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 ALREADY 13 YEARS AND 1 MONTH.
ON 06/07/2024 MORE THAN 2.101.500
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...
28-02-2019
The Great Barrier Reef Was Just Hit by a Flood of Polluted Water Visible From Space
The Great Barrier Reef Was Just Hit by a Flood of Polluted Water Visible From Space
CARLY CASSELLA
The Great Barrier Reef just can't catch a break. Year after year, this global treasure has been battered by cyclones and beaten by bleaching events. Now, with little time to recover, a part of the reef is being kicked while its down.
An exceptional year of rainfall in Queensland, Australia has caused a huge flood of polluted runoff to rush out to sea, straight towards the reef.
Satellite images show the muddy waters stretching from the swollen rivers of the Whitsundays to Cape Tribulation.
(NASA)
For the nearest reefs, some 60 kilometres away from shore, the floodwater has already arrived, possibly shielding the sun and smothering the life below.
The biggest fear, according to the ABC, is that the muddy waters contain common farming chemicals, like nitrogen or phosphorous, because these could kill off the nearby coral and seagrass.
The longer the murky cloud sits there, the more damage it could do, and without strong winds, the plume of polluted water may take a while to move on.
AFP news agency✔@AFP
Smothering life: Runoff from recent floods in Australia is flowing onto parts of the Great Barrier Reef starving coral of light http://u.afp.com/J3yV
Right now, it's not clear if or how the runoff has impacted the reef, but there's not a lot more we can afford to lose.
Back in 2016, 93 percent of the reef was reported to be bleached due to unseasonably warm weather, with 50 percent listed as dead or dying, and some think it can no longer be saved.
(NASA)
But there may be an upside to all of this. If the rivers transport cold water out to sea and if the clouds continue to block out the sun, this might be enough to cool down some underwater heatwaves headed for the region in the coming weeks.
"If you want to have a flipside to the story that would be one, yes," marine scientists Frederieke Kroon told the ABC, "but it's still a huge disturbance to the reef [after] the bleaching and the cyclones that we've had over the last couple of years."
High Speed UFO makes 90 degrees turn without slowing down filmed over Doi Ang Khang, Thailand
High Speed UFO makes 90 degrees turn without slowing down filmed over Doi Ang Khang, Thailand
When selecting video material for their wedding video, the couple discovered a UFO in the video flying at an incredible speed over Doi Ang Khang, Thailand.
The most fascinating aspect of this UFO fastwalker is the fact that it abruptly makes a 90-degree turn without slowing down.
Again the question, what are these flying objects that manifest themselves in our atmosphere and in space?
Is it possible that these fastwalkers are advanced transport vehicles under intelligent control carrying highly confidence messages or codes from and to certain locations?
The video was made in 2013 but recently uploaded on February 17, 2019. You have to slow the speed of the video (video-settings-speed) to see the amazing movements of the UFO.
UFO Caught on TV Zooming Over Cleveland, and You Won't Believe NASA's Response
UFO Caught on TV Zooming Over Cleveland, and You Won't Believe NASA's Response
The unidentified streak of light was accidentally picked up by cameras belonging to a local television channel in the early morning hours of 21 February, with journalists failing to even notice the blip until it was uploaded to YouTube by UFO hunters.
The footage, published by UFOmania, has garnered close to 50,000 views, and sparked an online debate about whether it was an alien craft, a missile, a firework, swamp gas, a weather balloon, or something else.
Amid the hype, NBC affiliate WKYC, whose cameras picked up the footage, reexaminedthe video for themselves in HD, and contacted a NASA expert, who told them that the streak was just a bird.
Thomas Wertman, a local UFO watcher, similarly downplayed the clip's significance, saying that the 'unidentified flying object' was "most likely a gull," and not really anything out of this world.
"I can actually see the wings going up and down and this is not uncommon. I've had some other videos submitted over the past that have turned out to be insects, when you get a very high quality resolution, you can even see the wings going up and down as it goes across the screen," he said.
"So we can move this from the category of unidentified flying object to identified flying object," WKYC concluded.
But WKYC's viewers weren't so sure. On the channel's Facebook page, users insisted that the footage was real, or offered alternative explanations as to what caused the mysterious streak.
"I don't know what it is but the article says that 'experts' at NASA who examined the video said it was a bird. The experts at NASA who stated this must have a bird brain because of all things it could be it's certainly not a bird," a user named Jim angrily noted.
"Definitely a UFO," a user named Larry added, saying that at the time in question, he had just parked his car at work in the area "when a light shot across the sky behind the clouds…way too fast for a jet."
Others had alternative ideas, suggesting the blip was a "potato and cheese pierogi," a search light, lightning, a meteor, a blimp, Nancy Pelosi flying on a broomstick, or even God.
"Always someone recording it with a camera that looks like it was HD back in the 70s…can you donate some higher quality cameras to WKYC?" user Keith joked.
Here is his story, and those of two other people who believe they have seen something extraterrestrial.
"It was the 31st of March, 1999," said Colin.
"We had been out for a bar meal in Warwickshire to celebrate my mother-in-law's birthday.
"At approximately 9.30pm, myself, my ex-wife, daughter and mother-in-law headed home.
"We turned onto the Fosse Way, near the village of Monks Kirby, and immediately noticed some bright lights ahead of us.
"The lights were half a mile away and just off the road to the left. The lights appeared deep red, with a bit of white mingled in.
"We drove down, parallel to the lights. We had slowed right down at this point.
"I stared at the four lights, which were in a row, but not level with the ground.
"It was at this moment that I noticed a fifth, smaller, spurious light off to the left hand side.
'It tilted slowly upwards like an airship'
"I stared into the end light, and could see a criss cross of lines, a bit like a traffic light lens. It seemed to pulse very rapidly.
"As I was looking at this light and the lights in general, a shape started to appear around them. The edges looked like the sky was rippling, but they, and the body, I believe, were transparent at that time.
"I could see the shape of a diamond around the lights.
"As soon as I had realised there was an object there, it tilted slowly upwards like an airship or a submarine. The object was now solid and fully materialised in a triangular shape.
"The tilt was not from the centre of the craft but from the rear. It was so low that if it had pivoted from the centre of the craft it would have struck the ground.
"I noticed the surface looked to be alive, it was like a lake of dark grey liquid similar to mercury. The liquid, although tilted quite steeply, looked as though it had waves running up and down the surface, like ripples on a lake in a breeze.
"On top of this 'lake' were silver lines running up and down the surface. They were like raised box sections, which interlocked like an old fashioned maze.
"I could see how the craft's top and bottom surfaces joined to a lighter central core, like a sandwich. No nuts and bolts, rivets or welding seams visible.
"It was immediately obvious to me that this was not an earthly object."
CGI images of the UFO commissioned by Colin(Image: Colin Saunders)
At this point, said Colin, who is a former aircraft designer, having been employed by Saab Aerospace in the military in Sweden, and Chevron Petroleum in New Zealand, the driver of the car pulled forward so she could reverse into a gateway off the main road.
As she pulled forward, a large hedge momentarily blocked the view of the craft. When they could once more see the spot where it the UFO had been, it had disappeared.
"We got out of the car and it was gone."
Of the object they had seen, Colin said: "We could see a large craft in the distance with strange red lights at the rear. It seemed enormous to me with a huge wingspan.
"At the end of each wing was a steady white light shining up along the top surface.
"It was very, very quiet as we stood there, no smells of any fuel having been burnt.
"During the incident we didn't hear a single noise from the craft, which was the size of a house, hovering by the car."
Since his experience, which Colin described "like meeting God" and "life changing", he has devoted much of his time researching what he saw.
Colin was 40 when it happened. He immediately went home and starting building a model of the craft he believes he saw, which he completed in 2000. He has also had a 3D printed model made of the craft, and commissioned computer-generated imagery to enable him to show at his presentations.
Colin's hand built model(Image: Colin Saunders)
Colin, now aged 60, said: "The years since the encounter have been very interesting for me.
"I have given several presentations to different groups, as well as appearing on television a couple of times with my model.
"The result of this is that many people have come forward to tell me of their own experiences."
Although his story will sound hard to believe to many of us, Colin is not alone.
'I understand this sounds very weird'
In 2014, a man who lives in Earl Shilton had a similar experience in his back garden.
"I was out in the back garden having a cigarette - when I smoked - in the summer of 2014.
"It was late as it was dark. I don't remember exactly the time and date as I had put it to the back of my mind.
"I usually look up to the stars during clear nights as it's a very nice sight. When I did, I saw a 'fluid' looking triangular craft coming from the west over Earl Shilton.
"I understand this sounds very weird hence I've not talked about it before.
"I don't think I would have noticed it if it had been at a different angle as it was 'cloaked'. I could see stars as if I was looking straight through it, but I could clearly see the triangular shape of the craft and I still remember thinking to myself that it wasn't a very good cloaking device.
"It was moving very slowly and very low with no sound and no lights whatsoever, but it was huge - the size of a football pitch.
"As it got closer visibility got worse - I'm guessing it's all about the angle of view - then I could no longer see it at all. I managed to see what I assume would be the front right side as it was approaching, then the underneath.
"It was all smooth or fluid with no sharp edges with no markings that I could see."
CGI images of the UFO commissioned by Colin(Image: Colin Saunders)
Another person, who did not want to be named, said: "I have also seen triangular objects moving silently across the sky very low.
"On February 3, 2016, at 17.37, I was travelling from Stoney Stanton towards Earl Shilton. The lights seemed to be heading from Desford way, and following the Earl Shilton bypass across to Barwell.
"I wound down my window as it crossed overhead.
"The lights were very bright. I quite often stargaze and these lights stood out immediately. There didn't appear to be any other lights on it, just the three white lights in a triangle shape.
"They did not flash. The lights were around the size of helicopter’s search lights.
"I would say the height of it when it passed overhead was around 300-400 metres high. I couldn't make out the size of the craft as the street lights made it difficult.
"However, with the distance between the two rear lights and the front light, I would say it was the size of an articulated lorry and more of an isosceles triangle rather than equilateral. There was no sound as it passed over at approx 30mph."
Have you seen anything unusual in the skies that couldn't be explained? Send your pictures and videos to newsdesk@leicestermercury.co.uk
Scott C Waring, a popular extraterrestrial researcher who posts UFO-related stories, recently uploaded pictures of an alleged unidentified flying object sighting apparently shot from the Alps mountain Lesyn in Switzerland.
In his post, Waring revealed that the pictures were actually taken on last year, but the alleged UFO came to notice only after closer analysis a few days back. Even though no video of the sighting is available as of now, the photos of the incident have already gone viral on online spaces.
UFO Sightings Daily
After closely studying the image, Waring argued that this UFO might be actually entering or exiting a hidden alien base in the Alps mountain. The alien researcher also added that the alleged extraterrestrial craft might be using artificial gravity technology which is helping the occupants to stay intact even when the flying object is tilting.
"The UFO is tilted, but for the aliens inside, there is no tilting. The craft would have artificial gravity that keeps the pilots and occupants totally comfortable. The UFO would only be tilted if it was entering or exiting a mountain alien base," wrote Scott C Waring on his website UFO Sightings Daily.
In the website post, Waring assured that extraterrestrial aliens are living in the Alps, and this photograph is an irrefutable piece of evidence that substantiates this fact.
"This is a very rare moment not often seen, let alone photographed. Amazing evidence that an alien base exists below the mountains of Lesyn," added Waring.
However, experts have already ruled out the alien possibility by stating that this anomaly in the photo could be the result of a technical glitch.
The report of this UFO sighting came just a few days after popular conspiracy theory channel 'UFOmania' released footage that shows another flying object spotted during the live feed of Channel 3 NBC. Scott C Waring also checked this clip, and he claimed that aliens are visiting the earth to monitor human activities. Several viewers who watched the eerie footage also argued that extraterrestrials from deep space are gearing up for an invasion.
HITTING THE GAS ‘Oumuamua had its foot on the accelerator as it left the solar system. Some astronomers think the object was spewing jets of gas, as shown in this artist’s illustration, although there’s no evidence of that. Others think it was pushed by radiation from the sun.
NASA, ESA, STSCI
The first known interstellar visitor to the solar system is keeping astronomers guessing.
Ever since it was spotted in October 2017, major mysteries havedogged the object, known as ‘Oumuamua (SN Online: 10/27/17). Astronomers don’t know where it came from in the galaxy. And they’ve disagreed over whether ‘Oumuamua is an asteroid, a comet or something else entirely.
One of the strangest mysteries is how ‘Oumuamua sped up after it slung around the sun and fled the solar system, a motion that can’t be explained by the gravitational forces of the sun or other celestial bodies alone. The most natural explanation is that ‘Oumuamua spouts gas like a comet, which would have given the object an extra push away from the sun — except astronomers saw no signs of such outgassing.
In November, Harvard University astronomers Shmuel Bialy and Avi Loeb sparked a firestorm of media coverage when they suggested that the acceleration could be explained if ‘Oumuamua is an alien spaceship, in a paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. In particular, the duo suggested, the object could be a solar sail: a large flat sheet less than 1 millimeter thick that uses pushes from starlight to navigate the galaxy (SN: 9/10/11, p. 18). Loeb is part of an organization called the Breakthrough Initiative that has suggested sending solar sails to visit a nearby planet orbiting the star Proxima Centauri (SN Online: 8/25/16). Maybe some other spacefaring civilization sent a similar sail to visit us, Loeb argues.
Since then, astronomers have been kicking around other origin stories to explain ‘Oumuamua and its bizarre behavior. “Jumping to the conclusion that it has to be produced by extraterrestrial intelligence, I think we don’t have evidence for it yet,” says astronomer Amaya Moro-Martín of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “There are other natural explanations that can be explored.”
Here are three such possibilities.
1. Fluffy ice fractal
To get a push from starlight, an object needs to have a large surface area — to provide more surfaces for particles of light called photons to nudge — and a small mass, so that even tiny amounts of photon pressure can make a difference.
A flat sheet, such as a solar sail, isn’t the only way to harness this radiation pressure, Moro-Martín says. A fluffy, porous structure that resembles a fractal, a geometric pattern that repeats itself on smaller and larger scales, could also be propelled by light, she argues. “Physically it would be the same idea, just the geometry would be different.”
FEELING FLUFFY ‘Oumuamua could have the same porous structure as this interplanetary dust particle, but on a larger scale, researchers say.
H. VOLTEN ET AL/ASTRONOMY & ASTROPHYSICS 2007
Dust particles collected in Earth’s stratosphere can have this sort of fluffy fractal form, Moro-Martín says. She also sees similar structures in computer simulations of the way planets grow up in the dusty planet-forming disks astronomers see around other stars. As ice grains in the distant, frigid regions of those disks stick together, the particles develop into fractals.
“If ‘Oumuamua were to have such an origin, it will be very interesting because it will be the first time that we have evidence for what this intermediate stage is,” Moro-Martín says. “We don’t know how the planet formation process proceeds. All we can see are the smallest particles, the dust particles, or the very largest, planets.”
But could a fluffy fractal survive the journey from another star’s planet-forming disk, all the way into the solar system and out again?
To accelerate as much as ‘Oumuamua did, the object must have a density of just 0.00001 grams per cubic centimeter, Moro-Martín estimates. In comparison, graphene aerogel — the lowest-density artificially produced material — is at least 10 times as dense. “It tells you [the object] must be very fragile,” Moro-Martín says.
“The idea that ‘Oumuamua is a fluffy fractal of ice, pushed by radiation pressure from sunlight, is an interesting scenario,” Loeb says. “But there are major challenges that it faces,” including how such a fragile object would survive, he says.
2. Comet skeleton
Planetary scientist Zdenek Sekanina of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., agrees that a fluffy structure could account for ‘Oumuamua’s strange speedup. But he doesn’t think ‘Oumuamua was born with it. Instead, the object is a desiccated comet that lost most of its water and gases when it swooped close to the sun, he proposes in a paper posted January 30 at arXiv.org.
“It’s like a skeleton of the original body, with all the ice out,” Sekanina says.
SKY SKELETON Maybe ‘Oumuamua was a comet that was destroyed as it approached the sun, like this image of comet LINEAR shattering into mini-comets in 2000. If that’s the case, only the skeleton of the original comet was left by the time astronomers spotted ‘Oumuamua.
HAL WEAVER/JHU, NASA
Comets that fly close to the sun often do not survive. But some of these doomed objects have left observable fragments behind, like comet LINEAR. That comet came within 0.7 times the Earth’s distance to the sun in 2000 and left a cloud of mini comets behind, which were observed with the Hubble Space Telescope. ‘Oumuamua faced a harsher situation: It swooped closer to the sun, about 0.25 times Earth’s distance.
Like Loeb and Moro-Martín, Sekanina thinks solar radiation pressure is the best explanation for how ‘Oumuamua sped up. And a fluffy structure is the best way to accelerate with radiation pressure without invoking “little green men sending a sail,” he says. Although ‘Oumuamua is denser in Sekanina’s estimates than Moro-Martín’s, that’s still “just unbelievable,” he says. “It’s like a fairy castle type structure, or gossamer.”
If ‘Oumuamua were a fully solid, icy comet when it approached the solar system, and developed that gossamer structure only after flying close to the sun, that could explain how the object survived a trip through interstellar space.
3. Weird comet or ice shard?
When the Spitzer Space Telescope checked ‘Oumuamua for signs of a cometlike tail, the instrument saw none, meaning only minuscule amounts of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide gas would have been expelled, if any. And if you assume ‘Oumuamua’s composition is similar to comets in the solar system, Spitzer’s data suggest that the object must not have been spewing out much water, either.
But if ‘Oumuamua is a strange sort of comet, it could spew water vapor or other noncarbonated gases that Spitzer didn’t detect, which could explain how the object sped up. “‘Oumuamua is made of still water, not Perrier,” quips astronomer Gregory Laughlin of Yale University.
Laughlin and colleagues are working on a study that suggests that ‘Oumuamua releases a nozzlelike jet of gas whose source migrates across the object’s surface, following the warmth of the sun. That migration would let ‘Oumuamua tumble through space without spinning so fast that it breaks apart. Other comets, including one visited by the Rosetta spacecraft (SN: 11/11/17, p. 32), exhibit this sort of sun-tracking jet.
“The weirdness is that [‘Oumuamua] would have to be made of pretty pure ice” to explain such outgassing, Laughlin says. It’s not clear if a comet, even a weird one, could be made of pure ice. So it’s possible that it ‘Oumuamua could be an ice shard of a larger body, such as if an icy planet came too close to a larger neighbor and was ripped apart, he says.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to check how ‘Oumuamua is structured now — it’s too far away to make any more observations. The ultimate test will come when — and astronomers think it’s a matter of when, not if — another interstellar visitor comes calling.
“If [‘Oumuamua] was representative of a population, there will be opportunities to get an up-close look at them,” Laughlin says.
Sometime in the last decade, something heavy slammed into the Martian atmosphere and shattered into a hard rain of superheated material. Those pieces fell to the Red Planet's surface, dotting the Martian dirt with a pattern of pockmarks.
The impact craters, astronomer Phil Plait wrote on his Bad Astronomy blog, suggest that the asteroid hit Mars while in an already weakened state. Most solid rock or metal asteroids are strong enough to survive the journey through the planet's atmosphere to the world's surface. But many asteroids, he explained, have already suffered collisions during eons spent tumbling through the solar system. Those collisions can leave the space rocks weakened and covered in fissures, which split open under the intense heat and pressure of atmospheric entry.
"It's essentially an explosion, the force of the sudden and furious release of energy when it splits," Plait wrote. [5 Mars Myths and Misconceptions]
You know this happened recently on Mars because images of the same region from 2009 don't show the craters, as explained in a statement from the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.
The new features are exciting because Mars barely changes, or changes very slowly. University of Arizona researchers counted 21 separate craters in this image taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, with some of the features up to 23 feet (7 meters) across. They span an area just over 1,000 feet (305 m) across.
"This is a not-so-gentle reminder that although we may think of Mars as not being a terribly active world, especially when compared to Earth, there's still stuff going on there … even if it means importing the action from space," Plait wrote.
Planet Ninewill probably be detected within a decade or so, if the putative world does indeed exist, a new study suggests.
Three years ago, Caltech astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown estimated that the hypothesized Planet Nine — also known as Planet X, Giant Planet Five or Planet Next — is perhaps 10 times more massive than Earth and lopes around the sun at an average distance of 600 astronomical units (AU). (One AU is the Earth-sun distance — about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers.)
But in a detailed and lengthy new review paper, Batygin, Brown and two other researchers determined that the putative planet is likely smaller and less far-flung than that.
Orbits of distant Kuiper Belt objects and the hypothesized Planet Nine. Orbits rendered in purple are primarily controlled by Planet Nine's gravity and exhibit tight orbital clustering. Green orbits are strongly coupled to Neptune and exhibit a broader orbital dispersion. Updated orbital calculations suggest that Planet Nine is an approximately 5-Earth-mass planet that resides on a mildly eccentric orbit with a period of about 10,000 years.
Observational evidence and computer-modeling work indicate that 10 Earth masses is an upper limit for Planet Nine, according to the new study. Indeed, 5 Earth masses, and an average orbital distance of 400 to 500 AU, are likely to be closer to the actual marks, the scientists found.
And that means Planet Nine is probably easier to spot than scientists had suspected.
"Perhaps counterintuitively, the increase in brightness due to a smaller heliocentric distance more than makes up for the decrease in brightness due to a slightly diminished physical radius, suggesting that Planet Nine is more readily discoverable by conventional optical surveys than previously thought," Batygin and his colleagues wrote in the paper. The study was published online this month in the journal Physics Reports. You can read it for free at the online pre-print site arXiv.org.
Indeed, the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) project in Hawaii could conceivably spy Planet Nine any day now. And even if the hypothesized world is on the fainter and more distant side, it will probably still be detectable by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which is scheduled to come online in Chile in the early 2020s, the researchers said.
"Therefore, Planet Nine — if it exists as described here — is likely to be discovered within a decade," they wrote in the study.
The newly published paper also sums up the case for Planet Nine's existence, organizing the available observations into four main lines of evidence. All four deal with peculiarities in the orbits of small objects way out in the frigid wastes beyond Neptune's orbit.
Such peculiarities are best explained by the existence of a big, distant "perturber," whose gravity has shepherded the objects onto their current paths, the researchers wrote. (The magnitude of this sculpting effect is determined by both the perturber's mass and distance from the sun. So, a smaller-than-thought Planet Nine would have to be closer to the sun to produce the observed results.)
"Although this analysis does not say anything directly about whether Planet Nine is there, it does indicate that the hypothesis rests upon a solid foundation," Brown said in a statement.
This foundation is, indeed, very solid, Batygin said. In a conversation with Space.com last fall, he pegged the probability of the world's existence at "over 90 percent." Another key player in the Planet Nine hunt, Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science, is similarly bullish, putting the odds in the 80 to 90 percent range.
It may seem strange that an object considerably bigger than Earth could stay hidden in our own solar system for so long. But Planet Nine's neighborhood is extremely distant; for perspective, Pluto orbits the sun at an average distance of just 39.5 AU. So, Planet Nine is likely to be quite faint, and its orbital path is huge, meaning that astronomers have a lot of celestial ground to search.
"We've covered very little of the sky to the depth that's needed to be covered to find something this faint," Sheppard told Space.com last fall. "You can hide a very big thing in the outer solar system very easily."
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated byKarl Tate), is out now.
Chinese satellite snaps rare photo of moon's far side with Earth in the background
Eye-popping image evokes other iconic space photos, including the famous "Earthrise" portrait taken during the Apollo 8 mission.
China's LongJiang-2 satellite captured this rare view of the moon's far side, with Earth appearing tiny in the background.CAMRAS/MingChuan Wei (HIT), CAMRAS, DK5LA
By Denise Chow
Ready to feel small? A striking new photograph taken by China’s Longjiang-2 satellite affords a rare view of the lunar far side — the side that’s impossible to see from the surface of our planet — with Earth visible in the background as a tiny blue marble.
"Few pictures have been taken that show the entire far side of the moon, so we're pretty proud to have helped take this picture," Cees Bassa, an astronomer at ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, told NBC News MACH in an email. Bassa is a volunteer astronomer at the Dwingeloo Radio Observatory in the Netherlands, where the photo was processed.
The eye-popping portrait was taken Feb. 3 and beamed back to Earth the next day. Because the satellite’s camera lacks an infrared filter, the colors were distorted in the original photo (below). But the astronomers who processed the image created the color-corrected version seen above.
The colors in this photo are distorted because the camera aboard China's LongJiang-2 satellite lacks an infrared filter.CAMRAS/MingChuan Wei (HIT), CAMRAS, DK5LA
“We edited it to balance the colors, and make the moon greyscale,” Tammo Jan Dijkema, a software engineer at ASTRON who also volunteers at the Dwingeloo Radio Observatory, wrote in a blog post.
Longjiang-2, which has been circling the moon since last June, is a key part of China’s Chang’e 4 mission, which successfully placed a lunar lander and rover on the moon’s far side for the first time ever Jan. 3. In concert with Queqiao, a radio-relaying probe in orbit around Earth, Longjiang-2 has been providing the radio link between the Chang’e 4 lander and mission controllers in Beijing.
The Chang’e 4 mission is studying a part of the moon that previously had been explored only from afar. It has taken a series of dramatic photos of the surface and successfully sprouted a series of seeds that became the first plants ever grown on the moon.
Longjiang-2, which measures 20 inches across, is expected to operate until August. Dijkema said he expects to have even more photos of the moon from the Chinese satellite in the coming months.
NASA, the United States space agency has been searching for alien life outside the earth for many years, but until now, no probes have successfully found traces of life in the space. However, Jim Bridenstine, the reigning NASA administrator believes that the milestone alien discovery will happen soon, and he recently revealed that the upcoming Mars missions will find an answer to the billion-dollar question regarding extraterrestrial life.
An artist's illustration of NASA's life-hunting Mars 2020 rover on the Red Planet's surface.
As per a report published in The Independent, Jim Bridenstine is quite eager to equip upcoming NASA missions to search for alien life. Bridenstine revealed that future Mars missions by NASA will try to collect samples from the surface of the Red Planet, and will be later taken back to the earth for further research. The NASA administrator also added that studying these samples will help to identify biosignatures that aliens might have left behind.
“We’re going to be able to look at samples and determine if there’s a biosignature in there. The goal is to discover life on another world; that’s what we’re trying to achieve. And because of so many great people in this room, friends, we are well on our way to doing that,” said Bridenstine, Space.com reports.
Bridenstine also talked about the previous findings which indicate that Mars is one planet in the solar system where alien life can be found. Earlier, several reses arch reports have found that organic molecules are there in the Red Planet, and experts also believe that there might be water sources below the Martian surface.
A few days back, Scott C Waring, a popular conspiracy theorist had argued that Mars was once home to an advanced alien civilization. Waring made this conclusion after spotting various anomalies on Mars photos taken by NASA. In a recent post on his website UFO Sightings Daily, Waring also argued that the male-oriented society which once existed on Mars was the reason behind the extinction of life on the Red Planet.
As per Waring, in his research, he has spotted very less female face-like structures on the red planet, and most of the apparent face-like structures he found were males with beards and mustaches. Waring added that the intelligence of female Martian species was ignored by men, and thus the species increased the odds of destroying themselves.
An aeroplane pilot reported being hit by a 'laser' just moments before he encountered unidentified flying objects.
Halfpenny Green Airport, also known as Wolverhampton airport, in Bobbington
The flying instructor, from Wolverhampton airport, was travelling over Gloucestershire when his small aircraft was brightly illuminated.
Moments after the incident, the pilot and his student encountered UFOs, which reportedly consisted of unusual lights.
A spokesman for Air Midwest, which employs the pilot, said: "We are unsure if this event (the laser) is involved with the main event (UFO sighting).
"The pilot believes he may have been under a laser attack from the ground.
"A bright laser-like light illuminated the cockpit. Immediately after this the main lights (UFO) were observed."
Air Midwest, a flying school based at Wolverhampton airport in Bobbington, has been unable to identify the source of the light. Staff members are now wondering if this event was related to the UFO sightings. They are also unsure if the light source was actually a laser, or if it was caused by something else.
They were undertaking night navigation training over Gloucestershire when the sightings occurred, after taking off from Wolverhampton airport.
Both events - the UFOs and so-called laser-light - have left staff members at the flying school baffled.
In the 'laser incident', which took place before the UFO sightings, the affected pilot radioed air traffic control after his student raised concerns.
In the conversation to air traffic control, the pilot said: “Apparently there is someone shining lasers at the aircraft from the bottom of the base-downwind leg."
A while later into the flight, the two Air Midwest flying instructors, who were in separate aircraft, spoke about witnessing the UFOs.
One pilot said to the other: "Behind you at your six O'clock, there is something that looks stationery but has got some peculiar lights on it."
As part of Air Midwest's own investigations, staff members trawled logs from Notice to Airmen (NOTAM), which listed airborne events in the area.
Tim Brannon, director of the flying school, told the Express & Star: "There was no airborne activity that remotely the objects we saw.
The flight school published the pilot's report on its Facebook page. Note, the photograph is not what the pilots saw, but gives an illustration of their encounter
"This is a massive surprise to us as we expected to find an activity that explained the event.
"So as it stands my guys did see still unexplained objects that one would generally refer to as UFOs."
The incident has drawn interest from around the world and it remains a mystery.
