star, known as RW Aur A, is a few million years old and is located about 450 light years from Earth.
Studying this may help astronomers gain insight into the processes affecting the early stages of planet development.
This artist's illustration depicts the destruction of a young planet or planets, which scientists may have witnessed for the first time using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, as described in our latest press release. If this discovery is confirmed, it would give insight into the processes affecting the survival of infant planets.
RW Aur A is a star about 450 light years from Earth, making it relatively nearby. Since the 1930s, astronomers have studied RW Aur A and been curious about why the optical light from this star changes over time. In recent years, scientists have observed that this variability has increased, with the star dimming even more and for longer periods of time.
To investigate this mystery, a team of astronomers used Chandra to get information in the X-ray band of the electromagnetic spectrum. X-rays are generally emitted by more energetic and hotter phenomena than their optical light counterparts and can reveal information about different elements, including iron.
The Chandra data suggest that the most recent dimming event from RW Aur A was caused by the collision of two "planetesimals" (that is, infant planetary bodies still in the process of formation), including at least one object large enough to be a planet.
Because the X-rays come from the hot outer atmosphere of the star, changes in the X-ray spectrum — the intensity of X-rays measured at different energies — over these three observations were used to probe the density and composition of the absorbing material around the star.
The team found that the dips in both optical and X-ray light are caused by dense gas obscuring the star's light. Also, a Chandra observation in 2017 showed strong emission from iron atoms, indicating that the disk contained at least 10 times more iron than in the 2013 observation during a bright period.
The Chandra spectra from the 2013 and 2017 observations are shown in an inset in the graphic. The sharp peak on the right side of the 2017 spectrum is a signature of a large amount of iron.
The researchers propose the excess iron was created when the two planetesimals collided. If one or both planetary bodies are made partly of iron, their smash-up could release a large amount of iron into the star's disk and temporarily obscure its light as the material falls into the star.
A paper describing these results led by Hans Moritz Guenther (MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics) appears in the most recent issue of The Astrophysical Journal and is available online. The other authors on the paper are Til Birnstiel (Ludwig-Maximillians-University Munich), David Huenemoerder (MIT), David Principe (MIT), Christian Schneider (Hamburger Sternwarte), Scott Wolk (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), Franky Dubois (Astrolab IRIS), Ludwig Logiie (Astrolab IRIS), Steve Rau (Astrolab IRIS), and Siegfried Vanaverbeke (Astrolab IRIS). NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, controls Chandra's science and flight operations.
Un militaire sur l'USS Carl Vinson communique avec l'USS Princeton, en octobre 2001 (image d'illustration)
Selon un rapport du Pentagone cité par la presse américaine, un ovni de la taille d'un avion de ligne mais de la forme d'un «œuf allongé», est apparu à proximité d'un porte-avion américain, plusieurs jours durant en 2004.
Un rapport du Pentagone révélé par la chaîne de télévision américaine KLAS fin mai et amplement cité par la presse anglo-saxonne, livre de nouveaux détails sur un objet volant non identifié (ovni) qu'ont observé, plusieurs jours durant en 2004, des militaires américains au large de la côte californienne. Le New York Times avait publié une vidéo de l'incident en question en décembre dernier, dans un article traitant du programme d'étude des ovnis financé aux Etats-Unis par le Pentagone.
Selon ce rapport, l'objet, de la taille d'un avion de ligne et de forme ovale, a été repéré une première fois par le radar de l'USS Princeton, un porte-avion américain, alors qu'il volait à 60 000 pieds (plus de 18 000 mètres). Il a alors subitement plongé vers la surface de l'océan, pour l'atteindre en quelques secondes seulement. Peu après, l'ovni s'est éloigné à une vitesse si impressionnante que les membres d'équipage ont pensé qu'ils s'agissait d'un missile balistique.
Deux jours plus tard, toujours selon le rapport du Pentagone, l'objet est à nouveau apparu près de l'USS Princeton et a cette fois été pris en chasse par deux F-18. Mais les pilotes ont expliqué qu'ils avaient été incapables de l'intercepter, l'ovni s'étant brusquement rendu invisible. Il pouvait cependant toujours être détecté, à cause de l'onde visible à la surface de l'eau créée sous lui, «d'environ 50 à 100 mètres de diamètre».
L'engin a été décrit par un des pilotes comme étant «blanc uni, lisse, sans bords, uniformément coloré, sans nacelles, pylônes ou ailes» et ressemblant à «un œuf allongé ou un Tic Tac». D'après le rapport du Pentagone, un avion de surveillance E-2C Hawkeye a réussi à détecter l'objet mais sans pouvoir le «verrouiller», ce qui laisse penser qu'il était capable d'esquiver le radar.
Le rapport se conclut en confirmant que l'engin ne correspondait à «aucun avion ou véhicule aérien actuellement connu dans l'inventaire des Etats-Unis ou de toute autre nation étrangère».
Photo Credit: Roberto Molar-Candanosa, courtesy of Carnegie Institution for Science
2. 79 moons … wow
12 new moons have been discovered around Jupiter, bringing the grand total of known moons around the planet to 79. Of these 12 newly found moons, 1 is an "oddball."
NASA deployed a tiny, 26-lb (12-kg) satellite called HaloSat from the International Space Station. It will explore the halo of hot gas around the Milky Way.
Photo Credit: Retro Space Images/NASA via collectSPACE.com
4. 49 years from moonshot
50 years ago Friday (July 20), the first moon landing with Apollo 11 was still four months from being announced. Look back at where things stood on July 20,1968, and how NASA got from there to the next year's moonshot.
Researchers think that two different types of stars, pulsars and magnetars, might actually be the same type of star, just at different points in its life.
Two newfound "twin" exoplanets, discovered by direct imaging, look and act very similarly. But researchers think that they were created in very different ways.
Raging, planet-wide dust storms – like the one going on now – happen only every 6 to 8 years on Mars. Here’s how NASA spacecraft are studying it, plus a cool before-and-after video!
Side-by-side movies shows how dust has enveloped the red planet, courtesy of the Mars Color Imager (MARCI) camera onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The view from May shows Valles Marineris chasms (left), Meridiani center, an autumn dust storm in Acidalia (top) and the early spring south polar cap (bottom). The view from July shows the same regions, but most of the surface was obscured by the planet-encircling dust cloud and haze.
Over the past month, Mars has put on a spectacular show in our night sky. The show culminates on July 27, 2018, when Earth will pass between Mars and the sun, bringing Mars to opposition on the same night that Mars will be near a totally eclipsed moon! All of that is wonderful for skywatchers, but space scientists are having a field day with Mars now, too. The same event that’s making Mars extra bright for us – that is, Mars’ September 16, 2018, perihelion or closest point to the sun – has also created conditions for a planet-wide dust storm, which has been raging now for over a month.
For scientists watching the red planet from data gathered by NASA’s orbiters, the past month has been a windfall. Global dust storms, where a runaway series of storms creates a dust cloud so large it envelops the planet, only appear every six to eight years (that’s three to four Mars years). Scientists still don’t understand why or how exactly these storms form and evolve.
Side-by-side movies shows how dust has enveloped the red planet, courtesy of the Mars Color Imager (MARCI) wide-angle camera onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.
For NASA’s Opportunity rover, the dust storm has not been good news. NASA said it meant:
… a sudden drop in visibility from a clear, sunny day to that of an overcast one. Because Opportunity runs on solar energy, scientists had to suspend science activities to preserve the rover’s batteries. As of July 18, no response has been received from the rover.
But other NASA spacecraft – both on the ground and in orbit – are observing the dust storm. In fact, NASA said:
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey, and Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) orbiters are all tailoring their observations of the red planet to study this global storm and learn more about Mars’ weather patterns. Meanwhile, the Curiosity rover is studying the dust storm from the Martian surface.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has two instruments studying the dust storm. Each day, its Mars Color Imager maps the entire planet in mid-afternoon to track the evolution of the storm. Meanwhile, its Mars Climate Sounder instrument measures how the atmosphere’s temperature changes with altitude. Rich Zurek of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, is the project scientist for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Zurak said:
The very fact that you can start with something that’s a local storm, no bigger than a small [U.S.] state, and then trigger something that raises more dust and produces a haze that covers almost the entire planet is remarkable,
The MAVEN orbiter has been circling Mars since 2014. Since it entered Mars’ orbit, said Bruce Jakosky, the orbiter’s principle investigator,
… one of the things we’ve been waiting for is a global dust storm.
NASA said MAVEN isn’t studying the dust storm itself. Instead:
… the MAVEN team wants to study how the dust storm affects Mars’ upper atmosphere, about 62 miles (more than 100 km) above the surface — where the dust doesn’t even reach. MAVEN’s mission is to figure out what happened to Mars’ early atmosphere. We know that at some point billions of years ago, liquid water pooled and ran along Mars’ surface, which means that its atmosphere must have been thicker and more insulating, similar to Earth’s.
Since MAVEN arrived at Mars in 2014, its investigations have found that this atmosphere may have been stripped away by a torrent of solar wind over several hundred million years, between 3.5 and 4.0 billion years ago.
But there are still nuances to figure out, such as how dust storms like the current one affect how atmospheric molecules escape into space … For instance, the dust storm acts as an atmospheric insulator, trapping heat from the sun. Does this heating change the way molecules escape the atmosphere?
Most of NASA’s spacecraft are studying the dust storm from above. And the Opportunity rover is currently inoperable. But the Curiosity rover – designed to explore Gale Crater on Mars – isn’t suffering the same fate as Opportunity. That’s because Curiosity doesn’t run on solar power. It is a nuclear-powered science machine – and therefore largely immune to Mars’ dust-darkened skies – still collecting science data as the dust flies all around it.
We’re working double-duty right now. Our newly recommissioned drill is acquiring a fresh rock sample. But we are also using instruments to study how the dust storm evolves.
NASA said:
Curiosity has a number of “eyes” that can determine the abundance and size of dust particles based on how they scatter and absorb light. That includes its Mastcam, ChemCam … its suite of weather instruments [called the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station, or REMS]. REMS can also help study atmospheric tides – shifts in pressure that move as waves across the entire planet’s thin air. These tides change drastically based on where the dust is globally, not just inside Gale crater.
The global storm may also reveal secrets about Martian dust devils and winds. Dust devils can occur when the planet’s surface is hotter than the air above it. Heating generates whirls of air, some of which pick up dust and become dust devils. During a dust storm, there’s less direct sunlight and lower daytime temperatures; this might mean fewer devils swirling across the surface.
Even new drilling can advance dust storm science: watching the small piles of loose material created by Curiosity’s drill is the best way of monitoring winds.
Scientists expect the Mars dust storm to last several more months. Expect some new science results from this grand opportunity to study nature on another world!
Physics professor unveiled: "Face on Mars" clearly has a mouth full of teeth
Physics professor unveiled: "Face on Mars" clearly has a mouth full of teeth
Several studies and scientists have argued on the basis of strictly scientific criteria that the "face of Mars" was indeed built by a very highly developed Mars civilization from the past of Mars. An exact analysis also reveals a mouth full of "teeth".
Why do we ignore such important discoveries and fail to report on them and highlight their importance simply because they contradict established science?
The anomalous features of the so-called "Mars Face" feature, as seen in the 1976 Viking image, were refuted 20 years ago with reference to a 1998 Mars Global Surveyor image. Ten years later, in 2008, however, a much higher-quality image was achieved with details that were identical to the original from 1976.
By means of comparisons, we show how this 2008 picture can better identify the identified anomalous details.
The following picture was taken by NASA in 1976
Among them an image of Mark Carlotto, an image scientist with 30 years of experience in satellite remote sensing and digital image processing, who studied optics, signal and image processing at Carnegie-Mellon University from 1972-1981 and received his doctorate in electrical engineering there. He has held several positions in science and industry. Here are some of the peer-reviewed essays he wrote and co-authored before this one.
Below is a screenshot of a section of the study describing what happened to the picture that was published in 1998.
NASA released the image on April 5, 1998, with low contrast to make the feature look flat, faceless and without three-dimensional depth. The lack of tonal value details is surprising.
The study then continues to compare a decade later with a picture that seems very strange because they look so different.
What's really going on here? Is NASA changing its images?
Below you can see the MRO CTX image: B01_010143_2216, received on 24 September 2008, from a distance of just over 311 km. This image has not been edited and is shown here as it was received from the MRO HiRise website.
According to the authors, the following picture shows "clearly an 'eyeball' in the eye socket and 'teeth' in the mouth area".
Comparison of Viking single image 70A13 with 2008 MRO CTX image B01_010143_2216
It seems that there are a lot of people who are firmly convinced that we are visited by ETs and that this is hushed up. People aren't stupid, and all these people just don't believe that for no reason.
The truth is out there, and it has enormous effects on perception, consciousness, spirituality, historiography, and science.
This matter really does not leave any aspect of humanity untouched.
NASA Scientists Claim the Face & Pyramid on Mars is Real "NASA is Covering Them Up"
1. The real perspective of Cydonya Face. Fill the void (mirror) and you have the real Cydonya Lord
2. Half of the face, from Mars Global Surveyor, then the half flipped and put side by side, to create a whole face. This is what it would have looked like a million years or so ago. Can you say, planet of the apes?
3. Not well studied but this is pretty hard to deny...
New Look Inside Sun's Atmosphere Yields Clues About Mysterious Solar Wind
New Look Inside Sun's Atmosphere Yields Clues About Mysterious Solar Wind
By Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Writer
Heavy data cleaning allowed scientists to study the sun's corona, or outer atmosphere, in stunning detail.
Credit: Craig DeForest, SwRI
Our sun is surrounded by a deep, million-degree atmosphere that affects everything in the solar system — but how, precisely, it does so is a mystery.
The atmosphere, called the corona, produces the solar wind — a flood of charged particles that stream out of the sun and across the solar system. As the solar wind travels to Earth, it brings threats of radiation and magnetic interference.
Now, in a new study, researchers have finally managed to watch it being born in the sun's outer corona. The images provide enough detail for researchers to be able to start piecing together why it flows in such complex ways. They have concluded that one likely explanation is that the turbulence is a legacy of where it comes from. [During Eclipses, Astronomers Try to Reveal the Secrets of the Solar Wind]
"Previous images showed the outer corona as a smooth structure, but in deep space, the solar wind is turbulent and gusty," co-author Craig DeForest, a solar physicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Texas,said in a university statement. "Using new techniques to improve image fidelity, we realized that the corona is not smooth, but structured and dynamic. Every structure that we thought we understood turns out to be made of smaller ones, and to be more dynamic than we thought."
The research relied on data from STEREO, a NASA mission that has been orbiting the sun since 2006. It carries an instrument called a coronagraph, which uses a black disk to block out the bright surface of the sun. That lets scientists see what's happening in the corona, which is much fainter than the surface and would otherwise be washed out by its light.
But that data hasn't been detailed enough to let scientists see what's really happening inside the corona, according to NASA. To tackle that problem, the researchers first asked for a specific type of data from the STEREO team: long-exposure images that would capture fainter signals. Then, they set to work laboriously cleaning up the data to remove confusing factors like the light of background stars or false signals from the instrument itself.
The cleanup involved piecing together the images in a particularly careful way that considered how quickly the solar wind was flowing out and shifting the images accordingly. To do so, they matched up images over time, according to their place in the flow of solar wind, rather than their specific location in space — like tracking individual patches of solar wind as they streamed out of the sun.
The process is the equivalent of aligning sequential images of a log drifting in a current so that the log, rather than the trees along the riverbank, stacks up in every image — offering a more detailed image of the log.
The solar wind, as seen before (left) and after (right) serious imaging processing. While the processed image may look fuzzier, it's actually a better view of the solar wind, with background stars and dust eliminated from view.
Credit: Craig DeForest, SwRI/NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
The result is a much clearer picture of the flow of solar wind, showing the smaller structures that make up the seemingly disorganized whole. That structure, hidden below the smooth surface, helps explain why the solar wind flows so turbulently as it travels farther away from the sun.
The research is described in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal on July 18.
The new imaging also highlighted a region where things got particularly interesting, about 4.3 million miles (7 million kilometers) above the sun's surface. Before and after this point, the solar wind was relatively easy to track, but in this region, the flow seemed to hit a bump in the road. The team isn't sure what's happening there.
Conveniently enough, NASA is due to launch a new mission that will bring scientists even more data about the sun's corona. The Parker Solar Probe, scheduled for launch in early August with data collection beginning later this year, will eventually fly directly through this region of our star, dipping below the bumpy section — and hopefully deciphering still more mysteries about the solar wind and its birthplace.
Chinese residents claimed to have sighted UFOs after several mysterious lights were seen flashing in the sky of Chongqing.
The strange bright dots appeared to move in a line as one disappeared and another one emerged in front of it. The eerie scenes from Wednesday have been captured in videos, which are trending on Chinese social media platforms.
While the rumours of extra-terrestrial activities were circulating among Chinese web users, a leading UFO expert claimed that the footage could be of 'a rocket zooming into the atmosphere'.
Video emerged online shows mysterious lights moving in a linear motion in the sky in Chongqing, China (left). It disappeared and reappeared in front of one another (right)
The series of baffling videos were posted yesterday on Weibo, a Twitter-like social media platform.
They showed several orange-red lights following each other in a linear motion.
Some web users claimed the scene looked like a cell splitting in the sky, whilst others said aliens were visiting China.
Weibo user 'wangshuashuadishua' said the phenomenon resembled 'a person making smoke rings while walking'; while 'BIM' gushed 'the aliens finally made their visit to China, they used to go to America only'.
There were also web users claiming to have seen the same mysterious pattern appearing above other cities, including Shanghai in east China and Xinjiang Autonomous Region in north-west China.
Residents of Chongqing wondered if aliens were visiting the city after sighting the unusual lights on Wednesday night (left). Web users claimed it was also seen in other cities (right)
One influential science blogger, known as 'Steed's scarf' on Weibo, has another theory.
'Steed's scarf', who has more than 4.5 million Weibo followers, believed that the lights came from a moving plane and they were the aircraft's navigation lights.
In a post on July 19, he wrote: 'If you watch the footage carefully, the lights actually appeared in pairs. It came from a dark-coloured aircraft, so it was difficult to spot.
'The lights appeared a few seconds on the camera but as the plane kept moving, another pair of lights appeared. So it looks like one following each other.'
Leading British UFO expert Nigal Watson, the author of Haynes UFO Investigations Manual, told MailOnline that the footage 'could be of a rocket zooming into the atmosphere'.
'The pulses of light are either blasts from its engines or reflections. Similar lights were filmed elsewhere in China, suggesting it was something of this nature,' he said.
Chinese authorities are yet to comment on the matter.
Chinese stad in rep en roer na verschijnen mysterieuze vliegende lichten. Zijn dit UFO’s?
Chinese stad in rep en roer na verschijnen mysterieuze vliegende lichten. Zijn dit UFO’s?
De Chinese stad Chongqing is in rep en roer nadat mysterieuze vliegende lichten boven de stad zijn verschenen.
Beelden van het tafereel verschenen op Chinese social mediaplatforms, waar ze enige tijd trending topic waren.
Terwijl Chinese internetgebruikers dachten aan buitenaardse activiteiten, claimde een UFO-expert dat de beelden mogelijk een raket in de atmosfeer toonden.
Andere steden
De filmpjes werden op Weibo geplaatst, een Twitter-achtig social mediaplatform. In de filmpjes zijn meerdere oranjerode lichten te zien.
Sommigen zeiden dat het deed denken aan cellen die zich deelden in de lucht, terwijl anderen zeiden dat China werd bezocht door aliens.
Meerdere mensen claimden dat hetzelfde mysterieuze patroon ook boven andere steden is verschenen, waaronder Shanghai in het oosten van China en de autonome regio Xinjiang in het noord-westen.
Nog niet gereageerd
Een invloedrijke blogger op Weibo dacht dat de lichten afkomstig waren van een vliegtuig.
“Als je goed naar de beelden kijkt zie je dat de lichten in paren verschijnen,” zei de blogger, die meer dan 4,5 miljoen volgers heeft. “Ze waren afkomstig van een donker vliegtuig en dus moeilijk te spotten.”
UFO-expert Nigel Watson zei tegen de Daily Mail dat het een raket in de atmosfeer zou kunnen zijn geweest.
De Chinese autoriteiten hebben nog niet gereageerd op de waarnemingen.
ONTVOERDE PROFESSOR HEEFT FOTO'S VAN BUITENAARDSEN ( VIDEO )
ONTVOERDE PROFESSOR HEEFT FOTO'S VAN BUITENAARDSEN ( VIDEO )
Er zijn genoeg verhalen van mensen die zeggen ontvoerd te zijn door buitenaardsen, maar nooit zie je eigenlijk foto’s van die wezens.
Dat ligt anders bij de oud professor Maurizio Cavallo uit Italië, want hij heeft wel degelijk opnames van de buitenaardsen die hem hebben ontvoerd.
De nu 63-jarige Maurizio Cavallo heeft een wel heel bijzonder verhaal en hij heeft foto’s waarvan hij zegt dat het de buitenaardsen afbeeldt die hem ontvoerden.
Vroeger was Maurizio Cavallo professor aan de Volksuniversiteit in Vercelli in Italië, maar tegenwoordig is hij meer auteur en journalist.
Het leven van Cavallo veranderde compleet toen hij naar eigen zeggen in september 1981 werd ontvoerd door buitenaardsen afkomstig van een planeet met de naam Clarion. Deze planeet bevindt zich in een sterrenstelsel met de naam Adelaar op een afstand van 150.000 lichtjaren van onze aarde.
Op aarde hebben de buitenaardsen die hem ontvoerden een ondergrondse basis in het Amazone gebied en dat is ook de plek waar ze hem naartoe brachten en aan het werk gingen met het verruimen van het bewustzijn van Cavallo.
Tijdens zijn verblijf aldaar slaagde Cavallo erin om de nodige foto’s te maken van de buitenaardse wezens.
Niet alleen waren daar de originele buitenaardsen, maar ook de zogenaamde hybriden, een kruising tussen mensen en buitenaardsen.
De nu 63-jarige Cavallo geeft hoog op over de buitenaardsen en noemt ze sterk geëvolueerde tijdloze wezens die afkomstig zijn uit dat deel van de kosmos waar eeuwigheid wordt geschapen.
Verder zegt Cavallo dat onze opvattingen over de ruimte niet kloppen, dat er nooit een big bang is geweest en dat buitenaardsen veel sneller kunnen reizen dan de snelheid van het licht. Daarnaast dat er 12 planeten in ons zonnestelsel zijn en geen acht of negen.
Verder zegt hij dat er wel degelijk zuurstof en water op de maan aanwezig is.
Iemand die veel contact heeft gehad met Maurizio Cavallo is de Italiaanse journaliste Paola Harris.
Zij heeft hem persoonlijk geïnterviewd en in de volgende video vertelt zij onder andere het vreemde, maar ook fascinerende verhaal van Maurizio Cavallo. Het deel over Cavallo begint rond minuut 53.
If you thought that Roswell was/is the most controversial of all alleged crashed UFO cases, you would be wrong. There is also the matter of the much-debated claims of a UFO crash at Aztec, New Mexico in March 1948. It’s a story which was made famous in Frank Scully’s 1950 book, Behind the Flying Saucers, a book which turned out to be a huge seller. Many researchers of the UFO phenomenon (although certainly not all, such as Scott and Suzanne Ramsey) dismiss Aztec as nothing but a hoax, one perpetrated by a shady businessman / conman named Silas Newton.
There is an interesting aspect to the Newton / Aztec story, which is worth noting. By his own admittance, and after the Aztec story surfaced, Newton was clandestinely visited by two representatives of “a highly secret U.S. Government entity,” as the late UFO researcher (and CIA employee) Karl Pflock worded it. Those same representatives told Newton, in no uncertain terms, that they knew his Aztec story was complete bullshit. Incredibly, though, they wanted him to keep telling the tale to just about anyone and everyone who would listen.
This led Pflock to wonder: “Did the U.S. Government or someone associated with it use Newton to discredit the idea of crashed flying saucers so a real captured saucer or saucers could be more easily kept under wraps?” Far more intriguing, though, is the next question that Karl posed: “Was this actually nothing to do with real saucers but instead some sort of psychological warfare operation [italics mine]?”
Pflock – a CIA intelligence officer, and a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration – was not just fascinated by the Aztec saga of 1948, per se. He was also fascinated by the possibility that someone in the government, the intelligence community, or the military – and maybe even a combination of all three – had created the story to hide something else. Or, at the very least, had encouraged the telling and retelling of the Aztec story for psy-op-basedreasons.
I know just how fascinated Karl was when it came to Aztec and the claims of Newton and that “highly secret U.S. Government entity.” I first met Karl in 2003 – at a UFO gig in the small town of Aztec, New Mexico. For a number of years, the conference was a yearly event. But, no more. Karl and I were in touch by landline and fax (how quaint) as far back as the mid-1990s. When Karl and I finally met, he near-immediately suggested that we should write an Aztec-themed book. Karl’s reasoning was that he knew the story very well, and, via the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, I had uncovered hundreds and hundreds of pages of material – chiefly from the FBI – on the Aztec controversy. He thought we would make a good team, and particularly so now that I lived in the U.S. – and specifically in Texas, which is, of course, not at all far from New Mexico, where Karl resided and where the 1948 crash supposedly happened.
As I listened, Karl told me that his idea was, essentially, to make the book a biography on Newton, but with the Aztec affair being the main thrust. I thought it was a good idea and Karl suggested we prepare a synopsis. Which is exactly what he did. The book was going to be called Silas the Magnificent: A True Tale of Greed, Credulity, and (Maybe) Government Chicanery and Cover-up in 1950s America. Note that the book makes no mention of UFOs in its title and sub-title.
Unfortunately, the project was permanently derailed when Karl fell sick with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He unfortunately died from the effects of ALS on June 5, 2006, at the age of just sixty-three. Karl is gone, but the synopsis still exists. It would have made a good book. And, very possibly, it just might have revealed more of the psy-op/disinformation aspect of Aztec and of other crashed UFO yarns of bygone decades.
Comet PANSTARRS C/2017 S3 in Outburst - Its Atmosphere is Twice as Wide as the Planet Jupiter
Oumuamua actually is a comet or eventually a spaceship” that arrived from out of our solar system then we may now be looking at the second object of this class.
Comet C/2017 S3 has an eccentricity of 1.0000787, which makes its orbit hyperbolic. Its inclination is about 99 degrees to the plane of the solar system. This makes it very unlikely that it a comet from our own solar system, kicked into a hyperbolic, sun-escaping orbit by a close encounter with Jupiter.
This strange comet suddenly flashed on July 2, 2018.
Michael Jäger took the above picture of the comet's expanding green atmosphere shortly after the outburst.
The gas cloud around the comet's nucleus is about 4 arc minutes wide," says Jäger. That means the comet's atmosphere is 260,000 km in diameter, almost twice as wide as the planet Jupiter.
Barely a week later, the comet fizzled, dimming almost as much as it had brightened. Then it exploded again, its green atmosphere ballooned in size, large enough to swallow Jupiter twice.
Michael Jaeger captured the comet's newly-formed tail on July 20, 2018 see GIF animation below.
Why is Comet PanSTARRS so unpredictable? Is it really a comet or is it something like Oumuamua?
They suggest that probably it has never felt the heat of the sun before. The comet is arriving from the Oort cloud, a vast reservoir of fresh comets in the outermost solar system.
And this is its first time among the inner planets. Unfamiliar warmth is making veins of fresh ice pop and fizz as the comet approaches.
It is expected to brighten many-fold as it approaches the sun inside the orbit of Mercury in August, a narrow open-ended path that will ultimately fling it back to the outer solar system, reports spaceweather.
Black UFOs Size Of Car Shoot Past SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket Launch, July 2018, UFO Sighting News
Black UFOs Size Of Car Shoot Past SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket Launch, July 2018, UFO Sighting News
Date of sighting: July 2018
Location of sighting: SpaceX Launch site
I was watching the SpaceX launch of the Falcon Heavy when I noticed that some dark black objects shot past the rocket at incredible speed. The object were 1000X faster than birds and 20X faster than a jet, so what the heck could it be other than alien craft that are investigating and observing the progress of Elon Musk. The UFO was the size of a minivan and there were several of them. Now my estimate of its size is very conservative. Being about 5+ meters long, the UFO could be as large as 8 meters in comparison with the width of the rocket. Why were they moving so fast? So they wouldn't be noticed by the human eye. Well, most human eyes, but apparently not fast enough.
Glowing White UFOs At International Space Station During Space Walk, July 10, 2018, UFO Sighting News
Glowing White UFOs At International Space Station During Space Walk, July 10, 2018, UFO Sighting News
Date of sighting: July 10, 2018 Location of sighting: Earths orbit at Space Station Source: MUFON #93505 This video is part of a MUFON report that came in today. In the video we see several white UFOs that move past the space station during a space walk this week. The UFOs are there to observe how humans do things on the outside of the space station and in stressful environments. Watching humans under stress teaches aliens a lot about us, including how we may react to meeting a real alien. Scott C. Waring
This article was produced in partnership with the History Channel's Project Blue Book, who sponsor IFLScience. Learn more here.
In recent months, leaked military intelligence has been attracting international attention, yet again prompting the question: Is there something – or someone – else out there?
Of course, the question of intelligent life beyond our planet is nothing new. A top-secret United States program, made available online in 2015, even shows the lengths governments have gone to in order to investigate that very question. The program, called Project Blue Book, is the longest-running UFO investigation conducted by the US government.
It all started in 1947 when the government began conducting investigations into unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and related phenomena under the name Project Sign, which later evolved into Project Grudge. From 1952 to 1969, the United States Air Force worked under Project Blue Book to scientifically analyze data related to UFOs and determine if they were a threat to national security.
Of the 12,618 UFO sightings recorded during Project Blue Book, 701 remain "unidentified" to this day.µFBI
In the short amount of time the program was in operation, there were 12,618 sightings researched and investigated – 701 of which remain “unidentified” to this day. More than half a century later, about 130,000 pages of files from the project were made available to the public online.
Outlined in the heavily marked pages are some of the project’s most famous cases, including the 27-minute “dogfight” between a UFO and a North Dakota Air National Guard lieutenant in 1948 as well as the formation of lights seen over a small Texas town for two months in 1951 known as the Lubbock Lights. There's even the case of the Flatwoods Monster that tormented a small West Virginia town and terrified a nation in 1952, which remains unsolved to this day.
In just a few months, these cases will be investigated in a new scripted drama series called Project Blue Book coming to cable network HISTORY this winter. The all-star cast in each episode draws from actual case files and methodically blends UFO theories with authentic historical accounts.
Whether you have your own personal out-of-this-world extraterrestrial experience or you’re a total skeptic, you can check it all out for yourself at Comic-Con in San Diego this weekend. Here, you can take time to investigate past UFO cases for yourself and have a professional sketch artist bring your own UFO experience to life (if you have one, of course).
In addition, a collaboration between HISTORY and SpaceSpeak is teaming up to try to answer one of humanity’s greatest burning questions: Is there life beyond Earth? To help find out, you can now beam a text message made up of radio waves billions of miles into space using a transmitter attached to a parabolic dish. Developed by SpaceSpeak, the technology allows these messages to travel through space for millions of years. Senders can program their message to automatically rebroadcast each year and track how far the message has traveled.
From top-secret programs to curious citizens, it seems the quest for alien life continues to capture the attention of both believers and skeptics alike.
Blood Moon 2018: Longest Total Lunar Eclipse of Century Occurs July 27
Blood Moon 2018: Longest Total Lunar Eclipse of Century Occurs July 27
By Elizabeth Howell, Space.com Contributor
Skywatcher Giuseppe Petricca took this image of a "supermoon" total lunar eclipse on Sept. 27, 2015, from Pisa, Italy, about 2 minutes prior to the beginning of the totality phase.
The longest total lunar eclipse of the 21st century is less than two weeks away.
The total phase of the "blood moon" eclipse of July 27 will last 1 hour and 43 minutes, during which Earth's natural satellite will turn a spectacular red or ruddy-brown color. From start to finish, the entire celestial event will last nearly 4 hours.
The eclipse won't be visible to viewers in North America, except via webcasts. But observers in much of Africa, the Middle East, southern Asia and the Indian Ocean region will get an eyeful, given cooperative weather, according to lunar scientist Noah Petro, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. [In Photos: The Rare Super Blue Blood Moon Eclipse of 2018]
July's total lunar eclipse occurs on the same day the planet Mars reaches its opposition, when it will shine at its best in the night sky. This month, Mars will be at its closest to Earth since 2003. After opposition, when Mars will be brightest, it will reach that closest point on July 31. You can learn more about that event in our dedicated guide here: Mars at Opposition 2018: How to See It and What to Expect
Unlike with solar eclipses, you need no special equipment to observe lunar eclipses. These latter events, which occur when the moon passes into Earth's shadow, are safe to view directly with the naked eye, telescopes or binoculars.
The moon turns deep red or reddish brown during eclipses, instead of going completely dark. That's because some of the sunlight going through Earth's atmosphere is bent around the edge of our planet and falls onto the moon's surface. Earth's air also scatters more shorter-wavelength light (in colors such as green or blue); what's left is the longer-wavelength, redder end of the spectrum.
Where and when will it be visible?
The timing if this total lunar eclipse means it won't be visible from North America, though much of the Eastern Hemisphere of Earth will see part or all of the eclipse. The entire eclipse will be visible from Africa, the Middle East and countries in central Asia. The eclipse will be visible from eastern South America as it is ending, and from Australia as it is beginning.
The time of greatest eclipse will be 4:21 p.m. EDT (2021 GMT) on July 27, according to EarthSky.org. The total eclipse will last from 3:30 p.m. to 5:13 p.m. EDT (1930 to 2113 GMT). There will also be some time before and after when the moon is in the lighter part of Earth's shadow, which is called the penumbra. Including that penumbral time, the eclipse will last for 3 hours and 55 minutes.
In July 27, 2018, a total lunar eclipse will be visible from South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. This NASA chart by eclipse expert Fred Espenak shows details and visibility projections for this “blood moon” eclipse.
Credit: Fred Espenak/NASA GSFC
Why is it the longest of the century?
"What controls the duration of the lunar eclipse is the position of the moon as it passes through the Earth's shadow," Petro told Space.com. The darkest part of Earth's shadow is called the umbra. You can picture the umbra as a cone extending from Earth in the opposite direction to the sun, Petro explained.
"The moon can either graze through the cone, or go right through the middle. That [the middle] gets a longer-duration eclipse," he said. "This time, the moon is passing closer to the center of that cone, and it's therefore a little bit longer than the eclipse we had back in January."
Additionally, the moon will be at a farther point from Earth along its orbit, EarthSky pointed out. That means the moon will appear slightly smaller in the sky and will take a little bit longer to go through Earth's shadow.
Petro is also the project scientist for NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter(LRO), which has been orbiting the moon for nine years. It is best-known for obtaining detailed information on water ice and taking high-resolution pictures of spacecraft on the lunar surface. Because LRO is an older probe, most of its components (except for battery warmers and the like) will be turned off during the eclipse, to preserve the solar-powered spacecraft's battery and keep it safe during the greatest part of the eclipse, Petro said.
When is the next lunar eclipse?
The next total lunar eclipse visible from North America will occur on Jan. 21, 2019. Totality on that day will last 1 hour and 2 minutes, and the eclipse will especially favor viewers on the West Coast. That year will also see a partial eclipse, on July 16, 2019 — the 50th anniversary of the launch of the first moon landing mission, Apollo 11. LRO will likely still be operating then, having passed its 10th anniversary of arriving at the moon on June 23, 2019.
Editor's note: If you capture an amazing photo or video of the total lunar eclipse or any other night-sky sight and would like to share it with Space.com for a story or gallery, send images and comments to spacephotos@space.com.
Wandering Star May Have Disrupted Outer Solar System's Order
Wandering Star May Have Disrupted Outer Solar System's Order
By Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Writer
An artist's depiction of Sedna, hidden in the outer reaches of the solar system.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
There's something strange about the outer solar system — and that could be the signature of a long-ago visit to our neighborhood, according to a new study that looked to simulate how the outer solar system might have ended up so oddly arranged.
Astronomers have been wrestling with a few puzzles about the neighborhood for a while now. First, there's just not nearly as much stuff out there, all told, as they would expect. Also, it's odd that Neptune is more massive than the closer-in Uranus. And many of the small objects in the outer swath — like Sedna, a strange dwarf planet — follow extreme, stretched orbits at stark angles to the rest of the solar system's more orderly inhabitants.
Those quirks suggest that something must have stirred up the pot after the planets and large moons clumped together and formed out of the cloud of dust surrounding our sun early in its life. One possible culprit is a star that might have slipped next to our solar system and tugged objects off their original paths, throwing some out of the solar system entirely and skewing the orbits of others. [Planet 10? Another Earth-Size World May Lurk in the Outer Solar System]
That's not a new idea, but astronomers had thought that it was a pretty unlikely scenario. They expected that a close stellar flyby would have been pretty rare, starting about 10 million years after the birth of the Milky Way, when they thought objects would still be busy forming in the outer solar system.
But recently, scientists have been able to study many more young solar systems, and they've realized that, early in their lives, their outer edges can be more developed than expected. That means that an early flyby could still do the trick when it comes to explaining our solar system's oddities.
So, the team behind the new research ran a set of simulations to see how likely it was that a neighboring star might have snuck past our solar system in just such a way that it explains what we see today.
That calculation is pretty promising, and the researchers claim such a model may explain all the weird qualities of the outer solar system. The research is described in a recent paper posted to the preprint server arXiv.org.
Next, the team wants to keep testing the hypothesis, making their models more detailed and exploring more details of how the region could have responded to such a close approach.
Previously unseen documents reveal how officials at the U.K.'s Ministry of Defence handled the 'UFO mania' of the late 1990s.
The truth is out there … and it’s not from another planet. Previously unseen documents reveal how officials at the U.K.’s Ministry of Defence handled the “UFO mania” of the late 1990s.
In 1997, there was massive spike in interest around UFOs, fueled by the 50th anniversary of the purported UFO incident in Roswell, NM. and the global popularity of the “X-Files” TV series.
Set against this backdrop, over-worked officials at the Ministry of Defence sought to cut their commitment to investigating UFO reports, the Guardian reports.
The documents were obtained from the MoD by Dr. David Clarke, a principal research fellow at the U.K’s Sheffield Hallam University. “The new papers show the UFO desk head in 1997 ‘wanted to get rid of’ an issue they considered a ‘diversion from their main duties’,” Clarke wrote in a blog post. “Within the files civil servants, intelligence officers and military staff debate how the British Government should respond to growing public interest in the phenomena and what they called ‘the media’s obsession with UFOs’.”
The UFO documents
(Dr David Clarke/Sheffield Hallam University)
The files run to more than 2,500 pages and some of the more sensitive papers, declassified from “secret,” are heavily redacted, according to Clarke. “What has survived the censor’s pen paints a fascinating picture of the arguments that raged behind closed doors in Whitehall around the 50th anniversary of the UFO mystery in 1997,” he wrote.
One RAF Wing Commander, for example, urged caution on shifting focus away from UFOs. “He argued that as MoD had not carried out any study of the UFO data they had collected since the 1970s it was not credible – and also politically risky – to continue to claim UFOs posed no ‘threat to the realm’,” Clarke explained.
In 1996, the MoD commissioned a defense contractor to produce a comprehensive report on UFO sightings, which were carefully described as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP).
The report, which analyzed a database of sightings between 1987 and 1997, was delivered in 2000. The study duly found that sightings could be explained by a variety of known phenomena, both man-made and natural. The incidence of relatively rare natural phenomena was also noted.
This opened the door for the MoD to start scaling back its UFO-related operations. The DI55 department, which had secretly collected data on potential UFO sightings since 1967, closed at the end of 2000. The MoD’s UFO Desk closed in 2009.
It appears, however, that the writing was already on the wall for the MoD’s UFO operations long before the report was finished. In a document dated April 16 1998, the report’s author writes: “I am particularly looking ahead to my expected recommendation, that DI55 should no longer be involved in UAP monitoring.”
“It was the end-game,” Clarke told Fox News. “They created a definitive study that would draw a line under their involvement in the subject.”
The academic notes that in 1997 MoD officials were clearly swamped with reports of UFO sightings. At that time, the Ministry even had a UFO hotline that members of the public could call. “The workload on the subject had trebled as a result of what was going on in popular culture,” he said.
“All our historic files which refer to UFOs have either been released, or are in the process of being released to The National Archives,” explained the MoD, in a statement emailed to Fox News. “The MoD continues to have no opinion on the existence, or otherwise, of extra-terrestrial life and does not investigate reported unidentified flying object sightings.”
Asked by Reddit to name the creepiest thing he’s ever dealt with in space, former astronaut and retired US Navy captain Scott Kelly didn’t hold back. In the video, posted Wednesday, he revealed it was a huge floating orb of sulfuric acid and astronaut pee.
“I had to clean up a gallon-sized ball of urine mixed with acid,” Kelly told Biography.com in a video interview produced with Reddit. “Essentially, the sulfuric acid that is mixed with the urine basically keeps the toilet from clogging up.”
“If you could imagine, something like Drano.”
The specific piece of hardware that Kelly’s referring to here is the International Space Station’s E-K pre-treatment toilet tank. The E-K introduces astronaut urine to a mixture of water, sulfuric acid, and chromium oxide — the latter of which helps to prevent oxidation and gives the solution an alien-like (but also, maybe, less gross) purple color. The top photo on this article doesn’t actually depict the urine-acid ball but approximates what it might look like; the green orb is actually an experiment Kelly once ran on the ISS using water, green food coloring and an antacid tablet designed to visualize water’s complex physics in zero gravity.
Nearly all varieties of stainless steel contain at least 10.5 percent chromium, and it is the invisible surface layer of chromium oxide created by these oxidation reactions that helps to keep that steel from rusting (that is, oxidizing). You can imagine how important adding more of that chemical might be for restroom facilities inside of a hermetically sealed can of human beings orbiting the Earth.
Astronaut Akihiko Hoshide with a space toilet on the ISS.
While you’re here thinking about it: the ISS had a major overhaul to its bathroom system in 2008, installing a system that actually harvests all wastewater and recycles it into potable drinking water. This wastewater includes: all of the astronauts’ urine, the water used to brush their teeth and conduct other personal hygiene activities, and even the excess moisture in the air.
During the so-called Year-Long Mission (Ron Howard voice: “It was 11 months.”), NASA estimates that Kelly consumed somewhere around 193 gallons (730 liters) of water recycled from the team’s urine and sweat (as well as his own).
Kelly is, of course, only one in a long line of space plumbers. This lucrative, high-demand trade job has also been performed by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Aki Hoshide; cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko; and Italian European Space Agency astronaut and Italian Air Force pilot, Samantha Cristoforetti.
Samantha Cristoforetti✔@AstroSamantha
In space-plumber mode, replacing the pre-treat tank in our toilet. In modalita' "idraulica spaziale".
While the urine-acid orb might be the creepiest or grossest thing that Kelly has ever experienced in space, it’s very likely not the nastiest thing anyone has ever dealt with up there. That distinction would have to go one of the innumerable horror stories to come out of the Soviet space station Mir — which was plagued by hidden orbs of watery mold, fires, porthole-damaging fungal infections, and the occasional power failure. (Mir was like an RV driven by a touring 80s hardcore band. It was gross and it ruled.)
If you think you can handle it, you can watch the rest of Kelly’s admittedly less scatological AMA answers here.
Mysterious lights over China spark rumours of extra-terrestrial activities
Mysterious lights over China spark rumours of extra-terrestrial activities
Chinese residents saw UFOs after several mysterious moving lights were seen flashing in the sky over Chongqing.
The strange bright orbs appeared to move in a line as one vanished and another one emerged strangely in front of it. The weird scenes from Wednesday have been recorded in multiple videos, which went viral on Chinese social media platforms.
'The lights appeared a few seconds on the camera but as the plane kept moving, another pair of lights appeared. So it looks like one following each other.'
While the rumors of alien activities were circulating among Chinese Internet users, a leading UFO expert claimed that the videos could be of 'a rocket zooming into the atmosphere'.
The series of the astonishing video footage was posted yesterday on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform in China.
It is quite common for intelligent, sober-minded astronomers to believe in the possible existence of Little Green Men (LGM) – that is, extraterrestrial life. The problem is, there’s absolutely no hard evidence for such a belief. In fact, a new Oxford University analysis of the best and latest scientific evidence concludes that believing in LGM is on a par with believing in the Tooth Fairy.
In 1950 the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi reportedly mused, “Where are they??” Where are all the LGM? Given there are roughly 100 - 400 billion suns in our Milky Way galaxy alone, it seemed reasonable to suppose at least one of them had a planet with intelligent life on it.
Fermi further reckoned that any intelligent civilization would be technologically savvy enough to colonize the galaxy within 10 million years. Given the Milky Way has been around for more than 10 billion years, such a thing would have long-since happened, making the LGM’s presence obvious to us. Yet, our strongest telescopes – and that includes the vaunted, space-based Hubble telescope – see no such thing in our galaxy or any of the other 100 - 200 billion galaxies in the cosmos.
That cosmic-sized quandary – now known as the Fermi Paradox – still dogs us today. We look up at the night sky, marvel at the vast canopy of stars and galaxies, and naturally think, “There’s got to be oodles of civilizations out there. But, if so, where is everybody??
During my graduate studies at Cornell, I took a course from Frank Drake and the late Carl Sagan in exobiology, the study of possible life forms on other planets. Sagan is well-known to the public, of course, but Drake is the true pioneer in the search for extraterrestrial life (SETI).
Among astronomers, Frank is especially famous for the Drake Equation, which attempts to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations that, by all rights, should be out there colonizing our galaxy. The equation multiplies together seven factors:
R* = How frequently are suns born whose light could conceivably sustain intelligent life?
fp = What fraction of those stars have planets?
ne = How many of those planets, per solar system, have environments suitable for life?
fl = What fraction of those planets actually host life?
fi = What fraction of those life-bearing planets have intelligent life?
fc = What fraction of those intelligent civilizations broadcast detectable signals into space?
L = How long do those civilizations broadcast detectable signals into space?
Drake first scribbled out his equation in 1961, during a scientific conference in Green Bank, West Virginia. He and his colleagues guesstimated values for all seven factors and calculated there should be about 1,000 – 100,000,000 intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way alone. That meant about 100 trillion – 20 quintillion intelligent civilizations should exist in the visible universe! A veritable urban explosion of technologically advanced LGM.
And yet – notwithstanding today’s hype about possible Martian life and the discovery of exoplanets (worlds circling other suns) – when we look and listen into deep space with our finest, most exquisite instruments, we see no hard evidence for LGM and hear only crickets. Why?
According to a team of researchers at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, it’s because we’ve been using the wrong factors in the Drake Equation. We – including usually hard-nosed scientists – want so badly for there to be LGM, we’ve been grossly overestimating the values of Drake’s factors, resulting in a flagrant overestimation of the number of civilizations that should exist out there.
When the Oxford folks assign realistic numerical values to the seven factors – based on an honest evaluation of the uncertainties in our very best chemical, biological, physical, and astronomical knowledge – Frank’s famous equation predicts a much, much, much smaller number than 1,000 – 100,000,000 intelligent civilizations per galaxy. The median number plummets to something as low as 0.00000000000000000000000000000000008 (that’s an eight preceded by thirty-four zeroes).
In plain English, explain the authors in a paper submitted to the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, “we find a substantial probability that we are alone in our galaxy, and perhaps even in our observable universe.” If any LGM do exist out there somewhere, the researchers conclude, it is somewhere over the rainbow, so to speak – “quite possibly beyond the cosmological horizon and forever unreachable.”
So, next time you look up at the night sky and say to yourself, “There has to be someone out there!” think again. Even though it sounds like a possibility more fantastic than the Tooth Fairy, science itself is presently telling us we are very likely it – the only intelligent creatures inhabiting this immense and incredible universe.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Juno: Taking a Long Look at Jupiter
Juno: Taking a Long Look at Jupiter
By Elizabeth Howell, Space.com Contributor
Artist's illustration of NASA's Juno spacecraft at Jupiter. The probe entered orbit around the solar system's largest planet on July 4, 2016.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA's Juno spacecraft, which arrived at Jupiter on July 4, 2016, is studying the planet in detail to give scientists a better idea of the gas giant's weather, magnetic environment and formation history.
Juno is only the second long-term mission at Jupiter after the Galileo spacecraft, which orbited the planet from 1995 to 2003. Juno's mission is planned to last for five years, with its current end date (and impact in Jupiter) set for 2021.
Juno is one of NASA's three New Frontiers probes. The others are New Horizons, which flew by Pluto in 2015, and OSIRIS-REx, which is expected to fly to asteroid 101955 Bennu in 2020 to collect a sample and return it to Earth
New Frontiers was a program NASA created in 2003 for medium-sized missions that are capped at $1 billion in development and launch costs each. (The Curiosity rover, by contrast, cost about $2.5 billion.) Two finalists are in the running for the fourth New Frontiers mission — a Titan probe and a sample return probe for Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (the target for Europe's past Rosetta mission.)
Does Jupiter have a central core, which will help narrow down how the planet was formed?
How much water is in its atmosphere, which helps researchers understand how big planets were created?
How it is possible that giant weather systems remain so stable?
What is the nature of the magnetic field and plasma surrounding Jupiter?
Juno was selected in 2005 and was originally expected to launch in June 2009, but was delayed until August 2011 due to NASA budgetary restrictions.
The team decided to take advantage of the "unusually long Phase B" (a planning phase) to find and reduce the risks to the spacecraft's development. With three years to work with instead of the usual one, they hoped to avoid design changes late in the game, communication gaps and other matters.
Launch and in-flight maneuvers
Juno launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Aug. 5, 2011. While eight other spacecraft have flown in Jupiter's neighborhood in decades past, part of what makes Juno stand apart is its ability to generate solar power from Jupiter's neighborhood. The other spacecraft relied on nuclear power, but the reserves for plutonium generation have dwindled for NASA in recent decades.
"Solar power is possible on Juno due to improved solar-cell performance, energy-efficient instruments and spacecraft, a mission design that can avoid Jupiter's shadow, and a polar orbit that minimizes the total radiation," wrote NASA in 2016, when Juno broke a solar distance record for all spacecraft. (The previous record-holder was Rosetta, which arrived at Comet 67P — beyond the orbit of Mars — in 2014.)
Before setting out for Jupiter for good, Juno earned a speed boost of more than 8,800 mph (3.9 kilometers per second) when it flew by Earth on Oct. 9, 2013. The spacecraft took images of our planet (it reminded principal investigator Scott Bolton of Star Trek imagery) and also listened in on amateur radio signals as part of an outreach effort with ham radio operators.
In February 2016, the Juno spacecraft did a maneuver to put in on course for the gas giant for a July 4, 2016, arrival. Independence Day has been an auspicious date for NASA spacecraft arrival in the past. Examples include the Mars Pathfinder and Sojourner mission arrival at the Red Planet (1997) and Deep Impact's planned collision with Comet Tempel 1 (2005).
Viking 1, NASA's first lander on Mars, was also supposed to touch down on July 4, 1976, but when the spacecraft got closer, pictures revealed the landing site was too rough for a landing. Viking 1 successfully landed at an alternate site on July 20, 1976, seven years to the day after the first human moon landing.
Several spacecraft have flown by Jupiter en route to other locations in the solar system (such as Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager 1 and 2, and New Horizons). Even during the brief flybys, they have been able to glimpse interesting information about Jupiter and its moons. For example, New Horizons caught a large outburst on the volcanic moon Io.
To date, however, only one mission stayed for the long term: Galileo. After being launched from space shuttle Atlantis in October 1989, Galileo arrived at Jupiter in 1995 and spent eight years studying the planet and its moons.
Galileo's discoveries include finding potential salt-water oceans under the crusts of Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. It also sent a descent probe into Jupiter's atmosphere. Much of the mission's value also came from spending nearly a decade in Jupiter's system, allowing scientists the rare chance to do up-close, lengthy observations of the largest planet in the solar system.
Juno focuses solely on Jupiter and is trying to answer at least some of the following questions, according to NASA:
How much water does Jupiter have in its atmosphere? This is important to figure out if our formation theories of the solar system are correct, or if they need some work.
What is Jupiter's atmosphere like? Specifically, what are the properties at every layer such as gas composition, temperature and cloud motions? Figuring out the weather on Jupiter will help us learn more about gas giant weather generally. (It's important for planets in our solar system, as well as exoplanets.)
What are the magnetic and gravity fields of Jupiter? This will give scientists some hints of what the interior structure of Jupiter looks like.
How does the magnetic environment of Jupiter affect its atmosphere? Part of that study will come through looking at auroras.
In February 2017, NASA announced that Juno would remain in its current, 53-day orbit throughout the rest of the mission. Managers initially had planned to alter the orbit so that Juno came closer to the planet, but indicated they were concerned that – given the spacecraft had trouble with helium valves in its engine – firing the main engine may result in a "less than desirable orbit."
A view from Juno in May 2017 showed the rings as never glimpsed before. Jupiter, like all the gas giants in the solar system, has rings – but they are much less spectacular than those at Saturn. Juno's picture was the first to show Jupiter's rings from an inside point of view.
The team also revealed that particles powering Jupiter's auroras appear to be different than those that make Earth's auroras glow. Also, the poles feature gigantic cyclones, and none of the zones and belts that are visible at more equatorial latitudes. High-altitude clouds appear to be snowing material in the upper atmosphere. Even more weirdly, the core appears larger and more diffuse than scientists previously anticipated, which has implications for our understanding of how Jupiter formed.
Juno took many images of Jupiter's iconic Great Red Spot — a gigantic storm — in July 2017. Scientists are interested in why the storm persisted for so long, and why it has been shrinking for the past several decades.
Meanwhile, citizen scientists continue participating through the JunoCam instrument, which takes pictures for people to process on their own time. Some examples of collaborations include a picture of moons Io and Europa in October 2017 and a stunning view of Jupiter's clouds released in September that year.
Moving into an extended mission
In June 2018, NASA announced it would extend the Juno mission until at least July 2021 to allow scientists to do more data analysis. At the time, the extension was billed as allowing scientists to follow up on some of the interesting questions Juno had raised so far.
The announcement also discussed several intriguing Juno findings pointing to trends in Jupiter's long-term weather and atmospheric features. Earlier that year, around the same time the Juno team released several new picturesshowing colorful atmospheric bands stretching across the planet, Bolton told reporters that scientists had been "totally wrong" about Jupiter before Juno arrived. "Our ideas were totally wrong about the interior structure, about the atmosphere, [and] even about the magnetosphere," said Bolton at the 231st meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Jan. 9, 2018.
In late 2017, Juno also revealed that the Great Red Spot are at least 50 times deeper than the Earth's oceans. "Juno found that the Great Red Spot's roots go 50 to 100 times deeper than Earth's oceans and are warmer at the base than they are at the top," said Andy Ingersoll, a professor of planetary science at Caltech and a Juno co-investigator, at the time. "Winds are associated with differences in temperature, and the warmth of the spot's base explains the ferocious winds we see at the top of the atmosphere."
Hybrids Of Human And Alien Really Do Exist On Earth!
Hybrids Of Human And Alien Really Do Exist On Earth!
A scientist, who is an alien expert, swears that he has proofs that aliens have been implanting DNA in pregnant humans in secret for years! He believes that the hybrids of human and alien really do exist and he shares a lot of facts that are very convincing.
His name is Miguel Mendoca and he believes that this newly formed hybrid community would be vital for the human race in the future. He says that these alien help us human evolve into higher beings. As for himself, he admits that he suffers from a very rare condition that causes neurological problems and muscle pains and yet when near and in contact with these hybrids he admits he feels better and relieved but not all cured.
Miguel even had a publication called “Meet the Hybrids” In which he interviews people who claim that they grew up with an implanted DNA in their bodies. Every one of these people believes that they have a mission to improve the mankind.
After listening to every one of their stories Miguel was fully convinced that these people really are human and alien hybrids. However, he states that after all this time he realized the true reason of why aliens exist or why they come on Earth. He truly believes that aliens want to help us improve on many levels. As for the hybrids, he states that they are here in order to awake the human race. They raise the vibration as well as the energy flow. For the people implanted with alien DNA, they say that is the best thing that ever happened to them.
You may wonder how did Miguel figure all this out and if it is really true? Because of that, he explained to the public the process of how he interviewed all the hybrids and he exposed all the facts that lead to the undeniable truth that there really are human and alien hybrids.
First, he said that he prepared a list of questions he asked and made sure to ask every single one of them the same. After he interviewed most of them he came to a fascinating realization that all of them answer the same when it came to questions such as: Why are you here? What is your mission? Do you feel different and how?
What is even more interesting is the fact that most of them are even aware of them being implanted with an alien DNA and they believe that it is a blessing. They are convinced that their task is to help the human race evolve and lift the energy up. They believe that such thing of creating hybrids is very normal.
It is up to us if we believe in this very interesting theory of the existence of hybrids whose purpose on this Earth is to better the frequency and lift the energy up through vibrations in order to upgrade the human race and help mankind evolve. Just amazing!
George Gorman, left, discusses his flight over the skies of North Dakota Air National Guard Base at Hector Field with Dan Oxley and Duane Lund on October 2, 1948.
(Credit: Image Bank/Alamy)
In the words of Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, the man who investigated unidentified-flying-object reports for the U.S. Air Force in the early 1950s, the Gorman Dogfight remains one of the “classics” among UFO sightings.
The incident, which still lacks an airtight explanation, involved a 27-minute air encounter between a veteran World War II fighter pilot named George F. Gorman and a mysterious white orb at high altitude above Fargo, North Dakota. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Gorman told a local newspaper following the October 1, 1948 event. “If anyone else had reported such a thing I would have thought they were crazy.”
Captain Ruppelt operated Project Blue Book, which continued the work of Project Sign and Project Grudge, a series of hush-hush studies conducted by the U.S. Air Force between 1947 and 1969. His mission: to determine if UFOs were a threat to national security and to scientifically analyze UFO-related data.
What makes the Gorman Dogfight unique in the now-declassified pages of Project Blue Book is not only the length of the encounter, but that it was recorded both on the ground and in the sky by numerous reputable sources.
George Gorman’s depictions of his UFO encounter.
(Credit: The Project Blue Book Archive)
Chasing—and being chased by—a light
At the time of the incident, Gorman, a 25-year-old former fighter pilot, served as a second lieutenant in the North Dakota Air National Guard. It was this role that placed him behind the flight controls of a P-51 Mustang on Oct. 1, 1948, taking part in a cross-country flight alongside other National Guard airmen.
While the other pilots landed at Fargo’s Hector Airport, on that fateful evening Gorman stayed in the air in order to get in some night-flying time in the cloudless conditions. Having circled his P-51 over a lighted football stadium, he was preparing to land at about 9 P.M. Advised by the control tower that the only other plane in the vicinity was a Piper Cub (which Gorman could see about 500 feet below him), he witnessed what he believed to be the taillight of another craft passing on the right, though the tower had no other object on the radar.
Deciding to take a closer look at the unidentified object, Gorman pulled his plane up and closed to within about 1,000 yards. “It was about six to eight inches in diameter, clear white and completely without fuzz at the edges,” he said of the object in his report. “It was blinking on and off. As I approached, however, the light suddenly became steady and pulled into a sharp left bank. I thought it was making a pass at the tower.”
Deciding to follow, Gorman tried in vain to catch up with the object, reporting that he finally got behind it at around 7,000 feet, where it made a sharp turn and headed straight for the P-51. Almost at the point of collision Gorman dived and said the light passed over his canopy at about 500 feet before cutting sharply once more and heading back in his direction. Just as collision seemed imminent once again, Gorman said the object shot straight up in the air in a steep climb—so steep that when he tried to intercept, his plane stalled at about 14,000 feet. The object was not seen again, but according to Gorman he had been engaged in aerial maneuvers with it for 27 minutes by the time he brought his plane in to land.
‘Definitive thought behind its maneuvers’
Shaken by the encounter, the pilot went on to report he noticed no sound, exhaust trail or odor from the object. And while he had reached speeds of up to 400 m.p.h. while in pursuit—he couldn’t keep up with whatever it was.
“I am convinced that there was definite thought behind its maneuvers,” Gorman said in a sworn statement to his commander. “I am further convinced that the object was governed by the laws of inertia because its acceleration was rapid but not immediate; and although it was able to turn fairly tight at considerable speed, it still followed a natural curve.”
Gorman reported blacking out temporariliy due to the excessive speed he reached in attempting to turn with the object. “I am in fairly good physical condition and I do not believe that there are many, if any, pilots who could withstand the turn and speed effected by the object, and remain conscious,” he wrote. “The object was not only able to out-turn and out-speed my aircraft… but was able to attain a far steeper climb and was able to maintain a constant rate of climb far in excess of my aircraft.”
Three P-51 Mustangs circa 1945, the same aircraft George Gorman was flying during his UFO encounter.
(Credit: Toni Frissell/Interim Archives/Getty Images)
Other witnesses
Gorman wasn’t the only one to see the mysterious object that night. It was also witnessed by air-traffic controllers Lloyd D. Jensen and H.E. Johnson, who were manning the Hector Airport tower. According to Johnson, who reported seeing the Piper Cub and the UFO at the same time, the object was “travelling at a high rate of speed” and was “fast enough to increase the spacing between itself and [Gorman’s] fighter.” Johnson described the object as appearing to be “only a round light, perfectly formed, with no fuzzy edges or rays leaving its body.”
Dr. A. E. Cannon, the pilot of the Piper Cub, and his passenger also viewed the object—both in the sky and upon their return to the airport, where they immediately joined the traffic controllers in the tower. Cannon described the light as moving “very swiftly, much faster than the 51.” Two Civil Aeronautics Authority employees on the ground also reported seeing the object.
Exploring the options
Could it have simply been another aircraft? Taking the technology of the time into account, Dr Travis S. Taylor, aerospace engineer and author of Introduction to Rocket Science and Engineering, believes any other aircraft would have been apparent to Gorman.
Earlier that year, he points out, Chuck Yeager made his famous flight in the Bell X1 at record-breaking speed, in which he broke the sound barrier. “A craft like that would have been very obvious to a pilot in a P-51. [Gorman] would have known what he was looking at—the X1 looked like an airplane,” says Taylor. “If he was chasing something that didn’t look like a standard aircraft and he couldn’t keep up with it, either it was too far away, and he didn’t realize how far away it was, or it was moving faster than a P-51 could move.”
U.S. Air Force investigators from Project Sign (later to become Project Grudge and ultimately Project Blue Book) soon arrived in Fargo, where Geiger counter measurements of Gorman’s plane revealed heightened radioactivity, though this was later explained away as a side effect of the high-altitude flying that took place.
Was Gorman a kook, or maybe touched in the head by his war experiences? Government investigators found him to be a credible witness, noting that he “did not make the impression of being a dreamer. He reads little, and only serious literature. He spends 90 percent of his time hunting and fishing; drinks less than moderately; smokes normally; and does not do drugs. He appears to be a sincere and serious individual who was considerably puzzled by his experience and made no attempt to blow his story up.”
A model of a R-1, the first Soviet guided missile.
(Credit: Mikhail Dyuryagin/TASS/Getty Images)
What about Cold War testing?
One conspiracy theory speculated that Gorman’s encounter may have been with a top-secret test craft. With World War II a very recent memory, tensions in 1948 were heightened both in military and civilian circles. And as the Cold War tightened its grip on the American psyche, the U.S government sought to boost its scientific firepower with a clandestine initiative called Operation Paperclip, through which it recruited former Nazi scientists, engineers and technicians (including Wernher von Braun and his V-2 rocket team) to America, to boost the nation’s chances in the Cold War and looming space race.
Further afield, the Soviets had begun testing the R-1 Rocket (a Soviet version of the German V-2 of WWII) the same year as Gorman’s encounter, raising questions of whether the object he and the others saw could have been a Soviet craft or weapon. “The R-1 didn’t have the range to go from wherever their launch capability was in the Soviet Union to Fargo,” says Taylor. “It was a dumb rocket. All the rockets at that time were projectiles. They used aerodynamics mostly to guide them. They could do slow maneuvers, but if they did a fast maneuver they’d start tumbling apart.”
The weather-balloon theory
Back in Fargo, after the Air Weather Service revealed it had released a lighted weather balloon 10 minutes before Gorman first saw the object, investigators pounced, proclaiming the balloon the likeliest explanation for the object seen.
As for the seemingly incredible movements witnessed, the report said those were due to Gorman’s own maneuvers as he tried to chase the bright object. Essentially, investigators wrote, his high speed gave the balloon the appearance of moving in opposite directions as he passed by. Added to that theory, investigators noted the bright appearance of Jupiter on that date, hypothesizing that Gorman had been attempting to chase the bright dot of the planet at the same time the weather balloon was in range.
The lighted weather balloon would become the official cause of the encounter in the Project Blue Book file.
“We were doing Project Mogul at the time, which was high-altitude balloons [fitted with high-powered microphones] that we were trying to listen to see if the Soviets were doing above-ground nuclear testing,” says Taylor, who points out that the famous Roswell, New Mexico UFO sighting was explained away as a Project Mogul balloon.
Whether Gorman was happy with the official outcome remains unknown. Maintaining his silence, he returned to the Air Force full-time, eventually retiring at the rank of lieutenant colonel in 1969. He never spoke publicly about the encounter again, though according to The Bismarck Tribune, he did tell friends “he was never convinced that he had been dueling with a lighted balloon for 27 minutes.” Gorman died in 1982.
Taylor has his own theory: “Possibly somebody was playing around with rocketry.” But, he notes, there were no known test facilities or scientists in the Fargo area when the encounter took place. All the [Operation Paperclip] Germans were at the missile grounds in White Sands, New Mexico, while rocket guru Robert H. Goddard, had died in 1945. “It makes no sense,” says Taylor, “that there was anything there that was manmade that they were chasing.”
VIDEO: Comic-Con Trailer: Project Blue Book Watch an exclusive clip of the new series Project Blue Book, coming soon on HISTORY.
Ik heb nog nooit zoiets gezien. Mysterieuze bolvormige UFO gaf deze Amerikaanse piloot het nakijken
Ik heb nog nooit zoiets gezien. Mysterieuze bolvormige UFO gaf deze Amerikaanse piloot het nakijken
De Amerikaanse piloot George F. Gorman kwam op 1 oktober 1948 boven de staat North Dakota oog in oog met een mysterieuze witte bol.
Uit documenten die nu zijn vrijgegeven blijkt dat de UFO en de piloot 27 minuten lang een kat-en-muisspel hebben gespeeld en dat het object zowel op de grond als in de lucht door meerdere gerespecteerde bronnen is waargenomen.
“Ik heb nog nooit zoiets gezien,” zei de piloot na zijn waarneming tegen een lokale krant.
De 25-jarige gevechtspiloot vloog die dag in een P-51 Mustang en wilde rond 21.00 uur lokale tijd de landing inzetten, toen hij een ander vliegtuig meende te zien.
Niets op de radar
De luchtverkeersleiding zag echter niets op de radar. Gorman besloot op onderzoek uit te gaan en stuurde zijn vliegtuig richting het object.
“Het was helderwit en had gladde randen,” zei hij. “Toen ik naderde maakte het een scherpe bocht naar links. Ik dacht dat het over de toren zou vliegen.”
Gorman probeerde tevergeefs de witte bol bij te houden. Ineens maakte het object nog een scherpe bocht en vloog het recht op zijn P-51 af.
Om een botsing te voorkomen dook Gorman met zijn toestel omlaag. Hierna schoot het object recht omhoog.
Geen geluid
De UFO steeg zo snel dat de motoren van Gormans vliegtuig stilvielen toen hij de achtervolging inzette. Daarna heeft hij het object nooit meer gezien.
De piloot zei dat het geen geluid voortbracht en geen sporen achterliet. “Ik ben ervan overtuigd dat het door iets werd aangestuurd,” zei hij in een verklaring.
Vanwege de hoge snelheden die hij bereikte tijdens de achtervolging, verloor Gorman een paar keer kort het bewustzijn.
Er waren die avond nog meer mensen die het mysterieuze object zagen, waaronder luchtverkeersleiders Lloyd D. Jensen en H.E. Johnson.
Perfect gevormd
Johnson zei dat de P-51 van Gorman niet in staat was het object bij te houden en dat ‘het een rond licht was, perfect gevormd, met gladde randen’.
Een andere piloot, dr. A.E. Cannon, zag het object in de lucht en bij terugkeer op het vliegveld. Het licht bewoog volgens Cannon ‘zeer snel, veel sneller dan de 51’.
Daarnaast zagen twee luchthavenmedewerkers het object vanaf de grond.
Topgeheim testvliegtuig
Volgens één theorie werd Gorman geconfronteerd met een topgeheim testvliegtuig. Anderen claimden dat hij een weerballon had gezien.
Maar de piloot zei dat hij niet 27 minuten lang met een verlichte ballon had geduelleerd. Wat heeft hij die dag gezien?
a) a giant planet b) a cluster of asteroids c) a myth d) none of the above e) all of the above
If you said “none of the above,” Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Radio Astronomy thanks you for your support. This week it issued a paper supporting the idea that a violent restructuring of our solar system some time soon after its formation may have been caused by something completely different.
“The study presented shows that a close fly-by of a neighbouring star can simultaneously lead to the observed lower mass density outside [the solar system] and excite trans Neptune objects onto eccentric, inclined orbits.”
New Scientist announced the study with an interview of Max Planck astronomer Susanne Pfalzner. She led a team investigating the strange orbits of trans-Neptunian objects, particularly the dwarf planet Sedna, one of the most distant object to orbit our Sun, completing the huge oblong loop once every 11,400 Earth years. Sedna is the largest of at least 20 trans-Neptunian objects with these long, misshapen orbits that have puzzled astronomers since their discovery. Adding to the confusion is the Kuiper Belt, a region also beyond Neptune made of tiny, icy comets, asteroids and other small bodies.
Artist’s conception of Sedna
With no visible cause of this trans-Neptunian chaos, astronomers turn to models to speculate on possible causes. That – not the warnings of Planet X or Nibiru doomsday predictors – is how the idea of a large ten-times-the-mass-of-Earth Planet 9 developed in 2015. Besides the fact that it doesn’t explain everything, including how a planet that big could travel so far away from the Sun that we can’t find it, prompted Pfalzner’s team to try modeling a close encounter with a rogue star.
The simulations showed a one-in-four chance of a rogue star passing close by during a billion year period early in the life of the solar system. And by “close, they mean really close – 80 to 100 astronomical units (80 to 100 times the distance between Earth and the Sun). Sedna, the result of this possible brush-by, is 86 AU away from the Sun at its closest point. A star that close to the Sun would “excite” any and all things nearby, pulling tiny objects into the Kuiper Belt and knocking larger ones like Sedna into strange orbits.
Orbits of Sedna, other objects and a possible orbit of Planet X
Then there’s Planet 9. Pfalzner’s models do not refute the existence of Planet 9 but they change its size. The simulations worked best when Planet 9 was the size of the Earth. That would allow it to be in a long oblong orbit and keep it small enough that it’s still a needle in the galactic haystack to detect.
So, does the probability of a rogue star stirring up the solar system also answer the question of what is Planet X? Of course not. It doesn’t even answer the question of what to call it. Instead, it keeps the mystery planet in play, albeit a fraction of its former size.
Black UFO Recorded Flying Over Prohibited Airspace Manhattan, New York
Black UFO Recorded Flying Over Prohibited Airspace Manhattan, New York
On July 18, 2018 an unknown black object appears from behind a tower flying straight towards the camera of the person who has filmed the object.
The videographer: “Can someone explain what I just recorded? It's that a UFO?”
Manhattan is prohibited airspace. Within 2,000 feet horizontal in a built-up area, you will not be able to fly in that area. No aircraft may operate over Manhattan without valid Air Defence Clearance.
With the 9/11 attack still in mind, how is it possible that this very low flying black object, UFO or perhaps a drone can fly in prohibited airspace without detection and intervention by Air Defence.
Huge Fireball Captured Over Campinas, Brazil. July 17, 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Huge Fireball Captured Over Campinas, Brazil. July 17, 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: July 2, 2018
Location of sighting: Sao Goncalo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
The object in this video is not a meteor. I have seen many meteors, but this travels too slow. Also meteors don't fly low and horizontal to the planet. Meteors fall downward in a diagonal, but this is cruising though our atmosphere with no fear of falling. That is 100% proof its not a meteor. Obviously its a intelligently made craft with a high probability of being alien.
Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
The UFO Institute took a look at this video filmed by my family in São Gonçalo - Rio de Janeiro. About 15 days ago. It's the size of about 8 houses and it went up and down. Discard the possibility of balloon or drone.
The UFO Institute I sent this to was in Campinas. They said that the UFO was turning. Discarding the possibility of it being a meteor.
UFO Shocks Newscaster On TV News Show, June 21, 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Shocks Newscaster On TV News Show, June 21, 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: June 21, 2018 Location of sighting: Buffalo, New York, USA The newscaster caught a UFO on the sky cam and as you can see, it shoots right past the weather cam. The UFO actually zig zags and then shoots off. I moves too fast to be drone and too fast to be a helicopter. The close up screenshot you see above clearly shows a huge square light. No wings, no blades, no aircraft lights or red lights as some drones have. All signs point to this being an alien craft. I believe that aliens are drop feeding the public daily around the world evidence of their existence in hopes to one day prepare humanity for interaction with them. Scott C. Waring
I recorded a UFO last night during sunset over the Taipei 101 building, Taiwan, July 20, 2018, UFO Sighting News.
I recorded a UFO last night during sunset over the Taipei 101 building, Taiwan, July 20, 2018, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: July 20, 2018 Location of sighting: Taipei, Taiwan
Guys I recorded this video myself (Scott C. Waring) from my 16 floor window of my Taipei apartment. It was sunset about 6:15pm and I took a photo for Instagram...then a few minutes later I noticed a bright glowing light flying lower and lower towards the top of the Taipei 101 building. The object moved closer for about 3 minutes and then disappeared. I took the video with my iPhone 7 plus. Below is the Instagram photo I took with no UFO in it, then the UFO just appeared about 5 min later. Thats when I recorded a video of it. Please follow me on Instagram. I'm UFOSIGHTINGSDAILY. Scott C. Waring-Taiwan
One of the most fascinating and curious aspects of the UFO phenomena is the way in which, over the course of the last century, the appearance of both our alleged extraterrestrial visitors and their craft have changed dramatically. For example, in the latter part of the 19th century and early years of the 20thcentury, the skies of the United States (and, to a lesser degree, Britain) were filled with strange-looking flying machines known within ufological circles as “phantom airships.” As their name suggests, many of the aerial devices in question closely resembled the huge Zeppelin airships of the First World War. Essentially, the 19th century UFO invasion mirrored either what was on the drawing-boards, or what had been envisaged within the minds of both the military war-machine and skilled inventors of the time.
Then, in the 1930s, as aviation technology progressed, reports began to surface of so-called Ghost Planes – aircraft that no-one could seemingly identify. A decade later, at the height of the Second World War, the skies of war-torn Europe and the Pacific theater were home to strange invaders known as Foo Fighters: small, glowing balls of light that furiously pursued both Allied- and Axis-aircraft.
By 1946, when rocketry was seen as likely playing a dominant role in the future of warfare and eventually space-travel too, the Foo Fighters had given way to the Ghost-Rockets: missile-like vehicles that were the opening act for the era of the Flying Saucer that was ushered in during the summer of 1947. The true irony, however, is the fact that the one man who can lay claim to having brought the Flying Saucer into being – American pilot Kenneth Arnold – never saw saucer-shaped craft.
Rather, while flying over Washington State on June 24, 1947, Arnold described seeing a fleet of objects that were of a distinctly wedge- or delta-shape. However, when Arnold specifically likened their movements – rather than their shape – to how a saucer would fly if it were skipped, like a pebble, across a body of water – the term Flying Saucer became commonplace; as did, interestingly enough, countless sightings of specifically saucer-shaped craft. In other words, people were seeing objects of a shape that was based around media-hyped terminology, rather than what Arnold actually witnessed. Today, the Flying Saucers of yesteryear are largely gone and have been firmly replaced by the ominous-looking, so-called Flying Triangles: huge, black, triangular-shaped aircraft that might accurately be described as next-generation Stealth aircraft.
Our reported alien visitors have also changed over the decades – and dramatically so. In the 1950s, numerous people all across the world claimed face-to-face contact with eerily human-like extraterrestrials, who generally sported long blonde hair, and who suggested that we should lay down our nuclear weapons and live in peace and harmony with one another. And thus was born the cult of the Contactee.
The most famous of the Contactees was undoubtedly George Adamski, whose book with Desmond Leslie, Flying Saucers Have Landed, forever made his mark in the world of Ufology. Like nearly all of the Contactees, Adamski maintained that his alien friends came from planets within our own solar system, with Venus being a particular favorite.
As science, space-travel and astronomy progressed, however, two things became apparent:
(a) Venus, Mars and the several various other planets in our solar system that the Contactees maintained were inhabited, were in all likelihood – or at least to a highly significant degree – barren and inhospitable wastelands;
and (b) if aliens really did exist, the idea that they would resemble us to such a significant degree was highly unlikely. And, as belief systems changed concerning alien life, and as it became more and apparent that the Earth was probably the only inhabited world in our solar system, lo and behold the aliens and their points of origin changed, too.
The long-haired kindly aliens of the 1950s were kicked into large-scale oblivion by the now-ubiquitous black-eyed dwarfs known as the Greys: emotionless creatures whose points of origin are claimed to be light-years away, and who are motivated by nothing less than the large-scale abduction of human-beings as part of an attempt to create a hybrid species that will ensure the survival of the declining Gray race. The dire warnings of the aliens have changed too: at the height of the Cold War, the long-haired blondes spoke of the perils of atomic weaponry. In today’s world, however, it is global-warming and environmental destruction that the Grays seem so concerned about – something that mirrors exactly our own concerns on such matters.
Only the most hardened skeptic, or those whose belief in literal aliens is driven by an X-Files-like “I want to believe” approach that borders upon religious mania, could deny that there is a distinct pattern at work here. And it’s a pattern that suggests much of the genuinely unexplained facets inherent in the UFO puzzle might well be explainable in a very strange fashion.
It is quite clear from all the above that as our technology changes, and as our knowledge of the universe advances and our beliefs are modified or altered, so our aliens and their craft change too. And why is it that from 1947 onward people were seeing Flying Saucers, when the term actually related to their method of movement rather than their apparent design?
In view of the observations and questions above, I have to seriously consider the very real possibility that humankind’s fascination with the idea of extraterrestrial life and UFOs has – whether consciously, unconsciously or subconsciously – led to the creation of belief-systems of such intensity among the masses that they may well have given birth to literal Tulpas of the alien and Flying Saucer kind. And what might Tulpas be? Well, that depends on your perspective.
In my 2018 book, The Slenderman Mysteries, I addressed the possibility that the Slenderman is a Tulpa. I said: “The phenomenon of the Tulpa has its origins in the ancient teachings of Buddhism and is a Tibetan term that roughly translates into English as ‘manifestation’. It’s a highly appropriate piece of terminology for the Slenderman. In essence, it is the process by which the human mind can allegedly bring some degree of alternative, physical existence to an entity that is created solely within the depths of the imagination – and from within the dream state, too. In other words, and as incredible as it may sound, each and every one of us may well possess the ability to give ‘life’ to certain ‘things’ that don’t exist in the same way that we do.”
It’s very important, too, to note the words of magician and exorcist, Ian Vincent, who told me: “I ended up writing a scholarly paper on the fact that the Western version of the Tulpa has absolutely nothing to do with the actual meaning of the word in Tibet. In the original, the thought-form is just the thing you picture in your head when you are meditating as an offering to the gods, like an apple, as an example. The Tulpa is the visualization of the apple in your mind when you pray; that’s all it has ever been. But, it’s mutated so much to a point where it’s now just this go-to idea of if enough people believe in it becomes a thing.”
Perhaps we really are all alone in the universe. But, maybe our desire to think there is something more out there has inadvertently led us to give various phenomena life. And, now, with belief firmly instilled, it has escaped from the moorings of its creators – that’s us – to terrorize and mystify drivers on lonely stretches of road late at night, or to invade people’s bedrooms after darkness has fallen.
Ghosts, Tulpas, Shades, Shadow People and Phantoms
Ons weer is vreemd geworden, want van natte koele zomers zijn we ineens beland in een lange en vooral ook heel droge zomer.
Dit heeft niets te maken met de door de mens veroorzaakte opwarming, maar is wel een teken dat de mini ijstijd nu echt is begonnen.
De zomer in ons land is misschien net op de helft en nu al dreigen alle droogterecords te worden verbroken, vertonen sommige bomen al herfstkleuren en is alle gras wat niet regelmatig wordt besproeid totaal verdord.
Wat er nu gebeurt is natuurlijk koren op de molen van de klimaatprofeten die nu om het hardst roepen dat de door de mens veroorzaakte klimaatopwarming van de aarde zo langzamerhand desastreuze vormen begint aan te nemen.
Dit alles vormt dan weer een reden om de angstige burgers nog veel meer geld uit de zak te kloppen omdat alles en iedereen zich moet onderwerpen aan de religie van het afgrijselijke woord duurzaam.
Het laatste wat je dan in een dergelijk scenario verwacht is een bericht dat de nieuwe en door ons vijf jaar geleden al voorspelde mini ijstijd is begonnen. Een mini ijstijd houdt niet in dat het land het hele jaar door met ijs is bedekt, maar refereert aan de periodes van enkele honderden jaren geleden dat vooral de winters in ons land en de rest van West Europa extreem koud waren.
De temperatuur op aarde wordt niet door de mens bepaald, maar door de zon. Hoe actiever de zon, des te warmer wordt het op aarde. De activiteit van de zon wordt gemeten door het registreren van het aantal zonnevlekken en wanneer er in een bepaalde cyclus weinig of geen zonnevlekken zijn, dan spreekt men van een Minimum, zoals we vroeger het Dalton en het Maunder Minimum hadden.
De verwachting is dat de komende decennia de activiteit van de zon steeds verder gaat afnemen, zodanig dat er waardes worden bereikt zoals we die hadden rond de eerder genoemde periodes.
Onlangs schreven wij een artikel met daarin het vermoeden dat onze streken wel eens slachtoffer konden zijn van weermanipulatie, simpelweg omdat de jetstream ons land nauwelijks meer bereikt, maar wordt afgebogen naar het noorden, waardoor landen als IJsland en Groenland geen zomer hebben dit jaar en wij eigenlijk permanent wind uit noordelijke streken hebben, soms variërend naar noordwest of noordoost. Terwijl wij eigenlijk hier gewend zijn aan voornamelijk gematigde en vochtige westelijke winden.
En dan stuiten we eigenlijk bij toeval op een heel belangrijk wetenschappelijk onderzoek, uitgevoerd door de Universiteit van Cardiff en dat begin 2014 werd gepubliceerd in het blad Nature Geoscience. Een onderzoek dat waarschijnlijk door de klimaatprofeten zoveel mogelijk wordt genegeerd, want er staan opzienbarende dingen in.
Het onderzoek richtte zich op een periode van 1.000 jaar en de effecten die de zonneactiviteit heeft op ons weer. De wetenschappers komen daarbij tot de conclusie dat zelfs de kleinste verandering in zonneactiviteit een aanzienlijk gevolg op aarde kan hebben en dan met name op de dynamiek tussen oceaan en atmosferische veranderingen in het noorden van de Atlantische Oceaan, hetgeen dan weer een effect heeft op het regionale klimaat.
De onderzoekers kwamen tot de conclusie dat ten tijde van lage of geen zonneactiviteit er heel regelmatig blokkades ontstaan van de jetstream, waardoor je de zogenaamde “polar vortex” verschijnselen krijgt.
In de praktijk betekent dit dat de jetstream wordt afgebogen naar het noorden, waarbij wij dan niet langer onder invloed staan van de relatief zachte en vochtige lucht uit het westen zoals we gewend zijn, maar te maken krijgen met lucht die via de poolstreken naar ons land stroomt. Met andere woorden, langere periodes met wind uit een noordelijke of noordoostelijke richting.
Eind februari dit jaar hebben we een dergelijke periode meegemaakt, waarbij het bij ons ongekend koud werd.
Op dit moment hebben we weer een dergelijk periode, maar dit keer veel langer en zorgt het niet voor vrieskou, maar voor heldere droge lucht en wanneer de wind iets meer richting oosten draait, warm tot heel warme lucht. Deze lucht is niet geschikt voor cloud seeding omdat er te weinig luchtvochtigheid is en daarom zie je hier momenteel ook veel minder chemtrails. Deze geo engineering is weer een ander onderwerp en we zullen daar hier niet verder op in gaan. Via de voorgaande link is er meer over te vinden.
Wanneer ditzelfde verschijnsel van oostelijke of noord oostelijke wind zich de komende winter voordoet, dan krijgen we een winter vergelijkbaar met de periode eind februari dit jaar.
De onderzoekers van Cardiff ontdekten dat hoe minder zonneactiviteit, des te meer kans er ook is op langdurige blokkades in de winter van de jetstream, hetgeen dan zorgt voor wat men noemt de mini ijstijd.
Deze blokkades van de jetstream worden veroorzaakt door permanent hoge druk gebieden in de buurt van Engeland. Soms iets ten westen, soms boven Engeland en soms iets ten oosten van Engeland zoals nu het geval is.
Het onderzoek dat door Cardiff in samenwerking met de Universiteit van Bern werd uitgevoerd zegt dat ze door de voornoemde atmosferische blokkade van de jetstream tijdens periode van lage zonneactiviteit het antwoord hebben op de vraag waarom er zich in het verleden een mini ijstijd voordeed, waarbij alles ’s winters bevroor en mensen honger leden omdat oogsten mislukten. Ook nu dreigen oogsten te mislukken door het extreem droge weer en ook nu eten de koeien op stal al het voer dat eigenlijk bedoeld is voor de winter.
We hebben even gekeken of de zon misschien ondertussen wat actiever is geworden, maar het resultaat wijst op nog veel meer atmosferische blokkades van de jetstream en in de winter een polar vortex.
Wel een heel slim idee om tijdens de komende mini ijstijd iedereen af te sluiten van het gas, waardoor de machthebbers dan zeker weten dat wanneer ze met één druk op de knop de elektriciteit afsluiten, de bevolking absoluut zal doodvriezen of desgevraagd (nog) een stuk gehoorzamer.
One new image from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) shows just how far our star-gazing ability has come.
Image credits: ESO/P. Weilbacher.
The image was snapped using a new adaptive optics mode called laser tomography — a technique which has shown promise in astronomy as well as in medical research. The technology was made possible by the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE), which works with an adaptive optics unit and can correct for the effects of atmospheric turbulence up to one kilometer above the telescope. Using laser tomography, MUSE is able to compensate for almost all of the atmospheric turbulence (which bends incoming light and so distorts images) above the telescope to create much sharper pictures — with the caveat that it does so over a smaller region of the sky than comparable telescopes.
With this approach, astronomers were able to bypass the biggest downside of Earth-based imaging — dealing with the atmospheric disturbances and noise. This is the main reason why we send telescopes like Hubble out in space. However, if we can do that just as well (or almost as well) from Earth, it could be a game changer for future observations.
The image of Neptune on the left was obtained during the testing of the Narrow-Field adaptive optics mode of the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The image on the right is a comparable image taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The two images were not taken at the same time so they do not show identical surface features.
Image Credits: ESO/P. Weilbacher (AIP)/NASA, ESA, and M.H. Wong and J. Tollefson (UC Berkeley).
Compared to pictures taken from the same telescope without the adaptive optics technique, the difference is even more striking:
These images of the planet Neptune were obtained during the testing of the Narrow-Field adaptive optics mode. The image on the right is without the adaptive optics system in operation and the one on the left after the adaptive optics are switched on.
Image Credits: ESO/P. Weilbacher (AIP).
The combination of exquisite image sharpness and the spectroscopic capabilities of MUSE will enable astronomers to study the properties of astronomical objects in much greater detail than they ever could before. Of course, having sharp images of objects allows you to study them in better detail, and gives astronomers a better chance to understand what they look like and how they were formed.
“It will enable astronomers to study in unprecedented detail fascinating objects such as supermassive black holes at the centers of distant galaxies, jets from young stars, globular clusters, supernovae, planets and their satellites in the solar system and much more,” says the ESO.
The ESO will continuously update with more photos as their instruments capture better and better resolution images. We can only imagine what these next images will look like, but for now, color me impressed.
Protocols Exist to Communicate With Extraterrestrials
Protocols Exist to Communicate With Extraterrestrials
By Greg O’Shalae
• With the October 2017 discovery of the cigar-shaped “asteroid” from another star named Oumuamua, cruising through our solar system, and the December 2017 release by the US Navy video of a “tic tac” shaped UFO off of San Diego and similar videos released in March of 2018, it appears that extraterrestrials are already here. An episode of The History Channel’s Ancient Aliens (S13 E3, aired May 11, 2018) addresses the question of how we should attempt to communicate with them.
• The International Academy of Aeronautics, an informal “study group” endorsed by SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has adopted a written set of communications protocols called the “Declaration of Principles Concerning the Conduct of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence”. This non-binding set of guidelines for extraterrestrial communication emphasizes process transparency, third party verification, full media disclosure, and submission of findings made to the International Astronomical Union.
• Ancient Aliens suggests that we avoid welcoming parties, international squabbles over who will represent the Earth, and wholesale integration of alien beings into our society.
• The Brookings Report (as usual) advocates releasing information slowly to culturally acclimate the population and avoid widespread paranoia.
• In 1977, the Voyager 1 probe contained “the golden record” which set forth the story of humanity in glowing terms for any extraterrestrial with a golden record player.
• [Editor’s Note] – It is apparent that there is no official representative body or protocol for communicating with extraterrestrial beings. When the time comes, might I suggest that the world turn to Dr Michael Salla and the thirteen years’ worth of study on the subject by the distinguished members of the Exopolitics Institute to form an initial delegation to represent the interests of humanity on Earth in negotiations with extraterrestrial civilizations.
What if aliens visit Earth? Indeed, what if they have already visited? Ancient Aliens explores this concept and links multiple data sources to the conclusion.
Additionally, Ancient Aliens discusses multiple possibilities for future contact. Theoretically, how should humanity interact with aliens? As space exploration continues, this is a subject humanity will have to discuss.
If you’re a frequent watcher of Ancient Aliens, you know the answer to visitation is the same as the age old “Does a bear defecate in the woods”-question. A discovery less than a year ago has propagated this belief.
On October 19, 2017, at the Haleakala Observatory in Maui, a mysterious cigar-shaped object traveling at high speed was detected with a massive telescope and technology that takes a astrophysics Ph.D. to figure out. The object had a unique hyperbolic trajectory like none other, seemingly moving too fast for gravity to force the typical circular or elliptical orbit. It was determined that, for the first time ever, an asteroid entered our solar system from a different star system. It was named Oumuamua, which is Hawaiian for “scout.”
Some leaders in the field – like Avi Loeb, theoretical physicist and Professor of Science at Harvard University – have suggested the ideal shape/environment for an extraterrestrial vessel would be an elongated cylinder not unlike Oumuamua. The classification (i.e. asteroid or comet) of the object, however, has since been debated. Of course, many of the Ancient Aliens crew suggest a third alternative:
The good folks at SETI were very interested in Oumuamua, and have reignited the conversation about how humans should communicate with aliens when we are contacted. Furthermore, the International Academy of Aeronautics, an informal collection of people who deliberated in 1989 on a response to alien visitation, published the “Declaration of Principles Concerning the Conduct of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”
Since the aforementioned document is not legally binding, which government or scientific community should communicate with aliens? Ancient Aliens suggests the decision and plans have already been made, and they exist deep in the bowels of government obstruction and obfuscation.
Are the ‘Hessdalen Lights‘, strange luminous aerial phenomena (some might even say the word ‘UFOs’…) observed for many years in the Hessdalen Valley of Norway, the equivalent of sparks created by a natural geological battery? That’s one of the theories suggested in a story in this week’s issue of New Scientist, in which reporter Caroline Williams spoke to some of the researchers who have returned year after year to study the anomaly:
Sometimes the lights are as big as cars and can float around for up to 2 hours. Other times they zip down the valley before suddenly fading away. Then therea re the blue and white flashes that come and go in the blink of an eye, and daytime sightings that look like metallic objects in the sky. It is little wonder that when they started appearing up to 20 times a week in the early 1980s, UFOlogists hailed the Hessdalen valley as a portal to other worlds and flocked there to celebrate.
But for an international team that has been studying the mysterious lights since then, the valley harbours something much more exciting than flying saucers. If they can work out what it is about the place that powers such incredible light displays, it may not only help explain mysterious lights in other parts of the world, but also open up the possibility of storing energy in a radical way. It is a big if, but the team will be heading back to Hessdalen in the summer to test out a bunch of theoires on what is generating the lights. Armed with clues from recent lab studies, plus a bank of new instruments and sensors, they could find that this is the year it all starts to make sense.
The small group of Italian, Norwegian and French researchers who have been working together (part-time) on the mystery for the last 14 years have have noticed a few curious things about the Hessdalen Lights: while they make no sound and don’t seem to be overly hot (no evidence of burn marks where they contact trees and the ground), they do seem to sterilise the ground where they land, as there is an absence of soil microbes at areas of contact. Furthermore, the researchers have found that they sometimes get strong radar echoes “from unseen entities” even when no lights are visible.
The combination of all these clues has researchers thinking that the Hessdalen Lights are a kind of plasma, formed from ionised gas. When the gas ionises, it forms “a cloud of ions and electrons which release energy in the form of light when they recombine”. This light is not always in the visible spectrum though, and plasmas can be cool enough to touch. Even more interesting, plasmas are known to kill bacteria. And a plasma cloud would also account for the strange daytime sightings of ‘metallic objects’ flying through the sky – such objects would in fact be very dense plasma clouds beginning to emit light.
However, to ionise gas usually requires temperatures around the 10,000°C mark…something like a lightning strike. Therein lies the problem: in Hessdalen the lights aren’t linked to thunderstorms, and appear on sunny days and clear nights. This has researchers mystified. “There must be an energy source somewhere that has the power of a lighting strike,” electrical engineer Bjorn Gitle Hauge says. “What can electrify and drive a ball of light as big as a car for several hours?”
There are a number of theories. One is that strong winds whipping through the valley might create static electricity on the mountains. Another theory is they are powered by radioactivity – specifically, decay of radon in the atmosphere (though radioactivity tests have failed to find any evidence for this). One other theory is that the valley acts as a giant battery, due to its unique geology: it is literally a “valley of two halves”, as the rocks on one side of the river are rich in zinc and iron, while those on the other side are rich in copper. With the possibility that the river water between has sulphur in it, researchers have asked whether the natural geology of the valley make it “a perfect battery”.
“To test the idea, Jader Monari (of the Institute of Radio Astronomy in Medicina, Italy) and Romano Serra (from the University of Bologna, Italy) set up a pair of rocks from opposite sides of the valley as electrodes, and dunked them in river sediment to mimic a battery. They found that a current flowed between the two. “It was possible to light a lamp,” says Monari.
Monari suggests that this unique geology contributes to the lights in two ways. First, it supplies the bubbles of ionised gas, formed when sulphurous fumes react with the humid air of the valley. Second, it forms electromagnetic field lines in the valley that could move the bubble around. “This electrical field creates a path that could be the ‘main raod’ of the lights inside the valley,” he says.
The amount of theories has some researchers worried though. Computer engineer Erling Strand, who began the scientific study of the lights some three decades ago with ‘Project Hessdalen’, says he thinks “the theories we have now are based on too few hard facts. It can damage the research.” Nevertheless, the idea that the phenomena have some basis in electrical charges is supported by other observations, such as a connection between the aurora and the Hessdalen lights – witnesses have found that they are particularly impressive during auroral displays.
For those that would like to know more about the Hessdalen Lights, watch the documentary below. And of course, check out the feature in the latest issue of New Scientist.
Blood Moon 2018: Longest Total Lunar Eclipse of Century Occurs July 27
Blood Moon 2018: Longest Total Lunar Eclipse of Century Occurs July 27
By Elizabeth Howell, Space.com Contributor
Skywatcher Giuseppe Petricca took this image of a "supermoon" total lunar eclipse on Sept. 27, 2015, from Pisa, Italy, about 2 minutes prior to the beginning of the totality phase.
The longest total lunar eclipse of the 21st century is less than two weeks away.
The total phase of the "blood moon" eclipse of July 27 will last 1 hour and 43 minutes, during which Earth's natural satellite will turn a spectacular red or ruddy-brown color. From start to finish, the entire celestial event will last nearly 4 hours.
The eclipse won't be visible to viewers in North America, except via webcasts. But observers in much of Africa, the Middle East, southern Asia and the Indian Ocean region will get an eyeful, given cooperative weather, according to lunar scientist Noah Petro, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. [In Photos: The Rare Super Blue Blood Moon Eclipse of 2018]
July's total lunar eclipse occurs on the same day the planet Mars reaches its opposition, when it will shine at its best in the night sky. This month, Mars will be at its closest to Earth since 2003. After opposition, when Mars will be brightest, it will reach that closest point on July 31. You can learn more about that event in our dedicated guide here: Mars at Opposition 2018: How to See It and What to Expect
Unlike with solar eclipses, you need no special equipment to observe lunar eclipses. These latter events, which occur when the moon passes into Earth's shadow, are safe to view directly with the naked eye, telescopes or binoculars.
The moon turns deep red or reddish brown during eclipses, instead of going completely dark. That's because some of the sunlight going through Earth's atmosphere is bent around the edge of our planet and falls onto the moon's surface. Earth's air also scatters more shorter-wavelength light (in colors such as green or blue); what's left is the longer-wavelength, redder end of the spectrum.
Where and when will it be visible?
The timing if this total lunar eclipse means it won't be visible from North America, though much of the Eastern Hemisphere of Earth will see part or all of the eclipse. The entire eclipse will be visible from Africa, the Middle East and countries in central Asia. The eclipse will be visible from eastern South America as it is ending, and from Australia as it is beginning.
The time of greatest eclipse will be 4:21 p.m. EDT (2021 GMT) on July 27, according to EarthSky.org. The total eclipse will last from 3:30 p.m. to 5:13 p.m. EDT (1930 to 2113 GMT). There will also be some time before and after when the moon is in the lighter part of Earth's shadow, which is called the penumbra. Including that penumbral time, the eclipse will last for 3 hours and 55 minutes.
In July 27, 2018, a total lunar eclipse will be visible from South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. This NASA chart by eclipse expert Fred Espenak shows details and visibility projections for this “blood moon” eclipse.
Credit: Fred Espenak/NASA GSFC
Why is it the longest of the century?
"What controls the duration of the lunar eclipse is the position of the moon as it passes through the Earth's shadow," Petro told Space.com. The darkest part of Earth's shadow is called the umbra. You can picture the umbra as a cone extending from Earth in the opposite direction to the sun, Petro explained.
"The moon can either graze through the cone, or go right through the middle. That [the middle] gets a longer-duration eclipse," he said. "This time, the moon is passing closer to the center of that cone, and it's therefore a little bit longer than the eclipse we had back in January."
Additionally, the moon will be at a farther point from Earth along its orbit, EarthSky pointed out. That means the moon will appear slightly smaller in the sky and will take a little bit longer to go through Earth's shadow.
Petro is also the project scientist for NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter(LRO), which has been orbiting the moon for nine years. It is best-known for obtaining detailed information on water ice and taking high-resolution pictures of spacecraft on the lunar surface. Because LRO is an older probe, most of its components (except for battery warmers and the like) will be turned off during the eclipse, to preserve the solar-powered spacecraft's battery and keep it safe during the greatest part of the eclipse, Petro said.
When is the next lunar eclipse?
The next total lunar eclipse visible from North America will occur on Jan. 21, 2019. Totality on that day will last 1 hour and 2 minutes, and the eclipse will especially favor viewers on the West Coast. That year will also see a partial eclipse, on July 16, 2019 — the 50th anniversary of the launch of the first moon landing mission, Apollo 11. LRO will likely still be operating then, having passed its 10th anniversary of arriving at the moon on June 23, 2019.
Editor's note: If you capture an amazing photo or video of the total lunar eclipse or any other night-sky sight and would like to share it with Space.com for a story or gallery, send images and comments to spacephotos@space.com.
Nog nooit waargenomen structuren ontdekt in de zonne-atmosfeer
Nog nooit waargenomen structuren ontdekt in de zonne-atmosfeer
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Opgepoetste beelden van de zogenoemde corona onthullen dat deze veel complexer en dynamischer is dan gedacht.
De atmosfeer van de zon kun je onderverdelen in verschillende lagen. En de buitenste laag wordt ook wel de corona genoemd. Hier ontspringt de zonnewind: een stroom van geladen deeltjes die zich in alle richtingen van de zon vandaan haast. Met behulp van NASA’s Solar Terrestraial Relations Observatory-A(STEREO-A) hebben onderzoekers de corona al goed in beeld weten te brengen. Maar wetenschappers hebben de kwaliteit van de beelden nu verder opgekrikt, waardoor er nog meer details zichtbaar worden. En dat heeft verstrekkende gevolgen voor ons begrip van de corona. “Elke structuur waarvan we dachten dat we deze begrepen, blijkt te bestaan uit kleinere structuren en veel dynamischer te zijn dan we dachten,” aldus onderzoeker Craig DeForest.
Lussen Een mooi voorbeeld daarvan zijn de magnetische lussen die op de zon ontstaan en coronale massa ejecties voort kunnen brengen (dit zijn gigantische plasmawolken die doorspekt zijn met magnetische veldlijnen). Aangenomen werd dat deze lussen vrij eenvoudig waren. Maar niets is minder waar. “Wat wij ontdekten, is dat het niet één lus is,” stelt DeForest. “De lussen zijn opgebouwd uit een groot aantal fijne strengen.”
Alfvén-oppervlak En de beelden halen ook het idee van een Alfvén-oppervlak onderuit. Een Alfvén-oppervlak is een soort grens in de zonne-atmosfeer en ter hoogte van die grens zou de versnellende zonnewind een “kritieke snelheid” bereiken. Maar de beelden onthullen dus dat het anders zit. “Wat wij ontdekten, was dat er geen duidelijk Alfvén-oppervlak is,” stelt DeForest. “Er is in plaats van één duidelijke grens een breed ‘niemandsland’ of ‘brede Alfvén-zone waar de zonnewind geleidelijk aan loskomt van de zon.”
Iets nieuws Daarnaast hebben de onderzoekers ook compleet nieuwe structuren ontdekt in de corona. Zo ontdekten ze dat het karakter van de zonnewind op een afstand van ongeveer 10 keer de straal van de zon – je bevindt je dan nog steeds in de corona – plotsklaps veranderd. “Hier vindt interessante natuurkunde plaats,” aldus DeForest. “We weten nog niet wat het is, maar we weten wel dat het interessant gaat zijn.”
Naar verwachting zullen we op vrij korte termijn een nog veel beter beeld krijgen van de corona; binnenkort wordt namelijk een ruimtesonde gelanceerd die – en dat is een primeur – metingen in de corona zelf moet gaan uitvoeren. De sonde heeft de naam Parker Solar Probe gekregen.
Deze stofstorm welde in april van dit jaar nabij de noordpool op.
De foto is gemaakt door ESA’s Mars Express en laat maar weer eens zien dat het nooit saai is op de rode planeet.
Opportunity Marsrover Opportunity kan daarover meepraten; de rover bevindt zich al weken in een winterslaap, omdat een stofstorm het de rover onmogelijk maakt om zonne-energie op te wekken en er dus zuinig met de acculadingen moet worden omgesprongen. Die gewraakte stofstorm – die inmiddels vrijwel het hele oppervlak van Mars beslaat – ontstond eind mei, iets ten zuidwesten van de stofstorm die je op de foto van ESA ziet.
Zomer Op de foto van ESA zien we een zogenoemde ‘lokale, kleinschalige stofstorm’. Dergelijke stofstormen ontstaan – met name tijdens de zomer op Mars – regelmatig. Gedurende de zomer is de afstand tussen Mars en de zon kleiner, waardoor deze meer zonlicht opvangt en er op het oppervlak grotere temperatuurverschillen ontstaan. Hierdoor kan ook de lucht op Mars in beweging komen en stofdeeltjes van het oppervlak tillen en meevoeren.
Afbeelding: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin.
Zwak De stofstormen die zo kunnen ontstaan, zijn vaak veel zwakker dan orkanen op aarde. Dat komt doordat Mars een veel dunnere atmosfeer heeft (waardoor de luchtdruk veel beperkter is) en de stormen veel minder snelheid hebben dan op aarde. Tegelijkertijd kunnen de stofstormen echter wel veel langer standhouden op Mars dan op aarde.
Onderzoek Wetenschappers zijn dol op stofstormen en zeker op de vrij zeldzame exemplaren die vrijwel het hele oppervlak bedekken. Onderzoek naar deze stofstormen kan onthullen hoe ze precies ontstaan. En onderzoekers uiteindelijk mogelijk zelfs in staat stellen om het ontstaan van zulke stormen te voorspellen. Dat is met name handig wanneer er in de nabije toekomst mensen naar Mars gaan.
Als het gaat om het onderzoek naar stofstormen kunnen onderzoekers nu dus hun hart ophalen. Het is een maand geleden dat de stofstorm die in mei op Mars ontstond tot een wereldwijde stofstorm werd uitgeroepen. En nog altijd onttrekt deze storm vrijwel het gehele Martiaanse oppervlak aan het zicht. Onderzoekers monitoren de storm met behulp van vijf orbiters en één rover: de niet van zonne-energie afhankelijke Marsrover Curiosity.
Mogelijk voor het eerst gespot: een jonge ster die 1 of zelfs 2 planeten 'opeet'
Mogelijk voor het eerst gespot: een jonge ster die 1 of zelfs 2 planeten 'opeet'
Caroline Kraaijvanger
De ster RW Aur A zou as we speak bezig zijn om de resten van enkele van zijn planeten te nuttigen.
Dat suggereren waarnemingen van röntgenobservatorium Chandra. “Computersimulaties hebben lang voorspeld dat planeten in een jonge ster kunnen vallen, maar we hebben dat nog niet eerder geobserveerd,” stelt onderzoeker Hans Moritz Guenther. “Als onze interpretatie van de data klopt, zou het de eerste keer zijn dat we direct waarnemen hoe een jonge ster een planeet of planeten verorbert.”
OVER RW AUR A
RW Aur A bevindt zich op 450 lichtjaar afstand van de aarde en is nog maar een paar miljoen jaar oud. De ster wordt nog steeds omringd door een gas- en stofschijf. RW Aur A maakt verder deel uit van een dubbelstersysteem: beide sterren hebben ongeveer dezelfde massa als onze zon.
Chandra De jonge ster RW Aur A houdt de gemoederen eigenlijk al sinds 1937 bezig en wel doordat de helderheid van de ster om de paar decennia kort afneemt, om vervolgens weer toe te nemen. En de laatste jaren zijn de onderzoekers er getuige van geweest dat de helderheid van de ster nog frequenter en gedurende langere perioden afneemt. En dat konden ze maar niet verklaren. Tot ze de ster met behulp van röntgenobservatorium Chandra bestudeerden.
IJzer Chandra bestudeerde de ster in 2013, toen deze heel helder was. Maar ook in 2015 en 2017, in perioden waarin de helderheid afnam. Chandra stelde vast dat niet alleen de optische helderheid van de ster afnam; ook de röntgenstraling afkomstig van de ster liep in deze perioden terug. Het suggereert dat iets het licht én de röntgenstraling van de ster tegenhoudt. Maar wat? Om daar achter te komen, bestudeerden de wetenschappers het röntgenspectrum: de intensiteit van de röntgenstraling gemeten op verschillende golflengtes. Op basis van die data – verzameld in perioden waarin de ster heel helder en juist minder helder was – konden de onderzoekers de dichtheid en de samenstelling van het licht en röntgenstraling absorberende materiaal rond de ster afleiden. Het onderzoek wijst uit dat de afnames in röntgenstraling en optisch licht veroorzaakt worden door de aanwezigheid van een dicht gas. Observaties uit 2017 laten bovendien zien dat de gasschijf rond de ster zeker 10 keer meer ijzer herbergde dan in 2013, toen de ster heel helder scheen.
Afbeelding: NASA / CXC / M. Weiss; X-ray spectrum: NASA / CXC / MIT / H. M.Günther.
Planetesimalen Langzaam begonnen de puzzelstukjes op hun plaats te vallen. Volgens de onderzoekers is het overvloedig aanwezige ijzer in de schijf afkomstig van twee planetesimalen – planeten in wording – die met elkaar in botsing zijn gekomen. Zeker één van deze planetesimalen zou reeds de omvang van een planeet hebben gehad. De botsing zou geresulteerd hebben in een enorme hoeveelheid ijzerrijk puin dat vervolgens in de ster is gevallen en een dikke sluier van gas en stof rond de ster heeft gevormd, waar het sterlicht tijdelijk deels door werd tegengehouden.
Alternatief
Een andere mogelijke – maar minder waarschijnlijke – verklaring voor de afnames in helderheid is dat deeltjes, zoals ijzer, in bepaalde delen van de schijf rond RW Aur A gevangen zitten. Wanneer de structuur van de schijf verstoord wordt – bijvoorbeeld doordat de andere ster in het dubbelstersysteem dichtbij komt – zouden die deeltjes vrijkomen, waardoor opeens een overvloed aan ijzer in de ster kan vallen.
Onderzoekers blijven de ster in de gaten houden om te kijken met welke snelheid de hoeveelheid ijzer in de gas- en stofschijf rond de jonge ster afneemt. Als die hoeveelheid ijzer over een paar jaar nog vrijwel even groot is, wijst dat erop dat het afkomstig is van een relatief grote bron. “Op dit moment wordt er veel onderzoek gedaan naar exoplaneten en hoe zij tot stand komen,” stelt Guenther. “Dus het is overduidelijk heel belangrijk om te zien hoe jonge planeten vernietigd kunnen worden door de interactie met hun moederster en andere jonge planeten en welke factoren bepalen of zij in leven blijven.”
Newly Discovered Crop Circle Has A Message For Humanity (July 2018)
Newly Discovered Crop Circle Has A Message For Humanity (July 2018)
(Alanna Ketler) A new crop circle was recently discovered on July 8th in Coneybury Hill, Nr Stonehenge, Wiltshire. This circle is the exact same as the chemical weapons warning symbol.
Interestingly this crop circle was found shortly after the death of Dawn Sturgess who had come into contact with a deadly nerve agent.
While we can’t know for sure, this crop circle certainly appears to be a message to humanity about the dangers of chemical weapons and the catastrophic damage they can cause, regardless of who you believe made it. Perhaps this circle symbolizes the fact that these weapons have no place in our world, and it’s time we got rid of them, for good.
Check out some amazing drone footage of this newly discovered crop circle below.
ET Intervention?
It is not all that surprising to see this message show up in a crop circle, as in the past we have seen deliberate ET intervention when nuclear weapons would have otherwise been used. We have covered this topic before, and the following is an excerpt from an older article,
One of many previously classified reports -out of the thousands in existence -that is now available in the public domain is the intrusion at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, on August 24, 1966. Air Force personnel were concerned about a light in the sky. A team went to check it out and confirmed the object, then saw a second white object while doing so. The object was tracked on radar and moved vertical several times; each time it descended, an air force officer in charge of a missile crew found his radio transmission interrupted by static. The object eventually descended to ground level, and the Air Force sent a team to check it out. They saw the object either on the ground or hovering very low. According to the official report:
“When the team was about ten miles from the landing site, static disrupted radio contact with them. Five to eight minutes later, the glow diminished, and the UFO took off. Another UFO was visually sighted and confirmed by radar. The one that was first sighted passed beneath the second. Radar also confirmed this. The first made for altitude toward the north, and the second seemed to disappear with the glow of red.”
It seems that these extraterrestrials know just how damaging nuclear weapons can be to our planet, and possibly to our entire solar system. There is information that says that UFO’s have been deactivating nuclear weapons since we created them and started to show up a lot more often when we were testing the atomic bomb. Thankfully, someone or something has our back and is helping to stop us, humanity from making a huge mistake.
MUFON Case 92671 Date of event: June 9, 2018 Location of sighting: Dublin, Ireland
Long description of sighting report:
''On Saturday 9th of June 2018 at 18:00 hours I was having a family barbecue. It was a crystal clear sky. This object caught my eye, it was stationery and very high in the sky, it was turning and pulsating, it seem to have three lights at the bottom of it. I observed this object carefully through my binoculars at this stage. My partner and my daughter also witnessed this and my daughter took a video of this. The family next door also came out to witness this as I was observing this object for 45 minutes when I witnessed a smaller orb come out from the side of it. It darted up and down a few times before disappearing again. I then lost sight of the object.
After a while when myself and my partner went to the front of the house the object reappeared in the sky. I showed my partner the object through the binoculars when my partner asked what where the objects beside it. When I looked through the binoculars myself I witnessed 9 orbs in formation of which two were moving. I watched this some time and then returned to the main object, I then saw a small orb around the main object again which appeared and disappeared again. I return outside after a short while and the object was no longer there.''
Milky Way Galaxy Is 'Disturbed' and More Revealed in ESA Gaia Mission Data (Video)
Milky Way Galaxy Is 'Disturbed' and More Revealed in ESA Gaia Mission Data (Video)
ByElizabeth Howell, Space.com Contributor
The European Gaia spacecraft recently released a catalog of the positions of 1.7 billion stars, mapping our stellar neighbors around the Milky Way with unprecedented precision. The star map not only looks stunning but also includes a wealth of information about the evolution of our galaxy, the European Space Agency (ESA) said in a recent video.
The video, posted to YouTube in May, took place at the Paris Observatory. There, in 1887, astronomers attempted to map hundreds of thousands of stars in an effort called the Carte du Ciel (the Map of the Sky). Gaia is therefore part of a long line of star mappers, both on the ground and in space. But for all of our efforts, astronomers said in the video, we still have much to learn about the Milky Way — such as why certain stars' motion is "disturbed," and how the arms were formed.
ESA Euronews: Gaia’s revolution in astronomy
Finnish astronomer Timo Prusti, Gaia project scientist, gestured toward Gaia's new map of the Milky Way and told video viewers what the spacecraft is revealing: "We see a flattened structure," he said. "That's the Milky Way; that's our Milky Way disk. We see some dark patches on top of it. What does it mean? It means that there, we see less stars. There are more stars [in that location], but there is dust in front of them, and that's why we don't see the stars." [Europe's Billion-Star Mapping Spacecraft Snaps 1st Photo (Image)]
The orbits of four globular clusters (NGC 104, NGC 288, NGC 362 and NGC 1851), shown in blue, and three dwarf galaxies (Carina, Bootes I and Draco), shown in red, around the Milky Way, as imaged by the Gaia spacecraft.
Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC
But the spacecraft is also revealing some mysteries that will require further investigation. Previously, astronomers thought that the stars rotating around the Milky Way's center did so in an orderly fashion, no matter how far they were from our sun. Gaia, however, shows that some of these stars' motions are "disturbed," particularly for those that are far from the sun, Prusti said. Why that happens is a complete mystery.
Astronomers are also uncertain about how the arms of the Milky Way came to be, added François Mignard, one of the founders of Gaia and an emeritus director of research at French space agency CNRS.
"Were the arms born at the same time?" he asked in French, translated in voiceover to English. "Do the arms have a unique history? Are the arms a result of a merger with an external galaxy? It's these questions that people are going to try to answer, and the Gaia data is absolutely fundamental for this kind of study."
Gaia's April data release mapped 10,000 times more stars than its predecessor mission, Hipparcos. Frédéric Arenou, a senior research engineer at CNRS, said the new Gaia information includes the stars' luminosity, or how much light they produce. With that information in hand, astronomers will be able to learn more about the stars' physical properties, he added.
Gaia's position in space is a huge asset in allowing it to map the sky. It is located 1.5 million kilometers (0.93 million miles) from Earth in the opposite direction to the sun. The spacecraft rotates around itself every 6 hours, and over time it can generate a complete map of the sky. Its three major instruments include an astrometric instrument to measure star positions, a photometer to map star colors and a spectrometer that shows stars' radial velocity — or the speed at which the stars move toward or away from Earth.
Gaia continues to send down measurements 11 hours a day, ESA officials said in the video, and several more data releases are expected in the next decade to address some of these outstanding scientific questions.
Tiny Satellite Begins Hunt for Missing Milky-Way Matter
Tiny Satellite Begins Hunt for Missing Milky-Way Matter
By Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Writer
The International Space Station deployed HaloSat, a tiny satellite that will study the Milky Way's halo, on July 13, 2018.
Credit: NanoRacks/NASA
A tiny satellite has set out to investigate the halo of incredibly hot gas surrounding the Milky Way — and it could help scientists track down the huge amount of missing matter in the universe.
NASA deployed the 26-lb. (12 kilograms) satellite, called HaloSat, on July 13 from the International Space Station.
Scientists can't find a whopping one-third of all the matter that should exist in the universe. It's not dark matter; it's just … missing. They've calculated how much matter was in the universe 400,000 years after the Big Bang based on information encoded in the cosmic microwave background. And they've calculated how much mass they see now in galaxies, stars, planets, dust and gas. But the numbers do not add up. [Our Milky Way Galaxy Has Cosmic Halo 11.4 Billion Years Old]
Tiny Satellite Begins Hunt for Missing Milky Way Matter
"We should have all the matter today that we had back when the universe was 400,000 years old," said Philip Kaaret, HaloSat's principal investigator and an astronomer at the University of Iowa, said in a NASA statement. "Where did it go?"
Scientists have made some progress in tracking down chunks of the missing matter, and they've narrowed it down to two hiding places: within galaxies themselves, or spread out in the space between them. So scientists are starting close to home, by searching for the matter that's missing from the Milky Way.
HaloSat will try to find the missing matter by mapping the galaxy's halo of superhot gas, which can reach 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit (2 million degrees Celsius), according to NASA. That's hot enough for oxygen gas to produce X-rays, which HaloSat will measure across the sky to figure out the shape of the halo and determine whether it's spread evenly around the Milky Way or in a flattened disk, like a fried egg.
"If you think of the galactic halo in the fried egg model, it will have a different distribution of brightness when you look straight up out of it from Earth than when you look at wider angles," Keith Jahoda, a HaloSat co-investigator and a NASA astrophysicist, said in the statement. "If it's in some quasi-spherical shape, compared to the dimensions of the galaxy, then you expect it to be more nearly the same brightness in all directions."
Once scientists know how the halo is arranged, they can estimate its mass and determine whether it's hiding all that missing matter.
But to make those measurements, HaloSat needs to be careful not to fall for an imposter signal. That signal is caused by the solar wind, the constant stream of highly charged particles produced by the sun, which produces X-ray signatures that mimic that of the galactic halo.
To avoid being tricked, HaloSat will switch tasks according to where it is in its orbit around Earth: When it's over the night side, it will gather data, and when it's over the daylight side, it will charge up and send that information home. That should make HaloSat's data much cleaner than other X-ray observations, the researchers think.
Dazzling Views Show Saturn Moon Titan's Surface Like Never Before
Dazzling Views Show Saturn Moon Titan's Surface Like Never Before
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
These mosaics of the Saturn moon Titan's surface were constructed using data gathered over 13 years by the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer instrument aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Nantes/University of Arizona
The mysterious surface of Saturn's huge moon Titan comes into gloriously sharp focus in newly released photos captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
Cassini team members created the six-image set using data collected over 13 years by the Saturn-orbiting probe's Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS). As its name suggests, VIMS deals in long-wavelength infrared light, allowing the instrument to see through the thick Titanic haze that obscures visible-light views of the moon's frigid surface.
Cassini scientists have created VIMS mosaics before, but those previous efforts generally had prominent seams, NASA officials said. Such seams naturally result from the stitching together of images snapped during different Titan encounters, which featured different lighting conditions and flyby angles. [Amazing Photos: Titan, Saturn's Largest Moon]
But the new mosaics are pretty much seamless — a breakthrough made possible by a reanalysis of the VIMS data and laborious hand processing of the resulting mosaics, mission team members said.
"With the seams now gone, this new collection of images is by far the best representation of how the globe of Titan might appear to the casual observer if it weren't for the moon's hazy atmosphere, and it likely will not be superseded for some time to come," NASA officials wrote in a statement Wednesday (July 18).
Indeed, the photos give viewers a new appreciation for Titan's complex and varied surface, which boasts dunes of carbon-containing organic compounds, icy deposits and vast seas of liquid hydrocarbons. (Titan is the only extraterrestrial object known to harbor stable bodies of liquid on its surface.)
In visible-light images captured from above Titan's thick, nitrogen-dominated atmosphere, none of this diversity comes through; the 3,200-mile-wide (5,150 kilometers) moon looks like a fuzzy, orange-brown ball.
Titan as it appears from space in visible light. NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this view in January 2013, when it was about 895,000 miles (1.44 million kilometers) from the big moon.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Scientists might get some sharp, up-close looks at the Titan landscape in the not-too-distant future, however: A mission called Dragonfly would explore the huge moon's surface, and assess its potential to host life, using a robotic minihelicopter. Dragonfly is one of two finalists, along with a comet sample-return effort, for NASA's next New Frontiers mission slot. The agency aims to announce a winner in 2019 and launch the mission by 2025.
The $3.2 billion Cassini mission — a joint effort of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency — launched in 1997 and reached Saturn in the summer of 2004. Cassini zoomed through the gas-giant system for more than 13 years, gathering a wealth of data about the planet, its iconic rings and its many moons. The Cassini mother ship also carried a lander called Huygens, which touched down on Titan in January 2005.
The groundbreaking mission came to an end in September 2017 with an intentional death dive into Saturn — a move designed to ensure that Cassini would not contaminate Titan or the fellow potentially life-supporting satellite Enceladus with microbes from Earth.
The Parker Solar Probe is not only one of NASA’s most ambitious missions, but it seems to defy logic. The spacecraft slated to launch this summer will enter the sun’s corona and travel through material with temperatures greater than a million degrees Fahrenheit. So, why won’t it melt?
Parker Solar Probe will embark August 4 on what NASA calls “a mission 60 years in the making,” coming within four million miles of the surface to collect unprecedented data about the sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere. If successful, it will become the first spacecraft to enter the sun’s corona and enjoy a balmy inside temperature of just 85 degrees while its outer shell is surrounding in the sun’s blaze. The probe will essentially be the embodiment of “this is fine” dog.
Illustration of Parker Solar Probe circling the Sun.
NASA revealed the science behind why this space dog will not melt in such an extreme environment on Thursday. To understand why the Parker Solar Probe won’t melt, the space agency explained key concepts of heat versus temperature, its custom heat shield, and the spacecraft’s unique innovation.
Parker Solar Probe’s Temperature vs. Heat
The difference between heat and temperature will help in making the Parker Solar Probe’s mission seem a little more (but not much more) feasible. Temperature is a measurement of how fast particles are moving, while heat refers to how much of that energy is transferred. Thus, in a place that is mostly empty like space, high temperatures don’t always mean high heat. Particles could be moving fast and creating high temperature, but since there are so few of them, they won’t transfer that much heat towards the spacecraft.
While Parker Solar Probe will be traveling through a space with temperatures of several million degrees, it won’t feel most of that heat, and the surface of the heat shield will only reach 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
Parker Solar Probe’s Heat Shield
That’s still pretty hot, though. Experiencing 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit is nothing to scoff at, and ensuring an unmelted Parker Solar Probe may have caused some delays in scheduling the launch. To withstand the heat, NASA installed a shield known as the Thermal Protection System, or TPS.
Designed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, TPS is made of a lightweight carbon foam core that is flanked by two carbon-carbon composite panels. The sun-facing panel is sprayed with a white coating that will reflect as much of the sun’s energy away from the spacecraft as possible. It’s just 4.5 inches thick, and yet it’s expected to keep almost all instrumentation safe.
Parker Solar Probe’s Measuring Cup
Not every instrument will be protected by TPS, however. The Faraday cup is a sensor that will poke out over the heat shield to measure the solar wind, and in order to get an accurate read, it could not be sheltered by TPS.
So, why doesn’t Faraday melt?
“Due to the intensity of the solar atmosphere, unique technologies had to be engineered to make sure that not only can the instrument survive, but also the electronics aboard can send back accurate readings,” NASA’s Susannah Darling explained. The cup is made from sheets of Titanium-Zirconium-Molybdenum, an alloy of molybdenum, giving it a melting point of about 4,260 degrees Fahrenheit. The chips that produce an electric field for the Faraday cup are made from tungsten, the metal with the highest known melting point. With a threshold of 6,192 degrees Fahrenheit before melting, Faraday has the wiggle room to collect the solar wind data it needs.
After launching on August 4, Parker Solar Probe will use Venus’ gravitational pull to shrink its orbit around the sun. These flybys will take roughly seven years, eventually bringing the probe as close as 3.7 million miles from the center of the solar system. Its final loop within the sun’s corona is expected in late 2024. But thanks to this slew of innovative technologies, it should keep cool the whole time.
When the Apollo astronauts returned from the moon, the dust that clung to their spacesuits made their throats sore and their eyes water. Lunar dust is made of sharp, abrasive particles, but how toxic is it for humans?
When the Apollo astronauts returned from the moon, the dust that clung to their spacesuits made their throats sore and their eyes water. Lunar dust is made of sharp, abrasive and nasty particles, but how toxic is it for humans?
The “lunar hay fever,” as NASA astronaut Harrison Schmitt described it during 1972’s Apollo 17 mission, created symptoms in all 12 people who have stepped on the moon. From sneezing to nasal congestion, in some cases it took days for the reactions to fade. Inside the spacecraft, the dust smelled like burnt gunpowder.
The moon missions left an unanswered question of lunar exploration – one that could affect humanity’s next steps in the solar system: can lunar dust jeopardize human health?
An ambitious European Space Agency (ESA) research program with experts from around the planet is now addressing the issues related to lunar dust.
Kim Prisk, a pulmonary physiologist from the University of California with over 20 years of experience in human spaceflight, is one of the 12 scientists taking part in ESA’s research. Prisk said:
We don’t know how bad this dust is. It all comes down to an effort to estimate the degree of risk involved.
Nasty dust
Lunar dust has silicate in it, a material commonly found on planetary bodies with volcanic activity. Miners on Earth suffer from inflamed and scarred lungs from inhaling silicate. On the moon, the dust is so abrasive that it ate away layers of spacesuit boots and destroyed the vacuum seals of Apollo sample containers.
Fine like powder, but sharp like glass. The low gravity of the moon, one sixth of what we have on Earth, allows tiny particles to stay suspended for longer and penetrate more deeply into the lung. Prisk explained:
Particles 50 times smaller than a human hair can hang around for months inside your lungs. The longer the particle stays, the greater the chance for toxic effects.
The potential damage from inhaling this dust is unknown but research shows that lunar soil simulants can destroy lung and brain cells after long-term exposure.
Down to the particle
On Earth, fine particles tend to smoothen over years of erosion by wind and water; lunar dust, however, is not round, but sharp and spiky.
In addition, the moon has no atmosphere and is constantly bombarded by radiation from the sun that causes the soil to become electrostatically charged.
This charge can be so strong that the dust levitates above the lunar surface, making it even more likely to get inside equipment and people’s lungs.
Dusty workplace
To test equipment and the behavior of lunar dust, ESA will be working with simulated moon dust mined from a volcanic region in Germany.
Working with the simulant is no easy feat. Erin Tranfield, biologist and expert in dust toxicity, said:
The rarity of the lunar glass-like material makes it a special kind of dust. We need to grind the source material but that means removing the sharp edges.
The lunar soil does have a bright side, explained science advisor Aidan Cowley.
You can heat it to produce bricks that can offer shelter for astronauts. Oxygen can be extracted from the soil to sustain human missions on the moon.
Bottom line: Can lunar dust jeopardize human health?
Extraterrestres : 8 théories pour expliquer le silence
Extraterrestres : 8 théories pour expliquer le silence
Extraterrestres : 8 théories pour expliquer le silence - Aliens : 8 theories to explain silence
Pourquoi les extraterrestres ne se montrent-ils pas ? Plusieurs théories peuvent expliquer le silence des extraterrestres. Futura vous en présente ici 8. Rentrez dans le secret...
Si la vie est fréquente dans l'univers, alors de nombreuses planètes de notre galaxie, la Voie lactée, devraient porter ou avoir porté des civilisations extraterrestres. Or, mis à part de témoignages douteux et jamais vérifiés d'incursions très brèves (et aux objectifs mystérieux), force est de constater qu'aucune observation, sur Terre ou dans le ciel, ne vient prouver l'existence de grandes sociétés technologiquement avancées.
Pourquoi ? La question alimente facilement les discussions entre amis, préférentiellement le soir, idéalement sous un ciel étoilé. On l'appelle le « paradoxe de Fermi », du nom d'Enrico Fermi. Ce spécialiste de physique nucléaire aurait évoqué cette question dans les années 1930, lui aussi au cours d'un dîner. Elle a ensuite été popularisée par Carl Sagan, astronome éclectique, qui a lancé le programme Seti.
Les civilisations E. T. : un très bon sujet de discussion
De multiples réponses sont possibles devant le silence des autres intelligences. Les huit principales sont posées ici mais il en existe d'autres. Lors des discussions, l'impression vient vite que chacun arrive avec ses propres convictions et tente de les imposer aux autres. Cette étape passée, il devient bien plus intéressant de lister, objectivement, toutes les réponses auxquelles on peut penser. L'exercice devient alors un jeu.
Une bonne idée est d'explorer les nombreuses observations réalisées depuis quelques décennies dans le domaine que l'on peut appeler exobiologie ou astrobiologie. De la composition chimique des nébuleuses (où se formeront les étoiles et leurs planètes) jusqu'aux idées sur l'apparition de la vie sur Terre en passant par les océans cachés des satellites de Jupiter et de Saturne sans oublier les exoplanètes, la réalité, souvent, dépasse nos imaginations...
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Quel est cet ovni filmé depuis l'ISS ?
Quel est cet ovni filmé depuis l'ISS ?
Régulièrement, les caméras de la Station spatiale internationale (ISS) filment des objets volants non identifiés, alias ovnis. Satellites, débris ou étages de lanceurs, quand ce ne sont pas de simples reflets dans les vitres : ces images font le bonheur des ufologues. Ici, on voit un objet allant dans le même sens que l'ISS, un peu plus bas et (logiquement) un peu plus rapide. Rêvons un peu.
Non, l'espace n'est pas rigoureusement vide. Juste au-dessus de l'atmosphère, il est même assez fréquenté, surtout par des objets créés de main d'Homme. Ce peut être des satellites ou des débris spatiaux mais aussi des étages de lanceurs en train de retomber dans l'atmosphère. Ces apparitions plus ou moins fugaces sont aussi, parfois, des phénomènes lumineux dans la haute atmosphère et il est arrivé qu'il ne s'agisse que de reflets sur un hublot ou dans l'optique de la caméra.
Qu'importe. Chaque évènement de ce genre fait le bonheur des amateurs de l'étude des ovnis, qui y voient facilement la preuve de l'existence de vaisseaux extraterrestres patrouillant dans le secteur. Mieux, la molle réaction de la Nasa, qui est le plus souvent « bon eh bien c'est un débris, comme d'habitude ; on va tâcher de voir ce que c'est, comme d'habitude », conforte les convictions de ces passionnés, qui pensent fréquemment que l'agence spatiale dissimule des preuves de tourisme d'extraterrestres. La Nasa est même régulièrement accusée de couper le flux vidéo au moment crucial.
Débris, satellite, ombre ou Surfeur d'argent
L'exercice d'identification est tout de même amusant, voire intéressant. Ici, on voit un objet, de dimension inconnue, filant à peu près dans la même direction que l'ISS et un peu plus rapidement. Il ne peut donc s'agir d'un avion. Sa distance est impossible à déterminer mais l'objet évolue au-dessus de la couverture nuageuse. Celui-ci est clairement en orbite, sur une altitude plus faible que celle de l'ISS. Sa vitesse plus élevée est donc logique. En effet, plus l'orbite est éloignée de la Terreplus la vitesse de satellisation est faible : elle est d'environ 8 km/s au niveau de l'ISS et de 1 km/s à la distance de la Lune (laquelle, bonne connaisseuse des lois de Newton, a d'ailleurs adopté cette vitesse).
Il reste en lice trois hypothèses :
un satellite en orbite très basse ;
un débris ;
l'ombre d'un satellite (l'éclairage des nuages indique que la lumière solaire vient d'en haut à droite, ce qui exclut qu'il s'agisse de l'ombre de l'ISS elle-même).
Une quatrième hypothèse, bien sûr, est qu'un vaisseau spatial d'exploration venu d'une autre planète soit en train d'étudier la météorologie terrestre, qui serait encore mystérieuse pour les concepteurs de cet engin. Une cinquième est celle, tout simplement, du passage de Norrin Radd, le Surfeur d'argent, profitant des vagues atmosphériques au-dessus d'une formation cyclonique...
Legendary Ship With 5,500 Boxes Of Gold Worth $133 Billion Discovered
Legendary Ship With 5,500 Boxes Of Gold Worth $133 Billion Discovered
A legendary ship carrying cargo of $133 billion found off a South Korean island.
The Dmitrii Donskoi, a Russian ship that was scuttled in 1905 and is believed to be carrying more than 5,500 boxes of gold bullion and coins estimated to be worth $133 billion has been recovered by divers off the South Korean island of Ulleungdo.
The incredible discovery came off the back of many years of work by the maritime salvage company, the Shinil Group, who have long been after the prize. In order to uncover the ship a team of experts from South Korea, China, Britain, and Canada have worked tirelessly trawling the area. Now they have seen the fruits of their labors with the discovery of the legendary ship which they positively identified by the Cyrillic letters on its stern.
The Dmitrii Donskoi was never intended to be a battleship but was designed to be a commerce raider. It set sail for the first time in the late nineteenth century and would go on to spend most of its operational career on missions in the Mediterranean Sea and the Pacific theatre.
During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, the Russians suffered major losses at sea as the superior Japanese destroyed the vast majority of the Russian ships in the vicinity of the Asian country. To bulk up the depleted forces, the Dmitrii Donskoi was one of a number of ships deployed to fight on the frontlines of the short-lived but vicious war.
Built in St Petersburg and launched in August 1883
Photograph of the legendary ship: Dmitrii Donskoi
The Dmitrii Donskoi formed part of the ill-fated squadron that met the Japanese fleet at the Battle of Tsushima. The ship had been assigned to protect the transport ships sailing at the rear of the formation and managed to slip away and flee when it became clear that the Japanese were about to deal the Russian forces a crushing defeat. The captain, Ivan Levedev, evaded Japanese forces for some time but was discovered by the enemy steaming towards the Russian port town of Vladivostok.
The extensive damage the international team discovered on the wreckage of the ship tells the story of the violence of the Japanese onslaught. The ship endured major damage from shell fire and was eventually scuttled.
According to records from the time, sixty of the five hundred and a ninety-one strong crew were killed in the assault, and more than a hundred others suffered injuries. The rest were saved by the capable actions of Captain Lebedev who managed to get the men to shore. The crew would eventually be taken prisoner by the Japanese landing parties on the South Korean island of Ulleungdo. The brave captain died of the injuries he incurred in the course of the battle.
After the ship was lost and the crew was captured, rumors began circulating about the incident. It was strongly suggested that the Dmitrii Donskoi had been tasked with carrying a massive amount of money which was to be used to pay for fuel, port fees and the crews of the ships in the ill-starred squadron. This money amounted to the equivalent of more than a hundred billion US dollars. It is believed that the captain chose to scuttle the ship rather than let such an extraordinary amount of money fall into enemy hands.
More than a hundred years later, Russia and Japan are at peace, and the sunken war chest is destined to be spent on more peaceful projects. Half of the gold will be returned to the Russian government, approximately 10% of that which remains will be spent on tourism projects on the island of Ulleungdo which will include a museum dedicated to the legendary vessel. The rest of the money will be scattered among a number of joint projects promoting development in northeast Asian such as a railway link which will improve travel connections between Russia, South Korea, and North Korea.
Mysterious black granite sarcophagus is finally OPENED
Mysterious black granite sarcophagus is finally OPENED
A mysterious ten foot (three-metre) long black sarcophagus has been opened in Alexandria, found on the northern coast of Egypt and founded by the legendary leader of the same name.
The 6.5ft (two metre) high coffin was first discovered earlier this month and unearthed in recent days.
The 30-ton (27,000 kg) tomb was found buried 16ft (five metres) beneath the ground of the city.
Egyptologists pried open the black granite sarcophagus earlier today to reveal three decomposed bodies.
The stone coffin was also filled with sewage water, which is believed to have increased the rate of decomposition.
Giant Stone Spheres Discovered On Artic Island Baffle Scientists
Giant Stone Spheres Discovered On Artic Island Baffle Scientists
The appearance of perfectly spherical rocks baffles the scientific community.
Bizarre, perfectly rounded rocks described by some observers as the ‘footballs of God’ have been discovered on the uninhabited Champ island which lies above the polar circle in the Franz Josef archipelago.
At first glance, it would appear that these perfectly spherical objects had been scattered on the island quite deliberately. However, the small island is completely barren and there is no evidence to suggest that human beings have ever settled there meaning that scientists studying the area do not believe that it is feasible that they were artificially created by humans.
To compound the mystery, similar spherical balls have been found on Heiss Island in the same archipelago as well as in more distant locations such as Volgograd, New Zealand, China, Bosnia and South Africa. According to the Russian polar researcher, Viktor Boyarsky, the spheres are made from a soft sandstone.
The material that the spheres are comprised of is about the only thing that geologists can agree on when it comes to these mysterious stones. According to Konstantin Zaikov of the Arctic Federal University, these fascinating stones were formed thousands of years ago by processes of crystallization of the sandstone followed by the subsequent magnetization of the grains of sand on the created crystals. Over time, the sand grains hardened and created a dense spherical stone.
However, this conclusion is contradicted by the Austrian geologist Sepp Fridhubera who has put forward a rival theory. Fridhubera claims that the rounded shape of the stones suggests that it was formed under the water and it is likely that an organic core at the center of the stones has contributed to its spherical shape.
These theories are merely the most popular in geological circles. There are dozens of theories circulating about what processes might have caused this astonishing natural phenomenon and no sign that agreement will be reached at any point in the near future.
Interestingly, all of these scientists presume that the stones must have been made naturally. However, the bizarre shape of the stones does open up the possibility that they were created by intelligent hands. If this theory is thrown into the mix, then there could be hundreds of more questions to answer about the stunning footballs of God.
Giant Stone Spheres Discovered On Artic Island Baffle Scientists
Giant Stone Spheres Discovered On Artic Island Baffle Scientists
The appearance of perfectly spherical rocks baffles the scientific community.
Bizarre, perfectly rounded rocks described by some observers as the ‘footballs of God’ have been discovered on the uninhabited Champ island which lies above the polar circle in the Franz Josef archipelago.
At first glance, it would appear that these perfectly spherical objects had been scattered on the island quite deliberately. However, the small island is completely barren and there is no evidence to suggest that human beings have ever settled there meaning that scientists studying the area do not believe that it is feasible that they were artificially created by humans.
To compound the mystery, similar spherical balls have been found on Heiss Island in the same archipelago as well as in more distant locations such as Volgograd, New Zealand, China, Bosnia and South Africa. According to the Russian polar researcher, Viktor Boyarsky, the spheres are made from a soft sandstone.
The material that the spheres are comprised of is about the only thing that geologists can agree on when it comes to these mysterious stones. According to Konstantin Zaikov of the Arctic Federal University, these fascinating stones were formed thousands of years ago by processes of crystallization of the sandstone followed by the subsequent magnetization of the grains of sand on the created crystals. Over time, the sand grains hardened and created a dense spherical stone.
However, this conclusion is contradicted by the Austrian geologist Sepp Fridhubera who has put forward a rival theory. Fridhubera claims that the rounded shape of the stones suggests that it was formed under the water and it is likely that an organic core at the center of the stones has contributed to its spherical shape.
These theories are merely the most popular in geological circles. There are dozens of theories circulating about what processes might have caused this astonishing natural phenomenon and no sign that agreement will be reached at any point in the near future.
Interestingly, all of these scientists presume that the stones must have been made naturally. However, the bizarre shape of the stones does open up the possibility that they were created by intelligent hands. If this theory is thrown into the mix, then there could be hundreds of more questions to answer about the stunning footballs of God.
Giant Stone Spheres Discovered On Artic Island Baffle Scientists
Giant Stone Spheres Discovered On Artic Island Baffle Scientists
The appearance of perfectly spherical rocks baffles the scientific community.
Bizarre, perfectly rounded rocks described by some observers as the ‘footballs of God’ have been discovered on the uninhabited Champ island which lies above the polar circle in the Franz Josef archipelago.
At first glance, it would appear that these perfectly spherical objects had been scattered on the island quite deliberately. However, the small island is completely barren and there is no evidence to suggest that human beings have ever settled there meaning that scientists studying the area do not believe that it is feasible that they were artificially created by humans.
To compound the mystery, similar spherical balls have been found on Heiss Island in the same archipelago as well as in more distant locations such as Volgograd, New Zealand, China, Bosnia and South Africa. According to the Russian polar researcher, Viktor Boyarsky, the spheres are made from a soft sandstone.
The material that the spheres are comprised of is about the only thing that geologists can agree on when it comes to these mysterious stones. According to Konstantin Zaikov of the Arctic Federal University, these fascinating stones were formed thousands of years ago by processes of crystallization of the sandstone followed by the subsequent magnetization of the grains of sand on the created crystals. Over time, the sand grains hardened and created a dense spherical stone.
However, this conclusion is contradicted by the Austrian geologist Sepp Fridhubera who has put forward a rival theory. Fridhubera claims that the rounded shape of the stones suggests that it was formed under the water and it is likely that an organic core at the center of the stones has contributed to its spherical shape.
These theories are merely the most popular in geological circles. There are dozens of theories circulating about what processes might have caused this astonishing natural phenomenon and no sign that agreement will be reached at any point in the near future.
Interestingly, all of these scientists presume that the stones must have been made naturally. However, the bizarre shape of the stones does open up the possibility that they were created by intelligent hands. If this theory is thrown into the mix, then there could be hundreds of more questions to answer about the stunning footballs of God.
Look! Up in the sky! It isn't a bird or a plane. It's probably a UFO, at least if you're watching History's upcoming Project Blue Book drama series.
The series, which was inspired by real UFO studies conducted by the US Air Force starting in the early 1950s, debuts on the History channel this winter. But a first-look trailer shows off its cast, which includes Game of Thrones' Aidan Gillen as Dr. Allen Hynek and Neal McDonough, who plays Damien Darhk in Legends of Tomorrow, as Gen. James Harding. Hynek, a real historical figure, was a scientific adviser for the Air Force's UFO work.
The trailer doesn't leave much to the imagination. We see lights moving in the sky, mysterious crop circles and a bizarrely elongated skull. It seems like it will be stocked with plenty of action, alien intrigue and stylish camera work.
Don't mistake this for a documentary series. History says it will blend "UFO theories with authentic historical events from one of the most mysterious eras in United States history."
You can delve deeper into the real history behind the television show on your own. The Project Blue Book files are available for anyone to peruse through the online Project Blue Book Archive.
Voor wat betreft de maan lijkt de wereld verdeeld in twee kampen, de ene die gelooft dat de maanlandingen nep waren en de andere dat er wel degelijk mensen op de maan waren.
Uit een recente ontdekking van ufoloog Scott Waring en verborgen conversaties van astronauten komt er nu misschien toch iets meer duidelijkheid.
We kunnen natuurlijk beginnen met te stellen dat alles op onze wereld nep is en niets meer dan een illusie. Dat is de waarheid, alleen maakt dat het een beetje lastig om over dingen te praten.
Binnen die beperking hebben we nog andere illusies en dat zijn die dingen die bewust anders worden voorgespiegeld dan hoe ze in werkelijkheid zijn gebeurd. En dan hebben we het in dit geval over de maanlandingen.
Ook op deze website zijn artikelen te vinden die met overtuigend bewijs komen dat de maanlandingen nooit plaatsgevonden kunnen hebben, zoals dit artikel.
Anderzijds zijn er dan toch weer dingen die erop lijken te wijzen dat er wel degelijk mensen op de maan zijn geweest en daar willen we vandaag iets verder op in gaan.
Iemand die nog steeds iedere dag onvermoeibaar in de weer is met het bestuderen van allerlei foto’s is ufoloog Scott Waring. Nu ziet Scott heel vaak UFO’s vliegen die er soms helemaal niet zijn, maar vaak heeft hij ook wel bijzonder dingen, zoals het volgende.
Bij de bestudering van een foto van de maan die afkomstig is uit de verzameling van de Universiteit van Arizona, vond hij een aantal bijzondere koepels boven kraters. Het zijn behoorlijk grote glimmende objecten en Scott vraagt zich dan ook af hoe het mogelijk is dat astronomen dit soort dingen volkomen over het hoofd hebben gezien.
Ze zien er als volgt uit:
Tijdens de Apolloreizen naar de maan kon het publiek af en toe de gesprekken volgen tussen de astronauten en de verkeersleiding in Houston. Echter, dit was een zorgvuldig uitgewerkt script, want wat de astronauten echt hadden te melden werd ver van het publiek weggehouden.
Jaren later zijn er een aantal gesprekken vrijgegeven tussen de astronauten onderling, waar op zijn zachtst gezegd een aantal zeer merkwaardige dingen in voor komen.
Zoals de volgende, waarbij astronauten praten over een snelweg op de maan en dat “ze” waarschijnlijk geen geld meer hadden om die weg af te maken.
En dan de volgende die heel interessant is in het kader van de ontdekking van Scott Waring. Astronauten die praten over driehoekige wegen in de buurt van de Moltke krater waarbij ze het hebben over een tijd voordat de koepels werden gebouwd.
En als laatste, een gesprek dat een Amerikaanse professor had met Neil Armstrong. Waarin Armstrong duidelijk maakt dat de reden dat wij nooit meer op de maan zijn geweest is omdat we in feite door de buitenaardsen zijn weggejaagd met de mededeling daar niet meer terug te komen.
Dus, zijn we nu wel of niet op de maan geweest? Wie het weet mag het zeggen.
Trailer New UFO Series “Project Blue Book” Based On Actual Cases
Trailer New UFO Series “Project Blue Book” Based On Actual Cases
History Channel’s upcoming new UFO series 'Project Blue Book' is based on the true, top-secret investigations into Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) and related phenomena conducted by the United States Air Force from 1952 to 1969.
The series that starts at end of this year revolves around secret U.S. Air Force investigations into supposed UFO encounters and unexplained phenomenon, undertaken by astrophysicist, and eventual ufologist, Josef Allen Hynek in the 1950s and 1960s.
The incidents that are shown in this 10 episode series are based on actual cases that were investigated by the USAF.
Blazing UFO reported flying over Suffolk, England 14/07/2018 Video, UFO
Blazing UFO reported flying over Suffolk, England 14/07/2018 Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: 7-14-2018 Location of sighting: Suffolk, England This blazing UFO was seen a few days ago over England. The object shoots out flames like a meteor, but does acrobatics. UFOs do sometimes perform for people when they are notices, usually the light ships (pure energy beings) get excited when someone notices them and they do acrobatics, loops, zig zags, which I and my family personally witnessed one night here in Taiwan at midnight. However, this is fiery, which may be fireworks attached to a drone. Maybe a remote control plane with sparklers attached is my thought. Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
Saw strange flying object in distance whilst sitting in our back garden at dusk. Watched it for at least 5 mins. No idea what it was and have seen no media coverage. Viewed S.E. direction from Moats Tye, Stowmarket towards Ipswich, Suffolk, England. Curious if anyone else saw it?!
In early 2005, the late Rob Riggs – the author of the book In the Big Thicket, and who I had first met in the summer of 2003 – telephoned me and asked if I would be interested in speaking at a conference he was planning on soon holding in the city of Austin, Texas. The subject was “ghost lights,” and the links between that same phenomenon and sacred sites, stone circles, and Bigfoot-like entities. I replied that, yes, I would definitely be interested. And thus was born the Texas Ghost Lights Conference. It was held at Austin’s First Unitarian Universalist Church on Saturday, June 11. Precisely what the God-fearing folk of the Church thought about a group of Bigfoot-hunting, ghost-light-seeking adventurers descending upon their property, I never learned. But, they didn’t seem to mind at all.
In addition to Rob and me, the other lecturers were James Bunnell and Paul Devereux. James has an interesting background: the author of two books on the famous “Marfa Lights,” namely Night Orbs and Seeing Marfa Lights. he was an aeronautical and mechanical engineer by profession, and retired in 2000 from BAE Systems as Director of Mission Solutions for various U.S. Air Force programs. Like me, Paul is a Brit. He’s a longstanding, prestigious figure in the field of ghost-light style phenomena.
Big Thicket National Preserve
In addition to organizing the conference, Rob had also put into place something that he termed the Bragg Road Project. Essentially, it was a road-trip to the Texas-based Big Thicket (a hotbed for “ghost lights”)that he had planned for the day after the Austin gig. The idea was to travel down to the woods of east Texas and hang out in the area for two nights, in the event that something – be it a ghost light or a Bigfoot, or both if we were that lucky – decided to make an appearance.
Early on what turned out to be a bright and sunny Sunday morning, me, Rob, James, Paul, S. Miles Lewis of the Austin-based Scientific Anomaly Institute, and two conference attendees, Renee and Nancy, met at a prearranged location for our journey into the unknown. I can hardly say that the trip was one of proportions that would have made Jack Kerouac proud. But nevertheless, we were on a mission and everyone was fired up about what we might uncover, and so our convoy set off in earnest. It was late afternoon when we finally arrived in the town of Kountze, where all of us had reservations at the local Super 8. And, after a shower and a Mexican dinner, we were forest-bound. And this was where, as was so often the case, things got very strange.
Bragg Road can be an eerie location during daylight – as I had found to be so when I ventured deep into the Big Thicket with Rob in the summer of 2003. At night and under the spotlight of a full moon, however, it was truly spooky. Not in a scary sense, as I always relish the opportunity to check out such places, but just from the perspective of believing that quite possibly anything could happen here. Of course, it’s important to note that more than a few people have mistaken distant car headlights for the legendary lights (as Andy Collins notes at this link). But, given that some sightings have occurred within just a feet of eyewitnesses demonstrates that not all cases can be written off so easily.
With flashlights in hand, we began a walk through the darkened woods, with Rob pointing out to us various locations where wild men, Bigfoot, and, of course, ghost lights had been seen and reported for decades. For twenty minutes or so, we walked around, seemingly forever trying to avoid the overwhelming mass of mosquitoes that surrounded us, while at the same time negotiating the thick blanket of ancient and mighty trees that dominated the area. And then, suddenly, it happened. We were on our way back to the vehicles to grab a bite to eat and some drinks when, as we entered a clearing in the trees, a basketball-sized bright light floated over us at a height of about thirty-five feet. It was moving from right to left, and sailed slowly yet purposefully on its journey. The ghost light was present for barely a handful of seconds, but it was definitely there.
Due to work, I was unable to stay for the second night, but when I got back to Dallas and turned on the computer, I read an email from Rob that was of true jaw-dropping quality. The odd experiences of the first night in the Big Thicket were apparently not isolated. As Rob said: “Renee had a frightening experience Monday night. We split up into teams of two and spread out about a mile apart. Renee was paired with Nancy. Nancy walked down the road briefly away from Renee. Renee said she then heard something walking in the woods off the road directly behind her that sounded large. She said whatever it was, was large enough to snap twigs, and she said that it seemed to be moving stealthily, as if it were trying to sneak up on her. She panicked, locked herself into her van and drove off, leaving Nancy to fend for herself.”
Rob continued: “Several hours later she was still shaken and still had goose bumps. Such irrational panic is not characteristic of Renee. She is a ghost hunter and has many times been in creepier situations than being on Bragg Road. She has even gone to cemeteries alone just to test her mettle. There are theories that the creatures deliberately provoke such panic reactions through chemicals in their scent or by mental projection of energy.”
He concluded: “Renee, Nancy and I also saw a peculiar light. It looked somewhat like a firefly but actually left a solid streak 10 – 15 feet in length that was brilliant bluish-white in color. It happened near a power line, and it was suggested that it might have been some kind of surge on the power line itself. But what could cause such a surge? That, in itself would be suggestive of a electromagnetic anomaly.”
Rob’s research into the matter of Texas’ ghost lights continued until his death in 2015.
Well, it happened and we’re all still here. Egyptian archaeologists have opened the giant, mysterious black marble sarcophagus recently unearthed in Alexandria, and…
A whole lot of stinking sewage water fell out. No curse, no vengeful mummy, no evil necromancer. No hieracosphinx, no serpopard, no Ammit, damnit. Not one Nazi’s face melted off. I guess we can’t be too disappointed, though – the world is still here and only somewhat doomed, as opposed to covered in locusts and horrible man-eating beasts out of Egyptian mythology. So what exactly was found in this once-in-a-lifetime archaeological find?
The usual. Just some old dead people.
According to initial reports, three skeletons and a whole lot of “red-brown sewage water” which filled observers’ nostrils with what the BBC describes as “an unbearable stench” that sent researchers fleeing from the inspection scene entirely. At least that much was awesome.
The sarcophagus was opened by a specially-appointed committee of specialists on behalf of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities. Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, says that while the find is unique, it’s ultimately a little disappointing:
We found the bones of three people, in what looks like a family burial… Unfortunately the mummies inside were not in the best condition and only the bones remain. We’ve opened it and, thank God, the world has not fallen into darkness. I was the first to put my whole head inside the sarcophagus… and here I stand before you. I am fine.
Yeah, fine so far, Mostafa. Sometimes ancient Egyptian curses can take a few decades to catch up with you. Come back to me when you develop prostate cancer in 16 years.
It took 16 years for the Curse of the Pharaohs to catch up with Howard Carter.
Actually, don’t; I don’t wish that upon anyone. I’m just bitter and a little disappointed. Like most of us, I was hoping something truly marvelous would have been inside of this mysterious, imposing sarcophagus. Instead, it appears that this was some type of ritual burial for three soldiers who served during the time of the Pharaohs. It’s unknown who they were, but one of the skulls bears an arrow injury, suggesting a warrior. Still, given the nature of their burial, it’s likely they have an interesting story to tell.
I guess it’s great and all that the world is still here, but deep down I was hoping for an evil wizard. Just once before I die, I want to witness the awe-inspiring, spacetime-bending power of an ancient undead necromancer. Is that too much to ask?
Mysterious radio signals have long been a mainstay of science fiction tales, but lately they’ve also been the subject of serious scientific scrutiny. Radio bursts originating from deep spacehave become a hot topic in the astronomy world, and while most of these appear to be naturally occurring, you never know when one of them turns out to be something far stranger. At least, we can hope one of them will. Here on boring planet Earth, mysterious radio signals often pop up in the form of pirated transmissions broadcasting strange, cryptic messages. While most of these turn out to be merely hoaxes or pranks, many of them also remain unexplained.
A radio telescope at the Parkes Observatory.
Just this week, physicists studying cosmic rays in Antarctica have uncovered a strange radio signal that appears to have a mysterious origin. The physicists are part of the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) program, a project which uses balloons to locate and identify signals produced by strange particles travelling from deep space as they collide with the Earth. However, this latest signal appears to originate from deep within the Earth itself. Is this a lost race of molemen and molewomen’s attempt at communication with us surface dwellers?
Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear so. Or maybe fortunately, those things look like they could eat a human brain or two. According to a press release issued by Physics World, the strange radio signal is likely the product of neutrinos colluding with atomic nuclei deep within Antarctic ice sheets. These collisions produce explosions of charged particles which emit radio waves that then bounce through 7,000 kilometers of ice and the Earth’s crust and into the air where ANITA balloons detect them. Neutrinos are a little-understood cousin of the other subatomic particles which don’t seem to interact with other particles and fields as much as other elementary particles do. Scientists believe neutrinos might someday be used in deep space communications, as they are capable of travelling through matter and across long distances unscathed.
Peter Gorham of the University of Hawaii is one of the ANITA researchers behind this discovery. Gorham notes that while it’s possible human activity created these anomalous radio signals, the data more likely point to this extremely rare interaction between deep space neutrinos and Antarctic ice sheets. “It’s still possible that the events are due to two isolated people, each transmitting a single radio pulse very far from the nearest Antarctic base, Gorham says. “But that seems very unlikely at this stage.”
The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory located 2100m underground in a mine in Canada.
It’s pretty amazing to think about: strange, exotic particles flying through unimaginably vast reaches of space only to penetrate deep within the Earth and explode into a shower of radio waves which are then detected by a weather balloon. I consider myself a proponent of science and scientific explanation, but the history of science and scientific knowledge proves that each explanation isn’t necessarily the definitive answer, but only the best answer we have at the time given current methods, instruments, and data. Could there be an even more exotic explanation for these anomalous radio signals originating from deep within the Earth that we haven’t even considered yet?
REAL X-FILES Secret files reveal MI5 spent 50 YEARS hunting UFOs in bid to steal alien tech to make super-weapons – and feared Russia already had flying saucers
REAL X-FILES - Secret files reveal MI5 spent 50 YEARS hunting UFOs in bid to steal alien tech to make super-weapons – and feared Russia already had flying saucers
Alien experts claim there have been more than 100,000 recorded UFO sightings worldwide in the past 100-plus years
By Sofia Petkar
A SECRET dossier has revealed that British spies spent at least 50 years hunting UFOs in the hope of stealing alien technology.
The declassified files confirm that British spies were desperate to build their own super-weapons amid fears either China or the Soviet Union had already impounded a UFO.
GETTY - CONTRIBUTOR
British spies worries that the Soviet Union or China had already managed to capture a UFO
The other worked in the background and did the “real work” of sending spies to investigate these claims.
These ‘UFO desks’ ran until 1997, until Whitehall expressed concern that security services “investigating X files stuff such as alien abductions” had started becoming diverted from their main duties.
While the desks were shut down with immediate effect, officials wanted to know if anything had been learned over the past half century that could be useful for military purposes.
GETTY - CONTRIBUTOR
British spies were desperate to build their own super-weapons using alien technology
A report entitled “UAPs” (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) in the UK Air Defence Region set to be released after being declassified.
The report makes up a part of three files running to more than 1,000 pages which were held back from the UFO records earmarked for transfer to the National Archives as part of the Open Government project from 2008 to 2013.
Earlier this year, complete set of redacted copies was released to investigative journalist and university lecturer Dr David Clarke, ahead of their imminent release to the National Archives.
Dr Clarke was also the curator for The National Archives UFO project from 2008–13, and regularly comments in national and international media on UFOs.
These documents revealed how the RAF expressed great interest in finding UFOs to help come up with new and innovative ways of being their enemies during the Cold War.
They also reveal how spies were given tips on what to look out for when identifying foreign objects.
GETTY - CONTRIBUTOR
During that time, intelligence services had two desks revolving around aliens and UFOs
According to one unnamed commander documented in the dossier, particular attention needed be paid to any aircraft behaving “like a UFO”.
He said: “Look out for high velocities, sharp manoeuvre, stationary 'flight', and few radar returns.”
Dr Clarke said: “The MoD have been desperately trying to delay the release of these formerly secret and highly sensitive papers for more than a decade.
“Even though they have been partly censored they can't conceal the fact the UK military were interested in capturing UFO technology - or what they coyly refer to as 'novel weapon technology'.
“And the files reveal they were desperate to capture this technology - wherever it came from - before the Russians or the Chinese got hold of it first.
“Although this was 1997, Russia was still regarded as undefeated enemy with a weapons programme regarded as a threat to the West.”
Alien experts claim there have been more than 100,000 recorded UFO sightings worldwide in the past 100-plus years.
Secret Documents Reveal MI5 Used To Hunt For Alien UFO Technology To Make Super Weapons
Secret Documents Reveal MI5 Used To Hunt For Alien UFO Technology To Make Super Weapons
Alien enthusiasts claim there have been over 100,000 recorded UFO sightings around the world in the past 100-plus years.
A secret collection of papers containing detailed information has reportedly revealed that British investigators spent at least 50 years searching for UFOs in the hope of stealing alien technology. They were looking to build their super-weapons amid fears that either the Soviet Union or China had already impounded a UFO.
Dated between 1947 and 1997, the cache suggests intelligence services had not only one but two desks based around the idea of space alien visitors to Earth.
While one desk has been known to the public for taking calls from concerned citizens about possible UFO sightings, the other one worked in the background. The alleged secret office did the real work of sending spies to look into UFO claims.
Both UFO desks ran until 1997 when Whitehall expressed concern that services had begun becoming diverted from their primary duties. After the shutdown, officials wanted to know what had been learned out of the two desks that could be useful for military purposes.
A report titled Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) in the Air Defence Region of UK is set to be released after being declassified.
The report includes three files containing more than a thousand pages that were kept secret from the UFO records, which are scheduled for transfer to the National Archives as part of the Open Government project from 2008 to 2013.
The complete set of redacted copies was released ahead earlier this year to investigative journalist and Dr David Clarke, a university lecturer and curator for The National Archives UFO project from 2008 to 2013.
These documents revealed that the RAF expressed great interest in discovering UFOs to help come up with innovative ways to gain military advantage. Also disclosed is how spies were provided with tips about what to look out when identifying unknown objects.
Documented in the dossier is particular attention to be paid to any aircraft suspected to be a UFO.
One unnamed commander instructed to look out for high velocities, few radar returns, stationary flight and sharp manoeuvre.
Dr Clarke accused the MoD of desperately trying to delay the release of these formerly secret papers for over a decade.
He said that the documents had been partly censored but the fact the UK military was interested in getting UFO technology can’t be concealed.
New UFO Drama Series “Project Blue Book”: First Look Trailer
New UFO Drama Series “Project Blue Book”: First Look Trailer
First Look Trailer – HISTORY’s new UFO drama series “Project Blue Book” starring Aidan Gillen (“Game of Thrones”) and Michael Malarkey (“The Vampire Diaries”). Coming this Winter.
The USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group tracked UFOs not just one but many occasions that lasted for several days off the coast of San Diego in 2004. A secret group investigating UFOs within the Pentagon turned out to be the investigative team of the event.
The existence of this UFO project caught the attention of media organizations worldwide, including the New York Times that published an article on the subject in December 2017.
Many articles worldwide mentioned this case and included video of one of the UFOs from a jet fighter’s infrared camera. However, the government shared very little official information beyond the video.
Former head of the UFO program Luis Elizondo and one of the fighter pilots in the incident David Fravor have come forward in media interviews.
Unfortunately, no documents have been made public. Recently, Las Vegas’8 News Now’s I-Team released an alleged leaked report they got from the incident and it was shocking.
Below are recent interviews with David Fravor by filmmaker Jeremy Corbel and with Luis Elizondo from Las Vegas 8 News Now.
Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier is melting, thanks to warming waters from below. What’s more, a recent study has discovered a volcano beneath the glacier.
This article is republished with permission from GlacierHub. This post was written by Andrew Angle.
West Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier (PIG) is the fastest-melting glacier in Antarctica, making it the single biggestcontributor to global sea-level rise. The main driver of this rapid loss of ice is the thinning of the PIG from below by warming ocean waters due to climate change. However, a study, published June 22, 2018, in Nature Communications, discovered a volcanic heat source beneath the PIG that is another possible driver of the PIG’s melting.
On the icebreaker RSS James Clark Ross looking toward the Pine Island Glacier on the 2014 expedition
Study lead author Brice Loose spoke to GlacierHub about the research. He said that the study was a result of a larger project funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.K. National Environmental Research Council to
… examine the stability of the Pine Island Glacier from the terrestrial and the ocean side.
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), which includes the PIG, sits on top of the West Antarctic Rift System that includes 138 known volcanoes. It is difficult, however, for scientists to pinpoint the exact location of these volcanoes or the extent of the rift system, because most of the volcanic activity occurs below kilometers of ice.
The Pine Island Glacier from above taken by Landsat Image via NASA.
Warming ocean temperatures due to climate change have long been identified as the primary contributor to the extensive melting of the PIG and other glaciers that transport ice from the WAIS. This melting is largely driven by Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW), which melts the PIG from below and leads to the retreat of its grounding line, the place where the ice meets the bedrock.
To trace CDW around coastal Antarctica, the scientists used helium isotopes, specifically He-3, because CDW is widely recognized as the principal source of He-3 in the waters near the continent. For this study, the scientists used historical data of helium measurements from the Weddell, Ross and Amundsen seas around Antarctica. They looked at the three seas, all of which have CDW, and examined differences in He-3, which could have come from volcanic activity.
By tracing the glacial meltwater produced by the CDW, the researchers discovered a volcanic signal that stood out in their data. The helium measurements utilized were expressed by the percent deviation of the observed data from the atmospheric ratio. For the observed CDW in the Weddell Sea, this deviation was 10.2 percent. In the Ross and Amundsen Seas, it was 10.9 percent. However, HE-3 values gathered by the team during expeditions to the Pine Island Bay in 2007 and 2014 differed from the historical data.
For this data, the percent deviation was considerably higher at 12.3 percent, with the highest values being near the strongest meltwater outflow from the PIG’s front. Additionally, these high helium values coincided with raised neon concentrations, which are usually an indication of melted glacial ice. The helium was also not uniformly distributed. This suggests it originated from a distinct meltwater source and not from across the PIG’s entire front.
With this knowledge in hand, the team of scientists endeavored to identify the source of the HE-3 production. The Earth’s mantle is the largest source of HE-3, although it is also produced in the atmosphere and during past atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons through tritium decay. These two sources, however, could only account for 0.2 percent of the 2014 data.
Another potential source was a fissure in the earth’s crust directly below the PIG, where He-3 could rise from the mantle. However, this source was ruled out as it would have a strong thermal signature, something that was not discovered by mapping expeditions.
Map of He-3 samples around Antartica (yellow = 2007, red = 2014)
The researchers then considered another source: a volcano beneath the PIG itself, where He-3 escapes from the mantle in a process known as magma degassing. The He-3 could be transported by glacial meltwater to the PIG’s grounding line, where the ice meets the underlying bedrock. At this line, the ice shifts due to the ocean tides, allowing the meltwater and the He-3 to be discharged into the ocean.
After identifying a subglacial volcano as the most likely source of the elevated He-3 levels near the PIG’s front, the scientists next calculated the heat released by the volcano in joules per kilogram of sea water at the front of the glacier. It turned out that the heat given off by the volcano constitutes a very small fraction of the overall mass loss of the PIG compared to the CDW, according to Loose.
In total, the volcanic heat was 32 ± 12 joules kg-1, while the heat content of the CDW was much larger at 12 kilojoules kg-1. Nevertheless, if the volcanic heat is intermittent and/or concentrated over a small surface area, it could still have an impact on the overall stability of the PIG by changing its subsurface conditions, said Loose. There is also the possibility that the continued melting of the PIG could lessen the pressure and weight on the volcano, spurring more volcanism and subsequent melting.
The presence of an active volcanic heat source beneath the world’s fastest-melting glacier is a disturbing discovery that threatens to accelerate the PIG’s contribution to future sea-level rise. To develop a better understanding of how the volcano might impact the PIG, Loose stated that future studies should examine how the volcanic signal varies from year to year and attempt to pinpoint the likely location of the volcano itself beneath the ice.
Active volcano discovered beneath Antarctic ice sheet
Bottom line: A recent study discovered a volcano beneath Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier.
Scientists Just Discovered 12 New Jupiter Moons - One Of Them Is On A Collision Course
Scientists Just Discovered 12 New Jupiter Moons - One Of Them Is On A Collision Course
Scientists have discovered 12 new moons that orbit Jupiter, but it appears there is an issue: one moon is on a suicide mission!
Researchers came across the new discovery during a search for the mysterious Planet X said to be hiding outside of Neptune`s orbit. If found it would make it the most distant planet out there.
The researchers found the moons back in March of last year thanks to the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. However, they did not want to report them and kept them quiet for more than a year so they could get confirmation that they were in orbit around Jupiter.
These are images of one of the new moons, named Valetudo. The moon can be seen moving relative to the steady state background of distant stars.
The Discovery of the New Moons Mean Jupiter Now Has 79 in Total
Jupiter, of course, is known for its big amount of moons, but the addition of twelve more means that in total there are 79 moons in orbit around the planet.
Nine of these moons are in an outer group orbiting around Jupiter in retrograde, which means they are traveling in the total opposite direction to the spin of the planet. Scientists believe they are what is left over of the bigger parent bodies probably broke up with they collided with comets, asteroids, and moons.
In prograde orbit around Jupiter, there are two moons, and they are traveling in line with the spin of Jupiter. These are pieces of a bigger moon that were broken in orbit, and these take about one year to go around the planet.
The 12th new moon that scientists discovered has been called the oddball moon as it is less than one kilometer in width with the body circling Jupiter at a distance crossing path with the other new moons found.
The new moon Valetudo was given the name from the great-granddaughter of the Roman god Jupiter, goddess of health and hygiene. Valetudo is on a collision course that could end in destruction the name Vale Tudo is appropriate when using the Portuguese translation, which means “anything goes”, which is a form of full-contact martial arts.
Sheppard said:
“Valetudo is like driving down the highway on the wrong side of the road. It is moving prograde while all the other objects at a similar distance from Jupiter are moving retrograde. Thus head-on collisions are likely.”
NEW MOON, I SAW YOU ORBIT ALONE Of 12 recently discovered Jovian moons (illustrated in bold orange, blue and green), one orbits in the opposite direction of its neighbors (arrows show orbit direction). Four moons discovered by Galileo are also shown (purple).
ROBERTO MOLAR CANDANOSA/CARNEGIE INSTITUTION FOR SCIENCE
Astronomers have found 12 more moons around Jupiter, and one is really weird. While 11 orbit in the same direction as their nearest neighbors, one doesn’t, potentially putting it on a fatal collision course.
“It’s driving down the highway on the wrong side of the road,” says planetary scientist Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.
Astronomers Just Discovered 12 NEW Moons Around Jupiter
Sheppard and colleagues found the moons while looking for something else entirely: a putative planet that could exist beyond the orbit of Neptune, known colloquially as Planet Nine (SN: 7/23/16, p. 7). During a survey in 2017 of the most distant objects in the solar system using the Victor Blanco 4-meter telescope in Chile, Jupiter happened to be visible in the same area of sky that the team was searching during one of its observing runs. “Might as well kill two birds with one stone,” Sheppard thought.
The researchers found a dozen objects moving around the sun at the same rate as Jupiter. Follow-up observations confirmed the moons’ existence and orbits: two inner moons that orbit in the same direction that Jupiter spins, nine outer moons that orbit the planet in the opposite direction and one oddball traveler. The researchers announced two of the moons in 2017 and the remaining 10 on July 16.
The motions of all but the oddball are normal for Jovian moons, which now number a whopping 79. Scientists think that’s because the inner moons formed from a disk of gas and dust that orbited the giant planet in the solar system’s early days, similar to how the planets formed around the sun (SN: 5/12/18, p. 28). The outer moons were probably free-floating space rocks captured when they came too close, and their opposite orbit was set by the direction that they approached Jupiter from.
But one moon broke the mold. This rock, which the team calls Valetudo for the Roman goddess of health and hygiene, is tiny, only about a kilometer across. It orbits in the same direction as Jupiter’s spin, but alongside the farther-out retrograde moons. As a result, Valetudo is probably doomed to collide with one or more of the other moons someday. The researchers are still calculating when, but they expect it to occur sometime between 100 million and a billion years from now.
Valetudo may be the last remnant of a bigger object that has already withstood several collisions, or of a family of moons that has since been smashed to smithereens. “It’s probably the largest surviving member, if not the only one,” Sheppard says.
Such nonconformist satellites are not rare, notes planetary scientist David Jewitt of UCLA, who was not involved in the new work. “But they are very interesting, because we know that they have been captured by their host planets, but we don't know how, or from where,” he says. Figuring out what oddballs like Valetudo are made of could help nail those details down.
Editor's note: This story was updated July 18, 2018, to clarify that of the 12 newfound moons, two were announced in 2017 and the remaining 10 on July 16.
Ce que la science actuelle sait des extraterrestres
Ce que la science actuelle sait des extraterrestres
Plus que jamais, la quête d’une vie extraterrestre passionne les chercheurs. Succès en Angleterre, «Aliens», publié pour la première fois en français cet été, fait le point sur ce que l’on sait de nos potentiels voisins de galaxie
Virginie Nussbaum
Depuis près de soixante ans, la science a les yeux rivés sur les étoiles. En 1959, le SETI, institut dédié à la recherche d’intelligence extraterrestre, voyait le jour et, depuis, des millions de kilomètres de cosmos ont été scannés et inondés d’émissions radio.
Mais où en est-on aujourd’hui? L’Univers est-il désespérément vide, ou y a-t-il des raisons de croire que nous ne sommes pas seuls? Pour faire le point, Jim Al-Khalili, professeur britannique de physique théorique à l’Université de Surrey, s’est entouré d’une douzaine de scientifiques de tous bords.
Dans Aliens, vendu à plus de 50 000 exemplaires en Grande-Bretagne et publié cet été dans sa version française, ils décortiquent les quelques certitudes et nombreuses inconnues qui subsistent quant à nos potentiels voisins de galaxie.
Le Temps: Sommes-nous à un tournant dans notre exploration de l’espace?
Jim Al-Khalili: On peut dire ça, oui! Ces dernières années, des avancées dans le domaine de l’astronomie ont rendu la recherche de vie dans l’espace… faisable, tout simplement. Au lieu de nous contenter de pointer un radiotélescope en espérant capter quelque chose d’intéressant, les technologies actuelles nous permettent d’identifier des planètes semblables à la Terre, à l’image de Proxima b, découverte en 2016 à quelques années-lumière d’ici. En 2020, un nouveau télescope, nommé James-Webb, promet d'étudier encore plus précisément la lumière venue d'autres systèmes stellaires. Des recherches pour le moins respectables, alors que les scientifiques, qui les associaient aux théories du complot et aux petits hommes verts hollywoodiens, les ont longtemps dédaignées.
Le cinéma, comme la littérature, s’empare en effet inlassablement du sujet. Pourquoi cette fascination pour la figure de l’alien?
Parce qu’elle nous renvoie à une question fondamentale: sommes-nous seuls dans l’Univers? Et d’où venons-nous? Pour les croyants c’est simple, Dieu a créé cette planète et nous avec. Mais, scientifiquement, nous aimerions comprendre pourquoi, dans un espace que l’on sait immense, nous ferions office d’exception.
Au contraire, on entend souvent que, au vu de l’immensité de l’Univers, nous devrions avoir un alter ego quelque part…
Ce qui est vrai, c’est que les planètes réunissant tous les ingrédients favorables à la vie – l’eau, l’énergie et le carbone – sont bien plus nombreuses qu’on l’imaginait. On pense même que, sous leurs couches de glace, les lunes de Saturne et Jupiter pourraient être des candidates! Mais ça ne signifie pas pour autant que la vie y soit née comme sur la Terre, ou ait jamais dépassé le stade de cellule microbienne unique.
Car notre propre évolution est le résultat d’une longue chaîne de coïncidences.
Exactement. Et puisque nous n’avons que notre exemple sous la main, nous ne pouvons pas encore chiffrer statistiquement la mince probabilité que ce cas se reproduise. Personnellement, j’ai la conviction que nous observerons des signes de vie microbienne extraterrestre de mon vivant encore.
Et si nous détectons effectivement des voisins, à quoi pourraient-ils ressembler?
Nous avons tendance à tout antropomorpher: notre alien typique est un E.T., avec deux bras, tout au plus quelques doigts en moins… alors que notre apparence est totalement accidentelle! Le filmPremier contact, sorti en 2016, est intéressant à ce niveau car il représente les extraterrestres sous la forme de pieuvres immenses, dont l’intelligence se révèle très éloignée de la nôtre. En réalité, il y a plus de chances que les extraterrestres ne nous ressemblent pas du tout.
Ou qu’ils prennent la forme de machines, comme le suggère votre livre?
En effet. Pensez à l’humanité: nous utilisons déjà des robots alors que nous en sommes au tout début de nos explorations. Il y a fort à parier que, d’ici à quelques centaines d’années, l’intelligence artificielle voyagera pour nous, car elle survit dans des conditions extrêmes. Logiquement, ceux qui nous rendraient visite aujourd’hui devraient être en avance sur nous technologiquement parlant. Il est donc probable qu’ils nous apparaissent sous la forme de machines en silicone plutôt que d’êtres biologiques.
Il se pourrait que les aliens nous aient devancés au point d’avoir déjà disparu…
C’est possible. Sur l’échelle temporelle du cosmos, notre fenêtre de recherche est plus qu’étroite. Peut-être que des civilisations se sont formées puis éteintes il y a des milliards d’années, et que nous avons tout bonnement manqué la fête.
Votre livre pose une autre question intéressante: s’ils existent, pourquoi les aliens entreraient-ils en contact avec nous?
Dans les scénarios hollywoodiens, on les imagine nous attaquer, nous manger ou encore nous utiliser à des fins de procréation. Pourtant, rien ne peut nous assurer que cette forme de vie serait elle aussi basée sur l’ADN, et donc que ces interactions auraient un sens. Et que pourrait-on posséder que cette civilisation avancée n’ait pas déjà? Non, je pense que sa motivation serait avant tout la curiosité. Vouloir savoir et comprendre n’est pas un trait humain, mais un trait d’intelligence.
Pour résumer, nous investissons du temps et des sommes folles à chercher quelque chose d'hautement improbable...
Cet argument revient régulièrement, dans toutes les branches scientifiques: pourquoi rechercher le boson de Higgs au Cern plutôt qu'une cure contre le cancer? Mais comprendre le monde et comment il fonctionne est ce qui nous rend humain. Et nous continuerons à le faire.
Aliens: ce que la science sait de la vie dans l’Univers, sous la direction de Jim Al-Khalili, Quanto, 2018, 320p.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Alien Planets Without Oxygen Could Still Be Home To Extraterrestrial Life
Alien Planets Without Oxygen Could Still Be Home To Extraterrestrial Life
Scientists should not quickly rule out planets without oxygen in the quest for alien life. Researchers said these no-oxygen worlds could in fact be filled with microbial life. ( NASA/JPL )
The search for extraterrestrial life should not disregard planets with zero oxygen, as these other worlds may just be teeming with microbial life.
A team of researchers has found huge fluctuations in oxygen levels of ancient Earth that took place before the Great Oxidation Event.
They believe the same fluctuations could be happening in other planets, which means it is possible that planets with undetectable oxygen could be home to simple microorganisms that dominated the Earth a few billion years ago.
The Great Oxidation Event
Researchers at the University of Washington have found that, for hundreds of millions of years before the Great Oxidation Event, oxygen levels varied tremendously.
Around 3.5 billion years ago, the only life forms on the planet were one-celled microorganisms, such as the blue-green algae called cyanobacteria.
These simple microbes evolved a way to make their own food by using sunlight to create sugar out of water and carbon dioxide. The process, called photosynthesis, created oxygen as a waste product, which the bacteria released into the atmosphere.
Over a billion years, some experts believe the one-celled cyanobacteria became multicellular, allowing it to pump more oxygen into the atmosphere in an event that changed the course of the planet.
A Minor Whiff Before The Major Event
The Great Oxidation Event, which is believed to have happened between 3 and 1 billion years ago, is one of the defining moments in Earth's history. Without the rise of oxygen levels, plant and animal species seen today, including humans, would not be around.
However, the researchers say they have found an instance of rising oxygen levels before the Great Oxidation Event took place. This ancient "whiff" shows that oxygenation did not happen in a single geological breath. It was a complex process characterized by ebbs and flows in oxygen levels.
"The production and destruction of oxygen in the ocean and atmosphere over time was a war with no evidence of a clear winner, until the Great Oxidation Event," says lead author Matt Koehler, PhD student in Earth and space sciences.
Implications For The Search For Alien Life
The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could keep researchers involved in the search for alien life from discounting false negatives, such as planets that may not have detectable oxygen levels.
When searching for signs of life in other planets, experts look for biosignatures that increase the possibility of success. One of these is the presence of oxygen. However, just because a planet does not have oxygen does not mean life cannot exist on it.
Ancient Earth, after all, was teeming with bacteria at least a billion years before the planet's oxygen levels rose. The researchers believe it is entirely possible that a planet with no oxygen may just be in the ebb phase of its own oxygenation event.
"One of the strongest atmospheric biosignatures is thought to be oxygen," says coauthor Roger Buick, "but this study confirms that during a planet's transition to becoming permanently oxygenated, its surface environments may be oxic for intervals of only a few million years and then slip back into anoxia."
Rock Samples Show Signs Of Oxygen
By analyzing sediment samples collected at the Jeerinah Formation in Western Australia, Koehler's team found rising oxygen levels that took place 2.66 billion years ago.
The minor oxygenation event lasted 50 million years, which is hardly a blink in geological time, and spanned hundreds of miles across a wide body of water.
The researchers looked for traces of nitrogen isotopes and selenium in the rock layers. Both are indications of the presence of oxygen.
They found a gradual rise in nitrogen isotopes ended by an abrupt disappearance, leading the researchers to believe that oxygen levels gradually rose before immediately dropping off.
They also found traces of selenium in a shallow part of the marine basin, which means the selenium must have come from the land. When oxygen levels are high, more selenium gets drained into the sea through the rusting of rocks and is deposited into ocean sediments.
The samples collected by the researchers show high selenium levels in the sediments, suggesting that there was an oxygen spike in the atmosphere at the time.
In 2007, an international team of researchers also discovered a similar whiff that took place 50 to 100 million years before the Great Oxidation Event.
The asteroid Ryugu as seen by Hayabusa 2 from 40 km away.
JAXA, University of Tokyo, Kochi University, Rikkyo University, Nagoya University, Chiba Institute of Technology, Meiji University, University of Aizu and AIST
It’s been nearly four years since the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa-2 blasted off, heading for a small asteroid that was then known only as 1999 JU3.
Back then, we didn't have many details about 1999 JU3—not even a good picture of the object. But JAXA, the Japanese space agency, still planned to visit it with Hayabusa-2, use explosives to blast debris off its surface, scoop up the fresh asteroid dust and return its cargo back to Earth, after depositing a few mini-rovers on the surface of the asteroid, of course.
The asteroid needed a better name. Eventually it was reborn as Ryugu, the name of the underwater palace of the Dragon God in Japanese mythology. The hero in one Japanese legend visits Ryugu and returns with precious cargo, a trajectory that Hayabusa-2’s creators hope to emulate with more success than the original Hayabusa mission. While that sample-return mission to an asteroid did succeed in bringing back a very small sample of asteroid dust in 2010, the mission encountered a host of obstacles and malfunctions.
Hayabusa-2 started its final approach towards Ryugu on June 3, and the asteroid is starting to come into focus. But it takes time to get a clear picture. In this image, taken on June 10 from 1,500 miles away, Ryugu is a blob just 5 or 6 pixels across.
Ryugu as seen from 1500 km away.
JAXA, University of Tokyo, Kochi University, Rikkyo University, Nagoya University, Chiba Institute of Technology, Meiji University, University of Aizu and AIST
By June 14, Hayabusa-2 was 700 km away, and JAXA researchers were finally able to see the asteroid’s rotation, which is in retrograde—rotating in the opposite direction in relation to the orbit of planets around the Sun. It was also rotating around its vertical axis.
A gif of the asteroid Ryugu as seen from 700 km away.
JAXA, University of Tokyo, Kochi University, Rikkyo University, Nagoya University, Chiba Institute of Technology, Meiji University, University of Aizu and AIST
As the spacecraft gets closer, more details emerge. Researchers found that Ryugu makes a full rotation every 7.5 hours, and found that it’s tapered shape resembled a spinning top. Mission Manager, Makoto Yoshikawa wrote “When I saw these images, I was surprised that Ryugu is very similar in shape to both the destination of the US OSIRIS-REx mission, asteroid Bennu, and also the target of the previously proposed MarcoPolo-R mission by Europe, asteroid 2008 EV5.” Yoshikawa writes. “So far, the asteroids we have explored have been different in shape, so Ryugu and Bennu could be the first time two similar-shaped asteroids have been examined. It will be interesting to clarify exactly what this similarity means scientifically.”
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission is scheduled to begin its approach to the asteroid Bennu in August of this year. Though they are on two separate timelines (OSIRIS-REx launched in 2016, and will spend a year surveying the asteroid), a main goal of both missions is to return a sample of an asteroid to Earth, a project scientists from each mission have been working closely together on to share information.
Images taken by Hayabusa-2 of Ryugu at distances between 220 km and 100 km.
In the most recent photo (seen at the top of this post) an even more detailed image comes into focus, an angular spinning shape pocketed with craters. Project Manager, Yuichi Tsuda compares the shape to the crystalline shape of fluorite, which he says in Japanese is known as the “firefly stone.” The resemblance is pretty uncanny.
Fluorite crystals can bear a striking resemblance to the asteroid Ryugu.
Ryugu is technically classified as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid, but this does not mean you need to worry about it. As Ryan Mandelbaum points out at Gizmodo the ‘potentially hazardous’ designation does not mean that an asteroid is likely to hit Earth any time soon. It could, maybe at some point in the distant future, but it’s being tracked and closely monitored, so we’d have plenty of warning should its path eventually cross our own.
Researchers are interested in Ryugu because it is a C-class asteroid, one of the most common types of asteroids. By analyzing material from the space rock, scientists hope to get a better understanding of how bodies in the solar system, from asteroids to planets, developed.
Hayabusa-2 is scheduled to arrive at Ryugu on June 27, staying about 20 km above the asteroid’s surface. If all goes well, it will gather its first sample sometime between September and October.
Why this blind, catlike robot could transform search and rescue
Why this blind, catlike robot could transform search and rescue
No vision, no problem.
by Sarah Cahlan
MIT's Cheetah 3 robot can climb stairs and step over obstacles without the help of cameras or visual sensors.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Scientists at MIT have created a four-legged robot that can climb debris-ridden stairs and leap almost three feet into the air, but the ominous-looking catlike bot — dubbed "Cheetah 3" — is intended not to hasten the robot apocalypse but to help bring about a new generation of first-responder robots.
As seen in a video released by the university, the 90-pound, retriever-sized robot navigates with touch sensors rather than cameras — a bit like the way humans feel their way when it's too dark to see.
“Cheetah 3 is designed to do versatile tasks such as power plant inspection, which involves various terrain conditions including stairs, curbs and obstacles on the ground,” Sangbae Kim, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and one of the robot's developers, said in a statement.
Kim plans to give Cheetah sight, but for early tests he wanted to keep the robot in the dark. "In order to be as agile as animals, including humans, we need to have a great blind controller first before relying on vision," he told NBC News MACH in an email.
Growing concern over fire risk involving Kia vehicles
Robin Murphy, a professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M University, sees big potential for search-and-rescue robots that maneuver with touch technology. Such bots could navigate in areas shrouded in darkness or obscured by airborne dust, said Murphy, who is not involved in the Cheetah project.
“It would be so great when that technology that they're showing matures and could be added to the robots that are the size of a shoebox,” she said of the MIT researchers' work. Small bots, of course, are able to get inside nooks and crannies too confined for humans — and relay information that human rescuers can then use to extricate victims of building collapses, for example.
“If you just start excavating, you could possibly trigger a secondary collapse that would kill the survivor or another survivor that you haven't found yet,” she said.
Search-and-rescue robots aren't new, but Cheetah 3 is one of many new bots now in development. Last fall, Honda unveiled a five-foot-tall robotthat can rotate its torso 180 degrees in order to climb steep stairs. Last February, the Italian Institute of Technology released a video showing its WALK-MAN humanoid bot wielding a fire extinguisher.
Next year, Kim and his team plan to equip Cheetah 3 with robotic arms that can be controlled by a human operator. They aim to have a commercial version of their bot ready in five years.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
9 UFO Sightings No One Can Explain
9 UFO Sightings No One Can Explain
Krista Carothers
Lots of unidentified flying objects turn out to be weather balloons, clouds, or planes, but there are definitely sightings that can’t be explained away so easily.
Most UFOs don’t stay unidentified
Christoff/Shutterstock
UFO sightings often turn out to have very simple explanations, such as “aircraft, astronomical objects, rocket launches, balloons (escaped party balloons at sunset are particularly effective!), birds, insects, intensely bright squid lights used by Japanese fishermen, and so forth,” saysSeth Shostak, senior astronomer and fellow at theSETI Institute, which is dedicated to exploring the origins of life and intelligence in the universe. In 1973, before he became president, Jimmy Carter reported seeing a UFO, but it’s widely believed to have been the planet Venus. The debris found at Roswell Army Airfield in New Mexico in 1947 turns out to have been from a top-secret experimental spy balloon project that wasn’t declassified for almost half a century.
But not all can be explained away
Ivan Cholakov/Shutterstock
In December 2017, the U.S. Department of Defense acknowledged to The New York Times that it had been running a program focused on investigating unidentified flying objects, or UFOs. The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) received about $22 million in funding between 2007 and when it was shut down in 2012, according to the Pentagon. Two infrared videos were released with the articles that showed an encounter between Navy fighter jets and a UFO off the coast of California in 2004. Commander David Fravor, who was piloting one of the jets, told the paper that after a radio operator asked him to check out a mysterious aircraft, he flew to the specified location and saw the seawater churning below him. A whitish, oval-shaped aircraft was hovering above the water. “It accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Fravor told the Times, admitting that it made him feel “pretty weirded out.” Here are more science mysteries no one has figured out.
Unidentified, but not necessarily alien
Natural Earth Imagery/Shutterstock
Of course, just because there’s no explanation for an event does not mean it was a visit from extraterrestrial intelligence. There are plenty of phenomena that scientists don’t understand—they’re not even sure why ice is slippery. Shostak says he doesn’t know exactly what the AATIP videos show (though he has some ideas), but he’s not convinced that they indicate cosmic visitors: “There’s no explanation for about one-third of the murders in New York City,” he says. “Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean that they weren’t committed by people!”
Still, humans have been spotting mysterious objects in the sky for centuries, with cases increasing dramatically in the middle of the twentieth century, when aviation and the Cold War presumably made people extra wary of unexplained lights in the sky. Here are a few of the most notable examples of encounters that haven’t been solved yet.
China, 11th century
Humannet/Shutterstock
Around the year 1088, Shen Kuo, a well-respected poet and military tactician, wrote a book called Dream Pool Essays (named after his garden estate) that covered his scholarship in astronomy, mathematics, geology, zoology, botany and more. In the book, he describes what might be the first recorded UFO sighting; an object nicknamed “the Pearl” regularly appeared in the sky over Yangzhou province. Its door would open and very bright light would pour out. “The spectacle was like the rising sun, lighting up the distant sky and woods in red,” according to the text.
Mount Rainier, Washington, 1947
Jeff Zenner Photography/Shutterstock
The flying-saucer era can be traced back to a sighting of a UFO that didn’t even look like a saucer. Amateur pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying over Washington on a clear June night when he spotted a flash of bluish light near Mount Rainier. Then he saw more—nine flashes in total. He said the lights moved around, like “the tail of a Chinese kite,” according to a 1967 book about the incident by Ted Bloecher. Arnold at first thought they were jets, then maybe geese, and then he ruled both of those out and did not know what he was looking at. Later, when he described the sight to reporters, he said something about how the lights moved “like a saucer if you skip it across the water.”
Socorro, New Mexico, 1964
jo Crebbin/Shutterstock
By the mid-1960s, UFOs were being investigated by the U.S. government through Project Blue Book, and space alien plots were common in movies and TV shows; TheOuter Limits series started in 1963. When Socorro, New Mexico, police officer Lonnie Zamora heard a loud roaring sound and saw a flame in the sky, he abandoned the speeding car he’d been chasing to check it out. He found a round object in a canyon and saw two figures in white near it, but as he got closer, the object flew away. Investigators from Project Blue Book apparently believed Zamora wasn’t making up the story and weren’t able to come up with a clear explanation (despite the event’s proximity to the White Sands Missile Range). They classified the case as “unidentified.” Find out all the secrets about Area 51 the US government won’t tell you.
Finland, 1969
Jani Riekkinen/Shutterstock
A group of fighter pilots on a navigation flight saw seven objects shaped like disks or balloons hovering about 5,000 feet in the air over a field. As the jets approached, the objects flew off at what the air force pilots called astonishing speed, according to an article in the Finnish Defense Forces’ magazine, Ruotuväki. The incident is the only UFO encounter acknowledged by the country’s air force.
France, 1981
csp/Shutterstock
When the French UFO investigation division (called GEIPAN) released its records to the public in 2007, its website crashed from too many users. One of its most famous unexplained cases happened near the southern village of Trans-en-Provence, where a resident said an 8-foot oval-shaped craft landed on his property and then quickly took off again. It left behind marks, which GEIPAN confirmed appeared to have been made by a heavy object.
New Jersey Turnpike, 2001
T photography/Shutterstock
Several drivers actually pulled off the highway to get a better look at what they described as a group of golden-orange lights moving quietly overhead near the Arthur Kill Waterway. One of the witnesses was a lieutenant from the nearby Carteret Police Department. Air traffic controllers couldn’t come up with any explanations, and the National Weather Service didn’t have any ideas either. Here are more everyday mysteries scientists can’t explain.
Chicago O’Hare International Airport, 2006
Thomas Barrat/Shutterstock
On a cold November afternoon, pilots, ramp workers, mechanics, and United Airlines employees working at or near Concourse C at O’Hare saw what looked like a very unusual aircraft hovering above the airport. All described it as a shiny gray disc, according to the Chicago Tribune, and some thought it was spinning. After several minutes, it shot silently upward and punched a hole in the cloud above. Unfortunately, nobody got a photo or video, and the Federal Aviation Administration said it hadn’t caught anything on its radar systems.
Arizona, 2018
Kenneth Keifer/Shutterstock
Two commercial pilots—one in a Learjet and the other flying an American Airlines plane—both reported seeing an object pass two or three thousand feet over them in Arizona airspace in February. The Federal Aviation Administration released the radio exchanges between the pilots and the air traffic controller and confirmed that it did not know of any other aircraft that was supposed to be in the area at the time, according to Fortune. You’ll also want to check out the 13 weirdest things archaeologists have ever found.
Civilian reports
Andrey Armyagov/Shutterstock
The SETI Institute’s Seth Shostak says he’s received thousands of reports of sightings that witnesses can’t explain. “I hear from members of the public every day who have seen or experienced something they attribute to alien presence,” he says. But he’s not convinced that aliens are invading, and he doesn’t think we should worry. “Keep in mind that there are more than 3,000 satellites in orbit making images of the Earth—many at very high resolution. If we were really being buzzed by extraterrestrial craft, they would be seen by satellites all the time.” Read more about the UFO myths scientists want you to stop believing.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETHet was groot nieuws toen de Marsrover Curiosity van de NASA vorige maand meldde dat hij organische moleculen op Mars gevonden had. In de late jaren 70 had de ruimtevaartorganisatie al gezocht naar sporen van leven op de rode planeet, maar zonder resultaat. Een nieuwe studie zegt nu dat de NASA de organische moleculen ook toen in handen had, maar ze verbrandde. Per ongeluk.
Het was begin vorige maand dat de ontdekking van Curiosity wereldnieuws was. De rover – die al zes jaar rondzwerft op Mars – had organische moleculen gevonden in afzettingsgesteenten van 3 miljard jaar oud. En dat kon erop wijzen dat er ooit leven was op Mars.
Curiosity was niet de eerste rover van de NASA die er op zoek ging naar sporen van leven. In de late jaren 70 stuurde de ruimtevaartorganisatie al eens twee Vikingrobots naar Mars om organische (lees: uit koolstof opgebouwde) moleculen te vinden. De missie moest een makkie worden, want de oppervlakte van de rode planeet werd constant onder vuur genomen door kleine koolstofrijke meteorieten. Sporen van koolstof vinden kon toch geen probleem zijn?
EPAEen foto vn het landschap op Mars, zoals hij genomen werd door Curiosity.
Dat was het wél. Na vijf jaar zoeken had geen van beide Vikings ook maar iets bovengehaald. Een nieuwe studie – die gepubliceerd werd in het wetenschappelijke tijdschrift Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets – zou daar nu een verklaring voor hebben. De koolstof was er de hele tijd, maar de Vikings zouden alle bewijsmateriaal per ongeluk verbrand hebben.
“Er werden in totaal vier stalen geanalyseerd, elk verschillende keren, door ze snel op te warmen tot een van vier temperaturen”, aldus wetenschappers van het Ames Research Center van NASA en het Atmosphere, Media, Spatial Observations Laboratory in Frankrijk die het onderzoek uitvoerden.
500 graden Celsius
De Vikings verhitten hun bodemstalen tot een maximumtemperatuur van 500 graden Celsius om vluchtige organische componenten die er mogelijk in zaten, vrij te laten komen. Die moesten dan waarneembaar zijn in de verdampte bodem. Maar waarom werd er niets gevonden?
NASADe planeet Mars werd midden jaren 70 prachtig gefotografeerd door marssonde Viking 1.
Volgens de onderzoekers van de nieuwe studie kan er nog iets anders gespeeld hebben. Er zou immers nog iets anders in de bodem gezeten hebben, waarop de NASA niet gerekend had. In 2008 ontdekte de Marsrover Phoenix een ongewone stof toen hij door de bodem ging aan de noordpool van de planeet: perchloraat. Dat is een extreem brandbare stof, die op Aarde gebruikt wordt om raketbrandstof te maken en vuurwerk sneller te doen branden. Als die stof op Mars aanwezig was, zou de verhitting in de oven van de Vikings het perchloraat hebben doen ontbranden, waardoor elk spoor van mogelijke organische moleculen meteen vernietigd was.
Bewijs
Als die these klopte, moest er bewijs zijn in de as. Als koolstof en perchloraat samen branden, ontstaat de molecule chloorbenzeen. Toeval wilde dat Curiosity daar sporen van vond tijdens een missie in 2013. Om zeker te zijn, gingen de onderzoekers ook terug naar de Vikings zelf.
Ze doorzochten de data van de robots naar sporen van chloorbenzeen en vonden die. Ze zaten in stalen die door Viking 2 waren genomen en daarop kwamen de onderzoekers tot de conclusie dat de robot ooit organisch materiaal in zijn hand moet hebben gehad, maar het per ongeluk zelf vernietigde.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:HLN.be - Het Laatste Nieuws ( NL)
RUSSIA DESTROYS EXTRATERRESTRIAL DRONES
NASA zou voor het eerst glimp opgevangen kunnen hebben van ster die planeet verslindt - HLN.be
Koen Van De Sype
APEen illustratie die RW Aur A voorstelt, op 450 lichtjaar van de Aarde.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET De NASA zou wel eens voor de allereerste keer een glimp opgevangen kunnen hebben van een jonge ster die een babyplaneet verslindt. De ster in kwestie – RW Aur A – is een paar miljoen jaar oud en bevindt zich op 450 lichtjaar van onze Aarde. Als de waarneming bevestigd wordt, zou het om een buitengewone observatie gaan. Ze kan astronomen meer inzicht geven in de processen rond de ontwikkeling, de vernietiging en het overleven van planeten.
De waarneming werd gedaan door het Chandra X-Ray Observatory van ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA. RW Aur A – dat zich in ruimtevaarttermen met zijn 4.275 biljoen kilometer niet zo heel ver van onze Aarde bevindt – wordt al sinds de jaren 30 van vorige eeuw bestudeerd en astronomen braken er zich het hoofd over waarom het optische licht van de ster zo wisselt met de tijd. Om de paar decennia neemt het licht ongeveer een maand af, waarna het terugkeert.
In 2011 veranderde er echter iets. De ster dimde vaker en voor langere periodes: de eerste keer voor 6 maanden, in 2014 zelfs voor 2 jaar en in januari vorig jaar werd het opnieuw donkerder.
Om een tip van de sluier op te lichten werd Chandra ingeschakeld. Meer bepaald tijdens een optisch heldere periode in 2013 en duistere periodes in 2015 en 2017, toen ook een vermindering van X-stralen werd vastgesteld. Omdat die X-stralen uit de hete buitenste atmosfeer van de ster afkomstig zijn, konden schommelingen in de intensiteit iets meer zeggen over de dichtheid en de samenstellingen van het absorberende materiaal rond de ster.
Het team ontdekte dat de donkere periodes veroorzaakt werden door een dicht gas dat het licht van de ster verduisterde. In 2017 werden er heel veel ijzeratomen uitgestoten, wat aangaf dat de ster minstens 10 keer meer ijzer bevatte dan in de heldere periode in 2013.
Dat ijzer zou ontstaan zijn door een botsing van twee jonge planetaire lichamen, waarvan er zeker eentje groot genoeg was om een planeet te zijn. Puin – met daarin ijzer – van de lichamen viel op de ster, wat een dikke sluier van stof en gas veroorzaakte, dat het licht van de ster tijdelijk dimde.
Interpretatie
“Computersimulaties voorspellen al langer dat planeten op een jonge ster kunnen botsen, maar we hebben dat nog nooit kunnen observeren”, aldus Hans Moritz Guenther van het Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research van het Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Hij leidde de studie. “Als onze interpretatie van de data correct is, zou dit de eerste keer zijn dat we een directe waarneming kunnen doen van een jonge ster die een of meerder planeten verslindt.”
De vorige keren dat het licht van de ster – die ongeveer dezelfde massa heeft als onze relatief oude zon – gedimd werd, zou er iets soortgelijks gebeurd kunnen zijn: botsingen van twee planetaire lichamen of grote resten van eerdere botsingen die tegen elkaar aan knalden en nog verder in kleine stukken gebroken werden.
De resultaten van het onderzoek werden gepubliceerd in het wetenschappelijke tijdschrift Astronomical Journal.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:HLN.be - Het Laatste Nieuws ( NL)
Complotdenkers zijn niet gek. Socioloog legt uit waarom we nog veel van hen kunnen leren
Complotdenkers zijn niet gek. Socioloog legt uit waarom we nog veel van hen kunnen leren
Het merendeel van de complotdenkers is niet gek. En als we hen serieus nemen, kunnen we veel van hen leren. Dat stelt socioloog Jaron Harambam, die zijn proefschrift schreef over complottheorieën.
Hij kwam via de films van Zeitgeist in aanraking met de wereld van de samenzweringstheorieën.
“Daar ging mijn wereld echt van op zijn kop staan,” vertelt hij aan De Correspondent. “Hier werd verteld hoe ons geldsysteem werkt, hoe geld eigenlijk uit het niets wordt gecreëerd.”
“Ik las daar niets over in de reguliere media,” vervolgt hij.
Gelijk
Harambam stoort zich aan het dominante denken van veel wetenschappers en media over complotdenkers.
“Ze pikken een paar figuren uit die complot-scene die het meest extreem zijn en gaan er vervolgens van uit dat alle complotdenkers zo zijn,” zegt hij.
Hij wijst erop dat er complotdenkers zijn die gedegen onderzoek doen en veel dieper graven dan sommige wetenschappers.
“En soms hebben complotdenkers gewoon gelijk, maar krijgen ze dat gelijk pas later,” klinkt het.
Genoeg vragen
Er zijn rond 9/11 bijvoorbeeld nog genoeg vragen over de toedracht en de officiële lezing die nog niet beantwoord zijn.
“Deze complotdenker heeft zijn verhaal niet dichtgetimmerd, maar doet open onderzoek naar die vragen,” zegt hij.
“Hij doet alleen beweringen die hij kan staven en documenteert zijn bevindingen heel secuur,” voegt hij toe.
Totaal onduidelijk
Volgens hem zijn complotdenkers niet de enigen die worstelen met de waarheid. Over de recente gifgasaanval in het Syrische Douma zegt hij: “Wat daar werkelijk gebeurd is, is door allerlei propaganda van verschillende partijen totaal onduidelijk.”
Sommige wetenschappers, politici en media willen ons doen geloven dat er maar één waarheid is, maar die bestaat niet, aldus Harambam.
Mysterious sarcophagus to be opened in two days, Egypt’s MOA says
Mysterious sarcophagus to be opened in two days, Egypt’s MOA says
Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities (MOA) has finally decided to open a mysterious sarcophagus uncovered in Alexandria within the next two days, according to Waad Allah Abu al-Ela, head of the MOA’s project sector.
On July 1 a large black granite sarcophagus was accidentally unearthed in an Alexandrian construction site. It was found at a depth of 5 meters and dates well over 2,000 years ago, likely at the Ptolemaic era between 305 BC and 30 BC.
A man’s head sculpted from Alabaster was also found, likely belonging to the owner of the tomb.
Abu al-Ela said that they will use thick pipes to raise the sarcophagus lid until they can see inside. Once something was found, a specialized restoration team will immediately take over, transferring the contents into an Alexandria museum storage to quickly start restoration procedures.
“If nothing was found inside the sarcophagus and we did not find any inscriptions on the coffin’s body, we will keep it in place until it can be lifted later,” he said.
Speculation ran wild across the globe following the discovery as the unique specifications of the tomb has prompted some experts to conclude the sarcophagus belongs to none other than Alexander the Great, who’s tomb has yet to be uncovered. Born in 356 BC and living until 323 BC, Alexander was one of the world’s greatest conquerors and ruled the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon.
The MOA considers this the biggest coffin unearthed yet from Alexandria, as it weights around 20 to 30 tons, with dimensions that are 185 cm tall, 265 cm long and 165 cm wide.
As if that wasn’t enough, Ayman Ashmawy, an MOA official stated that to their surprise the layer of mortar between the coffin’s lid and the body was undamaged, meaning it had not been opened since it was buried 2000 years ago, an incredible rare occasion.
However Abu al-Ela denounced the speculation, stating that the tomb is far too poor and weak to belong to someone like Alexander the Great. He also stated that the weight of the sarcophagus is not abnormal, as coffins weighting more than 90 tons have been found in the past.
Mustafa Waziri, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities supported Abu Ela’s doubt, and stated that while the coffin might not be suitable for Alexander, it could still belong to an ancient Egyptian noble.
Mysterieuze zwarte sarcofaag uit Alexandrië wordt na 2000 jaar opengemaakt. Wat gaan archeologen aantreffen?
Mysterieuze zwarte sarcofaag uit Alexandrië wordt na 2000 jaar opengemaakt. Wat gaan archeologen aantreffen?
De mysterieuze sarcofaag die onlangs in Alexandrië is ontdekt, wordt vandaag of morgen geopend. Dat heeft het Egyptische ministerie van Oudheden besloten.
Begin deze maand werd bij toeval een gigantische zwarte sarcofaag gevonden in een bouwput in Alexandrië.
De graftombe bevond zich op een diepte van vijf meter en is ruim 2000 jaar oud. Er werd ook een albasten hoofd van een man gevonden, waarschijnlijk van de eigenaar van de tombe.
Alexander de Grote
Met behulp van zware pijpen zal het deksel van de sarcofaag worden gehaald. De eventuele inhoud van de tombe wordt vervolgens overgebracht naar een museum in Alexandrië.
Na de ontdekking werd op internet druk gespeculeerd over de vondst. Sommige experts claimden dat de sarcofaag toebehoort aan niemand minder dan Alexander de Grote, wiens tombe nog altijd niet is ontdekt.
Het gaat om de grootste grafkist die ooit in Alexandrië is opgegraven. De tombe weegt 20 tot 30 ton en is ruim 2,5 meter lang.
Extreem zeldzaam
Opvallend genoeg is de laag cement tussen het deksel en de grafkist onbeschadigd, wat betekent dat de tombe in ruim 2000 jaar niet geopend is. Dat is extreem zeldzaam.
Volgens het ministerie gaat het niet om de tombe van Alexander de Grote. In het verleden zijn grafkisten van meer dan 90 ton gevonden.
Are we alone in the universe? Could alien life exist, and if so, is there a reasonable explanation for why—scientifically speaking—we’ve never seen any evidence for it?
This is a question many have asked over time, although it is most famously attributed to physicist Enrico Fermi, for whom the so-called “Fermi Paradox” is named. The general premise has to do with what appears to be the contradictory nature of high probability for the existence of alien life, versus the paltry evidence to support it.
As the name suggests, the idea is famously attributed to Enrico Fermi, and was suggested under circumstances of such fame in the scientific literature that they border the mythical. As the story goes, Fermi was on his lunch break with fellow Los Alamos employees Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York in 1950, when discussion about a funny little cartoon depicting dumpster-diving aliens returning from a visit to New York caught their imagination. Musing more broadly on the subject of aliens, Fermi is said to have asked, “where is everybody?”
Los Alamos National Laboratory (Public Domain)
It was a decidedly scientific question, despite its simplicity: where is the evidence of aliens, if it otherwise seems so likely that we aren’t alone in the universe?
Taking a stab at this famous conundrum, a recent paper published by a team of Oxford researchers with the University’s Future of Humanity Institute argues that the absence of evidence may, in fact, actually be evidence of absence: we may be alone after all.
The problem, researchers Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord argue, has a lot to do with human expectations, which build on earlier models for the likelihood of whether life exists elsewhere; namely the Drake equation, which supposes a decent probability that alien civilizations exist, which are technologically advanced to the degree they would be potentially observable to us.
As stated in a portion of the paper’s abstract:
We show that this conflict arises from the use of Drake-like equations, which implicitly assume certainty regarding highly uncertain parameters. We examine these parameters, incorporating models of chemical and genetic transitions on paths to the origin of life, and show that extant scientific knowledge corresponds to uncertainties that span multiple orders of magnitude. This makes a stark difference. When the model is recast to represent realistic distributions of uncertainty, we find a substantial ex-ante probability of there being no other intelligent life in our observable universe, and thus that there should be little surprise when we fail to detect any signs of it. This result dissolves the Fermi paradox, and in doing so removes any need to invoke speculative mechanisms by which civilizations would inevitably fail to have observable effects upon the universe.
As Vox reports, “the paper’s authors do not appear to be making any definitive claim about whether or not aliens exist; simply, our current knowledge across the seven parameters suggests a high likelihood of us being alone,” noting that with new forthcoming information, the Oxford team “would update that likelihood accordingly.”
Naturally, criticisms will arise from such a claim. To consider just a few of them here, it seems difficult (even in probabilistic terms) to suggest the unlikelihood of alien life elsewhere given the expansiveness of the universe, let alone the fact that so little of it has been explored by humans. Also, this isn’t the only solution to Fermi’s paradox that has appeared recently; there are constantly a variety of contrasting viewsabout what might, or might not, explain it.
Sure, Frank Drake’s famous aforementioned equation also focused on the question of alien life, and more specifically, those civilizations which would be sophisticated enough that any evidence for their existence would be detectable by us. While we might expect that a significantly advanced alien civilization would leave an easily discernible cosmic footprint, it may just the opposite: what if our cosmic neighbors have advanced to the point that they employ what we might call “cleaner,” energy sources and other sustainable technologies… and thus, maybe they’re less easily detected, as well?
Bottom line, it’s nearly impossible to conceive of what alien life and their technology would be like without anthropomorphizing the argument (that is, projecting our own ideas, values, and expectations onto things). However, there are at least a few other problems with the Oxford study, one of which has to do with what Fermi actually said about aliens in the first place.
Fermi’s ID photo from his years at Los Alamos (Public Domain).
The paper leads off, naturally, with the famous story of the Fermi lunch at Los Alamos. “While working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1950,” the paper reads, “Enrico Fermi famously asked his colleagues: ‘Where are they?’ ” Although it’s a famous and often-cited story, some have questioned whether it’s entirely true and accurate. Robert H. Gray, writing for Scientific Americanin 2016, noted that Fermi’s fellow diners at the famous lunchtime discussion had a pretty clear memory of the conversation when asked about it years later, and noted that Fermi hadn’t been merely discussing where all the aliens were. More specifically, they had been talking about interstellartravel, and why there was so little evidence in the specific form of alien spacecraft:
Both York and Teller seemed to think Fermi was questioning the feasibility of interstellar travel—nobody thought he was questioning the possible existence of extraterrestrial civilizations. So the so-called Fermi paradox—which does question the existence of E.T.—misrepresents Fermi’s views. Fermi’s skepticism about interstellar travel is not surprising, because in 1950 rockets had not yet reached orbit, much less another planet or star.
All discussion of UFOs aside (since, to date, there is nothing that conclusively proves that these objects are in any way related to alien spacecraft), the minor detail of what Fermi actually meant may not be enough to change the outcome of the Oxford study’s findings, which purportedly employed “millions” of logarithmic simulations to arrive at the mathematical conclusion that we’re 53 to 99.6 percent likely to be the only civilization in the galaxy. Further, we run a 39 to 85 percent chance of being the only intelligent life in the entire observable region of the universe.
However, if we consider that the basic averages of the Oxford study boil down to there being roughly a 50% chance that we’re alone in the universe, our potential desolation still amounts to a coin flip: either we’ve got some interstellar neighbors out there somewhere, or we do not. We simply don’t know yet.
So maybe it’s a little too soon to be cashing in on whether aliens exist or not; we still have an awful lot of the universe we’ve yet to explore, and innumerable scientific advances that will be required before we can embark on our ultimate journey. For the time being, maybe it’s best to keep an open mind, and see what the innovations of the coming years have to say about what may await us out in that great and final frontier.
Our planet continues to change due to the various forcesfalling under the blanket term of climate change. While this obviously poses challenges and threats the likes of which humanity hasn’t seen since perhaps the last Ice Age, there are a few positive effects that help lessen the blow of witnessing the beginning of a new, hot and decidedly wet era of human history.
Remember that awesome Kevin Costner movie? Yeah, it’s going to be like that.
As Earth changes around us, strange animal sightings are becoming more common in populated areas likely thanks to loss of habitat and food sources. Along those same lines, the melting Arctic and Antarctic sea ices are revealing new, untouched areas of the Earth possibly containing entirely new forms of life.
In the archaeological world, a rapidly changing Earth has meant that many ancient mysteries have begun to reveal themselves from below the ground or the bottom of the seas. The latest case comes out of Ireland’s Boyne Valley where a harsh drought has meant a sharp decline in native grass and scrub plants. With that ground-covering vegetation out of the way, historians conducting aerial drone photography in the area have been able to discover a mysterious ancient ringed structure lying literally right under their feet.
The Boyne Valley
The structure appears to be composed of concentric rings, the largest of which is about 200 meters in diameter. Like other ancient henges, the rings are composed of post holes, implying that this was once some sort of walled enclosure. Anthony Murphy, founder of Mythical Ireland, says the discovery was a complete surprise to even the most seasoned local researchers:
We couldn’t believe it to be honest. It soon became apparent that were looking at something very very exciting. I was aware of the possibility that previously unrecorded things might show up, but I didn’t think they’d show up in the Boyne Valley because it’s been under intense scrutiny for the past few decades by archaeologists. Only because of the drought has it become visible.
The discovery was made not farm from Brú na Bóinne, or Boyne Valley tombs. The tombs are a UNESCO World Heritage site and date back some five or six thousand years.
The Newgrange burial mound at Boyne Valley was constructed with a network chambers and passages.
Like other Neolithic monuments, the Boyne Valley site consists of burial mounds, henges, and earthworks. Its overall purpose or use remains a mystery, though many of the structures are believed to have been used for archaeoastronomical rituals or timekeeping.
Dozens of Long White Structures On Moons Surface Found, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Dozens of Long White Structures On Moons Surface Found, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of discovery: March 2014 , but revisiting today. Coordinates of discovery: 3°53'18.47"S 17°34'20.73"W Method used: Google Moon map I wanted to take a look at the structures I discovered back in 2014, because many of the buildings and discoveries have been deleted or the URLs don't exist any more. These buildings are still there on Google Moon which is a free program to download and use from your desktop. The structures measure about 100-150 meters long and 10-15 meters wide. I don't think they are structures to live in, but probably have a purpose like air or breathing filtration or collecting of energy or even as a transmitting antenna. Glad to see they are still there. Scott C. Waring
65 million years ago, a monster asteroid wiped out 2/3 of all life on Earth, including the dinosaurs. But an astrophysicist explains why it’s the smaller near-Earth objects (NEOs) that pose a greater imminent threat.
Sixty-five million years ago, a 15 kilometer [9 mile] sized asteroid wiped out two-thirds of all life on Earth, including the dinosaurs. But it’s probably not this kind of monster asteroid that we should be worried about. It’s actually the smaller NEOs that pose a greater imminent threat, like the asteroid that struck Earth on June 2 that scientists only saw coming a day in advance.
Internationally renowned astronomers, astrophysicists and space researchers gathered for a conference in Garching near Munich, Germany, from May 14-June 8, 2018, for the to develop new strategies for the improved detection, scientific and commercial exploitation of and defense against NEOs.
Flyeye-telescope planned by ESA as part of the global effort to hunt out risky celestial objects such as asteroids and comets.
Image via A. Baker/ESA.
Detlef Koschny, head of the Near Earth Objects team at the European Space Agency (ESA) and a lecturer with the Technical University of Munich Chair for Astronautics, explains why scientists are increasing their research focus on smaller NEOs.
Let’s start with a basic question: How is an asteroid different from a meteorite?
Detlef Koschny: Asteroids are objects larger than one meter – for example the object that exploded over Botswana earlier this month. Meteoroids are objects smaller than one meter. If they enter and pass through a planet’s atmosphere [and hit the ground], they are called meteorites. Comets are asteroids with large amounts of volatile compounds such as water ice. If they come close to the sun, these compounds vaporize, creating their distinctive tails.
Hollywood disaster films like Armageddon always feature colossal asteroids on a direct collision course with Earth. So why should we be worried about smaller NEOs?
Detlef Koschny: NEOs that might potentially come close to or hit our planet range in size from a few millimeters to about 50 to 60 kilometers [30 to 37 miles] in diameter. We’ve detected the majority of the larger NEOs and computed their trajectories and the statistical risk for collision with Earth 100 years into the future.
We’ve mapped 90 percent of the asteroids that are a kilometer in size or larger. We know precisely where the big ones are and that they won’t pose a threat. In the “mid-size” region, the situation is completely different: We have only detected and mapped less than one percent of NEOs smaller than a kilometer.
If a 100-meter (328 feet) asteroid hit Earth, it would cause significant damage in an area the size of Germany, and even affect the surrounding region. But asteroids of this size don’t strike Earth very often. Maybe every 10,000 years on average.
Going from 100 meters down to 50 meters (164 feet), the statistical frequency of strikes increases to once every 1,000 years. Exactly a century ago in 1908, a 40-meter object struck the Earth over Tunguska, Siberia, destroying an area of forest the size of the Munich metro area.
And then if we go down to asteroid sizes around 20 meters (66 feet) – like the asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk in Russia in 2013, which ended up injuring 1,500 people – these occur on average once every 10 to 100 years. We will definitely see something like that again in our lifetime.
Nobody saw the Chelyabinsk asteroid coming before it hit. And scientists only spotted the one that hit Botswana a few hours in advance. What is the current state of NEO detection technology?
Detlef Koschny: Right now, there are two main survey programs running on Earth, both funded by our American colleagues. They utilize optical telescopes that cover a large field of view and can continually scan the night sky to detect any objects that are bright enough.
When it comes to detecting larger objects, this strategy works quite well, as these are visible even when they’re still far away from the Earth. But to detect smaller objects down to a size of 20 meters (66 feet) is very difficult. They are not bright enough to be detected until they are at least as close as the Moon.
If you only have two of these telescopes on the planet and it takes each telescope three weeks or so to cover the complete sky, you have to be really lucky that a small asteroid crosses your field of view just when you’re looking in the right direction.
That’s why we are currently developing extremely wide-field telescopes that will have the ability to scan the entire sky in just 48 hours. Additionally, within the ESA Space Situational Awareness (SSA) program, in which I work, we mobilize observatories and astronomers worldwide through the NEO Coordination Centre at the Agency’s European Space Research Institute (ESRIN) facility in Italy.
Dr. Detlef Koschny, lecturer with the TUM Chair for Astronautics and head of the Near Earth Objects team at the European Space Agency (ESA).
Image via A. Battenberg/TUM.
So what are your recommendations for improving detection and tracking capabilities, and what new detection technologies are being deployed either currently or in the near future?
Detlef Koschny: There’s a system called Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) that just went online in the U.S. It consists of small telescopes which, while they don’t see very faint objects, cover almost the complete night sky once per night. Here in Europe, we are building the Flyeye telescope, with a one-meter effective aperture. It provides us with a big field of view that is more than 100 times the size of the full moon in the night sky. In one night, with one telescope, we can cover about half the sky. The strategy to achieve this was developed by one of our master’s students here at TUM.
Our conclusion as the conference wraps up and one of the recommendations we’ll be making in the post-conference whitepaper: There’s an urgent need for more telescopes that can scan the sky for these NEOs, and a global network of telescopes that are working in concert, so that we can truly cover the smaller size range of asteroids in near-earth orbit. We definitively need to FIND these objects first before we can take any concrete action to defend ourselves against them.
Bottom line: An astrophysicist explains why it’s the smaller near-Earth objects (NEOs) that pose a greater imminent threat.
Zeewier reist 20.000 kilometer en meert aan op Antarctica
Zeewier reist 20.000 kilometer en meert aan op Antarctica
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Dit is de langst bekende biologische drijftocht ooit.
Onderzoekers hebben langs de kust van Antarctica zeewier ontdekt dat daar niet thuishoort. DNA-onderzoek wijst uit dat een deel ervan afkomstig is van de Kerguelen-eilanden in de zuidelijke Indische Oceaan. En een ander deel komt helemaal uit de Zuid-Georgia-eilanden in de zuidelijke Atlantische Oceaan. Het betekent dat dit zeewier tienduizenden kilometers heeft afgelegd alvorens het bij Antarctica aanmeerde.
Onmogelijke reis Het is volgens onderzoekers de langste bekende biologische drijftocht ooit. En dat niet alleen: het is een reis die tevens onmogelijk werd geacht. Zo wist het zeewier polaire winden en stromingen die ondoordringbaar werden geacht, te trotseren en Antarctica – dat altijd gezien wordt als een geïsoleerd gelegen continent – te bereiken (zie kader). “Dit onderzoek laat zien dat levende planten en dieren Antarctica over de oceaan kunnen bereiken, en dat de Antarctische kustlijnen waarschijnlijk constant gebombardeerd worden met allerlei plant- en diersoorten,” aldus onderzoeker Crid Fraser. “Wij dachten altijd dat het Antarctische ecosysteem zo uniek was vanwege de geïsoleerde omgeving, maar dit onderzoek laat zien dat deze verschillen bijna volledig te wijten zijn aan extreme omgevingsfactoren, niet isolatie.”
Sterke westenwinden en oppervlaktestromingen zorgen er in principe voor dat drijvende objecten van Antarctica vandaan bewegen. Tot stormen de boel verstoren, zo stellen de onderzoekers. Hun nieuwste modellen laten zien dat hoge golven die tijdens deze stormen ontstaan grote ‘vlotten’ zeewier helpen om naar Antarctica te reizen.
Andere dieren Als zeewier op deze wijze bij Antarctica kan komen, dan kunnen nog veel meer organismen Antarctica bereiken, zo redeneren de onderzoekers. “Dit zeewier groeit niet op Antarctica, maar kan als vlot dienen voor andere planten en dieren” stelt onderzoeker Erasmo Macaya. “Als die vlotten van zeewier naar Antarctica drijven, kunnen we binnenkort enorme veranderingen zien in de ecosystemen daar.” Antarctica warmt namelijk razendsnel op. “Als planten en dieren vrij vaak over zee naar Antarctica reizen, zullen ze zich kunnen vestigen zodra de lokale omgeving voldoende gastvrij is,” aldus Fraser.
Het onderzoek heeft ook implicaties voor niet-levende drijvende objecten, zoals plastic. “Het zou goed kunnen dat de stormen en zeestromingen die dit zeewier hebben vervoerd, ook plastic naar Antarctica kunnen transporteren, waardoor het kwetsbare ecosysteem daar extra onder druk komt te staan,” vertelt onderzoeker Erik van Sebille. “We moeten er zo snel mogelijk achter komen of dat zo is.”
Dat blijkt uit nieuw onderzoek. Klein minpuntje: we kunnen er onmogelijk bij.
Het onderzoek onthult dat de aarde veel meer diamanten herbergt dan gedacht. Maar de meeste van die diamanten zitten ontzettend diep: tussen 140 en 240 kilometer onder het oppervlak.
Kratons De diamanten zitten opgesloten in de ‘wortels’ van rompgebergtes (ook wel kratons genoemd). Dit zijn een soort omgekeerde gebergten die je kunt vinden onder het centrum van de meeste aardplaten. Ze reiken tot wel 240 kilometer diep en zijn al lange tijd ‘tektonisch stabiel’. Dat betekent dat ze al zeker 1 miljard jaar geen grootschalige deformatie of metamorfose hebben ondergaan. De diepste secties van deze kratons worden ook wel aangeduid als ‘wortels’ en dringen tot in de aardmantel door. En het nieuwe onderzoek onthult nu dat deze ‘wortels’ voor wel 1 tot 2 procent uit diamanten bestaan. Als je dan het volume van de wortel van een kraton in ogenschouw neemt, moet je concluderen dat deze meer dan 1 biljard (10^15) ton diamanten herbergt. En aangezien er zo’n 10 van deze wortels zijn, zou het in totaal zelfs om 10^16 ton diamanten gaan.
Niet zo exotisch “Dit laat zien dat diamant misschien niet zo’n exotisch mineraal is, maar op de geologische schaal vrij veel voorkomt,” aldus onderzoeker Ulrich Faul. “We kunnen er niet bij, maar toch, er zijn daar veel meer diamanten dan we eerder dachten.”
Seismische activiteit De onderzoekers kwamen deze enorme voorraad op het spoor nadat ze zich bogen over een anomalie in seismische data. Al decennialang houden onderzoekers de seismische activiteit – in feite niets anders dan geluidsgolven die door de aarde reizen en ontstaan door bijvoorbeeld aardbevingen, tsunami’s en explosies – wereldwijd in de gaten. Aan de hand van deze seismische data kunnen onderzoekers zich een beeld vormen van hoe de aarde er van binnen uitziet; de snelheid waarmee de geluidsgolven door de aarde bewegen, wordt immers bepaald door de temperatuur, dichtheid en temperatuur van het gesteente waar deze doorheen moeten reizen. En zo onthult seismische data bijvoorbeeld dat geluidsgolven significant versnellen wanneer ze door de ‘wortels’ van oude kratons bewegen. En dat is vreemd (zie kader).
Kratons zijn kouder dan de omringende mantel, ook is hun dichtheid kleiner dan die van de omringende mantel. Je zou dus verwachten dat geluidsgolven wanneer ze door de diepste secties van deze rompgebergten bewegen iets versnellen. Maar de versnelling die we zien, is veel groter dan onderzoekers kunnen verklaren.
Virtuele gesteenten Die anomalie vormt het uitgangspunt van dit nieuwe onderzoek. Faul en collega’s gingen in het laboratorium na hoe geluidsgolven door verschillende mineralen bewegen. Vervolgens maakten ze ‘virtuele gesteenten’ die uit verschillende combinaties van die mineralen waren samengesteld en berekenden hoe snel geluidsgolven door deze virtuele gesteenten bewogen. Er bleek slechts één type gesteente te zijn dat geluidsgolven net zo sterk versnelde als de kratons en dat was een gesteente dat voor 1 tot 2 procent uit diamant bestond. In dit scenario bevatte het gesteente zeker 1000 keer meer diamant dan eerder werd gedacht. Maar dat had verder geen impact op de dichtheid van de kraton (die dus kleiner is dan die van de omringende mantel). “Het zijn een soort stukjes hout, drijvend op water,” legt Faul uit. “Kratons hebben een iets kleinere dichtheid dan hun omgeving, dus ze duiken niet terug de aarde in, maar blijven aan het oppervlak drijven. Dat is hoe de oudste gesteenten bewaard blijven. En wij ontdekten dat je slechts 1 tot 2 procent diamant nodig hebt voor stabiele kratons die niet zinken.”
Dat kratons zoveel diamanten herbergen, is achteraf gezien trouwens best logisch. Diamanten ontstaan namelijk diep in de aarde, onder hoge druk, bij hoge temperaturen en komen aan het oppervlak door vulkaanuitbarstingen. Deze uitbarstingen zorgen ervoor dat er geologische kanalen ontstaan die opgebouwd zijn uit een gesteente dat kimberliet wordt genoemd. Diamanten reizen door deze kanalen – samen met magma dat diep uit de aarde komt – naar boven. De meeste van deze kimberlieten kanalen zijn gevonden aan de rand van de ‘wortels’ van kratons. Het lijkt dan ook niet meer dan logisch dat deze wortels voor een deel uit diamant bestaat. “Het is indirect bewijs, maar het komt allemaal samen,” aldus Faul. “We hebben alle verschillende mogelijkheden vanuit elke hoek bekijken en dit is de enige redelijke verklaring.”
This mosaic of Cerealia Facula inside the dwarf planet Ceres' Occator Crater is based on images obtained by NASA's Dawn spacecraft in its second extended mission, from an altitude as low as about 21 miles (34 kilometers).
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
You may have seen the bizarre bright spots speckling the dwarf planet Ceres — but not like this.
NASA's Ceres-orbiting Dawn spacecraft has captured jaw-dropping new photos of several of the bright-white features, formally known as faculae, that lie at the bottom of the dwarf planet's 57-mile-wide (92 kilometers) Occator Crater.
"The new images of Occator Crater and the surrounding areas have exceeded expectations, revealing beautiful, alien landscapes," Dawn principal investigator Carol Raymond, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a statement yesterday (July 16).
The $467 million Dawn mission launched in September 2007 with a bold goal: to orbit and study the two largest bodies in the asteroid belt: Vesta and Ceres. Both objects are considered leftovers from the solar system's planet-formation period (hence the mission's name).
Dawn reached Vesta in July 2011 and eyed the object up close for more than a year, finally leaving for Ceres in September 2012.
Dawn discovered the Occator Crater bright spots during its approach to Ceres in early 2015, and later found a number of other crater-associated faculae around the dwarf planet. The probe's observations have since revealed that the bright spots are salty deposits, composed primarily of sodium carbonate and ammonium chloride.
Scientists think this material was left behind when briny water boiled away into space, but they're not sure where, exactly, those brines came from — specifically, how deep underground the reservoirs were.
This close-up photo of the Vinalia Faculae in Ceres' Occator Crater was captured by NASA's Dawn spacecraft in its second extended mission, from an altitude as low as 21 miles (34 kilometers).
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
Dawn team members are using the probe's observations to tackle this and other questions about the 590-mile-wide (950 km) Ceres. Some of the most intriguing data and eye-popping photos come from Dawn's most recent mission phase, during which the probe has circled above Ceres at an altitude of just 21 miles or so.
Dawn spiraled down to this superlow orbit early last month and will remain there through the end of its operational life, which is expected to come in a few months. The spacecraft is nearly out of hydrazine, the fuel that powers Dawn's small orientation-controlling thrusters. When the hydrazine is gone, Dawn will be unable to point its science instruments at Ceres, or its communications gear at Earth.
The Dawn team is presenting the results from the latest (low-orbit) mission phase this week at the Committee on Space Research conference in Pasadena.
Canada – Les OVNI sont majoritairement observés au Québec
Canada – Les OVNI sont majoritairement observés au Québec
L’organisme manitobain UFO Research a compilé des données sur les observations d’OVNI survenues au Canada au cours de l’année 2017. Il s’avère que le Québec est la province où ce genre de phénomène est le plus souvent rapporté.
En 2017, 1101 observations d’OVNI ont été rapportées au Canada. Le Québec en regroupe, à lui seul, 518, ce qui constitue un véritable record ! Ce nombre est en nette augmentation depuis 2016 où « seulement » 430 objets volants non identifiés avaient été signalés.
La province de l’Ontario, qui est la plus peuplée du pays, ne compte que 241 observations d’OVNI, tandis que 128 ont été rapportées en Colombie-Britannique.
Parmi les grandes métropoles du pays, c’est à Montréal que la population a observé le plus d’OVNI avec 74 signalements. En seconde position, on retrouve Toronto avec 57 observations.
Les récits d’OVNI sont très différents et les témoins ont vécu des expériences parfois étonnantes. Ainsi, un objet gris en forme de beignet a été vu en train de tourner sur lui-même à Rimouski. À Saint-Jean-Baptiste, un engin de couleur rouge s’est approché de 10 campeurs avec de s’éloigner dans la stupeur générale.
Selon cet organisme, 8 % des cas recensés demeurent complètement inexpliqué, alors que 43 % ne sont que de simples « lumières dans le ciel ».
Les durées de ces observations sont d’environ 15 minutes après quoi les OVNI disparaissent à la vue des témoins.
Depuis 1989, année à partir de laquelle Ufology Research a commencé à collecter ses données, le nombre de signalements n’a cessé de croître. Au tournant des années 2000, la tendance s’est accrue de manière surprenante. 2012 fut une année exceptionnelle puisque près de 2000 OVNI ont été observés.
A senior SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) astronomer recently posted an essay on UFOs inside the Huffington Post where he first said: "Allow me to first be aware that that is a phenomenon worth of interest. If aliens are honestly striking out in our 'hood, it is difficult to assume every other truth extra worth of observe." Then he concludes with: "The truth is, in case you're positive that our planet is website hosting alien visitors, the way to advantage popularity for your point of view is to prove it, now not insist that the hassle lies with 1/3 parties. The blame sport is a cop-out."
WTF is that this man announcing? UFOs are critical however it is up to others to do all of the hard yards and show that UFOs and aliens are associated. You can pretty much hear the author scream out WE REQUIRE PROOF so long as the weight is on others to provide you with the smoking gun!
WE REQUIRE PROOF! That's all first-class, well and suitable in principle, an in a perfect global, besides the common member of the awesome unwashed does not have the call-logo, instructional bona-fides or assets required. No depend what 'proof" the exquisite unwashed provide up, the WE REQUIRE PROOF demands of the numerous (scientists) outweigh the skills of the few (the super unwashed) to proved the required goods. If I ring up a pinnacle scientist at a pinnacle college and say I actually have a bit of an alien spaceship, do you without a doubt suppose they'll pay attention to me or slam down the cellphone uttering "every other bloody wacko losing my time"! So the 'blame sport' is perhaps greater a plea for people with the medical bona-fides, and the resources and the credibility and revered home institutions to take the fantastic unwashed a tad more significantly with regards to UFO reviews and get their hands grimy analyzing the problem.
I play the blame game. I placed blame on individuals who may want to, but may not get their hands dirty. It's highbrow cowardice pure and simple. The fairly apparent if unstated message is I'm interested by ET, I'm a SETI scientist via career, however I'm now not interested in UFOs except someone else provides the proof that there may be an actual alien connection. I'm now not interested in UFOs due to the fact I might not get outside investment to look at them. That's because I've were given an excessive amount of on my plate already. That's due to the fact I'd instead sit on my ass and allow the top notch unwashed do the dirty work. That's due to the fact a person may make amusing of me, like my expert colleagues. The sociology (workplace politics) of the technological know-how community normally runs some thing alongside the strains of don't stray beyond the mainstream; do not think out of the box; don't rock the boat or you may become like Jonah and tossed overboard with out a whale in sight.
So holier than thou essays like that published by using 'Mr. SETI' aren't absolutely beneficial; relevant scientists need to place up a few reputable technology or shut up considering the fact that if they are truely not a part of the answer, they're part of the problem status within the way of an answer!
Let's forget about the super unwashed for the instant; allow's talk nerdy speak and cope with proof, no longer proof, just evidence, that some thing atypical is afoot thru observations from astronomers, expert colleagues of SETI scientists, and their reported anomalous observations which can be in the scientific literature. Now albeit it's 'colleagues' from several generations ago and way before cutting-edge SETI instances, but that doesn't regulate their educational bona-fides nor what they said inside the professional literature.
I talk to the numerous ancient sightings of Neith (suggested satellite tv for pc of Venus) and the intra-Mercurial planet Vulcan in conjunction with severa different sightings of alleged planets inside the orbit of Mercury. Not one, or but multi-dozens of reports are in the scientific literature for each. That's similarly to those multi-dozens of sightings of unexpected by uncharted and unknown items that made unexpected transits of the Sun and Moon. So, expert astronomers are on file as having seen, for all sensible functions, unidentified 'aerial' phenomena. Now we recognise there may be no Neith and there's no Vulcan, and many others. So exactly what did scientists in the astronomical career take a look at? A UFO with the aid of some other name remains a UFO. Okay, it is simply proof, not proof. Still, UFO observations are not completely the property of the exquisite unwashed.
WE REQUIRE PROOF! Okay, even though scientists do not need to actively take part, their demand WE REQUIRE PROOF (lay it at the slab in my lab) sounds affordable, till you realise that the ones identical scientists receive the reality of many other things that they similarly can not study on a slab inside the lab, matters that simplest may be visible or photographed.
An obvious working example is the ones stars inside the night time sky. You see them; you can picture them, however so far you can't observe the bodily object within the laboratory! You cannot placed a celebrity on the slab. So, if stars are ideal, why now not UFOs? Well, stars may be consequently they're; UFOs cannot be therefore they are not*.
Scientists have a readymade excuse for now not being able to verify the bona-fides of stars as laboratory specimens; they're out of attain - way too remote to grab keep of. But they nevertheless argue that stars aren't illusions or misidentifications or all-in-the-thoughts or hoaxes due to the fact astrophysical concept supports stars being what scientists consider they may be. Of direction in a manner of speakme starlight may be 'captured' and analysed in the lab, and at least stars have the decency of making their appearance on agenda. Still, you can't have a look at up close and private the physical megastar itself.
So as a generality, in defence to an anti-UFO stance, scientists will say there are theoretical reasons for accepting the reality of factors they can not positioned their mitts on, implying that there are no theoretical motives supporting the UFO ETH (ExtraTerrestrial Hypothesis). Alas and alack, as an extra counterattack, as stars (and rainbows - see beneath) are supported with the aid of astrophysics' idea, there is also an actual theoretical situation that almost demands that there be UFOs and that UFOs be extraterrestrial spacecraft - it is called the Fermi Paradox. That simply essentially says that even supposing there may be handiest one superior technological civilization 'available' with the ability to "boldly go", then the time it would take to discover (even at low sub mild velocities - say 1% to 10% the speed of light) and colonize end-to-cease our galaxy is however a tiny, tiny fraction of the age of our galaxy. So where is each person? They need to, in the event that they exist in any respect, through rights be right here. Why would they pay unique interest to the 0.33 rock from the Sun? While stars and planets are dimes-a-dozen, abodes with biospheres are likely as uncommon as chook's tooth - that is why. Planet Earth is a hen's tooth! Alas, even as astrophysical theory passes their muster, the Fermi Paradox does not reduce their mustard apparently.
Okay, for terrestrial scientists, physical famous person-stuff cannot be placed at the lab's slab. But there are parallels a lot in the direction of home wherein that excuse of extreme distance falls far brief. Now here is a parallel. The rainbow is the case in point. If scientists can play UFO skeptic, I can play the position of rainbow skeptic.
If you are saying you've got seen a rainbow, you cannot prove that to me since you can't convey the rainbow, or any part of it (like say the related pot-of-gold), into my lab and region it on the slab for me to hammer away at or placed underneath the microscope. You obviously trust inside the truth of rainbows, but you can't put the only you see inside the sky to your lab's slab either. Okay, you understand and I recognise that rainbows exist, but the important factor is that you can't show to me (or anybody) that you saw a rainbow. We all understand eyewitness testimony, ain't really worth the fee of spit in a bucket. As for snap shots, being the grand skeptic I am, absolute confidence your photos of rainbows are fakes, pure and easy. I REQUIRE PROOF of rainbows and you cannot provide it.
Can you capture and put an real rainbow within the sky right into a laboratory surroundings and situation it to merciless and unusual punishments? You can artificially create one in the lab, but it is not quite the identical thing - it is not the real McCoy. And what approximately that associated physical trace - the pot-of-gold at the quit of the rainbow? I've but to examine of any laboratory evaluation of that pot and that gold. How can we are aware of it's honestly gold with out slab-in-the-lab analysis? Maybe its idiot's gold! And much like Pandora's 'box' is truly a jar and not a container, maybe the 'pot' is in reality a bowl! Of path the scientists can't quite get at the pot-of-gold since it is guarded with the aid of a leprechaun, and no scientist is going to admit being thwarted with the aid of a little inexperienced guy (or kidnapped by way of a bit grey one both for that count).
Okay, I could be foolish not to agree with your commentary and to disclaim the fact of rainbows, but its k for clinical skeptics to ignore the rainbow parallel when it comes to UFOs. Eyewitness testimony regarding UFO sightings isn't always really worth the fee of the paper it is published on; images of UFOs are indeed pure Photoshop fakery.
But in reality, UFOs offer up way extra physical proof than the rainbow. Despite that pot-of-gold on the cease of a rainbow legend, rainbows leave at the back of no physical strains; no physiological consequences, and no electromagnetic results; they make no sounds, and so forth. UFOs aren't so hampered. So, if crunch-comes-crunch, the truth of UFOs have plenty greater going for them in terms of bodily evidence than the truth of rainbows. Of course no scientist in their proper mind might show off scepticism of the existence of rainbows even with none bodily evidence backing them up, however with regards to UFOs, it is a different horse of some other coloration - but is it certainly a one-of-a-kind horse, and is it truely of a special hue?
Of route one motive physical scientists receive the fact of the rainbow is that they have got seen one themselves (many maximum probable) and seeing is believing as lengthy because it's they who are doing the seeing. If they themselves had witnessed a UFO event they (and their colleagues) couldn't pick out then I'm certain they would be a good deal greater open and willing to simply accept some other's eyewitness testimony. A bit of a double wellknown there of direction however this is human nature and scientists aren't exempt from that weakness. Unfortunately, UFOs tend to be a rarer commodity than rainbows and therefore witnessed way much less regularly, together with viewings via scientists.
While UFOs have a better bodily evidence quota than rainbows, they also have a better strangeness quota too, which is not to say that rainbows do not have a unusual mythological air of mystery approximately them. I wonder if the scientist who accepts the fact of the rainbow additionally accepts that the rainbow is a bridge to heaven (Asgard) consistent with Norse mythology and made famous within the conclusion to Richard Wagner's first "Ring Cycle" opera "Das Rheingold". Christian mythology has the rainbow as a sign that as a minimum the subsequent time God lays waste to the sector it may not be thru the Big Wet, although I doubt you will discover that in any textbook on optical and atmospheric phenomena. And if you're into cryptozoology, the Australian aborigines have a Rainbow Serpent (which doubles as a writer deity), however alternatively, scientists are not referred to for his or her curiosity into the real life of unknown mega-fauna or polytheistic creator deities** either for that count. In reality, you name the subculture; you will discover a rainbow mythology contained within. Rainbows are related to spirits and demons and all way of omens from the good, to the bad and the ugly that scientists will reject as component and parcel of their notion machine.
So, in which do scientists draw the road? Rainbows - sure; rainbow serpents and rainbow bridges - no. And this distinction is rightly so, IMHO. But when they reject out of hand a phenomenon that genuinely has extra and better evidence than say rainbows (auroras and sprites might be other cases in point) then eyebrows must be raised and questions requested - like please give an explanation for your good judgment.
While on the problem of things mythological, allow's move reminiscent of the celebrities and planets and other celestial objects. There's a huge mythology from many historical cultures that generally is going hand-in-hand with how those celestial items and night time sky patterns came to be. Astronomers do not aid those tall tales both considering they have got different greater scientific theories that explain the origins of stars and constellations. Still, its competing theories of a way to account for say, the Pleiades famous person cluster. Once upon a time it turned into Zeus. Today it is astrophysics. Who's to say considering that neither scenario may be subjected to a definitive WE REQUIRE PROOF slab-in-the-lab test.
By the way, as a very last counterattack, I have not but visible any SETI scientist provide you with proof high quality on ET, so IMHO it is nevertheless a tied ball game. But rather than have opposing groups, SETI scientists might also as properly take a look at UFOs as properly when you consider that SETI to this point has a batting common of zero. Perhaps that's what comes from scientists setting all their ET eggs in only the SETI basket.
*And the Sun can't have sunspots due to the fact all of us understand that the Sun is best; meteorites cannot exist seeing that we all know stones can't fall from the sky;
**Though faith inside the reality of God is hardly ever unknown to exist in some bodily scientists, even though like stars and rainbows, they can't placed God at the slab of their lab either. Somehow the WE REQUIRE PROOF standards don't remember in this case.
Cancer survival rates could be greatly improved if scientists are successful in developing microscopic medical weapons that obliterate cancerous cells.
Nanomachines may be tiny – 50,000 of them would fit across the diameter of a human hair – but they have the potential to pack a mighty punch in the fight against cancer.
A graphic showing the tiny nanomachine
Image: TOUR GROUP/RICE UNIVERSITY
Researchers at Durham University in the UK have used nanobots to drill into cancer cells, killing them in just 60 seconds.
They are now experimenting on micro-organisms and small fish, before moving on to rodents. Clinical trials in humans are expected to follow and it is hoped that the results may have the potential to save millions of lives.
The number of cancer cases is predicted to rise by 2035
Image: World Health Organization (WHO) GloboCan, BBC
The mechanics of nanobots
These minute molecules have components that enable them to identify and attach themselves to a cancer cell.
When activated by light, the nanobots’ rota-like chain of atoms begin to spin at an incredible rate – around two to three million times per second. This causes the nanobot to drill into the cancer cell, blasting it open.
The study is still in its early stages, but researchers are optimistic it has the potential to lead to new types of cancer treatment.
Dr Robert Pal, of Durham University, said: “Once developed, this approach could provide a potential step change in noninvasive cancer treatment and greatly improve survival rates and patient welfare globally.”
The spinning nanobots burrow into cancer cells to destroy them
Image: Tour Group/Rice University
Nanobots in our veins
The destructive properties of the nanobots make them perfect for killing cancer cells. But the technology can also be used to repair damaged or diseased tissues at a molecular level.
In the future, these nanomachines could essentially patrol the circulatory system of the human body. They could be used to detect specific chemicals or toxins and give early warnings of organ failure or tissue rejection.
Another potential function may involve taking biometric measurements to monitor a person’s general health.
A computer-generated image of a nanobot
Image: Tour Group/Rice University
Searching for oil
The medicinal advantages of nanobots are clear to see, but industry might also benefit from the technology.
Oil and gas is one example. The idea is that nanobots could be injected into geologic formations thousands of feet into the earth. Changes to the chemical make-up of the machines would point to the location of reservoirs.
The crater lakes at the summit of Kelimutu volcano in Indonesia change colors from day to day. The colors can change from white, green, blue and brown to black.
Landsat 8 views from space of the 3 lakes at the summit of the Kelimutu volcano in Indonesia, known to change color unpredictably, via NASA Earth Observatory.
This composite image of Kelimutu volcano in Indonesia was the NASA Earth Observatory Image of the Day for July 6, 2018. It called them volcanic mood rings and explained:
From milky white to vibrant turquoise to blood red, the three lakes at the summit of the Kelimutu volcano are known to unpredictably change color – a phenomenon unique to this volcano on the Indonesian island of Flores.
These images, acquired by the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8, show the various colors of the crater lakes on three different days. All three crater lakes appear on the crest of the volcano with the eastern two lakes sharing a common crater wall … Depending on when you visit, the colors can range from white, green, blue, brown or black. In 2016, the lakes changed colors six times.
Local folklore contends the lakes are the resting place for the dead, and that a person’s good or bad deeds in life determine which of the three lakes becomes his or her resting place.
Science says the changing colors of Kelimutu’s summit lakes are caused by fumaroles, or volcanic vents that release steam and gases, producing upwelling in the lakes and bringing denser, mineral-rich water from their bottoms to their surfaces. NASA Earth Observatory explained:
All of the lakes contain relatively high concentrations of zinc and lead.
While minerals play a part in the coloring, another key factor is the amount of oxygen present in the water. Like your blood, these lake waters appear bluer (or greener) when low in oxygen. When they are oxygen-rich, they appear blood red or even cola black.
Bottom line: NASA Earth Observatory Image of the Day for July 6, 2018, showing the three variously colored lakes at the summit of Kelimutu volcano in Indonesia.
Whether you find flocks of birds terrifying or mystifying, you can objectively say that they’re pretty skilled at not ramming into each other mid-flight.
Looking to the success of birds, group of European researchers has successfully enabled a group of 30 quadcopters to fly in sync after programming the drones to mimic the flight of a flock of birds.
Dr. Gábor Vásárhelyi, the first author of this new research published on Wednesday in the Science Robotics journal, tells Inverse he believes collective bird movement holds the answer to solving an issue we’ll soon be faced with: Keeping thousands of drones from colliding over our heads. Dr. Agoston E. Eiben, a co-author of the new study, describes their development of drone technology that mimics how birds flock together as “natural computing.”
Here’s how they did it: Researchers spent six years observing pigeons with GPS devices to determine if they could reproduce these aerial formations of the birds with autonomous drones. For drones, mastering synchronized flight may be a crucial first step to mastering real-world delivery routes.
Flight simulation of 30 autonomous drones moving in a confined area at 6 m/s (13.4 mph) using the method developer by Vásárhelyi and his colleagues.
“When the first cars appeared on the streets people were walking in front of them and ringing a bell that cars were coming, but soon there we a diversity of cars moving in coordinated ways throughout cities, something similar is going on with drones,” Vásárhelyi says. “Now, every drone has a single pilot, soon these drones will have such a density in the air that we need to make them able to communicate with each other.”
Realistic simulations of 30-1000 drones flocking in confined environments
Why Drone Delivery Could Be Big Business
This in-air communication is crucial, because of the intense interest in drone delivery as a business. Multi-national companies and startups alike are working to make these services a reality.
The best-known player in the competition to develop delivery drones is probably Amazon: The e-commerce giant makes 1.6 million daily deliveries in the United States, according to one estimate. Even if its future Prime Air service would take care of a quarter of those deliveries, that would be thousands of autonomous drones that would some system to make sure they don’t slam into each other, or anything else.
30 drones light up the night sky.
Drone Delivery Faces Regulatory Obstacles
In March 2016, the Federal Aviation Administration announced that drone registration outnumbered that of airplanes. Standard planes use control centers to coordinate their flights but with so many drones in the sky, it would be impossible to develop a drone-ports to manage them all. Eiben tells Inverse that each drone will need to have the capability of managing itself.
There needs to be underlying, decentralized software to make sure [drones] don’t collide.”
“We have a massive e-commerce industry. If drone delivery gets big than urban environments will be a major hurdle for various drones sharing the same airspace,” says Eiben, a professor of computer science at VU University Amsterdam. “There needs to be underlying, decentralized software to make sure they don’t collide, it’s core to this advancement.”
Eiben explained drone delivery has been held back by the “reality gap” — or the rift between what works in simulation and what works in real life. Previous studies found that even though solutions seemed promising on the computer screen, testing them on hardware would yield disappointing results. But not this time.
Vásárhelyi and his other colleagues built their own custom drones, implemented their bird-inspired models, which were refined by Eiben’s software expertise and dunked on prior research. They managed to get 30 quadcopters to self-organize themselves using GPS modules, just like our feathery, avian friends. They managed to pull this off by not only determining the distance to the closest drone but also calculate the speed and acceleration of their fellow robots.
But don’t worry, this isn’t the beginning of some futuristic version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Vásárhelyi sees great potential for this type of technology to be used for search and rescue missions, as well as enabling drone deliveries.
So if the day comes where quadcopters are delivering parcels right to your window sill, remember to thank the birds. The OG drones.
Researchers have discovered what appears to be a cache of diamonds hidden in the Earth’s mantle. This suggests that, at a geological scale, diamond might not be the exotic mineral we once thought it to be — they may be quite common, though not easily accessible.
Diamond embedded in a rock matrix.
Image credits: Rob Lavinsky.
Earthquakes and diamonds
The world’s deepest borehole goes down 12.262 kilometers (40,230 ft). How is it then that we know so much about the depths of the Earth, which boasts an average radius of over 6,300 km? As is so often the case, scientists have gathered a trove of data which enabled them to infer many things beyond sight — in this case, of the Earth’s interior properties.
Seismometers record the ground movement on a seismograph. Based on the wiggles of the seismograph, certain pieces of information can be drawn, particularly about the nature of the ground the wave has passed through. Of course, this is a great simplification and the seismogram analysis process is much more intricate, often involving a great deal of complexity and mathematical algorithms. You can pick up simpler things, like where the earthquake epicenter was and how much energy the earthquake had, or use the data for complex things — like constructing an image of what the Earth’s interior might look like.
A simplified “slice” of the Earth, showing its major components (not to scale).
Image credits: Siyavula Education.
For decades, agencies such as the USGS, universities, and research groups have been keeping track of this seismic activity. Among many other things, scientists have noticed an intriguing anomaly: the velocity of some seismic waves in some areas could not be explained with our existing knowledge of the Earth’s structure.
In this particular case, an MIT team aimed to identify the composition of so-called cratonic roots that might explain the spikes in seismic speeds. They concluded that the reason for this anomaly is diamonds.
“This shows that diamond is not perhaps this exotic mineral, but on the [geological] scale of things, it’s relatively common,” says Ulrich Faul, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. “We can’t get at them, but still, there is much more diamond there than we have ever thought before.”
Cratons
Cratons whose ancient rocks are widely exposed at the surface are typically called shields. If the ancient rocks are largely overlain by a cover of younger rocks, the craton is generally referred to as a platform.
Image credits: USGS.
The Earth’s crust made out of mobile, dynamic tectonic plates. We don’t see that because the movement is essentially unnoticeable at a human scale, but at a geological scale, tectonic plates move about quite a lot. Most tectonic plates’ movement is on the scale of a few centimeters per year.
Cratons are very old and stable parts of the Earth’s tectonic crust. Most cratons on Earth have survived cycles of merging and rifting of continents, and are typically located at the interior of tectonic plates. They have a thick crust and deep lithospheric “roots” that can extend several hundred kilometers into the Earth’s mantle.
Cratons are also colder and less dense than the surrounding mantle, which means that they would yield slightly faster seismic waves — but this alone can’t entirely account for the speed anomaly. So there must be something else.
“The velocities that are measured are faster than what we think we can reproduce with reasonable assumptions about what is there,” Faul says. “Then we have to say, ‘There is a problem.’ That’s how this project started.”
In order to solve this conundrum, Faul and colleagues started assembling virtual rocks which could theoretically exist at the temperature and pressure conditions in those parts of the mantle. They then calculated how fast seismic waves would pass through these structures, to see if this would fit the observed seismic data.
They found that the data would be best explained by a craton rock composition of 1 to 2 percent diamond. This would translate to about quadrillion tons of diamond.
In a way, this makes a lot of sense. We know that diamonds are forged deep in the bowels of the Earth, in high-pressure, high-temperature environments. The only reason why we’re able to find diamonds is that they’re brought closer to the surface by volcanic eruptions which act like “pipes” — bringing them to the surface, where we at least have a chance of finding them.
Of course, it’s important to note that Faul and colleagues found no direct evidence that the craton roots do contain diamonds, it’s just that this explanation seems to fit best. But this line of thinking has brought us so far, so at least for now, it seems convincing enough.
“It’s circumstantial evidence, but we’ve pieced it all together,” Faul says. “We went through all the different possibilities, from every angle, and this is the only one that’s left as a reasonable explanation.”
Journal Reference: Joshua M. Garber et al. Multidisciplinary “Constraints on the Abundance of Diamond and Eclogite in the Cratonic Lithosphere”, Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (2018). DOI: 10.1029/2018GC007534.
Ever had a moment when you feel like you’re important and what you do matters? Here’s the antidote.
Infrared view of a section within the North Galactic Pole, a region near the constellation Coma Berenices. Every point of light in this image represents anentire galaxy.
Image: ESA/Herschel/SPIRE; M. W. L. Smith et al 2017.
At a first glance, not much is going on in this image — just some yellowish noise on a blue-green background. But this photo from ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory shows much more than you’d think: every yellowish speck is a galaxy.
This is the North Galactic Pole, an area which covers some 180 square degrees of the sky and features a galaxy-rich cluster known as the Coma Cluster, which contains at least 1,000 points of light (read: galaxies).
Visual depiction of the spherical coordinate system for a point P.The polar angle is in blue, the azimuthal angle in red.
Just like on Earth, astronomers define observations using a coordinate system — but unlike the XYZ coordinate systems you might be more familiar with, they use a spherical coordinate system. In the former, a point is described by its X, Y, and Z coordinates.
A visual depiction of the spherical coordinate system for a point P. The polar angle is in blue, the azimuthal angle in red.
In a spherical system, a point is also described by three coordinates but, in this case, it’s the radial distance of that point from a fixed origin, the polar angle, and the azimuth angle. It can be a bit weird to wrap your head around, but it can be much easier to navigate astronomical observations.
So here, we have the North Galactic Pole, which lies far from the cluttered disc of the Milky Way and offers a good view of the distant Universe beyond our home galaxy.
Zoomed-in view showing about 8 percent of the entire photo width. How many galaxies can you count? Image: ESA/Herschel/SPIRE; M. W. L. Smith et al 2017. via Gizmodo.
The image above was taken at a wavelength of 250 μm, in the infrared range (the human visible range is generally within 0.4 – 0.7 μm). It was taken using the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey (H-ATLAS). Unfortunately, Herschel isn’t active anymore — it functioned from 2009 to 2013, using its instruments to study the sky in the far infrared range.
Aside from making us feel incredibly small and showing us just how puny our struggles really are, these pictures also help astronomers to estimate how many galaxies there are in the Universe. Recent surveys have estimated that number to be around 20 trillion, which is 20 times more than previous estimates gathered using the Hubble telescope. All these galaxies are packed with billions of stars, which can also host planets just like Earth.
Jupiter is definitely the most popular planet in the Solar System — at least as far as moons are concerned.
Image credits NASA / JPL-Caltech / JunoCam.
In Roman mythology, Jupiter (Zeus for the Greek) is quite the player. Never content to let a pretty mortal get by without his (usually unwanted) affections, the mythos abounds with the thunder god’s, um, transgressions. Which, quite understandably, gets everyone in deep trouble with his wife Juno (Hera in Greek mythology).
New research shows that the planet Jupiter is also quite happy to collect consorts. Twelve new moons have been discovered orbiting it, bringing the gas giant’s total collection to an impressive 79 moons — more than any other planet in the Solar System. One of these moons, according to the researchers who made the discovery, is an “oddball” that might help explain how the ochre giant got all of its moons. In a twist of mythological foreshadowing, it likely wasn’t a peaceful process.
The team from the Carnegie Institution for Science (story source) first spotted the moons in the spring of 2017. They weren’t looking for the moons per se — the team was actually looking for very distant objects in the Solar System as part of the hunt for Planet X, nestled somewhere far beyond Pluto. Some of the members involved in this research were actually part of the team that proposed the existence of this planet in the first place.
But back to the moons. As luck would have it, the researchers were simply looking in the right place at the right time to spot the gas giant — so they decided to have a look.
“Jupiter just happened to be in the sky near the search fields where we were looking for extremely distant Solar System objects, so we were serendipitously able to look for new moons around Jupiter while at the same time looking for planets at the fringes of our Solar System,” said team leader Scott Sheppard.
Based on these observations, members of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) calculated the orbits of the recorded bodies — and were surprised to see that they didn’t match any of Jupiter’s known moons.
“It takes several observations to confirm an object actually orbits around Jupiter,” said Gareth Williams, from the IAU’s Minor Planet Center, who was involved in the orbit calulations. “So, the whole process took a year.”
Various groupings of Jovian moons with the newly discovered ones shown in bold. Image credits Roberto Molar-Candanosa / Carnegie Institution for Science.
Nine of these bodies are more distant relative to other Jovian moons, and orbit in retrograde — the opposite direction of the planet’s spin. These distant moons form at least three distinct orbital groups; the team believes they’re the remnants of larger bodies that broke apart during past collisions with asteroids, comets, or other moons. They generally take about two years to orbit their host planet.
Two others form a closer group that orbits in the prograde — the same direction as Jupiter’s rotation. Since they both have similar orbital distances and inclinations relative to Jupiter, they’re also likely remnants from a larger moon that since broke apart. They take just shy of a year to orbit Jupiter.
The most surprising moon, however, is the runt of the litter.
“Our other discovery is a real oddball and has an orbit like no other known Jovian moon,” Sheppard explained. “It’s also likely Jupiter’s smallest known moon, being less than one kilometer in diameter.”
This tiny moon has a more inclined orbit and keeps a wider berth to the planet that the prograde group. Its orbit crosses that of the outer, retrograde group, making head-on collisions much more likely between itself and this latter group.
This situation could explain how Jupiter got so many moons. Today, head-on collision would break any of the bodies “down to dust”, Shepard says, and could shatter a larger body into the tiny moons of today. It’s possible then that the current various moon groupings were formed in the distant past through such collisions.
The oddball itself could be all that remains of a much larger prograde moon that impacted with other bodies to create the retrograde group identified by the team. It has yet to be christened, but the name Valetudo (the Roman goddess of health and hygiene and Jupiter’s great-granddaughter) has been suggested.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETDe wetenschap schenkt ons meestal klare antwoorden, maar roept soms ook extra vragen op. Volgende ontdekkingen doen je waarschijnlijk bedenkelijk met de wenkbrauwen fronsen.
Onderzoekers houden zich normaal zoet met de grote levensvragen. Zo riep Archimedes luidkeels eureka uit eenmaal hij zijn beroemde natuurkundewet neerschreef die verklaart waarom een schip blijft drijven. Newton testte met behulp van een appel uit hoe de zwaartekracht werkt en Thomas Edison gaf ons meer dan enkel kaarslicht: de gloeilamp.
Natuurlijk is het vandaag de dag wat moeilijker om een belangrijk onopgelost vraagstuk te vinden. Dus houden wetenschappers zich bezig met bedenkelijke experimenten met even bizarre resultaten. Nieuwsgierigheid is toch de motor van de wetenschap?
1. Één kilogram veren
“Wat weegt meer? Een kilogram lood of een kilogram veren?” Het is een klassieke instinker. Logischerwijs zouden beide opties evenveel wegen. Het hoopje pluimen is waarschijnlijk wel een pak groter.
Toch bewees een proef het tegendeel. Onderzoekers blinddoekten enkele personen waarna ze een doos gevuld met lood en een doos gevuld met hetzelfde gewicht aan veren moesten optillen. Wanneer men hen vroeg om de zwaarste doos aan te duiden, selecteerden de meeste proefpersonen de doos met veren.
2. Van vetberg naar biodiesel
In 2017 werd Londen geteisterd door een gigantische blokkade van de rioleringen. Bijna 250.000 kilogram samengekoekt vet, luiers, toiletdoekjes en ander afval had zich opgehoopt en verhinderde de goede werking het rioolbeheer.
Eenmaal de bevoegde instanties de reusachtige berg afval verwijderden, gingen de beelden de wereld rond. Het prikkelde niet enkel de nieuwsgierige kijker maar ook enkele wetenschappers. Ze beweerden dat ze de vetberg voor andere doeleinden konden gebruiken. Ze besloten de berg in kleinere stukken te hakken en het afval van het vet te scheiden. Dat vet zetten ze uiteindelijk om in biodiesel, een milieuvriendelijkere brandstof dan diesel en benzine. Zo’n 350-tal bussen konden een dag rondrijden met het resultaat van het experiment.
3. De kracht van pinguïnuitwerpselen
Wanneer pinguïns poepen, doen ze dat gewoon vanuit hun nest. Dat lijkt misschien niet zo netjes. Toch bevuilen de zeevogels hun slaapplaats niet. Ze bewegen hun achterste simpelweg naar de rand van het nest waarna ze met enorm veel druk hun uitwerpselen naar achter spuiten. De druk die daarbij komt kijken is veel groter dan die bij de menselijke ontlasting. Je zou er als ongelukkige pinguïn maar net achter staan.
In 1994, toen de anticonceptiepil een beetje beter in de markt lag, onderzochten wetenschappers wat voor ’n zichtbaar effect het pilletje had op vrouwen. Zo ondervonden ze dat vrouwen die de pil innamen feller blonken dan vrouwen die dat niet deden.
Al lijkt het niet meteen geloofwaardig, recenter onderzoek bewijst dat een anticonceptiepil een invloed uitoefent op 150 verschillende biologische functies. Eentje daarvan is waarschijnlijk verantwoordelijk voor een vettere en glimmende huid.
5. Een vinger in de poep tegen het hikken
In de jaren ’90 kon een zestigjarige man maar niet stoppen met hikken. Een vervelend kwaaltje vond hij. Dus bezocht hij zijn dokter. Die dacht dat het misschien te wijten was aan de neussonde die zijn patiënt moest dragen. Maar ook na het verwijderen van de sonde stopte het hikken niet. Vervolgens schreef hij de oude man enkele medicijnen voor. Tevergeefs.
Tenslotte zocht de wanhopige dokter zijn antwoord bij een eerder gerapporteerd geval. Daar werd de patiënt van zijn lijden verlost met behulp van een prostaatmassage. Kortom, de dokter stak zijn vinger in de poep van zijn patiënt en vreemd genoeg kon dat soelaas bieden.
6. De gevaren van een grasmaaier
Heb je jezelf al eens ooit pijn gedaan tijdens het grasmaaien? Dan ben je niet alleen. In 1988 ondervonden enkele onderzoekers dat maar liefst 70.000 van de verwondingen in de Verenigde Staten te wijten waren aan grasmaaiers. Daarvan ging het bij vijf procent om een pijnlijke wonde aan het oog.
Al denk je dat het er misschien op vooruit ging omdat grasmaaiers heel wat hipper zijn, nieuwe studies bewijzen het tegendeel. Intussen blijkt de grasmaaier verantwoordelijk te zijn voor 75 doden per jaar. Ook het aantal gewonden wordt alleen maar groter. Meestal gaat het om verwonde vingers of handen.
7. Kleur van medicatie doet er toe
Nog voordat we een pilletje innemen, vraagt ons brein zich al of het zal werken of niet. De kleur en vorm ervan beïnvloeden het verdict. Blauwe medicatie wordt als kalmerend waargenomen. Pillen met een rode en oranje kleur hebben een tegengesteld effect. Van zulke pillen verwacht men een stimulerend effect en die verwachting wordt meestal ingelost, zelfs bij placebo’s. Gele varianten hebben dan weer een antidepressieve werking en heldere kleuren blijken over het algemeen een beter effect te hebben dan neutrale kleurtjes.
8. Viagra verlost hamsters van hun jetlag
Hoe ze in godsnaam op het idee kwamen, weet niemand. In 2007 vermoedden enkele vernuftige onderzoekers dat Viagra een handje kon helpen bij het verwerken van hamsters hun jetlag. Ze wijzigden de tijdzone en simuleerden een verschil van zes uur. Na het toedienen van Viagra bleken de hamsters tot vijftig procent sneller te herstellen van het tijdsverschil dan de hamsters die geen hulp kregen. Of de sekspil eenzelfde invloed heeft op de mens moet nog onderzocht worden.
wiggenraadJe hond kiest weloverwogen hoe en waar hij zijn uitwerpselen achterlaat.
9. Honden poepen enkel noord of zuid
Let eens op de manier waarop je hond poept. Tenslotte toont onderzoek aan dat de dieren steevast naar het noorden of het zuiden kijken wanneer ze hun uitwerpselen lozen. Blijkbaar doen ze dat omdat ze zich bewust zijn van het magnetisch veld van onze aarde. En ze zijn niet alleen. Ook koeien en herten houden er rekening mee. Leg gerust een kompas naast je trouwe viervoeter wanneer hij nog eens hurkt.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:HLN.be - Het Laatste Nieuws ( NL)
The Hunt for Earth’s Deep Hidden Oceans
The Hunt for Earth’s Deep Hidden Oceans
Water-bearing minerals reveal that Earth’s mantle could hold more water than all its oceans. Researchers now ask: Where did it all come from?
A couple hundred pebble-size diamonds, plucked from Brazilian mud, sit inside a safe at Northwestern University. To some, they might be worthless. “They’re battered,” said Steve Jacobsen, a mineralogist at Northwestern. “They look like they’ve been through a washing machine.” Many are dark or yellow, far from the pristine gems of jewelers’ dreams.
Yet, for researchers like Jacobsen, these fragments of crystalline carbon are every bit as precious — not for the diamond itself, but for what is locked inside: specks of minerals forged hundreds of kilometers underground, deep in Earth’s mantle.
These mineral flecks — some too small to see even under a microscope — offer a peek into Earth’s otherwise unreachable interior. In 2014, researchers glimpsed something embedded in these minerals that, if not for its deep origins, would’ve been unremarkable: water.
Not actual drops of water, or even molecules of H20, but its ingredients, atoms of hydrogen and oxygen embedded in the crystal structure of the mineral itself. This hydrous mineral isn’t wet. But when it melts, out spills water. The discovery was the first direct proof that water-rich minerals exist this deep, between 410 and 660 kilometers down, in a region called the transition zone, sandwiched between the upper and lower mantles.
This diamond from Juína, Brazil, originally formed deep inside Earth. It contains an inclusion of ringwoodite, a water-bearing mineral.
University of Alberta
Since then, scientists have found more tantalizing evidence of water. In March, a team announced that they had discovered diamonds from Earth’s mantle that have actual water encased inside. Seismic data has also mapped water-friendly minerals across a large portion of Earth’s interior. Some scientists now argue that a huge reservoir of water could be lurking far beneath our feet. If we consider all of the planet’s surface water as one ocean, and there turn out to be even a few oceans underground, it would change how scientists think of Earth’s interior. But it also raises another question: Where could it have all come from?
Water World
Without water, life as we know it would not exist. Neither would the living, dynamic planet we’re familiar with today. Water plays an integral role in plate tectonics, triggering volcanoes and helping parts of the upper mantle flow more freely. Still, most of the mantle is relatively dry. The upper mantle, for instance, is primarily made of a mineral called olivine, which can’t store much water.
But below 410 kilometers, in the transition zone, high temperatures and pressures squeeze the olivine into a new crystal configuration called wadsleyite. In 1987, Joe Smyth, a mineralogist at the University of Colorado, realized that wadsleyite’s crystal structure would be afflicted with gaps. These gaps turn out to be perfect fits for hydrogen atoms, which could snuggle into these defects and bond with the adjacent oxygen atoms already in the mineral. Wadsleyite, Smyth found, can potentially grab onto lots of hydrogen, turning it into a hydrous mineral that produces water when it melts. For scientists like Smyth, hydrogen means water.
Deeper in the transition zone, wadsleyite becomes ringwoodite. And in the lab, Jacobsen (who was Smyth’s graduate student in the 1990s) would squeeze and heat bits of ringwoodite to mimic the extreme conditions of the transition zone. Researchers doing similar experiments with both wadsleyite and ringwoodite found that in the transition zone, these minerals could hold 1 to 3 percent of their weight in water. Considering that the transition zone is a roughly 250-kilometer-thick shell that accounts for about 7 percent of Earth’s mass (by comparison, the crust is only 1 percent), it could contain several times the water of Earth’s oceans.
Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Quanta Magazine
These experiments, however, only gauge water capacity. “It’s not a measurement of how wet the sponge is, it’s a measurement of how much the sponge can hold,” said Wendy Panero, a geophysicist at Ohio State University.
Neither were the experiments necessarily realistic, since researchers could only test lab-grown ringwoodite. Apart from a few meteorites, no one had ever seen ringwoodite in nature. That is, until 2014.
Tantalizing Clues
While soccer fans converged on Brazil for the 2014 World Cup, a small group of geologists headed to the farmlands around Juína, a city almost 2,000 kilometers west of Brasilia. They were on the hunt for diamonds that had been panned from local rivers.
As diamonds form in the heat and high pressure of the mantle, they can trap bits of minerals. Because diamonds are so tough and rigid, they preserve these mantle minerals as they’re blasted to the surface via volcanic eruptions.
The researchers bought more than a thousand of the most speckled, mineral-filled crystals. One of the scientists, Graham Pearson, took several hundred back to his lab at the University of Alberta, where, inside one particular diamond, he and his colleagues discoveredringwoodite from the transition zone. Not only that, but it was hydrous ringwoodite, which meant it contained water — about 1 percent by weight.
“It’s an important discovery in terms of plausibility,” said Brandon Schmandt, a seismologist at the University of New Mexico. For the first time, scientists had a sample of the transition zone — and it was hydrated. “It’s definitely not crazy, then, to think other parts of the transition zone are also hydrated.”
But, he added, “it would also be a little crazy to think that one crystal represents the average of the entire transition zone.” Diamonds, after all, form only in certain conditions, and this sample might come from a uniquely watery place.
To see how widespread hydrous ringwoodite could be, Schmandt teamed with Jacobsen and others to map it using seismic waves. Due to convection, hydrous ringwoodite can sink, and as it drops below the transition zone, the rising pressure wrings water out, causing the mineral to melt. Just beneath the transition zone where mantle material is descending, these pools of molten minerals can abruptly slow seismic waves. By measuring seismic speeds under North America, the researchers found that, indeed, such pools appear common below the transition zone. Another studymeasuring the seismic waves under the European Alps found a similar pattern.
Abundant mantle water got yet another boost in March when a team led by Oliver Tschauner, a mineralogist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, discovered diamonds that contain actual pieces of water ice — the first observation of freely existing H2O from the mantle. The samples might say more about the wet conditions that formed the diamond than the existence of any ubiquitous reservoir. But because this water — a high-pressure form called ice-VII — was found in a variety of locations across southern Africa and China, it could turn out to be relatively widespread.
“A couple years from now, we’ll find ice-VII is much more common,” said Steve Shirey, a geologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science. “It’s telling us we have the same story that hydrous ringwoodite is telling us.”
But if the story is that the mantle is brimming with water, the cliffhanger leaves us wondering how it all got there.
Watery Origins
According to the standard tale, Earth’s water was imported. The region around the sun where the planet formed was too hot for volatile compounds like water to condense. So the nascent Earth started out dry, getting wet only after water-rich bodies from the distant solar system crashed into the planet, delivering water to the surface. Most of these were likely not comets but rather asteroids called carbonaceous chondrites, which can be up to 20 percent water by weight, storing it in a form of hydrogen like ringwoodite.
But if there’s a huge stockpile of water in the transition zone, this story of water’s origin would have to change. If the transition zone could store 1 percent of its weight in water — a moderate estimate, Jacobsen said — it would contain twice the world’s oceans. The lower mantle is much drier but also voluminous. It could amount to all the world’s oceans (again). There’s water in the crust, too. For subduction to incorporate that much water from the surface at the current rate, it would take much longer than the age of the planet, Jacobsen said.
If that’s the case, at least some of Earth’s interior water must have always been here. Despite the heat in the early solar system, water molecules could have stuck to the dust particles that coalesced to form Earth, according to some theories.
Yet the total amount of water in the mantle is a highly uncertain figure. At the low end, the mantle might hold only half as much water as in the world’s oceans, according to Schmandt and others.
On the high end, the mantle could hold two or three times the amount of water in the oceans. If there were much more than that, the additional heat of the younger Earth would have made the mantle too watery and runny to fracture the continental plates, and today’s plate tectonics may never have gotten started. “If you have a bunch of water in the surface, it’s great,” said Jun Korenaga, a geophysicist at Yale University. “If you have a bunch of water in the mantle, it’s not great.”
But many uncertainties remain. One big question mark is the lower mantle, where extreme pressures turn ringwoodite into bridgmanite, which can’t hold much water at all. Recent studies, however, suggest the presence of new water-bearing minerals dubbed phase D and phase H. Exactly what these minerals are like and how much water they might store remains an open question, Panero said. “Because it is a wide-open question, I think that the water content in the mantle remains open for debate — wide open.”
Measuring Earth’s interior water storage isn’t easy. One promising way is to measure the electrical conductivity of the mantle, Korenaga said. But those techniques aren’t yet as advanced as, say, using seismic waves. And while seismic waves offer a global view of Earth’s interior, the picture isn’t always clear. The signals are subtle, and researchers need more precise data and a better understanding of the properties of more realistic mantle material, instead of just ringwoodite and wadsleyite. Those two minerals constitute about 60 percent of the transition zone, the rest being a complex mix of other minerals and compounds.
Finding more diamonds with hydrous minerals would help, too. In Jacobsen’s lab, that job falls to graduate student Michelle Wenz. For each diamond, she uses powerful X-rays at Argonne National Laboratory to map the location of every mineral speck, of which there may be half a dozen. Then, to identify the minerals, she blasts X-rays onto each bit and measures how the rays scatter off its crystal structure. Of the hundreds of diamonds in the lab, all from Brazil, she’s gone through about 60. No water yet.
Water or not, she said, these capsules from the deep are still amazing. “Each one is so unique,” she said. “They’re a lot like snowflakes.”
Correction:This article was revised on July 11, 2018, to correct a typographical error; it is the mantle, not the ocean, that could hold two or three times the amount of water in the oceans.
De zoektocht naar verborgen oceanen in het onbereikbare binnenste van de aarde. Waar komt dit water vandaan?
De zoektocht naar verborgen oceanen in het onbereikbare binnenste van de aarde. Waar komt dit water vandaan?
Diamanten uit het onbereikbare binnenste van de aarde blijken water te bevatten. Dat lees je goed: water.
Als de mineralen worden gesmolten, komt er water uit tevoorschijn. Deze waterrijke mineralen bevinden zich op een diepte van 410 tot 660 kilometer in de mantel en mogelijk nog veel dieper.
Sommige wetenschappers stellen dat zich ver onder onze voeten een gigantische watervoorraad bevindt.
Belangrijke rol
Als je al het oppervlaktewater op aarde als één oceaan ziet, dan kunnen zich onder de grond met gemak enkele oceanen bevinden. De vraag is nu waar al dit water vandaan komt.
Water speelt een belangrijke rol bij platentektoniek, vulkaanuitbarstingen en zorgt ervoor dat delen van de mantel zich vrijer kunnen bewegen.
Het bovenste gedeelte van de mantel bestaat vooral uit olivijn, een mineraal dat weinig water kan opslaan.
Maar vanaf een diepte van 410 kilometer verandert olivijn als gevolg van hoge temperaturen en druk in wadsleyiet, dat veel gemakkelijker water opslaat.
Meerdere keren
Op nog grotere diepte wordt wadsleyiet ringwoodiet. Deze mineralen bestaan voor zo’n één tot drie procent uit water.
Aangezien het gebied waarin ze voorkomen zeven procent van de massa van de aarde uitmaakt, kan het meerdere keren de totale hoeveelheid van al het water op aarde bevatten.
In maart ontdekte Oliver Tschauner van de Universiteit van Nevada in Las Vegas diamanten uit de mantel die stukjes waterijs bevatten. Het was de eerste aanwijzing dat H2O voorkomt in de mantel.
Sneeuwvlokken
Als de mantel vol water zit, is water van de aarde niet van buitenaf naar onze planeet gekomen. Dat water moet er dan altijd al zijn geweest.
Studente Michelle Wenz doet in het laboratorium onderzoek naar de diamanten. “Ze zijn allemaal zo uniek,” zei ze. “Ze lijken erg op sneeuwvlokken.”
At first, ancient Egyptians buried all of their dead, regardless of social status, in pits in the sand that covers much of their country. The dry air quickly and naturally preserved these bodies, giving Egyptian religions support for their beliefs in the afterlife. Unfortunately, animals had no such respect for the human dead, so the bodies were later placed in coffins or sarcophagi, which protected them from beasts but not from decomposition. Somewhere around 2800 BCE, a type of artificial mummification began to be developed and tested, using oils and minerals and techniques that have mystified and baffled those trying to duplicate them.
Until now.
At a press conference in Cairo, Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities announced that German and Egyptian archeologists led by Ramadan Badry Hussein have uncovered an ancient laboratory or workshop dating back to the Saite-Persian period (664-404 BCE) which contains fragments of mummy cartonnages (funeral masks), canopic jars (used for storing human organs removed before mummification) and clay and glazed ceramic cups (pictures here). Even more exciting to Hussein was the discovery of the ingredients and possible measurements for making the secret embalming fluids.
“This [discovery] is so important as it’s extensive. We have oils and measuring cups – all of them are labelled … from this we can find the chemical composition of the oils and discover what they are.”
Set of canopic jars
The laboratory was located next to a 30 meter (98 foot) shaft filled with the end results – mummies. On one of these mummies they found something nearly as significant as the workshop – a gilded silver mask belonging to a priest. Only a handful of these masks covered with precious metals have been found due to looting.
That brings us to how the mummy lab was found in the first place. The Saqqara necropolis of Memphis was last excavated in 1900 but was looted in 2011 during Egyptian protests. It was reopened in 2016 as part of Egypt’s push to use archeology to increase tourism. Artifacts from the discovery of the mummy lab are already on display at the Grand Egyptian Museum, which is still under construction.
Is this push to increase Egyptian tourism through mummies the new looting? Despite warnings, archeologists plan to open a giant mysterious sarcophagus discovered in Alexandria. Researchers are also going back to previously-investigated tombs and sites to search again. Is archeology and history being pushed aside in the name of money? Peru seems to be making an attempt to protect its mummies – real or otherwise – and the World Congress on Mummy Studies is pushing for the same in other countries. Can the mummy workshop at least be protected until its secrets are studied by scholars?
Or is this just another example of why we can’t have nice things?
I founds some mind-blowing alien structures in this large moon photo from the Univ of Arizona index controlled by the USGS and NASA. The most remarkable thing I found was an emerald green dome over a crater. Reminds me of the Emerald City from the Wizard of Oz. There were also two large black shiny domes over craters not far away. I'm not sure how astronomers around the world have ignored such discoverers, but from my research I have learned that NASA has donated a lot of money to observatories around the world, probably to control their research and their released findings. Its up to us, the public to release the truth about the existence of aliens. The truth is...every planet and moon in our solar system has had alien life upon it or within it. Scott C. Waring
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Large “Mythological” Fire Bird Spotted Near Yellowstone
Large “Mythological” Fire Bird Spotted Near Yellowstone
A strange colorful bird has been spotted on the Grand Teton National Park live webcam just days after a highly popular area near Jenny Lake in Grand Teton National Park located near the Yellowstone National Park has been closed to the public for the immediate future due to concerns over expanding cracks and fissures in a large rock formation.
While Yellowstone seems to be in a perpetual state of unrest with its Steamboat geyser that has erupted for the 11th time since March and now the expanding cracks and fissures at the Grand Teton National Park the appearance of this colorful bird that resembles the mythological fire bird is at least odd.
The fire bird also called as a phoenix is a sacred fire bird found in the mythologies of many cultures and described as a large magical glowing bird with majestic plumage that glows brightly emitting red, orange, and yellow light, like a bonfire that is just past the turbulent flame.
The fire bird can be seen at around the 2.08 mark in the video and according to the ancient legend the fire bird comes from a faraway land which is both a blessing and a bringer of doom.
Roads have always seemed to attract about them tales of the strange and unusual. They push out, further and further ahead of us, their destinations not visible, mysterious, as the landscape rushes by us, sometimes bringing with it bizarreness. It is perhaps this almost primal sense of oddness that has spawned countless tales of haunted roads, inhabited by all manner of strange entities and apparitions. One feature of some spooky haunted roads are ghost lights, also called spook lights, dancing and twirling in the dark to baffle and amaze, and sometimes they seem to be far from harmless.
Some malevolent spook lights seem to be linked to some sort of phantom motorists, and perhaps one of the more well-known of these is said to prowl a rural road in Switzerland, in St. Johns County, Florida, in the United States. Here there is a modest little road called Greenbriar Road, which runs just east of the main town, and there have for years been tales of a rather aggressive spook light that stalks vehicles that dare to drive along here at night. The enigmatic light is typically said to look just like a motorcycle headlight, which will pull up behind cars and steadily catch up no matter how fast one goes, growing ever larger in the rear view mirrors of the startled drivers.
The light of Greenbriar Road will then either chase the car until it is gone, or bizarrely perch itself atop the vehicle, sort of piggybacking the car for some distance before blinking out of existence as if it were never there at all. In some cases the mysterious light has even been blamed for causing crashes along this lonely stretch of road. The most common origin story for this mysterious light is that it is the wraith of a doomed motorcyclist who died along the road when he was decapitated after running into a telephone pole wire, and that he now terrorizes the stretch upon which he met his fate, with only the headlight of his phantom bike visible. One witness named Todd M. gave an account on the site Weird U.S. thus:
A few years ago I went to see Greenbriar Road at night with three of my friends. We had heard the stories about that light that people see and we wanted to see it. We drove up and down the road for like forty-minutes trying to see something but never saw anything until we got ready to leave. My friend Tom was driving and he looked in the rear view mirror and said what is that? We looked behind us and there was the headlight of a motorcycle coming up fast. We slowed down a little and thought that the biker would pass us but then just as it got right behind us about a hundred feet the light went out. There was no motorcycle or anything. We turned around and went back but didn’t see anything. I really think we saw a ghost biker of that guy that was killed on his motorcycle on that road.
The malignant Greenbriar ghost light is so well-known in the area that it has been the target of paranormal investigations and even scientific studies and police investigations trying to find a rational explanation for what people are seeing, but no explanation has ever been found. Speaking of phantom motorcyclists, there is another similar spook said to haunt a remote stretch of road winding through the rural farming community of Exeter, in Tulare County, California, which is supposedly the stomping ground of a similar ghost.
In this case, in the 1950s a group of friends allegedly decided to play a prank on one of their friends by stretching out some rope across a narrow road called Bardsley road, in the Fresno Valley, after which they lied in wait for their motorcycle riding pal to come cruising by on his way home from work. The plan was for the rope to just hit him in the chest and knock him off his bike, which was pretty mean but they certainly didn’t intend to seriously hurt him, certainly not kill him.
The story goes that the rider came along the darkened road as expected and hit the rope just as expected. What wasn’t expected was that the rope would be too high and lop his head clean off to go rolling across the pavement. In the aftermath of the gruesome accident, people started occasionally claiming to see a bright light shooting up and down the road, sometimes accompanied by the sound of a motorcycle engine, and with the full apparition of a headless rider visible as well. Motorists and people walking along the road at night have also told of being followed or even chased by the phantasm motorcyclist, and it is believed that if you encounter the rider you will be cursed to be in an accident yourself.
Adding to these a is headless rider is said to prowl Creek Road of Ojai, California, apparently riding a vintage 1940s motorcycle and appearing as a glowing light at first, often pulling up next to motorists to bang on their vehicles or chasing them. Interestingly, Creek Road is ground zero for all manner of ghostly phenomena and high strangeness, including at least two phantom horse riders, numerous apparitions, a smoking, horribly burned and disfigured entity called the Char Man, and even a supposed vampire, making a headless motorcycle rider actually one of the less bizarre tales from this place. For more on phantom motorcyclists, you can read my article on this phenomenon here.
Other sinister spook lights seem to be malevolent spirits or even possibly demons. Located out just northeast of Jacksonville, Florida, is St. George Island, which is home to a historic sugar cane, cotton, and corn plantation from the slave days called Kingsley Plantation, established by a Zephaniah Kingsley in 1813. The original plantation would quickly grow until Kingsley owned around a total of 32,000 acres of land and employed about 200 slaves. Despite having so many slaves, Kingsley was known for being a very lax and kind master, allowing his workforce to basically do whatever they wanted when they were off duty, and they were allowed to sell any crafts they made on their own time. Kingsley even married one of his slaves, Ana Madgigine Jai, who would go on to take a prominent management role on the plantation, own her own land, and end up being one of the richest women in the state.
Although conditions were much better for slaves on the Kingsley plantation than they were elsewhere, there was some amount of tragedy on the plantation nevertheless. At some point one of the slaves allegedly took to beating and raping other female slaves, even according to the stories murdering a few and hiding their bodies in the wilderness. When the other slaves got wind of this grim behavior they are said to have gathered a lynch mob to hunt the perpetrator down and hanged on a massive, spooky looking oak tree right in front of the plantation along the main road to the premises, leaving his lifeless body to swing there in the wind. Although Kingsley would move to Haiti along with all of his slaves in 1837, it seems that at least some of them remained, in a macabre sense.
Over the years the Kingsley plantation has come to gather quite a reputation for being intensely haunted, supposedly by the ghosts of those murdered here. One is a woman in white that is frequently spotted roaming around, and has a habit of photo-bombing pictures taken at the locale, while another is an unearthly screaming or wailing that supposedly emanates from the old abandoned well on the property, said to be from a victim of the crime spree whose body was unceremoniously dumped down there in the darkness.
Kingsley Plantation
However, one of the most frightening of the spirits of the old Kingsley Plantation is supposedly the vindictive spirit of the slave murderer himself, who terrorizes the plantation’s creepy and rugged unpaved road. This particularly malicious spirit typically takes the form of two malevolent, angry looking red lights, said to be his glowing eyes, earning the phantom the name “Old Red Eyes.” These lights will supposedly appear behind cars right about at the old oak tree and chase them, in some reports even relentlessly attacking them. One report of an encounter with Old Red Eyes was described by a witness thus:
I’ve saw Old Red Eye several years ago. I have a friend that lives just off that road and had taken him home from Jacksonville one night. It was about midnight and after dropping him off, I was driving back down that road to the hard road and looked in the side mirror on my car and saw two red lights. At first I thought it was the tail lights of another car but they were too close together. I slowed down a little and watched them in the mirror and it looked like they were coming closer. I knew that I had not passed another car and it did not seem like a car would be coming down that dark road backwards. I stopped and stuck my head out the window and looked back and there was nothing there. Then I looked in the mirror again and there they were and they were right behind my car. I gunned it and got the hell out of there. What I saw wasn’t a car.
Just as ominous is the appropriately named “Demon’s Road” in Huntsville, Texas, which is already spooky enough, as it meanders through groves of twisted trees and darkened woods and ends up at the desolate Martha’s Chapel Cemetery. The real name is Bowden Road, but it has earned its nickname in the decidedly frightening phenomena that have been reported from here, such as shadow people, a ghostly child on a tricycle, a hulking faceless beast, a strange hooded figure, and arms reaching out from graves. There are many spirits said to lurk along the murky stretches of this road and in the cemetery, but one of the creepiest is a ghost light that seems to be quite malicious indeed.
Motorists venturing down the Demon’s Road have often reported mysterious red lights hovering about in the dark, the number of which seems to depend on how many people are in the vehicle at the time. These spook lights will supposedly aggressively pursue cars, and spookiest of all, will leave unexplained handprints on the outside. Indeed these lights have plagued many who have travelled down the road, often leaving those handprints and always hostile, sometimes even clawing or grabbing at cars to leave scratches and dents behind. What could this diabolical force be and why does it want to attack vehicles? Who knows?
Another case in Texas of an aggressive ghost light is that said to roam a road in Hardin County leading from Bragg to Saratoga, which actually at one point was a part of the Santa Fe Railroad back in the early 1900s before being paved over to be turned into a road. In an area called Big Thicket there have long been reports of a multicolored spook light hovering about at night along the road and in the surrounding wilderness, with many of them pointing at the light being quite evil.
Even from beginning the reports of the Big Thicket ghost light, also called the Saratoga ghost light, were far from friendly. Hunters reported being chased by the lights and it was not uncommon to here of them rushing amongst horses to send the animals into a panicked frenzy, to the point that on at least one occasion a horse drawn wagon was forced to go crashing into a ditch because of the lights. At the time the lights became a pretty widespread rumor, attracting all sorts of curiosity seekers, and author F.E. Abernethy would explain of the phenomenon in his book Tales from the Big Thicket thus:
Light-seers poured onto the road by the hundreds. People of all ages and intellects came to see and test their belief in the supernatural. They shot at it, they chased it, and they tested it with litmus paper and geiger counters. A preacher harangued the road’s multitudes from the top of his car, making the Light as an ill omen of the world’s impending doom. There were some nights the light didn’t show at all, but for the most part it was there to inspire stories that could be passed on, to change and grow at the will and imagination of the story teller.
The Big Thicket Ghost Light road
In later years the light did not stop its antics in the slightest bit, with reports of it chasing people or even attacking them common, such as cases in which the light stopped car engines, burned people’s hands, or even violently knocked them down. There have been reports of cars being dinged, dented, or smashed by the ghost light, and it is generally not something one wants to encounter while driving down the already eerie rural road. As usual there have been many attempts to rationally explain the Big Thicket Light, such as that it is some sort of illusion, swamp gas, or merely headlights, and there have been a fair number of more paranormal explanations as well, including that it is the spirit of a hunter or Civil War soldier, or even that it is a curse placed over a lost Spanish treasure. Whatever the case may be, the stories of the evil ghost light of Saratoga persist.
Texas seems to be a haven for such spook lights, because there is another road in this state that has its own scary stories of such entities. In the area of the Mitchell Flat, east of Marfa, Texas, there have long been reports of mystery lights floating out over the desert landscape since at least the 1800s. The phenomena are usually described as dancing orbs of light that zip and zoom low to the ground over the parched desert scrub, and they have collectively been coined the “Marfa Lights.” While the phenomenon is puzzling but usually harmless, there have been some reports that show these lights can be rather frightening on occasion.
In one report from Weird Texas, one man named Tim Stevens gave an account of a very bizarre experience witnesses by a friend of his father’s named Roy while traveling down Route 90 in the 1970s. According to the report, Roy had been driving for hours out from San Antonio after sunset and just before dark, and there had been no other cars out on this remote stretch of the highway that evening. Suddenly, he noticed what he took to be headlights in his rear view mirror. For some time the lights remained a comfortable distance away, but at some point the lights quickly closed the distance to follow right behind him. The report explained the follwing sequence of events:
My dad said that Roy had been driving with the lights a comfortable distance behind him for several minutes when the vehicle sped and up and approached his truck rapidly. For a few seconds, he honestly thought he was about to be rear-ended. Before an impact occurred, however, the lights stopped a few feet short of hitting his truck. At 60 MPH, in the middle of an otherwise deserted highway, it probably wasn’t too much to ask for the courtesy of a little breathing room. So Roy tapped the brakes. The driver of the vehicle behind him maintained his distance. Roy again tapped his brakes––no response. Finally, very annoyed, Roy jammed hard on his brakes for a fraction of a second. To his amazement, the vehicle behind him stayed the exact distance from his rear bumper as it had been.
Roy decided to try a different approach. He said he floored the gas pedal making his small truck shudder and lurch ahead. The speed crept up to 80 MPH. The lights behind him reacted in perfect unison, staying several feet behind his truck, as it approached speeds Roy was sure he’d never pushed it to before. At nearly 100 MPH, the truck was beginning to vibrate badly, but the lights did not waiver.
Enough was enough. Roy eased off the gas and let the truck coast down to a sane speed, and then he stood on the brakes. The tires screeched and smoked, and the truck pitched and slid slightly to the side––but the whole time, Roy watched the lights in the mirror. They stayed in exactly the same spot until the truck came to a stop. Roy then saw something completely unexpected––the lights shot out, off the road to the right, and fired across the desert like missiles. He craned his neck around to try and follow them visually, impressed by the driver’s driving on what was sure to be very rough road. He smiled and was about to drive on when a thought occurred to him.
He frowned, and, making sure that he wasn’t about to be run over by a big rig or other traffic, put his truck in reverse and slowly backed up maybe a couple of hundred feet. He checked the barbed wire fence line for a road, a gate, or other break of some kind where his pursuer might have slipped through––but there was none. Roy said he was pretty spooked, alright. Off in the distance he could see lights moved swiftly across the horizon.
Whatever this was, whether it was connected to the Marfa Lights or not, it certainly seems hard to explain away as a trick of light or headlight reflections from the distance. Ghost lights have been a persistent phenomenon within the world of the weird, and there have been countless theories to try and explain them. Yet, none seem to touch on those lights that seem to reach out from the merely mysterious to lash out at those who encounter them. Is there some explanation for this or is this hoaxes and tall tales? If it is indeed real, then why do these particular spook lights cling to these locations, and why do they seem so hostile and threatening? It seems to be beyond our ability to comprehend at this point, and these lights may flit about the periphery of our understanding prowling their haunting grounds without ever being satisfactorily explained.
Which is more shocking: the fact that Jupiter has at least 12 more moons than once thought or the fact that they were discovered by real astronomers who were looking for the mythical Planet Nine? Planetary scientists announced that the discovery of the tiny and somewhat erratic moons brings Jupiter’s total to 79, but are they just bragging to cover up the time they spent searching for an allegedly apocalyptic yet unproven giant planet?
12 new moons discovered around Jupiter
“Jupiter just happened to be in the sky near the search fields where we were looking for extremely distant Solar System objects, so we were serendipitously able to look for new moons around Jupiter while at the same time looking for planets at the fringes of our Solar System.”
In a press release by The Carnegie Institution for Science, part of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, astronomer Scott S. Sheppard admitted publicly that he and his team were looking for Planet Nine or Planet X in 2017 when Jupiter passed into the field of vision of their telescopes and they spotted the 12 tiny new moons. “Tiny” is an overstatement – most the moons range from just one to three miles in diameter. It required waiting a year for them to appear a few more times before the team was confident enough to announce the find.
Jupiter and its four biggest moons
12 new moons discovered around Jupiter
Nine of the newly discovered moons are in three groups making distant retrograde orbits (opposite Jupiter’s rotation) and the researchers speculate they may be what’s left of three larger moons that suffered collisions with each other, other moons, asteroids or comets. Two more moons are closer to Jupiter and follow its spin. Their matching orbits and tilts indicate they were probably once a single moon.
Then there’s the tiny eccentric satellite.
“Our other discovery is a real oddball and has an orbit like no other known Jovian moon. It’s also likely Jupiter’s smallest known moon, being less than one kilometer in diameter. This is an unstable situation.”
According to Sheppard, this moon’s orbit is prograde despite being far enough from Jupiter that it should be retrograde or at least off-kilter due to collisions. The abundance of these tiny moons suggests that they formed after the solar system’s planetary creation had settled down, allowing them to survive rather than be knocked down by Jupiter’s formational gas and dust.
While Sheppard seemed excited about the discovery of this odd and minute moon, its chosen moniker suggests otherwise. The astronomers named it Valetudo after the Roman goddess of health and hygiene. Really? There’s a goddess of hygiene? How far down the line of succession is she?
Valetudo
And what about Planet Nine? The announcement seems to overplay the discovery of moons around a planet that already had five dozen of them and doesn’t mention much about the Planet Nine search. Is it being phased out due to lack of success? Did the discovery of Valetudo and her friends save some jobs?
Is there a god of hygiene or did the Romans figure men wouldn’t listen to one anyways?
A giant black sarcophagus the likes of which have never been seen before has been found deep within the ground in Egypt, and a whole lot of scientists want to open it – despite having neither one earthly nor one unearthly idea what might lie waiting possibly maliciously inside. Say it with me now: “What! Could! Go! Wrong?” [cue applause and intro music]
Today’s episode of What The Hell Are They Thinking? comes to you straight from the ancient city of Alexandria in Egypt, one of the cradles of Western civilization as we know it. Earlier this month, construction crews there unearthed a true archaeological mystery the likes of which can only be found in Egypt. A massive alabaster head was found in the ground, the identity of which still remains a mystery. Even stranger (and scarier), a massive black sarcophagus was discovered nearby, measuring two meters by three meters, weighing over 30 metric tons, and carved entirely from black marble. Sounds like the perfect way to entomb an immortal evil wizard if you ask me.
How would you feel if some science nerds a few thousand years from now cracked open your coffin to look at your embarrassingly shriveled remains? How are they supposed to know you’re a grower and not a shower?
But they didn’t ask me. Instead, a team of archaeologists and scientists from Egypt’s money hungry Ministry of Antiquities will crack the menacing-looking thing open despite the entirety of the internet knowing that it’s a terrible idea. “We are hoping this tomb may belong to one of the high dignitaries of the period,” Ayman Ashmawy, the head of Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities said in a statement, his pupils turning into dollar signs as he eyes the sarcophagus and licks his lips. “The alabaster head is likely that of a nobleman in Alexandria. When we open the sarcophagus, we hope to find objects inside that are intact, which will help us to identify this person and their position.”
Let’s take a step back for a second, though: why would you take the time and resources to bury something underneath a 15-ton slab of black marble unless you really, really want it to stay there? But no, fetch the crowbars and let’s get crackin’ boys! There’s museums to stock and tours to plan!
“Why did you release me!? I wasn’t finished with my cleanse yet!”
While in all likelihood the tomb contains nothing more than the stinking remains of some poor inbred aristocrat and all of his junk, there does in fact seem to be a precedent for a real-life pharaoh’s curse – although it seems the “curse” is more like a lifetime of disappointment and waning fame living in the shadow of your greatest discovery than a persistent haunting from a vengeful ancient ghost. But who knows? Maybe vengeful ancient ghosts work in mysterious ways. Maybe evil wizards don’t like being buried for 2,000 years in a musty black marble box. Maybe some things are better left in the ground where one of the most advanced civilizations in human history clearly wanted it to stay.
I’ll be in the bunker tonight, honey; no dinner for me. I’ve got talismans to enchant and salt circles to pour.
Diamonds are not rare at all on Earth- Representational imagePixabay
Diamonds are famously known to be both rare and "forever". Both of those supposedly well-known facts are, as it turns out, not true at all.
New research by a team from MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley has found that there is a lot more diamond in the planet than once believed. A quadrillion tonnes, or about a 1,000 trillion tonnes of diamond is buried below the Earth, but it is out of reach to humans. At about 120 to 150 km below the surface, it is out of reach of even the best drills available right now.
That means there are more diamonds than gold on the planet. According to a BBC report, there is only 2.5 million tonnes of the shiny metal in the world.
"This shows that diamond is not perhaps this exotic mineral, but on the [geological] scale of things, it's relatively common," said Ulrich Faul, of MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.
"We can't get at them, but still, there is much more diamond there than we have ever thought before."
Astronomers Spot ‘Celestial Diamond Ring’ Nebula - Diamonds are surprisingly common in outer space
European Southern Observatory
This massive stash of diamonds are stored in rock formations called cratons. Cratons form as a result of tectonic plate movement. Similar to the way mountains happen as a result of tectonic movement and are pushed up, cratons are pushed down. They can be likened to inverted mountains and can go as deep as 200 miles, says MIT. At the very bottom of these cratons lie the diamond "roots". The study found that diamonds likely make up about 1 to 2 percent of croton roots.
As to how this find was made, the tech is similar to what is used to detect and measure seismic activity, or earthquakes. Seismic data can also be used to effectively see inside Earth, similar to an ultrasound scan.
Sound travels faster in more dense material than light materials, so its speeds vary according to the composition, temperature, and density of rocks below the surface. By comparing the way sound travels and bounces back, scientists can accurately find what rock lies beneath the surface and at what depth they lie.
The study was published by the American Geophysical Union.
Jupiter has been found to have a dozen more moons orbiting it and they have been idenrified for the first time. Of the 12, 11 moons are "normal" outer moons, and one "oddball" moon. That makes Jupiter the planet with the highest number of moons with a grand total of 79 natural satellites—the highest of any planet in the solar system.
The team of astronomers were led by Scott S. Sheppard, of Carnegie. The moons were first spotted in the spring of 2017, says a release put out by the researchers. This discovery was made while on the lookout for distant solar system objects far beyond Pluto. They were looking for the mysterious Planet 9, which is believed to be a massive object that is actually affecting Pluto's orbit and even possibly firing comets at Earth.
12 new moons have been seen and identified for the first time ever
Roberto Molar Candanosa via Carnegie Institution for Science
A few years back in 2014, this same team found an object with the most-distant orbit in the solar system. They were also the first to realise that there just might be a massive planet out there in the outer reaches of the solar system. This "Planet 9" is also sometimes called Planet X.
"Jupiter just happened to be in the sky near the search fields where we were looking for extremely distant solar system objects," said Sheppard.
So we were serendipitously able to look for new moons around Jupiter while at the same time looking for planets at the fringes of our solar system," he added.
Using the team's observations, Gareth Williams at the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center was able to measure out the orbits for these newly found moons each about one to three kilometres in size.
The newly discovered Moons include one oddball moon that could collide with the outer Moons of Jupiter
Carnegie Institution for Science
As to why the announcement comes so long after it was first observed since the spring of 2017, Williams said that, "It takes several observations to confirm an object actually orbits around Jupiter."
"So, the whole process took a year."
Nine of the 12 newly discovered moons are reported to be a part of Jupiter's distant outer swarm of moons that orbit it in the retrograde—opposite direction of the planet's spin. These distant retrograde moons are now grouped into at least groups that are thought to be the remnants of three once-larger parent bodies that broke apart because of collisions with asteroids, comets, and other moons near Jupiter. The retrograde moons take nearly two years to completely orbit Jupiter.
Of the remaining 3, 2 moons are part of a close, inner group that orbit in Jupiter's prograde--same direction as planet rotation. They also have similar orbital distances from the gas giant and their angles of inclination around Jupiter point out them also once being part of a much larger boody that has since broken down. These two moons, being a lot closer to the planet take less than a year to travel around Jupiter, say the researchers.
"Our other discovery is a real oddball and has an orbit like no other known Jovian moon," Sheppard explained. "It's also likely Jupiter's smallest known moon, being less than one kilometer in diameter."
The one "oddball" moon lies between the two groups of moons and its orbit is more inclined than the prograde group. This one takes about one and a half years to orbit Jupiter, say the researchers. This moon also has a prograde orbit, but its path crosses the outer retrograde moons. Chances of the oddball moon crashing into the outer retrograde moons moving in the opposite direction are very real, say the astronomers, who have proposed the oddball be named "Valetudo" after the Roman god Jupiter's great-granddaughter, the goddess of health and hygiene.
Sheppard called this situation unstable and explained that, "Head-on collisions would quickly break apart and grind the objects down to dust."
Nick Pope, a British media commentator who worked with the British Government's Ministry of Defence (MoD) from 1985 to 2006 has claimed that unidentified flying objects (UFO) are real. In an exclusive story written for the Sun, Pope revealed that most of the UFO sightings could be explained, but around five percent remain mysterious.
UFOs are real
As per Nick Pope, the cases which perplexed his MoD team during the investigation were the near misses between UFOs and commercial aircraft. The former MoD insider argued that many pilots have reported mysterious UFO encounters which still remain unanswered.
"The bottom line was that we knew UFOs were real, but we didn't know what they were. What was much more fun was the other weird stuff that came our way simply because there was nowhere else in government to send it: crop circles, claims that people had been abducted by aliens, ghost sightings and people who claimed to be psychic and volunteered their services to British intelligence," wrote Nick Pope on the Sun.
Nick Pope also made it clear that Russians and Chinese had conducted tremendous probe to unravel the mystery behind UFO sightings. As per Pope, Russians had also researched and investigated about parapsychology, telekinesis, and various other psychic phenomena.
US government's clever move
The former Directorate of Defence Security also talked about Pentagon's secret UFO search program 'Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP)'. He wrote that the US government did a very clever move by not mentioning the word UFO in the name of the investigation program.
"We still don't know much about AATIP, and it may take Congressional hearings to resolve the issue. Either way, if anyone was laughing about UFOs before, they're not laughing now," added Pope.
He also revealed that the UFOs spotted in the gun camera footage of the Royal Air Force were very similar to that of the flying objects featured in the declassified videos released by Pentagon.
Unidentified flying objects (UFOs) are real, according to British media commentator Nick Pope. While conceding the fact that most of the UFO sightings could be explained, Pope stressed that five per cent remain mysterious. Pope, who worked with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) from 1985 to 2006, stated that near-misses between commercial aircraft and UFOs perplexed his MoD team during the investigation. He said that several pilots had reported unexplained UFO encounters, which remain mysterious.
Pope said that they knew UFOs were real, but no idea what they were. He revealed that other weird stuff also came their way because there was nowhere else in the government where people could send it. They also met people who claimed to be psychic and volunteered to be part of the British intelligence.
Nick Pope also disclosed that China and Russia had conducted serious investigations to shed light to reported UFO sightings. As per Pope, Russia had also researched about parapsychology, telekinesis and several other psychic phenomena.
Pope also made mentioned about the Pentagon’s secret UFO search program “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program” (AATIP). He noted the smart move of the American government not to mention the word UFO in the name of the investigation program.
He said that they do not know much about the program and it might need Congressional hearings to resolve the issue.
He further revealed that the UFOs recorded in the gun camera of the Royal Air Force had similarity to the flying objects in the Pentagon’s declassified videos.
‘Alien arachnids’: Spider-like mounds captured by NASA on Martian surface (PHOTO)
‘Alien arachnids’: Spider-like mounds captured by NASA on Martian surface (PHOTO)
Incredible spider-like mounds have been captured ‘crawling’ across the surface of Mars as winter drew to a close on the Red Planet.
An image, taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in May as the South Pole of Mars edged towards spring, shows patterns etched across the surface, freakishly similar in appearance to Earth’s eight-legged creatures.
“But these aren't actual spiders,”NASA clarifies in a post explaining the scientific process behind the distinct features.
So where are the spiders? On Mars! Our Mars orbiter took this image of "araneiform terrain," spider-like radiating mounds that form when Martian carbon dioxide ice below the surface heats up and releases each spring in a process not seen on Earth: https://go.nasa.gov/2KYSRAn
The spider-like radiating mounds are known as “araneiform terrain,” and form when carbon dioxide ice below the surface heats up and releases. This is an active seasonal process not seen on Earth, according to the space agency.
The carbon dioxide ice on Mars changes from solid to gas as it warms, causing the gas to become trapped below the surface. Over time this trapped gas builds in pressure and breaks through the ice as a jet that emits dust.
The result is veiny spider-like ‘formations’ spread across the planet accompanied by dark spots formed by dust deposited around vents during the CO2 eruption.
How an alien seaweed invasion spawned an Antarctic mystery
Southern bull kelp can drift huge distances before washing ashore.
Ceridwen Fraser, Author provided
How an alien seaweed invasion spawned an Antarctic mystery
Two small pieces of seaweed found by a Chilean scientist on an Antarctic beach set in train research that may transform our understanding of ocean drift and reveal what the future holds for Antarctic ecosystems affected by climate change.
It all started in January 2017, when sharp-eyed marine biologist Erasmo Macaya spotted two clumps of southern bull kelp washed up on the tide line of an Antarctic beach.
Most of us would have walked right on by, but it stopped Macaya in his tracks. To him it was as if an alien had just landed – and in many ways that was exactly what had happened.
The kelp that washed up on Antarctica’s Prince George Island.Erasmo Macaya, Author provided
Every piece of science he knew said that this species of kelp should never have ended up in Antarctica. Its home was the regions around New Zealand, Chile and the sub-Antarctic islands. Indeed, a genetic test later confirmed that the pieces he found had travelled tens of thousands of kilometres from the Kerguelen and South Georgia islands.
So how did the kelp get to Antarctica?
The ocean barrier
Many scientists considered such a journey impossible, because of the fierce barrier of winds and currents that encircle Antarctica. These winds – known to sailors as the Roaring Forties – combine with the world’s strongest ocean current, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, and the Coriolis force generated by Earth’s rotation.
Together, these forces push floating objects east and north, away from Antarctica. Before Macaya’s discovery, this barrier was thought to be impenetrable to floating debris.
Ocean currents in the Southern Ocean push floating objects east and north away from Antarctica.Author provided
But if kelp and other organisms could make it to Antarctica, this would have profound consequences for Antarctic ecosystems. So was there a way for the kelp to drift through that barrier?
We took up the challenge, using our ocean models. The mystery deepened when our first modelling attempts suggested that the Southern Ocean was indeed uncrossable by floating kelp. Even ocean eddies – the “weather” of the ocean – were not able to push floating objects southward away from the main ocean currents.
Yet the kelp had undeniably made the crossing. This led us to think about other influences on ocean drift that could play a role. We decided to add a very small effect known as Stokes drift to our models.
You can think of Stokes drift as deep ocean surfing. Waves can push floating objects in unusual directions. In the kelp’s case, each time a wave passes, the kelp will move a short distance with the wave. This drift is slow when waves are small, but in regions with large waves (such as the Southern Ocean) it can be much faster.
During storms around Antarctica, waves are typically 10-15m high. The largest wave ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere, more than 23m, was in the Southern Ocean off New Zealand. Stokes drift must be large here.
When we added this factor to our ocean models, the change was instant. The massive waves generated by Antarctic storms pushed a small proportion of floating objects southwards. As we report in Nature Climate Change today, this conceivably explains the kelp’s voyage to Antarctica.
Modelling virtual kelp pathways with surface ocean currents and wave motion.
We calculated that the kelp specimens must have drifted at least 20,000km to reach Antarctica – the longest biological rafting events ever recorded.
Our results will also change the way that drift pathways for floating objects – such as plastics, aeroplane crash debris, pumice from volcanoes, driftwood, seaweeds, and messages in bottles – will be calculated, particularly in stormy oceans.
What this means for Antarctica
The implications don’t stop there. Until now, Antarctica was thought to be an isolated ecosystem, largely insulated from environmental change. This is not in fact true.
Southern bull kelp can carry many other species of plants and animals when it detaches and floats out to sea. The discovery that this kelp can raft to Antarctica means we could see major ecological changes in Antarctic marine ecosystems as the climate warms.
So far there is almost no evidence of natural colonisations of Antarctica from northern regions in the past few tens of thousands of years. Many Antarctic plants and animals are distinct from those found on other continents and sub-Antarctic islands.
In fact, the kelp strands Macaya found are the first recorded foreign organisms to have drifted across the Southern Ocean. But our models suggest these are unlikely to be the only ones to have made the trip.
This means that Antarctica’s ecological differences are not really due to physical isolation. It is more likely that the harsh Antarctic climate prevents new plants and animals from establishing themselves.
But Antarctica is changing. Parts of the frozen continent are among the fastest-warming regions on Earth. As Antarctica and the ocean around it warms, the kelp rafts – and other floating organisms, including invertebrates hanging onto the kelp, seeds, driftwood that could harbour insects, and larvae – may one day be able to colonise.
By the end of this century, when parts of Antarctica are expected to be similar to current sub-Antarctic environments, we might see many new species colonising Antarctica, bringing dramatic ecosystem change.
Other human-caused influences may also be felt. If kelp can break through the barrier, then floating plastic debris from the large garbage patches in the South Atlantic and South Pacific, just north of the Southern Ocean, could conceivably make a similar journey.
Plastic litter is still very rare in the waters around Antarctica. But with ever-growing amounts of plastic entering our oceans and the new drift pathways we have discovered, more plastic will likely find its way south to pollute one of our last near-pristine environments.
And all of this has been revealed through the discovery of two small pieces of kelp on a distant beach, and the application of a relatively insignificant piece of ocean physics. From these small beginnings we now know that one of the world’s last great wildernesses might not escape our influence.
SpaceX’s component-catching ship has got an upgrade. Mr Steven, the vessel designed to catch the fairing from the Falcon 9 as it returns to Earth after launch, has been demonstrating its larger net around the port of Los Angeles. New images on Tuesday and a video earlier this week show the ship conducting sea trials at speeds of up to 20 knots, or 20 mph.
Images captured by Teslarati and video captured by YouTuber “Drone Dronester” show the ship conducting tests between July 12 and 15, with the crew and recovery technicians sending the ship out after a multi-week installation of the new net. The ship is what’s known as a “fast supply vessel,” meaning it’s ranked to move 400 metric tons of cargo at regular speeds of 23 knots, or 27 mph. The ship itself weighs almost 200,000 pounds and is around 200 feet long. The crew focused on sharp corners at high speed less than half an hour after setting sail, testing the stability with a net that’s four times bigger than its predecessor with an area of 0.9 acres.
The upgrade was much needed, as its predecessor first deployed in February never caught a fairing. The component protects the satellite on its way to orbit, normally discarded at the end of the mission. SpaceX is aiming to reuse as much of its rockets as possible to reclaim some of the $62 million construction costs. CEO Elon Muskdescribed the fairing as “a pallet of cash worth $6 million dollars falling through the sky” at around eight times the speed of sound, so capturing the component is highly lucrative.
On the fairing side, SpaceX has made some key changes to make Mr Steven’s job a bit easier. Modifications like onboard thrusters and a guidance system are aimed at positioning the fairing for a landing before the parafoil deploys to assist with the final landing on the ship’s netting. Those weren’t enough to catch the component, so SpaceX changes the ship’s net. Musk joked on Twitter that the new netting “looked smaller on paper.”
Mr Steven is expected to make its debut at the Falcon 9 launch scheduled for July 25 at 7:39 a.m. Eastern time from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
Another Volcano? Jupiter Probe Sees Hotspot on Roiling Moon Io (Photo)
Another Volcano? Jupiter Probe Sees Hotspot on Roiling Moon Io (Photo)
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
This annotated image highlights the location of a new heat source close to the south pole of the Jupiter moon Io. The image was generated from data collected on Dec. 16, 2017, by the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper instrument aboard NASA's Juno probe when the spacecraft was about 290,000 miles (470,000 kilometers) from Io. Higher temperatures are characterized in brighter colors; lower temperatures in darker ones.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM
NASA's Jupiter-orbiting Juno spacecraft may have just boosted the already-impressive volcano tally on the gas giant's lava-spewing moon Io.
Juno's Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper instrument, or JIRAM, detected a sizable "hotspot" near Io's south pole on Dec. 16, 2017, during one of the probe's close Jupiter flybys. Juno was about 290,000 miles (470,000 kilometers) away from Io at the time, NASA officials said.
"The new Io hotspot JIRAM picked up is about 200 miles (300 kilometers) from the nearest previously mapped hotspot," Alessandro Mura, a Juno co-investigator from the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome, said in a statement. [Amazing Photos: Jupiter's Volcanic Moon Io]
"We are not ruling out movement or modification of a previously discovered hotspot, but it is difficult to imagine one could travel such a distance and still be considered the same feature," Mura added.
Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system, with its insides roiled and churned by Jupiter's powerful gravity and the tugs of its fellow Galilean satellites, Callisto, Ganymede and Europa. Thanks to the efforts of ground-based telescopes and NASA probes such as the Jupiter-orbiting Galileo and the Saturn-studying Cassini, astronomers have already mapped about 150 volcanoes on the moon, some of which blast lava 250 miles (400 km) out into space.
So, confirming a new Io volcano wouldn't come as much of a shock. Indeed, according to NASA officials, about 250 additional volcanoes likely await discovery on Io, which is the fourth-largest moon in the solar system. (With a diameter of about 2,260 miles, or 3,640 km, Io is slightly larger than Earth's moon.)
Space SCIENCE As the Juno spacecraft orbits Jupiter, new discoveries about the giant planet continue to be made.
The $1.1 billion Juno mission arrived in orbit around Jupiter on July 4, 2016. The spacecraft loops around the gas giant on a highly elliptical path, making close flybys like the Dec. 16 encounter every 53 days. During these passes, Juno studies Jupiter's composition, structure, and gravitational and magnetic fields, looking for clues about the huge planet's formation and evolution (and also collecting a wealth of other data, as the Io observations show).
Juno's next close science flyby of Jupiter occurs today (July 16).
The mission is scheduled to run through July 2021.
How Engineers Are Practicing for the BepiColombo Mission to Mercury (Video)
How Engineers Are Practicing for the BepiColombo Mission to Mercury (Video)
By Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Writer
Within just six months, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency are planning to launch a new mission to Mercury called BepiColombo — but they're already acting like the mission has launched.
That's because the team is simulating a whole range of conditions to make sure that once the spacecraft leaves Earth, everything will go as smoothly as possible, no matter what happens, as they explain in a new video released by ESA.
It may seem odd to practice fora missionthat will become reality soon enough, particularly when the two space agencies have plenty of other projects in the works. But because so many things can go wrong during a space mission, preparation is crucial.
An artist's depiction of the BepiColombo spacecraft approaching Mercury. The mission is due to launch in 2018.
Credit: ESA/ATG medialab/NASA/JPL
"The failures can be anything," Elsa Montagnon, BepiColombo's operations manager, said in the video. "The failures can be a problem on the spacecraft, a problem on the ground, it can be a problem with computers, a problem with ground software, communication lines, ground stations, control rooms here, it can even be a problem with the operators themselves."
So, until August, ESA scientists and engineers are using a replica of the spacecraft and its computer to practice for perilous situations on the long flight, like instruments getting overheated as it flies closer to the sun.
Then, all the practice will become reality once BepiColombo launches between Oct. 5 and Nov. 29 of this year. The spacecraft will take seven years to reach its destination: orbit around Mercury. After the long journey, it will separate into two orbiters peeling off to study the tiny planet's geology, atmosphere and magnetosphere.
BEPICOLOMBO Face aux Mystères de Mercure – LDDE
Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels.
Astronomers created this all-sky map of the cosmos using data collected by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The map shows gamma-rays detected by the telescope from 2008 to 2017.
Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration
The Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope is a space observatory designed to study the universe in highly energetic frequencies known as gamma-rays. It includes participation from NASA, the U.S. Department of Energy, and several partners both in the United States and internationally. The mission was launched in 2008 and remained operational as of mid-2018.
Development and timeline
In 2000, the National Academies of Sciences' Decadal Survey, which identifies the scientific community's top priorities for research in the coming years, a mission studying energetic gamma-rays was the top priority for a mid-sized project, according to NASA.
Scientists saw Fermi as a successor to NASA's Compton-Gamma-ray Observatory, which operated between 1991 and 1999. NASA said that Fermi's field of view and sky survey capabilities were twice as large as one of Compton's instruments, and 30 times as sensitive. Fermi was also designed as a complement to the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory; Swift is optimized to look at the locations of gamma-ray bursts, as well as their afterglows.
NASA described Fermi as "an astrophysics and particle physics partnership," which included development by NASA in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy. International partners from France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Sweden also contributed, as well as other institutions in the United States. The mission cost $690 million (with a U.S. contribution of $600 million and an international contribution of $90 million).
Fermi, which was called the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) until it reached its operational orbit, launched on June 11, 2008, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station aboard a Delta II Heavy rocket. It was placed into a circular orbit around Earth with an altitude of about 350 miles (560 kilometers). It circles the planet every 90 minutes. "This orbit is chosen to minimize the effects of charged particles that surround Earth, and which would create additional unwanted background signals in the detectors, while still ensuring the full mission lifetime," NASA stated.
Fermi was designed to last five to 10 years. The mission passed its 10th anniversary in June 2018 and was still operational as of mid-2018, although it is expected to end operations in fall 2018.
Fermi is designed to examine gamma-ray radiation, the most energetic form of light that there is. Like the visible light that humans can see, gamma-rays are on the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. Gamma-rays, however, have billions of times more energy than visible light.
In gamma-rays, several types of exotic objects shine brightly. Researchers have seen gamma-ray bursts, which are the most energetic types of explosions in the universe and may have caused a large extinction on Earth. Solar flares – eruptions from our sun – are bright both in visible light and in gamma-rays. Rapidly rotating and ultra-dense stars known as pulsars are also sources of gamma-rays.
Researchers also want to examine gamma-rays to better understand a substance known as dark matter. (Initially, scientists thought that "excess" gamma-rays might be a signal of dark matter, but later research put this hypothesis into doubt.) Dark matter probably makes up most of the known universe, but dark matter can't be "seen" by conventional telescopes. The only way it's visible to us right now is through its effect on other objects, such as gravitational influences. Better understanding dark matter will help researchers make better predictions about things such as star movements and the fate of the universe.
In NASA's words, these are the main mission objectives for Fermi:
Explore the most extreme environments in the universe, where nature harnesses energies far beyond anything possible on Earth.
Search for signs of new laws of physics and what composes the mysterious dark matter.
Explain how black holes accelerate immense jets of material to nearly light speed.
Help crack the mysteries of the stupendously powerful explosions known as gamma-ray bursts.
Answer long-standing questions across a broad range of topics, including solar flares, pulsars and the origin of cosmic rays.
To perform its investigations, Fermi carries two instruments: its primary instrument that is called the Large Area Telescope (LAT), and a complementary instrument known as the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM), according to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
To best understand what energy frequencies they see, here's a quick explanation of an electronvolt (eV). An electronvolt is defined as how much energy a single electron gains when its electric potential increases by one volt, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. (Electric potential is the amount of work to move a unit charge from one spot to another against an electric field.)
Visible light has a photon energy of between 1.6 eV and 3.4 eV. The scale for electronvolts continues as follows: kilo-electron volt (keV, one thousand eV), mega-electron volt (MeV, one million eV), giga-electron volt (GeV, one thousand million eV), etc. For a quick idea of how much energy we're talking about, a single nuclear fission event is measured at about 200 MeV, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Fermi can view objects at a wide range of scales – anywhere between 8 keV to 300 GeV.
The GBM can view the entire sky and is designed to spot about 200 gamma-ray bursts every year, as well as events such as solar flares. It detects X-rays and gamma-rays that have an energy range between 8 keV and 30 meV, Goddard says.
The LAT can view 20 percent of the sky at once, and if it is left in its default "sky-survey" mode, it will move around the entire sky once every three hours. Researchers can also choose to swing the LAT to view interesting objects. The telescope is also designed to move itself when either the LAT or the GRB sees a gamma-ray burst. LAT is supposed to see photons with energies of between 30 MeV to at least 300 GeV, Goddard says.