The Air Midwest spokesman added: "We at Air Midwest are still expecting a normal explanation at some point but as yet after investigating, we still cannot find an explanation for what four of our pilots saw that evening."
They say “seeing is believing” when examining evidence for Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). And the latest proof of an alien spaceship visiting Earth has landed this week, according to wild online reports. The eye-opening footage is said to show a rectangular-shaped UFO flying at high speeds over English skies.
Self-proclaimed UFO researcher Scott C. Waring uploaded the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it footage this week.
It is mind-blowing that something could fly that fast
UFO researcher Scott C. Waring
“The UFO is a rectangle shape from the side, but a diamond shape from a tilted position.
“Also the fact that unusual tunnel clouds appear in the background make me believe this is a UFO and it may be responsible for making that cloud tunnel.
YouTube viewer Melissa Smidt appeared convinced, writing: “Clearly, not a plane or bird. Plus, it traverses the entire bridge ‘cloud’ in just 2 frames.”
And viewer UpNorthOfThe49th agrees, adding: “26 sec mark there in a few frames but at the 46 sec mark it is like it is in two places at once. You can catch two then one then two then one again like skipping.”
However, not all the viewers of the bizarre and grainy footage are completely certain about the video’s veracity.
YouTube viewer YouSaltyD0g commented: “Looks like a bug to me.”
Life on Ceres, largest body in the asteroid belt? Maybe, at one time. New research points to ancient subsurface reservoirs of salty meltwater that might have lasted millions of years and let life’s chemistry begin.
False-color view of Ceres from the Dawn spacecraft showing differences in surface materials. The bright spots are salt deposits left over from when salty water (cryomagma) reached the surface and evaporated. New research shows that subsurface reservoirs of salty meltwater existed on Ceres for millions of years.
What astronomers now characterize asdwarf planets might seem to be little more than large asteroids. But, as planetary scientists have been discovering, dwarf planets can share characteristics with full-sized planets; they are indeed actual worlds. That’s certainly true of distantPluto, with its blue skies, high mountains, and red snows, not to mention its system of moons. Another example is the dwarf planetCeres, which resides in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Despite being a lot smaller than the primary rocky planets like Earth or even Mercury, and a lot farther from the sun, we now know Ceres has its own unique and active geological history, too.
One of the most intriguing discoveries about Ceres has been evidence for ancient cryovolcanoes – an icy type of volcano that releases water, ammonia or methane instead of hot molten rock. Now, a new research study – a joint project between the University of Texas at Austin and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) – suggests that shallow meltwater reservoirs of salty meltwater were able to stay liquid for millions of years, thanks to an insulating crust. The findings are related to the numerous bright spots seen on Ceres, in particular the largest ones in Occator Crater, which are sodium carbonate salt deposits thought to be the remnants of cryomagma – salty meltwater – that vaporized after reaching Ceres’ virtually airless surface.
High-resolution view of the brightest spots on Ceres, in Occator Crater.
Image via NASA/JPL-CalTech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA.
An even closer view of one of the bright spots in Occator Crater, on the southwest part of Cerealia Facula. The spots are now thought to be salt deposits on Ceres’ surface. They reached the surface through cracks.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA/Jason Major.
The new peer-reviewed research was published online on February 8, 2019, in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. From the summary:
We are testing the hypothesis that the bright spots in the center of Occator crater on Ceres are salts extruded from a large brine reservoir in the crust that melted during the asteroid impact that formed Occator Crater. The age difference between the crater and the salt deposits is approximately 16 million years and it is not clear if the brine can remain molten for such a long time. Our simulations show that an isolated impact-induced cryomagma chamber will cool in less than 12 million years. However, our simulations show that the crustal brine reservoir might communicate with a deeper brine reservoir in Ceres’ mantle. Such recharge could extend the longevity of the impact-induced cryomagma chamber beneath Occator Crater.
Cryovolcanism could help mix chemicals that produce the more complex molecules needed for life, such as on Jupiter’s moon Europa. Scientists are interested in studying how similar processes work on Ceres and whether they could could also create the molecules needed for life to begin. According to lead author Marc Hesse, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin Jackson School of Geosciences:
Cryovolcanism looks to be a really important system as we look for life. So we’re trying to understand these ice shells and how they behave.
Illustration of the history of the interior of Ceres. Scientists now think that salty meltwater reservoirs (cryomagma) in the crust lasted for millions of years.
Image via Neveu/Desch/Arizona State University.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that life itself ever started on Ceres, but the initial chemical interactions needed certainly could have, at least. A subsurface supply of salty water below the surface would have been an ideal environment for that to occur.
The new study focused on the bright salt deposits in Occator Crater. While the crater is about 20 million years old, the deposits are as young as 4 million years old. The cryomagma is thought to have been produced by the impact that created Occator, and was originally estimated to have only been able to remain liquid for about 400,000 years after the impact. But if the deposits are only about 4 million years old, how did the meltwater reservoirs remain liquid so long? To answer that question, Hesse and Julie Castillo-Rogez, a planetary scientist at JPL, looked closer at Ceres’ crustal chemistry and physics. As Castillo-Rogez explained:
It’s difficult to maintain liquid so close to the surface. But our new model includes materials inside the crust that tend to act as insulators consistent with the results from the Dawn observations.
The large cryovolcano Ahuna Mons (“Lonely Mountain”) on Ceres, which sits in isolation on the surface with no other volcanoes nearby.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA.
According to their calculations, the melt reservoir of cryomagma could have lasted for 10 million years. As Hess added:
Now that we’re accounting for all these negative feedbacks on cooling – the fact that you release latent heat, the fact that as you warm up the crust it becomes less conductive – you can begin to argue that if the ages are just off by a few million years you might get it.
The bright spots, including those in Occator, tend to be located in the or near the center of impact craters, which suggests that the impacts created the reservoirs of cryomagma, which then came to the surface through cracks. The salty water evaporated, leaving the salt deposits behind.
The new findings will help scientists better understand how Ceres evolved, according to Jennifer Scully, a planetary geologist at JPL:
They used more up-to-date data to create their model. This will help in the future to see if all of the material involved in the observed deposits can be explained by the impact, or does this require a connection to a deeper source of material. It’s a great step in the right direction of answering that question.
An ancient cryovolcano called Wright Mons on Pluto, as seen by the New Horizons spacecraft in 2015.
Image via NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI.
Cryovolcanism is rather common in the outer solar system – it is known to exist, and suspected to exist, on many icy worlds including Ceres, Titan, Pluto, Europa, Enceladus, Triton and others. This icy form of volcanism mimics the “hot” volcanism of planets and moons like Earth, Venus and Io, and shows that even small, cold bodies in the solar system can be surprisingly geologically active – Ceres itself is only 592 miles (952 km) in diameter.
Bottom line: The dwarf planet Ceres had subsurface meltwater reservoirs of salty water (cryomagma) for millions of years, the new research suggests. Whether any kind of primitive life could have ever evolved is unknown, but the environment could at least have allowed the chemistry to begin that would lead to the creation of the kinds of organic molecules that are the building blocks of life.
UFOs and Odd “Vibraniums”: A Look at the CIA’s Weird Tweeting Habit Micah HanksFebruary 28, 2019
UFOs and Odd “VibraniUFOs and Odd “Vibraniums”: A Look at the CIA’s Weird Tweeting Habit
Micah Hanks
On Sunday night, as Americans were settling in for the beginning of the week ahead, many televisions were dialed-in to the 91st Academy Awards, held this year at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California.
Notably, this year’s Oscars ceremony was the first since 1989 to be held in the absence of a host, after repeated failed attempts to secure prospectives that included Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, as well as comedian Kevin Hart (who stepped aside after a series of Tweets rose from his past and stirred controversy; it’s a social media trap that has become all-too-familiar to us these days).
However, these weren’t the only notable and controversial things happening with relation to this year’s Oscars on Twitter. As the awards were being given, many people following the proceedings on social media were surprised to see the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency chiming in.
“In #BlackPanther,” the CIA’s Tweet read, “a unique metal called #vibranium helped the fictional African nation of #Wakanda become the most technologically advanced country on the planet.” It was accompanied by a poll asking whether viewers thought “vibranium” was “A real metal,” “Based upon real materials,” “Possible future tech,” or simply “Total fiction”, with the latter option winning at
The Tweet was linked to a page about the CIA’s “Reel vs. Real,” described at its website as follows:
Merging the overt world of Hollywood with the covert mission of the CIA, the Agency’s “Reel vs. Real” event seeks to demystify the CIA’s mission by comparing what’s seen on TV to what happens in reality. Former CIA officers join the acclaimed creator and actors from FX’s “The Americans” on-stage at UCLA for a lively discussion about the facts vs. fiction of espionage, CIA tradecraft, and living under cover.
Although Hollywood and entertainment reporting isn’t something we focus on all that often here at MU, the occasional humor that appears on the CIA’s Twitter feed isn’t lost on us. Back in January 2018, Paul Seaburn also reported here on one of the agency’s occasional UFO-related Tweets, which featured a famous UFO photograph in conjunction with a post commemorating World UFO Day.
This wasn’t the first time the CIA used its Twitter account to make references to UFOs. Back in early 2015, as the agency Tweeted about its most-read articles from the previous year, it featured what was likely the first of its Tweets about the subject when it shared the following:
The Tweet linked to an article titled “The CIA and the U-2 Program, 1954-1974,” featured as a PDF document which discussed the agency’s high-altitude tests involving the U-2 spyplane in the 1950s.
“[T]esting of the U-2 soon led to an unexpected side effect — a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs),” the report states. Two years earlier, the agency had already released historical documents pertaining to the U-2 Program, which gave the position of the famous Area 51 base near Groom Lake Nevada. There was no Tweet that accompanied this release, however, since the CIA’s Twitter account did not appear online until the following year.
In fact, the CIA’s penchant for the provocative and humorous in its Tweeting habits goes all the way back to its very first Tweet, issued on June 26, 2014, which simply stated, “We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.”
Obviously, whoever handles the CIA’s Twitter account enjoys poking a little fun at the tropes associated with their work, and even putting their own spin on a few common internet memes. The agency may have even resorted to posting cat pictures on at least one occasion; but as you might have guessed, we’re not in a position to confirm, nor deny whether such an incident ever occurred… you be the judge.
It’s 6:30 am. The coffee’s still brewing, the sun is about to peek over the horizon, and you turn on the local news because you’re a responsible and informed citizen. Or a masochist. The camera pans across Lake Erie and shows Cleveland, Ohio getting ready to meet the day. And then you see it. A glowing white shape comes out of the clouds and wobbles across the sky. A UFO. You’ve always known this day would come, but never thought it would be live on WKYC. The anchors don’t notice, it was too fast. As Mr. Coffee gives his last gurgle, you don’t know what you’ve just seen and realize it’s going to be one of those days.
Last Thursday, someone in Cleveland had that exact morning. During their early morning broadcast a strange object briefly appeared on a WKYC camera. It went unnoticed by the anchors, but was soon uploaded to YouTube where it began gaining traction—You can see the video for yourself here. According to WKYC, it was MUFON investigator Thomas Wertman who brought the existence of the clip to their attention. Which shows how dedicated MUFON investigators are. They know what’s on your camera before you do.
The video looks pretty strange. A shape seems to appear out of nowhere over the bay and disappears just as quickly as it arrives. It’s not necessarily how I’d prefer to start my day, and you can see why someone would immediately upload it to YouTube.
No one needs alien nonsense at 6:30 in the morning. Start normal, end weird. That’s my motto.
You’ve got to hand it to WKYC. They actually followed up with MUFON’s Thomas Wertman and invited him into the studio to go over the footage. The benefits of it being unintentionally filmed by a news station means they can prove it’s not doctored, they can slow it down, they can see what’s actually going on here.
And this is where the disappointment comes in. According to Wertman, after seeing the video in full resolution, he believes the the UFO is just a bird:
“I can actually see the wings going up and down and this is not uncommon. I’ve had some other videos submitted over the past that have turned out to be insects, when you get a very high quality resolution, you can even see the wings going up and down as it goes across the screen.”
Asked if it was safe to say the object in the video had been identified, he said:
“I’m sure we can, because I’ve also gone and scrubbed up any aircraft in the region. I had one helicopter flying around in that region, but no other aircraft in that area that I could pick up on the transponder. So, I’m sure we’re seeing wildlife down along there, most likely a gull.”
Seagulls ruin everything.
Like I said, dedicated. In the slowed down video, you can see what appears to be wings flapping. Although, there has been some winged weirdness in that part of the country recently. Was it mothman? Sorry, I didn’t need to bring him into it. UFOs are one thing, but no one deserves mothman before coffee.
I often like to look into reports that truly skirt around the periphery of the paranormal and cryptozoology, the cases that stand out as being particularly odd and baffling. Such cases truly tax the imagination and leave us scrambling to try and explain just what in the world could be going on, and challenge our notions of what we think we know. Here I have collected together an eclectic mix of very weird encounters with everything from jellyfish floating through the sky, to squid-like beasts and octopod monsters roaming the wilderness, so sit back, buckle up, and enjoy this journey to the other side of the bizarre.
One of the stranger things one could see soaring through the skies is a jellyfish, but there are actually numerous reports throughout the world of just that. These incredibly bizarre entities are often reported as looking very similar to a typical jellyfish one would find bobbing about in the sea, only in this case soaring through the air, and in some accounts they are described as being able to change density, color, or size, and to be able to go almost completely transparent, and there have even been cases of some sort of bioluminescence present. They are variously reported as moving about on their own through some unknown form of propulsion or merely at the whim of the air currents, and they are always just about as otherworldly as can be.
There have been particularly strange accounts of encounters with flying jellyfish going back decades. In the 1950s a police man in England claimed to have had a run in with a low flying sky jellyfish as he was riding his bicycle on patrol. He claimed that it drifted right down in front of him and that he actually bumped up against it, describing the sensation as similar to brushing up against a soft blanket, and that it had a slightly unpleasant smell of mildew. In 1958 there was also report from Florida, where a policeman named Faustin Galegos found a translucent purple blob about the size of a soccer ball outside of his house. He claimed that when he had approached it seemed to be some sort of dying creature, and when he picked it up the thing just sort of evaporated in his hands.
A more recent account was given on the site Phantoms and Monsters, and comes from a witness in Perth, Australia, who is referred to merely as “BD.” The witness claims that in 2012 he was out in front of his house one evening having a cigarette when his attention was drawn to the curious sight of the light patterns of the stars being disrupted by something passing over them. At first he thought it might be a plane, but it soon became apparent that this was no aircraft. The witness explains:
As it got closer, the way it moved resembled the way a jellyfish would swim if it was horizontal. It was hard to describe, but it looked to be expanding at the front like a balloon, then using that air to propel itself along. It was roughly 100 meters above me and I watched it for 10 minutes. After that it was out of sight. This was during a clear night sky in Australia. I am very familiar with aircraft as I live relatively close to Jandakot airport and we see/hear them all the time. It was certainly not a machine of any kind.
I yelled out to my Mother-in-Law who was staying at the time to come out and look. She also saw it. I filmed it on my smartphone, but being 8pm at night it was pitch black and you couldn’t see anything. If I had to guess, I would say the feeling I was left with is that it was some kind of creature. It moved gracefully and gradually in large deliberate movements. Like a large bird would do with a large flap of its wings, then gliding for a bit, although this was unlike anything I could describe. It appeared to be translucent in parts and remained at the same altitude and speed but just completely silent.
Amazingly, there was a follow up report from a different witness, who claims that he and a friend saw what appears to be the same or a similar creature around Perth at around the same time as this sighting. The witness says of the creature:
I would like to confirm the story of the flying jellyfish like creature as described on your forum by “BD,” There were two of us actually not just myself. We were in Perth CBD actually having a glass of wine on a quite loud jazz music playing balcony about 10 meters from the ground. I am so thrilled to find out there is another person who has seen this. The creature was behaving exactly as described by “BD” so basically like jellyfish but without any long tentacles – about a size of a balloon.
It was kind of changing according to the different colored lighting attached to the balcony and it was flying upwards so effortlessly. It is really precious I have finally found this. I have been searching for so long. I have to be honest I don’t recall the exact day but it must have been the same night as “BD” mentioned. We had seen it around 9-10pm either friday or saturday. The creature wasn’t too shy either meaning it didn’t fly in a hurry. Would gladly put my hand on my heart on this one and now may actually try to find it again, but who knows how often do they appear.
A very odd claim was posted on the site Norcalblogs, from a commenter calling himself Pie Guevara, who claims that his uncle, an Oscar Guevera, had taken part in a scientific survey of these sorts of creatures in the 1950s and 60s. The remote areas north of San Fransisco had apparently experienced a spate of sightings for over a decade of what were usually referred to as “Space Jellies,” which would congregate in the upper atmosphere along the coast, after which they would soar up into the upper atmosphere out of sight. Pie provides a letter that he allegedly received from his uncle, which outlines the phenomenon and his study of it, and reads:
This coalescence of “space jellies”, as we called them, was assumed to be part of a seasonal migration pattern in and about the western Pacific. With a small joint grant fund from several philanthropic scientific organizations (which shall remain unnamed), I developed a small, high altitude, long distance ultralight aircraft (the first of its kind) assisted by an in-flight deployable and detachable ovoid helium balloon. This platform was developed as it had become evident through observation and experimentation that the behavior of these creatures was disturbed by the approach of larger aircraft. It was not by coincidence that the craft bore a distinct resemblance to the large, presumably mature form, of “space jelly” creatures themselves.
Working within a shoe-string budget, I deployed a modified aqualung attached to a motorcycle helmet and a small forge bellows that was fashioned into a crude but effective and light weight re-breathing system for high altitudes. For warmth I wore a gorilla suit (procured from a costumer’s auction in Emeryville) and had it fitted with a lining of goose down. From below the aircraft was lowered a fair sized grappling hook with several large mackerels tied to it with bailing wire. Inside of six weeks in the fall of 1973 I had snagged most of these diaphanous jelly fish like buggers. None of the captured survived the experience and within minutes dissolved into an odd steamy smoke. On my final expedition, as per standard operating procedure, I reached the specified location at an altitude of 9500 feet, deployed the balloon, and floated up into the remaining few of these creatures which, apparently, died of fright on the spot, dissolving into threadlike wisps before me.
Besides the regrettable loss of the subjects under study there was one more unfortunate circumstance. On the last mission, after jettisoning the balloon, I was flying in from the Pacific over the Farallons at about 5000 feet towards my hidden base of operations in a remote area of [redacted]. I was spotted by a US Navy crew on a practice and shakedown cruise flying a restored antique Consolidated Vultee PB2Y Coronado that was to be displayed in a few days at a Fleet Week exposition near Fisherman’s wharf. They veered off course, followed me, and executed a close and slow pass-by over San Francisco Bay. So close I could see the faces of the pilot and crew. The flying boat then abruptly dropped altitude and beached near the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in what, for all intents and purposes, appeared to be an emergency landing.
Weeks later I learned, through some Navy sources in Vallejo who hung out Fridays at the [redacted] Bar and Grill, that the pilot and crew recovered from the plane had babbled incoherently and for days all they could get out of them was, “Flying fish bear … flying fish bear …” Needless to say this story has never been declassified and likely never will be. The only reason I relate it now is lay to rest any fears that may still exist about these creatures and confident in the knowledge that no one in their right mind would ever actually believe it.
This is truly a far-out and spectacular account, and one can’t help but wonder how much veracity any of it holds. A guy in a gorilla suit collecting flying jellyfish from the upper atmosphere? Flying Fish Bears? It is all quite beyond bizarre. You can’t make this stuff up, folks. In December of 1999 there was a rather unusual sighting of something like this at Vitebsk, in the Republic of Belarus. The two witnesses described the object as being somewhat tubular or cigar-shaped, with a front part that was rounded and asymmetric, and a rear part that seemed blurred. It was apparently a blue and red color, and exhibited a somewhat transparent quality, as well as what looked to be some sort of flickering bioluminescence. Whatever it was moved with a sort of undulating movement and made no noise during the sighting, and after a while it was reported as just vanishing into thin air. The witnesses would claim that it was not an aircraft, and that they had had the distinct impression that it was a living creature, saying it somewhat resembled an animal known as the glass squid (Cranchiidae).
Glass squid
What could such creatures be? One idea is that they are a type of theoretical organism known as an “atmospheric beast.” Atmospheric beasts, or atmospheric life-forms, as they are often called, are said to be organisms that live their entire lives floating high in the atmosphere, undetected by humans. These creatures are most often described as having bodies that are semi-solid, or almost insubstantial, with some reports even claiming that they are able to adjust their density from almost immaterial and invisible to more solid, depending on as yet unknown factors. Numerous theories have been posited as to how such seemingly fantastical organisms could manage to stay adrift in the air, such as air bladders or very low body densities.
The appearance of these atmospheric beasts varies wildly. Accounts have variously described them as amorphous and cloud-like behemoths, finned squid-like creatures, floating jellyfish, translucent, vaporous blobs, flitting rods, amoeba-like organisms, gelatinous oddities, and even dragons. The sizes of atmospheric beasts likewise run the gamut from tiny and bird-like, to gargantuan monsters hundreds of feet long. Although these enigmatic creatures are said to typically lurk too high in the atmosphere or to be too insubstantial to see with the naked eye, there are instances when one might become observable for some reason. Indeed, there has been a substantial amount of sightings reports over the years from all over the world describing unusual flying monsters that do not fit into the typical mold of thunderbirds or other flying cryptids. These atmospheric life forms have even allegedly been photographed, and there have been reports of the gelatinous remains of dead ones on occasion. Are such sightings evidence of this type of lifeform?
While flying jellyfish are weird enough, let’s move on to something just about as strange. One thing that one would not typically expect to find out walking around on land is an octopod beast, but there have been some downright surreal reports of these as well. One earlier and very weird case comes from the battlefields of World War II, in particular the Battle of Okinawa, in Japan. Lasting from April until June of 1945, the 82-day-long battle was envisioned as the first step in a planned eventual invasion of the Japanese Okinawa Islands and on to the mainland. It was the largest amphibious assault of the Pacific Theater, and saw some of the fiercest, most intense, and bloodiest fighting of the entire war. From here among the many scattered dead bodies strewn about in the aftermath of the fighting come some odd tales of encounters some Japanese troops allegedly had with something very bizarre indeed.
Fighting at the Battle of Okinawa
There are some scattered stories of Japanese troops surveying the smoking battlefields and telling of seeing what appeared to be very large octopuses picking through the corpses. These creatures were said to be around 4 feet in height, and rather than slither about like one would expect a normal octopus to do, they were said to walk about on their tentacles with their heads held above the ground. When one of the beasts was startled or on alert, it would apparently stretch its tentacles up to hold its head higher, like a camera mounted upon a tripod. Making it all more sinister is that the soldiers who saw these creatures claimed that they seemed to be actually coming to feed upon the corpses of the fallen. It is hard to know what to make of these reports, and one wonders if it just wasn’t a spooky forgotten wartime legend of the battlefield.
Then we have what has come to be known as the “Octosquatch.” In the summer of 1961, a 29-year-old truck driver named Arquimedes Sanchez was driving along a precipitous mountain road through the Basque mountains in Spain at around 11PM, along with an unnamed companion, on their way to the town of Puerto de Barazar. As they rounded a bend, their headlights hit a bizarre and rather monstrous being standing upon an embankment nearby, which prompted the pair to stop their vehicle.
When they peered through the murk ahead of them they claim that they saw a “hairy octopus,” which stood around 4 feet tall, with glowing eyes and “tentacle-like” arms. The witnesses and the thing apparently sat there completely frozen and immobile for several minutes, both parties probably just as startled and scared as the other, before Sanchez snapped out of it and slammed the accelerator, which caused the weird apparition to scurry backwards away from the threat, after which Sanchez backed up and tried again, apparently intent on running it over. Interestingly, the otherworldly intruder refused to take off into the night, instead always just managing to avoid being run over, as if it were all a game. Finally the two men, neither who were willing to step out of the vehicle to investigate, drove off to leave the being behind, never to be seen again.
In more recent years, in December of 2014 there was a very odd report taken by the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), concerning an outlandish bipedal creature that was sighted and almost hit by a car in the vicinity of the sleepy town of Carmel, in Highland County, Ohio. The witnesses, a former Marine and his wife, had just moved to the area, and one evening they were driving along the rural road through a wooded area towards their home when a 7-foot-tall creature with muscular, very bendable, tentacle-like legs, and a tubular body without any arms or head ran in front of their car and into the woods on the other side of the road, narrowly avoiding being hit by the vehicle in the process.
It would later be described as being a dull, sickly grey in color and looking sort of like a “walking squid,” and after the report was featured in the local paper there was a lot of speculation as to what it might be. One of the most popular ideas is that this was merely a misidentified deer that had just happened to be witnessed in a strange, bipedal pose. This sort of makes sense, as white-tailed deer are known to rear up on their hind legs and even take a few steps in that position, but it seems odd that one would walk so far, and it doesn’t really seem to totally match the witnesses’ description. Interestingly, the witnesses also claimed that there was a large sphere of grass near their house that is always greener than the surroundings and where snow does not gather, so make of that what you will. Whatever it is, the “Walking Squid” Of Carmel, Ohio, is a truly bizarre case that can’t easily be explained away.
Here we have looked at an array of utterly bizarre tales of jellyfish, squid, and octopus-like creatures popping up in the oddest of places. These obviously could not be considered normal examples of these types of animals, so what were they? Some sort of undiscovered species? Aliens? Interdimensional interlopers? Are they just tall tales or hallucinations? No matter what the answer may be, these are certainly highly odd cases that go beyond the strange, and elude any easy classification.
Jim Marrs – Remote Viewing Aliens and UFOs – Lecture from the 2011 International UFO Congress. Jim Marrs has written about government projects to establish remote viewing groups. An interesting side note to this psychic spying project is that many remote viewers have made discoveries regarding UFOs and extraterrestrials. Marrs will show us some of the amazing findings that top remote viewers have recovered. Jim Marrs is a former journalist and a bestselling author. He primarily focuses on government cover-ups and conspiracies. His book Crossfire, an investigation into the death of John F. Kennedy, was turned into the movie JFK by Oliver stone. While researching the power elite, he also discovered the reality of the UFO cover up and has written extensively on his findings on this matter. www.jimmarrs.com Jim Marrs unfortunately left us early. He passed on August 2, 2017. Fortunately, we can still enjoy the fruits of his efforts. Enjoy.
Dr. John Alexander – UFO Research and the U.S. Government
Dr. John Alexander – UFO Research and the U.S. Government
John Alexander is a retired Army Colonel who has been a critical figure in the field of non-lethal weapons and also played a role in U.S. Army Intelligence research in the paranormal. In the 1980s John put together a group of intelligence officials, members of all branches of the military and the defense aerospace industry to investigate UFO secrecy. His group was called the Advanced Theoretical Physics (ATP) project. In this episode, we discuss the similarities between John’s ATP and the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). Due to the attention the disclosure of the existence of AATIP has garnered, there is a resurgence of interest in the UFO topic in Washington D.C. Relying on John’s insider knowledge on how the government works, we also discuss the difficulties a UFO research program would have functioning inside the government, the concerns the military or other credible organizations may have hosting a UFO program, and whether a government UFO program is the best option for resorcin into the UFO Phenomenon.
Navy UFO Events Took Place Off the Coast of Florida AND VIRGINIA
Navy UFO Events Took Place Off the Coast of Florida AND VIRGINIA
Since the “Gimbal” video was released in December 2017 and the “Go Fast” video was released in March 2018, many people have been trying to figure out where they took place.
“What makes it even more interesting is when you hear the audio, the individuals say, ‘there’s an entire fleet of them.’ I can not go into detail why that’s important. I hope at some point the details of that will come out, but it will not come out from me. It isn’t just one and if you know the backstory behind that incident, you’re just looking at a very short video, maybe thirty or thirty-five seconds worth, but there’s an entire story, weeks and weeks and weeks worth, that go behind that video and that is what’s so compelling and if those details should come out, I think that’s going to be the ‘A-ha’ moment, the epiphany, so to speak, where people are going to look and say, ‘Holy smokes! That really is an important video. That’s not just some blurry thing on the screen.”
TTSA’s Chris Mellon made the comment about fifteen encounters off the east coast since 2015, as well as the fleet, in his Washington Post article. There have been rumors circulating behind the scenes of at least five videos filmed during the encounter. They were referenced openly by Keith Basterfield on Coast to Coast AM. Pilot Dave Fravor and investigative filmmaker Jeremy Corbellhave given us some of the best hints and information about what occured. Creator of The Nimitz Encounters, Dave Beaty, has also been on the forefront of citizen investigators who are looking into this occurrence. There are claims that more witnesses from The Gimbal Events will come forward and speak in March at a conference. If more Gimbal Event videos and data is released soon, the witnesses will tie into this perfectly.
Like always, some of the most powerful comments and corroboration have been stated by George Knapp. Hours ago, on Coast To Coast AM, while interviewing defense and aviation writer and expert, Tyler Rogoway, George Knapp said this:
“In 2015 The Gimbal shows up, and not just once. We were told more than fifteen times, maybe a couple dozen times, both off the coast of Florida and subsequently off the coast of Virginia. Again involving naval craft and multiple sensors…”
Project Blue Book continues to be much more exciting than real-life events, even though the real story is about the Air Force investigating potential alien spacecraft. This week, Hynek invokes the swamp gas theory for a UFO sighting, later revealing the case to be a hoax, while Captain Quinn discovers he is the victim of deception as well.