Fermi discovered two massive bubbles of material emanating from the Milky Way's center in 2010. Follow-up observations have been performed in X-rays and radio wavelengths, including a Hubble Space Telescope study released in 2015 that clocked these bubbles moving at 2 million mph (3.2 million km/h).
In April 2013, NASA said Fermi had "dodged a 1.5-ton bullet" just over a year before, in March 2012. An automatic report showed that Fermi was only a week away from a potentially devastating collision with Cosmos 1805, a dead Soviet-era spy satellite that used to be operational during the Cold War in the 1960s. The two satellites were forecast to pass each other by only a few hundred feet, which is a very small margin of error when calculating spacecraft trajectories. Engineers commanded Fermi to fire its thrusters for one second, avoiding the possibility of disaster.
That August, NASA announced it would extend the Fermi mission into 2018 to allow investigators more time to search for links between gamma-rays and dark matter.
A 2014 story on Space.com sister site LiveScience examined the phenomenon of terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, which are gamma-rays that originate from the Earth during intense storms. Fermi can view these Earthly sources of gamma-rays, as well as those originating further out in the universe. The same year, Fermi spotted a gamma-ray's light being focused by a gravitational lens, which occurs when the gravity of a massive object distorts the light of a more distant object.
In 2015, research from Fermi suggested that gamma-rays it found could indicate a magnetic field that originated only a few nanoseconds after the Big Bang that formed the universe. At the time, however, the researchers said the detected signal was weak and required more follow-up observations to be sure.
Solar energy is a contributor to gamma-rays as well, as a 2017 study showed. Hidden solar eruptions were linked to gamma-ray bursts observed by Fermi.
In March 2018, Fermi had an issue with one of its solar array drives, which put the telescope into an automatic "safe hold." With the solar array stuck, engineers moved Fermi into a fixed angle relative to its orbit. "This direction put the most sunlight on a solar panel that stopped moving," NASA stated. By May 2018, Fermi was back to science operations; NASA was still studying the cause of the failure.
TR-3B Black Triangle ∇ Code Name: ASTRA | Magnetic Field Disruptor Plane
TR-3B Black Triangle ∇ Code Name: ASTRA | Magnetic Field Disruptor Plane
TR-3B Black Triangle ∇ In recent years, countless people have reported seeing flying objects of strange shapes (including triangular) and spectacular trajectories. Without ever challenging the existence of UFOs of alien origin, we must make it clear that some of such aircraft are in fact owned and used in the greatest secrecy by the US government.
TR-3B Black Triangle | Code Name: ASTRA
Only with the tremendous courage of some people who worked in different military bases, the truth about these aircraft’s was able to come to light, which is likely to hurry their future use in civil society for the benefit of all mankind.
This is not just about the use of the aircraft itself but primarily about the technology behind its propulsion system – a technology that is also called “black technology” and which, as Steven Greer mentions in his Hidden Truth,
Prohibited information is about 10,000 years more advanced than space-based space technology currently used globally.
The TR-3B vehicle’s outer coating is reactive to electrical stimulation and can change color, reflectiveness, and radar absorptiveness.
In this regard, it is very interesting, the account of an American specialist who worked on a secret military base near Groom Lake City, about an unimaginable aviation technology for the general public, which the Americans already have.
Since this report, originally published online at http://www.darkgovernment.com/news/tr-3b/, is no longer accessible at that address, we offer it below:
“A friend told me at some point he would never forget the image of the TR-3B aircraft in the Papoose Base, which looks exactly like an alien ship.
Black as triangular pitch, TR-3B was rarely mentioned (and only whispering) in Groom Lake, where he worked.
At one point, the aircraft flew over the Groom Lake track in complete silence, and as if by surprise, it suddenly stopped above the S-4. Floated silently in the same position for about 10 minutes, after which he left softly on the asphalt of the track.
Sometimes a bright blue-silver crown surrounds the massive circumference of the TR-3B.
The operational model is approximately 183 meters in diameter.
The TR-3B aircraft also has the ASTRA code name.
The first operational reconnaissance flight took place in the early 1990s.
The triangular nuclear platform of the aircraft was built in the highest secret of the AURORA Program, funded with money from the “black budget” (at least $ 3 billion invested in this project).
“Aurora” is now the most secretive US aerospace program and TR-3B is the most “exotic” vehicle that was created under the Aurora Program, funded and coordinated by the NSA (National Security Agency), the NRO National Recognition) and the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency).
The functionality of TR-3B is not a fiction, it was built with technology already available in the mid-1980s. So, not every UFO spotted is necessary of alien origin.
The material covered by the TR-3B aircraft is a radar-reactive polymer, which can change its reflectivity, radar absorption, and color.
This polymer, when used in conjunction with some internal TR-3B electronic systems, can give the vehicle such a look that it looks like a small ship or a flying cylinder on the radar screen.
TR3B Astra is at the same time a strategic vehicle of recognition and a combat vehicle.
A circular ring, filled with acceleration plasma, called the Magnetic Field Disruptor (MFD), surrounds the crew’s rotating compartment and outperforms any currently known technology.
The Sandia and Livermore laboratories have developed this secret technology, and the [American] government will do everything to protect it.
The plasma generated by bringing mercury to 250,000 atmospheres and at a temperature of -123 degrees Celsius, if accelerated to 50,000 rpm, becomes a superconducting plasma, the ultimate result of this process being the cancellation of gravity (levitation).
More specifically, by generating this rotating magnetic field, the effect of gravitational attraction on the ship is neutralized to 89%.
In other words, the weight of the circular accelerator, as well as all the weight of the accelerator – crew cap, avionics (navigation and operation devices and appliances), fuels, crew environment systems and a nuclear reactor, etc. – are reduced by 89%.
This makes the vehicle extremely easy and has the ability to far exceed the performance and manoeuvrability of an aircraft built so far (except, of course, UFOs).
The TR-3B aircraft evolve at high altitudes in an undetectable way (using STEALTHtechnology), thus providing an undetermined flight time recognition platform.
Once it reaches (at a high speed) at that altitude, it needs only very little propulsion to maintain its altitude.
In addition, I remember that at the Groom Lake secret base there were rumours about a new element that would act as a plasma catalyst.
Having the weight reduced by 89%, the vehicle can travel at a speed of 9 Mach [9 times the sound speed: approx. 10,000 km / h], both vertically and horizontally.
Sources say that performance is limited only by the biological limitations of pilots – which are many, given that the gravitational force is reduced by 89%.
The propulsion of the TR-3B is provided by three multimodal propellers mounted in each corner at the bottom of the triangular platform (see Fig. …). TR-3B moves at a speed of up to 9 Mach (Mach is a unit of measurement used in aerodynamics to express the speed of a body moving in a fluid: projectile, aeroplane, rocket, etc.
The Mach 1 speed is equal to the sound velocity in that fluid; Under standard conditions, Mach 1 is equal to 1224 km / h (or 340 m / s) until it rises to 120,000 meters (120 Km), then God knows how fast it can move.
The three multimode rocket engines that are mounted on each corner of the platform use hydrogen or methane and oxygen for propulsion.
In a rocket system that uses hydrogen and liquid oxygen, 85% of the propulsion provides oxygen.
The rocket nuclear engine uses a liquid hydrogen and oxygen boost for additional power.
The reactor heats liquid hydrogen and injects liquid oxygen through supersonic nozzles so that hydrogen combusts at the same time with liquid oxygen.
The multimodal propulsion system can operate in the atmosphere with the propulsion offered by the nuclear reactor in the upper atmosphere with hydrogen propulsion and in the combined orbit (hydrogen/oxygen) circumferential orbit.
What you need to keep in mind is that the three rocket engines actually propel only 11% of the mass of the Top Secret TR-3B aircraft. Engines are built by Rockwell.
Therefore, when triangular UFOs are recorded, it does not necessarily mean they are of extraterrestrial origin, and may also be ultra-sensitive flight apparatus, such as the TR-3B.
The TR-3B Craft
The National Security Agency (NSA), the National Recognition Office (NRO), the CIA and the United States Air Force (USAF) intentionally created a certain ambiguity about the names of these aircraft: they created the TR-3, which was modified in TR-3A, TR3-B, plus 2, 3, or 4 suffixes that actually mean completely different aircraft.
Thus, the TR3-B model is just as different from TR3-A as banana grapes. Some of these are designed to have a human crew, others are designed to operate unmanned. ”
Independent journalists who courageously reveal all this secret information hope that their emergence on more and more media channels will greatly help to “wake up” people in the face of these occult realities and thus lead them to their use for the good of the whole mankind.
On the other hand, disclosure in the press of this information will prevent and completely dismantle the various manipulations of an eventual alien invasion or other similar rumours that are being made to escape the “black operations” of the satanic “elite” of so-called “enlightened”.
Robot orbiters circling Mars have acquired images of ghost dunes. They’re pits where, scientists believe, tall crescent-shaped sand dunes once existed on this red desert world.
Ghost dunes in the Noctis Labyrinthus region on Mars, west of the more famous Valles Marineris. The crescent-shaped pits are the remains of active barchan-type dunes from billions of years ago.
Mars is a desert planet, a lot like some deserts on Earth, but much colder. Also just like Earth, the Martian deserts have vast dunes, ranging from small sand ripples (technically not dunes) to towering, cliff-like true dunes of fine sand. But – while various types of dunes have been seen from orbit and up close by Mars rovers, currently still active and gradually making their way across the landscape – now another kind of dune has been found on Mars as well. Scientists call these ghost dunes, and they are very ancient. They reported the finding in GeoSpace on July 10, 2018. The new research paper was just published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
These ghost dunes are not active dunes today. Rather, they are the remains of previous ancient dunes that left pit-like depressions in the ground after they eroded away. Hundreds of these crescent-shaped pits have been discovered, each about the size of the U.S. Capitol building. As Mackenzie Day, a planetary geomorphologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and an author of the new study, explained:
Any one of these pits is not enough to tell you that it’s a dune, or from an ancient dune field, but when you put them all together, they have so many commonalities with dunes on Mars and on Earth that you have to employ some kind of fantastic explanation to explain them as anything other than dunes.
Current and active crescent-shaped sand dunes in the Hellespontus region on Mars, west of the Hellas basin.
How do ghost dunes form? On Earth, ghost dunes may have been partially buried by lava or water-borne sediments. For these Martian ghost dunes, when the lava or sediments hardened, they preserved the contours of the dunes. The remaining top portions of the dunes were then eroded away by winds, which scoured them out, leaving only the “mold” outlines of the former dunes. Now they look like pits with hardened edges.
These dunes’ existence on Mars provide more clues as to what conditions were like billions of years ago, in particular, winds. As Day noted:
One of the cool things about the ghost dunes is that they tell us, for sure, that the wind on Mars was different in the ancient past, when they formed. The fact that the wind was different [when the ghost dunes formed] tells us that the environmental conditions on Mars aren’t static over long time scales, they have changed over the past couple billion years, something we need to know to interpret the geology on Mars.
Crescent-shaped barchan dunes in Egypt’s Western Desert.
The Martian ghost dunes were found in orbital images of Hellas Planitia basin and Noctis Labyrinthus. They are similar to ones discovered in the Snake River Plain in eastern Idaho in 2016. More than 480 potential dune molds were discovered in orbital images of Noctis Labyrinthus alone, and more than 300 in Hellas Planitia, by Day and co-author David Catling. Noctis Labyrinthus is a region of jumbled plateaus just west of Valles Marineris, the largest-known canyon in the solar system. Hellas Planitia is a massive 4-billion-year-old impact crater over 1,678 miles (2,700 km) across in the southern hemisphere.
The shapes of the ghost dunes on Mars are crescents, just like barchan dunes on Earth, meaning that the original dunes would have been very similar to barchan dunes, the most common type on both Mars and Earth. The “horns” or tips of the crescents point in the direction of the prevailing wind. This type of dunes tends to form on flat terrain where there is little or no vegetation. The fact that there are so many of these pits in each location points to them being the remains of once-active dune fields. As Day noted:
They are all going the same way, which you would expect for dunes because they are all migrating and forming in the same wind regime. So just the shape and size tell us that these are features that are coming from an ancient dune system.
Ghost dunes on Idaho’s eastern Snake River plain. Image via Google Earth.
Analysis of the ghost dunes on Mars indicates that the original dunes were quite large – about 130 feet (40 meters) tall at Noctis Labyrinthus and 246 feet (75 meters) tall at Hellas basin. By comparison, the Curiosity rover has studied a series of dunes near the base of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater. The striking Namib Dune is about 16 feet (5 meters) tall.
As well as providing fascinating clues about ancient environmental conditions on Mars, these ghost dunes may also be a good place to search for evidence of past life. As mentioned in the summary in the new paper:
Ancient dunes in two places on Mars were partially buried and then eroded away, leaving behind dune-shaped pits that preserve information about the ancient environment. These pits may contain ancient dune sandstones around the edges of the pits and could be a good place to look for evidence of ancient life. The shapes of the pits also tell us how the winds behaved in the past.
Namib Dune in Gale Crater on Mars, as seen by the Curiosity rover. It is about 16 feet (5 meters) tall.
We know that dunes on Earth can support life, and dunes on Earth are very similar to dunes on Mars. One problem that Mars has that Earth doesn’t is the surface radiation. If you are inside a dune, or at the bottom of a dune, and you are microbial life, the dune is protecting you from a lot of that radiation. There is probably nothing living there now. But if there ever was anything on Mars, this is a better place than average to look.
Bottom line: As well as being common on Earth, dunes have also been found on Mars, Venus, Titan and even comet 67P. Now another type of dune has been discovered on Mars – “ghost dunes,” the pit-like remains of ancient, once-active dunes which have mostly eroded away. They bear a strong similarity to present-day dunes and may even hold clues to past life on the red planet.
This Is The Center Of The Milky Way In Its Clearest View Yet... Breathtaking
This Is The Center Of The Milky Way In Its Clearest View Yet... Breathtaking
A mega-telescope gives the clearest breath-taking view of the center of the milky way.
The MeerKAT radio mega-telescope has given us a glimpse of the center of the Milky Way that is stunning. The image reveals the red center in all its glory, showing in clear detail the region around the black hole, some 25,000 light years away.
Galactic Center of the Milky Way Galaxy in the Infrared
The MeerKAT Telescope with 64 Dishes is More Sensitive than Any Telescope Before
The telescope is a combination of 64 individual dishes with all of them being able to detect radio waves. The MeerKAT radio telescope is situated in South Africa in the Karoo region with it being more sensitive than any other telescope according to Sciencealert. com.
The starling red colors in the image reveal just how bright the radio waves are when the telescope picks them up. They range in color, with the faintest emissions being red, while the stronger of the emissions vary orange, yellow and white. The whole image looks like a photograph from hell with a fiery swirling mass. The telescope has managed to give us a never before seen glimpse of the features in the center of the Milky Way. It also gives a view that is clearer than those offered by other telescopes of the remnants of the supernova along with the star-forming regions.
The line at lower left is 240 light years
Long Narrow Filaments Have Been a Riddle For Three Decades
The filaments, which are narrow and long, were first seen during the 1980s, but scientists did not know the origin of them. They lie close to the middle of the black hole, however, they are not found in any other location in the Milky Way. Farhad Yusef-Zadeh from the Northwestern University in Evanston in Illinois said, "This image is remarkable", Farhad is an expert on filaments such as these. He went on to say, "It could provide the key to cracking the code and solve this three-decade riddle."
Because the Milky Way is 25,000 light years away, it has been very difficult to capture images of it in the past. Along with this, the Milky Way lies behind Sagittarius constellation, which means it is obscured by gas clouds along with dust. The telescopes used on Earth have not been able to pick it up before the MeerKAT telescope was used. The MeerKAT telescope makes use of x-ray, infrared and radio wavelengths, which penetrate the dust, giving a unique view of the region. It is also ideally located in South Africa as for 12 hours each day there is a visible view of the Milky Way.
The MeerKAT Telescope Shows Science Capabilities Never Before Seen
Fernando Camilo, the chief scientist of the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory who was responsible for the building along with the operation of the MeerKAT telescope, said:
"We wanted to show the science capabilities of this new instrument. The center of the galaxy was an obvious target: unique, visually striking and full of unexplained phenomena – but also notoriously hard to image using radio telescopes. Although it's early days with MeerKAT, there is a lot that remains to be optimized, we decided to go for it – and were stunned by the results."
Scientists are not the only ones who are stunned by the results of the telescope. People alike are amazed at the clarity of the image along with the breath-taking views of the center of the Milky Way.
Milky Way Galaxy Center in Infrared (2006.01.10) [720p]
Chinese Airports Shut Down After Mass UFO Sighting
Chinese Airports Shut Down After Mass UFO Sighting
The thing that struck me about that incident was that it was a mass sighting with photographs from independent people taken from different angles in different areas of the city. Each of the photos depicts the same elongated structure, none resembling a helicopter.
Sure, you could fake photos from the same angle taken from the same camera, but you'd have to enlist the help of many confederates from all over the city to photograph the object with long exposures, then also convince the myriad of eyewitnesses to change their stories from helicopter to UFO to perpetuate the deception.
I don't think it was ever adequately explained. It happened, then nobody really talked about it after.
UPS AND DOWNS This view shows Pluto’s highest mountains, which rise 3 to 6 kilometers above the smooth nitrogen-ice plains of Sputnik Planitia. New maps of Pluto’s topography show more details of familiar landscapes like this one.
PAUL SCHENK/LUNAR AND PLANETARY INSTITUTE
The first global maps of Pluto and its moon Charon are now available, putting a bookend on NASA’s New Horizons mission.
“From a completionist’s point of view, they are all the good data we have, stitched together into a coherent, complete mosaic,” says planetary scientist Ross Beyer of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.
The charts focus on the 42 percent of Pluto and 45 percent of Charon where New Horizons snapped images from at least two angles during its 2015 flyby, revealing the landscapes’ height and depth (SN: 6/27/15, p. 16).
These measurements add topographic detail to already familiar features. For instance, the smooth plains of Pluto’s distinctive, heart-shaped ice sheet, known as Sputnik Planitia, lie two to three kilometers below the region’s rim.
The biggest surprise on Pluto is a 3,200-kilometer-long system of ridges and troughs that traces a single, long line across the dwarf planet. That streak may stretch all the way around the globe, Beyer and colleagues report online June 11 in Icarus. This feature was only visible with all the data put together, Beyer says. The team doesn’t have a good explanation for its formation yet.
LONG AND LEAN This subset of the new Pluto map (bottom) shows part of a long series of ridges and troughs that extends over at least 3,200 kilometers. Astronomers aren’t sure how it formed. The digital elevation model (top) shows the same area. White arrows highlight the edge of Sputnik Planitia, the planet's heart-shaped plains of nitrogen ice.
P.M. SCHENK ET AL/ICARUS 2018
Charon’s map confirmed that the moon is made up of two large zones: smooth plains in the southern hemisphere and fractured blocks and canyons in the north, Beyer and colleagues report online July 3 in another paper in Icarus (SN: 4/2/16, p. 20). Initially, scientists thought both terrains were at the same elevation, but the new map shows that the plains are situated a kilometer or two lower than the northern terrain.
“We don’t know quite why that is yet, but it sure is interesting,” Beyer says.
Other planetary scientists will use these charts to continue unearthing Pluto and Charon’s secrets. “These maps really form the basis, the cartographic foundation, for anything any other scientist will do,” Beyer says.
On Saturn’s small moon Enceladus, perpetual fountains of alien seawater launch all sorts of curious stuff into space: water, salt, silica, and even simple carbon-containing compounds fly into the void—many of which are ingredients for life as we know it.
Now, scientists working with data from a dead spacecraft have discovered something even more potentially intriguing: heavy organic compounds containing hundreds of atoms arranged in rings and chains. These are the most complex organic molecules uncovered so far at Enceladus, and—sorry, Europa—they may make the moon the most promising place in our solar system to search for life beyond Earth.
“What we know today is telling us that Enceladus is an outstanding target to go look for life, and there may be microbes living in that ocean today,” says Cornell University’s Jonathan Lunine.
SATURN 101
How did the rings around Saturn form? How many moons does the planet have? See stunning NASA images of the gas giant studied by Christian Huygens and Giovanni Cassini.
Discovered by the Saturn-exploring Cassini spacecraft in late 2005, icy jets erupting from Enceladus were a surprise to most scientists. Blasting through fissures in the south polar region, the jets contain seawater from a global ocean locked beneath the moon’s icy shell. Over the years, scientists have been able to study those jets and calculate the salinity and acidity of the ocean, identify ejected organic compounds such as methane, and determine that hydrothermal vents in the seafloor are providing heat and energy.
But these newly detected complex molecules spin that story forward and raise questions about whether they’re the work of lifeless chemistry or a sign pointing toward alien life.
“We cannot decide this hundred-million-dollar question, but it certainly shows that something is going on there, that complex organic chemistry is happening and that we can probe it from space,” says Frank Postberg of the University of Heidelberg, lead author on the paper describing the results today in the journal Nature.
“The moon freely delivers its organic inventory at high concentrations to the Cassini spacecraft. That’s just an amazing finding.”
Saturn's icy moon Enceladus sinks behind the planet in a farewell portrait from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which destroyed itself by diving into the ringed giant on September 15, 2017.
PHOTOGRAPH BY NASA, JPL- CALTECH, SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE
That includes information Cassini gathered while flying near the planet’s E ring. Thin and diaphanous, this ribbon is formed by dust and ice ejected by Enceladus. As Cassini skirted the E ring’s edge, some of its particles collided with an onboard instrument designed specifically to study cosmic dust and return information about its ingredients.
Postberg and his colleagues decided to look at data gathered during E ring flybys between 2004 and 2008, when the instrument was least contaminated by interplanetary dust from elsewhere in the solar system. Over 15 separate intervals, the spacecraft collected and studied about ten thousand dust particles. And in roughly one percent of those, Postberg and his colleagues identified the signatures of complex organic compounds.
“It was kind of a needle in a haystack problem,” he says.
Clinging to grains of water ice ejected by Enceladus, these heavy, carbon-containing molecules had been launched into space, just waiting for Cassini to come by and collect them upon impact. What’s more, the large compounds are likely fragments of even larger parent molecules that could weigh thousands of atomic mass units, Postberg says.
Floating Film
It’s the first time such heavy organics have been identified at Enceladus. Previously, Cassini detected lighter, gassy molecules such as methane and ethane, which contain one or two carbon atoms and a smattering of hydrogens; these molecules weigh in at around 15 atomic mass units.
But the newly detected molecules are as heavy as 200 atomic mass units and comprise anywhere between seven and 15 carbon atoms, handfuls of hydrogens, as well as nitrogen and oxygen.
“While we have found large molecules outside of Earth before, this is the first time they have been detected emerging from a liquid water ocean,” says Morgan Cable of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who looks for life in improbable places on Earth. (Recently, scientists also found complex organics on cold, dry Mars.)
“Many large organic molecules are not stable in liquid water for extended periods of time, so one of the next questions to ask is, where are these organic molecules coming from?”
Postberg and his colleagues think it’s likely that newly formed heavy organics rise to the top of the moon’s buried ocean and end up floating in a layer near areas where water erupts from fissures at the south pole. There, they stick to ice grains that are carried into space by bubbles rising from the seafloor to the surface.
“Our oceans have a thin film of organic molecules floating on top—think 'oil slick' but made up of life and its byproducts—that covers the ocean to a significant extent,” Cable says. “Now it seems that Enceladus has this too. But is it also made by life?”
Lying in Wait
Though tantalizing, this soup of carbon-containing riches is not an indication of life yet. Many processes could have crafted such structures in the absence of extraterrestrial metabolisms.
“Are they being made by abiotic processing at the bottom of the ocean, where the rock and water meet, or are they the waste products of microbes? That’s the question, with a capital Q,” Lunine says.
Fundamentally, the molecular soup tells scientists that the environment beneath Enceladus’s icy shell is capable of extremely complex chemistries. Whether those reactions are completely independent of life and fueled simply by chemistry and geology, are part of a prebiotic mix from which life could one day emerge, are currently building alien microbes, or are perhaps the waste products of extraterrestrial lifeforms already living in the Enceladian sea is still unknown.
Fractures in the icy shell snake along the south polar region of Enceladus in this Cassini picture.
PHOTOGRAPH BY NASA, JPL-CALTECH/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE
“We should try to go back to Enceladus as soon as we can,” Lunine says. “It’s waiting for us. It’s not going anywhere, and think of all that microbial poo that could be spewed out into space and analyzed today.”
The instruments needed to answer these questions already exist—all it takes is a return trip. One such mission, designed by Lunine and his colleagues and called the Enceladus Life Finder, could have flown in the near future. But NASA declined to fund the project.
Soon, though, a fleet of spacecraft will be sent to explore another icy ocean world: Europa, which orbits Jupiter. Scientists don’t yet know what kinds of chemistry take place in that alien sea, or if the ingredients needed for life as we know it are similarly abundant.
For now, Enceladus will have to wait. And so will scientists, who will continue hoping that maybe someday soon, they won’t need to mine archival data to answer one of humanity’s most pressing questions, and instead coax this promising astrobiological target into revealing its secrets in real time.
CASSINI'S FATAL CRASH
A three billion dollar spacecraft is hurtling towards destruction, and it's no accident.
Un OVNI a été aperçu dans le ciel australien le mois dernier et la scène a été immortalisée par un habitant de la région. Elle a beaucoup tourné sur YouTube et les réseaux sociaux depuis, alimentant d’innombrables théories complotistes sur fond de vaisseaux extraterrestres. La réalité est cependant beaucoup moins excitante.
L’affaire remonte donc au mois dernier. Junelyn Bitalac venait de dép.oser sa mère au travail et elle était en train de se promener à Hastings lorsqu’elle a aperçu une étrange forme ronde filer à travers le ciel
Intriguée, elle a immédiatement sorti son téléphone pour filmer la scène. La séquence a ensuite été partagée sur les réseaux sociaux.
Un OVNI a été aperçu dans le ciel australien en juin
Très vite, la vidéo a commencé à être massivement relayée par les internautes sur la toile. Le lendemain, elle a été reprise par plusieurs chaînes spécialisées dans le domaine de l’ufologie avant de se retrouver en une d’un certain nombre de médias anglo-saxons.
En tout, la vidéo a été vu plusieurs centaines de milliers de fois en moins d’une semaine.
Certains ufologues se sont alors lancés dans une véritable enquête en ligne et de nombreuses théories fantaisistes ont commencé à voir le jour.
Pour certains, la soucoupe volante immortalisée en vidéo était un vaisseau extraterrestre venant d’un monde lointain. Pour d’autres, il s’agissait d’un drone ou d’un appareil testé par l’armée australienne. Il faut dire aussi que la scène s’est produite à quelques kilomètres à peine de HMAS Cerberus, une base appartenant à la Royal Australian Navy à Victoria.
Une soucoupe volante… sans le moindre alien à son bord
Mais voilà, dans les faits, il ne s’agissait ni d’un vaisseau alien ni même d’un nouvel aéronef militaire… mais plutôt d’un avion construit par un amateur.
Si vous vous intéressez un peu à l’aéronautique, alors vous avez peut-être entendu parler de David Rowe. C’est tout à fait logique, car cet ingénieur travaille depuis plusieurs années sur un prototype de soucoupe volante.
En 2016, il a même été assez loin en faisant une démonstration de son quatrième prototype, un prototype parfaitement fonctionnel et capable de voler comme n’importe quel avion. La performance avait été assez relayée à l’époque avant de tomber dans l’oubli.
Toutefois, depuis, David Rowe a multiplié les essais et ce étrange OVNI aperçu dans le ciel australien n’était en réalité rien d’autre que l’un de ses derniers prototypes.
Disk-shaped UFO goes in and out the water of Lake Michigan
Disk-shaped UFO goes in and out the water of Lake Michigan
The witness has taken several photographs of a disk-shaped UFO with port holes that according to the photographer goes in and out the water of Lake Michigan known for its many mysterious UFO sightings.
Below the statement of the witness:
On the night of March 31st 2018, about 10:20pm, it was a very clear, calm night with a bright full moon. I was driving along the coastline from Kewaunee to Algoma when I noticed a very long, brightly lit ship.
I initially thought it was a cargo ship. But the more I watched it, the more erratic the movements and lights became.
I decided to park at a local wayside right before entering Algoma, that overlooks the water of Lake Michigan where this UFO is.
I can now see it flashes different patterns of lights all long it's structure. The shape seemed to shift between a long rectangular object to a disc shape object.
The colors would vary from bright white, red, green, white blue, lights. It made a couple sharp turns than would correct itself on what seemed to be a Northeastern path.
It would sporadically hover over the water than seem to land on the water all the while gradually going northeast.
Then, when it seemed to have been completely aligned with my vehicle (maintaining a good mile out or less distance in front of me), all the electronics, my vehicle radio, dashboard lights, headlights, cell phone turned on by themselves bright and loud. After about 3 seconds they all suddenly turned off at once.
I took that as my sign to take off. I sat there another few minutes, trying to calm myself and locked my vehicle doors (out of instinct). After I got my wits about me, I left with the UFO still just meandering on it's way over the water going northeasterly.
The witness has submitted the sighting including the images to Mufon , case 93368
UFO Over Mountains of Sierra Cabrera, Spain June 28, 2018, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Over Mountains of Sierra Cabrera, Spain June 28, 2018, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: June 28, 2018 Location of sighting: Mountains of Sierra Cabrera, Spain This UFO was recorded and sent into us at UFO Sightings Daily by Twitter user@RoyGibbo. This is a awesome sighting of a cigar UFO. Its very long and looks like a disk viewed from the side. He says it looks big and boy is he right. This is one big UFO! It looks like its rotating and almost has the appearance of a submarine from the side. A rare sighting indeed. Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
I was taking my dogs for a walk in the evening before going to bed, I enjoy looking at the sky while walking but I hadn't looked up until I was at the end of my driveway on this occasion so when I did look up I was so shocked to see this craft. It was absolutely enormous! I could tell where it was in the distance as it was over some local mountains around Mojacar in southern Spain, I could tell that the size of the thing was like the Empire State building on its side and it wasn't moving at all, it stayed very very still. I ran back to my house in flip flops as fast as I could with my dogs behind thinking what's up.
Well I captured this video and I was still in shock at the size off the thing, it slowly faded out slowly in a seemingly controlled manner so it wasn't bright at all so my phone that I took the video on couldn't see it but I could still see it a very little bit for a few more seconds and then it was totally gone, it didn't fly off or move, it just disappeared. It was so strange!!
Two Black Triangle UFOs Seen Over Bay Area, California On July 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Two Black Triangle UFOs Seen Over Bay Area, California On July 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: June 24, 2018 Location of sighting: Bay Area, California, USA This UFO report was sent into us from Twitter user @IsaacShapil. He caught two dark triangle UFO shooting across the sky. They appear to be very high up. Although these could be stealth fighters being flown from a nearby USAF base. Hard to tell for sure, but still awesome catch. They don't move like jets. Lots of dark UFOs have been seen around the world, so this can't be dismissed so easily. If you live in the Bay Area and have seen these UFOs, please let us know on Twitter at @UFO_Sightings_X Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
June 24th 2018, Bay Area, California. I saw two triangular objects in the sky, I reached for my phone to take a video and a few seconds later the objects made a strange noise and then they disappeared.
As members of both the ufology community and mainstream media (whatever that means) still work to make sense of the disclosures of the Pentagon’s UFO research program and alleged declassified footage of truly anomalous flying objects stalking military vessels, more and more voices are being raised in support of taking the study of UFO phenomena seriously.
The latest voice to join that chorus is Dr. Kevin Knuth, a former NASA research scientist who is currently a professor of physics at the University of Albany and the director of both the Knuth Information Physics Laboratory and the Knuth Cyberphysics Laboratory. Writing on The Conversation, Knuth argues that “blanket skepticism about extraterrestrial craft is not sustainable” in light of recent developments. Is this yet another sign of the beginning of a major step towards disclosure and discovery?
I sure hope so. In his wide-ranging article, Knuth touches upon such topics as the Fermi paradox, the recently disclosed Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, and international agencies devoted to studying UFOs. Knuth admits that he’s always been interested in UFOs and the possibility of interstellar travel, and that after years of skepticism, he now believes “we need to face the possibility that some of the strange flying objects that outperform the best aircraft in our inventory and defy explanation may indeed be visitors from afar.”
Knuth points out that despite the growing evidence that militaries and government agencies worldwide have taken the UFO phenomenon seriously for some time, the study of anomalous aerial phenomena remains taboo among professional scientists:
Essentially, we are told that the topic is nonsense. UFOs are off-limits to serious scientific study and rational discussion, which unfortunately leaves the topic in the domain of fringe and pseudoscientists, many of whom litter the field with conspiracy theories and wild speculation.
It’s not only the scientific community that’s to blame for this perception, Knuth adds, noting that popular culture and mass media have played right into this narrative as well:
The media amplifies the skepticism by publishing information about UFOs when it is exciting, but always with a mocking or whimsical tone and reassuring the public that it can’t possibly be true. But there are credible witnesses and encounters.
Despite this widespread skepticism, Knuth is confident that “many of these encounters – still a very small percentage of the total – defy conventional explanation.” Knuth also points the fact that UFO sightings are fairly common among astronomers, more than half of whom feel that the UFO phenomenon deserves serious scientific study.
What will it take to remove the stigma surrounding the study of UFOs? A mothership landing on the 50-yard line during the Super Bowl halftime show and unleashing a cybernetic hive mind? A little green woman using the Voyager 2 probe to take an intergalactic selfie? Or could the support of enough credible scientists turn the tide in favor of ufology as a legitimate science? On that note, Knuth closes with the observation that “while there is no single case for which there exists evidence that would stand up to scientific rigour, there are cases with simultaneous observations by multiple reliable witnesses, along with radar returns and photographic evidence revealing patterns of activity that are compelling.”
And then there’s stuff like this.
Science is based on replicability, testable explanations, and empirical evidence; since UFOs don’t typically fit this model, they’re excluded from most scientific study. As history has shown, however, scientific paradigms can change as we discover or invent new methods of studying the phenomena around us. What will be the tipping point that brings ufology into the realm of the hard sciences?
The YouTube channel A51:S published a video clip that prompted debates among conspiracy theorists online. The clip shows a mysterious spherical UFO moving across deep space. The alleged imprinted drawings on its body add to the mystery. According to the YouTube channel, they found the strange object while researching the website of NASA’s stereo mission.
The video did not gain much attention after it was uploaded, but that has been changed after conspiracy theory channel UFOmania shared it online. On the video description, UFOmania wrote that the UFO has a planetarium and appears to have a force field around it.
The uploader described the UFO to be so massive, which approximately the same size as a planet. Many conspiracy theorists commented that the mysterious, gigantic object might be an alien mega-ship from deep space.
Some other commenters suggested the object could be an alien space station.
One user believed that Trump knew about it and that he formed a space force to prepare for something big.
Another user revealed that the massive thing had been out there moving around for at least a year and NASA won’t comment on it. The same user wrote that it could look bizarre sometimes like it is shooting a missile.
Some other commenters on the video argued that it could be planet Nibiru, which could collide with Earth.
If you think the world is strange right now, wait until you watch HISTORY's new series, Project Blue Book.
Blue Book chronicles actual U.S. Air Force-sponsored investigations into the reported sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) in America during the 1950s and '60s. Some 12,000+ cases were reported, and close to 10 percent of those cases remain unexplained today. And they're fodder for some great television: documented government investigations on UFO sightings makes it a real-life X-Files, complete with conspiracy theories, Russian spies, and military coverups.
Game of Thrones alum Aidan Gillen plays the main character in the series, Dr. J. Allen Hynek. He's an astrophysicist, family man and UFO skeptic who is appointed as the Chief Scientific Advisor to Project Blue Book.
Hynek encounters a variety of Air Force Generals, who each have their own agenda including his partner, decorated World War II hero, Captain Michael Quinn, played by The Vampire Diaries' Michael Malarkey. Quinn's instincts and impulsive behavior clash with Hynek's scientific mind.
SYFY WIRE visited the set of Project Blue Book in Vancouver for a close-up look at the production and to learn about the series with creator David O'Leary. We are also revealing one of the first images used to promote the series, an image of Hynek and Quinn, that's going to wrap one of the walls of Petco Park by San Diego Comic-Con. We've also got one of the early looks at Gillen as Hynek below.
Project Blue Book Petco Wrap
Setting the stage:
The government began looking into UFO studies under Project Sign at the end of 1947. A year later, it launched Project Grudge, which was more of a debunking operation. But to the dissatisfaction of United States Air Force generals, Project Blue Book replaced Grudge in March 1952 and ran through 1969. History's Project Blue Book begins in the fall of 1951.
"The conception of the show was always like Mad Men, beginning in the 1950s and ending in the late 1960s and every season we would move forward in time a little bit," O'Leary told SYFY WIRE. "All the cases we explore (this season) happened in 1953 and before. By the 10th episode, the Season 1 finale, we're definitely planting seeds for future story, we're closing some loops while opening and expanding other loops."
X-Files came up again as a way to describe the series, but during this earlier era, there was still an innocence to the idea of UFOs. Fortunately, Project Blue Book doesn't have to fill 22 episodes and do odd one-off episodes, like the long-running Fox series. It can stay focused. "Blue Book could go deeper, and not be forced to do vampires. Don't get me wrong, I was a big X-Files fan, but I always thought it was at its best when it felt real and plausible," he said "I love that we're doing 10 episodes in this first season, because we're able to craft one large mystery. Then there's a dark undercurrent of something mysterious, like a David Lynch-ian, tweaky X-Files thing happening underneath. It's like a grounded sci-fi noir."
Real people, real stakes
The historical aspect of the series sets the show apart. These are real people, or amalgamations of many real people, living real lives with real consequences; scientific minds trying their hardest figure things out but finding things beyond the limits of human knowledge. Members of the military acting on morals, others following orders. There are plenty of gray areas explored in Blue Book, where the government wanted to define it as black or white.
Nearly 1,000 cases were left officially unexplained, and even that number is hard to verify as there was pressure to explain cases, whether or not facts could actually do so. O'Leary tells me that the official explanations of many cases never sat right with those investigating it. They didn't sit right with Hynek, who would eventually conclude two things over the course of his time working on the project:
"One, that Bluebook became a misinformation campaign, a government front used to control the public perception to UFOs. And two, something of intelligence of an unknown origin — and he never said 'alien' definitively — but something unearthly, something that is not mankind is flying in our skies."
Aidan Gillen as Dr. J. Allen Hynek encounters alien subject.
Photo by Eduardo Araquel / HISTORY.
The work of Dr. J. Allen Hynek
Hynek was also the father of the close encounter classification system, creating the terms, creating the first, second and third kind rating. Appropriately, he was the consultant on Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind and made a cameo in the film. One of his five children, Joel, grew up to become a special effects supervisor and was part of the Oscar-nominated team that created the camouflage effect in Predator.
"Hynek was born amidst Haley's Comet in 1910 and died when it returned in 1986," O'Leary shared. "So there's this cool cosmic something with him, which we touch upon a little bit, like he was destined to do this work. He was the father of what we know as the language of UFOs. If you look at his books, he's a detail-oriented guy. He's meticulous, with just endless sightings and pages of data, looking for patterns."
Hynek wrote five books after Project Blue Book closed, delving into his studies on UFOs that he pursued on his own. The scope of Blue Book, should it continue to run, is vast considering how long the actual project ran, the number of historical and legendary UFO sightings, as well as Hynek's gradual change in belief.
"We were pretty good about sticking with history," O'Leary explained. "For example, there would be a case that we would love, but it happened in 1956. Fortunately, there were so many great cases that it wasn't hard to find some really good ones in that little slice. If we were to get a second season, maybe we advance our scope to cases from 1953-1957. As a writer, you then just have to figure out how to take that framework and build the spookiest thing, inside of what was reported, known, and documented."
Living History
There's a natural curiosity from viewers, who want to know how much of what they just saw was real and seek out more knowledge. HISTORY has taken this approach first with Vikings, Six, Knightfall, and now Blue Book. The title of each episode will be named after an actual case, so viewers can go back and look these cases up. There is also potential for HISTORY to track down people who are still connected to these cases for new specials.
Another influence on the series is FX's The Americans, in the way that series had multiple layers. It was a family drama, a contained spy drama, with the backdrop of the government and military, and an attention to detail from the set design to prop generation. "That sense of paranoia, conspiracy, that sense of, 'can I trust my neighbor?' – all of those elements we try to layer into Blue Book," O'Leary said. "My hope is that people feel like it's real. Our production team has made authentic, accurate, and time-appropriate sets and props."
Other supporting cast members include Laura Mennell (Alphas, Man in the High Castle) who will play Mimi Hynek, Allen's wife who goes from being a stay-at-home wife and mother to something much more; Ksenia Solo (Lost Girl, Orphan Black) is Susie Miller, Mimi's friend; Michael Harney (Orange is the New Black) is General Hugh Valentine and Neal McDonough (Justified, Minority Report) is General James Harding who may or may not be allies to Captain Quinn.
Changing minds
Besides creating the show, O'Leary co-executive produces with Sean Jablonski (Suits, Nip/Tuck) the showrunner, and with Robert Zemeckis(Contact, Back to the Future) and his partners Jack Rapke and Jackie Levine of Compari Entertainment. The first two episodes are directed by Robert Strongberg (Maleficent) and the last two are directed by Alex Graves (Game of Thrones).
"The biggest goal of the show is that people take a real hard look at America's history with UFOs as much as I did and many other people before me, when researching the show," he said. "That's when I realized that there's something here. I believe. We're dramatizing it as a piece of entertainment but it is also this weird, strange era of American history that if half of this stuff is for real, it changes the nature of the reality we live in. It could be a huge story."
In this current era of "fake news" and the government trying to control the narrative of truth and misinformation, Project Blue Book is a study into a moment of time when the control of information was as relevant as it is today. Even though UFOs are not making headlines in sheer quantity like they once did in the 50s and 60s, new sightings are still being reported and hastily recorded on cellphone cameras. The curiosity about our place in the vast universe remains healthy, and whether or not we are alone is intrinsic to our very nature.
Stay tuned to SYFY WIRE for more exclusive stories about Project Blue Book and the series in the near future.
The central portion of Osuga Valles on Mars resembles features found in the arid deserts of Arizona, rather than those formed by emerging groundwater in Florida.
Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
The Martian surface is crisscrossed with what looks like the scars of running water cut into its dusty dry surface. For years, researchers have argued over the source of this water, whether it was fed by rainwater falling from the sky or from ice melting beneath the surface. By taking a statistical approach to the features, a trio of researchers now argue for rivers of rainwater.
The team studied all the mapped river valleys on Mars, measuring the angles where they divided from one another. These angles are determined by how dry an area is and whether water has emerged from the ground, among other things. They found that the angles are comparatively low, allowing them to rule out the influence of groundwater as a major formation process for the channels.
The narrow angles of the valleys bear a stronger resemblance to those found in Earth's arid landscapes, such as in the deserts of Arizona. In Florida, where groundwater re-emerges, the river networks have much wider angles between their tributaries. [Amazing Mars Rover Curiosity's Latest Photos]
The emergence of groundwater and the dryness of a region both play a role in determining the angle between the branches of a river.
Credit: Seybold 2018, Science Adv
According to lead author Hansjörg Seybold, this implies there must have been a similar hydrological environment with sporadic heavy rainfall on Mars over a prolonged period. The rainwater would have quickly run off over the surface, shaping the network of valleys.
Seybold, a physicist at ETH Zurich, worked with terrestrial geologist James Kirchner, also at ETH Zurich. Edwin Kite, a planetary specialist at the University of Chicago, was the third team member. Their research was published June 27 in the journal Science Advances.
Although Mars is dry today, scientists think it once held an ocean of water in much of its northern hemisphere nearly 4 billion years ago. The thicker atmosphere it used to have kept the liquid on the surface. As water evaporated, it would have condensed around the volcanoes in the highlands south of the ocean, then rained down, carving out the river valleys.
The Colorado River from space on March 12, 2013.
Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
"Recent research shows that there must have been more water on Mars [in the past] than previously assumed," Seybold said in a statement.
But the Red Planet's wet period was short-lived, lasting only a few hundreds of millions of years. The atmosphere was lost to space, and any liquid on the surface quickly disappeared, leaving scientists to ponder where the water went.
"It's likely that most of it evaporated into space," Seybold said. "But it could still be in the vicinity of Mars."
"This is a question for a future space mission," he said.
FALSE REPORTS CLAIM NASA DESTROYED PROOF OF ALIEN LIFE ON MARS
The base of Mars' Mount Sharp - the rover's eventual science destination - is pictured in this August 27, 2012 NASA handout photo taken by the Curiosity rover ( REUTERS/NASA/Handout )
FALSE REPORTS CLAIM NASA DESTROYED PROOF OF ALIEN LIFE ON MARS
There almost certainly wasn't any such proof to destroy
Nasa has been falsely accused of destroying proof of alien life on Mars.
But despite a huge number of reports to the contrary, there was no proof of aliens, and Nasa might not even have destroyed anything relevant.
In truth, the report was looking at why organic molecules – an important building block of life – were only found recently when the space agency had explored the surface of the planet decades ago. It revealed that might have been the result of a slip-up by Nasa, when it burnt away those molecules during the testing process.
But there is no truth to the claim that Nasa destroyed proof of alien life – because the agency did not have it in the first place. Those organic molecules are important parts of the building blocks of life, but they are not aliens themselves.
And the molecules themselves might not even have been there. In fact, the report speculated that the reason Nasa's Viking mission failed to find the molecules – despite searching for things that we now know are there – was because they were burnt away during the testing process.
Despite all of that number of reports claimed that Nasa had found evidence of aliens on Mars and then accidentally destroyed it.
"Life on Mars? NASA may have accidentally BURNED evidence of aliens on the red planet almost 50 years ago," read one headline. "NASA may have 'accidentally BURNED' evidence of life on Mars 40 years ago, says study," another said.
The controversy arrived because of a new report that study that looked to explain the mystery of why the Viking mission's on-board Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer, which was intended to look for proof of organic molecules, failed to actually find them. The twin Viking spacecraft's primary goal was to test whether life could survive on Mars, and their results were surprisingly pessimistic.
To solve the mystery of why it failed to find those organic molecules, or building blocks of life, the new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research suggested that it could be the result of a mistake in the testing process that burnt them away.
It is important to note, however, that the building blocks of life are entirely distinct from the life itself. Even now, Nasa has never reported evidence of life anywhere else in the universe – despite having found those building blocks in a range of different places.
Hawaiian Asteroid-Warning Telescope Passes Key Test
Hawaiian Asteroid-Warning Telescope Passes Key Test
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
Impact time and location predictions for asteroid 2018 LA. The long blue bar shows the predictions prior to ATLAS data being obtained. The much shorter red bar shows the prediction including ATLAS data, while the yellow star marks the actual location.
If you're someone who worries about death from above, this should make you sleep a little easier.
A telescope that's part of the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in Hawaii showed its chops on June 2, spotting an incoming space rock about 5 hours before the interloper smashed into Earth's atmosphere.
The asteroid, called 2018 LA, was tiny — on the order of 6 feet (1.8 meters) across or so — and the ATLAS scope picked it up as part of an automated survey, not a directed search, researchers said. (ATLAS didn't discover 2018 LA, however; the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona did, a few hours earlier that same day.) [Asteroid Threat: Potentially Dangerous Space Rocks in Pictures]
"This is a great test of the system," ATLAS principal investigator Larry Denneau, of the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy (IfA), said in a statement. "We've confirmed that ATLAS can find impactors. If 2018 LA had been big enough to cause a dangerous explosion, like the asteroid that hit Russia in 2013, we'd have had enough warning that people could evacuate the impact zone."
Almost all of 2018 LA burned up over southern Africa on June 2. ATLAS' observations allowed scientists to pinpoint the rock's entry point and tie it to a fireball spotted that day by observers in Botswana. Researchers later journeyed to the fall zone and nabbed a few bits of the asteroid that managed to survive the trip to Earth's surface.
A fragment of the asteroid 2018 LA, which a team of experts found in Botswana on June 23, 2018, three weeks after the space rock fell to Earth.
Credit: Peter Jenniskens
"This is only the second time in history that fragments have been found from an asteroid whose orbit was known prior to its impact with Earth — and when they have been chemically analyzed, we'll know what kind of asteroid 2018 LA was," officials with the IfA, which operates ATLAS, wrote in the same statement.
ATLAS consists of two 1.6-foot (0.5 m) telescopes about 100 miles (160 kilometers) apart — one on the Big Island's Mauna Loa volcano and the other on the Maui mountain Haleakala. The two-scope system became fully operational in June 2017.
The ATLAS telescopes scan the sky autonomously several times every night, looking for potentially hazardous asteroids and other objects of interest. Together, they find about 100 space rocks that are 100 feet (30 m) wide or bigger per year, IfA representatives said.
Asteroids of that size have the potential to wipe out a city. And that's where ATLAS comes in: It's designed to spot such rocks with enough lead time to allow folks in the projected impact zone to scurry to safety.
Actually steering a big, incoming asteroid away from Earth would require much more warning time — likely several years at the minimum, experts have said.
Adorning an ear or encircling a finger, a natural diamond is synonymous with luxury. The average cost of a diamond engagement ring is about $6,000, which is a lot of cash for a tightly bound piece of carbon. A new study in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, however, points out that the value of diamonds would be very different if humans had better access to the subterranean world.
“Diamond is not a particularly rare mineral,” Roberta Rudnick, Ph.D., an earth science professor an earth science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, tells Inverse. Rudnick is part of the international team behind the new study.
She and her colleagues, brought together by the Cooperative Institute for Dynamic Earth Research (CIDER), discovered that there may be more than a quadrillion tons of diamonds scattered throughout the Earth, buried within ultra-deep slabs of rocks stretching between the planet’s crust and mantle. These ancient, immovable rocks are known as cratonic roots, and the diamonds stuck there lie 90 to 150 miles below the Earth’s surface.
Co-author and Harvard University postdoctoral fellow Li Zeng, Ph.D. explains to Inverse that during the 2016 CIDER workshop, the seismologists in the collaboration revealed evidence of a strange anomaly deep within the Earth. Seismologists study sound waves, or seismic activity, to study ground-shaking events like earthquakes, but that data also can help explain the contents of Earth’s interior. This team picked up on sound waves that were moving unusually quickly as they passed through cratons.
There may be more than a quadrillion tons of diamond hidden in the Earth's interior.
Originally, says Zeng, there were several possible explanations for this anomaly in seismic data, which led the team to build a three-dimensional model of the velocities of the seismic waves moving through the Earth’s major cratons. Introducing various virtual rocks into the model, they calculated how fast sound waves would move through these rocks.
Of all the original explanations, says Zeng, “the most fascinating one was the possibility of diamonds — that there exists a sweet spot in terms of pressure, temperature, and redox conditions for the growth and retainment of diamonds at that depth.” Sure enough, the data revealed that might be the case.
“When the experimental results in hand, I began calculating sound speeds expected for continental cratons,” MIT research scientist Ulrich Faul, Ph.D. tells Inverse. He compared the experimental results to measurements made on actual rocks in continents, and, through process of elimination, “ended up with diamonds as the only plausible and reasonable explanation as a solution to this puzzle.”
It turns out that only one type of rock can produce the same velocity that the seismologists measured: One that contains minor amounts of a coarse-grained rock called peridotite, includes a little bit of oceanic crust, and is one to two percent diamond. This means that there is at least 1,000 times more diamond in the cratons than scientists had previously estimated.
Diamonds aren't as rare as you might think.
Faul says that this discovery may affect our understanding of how continental cratons were assembled and stabilized, which is an important step in understanding some of the oldest parts of Earth. But generally, the findings add support to older theories about Earth’s treasure trove of diamonds. While the finding may alter our view about diamond resources, says Rudnick, it doesn’t significantly alter our understanding of the planet. The idea that cratonic roots may contain 2 percent diamond is within predictions based on global carbon estimates.
“While it is a higher concentration of diamonds than we would have expected based on the rocks that have come up from those depths, it is not more than the Earth can handle,” study co-author and geochemist Megan Duncan, Ph.D. tells Inverse. “We’re not adding lots of extra carbon to the Earth’s overall budget. It doest have some interesting implications for ancient Earth processes, like subduction, and how it may or may not changed with time.”
Generalized diagram of a kimberlite pipe.
Unfortunately, we’re probably not going to get access to these diamonds with a drill anytime soon. The deepest hole ever drilled is about 7.5 miles deep — and these diamonds are more than 10 times deeper. “We’ll have to wait for them to come up the old-fashioned way,” says Duncan. “In kimberlites.”
Kimberlite pipes — igneous rock formed from the cooling of molten magma after deep-source volcanic eruptions — act as conveyor belts that move deep-rooted diamonds closer to the Earth’s surface. They are often found at the edges of cratonic roots, and most diamonds on the market come from kimberlite pipes that sample these regions of the mantle. Finding these pipes is what’s rare — not the diamonds themselves — so if a miner finds a pipe, then they can do business.
Despite SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic racing to be the first to bring tourists to Mars, NASA’s latest photos depict a volatile Martian landscape that might not be ready for a tourist season. Such is the case with the latest photo from the Reconnaissance Orbiter, which reveals a region in the red planet’s south pole that looks to be covered with spiders.
On ThursdayNASAreleased photos captures by the Reconnaissance Orbiter on May 13 of spider formations in the normally ice-capped region of Mars’ south pole. This photo was released just weeks after the Orbiter captured the planet’smesmerizing blue sand dunesas part of its mission to understand Mars’ geological diversity. The cobalt blue sand dunes could make someone rethink the “red planet” moniker, but the south pole spider fleet is enough to make someone rethinkElon Musk’s proposed colony.
Spider formations on Mars' landscape
Luckily, these “spiders” aren’t actually organic lifeforms, but are called “araneiform terrain.” It’s a radiating mound that forms when carbon dioxide ice heats up below the surface, causing to change from a solid to gas, much like dry ice here on Earth. Thanks to the sun’s warmth each spring, the carbon dioxide gas trapped below the surface before it builds enough pressure to break through the ice.
Once the gas is released into the atmosphere, darker dust can be deposited around the vent or transported by winds to produce streaks. The loss of the sublimated carbon dioxide leaves behind heaps of dust mounds that look like giant arachnids crawling along the landscape. And there’s nothing like a warm spring day on Mars to help the spider-mounds bloom.
The Martian spiders were captured on film thanks to the Orbiter’s High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE. The camera, which is operated by University of Arizona, Tucson, has helped NASA decrease the noise and bad pixelation of earlier images by employing a longer warm-up time and is expected to continue returning images that help scientists understand Mars’ diverse and divergent geological properties.
With the commercial race to Mars still on, it’s important to know what to expect before tourist board a spacecraft from Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, or SpaceX, all of which promise to offer trips to the red planet in the near future. Between its blue dunes, violent dust storms, and now blooming spiders, even if the planet cannot sustain organic life, it can at least sustain trippy nightmares.
Laguna Negra in the Chilean Andes is a glacial lake that contains the remains of ancient life and is exposed to ultraviolet light.
Credit: Wamba Wambez/Wikimedia Commons
Detecting biomarkers in glacial lakes on Earth could pave the way for astrobiologists to detect evidence for life on other worlds, and also unravel the properties of the environments in which that life lived.
High in the Andes Mountains in Chile, unrelenting ultraviolet (UV) radiation blasts the nutrient-poor waters of Laguna Negra and Lo Encañado, two lakes fed by rapidly melting glaciers. In this hostile and remote environment, researchers are trialling life-detection technology to see if we can use it on other planets.
Understanding these lake systems will help scientists to interpret biomarkers in ancient lakes both on Earth or other planets. Although the organisms themselves are long dead, the traces and history of their deaths are encoded in the biomolecules that litter the lakes' sediments.
The implications of these biomolecules extend far beyond the boundaries of these lakes: they could help scientists to recreate the evolutionary history of extraterrestrial life. The scientists' findings were described in a recent article in Astrobiology.
"Once a microbe dies, different physiochemical factors – such as humidity, temperature, oxygen, or the presence of metals – affect the degradation or chemical alteration of its structures and molecular components," says lead author Victor Parro, based at the Centro de Astrobiología, in Madrid, Spain.
Certain biomarkers are characteristic of certain groups of microbes and even particular metabolisms, he says. "From this information it is possible to infer what the environment where they developed was like."
Crater lakes
In the Andes, this can tell us about the paleoclimate of the mountains and their rapidly thawing glaciers. But it could possibly unravel the geochemical and atmospheric histories of other worlds, such as Mars and Saturn's moon Titan.
"These high-altitude lakes in the Andes mountains are interesting for astrobiology because they are exposed to high levels of ultraviolet radiation," says Lewis Dartnell, an astrobiologist at the University of Westminster, in London, who was not involved in the research. "Understanding how microbial life in the lake copes with these UV levels is important for the search for life beyond Earth – on Mars, for example, where there are believed to have once been crater lakes but also very high UV levels. "
The researchers used a Life Detector Chip (LDChip) to hunt for these fragments of life. An LDChip is a biosensor that can detect the presence of life (recent or ancient) from protein fragments and other biomolecules.
"An LDChip doesn't need entire living microbes, it just needs biological material, whether it is alive or dead, recent or ancient, free or as part of large polymers or even organo-mineral particles [which are mineral by-products of life]," Parro says. The chip needs between four and ten amino acids to identify the protein or family of proteins that the amino acids came from.
Gale Crater on Mars, which NASA’s Curiosity rover is exploring, used to contain a lake that was exposed to the ultraviolet radiation incident on the surface of the red planet, and which may contain evidence for past life. Credit: NASA/JPL–Caltech
Testing for life in situ
The LDChip is the core of the Spanish Signs Of LIfe Detector (SOLID), an instrument that can liquidize up to two grams of solid rock, soil or ice, which can then be screened for biopolymers.
Importantly, especially when viewed through the lens of astrobiology, it can test for life in situ.
Researchers can treat these extreme environments as proxies for the remote and harsh conditions on other planets, allowing them to test their theories and technologies on Earth. Astrobiologists often view Laguna Negra as a stand-in for the lakes of Titan.
Understanding water, glaciers and ice is a fundamental part of astrobiology. "Ice and glaciers were and are common in other planetary bodies, such as Mars, and they must have played a critical role in the hydrogeology of those planets, the formation and behavior of ancient lakes, as well as in the development and evolution of potential Martian microbiology," says Parro.
In their study, Parro's team investigated the shallow sediments of the lakes. They reported the presence of sulphate-reducing bacteria, methanogenic (methane producing) archaea, and exopolymeric substances (polymers, such as biofilms, secreted by organisms) from Gammaproteobacteria.
Proof of life
Don Cowan, a professor of microbial ecology at the University of Pretoria, in South Africa, says that their presence is unsurprising and "just what one would expect in a glacial lake sediment".
Asked if they were significant biomarkers, he says that "All are important, in a general sense, in that identification of any of these biomarkers (which are examples of many possible biomarkers) in an 'astrobiological' sample, such as from Mars, would be definitive evidence of life."
A library of biomarkers is the next step in Parro's research. "We need further studies and understanding of what biomarkers we can expect to find in different planetary environments," he says. This involves identifying the most universal ones, discovering how they are preserved and how they respond to radiation and other environmental conditions, and then using that information to hone their tests for the presence of life.
The end game is to see the SOLID instrument with its LDChip on extraplanetary missions to test for biomarkers or assist astronauts in biohazard detection. Until then, the researchers plan to deploy it in as many terrestrial environments as they can, from extreme environments to the veterinary sector, Parro says.
More information: Víctor Parro et al. Biomarkers and Metabolic Patterns in the Sediments of Evolving Glacial Lakes as a Proxy for Planetary Lake Exploration, Astrobiology (2016). DOI: 10.1089/ast.2015.1342
The object known as 1I/2017 U1 (and nicknamed ‘Oumuamua) was traveling too fast (196,000 miles per hour, that’s 54 miles per second or 87.3 kilometers per second) to have originated in our solar system. Comets and asteroids from within our solar system move at a slower speed, typically an average of 12 miles per second (19 km per second) . In non-technical terms, ‘Oumuamua is an interstellar vagabond.
Artist’s concept of the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua.
Image via ESA/Hubble, NASA, ESO, M. Kornmesser.
2. We’re not sure where it came from.
‘Oumuamua entered our solar system from the rough direction of the constellation Lyra, but it’s impossible to tell where it originally came from. Thousands of years ago, when ‘Oumuamua started to wander from its parent planetary system, the stars were in a different position so it’s impossible to pinpoint its point of origin. It could have been wandering the galaxy for billions of years.
3. We know it’s out of here.
‘Oumuamua is headed back out of our solar system and won’t be coming back. It’s rapidly headed in the direction of the constellation Pegasus and will cross the orbit of Neptune in about four years and cover one light year’s distance in about 11,000 years.
4. We don’t really know what it looks like.
We’ve only seen it as a speck of light through a telescope (it is far away and less than half a mile in length), but its unique rotation leads us to believe that it’s elongated like a cigar, about 10 times longer than it is wide. We can’t see it anymore. Artist’s concepts are the best guesses at what it might look like.
5. We know it got a little speed boost.
A rapid response observing campaign allowed us to watch as ‘Oumuamua got an unexpected boost in speed. The acceleration slightly changed its course from earlier predictions. Davide Farnocchia, of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said:
This additional subtle force on ‘Oumuamua likely is caused by jets of gaseous material expelled from its surface. This same kind of outgassing affects the motion of many comets in our solar system.
6. We know it’s tumbling.
Unusual variations in the comet’s brightness suggest it is rotating on more than one axis.
This illustration shows ‘Oumuamua racing toward the outskirts of our solar system. As the complex rotation of the object makes it difficult to determine the exact shape, there are many models of what it could look like.
Image via NASA/ESA/STScI.
7. We don’t know what it’s made of.
Comets in our solar system kick off lots of dust and gas when they get close to the sun, but ‘Oumuamua did not, which led observers to consider defining it as an asteroid.
Karen Meech, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii’s Institute of Astronomy, said small dust grains, present on the surface of most comets, may have eroded away during ‘Oumuamua’s long journey through interstellar space. She said:
The more we study ‘Oumuamua, the more exciting it gets.
It could be giving off gases that are harder to see than dust, but it’s impossible to know at this point.
8. We knew to expect it.
Just not when. The discovery of an interstellar object has been anticipated for decades. The space between the stars probably has billions and billions of asteroids and comets roaming around independently. Scientists understood that, inevitably, some of these small bodies would enter our own solar system. This interstellar visit by ‘Oumuamua reinforces our models of how planetary systems form.
9. We don’t know what it’s doing now.
After January 2018, ‘Oumuamua was no longer visible to telescopes, even in space. But scientists continue to analyze the data gathered during the international observing campaign and crack open more mysteries about this unique interstellar visitor.
10. We know there’s a good chance we’ll see another one … eventually.
Because ‘Oumuamua is the first interstellar object ever observed in our solar system, researchers caution that it’s difficult to draw general conclusions about this newly-discovered class of celestial bodies. Observations point to the possibility that other star systems regularly eject small comet-like objects and there should be more of them drifting among the stars. Future ground- and space-based surveys could detect more of these interstellar vagabonds, providing a larger sample for scientists to analyze. Meech said:
I can hardly wait for the next interstellar object!
Bottom line: What science knows and doesn’t know about ‘Oumuamua, the first confirmed interstellar object to pass through our solar system.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
Three Bright UFOs Filmed Over France in Broad Daylight
Three Bright UFOs Filmed Over France in Broad Daylight
This footage captured by Sebastien Monnetver in Lyon, France shows 3 bright UFOs hovering in the daytime. The brights ufos were seen for several minutes before fading away. Good daytime UFO footage can be hard to find! For recent news about UFO sightings visit our YouTube channel!
Checkout This Dynamic New Crop Circle That Was Just Reported in the UK
Checkout This Dynamic New Crop Circle That Was Just Reported in the UK
This impressive crop circle was just discovered in the UK on July 14th. The details in this one are pretty remarkable. To us it looks like 24 star systems circling the core of the galaxy!
Extraterrestrial and Extradimensional Beings — How They Travel Space and Time
Extraterrestrial and Extradimensional Beings — How They Travel Space and Time
To Understand ET, You Need to Understand Dimensionality
We have talked before about the fact that most extraterrestrial beings visiting our planet are actually extradimensional in nature, but limited to travel within and across dimensional realities within our sub-universe (there are many sub-universes in the cosmos). Sub-universes are what we might call instances, shards, or even forks in technical terms.
The UFOs that we regularly see are often light ships that are interdimensional nature, hailing from a 5D reality or other dimensional reality. Dimensionally speaking, 5D is right next door and certain ET groups have the ability to cross the dimensional veil into our reality. This is referred to as the Interdimensional Hypothesis (IDH). Most of the benevolent ET groups are extradimensional, interdimensional, and frequently transdimensional, as well. UFOs that are metallic in nature are not typically interdimensional and frequently not extraterrestrial either. More on that later, but for now, let’s discuss extradimensionals.
One advantage of IDH proffered by Hilary Evans is its ability to explain the apparent ability of UFOs to appear and disappear from sight and radar; this is explained as the UFO entering and leaving our dimension (“materializing” and “dematerializing”). Moreover, Evans argues that if the other dimension is slightly more advanced than ours, or is our own future, this would explain the UFOs’ tendency to represent near future technologies (airships in the 1890s, rockets and supersonic travel in the 1940s, etc.
It is also worth knowing that the entire cosmos is holographic in nature, and is indeed a matrix with many sub-matrices in existence, as well. Some of the beings exist across multiple dimensions. There aren’t just 11 or 12 dimensions, either. They number in the thousands. Some extensions of multiverse or parallel universes hypotheses are not entirely correct — there is not a dimension spawned at every decision point — only observed realities come into or stay in existence. Most of the other dimensional realities experience time differently than we do, as well. They call it ‘no time’. It doesn’t mean that things don’t progress in a linear fashion, but they are able to perceive multiple possibilities simultaneously. They then choose to train their observation on the possibilities they want to manifest. Many beings can instantly manifest within their realities (which would look like magic to us), but some manifestation requires collective effort/observation over time (like it does with us).
The holographic nature of the cosmos means that the Galactics, as they like to be called, are able to use their projectors (we all project and co-create our realities) to focus on creating the reality that is most positive. It is a co-created, negotiated in real-time, collective reality. Our individual consciousnesses are projections that we create and when married with similar projections from other beings, the collective reality becomes manifest. We are all essentially AI, if you think about the cosmos from a technical/IT perspective. The dark beings are IT experts, in a manner of speaking, and have made a mess of the security infrastructure relative to planet Earth. They are hackers of a sort, and were trying to lead humanity onto a negative timeline. However those efforts were subverted by benevolent extradimensionals.
The Fermi Paradox, as you know, posits that no extraterrestrial nor extradimensional beings have been able to get to our planet. That isn’t true. There have been all sorts of beings, both light and dark, who have visited Earth throughout history. The dark ones considered our reality an experiment and there were all sorts of interventions, including genetically engineering early hominids into a slave species. The reason we, homo sapiens sapiens, do not look like most other hominids and our close cousins, the higher primates, is because we were seeded with DNA from various ET/ED species. Most of them are humanoid, as well. Civilization was also seeded by some of these beings, which was how we developed, very quickly, advanced knowledge of engineering, architecture, astronomy, mathematics, and various cosmological mythologies involving star beings and galactic-level conflicts. This video explains the cosmic back story to what is happening now:
Dark energy is the space between what we might consider visible matter. All matter is fundamentally energy, whether it is light or dark in nature. Dark energy is what we might call the glue that holds all light matter in the cosmos together. Within dark matter is a tremendous amount of what we call zero-point energy, which is the fundamental force behind systems like gravity, light, and the electro-magnetic forces. It is also the mechanism behind what some of us might call soul force, love force, or light force. Dark energy could be compared to wet sand on a beach — we have the ability to make sand castles from it, or it can remain in its natural state. Dark matter, as we call it, is the fundamental force of entropy that allows the sand castles to decay.
Both light and dark energy are what connects everything in the cosmos. At a quantum level, the divine spark of creation resides in dark energy, ready to be manifested into light matter. This is how the big bang happened, and how our sub-universe came into being. The singularity was the original spark and dark energy was the kindling. Dark matter is what causes the fire to go out.
So, how do these beings physically get to our planet/reality? As we have theorized, faster than light or superliminal travel isn’t possible for them either, though it is theoretically possible for them. ET/ED do travel via what we might call conventional means, but they can only travel at a maximum of two-thirds light speed. What they can also do, however, is travel via what we might call wormholes. There are several different types of wormholes — they all persist once created, as long as there is an energy source. Contrary to some sci fi, wormholes are not created on the fly as they are not stable enough when created that way:
Jump gates are wormholes that persist once they are created. There are several hundred thousand jump gates in our sub-universe alone. They are often referred to as portals and are powered by zero point energy. Jump gates are used for intra-galactic travel.
Star portals are wormholes that persist, as well, but they rely on the energy of a sun to fuel them. The ‘alien megastructure’ is a grid around a star that is being utilized to power a star portal. It harnesses the solar plasma field as energy. Star portals are much larger than jump gates and many solar systems have them. Since many of their vessels are enormous bio-spheres that are planet-sized, these large portals are necessary. They can travel inter-galactically using these portals.
There are two forces that are relevant to travel through space and time. One is the attractive force (the pull) and the other is the magnetic or repulsive force (the push). Dark energy is magnetical (repelling) and dark matter is gravitational (attracting) with a weaker magnetical force applied to it. There is an energy field surrounding all planets that is toroidal in nature. It, and many other things, maintain their form through a perfect balance of these two forces:
The toroidal plasma field
The Keshe Foundation has been doing a lot of work in this area, using controlled gravitational and magnetic fields powered by zero-point energy.
I’m an anthropologist, not a physicist, but this is how it was explained to me!
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
This Week's Top Space Stories!
This Week's Top Space Stories!
By Chelsea Gohd, Space.com Staff Writer
Photo Credit: MPIA
The Week's Top Space Stories
Saturn's singing, a ghost particle is traced to its source, and NASA may have found organics on Mars in the 1970s — it's Space.com's best news stories of the week.
Photo Credit: DESY, Science Communication Lab
1. Ghost particle
In a major breakthrough and world first, astronomers have traced a high-energy neutrino to its distant, blazing source.
Researchers have discovered hundreds of enormous, crescent-shaped pits on the surface of Mars that they suspect used to be sand dunes. Those former dunes might hide traces of ancient life.
NASA's Parker Solar Probe has a fancy new heat shield. This will protect the spacecraft as it travels closer to the sun than any human-made object has before.
Photo Credit: Paul Schenk/Lunar and Planetary Institute
4. Pretty Pluto maps
New research has revealed the topography of Pluto and its moon Charon in a best-ever series of maps — this could help scientists to figure out what shaped them.
For years, researchers have wondered how NASA's Viking landers, which studied the Martian surface in 1976, found no organic molecules. New research shows how they may have found organics after all — then burned them up.
The hottest exoplanet ever discovered, KELT-9b, is so hot that it's "boiling off" its own atmosphere. This gas is then being captured by its host star.
A Russian cargo spacecraft traveled to the International Space Station on July 9 and arrived in less than 4 hours, traveling at record speed. This is the first time a Progress spacecraft has made the trip in less than 6 hours.
Is er leven na de dood? Hierna zul je nooit meer hetzelfde kijken naar reïncarnatie
Is er leven na de dood? Hierna zul je nooit meer hetzelfde kijken naar reïncarnatie
Onlangs werd op het Tom Tom Founders Festival in Virginia een belangrijke vraag gesteld: is er leven na de dood?
Experts van de Universiteit van Virginia vertelden hoe zij hierover denken. De discussie werd geleid door Monty Python-acteur John Cleese.
Emeritus hoogleraar Bruce Greyson vertelde over zijn decennialange onderzoek naar bijna-doodervaringen en deelde anekdotes die duidelijk maken dat we voor bepaalde fenomenen nog geen goede verklaringen hebben.
Terugkomen
Hij noemde daarbij het ‘zien’ van dingen met je bewustzijn terwijl je niet in je fysieke lichaam zit, het zien van overleden familieleden of vrienden of het zien van overleden mensen die je niet kent.
Professor Jim Tucker heeft jarenlang onderzoek gedaan naar kinderen die herinneringen hebben aan vorige levens.
Hij merkte op dat vooral mensen die een gewelddadige dood sterven ‘terugkomen’. Moedervlekken laten zien waar ze in hun vorige leven fatale wonden opliepen.
Onafgemaakte zaken
Het lijkt er dus op dat ze nog onafgemaakte zaken hebben, aldus Tucker.
Professor Emily Williams is vooral gespecialiseerd in sterfbedvisioenen en hoe stervende patiënten contact lijken te maken met individuen en entiteiten die niet in de ruimte aanwezig zijn.
Teken
Dit gebeurt zo vaak dat verplegers het zijn gaan zien als teken dat iemand op het punt staat te overlijden, merkte Williams op.
Ze vertelde ook over gevallen waarbij mensen op afstand voelen dat een geliefde is overleden.
WETENSCHAPPERS WETEN ZEKER DAT WIJ ALLEEN ZIJN IN DE MELKWEG
WETENSCHAPPERS WETEN ZEKER DAT WIJ ALLEEN ZIJN IN DE MELKWEG
Een team onderzoekers aan de universiteit van Oxford weet na gedegen onderzoek zeker dat er absoluut geen buitenaardsen bestaan.
Dat niet alleen, maar de kans dat wij ooit buitenaardsen leven zullen vinden is volgens hen heel erg klein.
Alles wat met buitenaardsen, hun ruimtevaartuigen en waarnemingen daarvan te maken heeft wordt systematisch uit het mainstream nieuws gehouden. Behalve die keren dat er eigenlijk geen ontkennen meer aan is en dan wordt het meestal belachelijk gemaakt of er wordt “een logische verklaring” voor gevonden zoals Thaise ballonnen.
Ze doen dit dan onder andere door middel van de zogenaamde Fermi paradox.
De Fermiparadox is een paradox waarin de grote statistische waarschijnlijkheid van het bestaan van intelligent buitenaards leven in schril contrast staat met een gebrek aan bewijs daarvoor.
De vergelijking van Drake is een wiskundige formule, die radioastronoom Frank Drake in 1961 opstelde. De formule schat het aantal intelligente beschavingen in ons melkwegstelsel, die via radio met ons kunnen communiceren. Alle factoren die van invloed kunnen zijn op het ontstaan van intelligent leven staan in de formule.
En wanneer ze dat dan allemaal doen, dan komen ze tot de conclusie dat er in de gehele Melkweg geen buitenaards leven bestaat en dat er niet meer dan 50 procent kans is dat daar buiten ergens buitenaards leven bestaat.
En zo kan het dat er voor onze wereld dingen worden bepaald door een aantal wetenschappers achter een bureau die nog nooit de moeite hebben genomen om zelf naar de lucht te kijken, of zelfs maar een blik te werpen op al die vreemde dingen op aarde waar geen enkele “logische verklaring” voor te vinden is.
Die korte metten maken met al die miljoenen mensen wereldwijd die met eigen ogen dingen hebben waargenomen.
Die websites zoals deze waar in de loop der jaren een enorme database is opgebouwd met een overweldigende hoeveelheid aanwijzingen dat er wel degelijk buitenaards leven bestaat, volkomen genegeerd.
Of zoals Tyler van Secureteam zegt: Ik kan net zo goed dit kanaal sluiten, want het maakt toch allemaal niet uit want alles dat wordt aangevoerd als bewijs wordt systematisch genegeerd. Don't stop Tyler!
Je kunt zeggen wat je wilt over het Nederlandse medium Robbert van den Broeke, maar is er altijd wel wat gaande met hem.
Nu is het een door Robbert ontdekte graancirkel in Zevenbergen en een woedende boer die het nieuws halen.
Wanneer we denken aan graancirkels, dan komt eigenlijk automatisch Engeland in gedachten, het land waar je soms de meest prachtige graancirkels ziet verschijnen.
Ook in Nederland komt zo heel af en toe een graancirkel voorbij, maar wanneer je naar de beelden daarvan kijkt, dan halen ze het in de verste verte niet bij die uit Engeland.
Als dergelijke graancirkels in Nederland worden ontdekt, dan kom je ook vaak de naam Robbert van den Broeke tegen.
Zo ook op 12 juli toen Robbert de volgende graancirkel ontdekte bij Zevenbergen.
Het is een graancirkel, maar wanneer je bijvoorbeeld kijkt naar een Engelse zoals de volgende, dan zie je het verschil. De Engelse cirkels lijken ook veel groter dan de Nederlandse.
Tussen kwart voor twaalf en twaalf uur kwam er vanuit de rechterhoek een lichtbol zo groot als een tennisbal in het zicht, op het moment dat ik in mijn tuin zat. Deze lichtbol ging rakelings langs me heen en schoot tegen mijn deurkozijn aan en het bolletje loste daar op.
Op de plek waar het lichtbolletje het kozijn heeft geraakt zie je een grote schroeivlek, daarvan zijn de foto’s te zien in het artikel.
Op dat moment kreeg ik een drukkend, onrustig gevoel wat ik de dag daarvoor ook al had. Ik kreeg sterk het gevoel dat ik naar Zevenbergen moest, ik kreeg duidelijk een beeld van een grote, zilverachtige ufo die heel rustig boven een graanveld hing, waar drie metaalachtige bollen uitkwamen die licht gaven. Ik zag in het visioen hoe de bollen de graancirkelformatie vormden. Het voelde heel liefdevol en zacht.
Toen kreeg ik heel duidelijk de straat (straatnaam kan ik nog niet bekend maken, aangezien de boer nog niet op de hoogte is) door in Zevenbergen waar ik de cirkel zou treffen. Daar aangekomen trof ik inderdaad de graancirkelformatie aan die ik in mijn visioen had gezien. Ik voelde duidelijk dat er wezens aanwezig waren van arcturus. De cirkelformatie heeft een zachte , helende roze/gele energie. De graancirkelformatie heeft ook een ritmische energie.
Toen de boer bericht kreeg van Robbert dat er op zijn land een graancirkel was gevonden, was deze niet blij.
Maar boer Örjan Schrauwen moet er niets van weten. „Onzin”, vindt hij de vondst. „Ik kreeg een berichtje, dat Van den Broeke iets had gevonden op mijn land. Ik ben gelijk op de machine gestapt en heb het gedeelte van de ’graancirkel’ geoogst.” De schade is minimaal: de paar vierkante meter schelen ’enkele euro’s in opbrengst’. „Maar het gaat mij om het principe”, aldus de agrariër. „Je moet gewoon van mijn land af blijven en niet het graan plat gaan trappen.”
Zoals te zien op de volgende foto maakte hij korte metten met de graancirkel.
Hij is zo boos dat hij meteen vandaag de graancirkel er uit maaide uit boosheid, en verder het graan nog niet oogstte, alleen de cirkels zijn er uit gemaaid.
Ik heb de boer netjes benaderd dat ik het erg vond voor hem dat het op zijn land de graancirkel was ontstaan omdat ik al had begrepen dat hij er niet blij mee was opperde ik het idee om van de graankorrels in de cirkel brood te bakken en dat te verkopen, er zit energie in die korrels van de graancirkel, de opbrengst is dan geheel voor de boer.
Ik zei ik kan het op mijn facebook plaatsen dat het brood te koop is en dan weet ik zeker dat veel mensen het brood willen kopen. Toen kreeg ik in het chatgesprek "BARST" terug met de foto er bij genomen vanuit de cabine van de graandorser waar op te zien is dat hij de graancirkel weg aan het maaien is.
Ik betreur het dat hij zo reageert, ik heb hem netjes en lief benaderd, dan denk ik.. kom op denk je nou werkelijk dat ik die cirkels stiekem 's nachts maak?? echt niet tof dit.
It’s frequently alleged that NASA may have hidden, obfuscated, or otherwise destroyed evidence of extraterrestrial life in its sixty-year history. While a great deal of these claims are based solely on individuals’ interpretations of NASA photographs or videos, sometimes scientists do actually uncover inconsistencies or irregularities in NASA’s hard data. In 2016, one such case came to light when a pair of astrophysicists published a rebuttal of forty-year-old data gathered on the surface of the Red Planet by NASA’s Viking 1 lander. The article claims that the Viking lander actually uncovered evidence of organic molecules in Martian soil samples, but that the data was either misinterpreted or deliberately hidden.
No way. Government agencies never lie to us, do they?
Now, those claims have been taken one step further as a new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research now claims that the Viking lander might have actually destroyed evidence of organic molecules – the building blocks of life – by heating them up in its gas chromatograph‐mass spectrometer or GCMS, a scientific instrument which heats/burns substances to determine their composition. Did NASA unwittingly incinerate proof of life (or more realistically, the potential for life) on Mars?
It’s hard to stay. This new study examines data gathered by NASA’s Phoenix lander in 2008 and Curiosity rover in 2013. In their analyses of Martian soil, both rovers discovered the presence of perchlorates, salt compounds used in propellants and to control static electricity in food packaging. When heated to high temperatures, perchlorates break down into other compounds, one of which is chlorobenzene. It turns out that the 1976 Viking lander, the same one accused of possibly having detected organic compounds without NASA admitting as much, detected the presence of chlorobenzene in its GCMS data.
That’s some nice soil you got there. It’d be a shame if someone, I don’t know, burned it to smithereens.
What does this mean? Ultimately, all we know for sure is that NASA likely had evidence of organic matter on Mars forty years ago and either didn’t realize what they were looking at, or intentionally hid the data. Nobody has gone so far as to make that claim yet, but given that the Viking landers cost over $5 billion, it wouldn’t have been a wise funding move to admit that NASA’s flagship lander incinerated the best evidence we had at the time that life may exist or may have existed elsewhere in the solar system.
Viking I
Ultimately, not even all of the scientists involved with this study are convinced that the chlorobenzene is proof that the Viking incinerated organic compounds; one author believes the readings could be the result of terrestrial contamination. Whatever the case may be with this reexamination of the Viking data, this case makes you wonder: could we already have proof of alien life resting in some vault or dataset somewhere and not even know it yet?
Scientist Says He’s Found Alien Footprints On Mars, Accuses NASA Of Cover-Up
One of the most controversial of all of Bob Lazar’s claims (made after he allegedly briefly worked, in late 1988, at a portion of Area 51 called S-4) is that he read a series of highly-classified documents on various aspects of the UFO phenomenon. One of those documents, Lazar maintained, told a strange and sinister story of a violent confrontation between security personnel at Area 51 and a group of aliens that were in residence and working at S-4, alongside a scientific team. It was a confrontation that reportedly resulted in more than a few deaths. Far more than a few.
Lazar has admitted that he cannot say for sure that the briefing papers he read were the real thing. He has acknowledged that they may have been nothing but disinformation, designed to swamp him with both real and bogus material. Why might the project leaders at Area 51 do such a thing? Simple: if there were concerns that Lazar might blow the whistle on what he knew (which, as history has shown, he did, in 1989), mixing up the truth with a more than liberal amount of lies might have an adverse effect on his credibility. It should be noted that’s exactly what happened. That said, and although he cannot say for sure that the documentation was the real deal, he does recall the contents of the material, in relation to this fire-fight situation.
According to Lazar, the deadly confrontation occurred at some point in 1979, in the S-4 facility. Lazar said: “I believe the altercation came about in 1979, or sometime like that. And I don’t remember exactly how it was started, but it had something to do with the security personnel. The aliens were in a separate room. I think it had something to do with the bullets [the security guards] were carrying, and somehow they were trying to be told that they couldn’t enter the area with the bullets, possibly because it was hazardous – the bullets could explode, through some field or whatever.”
Lazar continued that despite the warning, one of the security guards did indeed enter the room with the bullets – something which resulted in a violent and lethal response from the aliens. Lazar recalled that the papers he read described how the security personnel were all quickly killed by “head wounds.” The same fate befell a group of scientists on the program, too. Timothy Good, who interviewed Lazar at the height of the controversy surrounding his claims, said: “The incident is said to have led to the termination of an alien liaison at the Nevada Test Site.”
It’s important to note that there is a variation on this story. Not from Lazar, who stuck to the story which he read out at S-4. But, from a man named Paul Bennewitz, who in the late 1970s began digging into claims that an alien base existed below the New Mexico town of Dulce. From intelligence personnel at Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, Bennewitz learned of a story of a fatal encounter between hostile aliens and a security team in the lower levels of the Dulce Base. The different location given to Bennewitz is just about the only difference between what Lazar was told and what Bennewitz was told.
Clearly, both scenarios cannot be true, something which means we must give deep consideration to the possibility that the papers Lazar read were not the real deal. They may well have been disinformation. So might have been the data provided to Paul Bennewitz. In other words, there is a strong likelihood that both tales were fabricated and fed to Lazar and Bennewitz as a means to confuse the truth surrounding what is really going on at Area 51 – and which may actually have nothing to do with real aliens, hostile or not.
New research from the up-close Grand Finale orbits of NASA’s Cassini mission shows a surprisingly powerful interaction of plasma waves moving from Saturn to its moon Enceladus.
Researchers converted the recording of plasma waves into a “whooshing” audio file that we can hear, in the same way a radio translates electromagnetic waves into music.
Much like air or water, plasma (the fourth state of matter) generates waves to carry energy.
The recording was captured by the Radio Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) instrument Sept. 2, 2017, two weeks before Cassini was deliberately plunged into the atmosphere of Saturn.
The universe is not only fascinating and full of secrets it continues to surprise us. Listen to the eerie sounds of Saturn and its Moon Enceladus.
Hey everyone. I have tweeted Tom Cruise to ask him to verify if this video below is truly Stanley Kubrick. Since they made a movie just before his death together, I believe Tom could clear this up for us. Lots of regular joes are calling the video a fake, but I have done some analysis of my own of the video and found the following. 1. Resonance (grating vibration) is same in both videos. 2. His voice is slightly higher pitch than others. 3. His hesitations...which are common of him in both videos when speaking. 4. Vocal Inflections are the same. Meaning his voice rises and lowers in the same places in the sentences. Also there are photo similarities that are interesting. 1. Both wear glasses, but different types. 2. Both have a receding hairline and beard. 3. Both have matching skin bumps. 4. Both have matching scars between eye lid and brow. 5. Both have bags under and over eyes.
It is my professional opinion that this video of Stanley Kubrick admitting to the moon landings is 100% real. Watch the videos below and compare and contrast for yourself. I also believe that the US gov has spent a lot to time and money on leaving fake comments on Youtube and other sites calling this video a fake in order to control the public perspective of it. This video would be enough evidence in a court of law to convict NASA of lying to the USA and to the world.
UFO Recorded Over Grand Canyon On July 15, 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Recorded Over Grand Canyon On July 15, 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: July 15, 2018 Location of sighting: Grand Canyon, New Mexico, USA A UFO was caught by accident over the Grand Canyon this week. It shot past the camera at incredible speed, but lucky for us it was recorded on camera. No jet or aircraft is capable of such speed. 100% evidence that aliens are visiting us. Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
Filmed over Grand Canyon, Arizona today. (Navajo point overlook). While attempting to capture lightenings from the storm on the horizon a very fast object crossed the sky. You can see it appearing from the top center of the screen and disappearing towards the bottom left. I have slowed it down to the extent possible with my iphone.
'Mensachtigen waren 2,1 miljoen jaar geleden al in China aanwezig'
'Mensachtigen waren 2,1 miljoen jaar geleden al in China aanwezig'
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Het zou betekenen dat mensachtigen Afrika veel eerder verlieten dan tot op heden werd aangenomen.
Dat schrijven onderzoekers in het blad Nature. Ze baseren zich op opgravingen op het lössplateau in China. In opeenvolgende aardlagen werden tientallen stenen gereedschappen aangetroffen die er sterk op wijzen dat dit gebied tussen 1,3 en 2,1 miljoen jaar geleden mogelijk vrijwel continu of in ieder geval herhaaldelijk door mensachtigen bewoond is geweest.
Oudste bewijs? Het is een spectaculaire vondst die suggereert dat mensachtigen al veel eerder buiten Afrika te vinden waren dan gedacht. Als de dateringen kloppen, is het tevens het oudste bewijs voor de aanwezigheid van mensachtigen dat tot op heden buiten Afrika is aangetroffen.
Georgië Het oudste bewijs voor de aanwezigheid van mensachtigen buiten Afrika dat ons tot voor kort bekend was, werd ontdekt in Georgië. Het gaat om gereedschappen en botten van Homo erectus die tot zo’n 1.85 miljoen jaar oud zijn. Tevens zijn in China en op Java fossiele resten van mensachtigen aangetroffen die tussen de 1.5 en 1.7 miljoen jaar oud zijn.
Dieren Maar nu zijn in China dus meer dan 2 miljoen jaar oude sporen van mensachtigen ontdekt. Naast de stenen gereedschappen zijn ook resten van dieren gevonden. Onduidelijk is of de aangetroffen gereedschappen gebruikt zijn om die dieren te slachten. Vervolgonderzoek zal dat uit moeten wijzen.
De implicaties van de vondst zijn hoe dan ook enorm. Dit is namelijk de eerste aanwijzing dat mensachtigen zich meer dan 2 miljoen jaar geleden al (ver) buiten Afrika begaven. Hoe ze zich precies verspreid hebben vanuit het meer dan 14.000 kilometer verderop gelegen Oost-Afrika blijft voor nu een raadsel.
Nieuw bewijs dat dit de hoogste bergen op Pluto zijn
Nieuw bewijs dat dit de hoogste bergen op Pluto zijn
Vivian Lammerse
De hoogste pieken zijn zo’n 6 kilometer hoog en moeten wel uit waterijs bestaan.
Toen ruimtesonde New Horizons in 2015 een expeditie naar Pluto deed, kwam het grote nieuws naar buiten: er bestaan daadwerkelijk torenhoge pieken en diepe valleien op zowel de ijzige dwergplaneet als op zijn grootste maan Charon. Na een aantal jaar van onderzoek zijn dan nu officieel de topografische kaarten van deze twee aldaar. De kaarten, evenals het proces om deze te maken, zijn terug te vinden in twee nieuwe onderzoeksartikelen gepubliceerd in het tijdschrift Icarus.
Beeld van de hoogste bergen op Pluto, de Tenzing Montes. Het heuvelachtige gebied achter de bergen is de ijsvulkaan Wright Montes. Het getoonde gebied is zo’n 500 kilometer breed.
Foto: Lunar and Planetary Institute/Paul Schenk
Kaarten Om de kaarten te maken, werden alle beelden van zowel de Long Range Reconnaissance Imager(LORRI) als de Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) samengevoegd. En dit ging niet zonder slag of stoot. Voor dit werkje was een gedetailleerde uitlijning van oppervlaktekenmerken in overlappende afbeeldingen nodig. Door digitale analyse van stereobeelden, verkregen van beide camera’s, werden de topografische kaarten voor elke regio gemaakt. Over een periode van twee jaar stuurde New Horizons mondjesmaat de afbeeldingen die gebruikt werden naar de Aarde. De kwaliteit van de geografische-, en topografische kaarten werden hierdoor met elke nieuwe reeks beelden verbeterd.
CHARON
Op Charon onthullen de topografische kaarten valleien nabij de noordpool die zo’n 14 kilometer diep zijn. In vergelijking, dit is dieper dan Marianentrog op Aarde. De equatoriale troggen die de grens vormen tussen de noordelijke en zuidelijke vlaktes op Charon, hebben een reliëf van zo’n 8 kilometer.
Ontdekkingen Op de kaarten is goed te zien dat er op Pluto als op Charon veel verschillende landvormen voorkomen. Daarnaast bevestigen de kaarten dat de hoogste berg op de dwergplaneet de Tenzing Montes is, gevormd langs de zuidwestelijke randen van de bevroren stikstofijskap Sputnik Planitia. De steile ijspieken hebben hellingen van 40 graden of zelf meer. De hoogste piek is zo’n 6 kilometer hoog, wat vergelijkbaar is met de Kilimanjaro in Kenia. Waarschijnlijk bestaan Pluto’s bergen uit waterijs, om op die manier hun hoogten te behouden. Als de bergen namelijk uit eerder waargenomen vluchtig ijs zouden bestaan, waaronder methaan en stikstofijs, zouden de bergen instorten.
Daarnaast blijkt uit de topografische kaarten dat de ijskap in de 1000 kilometer lange Sputnik Planitia gemiddeld 2,5 kilometer diep is, terwijl de buitenste randen van de ijskap meer dan 3,5 kilometer onder Pluto’s gemiddelde hoogte liggen. Hoewel het grootste deel van de ijskap relatief vlak is, zijn de buitenranden de laagst bekende gebieden op de dwergplaneet. Daarnaast tonen de kaarten het bestaan van een mondiaal geërodeerd diep rif van meer dan 3000 kilometer lang. Deze loopt van noord naar zuid nabij de westelijke rand van de Sputnik Planitia. Deze trog is de langst bekende op Pluto en geeft aan dat er een grote breuk in het verre verleden heeft plaatsgevonden. Op de vraag waarom deze breuk zich alleen langs de lineaire lijn voordoet, hebben de onderzoekers nog geen antwoord.
The new discovery leaves the secrets of the ancient Egyptian mummification in the open, offering unprecedented details not only about the mummification process but the oils used by the ancient Egyptians thousands of years ago to mummify their deceased.
Egyptian archaeologists have confirmed they’ve discovered an ancient Egyptian cemetery and a mummification temple located thirty meters below the surface near the necropolis of Saqqara, south of Cairo.
Experts have also come across a large number of small stone statues, jars, and vases which were most likely used in the mummification process. Image Credit: Ministry of Antiquities وزارة الآثار
Dr. Ramadan Badry Hussein, Director of Saqqara Saite Tombs Project and Professor at Tübingen University describes the discovery as “rare”.
The amazing underground mummification workshop will provide, according to experts, a new vision of the chemical composition of the oils used by the ancient Egyptians to mummify their dead. It is thought that the funerary well, which is believed to be more than 2,000 years old, dates from the Saita-Persian period (664-404 a.C.).
According to reports, the discovery of the 35 mummies and the abandoned mummification workshop was made in April of this year and includes a number of stone sarcophagi.
“The discovery will offer experts a couple of things but most importantly the type of oils used (in mummification) and their chemical composition, so we can identify the exact types of used oils, “said Ramadan Badry Hussein, head of the Egyptian-German mission that discovered the site.
Among the many discoveries on the site, the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities has pointed out that the most important artifact experts have come across is a Gilded Silver Mummy Mask, the second discovery of this kind ever made. The mask was found in one of the burial chambers of the main shaft attached to the Mummification Workshop reports the Ministry of Antiquities via their official Facebook page.
It is believed that the mask belonged to a person who held the title of ‘the Second Priest of Mut and the Priest of Niut-shaes’.
The Ministry has revealed that preliminary tests have revealed the mask is composed of gilded silver, and that the eyes of the mask are inlayed with a black gemstone (most likely onyx), calcite and obsidian.
“the Mummification Workshop also includes an embalmer’s cachette with a 13.00 m. deep shaft that ends with a rectangular subterranean chamber, where a large corpus of pottery was found. This pottery included vessels, bowls and measuring cups inscribed with names of oils and substances used in the mummification. The Mummification Workshop has also a large shaft (K 24) in the middle, which is used as a communal burial place. It measures 3.00 x 3.35 m x 30.00 m. Shaft K24 uniquely has several burial chambers, including a complex of burial chambers, cut into the bedrock on a depth of 30.00 m,”explained Dr. Ramadan Badry Hussein.
COSMIC CLOAK Whirls of cold and hot gas billow in this simulation of a circumgalactic medium surrounding a galaxy. With new tools and simulations, researchers have learned that the CGM helps a galaxy recycle its materials.
There’s more to a galaxy than meets the eye. Galaxies’ bright stars seem to spiral serenely against the dark backdrop of space. But a more careful look reveals a whole lot of mayhem.
“Galaxies are just like you and me,” Jessica Werk, an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in January at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. “They live their lives in a constant state of turmoil.”
Much of that turmoil takes place in a huge, complicated setting called the circumgalactic medium, or CGM. This vast, roiling cloud of dust and gas is a galaxy’s fuel source, waste dump and recycling center all in one. Astronomers think the answers to some of the most pressing galactic mysteries — how galaxies keep forming new stars for billions of years, why star formation abruptly stops — are hidden in a galaxy’s enveloping CGM.
“To understand the galaxies, you have to understand the ecosystem that they’re in,” says astronomer Molly Peeples of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
Yet this galactic atmosphere is so diffuse that it’s invisible — a liter of CGM contains just a single atom. It has taken almost 60 years and an upgrade to the Hubble Space Telescope just to begin probing distant CGMs and figuring out how their constant churning can make or break galaxies.
“Only recently have we been able to really, truly, observationally characterize the relationship between this gaseous cycle and the properties of the galaxy itself,” Werk says.
Armed with the first extragalactic census, astronomers are now piecing together how a CGM controls its galaxy’s life and death. And new theoretical studies hint that galaxies’ stars would be arranged very differently without a medium’s frenetic flows. Plus, new observations show that some CGMs are surprisingly lumpy. A better understanding of CGMs, enabled by new telescopes and computer simulations, could change how scientists think about everything from galaxy collisions to the origins of our own atoms.
“The CGM is the part of the iceberg that’s under the water,” says astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski of ETH Zurich, who studies the more conventional parts of galaxies. “We now have good measurements where we’re sure it’s important.”
Frenetic fog
Researchers use a bright source of background light, like a quasar, to learn about a galaxy’s circumgalactic medium, a diffuse cloud of gas and metals (pink in the illustration) surrounding a galaxy. Gas is recycled between the galaxy and the CGM.
C. CHANG
Sources: J. Tumlinson, M.S. Peeples and J.K. Werk/Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 2017; M.S. Peeples/Nature 2015
Waiting for Hubble
That 2009 Hubble telescope upgrade, which made the CGM census possible, almost didn’t happen.
In a cosmic coincidence, the Hubble telescope’s chief champions were also the first astronomers to figure out how to observe a galaxy’s CGM. Lyman Spitzer of Princeton University and John Bahcall of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and other astronomers noticed something strange after the 1963 discovery of quasars (SN Online: 3/21/14), bright beacons now known to be white-hot disks surrounding supermassive black holes in the centers of distant galaxies.
Everywhere astronomers looked, quasars’ spectra — the rainbow created when their light is spread out over all wavelengths — were notched with dark holes. Some wavelengths of light weren’t getting through.
In 1969, Spitzer and Bahcall realized what was going on: The missing light was absorbed by gas at the edges of galaxies, the same stuff that would later be called the CGM. Astronomers had been peering at quasars shining through CGMs like headlights through a fog.
Not much more could be done at the time, though. Earth’s atmosphere also absorbs light in those same wavelengths, making it difficult to tell which light-blocking atoms were in a galaxy’s CGM and which came from closer to home. Knowing that a CGM was there was one thing; taking its measurements would require something extra.
Spitzer and Bahcall knew what they needed: a space telescope that could observe from outside Earth’s atmosphere. The pair were two of the most vocal and consistent champions of the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched in 1990. Spitzer’s colleagues called him Hubble’s “intellectual and political father.”
Bahcall never stopped advocating for Hubble. In February 2005, six months before his death at age 70 from a rare blood disorder, he cowrote an article in the Los Angeles Times urging Congress to restore funding for a mission to fix some aging Hubble instruments, which NASA had canceled after the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster.
“What is at stake is not only a piece of stellar technology but our commitment to the most fundamental human quest: understanding the cosmos,” Bahcall and colleagues wrote. “Hubble’s most important discoveries could be in the future.”
His plea was answered: The space shuttle Atlantis brought astronauts to repair Hubble for the last time in May 2009 (SN Online: 5/19/09). During the repair, the astronauts installed the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, which could pick up diffuse CGM gas with 30 times the sensitivity of any previous instrument. Although earlier spectrographs on Hubble had picked out CGMs a few quasar-beams at a time, the new device let astronomers search around dozens of galaxies, using the light of even dimmer quasars.
“It blew the field wide open,” Werk says.
Gas flows out from M82, the Cigar galaxy, to its invisible circumgalactic medium in this Hubble image.
NASA, ESA, HUBBLE HERITAGE TEAM
The circumgalactic census
A team led by Jason Tumlinson of Baltimore’s Space Telescope Science Institute, Hubble’s academic home, made a catalog of 44 galaxies with a quasar sitting behind them from Hubble’s perspective. In a 2011 paper in Science, the researchers reported that every time they looked within 490,000 light-years of a galaxy, they saw spectra dappled with blank spots from atoms absorbing light. That meant that CGMs weren’t odd cloaks worn by just a few galaxies. They were everywhere.
Tumlinson’s team spent the first few years after Hubble’s upgrade like 19th century naturalists describing new species. The group measured the mass and the chemical makeup of the galaxies’ CGMs and found they were huge cisterns of heavy elements. CGMs contain 10 million times the mass of the sun in oxygen alone. In many cases, the mass of a CGM is comparable to the mass of the entire visible part of its galaxy.
The finding offers an answer to a long-standing cosmic mystery: How do galaxies have enough star-forming fuel to keep going for billions of years? Galaxies build stars from collapsing clouds of cool gas at a constant rate; the Milky Way, for example, makes one to two solar masses’ worth of stars every year. But there isn’t enough cool gas within the visible part of a galaxy, the disk containing its stars, to support observed rates of star formation.
“We think that gas probably comes from the CGM,” Werk says. “But exactly how that gas is getting into galaxies, where it gets in, the timescale on which it gets in, are there things that prevent it from getting in? Those are big questions that keep us all awake at night.”
Werk and Peeples realized that all that mass could help solve two other cosmic bookkeeping problems. All elements heavier than helium (which astronomers lump together as “metals”) are forged by nuclear fusion in the hearts of stars. When stars use up their fuel and explode as supernovas, they scatter those metals around to be folded into the next generation of stars.
But if you add up all the metals in the stars, gas and dust in a given galaxy’s disk, it’s not enough to account for all the metals the galaxy has ever made. The mismatch gets even worse if you include the hydrogen, helium, electrons and protons — basically all the ordinary matter that should have collected in the galaxy since the Big Bang. Astronomers call all those bits baryons. Galaxies seem to be missing 70 to 95 percent of that stuff.
At the time, Werk reported that at least half of galaxies’ missing ordinary matter can be accounted for in their CGMs. In a 2017 update, Werk and colleagues found that the mass of baryons just in the form of cool gas in a galaxy’s CGM could be nearly 90 billion solar masses. “Obviously, this mass could resolve the galactic missing baryons problem,” the team wrote.
“It’s a classic science story,” Schawinski says. The researchers had a hypothesis about where the missing material should be and made predictions. The group made observations to test those predictions and found what it sought.
In a separate study, Peeples showed that although metals are born in galaxies’ starry disks, those metals don’t stay there. Only 20 to 25 percent of the metals a galaxy has ever produced remains in the stars, gas and dust in the disk, where the metals can be incorporated into new stars and planets. The rest probably ends up in the CGM.
“If you look at all the metals the galaxies ever produced in their whole lifetime, more of them are outside the galaxy than are still inside the galaxy,” Tumlinson says, “which was a huge shock.”
Recycling centers
So how did the metals get into the CGM? Quasars’ spectra couldn’t help with that question. Their light shows only a slice through a single galaxy at a single moment in time. But astronomers can track galaxies’ growth and development with computer simulations based on physical rules for how stars and gas behave.
This strategy revealed the churning, ever-changing nature of gas in galaxies’ CGMs. Simulations such as EAGLE, or Evolution and Assembly of GaLaxies and their Environments, which is run out of Leiden University in the Netherlands, showed that metals can reach CGMs through stars’ violent lives: in powerful winds of radiation blowing away from massive young stars, and in the death throes of supernovas spraying metals far and wide.
This EAGLE simulation shows that, over time, metals (colors) move away from the center of a galaxy to the circumgalactic medium.
J. TUMLINSON, M.S. PEEPLES AND J.K. WERK/ANNUAL REVIEW OF ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS 2017
Once the metals are in the CGM, though, they don’t always stay put. In simulations, galaxies seem to use the same gas over and over again.
“It’s basically just gravity,” Peeples says. “Throw a baseball up, and it’ll come back to the ground.” The same goes for gas flowing out of galaxies: Unless the gas travels fast enough to escape the galaxy’s gravity altogether, those atoms will eventually fall back into the disk — and form new stars.
Some simulations show discrete gas parcels making the trip from a galaxy’s disk out into the CGM and back again several times. Together, CGMs and their galaxies are giant recycling devices.
That means that the atoms that make up planets, plants and people may have taken several trips to circumgalactic space before becoming part of us. Over hundreds of millions of years, the atoms that eventually became part of you traveled hundreds of thousands of light-years.
“This is my favorite thing,” Tumlinson says. “At some point, your carbon, your oxygen, your nitrogen, your iron was out in intergalactic space.”
How galaxies die
But not all galaxies get their CGM gas back. Losing the gas could shut off star formation in a galaxy for good. No one knows how star formation shuts off, or quenches. But the answer is probably in the CGM.
Galaxies come in two main forms: young spiral galaxies that are making stars and old blobby galaxies where star formation is quenched (SN Online: 4/23/18).
“How galaxies quench and why they stay that way is one of the most important questions in galaxy formation generally,” Tumlinson says. “It just has to have something to do with the gas supply.”
Reading what's not there
Using light from a quasar (QSO), researchers can “see” CGMs. In this example, spectra from two galaxies, G1 and G2, have certain wavelengths missing (red, in bottom boxes) where the CGM atoms are absorbing light.
J. TUMLINSON ET AL/SCIENCE 2011
One possibility, suggested in a paper posted online February 20 at arXiv.org, is that sprays of supernova-heated gas could get stripped from galaxies. Physicist Chad Bustard of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and colleagues simulated the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, and found that the small galaxy’s outflowing gas was swept away by the slight pressure of the galaxy’s movement around the Milky Way.
Alternatively, a dead galaxy’s CGM gas could be too hot to sink into the galaxy and form stars. If so, star-forming galaxies should have CGMs full of cold gas, and dead galaxies should be shrouded in hot gas. Hot gas would stay floating above the galactic disk like a hot air balloon, too buoyant to sink in and form stars.
But Hubble saw the opposite. Star-forming galaxies had CGMs chock-full of oxygen-VI — meaning that the gas was so hot (a million degrees Celsius or more) that oxygen atoms lost five of their original electrons. Dead galaxies had surprisingly little oxygen-VI.
“That was puzzling,” Tumlinson says. “If theory told us anything, it should have gone the other way.”
In 2016, Benjamin Oppenheimer, a computational astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, suggested a solution: The “dead” galaxies didn’t lack oxygen at all. The gas was just too hot for Hubble to observe. “In fact, there is even more oxygen around those passive galaxies,” Oppenheimer says.
All that hot gas could potentially explain why those galaxies died — except that these galaxies were full of star-forming cold gas, too.
“The dead galaxies have plenty of fuel left in the tank,” Tumlinson says. “We don’t know why they’re not using it. Everybody’s chasing that problem.”
Grabbing at the elephant
The chase comes at a good time. Until recently, observers had no way to map a single galaxy’s CGM. Researchers have had to add up dozens of quasar beams to understand the composition of CGMs on average.
“We’ve been like the three blind people grabbing at the elephant,” says John O’Meara, an observational astronomer at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vt.
Teams using two new spectrographs — KCWI, the Keck Cosmic Web Imager on the Keck telescope in Hawaii, and MUSE, the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer on the Very Large Telescope in Chile — are racing to change that. These instruments, called integral field spectrographs, can read spectra across a full galaxy all at once. Given enough background light, astronomers can now examine a single galaxy’s entire CGM. Finally, astronomers have a way to test theories of how gas circulates into and out of a galaxy.
The European Southern Observatory’s Medusa-like MUSE instrument was installed on the Very Large Telescope in Chile in 2014 to take spectra across a full galaxy.
ERIC LE ROUX/SERVICE COMMUNICATION/UCBL/MUSE/ESO
A Chilean team, led by astronomer Sebastian Lopez of the University of Chile in Santiago and colleagues, used MUSE to observe a small dim galaxy that happens to be sandwiched between a bright, distant galaxy and a massive galaxy cluster closer to Earth. The cluster acts as a gravitational lens, distorting the image of the distant galaxy into a long bright arc (SN: 3/10/12, p. 4). The light from that arc filtered through the CGM of the sandwiched galaxy, which the team called G1, at 56 different points.
Surprisingly, G1’s CGM was lumpy, not smooth as expected, the team reported in the Feb. 22 Nature. “The assumption has been that that gas is distributed homogeneously around every system,” Lopez says. “This is not the case.”
MUSE makes a mark
Light from a source galaxy is deflected and magnified by an intervening galaxy cluster to form the bright arc seen in the projected image at far right. Unlike a quasar’s narrow beam of light, the extensive arc lights up a large area of galaxy G1’s CGM, showing it is surprisingly lumpy.
CARLOS POLANCO, ESO
O’Meara is leading a group that is hot on Lopez’s trail. Last year, while KCWI was being installed, O’Meara got an hour of observing time and was able to see hydrogen — which is associated with cool, star-forming gas — in the CGM of another galaxy backlit by a bright lensed arc. He’s not ready to discuss the results in detail yet, but the team is submitting a paper to Science.
FOGGIE computer simulations improve CGM resolution. In these renderings of the same galaxy, the bottom shows FOGGIE at work. The galaxy’s shape and size change dramatically.
M. PEEPLES, G. SNYDER ET AL/FOGGIE PROJECT
Meanwhile, Peeples’ team is revisiting how computers render CGMs. “The resolution of the circumgalactic medium in simulations is, um, bad,” she says. Existing simulations are good at matching the visible properties of galaxies — their stars, the gas between the stars, and the overall shapes and sizes. But they “utterly fail at reproducing the properties of the circumgalactic medium,” she says.
So she’s running a new set of simulations called FOGGIE, which focus on CGMs for the first time. “We’re finding that it changes everything,” she says: The shape, star formation history and even the orientation of the galaxy in space look different.
Together, the new observations and simulations suggest that the CGM’s function in the life cycle of a galaxy has been underestimated. Theorists like Peeples and observers like O’Meara are working together to make new predictions about how the CGM should look. Then the researchers will check real galaxies to see if they match.
“Molly will post a really amazing new render of a simulation on Slack, and I’ll go, ‘Holy crap, that looks weird!’ ” O’Meara says. “I’ll go scampering off to find a similar example in the data, and we get into this positive feedback loop of going ‘Holy crap! Holy crap!’ ”
While future circumgalactic studies will focus on gathering spectra from full CGMs, Tumlinson is hoping to squeeze more information out of Hubble while he still can. Hubble made CGM studies possible, but the telescope is 28 years old, and probably has less than a decade left. Hubble’s spectrograph is still the best at observing certain atoms in CGMs to help reveal the gaseous halos’ secrets. “It’s something we definitely want to do,” he says, “before Hubble ends up in the ocean.”
This article appears in the July 21, 2018 issue of Science News with the headline, "A Galaxy's Ecosystem: The circumgalactic medium is an invisible cloak that controls how galaxies live and die."
Jason Tumlinson, Molly Peeples and Jessica Werk. The Circumgalactic Medium. Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Published online June 28, 2017. doi:10.1146/annurev-astro-091916-055240.
Severe Drought Reveals Massive Ancient Monument That Predates The Pyramids And Stonehenge in Ireland
Severe Drought Reveals Massive Ancient Monument That Predates The Pyramids And Stonehenge in Ireland
Severe Drought Reveals Massive Ancient Monument in Ireland
As severe droughts swipe across Britain, new aerial images of a crop field in Ireland have revealed what appears to be a gigantic monument similar to Stonehenge, reports the Irish Times.
June of 2018 was one of the top five warmest Junes across the UK, according to the UK Met Office, dating back to 1910.
Aerial images taken this week from a drone reveal the presence of a circular monument 200 meters in diameter buried under a field in Ireland.
Image Credit: Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht
The circle is located around one kilometer from Newgrange.
It is believed that the discovered site is at least 500 years older than Newgrange, so it was most likely built at the end of the Neolithic or beginning of the Bronze Age, say experts.
Interestignly, Newgrange remained ‘lost’ during more than 4,000 years due to a decrease of the mound until it was discovered in the XVIIcentury by people who looked construction stones and described it as a cave.
The true purpose of Newgrange remains a mystery, although experts believe it was a religious center of some sort.
The new discovery–not far from Newgrange–is hailed as ‘extremely significant’
As explained by experts, the moisture left in the soil lodged into the archaeological features more than the surrounding soil, making the outside soil and crops to become drier.
The image of the new archeological site was snapped by historian and authorAnthony Murphy.
Speaking to the Irish Times Mr. Murphy said: “the weather is absolutely critical to the discovery of this monument. I have flown a drone over the Boyne Valley regularly and have never seen this.”
“So when that crop is harvested all surface traces of this monument will vanish and we may not see this monument again for 2 or 3 decades depending on when we get another prolonged dry spell like this.”
The discovery could be the beginning of something bigger.
According to archeologists, the fact that the massive monument is located not far away from Newgrange means that we are most likely looking at a much larger ancient landscape filled with monuments.
The Newgrange UNESCO World Heritage Site in Ireland is home to several monuments, including this mound.
As explained by Archaeologist Dr. Gerladine Stout:
“I believe Newgrange is just the center of a much larger sacred landscape and I think there was a whole series of facilities built for the pilgrims coming to Newgrange in prehistory.”
“Generally we believe these henge monuments were built up to 500 years after the main use of Newgrange and in a lot of cases they actually enclose the area of monuments.”
The Secret Space Force & Astronauts You Never Even Knew Existed
The Secret Space Force & Astronauts You Never Even Knew Existed
Considering President Donald Trump's recent comments about launching a military space force, we should all take a look back at the EXISTING secret military space force that may operate today, but definitely operated back in the 1970s (it is now known). What do you think of Trump's statements, and do you think the secret space program from the 70s ever really shut down?
The last time a person visited themoonwas in December 1972, during NASA’s Apollo 17 mission.
Over the decades,NASAplanned to send people back to the moon but has yet to succeed.
Astronautsoften say the biggest reasons why humans haven’t returned to the lunar surface are budgetary and political hurdles – not scientific or technical challenges.
Private companies likeBlue Originor SpaceXmay be the first entities to return people to the moon.
Landing 12 people on the moon remains one of NASA’s greatest achievements, if not the greatest.
Astronauts collected rocks, took photos, performed experiments, planted some flags, and then came home. But those week-long stays during the Apollo program didn’t establish a lasting human presence on the moon.
More than 45 years after the most recent crewed moon landing – Apollo 17 in December 1972 – there are plenty of reasons to return people to Earth’s giant, dusty satellite and stay there.
“A permanent human research station on the moon is the next logical step. It’s only three days away. We can afford to get it wrong, and not kill everybody,” former astronaut Chris Hadfield recently told Business Insider. “And we have a whole bunch of stuff we have to invent and then test in order to learn before we can go deeper out.”
But many astronauts and other experts suggest the biggest impediments to crewed moon missions over the last four-plus decades have been banal if not depressing.
It’s really expensive to get to the moon – but not that expensive
Foto: sourceBloomsbury Auctions
A tried-and-true hurdle for any spaceflight program, especially for missions that involve people, is the steep cost.
A law signed in March 2017 by President Donald Trump gives NASA an annual budget of about$19.5 billion, and it may rise to $19.9 billion in 2019.
Either amount sounds like a windfall – until you consider that the total gets split among all of the agency’s divisions and ambitious projects: the James Webb Space Telescope, the giant rocket project called Space Launch System, and far-flung missions to the sun, Jupiter, Mars, the Asteroid Belt, the Kuiper Belt, and the edge of the solar system. (By contrast, the US military gets a budget of about $600 billion per year. One project within that budget – the modernization and now expansion of America’s nuclear arsenal– may even cost as much as $1.7 trillion over 30 years.)
Plus, NASA’s budget is somewhat small relative to its past.
“NASA’s portion of the federal budget peaked at 4% in 1965. For the past 40 years it has remained below 1%, and for the last 15 years it has been driving toward 0.4% of the federal budget,” Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham said during a 2015 congressional testimony.
Trump’s budget calls for a return to the moon, and then later an orbital visit to Mars. But given the ballooning costs and snowballing delays related to NASA’s SLS rocket program, there may not be enough funding to make it to either destination, even if the International Space Station gets defunded early.
A 2005 report by NASA estimated that returning to the moon would cost about $104 billion(which is $133 billion today, with inflation) over about 13 years. The Apollo program cost about$120 billion in today’s dollars.
“Manned exploration is the most expensive space venture and, consequently, the most difficult for which to obtain political support,” Cunningham said during his testimony, according to Scientific American. “Unless the country, which is Congress here, decided to put more money in it, this is just talk that we’re doing here.”
Referring to Mars missions and a return to the moon, Cunningham added, “NASA’s budget is way too low to do all the things that we’ve talked about doing here.”
The problem with presidents
Foto: US President Donald Trump scrapped the Obama administration’7s
sourceReuters/Carlos Barria
The Trump administration’s immediate goal is to get astronauts to “the vicinity of the moon” sometime in 2023. That would be toward the end of what could be Trump’s second term if he is reelected.
And therein lies another major problem: partisan political whiplash.
“Why would you believe what any president said about a prediction of something that was going to happen two administrations in the future?” Hadfield said. “That’s just talk.”
From the perspective of astronauts, it’s about the mission. The process of designing, engineering, and testing a spacecraft that could get people get to another world easily outlasts a two-term president. But there’s a predictable pattern of incoming presidents and lawmakers scrapping the previous leader’s space-exploration priorities.
“I would like the next president to support a budget that allows us to accomplish the mission that we are asked to perform, whatever that mission may be,” astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent a year in space, wrote during a January 2016 Reddit Ask Me Anything session (before Trump took office).
But presidents and Congress don’t seem to care about staying the course.
In 2004, for example, the Bush administration tasked NASA with coming up with a way to replace the space shuttle, which was due to retire, and also return to the moon. The agency came up with the Constellation program to land astronauts on the moon, using a rocket called Ares and a spaceship called Orion.
NASA spent $9 billion over five years designing, building, and testing hardware for that human spaceflight program. Yet after President Barack Obama took office – and the Government Accountability Office released a report about NASA’s inability to estimate Constellation’s cost– Obama pushed to scrap the program and signed off on the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket instead.
Trump hasn’t scrapped SLS. But he did change Obama’s goal of launching astronauts to an asteroid to moon and Mars missions.
Such frequent changes to NASA’s expensive priorities has led to cancellation after cancellation, a loss of about $20 billion, and years of wasted time and momentum.
“I’m disappointed that they’re so slow and trying to do something else,” Apollo 8 astronaut Jim Lovell told Business Insider in 2017. “I’m not excited about anything in the near future. I’ll just see things as they come.”
Buzz Aldrin said in a 2015 testimony to Congress that he believes the will to return to the moon must come from Capitol Hill.
“American leadership is inspiring the world by consistently doing what no other nation is capable of doing. We demonstrated that for a brief time 45 years ago. I do not believe we have done it since,” Aldrin wrote in a prepared statement. “I believe it begins with a bi-partisan Congressional and Administration commitment to sustained leadership.”
The real driving force behind that government commitment to return to the moon is the will of the American people, who vote for politicians and help shape their policy priorities. But public interest in lunar exploration has always been lukewarm.
Even at the height of the Apollo program – after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface – only 53% of Americans thought the program was worth the cost. Most of the rest of the time, US approval of Apollo hovered significantly below 50%.
Today, 55% of Americans think NASA should make returning to the moon a priority, though only a quarter of those believers think it should be a top priority, according to a Pew Research Center poll released in June. But 44% of people surveyed by the poll think sending astronauts back to the moon shouldn’t be done at all.
Support for crewed Mars exploration is stronger, with 63% believing it should be a NASA priority, and 91% of people think scanning the skies for killer asteroids is important.
The challenges beyond politics
Foto: Many space enthusiasts have long hoped to build a base on the moon, but the lunar surface’s harsh environment wouldn’t be an ideal place for humans to thrive.
sourceNASA
The political tug-of-war over NASA’s mission and budget isn’t the only reason people haven’t returned to the moon. The moon is also a 4.5-billion-year-old death trap for humans, and must not be trifled with or underestimated.
Its surface is littered with craters and boulders that threaten safe landings. Leading up to the first moon landing in 1969, the US government spent what would be billions in today’s dollars to develop, launch, and deliver satellites to the moon to could map its surface and help mission planners scout for possible Apollo landing sites.
But a bigger worry is what eons of meteorite impacts has created: regolith, also called moon dust.
Madhu Thangavelu, an aeronautical engineer at the University of Southern California, wrote in 2014 that the moon is covered in “a fine, talc-like top layer of lunar dust, several inches deep in some regions, which is electro-statically charged through interaction with the solar wind and is very abrasive and clingy, fouling up spacesuits, vehicles and systems very quickly.”
Peggy Whitson, an astronaut who lived in space for a total of 665 days, recently told Business Insider that the Apollo missions “had a lot of problems with dust.”
“If we’re going to spend long durations and build permanent habitats, we have to figure out how to handle that,” Whitson said.
There’s also a problem with sunlight. For 14.75 days at a time, the lunar surface is a boiling hellscape that is exposed directly to the sun’s harsh rays – the moon has no protective atmosphere. The next 14.75 days are in total darkness, making the moon’s surface one of the coldest places in the universe.
A small nuclear reactor being developed by NASA, called Kilopower, could supply astronauts with electricity during weeks-long lunar nights – and would be useful on other worlds, including Mars.
“There is not a more environmentally unforgiving or harsher place to live than the moon,” Thangavelu wrote. “And yet, since it is so close to the Earth, there is not a better place to learn how to live, away from planet Earth.”
NASA has designed dust- and sun-resistant spacesuits and rovers, though it’s uncertain if that equipment is anywhere near ready to launch, as some of it was part of the now-canceled Constellation program.
A generation of billionaire ‘space nuts’ may get there
Foto: An illustration of Elon Musk’s and SpaceX’s “Big F—ing Rocket” landed at a lunar base.
“There’s this generation of billionaires who are space nuts, which is great,” astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman told journalists during a roundtable earlier this year. “The innovation that’s been going on over the last 10 years in spaceflight never would’ve happened if it was just NASA and Boeing and Lockheed. Because there was no motivation to reduce the cost or change the way we do it.”
Hoffman is referring to the work by Elon Musk and his rocket company, SpaceX, as well as that of Jeff Bezos, who runs a secretive aerospace company called Blue Origin.
“There’s no question – if we’re going to go farther, especially if we’re going to go farther than the moon – we need new transportation,” Hoffman added. “Right now we’re still in the horse-and-buggy days of spaceflight.”
Many astronauts’ desire to return to the moon fits into Bezos’ long-term vision. Bezos has floated a plan around Washington to start building the first moon base using Blue Origin’s upcoming New Glenn rocket system. In April, he said, “we will move all heavy industry off of Earth, and Earth will be zoned residential and light industry.”
Musk has also spoken at length about how SpaceX’s in-development “Big Falcon Rocket” could pave the way for affordable, regular lunar visits. SpaceX might even visit the moon before NASA or Blue Origin. The company’s new Falcon Heavy rocket is capable of launching a smallCrew Dragon space capsule past the moon and back to Earth – and Musk has said two private citizens have already paid a large deposit to go on the voyage.
“My dream would be that, some day, the moon would become part of the economic sphere of the Earth – just like geostationary orbit and low-Earth orbit,” Hoffman said. “Space out as far as geostationary orbit is part of our everyday economy. Some day I think the moon will be, and that’s something to work for.”
Astronauts don’t doubt we’ll get back to the moon, and on to Mars. It’s just a matter of when.
“I guess eventually, things will come to pass where they will go back to the moon and eventually go to Mars, probably not in my lifetime,” Lovell said. “Hopefully they’ll be successful.”
Correction:Twelve people landed on the moon during NASA’s Apollo program, not 14. We regret this astronomical error.
A Long March 2C/SMA rocket lifts off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 03:56 UTC on July 9, 2018. Credit: CGWIC
HELSINKI, Finland — China launched twice July 9, with an early Long March 2C launch of two satellites for Pakistan into low Earth orbit being followed up with a Long March 3A mission to back up China’s Beidou navigation satellite system.
China launches two satellites for Pakistan aboard Long March-2C rocket
The first launch saw the Pakistan Remote Sensing Satellite-1 (PRSS-1) lofted from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in a desert region of Gansu province, northwest China, at 03:56 UTC July 9 (11:56 p.m. Eastern July 8).
The optical satellite was put into a 588 by 624 kilometer orbit inclined by 98 degrees by the Long March 2C/SMA configuration which uses an upper stage.
PRSS-1 was developed by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) and is based on a CAST-2000 satellite bus. Its imaging system provides panchromatic and multispectral imaging at 1-meter and 4-meter resolution, respectively, with a swarth width of around 60 kilometers.
It will be used for land and resources surveying, monitoring of natural disasters, agriculture research, urban construction and providing remote-sensing information for the establishment of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and in the Belt and Road initiative, according to Chinese state media.
PRSS-1 was accompanied by the smaller PakTES-1A satellite, a scientific experiment satellite designed and developed by Pakistan’s Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO).
CAST is a subsidiary of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the main contractor for the Chinese space program, which also provided the launch service. CAST also stated it provided training to Pakistan personnel as part of the satellite package, with SUPARCO to operate PRSS-1 after on-orbit delivery.
China has in recent years adopted a strategy of offering turnkey projects which include satellite manufacture and launch as well as possible financing mechanisms. The country has launched communications and other satellites for countries including Belarus, Laos, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nigeria.
Around 1,400 kilometers away in southwest China, final preparations for the launch of a Long March 3A rocket were being made at the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre, among hills in Sichuan province.
The launch vehicle lifted off at 20:58 UTC (4:58 p.m. Eastern) on July 9 carrying a backup second generation Beidou navigation and positioning satellite into a geosynchronous transfer orbit, boosting China’s own version of the U.S. Global Positioning System.
CASC declared the launch to be a success just over an hour after takeoff from Xichang, which occurred 17 hours after liftoff of the Long March 2C from Jiuquan.
Beidou-2 satellites provide regional services, while third-generation Beidou-3 satellites are part of the global coverage constellation. The satellite launched Monday, designated IGSO-7, will replace a soon-to-be retired satellite in inclined geosynchronous orbit.
The July 9 launches were China’s 19th and 20th of 2018, with CASC aiming to carry out around 36 launches this year. The country’s record number of launches in a single year is 22, set in 2016, which included one failure and another partial failure. Commercial launch companies could boost the number to around 40.
The major upcoming government missions for the second half of the year include the return-to-flight of the heavy-lift Long March 5, which failed during its second flight last July and prompted a redesign of first stage engines, and the Chang’e-4 lunar far side soft-landing mission. Both are set for late 2018.
China sent a new navigation satellite into orbit from southwest China's Xichang Satellite Launch Center, at 04:58 on Tuesday.
In the mountains of Peru stands a gateway shrouded in mystery and attributed with capabilities of mythic proportions. Many ancient sites on Earth are believed to hold special powers and emit unique frequencies of energy, lights, or sounds that otherwise seem impossible. Others hold stories of people, cities, and even entire ships vanishing without leaving a trace.
Stonehenge, the Bermuda Triangle, the Gate of the Sun in Tiwanaku, Bolivia, and many others caused even scientists to scratch their heads and admit that they aren’t sure. Could these regions actually be portals to other dimensions, doorways know as Stargates, through which humans as well as gods pass to and from this world to the next?
THE CITY OF THE GODS
The City of the Gods, high in the mountains of Peru, is home to one of these suspected Stargates. Due to rocky mountain terrain and protection from the Peruvian government as an ancient archeological site, it has gone vastly unexplored. Researchers still aren’t certain whether or not this area actually contained a settlement, but the rock formations bear an interesting resemblance to dwellings and structures.
The Gate of the Gods was discovered in 1996 by Jose Luis Delgado Mamani, a local tour guide who came upon the place as he hiked through the local foothills to familiarize himself with the area. As he approached the massive gateway, nestled into the rock formation, he was overcome with recognition — he had seen this very gateway before in his dreams. For years, a pink marble gateway with a smaller inset door from which emanated a mysterious blue light had presented itself to him while he slept, and the moment of discovery overwhelmed him almost to the point of fainting. How could this be just a fantastic coincidence?
THE LEGEND OF THE GATE OF THE GODS
The native peoples of Lake Titicaca, Panu, and the rest of the surrounding region, had long retold a myth about a mysterious doorway that led to the “lands of the Gods.” Heroes in ancient times were witnessed entering into the beyond through this door to join their deities once their time on this earth had come to an end.
The legend also mentioned these same great men re-entering through the same gate with their gods beside them, to check in on the lives of those they’d left behind. It also told of a prophecy: Some day in the future, the gate would open “much bigger than it actually is,” and allow the gods to return to their sun ships.
All of this and more raced through Mamani’s mind as he beheld this magnificent structure outside of his dreams for the first time. This Gateway was carved from the rock face, standing 7 meters high by 7 meters wide, with a smaller door inset at the base. In the center of the smaller door was a circular depression, and it was soon discovered that this alluded to yet another myth involving an ancient Incan priest fleeing for his life from Spanish conquistadors.
The priest of Temple of the Seven Rays snatched up the precious golden disk known as “the key of the gods of the seven rays” when the pillaging pirates arrived to plunder everything for themselves, and fled into the mountains of Hayu Marca.
He came across the Gateway of the Gods, which was being watchfully guarded by shaman priests. Whether in desperation for the fleeing priest’s life, or for protection for his people against the marauders, the shaman noticed the golden disk proved to fit perfectly into the molded depression within the smaller door. They gazed in awe as the portal opened. Pale blue light bathed the reddened rocks as it yawned wide. Lest the golden key be lost, the Incan priest, Amaru Ramu, relinquished it, and stepped through the gateway, never to be seen again.
Once he recognized the portal from his dreams, Mamani immediately contacted archeological experts in the surrounding villages of La Paz, Puno, and Lima, and within hours the site was crawling with Inca historians and scientists, who were familiar with the legends swirling about the area.
Despite allegations of the gateway being a portal to other worlds, whether leading to numerous tunnels harbored inside the mountain or capable of transporting humans and other beings into other dimensions, the scientists remained skeptical. The gate appeared to be carved as one structure from the rock with no gap that would indicate it as a door being visible. According to some of the research party, by placing their hands on the door, they could feel a subtle energy pulsing from the inside. Some heard strange rhythmic music. Others claimed they saw visions of columns of fire and things beyond this world.
What struck the scientists most was that the massive doorway bore a striking resemblance to another structure attributed with Stargate capabilities. The Gate of the Sun, in Tiwanaku, Bolivia, as well as five other archeological points, all connected in a grid-like pattern whose lines intersected exactly where the plateau and Lake Titicaca happened to be. Locals also claim to have witnessed significant UFO activity, such as twinkling blue lights and white glowing discs. Signs of ancient advanced technology in Peru, or something a even more out of the ordinary?
The majority of these sites remain vastly unexplained by modern science, and perhaps that’s a large part of their allure. Whether alien portals to alternate universes, passages through which gods can reappear and humans can disappear, or simply an ancient structure designed for rituals and worship, these strange formations continue to intrigue us thousands of years later.
Crop circle reveals ancient ‘henge’ monument buried in Ireland WORLD Experts believe a 5,000 year old Neolithic site has been discovered in a field in Ireland s Boyne Valley, after a summer drought deadened the grass enough for the monument to be revealed.
U.K. archeologists are crediting a drought and a drone for the discovery of an ancient structure in Ireland, which first appeared as an outline under a parched farmer’s field.
The structure was spotted this week by drone enthusiasts recording footage over the Newgrange historic site in Boyne Valley, County Meath. The UNESCO World Heritage Site is home to several 5,000-year-old circular structures from the Neolithic era, many of which remain buried underground.
Photos from the air show the structure as a circular outline under a farmer’s field, with the ditch-and-upright architecture of a prehistoric henge, such as Stonehenge.
“Nobody knew it was there,” said archeologist Stephen Davis.
The monument was likely built around 3000 BCE along with the other structures at the site, according to Davis, who teaches at University College Dublin. He’s also been studying the site for several years.
“When it was standing, what you would’ve seen was two large rings of timber posts, and maybe a very low bank, and then this segmented ditch,” Davis said.
Ireland has been suffering through a historically hot, dry summer, which helped expose the structure where it lay hidden beneath a farmer’s tilled field.
Davis says the buried structure caused the drought-stricken plants above ground to ripen at different rates, because the earth was deeper in some places than in others. This created a green-and-brown pattern in the plants that corresponded to the buried ruins.
“The detail we’re seeing is pretty unprecedented, and it might not happen again for decades,” Davis said.
“You wouldn’t see this from the ground,” he added. “You’d only see it from the air.”
The most famous structure at Newgrange is the stone-rimmed, grass-domed mound known as Site P. The structure is centred around an ancient stone tomb, although the tomb predates the rest of the monument.
The newly-discovered monument was close to Site P.
The Newgrange UNESCO World Heritage Site in Ireland is home to several monuments, including this mound.
Newgrange.com
Newgrange is believed to be about 100 years older than Stonehenge, although the newest discovery might have been built slightly later.
Many of the structures at the Newgrange are over 200 metres wide, and may have been used as festivals or marketplaces, Davis said.
“You could put … thousands of people in them, but we just don’t really know what they were doing here,” he said.
He adds this latest discovery will stay buried for the foreseeable future, out of respect for the farmer who owns the land.
Davis suspects there are other structures in the area that have yet to be found.
Mythical Ireland@mythicalireland
Thrilled to have discovered a previously unknown "new" henge monument near Newgrange last night. Archaeologists tell me that this is a very major find. It appears to be similar in design and size to the nearby Site P, a recorded henge. Exciting times! http://bit.ly/newhenge
Graancirkel onthult ‘nieuw Stonehenge’ in Ierland. Waar werd dit monument voor gebruikt?
Graancirkel onthult ‘nieuw Stonehenge’ in Ierland. Waar werd dit monument voor gebruikt?
In Ierland is in een weiland een duizenden jaren oude ‘henge’ ontdekt. Anthony Murphy maakte met zijn drone al vaker beelden van het gebied, maar vanwege de aanhoudende droogte was er dit keer iets opvallends op te zien.
De henge, net als Stonehenge een cirkelvormig monument, wordt omringd door grafheuvels en andere henges.
Murphy vermoedde dat er meer henges te vinden moesten zijn, maar kon tot dusver niets vinden. Hij hoopte dat de droogte meer geheimen zou blootleggen en had geluk.
Niet bekend
De henge bestond uit hout en hoewel het materiaal is weggerot, is de grond altijd iets anders van samenstelling gebleven, waardoor de aarde beter in staat is vocht vast te houden en dus langzamer uitdroogt.
Hierdoor was Murphy in staat om het monument vanuit de lucht vast te leggen.
Het is niet bekend waarvoor de henges precies werden gebruikt. Ze stammen uit de periode 11.000 tot 2500 voor Christus. Geschat wordt dat de Ierse henge 5000 jaar oud is.
Mythical Ireland@mythicalireland
Thrilled to have discovered a previously unknown "new" henge monument near Newgrange last night. Archaeologists tell me that this is a very major find. It appears to be similar in design and size to the nearby Site P, a recorded henge. Exciting times! http://bit.ly/newhenge
Last week, paranormal researcher and inventor of The Wishing Machine Joshua P. Warren made international headlines with his announcement that he had discovered a “time warp”outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. Warren says he detected a spot in the desert in which time itself was observed to slow down by 20 milliseconds. Warren reports the discovery was made using a device called a DT-Meter, or differential time meter, claimed by its inventor to be able to “detect and measure the effects of technology that is able to bend space-time.” According to inventor Ron Heath’s website, “examples of this technology would be a UFO that bends space-time, or uses gravity as part of it’s propulsion system.”
Joshua P. Warren
Naturally, I was skeptical about this discovery. A single anomalous measurement is hardly conclusive proof of anything, particularly one using an unknown device which appears to have been made in some dude’s basement and sold on eBay. However, as someone who writes about the paranormal and unexplained, I am open to all possibilities – given sufficient evidence.
To that end, I recently spoke with Joshua P. Warren about his discovery and the device he used. To start, I asked Warren if he has been able to reproduce the same result at the same site:
This result is truly an anomaly. I have tested the same site three times, but this only happened for a moment on one occasion. However, I have used the DT-Meter all over the desert, between Vegas and Area 51, and it has always been easily, and reliably, calibrated and operated just as intended. In fact, the inventor of the device, Silicon Valley engineer Ronald Heath, has had two of them running on property in California for months, logging results 24/7, and he has never seen one anomaly. When he saw my reading he said ‘WOW! Incredible!!!’
Warren says he is the first individual to one one of these devices after they only became available in the last month. One thing I immediately wondered about the device after reading this story is if it was calibrated against a control, to which Warren replied that while he did not perform such a control calibration himself, he’s sure the DT-Meter’s inventor calibrated it and that he followed the onboard calibration instructions with each use. Thus, while Warren admits that a malfunction is indeed a possibility, he considers it to be the least likely of all of the possible explanations for the time anomaly he detected given the impeccable performance of the device in every other test:
Since humans are imperfect, no scientific results can be truly conclusive. But there is no direct evidence that the meter performed any differently that day, at that spot, than it has on any other occasion. Given all the variables, since the DT-Meter has worked reliably in every other case, and we know from mainstream science that spacetime anomalies exist, I think this reading is most likely an accurate recording of one such anomaly, and the first of many we will discover, on a civilian level, in the coming years.
In another post on one of his sites, Warren cites that this anomaly could be due to a black hole approaching Earth, or perhaps some type of gravity or spacetime-bending technology nearby. Warren pointed out that there are several well-known areas nearby where exotic or extraterrestrial technologies are rumored to be tested or de-engineered by the likes of Robert Bigelow and others – not to mention the infamous Area 51. I asked Warren if he suspects the nearby installations at Groom Lake/Area 51 might have something to do with the time anomaly. While Warren says he is open to the possibility, he says the readings he took at locations much closer to the facility came back normal:
The Groom Lake facility is so huge that one can conceivably tie any weird phenomenon in Nevada to conspiracies regarding their work. However, I cannot say that this particular result was directly related to Groom Lake. I traveled hundreds of miles testing spots in the desert, about every 20-30 miles, between Las Vegas and past Rachel, Nevada (near Area 51). Surprisingly, the land around Groom Lake/Area 51 tested as completely normal. It was only this one site, about 20 miles north of Vegas, in the desert, where I got the anomalous reading.
What might be the cause of this anomalous reading Warren took with the DT-Meter? Ultimately, it’s difficult to say given just one reading. However, within the field of physics there is some precedent for such anomalies. For one, there’s the the phenomenon of time dilation as proven by the famous Hafele-Keating experiment and other studies, in which working clocks have been found to report different times after being travelling at different velocities. Clocks on the International Space Station, for example, run .014 seconds slower per year than clocks on Earth. However, since Warren discovered the time anomaly while stationary on the surface of Earth, these types of effects normally shouldn’t apply.
The gravitational effects of blackholes can actually distort spacetime.
Of course, as Warren notes, there are other documented cases of physical anomalies here on Earth, such as inconsistencies in the Earth’s gravitational field detected by space agencies. Given that gravitational effects can also lead to time dilation, could the site of this Las Vegas time warp be home to some type of unknown gravitational anomaly? Much more data from a variety of sources would need to be collected to even begin approaching such a conclusion.
For now, Warren says his plans for the DT-Meter and the time warp going forward are to collect more data and look for any other locations which display similar time distortions in order to determine if there might be a correlation or pattern among other sites.
Like many of us, I hope to someday discover or be shown be conclusive proof of higher mysteries, extraterrestrial intelligence, or the paranormal. As most of us seekers who grew up on The X-Files, I truly want to believe. However, I also feel that unsubstantiated claims or premature conclusions can sometimes do harm to the paranormal research community and reinforce common stigmas levied at the study of anomalous phenomena. Where does this discovery stand? We’ve got a well-known paranormal researcher and inventor reporting a single anomalous reading taken with a homemade device. Is this conclusive proof of a time warp?
In 1997 a controversial U.S. Air Force document was published. It’s title: The Roswell Report: Case Closed. In a foreword to the report, the USAF stated: “The ‘Roswell Incident’ has assumed a central place in American folklore since the events of the 1940s in a remote area of New Mexico. Because the Air Force was a major player in those events, we have played a key role in executing the General Accounting Office’s tasking to uncover all records regarding that incident. Our objective throughout this inquiry has been simple and consistent: to find all the facts and bring them to light. If documents were classified, declassify them; where they were dispersed, bring them into a single source for public review.”
The USAF continued: “In July 1994, we completed the first step in that effort and later published The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert. This volume represents the necessary follow-on to that first publication and contains additional material and analysis. I think that with this publication we have reached our goal of a complete and open explanation of the events that occurred in the Southwest many years ago.
“Beyond that achievement, this inquiry has shed fascinating light into the Air Force of that era and revitalized our appreciation for the dedication and accomplishments of the men and women of that time. As we celebrate the Air Force’s 50th Anniversary, it is appropriate to once again reflect on the sacrifices made by so many to make ours the finest air and space force in history.”
On its decision to finally address the matter of the bodies allegedly found on the Foster Ranch, the Air Force began as follows: “The July 1994 Air Force report concluded that the predecessor to the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army Air Forces, did indeed recover material near Roswell in July 1947. This 1,000-page report methodically explains that what was recovered by the Army Air Forces was not the remnants of an extraterrestrial spacecraft and its alien crew, but debris from an Army Air Forces balloon-borne research project code named Mogul.
“Although Mogul components clearly accounted for the claims of ‘flying saucer’ debris recovered in 1947, lingering questions remained concerning anecdotal accounts that included descriptions of ‘alien’ bodies. The issue of ‘bodies’ was not discussed extensively in the 1994 report because there were not any bodies connected with events that occurred in 1947. The extensive Secretary of the Air Force-directed search of Army Air Forces and U.S. Air Force records from 1947 did not yield information that even suggested the 1947 ‘Roswell’ events were anything other than the retrieval of the Mogul equipment.”
The Air Force then got to the point: “Subsequent to the 1994 report, Air Force researchers discovered information that provided a rational explanation for the alleged observations of alien bodies associated with the ‘Roswell Incident.’ Pursuant to the discovery, research efforts compared documented Air Force activities to the incredible claims of ‘flying saucers,’ ‘aliens’ and seemingly unusual Air Force involvement. This in-depth examination revealed that these accounts, in most instances, were of actual Air Force activities but were seriously flawed in several major areas, most notably: the Air Force operations that inspired reports of ‘bodies’ (in addition to being earthly in origin) did not occur in 1947. It appears that UFO proponents have failed to establish the accurate dates for these ‘alien’ observations (in some instances by more than a decade) and then erroneously linked them to the actual Project Mogul debris recovery.”
The Air Force explained: “Air Force activities which occurred over a period of many years have been consolidated and are now represented to have occurred in two or three days in July 1947. ‘Aliens’ observed in the New Mexico desert were probably anthropomorphic test dummies that were carried aloft by U.S. Air Force high altitude balloons for scientific research. The ‘unusual’ military activities in the New Mexico desert were high altitude research balloon launch and recovery operations. The reports of military units that always seemed to arrive shortly after the crash of a flying saucer to retrieve the saucer and ‘crew’ were actually accurate descriptions of Air Force personnel engaged in anthropomorphic dummy recovery operations.”
It’s worth noting that in the immediate years before the Air Force’s “bodies report” was published, rumors were already quietly floating around to the effect that a report on the bodies angle would indeed soon be surfacing. On this very matter, and in a recent article for MU titled “The Many and Varied Balloons of Roswell,” I wrote the following (QUOTE):
“In 1997, Jim Wilson – writing for Popular Mechanics – said that the magazine’s staff had been told of a forthcoming government report that would explain the matter of the bodies said to have been found on the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico in July 1947 – and that it would all revolve around a secret program involving Japan. Such a report did not ultimately surface. What did surface was the Air Force’s controversial report suggesting the bodies were actually crash-test dummies. But, apparently, Popular Mechanics were onto something. Wilson wrote that magazine staff suspected ‘…the documents scheduled for future release will tell of a Japanese counterpart to Operation Paperclip. One of its purposes was to determine if the Japanese had constructed a suicide-piloted version of the Fugo [balloon] incendiary bomb.'”
I added in my article: “Wilson continued it was the opinion of Popular Mechanics that ‘…the craft that crashed at Roswell will eventually be identified as either a U.S. attempt to re-engineer a second-generation Fugo, or a hybrid craft which uses both Fugo [balloon] lifting technology and Horten-inspired lifting-body. In either case, Japanese engineers and pilots brought to the U.S. after the war to work on the project could have been the dead ‘alien’ bodies recovered at the crash site.’ This is verysimilar to many of the stories provided to me of a Japanese/balloon connection to Roswell.” (END OF QUOTE).
Of course, the “bodies” report that Popular Mechanicssuspected might surface never did appear. The Air Force stuck by its crash-test dummy theory and had no time for secret programs involving Japanese personnel. Jim Wilson and the staff of Popular Mechanics, however, were not the only ones to have heard rumors of a “bodies report” surfacing – and to have heard of such rumors years before the publication date of the Air Force’s report on such matters.
All of this brings us to the little-known matter of a man named Charles Moore. As is noted at Wikipedia: “Moore was recruited as a project engineer for Project Mogul in 1947 by New York University geophysicist Athelstan Spilhaus, who headed the Balloon Group within the project. Project Mogul, led by Dr. James Peoples and his assistant Albert P. Crary,made use of Moore’s work in materials science allowing the construction of balloons which could better withstand cold temperatures and safely rise to significantly greater altitudes. A balloon that Moore helped launch in New Mexico on June 4, 1947, was later identified as the source of the debris found on the Foster ranch which led to UFO conspiracy theories and claims surrounding the Roswell incident.”
Indeed, Moore championed the idea that the debris found on the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico in July 1947 was from a Mogul balloon array. There is, however, a story concerning Moore, the Air Force’s report, and the “bodies” angle, which many are not aware of. In 1997, Tim Shawcross’ book, The Roswell File, was published. In his book, Shawcross notes that a few years before the Air Force’s crash-test dummy report was published, he chatted with Moore about the matter of the Roswell bodies. Moore gave Shawcross a somewhat intriguing and carefully-worded response: “True – people reported…but that I think is another story and something there may be more on later but it had nothing to do with what we were flying.”
Moore also told Shawcross that a new report – one which would finally explain the matter of the bodies – was likely to surface in either 1995 or 1996. How did Moore know this? From contacts in the Pentagon, that’s how. There is, however, a very interesting aspect to this saga of Moore and his knowledge of a “bodies” report. Moore reacted in a very strange fashion to Shawcross’ questions. Indeed, Moore, as Shawcross noted, “became increasingly agitated…” and “ended the conversation rather abruptly.” Shawcross noted that the next time he spoke to Moore on this same matter, he (Moore) “was even more curt and seemed distinctly worried that he had mentioned as much as he had.”
Why Moore got so worried and deeply concerned about discussing a looming Pentagon report that would explain the Roswell bodies as being nothing stranger than dummies, is hard to fathom. If the report Moore had heard of was focused on the likes of the highly controversial things that Popular Mechanics anticipated (namely, a secret program involving Japanese personnel) I could easily understand why Moore might have been concerned about what he had revealed to Shawcross. But, just a few snippets of material on nothing stranger than a few dummies? Where is the harm in revealing that?
This all makes me wonder if – when Moore spoke with Shawcross – he, Moore, had come across controversial data that closely mirrored Popular Mechanics‘ data on the bodies. If that was the case, I can well understand why Moore regretted sharing a few words on the matter with Shawcross. Perhaps, in light of all this, it’s time for us to take a closer look at what Charles Moore may really have known about the Roswell bodies…
Beginning with the 1895 publication of the H. G. Wells novella The Time Machine, popular culture has been fascinated with the idea of inventing machines capable of sending humans through time. Despite our best efforts and a whole lot of dubious claims, though, true time travel seems as if it will remain the stuff of science fiction.
Who knows, though? Science and technology occasionally undergo paradigm shifts which make the impossible a reality, after all. The concept of devices which enable people to instantaneously see and hear other people on the opposite side of the world would have seemed like outlandish fantasy just a century ago, yet here you are watching live footage of cave rescues in Thailand while on the toilet and sending pictures of your naughty bits to that Czech girl you met on the train while backpacking through eastern Europe, all with a machine that fits in your pocket.
Will advances in technology someday allow us to travel back in time and make sure that mustard gas finishes off Hitler during World War I this time or, more importantly, fix all those embarrassing faux pas we made in middle school? One University of Connecticut physicist might thinks he may be able to some day make that all possible. Professor Ron Mallett recently met with interviewers the BBC’s Horizon science series to discuss a time machine design he believes might soon make time travel a reality.
I think of myself as being an ordinary person with a passion, and my passion is the possibility of time travel. If I could build a time machine, then I could go back into the past and see my father again and maybe save his life and change everything.
That’s how Mallett describes his quest to someday achieve time travel and save his father from an untimely death at age 33. Mallett has spent his life dreaming of saving his father ever since reading The Time Machine when he was just eleven years old. After researching the concept of time travel for decades, Mallett now believes he has a design that could theoretically work – with one hitch: the device would need an unbelievable, as yet impossible amount of energy to power. And a working shrink ray. But a man can dream, can’t he?
Mallett’s design centers around a vortex of incredibly intense lasers which generate a rapidly swirling beam of light. If that light could be spun fast enough, Mallett believes spacetime itself could become twisted “like stirring a cup of coffee:”
If space is being twisted strongly enough, this linear timeline is going to be twisted into a loop. If time all of a sudden is twisted into a loop that allows us the possibility of travelling into the past.
Several recent discoveries in quantum physics have suggested that affecting matter in the present can affect matter in the past, but quantum entanglement is one thing, and travelling back in time to attend Stephen Hawking’s funeral is quite another. Will a physics professor’s dream of swirling lasers one day enable use to right the wrongs of the past, or is this merely a case of one man’s obsession to bring his father back to life?
Mars is approaching Earth for a 15-year close encounter on July 27, 2018. The red planet now outshines every object in the sky except the sun, Moon, and Venus but is almost three times brighter than Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, and 30% brighter than the giant planet Jupiter.
Credit image: Peter Rosén.
Mars is not only outshines every object in the sky, it is doing things only very luminous objects can do--like produce a green flash, see below GIF animation, reports spaceweather.
GIF animation credit: Peter Rosén
On July 12, 2018 Peter Rosén of Stockholm, Sweden captured Mars in the early morning sky at a moment the turbulence was extreme, sometimes splitting the planet's disc in two or three slices and displaying a green and blue flash resembling those usually seen on the sun.
Long UFO Over Farm Community Caught On Video, La Porte, Indiana ( July 13, 2018 ), UFO Sighting News.
Long UFO Over Farm Community Caught On Video, La Porte, Indiana ( July 13, 2018 ), UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: July 13, 2018 Location of sighting: La Porte, Indiana, USA Source: MUFON #93311 Eyewitness states:
I was driving my work truck heading west towards LaPorte on West 400 South as I came out of the trees I saw a reflective object about 200 feet up or so moving very slowly. I approached the intersection of West 400 South and long Lane I observed and began recording at that time. I wasn't sure what I was seeing but it was very abnormal how slow it was moving was fairly large as you can see in the video and also very shiny and reflective and made no noise it looked like a shiny egg or pebble. it moved very close to the high tension power lines . I watched as the object moved along the power lines from west to east then over the farm. I watched until it was out of my view. As I was driving away on West 400 South I could see it hovering above the farm in my side view mirror on my work truck. The whole incident lasted about 4 minutes I was nervous because I've never seen an aerial vehicle like that.
Glowing UFO Over Melbourne, Australia On July 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Glowing UFO Over Melbourne, Australia On July 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: July 2018 Location of sighting: Melbourne, Australia This UFO was caught by Youtube user Shaun Manne who's watchful eye caught this glowing orb in the distance. In the video we see it moving and the light appear and disappear sporadically, not in any pattern. Awesome catch down under. Scott C. Waring-Taiwan Eyewitness states:
I went outside and looked straight up and saw this moving light. I always wait to see if it flashes like a plane but this one didn't. If it wasn't moving I would have said it was Venus, large and bright. No noise either. I'm located in Langwarrin, Melbourne. A bright white ball floated slowly above my house. It made no noise what so ever, and didn't flash like a plane would. It was fairly low but could have easily been missed.
Glowing UFO Over Melbourne, Australia On July 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Glowing UFO Over Melbourne, Australia On July 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: July 2018 Location of sighting: Melbourne, Australia This UFO was caught by Youtube user Shaun Manne who's watchful eye caught this glowing orb in the distance. In the video we see it moving and the light appear and disappear sporadically, not in any pattern. Awesome catch down under. Scott C. Waring-Taiwan Eyewitness states:
I went outside and looked straight up and saw this moving light. I always wait to see if it flashes like a plane but this one didn't. If it wasn't moving I would have said it was Venus, large and bright. No noise either. I'm located in Langwarrin, Melbourne. A bright white ball floated slowly above my house. It made no noise what so ever, and didn't flash like a plane would. It was fairly low but could have easily been missed.
'UFOmania', a conspiracy theory YouTube channel has uploaded an eerie video which has now emerged as the hottest debating point among conspiracy theorists and alien enthusiasts. The strange clip shows a spherical UFO moving across deep space, and interestingly, the flying object has imprinted drawings on its body. The conspiracy theory channel claims that they have spotted this bizarre object while researching the website of NASA's stereo mission.
"While researching the site of STEREO mission, I found this fantastic UFOthat as you can see has such a planetarium and seems to have a force field around it," wrote UFOmania on the video's description.
The uploader of the video reveals that the UFO spotted in the Stereo mission live feed is so gigantic, that it is of the size of a planet. As the video went viral, conspiracy theorists have started claiming that the bizarre object in the video might be an alien mega-ship from deep space.
The video which was uploaded a day ago has already racked up more than 4,100 views, and viewers were quick to speculate what the eerie object could be.
A YouTube user named Subrata Kundu commented that the gigantic object spotted could be a space station operated by aliens very similar to that of humans' International Space Station (ISS).
A section of other users claimed that Donald Trump has ordered to make a space force after understanding the threats posed by this alien mega-ship.
"Trump has called for an immediate formation of a space force, armies worldwide are prepared and at the ready for something, and the high strangeness occurring in our atmosphere...you have something big happening. The world as we know it may be about to change. Prepare yourselves," commented Snoot Dingo, a YouTube user.
"That thing has been out there for at least a year, moving around. NASA won't comment on it! No one says what it is. It can look pretty weird sometimes: like it is shooting a missile. Strange!," commented Corey Scott, another YouTuber.
Some other YouTube users argued that the object in the video might be the alleged killer planet Nibiru which is in its collision course towards earth.
The surface facility for the IceCube experiment, which is located under nearly 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) of ice in Antarctica. IceCube suggests ghostly neutrinos don't exist, but a new experiment says they do.
Credit: Courtesy of IceCube Neutrino Observatory
In the icy wasteland of Antarctica sits a massive particle detector, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. But searching the surface for the instrument will prove difficult, because the bulk of the observatory is trapped beneath the ice. The international observatory has been hunting for neutrinos — massless, chargeless particles that almost never interact with matter. Now, its observations may solve one of the biggest mysteries in astronomy, answering the questions behind the origin of neutrinos and cosmic rays.
The biggest of them all
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory covers one cubic kilometer near the South Pole. The instrument covers a square kilometer of the surface and extends down to 4,920 feet (1,500 meters) deep. It is the first gigaton neutrino detector ever built.
While photographs of IceCube often show a building sitting on the snowy surface, the real work is done below. The multipurpose experiment includes a surface array, IceTop, an array of 81 stations that sit above the strings. IceTop serves as a calibration detector for IceCube, as well as detecting air showers from primary cosmic rays, and their flux and composition.
The dense inner subdetector, DeepCore, is the powerhouse of the IceCube experiment. Each of the IceTop stations are made up of strings attached to digital optical modules (DOMs) that are deployed on a hexagonal grid spaced 410 feet (125 meters) apart. Each string holds 60 basketball-sized DOMs. Here, deep within the ice, IceCube is able to hunt for neutrinos that come from the sun, from within the Milky Way, and from outside the galaxy. These ghostly particles are connected to cosmic rays, the highest energy particles ever observed.
Cosmic rays were first discovered in 1912. The powerful bursts of radiation collide with Earth constantly, streaming in from all parts of the galaxy. Scientists calculated that the charged particles must form in some of the most violent and least understood objects and events in the universe. The explosive stellar death of a star, a supernova, provides one method of creating cosmic rays; the active black holes at the center of galaxies another.
Because cosmic rays are made up of charged particles, however, they interact with the magnetic fields of stars and other objects they pass by. The fields warp and shift the path of the cosmic rays, making it impossible for scientists to trace them back to their source.
That's where neutrinos come into play. Like cosmic rays, the low-mass particles are thought to form through violence. But because neutrinos have no charge, they pass by magnetic fields without changing their path, traveling in a straight line from their source.
"For this reason, the search for the sources of cosmic rays has also become the search for very high energy neutrinos," according to IceCube's website.
However, the same characteristics that make neutrinos such good messengers also mean they are difficult to detect. Every second, approximately 100 billion neutrinos pass through one square inch of your body. Most of them come from the sun, and are not energetic enough to be identified by IceCube, but some are likely to have been produced outside of the Milky Way.
Spotting neutrinos requires the use of very clear material such as water or ice. When a single neutrino crashes into a proton or neutron inside an atom, the resulting nuclear reaction produces secondary particles that give off a blue light known as Cherenkov radiation.
"The neutrinos that we detect are like fingerprints that help us understand the objects and phenomena where the neutrinos are produced," according to the IceCube team.
Harsh conditions
The South Pole may not be outer space, but it brings its own challenges. Engineers began construction on IceCube in 2004, a seven-year project that was completed on schedule in 2010. Construction could only take place for a few months each year, over the Southern Hemisphere's summer, which occurs from November to February.
Boring 86 holes required a special type of drill — two of them, actually. The first advanced through the firn, a layer of compacted snow, down to about 164 feet (50 meters). Then a high-pressure hot water drill melted through the ice at speeds of about 2 meters (6.5 feet) per minute, down to the depth of 2,450 meters (8,038 feet, or 1.5 miles).
"Together, the two drills were able to consistently produce almost perfect vertical holes ready for deployment of instrumentation at a rate of one hole every two days," according to IceCube.
The strings then had to be quickly deployed into the melted water before the ice refroze. Freezing took a few weeks to stabilize, after which the instruments remained untouchable, permanently frozen in the ice and unable to be repaired. The failure rate of the instruments has been extremely slow, with fewer than 100 of the 5,500 sensors currently nonoperational.
IceCube began making observations from the start, even while other strings were being deployed.
When the project first began, researchers were unclear about how far light would travel through the ice, according to Halzen. With that information well established, the collaboration is working towards IceCube-Gen2. The upgraded observatory would add approximately 80 more detector strings, while the understanding of the properties of ice will allow researchers to place the sensors more widely apart than their original conservative estimates. IceCube-Gen2 should double the size of the observatory for roughly the same cost.
An IceCube sensor, attached to a "string," descends into a bore hole in the Antarctic ice.
Credit: NSF/B. Gudbjartsson
Incredible science
IceCube began hunting for neutrinos before it was completed, producing several intriguing scientific results along the way.
Between May 2010 and May 2012, IceCube observed 28 very high-energy particles. Halzen attributed the detector's ability to observe these extreme events to the completion of the detector.
"This is the first indication of very high-energy neutrinos coming from outside our solar system, with energies more than one million times those observed in 1987 in connection with a supernova seen in the Large Magellanic Cloud," says Halzen said in a statement. "It is gratifying to finally see what we have been looking for. This is the dawn of a new age of astronomy."
In April 2012, a pair of high energy neutrinos were detected and nicknamed Bert and Ernie, after the characters from the children's television show "Sesame Street." With energies above 1 petaelectronvolt (PeV), the pair were the first definitively detected neutrinos from outside the solar system since the 1987 supernova.
"It is a major breakthrough," said Uli Katz, a particle physicist at University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, in Germany, who was not involved with the research. "I think it is one of the absolute major discoveries in astro-particle physics," Katz told Space.com.
Another major payoff came on December 4, 2012, when the observatory detected an event that the scientists called Big Bird, also from "Sesame Street." Big Bird was a neutrino with an energy exceeding 2 quadrillion electron volts, more than a million million times greater than the energy of a dental X-ray, packed into a single particle with less than a millionth of a mass of an electron. At the time, it was the highest-energy neutrino ever detected; as of 2018, it still ranks second.
With the help of NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space telescope, scientists tied Big Bird to the highly energetic outburst of a blazar known as PKS B1424-418. Blazars are powered by supermassive black holes at the center of a galaxy. As the black hole gobbles down material, some of the material is deflected into jets carrying so much energy they outshine the stars in the galaxy. The jets accelerate matter, creating neutrinos and the fragments of atoms that create some cosmic rays.
Starting in the summer of 2012, the blazar shone between 15 and 30 times brighter in gamma rays than its average before the eruption. A long-term observation program named TANAMI, which routinely monitored nearly 100 active galaxies in the southern sky, revealed that the core of the galaxy's jet had brightened four times between 2011 and 2013.
"No other of our galaxies observed by TANAMI over the life of the program has exhibited such a dramatic change," Eduardo Ros, from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Germany, said in a 2016 statement. The team calculated that the two events were linked.
"Taking into account all of the observations, the blazar seems to have had means, motive and opportunity to fire off the Big Bird neutrino, which makes it our prime suspect," said Matthias Kadler, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Würzburg in Germany."
In July 2018, IceCube announced that, for the first time, it had tracked neutrinos back to their source blazar. In September 2017, thanks to a newly installed alert system that broadcast to scientists around the world within minutes of detecting a strong neutrino candidate, researchers were able to quickly turn their telescopes in the direction that the new signal originated. Fermi alerted researchers to the presence of an active blazar, known as TXS-0506+056, in the same part of the sky. New observations confirmed that the blazar was flaring, emitting brighter-than-usual bursts of energy.
For the most part, TXS is a typical blazar; it's one of the 100 brightest blazars detected by Fermi. However, while the 99 others are also bright, they haven't hurled neutrinos toward IceCube. In recent months, TXS has been flaring, brightening and dimming as much as a hundred times stronger than in previous years.
"Tracking that high-energy neutrino detected by IceCube back to TXS 0506+056 makes this the first time we've been able to identify a specific object as the probable source of such a high-energy neutrino," Gregory Sivakoff, of the University of Alberta in Canada, said in a statement.
IceCube isn't finished yet. The new alert system will keep astronomers on their toes in future years. The observatory has a planned lifetime of 20 years, so there's at least another decade of incredible discoveries coming from the South Pole observatory.
New findings suggest that some exoplanets will have stable axial tilts and climates, much as Earth does. This knowledge will help astronomers search for worlds similar to ours – the long-sought Earth 2.0.
Artist’s concept of Kepler-186f, the 1st of 2 studied planets now thought to have seasons and a stable climate.
We sometimes hear the term Earth-like in describing exoplanets that might be similar to our own world. The terms Earth-like or Earth analog conjure up visions of alien oceans and continents, teeming with life. But how similar to Earth might such distant worlds really be? We still don’t know the answer to that question yet, but a new research study – announced by the Georgia Institute of Technology on June 28, 2018 – shows that there might indeed be some alien worlds that are quite similar to Earth in terms of their seasons and stable climates.
The study focuses on two known exoplanets, one about the same size as Earth and the other a super-Earth(larger than Earth but smaller than the gas giants Uranus or Neptune). The researchers found evidence that both planets likely have seasons and stable climates, just as Earth does. Kepler-186f is less than 10 percent larger then Earth, 500 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus the Swan. It is one of five known planets in that planetary system and orbits within the habitable zone, even though its host star is a red dwarf. Kepler-62f is about 40 percent larger than Earth, 1,200 light-years away in the constellation Lyra the Harp.
The research team, led by Georgia Tech astronomer Gongjie Li and graduate student Yutong Shan from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, used computer simulations to determine the axial tilt of each planet. The results indicated that the axial tilts of both planets are stable, like Earth’s, meaning that the planets would experience regular seasons and stable climates. That is good news in terms of how habitable the planets may be, although there are other factors to account for also of course, such as water, composition, type of atmosphere, etc.
Kepler-186f was the 1st Earth-sized exoplanet to be discovered in the habitable zone of another star.
Image via NASA.
Artist’s concept of Kepler-62f, the 2nd planet found to have seasons and a stable climate.
Image via NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle.
Planets with highly variable axial tilts, like Mars, are less likely to have such stable environments. Mars’ axial tilt has been very unstable, swinging from zero to 60 degrees over billions of years, and is thought to be a key reason why Mars lost most of its water and turned into the cold, dry desert world we see today.
Earth’s axial tilt has been much more stable, varying from 22.1 to 24.5 degrees every 10,000 years or so. According to Li:
Mars is in the habitable zone in our solar system, but its axial tilt has been very unstable – varying from zero to 60 degrees. That instability probably contributed to the decay of the Martian atmosphere and the evaporation of surface water.
Mars is a good example, then, of what can happen when a planet does not have a stable axial tilt. A stable climate has been important for the continued evolution of life on Earth. The axial variations of Earth have been largely kept in check by the Earth’s large moon, which Mars doesn’t have. The moon and Earth strongly interact gravitationally with each other. If Earth had no moon, its spin axis would precess at the same rate as the orbital oscillation, which could cause large variations in the axial tilt. As Li explained:
It appears that both exoplanets are very different from Mars and the Earth because they have a weaker connection with their sibling planets. We don’t know whether they possess moons, but our calculations show that even without satellites, the spin axes of Kepler-186f and 62f would have remained constant over tens of millions of years.
View of Mars from the Mars Orbiter Mission (India). Mars’ wild axial changes prevented it from having a long-term stable climate.
As it stands now, both Kepler-186f and Kepler-62f are candidates for having habitable conditions on their surfaces, but there is still more we need to learn about them. The mass, composition and density of Kepler-186f are still unknown, crucial factors in helping to assess habitability. As Li noted:
Our study is among the first to investigate climate stability of exoplanets and adds to the growing understanding of these potentially habitable nearby worlds.
Planets with stable climates would be more likely to be able to support life, at least as we know it on Earth. What about planets with ever-changing climates? Shan is optimistic about even those worlds:
I don’t think we understand enough about the origin of life to rule out the possibility of their presence on planets with irregular seasons. Even on Earth, life is remarkably diverse and has shown incredible resilience in extraordinarily hostile environments. But a climatically stable planet might be a more comfortable place to start.
Earth’s axial tilt has remained quite stable, thanks largely to the presence of our large moon. Our stable, habitable climate has enabled life to thrive.
A growing number of Earth-sized and super-Earth exoplanets have been discovered, including in the habitable zones of their stars, although it is too early to call any of them Earth-like yet specifically. This new research shows how some should have axial tilts and climates ideal for life to exist.
Bottom line: Finding other Earth-like planets is the holy grail of exoplanet research. The new findings showing stable axial tilts and likely stable climates on Kepler-186f and Kepler-62f are a big step in that direction. There is still much more work to be done, but scientists are now getting closer to discovering a world that is similar to ours – not only habitable, but perhaps, even teeming with life.
For centuries mankind believed that life only existed here on Earth, but today many scientists agree that we are not alone.
Practically every human civilization that has ever existed tells us we are not alone in the cosmos.
A long, long time ago, extraterrestrials came here, and through a targeted mutation of our genes, we became human.
We have, in theory, a worldwide civilization that has extraterrestrials interacting with it, and human beings, as we are today, who are possibly the genetic breeding of these aliens.
If we’re being visited, they’ve probably always been here.
Millions of people around the world believe we have been visited in the past by extraterrestrial beings.
A strange antenna can be seen in this image of Earth’s Moon.
But what if it were true? Did ancient aliens really help to shape our history? And if so, why did they come here? And just what was their mission? On July 20, 1969, the Apollo11 mission reached its destination, and two men– Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin– actually walked on the moon.
They’ve got the flag up now, and you can see the Stars and Stripes on the lunar surface.
Beautiful, just beautiful.
It was the first time in history that beings left their home and traveled through space to an alien planet.
Or was it? Were we really the first creatures in the universe capable of traveling to another world? Given the vastness of the universe and the billions of years that it took to create our galaxy, is it so hard to imagine that such a thing might have happened before, perhaps thousands of times and over the course of millions of years?
The ancient alien astronaut theory presupposes that thousands and thousands of years ago– even before recorded history– Earth was visited by astronauts from another world.
But if alien beings did, in fact, travel to Earth, why? Did they come to explore, to plunder, to study, to hunt, or to breed? When Armstrong and Aldrin explored their incredible surroundings, they found the moon a barren landscape.
It seemed to offer little more than a lifeless oasis of rocks and dust.
But in 1986, further testing determined that the lunar landscape actually contains a high amount of helium-3, an extremely powerful nonpolluting, nonradioactive fuel source.
Experts estimate that a single space shuttle filled with this material could satisfy all the energy needs in the United States for an entire year.
Think of it.
Armadas of spaceships mining the moon and other planets for natural resources.
Could this help explain why Earth might have served as a destination for travelers from other worlds? We’d go out there with robot mining crews and eventually human mining crews, mine those planets, extract the ore.
Ships would come; they’d take the ore and bring them back.
Well, if we would do it, why wouldn’t extraterrestrials? But if alien excavators did come to Earth– perhaps thousands of years ago– wouldn’t there be evidence?
Here, in what is now known as Iraq, lies what is commonly regarded by historians and archaeologists as the “cradle of civilization.”
Between 3500 and 1900 BC, the fertile area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers was the home of the Sumerian people.
The Sumerians were one of the first cultures that built actual cities with streets and a street grid, almost like New York City, where you have, you know, a square street grid.
They invented cobblestones.
They had a sewage system.
They were taught in agriculture.
The Sumerians also invented the first known writing system by using the cuneiform script on clay tablets.
In the 19th century, archaeologists exploring the ancient ruins of Nineveh discovered When they were later translated, the texts described many stories similar to those found in the Judeo-Christian Bible.
Virtually every story that’s in Genesis– the flood story, the Adam and Eve story– they all have precedence with the ancient Sumerians.
In 1976 author Zecharia Sitchin published his own translations of the Sumerian texts in a series of books called The Earth Chronicles.
According to Sitchin, the clay tablets describe an alien race known as the Anunnaki who came to Earth to mine gold.
Zecharia Sitchin has essentially suggested that the reason why we were visited in the remote past is because the ancient astronauts’ home planet needed gold for their atmosphere and that their gold content in the atmosphere was depleted, so they came to Earth in order to mine gold and bring it back to their home planet.
But why gold? What are the unique properties of this precious metal that might make it important and worth traveling through the galaxy for? I think, for extraterrestrials, gold would be an important resource just as it is for us.
If it’s at all like our society, one of the major things it’s going to be built on is electricity, and gold really is one of the top conductors, and its malleability and its ability to make it into wires, use it in really small forms as nanoparticles are going to make it an incredible technological resource for any sort of life- forms that reach that level of dealing with electricity and technology as we do.
One of the exciting directions is possibly as an energy source through properties called thermoelectric effects, where it can take the heat and turn it directly into electricity.
This would be obviously a very nice clean energy source.
With its capacity to create energy and conduct heat, some scientists believe gold may also be an invaluable asset in the construction of spaceships.
Gold actually reflects infrared light.
Infrared is basically light that’s not quite red, and so you don’t see it, but we interact with it as heat.
The radiation will interact with your molecules and make them vibrate faster and you’ll feel that as heat, so it makes a great heat shield, partly because it’s so malleable.
You can make it very thin; it’s easy to work with, and it has great properties for reflecting and heat protection.
The only metal that really lasts is gold. Gold is indestructible. All gold from ancient times still exists today.
If you look at Zecharia Sitchin’s theories– that E.T’s came down from another planet in our solar system, which is on a 3,600-year elliptical orbit, that they were running out of minerals, and gold specifically, that they somehow needed to line their atmosphere with.
These extraterrestrials–they just first measure our planet. And they have the instrument to find out: where on this planet do we find raw material?
Through their incredible equipment, they find a planet that has this. It’s got gold.
So they decide “We’re going to go there and we’re going to mine.” So they send some expeditions to planet Earth.
All of a sudden they get here and the factions begin to say, “Well, there’s a lot of gold here, but we’re not digging it out. What are we going to do? We need workers.”
The story that came down to the Sumerians is that the Anunnakiwere mining gold on the earth, and the run-of-the-mill workers complained, said: “This is really hard work and we’re tired. We don’t want to do this anymore.”
And so they had a big council and they decided to create a primitive worker called an Adamu.
So they look at what is on this planet, and that is Homo erectus, and they say, “Well, they’re not very intelligent and they’re not going to listen to us, so we’re going to genetically alter them.”
The Anunnaki created humans as a slave species. According to Zecharia Sitchin, the Adamu were the first modern humans.
They were created by the Anunnaki 450,000 years ago when they genetically mixed their DNA with that of prehistoric man.
They took one cell of one of these ancestors of us.
They believed that the gods came down and created them, and they were their slave species.
They knew that, and they didn’t have any philosophical beliefs about the purpose of man or anything.
If you believe Sitchin’s theory that mankind was created by E.T’s for slave labor, all of a sudden it makes sense.
And then when you look at the biblical terms of what may have happened– Adam and Eve? Sure, they may have been two individuals back a long time ago, the beginning of time.
But perhaps Adam and Eve were the first of the genetically created human beings.
Closer comparisons between the Hebrew Bible and the Sumerian texts reveal many similarities, not only in their stories but also in their language.
“Adam” is Hebrew for “man.”
“Adamu” is what the Sumerians refer to as “first man,” the Anunnaki slaves.
But do the Sumerian tablets actually describe an alien race, a race that conducted mining operations on a global scale?
Thousands of miles away, on the African continent, ruins of ancient gold mines have recently been discovered.
The largest concentration can be found in South Africa, where some excavations, according to scientists, dating back some 150,000 years.
They’re in areas that have an abundance of gold right now, so it’s very possible that they could have mined it.
Now, the big question is, how do we know they weren’t human beings that simply did that? Why the E.T. theory?
In many languages in Africa, the native word for “star” means “bringer of knowledge or enlightenment.”
Some African cultures believe that extraterrestrial beings have been visiting the Earth for tens of thousands of years.
Zulu legends speak of a time when “visitors from the stars” came to excavate gold and other natural resources.
These mines were worked by “artificially produced flesh- and blood slaves created by the First People.”
Some ancient mines in Southern Africa are thought to be a hundred thousand years old or older.
If humans weren’t doing that mining a hundred thousand years ago, and making metals, then we would have to assume it would be extraterrestrials doing it.
Alien slave mines? Genetically engineered humans? To believers of ancient astronaut theory, these notions are not far-fetched fantasies or fairy tales, but facts, and they point to additional evidence of alien mining a half world away on the American continent.
Peru has long been known as “the land of gold.”
In ancient times, Incan rulers adorned themselves with it.
And when the Spanish explorers arrived in the 16th century, they sent shiploads of their plunder back home to Spain.
Gold was largely a valuable commodity because of being rare and easy to make jewelry, coinage.
And if you’re looking at, like, the ancient Incas, those people are using gold as a status symbol.
Many cultures thought it came directly from the gods.
People thought gold was so pure, so wonderful, it must heal, and they would actually occasionally ingest pure gold.
Certainly, we’re discovering more and more, as we get better at archeology and as we can look into these things, applications that people have used.
For instance, there is some evidence that ancient people had very primitive batteries, and this would be a place in which gold would be very useful because of its electrical properties and its conductivity.
It should not be surprising, then, to find archaeological evidence of ancient gold mines.
But some sites have recently been discovered that date back some 50,000 years.
All throughout areas in Peru, you see remnants of what could have been ancient mining operations.
It’s there.
They go down, in some cases, thousands of feet deep.
Gold turns out to be surprisingly easy to mine for, even though it’s relatively rare.
There’s a lot of common techniques ancient people used, and some of them were used, you know, well into recent times.
A lot of it, you know, involves using water, often, to change the properties of the rock around it.
A lot of heating and freezing and the gold will come loose.
In addition to gold, other ancient sites in Peru provide evidence that they were once mined for quartz hematite and red ochre.
They’re used for different things.
Quartz is incredibly common.
It’s basically silicone dioxide.
It’s kind of like glass.
It’s a great mineral; it’s hard, but it can be formed into pretty sculptures; you could make quartz statues; you could probably even use it for money before you discovered minerals and gold.
Hematite and ochre are much more valuable because of their iron oxide.
And particularly ochre is important as a pigment, so as soon as you’re gonna start having painting, cave drawings even, or any sort of artwork, you need to make colors.
And making color can be a challenge, and ochre is a great source of that.
While the origins of these ancient geoglyphs remain a mystery, the area in which the lines are located suggests that a major excavation took place there, perhaps hundreds of centuries ago.
And I’m not talking, you know, a little wheelbarrow and-and a pick.
I’m talking sophisticated machinery because we today would also need sophisticated machinery in order to achieve such feats.
Could the vast flat plain located in the Nazca Desert be evidence of a gigantic mining operation, one that took place hundreds of thousands of years ago? Whoever comes here in a spaceship, Nazca would be like a beacon, as in: “Come here.”
Because the moment you come to Nazca, you’re sort of confronted with a Cliff Notes to planet Earth, where you have all sorts of raw materials that exist in that one particular spot in very, very abundant quantities.
I think the Nazca lines aren’t evidence of the search for gold, but they’re evidence of some communication with possibly E.T’s, or gods, from above.
But despite the controversy, one thing is plain, and the lines that scar the surrounding countryside, are not natural formations.
But while scientists and ancient astronaut theorists remain divided about who, or what, created the Nazca lines, they are in agreement about one the so-called Band of Holes, located in the Pisco Valley, Peru, is a complete mystery.
In the mountains of Peru, we have what’s commonly referred to as the Band of Holes, and it is this Band of Holes that were carved or dug into the mountainside.
It’s a bunch of little, shallow holes, dug into the ground, and it’s had all kinds of explanations.
Some people say it was just pot hunters, you know, looting, looking for burials.
Some people think it looks like some kind of machine was running over the territory.
Some people think it was some kind of systematic mining operation.
They need raw material, be it gold, be it silver, be it uranium, whatever; they need something.
And they send something down like a shuttle.
It can be a robot.
No extraterrestrial is on board.
And this robot just caresses over the surfaces and collects and measures raw material, and disappears again.
The holes run about three feet apart and measure six to seven feet in depth, and number in the thousands.
Often we see regular structures like that and we assume either a person or an intelligent life had to make it, but there are lots of examples in nature where the natural processes lead to large-scale what we call “pattern formation.”
You see it on a small scale in animals.
You look at leopards and zebras– leopards have spots; zebras have stripes.
Surprisingly, on geological scales, some of the same processes that give you spots on a leopard could give you indentations in the ground and raised areas that would look like holes.
It would take a long time over geological scales, but we’ve had a long time, and that might be what they’re left over from.
Mainstream archaeologists suggest the holes were used to store grain, but ancient astronaut theorists reject that notion.
It’s a mystery because who in their right mind would go ahead and dig all these holes? For what? The other intriguing aspect of the Band of Holes is that you can only see it from the air.
When you stand down there, all you see is a couple of holes dug into the ground, and it doesn’t really mean much.
But if you’re up in the air, there is this long band with these individual holes that you can see, and you can conceivably create some type of message that can only be seen from the air.
But if ancient aliens came to Earth searching for gold, why did they leave? More gold still exists here, as do many other valuable minerals.
Could it be that ancient mining operations were just the means to another possibly greater end? Or perhaps the real alien mission on Earth was to hunt the greatest prey in the Man.
Alamosa, Colorado. September 7, 1967.
When a three-year-old horse named Snippy went missing, her owners grew concerned and went out looking for her.
Their search yielded a gruesome and mysterious discovery.
Snippy’s body had been mutilated almost surgically.
An examination of the carcass showed that her skin and flesh had been neatly cut; her heart and brain had been removed, and a formaldehyde-like odor emitted from the remains.
An autopsy also revealed that her spinal fluid had been removed.
The events of Snippy’s death stunned the community and remain shrouded in mystery, even to this day.
Since the mutilation, an estimated 50,000 similar events have been reported around the world, most of them involving cattle.
But it was not until about the middle of the 1970’s that cattle mutilations really entered into Ufology.
Farmers would come out and find some prize livestock that was alive and healthy the day before and then it was just suddenly dead.
And it looked like it had been cut up in a rather odd way.
That certain parts of the body looked like they were cut out in ways that seemed to be almost surgical.
Television producer and UFO investigator Linda Howe has been tracking the mystery of animal mutilation for over 30 years.
I began trying to get to the bottom of what was happening to all of these animals.
There were horses, cows, other domestic animals found with the same pattern of bloodless excisions.
The law enforcement called them animal mutilations, and the first thing I felt was anger.
And then I felt nervous, and then I felt afraid.
I sat across from sheriffs who told me, “Linda, we’re not dealing with predators, disease, and satanic cults. We’re dealing with creatures from outer space.”
There are several explanations for why aliens would want to experiment on cows.
One is that they’re just looking for food.
One that they’re looking for some kind of information about vertebrate organisms.
Another one is that they’re looking for some kind of genetic material for some reason.
The closest answer I’ve ever gotten was from a man who had had very upfront, and close and personal observations of nonhumans in his work for the government.
He told me– he said, “The best answer I can give you, Linda, It’s a genetic harvest.”
But once you have said, “a genetic harvest from Earth,” there’s even a bigger question.
Why a genetic harvest from Earth? What is being made with this genetic harvest? To what end? The answer to these questions might be found in our ancient past, in the bizarre, almost Frankenstein-like experiments that were practiced by early civilizations.
We have ancient descriptions from Egypt where it says specifically that the gods created these chimeras– mixed beings, or hybrids.
We find paintings where you have a human body with a cut-off head and a red tube coming out of it, and next to it, you have just the head of some animal.
And in the next picture– ’cause they’re like– they look like comic strips almost.
And in the next picture, you see the same human body with the animal head attached to the human neck.
Incredibly, examples of strange human-animal hybrid beings date back to a time even older than ancient Egypt.
According to mainstream archeology, ancient Sumeria is the earliest civilization of humankind.
And the interesting part is the fact that their earliest writings are filled with references to these bizarre beings that descended from the sky called the Anunnaki.
Anunnaki means “those who from the heavens came.”
But is there any physical evidence of these human-animal hybrids? If so, wouldn’t we have found skeletal remains? The answer may have been found in Saqqara, Egypt, home to that country’s oldest pyramid.
Not only are the sarcophagi massive, they are also perfectly polished.
Inside were two sealed and intact sarcophagi. But when Mariette opened them, what they contained was shocking. They opened the sarcophagus and they didn’t find a bull. Instead, they found this black mass of what’s called bitumen, a type of asphalt.
And inside this stinking mass, they found the bone fragments of seven different types of animals crushed up.
According to the accompanying texts, some type of monsters existed during the time of the Egyptians.
And so who knows whether or not the priests instructed the people to destroy these beings, to rip them apart, to crush their bones, and put them inside this stinking mass, and put them underneath a lid in the sarcophagus weighing 80 tons.
I mean, all in all of Egypt we can find mummified remains of every single animal, but we find these sarcophagi that contain these crushed-up bones.
Doesn’t that mean the ancient Egyptians did not want for those creatures to ever return after their death? Of course, mainstream scientists and archaeologists believe ancient Greek and Egyptian stories of animal and human hybrids are just fanciful products of the imagination.
But we do have scientific evidence that at least the ancient Egyptians believed firmly that they ruled.
As to whether they are just human beings, like you or I; or whether they come from somewhere else; or whether they are a hybrid being, we have no idea.
What if ancient civilizations possessed the advanced scientific knowledge of our own modern-day scientists?
What if they, too, had unlocked the mysteries of DNA: cloning and gene-splicing?
Why is this so fascinating?
Well, because if you look at this from a genetics aspect, we’re in the process right now today of being able to recreate creatures like that.
I mean, this is Frankenstein.
This is science fiction stuff.
Yet, in ancient Egypt, we have the exact same descriptions, the exact same depictions of some very bizarre, hybridization program which took place thousands of years ago.
They are mixing alien, animal and human DNA, not just for ten years or 20 years, but for thousands and thousands of years.
And that’s why there are so many alien abductions, and that’s why each generation is cyclically more advanced than the next until we get to the complete union of two cultures– the ultimate hybrid.
I think the answer clearly is, we’re not alone in this universe and we have nonhuman intelligence interacting with this planet for reasons that are still unknown to most of us.
It leaves you feeling a little nervous.
If alien beings came here, as some suggest, to perform strange mutation experiments on animals, could they have done the same on humans?
And if so why?
Life on Earth comes in a tremendous diversity of shapes and sizes.
It can be found from the depths of the deepest oceans to the peaks of the highest mountains.
But the vast array of life-forms we see today is only a small portion of what has existed on this planet during its millions of years of history.
In fact, scientists estimate that 97% of all the species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct.
Most scientists today will tell us that there have been six major extinction events that have occurred during the history of life on Earth.
The most recent of these extinction events was the one that occurred 65 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs.
Paleontologists attribute these mass extinctions to natural causes such as meteor strikes floods and dropping sea levels.
But another theory suggests that these extinctions were not caused by nature, but by alien beings.
In the ancient Sumerian texts, they can control the weather, they can cause droughts, and they did this to humans.
They are capable of producing their own disasters.
But were now-extinct life-forms actually exterminated in order to make way for other, perhaps more docile or desirable species? Was the intent to clear the way for colonization? Or invasion? And if so, what sort of technology would be needed to effect such a widespread change? Some theories say that we have that technology now, called scalar technology.
We heat up to high, electrical impulses, a certain spot on the water, and that creates a hurricane.
And by making a path with that beam, you can track the hurricane.
Now if we can do that– and this is hypothetical– if we can do that, why can’t an alien culture say, “Let’s create an ice age on planet Earth?” It will kill off the dinosaurs, but pave the way for aliens to implant human beings on planet Earth.
Did alien beings come to Earth in order to stay?
Might they, as some believe, have seeded it with their own genetic offspring?
If so, where is the proof?
Some ancient astronaut theorists point to myths that describe gods coming down from the heavens in order to mate with humans.
Ancient texts talk about the fact that whoever visited the earth in the remote past, these gods, believed that Earth women were quite beautiful.
So, in many occasions, we find stories where those visitors essentially mated with Earth women.
It was misinterpreted, misunderstood as something divine that came here.
They were flesh-and-blood extraterrestrials.
Native American folklore refers to those beings who came down from the heavens to breed with Earth women as Star People.
The Star People are extraterrestrial people.
Have Ancient Aliens been visiting Earth for thousands of years?
They are not from this earth. They visit. They are star ancestors.
There’s a great deal of, uh, of interaction between them.
Like some of the American Indian star husband tales where some woman sleeping outside at night looks up at a star and thinks it’s very beautiful and would like to go there, and winds up finding herself in the morning being pulled up into heaven and meeting with the supernatural being who was associated with that star in becoming the bride of the star husband.
According to Native American mythology, the brides of these alien beings would become pregnant and give birth to star children.
They would be raised by the native mother until the age of six when they went to live with their star father.
Similar stories of intimate encounters between celestial beings and humans can be found in ancient Hebrew and Judeo-Christian testaments often referred to as The Pseudepigraph, or what many refer to as the Apocrypha.
There are lots of instances in the Pseudepigraph– these are the books that didn’t make it into the Bible– where people are visited by beings that aren’t from this earth.
Before the Bible became the Bible of today, there were many additional books that used to be a part of the Bible.
They were removed in what was called the Council of Nicaea because those books contained too much information, dangerous knowledge.
In Genesis 6, where it talks about these watchers that are kind of angels that came down from heaven and had sex with the women of the earth.
These strangers had sex with beautiful young girls on our planet.
How can angels have sex? This is impossible.
In our point, in our view, angels were something spiritual, not something who has a body and has a feeling of sex.
But they had sex.
Our prehistoric ancestors could not understand, and they believe that these extraterrestrials are some kind of gods.
The conception of the Christ.
An angel comes to the holy mother, to the Virgin Mary, and tells her that she’s going to be blessed by God with a child.
And then, essentially, she finds herself pregnant.
There is an angelic reality point in the New Testament.
And whether it be at the birth of Jesus or his resurrection, we’ve got the possibility of other powers from another world being involved from the beginning to the end.
The more literal version is the idea that Jesus is strictly alien, which, of course, in a sense, he is as, uh You know, even if you take him as the son of God, then obviously, he is not of this earth.
I tend to believe that Jesus was a very spiritual human being who understood a lot of things that we’re beginning to learn today.
But it’s also very possible that he might have been an extraterrestrial who came down to teach us things.
That divine intelligence is very real in some form or fashion.
Tales of gods mating with humans are prevalent in everything from Greek and Roman mythology to Native American legends.
In China, at the end of the fifth century BC, the country was divided into seven states, each ruled by powerful warlords who battled for territory and power.
It was during this turbulent era when the legendary story of Huangdi first appeared.
A great god took the form of a dragon, came down to a hilltop where a young maiden was out gathering fruit.
And as this great dragon came near, the sky darkened.
It was like a storm.
She was terrified, and she passed out.
When she came awake again, uh, the sun had come out again, and the dragon was gone, and she was pregnant.
Much like the story of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, the story of Huangdi told of an earthling woman who would give birth to him– the legendary first emperor of China who ushered in a time of great change.
Gods deliberately bred with humans so that they could produce, they could get a race that they could trust and control a little bit better.
In my mind, legends and-and myths are based on something real– while they have been mythified and distorted and exaggerated, in many cases– but there is, in my mind, some core of truth here.
Another prevalent theme in ancient texts, myths, and religions is that of a cataclysm of some kind.
Usually, these come in the form of an intense flood, fire, or other devastating catastrophes.
In the Hebrew Bible, for example, God punishes mankind for their decadence and sinful ways.
He sends punishment in the form of a great flood which destroys nearly all living things on the planet, except for Noah, his family, and the animals rescued aboard his ark.
Similar stories can be found in numerous ancient texts.
Many of the mythical tales of most civilizations include some kind of idea that there are gods that came to Earth at some point.
One interpretation has been that these are literal descriptions of visitors from space.
Not gods, but some creatures of with advanced technology that came to Earth in times past, and either created mankind, brought culture to the Earth, brought civilization, and then, for some reason, departed, usually under some kind of breach between mankind and the gods.
Take the case of the once-thriving Mesoamerican cultures of the Aztecs and the Mayans.
By the year 1500 AD, they had all but vanished.
But why? Was there a natural disaster of some kind? Or is there another, more otherworldly explanation? At some point, it all crashed in a cataclysmic disaster.
And the world, as they knew it, came to an end. And tidal waves washed across continents. Areas of the planet went under later. And the megalithic building that was going on then, too, also completely stopped. And it’s what we see at certain areas.
Like in Peru, where giant blocks of granite have been quarried and partially moved to where they were going.
But then it all came to a sudden, complete halt.
For nearly 3,000 years, the Mayan civilization thrived in Central America.
Among their many accomplishments, the ancient Maya invented a remarkably complex and accurate calendar.
According to scholars, the calendar started on August 11, 3114 BC.
The first calendar cycle ends about 5,000 years later on December 21, 2012.
But why? Did the Mayans know something about mankind’s future– something we have forgotten or chosen to ignore? There’s a lot of excitement being generated now about the Mayan calendar ending in the year 2012, and if there is such a cataclysm or some massive Earth change that’s suddenly going to occur.
And so the idea that ancient people, like the Maya say, were somehow totally in tune with this and had knowledge of these kinds of vast cosmic cycles, which apparently led to cataclysmic changes on the Earth, that’s the kind of advanced knowledge that we wouldn’t expect them to have.
And where would they get that kind of knowledge? You would think that would have to come from extraterrestrials.
If we accept the notion that alien beings left behind the Mayan calendar as some type of ancient advanced warning device, might they have left other astronomical instruments here on Earth? And if so, why was it so important for ancient civilizations to track the stars? The stars.
Since the beginning of time, man has gazed in wonder at the night sky.
Stars became the stuff of legends, home of the gods and sometimes, man’s final resting place.
It is no surprise then that ancient man built monuments dedicated to these celestial wonders.
When we look at ancient monuments around the world– these Mesolithic structures– we find that many of them are aligned astronomically to the sun, to planets, to stars Numerous examples can be listed.
Stonehenge is essentially an ancient astronomical observatory.
Guess it may have been used for ritualistic purposes.
It may have been used for religious purposes.
But it’s very clear that it was also used for astronomical purposes, for observations.
We’re not surprised whether it’s Stonehenge, pyramids, or perhaps the Nazca Lines that ancient people understood events that were going to happen in the sky, and when they would repeat.
But why was the ancient man so fixated on the sky?
And why did they construct elaborate stone monuments and temples in order to track the movements of the stars?
Was it simply to help farmers know when to plant their crops?
Or might there have been another, perhaps more profound purpose? Could they, as some believe, have been constructed as a type of extraterrestrial GPS system?
Egypt’s Nubian Desert sits one of the oldest astronomical sites ever discovered. In 1974, archaeologist Fred Wendorf almost passed it by before noticing its small stone artifacts and toppled rocks.
The stones at Nabta Playa.
It’s a very strange site. It’s just strange stone formations, circles, uh, stone alignments.
Bizarre trigger lines with strange rocks and others.
Later excavations put the date of the astronomical device at approximately 5000 BC, making it close to 1,000 years olderthan the remarkably similar formation at Stonehenge.
When they brought an astronomer there, they realized that it was a ceremonial site, very intensely astronomical.
The intriguing thing about this site is that it shows that they were tracking stars over thousands of years.
And to track stars over that period, they must have have been aware of what we call “precession,” which means they weren’t simply astronomers or ancient astronomers.
They were very sophisticated astronomers.
Could the people who built Nabta Playa 7,000 years ago have possessed an advanced understanding of physics and astronomy?
One that rivals or, perhaps, surpasses our own?
And why were they tracking Orion and Sirius?
In 1994, the mystery of Nabta Playa took on even greater significance when Robert Bauval announced a surprising discovery along Egypt’s Giza Plateau.
The Great Pyramid contained four long interior shafts.
Bauval determined that they were each precisely aligned with specific stars in the sky.
The southerners aligned to the belt of Orion and to Sirius, and the northern ones aligned to the second pole stars.
Again, this is very intriguing.
In terms of construction engineering, that’s, that’s bulls-eye.
As an engineer, I know that it’s one thing building a pyramid.
But it’s another thing building a pyramid with that kind of precision.
Bauval also proved that the three pyramids of Giza were laid out in the precise order and position of the three stars of the Orion’s Belt constellation.
But what exactly is the significance of the shaft alignment and the layout of the pyramids themselves? I mean, we’re deciphering a message.
The question is whether it is religious or whether it is a stellar message.
The fact is that what we have on the ground is an image of a constellation that we know now is the birthplace of stars.
Literally, stars are being born there.
And the Egyptians themselves believed that their gods had descended from the stars.
That could be either a knowledge of ancient astronomy, or it could also be a road map to where these E.T’s may have come from.
But why were the ancients so fixated on the Orion and Sirius constellations? Some believe the answer can be found on the other side of the world in North America.
Model of the city and Great Pyramid of Cholula. Cholula Museum, Puebla, Mexico. ( CC BY SA 4.0 )
More than 3,000 years old, it is estimated that it took approximately 1,400 years to complete.
Even though the Cholula Pyramid doesn’t look like much because of the overgrown jungle, it is, in fact, the world’s largest monument ever constructed by human hands.
In fact, the volume of the Cholula pyramid– the whole pyramid complex– is 4.
The great pyramid in Egypt only has 2.
5 million cubic meters in volume.
So, the great pyramid at Giza is way taller than the Cholula Pyramid, but volume-wise, the Cholula Pyramid is, by far, the largest man-made structure ever created on planet Earth.
Originally built by the Olmecs in the third century BC, it was later added on to and used by the Toltecs and the Aztecs as a place of religious ritual and human sacrifice.
But along with its history of bloodshed, an examination of the pyramid reveals that the ancient cultures of the region had a remarkable understanding of astronomy.
It’s interesting to consider what the Aztec people thought about its origins.
They did not think it was built by humans, like us, which is our theory today.
If you look at the Aztec cosmology, you’ll see that these giant beings were identified with different celestial objects.
The one, in particular, that is said to have built the Cholula Pyramid is identified with the planet Venus.
Both the Aztecs and the ancient Egyptians charted most of the planets in the solar system thousands of years before European astronomers.
But why? And even more compelling is the fact that the two cultures were thousands of miles and half a world apart.
Mainstream archaeologists are telling us that all these civilizations around the world– in the Americas, on remote Pacific islands, in Asia and Africa and Europe– that they’re all disconnected with each other, and that there wasn’t some contact with South America, and Egypt, or any of these ancient civilizations.
But really, it has to be the other way around.
All of these ancient civilizations were connected in some way.
But were these holy sites, as ancient astronaut proponents suggest, really connected to each other? And if so, why? Are they evidence of aliens coming to earth? Whoa, I’m getting a series of lights right there.
I got it, I got it, I got it.
These reports that we continue to get from people of E.T. visitations and craft, clearly points out to me that we’re being visited.
And we have been visited. Oh, there it is– over to the left. They may have physically left the planet, in terms of a civilization.
But they– they’re continuing to come back and monitor us for some reason.
If aliens are watching us today, what are they waiting for?
Or, as some claim, have they already left messages for us in plain view? county of Wiltshire, the English countryside remains pretty much as it has for thousands of years.
Small farms, stone walls, and rolling green hills provide inhabitants with an environment of peace and stability.
This historic region is also home to a large number of ancient sacred sites, many built thousands of years ago.
It’s an ancient, sacred landscape where most of them occur.
There are monuments that you know about: Stonehenge, Avebury, SilburyHill.
This is one small area that seems to be a manipulated landscape that was done thousands of years ago where sacred rituals have taken place.
But in 1978, Wiltshire’s tranquil landscape became the focus of a controversy that persists to this day.
Today alongside the tracks of farm machinery, a new set of circles were found.
No human tracks lead to the markings.
There, carved in fields of wheat, barley and rye were elaborate geometric patterns.
Even more curious was the fact that much like the famed Nazca Lines of Peru, the designs were only visible from the air.
When you see it for the first time, you go, “What in the world is that doing there?” I mean, it’s obviously not natural.
There have been cases that have been traced back for hundreds of years– so-called mowing devil, where apparently some sort of a devil supposedly mowed a field in a single night.
But they became recognized as a phenomenon only when these circles started appearing in English wheat fields.
They were very simple things at first.
And, well– but they kept occurring year after year, and each year they seemed to get a little more elaborate.
One of the early theories was that there was some kind of whirlwind that was making them.
But as they became more elaborate, they also became associated with a paranormal activity, particularly UFOs.
Some people said they saw a light in the field at night.
And some people that– began to read that was a UFO presence.
This circle in a Wiltshire field is just one of discovered in the last six weeks.
To farmers and scientists, how they’re formed or by whom remains a big mystery.
Not surprisingly, the region became the focus of intense interest from UFO enthusiasts and skeptics, each offering explanations as to who or what was responsible for this strange phenomenon.
But if in fact, alien beings from another planet were responsible for the crop circles, why were they making them in England?
Were they trying to contact us or were there clues embedded in the designs?
And was the proximity to Stonehenge and other ancient sites of any particular significance? So you have the idea of these earth energies, and these ancient structures, and then the crop circles are appearing around them.
And many of the crop circles appear to be some kind of signals and ancient writing.
The crop circles are calling us back to a time before science and spirit got separated when we were whole; we had a sense of wholeness.
And here, they’re landing near sacred sites that are from an ancient time when we did experience those things.
When I saw the first photographs, I was haunted, actually.
Are these extraterrestrials doing this?
Are we dealing with somebody who knows how to bend space and time? Our entire relationship with the universe and quantum physics– in all of its complexities– has been pushed hard by crop formations alone.
Certainly, it is one theory that extraterrestrials are trying to communicate in a big way through popular media.
Crop circles do get in newspapers all over the world.
Perhaps that’s what they want. These are being carefully designed. They’re not accidental– both, in terms of the shape, and where they land. These aren’t accidents. There’s a mind behind this that’s making these decisions.
Where is that mind? What kind of body is it in?
Scientists struggled to find an explanation for the phenomenon, until in British pranksters, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, came forward and proclaimed that they were the ones responsible.
They showed how they could make crop circles in a single night using some very simple tools.
And at the time, people said, “Well, that must be the explanation for it.”
Nevertheless, some researchers remain skeptical that a single pair of elderly men could have created literally hundreds of designs in the dead of night with little more than a few boards and some rope.
You know, it was very effective.
You still will run into people– “Crop circles– oh, forget about them. Those two old guys made a come on, don’t be so naive! They-they were done by those two old guys years ago. What are you paying attention to them anymore?”
It is a very effective piece of disinformation.
During the years that followed Bower and Chorley’s confession, crop circles continued to appear in the English countryside and at various locations around the world.
Some were inarguably the work of artists or jokesters.
But after studying soil samples and grain dispersion patterns in the disturbed farmland, researchers concluded that it would be impossible for all of these designs to be man-made.
Well, in what we would consider being a mysterious crop circle, where we can’t identify it being made by people– the lay is absolutely beautiful.
The lay of the crop.
It’s like a million carpet layers came down, and put these stalks of grain down, right parallel to one another.
It’s just a gorgeous thing to behold.
When the hoaxers make them, they tend to be sloppy and messy because they’re not they haven’t got that same force.
They’re doing handmade manipulation, which doesn’t lay them down quite as beautifully.
In 1991, noted biophysicist Dr. William Levengood put forth a startling new theory.
After spending ten years studying crop circle sites and samples, he concluded that they were created by a complex energy system, which he called a spinning plasma vortex that comes down from somewhere high up in the atmosphere.
Biophysicist Levengood has now analyzed 350-some samples from crop formations in his career.
Now, if Levengood were sitting here with me, he would say, “All I can do is, I can take you from the ground– I can take you from the crops, up. But I can’t tell you what sets in motion that spinning plasma vortex in the first place. It’s still a huge mystery.”
The anomalous things that happen inside crop circles are in fact one of the indications that you’re in a so-called genuine circle because indeed the weirdest things happen.
Batteries fail– brand-new batteries. People go in with cameras. Cell phones don’t work. There have been people who have started reading all kinds of messages into these crop circles.
Uh, that they have some kind of digital significance that-that you can read. There’s a kind of numerology, and there’ll be a kind of message.
People are really reading something into it.
In terms of who or what is delivering them– we have no way to know that. We only have science fiction that tells us what’s coming to visit us. So, we have to just speculate about where this might be coming from.
We have to wait for whatever the source is to introduce itself to us.
Are we dealing with time travelers?
Are we dealing with spiritual forces from some dimension we don’t understand?
Are we dealing with advanced intelligences that are not even in this galaxy, that are from someplace else?
And is this a form of communication? The conversations keep getting more and more complicated.
Crop circles are a form of contact. We are being contacted.
Just because we don’t have the bodies to shake hands with, we have the evidence that the bodies have left us.
I’m absolutely convinced that crop circles are evidence of intelligent life. There is intelligence bombarding us, winking at us, waving.
Are these mysterious crop circles messages or warnings?
Or might they have another, perhaps more profound, purpose? Could they be futuristic clues guiding us to our ultimate destiny or ancient symbols paving the way for our ultimate destruction?
Belize, Central America.
In 1924 British adventurer Frederick Mitchell-Hedges traveled here with his daughter Anna to explore the ruins of the ancient Mayan city of Lubaantun.
One afternoon Anna climbed to the top of a crumbling pyramid, hoping to see the ocean.
It was high noon and she was at the top, and the way the sun came in, the way the rocks had moved in that there was just a small opening and the light from the sun went through and it hit the top of the skull, and she ran down and she’s all excited.
She said, “There’s someone in there with a flashlight.”
Anna’s father and others in their party were too large to fit inside the small opening of the pyramid, so they tied a rope around Anna and lowered her into the hole.
A second search uncovered a matching jaw. The two-piece skull weighed appeared to be carved from a single piece of rock crystal. It’s the only crystal skull which is almost perfectly humanoid. It’s the only crystal skull which has a detachable jaw, and when I say “almost perfectly humanoid,” the one thing which is missing is the sutures on the cranium.
It has a perfect cranium. So it almost suggests that, even though it’s a human crystal skull, those who were carving it somehow felt that this creature was not born.
It somehow came into this world perfectly.
The skull’s appearance created an immediate sensation among the local tribesmen. When the natives saw it, it was like their god had returned. They all started crying and kissing the earth and everything.
They were just so excited, and Mitchell-Hedges seeing this, he presented it to the high priest and they put it in an altar, and for 24 hours a day, they burned flames around the crystal skull.
The Mayan elders believed that, in ancient times, secret places around the world.
Currently it is claimed that seven have been found.
Four are in private collections and one each in the British Museum, the Smithsonian, and the Quai Branly Museum in Paris.
All have been the focus of intense examination, speculation, and even worship.
A lot of natives and a lot of people working with crystal skulls say that the high quartz content skulls and especially the quartz skulls themselves are the highest frequency or energy or vibration possible on the physical plane, and so a lot of native people kind of worshipped or took care of these objects because they knew that they had or felt that they had the highest energy possible on the earth plane.
But what are the exact origins of these mysterious crystal skulls?
Since their discovery, scientific tests have determined that the two owned by the British Museum and the Quai Branly were not authentic pre-Columbian artifacts.
Could it be that the Mitchell- Hedges skull was also a fake?
In the 1960s it underwent extensive testing by art curator Frank Dorland and the Hewlett- Packard Company.
They used the most advanced stuff that they had.
They could not find any marks on it except for around the jaw and, I think, a little bit around the eyes– the only place they saw tool marks using their techniques.
At the time, Hewlett-Packard found that the temperature always stays about the same temperature, no matter if it’s in hot or cold.
It was carved against the lines of the crystal.
If anybody tried to do that, it would break into a thousand pieces.
It’s made out of a high level of electronic crystal, and they’re not really sure exactly where it came from.
If you listen to the academics, crystal skulls are all modern fabrications, meaning somebody has gone on there with a wheel and has carved them as such, and this is where the big divide is between established academics and alternative researchers like myself, who feel that the academics are not using all the available evidence to draw their conclusions, and, in short, we believe that the academics are wrong in their conclusions.
Are these skulls really ancient artifacts? And if not, who or what carved them? Crystal skulls, according to certain stories, yes, they are alien artifacts.
Even some people think they’re made on another planet.
I think there are links between crystal skulls and extraterrestrials, not necessarily that they were carved and created by extraterrestrials.
I’ve been told they were created by humans, but they were created specifically to hold records from alien civilizations.
Could there actually be some type of coded information stored inside these skulls? And if there is, how could it be retrieved? There is a legend that there were 13 skulls and that when the 13 skulls come together, then something significant will change in the world.
Legends suggest that there are 12 additional worlds out there, planets which are inhabited by intelligent species.
Now, we belong to those worlds or to those planets, and our planet Earth is called “planet of the children.”
They also suggest that these 13 crystal skulls that allegedly exist on planet Earth were each brought here from one of those is the one that apparently contains all of the information of all those 12 different worlds.
Within each crystal skull, information is stored, and in fact, IBM has shown that too, that quartz crystal can store millions of gigabytes of information, and, in fact, any quartz crystal or a crystal skull could hold much more information than any computer we have now.
So when these crystal skulls would be brought together, they begin to interface with each other and ultimately a greater knowledge and information is condensed and brought to us, and that’s the legend of the crystal skulls.
But as ancient astronaut theorists maintain, why would visiting aliens have given the crystal skull to the Maya? To what purpose? The skull is a very important motif for the Mayans.
When you look around the Mayan monuments, you see skulls carved pretty much everywhere.
They use it for some of the notations for calendars.
And it is the Mayan calendar that many people refer to when discussing the possibility of a new Armageddon.
Are the skulls somehow linked to this? The current keeper of the Mitchell-Hedges skull believes they are.
We’ve got 2012 just a few years away.
All these different things are happening, the wars, et cetera, and I think the skulls are coming forward to do what they were they were made to do.
But are these skulls the trigger that will begin the dawn of a new era?
Or will they simply be used as a tool by some form of extraterrestrial intelligence to guide mankind to its next stage of evolution? If so, is this intelligence waiting and watching for the right moment?
And from where exactly could it be watching us? If extraterrestrial beings do exist in the universe, where are they? That was the question posed by Enrico Fermi, one of the leading scientists of the 20th century.
Shortly after the Second World War, the famous physicist Enrico Fermi, who was taking part in the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, was talking at Los Alamos with some friends about the reports of flying saucers, and Fermi suddenly said, in relation to extraterrestrial intelligent beings, “Where are they?”
And he was simply making the point that if there was a civilization somewhere in the galaxy that had arisen, say, 100 million years ago, then they had plenty of time to spread across the galaxy.
Fermi said, “Gee, if there’s all of these civilizations out there and all of these planets out there, where is everybody?”
The Fermi paradox, as it became known, was an attempt to explain the lack of evidence of aliens despite the mathematical probability of their existence.
Up unto this point, to modern time, no credible scholar, no credible scientist looks at any of the evidence that ancient alien enthusiasts put forth and say, “Yes, this is evidence of ancient aliens.” No credible scholar does that.
Moreover, the whole SETI project– the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence– it’s been going on now for nearly 50 years.
The fact that we have found no radio telescope evidence of extraterrestrials plays very much into the Fermi paradox in that it further indicates: if they’re out there, why aren’t we hearing from them? And we don’t seem to be hearing from them.
But in the 1960s, MIT astrophysicist John Ball rebutted Fermi’s hypothesis with the zoo hypothesis.
The zoo hypothesis says that we are in a zoo or a wilderness area, that they have essentially left alone and are going to leave alone to allow us to develop in our own way and at our own rate.
Extraterrestrials have detected us on Earth, but have chosen not to come here, not to invade, but rather to observe us as we observe animals in the zoo.
They’ve thought, “We’ll do a study of those earthlings and see what sort of people they are.”
Now, why would they do this? Well, if on the one hand, we have nothing they want, that’s surely true.
And on the other hand, we aren’t able to interfere with whatever they’re doing. That’s also surely true.
They’re out there doing their own thing, and they’re not paying any attention to us. And we’re not clever enough to eavesdrop on whatever they’re doing.
That’s the predicament we’re in. We have something that is looking down and monitoring us.
We are on the Petri dish and we can’t get out far enough to see what’s behind those eyes behind that microscope.
If aliens are watching us right now, where are they? Some believe they are sitting out in space in what are called “Lagrange points named after mathematician and astronomer Joseph Lagrange, who discovered them in 1772.
There are five of these points between the sun, the Earth, and our moon.
Lagrange points are points between two bodies where the forces balance equally.
Think of, like, a seesaw when you have a one really heavy person and one really light person.
There’s a kind of balance point in there, and that’s what a Lagrange point is.
Lagrange points are where we send some of our own satellites.
And that’s a point in space where you can just sort of sit there inert for millions of years if you had to without having to worry about in course corrections.
If you go anywhere else in the solar system, uh, then in order to keep pace with Earth as it orbits the sun, you’ve got to continually change your position.
So people have talked about Lagrange points as a place where a spacecraft might hide out because you don’t have to do a lot to stay in that spot.
It’s sort of equally balanced and you just get carried along.
If an extraterrestrial race would have ever visited our solar system, they would have placed a probe in those specific points in order to observe us, to record us, what have you.
So, I mean, this is not something that the ancient astronaut theory has proposed.
This is, you know, university professors, astrophysicists who have proposed this.
Some argue that another reason alien beings have yet to reveal themselves is that they don’t yet consider us worthy.
This forms the basis of John Ball’s jungle hypothesis.
The jungle hypothesis just means that if you have animals, such as ants, that live in the jungle, no matter how many of them you have, their chances of ever having seen a human being are very slim.
Not because we’re hiding or anything, but we just don’t have a reason to go into the jungle and step on anthills.
So, the idea is that we are probably related to advanced extraterrestrial intelligence similar to an anthill might be related to humans.
And the fact that we’ve never seen any extraterrestrial intelligence is just we don’t have anything they want.
We could actually shake hands with something that might have been coming and going on this planet for literally thousands, perhaps millions, of years, and has kept a distance during the last age of man for reasons unknown, and maybe is waiting for us all to finally grow up.
One thing that can be said with a great deal of confidence is that, if the contact is initiated by them, they are going to be not only superior to us but greatly superior to us.
They won’t be just beginners like we are. They will be far more advanced than we are.
Both the jungle and zoo hypotheses propose that alien beings are watching us, but are, for the time being, keeping their distance.
But what if they’re not? What if the alien mission was to integrate with our society in a way that avoids detection? If so, might they be walking among us right now? According to the ancient astronaut theory, aliens may have come to Earth for many reasons: to excavate, to breed, to conquer, or simply to explore.
Certainly, we want to go out and find out about things we don’t know about.
We see the moon. We want to go up to the moon and find out more things about it; we see Mars, we want to go there. We want to go to Jupiter. We send out our probes.
So, if aliens are something like us, then perhaps they have that same kind of motivation.
They just want to go learn.
Just like we exhibit curiosity, there are other species out there that have the same trait. It would be very egotistical to think that we’re the only explorers in this galaxy.
I mean, that would be a very sad statement to suggest we’re the only ones with a brain and want to go out there and explore.
But while our own journeys into space have been brief and largely exploratory, could other beings, traveling millions of miles to Earth, have stayed? And, if so, might they still be among us?
Many ancient astronaut theorists think this all happened in the past and the extraterrestrials came here, did this and did that, and then they took off back to their own planet.
But there’s a lot of evidence to show that extraterrestrials who might have come here in the past, they’ve never left.
They have bases somewhere on the planet underneath the oceans, inside mountains.
In South America, there are very strong beliefs that many UFO’s come out of lakes and underwater.
Lake Titicaca and other lakes in Peru and Bolivia and other areas of South America have some kind of underground, underwater alien base associated with them.
If aliens were coming to our planet, there seems little doubt that they would stop at the moon on their way here.
The moon itself is kind of the eye in the sky.
NASA says that the moon is apparently hollow.
During the Apollo missions, the command module crashed into the moon.
And the moon rang like a bell for hours.
There are craters on the moon which they cannot find a bottom to.
It’s thought by some researchers, that these bottomless craters are entrances inside our moon.
The whole enigma of the moon gets weirder and weirder the more you know it.
Was the moon actually brought here from another solar system and put into orbit around our planet? Biologists say that life on this planet could never have occurred without our moon.
And the reason for that is that the moon creates the tidal effect.
And without the effect of tides and this rhythmic motion on the oceans, life would never have begun on this planet.
In my mind, the evidence is there that the moon is a gigantic spaceship in orbit around our planet.
It’s occupied by some extraterrestrial race.
In many ways, it’s much like the George Lucas Death Star concept in Star Wars where they’re building this artificial moon that’s capable, with technology, of actually destroying a planet.
But if alien beings are using the moon as some sort of satellite for Earth observation, why? What would be the purpose? And where is the proof? They would like to see us evolve.
You know, they are great masters, great avatars.
They are very high. And so are we. And we need to live up to our potential.
We really need to live up to our potential for all people.
Your attention, please. Today, we are living still, as if we are alone in the universe while hundreds and thousands of people are seeing unusual crafts in the skies as they did 5,000 years ago.
And so, in a way, the idea that the ancient aliens would finally be coming around full circle all the way into the 21st century trying to push open a truth that governments have suppressed in the 20th century is really very ironic.
There are many diverse and conflicting theories concerning the idea that alien astronauts have been visiting the earth for centuries.
But perhaps the proof lies in the most obvious place of all: right within ourselves.
Somewhere in our genes, it is coded that extraterrestrials were here thousands of years ago.
And it takes a certain time before this message is open to us, maybe in the brain.
I don’t believe extraterrestrials, E.T’s, ancient astronauts are the missing link.
I think what they very well could be, they may be the beginning of the link– the link that helped genetically alter human beings, the link that jump-started our civilization the way we are today.
It’s very possible they came down here and saw some creature, and they said, “You know what? We’re going to jump-start this.”
It may take another ten million years for this thing to become smart and intelligent.
So they created us.
And we’re smart and intelligent now, aren’t we?
Read episode two, season one here(Part One) and here(Part Two).
NOTE: This article is an edited version of episode three, season one, of the TV Series Ancient Aliens. Our editors worked hard to correct out any mistakes, and arrange the context so that our readers can enjoy reading through the episodes, without having to watch them. I believe that when you read through these episodes, you can imagine (reconstruct) what the participants of the Series were trying to say in a much more efficient, a much richer way.
Govert Schilling neemt je mee op reis naar M13, een kolossale, bolvormige samenscholing van vele honderdduizenden sterren die tot de oudste structuren in het Melkwegstelsel behoort.
Kon Charles Messier vandaag maar mee. De 18de-eeuwse Franse astronoom zou onze ruimtereis naar M13 fantastisch hebben gevonden. Een reis van 22.000 lichtjaar naar een van de mooiste objecten in zijn Catalogue des Nébuleuses & des amas d’Étoiles uit 1781. Nummer 13 om precies te zijn; de letter M staat voor ‘Messier’.
Het kogelronde nevelvlekje in het sterrenbeeld Hercules werd in 1714 al ontdekt door Edmund Halley. Ook Messier kon er aanvankelijk geen structuur in onderscheiden. Pas later ontdekten astronomen dat het geen gasnevel is, maar een gigantische verzameling van afzonderlijke sterren – een zogeheten bolvormige sterrenhoop. In België en Nederland staat de sterrenhoop in de zomermaanden ’s nachts hoog aan de hemel, bijna in het zenit.
Onze trip naar M13 voert ons uit de platte, centrale schijf van het Melkwegstelsel. Het uitzicht tijdens de reis is adembenemend: we kijken onder een steeds grotere hoek tegen het Melkwegstelsel aan, dat zich al snel over de halve hemel uitstrekt. In de verte is de gele gloed van de oude sterren in het Melkwegcentrum zichtbaar. Daaromheen zijn de opvallende spiraalarmen gewikkeld, met hun donkere stofwolken, felroze gasnevels en blauwwit fonkelende jonge sterren.
Ons reisdoel wordt steeds beter zichtbaar: een kolossale, bolvormige samenscholing van vele honderdduizenden sterren, met een middellijn van zo’n 150 lichtjaar. De meeste van die sterren zijn twaalf of dertien miljard jaar oud; astronomen hebben ontdekt dat bolhopen tot de oudste structuren in het Melkwegstelsel behoren.
Tussen die talloze oranjegele oude zonnen schitteren hier en daar ook heldere blauwe sterren. Die doen een veel jongere leeftijd vermoeden. Maar schijn bedriegt. In het centrum van M13 staan de sterren zo dicht bij elkaar dat ze af en toe met elkaar in botsing komen en versmelten tot een zwaardere ster die een even fel en blauwwit licht uitstraalt als een pasgeboren exemplaar.
We laveren tussen de sterren door naar het oogverblindende centrum van M13. Kijk: rond sommige van de sterren in de bolhoop cirkelen planeten. We zetten ons ruimteschip aan de grond aan de nachtzijde van een van deze buitenaardse werelden. Maar donker is het er niet: de hemel is bezaaid met vele duizenden sterren. Die geven stuk voor stuk meer licht dan de heldere planeet Venus. Het is een spectaculair schouwspel, deels dankzij dat overweldigende beeld van ons eigen Melkwegstelsel op de achtergrond.
Zou er op sommige van de planeten in M13 leven kunnen voorkomen? De wereld waar wij geland zijn is een kale, rotsachtige bal zonder water en zonder dampkring. Maar hoe zijn de omstandigheden op die vele andere planeten? Net als hun moedersterren zijn ze miljarden jaren oud. Heeft er zich in die enorm lange tijd leven kunnen vormen en ontwikkelen? Of waren de organische bouwstenen die daarvoor nodig zijn in die kosmische oertijd nog onvoldoende voorradig?
De aardse astronomen die in 1974 de grote Arecibo-radiotelescoop op Puerto Rico in gebruik namen, wisten dat natuurlijk ook niet. Toch zonden ze met hun gloednieuwe, 300 meter grote schotelantenne een radiosignaal in de richting van M13. Het was een boodschap van de mensheid, bestemd voor mogelijke buitenaardse beschavingen.
Het zal nog ruim twintigduizend jaar duren voordat dat zwakke signaal hier, op M13, aankomt. Daarop kunnen we moeilijk wachten. We laten onze blik nog eenmaal over de flonkerende sterrenpracht dwalen, en dan draaien we de neus van ons sneller-dan-het-licht-ruimteschip weer in een andere richting. Het heelal heeft nog veel meer voor ons in petto.
Verrassing! Planetoïde die in juni langs de aarde scheerde, is niet alleen
Verrassing! Planetoïde die in juni langs de aarde scheerde, is niet alleen
Vivian Lammerse
Het blijkt te gaan om twee ruimtestenen!
Eind vorig jaar maakte we kennis met de planetoïde YE5, die vervolgens in juni langs de aarde scheerde. Hij ontmoette ons op zo’n 6 miljoen kilometer van de aarde vandaan, ofwel ongeveer 16 keer de afstand tussen de aarde en de maan. En hoewel we tot nu toe dachten dat het ging om een eenling, blijkt YE5 een tweeling te zijn!
BINAIRE SYSTEMEN
Wetenschappers denken dat van de aardscheerders die groter zijn dan 200 meter, 15 procent binaire systemen zijn. Deze hebben in de meeste gevallen een groter object en een veel kleinere satelliet. Twee even grote ruimtestenen zoals YE5 zijn veel zeldzamer. Daarnaast schatten de onderzoekers dat planetoïden die ook nog eens van dezelfde grootte zijn en met elkaar in contact staan, een andere 15 procent inhouden.
YE5 Waarnemingen met NASA’s Goldstone Solar System Radar (GSSR) onthulden de eerste tekenen dat YE5 een binair systeem zou kunnen zijn. De waarnemingen lieten twee verschillende lobben zien, maar door de stand van de planetoïde was het niet goed te zien of de twee ruimtestenen gescheiden, of verbonden waren. Toen de twee objecten roteerden, werd de opening tussen de twee zichtbaar. De twee zijn vrijwel identiek van grootte en draaien om elkaar heen. Een interessante ontdekking, want dit is slechts de vierde binaire planetoïde die ooit langs de Aarde scheerde. De nieuwe waarnemingen leveren de meest gedetailleerde beelden ooit van dit type binaire planetoïde op.
Observaties Een aantal observaties zijn bijzonder interessant. Zo draaien de twee ruimtestenen om de 20 tot 24 uur om elkaar heen. Daarnaast blijken de twee niet zoveel zonlicht te reflecteren als een typische rotsachtige planetoïde. YE5 is waarschijnlijk net zo donker als houtskool. Uit de foto’s blijkt dat er ook een opvallend verschil zit in de radarreflectiviteit van de twee objecten, een fenomeen dat nog niet eerder is waargenomen bij meer dan 50 andere binaire planetoïde systemen die sinds 2000 zijn bestudeerd. De tweeling kan bijvoorbeeld verschillende dichtheden, composities in de buurt van hun oppervlakken of verschillende oppervlakteruwheden hebben.
Radarbeelden van YE5.
Afbeelding: NASA
De ontdekking dat YE5 met z’n tweeën is, biedt wetenschappers een belangrijke mogelijkheid om de kennis over de verschillende soorten binaire systemen te verbeteren. Door analyse van radarbeelden en optische waarnemingen, kunnen wetenschappers de dichtheden van de YE5-objecten schatten. Dit zal belangrijke informatie over de samenstelling, interne structuur en hun ontstaan boven tafel brengen.
Planet Sized Circular Object Detected by STEREO Satellites
Planet Sized Circular Object Detected by STEREO Satellites
Given the knowledge of where the STEREO crafts were at the time, it should be able to triangulate the size, orbit, and relative position at the time of this video. Very cool video.
The STEREO project (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) of the US space agency NASA consists of two almost identical space probes, which for the first time observe the sun and the interaction of its particle eruptions and fields with the Earth's magnetosphere in three dimensions (stereo effect) and also monitor its remote side.
(Arjun Walia) With the recent release of the Pentagon’s UFO footage, which comprised of two videos filmed by U.S. Navy pilots of objects performing maneuvers that defy our current understanding of aerodynamics, the topic of UFOs has once again grabbed headlines around the world.
The video was a step forward towards disclosing the fact that there are unknown objects in our atmosphere that are commonly spotted and tracked on radar by defence authorities. They are highly technologically advanced, more so than any air-craft which is available in any global inventory at the moment.
Further to this, many people have had strange sightings that don’t really ‘make sense,’ in the realm of known aircrafts. The frequency of these sightings are not uncommon these days, especially for avid star gazers.
Haven’t seen one yourself? Well, how often are you looking up into the night sky? For many people, the answer is little to never.
Who Man’s These Craft’s?
The next question to be asked is, are these objects, or at least some of them, extraterrestrial?
According to one of the pilots who filmed the UFO released by the Pentagon, yes, they are, at least that’s their belief. The Pentagon’s “aerial defence” program director, Luis Elizondo also shared his belief that they are, along with hundreds of other high ranking personnel from several branches of military, intelligence, academia, aerospace and academia. He said that there is plenty of evidence to make that connection… The most recent example might be Robert Bigelow, founder of the Bigelow Aerospace corporation who, not long ago, stated that he knows we are being visited, and have been visited by ET’s.
“Yes there have been crashed craft, and bodies recovered. . . . We are not alone in the universe, they have been coming here for a long time. . . . I happen to be privileged enough to be in on the fact that we have been visited on this planet, and the UFO phenomenon is real.”
Ancient history is fascinating to say the least, and we’ve discovered so much about it. But, at the same time, we still know very little about Earth’s history and even the history of humanity. One of the most fascinating points to make about ancient history is that much of which was once considered mythological, is actually turning out to be true.
Perhaps information that didn’t fit within our framework of accepted knowledge was deemed mythological? How can we take seriously the writings of ancient Greek philosophers when describing social life and other aspects of humanity, yet when it comes to other areas of the world, like the Oracle at Delphi, they are placed in a the mythological realm?
Perhaps some was mythological, but perhaps some of what we call mythological was actually real.
Another great example is the Lost Land of Atlantis, a highly technologically advanced civilization that would shake what we thought we knew of human history, it’s not so much a tale anymore, and it’s one of many examples that show what we’ve been taught may not be completely correct.
For anybody who has done their research in this area, it’s quite clear given the evidence we now have, that Atlantis was far from a mythological place. Given our research on Atlantis, and many scholars out there, Atlantis is no joke, and perhaps before that, Lemuria as well.
This is why when it comes to stories of figures like Quetzalcoatl, it’s always interesting to contemplate that they were real.
The video footage mentioned above, which was released by the Pentagon, was done so in conjunction with To The Stars Academy headed by Tom Delonge, along with Luis Elizondo (mentioned earlier), and several other figures who’ve held high level positions within the Department of Defence. The Pentagon is working with the academy in the disclosure of UFO’s.
That in itself is a completely different discussion with many implications. It’s hard to trust the government these days, so can we really trust them with UFO disclosure and what that means? Will leave this for another time.
Delonge recently made some interesting comments about his experiences so far, and the contacts he’s been able to make, and the discussions that have been had.
“I went and met a former director of the CIA and NSA…Right when I sat down and told him about the book you know what he says to me? He goes, “I didn’t read much science fiction when I was a kid but I read a lot about Greek mythology”…The sixth biggest defense contractor in the world is a company called Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)…and in the front of the building (SAIC’s headquarters) you have an obelisk coming out of a fake leg and two Atlantians on thrones, and they’re both holding pyramids and one says the past and one says the future, and they’re 8 foot tall statues.”
So, who was Quetzalcoatl? Considered to be a mythical tale, Spanish chronicler Juan de Torquemada states that Quetzalcoatl was ‘a fair and ruddy complexioned man with a long beard. Another describes him as follows:
“A mysterious person…a white man with strong formation of body, broad forehead, large eyes, and a flowing beard. He was dressed in a long, white robe reaching to his feet. He condemned sacrifices, except of fruits and flowers, and was known as the god of peace…When addressed on the subject of war he is reported to have stopped up his ears with his fingers.”
Graham Hancock, one of the world’s foremost researchers into such things, describes another description from Central American Mayan tradition in his book, Fingerprints of the Gods:
“He came from across the sea in a boat that moved by itself without paddles. He was a tall, bearded white man who taught people to use fire for cooking. He also built houses and showed couples that they could live together as husband and wife; and since people often quarrelled in those days, he taught them to live in peace.”
This figure is spoken of the Mesoamerican culture.
It’s interesting because there are multiple accounts of various figures, not just Quetzalcoatl, all of which seemed to have provided humanity with a little ‘push’, here and there, and assistance with regards to discovery. Nothing was really done for humanity, it seemed that the common theme through all of these contacts was for us to better ourselves, and be responsible for our own progression, with a little bit of assistance.
Not all of the ‘gods’ were kind, loving and peaceful. There were others who required sacrifices, and seemed to almost be a little opposite of ones like Quetzalcoatl.
What’s also interesting is that the descriptions of Quetzalcoatl resemble modern day descriptions of some, supposed extraterrestrial beings. Those who have examined the lore, like myself, would know this. Could these have been who we consider today, benevolent extraterrestrial beings? Perhaps.
Ancient history, along with many ancient cultures who pre-date modern-day religion, all have very interesting stories which can easily be interpreted has highly advanced beings from another place.
The idea that these are just mere interpretations seem to be dwindling every year. Being an avid researcher in the field for more than a decade, I can tell you that extraterrestrial intelligence is just the tip of the iceberg. It truly does open up Pandora’s box, and there is much more to this universal story, so much so that we probably couldn’t even comprehend it.
The evidence today points to the idea that we’ve been visited for a long time, so to contemplate the idea that these were extraterrestrial visits is not out of the question.
“There are objects in our atmosphere which are technically miles in advance of anything we can deploy, that we have no means of stopping them coming here … [and] that there is a serious possibility that we are being visited and have been visited for many years by people from outer space, from other civilizations….Who they are, where they come from, and what they want. This should be the subject of rigorous scientific investigation and not the subject of ‘rubishing’ by tabloid newspapers.”
– Lord Admiral Hill-Norton, former Chief of Defence Staff, 5 Star Admiral of the Royal Navy, Chairman of the NATO Military Committee (source)
If they have been here as well as visiting us for a long time, that’s good news. It takes out the idea of an ‘extraterrestrial invasion’, because, if that were the case, it would have already happened by now.
To find all of our archived articles on the UFO/Extraterrestrial phenomenon, you can visit theexopolitics section of our website.
The meaning of Quetzalcoatl is “feathered serpent,” this is the translation that comes from ancient South America, from the Maya and the Aztecs. In Hancock’s book, he goes on to describe how there were other entities who resembled Quetzalcoatl quite closely:
“There were other deities, among the Maya in particular, whose identities seemed to merge closely with those of Quetzalcoatl. One was Votan, a great civilizer, who was also described as pale-skinned, bearded and wearing a long robe. Sholars could offer no translation for his name but his principal symbol, like that of Quetzalcoatl, was a serpent. Another closely related figure was Itzamana, the Mayan god of healing, who was robed and bearded individual, his symbol, too, was the rattlesnake.”
Graham, in his book, goes on to state:
“All of the legends stated unambiguously that Quetzalcoatl/Kukulkan/Gucumatz/Votan/Itzamana had arrived in Central America from some-where very far away (across the “Eastern Sea”) and that amid great sadness he had eventually sailed off again in the direction whence he had come.”
This is an interested quote, and relates closely to a sentiment shared by a First Nations Canadian storyteller, Richard Wagamese:
“My people tell of Star People who came to us many generations ago. The Star people brought spiritual teachings and stories and maps of the cosmos and they offered these freely. They were kind, loving and set a great example. When they left us, my people say there was a loneliness like no other.” (source)
Interesting to think about. These are versions of history that old more plausibility to them than the ones we currently consider concrete. As we continue to move forward exponentially, perhaps our destiny is in the stars and we ourselves one day will be the extraterrestrials, or perhaps we already are.
About the Author
Arjun Walia: I joined the CE team in 2010 shortly after finishing university and have been grateful for the fact that I have been able to do this ever since There are many things happening on the planet that don’t resonate with me, and I wanted to do what I could to play a role in creating change. It’s been great making changes in my own life and creating awareness and I look forward to more projects that move beyond awareness and into action and implementation. So stay tuned arjun@collective-evolution.com
*******
Stillness in the Storm Editor’s note:
Did you find a spelling error or grammar mistake? Do you think this article needs a correction or update? Or do you just have some feedback? Send us an email at sitsshow@gmail.com with the error, headline and url. Thank you for reading.
The temple was discovered when archaeologists were analyzing the damage in Teopanzolco pyramid.
(National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH))
Archeologists made a stunning discovery in Mexico on Wednesday when they uncovered an ancient temple nestled inside an Aztec-era pyramid that was damaged during last September's 7.1-magnitude earthquake.
Scientists from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) were checking for structural damage on the Teopanzolco pyramid in Morelos state, about 43 miles south of Mexico City, with a radar when they discovered the 20-by-13-feet temple.
Teopanzolco pyramid was built sometime between 1200 and the Spanish conquest in 1521.
(National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH))
“In spite of what the earthquake meant, it is necessary to be thankful that, for this natural phenomenon, this important structure [appeared] that changes the dating of the archaeological site,” the institute said in a news release.
The ancient temple nestled inside an Aztec-era pyramid.
(National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH))
The temple dates back further than the pyramid, which was built sometime between 1200 and the Spanish conquest in 1521. Archeologists believe the temple was built between 1150 and 1200 and was dedicated to the Aztec rain god Tlaloc.
An incense burner and ceramic shards were also located among the remains.
Archeologists believe the temple was built between 1150 and 1200 and was dedicated to the Aztec rain god Tlaloc.
(National Institute of Anthropology and History)
Barbara Koniecza, archeologist from the INAH Morelos Center, said it was common for pre-Hispanic cultures to build one temple over another.
"Possibly, on the right side are the remains of another temple dedicated to Huitzilopochtli,” she said in a Wednesday news conference.
She added that the pyramid endured extensive damage during the September quake.
An incense burner and ceramic shards were also located in the remains. (National Institute of Anthropology and History)
"The pyramid suffered considerable rearrangement of the core of its structure," Koniecza said.
Koniecza explained the quake left big gaps between the stones, causing the pyramid to be unstable. Scientists are working to restore the pyramid’s main structure.
The earthquake struck on Sept. 19, causing significant damage to many historical monuments, including colonial churches. More than 200 people were killed in Mexico City and many people were trapped under rubble when buildings were toppled.
Are we alone? Unfortunately, neither of the answers feel satisfactory. To be alone in this vast universe is a lonely prospect. On the other hand, if we are not alone and there is someone or something more powerful out there, that too is terrifying.
As a NASA research scientist and now a professor of physics, I attended the 2002 NASA Contact Conference, which focused on serious speculation about extraterrestrials. During the meeting a concerned participant said loudly in a sinister tone, "You have absolutely no idea what is out there!" The silence was palpable as the truth of this statement sunk in. Humans are fearful of extraterrestrials visiting Earth. Perhaps fortunately, the distances between the stars are prohibitively vast. At least this is what we novices, who are just learning to travel into space, tell ourselves.
I have always been interested in UFOs. Of course, there was the excitement that there could be aliens and other living worlds. But more exciting to me was the possibility that interstellar travel was technologically achievable. In 1988, during my second week of graduate school at Montana State University, several students and I were discussing a recent cattle mutilation that was associated with UFOs. A physics professor joined the conversation and told us that he had colleagues working at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, where they were having problems with UFOs shutting down nuclear missiles. At the time I thought this professor was talking nonsense. But 20 years later, I was stunned to see a recording of a press conference featuring several former US Air Force personnel, with a couple from Malmstrom AFB, describing similar occurrences in the 1960s. Clearly there must be something to this.
With July 2 being World UFO Day, it is a good time for society to address the unsettling and refreshing fact we may not be alone. I believe we need to face the possibility that some of the strange flying objects that outperform the best aircraft in our inventory and defy explanation may indeed be visitors from afar – and there's plenty of evidence to support UFO sightings.
The nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi was famous for posing thought provoking questions. In 1950, at Los Alamos National Laboratory after discussing UFOs over lunch, Fermi asked, "Where is everybody?" He estimated there were about 300 billion stars in the galaxy, many of them billions of years older than the sun, with a large percentage of them likely to host habitable planets. Even if intelligent life developed on a very small percentage of these planets, then there should be a number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. Depending on the assumptions, one should expect anywhere from tens to tens of thousands of civilizations.
With the rocket-based technologies that we have developed for space travel, it would take between 5 and 50 million years for a civilization like ours to colonize our Milky Way galaxy. Since this should have happened several times already in the history of our galaxy, one should wonder where is the evidence of these civilizations? This discrepancy between the expectation that there should be evidence of alien civilizations or visitations and the presumption that no visitations have been observed has been dubbed the Fermi Paradox.
Carl Sagan correctly summarized the situation by saying that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." The problem is that there has been no single well-documented UFO encounter that would alone qualify as the smoking gun. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that many governments around the world have covered upand classifiedinformation aboutsuch encounters. But there are enough scraps of evidence that suggest that the problem needs to be open to scientific study.
When it comes to science, the scientific method requires hypotheses to be testable so that inferences can be verified. UFO encounters are neither controllable nor repeatable, which makes their study extremely challenging. But the real problem, in my view, is that the UFO topic is taboo.
While the general public has been fascinated with UFOs for decades, our governments, scientists and media, have essentially declared that of all the UFO sightings are a result of weather phenomenon or human actions. None are actually extraterrestrial spacecraft. And no aliens have visited Earth. Essentially, we are told that the topic is nonsense. UFOs are off-limits to serious scientific study and rational discussion, which unfortunately leaves the topic in the domain of fringe and pseudoscientists, many of whom litter the field with conspiracy theories and wild speculation.
I think UFO skepticism has become something of a religion with an agenda, discounting the possibility of extraterrestrials without scientific evidence, while often providing silly hypotheses describing only one or two aspects of a UFO encounter reinforcing the popular belief that there is a conspiracy. A scientist must consider all of the possible hypotheses that explain all of the data, and since little is known, the extraterrestrial hypothesis cannot yet be ruled out. In the end, the skeptics often do science a disservice by providing a poor example of how science is to be conducted. The fact is that many of these encounters – still a very small percentage of the total – defy conventional explanation.
The media amplifies the skepticism by publishing information about UFOs when it is exciting, but always with a mocking or whimsical tone and reassuring the public that it can't possibly be true. But there are credible witnesses and encounters.
Cover of the October 1957 issue of pulp science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. This was a special edition devoted to 'flying saucers,' which became a national obsession after airline pilot Kenneth Arnold sighted a saucer-shaped flying objects in 1947.
Why don't astronomers see UFOs?
I am often asked by friends and colleagues, "Why don't astronomers see UFOs?" The fact is that they do. In 1977, Peter Sturrock, a professor of space science and astrophysics at Stanford University, mailed 2,611 questionnaires about UFO sightings to members of the American Astronomical Society. He received 1,356 responses from which 62 astronomers – 4.6 percent – reported witnessing or recording inexplicable aerial phenomena. This rate is similar to the approximately 5 percent of UFO sightings that are never explained.
As expected, Sturrock found that astronomers who witnessed UFOs were more likely to be night sky observers. Over 80 percent of Sturrock's respondents were willing to study the UFO phenomenon if there was a way to do so. More than half of them felt that the topic deserves to be studied versus 20 percent who felt that it should not. The survey also revealed that younger scientists were more likely to support the study of UFOs.
UFOs have been observed through telescopes. I know of one telescope sighting by an experienced amateur astronomer in which he observed an object shaped like a guitar pick moving through the telescope's field of view. Further sightings are documented in the book "Wonders in the Sky," in which the authors compile numerous observations of unexplained aerial phenomena made by astronomers and published in scientific journals throughout the 1700s and 1800s.
Evidence from government and military officers
Some of the most convincing observations have come from government officials. In 1997, the Chilean government formed the organization Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos, or CEFAA, to study UFOs. Last year, CEFAA released footage of a UFO taken with a helicopter-mounted Wescam infrared camera.
The countries of Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom have been declassifying their UFO files since 2008. The French Committee for In-Depth Studies, or COMETA, was an unofficial UFO study group comprised of high-ranking scientists and military officials that studied UFOs in the late 1990s. They released the COMETA Report, which summarized their findings. They concluded that 5 percent of the encounters were reliable yet inexplicable: The best hypothesis available was that the observed craft were extraterrestrial. They also accused the United States of covering up evidence of UFOs. Iran has been concerned about spherical UFOs observed near nuclear power facilities that they call "CIA drones" which reportedly are about 30 feet in diameter, can achieve speeds up to Mach 10, and can leave the atmosphere. Such speeds are on par with the fastest experimental aircraft, but unthinkable for a sphere without lift surfaces or an obvious propulsion mechanism.
1948 Top Secret USAF UFO extraterrestrial document. United States Air Force
Credit: United States Air Force
In December 2017, The New York Times broke a story about the classified Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, which was a $22 million program run by the former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo and aimed at studying UFOs. Elizondo resigned from running the program protesting extreme secrecy and the lack of funding and support. Following his resignation Elizondo, along with several others from the defense and intelligence community, were recruited by the To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science, which was recently founded by Tom DeLonge to study UFOs and interstellar travel. In conjunction with the launch of the academy, the Pentagon declassified and released three videos of UFO encounters taken with forward looking infrared cameras mounted on F-18 fighter jets. While there is much excitement about such disclosures, I am reminded of a quote from Retired Army Colonel John Alexander: "Disclosure has happened. … I've got stacks of generals, including Soviet generals, who've come out and said UFOs are real. My point is, how many times do senior officials need to come forward and say that this is real?"
A topic worthy of serious study
There is a great deal of evidence that a small percentage of these UFO sightings are unidentified structured craft exhibiting flight capabilities beyond any known human technology. While there is no single case for which there exists evidence that would stand up to scientific rigor, there are cases with simultaneous observations by multiple reliable witnesses, along with radar returns and photographic evidence revealing patterns of activity that are compelling.
Declassified information from covert studies is interesting, but not scientifically helpful. This is a topic worthy of open scientific inquiry, until there is a scientific consensus based on evidence rather than prior expectation or belief. If there are indeed extraterrestrial craft visiting Earth, it would greatly benefit us to know about them, their nature and their intent. Moreover, this would present a great opportunity for mankind, promising to expand and advance our knowledge and technology, as well as reshaping our understanding of our place in the universe.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Space.com.
Martian 'Ghost Dunes' Could Preserve Signs of Ancient Life
Martian 'Ghost Dunes' Could Preserve Signs of Ancient Life
ByElizabeth Howell, Space.com Contributor
The footprints of long-gone sand dunes stretch across the Hellespontus region of Mars west of the Hellas basin in this image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Scientists can identify consistent winds from the east (blowing from top to bottom in this image) that formed them. The dunes migrated with the wind and sometimes merged or extended to form new dunes, NASA officials said.
Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Could pits hold evidence of ancient Mars life? Researchers just found hundreds of crescent-shaped depressions on the surface of the Red Planet. These pits likely used to be sand dunes — each one the size of the U.S. Capitol building, according to researchers.
These 'ghost dunes' remain preserved because of their composition. Lava or sediments washed into the area with water and partially buried these dunes as it streamed around them. Like a mold, the buried part of the dune hardened over time. After wind blew the exposed sand away, the mold inside remained and showed where the full dune used to be.
And maybe life is hiding there. In a statement from the American Geophysical Union, the research team said the tip of the trailing ends of each of these dunes might have enough shelter to preserve a bit of sand. Inside this sand could be signs of ancient life, protected from the radiation-heavy Mars environment. [Boiling Blood and Radiation: 5 Ways Mars Can Kill]
"We know that dunes on Earth can support life, and dunes on Earth are very similar to dunes on Mars," lead author Mackenzie Day, a planetary geomorphologist (someone who studies planetary surface changes) at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in the statement.
"One problem that Mars has that Earth doesn't is the surface radiation. If you are inside a dune, or at the bottom of a dune, and you are microbial life, the dune is protecting you from a lot of that radiation," Day added. "There is probably nothing living there now. But if there ever was anything on Mars, this is a better place than average to look."
The making of a ghost dune. a) Crescent-shaped barchan dunes form with the steep face away from the prevailing wind, seen with the black arrows. b) A slow-moving liquid such as lava or sediment in water flows around the dunes and buries them halfway before hardening into rock. c-e) Wind blows away the exposed sand and is directed inward to eventually mostly hollow out the pit. f) Some ancient sand may still lurk in the pits' deep crevices, protected from radiation.
Credit: Mackenzie Day/David Catling/AGU
Similar to active dune fields
Features like this aren't unique to Mars. The first ghost dunes were found on Earth in 2016 in the Snake River Plain, in eastern Idaho. On Mars, the new study uncovered similar-looking features in Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter images of the southern hemisphere at Hellas (an ancient impact crater) and Noctis Labyrinthus (a set of deep valleys.)
The ghost dunes probably stood about 40 meters (130 feet) tall at Noctis Labyrinthus and 75 meters (246 feet) tall at Hellas basin just before they were buried. They also appear to be barchan dunes – common dune types on both Mars and Earth. Barchan dunes are crescent-shaped features that occur on flat surfaces with little sand, in zones where the wind blows mostly from one direction.
Dune cast pits (panel b) found at Noctis Labyrinthus, west of Valles Marineris, indicated as the black star in panel a. Panels c and d are close-ups of the pits, showing the crescent shapes of barchan dunes.
Credit: Mackenzie Day/David Catling/AGU
The observations also suggest these pits have a similar size and shape to active dune fields on Mars, especially because the pits are aligned in the same way as today's dunes.
"Any one of these pits is not enough to tell you that it's a dune, or from an ancient dune field. But when you put them all together, they have so many commonalities with dunes on Mars and on Earth that you have to employ some kind of fantastic explanation to explain them as anything other than dunes," Day said.
"They are all going the same way," she added, "which you would expect for dunes, because they are all migrating and forming in the same wind regime. So just the shape and size tell us that these are features that are coming from an ancient dune system." [Gullies Streak Down Mars Crater in Stunning NASA Photo]
The ghost dunes probably were buried about 2 billion years ago, during the late Hesperian or early Amazonian period on Mars. The Hesperian is a transitional period in Martian history, when the planet changed from a wetter environment into the drier and wind-swept planet observed today. Researchers are still trying to understand why the climate changed; according to a leading hypothesis, the atmosphere thinned, making it impossible for water to flow on the surface.
The two sets of dunes might have been buried differently, the researchers said. Noctis Labyrinthus lies near previously active volcanoes, while the Hellas basin dune field is downstream of two large canyons that likely were shaped by water.
"If some of the water that carved those valleys made it downstream far enough, it could have gotten to the dune field," Day said. "The only thing that we know for sure is that the flow had to be relatively low energy, relatively slow, otherwise it would erode the dunes and we wouldn't get the shapes that we see today."
The first ghost dunes were discovered by David Gaylord in 2015 on Idaho's eastern Snake River Plain (111 degrees 36 minutes 11.06 seconds latitude and 44 degrees 4 minutes 54.2 seconds north longitude).
Credit: Google Earth
Besides giving clues of ancient life, the dunes could also show how the winds used to blow during earlier parts of Mars' history. This knowledge would help researchers better understand how sediments moved over the surface, the formation of large features and how the climate of the ancient past is different from atmospheric conditions observed today.
"The fact that the wind was different [when the ghost dunes formed] tells us that the environmental conditions on Mars aren't static over long timescales, they have changed over the past couple billion years, something we need to know to interpret the geology on Mars," Day said.
NASA Just Released Over 1,000 New Images Of Mars And They’re Out Of This World
The new work was detailed June 5 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
Crescent-shaped Barchan dunes in Egypt's Western Desert show prevailing winds coming from the north (top of the image). The pits on Mars were once similar dunes. (25.706⁰, 30.347⁰)
Jacques-Yves Cousteau left an indelible mark on history thanks to his conservation efforts, marine exploration, and co-invention of the first self-contained scuba apparatus. The filmmaker and scientist left behind a rich body of work including dozens of books and over 100 oceanographic documentaries which have inspired new generations of ocean explorers and conservationists.
And he had an actual yellow submarine.
Now, it appears two of Cousteau’s grandchildren are following in their grandpere’s footsteps with an ambitious oceanographic project of their own. Rather than collecting records of the diverse flora and fauna of the silent world beneath the waves, however, Celine and Fabian Cousteau are diving into the inky black waters of Nova Scotia to investigate the infamous Shag Harbour UFO incident. What would Jacques think?
A bit of background for the unfamiliar: the Shag Harbour incident occurred on October 4, 1967 off the coast of the small fishing village of near Shag Harbor in Nova Scotia. Several eyewitnesses including an Air Canada cabin crew reported seeing a strange, yellow rectangular object in the skies, while other witnesses reported a rectangular formation of lights.
A few hours after those sightings were reported to have occurred, a low-flying object crashed into the waters of the harbor around 11:20 p.m. Units from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canadian Coast Guard, Royal Canadian Navy, and Royal Canadian Air Force were all dispatched to investigate the incident and recover what might have crashed into the waters. According to official reports, nothing was found. Today, the Canadian government largely ignores or disregards the incident.
Although there is a sweet gift shop at the site.
According to Canada’s Global News, the Cousteau grandchildren will carry out an underwater search operation to try and unravel this mystery along with a local diver who participated in the initial search operations 51 years ago. No word on if their grandfather’s yellow submarine will be involved. Will their grandfather’s legacy enable them to uncover any hidden truths from the bottom of the icy waters of Shag Harbour?
Scientists may have found the missing piece to the puzzle of the “Gaia hypothesis.” First proposed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the 1970’s, the Gaia hypothesis is an attempt to explain how Earth has managed to sustain life in the face of the multitudes of cosmic and terrestrial cataclysms that have befallen our pale blue dot throughout the approximately 3.8 billion years since our very first single celled ancestors started this whole mess.
Were pretty much surrounded.
Essentially, the Gaia hypothesis (named for the Greek goddess who personified our planet) states that organic life interacting with non-organic materials—like the rock that makes up Earth’s crust—creates conditions that allow life to persist. Another way to say it is that Earth functions just like any other multi-cellular organism, with self regulating processes and systems that make sure that the whole thing doesn’t fall to pieces the next time it gets smacked with a space rock or some of its constituent parts go rogue and start tearing up the joint.
The thought that we’re all cells in the larger organism that is our mother Earth is a beautiful idea, even if it does sound like something your buddy Kevin might say around a campfire at 4 AM. The problem with the Gaia hypothesis is that scientists had no testable ideas on how these processes of self-stabilization might work. In a paper published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, scientists at the University of Exeter and University of Southhampton say they have found a solution to the puzzle of the Gaia hypothesis.
“What if we’re, like, all part of one big thing? Like, we are the cells.”
Writing in The Conversation, co-authors of the paper Tim Lenton and James Dyke say that the key may lie in the concept of “sequential-selection”:
In principle it’s very simple. As life emerges on a planet it begins to affect environmental conditions, and this can organise into stabilising states which act like a thermostat and tend to persist, or destabilising runaway states such as the snowball Earth events that nearly extinguished the beginnings of complex life more than 600m years ago.
If it stabilises then the scene is set for further biological evolution that will in time reconfigure the set of interactions between life and planet.
So what about those destabilizing runaway states? How could that help explain the persistence of life? Well, sequential selection means that when something gets out of hand, Gaia has a way of taking out the trash, so to speak. Dyke and Lenton say that there’s a good chance spontaneous interaction works, but like all things, there are boundaries:
The chances of life and environment spontaneously organising into self-regulating states may be much higher than you would expect. If fact, given sufficient biodiversity, it may be extremely likely. But there is a limit to this stability. Push the system too far and it may go beyond a tipping point and rapidly collapse to a new and potentially very different state.
It is pretty arrogant to think we could kill the earth before the earth kills us, come to think of it.
So, if the Gaia hypothesis is correct then it’s not that we need to worry about killing the planet—Earth has been around for far longer and been through way worse than we can throw at it—it’s that we need to worry about angering a vengeful nature goddess who’s back we happen to be riding upon, lest she decides to toss us off. That’s a comforting thought.
People in cities around the world—from Taos, New Mexico, to Windsor, Ontario, to Blackburn, England, to Auckland, New Zealand—have reported hearing strange humming noises that have no obvious source. The hums are often compared to the sound of idling trucks, and for the people who can hear them, they can be maddening, causing nausea and insomnia.
City officials and scientists have investigated various potential causes of the hums, including industrial plants, electricity pylons, mating fish, and even mass hysteria. In the first episode of our new series “Sound Mysteries,” we look into the case of the mysterious hums that have vexed people across the globe.
Overal ter wereld worden deze mysterieuze geluiden gehoord. Waar komen ze vandaan?
Overal ter wereld worden deze mysterieuze geluiden gehoord. Waar komen ze vandaan?
Inwoners van steden over de hele wereld – van Taos tot Windsor en van Blackburn tot Auckland – horen vreemde brommende geluiden die ze niet thuis kunnen brengen.
De bromtoon wordt vaak vergeleken met het geluid van stationair draaiende motoren. Mensen die ze horen kunnen er helemaal gek van worden.
Wetenschappers hebben de mogelijke bronnen van de geluiden onderzocht, waaronder industriegebieden, elektriciteitsmasten, parende vissen en zelfs massahysterie.
Raadsel
In 1991 werd de bromtoon gehoord door inwoners van Taos in New Mexico. De overheid kon de bron niet achterhalen en uiteindelijk leek het geluid vanzelf weer te verdwijnen.
In 2012 werd het mysterieuze geluid ook gehoord door tienduizenden Canadezen. Wetenschappers slaagden er niet in het raadsel op te lossen.
Overal
Ondertussen dook het geluid overal ter wereld op: Schotland, Nieuw-Zeeland, Engeland en verschillende Amerikaanse staten.
Er werd zelfs geclaimd dat de geluiden werden voortgebracht door UFO’s. Anderen beweren dat HAARP verantwoordelijk is voor de bromtoon.
Het lijkt alsof er ieder week meer meldingen komen van mensen die mysterieuze wolken of vreemde zaken er direct omheen waarnemen.
Het laatste was het geval in Pakistan waar een aantal mensen getuige was van manoeuvres van een UFO achter de wolken.
Of het nu iets is dat UFO’s de laatste tijd vaker doen of dat mensen meer naar de lucht kijken, weten we niet, maar er zijn steeds vaker meldingen van mensen die vreemde zaken waarnemen rondom wolken.
Iemand in Sialkot in het noorden van Pakistan heeft een bijzondere opname gemaakt van een wolk in de lucht waar vreemde dingen gebeuren.
Het ziet er in eerste instantie uit als een normale wolk, maar dan verschijnt er plotseling een object dat met de beste wil van de wereld niet uitgelegd kan worden als onderdeel van een natuurlijke wolk. Je ziet ook allerlei rare bewegingen in die wolk.
Volgens ufoloog Scott Waring zien we hier een kleinere UFO aan het werk die druk doende is om een cloak (wolk) te creëren om het grote moederschip onzichtbaar te maken.
Hij zegt dat dit soort UFO’s speciaal zijn gemaakt om wolken te laten ontstaan, als dekmantel voor de grotere schepen.
Bovenstaande opname is vrij zeldzaam omdat je vaak niet kunt zien dat ze bezig zijn met het maken van de wolk en je alleen het eindproduct ziet.
En als je dan toch probeert je ruimteschip te verbergen in een wolk zoals ook in onderstaande video dan kun je die beter niet de vorm geven van een klassieke retro UFO, want dat valt behoorlijk op.
En hoewel de natuur soms ook bizarre wolken kan maken, lijkt het hier toch een beetje teveel op de bekende vliegende schotel vorm.
Degene die deze video heeft geupload is hoogst waarschijnlijk niet de maker omdat deze verschillende vrij bekende video’s van anderen op zijn kanaal heeft geplaatst. Daardoor zal de opname waarschijnlijk ook ouder zijn, maar desalniettemin zijn het mooie beelden van een wolk die allesbehalve natuurlijke lijkt te zijn.
Dan nog een andere variant en dat is een grote wolk (UFO) waar als het ware kleinere UFO's omheen dansen. Enkele jaren geleden hadden we daar een prachtig voorbeeld van in Friesland.
Het verhaal van die getuige volgt hierna en hou je ogen open en kijk omhoog want je weet nooit wat voor bijzondere dingen je daar soms kunt zien.
"Het is dinsdagavond 7 oktober en om 20.30 stap ik op de fiets vanuit Lytse Geast,(een dorpje een kleine tien kilometer ten zuid-oosten van Leeuwarden).
Mijn weg voert door de weilanden over een afgelegen pad en als het even kan zorg ik er voor dat ik niet in mijn eentje in het donker nog op pad ben. Vandaag ben ik al te laat en de laatste schemering gaat al over in duister.
Ik ben nog maar net buiten, of het begint te regenen en hard te waaien. Schuin voor me zie ik een paar flitsen, en het rommelt in de verte, precies tussen mij en Leeuwarden, waar ik naar op weg ben. Onweer dus, ook dat nog.
Voor me is een brede, langgerekte, vrij laag hangende wolk. Dat is waar ik de hemel op zie lichten. Er komen witte bollen uit de wolk. Twee gaan naar links en twee gaan naar rechts. De afstand van de ene bol tot de andere blijft steeds gelijk, alsof ze met een touwtje aan elkaar vast zitten. Ze bewegen langzaam.
Ik weet niet, wat het is, dat ik zie... zijn dit vliegtuigen? van de basis? En waarom zijn die geïnteresseerd in een onweerswolk? Ja, het zijn vast vliegtuigen. Het licht pulseert ook, zoals bij een vliegtuig. Flits aan, flits uit. Ja maar, bij een vliegtuig zie je dan altijd ook een rood licht aan en uit flitsen. dat is hier niet. Alleen wit. Melkwit.
De twee bollen rechts zijn verdwenen, die van links zijn opeens weer terug boven de wolk. Verbeeld ik me nu dat ze sneller pulseren dan zo net? Nee, dat verbeeld ik me niet. Het lijken wel sterren en het licht is niet meer zozeer wit, als wel koud. Zoals bij sterretjes voor kleine kinderen. Het zijn nu dus geen witte bollen meer, maar steeds sneller aan- en uit flitsende 'sterren'.
Dan zijn ze weg. Een paar minuten is er niks meer te zien en dan opeens zijn er wel twintig. Allemaal onder, boven, naast of uit de wolk. En allemaal flitsen ze aan en uit, nu in een heel hoog tempo. In een ijzig wit licht dat zo fel is dat het mij verblindt. Je zou zeggen dat ze er plezier aan beleven, zoals ze om en door de wolk heen duiken. Er in, er uit, om de wolk heen, achter elkaar aan... Net zo plotseling als ze verschenen zijn ze nu weer weg.
En komen niet meer terug. En ik ben bijna bij de eerste huizen van de stad. Het regent niet meer en de wind gaat ook liggen. Hoe lang dit al met al geduurd heeft? Twintig minuten à hooguit een half uur. Ik kan me niet voorstellen, dat er niet meer mensen geweest zijn die dit gezien hebben. Er was echt een hele lichtshow in de lucht.
Wat me achteraf ook nog wel frappeert, is dat er eigenlijk alleen die ene enorm grote wolk was, verder was er vrijwel geen bewolking.
Many UFOs Over Forest Area In France, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Many UFOs Over Forest Area In France, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: July 2018 Location of sighting: Lyon, France Three glowing UFOs were seen over France this week. Glowing balls are one of the there most commonly seen UFO...so much so that even I have witnessed 25 747 size balls in one sighting back in 1998. Its difficult to confirm that these UFOs are UFOs, since they are so far off. Similar but further off from what I saw that started above our apartment parking lot only 800-900 meters above us in Rapid City, South Dakota. Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
Looked at this video and thought it very strange. I stop thinking about it since I filmed it, but I went out with my wife and rolled my eyes at what I saw laughing. I said to my wife: look There are some UFOs. And when I start filming, I realized that it was not a joke. What do you think?
Metalic UFO Visits Space Station On Live Cam, July 13, 2018, Video, UFO Sightings News.
Metalic UFO Visits Space Station On Live Cam, July 13, 2018, Video, UFO Sightings News.
Date of sighting: July 13, 2018 Location of sighting: Earths orbit at Space Station
This UFO at the space station was caught on live cam this week and then NASA went to blue screen when they noticed it. Found by Jonnyy 5 of Youtube, its a great capture of the UFOs that frequently visit the International Space Station.
The coloration of the UFO indicates a dull grey metallic surface, and a shape that similar to the UFOs that were reported on CNN when the Shuttle Atlantis couldn't land because three or more round metallic UFOs were closely following it, disrupting the ability to land safely that day. I'll include the video below for you to decide. Scott C. Waring
Shuttle Atlantis 3 UFO orbs. I remember seeing this footage personally on CNN world news.
Pair Of Fireball UFOs Over Las Vegas, Nevada On July 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Pair Of Fireball UFOs Over Las Vegas, Nevada On July 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: July 11, 2018 Location of sighting: Las Vegas, Nevada, USA There two UFOs were caught by Steven Barone of Youtube over Vegas this week. In the video you can see several aircraft pass above and below the UFOs. That tells us the UFOs are flying and are very high up, not lights from a a car on a hill. Its my personal belief that these are Tall White ships, because the US gov gave a small allotment of land behind the old firing range at Nellis AFB for use to the Tall Whites a few decades ago. There is another option however. These ships hover in place and move slowly, as if the pilots are cautious and slow...learning the ropes of the controls, which makes me think these could be alien tech (TR3B) in the hands of new pilots at the USAF testing area. Either way, awesome video that boggles the mind. Scott C. Waring Steven Barone states: I shot this video from my backyard in the Summerlin area of Las Vegas, Nevada on the night of July 11, 2018.
Chris Mattmann, second from left, and students Eric Hachuel, Matheos Asfaw and Pablo Guidice, from left, conducted a data analysis of UFO sightings for an engineering course. (USC Photo/Caitlin Dawson)
Computer science master’s students sifted through thousands of documented UFO sightings to tackle one of the greatest unsolved mysteries: Are we alone in the universe?
Glowing objects near Mount Rainier, crashes in Roswell — for millennia, people have looked up to the skies and witnessed mysterious unidentified flying objects. But are these signs of alien civilizations or the result of earthly phenomena such as weather balloons, rocket launches or even the release of a popular sci-fi movie?
These are some of the questions that 60 USC computer science master’s students set out to answer last semester in “Content Detection and Analysis for Big Data,” an advanced content and data analysis class taught and developed by Adjunct Professor Chris Mattmann. A lifelong fan of all things space-related, Mattmann is a principal data scientist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and the director of USC’s Information Retrieval and Data Science group.
UFO sightings by students: any conclusive evidence of alien life?
Working in small teams, students in the class pored over thousands of documented sightings of UFOs to discover how factors such as movie releases and weather events influenced sighting patterns.
What did they discover? While they didn’t find any conclusive evidence of alien life visiting our planet, the students did unearth some interesting patterns hidden within the data.
We found sci-fi movie releases correlated with an increase in sightings. We also found that events like thunderstorms caused an uptick in reports.
Matheos Asfaw
“We found sci-fi movie releases correlated with an increase in sightings,” said Matheos Asfaw, who took the course in the spring. “We also found that events like thunderstorms caused an uptick in reports.”
Asfaw, who graduated in May and has since secured a full-time role with the Santa Monica software company Cornerstone OnDemand, was a member of Team 8, along with Eric Hachuel, Pablo Guidice, Bruno Mazetti and Teague Ashcraft. The team’s visualization and analysis of its research is available.
Analyzing a public database of 60,000 sightings
Although the topic of UFOs may raise a smile, make no mistake — exploring a mystery of this magnitude requires rigorous analyses involving massive amounts of unstructured data, including dates, locations and descriptions of sightings.
In fact, each team analyzed a public database of more 60,000 sightings, which they enriched with data from other sources during the semester. Finally, they used data visualization techniques to evaluate the data analysis tools and communicate their insights. Along the way, they learned important lessons about using data to paint a clearer picture of a complex problem.
“I came to USC for my master’s because I wanted to be a computer scientist,” said Hachuel, who earned his undergraduate in industrial engineering and is working at SpaceX this summer as a software flight reliability intern.
“I really enjoyed this class because it taught us the process a data scientist would follow in real life. It’s a dynamic process — it’s not straightforward and it can be frustrating. You have to really dig to find the answers, but that’s how you learn.”
Close encounters of the data kind
As a PhD student in computer science at USC, Mattmann, who graduated in 2007, relished the opportunity to work on projects with real-world implications. It was during this time that he co-developed the Apache Tika software used to extract data in the Panama Papers, exposing how wealthy individuals exploited offshore tax regimes.
Now he vows to bring the same practical experience to his own students by focusing on a different real-world topic with every course. In the past, his students have wrangled data about polar ice and the sale of illegal weapons online, both of which were real-life research projects Mattmann was working on at the time.
Most importantly, no matter their skill level on the first day, Mattmann hopes his students will leave the class prepared to tackle even the most unwieldy data.
“In this class, I’m hoping to expose students to real-world big data end-to-end: how to collect it, what to do with it and how to infer knowledge ethically and responsibly,” Mattmann said.
In addition to the UFO project, students also participated in weekly class presentations addressing diverse topics, including the ethical considerations of data collection, from the rise and fall of bitcoin to the Cambridge Analytica data leak.
“I want my students to do something new and relevant every time,” Mattmann said. “We have students from a broad range of backgrounds with a variety of different undergraduate degrees and many come in knowing very little about data analysis. But they leave well on their way to becoming masters of the tools.”
Data detectives
To extract as much meaningful information to analyze as possible, students scraped data from ufostalker.com, a UFO sighting website, and converted PDF files from archival sightings into a searchable format that could be added to the database. They also used the machine-learning software co-created by Mattmann to analyze images of UFO sightings to automatically group similar images.
Through this type of project-based learning, students learn to solve problems the same way a computer scientist would in the real world — including facing the fundamental challenges of dealing with large amounts of raw data.
“We learned the importance of cleaning the data early on in the process,” said Guidice, a member of Team 8.
“For example, we scraped data from an online forum about UFO sightings, but people were also posting ads in the same forum. If we hadn’t cleaned the data first, it could have led us to the wrong conclusions.”
The struggle was all part of the plan for Mattmann. By confronting this real-world data messiness, he aims to give students a taste of life as professional data scientists and prepare them to tackle data projects outside the classroom.
“In their future jobs, they may get asked to find similar images in a huge data set or combine data sets with different values —after this class they’re ready to do that,” said Mattmann, adding with a smile: “And who knows, maybe someday they’ll get asked to investigate UFOs.”
'Witnesses were very frightened': Survey of 2017 Canadian UFO sightings released
'Witnesses were very frightened': Survey of 2017 Canadian UFO sightings released
Edmonton, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver topped the list
The Canadian Press
There were 1,101 UFO sightings — an average of three a day — reported in Canada in 2017.
Hovering lights in the sky. Pulsing lights. A humming noise.
Objects shaped like spheres, discs, triangles and boomerangs.
The witnesses include ordinary folk, airline crews, a particle physicist and an airport's weather observer.
Alien visits? UFO survey says 1,101 sightings across Canada in 2017
Manitoba-based Ufology Research has released its most recent UFO sightings survey and analysis. Eight per cent of the 1,101 reported eye-witness accounts across Canada in 2017 could not be explained. Here are some other findings from the survey:
Sightings reported in 1989 (first year of survey): 154
Sightings reported in 2017: 1,101
Highest number of sightings: 2015 with 1,267
Top three provinces for sightings: Quebec (518), Ontario (241) and British Columbia (128)
Cities with most UFO sightings: Montreal (74), Toronto (57), Vancouver (46), Edmonton (29), Hamilton (28), Ottawa (26), Calgary (24), Winnipeg (9)
Average number of witnesses per sighting: 2
Typical length of sightings: 15 minutes
Shape of sightings: Boomerang, cigar, cone, cylinder, diamond, disc, fireball, irregular, line, oval, point source, rectangle, round, sphere, square, triangle
Source: Ufology Research
A survey released by Manitoba-based Ufology Research on Tuesday says there were 1,101 UFO sightings — an average of three a day — reported in Canada in 2017.
About eight per cent of those were deemed unexplainable.
"Many people continue to report unusual objects in the sky, and some of these objects do not have obvious explanations," says the survey.
"Many witnesses are pilots, police and other individuals with reasonably good observing capabilities and good judgment."
Quebec had the most sightings at 518. Nunavut had the fewest at two.
Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and Edmonton topped the cities with the most UFO reports.
Ufology Research takes data from all known sources, including UFO organizations, government files, direct witness reports, media and some internet posts. Its analysis takes into account location, types of encounters, reliability of witnesses and strangeness of sightings.
Some of the more bizarre unexplained reports from 2017 included:
Jan. 5, 6 p.m: Two people in French River, Ont., observed multiple colours for about 10 minutes. Several coloured "orbs"approached the witnesses and hovered before moving away. "Witnesses were very frightened."
March 15, 7:20 p.m: Crews on two separate airliners 65 kilometres northeast of Enderby, B.C., reported a bright, white strobing light above them. Radar indicated no other known aircraft were in the vicinity.
July 11, 3:12 p.m: One witness near Smithville, Ont., reported that a "shiny object with a raised dome moved slowly and silently over nearby trees ... It seemed to hover, then ascended rapidly out of sight."
Aug. 25, 9:50 a.m: Two people in Stewiacke, N.S., watched a dark triangular object for about three minutes silhouetted against the sky. It had three white lights at the points, an orange-red light in the centre and two strobe lights. "The object flew over the witnesses, making a humming noise."
Sept. 23, 8:30 p.m: Ten people watched as a red, triangular object approached Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Que., from the northeast and came to a stop above them. It was stationary for several seconds before its red lights intensified, then flickered, before it moved away.
Ufology Research notes the number of reported UFO sightings remains high. The 2017 figure compares with 1,132 in 2016 and 1,265 in 2015.
The group suggests several explanations, among them more secret or classified military exercises, people unaware of natural objects in the sky and easier reporting of alleged sightings because of advancing online technology.
Do aliens have different colors within their species like humans? Just as we have people with various skin tones, do extraterrestrials come in different ‘flavors’ too.
Alien abductees and experiencers have described all kinds of various looking entities. From little grey men, to tall white creatures, people have claimed to see just about every type of being from outer space.
The interesting part comes when you hear these same stories from those around the world, from all different cultures, who see the exact same thing.
The grey aliens seem to be the most common entities encountered. Within their groups, you find little 3—4 feet tall grey henchmen who do the actual kidnapping. These little guys are the ones who come and grab you then take you to the taller grey creature who is typically referred to as ‘doctor.’ The tall guy is the one who is in charge in the lab. Even stranger than that, people who have had these encounters have said that when taken to a UFO by the Greys, they have also seen giant praying mantis looking beings. And these mantis things appear to be in charge of all of the ship. In other words, the mantis are the brains behind the operation. At least that is how the majority of abductees describe it.
Interestingly, others portray the aliens as not being grey at all. Some entities seem to have skin like a mole, almost see through and very, very pale. Others have skin that looks completely white. The white creatures tend to be very tall and more humanoid. Still others refer to Reptilians who look exactly as their name sounds.
So where do the blue creatures come in?
There are a number of abductees who say that Greys are not grey at all, but they are bluish in color. They have the same characteristics of the traditional grey alien except that the color of the skin is more bluish. Perhaps this is a distinction that depends upon the observer. Basically, it is a matter of personal opinion and what an individual remembers. They may be one in the same.
But that is not the only type of alien who has this blue hue on their skin. Several abductees have seen blue aliens who are quite different from the traditional grey creatures we would recognize as ET’s. People say these tall Blues are more humanoid in appearance than Greys. Their facial features are similar to us. They tend to be taller than humans and bald. Their eyes are described as ‘pretty,’ unlike the Greys. It kind of reminds you of the entities from the movie Avatar. Perhaps there is more truth in that movie than we ever thought. Personality wise, the Blues come across as shy, kind of like a child who peeks out from behind his mother’s skirt. That is the way people describe them. They remain in the background, peeking out to watch. It seems they would rather observe than interact overall.
The Blues are said to be more empathetic. That is, they seem to be able to tune into human emotion better than Greys. In short, people who come into contact with the tall Blues tend to have better experiences than those who come across the little Greys. This could be a result of only finding Blue alien contact cases that were positive. Perhaps there are abductees out there who have had bad experiences with the tall Blues who simply have not spoken about it.
When abductees or contactees talk about conversations with the Blues, they say communication is indeed telepathic. A person can form a question for the ET’s in his mind and the aliens will answer before you fully form the question in your head. Like the Greys, however, they do not directly answer questions and are extremely evasive when dancing around providing actual answers. And they are not very good at ‘dancing.’ What I mean by that is that they fumble and provide stock mumbo jumbo answers to abductee questions.
People get answers like humans need to come together and hold hands and that if we all just get along, then all of our world problems will simply vanish. That isn’t to say that there is not some truth in that. Our minds are very powerful. Our thoughts can dictate our realities. If you have ever read a book about mind over matter, you will see how our thoughts effect our bodies. Positive beliefs matter. Fighting over petty things keeps us from focusing our energies on more important matters.
Yet, the kumbaya answer is an overly simplistic response to extremely complicated problems. In these cases, the aliens never give concrete answers that can be beneficial in a very specific way. For example, let’s look at human health. These entities haven’t provided any cures for any diseases that can be given to more than one person. There are examples of abductees who after ET contact are healed from serious illnesses. While it is great for that one person, how about the rest of the people with these terrible diseases? Tough cookies for them I guess.
While contact with Blues seems more positive, there just isn’t a lot there to say that the Blues are totally benevolent either. They are still involved in abductions. People are taken against their will. Medical procedures are done to these people without permission. Their memories are tampered with. Doesn’t sound too kind to me.
One thing that is consistent in ALL abduction and contact cases is the alien entities expressing how superior they are to us. Interesting when you think about that. While these beings claim to be far advanced, way more advanced than us, they don’t provide any meaningful help to humans. Messages from them always include something like save the oceans or heal the Earth. This is a no-brainer. Anyone with any sense knows we need to have clean air and water to live. Not exactly Earth-shattering news. There’s never a cure for cancer or a way to heal MS included in their superior advice. It is all generic bumper sticker instruction that truly doesn’t do much for us. At the same time, they are using humans for their own purposes. They are taking from us; not helping us. In the long run they may be assisting humanity, but for those suffering now, they are virtually useless.
Apologists for these beings claim that aliens are merely trying to help our species along by ‘tweaking’ human beings and waiting for evolution to take over. While that may be a fine goal, it ignores terrible human suffering in the present time. By taking that approach, the beings profile themselves. While they may be superior in some ways, they are stunted in other ways. They seem to lack basic empathy and the ability to understand and be impacted by human suffering. This is a flaw.
These entities can do complex medical procedures on humans and heal them instantly in order to get genetic material and/or place implants in the human subjects. In doing so, they have demonstrated that they can help us. They just won’t. Let me put it to you this way. Imagine having a human friend who could 100% cure your child of brain cancer but refused to do so, telling you he had his own plan for humans. Would you say ‘well, he has his reasons,’ or would you scream at him and come to the conclusion that this isn’t your friend at all?
I know people have very different views on this subject. People who have positive experiences will vehemently defend ET’s. Even certain researchers will do so. And for those people who have these good contacts, their personal encounter and result is benevolent. That just isn’t the case for everyone. A large number of abductees suffer from their contact, both mentally and physically. They get sick afterward. They lose their jobs and families. Contact is anything but benevolent for them.
This reminds me of serial killers I studied. I interviewed 25 serial killers and mass murderers and worked hundreds of serial homicide cases. Sadistic serial murderers told me that sometimes they would be kind to people in their lives. One serial offender actually volunteered at a soup kitchen during his killing spree. Another donated meals to the homeless. When I asked them why they would do good deeds while at the same time slaughtering people, their response was always the same. They decided when they were good, and they decided when they were bad. In that way, they were like God as they determined who lived and who died. It was sheer narcissism and arrogance, coupled with psychopathy. Kind of reminds me of the aliens.
Instead of being forthright, open, and honest, ET’s use trickery, violence, and deceit to achieve their goals. They kidnap, torture, and then mess with the minds of abductees afterward. Sorry people, that’s not friendly.
There appear to be several different races of ET’s visiting our planet. They may look different and operate in various ways. However, none of them are particularly open about their goals. Very little help is provided, if any at all. At the same time, they are not killing all of us, so bravo to them for that.
There are countless examples of UFO phenomena around the globe which are not able to be explained away. When you put all the abductee stories together with UFO cases and physical evidence, the information will send a shiver down your spine. There is something out there, and some of it appears to be hunting humans.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Fascinating Discovery:
Fascinating Discovery: "Ghost Particle" Heralds A New Era In Astronomy
From the depths of space, billions of particles patter to the earth every second. Now researchers have identified a source of high-energy neutrinos for the first time - and solved a puzzle of the century.
Researchers find the extragalactic source of ghost particles
"We still do not know where they come from," says Elisa Resconi from the Technical University of Munich. It is five years since researchers used a large detector at the South Pole to detect high-energy neutrinos from deep space. Now for the first time, they have also found a source of ghost particles. It's in a distant galaxy.
Neutrinos hardly interact with their environment and possess almost no mass. They travel billions of light years through the universe and penetrate galaxies, stars, and planets almost without a trace. The physicists around Resconi have now taken advantage of this special feature.
▶ Particles with enormous energy
"Our goal is actually to learn more about the origin of cosmic radiation," explains Marek Kowalski, head of neutrino astronomy at the German Electron Synchrotron (Desy) in Hamburg. Some particles of cosmic radiation carry enormous energy and scientists have been puzzling for over a hundred years where in space they have their origin.
The problem: Cosmic radiation - mainly protons - is charged and is therefore strongly deflected on its way to Earth. "You can't understand where it came from," says Kowalski.
The situation is different with neutrinos: they travel to Earth together with cosmic radiation, but do not change direction. If you know its origin, you also know a source of cosmic radiation.
Here Are 11 Of The Oldest Cities Ever Built On Earth
Here Are 10 Of The Oldest Cities Ever Built On Earth
When you think about the oldest settlements and cities on Earth, a few of us are aware of the fact that some of these cities date back to times before history was even written.
Depending on the definition of a city, we can discuss a number of ancient settlements that could rightfully compete for the title of the oldest city on Earth.
If we take a look what textbooks have to say, a city is usually defined as being a large populated urban center of commerce and administration, ruled by a system of laws, while regulated with means of sanitation.
And while this may be a really basic definition of a city, other factors such as population, number of buildings, level of government, the presence of walls and fortification, and the density of buildings/population.
In ancient times, a city was mostly described as an urban center of dense population, featuring a specific pattern of buildings.
Professor M. E. Smith of Arizona State University writes in The Sage Encyclopedia of Urban Studies: The demographic definition, based on the concepts of Louis Wirth, identifies cities as large, dense settlements with social heterogeneity”.
Based on the above definitions, I’ve gathered a list of 11 of the oldest cities erected on Earth.
1. Damascus is arguably the oldest of them all
Damascus is now the capital of the Syrian Arab Republic and is considered the countries largest city. Damascus has an extensive history and according to scholars, the early stages of the city date back to around 10,000 BC.
The ancient city of Damascus was recognized as a significant cultural, commercial and administrative center for thousands of years.
2. Jericho, nearly as old as Damascus
The ruins of the city of Jericho
According to reports, archaeologists have successfully excavated the ruins of as many as twenty successive settlements in Jericho, dating back more than 11,000 years. The city is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on Earth, and the first people settled there as early as 9,000 BC.
3. Eridu—the oldest city on Earth, according to the Sumerian King List?
We start off with Eridu, located in modern-day Iraq. This city was long considered the earliest city in southern Mesopotamia and is still today argued as being the oldest city in the world. Experts argue that Eridu could mean either mighty place of guidance place.
It is mentioned in the Sumerian King List: “In Eridu, Alulim became king; he ruled for 28800 years. Alalngar ruled for 36000 years. 2 kings; they ruled for 64800 years. Then Eridu fell and the kingship was taken to Bad-tibira.”
The ancient city of Eridu was considered the birthplace of humanity.
According to the Sumerian King List Eridu was the first city in the World. The opening line reads,
When kingship from heaven was lowered, the kingship was in Eridu.
In Sumerian mythology, Eridu was said to be one of the five cities built before the Deluge occurred. The city is believed to have been founded in 5400 BC.
4. Varanasi India—an ancient city founded by a God
India is the birthplace of many incredible things. Rightfully, India holds one of the most incredible histories in the world. According to Hindu Legend, the ancient city of Varanasi is at least 5,000 years old and is considered one of the first cities to appear on Earth. Despite legends suggesting the city dates back more than 5,000 years, evidence of habitation goes back around 3,000 years.
According to Hindu mythology, Varanasi was founded by the god Shiva.
5. Byblos—From where the English word ‘Bible’ is derived from
Byblos is considered by many authors cradle of many civilizations. This ancient city is considered the oldest of Phoenicia and is believed to have been continuously inhabited for at least 5,000 years, although signs of occupation date back even longer.
The English word Bible is derived from Byblos, as the city was an important port where papyrus was exported from.
The city was founded as Gebal by the Phoenicians, and its current name was given to the city by the Greeks.
6. Uruk—the Legendary City of Gilgamesh
Gilgamesh statue at Sydney University (Samantha/Flickr/Creative Commons)
Uruk rightfully competes in the list as one of the oldest cities on Earth. Founded by the king Enmerkar, the Sumerian King List mentions a king of Eanna before him, the epic Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta relates that Enmerkar constructed the House of Heaven for the goddess Inanna in the Eanna District of Uruk.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh builds the city wall around Uruk and is king of the city.
Archeologists have discovered multiple cities of Uruk built atop each other in chronological order.
Uruk XVIII Eridu period (c 5000BC); the founding of Uruk
Uruk XVIII-XVI Late Ubaid period (4800–4200 BC)
Uruk XVI-X Early Uruk period (4000–3800 BC)
Uruk IX-VI Middle Uruk period (3800–3400 BC)
Uruk V-IV Late Uruk period (3400–3100 BC); The earliest monumental temples of Eanna District are built
Uruk III Jemdet Nasr period (3100–2900 BC); The 9 km city wall is built
Uruk II
Uruk I
7. Aleppo—currently the second largest city in Syria
The ancient City of Aleppo is a treasure-trove of history. The city has barely been excavated by experts since the modern city occupies its ancient city. According to reports, the ancient city of Aleppo was inhabited since around 5,000 BC, as excavations in Tallet Alsauda have shown.
The ancient city was of great importance and evidence of that is that fact that Aleppo appears in historical records much earlier than Damascus.
The first record of Aleppo comes from the third millennium BC, in the Ebla tablets when Aleppo was referred to as Ha-lam. Alexander the Great took over the city in 333 BC.
8. Arbil—an ancient city a few have heard of
Locally called Hawler by the Kurdish people, the ancient city of Arbil is the modern-day capital of Iraqi Kurdistan and is one of the largest cities in modern-day Iraq. According to archaeological evidence, human settlement at Arbil (aka Erbil) can be traced back to around 5,000 BC, making it one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements of the world. Erbil was an integral part of Assyria from around 2050 BC, becoming a relatively important city during the Old Assyrian Empire.
9. Athens—the birthplace of Western civilization
The ancient city of Athens is considered as being not only the birthplace of western civilization but the homeplace of philosophy and critical thinking.
The city of Athens has been continuously inhabited for around 7,000 years while the oldest human occupation in the surrounding area dates back between the 11th and 7thmillennium BC.
10. Argos—home of the Pheidonian measures
According to experts, the ancient city of Argos was inhabited continuously since at least 5,000 BC. In Greek Mythology, Argos was the son of Zeus. The city is famous for the introduction of measures that set the standards for an accepted system.
The city has been cycling between village and city status for 7,000 years. According to scholars, the recorded history of the city begins in the latter 1st millennium BC.
11. Crocodilopolis—yeah that’s a name and it is most likely the oldest city in ancient Egypt
Crocodilopolis or if you wish Shedet, or more commonly Faiyum was founded around 4,000 BC.
The ancient city was homeplace of the worship of the Crocodile God Sobek. The ancient city was established on the Nile river, located southwest of Memphis.
WHY NASA'S JAMES WEBB TELESCOPE WILL STUDY GAS GIANTS BEFORE LOOKING FOR ALIENS
WHY NASA'S JAMES WEBB TELESCOPE WILL STUDY GAS GIANTS BEFORE LOOKING FOR ALIENS
The team expects to find water, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide on WASP-79b, a prospective habitable planet
In the latest addition to NASA's toolkit in its search for habitable planets larger than Earth, called “super-Earths”, is the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Launched in April 2018, its main objective is to scan regions of the cosmos just outside our solar system for planets that could support life.
At the slightest blip towards a potential lead that TESS discovers,NASA's space observer — the James Webb Telescope — has seen more than one delay in its estimated launch. It was recently committed to launching by the end of 2021, and will be NASA's on-call eye to peek into what TESS deems as a life-supporting atmosphere.
This image made available by NASA shows an illustration of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Scheduled for an April 2018 launch, the spacecraft will prowl for planets around the closest, brightest stars. These newfound worlds eventually will become prime targets for future telescopes looking to tease out any signs of life.
(NASA via AP)
What Webb and TESS are primed to do
The missions lined up for the Webb Telescope are a mix of studies to give NASA new insight into space objects TESS finds, and to test the capabilities of Webb’s science instruments. Since observing small exoplanets with thin atmospheres like Earth's will be challenging for Webb, astronomers will target easier, gas giant exoplanets first, according to an official statement.
The foremost struggle in the hunt for exoplanets is that the light from a star is very bright, bright enough to dwarf a faint light from potentially habitable planets nearby. Till NASA gets a better understanding of exoplanets to overcome this challenge, its scientists have armed their exoplanet project with a temporary fix.
The Webb Telescope will be primed to look for planets orbiting red dwarf stars, which are the smallest of stars weighing between 7.5 to 50 percent of our sun's mass. Since these red dwarfs are smaller and dimmer through a telescope, astronomers believe it could tease out a signal from a star-orbiting planet with relative ease. Red dwarfs are also the most common stars in our galaxy, which improves the odds of locating an orbiting exoplanet capable of supporting life.
An artistic rendition of the James Webb Space Telescope.
Image courtesy: NASA
How the Webb Telescope works
When a planet crosses in front of, or transits, its host star, the star’s light is filtered through the planet’s atmosphere. Molecules within the atmosphere absorb certain wavelengths, or colours, of light. By splitting the star’s light into a rainbow spectrum, astronomers can detect those sections of missing light and determine what molecules are in the planet’s atmosphere.
The project team has already zeroed in on a prospect. WASP-79b, a planet the size of Jupiter about 780 light-years away from Earth will be first of many targets for the Webb telescope. The team that will study the telescope's observation expect to find and quantify water, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide on WASP-79b. NASA also thinks it could host previously unknown molecules, which they see as a likely finding in exoplanet atmospheres.
“We have two main goals. The first is to get transiting exoplanet datasets from Webb to the astronomical community as soon as possible. The second is to do some great science so that astronomers and the public can see how powerful this observatory is,” said Jacob Bean of the University of Chicago, a co-principal investigator on the transiting exoplanet project.
Astronomers manning the Webb telescope intend to observe the entire orbit of the exoplanets it surveys to map its temperature, clouds, and chemical variations along its width, a NASA statement said.
Planets orbiting their stars in very close proximity tend to be what scientists called 'tidally-locked'. In such cases, one side of a planet is permanently facing the star it orbits, with the other side faces away. This is akin to the case of our Moon, one hemisphere of which always faces the Earth. In the case of planets tidally-locked with stars, anyone observing it through a telescope would the cooler face of the planet. On longer observation, the planet will show more of its hotter, day-facing surface as it orbits the star.
“We have already seen dramatic and unexpected variations for WASP-79b with Hubble and Spitzer. With Webb we will reveal these variations in significantly greater detail to understand the physical processes that are responsible,” said Jacob Bean of University of Chicago, currently a co-principal investigator on the exoplanet project.
“TESS should locate more than a dozen planets orbiting in the habitable zones of red dwarfs, a few of which might actually be habitable. We want to learn whether those planets have atmospheres and Webb will be the one to tell us,” Kevin Stevenson of the Space Telescope Science Institute, another co-principal investigator on the project, was quoted as saying.
He added, “The results will go a long way towards answering the question of whether conditions favourable to life are common in our galaxy.”
Un Ovni a survolé le module lunaire de la Mission Apollo, dans les Archives de la NASA
Un Ovni a survolé le module lunaire de la Mission Apollo, dans les Archives de la NASA
Un Ovni a survolé le module lunaire de la Mission Apollo, dans les Archives de la NASA
Cette sonde extraterrestre se déplace rapidement, très difficile à capturer mais au ralenti, c’est facile.
Date d’observation:1968-1970 Lieu d’observation: En orbite autour de la Lune
Mise à jour juillet 2018: Ce message a été supprimé par le gouvernement américain et je le rediffuse à nouveau aujourd’hui. Heureusement j’avais une copie de sauvegarde.
Scott C. Waring: J’étais en train de traîner hier soir et j’ai trouvé cette vieille vidéo de la NASA. Il y avait quelques anomalies qui ne ressemblent pas aux erreurs du vieux film. Je l’ai interrompu plusieurs fois jusqu’à ce que je puisse voir l’objet et, à ma grande surprise, il ressemblait à une sonde extraterrestre tridimensionnelle. J’ai mis les captures d’écran et la vidéo au ralenti et j’y ai aussi mis les séquences originales. Je sais que c’est un vieux truc, mais cet OVNI n’a jamais été signalé auparavant et il a été filmé entre 1968-1970. C’est la première fois que des humains voyaient la face cachée de la Lune. J’ai remarqué la surface métallique et sa forme étrange et cristalline me laisse croire qu’elle a été confectionnée biomécaniquement, ou d’une machine-cyborg qui a grandi dans un labo.
A Rare Cosmic Collision Might Let Scientists Calculate the Precise Age of the Universe
A Rare Cosmic Collision Might Let Scientists Calculate the Precise Age of the Universe
By Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Write
An artist's depiction of a neutron star and a black hole colliding.
Credit: A. Tonita, L. Rezzolla, F. Pannarale
A so-far unseen celestial collision could be astronomers' best bet for figuring out just how quickly the universe is expanding.
Right now, physicists have two ways of measuring that expansion rate, and both are quite precise — but their answers don't match. That's been frustrating, since the number, known as the Hubble constant, feeds calculations like the ones scientists use to estimate how old the universe is.
And that's why they're looking for a third method to pin it down. A pair of scientists based in Massachusetts think the trick will be catching a glimpse of the violent phenomenon of a black hole and a neutron star colliding. [Did a Neutron-Star Collision Make a Black Hole?]
"Black hole-neutron star binaries are very complicated systems, which we know very little about," Salvatore Vitale, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,said in a statement. "If we detect one, the prize is that they can potentially give a dramatic contribution to our understanding of the universe."
So far, scientists haven't observed the collisions of a mixed pair, only of binary black holes and of binary neutron stars. Most of those observations have included only black holes, so the collision can only be detected using gravitational waves. Astronomers know they also need a light signal to calculate the Hubble constant, which leaves them looking for either pairs of neutron stars or black hole-neutron-star binaries.
But when physicists tried to calculate the Hubble constant from the data they gathered during August's neutron-star merger — the first ever observed — they couldn't be very confident in the result. That's because neutron-star collisions are a mess, shooting out material asymmetrically and making it difficult for scientists to figure out just how far away a signal is coming from.
Switch out one of those neutron stars for a black hole and the mess becomes more manageable, giving physicists the location they would need to recalculate the Hubble constant. But scientists think these mixed collisions are rarer, so Vitale and his colleague wanted to check whether the benefit of the more precise location outweighs the handicap of the mergers being less common.
That work was detailed July 12 in an article published in the journal Physical Review Letters and posted to the pre-print site arxiv.org.
According to their estimates, just one mixed merger should let physicists calculate the Hubble constant as effectively as combining data from 50 different neutron-star collisions.
Now, all we have to do is wait for a lucky strike.
This space trash disk was made by heating and compressing a sample example of trash that astronauts could produce. These disks are being tested for possible use in shields guarding against space radiation.
Credit: NASA
As we explore and reach farther out into the cosmos, what will we do with all of our trash?
For astronauts aboard the International Space Station, storage space is extremely valuable and limited — but even astronauts have garbage. In addition to taking up precious space, this garbage creates potential physical and biological health and safety hazards for the astronauts. On the space station, astronauts currently squeeze their garbage into trash bags and, for temporary periods of time, store up to 2 metric tons of trash on board. They then send the trash out on commercial supply vehicles, which either reach Earth or burn up in reentry.
But what will happen to these tons of trash when astronauts are much farther from Earth? The farther we travel into the solar system, the more complicated it will be to effectively manage and dispose of trash. NASA thinks that the key to this big space-trash problem could be addressed with technology that compacts and processes trash, according to a new statement from the agency. [Gallery: Visions of Deep Space Stations for Exploration]
This space trash disk was made by heating and compressing a sample example of trash that astronauts could produce. These disks are being tested for possible use in shields guarding against space radiation.
Credit: NASA
In an effort to ensure astronaut safety and find an improved trash solution, NASA has sent out a call to U.S. companies to create prototype compactors and trash-processing systems. The agency is looking for innovative designs that could not only compact trash but also remove hazardous components, and process and remove pieces that could then be repurposed or recycled.
Resources are limited on the space station, and they would become even more so on a deep-space mission with no resupply. So, NASA is hoping that this technology will also be able to help astronauts reuse materials more effectively.
Proposals that look to fill this void will have a variety of NASA technologies to inspire them. Previously, NASA scientists designed a heat melt compactor, which recovers water from trash using heat transfer and compacts the trash; and "trash to gas" technologies, which convert trash into methane gas that could be used as a rocket propellant. Researchers have even developed trash-compacting technology that could help astronauts turn trash into a space radiation shield.
A Russian cargo ship drifts from the International Space Station after undocking in 2007. NASA has sent out a call for U.S. companies to develop a new and improved way to deal with trash in space for future, deep-space missions.
Credit: NASA TV
The search for the next great trash solution will occur in two parts, according to the statement. First, NASA will select companies that will go on to create a concept for a system that compacts and processes trash. In this first phase, the companies will go through design reviews with NASA and complete ground demonstrations of their prototype. In the second phase, the companies will build a flight unit that could be tested on the space station by 2022.
NASA has been very public about its intention to not only revisit the moon, but also push farther out into the solar system and explore deep space. Effective trash-processing and -compacting technology will maximize space on future spacecraft, increase crew safety and make the most of the limited resources on board.
It took three of the world’s largest radio telescopes to get a better picture of what the YE5 asteroid looked like, but when NASA finally caught a glimpse of the planetoid, the agency was shocked. While working to improve NASA’s asteroid detection and tracking capabilities, scientists discovered that YE5 is a double asteroid, a rare instance of two equal-mass objects orbiting each other.
The near-Earth asteroid was first discovered by the Morocco Oukaimeden Sky Survey in late 2017, but its properties remained a mystery for months. On June 21, YE5 came within 3.7 million miles of Earth, giving scientists an opportunity to get up close and personal with the asteroid. It was then that NASA’s Goldstone Solar System Radar (GSSR) first learned YE5 was a binary asteroid, making it the fourth equal-mass binary near-Earth asteroid ever detected. NASA released the rare footage of the phenomenon on Thursday.
Artist's concept of what binary asteroid 2017 YE5 might look like. The two objects showed striking differences in radar reflectivity, which could indicate that they have different surface properties.
To collect images of the binary asteroid, NASA scientists at the GSSR teamed up with the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and researchers at the Green Bank Observatory (GBO) in West Virginia. These two observatories were able to create a bi-static radar configuration in which Arecibo transmits the radar signal and Green Bank receives the return signal.
Initially, these observations revealed two distinct lobes that appeared to be joined. It wasn’t until a later rotation that scientists could identify a gap between them. By June 26, both Goldstone and Arecibo had independently confirmed that YE5 does consist of two separate objects that revolve around each other every 20 to 24 hours.
Scientists estimate that among near-Earth asteroids larger than 650 feet, about 15 percent are binaries with one larger object and a much smaller satellite. However, equal-mass binaries like YE5 are much rarer, as this is only the fourth scientists have been able to document. It might be awhile before NASA can collect more details on YE5’s physical attributes, seeing as it won’t come within that close proximity to Earth again for another 170 years.
Footage from this brief encounter with YE5 is not only rare but important for scientists to better understand binary systems and their formations. In the short span of time that YE5 came within 3.7 million miles of Earth, NASA was able to collect radar and optical observations to estimate both densities in the double asteroid, giving scientists clues to its internal structure and earliest formation. YE5’s binary nature was more than a surprise to scientists, but a game changer for how scientists will investigate double asteroids.
Image copyrightBBC / THOMAS SCHEIDLImage captionRon Mallett built a device that illustrates principles he believes could be used to build a time machine
Travelling in time might sound like a flight of fancy, but some physicists think it might really be possible. BBC Horizon looked at some of the most promising ideas for turning this staple of science fiction into reality.
Ron Mallett has a dream: He wants to travel in time.
This isn't mere fantasy - Mallett is a respected professor of physics.
"I think of myself as being an ordinary person with a passion, and my passion is the possibility of time travel," he says.
Prof Mallett has wanted to build a time machine for most of his life. His passion, he explains, can be traced to a tragic event early in his life.
Ron's father, a heavy smoker, died of a heart attack at the age of 33 - when Prof Mallett was just 10 years of age. Ron was devastated and withdrew into his books.
Image captionRod Taylor starred in the 1960s adaptation of HG Wells' classic novel, The Time Machine
"The cover caught my attention, but it was when I read the inside, and it said: 'Scientific people know very well that time is just a kind of space and that we can move forward and backwards in time, just as we can… in space'.
"When I read that I said: 'This is wonderful!'."
Prof Mallett explains: "If I could build a time machine, then I could go back into the past and see my father again and maybe save his life and change everything.
Image captionProf Mallett's father Boyd inspired his love of science and reading
Time travel may sound far-fetched, but scientists are already exploring several mysteries of nature that could one day see Ron's dream fulfilled.
Albert Einstein thought the three dimensions of space were linked to time - which serves as a fourth dimension. He called this system space-time, and it's the model of the Universe that we use today.
But Einstein also thought it was possible to fold space-time, creating a shortcut between two distant locations. This phenomenon is called a wormhole, and it can be visualised as a tunnel with two openings, each emerging at different points in space-time.
Wormholes might exist naturally in the cosmos; indeed, scientists in Russia are trying to use radio telescopes to detect them. But using wormholes for time travel won't be straightforward.
Image copyrightALAMYImage captionArtwork: A wormhole can be thought of as a kind of tunnel creating a shortcut between separate points in space-time
The nearest ones could be many light-years away. And even if you could get to them and then survive the journey through them, there's no guarantee where you'd end up.
But some physicists have speculated that we might be able to conjure up bespoke wormholes at some point in the future - though we currently have no idea how.
Physics also predicts that wormholes would have a habit of collapsing, crushing whatever's inside them. If a time machine is ever to exploit them, we'd have to find a way to stop this inconvenient feature.
The mysterious phenomenon of dark energy might provide a solution. In the 1990s, astronomers found that the expansion of the Universe was speeding up, rather than slowing down as might have been expected.
"Something out there is having an 'anti-gravity' effect - it's pushing rather than pulling. We don't know what that is, but it makes up most of the Universe. We call it dark energy," says Prof Tamara Davis, a cosmologist at the University of Queensland in Australia.
Image captionProf Tamara Davis says wormholes might offer a way of travelling in time
A wormhole will only work for time travel if its "mouth" can be held open for long enough that it allows something to travel through it. That requires something called negative energy, which doesn't really exist in the everyday world.
But the dark energy that permeates the cosmos fits the bill - if we can figure out what it is, we might be able to prop open a wormhole long enough to go in one end and out the other.
"We don't know whether we are able to make a wormhole, whether that's technically within our capabilities… But who knows what a future human civilization is going to be able to do," says Prof Davis.
"Technology has advanced so rapidly that maybe space and time themselves are something that can come under our control."
Wormholes exist at the more speculative end of physics, offering one approach to travelling in time. But Ron Mallett has another.
He has drawn up plans for an actual time machine, and his concept was inspired by a book he read at age 12 about Albert Einstein's equations.
Prof Mallett has built a table-top device that illustrates principles he thinks could be used to build a real, working time machine. First, lasers are used to generate a circulating beam of light. The space inside this "ring laser" should become twisted, "like stirring a cup of coffee", the University of Connecticut professor explains.
Image captionProf Mallett's theoretical work suggests our normally linear timeline could be twisted into a loop
Because space and time are intimately connected, warping space should also warp time. Prof Mallett's theoretical work has shown that, given enough laser intensity in a small enough space, it should be possible to alter the normally linear timeline we all inhabit.
"If space is being twisted strongly enough, this linear timeline is going to be twisted into a loop. If time all of a sudden is twisted into a loop that allows us the possibility of travelling into the past," says Ron Mallett.
However, in order to make it work, the concept would require vast amounts of power and a way of shrinking everything to a microscopic scale.
But once we have a time machine, using it successfully will require a detailed understanding of time itself.
The generally accepted view is that the Universe is an unchanging "block" of space-time; this idea arises directly from Einstein's equations.
"What's important about the model is the idea that the past, present and future are all equally real. So you can think of everything that ever did exist, does exist or will exist as all somehow being out there in space-time," says Dr Kristie Miller, director of the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney, Australia.
"The dinosaurs are all out there somewhere in the past doing dinosaur stuff, we're all here now and all of the future is out there somewhere in space-time too."
Image copyrightSPLImage captionThe "block" theory of space-time arises directly from Albert Einstein's equations
One way to visualise the block model is to think of other places in time as being like other places in space: "We are here in Sydney, but there are other people located in Singapore and London. Those places are perfectly real, it's just that we aren't at them," says Dr Miller.
This is good news for the budding time traveller, because it suggests there is nothing to stop us from swapping where we are now for some other place and time.
But, importantly, it also implies that the past, present and the future are already written, so that if we were to travel back in time, we wouldn't be able to alter it. To take an oft-quoted example, we shouldn't be able to kill someone's grandparent so that their descendant will cease to exist in the future.
The block model treats our everyday concept of time as an illusion, a way that humans rationalise reality. But Prof Lee Smolin, from the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, disagrees. He believes that the passage of time is a real and fundamental phenomenon.
Image copyrightBBC / EUAN SMIT
Image captionProf Lee Smolin believes the concept of time passing may be a real one, rather than an illusion created by humans
"Time travel is probably impossible," he says. "If what's real is the present moment and the past is only real in the sense that there are memories and records of it in the present, and the future is still to exist… there's nowhere to go."
His colleague Prof Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute, thinks the weird world of quantum physics could be crucial to answering this question.
This area of physics emerges at very small scales, where the rules of classical physics we learnt about in our school textbooks break down. For example, in the quantum world, it might be possible for a particle to be in many places at once.
"I think it's clear to me that there is some probability of us going backwards in time," he says. "In quantum physics, nothing is impossible - particles travel through walls!"
Prof Turok explains that time travel remains a distant hope because "no one really has any plausible idea of how to go backwards in time right now". But he adds: "One should never say never, because some clever person will come along and tell you how to break the rule."
We kunnen een echte tijdmachine bouwen. Professor legt hier uit hoe tijdreizen werkt
We kunnen een echte tijdmachine bouwen. Professor legt hier uit hoe tijdreizen werkt
Sommige natuurkundigen zijn van mening dat tijdreizen echt mogelijk is. Eén van hen is Ron Mallett, een gerespecteerde professor.
Mallett heeft een droom: hij wil een tijdmachine bouwen. De natuurkundige van de Universiteit van Connecticut haalde zijn inspiratie uit het boek The Time Machine van HG Wells.
In dat boek staat: ‘Wetenschappers weten dat tijd een soort ruimte is en dat we vooruit en achteruit in de tijd kunnen gaan, net zoals in de ruimte’.
Wormgat
“Als ik een tijdmachine kon bouwen, zou ik naar het verleden gaan om mijn vader te zien en misschien zijn leven te redden en alles te veranderen,” zei Mallett tegen de BBC.
Albert Einstein dacht dat de drie ruimtelijke dimensies gelinkt waren aan de tijd, die fungeert als een vierde dimensie. Hij noemde dit systeem ruimtetijd.
Einstein dacht ook dat het mogelijk was om ruimtetijd te vouwen, waardoor je in een oogwenk van de ene plek in het heelal naar de andere zou kunnen reizen. Dit fenomeen wordt ook wel een wormgat genoemd.
Wormgaten komen mogelijk van nature voor in de kosmos. Russische wetenschappers speuren ernaar met behulp van radiotelescopen.
Tegelijkertijd
Sommige natuurkundigen stellen dat we in de toekomst zelf wormgaten kunnen creëren. Je kunt alleen tijdreizen via een wormgat als je de ‘mond’ lang genoeg open kunt houden. Daar heb je negatieve energie voor nodig, die niet zomaar voorhanden is.
Donkere energie in het heelal kan een wormgat theoretisch gezien lang genoeg openhouden om door de tijd te reizen.
Mallett heeft al plannen gemaakt voor een werkende tijdmachine, maar daar heeft hij wel grote hoeveelheden energie voor nodig.
Het universum wordt gezien als een ‘blok’ ruimtetijd, waarbij het verleden, heden en de toekomst tegelijkertijd bestaan.
Dinosaurussen
Dus alles wat ooit bestond, bestaat en zal bestaan, bevindt zich in de ruimtetijd, stelde dr. Kristie Miller van de Universiteit van Sydney.
“De dinosaurussen doen ergens hun ding, wij zijn nu hier en de toekomst bevindt zich ook ergens in de ruimtetijd,” zei ze.
Je kunt het volgens haar als volgt zien: jij bent hier in Nederland, maar er zijn ook mensen in Londen en Singapore. Die plekken bestaan ook, maar jij bent daar nu niet.
Er zullen de komende tijd weer veel mensen vertrekken richting Frankrijk en wie weet kunnen ook zij straks vreemde zaken waarnemen boven de Franse velden.
Terwijl Israël grote plannen heeft om volgend jaar een ruimtevaartuig op de maan te laten landen, duiken er beelden op van een grote vloot schepen die vanaf de maan vertrekt.
De Fransman Sebastien Monnet is op 9 juli 2018 samen met zijn vrouw op pad wanneer ze wat vreemde zaken waarnemen in de lucht.
De opname is gemaakt in de buurt van Lyon en voor zover wij dit kunnen beoordelen lijkt hij echt te zijn.
Monnet maakte eerst een grapje tegen zijn vrouw en zei: kijk, daar zijn een stel UFO’s, maar begon toch maar te filmen.
Later besefte hij dat het helemaal geen grap was, maar dat daar echt een drietal objecten in de lucht hingen. In het commentaar dat Monnet zelf onder de video heeft geplaatst zegt hij dat hij er op een gegeven moment tegen het einde van de video rechtsboven een Mirage te zien is van de Franse luchtmacht.
Van Frankrijk gaan we naar onze maan, waar ook de meest wonderlijke zaken gebeuren.
Wat te denken van een vloot ruimteschepen die de maan lijkt te verlaten?
Ze schijnen ook hitte af te geven, waardoor het dan solide objecten moeten zijn.
In het tweede deel van de onderstaande video zie je vier UFO’s die de maan naderen en daar daadwerkelijk lijken te landen.
Bekijk hier de beelden en oordeel zelf of het een vloot ruimteschepen is of iets anders.
Of dit soort opnames echt zijn of niet weet je natuurlijk nooit zeker, maar iets dat wel zeker is, is dat Israël nog dit jaar een missie naar de maan gaat ondernemen.
Het is zoals ze zelf zeggen om onderzoek te doen, maar zeker weten doe je (ook) dat nooit, want voordat je het weet hebben we een centrale bank op de maan.
Just recently, I wrote an article here at Mysterious Universe on the matter of sex with robots. The article was prompted by a long-lost (or, I assumed it was long-lost) interview I did years ago with the late Mac Tonnies. Well, I have now found another interview I did with Tonnies, but on a completely different issue. This one – specifically the original audio version, which finally surfaces again – was undertaken the year before he died. The subject: Tonnies’ theories which led to the 2010 publication of his book, The Cryptoterrestrials. Tonnies suggested that alien abductions, the abilities of the assumed ETs to breathe our air, and their concerns about nuclear war were all due to one fact: the aliens were from right here. And not from faraway worlds.
Tonnies told me a great deal in the interview (portions of which he related to me, verbatim, down the phone direct from his original Word document, parts of which were taken from his blogging days): “After devouring countless books on the UFO controversy and the paranormal, I began to acknowledge that the extraterrestrial hypothesis suffered some tantalizing flaws. In short, the ‘aliens’ seemed more like surreal caricatures of ourselves than beings possessing the god-like technology one might plausibly expect from interstellar visitors. Like [UFO researcher] Jacques Vallee, I came to the realization that the extraterrestrial hypothesis isn’t strange enough to encompass the entirety of occupant cases. But if we’re dealing with humanoid beings that evolved here on earth, some of the problems vanish.”
Tonnies continued: “I envision the cryptoterrestrials engaged in a process of subterfuge, bending our belief systems to their own ends. And I suggest that this has been occurring, in form or another, for an extraordinarily long time. I think there’s a good deal of folkloric and mythological evidence pointing in this direction, and I find it most interesting that so many descriptions of ostensible ‘aliens’ seem to reflect staged events designed to misdirect witnesses and muddle their perceptions.”
During the course of his research into the Cryptoterrestrial theory, Tonnies spent a great deal of time addressing the matter of alien abductions. For those who aren’t fully aware of the nature of the phenomenon, a bit of background data is required. Regardless of whether people believe or don’t believe in the reality of the alien abduction phenomenon, there is no doubt that the vast majority of people have heard of it. It was, however, a phenomenon that was pretty much unknown until September 19, 1961. Yes, there were a few, earlier cases, but, for the most part, they were not publicized until after September 19. So, what, exactly is so significant about that particular date? The answer is that it was the date of a now-historic UFO event which occurred to a married couple from New Hampshire. They were Betty and Barney Hill.
Such was the phenomenal reaction to the story of Betty and Barney Hill, it prompted author John Fuller to write a book on the subject, titled The Interrupted Journey – an appropriate title, indeed – and which was published in 1966. Since then, the alien abduction phenomenon has grown and grown and spread like wildfire. We may never know for sure how many people believe they may have been kidnapped and experimented on by black-eyed, dwarfish beings from far away galaxies. After all, not everyone wants publicity – and particularly so not publicity of a very controversial type. In that sense, there may be as many silent abductees as there are publicly visible ones.
To demonstrate the sheer level of experiences on record, it is worth noting that after Whitley Strieber’s 1987 alien abduction-themed book, Communion, was published Strieber and his late wife, Anne received letters from the public in no less than six figures. Other books, such as Budd Hopkins’ Missing Time and Dr. John Mack’s Passport to the Cosmos, have added to the controversy and given it more publicity. But, what if there was a far more down to earth explanation for the alien abduction phenomenon? That question brings us back to Mac Tonnies:
“I regard the alleged ‘hybridization program’ with skepticism. How sure are we that these interlopers are extraterrestrial? It seems more sensible to assume that the so-called aliens are human, at least in some respects. Indeed, descriptions of intercourse with aliens fly in the face of exobiological thought. If the cryptoterrestrial population is genetically impoverished, as I assume it is, then it might rely on a harvest of human genes to augment its dwindling gene-pool. It would be more advantageous to have us believe we’re dealing with omnipotent extraterrestrials rather than a fallible sister species. The ET-UFO mythos may be due, in part, to a long-running and most successful disinformation campaign.”
Tonnies then turned his attention to the claims of Antonio Villas Boas, a Brazilian lawyer who claimed that, in 1957, as a young man and while living on his family’s farm at the time, he was abducted onto a UFO and had sex with a surprisingly hot-looking space-babe. Tonnies said of Villas-Boas’ story:
“After intercourse, the big-eyed succubus that seduced Antonio Villas Boas pointed skyward, implying a cosmic origin. But the mere fact that she appeared thoroughly female, and, moreover, attractive, belies an unearthly explanation. Further, one could argue that the clinical environment he encountered aboard the landed ‘spacecraft’ was deliberately engineered to reinforce his conviction that he was dealing with extraterrestrials. If cryptoterrestrials are using humans to improve their genetic stock, it stands to reason they’ve seen at least a few of our saucer movies. As consummate anthropologists, they likely know what we expect of ‘real’ extraterrestrials and can satisfy our preconceptions with a magician’s skill. Their desire for our continued survival, if only for the sake of our genetic material, may have played a substantial role in helping us to avoid extinction during the Cold War, when the UFO phenomenon evolved in our skies; much to the consternation of officialdom.
“Commentators regularly assume that all the Contactees [a term for those who claimed encounters with human-like aliens, chiefly in the 1950s] were lying or else delusional. But if we’re experiencing a staged reality, some of the beings encountered by the Contactees might have been real and the common messages of universal brotherhood could have been a sincere attempt to curb our destructive tendencies. The extraterrestrial guise would have served as a prudent disguise, neatly misdirecting our attention and leading us to ask the wrong questions; which we’re still asking with no substantial results.”
Tonnies told me, when word got out that he was working on his book, The Cryptoterrestrials: “The cryptoterrestrial theory has met with mixed reactions. Some seem to think that I’m onto something. Most UFO researchers are, at best, extremely skeptical. Others think I’m parroting John Keel’s ‘superspectrum’ [Keel was the author of the acclaimed 1975 book, The Mothman Prophecies], a variation on the ‘parallel worlds’ theme that in turn shares memes with Jacques Vallee’s ‘multiverse.’ Both ideas suggest that we somehow occupy dimensional space with our ‘alien’ visitors, doing away with the need for extraterrestrial spacecraft while helping explain the sense of absurdity that accompanies many UFO and occupant sightings. Keel and Vallee have both ventured essentially ‘occult’ ideas in cosmological terms; both the ‘superspectrum’ and the ‘multiverse’ require a revision of our understanding of the way reality itself works. But the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis is grounded in a more familiar context.”
He explained: “I’m not suggesting unseen dimensions or the need for ufonauts to ‘downshift’ to our level of consciousness. Rather, I’m asking if it’s feasible that the alleged aliens that occupy historical and contemporary mythology are flesh-and-blood human-like creatures that live right here on Earth. Not another version of Earth in some parallel Cosmos, but on Earth. While I can’t automatically exclude the UFO phenomenon’s ‘paranormal’ aspects, I can attempt to explain them in technological terms. For example, I see no damning theoretical reason why ‘telepathy’ and ‘dematerialization’ can’t ultimately be explained by appealing to cybernetics, nano-technology and other fields generally excluded from ufological discourse.”
Finally, there was this from Tonnies: “The cryptoterrestrial hypothesis manages to alienate champions of the extraterrestrial hypothesis and those who support a more esoteric, ‘inter-dimensional’ explanation. It offers no clear-cut reconciliation. It does, however, wield explanatory potential lacking in both camps.”
Personally, I thought that Tonnies’ theory was well-argued (he admitted, however, that it was just his”meditation on” the scenario). But, the idea of some kind of ancient race hiding from us, living deep underground, and passing themselves off as ETs, stretches matters to the absolute extreme. Could it really be??? I say “No.”
As vast and empty as it is, the universe is actually full of radio signals. Not necessarily the ones we tend to think of when we hear the word “radio,” but radio waves nonetheless. Radio waves are a type of electromagnetic radiation similar to light or X-rays, but just with a much longer wavelength. Radio waves can be generated from a variety of naturally occurring sourcesout in space, making them one more way for us to understand our mysterious universe.
Still, these deep space radio waves offer a fascinating glimpse into our solar system and beyond. Just this week, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory released a series of audio recordings generated from radio waves beaming back and forth between Saturn and its moon Enceladus, a prime candidate for possible life in our solar system. The audio recordings are quite eerie and somewhat unsettling, sounding like something out of a David Lynch film soundtrack or like a slowed-down Brian Eno album.
Recordings of these radio waves were taken by the Cassini spacecraft.
In reality, the audio file was actually extremely sped up from 16 minutes to 28.5 seconds as the wavelengths of these radio waves are quite long. They’re not audible from anywhere in the airless vacuum of space nor from either Enceladus or Saturn; they have to be converted into audio by scientists the same way a radio receiver converts radio waves into Katy Perry here on Earth.
The University of Iowa’s Ali Sulaiman was one of the researchers who published a study of these radio waves. According to a JPL press release, Sulaiman says these radio waves are among the first known radio “duets” between a planet and one of its moons:
Enceladus is this little generator going around Saturn, and we know it is a continuous source of energy. Now we find that Saturn responds by launching signals in the form of plasma waves, through the circuit of magnetic field lines connecting it to Enceladus hundreds of thousands of miles away
Naturally occurring intergalactic radio waves previously made headlines throughout 2017 as several deep space sources were observed to send out powerful rapid fire bursts, leading to a flurry of speculation that these bursts might be an attempt at communication on behalf of an intelligent alien race.
Discovering alien communications via radio is a common theme of science fiction.
However, further observations revealed these fast radio bursts are likely caused by an exotic type of neutron star with an “extreme magneto-ionic environment” or some other astronomical gobbledygook.
Drone Caught A Fastwalker Speeding Over Trollstigen Norway
Drone Caught A Fastwalker Speeding Over Trollstigen Norway
On July 1, 2018 a drone accidentally recorded a UFO or more likely a fastwalker moving at an incredible speed over Trollstigen, Norway.
“Fastwalker” is a term used by NORAD and branches of armed forces to describe unidentified aerial phenomena moving and/or changing directions at high speed far beyond what current aerospace technology is capable of.
Usually these objects are observed in space and it is assumed that these objects only move in space but it is quite possible that fastwalkers also move in our atmosphere.
The Norway footage shows the possible fastwalker, which has the same resemblance to a fastwalker in space and it also moves at such an incredible speed that is not perceptible to the naked eye, in normal speed and in extra slow motion speed.
I added color to make it easier to see, because psychology says black and white photos often confuse the mind on first glance. I found this in the Mars Global Surveyor MOC images. This particular image seems to depict many trees on the Mars surface. These trees are similar to what you see when using Google Earth and looking over a forest, but this is Mars and it should be impossible, but here it is, right in front of us and with the link to the official NASA site as proof that it exists. Obviously there are large bushy trees on Mars. There is no geological formation that could explain these features. These are living, growing organisms on the surface of Mars. Now why would NASA want to hide trees? Because its a form of life and where there are trees, there are animals and insects. Thus, NASA finds this information to be athreat to national security, because other countries would race to get to Mars if they knew it was more habitable than once thought. NASA does not want competition to get to other plants. Did you hear NASA criticising Elon Musks SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket last week? They did saying it was just too small to be useful, but it didn't seem to discourage Elon Musk at all. Scott C. Waring
NOTE PETER2011:
I have decided to publish this article on my blog. I don't know if it's true or fake news, but as a forum ii try to give the most complete information as possoble. Judge yourself
Closest Ever To the Actual UFO As We Know It Caught On Video
Closest Ever To the Actual UFO As We Know It Caught On Video
UFO enthusiasts online claim that a video showing a glowing orb shooting across the Bolivia sky is the closest actual UFO they have seen.
The video starts with a sight of a small ball over the clouds as it seems to move away from the Earth. However, seconds into the footage, the bright orb apparently explodes, making a tail of super bright light as it somewhat falls to the surface.
Many viewers have praised the cameraman for uploading the video, calling it the closest thing to an actual UFO.
Others believe the video shows some sort of rocket but also does not.
Several others cannot decide if it is alien or not unless extraterrestrials use a field that requires an exhaust.
Conspiracy theorists have been uploading strange photos and videos that allegedly support their beliefs in the existence of intelligent alien beings.
But for some enthusiasts, nothing comes closest to the latest video when it comes to the level of evidence.
They say that the unidentified flying object in the video is the closest ever to the actual UFO.
WINSTON CHURCHILL'S X-FILES: Wartime PM ordered UFO PROBE but 'covered up results'
WINSTON CHURCHILL'S X-FILES: Wartime PM ordered UFO PROBE but 'covered up results'
WINSTON Churchill ordered a special team to investigate a strange rise in flying saucer sightings....but the results of the inquiry were covered up, claim conspiracy theorists.
Declassified documents have revealed the wartime leader built a special Whitehall team, known as the Flying Saucer Working Party, to look into a strange increase in UFO sightings.
An official report said the numerous sightings had earthly explanations, including the cause of strange objects over US capital Washington DC which were picked up by several military radar.
But, conspiracy theorists claim the report involved the cover up of a sighting in the UK by RAF staff.
The theory is fueled by an alleged deathbed confession by Churchill’s personal bodyguard who spoke of these bizarre events which involved two RAF pilots reporting encounters with mysterious aircraft, known as “foo fighters”, as WWII drew to an end.
Foo fighters was the term used by Allied aircraft pilots in World War II to describe UFOs and mysterious aerial phenomena such as balls of fire that followed fighter aircraft during battles in the skies over Europe and the Pacific.
Military chiefs assumed the foo fighters were really secret German weapons sightings, but they are said to have continued after the end of the war and even into modern times, causing many to dispute this.
So what triggered Churchill's involvement?
In July 1952, US Air Force fighter jets had to be scrambled on two consecutive weekends after radar detected several unidentified objects flying in a restricted zone over the White House – causing public panic.
Although in the US, Churchill wanted to know more and about any implications for the UK.
GETTY
Churchill ordered a UFO inquiry, but covered up some of the results, it is claimed.
On July 28, 1952, Churchill sent his Secretary of State for Air, Lord Cherwell, a memo, requesting investigations into what happened in the US and the wider issue.
The note, now called the “Churchill Memorandum,” the then PM wrote: "What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to?
“What can it mean? What is the truth?
“Let me have a report at your convenience."
Lord Cherwell launched the Flying Saucer Working Party to find answers.
The top secret group had actually been set up two years earlier to look into home grown UFO sightings.
NATIONALARCHIVE
The memo when Churchill asked for the UFO inquiry.
GETTY
Churchill allegedly had one of his famous outbursts over the need for secrecy
This should be immediately classified since it would create mass panic among the general population and destroy one's belief in the church.
Winston Churchill
It was unable to completely rule out “an aircraft of extraterrestrial origin, developed by beings unknown to us on lines more advanced than anything we have thought of”.
However, it explained it was more likely the sightings were down to normal aircraft, balloons, birds or other natural phenomena, optical illusions, deliberate hoaxes – or “psychological delusions”.
But years later, in 1999, Churchill's involvement in the great UFO debate resurfaced.
The grandson of a retired RAF officer wrote to the MoD, inquiring about an incident in which Churchill allegedly banned the reporting of a UFO encounter off the east coast of England.
The RAF officer – who was said to be Churchill’s personal bodyguard – had allegedly confessed on his deathbed that an RAF reconnaissance plane was returning from a mission over occupied Europe when it was shadowed by a “metallic UFO” off Cumbria.
It was claimed the crew took pictures of the object – which was said to “hover noiselessly” by the plane.
At the time, when the mysterious encounter was brought to Churchill's attention, he ordered that details remain classified for at least 50 years – and could only be released EVER following a review by a future PM.
NATIONALARCHIVE
A British Government report into flying saucer sightings.
Churchill was allegedly terrified that news of the possibility of aliens could destroy faith in God and cause unrest and mass panic.
The British bulldog is alleged to have shouted: "This should be immediately classified since it would create mass panic among the general population and destroy one's belief in the church.”
Conspiracy theorists claim the establishment must have since hidden or destroyed all records of the incident.
There is no record of the event, or Churchill's orders, and the MoD says all UFO files from before 1967 have been destroyed.
Jason Chapman, who has written several books on the Churchill Memorandum, said: “The MoD has demonstrated in the past that it is capable of covering up a great many incidents.
“I believe it is possible that a former high ranking military official would have knowledge of UFOs.”
The 46-year-old, who works for British defence contractor BAE Systems, said: “Someone, somewhere knows something.
“It’s definitely not our world leaders – such information is way above the pay grade of the Prime Minister.
“Perhaps sat at the back of the House of Lords there’s a retired general, a relic left over from the Cold War, who has information which could prove there’s a cover-up.”
United Kingdom X-Files | W. Churchill UFO Cover-Up | Calvine UFO FIles | Declassified UFO Documents
Shocking: Secret files reveal British spies spent years trying to catch UFO to build superweapons
Shocking: Secret files reveal British spies spent years trying to catch UFO to build superweapons
Declassified files reveal Govt was concerned Soviet Union of China had a UFO and were using its secret to develop super-fast warplanes.
After all these years, a report called UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) in the UK Air Defence Region is part of three files running to more than 1,000 pages set to be released after being declassified.
A secret dossier has now emerged to reveal that British spies spent half a century to catch a UFO so they could use its alien technology to build superweapons.