Captain Quinn is on special assignment for General Harding. Someone stole something important from the Air Force base Hynek and Quinn visited in the last episode, and Harding tells Quinn he thinks it was Edward Rizzuto. Rizzuto is the Russian spy Quinn caught. Harding is sending Quinn to question Rizzuto. Quinn’s form of questioning is brutal. First, he roughs up Rizzuto, and then he makes him breakfast with a gun on the table. At one point Rizzuot pisses off Quinn, so Quinn sticks a fork in his hand. Ouch!
Quinn eventually leaves Rizzuto’s apartment, and Harding comes in. It turns out Rizzuto and Harding were setting Quinn up. Harding suspects Quinn was the thief. Quinn overhears Harding and Rizzuto and confronts Harding. Harding said he had to test him because they found the object missing after Quinn and Hynek had left. He also explains how he turned Rizzuto into a double agent.
When told all of this, Quinn’s expression revealed he knows who might have the mysterious important object. Although we as the audience can tell from his mannerisms, Quinn knows something. Fortunately, Harding doesn’t notice. I am being sarcastic of course. I find it funny when characters play to the audience, and the other characters miss their obvious reactions.
Meanwhile, Hynek has gone to Bowling Green, Ohio to investigate the Bowling Green Massacre. It turns out there was a massacre, and it was an alien who was gunned down mercilessly. A scoutmaster was camping with his troop when they all witnessed lights in the forest. The scoutmaster told the kids to stay put while he investigates. There is then yelling and gunshots. The kids find a charred and burning forest, but their scoutmaster is gone.
Hynek comes on the scene and joins a town hall meeting on the matter. He explains to the townsfolk it could be a case of swamp gas. Swamp gas, also known as marsh gas, is a condition in which rotting vegetation can produce flammable gasses. It is rare, but these gasses can then ignite in the right circumstances. The townsfolk do not like his explanation.
As Hynek is explaining this trying to convince the townspeople, the scoutmaster wonders into the room, battered and singed. So much for swamp gas, Dr. Hyenk. The scoutmaster explains that he saw an object above him in the forest that night. Then a creature came out of the object. Naturally, the scoutmaster shot at it, and it appeared he go it.
Hynek takes the scoutmaster back to the scene of the encounter, and they find an alien looking skull in the ground. Hynek takes the skull to a local Choctaw who is visibly upset. It turns out this skull was stolen. It is a skull that looks alien because the head has been elongated by head binding. Some cultures place binding around the skull of a child beginning at birth to cause the skull to change shape. The Choctaw man explains this was first done in honor of the “Star People.”
In the end, Quinn confronts Hynek who denies having stolen anything.
This episode is undoubtedly full of twists and turns, and it keeps the audience on their toes. As far as aliens go, the UFO case in this episode turned out to be a hoax, but there is still a matter of the mysterious alien-looking object. At the end of the episode, Hynek puts it in the backseat of his car and his tail lights get bright and crack.
The Project Blue Book Files
In this episode, Hynek is a little annoying with his debunking. He is getting a bit like Quinn insisting on prosaic answers. Perhaps it is because Hynek is fighting the alien answer externally while inside he is becoming more accepting of the possibility. He does seem to be mystified by the mysterious object, and he admitted that the green fireballs in the previous episode appear to be too advanced to be human technology.
Some people got annoyed by the real Hynek's debunking as well. Perhaps the most notable is Gerald Ford. Before he was president, Gerald Ford was a congressman from Michigan. In 1966 there were many mysterious UFO sightings in Michigan. Some of those sightings made headlines. During a press conference, Hynek infamously suggested the lights could be swamp gas. Like in the show, this explanation did not sit well with locals. Ford’s office responded in a press release that stated, “Ford is not satisfied with the Air Force explanation of the recent sightings in Michigan and describes the ‘swamp gas’ version given by astrophysicist J. Allen Hynek as flippant.”
Ford even suggested, “Congress investigate the rash of reported sightings of unidentified flying objects in Southern Michigan and other parts of the country.”
Congressional investigations never happened, and when Ford became president, he did not pursue UFO investigations. But he and the state of Michigan were not impressed with Hynek. To this day the term “swamp gas” is used as a joke by UFO enthusiasts to explain away UFO sightings mockingly.
The primary case in the episode was the sighting by the scoutmaster. This was based on a real incident that occurred in West Palm Beach in August 1952. Scoutmaster D.S. DesVergers claims that he was driving with several of his scouts when they saw a light in the forest. He told the boys to stay in the car while he investigates. He claimed to see a large disc-shaped object in the sky that opened up and emitted a red orb. The orb moved towards DesVergers and grew into a haze that engulfed him. He then claims to have lost consciousness.
The next thing he remembers is waking up leaning against a tree. He could barely see, but he made his way back to the highway and found the boys. Local authorities had also arrived.
Project Blue Book Chief Captain Edward J. Ruppelt personally investigated the case. Ruppelt says one of the deputies on the scene who had witnessed DesVergers come out of the forest told him, “In all my 19 years of law-enforcement work, I’ve never seen anyone as terrified as he was.”
At first, Ruppelt seems to believe DesVergers. There was even some physical evidence at the scene in the form of singed grass. However, in the end, Ruppelt concluded the case was an elaborate hoax perpetrated by DesVergers and his scouts. His conclusion was likely influenced by the discovery that DesVergers had a criminal record. Of course many argue Ruppelt’s conclusion was unfounded.
Images of the singed grass and the area where the alleged UFO encounter took place can be found in the Project Blue Book files. In an article on the case on the History Channel’s website, more images can be seen, but I could not find more of the original Blue Book files on this case.
Whether or not aliens are to be blamed for the alleged attack on scoutmaster DesVergers will continue to be debated. As for the show, whether or not aliens have anything to do with UFOs is also still unclear. We are learning a lot about Russian espionage, mind control, and men in black related to Project Blue Book, which is all fictional, but what about the aliens?
History has renewed the series for a second season, so audiences must be liking the show. It could be that viewers like exploring alternate conspiracy theories to the idea that UFOs are aliens. I appreciate that line of thinking because it seems like I have to continually remind people the U in UFO does not stand for aliens, it stands for Unidentified. Meaning, we do not know what the hell is going on.
Alejandro Rojas writes and blogs about science, entertainment, and the paranormal. Alejandro has spent many hours in the field investigating anomalous phenomena up close and personal. You can find him on Twitter here.
Alien technology in the hands of army! Testor model kits for Roswell UFO, and U.S. top secret aircraft.Videos.
Alien technology in the hands of army! Testor model kits for Roswell UFO, and U.S. top secret aircraft.Videos.
By Tom Keller, an aerospace engineer who has worked as a computer systems analyst for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. he said:
“We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects, and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity
Anything you can imagine, we already know how to do.”
“We now have the technology to take ET home. No, it won’t take someone’s lifetime to do it. There is an error in the equations. We know what it is. We now have the capability to travel to the stars.
First, you have to understand that we will not get to the stars using chemical propulsion. Second, we have to devise a new propulsion technology. What we have to do is find out where Einstein went wrong.”
When Rich was asked how UFO propulsion worked, he said, “Let me ask you. How does ESP work?” The questioner responded with, “All points in time and space are connected?” Rich then said, “That’s how it works!
Ben Rich Lockheed Former Director knew of extraterrestrial UFO visitors
Lockheed „Skunk Works“ former director knew the Roswell extraterrestrial UFO influenced designs of Testor model kits for Roswell UFO models, and U.S. top secret aircraft.
“It’s getting dark, my batteries are running low.” With this final poignant message, the most successful mission to Mars – originally planned to last 90 days – ended after 15 years, in adust stormin June 2018.
Despite efforts to re-establish contact with its solar-powered rover “Oppy”, NASA declared the mission over on February 13 2019. The little robotic geologist had transmitted thousands of images from the surface of the planet, transforming our understanding of Mars and paving the way for future exploration.
In 2003, NASA launched its daring new mission with twin exploration rovers Spirit and Opportunity, heralding a new era of discovery on the Red Planet. While not the first rovers on Mars – that was Sojourner on 1997’s Mars Pathfinder mission – they were the first to look beyond the horizon of any stationary landing platform.
With a planned lifetime of 90 days and a range of just one kilometre, Spirit and Opportunity exceeded our wildest expectations. Spirit covered more than seven kilometres and stopped communication in 2010, six years after it landed on Mars in 2004. Oppy continued exploring until mid-2018, setting the record for off-Earth driving distance at 45km.
Chance of a lifetime
Opportunity knocked for me too. Nineteen years ago, searching for a dissertation topic in the final year of a physics degree at the University of Mainz, I happened to come across an ad on a notice board that read: “Let’s go to Mars!” Incredibly, I was the only respondent and soon found myself working with a group developing a miniaturised Mössbauer spectrometer for Mars exploration. This device identifies iron-bearing minerals – important on Mars, also known as the Red Planet because of the iron oxides (rust) on its surface.
The NASA Mars Surveyor lander, originally due to launch in 2001, had been cancelled because of a landing platform failure. But our spectrometer was selected for an ambitious new Mars rover project. I graduated in 2001 but was hooked and wanted to see this thing through to launch, so I managed to secure a PhD position to carry on working with the development group in Mainz.
Against all odds, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the outskirts of Los Angeles had managed to build two rovers from scratch in just three years to launch in 2003. Our instruments had overcome various challenges to function properly once integrated into the two new rovers and were on board. After celebrating a successful launch, the fickle nature of space flight and the Martian curse, which had rendered about half of all Mars missions a failure, hit home at the end of the year.
The UK-led Beagle 2 lander, which also had one of our Mössbauer spectrometers on board, landed at Christmas time but failed to respond. Our instruments on board the Mars rover were not working properly either when checked during flight. It looked like all our work had been in vain.
Opportunity’s twin, Spirit, was next. It landed successfully to the immense relief of the engineering team. A lot was riding on the rovers’ success for NASA after two failed missions. Now it was time to jump into action. The rover rolled off the platform to investigate the composition of the planet’s surface. Miraculously, our spectrometer worked flawlessly – the first ever extraterrestrial application of Mössbauer spectroscopy on the surface of Mars.
Life of Opportunity
Opportunity landed three weeks later. We only had 90 days to accomplish the mission goals, working at JPL on Mars time (a day on Mars – a “sol” – is about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day), ignoring Earthly day and night cycles to make it happen. What’s more, Spirit and Opportunity had landed on opposite sides of Mars. With the day’s shift on one rover ending, how could we go to bed without knowing what was going on on the other side of the planet?
The rovers had to drive a minimum distance of 600m and use their instruments to find evidence for the past existence of water, and assess past environmental conditions for their suitability for life. The rocks at Spirit’s landing site in Gusev crater were revealed to have a volcanic composition. Which meant if there had ever been any lake sediments inside the crater, they had been covered by a lava flow. Hills visible at the horizon offered some hope of discovery of evidence for past water. But would Spirit be able to get there given that the distance and timescale needed exceeded what the rover had been designed for?
Opportunity had more luck. The crater it landed in revealed sedimentary bedrock that provided evidence for water. Not only had water soaked the rocks, it had also episodically pooled at the surface. Though it was acidic it would have provided a habitable environment for various known microorganisms. Mission accomplished! But what now?
The new Mars 2020 rover builds on lessons learned from Opportunity. NASA
New chapter of exploration
Of course we know the end of this story. Both rovers continued to function many years beyond their original lifetime, making new discoveries that greatly enhanced our understanding of Mars. They established that there was plenty of liquid water on Mars’ surface in the past, and that this wet environment would have been capable of supporting life. The rovers and the thousands of images they beamed back to Earth have made Mars a familiar place. I moved to the University of Stirling in 2013, where I continued my work, and can say I’ve been going to work on Mars for almost 15 years.
Though Opportunty’s mission is over, Mars exploration will enter a new phase with the NASA Mars 2020 rover and the European Space Agency’s ExoMars rover, Rosalind Franklin, scheduled for next year. This rover will open up a new dimension by excavating material from two metres below the surface. Mars 2020 will kick off the long awaited effort to return rock and soil samples from Mars back to Earth. Both will owe a huge debt to the experience and knowledge gained from Spirit and Opportunity.
RH Negative: Aliens Genetically Created Us: Overwhelming Evidence (Video)
RH Negative: Aliens Genetically Created Us: Overwhelming Evidence (Video)
If you want to rouse passionate opinions – just discuss the origin of the human race. Fervent believers argue the literal, biblical perspective… that we were created in an instant by a Creator … while scientists claim we are the result of pure evolution – and there are many theories inside that. As it turns out, more and more evidence is showing the likelihood that both theories actually hold some truth, …that the human race is, by all means, an evolving species, but also, that there are a multitude of reasons to believe that a more intelligent life form played a role in developing our DNA.
As we unravel more mysteries from our past, more and more physicists, historians, geneticists, and anthropologists are pushing the boundaries of accepted theories by mentioning the “A” word – yes – the dreaded “alien” – and the overwhelming evidence that something played a role in our evolution. So if you’re among those people still laughing off this possibility – because you’ve never seen one – we’d like to bring you up to speed with some of the remarkable discoveries being discussed in the scientific community, ones that prove our genetic makeup has to be more than just a random hand of cards.
TAKEN: The unnamed person claims to have been abducted by aliens
The unnamed man wrote a post on a popular conspiracy forum about his “experience” in the company of extraterrestrials and what they told him.
Among his supposed revelations are that the universe did not come about as a result of the “Big Bang” and that aliens are able to communicate with each other via telepathy.
The bloke writes that his first contact with beings from outer-space happened when he was young when one got in touch with him through his brainwaves.
He the says that since then, he has been constantly conversing with them.
GETTY
CLAIMS: The person says aliens have been communicating with him for years
“I woke up and realized immediately what happened. I was freezing. And soaking wet.”
Alien abductee
He goes on: “For the last 17 years it’s been an on and off again thing. I’d just gone 5 years without any contact or communication incidents, but in Aug 2016, things got very serious, very fast.
“I went to bed one Saturday night just like any other night. But Sunday morning was not anything like any Sunday I’d been through before.
"I woke up and realized immediately what happened. I was freezing. And soaking wet. And I felt like I was in a dream. Have you ever been under anaesthetic? Same feeling when waking up.”
He claims that during this encounter, he was told that the universe was created by something called “The One” – something that is neither alive nor dead, male nor female, but responsible for everything in existence.
He then makes a series of outlandish claims about the history of the Earth from the Garden of Eden to today.
“You likely won’t believe me yet, but that voice in your head, your conscience, is actually what’s left of the telepathic connection to our counterpart on Eden.
“Of course today we are raised to believe thinking anything other than ‘it’s your own voice’ will get you locked up in a psych ward,” he adds.
So-called “truths” are continually making far-fetched claims about the existence of extraterrestrials.
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Rh-Negative Blood: An Exotic Bloodline or Random Mutation?
Rh-Negative Blood: An Exotic Bloodline or Random Mutation?
Most people who have the Rh blood type are Rh-positive. There are also instances, however, where people are Rh-Negative. Health problems may occur for the unborn child of a mother with Rh-Negative blood when the baby is Rh-Positive. This has led some to suggest that Rh-Negative blood must be of a non-human origin. Theories range from supernatural ones such as being of divine descent or membership in a divinely chosen people-group, to more scientific or pseudoscientific explanations such as interbreeding with extraterrestrials. The majority of scientists who have studied the blood type have concluded that it is most likely just a random mutation. This explanation seems to be the one most consistent with available evidence and the one that is most able to withstand Occam’s Razor.
What is unusual about Rh-Negative blood is that the gene for it is surprisingly common despite being potentially harmful. When a woman who is Rh-Negative is pregnant with a child that is Rh-Positive, the mother’s immune system creates protective anti-bodies to the Rh-Positive blood, and her blood essentially becomes toxic to the child. To some people, this looks like the mother’s body is rejecting the baby - which has led them to suggest that perhaps the reason for the rejection is incompatibility based on the mother and child being of different species. Others suggest that lineages with the gene for Rh-Negative blood are merely special in some way and were not meant to be mixed with lineages which are predominantly Rh-Positive.
One population which contains an unusually high frequency of the gene for the Rh-Negative blood type are the Basques from northeastern Spain. The Basques have the highest incidence of the gene out of any population in the world. The Basques also speak a non-Indo-European language and have genetic markers that pre-date the rise of agriculture. This has led to speculation that Rh-Negative blood is related to Cro-Magnon ancestry going back to the upper Paleolithic period in Europe.
Among the more exotic theories is the idea that the Rh-Negative gene represents a separate branch of humanity that intermarried with the branch that came out of Africa. One blogger has gone as far as to say that those with Rh-Negative blood are descendants of the Hyperborean race, which they believe to be the original human race. Followers of this idea believe that this race was blonde-haired and blue-eyed and included most major spiritual teachers in history, including Jesus.
Some people who are not satisfied with the idea that those with RH- blood are another form of humanity have suggested that the trait originates from extraterrestrials either interbreeding with humans or creating humans through genetic engineering.
The Role of Genetics in Rh-Negative Blood
This unusual trait can, however, also be explained in terms of relatively mundane human genetics and natural selection. One possibility is that the gene for Rh-Negative blood has some sort of selective advantage that outweighed the negative consequences of having Rh-Negative blood.
A well-known example of this phenomenon would be the case of sickle cell anemia and malaria. A large percentage of the population in west Africa where malaria is common consists of carriers of the gene for sickle-cell anemia, although they don’t have the disease themselves. The reason is that just carrying the gene for sickle cell anemia gives the person carrying it immunity to Malaria. Although sickle-cell anemia is harmful, even deadly, carrying the gene gives a selective advantage and therefore it is much more common than would be expected.
Sickle-cell disease is inherited in the autosomal recessive pattern.
Scientists studying the effects of Rh-Negative blood have found that individuals carrying the gene for Rh-Negative blood are more resistant to certain parasites such as toxoplasma, which can threaten unborn children. It has also been found that there are more carriers of the gene in areas where toxoplasma is more common. This suggests that carriers of the gene for Rh-Negative blood might be more common than expected because there is a positive selective advantage, greater resistance to parasites, that outweighs the negative, possibly having a pregnancy where the mother’s blood endangers the unborn child.
Dividing Toxoplasma gondii, an obligate intracellular human parasite.
As a result, it could be that some populations contain a higher occurrence rate of the gene not because of a unique lineage but because they are adapted to a region with a high prevalence of certain parasites such as toxoplasma. This would explain why the gene occurs in high frequency in populations that are not really connected other than the fact that they are Homo Sapiens, such as Basques and certain Jewish populations.
The Basques have an ancestry that, with other European groups, goes back to the European Upper Paleolithic. Yet the Jews ultimately descend from relatively recent Middle Eastern populations. This would make sense if the reason for the prevalence of the gene was because both the ancestral Basque and Jewish populations originated in an environment with similar selective factors rather than being of a common lineage.
Although it could still be that there is a common, unique ancestral lineage connecting populations with high prevalence of Rh-Negative blood, the fact that the populations where the gene occurs in high prevalence appear otherwise unrelated to each other makes it less likely and in need of more evidence.
Could Rh-Negative Blood Come from Extraterrestrials?
The extraterrestrial explanation is even more problematic because the Rh-Negative gene is clearly a variation of an otherwise completely human gene. Unless it was specifically engineered by extraterrestrials from a pre-existing human gene, it is unlikely that it comes from anything other than Homo Sapiens .
The other problem with the Rh-Negative blood type being the result of hybridization with extraterrestrials is that extraterrestrials are likely to have a completely different biology and genome than human beings. Their genome might not even be based on DNA - but something else such as RNA, or some exotic form of genetic storage that never evolved on Earth. This would make any viable hybrids very improbable if not impossible. As the astronomer Carl Sagan would have put it, it would be easier to make a human-tulip hybrid, than a human-extraterrestrial hybrid.
An artist’s representation of an extraterrestrial.
The unlikelihood and uncertainty of the other options make the explanation that the Rh-Negative blood type is just a mutation that became common in some populations due to a selective advantage the most likely option. It is also the one that most easily survives the application of Occam’s Razor. If this blood type was because of another human species, let alone extraterrestrials, many more unnecessary assumptions that are difficult to verify have to be made. As a result, the evidence currently points toward little more than an ordinary mutation as the cause of the Rh-Negative blood phenotype.
Researcher Dani Arnold-McKenny rejoins the program to discuss the massive geomagnetic blasts that have been routinely hitting the Earth since the beginning of January. These blasts are at levels not seen by scientists in the field who have been watching and observing Earth’s magnetic forces for years. We discuss the unusual events and what this could mean.
Video cameras typically have LED illuminators sited close to the lens, and these can capture floating particles of dust, moisture droplets and tiny insects in a similar way to the flash of a still camera. The primary difference is, needless to say, movement. Researchers use infra-red DV cameras in there investigations, and these have multiple IR LEDs situated in a circle with the lens at its centre. We frequently record floating orbs using this setup, usually triggered by dust stirred up by passing humans, which shows up as orbs up to several minutes afterwards, or completely randomly. Occasionally the orbs have a flight path that makes them seem to follow folks; however, as with still-photo orbs, they are actually much closer to the camera than they appear. The noticeable size of the orbs, and their flight paths, is an illusion attributable to the compression of 3D visual space down to 2D. Typically there’s nothing paranormal involved, but that does not suggest we take things for granted and don’t bother to check it out?
With that being said, many thanks to youtube’s UFOmania – The truth is out there for this video.
Some people believe seeing orbs of light is visible evidence of spirits while others say orbs show signs of intelligence.
WETENSCHAPDe Britse miljardair Richard Branson dook met een team van wetenschappers naar de bodem van het ‘Great Blue Hole’, het grootste zinkgat ter wereld. Het team kon prachtige beelden vastleggen vanop de bodem, 124 meter onder het zeeniveau. En dankzij een sonarscan krijgen we binnenkort een uiterst gedetailleerd beeld van de omvang van het zinkgat.
Het ‘Great Blue Hole’ ligt voor de kust van Belize in de Caribische Zee en is 124 meter diep en 318 meter breed. Het zinkgat spreekt al jaren tot de verbeelding van wetenschappers, maar mede dankzij miljardair en Virgin-baas Richard Branson weten we nu hoe het zinkgat er vanbinnen uitziet. Branson daalde in december, samen met een team diepzeespecialisten van Aquatica Submarines, af naar de bodem met een speciaal uitgeruste duikboot.
Nooit eerder ontdekte stalactieten
Een van de meest opmerkelijke ontdekkingen in het zinkgat waren stalactieten die er nog nooit eerder werden waargenomen. Volgens wetenschappers was het zinkgat zo’n 100.000 jaar geleden een gigantische bovengrondse grot en ontstonden de stalactieten toen de grot nog niet was overspoeld. Toen het zeeniveau steeg, verdween de grot diep in het water en zakte het dak van de grot in. Maar vanbinnen heeft de tijd wel 100.000 jaar stilgestaan.
Aquatica SubmarinesRichard Branson en het team van Aquatica Submarines botste in het 'Great Blue Hole' op nooit eerder ontdekte stalactieten.
Naast de stalactieten vond het team ook mysterieuze sporen op de bodem van het zinkgat. “We weten niet waar die sporen vandaan komen”, zegt diepzeepilote Erika Bergman, die ook de leiding van de expeditie nam.
3D-kaart
Branson en zijn team konden met sonarscan een 3D-kaart maken van het zinkgat. Die kaart wordt binnenkort vrijgegeven, maar Aquatica Submarines licht nu al een tipje van de sluier met videobeelden.
Aquatica SubmarinesAquatica Submarines kon met sonar een 3D-kaart samenstellen van het zinkgat. Die kaart wordt binnenkort gepubliceerd.
Binnenkort wordt ook een documentaire uitgezonden over de expeditie naar het Great Blue Hole. Die documentaire wordt ergens in de lente verwacht.
Aquatica SubmarinesRichard Branson en het team van Aquatica Submarines
Aquatica SubmarinesRichard Branson zakte met een duikboot af naar de bodem van het 'Great Blue Hole'.
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — Death is one of the mysteries of life. But the dreams of patients at Hospice Buffalo in New York State are revealing something incredible about the process of dying.
Dr. Christopher Kerr and his team have been documenting dreams or visions of dying patients for years.
They’ve found that the dreams are often comforting and make death less scary.
It turns out, when we have little time left, many of us may see the people we miss the most.
They’ve recorded many of the interviews.
A man named Horace explained one of his dreams: “My wife all of a sudden appeared.”
A woman named Jeanne describes how vivid they are: “I remember seeing every piece of their face. I mean, I know that was my mom and dad and uncle and my brother-in-law.” She continued: “I felt good. I felt good to see some people.”
A patient named Maggie dreamt about her sister, who had passed away before her.
“So I said, Beth, you’ve got to stay with me,” Maggie said. “I’m alone, stay with me. She says, ‘I can’t. Not now.”
But then, her sister gives her a message: “And then she says, ‘Soon we’ll be back. We’ll be back together.”
Dr. Kerr didn’t start out believing. He’s now the Chief Medical Officer at Hospice Buffalo, and when he was first starting out, something happened that opened his mind. He thought a certain patient could live a little longer with IV fluids.
“I walked in and the nurse didn’t even look up,” said Dr. Kerr. “And she said, “No, no, he’s dying,’ and I said, ‘Why are you saying that?’ And she said, ‘Well, he’s seeing his deceased mother,’ and I was like [laughing noise] ‘Yeah, right.'”
He was skeptical, but he explained that he was proven wrong over and over.
“Everybody but me was able to prognosticate death in part based on what people were seeing or experiencing,” he said.
He says doctors aren’t trained to deal with these dreams, but he began studying them and realized that they’re therapeutic.
“Instead of having this fear of death,” said Dr. Kerr. “It almost transcends the fear of death to something bigger.”
In 10 years, he and his team have documented 14,000 cases. Eighty percent of his patients report dreams or visions.
“What’s clear is people are universally saying this feels more real and different than any dream I’ve ever had before,” he said.
Dr. Kerr with Gregg Liebler
(Photo Credit: KDKA)
KDKA met one of those patients during our visit, a man named Gregg Liebler.
Liebler: “My grandmother and grandfather are both passed.” Dr. Kerr: “Have you had any dreams of them?” Liebler: “Yes. I see them often.”
Liebler’s sister, Karen Paciorkowski, is a nurse at Hospice Buffalo.
“He was really close with my mom’s parents,” she said.
“The people who loved him and nurtured him, he says the most, were his grandparents and that’s who returns to him,” Dr. Kerr said.
He sees himself as a child, talking to them again.
Dr. Kerr: “But it feels good?” Liebler: “It sure does.”
Liebler passed away less than three weeks after our interview.
“You’re physically declining, but inside, you’re very vibrant and alive,” said Dr. Kerr.
He says the dreams happen more often as death gets closer, and there are common themes, like upcoming travel.
A patient named Paul shared one of his dreams, “She wanted me to pack up some things for her, so I had this crazy dream, I’m packing goods.”
Sometimes the dreams allow people to address unresolved issues.
A patient named Patricia felt relief after delivering a message to her deceased husband: “I told him, ‘You should have taken care of this, and I want you to know that I’m really angry that you didn’t,’ and he smiled.”
When children are dying, they often don’t know any people who have passed, so they dream of deceased pets.
A girl named Jessica explains her dreams: “I dream about my old dog Shadow, that has passed away.”
“They’ll come of these experiences and say they want to go back,” said Dr. Kerr.
So what causes the dreams? Is there a religious, spiritual or scientific explanation?
“I don’t have one,” said Dr. Kerr.
He says his goal is just to record what’s happening and he’s not sure there need to be an explanation.
“When they wake up crying because they’ve been so deeply moved by something,” said Dr. Kerr. “That just should be respected. Period.”
Wie je ziet voordat je sterft: patiënten vertellen over hun mysterieuze droomervaringen
Wie je ziet voordat je sterft: patiënten vertellen over hun mysterieuze droomervaringen
Dr. Christopher Kerr van een verzorgingstehuis in Buffalo en zijn team doen al jaren onderzoek naar de dromen en visioenen van stervende patiënten.
Een man genaamd Horace zei vlak voor zijn dood dat ‘zijn vrouw plotseling voor hem verscheen in een droom’.
Een vrouw, Jeanne, zei over haar levendige droom: “Ik herinner me ieder deel van hun gezicht. Ik weet dat het mijn moeder, vader, oom en zwager waren. Ik voelde me goed.”
Samen
Een patiënt genaamd Maggie droomde over haar zus, die voor haar was overleden.
“Ik zei: ‘Beth, je moet bij me blijven’,” zei Maggie. “Ze zei dat dat nu niet kon.”
Haar zus voegde toe: “Spoedig zijn we weer samen.”
Een zuster zei op een dag tegen dr. Kerr dat één van de patiënten zijn overleden moeder had gezien. Hij geloofde er niks van en moest lachen.
Geloven
Hij was in eerste instantie sceptisch, maar hoe meer verhalen hij hoorde, hoe meer hij zelf begon te geloven.
Hij merkte op dat artsen niet worden getraind om dergelijke dromen te analyseren.
Na hun ervaringen zijn patiënten minder bang voor de dood.
Dichter bij de werkelijkheid
In de afgelopen 10 jaar heeft dr. Kerr 14.000 gevallen gedocumenteerd. Tachtig procent van zijn patiënten heeft dit soort dromen of visioenen.
Mensen zeggen allemaal dat de ervaringen dichter bij de werkelijkheid komen dan de realiteit om ons heen en anders zijn dan gewone dromen, aldus Kerr.
Strange new island or mere mirage? Border patrol tweets phenomenal PHOTO
Strange new island or mere mirage? Border patrol tweets phenomenal PHOTO
A Finnish border guard was, quite literally, stopped in their tracks Sunday after a ‘new island’ appeared in the middle of the frozen Lake Inari without warning.
Finland’s Lapland Border Patrol tweeted images of the strange, apparently geological, phenomenon; an impressive feat considering temperatures in the region had plummeted as low as -25 degrees Celsius and there was no sight nor sound of any volcanic activity in the area that might explain the sudden appearance of new rock formations, seemingly out of nowhere.
Lapin rajavartiosto@lapinraja
Inarinjärvelläkin on joskus harvoin mahdollisuus nähdä kangastuksia. Papinsaaren edustalle on noussut uusi saari. Ivalon partio sai ilmiön ikuistettua kameralle kirkkaassa -25 C pakkassäässä. #ivalonraja#inarinjärvi
It was merely an optical illusion, however, as one commenter pointed out on Twitter. Light behaves differently when passing through atmospheric layers, which can lead to mirage-like effects along the horizon, reflecting and refracting distant landscapes in mind-bending ways.
Mirages aren’t exclusive to sandy deserts, it would seem.
‘Spookeiland’ verschijnt op Fins meer. Grenswachter maakt fenomenale foto
Foto: Twitter/Lapin rajavartiosto
‘Spookeiland’ verschijnt op Fins meer. Grenswachter maakt fenomenale foto
Een Finse grenswachter keek afgelopen zondag vreemd op toen hij midden op het Inarimeer uit het niets een ‘nieuw eiland’ zag ontstaan.
De grenswacht van Lapland zette een foto van het raadselachtige fenomeen op Twitter.
Het was er op dat moment -25 graden Celsius en er was geen vulkanische activiteit in het gebied.
Optische illusie
Het bleek hier te gaan om een optische illusie. Licht kan terwijl het de atmosfeer passeert luchtspiegelingen veroorzaken aan de horizon, waarbij landschappen in de verte op verbijsterende manieren vervormd worden.
Het tafereel doet denken aan legendarische verhalen over verloren werelden die ogenschijnlijk uit het niets verschijnen en weer verdwijnen.
Bekijk de beelden hieronder:
Lapin rajavartiosto@lapinraja
Inarinjärvelläkin on joskus harvoin mahdollisuus nähdä kangastuksia. Papinsaaren edustalle on noussut uusi saari. Ivalon partio sai ilmiön ikuistettua kameralle kirkkaassa -25 C pakkassäässä. #ivalonraja#inarinjärvi
There are billionaires – not many but the number is growing. Some inherited their wealth. Others created their wealth but their life stories have become more annoying than inspiring (we’re looking at you – Jeff and Elon). Then there’s Sir Richard Branson. The owner of the Virgin Group of over 400 assorted companies, he’s always been an adventurer who’s now in the process of preparing for his first space flight. However, Sir Richard also travels in the opposite direction and in December 2018 he joined up with Fabien Cousteau to dive to the bottom of the mysterious Great Blue Hole in the Belize Barrier Reef. The submarine dive was broadcast live on the Discovery Channel and vessels remained at the hole for a few more weeks collecting data. Much of that data was made available this week and what Branson observed on the bottom of the Great Blue Hole sheds new light on the deepest, darkest sinkhole on the planet. What did he see?
“One of the top five scuba diving sites in the world.”
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
While the Great Blue Hole in the Caribbean off the coast of Belize has long been known about by local fishermen, it was exposed to the world in 1971 by Calypso Captain Jacques Cousteau on his famous television show. (You can watch the episode here.)
While divers agree with Cousteau’s description, at 410 feet (125 meters), the sinkhole is too deep for scuba divers to see the bottom. In December 2018, Richard Branson joined Cousteau’s grandson Fabien and a team of scientists in two submarines and descended to the bottom of the hole with cameras, sonar and 3D mapping equipment. Erika Bergman was the chief pilot, oceanographer and operations manager. (See pictures from the expedition here.)
The Blue Hole is largely unexplored.
shutterstock
While that descent was broadcast on the Discovery Channel, it has taken until now to create the map, which Bergman revealed to CNN Travel.
“We did our complete 360 sonar map and that map is now almost complete. It looks really cool, it’s this mesh-layered, sonar scan of the entire thousand-foot diameter hole.”
Bergman gave new details on the expedition. The team encountered never-before-seen stalactites at 407 feet near the bottom – which makes sense because it’s believed the Great Blue Hole was once a great big cave on dry land before the area became the Caribbean. Passing through the hydrogen sulfide layer at 300 feet, all surface light is gone, along with any oxygen that could support fish or other life forms. However, they found remains of dead sea creatures on the bottom. Unfortunately, they also found evidence of humans.
“There were basically two or three little pieces of plastic — and other than that, it was really, really clear.”
And something else. On the bottom of the Great Blue Hole, Bergman reveals that the team found some tracks. Of what?
“(That remains) open to interpretation.”
Tracks! That alone should generate enough interest to fund another expedition, right?
“It’s neat that there are spaces on our planet — and most of them in the oceans — that are exactly the way they were thousands of years ago and will remain exactly the way they are thousands of years in the future.”
Richard Branson
It sounds like Sir Richard has already moved on in the opposite direction to infinity and beyond while Captain Bergman says she’s already planning for a similar expedition to the depths around the Virgin Islands. That leaves Fabien Cousteau to go back and look at the tracks.
The mystery boom phenomenon continues worldwide without any official explanation. While these incidents are spread out around the globe, the similarities among all of these unexplained ground-shaking booms are too striking to ignore. Even more striking is the deafening silence of law enforcement and governmental agencies. Are these all merely unconnected natural events? Why the sudden and sharp increase in frequency, then?
February has seen (heard?) cities all throughout North America rattled by powerful and mysterious explosion-like sounds. The phenomenon continued this week as cities in South Carolina, Arkansas, Kentucky, and England were rattled by unknown booms. It all began on February 18 when residents of the Charleston, South Carolina area felt the ground shake and heard a powerful boom. Geologists with the College of Charleston said that while they’re investigating the reports, it appears the noise was likely a sonic boom. The area is home to Joint Base Charleston, a military complex which houses units from every branch of the military.
U.S. Air Force units stationed at Joint Base Charleston routinely conduct exercises around Charleston.
The next day, residents of Nottingham, England reported a late night “explosion” heard for miles. Concerned residents described the sound as “like a bomb going off,” and have suspected either a meteorite or explosive device. Louise Hunt of St. Ann’s said the noise was too powerful to have been terrestrial in origin and believes its perpetrator originated from space:
It was like a big explosion, I put a status on Facebook and a few of my friends replied all saying they heard it too. It was really strange as we heard no sirens afterwards my partner then suggested it could if been a meteorite that exploded in mid-air somewhere.
When asked for comment from Nottinghamshire Live, Nottinghamshire Police merely shrugged, said they’ve “received no reports,” and presumably went back to their crosswords.
Nottingham, England.
Back in the US, another terrifyingly loud set of booms rattled Fort Knox, Kentucky on February 22 – although these seem to have an explanation. The U.S. Army’s Marine Detachment has been conducting live fire tank training this week, creating booms loud enough to be heard 30 miles away. While residents of Fort Knox are used to the loud noises generated by military exercises, residents in surrounding areas say the noises usually don’t travel so far. Why the sudden change?
The month in mystery booms ended in the cities of Ward and Beebe, Arkansas, where residents heard a loud, unexplained explosion on February 24. Local police forces acknowledged the booms but asked residents not to call them in unless there was a “real” emergency.
Every week I write a round-up of the week’s mystery booms, and every week I’m left to wonder what’s behind the phenomenon. There are far too many identical incidents occurring each week for this to be merely a coincidence. Someone out there knows something the public doesn’t.
“Shhh. The Masked Singer is on. Keep shopping. OBEY.”
Or maybe not. Maybe these are merely unconnected and insignificant natural phenomena. Is my obsession with these booms all a case of the Baader-Meinhof effect in which individuals first notice a phenomenon or occurrence only to then see the same phenomenon everywhere? If it were only me hearing these noises I might think so, but the fact that they’re receiving the attention of at least local news outlets shows that the phenomenon has been heard and felt by thousands if not tens of thousands of individuals around the world. What is causing these mystery booms?
No TV show has so effectively blurred the boundaries between UFO fact and fantasy as NBC’s Dark Skies, which ran from September 1996 to May 1997. Created byBryce ZabelandBrent Friedman, the series presented an alternate history of 20th Century America. Its tagline read: “History as we know it is a lie.” In this case, it was a lie sprung from and built around a covert extraterrestrial presence on Earth and the US government’s quiet efforts to understand and control the alien threat.
J.T. Walsh as Agent Frank Bach in ‘Dark Skies.’
The narrative begins with the Roswell Incident (here a deliberate military downing of an alien craft) and the establishment of the top secret working group, Majestic, which, as in the UFO literature, is tasked with overseeing the rapidly escalating flying saucer problem in the United States.
We then jump forward to 1961 when the show’s protagonists, John Loengard (Eric Close) and Kim Sayers (Megan Ward), a young couple with political aspirations, find themselves drawn into the shadowy world of Majestic 12, headed by the imposing Frank Bach (J.T. Walsh). Whereas in The X-Files’ Fox Mulder was forever on the outside of the cover-up attempting to look in, in Dark Skies, John Loengard was on the inside looking out.
Each episode saw John and Kim attempting to understand and combat not only the Gray aliens, known in the series as “The Hive,” but Majestic themselves, whose motives and actions are morally dubious at best. All of this plays out against the backdrop of real historical events of the 20th Century, including the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of JFK, the death of Marilyn Monroe, the Watts riots of 1965, and the north-east black out of that same year. Numerous cultural icons show up throughout the series, including The Beatles, Jim Morrison, Ed Sullivan, and Timothy Leary, as well as real-life figures from politics, science, and UFOlogy, such as Harry Truman, Allen Dulles, Nelson Rockefeller, J. Edgar Hoover, J. Allen Hynek, and Carl Sagan.
So, how did such an ambitious UFO show come to be? While researching my book, Silver Screen Saucers, Dark Skies co-creator Bryce Zabel shared with me the intriguing and, at times, creepy production history of his show.
Zabel and Friedman pitched their series to networks in the form of a faux “Top Secret” briefing file, modeled on the MJ-12 documents. The thick, ring-bound file, which they referred to as the “Dark Skies Bible,” contained enough rich UFO lore intertwined with official history to comfortably fuel five full series of the prospective show, which had been the original plan. The file was fronted by a one-page letter “written by” the show’s fictional hero, John Loengard. It was dated 2 January 1995 and was addressed to his real-world creators. It read:
Bryce and Brent,
The truth must be told. You have been chosen as instruments to achieve this objective.
The truth, however, must not be represented as truth. Too many people who are needed in the struggle will die.
The cover of fiction must be used to present this truth. Those who fear the light will not want to bring attention to you by allowing your death.
This is the only way.
Do not be afraid.
The fight for humanity demands your courage.
[SIGNED]
John Loengard.
The Dark Skies Bible, and the Loengard letter in particular, exemplified the now complete inseparability and symbiosis of UFOlogical “fact” and Hollywood fantasy. Loengard’s statement to his creators that they had been chosen as instruments to tell the truth about UFOs under the cover of fiction, would later ring disturbingly true for Zabel and Friedman, as we shall see.
Official Denial
Before we delve into the weirdness that went on behind the scenes of Dark Skies, we first need to mention Brcye’s previous production. A made-for-TV movie, Official Denial was an ambitious exploration of modern UFO mythology, featuring MJ-12, UFO crash-retrievals, and aliens in the custody of the US government. It even anticipated reports to follow of military abductions of UFO experiencers (known in UFOlogy as “MILABs”). Indeed, it seems fair to say that Official Denial was perhaps the most explicitly UFOlogical movie ever produced at that point. Unfortunately, its ambitions greatly exceeded its limited budget, and its special effects were severely dated even at the time of its broadcast. It was not widely seen and has yet to receive a DVD release.
Official Denial was a passion project for Bryce, and so its less-than-perfect onscreen realization disappointed him greatly:
The sadness of my life is that I didn’t sell the script to a large film studio who would have spent 30 or 40 million dollars making the perfect version of it. Instead it got sold to a small company, which sold it to the Sci-Fi Channel [now The SyFy Channel], which made it for around $2 million. The result was that I couldn’t even watch the finished product. The alien was a twelve-year-old ballerina in a plastic costume, and the effects were bad, and the acting was bad. It just wasn’t on film what it was in my mind.
It was the partial failure of Official Denial that prompted Bryce to embark on his next UFO-themed project. “I just felt I needed to sell something to somebody who had more money so that we can do these aliens right,” he recalled. The development of Dark Skies began in late-1994 while Bryce was working at Universal as a writer on M.A.N.T.I.S, Sam Raimi’s short-lived TV show about an African-American super hero. “My assistant on that show introduced me to her husband, who was Brent Friedman. Brent and I started talking UFOs and it turned out he had been told certain things by a government insider.”
‘Dark Skies’ co-creator, Brent Friedman.
Friedman has described this incident as follows:
A good family friend of ours when I was just getting out of high school was working at a very high level in the Reagan administration. One night he took me aside and told me some of the things he was doing in the government, and he ended up telling me some pretty shattering stories. He knew that I’d always been into science-fiction, fantasy, and comic books, and he very casually just threw out there that ‘aliens are real, they’re here, and I’ve seen them.’ At the time I was just absolutely shocked. This was a person that I grew up with and absolutely trusted, and it just rocked my world.
With their mutual interest established, Bryce and Brent set about developing what would become their Dark Skies Bible. “Our show was really about blending the UFO phenomenon into documented, accepted world history,” Bryce told me. “Everything I had read in UFO literature ended up in Dark Skies, from Betty and Barney Hill to Majestic-12, you name it. I tried to weave it all in there.”
Here come the Men in Black
The inclusion of such intricate UFOlogical detail in Dark Skies apparently attracted the attention of real government UFO spooks. The series pilot premiered on NBC on 21 September 1996. That same night, Bryce threw a wrap party at his Los Angeles home for his cast and crew—some 200 people in total. They would watch the pilot live together. It was a private party, invitation only. All invited guests were issued in advance with a faux Majestic-12 ID badge (loosely modeled on Bob Lazar’s Area 51 ID badge) which they were required to wear throughout the evening. One man at the party that evening wore no ID badge.
“A guy showed up here,” Bryce recalled. “Nicely dressed, young. Nobody recognized him. He approached Brent and myself and he told us, “We’ve seen your pilot.” This was strange, because at that point in evening the pilot had yet to air. “Nobody else had seen it, other than a few people in Hollywood,” said Bryce. The man stated again, “We’ve seen your pilot and we think you get a lot right, but we want to help you with the rest.”
The mystery man suggested to the producers that their show could benefit from inside information on UFOs, and that he could provide them with this information. Here, then, was John Loengard sprung to life from Bryce and Brent’s fictional letter, choosing them as conduits to share the truth disguised as fiction. The producers initially suspected a prank, but their Dark Skies pitch had been private. No one had seen their Loengard letter but for a handful of network executives in Hollywood. What’s more, based on his detailed knowledge of its plot, the mystery man seemed to have really seen the unaired Dark Skies pilot, as he claimed. He even knew details about episodes that hadn’t been filmed yet.
“Who are you?” the producers asked. “That’s really not important right now,” came the reply. “But I work with people who have an interest in what you’re doing and what you’re putting out.” The mystery man then proceeded to grab a napkin and scrawl something on it. “It was a bunch of symbols and stuff,” said Bryce. The man handed the napkin to Brent, who naturally inquired as to its meaning. “The secrets of the universe,” said the man, enigmatically. “Sound, light, and frequency.” I asked Bryce where the napkin is now. “I haven’t seen it in years,” he told me. “Brent has it locked in a safe some place.”
The man and his napkin were undeniably intriguing, but this was bad timing. Bryce was playing host to 200 people: “I didn’t really have time to stand around talking to this guy. But Brent invited him to our office at NBC to come and talk to us some more at a later date.”
That meeting happened a few days later, and it would prove both confusing and unsettling.
Bryce described the meeting to me:
The guy from the party shows up with two other people, older men, who he said were his bosses in Naval Intelligence. They sat around a table with us and they spoke for around two hours. They certainly had a well-constructed alternate world. They had lots of details, and they weren’t shy. Actually they were a little condescending to us, saying things like, “You guys think you’re such hotshots because you’re in Hollywood, but the truth is that you don’t even know what you’re playing with. Yes, you’ve stumbled into getting most of it right, but there are some things that you haven’t got right.”
Cemetery at midnight
Things were about to get even stranger: “At one point the guy puts a little vile on the table and says ‘you don’t have this in your show.’ And we’re looking at it and we say ‘what is this?’, and he says ‘this is what this is all about.’ It was a vile of gold, or fool’s gold, I’m not sure which.” Were Bryce and Brent meant to infer that aliens were after our gold, like the Anunnaki of Ancient Astronaut lore? Or were they supposed to think the vile contained some alien element, perhaps used to fuel a flying saucer? It is impossible to know, but certainly the mystery men were intent on confusing and provoking the producers. “Their whole tone was like, ‘You fucking idiots! This is what it’s about! You don’t even have the truth!’ It was just weird.”
Bryce asked again precisely who these men were. “So one of them said, ‘look. we’re with Naval Intelligence and if you really want us to read you in you’re going to have to meet the big guy. There’s a ship down in Long Beach right now and we can arrange for you to meet him. But you can’t meet him on the ship.”
One of the men then provided Bryce and Brent with the location of a cemetery in Long Beach, where they could meet the big guy at midnight on a given date. Bryce was now thoroughly perturbed. He’d heard enough. “That’s when I pushed back from the table and said “Okay, I’m done. I have a show to run, and I have three children, and I am not meeting you or anyone else in a cemetery at midnight. Good day.’” That was the last Bryce heard from them.
What can we make of these events? Certainly they would appear to be neatly in line with disinformative strategies employed previously against UFO researchers and through entertainment media. Did intelligence operatives get wind of a new X-Files-style TV show utilizing factual UFOlogical detail and see it as great new opportunity to sow its content with self-serving UFO conspiracy mythology, or even simply to manage and guide the show’s existing mythology? “It was very intricate,” said Bryce of the whole affair. “It felt like it was staged for us. Like it was all built around us. It seems to be that we had been targeted for some elaborate disinformation job.”
I asked Bryce if he felt the men were the real deal, and if there is any chance it was all just a prank by some amateur tricksters:
Do I think they were really going to read us into a secret UFO program? No. But it did seem like they really were part of some official organization. One of the guys said he was a SEAL, and, I have to say, all of these guys looked like veryhardcore military guys. They didn’t look like soft fanboys pulling a prank on us. They didn’t look like guys you’d see at Comic Con. They looked and spoke like military guys.
I asked Bryce if he believed in UFOs at the time of Dark Skies’development and if his intention with the show was to educate and inform the public about the subject. He replied:
Did I intend to inform? No. I intended to entertain. But did I believe in UFOs and alien visitation? Yes. I believed strongly at the time of Dark Skies that Roswell was a real event and that it was probably unearthly in nature. I still believe that today. Whether or not I believed the Majestic 12 documents were real or faked was irrelevant. I just used the name because it was on people’s minds. But I did feel that if MJ-12 didn’t exist, then another group like it by another name probably did. Somebody had to be working on the UFO problem.
Dark Skies arrived on TV in 1996, and comparisons to a certain other UFO conspiracy show were inevitable. Bryce said:
People accused us at the time of ripping off The X-Files. But actually we didn’t like what The X-Files was doing, which was teasing everybody. We wanted to do the opposite. We wanted to say ‘we’re not going to tease you about the cover-up. We’re going to take you inside the cover-up and let our character be your tour guide through these events of history.’ It was more direct than The X-Files.
A 1996 issue of ‘Starlog’ magazine.
Dark Skies was cancelled before the end of its first season due to low ratings, which may have been a result of its inopportune weekly scheduling. The show was dark in name, dark in themes, and dark in visual content, with violent and intense scenes in most episodes. Despite this, Dark Skies was broadcast at 8pm on Saturday evenings—peak viewing time for families (for whom the show was not entirely suitable), and peak going-out time for teens and young adults. Today Dark Skies retains a cult fanbase, and Bryce is proud of what he and Brent achieved with the show. “It’s about 90 percent faithful to what I set out to do back in 1994, and it certainly succeeds in twisting UFOlogy and history and tying them into this knot. It’s one of the most subversive TV shows ever produced.”
If you’re a fan of science fiction, and of UFO conspiracy shows in particular, you owe it to yourself to check out Dark Skies… the real Men in Black did.
Earlier this month, a massive and mysterious fireball was seen above West Cornwall in the United Kingdom. Some witnesses described the fireball as green, while others say it was red, but all described it asmoving unusually slowand leaving a trail of flame in its wake. While a meteor was suspected, many eyewitnesses said the fireball did not look anything like other shooting stars or meteors they’ve seen in the past.
Now, another strangely slow-moving fireball has been spotted, this time over Canada. Bruce and Melody Hamilton, amateur astronomers based in Nova Scotia spotted the fireball on February 23rd while skygazing from their home. The similarities in the descriptions of this fireball and the one seen in England are striking. The Hamiltons described this Canadian fireball as orange with fiery debris trailing behind it, and like the Cornwall fireball, this one appeared to move incredibly slowly across the sky.
“I saw a light travelling west to east, quite a bright ball cutting a trail,” Melody told the CBC. “But it wasn’t as fast as any meteor that we’ve ever seen. We’ve seen some fairly slow ones, but this was slower. But it wasn’t as slow as an airplane. It was this unusual speed … it looked like it was on fire.”
The fireball was spotted by other witnesses who likewise said the light was different from other shooting stars. “It was quite amazing, actually,” said Jonathan Pettigrew of New Brunswick. “It seemed so close. You could even see it looked like sparks on the tail of it. It was getting brighter. It was quite interesting.”
Charles White of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada told the CBC that without further evidence, it is difficult if not impossible to determine exactly what eyewitnesses saw. White suspects the object was either a ferrous meteorite or a piece of space debris. Given the slow speed and the unusual fiery trail the fireball left behind, I’m more inclined to suspect it was the latter. With all of the talk of satellite warfare going on lately, there’s no telling what may soon be falling out of the skies. For now, these two satellites remain a mystery.
After much debate over the last 150 years, paleontologists have finally identified the mysterious creature that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. The oddly shaped creature, which is flat-looking with a long arm coming out of its side, is known as a stylophoran which is an ancient relative of starfish, sea urchins, sea lilies, brittle stars, sea cucumbers, and feather stars.
Sea Urchins
The fossils – which included around 450 specimens of the stylophoran – were discovered during a 2014 excavation at the Fezouata Formation which is along the edge of the Sahara Desert in the southern part of Morocco. These fossils date back approximately 478 million years.
Researchers were able to find out exactly what type of creature it was because their fossils had “unequivocal evidence for exceptionally preserved soft parts, both in the appendage and in the body of stylophorans,” explained Bertrand Lefebvre, who is a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) at the Laboratory of Geology of Lyon which is located in France.
After analyzing the fossils using a binocular microscope, they noticed that there were also soft parts. Since soft tissues hardly ever fossilize, the stylophorans were only recognized for their hard skeletal parts and not for their soft insides. According to Lefebvre, “Their internal anatomy was not only entirely unknown, but also – and mostly – highly controversial.”
Stylophoran fossils have been discovered around the world since the 1850s which led researchers to confirm that they lived from the middle Cambrian to the late Carboniferous periods, which date back from around 510 million to 310 million years ago.
These creatures had two main parts: a core body and an appendage that were both around 1.2 inches long. From the 1850s to the 1950s, it was believed that stylophorans were “normal” echinoderms with its appendage being compared to the stem of sea lilies. However, in the early 1960s, Georges Ubaghs, who was a Belgian paleontologist, discovered that the creature’s appendage was quite a bit different than a stem and more like an arm for feeding – similar to a starfish.
Starfish
A few years later, in the late 1960s, Richard Jefferies, who was a British paleontologist, suggested that the main body of the stylophoran was instead a head containing a brain and a pharynx, while its appendage consisted of muscles and a notochord which is a type of primitive backbone. He also believed that stylophorans were the missing link between echinoderms (invertebrates) and chordates (vertebrates).
Much later, in the 2000s, another British paleontologist named Andrew Smith gave his own interpretation of the creature. He believed that stylophorans were not the missing link between echinoderms and chordates and instead they were primitive deuterostomes which put them right in the middle of the gap between acorn worms and echinoderms.
With this new discovery, researchers can perform testing on the creature’s soft tissue and find out which of the theories best explains the creature. Ubaghs’ theory, however, does seem to be the most plausible. The creature’s flat body consisted of intestines and its appendage was more like an arm since it had a water vascular system which would have aided the creature to eat and move the same way that the arms of starfish do.
With their new study (which can be read here), we finally know the origins of the mysterious creature that has baffled scientists for over a hundred years. Lefebvre explained it best when he said, “This discovery is of particular importance, because it brings to an end a 150-year-old debate about the position of these bizarre-looking fossils in the tree of life.”
Ready to feel a bit useless? A boy from Memphis, Tennessee has apparently become the youngest person to ever build a fusion reactor aftersuccessfully building onein the spare room in his home using parts sourced from eBay. Jackson Oswalt, now 14, began construction on the machine when he was 12 and completed his working fusion reactor just before his 13th birthday.
Jackson Oswalt says that after reading a story of another boy, Taylor Wilson, who grabbed headlines when he built a working reactor at age 14, he wanted to beat his record. So he did. With his parents’ financial backing and a self-taught course in nuclear engineering, Jackson Oswalt built a small, working, fusion reactor that has apparently been verified by nuclear engineers. The machine works by running 50,000 volts of electricity through deuterium gas to force the deuterium atoms together, similar to the process that powers the sun.
Despite their admittedly limited understanding of what their son was working on, his parents provided financial support to the tune of $8,000-$10,000 dollars for parts that Jackson bought off of eBay. According to Jackson, finding the components was fairly straight-forward:
“The start of the process was just learning about what other people had done with their fusion reactors. After that, I assembled a list of parts I needed. [I] got those parts off eBay primarily and then often times the parts that I managed to scrounge off of eBay weren’t exactly what I needed. So, I’d have to modify them to be able to do what I needed to do for my project.”
Jackson Oswalt’s nuclear fusion reactor.
Credit: (CC BY-SA 4.0) James Smith39
The process of building the reactor was, unsurprisingly, a bit more complicated. There isn’t a “Nuclear Fusion For Young Engineers” guidebook just yet, so according to Jackson, the process involved a lot of trial and error and consulting the Open Source Fusor Research Consortium, a forum for amateur amateur physicists and budding mad scientists trying to construct reactors of their own. Jackson Oswalt says that once he began tinkering, the pieces began to fall into place:
“After a while, it became pretty simple to realize how it all worked together, but at the start it was definitely figuring out one aspect of it, memorizing what that actually meant and then moving on to a different aspect of it. Eventually all those pieces of the puzzle came together to make a good project.”
His father, Chris Oswalt, says that although he doesn’t know anything about how a fusion reactor works, he knew it was likely a pretty dangerous project and made sure his son consulted with experts to avoid electrocution, radiation poisoning, or any other the other potential hazards involved in nuclear reactors.
Jackson Oswalt’s resulted were verified by Richard Hull, a retired engineer and administrator of the Open Source Fusor Research Consortium, who says his machine works and that Jackson Oswalt is the youngest person in America, and likely the youngest person in the world to build a working fusion reactor.
Orb approaches huge ball of light filmed over Canada
Orb approaches huge ball of light filmed over Canada
Some people believe seeing orbs of light is visible evidence of spirits while others say orbs show signs of intelligence.
Why are we seeing these orbs or spheres only on occasion? They are beings from another dimension or they are coming from a parallel universe?
A fact is that these orbs sometimes appear in our world.
Now, last month a driver has filmed such a bright ball of light over Canada. Then suddenly a second smaller orb appears out of nowhere and follows the huge orb.
Most remarkable, at some point the bigger orb lights up, on which the smaller orb approaches and disappears into the ball of light suggesting that these orbs are under intelligent control.
Humpback Whale Found In The Forest Of The Amazon, Video, Feb 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Humpback Whale Found In The Forest Of The Amazon, Video, Feb 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Date of discovery: February 2019 Location of discovery: Island of Marajo, Araruna Beach, Amazon River, Brazil This baby humpback whale was found laying among some trees and shrubs far from the beach. Whales are often taken by UFOs...analyzed...and then returned. But sometimes animals are returned to a location that is not hospitable to them. Apparently the alien who took this whale had no idea that they only live in the water. LOL, it looks like aliens make a lot more mistakes than I thought. Scott C. Waring News states:
The humpback whale was discovered last Friday in the middle of the undergrowth on the island of Marajo off the Araruna Beach, at the mouth of the Amazon River. Scientists believe the creature died at sea and may have landed in the wooded area after rough seas and high tides threw it inland, far from the ocean. A team from Semma went to the region to inspect the remains, believed to be a 12-month old calf, and to gather information which could help to explain how the aquatic creature crash landed in the jungle. In a Facebook post by the NGO, Bicho D’agua Institute which is based on Marajo Island, biologists suspect that the calf become entangled in the mangroves after being thrown ashore by high waves.