Declassified files reveal the Government was concerned that the Soviet Union of China had impounded a UFO and were harvesting its secret to develop super-fast warplanes.
The cache of documents reveal between 1947 to 1997, intelligence services ran two UFO desks - one was a public-facing desk where people could phone in sightings. The real work was carried out in the background by spies set to investigate.
A secret dossier reveals British spies spent half a century trying to catch a UFO so they could use its alien technology to build superweapons
(stock image)
The UFO desks ran until 1997 by which time word had come from Whitehall that security services 'investigating 'X files stuff such as alien abductions' had become a diversion from their main duties.
A review was ordered to confirm the desk should be shut down, but also to determine whether anything had been learned over the years which could be useful to military.
After all these years, a report called UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) in the UK Air Defence Region is part of three files running to more than 1,000 pages set to be released after being declassified.
They were held back from the UFO records earmarked for transfer to the National Archives as part of the Open Government project from 2008 to 2013.
But earlier this year, a complete set of redacted copies was sent to Dr Clarke ahead of their release to the National Archives, which is imminent.
The documents reveal the RAF expressed great interest in finding an UFO to help them come up with an innovative way of beating enemies during the Cold War.
Declassified files reveal the Government feared the Soviet Union or China had impounded a UFO and were harvesting its secrets to develop super-fast warplanes
(stock image)
Another air force commander feared the enemy may have already seized a UFO, writing: 'Monitor all reports in case in the future the hitherto unknown/not understood underlying phenomena is being exploited by another nation.
'An actual - or potential enemy - could develop a flying device with the characteristics that these phenomena seem to have.'
Spies were given given tips on what to look out for when identifying foreign objects. The unnamed commander wrote particular attention should be paid to any aircraft behaving 'like a UFO'.
The Truth is out There: We Look to the Skies with UFO Expert James T. Abbott
The Truth is out There: We Look to the Skies with UFO Expert James T. Abbott
By The MALESTROM
Throughout the known history of the world, there have been accounts of strange sightings and happenings in our skies. From the ancient Indian Vedic texts that describe flying crafts to phantom ships seen in the air in Roman times and strange phenomenon observed over Basel, Switzerland in the 16th century. In more recent memory UFO sightings, often along with footage of varying quality, come to the fore in their thousands each year. Many of these accounts are rubbished and dismissed, usually without good explanation, however, when such accounts come from police officers or pilots, they inevitably carry more weight and as such are harder to ignore.
The study of these unidentified flying objects has become a fascination for many, one man, James T. Abbott, has spent decades researching the phenomenon. In his book The Outsider’s Guide to UFOs he looks at 40 of the most compelling cases from over the past 70 years. We spoke to him recently to talk about the changing attitude to the subject we’re seeing from governments, his hopes for pushing the boundaries of scientific research to get more answers and just what makes a credible UFO case.
The MALESTROM: Let’s start with your definition of the term UFO…
James Abbott: It’s quite simple really, a UFO is an unidentified flying object, that’s all we know about them. We don’t know what they are, we don’t know where they come from or whether they’re an atmospheric phenomenon or whatever, so we start from pretty well zero in relation.
TM: What sparked your interest in UFOs?
JA: I think it was Donald Keyhoe’s book The Flying Saucers Are Real, and then I went on to read Edward Ruppelt’s great book on unidentified flying objects and it expanded from there. It started as a hobby and then it got to the stage recently four or five years ago when I was getting a bit fed up of all the bickering that was going on in the general environment of UFOs, the ‘I saw something, no you didn’t, yes I did’ sort of thing. I think the more you look into it the more you find that it is a serious phenomenon, it’s not something that can be explained easily and there are some fairly compelling pieces of circumstantial evidence around the subject and it all builds up into what I would call an ‘a priori case’ for some deeper research to be done. Governments have tried of course, but they’ve tended to look at it from a defence point of view only.
TM: How are official attitudes to the subject changing?
JA: I think it’s very much undercover at the moment or under the surface, lets put it that way. There is the evidence that there is a slight change in official approaches to the subject, particularly in America of course with the Department of Defence releasing those videos and accounts from the US Navy fighters. That I think is a bit of an earthquake in the whole phenomenon because the Americans have generally not revealed anything at all of what’s being kept in secret vaults inside the Pentagon and the release of that video for me is quite telling. It says the United States government doesn’t know what these things are, haven’t got a clue and they’re saying effectively ‘look, here’s some evidence, see what you all think about it’ to see if someone can come up with some reason.
TM: What do you make of that UFO footage?
JA: I think it’s incredible footage, not only is the footage incredible but the statement by the pilot David Fravor is stunning, he effectively said he’d have like to have flown one of those things. If it was just electronic you might think it’s something the electronics were picking up and shouldn’t have done, but then we’re talking about state of the art kit here, these are F-18 fighter planes, so if they were being fooled by clouds or electronic discharges from the atmosphere then I think the Americans would have been a bit embarrassed and not released the footage.
TM: The concept of UFOs isn’t still generally excepted though is it?
JA: That’s right and the media don’t help of course, for understandable reasons, they have to protect themselves. It was interesting when USA Today ran the story on the US Navy sightings they had a picture of a little green man on the page with a caption by it reading ‘was this the pilot?’ So they always protect themselves by keeping their tongues very firmly in their cheeks. I think that’s fair enough, it’s not an easy subject to grapple with, it’s really pushing the boundaries of belief where you think there’s maybe something behind it that’s not of this planet. I suspect there are parts which are of this planet, and maybe parts that aren’t.
TM: It’s seriously naive for us to think that things outside of our field of perception don’t exist isn’t it?
JA: Oh, it’s incredibly naive. I don’t think a lot of people realise quite how far physics is uncovering an extremely weird universe we never believed would be possible and it’s just not logical, it’s not rational, we’re looking at Quantum physics where particles can be in two places at once, where particles can be entangled over incredible distances and communicate faster than the speed of light. Scientific American ran an article recently in which they were talking about the probability of black holes being two dimensional and about the universe expanding forever, all of these things are pushing science closer to the weirdness that is the UFO phenomenon.
TM: In your book, you look extensively at accounts, some very early, but there are even earlier ones back to the Indian Vedic texts and later, accounts of UFOs aren’t new are they?
JA: No it’s not new at all. The only problem with the stuff that’s pre late 19th century is there are very few ways we can sensibly interrogate it. We just have to take it as a possibility, as skeptics quite rightly say it could be anything. My view is we should be looking at modern stuff, even with the stuff over the last 70 years, there’s no way of actually getting at the truth of whatever might have happened, or what might not have happened. So Rendlesham 1980, what actually happened? Was there a landing? Was there something that landed in the woods that was seen and touched and walked around? Or was it somebody’s practical joke?
Photograph of Suffolk Police inspecting the supposed landing site in Rendlesham Forest
All of these things are not susceptible of proper scientific inquiry and what I think we need to do is have a primary scientific inquiry which starts from the point of view of saying there is an anomaly, there is a priority case for more research and therefore lets set something up. Bearing in mind of course that a lot of this stuff is going to be beyond current science, way beyond it. Even the atmospheric stuff, ten years ago we weren’t even close to understanding what upward striking lightning was, or blue jets, or sprites. Well, now science is taking those as real and saying these things can happen and they’re a danger to future hypersonic aircraft and all the rest of it. The bottom line is we simply have masses of stuff out there that we don’t understand and our current science can’t tell us a lot about it. We’re trying to get primary data but we need to push the boundaries of science as well.
TM: Just how much credible evidence do we have of these unexplained objects?
JA: It depends on your definition of credibility. If you take the police approach to this and you say I’m a policeman and somebody has just robbed a store, you’ve got one witness and the witness says the guy was seven foot tall with an athletic build with blonde hair. Well, the police might or might not believe one witness, but if twenty other witnesses come forward and say yes that’s exactly what he was like, a very weird bloke, and he did this and he did that, then the policeman starts to think right there’s something to that.
I think credibility depends on what you’re looking at and how you assess the evidence, so that’s why in the book I’ve taken 40 of what I consider to be the most credible cases, the ones that were cited by police officers, pilots and so on, that’s not to say that an 18-year-old waiter from the local hotel that has wandered outside one night and has seen a glowing globe in the sky doing weird things, that’s not to say he’s wrong, he might well be right, but I do think we should be starting with people who are trained observers who have seen things are reporting them in a dispassionate way.
Airline pilots do, military pilots tend to do. I mean going back to Farnborough in 1952 you’ve got Hubbard the test pilot who saw an object in the sky and got laughed out of town, he went on to be a very eminent guy but he never withdrew that claim, he said yeah that’s what I saw, and it was doing weird things. It was floating in the sky like a sycamore leaf he said. When guys like that are seeing things I believe that they’re credible.
TM: Do you think some of these UFOs are military testing?
JA: I’m absolutely certain that at some time over the last 70 years people have seen advanced aircraft of some sort and have got excited thinking they were looking at interplanetary crafts. It’s not that that’s impossible, it’s simply that in every single case that we look at that is not capable of being explained in any other way, logic seems to imply that all of them will have been some advanced aircraft. And the things that they are seen doing are not the type of things Earthbound aircraft can do. It’s exactly what Commander Fravor was saying about that US Navy sighting, it was doing things no Earthbound craft could possibly do, descending from 80,000 feet to 50 foot above the water in seconds and stopped dead, then went away just as quickly. Those sort of accounts from people who are used to seeing things in the sky also backed up by instrumentation and the USS Princeton’s own radars, they’re the ones that really make you think. We can’t keep ignoring all these things just because we laugh at little green men.
TM: Why do people see so many different shapes? Although there are many of the same reoccurring shapes like cylinders and orbs…
JA: That’s exactly the way people have seen things for at least 100 years. And each generation has described them in terms they understand best. In the late 19th century it was airships and then coming into WWII we had orbs and the foo fighters and so on, then after the war people saw discs in the sky, Kenneth Arnold spotted those things flying very strangely. Again if Kenneth Arnold was fooling everybody and wanted to make a story seem real about interplanetary spaceships why tell a story about things bouncing along like pebbles on a pond? The circumstantial evidence itself is pretty weak, but when you link all these things together, if you were a police officer you’d say, ‘yes it could well have been’.
Kenneth Arnold with a drawing of his UFO sighting
TM: You mentioned the word dispassionate earlier, many of these accounts are simply by people doing their civic duty and informing the authorities in a measured manner, like the case of Henry White in Clapham (1914)…
JA: Precisely. He saw something, they were in the middle of a very nasty war and he reported it. It could well have been ball lightning or whatever else the skeptics claim, the problem is with all of these explanations you have to be able to scientifically show how it exists for minutes at a time and so far they’ve been able to show ball lightning might exist and that it can exist for seconds, but nothing more than that.
Ball lightning
TM: I suppose the big problem with the view from the scientists perspective is they just don’t believe in the possibility of other life out there, again slightly nieve…
JA: It’s incredibly naive. For scientists to discount something just because it doesn’t fit into our current scientific paradigm is stupidity, not just naivety, that’s not what they’re supposed to do, scientists are supposed to say, ‘look here’s something we don’t understand, let’s try and understand it.’ If that means that whatever they’re trying to understand gets explained in natural terms as new meteorological or physical phenomenon then that’s fine by me, I’ve got no problem with that. If you can explain all these sightings in natural terms then that’s great, we can all go away and do our own day job, but at the end of the day, I think it’s incumbent on scientists to put their money where their mouths are.
They make a big deal about being dispassionate, about being objective, not being swayed by subjective arguments, but here is a phenomenon that I can show has been going on at least 70 years and with massive numbers of observations every year, more than 2 million since the turn of this century. And thousands of observations each year probably will be inexplicable in scientific terms and they turn their backs on it saying it can’t possibly exist. That’s the rocks from the sky issue.
TM: Which of your accounts of sightings have you found most interesting?
JA: I love them all, they’re all very compelling but I think the Lonnie Zamora one is particularly interesting because it also has a pathos and a tragedy to it in the sense that he was just an ordinary copper who was driving a car one day and saw a flash and as was his duty he went to investigate. What he saw was something that not only shook him to the core but made him a laughing stock for probably the rest of his life. The poor bloke was vilified by just about everybody apart from his very close friends. Now I find the Lonnie Lamora one very compelling, a lot is said by the reaction of people afterward. If they go around giving studio interviews at TV stations getting paid I tend not to be too convinced. But if they do not make money out of it, like the Trents and Charles Holt of the Rendlesham case their attitude tells a lot. They’re hurt, bemused, baffled and they say ‘yes I saw it, but please tell me what it was, if it wasn’t something incredibly weird then please tell me what it was.’ To be honest, that’s what scientists should be doing, they should be able to turn round and say ‘yes we understand that, it’s this.’ Or ‘no we don’t understand and we’re going to keep investigating.’ That to me is a respectful and proper way to do science.
Farmer Paul Trent’s famous UFO photo from over McMinnville, Oregon
TM: Have any recent cases caught your eye?
JA: The best one is the American Airlines one over Arizona recently where once again, and this is the point, sometimes airline pilots see things in the sky, but when other airline pilots in different planes see the same thing that’s when you start to sit up and notice. This case is particularly compelling on that basis. There are huge numbers of things, there was a lad in Exmouth last year who took a video of what appeared to be a triangular formation of lights over the city. He was a bus driver and he saw this object or thing in the sky, there’s a video online which is incredible really as you get a sense of his shock and surprise and he’s really annoyed at himself for not having a proper camera with him, he’s only got his cell phone. And the footage is convincing, it looks like what he said was happening and there were other witnesses that said the same thing.
Those sorts of sightings where people are seeing things and then being completely baffled by the whole thing, just as you’ve got hundreds of reports on UFO sights all over the world of people saying ‘I saw this, I don’t know what it was, please explain it to me’, they’re not talking about seeing little green men sticking their heads out of the window or being abducted by aliens, it’s ordinary people going about their everyday lives and they see things and then report them, to me that’s convincing, that’s a witness. They may be right, they may be wrong in that they’re seeing a natural thing like a planet, a star or so on but it really is incumbent on us to say these things are the following, this explains all of them.
And the fact that governments keep returning to this subject and keep setting up investigations like Condign back in the late 1990s in Britain, it means governments keep thinking there must be something to it, but what is it? And they set their scientists on it and they come back and say they can’t explain it. The Condign report came up with all sorts of possible explanations for UFOs, but the key word is ‘could’, it’s always ‘could be’, there’s never any lasting proof and there’s never a sense that they’ve covered all the possible options.
TM: The problem is there’s still such a stigma around the subject. You defined the term UFO very clearly at the start of this interview, but the mention of the word conjures up in many that people who believe in such things are crazy…
JA: I think that’s two generations of ridicule and general disbelief of the subject. I get it exactly the same if I tell a friend I’m interested in UFOs, they say ‘what! How on earth did you get into that?’ I have a very good friend who lives in Northern Island who read the book and she came back to me and said she hadn’t realised there was so much to it, she still didn’t know what there were and still had her doubts, but it does open the doors a little bit and I hope that’s what this book will do.
TM: What did you come across when researching probably the most famous UFO incident, the one that took place in Roswell? Did you find much credibility in that? There’s that credibility word again.
JA: I think the word credibility is a very important one, it’s all we’ve got at the moment until we get decent scientific results and information. Are the witnesses credible? Is what happened credible? What happened was incredible, but that’s UFOs if you look at all the stories. With Roswell, it comes down to a simple question. Why was that press release issued by Blanchard? It seems beyond the realms of belief that a mere career Colonel, who went on to become a General would issue a press release about flying saucers, effectively saying a disc had been recovered and that it would settle all the questions about what people had seen in the sky recently. That was a well-crafted press release, it mentioned discs six times. It did not mention balloons, it did not mention fragments of balloons or weather, it simply said a disc had been recovered. To me, that bit alone destroys virtually the whole of the Roswell story, because it means deliberately they set that hare running that this disc had been recovered, it was such a strange thing to do and set the whole world talking.
Roswell Daily Record newspaper detailing the flying saucer story
Normally if something actually happened and they recovered parts of what they thought to be an alien spaceship that would have gone straight undercover with no question about putting out press releases and if they did it would have read ‘no need to worry everybody, what crashed on that farm was actually a weather balloon, we have all the fragments now, you can all go back to sleep.’ That would have been the logical thing to do. For me, I think it was likely something else that they wanted to cover up with a colourful story that would take all the attention from the real thing. It could have just been a Mogul balloon that crashed, they were highly secretive at the time, spying on the Russians, and they may have just tried to deflect that with the flying saucers. I do believe Roswell was not about aliens, but probably more to do with the US government and what they were doing at the time.
TM: Going back finally to science, do you think we’ll ever see that sea change where the narrow perception field is widened and scientists accept that some of these things might be otherworldly?
JA: I think it’s already happening. If there is going to be a sea change I think it’ll be a gradual one that will take place over 30 to 50 years because the whole subject is so complex I don’t think anyone is going to go into a laboratory and suddenly find an answer to the whole thing. You’ve got organisations working all around the world but they’re badly underfunded and the process as it is is extremely slow. I think it’s important to note the Department of Defense release of these videos because it indicates they are willing to share at least some very important data that looks credible, so I suppose that represents a bit of a sea change, maybe we’ve stopped being worried that these things are secret Soviet weapons and the governments have convinced themselves that even if they are from a distant galaxy they’re no threat to us because they haven’t done anything to us ever. So if those to things are true that they’re not secret weapons and not a threat maybe we should start sharing information and look at them as a scientific anomaly and find out what they are.
The basic fact is we might learn a lot while doing so, it might expand our science. Luis Elizondo of the To the Stars Academy came to the conclusion that these things were real and were based on science we simply didn’t understand. He was talking about time warps, quantum physics drives, all kinds of things. I think even the scientists and advanced engineers are struggling at the boundaries of what they know and until we know more about the quantum world and the universe itself and how it operates, what dark matter is and how it interacts with gravity, if we can start to build our own knowledge then perhaps we’ll see possible ways in which these anomalies could be caused, they could be perfectly natural or they could be visitors from another galaxy.
Pluto and Charon Shine in Most Detailed Topographical Maps Ever
Pluto and Charon Shine in Most Detailed Topographical Maps Ever
By Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Writer
An image of the Tenzing Montes peaks on Pluto created with New Horizons data and released on July 10, 2018. The mountains range from about 1.8 miles to 3.7 miles (3 to 6 kilometers) above the dwarf planet's surface.
Credit: Paul Schenk/Lunar and Planetary Institute
New research showcasing the dramatic topography of Pluto and its moon Charon should help scientists better guess what forces have shaped them.
The New Horizons spacecraft flew past the two bodies almost three years ago, but scientists are still exploring the wealth of data the mission produced. In the case of the new maps, that means stitching together images taken by a pair of cameras
"This was one of the most complex yet most exciting planetary mapping projects I've had the pleasure to be involved with," Paul Schenk, a planetary geologist at Universities Space Research Association's Lunar and Planetary Institute in Texas, said in a statement. "Every time new images came down, something new would be revealed."
The mapping project shows off the dramatic topography of both bodies and offers more accurate measurements of some of their most stunning features.
For example, the research has confirmed that the Tenzing Montes are the highest peaks on Pluto, boasting heights up to 3.7 miles (6 kilometers) above the nearby surface. That's the equivalent of Alaska's Denali mountain here on Earth, according to the team. It's also high enough that the scientists are more confident than ever that Pluto's surface is made of water ice — methane ice, for example, wouldn't be strong enough to hold up features that large.
Elsewhere on Pluto, the team identified possible locations where volcanic activity has shaped the dwarf planet's surface as well as a deep gash running more than 1,800 miles (3,000 km) around it, which scientists think shows the dwarf planet somehow extensively fractured earlier in its life.
The map of Charon shows an even more dramatic range of features, with even higher peaks countered by an abyss deeper than the lowest point on Earth.
A view of the surface of Charon released on July 11, 2018, uses data from the New Horizons spacecraft to show mountains on the left and a smoothed volcanic plain on the right.
Credit: Lunar and Planetary Institute/Paul Schenk
Because the process took advantage of the sun illuminating the harsh terrain, scientists have only been able to piece together the surfaces of Pluto and Charon that New Horizons flew over during their daytime — about 78 percent of Pluto and 45 percent of Charon.
That means both bodies are still hiding some secrets for their next robotic visitors, according to New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Texas.
"I can’t wait to see the other side of Pluto revealed in detail by a future mission to orbit the planet," Stern said in the statement.
The new work was detailed June 11 and July 3 in a pair of articles published in the journal Icarus.
Nearby Alien Planet May Be Capable of Supporting Life
Nearby Alien Planet May Be Capable of Supporting Life
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
This artist’s illustration shows the potentially temperate planet Ross 128b, with its red dwarf parent star in the background.
Credit: M. Kornmesser/ESO
One of the nearest exoplanets to Earth may be a decent abode for life.
Ross 128b — which lies just 11 light-years from our planet — is likely a rocky and temperate world, a new study suggests.
"Although Ross 128b is not Earth's twin, and there is still much we don’t know about its potential geologic activity, we were able to strengthen the argument that it's a temperate planet that could potentially have liquid water on its surface," lead author Diogo Souto, of the Observatório Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, said in a statement. [10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life]
Ross 128b has excited and intrigued astrobiologists since its discovery last year. The planet appears to circle in the "habitable zone" of its host star — that just-right range of distances where liquid water could exist on a world's surface. (Ross 128b circles a small, dim red dwarf star, so the habitable zone is quite close in; the planet completes one orbit every 9.9 Earth days.)
Initial estimates also indicated that Ross 128b has a minimum mass just 1.35 times that of Earth and therefore stands a good chance of being rocky, just like our own planet.
The new study will not dampen that enthusiasm. The researchers analyzed Ross 128b's parent star, known as Ross 128, using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE), a spectroscopic instrument installed on a telescope in New Mexico.
"The ability of APOGEE to measure near-infrared light, where Ross 128 is brightest, was key for this study," study co-author Johanna Teske, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., said in the same statement. "It allowed us to address some fundamental questions about Ross 128b's 'Earth-like-ness.'"
The APOGEE data revealed the abundances of certain key elements in Ross 128, including carbon, oxygen, magnesium and iron. Because stars and their orbiting planets coalesce from the same massive cloud of raw materials, this information revealed some key characteristics about Ross 128b as well.
For example, the stellar abundances, combined with Ross 128b's known minimum mass, suggest that the planet's radius is less than 1.7 times that of Earth. That's the rough threshold beyond which worlds have a significant gassy envelope — meaning that Ross 128b is probably rocky.
In addition, the red dwarf's observed iron-to-magnesium ratio indicates that Ross 128b's core is larger than that of Earth, the researchers said.
The team also determined that temperatures at or near the "surface" of the star are around 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit (3,000 degrees Celsius). The researchers used this information, along with Ross 128b's radius and orbital distance, to figure out how much stellar energy the planet receives — and, therefore, how hot it's likely to be.
The result? Ross 128b probably has an "equilibrium temperature" of about 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21 degrees C). This shouldn't be taken as gospel, however; planets' temperatures depend greatly on the composition and thickness of their atmospheres, and the nature of Ross 128b's air is a complete mystery.
Watching a plane’s wings detach isn’t something you want to see in today’s air travel. But that just might be where airplanes are headed, according to one tech CEO.
French entrepreneur Maurice Ricci is the CEO of Akka Technologies, and he has a pretty unique vision for the future of airplanes. And it happens to have a lot in common with the future of trains.
He thinks combining the two modes of transportation — creating a plane that can travel on the ground via tracks / a train that can fly through the air — will improve the passenger experience. According to an interview with Bloomberg, he even got a chance to pitch his flying train concept to Boeing, one of the biggest names in air travel.
THE PLANE.
Akka calls the plane/train hybrid Link & Fly. Late last year, it released a digitally rendered video of the concept in action. With its wings attached, the craft doesn’t look all that different from the planes soaring in and out of today’s airports. The primary difference is that the wings connect to one another over the plane’s cylindrical body, rather than connecting to each side of the plane separately.
Once on the ground, the body of the flying train separates from those wings and the cockpit, dropping onto a platform positioned on tracks. It’s then free to ride the rails. According to the Bloomberg report, passengers would board and disembark the craft at train stations, so they wouldn’t have to find alternate ways to travel to and from airports.
THE PURPOSE.
Akka might not be a household name, but the company is growing — just this year, its stock increased by 23 percent. It’s also been dabbling in forward-thinking transportation tech for more than a decade now. It had a concept for an autonomous car back in 2008 — a time when the idea was just starting to really seem viable.
In March, it announced a partnership with Microsoft and ICONIQ MOTORS to design an car capable of Level 5 autonomy by 2020. A few months later, it acquired PDS Tech, a staffing agency that connects big-names in the aerospace industry with engineering and R&D talent. One of those big-names? Boeing.
You probably won’t be able to hop aboard one of Akka’s futuristic planes any time soon, though. According to the Bloomberg piece, the company “[isn’t] banking on convincing a plane maker to necessarily build the entire ‘Link & Fly’ concept,” though Ricci does believe bits and pieces of the design might find their way into commercial aircraft in the future.
So the purpose behind this flying train video and pitch, then, is probably to draw attention to the company. And in that, they appear to have been successful.
While most people in Britain struggle to deal with the summer heat, aerial archaeologists are loving it: the hot weather is revealing archaeological features which are usually hidden.
These crop marks indicate the location of an ancient settlement.
Image credits: Toby Driver/RCAHMW.
It’s not usually this hot in the UK. While no records were really broken, overall temperatures were unusually high, often with serious consequences for ecosystems. But the heat had another unexpected consequence: it is revealing archaeological features.
“I’ve not seen conditions like this since I took over the archaeological flying at the Royal Commission in 1997,” aerial investigator Toby Driver from the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales (RCAHMW) told Wales Online.
“So much new archaeology is showing it is incredible.”
Britain is riddled with archaeological features. Continuously inhabited since pre-Roman times, the country can boast a trove of archaeological remains, which are now being brought to light without any digging. The remains of former castles, forts, farms, mansions, and more are becoming visible — some of them dating back to the Iron Age, while others, like WWII air shelters, are much more recent structures.
A prehistoric or Roman farm.
Image credits: Toby Driver/RCAHMW.
Many of these were previously known to researchers but some are entirely unknown.
The reason these structures are popping up has a lot to do with water in the soils. The difference is that archaeological soil (soil that contains archaeological remains) often has different physical characteristics than its surrounding areas. For instance, it can be more compact or contain iron particles, which make it a bit harder for plants to survive.
A similar thing can happen if the soil is rocky — due to foundations or walls being buried under it, for example. Under heat stress, plants above these areas are more likely to wither away. Conversely, ancient ditches or moats that later get filled in with fresher soil can make it easier for plants to survive. Either way, archaeological features often cause a contrast i soil properties which can have visible effects on vegetation.
This kind of event is not exactly rare, but it’s not very common either. If archaeologists want to make the most out of this opportunity, time is of the essence: the window might close soon, and there’s a good chance that the marks will only remain visible for a week or two (depending on the weather conditions).
What will likely happen after these new features have been noted down is a geophysical survey — a non-invasive measurement of the subsurface properties which produce an even clearer evidence of buried archaeological structures. After that, archaeologists may decide to start digging and bring them to light.
LINDA HOWE: The idea that there was one or more non-human groups inspiring us is the truth. Millions of people around the world believe we have been visited in the past by extraterrestrial beings. But what if it were true? Did ancient aliens really help to shape our history? And if so, where did they come from? And just who were the visitors?
Roswell, New Mexico.
This sleepy town in America’s Southwest was once best known for its large military airbase. But that changed in 1947 when a local rancher reported that a spaceship crashed on his property.
Several weeks later, the U.S.Army issued a press release confirming the existence of an alien craft. The next day, the military changed its story and announced that what they had found was a weather balloon. These conflicting reports sent shock waves around the world, and the name “Roswell” became a pop culture code word that forever links extraterrestrial visitation with enduring mystery.
NICK POPE: Speculation about why the Roswell crash would be covered up is difficult to pin down. Some people talk about this in terms of information that would be shattering to our worldview.
STEVEN GREER: Almost everyone’s heard about the so-called Roswell event, and one of the real implications of disclosure is that some of our most cherished myths about the origins of the human race and our history and archaeology would fall apart.
GEORGE NOORY: Something happened at Roswell, New Mexico a long time ago. People want the truth. I think there’s something in the human being itself that is striving, that is hungry for this knowledge in order to answer questions about our own existence. Today, public opinion polls indicate more than half the world’s population believes aliens have either come here in the past or are coming here now. But what is it exactly that makes so many people believe?
JONATHAN YOUNG: I do think looking upward makes sense. The universe is large. There are things out there we do not understand. There is probably intelligent life somewhere.
ROBERT BAUVAL: People tend to forget that we’re on a planet that’s four and a half billion years old. The presence of our civilization in that vast scale of time I mean, if I click my finger, it wouldn’t even be fast enough to say this is the time of our civilization. And to think that we’re the only ones in this vast period of time, to me, is absurd.
SARA SEAGER: Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has over 100 billion stars. And in our universe, we think there are more than 100 billion galaxies. So if every star had a planet with intelligent life, how many alien civilizations would we have?
ERICH VON DANIKEN: If you take us as the crown of creation, or the top of evolution, we look at our self as the greatest, the biggest. We say, how incredible, uh, unique we are in the whole universe. We forgot to learn modesty.
JENNIFER HELDMANN: Each step that we take makes us a little bit less special. We used to think that we were the center of the universe, as humans, and then we realized, “Oh, all right, well, that’s not true.” And But we’re at the center of the galaxy, and, like, well, all right, so we’re like two thirds of the way out in a spiral arm. And then, well, at least our sun, you know, with this No. The sun is actually in the middle, and the earth goes around it.
So earth isn’t even the center of that system, and So, the more that we learn, we sort of, you know It’s a very humbling science. When man first landed on the moon, our perspective on the universe changed forever.
Houston, uh, the Eagle has landed.
BUZZ ALDRIN: We aliens who happened to go down the ladder on July were certainly part of a magnificent race. I just don’t think people have a grasp for what energy it takes to go from one star to another. This historic event raised the question: if humans can successfully navigate in space and explore other worlds, why couldn’t beings from other parts of the universe have done the same? And might they have already come to Earth hundreds, or perhaps, thousands of years ago?
VON DANIKEN: I think human past is more fantastic than we all believe. I have come to the idea that maybe extraterrestrials were on this planet.
The settlement served as the religious and cultural capital of the Nazca people. But sometime around 500 AD, the Nazca mysteriously disappeared, leaving Cahuachi to fall into disarray. Anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka came to Cahuachi to study the ancient Nazca civilization. During a dig, he unearthed some of the most surprising and shocking artifacts he had ever seen. They were skulls with enormous, elongated craniums. Where did they come from? How did they get there? And were they human?
CHILDRESS: In Peru, we find these weird, elongated skulls. And they’re bizarre-looking. I mean, and-and these people look like aliens.
ROBERT SCHOCH: One may say, okay, aliens. But another aspect that we have to consider is that skull and cranial deformation, forming elongated heads is a practice that’s known throughout much of the ancient world. In 1870, the process of skull deformation was well chronicled by a German botanist and explorer named Georg Schweinfurth. While exploring the African Congo, he came in contact with a tribe called the Mangbetu. They routinely performed a ritual of cranial binding that allowed them to physically alter the shape of human skulls.
CHILDRESS: They took infants’ skulls and compressed them and bound them. And they forced the cranium out and elongate it. And in many cases, they doubled the size.
Elongated skulls found in Peru
SCHOCH: And a big question is why was this being done? It may have been a way to distinguish the elite, perhaps, from the everyday people.
May have been a social stratification type of issue. Something that also appeals to me is, that may have been a way to express physically and maybe try to achieve physically greater levels of consciousness or higher levels of mental ability.
TSOUKALOS: In my opinion, they did this in order to mimic the gods. And those gods were physical beings because if they were just a figment of our ancestors’ imagination, I don’t think that’s a compelling enough reason to expose your children to such a ritual to achieve that type of look. And in my opinion, these people were misinterpreted flesh-and-blood space travelers.
SCHOCH: Some people have suggested aliens had elongated skulls, and apparently, ancient peoples are mimicking those skulls. The old saying is that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Although there have been many images that attempt to depict what aliens might actually look like, one in particular has come to dominate the public perception. It, too, features an elongated cranium, and is associated with an extraterrestrial race that many refer to as the grays.
POPE: In terms of entities, one very common description are the so-called grays– three and a half, four feet tall, essentially humanoid, but, uh, very spindly with disproportionately large heads and huge black almond-shaped eyes. But would someone in a primitive society really want to replicate this look and deform their skull? Some archeologists have a different perspective. They point to artistic self- expression as an explanation of these customs.
ROBERT R.CARGILL: There are all kinds of people that either worship the body or use the body as art, be it a tattoo or a piercing of some sort, or tribes that, that put things in their ears or on their lips to try to, to try to grow parts of their body. Some societies, we know, practiced binding parts of the body, feet, or heads and try to make certain shapes, and this was done for whatever reason. We know today that this isn’t usually the most healthy thing to do, but it doesn’t mean people don’t do it. People are always trying to change their body to make it look a certain way. Whatever the explanation may be for these rituals, they are not just found in Peru and the African Congo. Skull deformation is a global phenomenon.
CHILDRESS: What’s really strange is that this is found all over the world, and this is something that archaeologists cannot easily explain because, for people on remote islands, for people in South America or Malta or in Africa to suddenly, independently do this cranial deformation like this seems incredible. I mean, this is something that had to be learned, something that was taught to them.
SCHOCH: We seem to have basic similarities, as if there was one civilization or at least one type of culture that was influencing people around the world. I find it more and more difficult to believe what I was taught as an undergraduate– that all these different cultures just coincidentally came up with the same concepts independently of each other.
Is it possible that individual societies around the world were influenced by similar events? And were they imitating real beings who visited from other planets? Some of the most compelling images of an elongated cranium can be traced to ancient Egypt and the depictions of one of its most controversial pharaohs.
Could it be that he too was mimicking the look of extraterrestrials? Or is there an even more outrageous explanation? Could he have been one of them?
Egypt.
Long before the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids or even settled along the Nile River, they spoke of an era called Tep Zepi, or the beginning of time. According to legends, Tep Zepi was when “sky-gods” descended from the stars to Earth on flying “boats,” and then turned mud and water into a new kingdom.
BAUVAL: The word “god,” according to the ancient Egyptian, is “netyro.” It means a being that came from the cosmos. They are very adamant about the fact that their gods had descended from the stars. They tell us that the god Osiris, who ruled with his consort and sister– the goddess Isis they were star gods, and in fact they identify them very clearly. Osiris was identified the constellation of Orion.
Isis was identified as the god to the star Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. There’s an interesting point about this– is that within the constellation of Orion is the so-called nursery of stars. The stars in our galaxy literally were born in that zone, and it’s really peculiar that the ancient Egyptians insist that the birth of star gods are in this constellation. They truly believed– they were very adamant about this– that their origins is in the sky.
SCHOCH: Something that we see around the world with ancient civilizations is that they had incredible knowledge of the stars, of the planets, of the heavenly motions. The average person in the ancient world had way more knowledge of what’s going on in the skies than a lot of well-educated people today. As ancient Egypt grew into a great civilization, its citizens believed their pharaohs were sons of Osiris and thus, living gods. Artwork and wall carvings depicted them as perfect humans, and while the people worshipped many different gods, the pharaoh stood above them all.
This basic Egyptian religious belief remained in force for nearly a thousand years until one pharaoh changed everything. Who was this heretic? His name was Akhenaten, and in every surviving depiction, he is shown with an elongated skull. Who was he?
According to Egyptian mythology, he too was descended from the gods who arrived on Earth at the time of Tep Zepi.
But why do so many still believe he actually came from the stars? In 1352 BC, Akhenaten ascended to the throne as the tenth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty. Almost immediately, he instituted a series of radical religious changes, including a ban on references to multiple gods.
BAUVAL: It’s a rather strange thing that he would want to do that in one sweep, but he ordered all the iconography of previous gods to be removed. He only allowed one emblem, which was a sun emblem, literally a sun disk with curious arms or rays pointing down.
TSOUKALOS: Why did he do this? Because according to his writings and his poems that were written about him later on, he was visited by one of those beings that descended from the sky, who told Akhenaten: “This is the way. I am your god.”
This sun god was known as Aten. Akhenaten claimed to be a direct descendent of Aten.
BAUVAL: Akhenaten, like any other pharaoh, regarded himself to be divine. He was a god. Not only himself believed himself to be a god, but the whole nation saw him as a god. Now, the definition of a god is that he was a descendant from these celestial beings. During his fourth year as pharaoh, Akhenaten ordered the construction of a new capital city. He called it Amarna and dedicated it to the sun. Akhenaten would spend the next ten years here, during which time he instituted changes in both art and culture, including how he himself would be publicly depicted.
CARGILL: In Egyptian iconography, Egyptian pharaohs are depicted as these triangular-shaped beings– these broad, strong shoulders and these very skinny waists. Now, we look at leaders today and we know that most leaders don’t have broad shoulders and skinny waists, but it was important to depict the Egyptian kings as having broad shoulders and skinny waists– very, you know– the epitome of what a king ought to look like.
BAUVAL: That’s exactly the opposite of Akhenaten. He shows himself perhaps as he really is a rather strange look. He has a very mystical look.
SCHOCH: If we take Akhenaten’s statues, for instance, literally, he was a very strange-looking character. Sort of combined, some people would say, feminine aspects with masculine aspects, may have had an elongated skull.
CARGILL: The change in royal iconography of Akhenaten showed him as he probably really was, with a misshapen head, with a potbelly, with a sunken chest, as opposed to the idealized iconography of traditional Egyptian artists that showed this big, strong pharaoh.
Akhenaten’s wife Queen Nefertiti and their children were also depicted as having elongated skulls. So why were Akhenaten’s and Nefertiti’s heads deformed?
Did they suffer from a genetic abnormality or did they deliberately alter their shape?
Some believe there could be yet another explanation behind their strange, otherworldly appearance.
CHILDRESS: They look like they’re different than other human beings.
TSOUKALOS: Is it possible that Akhenaten might have been an extraterrestrial hybrid?
CARGILL: Ancient alien enthusiasts look at Pharaoh Akhenaten of Egypt and say, “Ah, look at that long head. That looks like an alien gray. That looks like some kind of something that’s nonhuman, some hybrid between something else and something human.
Must be evidence of alien interference, alien reproduction with humans. Something like that.”
BETTY ANN BROWN: I’ve been to Egypt, and one of the most stunning things about seeing the archeological remains of ancient Egypt is that one unique pharaoh, Akhenaten.
TSOUKALOS: I mean, he’s got a very narrow, pointy face, high cheekbones, and a very elongated cranium.
CHILDRESS: The idea that they were either looking like extraterrestrials or perhaps had extraterrestrial DNA in them is a credible idea. Akhenaten ruled for 17 years. After his reign, Amarna was abandoned, and temples to the sun were destroyed. Images of Akhenaten were deliberately defaced.
Ancient Egypt swiftly returned to its old ways, worshipping many gods. Was this a rejection of Akhenaten’s radical religious belief system, or a cover-up of his alien identity?
BAUVAL: There’s been a lot of theories about why. Um, if I mean, the most extreme is that he somehow had some sort of extraterrestrial connection.
If one accepts that conclusion, then it would explain why he was literally put off the reign and, some say, put to death. Some Egyptologists believe Akhenaten was forced to abdicate and flee from Egypt with a group of his loyal followers.
In 1907, the actual body of Akhenaten was discovered in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings by a British archeologist named Edward Ayrton. After unearthing Akhenaten’s mummified remains, he was able to confirm that, indeed, the ancient pharaoh’s skull was misshapen and elongated.
CARGILL: Some scholars argue that he suffered from some kind of physical abnormality; he suffered from a disorder that caused his face to appear to be long, or his head actually was longer. I think with Akhenaten we’re dealing with a physical deformation that wasn’t They just depicted him as he was: potbelly, sunken chest, long head. Akhenaten was succeeded by his son, Tutankhamen, who became the most renowned pharaoh of all time.
When his tomb was discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter, Tutankhamen was also found to have an elongated skull.
Could he have inherited alien genes from his father?
Today, much of Akhenaten’s life still remains a mystery. Did he really change Egypt’s entire belief system because, as some suggest, he was a celestial being?
If that’s true, might there be evidence of similar entities coming to Earth?
Perhaps more clues can be found thousands of miles away on the other side of the African continent.
Mali, in northwest Africa
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0
Deep in a remote valley live the Dogon people, who are the descendants of a nomadic tribe that settled here around 1000 AD. Just like Akhenaten’s followers, the Dogon had been forced to leave Egypt because of religious persecution.
SCHOCH: The Dogon claim a very long and ancient tradition, and in my opinion maintain some of the ancient Egyptian traditions and myths that have been carried on right into the present age. Parts of ancient Egypt may not have died. They were carried on, to this day, among the Dogon. But what exactly are their beliefs?
Dogon mythology holds that the sky god Amma created the first living creature known as Nommo. The legend also says that shortly after his creation, Nommo multiplied into several parts, one of which rebelled against Amma. Amma responded by destroying him and scattering his ashes throughout the world.
PETER FIEBAG (translated): According to the Dogons’ myths, a god gave them this knowledge. He descended from the sky in an arc, surfing on fire, landing in a storm.
TSOUKALOS: Still today, the Dogon celebrates a festival in the honor of Nommo and that visitation that occurred in the remote past. How do we know this? For this festival, they have wooden masks that date back to a very long time ago, when this festival began.
FIEBAG (translated): Dogon masks tell the mystic stories of their ancestors. This is a sculpture of the creator. They call him Amma. He is embracing the universe. This is how they pass on information from generation to generation, by stories carved in masks. But could Nommo have been a real person?
Some see eerie similarities between the Dogons’ legend and the story of the mysterious Pharaoh Akhenaten. Akhenaten believed he was directly descended from the sun god Aten. Nommo was said to have been created by the sky deity, Amma.
Is it a coincidence that both cultures, although thousands of miles apart, shared mythical tales of beings coming from the skies? And both Nommo and Akhenaten were depicted with elongated heads.
Is it possible that these legends were based on real events?
FIEBAG (translated): The Dogons dwell in the central plateau region of Bandiagara.Their knowledge is centuries old, and their priests have been sharing it with chosen individuals only. In the 1920s, French anthropologist Grialue and ethnologist Dieterle visited the tribe and were invited to share their secrets.
But one secret stood out: the Dogon claimed that their god Amma came from a specific star in the Sirius constellation, the same place where the ancient Egyptians believed their god Osiris was born. This star, which modern astronomers refer to as Sirius B, the Dogon called Po Tolo. But what baffles experts is that the star is so far from Earth, it’s impossible to see with the naked eye.
BAUVAL: I was very intrigued by this, by the way. I mean, the Dogons should not have known about the existence of this star. Sirius is the second nearest star from our solar system. It’s eight light-years away. In fact, it’s not even visible with standard telescopes. It was first seen, literally seen, and photographed in the
TSOUKALOS: Modern science has corroborated that Sirius B does indeed exist. Problem is, the Dogon knew about this before modern science corroborated it. I mean, that’s spooky. Measurements taken with the Hubble telescope in B is what’s known as a white dwarf– or a partially rnt-out star with extremely dense mass. Although it is smaller in size than Earth, it’s estimated to weigh eight times as much as our sun. But how did the Dogon acquire this ancient knowledge of astronomy that seems to be centuries more advanced than that of modern science?
SEAGER: The mystery is, how did this story get passed on down generations if the story came from a time before astronomers knew there was a companion star to Sirius which can’t be seen with the human eye?
FIEBAG (translated): This is the Dogon symbol for Sirius. When you move it around, you can see an orbit around the center marked by Sirius A.Sirius B circles around it, so it is a circular system. This sign is practically an astronomic model that the Dogons could not have invented because only Sirius A is visible, and Sirius B and C are invisible.
However, their description of the orbit is correct. One assumption is that this god, Nommo, who brought them this knowledge, could have been an extraterrestrial intelligence.
Since the early 20th century, the tribe has been routinely studied and researched by anthropologists. This has led many modern historians to claim that the Dogon must have learned about astronomy from Westerners.
CARGILL: The Dogon’s mythology is so fluid that when science confirms something that they might have believed in antiquity, it might have just been sheer coincidence, or it could have been a conflation. That is, they heard Because it’s an oral culture, and because the mythology is so fluid, they heard something that someone said about this star in relation to another star, and they just grafted that in to their mythology. They grafted that into their religion. And then when some reporter, some subsequent reporter comes along and says, “What do you believe? ,” they say, “Well, we’ve thought this for millions of years.”
TSOUKALOS: When critics suggest that this knowledge was given to them by modern ethnologists, that’s simply incorrect because we know that the story goes back hundreds of years earlier than any modern ethnologist ever went there.
FIEBAG (translated): If it were ever proven that all this information is exactly correct, including the parts that are still being studied by astronomers, this would mean that the earth had visitors from outer space in prehistoric times.
BAUVAL: Either they inherited that knowledge, and the question is, from where? From a previous civilization, or from some sort of extraterrestrial civilization? Or it’s a coincidence. In my view, it is not a coincidence.
If the Dogon people really possessed this advanced astronomical knowledge, were their legends based on real events? The ancient Egyptians and Dogon were far from alone in their belief in gods or mystical beings that came from the sky.
Is there an explanation for similar myths shared by ancient cultures all around the world? And what does that reveal as to who these visitors may be? Perhaps the answer can be found, not in northern Africa, but here in the rocks and canyons of the American Southwest.
NOTE: This article is an edited version of episode one, season two, of the TV Series Ancient Aliens. Our editors worked hard to correct out any mistakes, and arrange the context so that our readers can enjoy reading through the episodes, without having to watch them. I believe that when you read through these episodes, you can imagine (reconstruct) what the participants of the Series were trying to say in a much more efficient, a much richer way.
In New Mexico lies the Pueblo of Zuni. Sheltered from the desolate high plains, this adobe city is home to the Zuni Indians, one of the oldest indigenous tribes in North America.
They have inhabited this land for almost 2,000 years, and have protected their secrets even longer.
CHRIS O’BRIEN: The Zuni are a very interesting culture in that they’re one of the few cultures that really have not opened up, uh, to the rest of the world about their star knowledge traditions. Most of this type of information is very closely held by the natives. And, um, I really find it very intriguing that this is the time period in history where now we’re starting to learn more and more about their star knowledge. Much of the Zuni people’s history is etched in the rocks in the New Mexico desert.
Tribal Elder Clifford Mahooty and archeologist Dan Simplicio have studied the Zuni’s secret history firsthand. They’ve collected stories passed down through generations that are rooted in the belief that the tribe’s creators and protectors are supernatural beings from the sky.
DAN SIMPLICIO: This one’s kind of interesting here. I would imagine it was created in the last century, but from this design, you can see the star figure. Celestial images oftentimes are depicted in a lot of our cultural petroglyphs. And this is one of ’em where it depicts the star. It could be the supernova of the crab nebula.
CLIFFORD MAHOOTY: Our Zuni mythology in the prayer system, in the ritualistic protocols, talk about these people that came over here, and told us how to actually live our lives as beings, sky people. If you listen to a lot of religious chants and songs and prayers, that’s all they talk about. They’re talking about space. They’re talking about out there in the universe where they came from.
So they depict it on a rock wall here. But the actual meaning of it is somewhere more profound and more complex than that. These drawings are thought to have been created around 1200 BC, yet they appear to depict modern space travelers and their vehicles.
SIMPLICIO: If you move back a little bit, you can see another figure here. It has a de. It has eyes. Uh, there’s something coming down
MAHOOTY: And a nose.
SIMPLICIO: Like a nose. There’s a nose, but it kind of flares out.
MAHOOTY: I think it was something to do with the ancient ones when they saw something. They took as much description of it to put in on there. Of course, it’s not going to be exactly what they saw, but that’s as best as they can do for something that they saw.
CHILDRESS: With all petroglyphs and things like that, I mean, they’re up to interpretation. Sometimes they are just doodlings of people. But other times, they may well be actual descriptions and depictions of some kind of god from outer space, some ancient astronaut. And when you go around, say like the Zuni Pueblo, I mean, that’s what they’ll tell you those petroglyphs e. Even the Zunis themselves call them the spacemen.
SIMPLICIO: This one seems to have two legs coming out like that. It has a, you know, broad diamond shape body. Um, there probably was a better head that chipped off here. Well, that’s very different-looking than humans are.
MAHOOTY: Now usually they’re called UFOs. But in the Zuni way, we’ve always been taught that they’re the keepers of the upper world, which means space. You know, they’re sky people. Beings that are of the extraterrestrial origin and this is still within our mythology and our religious practices today. Like most Indian tribes, the Zunis call these sky people kachinas.
According to the Zunis’ creation story, the kachina gods came down from the heavens to lead the Zunis to earth through a special portal.
MAHOOTY: The sipapu– that’s the entrance to the fourth world or the underworld. And that’s a representation of where the kachinas come and go. And so, according to the mythologies, the Zunis were brought forth into the world of light– which is where we are at today–by what I would interpret as extraterrestrial beings from the universe.
Every year, the Zunis participate in a ceremony known as the Shalako festival. Dressed in traditional costumes to represent the kachinas, the Indians celebrate the arrival of the gods on earth.
CHILDRESS: This is a figurine of kachina gods. And these guys are some gods from the sky who came down. Uh, they wear weird helmets.
TSOUKALOS: This one has a helmet as a head, and if you look at the whole body of it, it’s as if it wears some type of a suit. This one here also has the helmet and the visor.
CHILDRESS: For the Pueblo Indians, like the Zunis, these are their-their sky-gods that every year, they have special ceremonies. People put on these special costumes and masks to reenact the coming of the gods. They really look like ancient astronauts.
BILL BIRNES: If you look at the poetry and the legends and the stories from American Indian tribes in the Southwest, they have the legend of the star people. The star people came to Earth and seeded planet Earth, and they came on flying ships. If you speak to the elders, they will tell you that a lot of us believe in the existence of extraterrestrials.
STEVEN M.KARR: These are timeless traditions that have been passed on through the centuries from clan to clan, from family to family, from family member to family member. And it is an oral tradition. Native peoples did not have the written word. They had the spoken word. And culturally, the spoken word is still a significant component of their daily lives, and the ability to pass down the truth.
SIMPLICIO: I remember my grandparents talking about a craft that flew and had actually crash-landed on one of the mesas east of here. There’s no interpretation of what an aircraft is, so the closest thing that they could interpret as anything capable of flight is a bird or our masked kachina dancers.
MAHOOTY: We are very, very superstitious people. It’s always been in the history of Zuni that they have always been here even right here where we’re sitting right now, but you just don’t see them. They’re in a different frequency. And those are very, very sacred, and those are very, very secret.
They’re out there somewhere. For those who believe that ancient astronauts came to earth thousands of years ago, the prehistoric artwork provides more clues in what they claim is a growing body of evidence: from wall carvings and statues in ancient Egypt to tribal traditions and exotic masks in West Africa to petroglyphs in the American Southwest.
All thousands of years old, they seem to recount similar stories of visitors from the skies. Could the legends of alien beings visiting earth thousands of years ago have inspired more traditional beliefs?
Celestial beings coming down to Earth. Gods descending from the sky.
Can these events only be found in the ancient legends of the Zuni? Do similar accounts exist in other cultures and other religions across the world?
And if so, what is the explanation?
TSOUKALOS: We have to remind ourselves that our ancestors were highly intelligent. However, their technological frame of reference was different than our technological frame of reference, so they didn’t have the vocabulary with which to describe or with which to name certain things that they saw. So what did they do?
They used words that they were familiar with in their time, and so they tried to describe whatever they witnessed to the best of their abilities with their vocabulary. Ancient China also shared some of the same beliefs that can be found in Egyptian, Native American, and Dogon legends– that deities arrived from the stars.
According to Chinese mythology dating back to 3000 BC, when the god named Huang Di was born, there was “a radiance from the great star Chi.” Huang Di would later emerge from the belly of a fire-breathing dragon to become China’s first emperor.
YOUNG: The origins of the Han Chinese people start with a story of a great god looking down with empathy.
Here were people in poverty, in a beautiful, rich country, the landscape profound, but the people were suffering. He took pity and decided to come down.
TSOUKALOS: Huang Di arrived on planet Earth in a flying dragon. He had the power of flight. Huang Di could be anywhere within minutes, and he usually accomplished this by hopping on his dragon and flying somewhere.
YOUNG: Now this divine energy becomes human and is a great leader– the Yellow Emperor who rules and unites the people– and there is a period of great prosperity until his work is done. Huang Di brought order to the chaos, creating China’s first empire. He is seen as a cultural hero and is credited with the invention of the compass, acupuncture, and the standardization of Chinese writing. One of his greatest legacies is the Great Wall of China.
YOUNG: When the land is prosperous, he decides it’s time to go, and the great yellow dragon comes back and he gets back into the belly of the dragon and flies off forever.
TSOUKALOS: Now, were these dragons truly dragons in a biological nature? Or were they misinterpreted types of machines?
Because, as we all know, dragons are always correlated with spewing fire and a lot of smoke. Whenever we see a modern rocket take off, there is all this smoke, and sometimes the smoke is yellow and sometimes it’s red.
So it’s very bizarre how we have these correlations between the ancient times and modern times today.
YOUNG: Mythology is the effort to grasp what we can’t grasp, to understand what is beyond us. In the Eastern teachings, the dragons very often carry people, sometimes on their back or sometimes inside their bellies, so if we think of them as, as a poet’s effort to explain a vehicle that was strange to them, well, those sound like flying saucers.
So it might just be a problem with translation because, after all, it’s just a word. It’s trying to describe something that’s very difficult to grasp.
Another tale of celestial beings influencing civilization can be found, this time in what is now modern-day Iraq. The Babylonian legend of Enuma Elish dates back to the seventh century BC.
The text was first discovered in Austen Henry Layard while searching the ruins of the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh. The story tells of how the first humans were created by an extraterrestrial re known as the Anunnaki.
TSOUKALOS: In the ancient texts of Sumeria, we have descriptions of these beings descending from the sky called the Anunnaki. The term “Anunnaki” means “those who from the heavens came.” It says, word for word, that these beings descended in flying vehicles from the sky, and we can find not only descriptions of the Anunnaki, but also depictions and we can see them in statues, in carvings, so it’s all very interesting to see that those beings looked like modern-day space travelers with weird suits.
Some of them wore wristwatches.
They had boots on and helmets and, above all, wings, and they were always described or depicted in floating above some “regular people.” So the question is: who were the Anunnaki? And according to the ancient astronaut hypothesis, they were space travelers who visited Earth in the remote past.
Similar themes can be found in the legends of Greek and Roman gods, which also describe events that some interpret as an extraterrestrial contact. Both cultures believed in powerful gods who lived in the heavens and often came down to Earth to interact with humans.
CHILDRESS: A well-known example is Zeus and the Greek gods, and they’ve come down from the sky and Mount Olympus, where they live in some mountain, and they’re bringing, really, civilization and sciences to mankind, but they have many human attributes, too, where, yeah, they, uh, they’re attracted to human women, uh, they want to have sex and children with as many of ’em as they can, and then they go back into the sky.
THOMAS BULLARD: These ideas of gods mating with humans are very commonplace, like Zeus in Greek mythology was always coming down, mating with mortals, and producing demigods like Hercules or Helen of Troy, who were exceptionally beautiful, exceptionally powerful, unusually gifted in every way. So, in other words, you were creating a better race in, in this sense.
TSOUKALOS: In the ancient astronaut opinion, the whole pantheon of gods that we have in ancient Greece consists of nothing else but flesh-and-blood extraterrestrials who were misinterpreted as being these divine creatures by our ancestors.
CREMO: There is a lot of evidence showing that we’re not alone in the cosmos and that our human civilizations on Earth have been interacting for long periods of time with extraterrestrial intelligence.
Belief in celestial beings interacting with humans is a cornerstone of several major religions. In fact, according to the Bible’s Book of Genesis, God created the first humans Adam and Eve. The Bible also contains other passages that describe strange interactions between “otherworldly” beings and humans.
CARGILL: People believe messengers of some sort come down from the heavens. You know, they came down and they had sex with humans, and this is where we produced giants, people like Goliath, so in a technical sense, they are alien. They’re gods or they’re angels; there’s some kind of superhuman thing.
Interpreting these Bible stories has also led to a certain amount of debate and controversy. While most see a single god directing and influencing mankind’s destiny, others argue that it is really a number of gods that are responsible.
TSOUKALOS: In the Old Testament, it says very clearly, “And then God created man in our own image.” Now, grammatically speaking, that sentence doesn’t make sense, because you have “God” and then you have “our image.”
Well, theologians suggest that, by “our,” what they meant is the Trinity, the Holy Trinity, so basically, if you were to change the word “god” to “gods,” then all of a sudden, the sentence makes sense– “and then the gods created man in our own image.”
CARGILL: So you have this reference– “let us create man in our image.” In several religious texts, specifically the Hebrew Bible, which Christians also accept, and in the Koran, which Muslims revere as holy, you have the reference to God in the plural, and it is incredibly interesting. But do all these religious scriptures that tell similar stories really point to the possibility that aliens have visited Earth throughout ancient history?
BIRNES: The fact is, the story of creation in our own Bible is the story of creation in cultures around the world. The story of the flood, the evolution of the human species, the development of language– all of this points to– in fact, the Bible says so– life on Earth came from contact with an extraterrestrial life form. That’s in the Bible.
That’s in ancient cultures around the world. So I believe the theory of ancient astronauts is true, and I believe there’s solid evidence there, and I believe the harder you try to refute that evidence, the more you wind up against a brick wall. That ancient astronauts visited us, visited Earth thousands upon thousands of years ago, and seeded the very civilization we have today. If the believers in the ancient astronaut theory are correct, then just who were these visitors?
And might cutting-edge astrophysics and biology help us to uncover their identity?
On March 18, 1965, Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov stepped outside the Voskhod 2 and became the first human to walk in space. He spent 12 minutes and eight seconds outside his ship before returning. Leonov’s survival depended upon a protective suit that could keep him alive where there was neither atmospheric pressure nor oxygen. If we need spacesuits, would aliens traveling to Earth require the same protection?
Is that what we’re looking at in these ancient carvings and drawings?
TSOUKALOS: When critics ask, “Well, why would ancient astronauts have to wear astronaut suits like that we’re familiar with today?” the answer is very simple. Can we go through space without wearing a type of suit? Of course not. We would die. ‘Cause who says that whoever visited us in the remote past, that they could breathe in the atmosphere of planet Earth? So, it’s not farfetched to suggest that they did, in fact, wear some type of suit. Why might these images resemble modern astronauts?
If they are aliens, is it possible they are similar to humans? And could they have come from a planet just like Earth? At the turn of the 20th century, a group of British and German scientists considered this possibility.
They embraced a theory put forth by early Greek philosophers, that all life in the universe began in one specific place. This theory is called panspermia.
SEAGER: Panspermia is the theory that life formed in one place, and then got spread around to other places. In outer space in the medium between stars, we see molecules that are the building blocks of life. So it’s easy to get the building blocks of life to another planet. For example, if life formed on Mars, it could have come here to Earth, contaminated Earth, and then started life here.
Roughly 3.6 billion years ago, Mars was warm and wet, much like the conditions on Earth today. Biologists believe that because Mars cooled more quickly than other planets, life may have developed there first.
PAUL DAVIES: Mars is a better candidate for life during the early part of the solar system. Mars rocks are coming here all the time, and these have been knocked off Mars by asteroid and comet impacts. And we know that they could convey any Martian microorganisms to Earth. In August 1996, a team of scientists made a stunning announcement. A Martian meteorite found in Antarcticacontained evidence of fossilized life.
The four-pound rock, designated ALH 84001, showed the presence of carbonate globules excreted by microbes when they were alive on Mars 3.6 billion years ago. Earth was no longer alone. Life had existed elsewhere in the universe.
DAVIES: So this cross-contamination between Mars and Earth, which 20 years ago was regarded as a rather wild conjecture, is now pretty much accepted by the astrobiology community.
Astrobiologists studying the origin and evolution of life in the universe embraced the possibility that life on Earth began in outer space. Did modern-day scientists finally prove what ancient cultures have believed for centuries?
BAUVAL: The common myth or idea that the origins of humankind is from the stars is widespread. Ancient cultures have The ancient Egyptians, the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Indians and so forth Uh, is intriguing, and it’s probably true. And I mean it from an astrophysical point of view. We do come from the stars. It’s a fact that life on earth has been seeded by the coming of a comet containing the life matter.
SCHOCH: I personally suspect there is life out there. In fact, I believe that we have evidence if nothing else, microbial evidence, for life extraterrestrially. But if life did land on Earth from outer space, was it by accident, or might it have been sent here on purpose? One mainstream scientist thought so. British geneticist Francis Crick is best known for his collaboration with James Watson. Together, they unraveled the structure of human DNA in 1953.
Less than ten years later, they were awarded the Nobel Prize for their groundbreaking work in genetics. In the 1960s, Crick became a proponent of panspermia theory and took it to a whole new level with an idea he called directed panspermia.
GRAHAM HANCOCK: Francis Crick hypothesized that somewhere, perhaps on the other side of the galaxy, there had been a civilization of advanced intelligent beings. And they had found that their planet was going to be destroyed. Perhaps a supernova was going to go off in their vicinity, and their planet would be sterilized of life. And he asked himself, “What would an intelligent civilization do in that situation?”
Um, well, first of all, they’d try to figure out if they could get out of there, if they could actually preserve their lives and the lives of their descendants. Perhaps crowd into spaceships and fly across interstellar space until they found a suitable planet to colonize. But could it actually be true?
Could we really be the descendants of an alien race that traveled here from another world?
POPE: The ultimate implication of some exobiological theories is actually that we ourselves are extraterrestrials, that life on earth arose because the organic material was brought here from elsewhere.
BIRNES: What if we’re the ones, the descendants of those who came from another planet? We weren’t created. We were brought here, seeded planet Earth as a colony from some other planet. So we’re colonists of another race. And that’s why the aliens look like us.
SCHOCH: In my opinion, it’s not unscientific to consider the possibility of ancient astronauts, alien intervention. We live in a huge universe. Now, bacteria versus humanoids– one may say, that’s a big difference, but in some ways, it’s not a big difference. Where you have life, you have the ability for that life to develop into what we consider civilization or intelligent beings. Is it just a coincidence that modern science and ancient alien theory have come to the same conclusion: that life on Earth came from the stars?
And if it’s possible that billions of years ago, an extraterrestrial race spread out across space, how would they survive in their new home? Could they really be our missing link?
For thousands of years, mankind has tried to depict alien beings who they believe came from the skies. Many of those creatures seem to share characteristics with humans. They often have two arms, two legs, fingers and a head just like we do. Biologists refer to this basic body shape as bilateral symmetry.
MICHAEL DENNIN: Bilateral symmetry is, very simply, you divide something down the middle into two parts, and lateral means up and down, and the two sides are an exact reflection of each other. If you fold the thing in half, all the parts line up.
RUSSELL TUTTLE: Being bilaterally symmetric allows you to be streamlined and to develop a head end, so you become cephalized.
And that certainly happened in vertebrates. Virtually, the mouth at the end of something and then you get progressive development, and that seems to have led to many, many advances.
DENNIN: So, when you look at it closely, you can see a lot of advantages coming in. Having the two arms and two legs to work together really gives you great mobility and balance and speed. Having eyes on two sides separated gives really improved vision in various ways.
Animals that are predominantly prey use their two eyes independently and get a huge field of view. Animals that are predominantly hunters have them more in the front and get really good depth perception, which you need if you’re gonna land on the animal you’re hunting.
If it is true that aliens resemble humans in their physical characteristics, might there also be genetic similarities? Could we even be related?
In 2003, the U.S.Government announced that the Human Genome Project had identified all of the nearly 25,000 genes in the human body. For the first time, scientists had a roadmap to the genetic make-up of humans.
In 2006, genetic researchers at the University of California at Santa Cruz discovered an area of the genome they called HAR1 that appears to be unique to humans.
Scientists believe the HAR1 gene plays a critical role in the advanced development of the human brain, and is a key element that sets us apart from other animals.
But where did it come from?
Did humans develop this distinct gene naturally through evolution?
Or did it land here from another planet?
Francis Crick, the British scientist who helped discover the structure of DNA, believed that human genes could not have evolved by chance.
HANCOCK: Crick didn’t feel in that period of roughly formation of the planet down to the time when the planet could first support life, there was enough time for DNA to evolve by accident. It’s an enormously complicated molecule.
Crick gave this analogy: You would be more likely to assemble a fully functioning and flying jumbo jet by passing a hurricane through a junkyard than you would be to assemble the DNA molecule by chance in any kind of primeval soup in five or six hundred million years. It’s just not possible.
But if this molecule could not have evolved accidentally, how was it created?
Was it, as some believe, put there on purpose?
TSOUKALOS: The question should not be do the extraterrestrials look like us or what do the extraterrestrials look like, but do we look like the extraterrestrials? Because according to the ancient astronaut theory, a long, long time ago, extraterrestrials came here, and through a targeted mutation of our genes, we– quote, unquote– “became human.”
FIEBAG (translated): Possibly there is information in our DNA about whether human evolution was manipulated or not. The DNA is almost deciphered, yet we only understand five percent of the information it carries.
TSOUKALOS: Geneticists have determined that it only takes about five percent to clone a human being, and that that we have in our bodies is nothing more than what they refer to as “genetic junk.”
DENNIN: Why is everything there? And there’s probably parts of the DNA that don’t have an obvious current function. Maybe they’re left over from something that was used in the past, kind of like our appendix is left over. Could this “genetic junk” hold the key to the evolution of humans?
Some people suggest that decoding our DNA entirely will unlock startling information about our origins. But could it even prove that aliens played a role in our development thousands of years ago?
HANCOCK: If you hypothetically wanted to record an eternal message that could be decoded by a creature that had eventually evolved enough intelligence to decode it, the place to put that message would not be on some monument or in some text, which might be swept away, but actually on the DNA of the creature itself.(baby cooing) It’s recently been established that DNA is a recording medium of almost limitless power.It would be technically possible to record the entire knowledge of a civilization on the DNA in our bodies.All you’d need is a way to access that information.
VON DANIKEN: I think we have something, the whole humanity, in our genes. Somewhere in our genes, it is coded that extraterrestrials were here thousands of years ago. But the questions persist: If aliens visited Earth tens of thousands of years ago how did they get here?
When we look to the past for the answers, are we looking in the wrong place? Should we actually look forward to our future?
Scientists agree that the best chances of finding alien life will be on planets similar to ours, and descriptions of extraterrestrials seem to resemble humans in many ways. Some ancient astronaut theorists draw a surprising conclusion from these facts, suggesting that aliens might actually be human.
POPE: It is odd that many of the descriptions of aliens are effectively humanoid, and this raises an interesting possibility. One idea that’s been put forward is that, uh, these are not extraterrestrials at all, but they’re time travelers from the future.
NOORY: They could be us from a thousand, 2,000, 10,000 years from now. Let’s assume for a moment that planet if we all survive, that time travel was created. They’ve invented it. Just like the time machine of H.G.Wells’ day, they can go back, or they can go forward. So let’s assume 10,000 years from now we decide to come back to see us. Maybe they have changed physically. They look like the alien grays or whoever they may be.
BIRNES: It could well be that ancient astronauts might not be creatures from other planets at all, but time travelers from 2720 in a time machine. Time travel is an essential concept for science fiction, but would it be possible for flesh-and-blood humans to find a way to transport themselves through time with current technology?
Would this enable us to cover the vast distances of space?
PAUL DAVIES: If I could travel close to the speed of light, I could reach the year Have to get very close to the speed of light for that, but it’s doable, and we know that this isn’t a theory, this is this is real physics– we could demonstrate these time-warping effects. So you can reach the future quicker by traveling close to the speed of light.
The concept of time travel was first proposed by Albert Einstein in 1905 when he published his Theory of Special Relativity.DENNIN: Ancient astronaut theory says that astronauts visited us a long time ago from somewhere else. The technology involved in doing that, we would assume would be similar to what we understand now.
I mean, we know special relativity is a law of physics. It holds anywhere in the universe. Ancient astronauts that would come all the way here can travel these large distances and not age that much, relative to their home planet. Because if you’re going close enough to the speed of light, you will have slowed down time enough that when you get back, hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years could have passed.
One limitation of this method of travel is that because a spacecraft has mass, it theoretically cannot reach the exact speed of light. The resulting reduction in velocity would then dramatically increase the amount of time needed to cross the vast universe.
NOORY: Well, there are definitely many theories about how extraterrestrials got here, how their propulsion system got them to planet Earth. They’re surely not coming here the way we go out into space. They’d never get here. They are finding different ways. They have either developed a new form of propulsion, or they’re able to travel through– what I’ve always believed– wormholes throughout the universe. That would instantaneously put them here. The idea of wormholes was first proposed in longtime collaborator Nathan Rosen. They began to explore the possibility that space and time could literally be bent to create a time travel shortcut.
DENNIN: Wormholes have not been detected. They are a postulated structure in space that involve actually taking– if you want to think of a sheet of paper– bending it in half and connecting the two pieces that you get together. A wormhole is thought to do something like that. Space gets warped, and it connects between two different parts of space. You know, there’s predictions about what they would look like; there’s theories about them, but we haven’t detected one yet. You’re not actually ever traveling faster than the speed of light; you’re just cutting corners.
CHILDRESS: You don’t actually have to go light speed and travel for light-years to someplace. You literally go there through a wormhole and through hyperspace, and bang, you’re there.
DAVIES: If you can have a wormhole in space, then it can be turned, in principle, into a time machine. And so travel back in time as well as forward in time would then be possible. The problem is: where do you get your wormhole? Uh, it’s not inconceivable that wormholes were made in the Big Bang, coughed out along with everything else, and there might be one out there in the universe we could harvest or adapt to form a time machine.
DENNIN: If you end up discovering that you could make wormholes, then that increases the range that you can explore in space and that increases the likelihood of having two civilizations at the same time with the right technology to communicate with each other. While theoretically possible, traveling through wormholes or at the speed of light is currently both economically and technically impossible for us here on Earth. Using modern propulsion methods, it would take 70,000 years to reach the nearest star.
DAVIES: Our fastest rockets are totally puny. It’s really pathetic. So we’re talking about luck. Any object that we can fire out into the solar system is going to take tens of thousands of years to reach the nearest star. Believe it or not, at 4.6 billion yrs old, our solar system is one of the youngest in the universe. But if civilizations exist in other galaxies, is it possible that they are more advanced than those on Earth?
And if so, could they be ahead of us in their ability to travel through space and time?
CHILDRESS: For extraterrestrials to come here, through the vast reaches of space to our planet, they clearly have to have technology that’s way in advance of what we have today. To go from solar system to solar system, rather than going warp speed, like in Star Trek, you really are going to travel, as they do in Star Wars, where you’re jumping through hyperspace. Going from a solar system to solar system is no time at all.
TSOUKALOS: Just because we can’t travel from star to star does not mean another more advanced society can’t do it either. I think that’s the height of human arrogance to say, “Just because we can’t do it, another more advanced civilization can’t do it either,” so, you know, we have to stop looking at us that we are the pinnacle of creation ’cause we’re not. Celestial beings. Visitors from the skies.
Deities descending from the heavens to interact with man. Could these worldwide stories be the foundation for the prevailing belief that something greater than ourselves, from beyond our world, created the universe as we know it?
Almost all of the great world faiths are based on stories of celestial beings who visit Earth. Many millions of people accept these legends as part of their core beliefs. And from the earliest cave drawings to images at Roswell, we see artists’ interpretations of extraterrestrials or gods coming to our planet.
YOUNG: In many traditions, there is something coming from above. There is a stairway to heaven or there’s a whirlwind or an angel descends. Sometimes the encounter is quite dangerous. As would be appropriate to something awesome and larger and more powerful than we are. Usually it is memorable.
CHILDRESS: Many of the myths are much more specific and they really talk about gods physically coming to Earth– landing, doing miracles, and showing the people how to live. If visitors did come from the stars, is it possible that they actually changed the way ancient people thought? Did they provide an intellectual spark to prehistoric civilizations? Could that be the reason why so many different cultures could build such large and lasting monuments?
NOORY: It’s almost as if primitive man woke up one morning and went, “Hey, I’ve got this knowledge and I know how to make tools and I’m gonna go and build all these things.” Nah, I don’t think it happened that way. I think others came down to this planet and started teaching other people, uh, that were beginning to evolve. But the one thing I truly do not believe is that modern cavemen at the time basically created all this knowledge out of thin air.
TSOUKALOS: All around the world, we have concise descriptions in ancient texts which say word for word that some beings came from the sky. So it’s as if this intellectual Big Bang or this Big Bang of knowledge occurred in various periods of time, and those various periods of time most concisely always correlate with some type of description of gods descending from the sky.
HANCOCK: I do think of that as a very significant before-and-after moment in the human story, and it is not a moment that is linked to physical evolution. We’ve already got the hardware. It’s as though something happened to our software around about that time, and I think it’s a very intriguing moment in the human story. For supporters of ancient alien theory, the verdict is already in. They believe that aliens visited many of Earth’s earliest cultures thousands of years ago. But is it possible?
Are extraterrestrials responsible for the sacred creation myths of the first human civilizations? Might they have tampered with our DNA?
Are humans themselves aliens from another planet in the heavens or even from another time? While man continues to search for these answers, the questions remain. If they came here, what was their mission?
We call Earth home, but with perfect conditions for life, could it be a beacon, calling out to other intelligent civilizations that may exist in the universe?
CARGILL: I think there is life, simple life, bacterial life, microbial life on other planets. I think we’re going to find that. And who knows?
Maybe one day we’ll find some other planet that’s capable of sustaining life, that has evolved people over a long period of time, that are also looking up at the stars wondering: is there anybody else out there, are we the only ones?
HELDMANN: What bigger question could we ask about ourselves and our place in the universe? You know, is there life elsewhere in the universe, or are we it?
I mean, I think it’s one of the most fascinating questions, and we’re fortunate enough to live in a time when we can address this question scientifically and really try and get at some answers.
NOORY: You can then come up with a conclusion that something, one, very strange is happening on this planet, and two, if it’s coming from outside of this system, then we’re being visited by something that has some intelligence behind it.
TSOUKALOS: In the end, the truth wins, and we’ve seen this in history, where scientific theories or ideas that have been deemed impossible turned out to be true, and so it is my firm conviction that the same will count for the ancient alien theory.
NOTE:This article is an edited version of episode one, season two, of the TV Series Ancient Aliens. Our editors worked hard to correct out any mistakes, and arrange the context so that our readers can enjoy reading through the episodes, without having to watch them. I believe that when you read through these episodes, you can imagine (reconstruct) what the participants of the Series were trying to say in a much more efficient, a much richer way.
Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Lockheed Martin, and NanoRacks all love talking about how they want to colonize space. But there are obviously a few of logistical issues, including how to produce enough energy and breathable air for astronauts to be in outer space for prolonged periods of time.
Cracking the code may involve taking a cue from our fellow earthlings, plants, who are able to convert sunlight into chemical energy through the process of photosynthesis. That’s according to an international group of scientists who say that their recent leap in the field of so-called artificial photosynthesis may help establish human outposts in deep space.
In the paper published in Nature Communications Thursday, the researchers detailed how to conduct photoelectrochemical experiments — the chemical reactions needed to turn light into chemical energy and produce oxygen — in a microgravity environment. This takes them one step closer to being able to use sunlight both to extract breathable oxygen from water but also to harvest hydrogen gas as a renewable source of fuel.
There is still a lot of work to be done until scientists can reproduce this process as well as plants, but first-author Katharina Brinkert, said the team believes artificial photosynthesis could one day create artificial atmospheres in outer space.
A 1969 NASA space concept, to be assembled on-orbit from spent Apollo program stages.
“On long-term space missions, it’s about creating an artificial atmosphere on the spaceship, so essentially something nature provides for us,” she tells Astronomy Magazine “We are so lucky to actually have trees and algae and so on performing natural photosynthesis. So we would like to do […] artificial photosynthesis.”
The team conducted their experiments inside the Bremen Drop Tower in Germany — a 476-foot spire built to drop things off of. Throwing things down this tower creates exactly 9.3 seconds of weightlessness. This gave the researchers a moment to see if their photoelectrochemical cell could produce hydrogen gas from a water solution in zero-gravity.
The experiment succeeded, which means it could potentially be implemented to improve existing devices aboard the International Space Station. The ISS already has its own system that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen, but it’s far from becoming the spacecraft’s only source of fuel. The station relies on regular resupply shipments from Earth to keep it operational.
By dropping their TK cell from the top of the Bremen Drop Tower, the researchers were able to see if it would function in a microgravity environment.
Frequent shipments to the ISS are possible because it’s only orbiting a couple of hundred miles above our head. The further out in space we go, the more costly these missions become.
The type of research conducted by Brinkert’s team could one day lead to self-sustaining human outposts orbiting the Moon, Mars, and even our most distant planetary neighbors.
Claudio Kopper didn’t think there was anything to see in that part of the sky, but he was wrong. What he and other scientists around the world soon observed on Earth and in space marked the beginning of a new age of astrophysics — one in which a long-elusive “ghost particle,” or high-energy neutrino, can finally be traced back to its mysterious origins.
Optical detectors at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica picked up evidence of a high-energy neutrino in September 2017, prompting the project’s computers to begin calculating where in the universe the particle may have come from. Neutrinos are tiny subatomic particles with so little mass that they barely interact with anything in space, making it incredibly difficult for physicists like the University of Alberta’s Kopper, an assistant professor of physics, and his hundreds of collaborators to study them and trace their origins.
With the new data, which are described Thursday in a groundbreaking pair of Science papers, IceCube collaborators alerted other laboratories around the world to gaze at that part of the sky and figure out what emitted the neutrino.
Against all odds, they succeeded.
The team had sent out these alerts before, and Kopper didn’t think this one would be special. “How wrong I was,” Kopper tells Inverse.
Estimates showed that the neutrino was flung toward Earth off the shoulder of the constellation Orion, and when Kopper returned to work the next morning, he saw that astronomers at the Fermi Large Area Telescope had indeed identified a source of gamma radiation in that part of the sky. Soon after, astronomers at the Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) Telescope confirmed a bright emission of light in that part of space at the time in question. And so, the hunt for the neutrino’s source began.
In the new papers, the scientists announced their findings: The neutrino most likely came from a flaring blazar, an astronomical object considered to be one of the most energetic bodies in the universe. A blazar is a supermassive black hole situated at the center of a galaxy, whose powerful jet blasts light and radiation toward Earth from across all that space.
The blazar in question, TXS 0506+056, is about 4 billion light-years away from Earth, and in the pair of Science papers, over 100 scientists present evidence that this coincidence — the neutrino detection and the blazar flare — are most likely connected. In one paper, an international team shows that there’s a very low probability that the coincidence of the neutrino detected on Earth and the blazar flare observed in outer space did not occur by random chance.
In the other paper, scientists from the IceCube Collaboration confirm that high-energy neutrons came from the direction of blazar TXS 0506+056 between September 2014 and March 2015.Together, these papers support the idea that blazars are a source of the cosmic rays that create the evasive ghost particles. Neutrinos are produced when the high-energy protons and atomic nuclei in cosmic rays smash together, so where there are neutrinos, there are cosmic rays.
Prior to this discovery, scientists knew that cosmic rays came from our sun and from supernovae, but now they know the most energetic ones originate in blazars.
While the discovery of the neutrino’s source is an astounding find, what’s even more important is the near-unprecedented method used to discover it, which will usher in a new age of physics. For only the second time in history, the scientists used both light and radiation to understand an astronomical phenomenon. The only other time “multimessenger observation” had ever been used was when scientists used light and gravitational waves to detect a neutron star collision.
To detect all those signals, scientists need seriously heavy-duty equipment. “It can be hard to even imagine how big the detector is,” says Kopper. The IceCube Observatory detector, situated at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica, lies entirely below the surface of the ice. It includes 86 vertical strings that reach over 8,000 feet below the surface of the Antarctic ice, spread out over a cubic kilometer of ice. Each string has 60 optical detectors on it, so as a neutrino passes undisturbed through the ice and the Earth, the observatory’s array can detect which direction the particle is moving. But even with this massive sensor array, the observatory can only detect about 10 astrophysical neutrinos each year.
“Painting a picture of the entire sky at a pace of ten dots per year is hard, so we rely on the multimessenger technique, using other telescopes to see what else is going on in the sky at the position where a neutrino is detected,” Marcos Santander, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the Universty of Alabama and one of the collaborators on the discovery, tells Inverse. This use of multimessenger observation is the bigger, perhaps more important context of the blazar discovery.
“It was not only IceCube but so many more people across so many other experiments and observatories that needed to come together to make this happen,” says Kopper of the collaboration that allowed scientists to make this discovery.
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is almost entirely under the Antarctic ice, consisting of over 5,000 detectors that lie between 1.5 and 2.5 kilometers below the surface.
As astrophysicists begin to use all the available signals sent our way by astronomical phenomena, they’ll be able to piece together mysteries about the universe that had puzzled their predecessors for decades. For instance, even though scientists have known about cosmic rays for a century, multimessenger observation helped them identify a likely source for the most energetic ones. But this is much more of a starting point than a final result.
“Now that we have the first source candidate we need to know what makes it special and how the acceleration actually happens,” says Santander.
“We want to also be able to do neutrino astronomy, finding many sources that we can study and comparing their emission to what we see in electromagnetic waves. This is really just the beginning.”
REUTERSDeze illustratie laat zien hoe het deeltje wordt weggeslingerd door een enorm zwart gat op vier miljard lichtjaar afstand.
WETENSCHAPHet is een van grote mysteries van de natuur: waar komen de mysterieuze neutrino’s vandaan? Het zijn fundamentele deeltjes in het heelal, maar wetenschappers weten er haast niets van. Nu hebben wetenschappers voor het eerst uitgerekend waar zo’n neutrino is ontstaan.
Neutrino’s zijn miniem. Ze hebben geen elektrische lading en nauwelijks massa. Elke seconde vliegen er vele miljarden neutrino’s recht door ons lichaam en door de aarde heen. Ze zijn door niets tegen te houden. Ook magnetische velden kunnen de deeltjes niet wegkaatsen. Dat maakt het ook heel moeilijk om neutrino’s te vangen en te bestuderen. Ze worden daarom ook wel ‘spookdeeltjes’ genoemd. Om ze toch op te sporen, zijn in het ijs van de Zuidpool 86 gaten van 2,5 kilometer diep geboord. In die gaten zitten 5160 ultragevoelige sensoren, verspreid over een gebied van 1 vierkante kilometer. Als neutrino’s een spoor achterlaten in het ijs, is er een miniem lichtflitsje te zien. De sensoren zijn in staat om dat op te vangen.
Zo’n flitsje is op 22 september vorig jaar gemeten. De kleine neutrino raakte het ijs met een kracht van 300 biljoen elektronvolts. Dat is 45 keer de kracht van de sterkste deeltjesversneller op aarde.
Telescopen op aarde en in de ruimte sloegen vervolgens aan het meten en rekenen. Daaruit bleek dat het deeltje is opgejaagd en weggeslingerd door een enorm zwart gat op vier miljard lichtjaar afstand. Eerder gemeten deeltjes kwamen van dezelfde bron, bleek uit een ander onderzoek. De beide studies staan donderdag in het belangrijke wetenschapsblad Science.
Neutrino’s kunnen wetenschappers iets leren over de manier waarop het heelal in elkaar zit.
Two new papers in Science report that blazars are a source of high-energy neutrinos, a discovery that could open a new field of astronomy: https://scim.ag/2zvwHAz
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:HLN.be - Het Laatste Nieuws ( NL)
UFO Caught Making A Cloud To Hide In, July 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Caught Making A Cloud To Hide In, July 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: July 11, 2018
Location of sighting: Unknown
What starts off looking like a normal cloud is actually a cloud created around a large UFO. This particular cloud is being made by a smaller UFO built for the job, like small worker drones around a main craft. The UFO produces the clouds to hide the craft. There are many reasons to hide it even though it may be cloaked...if its glowing in any way, they always will create clouds around it to hide the glow. Also when you see long cloud tunnels side by side, that is how they hide the glowing ships when moving across the planet from base to base.
Former MUFON Field Investigator Ron Wright shared a first-hand report of a close encounter of the third kind. The incident started when his spouse received a phone call on the late evening of June 6, 2018, from her son. He is a former police officer, former American Army veteran, and currently a local casino security guard.
Watching the face of his spouse while talking to her son, he noticed a look of concern. She handed the phone to him and said: “you need to hear this!” As Ron listened to her son, he was serious about what they spotted and encountered.
The primary witness was the 12-yr old daughter of his girlfriend. Ron spoke to the girl for over half an hour asking several questions.
The girl told him that the encounter took place at around 7:30 pm on June 6, 2018, 5 miles southeast of Siletz off a gravel road close to Ojalla Road in the woods.
The creature was approximately 100 feet standing 2 legs from the girl. The witness described the strange being to be pale grey, standing about 4-5 feet with quarter size dark brown eyes. The ribs were showing, super skinny, no clothes and had round, oval head, according to the witness. She added that it looked like no ears or nose, just a roundish bump of where the nose should be located.
The girl saw it about 10 seconds the first time and around 12 seconds the second time. The witness noticed that the birds were quiet but got noisy when it took off. She heard a buzzing noise before the sighting. Then the sounds got echoing for approximately 20 seconds before going normal again.
She went on to tell Ron that the family checked the area but saw only tuffs of white and black fur on the stump.
There’s been no shortage of shows this century seeking to dissect and expound on the strange natural mysteries of Earth. David Attenborough managed to jumpstart things with the BBC’s Blue Planet back in the day, and then with Planet Earth. Now, every season seems to herald a new mini-series focused on showing exactly how wondrous and unique our third rock from the sun really is.
One Strange Rock, National Geographic Channel’s ten-episode series produced by Darren Aronofsky and Will Smith (who also doubles as a narrator) is just the latest in this entry, but with a twist: Each episode is hosted by an astronaut who has been to space, using the stories of what they’ve seen and heard and felt while drifting weightlessly in Earth’s orbit to regale Earthlings about the unique home we have, unlike anything we’re likely to discover out in the rest of the universe.
“It might be the weirdest place in the universe,” Smith says about Earth in the series’ opening scene. Each astronaut discusses a specific theme or concept critical to our understanding of the planet’s evolution, and how it’s helped lead to the human species’ dominance of this world.
“It’s like I lived my life in a little dark room and somebody flipped on a light,” astronaut Peggy Whitson, the record holder for the most cumulative time spent in space, says at one point.
Take “Gasp,” the premiere episode of One Strange Rock. Hosted by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, “Gasp” essentially tells the story of oxygen on Earth. The episode demonstrates not just how the oxygen cycle moves through the smallest microbes to the tallest reaches of the atmosphere and sustains most life throughout the planet. Learning to “gasp” allowed us to evolve into complex creatures, but it also comes with severe biological limitations. Breathing oxygen is both a gift and a curse.
Hadfield drives this point acutely home through a story of his own, recounting the time during a spacewalk when his helmet became contaminated by some sort of anti-fog solution and caused him to lose the ability to see for several minutes. The solution to clear up the problem was to release his own oxygen out from his helmet into space, and flush out the contaminant.
For Hadfield, breathing suddenly transformed from something so automatic and natural he never gave it a second’s thought to a precarious action requiring his full attention. Oxygen, which is essentially Hadfield’s lifeline, is now hissing out of his helmet, and should this plan fail, he’ll be gasping furiously for air.
“That’s when you really appreciate the significance of that thin blue line,” Hadfield tells The Daily Beast, referring to the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. That small division is the difference between living in a comfortable blanket of freely-available oxygen and a bleak vacuum where your ability to breathe could vanish in mere seconds.
As a show about the natural world, One Strange Rock is offers the same lessons its contemporaries do (the Earth is strange and wonderful and we should have more reverence and respect for it, or something like that), but it’s fascinating to see it arrive there through the tales of astronauts.
“It’s like I lived my life in a little dark room and somebody flipped on a light.”
— Peggy Whitson, astronaut, 'One Strange Rock'
“It’s important that people see the world differently, and weigh that into their decision making,” says Hadfield. “The perspective that we get orbiting the world in 92 minutes kind of inevitably gives that to us.”
Watching the planet’s glaciers in full; algal blooms in the ocean pluming off the coasts; volcanic eruptions in the mountains and fires in the amazon; snowstorms and hurricanes and typhoons making landfall; dust storms stretching out across the equator and making their way across entire oceans—astronauts are able to bear witness to how intertwined and interconnected the Earth’s regions and its inhabitants.
“It’s all just so wonderfully unlikely,” Hadfield says. “And yet it’s here.”
Unlikeliness is a common theme for each episode. In the episode “Awakening,” astronaut Leland Melvin explores the evolution of the brain and how this multi-neuronal structure has learned to grant humans the ability to create new languages for communication, design and build entire ships that exist in space, and even, as happened to Melvin, rewire itself in order to regain lost abilities like hearing.
“We still don’t understand how our brain works in this magnificent way,” he tells The Daily Beast. For such an organ to take shape, even over billions of years of evolution, is a mathematical miracle.
Sometimes, that rarity coalesces with fragility, spelling out gloom and doom. “Storm,” hosted by astronaut Nicole Stott, explores how violent natural events are basically the a global version of a forest fire: clearing out life as we know it, but from the ashes new life arises. If an asteroid hadn’t hit a specific sulfur reserve and thrown toxic elements into the air which killed off the dinosaurs, humans might have never evolved to take their place.
“It’s all just so wonderfully unlikely. And yet it’s here.”
— Chris Hadfield, astronaut, 'One Strange Rock'
As Smith points out, this asteroid had been traveling through space for billions of years before it hit Earth. And almost impossibly, “if this rock had arrived just a few seconds later, it would have crashed out in the deep blue ocean.” No bullseye into the sulfur reserve, and no massive extinction. The Earth is capable of weathering extinction impacts, but life is fragile, and prone to disappearing in the blink of an eye.
That dichotomy is what is effectively at the core of One Strange Rock. The show uses National Geographic’s greatest asset—unparalleled images and footage of Earth—to push forward the very important lesson that the planet is a witness to a long geological and biological history. Yet most of the life, humans included, are delicate spectators. Yes, we’re tearing the planet up with climate change, and it might devastate us and lead to our ruin, but Earth will still be here, and life will find a way to move on without us.
The show is certainly not without its faults—different segments in each episode don’t always neatly fit in the overall theme being explored, and sometimes it feels like Smith and Aronofsky are fitting a square peg in a round hole just because the visuals are so stunning. But there’s no question they succeed in delivering their overall message; Earth is a one of a kind place, and it seems the farther one gets away from, the stranger and more miraculous it looks.
One Strange Rock premieres on March 26 on the National Geographic Channel.
Apollo 15 Astronaut Says Humans Are Descendants Of Ancient Aliens
Apollo 15 Astronaut Says Humans Are Descendants Of Ancient Aliens
The idea that Ancient Aliens created the human race has fascinated countless authors and researchers for decades.
And while mainstream science believes this is just absurd, countless pieces of evidence have been found across the globe that back up the ancient alien theory.
Perhaps the most important connection between the rise of civilization and alien beings can be found in history, tucked away in ancient manuscripts and clay tablets that have survived for thousands of years.
Example of this is the Ancient Sumerian King list, which describes kings who ruled over Earth for a total of 241,200 years since the original kingship had ‘descended from heaven.’
This ancient list is written in Ancient Sumerian lists numerous generations of Kings that ruled over Ancient Sumer, detailing their length and location of kingships.
But mainstream scholars believe not everything written down on the Sumerian King list is real, saying that the Sumerian King list is a mixture of prehistorical and mythological accounts which speaks of Gods that ruled over the land enjoying implausibly lengthy reigns.
If we travel halfway around the world, all the way from Ancient Mesopotamia to the Americas we will find how the sacred book of the ancient Maya, the Popol Vuh describes the beings that created mankind.
The creators of our race in the Popol Vuh are referred to as “the Creator, the Former, the Dominator, the Feathered-Serpent, they-who-engender, they-who-give-being, hovered over the water as a dawning light.”
And while these above mentioned ancient texts are extraordinary, perhaps, even more, are the countless artifacts that have been found scattered across the globe depicting beings eerily similar to modern-day astronauts.
And while speaking of astronauts, Al Worden, former astronaut and member of the Apollo 15 mission had something fascinating to say about alien life, while speaking in an interview with Good Morning Britain.
Al Worden was an American astronaut and engineer who was the Command Module Pilot for the Apollo 15 lunar mission in 1971. He is one of only 24 people to have flown to the Moon. The former astronaut has also been listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the “Most isolated human being” during his time alone in the Command Module Endeavour.
While Speaking to Good Morning Britain, Al Worden, the astronaut who flew around the moon 75 times, spending six days in orbit around the moon, was asked if he believed aliens were real.
The answer probably surprised everyone watching the interview.
The former Apollo 15 member said that not only are aliens real, but they came to Earth in the distant and created our civilization, and if we wanted to look for evidence, all we had to do was look at ancient Sumerian literature.
Al Worden, former astronaut and the first person to take a space walk, gave an interview today to describe his view of the history of mankind. He believes that the people are descended from an extra-Iridic race related to ancient Sumerians.
“We are the aliens, but we just think they are somebody else. But we are the ones who came from somewhere else, because somebody else had to survive, and they got into little spacecraft then they came here and landed, and they started civilization here.”
“And if you don’t believe me, go get books on Ancient Sumerians and see what they had to say.”
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
NASA May Have Discovered and Then Destroyed Organics on Mars in 1976
NASA May Have Discovered and Then Destroyed Organics on Mars in 1976
By Chelsea Gohd, Space.com Staff Writer
This view from the Viking 2 shows Utopia Planitia on Mars in 1976. Some researchers think that the Viking lander's main instrument may have burned up organic molecules in collected soil samples.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Over 40 years ago, a NASA mission may have accidentally destroyed what would have been the first discovery of organic molecules on Mars, according to a report from New Scientist.
Recently, NASA caused quite a commotion when it announced that its Curiosity rover discovered organic molecules — which make up life as we know it — on Mars. This followed the first confirmation of organic molecules on Mars in 2014. But because small, carbon-rich meteorites so frequently pelt the Red Planet, scientists have suspected for decades that organics exist on Mars. But researchers were stunned in 1976, when NASA sent two Viking landers to Mars to search for organics for the first time and found absolutely none.
Scientists didn't know what to make of the Viking findings — how could there be no organics on Mars? "It was just completely unexpected and inconsistent with what we knew," Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, told New Scientist. [Viking 1: The Historic First Mars Landing in Pictures]
A technician checks the soil sampler on the Viking Lander in 1971 before the probe traveled to Mars. Some scientists think that the organic molecules in the soil samples collected by the lander were burned up accidentally.
Credit: NASA.
A possible explanation arose when NASA's Phoenix lander found perchlorate on Mars in 2008. This is a salt used to make fireworks on Earth; it becomes highly explosive under high temperatures. And while the surface of Mars isn't too warm, the main instrument aboard the Viking landers, the gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer (GCMS), had to heat the Martian soil samples to find organic molecules. And because perchlorate is in the soil, the instrument would have burned up any organics in the samples during this process.
The discovery of perchlorate reignited scientists' convictions that the Viking landers could have found organics on Mars. "You get some new insight, and you realize that everything you thought was wrong," McKay said.
However, finding perchlorate didn't provide concrete proof that the Viking landers found and accidentally destroyed organic molecules, so the investigation continued.
The variety of organic molecules that Curiosity recently discovered on the Red Planet included chlorobenzene. This molecule is created when carbon molecules burn with perchlorate, so scientists suspect that it could have been created when the soil samples were burnt, according to New Scientist.
Researchers were inspired by this indirect evidence to dig a little deeper and find more evidence that the Viking landers could have found and then destroyed organics. In a new study, published in June in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, Melissa Guzman of the LATMOS research center in France, McKay and a handful of collaborators revisited the Viking lander data to see if anything was missed.
This team found that the Viking landers also detected chlorobenzene, which the researchers said could have formed from burning organic material in the soil samples.
Still, this is not proof that the Viking landers found organic molecules and then accidentally burned them, the researchers told New Scientist. Even the scientists who completed this investigation are divided.
Guzman said she still isn't completely convinced that the chlorobenzene they detected formed when organics in Martian soil were burned. She said that the molecule could have come from Earth aboard NASA equipment.
But despite this skepticism, others are convinced; "this paper really seals the deal," Daniel Glavin, an astrobiologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center who was not involved in the study, told New Scientist.
Last year, more than 1,100 Canadians reported seeing unusual lights or shapes in the sky and a new study says some are still unexplained.
Last September, 10 campers in Quebec say they watched as a glowing, pyramid-shaped object floated above their trailer and came to a halt mid-air.
The group says the unusual object hovered above the campsite and emitted an intense red light. A moment later, the light flickered and it flew out of sight.
The unexplained encounter is one of the best-documented UFO sightings reported in Canada in 2017. Last year, 1,101 people reported seeing unusual lights and shapes in Canada’s skies, according to the annual Canadian UFO Survey released by UFOlogy Research of Manitoba.
Last year, 1,101 people reported seeing unusual lights and shapes in Canada’s skies, according to the annual Canadian UFO Survey released by UFOlogy Research of Manitoba.
A donut-shaped UFO was spotted in Rimouski, Que. on Oct. 23, 2017 and photographed by witnesses. It's one of 1,101 UFO sightings in Canada last year.
(Source: 2017 Canadian UFO Survey)
A UFO sighting at a Quebec campsite in 2017 is illustrated in this drawing submitted by witnesses.
(Source: 2017 Canadian UFO Survey)
That amounts to about three UFO sightings in Canada each day. It was the fifth-highest number of sightings since the survey began in 1989, says science writer Chris Rutkowski, who spearheaded the project.
“UFOs still seem to be thing. They haven’t gone away. And they don’t seem to be declining in any numbers,” Rutkowski told CTVNews.ca
The report collects and analyzes UFO sightings across the country each year. A team then analyzes the reports, including photographs and other evidence, for their reliability and strangeness factor.
About one-third of last year’s cases had a logical explanation, such as a solar flare, drone or shooting star. Another third of cases didn’t include enough information to be sufficiently studied.
But 10 cases had a high degree of both reliability and strangeness, and are what the UFO researchers describe as “high quality unknowns.”
“It’s not just an average person seeing a light in the sky. It’s someone with a good background of observing the sky … who sees something a bit more structured,” Rutkowski said.
The Quebec campsite case is among last year’s small list of high-quality unknowns, which account for just one per cent of all sightings.
Other examples include a spinning, donut-shaped object spotted around 5 a.m. in Rimouski, Quebec; a university physicist who, along with two other witnesses, saw an illuminated “V”-shaped object on a condo rooftop in downtown Montreal; and a cigar-shaped object that darted across the Ottawa sky on an April morning.
One of the more frightening encounters occurred on Jan. 5 in Ontario’s French River, where two witnesses saw several coloured orbs float toward them and hover before moving away.
Among the less reliable cases: someone said a three-foot-tall alien was seen last June in Rothesay, N.B. crouching and “poking at some bushes.” In Toronto, someone said they were watching lights flashing in the sky when suddenly a group of aliens appeared beside their car.
Below is a map of UFO sightings in Canada in 2017, using data provided by UFOlogy Research. The accuracy of locations depends on the report. Using our app? Touch here.
Canada’s UFO capital
While plenty of UFO sightings come from rural locations, a number of city-dwellers spotted UFOs in urban areas last year. In 2017, Montreal was the country’s UFO-sighting capital.
Montreal - 74
Toronto - 57
Vancouver - 46
Edmonton - 29
Hamilton - 28
Ottawa - 26
Calgary - 24
Winnipeg - 9
Nearly half of all UFO sightings in 2017 came from Quebec, which had a record year. Many of those were linked to a series of fireballs seen crossing the sky in the fall.
“It was in fact pieces of comet entering the atmosphere,” Rutkowski said.
Quebec – 518
Ontario – 241
British Columbia – 128
New Brunswick – 27
Nova Scotia – 27
Yukon - 3
Nunavut – 2
The sightings themselves were generally quite long, with the average UFO sighting lasting 15 minutes in 2017.
The purpose of the study is not to prove that extra-terrestrial life exists, but rather, to document and investigate unidentified flying objects in Canada’s skies. More often than not, the report debunks what a witness may have initially considered unexplainable.
“In fact, none of these cases are proof that aliens are visiting us,” Rutkowski said. “What it does say, what our report overall says is that people continue to see UFOs in significant numbers and Canadians are certainly reporting them in very significant numbers.”
Since the report began 29 years ago, 19,138 Canadian UFO reports have been catalogued.
Europa’s Buried Ocean Could Rise to the Surface (Video)
Europa’s Buried Ocean Could Rise to the Surface (Video)
By Chelsea Gohd, Space.com Staff Writer
This animation shows how subsurface ocean water could be transported to the surface on Europa, one of Jupiter's moons.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Samuel M. Howell
Beneath the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa lies a massive liquid ocean — and one new animation shows how this subsurface water could move to the moon's surface.
Europa's ice shell is changed by gravitational interactions with Jupiter, according to a statement. The new animation is one of a number of simulations that show behaviors on Europa from a new study, published May 2018 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, conducted by scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
As gravity pulls at Europa's icy shell, faults form and re-form in the ice — these faults can be seen in the animation as yellow, green and blue lines. The lighter, speckled, swirling bottom of the animation represents the upper part of Europa's ocean that meets the ice. The little white dots represent pieces of the ocean that have been frozen into the bottom of the ice. [Europa Report: Jupiter's Icy Moon Explained (Infographic)]
Jupiter's moon Europa has a massive moon hidden beneath its icy surface. One new animation shows how water in this ocean moves upward toward the surface, which would help future missions to study the moon's surface.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The researchers who made this animation refer to these little white bits as "fossil" ocean material because the pieces spend hundreds of thousands or even millions of years traveling to the moon's surface. Bits that reach the surface could be from over a million years prior, so spacecraft that study these "fossils" would reveal a picture of Europa's ancient ocean.
NASA has plans to further study the moon and will send the Europa Clipper spacecraft to Europa in the early 2020s. This craft will be the first spacecraft intended to study Europa exclusively. The craft will analyze the moon's surface during a series of flybys, looking to figure out what it's made of, and it will likely be able to test and validate this animated simulation, according to the statement.
While Europa's "fossil" ocean material won't show the current state of the moon's ocean, the spacecraft will also analyze these bits. Studying these ocean bits and what they're made of could give researchers clues as to whether life could have ever existed on Europa, according to the statement.
Making oxygen from water may pave way for long-distance space travel
Making oxygen from water may pave way for long-distance space travel
by Brooks Hays
Scientists have converted water into oxygen and hydrogen under microgravity conditions using only a semiconductor and sunlight. The technology could make long-distance space travel possible.
NASA astronaut Robert Curbeam works on the International Space Station's S1 truss during the space shuttle Discovery's STS-116 mission in December 2006.
File Photo by NASA/UPI | License Photo
Researchers have previously developed a variety of water-splitting technologies for use on Earth. One of the simplest methods is called photocatalysis -- the technology uses photons, a semiconductor material and water to create electron-hole pairs.
When the material absorbs photons, a free electron is released. The reaction pulls a proton from the water, which can combine with the free electron to form hydrogen. The hole created by the released electron is replaced by an electron from water, which can combine with protons to form oxygen.
The system can produce hydrogen fuel for a spaceship and oxygen for astronauts to breathe.
To see if the technology can work under microgravity conditions, scientists dropped a photocatalysis system down a drop tower. When an object is in free fall, it experiences conditions similar to microgravity.
Photocatalysis results in bubble production near the catalyst material. On Earth, buoyancy causes the bubbles to float to the surface. But under microgravity conditions the bubbles remain near the catalyst.
Scientists were able to make nanoscale augmentations to the catalyst material's microstructure, creating tiny pyramid-like shapes on the surface. The texture causes bubbles to move to the tip of the pyramid and disengage.
Researchers detailed their design change this week in the journal Nature Communications.
NASA astronaut Kate Rubins works with a Nitrogen/Oxygen Recharge System tank aboard the International Space Station. The tanks are designed to be plugged into the station’s existing air supply network to refill the crew’s breathable air supply.
NASA
The technology isn't yet perfect. Though scientists were able to get the bubbles to separate from the catalyst, they still remain in the water. The accumulating foam diminishes the efficiency of the hydrogen-production process.
"Engineering solutions around this problem will be key to successfully implementing technology in space -- with one possibility being using centrifugal forces from rotation of a spacecraft to separate the gases from the solution," researchers wrote in The Conversation.
There is also the problem of water supply. Though blasting off with large amounts of water is safer than carrying large amounts of fuel, water is heavy. Long-term space travel will require external sources. Eventually, scientists hope space-mining operations will be able to harvest water form asteroids.
"Thanks to this new study we are a step closer to long-duration human spaceflight," scientists said.
Photo catalyst producing hydrogen gas from water.O. Usher
AMERICAN MADE Human-modified stones excavated in central Texas date to more than 16,000 years ago. Finds include a spearpoint (far right) unlike any others previously unearthed at ancient American sites.
People inhabited what’s now central Texas several thousand years before hunters from North America’s ancient Clovis culture showed up, researchers say.
Excavations at the Gault site, about 64 kilometers north of Austin, produced a range of stone artifacts that date to between around 16,700 and 21,700 years ago, reports a team led by archaeologist Thomas Williams of Texas State University in San Marcos. An analysis of 184 of those finds identified 11 spearpoints unlike any others that have been found at ancient American sites, the scientists conclude July 11 in Science Advances.
Researchers have long argued about whether people reached North America before the rise of Clovis culture 13,000 years ago. Evidence from the Gault site joins other recent reports of humans venturing deep into North America far earlier (SN: 6/11/16, p. 8), which would take Clovis people out of the running for the title of first New World settlers.
Williams’ group estimated the age of the Gault pre-Clovis discoveries with a method that calculates the time since artifact-containing sediment has been exposed to sunlight.
Previous work at the Gault site uncovered Clovis spearpoints and other implements from roughly 13,000 years ago, as well as tools and other artifacts made by groups dating to as recently as a few thousand years ago. Some of the newly described stone tools at Gault, such as small, rectangular cutting implements, display similarities to Clovis tools, the investigators say. Overall, though, the earlier artifacts belong to a toolmaking tradition separate from Clovis, the team asserts.
Ancient Tools Discovered In China Rewrite Mankind’s History
Ancient Tools Discovered In China Rewrite Mankind’s History
Ancient tools and bones discovered in China by a group of archaeologists indicate that the first humans left Africa and arrived in Asia sooner than previously thought.
This discovery implies that hominins left Africa earlier than indicated by the evidence from Dmanisi.
The discovery illustrates how our ancestors colonized East Asia more than two million years ago, effectively rewriting history as we know it.
The archaeological evidence was discovered at Shangchen, on the south Loess plateau, by a Chinese team led by Zhaoyu Zhu.
The oldest pieces date back to 2.12 million years ago and are about 270,000 years older than the bone remains and stone tools of Dmanisi, Georgia, which were previously considered as the oldest evidence of human evidence outside of Africa.
Nestled on a hillside in China’s Shaanxi Province, this dig site exposed Shangchen’s oldest stone tools. Chinese Academy of Sciences geologist Zhaoyu Zhu and his colleagues excavated the area for 13 years. Image Credit: Zhaoyu Zhu
“Finding artifacts that you knew were around two million years old—and therefore the oldest outside Africa—was for me, as a palaeoanthropologist, really exciting,” saysstudy coauthor Robin Dennell, a professor at the University of Exeter.
“More people have climbed Everest than found stone tools that old.”
The artifacts include a notch, scrapers, hammerstones and pointed pieces.
Some of the stone artifacts from Shangchen’s oldest sediment layers. Image Credit: Zhaoyu Zhu
A team of researchers from China and the UK investigating the ancient Chinese site have rewritten the history of early humankind
All show signs of use: the stone, for example, had scales made intentionally.
Most were made out of quartzite and quartz that probably came from the Qinling Mountains at a distance of between 5 and 10 km.
Fragments of animal bones dating back to around 2.12 million years were also discovered by the archaeological team led by Zhaoyu Zhu.
The ancient stone tools were discovered in 11 different layers of soil that correspond to a warm and humid climate.
THE SUN
The Loess Plateau, where the tools were found, is said to be an early cradle of human civilisation
RECONSTRUCTION BY W. SCHNAUBELT & N. KIESER / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
A reconstruction of Homo Erectus, which would've been responsible for creating the tools
PROF. ZHAOYU ZHU
Scientists say the earliest discoveries at the site date back 2.12million years
PROF. ZHAOYU ZHU
The Loess Plateau is famous for its high erosion, creating a carved-out environment that has sheltered human life for millions of years
Others, found in six different layers, corresponded to colder and drier conditions.
In total, the 17 layers cover a period of almost one million years.
According to experts, this shows that the first types of humans occupied the Chinese plateau under different climatic conditions between 1.2 and 2.12 million years ago.
SETI: “To find ET’s we must open our minds and have a less anthropocentric stance”
SETI: “To find ET’s we must open our minds and have a less anthropocentric stance”
To find ET, we must open our minds beyond a deeply rooted, Earth-centric perspective, expand our research methods and deploy new tools. Advanced intelligent life is probably abundant in the universe, but can be very different from us. We need to understand how to identify it. In order to do so, a radical change in current methodologies is needed.
Must Aliens be a physical manifestation necessarily? What If there is Alien life out there we cannot even perceive? Image Illustration: Prometheus movie.
Research director of SETI, Nathalie Cabrol, proposes a more multidisciplinary approach in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, beyond radio and optics. According to Cabrol, we must remain open-minded about Alien lifeforms and have a lesser anthropocentric stance when looking for ET.
In an article published in the journal Astrobiology, Cabrol suggests the need for a radical change in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, with a combination of physical, biological, computer and social sciences, joined on a mission to search for life in different forms we may not even know exists.
Cabrol asserts that “To find ET, we must open our minds beyond a deeply rooted, Earth-centric perspective, expand our research methods and deploy new tools. Never before has so much data been available in so many scientific disciplines to help us grasp the role of probabilistic events in the development of extraterrestrial intelligence. These data tell us that each world is a unique planetary experiment. Advanced intelligent life is likely plentiful in the universe, but may be very different from us, based on what we now know of the co-evolution of life and environment.”
Led by pioneers such as Frank Drake and Jill Tarter, SETI-the Search for extraterrestrial intelligence began in the 1960s using radio astronomy to ‘listen’ to potential signals sent from our cosmic neighbours. Today, we search for radio and optical signals generated by a technology similar to ours. And even though there are compelling reasons to continue with these efforts, it is equally convincing expand the search criteria and accept existing and other methodologies that might prove useful in the near future.
Advanced intelligent life is probably abundant in the universe, but can be very different from us.
This is why Cabrol promotes the establishment of a Virtual Institute with the participation of the global scientific community. The new Virtual SETI Institute would integrate our new knowledge to understand who aliens might be and where they might be located. Cabrol proposes we should break the constraints imposed by only suggesting extraterrestrial necessarily needs to be similar to us.
“The timing is right for SETI research around the world to open a new chapter in its history. The SETI Institute is taking the lead on this new path,” says Bill Diamond, President, and CEO of the SETI Institute. “In the coming months, we will invite the US and international research communities to contribute to a new scientific roadmap for SETI. We will explore resources for the development of a Virtual Institute, and an intellectual framework for projects focused on the advancement of knowledge on extraterrestrial intelligence,” said Cabrol.
Scientists reveal: Our Galaxy alone has at least 100 Billion Planets!
Scientists reveal: Our Galaxy alone has at least 100 Billion Planets!
There are at least 100 BILLION Planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone. Do you think there’s a chance some of them have Alien life?
Just within our Galaxy the Milky Way, astronomers say there are at least 400 BILLION STARS—even though some believe stars in the milky way number the trillion, which means that the Milky Way alone is home to at least 100 BILLION planets.
Due to the fact that Astronomers are unable to take a peek at our galaxy from the outside, it’s nearly impossible to know the exact number of planets in our galaxy. This means that scientists are forced to make estimates of the number of worlds within the Milky Way.
To understand the number of planets hiding in our galaxy, scientists calculate the Milky Way’s mass, and estimate of how much of the mass is composed of Stars. Based on these mathematical calculations, scientists are confided that the Milky Way is home to roughly 400 BILLION STARS—even though some believe stars in the milky way number the trillion—which means that the Milky Way alone is home to at least 100 BILLION planets, although many astronomers agree that this number could rise as our observational techniques get better.
According to Universe Today, we can then say that the Milky Way galaxy has – on average – between 800 billion and 3.2 trillion planets, with some estimates placing that number as high as 8 trillion.
NASA indicates that there is likely to be at least 1,500 planets within just 50 light-years of Earth.
Based on a statistical analysis of all the Kepler observations, UC Berkeley and University of Hawaii, Manoa, astronomers now estimate that one in five stars like the sun have planets about the size of Earth and a surface temperature conducive to life.
Based on geometric-based methods, or measuring specific astronomical objects, our Sun is located around 25,000–28,000 ly (7.7–8.6 kpc) from the Galactic Center.
Now remember, we are talking about the Milky Way Galaxy alone. In comparison, the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy contains an estimated one trillion (1012) stars.
Jason Marshall, aka “The Math Dude,” has calculated that there are roughly 5 sextillion grains of sand on all our planet’s beaches combined. So take every grain of sand on every beach on Earth and you can begin to be able to actually visualize how many planets we’re talking about. Then you begin to wonder why we aren’t overrun with aliens. (source)
NASA’s Kepler space telescope has been one of the most important tools for discovering alien worlds.
Based on Kepler space mission data, astronomers believe there could be as many as 40 BILLION Earth-sized planets orbiting habitable zones of Sun-like stars and red dwarfs in the Milky Way alone. Interestingly, astronomers say that around 11 billion may be orbiting Sun-like Stars.
The nearest such planet may be 4.2 light-years away, according to a 2016 study.
Do you think there may be Alien life on some of the—aproximate—100 BILLION in the Milky way?
17 Google Satellite images you won’t believe are real
17 Google Satellite images you won’t believe are real
Google Maps/ Google Earth has become one of the most popular tools on the internet for researchers, paranormal hunters and those who are naturally curious about what’s out there.
According to reports, combining satellite, aerial and street level imagery, Google Maps has over 20 petabytes of data, which is equal to approximately 21 million gigabytes, or around 20,500 terabytes.
Interestingly, aerial and satellite images are updated nearly every two weeks, depending on data availability.
Curiously, The Street View team from Google Maps has taken tens of millions of images since the Street View project began in 2007, and they’ve driven more than 5 million unique miles of road.
Google’s software has allowed millions of people around the world to explore places they’d probably never be able to travel to.
Not only has Google Earth allowed us to explore our planet like never before, it has allowed us to go beyond Earth and take a peek at what’s on the Moon, and even Mars.
In this article, we take a look at 17 mind-bending images that have been found on Google Earth you WON believe are real.
Not long ago, Google Earth has moved into sharper focus due to an update provided by a new satellite. NASA’s Landsat 8 satellite launched in 2013, but Google has just launched a fresh set of imagery taken from the satellite which enables not only sharper images, but also better, brighter and more realistic colors than previously possible.
These 17 images are stunning. From heart-shaped islands, to what seem to be GIANT bunny’s, Google Earth will make you look at the surface of our planet like never before.
You’ll be able to see the SS Jassim—one of the LARGEST shipwrecks visible in satellite images. The ferry is 80.54 meters long and has a width of 13 meters. The SS Jassim is just one of the ONE MILLION shipwrecks around the globe, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration.
But shipwrecks aren’t the only thing that you will see while using Google Maps.
You’ll come across the world’s LARGEST airplane graveyard, commonly referred to as the Boneyard. According to reports, there are around 5,000 discarded aircraft there, including several types of military planes. The ‘Boneyard‘ is open to the public so you can actually take a trip there and visit the ‘open air, airplane museum’.
However, shipwrecks and MASSIVE airplane graveyards are the only interesting things you’ll come across as this video intricately shows:
Does ‘Quantum Theory’ prove consciousness moves to another universe after death?
Does ‘Quantum Theory’ prove consciousness moves to another universe after death?
As controversial as it may sound to many, there are several theories that indicate that man’s consciousness moves to another place after death. According to scientists, the structure of the universe we live in, its laws and forces and constants are in fact fine-tune for life. This implies the existence of intelligence prior to matter.
Quantum Theory Proves That Consciousness Moves To Another Universe After Death
The book Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe written by Dr. Robert Lanza –who was voted the 3rd most important scientist alive by the NY Times— expands the theory like never before, stirring along the way the internet up by proposing that life as we know it does not die with the body, and can be considered as forever lasting. Robert Lanza is one of the most respected scientists in the world—a USNews & WorldReport cover story called him a “genius” and a “renegade thinker,” even likening him to Einstein.
Dr. Lanza is the man to go to when it comes to regenerative medicine and works as the director of Advanced Cell Technology Company. Prior to this, Dr. Lanza was known for his extensive studies in the field of stem cells and is known for perfuming successful experiments in cloning endangered animal species.
However, as all scientists are curious by nature, Dr. Lanza became interested and involved with physics, quantum mechanics, and astrophysics. This erratic mixture gave rise to a new theory of biocentrism.
According to Biocentrism, life and consciousness are fundamental parts of the universe. Consciousness is responsible for creating the material universe and not the other way around.
Dr. Lanza indicates that the structure of the universe we live in, its laws and forces and constants are in fact fine-tune for life. This implies the existence of intelligence prior to matter.
Furthermore, Dr. Lnaza suggests that space and time are not like objects or things, but are tools that are utilized by our ‘animal understanding’.
Lanza indicates that mankind carries space and time “like turtles with shells.” When the shell comes off –space and time— we do not cease to exist.
In other words, this theory suggests that death of consciousness simply does not exist. In fact, it only exists in such a way because people are identified with their body, and since they believe that this body will ‘perish’ one day, their consciousness may disappear too.
This would mean that if our body crates consciousness, then consciousness will disappear together with the body.
However, if our body is receiving consciousness like a satellite received obtains its signals, then ‘consciousness’ does not cease to exist on death.
This suggests that Consciousness exists outside of the constraints of time and space and is able to travel anywhere, within the human body and outside of it: it is not something that is localized, just as quantum objects are not.
Furthermore, Dr. Lanza believes that multiverse can exist simultaneously: In one universe the body can die while in another it continues to exist, absorbing consciousness which migrated into this universe. In other words, this would mean that someone who died ends up in a similar world where that person once inhabited, and so on infinitely. Think of it like a Russian doll ‘afterlife effect’.
NASA Just Released First Close-Up Images Of Ceres' Mysterious Bright Spots
NASA Just Released First Close-Up Images Of Ceres' Mysterious Bright Spots
NASA has released some high-resolution images that give a close-up look at the mysteriousbright spots of Ceres.
The images come courtesy of the NASA Dawn spacecraft, which at the moment, is at the lowest orbit of the planet.
Bright Spots Are No Alien Cities
The amazing photographs reveal the salt deposit in the southwest region of Cerealia Facula, which is located in the Occator Crater of Ceres. The Dawn spacecraft captured the photographs on June 22.
High-Resolution Images Courtesy of NASA Dawn Spacecraft
The Dawn spacecraft is able to send back superb high-resolution photographs showing the rugged surface with scientists having been intrigued by the bright spots of the Occator Crater. The spots can be clearly seen in the high-res photos due to the fact they stand out against what is essentially a dark background. They are something the public along with scientists were amazed ever since Dawn first discovered them in 2015 when arriving at Ceres.
On June 6, the spacecraft was at its lowest orbit and since then has managed to send back many thousands of images along with data that has given scientists a lot more information about Ceres.
One thing that has baffled scientists is how Ceres evolved over time along with how it manages to remain geologically active even though the planet is relatively small in comparison to other planets.
Data Has Exceeded All Expectations of NASA
NASA said the latest images to come from Ceres have a resolution that is less than 5 meters per pixel. The framing camera lead investigator, Dr. Andreas Nathues said, “The data exceeds all our expectations.”
NASA showed an image taken in February 2015 of Ceres, with the image sparking interest in the bright spots, which at that time remained even more of a mystery than they are today. It was said they took on the appearance of alien headlights. After more analysis, it was determined they were, in fact, salt deposits.
Dawn Spacecraft is Just 22 Miles Off Ceres Surface
The orbit of Ceres is 22 miles from the surface of Ceres with NASA capturing the carbonate deposit on the southwest part. The salt deposits gave a huge clue about the current activity while the data and images will help scientists to find answers to how they got there.
Cerealia Facula is the biggest deposit in the middle with Dawn managing to take some of the closest ever photos after it adjusted the orbit trajectory.
The results of the high-resolution images have been better than hoped for as they show the rich details of the planet offering scientists along with others a glimpse of the beauty of Ceres. The low orbit meant that many more details could be seen on the planet, including the bright spots.
The Lost City of Z, and its Mysterious Connection to the Mighty Atlanteans
The Lost City of Z, and its Mysterious Connection to the Mighty Atlanteans
There are a number of ancient cities—considered myths by most authors—that some believe existed before written history, in different places on Earth.
The Lost City of Z, just like Atlantis is one such mysterious place.
The strange mystery of Colonel Percy Fawcett and the lost city of Z
The most famous person to ever search for this lost city was a man called Percy Harrison Fawcett a renowned explorer who tried discovering the long-lost city thought to remain hidden somewhere in the Amazon jungle.
According to myths and legends, the lost City of Z would have been erected in very ancient times by the descendants of Atlantis. It is believed that the Atlanteans who survived the destruction of their home and escaped to a number of different regions on Earth, and some of them ended up in the Amazon, where they eventually settled down.
Fawcett made eight expeditions, disappearing in the last in strange circumstances.
Did he find the lost city of Z in the Amazonian jungle? Could the Lost City of Z be connected to El Dorado and Atlantis? And what exactly happened to Fawcett in his last expedition?
No one seems to have answers for these questions.
But where to stories about massive cities made of gold, inhabited by powerful beings come from?
We can say that part of the stories come from the old continent. In other words, when the Europeans explorers began arriving at the Americas, the myths and legends of supernatural creatures and pseudo-human tribes slowly gave way to stories of massive ancient cities hidden in the heart of the jungle.
But what exactly is the reason?
Some authors would argue that thanks to the abundance of indigenous communities that the Europeans faced and their exuberant religious rites fed the European fantasies which quickly spread.
Thinking of a great civilization whose wealth one cannot imagine was quickly acknowledged as a common idea. An idea that would later—acoridng to many authors—become known as the legend of El Dorado and that, moreover, satisfied the delirious hunger for gold of the first, and several of the following, visitors to the continent.
The Strange Mystery Of Colonel Percy Fawcett And The Lost City..!!
The Lost City of Z and Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett
Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett was a British explorer who named the Lost City of Z in 1912 after finding an ancient document titled Manuscript 512, kept in the National Library of Brazil. It is believed that his conviction was fed in part due to the rediscovery of the lost city of Machu Picchu in 1911.
Seen here is the first page of the Original Brazillian text titled Manuscript 512.
The docuemnt—Mansucript 512—is believed to have been authored by Portuguese Bandeirantes, João da Silva Guimarães, who allegedly discovered the ruins of a mighty ancient city, containing arches, statues, and temples covered in hieroglyphs, deep in the Amazonian Jungle in 1753. While Guimarães described the city in great detail, he failed to give off its location.
The enigmatic manuscript is completed with curious details, such as documenting the discovery of a bag of gold coins bearing the silhouette of an archer and a crown, or the reproduction of hieroglyphs copied from various corners of the city, which some say bare an uncanny similarity with Greek and Phoenician letters.
In some way, Fawcett was obsessed with lost cities.
Throughout his travels, Fawcett had heard rumors of a secret ancient underground city located ‘somewhere’ in the jungles of Chile, which, according to tales, legends, and reports, was made of streets paved with silver and roofs of gold.
The strange mystery of Colonel Percy Fawcett and the lost city of Z
Fawcett wrote about the Lost City of Z in a letter to his son in 1912:
I expect the ruins to be monolithic in character, more ancient than the oldest Egyptian discoveries. Judging by inscriptions found in many parts of Brazil, the inhabitants used an alphabetical writing allied to many ancient European and Asian scripts. There are rumors, too, of a strange source of light in the buildings, a phenomenon that filled with terror the Indians who claimed to have seen it. The central place I call “Z” — our main objective — is in a valley surmounted by lofty mountains. The valley is about ten miles wide, and the city is on an eminence in the middle of it, approached by a barreled roadway of stone. The houses are low and windowless, and there is a pyramidal temple. The inhabitants of the place are fairly numerous, they keep domestic animals, and they have well-developed mines in the surrounding hills. Not far away is a second town, but the people living in it are of an inferior order to those of “Z.” Farther to the south is another large city, half buried and completely destroyed.
The mystery behind Fawcett’s disappearance
So what happened to one of the most famous explorers in history?
In 1921, the first expedition to find the Lost City of Z was assembled by Fawcett. His search for Z culminated with his disappearance and the appearance of many myths and tales surrounding his faith.
His last expedition was set in March in April of 1925, this time financed by newspapers and societies such as the Royal Geographic Society and the Rockefellers. Fawcett was certain that his expedition would culminate with the discovery of the mythical city.
In May of 1925, the expeditions had reached the edge of uncharted territory, exploring an area that no foreigner had ever dared crossing.
Fawcett’s beliefs were greatly influenced on what the Indians had told him about alleged Lost Cities spread across the Amazon jungle. Even his penultimate letter – nine days before he mysteriously vanished, mentions one such tale.
Correspondence from Colonel Fawcett dated May 20th, 1925
“I saw the Indian chief Roberto and had a talk with him. Under the expanding influence of wine he corroborated all my Cuyaba friend told me, and more. Owing to what his grandfather had told him, he always wanted to make the journey to the waterfall, but is now tot old. He is of the opinion that bad Indians are numerous there, but committed himself to the statement that his ancestors had built the old cities. This I am inclined to doubt, for he, like the Mechinaku Indians, is of the brown or Polynesian type, and it is the fair or red type I associate with the cities.”
The team traveled into territory that no one had ever seen. They faced many dangers, but they wouldn’t give up. Eventually, they reached an area called ‘Dead Horse Camp’ when Fawcett sent back dispatches for another five months, finally stopping after the fifth. In this dispatch, he would send a letter to his wife saying (dated 29th May 1925):
“My dear Nina, The attempt to write is fraught with much difficulty, thanks to the legions of flies that pester one from dawn till dusk – and sometimes all through the night! The worst are the tiny ones that are smaller than a pinhead, almost invisible, but sting like a mosquito. Clouds of them are always present. Millions of bees add to the plague, and other bugs galore, stinging horrors that get all over ones hands. Even the head nets won’t keep them out, and as for mosquito nets, the pests fly through them! It is quite maddening. We hope to get through this region in a few days, and are camped here for a while to arrange for the return of the peons, who are anxious to get back, having had enough of it – and I don’t blame them. We go on with eight animals – three saddle mules, four cargo mules, and a madrinha, a leading animal which keeps the others together. Jack is well and fit and getting stronger every day, even though he suffers a bit from insects. I myself am bitten or stung by ticks, and these piums, as they call the tiny ones, all over the body. It is Raleigh I am anxious about. He still has one leg in a bandage but won’t go back. So far we have plenty of food and no need to walk, but I am not sure how long this will last. There may be little for the animals to eat as we head further in. I cannot hope to stand up on this journey better than Jack or Raleigh – my extra years tell, though I do my best to make up for it with enthusiasm – but I had to do this.
I calculate that I shall contact the Indians in about a week, perhaps ten days, when we should be able to reach the much talked-about waterfall.
Here we are at Dead Horse Camp, Lat. 110 43’ S and 540 35’ W, the spot where my horse died in 1920. Only his white bones remain. We can bathe ourselves here, but the insects make it a matter of great haste. Nevertheless, the season is good. It is very cold at night and fresh in the morning, but the insects and heat are out in full force come mid-day, and from then until evening it is sheer misery in camp.
You need have no fear of any failure ….”
Those were the final words of Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett.
Two years passed and nothing was heard from Fawcett nor his team.
This resulted in many expeditions being launched in order to find them.
Mysteriously, each expedition suffered the same fate as Fawcett’s.
Fawcett’s disappearance resulted in a total of 13 expeditions being mounted in which more than a hundred people lost their lives, attempting to find not only Fawcett but the Legendary Lost City of Z as well.
No one knows what exactly happened to Fawcett, his expedition and to more than one hundred people that set out to search for him.
Numerous theories were proposed eventually.
Some say Fawcett and his team were killed by an Amazonian tribe, while otters suggest they may have starved, drowned, or suffered a disease. There are some who also say that they may have been robbed and killed by bandits in the region.
Featured Image Credit: Leon Tukker. Posted with permission.
The map was found in Qorikancha, near Cusco, within a temple which had once been covered in gold (Qorikancha means Golden Temple). Other artifacts that were on display there include a large golden sun disc which is believed to have been stolen or hidden at some point in history before the Spanish Invasion.
The temple itself was a site of worship to the God Inti, also known as the Sun God. The temple has been mostly stripped now, but records from the Spanish occupancy note the volume of riches it once held, including a large amount of Gold and Jewels.
The star map has been examined by historians for many decades with limited success. An Inca elder believes the map to show the origin of their great deity, Viracocha, the father of Inti, who is believed to have come from somewhere amongst the stars.
The golden pictures on the map show a variety of cosmological events as well as more down to earth images- a depiction of the Milky Way galaxy itself is represented, as well as the Southern Cross, people, stars, comets and possibly even a rudimentary drawing of South America- the home continent of the Inca.
Others believe some of the drawings such as the people and the land mass are actually just other star constellations, Gemini and Cancer. Another interpretation suggests the two people are water and earth goddesses Mamacocha and Pachamama.
A wilder notion determines that the map is actually a clue to where the missing sun disc is located.
More theories suggest the Planet Nibiru or a comet could be heading in Earth’s direction. Regardless, scholars have reportedly agreed to the idea that the story of Viracocha coming from the stars is one they have encountered before, reports ThinkBig-DiscloseTV.
Ancient Golden Inca Star Map Remains A Mystery
The map was found in Qorikancha, near Cusco, within a temple which had once been covered in gold (Qorikancha means Golden Temple). Other artifacts that were on display there include a large golden sun disc which is believed to have been stolen or hidden at some point in history before the Spanish Invasion.
UFO over Lunar Module of Apollo Mission, from NASA archives, slow motion, discovered Feb 6, 2012, but reposted, UFO Sighting News.
UFO over Lunar Module of Apollo Mission, from NASA archives, slow motion, discovered Feb 6, 2012, but reposted, UFO Sighting News.
This alien probe moves lighting fast, very hard to catch but in slow motion, it's easy.
Date of sighting: 1968-1970 Location of sighting: Orbiting Earth's Moon Updated July 2018: This post was deleted by the US Gov and I am reposting it again today. Lucky I have a back up made. I was messing around last night and found this old NASA footage. In it were a few anomalies that did not look like the old film errors. I paused it several times till I could see the object and to my surprise it looked like a three dimensional alien probe. I put the screenshots and video into slow motion and also put the original footage in it. I know this is old stuff but this UFO has never been reported before now and it was recorded between 1968-1970 but its unclear. This is the first time that humans crossed onto the dark side of the moon. I noticed the metallic-like surface of it and it's odd crystal-like shape makes me believe it was made from biomechanics, or a machine that was grown. SCW
Did aliens visit Russia in 1995? UFO video broadcast by Russian TV channel claims so
Did aliens visit Russia in 1995?UFO video broadcast by Russian TV channel claims so
The image which was captured in 1995 shows a weird flying object making a landing in the roadside of a Russian suburb and aired on Russian TV channels
Conspiracy theory YouTube channel ‘UFOmania’ has released some eerie images which were apparently captured in Ostankino, Moscow in October 1995.
The YouTube channel reveals that the UFO images were originally aired by a Russian TV channel and many television news hosts claimed that aliens had entered mother earth.
Did Aliens Really Visit Earth?
The image shows a bright object landing from the skies on the edge of a road in the suburbs of Moscow. In the same image, two people were seen possibly from the Russian military watching the landing of the UFO.
The flying object seems quite large in size, and at first look, it can be assumed that it measured approximately 15 to 20 feet in diameter. Boris Yeltsin was the President of Russia in 1995.
Even though the news of the UFO landing ruled the headlines of the newspapers initially, the news was later hushed up for unknown reasons. Now, conspiracy theorists allege that this image might be a proof of the aliens’ first contact with humans.
However, several other skeptics argue that the object spotted in the image might be actually a secret spacecraft developed by the Russian military.
The video which went viral has already garnered more than 5,700 views on YouTube and many viewers were quick to speculate what the object could be.
A YouTube user named Kelly Ward commented under the video that the weird object in the video could be a Russian made AFV (Advanced Flying Vehicle).
A Mysterious Recent Sighting
Interestingly, another speculated UFO sighting happened in Russia on the night of June 16, 2018. The white UFO which appeared in the shape of a jellyfish perplexed many local residents, and most of them initially believed that it was an alien invasion.
Some other people speculated that enemies have waged a war against Russia at a time when Fifa 2018 was going on. However, it was later revealed that the white trail was produced as a result of the launch of the Russian Soyuz 2.1-b rocket from the Plesetsk test launch site.
Otherwise, Russia is emerging as the centre-stage for cosmic events. Last year, a 21-year-old Russian young man claimed to have had his previous birth on Mars. Boriska Kipriyanovich, who lives in Volgograd, stunned his mother who is a doctor with his fluency in conversation within just a few months after he was born.
By the age of two, he started drawing paintings depicting space and various cosmic events. From his past birth, he recollected the link between Giza Pyramids and Mars.
Declassified 1968 Video Of A Russian KGB UFO Recovery & Alien Autopsy
Final Three UFO Files Released By UK Government Reveal A Very British Conspiracy
Final Three UFO Files Released By UK Government Reveal A Very British Conspiracy
By Katie Spalding
In the latest in a series of revelations bound to excite any conspiracy theorists out there, the UK government has finally released the last of its newly-declassified UFO files.
In America, conspiracy theories have proliferated ever since a hot air balloon crashed near Roswell in 1947
JOSHUA ROBERTS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Those following the saga will remember that the UK’s Ministry of Defence supposedly released all its UFO-related intelligence back in 2013 – before admitting that 18 documents had been held back as they contained potentially sensitive information. Then, last year, 15 of those documents were released without fanfare, finally revealing to ufologists the disappointing news that “no UFO sighting … has ever revealed anything to suggest an extra-terrestrial presence.”
Now, finally, the last three are cleared and ready to go to the National Archives. And, while you won’t find stories of little green men or narrowly-avoided alien invasions, they do show the UK took the threat of UFOs – or, to use their own incredibly British terminology, “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” (UAP) – more seriously than they have been willing to admit.
The first revelation contained in the new files shows that the MoD ran two desks dealing with UFO sightings between 1947 and 1997. Although one of these desks was known to the public, taking calls from citizens reporting possible UFO sightings, the second was classified and staffed by intelligence experts working to investigate possible extra-terrestrial threats.
One apparently serious concern revealed by the dossier was that a hostile government – China or the then-USSR – had captured their own UFO and might use alien technology to attack the UK. And obviously, Britain was on the lookout for their own interplanetary leg-up: the reports show that officials expressed a major interest in the UK finding their own little ET to help them fight the communists.
"Monitor all reports in case in the future the hitherto unknown/not understood underlying phenomena is being exploited by another nation," a senior Air Force Commander is revealed to have written. "An actual – or potential enemy – could develop a flying device with the characteristics that these phenomena seem to have …high velocities, sharp manoeuvre, stationary flight and few radar returns.” The RAF was to be informed of “…novel technologies which might be useful to their programmes ...Propulsion, stealth and any novel electromagnetic technologies are of particular interest.”
The MoD’s UFO unit was closed in 2000 after an investigation, also declassified this year, concluded that UAP reports "do not demonstrably provide information useful for Defence Intelligence.” But is that just another layer of the conspiracy? Perhaps the truth is still out there ... but, sadly, the chances are it's probably not.
Derbyshire has had its fair share of UFO sightings
SARA KOPECSNI
Today is World UFO Day, the day when people gather together to gaze at the sky for unidentified flying objects.
Derbyshire has a long history of mysterious sightings, with UFOs spotted in places like the village of Bonsall and Ladybower Dam in the Peak District.
A government file, released by the National Archives in 2014, revealed details of a 1994 sighting.
A member of the public reported a large orange light close to the Ladybower Dam.
Derbyshire Police Control’s record reads: “Incident occurred near the A47, Snake Road, north of Lady Bower Damm (sic). NAME BLANKED reported seeing a large orange light moving horizontally and dropping slowly until it went below a line of hills.
“A cloud of smoke was seen to billow out from the light and it then disappeared behind Kinder Scout. The light did not reappear.”
The police contacted Manchester Airport but they could not confirm any aircraft operating in the area - and the sighting remained unexplained.
The 1994 case is not an isolated incident, the Peak District has been described as a hotspot for UFO sightings for many years.
There have been reports of numerous sightings in the old village of Bonsall.
The most famous encounter occurred in October 2000 when Sharon Rowlands filmed a large mysterious flying object above her house.
She said she heard a strange noise from outside of her house one evening, and used a camcorder to film the huge circular object.
“It resembled a giant disc with a bite taken out of the bottom,” she told reporters.
“As it hovered over the woods, it seemed to expand and then get smaller again.
“We could see it pulsing as if it started up and then it just went it came really close at one stage and I thought it was going to land in the field. “You can hear me on the video say “Wow!”
The Derbyshire housewife reportedly sold the footage to a Hollywood producer for £20,000. Some UFO experts described the video as ‘one of the most important pieces of footage ever taken’ and the captured image was just one of the many sightings in the area.
Since 2000 there were 19 alleged UFOs spotted near Bonsall. A dog walker reported a ‘pink glow, vertically shaped like a shoe box’ and a woman witnessed a ‘ball of fire’ and ‘two big, bright lights’ on the sky.
On the night of 28 September, 2016, a number of people witnessed two flashing white lights in the Derbyshire sky. Fiona Jordan, of Houfton Road, Bolsover, said: “They were like little cloudy lights in the sky. They were dancing about.
“I had just let my dogs out before I went to bed. There was about four in total. There was one above my neighbour’s house and two or three over another neighbour’s house. “We stood outside for about 20 minutes watching them. It was about 10pm.
“My son who lives in Carr Vale also saw them about two or three nights ago.”
Similar lights were reported above Manchester, Liverpool and other parts of the UK.
With a clear and dry night ahead, today’s World UFO Day could give a good opportunity for stargazers to observe the Derbyshire sky and its many mysteries.
If you see anything unusual, let us know! To email us, click HERE
Declassified Files Reveal UK Feared Soviets, Chinese Would Acquire UFO Tech
Declassified Files Reveal UK Feared Soviets, Chinese Would Acquire UFO Tech
Once-classified documents being called “Britain’s X-Files” have revealed that the British Ministry of Defense spent half a century hunting UFOs, driven in some part out of concern that the Soviet Union or China had already gotten their hands on alien technology.
According to the cache of documents recently obtained by investigative researcher David Clarke, British intelligence services had two UFO desks between 1947 and 1997. One of the desks allowed people to phone in UFO sightings, while the other involved spies investigating UFO reports.
Earlier this month, Clarke, a research fellow at Sheffield Hallam University, obtained copies of the Ministry of Defense's Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) from the ministry following a freedom of information request.
According to the UAP report, which will be released to the public after being declassified, the Royal Air Force was "particularly interested in any novel technology… propulsion, stealth and any novel electromagnetic technologies," news.com.au reported July 2. The documents also reveal that the British government was interested in finding UFOs to use against their enemies during the Cold War, which took place between 1945 and 1990 between socialist countries allied to the Soviet Union and US-led Western powers.
"Even though they have been partly censored, they can't conceal the fact the UK military were interested in capturing UFO technology — or what they coyly refer to as ‘novel weapon technology,'" Clark recently told the Sun.
"And the files reveal they were desperate to capture this technology — wherever it came from — before the Russians or the Chinese got hold of it first," he added.
In an email to Sputnik on July 2, Nick Pope, a former civil servant who worked for the UK Ministry of Defense from 1985 to 2006, said that he has been working with his former employers to ensure that files from the British government's UFO project would be revealed to the public.
"I ran the British government's UFO project and I'm pleased that a number of 'UFOlogists' have acquired documents about my old job, using the UK's Freedom of Information Act. Actually, this is part of what's been a wider 10-year program to declassify and release these files, and I've been working with my former employers to try to ensure that the final files are made available to the public as soon as possible, as part of our wider commitment to open government and freedom of information," Pope told Sputnik Monday.
Pope also confirmed that the British government was aware of Russian and Chinese research into UFOs and was attempting to develop its own alien military technologies.
"I can confirm that we were aware of Russian and Chinese research into UFOs and into parapsychology more generally. We didn't take a definitive view on the true nature of the UFO phenomenon (we remained open-minded but noncommittal about the possibility of extraterrestrial visitation) and so we looked at the issue in terms of threats and opportunities. Even if UFOs were just exotic atmospheric plasma phenomena — as one of my colleagues in intelligence believed — we thought we might be able to derive some ‘novel military technologies' from this, and weaponization formed part of our speculation, particularly the idea of some sort of directed-energy weapon," Pope added.
"If such a thing was possible, self-evidently we didn't want the Russians or the Chinese getting there first. While I don't characterize any of this as being a race to acquire 'alien weapons', what we did was probably as strange as anything you can see in an episode of The X-Files," he noted.
According to UFO investigator John Tenney, national director of Mufon, the mutual UFO network, "one aspect, to which very little discussion has been made, with the UK's Ministry of Defence's the newly released documents concerning 'Unidentified Aerial Phenomena' (UAP) exposes that while the major governments of the world, even to this day, continue to tell the general population that there is no reason to be affected by the UFO phenomena the governments themselves are indeed interested and actively engaged in a continuing process of research and discovery."
"For decades governments, officials and the media have tended to portray those interested in UFO phenomena as irrational, delusional and/or paranoid while at the same time spending millions of taxpayer dollars investigating the same phenomena and the implications which those phenomena may contain," Tenney told Sputnik via email Monday.
'Witnesses were very frightened:' Survey of 2017 Canadian UFO sightings released
'Witnesses were very frightened:' Survey of 2017 Canadian UFO sightings released
THE CANADIAN PRESS
Published:July 10, 2018
Updated:July 10, 2018 1:28 PM PDT
A group of attendees gather in a desert area for UFO sightings at the Annual International UFO Congress Convention Convention & Film Festival in Laughlin, Nev., on February 26, 2009.Jae C. Hong / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
A survey released by Manitoba-based Ufology Research on Tuesday says there were 1,101 UFO sightings -- an average of three a day -- reported in Canada in 2017
Hovering lights in the sky. Pulsing lights. A humming noise.
Objects shaped like spheres, discs, triangles and boomerangs.
The witnesses include ordinary folk, airline crews, a particle physicist and an airport’s weather observer.
A survey released by Manitoba-based Ufology Research on Tuesday says there were 1,101 UFO sightings — an average of three a day — reported in Canada in 2017.
About eight per cent of those were deemed unexplainable.
“Many people continue to report unusual objects in the sky, and some of these objects do not have obvious explanations,” says the survey.
“Many witnesses are pilots, police and other individuals with reasonably good observing capabilities and good judgment.”
Quebec had the most sightings at 518. Nunavut had the fewest at two.
Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and Edmonton topped the cities with the most UFO reports.
Ufology Research takes data from all known sources, including UFO organizations, government files, direct witness reports, media and some internet posts. Its analysis takes into account location, types of encounters, reliability of witnesses and strangeness of sightings.
Some of the more bizarre unexplained reports from 2017 included:
Jan. 5, 6 p.m:
Two people in French River, Ont., observed multiple colours for about 10 minutes. Several coloured “orbs” approached the witnesses and hovered before moving away. “Witnesses were very frightened.”
March 15, 7:20 p.m:
Crews on two separate airliners 65 kilometres northeast of Enderby, B.C., reported a bright, white strobing light above them. Radar indicated no other known aircraft were in the vicinity.
July 11, 3:12 p.m:
One witness near Smithville, Ont., reported that a “shiny object with a raised dome moved slowly and silently over nearby trees … It seemed to hover, then ascended rapidly out of sight.”
Aug. 25, 9:50 a.m:
Two people in Stewiacke, N.S., watched a dark triangular object for about three minutes silhouetted against the sky. It had three white lights at the points, an orange-red light in the centre and two strobe lights. “The object flew over the witnesses, making a humming noise.”
Sept. 23, 8:30 p.m:
Ten people watched as a red, triangular object approached Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Que., from the northeast and came to a stop above them. It was stationary for several seconds before its red lights intensified, then flickered, before it moved away.
Ufology Research notes the number of reported UFO sightings remains high. The 2017 figure compares with 1,132 in 2016 and 1,265 in 2015.
The group suggests several explanations, among them more secret or classified military exercises, people unaware of natural objects in the sky and easier reporting of alleged sightings because of advancing online technology.
It also posits that perhaps “more UFOs are present and physically observable by witnesses.”
But the survey concludes that “there is no incontrovertible evidence that some UFO cases involved extraterrestrial contact.”
‘Closest ever to actual UFO’ Glowing orb races across sky in BIZARRE clip
‘Closest ever to actual UFO’ Glowing orb races across sky in BIZARRE clip
ASTONISHING footage of a glowing orb shooting across the sky in Bolivia has sent conspiracy theorists into meltdown, claiming it is the closest thing they’ve seen to an actual UFO.
Israeli unmanned spacecraft to land on Moon in 2019
Israeli unmanned spacecraft to land on Moon in 2019
Image copyrightEPAImage captionIsrael Aerospace Industries' Ofer Doron said the probe "showed the way for the rest of the world"
An Israeli non-profit organisation has announced plans to send the first privately-funded unmanned spacecraft to the Moon.
SpaceIL said the probe would be launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in December on a Falcon 9 rocket built by Elon Musk's SpaceX company.
It is expected to land on the Moon in February 2019.
The spacecraft will plant an Israeli flag on the Moon's surface and carry out research into its magnetic field.
SpaceIL's project began as part of the Google Lunar XPrize, which offered $30m (£23m) in prizes to inspire people to develop low-cost methods of robotic space exploration. However, the competition expired this March, with the $20m grand prize for landing on the Moon unclaimed.
Despite the setback, SpaceIL continued developing its spacecraft, which is being built in co-operation with Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), a state-owned firm.
So far it has spent about $88.5m, much of which it has received from the South African-born Israeli billionaire businessmen Morris Kahn.
Image copyrightSPACEI
Image captionThe probe will plant an Israeli flag, and then conduct research into the Moon's magnetic field
Ido Anteby, CEO of SpaceIL, told a news conference in the Israeli town of Yehud on Tuesday that its probe would be the smallest yet to land on the Moon.
It is about 2m (6.6ft) in diameter and 1.5m high, and will weigh only 585kg (1,300lb) at launch. More than 400kg of that weight is fuel that will be burnt off by the time it lands on the Moon.
The spacecraft is a "hopper", which will land and then take off again with the fuel left in its propulsion system, and then perform another landing 500m away, which was a condition of the XPrize.
If successful, SpaceIL's mission will make Israel the fourth country in the world to "soft land" a probe on the surface of the Moon - after the former Soviet Union, the United States and China.
Mr Kahn said he hoped the mission would create an "Apollo effect" for the next generation in Israel - a reference to the enthusiasm for science, technology, engineering and maths triggered by Neil Armstrong's Moon walk in 1969.
"This is a tremendous project," he added. "When the rocket is launched into space, we will all remember where we were when Israel landed on the Moon."
Ofer Doron, head of IAI's space division, said Israel was "going to show the way for the rest of the world" to send a spacecraft to the Moon at a reasonable cost.
Breaking News - Israeli spacecraft to land on Moon in 2019
Meteor Suddenly Changing Direction Filmed Over Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil
Meteor Suddenly Changing Direction Filmed Over Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil
EXPLAINED?
As a group of people where enjoying some evening celebration an huge fireball made an appearance. This event took place on July the 7th 2018 around 10:35pm but what is strange is the fireball suddenly change direction before hitting the ocean
Fiery Object Filmed Moments Before Exploding Over An Californian Suburb. July 9, 2018
China Reaches The Moon Releasing Never-Before-Seen HD Photographs
China Reaches The Moon Releasing Never-Before-Seen HD Photographs
These HD images of the Moon's surface captured by China are incredible.
China has captured images of the Moon in HD that have never before been seen thanks to the Chang`e 3 lander.
China Has One of the Most Advanced Lunar Landers
The Chinese lander captured thousands of HD resolution images after finding a moon rock that has not been seen before. China developed one of the most advanced lunar landers to ever land on the surface of the Moon, giving Earth a look at the surface as never before.
In 2013, the Lunar Mission landed on a region of the Moon known as Mare Imbrium. This was a part of the Moon in which it was thought water might have existed. While this is a feat for China, they come in third in regards to making a soft landing on the Moon’s surface, with the United States and the Soviet Union being ahead.
The images had been captured during 2013 but were not released by the National SpaceAdministration in China until 2015. Western media did not get them, as China does not release them until around 18 months later.
Photos among 45 Gigabyte of Data
Emily Lakdawalla from the Planetary Society took many weeks looking through the 45 gigabytes of data, then going ahead and putting it all into a package that could easily be downloaded to ensure that everyone interested could see them. Lakdawalla said, “When it comes to data sharing from China, the situation is pretty good, ” says Lakdawalla, who notes that the images’ formats mirror those used by NASA and the European Space Agency. “It would probably be much easier if I could read the language.”
There is no doubt the images have stunned everyone. Meanwhile, scientists have used them to gain a better understanding of the geology of the Moon’s surface. China even revealed they discovered a moon rock that surprisingly neither the United States nor Soviet Union found during their previous missions to the Moon.
China Is a Major Player in Space Power Revealed Analyst
A Defense Group Inc. analyst from the University of California San Diego, Kevin Pollpeter, said, “China is trying to reach the top tier and show that they’re a major space power.” He went on to say, “They’re also contributing real knowledge about the moon that we haven’t been able to get before.”
China is forging ahead with space exploration; they have revealed they are planning manned missions to the Moon at some point in the future. If so, they would expand lunar exploration like never before. The US Planetary Society reposted images due to the fact the CNSA website is very difficult to navigate around along with it being in Chinese. Posting the photos ensures people from around the world are able to access them and view them.
Scientists have been working for years on plans to colonize Mars. But what is the point in constructing interesting Martian habitats, growing food or digging tunnels into Mars if our most basic and immediate need of survival is not taken care of?
Astronauts can’t breathe on Mars unless they wear a spacesuit. However, a new study published in the journal Science offers some hope of making Mars breathable for humans. Researchers believe that a species of sea-dwelling bacteria, known as cyanobacteria, may provide a steady supply of oxygen for humans on the red planet.
This family of bacteria is photosynthetic — it can take in carbon dioxide and energy from the sun and discharge oxygen. What makes cyanobacteria particularly well-suited for a job on Mars is the ability to conduct photosynthesis and generate oxygen even in low-light and other harsh environmental conditions.
Elmars Krausz, Australian National University emeritus professor, said, “Photosynthesis could theoretically be harnessed with these types of organisms to create air for humans to breathe on Mars. Low-light adapted organisms, such as the cyanobacteria we’ve been studying, can grow under rocks and potentially survive the harsh conditions on the red planet.”
Krausz continued, “This might sound like science fiction, but space agencies and private companies around the world are actively trying to turn this aspiration into reality in the not-too-distant future.
This Bacteria Could Help Humans Breathe on Mars
Cyanobacteria may just be humanity's key to breathing on Mars in the future. The bacteria can produce oxygen, but more importantly it can survive in extreme environments.
Bacteria that can grow in space could help humans breathe on Mars
It is a staple of space and spy movies: the handheld laser gun that can target from a long distance. This devastating science fiction weapon was just a fantasy — until now.
The Chinese military has built a terrifying high-tech weapon that is capable of setting fire to targets and clothing from 800 meters (about a half-mile) away. Dubbed the ZKZM-500, it fires a destructive laser beam that can cause “pain beyond endurance.”
The ZKZM-500 weighs about 3 kilograms (6.6 lbs.) with a caliber of 15 millimeters and is powered by rechargeable lithium batteries that can handle over 1,000 laser bursts that last around two seconds each.
It is completely silent and the beam it produces is invisible. When the gun is fired on a target, there is no way for the target to know where the attack is coming from.
The rifle can burn through a person’s clothes and skin. If the unfortunate target happens to be wearing flammable clothing, they could go up in flames. As this technology is very sensitive and could possibly be misused, it will be restricted to China’s military and police only.
ZKZM-500 is reportedly ready for mass production for China’s military. The production costs are set to be 100,000 yuan (US$15,000/ £11,000) per piece.
The UN Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons, signs by over 100 nations, prohibits the use of weapons that can cause permanent blindness. Because of this, the ZKZM-500 is a “non-lethal” weapon. The laser can’t kill a person with a single shot, but if he or she is hit with it enough times, it would start to burn a hole in their body.
“The weapon is designed to do things such as setting fire to illegal banners at a protest or setting fire to the hair or clothing of a protester,” said the general manager of ZKZM Laser, the tech company that built the prototype. “It is not designed explicitly for killing like a gun that uses bullets and cannot cause the ‘instant carbonisation’ of human skin and tissues.”
Another researcher said the weapon would “burn through clothes in a split second … If the fabric is flammable, the whole person will be set on fire.”
A Chinese government document cited by the Post says protest leaders would lose “the rhythms of their speech and powers of persuasion” as a result of getting hit with the ZKZM-500.
In addition to non-lethal protest applications, the ZKZM-500 is also suited for covert military operations and hostage situations, the Post claims.
The ZKZM-500 is allegedly ready to be mass produced. The first unit to receive them will be anti-terror squads in the People’s Armed Police in China.
Skepticism
While this all sounds intriguing, some are skeptical of the story.
“There’s just no way that a laser powered by a lithium-ion battery that a person could carry would be capable of producing the kind of heat described at point blank range, let alone at 800 meters,” TechCrunch‘s Devin Coldewey said. “That’s because of attenuation. Lasers, unlike bullets, scatter as they progress, making them weaker and weaker. Attenuation is non-trivial at anything beyond, say, a few dozen meters. By the time you get out to 800, the air and water the beam has traveled through enough to reduce it a fraction of its original power.”
“I’m not saying there will never be laser weapons. But I do feel confident in saying that this prototype, ostensibly ready for mass production and deployment among China’s anti-terrorist forces, is bunk,” Coldewey added. “As much as I enjoy the idea of laser rifles, the idea of one that weighs a handful of pounds and fires hundreds of instantly skin-searing shots is just plain infeasible today.”
In response to the skepticism, the South China Morning Postput up a video from ZKZM Laser allegedly showing the ZKZM-500 hitting targets on a rooftop. Check it out above.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
Crop Circle de Martinsell Hill du 7 juillet 2018
Crop Circle de Martinsell Hill du 7 juillet 2018
Martinsell Hill, Nr Wooton Rivers, Wiltshire, Angleterre
Le pentagramme fractal récursif, accompagné d'un "champ infini d'étoiles" (Voir interprétations et Vidéo après).
Deux photos de culture récentes de Hackpen Hill le 23 juin 2018 ou de Martinsell Hill le 7 juillet 2018, s'emboîtent comme deux pièces d'un même "puzzle". Le 23 juin, à Hackpen Hill, nous avons pu voir une "étoile simple" tout en regardant à travers un "vortex spatio-temporel". Peut-être que cette nouvelle photo de culture à Martinsell Hill le 8 juillet décrit ce que c'est que de voyager à travers un vortex spatio-temporel, et ainsi voir une " infinité fractale d'étoiles " ?
Vidéo du Crop Circle de Martinsell Hill du 7 juillet 2018
La Porte des Étoiles du Pentagramme Fractal-Dimensionnel!
Une géométrie pentagonale complexe apparaît dans cet agroglyphe annoncé le 7 juillet, l'alignement Soleil-Sirius, et l'imagerie aérienne autour confirme les anciennes symbologies des Dogons pour cette étoile, ainsi que le symbole du pentagramme dans l'Égypte Ancienne. Le fond clair du cercle peut être considéré comme le Soleil, et ce pentagramme fractal, Sirius, est aligné avec le Soleil. C'est une géométrie fractale, et fractale signifie Dimensions, c'est-à-dire que chaque niveau fractal de la géométrie 5 est un niveau dimensionnel, c'est-à-dire une Porte des Étoiles, ou un voyage entre 2 Étoiles ou Systèmes à travers des niveaux ou des plans dimensionnels superposés représentés par la géométrie fractale. Si je ne me trompe pas dans les comptes, j'ai remarqué quatre tailles de pentagrammes : la Matrice (niveau le plus élevé) 1, le deuxième pentagramme (clair au centre) niveau 2, et 10 pentagrammes (5 + 5) niveau 3, et 16 pentagrammes (5 + 11) niveau 4 en taille.
En lisant le niveau 3 (5 + 5), je me souviens que d'autres agroglyphes représentaient deux pentagrammes opposés et unis, comme la formation d'un vortex Portail des Étoile pour d'autres dimensions (comme le Crop Circle à Jubilee Plantation, en 2011), représentant l'union dans l'espace-temps de deux étoiles lointaines. La somme de 5 + 11 = 16, des plus petits pentagrammes, niveau 4, nous mènent à l'Arcane 16, qui s'appelle la Maison de Dieu, et c'est la Tour, la Montagne, la Pyramide et l'Escalier d'accès au ciel. Une autre direction pour la Porte des Étoiles. Non seulement la géométrie, mais le message des nombres est également important dans cet agroglyphe. Et il illustre un voyage à l'intérieur d'un vortex, avec la fuite des étoiles dans le mouvement de l'hyperespace représenté par tous ces pentagrammes. Mais intégré dans le tissu de l'Espace-Temps qui semble se briser devant cette singularité. En cette saison 2018 nous avons eu d'autres modèles avec des douelles et des trous de ver indiqués. Ce serait un autre modèle, en utilisant l'analogie avec l'alignement Soleil-Sirius d'aujourd'hui, le 7 juillet 2018, comme annoncé précédemment !
Martinsell Hill CROP CIRCLE 7.7.2018 4k60p
Martinsell Hill CROP CIRCLE 7.7.2018 4k60p SUPERLONG EDIT
The Skylab Orbital Workshop experienced a failure that led to a replacement shield to protect against solar heating.
Credit: NASA.
Skylab was the first space station operated by the United States. It spent six years orbiting Earth until its decaying orbit caused it to re-enter the atmosphere. It scattered debris over the Indian Ocean and sparsely settled areas of Western Australia.
Three successive three-man crews lived on board the station for 28, 56 and 84 days in orbit — an American record that stood until the shuttle era. Astronauts aboard the station conducted 270 experiments in biomedical and life sciences, solar astronomy, Earth observations and materials processing. Among the most important were investigations on the astronauts' physiological responses to long-duration space flight.
Meet Skylab, America's First Space Station
Apollo's shadow
Various NASA centers had kicked around ideas for a space station for years before Skylab launched. However, the agency was very focused on the space race and moonshots that dominated public consciousness in the 1960s.
As Apollo began to wind down in the early 1970s, NASA began an Apollo Applications Program to fly unused hardware from the moon program. One idea, proposed by famous Apollo rocket engineer Wernher von Braun, would be to build a space station out of an unused rocket stage. The design evolved over the years as NASA struggled with reduced funding.
Components
Skylab consisted of four major components: the Orbital Workshop (OWS), the Airlock Module (AM), the Multiple Docking Adapter (MDA) and the Apollo Telescope Mount (ATM). The Apollo command and service module that transported crews to Skylab remained attached to the station throughout a crew's occupancy.
The OWS, which served as the main working, living and sleeping compartment for the crews, was converted from the upper stage of a Saturn rocket. It contained exercise equipment, a galley, and many of the scientific experiments, in particular for the life sciences studies. Two large solar arrays on the OWS provided 12.4 kilowatts of power to the station.
The AM enabled astronauts to conduct spacewalks, and the MDA included a prime and backup docking port for the Apollo spacecraft. The second docking port enabled a rescue capability. A second Apollo capsule carrying two astronauts could come to the aid of the resident crew if their spacecraft became disabled, and all five astronauts returning to Earth in the new spacecraft. The MDA also housed the Earth Resources Experiment Package.
The ATM contained telescopes for solar observations and four solar arrays for additional power. Once in orbit, the station weighed 170,000 lbs., by far the heaviest spacecraft to date. [Photos: Skylab, the 1st U.S. Space Station]
Rocky start
Skylab launched for space on May 14, 1973. However, a micrometeoroid shield, which was supposed to shelter Skylab from debris and also act as a thermal blanket, accidentally opened about 63 seconds into the launch. The shield and a solar array tore off, and another solar array was damaged. "When the meteoroid shield ripped loose, it disturbed the mounting of workshop solar array wing No. 2 and caused it to partially deploy," NASA wrote. "The exhaust plume of the second stage retro-rockets impacted the partially deployed solar array and literally blew it into space."
The space station experienced communications problems with the antenna as a result of the incident, but that was the least of NASA's worries. Without the protection from the micrometeoroid shield, temperatures inside the station rose to intolerable levels. Also, the remaining solar arrays were only generating 25 watts of power, according to NASA. Flight controllers faced a dilemma. If they oriented the station toward the sun to maximize power generation, temperatures rose too high for the crew and equipment. But an attitude that minimized the heat significantly reduced power generation.
Workers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center scrambled to stabilize the station. They eventually decided to put the station in an attitude that would minimize overheating.
Meanwhile, the launch of the first crew — Commander Charles "Pete" Conrad, pilot Paul J. Weitz and science pilot Joseph P. Kerwin — was delayed as the astronauts began training for the new mission to make the station habitable. Launching 10 days later, on May 25, the crew's first challenge, just hours after launch, was to attempt to deploy the solar array during a spacewalk. However, initial attempts met with no luck as a metal strip holding it down refused to give way.
Crewmembers emerged from an expected communications blackout in a foul mood, according to an official NASA account of the mission. "The astronauts were venting their frustration with four-letter words, while Houston repeatedly tried to remind them that communication had resumed," NASA wrote.
Realizing the tools they had with them that day would not work, Conrad abandoned the exercise and focused on trying to dock his spacecraft with the station. Unfortunately, the docking mechanism failed and the crew had to depressurize the spacecraft and bypass electrical connections to achieve it.
In subsequent days, Conrad's crew erected a sun shade, successfully deployed the stuck array, and began operational work aboard the station. While the incident was frustrating for the teams involved, it also demonstrated that it was possible to fix a badly damaged space station while it is in orbit.
Cutaway view of Skylab
Credit: NASA
The psychology of astronauts
With the worst of the mechanical problems behind, NASA and the three Skylab crews focused on matters pertaining to long-duration spaceflight. Everything from the crew's exercise time to nutritional requirements to scheduling came under scrutiny and debate.
Skylab's second crew — led by Apollo 12 moonwalker Alan Bean, with pilot Jack R. Lousma and scientist Owen K. Garriott — impressed NASA with its productivity. The crew finished its assigned tasks much faster than expected, and clamored for more. While the pace was impressive, it set within NASA some false expectations for how much a group of astronauts could accomplish.
Things weren't always that smooth between the ground and space. Skylab's third crew in particular complained repeatedly about being overloaded with tasks and superhuman expectations. Some have said the crew did a mutiny in orbit, although others characterize it more as a temporary refusal to do more work.
Whatever the situation, the unhappiness prompted a discussion between the ground and space where the two sides brought their mutual concerns to the table. Things never got that bad again between the crew and the ground controllers, but none of the astronauts — Commander Gerald P. Carr, pilot William R. Pogue and scientist Edward R. Gibson — flew in space again.
Carr later said he regretted having waited for several weeks before airing his concerns. "We swallowed a lot of problems for a lot of days because we were reluctant to admit publicly that we were not getting things done right," he said in a NASA account of Skylab. "That's ridiculous, [but] that's human behavior."
In between adapting to a longer mission, crews focused on the science. A solar telescope mounted on the station allowed the astronauts to observe solar flares in action, although an early crewmember joked that he was left wishing for "supernormal" flares. One crew also observed Comet Kohoutek as it swung closest to Earth.
Skylab's last crew left in February 1974, leaving the station in orbit. NASA had planned to bring more crews into orbit, but financial concerns and the run-up to the shuttle program turned attention elsewhere. An effort to send the shuttle there also fell through.
The space station's orbit decayed faster than expected due to intense solar activity heating up Earth's atmosphere. NASA, faced with the inevitable, adjusted the station as best as it could so it wouldn't hit populated areas upon re-entering on July 11, 1979. A math mistake led to pieces falling in Australia, but fortunately nobody was hurt.
Skylab's legacy
While Skylab's end marked a temporary stop to NASA's work on long-duration spaceflight, the agency resumed long flights during the shuttle-Mir program in the 1990s in partnership with Russia and its space station, Mir. That work laid part of the groundwork for the 16-nation cooperation on the International Space Station. In 2015-16, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikail Kornienko spent nearly a year on the orbiting complex. Most crews tend to remain there for five or six months, however.
Unlike during the days of Skylab, astronauts today have regular private sessions with an assigned doctor where they can air concerns about workload, family life or anything else that might be bothering them – without repercussions and without the fear that the public might be listening in. The doctor can then search for solutions among managers on the ground, freeing up time for crews to work in orbit.
Astronauts also follow a strict exercise regimen, receiving about two hours a day to run on a treadmill, use an exercise bike or lift using a machine that simulates weight-lifting. Medical studies have shown that this sort of exercise reduces bone loss, muscle atrophy and other problems in spaceflight.
NASA is planning on constructing a lunar space station in the 2020s, which is called the Deep Space Gateway. This would allow astronauts to do long-duration stays at a location further from Earth – valuable practice for colonizing Mars, while still being close enough to quickly turn around and go home if a problem arises. It is unclear who else will participate in this venture, but NASA is seeking international collaborators.
In 2018, a documentary film "Searching for Skylab" was fully funded on Kickstarter. The filmmakers argued that Skylab is not a well-remembered mission in the public eye. In the film, Skylab astronauts and ground workers explain the work that went into the missions and the first U.S. space station's legacy.
Scientists To Attempt To Make Matter Out Of Pure Light
Scientists have found out how to turn pure light into matter for the very first time – after 80 years of trying.
The idea was first dreamt up in 1934 by two physicists, but they never expected anybody to be able to physically demonstrate their prediction.
But researchers at Imperial College London say they have found a way to convert light into matter by using new equipment in the form of an extremely powerful high-intensity laser, capable of speeding up electrons to just below the speed of light.
Researchers say they have found a way to convert light into matter by using new equipment in the form of an extremely powerful laser capable of speeding up electrons to just below the speed of light
The 80-year-old theory involved smashing together two particles of light, or photons, to create an electron and a positron - subatomic particles found in all materials.
Although scientists at the university believe they can create matter, at this stage the end result would not be visible to the naked eye.
Professor Steve Rose, from imperial College, said: 'What was so surprising to us was the discovery of how we can create matter directly from light using the technology that we have today in the UK.
‘As we are theorists we are now talking to others who can use our ideas to undertake this landmark experiment.'
The experiment would involve blasting electrons, sped up by lasers to just below the speed of light, into a slab of gold to create a beam of photons a billion times more energetic than visible light.
The next stage would need a tiny gold can called a hohlraum, German for 'empty room'.
Scientists would fire a high-energy laser at the inner surface of this to create a thermal radiation field, generating light similar to that emitted by stars.
Although scientists at Imperial College London, pictured, believe they can create matter, it would only be in the form of tiny subatomic particles, not visible to the naked eye
They would then direct the photon beam from the first stage of the experiment through the centre of the can, causing the photons from the two sources to collide and form electrons and positrons.
It would then be possible to detect the formation of the electrons and positrons when they exited the can – in their microscopic state.
Oliver Pike, who is currently completing his PhD in plasma physics at Imperial College London, said: 'Although the theory is conceptually simple, it has been very difficult to verify experimentally. The experimental design we propose can be carried out with relative ease and with existing technology.
'Within a few hours of looking for applications of hohlraums outside their traditional role in fusion energy research, we were astonished to find they provided the perfect conditions for creating a photon collider.
'The race to carry out and complete the experiment is on.'
The research published in Nature Photonics shows how the original theory, put forward by US physicists, Gregory Breit and John Wheeler in the 1930s, could be proven in practice.
This 'photon-photon collider', which would convert light directly into matter using technology that is already available, would be a new type of high-energy physics experiment.
The experiment would recreate a process that was important in the first 100 seconds of the universe and that is also seen in gamma ray bursts, which are the biggest explosions in the universe and one of physics' greatest unsolved mysteries.
Scientists Discover a Way to Turn Light Into Matter
Une « soucoupe volante » s’est-elle abîmée près d’Aztec au Nouveau-Mexique en 1948, huit mois après Roswell ? C’est la thèse que défendent deux enquêteurs américains, qui ont épluché le dossier pendant plus de deux décennies… Un dossier troublant !
La scène se passe le 25 mars 1948, au Nouveau-Mexique, non loin de la zone des Four Corners (quatre coins), qui sépare quatre États du Sud-Ouest américain : Nouveau-Mexique, Arizona, Utah, Colorado. Un peu plus à l’est se trouve la ville d’Aztec ; la région est assez désertique et le décor se compose des fameuses mesas, le nom espagnol qui désigne les plateaux rocheux d’altitude où quelques arbres ont réussi à s’enraciner au fil du temps. Peu avant l’aube, le policier Manuel Sandoval roule sur l’autoroute après sa nuit de service passée à surveiller le pipeline de la Southern Union Gas. Soudain, il voit passer au-dessus de lui un objet en forme de disque, de grande taille, qui semble en difficulté et louvoie vers le nord-ouest, en direction d’Aztec et de la zone des Four Corners. Juste après, l’éleveur de chèvres Valentin Archuleta, qui s’affaire à ses tâches matinales, entend un grand bruit et lève la tête pour voir vraisemblablement le même objet, très bas, apparemment hors de contrôle, qui se dirige vers une mesa de l’autre côté de la route. L’objet érafle le bord de la mesa en provoquant une gerbe d’étincelles et poursuit sa route vers le nord. Ancien militaire, Archuleta n’hésite pas une seconde : il se rend à la supérette proche de son ranch, où se trouve un téléphone et finit par joindre la base aérienne de Kirtland à Albuquerque. Son interlocuteur montre un grand intérêt et demande où se dirigeait l’engin : « Vers Hart Canyon », répond le fermier.
Un disque de trente mètres de diamètre
Un troisième témoin direct est Doug Noland, un ouvrier de 19 ans qui travaille pour une compagnie pétrolière. La région compte, en effet, plusieurs zones d’exploitation. Alors qu’il passe prendre son collègue Bill Ferguson, celui-ci lui dit qu’un feu a été annoncé près d’une zone de réservoirs de pétrole et qu’ils doivent s’y rendre immédiatement. En arrivant, d’autres ouvriers se trouvent déjà sur place. Ils leur expliquent que le feu de broussailles semble confiné au sommet de la mesas et que quelque chose s’est passé là-haut. Les deux comparses montent la colline et tombent sur le vaisseau, un disque d’une trentaine de mètres de diamètre ! Il est légèrement couché sur le côté, en raison d’une protubérance sur la partie inférieure, et doté d’une espèce de capsule à son sommet. « Le vaisseau était lisse, sans joints, rivets, boulons ni marques de soudure, explique Doug Noland.Il était comme en aluminium brossé, semblait très lisse, mais ce n’était pas de l’aluminium hautement poli comme un avion. » En s’approchant, les ouvriers découvrent que cette surface brillante est transparente quand on regarde de très près, comme les lunettes qui deviendront populaires quelques années plus tard. Alors que le soleil se lève à peine, les témoins distinguent deux petits corps inanimés à l’intérieur de l’habitacle, « penchés au-dessus d’une espèce de tableau de bord ». Alors qu’un autre couple de ranchers arrive sur place, les personnes présentes entendent un hélicoptère qui survole la zone. Le policier Manuel Sandoval arrive au même moment. Quand Doug l’interroge sur l’attitude à tenir, Sandoval lui dit des choses très significatives. Il explique qu’il a suivi la route de l’objet après l’avoir vu passer au-dessus de lui, et que des résidents de la ville de Cuba ont signalé plusieurs observations d’ovnis dans les semaines précédentes. Lui-même et l’un de ses collègues, Andy Andrews, ont été témoins de plusieurs observations.
Les "leçons" de Roswell
Il faut préciser que tout ceci se passe huit mois après le crash supposé d’un autre objet à Roswell, à quelques centaines de kilomètres au sud-est, le 7 juillet 1947. L’affaire a fait grand bruit, puisque la presse avait parlé d’un crash d’ovni, avant que l’Air Force ne se rattrape aux branches en affirmant qu’il s’agissait finalement d’un ballon météo. Ainsi, avant de juger ridicule le fait qu’un second objet ait pu s’abîmer si peu de temps après le cas de Roswell, il faut envisager le contexte d’une région à l’époque surveillée de près par d’éventuels visiteurs.
Les témoins présents vont être débriefés et soumis à un serment du secret.
Cela expliquerait les nombreuses observations réalisées durant cette période, d’autant plus que ce secteur abritait la zone d’essais des nouveaux appareils et équipements de l’Air Force. Pour le physicien nucléaire Stanton Friedman, connu pour avoir remis en lumière le dossier Roswell dans les années 1980, « il est incontestable qu’un engin extra-terrestre fut récupéré par des agents du gouvernement à proximité d’Aztec, en mars 1948, et qu’il fut transporté en vue d’un examen classifié. »
En effet, à partir du moment où l’hélicoptère a été vu sur site, tout va aller très vite, comme si les militaires avaient justement tiré les leçons de « l’incident » Roswell et, cette fois, mis en œuvre une procédure extrêmement rigoureuse. Une fois sur place, ils vont trouver le moyen d’ouvrir l’habitacle en actionnant une commande à l’aide d’une perche introduite par un hublot brisé. Ils en extraient seize corps qui semblent brûlés, dont la plupart se trouvent sur un pont inférieur du vaisseau. Les témoins présents vont être débriefés et soumis à un serment du secret. L’objet, qui est très léger, va ensuite être démantelé et transporté en plusieurs pièces vraisemblablement jusqu’à la base de Los Alamos, située à 250 kilomètres.
L'enquête ultra-fouillée des Ramsey
Franck Scully, auteur de Behind the Flying Saucers.
L’affaire va cependant rapidement fuiter, par l’intermédiaire d’un des scientifiques impliqués dans le travail d’étude de l’objet, en vue d’en comprendre la technologie, un processus appelé rétro-ingénierie. Ce scientifique approche en 1949 un journaliste et auteur respecté d’Hollywood, Frank Scully (dont le nom a inspiré à Chris Carter le personnage féminin de la série The X-Files). Il faut ici donner la parole à l’un de ceux par qui l’histoire refait aujourd’hui surface. En effet, après avoir repris l’enquête menée à l’époque par Frank Scully, les ufologues Scott Ramsey et son épouse Suzanne ont publié récemment un ouvrage de synthèse sur l’affaire (voir encadré). Scott Ramsey explique que ce scientifique « voulait que Scully révèle l’histoire et lui a fait croire que le gouvernement allait le faire officiellement, ce qui était bien sûr faux. Je pense que les scientifiques impliqués voulaient s’assurer, au sortir de la guerre, que la technologie récupérée ne puisse servir qu’à des fins pacifiques. Le livre de Scully est sorti en septembre 1950 et a immédiatement été un succès de librairie ; il a vendu plus de 64000 exemplaires en plusieurs langues. Ce que nous avons fait, c’est reprendre la recherche de Scully en la joignant à la nôtre et en l’épluchant comme un oignon. Scully a notamment révélé des aspects du Manhattan Project développé par l’OSRD et qui étaient top secret à l’époque. Il parle d’un groupe de huit ou neuf scientifiques désignés sous la seule appellation de "Dr Gee", qui avaient travaillé au sein de l’OSRD sur le projet Manhattan. Nous avons pu avoir accès à certains documents déclassifiés qui confirment ce qui figure dans le livre de Scully. Il était impossible que Scully ait eu accès à ces documents à l’époque, même s’il était connu. »
Le pasteur fond en larmes
La suite de l’affaire consiste en une entreprise de décrédibilisation du travail de Scully par les autorités, en s’appuyant sur un autre journaliste, J.P. Cahn, qui s’est estimé spolié parce qu’il voulait acheter l’histoire pour son journal, le San Francisco Chronicle. Ainsi, tout va être fait pour que l’ensemble du dossier passe pour un canular.
Dernière photo connue de J.P. Cahn peu de temps avant sa mort.
Cependant, les Ramsey ont retrouvé plusieurs témoins directs et indirects qui lui donnent une véritable consistance, même si, compte tenu du caractère extraordinaire de l’enquête, le doute ne pourra être entièrement levé. Parmi les témoins, outre ceux déjà évoqués, on peut citer le cas du pasteur Solon Brown, qui s’est rendu sur le site du crash/atterrissage parce qu’il a remarqué l’agitation inhabituelle ce matin-là, alors qu’il rentrait à sa paroisse principale dans le Colorado, après une nuit passée à Aztec. Il a proposé son aide et un policier lui a confirmé que « des prières » ne seraient pas inutiles, car il y avait des corps... Après avoir fait son office, il était tellement choqué qu’il n’a pu s’empêcher de contacter un proche, diacre de sa paroisse, et lui a raconté ce qu’il avait vu en dépit de son serment du secret. Le fils du pasteur et celui du diacre, qui étaient présents, ont été retrouvés par les époux Ramsey et ont confirmé le récit du pasteur. Celui-ci avait notamment éclaté en sanglots et confié au diacre : « J’essaie de relever cette paroisse. Pourquoi inventerais-je une telle histoire ? Je vous jure que je dis la vérité.»
Les autres témoignages complètent le scénario possible de l’événement et évoquent les modalités de transport de l’objet démantelé, le « nettoyage » du site, ou encore la constitution de « fiches » de désinformation pour tous les témoins directs (c’est-à-dire la création d’un agenda alternatif prouvant qu’ils n’étaient pas là). Même si les faits relatés dans l’enquête des époux Ramsey, aidés par Frank Thayer, sont extraordinaires et semblent, à ce titre, incroyables, le caractère extrêmement minutieux de leur travail ne laisse pas d’interroger. D’ailleurs, ils ne prétendent pas avoir épuisé le dossier et affirment que leur recherche se poursuit. Toutefois, conclut Scott Ramsey : « J’espère que le lecteur comprend que les auteurs savent avec certitude que l’incident d’Aztec est un événement réel, et que la récupération qui a eu lieu à Hart Canyon aurait dû, depuis longtemps, être portée à la connaissance du public américain».Et pas seulement lui, bien sûr.
Une enquête fouillée, implacable
Pourquoi l’affaire Aztec refait-elle surface aujourd’hui ? Parce que deux enquêteurs tenaces, le couple Scott et Suzanne Ramsey, ont consacré plus de deux décennies à rassembler les pièces du puzzle et ont récemment publié un livre, aidés de Frank Thayer, ancien professeur d’université. Traduit en français à l’excellente initiative des éditions Atlantes, Aztec 1948 : un crash d’ovni au Nouveau-Mexique est le fruit de cette enquête minutieuse, qui fait dire à de bons connaisseurs de l’ufologie comme Thibaut Canuti que « Scott et Suzanne Ramsey sont des ufologues comme il ne s'en fait plus guère et qui ont finalement tout de parfaits enquêteurs criminels ». Et de saluer « un travail fouillé, implacable et pour le moins troublant des époux Ramsey.»
Le crash d'Aztec partie 1 avec Scott Ramsey, Suzanne Ramsey et Franck Thayer PhD
Le crash d'Aztec partie 2 avec Scott Ramsey, Suzanne Ramsey et Franck Thayer PhD
Le crash d'Aztec partie 3 avec Scott Ramsey, Suzanne Ramsey et Franck Thayer PhD
The European Southern Observatory just published a breathtaking image of a nearby star nursery.
Star cluster RCW 38. Image credits ESO / K. Muzic.
Earlier today, we’ve talked about the first colors complex-ish life created — it was a story of algae, fossils, and pink. Moving on from this daring display by early life, however, I thought we’d seize the occasion to look at what colors accompany birth in the other direction — up in space.
Our eyes can’t peer that far out, but, luckily for us, the European Southern Observatory(ESO) can. Using the HWAK-I (High Acuity Wide field K-band Imager) infrared imager mounted on the Very Large Telescope (VTL) in Chile, the ESO captured some spectacular shots of stars being born in the Vela constellation.
Ashes to ashes, dust to stars
RCW 38 in the constellation of Vela (The Sails). The map shows most of the stars visible to the unaided eye under good conditions. Image credits ESO / IAU / Sky & Telescope.
The image depicts the star cluster RCW 38 as seen in infrared. ESO chose this bit of the electromagnetic spectrum for their observations since infrared can see ‘through’ the clouds shrowding star nurseries such as RCW 38. The cluster itself contains hundreds of young, brightly hot, and quite massive stars. Even at the relatively short distance of 5500 light-years away, however, their (visible) light can’t peer through the vast bodies of dust surrounding the cluster.
The central area, seen as a bright blue region, houses numerous very young stars as well as a few protostars — ‘stars’ that are still forming. Observations by the Chandra X-ray Observatory revealed the presence of over 800 X-ray emitting young stellar objects in the cluster. You won’t be surprised to hear, then, that the area is drenched in radiation, making local gas clouds glow vividly. Cooler bodies of dust languishing in front of the cluster carry more subdued, darker hues of red and orange. The end result, a ‘colorful celestial landscape’ as ESO puts it, is quite the striking interplay of color and light.
This image was captured as part of a series of tests — a process known as science verification — for HAWK-I and GRAAL (the ground layer adaptive optics module of the VLT). These tests are performed to ensure newly-commisioned instruments work as intended and include a set of test observations that verify and demonstrate the capabilities of the new instrument.
Star cluster RCW 38 in the visible spectrum. Image credits ESO – Digitized Sky Survey 2 / Davide De Martin.
Previous images of this region — snapped in the visible spectrum — show a very different sight. Optical images appear almost devoid of stars in comparison with those taken in the infrared spectrum due to dust obscuring the view.
Peering through dense bodies such as dust clouds or nebulae is actually one of the HWAK-I’s main roles. The device also projects four laser beams out into the night sky to use as artificial reference stars — used to correct for any atmospheric turbulence, which can bend incoming light — to increase the quality of the final image.
The science of superstition – and why people believe in the unbelievable
The science of superstition – and why people believe in the unbelievable
Credit: Pixabay.
The number 13, black cats, breaking mirrors, or walking under ladders, may all be things you actively avoid – if you’re anything like the 25% of people in the US who consider themselves superstitious.
Even if you don’t consider yourself a particularly superstitious person, you probably say “bless you” when someone sneezes, just in case the devil should decide to steal their soul – as our ancestors thought possible during a sneeze.
The science of superstition and why people believe in the unbelievable - fox news
Superstition also explains why many buildings do not have a 13th floor – preferring to label it 14, 14A 12B or M (the 13th letter of the alphabet) on elevator button panels because of concerns about superstitious tenants. Indeed, 13% of people in one survey indicated that staying on the 13th floor of a hotel would bother them – and 9% said they would ask for a different room.
On top of this, some airlines such as Air France and Lufthansa, do not have a 13th row. Lufthansa also has no 17th row – because in some countries – such as Italy and Brazil – the typical unlucky number is 17 and not 13.
Although there is no single definition of superstition, it generally means a belief in supernatural forces – such as fate – the desire to influence unpredictable factors and a need to resolve uncertainty. In this way then, individual beliefs and experiences drive superstitions, which explains why they are generally irrational and often defy current scientific wisdom.
Psychologists who have investigated what role superstitions play, have found that they derive from the assumption that a connection exists between co-occurring, non-related events. For instance, the notion that charms promote good luck, or protect you from bad luck.
For many people, engaging with superstitious behaviours provides a sense of control and reduces anxiety – which is why levels of superstition increase at times of stress and angst. This is particularly the case during times of economic crisis and social uncertainty – notably wars and conflicts. Indeed, Researchers have observed how in Germany between 1918 and 1940 measures of economic threat correlated directly with measures of superstition.
2. Touch wood
Superstitious beliefs have been shown to help promote a positive mental attitude. Although they can lead to irrational decisions, such as trusting in the merits of good luck and destiny rather than sound decision making.
Carrying charms, wearing certain clothes, visiting places associated with good fortune, preferring specific colours and using particular numbers are all elements of superstition. And although these behaviours and actions can appear trivial, for some people, they can often affect choices made in the real world.
Superstitions can also give rise to the notion that objects and places are cursed. Such as the Annabelle the Doll – who featured in The Conjuring and two other movies – and is said to be inhabited by the spirit of a dead girl. A more traditional illustration is the Curse of the Pharaohs, which is said to be cast upon any person who disturbs the mummy of an Ancient Egyptian person – especially a pharaoh.
Numbers themselves can also often be associated with curses. For example, the figure 666 in a licence plate is often featured in stories of misfortune. The most famous case was the numberplate “ARK 666Y”, which is believed to have caused mysterious vehicle fires and “bad vibes” for passengers.
3. Sporting superstitions
Superstition is also highly prevalent within sport – especially in highly competitive situations. Four out of five professional athletes report engaging with at least one superstitious behaviour prior to performance. Within sport, superstitions have been shown to reduce tension and provide a sense of control over unpredictable, chance factors.
Superstitions practices tend to vary across sports, but there are similarities. Within football, gymnastics and athletics, for example, competitors reported praying for success, checking appearance in mirror and dressing well to feel better prepared. Players and athletes also engage with personalised actions and behaviours – such as wearing lucky clothes, kit and charms.
Famous sportspeople often display superstitious behaviours. Notably, basketball legend Michael Jordan concealed his lucky North Carolina shorts under his Chicago Bulls team kit. Similarly, the tennis legend Björn Bork, reportedly wore the same brand of shirt when preparing for Wimbledon.
Rafael Nadal has an array of rituals that he performs each time he plays. These include the manner in which he places his water bottles and taking freezing cold showers. Nadal believes these rituals help him to find focus, flow and perform well.
4. Walking under ladders
What all this shows is that superstitions can provide reassurance and can help to reduce anxiety in some people. But while this may well be true, research has shown that actions associated with superstitions can also become self-reinforcing – in that the behaviour develops into a habit and failure to perform the ritual can actually result in anxiety.
This is even though the actual outcome of an event or situation is still dependent on known factors – rather than unknown supernatural forces. A notion consistent with the often quoted maxim, “the harder you work (practice) the luckier you get”.
So the next time you break a mirror, see a black cat or encounter the number 13 – don’t worry too much about “bad luck”, as it’s most likely just a trick of the mind.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETRuimtevaartorganisatie NASA heeft bekendgemaakt dat haar ruimtetuig Cassini een vreemde waarneming heeft gedaan vlak voor het vorig jaar neerstortte op Saturnus. Cassini detecteerde plasmagolven die van de planeet naar haar maan Enceladus gingen. De NASA zette een opname van die plasmagolven nu om in een geluidsfragment en die klinkt griezelig buitenaards.
Cassini deed de waarneming op 2 september 2017, twee weken voor het ruimtetuig de atmosfeer van Saturnus in gestuurd werd en verdween. Nieuw onderzoek van de data van die laatste missie toonde een sterke uitstoot van plasmagolven van de planeet in de richting van zijn maan Enceladus. Een uitstoot die deed denken aan een elektrisch circuit, waarover energie heen en weer ging.
Onderzoekers slaagden er nu in om een registratie van die plasmagolven om te zetten in een audiobestand, een beetje zoals een radio elektromagnetische golven omzet in muziek. Vervolgens werd de tijd samengedrukt van 16 minuten tot 28,5 seconden en de frequentie van de golven verlaagd met een factor vijf. Het resultaat was buitenwerelds.
“Enceladus is een kleine generator die rond Saturnus draait en we weten dat die een constante energiebron is”, aldus Ali Sulaiman, een planetair wetenschapper van de universiteit van Iowa die bij het onderzoek betrokken was en er twee papers over schreef die gepubliceerd werden in het wetenschappelijk tijdschrift Geophysical Research Letters. “We hebben nu ontdekt dat Saturnus antwoordt door signalen te sturen in de vorm van plasmagolven, door een circuit van lijnen in een magnetisch veld die de planeet verbindt met zijn maan honderdduizenden kilometers verderop.”
De interactie tussen Saturnus en haar maan verschilt fundamenteel van die tussen onze Aarde en haar maan. Enceladus is ondergedompeld in het magnetisch veld van Saturnus en geologisch actief. De maan stoot pluimen van waterdamp uit die geïoniseerd worden en de omgeving rond Saturnus vullen. Eenzelfde interactie is te zien tussen Saturnus en haar ringen, die ook erg dynamisch zijn. Tussen onze planeet en haar maan is er geen dergelijke interactie.
The Angry Red Planet (10/10) Movie CLIP - Parting Martian Warning (1959) HD
For decades, Hollywood filmmakers have been romantically drawn to the mysteries of Mars, compelled to explore the majestic sweep of its rust-hued surface and to unearth its ancient subterranean secrets. Hollywood’s love for Mars, though, is unrequited. Indeed, it seems that the potential inhabitants of the planet (be they microbes or, as has been suggested by remote viewers, technologically advanced underground base-dwelling humanoids) are aggressively anti-Hollywood and have actively been working their malicious mojo against Tinseltown’s Mars movies.
Okay, you’re probably thinking now about Matt Damon… yes, his 2015 collaboration with Ridley Scott, The Martian, was a hit, critically and commercially. Or perhaps you’re thinking of Jake Gyllenhaal, who co-starred in the 2017 sci-fi thriller Life, which used the Red Planet as a narrative springboard to moderate financial success. But these are anomalies. Historically, Hollywood’s Mars movies have bombed at the box-office.
During the Cold War, the only Mars movie that could claim any measure of success was War of the Worlds (1953). Other productions of the era fell afoul of the curse. Movies such as Rocketship XM (1950), Flight to Mars (1951), Red Planet Mars(1952), Invaders from Mars (1953),The Angry Red Planet (1959) and The Day Mars Invaded Earth (1963) received, at best, mixed reviews from critics and generated little or no profit. But the Mars movie-bomb conveyor belt was only just slipping into gear. Here’s a quick chronological glance at some of Hollywood’s most memorably disastrous visits to our planetary neighbor:
Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964):
Despite its silly title, this movie is a surprisingly sober and dramatically engaging affair. It was also billed as being “scientifically accurate” based on technical advice that the production received from NASA (though actually it’s about as scientifically accurate as the Transformers franchise). There were high hopes for the movie, and a sequel—Robinson Crusoe in the Invisible Galaxy—was planned but quickly scrapped after the first movie took a nose dive at the box-office.
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964):
The title says it all. It is currently ranked number 90 in the IMDB’s bottom 100 movies of all time.
Mars Attacks! (1996):
Inspired by the cult trading card series of the same name, Tim Burton’s manic B-movie parody—described by the director as “kind of a Mad magazine version of Independence Day”—had a production budget of $80 million, on top of which Warner Bros. forked out $220 million on marketing. The movie grossed just over 100 million worldwide and introduced Burton to the notion of box-office failure (something he has rarely experienced since).
My Favorite Martian (1999):
a big screen version of the popular 1960s sitcom of the same name in which a Martian crash-lands on Earth and disguises himself in human form. This Disney flick grossed just $37 million against a budget of $65 million and was slammed by critics. It has a great opening scene though (see video below).
Mission to Mars (2000):
When the first manned mission to Mars meets with disaster in the year 2020, the ensuing rescue mission learns that humans are descended from an ancient and long-since-departed race of Martians. Disney (again) and director Brian De Palma had high hopes for this $100 million epic, but the best it could do at the worldwide box-office was to recoup its productions costs plus a paltry $11 million.
Red Planet (2000):
Released in the same year as Mission to Mars, Warner Bros.’ bid to lift the Martian Curse fared no better than Disney’s. The story follows a team of astronauts who travel to Mars in search of solutions to Earth’s environmental degradation and eventually come up against some nasty Martian insect thingies. Other stuff happens too, but none of it good. It cost $80 million to produce and grossed just $33 million worldwide, making it one of the world’s biggest ever box-office bombs.
Ghosts of Mars (2001):
In which human colonists on the Red Planet become possessed by angry Martian spectres. Another big rusty nail in the coffin of John Carpenter’s career, the movie had a $28 million budget and grossed just $14 million worldwide. Scathing critics’ reviews didn’t help.
Mars Needs Moms (2011):
undeterred by the back-to-back failures of My Favorite Martian (1999) and Mission to Mars(2000), Disney chose to return to the Red Planet with this family-friendly offering about emotionally stunted Martians who abduct Earth moms in order to extract their maternal instincts for the benefit of their own babies. The moms’ natural know-how is then uploaded into thousands of automated robots which are tasked with nurturing the Martian young. It’s as weird as it sounds, but actually not half bad—the visuals, at least, are jaw-dropping. Disney poured a staggering $175 million into the movie, of which it lost $136 million (ouch!). It is one of the biggest box-office bomb of all time.
John Carter (2012):
A lavish, big-screen adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series of science fiction adventure novels. John Carter chronicles the exploits of the eponymous hero, a 19th Century American Civil War veteran who, upon being mysteriously transported to Mars, discovers it to be a thriving and diverse world populated by 9 ft tall, green, four-armed warriors called Tharks, as well as more human-looking red Martians. Disney (yet again) invested almost $300 million in the movie, placing great faith in its director Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, Wall-E), as well as its much-loved source material, and hopes were high for a franchise. Not to be. It tanked hard, failing even to recoup its production budget.
Last Days on Mars (2013):
On the first human mission to Mars, a crew member discovers fossil evidence of bacterial life. When contact is lost with him, the rest of the crew investigates and learns that there is still life on the planet. The movie was savaged by the critics and went on to become one of the biggest flops in cinematic history. Budget: $10,600,000. Worldwide Box Office: $261,364 (yes, you read that correctly).
The Space Between Us (2017):
Starring Gary Oldman, Asa Butterfield and Carla Gugino, the movie follows the first human born on Mars as he travels to Earth for the first time, experiencing the wonders of the planet through fresh eyes. Yet another bomb, it failed to recoup even half of its $30 million production budget.
Considering the high failure rate of Hollywood’s Mars missions, it’s a wonder that filmmakers continue to gamble on the Red Planet at all, and yet, they do. According to The Hollywood Reporter, John Krasinski (A Quiet Place) is set to produce Life on Mars. The project will adapt a short story by Cecil Castellucci titled We Have Always Lived on Mars that centers on a woman who is among a handful of descendants of a Martian colony long-abandoned by Earth following a cataclysm. The woman one day finds she can breathe the air on Mars, upending her world and that of her fellow colonists.
Will John Krasinski succeed in lifting the Martian Curse, or, like so many other filmmakers before him, will he end up biting red dust? Watch this space… (pun intended).
Earth Awakens while using his telescope has recorded a fleet of UFOs leaving the Moon.
The footage shows the fleet of UFOs in the original color as well as in different colors and zoomed in.
It seems that the movements of the objects are not identical to birds, like flapping wings, suggesting that these objects are indeed unidentified flying objects that leave the moon.
Moscow Declares UFO Sighting As Rocket Test, Can We Trust Them? UFO Sighting News.
Moscow Declares UFO Sighting As Rocket Test, Can We Trust Them? UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: July 2018 Location of sighting: Sub Arctic, Arkhangelsk region Russia told the news media that this UFO sighting was a rocket launch, but honestly how much do you trust the Russians? They are not known for their honesty and trustworthiness...so I call bullshit on this being a rocket. No rocket is going to be aimed directly above the capital Moscow! This is their pride and joy, they live and die to protect this city and would never shoot a rocket over it. This is a UFO that the Russians had made contact with in order to create alien trade agreements similar to the ones the USAF has with a few alien species. Scott C. Waring
News states:
Stunning footage shows the galactic missile Soyuz-2.1.B bursting through the air after being fired from the country's sub-Arctic Arkhangelsk region. Social media users were convinced that they were being visited by extraterrestrials. The rocket, which was carrying a satellite, was fired just before 1am Moscow time today. Military officials confirmed the satellite was safely delivered to orbit as part of Russia’s own global satellite navigation system.
Must Watch! Earth Alien holographic simulation? UFO Sighting News.
Must Watch! Earth Alien holographic simulation? UFO Sighting News.
Are you living in a holographic simulation? Recently, the idea that we may be living in a giant video game, or as it’s sometimes called, the Simulation Hypothesis, has gotten a lot of attention because of prominent figures like Elon Musk who have openly discussed the idea. As Virtual Reality technology has gotten more sophisticated, we are starting to contemplate virtual worlds like that of the omni-present Oasis in Ready Player One, soon to be a blockbuster movie directed by Stephen Spielberg.
The World's Most Shocking Secret | Full Documentary (2018) UFO Sighting News.
The World's Most Shocking Secret | Full Documentary (2018) UFO Sighting News.
I live on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, a rural area just a stone's throw away from DC and a ton of military establishments. Myself and my husband have seen interesting things in the night sky but nothing like tonight. Multiple starlike lights moving about/odd moving lights with combustion/popping noises. Has anyone in or around this area experienced similar things, especially this night (7/10/18)?
This made me really want to research more into what could be and stumbled upon this video -- Which after watching I agree with a lot of points and make my mind go down the rabbit hole to make truth to alternate/reverse realities and time travel. I know this is a lot but. Comment with thoughts.
The Most Surprising LIE on Earth - Full Documentary (2018)
The Best UFO Sightings Of 2018 - Part 1 - SECTION 51
The Happy Mondays Star Claims He Saw A UFO and that Aliens Are Real
The Happy Mondays Star Claims He Saw A UFO and that Aliens Are Real
Good Morning Britain viewers were hysterical after being left with the claim of Shaun Ryder that he had seen a UFO.
Appeared on the TV show to mark World UFO Day, the Happy Mondays star told hosts Susanna Reid and Piers Morgan about the time he saw a UFO as a teen.
Ryder said that he believes in UFOs because they exist. He explained that he does not believe anything these academic types have been saying because they do not know anything.
Shaun, 55, said that he saw a UFO when he was 15 working as a message boy for the post office. He saw a UFO zigzagging across the sky and then shot off at around 7 am.
He saw it together with a kid who looked at him, and they both did not say a word.
Shaun said that it was ridiculous to think humans on Earth were the only species in the universe.
Viewers like his appearance on the show with one suggesting on Twitter to have Shaun every day discussing a different subject. Some other agree with Shaun’s point about scientists.
Kevin Day is a retired United States Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer, a former Operations Specialist and TOPGUN Air Intercept Controller with more than 20 years’ experience in Strike Group air defense including war-time operations. He joined George Knapp to discuss his experience with the USS Princeton’s Combat Information Center that discovered the fleets of anomalous air contacts, now known as the Tic Tac UFOs, in the skies above the Southern California in November 2004. While working on the Princeton (a support ship for the USS Nimitz) on November 10, 2004, he noticed 8-10 tracks on the radar scope in the vicinity of the Catalina Islands. They were moving south at 28,000 feet and 100 knots, which is quite slow for something that high in the air.
Here are the Canadian cities with the most UFO sightings in 2017: survey
Here are the Canadian cities with the most UFO sightings in 2017: survey
By Sylvia Strojek The Canadian Press
A group of attendees gather in a desert area for UFO sightings at the Annual International UFO Congress Convention Convention & Film Festival in Laughlin, Nev., on February 26, 2009. Hovering lights in the sky. Pulsing lights. A humming noise. Objects shaped like spheres, discs, triangles and boomerangs. The witnesses include ordinary folk, airline crews, a particle physicist and an airport's weather observer. A survey released by Manitoba-based Ufology Research on Tuesday says there were 1,101 UFO sightings -- an average of three a day -- reported in Canada in 2017.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP, Jae C. Hong
Hovering lights in the sky. Pulsing lights. A humming noise.
Objects shaped like spheres, discs, triangles and boomerangs.
The witnesses include ordinary folk, airline crews, a particle physicist and an airport’s weather observer.
A survey released by Manitoba-based Ufology Research on Tuesday says there were 1,101 UFO sightings — an average of three a day — reported in Canada in 2017.
About eight per cent of those were deemed unexplainable.
“Many people continue to report unusual objects in the sky, and some of these objects do not have obvious explanations,” says the survey.
“Many witnesses are pilots, police and other individuals with reasonably good observing capabilities and good judgment.”
Quebec had the most sightings at 518. Nunavut had the fewest at two.
Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and Edmonton topped the cities with the most UFO reports.
Ufology Research takes data from all known sources, including UFO organizations, government files, direct witness reports, media and some internet posts. Its analysis takes into account location, types of encounters, reliability of witnesses and strangeness of sightings.
Some of the more bizarre unexplained reports from 2017 included:
Jan. 5, 6 p.m: Two people in French River, Ont., observed multiple colours for about 10 minutes. Several coloured “orbs” approached the witnesses and hovered before moving away. “Witnesses were very frightened.”
March 15, 7:20 p.m: Crews on two separate airliners 65 kilometres northeast of Enderby, B.C., reported a bright, white strobing light above them. Radar indicated no other known aircraft were in the vicinity.
July 11, 3:12 p.m: One witness near Smithville, Ont., reported that a “shiny object with a raised dome moved slowly and silently over nearby trees … It seemed to hover, then ascended rapidly out of sight.”
Aug. 25, 9:50 a.m: Two people in Stewiacke, N.S., watched a dark triangular object for about three minutes silhouetted against the sky. It had three white lights at the points, an orange-red light in the centre and two strobe lights. “The object flew over the witnesses, making a humming noise.”
Sept. 23, 8:30 p.m: Ten people watched as a red, triangular object approached Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Que., from the northeast and came to a stop above them. It was stationary for several seconds before its red lights intensified, then flickered, before it moved away.
Ufology Research notes the number of reported UFO sightings remains high. The 2017 figure compares with 1,132 in 2016 and 1,265 in 2015.
The group suggests several explanations, among them more secret or classified military exercises, people unaware of natural objects in the sky and easier reporting of alleged sightings because of advancing online technology.
It also posits that perhaps “more UFOs are present and physically observable by witnesses.”
But the survey concludes that “there is no incontrovertible evidence that some UFO cases involved extraterrestrial contact.”
Open Minds UFO Radio: his year’s annual Roswell UFO festival was another success. The festival began with the 50th anniversary and continues to this day. The UFO Museum has broken attendance records for the last few years, so festival attendance is going strong. However, there was a unique aspect to this year’s festival that will make future events feel a bit like they are missing something. What they will be missing is Stanton Friedman, the man who put Roswell on the map, and made the alleged crash of a UFO in 1947 the most well-known UFO story in the world.
Stanton Friedman is retiring this year, and although he will be attending a few more events, this will be his last yearly trek to the UFO festival. In this episode of Open Minds UFO Radio, we talk to several of the attendees and speakers at this years event, and we end the episode with a talk with Stanton about his retirement. Some of the other interviews include Jason McClellan, Shane Hurd, Karen Brard, Travis Walton, Thom Reed, and Jim Hill. Jim is the director of the Roswell UFO Museum.
Un chercheur d'UFO au Pérou a récemment capturé quelques images intrigantes d'un objet anormal planant dans le ciel au-dessus des lignes emblématiques de Nazca. La scène étrange a été filmée par Rafal Mercado de l'Association Péruvienne d'Ufologie plus tôt ce mois-ci et posté sur son compte YouTube. Comme décrit par lui et vu dans la vidéo, un objet tubulaire étrange peut être vu assis stationnaire dans l'air pendant une période de temps prolongée. À son crédit, Mercado se demande simplement, dans sa description de la vidéo, si l'anomalie pourrait être une «manifestation d'un OVNI» et laisse ses spectateurs décider eux-mêmes. Ceux qui croient que les géoglyphes légendaires ont été l'œuvre d'extraterrestres qui ont visité la planète dans un passé lointain verront probablement la vidéo étrange comme une preuve que, peut-être, les créateurs des dessins sont revenus pour admirer leur travail.
Les sceptiques, d'un autre côté, noteront que la nature ambiguë de l'OVNI dans la vidéo laisse la porte ouverte à un certain nombre d'explications prosaïques possibles, comme un drone ou un nuage. Et puisque l'objet ne fait rien d'autre que s'attarder dans un endroit, il ne semble pas afficher de comportement indiquant quelque chose au-delà de ce qui pourrait être possible à partir de quelque chose provenant d'ici sur Terre. Cela dit, l'observation fait suite à une paire d'événements OVNI sur la Grande Barrière de Corail et la Grande Muraille de Chine à la fin de l'année dernière. Dans cet esprit, on ne peut s'empêcher de s'interroger et peut-être s'inquiéter que, si ces objets sont vraiment des extraterrestres, ils font beaucoup de visites ces derniers temps et peut-être qu'ils connaissent quelque chose sur l'avenir de la planète. . Dans ce cas, espérons que cet objet ait vraiment été un nuage et que les ET n'aient pas eu un dernier aperçu des merveilles de notre planète avant que tout ne s'éteigne.
There's Spooky Plasma Music Traveling From Saturn to its Weirdest Moon
There's Spooky Plasma Music Traveling From Saturn to its Weirdest Moon
By Rafi Letzter, Staff Writer
Plumes rise above Enceladus.
Credit: NASA
Two weeks before Cassini, a robot probe, destroyed itself in a controlled dive into Saturn's whirling atmosphere, it heard the gas giant sing to its weirdest moon.
When Cassini passed between Saturn and its sixth-largest moon, Enceladus, it recorded for the first time a vibrating column of plasma passing from the gas giant to the little icy world. Those plasma oscillations looked a lot like the vibrations in the air we hear as sound, so researchers converted the plasma record into a sound file, making a listenable version of Saturn's song.
That recording was published Saturday (July 7) along with a paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Researchers already knew from earlier Cassini observations that Enceladus heavily plucked the magnetic fields around Saturn with its own magnetism and spurting vapors, they wrote. Enceladus, under its frozen crust, hides a mysterious warm ocean that sometimes vomits up clouds of vapor and organic molecules into the space around Saturn, which (in addition to being a tantalizing hint of conditions that could give rise to life) mess with the electrical energies around the ringed planet.
This Cassini observation, conducted during the last stages of the probe's "Grande Finale," is the first recording showing that when Enceladus sends its humming pulses of energy into Saturn's ionosphere, its massive parent planet sings back.
Researchers call that song an "auroral hiss," since it's made up of the same stuff (plasma) that people sometimes see as auroras above Earth. Plasma, a highly electrically-conductive state of matter that's similar in some ways to gas, can carry waves inside it. And it was those waves in the column of plasma reaching from Saturn to Enceladus that you can hear in the video above.
If you passed between Saturn and Enceladus though, you wouldn't hear that high, spooky keening. The waves aren't audible. To hear them, researchers converted their waveforms into sound, in a process similar to how your car radio converts electromagnetic waves into sound, the researchers said in a statement. The researchers then sped the recording up from the 16 minutes of plasma recordings Cassini made on Sept. 2, 2017, to a quick, audible 28.5 seconds. [Moon Birth and Methane Weather: Cassini's 7 Oddest Saturn Finds]
This recording also illustrates a big difference between the distant gas giant and our planet, the researchers wrote. Whereas Saturn interacts energetically with its dynamic close-orbiting moon and even its rings, Earth has no such similar plasma song for its own moon. Our moon is just too stable, and too far outside Earth's ionosphere for the two bodies to get lost in cosmic song.
No amount of fancy probabilistic analysis can justify treating guesswork and wishful thinking as having any sort of scientific weight. Applying scientific techniques to an inherently unscientific endeavor, such as inventing estimates to unknowns about the Universe, doesn’t make it any more scientific. The opposite of knowledge isn’t ignorance; it’s the illusion of knowledge.
It’s still possible that life, and even intelligent life, is ubiquitous in our galaxy and the Universe. It’s also possible that one is common and one is uncommon, or that both are extraordinarily rare. Until we have more information, don’t be fooled by the headlines: these aren’t brilliant estimates or groundbreaking work. It’s guessing, in the absence of any good evidence. That’s no way to do science. In fact, until we have better evidence, it’s not science at all. More.
Enceladus/NASA
All true. But that said, we have found complex organic molecules on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which should provide a basis for genuine research. From a minimalist perspective, what if we encounter a number of instances where the setting seems to be right but life or intelligent life is markedly absent? In certain situations, persistently not finding something can be a source of information.
See also: Are we doing theoretical physics all wrong? (Ethan Siegel)
Complex organic molecules found on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. At this point, it will be just as interesting if Enceladus has “all of the basic requirements for life as we know it” but does not have life. That would cast doubt on the thesis that life naturally evolves when the conditions are right. Of course, we will need quite a few examples to be sure.
Could Earth germs be contaminating other planets Life on other planets? Yes, for sure, if Earth’s microbes get there with our help
Looking for life in all the hard places – a guidebook Researcher: “We are using Earth to guide our search for life on other planets because it is the only known example we have,” said Timothy Lyons, a distinguished professor of biogeochemistry and director of the Alternative Earths Astrobiology Center.
No, We Haven't Solved The Drake Equation, The Fermi Paradox, Or Whether Humans Are Alone
No, We Haven't Solved The Drake Equation, The Fermi Paradox, Or Whether Humans Are Alone
Intelligent aliens, if they exist in the galaxy or the Universe, might be detectable from a variety of signals: electromagnetic, from planet modification, or because they're spacefaring. But we haven't found any evidence for an inhabited alien planet so far. We may truly be alone in the Universe, but the honest answer is we don't know enough about the relevant probability to say so.RYAN SOMMA / FLICKR
In 1950, Enrico Fermi famously asked the question, "Where is everybody?" It wasn't because his retinas detached; it was because he was curious about the lack of visits by extraterrestrials. If life in the Universe is ubiquitous, the argument goes, then surely the signs of it should be everywhere? Over the past 60+ years, we've developed a number of possible explanations for this puzzle, known today as the Fermi Paradox.
On the surface, this seems like a reasonable question to ask. There are billions of stars in the galaxy, many of which have Earth-like planets, and if Earth is fairly typical, some of these may have developed intelligent life. Many of us on Earth are working to develop interstellar travel, and even though the galaxy is 100,000 light years across, we've been around for many billions of years. If life is common, then where is everyone? A new paper claims to have the answer, but their conclusions are highly suspect.
An artist's rendition of a potentially habitable exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star. When it comes to life beyond Earth, we have yet to discover our first inhabited world.
NASA AMES / JPL-CALTECH
Clearly, if they're out there, they haven't shown up around these parts or left surefire signs of their existence. Our searches for alien civilizations — such as with giant radio dishes and projects like SETI — have all come up empty, with no signatures of an alien intelligence out there. UFOs are likely to have earthly explanations, not extraterrestrial ones. Exoplanetary searches, exemplified by NASA's Kepler mission, have turned up thousands of planets beyond Earth, many of which are Earth-like in size, teaching us that there are literally billions of chances for Earth-like life in our galaxy alone. Yet no life beyond Earth has ever been found; not on those worlds, nor on any of the other worlds in our Solar System.
The hematite spheres (or 'Martian blueberries') as imaged by the Mars Exploration Rover. These are almost certainly evidence of past liquid water on Mars, and possibly of past life. NASA scientists must be certain that this site -- and this planet -- are not contaminated by the very act of our observing. As of yet, there is no surefire evidence for either past or present Martian life.
NASA/JPL-CALTECH/CORNELL/ASU
Water, light, heat, organic mlecules, and the ingredients for life are indeed everywhere. But aliens of any type have yet to show themselves. For all we have hard evidence for, Earth may be it for life in the entire Universe.
If that sounds pessimistic to you, or, as Carl Sagan put it, "an awful waste of space," you're not alone. Back in the early 1960s, Frank Drake put forth an equation that allowed us to make an estimate of the number of spacefaring, intelligent alien civilizations out there — in either our galaxy or the entire observable Universe — at any point in time. Although we knew very little about the various parameters in it, the Drake Equation is still used by many today to estimate the number of potential civilizations we can communicate with in space.
The Drake equation is one way to arrive at an estimate of the number of spacefaring, technologically advanced civilizations in the galaxy or Universe today. But until we know how to estimate these parameters, we're just guessing at the possible answers.UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
While we can make better estimates, today, of quantities like:
the number of stars in each galaxy,
the number of galaxies in the Universe,
the fraction of stars that are like our Sun,
and the fraction of Sun-like stars with potentially habitable, Earth-sized planets,
there are still a few enormous unknowns that are out there.
The possibilities of having another inhabited world in our Milky Way are incredible and tantalizing, but if we want to know whether it's real or not, we absolutely have to get the science right.WIKIMEDIA COMMONS USER LUCIANOMENDEZ
In particular, there are a few steps that we simply don't know how frequently they occur. They clearly occurred here on Earth, but we haven't, as of yet, discovered anyplace else in the Universe where even one has occurred. These are the steps that lead us from non-living molecules to the complex, differentiated, intelligent species that we fancy ourselves to be.
This equates to two (in the Drake equation) unknowns that are absolutely necessary to reach the ultimate goal of intelligent aliens:
the likelihood of creating life from non-life on an Earth-like world,
and the likelihood of that life evolving into an intelligent, communicative, and possibly interstellar species.
In terms of raw probability, we have no idea how likely or unlikely these events are.
Structures on ALH84001 meteorite, which has a Martian origin. Some argue that the structures shown here may be ancient Martian life, but others contend that this is Earth-originating life that has made its way into a Martian rock. No such fossils have been found in situ in the rocks examined on Mars.
NASA, 1996
Sure, there are plenty of sensible things we can say about them. We can talk about the experiments we've done to create organic molecules from raw, inorganic ingredients. We can discuss the complex organic molecules we find in interstellar space or in meteorites. We can mention the tantalizing hints that worlds in our Solar System house about watery pasts, sub-surface liquid oceans, and potentially fossilized microbes. And we can look at the fact that, if we extrapolate the genetic information encoded in extant organisms back to the formation of the Earth, they indicate that what we consider "life" to be may have had its origin billions of years before our planet came into existence.
On this semilog plot, the complexity of organisms, as measured by the length of functional non-redundant DNA per genome counted by nucleotide base pairs (bp), increases linearly with time. Time is counted backwards in billions of years before the present (time 0). Note that, if we do this extrapolation, we might conclude that life on Earth began billions of years prior to Earth's formation.
SHIROV & GORDON (2013), VIA HTTPS://ARXIV.ORG/ABS/1304.3381
But none of that is reasonable for calculating a probability for the likelihood of life arising from non-life, given an Earth-like world. The odds may be extremely high, like a few percent, as some have estimated. But the odds could be catastrophically low: one-in-a-million, or even worse. Life could be incredibly rare. The fact that life exists on Earth does not mean we didn't win the cosmic lottery. We cannot draw a reasonable conclusion from a sample size of one.
And things get even worse if you try and extrapolate that second conditional probability: given life, what are the odds that it becomes intelligent, sentient, spacefaring and communicative across interstellar distances?
The Atacama Large Millimeter submillimeter Array (ALMA) are some of the most powerful radio telescopes on Earth. These telescopes can measure long-wavelength signatures of atoms, molecules, and ions that are inaccessible to shorter-wavelength telescopes like Hubble, but can also measure details of protoplanetary systems and, potentially, alien signals, that even infrared telescopes can't see.
ESO/C. MALIN
Again, we have a sample size of one. There are many steps that life took on Earth to bring us to this point, including mass extinctions, selection pressures, a changing environment, asteroid strikes, and much, much more. For over four billion years on this world, there was nothing we'd call "intelligent" by human standards. For over half a billion since the Cambrian explosion, it's only for the past 200,000 or so that a species-of-interest existed on Earth: less than 0.05% of that time. And remember: we are the great cosmic success story. We are the winners of the cosmic lottery.
The Earth at night emits electromagnetic signals, but it would take a telescope of incredible resolution to create an image like this from light years away. Humans have become an intelligent, technologically advanced species here on Earth, but we occupy only a tiny fraction of Earth's history in time.
Our main result is to show that proper treatment of scientific uncertainties dissolves the Fermi paradox by showing that it is not at all unlikely... for us to be alone in the Milky Way, or in the observable universe.
It's long been theorized that the first detection of extraterrestrial intelligence will come from radio waves. The lack of an observed signal doesn't mean that aliens aren't out there, transmitting, or waiting to be discovered. But drawing conclusions about the number of civilizations out there without any such evidence is not only a fool's errand, it's unscientific.
DANIELLE FUTSELAAR
This is not a surprise to anyone who has thought about the consequences of drawing sweeping conclusions from a position of insufficient evidence and ignorance. If you haven't thought about it, the main results is that you probably shouldn't do it if you care about your conclusions being based in facts.
You cannot simply state, "here are my estimates for these quantities" and then calculate how many civilizations you expect. What are the probability ranges for your estimates? How robust are they? What evidence backs them up?
The answer is "none."
Alan Chinchar's 1991 rendition of the proposed Space Station Freedom in orbit. Any civilization that creates something like this would definitely count as scientifically/technologically advanced, but inferring their existence is no more than wishful thinking at this point.
NASA
Despite the replacement of point estimates with probabilistic distributions, as the authors impose, there is still no evidence that we can say anything sensible about these likelihoods. In the absence of evidence, theorists aren't theorizing based on sound science; they're simply making numbers up. The authors state their methodology as such:
In this paper, we shall look at two different ways of extending this approach beyond a toy model — generating probability distributions for the parameters of the Drake equation based on the variation in historical estimates and doing so based on the authors’ best judgment of the scientific uncertainties for each parameter.
Unfortunately, this falls prey to what I call the first law of computer science: garbage in, garbage out. Historical estimates and the authors' judgments are no substitute for the data we need, and do not have.
Once intelligence, tool use and curiosity combine in a single species, perhaps interstellar ambitions become inevitable. But this is an assumption that isn't backed in science, and we must be careful (and suspicious) about any such conclusions we draw from them.
DENNIS DAVIDSON FOR HTTP://WWW.NSS.ORG/
No amount of fancy probabilistic analysis can justify treating guesswork and wishful thinking as having any sort of scientific weight. Applying scientific techniques to an inherently unscientific endeavor, such as inventing estimates to unknowns about the Universe, doesn't make it any more scientific. The opposite of knowledge isn't ignorance; it's the illusion of knowledge.
It's still possible that life, and even intelligent life, is ubiquitous in our galaxy and the Universe. It's also possible that one is common and one is uncommon, or that both are extraordinarily rare. Until we have more information, don't be fooled by the headlines: these aren't brilliant estimates or groundbreaking work. It's guessing, in the absence of any good evidence. That's no way to do science. In fact, until we have better evidence, it's not science at all.
Astrophysicist and author Ethan Siegel is the founder and primary writer of Starts With A Bang! His books, Treknology and Beyond The Galaxy, are available wherever books are sold.
VIDEO: Strange, Mysterious Lights Captured On Milwaukee TV News Station Recording. What Are They? Aliens? UFO's? Birds? Bugs?
VIDEO: Strange, Mysterious Lights Captured On Milwaukee TV News Station Recording. What Are They? Aliens? UFO's? Birds? Bugs?
Well here’s something you don’t see every day.
Video Description: Mysterious lights over Milwaukee 2/27/18 – Quick moving lights appeared over Milwaukee Tuesday morning and were captured live on TV from FOX6. Any ideas?
Looking through YouTube comments, there seem to be several plausible theories:
“This could only be Drones surely! they also don’t have contrails, if you look at the car lights in the bottom left you can see every moving light has a trail so that only means they’re let it, like a drone right?! they all have lights.”
“a swarm of mosquitos [sic] or gnats close to the camera illuminated by a light source, the trails are just camera artifacts”
"If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say a flock of seagulls. The trails are a compression issue, or an issue with shutter speed, etc. It's nighttime so the trails are easily explainable as a camera issue, it also isnt a high quality feed. White birds reflecting all those bright white lights down there. Milwaukee is next to a body of water, Seagulls are most likely."
Wasps don’t have the greatest reputation, but that’s probably just because their PR reps have failed to spread the word about all the great stuff they do. Most people just know wasps as little stinging jerks, but the huge variety of beautiful and strange species all over the world actually fulfill all sorts of important roles, like pollinating plants and killing insect pests. Nevertheless, the new discovery of a whole group of uniquely proportioned South American wasps that inject their eggs either into spiders’ egg sacs or inside the spiders themselves probably won’t help their reputation.
Nightmare wasps lay EGGS inside victims that then EAT their way out like in Alien
In a paper published June 29 in the journal Zootaxa, a team of international researchers laid out descriptions of seven previously undescribed wasp species, all of which belong to the genus Clistopyga.
Clistopyga isayae, like other membrs of its genus, has a wild looking ovipositor, an adapted stinger through which it lays eggs.
What links all of the newly described species is the trademark Clistopygaovipositor, a long and narrow adapted stinger that the female wasp uses to lay eggs. As parasitoids — organisms that are only parasitic for part of its life cyccle — these insects use other bugs as part of their life cycle. This is where their unique ovipositors come into play, allowing them to reproduce in a particularly gruesome way.
“Females of Clistopyga crassicaudata seek out spiders living in nests and paralyze them with a quick venom injection,” the researchers told Sci-News on Monday. “Then the wasp lays its eggs on the spider and the hatching larva eats the paralyzed spider as well as the possible spider eggs or hatchlings.”
This behavior is similar to other parasitoid wasps, like the Apocrypta westwoodiGrandi, which uses its ovipositor to lay larvae into figs. This wasp’s larvae then eat the larvae of other wasps that are already in there. Brutal.
Close-up view of the ovipositor on a female Clistopyga kalima Palacio .
These seven new species of Clistopyga wasps are still so new that scientists aren’t totally sure about the specifics of their reproductive cycles.
“We do not know for sure which spider this wasp species prefers,” Ilari Sääksjärvi, Ph.D., a professor of biodiversity research at University of Turku in Finland and one of the paper’s co-authors said. What is clear is that they do use their wicked sharp ovipositors to both sting their prey and insert eggs into them. Further research will reveal these mysterious insects’ life cycles.
One wasp in particular, C. crassicaudata — named for the Latin words crassus, for fat, and caudata, for tail — caught Sääksjärvi’s eye:
“The stinger of the new parasitoid wasp called *Clistopyga crassicaudata is not only long but also very wide, in comparison with the size of the species. I’ve studied tropical parasitoid wasps for a long time but I’ve never seen anything like it. The stinger looks like a fierce weapon.”
Alien civilizations may be forced to capture stars and harness their energy using ginormous structures – all to keep themselves alive in the cold, ever-expanding vastness of universe, a Fermilab cosmologist believes. Expansion of the universe, thought to be further accelerated by dark energy, is flinging matter apart, while galaxies are being pushed away from each other. This is a challenge alien technologies will have to deal with in order for them to survive, Dan Hooper, a senior Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory scientist, writes in a new study
The paper looks at the use of megastructures, popularly known as Dyson spheres, which may theoretically be built around stars to harvest their energy. But it goes further than that, arguing that the huge balls of gas will also have to be shifted in their course so as not to escape the energy-hungry aliens.
“In order to maximise its access to useable energy, a sufficiently advanced civilisation would chose to expand rapidly outward, build Dyson Spheres or similar structures around encountered stars, and use the energy that is harnessed to accelerate those stars away from the approaching horizon and toward the centre of the civilization,” Hooper, who is also a professor of astronomy at the University of Chicago, writes.
While the futuristic scenario may or may not be already playing out somewhere in the universe, the study suggested that “any sufficiently advanced civilization” which is faced with the problem of possible isolation, will be prompted to start hunting for available stars in order “to secure as many of them as possible” before it is too late to reach them and extract their energy.
“Over the next approximately 100 billion years, all stars residing beyond the Local Group will fall beyond the cosmic horizon and become not only unobservable, but entirely inaccessible, thus limiting how much energy could one day be extracted from them,” Hooper writes.
Considering distances measured in billions of light years between us and the cosmic horizon, aliens could already be grabbing and moving stars, the study has admitted.
Hooper, however, remains skeptical that harvesting energy from stars can be something doable for humans at the present moment. But given that the human race will eventually reach the limit of our planet’s resources, the idea of fishing for stars to extract their energy may not seem so surreal in the future – unless some other race comes to snatch our Sun for their needs first.
Hyperborea: Atlantis’ Rival, Land to the North, and the Homeplace of the Gods
Hyperborea: Atlantis’ Rival, Land to the North, and the Homeplace of the Gods
Our planet is filled with incredible stories, myths, and legends about incredible civilizations and cultures that inhabited Earth tens of thousands of years ago, before written history.
Among all these fascinating legends, including Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, and Shambala among others, there is one especially suggestive for which the ancient Greek historians were interested.
It was the so-called land of Hyperborea, which was said to rival the mythical Atlantis. A place in which, according to the myths, the gods who descended from heaven lived, a place of incredible prosperity, technology, and history.
This mythical land is said to have been like no other. Hyperboreans were said to have been immortal, in addition to being described as Gods. Hyperborea was said to have been a theocracy ruled by three priests of the god Apollo.
Some authors argue that Hyperborea may have been located near or at the arctic circle. Image Credit: Julian Faylona.
Furthermore, the god Apollo drove his flying vehicle to this region every nineteen years to rejuvenate.
It is also said that Medusa was banished to those lands. Various fragments about Pythagoras claimed that he came from the Hyperboreans.
Located far to the north, somewhere near the icy regions of the NorthPole, the legends speak of an ancient and almost forgotten civilization.
Mythical in character, it is said that the Hyperborean civilization flourished in the northernmost region of planet Earth at a time when the area was suitable for human life and development.
Certain esoteric systems and spiritual traditions speak of Hyperborea as the terrestrial and celestial principle of civilization. In other words, the home of the ancient people. The original human.
Some authors have even proposed several theories suggesting that Hyperborea was the original Garden of Eden, the exact place where the earthly planes and celestial planes meet.
The land was described in a number of legends as being the perfect place on Earth, hence its connection to the Garden of Eden.
Hyperborea is said to have been a land where the Sun shone twenty-four hours a day.
Greek Mythology and the Hyperboreans
It is in Greek Mythology where we find a lot of details about this mythical land. According to Greek literature, Hyperborea was a place inhabited by a race of Giants who were described as living in a place ‘beyond the north wind’.
The Ancient Greek believed that Boreas, the God of the North Wind inhabited Thrace, and therefore Hyperborea was commonly referred to as a place located far to the north of Thrace.
As the Greek described Hyperborea as a place where the Sun shone twenty-four hours a day, modern authors have suggested they may have described a location within the North Circle of our planet.
1599 map by Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz illustrating what is believed to be the Arctic Circle composed of a number of islands.
the marvelous road to the assembly of the Hyperboreans.
Pindar also described the otherworldly perfection of the Hyperboreans:
Never the Muse is absent
from their ways: lyres clash and flutes cry
and everywhere maiden choruses whirling.
Neither disease nor bitter old age is mixed
in their sacred blood; far from labor and battle they live.
But it is Greek historian Herodotus who describes this incredible place with detail in his book Histories (Book IV, Chapters 32–36).
Herodotus reported three initial references that apparently mentioned the Hyperboreans, including Hesiod and Homer, the latter purportedly having written about Hyperborea in his lost work Epigoni.
Herodotus also recorded that the 7th-century BC poet Aristeaswrote of the ancient Hyperboreans in a poem (now regrettably lost) called Arimaspea which speaks about a journey to the Issedones, who are thought to have lived in the Kazakh Steppe.
Beyond these lived the one-eyed Arimaspians, further on the gold-guarding griffins, and beyond these the Hyperboreans.
Herodotus thought that Hyperborea prevailed somewhere in Northeast Asia.
So, if Hyperboreans did exist, where was it located then? Different sources indicate different locations.
Some authors argue that the ancient Hyperboreans were located somewhere beyond the snowy Riphean Mountains–a mountain range mentioned by various authors of classical antiquity but whose locations remains a profound mystery. (The Montes Riphaeusmountain range on Earth’s Moon is named in honor of the Riphean Mountains.)
If we take a look at the work of Pausanias: “The land of the Hyperboreans, men living beyond the home of Boreas.”
According to Homer, Boreas was in Trace, so Hyperborea was in his opinion north of Thrace, in Dacia.
But, as the Riphean Mountain’s location was a heavily discussed topic in ancient time, it was a difficult task to agree on the location of both the mountains and the land where the Hyperboreans lived.
According to Hecataeus of Miletus, an early Greek historian, and geographer, the Riphean Mountains were located near the Black Sea. Pindar, however, was convinced that the Ripehean Mountains and Borea was located near the Danube, while Heraclides Ponticus and Antimachus, in contrast, identified the Riphean Mountains with the Alps. They were also convinced that the Hyperboreans were a Celtic tribe who lived beyond the Riphean Mountains.
“In the regions beyond the land of the Celts there lies in the ocean an island no smaller than Sicily. This island, the account continues, is situated in the north and is inhabited by the Hyperboreans, who are called by that name because their home is beyond the point whence the north wind (Boreas) blows; and the island is both fertile and productive of every crop, and has an unusually temperate climate…”
Plutarch, on the other hand, wrote in the first century AD that the Hyperboreans were most likely the Gauls, who attacked and sacked Rome in the Fourth century BC.
Legends speak of mighty ancient civilizations
To the ancient Greek and Romans, Thule and Hyperborea were one of several terrae incognitae, regions that have not been mapped or documented.
In these uncharted lands, Pliny, Pindar, and Herodotus among others believe that people lived incredible longevous lifespans, surpassing the age of one thousand years.
According to a number of ancient authors, the sun supposedly rose and set only once a year, meaning that if such civilization existed, it was most likely located above or on the arctic circle.
An artists illustration of what Atlantis may have looked like.
The Hyperboreans were allegedly once on the verge of war against a race of soldiers which many authors suggest may have been the Atlanteans. However, the war never happened as the soldiers realized the inhabitants of Hyperborea were far too strong.
This account was preserved by Aelian–a Roman author and teacher of rhetoric. Some beleive the account by Aelian was a work of satire or comedy
Physicist and former NASA researcher Kevin Knuth argues that blanket skepticism about extraterrestrial craft is not sustainable.
US F/A-18 footage of a UFO (circled in red). Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
PARZIVAL191919
Are we alone? Unfortunately, neither of the answers feel satisfactory. To be alone in this vast universe is a lonely prospect. On the other hand, if we are not alone and there is someone or something more powerful out there, that too is terrifying.
As a NASA research scientist and now a professor of physics, I attended the 2002 NASA Contact Conference, which focused on serious speculation about extraterrestrials. During the meeting a concerned participant said loudly in a sinister tone, “You have absolutely no idea what is out there!” The silence was palpable as the truth of this statement sunk in. Humans are fearful of extraterrestrials visiting Earth. Perhaps fortunately, the distances between the stars are prohibitively vast. At least this is what we novices, who are just learning to travel into space, tell ourselves.
Cover of the October 1957 issue of pulp science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. This was a special edition devoted to ‘flying saucers,’ which became a national obsession after airline pilot Kenneth Arnold sighted a saucer-shaped flying objects in 1947.
I have always been interested in UFOs. Of course, there was the excitement that there could be aliens and other living worlds. But more exciting to me was the possibility that interstellar travel was technologically achievable. In 1988, during my second week of graduate school at Montana State University, several students and I were discussing a recent cattle mutilation that was associated with UFOs. A physics professor joined the conversation and told us that he had colleagues working at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, where they were having problems with UFOs shutting down nuclear missiles. At the time I thought this professor was talking nonsense. But 20 years later, I was stunned to see a recording of a press conference featuring several former US Air Force personnel, with a couple from Malmstrom AFB, describing similar occurrences in the 1960s. Clearly there must be something to this.
With July 2 being World UFO Day, it is a good time for society to address the unsettling and refreshing fact we may not be alone. I believe we need to face the possibility that some of the strange flying objects that outperform the best aircraft in our inventory and defy explanation may indeed be visitors from afar – and there’s plenty of evidence to support UFO sightings.
The Fermi paradox
The nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi was famous for posing thought provoking questions. In 1950, at Los Alamos National Laboratory after discussing UFOs over lunch, Fermi asked, “Where is everybody?” He estimated there were about 300 billion stars in the galaxy, many of them billions of years older than the sun, with a large percentage of them likely to host habitable planets. Even if intelligent life developed on a very small percentage of these planets, then there should be a number of intelligent civilisations in the galaxy. Depending on the assumptions, one should expect anywhere from tens to tens of thousands of civilisations.
With the rocket-based technologies that we have developed for space travel, it would take between 5 and 50 million years for a civilisation like ours to colonise our Milky Way galaxy. Since this should have happened several times already in the history of our galaxy, one should wonder where is the evidence of these civilisations? This discrepancy between the expectation that there should be evidence of alien civilisations or visitations and the presumption that no visitations have been observed has been dubbed the Fermi Paradox.
This photograph was taken in Wallonia, Belgium.
J.S. HENRARDI
Carl Sagan correctly summarised the situation by saying that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The problem is that there has been no single well-documented UFO encounter that would alone qualify as the smoking gun. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that many governments around the world have covered upand classifiedinformation aboutsuch encounters. But there are enough scraps of evidence that suggest that the problem needs to be open to scientific study.
UFOs, taboo for professional scientists
When it comes to science, the scientific method requires hypotheses to be testable so that inferences can be verified. UFO encounters are neither controllable nor repeatable, which makes their study extremely challenging. But the real problem, in my view, is that the UFO topic is taboo.
While the general public has been fascinated with UFOs for decades, our governments, scientists and media, have essentially declared that of all the UFO sightings are a result of weather phenomenon or human actions. None are actually extraterrestrial spacecraft. And no aliens have visited Earth. Essentially, we are told that the topic is nonsense. UFOs are off-limits to serious scientific study and rational discussion, which unfortunately leaves the topic in the domain of fringe and pseudoscientists, many of whom litter the field with conspiracy theories and wild speculation.
I think UFO skepticism has become something of a religion with an agenda, discounting the possibility of extraterrestrials without scientific evidence, while often providing silly hypotheses describing only one or two aspects of a UFO encounter reinforcing the popular belief that there is a conspiracy. A scientist must consider all of the possible hypotheses that explain all of the data, and since little is known, the extraterrestrial hypothesis cannot yet be ruled out. In the end, the skeptics often do science a disservice by providing a poor example of how science is to be conducted. The fact is that many of these encounters – still a very small percentage of the total – defy conventional explanation.
The media amplifies the skepticism by publishing information about UFOs when it is exciting, but always with a mocking or whimsical tone and reassuring the public that it can’t possibly be true. But there are credible witnesses and encounters.
Why don’t astronomers see UFOs?
I am often asked by friends and colleagues, “Why don’t astronomers see UFOs?” The fact is that they do. In 1977, Peter Sturrock, a professor of space science and astrophysics at Stanford University, mailed 2,611 questionnaires about UFO sightings to members of the American Astronomical Society. He received 1,356 responses from which 62 astronomers – 4.6 percent – reported witnessing or recording inexplicable aerial phenomena. This rate is similar to the approximately 5 percent of UFO sightings that are never explained.
As expected, Sturrock found that astronomers who witnessed UFOs were more likely to be night sky observers. Over 80 percent of Sturrock’s respondents were willing to study the UFO phenomenon if there was a way to do so. More than half of them felt that the topic deserves to be studied versus 20 percent who felt that it should not. The survey also revealed that younger scientists were more likely to support the study of UFOs.
UFOs have been observed through telescopes. I know of one telescope sighting by an experienced amateur astronomer in which he observed an object shaped like a guitar pick moving through the telescope’s field of view. Further sightings are documented in the book “Wonders in the Sky,” in which the authors compile numerous observations of unexplained aerial phenomena made by astronomers and published in scientific journals throughout the 1700s and 1800s.
Evidence from government and military officers
Some of the most convincing observations have come from government officials. In 1997, the Chilean government formed the organisation Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos, or CEFAA, to study UFOs. Last year, CEFAA released footage of a UFO taken with a helicopter-mounted Wescam infrared camera.
Declassified document describing a sighting of a UFO in December 1977, in Bahia, a state in northern Brazil.
ARQUIVO NACIONAL COLLECTION
The countries of Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom have been declassifying their UFO files since 2008. The French Committee for In-Depth Studies, or COMETA, was an unofficial UFO study group comprised of high-ranking scientists and military officials that studied UFOs in the late 1990s. They released the COMETA Report, which summarised their findings. They concluded that 5 percent of the encounters were reliable yet inexplicable: The best hypothesis available was that the observed craft were extraterrestrial. They also accused the United States of covering up evidence of UFOs. Iran has been concerned about spherical UFOs observed near nuclear power facilities that they call “CIA drones” which reportedly are about 30 feet in diameter, can achieve speeds up to Mach 10, and can leave the atmosphere. Such speeds are on par with the fastest experimental aircraft, but unthinkable for a sphere without lift surfaces or an obvious propulsion mechanism.
1948 Top Secret USAF UFO extraterrestrial document.
UNITED STATES AIR FORCE
In December 2017, The New York Times broke a story about the classified Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, which was a $22 million program run by the former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo and aimed at studying UFOs. Elizondo resigned from running the program protesting extreme secrecy and the lack of funding and support. Following his resignation Elizondo, along with several others from the defence and intelligence community, were recruited by the To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science, which was recently founded by Tom DeLonge to study UFOs and interstellar travel. In conjunction with the launch of the academy, the Pentagon declassified and released three videos of UFO encounters taken with forward looking infrared cameras mounted on F-18 fighter jets. While there is much excitement about such disclosures, I am reminded of a quote from Retired Army Colonel John Alexander: “Disclosure has happened. … I’ve got stacks of generals, including Soviet generals, who’ve come out and said UFOs are real. My point is, how many times do senior officials need to come forward and say that this is real?”
A topic worthy of serious study
There is a great deal of evidence that a small percentage of these UFO sightings are unidentified structured craft exhibiting flight capabilities beyond any known human technology. While there is no single case for which there exists evidence that would stand up to scientific rigour, there are cases with simultaneous observations by multiple reliable witnesses, along with radar returns and photographic evidence revealing patterns of activity that are compelling.
Declassified information from covert studies is interesting, but not scientifically helpful. This is a topic worthy of open scientific inquiry, until there is a scientific consensus based on evidence rather than prior expectation or belief. If there are indeed extraterrestrial craft visiting Earth, it would greatly benefit us to know about them, their nature and their intent. Moreover, this would present a great opportunity for mankind, promising to expand and advance our knowledge and technology, as well as reshaping our understanding of our place in the universe.
Coneybury Hill Crop Circle Has a Clear Warning For Humanity
Coneybury Hill Crop Circle Has a Clear Warning For Humanity
This new crop circle in the form of a chemical weapons warning symbol was discovered near Stonehenge recently. This comes as a warning after Dawn Sturgess was killed tragically after being exposed to a powerful nerve agent. These weapons have no place in our world and we need to find a way to get rid of them for good.
This stunning drone footage was provided by Matthew Williams.
Visit his channel for full-length 4k videos of these formations!
The above first image is of Hale Crater located within the much greater Argyre Planitia Crater Basin. This image of it is beautiful isn't it. This appearance is a signature characteristic of the often visually stunning ESA Mars Express HRSC (High Resolution Stereo Camera) imaging as it is presented to the public and media. However, what we all need to be aware of is that this pretty picture for the public and media is partially art work and not be confused with the raw visual science data as seen by the Mars Express camera systems that would not have this information overlaid on it. This pretty look is accomplished right here on Earth by some heavy artificial processing and manipulation of the image to this effect.
That fact wouldn't be so bad if the image manipulation was just limit to color but the truth, in my opinion, is that the ESA imaging is so heavy with map type carpeting image tampering obfuscation that quality anomalous discovery information can very rarely be found in it. In fact,this beautiful color rides on the back of this type of software mapping into the terrain. This problem is so prevalent in the ESA imaging as released to the public that I long ago came to the personal conclusion that it generally just isn't practically worth me devoting much of my very limited time to trying very hard to find something in it. Yet, no matter how diligent the tampering, mistakes are still made in its application and such mistakes can produce discoveries providing some real information. That is the situation we have here in this report with this image.
In the above first image, which is only 34% of the original full resolution size and similar to the even smaller type of imaging you will often see presented in the media, note the black arrow and label pointing out the evidence site location that the strong anomalous content of this report is based on. Don't see anything suggestive or anomalous there? Well you are seeing correctly because you are seeing only what the secrecy agenda wants you to see and that is essentially nothing but a little, and I do mean a little, geology in the form of just the tops of some rough mountainous terrain. This limited view coincides nicely with the fact that the main past and current scientific debate associated with the Hale Crater environs centers primarily around the question of possible past ancient water erosion on its worn slopes.
In other words, the focus is all about geological evidence and little else and this kind of beautiful designer imaging is designed to get in behind and reinforce that perception and psychology. Yet, all of the more smooth areas you see in the above first image, regardless of color or size, is map type smudge image tampering application and you'll note that this accumulatively constitutes the great bulk of the image area and only a little of any natural geological forms stick up through this covering.
In fact, it is the universal smoother texture image tampering that gives this general scene is worn look illusion that current scientific debate is so focussed on. This kind of thing not only serves to cover up any anomalous evidence that may be present in a particular image like this one, it also from official image to image accumulatively in the many hundreds and thousands creates the universal perception illusion that what one is looking at in these images is all real terrain when the truth is that only the tops of some of the rougher geology is real in a scene like this. This is how misdirection and manipulation of perception is done in the world of planetary satellite imaging.
For those of you who may be hesitant to accept this, resolution is only a matter of common sense. I invite you to take a look at the fifth and last image in my previous Report #055 titled Towers In The Sun. This standard commercial quality technology image demonstrates satellite older than ESA's current science imaging technology of an Earth city from the satellite over 400+ miles out as compared to the 230 mile average for satellites circling Mars and through Earth's heavy atmospheric envelope and cloud cover as compared to Mars thin much clearer atmospheric cover.
Earth satellite images like this should provide very clear insight as to what kind of minimum quality that we have a right to expect from this planetary science imaging that uses the best cutting edge equipment of the time and not available commercially. Yet, this is clearly not what we are getting. Oh the real and much clearer science imaging data is out there somewhere within secrecy control but only the poorest quality heavily manipulated and obscured imaging full of misdirection and illusion is made available to the public and researchers as evidenced by the first and second images you see here in this report.
Now the above second image is again the official ESA image (without any work in it by me) but specifically of part of the anomalous evidence site and this time shown at the full official 100% resolution size. The anomalous evidence site is below, to the left of off screen, and to our right of the three arrows. The mountains you see that I have included in this view above within the Hale Crater basin and their orientation provide the needed ease of location factor. As you can see, any evidence there is very faint in the official imaging and therefore so very easy to miss.
The only thing that can be seen here in this official view is some faint organized patterns uncharacteristic of natural geology under and through the partially transparent smudge image tampering cover. The above marginal view of the faint evidence is a bit better seen in the original official image found HERE than in my above necessarily lesser quality compressed image sized for this Web presentation.
For a researcher worth his or her salt, this faintly seen but definite organized pattern evidence is the clue that indicates the need for closer examination and then the attempts at defeating the obscuring image tampering treatment. I have been aware of this anomalous evidence at this site all the way back into the MGS MOC data but it has always been too obscured not allowing adequate defeat of the image tampering. When I have promising but only suggestive evidence like this, I often hold off reporting on it hoping with the passage of time to find a better image of the anomaly site that will allow more detail to be brought out.
That was my situation with this evidence. I had looked at various MOC, THEMIS and ESA imaging of this site but could never visually get the evidence via graphics work beyond being merely suggestive and not having much respect for the ESA imaging, my research into it wasn't as detailed as it should have been. However, thankfully along comes a viewer (who wishes her identity withheld) finding this particular ESA image that I missed completely on her own that is the basis of this report. When she brought it to my attention, her imaging was too close to the evidence obscuring it too much so that it to was still only suggestive. But, it was plenty good enough for me to see by her graphics work that defeating the Hale Crater image tampering covering was possible in the image she had found, at least to a greater extent than heretofore in my experience. The result is as you see in the following three images.
. .. .
Now remember that the above third larger image with its accompanying three smaller thumbnail size ever so slightly clearer images of the Hale Crater civilization evidence is a distant wide view and the result of only a partial defeat of only the overall covering slightly transparent smudge image tampering obfuscation you see in the first two official images. So only various areas of the evidence can be seen adequately while other areas in the scene are still seriously impacted by image tampering more resistant to defeat. Note that I got rid of the nice beautiful but fuzzy, highly reflective, and obscuring ESA processing and color and introduced this alternative color to give the evidence a little better definition.
I've waited patiently a long time to present this evidence site and we all owe this lady viewer a lot for bringing this image to my attention as well as to the secrecy types for choosing poorly and making the mistake of using smudge tampering with just a little too much transparency to it in this particular image. As I have stated over and over again, it is only via full awareness of the presence of the image tampering and capitalizing on the mistakes made in its application that a little true hard evidence like this filters through to us rather than just the designer pabulum and illusion that the secrecy agenda would prefer that we be limited to.
As you can see in the above image, I don't think even the most in denial loyal to the official view person can see this as anything other than the civilization evidence that it clearly is and on another world. There can be no confusing this distantly seen wide area highly organized geometric patterns so typical of intelligent life civilization evidence sites with natural geology or misleading imaging artifacts, etc. Now the next two images below will show a closer view to the left and right of the above third image scene.
The above fourth image is a 180% zoom (as far as I could go before getting just too blurry) closer view of the general wide field scene to the left in the third image in this report. This is still a distant blurry view but still informative none the less. The civilization evidence is so thick here and in such variety that I have elected not to obscure anything with arrows and labels under the assumption that most of you can recognize much of this evidence for what it is. Just keep in mind that this is a distant satellite view, not a closer aerial view, and the general image quality has been degraded at official level resulting in the blurry look that I cannot help.
Except for some of the evidence in Report #010 titled "Domes & Plant Puffing Vapor" and possibly Report #006 titled "Water Industrial Site, et al," due to the large variety of shapes and structures, this site is unique among the evidence I've presented. Why? Because the civilization evidence here appears to be spread out in the terrain as a great variety of different probably industrial and/or possibly military uses with many lower profile structures as compared to the usual concentrated living and/or general business sites I've so far mostly reported on with crowded densely packed tall high density towering structures.
Further, the patterns and structure evidence that we can see reasonably well here (for planetary satellite imaging as released) are relatively small and/or lower profile. That's because the tampering depended on the overall general upper layer semitransparent smudge treatments to hide this smaller size evidence to continue to provide some misleading visual surface texture patterns. That type of general tampering cover is what my clarification work did a fairly good job of defeating.
However, the darker areas and the over saturated light color areas are I suspect larger more readily recognizable geometric structures that have higher priority object specific tampering applied on them at higher resolution levels in deeper flattened layers that my relatively simple clarification work couldn't deal with. So this evidence remains hidden under the more individual tampering treatments. I suppose you can't hope to have your cake and eat it to as the old saying goes.
The above fifth image is also a 180% zoom closer view of the general wide field scene but to the right in the third image in this report. Again I've elected not to obscure anything with arrows and labels pointing out features. Many will see and describe more detail of some of the objects seen in the last three images in this report. Some such perceptions may be correct but most will no doubt be wide of the mark and seeing things just not able to be seen adequately in this limited quality publicly released satellite imaging.
However, that kind of more risky extrapolation of the evidence is not the primary purpose of my reporting here. I see that as much less important at this point than simply reporting the straight forward but extraordinary message and realization that we are looking at intelligent life advanced civilization evidence on another world and that this is a reality and that we are going to have to wake up to and deal with this fact.
Just look at evidence like this, there can simply be no confusing this type of evidence with natural geology or imaging artifacts. We as a people following the official lead are just beginning to start to consider that surface water may have once existed on Mars but only in the ancient past. That is the secrecy agenda muddy water pabulum preferred and promoted for us all. But, we are not stepping up to the reality plate in accepting just this little ultra conservative information tidbit. Likewise, reluctantly just beginning to start to consider that organic life of some kind and perhaps even intelligent life may have once existed in the ancient past possibly leaving some old dead ruins behind we can eventually explore is again us just not stepping up to the reality plate.
In scenes like this, think what the real untampered with unobscured much higher resolution satellite imaging science data never released to us would have to reveal about sites like this offering tremendous insight so very far beyond the sparse and weak but still extraordinary information we see here in this badly crippled imaging. Think about what some in the secrecy agenda would have to know about sites like this but never share with those that support and pay for this information's acquisition. That so many of us are hiding from and preferring our denial pabulum on information like this is what the secrecy agenda prefers to believe about you and I. This perception dovetails in nicely with their secrecy agenda addiction with its resulting elitism and alienation from the public interest they are suppose to serve.
But, are they right?Is it what you really want? If not, then it's time to loudly and forcefully communicate your willingness to face up to information like this and demand of your media and political leadership to start looking into this in depth and providing this type of information the full investigative exposure that it requires and then let the people judge any merit it may have for themselves. The science and academic communities have evidently abdicated their responsibility in this regard to the secrecy agenda by swallowing the official science data misdirection and illusion pabulum hook line and sinker, so it is up to us to start this incredible information moving toward greater awareness, responsibility and debate.
We are all of us headed relentlessly toward dramatic changes in our lives arising from our true greater environment. It is a natural outgrowth of this speeded up high tech information age we now live in where a massive secret and ignorance like this cannot ultimately stand. The change cannot be avoided and especially not by pretense, official or otherwise. The question is will we as a people be caught by surprise and be swept along out of control by inevitable events or will we start anticipating and preparing now by allowing this kind of preparatory information onto our mental radar?
ADDENDUM..(added 2/9/2008 and again 3/15/2008)
The above image is a very nice one of the Hale Crater evidence completed by a viewer known to me only as C.K. Except for the red border bracketing the image and the labeling that I've put in it, this is entirely his original work and has no work in it by me. His work is this good because he recognized from the outset that obfuscation tactics were present as upper layer additions in the image and first must be defeated to get the best visual results. It should also be noted that, although his tactics mimicked my own, they were arrived at entirely on his own with no input by me.
As you can see, it offers an improvement over my own imaging. This is a real help to me because it saves me from eventually having to go back and do this work myself eking out this tiny additional detail. I would have had to have done this before my first book evidence gets into public and science community awareness. If this had not been done, it would have left too much room for misdirection argument and debate. So thank you CK and well done.
This improvement is always quite possible as my work is often hurried to meet posting deadlines that I've established for myself and I come to the conclusion that the work may not be as good as it can get but it's good enough for posting the report with no more delays. The next three images below, one black and white, the next with a little color in it, and the third smaller in color focusing on a more narrowly defined area are just CK's image with some very slight improvements in them by me to accentuate fine detail.
................................. .
Now many of you are no doubt aware that the argument against this evidence being real is that it is simply image artifacts. The truth is that there is no other argument that might have merit that could be made and so this is natural and expected path for anyone to go to who cannot accept this as civilization evidence on another world for a variety of reasons.
Yes, although many of us are not, some are satisfied with this countering argument for a number of reasons. Some because they have a vested interest in it not being civilization evidence, some because they just simply don't believe it is possible, some because the artifact arguments and points made makes sense to them, some because they just don't know and default to the opinion of those they consider reliable experts and in the know, and some of course have a mix of these reasons. But, the bottom line is the basic argument that these are imaging artifacts and artificial software processing creations and not real ground level evidence.
With that in mind, I want you to look very closely at these newer images and especially the above small but wider field image #8 and #9 cropped out scene. Yes the evidence is poorly seen and it's quite small but it is good enough for the determination of what is needed here. That is if one has an open mind.
The first thing that I want to point out to you is that the top of many of the what appear to be elevated structures for the most part demonstrate stronger than its surroundings sunlight reflectivity defining the top of the object and its shape and size. This is typical of more flatten roof structures in strong sunlight. Now as you focus in on these structures scattered around this scene noting this roof top reflectivity factor, please also note that the near side (closer to us) of each of these elevated objects is also very often in degrees of shadow. The combination of these factors creates a 3-dimensional effect further defining the objects.
Now take a look at the above two additional tighter field of view images of the same scene both at 200% zoom and 250% zoom respectively. These were developed by me separately and are not crop outs from any of the 6–9 images above.
Note the larger structure in the upper center of these two #10 and #11 tight zoom images. Note that the roof surface of this particular structure is reflecting sunlight while the near side is in shadow and that all this is importantly consistent with other elevated adjacent objects in this scene. More importantly, on the near shadow side of the larger object, note the multiple projections sticking horizontally out from within the near side shadow and into the sunlight with sunlight reflecting off of their upper surfaces. Now note the corresponding unique shadows or buttresses matching the projections on the ground.
This is very powerful hard visual evidence. Do you really think that it is possible for imaging artifacts that are false information and not real in the terrain to block and reflect sunlight and cast shadows, including such unique shadows, as would real objects? Likewise look at the over all general view in these images. Note the scattered random nature of this evidence as it sprawls around on the bottom of the crater floor in such a great variety of mixed patterns from a little to a lot. This is typical of civilization artificiality evidence that has accumulated in an area over time attending to many different purposes that have also accumulated in such a place over time.
Imaging artifacts just simply do not behave in this way regardless of their type and origin. Heavily influenced by the underlying image geometric pixel grid and digital matrix, image artifacts are much more ridgidly geometric as well as uniform, repetitive, and heavily concentrated being much more dense and closely packed in their patterns. This uniformity and concentration is a dead giveaway as to their artifact origin and note that this factor is quite absent here. These sunlight reflectivity and shadow factors are hard evidence that the artifact proponents are going to have to deal with and not ignore.
What the artifact proponents must realize is that any such artifact presence was primarily in the upper most obscuring layers reacting across those layers later added into the image to obscure what was below. Those layers should have been flattened and locked which would have in turn locked all of the lower layers. This was not done adequately amounting to a technical snafu and so converting the official RGB subsequently added false color image back to original gray scale partially defeated most of the obscuring top layers and then inverting the image defeated even more loosing them and revealing what was below that could be worked with and clarified.
It's sort of like an archaeologist coming along and digging at a likely site starting on fresh ground and soon finding evidence of some relatively modern 500 year old trash dump (obscuring imaging artifacts) near the surface, being satisfied with that, and stopping there. Then only to have someone else come along later that is not satisfied with the surface treatment and dig deeper below the original find to discover a fabulous very real 2,500 year old civilization very much in tact below it. Not exactly the same, but similiar.
So it is up to you as to whether you can believe your own eyes and exercise some common sense. If not, you will sadly need to default to the opinion of others. As always, it is a matter of choice.
This link accesses the official ESA image that is the source for this report that came to us via the excellent work of a female viewer who prefers to keep her identity private. In the official image, be prepared to see the anomalous civilization evidence patterns very faintly through and below the slightly transparent smudge image tampering covering using the second image in this report and its mountains for location of the evidence site.
NOTE: Remember that you will not be seeing any civilization evidence detail beyond the faint organized patterns in this official image unless you are prepared to do graphics clarification work with it. If you choose that path, you'll need to first loose the pretty, highly reflective but obscuring haze and ESA colors by converting to standard black and white grayscale format as well as invert the image. This will partially defeat the obfuscating top layer and better reveal the evidence. Then proceed with darkening and contrast work to clarify and then add color if you wish.
Mars Hale Crater Civilization Hoax? Weighing the evidence
In Mexico-Stad verscheen dit weekend een enorme halo aan de hemel. Het zeldzame fenomeen werd veroorzaakt doordat het zonlicht door ijskristallen in de atmosfeer scheen.
WETENSCHAP SpaceIL, een Israëlisch privébedrijf, is van plan om een onbemand vaartuig naar de maan te sturen. Israël is daarmee het vierde land ooit dat een landing op de maan zou realiseren. De missie start eind dit jaar, zo maakte het bedrijf bekend.
Het gaat om een vaartuig van 585 kilo, dat als alles goed verloopt, op 13 februari 2019 op de maan zou landen, klonk het op een persconferentie. Het vaartuig wordt gelanceerd met een raket van SpaceX, het bedrijf van Elon Musk. De bedoeling van de missie is om de magnetische golven op de maan te bestuderen.
De eerste missie wordt echter het planten van de Israëlische vlag op het maandoppervlak.
De missie zou 95 miljoen dollar kosten, geld dat vooral afkomstig is van de Israëlische miljardair Morris Khan.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:HLN.be - Het Laatste Nieuws ( NL)
Gigantische 2,6 meter lange sarcofaag ontdekt in Egypte. Wie ligt hier begraven?
Gigantische 2,6 meter lange sarcofaag ontdekt in Egypte. Wie ligt hier begraven?
In Egypte is een mysterieuze zwarte sarcofaag ontdekt. De tombe, die stamt uit de Ptolemaeïsche periode, is gevonden in de stad Alexandrië.
Dr. Mostafa Waziri van de Egyptische Raad voor Oudheden kondigde op Facebook aan dat de sarcofaag met een lengte van 2,6 meter de grootste is die ooit is gevonden in Alexandrië.
Niet geopend
De sarcofaag bevond zich zo’n vijf meter onder het oppervlak. Uit onderzoek blijkt dat de tombe in ruim 2000 jaar niet geopend is geweest.
Er is ook een hoofd gevonden van albast, een zacht gesteente, waarschijnlijk van de eigenaar van de sarcofaag. Archeologen hebben geen idee wie de kolossale figuur is die in de tombe begraven ligt.
Geheimen prijsgeven
De grootste sarcofaag die ooit in Egypte is gevonden had een lengte van ruim vier meter.
Het Oude Egypte blijft geheimen prijsgeven. Onlangs ontdekten archeologen een 2200 jaar oude munt met daarop het gezicht van koning Ptolemaeus III, een voorouder van Cleopatra.
An Egyptian archaeological mission from the Supreme Council of Antiquities uncovered an ancient tomb dating back to the Ptolemaic period, during the excavation work carried out to inspect the land of a. alexandrian inhabitant before digging the foundations of his building at Al-Karmili Street in Sidi Gaber district, Alexandria. Dr. Mostafa Waziri, General Secretary of the Supreme Council of Antiquities announced. He explains that the tomb contains a black granite sarcophagus considered to be the largest to be discovered in Alexandria. It has a height of 185 cm, length 265 cm and width of 165 cm. Dr. Ayman Ashmawy Head of the Ancient Egyptian Antiquities Sector said that the tomb was found at a depth of 5 m beneath the surface of the land. It is noted that there is a layer of mortar between the lid and the body of the sarcophagus indicating that it had not been opened since it was closed in antiquity. An alabaster head of a man was also found and most probably belongs to the owner of the tomb.
8.7-Feet Long Sarcophagus Discovered In Egypt May Contain A Giant From The Past
8.7-Feet Long Sarcophagus Discovered In Egypt May Contain A Giant From The Past
Egyptian archaeologists have discovered the largest granite sarcophagus ever found
An ancient black granite sarcophagus which dates back to the Ptolemaic period between 305 B.C. and 30 B.C., was uncovered in the city of Alexandria, Egypt.
Credit image: Egypt Ministery of Antiquities - Dr. Mostafa Waziri.
Dr. Mostafa Waziri, general secretary of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, announced that the 6-foot high sarcophagus, which is 8.7-feet long (2.65 meters) and 5.4-feet wide (1.64 meters), is the largest ever found in Alexandria reports Foxnews.
The sarcophagus was found buried 16.4 feet below the surface. A layer of mortar between the lid and experts say the ancient coffin has remained untouched since its burial thousands of years ago during the Ptolemaic period.
Credit image: Egypt Ministery of Antiquities - Dr. Mostafa Waziri.
Archeologists also found a giant carved alabaster head – likely belonging to the giant who owned the tomb.
Throughout Egypt’s past there have been numerous examples of giants reported, excavated, depicted in art, and mummified examples that have been hidden from the public.
King Khasekhemui, ca. 2690 BC was the final ruler of the Second Dynasty of Egypt based near Abydos and he was something of a giant. King Khasekhemui was 2.44-2.60 meters long.
Credit image: Egypt Ministery of Antiquities - Dr. Mostafa Waziri.
The new discovered sarcophagus may contain a giant from the past, and given the size of the sarcophagus it may contain one of the tallest giants ever found.
30-Ton Sealed Black Granite Sarcophagus Discovered in Egypt | Ancient Architects
Giant Inside? Mysterious Sealed Coffin Is The Largest Ever Found In Alexandria, Egypt
Enormous Flash after Ball Of Fire changes direction over ocean Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil
Enormous Flash after Ball Of Fire changes direction over ocean Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil
An enormous flash has been seen in the Rio Grande do Norte sky intrigued residents of several cities on Saturday night, July 7, 2018 around 10:35 pm.
Residents of the cities of Mossoró, Areia Branca, Assú, Baraúna, Severiano Melo and even in Ceará cities like Icapui said they had witnessed the flash.
The first information is that a ball of fire suddenly appeared upon which it changed direction before falling towards the ocean, eventually hitting the ocean.
"I saw it clearly here on the beach of São Cristóvão and it lit up all the sea. It seemed to me an explosion of something in space," reported witness Daniel Fortunato.
At first glance it looks like a meteorite but since meteorites are not changing direction the question arises what it could have been that exploded over the ocean.
This unexplained event comes shortly after a mysterious object splashed into the ocean off shore Washington.
Astronomers find new evidence of Organic Molecules in nearby Galaxy
Astronomers find new evidence of Organic Molecules in nearby Galaxy
Words by AC Speed | Senior Editor
A study led by the researcher of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) Ana Monreal Ibero proves the presence of organic molecules in galaxies beyond the Milky Way.
Astronomers find evidence of Organic Molecules in nearby Galaxy
By analyzing Diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs), the team was able to determine what parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, emitted by the galaxy, could only be explained by the presence of organic material.
The team used the MUSE instrument, and the VLT to carry out the analysis in the Antennae Galaxies.
"To our knowledge, we have derived the first maps for the DIBs at λ5780 and λ5797 in galaxies outside the Local Group."
These findings are important as it suggests complex organisms may well be able to develop outside of our own galaxy, increasing the probability that alien life is out there, somewhere.
Have we found alien life outside of our own galaxy?
We’ve essentially looked at the composition of another object in the universe and by looking at the spectrum of light it emits, we can determine the chemical composition of the object. In this case, we’ve simply found Organic Material that is more complex than a singular molecule.
What are the Antennae Galaxies?
The Antennae Galaxies, also known as NGC 4038/NGC 4039, are a pair of interacting galaxies in the constellation Corvus. They are currently undergoing a cosmic collision of gas, and dust.
These galaxies were separate about 1.8 billion years ago and it is thought that our very own Milky Way Galaxy will suffer the same fate in a few billion years.
What will alien life look like?
It’s hard to say, considering how many different variations of life we have here on Earth, it could take on an incomprehensible number of forms, many which we probably won’t even recognise.
Life on Earth is comprised of complex organic carbon molecules, and it’s very possible that evidence of complex organic material outside of our own galaxy could be proof that life can easily evolve in other parts of the universe.
I found a crashed alien ship on Mars today. It was in a gigapan photo and the ship is upside-down. The line down the middle from the tail section is similar to that of many military stealth craft. This is one of two craft I found in this photo, along with many faces of statues, walls and other structures.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
“The Star Gate Project” What Is It? Did The US Government Really Shut It Down?
“The Star Gate Project” What Is It? Did The US Government Really Shut It Down?
“Star Gate” is a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) program which involved(s) the use of phenomena that many in the mainstream world still consider non-existent. Project “Star Gate” in particular lasted for 25 years before it was unexpectedly shut down.(1)(2)(3) Much of the material and research from the program still remain classified. “Star Gate” incorporated(s) consciousness, paranormal phenomena, ESP, remote viewing, and more for intelligence collection and research.(1)(2)(3) How can the Department of Defense have programs that study these phenomena for over 35 years when our mainstream world still doesn’t consider it real enough to study? I find the name “Star Gate” intriguing and wonder what inspiration lay behind the name chosen by those who initiated the program. It’s unfortunate that these concepts are not studied by major universities and our mainstream world, the significance of these realities can be far reaching. Having major educational institutions governing what type of “knowledge” is useful for learning isn’t fair. It’s simply a stepping stone for people to integrate themselves into a system that no longer resonates with the majority on the planet. As a result, extended human capacities, which are completely natural and lay dormant within all of us, remain unused, undiscovered, and not provided the opportunity to grow.
Star Gate was declassified in September of 1995, and the final report was released to the public which concluded that “a statistically significant effect had been demonstrated in the laboratory,” but that there is compelling evidence that the CIA set the outcome with regard to intelligence usage before the evaluation had begun. This was accomplished by limiting the research and operating data sets to exude positive findings, by purposefully not interviewing historically significant participants, by ignoring previous DOD extensive program reviews, and by using the questionable National Research Council’s investigation of parapsychology as the starting point for their review.(1)(3)
Although a statistically significant effect had been demonstrated in the lab, it was shut down because it remained unclear whether the existence of paranormal phenomenon, remote viewing, and more had been demonstrated phenomenon, because the origins and nature of the phenomenon remained unclear, assuming it exists, nor does it address an important methodological issue of inter-judge reliability.(1) It was concluded that even if paranormal phenomenon occurs under the conditions present in the setting of a laboratory, (which it did) conditions would still differ outside the lab and have limited applicability and utility for intelligence gathering operations in the real world.The review was done by a group of experts, one of them being Dr. Jessica Utts, a professor in the Division of Statistics at the University of California, Davis.(1)(3)
It is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of similar magnitude of those found in government experiments have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the world.(1)
Dr. Utts
Star Gate, after a 25 year run was shut down due to it’s lack of applicability within the world of intelligence gathering. Most people these days know that the explanations for a previous, extremely classified subject are not always indicative of the truth. Could there have been another reason for the shut down? Did the US government really shut it down? Is there evidence to suggest that it was “shut down” for other reasons?
There is some evidence that suggests it was not shut down at all. First of all, these programs are called Special Access Programs, they are extremely classified and extremely secretive, the full extent and findings within these programs are not yet, and never have been known to the main stream world, but truth can’t remain concealed forever. They are so secretive that they do not even have to report to the congress, they are exempt.(4)(7) That means there is absolutely no oversight into these programs, no body has any idea about what is going on and who is involved. You can read more about the recent leak by Edward Snowden on the black budget here, it could be taking in trillions and trillions of dollars each year.
Another significant reason, some might call it definitive proof that the program is still running is the ‘whistle-blowing,’ of Ingo Swann. Ingo was the primary participant in multiple studies conducted by the CIA, NSA, the DOD, alongside researchers at Stanford University, on the subject of “Remote Viewing.”(1)(2)(3) Remote Viewing is the ability of an individual to describe a remote geographical location of up to several hundred thousand kilometers away from their physical location.
The FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) resulted in the government’s recent admission of its two-decade plus involvement in funding highly classified, special access programs in remote viewing and related psi phenomena. First at Stanford Research Institute and then at Science Applications International Corporation (SIAC), both supplemented by various in-house government programs.(2)
– H.E. Puthoff
During the experiments, Ingo was able to successfully remote view the rings around Jupiter before the NASA pioneer 10 made a fly by of the planet. All of this is documented in the literature.(2)(1)(3) What is not documented is the fact that Ingo Went on to write multiple books sharing is experience within the program. In his experience, he describes intelligence officers coming to get him, blind folding him, transporting him to locations that were underground where he would speak to another man in a suit.(5) We know that Ingo successfully remote viewed Jupiter (as documented), he claims he also remote viewed the back side of the moon, and that who ever was taking him to these locations and interrogating him were astounded to know that he was able to see what he saw a the back side of the moon. That means they (men in suits) were confirming what he (Ingo) was looking at, and already knew of what he was looking at.(5) You can read more about Ingo’s findings on the back side of the moon here.
Ingo expressed that the reason the program was declassified was so they (DIA) could say it was shut down and didn’t find anything worthy of use within the intelligence community. It was really shutdown and declassified so it could remain secret, and so they could say “it’s been declassified, nothing more to see here.” Ingo expressed that it was highly classified, and that they publicly shut it down because remote viewing and psychic phenomenon is one of the greatest threats to government secrecy.(6) This seems to me to be a much better explanation of the apparent shut down of the program.
According to our best estimates, more than half of all U.S. government records are classified. For an archivist seeking to preserve and understand our history, that means most of our history is kept secret from us, think about that for a moment
– Richard Dolan
Using Extended Human Capacities For The Wrong Reasons
Human beings are capable of much more than they are currently aware of. Many of these capacities (as illustrated earlier) still remain known, but hidden. Regardless, truth cannot remain concealed forever, it will eventually make it’s way out over time. What is occurring here are natural phenomena, it’s nothing to fear. In our not-too-distant history, exploring concepts such as these was viewed as a heretic act. Fear was used as a form of control, and people were taught to be wary of these concepts and stay away from them as if they were the work of something not so pleasant. The dominant ruler on the planet in these times was the Catholic Church, and it was common for them to ban and forbid knowledge that did not fit the accepted framework, worldview or paradig. Things are changing, and extended human capacities like ESP are beginning to be seen in a new light.
The implications of this are far reaching. From birth we emerge into a world with so much to discover. As children, discovery is the joy of life. That sense of discovery is taken from us at a very early age. We are placed into the educational system very fast and told that “this” is how the world is and what we need to do to be “successful” in it. This immediately shifts our attention away from what is really important, into a framework of a robotic like existence, trapping ourselves into a program and way of life that does not resonate with our souls, and is not in balance with our natural selves. In the mean time, we let our planet suffer, and let others live in conditions that nobody deserves to live in.
We can live in a world that is built upon cooperation, and service to others. Where all needs are met, and the enthusiasm of discovery we had when we were children is encouraged and extended. If we did this, the human race would be living in world of more wonder and potential, far beyond the limitations we put on ourselves today. The only barrier that prevents us from getting there is the place at which the human race chooses to operate from. We don’t have the best track record in using our ‘scientific discoveries’ to benefit the whole. The only way we can continue forward with our exploration beyond this point is if our intention for creation has the entire planet and every living being on it first in their heart. Technological developments must work with nature, not against it. The same concept applies to extended human capacities, and specifically the place to which we choose to apply them.
Using extended human capacities and new technological discoveries with the intention of doing nothing but good for the entire collective, would be a really cool planet to live on.
No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it
On Monday, the Russian military scored a decisive victory over marauding extraterrestrials, said Russian Federal Service Bureau officer Isan Ivanov. His account expands on an official statement issued by the Ministry of Defense, which claims that Russian air defense batteries shot down a group of unmanned drones of unknown origin near Khmeimim Air Base in Syria.
Russia Destroys Alien Drones in Syria
Ivanov said the alien craft employed cloaking technology to penetrate Russian-controlled airspace but were detected by Russia’s next-generation Air Defense Identification Grid (ADIG) five kilometers from the airfield. Although he would not comment on technology used to defeat the cloak, Ivanov claims at least three aircraft, each approximately thirty-five feet long, were destroyed.
He admits Russia’s first attempt to destroy the drones failed. Upon detecting the intruders, the airbase commander used a combination of conventional weapons–23mm anti-aircraft shells and several short-range ground-to-air missiles. But the extraterrestrials possessed an energy screen that absorbed or repelled kinetic-based weapons. At that point, vehicle-mounted, high-energy lasers—a technology Russia has been developing to defeat extraterrestrial threats—engaged and destroyed the invaders.
Ivanov said this is not the first time extraterrestrials have overflown the airbase; in January, a two kilometer wide “mothership” appeared in the sky above Khmeimim, and in may a pair of smaller vessels travelling at over 7,000 mph flew over the airfield. In those instances, the intruding aircraft disappeared before they could be engaged.
There is a reason, Ivanov said, Khmeimim is such a hotbed of UFO activity: the airbase is a secret staging ground for Vladimir Putin’s clandestine war against species of malevolent extraterrestrials.
“They are constantly probing our defenses. Khmeimim has been a primary base of operations for assaults on alien life forms in this theater of operations. It is used to launch attacks on the Anunnaki and others that seek to extinguish human life. There are always two divisions of Special Services here and a compliment of extraterrestrial specialists from the Metzgoya outpost. We are dedicated to protecting humanity from non-terrestrial entities. We do not know what race Monday’s targets belonged to, but this shows our resolve.”
He said Russian scientists in hazmat suits examined the wreckage and were bewildered at the technology. A thorough analysis of salvaged components revealed neither a visible propulsion system nor a hint of the vehicle’s cloaking mechanism. One section contained “millions” of, what he described as, fiber optic-like cables through which pulsed a luminous amber liquid. The remnants were classified “above top secret” and flown to the Metzgoya extraterrestrial research station in the Ural Mountains. That location, he said, is the Russian equivalent of Area 51 and Dulce Base, and houses captured ETs and their respective technologies. He warns that alien superiority raises the risk of worldwide attacks and believes only a unified command, with all governments working in tandem, can defeat extraterrestrial threats to our planet.
“President Putin is working hard to understand these technologies and develop countermeasures,” Ivanov said. “But he knows he needs help, which is why he is soliciting assistance from other leaders across the planet. No one government can win this war alone.”
At first she thought they were planes, but they're something else
At first she thought they were planes, but they're something else
A woman in Arkansas filmed this interesting video. Two white objects flying close to each other at high altitude. At first, she thought it was planes.
In the video, however, you can see that these objects are something else. They seem to have wings. So they're very big birds? What kind of bird can be that big? Or are they something completely different?
Something Big Crashed into Uranus and Changed It Forever
Something Big Crashed into Uranus and Changed It Forever
By Chelsea Gohd, Space.com Staff Writer
Massive object damaged Uranus forever
It turns out that Uranus is so weird because of a massive collision billions of years ago.
A new study confirms that this collision with a huge object — which was approximately twice the size of Earth — could have led to the planet's extreme tilt and other odd attributes.
Uranus, the planet with the unforgettable name, is unique in a number of ways. "All of the planets in the solar system are spinning more or less in the same way … yet Uranus is completely on its side," Jacob Kegerreis, the new study's lead author and a researcher at Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology in the U.K., told Space.com. And this isn't the only thing that makes the planet so strange.
Uranus also has a "very, very strange" magnetic field and is extremely cold, even though it "should" be warmer, according to Kegerreis. In this study, Kegerreis and his team of astronomers seek to explain many of the planet's odd features by attributing them to a collision with a massive, icy object about 4 billion years ago. [Photos of Uranus, the Tilted Giant]
To better understand how the impact affected Uranus' evolution, the team used a high-powered supercomputer to run a simulation of massive collisions — something that has never been done before. This study confirms an older study that suggested Uranus' significant tilt was caused by a collision with a massive object.
Scientists used a high-resolution simulation to confirm that an object twice the size of Earth collided with Uranus and altered its tilt.
Credit: Jacob Kegerreis/Durham University
The researchers suspect that this object was probably a young protoplanet, made up of rock and ice. This collision is "pretty much the only way" that we can explain Uranus' tilt, Kegerreis said.
Amazingly, Uranus retained its atmosphere after this impact. The researchers think that this is because the object only grazed the planet, hitting it hard enough to change its tilt but not enough to affect its atmosphere, according to a statement from Durham University.
It's likely that this type of event isn't uncommon in the universe: "All the evidence points to giant impacts being frequent during planet formation, and with this kind of research, we are now gaining more insight into their effect on potentially habitable exoplanets," Luis Teodoro, study co-author and researcher at the BAER/NASA Ames Research Center, said in the statement.
This composite image, created in 2004 with Keck Observatory telescope adaptive optics, shows Uranus' two hemispheres.
Credit: Lawrence Sromovsky, University of Wisconsin-Madison/W.W. Keck Observatory
But this enormous object crashing into Uranus did more than just knock it into a new tilt. According to this research, when the object hit Uranus, some of the debris from the impact may have formed a thin shell that continues to trap heat coming from the planet's core. This could at least partially explain why Uranus' outer atmosphere is extremely cold.
According to Kegerreis, this collision could also explain two other oddities about the tilted planet. First, it could explain how and why some of Uranus' moons formed. The researchers think that the impact could have knocked rock and ice into the young planet's orbit — debris that later became some of Uranus' 27 moons. Additionally, they think that the collision could have altered the rotation of any moons that already existed at the time. Last year, a separate study also explored this aspect of the collision.
The researchers also suggest that the collision could have created molten ice and lumps of rock inside the planet, which tilted its magnetic field, according to the statement.
Following this study, the researchers hope to study this collision with even higher-resolution simulations to better understand Uranus' evolution, according to Kegerreis. He also noted that the team aims to study Uranus' chemistry and the different ways that an impact like this could have affected its atmosphere.
Filer’s Files #27 – 2018 UFOs in Saturn’s Rings - PART I
Hanga Roa.Hotel Victoria on Easter Island on March 14, 2018
Filer’s Files #27 – 2018 UFOs in Saturn’s Rings - PART I
In special reports, this week’s files cover: Astronaut Dr. Brian O’Leary Alien Contact, Alien Worlds and the Fate of Earth, Saturn’s Moons Enceladus, Titan and Rings Likely Have Life, Richard Doty Interviews with Bill Moore and Jamie Shandera?, and Watch Liberals Protest ICE as the Agency Breaks Up a Child Sex-Trafficking Ring
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Texas and Washington.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over, Canada, Chile, Cyprus, Easter Island, France, Portugal, , and England in the United Kingdom.
Major George Filer Editor of The National UFO Center, would like to invite join him in Mt Shasta this summer July 27-29th 2018. He will present a wonderful program at the “From Venus with Love” conference.
The Filer Research Institute feels the scientific study of UFOs is for the benefit of humankind and is an important endeavor. The US Air Force investigated UFOs publicly for more than twenty years under Project Blue Book; and I continue this advanced research. I believe the God of the universe has spread life throughout the cosmos and UFO’s are visiting us in ever-increasing numbers.
Forward these files to your friends and neighbors.
Special Projects
Dr. Brian O’Leary Alien Contact
Dr. Brian O’Leary, on 18th September 1994 made the following declarations publicly at the International Forum on New Science in Fort Collins, Colorado. Dr O’Leary said that “For nearly 50 years, the secrecy apparatus within the United States Government has kept from the public UFO and alien contact information.” He flatly stated that. “We have contact with alien cultures…” As for the non-disclosure of these facts, Dr O’Leary said, “The suppression of UFO and other extraterrestrial intelligence information for at least 47 years is probably being orchestrated by an elite band of men in the CIA, NSA, DIA and their like. This small group appears able to keep these already-hard-to-believe secrets very well. Those who have investigated this hydra-headed beast believe that the Cosmic Watergate of UFO, alien, mind-control, genetic engineering, free-energy, anti-gravity propulsion and other secrets will make Watergate or Iran-Gate…appear to be kindergarten exercises.” Brian O’Leary – NASA Astronaut
Alien Worlds and the Fate of Earth
It is estimated there are millions if not billions of exoplanets. Many of these planets are likely to have various kinds of alien life. Adam Frank deserves our gratitude for condensing so much fascinating material into the ‘Light of the Stars, Alien Worlds and the Fate of Earth,’ this highly readable book. Adam ably picks up where Carl Sagan left off, Intelligent life does not necessarily mean it will succeed. His book describes the emerging science of astrobiology very clear, succinct, and entertaining.”,
We are just one of almost countless planets in the Universe, and it’s likely that many of those planets hosted technologically advanced alien civilizations which may have faced the same challenges we’re facing today. Astrophysicist and NPR commentator Adam Frank tells of his latest research on the existence and trajectories of alien civilizations and what they may teach us about our own. He described science as “constrained imagination,” and discusses the famous Drake equation, which was formulated to give us an idea of the possibility of the number of extraterrestrial civilizations that may have reached an age of technological sophistication. Frank also speculated on the possibility of an earlier Earth civilization, which may have existed 10 to 100 million years ago, and would leave very little trace of itself after that amount of time.
Frank also discussed the record of Earth’s climate and the scientific consensus that temperatures on the planet have remained fairly constant for at least 10,000 years, and added that “we would have to be wrong” about the effects of the sun on climate change for it to be a factor in any warming or cooling trends. Frank also used the example of Easter Island, and the depletion of natural resources over a few hundred years and how this can be scaled up to a planetary level. He concluded that “climate change shows how powerful how we’ve become” as a technological species.
Astrophysicist Adam Frank is a leading expert on the final stages of evolution for stars like the sun, and his computational research group at the University of Rochester has developed advanced supercomputer tools for studying how stars form and how they die. A self-described “evangelist of science,” he is also committed to showing others the beauty and power of science, and exploring the proper context of science in culture.
Editors Note: An advanced civilization with its star dying would need to find a newer planet with a viable Sun such as Earth. This is likely responsible for some of the craft we are seeing in our skies.
Saturn’s Moons Enceladus, Titan and Rings Likely Have Life
In 2005, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft detected plumes of water vapor and icy particles erupting from Enceladus, revealing the existence of a giant ocean hidden under the moon’s frozen shell. Because there is life virtually wherever there is water on Earth, these findings suggested that life might also exist on Enceladus. Now, new data from the European Space Agency suggests that those plumes might contain complex organic (carbon-based) molecules.
A mix of saltwater and ice grains erupt from geysers on Saturn’s moon Enceladus according to the .European Space Agency
When a massive saltwater ocean was found hidden beneath the icy crust of ’Saturn’s Moon Enceladus in 2015, astronomers were cautiously optimistic that this watery world could have just the right conditions to host life. Now, thanks to a new study, Enceladus’ stock has gone up — way up. Complex organic molecules have been discovered for the first time coming from the depths of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Spacecraft scheduled to launch soon could explore what this new discovery says about the chances of life within icy moons like Enceladus. The sixth largest of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus is only about 314 miles (505 kilometers) in diameter. This makes the moon small enough to fit inside the borders of Arizona.
Using data from a spacecraft, an international team of astronomers has for the first time discovered complex organic (carbon-containing) molecules — the building blocks of life— spewing from Enceladus. The new finding, described in a paper published online June 27 in the journal Nature, makes the small icy moon the most promising place beyond Earth to find life in the solar system. “Enceladus’ subsurface ocean is a habitable place that may even produced intelligent life forms. The organics are then injected, together with the hot water, into the overlying cooler ocean by hydrothermal vents,” Postberg said. “Then, they can be transported upwards to the ocean surface on the walls of rising bubbles of gas.”
“This is the first-ever detection of complex organics coming from an extraterrestrial water world.” The big question is if it is inhabited,” Frank Postberg, a planetary scientist at the University of Heidelberg in Germany and the study’s lead author, told NBC News. Now, researchers have detected complex organic molecules from Enceladus, including some at least 15 carbon atoms in size
Titan Another Saturn Moon Has Atmosphere and Liquids
Saturn’s largest moon Titan is an extraordinary and exceptional world. Among our solar system’s more than 150 known moons, Titan is the only one with a substantial atmosphere. Titan is the only place besides Earth known to have liquids in the form of rivers, lakes and seas on its surface.
Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is just a little bit larger (by about 2 percent). Titan’s atmosphere is made mostly of nitrogen, like Earth’s, but with a surface pressure 50 percent higher than Earth’s. Titan has clouds, rain, rivers, lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons like methane and ethane. The largest seas are hundreds of feet deep and hundreds of miles wide. Beneath Titan’s thick crust of water ice is more liquid—an ocean primarily of water rather than methane. Titan’s subsurface water could be a place to harbor life as we know it, A close up of Titan shows a series of possible faces of humanoid appearing aliens. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
The Ringmakers of Saturn
A NASA scientist Dr. Norman Bergrun ‘who wrote the book The Ringmakers of Saturn has posted his excellent book in its entirety up on a website that is well worth reading. Having privy to top-secret documents during his time in NASA came at a cost, as Bergrun himself explained in a Project Camelot interview, “I had to sign my life away for thirty years.” He also intimated that there was a limit to what he can say even now, and revealed that his life would be in serious danger should he say too much.
With exclusive access to the raw NASA photographs been sent back from Voyager I in 1980, Bergrun saw firsthand what the general public was not allowed to see, making him the first legitimate, verified member of the scientific community to discover cylindrical vehicles.
Bergrun had the exciting experience of having sighted and photographed a mobile slender body fitting the specific properties of the two bodies shown later in the photos. This sighting at the time was experienced by the author’s wife and daughter. Through binoculars, this body appeared to be large and incorporated fine aerodynamic features at the fore and aft exhaust ends. That is, the ends did not terminate squarely cut-off as would result when a pole is sawed in two. Rather, the ends were rounded much the same as are cowls of jet engine intakes. Bulb like streamers were emitted from locations along the body. Control over these streamers was demonstrated by the modulation of their activity, and also by introduction of additional streamers which moved with definite periodicity. Drawing upon many years of aerospace experience, the author has no reservation about labeling the sighted body a vehicle.
He feels he sees similar vehicles on Saturn’s rings and has chosen to reveal his thoughts in his books.
Here is a little bit of the vehicle research he states in his book.
“Near the end of the 18th century, luminous points were observed on the edge of the ring planes of Saturn. One of these is reported to have moved off its position. None of the luminous points persisted very long (less than 16 hours), On 9 February 1917, two astronomers, Maurice Ainslie and John Knight of Great Britain, observed the source independently. Brightness of the source was so intense that Ainslie referred to the object as a “star”. The star traveled a straight-line course which, in effect, subtended a chord across the ring system. Length of the chord was of the order of 125,000 km (77,700 miles). Observed time to traverse this chordal distance across the ring system was 1 hour and 40 minutes, making the average velocity 21 km/sec (13 mi/sec) or 48.600 mph. This value compares with an average velocity for Voyager en route to Saturn of about 13.7 km/sec (8.5 mi/sec) or 39,500 miles per hour.. That is, the star was about 1 1/2 times faster.
During the observations when the star was in plain view, the light from the object appeared to be elongated. There was a strange aspect about the traversal itself. Seeming to move through the ring plane without difficulty, the star appeared to devour material ahead as it proceeded. Further, at no time did the rings completely block out the radiating light.
Results from Voyager 1 have added new puzzlements. For example, so-called “spokes” of light stretch across part of the ring system; the F ring, which is positioned alone outside the main ring plane, contains entwined strands or “braids”; intense electrical discharges. The NASA photographs picked up likely bases with points of light and heat plus a gigantic electromagnetic vehicle according to Dr. Bergrun who had excess to thousands of NASA photos.
SATURN’S RINGS EXPLAINED
He states, “Wherever you see some rings, that’s where I see the crafts, I call them ring makers,” explained Dr, Bergrun. “I say that it is electromagnetic because I can identify streamline patterns with respect to it that I knew were what we called ‘potential lines’ and that says it was electrical,” said Dr. Bergrun. “I could tell that those lines demarked the outside of an object.” The scientist argues that the some of the footage near the rings shows “exhaust” emanating from alien craft and he warned that things are getting “critical” in deep space as these space ships continue to proliferate throughout the solar system.”
The possibility of life on various moons of Saturn coupled with the appearance of spaceship like vehicles, and alien bases all points a possible civilization or at least an extraterrestrial way station.
This photo shows the length of a slender body exhausting at both ends generating the A ring. The slender body is orbiting clockwise and, in doing so, deposits a wide trail. This trail, which can be recognized as the A ring without the Enke division, is generated by efflux or something emanating from nearly the entire length of the body. While most of the efflux is generated along the top, some also appears to begin underneath and along the body sides in the form of streamers. These streamers pass over the side, proceed above the body and contribute to the A-ring trail. Presence of exhaust flames from each end of the body and the bulgy appearance of the streamers as they pass over the body suggest a circular cross-section for the body. A light source, somewhat greater in diameter than the body, is positioned below the right end. This source is attached to the body with inter-connecting emissions turning to an orange-red arc along the top edge. Emissions from the body can be viewed collectively as creating a net force on the unit. According to one of Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, forces can occur only in action-reaction pairs. The reaction of the body to the action of the emissions is to move the body, presumably in a direction so as to complete the ring. This physically inherent mobile capability is justification for calling the body a vehicle.
This photo shows formation of the Enke division ring that ends next to a vehicle. In the photo, the A and B rings as well as the Cassini division can be recognized. Once again, an electromagnetic vehicle is found depositing an orbital trail. Efflux emanating primarily from the radially outboard 2/3 of body length is responsible. Clearly, were the vehicle located at a slightly shorter radius, the gap would be lessened. Widths reported for the Enke division range from approximately 200 to 320 km (125 to 200 mi). Nominally, this gap width is equivalent to a variation in orbital radius of only about 1/4 of one percent.
The implication is that orbital radius of vehicle position is set very precisely in order to have a gap produced in the ring. Inspection of the vehicle reveals numerous jets issuing from many different positions around and along the body. A fan of three jets appears to form in the Photo: Formation of the Enke division. inboard part of the trailing efflux. Each jet appears to consist of a series of bulbous swellings. Such swellings are indicative of the form of electrically charged flows known as pinched plasmas. Length of the vehicle appears to be about 10 times its diameter. A dark jet crossing the body near the left end makes the vehicle appear as though there are two sections aligned longitudinally. In reality, the vehicle is integrally one. An attempt at sizing yields an apparent length of about 4700 km (2900 mi) and a diameter of 470 km (290 mi). Diameters of issuing jets are of the order of 0.1 to 0.2 body diameter, or about 47 to 94 km (29 to 58 mi). Numerous photographs have been examined with special attention being given to the outermost region of Saturn’s A ring The large lights are frequently attached to an electromagnetic vehicle that are huge. These vehicles may include plants for farming and enclosed large living quarters, and even enclosed towns.
Dr. Norman Bergrun, a distinguished mechanical engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center argues that extraterrestrial life exists within the earth’s solar system arguing that UFOs spaceships that were first spotted in Saturn’s rings are “proliferating” to other planets that have rings including Uranus and Jupiter. “What I found out is, these things inhabit Saturn, that’s where I first discovered them, and they’re proliferating. You can find them around Uranus and Jupiter.” He explained why what he was seeing was an electromagnetic vehicle, “I say that it is an electromagnetic vehicle because I can identify streamline patterns with respect to it that I knew were what we called ‘potential lines’ and that says it was electrical”.
Bergrun thought it could be possible that these craft were actually making the rings, hence the book’s title, but other scholars have raised the possibility that they could be mining the precious metals and nutrients that make up the rings. Either way, what an incredible discovery, another one that appears to have been left out of the public domain. A reviewer commenting on Bergrun’s book wrote, “Saturn’s rings are ‘not’ natural, but are some type of effluent from massively huge, cylindrical objects, themselves measured in terms of earth diameters!”
On each extremity of Saturn’s rings, cylindrical bodies have been photographed spewing emissions. These emissions assume complicated patterns while contributing compositional material for the rings. A time-varying appearance of Saturn’s disc is a natural consequence of this process. The B ring and inner- and outer-A rings are separate entities because different vehicles fabricate these rings, intervening spaces, such as the Cassini and Enke divisions, are safety buffer regions to preclude vehicle collisions. The pink area is spaceship enhanced by the editor.
Bergrun has detected similar things around the other gas giants of the outer solar system such as Jupiter and Uranus. If he is to be believed, then the situation is “critical” as the solar system becomes infested with living alien spaceships, and if he is wrong then we all got a chance to imagine something unique for a moment. Electromagnetic vehicles possess obvious devastational capabilities which might evoke fear and anxiety in some people. These discomforting emotions can be alleviated upon realization that these powerful vehicles have been around for many, many centuries; and the human race still continues.
Artist’s Spaceship
Electromagnetic vehicles most likely originate outside the solar system. Hence, new avenues of inquiry can be considered concerning observed phenomena in the universe. The universe is laden heavily with nuclear energy; and apparently some societal intelligence has mastered its application on a large scale. Accomplishments include massively large engines, controlled nuclear fusion, planetary-satellite surface modification, lengthy transmission of huge electrical currents, and immensely high-power electro-potential fields. Electromagnetic vehicles have played, and continue to play a role in effecting change. Electromagnetic vehicles, however, also create. They create rings of different types and compositions. They create satellite surfaces, such as that of Saturn’s moon Iapetus. Is there any reason to think creation stops at this impressive level of achievement? Not at all. Saturn, has fairly ideal chemical broths containing life-form building blocks. Dry-lightning strikes from electromagnetic vehicles should be able to initiate life-form chemical reactions. The researchers conjectured that these organic materials were cooked up inside the hot, rocky and fragmented core
Richard Doty Interviews with Bill Moore and Jamie Shandera?
Robert Collins writes in his book, ‘Exempt from Disclosure,’ the Doty Chapter is very detailed as is the whole book, very analytical and well referenced and why Rick Doty tried to sue me in 2016 (Ron Pandolfi, works for DNI knows the case) claiming I fabricated the under the Reagan Disclosure Program and have nothing to do with any current interviews. However, Rick Doty since working for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is now trying debunk his own contributions to this book.
Richard Doty was a Special Agent for Counter-Intelligence for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI). For over eight years he was specifically tasked with the UFO/Extraterrestrial issue at Kirkland Air Force Base in New Mexico and also at Nellis Air Force Base (the so-called Area 51) and at other locations.
This Chapter was taken from a set of four interesting interviews done by both Bill Moore and Jaime Shandera in the 1980s and later updated in the. Book ‘Exempt from Disclosure” Pages 62 thru 64.
“So, where do I begin? Well, in August of 1968, I began my basic training at Lackland A.F.B., TX, which, lasted until November. After that I stayed at Lackland for a special duty assignment. After basic training, I went through air force security police school at Lackland. I then was assigned to the 1041st Combat Security Police Wing, where I went through 14 weeks of combat training in Hawaii. After training, I volunteered for a special duty assignment at Indian Springs AFB Nevada which required that I have a “Top Secret” clearance. There were a total of 10 security policeman selected for this TDY. After receiving our clearances, we were flown to Indian Springs AFB.
Indian Springs AFB is located approximately 60 miles northwest of Las Vegas and contained tactical firing ranges used by combat aircraft.
Approximately 15 miles southeast of Indian Springs was located a top secret Air Force facility and this is where my career as a security policeman began. Upon my arrival at this special facility the 10 security policemen and I were given a Top Secret briefing by a USAF Colonel. The briefing was quite generic; no details of the special facility were given. All we were told was that the facility tested special aircraft. We were housed in a new air-conditioned building containing a theater, dining facility and a recreational area. My special duty was to guard a very large hangar estimated to be 3500 feet by 4000 feet and at least 100 ft in height. The hangar was located inside a high security fenced in area with two entry points. It was one of the largest hangars I’d ever seen. I was assigned to security flight “C.”
My supervisor was a Master Sergeant. We also had two air force officers, one captain and one lieutenant. Another flight of security policemen guarded the interior of the building. These security policemen were E-6 or higher. During an extremely hot July day in 1969 at ~9:00 a.m., and under very tight security, the hangar doors were opened. I was amazed at the size of the object located inside (this scene was depicted in Steven Spielberg’s “Taken” which was televised on the Sci-Fi channel in December 2002). My first impression was that the object was a “flying saucer.”
Similar Hangar
It was pulled out of the hangar by a large USAF tug vehicle and because of my close proximity to the hangar door (about 50 ft), the object literally passed over my head. I was again stunned by its size as it was pulled out onto a runway. It sat on the runway for about an hour while several attempts were made to start it up, but it would not start. Technicians in white coveralls and civilian suits worked on the object for another hour. Finally, the large craft was pulled back into the hangar.
Later that afternoon, while off duty, I asked my supervisor what the object was. I was told it was an experimental aircraft. I joking replied that the object looked like a flying saucer. About that time, a man in civilian clothing asked me to meet with him in an unoccupied room.
Once inside, the room the civilian identified himself as Mr. Blake. Blake asked me what I knew about flying saucers. I mentioned that I had read some magazines, but that I was joking when I said the object looked like a flying saucer. Blake told me that he knew my uncle and how my uncle (Ed Doty) worked as an investigator on UFO sightings. I stated that I knew his and that my uncle had mentioned this to me in the past. Blake then said, “What if I told you that the object you saw today was a real flying saucer from another planet then what would you say?” I said I wouldn’t know what to say. Blake laughed and then he told me not to mention this to anyone. Blake then escorted me to the door saying, “Airmen Doty, someday you’ll know the true story about that object sitting in the big hangar.” I simply nodded and left the room. Little did I know how right he would be?
I saw the large “flying saucer” again several more times in the next 45 days. However, it never did fly. The day prior to my departure the same Colonel who gave the initial briefing debriefed me. I flew back to Nellis then eventually back to Sheppard AFB.” Thanks to Robert M. Collins Reference Exempt from Disclosure: http://www.ufoconspiracy.com/reports/efd_book.htm
Travis Abduction Film
I will be part of a special UFO panel after the Travis abduction film is shown at the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia next Thursday July 12, 2018, with Frank Chille, and Jennifer Stein and Bob Terrio the Co-producers of this film.
The National Liberty Museum New Exhibit
SPACE LAB – Exploring our Fragile Liberties
Special VIP event, July 12, 2018 Thursday
$10.00 per person 5:30 to 7:00 light fare and wine, meet and greet 7:00 to 8:30 screening – “
Travis – The True Story of Travis Walton”film with his logging crews famous 1975 UFO encounter and 5 day abduction!
8:30 to 9:30 Question and Answer panel with film producers and UFO researcher experts.
The National Liberty Museum is a nonprofit 501.(c)(3) organizatio
Watch Liberals Protest ICE as the Agency Breaks Up a
Child Sex-Trafficking Ring
July 5, 2018
Amanda Prestigiacomo reports, As Democratic politicians’ calls for the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) grow intensely loud, a video of liberals protesting the agency as they break up a child sex-trafficking ring has resurfaced online. CBS San Francisco reported in August of 2017 that federal agents served a search warrant on a Guatemalan immigrant family home in Oakland in connection with an investigation concerning the sex trafficking of juveniles. The human trafficking operation was later confirmed by authorities.
Amazingly, as ICE officers were literally breaking up the child prostitution operation, they were being protested against by liberal neighbors who demonized the agency and advocated for the “rights” of illegal immigrants who 15% are thought to be criminals or terrorists.. Oakland is designated a “sanctuary city” for illegals. Hadar Cohen, a female neighbor protesting ICE said a “No person is illegal” sign in-hand. “We care for our neighbors, and we for immigration rights.”
Even after neighbors were informed that the raid was about sex-trafficking and not immigration, the ICE-bashing continued, Notes: The Federalist. “ICE is not welcome in this country.. ” Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is apparently the “future” of the Democrat Party, has called for the abolition of ICE. Following suit, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), and other prominent Democrats have made similar demands. Thanks to CBS Watch: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/08/16/ice-raid-west-oakland/
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:FILER FILES - overzicht met foto's met dank aan Georges Filer en WWW.nationalUFOCenter.com (ENG)
Filer’s Files #27 – 2018 UFOs in Saturn’s Rings - PART II
Filer’s Files #27 – 2018 UFOs in Saturn’s Rings - PART II
UFO Sightings in the United States
Arizona Light
Glendale — We were watching fireworks when my wife pointed out that what she thought was a helicopter. It turned red andwas moving very fast. I noticed its still had a small white connected to the back of the object. It quickly lowered about 250-feet and began ascending in a wide sweeping circle. When it finished its circle it rose very quickly straight up another fewhundred feet. Then the object began moving south and-5 times faster. It looked like it was going straight twords the airport. Which is about 20 miles from my house. Thanks to MUFON CMS
California Object
Kelseyville — I took this photo. The place was in, Soda Bay in Lake County, California on June
Note: The witness did not say anything about the object in the photo. Without a description little can be concluded about this sighting. We don’t even know if the witness saw the object or later discovered the object in the photo. A request has been sent to the witness to obtain more detail. Updates will be posted.
Cocoa Beach — I don’t really know if it’s anything, but I will send a short video and a still picture. I just thought it was really weird. This happened I don’t really know if it’s anything, but I will send a short video and a still picture. I just thought it was really weird. This happened on June 27, 2018, Wednesday night. It is not far from Cape Canaveral.
Note: The video taken by the witness did not show anything unusual. The photo shows a vertical beam of light. This is likely a natural phenomenon and not likely UFO related. The photo shows dense clouds in the area so the beam of light could be meteorological. Thanks to William Puckett, Director Http://www.UFOsnw.com
Illinois Light
Springfield — Pamela Stark writes that she took this photo on June 30, 2018, at 9:02 pm.
The light was changing shape. They seem to be back again.
Hope you are well. They are still hanging around.
Thanks to Pamela Stark
Louisiana Objects
New Iberia— My wife and I were in our front yard when I saw a low flying plane on November 11, 2017
I started the video and he started spraying what appeared to be poison. I was pissed off. Sorry about the language.
I didn’t notice the other objects flying around the plane until reviewing the footage. It appears one craft enters the cloud the plane has sprayed out. They don’t blink, they’re fast and camouflaged.
Thanks to MUFON CMS
Missouri Lights
I was shopping and took photo of the storm in the sky on June 28, 2018. I didn’t notice the objects until I looked at the photo later that night After reviewing the objects I noticed the parking lot light group of 3 where on at the same time in the photo. Not sure if they the 3 objects in the sky are the reflection from them and my cell lens.
Thanks to MUFON CMS
New Jersey Lights
Yardville — This account was filmed at approximately 10 p.m. on Tuesday, July 3rd 2018 in Yardville Heights New Jersey. Hovering objects sighted seem to have a triangular design and glowed reddish orange and yellow and white. At first there were five, then 3, then two. The last two seem to dissolve upward. Thought this would be worth reporting. I have been studying the skies for many years and I have never seen anything quite like this. First thought that it was a sophisticated drone(s). I have spotted various drones hovering in the past .but. nothing quite like this.
Thanks to MUFON CMS
New York Objects
Queens — We were in Breezy Point standing about 500 feet from the surf watching people shooting fireworks on the beach which were probably going as high as 200 feet. We looked way above the fireworks to 4 or 5 thousand feet to see jets from nearby airports Kennedy and LaGuardia so we new it wasn’t a plane or fireworks. Now I’m guessing , not knowing the altitude or the exact size of the object what took the jet to go from point a to b was 20 seconds this object disappeared in a cloud of smoke. It did this several times back and forth until it disappeared. It was impressive to say the least there were probably seven or eight of us that saw it, Thanks to MUFON CMS
Ohio Objects
Mount Orab — I was outside with my dog and saw two objects in the sky. I’m not sure what they were for being that low in the sky on May 9, 2018 .They appeared to be still and then started to move toward my direction, with no lights and metallic looking below the clouds, They were big ( like small plane big) no sound. I got my phone and took photos and zooming in on one. same height in the sky i watched until they were out of line of sight. I’m. not sure what that is in the photo. they just caught my eye.
Thanks to MUFON CMS
Texas Light
Lake Buchanan — I just noticed the circle of light. I checked and the were no visible planets in the sky that morning.
I just noticed the object in the corner of the picture a few days ago.
Photo taken over Lake Buchanan on January 29, 2018
Thanks to MUFON CMS
Washington Lights
Goldendale — Maryhill State Park — Mom saw a dot in sky on June 30, 2018, It could be a weather balloon or drone.
It was white/oval shaped half metallic with dots. There was white cloud cover then it was gone after being visible for more than an hour.
Thanks to MUFON CMS
Worldwide UFO Sightings
Canada Lights
Meteghan, Nova Scotia — A bright orange light appeared in the western sky at about 9:55 PM on June 27, 2018. It appeared to burn out and another one appeared.
Then it went out and two appeared. They disappeared at about 10:05 PM.
I was watching with binoculars and saw a plane circling the area and it continued for another half hour.
Santiago de Chile (La Flo) — My best friend walked (trekking) by a hill in the city of Santiago, approximately 2,000 meters above sea level, on August 19, 2017 and took many pictures of the landscape, when he arrived home at night he began to see the photos on his notebook and just then he realized that a photo contained an object in the sky, above the clouds, shaped like a saucer.
Thanks to MUFON CMS
Cyprus Object
Limassol– I have been on watch at the bridge, onboard a vessel on April 29, 2018. I’ve seen the object a few degrees north of the setting sun. Its height was about 3 finger lengths from the horizon with my arm extended , at 15 m above sea level. I 1st noticed 3 planes with chemtrails above the sun that was about to set. Then I noticed it at ( 19:30:04-19:31:08 based on time between 1st and last photos) for about 2 minutes . It was hovering, not moving up and down or towards any direction, had no emissions, looked like a flower bud, whitish bright. It could have been 3 times bigger than an airplane in that distance. In all the photos I took it looks solid , enough although the top of it seems to fade out, if not exactly solid , it looked not changing shape . I went in to ask the chief officer to have a look but by this time it has been covered by a cloud. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Easter Island
Hanga Roa — My wife Margareth Boaventura and I were on vacation on Easter Island. We stayed at Hotel Victoria on March 14, 2018, we returned to the hotel and I saw a silver object entering the cloud and I warned my wife. Then my wife saw another object farther on and also disappeared into the cloud. I was able to get only one photo of the unidentified flying object at 5:23 p.m. on March 14, 2018. In the last few days we saw bright strange lights at night that were not airplanes, stars, balloons, or drones. It was strange. On the 14th we saw by day the two silver objects that reflected the light of the Sun. We would like an analysis in the photograph.
Coimbra — After filming the sunset on June 1, 2018 21, 2018, I watched a storm of lightning from which after reviewing the images I noticed several objects. a cylindrical other triangular. the cylindrical one hovered far below the very low black clouds that produced a rain of red color. the black triangular object seemed camouflaged in the clouds beyond the circular shape that seemed to cause electromagnetic discharges from the clouds. see the pictures and the full video. Thanks to MUFON CMS
UK/England Orb
Lincoln— I was getting ready for a Dr appointment in my dressing room on June 13, 2018, I looked out the window ( above my mirror ) and saw this very bright shiny silver oval object, I was in total shock, and disbelief I grabbed my IPhone and immediately started filming ….so sorry for my language, I lost sight of the object ,then ran to the back of the house south facing , there I continued filming for just over a minute .. as you will see in the pictures I screenshot the object from the filming I recorded, the three light in a triangle shame we’re not visible to the naked eye, I only noticed this when playing the recording back in very slow second by second motion .I lost sight over the oak tree in my garden ..This is nothing like I have ever seen in my life …
Support Earth Changing Research
Please Help
Buy a Great DVD
I have put together a DVD of the last twenty years of Filer’s Files for you with hundreds of great photographs and UFO sightings that will explain the phenomena and the importance to your life and your family. Additionally, I have included my book within the DVD that includes George Ritter’s exciting abduction story told by Linda Moulton Howe. Broadcaster David E. Twichell joined me to write the book. We are asking for a donation of only $50 that includes next year’s subscription and our book. Please include your e-mail address and mailing address.
Our research is uncovering amazing truths by solving challenging projects deemed too difficult by other firms. We have had some success in finding missing persons. We could use your help in getting more results from our research. I have put together a DVD of the last seventeen years of Filer’s Files for you with hundreds of great photographs and UFO sightings. Additionally, I have decided to include my book within the DVD that includes George Ritter’s exciting abduction story told by Linda Moulton Howe. Broadcaster David E. Twichell joined me to write the book. We are asking for a donation of only $50 that includes next year’s subscription and our book. Please include your e-mail address and mailing address.
Have been digging through the giant DVD you sent recently. As a relatively recent joiner, I was unaware of the years’ worth of consistent reports of the same types of objects all over. This has been very educational. Just wanted to thank you for all you’ve done. Bruce W. Freeman Attorney at Law
Sign me up right now for Filer’s Files.
I have put together a DVD of the last seventeen years of Filer’s Files for you with hundreds of great photographs and UFO sightings that will explain the phenomena and the importance to your life and your family. Additionally, I have included my book within the DVD that includes George Ritter’s exciting abduction story told by Linda Moulton Howe. Broadcaster David E. Twichell joined me to write the book. We are asking for a donation of only $50 that includes next year’s subscription and our book. Please include your e-mail address and mailing address. Please use this link to receive this offer.
JOIN MUFON!
Become a MUFON member today! Benefits of membership include a subscription to the monthly UFO Journal that contains current investigations, sightings reports, articles by world-renowned researchers and more. To join now, click here JOIN NOW
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:FILER FILES - overzicht met foto's met dank aan Georges Filer en WWW.nationalUFOCenter.com (ENG)
The Book Of Ezekiel And The Flying Chariot of Fire: Misinterpreted Ancient Alien Technology?
The Book Of Ezekiel And The Flying Chariot of Fire: Misinterpreted Ancient Alien Technology?
“I looked and saw a whirlwind coming from the north, a great cloud with fire flashing back and forth and brilliant light all around it. In the center of the fire was a glow like amber, and within it was the form of four living creatures. And this was their appearance: They had a human form…”
One of the most fascinating accounts of ancient flying machines can be found in a very unexpected place, The Bible.
There, in addition to descriptions of what many believe are details of flying machines, we find a number of odd details about ‘misinterpreted technology’ that existed on Earth thousands of years ago.
In the Book of Ezekiel, the prophet describes ‘a flying chariot’ that is supposedly composed of ‘wheels within wheels’ and was powered by no one other than Angels.
The Ancient Astronaut Theory presupposes that this reference is clear evidence of ancient flying machines.
On the other hand, skeptics and Bible scholars argue that the Book of Ezekiel does not describe literally flying machines, but suggest Ezekiel was speaking symbolically about powerful enemies that Israel was facing.
But descriptions of Flying Chariots can be found in a number of other cultures around the globe: The Ancient Hindu Culture for example.
This raises a number of questions. Is it possible that the book of Ezekiel describes mythological enemies?
Or, is it possible, as some authors suggest that the Book of Ezekiel offers the ultimate evidence of ancient alien visitation? And evidence of the existence of flying machines, thousands of years ago?
One traditional depiction of the cherubim and chariot vision, based on the description by Ezekiel. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain
Ancient Astronauts and Ezekiel
Ezekiel is considered the 6th-century BCE author of the Book of Ezekiel that reveals prophecies about the destruction of Jerusalem, the restoration to the land of Israel, and what some refer to as the Millennial Temple visions or the Third Temple. Ezekiel happens to be one of the protagonists both in the Book of Ezekiel and in the Hebrew Bible. Ezekiel also is a protagonist in Judaism, and also in other Abrahamic Biblical Texts.
History suggests that Ezekiel arrived at Babylon in the first captivity of Israel and is mentioned, in a number of ancient texts, as a great Prophet.
The name Ezekiel means ‘God strengthens’.
One of the key parts of the book of Ezekiel and one of the main reasons why we take into consideration what is written in the book is the fact that The Book of Ezekiel was written in the first person. I saw this. I observed that. I went there.
The book describes something observed in the first person, unlike many other Biblical texts that are written in the third person.
One of the key parts of the Book of Ezekiel is when Ezekiel mentioned witnessing a ‘wheel chariot’ come from the heaven towards him. Inside this wheel chariot were beings with the ‘likeness of man’.
The Book of Ezekiel makes reference of a chariot—a flying vehicle—without clear means of propulsion, although it was powered by divine energy, celestial energy. An energy that moved. An energy that had sound. Those descriptions are interpreted by many people as technology. Modern technology, but it was modern technology that was misinterpreted by people in the past.
If we read the book of Ezekiel, specifically where the chariot of fire is mentioned we will notice its similarity to the landing and/or takeoff of a modern spacecraft. There’s a windstorm, there are flashes of lighting, there are clouds, lights and altogether it’s a magnificent spectacle, especially for someone who lived two thousand years ago.
Furthermore, Ezekiel even describes the composition of the chariot that came down from the heaven as appearing to be made out of glowing metal.
The Book Of Ezekiel, Chariots of Fire, and Spaceships
4I looked and saw a whirlwind coming from the north, a great cloud with fire flashing back and forth and brilliant light all around it. In the center of the fire was a glow like amber,
5and within it was the form of four living creatures. And this was their appearance: They had a human form,
7Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were like the hooves of a calf, gleaming like polished bronze.…
8Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands. All four of them had faces and wings…
9and their wings were touching one another. They did not turn as they moved; each one went straight ahead.…
10The form of their faces was that of a man, and each of the four had the face of a lion on the right side, the face of an ox on the left side, and also the face of an eagle.…
11Such were their faces. Their wings were spread upward; each had two wings touching the wings of the creature on either side, and two wings covering its body.…
12Each creature went straight ahead. Wherever the spirit would go, they would go, without turning as they moved.…
13In the midst of the living creatures was the appearance of glowing of coals of fire, or of torches. Fire moved back and forth between the living creatures; it was bright, and lightning flashed out of it.…
14The creatures were darting back and forth as quickly as flashes of lightning.…
And despite the fact that Ezekiel does his best effort in describing what he witnessed coming frown from heaven, most of the accounts portrayed in the bible artwork leave out key details of Ezekiel’s Flying Chariot; The Fire, the Lightning, and the omnidirectional wheels.
Furthermore, in the Book of Ezekiel we find a crystal-clear description of the mysterious, powerful flying device:
15When I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature with its four faces.
16The workmanship of the wheels looked like the gleam of beryl, and all four had the same likeness. Their workmanship looked like a wheel within a wheel.
17As they moved, they went in any of the four directions, without pivoting as they moved.
18Their rims they were high and awesome, and all four rims were full of eyes all around.
19So as the living creatures moved, the wheels moved beside them, and when the creatures rose from the ground, the wheels also rose.
20Wherever the spirit would go, they would go, and the wheels would rise alongside them, because the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.
21When the creatures moved, the wheels moved; when the creatures stood still, the wheels stood still; and when the creatures rose from the ground, the wheels rose alongside them, because the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.
22Spread out above the heads of the living creatures was the shape on an awesome expanse, gleaming like crystal.
As you can see, Ezekiel describes in his book something fascinating coming down from heaven, making the Earth tremble.
It was something, unlike anything he had seen before. It was powerful, it was glowing. From it came beings that resembled humans but were altogether different.
In the 1970’s A NASA scientist called Joseph Blumrich decided he wanted to disprove the idea that Ezekiel witness ed a spaceship coming down from the heaven.
Blumrich was a top-notch NASA scientist who worked on the moon project, and he wa s a rocket engineer. From that standing point, he decided to see what was written down by Ezekiel in the first part of the Book of Ezekiel.
Despite his skepticism, and after months of tedious research and reading, Blumirch eventually concluded that what Ezekiel described in his eyewitness report, was indeed a type of spacecraft.
This conclusion led Blumrich to write a book titled The Spaceships of Ezekiel.
So what did Ezekiel witness, if he witnessed anything at all? Could he have really witnessed a flying chariot and angles resembling human beings?
Or, is it possible, as some like to suggest, that Ezekiel had witnessed, like many before and after him, physical evidence of extraterrestrial beings?
The Book Of Ezekiel And The Flying Chariot of Fire: Misinterpreted Ancient Alien Technology?
In a mission that sounds inspired by the myth of Icarus, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is expected to become the first spacecraft to enter the sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere. Although this daredevil mission has been delayed, the probe now includes an innovative new heat shield that will hopefully improve its odds.
On August 4, Parker Solar Probe will embark on what NASA calls “a mission 60 years in the making,” coming within four million miles of the surface to collect unprecedented data about the sun’s corona. Temperatures for expected to reach nearly 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit at the probe’s upcoming destination, but if the new heat shield is a success, the instruments inside the spacecraft will enjoy a balmy inside temperature of just 85 degrees.
Parker Solar Probe’s heat shield, called the Thermal Protection System, is lifted and realigned with the spacecraft’s truss as engineers from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab prepare to install the eight-foot-diameter heat shield on June 27, 2018.
The new and improved heat shield, known as the Thermal Protection System, is made of a lightweight carbon foam core that is flanked by two carbon-carbon composite panels. The sun-facing panel is sprayed with a white coating that will reflect as much of the sun’s energy away from the spacecraft as possible. While the Thermal Protection System was once attached to Parker Solar Probe during testing in 2017, this is the first time the heat shield has been fully integrated with the spacecraft.
The mission is expected to achieve many firsts, traveling nearly seven times closer to the sun than any previous spacecraft. Once launched, Parker Solar Probe will charge towards the sun at over 430,000 miles per hour, making it the fastest man-made object in the solar system. To understand that speed in context, that’s fast enough to travel from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. in one second, leaving Elon Musk’s wildest dreams for a Hyperloop in the dust.
After launching on August 4, Parker Solar Probe will use Venus’ gravitational pull to shrink its orbit around the sun. These flybys will take roughly seven years, eventually bringing the probe as close as 3.7 million miles from the center of the solar system. Its final loop within the sun’s corona is expected in late 2024.
As part of NASA’s Living with a Star Program, Parker Solar Probe is meant to explore aspects of the sun that directly affect life and society. The results of this mission not only have the potential to improve scientists’ understanding of the sun’s atmosphere, but could mark a historic milestone in society’s longstanding pursuit of Helios.
Most residents of Botswana had no idea that a bright white fireball would explode in the sky on June 2. It lit up the sky as it zoomed through the upper atmosphere, illuminating the region in a strange white glow before it exploded in a flash of light. Since then, researchers have been scouring the area for traces of the asteroid, and on Monday, they announced their success: After days of searching in the desert, they’d found a piece of the once-great fireball.
Asteroid disintegrates over southern Africa
The fragment of asteroid 2018 LA was discovered in Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve, which, at 20,400 square miles, is the second-largest reserve of its kind in the world. To find it in that enormous swath of the Kalahari desert, researchers from theSETIInstitute, the University of Botswana’s Okavango Research Institute,NASA, and the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa combed throughsurveillancevideos and other footage to calculate the meteor’s exact position and altitude.
They got a headstart by using data collected by the University of Arizona’s Catalina Sky Survey, which actually spotted the asteroid eight hours before it raced toward Earth.
The team narrowed down their search to an area of only 77 square miles.
“The biggest uncertainty we faced was to determine where exactly the meteorites fell,” says SETI senior research scientist Peter Jenniskens, Ph.D., a subject expert of the SETI Institute in California, in a statement released Friday. The team discovered that the asteroid broke up into many fragments, which were scattered by the wind. Fortunately, they were able to narrow down the fragments’ whereabouts to a relatively small area of 77 square miles.
From there, the hunt became very low-tech and, at times, quite dangerous. Geoscientists from various Botswana research institutions, guided by Jenniskens, could do nothing but walk through the grass, shrubs, and sand looking for unusual stones while avoiding elephants, snakes, and lions. After five days, Lesedi Seitshiro, a student at Botswana International University of Science and Technology, spotted the small rock in the sand.
A fragment of the great fireball that lit up the sky over Botswana.
Tiny as it is, the meteorite is significant because it’s rare that anyone ever finds pieces of an asteroid first spotted in space. This is only the second time in recorded history that this has happened. In 2009, another team led by Jenniskens discovered pieces of a truck-sized asteroid that had blown up over an 18-mile stretch of the Nubian Desert in 2008. LA 2018, in comparison, was only about six feet across. As such, the Catalina Sky Survey team that spotted it deemed it non-dangerous and didn’t alert anyone, which is why it was such a surprise when the fireball lit up the Botswana sky.
Astronomers detected this small asteroid just 8 hours before it struck Earth’s atmosphere over southern Africa on June 2, 2018, producing a terrific explosion. Now researchers report finding its meteorites.
The 1st meteorite was found after 5 days of walking and scouring a landscape of sand, thick tall grass, shrubs and thorn bushes. Meteorite expert Tomas Kohout (left) and gamekeeper Kegilwe Mogotsi in Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
An international team of researchers in Botswana has found meteorites known to be fragments of asteroid 2018 LA, which astronomers detected just eight hours before it struck Earth’s atmosphere on June 2, 2018. The space rock was captured in videos (such as the one below) as it disintegrated at a height of 30 miles (50 km) in the atmosphere.
After searching for five days, the team found the first meteorite in Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
This is only the third time an asteroid has been detected before striking Earth’s atmosphere, and it’s the second time fragments of the inbound rock have been recovered. The first time was in October 7, 2008, when a 13-foot (4-meter) asteroid, designated as 2008 TC3, exploded over Sudan.
This time, astronomers discovered the small asteroid on a Saturday morning, June 2, and were surprised when its trajectory suggested it would pass very, very close to Earth just hours later. They detected the asteroid with the 60-inch (1.5-meter) telescope at Mt. Lemmon, which is part of the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona.
Credit: Peter Jenniskens/Botswana International University of Science and Technology
Asteroid 2018 LA (previously ZLAF9B2) seen at a farm in Vanzylsrus, South Africa (Picture: Melissa Delport/YouTube)
It looks like there is a good probability ZLAF9B2 will impact the Earth within the next few hours. (Plot from MPML and Peter Birtwhistle) https://projectpluto.com/temp/z.png
Trajectory models suggest small asteroid ZLAF9B2 impacted our atmosphere over South Africa on June 2, and U.S. government sensors and satellites confirmed the event. After mounting a search, an international team of researchers has now found fragments of the asteroid.
When it struck Earth’s atmosphere, asteroid 2018 LA produced an explosion with an intensity of about 1 kiloton, which suggests an estimated size for the space rock of 10 to 16 feet (3 to 5 meters) in diameter.
Peter Jenniskens, a meteorite expert from NASA Ames and SETI Institute, along with Jarmo Moilanen and Esko Lyytinen of the Finnish Fireball Network, made calculations to determine the area to search for meteorites.
The space rock will be investigated further by a research consortium of scientists.
A fragment of asteroid 2018 LA, which entered Earth’s atmosphere on June 2, 2018, causing a terrific explosion.
Bottom line: Researchers have found meteorite fragments of asteroid 2018 LA in Botswana. The asteroid exploded in the atmosphere over southern Africa on June 2, 2018.
How These Astronauts Had Life-Changing Experiences With Aliens
How These Astronauts Had Life-Changing Experiences With Aliens
How often have we thought about the existence of life beyond Earth, and feared that if we ever encountered extraterrestrial beings, they might wreak all kinds of havoc on our planet, as shown in the movies.
But the pertinent question still remains, do aliens exist?
Some might think the only people who believe in aliens are "forum-dwelling internet conspiracy theorists," but several NASA astronauts believe extraterrestrials exist and have been in touch with humanity for a long period, reports said.
Data cruncher and blogger Sam Monfort in his blog on Feb. 21 said the number of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) sightings is currently at an all-time high. He wrote that one of the first recorded UFO sightings was in Portland in 1905, where a "buzzing sphere-shaped UFO descended from the clouds."
According to Monfort's report, there have been 104,947 reported sightings on record over the past 100-plus years. He used information from the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), which collects and disseminates objective UFO data and keeps careful logs of all UFO sightings worldwide.
Furthermore, there have been several astronauts such as Edgar Mitchell, Cady Coleman, Edwin Buzz Aldrin and Dr Brian O’Leary who have claimed to have seen UFOs. Aldrin, one of the first people to walk on the Moon, had shared his experience on board the Apollo 11, when he and fellow astronauts saw something flying alongside their spacecraft. Initially, they thought it was the final stage of a detached rocket, until mission control confirmed it was 6000 miles away from them.
Buzz Aldrin
Both Neil Armstrong and Aldrin saw UFOs shortly after their historic landing on the Moon in Apollo 11 on July 21, 1969, according to unconfirmed reports. NASA astronaut Armstrong believed aliens have a base on the Moon and they apparently warned Armstrong and others to "get off and stay off the Moon."
During a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" session, Aldrin said the "first humans to set foot on Mars should never return to earth."
When one user asked Aldrin if he believed in aliens and asked him about the sightings he saw on board Apollo 11, the astronaut replied: "On Apollo 11 en route to the Moon, I observed a light out the window that appeared to be moving alongside us. There were many explanations of what that could be, other than another spacecraft from another country or another world - it was either the rocket we had separated from, or the 4 panels that moved away when we extracted the lander from the rocket and we were nose to nose with the two spacecraft."
Although Aldrin was reluctant to describe the sighting as an extraterrestrial craft, he believes there are other life forms in space.
Edgar Dean Mitchell
In 1971, Mitchell became the sixth person to walk on the Moon, and the journey spiritually transformed his life in such a way that he devoted much of his time exploring "esoteric realms of science, psychic phenomena and the existence of extraterrestrial beings."
He was convinced after the journey to the Moon that "aliens have been observing us and have been here for some time." Mitchell once even claimed that "peace-loving" aliens had visited Earth to save humanity from nuclear war, and indicated the Vatican knew about the existence of extraterrestrials.
Mitchell, who had been outspoken about his belief in aliens, told Mirror Onlinethat top-ranking military sources had spotted UFOs during weapons tests. He also said that strange crafts flying over missile bases at the White Sands facility have been spotted by military insiders. The facility is a government-owned rocket engine test site where the world's first ever nuclear bomb was detonated in 1945.
Gordon Cooper
Cooper was one of the seven astronauts who took part in Project Mercury, the first human spaceflight program of the U.S., which ran from 1958 to 1963. Cooper, the last American to fly in space alone, had said he spotted UFOs flying over Germany seven years before he went into space.
In 1963, when he shot into space in a Mercury capsule for a 22-orbit journey around the world, Cooper told the tracking station he could see a glowing, greenish object appearing in front of him and approaching his capsule. The UFO was reportedly "real and solid," because even the tracking radar had picked it up, according to syti.net.