The origin of life is one of the most important questions in science. For NASA, answering this question is especially important because it enables scientists to narrow down their search for alien life, in the solar system or beyond. In a new study, a research team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, reported how it managed to create amino acids — the basic building blocks of life that, like pieces of LEGO, assemble into proteins — in an environment that simulates what the ocean floor was like four billion years ago.
Life in a jar
Researchers made miniature seafloors by filling beakers with a solution that mimics Earth’s primordial ocean, including a hydrothermal vent — cracks in the seafloor where hot fluid escapes from the crust. These porous geological structures are produced by chemical reactions between solid rock and water, as alkaline fluids from the Earth’s crust flow up the vent towards the more acidic ocean water. This interaction leads to natural proton concentration differences remarkably similar to those powering all living cells.
Like an underwater chimney, hydrothermal vents produce a warm environment that is constantly in flux, which is why biologists have identified them as a probable hotspot for the formation of life.
“Understanding how far you can go with just organics and minerals before you have an actual cell is really important for understanding what types of environments life could emerge from,” Laurie Barge, and astrobiologist and the first author on the new study, said in a statement. “Also, investigating how things like the atmosphere, the ocean and the minerals in the vents all impact this can help you understand how likely this is to have occurred on another planet.”
Barge and colleagues combined water and minerals, along with pyruvate and ammonia, which are precursor molecules to amino acids. The solution was heated to around 158ºF (70ºC), the average temperature of a hydrothermal vent, and researchers adjusted the pH in order to mimic an alkaline environment. Oxygen was carefully removed until it reached a low concentration, similar to that of early Earth when cyanobacteria had yet to transformthe planet’s suffocating atmosphere. Finally, the researchers also added iron hydroxide, also known as “green rust”, which was abundant billion of years ago.
A time-lapse video of a miniature hydrothermal chimney forming in the lab.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
The researchers found that the green rust reacted with the oxygen from the solution, producing the amino acid alanine and the alpha hydroxy acid lactate. The latter is important because alpha hydroxy acids are the byproducts of amino acid reactions, and are therefore considered to be essential components of the complex organic molecules that might form life.
“We’ve shown that in geological conditions similar to early Earth, and maybe to other planets, we can form amino acids and alpha hydroxy acids from a simple reaction under mild conditions that would have existed on the seafloor,” said Barge.
Jupiter’s moon, Europa, is believed to hide a deep ocean of salty liquid water beneath its icy shell. Now, a new Nasa study has revealed that this ocean may have an Earth-like chemical balance that could sustain life.
Credit: NASA.
Previously, researchers had investigated whether the right ingredients for life could be found in hydrothermal vents or if they could supply enough power to drive important chemical reactions. However, this was the first time that scientists produced the precursors to life in a hydrothermal-vent-like environment.
Such environments are believed to exist elsewhere in the solar system, beneath the thick ice that covers Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. In the future, NASA would like to send robotic exploration missions to these worlds that might drill through the ice and gather evidence of amino acids and other biological signatures.
“We don’t have concrete evidence of life elsewhere yet,” said Barge. “But understanding the conditions that are required for life’s origin can help narrow down the places that we think life could exist.”
New analysis of 40 years’ worth of satellite data shows that it’s a near-certainty that humanity is actively causing global climate change.
Climate deniers often claim, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that the planet is heating up and natural disasters are becoming more intense and common just because that’s the way it is — incorrectly insisting that humanity’s love affair with fossil fuels has nothing to do with it. Now, scientists say the chances that that’s true are just one in a million.
Yep, Pretty Sure
According to the research by scientists at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, that’s because climate data has now reached a so-called “gold standard” of scientific evidence — there’s only a one in a million chance that ongoing climate change could have been caused by anything other than humanity, reports Reuters.
“The narrative out there that scientists don’t know the cause of climate change is wrong,” Benjamin Santer, the scientist who led the research, told Reuters. “We do.”
No Uncertainty
The scientific research process almost never eradicates uncertainty: researchers test their hypotheses to get a better understanding of the world, but there’s almost always some other factor out there that could have impacted their findings. In other words, a gold standard is not something that’s taken lightly.
The new analysis looked at the three largest satellite data sets used by climate scientists. It shows that two of those data sets reached the gold standard of certainty that humanity causes climate change back in 2005, and the third did in 2016.
That level of certainty, highly uncommon in scientific research, makes humanity’s impact on the planet very clear. And now we have to figure out what to do about it.
“Humanity cannot afford to ignore such clear signals,” reads the analysis.
WETENSCHAPHet ontwerp voor de grootste radiotelescoop ter wereld is klaar. Bedoeling is om volgend jaar in de outback van West-Australië te beginnen met de bouw van de SKA, ofte de ‘Square Kilometre Array’, een verwijzing naar de totale netto schoteloppervlakte van 1 km².
Het volledige gebied dat radiosignalen vanuit de ruimte moet opvangen beslaat inderdaad meer dan 1 miljoen vierkante meter. In Zuid-Afrika komt de tweede hoofdcomponent van de megatelescoop met een doorsnede tot 5.000 km. In 2028 zou hij operatief moeten zijn. SKA zou in de ruimte moeten kunnen kijken tot net na de big bang.
Lange tijd was er een strijd tussen Zuid-Afrika en Australië om de allergrootste radiotelescoop ooit te mogen bouwen. Het project van ongeveer 1,5 miljard euro werd uiteindelijk aan beide landen toegekend. Nog een tiental andere landen zijn betrokken. Nederland kocht zich in voor 30 miljoen euro en ook Canada, China, Frankrijk, India, Italië, Nieuw-Zealand, Spanje, Zweden en het Verenigd Koninkrijk doen mee.
EPADe melkweg boven 6 van de 36 antennes van de Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) in de West-Australische outback, al een voorbereiding op SKA.
De SKA zal bestaan uit duizenden antennes die gespreid worden over de wereld. Er zijn twee centra: Zuid-Afrika en West-Australië, respectievelijk SKA-midden en SKA-laag, verwijzend naar midden- en laagfrequentie. Al die antennes moeten met elkaar in verbinding staan om een zo nauwkeurig mogelijk beeld te krijgen van de ruimte. Zo zijn er in Australië 65.000 optische glasvezelkabels nodig om de enorme hoeveelheid aan data van de 132.000 laagfrequentie-antennes te kunnen transporteren.
De centrale supercomputer die alles moet verwerken heeft een rekencapaciteit van maar liefst 100 miljoen pc’s. De SKA zal het universum dan ook gedetailleerder dan ooit kunnen vatten. De radiotelescoop zal zo gevoelig zijn dat hij een luchthavenradar kan waarnemen op een planeet tientallen lichtjaren van hier.
SKA OrganisationArtistieke impressie van wat SKA moet worden in West-Australië.
Dat zou tot wetenschappelijke revoluties kunnen leiden over het universum en het ontstaan ervan. Er wordt zelfs al luidop gedroomd van een verklaring voor het mysterie van ‘donkere energie’. We zullen ook meer te weten komen over de magnetische velden die het universum doorkruisen, en over hoe die gegenereerd worden.
“Astronomen hopen verder dat de SKA iets zal vinden waar ze al decennialang naar zoeken: een pulsar die in een baan rond een zwart gat cirkelt”, klinkt het. “Zo’n ontdekking zou hen in staat stellen de meest veeleisende test tot nu toe van Einsteins theorie van de zwaartekracht te maken.”
Last but not least: het is ook niet uitgesloten dat het gigantische meetinstrument signalen zou opvangen van buitenaardse beschavingen.
YouTubeDe Venera 8 die in 1972 door de Sovjet-Unie gelanceerd werd.
WETENSCHAPDe restanten van de Cosmos 482 - een mislukte ruimtemissie van de Sovjet-Unie – die in 1972 gelanceerd werd, zullen waarschijnlijk dit jaar terug naar de aarde keren. Dat voorspellen astronauten die het ruimteafval in de gaten houden.
Een tripje naar het verleden: op 31 maart 1972 lanceerde de toenmalige Sovjet-Unie de Cosmos 482, een ruimtesonde met een satelliet aan boord om de planeet Venus te bestuderen. De Koude Oorlog was volop aan de gang en de Sovjet-Unie wedijverde niet alleen op aarde met de Verenigde Staten.
Ruimtewedloop De ruimtewedloop van de twee naties liep synchroon met de wapenwedloop. Daarbij leverden zowel de VS als de Sovjet-Unie inspanningen om zoveel mogelijk satellieten te lanceren om de ruimte te verkennen. De Spoetnik 1 (1957) was de eerste succesvolle satelliet die door de Sovjet-Unie in een baan rondom de aarde werd gestuurd. Daarop volgde vier maanden later het antwoord van de VS: de Explorer 1. En zo snelden in nog geen half jaar tijd plots twee satellieten doorheen de ruimte.
De Sovjets stuurden de eerste hond naar de ruimte, maar Neil Armstrong was de eerste man die een (Amerikaanse) stap op de maan zette. “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, zijn de legendarische woorden die in alle geschiedenisboeken geschreven werden. Daarmee leken de successen van de Sovjets al snel vergeten, al waren het er eigenlijk meer dan de Amerikaanse successen.
Trial and error
Zo was de Sovjet-Unie de eerste om Venus te verkennen. Dat gebeurde voor het eerst in 1971 met de Venera 7. Hetzelfde moest een jaar later gebeuren met de Venera 8, onderdeel van de ruimtemissie Cosmos 482. Maar daar liep het even mis. Door een probleem met de rakettrap, brak de ruimtesonde in verschillende brokstukken. Sommige brokstukken kwamen enkele dagen later al neer in Nieuw-Zeeland. Andere restanten bleven als ruimteafval rondom de aarde wentelen.
Ruimteafval
Bijna exact 47 jaar later dreigen die restanten terug te keren naar de aarde. Bovendien geloven astronauten dat 40 tot 50 procent van het ruimtevaarttuig nog in één geheel rondom de aarde cirkelt. En omdat de ruimtesonde voorzien was van een afdalingsmodule die zo’n 500 kilogram woog, is de kans groot dat de onderdelen hun terugkeer naar de aarde overleven.
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Wat zagen de Apollo-astronauten op de maan? Bekijk deze video
Wat zagen de Apollo-astronauten op de maan? Bekijk deze video
Veel mensen zijn ervan overtuigd dat de maanlanding is opgenomen in een Hollywood-studio. Er zijn ook mensen die zeggen dat we wel zijn geland op de maan, maar dat daar onverklaarbare gebeurtenissen hebben plaatsgevonden.
Na de maanlanding in 1969 viel er een radiostilte die twee minuten duurde, merkte auteur Michael Salla op in het tv-programma Ancient Aliens.
Er heerst veel controverse over wat er gedurende die twee minuten is gebeurd, aldus Salla.
Geheime boodschappen
Volgens NASA-onderzoeker Otto Bender hebben diverse zendamateurs geheime boodschappen onderschept die nooit openbaar zijn gemaakt.
“De astronauten spraken naar verluidt over het zien van buitenaardse objecten op de maan, waaronder vliegende schotels die aan de rand van een krater waren geparkeerd,” zei auteur David Childress.
Radiopresentator David Whitehead wees op de gezichtsuitdrukking van de astronauten bij terugkeer op aarde.
Depressief
Je zou verwachten dat ze dolblij waren omdat ze op de maan waren geweest, maar in plaats daarvan zagen ze er heel depressief uit, alsof ze op het punt stonden om over te geven, stelde Whitehead.
Na Apollo 11 stuurde de NASA nog zes bemande missies naar de maan.
Schrijver Alan Butler vroeg zich af waarom we nooit meer terug zijn gegaan en waarom de Sovjet-Unie nooit mensen naar de maan heeft gestuurd, terwijl het land daar wel toe in staat was.
The 10-ton mammal was found in the jungle undergrowth on the island of Marajo, which sits at the mouth of the Amazon River.
Although scientists presume the enormous creature was hurled onshore during a storm, they do not understand how it came so far inland or why it was swimming off the coast in the first place.
Marine specialists from the Bicho D’agua Institute, a conservation group based on Marajo, are part of the team examining the whale, which is thought to have died several days before it was found.
A dead sperm whale lies on Hunstanton beach in Norfolk on February 5 2016
AFP/Getty
Renata Emin, the institute’s project leader, said: “We’re still not sure how it landed here, but we’re guessing that the creature was floating close to the shore and the tide, which has been pretty considerable over the past few days, picked it up and threw it inland, into the mangrove.
“Along with this astonishing feat, we are baffled as to what a humpback whale is doing on the north coast of Brazil during February because this is a very unusual occurrence.”
Humpback whales are commonly seen further south on the Bahia coast of Brazil between August and November, but very rarely travel the thousands of kilometres north to the mouth of the Amazon.
Ms Emin said the whale is believed to be a calf which got separated from its mother while migrating back south.
Researchers said there were no clear reasons why the animal died but were starting to take samples from the carcass for further study.
Marine biologists are now taking samples from the enormous creature to find out how it died (SEMMA/FocusOn News)
“Depending on the state of decomposition, some information may already have been lost.
“We are collecting as much information as we can get and identifying marks and wounds on its body to see if it was caught in a net or hit by a boat,” Ms Emin said.
Dirlene Silva, from the state environment department, told local television that the body of the whale would be left where it crash-landed into the jungle.
“It’s very difficult to get there and there’s no way we can send a bulldozer because it would not get through. There is no way to remove it. To get there, we need to cross the swamp.”
The skeleton of the humpback will, however, be dismantled, preserved, and then sent to a natural history museum in the city of Belem for future study.
11 meter lange walvis ontdekt middenin Braziliaanse jungle. Biologen staan voor een raadsel: hoe kan dit?
Foto: Facebook/Bicho D'água
11 meter lange walvis ontdekt middenin Braziliaanse jungle. Biologen staan voor een raadsel: hoe kan dit?
Brazilië is in de ban van een 11 meter lange bultrug die middenin de jungle is gevonden. De walvis werd vrijdag op tientallen meters van de zee ontdekt op het eilandje Marajo in de monding van de Amazone.
Biologen staan voor een raadsel. Hoe het dier zo ver van het water in de jungle terecht is gekomen, weet niemand.
Bultruggen komen maar zelden in de buurt van de noordkust van Brazilië en al helemaal niet in februari.
Toeval
Normaal gesproken verblijven bultruggen tussen augustus en november aan de noordoostkust en trekken ze daarna richting Antarctica.
De walvis werd bij toeval ontdekt, omdat het dier grote zwermen aasgieren aantrok.
Wetenschappers onderzoeken nu hoe en waarom het dier op de vreemde plaats terecht is gekomen.
Geen verwondingen
Op het eerste gezicht lijkt de walvis geen verwondingen te hebben.
Vermoed wordt dat het dier, dat ongeveer een jaar oud was, tijdens de tocht naar het zuiden zijn moeder is kwijtgeraakt.
Omdat het gebied moerassig is, kan het karkas niet worden verplaatst.
The Earth’s atmosphere is much bigger than previously thought, extending far beyond the Moon, a team of scientists have revealed. The amazing discovery was made thanks to data that has been sitting unexamined for over 20 years.
We now know that the atmosphere surrounding our planet stretches 630,000km (391,464 miles) away and is 50 times the diameter of Earth, thanks to the discovery and analysis of decades-old data by scientists at Russia’s Space Research Institute.
It means that the Moon is part of our atmosphere and not outside of it. In fact, it’s actually located right in the middle of our atmosphere, at an average distance of 384,400 kilometres (238,855 miles) from Earth.
“The Moon flies through Earth’s atmosphere,”explained study author physicist Igor Baliukin of Russia’s Space Research Institute.
The jaw-dropping data was collected by the NASA/European Space Agency Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) between 1996 and 1998 and had been gathering dust in an archive since then.
SOHO unwittingly gathered the groundbreaking information when it was mapping the geocorona, the layer of hydrogen atoms located where the atmosphere merges with outer space. The thin layer glows in far-ultraviolet light which can only be seen from space and is difficult to measure.
Because of this, it was, until now, thought to be about 200,000 kilometres (124,000 miles) from Earth, as that is the point at which solar radiation pressure would override Earth’s gravity.
SOHO’s SWAN instrument has the ability to measure far-ultraviolet emissions from hydrogen atoms, allowing it to make its amazing observation of the geocorona.
“Data archived many years ago can often be exploited for new science,” SOHO project scientist Bernhard Fleck of the European Space Agency said. “This discovery highlights the value of data collected over 20 years ago and the exceptional performance of SOHO.”
Waarom de mens de atmosfeer van de aarde nog nooit heeft verlaten. Onderzoekers doen verbazingwekkende ontdekking Waarom de mens de atmosfeer van de aarde nog nooit heeft verlaten. Onderzoekers doen verbazingwekkende ontdekking in Universum 26 februari 20
Waarom de mens de atmosfeer van de aarde nog nooit heeft verlaten. Onderzoekers doen verbazingwekkende ontdekking
De atmosfeer van de aarde is veel groter dan gedacht en strekt zich uit tot voorbij de maan, zo hebben wetenschappersonthuld.
Ze hebben gegevens geanalyseerd waar al meer dan 20 jaar niks mee gedaan was.
Uit waarnemingen van het zonneobservatorium SOHO blijkt dat de aardatmosfeer zich uitstrekt tot een afstand van 630.000 kilometer.
Middenin
Dat betekent dat de maan onderdeel van onze atmosfeer is. Sterker nog: de maan bevindt zich middenin de aardatmosfeer.
De zogeheten geocorona, bestaande uit een wolk van waterstofatomen, vormt de grens tussen de atmosfeer en de ruimte. SOHO heeft deze wolk vast weten te leggen.
De waterstofatomen zenden in de atmosfeer ultraviolet licht uit, dat alleen vanuit de ruimte waarneembaar is.
Niets mee gedaan
“De maan vliegt door de aardatmosfeer,” zei natuurkundige Igor Baljoekin van het Russische instituut voor ruimteonderzoek.
De gegevens zijn tussen 1996 en 1998 verzameld door SOHO, maar er werd vervolgens niets mee gedaan.
Eerder werd aangenomen dat de atmosfeer zich uitstrekt tot een afstand van pakweg 200.000 kilometer.
Waardevol
“Gegevens die vele jaren geleden zijn verzameld, kunnen vaak worden gebruikt voor nieuwe wetenschap,” zei SOHO-wetenschapper Bernhard Fleck.
“Deze ontdekking laat zien hoe waardevol 20 jaar oude gegevens zijn en hoe uitzonderlijk goed SOHO presteert,” voegde hij toe.
Biologists in Brazil are baffled this week after one of the world’s largest mammals has been found in an anomalous location. Wildlife experts were alerted this week to the presence of a humpback whale carcass on the island of Marajo, which sits at the mouth of the Amazon River. Locals discovered the out-of-place whale after first noticing carrion birds circling above a remote part of the island’s dense mangrove swamp. In fact, the area is so remote that wildlife officials struggled to even reach the carcass in the first place. The whale measures around 11 meters (36 feet) in length and is estimated to weigh around 10 tons (9,100 kg).
Scientists are baffled by the find. It is speculated that the whale was already dead before being washed upon the island by a massive storm surge, but that much so far remains merely an educated hunch. Even more mysterious is the fact that a humpback whale was off the coast of Brazil in the first place.
Out of place animals are a classic Fortean phenomenon.
Renata Emin, leader of Brazilian conservation project Bicho D’agua Institute, told The Independent the discovery of the whale carcass is a rare and somewhat unexplained anomaly. “We’re still not sure how it landed here, but we’re guessing that the creature was floating close to the shore and the tide, which has been pretty considerable over the past few days, picked it up and threw it inland, into the mangrove. Along with this astonishing feat, we are baffled as to what a humpback whale is doing on the north coast of Brazil during February because this is a very unusual occurrence.”
Humpback whales are known to migrate close to the southern coasts of Brazil in warmer months, but discovering one so far north and at this time of year is quite unusual. Interestingly, marine biologists in Hawaii have been baffled by a mysterious drop in the number of whales visiting the islands in recent years, and “researchers aren’t sure if there has been a reduction in the overall humpback population or if the mammals are simply going somewhere else.” Are these whale populations in the midst of a massive and mysterious migration, or might something more catastrophic be afoot?
Whales are believed to be among the most intelligent animals on Earth.
As we continue to discover anomalous animal deaths, one thing is clear: the natural world is under stress like never before. Is humanity destined for a future alone on the Earth as so many science fiction tales have foretold? Will we be able to develop the technological means needed to live on an Earth devoid of plants and animals before it’s too late? Is such a thing even possible?
There’s probably no bigger stereotype in the modern Sci-Fi genre than the concept of the ‘alien invasion’. Since Hollywood found it to be such a gold mine (something my friend and colleagueRobbie Grahamhas explored at length) popular culture has flooded our heads with visions of ginormous vessels blackening the skies of New York, London or other major metropoles, and ill-intentioned intruders from outer space so highly advanced and powerful they are almost unstoppable –‘almost’ being always the operative word, since a story in which the aliens couldn’t be defeated by some unexpected weakness by indomitable Earthlings would make for a pretty depressing blockbuster… Or at least, boring AF.
But what if aliens turned out to be not that highly advanced and unstoppable, as we would like to imagine them? What if the only thing needed to stop them was not a secret weapon or a computer virus coded by Jeff Goldblum, but just a bit of bravery –and a good whack in the head?
The bizarre tale I’m about to share with you, dear Coppertops, has its roots during the crazy years of the UMMO affair we revisited on my last article, yet it concluded decades later under very serendipitous circumstances. Its high-strangeness nature is a perfect example of how the UFO phenomenon –whatever its origin and true nature it may be– always seems to confound our preconceived expectations.
It all started around the time when a group of people in Spain began to receive the first of those long, typewritten letters allegedly sent by extraterrestrials from planet UMMO. The landing of a disk-shaped object in the neighborhood of Aluche had already been published by the press –for more info about that, please go to my previous post– and a small group of flying saucer enthusiasts were having regular gatherings at the basement of the Café Lion in Madrid, which was known around bohemian and literary groups of the Spaniard capital as “La Ballena Alegre” (The Happy Whale) due to the whimsical murals adorning its walls.
“La Ballena Alegra” at the basement of Café Lion (which is now an Irish pub)
It was in one of those UFOlogical salons, on the night of May 30th, 1967 and with around 30 people present, when the lecture of a new UMMO letter took place. The document announced the coming of three of their scout ships to planet Earth, which would take place in the coming days. The specified coordinates for the arrival of the Ummite vessels were:
“BOLIVIA (Oruro Zone): The descent will be verified on a point located within a circular area which, having the city of Oruro at its center, has a radius of 208 kilometers with a margin of error of ± 4 kilometers.
SPAIN (Madrid Zone): The descent is foreseen within a circular area which has the following coordinates at its center: Longitude (3° 45′ 20,6″ W). Latitude (40° 28′ 2,2″ N)
BRAZIL (Río Grande Do Sul Zone): Proximity of Santo Angelo. The elevated margin of error prevents further specification.”
The whole assembly signed on the document as witnesses of what they had heard. If the announcement came true it would prove the extraterrestrial origin of the letter –or so they thought. Nobody seemed to find it funny that the only precise coordinates provided by the extraterrestrials were the ones from their own country, Spain (why couldn’t these space visitors be more accurate with the Bolivia and Brazil landings?). José Luis Jordán Peña, the man who decades later would claim the authorship of the UMMO deception, even had the gall to put his own signature on the paper.
On June the 2nd the newspaper Informaciones published the UFO photographs taken near San José de Valderas, that would end up to be known worldwide thanks to Antonio Ribera and Rafael Farriols’s book “Un Caso Perfecto” (A Perfect Case), which didn’t turn out to be so ‘perfect’ after all (as I already explained on my previous article) but such controversy was still years in the horizon, and the nitid images of the white disk with the black H-like emblem was all the true believers needed to deem the UMMO information worthy of credit.
But what about the two other landing sites? On June 5th Enrique Villagrasa –one of the earliest recipients of UMMO letters– took the initiative of writing to the biggest newspapers in the Bolivian city of Oruro and the Brazilian city of Santo Angelo, to inquire whether any UFO-related news had been reported between the dates of the reading of the UMMO letter at La Ballena Alegre, and the Valderas sighting. Although he never got a reply back from Brazil, two weeks later Villagrasa obtained a written response from the director of the Bolivian newspaper La Patria, telling him that something strange actually did take place around that time, which had been reported by one of the newspaper’s correspondents who had traveled to the town of Uyunu (approximately 300 kilometers south of Oruro) to cover a story pertaining to a robbery of dynamite –remember that at the time, the Bolivian army was fighting guerrilla insurgents and in that same year (1967) Ernesto “Che” Guevara was captured and executed.
“Che” Guevara, about to be executed by Bolivian forces (1967)
According to Enrique Miralles, director of La Patria, the story the correspondent had brought back from that remote location was so fantastic,“I refused to print it until I could count with convincing proof [of its authenticity] –adequate identification of the persons and authorities that intervened in the event, evidence and photographs, etc. It was in such circumstances that your letter arrived to my hands.”
What was this ‘fantastic’ story obtained by the La Patria reporter? Why and how were the authorities involved? The director’s letter didn’t offer any details, and it was the last time Villagrasa would ever hear from Miralles. And thus for almost 30 years the cryptic words from the South American journalist sat as an unassuming thread in the larger yarn of the UMMO affair, until UFO investigator Juan José Benítez decided to do what no one else thought of: travel to South America to try and discover what –if anything– had taken place on that small corner of the Bolivian Altiplano on June of 1967.
As Benítez’s explains in his book “El Hombre que Susurraba a los Ummitas” (The Man who Whispered to the Ummites) the quest took 5 years, several trips to Bolivia, a lot of tenacity (Benítez’s wife, who accompanied him, would probably say “stubbornness”) and more than a few synchronicities, but he eventually managed to track down most of the participants involved in what certainly constitutes one of the strangest cases in the annals of UFOlogy. The first one was the by-then retired newspaper director Enrique Miralles in 1996, who confirmed to him that one of their correspondents –an Argentinian by the name of Lucho Amarayo– was the one who brought back a report concerning a remote village in the Uyuni region where “little men” were said to have slaughtered the sheep of the native farmers, and then fled the scene riding some ‘flying chairs'(!). The peasants had complained to the nearest local authorities who –despite the fantastic narrative– decided to deploy a small regiment of soldiers to investigate anyway, for fear it could be the work of rebel forces; but Miralles never learned what came of that, and as explained in the letter he wrote to Villagrasa in 1967, he never bothered to print the story for lack of evidence.
Benítez tried to obtain more information by looking at the old records of the La Patria newspaper during his stay at Oruro, but the only thing he found was the date when the robbery of the explosives took place (June 11, 1967) –which didn’t coincide with the UMMO announcement received by the Madrilenian contactees, but by now the story of the ‘little flying men’ was enough to pique his curiosity. His next clue of the case came rather unexpectedly, when he was forced to stop the investigation and travel to the Bolivian capital (La Paz) to attend a book fair. There, while signing books, he managed to meet two fans of his who turned out to be related to colonel Rogelio Ayala, the officer in charge of the regiment that had been sent to investigate the what had upset the indigenous villagers. Such incredible coincidences have become a regular feature in Benítez’s adventures and have further convinced him that, when it comes to UFOs, nothing happens by chance.
Through the testimony of colonel Ayala, Benítez’s managed to gather more pieces of the puzzle, and interviewed other members of the regiment who accompanied the Bolivian officer to the remote native village –Pablo Ayala (the colonel’s son and the youngest in the group), lieutenants Caso and Ampuero, and doctor Jesús Pereyra, who joined the soldiers in the expedition to respond to the plea of the three men sent by the village, who had made the long trek to the military station at Uyuni to denounce the loss of their precious animals.
“We left at dawn and the trip felt endless to me,” Pablo told Benítez. “The site was just composed by 2 or 3 adobe huts in the middle of nowhere and far away from the nearest town. Close to the houses were the stone corrals where they keep their sheep, and on the ground they had placed all the dead animals. We counted more than 30. We were perplexed: the carcasses showed numerous mutilations, with a series of near-perfect circular orifices. The death of the beasts didn’t make any sense –it was the only source of sustenance for these people.”
Bolivian stone corral. In a similar enclosure, Valentina found the ‘dwarf’ butchering her sheep
Aside from the surgical incisions in the bodies, the members of the regiment also noticed that several organs (the eyes, ears, tongues, kidneys and livers) were missing. If this had been the work of guerrilla forces, they thought, it was most peculiar –if the rebels were looking for food, why take only the entrails and leave all the meat behind? The soldiers also observed another peculiar thing: most of the animals appeared to be completely exsanguinated (devoid of blood), a typical hallmark in anomalous mutilation cases.
The manner by which those poor sheep had been slaughtered was told to the military men by one of the village’s women, who had been the main witness of the incredible event. Through all sorts of inquiries and synchronicities that involved further trips to Bolivia, Benítez was miraculously able to track down that same native woman in 2001 –an illiterate peasant that only spoke in quechua by the name of Valentina Flores, who was around 60 years old when Benítez interviewed her, yet still clearly remembered that ominous encounter with “los hombrecitos” (the little men), which had brought an irreparable calamity to her family:
“That day I was alone, with only my youngest daughter beside me; I was carrying her on my back with a blanket. My husband was a commissioner and –like the rest of the other men– he was at the pampa, working. It was around four in the afternoon when it happened. I secured the sheep and lambs at some place, and then went out to look for a llama and its calf which had gone missing.”