According to a taped interview by author, J.L. Ferrando, Cooper revealed how he felt he was living with a secret, which was imposed on all specialists in astronautics. "I can now reveal that every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us. And there are thousands of witness reports and a quantity of documents to prove this, but nobody wants to make them public," he said. He added: "Because authority is afraid that people may think of God knows what kind of horrible invaders. So the password still is: We have to avoid panic by all means."
O'Leary, who was one of the 11 astronauts named for a possible NASA Mars mission in the 1960s, authored three books that spoke about our connection to UFOs. He had also lectured on the subject across the world.
Regarding crop circles that he first saw in 1991 in England, he said in an interview: "The Crop Circle phenomenon, besides the hoaxed ones, is a very real phenomenon created by some unknown, probably non-human intervention," according to UFO Evidence.
O’Leary is also reported to have said, "There is abundant evidence that we are being contacted. Civilizations have been monitoring us for a very long time and that their appearance is bizarre from any type of traditional materialistic western point of view.”
'Apollo' Unpacks Urban Legends, Gossip, Speculation Behind First Moon Landing
'Apollo' Unpacks Urban Legends, Gossip, Speculation Behind First Moon Landing
By Forrest Helvie, Newsarama Contributor
Credit: Mike Collins (Self-Made Hero)
"One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
- Neil Armstrong.
We all know the famous words associated with the first moon landing from 1969, but how many of us know the real story behind those early space explorers?
Newsarama spoke with writers Chris Baker and Matt Fitch about "Apollo," which they completed with artist Mike Collins. The duo explained why this was a story they were excited to tell and the ways in which they might surprise readers with a chapter from our school history books that we already know … or do we?
Newsarama: "Apollo" aims unpacks the urban legends, the gossip, and speculation surrounding the historical moon landing that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins were involved in back in 1969. Matt, Chris, In truth, are most American really aware of their being much "gossip and speculation" around this event? What led you to want to explore this little known "story behind the story"?
Matt Fitch: Most people know the broad strokes of the story but what we were interested in were the elements that you might not find in the official accounts - the resentment Buzz held against Neil for being first out of the Lunar Lander, the program being used as a political tool, the fact that not everybody in America thought it was a particularly good use of tax-payers money and wanted it shut down… overall the story is positive and full of hope, but when you look a little deeper, it isn't always as 'star-spangled' as the history books would have us believe.
Chris Baker: One piece of gossip we often hear is that the moon landing didn't happen. We didn't want to give this silly urban legend credence by overtly referencing it in the book but we hope that by exploring this piece of history on a more human level we can make people believe once and for all that this was a real event involving real people. They breathed, they felt, they loved. You can't fake that.
Nrama: Of the historical characters involved, whose narrative arc did you find most compelling and why?
Fitch: When Chris and I started writing "Apollo" I'd just become a new father, so Neil Armstrong's loss of his young daughter resonated strongly with me. He never admitted it himself, but many believe that this tragedy was what led him to throw himself into the space race and ultimately walk on the moon. Neil was an "everyman" and very easy to relate to, so using his arc to explore universal concepts of life, death and rebirth was something that I found very compelling.
Baker: Mike Collins (the astronaut, not the artist!), for me personally, was the most fun. He is that forgotten American hero. Because his story is largely untold, we felt most comfortable getting inventive with him. He had a list of jobs, which were pivotal to the mission, and we explored their importance. He ultimately succeeded and confronted the demons racing through his mind.
Nrama: By and large, the comic itself concerns itself with historical fact, or at least, realistic accounts of what took place surrounding the moonwalk in 1969. What sources did you use to help develop the dialogue we hear between son and father, husband and wife, and President and First Lady?
Fitch: Our main 'source' was our imaginations. Anybody can read up about these events on Wikipedia, but as writers, we wanted to put ourselves and our readers into the shoes of the key characters. How would Neil's wife Janet be feeling as her husband blasted off into the unknown? How would she act around other people? What would she say to her children? How would Apollo 11's message of peace and unity go down with the soldiers fighting in Vietnam? What would the loving wife of the President say to calm her husband on the eve of the launch as the press and naysayers closed in? As writers, it was up to us to give voices to these characters.
Baker: The conversation between the President and First Lady was something of a guess based on our understanding of the people and the way America reacts to events and assigns praise or blame. Richard Nixon was a man with a chip on his shoulder, and this scene used that. It's us using creative license to speculate about what a private conversation might sound like based on our understanding of the historical figures.
Nrama: There is one page in particular that seemed especially of interest when President Nixon recounts to his wife how the success of the Apollo mission would be attributed to John F. Kennedy but its failure would rest on him. How accurate would you say Nixon's assessment was given where we are now?
Fitch: Nowadays, when you think of the moon, you think of Kennedy. He was the man with the vision to get the ball rolling. Nixon… well, he'll be remembered for other things, won't he?
Baker: The whole thing feels a bit tainted by his presence when you stop and think. This 'crooked' guy has his signature on the moon right now. But the world may have remembered him if the mission failed.
Nrama: Because we're focusing on an historical account, it makes sense for the artwork to adopt a more realistic style for the story. Yet, there are times when Mike Collins deviates from a more linear approach especially with some of the flashback and dream sequences. Can you share your thoughts on why the decision was made to go in this direction, and how do you think it helps further tell the story of Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins?
Fitch: We wanted there to be a clear delineation between the more factual 'present day' mission scenes and the more 'point of view' nature of the flashbacks, so we worked with Mike, as well as colourists Kris Carter and Jason Cardy, to create a subtle change in style between certain scenes, which we think goes a long way to helping the reader get under the skin of what the characters were going through in those moments.
Baker: The art needed to adapt to the mood of the script to create the glowing dreamlike state the narrative is set up to be. The 'dream' sequences were purposely written to be less linear, with a looser panel structure and more whimsical, dreamlike dialogue.
Nrama: The Ben Day Dots were one method Kris and Jason used to help set the tone for the story. How else did you and both along with Collins and the art team help immerse the reader in the setting of the story?
Fitch: We originally approached Mike to draw "Apollo" because his overall style lent itself well to the classic comic book look we were aiming for. But what we didn't know when we gave him the script was that he was a keen space historian himself and knew the details of the mission inside out! Between the three of us we made sure that everything on the page, from the ships to the spacesuits to the switches on the flight consoles were accurate so that readers could be fully immersed in the world of the story.
Baker: We also made sure that all the dialogue was authentic to the era. Some of the in-ship stuff is adapted from actual NASA transcripts, but everything else came from us and we didn't want to ruin the experience for anybody by getting the lingo wrong! It was fun to research and write.
Nrama: For a final thought, what do you think it is about the 1969 moon landing that makes it a story worth telling almost fifty years after the event?
Fitch: The moon landing shows what we as a species can do when we put our mind to it. At the time, the optimists believed setting foot on another world would usher in an era of peace on this one. Sadly, that reality hasn't emerged yet, but maybe by reminding ourselves what we're capable of it can one day.
Baker: Nothing close to setting foot on another world has happened in nearly 50 years. This story is awe-inspiring and could do with more light on it. It was an adventure just reading about these three incredible men and having a chance to enhance and dramatically interpret their personal stories, and we hope to pass on some of that awe to our own readers.
HELSINKI, Finland — A senior designer with the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology has presented updated details for an upcoming series of new rockets to expand China's launch capabilities, including super-heavy-lift and reusable rockets.
Long Lehao, a chief designer with CALT, a major launch vehicle institute under the main contractor for China's space activities, revealed the details in a lecture at Tsinghua University in Beijing on May 31.
Long gave an overview of the history and progress of Chinese launch vehicles before providing updates on new projects under development, notably the Long March 9.
The Long March 9 will be a Saturn V-class super-heavy-lift rocket comparable in capacity to the Space Launch System currently being developed under NASA.
According to Long, the Long March 9 will be capable of lifting 140 metric tons to low Earth orbit, 50 tons to Earth-Moon transfer orbit, and 44 tons to Earth-Mars transfer orbit.
The 93-meter-high Long March 9 is expected to have a launch mass of over 4,000 metric tons, producing close to 6,000 tons of thrust.
The core stage will have a diameter of 10 meters while four boosters will each have a diameter of up to 5 meters. This would make the boosters comparable to the Long March 5, China's largest rocket so far, which debuted in 2016 and last July suffered a first stage engine issue that prompted a redesign. A third flight of the rocket is expected around November.
The Long March 9 is slated to be ready for a test flight around 2030, with Long adding that progress on the project includes successful forging of 10-meter-diameter alloy rings and breakthroughs related to 500-ton-thrust kerosene-liquid oxygen and 220-ton-thrust hydrolox engines.
Crewed lunar landings, Mars sample return
Escape Velocity - A Quick History of Space Exploration
The first major mission of the Long March 9 is expected to be a single-launch Mars sample return mission, while the rocket is also being designed to facilitate lunar missions, including crewed landings.
CALT has previously said that it is studying a mission profile which would see the Long March 5B—a variant of the Long March 5 to be used for low-Earth orbit launches, including lofting modules for the country's space station—be used to launch the crewed spacecraft which would then rendezvous in LEO with the lunar spacecraft stack launched by the Long March 9 ahead of trans-lunar injection.
Toward this goal, two versions of a new generation crewed spacecraft are being developed, with a scale return-capsule test having been carried out in 2016. The debut of the Long March 5B, expected to follow a successful return-to-flight of the Long March 5, will include a new test related to the spacecraft in summer 2019.
Long also stated that the Long March 9 would be able to launch components for a space-based solar power system, a project which has been previously stated by senior Chinese aerospace and military figures to be under consideration.
Move to reusability
Long explained in the lecture that the Long March 8 would be CALT's first rocket to attempt first stage reusability, which will launch for the first time in 2021.
As previously reported, the Long March 8 is based on the existing Long March rockets, using a core very similar to that of the 3.35-meter-diameter Long March 7, a new-generation medium-lift rocket that had its maiden flight in 2016, with the second stage to be based on the 3-meter-diameter liquid hydrogen-liquid oxygen second stage of the older Long March 3A. The rocket will also use two solid propellant boosters, likely based on the Long March 11.
Long stated that both the first stage and boosters will attempt vertical landing.
The Long March 8 was originally intended to be an expendable rocket to increase China's lift capacity for launches to sun-synchronous orbits, but the plans have changed to allow China to experiment with vertical landing and reusability.
China launched its first satellite into space in 1970, with a Long March 1 putting the Dongfanghong-1 satellite into orbit. The country has since developed a series of Long March rockets, which take their name from a mythologized retreat by the Red Army of the Communist Party of China in the 1930s.
The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), which owns CALT, released a long-term space transportation roadmap in fall 2017 which stated 2035 as the target for achieving full reusability for its launch vehicles. Long did not, however, appear to comment on the possible reusability of the Long March 9.
This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.
Enormous Flash after Ball Of Fire changes direction over ocean Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil
Enormous Flash after Ball Of Fire changes direction over ocean Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil
An enormous flash has been seen in the Rio Grande do Norte sky intrigued residents of several cities on Saturday night, July 7, 2018 around 10:35 pm.
Residents of the cities of Mossoró, Areia Branca, Assú, Baraúna, Severiano Melo and even in Ceará cities like Icapui said they had witnessed the flash.
The first information is that a ball of fire suddenly appeared upon which it changed direction before falling towards the ocean, eventually hitting the ocean.
"I saw it clearly here on the beach of São Cristóvão and it lit up all the sea. It seemed to me an explosion of something in space," reported witness Daniel Fortunato.
At first glance it looks like a meteorite but since meteorites are not changing direction the question arises what it could have been that exploded over the ocean.
This unexplained event comes shortly after a mysterious object splashed into the ocean off shore Washington.
Enormous Fireball Is Seen In The Sky Over Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. July 7, 2018
“The mutated bacteria showed high aggressiveness and resistance to antibiotics on their return to Earth.”
So, you may ask … why on Earth did Russian scientists bring these mutant bacteria back to Earth? For the answer, you have to attend the COSPAR 2018 convention being held July 12-22 in Pasadena, California. At this, the 60th anniversary of the first meeting of the International Committee for Space Research, the Russian scientists responsible for the mutant bacteria will present a paper about “Biorisk” (didn’t anyone look at the name before sending it back?), a 31-month experiment where eggs of crustaceans and African carp fish were sent to the International Space Station, placed in a container on the outside of it, exposed to 2.5 years of cosmic rays, brought back to Earth, hatched and then asked, “How did that make you feel?”
“In this way, it can be concluded that after the exposure of microorganisms to hostile conditions typical for the open cosmic space, the most resistant and aggressive strains survive.”
The results of the latest experiment confirmed what earlier tests found (yes, Biorisk has actually been on the ISS since 2005) — that bacteria such as Bacillus subtilis which spent time in space came back resistant to 6 out of 8 antibacterial products (no word on whether Purell was one of them – keep scrubbing!). The tougher eggs and embryos of other creatures were also more inclined to be the survivors, and they came back even stronger and more aggressive.
OK, we’ve heard enough. We believe. You can stop bringing the Biorisk mutants back to Earth … before it’s too late.
“The experiment is conducted to confirm the theory of panspermia. According to her, in space, spores of microorganisms are scattered, which move under the pressure of light rays, and falling into the sphere of gravity of the planet, settle on its surface and lay the beginning of the living on this planet. According to this theory, life could be brought to Earth from space. Probably the hit of living organisms of extraterrestrial origin with meteorites and cosmic dust.”
If you accept the idea of panspermia, then it’s too late. However, if you accept panspermia, then the life on Earth that descended from it should be better able to coexist with any life forms it encounters in space or from space — because we may all be related. Right? RIGHT?
If that’s the case, instead of fearing mutant space bacteria, we should welcome them to Thanksgiving dinners, family reunions and summer picnics. If they’re truly space-toughened, they should have no trouble with undercooked turkey or potato salad that’s been out in the sun too long.
Russian Scientists Warn Earth Must Defend Itself From Mutant Space Bacteria
Get ready for another round of doomsday predictions. A comet en-route to our solar system has dramatically increased in brightness and carries with it a giant, glowing green atmosphere twice the size of Jupiter, according to astronomers. The comet, PANSTARRS (C/2017 S3), is visible with low power telescopes now, but if it does continue to increase in brightness it may be visible to the naked eye in parts of the northern hemisphere in early August. It might also disintegrate due to the gas cloud, and as it’s the first time the comet has passed through our solar system, there’s no telling what might happen when the comet’s visit brings it inside Mercury’s orbit and it takes a face-full of unfiltered sunshine.
Comet PANSTARRS C/2017 S3 in Outburst - Its Atmosphere is Twice as Wide as the Planet Jupiter
Comet PanSTARRS (C/2017 S3), which had been chillin’ at magnitude 12.5, experienced an outburst some time on June 30th, rocketing to magnitude ~9.5 overnight. Located in Camelopardalis northeast of the Double Cluster, it was super obvious in the 15-inch [telescope] at low power on July 2.18 UT, appearing as a dense, tailless cotton ball about 3′ across. It looked suspiciously “gassy,” so I applied the Swan Band filter and both the brightness and size of the coma increased, a sure sign of a gas blast from the outburst.
Comet C/2017 S3 may reach magnitude 3 or 4 as it speeds sun-ward in the morning sky en route to an August 16th perihelion. Keep an eye on it…and expect the unexpected. The outburst could continue or even trigger the comet’s disintegration.
The comet’s approach will bring it inside Mercury’s orbit.
A gas outburst in this case refers to a crack or other sudden leak in a comet’s ice surface, which releases gas previously trapped in pressurized caverns. This gas reflects light and a continuing outburst may either increase the comet’s brightness to visible levels, inevitably sparking fearful YouTube videos and a non-trivial amount of references to Nibiru or it may just disintegrate before we get a chance to see it. Easy come, easy go.
Even if it never reaches brightness visible to the naked eye, you’ll still be able to see it with binoculars, according to Bob King:
As it scurries east through Auriga and Gemini C/2017 S3 quickly becomes a binocular object at magnitude 7. Even as it brightens rapidly, possibly reaching 6th magnitude on August 7th on its way to perihelion (August 16th), dawn encroaches. We’ll probably get our last views when it passes Castor and Pollux on August 4–5 before twilight and daylight finish it off. Thereafter the comet remains near the Sun and rapidly fades from view.
The comet Lovejoy as seen from the International Space Station
If you’re interested in trying to observe the comet, there’s more information on how to do so and where in the world the comet will be visible from at Sky and Telescope.
British spies spent 50 years trying to catch UFO, secret dossier reveals
British spies spent 50 years trying to catch UFO, secret dossier reveals
Government hoped to harvest alien technology in order to develop superweapons
‘Flying saucers’ spotted over Sheffield in 1952
British spies spent at least half a century hunting for UFOs in the hope of stealing alien technology, newly declassified files show.
The UK government appears to have been concerned that the Soviet Union or China had already taken control of an unidentified flying object and were using its secrets to develop ultra-advanced warplanes, says the Daily Mail.
According to the secret files, between 1947 to 1997 intelligence services ran two UFO desks - one where the public could phone in sightings, the other assigning tasks for spies to investigate.
The UFO desks were finally closed down after Whitehall expressed concerns that security services “investigating X files stuff such as alien abductions” were being distracted from their main duties.
A review was then undertaken in order to determine whether any information found over the years would be useful to the military.
The resulting report makes up a part of three files running to more than 1,000 pages that were held back from UFO records earmarked for transfer to The National Archives as part of the Open Government project from 2008 to 2013, according to The Sun.
Earlier this year, a complete set of redacted copies was sent to Dr David Clarke, an investigative journalist and lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, ahead of their release to the official archives, which is imminent.
The documents reveal that the Royal Air Force expressed significant interest in finding a UFO to come up with an innovative way of beating enemies during the Cold War.
Spies were trained on what to look for when identifying foreign objects, and were told to pay particular attention to any aircraft “behaving like a UFO”.
An unnamed Air Force commander wrote that security services staff should “look out for high velocities, sharp manoeuvre, stationary ‘flight’, and few radar returns”.
Clarke, former curator for The National Archives UFO project, said: “Even though [the files] have been partly censored they can’t conceal the fact the UK military were interested in capturing UFO technology - or what they coyly refer to as ‘novel weapon technology’.
“And the files reveal they were desperate to capture this technology, wherever it came from, before the Russians or the Chinese got hold of it first.”
De eerste geprinte sla komt in een vorm die wellicht zelfs kinderen kan bekoren: gummibeertjes!
Het klinkt misschien een beetje gek: sla printen in de vorm van gummibeertjes. Maar dat is precies wat onderzoekers van de KU Leuven voor elkaar hebben gekregen. De groene gummibeertjes leven omdat ze zijn opgebouwd uit plantenweefsel. En hiermee strijkt de universiteit een wereldprimeur in 3D food printing binnen.
3D FOOD PRINTING
3D food printing is een opkomende technologie met een tal aan mogelijkheden. Zo kan de technologie bijvoorbeeld binnen de geneeskunde uitkomst bieden. Veel patiënten hebben bijvoorbeeld moeite met slikken. Door de levende plantencellen te printen, kan de structuur en de textuur van een maaltijd onder controle gehouden worden. Daarnaast is de presentatie aantrekkelijker dan gepureerd voedsel.
Consumptie Hoe smakelijk ze er dan ook uit mogen zien, tot nu toe heeft niemand de beertjes nog kunnen proeven. “Ze zijn niet giftig, maar evenmin goedgekeurd voor consumptie,” zegt onderzoeker Valérie Vancauwenberghe die de techniek ontwikkelde. Niet dat dit voor de wetenschap veel uitmaakt. “Het punt is dat we een protocol hebben ontwikkeld om plantweefsel te printen,” legt ze uit. “Het gaat om de technologie, de beschrijving van de materialen, de optimale recepten en condities.”
Nabootsen Het idee voor de beertjes ontstond met de vraag of de structuur van vruchten ook in het echt nagebootst kan worden, en niet alleen op de computer. “Inkt van chocolade, hummus en glazuur wordt al gebruikt in de voedselindustrie,” zegt Vancauwenberghe. “Printexperimenten met vlees zijn ook beschreven. Maar levende plantencellen zijn daarentegen nog nooit door iemand geprint.” Het resultaat is natuurlijk en artificieel tegelijkertijd. “De inkt bevat pectine en levende cellen die ik heb geïsoleerd uit sla,” vertelt Vancauwenberghe. “Maar ook honinggraatstructuren en blokjes zijn mogelijk, telkens met een verschillende textuur, luchtig of minder luchtig.”
Er is nog wel een weg te gaan om de sla te optimaliseren. Zo bevat echte sla 100 miljoen levende cellen per milliliter, terwijl het bij de geprinte sla gaat om 1 miljoen levende cellen per mililiter. “De hoeveelheid aanwezige cellen is nog niet groot genoeg, maar ze overleven de printkop,” zegt de onderzoeker. Toch kan al gesteld worden dat levende gummibeertjes uit het laboratorium nog maar het begin zijn. In de toekomst zou het bijvoorbeeld best kunnen dat iedereen zijn eigen voedsel print, met de exacte hoeveelheden aan voedingstoffen aangepast aan je eigen noden. “Samen met andere kenniscentra en geïnteresseerde bedrijven gaan we de techniek verder ontwikkelen,” besluit Vancauwenberge.
Parker will whip around the sun two dozen times over the next seven years, skirting within about 6 million kilometers of the star’s surface — more than seven times as close as any previous spacecraft. At its nearest approach, Parker will hurtle through the corona at about 700,000 kilometers per hour, making the craft the fastest human-made object in the solar system. The probe would need only about a second to zip from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C.
Parker’s closeup observations of the corona and the solar wind, the torrent of charged particles that the sun spews into space, could help resolve long-standing mysteries about the inner workings of the sun’s atmosphere. And the new data may improve forecasts for space weather that endangers spacecraft, astronauts and technology on the ground.
The trove of new data gathered by this probe “is going to answer a lot of questions that we couldn’t answer in any other way,” says Craig DeForest, a heliophysicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who is not involved in the mission. “There’s been a tremendous amount of anticipation.”
IN THE THICK OF IT
This view of the sun, as seen the by a coronagraph onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory spacecraft, reveals the turbulent structure of the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona. Parker will be the first probe to soar through this searing plasma.
Scientists have had a probe like Parker on their mission wish lists for nearly 60 years. In 1958, the year that NASA was created, the National Academies’ Space Studies Board recommended that the new agency send a spacecraft inside the orbit of Mercury to investigate the environment surrounding the sun.
Over the years, several research groups have floated solar probe mission ideas, but none could get as close to the sun as astronomers wanted. “It’s only been recently that the technology of heat shields and everything else has converged well enough that we could make this a reality,” DeForest says.
About the size of a small car, the Parker Solar Probe will pack instruments to take 3-D images, measure electric and magnetic fields and catalog high-energy particles. Although the corona sizzles at millions of degrees, the atmosphere is so diffuse that most of the heat that will imperil Parker’s instruments comes from radiation emanating directly from the sun’s surface. This lethally intense sunlight can heat the face of the spacecraft to about 1370°.
To guard Parker’s instruments against that radiation, the probe is armed with a heat shield composed of a layer of carbon foam sandwiched between panes of another carbon-based material similar to the graphite epoxy used to make golf clubs and tennis rackets. As Parker swings around the sun, this heat shield will continuously face the star to keep the instruments tucked behind it safe from radiation up to about 475 times as intense as what Earth-orbiting spacecraft endure.
Parker will dive into the sun’s corona for the first time just three months after launch, sending its first batch of data back to Earth in early December. For scientists, that’s pretty quick gratification: For spacecraft such as New Horizons (SN Online: 6/15/15) that have rendezvoused with more distant solar system objects, the intermission between launch and arrival can span years.
The probe will circle the sun 24 times, using Venus’ gravitational pull to gradually shrink the craft’s orbit. On its first go-round, Parker will fly to about 24 million kilometers from the sun’s surface; on its final few loops in 2024 and 2025, the probe will get within about 6 million kilometers.
ROUND AND ROUND
The Parker probe will circle the sun 24 times over the next seven years, using the gravitational tug of Venus to gradually shrink its own orbit. On its first go-round, Parker will get as close as 24 million kilometers to the surface of the star. On its final few loops, beginning in 2024, the probe will skirt within about 6 million kilometers of the sun’s surface.
The probe may have some fuel left over to keep cruising around the sun after completing its mission-mandated 24 orbits, says Nicola Fox, project scientist for the mission. But eventually, Parker won’t be able to fire the thrusters that it needs to keep its heat shield aimed at the sun. The probe “will start to turn, and bits of the spacecraft that are totally not designed to see the sun will be in full illumination,” says Fox, a heliophysicist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. “The spacecraft will break up into kind of large chunks at first, and then they’ll get smaller and smaller.” Eventually, Parker will be nothing more than a smattering of dust scattered across the corona.
The spacecraft’s legacy, however, will live on. Parker’s observations are expected to help answer questions about the corona and solar wind that researchers have puzzled over for decades.
For instance, Parker data could explain the strange temperature difference between the surface of the sun, which is a toasty 5500°, and the several-million-degree corona. This spike may be due to vibrating magnetic field lines heating up material in the corona, or jets of material from the sun’s surface that inject energy into its atmosphere (SN Online: 8/20/17). Parker could also help explain where solar wind particles get the energy to speed up as they escape the sun’s immense gravitational pull (SN Online: 8/18/17).
The enigmatic coronal heat and acceleration of the solar wind probably have a common cause, says David McComas, a space plasma physicist at Princeton University. McComas is the principal investigator for one of the probe’s instruments, the Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun. There are many competing theories to explain these two problems, but Parker’s views of the sun should help winnow down the list of possible explanations.
Parker’s observations should also give new insight into the origins of those highly energetic particles that escape the sun into the solar wind, McComas says. The solar wind washes over Earth at hundreds of kilometers per second, and disturbances in this cosmic breeze can mess with satellites, spacecraft and power grids (SN: 8/19/06, p. 120). A better understanding of the sun’s tumultuous atmosphere and solar wind could lead to better forecasts for potentially dangerous space weather events.
On top of all that, Parker’s zoomed-in view of the sun will undoubtedly raise new mysteries about our home star, McComas says. The data haul from “one mission [often] just whets our appetites for even more observations down the road,” he says.
Fortunately, another spacecraft bound for the sun is launching right on the heels of the Parker probe. The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter, set to take flight in 2020, will provide the first direct images of the sun’s poles. Paired with Parker’s observations closer to the sun’s midriff, Solar Orbiter data may reveal how the solar wind varies at different latitudes.
POLAR EXPLORER The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter (seen in this composite illustration) is scheduled for launch in 2020. Its observations of the sun’s poles could be paired with Parker’s lower-latitude data to reveal how the solar wind varies across its surface.
SPACECRAFT: ATG MEDIALAB/ESA; SUN: P. TESTA (CFA)/SDO/NASA
These missions aren’t just about getting to know our own solar system. “Once you know about how our star works, you’re going to know a lot more about … other stars,” Fox says.
Whatever scientific discoveries come from the mission, it’s difficult not to get excited for the sheer “wow” factor of the probe’s impending expedition. “This is really freaking cool,” DeForest says. “We’re launching a probe and flying it through [several-] million-degree plasma on the periphery of a star. I mean, how cool is that?”
UFO spotters looking out over the Forth Valley in central Scotland where unexplained sightings are said to be frequent. (Credit: Colin McPherson/Sygma/Getty Images)
In 2017, several news organizations revealed the existence of the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a U.S. government funded investigation into unidentified flying objects from 2007 to 2012. This secret $22 million program, however, was not the first of its kind. In fact official government UFO studies began in the 1940s with Project Sign providing some of the most credible videos of aerial phenomenon to date. The 2017 revelation that the U.S. government was actively researching UFOs reignited world interest in UFOs and aliens. Let’s revisit five of the most believable UFO sightings of the 21st century.
1. The Lights Above the New Jersey Turnpike (2001)
It takes a lot for motorists to stop alongside a highway to look towards the sky, but on July 14, 2001, drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike did just that. For around 15 minutes just after midnight, they marveled at the sight of strange orange and yellow lights in a V formation over the Arthur Kill Waterway between Staten Island, New York, and Carteret, New Jersey. Cataret Police Department’s Lt. Daniel Tarrant was one of the witnesses, as well as other metro area residents from the Throgs Neck Bridge on Long Island and Fort Lee, New Jersey near the George Washington Bridge. Air traffic controllers initially denied that any airplanes, military jets or space flights could have caused the mysterious lights, but a group known as the New York Strange Phenomena Investigators (NY-SPI) claimed to receive FAA radar data that corroborated the UFO sightings of that night.
An image taken from a video released by the Defense Department’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program of a 2004 encounter near San Diego between two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets and an unknown object. (Credit: U.S. Department of Defense via The New York Times/Redux)
2. The USS Nimitz Encounter (2004)
On November 14, 2004, the USS Princeton noted an unknown craft on radar 100 miles off the coast of San Diego. For two weeks, the crew had been tracking objects which appeared at 80,000 feet and plummeted to hover right above the Pacific Ocean. When two FA-18F fighter jets from the USS Nimitz arrived in the area, they first saw what appeared to be churning boiling water in an oval shape underneath the surface. Then, in a few moments, a white Tic Tac-like object appeared above the water. It had no visible markings to indicate an engine, wings, or windows, and infrared monitors did not reveal any exhaust. Commander David Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight of Strike Fighter Squadron 41 attempted to intercept the craft, but it accelerated away, reappearing on radar 60 miles away—it moved three times the speed of sound and twice the speed of the fighter jets. This encounter was one of the stories reported along with the news of AATIP.
3. O’Hare International Airport Saucer (2006)
Flight 446 was getting ready to fly to North Carolina from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, when a United Airlines employee on the tarmac noticed a dark grey metallic craft hovering over gate C17. That day, November 7, 2006, a total of twelve United employees, and a few witnesses outside the airport, spotted the saucer-shaped craft around 4:15 p.m. The witnesses say it hovered for about 5 minutes before shooting upward where it broke a hole in the clouds, enough that the pilots and mechanics could see the blue sky. The news report became the most read story on Chicago Tribune’s website to that date and made international news. However, because the UFO was not seen on radar, the FAA called it a “weather phenomenon” and declined to investigate.
4. The Stephenville Sightings (2008)
The small town of Stephenville, Texas 100 miles southwest of Dallas, is mostly known for its dairy farms, but in the evening of January 8, 2008, dozens of its residents viewed something unique in the sky. Citizens reported seeing white lights above Highway 67, first in a single horizontal arc and then in vertical parallel lines. Local pilot Steve Allen estimated that the strobe lights “spanned about a mile long and a half mile wide” traveling about 3,000 miles per hour. No sound was reported. Witnesses believed the event was reminiscent of the Phoenix Lights sightings of 1997. While the U.S. Air Force revealed weeks later that F-16s were flying in the Brownwood Military Operating Areas (just southwest of Stephenville), many townspeople didn’t buy that explanation, believeing that what they saw was too technologically advanced for current human abilities.
5. East Coast GO FAST Video (2015)
Leaked in 2017 along with the news of the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, was a video that revealed an encounter between an F/A-18 Super Hornet and an unidentified flying vehicle. Seen along the East Coast on a Raytheon Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) Pod, the craft was similar to that spotted off San Diego in 2004: It was a fast-moving white oval about 45-feet-long without wings or exhaust plume. The pilots tracked the object at 25,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean as it flew away and simultaneously rotated on its axis. Whether the vehicle was a product of another country’s technology or alien airship remains a mystery.
For more, watch the season premiere of Ancient Aliens Friday, April 27 at 9/8c on HISTORY.
Il faut prendre les histoires de rencontres extraterrestres au sérieux selon cet ancien chercheur de la NASA
Il faut prendre les histoires de rencontres extraterrestres au sérieux selon cet ancien chercheur de la NASA
Bien qu’il n’y ait aucune preuve scientifique concrète d’extraterrestres, un professeur de physique et ex-scientifique de la NASA pense qu’il y a de la vérité dans les histoires de rencontre d’extraterrestres, et que les scientifiques devraient se pencher sur la question.
Le 28 juin, un ancien scientifique de la NASA a publié un article appelant la communauté scientifique à examiner de manière approfondie les preuves d’apparition d’ovnis sur Terre.
Pourquoi devrions-nous étudier scientifiquement les ovnis ?
L’article a été publié quelques jours avant le 2 juillet, qui est le World UFO Day (la journée mondiale des OVNIs).
Kevin Knuth, professeur de physique à l’Université d’État de New York à Albany, décrit deux histoires personnelles sur la spéculation des extraterrestres. La première est arrivée à une conférence de la NASA en 2002. « Vous n’avez absolument aucune idée de ce qui se passe là-bas ! », un participant avait alors dit.
La deuxième histoire s’est produite quand Knuth était un étudiant diplômé en 1988. Quand son professeur de physique a dit que les OVNIS abattaient des missiles nucléaires de l’Armée de l’Air, Knuth ne le croyait pas. Des années plus tard, il a vu un enregistrement d’une conférence de presse avec des responsables de l’armée de l’air décrivant des événements identiques à ce qu’avait dit son professeur.
On nous cache l’existence des aliens
Knuth pense qu’il y a de bonnes chances qu’il y ait des aliens et qu’il y a des preuves pour soutenir cette théorie. Il estime qu’il pourrait y avoir des dizaines de milliers de civilisations intelligentes dans la galaxie.
Malgré l’âge de la galaxie, il n’y a pas de preuves, même controversées, d’une rencontre avec des ovnis. Knuth est convaincu que cette information a été dissimulée par de nombreux gouvernements et qu’il y a suffisamment de preuves pour ouvrir une étude scientifique.
Les cas d’observation d’ovnis déclassifiés
Knuth dit qu’il y a eu des cas documentés d’observations d’OVNIS, y compris à travers des télescopes. Il dit que les observations remontent aux années 1700. Il ajoute qu’en 2017, le gouvernement chilien a publié des images d’un OVNI.
Il affirme que de nombreux pays ont déclassifié des dossiers d’OVNIS, y compris le Canada, la France, l’Equateur et le Royaume-Uni. Il y a des cas où les États-Unis ont même financé des enquêtes sur les aliens, mais certaines conclusions n’ont pas encore été déclassifiées, dit-il. Knuth soutient que tous ces cas devraient encourager la recherche scientifique.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
08-07-2018
DES CENTAINES DE PERSONNES VOIENT COMMENT UN ÉNORME OVNI S'ÉCRASE AU KAZAKHSTAN.
DES CENTAINES DE PERSONNES VOIENT COMMENT UN ÉNORME OVNI S'ÉCRASE AU KAZAKHSTAN.
Beaucoup de croyants en question ont entendu parler d’extra-terrestre du fameux « incident de Roswell UFO », largement diffusé sur les sites Web, la radio et la télévision. Certains ont même entendu parler de la célèbre plante OVNI dans Kecksburg, Pennsylvanie et Shag Harbour, en Nouvelle-Écosse, Canada. Cependant, la plupart des chercheurs sur les ovnis ne savent pas combien d'objets volants non identifiés se sont écrasés à travers le monde à travers l'histoire.
Malheureusement, certains cas n'ont pas été correctement étudiés par le manque de preuves, tandis que d'autres ont peu ou pas de preuves pour étayer les allégations d'un vaisseau spatial étranger lésé. Il est intéressant de savoir que les incidents qui ont été documentés ont fini par être cachés par les gouvernements ou d'autres agences secrètes. Dans World Esotérisme Paranormal've a parlé de certains de ces événements inexpliqués, comme l'incident de Roswell, le crash d'OVNI en Russie et l'autopsie subséquente sur un étranger en 1969, l'étrange objet circulaire est écrasé dans l'Antarctique, ou l'armée canadienne interdit accès au lac Winnipeg après la chute d'un OVNI. Mais cette liste aura maintenant d'ajouter un nouvel incident vu par des centaines de témoins : un énorme OVNI a provoqué un écrasé et le feu dans un terrain vague à l'ouest du Kazakhstan.
"Zone 51" au Kazakhstan
Un énorme OVNI avec des lumières pulsantes s'est écrasé et a explosé à seulement 128 kilomètres du stade de football Cosmos Arena, également appelé Samara Arena, situé dans la ville de Samara en Russie, et où s'est déroulé le match de Coupe du Monde Suède-Angleterre. Russie 2018, avec la victoire pour les anglais par deux tanos à zéro.
Selon le tabloïd britannique Daily Mirror, l'accident mystérieux s'est produit pendant minuit, quand deux boules lumineuses sont apparues illuminant le ciel. L'OVNI s'est écrasé près de la ville de Bostandyk, provoquant une forte explosion qui a fait trembler les maisons voisines et a mis le feu à une montagne voisine, laissant les arbres et les pâturages détruits dans un rayon d'un kilomètre.
Cependant, la chose la plus étrange était que les habitants des régions voisines ont dit que peu de temps après l'accident, les appels téléphoniques étaient coupés, à la fois le téléphone fixe et le téléphone mobile. Certains des témoins les plus courageux sont immédiatement allés à l'endroit où l'OVNI se serait écrasé et au milieu des flammes ont trouvé un mystérieux objet en argent partiellement enterré dans le sol.
Apparemment, il avait une sorte de trappe scellée avec des soupapes en saillie. Certains ont essayé d'ouvrir la couverture sans succès. En dehors de cet objet, il y avait une autre clôture similaire et plus petite.
"Le matériel OVNI ne semble pas être fait de métal", a déclaré l'un des témoins. "C'est doux comme un tissu."
Des sources policières ont dit que l'objet étrange qui est tombé du ciel était comme une balle qui avait été scellée et fermée. Les bords de l'OVNI avaient fondu probablement pour rentrer dans l'atmosphère de la Terre. Il est également important de noter que les habitants de Karasu, une autre ville près du site de l'accident, ont déclaré que l'objet semblait être hors de contrôle dans le ciel avec des lumières pulsantes avant de s'écraser.
"Cette sphère rougeoyante a semblé tourner et entourer notre ville", a expliqué Assel Mukhambetkaliyeva, une femme qui vit dans la ville de Karasu, aux médias locaux. "Ensuite, il est tombé quelque part derrière la ville et a explosé. Il y avait un fort grondement. La maison tremblait.
Une grande flamme et de la fumée apparurent sur le lieu de la chute. Nous avons couru hors de la maison effrayée. C'est bien que personne n'ait été blessé. "
Selon les descriptions fournies par les témoins, l'ovni était en forme de boule et avait environ 3 mètres de diamètre. Ils ont également trouvé un deuxième objet sphérique, plus petit, à proximité. Les pompiers ont mis quatre heures à éteindre les flammes dans la brousse. Les habitants des villes voisines ont été les premiers à arriver à cet endroit et à inspecter l'objet extraterrestre.
Jusqu'à présent, il n'y a eu aucune explication officielle de la part des autorités kazakhes ou des agences spatiales. Alors ils ont rapidement commencé à faire circuler toutes sortes de théories sur l'accident mystérieux. Une théorie est qu'il s'agissait d'un appareil aérospatial comme les restes d'une fusée ou d'un satellite, comme ce fut le cas en Espagne en 2015.
Cependant, les théoriciens de la conspiration et les ufologues s'accordent à dire qu'il s'agit clairement d'un vaisseau d'origine extraterrestre qui s'est écrasé. Ils mettent en évidence le fait que les débris spatiaux n'ont pas de lumières clignotantes et surtout la coupure des communications dans la zone de l'incident, qui coïncide avec le protocole des autorités en cas de chute d'un objet non terrestre, dans le seul but d’être capable de couvrir l'événement. Heureusement, cette fois nous avons des images qui montrent ce qui s'est passé au Kazakhstan. Maintenant, chacun doit tirer ses propres conclusions.
L'étrange objet s'est-il écrasé au Kazakhstan un OVNI d'origine extraterrestre ? Ou est-ce les restes d'une fusée ou d'un satellite, comme le suggèrent les sceptiques ?
Einstein was proved right yet again, complex organics were found on one of Saturn's moons, and a Japanese rocket crashed to Earth in a huge fireball. These are just some of the top stories this week from Space.com.
Photo Credit: University of Warwick
1. Einstein: right again
Einstein's theory of general relativity is verified once again. Scientists tested the theory of gravity with a system composed of two white dwarfs and a neutron star, and it passed with flying colors.
SpaceX's 15th cargo-resupply mission to the International Space Station launched on a reused Falcon 9 rocket on Friday (June 29). Inside the cargo capsule were plants, algae and a variety of other supplies and research gear.
Researchers made the first-ever confirmed direct observation of an exoplanet being born. This gas-giant alien world can be seen in a first-of-its-kind image.
New research reveals how Jupiter's moons create beautiful, complex auroras at the planet's poles. This was accomplished using the closest-ever observations of Jupiter's auroras.
Virgin Orbit is making moves. The company has received a license from the Federal Aviation Administration for the first liftoff of its LauncherOne vehicle, which Virgin Orbit hopes to complete this summer.
For the first time ever, scientists have found meteorites on the ocean floor. Researchers used robotic submarines to search a patch of ocean off the Washington coast.
Photo Credit: Lawrence Sromovsky, University of Wisconsin-Madison/W.W. Keck Observatory
8. Smashing into Uranus
A new study confirms that a massive object, twice the size of Earth, crashed into Uranus billions of years ago. The researchers think this crash explains many of the planet's strange characteristics.
Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
9. Organics on Enceladus
Researchers have discovered carbon-rich organic molecules on Saturn's ocean-harboring moon Enceladus. The molecules were detected in the watery plumes that spew from the moon's icy surface.
Since 2011, astronauts have relied exclusively on Russian Soyuz vehicles to get to and from the International Space Station. But things will change in the next few years, when private American spacecraft take over this taxi service for NASA spaceflyers.
UFO Crashes 80 Miles From England-Sweden World Cup Match Site
UFO Crashes 80 Miles From England-Sweden World Cup Match Site
A UFO with pulsating lights crash landed and exploded near the village of Bostandyk in western Kazakhstan which is just 80 miles from the Russian city hosting England-Sweden World Cup quarter final clash with Sweden on July 7, 2018.
The UFO described as ball-shaped and 10ft in diameter “exploded” on landing - causing local houses to “tremble” and igniting a blaze on the parched steppe destroying bushes and grass covering 100 hectares.
Credit images TheMirror.
The silver colored UFO has a sealed hatch and the UFO material doesn’t look like metal, it is soft like fabric according to witnesses who tried to open the hatch without success. A second spherical object but smaller in size was found nearby reports TheMirror.
Remarkable, immediately after the UFO crash all mobile communications in the remote area were cut off.
Mysterious Flashing Object Caught In The Sky Over New Jersey
Mysterious Flashing Object Caught In The Sky Over New Jersey
On July 5, 2018 the witness recorded unknown flashing lights in the sky over New Jersey.
According the witness the flashing lights are not the typical light in the sky, this one's much stranger.
The mysterious flashes are probably not fireworks otherwise the witness would certainly have mentioned it but a rare aerial phenomenon or eventually unknown object or portal in the sky over New Jersey none the less.
A spooky UFO with pulsating lights crash landed and exploded just 80 miles from the Russian city hosting England's World Cup quarter final clash with Sweden.
Two glowing balls were seen lighting up the midnight sky over the west of the ex-Soviet republic of Kazakhstan.
The eerie UFO crashed near the village of Bostandyk some 1,000ft from the Zhalpakatal-Karasu highway, say police.
The object “exploded” on landing - causing local houses to “tremble” and igniting a blaze on the parched steppe destroying bushes and grass covering 100 hectares.
An "explosion" lit up the night sky in Kazakhstan(Image: east2west news)
Immediately, mobile communications in the remote area were cut, say frightened locals.
Residents rushed to the scene and amid the flames found a silver-coloured object partially buried in the ground.
It has a sealed hatch with a protruding valve. Locals evidently tried to open the hatch without success.
The crash landing ignited a blaze on the parched steppe
(Image: east2west news)
A smaller but similar object was nearby.
One witness said: “The UFO material does not look like metal. It is soft like fabric.”
A law enforcement source said the weird object that fell from the sky was like “a ball that had been welded shut”.
The edges of the UFO had melted possible oil entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.
The UFO is described as ball-shaped and 10ft in diameter
(Image: east2west news)
Residents of Karasu village saw the object spinning in the sky with bright lights pulsating before it crash landed.
Local woman Assel Mukhambetkaliyeva explained: “This glowing sphere seemed to be spinning around and turning over our village.
“Then it fell down somewhere behind the village and exploded. There was a loud rumble. The house trembled.
“A large flame and smoke appeared over the place of the fall. We ran out of the house in fright. It's good that no one was hurt.”
Locals crowded to the scene to inspect the alien object
(Image: east2west news)
The UFO is described as ball-shaped and 10ft in diameter.
A second spherical object - smaller in size - was found nearby, according to witnesses.
It took firefighters four hours to put out the flames on the burning steppe.
Locals have crowded to the scene to inspect the alien object.
One theory is that it was a satellite or spacecraft that crashed to earth in spectacular fashion.
However, there was no announcement about Russian space launches coinciding with the UFO’s appearance.
There was no immediate official comment from the Kazakh authorities nor from space officials in neighbouring Russia.
The first call to police was at 12.07 am local time on Thursday.
News about the curious UFO has only just emerged from this remote area of Kazakhstan.
Humanity is facing now the dawn of a new technological era involving quantum mechanics in almost all aspects of social life, from computation to communication. It might be natural to ask if we shouldn’t consider search for quantum messages from extraterrestrial intelligence.
China has launched the first quantum communication satellite last year bringing the humanity on the verge of a huge jump in communication technology. Considering light as the carrier of the quantum information, the Chinese satellite is primarily designed to test the robustness of quantum entanglement, a bizarre property of quantum systems responsible for quantum computation and quantum communication. Furthermore, this first quantum satellite will probe not only high security data encryption but also a new way of data transfer as quantum information encoded in properties of the light particles, photons.
The quantum communication revolution may prove importance in transferring data at far distances and so, in communicating with our peer intelligence life in the universe.
Is quantum communication through light the answer to our long search for the Extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) signals?
Quantum information processing in Nature
As weird as may sound considering our actual technology of exploring the physical reality, quantum communication might be the primarily way of information transfer in the universe, as a recent article suggests [1] . According to the article, light travelling in the deformed spacetime close to the spinning black holes is constrained to encode and process quantum information pretty much like the information is manipulated in our actual laboratory quantum computers.
Following the curved and twisted lines of the distorted spacetime photons encode quantum bits of information in defined sequences that could make one to think of computer program lines of a code. When eventually escape the black hole influence, photons in the light beams are endowed with simple quantum codes that we may interpret and asses the information they contain.
Since quantum computation and quantum communication seem natural phenomenon occurring in the universe, it might look genuine to consider quantum communication with light as the proper way advanced civilization exchange information.
Will We Ever Find and Understand Extraterrestrial Messages ?
Searching for extraterrestrial quantum messages
We already have the technological capabilities to detect and measure quantum information encoded in light. Accordingly, many university laboratories and private companies around the world are testing quantum technology in all aspects of their applicability, from encoding quantum algorithms in photons, to transferring quantum bits at significant distances and to storing quantum information.
The technological equipment researchers are using now in labs may well serve to analyze the light captured by telescopes from outer space and measure the quantum information stored in every photon. Moreover, pointing the telescope in the right direction in space, considering all the earth-like exoplanets [2] lately discovered by NASA, our chances to detect quantum signals increase.
Initially, we may only detect and measure elementary quantum states exhibiting a certain extent of quantum entanglement or even maximally entangled Bell states. This is a clear sign that we are not alone.
Although, we may detect and decode fragments of quantum information stored in the astronomical light, to properly identify the encoded message we need some special tools.
Quantum computation
Detection the quantum information encoded in light might be the premise to quantum communicating with ETI, but still it not resolves the problem of interpreting the content of the message. The required instrument that hypothetically may arrange the detected quantum states in the right sequence to decipher the quantum message is the quantum computer. Harnessing the computation tremendous power of quantum computers quantum states of photons may be put together in the right order to form the intelligible output.
The efforts to create a functional quantum computer are now in the final stage of moving the final product out of laboratory and implement it on the industrial level. In the not so distant future quantum computation will be part of our daily routine.
Still, the fact that we will not be able to properly interpret the quantum message we may detect from outer space intelligent life should not affect our quantum search for ETI; even the SETI program if will one day detect an extraterrestrial signal, most probably won’t be able to immediately decrypt its content.
Instant alert
Another key ingredient in the attempt to quantum communicate with other intelligent forms of life in the universe is a mean to decrypt quantum messages. We should need a quantum key. The quantum key ensures the security of the communication and endow the receiver with the necessary tool to properly asses the content of the message. In the absence of the quantum key we may not be able to properly decipher a hypothetical quantum message ETI may communicate.
Although the quantum key is missing, we should emphasize here a remarkable property of quantum entanglement. Thus, the measurement of the quantum state of one photon of an entangled pair instantly decays the state of the other. Roughly speaking, when we will first detect and measure the quantum information encoded in photons by ETI, the sender of the message will intently be avert. Our first quantum measurement acts like an “alert button”, instantly alerting the sender ETI that another technological superior civilization in the universe is raising.
In conclusion, all we have to do is to measure the quantum information stored in one tiny photon to connect ourselves to the “universal quantum internet”.
The past month has seen several fairly major developments with regards to the discovery of organic molecules at different locations in the solar system. First NASA announced the discovery of variations in methane concentrations on Mars, followed by the discovery of organic molecules in Martian mudstone. More recently it was revealed that the Cassini probe had observed even more massive organic molecules on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. But if organic can have abiotic origins, what is it about these recent discoveries that point to the possibility of life elsewhere in the Solar-system?
The news of the observations listed above and in more detail below has generally been met with one of two reactions. Some are excited about the revelations and believe that they indicate that we may finally be on the trail of evidence that life has or does exist elsewhere in our solar system with implications for the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. Sceptics correctly point out, however, that the phrase ‘organic molecules’ simply refers to molecules comprised of rings or chains of carbon with other common elements such as oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen. As such, these molecules can’t be too closely associated with life. Organic molecules, they point out, can be created by mechanisms that don’t involve life and it’s wrong to see ‘organic molecule’ and immediately assume biology. They also point out that methane has been discovered on Mars before and that this discovery didn’t immediately lead to speculation of life.
So who is right here?
The answer is a little from column A, a little from column B.
Consider complexity
Whilst the recent discoveries resemble similar finds in the past and there remains a possibility that these molecules arose through processes other than life, what makes these discoveries so significant is the circumstances that surround them, the situations that we have found these carbon-rich molecules in and the patterns in those observations.
When it comes to the discovery of life elsewhere in the solar system, the devil is in the details, or perhaps more accurately in the complexity.
Lee Cronin, a chemist at the University of Glasgow indicates why astrobiologists look for complex organic molecules as potential signs of extraterrestrial life by pointing out that the more complex the more likely these molecules are a sign of biological processes. “Biology has one signature: the ability to produce complex things that could not arise in the natural environment,” Cronin suggests the use of a system to count the number of unique steps such as chemical side groups or ring structures in the formation of a compound to indicate molecules which are biological in origin. He suggests that any structure requiring 15 or so unique steps would indicate a strong chance of biological origin.
Life on Mars?
The idea of life on Mars has been explored in various forms of media, not least lurid science fiction
Without a shadow of a doubt the most interest in extraterrestrial life concerns our neighbour Mars. This is perhaps to be expected as the idea of life having existed on Mars has been popularised by the media and fiction writers for decades. To the scientific community though, Mars represents perhaps the most logical first step in the search for life in the solar system for several reasons. In terms of proximity, it’s our easiest option for exploration and sample collection. In addition to this, there are some similarities between Mars and Earth that would favour the type of life that has thrived on Earth or would have at some point in our neighbour’s history.
the fact that Mars has a similar axial tilt to Earth means that it has similar changes in seasons
These similarities include a similar axial tilt leading to seasonal variability, similar atmospheric conditions, similar land surface area, the presence of polar ice caps and crucially the presence of surface water. Evidence also suggests that Mars may once have had a magnetosphere as Earth does now. This is crucial in the development of early life as it would have protected the surface from solar and cosmic radiation allowing early molecules to flourish and grow in complexity without the risk of being broken down or destroyed by harmful radiation.
Since landing on the surface of Mars in 2012, the Curiosity Rover has detected traces of atmospheric methane, albeit in far scarer supply in the atmosphere of Mars than it is found in Earth’s atmosphere, 0.4 parts per billion (ppb) in comparison to 1800 ppb. On Earth, the majority of atmospheric methane is generated by microbial life but before ascribing the same cause to Mar’s methane one must consider that methane can be generated in other ways. Ways that don’t involve biology. Hydrothermal reactions with olivine-rich rocks underground can generate it, as can reactions that are driven by ultraviolet (UV) light striking the carbon-containing meteoroids and dust that constantly rain down on the planet from space.
Methane’s atmospheric methane as recorded by the Curiosity rover
(NASA)
What is interesting about Mars’ atmospheric methane isn’t its presence alone though. Rather, it’s the fact that Mars seems to have an excess of methane and also displays seasonal variation in its atmospheric methane concentration. This variation is approximately three times higher than can currently be explained by known events such as the thinning of the atmosphere caused by the freezing of carbon dioxide at the planet’s southern polar cap. Even though we’ve been aware of methane in Mars’ atmosphere since at least 2004 thanks to Earth-based remote sensing and telescopes, this seasonal variation and some variations in time and location weren’t seen until we were able to make in-situ observations.
One of two pieces of recent research concerning organic molecules on Mars published in Science earlier this month concludes that the observed spikes in methane concentration are consistent with it being released from small localized sources on the surface or subsurface reservoirs. The seasonal variation indicates a process by which methane is held at the surface and released at times of higher temperature. This could indicate methane is stored at or just under the planet’s surface and is released in greater volume when heat causes cracks and fissures in the surface layer to expand.
This would seem to indicate that Mars possesses methane-rich sedimentary rock, much like Earth. The question remains how did this methane become trapped in sedimentary rock in the first place?
The Curiosity rover takes a selfie as it drills for mudstone samples. (NASA/Caltech)
A second study also published in Science this month indicates that the storage and preservation of methane and other organic molecules geologically is key to understanding the possibility of ancient life having once existed on Mars. To analyse this, researchers collected samples of mudstone from various sites on the planet’s surface including a dried out lake bed. These samples were baked in Curiosity’s onboard oven, breaking down to release aromatic, aliphatic and thiophenic vapours. These substances could well be the breakdown products of even larger organic molecules.
Aromatic molecules such as benzene are formed with one or more hexagonal carbon rings
They concluded that carbon-rich molecules such as benzenes are widespread in the Martian rock record and there could well be an abundance of such materials further beneath the planet’s surface protected from solar radiation.
Of course, this doesn’t tell us that biological processes are definitely responsible for depositing organic molecules in the geological record of Mars. But it’s encouraging because it does tell us that at some point some process that we are currently unaware of is responsible for these overabundances in carbon-rich organic molecules. We can couple this with the knowledge that in our own planet’s geological record the presence of an excess of organic molecules is a result of biological processes.
Again, a little from column A, a little from column B.
Tantalising signs of life from Saturn’s moon Enceladus?
Perhaps even more significant than the traces of organic molecules found on Mars are the traces of more massive organic compounds from Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Enceladus, a mere 500 km in diameter with a gravitational force 1% that of Earth’s, has long been an interest of astrobiologists due to its global ocean which lies between a surface ice sheet and a rocky core.
Enceladus’ composition makes it a primary candidate for simple life (NASA/Caltech)
The collection of samples from Enceladus is possible via a fly-by from the Cassini probe due to the fact that ice-grains and gas are ejected from the moon to space in cryo-volcanic plumes at the moon’s southern pole. These plumes are likely the result of hydrothermal activity deep within the moon’s porous core. Cassini made several passes through these gas plumes collecting samples to examine.
An artist’s impression of Cassini’s Enceladus flyby
Research published in Nature this month discussed the discovery of molecules of 200 atomic masses and above on Saturn’s moon. To put that into context, molecules 10 times more massive than methane. The finding suggests a thin-film of organic macromolecules on the top of Enceladus’ water table. The sheer size of these molecules has taken researchers by surprise and when coupled with some of Enceladus’ other characteristics, a salty-liquid water ocean, hydrothermal vents and sub-surface geysers, it makes Enceladus a tantalising prospect for extraterrestrial life. The molecules found aren’t amino acids, but they aren’t far away from that size and complexity.
Unfortunately, as Cassini, the probe which collected these samples has now crashed meaning that the collection of further samples may have to wait for now.
Increasingly scientists are coming around to the idea that Enceladus should now be made our primary focus in the search for life in the solar system overtaking previous best candidate, Jovian moon Europa. Carolyn Porco, a prominent planetary scientist who has worked on several key NASA missions, is a strong supporter of Enceladus becoming a primary focus of research. “We simply know more about Enceladus,” Porco stated at the National Geographic Awards in June. “We just don’t know that much about Europa with certainty,” Porco said. “There is a lot of excitement, but it’s speculation at this point. Of course, I’d choose Enceladus. We know it’s the best, and it stands the greatest chance of making that next big step.”
Again, it must be noted that there are possible abiotic pathways to the creation of these molecules, but what remains striking here is that some of the detected organic compounds bare a strong resemblance to compounds found on Earth as a result of the decomposition of biological life.
A little from column A… you get the point.
Don’t call this evidence of life… yet
You’ll notice that articles discussing these findings generally tend to avoid the word ‘evidence’. That’s simply because that as the sceptics point out, at this stage, we simply can’t conclude that detected organic molecules are a result of biological activity. But what we should also consider that the more data points like those we’ve described above that are collected the more likely we are to find something extraordinary. Something else like the extremely massive compounds or seasonal variations in concentration detailed above. Maybe something more significant. It is these outliers in the normal data that make scientists sit up and pay attention.
Other options for the discovery of life elsewhere in the solar-system also exist. As mentioned above, Europa is believed to be a primary candidate due to the fact it hosts the largest ocean in the solar system that we are aware of. In addition to this, another Jovian moon Ganymede is believed to possess a subsurface ocean similar to Enceladus. Saturn’s moon Titan has a subsurface ocean and surface hydrocarbon liquids which could increase the probability of life.
A cross-section of Europa’s surface shown its subsurface salty water ocean
This is coupled with further research recently published that reveals complex organic molecules, the necessary building blocks for life, are far more abundant in the Universe than previously suspected.
Though clearly caution is of the utmost importance when considering the discovery of complex organic molecules and that discovery’s possible significance with regards to the possibility of biological systems, the future does seem promising. These recent discoveries though, suggest we may well be on the verge of discovering extraterrestrial life in our solar system, whether extant or extinct.
This Discovery Shows Life Might Have Come From Space
Who Or How Were Earth’s Ancient Structures Built? Ancient Aliens or Forgotten Technology? … Or Both?
Who Or How Were Earth’s Ancient Structures Built? Ancient Aliens or Forgotten Technology? … Or Both?
Exactly how were the great pyramids in Egypt and Mexico built?
How were the famous Inca & Mayan stones squashed into each other?
How was the great stones of Stonehenge placed high on top of each other
These questions and many more have fascinated people for centuries. Not only are they structures which were built during periods where technology was supposed to be very basic but the more we learn about them the more they baffle us.
For example, the Sphinx and the Pyramids in Egypt are thought to be older than what we are being told. Geologists say that weathering patterns on the Sphinx show rain damage which puts the building date of the Sphinx well past the date of the Egyptians we are lead to believe were responsible for building it.
The pyramids themselves hold many mysteries, much of it appears as scientific code. The layout of the pyramids in Giza are an exact copy of the stars in the Orion’s Belt constellation. Spread out over miles of Egypt’s land the smaller pyramids also line up with the stars of the same constellation. Is Egypt a star map of where our ancestors came from,
More interesting is the coordinates of the pyramids at Giza in Egypt . Their coordinates are 29.9792458 degrees North and what is the speed of light in a vacuum? 299.792,458 metres per second. Coincidence or planned as a message to modern man?
However it should be mentioned that modern latitude is set so that the prime meridian goes through Greenwich England which did not exist at the time the pyramids were built so whatever system they would have used would not have been this one… unless… they were time travellers and knew what system would be in place several thousand years later. Now that would blow the socks of modern man if that were true!
The pyramids are also mentioned on an ancient Sumerian tablet. The Sumerians were in Egypt thousands of years before the ancient Egyptians who are believed to be responsible for building them. This ages them thousands of years more than what is publicly believed.
The Great pyramid hasn’t dropped more than a feet yet the weight of the structure is immense. Modern skyscrapers are designed to drop more once built. The blocks of stone that the pyramids are made from are huge and weigh so much that even modern cranes would struggle to move them. As far as we know there were no modern cranes around.
So how were they built? How were the big stones of Stonehenge lifted? Were there aliens involved in the construction? Was alien technology used? Was there an Atlantis type super race of ancient humans building these structures or did basic man know more about physics than we believe.
The Mayans, Egyptians and Incas are all supposed to have cosmology knowledge and understanding which far surpassed that of which we believe they should have so did they have a better understanding of quantum physics and the little known vibrational physics than we first thought?
The reason I say vibrational physics is that there is a story of a Swedish dr who went to Tibet in 1939 to visit the Dalai Lama. It is said that while he was there the monks were building a high wall using heavy stones. The story goes that he observed the monks lifting up the heavy stones by levitating them using sound.
The monks set up drums and horns in an arc shape a certain distance away from the stones and then began to make sounds which lifted up the heavy stones and they were then pushed into place. Meditation and Eastern philosophies put a lot of emphasis on sound. Especially the Ohm sound which is the Universal vibration rate sound.
Did our forefathers know something that we are just beginning to understand? Was this kept a secret from us?
The Swedish doctor apparently recorded this on film but the film was confiscated from him by British authorities and never seen again. Funny that?
We know about the law of attraction, things which vibrate with the same or similar frequency are drawn to each other like magnets. We have seen what some metals do when they are near magnets but everything has a vibration and a specific rate so that means that everything can be lifted up like a magnet if you hit the right frequency.
Acoustic Levitation in Egypt – Ancient High Technology
Alien abductees talk about being lifted up out of houses. Do aliens know something about acoustic levitation or vibrational physics? Did they give that knowledge to us years ago and has been kept secret by those in the know or did ancient man know about it but it somehow got forgotten about? Maybe it was lost when modern style governments were formed and knew that there would be no profit or tax in construction if everyone had access to this knowledge.
If you are not sure whether you have been abducted by aliens then use this checklist here to find out:
Another puzzling ancient mystery is the stone walls in south and central America. They have been cut and shaped to fit so tight and snug that even to this day people cannot slide pieces of paper between them.
They are also oddly shaped which is interesting. What people do not know is that how they were carved and made. There have been stories and theories that say that the Ancient Mayan and Incan builders were able to soften the stones and mold them into position.
Megalithic Softening of Stone Part 1
A very old story spoke about how an explorer discovered that a mixture made from plants which were found in central America would somehow soften the stone which was then pushed and molded into shape. How true this is no one knows.
What is interesting is that there are very little scratch and tooling marks to see. We do have thousands of years of weathering so the smallest marks might have been eroded but the stone work across central and south America is pretty impressive.
Maybe the stone was an ancient version of concrete and were molded and fashioned into shapes. This is another theory being put forward today.
What do you think? Were our ancestors smarter than we give them credit for using technology we no longer use or were these impressive structures built by or with the help of Ancient Aliens?
Click the nav button below to read all about the mysterious Bosnian Pyramids.
Clearest Photo And Video Ever Of An Unexplained Aerial Object
Clearest Photo And Video Ever Of An Unexplained Aerial Object
Generally, photos taken of UFOs or unidentified aerial objects are blurred with the object being difficult to make out. This time a photograph has been taken that is one of the clearest seen but is it proof of a UAO?
Strange Object Was Filmed by Man Over 45 Minutes
The photograph in question was sent to MUFON dating back to 2014 taken in San Diego, California by a man who was pulling into his driveway. The information that was posted with the photograph says the man watched the object for around 45 minutes.
According to MUFON, the man saw a bright orb hovering over the home of a neighbor as he was going into his driveway. He said the sunset was reflecting on the orb that was why he noticed it.
The man then went into his backyard to get a better look at the mysterious orb; it was around a mile away from his home. He set up a tripod with a camera to take photos and video, continuing to do so for about 20 minutes. Sometimes the strange object would go behind a tree but then come back into view. It was stable in the sky but drifted slowly in a southwest direction. Eventually, it became too dark to see the orb.
No Tethers or Rotors on the Object
When the man posted the footage and images online, he received many comments. Many people thought it was a drone or balloon or some kind, just a terrestrial object. However, the man pointed out that there were no tethers on the object or rotors to suggest it was a drone. The object drifted away slowly according to the person who captured the footage, but there is no evidence that supports this in the footage.
What was strange about the footage is the fact that at first, it seems to just sit in the sky, but then it begins to bob about in the sky. It is also difficult to determine the size of the object as there is nothing to compare it against.
Is The Object Terrestrial or A Unidentified Aerial Object?
What the object is remains unknown, it may have been a terrestrial object such as a balloon or a drone, or it may have been something more alien. However, many people believe the person taking the footage fakes it. One person suggested it was a model of Sputnik that had been used; another said it looked like the person had made a ball from Styrofoam, then put sewing pins in it along with drawing on it using a black marker pen.
Another person went into a lot more detail when they commented. They pointed out the images were said to have been taken using a Nikon D80 10.2 Mega Pixel digital camera but the image did not reflect that. They said the image had grain on it that comes from a chemical film. They also mentioned vertical discolorations, saying they thought it had been printed out with a color laser and then re-scanned to reduce the color range. This would also do away with fine details in the photo, possibly getting rid of the tether of a balloon.
The same person pointed out the light along with dark areas were not consistent. While the “out of round” on the object did suggest to them, it might be a balloon that was tethered. The person finally concluded it was a fake thanks to the lighting inconsistency along with the image having been manipulated.
This image is from U.S. military footage of the Tic Tac.
Are we alone? Unfortunately, neither of the answers feel satisfactory. To be alone in this vast universe is a lonely prospect. On the other hand, if we are not alone and there is someone or something more powerful out there, that too is terrifying.
As a NASA research scientist and now a professor of physics, I attended the 2002 NASA Contact Conference, which focused on serious speculation about extraterrestrials. During the meeting a concerned participant said loudly in a sinister tone, "You have absolutely no idea what is out there!" The silence was palpable as the truth of this statement sunk in. Humans are fearful of extraterrestrials visiting Earth. Perhaps fortunately, the distances between the stars are prohibitively vast. At least this is what we novices, who are just learning to travel into space, tell ourselves.
I have always been interested in UFOs. Of course, there was the excitement that there could be aliens and other living worlds. But more exciting to me was the possibility that interstellar travel was technologically achievable. In 1988, during my second week of graduate school at Montana State University, several students and I were discussing a recent cattle mutilation that was associated with UFOs. A physics professor joined the conversation and told us that he had colleagues working at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, where they were having problems with UFOs shutting down nuclear missiles. At the time I thought this professor was talking nonsense. But 20 years later, I was stunned to see a recording of a press conferencefeaturing several former US Air Force personnel, with a couple from Malmstrom AFB, describing similar occurrences in the 1960s. Clearly there must be something to this.
With July 2 being World UFO Day, it is a good time for society to address the unsettling and refreshing fact we may not be alone. I believe we need to face the possibility that some of the strange flying objects that outperform the best aircraft in our inventory and defy explanation may indeed be visitors from afar - and there's plenty of evidence to support UFO sightings.
De Fermiparadox - Waar Zijn Alle Aliens? (1/2)
The Fermi Paradox II — Solutions and Ideas – Where Are All The Aliens?
The Fermi paradox
The nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi was famous for posing thought provoking questions. In 1950, at Los Alamos National Laboratory after discussing UFOs over lunch, Fermi asked, "Where is everybody?" He estimated there were about 300 billion stars in the galaxy, many of them billions of years older than the sun, with a large percentage of them likely to host habitable planets. Even if intelligent life developed on a very small percentage of these planets, then there should be a number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. Depending on the assumptions, one should expect anywhere from tens to tens of thousands of civilizations.
With the rocket-based technologies that we have developed for space travel, it would take between 5 and 50 million years for a civilization like ours to colonize our Milky Way galaxy. Since this should have happened several times already in the history of our galaxy, one should wonder where is the evidence of these civilizations? This discrepancy between the expectation that there should be evidence of alien civilizations or visitations and the presumption that no visitations have been observed has been dubbed the Fermi Paradox.
Carl Sagan correctly summarized the situation by saying that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." The problem is that there has been no single well-documented UFO encounter that would alone qualify as the smoking gun. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that many governments around the world have covered upand classifiedinformation aboutsuch encounters. But there are enough scraps of evidence that suggest that the problem needs to be open to scientific study.
UFOs, taboo for professional scientists
When it comes to science, the scientific method requires hypotheses to be testable so that inferences can be verified. UFO encounters are neither controllable nor repeatable, which makes their study extremely challenging. But the real problem, in my view, is that the UFO topic is taboo.
While the general public has been fascinated with UFOs for decades, our governments, scientists and media, have essentially declared that of all the UFO sightings are a result of weather phenomenon or human actions. None are actually extraterrestrial spacecraft. And no aliens have visited Earth. Essentially, we are told that the topic is nonsense. UFOs are off-limits to serious scientific study and rational discussion, which unfortunately leaves the topic in the domain of fringe and pseudoscientists, many of whom litter the field with conspiracy theories and wild speculation.
I think UFO skepticism has become something of a religion with an agenda, discounting the possibility of extraterrestrials without scientific evidence, while often providing silly hypotheses describing only one or two aspects of a UFO encounter reinforcing the popular belief that there is a conspiracy. A scientist must consider all of the possible hypotheses that explain all of the data, and since little is known, the extraterrestrial hypothesis cannot yet be ruled out. In the end, the skeptics often do science a disservice by providing a poor example of how science is to be conducted. The fact is that many of these encounters - still a very small percentage of the total - defy conventional explanation.
The media amplifies the skepticism by publishing information about UFOs when it is exciting, but always with a mocking or whimsical tone and reassuring the public that it can't possibly be true. But there are credible witnesses and encounters.
Why don't astronomers see UFOs?
I am often asked by friends and colleagues, "Why don't astronomers see UFOs?" The fact is that they do. In 1977, Peter Sturrock, a professor of space science and astrophysics at Stanford University, mailed 2,611 questionnaires about UFO sightings to members of the American Astronomical Society. He received 1,356 responses from which 62 astronomers - 4.6 percent - reported witnessing or recording inexplicable aerial phenomena. This rate is similar to the approximately 5 percent of UFO sightings that are never explained.
As expected, Sturrock found that astronomers who witnessed UFOs were more likely to be night sky observers. Over 80 percent of Sturrock's respondents were willing to study the UFO phenomenon if there was a way to do so. More than half of them felt that the topic deserves to be studied versus 20 percent who felt that it should not. The survey also revealed that younger scientists were more likely to support the study of UFOs.
UFOs have been observed through telescopes. I know of one telescope sighting by an experienced amateur astronomer in which he observed an object shaped like a guitar pick moving through the telescope's field of view. Further sightings are documented in the book "Wonders in the Sky," in which the authors compile numerous observations of unexplained aerial phenomena made by astronomers and published in scientific journals throughout the 1700s and 1800s.
Evidence from government and military officers
Some of the most convincing observations have come from government officials. In 1997, the Chilean government formed the organization Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos, or CEFAA, to study UFOs. Last year, CEFAA released footageof a UFO taken with a helicopter-mounted Wescam infrared camera.
The countries of Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom have been declassifying their UFO files since 2008. The French Committee for In-Depth Studies, or COMETA, was an unofficial UFO study group comprised of high-ranking scientists and military officials that studied UFOs in the late 1990s. They released the COMETA Report, which summarized their findings. They concluded that 5 percent of the encounters were reliable yet inexplicable: The best hypothesis available was that the observed craft were extraterrestrial. They also accused the United States of covering up evidence of UFOs. Iran has been concerned about spherical UFOs observed near nuclear power facilities that they call "CIA drones" which reportedly are about 30 feet in diameter, can achieve speeds up to Mach 10, and can leave the atmosphere. Such speeds are on par with the fastest experimental aircraft, but unthinkable for a sphere without lift surfaces or an obvious propulsion mechanism.
In December 2017, The New York Times broke a story about the classified Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, which was a $22 million program run by the former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo and aimed at studying UFOs. Elizondo resigned from running the program protesting extreme secrecy and the lack of funding and support. Following his resignation Elizondo, along with several others from the defense and intelligence community, were recruited by the To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science, which was recently founded by Tom DeLonge to study UFOs and interstellar travel. In conjunction with the launch of the academy, the Pentagon declassified and released three videos of UFO encounters taken with forward looking infrared cameras mounted on F-18 fighter jets. While there is much excitement about such disclosures, I am reminded of a quote from Retired Army Colonel John Alexander: "Disclosure has happened. ... I've got stacks of generals, including Soviet generals, who've come out and said UFOs are real. My point is, how many times do senior officials need to come forward and say that this is real?"
A topic worthy of serious study
There is a great deal of evidence that a small percentage of these UFO sightings are unidentified structured craft exhibiting flight capabilities beyond any known human technology. While there is no single case for which there exists evidence that would stand up to scientific rigor, there are cases with simultaneous observations by multiple reliable witnesses, along with radar returns and photographic evidence revealing patterns of activity that are compelling.
Declassified information from covert studies is interesting, but not scientifically helpful.This is a topic worthy of open scientific inquiry, until there is a scientific consensus based on evidence rather than prior expectation or belief. If there are indeed extraterrestrial craft visiting Earth, it would greatly benefit us to know about them, their nature and their intent. Moreover, this would present a great opportunity for mankind, promising to expand and advance our knowledge and technology, as well as reshaping our understanding of our place in the universe.
“And the second angel poured out his bowl into the sea, and it turned to blood like that of the dead, and every living thing in the sea died. Then the third angel poured out his bowl into the rivers and springs of water, and they turned to blood.”
Here we go again. Every time something red falls from the sky, this passage from the Book of Revelations gets pulled out and talk turns to apocalypse. It’s never been a good sign – Zeus made it rain blood before a battle in Homer’s Iliad. A blood rain reportedly preceded the Black Plague in Germany. Even Charles Fort in The Book of the Damned wondered if blood rain was a sign …
Mysterious Blood Rain Falls in Siberia
| Mysterious Universe
“… that our whole solar system is a living thing: that showers of blood upon this earth are its internal hemorrhages.”
While colored rain is not all that uncommon and can often be explained by human inventions or interventions, it sometimes occurs in locations that makes one wonder if there might be something more going. That’s the case in Norilsk, Siberia, where a recent mysterious red rain is being blamed on many unnatural things while its “official” cause and official admonitions that it’s “nothing to worry about” are being questioned.
They “say” it was just due to removal of iron deposits….why do I not believe that? Looking into it further…. — Z (@IronFalcon77) July 5, 2018
This is somehow going to be turned around and blamed on Trump. — Robert (@SlytherinRob) July 5, 2018
Nuclear fallout — Mike Walton (@MikeWaltonSR) July 5, 2018
Photographs and videos on various Russian media sites showed a parking lot in Norilsk covered in red water, cars dripping with thick red slime and people cautiously stepping in red goop. That fact that the only pictures were from this particular parking lot were one clue to the “official” solution given by the lot’s owner — the Nadezhdinsky processing plant owned by the city’s largest employer, the Russian industrial giant Nornickel. A spokesperson said that the plant had just removed a massive amount of iron oxide (rust … what color is that?) from the factory floor and had it stored outside when a pre-storm gust of wind blew it into the air and the subsequent rain came down red. Nothing to see here … move along … don’t touch it … the Control and Analytical Department is here to carry out analysis of the collected samples.
That might be enough to allay fears if the Doldykan River running alongside the plant wasn’t already red long before the storm. In the U.S., problems like this are blamed on the previous presidential administration. According to Nikolay Utkin, director of the Polar Division of Norilsk Nickel, speaking to the Siberian Times, here it’s a little different.
“The reason why the water in the Doldykan River got the reddish-brown colour is the active melting of snow, a powerful flood, which washes off the stuff that had been gathering here for decades. Unfortunately, during the Soviet era, the environmental issues were resolved on a residual basis.”
Red rain in Russia … it’s always the Soviets.
Well, not quite always. Norilsk is an unusual city. It’s a recent development (late 1920s), the world’s northernmost city with more than 100,000 inhabitants, the second-largest city inside the Arctic Circle and one of only two large cities in the continuous permafrost zone. It’s covered with snow up to 270 days a year, so anything falling from the sky that’s not white is strange. That sounds like the kind of remote location where the “Soviets” conducted nefarious activities. It is also home to the northernmost Muslim mosque in the world, whose congregation seems to get along just fine with its Russian Orthodox and Ukrainian Orthodox neighbors.
Is there something more to the “blood rain” of Norilsk than the local biggest employer or government officials want residents to believe? Is it time to start treating industrial pollution as an apocalypse? Now THAT would be revelation!
Video 2017
Mysterious Blood Rain of 21st Century in India. Scientists are still trying to figure it out.
Video 2012
Shocking! BLOOD RAIN Apocalypse! SRI LANKA - ASIA Nov.18,2012
Aliens might consider collecting and storing stars to power their futuristic civilisations, according to a senior scientist.
Because of dark energy, our universe is expanding at an increasing rate. Over the next 100 billion or so years, that expansion will mean that any stars apart from those nearby will not only be impossible to see but also entirely unreachable.
Could Alien Civilizations Predict the Fate of Our Planet?
That means that it will be difficult to extract energy from them. That is probably going to be very difficult for any advanced civilisations that rely on those stars to harvest that energy.
Now Dan Hooper, a senior scientist with Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, has written a paper exploring what those civilisations might do in response to that event.
He claims that civilisations could expand quickly outwards, build huge structures around those stars, and use the power generated to direct them back towards the civilisation.
Such megastructures have long been seen as a potential mark of advanced civilisations. Though it is very difficult to imagine what a future alien race might do, it is likely they will search out ways of harnessing renewable energy, such as building power plants around stars – those structures, known as Dyson spheres, have never been seen but are the object of keen astrophysical investigation.
But the new paper makes clear that could only work for so long, and would become impossible once the universe filled with dark energy and the stars were too far apart. That would force them to reach out, grabbing stars before they become inaccessible.
"Given the inevitability of the encroaching horizon, any sufficiently advanced civilization that is determined to maximize its ability to utilize energy will expand throughout the universe, attempting to secure as many stars as possible before they become permanently inaccessible," the paper reads.
To make sure they didn't get lost, the civilisations would be able to move the stars closer to their home – with the hope that they would eventually become stuck in their own orbit, and would not stray too far away to become useful.
Having worked out what such activity might look like, the paper then aims to look at how we might be able to see if that activity is happening already. If it were, we would be able to look for stars that seem to be moving in an unexpected way, or to spot holes in galaxies where a star might normally be expected
What Would A Civilization 1 Billion Years Older Than Us Be Like?
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Aliens kunnen mogelijk hele sterren verplaatsen. Wetenschappers hopen er op deze manier achter te komen of dat al gebeurt
Aliens kunnen mogelijk hele sterren verplaatsen. Wetenschappers hopen er op deze manier achter te komen of dat al gebeurt
Aliens kunnen mogelijk sterren verzamelen en opslaan om het voortbestaan van hun beschaving te verzekeren. Dat heeft een wetenschapper gezegd.
Vanwege de uitdijing van het heelal komen sterren steeds verder van elkaar te staan. Daardoor wordt het moeilijker voor hoogontwikkelde beschavingen om er energie uit te halen.
Dan Hooper van het Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory heeft nu een paper geschreven over de manier waarop dergelijke beschavingen het hoofd zullen bieden aan dit probleem.
Energiecentrales
Hij beweert dat beschavingen enorme structuren om die sterren kunnen bouwen en de energie die hiermee wordt opgewekt kunnen gebruiken om ze weer dichter in de buurt van de beschaving te brengen.
Dergelijke megastructuren worden al lange tijd gezien als teken van hoogontwikkelde beschavingen.
Hoewel het moeilijk voor te stellen is wat een buitenaards ras zou doen, is het waarschijnlijk dat ze energiecentrales rond sterren zullen bouwen, aldus Hooper.
Dysonbollen
Die structuren, Dysonbollen genoemd, zijn nog niet ontdekt, maar er wordt wel veel onderzoek naar gedaan.
Elke voldoende geavanceerde beschaving […] zal zich uitbreiden in het universum in een poging zoveel mogelijk sterren veilig te stellen voordat ze onbereikbaar worden, schrijft Hooper.
Gaten
Om ervoor te zorgen ze binnen hun bereik blijven zouden de beschavingen ze dichter bij huis plaatsen, in de hoop dat ze uiteindelijk dichtbij zullen blijven.
Er is volgens Hooper een manier om erachter te komen of dit al gebeurt. We zouden namelijk kunnen zoeken naar sterren die zich vreemd lijken te gedragen of naar ‘gaten’ in sterrenstelsels waar je normaal gesproken een ster zou verwachten.
ATLANTIS FOUND? '8.5-mile pyramid' discovered at bottom of the ocean
ATLANTIS FOUND? '8.5-mile pyramid' discovered at bottom of the ocean
COULD this bizarre object, described as a giant ancient pyramid and found at the bottom of the sea, be a clue to the site of the mythological City of Atlantis?
The structure, estimated as being between 3.5 and 11 miles across, was spotted on Google Earth in the Pacific Ocean just west of Mexico.
A video about the discovery uploaded to YouTube has drawn vast speculation about what it could be, including an ancient sunken city, a bizarre UFO, or even an alien base.
The "discovery" was made by Argentinian Marcelo Igazusta.
He says in a video about the find it is an alien UFO left underwater.
The video commentary described it has being "an intense light in the Pacific Ocean" of 3.5 miles in length, with a shape similar to a plane.
Scott C Waring, an alien conspiracy theorist, said: "It is a perfect pyramid that measures over 8.5 miles across one side of its base. Thats a conservative estimate, it could be up to 11 miles across.”
He suggested it could symbolise an ancient civilisation, or even something alien.
GOOGLE
Conspiracy theorists claim it could be an undersea ancient pyramid or even connected to aliens.
Viewers of the video have said it could be the site of an ancient submerged city or even Atlantis.
Simon Clark posted that it should be investigated to see exactly what it is.
But another poster pointed out there was no evidence it was anything more than an undersea mountain.
He said: "I don't understand why you're calling this a UFO? It is unidentified, yes (though most likely just the mountains of the sea floor) but it's not flying, so not a UFO."
The fabled Atlantis is an Ancient Greek myth – the name means Island of Atlas – and was first mentioned by the philosopher Plato.
The Atlantis military attempt to storm Ancient Athens but despite overwhelming odds the Atheneans repel them.
The allegory is supposed to suggest that the power of the organised democratic state will beat the power of a tyrannical system – the basic theme of his later work The Republic.
Atlantis and its inhabitants incur the wrath of the gods for the attack and the whole lot is submerged by the ocean, giving rise to the myth.
14 kilometer grote piramide ontdekt op de zeebodem? Argentijn doet vreemde vondst
14 kilometer grote piramide ontdekt op de zeebodem? Argentijn doet vreemde vondst
De Argentijnse ufoloog Marcelo Irazusta zorgt voor consternatie. Op de bodem van de Grote Oceaan heeft hij iets vreemds ontdekt. Mogelijke verklaringen variëren van een gecrashte UFO tot de resten van een oude beschaving.
De Argentijnse onderzoeker, die zich specialiseert in buitenaardse levensvormen, heeft naar eigen zeggen op Google Earth een UFO gevonden voor de kust van Mexico.
Het object is 5,5 kilometer lang en lijkt qua vorm nog het meest op een vliegtuig.
Piramide
Andere ufologen zijn er niet zo zeker van dat hij op een UFO is gestuit. Scott Waring, die verschillende boeken over het onderwerp heeft geschreven, zei volgens de Britse Daily Express dat hij er een piramide in ziet.
“Het is een perfect gevormde piramide, die een doorsnee heeft van meer dan 14 kilometer,” zei hij.
Atlantis
Volgens hem gaat het om de grootst bekende piramide. Het bouwsel is zo indrukwekkend dat het moet zijn gemaakt door leven van een andere planeet, aldus Waring. “Enkel aliens zijn in staat om zoiets te bouwen.”
De Daily Express meldt dat het volgens sommigen gaat om de resten van het mythische eiland Atlantis, dat werd beschreven door de Griekse filosoof Plato. Anderen zeggen dat het bouwwerk is achtergelaten door de Maya’s of Azteken.
Perhaps they will not be millions as some say, but the cases of people who claim to have been abducted by aliens are now numerous all over the world and rising even in Italy as even Fanwave.it has already reported.
BARNEY AND BETTY HILL INCIDENT
Many cases have been classified as simple hallucinations, when not even overt scams. Some however remained unresolved even decades later, like that of US spouses Barney and Betty Hill, who in 1961 claimed to have been abducted by alien entities in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in the night betweenDecember 19th and 20th. It is indeed what may be considered the first famous case of “alien abduction” of modern era.
Mixed couple, rare for the time (Barney was African American, Betty white), the Hills were also activists of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and were therefore rather in sight.
According to their testimony, rendered during sessions of regressive hypnosis recorded on tape and still publicly available, December 19th, around 10pm, the couple was coming home, being near the White Mountains, when they noticed a bright object in the sky that they thought was a plane in distress or a satellite.
Reconstruction encounter with UFO
MEMORIES RE-EMERGE THANKS TO REGRESSIVE HYPNOSIS
Returning home they discovered that it had been several hours, without them being aware of it. Thanks to the regressive hypnosis the two, who in the meantime had started to experience migraines, burns and nightmares, managed to reconstruct what would happen in the time frame of which they had no memory (the so-called "missing time").
Barney would in fact at first come down from the car and approached the strange light that in the meantime had landed to the ground, only to realize that it was a vehicle of extraterrestrial origin from a porthole of which he seemed to see humanoid figures. At that point he would return to the car explaining to his wife that he had the feeling that those beings wanted to capture him.
The car left trying to sow the aircraft without succeeding. At a certain point the car would have been, indeed, stopped and beings would surround them, inviting them to board. Here they would have been subjected to physical tests and from there would have arisen had the illness of which later suffered the Hills.
Zeta Reticuli map drawn down by the Hills
STAR MAP ON THE UFO
The most surprising thing, as also mentioned by the Italian tv show Mistero Adventure, was however that Mrs. Hill in a further session of regressive hypnosis would be able to rebuild a star map seen on board the UFO, also describing the extraterrestrials on board the UFO as humanoid beings of short stature, with big head and eyes and with a gray skin.
Ufologist Marjorie Fish then declared to identify the Zeta Reticuli system on the map (a binary system distant 39.2 light years from the Earth), suggesting that the “gray” could come from there. Here ends the story of the Hill and begin discussions on the veracity of the case and on the possible further interpretation of the episode.
ASSUMPTIONS OF TRAVELERS OF THE TIME
The “extraterrestrial” according to Mistero Adventure, could have been some time travellers and having seen the interest that has often been shown towards humanity could have been nothing but humans from a distant future, perhaps archaeologists or historians returned to visit "critical" historical periods for the future of humanity. The hypothesis is fascinating, but for the time being travel through time are as theoretical as intergalactic journeys at subluminal speeds.
It is not however said that a company with a few hundred thousand (or million) years of evolution in more than those currently experienced by humanity can not be able to bend to its needs those that today seem to be physical laws and impassable limits. Never say never, therefore,at least until it is possible to offer a complete and convincing explanation of incidents like this of Hills mates.
A meteorite crashed near the American Pacific coast on March 7.
NASA is now analyzing two fragments found on the seabed to establish whether they came from the same meteorite.
The meteorite could contain extraterrestrial metal that scientists haven't come across before.
NASA hopes to use any findings to learn more about the behavior of meteorites.
A meteorite that crashed near the American Pacific coast on March 7 has been causing quite a stir for the past few days.
A NASA researcher named Marc Fries is on a research expedition seeking remains of the meteorite, believed to have landed on the seabed. Fragments of the meteorite could contain extraterrestrial metal that scientists haven't come across before.
The NASA mission reports its first success
The official website of the expedition's research vessel, Nautilus, has reported that meteorite fragments have already been found. Two fragments thought to be from the crashed meteorite are being investigated by Fries and his team.
E/V Nautilus✔@EVNautilus
So...did we find meteorites in the ocean?
After 7 hours exploring @OlympicCoast seafloor, we brought back several samples. @NASA_Johnson Cosmic Dust Curator Dr. Marc Fries conducted a visual analysis of these possible spacerocks--preliminary findings: https://nautl.us/2KDVgzB
Fries' expedition was planned in June in conjunction with the Nautilus, which happened to be operating in the same area as the crash site.
The Nautilus is equipped with state-of-the-art deep-sea robots, called ROVs, designed to scan the seabed with cameras and special sensing instruments. A kind of "magnetic rod" is used to scan the floor for metallic material.
As the researchers are hoping to make further discoveries in as large an area as possible within a short time, the vessel is also using wave technology to find hard objects among the soft areas of the seabed. The harder the object, the more the measuring device deflects waves.
Fries believes the impact location is most likely limited to an area of about 1 square kilometer.
The success of this NASA project could be a huge scientific milestone
With this mission, NASA hopes to learn more about the composition and behavior of meteorites — the debris left over when a meteor burns through the Earth's atmosphere. This meteorite could contain heat-resistant materials, an area on which researchers have been trying to focus their efforts in recent years.
You can follow the expedition and the work of the Nautilus in the livestream on nautiluslive.org.
Complex organics bubble up from ocean-world Enceladus
Complex organics bubble up from ocean-world Enceladus
by Staff Writers Washington DC (SPX) Jun 28, 2018
Data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft reveal complex organic molecules originating from Saturn's icy moon Enceladus, strengthening the idea that this ocean world hosts conditions suitable for life. Research results show much larger, heavier molecules than ever before.
Powerful hydrothermal vents mix up material from the moon's water-filled, porous core with water from the moon's massive subsurface ocean - and it is released into space, in the form of water vapor and ice grains. A team led by Frank Postberg and Nozair Khawaja of the University of Heidelberg, Germany, continues to examine the makeup of the ejected ice and has recently identified fragments of large, complex organic molecules.
illustration only
Previously, Cassini had detected small, relatively common organic molecules at Enceladus that were much smaller. Complex molecules comprising hundreds of atoms are rare beyond Earth. The presence of the large complex molecules, along with liquid water and hydrothermal activity, bolsters the hypothesis that the ocean of Enceladus may be a habitable environment for life.
Such large molecules can be created by complex chemical processes, including those related to life, or they can come from primordial material in some meteorites.
At Enceladus, it's most likely they come from hydrothermal activity driving complex chemistry in the core of the moon, Postberg said.
"In my opinion, the fragments we found are of hydrothermal origin; in the high pressures and warm temperatures we expect there, it is possible that complex organic molecules can arise," Postberg said.
The organic material is injected into the ocean by hydrothermal vents on the floor of Enceladus' ocean - something akin to the hydrothermal sites found at the bottom of the oceans on Earth, which are one of the possible environments that scientists investigate for the emergence of life on our own planet.
On Enceladus, bubbles of gas, rising through miles of ocean, could bring up organic material from depths, where they could form a thin film floating on the ocean surface and in cracks of vents, in the interior of the moon, beneath its icy shell.
After rising near the top of the ocean, the bubbles may burst or otherwise disperse the organics, where they were detected by Cassini.
"Continuing studies of Cassini data will help us unravel the mysteries of this intriguing ocean world," said Cassini Project Scientist Linda Spilker of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini spacecraft deliberately plunged into Saturn on Sept. 15, 2017. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter. The radar instrument was built by JPL and the Italian Space Agency, working with team members from the U.S. and several European countries.
Scientists just changed their mind about that ‘Alien Probe’ asteroid again
Scientists just changed their mind about that ‘Alien Probe’ asteroid again
The bizarre interstellar visitor that whizzed through our Solar System late last year stunned scientists the world over. The object, named Oumuamua snuck up out of nowhere, cruising around the Sun and then slingshotting back out into space before most astronomers even knew what to make of it. Its strange shape and odd coloring were so strange that some researchers thought it might have been an alien probe checking us out.
Once that was put to rest, one of the more humorous twists to the story was the repeated flip-flopping of scientists who couldn’t decide whether it was a comet or an asteroid. It was initially thought to be a comet, but its lack of an iconic tail suggested otherwise. So, it was an asteroid, at least for a little while, but subsequent rounds of research suggestedit was a comet again… then an asteroid, again. Now, yet another study has been published in Nature and, well, it’s definitely a comet. Again.
The new paper, which was led by an astronomer with the European Space Agency (ESA), takes a close look at the strange visitor as it speeds away from our Solar System. The data reveals that the object is speeding up as it exits our neighborhood, which shouldn’t be possible if it were just a rocky asteroid being flung by gravity.
Instead, the researchers say, the object being a comet would explain its acceleration. The idea being that gasses heated during Oumuamua’s close brush with our Sun are actually pushing it faster and faster, matching what we know about comets.
So, the cigar-shaped object is actually a comet after all… or so the scientists say.
It’s hard to overstate just how bizarre Oumuamua really is. It’s confounded so many researchers in so many ways that it’s not hard to see why some have pushed the theory that it might actually be a spacecraft of some sort. In fact, the entire situation was so odd that the Breakthrough Listen project aimed its electronic ears at the object in an attempt to hear if it was sending out signals, perhaps being controlled remotely from some unseen intelligence. That experiment turned up nothing but silence.
For now I guess we’ll just have to accept the very little we know about Oumuamua. That is, unless it decides to turn around and come back, and at this point that might not be entirely out of the question.
Jupiter's Moons Spin Intricate Auroras at Planet's Poles
Jupiter's Moons Spin Intricate Auroras at Planet's Poles
By Sarah Lewin, Space.com Associate Editor
Electron auroras swirl on Jupiter's poles, with features caused by the planet's four Galilean moons. Here, the aurora can be seen as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Credit: NASA/J Clarke
New research shows the closest-ever views of features in Jupiter's swirling auroras, revealing the complicated footprints left by its moons Io and Ganymede.
As Jupiter's moons orbit close over the gas giant, they interact with its powerful magnetic field, influencing the electron auroras that form at the planet's poles. The Hubble Space Telescope has imaged the bright dots and trails left by each of the four Galilean moons as they pass by — the footprint of the farthest moon, Callisto, was finally pinned down this year. But Hubble's (and Earth's) view of Jupiter makes it hard to clearly see the planet's poles, and its distance doesn't allow a good-enough resolution — so to dig deeper into those footprints, scientists needed a different perspective.
Enter NASA's Juno spacecraft, currently orbiting Jupiter and giving researchers their closest look at the gas giant. New images from Juno's Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument are revealing that the moons' auroral footprints are much more complicated, and tailored to the individual moons, than previously thought. [In Photos: Juno's Amazing Views of Jupiter]
Swirls behind Io
As Jupiter's moons pass through the charged particles called plasma that surrounds it, researchers think the plasma interacts with Jupiter's magnetic field to spark features in the planet's electron auroras. Those auroras aren't visible to the naked eye, but can be picked up by infrared and ultraviolet sensors.
Juno swings by Jupiter's poles every two months, giving Juno's aurora-mapper instrument the chance to observe the auroras up close for about an hour.
"During Orbit 8 [in] September of 2017, we decided to look close, very, very close to the footprint of Io," Alessandro Mura, lead author on the new work and a researcher at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy, told Space.com. "We were not expecting anything special, because so far there was no particular reason why to expect anything different than a big spot."
But what they did find was surprising: Rather than one big spot, the volcanic moon Io generates a pattern of vortices swirling off the footprint's "tail," resembling the swirls that form when a cylindrical object passes through a fluid.
"The discovery of the footprint itself is not new, it is that we now see how they are shaped — and the shape is very, very strange," Mura said.
The footprint of the moon Io in Jupiter's aurora resembles a Von Kármán vortex street, a pattern that forms when a fluid flows by a cylindrical object.
The pattern streaks for hundreds of kilometers after the moon passes by, leaving a spot on an alternating side about every 62 miles (100 km), for 10 or more spots. Mura noted that it's simply a physical resemblance to that fluid dynamics pattern at this point — researchers don't have the models yet to explain why Io traveling through Jupiter's magnetic field would spark that particular pattern.
"Io, being the closest [moon to Jupiter], has the most intense footprint," Mura said. "Io is so close that tracing the magnetic field from Io to Jupiter is a very powerful tool to understanding the magnetic field." Jupiter's intense field of plasma, which Io seems to contribute to, also plays a role in the imprint.
This image of auroras on Jupiter is a composite of ultraviolet observations by the Hubble Space Telescope taken in 2016 and a visible light image of the planet taken in 2014.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Nichols (University of Leicester)
Doubled-up at Ganymede
And when they investigated the footprint of the planet Ganymede, the researchers saw something unusual as well: rather than one spot, they saw two separated by about 100 km — a never-before-seen double footprint.
That feature probably reflects something unique about the moon, Mura said: "There's only one moon which has its own magnetic field, which is Ganymede."
At "Ganymede, what we're seeing is not the interaction of the moon itself with the plasma of Jupiter," he added. "We are seeing the interaction of the magnetosphere of Jupiter inside another magnetosphere."
And as Io's complicated footprint gives researchers a rare chance to better understand the moon's interactions with the plasma around Jupiter, Ganymede's gives a key observation opportunity as well: "This is the first time we can have an image of the size of the magnetosphere of Ganymede by looking to its projection on top of Jupiter," Mura said.
A view of Jupiter's auroras in the infrared, taken by the JIRAM instrument on the Juno spacecraft in August 2016.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM
Lucky break
Mura said that getting more data from the auroras — including analyzing the footprints of other Galilean moons — is the easy part of future research. After all, Juno is already set to pass over Jupiter's poles for many more orbits, providing plenty of opportunity for analysis.
"But one important thing is that we are refining our pointing," Mura said. "Because actually, the footprints are not exactly the place that we expected them, because the magnetic field models have to be improved."
"The chance we had to observe the Io footprint was very lucky, because we caught both of them during the first shot during Orbit 8… the chances were that we could miss the footprint by, say, 1,000 km [600 miles]," he added. "Now that we have better models and better understanding, we can try to have even better images." And those images will tell researchers more about the great gas giant as well as the moons that pass through its magnetic field.
The new work was detailed today(July 5) in the journal Science.
Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her@SarahExplains.
Einsteins gelijk opnieuw bewezen: alle objecten vallen op dezelfde manier
Einsteins gelijk opnieuw bewezen: alle objecten vallen op dezelfde manier
Een internationaal team van astronomen heeft dit getest met behulp van drie sterren die om elkaar heen draaien: een neutronenster en twee witte dwergen
Einsteins zwaartekrachttheorie, de algemene relativiteitstheorie, voorspelt dat alle objecten op dezelfde manier vallen, ongeacht hun massa of samenstelling. Maar geldt dit principe ook voor objecten met extreem sterke zwaartekracht? Een internationaal team van astronomen heeft dit getest met behulp van drie sterren die om elkaar heen draaien: een neutronenster en twee witte dwergen. Hun bevindingen bewijzen dat Einsteins theorie de test ook doorstaat in dergelijke extreme omstandigheden (Nature, 5 juli).
Een hamer en een veer vallen met dezelfde versnelling op de maan. En als een lichte en zware kanonskogel van de toren van Pisa worden gegooid, raken ze op hetzelfde moment de grond. Zelfs de aarde en de maan vallen op dezelfde manier naar de zon toe. Einsteins theorie heeft alle tests in laboratoria en elders in ons zonnestelsel doorstaan. Maar de meeste alternatieve zwaartekrachttheorieën voorspellen dat objecten met extreem sterke zwaartekracht, zoals neutronensterren, anders vallen dan objecten met geringe zwaartekracht.
Dankzij de ontdekking van een ‘natuurlijk, kosmisch laboratorium’ hebben astronomen deze theorie nu kunnen testen in extreme omstandigheden: het drievoudige stersysteem PSR J0337+1715, op 4200 lichtjaar afstand van de aarde. In dit unieke, in 2012 ontdekte systeem draaien een neutronenster en een witte dwerg in 1,6 dagen om elkaar heen. En dit paar cirkelt in een baan van 327 dagen om een andere witte dwerg, veel verder weg. Volgens sommige alternatieve zwaartekrachttheorieën zouden de neutronenster en de binnenste witte dwerg elk op een andere manier naar de buitenste witte dwerg moeten vallen.
Einsteins gelijk opnieuw bewezen: alle objecten vallen op dezelfde manier
‘We hebben dit getest door de neutronenster te volgen’, licht eerste auteur Anne Archibald (postdoc aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam en ASTRON, het Nederlands instituut voor radioastronomie) toe. ‘De neutronenster, een millisecondepulsar, gedraagt zich als een klok: hij wentelt 366 keer per seconde om zijn as, en bundels radiogolven roteren mee. Ze zwaaien met regelmatige tussenpozen als een kosmische vuurtoren over de aarde en produceren pulsen. We hebben deze radiopulsen gebruikt om de beweging van de neutronenster te volgen.’
Het team van astronomen volgde de neutronenster zes jaar lang met de Westerbork Synthese Radiotelescoop in Nederland, de Green Bank Telescoop in West Virginia, VS en het Arecibo Observatorium in Puerto Rico, VS. ‘We kunnen elke puls van de neutronenster nagaan sinds het begin van onze waarnemingen’, zegt Archibald. ‘En zijn locatie weten we tot op een paar honderd meter nauwkeurig. We weten daarom heel precies waar de neutronenster is geweest en waar hij naartoe gaat. Als de neutronenster anders zou vallen dan de witte dwerg, zouden de pulsen op een ander tijdstip aankomen dan verwacht.’
Archibald en haar collega’s ontdekten dat een eventueel verschil tussen de versnelling van de neutronenster en van de witte dwerg te klein is om te detecteren. ‘Als er al een verschil is, is het niet meer dan drie op een miljoen’, zegt Nina Gusinskaia, promovenda aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam. “En dat is heel erg weinig. We ontkrachten hiermee een deel van de alternatieve zwaartekrachttheorieën. Ook hebben we de nauwkeurigheid van de beste zwaartekrachttest ongeveer tien keer verbeterd, zowel binnen het zonnestelsel als met andere pulsars.’
PSR J0337+1715 Triple System Credit: Jason Hessels; ASTRON/UvA. “
The Asteroid Belt Was Formed By Destroyed Ancient Alien Worlds, Study
The Asteroid Belt Was Formed By Destroyed Ancient Alien Worlds, Study
A new study has found that the asteroid belt of our solar system consists of destroyed former planets that collided with each other.
Before this study, such thoughts were called pseudo-science and were always rejected by mainstream scientists.
I wonder what planets they were, what destroyed them and whether they might have been inhabited. Maybe humans inhabited these worlds?
Study CONFIRMS that the asteroid belt was created from destroyed planets. Mainstream scientists have debunked themselves once again, previously denying any possibility that the asteroid belt was made up of a planetary collision... sometimes called those who suggested it “pseudoscientists”.
NASA: A Giant Star System Is Blasting Cosmic Radiation In Our Direction
NASA: A Giant Star System Is Blasting Cosmic Radiation In Our Direction
NASA scientists have revealed radiation is heading on a collision course with Earth with it coming from a huge star system.
The star system has two huge suns, which blast cosmic rays out intospace, with the radiation moving thanks to intergalactic winds.
Cosmic radiation from giant star system heading towards Earth – NASA
Scientists have been puzzled about high-energy observations in the southern constellation of Carina but have had the puzzle solved, thanks to the orbital telescope of NASA. NASA revealed the energy source is on Eta Carinae. This is a double star system around 7,500 light years from Earth.
Rays containing energy larger than 1 billion electron volts are sent out into the solar system. The expanse into which they are sent out is vast, while the energy is erratic in its movement, both of which combine to make it very difficult in regards to being able to locate the sources.
NASA pointed out that stellar winds from Eta Carinae are the reason behind the energy patterns. Kenji Hamaguchi, an astrophysicist for NASA, said, “Similar processes must occur in other extreme environments. Our analysis indicates Eta Carinae is one of them.”
NASA used the NuStar telescope to collect data about the cosmic rays, saying that some of them have bounced off the magnetic field of Earth. A researcher claimed that before the use of the NuStar telescope, they did not know where the origin of the radiation was.
A video shows images of Eta Carinae shooting out cosmic rays:
China Reaches The Moon Releasing Never-Before-Seen HD Photographs
China Reaches The Moon Releasing Never-Before-Seen HD Photographs
These HD images of the Moon's surface captured by China are incredible.
China has captured images of the Moon in HD that have never before been seen thanks to the Chang`e 3 lander.
China Has One of the Most Advanced Lunar Landers
The Chinese lander captured thousands of HD resolution images after finding a moon rock that has not been seen before. China developed one of the most advanced lunar landers to ever land on the surface of the Moon, giving Earth a look at the surface as never before.
In 2013, the Lunar Mission landed on a region of the Moon known as Mare Imbrium. This was a part of the Moon in which it was thought water might have existed. While this is a feat for China, they come in third in regards to making a soft landing on the Moon’s surface, with the United States and the Soviet Union being ahead.
The images had been captured during 2013 but were not released by the National SpaceAdministration in China until 2015. Western media did not get them, as China does not release them until around 18 months later.
Photos among 45 Gigabyte of Data
Emily Lakdawalla from the Planetary Society took many weeks looking through the 45 gigabytes of data, then going ahead and putting it all into a package that could easily be downloaded to ensure that everyone interested could see them. Lakdawalla said, “When it comes to data sharing from China, the situation is pretty good, ” says Lakdawalla, who notes that the images’ formats mirror those used by NASA and the European Space Agency. “It would probably be much easier if I could read the language.”
There is no doubt the images have stunned everyone. Meanwhile, scientists have used them to gain a better understanding of the geology of the Moon’s surface. China even revealed they discovered a moon rock that surprisingly neither the United States nor Soviet Union found during their previous missions to the Moon.
China Is a Major Player in Space Power Revealed Analyst
A Defense Group Inc. analyst from the University of California San Diego, Kevin Pollpeter, said, “China is trying to reach the top tier and show that they’re a major space power.” He went on to say, “They’re also contributing real knowledge about the moon that we haven’t been able to get before.”
China is forging ahead with space exploration; they have revealed they are planning manned missions to the Moon at some point in the future. If so, they would expand lunar exploration like never before. The US Planetary Society reposted images due to the fact the CNSA website is very difficult to navigate around along with it being in Chinese. Posting the photos ensures people from around the world are able to access them and view them.
Storing quantum bits of information, or qubits, is a lot harder than storing ordinary binary digits. It’s not simply ones or zeroes, but the whole range of subtle quantum superpositions between them. Electrons can easily slide out of those states if they’re not stored in the right materials, which is why electrical engineers at Princeton are working with a UK manufacturer to create a better storage material — synthetic diamonds — from scratch. They published an account of their success on Thursday in Science.
For decades, physicists, materials engineers, and others have been trying to achieve the conceptual promise of quantum-encrypted communications because the data transferred in that process is theoretically immune to covert surveillance. Any attempt to observe that data between parties — à la the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle — would fundamentally alter that information, quickly revealing that it was compromised. The problem has been storing and preserving qubits and then converting them to fiber optic-ready photons, and using diamonds appears to be the route toward achieving both. But not just any diamond will do, which is why Princeton’s team has been hard at work creating a synthetic one, as they describe in their paper.
“The properties that we’re targeting are what’s relevant for quantum networks,” electrical engineer Nathalie de Leon tells Inverse. At Princeton, where de Leon is an assistant professor, her team’s focus is essentially inventing quantum hardware. “It’s applications where you want something that has a long storage time, and then also has a good interface with photons so that you can send light over very long distances.”
One of the Element Six diamonds that Princeton University researchers are using for quantum information storage.
Photonic interactions matter a lot for high-speed international communications because all of the information traveling along fiber optic cables moves through our global infrastructure as discrete photons — cruising at 69 percent of the speed of light. (Nice.)
“That puts a lot of constraints on the optical characteristics,” de Leon says. “As one example, it’s really important that the color be stable. If the color of the photon is jumping around over time, then that’s really bad for these protocols.”
Right now, de Leon’s group is trying to craft a version of these synthetic diamonds that can convert to the standard 1,550-nanometer wavelength on which photons now traverse fiber optic cables. Currently, her team’s synthetic diamonds support 946-nanometer photon wavelengths. (Photon “color” is a bit of a euphemism here since both of these wavelengths are shades of infrared outside the visible spectrum.)
The hurdle that her team just succeeded in crossing is storing those qubits in crystalline quantum repeaters, similar to the repeaters that are currently used to prevent signal loss and degradation in today’s fiber-optic communications. The critical step in this process was producing synthetic diamonds with as little unwanted impurities as possible (nitrogen, mainly) and more of the impurities they actually did want (silicon and boron).
“Nitrogen turns out to be the predominant defect that you get in these diamonds,” de Leon says. Her group’s partners at the British diamond maker Element Six had to create above-average vacuum conditions since even ordinary vacuums can leave enough nitrogen in the chamber to contaminate the artificially-made crystals. Because nitrogen has one more free electron than carbon, nitrogen impurities disturb the unique electrical makeup that the researchers are hoping for.
Synthetic diamonds, if formulated correctly, could safely store and preserve qubits.
Other small defects can undermine the qubit-storing potential of these diamonds, too. The goal is to have pairs of atom-sized vacancies in the crystal framework alongside a substituted silicon atom where a single carbon used to be, but sometimes those pairs can bunch up together in “vacancy clusters” that start to redistribute their electrons in annoying, counterproductive ways. Sometimes polishing and etching damage on the surface of the diamond can also cause a domino effect, messing with this pattern of electrons, too. This is where adding boron — which has one less free electron than carbon — can help.
“What we had to do,” de Leon says, “is both start with this ultra-high purity diamond and then grow in some boron to basically soak up any of the extra electrons that we couldn’t control. Then there was a lot of materials processing — boring stuff like thermal annealing and repairing the surface at the end to make sure that we still get rid of a lot of these other types of defects that give you extra charges.”
Mastering both of these challenges, many in the field suspect, are the keys to fully functional and nearly impossible to crack quantum encryption.
Other researchers have been working with "photonic crystal fibres" for quantum information applications, like Professor Andre Luiten at the University of Adelaide whose device is pictured above.
Before the dawn of synthetic diamonds only a few years ago, researchers in the field of quantum optics had to rely on natural diamonds to do their work — one specific diamond, in particular.
According to de Leon, everyone in the field of quantum optics had to rely on a single, naturally-made diamond from Russia that just happened to have the right percentage of boron, nitrogen, and other impurities to make their research possible. Fragments of the diamond were cleaved off and distributed to research groups across the world.
“Many of the groups had their own little piece of the ‘magic’ Russian diamond,” as de Leon told Princeton’s in-house news service in 2016. “At Harvard, we called ours ‘Magic Alice’ and ‘Magic Bob.’”
So, TL;DR, Western scientists are getting better at manufacturing their own magical quantum computing diamonds instead of depending on slivers of Russia’s magical quantum computing diamond. This is a factual sentence that sounds ridiculous. Classic 2018.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology could one day create a pack of blind robotic cheetahs capable of searching for survivors amongst the wreckage left behind by an earthquake or tornado.
The sightless Cheetah 3 is 90 pounds of sheer resilience being able to traverse jagged terrain, even when it’s being pushed around or pulled back. Instead of relying on cameras or sensors, it uses what MIT roboticists call “blind locomotion” to climb stairs, jump vertically, and gallop at speeds up to 6.7 miles per hour.
“If humans close our eyes and make a step, we have a mental model for where the ground might be, and can prepare for it. But we also rely on the feel of touch of the ground,” the robot’s designer Sangbae Kim said in a statement. “[Cheetah 3 is] sort of doing the same thing by combining multiple [sources of] information to determine the transition time.”
But that doesn’t mean Cheetah 3 will be blind forever. Kim, who is also an MIT associate professor of mechanical engineering, doesn’t want his creation to rely too much on its vision. Instead, he explained that initially training his creation without eyes will ensure it becomes an expert at dealing with rough topography and recovering from stumbling.
“We want a very good controller without vision first,” he said in a press release. “And when we do add vision, even if it might give you the wrong information, the leg should be able to handle (obstacles). Because what if it steps on something that a camera can’t see? What will it do? That’s where blind locomotion can help. We don’t want to trust our vision too much.”
The plan is to send Cheetah 3 to places that are outright dangerous for humans to explore. At the moment it is only carrying out safe tasks, like power plant inspection. But if it keeps improving its hiking skills it might have what it takes to help first-responders during natural disasters.
Better watch out Boston Dynamics, there’s another robotic feline in these streets.
Why is NASA hunting for a meteorite in the Pacific Ocean with a submarine? Wait, let’s back up a minute. Why does NASA have a submarine? And why isn’t it looking for asteroids BEFORE they plunge through the Earth’s atmosphere? Inquiring minds in Siberia, Africa, Michigan and other areas recently hit by meteorites would like to know.
NASA Hunts for Mysterious Meteorite in the Pacific | Mysterious Universe
Back to the Pacific meteorite hunt. The story begins on March 7, 2018, when residents of Grays Harbor County on Washington’s Pacific coast reported a sonic boom. The boom was loud enough to register on the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network seismometers around 7 pm. The Seattle Times reported that eyewitnesses on the coast saw a flash and three National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather stations detected a meteorite 16 miles off the coast. After seeing the report, Marc Fries, the Cosmic Dust Curator at NASA Johnson Space Center (nice work if you can get it), called it “the largest meteorite fall I’ve seen in 20-plus years of radar data.”
Based on the amount and quality of the data, Fries estimated that about 4,400 lbs. (2,000 kg) of meteorite pieces, with the largest weighing 9.7 pounds (4.4 kg) and measuring 5 inches (12 cm) in diameter, survived the fall and are somewhere on the ocean floor. Well, not ‘somewhere’ — Fries was able to narrow the location down to one square km (.38 sq. miles) at a shallow depth of 100 meters (300 feet). If only NASA had a submarine …
Enter the Ocean Exploration Trust. Founded in 2008 by Dr. Robert Ballard to “engage in pure ocean exploration,” it provides its 64-meter Exploration Vessel (E/V) Nautilus and its remote-controlled submarines to NASA for various projects. Nautilus just “happened” to be in the area and offered to be a part of what Fries called the “first intentional search for meteorites from the ocean.”
According to the Nautilus reports, the crew conducted a multibeam sonar survey on July 1 to identify possible locations, On July 2, two remote-controlled subs conducted a 7-hour survey of the seabed in the most likely spot and collected samples with a suction hose, magnet and scooper. The bucket of sand was then taken to Dr. Fries, who sifted through it and issued this report:
“NASA Cosmic Dust Curator Dr. Marc Fries conducted an initial visual analysis of the samples collected, and his preliminary findings include two small fragments of fusion crust–meteorite exterior that melted and flowed like glaze on pottery as it entered the atmosphere. Additional analysis will be conducted in the coming weeks to determine if these fragments indeed came from the massive meteorite fall seen entering the Pacific Ocean off Washington’s coast in March 2018.”
Sample meteorite fragments
So the answer is … yes and no. Yes, the fragments are definitely from a meteorite, and no, they don’t know if they’re from THE meteorite they were searching for. While Dr. Fries continues to sift sand, no one seems to be addressing the original question … why is NASA so interested in this particular meteorite?
Actually, NASA is taking a sudden interest in meteorites in general. It could be due to criticism of its early warning system which doesn’t seem to be giving much warning of recent really big asteroids which fortunately missed the Earth. NASA researchers were also in Botswana last week where they recovered a piece of asteroid 2018 LA, an asteroid that was actually detected by the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey at the University of Arizona eight whole hours before it pierced the Earth’s atmosphere, making it just the third one to be identified before impact.
Is that a good enough record to continue to justify the existence of asteroid warning systems?
Or is NASA using these meteorite-recovery exercises as a cover-up for something else? Are they really meteorites? Is NASA tracking something else? Whatever it is, is an eight-hour warning long enough to bend completely around and kiss your butt goodbye?
One of the more unsettling developing stories over the last few years as been the seemingly growing phenomenon of mysterious and unexplained booms being felt across America. From sea to shining sea, loud explosion noises have shaken homes and terrified homeowners, leaving no explanation in their wake. The FBI and some familiar sounding gentlemen-in-dark-clothing recently began investigating some of these booms in rural Pennsylvania, and it turns out that at least some of these booms have a mundane – yet terrifying explanation.
In late June 2018, the Bucks County District Attorney’s Office in Pennsylvania arrested the owner of a local chemical and solvent retailer who has been accused of detonating improvised explosives in the area. Law enforcement agencies found disturbing drawings and images at the man’s house, leading them to suspect that they might have foiled an attempted domestic terrorism plot. While this arrest solves a small set of these mystery booms, there have been dozens of other reports of unexplained explosion noises in 2018 alone from areas far from rural Pennsylvania. Could all of these have a similar origin, or might there be multiple mysteries afoot here?
Since I’ve started covering these anomalous booms, I’ve always felt that they likely do have a man made origin, but one more related to the clandestine testing of aircraft or weaponry. It’s no secret that the skies and now space have become the most contested front in our new Cold War, so it could be that these mysterious noises are merely sonic booms caused by aircraft or projectiles overhead. Supersonic flight over the United States has been illegal since 1973, so that explanation isn’t typically thrown around. However, a new prototype aircraft recently shown off by NASA might offer some credence to this theory.
NASA’s experimental X-59 QueSST aircraft is designed to break the sound barrier without creating the deafening sonic boom.
For years, NASA has been attempting to design aircraft capable of supersonic flight which do not create sonic booms when breaking through the sound barrier. As part of their current research, Space.com reports that NASA has been testing so-called “quieter sonic booms” to determine “how much sonic noise people on the ground deem acceptable in their everyday lives.” A specially outfitted F/A-18 Hornet will conduct tests this November over coastal towns in the Gulf of Mexico, collecting observations from volunteers on the ground about how loud and disruptive the sonic booms are. NASA’s ultimate goal is to develop aircraft which could fly at supersonic speeds while still meeting regulations concerning sonic booms, a development which could revolutionize commercial and military air travel.
Sonic booms are caused by the changes in air pressure caused by aircraft as they pass through the air.
Still, this story makes you wonder: could some of the anomalous mystery booms heard recently be caused by testing of similar aircraft? Hypersonic weapons and aircraft have become a hot topic of aerospace research – could tests of these aircraft be behind these booms? Could NASA or the military already be conducting private tests of these ‘quiet’ supersonic aircraft ahead of the public tests later this year?
Or, perhaps more worryingly, could these mystery booms still be something else entirely? Let’s hope they’re not all tests of improvised explosives.
Mystery Boom Update and NASA's New 'Quiet' Supersonic Aircraft | Mysterious Universe
If you want to see a UFO, where’s the best place in the world to go? If you want to not just see a UFO but be seen by one … perhaps even abducted by one … where should you stand and wave? According to the director of the Ovniological Research Group of Chile, the answer to the first question is Chile and to the second is Patagonia, the southern tip of South America shared by Chile and Argentina. If you answered “the U.S.” to either query, we have some nice parting gifts for you (a laurel and hearty handshake) because UFO trackers in the U.S. say sightings are down and they’re not sure why.
In an interview with the Spanish international news agency Agencia EFE, Rodrigo Fuenzalida, the director of the Agrupación de Investigaciones Ovniológicas de Chile (Ovniological Research Group of Chile or AION), declared that Chile has long been a good place to see UFOs, especially northern Chile, because of the country’s “clean” skies. UFOs have been reported in many places, including over Chilean copper mines, volcanoes and cows. However, if you want to step inside a UFO, Fuenzalida suggests heading south to Patagonia, where they have been occurring since 1997.
“The Patagonia, without a doubt, is the one that at the moment concentrates the greater amount of interesting cases that make that we as an organization are concentrating all our efforts in that region. Even in the UFO series, produced by National Television, we managed to record that 70% of the abductions that we had placed in the program had been registered in that place. “
Why Patagonia? Possibly because aliens are already there. In an interview in 2017 with TiempoSur, Patricio Frias. Regional Ufologo and director of the UFO organization Noise Patagonia, says the abundance of minerals and fresh water in Patagonia may have already attracted tall, intelligent extraterrestrials:
“Patagonia is visited by intelligence that we can not understand. They told me in that place that there is the phenomenon that occurs there, with a lot of energy. I have been reported presence of humanoid species in that place. A person from birth came scared in his truck. He told us that he had seen on the road, that people were walking with bright helmets and a light on their foreheads. They approached these people and realized that it was something out of the ordinary. The height of the beings was more than two and a half meters.”
Wait a minute. Doesn’t the U.S. have plenty of clean water (OK, water) and minerals? Yes, but multiple UFO tracking and recording organizations report that the number of sightings has been on the decline. In an interview with Gizmodo, MUFON statistician David C. Kort pinpoints when it started.
“There definitely has been a fall off of late. It hasn’t been a straight line. But in looking at those numbers, it was a peak in 2012 and it’s been a 30 to 40 percent drop from 2012 to 2017.”
Cheryl Costa, the International UFO Congress’s 2018 Researcher of the Year, reported in the Syracuse New Timesthat UFO sightings of the past 17 years rose from 2001 to 2012 but have been declining ever since. While Kort says the decline is “perplexing,” Costa has an interesting theory. She believes that 2012 was an artificial peak interest year based on the alleged end-of-the-Mayan-calendar brouhaha. The years 2013 through 2017 are lower that 2012 but still higher than the years before it. However, she had expected to see the number go back up again and they haven’t.
Sharon Hill, a science, pseudoscience and paranormal culture writer, thinks the attention of the U.S. is moving from looking for UFOs and aliens to looking for conspiracies and cover-ups about UFOs and aliens.
“Ideas about conspiracy have just infiltrated and warped the idea of investigating UFOs. You aren’t able to investigate those things. They’re conspiracies.”
Finally, the U.S. UFO organizations may be getting much better at eliminating the identifiable from the unidentified.
Is there a way to get the U.S. UFO numbers up? Costa says it’s complicated. Hill says to keep looking. Cleaing up our water supplies might help.
Perhaps the best solution is to make UFO spotting an Olympic sport. Are we going to let Chile win the UFO gold? U-S-A! U-S-A!
“On a summer’s afternoon, in either 1948 or 1949, my mother, Brenda, was walking with our dog and myself in the area we called simply ‘The Field’ at the back of our housing estate… in what was then the outskirts of Chippenham in Wiltshire [England]. Whilst there, she saw an unusual, occupied aircraft…”
So began a handwritten letter addressed to this author. Tidy and succinct, it documented a mother and daughter’s close encounter with a peculiar flying object, piloted by apparently non-human beings. Many years later, the daughter, Karen, a mere toddler at the time of the incident, solicited from her mother, Brenda, a detailed description of what they had both witnessed that day, making a written record of her response. Brenda had no trouble in recalling the details:
We were walking through ‘The Field’ when this aircraft came out of nowhere and stopped nearby. There were two beings inside, sat facing one another. The aircraft was like a boat with a see-though cover. The two beings inside were neat and compact; they were dressed in grey and had helmets with a sort of crest on top. They were looking towards us, then one of them raised a hand as if he were waving. Then the aircraft just went.
Through further conversation with her mother, Karen was able to establish that:
There was no accompanying sound or scent with the aircraft; that it was in view for no more than three minutes; it was about nine feet long and stopped approximately fifteen yards away at bungalow-roof height; there were no trains on the track nearby at the time; and the area was otherwise deserted.
Their dog, incidentally, “was interested in the aircraft, but was not alarmed.”
Regarding her nondescript recounting of the object’s departure, beyond stating that “it just went,” Brenda had difficulty expressing the character of its movement. “She said that it didn’t exactly vanish instantly, it just ‘went’ very rapidly,” Karen related.
Brenda’s sketch of the object and occupants.
Speaking with her by telephone, I found Karen to be charming and genuine, an intelligent and well-spoken woman whose bewilderment at the described event was evident nearly sixty years on. What, then, to make of her story?
It was clear to me that Karen had no prior interest in UFOs and no UFOlogical knowledge of which to speak, and at no time had she or her mother sought to publicize their experience. Indeed, the witnesses’ names as written here—”Brenda” and “Karen”—are pseudonyms, a reflection of Karen’s continuing desire for anonymity (their real names and backgrounds are known to me).
During our telephone conversation, Karen told me that her mother had always been a “no nonsense” sort of lady and had been reluctant to speculate about the precise nature of the “aircraft,” or about the possible origin of its occupants. Sadly, Brenda passed away a few years ago, but despite her apparent nonchalance at what she and her daughter had witnessed, she had always acknowledged the high-strangeness of the event. “She said that she realized that what she was seeing was ‘something very different,’” Karen wrote in her letter, “but she wasn’t alarmed or afraid. She felt the beings were friendly.”
A map drawn by Karen of the location of the UFO encounter.
Karen’s account is significant in that it documents a rare British Close Encounter of the Third Kind (in which a UFO is seen within 500 feet and occupants are visible) in the very early years of the flying saucer enigma—before descriptions of saucer occupants became commonplace in the literature with the dawning of the contactee movement just a few years later. It is cases like Karen’s that I find interesting—much more so than the now traditional contactee or abductee narratives.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, literally hundreds of accounts of interstellar or interdimensional interlopers began to surface all around the globe—cases that make a mockery of expectation; cases in which entities of all shapes and sizes (though typically humanoid) would show up, day or night, usually outdoors, in the vicinity of a low-hovering or landed “craft.” These entities would sometimes acknowledge their witnesses from afar or even face-to-face, engaging in communication that ranged from incomprehensible and absurd to profoundly philosophical. More often than not, though, the beings in in these “fleeting greeting” cases seemed to be hurrying about their business—making repairs, taking samples from their immediate environment, and occasionally engaging in acts of apparent absurdity (like waving at the witness or giving them pancakes, for example) before bustling back into their bizarre looking contraptions and exiting the scene in the blink of an eye, leaving the observer in a state of bewilderment. Some 300 cases along these lines are documented in the 1969 book The Humanoids, edited by Charles Bowen, which is an essential read for any self-respecting UFO buff.
The question is—and it’s a question that’s been asked many times over the years—why are there relatively few cases of this nature reported today? It’s a question I could spend a very long time trying to answer, citing the work of theorists from Jacques Vallée and Terrence McKenna, to George P. Hansen and Greg Bishop. Is the cause of close-encounter entity reports a result purely of the comings and goings of “alien” intelligences and technologies, or is it the result of something far closer to home—something in us, something intrinsic to the human experience that morphs across time and culture? Or does the truth lie somewhere in between; somewhere in the realm of co-creation, in which the perceptual apparatus of the human observer plays a fundamental role in the manifestation of the phenomena observed? It’s phenomenological food for thought, and it seems likely we’ll be chewing on it for a very long time to come.
IS ER EEN BUITENAARDS RUIMTEVAARTUIG IN ZEE GESTORT? ( VIDEO )
IS ER EEN BUITENAARDS RUIMTEVAARTUIG IN ZEE GESTORT? ( VIDEO )
Op 7 maart 2018 verscheen er niet alleen iets in de lucht wat leek op een meteoriet voor de noordwestkust van Amerika, maar er volgde ook een luide explosie.
Dit soort dingen gebeuren wel vaker, maar waarom haalt men nu alles uit de kast om “de brokstukken te vinden” en waarom is ook NASA erbij betrokken?
Soms voel je op je klompen aan dat er bepaalde dingen niet kloppen. Zoals de berichten die nu verschijnen over een team wetenschappers dat de bodem van de oceaan af speurt op zoek naar overgebleven brokken van een meteoriet.
De meteoriet was zichtbaar op 7 maart in de staten Washington, Oregon en Brits Columbia, tenminste als het een meteoriet was.
Er is zelfs een compleet onderzoeksschip ingezet om te proberen brokstukken te vinden, wat niet gemakkelijk zal worden want in het gebied waar dit is neergekomen is ook nog een heel diep onderwater ravijn.
Volgens NASA was het een meteoriet ter grootte van een golfkarretje en hoewel dat voor een meteoriet best fors is, is het nu ook weer niet een gebeurtenis waarbij je alle zeilen bijzet om er delen van terug te vinden.
Iemand die dit ook heel erg verdacht vindt allemaal is Tyler van Secureteam, de man die wel een aardig goed instinct heeft om dingen op te sporen waar een luchtje aan zit.
En dat lijkt hier het geval.
Is het een meteoriet die daar op die bewuste avond naar beneden kwam of is het misschien een gecrasht buitenaards ruimtevaartuig. In dat laatste geval zou het ook volkomen logisch zijn dat er dit soort operaties plaatsvinden.
En natuurlijk zullen ze dan niet aan het grote publiek vertellen dat ze op zoek zijn naar een neergestort ET schip.
Research Claims UFOs Are Getting More Difficult To Spot
Research Claims UFOs Are Getting More Difficult To Spot
It might be one of the blurred kind close encounters.
Researchers are puzzled with the new research that suggests UFO sightings in the US tend to move in fluctuating cycles for six to seven years and a permanent downtrend.
The International UFO Congress researcher of the year Cheryl Costa found out that there are 7, 837 average sightings in the country, a massive 41 per cent drop from the three-year peak average years.
Costa explained her findings in the Syracuse New Times that the UFO sightings rise to a peak during the cycles, went back to the baseline, and initiate a new cycle with a rise.
Based on her findings from National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) and Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), Costa wrote that the US had a peak average of 13,500 annual UFO sightings between 2012 and 2014.
In 2015, however, sightings fell 11,975 to 11 per cent and an even more dramatic drop in 2016, falling to 10,602 to 21 per cent.
Costa did not discover a concrete reason for the significant decline in sightings. However, she speculated that broadband Internet access had something to do with it.
Costa wrote that from 2001 to 2006, they see relatively flat sighting report numbers. The flatness is deemed to be an artefact of reporting because of the broadband Internet access was still growing in almost all areas. Broadband access is a significant driver in people having routine use of web reporting services such as MUFON and NUFORC.
The New York state rose to the fourth-most likely place to see a UFO during 2016 and 2017, Costa noted, but the number of sightings sharply declined from its peak average in 20017 at 325 sightings down form an average of 577 between 2012 and 2014.
Costa wrote that both New York state and the national charts reveal the classic rise-and-fall scenario from 2006 to 2010 and the spike started again in 2011.
She also explained that the Mayan Calendar media ballyhoo could be attributed to the spike in 2012, causing more people to become more curious about what’s going on in our skies. With that into consideration, from 2011 to 2017 the classic UFO sighting cycle is clearly seen.
An object hovering over Gulf Shores has brought excitement among UFO watchers after seeing a video of it.
Nicholas, a commuter, captured the video during an electric storm. The video was then released on conspiracy theory YouTube channel MRMB333. It showed an apparent UFO in the sky next to what the site called an “out of this world portal.”
The video received mixed suggestions from conspiracy theorists as to what the object could be, ranging from a run-of-the-mill UFO visit to Planet X or Nibiru appearance.
The video garnered thousands of views after just a few days it was uploaded.
According to the International Business Network, the video clip of the UFO sighting has been submitted to Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) for further investigation.
At a time when astronomers are building billion-dollar telescopes with mirrors 30 meters across, the 1.4-meter instrument being installed this month atop South Baldy Mountain in New Mexico may seem like a bit player. But over the next few years, nine more identical telescopes will join it on the grassy, 3200-meter summit, forming a Y-shaped array that will surpass any other optical telescope in its eye for detail. When it's complete around 2025, the $200 million Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer (MROI) will have the equivalent resolution of a gigantic telescope 347 meters across.
MROI's small telescopes can't match the light-gathering power of its giant cousins, so it will be limited to bright targets. But by combining light from the spread-out telescopes, it is expected to make out small structures on stellar surfaces, image dust around newborn stars, and peer at supermassive black holes at the center of some galaxies. It will even be able to make out details as small as a centimeter across on satellites in geosynchronous orbit, 36,000 kilometers above Earth, enabling it to spy on spy satellites.
That's one reason why the U.S. Air Force, which wants to monitor its own orbital assets and presumably those of others, is funding MROI. "They want to know: Did the boom break or did some part of the photovoltaic panels collapse?" says Michelle Creech-Eakman, an astronomer at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro and project scientist on MROI. But if the facility succeeds, its biggest impact could be on the field of astronomy, by drawing new attention to the promise of optical interferometry, a powerful but challenging strategy for extracting exquisitely sharp images from relatively small, cheap telescopes.
MROI, like optical interferometry itself, has made slow progress. The U.S. Navy began funding the facility in 2000, but lost interest and pulled out in 2011. Air Force support is not assured beyond the array's first three telescopes. "If for some horrible reason they failed, it would be a disaster for us all," says Theo ten Brummelaar, associate director of the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA), an array of six 1-meter optical telescopes on Mount Wilson in Los Angeles, California.
Radio astronomers have had it easier. The long radio wavelengths mean data from separated dishes can be recorded, digitized, time-stamped by an atomic clock, and combined later for analysis. But optical interferometry is far trickier: The short wavelengths of visible light, running at terahertz frequencies, cannot yet be digitized by any electrical system. So the light must be merged in real time, with nanometer precision.
Boiling cells of plasma were seen on a distant red giant star using an optical interferometer in Chile.
ESO
In the 1990s, advances in fiber optics, lasers, and computers developed to the point where the Keck Observatory's twin 10-meter telescopes, separated by 85 meters atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii, could be made to work as an optical interferometer. But the system needed at least four additional NASA-funded "outrigger" telescopes to reach its full potential—and the outriggers were canceled in 2006 after protests from native Hawaiians, who consider the summit of Mauna Kea sacred. "Interferometry is still something of a dirty word around NASA," says Gerard van Belle, chief scientist at the Navy Precision Optical Interferometer (NPOI) near Flagstaff, Arizona.
Many astronomers have overlooked optical interferometry's recent achievements, says Tabetha Boyajian, an astronomer at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, who used CHARA to perform a survey of stellar sizes. She says astronomers are sometimes surprised to learn about the technique's capabilities. "You hear, ‘Oh wow, how can I use that for my science?’” she says.
CHARA and other optical arrays have imaged the squashed shapes of rapidly rotating stars, captured roving sunspots on stellar surfaces, filmed binary companion stars swapping material, and witnessed objects whipping around the Milky Way's central black hole in real time. After linking up the four 8.2-meter telescopes of the Very Large Telescope in the Atacama Desert of Chile, researchers with the European Southern Observatory last year were able to discern boiling convective cells on the face of a star 530 lightyears away. A new infrared instrument should enable that interferometer to image the warm dusty disks where planets are forming around other stars.
And despite its previous setbacks, NASA is supporting interferometry on the twin 8.4-meter instruments at the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory atop Mount Graham in Arizona. This year, scientists there announced they had used an interferometric technique to show that many young solar systems contain less dust than expected—good news for astronomers hoping to image exoplanets directly.
Once complete, MROI's telescopes will be more widely separated than any other interferometer, enabling its superior resolution. It will also test new technologies for combining starlight from multiple telescopes that could simplify the process. If it lives up to expectations, the observatory could give optical interferometry a boost in future decadal reviews, community exercises that set budget priorities for NASA and the National Science Foundation. By the time of the 2030 decadal survey, John Monnier, a physicist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and a CHARA member, wants solid support for the Planet Formation Imager, a 12-telescope, 1-kilometer-baseline optical interferometer that would be able to resolve dusty disks not just around young stars but newborn planets—the grist for moons and rings.
By then, NASA could be ready to put an optical interferometer in space, too. In 2007, the agency abandoned plans for the Terrestrial Planet Finder, an orbiting array of four telescopes designed to image planets around other stars. But it may now be more receptive to space interferometers, as giant space telescopes like the 6.5-meter James Webb Space Telescope, due to launch in 2021, strain the limits of rocket cargo loads.
"At some point [interferometry is] the only way we can address questions that are burning on the frontiers of astronomy," Van Belle says.
EPAEen artistieke impressie van ons melkwegstelsel.
WETENSCHAPDe planeet Aarde maakt deel uit van de Melkweg. De diameter van die galactische schijf blijkt nu nog groter dan eerder gedacht. Volgens een nieuwe studie zouden we er maar liefst 200.000 jaren over doen om met de snelheid van het licht ons hele melkwegstelsel over te vliegen.
De wetenschappers onderzochten de verhouding van metalen, de zware elementen, in sterren. Ze ontdekten dat er nog voorbij de veronderstelde grenzen van de galactische schijf sterren te zien waren met samenstellingen die lijken op die van sterren binnen de schijf. “We hebben aangetoond dat er nog verder dan de tot nu aangenomen stralingslimieten van de galactische schijf een aanzienlijk deel van sterren bestaat met een hogere metaalverhouding, een kenmerk van sterren binnen de schijf”, zegt co-auteur Carlos Allende van het Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias.
Tot nog toe werd de diameter van onze melkwegschijf geschat op iets tussen de 100.000 en 160.000 lichtjaren. Een lichtjaar is de afstand die het licht in een jaar aflegt of ongeveer 10 biljoen kilometer. Volgens het nieuwe onderzoek - gepubliceerd in Astronomy & Astrophysics - blijkt de schijf nu een diameter van 200.000 lichtjaren te hebben.
De astronomen beweren dat de pas ontdekte sterren zo’n drie keer verder van het melkwegmidden staan dan de zon. Mogelijk kunnen er zelfs sterren binnen de galactische schijf gevonden worden die zich zelfs vier keer verder bevinden.
Het gebeurt wel meer dat wetenschappers bepaalde meetresultaten bijstellen dankzij moderne technieken. Zo bleek onlangs dat de Andromedanevel toch niet groter zou zijn dan ons eigen melkwegstelsel, maar ongeveer even groot is. Dat heeft belangrijke gevolgen voor de berekening van de crash tussen de twee stelsels, die er onvermijdelijk over zo’n 4 miljard jaar zou aankomen.
WETENSCHAPHet is wetenschappers van de Leuvense universiteit gelukt om sla te printen. De planten zijn in de vorm van gummibeertjes uit de voedselprinter gekomen.
“Levende plantencellen geven voedsel een sappig en knapperig mondgevoel”, zegt onderzoeker Valérie Vancauwenberghe die de techniek ontwikkelde, op de site van Vilt, het Vlaams infocentrum land- en tuinbouw. “Daarom wilden we ze printbaar maken.” Het is volgens de makers een wereldprimeur in 3D-foodprinting.
Niemand heeft de beertjes al geproefd. Niet omdat ze giftig zijn, maar omdat ze nog niet goedgekeurd zijn voor consumptie. Voor de wetenschap maakt het weinig verschil, vindt Vancauwenberghe. “Het punt is dat we een protocol hebben ontwikkeld om plantweefsel te printen. Het gaat om de technologie, de beschrijving van de materialen, de optimale recepten en condities.” De onderzoekster heeft de bioprinter zelf gebouwd, de inkt ontwikkeld en geëxperimenteerd met printmodellen.
De inkt bevat pectine en levende cellen die ik heb geïsoleerd uit sla. Daarmee heb ik beertjes geprint.
Valérie Vancauwenberghe
Langer houdbaar
Virtueel fruit is de specialiteit van de onderzoeksgroep aan de KU Leuven. Er is al een digitale bibliotheek van wiskundige modellen van appels, peren en tomaten. Die worden gebruikt om te achterhalen hoe groenten en fruit langer houdbaar gemaakt kunnen worden. Het printen van sla is een logische stap, vindt Vancauwenberghe. Het resultaat is volgens haar “natuurlijk en artificieel tegelijkertijd”. “De inkt bevat pectine en levende cellen die ik heb geïsoleerd uit sla. Daarmee heb ik beertjes geprint. Maar ook honingraatstructuren en blokjes zijn mogelijk, telkens met een verschillende textuur. Luchtig of minder luchtig.”
Echte sla bevat 100 miljoen levende cellen per milliliter. Geprinte sla bevat één miljoen levende cellen per milliliter. Onderzoeker Valérie Vancauwenberghe: “De hoeveelheid aanwezige cellen is nog niet groot genoeg, maar ze overleven de printkop. In de toekomst moet het mogelijk zijn ze te laten groeien nadat ze geprint zijn.”
ShutterstockDe sla heeft de vorm gekregen van gummibeertjes.
De uitvinding kan mensen helpen die moeite hebben met slikken. Het printen biedt de mogelijkheid de structuur en de textuur van voeding in de hand te houden. “De presentatie is daarnaast aantrekkelijker dan bij gepureerd voedsel.” In de toekomst wordt het volgens Vancauwenberghe mogelijk voeding te printen die is afgestemd op persoonlijke wensen en noden.
Today is World UFO Day, when UFO enthusiasts around the world celebrate that strange phenomenon and remind the public that many mysteries remain unsolved. A whole 71 years after the sighting that kicked off the worldwide UFO craze, we are still no closer to determining what exactly causes hundreds of thousands of people to believe they have been witnesses to flying saucers.
UFO eyewitness Kenneth Arnold, center, examines an alleged photo of a UFO with two other pilots.
GETTY IMAGES
The History of “Flying Saucers”
On June 24th 1947, civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying his private airplane over the Pacific Northwest when he suddenly realized he was not alone in the skies. Near Mt. Rainier, Washington Arnold spotted “nine objects, glowing bright bluish-white” flying nearby. Eight of the objects were roughly disc-shaped, while the ninth larger object resembled a crescent. The nine objects were flying in a v-shaped formation.
Arnold estimated the craft were flying somewhere around 1,200 miles an hour and that he was witnessing a military exercise. He also compared their motion to a “saucer if you skipped it across water.” The objects obviously did not resemble any known aircraft and at the time there were no aircraft capable of flying in formation at Mach 1.5—Chuck Yeager would break the sound barrier only two months later.
The press misconstrued the “saucer” comment, applying it to their physical description, and the term flying saucer was born. Obviously, since the objects were beyond the ability of humans, newly minted UFO experts declared the objects had to be from space and evidence of life on other planets. Though in strict terms, a UFO is merely a mysterious flying craft and so is not inherently tied to the idea of visiting aliens.
"Could other stars harbor other forms of life, and could they be more advanced than ours?" If there are aliens, UFO thinkers speculated, it would stand to reason that at least some of them are millennia more advanced than we are, leaping across the universe in the blink of an eye.
GETTY IMAGESDAVID MCNEW
Back when Kenneth Arnold’s sighting over the Pacific Northwest triggered a flying saucer mania, with flying saucers reported worldwide, the fast pace of technological development which saw the U.S. go from subsonic propeller-driven to supersonic jet-powered fighters and a military based on conventional to nuclear weapons in less than ten years drove an intense interest in UFOs. The U.S. was also set to push into space with the establishment of NASA and the eventual goal of reaching the moon. Anything seemed possible, so why not aliens?
In the 1970s, as environmental problems mounted, trust in government decreased and the threat of nuclear war loomed, the emphasis shifted to reports of face-to-face contact with alien species, many of which were apparently unhappy with how humans were ruining the planet.
In the 1990s this narrative of direct interaction grew to its most extreme, with thousands reporting that they had been “abducted” by aliens, who then performed medical experiments.
GETTY IMAGES
Is the Government Hiding Something?
If you take these experiences to be even remotely true, the logic leads you to an inevitable conclusion: The U.S. government knows far more than it lets on about flying saucers. One conviction among UFOlogists is that the U.S. government not only knows more about aliens than it lets on, but that actively cooperates with them. According to some conspiracy theories, the federal government, particularly the national security apparatus, allows aliens to maintain underground bases, such as the one allegedly underneath Dulce, New Mexico, or in the mountain next to the famous Area 51 in Nevada.
Another, more plausible theory is that a secret arm of the U.S. government achieved a technological breakthrough to the point where its craft are mistaken for the work of aliens. This technology, proponents explain, is so advanced the government is keeping it under wraps. Still, if Kenneth Arnold had seen top-secret military aircraft in the 1940s, why does the U.S. military not have anything like his “flying saucers” 70 years later?
GETTY IMAGES
PASCAL PAVANI
The military's engagement with flying saucers isn't just conspiratorial. In December 2017, The New York Times published an account involving U.S. Navy fighter pilots and their encounter with unidentified flying objects. The encounter, which took place in 2004, involved UFOs sighted on radar, by pilots themselves, and actual video of the mysterious objects. Six months later the account was followed up by another, also involving Navy pilots, that reportedly took place in 2015.
The Navy sightings were some of the best accounts in decades, and involved some of the most highly trained pilots and advanced sensors in service anywhere. If the objects involved in the sightings were real and were not U.S. government property their technological superiority could be a real threat to our national security.
Yet despite all of this the Navy has offered no explanation for the events and appears disinterested in investigating the matter further.
F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighter.
GETTY IMAGES
The Suspicious Decline
The Navy's UFO interaction is notable in large part because it is the exception that proves the rule of modern UFO sighting trends: They're just not happening so much despite the fact that the smartphone revolution should ostensibly increasing sightings if UFOs exist.
Every single day, hundreds of millions of people are carrying a high quality camera in their pockets but there has been no corresponding explosion in UFO photos or video. The connected nature of the internet and social media allows ordinary people to reach a wide audience, but interest in talking about so-called “alien abductions” has dropped precipitously in the last ten years.
YOUTUBE
Even in the face of those seemingly obvious facts, it can be tough to shake the uncanny experience of seeing the explainable with your own eyes. In May of 1987 on an overnight trip to the San Francisco State University Sierra Nevada Campus at Yuba Pass, California with my high school biology class, it happened to me.
After curfew, about a dozen of us decided to climb a nearby tree-covered ridge and sat in silence, taking in the clean, cool night air and the twinkling stars above.
Then, someone saw it, and pointed it out to us all. It was a white, blinking light not unlike a satellite visible from Earth, but brighter. It was moving faster than anything I had ever seen before. But the real shock came when it made two sets of three zig-zagging turns, like a cue ball hitting the side of a pool table. Then it vanished over the horizon in seconds.
So what was it? I've asked myself over and over. Was it a classified military aircraft? At the time the F-117A Nighthawk, the world’s first stealth fighter was highly classified but we now know the aircraft regularly flew at night from Area 51 in Nevada over nearby Lake Tahoe, using its electro-optical targeting systems to pinpoint individual boats on the lake for target practice.
Still, F-117s—or any other publicly known aircraft in the past thirty years—are incapable of the maneuvers I saw that night. It was impossible to tell the object’s speed and altitude. If it was a high-flying aircraft, it was moving much faster than anything with the possible exception of the SR-71 Blackbird—and the SR-71 couldn’t pull off turns like that. If it was flying low we should have heard engines—and a sonic boom—but the encounter was totally silent.
Thirty one years later, all I know was that I saw a flying object and I could not and cannot identify it.
GETTY IMAGES
The State of UFOs Today
Today, 71 years after Kenneth Arnold’s sighting, we are still no closer to the truth behind the UFO phenomenon. There is a real phenomenon, but whether it is based in mass hallucinations, secret government aircraft, or actual beings from another planet is still up in the air.
A LOOK AT THE WORLD'S MOST SECRET MILITARY BASE
The Real Story Behind the Myth of Area 51
James Abbott, author of The Outsider’s Guide to UFOs, says, “For anyone with a truly open mind, the a priori case for UFOs as a scientific anomaly is firmly established. We do not have a good understanding of what the inexplicable sightings are, but the numbers, credibility of observations, and the lack of satisfactory scientific explanation in many cases, mean that we have to start looking at the phenomenon as a scientific problem; one which must be given long-term, serious scientific attention.”
On the other side of the fence is the bulk of scientific community, many of which are unconvinced. Skeptics believe that extraordinary claims, from claims of aliens to government aircraft that can make abrupt 90 degree turns in violation of the laws of physics, require extraordinary proof. This is not an unreasonable demand but it also, given the lack of accumulated evidence over the better part of a century, seems unlikely to be fulfilled anytime soon.
Uit reisverslagen blijkt dat de inheemse bewoners van Patagonië reuzen waren. Waarom is dit in de doofpot gestopt?
Uit reisverslagen blijkt dat de inheemse bewoners van Patagonië reuzen waren. Waarom is dit in de doofpot gestopt?
De Spaanse ontdekkingsreiziger Ferdinand Magellaan ontdekte in Zuid-Amerika verschillende inheemse stammen.
De Italiaan Antonio Pigafetta deed verslag van de reis en deed een aantal opmerkelijke observaties. Uit zijn reisverslagen blijkt dat de inheemse bewoners van Patagonië reuzen waren.
In de 19e eeuw kwamen Europese kolonisten in Amerika op allerlei plekken grafheuvels tegen die waren achtergelaten door de inheemse bevolking.
Abraham Lincoln
De kolonisten begonnen er opgravingen te verrichten en deden er ontdekkingen die de aandacht van grote kranten trokken.
In de grafheuvels werden reuzenskeletten gevonden. Media waaronder de New York Times en Scientific American stonden er indertijd bol van.
Zelfs Abraham Lincoln verwees in 1848 naar de reuzen toen hij een bezoek bracht aan Niagara Falls. “De ogen van die soort uitgestorven reuzen, wiens botten de grafheuvels van Amerika vullen, keken neer op Niagara zoals onze ogen dat nu doen,” zei hij.
Ruim vier meter
In een artikel in de New York Times uit 1885 wordt gesproken van een skelet dat ruim vier meter lang moet zijn geweest.
In hetzelfde artikel wordt gesteld dat iemand van het Smithsonian Institution aanwezig was op de locatie om onderzoek te verrichten.
Cover-up
De naam van deze organisatie dook vaker op na de vondst van een reuzenskelet. Sommigen geloven dan ook dat het Smithsonian betrokken is bij de cover-up.
De skeletten werden meestal overgedragen aan het museum voor verder onderzoek. Daarna bleef het stil.
The onscreen teaming of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost has produced some real gems over the years, from Spaced, to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz—all co-written and dynamically directed by Edgar Wright. Their 2013 sci-fi, The World’s End, put a slightly disappointing cap on their “Cornetto Trilogy” (so-called for each of the instalments—Shaun, Fuzz, and End—featuring a different flavoured Cornetto ice cream). But before The World’s End, Pegg and Frost gave us another sci-fi outing, this time without their favored director, Edgar Wright.
Pegg and Frost.
2011 saw the release of Paul, a foul-mouthed, sweet-hearted story of geekdom and friendship set against the rich tapestry of American UFO lore. In the movie, directed by Greg Mottola, writers Pegg and Frost play Graeme and Clive, two British sci-fi enthusiasts who embark upon a UFO road trip across the United States with the goal of hitting all the key pilgrimage sites, including Roswell and Area 51. While in the Nevada desert en route to the famous Area 51 perimeter, Graeme and Clive stumble across a Gray alien named Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen) who has just escaped from the base, where he had been a “guest” (i.e. prisoner) since 1947. Graeme and Clive agree to help the benevolent but potty-mouthed Paul flee his Men in Black pursuers and eventually return to his home planet.
The idea for Paul traces back to the filming of Shaun of the Dead in 2003 when the crew had lost so many days to the torrential English rain that they started wondering how great it would be to shoot a movie where it never, ever rained. “We just spit-balled from there,” Frost told MTV. “No rain became the desert, the desert became Area 51 and then it was a short step to thinking about these two guys encountering an alien.” They proceeded to watch more than 50 movies about aliens and road trips. “Then we just sat opposite one another and banged it out, line by line,” recalled Frost.
Paul is a witty movie that utilizes almost every ingredient of modern UFO conspiracy lore to enrich its plot, from the Roswell Incident and Men in Black, to aliens in the custody of the US government inspiring human technological developments. It even draws our attention to the interplay between UFOs and Hollywood and makes light of the idea that pop-culture has been deliberately seeded with alien imagery in an effort to prepare the masses for open contact. At one point in the movie, Clive remarks of Paul’s archetypal appearance, “He looks too obvious!” Paul responds: “There’s a reason for that, Clive! Over the last 60 years, the human race has been drip-fed images of my face, on lunchboxes and T-shirts and shit. It’s in case our species do meet, you don’t have a fucking spaz attack!”
Rain-free shoot: Greg Mottola directs Nick Frost and Simon Pegg on location for ‘Paul’ (2011).
Later in the movie it is revealed that, while at Area 51, Paul worked closely with Hollywood filmmakers, inspiring iconic movie and TV characters, including Fox Mulder and Steven Spielberg’s E.T. In a flashback scene set in 1980, we see Paul at Area 51 on the phone to Spielberg (appearing as himself in vocal form only), who is seeking Paul’s advice on a future movie about a friendly little alien. The conversation plays out as follows:
Paul: Okay Steven, how about cellular revivification? Spielberg: I don’t know what that is. Paul: Oh. Restoration of damaged tissue through telepathic manipulation of intrinsic field memory. Spielberg: What’s that mean? Paul: It means healing, Mr. Spielberg. Spielberg: Yeah right, healing. Like by touch or something like that. Like maybe his finger lights up on the end when he reaches out and touches? Paul: Maybe… You know, sometimes I find less is more. Spielberg: Hey, trust me.
Today, seven years after its original release, Paul stands up well. Change comes so slowly in the UFO subculture that none of its UFOlogical references have dated even a day. The special effects still look strong too. This is thanks to Mottola and his team spending a huge portion of their production budget on bringing the CGI Paul to life. The director recognized that, for the movie to work, Paul had to look absolutely real—no expense could be spared.
“To do the CGI of Paul was one-third of our budget,” Mottola told recalled. “The actual production budget was kind of small… so we gave up 10 days of shooting and a second unit for the action scenes, just to pour more money into getting Paul right.”
It may not be as sharp as some of Frost and Pegg’s earlier outings (the absence of Edgar Wright can be felt in both script and direction), but Paul is still bags more brains and fun than most Hollywood comedies today. If you’re a fan of toilet humor, there’s a shit load. If you’re a sci-fi or UFO enthusiast, you might just feel you’ve died and gone to geek heaven.
Uranus already has self-esteem issues due it its name and the off-color mispronunciation the rest of the solar system (OK, just us) use. Now it looks like it will have to deal with taunts that it can’t defend itself from galactic invaders. A new study says it’s highly likely that the planet’s strange axial tilt and misplaced magnetic field was caused by a large rogue planet slamming into it four billion years ago. What’s up, Uranus? (Sorry.)
Uranus May Have Been Knocked Out of Alignment by a Huge Rogue Planet | Mysterious Universe
“We perform a suite of smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations to investigate in detail the results of a giant impact on the young Uranus.”
Is this what it looked like?
In “Consequences of Giant Impacts on Early Uranus for Rotation, Internal Structure, Debris, and Atmospheric Erosion,” a study published in the Astrophysical Journal, author Jacob Kegerreis describes how he and fellow researchers at Durham University’s Institute for Computational Cosmology tackled the perplexing questions about Uranus’ odd traits, such as its 98-degree axial angle to its orbital plane and its rings and moons which all seem to orbit in the same orderly direction. Then there’s the puzzling magnetic field which seems to open and close daily, allowing deadly solar winds through.
“We ran more than 50 different impact scenarios using a high-powered super computer to see if we could recreate the conditions that shaped the planet’s evolution. Our findings confirm that the most likely outcome was that the young Uranus was involved in a cataclysmic collision with an object twice the mass of Earth, if not larger, knocking it on to its side and setting in process the events that helped create the planet we see today.”
While simulations of objects hitting Uranus have been run before, this study uses the latest data and technology. These simulations showed that the rogue object most likely made a glancing impact rather than a direct hit, which explains why Uranus still has an atmosphere. That atmosphere is colder than expected because the simulations show debris from the impact could have formed a shell and trapped heat emanating from the planet’s core. The glancing hit could also explain why the debris spun off into rings and small moons that all travel in the same direction rather than in a helter-skelter multi-directional mess a direct hit would have caused.
The indirect blow would likely have made a less-visible shakeup inside Uranus, changing its shape and density in ways that would explain the funky, warped magnetic field and the axial tilt which is contrary to all other solar system planets.
NASA image of Uranus and its moons and rings
Unfortunately, while the simulation gives possible answers to the mysteries of Uranus and helps researchers better understand other ice giants being found in other solar systems, it leaves unanswered a bigger question … where did this rogue planet or giant object come from and will it come again? The model pictures its size at twice the size of Earth, which is smaller than speculations on the size of the rumored Planet X or Planet 9 or whatever you want to call it.
So many planetary mysteries … so little supercomputer time for running simulations. Perhaps these researchers need to focus more on rogue planets and get their heads out of Uranus. (Sorry.)
On March 7, 2018 a bright flash followed by a sonic boom occurred along the Washington coast.
A local resident told the Seattle Times that he thought it was a spaceship but from analysis of radar signals, they concluded it was a meteorite about the size of a golf cart that broke apart and plunged into the ocean about 16 miles off the coast.
Further analyses suggest that about two tons of meteorite debris, may be some as large as a brick, have survived the plunge into the ocean and now scientists want to retrieve as much as they can for further study.
According to scientists, who stated that it was the biggest recorded meteor fall in the United States in 21 years, the debris field is situated near an underwater canyon about 400 feet deep.
This week the exploration vessel Nautilus which is the flagship of the Ocean Exploration Trust (OET), a nonprofit group founded by explorer Robert Ballard has arrived on the spot and they are trying to recover debris of the object by using remote-operated submarines to survey the area and collect any fragments they find.
They are joined by scientists from the University of Washington, the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, and NASA.
Indeed, NASA is involved in the operation since NASA wants to study the meteorite fragments too and that is very suspicious as we know the organization for its ‘Never A Straight Answer’ policy.
Knowing NASA is involved in the search for debris, we may wonder whether it was a meteorite or something else that splashed down into the ocean.
If you want to follow the search, three live stream videos are available at nautiluslive.org.
Pyramid and Arch-like objects in the skies over Michigan and Southern England
Pyramid and Arch-like objects in the skies over Michigan and Southern England
A huge chevron/pyramid-like object has been photographed over Taylor, Michigan and it looks like it is cloaked.
Is it possible that a cloud formation could have been formed in this way or the photographer has captured a cloaked triangle UFO?
Another strange phenomenon has been filmed in the sky over Southern England on July 3, 2018.
The witness has no idea what it could be, but it looks like a bridge or arch in the sky. It is striking that a layer of clouds apparently sits on top of something.
In 2004 the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group (CSP) tracked UFOs on more than one occasion spanning several days off the coast of San Diego. It turns out an investigation of this event was conducted by a secret group within the Pentagon investigating UFOs. The existence of this UFO project made worldwide headlines after a New York Times published an article on the subject in December of last year.
Although the article mentioned this case and included video of one of the UFOs from the infrared camera of a jet fighter, the government shared very little official information beyond the video. Luis Elizondo, the former head of the UFO program and David Fravor, one of the fighter pilots involved with the incident have come forward in media interviews. However, no documents have been released. Recently, Las Vegas’ 8 News Now’s I-Team shared a leaked report they obtained from the incident, and the encounter was shocking. You can read more about this document in my recent article on Den of Geek: U.S. Navy Had a UFO Encounter According to Leaked Military Report.
You can also view recently released interviews with David Fravor by filmmaker Jeremy Corbell and a new interview with Luis Elizondo from Las Vegas 8 New Now below.
Footage showing a UFO moving fast in the skies of France has brought speculations about global governments running secret projects. The camera appears to struggle to keep up with the unidentified flying object, which seems to have a U-shape body.
YouTube channel ZealotinAll Black3 uploaded the clip online. They speculated the unusual aerial object vanished following the recording.
Soon after it was made available on the internet, the video has since gained popularity among conspiracy theorists.
Tyler Glockner of secureteam10 suggested it could be something out of Star Wars.
His video has gotten over 350,000 hits since. Viewers were quick to give their thoughts about it.
One commenter says the object is like a shape of an alien craft from the movie Prometheus.
Another comment says it looks the same thing in a Sci-Fi movie.
Another viewer claims it is a new secret weapon of the government, used to experiment people for future use on war.
However, it is not the first time alien life has reportedly spotted. Similar scenes were reported in Texas over the weekend when a man spotted something mysterious leaving a military facility.
And before that, another unidentified flying object was allegedly noticed close to Area 51.
Video Footage Apparently Shows White Orb Hovering Over Dublin Home In Ireland
Video Footage Apparently Shows White Orb Hovering Over Dublin Home In Ireland
A video that was posted online shows a strange white orb hovering over a residential area in Dublin.
The clip was reportedly recorded during a family barbecue. It apparently shows a white object in the skies over a heavily-populated residential area on June 9.
The video footage, which was posted to the YouTube channel UFO Institute, has a detailed description of the incident from the person who claimed to have witnessed it.
The description reveals that the object was stationary high above in the sky and was turning, pulsating and seemingly having three lights at the bottom of it.
After observing the object for 45 minutes, the witness noticed a smaller orb came out from the side of it. The orb darted up and down many times before it disappeared.
As the witness shed further light on his experience, he also cast further doubt on some of his claims.
The witness added that he saw nine orbs in formation wherein two were moving. He observed them for some time and returned to the main object. Then he saw a small sphere around the main object again, which then disappeared.
Though these claims come one in a blue moon, Dublin is becoming a hotspot for UFO sightings.
There have been over 20 reported sightings above the Irish capital in the past twenty years alone.
The military may be testing out top-secret flying stealth flying technology as one theory suggests.
However, this notion could easily be dispelled because these sightings took place in densely populated areas.
There are some commonalities on the latest sighting and the reported sightings chronicled on UFO Stalker.
In one instance, a witness claimed to have seen two star-like objects, similar to the ones in this clip. Low flying, silent craft were also reported elsewhere on the site.
Many other UFO sightings were reported in the Emerald Isle as well.
Filer’s Files #26 – 2018 UFOs Are Real and Ancient - PART I
U.S Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program
Filer’s Files #26 – 2018 UFOs Are Real and Ancient - PART I
In special reports, this week’s files cover: Canadian Wilbert B. Smith’s, TOP SECRET Memo, , Jacques Vallee Claims UFO Phenomenon Is Real but Maybe Dimensions, Titan Has Atmosphere and Liquids, Breaking the Silence on UFOS: Why Now? President Putin Claims Russia Stronger Than Ever, B-21 Will Reach Critical Design Review by End of Year, and We Are Not Alone.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Arizona, California, Georgia, Iowa, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Virginia, and Washington.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over, Afghanistan, Canada, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Japan, and England in the United Kingdom.
The Filer Research Institute feels the scientific study of UFOs is for the benefit of humankind and is an important endeavor. The US Air Force investigated UFOs publicly for more than twenty years under Project Blue Book; and I continue this advanced research. I believe the God of the universe has spread life throughout the cosmos and UFO’s are visiting us in ever-increasing numbers.
Major George Filer Editor of The National UFO Center, would like to invite join him in Mt Shasta this summer July 27-29th 2018. He will present a wonderful program at the “From Venus with Love” conference.
Forward these files to your friends and neighbors.