Valentina explained to Benítez the search for the missing llama had taken her about 90 minutes, but by the time she returned the sheep were gone.
“I followed the tracks of the herd and arrived to the corrals at the nearby hill. Inside the pen was a small man on his knees, with a sheep between his legs. The top of the corral –an open, circular enclosure with stone walls around 5′ high– was covered with something that looked like a net. I got scared. That man had killed all my animals.”
Drawing of the ‘flying humanoids’ by Pablo Ayala, part of the regiment sent to investigate
—“What did he look like?” asked Benítez.
—“He was like a child, this high (raising her hand to a height of about 4 feet). He wore a strange one-piece suit, like a scuba diver, dark in color from the feet to his neck. His boots were brown. On the head he was wearing something that reminded me of a helmet, leaving his face uncovered. His skin was very white; he had blond hair, blue eyes, and a red and bushy mustache.” Valentina also added that the short being looked young and ‘plump’, and was carrying a strange apparatus on his back that looked like a ‘chair with legs’, as well as other gadgets on the sides held together with suspenders. Not too far away from the enclosure Valentina observed a second individual similar to the one that was busy butchering her herd–who apparently hadn’t noticed her presence yet, because he had his back turned toward the entrance. Next to this pale-faced ‘dwarf’ was another weird contraption, which seemed to control the net covering the pen.
“I took up a rock from the ground and threw it at the one inside the corral, who got frightened when he saw me and got up. I kept throwing stones at him. He then touched the machine next to him and the net ‘disappeared'” –Benítez interpreted Valentina’s words as meaning that the net had contracted inside the radio-like contraption, after the small humanoid had touched one of its buttons.
Native Bolivian woman, herding sheep.
Valentina, who despite their strange appearance still thought she was facing two common thieves, kept coming closer and stoning the mysterious murdering midget. But by then the second intruder had taken flight and fled the scene! According to the crude description provided by the indigenous woman, on top of their helmet the beings had some sort of ‘propeller’, which combined with two long ‘tubes’ that dangled from the sides of their bodies allowed them to float in the air. Meanwhile the being inside the corral had hastily gathered all his things –including a bag full of the sheep’s freshly removed entrails– and ran out of the enclosure.
“He talked to me, but I couldn’t understand his words, which weren’t Quechua nor Spanish. He looked as upset as I was. Dear God, he had killed all my herd! I went crazy, grabbed a stick and went after him. When I was some 6 feet away from him I struck him with all my strength. The stick, which had iron on the tip, hit him straight in the face and he started to bleed.”The little man kept yelling at Valentina with that unintelligible language, and then he proceeded to attack her with some sort of “knife” that had a small hook on its end, the same weapon he had used to kill and butcher the sheep. “It had a chain on the other end,” Valentina explained,“and it always came back to his hand every time he threw it.” No disintegrator gun or phaser set to stun for this alien invader, as Hollywould would demand, but instead something more suitable for a cheesy kung-fu movie.
Bolivian woman carrying her child with a ‘rebozo’
The ‘boomerang knife’ made several deep cuts in the chest and arms of Valentina, but the thick knot of the blanket with which she was carrying her child protected her neck and probably saved her life, according to the brave woman, who kept on beating on her attacker with the stick until she managed to break his arm and wrist. “Then, very nervously and manipulating his devices with the left hand, he ran to the top of a little hill nearby and took flight like the other one,” she said, leaving only a trail of blood –red, just like ours, according to Valentina– as the fleeting testament of the amazing battle. According to the military men’s testimony to Benítez, although some samples of the blood were taken, they never bothered to sent it for analysis to one of the few labs operating in Bolivia at the time.
The other remnants of the encounter –the 63 sheep and lambs killed and mutilated by the flying little fiends– were later inspected by the regiment of soldiers who came to the village a few days later, as was already explained in the previous paragraphs. They took Valentina’s testimony, but since it was clear the slaughtering had not been the work of rebel forces it was no longer a matter for their official concern, so they returned to their station to give their report, and no reparation of the damage was ever given to the native farmers. Unlike Jacob, who had been blessed by the angel he had wrestled with, Valentina’s encounter with the flying humanoids was a curse: Financially ruined, the Flores family had no choice but to leave their home and seek work in the mines of Oruro. From there they migrated to the south of the country, never to set foot in their old village again.
After so many years, miles traversed and thousands of dollars spent, Benítez had finally closed the book on this UFOlogical case. Although satisfied, he now had more questions than when he began his personal quest: why would ‘superior beings from another world’ –supposedly more evolved than us, both technically and morally– have the necessity to rob indigenous peasants (the poorest of the poor in this world) of their livelihood by butchering the herd of livestock they depended on to survive? What could possibly be the connection between the Bolivian humanoids and the bigger UMMO affair? Valentina never observed the famous )+( emblem in the clothes of the aerial assailants, and yet it’s clear that the chain of events that led the Spanish investigator to this close encounter was triggered by the infamous letter received by the Madrilenian contactees in 1967. I already explained on my previous article why the UMMO case is filled with hoaxes and deception and how the letters were forged by José Luis Jordán Peña; yet without the letters, this case –like so many others– would have fallen through the cracks of history and be lost forever.
Or would it? Although I was forced to skip many details for the sake of brevity, the manner by which Juan José Benítez managed to be face to face with Valentina Flores is almost as incredible as the story itself. It’s almost as if some UFO cases take place not for the sake of the original witnesses, but instead are intended to be discovered and studied by someone else, years or even decades later. If that’s the case, it would not only be further proof of the ‘theatrical’ nature of the phenomenon, but also that *you*, dear Coppertop, were meant to read this post on Mysterious Universe, just as much as *I* was meant to write it…
As for me, one of the reasons I love this case so much is not only the fact that it’s level of absurdity makes me suspect it actually did take place, but also that it kind of goes counter to some of the more recent ideas proposed in the field of UFOlogy. Take my friend and mentor Greg Bishop, who coined the term ‘co-creation’ to depict how paranormal events are somehow influenced by the witness’s expectations and cultural circumstances; although I find Greg’s ideas provocative and going on the right track, Valentina Flores’s encounter with levitating leprechauns showing gear straight out of a Jetsons cartoon would make more sense if it had happened in 19th-century Ireland or to someone of Celtic ascendancy, instead of a South American indigenous woman deep in the heart of the Bolivian Altiplano –BTW, isn’t it interesting how her weapon against the intruder had IRON, which is known to be a substance fairy folk are notoriously averse to?
And yet encounters with pale-skinned dwarves are not that uncommon in South America, as stated by Jacques Vallee in his book The Invisible College, where he narrates the case of a Brazilian soldier who in 1969, while fishing on a boat at a lagoon North of Belo Horizonte, was abducted by two 4-feet-tall beings who took him inside a machine that looked like an upright cylinder. The poor man was dragged blindfolded until he was sat inside a large, windowless stone chamber in front of an assembly of robust dwarves with long reddish hair and bushy beards. The leader of the dwarves forced him to drink from a cubical glass made of stone, then proceeded to communicate through sign language and drawings their intentions of making the soldier their ‘envoy’ with the people of Earth. The man refused and started to frantically pray the rosary until the irritated dwarves took him out of the room and transported him back two hundred miles –and four days later– from the lake where he was kidnapped.
The Brazilian soldier recounted that in one of the walls of the stone chamber was a low shelf with the corpses of four human beings. Had they been killed by his diminutive captors? That was the soldier’s assumption. Maybe the whole event was some sort of ‘conditioning treatment” using a similar level of absurdity, shock and theatricality than in the Bolivia case of 1967, elaborately conducted for purposes that escape our reasoning. Or maybe there really are beings out there who –like the stereotypical alien invaders of Hollywood blockbusters– make no distinctions between the butchering of livestock and the slaughtering of people. In which case the name of Valentina Flores needs to be remembered and praised for all posterity, for giving ZERO FUCKS during a mano-a-mano with a being from another world, and showing advanced anti-gravity technology is not match against a feisty woman defending her property.
Move over, Will Smith! Here’s the *real* defender of planet Earth.
Charles Fort – wherever you are – this one is for you. The past week gave us a festival of classic Fortean phenomena: fish rained from the sky in Malta, green snow covered the ground in Siberia, and a biblical plague of locusts is heading to Egypt. What’s happening? Is the apocalypse now?
Let’s start in Malta, where one of the best pictures of the event was taken from inside a car and shows a plate-sized fish on the windshield. (See it and other pictures and video of the fish rain here.) Another has a man reaching up to catch another fish with his bare hand before it reaches the ground – a feat worthy of a tryout with the Yankees. Most of the media reports from Xemxija, a Maltese suburb on the western coast of St. Paul’s Bay on the Mediterranean island show the cause of the flying soon-to-be-frying fish – huge waves and gale-force winds blowing at a record-breaking 101 kph (63 mph or almost Force 11) that punished the area with falling trees and flooded streets and then asked for forgiveness with a gift of free fish dinners. Weather is typically the cause of fish rains but the sheer size of those falling on Xemxija made it a Fortean event.
There are many places around the world where locals will say, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute, it will change”. But colors? Welcome to Siberia, where just last week a deadly black snow fell on three cities (coal generator accidents and pollution were blamed). This week, a prettier but equally mysterious and toxic green snow (pictures here) covered parts of the Russian city of Pervouralsk on the Chusovaya River in the Ural Mountains. When there’s non-white snow, a first inclination is to see if it tastes like fruit – lime in this case – but that’s usually a mistake as kids at a pre-school in Pervouralsk found out when instead of a mouthful of candy they ended up with “a cough and their skin turned red, with rashes on their faces” according to one eyewitness report. A better idea is to look for a nearby manufacturing facility and sure enough, the snow gets greener as you get closer to the JSC “Russian Chrome 1915” plant. Plant officials deny any responsibility, saying there’s been no recent accidents, but it was deemed responsible for a similar green stream event in 2016 which was caused by waste in a storage well that dated back at least 30 years to the Soviet era. It’s happened often enough that Pervouralsk kids don’t need a copy of Fort’s “The Book of the Damned” or a Zappa song to remind them not to eat the green snow.
Onward to Egypt, where any strange event is first checked against the biblical story of Moses before becoming Fortean. In Egypt, the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is warning that massive swarms of desert locusts – “the world’s most dangerous migratory pest” – have finished their decimative dining in Sudan and Eritrea and are moving up the Red Sea to Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Heavy fall rains in those areas have allowed the locusts to breed twice and two generations of them are looking to be fed before taking time off for summer breeding. Eat, sex, repeat. Sound like any other bothersome creatures you know? The desert locusts are worse.
“But following a large rainfall they can quickly multiply, eventually forming hopper bands or swarms of adults, composed of billions of individual locusts. A desert locust adult can consume its own weight (roughly 2 grams) in food in a day. The added difficulty is they’re normally in the desert, so they’re eating the vegetation there. Once they get into rain-fed crops on the edge of the desert, grown by poor farmers, they’re eating an entire livelihood, and then they move into the country and affect national food supplies.”
It’s effectively a total annihilation of crops, says the UN’s locust expert, Keith Cressman. Would that constitute a biblical plague or a Fortean event? While there are many who would look at this as godly punishment for evil governments and religious oppression, even Charles Fort would agree that the real cause is the damned climate change. You can spend billions to kill the locusts and poison the environment, but that won’t stop the real plague.
Fish rain … green snow … locust plague. Tired of the Armageddon? Wait a minute … it’ll change.
The late Brad Steiger had a specific interest in the issue of alchemy.He wrote the following: “Helvetius, the grandfather of the celebrated philosopher of the same name, was an alchemist who labored ceaselessly to fathom the mystery of the ‘philosopher’s stone,’ the legendary catalyst that would transmute base metals into gold. One day in 1666 when he was working in his laboratory at the Hague, a stranger attired all in black, as befitted a respectable burgher of North Holland, appeared and informed him that he would remove all the alchemist’s doubts about the existence of the philosopher’s stone, for he himself possessed such an object.”
In 1852, Charles Mackay said of this that the mysterious man “…asked Helvetius if he thought he should know that rare gem if he saw it. To which Helvetius replied, that he certainly should not. The burgher immediately drew from his pocket a small ivory box, containing three pieces of metal, of the color of brimstone, and extremely heavy; and assured Helvetius, that of them he could make as much as twenty tons of gold. Helvetius informs us, that he examined them very attentively; and seeing that they were very brittle, he took the opportunity to scrape off a small portion with his thumb-nail. He then returned to the stranger, with an entreaty that he would perform the process of transmutation before him. The stranger replied, that he was not allowed to do so, and went away.”
Mackay continued that several weeks later the mysterious character was back. Helvetius implored the man to share with him the secrets of alchemy, which, apparently, he did: “Helvetius repeated the experiment alone, and converted six ounces of lead into very pure gold.” Such was the fame that surrounded this event, said Mackay, “all of the notable persons of the town flocked to the study of Helvetius to convince themselves of the fact. Helvetius performed the experiment again, in the presence of the Prince of Orange, and several times afterwards, until he exhausted the whole of the powder he had received from the stranger, from whom it is necessary to state, he never received another visit; nor did he ever discover his name or condition.”
In 1677, Leopold I, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Austria, suffered something terrible: his precious supply of gold finally became exhausted. This was utterly disastrous, as it was gold, specifically, that Leopold relied upon to pay his troops, as they sought to keep at bay the marauding attacks of the Turks. Help, however, was soon at hand, and in a decidedly curious fashion. Late one night, in November 1672, Leopold was visited by a monk of the Order of St. Augustine, one Johann Wenzel Seiler. Interestingly, it has been suggested that “Johann Wenzel Seiler” was actually a pseudonym that the dark-garbed, cloaked, and hooded character had adopted. Whatever the truth, Seiler confidently said he could banish all of the king’s problems in an instant. The king, who already had an interest in all things alchemical, listened carefully to what Seiler had to say.
The monk motioned Leopold to follow him to the steps of the palace, which he did. It was on the steps that Seiler did something remarkable. He took a silver medallion, placed into a cauldron of magical liquid, and then extracted it. Lo and behold, it had been transformed into gold. The king was delighted, Austria’s gold problem (or, rather, the sudden lack of it) was solved. In 1880, Dr. Franz Hartmann, who carefully and deeply studied the controversy surrounding alchemy, said: “…it is stated that this medal, consisting originally of silver, has been partly transformed into gold, by alchemical means, by the same Wenzel Seiler who was afterwards made a knight by the Emperor Leopold I. and given the title Wenzeslaus Ritter von Reinburg.”
Interestingly, Hartmann pointed out that many came to believe Seiler was not who he claimed to be, and was soon “regarded as an impostor.” Specifically, this was with regard to claims that Seiler had merely coated the medallion with a gold-colored substance, rather than having literally transformed it into gold. Nevertheless, and despite exiling Seiler shortly afterwards, Leopold – seemingly entranced by Seiler – continued to eagerly employ the skills of this mysterious character, time and again.
Recently Discovered “FarFarOut” Is Now Our Solar System’s Most Distant Object
It has been dubbed 'FarFarOut' by its discoverers who admit to knowing very little about the object. The discovery breaks the record for the most distant object in the solar system of 120 AU (11 billion miles) - which was named Farout (artist's impression pictured)
Recently Discovered “FarFarOut” Is Now Our Solar System’s Most Distant Object
An astronomer was enjoying a snow day when he made a huge discovery in our solar system. After the city was shut down because of a snow storm last week, Scott Sheppard, who is an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., decided to look through some telescopic views of the solar system that his team took last month while they were searching for a presumed – but not yet confirmed – ninth giant planet named “Planet X”.
And that’s when he noticed a very faint object at a distance of 3.5 times more further than Pluto and 140 times farther than the Earth is to the sun. If this object is confirmed, it would be the most distant object ever observed in our solar system, beating out their previous discovery in December of 2018 when they announced that they had located a dwarf planet named “Farout” which is 120 times further from the sun than the Earth is. This new discovery has been comically nicknamed “FarFarOut”.
For nearly a decade, Mr. Sheppard, along with Chad Trujillo from the Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff and Dave Tholen from the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, have been using some of the most powerful and wide-angled telescopes to observe the night sky and their research has paid off as they have netted four-fifths of the objects found that are over 9 billion kilometers past the sun.
FarFarOut’s orbit, just like Farout’s, is currently unknown which means that it’s unclear whether it will stay far enough away from the gravitation tug of our solar system’s giant planets. If both of them do manage to stay far enough away, they could potentially join “The Goblin” which is another one of Mr. Sheppard’s recent discoveries. These findings could also provide more information regarding the possible existence of Planet X and if it has anything to do with these three bodies’ orbits.
An artist’s interpretation of the hypothetical Planet X
Astronomers who have been studying the Kuiper Belt observed that small icy objects as well as some dwarf planets appear to follow orbits that are clustered together. The pattern in which they orbit indicate that there could potentially be a large planet there. Therefore, the gravity from this possible planet (the hypothetical Planet X) could explain why the Kuiper objects orbit in such an unusual way.
Although it may take years to figure out the orbits of Farout and FarFarOut, Mr. Sheppard will continue his research of the solar system using his favorite telescopes, the Blanco 4-meter located in Chile, and the Subaru 8-meter that’s in Hawaii.
A very common trope of science fiction literature and film is that of the alien invasion. In books and on screen we have spanning epics in which human beings bravely do battle against these mysterious intruders with their wits and whatever weapons they have at hand. In the end, they send the alien invaders back to from whence they came or destroy them outright. Go humans, right? This is all good fun and very entertaining, but have you ever thought of whether aliens might actually invade for real, or what would happen to us if they did? Here we will delve into the possibility of a real alien invasion, why they would come, what they would do, and what it would mean for us all.
The first thing to consider is why aliens would even want to attack or invade us in the first place, and this can be a bit tricky, with numerous theories on why they would even bother, and different possible outcomes to an invasion based on what they are after. One idea that has been thrown around is that they would be after our water or other resources, and that seems to make sense on the surface, but looking into this possibility more deeply brings about some problems. First of all is that it is believed that there are vast amounts of water frozen and locked away within asteroids, comets, and uninhabited planets, moons, and planetoids, so it seems a bit odd that they would want to use so many resources to travel all of that way just to pry the water from our cold, dead hands. Wouldn’t it make more sense for them to just mine nearby systems for all of that unused water floating about in space without any objection? And say they really do need us for our water, even if they did, there are numerous logistical problems involved with stealing it from us, and the same can be said of other resources as well. This is very well explained by astronomer Phil Plait, host of the Discovery Channel’s science show Phil Plait’s Bad Universe, who says of all of this:
In movie after movie, aliens come here for our precious resources, usually water. At first glance that makes sense; after all, 70 percent of Earth is covered in water. But on second glance that logic falls apart. For one thing, water is pretty inconvenient for packaging and shipping. It doesn’t compress, it’s heavy, and it’s hard to pump quickly from one place to another.
Worse, it’s sitting way down deep in our gravity well! Plunging into the inner solar system to Earth is hard enough, but then landing, grabbing all that water, and then taking off again? That’s a huge amount of energy wasted just to wet your whistle (or whatever mouth parts aliens have). And it’s worse when you look at the solar system as a whole. Orbiting the sun out past Neptune are gigantic repositories of water, essentially comets hundreds of kilometers across, in the convenient form of solid ice. Why would aliens blow right past all that prepackaged water to get to us way down here? The same is true for a lot of other natural resources; asteroids have minerals and metals that can be used for all manner of things, and you can mine them to your circulatory organ’s delight, again with no pesky humans to rise up and kill you.
OK, well then maybe they want something else? Another idea is that they might want to use us as a food source or as slaves, which also doesn’t make sense considering that even evolving on the same planet we are actually pretty limited with what is edible for us or available for us to eat. With aliens with totally different evolutionary histories and physiologies it seems highly unlikely that they would find us edible are all that good-tasting, especially not enough to come all of that way, and we could actually even be poisonous for them. There is also the same problem with water and other resources. How would they ship and store us all, then drag us back to their home world? Is prime grade A human steak really worth all of that effort? The same thing goes for if they came here to use us as slave labor, and why would they need slave labor anyway? With all of that technology at their disposal couldn’t they just make machines to do the work for them? They came here from light years away in order to get cheap manual labor? Really? It just seems like it would be way more trouble than its worth.
There is also the idea that these aliens might want to colonize this planet because it is similar to their home world and they have exploited their own to the point where it has become uninhabitable. This might make a bit of sense, but the odds of this planet being similar or compatible enough for their particular physiologies in this universe of billions of planets seems infinitesimally small. It would likely require some sort of terraforming, and if they can do that then why Earth?
Getting into more sinister territory is that they just might want to wipe us out. That’s it. End of story. This could be for a variety of reasons. Maybe they were passing by and do it for kicks, just as a kid might check out a weird bug before squashing it. Maybe they have been monitoring us and our violent past, watching our rampant destruction of our environment and either want to put us out of our misery or see us as an actual threat in some capacity, a scourge to be ended. Whatever the reason is, in this scenario they don’t need anything from us and don’t even need our world in any capacity, they just want to destroy us. This is quite an ominous concept to ponder, but it is a distinct possibility, and would likely be the easiest option for them.
For argument’s sake, let’s assume that the aliens really are coming, and have decided to invade our world, for whatever reasons. If they merely wanted to destroy us, as in that last option, then let’s face it there is very little we would realistically be likely be able to do against them. Indeed, if they really do want to just wipe us all out they would not even have to come down to us, they could just sit up in their spaceships and pull down asteroids to crash into our planet, causing tsunamis and mass destruction on a scale never before seen, or use some other type of weapon of mass destruction from orbit. Why would they have to come down and fight in the streets or even see us if they have all of that technology and their only desire is to obliterate us?
Well, maybe they do need something from our planet. If we assume that there is some resource they need or that they really do want to move in and evict us, then they would be more likely to need our planet at least somewhat intact. Maybe they do need to engage us in a military way, and let’s just put aside the fact that they could probably easily engineer a virus that would just kill all humans and assume that a fight is going to go down. But would it really be a fight in any appreciable sense? With their mind-boggling technology beyond the likes of anything we’ve ever seen, would it be a war between humans and aliens any more than a sadistic child with a magnifying glass burning anthills is a war between kids and ants? One very interesting comment left on the site Quora pretty well explains what would probably go down:
The late, great Iain M. Banks gave us the term in his book Excession. An Outside Context Problem works like this: You’re the king of the most powerful tribe in the history of your land, which, as far as you know, is the most important place in the world. Your people have a better standard of living than any before, your palaces and temples are bedecked in gold and precious gems, and your armies of warriors have destroyed any who stood up to you. You are worshiped as the physical incarnation of God on Earth, and it is well known that your people cannot be defeated.
Until a small group of large, completely unknown sea vessels appear on the horizon. They have what look like sheets suspended by tree trunks, and are so large that they can’t land on the beach but have to send small boats to the shore. The people on these boats are clad in drab metal chestplates and strange helmets, and speak a language unlike any ever encountered. They carry strange metal tubes and some of them are waving around a book with a cross on it that they seem to think is very important. Worst of all, they don’t seem to recognise your godhead.
A small scuffle ensues, and some of your warriors are killed as if by magic. You decide that you should make an example of these impertinent, outlandish savages, and you muster your army to crush them utterly. But it all goes wrong. Their dull metal clothing is impenetrable to even the finest obsidian blades, they carry tubes that contain the very fire and thunder of the gods, and, worst of all, from out of nowhere spring these half-man, half-beast creatures, that race through your lines, slashing with metal blades and blasting with smaller magic tubes.
This small group of heathens goes on to rout your army, capture you as king and plunder your cities. With the diseases that now ravage the land, they are unstoppable and your eternal kingdom is reduced to rubble and your people slaughtered or enslaved. This, more or less, is what happened when the Aztec Empire encountered Hernan Cortés and his relatively small group of conquistadores. It’s pretty much the textbook example of an Outside Context Problem.
The Aztecs simply had no conception of the Spanish, no idea how to deal with their massive technological advantage, no context with which to even consider these invaders. And they lost. Really, really badly. That’s what would happen, realistically, if Earth were invaded by hostile aliens. We wouldn’t stand a chance.
The simple fact is, if aliens don’t want us alive, the overwhelming possibility is that we won’t be. These would be beings far beyond us in terms of technology and intellect to have been able to come here in the first place, and if they came here for a fight, they’d be ready and would likely know far more about us than we do about them. The technology difference would be substantial, and would be akin to throwing rocks versus nuclear weapons. Nick Pope, who used to run the Ministry of Defense’s UFO project in the United Kingdom, has said of this:
In a universe nearly 14 billion years old, the chances of invading aliens happening to be only a hundred years or so more advanced than us is vanishingly small. The likelihood is that we’d be dealing with a civilization thousands or millions of years ahead of us, and as sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke once said: ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ If they are hostile, it would be like Bambi meeting Godzilla if we ever had to fight them…we would present no military challenge to such an advanced civilization…We would be a pushover for them. Forget all the Hollywood movies.
If we were to have any chance at all, we’d have to hope that the attack was not completely obliterating, with them wanting to keep us mostly alive for some reason. This would allow Earth governments to try to put aside their differences, gather intelligence, and assess the threat, find a weakness, and hopefully reverse engineer alien technology, although this would be akin to a medieval scientist trying to reverse engineer an iPad, probably impossible. We could try nukes, but this is a sloppy, poor strategy, and would cause almost as much damage to our own planet as anything the aliens would dish out.
With all of this talk of alien invasions, you might be thinking right about now that the government must have thought about this at some point. I mean, surely they have some sort of plan in effect if it ever comes down to this. Right? Guys? Well, yes and no. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has a plan in effect for what to do when alien signals are received, although these are more guidelines than anything else, and NASA has protocols in place for preventing the contamination of other worlds by us, but as to actual government contingency plans, especially against hostiles, not really. There have been sort of mental exercises and thought experiments drawn up for everything from alien invasions to zombie outbreaks drawn up by the government, but nothing really official or taken very seriously. Other countries are no different, as the The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) and their Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (CUPUOS) is apparently not geared for such possibilities, with UNOOSA director Simonetta Di Pippo saying:
UNOOSA and COPUOS Member States consider a range of space science and space exploration topics, fields in which the topic of astrobiology sits. However, the Office for Outer Space Affairs has been given no mandate by Member States to consider the question of potential advanced or intelligent extraterrestrial life. For this reason there is no protocol or process for any contact by extraterrestrial life.
Even the set SETI guidelines for assessing and dealing with possible alien communications are flimsy at best, and not particularly official. As astronomer Seth Shostak has said:
There are some protocols, but I think that’s an unfortunate name, and it makes them sound more important than they are. They say, ‘If you pick up a signal, check it out … tell everybody … and don’t broadcast any replies without international consultation,’ whatever that means. But that’s all that the protocols say, and they have no force of law. The United Nations took a copy of the early protocols and put them in a file drawer somewhere, and that’s as official as they ever got. Some people asked me at a conference last week, ‘What plan does the military have to deal with aliens should they land?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know … but to the best of my knowledge, they don’t have a plan.’
So there seem to be very few official concrete plans in effect for meeting alien life, period, let alone if they come roaring down out of the sky with guns blazing and malicious intent. We’d probably be left in a state of complete chaos, on top of our woefully inadequate technological weaponry, although many are convinced that there actually are secret contingency plans kept by world governments that we simply don’t know about. As the founder of UFO and paranormal hunters Strange Phenomena Investigations, Malcolm Robinson, says:
They won’t publicly admit it but I believe that they have a program up their sleeves for the lukewarm possibility of an alien invasion – and I completely believe they have something planned for the event.
Does that make you feel any better about our chances in the event of an alien invasion? Yeah, me neither. The main problem is that it is a lot of money and effort to spend on something that the vast majority of people sees as a very faint possibility at best. Part of the problem also lies in the fact that we have no way at all to know what to even expect if aliens came, no way to know at all what context to perceive them within, and thus virtually limitless possibilities that can’t all possibly be planned for, and their capabilities would be far beyond what we can comprehend anyway, making it an impossible venture. As Shostek explains, “It would be like the Neanderthals having a plan in case the U.S. Air Force showed up.”
In the end, we have good news and bad news. The good news is that there are few rational reasons for why aliens would expend the resources necessary to come here en masse for the purpose of wiping us out, and if they are here already, as many suspect, then they probably would have done it by now. The bad news is that if they do come, and want us to be dead, then our chances don’t look too good at all, and there isn’t even any plan in effect for it if they do. It’s basically see what happens and hope for the best. So while an alien invasion scenario on par with anything in the movies probably has a slim chance of happening, if it does it also will likely not play out like the films in that we won’t have any chance at all. Let’s hope that if they are out there, or are already here, then they are benevolent or indifferent. Sleep tight.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Sky-watcher recorded the ISS passing in front of the Moon
Sky-watcher recorded the ISS passing in front of the Moon
An interesting and rare view of the ISS passing in front of the Moon. On Feb. 10th,2019.
Szabolcs Nagy of London, England, recorded the ISS skimming the edge: "I used the ISS Detector app to find out when the ISS would pass close to the edge of lunar disk," says Nagy. "This way I could record a video where the space station wasn't only in front of the lunar disk, but instead a bit of both.
"It happened in the blink of an eye," he continues. "I took a high frame rate video (around 120fps), then slowed it down to make it easier to see" Szabolcs Nagy said to spaceweather.
UFO Exiting Alien Base Over Swiss Alps Caught In Photo By Accident, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Exiting Alien Base Over Swiss Alps Caught In Photo By Accident, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: 8-7-2017 but reported today.
Location of sighting: Lesyn, Switzerland
Source: MUFON #98765
This eyewitness was going through old photos and found one from 2017 that had a UFO over the Swiss Alps. Lesyn is a city of about 3,500 in Switzerland.
The UFO is tilted, but for the aliens inside, there is no tilting. The craft would have artificial gravity that keeps the pilots and occupants totally comfortable. The UFO would only be tilted if it was entering or exiting a mountain alien base.
From the forensic evidence...the photo close up, you can see that the top of the craft is in focus, but the bottom is fuzzy and out of focus. That means the focused part is the front, the other is the back, meaning it was leaving the mountain base at the time of the photo. This is a very rare moment not often seen, let alone photographed. Amazing evidence that an alien base exists below the mountains of Lesyn.
Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
Treating our old Pictures we discovered this strange object, on the pictures before or after we did see nothing similar.
Two Orange UFOs Over Sechi, Czech Republic On Feb 25, 2019, Photos, UFO Sighting News.
Two Orange UFOs Over Sechi, Czech Republic On Feb 25, 2019, Photos, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: February 25, 2019
Location of sighting: Sechi, Czech Republic
An eyewitness recorded two UFOs in the sky during a sunset in the Czech Republic yesterday. The UFOs both have extraordinary detail. They appear to be oval shaped disks with a thin cloud coating hiding them. The sunset really brings out the color well, notice that all the other clouds in the background are a different color and do not match the color of the UFOs. Sunset is the most easest time to catch sight of a UFO. The setting sun and the angel of the eyewitness in conjunction with the UFO...makes a triangle formation that causes the UFOs to be revealed for a few minutes.
Keep in mind that there are many different kinds of beings visiting our planet. Different reports from crashes describe beings with different numbers of fingers. Some of the beings are more human-looking, with smaller eyes than the classic little gray aliens depicted in the movies. There is no way at this time to sort this out completely, but you should be aware that different alien beings have been reported with four fingers, five fingers, and six fingers. Whether this includes a thumb I don' t know, but different eyewitnesses report different numbers of fingers on alien beings.
Very early on the morning of July 5 some civilians came upon a crash site. They found three alien bodies lying outside of the craft and they thought they could see at least one more through a large hole ripped in the side of the craft. All the occupants were dead, although rumors persist that at least one being was still alive. These civilians were at the crash site before the military arrived and secured the area. This site was the closer of the two sites to the town of Roswell, located only about thirty-five miles outside of town.
The craft they found was not actually disk-shaped. It was shaped more like a strange airplane without wings, and it had a large crescent-shaped section near the front. News reports later referred to it as a "disk;" however that could be because flying disks had been seen in the area for several days just prior to the crash or because part of an actual disk-shaped craft was blown off leaving the remaining crescent. This site is the one I will refer to as the "main crash site." This is where the main body of the craft was found, along with the alien bodies.
Reproduction of alien control panels found at the crash site based on eyewitness descriptions.
The Debris Field
The second crash site is what I will refer to as the "debris field." This is the site most people think of when someone says "Roswell." The debris found at this site was unlike anything ever seen before. There were very thin pieces of metal very much like tin foil. Some of these pieces could be crumpled easily. However, after a few seconds and if left alone, the piece would completely uncrumple like liquid and flatten out perfectly smooth, all by itself. Other pieces of the foil-like material could not be cut, dented with a sledgehammer, or burned with a blowtorch. Several pieces looked like small I-beams and had strange symbols on them resembling hieroglyphics. There were no bodies found at this site.
Eyewitness drawing hieroglyphic-like symbols appearing on some of the alien crash debris.
The Bodies
The occupants were small, approximately three to four-feet tall, with four fingers and no thumbs on their hands. They had finely featured faces and did not resemble the big-eyed gray aliens depicted in stories and commercials on TV. Official autopsy reports are classified, and for all practical purposes, non-existent. However, several written statements are available describing the bodies and autopsies in detail, written by physicians a few years later in the early 1950s.
This raises a question for those who believe this event involved a weather balloon. Why are documents still classified regarding the activities at Roswell Army Air Base during the first week in July, 1947? National security for a weather balloon after fifty years?
Assuming there may have been more than one crash, why were there so many? Well, no one knows for sure because the military isn' t talking. However, here are some things to think about. First, there were a lot of saucers flying around in the American southwest during the summer of 1947. Roswell was the only nuclear air base in the world at the time; White Sands Proving grounds were where all the top-secret missile testing was taking place. These locations, along with Los Alamos and Alamogordo Labs where the atomic bomb was developed, were all within a 150-mile radius of one another. It' s pretty clear our alien visitors were having a good look at humanity' s "progress."
Second, it appears the U.S. Military had some capability (whether intentional or unintentional) for throwing off the guidance systems of the saucers through the use of radar or other newly developed electronic devices. A case has been made for the idea that the U.S. military intentionally sought to down and recover some of these craft.
The Kingman, Arizona Landing
Credence for that concept comes from an event that happened several years later in 1953 at Kingman, Arizona. At Kingman the aliens simply landed a craft and left it there intact, for the military, ostensibly to give the military what it so actively sought and thus lessen the efforts to shoot a saucer down.
Eyewitness Bill Uhouse has gone on record to state that a "disk" was left at Kingman with the hatch open. The first soldiers to enter it became disoriented and nauseous. The disk was transported to what is now known as area 51. It made loud humming noises the whole time. The military didn't know what to do. They weren't sure if it was going to explode or what, so they left it sitting out in the open, on the tarmac, for nine months! Uhouse joins several other people who have come forward and said they worked alongside "gray" aliens at U.S. military bases for years.
The Sahara Desert, close to the Moroccan-Algerian border, served as a test site for three rovers and more than 40 engineers finishing the first phase of the Strategic Research Cluster on Space Robotics Technologies, a project funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 program.
The venue for the field tests was a site near Erfoud operated by the Ibn Battuta Centre in Marrakesh. Engineers tested the rovers' automated navigation systems over a period of two weeks in a project coordinated by PERASPERA, a partnership of space agencies from Europe, including Italy, France, Germany, Spain and the U.K., according to a statement from the European Space Agency (ESA).
This agile walking/driving SherpaTT rover was brought to the PERASPERA Morocco field trials by a team from Germany's DFKI Robotics Innovation Center.
The bleak, wind-swept environment was selected by the EU's Europlanet 2020 Research Infrastructure project as a good match for Mars. This would appear to be a belief held by many, as the teams had to share the location with a Hollywood film crew and Chinese documentary makers, ESA officials said in the statement. Erfoud has made appearances in "Spectre," "The Mummy" and even "Aquaman" and serves as a primary location for National Geographic's series "Mars."
"We are here in the Moroccan desert, with a cluster of research projects funded by the European Union, to test robotics technologies that are needed for future planetary exploration, because the soil, the rocks, the dunes, the environment here, is very similar to the surface of Mars," Christos Ampatzis, a computer scientist from the European Commission Research Executive Agency, says in a video about the project.
The Mana and Minnie rovers were brought to the PERASPERA field test by a team from France's Laboratory for Analysis and Architecture of Systems, LAAS. The two rovers work together as a team to survey their environment.
"What this kind of field test gives you is the proof of the pudding that your design is working well, even in some of the most challenging environments we can imagine," Gianfranco Visentin, head of ESA's Automation and Robotics Section, said in the statement.
"Lab testing of the hardware we design doesn't take account of the variability nature brings, from the light of the sky to the shape of the landscape, the texture and colours of the sand and rock," he added. "Operating outdoors in this way proves that our systems work in much more complex and elaborate settings than can ever be simulated."
Building on the information gathered in this field test, PERASPERA aims to begin a new phase of development that will result in a mission to space to demonstrate orbital robotics in just four years, according to the statement.
Here's another warning about incoming space hardware — but this saga has an interplanetary connection.
First, we have to peel back space history to the early 1970s, just after the height of the Cold War space-race between the Soviet Union and the United States.
The Soviet Union launched the Cosmos 482 Venus probe on March 31, 1972. But the spacecraft messed up its rocket-powered escape to that cloud-veiled world and got trapped in Earth orbit. [The 10 Weirdest Facts About Venus]
A big chunk of that failed craft remains in orbit today as space junk — but it's due to come down soon, perhaps as early as this year, experts said.
Sister probe
The descent vehicle of the Venera 8 spacecraft (left) and its parent spacecraft are seen in a Russian museum.
Cosmos 482 was a sister probe to Venera 8,which in July 1972 became the second craft to land successfully on the surface of Venus, said Don Mitchell, who studies Soviet space history and has a keen interest in that country's Venus exploration missions.
Venera 8 relayed data from Venus' surface for 50 minutes and 11 seconds before succumbing to the harsh, lead-melting conditions.
But Cosmos 482 got stranded in an Earth parking orbit, Mitchell told Space.com. Some hardware from that failed flight — a heavy frame of tanks and equipment that was jettisoned — fell into Earth's atmosphere in rather short order. But some remained aloft.
Venera 8 comprised a spacecraft "bus" and a lander probe. The lander was a spherical pressure vessel of similar design to the Soviet Union's Venera 7 probe.
Venera 7 launched in August 1970 and made the first-ever successful Venuslanding on Dec. 15 of that year. It sent valuable data back to Earth from the surface, if only for a few brief minutes.
Still adrift around Earth, making one lap every 112 minutes, is the wayward Cosmos 482 Venus entry capsule, a contraption built to withstand the heat of diving into that cloud-veiled planet's thick atmosphere. The errant Venus lander mass is 1,091 lbs. (495 kilograms) and carries significant thermal protection.
And this piece of space junk will likely survive its inevitable descent back to its home planet, experts said.
"Yes, the descent craft will survive a re-entry with no problems," said satellite watcher Thomas Dorman of the northeastern Oklahoma community of Zeb. "It would be funny if it was spotted coming down and the parachute has deployed … but I am sure the batteries to fire the pyrotechnics to release the parachute have died long ago!"
True condition a mystery
Ralf Vandebergh of the Netherlands has been observing the wayward Cosmos 482 leftovers for the last eight years.
Like Dorman, veteran astrophotographer Ralf Vandebergh of the Netherlands has been observing the wayward spacecraft for a while — the last eight years, in fact. He told Space.com he's done a new appraisal of Cosmos 482.
"My preliminary conclusion of Cosmos 482, observing using a 10-inch aperture telescope during varying passes, viewing angles, illumination angles and observing conditions, [is that it] seems [to be] an elongated object with strong brightness variations," Vandebergh reported. "There is an indication of smaller structures, but these are unconfirmed. Despite the successful results, the mystery around the true condition of Cosmos 482 and what elements of the spacecraft exactly are still in orbit still remains unsolved."
Meanwhile, Dorman recently captured Cosmos 482 on his skywatching equipment. His imagery showed the object flaring. A spherical object such as the Venus descent capsule seemingly wouldn't flare, he said, suggesting that more of the upper spacecraft bus was still intact. [Space Junk Clean Up: 7 Wild Ways to Destroy Orbital Debris]
Re-entry when?
A stamp printed in the USSR, shows the automatic interplanetary station Venera 8, circa 1972, which flew to Venus.
"Our guess is maybe as much as 40 to 50 percent of the upper spacecraft bus may still be there," Dorman told Space.com. "It is interesting to note the apogee of the orbit is slowly starting to decay. My guess right now is that re-entry is late this year to mid next year. But predicting its decay is as much of an art [as] it is science. The other issue is, nobody can forecast solar activity for the next year, which could affect the decay time," he said.
Dorman said Cosmos 482 is in an orbit that swings it out from Earth over 1,700 miles (2,735 km) away, but the low point, the perigee of the orbit, is just 125 miles (200 km) above our planet.
"Trying to study Cosmos 482 and what remains of the spacecraft is like attempting to gain an understanding and insight of a shipwreck that is moving at hypervelocity speeds, under ever-changing lighting conditions from the surface of an ocean…this ocean being several hundred miles deep, with only a few seconds to see it at its closest and at best a few times a year!"
Another rough estimate suggests that what's left of the failed Venus probe might stay up for another 2.5 years, even with such a low perigee.
"This suggests the object is very dense, which could support that it might withstand re-entry," said T.S. Kelso of CelesTrak, an analytical group that keeps an eye on Earth-orbiting objects.
You can see Vandebergh's latest view of Cosmos 482 here.
Leonard David is author of the forthcoming book, "Moon Rush: The New Space Race" to be published by National Geographic in May 2019. A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades.
Since 2009 NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has been scooting around the Moon once every 2 hours. Among the various onboard instruments is a cluster of imaging cameras: two narrow-angle and one wide-field, with multi-band capabilities on the narrow-angle devices, using a clever 'push-broom' approach as the spacecraft motion sweeps the sensitive sensor arrays over the surface below. Altogether these are referred to as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC.
LROC offers a way to peer down on the lunar farside, and to try to catch a glimpse of the CNSA's most recent mission: Chang'e 4, that made it onto the Moon's surface on January the 3rd, 2019.
On February 1st 2019 LRO passed almost directly over the landing site at an altitude of 82 kilometers - where LROC's resolution is about 0.85 meters per pixel. Here's the full image as released:
The larger vertically pointing arrow indicates the location of the main lander itself. The smaller arrow to the left is where the Chang'e 'Yutu-2' rover was at the time the image was made - about 29 meters from the lander.
It's a pretty amazing image, even if the lander and rover barely fill a couple of pixels. But it's not until you zoom out a little that you really begin to appreciate the context. This next image shows the square of the previous picture on the mare basalt plain (a comparatively small feature on the lunar farside). Suddenly the remoteness, and starkness of the environment becomes more apparent.
The lander and rover are miniscule specks on a very large, very remote, very alien landscape. As much as we are able to map a place like the Moon with the wonderful capabilities of LROC, and to place our robotic avatars on its surface, this is a vivid reminder of just how microscopically small our exploration footprint remains.
As this is a part of Earth's great, high wilderness - forged from common proto-planetary ancestors - it's pretty astonishing that we've not spent a lot more time here. Perhaps that will change in the future.
Our planet is full of ancient sites that modern archeology still can not satisfactorily explain.
These breathtaking and mysterious ancient buildings and structures defy our ability to explain who built them, how they were built and why. Was it ancient civilizationswith technologies far more advanced than we ever imagined? Or perhaps it wasancient alienscome to Earth to share incredible wisdom and knowledge with its primitive inhabitants?
These ancient mysteries continue to confound archeologists and inspire numerous theories about how prehistoric civilizations managed to make some of the largest and most enigmatic constructions on Earth.
Let’s take a brief tour of some of the world’s most incredible ancient mysteries. Who knows, maybe you will be the one to unlock some of the secrets that have remained hidden for centuries.
This massive temple located in Turkey is constructed from pillars organized into enormous stone rings. Each pillar is decorated with intricate sculptures of scorpions, lions and vultures, all twisting up and down the surface.
However, these pillars are far more than just beautiful pieces of art. They were designed to support enormous stone blocks, some weighing more than 10 tons. The act of raising 10 ton stone blocks and supporting their incredible weight with these beautiful and intricate pillars is amazing enough, but what has truly baffled archeologists is that Gobekli Tepe was built more than 11,000 years ago!
It has been called the oldest known temple in the world, and no one knows how or why Gobekli Tepe was built all those millennia ago.
2. Pyramids of Giza
Pyramids of Giza
These enormous mountains of stone blocks still dominate the horizon of Egypt’s most populous city just as they have for thousands of years.
The modern story of these incredible structures taught in schools and universities is that the Pyramids of Giza were built using simple technologies and massive amounts of human labor as tombs for the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt. However, despite the widespread acceptance of this explanation, these structures show none of the common signs that we would associate with ancient Egyptian burials.
The Pyramids of Giza demonstrate a level of knowledge that goes far beyond what we know of the ancient Egyptians who supposedly built them. The Great Pyramid is positioned precisely at the longitude and latitude lines that contain less water and more land than any other place on the planet. It is also directly in the geographical center of the Earth.
These facts among many others suggest that the builders knew a great deal more about our planet’s geography than we thought possible, and it is difficult to imagine how they could have completed these amazing structures without relying on some kind of aerial view.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the Pyramids of Giza were designed for a wide range of purposes. These structures have a number of intriguing connections to the heavens above, including special shafts aimed to specific stars. The theory claims there is a correlation between the position of the three largest pyramids at Giza and the three stars comprising the belt in the constellation of Orion. The extraordinary theory was actually proved by Robert Bauval in 1983 when the stars of Orion were overlaid over an aerial view of the pyramids and they matched almost exactly.
We are only just starting to scratch the surface of discoveries within these incredible ancient buildings, and many more mysteries are waiting to be solved.
The mystery of Puma Punku is perhaps one of the least well known yet compelling ancient mysteries. However, many people have never even heard of this mysterious ancient site or know where Puma Punku is located.
Puma Punku is found in modern Bolivia, and has attracted a great deal of archeological attention since its discovery. It is made up of stone blocks that were cut using incredibly precise lines and drilled with a range of different holes. One of the largest stones on this site has been estimated to weigh more than 130 tons!
The precise cutting and drilling of the stones has led many people to suggest that they are a strong proof of ancient alien visitation. The structures of Puma Punku were built without using any mortar to hold the stones together. Instead the stones that make up the walls were cut to interlock precisely with their neighbors, requiring a level of skill that would be hard to match even using today’s technology. In addition, the stones used in the construction were brought from a quarry more than 50 miles away.
Unfortunately much of Puma Punku has been damaged by weather and looters, though it still remains one of the world’s most breathtaking and mysterious ancient structures.
4. Moai Statues on Easter Island
Moai Statues
These multi-ton anthropomorphic statues dot the grassy mounds across Easter Island deep in the Pacific Ocean, and pose a mystery that has intrigued visitors since they were first spotted by European explorers in 1722.
The inhabitants of this eastern Polynesian island, the Rapa Nui, had been building these statues for over 5 centuries until shortly after the first European explorers arrived. Seeing these incredible structures up close leads people to wonder how these simple islanders were able to build and move these enormous stone statues, and why.
In total the Moai statues represent almost 900 human-like figures dotted along the edges of the extinct volcanoes on the island. These statues average 13 feet and weigh 14 tons, and were all chiseled directly from the volcanic stone of the island. There are also over 400 statues in various stages of quarrying, some left waiting to be transported to their final resting place.
The purpose of the Moai remains a mystery, though it is likely that they were sculpted for ritual or religious reasons. It is also unclear what happened to the Rapa Nui builders, but most theorists suggest that they eventually succumbed to an environmental disaster.
The couple had shared their story about seeing a massive black triangle-shaped UFO from their Edgeworth front yard one night in the late 1990s.
Dean, who owns Vern's Guitar Clinic at Wallsend, had a similar experience.
"It was 1999, around November. It was a hot, crystal clear night. You could see the stars. There was no breeze," he said.
He was living on Grandview Road at New Lambton Heights on top of a ridge. That night, he was having a barbecue.
At about 11pm, he was outside talking to a mate about the forthcoming new year.
Suddenly, they could see "what appeared to be a fire, down low behind trees".
They also thought it could be lightning.
"Then the orange light started to rise up. It rose above the eucalypt trees," he said.
"We could see it coming towards us. I said, 'we’re about to find out what this thing is'.
"We were absolutely stunned. I said 'what the hell is that?'. This thing was coming towards us at no more than 25km/h.
"It was about 30 metres high, just above the tallest eucalyptus tree.
"As it approached us, the hairs on our neck and arms stood up. We were in deep shock. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing."
A massive triangular-shaped craft flew above them.
"It was travelling so low, you could have thrown a rock and hit it. It was directly above our heads," he said.
"As we stood underneath it, there was no doubt what it was. We knew straight away it was an alien craft from another planet. There’s nothing like that on our planet.
"I never thought I’d see a UFO in my life. It seemed to take a minute for the whole craft to pass over our house."
Light from the craft shone on them and the house.
The pair screamed, "hello, hello".
"We felt calm, like we weren’t in any danger. It was almost like it was being emitted from the ship somehow," he said.
He said the UFO had five lights, including a massive orange light in its centre.
"It was kind of like the inside of an orange when you cut an orange in half," he said.
The orange light itself, he said, was about "three quarters the size of a football field".
The triangular craft was much bigger.
It appeared to be made of a substance that he likened to "black glass or titanium".
"This thing was absolutely huge. It was 50 to 100 times the size of a 747," he estimated.
"It was a massive ship. It seemed to float on air. There were no engines, no flames, no sound. It was completely silent. It was absolutely beautiful.
"It came from another world, an advanced world. We had the distinct impression that we and everything around us were being filmed. We didn’t know why, we just had that feeling."
Similar Sightings
Black triangle UFOs have been sighted many times around the world.
A photo of a UFO spotted in Belgium.
In 1989 to 1990, for instance, this type of UFO was reported many times in Belgium. Witnesses claimed to see large black silent triangles.
"Two key factors that make the Belgian wave of sightings so interesting to UFO scholars and skeptics alike are the large number of police making reports and the Belgian government’s official interest in the sightings," Michael Lauck reported.
Retired Belgian Major General Wilfried de Brouwer, who oversaw the investigation, said there were about 2000 reported sightings. In one case, two police officers spotted a triangular object with three spotlights illuminating the field over which it hovered. In its centre was a red flashing light.
Sceptics have suggested this type of UFO could be United States Air Force surveillance aircraft developed under "black operations".
Dean Garner, citing his close encounter of the first kind, dismisses this suggestion. He can't imagine a stealth military aircraft being as large as the one he saw. Nor can he comprehend why a military craft would want to fly low over Newcastle. Send your UFO stories to topics@theherald.com.au.
Cigar-shaped UFO and airplane in a Sun halo are one of my best UAP (unidentified aerial phenomenon) photos. It was captured while shooting some pictures of a Sun halo above Denmark on October 9, 2009. It was at 01.37 pm local time Odense city. I did not see this craft during the photography! But unknowingly, I got my very first photo of cigar-shaped UFO.
The popular term for this type is normally cigar-shaped UFO. But after some heavy image processing in Adobe Photoshop, the shape of this craft seems to be more straight-lined, like a cylinder! It looks like it has a little bend on top to the left. It has nice rounding´s in both ends. It is actually more in the shape of a large pressure tank. You will see that further down this article.
The picture above is a cropped version of the original photo processed with Auto Tone in Adobe Photoshop to sharpen it.
Massive Sun Halo in the sky
It all happened on a day the sky was covered with a thin veil of high altitude clouds, cluttered with remnants of aviation contrails from air traffic. Around 1.30 pm, I looked out my window in a westerly direction. Up to my left in a southern direction, I saw this massive halo around the Sun. The picture below shows the halo in grayscale.
Since it was the first time I had the opportunity to shoot some photos of a Sun halo with my new DSLR camera, I hurtled down to our backyard, attached the camera on a tripod and took 8 pictures with short intervals. I was quickly blinded by the Sun and my photo session was quickly settled. I did see the plane but not the cigar-shaped UFO during the photography.
Cigar-shaped UFO fly-by photos
When my eye vision was normalized again, I checked the Sun Halo photos. On one photo out of eight, a cigar-shaped visitor reveals itself together with a commercial airliner in a marvelous sight with the Sun halo as background. I saw the aircraft and zoomed in to shoot some photos of that particularly, and it was in one of those photos I got the cigar-shaped UFO.
Despite the fact that it passed in front of the camera while shooting one of the photos, a faintly luminous object that easily fell in with the background, had in any case been difficult to discern visually. When you look at the Sun, you are immediately blinded. So to see this whitish craft fly-by just above the Sun, would any day be against all odds.
Before I take a photo I usually always use the viewfinder to see what I am photographing. I looked through the viewfinder while shooting the pictures of the aircraft. But I do not remember that I saw any cigar-shaped object. It must have been a fast mover since I didn´t see anything?
It is obvious in the photo that this is not a high altitude vessel. Instead, it seems to be relatively close to the ground way below the aircraft above. I sense that this vehicle is in the size of a large submarine, but it´s only a guess.
Dark streak behind the cigar-shaped UFO?
Have you noticed the dark streak to the right of the cigar-shaped UFO? If this is caused by the visitor itself I do not know? I have seen those dark streaks (or shadows) in other pictures and videos. I believe those must be real and maybe engine-related. Perhaps we here see an indication of a propulsion agent that leaves a shadow behind the object? This could maybe be caused by the interaction with the air around the cigar-shaped craft, radiating a hidden force?
Unfortunately, I have no indications of flight direction since I only have one photo. I assume it flies either left or right but that is of course based on the aerodynamic principle. Difficult to imagine this craft flying away or towards the camera.
From cigar-shaped to pressure tank UFO?
I can easily imagine a cigar-shaped object when I see this visitor in the distance. But when you zoom in, a bit different shape than a cigar appears. Cigars comes in many different shapes and the vessel in my pictures does not fit any of those!
After some heavy image processing in Photoshop to clarify the object as clear as possible, I got the gray-scale result you see above. The cigar-shaped UFO seems more to resemble a pressure tank shape but with a little indentation on top on the left side. Based on the nature and the size of this craft it could be an alien mothership passing by. See this example of a pressure tank made in steel and this drawing of a tank with spherical ends.
Own source of light or field?
There is a concentration of light in a line along this vessel from end to end despite the sunshine from behind and below. I assume a commercial aircraft would be dark on the side pointing away from the sunshine. The cigar-shaped UFO should also be relatively dark on the side pointing away from the sunshine. At least it should not have indications of higher light intensity where it should be darkest. But the unidentified flying object here seems to have its own source of light (or field) even when bathed in sunlight.
Cigar-shaped UFO disappears in less than 8 seconds
The fifth photo in the series I take at 13:37:12 pm shows the passing cigar-shaped UFO with the upper part of the Sun halo visible. The next photo I take at 13:37:20 pm 8 seconds later shows the halo in full view, but here the unidentified flying object is nowhere to be seen. Below left, you have a preview of the original photo with the unknown visitor. Below right you have the halo in full view.
So, in less than 8 seconds, this cigar-shaped UFO manages to move completely out of my cameras field of view. A jet fighter in full speed could pass the area in the same altitude as the unknown object in less than 4 seconds. The 8 seconds is still very fast, too fast for an airship. Under any circumstances, it would have been visible on the sixth photo in the series 8 seconds later.
Balloon or airship?
A balloon or airship would have been on most of the 8 photos. My photo session was ended after only a few minutes and I would have seen a balloon in the sky if there was one. I was blinded by the Sun, yes, but not totally blind, and was able to see both the halo and the aircraft while photographing. There were absolutely no balloons in the sky that day.
Cloud manifestation or lens flare?
A cloud cannot condensate and manifest to what we see here and disappear again in such a short time frame (16 seconds). Unbelievable things can form in the sky based on condensation (thickening) in meteorological sense, but not so fast.
A lens flare caused by the Sun is typically transparent (if not too close to the Sun in the photo). The vessel in this article is not transparent in any way. I found a good example to compare with, in the above picture. It is a solar lens flare that actually looks a bit like the cigar-shaped UFO. This flare is transparent and you can see the contrail through it.
Based on the fact that I had the camera on a tripod pointing towards the same spot with only a minor change to the angle, it cannot be an optical reflection or lens flare. They would have been visible in all the photos probably.
Cigar-shaped/pressure tank vessel with extraterrestrial origin?
The fact that it was not in DSC04332.JPG but 8 seconds later clearly visible in DSC04333.JPG and 8 seconds later in DSC04334.JPG its gone again make me go hmm? The apparent fly-by is so fast that the airship theory is gone too.
And the strange higher light intensity where it should be darkest?
An alien vessel with extraterrestrial origin indeed becomes a reasonable explanation. The extraterrestrial presence is not new to me and my website here is proof for that. If you ask me, I would say this is probably an alien vessel with extraterrestrial origin.
Other cigar-shaped UFOs
I think I first learned the terminology cigar-shaped UFO through the reading of some George Adamski books in the 80´s. Later I went on the internet searching after videos and found a film from 1967 that shows a so-called cigar-shaped UFO hovering?
I also found the video from Salida in Colorado. It was a piece of footage recorded on August 27, 1995, with a so-called cigar-shaped UFO hovering high in the sky.
I was lucky again to capture a similar cigar-shaped elongated craft on still photography in both 2012 and 2017. Read about the alien mothership with flying saucers and scout fleet from 2012, which by the way probably re-appeared in 2017 in the UAP gallery
There isn’t a great deal of in between when it has to do with UFOs. The UFO looks like it’s been seen by lots of individuals. UFOs are spotted each day. Throughout that time period, there were two triangle UFOs sighted in the exact place. On weekdays it appears that UFO sightings are driven by men and women that are routinely outside daily, rain or shine. It’s easy to comprehend why there are a lot of UFO sightings. The most frequently known UFO sighting in the USA is called the Roswell UFO sighting of 1947.
For a few of you, you can observe Lenticular clouds on a normal basis but a lot people may never be so lucky to see one. The electron clouds which make up the shapes of every atom, for instance has to be in the type of three-dimensional patterns. Sky watching has some quite serious hobbyists! In fairyland the sun doesn’t shine and there are not any moon or stars. Light is a type of energy and it’s deemed to exist as a wave. 1 light appearing defines a standard baseline.