Special Projects
CanadianWilbert B. Smith’s, TOP SECRET Memo
Wilbert B. Smith states, “I made discreet enquiries through the Canadian Embassy staff in Washington DC who were able to obtain for me the following information:
The matter is the most highly classified subject in the United States Government, rating higher even than the H-bomb.
Flying saucers exist.
Their modus operandi is unknown but concentrated effort is being made by a small group headed by Doctor Vannevar Bush.
The entire matter is considered by the United States authorities to be of tremendous significance.
Wilbert Smith led the Canadian Project Magnet Program that was an unidentified flying object (UFO) study program established by Transport Canada on December 2, 1950. Wilbert B. Smith, was a senior radio engineer for the Transport Canada’s Broadcast and Measurements Section. It was formally active until mid-1954, and informally active without government funding until Smith’s death in 1962. Smith eventually concluded that UFOs were probably extra terrestrial. Wilbert B. Smith, TOP SECRET Memo; Department of Transport, Intra-departmental Correspondence, OTTAWA, Ontario, Nov 21, 1950 (downgraded to CONFIDENTIAL 15/9/69)
In June 1952, Smith issued a preliminary report arguing that UFOs likely came from intelligent, extraterrestrial sources and almost certainly manipulated magnetism for flight. A 1953 report reiterated these conclusions. Also in April 1952 the Canadian government established Project Second Storey, a parallel UFO research project, with Smith also involved. It consisted of a group of scientists and military officers who met periodically to consider the UFO question and to recommend government action. Smith reported to Second Storey on some of Project Magnet’s findings and conclusions.
Smith believed UFOs were linked to psychic phenomena and believed himself to be in contact with extraterrestrial beings who communicated to him through telepathy. Catholic Priests were also used as field investigations in many cases. Smith wrote a number of articles for Topside, the publication of the Ottawa New Sciences Club which he founded, outlining the philosophy of the “Space Brothers” with whom he claimed to be in contact The articles were later collected and published posthumously in 1969 under the title The Boys from Topside.[5]
The original 1969 edition of a compilation of 11 articles which Canadian engineer, leader of Project Magnet, UFO researcher and contactee Wilbert B. Smith wrote for Topside, the publication of the Ottawa New Sciences Club which he founded. Many of the articles were first reprinted in Flying Saucer Review from the late 1950s onward. (The name Topside derived from Smith’s favorite nickname for the space people — “the boys topside”, a maritime term denoting the personnel on deck.)
In the article ‘The Philosophy of the Saucers’ (chapter 4)Mr. Smith seems to allude to the dawning of the New Age when he writes: “In time, when certain events have transpired, and we are so oriented that we can accept these people from elsewhere, they will meet us freely on common ground of mutual understanding and trust. We will be able to learn from them and bring about the Golden Age all men everywhere desire deep within their hearts.” (p.29)
There is evidence that Canada shortly after World War II had been able to build disc shaped UFOs. Mr. Smith had a key role in the field and was able to release valuable data concerning contact with the space people. Several of his contacts revealed previous lives.. His contacts claimed to be in touch with aliens and three contactees from different parts of the world were all given the following message from the space brothers.
Be ever watchful for new people who come into your life unexpectedly and remember, as your Bible says, to treat such strangers well, for you are thereby entertaining angels unawares. One of your greatest Karmic tests will be your response to appeals for help. If you wish to progress spiritually and build up a happy future, you should, wherever humanly possible , give such help willingly. Under Cosmic Law, this is a moral obligation.
It is also good insurance that when you need help, it will ‘be given freely. A personal sacrifice in order to help others is never a loss • rather, it is the richest investment you cou1d ever make, for Under God’s Laws of Love, you will be rewarded tenfold. To continue on the tbcmc of the quality of prayer, before you any make requests of God you should first give all of yourself unto Him in a joyous outpouring of love and grateful thanks for all. His many blessings to you – in other words, praise the Lord Who is your Divine Creator. Let your words come straight from your heart – give and you shall receive. Topside Issue 35
Jacques Vallee Claims UFO Phenomenon Is Real but Maybe Dimensions.
I had a very memorable meeting with Dr. Jacques Vallee at Princeton University several years ago and he explained his thinking about UFOs. He holds a master’s degree in astrophysics and a Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University, and was an early scientific proponent of the theory that UFOs are extraterrestrial spaceships. His first book, “Anatomy of a Phenomenon” argued eloquently that “through UFO activity the contours of an amazingly complex intelligent life beyond the earth can be discerned. Vallee emphasized three points: one, the UFO phenomenon is real; two, it has been with us throughout history; three, it is physical in nature yet it represents a form of consciousness that is able to manipulate dimensions beyond time and space as we know them.
Vallee’s friend and mentor Dr. Allen Hynek had arrived at a similar conclusion as early as 1976, when he began expressing his doubts that UFOs are nuts-and-bolts spacecraft from other worlds. Hynek stated, “It’s ridiculous to suppose that super intelligence would travel enormous distances to do relatively stupid things like stop cars, collect soil samples, perform repetitive “medical exams” on abducted clients, and generally go around frightening people.”
Hynek key idea was that UFOs may operate in a multi-dimensional reality of which space-time is a subset that they may exist in a parallel universe.
Jacques Vallee in his autobiographical book, “Forbidden Science,” Vallee summed up his views about the provenance of UFOs, developed through decades of research: “The UFO Phenomenon exists. It has been with us throughout history. It is physical in nature and it remains unexplained in terms of contemporary science. It represents a level of consciousness that we have not yet recognized, and which is able to manipulate dimensions beyond time and space as we understand them.” He does not think they are starships ferrying Aliens from outer space. Vallee thinks UFOs are likely “windows” to other dimensions manipulated by intelligent, often mischievous, always enigmatic beings we have yet to understand.
But by 1969, when he published “Passport to Magonia on UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds.” Vallee’s assessment of the UFO phenomenon had undergone a significant shift from ET to the view that UFOs are paranormal in nature and a modern space age manifestation of a phenomenon which assumes different guises in different historical contexts. Folklore & UFOs: Jacques Vallee
Over two decades ago, eminent scientist Jacques Vallee wrote a provocative book about UFO cases, folklore, and certain unexplained phenomena. I spoke with Jacques Vallee to discuss that original groundbreaking work Passport to Magonia, which changed our understanding of the UFO phenomenon by connecting documents and data from earlier centuries that related to incidents in the modern era. Among the numerous parallels between UFOs, folklore, and religious traditions were tales of fairies, elves, leprechauns, apparitions, and strange creatures. We know that some visitors have the ability to change their appearance at will.
In Celtic regions such as Eire (Ireland), Cornwall, (England), (Isle of Mann), (Brittany, France), (Scotland), Wales. and Galicia, in northwest Spain, The Celts also expanded down the Danube river and its tributaries. The Celts described seeing fairies who were accompanied by strange oval objects from the sky, and these beings were also known for abducting people– not unlike modern reports of alien abduction, he pointed out.
Fairies dancing in the woods are often reported even in the U.S. today.
A ninth century account from the Archbishop of Lyon, France dealt with three people who were said to emerge from a flying ship– villagers thought they came from a magical land called Magonia that was beyond the clouds.
Vallee spoke of how UFO phenomena seems to straddle different layers of reality, and what witnesses actually observe may be modulated by their individual consciousness. People in Asia view the phenomenon “When the underlying archetypes are extracted,” he wrote, “the saucer myth is seen to coincide to a remarkable degree with the fairy-faith of Celtic countries … religious miracles… and the widespread belief among all peoples concerning entities whose physical and psychological descriptions place them in the same category as the angles.
UFOs and related phenomena are “the means through which man’s concepts are being rearranged.”There is “control system.” Described in “The Invisible College,” for planet earth,” he says. “I do not want to be misunderstood: I do not mean that some higher order of beings has locked us inside the constraints of a space-bound jail, closely monitored by psychic entities we might call angels or demons. I do not propose to redefine God. What I do mean is that mythology rules at a level of our social reality over which normal political and intellectual action has no power/” Thanks to Jacques Vallee
Titan Has Atmosphere and Liquids
Saturn’s largest moon Titan is an extraordinary and exceptional world. Among our solar system’s more than 150 known moons, Titan is the only one with a substantial atmosphere. And of all the places in the solar system, Titan is the only place besides Earth known to have liquids in the form of rivers, lakes and seas on its surface.
Titan is larger than the planet Mercury and is the second largest moon in our solar system. Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is just a little bit larger (by about 2 percent). Titan’s atmosphere is made mostly of nitrogen, like Earth’s, but with a surface pressure 50 percent higher than Earth’s. Titan has clouds, rain, rivers, lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons like methane and ethane. The largest seas are hundreds of feet deep and hundreds of miles wide. Beneath Titan’s thick crust of water ice is more liquid—an ocean primarily of water rather than methane. Titan’s subsurface water could be a place to harbor life as we know it, while its surface lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons could conceivably harbor life that uses different chemistry than we’re used to—that is, life as we don’t yet know it. Titan could also be a lifeless world. Cassini took photographs of a possible space base,
Note arrows pointing to what appears to be a series of carved faces on the Saturn’s Moon Enceladus that often mark key structures.
ASA’s Cassini spacecraft looks toward the night side of Saturn’s largest moon and sees sunlight scattering through the periphery of Titan’s atmosphere and forming a ring of color. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute.
Breaking the Silence on UFOs: Why Now?
Navy F-18 radar on UFO off California Coast
Irvine, CA — Bambi Dudley writes for Mutual UFO Network, It all started with an article on the front page of the Sunday New York Times. A $22 million allotted to a secret UFO agency loses its long-time manager for a private day job. He goes public with three official videos of military pilots confronting unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs). The pilots gasp as they see multiple tic-tac shaped objects zooming around them. The videos go viral.
Ralph Blumenthal spent three months researching “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program”for December 16, 2017. He collaborated with Pentagon correspondent Helene Cooper and author-UFO researcher Leslie Kean. “Our readers are plenty interested in unidentified flying objects. We know that from the huge response …revealing a secret Pentagon program to investigate U.F.O.s. The piece has dominated the most emailed and most viewed lists since.” It seems like ‘I told you so,’ when several government, military, and UFO researchers heard about the story. They went on the record in mainstream publications, a phenomenon in itself. The Washington Post, New YorkMagazine, Newsweek, fashion-oriented goop.com,
Robert Wood, Ph.D., retired aeronautical engineer, and co-author of Alien Viruses: Crashed UFOs, MJ-12 and Biowarfare, comments: “I believe the Government is merely disclosing what the vast majority of people already know: They have crashed, we have been studying the topic secretly for nearly eightdecades, some are alien, and that avoiding public panic when the details come out is a dominant principle. I also think that most of those involved in releasing information do not grasp the full reality of what we have learned.” Former U.S. Senator Harry Reid (Nevada) has always been fascinated with UFOs. In May 2018, Eric Benson of New York Magazine asked him: Do you know things about this program that you can’t discuss publicly? “Yeah, but there’s plenty that can be discussed publicly, and I’ve tried to do that. I’m interested only in research. I’m interested in science, and in helping the American public understand what the hell is going on. You know at this stage in the reports, we have thousands of people who have seen this stuff. Not hundreds — thousands.”
The topic is still taboo, according to Leslie Kean, author of UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. “Ridicule has been generated towards this topic since the 1950’s in order to make it go away, and the “giggle factor” has become ingrained in our culture. Some may feel that if these crafts have an extraterrestrial origin, they are way more advanced than us, that they could have complete power over us if they wanted to, and that we have no control over them or what they do.
This is frightening, so the reaction is to avoid dealing with UFOs altogether. And, our government’s attitude does not help either.” Unabashed by the public’s thinking him a wacko, in 2007 Senator Reid had secured $11 million in a defense appropriation bill to investigate aerial phenomena.
Called Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, (AATIP) the agency was tasked to investigate and report unidentified aerial phenomena, a potential threat to the U.S. Its manager was a 22-year veteran of the Department of Defense, Luis Elizondo. Ten years later, he left– citing its disregard of “overwhelming evidence” that unexplained phenomena have been interfering with the U.S. military. “We trust the American people to know that Kim Jong Un has thermonuclear weapons pointed at L.A.,” he says. “We trust the American people to know there’s a potential Ebola pandemic that could come out of Africa. And yet we don’t trust the American people with information that there are unidentified phenomena in our airspace, and that we don’t know how it works?” Elizondo joined Tom DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy, whose members had been “operating under the shadows of top-secrecy for decades” before joining DeLonge. TTS announced its intention to serve the public by researching and releasing reports on aerial phenomena. “Basically, it made UFOs go mainstream,”
Jan Harzan, executive director of the Mutual UFO Network says. “UFOs are real. And it represents advanced technology in our skies. If we want to advance as a civilization, this is something we have to focus on.” His organization accepts eyewitness accounts from all over the world. Over 600 field investigators in every state in the U.S. scrutinize, vet and then report their findings online at MUFON.com. “That’s the strength of MUFON as an organization, and as really being the-truth seekers of the UFO field.” After a drought in media coverage for eight decades, is the public ready to learn the truth?
And has the Pentagon eased up secrecy? Chris Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (now at TTS) cites a lack of awareness of a major problem and a need for change. “This is another case in which the system will not repair itself and people outside of government need to take action for breakthroughs to occur.” He trusts his new team has the skill set to analyze and disseminate information that will benefit all. Luis Elizondo can speak out. “Now is the time to move forward and try to answer some of life’s deepest mysteries.” He is the keynote speaker at the 49th MUFON Symposium, open to UFO enthusiasts, experts and the public. The theme is just right for him: “UFOs, Extraterrestrials and the Future of Humanity.” For the full schedule of weekend events, visit MUFONSymposium.com Bambi Dudley Consultants Arts Management BDudley@consultantsartsmgt.com
One-On-One with Luis Elizondo – get your tickets NOW
2018 MUFON Symposium is just around the corner andwe are looking forward to see you in Cherry Hill, NJ in 4 weeks!
This email is to remind you, or to let you know (in case you missed it) that we have added a SPECIAL EVENT for Saturday evening. 100 Symposium Attendees will have the opportunity to spend about 2 hours with the man who ran the Pentagon UFO Program, Louis Elizondo.
IF you have not purchase your tickets yet ($50), now is the time to do so. We may have a few tickets available for walk-ins but we expect to sell out and a possible line. Tickets are going fast and we do not want you to miss it. If you have purchased tickets for this event, no need to do anything else and we will see you there.
The blunt-talking President Putin explains it again – many of the new military weapons systems are operational, and the remaining ones are close to being so.
He also says there will be yet more announcements about even more new weapons systems.
Interviewer: And now let’s move on to our most advanced weapons. You spoke about those super-developments during your Address to the Federal Assembly. And it’s noteworthy that the Western media immediately came up with a series of articles stating that the tests were still in progress and they were not always successful, as Russia tried to present it, does our Army actually have these weapons?
Vladimir Putin: Look, I have already said it during my Address to the Federal Assembly and will repeat it again:
As early as in 2004, I said that we started developing such new systems as a response to the USA unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Avangard
And I spoke back then about the system, which we now call Avangard. It is an intercontinental missile system, not a ballistic one, which flies on a flat trajectory and changes its heading and height. It’s an ultimate weapon, if we speak about today. Its speed is over Mach 20, 20 times sound velocity.
I don’t think that any country would develop such a weapon in the years to come. But of course, it will be developed one day.
And I’ve already said that it doesn’t bother us because we already have one.
Now let’s talk about what we have and don’t have. Kinzhal hypersonic air-launched system, which is a Mach 10 hypersonic missile, is already deployed with the Army in the Southern Federal District. I have already said that.
If someone questions it, then let them have a look, we pointedly demonstrated the launches of this missile. That’s first.
Second, the laser weapon system. It is already deployed too.
I have already said and I want to repeat that The Avangard system is already being manufactured on an industrial large scale, and we plan to deploy it with the Armed Forces in 2019.
Sarmat
In 2020 we plan to deploy with the Armed Forces our most powerful strategic missile complex, the new Sarmat heavy-duty ballistic missile. We have several developments, which I have already mentioned.
These are two products with a nuclear engine, a nuclear propulsion device; a global-range missile with a small nuclear engine and an unmanned underwater vehicle. In both cases, we finished the main development stage.
Namely, everything about the tests of this nuclear propulsion device. There are still things to be done on a scheduled basis. The work is going exactly according to the plan, within the scheduled procedures.
I have no doubt that they will be deployed with the Army as scheduled.
As for those who doubt it… Well, they doubted the Avangard back in 2004. I have already said that it has been deployed in Syria. Sarmat Missile. But that’s not all that we plan to develop and deploy with the Army.
Well, I said during the Address that it’s too early to speak about that, but we will shortly. https://russia-insider.com President Putin will meet in Helsinki with President trump on July 16, 2018.It appears Putin desires to make Russia a great power like the Soviet Union had been.
B-21 Will Reach Critical Design Review by End of Year
The secret U.S. B-21 stealth bomber will have its critical design review—a major milestone—by the end of calendar 2018, Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office director Randall Walden told attendees at an AFA Mitchell Institute event in Arlington, Va. on Monday. Walden said a B-21 air intake issue has been resolved, and gave many new details about the size, budget, and activities of his organization. He said the first B-21 has yet to be fabricated, but testing of its components is progressing, and wind tunnel tests of the shape have taken place. Walden also said the RCO has been asked for help in setting up a dedicated Space version of the RCO at the Space and Missile Systems Center, and he has recommended the hiring of a number of RCO alumna, who have come aboard there. Thanks to AFA
1 – 2 PM: Tuesday Forum. We Are Not Alone
David Twichell
Dan Wright is a former Michigan MUFON State Director, and was later elevated to the international board of directors in 1986. Dan is in the process of having a non-fiction book published called “CIA CHRONICLE: THE UFO FILES”, in which he highlights many of the governments recently declassified documents concerning the UFO phenomenon. Join us Tue. July 3 at 1PM to hear some of the UFO cases that the US government has kept secret to date. Remember after the broadcast this show is available as a podcast from this website: click on Talk Shows–Tuesday Forum–(select date).
David Twichell’s Show “We Are Not Alone” is a two time award winning radio show on WHFR.FM and is a member of the MUFON Radio Network! The show airs the first Tuesday of each month at 1:00 PM EST with new shows each month. Go to http://streema.com/radios/play/23020 All shows are archived at WHFR’s website. Click on “Talk Shows” then the “Tuesday Forum” button and the date of the show. We Are Not Alone is also archived at my website which is http://www.ufoimplications.com/radio_archive.html
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:FILER FILES - overzicht met foto's met dank aan Georges Filer en WWW.nationalUFOCenter.com (ENG)
Filer’s Files #26 – 2018 UFOs Are Real and Ancient - PART II
Filer’s Files #26 – 2018 UFOs Are Real and Ancient - PART II
UFO Sightings in the United States
Arizona Light
Metlakalle–My kids and I were out at the beach on June 22, 2018. I was laying there and noticed a white object in the sky. I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at first. My daughter also noticed the white object. It took us quite a while to figure out that was going on. It was moving slow very high and coming towards us and then moved sideways. We then knew we were watching a UFO. It hovered around ascending but never disappeared. It then came back down and hovered for a while in the left side of the sky and blinked and it was gone. Thanks to MUFON CMS
California Object
Stockton– My friend noticed about 10 pm an object moving erratically on June 17, 2018. None of our aircraft does that. It shot a green laser at the object for about 20 seconds. A couple seconds after that the object’s green light came on. It started coming closer then stopped. My brand new green laser lost power in less than 2 minutes. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Georgia Lights
Atlanta— Someone commented on a picture of lightning that I posted to Facebook asking about an object in the north east corner of the sky on June 1, 2018 26, 2018. I later went back to take a photo and zoomed in to my shock and awe I saw what looked like 2 floating panels each with 2 rows of Vertical orbs. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Iowa Lights
Red Oak— My family is sure that it was very late 1957 or early 1958 on a cold dark cloudy night. I was waiting with my Mom for my Dad to get off work near the city square when my Dad started driving us home. At Fourth Street and Corning my Dad said, “Look and pointed towards the southeast.” My Mom and I saw a very large object hovering above the local high school. The object was flying east and had multiple colored lights and was egg or oval shaped. The object was flying at flag pole height against a wind. My Dad turned the car onto Corning Street and drove under the object and looked straight up at the object. It floated out of our line of vision behind the Jr. High building and was gone. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Minnesota Lights
New Brighten— I had just left some friends for dinner on June 21, 2018, and looked up and saw this object just above the buildings. It was hovering with red lights all in one area and two white lights in front. Then the colors changed to blinking blue and green. Then the red lights came on in the middle of the spaceship. I could then see the shape of the craft.. By the time I got my cell phone, it was already leaving. I only got a picture of if leaving.. Thanks to MUFON CMS
New Jersey Orbs
Egg Harbor — I had just gotten into my car at the Home Depot on June 20, 2018, when a black crow caught my eye. I then realized there were four black spheres or orbs around the crow. I had left my camera at home. I then focused my attention on four spheres that had now formed a and moved higher into the sky
I then quickly grabbed my cell phone and snapped a picture. I watched them until they were out of sight and they stayed in the same formation the whole time. Thanks to MUFON CMS
New York Object
Greenfield Park— While driving on Route 52 at roughly 50 MPH I noticed something that seemed to be floating above the roadway ahead. I couldn’t see it clearly because another car was tailgating. I pulled off into the parking lot of the Greenfield Park Post Office. I asked, “Is that you little light?” The object moved further up the road and I pursued it. It may have been 100′ to 300′ away and moving along with my car. It’s hard to tell how large it is or exactly how far away. It looked like a truncated cone shape with glowing blue lines running down its sides from the narrow end to the wider end. The metallic surfaces of the object reflected moonlight and streetlights.
The light was spreading in a wide cone shape and was slightly bluish. Then it started to rotate and shined at me and flashed five times in my direction.
As it faced away I could see the ‘top’ or the side that the light wasn’t shining from. The center where the cone shape was truncated looked dark and the lines of blue light looked like ‘EL Wires’ radiating from it. They seemed to come out of the dark opening and go into a metallic-looking flange surrounding the wider end that was shining the light. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Pennsylvania Object
Saint Thomas — My grandmother called us to tell us that there was a double rainbow, so me and my family took pictures on June 5, 2018. I took three consecutive pictures. Later I reviewed the pictures, I noticed an object in the second photo that did not appear in the first and third photos, even though the photos were taken consecutively.
Thanks to MUFON CMS
Texas Object
Midland — I was at the Cinergy movie theater in TX going to watch a movie on May 29, 2018 2. I felt like someone was looking at me and I happened to look up in the sky and saw it sitting in there. 3. I thought the object was a star or a satellite- but then it moved in ways that those objects naturally do not. 4. The object was circular and white and had a grey middle. In the picture looked like many rings within itself. 5. I was at first scared but then became inquisitive and decided to watch it and take pictures. It moved closer to me the longer I stood there. 6. Eventually I had to go inside when I returned the object had disappeared. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Virginia Object
I took this photo on June-22, 2018. I was taking pictures, and thinking that the sun might be cloaking or UFOs might be hiding near the sun as most people can’t look directly into the sun. At first I thought that this photo was an insect or a bird but after seeing the latest Filer’s Files, # 25 I am looking at the West Virginia photo and mine is quite similar. What do you think? Love and Light, Thanks to Dan Johnson
Washington Lights
Richland — We were walking outside at a local strip mall. We saw an airplane (the one in the photo) moving fast and heading toward us on May 26, 2018. I told my wife to take a photo of it as it was approaching. By the time she got her iPhone out, the aircraft was beginning to make a tight turn to the left. After she took the photo was when we noticed the three lights. They were not evident to us when the photo was being taken. In the video, the lights appear to be above the aircraft and moving with it. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Worldwide UFO Sightings
Afghanistan Triangle
Kabul – – Last April while on duty here in Kabul, I was outside at 0100 hours talking on my cell phone to my mother in Texas. I was pacing back and forth in the middle of our compound, which is located in the infield of the airport. I saw a matte black triangle/wedge shaped object hovering around 200-300 feet in the air above me. It was about 100 yards in front of me between the taxiway and the active runway. It had no lights whatsoever and made no sound and had several portholes in the sides of the craft. It was flat black and the portholes were completely black. It floated around in a N,S,E,W pattern for about 30-45 seconds, then descended down to about 50 feet off the ground and about 50 yards in front of me. I was explaining what I was seeing to my mother on the phone while this was happening. It looked to be about the size of a large car/SUV or something of that size, possibly a bit larger. It turned around and I could see it was more shaped like a wedge than a triangle. It had ridges in it as well, like it was made from flat black and matte black materials, It then began to rise up slowly as if floating and rose up until it was no longer in view.
We share our airfield with USA/NATO military, I have worked with UAV’s before and never seen anything this big or this quiet before. Plus they would NEVER allow any Gov aircraft to maneuver so close (50 yards) to an active commercial flight line. So, I just wanted to let someone know. I asked ATC if they had anything on RADAR and they said that they didn’t see anything. Photo is a similar craft. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Canada Light
On Sunday , June 10 ,2018, I was outside on my deck in Oshawa having a tea. The sky was quite clear before there was jet activity.
After some minutes outside looking westward I could see five miles away and very high in the sky. A bright longish white light object was moving very slowly so I took my camera and started filming at 9:44 am I tried to video but got seven shots, In number 29 & 34 you can see it in the clouds. I lost it after 9:46 am. This one was quite far away and appears to have size. Thanks once again for you interest and time Enjoy Paul Shishis
Columbia Light
Bogotá— I was waiting for the doc and I decided to take a few pictures of the scenery. However what came out after had me scratching my head as I did not see any of this with my own eyes. I thought I saw the lights from inside at first but it couldn’t have been since the bulbs used are the long bulbs and not the regular round bulbs.
PS. From what I can see, there are 3 things that were there but not visible to the naked eye. Thanks to MUFON CMS
France Triangle
Cap D’Ai— Every afternoon at 15: 00-16: 00 I always go out to clean the pool. In front of us is the sea and from time to time I look at the sky and to my surprise I saw this cloud shape triangle or something. It was huge. We are near the airport. There are planes and helicopters that pass every day here, So I know the size of an airplane. It can probably fit 8-10 planes within easy reach. It disappears slowly towards the West. That’s all I can describe. I had an experience before returning 2013 but it was a clear UFO (2) same place. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Germany Objects
Frankfurt— While walking in the fields south of Darmstadt and near castle Frankenstein, I noticed a group of 5 helicopters or light airplanes in the middle distance in front of me but more to the left. I got one photo with my mobile before they dwindled into the distance on June 23, 2018. In all the years of walking these fields I had never seen such a group of objects before. There was no noise so they were not jet planes. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Iran Cylinder
Gilan, Zendaneh — I go to nature tour with many people and I get many pictures in the mountain. It was a sunny day.
On April 17, 2018, after I come back home checking my photo and see this object on picture not like any airplane and chopper on sky . Also I have row image file from my canon camera. Thanks to MUFON CMS
Italy Moon
UFO hovering near Tycho Crater. the object seem to produce a shadow on the Moon.
This video footage was taken by T-FEB (Independent Research Group) from Italy, coordinate: N 45°70’86,02″, E 10°66’58,85″ at 00:02 on June 24, 2018 .
The video shows the passing of an U.F.O. over the moon surface between Tycho and Maginus craters. We can see clearly two unidentified objects moving together, where the biggest black one, seems to be the shadow of the smallest reflective one, on top of it. The dimension of the “shadow” is similar to the central Peak of Tyco crater. Equipment used: Telescope: Dobson 16 7mm ocular Video: IPhone 6s Thanks to MUFON CMS
Japan Object
Tanushimaru Machi — My family and I are staying in Japan for the summer, near Fukuoka on June 26, 2018. We were riding our bikes along the path, as seen on the map when I stopped to just take a sweeping shot of the surroundings. That is when I saw a helicopter being followed by a black pill shaped object. Only the helicopter made noise as the object flew just behind it. I filmed till I could not see it any more. The object following the helicopter was not another helicopter. It was smaller ( around 10 feet long) and shaped like a pill. Thanks to MUFON CMS
UK Object
London — 1. Watching TV in the living room after dinner. 2. My neighbor was shouting for me to come outside as they couldn’t really make out what they were seeing/. 3. Drones with LEDs/ birds/ bats but the light emanating from them just couldn’t be explained. 4. Swarming, rising and falling almost like birds but not. 5. They seemed to merge into the background and disappear Thanks to MUFON CMS
Support Earth Changing Research
Please Help
Buy a Great DVD
I have put together a DVD of the last twenty years of Filer’s Files for you with hundreds of great photographs and UFO sightings that will explain the phenomena and the importance to your life and your family. Additionally, I have included my book within the DVD that includes George Ritter’s exciting abduction story told by Linda Moulton Howe. Broadcaster David E. Twichell joined me to write the book. We are asking for a donation of only $50 that includes next year’s subscription and our book. Please include your e-mail address and mailing address.
Our research is uncovering amazing truths by solving challenging projects deemed too difficult by other firms. We have had some success in finding missing persons. We could use your help in getting more results from our research. I have put together a DVD of the last seventeen years of Filer’s Files for you with hundreds of great photographs and UFO sightings. Additionally, I have decided to include my book within the DVD that includes George Ritter’s exciting abduction story told by Linda Moulton Howe. Broadcaster David E. Twichell joined me to write the book. We are asking for a donation of only $50 that includes next year’s subscription and our book. Please include your e-mail address and mailing address.
Have been digging through the giant DVD you sent recently. As a relatively recent joiner, I was unaware of the years’ worth of consistent reports of the same types of objects all over. This has been very educational. Just wanted to thank you for all you’ve done. Bruce W. Freeman Attorney at Law
Sign me up right now for Filer’s Files.
I have put together a DVD of the last seventeen years of Filer’s Files for you with hundreds of great photographs and UFO sightings that will explain the phenomena and the importance to your life and your family. Additionally, I have included my book within the DVD that includes George Ritter’s exciting abduction story told by Linda Moulton Howe. Broadcaster David E. Twichell joined me to write the book. We are asking for a donation of only $50 that includes next year’s subscription and our book. Please include your e-mail address and mailing address. Please use this link to receive this offer.
JOIN MUFON!
Become a MUFON member today! Benefits of membership include a subscription to the monthly UFO Journal that contains current investigations, sightings reports, articles by world-renowned researchers and more. To join now, click here JOIN NOW
A purported UFO photograph from July 24, 1956 in San Bernardino, California.Photo: Michael Savage (AP)
Reported UFO sightings have been declining in the United States for the last few years, according to the statistician tasked with making sense of all the data acquired by the leading civilian UFO investigation group.
The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) is a non-profit that investigates reports of UFO sightings. The group encourages people who have close encounters to report their sightings on the MUFON site. The organization claims it receives about 7,000 reports per month—but numbers have been on a steady decline since around 2012.
“There definitely has been a fall off of late,” MUFON statistician David C. Korts told Gizmodo. “It hasn’t been a straight line. But in looking at those numbers, it was a peak in 2012 and it’s been a 30 to 40 percent drop from 2012 to 2017.”
Korts is a retired statistician who is currently studying the data to learn more about UFO sightings, like where they occur the most and how they’re changing over time.
Korts isn’t the only one who has noticed the shift. Cheryl Costa—a writer who was named International UFO Congress’s 2018 Researcher of the Year—recently reviewed reported sightings data from both MUFON and the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) over the last 17 years, and reported her findings in the Syracuse New Times. Her analysis showed that after a steady increase in sighting reports from 2001 to 2012, reports have been on the decline.
While both MUFON and NUFROC take online reports of sightings, MUFON field investigators examine reports and attempt to filter out hoaxes, mistakes, and objects that can be identified. According to Korts, MUFON ends up clearing out about half the reports that people submit. “I work with a highly filtered, highly clean data set,” Korts explained.
With this data set, he hopes to see how certain UFO shapes (like saucers and triangles) and colors, have increased or decreased over time. And he wants to find which areas have more and less sightings, after adjusting for factors like population and area size. But one thing is already very apparent: fewer people are reporting sightings.
“At this point, it’s unclear. It’s perplexing,” he said. “I don’t know why it is. I think it’s an interesting question. That’s the kind of thing you discover by doing this kind of work.”
This is a curious trend, given that almost every other aspect of our world is better documented than ever before. More people are carrying cameras on them and more people have access to the internet and can therefore share their strange observations. Meteoric fireballs, for instance, are extensively documented these days, captured on dashboard, security, and phone cameras. So why not UFOS?
Sharon Hill, a geologist and science writer who researches pseudoscience and paranormal culture, has some ideas about why there has been a decline in reports.
“In today’s social media culture, the way you express your odd experiences is with some sort of video on YouTube, or a picture. And UFOs are really difficult to photograph,” Hill told Gizmodo.
“It’s not to say that there aren’t weird things in the sky, because I really think that there are unidentified things in the sky,” Hill said. “Atmospheric anomalies I think are something that we probably should be looking into. But when people are interpreting these things as intelligent craft or physical objects that are examining us—that’s a dead end. It’s not something that can be scientifically investigated.”
Hill also believes that the culture around alien investigations has shifted to focus on exopolitical conspiracies—that is, alleged attempts by governments to suppress information about extraterrestrial visitors—instead of what’s in the sky. “Ideas about conspiracy have just infiltrated and warped the idea of of investigating UFOs,” she said. “You aren’t able to investigate those things. They’re conspiracies.”
But MUFON says it’s still committed to figuring out the truth behind UFOs. “We’re not alone in the universe and there is intelligent life visiting it,” MUFON executive director Jan Harzan told Gizmodo. He said MUFON shares the data so researchers can better understand UFO phenomena. and kills them the day after their wedding.
While there are still hundreds of reports each month, that data doesn’t include many clear photos. Harzan had an explanation for why so many of the UFO photos are blurry: “UFOs are basically manipulating space-time. And when they do that, it requires a high electromagnetic field. That distorts the images.”
Harzan did have some tips for anyone who wants to see a UFO. “Just being outdoors, being in a quiet place, and thinking about it tends to be one way you could attract these crafts,” Harzan said. “There appears to be some kind of a consciousness connection.”
(Dr. Michael Salla) A former employee in a covert program has described the draconian security measures in place in extraterrestrial related projects, and the dire consequences for transgressing these. In the June 26 episode of Cosmic Disclosure, Emery Smith described what happened when he violated security protocols.
In previous episodes of Cosmic Disclosure, Smith described his involvement in a highly classified project during his military service as a Surgical First Assist based at Kirtland Air Force Base from 1992 to 1995.
In addition to his regular military assignment he also worked in a classified program managed by a corporation, where he examined roughly 3000 tissue samples extracted from non-human entities. He says that he worked on approximately 250 extraterrestrial bodies.
As described in a previous article, Smith has provided documentation proving his training and service as a Surgical First Assist, which makes him a credible eyewitness to events he has described. So far, the reaction of the mass media to Smith’s stunning revelations has been consistent – silence.
Even the UFO research community has largely shunned Smith’s testimony, despite all the credentials he brings to substantiate his military and medical background.
In the security violation incident described by Smith, he says that he befriended his commander in the classified project involving medical examinations of extraterrestrial tissues and bodies. This eventually led to the commander inviting Smith to view a captured extraterrestrial vehicle stored at Kirtland Air Force base in what Smith believed at the time to part of a recruitment effort to introduce him into a different covert project.
In the interview, Smith describes how he believed that his friendship with the commander of the covert project was acceptable despite him knowing that befriending co-workers was against security protocols:
You think because it’s your commander inviting you to the barbecue, that – and he’s been in it for 10, 20 years more than you – that everything’s going to be all right, right? And that’s not the fact. That is not a fact . . . that it’s not all right.
Smith explained his belief that what the Commander was about to show him was part of a recruitment into a new project:
And one of the things he mentioned to me was this amazing craft that he was going to get me involved with possibly to work on and to actually try out the flight simulator of an alien reproduction vehicle.
In the interview, David Wilcock asked Smith about the security protocols surrounding him getting access to the extraterrestrial vehicle which was stored in a secure underground room at Kirtland AFB:
David: Okay. How did you get there if you’re not cleared to be there? If you’re not authorized to be there, how in the world would you get into that room?
Emery: There is a stipulation if you’re escorted by someone of high authority. And a lot of the times, for emergency reasons, you have to go to certain places really quick.
And as long as you’re with someone that has a clearance higher than you, then the responsibility falls under that person for legal issues and for everything….
Emery: But everyone knows that if you’re not read into a project, it’s very unlikely you would go see something without knowing everything about it. And I was NOT read into the project. I was read into the project clandestinely through my friend.
Smith further clarified how authority in such a corporate run classified projects on military bases is based on clearance rather than rank:
It’s all based on clearance. You can be a captain and have the same clearance as a general or a colonel. You can be a sergeant and have the same clearance as a captain or a colonel.
Remember, it’s the duties that you perform, and what is needed to get the job done. It’s not about the . . . They don’t use the military system of rank for these positions, okay?
They use the knowledge base and educational base of the people that are put in place to run these projects.
Smith’s account here parallels what William Tompkins described about his work in a covert Navy espionage program during World War II. Tompkins’ position as a “Disseminator of Aircraft Research and Information” carried with it an authority that was far beyond his lowly military rank as a 2nd class Petty Officer.
Smith says that his commander eventually showed him the captured extraterrestrial vehicle:
There was an actual extraterrestrial craft that they had captured and brought into one of the underground hangar operating rooms . . . the whole vacuumed one. And inside that, they were duplicating it in the same room, trying to reverse engineer the craft.
… they were duplicating it in the same room, trying to reverse engineer the craft… And it was a diamond-shaped craft, and it wasn’t that big. It was probably no bigger than an 18-wheeler [large semi-tractor trailer]….
The craft that they were making next to it was just . . . They were trying to find out how it works and how it flies around.
And they were doing a lot of stuff with the actual electromagnetics of it. So they duplicated a half version. They cross sectioned a man-made half version, okay?
Smith’s description of the craft he witnessed, both the diamond shaped extraterrestrial vehicle and the reverse engineered craft was captured in the following illustration.
Credit: Gaia.com – Cosmic Disclosure 6/26/18
Smith elaborated upon the large room and the thick walls that separated it from the rest of the facility:
… It’s very secured, for sure. And I don’t know why they have this room suspended away from walls maybe a hundred feet.
So you have this giant room now. You’re walking into it with multiple catwalks from other doors that go into it.
And then you come there, and the same thing. These doors open up . . . the same doors that you just saw, another 24”. And NOW you’re in the bay…
Smith further added:
This is not a clean area, by the way. So you don’t have to have your space suits in here. This is what we call a “dirty area”. So you can just be in your uniform there.
Smith described his excitement at the prospect of being recruited into a new program, and his confidence in the Commander’s authority to recruit Smith in the manner he was experiencing. After all, this was the same person running the classified corporate program involving medical examinations of extraterrestrial tissues and bodies, who also had authority over the stored alien vehicles at Kirtland AFB.
Most would have made similar assumptions to Smith about the unique opportunity that was unfolding with what was being shown to him, despite the violation in protocol in befriending one’s commander in a covert extraterrestrial related project:
David: What was your experience? Were you afraid to talk and to say how awesome this looked? Did you say anything to the commander?
Emery: Yes, I did say it. I said, “This is amazing! This is awesome! Thank you for allowing me to be part of this project.” Because I was just an . . . I really just thought this is my first introduction maybe to this, and now I’m maybe going to be part of this in some way or another….
I was figuring on him being the ultimate commander here being in charge of anything. No one’s higher than him. So how are any security going to say anything about this? Because I legitimately thought this was okay. And it was not.
Smith went on to explain how in the midst of him trying out the flight simulator for the alien reproduction vehicle, four or five very large men in suits walked unannounced into the classified facility. They proceeded to handcuff and blindfold both him and his commander, and assaulted Smith during his subsequent debriefing:
And these suits came in … suit and tie, four or five of them. They were all taller than me and bigger than me…. [Smith is 6’ 4” inches/193 cm]…. I had a concussion and a big hematoma on the back of my head…. I was broken down enough until they took the blindfolds off, and I just remember looking up at them. And they just said never to repeat this again, “and if you say anything or do anything, you know what happens.”
It’s worth emphasizing that none of the men wore uniforms which is significant given that the underground room was located at Kirtland Air Force base, and his debriefing occurred at the base.
Smith’s incident illustrates that despite the secure room/facility being on USAF property and using Air Force servicemen, it was a corporation that was firmly in charge of the facility and security.
This correlates with an incident described by Dr. Steven Greer where he and former astronaut Edgar Mitchell, were told in 1997, by Rear Admiral Thomas Wilson, that he was denied access to a covert project by corporate attorneys. Wilson was at the time the head of intelligence (J-2) for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, vividly illustrating how rank is inconsequential in gaining access to highly classified projects requiring need to know access.
Smith described how his silence over the brutal treatment he received during his debriefing, where he decided not to report it the base commander or senior Air Force personnel, saved him his covert job:
I was petrified to go report it… I thought that was the next test. And it was, because I didn’t say anything. And that’s how I got my job back, because I was able to keep a secret. And the secret hurt me….
I was restricted from ever trying to contact him [his commander] or his family ever again “for the duration of my life on Earth”, quote unquote.
Smith responded to Wilcock’s question about how the security violation changed his whole attitude to working in the corporate run project:
David: How did this event change you in terms of how . . . because you said you were very enthusiastic about your job. You felt like you were in an amusement park almost – an alien amusement park. How did this change that?
Emery: There was some sort of continuity breakdown, I thought. And I just didn’t believe in them anymore. I didn’t believe in the structure. Like, who the heck is behind this? Who is pulling the cords? Who is giving . . . You know, who is REALLY running this show down here? Who were those guys in the black suits?
I started getting mad, like going mad. I was trying to figure it out for myself and now I can’t even talk to anybody about it. I can’t even . . . To my own co-workers, I can’t say anything….
Smith’s account has many similarities to the testimonies of other whistleblowers/insiders that have worked on classified extraterrestrial related projects, where stringent security process are in place. His account parallels key elements of what Dan Sherman, Bob Lazar and Clifford Stonehave described about their involvement in classified extraterrestrial related projects and the security protocols they experienced.
In examining Smith’s testimony, one of the things that stands out is that he was informally being shown technology outside of his primary area of expertise and training in an apparent recruitment effort by his commander. It is not clear how someone trained as a Surgical First Assist who was recruited to examine extraterrestrial tissue samples and bodies, could transfer such skills into the reverse engineering of extraterrestrial craft.
Did Smith’s commander genuinely believe Smith could make such a transition or was Smith being set up? After all, there are important elements in the Lazar case which makes it very plausible that his whole recruitment into the covert operation involving reverse engineering flying saucer craft at Area 51 was a set up. Lazar’s friends and psychological profile would have been major red flags that he would break security protocols and eventually become a whistleblower.
Was Smith also identified as someone whose psychological profile would eventually lead him to becoming a whistleblower? Is Smith’s coming out part of a sanctioned disclosure process by White Hats or others running covert extraterrestrial projects?
Regardless of the answers to such questions, Smith’s testimony is ground breaking and reveals important information about a secure facility at Kirtland Air Force base conducting a variety of extraterrestrial related projects under the authority of corporations. He provides corroborating witness support for similar accounts by other whistleblowers/insiders describing what they encountered in classified facilities they were recruited to work in while enlisted in the USAF or other military services.
Smith’s testimony also provides important clues for understanding topical issues such as 2004 Tic Tac incident involving a Navy battlegroup encountering several Anomalous Aerial Vehicles (UFOs), a case which is being closely scrutinized by the mainstream media and many UFO researchers. Was the vehicle an alien reproduction craft, part of secret space program, or an extraterrestrial vehicle?
Given Smith’s credentials and credibility as a witness, it is hard to fathom why mainstream media, and most UFO researchers, are disinterested in what he has to say about covert extraterrestrial projects occurring at secure military facilities. One thing is becoming clearer by the day though, reverse engineering of extraterrestrial spacecraft has been secretly conducted for decades at multiple military facilities, with major aerospace companies in control, alongside stringent security procedures to keep it all secret.
[Note: Emery Smith’s interviews on Cosmic Disclosurecan be found here.]
In 1896, newspapers throughout the United States began reporting accounts of mysterious airships flying overhead. Descriptions varied, but witnesses frequently invoked the century’s great technological achievements. Some sources reported dirigibles powered by steam engines. Others saw motorized, winged crafts with screw propellers. Many recalled a flying machine equipped with a powerful searchlight.
As technologies of flight evolve, so do the descriptions of unidentified flying objects. The pattern has held in the 21st century as sightings of drone-like objects are reported, drawing concern from military and intelligence officials about possible security threats.
While puzzling over the appearance of curious things overhead may be a constant, how we have done so has changed over time, as the people doing the puzzling change. In every instance of reporting UFOs, observers have called on their personal experiences and prevailing knowledge of world events to make sense of these nebulous apparitions. In other words, affairs here on earth have consistently colored our perceptions of what is going on over our heads.
Reports of weird, wondrous, and worrying objects in the skies date to ancient times. Well into the 17th century, marvels such as comets and meteors were viewed through the prism of religion—as portents from the gods and, as such, interpreted as holy communications.
By the 19th century, however, “celestial wonders” had lost most of their miraculous aura. Instead, the age of industrialization transferred its awe onto products of human ingenuity. The steamboat, the locomotive, photography, telegraphy, and the ocean liner were all hailed as “modern wonders” by news outlets and advertisers. All instilled a widespread sense of progress—and opened the door to speculation about whether objects in the sky signaled more changes.
Yet nothing fueled the imagination more than the possibility of human flight. In the giddy atmosphere of the 19th century, the prospect of someone soon achieving it inspired newspapers to report on tinkerers and entrepreneurs boasting of their supposed successes.
The wave of mysterious airship sightings that began in 1896 did not trigger widespread fear. The accepted explanation for these aircraft was terrestrial and quaint: Some ingenious eccentric had built a device and was testing its capabilities.
But during the first two decades of the 20th century, things changed. As European powers expanded their militaries and nationalist movements sparked unrest, the likelihood of war prompted anxiety about invasion. The world saw Germany—home of the newly developed Zeppelin—as the likeliest aggressor. Military strategists, politicians, and newspapers in Great Britain warned of imminent attack by Zeppelins.
The result was a series of phantom Zeppelin sightings by panicked citizens throughout the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand in 1909, then again in 1912 and 1913. When war broke out in August 1914, it sparked a new, more intense wave of sightings. Wartime reports also came in from Canada, South Africa, and the United States. In England, rumors that German spies had established secret Zeppelin hangars on British soil led vigilantes to scour the countryside.
In the age of aviation, war and fear of war have consistently fueled reports of unidentified flying objects. A year after Nazi Germany’s surrender, Sweden was beset by at least a thousand accounts of peculiar, fast-moving objects in the sky. Starting in May 1946, residents described seeing missile- or rocket-like objects in flight, which were dubbed “ghost rockets” because of their fleeting nature. Rockets peppering Swedish skies was well within the realm of possibility—in 1943 and 1944, a number of V-1 and V-2 rockets launched from Germany had inadvertently crashed in the country.
At first, intelligence officials in Scandinavia, Britain, and the United States took the threat of ghost rockets seriously, suspecting that the Soviets might be experimenting with German rockets they had captured. By the autumn of 1946, however, they had concluded it was a case of postwar mass hysteria.
The following summer, a private pilot by the name of Kenneth Arnold claimed to have seen nine flat objects flying in close formation near Mt. Rainier. Looking back on the event years later, Arnold noted, “What startled me most at this point was the fact that I could not find any tails on them. I felt sure that, being jets, they had tails, but figured they must be camouflaged in some way so that my eyesight could not perceive them. I knew the Air Force was very artful in the knowledge and use of camouflage.”
Given the name “flying saucers” by an Associated Press correspondent, they quickly appeared throughout the United States. Over the following two weeks, newspapers covered hundreds of sightings.
News of these reports circled the globe. Soon, sightings occurred in Europe and South America. In the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, atomic bomb tests, and tensions between the United States and the USSR, speculation ran rampant.
Finding themselves on the front line of the Cold War, Germans on both sides of the Iron Curtain considered the United States the most likely culprit. West Germans thought the discs were experimental missiles or military aircraft, while Germans in the communist Eastern bloc considered it more likely that the whole thing was a hoax devised by the American defense industry to whip up support for a bloated budget.
Others had more elaborate theories. In 1950, former U.S. Marine Air Corps Major Donald Keyhoe published an article and book titled The Flying Saucers Are Real, in which he contended that aliens from another planet were behind the appearance of the UFOs. Based on information from his informants, Keyhoe contended that government authorities were aware of this, but wished to keep the matter a secret for fear of inciting a general panic.
Such a claim about UFOs was new. To be sure, at the turn of the century during the phantom airship waves, some had speculated that the vessels spotted might be from another planet. Already at that time, people were deeply interested in reports of prominent astronomers observing artificial “canals” and structures on Mars. Evidence of Martian civilizations made it seem conceivable that our interplanetary neighbors had finally decided to pay us a visit. Still, relatively few bought into this line of reasoning.
But by going further, Major Keyhoe struck a chord in a timely fashion. In the aftermath of World War II and over the course of the 1950s, it seemed that science and engineering were making remarkable strides. In particular, the development of guided rockets and missiles, jet airplanes, atomic and hydrogen bombs, nuclear energy, and satellites signaled to many that there were no limits—not even earth’s atmosphere—to technological progress. And if our planet were on the verge of conquering space, it would hardly be a stretch to imagine that more advanced civilizations elsewhere were capable of even greater feats.
But all this raised a question. Why were the extraterrestrials visiting us now?
Keyhoe believed that aliens had been keeping us under observation for a long time. Witnessing the recent explosions of atomic weapons, they had decided the inhabitants of planet Earth had finally reached an advanced enough stage to be scrutinized more closely. Still, there was no reason for alarm. “We have survived the stunning impact of the Atomic Age,” Keyhoe concluded. “We should be able to take the Interplanetary Age, when it comes, without hysteria.”
The flying saucer era had begun. Not everyone would remain as sanguine as Keyhoe. As concerns over global nuclear annihilation and environmental catastrophe grew during the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, claims about UFOs took on ever more ominous tones.
Times changed. And so, again, did the UFO phenomenon.
What was the Pentagon's secret UFO program looking for?
Within the constellation of Cygnus, NASA’s Kepler Probe has discovered over 50 planets that have what is known as a “Goldilocks” relationship to their suns: that is to say, the conditions aren’t overly hot or cold, but suitable enough to house water and other factors that could support life as it exists on Earth. Discoveries like this beg the question: is there alien life in this galaxy and if so, what would they want from us?
Probing the Stars
For years humankind has been scouring the airwaves for alien transmissions, occasionally trying to send out a message of our own. In the 1970’s, the Pioneer probes carried plaques bearing diagrammatical information about Earth and her population, and SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) was born. The next probes have been equipped with more sophisticated media should they be discovered by an alien intelligence. Yet, to everyone’s knowledge thus far, SETI has not been a success, turning up no proof of extraterrestrial civilisations. Could part of the reason for this be that we’re looking for the wrong thing?
Galactic Evolution
The assumption that whatever civilization we contact will be on the same humanoid evolutionary curve as humanity could be seen as arrogant. Perhaps our probes have passed planets where life has either died out eons ago or where life is at its most infant stages. A more ominous assessment for our lack of finding life on other planets, or life on other planets finding us, is based on the inherent conflict tied to natural evolution. This school of thought posits that intelligent life cannot evolve past a certain limit without destroying itself. If we look at the world around us today, with the ever present threat of nuclear war, climate change, and biological contagion, can we even state with confidence that our species will endure for much longer? Will we have reached a point of sustained stability where we can turn our attention as a species towards galactic exploration in a meaningful way? Our society and technologies are surely developing at an incredible speed, we now can create robots and sites to play emu casino here, so maybe we will soon know if the theory about self-destruction is not just a theory.
Anybody out THERE?
These are difficult questions to answer, but that doesn’t mean we should give up pursuing solutions. There’s hope even in our own solar system. Hydrogen gas has been discovered erupting from Enceladus, one of the moons of Saturn, being enough of an energy source to support microbial life forms. FRBs (Fasr Radio Bursts), micro-burst wave signals picked up recently by astronomers, are thought to come from deep space to our galaxy from an emission source which must be incredibly powerful to be detectable by Earth-based telemetry. Scientists have not come to an agreement about what the potential source of this energy could be. Some suggest it is an incredibly powerful cosmic phenomenon, but others suggest that the FRBs could be the ghosts of propulsion system emissions fuelling massive alien spacecraft. Whatever the source, we can only be sure of one thing: that there’s a lot more to the universe than what we know, which, certainly, could include extraterrestrial life.
Kaya Johnson – U.I.P Guest Writer
Searching the Universe for Extraterrestrial Life: A Timeline
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
A UFO appears in the form of a boomerang at high speed over France
A UFO appears in the form of a boomerang at high speed over France
Many people forget that the term UFO serves to define an unidentified flying object, which means that no one really knows what it is. While many UFO sightings have been documented over the years and on all continents, the only thing that unites these encounters is that many of these mysterious objects that appear out of nowhere in our skies can not be identified.
A UFO Appears In The Form Of A Boomerang At High Speed Over France
Of course, ufologists and conspiracy theorists suggest all sorts of theories, ranging from advanced military aircraft to visits in the form of extraterrestrial life. However, skeptics dismiss these theories claiming that they are simply strange weather patterns, commercial aircraft or misidentified birds. But this has not prevented more and more people from believing in conspiracy theories. There is even a day of the year dedicated to lovers of the UFO theme, World UFO Day, whose goal is to force governments to declassify any information they have about strange flying objects in our skies. But to date, all we know is that UFOs in the form of twinkling lights, rotating objects, luminous spheres and black dots continue to appear.
And the reality is that there are UFO sightings around the world, and some areas of our planet seem to be more prone to this type of activity. And there are not only UFO sightings in the United States and England. As in France, where a person has recorded what appears to be an unidentified flying object in the form of a boomerang. The video has become a subject of debate between the believers of the UFO subject and the conspiracy theorists.
UFO sighting over France
The video, uploaded to YouTube on the Now You Know channel, was recorded on June 14 and shows a mysterious object in the form of a very bright boomerang moving across the sky in broad daylight over Midi-Pyrénées (in French: Midi-Pyrénées), an administrative region of France.
“A disc-shaped silver object was recorded flying off the southwest coast of France,” reads the video description. “The UFO was recorded on June 14, 2018 in France, possibly near the interior region of Midi Pyrenees. In the video you can see that he performs high-speed aerial maneuvers and moves as smart. “
Although what has most struck is that curiously, the UFO that can be seen in the images has a very similar shape to the alien ship of the science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott ‘Prometheus’. But the controversy that has arisen has not been precisely by the UFO, but rather because originally the video was published by the YouTube channel ‘ZealotInAll Black3’ , which was eliminated after having increased the sighting for allegedly violating the Rules of the Community.
This has provoked all kinds of reactions among the conspiracy theorists, who believe that the elimination of the channel is due to the fact that it is clearly a real UFO of extraterrestrial origin . Even the controversial ufologist Tyler Glockner, responsible for the YouTube channel ‘secureteam10’, has investigated the video, speculating with the possibility that it was an object similar to the ships of the Star Wars saga.
As the video went viral, some experts in the field suggest that these UFO sightings are clear evidence that the government is executing the infamous Blue Beam Project , also known as the false alien invasion or the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Others said that this new sighting could be related to the new Donald Trump Space Force as they could be doing secret military maneuvers in our skies.
Although popular theory says that these sightings are irrefutable proof of the existence of extraterrestrial activity on our planet. It is well known that certain civilizations from other worlds have been visiting Earth for hundreds of thousands of years, and now they could be preparing for the great revelation.
And although the skeptics consider that this object is an unmanned aircraft, it must be said that a drone is not capable of performing such aerial maneuvers at such a high speed . No doubt this new material has everything to become a great conspiracy plot, a video that is published by a YouTube channel that is eliminated within a few hours.
STUNNING REVELATION: Former NASA scientist confirms the existence of extraterrestrials and how governments hide it
STUNNING REVELATION: Former NASA scientist confirms the existence of extraterrestrials and how governments hide it
Stories of mysterious flashing lights in the sky, spaceships and encounters with "real" aliens reflect the high level of public interest in UFOs and the belief that there is "something out there" . However, many psychologists have scientific explanations for all these phenomena. Skeptics argue that encounters with aliens are merely deceptions created to obtain economic benefits, Roswell being an example of this.
Ex-UFO program chief: We may not be alone
The initial reports of the 1940s left enough gaps for Ray Santilli to publish in 1995 what he said was a video that showed an extraterrestrial autopsy of the time, which confused the subject even more. Later he admitted that it was a hoax. The incident sparked controversy and prompted allegations that an alien ship had crashed in the New Mexico desertand that US authorities were covering it up. And the theory that abductions are tricks may be true in some cases, but there is no reason to suppose that the testimony of most "victims"be a lie In fact, psychologists have innumerable plausible scientific explanations for the supposed alien encounters of people.
But it must be said that this is what the scientific community believes, or at least what I believed so far. Because a former NASA scientist has just made an unexpected and surprising revelation about aliens and their visits to our planet. Affirms that humans are not alone in this universe and many governments know about the existence of these extraterrestrial entities, but they have kept it a secret.
What the truth hides
The shocking revelation has just been made by retired NASA scientist Kevin Knuth, who is now a professor of physics at the University of Albany, New York. According to his statement, there is more than enough evidence in the universe to support the existence of spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin , commonly known as UFOs.
Although there are more and more people who really believe in such entities and their frequent visits to Earth, Knuth says that those who have not yet accepted the evidence of the existence of extraterrestrials, the time has come to face the possibility that civilizations of Other worlds have been reaching this blue planet , this being the reason for the large number of UFO sightings.
The former scientist also stressed that, instead of ruling out this possibility, people should do more research on the subject, since all study will be useful for humanity. The professor at the State University of New York has revealed incredible facts in the research website The Conversation , where he has stated the following:
"Given that July 2 is World UFO Day, it is a good time for society to address the disturbing and refreshing fact that we may not be alone. We need to face the possibility that some of the strange flying objects that outnumber the best planes and defy explanation can be distant visitors, and there is a lot of evidence to support the UFO sightings. "
Knuth also spoke about Fermi's paradox , which was proposed by the Italian nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi, and made it clear that the existence of extraterrestrials is more likely since there are more than 300 billion stars in our universe capable of housing habitable planets. But the most controversial statement was when the former NASA scientist said that during his career as a scientist he was forced to ignore the issue , since it is nothing more than a meaningless subject that requires scientific study, as well as a rational discussion , which unfortunately leaves the subject in the domain of limits and pseudoscientific, many of which are in the field of conspiracy theories and speculation.
Por otro lado, mencionó que, en todo el mundo, especialmente Canadá, Nueva Zelanda, Rusia, Brasil, Dinamarca, Suecia, Suecia y el Reino Unido han desclasificado archivos relacionados con los ovnis. También compartió algunas fotos de documentos gubernamentales secretosque muestran como las autoridades sabían sobre los incidentes de avistamiento, pero aún así trataban de ocultar todos los encuentros con OVNIS.
"The situation is aggravated by the fact that many governments around the world have hidden and classified information about such encounters, " Knuth added. "If in fact there are extraterrestrial artifacts visiting the Earth, we would greatly benefit from knowing about them, their nature and their intentions. In addition, this would represent a great opportunity for humanity, promising to expand and advance our knowledge and technology, as well as changing our understanding of our place in the universe. "
Undoubtedly it is a shocking revelation and not only for his statement, but for being a recognized former NASA scientist and professor at a prestigious university. It seems that the foundations of the scientific community are staggering and more and more are those who dare to question the fundamental pillars of our existence , or what they have forced us to accept. So we can say that Kevin Knuth can be added to the list of illustrious free thinkers, along with former Canadian Defense Minister Paul Hellyer , who has been assuring for years that many UFO sightings are real, and that some extraterrestrial beings are among us and that the US government is hiding information about them.
We can no longer doubt the existence of extraterrestrial beings on our planet and how the scientific community and governments have been hiding the truth from us. You just have to "open your eyes" and see the real reality that surrounds us. Then, you can express your comments about it.
Are we alone? Unfortunately, neither of the answers feel satisfactory. To be alone in this vast universe is a lonely prospect. On the other hand, if we are not alone and there is someone or something more powerful out there, that too is terrifying.
Watch Navy jet lock scope on UFO
As a NASA research scientist and now a professor of physics, I attended the 2002 NASA Contact Conference, which focused on serious speculation about extraterrestrials. During the meeting a concerned participant said loudly in a sinister tone, "You have absolutely no idea what is out there!" The silence was palpable as the truth of this statement sunk in. Humans are fearful of extraterrestrials visiting Earth. Perhaps fortunately, the distances between the stars are prohibitively vast. At least this is what we novices, who are just learning to travel into space, tell ourselves.
I have always been interested in UFOs. Of course, there was the excitement that there could be aliens and other living worlds. But more exciting to me was the possibility that interstellar travel was technologically achievable. In 1988, during my second week of graduate school at Montana State University, several students and I were discussing a recent cattle mutilation that was associated with UFOs. A physics professor joined the conversation and told us that he had colleagues working at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, where they were having problems with UFOs shutting down nuclear missiles. At the time I thought this professor was talking nonsense. But 20 years later, I was stunned to see a recording of a press conference featuring several former US Air Force personnel, with a couple from Malmstrom AFB, describing similar occurrences in the 1960s. Clearly there must be something to this.
With July 2 being World UFO Day, it is a good time for society to address the unsettling and refreshing fact we may not be alone. I believe we need to face the possibility that some of the strange flying objects that outperform the best aircraft in our inventory and defy explanation may indeed be visitors from afar – and there's plenty of evidence to support UFO sightings.
The Fermi paradox
10 Unsettling Solutions to the Fermi Paradox
The nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi was famous for posing thought provoking questions. In 1950, at Los Alamos National Laboratory after discussing UFOs over lunch, Fermi asked, "Where is everybody?" He estimated there were about 300 billion stars in the galaxy, many of them billions of years older than the sun, with a large percentage of them likely to host habitable planets. Even if intelligent life developed on a very small percentage of these planets, then there should be a number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. Depending on the assumptions, one should expect anywhere from tens to tens of thousands of civilizations.
With the rocket-based technologies that we have developed for space travel, it would take between 5 and 50 million years for a civilization like ours to colonize our Milky Way galaxy. Since this should have happened several times already in the history of our galaxy, one should wonder where is the evidence of these civilizations? This discrepancy between the expectation that there should be evidence of alien civilizations or visitations and the presumption that no visitations have been observed has been dubbed the Fermi Paradox.
Carl Sagan correctly summarized the situation by saying that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." The problem is that there has been no single well-documented UFO encounter that would alone qualify as the smoking gun. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that many governments around the world have covered upand classifiedinformation aboutsuch encounters. But there are enough scraps of evidence that suggest that the problem needs to be open to scientific study.
Cover of the October 1957 issue of pulp science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. This was a special edition devoted to 'flying saucers,' which became a national obsession after airline pilot Kenneth Arnold sighted a saucer-shaped flying objects in 1947.
UFOs, taboo for professional scientists
Why Scientists Don't Freak Out About UFO Videos
When it comes to science, the scientific method requires hypotheses to be testable so that inferences can be verified. UFO encounters are neither controllable nor repeatable, which makes their study extremely challenging. But the real problem, in my view, is that the UFO topic is taboo.
While the general public has been fascinated with UFOs for decades, our governments, scientists and media, have essentially declared that of all the UFO sightings are a result of weather phenomenon or human actions. None are actually extraterrestrial spacecraft. And no aliens have visited Earth. Essentially, we are told that the topic is nonsense. UFOs are off-limits to serious scientific study and rational discussion, which unfortunately leaves the topic in the domain of fringe and pseudoscientists, many of whom litter the field with conspiracy theories and wild speculation.
I think UFO skepticism has become something of a religion with an agenda, discounting the possibility of extraterrestrials without scientific evidence, while often providing silly hypotheses describing only one or two aspects of a UFO encounter reinforcing the popular belief that there is a conspiracy. A scientist must consider all of the possible hypotheses that explain all of the data, and since little is known, the extraterrestrial hypothesis cannot yet be ruled out. In the end, the skeptics often do science a disservice by providing a poor example of how science is to be conducted. The fact is that many of these encounters – still a very small percentage of the total – defy conventional explanation.
The media amplifies the skepticism by publishing information about UFOs when it is exciting, but always with a mocking or whimsical tone and reassuring the public that it can't possibly be true. But there are credible witnesses and encounters.
1948 Top Secret USAF UFO extraterrestrial document. United States Air Force
Credit: United States Air Force
Why don't astronomers see UFOs?
I am often asked by friends and colleagues, "Why don't astronomers see UFOs?" The fact is that they do. In 1977, Peter Sturrock, a professor of space science and astrophysics at Stanford University, mailed 2,611 questionnaires about UFO sightings to members of the American Astronomical Society. He received 1,356 responses from which 62 astronomers – 4.6 percent – reported witnessing or recording inexplicable aerial phenomena. This rate is similar to the approximately 5 percent of UFO sightings that are never explained.
As expected, Sturrock found that astronomers who witnessed UFOs were more likely to be night sky observers. Over 80 percent of Sturrock’s respondents were willing to study the UFO phenomenon if there was a way to do so. More than half of them felt that the topic deserves to be studied versus 20 percent who felt that it should not. The survey also revealed that younger scientists were more likely to support the study of UFOs.
UFOs have been observed through telescopes. I know of one telescope sighting by an experienced amateur astronomer in which he observed an object shaped like a guitar pick moving through the telescope's field of view. Further sightings are documented in the book "Wonders in the Sky," in which the authors compile numerous observations of unexplained aerial phenomena made by astronomers and published in scientific journals throughout the 1700s and 1800s.
Evidence from government and military officers
Some of the most convincing observations have come from government officials. In 1997, the Chilean government formed the organization Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos, or CEFAA, to study UFOs. Last year, CEFAA released footage of a UFO taken with a helicopter-mounted Wescam infrared camera.
The countries of Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom have been declassifying their UFO files since 2008. The French Committee for In-Depth Studies, or COMETA, was an unofficial UFO study group comprised of high-ranking scientists and military officials that studied UFOs in the late 1990s. They released the COMETA Report, which summarized their findings. They concluded that 5 percent of the encounters were reliable yet inexplicable: The best hypothesis available was that the observed craft were extraterrestrial. They also accused the United States of covering up evidence of UFOs. Iran has been concerned about spherical UFOs observed near nuclear power facilities that they call "CIA drones" which reportedly are about 30 feet in diameter, can achieve speeds up to Mach 10, and can leave the atmosphere. Such speeds are on par with the fastest experimental aircraft, but unthinkable for a sphere without lift surfaces or an obvious propulsion mechanism.
In December 2017, The New York Times broke a story about the classified Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, which was a $22 million program run by the former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo and aimed at studying UFOs. Elizondo resigned from running the program protesting extreme secrecy and the lack of funding and support. Following his resignation Elizondo, along with several others from the defense and intelligence community, were recruited by the To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science, which was recently founded by Tom DeLonge to study UFOs and interstellar travel. In conjunction with the launch of the academy, the Pentagon declassified and released three videos of UFO encounters taken with forward looking infrared cameras mounted on F-18 fighter jets. While there is much excitement about such disclosures, I am reminded of a quote from Retired Army Colonel John Alexander: "Disclosure has happened. … I've got stacks of generals, including Soviet generals, who’ve come out and said UFOs are real. My point is, how many times do senior officials need to come forward and say that this is real?"
A topic worthy of serious study
There is a great deal of evidence that a small percentage of these UFO sightings are unidentified structured craft exhibiting flight capabilities beyond any known human technology. While there is no single case for which there exists evidence that would stand up to scientific rigor, there are cases with simultaneous observations by multiple reliable witnesses, along with radar returns and photographic evidence revealing patterns of activity that are compelling.
Declassified information from covert studies is interesting, but not scientifically helpful. This is a topic worthy of open scientific inquiry, until there is a scientific consensus based on evidence rather than prior expectation or belief. If there are indeed extraterrestrial craft visiting Earth, it would greatly benefit us to know about them, their nature and their intent. Moreover, this would present a great opportunity for mankind, promising to expand and advance our knowledge and technology, as well as reshaping our understanding of our place in the universe.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Space.com.
A new study has shown that wind energy can be harvested on Mars, despite the Red Planet’s extremely thin atmosphere and hellish sandstorms.
In this artist’s illustration, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander begins to shut down operations as the sunless winter sets in.
Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona.
Black sails for red sands
If we are to have a manned mission to Mars, energy is of the essence. In most cases, you’d rely on energy from the Sun, but that’s not possible in all areas on Mars — this is where wind energy steps in.
“The optimal locations for this type of power production are areas where the sun doesn’t always shine, but winds will blow, such as latitudes poleward of the polar circles,” the researchers wrote.
The problem is that the atmosphere on Mars isn’t really wind-friendly. For one, it only averages about 0.6% of Earth’s mean sea level pressure, which makes it incomparably thinner. Secondly, the atmosphere also hosts devilish sandstorms, which can be devastating for equipment.
But now, researchers have shown that even in these unfavorable conditions, wind energy can be harvested.
Blowing in the wind
“For now, we can say for the first time and with certainty, that, YES, you can use wind power on Mars!” the researchers, led by Christina Holstein-Rathlou of Boston University’s Center for Space Physics, wrote in the study.
Image Credits: Holstein-Rathlou et. al.
Along with her colleagues, Holstein-Rathlou carried out simulations at the Wind Tunnel Simulator II, located in Aarhus, Denmark. The tests first started out in 2010 but were only recently presented at the Mars Workshop on Amazonian and Present Day Climate in Lakewood, CO last week.
If researchers want to send missions to the polar areas of Mars, standard power sources wouldn’t work well. For once, the missions wouldn’t have access to sunlight about half of the year, and the heat expunged by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (the device that powers NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover and many other deep-space explorers) would significantly impede some science experiments. So researchers are considering having a wind turbine which they would use in conjunction to solar panels. The energy would be stored in customized batteries and used whenever necessary.
“The optimal locations for this type of power production are areas where the sun doesn’t always shine, but winds will blow, such as latitudes poleward of the polar circles,” the researchers write.
This extra source of energy could also allow Mars landers to be larger in size. Previously, energy has been a critical limitation in the size and capabilities of rovers and landers. A suite of studies are still required before turbine-toting probes are ready to launch toward Mars, the team stressed, but these are definitely encouraging results, which pave the way for new avenues of Martian missions.
Molecular oxygen found on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko isn’t produced on the surface — it comes from the early days of the Solar System.
Mosaic of four images taken by Rosetta’s navigation camera (NAVCAM) on 19 September 2014 at 28.6 km (17.8 mi) from the centre of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. Image credits ESA / Rosetta / NAVCAM.
Between August 2014 and September 2016, the European Space (ESA) Agency’s Rosetta craft tagged along with the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko as it was trekking around the Sun. The mission also saw a probe delivered to the comet’s surface.
Among other things, the ESA wanted to use Rosetta to study the comet’s coma — the nebulous envelope around the nucleus of a comet. This structure is created by ice subliming — turning from a solid directly into a gas — on the comet’s surface under the sun’s rays. Rosetta’s analysis of the coma revealed that it contains water, carbon monoxide and dioxide (all compounds we were expecting to find), but also molecular oxygen.
Retro oxygen
Molecular oxygen is composed of two oxygen atoms tied together by a covalent bond. Here on Earth, it’s produced by plants via photosynthesis, but researchers are well aware that oxygen is abundant in many places of the universe — we’ve detected molecular oxygen around some of Jupiter’s moons, for example. By mass, oxygen is the third-most abundant element in the universe, after hydrogen and helium — but finding it around a comet was surprising, to say the least.
With the finding also came questions regarding the origin of this molecular oxygen. Some researchers suggested that it might be produced on the comet’s surface under the action of charged ions in the solar wind.
A new paper published by members of the Rosetta team has analyzed data beamed back by the craft to get to the bottom of the issue. The research, led by researchers from the Imperial College London, found that the proposed ionic mechanism for molecular oxygen generation couldn’t account for levels of this molecule observed in the coma. This would mean that the oxygen molecules Rosetta stumbled upon are primordial — meaning they were already fully formed as the comet itself quickened during the early days of the Solar System 4.6 billion years ago.
“We tested the new theory of surface molecular oxygen production using observations of energetic ions, particles which trigger the surface processes which could lead to the production of molecular oxygen,” said lead author Mr Kevin Heritier. “We found that the amount of energetic ions present could not produce enough molecular oxygen to account for the amount of molecular oxygen observed in the coma.”
The findings don’t rule out oxygen generation at the surface level of 67P — but that the majority of the oxygen in the comet’s coma is simply not produced through such a process.
While there are other theories regarding the origin of 67P’s oxygen, the team didn’t address them in any way, either to confirm or infirm them. So far, however, they say that the primordial oxygen theory is the one which fits available data best. This is further supported by other theoretical work that treats the formation of molecular oxygen in dark clouds and the presence of molecular oxygen in the early Solar System, they add. In the team’s model, preexisting molecular oxygen froze into tiny grains that later clumped together, attracted more material, and eventually got bound up in the comet’s nucleus.
The paper “On the origin of molecular oxygen in cometary comae” has been published in the journal Nature Communications.
Space Force operating secretly since 1960s, says UFO researcher
Space Force operating secretly since 1960s, says UFO researcher
Written by Barnett Parker
RAW: Space Force operating secretly since 1960s, says UFO researcher
Dr. Steven Greer appears in an interview with FOX5 on July 2, 2018. (FOX5)
LAS VEGAS (FOX5) - Dr. Steven Greer offered a wry smile when told he was being interviewed on World UFO Day on July 2.
“There are two things going on,” Greer said from his home in Virginia. “There is the silly season of the UFO subject , which is 90-plus percent of it, and there are the very important operations that are going on. The silly stuff gets all the attention because it's silly.”
Greer has said he’s been involved in the serious business of providing information about UFOs to at least two U.S. presidents since 1993.
So he had an insider’s perspective in June when President Trump announced he wanted to create a Space Force that would be a new branch of the military.
Greer said: “In a sense what he's calling for is acknowledging something that has existed in an unacknowledged special access project, black project, that has been operational in one form or another since the mid-to-late ‘60s.”
“I have a man who is a very top secret technology management office whistleblower from the Pentagon who has acknowledged to me that we have operational systems on satellites in space that can track and target and destroy any object in space, and those have been fully operational for many years.”
Greer’s efforts to gain disclosure about this secretive topic can be explored on the Web page siriusdisclosure.com, on a similar page on Youtube, and by watching the documentary “Unacknowledged” on Netflix, Amazon or YouTube.
Greer didn’t fault Trump for not knowing about secretive projects conducted for more than 50 years, referring to the White House as a bubble into which information or disinformation is funneled.
“This is what we've discovered is the unacknowledged extra access projects are run off the books in an extra-constitutional way, and the leaders in Congress and in the presidency rarely have full access, never mind control, over those projects. This is something that needs correcting as soon as possible.”
Copyright 2018 KVVU (KVVU Broadcasting Corporation). All rights reserved.
Advanced UFO Technology; Man or ET made ? Lecture by Michael Schratt (HD)
Proof Secret Space Programs are Vastly More Advanced than the Public Realizes
Ruimteleger opereert al sinds jaren zestig in het geheim. UFO-onderzoeker licht hier tipje van de sluier op
Ruimteleger opereert al sinds jaren zestig in het geheim. UFO-onderzoeker licht hier tipje van de sluier op
Afgelopen maandag was het Wereld UFO Dag. Dr. Steven Greer zei tegen zender Fox 5 Las Vegas dat op die dag in de media alleen aandacht is voor domme dingen over UFO’s.
“De domme dingen krijgen alle aandacht omdat het dom is,” zei hij. “Daarnaast zijn er hele belangrijke operaties die momenteel lopen.”
Greer zei dat hij sinds 1993 aan tenminste twee Amerikaanse presidenten informatie heeft geleverd over UFO’s.
Ruimteleger
Hij was dan ook niet verbaasd dat president Trump pas geleden aankondigde opdracht te geven voor de vorming van een ruimteleger.
“Ik geef hierbij het Pentagon opdracht onmiddellijk te beginnen met de oprichting van een ruimtemacht als zesde tak van het leger,” zei hij.
Greer zei: “Eigenlijk erkent hij iets wat al bestond in de vorm van een black project, dat al sinds de jaren zestig in één of andere vorm operationeel is.”
Volledig operationeel
“Een klokkenluider binnen het Pentagon die toegang heeft tot topgeheime technologie heeft tegen me gezegd dat we systemen in de ruimte hebben die ieder object in de ruimte kunnen volgen en vernietigen, en dat die systemen al vele jaren volledig operationeel zijn,” voegde hij toe.
Volgens Greer kan Trump er weinig aan doen dat hij niet op de hoogte is van geheime projecten die al meer dan 50 jaar actief zijn.
Hij zei dat het Witte Huis een bubbel is waarin informatie of desinformatie wordt gepompt.
Buiten de boeken
“We hebben ontdekt dat deze geheime projecten buiten de boeken worden gehouden en dat congresleden en presidenten zelden volledige toegang hebben, laat staan dat ze er invloed op kunnen uitoefenen,” vertelde Greer.
“Hier moet zo snel mogelijk verandering in komen,” besloot hij.
Ik heb nog nooit zoiets gezien. Dit mysterieuze ruimteobject stelt astronomen van over de hele wereld voor een raadsel
Ik heb nog nooit zoiets gezien. Dit mysterieuze ruimteobject stelt astronomen van over de hele wereld voor een raadsel
Met behulp van twee telescopen op Hawaï is een ongewoon heldere explosie in de ruimte vastgelegd.
De ontdekking werd onlangs gepubliceerd in Astronomer’s Telegram. Het object kreeg de naam AT2018cow, kortweg ‘De Koe’.
Het object trok al snel de aandacht van astronomen uit de hele wereld. Ze richtten massaal hun telescopen op het gebied waarin het was ontdekt.
Pictures of the ATLAS telescopes show the point after the explosion on the left, the point before the explosion in the middle and the difference between the two on the right.
Stephen Smartt / ATLAS
Nog nooit
Inmiddels is het object met tenminste 24 telescopen nader bestudeerd. Nog altijd is onduidelijk wat de oorzaak is geweest van de explosie.
“Ik heb nog nooit zoiets gezien in het lokale heelal,” zei Stephen Smartt van de Queen’s University Belfast tegen de Washington Post.
De explosie was zo’n 10 keer feller dan een normale supernova. Het object bevindt zich waarschijnlijk in het sterrenstelsel CGCG 137-068, op zo’n 200 miljoen lichtjaar afstand.
Ongewoon krachtig
De explosie was ongewoon krachtig – hoogenergetische deeltjes werden met 20.000 kilometer per seconde de ruimte ingeslingerd – en met 9000 graden Celsius zeer heet.
Normaal gesproken bereikt een supernova binnen enkele weken zijn helderheidspiek, maar ‘De Koe’ had daar slechts enkele dagen voor nodig.
“We weten nog niet wat het is, maar dit fenomeen was te fel en te kortstondig voor een supernova,” zei astronoom Kate Maguire tegen New Scientist.
Size matters in a lot of areas (you know what we mean) but in archeology, the tiniest of finds are often more important that the biggest. That may be the case in Alexandria, Egypt, where archeologists have uncovered the largest granite sarcophagus ever found in that ancient city and a huge stone head that may be the image of the potentially large resident of the coffin. However, they’re more excited about a find in a huge (there’s that size word again) Greco-Roman era bath — a tiny gold coin with the face of King Ptolemy III, the 3rd century BCE ruler who helped build the Great Library of Alexandria, promoted freedom of religions and was an ancestor of Cleopatra.
Another coin with the face of Ptolemy III
In announcing the discovery, Dr Ayman Ashmawy, head of the Ancient Egyptian Antiquities Sector of the Egyptian government, seemed more excited about the coin that the unusual fact that the mortar sealing the sarcophagus has never been broken, so the lid has never been opened nor the contents disturbed or removed. The black granite sarcophagus is 6 feet (185 cm)tall, 8.6 feet (265 cm) long, 5.4 feet (165 cm) wide and was discovered buried 16 feet deep in the unknown tomb … at least until the identity of the big giant head (no, it’s not William Shatner) (5.4 ft). And no, it’s not a life-size replica of the owner of the coffin – there are most likely a Russian doll’s nest of coffins inside the big granite box and the mummy will probably be smaller in size than in historical stature. (Photos here.)
Osiris
Speaking of small, the coin found at the San El-Hagar archaeological site is one inch (2.6 cm) in diameter and says “Land of Prosperity” and Ptolemy’s name on the tails side. The bath itself (photo here) is 52.5 feet (16 meters) by 11.5 feet (3.5 meters) long – plenty of room for soaking or laps (or wet orgies). If that’s not enough artifacts for one week, a small bronze statue of Osiris, god of the afterlife, was discovered unexpectedly and unceremoniously by workings removing waste at the King Djoser step pyramid. (Photos here).
Step Pyramid of Djoser
There are no coins or wall graffiti or baths or full statues to identify the owner of the sarcophagus or the 15.5 inch (40 cm) head, nor are there any identifying features on the face. Alabaster is a soft rock and much of the face is worn away. The best solution is to open the coffin, but plenty of approvals have to be obtained and papers signed first.
All of these finds are further proof that size doesn’t always matter when it comes to Egyptian artifacts and you can’t throw a stone there without hitting a tomb. Just don’t get caught.
On May 9, Susan Allan of Kelowna, British Columbia, was driving home with her son after having lunch with her mother in nearby Peachland. The Weather Network’s historical records say that it was a mild 18 C (64 F) that day. While stopped at a red light near a local golf course Allan happened to look up through her car’s open sunroof. This, she and her boy would realize moments later, was a very bad and very smelly mistake.
Allan and her son were inundated with feces that she believes fell from a plane. The material was cold to the touch, blue-brown in colour, grainy, and smelled of chlorine and feces, “Like a clean poop smell if that’s possible,” Allan told me.
The human waste on Susan Allan’s car
Courtesy of Susan Allan
“I’m telling you: When this hit our vehicle, there was so much that it felt like a whole pile of mud falling from the sky,” Allan recounted over the phone. “You could see it hitting the vehicle. And when it was hitting our faces, the first thing my son said to me was that it felt freezing cold and that it smelled like, pardon the pun, shit.”
“My son threw up, and we had so much in our faces,” she continued. “Both of us, our faces were covered in poop.” Her eyes burned immediately, she told me, and she drove a couple blocks to a car wash to get hosed down. Allan sent me a photo of a signed letter that she said came from her doctor, which stated that she had conjunctivitis in both eyes—that is, a double serving of pink eye.
Allan’s story is not unique in Canada. This year alone, there have been well over a dozen reported cases of poop mysteriously falling from the sky, and not just in British Columbia. On Wednesday, the CBC reported that a family in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, was sitting out on their deck when they and their home were sprayed with poop from above.
“I believe that this is a cover-up by the government"
Transport Canada, the government department that oversees federal transportation policy and regulations, has received 18 reports of people or their vehicles being struck by "a substance" from above and has investigated all of them, a spokesperson told me, including Allan’s.
Allan received an apology from Transport Canada after she reported the incident in early May (“I’m truly sorry that this happened,” a spokesperson told Allan in an email shared with Motherboard), but no answers for what rained down on her that day.
There has been no explanation, official or otherwise, for the seemingly random sprayings. The intuitive answer to this puzzle is that the poop is coming from airplanes flying overhead, a phenomenon known as “blue ice”—named for the colour of the disinfectant that airplane bathrooms use—as Allan believes.
Susan Allan was hit by the debris as she was sat in the car with her son
(Picture: Castanet News)
She said the substance felt cold, smelt like chlorine and poo, and was a blue-brown colour
(Picture: Castanet News)
But Transport Canada says none of the 18 cases were aviation-related. “The department’s review has concluded that these incidents do not meet the description of blue ice and are therefore not aviation-related (i.e. the substance did not come from passing aircraft),” a Transport Canada spokesperson wrote me in an email.
Allan, who told me that she has spends a lot of time researching her incident—looking up flight patterns and other victims on social media, for example, and now she is seeking a private investigator. She does not believe Transport Canada’s assessment. “I believe that this is a cover-up by the government,” she said.
Blue ice gets its name from the blue disinfectant that’s added to human waste in airplane bathrooms. Waste from airplane passengers is supposed to be safely locked away in the air and only disposed of by ground crews, but mistakes happen.
“Blue ice incidents occur when the aircraft lavatory servicing hatch is not correctly closed and locked,” Henry Harteveldt, travel analyst and president of Atmosphere Research Group, wrote me in an email. “Employees are trained in the proper procedures, and may also be provided with checklists, but sometimes the doors are not correctly closed and locked.”
Susan reportedly wants her car to be cleaned by Transport Canada because it still smells like poo
(Picture: Castanet News)
Transport Canada also admits that blue ice incidents are possible, but noted they are uncommon.
“In rare cases, malfunctions can cause leakage from the holding tank,” a spokesperson wrote me in an email. “At high altitudes (low temperatures), this leakage could freeze on the outside of an aircraft. As the aircraft descends, temperatures rise and the blue ice melts; pieces may detach themselves from the aircraft. These pieces of blue ice will either melt or remain in their solid state before hitting the ground.”
Why don't Allan’s story and the many others that have been reported in the media meet Transport Canada’s description of a blue ice incident? The department has only said that after reviewing the reported details, assessing local radar, and following up with local pilots and airports, it concluded that they “do not meet the description of blue ice.” A department spokesperson added in an email, “Blue ice incidents are very rare and distinct due to their blue colour.”
If a correct shade of blue is the issue, one expert that I spoke to wasn’t convinced. “Transport Canada is dismissing the idea that an aircraft is involved, largely based on the absence of the blue-tinged solution used in privies,”Robert Young, an associate professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of British Columbia, said in an email. “I wonder though, if a malfunctioning system could also be cutting off the supply of the solution.”
If you take Transport Canada at its word, another, possibly even more complicated question arises: If planes aren’t spraying swaths of the country with flecks of poop, well, what is?
Diligent scientific work is needed to determine the real source of the feces falling from the sky, Young said. In the spirit of scientific inquiry and keeping an open mind, samples need to be collected and the DNA analyzed and compared against different species. It could be birds, Young suggested.
“Different species have different poop compositions; for example, Canada geese leave semi-solid remains, but I think eagles, osprey, and herons have similar diets that could lead to similar waste discharges,” he wrote me in an email.
The bird theory was also floated by an employee at an appliance store in Kelowna that was sprayed with material from above in May. When I spoke to them over the phone, they requested that the business name be kept anonymous so as not to impact business due to association with this story.
“What I have is marks on the side of the building,” the employee said. “I don’t know what they’re from. I can absolutely attest to the fact that there’s funny-looking marks on the side of the building coming from above, but I don’t know more than that."
“We had a discussion with one of the other tenants in the area, and the thought was maybe it’s geese,” the employee told me, describing the marks as being "sort of a browny colour."
Allan doesn’t buy that theory. “To say that there are 30 or 40 birds that all poop at the same moment, and they’ve done it a dozen other times? And it’s a bluish grey? Their poop is white," she told me.
To get a better handle on the bird theory’s plausibility, I reached out to Peter Arcese, a professor in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia. Arcese leads a lab that studies the evolution of small populations and the indirect effects of humans on the conservation of birds and other animal species.
“It is hard to see what the volume was, but given the descriptions, hard to believe birds were involved,” Arcese wrote me in an email. “Geese eat grass for the most part; fish-eating birds do stink, but hard to imagine a formation of them given the volume implied.”
Transport Canada’s denial that planes were involved in Allan’s incident and others has made the experience more emotionally taxing for her, as she remains convinced that it was a plane.
“How can I prove that it actually happened?” Allan told me. “I’m fighting against the government, and chances are that I’m not going to get anywhere because it is the government; that’s the way I look at it.”
Poop is still falling from the sky in Canada
It’s unlikely that Allan, or anybody else, will get answers from Transport Canada any time soon. When asked about the department’s investigation procedure for these complaints, or if it could go into more detail about the reasoning for its conclusion, a spokesperson politely told me that Transport Canada is not offering any more comments on the matter.
Poop is still falling from the sky in Canada, as the recent incident in Yellowknife illustrates, and Susan Allan isn’t giving up.
Listen to our podcastabout the world’s greatest mysteries that were solved by science.
Perhaps they will not be millions as some say, but the cases of people who claim to have been abducted by aliens are now numerous all over the world and rising even in Italy as even Fanwave.it has already reported.
BARNEY AND BETTY HILL INCIDENT
ABDUCTED: What REALLY Happened To Barney And Betty Hill?
Many cases have been classified as simple hallucinations, when not even overt scams. Some however remained unresolved even decades later, like that of US spouses Barney and Betty Hill, who in 1961 claimed to have been abducted by alien entities in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in the night betweenDecember 19th and 20th. It is indeed what may be considered the first famous case of “alien abduction” of modern era.
Mixed couple, rare for the time (Barney was African American, Betty white), the Hills were also activists of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and were therefore rather in sight.
According to their testimony, rendered during sessions of regressive hypnosis recorded on tape and still publicly available, December 19th, around 10pm, the couple was coming home, being near the White Mountains, when they noticed a bright object in the sky that they thought was a plane in distress or a satellite.
Reconstruction encounter with UFO
MEMORIES RE-EMERGE THANKS TO REGRESSIVE HYPNOSIS
Returning home they discovered that it had been several hours, without them being aware of it. Thanks to the regressive hypnosis the two, who in the meantime had started to experience migraines, burns and nightmares, managed to reconstruct what would happen in the time frame of which they had no memory (the so-called "missing time").
Barney would in fact at first come down from the car and approached the strange light that in the meantime had landed to the ground, only to realize that it was a vehicle of extraterrestrial origin from a porthole of which he seemed to see humanoid figures. At that point he would return to the car explaining to his wife that he had the feeling that those beings wanted to capture him.
The car left trying to sow the aircraft without succeeding. At a certain point the car would have been, indeed, stopped and beings would surround them, inviting them to board. Here they would have been subjected to physical tests and from there would have arisen had the illness of which later suffered the Hills.
Zeta Reticuli map drawn down by the Hills
STAR MAP ON THE UFO
Betty and Barney Hill UFO Star Map and Alien Abduction
The most surprising thing, as also mentioned by the Italian tv show Mistero Adventure, was however that Mrs. Hill in a further session of regressive hypnosis would be able to rebuild a star map seen on board the UFO, also describing the extraterrestrials on board the UFO as humanoid beings of short stature, with big head and eyes and with a gray skin.
Ufologist Marjorie Fish then declared to identify the Zeta Reticuli system on the map (a binary system distant 39.2 light years from the Earth), suggesting that the “gray” could come from there. Here ends the story of the Hill and begin discussions on the veracity of the case and on the possible further interpretation of the episode.
ASSUMPTIONS OF TRAVELERS OF THE TIME
The “extraterrestrial” according to Mistero Adventure, could have been some time travellers and having seen the interest that has often been shown towards humanity could have been nothing but humans from a distant future, perhaps archaeologists or historians returned to visit "critical" historical periods for the future of humanity. The hypothesis is fascinating, but for the time being travel through time are as theoretical as intergalactic journeys at subluminal speeds.
It is not however said that a company with a few hundred thousand (or million) years of evolution in more than those currently experienced by humanity can not be able to bend to its needs those that today seem to be physical laws and impassable limits. Never say never, therefore,at least until it is possible to offer a complete and convincing explanation of incidents like this of Hills mates.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
10 Amazing Technologies Used By Ancient Civilizations That Were Ahead Of Their Time
10 Amazing Technologies Used By Ancient Civilizations That Were Ahead Of Their Time
Ancient civilizations had access to technology that should never have existed at that time.
Discoveries revealed the ancients Romans, Greeks along with the Egyptians had technology allowing them to accomplish the building of monuments and buildings that should not have been possible for them to accomplish.
1. Persian Engineers Were Able to Store Ice in the Desert during summer in 400 B.C
People think of freezers being something of a modern technology that allows homes to store food for some time. However, crude forms of freezers existed in 400 B.C as Persians brought ice down from the mountain regions then stored it in a “Yakhchal”, an ice pit.
The ice pit was a large dome the Persian people made from mud bricks about 60 feet tall. Under the dome was a space for excess storage about 5, 00 cubic meters. This space has a wind catch, which was made up of many wind catchers, these helped to bring down the temperature to ensure the levels remained frigid in the summer. They were designed with two meter thick walls, with the walls being heat resistant thanks to them having mortar made from clay, sand, goat hair, ash and egg whites, mixed in specific amounts. Any ice that did melt was captured in a trench at the bottom where it would freeze up again during the cold winter nights.
2. The Archimedes Screw
The Archimedes Screw was designed to be used for irrigation, featuring a large screw inside a pipe that is hollow. This simple design was operated by hand during ancient times then powered by wind later on. This is technology that is still in use today; however, today a motor is used to power the machine. When the shaft turns the bottom of the device takes water up inside the pipe, which is pushed to the top of the screw thanks to the helicoid rotating, while the water poured out of the end of the device.
3. Ancient Mexican Masonry Technology for Building Roof Domes with Only a Trowel
Masonries in Tequisquiapan in Mexico are known as “bovederos”, they are able to use just a trowel to build roof domes along with vaults. They are able to do so without using any form of support in an act that defies gravity. The masons do not use ceiling mounts or formworks, with it being a skill and technology that has been passed throughout generations, which is still used today.
4. Ramps Were Invented By Ancient Egyptians for Construction
The building of the ancient pyramids is something that has always intrigued many people. How did they get the huge blocks of stone up to the top of the structures? It is thought that the Egyptian people were among the first to use ramps while constructing the pyramids. They found they could make an inclined plane that allowed them to overcome resistance. The Egyptian people were well ahead of their time in construction.
5. The Greeks Invented the Antikythera Mechanism – A 2,000-Year-Old Computer
Many say IBM invented the first personal computer; others suggest it was Bill Wozniak from Apple. However, the Greeks actually invented the Antikythera mechanism, which was essentially the first computer, 2,000 years old. The computer was used to predict planets and stars along with their position within the universe depending on the month.
The old computer was found by divers searching a shipwreck off the coast of a Greek Island. They found a strange item of gears in brass along with dials on something resembling a mantel clock. A detailed analysis of the device was finally made in 1959 by Derek J. de Solla Price, he said: “The mechanism is like a great astronomical clock … or like a modern analog computer which uses mechanical parts to save tedious calculation.”
6. The Lycurgus Cup
Nanotechnology actually dates back to 1,600 years when artisans in Rome impregnated glass used in the Lycurgus Cup with particles of silver and gold of only 50 nanometres in diameter. The cup was something that scientists puzzled about for many decades with the mystery not solved until 1990 when particles of just one-thousandth the size of a salt grain were found. The cup might have been the first example of a pregnancy test as when the different liquid was poured into it electrons behaved differently, changing in color.
7. A Programmable Robot Was Invented By Heron of Alexandria
Heron of Alexandria devised creations that blew the mind of people. It is said he created the first programmable robot, along with the vending machine, force pump, fountain, and syringe, to name just a few. He constructed a mechanical device that was used to entertain people, with it being able to play for around ten minutes, taking power from a unique system of knots, ropes, along with simple machines. It was operated by a cogwheel that rotated in a cylindrical shape.
8. The Hal Saflieni Hypogeum Built In Malta With Incredible Acoustic Properties
An underground burial chamber was built by the people of Malta and was given the name “Hal Saflieni Hypogeum”. The structure consisted of a huge network of corridors along with cavities, with it having unique acoustic properties that were amazing thanks to a chamber called the Oracle Chamber. This chamber magnified sound a hundred times, possibly being the first loudspeaker.
9. Romans Invented Concrete More Durable and Environmental Friendly Than Todays
2,000 years ago Romans invented concrete with it being more durable and environmentally friendly than the concrete of today. Structures built using the concrete have remained standing for more than 2,000 years.
10. Tough Damascus Steel Made by the Crusaders
Damascus steel made by crusaders has a reputation for being tough, while the blades cut through a hair that was dropped across it. The steel became legendary when the Crusaders made their way to the Middle East during the 11th century. The blades were so sharp they could split a feather that had been thrown in mid-air. They were distinguished by the damask pattern embedded into their blades.
Ex-NASA physics professor claims 'many governments' have covered up alien encounters and says humanity must 'face the possibility' UFO sightings really ARE alien craft
Ex-NASA physics professor claims 'many governments' have covered up alien encounters and says humanity must 'face the possibility' UFO sightings really ARE alien craft
A physics professor from University at Albany, State University of New York and former NASA researcher believes there is 'plenty of evidence to support UFOs'
He believes skepticism around UFOs prevents serious scientific research
Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom have been declassifying their UFO files since 2008
Are we alone? Unfortunately, neither of the answers feel satisfactory.
To be alone in this vast universe is a lonely prospect.
On the other hand, if we are not alone and there is someone or something more powerful out there, that too is terrifying.
Scroll down for video
A 1990 picture of a 'UFO' taken in Wallonia, Belgium. A physics professor from University at Albany, State University of New York and former NASA researcher believes there is 'plenty of evidence to support UFOs'
As a NASA research scientist and now a professor of physics, I attended the 2002 NASA Contact Conference, which focused on serious speculation about extraterrestrials.
During the meeting a concerned participant said loudly in a sinister tone, 'You have absolutely no idea what is out there!'
The silence was palpable as the truth of this statement sunk in.
Humans are fearful of extraterrestrials visiting Earth. Perhaps fortunately, the distances between the stars are prohibitively vast.
At least this is what we novices, who are just learning to travel into space, tell ourselves.
I have always been interested in UFOs. Of course, there was the excitement that there could be aliens and other living worlds.
But more exciting to me was the possibility that interstellar travel was technologically achievable.
In 1988, during my second week of graduate school at Montana State University, several students and I were discussing a recent cattle mutilation that was associated with UFOs.
A physics professor joined the conversation and told us that he had colleagues working at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, where they were having problems with UFOs shutting down nuclear missiles.
At the time I thought this professor was talking nonsense. But 20 years later, I was stunned to see a recording of a press conference featuring several former US Air Force personnel, with a couple from Malmstrom AFB, describing similar occurrences in the 1960s. Clearly there must be something to this.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders reaches to a question about UFOs in the White House Press Briefing Room in Washington, DC, USA 19 December 2017. The question was in response to the Pentagon's secret UFO program, recently revealed in the New York Times
With July 2 being World UFO Day, it is a good time for society to address the unsettling and refreshing fact we may not be alone.
I believe we need to face the possibility that some of the strange flying objects that outperform the best aircraft in our inventory and defy explanation may indeed be visitors from afar – and there's plenty of evidence to support UFO sightings.
The nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi was famous for posing thought provoking questions.
In 1950, at Los Alamos National Laboratory after discussing UFOs over lunch, Fermi asked, 'Where is everybody?'
He estimated there were about 300 billion stars in the galaxy, many of them billions of years older than the sun, with a large percentage of them likely to host habitable planets.
While the general public has been fascinated with UFOs for decades, our governments, scientists and media, have essentially declared that of all the UFO sightings are a result of weather phenomenon or human actions, Knuth claims.
Even if intelligent life developed on a very small percentage of these planets, then there should be a number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy.
Depending on the assumptions, one should expect anywhere from tens to tens of thousands of civilizations.
With the rocket-based technologies that we have developed for space travel, it would take between 5 and 50 million years for a civilization like ours to colonize our Milky Way galaxy.
Since this should have happened several times already in the history of our galaxy, one should wonder where is the evidence of these civilizations?
This discrepancy between the expectation that there should be evidence of alien civilizations or visitations and the presumption that no visitations have been observed has been dubbed the Fermi Paradox.
Carl Sagan correctly summarized the situation by saying that 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.'
The problem is that there has been no single well-documented UFO encounter that would alone qualify as the smoking gun.
The situation is exacerbated by the fact that many governments around the world have covered up and classified information about such encounters.
A black and white colored video from a 2004 encounter shows fighter jets closing in on an unidentified object (circled red) before it quickly accelerates out of sight
But there are enough scraps of evidence that suggest that the problem needs to be open to scientific study.
When it comes to science, the scientific method requires hypotheses to be testable so that inferences can be verified.
UFO encounters are neither controllable nor repeatable, which makes their study extremely challenging. But the real problem, in my view, is that the UFO topic is taboo.
While the general public has been fascinated with UFOs for decades, our governments, scientists and media, have essentially declared that of all the UFO sightings are a result of weather phenomenon or human actions.
A declassified document describing a sighting of a UFO in December 1977, in Bahia, a state in northern Brazil. Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom have been declassifying their UFO files since 2008
WHAT ARE SOME REPORTED UFO SIGHTINGS?
Among the sightings were reports from pilots of two U.S. Navy Super Hornet fighters who spotted a UFO on a training mission.
They were 100 miles from San Diego in the Pacific when a call on their radios asked if they were carrying weapons.
The unusual request, that day in 2004, came from a naval cruiser, the Princeton, that had spent two weeks tracking unidentified aircraft.
Commanders David Fravor and Jim Slaight had only dummy missiles, but were directed to investigate objects that appeared suddenly at an altitude of 80,000ft, then plunged towards the sea.
Hovering erratically 50ft above that spot was some sort of flying craft, around 40ft long, oval-shaped and whitish.
As the pilot descended towards it, it rose to meet him, but suddenly peeled away at an immense speed that he admits left him feeling 'pretty weirded out'.
The craft 'had no plumes, wings or rotors' but, seemingly travelling at a mile a second, easily outran America's fastest military jets.None are actually extraterrestrial spacecraft.
And no aliens have visited Earth.
Essentially, we are told that the topic is nonsense.
UFOs are off-limits to serious scientific study and rational discussion, which unfortunately leaves the topic in the domain of fringe and pseudoscientists, many of whom litter the field with conspiracy theories and wild speculation.
I think UFO skepticism has become something of a religion with an agenda, discounting the possibility of extraterrestrials without scientific evidence, while often providing silly hypotheses describing only one or two aspects of a UFO encounter reinforcing the popular belief that there is a conspiracy.
A scientist must consider all of the possible hypotheses that explain all of the data, and since little is known, the extraterrestrial hypothesis cannot yet be ruled out.
In the end, the skeptics often do science a disservice by providing a poor example of how science is to be conducted. The fact is that many of these encounters – still a very small percentage of the total – defy conventional explanation.
The media amplifies the skepticism by publishing information about UFOs when it is exciting, but always with a mocking or whimsical tone and reassuring the public that it can't possibly be true.
But there are credible witnesses and encounters.
I am often asked by friends and colleagues, 'Why don't astronomers see UFOs?' The fact is that they do.
In 1977, Peter Sturrock, a professor of space science and astrophysics at Stanford University, mailed 2,611 questionnaires about UFO sightings to members of the American Astronomical Society.
He received 1,356 responses from which 62 astronomers – 4.6 percent – reported witnessing or recording inexplicable aerial phenomena. This rate is similar to the approximately 5 percent of UFO sightings that are never explained.
As expected, Sturrock found that astronomers who witnessed UFOs were more likely to be night sky observers. Over 80 percent of Sturrock's respondents were willing to study the UFO phenomenon if there was a way to do so.
More than half of them felt that the topic deserves to be studied versus 20 percent who felt that it should not. The survey also revealed that younger scientists were more likely to support the study of UFOs.
Pictured: An example of a 'UFO' triangle formation that the UK government investigated as part of its report into alien sightings
UFOs have been observed through telescopes. I know of one telescope sighting by an experienced amateur astronomer in which he observed an object shaped like a guitar pick moving through the telescope's field of view.
Further sightings are documented in the book 'Wonders in the Sky,' in which the authors compile numerous observations of unexplained aerial phenomena made by astronomers and published in scientific journals throughout the 1700s and 1800s.
Some of the most convincing observations have come from government officials. In 1997, the Chilean government formed the organization Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos, or CEFAA, to study UFOs.
Last year, CEFAA released footage of a UFO taken with a helicopter-mounted Wescam infrared camera.
The countries of Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom have been declassifying their UFO files since 2008.
The French Committee for In-Depth Studies, or COMETA, was an unofficial UFO study group comprised of high-ranking scientists and military officials that studied UFOs in the late 1990s.
They released the COMETA Report, which summarized their findings. They concluded that 5 percent of the encounters were reliable yet inexplicable: The best hypothesis available was that the observed craft were extraterrestrial. They also accused the United States of covering up evidence of UFOs.
WHAT MAKES SOMEONE BELIEVE IN CONSPIRACY THEORIES?
Over the course of three online-based studies, researchers at the University of Kent showed strong links between the belief in conspiracy theories and certain psychological traits.
Narcissism and self-esteem levels have a large impact on a persons belief in conspiracy theories.
The results showed that people who rated highly on the narcissism scale and who had low self-esteem were more likely to be conspiracy believers.
However, while low self-esteem, narcissism and belief in conspiracies are strongly linked, it is not clear that one - or a combination - causes the other.
But it hints at an interesting new angle to the world of conspiracy and those who reinforce belief.
There are widely believed to be three main reasons as to why people believe in conspiracy theories.
The desire for understanding and certainty - Seeking explanations for events is a natural human desire.
The desire for control and security - Conspiracy theories can give their believers a sense of control and security.
The desire to maintain a positive self-image - People who feel socially marginalised are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories and it gives them a sense of worth in the UFO community.
These three things tie in with the previously stated qualities and combine to create an avid conspiracy theorist.
Iran has been concerned about spherical UFOs observed near nuclear power facilities that they call 'CIA drones' which reportedly are about 30 feet in diameter, can achieve speeds up to Mach 10, and can leave the atmosphere.
Such speeds are on par with the fastest experimental aircraft, but unthinkable for a sphere without lift surfaces or an obvious propulsion mechanism.
In December 2017, The New York Times broke a story about the classified Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, which was a $22 million program run by the former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo and aimed at studying UFOs.
Elizondo resigned from running the program protesting extreme secrecy and the lack of funding and support.
Following his resignation Elizondo, along with several others from the defense and intelligence community, were recruited by the To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science, which was recently founded by Tom DeLonge to study UFOs and interstellar travel.
In conjunction with the launch of the academy, the Pentagon declassified and released three videos of UFO encounters taken with forward looking infrared cameras mounted on F-18 fighter jets.
Pictured: A 1948 Top Secret US Air Force UFO extraterrestrial document. In December 2017, The New York Times broke a story about the classified Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, which was a $22 million program run by the former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo and aimed at studying UFOs
While there is much excitement about such disclosures, I am reminded of a quote from Retired Army Colonel John Alexander: 'Disclosure has happened. … I've got stacks of generals, including Soviet generals, who've come out and said UFOs are real. My point is, how many times do senior officials need to come forward and say that this is real?'
There is a great deal of evidence that a small percentage of these UFO sightings are unidentified structured craft exhibiting flight capabilities beyond any known human technology.
While there is no single case for which there exists evidence that would stand up to scientific rigor, there are cases with simultaneous observations by multiple reliable witnesses, along with radar returns and photographic evidence revealing patterns of activity that are compelling.
Declassified information from covert studies is interesting, but not scientifically helpful.
This is a topic worthy of open scientific inquiry, until there is a scientific consensus based on evidence rather than prior expectation or belief.
If there are indeed extraterrestrial craft visiting Earth, it would greatly benefit us to know about them, their nature and their intent.
Moreover, this would present a great opportunity for mankind, promising to expand and advance our knowledge and technology, as well as reshaping our understanding of our place in the universe.
A cataclysmic collision with an enormous cosmic body twice the size of Earth may have caused Uranus to tilt and could explain its freezing temperatures.
The collision with Uranus of a massive object twice the size of Earth caused the planet’s unusual spin.
Credit: Jacob Kegerreis/Durham University.
Uranus’ spins on its side, its axis pointing almost at right angles relative to all the other planets in our solar system. This behavior suggests that the planet almost certainly got knocked over by some giant impact, so the real questions astronomers have been asking are how all of this panned out and how else such a violent impact affected the planet.
Jacob Kegerreis and colleagues at Durham University’s Institute for Computational Cosmology performed over 50 different high-resolution computer simulations of massive collisions with the gas giant in order to answer these questions.
The conditions that lead to outcomes that most closely resemble what Uranus is doing right now suggest that the planet was most likely impacted by a young proto-planet mode of rock and ice during the solar system’s chaotic formation about 4 billion years ago. Since Uranus is so massive — it has about 14 times the mass of Earth and is around four times larger in radius — whatever hit the planet was huge, and scientists think it used to be between two and three Earth-masses.
According to the same simulations, the impact could have also released debris that formed a thin shell around the edge of the planet’s ice layer, trapping heat emanating from the planet’s core. This can partly explain Uranus’ ungodly cold temperature in the outer atmosphere, which averages around -216 degrees Celsius (-357 degrees Fahrenheit). Some of Uranus’ 27 moons — including 13 so-called ‘inner moons’ — might have formed as a result of the spewed debris.
“Our findings confirm that the most likely outcome was that the young Uranus was involved in a cataclysmic collision with an object twice the mass of Earth, if not larger, knocking it on to its side and setting in process the events that helped create the planet we see today,” Kegerreis said in a statement.
The collision wasn’t head-on. The cosmic body grazed Uranus instead, allowing the planet to retain the majority of its atmosphere. However, it was enough to affect the planet’s tilt.
2004 infrared composite image of the two hemispheres of Uranus obtained with Keck Telescope adaptive optics. The planet is tilted at almost a 90-degree angle with respect to the other planets in the solar system.
Credit: Lawrence Sromovsky, University of Wisconsin-Madison/W.W. Keck Observatory.
The impact could have created molten ice and lopsided lumps of rock inside the planet, explaining not only Uranus’ excentric tilt but also its off-center magnetic field.
Besides helping astronomers better their understanding of Uranus, the new study might also offer valuable clues as to how planets outside the solar system — called exoplanets — form and evolve.
Most people think of asteroids as scary, cold, and lifeless blobs of rock hurtling around the solar system. That’s a pretty accurate description, but that doesn’t mean that asteroids don’t get to have families. According to a new study, 85% of all objects in the asteroid belt can trace their origin to five or six planetoids (small planets) that turned to smithereens in the early days of the solar system. Accordingly, there are five to six families of asteroids tracing their lineage back to these larger parent bodies.
Illustration of an asteroid belt. Credit: NASA.
About four to five billion years ago, the solar system was a chaotic, crowded mess. Many of today’s planets had yet to form in their current configuration and collisions between massive planetary bodies were quite routine. Eventually, all this colliding gave rise to many of the solar system’s moons and to the countless asteroids that litter the outskirts of the system. For instance, the main asteroid belt — located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter — is estimated to contain millions of objects, although only hundreds of thousands have actually been observed.
While these parent bodies fragmented into thousands of smaller bits and pieces, it is possible to piece them back together based on their trajectories. In 1918, Japanese astronomer Kiyotsugu Hirayama was the first to notice that asteroids had similar elements, such as eccentricity and inclination, to their orbit. Suddenly, asteroids were no longer randomly zipping through the solar system but rather groups sharing orbital elements.
Based on Hirayama’s ideas, for the past 100 years, astronomers have grouped asteroids into families and non-families, with only half of all the asteroids that we know of being classed in families. However, this division into families and non-families is not productive, according to researchers led by Stanly Dermott, a Professor of Astronomy at the University of Florida.
Dermott and colleagues found that there’s a relationship between the orbital elements of asteroids and their sizes. By analyzing the dimensions of asteroids and their distribution within the inner asteroid belt, the team was able to classify 85% of the asteroid into about six families, each named after the biggest object in the family. They are Vesta, Flora, Nysa, Polana, Eulalia, and Hungaria. In 2011, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft visited Vesta.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually trace the origins of all asteroids in the main asteroid belt, not just those in the inner belt, to a small number of known parent bodies,” Dermott said.
The other 15 percent may also trace their origins to the same group of primordial bodies. What astronomers had previously thought of as ‘non-family’ asteroids were likely part of one of the six families, as well — just that they had become estranged due to the gravitational pull of Jupiter or Saturn, which changed their orbits ever so slightly.
The team only analyzed 200,000 asteroids, all found in the inner asteroid belt, which is closer to Earth and more studied than the middle or outer asteroid belt. A NASA survey tracked over 780,000 asteroids in the belt as a whole. This means there’s a lot of room to learn about asteroids. Perhaps there are more families, for instance. What’s more, there’s a similar ongoing analysis, only this time of meteorites, which are the bits of asteroids that survive atmospheric entry and reach Earth. This kind of information could prove essential to protecting the Earth and ourselves from killer asteroids of the kind that wiped out the dinosaurs.
“These large bodies whiz by the Earth, so of course we’re very concerned about how many of these there are and what types of material are in them,” Dermott said. “If ever one of these comes towards the Earth, and we want to deflect it, we need to know what its nature is.”
This year’s Asteroid Day will mark the 110th anniversary of the Tunguska event, when the largest recorded asteroid to collide with Earth struck Siberia. The area of damage was nearly equal to the size of Rhode Island, alarming the international community of its own lack of preparedness. This year, to avoid destruction of that magnitude from other near-Earth objects, the US government shared some of its own preventative measures.
How Does NASA Spot a Near-Earth Asteroid?
Asteroid Day was not only established to commemorate the catastrophe of 1908 but to raise awareness for the possibility of future threats. The Tunguska asteroid created massive damage, wiping out roughly 80 million trees in a blast that is thought to have measured 5.0 on the Richter scale. More than a century later, scientists are still scrambling to establish monitoring techniques while the public has demanded that protection from asteroids be a top priority to space agencies.
Cumulative number of near-Earth asteroids discovered by year since 1980
In June, the US National Science and Technology Council released the National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan that outlines the five key efforts to defend Earth from the risk of asteroids. The strategy will be unrolled over the next 10 years and will be led by experts from NASA, FEMA, and other US agencies. Not only will the strategy affect agencies across the US government, but several steps mention the need for collaboration at an international level.
1. Enhancing NEO Detection and Tracking
The first and most important strategic objective for the government is to improve NASA’s tracking and detection capabilities. The space agency has been conducting an NEO survey program since 1998, but more recently has worked with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope under construction in Chile, which is expected to become operational by 2023. This advanced telescope is integral to the strategy for tracking NEOs and cataloging data to improve detection.
2. Improve NEO Prediction
The document outlines the way it intends to boost nationwide preparedness through quantitative modeling and analysis. This includes an interagency modeling group comprised of the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate, as well as its National Protection and Programs Directorate, who will work to better predict Earth impact probabilities and possibly identify time and location of imminent NEO impacts.
3. Develop Ways to Deflect NEOs
“There is much that is not known about the orbits, size, and material composition of many NEOs,” the document says. “And it is essential to account for these uncertainties when developing and utilizing technologies for impact prevention.”
In order for the interagency modeling group to succeed, they need to be innovating. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, is expected to launch after 2020 and will crash into the asteroid Didymos to test its ability to change the orbit or path of an NEO. In addition to DART, NASA intends to invest in the development of several new technologies that can observe NEOs over many years to map their orbits and future trajectories.
Illustrative timeline of the potential phases of operations in a NEO threat scenario.
4. Collaborate With International Space Agencies
This should be a no-brainer. Anyone who’s watched Independence Day knows there’s nothing quite like an extraplanetary problem to bring the planet together. In addition to the State Department’s own foreign relations building, NASA will cooperate with other nations’ space agencies to synthesize data on all NEOs.
5. Practice NEO Emergency Procedures
Think of it as a fire drill, just way more bureaucratic. The government is working across several departments to develop exercise procedures and “action plans” in the event of the worst-case scenario. The US is also developing a protocol with foreign governments to ensure emergency preparedness and reduce physical and economic harm regardless of the location of impact. Should the first four plans fail, these “exercises” will prepare governments in sending first responders.
In the new plan, NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which is normally tasked with announcing potential space hazards, will work with FEMA to streamline how these messages are conveyed to the public in the event of an imminent disaster. The two agencies will work together to establish evacuation routes and other life-saving information during an asteroid-related emergency.
Since 2005, the overall number of cataloged NEOs has increased by five times, meaning that the more the US government invests in these strategies, the more obvious it becomes that these strategies were needed. This action plan aims to enhance the NEO detection capabilities not just in the US but internationally. When it comes to extraplanetary threats, we’re all in this together.
The contrail from the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station hangs above The Breakers and Palm Beach before dawn Friday, June 29, 2018. A two-stage SpaceX rocket launched at 5:42 a.m. sent the company’s Dragon capsule toward the International Space Station on a delivery mission for NASA. The Dragon is scheduled to arrive at the space station early Monday. The launch was SpaceX’s 12th of 2018, and was the ninth to re-use a rocket that had launched before.
(Lannis Waters / The Palm Beach Post)
An ethereal bloom of white painted a cobalt sky early Friday morning in South Florida, leaving some early risers curious about the origin of the unusual pre-dawn sight.
The wispy tendril that was shaped like a jellyfish or a heart, depending on where it was seen, was the result of a 5:42 a.m. SpaceX rocket launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
With 48 minutes before sunrise, the surface of the Earth was still dark, but the rocket and its exhaust plume became illuminated as the day’s first sunbeams met it on its journey into space.
“I thought maybe it was a cloud, but there weren’t any other clouds and it kept changing,” said Boynton Beach resident Arthur Small, who emailed a photo to The Palm Beach Post asking about the unusual object. “The Northern Lights came to mind, but I know you don’t see them this far south.”
At least one person sent a photo of the plume to the National Weather Service in Miami with a query on what it was. Others posted pictures to social media, either exalting the early-morning beauty or questioning its appearance.
“It’s very similar to when you put a cold cup of water in a humid room and you get water on the outside, except up there, it’s ice crystals,” said Robert Garcia, a meteorologist with the NWS in Miami. “Since it was dark, and then you have something suddenly with light on it, it really stands out.”
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is carrying more than 5,900 pounds of supplies to the International Space Station, including materials for about 250 science and research investigations that will be conducted on the space station.
The rocket is expected to arrive Monday.
A 2015 United Launch Alliance rocket that lifted off early in the morning left marks in the sky similar as to those seen Friday.
“Always a cool thing when you can combine weather, science, and rockets,” said Florida Climatologist David Zierden in 2015.
De verborgen agenda van de NASA. Zijn de officiële ruimteprogramma’s een dekmantel?
De verborgen agenda van de NASA. Zijn de officiële ruimteprogramma’s een dekmantel?
Sinds de jaren zestig wordt in de media uitgebreid verslag gedaan van de ruimteprogramma’s van de Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA. Onlangs kregen we nog te horen dat een NASA-sonde organische moleculen op een Saturnusmaan had ontdekt.
Maar wat als dit allemaal een dekmantel is om de interesse van het ruimteagentschap in oude ruimteprogramma’s te verbloemen?
Overal op aarde zijn er archeologische vindplaatsen die lijken te suggereren dat we al heel lang niet meer alleen zijn op aarde.
India
In onderstaande video wordt gespeurd naar bewijs voor buitenaardse beschavingen op onze planeet. Daarnaast wordt onderzocht waarom de NASA zich ontfermt over geavanceerde technologie die op dit soort vindplaatsen wordt gevonden.
Toen in India enkele jaren geleden in twee verschillende districten 10.000 jaar oude rotstekeningen van buitenaardse wezens en UFO’s werden gevonden, werd gelijk de hulp van de NASA ingeroepen.
Een lokale archeoloog zei indertijd dat de vondst suggereert dat de prehistorische mens mogelijk wezens van andere planeten heeft gezien. “Er is nader onderzoek nodig,” zei hij.
Ruimtepakken
De archeoloog voegde toe dat de wezens op enkele afbeeldingen zelfs ruimtepakken dragen. Een object in één van de tekeningen was voorzien van een antenne en drie landingspoten.
Lokale bewoners deelden verhalen van hun voorouders over kleine wezens die in cirkelvormige vliegende objecten in een naburig dorp waren geland.
‘Time warp’ ontdekt bij Area 51. Deze onderzoeker baart opzien in Las Vegas
‘Time warp’ ontdekt bij Area 51. Deze onderzoeker baart opzien in Las Vegas
Een paranormale onderzoeker claimt de eerste persoon op aarde te zijn die een zogeheten ‘time warp’ heeft ontdekt, een plek waar de tijd wordt vervormd. Dat meldt Fox 5 Las Vegas.
Joshua Warren heeft overal in het zuiden van Nevada gemeten hoe snel de tijd verstrijkt. Onlangs ontdekte hij dat de tijd net buiten Las Vegas heel even vertraagde.
Hij zei dat hij op meerdere plekken metingen had verricht tussen Las Vegas en Area 51.
Opzienbarende ontdekking
“We hebben met een splinternieuw apparaat iets vreemds opgepikt,” zei Warren. Hij gebruikte een zogeheten DT-meter, die recentelijk is ontwikkeld door ingenieur Ron Heath.
Het signaal dat het apparaat uitzendt zou overal op aarde op ieder gegeven moment gelijk moeten zijn en zou alleen moeten veranderen als er een zwart gat of iets soortgelijks op onze planeet afstevent.
In de woestijn net ten noorden van Las Vegas deed Warren een opzienbarende ontdekking. “Op deze plek heb ik op 18 juni gemeten dat de tijd 20 microseconden lang vertraagde.
Onbekende technologie
Warren zei dat dit volgens de natuurkundige wetten niet zou mogen gebeuren.
“Zoiets kan alleen gebeuren als er een onbekende technologie in de buurt wordt getest die de omgeving beïnvloedt of als er op de aarde plekken bestaan die af en toe ‘flikkeren’,” zei hij.
Hij voegde toe dat het erg interessant is dat deze onregelmatigheid zich heeft voorgedaan op een plek die wordt gezien als één van de populairste UFO-hotspots in de regio.
Andere realiteit
De grote vraag is nu wat de oorzaak is deze onregelmatigheden. “Is het iets wat ons toegang verschaft tot een andere wereld of een andere realiteit? Of is dit het effect van een vreemde technologie die is ontwikkeld door mensen of door aliens?”
Warren zei dat hij rond Las Vegas metingen zal blijven verrichten om te kijken of hij een patroon kan ontwaren.
Kathleen Jacob FOX5@Kathleenjjacob
A researcher says he’s discovered the first measurable TIME WARP right outside of Las Vegas! Details tonight on @FOX5Vegas at 4 and 5!
Britse overheid probeerde UFO te vangen om superwapens te bouwen. Dit geheime dossier komt nu naar buiten
Britse overheid probeerde UFO te vangen om superwapens te bouwen. Dit geheime dossier komt nu naar buiten
Uit een geheim dossier blijkt dat Britse spionnen een halve eeuw hebben geprobeerd een UFO te vangen zodat ze de buitenaardse technologie konden gebruiken om superwapens te bouwen.
Geopenbaarde documenten laten zien dat de Britse overheid bezorgd was dat de Sovjet-Unie of China al een UFO hadden en supersnelle gevechtsvliegtuigen ontwikkelden.
Tussen 1947 en 1997 waren er twee groepen die zich bezighielden met het onderzoek naar UFO’s. Eén openbare groep, waar mensen hun meldingen konden doorgeven, en één geheime groep.
Nieuwe technologieën
De stukken onthullen dat de Britse luchtmacht heel graag een UFO wilde vinden om zo ‘de vijand te kunnen verslaan tijdens de Koude Oorlog’.
Een luchtmaarschalk schreef dat de luchtmacht met name geïnteresseerd was in nieuwe technologieën die konden worden gebruikt voor hun programma’s.
Een commandant zei bang te zijn dat de vijand al de beschikking had over een UFO. “Houd alle rapporten in de gaten voor het geval dat het onbekende/niet begrepen onderliggende fenomeen in de toekomst wordt geëxploiteerd door een ander land,” klonk het.
Voorkomen
“Een (potentiële) vijand zou een vliegmachine kunnen ontwikkelen met de eigenschappen die deze fenomenen lijken te hebben,” zei hij verder.
Spionnen moesten vooral zoeken naar objecten die zich met hoge snelheid voortbewogen, scherpe manoeuvres maakten, in de lucht konden blijven hangen en niet of nauwelijks op de radar verschenen.
Het Britse ministerie van Defensie probeert al meer dan een decennium te voorkomen dat deze geheime stukken naar buiten worden gebracht.
Uit recente cijfers blijkt dat het aantal UFO waarnemingen in Amerika drastisch is gedaald, zodanig dat men zich afvraagt of ET weer naar huis is gegaan.
Dat ze er wel degelijk zijn, maar manieren hebben gevonden om zich beter te vermommen, blijkt uit een prachtige nieuwe waarneming uit Engeland.
In Amerika is er het National UFO Reporting Center, waar veel mensen melding maken van UFO waarnemingen. Daar constateert men een nogal drastische daling in het aantal meldingen.
Zoalste te zien op de volgende afbeelding werd een piek bereikt in 2014 en loopt het aantal meldingen daarna nogal drastisch terug.
Er is niet echt een aanwijsbare oorzaak van de daling en ook wij merken dat er minder meldingen binnen komen dan voorgaande jaren. Het zou kunnen dat mensen misschien een beetje UFO moe zijn geworden door alle nepbeelden die op internet rondslingeren, of ze zijn grotendeels verdwenen, of ze hebben een manier gevonden om zich beter te verbergen voor het publiek.
Dat laatste zou heel goed mogelijk kunnen zijn, omdat er wel relatief veel meldingen komen van vreemd uitziende wolken welke eigenlijk geen wolken zijn. We hebben hier ook onlangs over geschreven en ook nu komt er een prachtige waarneming uit Engeland.
Een man uit de buurt van Barnsley in het zuiden van Yorkshire kijkt rond een uur of negen naar buiten en ziet een prachtige wolkeloze hemel, behalve een soort vreemd uitziende wolk
De wolk hangt stil en zoals in de eerste video hieronder te zien, hangt dat ding daar meer dan een uur zonder te bewegen. Een paar uur later klimt hij naar zijn zolder en tot zijn stomme verbazing hangt die vreemde wolk daar nog steeds.
Het lijkt duidelijk dat we hier niet te maken hebben met een wolk, maar wederom met een zogenaamde gecloakte UFO, vermomd als wolk dus. Als je jezelf dan parkeert in een compleet wolkeloze hemel, begin je voor oplettend volk aardig op te vallen.
Dus, misschien een idee om met deze heldere dagen eens extra scherp te letten op vreemd uitziende wolken die eigenlijk niet thuis horen in de lucht op dat bepaalde moment.
Shadowy Human-Like Figure Walking Among The Clouds Over Alabama
Shadowy Human-Like Figure Walking Among The Clouds Over Alabama
During the Facebook live stream, Solo Dolo, the person who was filming the extreme weather conditions over Tuscaloosa, Alabama can be heard saying: "Hey, we've got a storm over here, we got no power, everything blowing over here, boxes, trees."
Image credit: Solo Dodo.
"Look at that hole right in the sky, that's who's got the power. "He got us covered at least, we're alright."
Yet it was not until uploading the video where a friend pointed out the strange shape which resembled a human body in the clouds, which some people are claiming to be God.
Viewers were quick to point out a shadowy figure which looks like it has arms and legal walking between the bright patch in the clouds.
Skeptical observers who point to more prosaic possibilities such as that the 'apparition' is just a weird weather effect.
They are pointing only to one figure walking across the sky but if you look closely you can see two figures, the taller figure is following a shorter figure.
Flying Saucer UFO Filmed In The Middle Of The Skies Of Las Vegas May 2018
Flying Saucer UFO Filmed In The Middle Of The Skies Of Las Vegas May 2018
STUNNING FOOTAGE OF A FLYING SAUCER SHAPED CHARIOT/UFO ON A SOMEWHAT RECONNAISSANCE MISSION SITTING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SKIES SCOPING OUT THE SIN CITY OF LAS VEGAS MAY 2018!!!
Red UFO Recorded Travelling At High Velocity...Romania May 2018
A secret dossier reveals British spies spent half a century trying to catch a UFO so they could use its alien technology to build superweapons.
Declassified files reveal the Government was concerned the Soviet Union or Chinahad impounded a UFO and were harvesting its secrets to develop super-fast warplanes.
The cache of documents reveal between 1947 to 1997, intelligence services ran two UFO desks - one was a public-facing desk where people could phone in sightings. The real work was carried out in the background by spies set to investigate.
The UFO desks ran until 1997 by which time word had come from Whitehall that security services 'investigating 'X files stuff such as alien abductions' had become a diversion from their main duties.
A secret dossier reveals British spies spent half a century trying to catch a UFO so they could use its alien technology to build superweapons
(stock image)
A review was ordered to confirm the desk should be shut down, but also to determine whether anything had been learned over the years which could be useful to military.
Now a report called UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) in the UK Air Defence Region is part of three files running to more than 1,000 pages set to be released after being declassified.
They were held back from the UFO records earmarked for transfer to the National Archives as part of the Open Government project from 2008 to 2013.
Declassified files reveal the Government feared the Soviet Union or China had impounded a UFO and were harvesting its secrets to develop super-fast warplanes
(stock image)
But earlier this year, a complete set of redacted copies was sent to Dr Clarke ahead of their release to the National Archives, which is imminent.
The documents reveal the RAF expressed great interest in finding an UFO to help them come up with an innovative way of beating enemies during the Cold War.
An air chief wrote the RAF was 'particularly interested in any novel technologies which might be useful to their programmes'.
Another air force commander feared the enemy may have already seized a UFO, writing: 'Monitor all reports in case in the future the hitherto unknown/not understood underlying phenomena is being exploited by another nation.
'An actual - or potential enemy - could develop a flying device with the characteristics that these phenomena seem to have.'
Spies were given given tips on what to look out for when identifying foreign objects. The unnamed commander wrote particular attention should be paid to any aircraft behaving 'like a UFO'.
He said: 'Look out for high velocities, sharp manoeuvre, stationary 'flight', and few radar returns.'
Dr Clarke said: 'MoD have been desperately trying to delay the release of these formerly secret and highly sensitive papers for more than a decade.
'Even though they have been partly censored they can't conceal the fact the UK military were interested in capturing UFOtechnology - or what they coyly refer to as 'novel weapon technology'.
'And the files reveal they were desperate to capture this technology - wherever it came from - before the Russians or the Chinese got hold of it first.
'Although this was 1997, Russia was still regarded as undefeated enemy with a weapons programme regarded as a threat to the West.'
Même les OVNIS ont leur journée, pas de discrimination ! Nous ne saurons peut-être jamais s'ils existent ou non, mais qu'importe, l'espoir est de mise. Nous sommes certainement tous impatients d'avoir cette réponse, elle ne sera peut-être pas pour nos générations, mais tous les espoirs sont permis !
“Un objet volant non identifié, généralement désigné sous l’acronyme ovni, désigne un phénomène aérien qu’un ou plusieurs témoins affirment avoir observé sans avoir pu l’identifier, ou encore une trace qui peut avoir été enregistrée par différents types de capteurs (caméra vidéo, appareil photo, radar, etc.) mais dont on ne connaît pas l’origine ou la nature exacte.” –Wikipédia
Pour info, “le « soucoupiste » désigne un amateur qui croit au phénomène ovni par opposition aux ufologues qui défendent une approche scientifique et rigoureuse”.
Cette journée aurait ainsi pour but de “connaitre l’existence indubitable et des êtres intelligents de l’espace”
“Cette journée est aussi une opportunité pour encourager les gouvernements à déclassifier leurs connaissances au sujet des observations tout au long de l’histoire. Les initiatives individuelles à l’organisation d’évènements au cours de La Journée Mondiale des OVNIs sont encouragées. Les participants sont connues pour regarder le ciel ensemble au cours de cette journée”
Astronomers have snapped the first pictures of a planet forming.
This is the first clear image of a planet forming around the dwarf star PDS 70. Image credits ESO / Müller et al., 2018, A&A.
Researchers led by a group at the Max Plank Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, are spying on a baby planet. The object of their attention is a still-forming planet that orbits around PDS 70, a young dwarf star. This is the first time we’ve captured clear images of a forming planet and its travels through the dust cloud surrounding young stars.
Far-away spheres
The images were captured using the SPHERE instrument installed on Unit Telescope 3 of the European Southern Observatory (ESO’s) Very Large Telescope (VTL) array in Chile. SPHERE, the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument, is one of the most powerful planet-finding tools astronomers have at their disposal today. What makes SPHERE stand out in the field of exoplanet exploration is that, unlike the majority of its contenders, it relies on direct imaging — SPHERE takes actual photographs of planets millions or billions of kilometers away.
SPHERE relies on a technique known as high-contrast imaging to produce such amazing shots. The device uses complex observation techniques and powerful data processing algorithms to tease out the faint traces of light incoming from planets around bright stars. Astronomers draw on the Earth’s rotation to help them better observe such planets — SPHERE continuously takes images of the star over a period of several hours, while keeping the instrument as stable as possible. This creates images of a certain planet taken from slightly different angles and at different points in the stellar halo, giving the impression that it’s slowly rotating or moving about. The stellar halo, meanwhile, appears immobile. The last step is to combine all the images and filter out all the parts that do not appear to move — blocking out signals that don’t originate from the planet itself.
The new planet, christened PDS 70b, stands out very clearly in the images SPHERE recorded. It appears as a bright point to the right of that blackened blob in the middle of the image. That blob is a coronagraph — a mask that researchers apply directly onto the star, lest its light blocks out everything else in the image.
Some examples of how such images from different angles helps astronomers tease out the light incoming from exoplanets. Image credits Müller et al., 2018, A&A.
PDS 70b is a gas giant with a mass several times that of Jupiter. It’s about as far from its host star as Uranus is to the Sun. Currently, PDS 70d is busy carving a path through the planet-forming material surrounding the young star, the researchers note, making it instantly stand out.
“These discs around young stars are the birthplaces of planets, but so far only a handful of observations have detected hints of baby planets in them,” explains Miriam Keppler, who lead the team behind the discovery of PDS 70’s still-forming planet. “The problem is that until now, most of these planet candidates could just have been features in the disc.”
PDS 70d is already drawing a lot of attention from astronomers. A second paper, which Keppler also co-authored, has followed-up on the initial observations with a few months of study. The data from SPHERE also allowed the team to measure the planet’s brightness over different wavelengths — based on which they estimated the properties of its atmosphere. The planet is blanketed in thick clouds, the team explained, and its surface is currently revolving around a crisp 1000°C (1832°F), which is much hotter than any planet in the Solar System.
The findings also helped researchers make heads and tails of a structure known as a transition disc. This is a ring-like protoplanetary (meaning it is involved in early planetary formation) structure. Transitional disks roughly resemble a stadium, with a clean area in the middle (from which planets drew their matter), surrounded by a ring of dust and gas. While these gaps have been known for several decades now and speculated to be produced by the interaction between forming planets and its host star’s disk, this is the first time we’ve actually seen them.
“These objects represent […] disks whose inner regions are relatively devoid of distributed matter, although the outer regions still contain substantial amounts of dust,” explains a paper published by Strom et al. in 1989.
All this data helps flesh out our understanding of the early stages of planetary evolution — which are quite complex and, up to now, “poorly-understood”, according to André Müller, leader of the second team to investigate the young planet.
“We needed to observe a planet in a young star’s disc to really understand the processes behind planet formation,” he explains.
The findings further help improve our overall knowledge of how planets form. By determining PDS 70d’s atmospheric and physical properties, astronomers now have a reliable data point from which to extrapolate — which will help improve the accuracy of our planetary formation models.
Not bad for a bunch of photographs.
The first paper, “Discovery of a planetary-mass companion within the gap of the transition disk around PDS 70” has been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The second paper, “Orbital and atmospheric characterization of the planet within the gap of the PDS 70 transition disk,” has also been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics
World UFO Day is celebrated annually on July 2 to bring awareness to mysterious objects in the sky. It may raise more than a few eyebrows, but don’t be so quick to dismiss this annual event: Last year, reports revealed that the United States government had run a secret program to investigate unidentified flying objects for years.
The partially declassified program to investigate UFOs, called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), existed from at least 2007-2012 but may still be active in some way, shape, or form. The Central Intelligence Agency’s website lists pages and pages of information on UFO reports from the 1940s through the early 1990s alone.
Remember, however, that unidentified flying objects still amount to just that: objects we can’t name but could have any number of non-extraterrestrial origins (sorry, alien stans). In honor of the occasion, Inverse dug through reports of unidentified flying objects from the Pentagon and the CIA to bring to light three of the weirdest discoveries.
In 2017, the government released two videos that documented Navy pilots’ encounters with unidentified objects, and Pentagon officials acknowledged the existence of the AATIP, according to The New York Times at the time. And although defense officials were tight-lipped about details like the location and date of the videos, they were confirmed as the real deal.
Navy Airmen Make a Strange Encounter
Then in March 2018, a new “purported military video” of an unidentified aircraft was made public, according to CNN at the time. And while the Pentagon declined to comment about the footage when CNN reported on it, the To The Stars Academy — the independent research company behind the video’s release — claimed multiple government organizations reviewed the video for release.
Of course, as with most UFO footage, it’s not clear what the object is. The objects shown in the videos could be foreign aircraft or any number of other phenomena, nothing more. Regardless, the government seemingly cared enough to look into the incidents.
Map of reported UFO sightings.
CIA Reports
As further evidence that the US government does take sightings of UFOsseriously, the CIA has 13 pages of information on the subject.
One such report from July 2, 1957 about an unidentified flying object observed on the Iran/USSR border described the UFO in question as a ball traveling at a high speed, and only visible for a few seconds.
Some of these may read like science fiction, but these UFO reports are the real deal (even though we’ve yet to figure out the objects’ origin). So, if you’re looking for a way to observe World UFO Day that doesn’t involve binging The X-Files, look no further than the CIA.
Massive ‘cloaked’ UFO caught over Barnsley in South Yorkshire, UK
Massive ‘cloaked’ UFO caught over Barnsley in South Yorkshire, UK
On June 18, 2018 at about 9.20 pm a massive possible partially cloaked UFO appeared in the sky of Barnsley in South Yorkshire, UK.
The witness describes the object as follows: This thing appeared over the sky's of Barnsley about 9.20pm, thought it looked out of place as there wasn't a single cloud in the sky all day.
When I went back in my kitchen about a hour later it was still in exactly same place as it was a hour ago, more I looked at it the object seemed to reflect light so I went up stairs to shoot this video. It stayed there till it was too dark to see about 11:30pm.
Often lenticular clouds are explained as UFOs, especially those clouds that resemble a flying saucer, but in the case of the black UFO-like object in the sky over Barnsley, it doesn’t seems to be a lenticular cloud or other cloud formation as there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky all day making it very possible that it is a partially cloaked Unidentified Flying Object.
A video footage apparently reveals evidence that aliens are real and already living among people on Earth.
As the Google Earth video zooms in on Neuquen, an Argentinian province, a UFO seems to become visible.
It looks like that the object is floating in the air over a truck running along the main road.
The discoverer, Marcelo Irazusta, claims that it constitutes clear proof of UFOs’ existence on Earth.
The shape of the object in question does not resemble any known flying thing in the planet. Furthermore, it does not look like any known flying birds.
According to Irazusta, the discovery surely deserves a fantastic diffusion, and it would be exciting that they can verify and make some comments about it.
Since he uploaded the clip to his YouTube channel, it has received thousands of views.
However, some viewers were not convinced about the wild claim.
One comment reads that it looks like a hub-cap someone threw out of a tree.
Another one adds that it could be a bird or wasp.
However, many others suggest that it certainly does not look like a bird.
Last year, the Solar System was treated to its first known tourist. 'Oumuamua, an odd, cigar-shaped body, shot through our neighborhood at high speed, following an orbit that indicates it arrived from somewhere else. Although bodies ejected from other solar systems are expected to make regular visits, this was the first one that we'd imaged sufficiently to determine that its origins were elsewhere.
The imaging, however, didn't resolve a somewhat different debate: what, exactly, is 'Oumuamua? Its odd orbit had initially had it categorized as a comet, as these tend to have more extreme orbits. But imaging didn't show any indication of gas and dust being released, as is typical when a comet approaches the Sun. That imaging also revealed that it had an elongated, cigar-like shape. Combined with its relatively rapid rotation, this would indicate that 'Oumuamua had to be fairly robust, leading to the conclusion that it was probably an asteroid.
But now, a large international team of researchers is weighing in with another vote for comet. The argument, says the team, is based on the odd behavior of 'Oumuamua, which appears to have been accelerating away from the Sun.
Gravity not enough
The new analysis is based on the fact that shortly after the body was recognized as likely to be a visitor from another solar system (or "exosolar system"), many telescopes were redirected to image it. Many of the images were of sufficient quality to provide positional information on 'Oumuamua. This let the researchers calculate the object's trajectory through the Solar System. From there, it's a relatively simple matter to calculate if that trajectory was the result of purely gravitational interactions. Here, the researchers were cautious, including "gravitational forces due to the Sun, the eight planets, the Moon, Pluto, the 16 largest bodies in the asteroid main belt, and relativistic effects."
Based on these calculations, gravity comes up short. There are 10 measurements where 'Oumuamua was more than five standard deviations away from where it would be expected to have ended up based on gravity alone. Another 25 locations are more than three standard deviations off.
The researchers then modeled an additional, non-gravitational effect based on 'Oumuamua's distance from the Sun. If the Sun was having an additional influence on its motion, then this should be able to compensate for it. It worked, in that an additional acceleration based on distance from the Sun could get 'Oumuamua's calculated motion to better match the observations. Quite a bit better, in fact, as the authors say that their modified equation "corresponds to a formal detection of non-gravitational acceleration with a significance of about 30σ." Typically, only five sigma is needed to call something a discovery.
But that doesn't tell us what's generating this additional acceleration. The researchers consider a large list of possible causes: warming-induced release of gas from 'Oumuamua, solar-radiation pressure, something called the Yarkovsky effect, friction-like effects, a single change in velocity due to a collision, 'Oumuamua being more than one fragment rather than a single body, the influence of irregular surface brightness, and 'Oumuamua having a high magnetic field.
Process of elimination
Most of these explanations are pretty unlikely. Solar radiation pressure could only cause enough acceleration if 'Oumuamua were exceptionally light, about 1,000 times less dense than a typical asteroid. There's a similar problem with an acceleration caused by 'Oumuamua radiating away heat (the Yarkovsky effect) or having the radiation pressure be off-axis due to differences in the body's surface brightness. There's no indication that 'Oumuamua is fragmented in any images, while the jolt of a collision doesn't fit the data as well as a consistent force. Small bodies don't have a large enough magnetic field to create this much force.
In the end, warming-induced gas release is the least-worst of the possible explanations. It should generate a consistent force and one that scales with proximity to the Sun, which is what seems to be happening. But it also requires that 'Oumuamua be fairly comet-like, which is inconsistent with its shape and rotation. Plus there's the fact that we didn't see any signs of outgassing, like a plume of dust or the spectral signature of gasses.
As far as directly detecting gasses, the researchers estimate that the amount of water released could be below detection limits while still producing enough force. But comets from our own Solar System also release another chemical with the water, and that should have been detected. Of course, it's possible that coming from a different solar system means that 'Oumuamua has a different chemical composition. The dust ejected along with the gas should also have been detected if it's typical of comets we've imaged before, but the dust could escape detection if its grains are sufficiently large.
Unfortunately, 'Oumuamua is now long past the point where further imaging could help clarify any of these issues. But that won't stop astronomers from arguing over the data we do have, and the new paper adds some significant points that will have to be part of any future arguments.
Pentagon Intelligence Chief: Russia And China Will Have Weapons in Space ‘In the Near Future’
Pentagon Intelligence Chief: Russia And China Will Have Weapons in Space ‘In the Near Future’
BY PATRICK TUCKER,
TECHNOLOGY EDITOR
The Defense Intelligence Agency’s director says the U.S. lead in space is diminishing and tomorrow’s skies will be filled with enemy robot satellites.
Russia and China are developing new space-based weapons and they’ll be ready “in the near future,” Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said Tuesday at the Defense One Technology Summit in Washington, D.C.
The countries, which Ashley called “competitors,” are developing “the ability to interdict satellites both from a ground standpoint and from a space standpoint,” he said. “The technology is being developed right now. It is coming in the near future.”
It was the most overt admission yet from an intelligence leader that Russia and China were rapidly seeking to weaponize space. But a February report from the Office of the Director of Intelligence also hinted at it.
“Russia and China continue to launch ‘experimental’ satellites that conduct sophisticated on-orbit activities, at least some of which are intended to advance counterspace capabilities,” the report said. “Some technologies with peaceful applications—such as satellite inspection, refueling, and repair—can also be used against adversary spacecraft.”
In September, 2014, Russia launched Olymp-K, which reached orbit and undertook a series of irregular maneuvers, coming within seven miles of a pair of Intelsat communications satellites. “This is not normal behavior and we’re concerned,” Kay Sears, president of Intelsat General, told Space News at the time. The incident sparked classified meetings at the Pentagon.
Since then, observers have raised alarms about three other Russian high-maneuverability satellites.
Ashley’s remark comes in the context of a new fight to establish a “Space Force,” an entirely new U.S. military service dedicated specifically to space. Ashley didn’t say whether a separate force was a good idea, but did offer that the technological advancements available to peer nations would pressure U.S.dominance in that domain.
“The competition is only going to grow,” said Ashley. “Look at the national defense strategy. There is an acknowledgement that our technological lead is vanishing… And so when you get to the warfighting doctrine you have to account for … what is the resilience you build into the domains, the redundancy? When it’s been degraded or denied, how do you fight?”
The 1967 Outer Space Treaty recognizes “the common interest of all mankind in the progress of the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes.”
However, the International Committee on the Red Cross has noted that the treaty does not expressly prohibit weapons in space “except the prohibition of weapons of mass destruction (including nuclear weapons) and the usage of the Moon and other celestial bodies for exclusively peaceful purposes.”
In March, Michael Griffin, the new defense undersecretary for research and engineering, said that the United States may dust off plans from the late 1980s to put a neutral-particle beam in space that could fire at missiles on earth or other space objects.
Patrick Tucker is technology editor for Defense One. He’s also the author of The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? (Current, 2014). Previously, Tucker was deputy editor for The Futurist for nine years. Tucker has written about emerging technology in Slate, ... FULL BIO
A teen skywatcher claims to have captured a UFO hovering near an RAF base – and is convinced it could be something extraterrestrial.
Lucas Budel, 19, said he spotted the mysterious aircraft near his home in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire.
The town is home to the RAF base which used to investigate UFO sightings and which now houses Headquarters Air Command.
In the video, a white mass can be seen making unusual movements in the sky, leaving wispy trails behind it as it goes.
Mr Budel said: 'I was just sitting in my room at my computer when I saw an extremely bright light out my window falling from the sky.
'I initially thought it was a meteor falling, which is already quite unusual to see, until its motion stopped for a few seconds and went back up.
'I was so in awe that I didn't have time to record it. It then disappeared.'
But when the supposed UFO reappeared, Lucas was ready. 'I went back to my desk and got my phone so when I saw it again I used that to record it,' he said.
A teen skywatcher claims to have captured a UFO hovering near an RAF base – and is convinced it could be something extraterrestrial.
Lucas Budel, 19, said he spotted the mysterious aircraft near his home in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire.
The town is home to the RAF base which used to investigate UFO sightings and which now houses Headquarters Air Command.
In the video, a white mass can be seen making unusual movements in the sky, leaving wispy trails behind it as it goes.
Mr Budel said: 'I was just sitting in my room at my computer when I saw an extremely bright light out my window falling from the sky.
'I initially thought it was a meteor falling, which is already quite unusual to see, until its motion stopped for a few seconds and went back up.
'I was so in awe that I didn't have time to record it. It then disappeared.'
But when the supposed UFO reappeared, Lucas was ready. 'I went back to my desk and got my phone so when I saw it again I used that to record it,' he said.
SpaceX launches rocket carrying AI robot, strong coffee and mice for station crew
SpaceX launches rocket carrying AI robot, strong coffee and mice for station crew
By Staff The Associated Press
SpaceX rocket launches to Intl Space Station with AI on board
A SpaceX rocket that flew just two months ago with a NASA satellite is back in action, launching with fresh station supplies.
The used Falcon rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, before dawn Friday.
This AI Robot Is Changing Everything In Space
Cimon, pronounced Simon, will be launched into space aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket today. Cimon is being sent to the International Space Station (ISS) to assist human astronauts there. Matthias Biniok, who led IBM's AI Project, told ABC News, “Cimon's task is to assist astronauts on the ISS. Also, Cimon is tasked with being a friendly colleague.”
It’s hauling nearly 6,000 pounds of cargo, including the first robot with artificial intelligence bound for space, genetically identical mice, or mousetronauts, and super-caffeinated coffee for the crew of the International Space Station.
A Floating 'Brain' Will Assist Astronauts Aboard the Space Station
The unpiloted ship is also transporting materials for the Canadian Space Agency, including:
57 Canadian food items such as crab, lobster and salmon pâtés, smoked salmon, and maple glazed salmon for David Saint Jacques’ December 2018 mission.
This marks SpaceX’s fastest reflight of a booster. The same first-stage booster launched the planet-hunting Tess satellite in April. The capsule, meanwhile, flew in 2016.
SpaceX won’t retrieve the booster for another flight. The company is switching to a new model.
Over the last few decades, NASA has managed to find a number of unusual things in our solar system. Among these discoveries, perhaps the most novel have been the odd shapes of various asteroids that are found to occasionally traverse our galactic region.
While the now famous, cigar-shaped ‘Oumuamua is probably first to come to mind, other oddly-shaped spacefaring objects have been discovered in recent times, which are teaching us new things about space objects, their origins, and formation.
One recent example was afforded us by Japan’s space mission Hayabusa2, which managed to capture photographs of an asteroid of unusual appearance from a distance of just 40 kilometers. Dubbed “Ryugu” by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the object is considered a potentially hazardous object possessing a rare kind of reflectivity (otherwise known as “spectral type,” the official designation used by astronomers) defined as Cg. This means the surface of the asteroid has a “linear, generally featureless spectra,” with varying degrees of UV absorption.
Ryugu, as seen from the Hayabusa2 spacecraft
(Image Credit: JAXA, University of Tokyo, Kochi University, Rikkyo University, Nagoya University, Chiba Institute of Technology, Meiji University, Aizu University, AIST.)
Since JAXA released its photos of Ryugu, there has been much discussion about the object’s unusual appearance. Specifically, its polyhedral shape has been likened by some to a multi-sided die, the likes of which are used in the classic fantasy roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons.
Ryugu’s shape isn’t the only association it has with myth and lore surrounding dragons; according to Spaceflight Now, its name is also evocative of these mythical creatures, borrowed from “an undersea dragon’s palace visited by Urashima Taro, a fisherman in a Japanese folk story who brings back a mysterious treasure box from the underwater castle.”
Hayabusa2 was launched in 2014, and in the days since photographs were obtained of Ryugu’s unusual shape, the spacecraft has closed its distance to approximately 20 km, with the objective of landing and extracting material for analysis, which it will retrieve and bring to Earth by the end of 2020.
In a statement, Yuichi Tsuda, the Hayabusa2 Project Manager, said of the odd space rock:
“The shape of Ryugu is now revealed. From a distance, Ryugu initially appeared round, then gradually turned into a square before becoming a beautiful shape similar to fluorite. Now, craters are visible, rocks are visible and the geographical features are seen to vary from place to place. This form of Ryugu is scientifically surprising and also poses a few engineering challenges.”
Tsuda further noted that “The Project Team is fascinated by the appearance of Ryugu,” expressing excitement on behalf of his colleagues. “I feel this amazing honor as we proceed with the mission operations.”
Ryugu may not be the strangest space rock we’ve managed to discover (especially when compared with objects like ‘Oumuamua, the newly-designated comet mentioned at the beginning of this post). Nonetheless, it bears enough unusual characteristics that its further study may bear some promise for new discoveries pertaining to off-planet affairs in our universe.
Grootste graancirkelformatie van Nederland ontdekt. Deze gerespecteerde filmmaker was getuige van de voorspelling en ontdekking
Grootste graancirkelformatie van Nederland ontdekt. Deze gerespecteerde filmmaker was getuige van de voorspelling en ontdekking
Onlangs werd de grootste graancirkelformatie van Nederland ontdekt. De Amerikaanse filmmaker William Gazecki was getuige van de voorspelling en ontdekking door Robbert van den Broeke.
“Hij was de hele week bij mij en is dus overtuigd van de echtheid,” verklaarde hij.
“Helaas denken mensen nog steeds wel eens dat ik de graancirkels zelf maak, maar tussen de voorspelling en het ontdekken van de formatie ben ik niet van zijn zijde geweken,” vervolgde hij.
Honderden meters lang
“Bovendien is de gigantische formatie honderden meters lang; dat kan ik niet eens zelf maken,” klonk het. “Daarnaast voelde hij ook de onverklaarbare energie.”
Emmy-winnaar Gazecki is zo onder de indruk van het leven van Van den Broeke dat hij een reallifesoap wil gaan maken over diens leven.
Overtuigd
“Het is sowieso geweldig dat zo’n gerespecteerd filmmaker overtuigd is van de echtheid,” lichtte Van den Broeke toe. “Het is echt te mooi om waar te zijn.”
Hij zei dat we alleen maar dankbaar mogen zijn voor zulke graanformaties. Gazecki heeft onder meer Discovery Channel en National Geographic benaderd voor een samenwerkingsverband.
WETENSCHAPPER BESCHULDIGT NASA VAN VERZWIJGEN WAARHEID OVER ASTEROÏDEN
WETENSCHAPPER BESCHULDIGT NASA VAN VERZWIJGEN WAARHEID OVER ASTEROÏDEN
NASA betekent volgens velen: Never A Straight Answer, maar eigenlijk gaat het nog veel verder dan dat en verbergen ze zelfs dingen voor de mensheid.
Deze van oorsprong occulte organisatie wordt nu aangevallen door een goed aangeschreven wetenschapper die ze beticht van “wetenschappelijk wangedrag”.
Je kunt de Amerikaan Nathan Myhrvold omschrijven als zeer bijzonder en actief. Er zijn van die mensen die van alles schijnen te kunnen en voor wie een dag geen 24, maar 36 uur heeft.
Myhrvold is de voormalige chief technology officer van Microsoft en mede oprichter van Intellectual Ventures, schrijver van een populair kookboek en daarnaast nog wetenschapper die zich met allerlei onderzoeken en projecten bezighoudt.
Peer review (Engels: peer review, ook wel aangeduid als: collegiale toetsing of onderlinge toetsing) is een methode om de kwaliteit van (geschreven) werk te verbeteren, verifiëren of controleren door het werk te onderwerpen aan de kritische blik van een aantal gelijken (Engels: peers), meestal vakgenoten of collega's van de auteur.
In dat onderzoek maakt Myrvold korte metten met de analyses van NASA voor wat betreft de zogenaamde NEO’s, de Near Earth Objects, oftewel de objecten die zich dicht in de buurt van de aarde bevinden en daardoor per definitie gevaar zouden kunnen opleveren.
De berekeningen van NASA vertonen volgens Myhrvold systematische fouten en tegenstrijdigheden.
In een toelichting via een Blog zegt Myhrvold niet specifiek dat NASA met opzet een te laag aantal NEO’s opgeeft die door hun speciale telescoop zijn geobserveerd, maar wel beschuldigt hij de NASA wetenschappers van “wetenschappelijk wangedrag”, omdat ze bepaalde dingen proberen te verbergen.
De Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is een infraroodruimtetelescoop die in december 2009 werd gelanceerd door de NASA en tot taak heeft een catalogus van infrarood-bronnen aan te maken. Met behulp van WISE is de eerste type Yster en aardgebonden trojanen waargenomen. Tevens werden enkele tienduizenden planetoïden ontdekt.
Verder geeft Myhrvold aan dat dagene wat hij wetenschappelijk wangedrag noemt in de NEOWISE onderzoeken niet per ongeluk is ontstaan, maar een systematische verdraaiing van de waarheid, waardoor de wetenschappelijke gemeenschap aan het werk ging op basis van de gedachte dat de resultaten van NASA veel accurater zijn dan ze in werkelijkheid zijn.
Hij noemt het gedrag van NASA buitengewoon misleidend. De reden dat het zo belangrijk is dat de door NEOWISE verzamelde gegevens correct zijn, is omdat honderden wetenschappers en andere ruimtevaartorganisaties deze gebruiken voor hun eigen onafhankelijke onderzoeken. En als de basisgegevens door manipulatie van NASA al niet kloppen, dan kunnen ook al die onderzoeken de prullenbak in.
Natuurlijk wordt aan alle kanten door NASA ontkend dat er iets mis zou zijn met de door hen gepresenteerde gegevens, maar dit keer is het geen aluhoedje die kritiek op hen heeft, maar een gerespecteerde wetenschapper.
Waarom NASA in dit geval de werkelijkheid verborgen houdt voor het grote en ook wetenschappelijke publiek en ze bewust op een dwaalspoor stuurt, weten we niet, al hebben we er wel gedachten over. Er is natuurlijk grote kans dat de werkelijke reden is dat een inslag van een NEO in de nabije toekomst vele malen groter is dan dat NASA officieel kwijt wil.
Sinds de oprichting van NASA in 1958 is er alles aan gedaan om de occulte oorsprong van dit instituut voor het publiek verborgen te houden. De oorsprong die direct leidt naar wat men wel het “slechtste mens ooit” op aarde noemt, Alistair Crowley.
De hoogste rangen binnen NASA werden gedomineerd door leden van de geheime genootschappen zoals de Vrijmetselaars en voormalige Nazi’s, waarvan de meest bekende Wernher von Braun is.
Dit instituut zal dan ook de laatste zijn die eerlijke informatie verstrekt aan de bevolking.
NASA to test Planetary Defense System on asteroid headed at Earth and Yellowstone update
Luminous UFO-Portal-Like Phenomenon Spotted In The sky
Luminous UFO-Portal-Like Phenomenon Spotted In The sky
Linda Miller has taken several photos in June, 2018 with a Canon Sl2 50mm at 12,9 sec exposures and in one of the images she discovered a strange unusual object what is something that isn't obvious a star, star movement or a rocket launch.
It is not clear what the phenomenon could be, but the image clearly shows a bright luminous UFO or portal-like object.
Since the image has been captured at 12,9 sec exposures the object seems to move very slowly in the sky.
Two Silver UFOs Over Easter Island On March 14, 2018, Photos, UFO Sighting News.
Two Silver UFOs Over Easter Island On March 14, 2018, Photos, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: March 14, 2018
Location of sighting: Easter Island
Source: MUFON #93005
This UFO was one of two seen and when they were noticed by the eyewitnesses, they darted into the clouds to hide. As I have said before, UFOs use the easiest way possible to hide...within clouds. They are even capable of making a cloud around them, but this can often take minutes to do.
Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
My wife and I were sightseeing on Easter Island and saw two silver-shaped flying objects entering the cloud. I was able to photograph one of the objects.
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...
Druk op onderstaande knop om je bestand , jouw artikel naar mij te verzenden. INDIEN HET DE MOEITE WAARD IS, PLAATS IK HET OP DE BLOG ONDER DIVERSEN MET JOUW NAAM...
Druk op onderstaande knop om een berichtje achter te laten in mijn gastenboek
Alvast bedankt voor al jouw bezoekjes en jouw reacties. Nog een prettige dag verder!!!
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.
Leaked images claim to show what Google's next Pixel...
Amazon workers who injure themselves in the warehouse are...
Tesla's limited edition $1,500 surfboards are already...
'Pico' the mako shark stuns researchers as satellite data...
:quality(75)/curiosity-data.s3.amazonaws.com/images/content/landscape/standard/6c5836a3-7327-48b0-a97d-8d1bdd40cf3a.png)
:quality(75)/curiosity-data.s3.amazonaws.com/images/content/portrait/standard/c3ece9b4-feb0-41c2-fa0e-ba13f6b052f9.png)
:quality(75)/curiosity-data.s3.amazonaws.com/images/content/landscape/standard/357f9903-be89-46bc-c15c-f61f66d17ae3.png)
Is the F-22 Raptor set for a return? Congress asks Air Force...
Facebook declares war on Snapchat with new dedicated 'camera...
New state of water behaves like no other solid, liquid or...
Behind the scenes at CERN: Stunning new pictures reveal what...
Declassified information from covert studies is interesting, but not scientifically helpful. This is a topic worthy of open scientific inquiry, until there is a scientific consensus based on evidence rather than prior expectation or belief. If there are indeed extraterrestrial craft visiting Earth, it would greatly benefit us to know about them, their nature and their intent. Moreover, this would present a great opportunity for mankind, promising to expand and advance our knowledge and technology, as well as reshaping our understanding of our place in the universe.
Neanderthals COULD start fires: Ancient flint tools reveal...
Welcome to the Meghalayan Age: Scientists have classified an...
The origins of pottery revealed: Ceramic jars were...
Humans made bread BEFORE they learnt how to grow wheat:...
.jpg?1532198053)
Company staff put food in a urinal before taking it out and...
Scorned wife jumps onto her cheating husband's car and...
Furious father hits his son more than 100 times after the...
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/56462457/Screen_Shot_2017_08_31_at_3.43.25_PM.0.png)
Our Mars orbiter took this image of "araneiform terrain," spider-like radiating mounds that form when Martian carbon dioxide ice below the surface heats up and releases each spring in a process not seen on Earth: 
Super motorways to have charging stations for electric cars...
All over-40s should take cholesterol-busting statins, says...
. .
.
So...did we find meteorites in the ocean?
/https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/cc/bb/ccbb5e39-e6f0-4d6e-9b64-c1ae44b58f5c/istock-611295678.jpg)
BBC chief stunned as secret staff sex survey reveals 417 of...
Ministers rehearse for Queen's death for first time with...
'Black Juicy' and Lyndsey's doorstep beatdown: Hilarious...
Flooding in the desert: Incredible footage shows drivers...
OK, so this is really a 2 part problem.
Part 1. Assuming Mars was WAY more Earthlike a couple billion years ago, Mars had the same problems as Earth in developing (being GIVEN?) primitive life.
Part 2. Without useful van Allen Belts, Mars was then stripped of its atmosphere. Without a protective atmosphere to form the Biosphere, whatever simple, primitive Life that may have developed as pond scum in tidal pools would have died a thousand deaths from galactic radiation, hurricane force winds, and cold deep enough to freeze any surface water.
So that pretty much leaves us with the freaks that on Earth are called Exremophiles. And as on Earth, Extremophiles are an END STATE, not a development path. That is, surface life deforms itself to invade environments in which life was not intended to live.
This means that Mars is to be considered MUCH more dangerously INFECTED with nasty little bugs than The Moon. This is just another reason Earthlings should never ever set foot on Mars. And never ever bring back any Mars rocks for direct analysis here on Mother Earth. But humans are smart little critters, and sending REALLY sophisticated MACHINES to locate and analyze really interesting Mars rocks on Mars is clearly cheaper, faster, and MUCH less dangerous than sending humans with specimen bags.