Ufo Sightings Explained
For aliens to create a round trip they would need to live for at least 6,000 decades. The alien said he was visiting earth to discover more about the atomic explosions that his race managed to observe from Venus. In terms of Bigfoot sightings, ape-like creatures are seen all over the united states and Canada. Giant skeletons are found all around the world, not just in America. The deer carcasses leave exactly the same evidence.
If you opt to take a visit to the Hudson Valley to attempt to see the strange UFO for yourself, you might want to remain at one of the fantastic community bed and breakfast Inns. So space travel is much more complex than achieving a lot of thrust. The distances involved with interstellar travel are huge, Lynch stated. Area 51 is a sizable military airfield which is usually employed for development of weapons and aircraft. Moreover, the radiation levels measured at UFO sightings consistently demonstrate a much greater count than that which is normally found in the surroundings. It’s simply absurd to feel our small pin drop in the sky is the sole life-giving plant that grows intelligent life.
Such phenomena can readily be taken advantage of to exploit an individual’s perception. There are lots of theories,” Kay stated. There are not many great explanations for the majority of the Hudson Valley sightings. Among the arguments that scientists use to debunk UFO sightings is that our planet has existed for over four billion decades, therefore the odds are incredibly small that the aliens would just chance to arrive here during the few decades that we’ve got technology. The question as to their existence is growing more and more valid. So, there’s no need to be concerned about the 156,353 UFO sightings and warnings. Attending a UFO conference offers an ample chance to do that, and to connect with like-minded men and women.
As Yellowstone Awakens, Dr. Michio Kaku Warns It Could Literally Tear The Guts Out Of The USA
As Yellowstone Awakens, Dr. Michio Kaku Warns It Could Literally Tear The Guts Out Of The USA
Scientists assure us that one day the absolutely massive Yellowstone supervolcano will once again experience a Category 8 eruption, and if it happened today it would “literally tear the guts out of the United States of America”. That is why what has been happening at Yellowstone in recent months is so alarming. We know that the ground has been rising and that “a 465-mile-long piece of molten rock” is moving upwards directly under Yellowstone.
Buurtschap Heukelom bij Oisterwijk wordt getroffen door een serie eigenaardige gebeurtenissen. ‘Een vreemd, groen licht in de duisternis en een met zwarte cirkels bekleed weiland zorgen voor beroering onder de inwoners,’ zo vermeld weekblad De Schakel. Wat is er aan de hand!?
Een vreemd licht in de lucht
Het eerste incident deed zich een week of vier geleden voor, op dinsdagavond 8 januari, toen de Heukelomse Lobke van Rijsewijk en haar bandleden zich verzamelden voor hun wekelijkse repetitie. Buiten op de parkeerplaats aan Hoog Heukelom viel hun oog op een voor hen onbekend groen licht, schijnend boven de weilanden in de donkere hemel. ‘Het was niet zomaar een lichtje, zoals dat van een vliegtuig of lampion’, vertelt Lobke de Schakel. ‘Het waren de plotselinge en snelle bewegingen die we niet konden thuisbrengen.’
Unidentified Flying Object Wat doe je vandaag de dag als een brainstormsessie van vier knappe koppen onvoldoende antwoorden biedt? Dan benut je de wisdom of the crowd. De volgende ochtend nog plaatste Lobke daarom een berichtje op Facebook, vergezeld door een filmpje van de onverklaarbare gebeurtenis. Daarop kreeg de Heukelomse een berg aan reacties. ‘Of het misschien een drone was geweest? Dat lijkt me onwaarschijnlijk: een drone maakt geluid en verplaatst zich bovendien niet op zo’n schichtige manier.’ Daarbij kwam dat zelfs de Heukelomse boerderijdieren waren getroffen; zijn koeien gedroegen zich die avond opvallend onrustig, zo liet een koeienboer weten. Maar een verklaring voor het Unidentified Flying Object kwam er niet.
Zwart gras
Cirkels in het gras
Bijna twee weken na het incident werd Heukelom opnieuw geconfronteerd met een geheimzinnig verschijnsel. Inwoonster Anneke Vugs vertelt: ‘Ik was net wakker en keek uit mijn badkamerraam. Daar ontdekte ik tot mijn verbazing twee grote, zwarte kringen in het midden van onze wei.’ Met het voorval van het groene licht nog vers in haar geheugen besloot ook Anneke haar Facebook-contacten in te schakelen. ‘Een van mijn vrienden opperde dat het gras door iemand kon zijn aangestoken, als kwajongensstreek. Meteen ben ik gaan kijken, maar nee, verbrand waren de kringen niet. Het gras leek uit zichzelf donker te zijn geworden.’ ‘Iets voor Hart van Nederland?’, reageerde een ander.
Sabine Doevendans van Weekblad De Schakel noteerde bovenstaande bijzonderheden, en is met haar redactie op zoek naar informatie. Haar verzoek is vooral uw oren en ogen open te houden, en wie weet, lossen we zo samen het mysterie van Heukelom op!
Een UFO en cirkels in het gras bij Oisterwijk. Wat is hier aan de hand?
Een UFO en cirkels in het gras bij Oisterwijk. Wat is hier aan de hand?
In Heukelom nabij Oisterwijk hebben zich een aantal vreemde gebeurtenissen voorgedaan. Zo werd ’s avonds een vreemd, groen licht gespot en verschenen er zwarte cirkels in een weiland.
Op 8 januari zag Lobke van Rijsewijk uit Heukelom een onbekend groen licht boven de weilanden.
“Het was niet zomaar een lichtje, zoals dat van een vliegtuig of lampion,” zei Lobke. “Het waren de plotselinge en snelle bewegingen die we niet konden thuisbrengen.”
Onrustig
De volgende ochtend plaatste Lobke een bericht op Facebook met daarbij een filmpje van de onverklaarbare gebeurtenis.
Sommigen dachten dat het een drone was. “Dat lijkt me onwaarschijnlijk: een drone maakt geluid en verplaatst zich bovendien niet op zo’n schichtige manier.”
Daarnaast liet een boer weten dat zijn koeien zich op de avond van de waarneming opvallend onrustig gedroegen.
Zwarte kringen
Een verklaring voor de UFO kwam er niet.
Bijna twee weken later gebeurde er in Heukelom opnieuw iets vreemds. Inwoonster Anneke Vugs zag twee grote, zwarte kringen in het midden van haar wei.
De kringen waren niet verbrand en het gras leek uit zichzelf donker te zijn geworden. Er wordt inmiddels al gesproken van ‘het mysterie van Heukelom’.
NASA Happily Reports The Earth Is Greener, With More Trees Than 20 Years Ago Thanks To China & India
NASA Happily Reports The Earth Is Greener, With More Trees Than 20 Years Ago Thanks To China & India
IN BRIEF
The Facts:
Thanks to China and India, human-induced 'greening' has increased by 5% across the earth!
Reflect On:
Why are we only getting the 'bad news' stories about the climate all the time? Is it politically convenient? Does it fit narratives? Is it always true? Are we only being told one side? Are we meant to remain in fear?
Amidst the climate alarmism that is sometimes misplaced, there are stories that paint a different picture.
Like the study published in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate showing that climate models exaggerate global warming from CO2 emissions by as much as 45%.
Or the study in the journal Nature Geoscience that found that climate models were faulty. As one of the authors put it, “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models.”
How about the findings from the University of Alabama-Huntsville showing that the Earth’s atmosphere appears to be less sensitive to changing CO2 levels than previously assumed?
Or the fact that Polar Bear populations are increasing?
“According to data collected by the federal government, polar bears along the entire west coast of Baffin Island are ‘stable.’ On the southeastern side of the island (around the Nunavut capital of Iqaluit) polar bears have even experienced a ‘likely increase.’ It’s only on the island’s northeastern corner — in a management area that meets Greenland — that polar bears are suspected to be in decline.”
And here, the topic of this article, our world is literally a greener place than it was 20 years ago according to data from NASA satellites. The cause of the greenery? Human-induced activity in China and India.
My point in all I wrote above is what we hear in the media is typically only one side of the picture, and it does not give us an accurate representation of what’s going on. For years now, we have been reporting on environmental issues from a grounded perspective here at CE. Looking at data, looking beyond the politics and simply at what’s happening. This approach shows you things are troubling in certain areas like pollution, air quality, EMF exposure and so forth, but the number one climate story we always hear about, C02 warming the atmosphere, simply does not hold water from the perspectives of many scientists and it hasn’t for the 10 years we have been reporting on it.
I recall a conversation I had with Gregg Braden where we were discussing research about the climate and what the data is TRULY showing. Amidst all the C02 alarmism I asked “Gregg… it appears to me that it’s more likely we’re headed into a global cooling period than a warming period.” He responded with “that’s precisely what the data shows, and it appears humanity is suffering from amnesia when it comes to the cycles of climate.”
The bottom line is, the majority don’t know the truth and the news is actually a lot better than what we’re being told. The challenge is, it’s more beneficial for power structures and business to keep us in fear.
NASA’s study will come as a surprise to many as we have not been told a balanced perspective on what’s going on with our climate for some time. To reiterate, yes, there are challenges we need to address, mainly pollution of water, land, air and the issues of animal agriculture.
The countries with the world’s biggest populations, China and India, are leading the improvement of ‘greening’ Earth’s land. In 2017 alone, India broke its own world record for the most trees planted after volunteers gathered together to plant 66 million saplings in just 12 hours! This is how fast change can happen!
In the mid 1990s, satellite data began to paint a greener picture, leading to the question as to whether or not human activity was actually helping to green the planet.
After 20 years of data collection from a NASA instrument orbiting the Earth on two satellites called the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), we know that Earth’s green coverage has increased by 5% over the last two decades. This works out to an extra two million square miles.
“China and India account for one-third of the greening, but contain only 9% of the planet’s land area covered in vegetation – a surprising finding, considering the general notion of land degradation in populous countries from overexploitation,” said Chi Chen of the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University and lead author of the study.
MODIS has captured as many as four shots of every place on Earth, every day for the last 20 years.
“This long-term data lets us dig deeper,” said Rama Nemani, a research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center and a co-author of the new work. “When the greening of the Earth was first observed, we thought it was due to a warmer, wetter climate and fertilization from the added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, leading to more leaf growth in northern forests, for instance. Now, with the MODIS data that lets us understand the phenomenon at really small scales, we see that humans are also contributing.”
Although all of the planting in China and India does not entirely make up for the damage we’re seeing through the clear cutting in Brazil and Indonesia, a good message still emerges here. When we recognize there is an issue, we tend to do something about it.
“Once people realize there’s a problem, they tend to fix it,” he said. “In the 70s and 80s in India and China, the situation around vegetation loss wasn’t good; in the 90s, people realized it; and today things have improved. Humans are incredibly resilient. That’s what we see in the satellite data.”
The Takeaway
Yes, we are still clear-cutting in ways we should be reflecting on, but this is happening due to a state of global consciousness that puts profits first. From this state of consciousness, we also give power to the government, put responsibility on others, blindly trust government and don’t see ourselves as part of a global community.
When the reference above points to ‘not being totally out of the weeds yet’ this is in reference to the belief that C02 is having a detrimental warming effect, which as we discussed, remains unfounded.
Remaining in a balanced heart centred state of being, we are better equipped to navigate information from a non-emotional state. When we get caught up in alarmism and panic, we tend not to see things clearly. The CE Protocol, that we have been sharing for a while now, was designed to help people not only navigate information but shift their perspective and consciousness such that we can change our world and take action from a NEW state of consciousness instead of the old.
NASA bevestigt dat de aarde een stuk groener is geworden. Deze twee onverwachte landen leiden de opmars
NASA bevestigt dat de aarde een stuk groener is geworden. Deze twee onverwachte landen leiden de opmars
De aarde is in vergelijking met 20 jaar geleden een stuk groener geworden, vooral dankzij twee onverwachte landen: India en China. Dat blijkt na bijna twee decennia uitgegevens die zijn verzamelddoor de NASA.
Vooral in China en India is meer groen waargenomen. De landen zijn verantwoordelijk voor een derde van de vergroening, terwijl ze maar negen procent van het groen op aarde bezitten.
China is bezig met ambitieuze programma’s om bossen te behouden en verder uit te breiden.
Wereldrecord
In India werden in 2017 door vrijwilligers 66 miljoen bomen geplant in 12 uur tijd: een wereldrecord.
De bebossing in China is met meer dan 10 procent toegenomen en in India met meer dan zes procent. Het wereldwijde gemiddelde bedroeg 2,3 procent.
De NASA is al bijna 20 jaar bezig om het groen op aarde te monitoren. Twee satellieten maken iedere dag vier foto’s van elk gebied op aarde.
De mens
Sinds 2000 is de planeet vijf procent groener geworden, wat gelijk staat aan alle bomen en planten in de Amazone.
Daar verdwijnt nog altijd veel bos, maar de cijfers uit China en India laten zien dat de ontbossing wel teruggedraaid kan worden.
De NASA dacht in eerste instantie dat de vergroening het gevolg was van klimaatverandering, maar nu is duidelijk geworden dat de mens verantwoordelijk is voor deze trend.
Al sinds 1998 geen sprake meer van global warming. Professor getuigt voor Amerikaans Congres
Al sinds 1998 geen sprake meer van global warming. Professor getuigt voor Amerikaans Congres
Professor Don Easterbrook van de Western Washington University getuigde enkele jaren geleden voor het Amerikaanse Congres dat klimaatverandering cyclisch van aard is.
Easterbrook heeft meer dan 50 jaar onderzoek gedaan en spreekt zich al sinds 1998 uit tegen theorieën over de door de mens gedreven klimaatverandering.
Hij stelde dat er in de afgelopen eeuw twee warmere en twee koudere periodes zijn geweest en dat die precies overeenkomen met het langetermijnpatroon.
Zonnevariatie
Tussen 1880 en 1915 was het kouder dan gemiddeld en tussen 1915 tot 1945 was er sprake van een warmere periode.
Tussen 1945 en 1977 was het weer kouder dan gemiddeld en tussen 1977 en 1998 warmer. Sinds 1998 koelt de aarde weer af.
Deze periodes kunnen in verband worden gebracht met de zonnevariatie sinds de Kleine IJstijd 400 jaar geleden, aldus Easterbrook.
Global cooling
Er is genoeg bewijs dat we hier te maken hebben met een natuurlijk fenomeen. Politici die zich zorgen maken over global warming, zijn vooral uit op het geld van de belastingbetaler.
De vraag is volgens Easterbrook niet hoe we de concentratie CO2 in de atmosfeer het beste kunnen terugdringen om global warming een halt toe te roepen, maar hoe we ons het beste kunnen voorbereiden op 30 jaar global cooling.
Neptune’s smallest moon no longer has to go by its previous names of “Neptune XIV” and “S/2004 N1” as it’s now officially known as “Hippocamp”. A team that was led by Mark Showalter of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California, confirmed the existence of the small moon back in 2013 after studying photographs that were captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope from 2004 to 2009.
Studies showed that the moon is located approximately 65,400 miles from Neptune and it takes around 23 hours to complete one full orbit. To better understand the proximity of Hippocamp to Neptune, our own moon orbits Earth at a distance averaging 239,000 miles.
Neptune’s size compared to Earth
Out of Neptune’s 14 known moons, Hippocamp is the smallest, as it was thought to have a diameter of no more than 12 miles. However, a new study suggests that it may be slightly larger with a diameter of around 21 miles. That would make it around the same size as the distant object, Ultima Thule. It’s hard to imagine a moon that tiny, as our own moon measures 2,160 miles wide.
As for its name, Hippocamp is a fish-tailed, horse-headed creature in Greek mythology, adding to the Greco-Roman mythology and the sea for the names of the Neptune system. In addition, the name Neptune means the Roman God of the sea which is comparable to the Greek Poseidon.
It’s incredible how the researchers found the small moon in the first place. They took eight five-minute Hubble exposures in sequence of the Neptune system and then they readjusted the pixels in order to stack the photographs on top of each other and that’s how they discovered the tiny moon. “We came really close to missing it entirely,” Showalter said, “It’s too faint to see in a single Hubble [exposure].” The team also used transformation-stacking to locate another one of Neptune’s moons called Naiad which hadn’t been seen since 1989.
Hippocamp is located in the same area as the six moons that were discovered by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989 and it’s only 7,450 miles interior to Proteus which is the outermost and biggest of the six moons, measuring at 260 miles wide.
Simulated diagram of Neptune and Proteus
It is thought that Hippocamp was more than likely located next to Proteus around 4 billion years ago. In fact, Showalter and his colleagues believe that Hippocamp is younger than Proteus and that perhaps it was created from pieces that were sent into space after the larger moon collided with a comet. It could even be connected to the Pharos Crater that’s located on Proteus from a once huge impact. “This is the first really great example of a moon that got created as a result of an impact,” Showalter suggested.
This is the earliest image of the Neptune moon Hippocamp, obtained by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 2004. Hippocamp is shown inside the red box, and an enlarged version is inset at upper right.
This is the image in which the tiny Neptune moon Hippocamp was discovered. Hippocamp is visible inside the red box; an enlarged version is inset at upper right.
Crystal Clear V-Shaped Alien Craft Photographed over Failsworth, GB
Crystal Clear V-Shaped Alien Craft Photographed over Failsworth, GB
A crystal clear image of a V-shaped alien craft has been photographed over Failsworth, GB. on October 22, 2018.
The photographer couldn’t believe what he saw, he looked down, rubbed his eyes and looked back up and it was still there, it slowly glided past him over his house.
According to photographer more people must have seen the UFO which started to materialize in the sky from being cloaked.
The photographer has long doubted whether he would make the remarkable photo public or not, on which he decided to send the photo to the Mutual UFO Network, last week.
Since the photo has been taken outdoors we can exclude that the object is a reflection in a window and though V-shaped UFOs have been previously photographed the clear image of this craft is truly amazing showing many details of the alien craft.
We may wonder whether these type of UFOs are responsible for the mystery booms and sounds heard around the world. Could it be that the mysterious booms and sounds are caused by air displacement when these kinds of UFOs arrive in our atmosphere?
I found an ancient sphinx on Mars in a gigapan photo today. Its so different and unlike what our human culture would make that I believe most people would actually deny this being real. Its a hard thing to accept that art could be anything other than what we want it to be. However even on earth, the art world is a little crazy and strange, leaving many onlookers wondering if its really art or something pulled off the ground and hung on the wall? Thats what we have here. An ancient monument created by a culture that never had our art schools, our books our TV shows or our Internet. This is truly a great example of how different alien cultures are to our own. I wonder, are humans really ready to mingle with a species so different?
This sphinx is about 30-35 meters across and 8-9 meters high. It has a back area I colored yellow, a horned helm area I colored green, and a facial area I colored pink. You can easily make out the eye, huge thick long nose, open mouth, strong chin and cheeks. Yes, it seems primitive in design, and yet it appears to stand the test of time...still standing after hundreds of thousands of years.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Australian Police Reveal a Video Showing a UFO In The Night Sky
Australian Police Reveal a Video Showing a UFO In The Night Sky
Police in a remote part of Australia have shared out of this world video of a mysterious bright light hovering in the sky.
Taken during a thunderstorm, the footage quickly created speculation on aliens including from the Broome Police themselves, who suggested the video might have shown a UFO.
The bright light shining in the sky looks like a flying saucer. The police’s official Twitter feed interestingly followed by a string of UFO emoji. The police say that it appears we are not alone after reviewing the CCTV at town beach catching the night’s storm.
The video shows an odd object in the sky after a flash of bright lightning. The apparent UFO stays there as each flash in the sky seems to lit it. It then moves away and comes back again.
The police posted the video on Twitter and Facebook, and it has since received a lot of suggestions from the public.
Some believe it is a lens flare, but many others suggest that extraterrestrials are behind the bizarre activity in the night sky.
After centuries searching for extraterrestrial life, we might find that first contact is not with organic creatures at all.
We have a problem. In a 10-billion-year-old galaxy there should have been ample opportunity for at least one species to escape its own mess, and to spread across the stars, filling every niche. That this species doesn’t seem to have come calling leads to Fermi’s Paradox – if life isn’t impossibly rare, then where is everyone? Efforts to scan the skies for signs of intelligent life have come up blank too, adding to the puzzle. Perhaps the vast gulfs of interstellar space and the narrow windows of time for communicative species to exist within shouting distance of each other are to blame. Intelligences might be like small ships passing in the night in a vast ocean. Actual close encounters of any kind could be exceedingly unusual.
Another explanation for the great silence of the galaxy is that any surviving intelligence out there is so different from us, so radically evolved, that we can’t even conceive of its forms or behaviours. As a consequence, actually detecting and recognising it could be next to impossible. That’s a bit of a downer.
But there is also a possibility that lies between such extremes and it might be the most probable of all. When our first encounter or detection finally occurs, it could be a machine intelligence that appears in our sights.
The idea is not truly new. Back in the 1940s, the mathematician John von Neumann explored the possibilities of non-biological, self-replicating systems steeped in computation but requiring no operating minds. Later on, in the 1980s, others expanded on this concept by considering the real engineering needs for autonomous, replicating, space-faring devices; these machines would be able to roam the Universe, finding raw materials to build more and more of themselves, creating the infrastructure for energy from space or human settlement among the stars.
It would require a more complex mission still for such devices to have true artificial intelligence (AI). What would that purpose be, and what kind of AI is such a machine likely to have? An encounter with an alien machine could help us unravel this puzzle.
After centuries searching for extraterrestrial life, we might find that first contact is not with organic creatures at all.
One possibility is that this machine is super-capable, exceeding our human capacity for cognitive or analytical tasks. Such an AI might be exceedingly hard to understand, either in terms of its underlying motivation or because of practical barriers of communication bandwidth. For this device, talking to us might be like talking to an infant. Or trying to discuss the collected works of Shakespeare using pictographs. An alien system optimised for processing vast data streams might not even be able to downgrade its pace enough to notice that we’re trying to talk, whether we use technology or not.
An extraterrestrial (ET) AI could also be seriously intimidating and scary simply because of its machine nature: a thing animated from non-living pieces, just like the classic tale of the golem moulded from clay or mud. By comparison, while a biological alien might be shocking, it would surely have some traits in common with us. We could convince ourselves that evolution leads to recognisable, even sympathetic behaviours and intentions. An artificial entity need not follow all of those evolutionary rules, taking alienness to a whole other level.
Encountering an alien AI would not only point to our own possible future, but also prompt a curious shift in our worldview. When Nicolaus Copernicus proposed in the 1500s that the Earth was not central in any way to the Universe, he set in motion the development of a critical scientific idea: that there is nothing cosmically special or significant about us. But meeting an ET-AI could turn that realisation on its head: if the only intelligence we meet is machine in nature, then we would be special, after all.
If we do meet an AI in our cosmological jaunt, it probably won’t be conscious in the full sense of the word. In fact, I think we’d find ourselves facing something akin to a ‘savant’ intelligence – a whiz at specific tasks, but otherwise extremely limited in its capacities.
A recent example right here on Earth is Google’s AlphaGo Master, a system that plays the board game Go, and learns some of its skills by exposure to vast catalogues of human-played games. Within a year of its inception, it began outdoing the world’s highest-ranking human Go players. Next came an evolved system called AlphaGo Zero. In 40 days of training, without recourse to data from historical games, this new AI made itself better than its silicon ancestor, and better than any living human. Now, yet another variant, AlphaZero, has taken a mere 24 hours to train itself and beat a modestly trained iteration of AlphaGo Zero – as well as topping other systems at playing both chess and Shogi, sometimes known as Japanese chess. If you read interviews with expert players, you’ll see that these machines don’t even play like humans, their strategies are alien and seemingly unfathomable.
These Alphas are the epitome of a savant machine. Such AIs will help us answer a host of scientific problems that are presently on the hairy edge of tractability. The researchers behind the Alpha systems are already talking about the puzzle of protein-folding – how chains of amino acids twist, gyrate and fold into structures with essential biological utility. The underlying molecular rules are understood but predicting what a particular recipe will give you is currently extremely difficult. It certainly sounds like a job for some future AlphaFold Zero.
Or take other pieces of modern science. Cosmological simulations or climate and weather predictions are all driven by physics phenomena such as gravitation, fluid dynamics and thermodynamics. Computer codes digitise these phenomena, calculating billions of iterations of forces and movements. But these computations are still hemmed in by processor speeds and precision. Deep-learning self-taught AIs might turn out to do better as quantitative soothsayers than those intense numerical simulations – presently bounded by their comparatively plodding, systematic approaches. A machine’s savant intuition might be able to skip across compute cycles, ‘seeing’ what the answer will be in a probabilistic sense, rather than painstakingly reproducing a pixelated version of it. Similarly, a machine’s savant intuition might be applied to the root process of scientific deduction and discovery itself. The possibilities are yet to be much explored, but they could be extraordinary. Savant machines could turn out to be simply so useful, so revolutionary in expanding our capacity for discovery and exploration, that there’s little initial motivation to seek anything fancier.
A cosmos filled with worlds offers millions, billions, even trillions of natural test tubes.
If this pattern of machine development is happening for us, it could represent a pattern that happens across the cosmos to influence the nature of cosmic exploration itself. Savant AIs would become the ultimate tools for allowing biological life to reach across interstellar distances: more robust than biology, and not smart enough to raise ethical concerns about being sent off to roam the cosmos according to our scientific whims. Propelling millions of these investigators into space would be an inevitable step. They could be sent to other stars and planetary systems, and designed to recognise the most interesting characteristics of these places, from astrophysics to the presence of life. These machines would reflect the motivations of their biological creators; perhaps simple curiosity, perhaps something more.
Another compelling reason for savant machines to be roaming the cosmos arises from thinking about how to build more general, more powerful AIs. It might be that a general AI system can be built out of lots of smaller savant AIs, each taking on some specific, difficult cognitive task, but linked together. That linkage could be very localised or quite spread out like the architecture of biological neural circuits. There’s the face-recognising savant, the natural-language savant, the calculus-savant, the tax-evading savant. One could then imagine an AI whose job is to learn how to combine savant AIs into something akin to a general intelligence – establishing a nursery for machine consciousness run from on-high.
The most challenging task for a nursery-room AI would be how to expose its collective of savants to the complexity of the real-world environment. Nature isn’t just about meeting fixed goals; it’s full of noise, randomness and trillions upon trillions of interacting pieces. For example, from the very instant an embryo forms, it is exposed to constant variation. First just a few cells, it senses the world purely from a molecular point of view. As the embryo develops organs to register light, sound, touch and smell, the portals to experience – and their complexity – expand.
In short, the way for a species to make a better AI is to let that AI and its components explore the messy Universe. As complex and nourishing as a single planet can be, a cosmos filled with worlds offers millions, billions, even trillions of natural test tubes, each with its own tale of natural selection and chance. Spreading savant AI pieces across the stars offers a way to exploit these endless natural experiments and sensory inputs.
The path towards better AI might parallel biological evolution only in superficial ways. Consider the raw development of a human brain. The core process appears to be a one-shot effort. It starts with stem cells racing up an initial structure called a neural tube at a rate of 15 million every hour and hooking together in a developing embryo. That prodigious assembly of the brain is followed by learning – the brain is shaped and pruned as experience creates our unique path through life. Although we’re incredibly flexible, and capable of absorbing and mastering all sorts of skills and knowledge, as individuals we are also, sadly, constrained by whatever genetic hand we were dealt. And, in truth, while we can all keep learning and changing, we seldom develop any miraculous new talents during our lifetimes.
A machine might not be as constrained, especially if critical pieces are out exploring the cosmos and have been designed to evolve into something new. Savant components of a larger intelligence might come and go in an ever-changing pick-and-mix. Some cognitive skills might be useful in certain contexts but could simply get in the way in other situations. In other words, machine-based intelligence could be highly fluid, changeable and, most of all, rapidly evolvable. As a consequence, what could be lurking out there in the cosmos is a vast and diverse zoo of AIs.
We might be incapable of registering the presence of billion-year-old machine savants.
In a sense, such AIs parallel the microbial machines that are at the core of life on Earth – forming the smallest units of intelligence to traverse the Universe, and ultimately combining together, as the evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis posed, to create multicellular creatures, larger entities and consciousness itself. In fact, long after a biological species has faded away amid the relentless torrent of natural selection, or self-destruction, this type of machine will remain.
AI beyond Earth might be hard to recognise. Just as someone living on the steppe in 12th-century Mongolia would find a self-driving car both magical and meaningless, we might be quite incapable of registering or interpreting the presence of billion-year-old machine savants. Equally, savant machines might not be actively seeking to talk to us, or any other intelligences.
But a recognisable encounter with even one savant machine would indeed change everything. It would tell us that the galaxy is awash with intelligence, and could suggest that our future might be one of a vestigial, fading biological presence. Most of all, this discovery would tell us that we might currently be the only natural minds consciously aware of these facts. That’s because the biology that could produce AI explorers would likely evolve or go extinct on timescales far shorter than the persistence of these interstellar machines, and we already live in a galaxy that is 10 billion years old.
Finding an AI-ET could unlock our own cosmic exploration by lighting a path forward. It might also offer insight into the nature of its creators, those ancestral intelligences, presumably in biological form. Exactly what this investigative process would look like is extremely hard to imagine. Even a single savant AI might not come in one physical package but rather a swarm of tinier components incredibly hard to digest. However, let’s assume that by interrogation or literal disassembly we eventually solve the mystery of the AI-ET’s origins. We might find evidence of an organic species like us – or we might discover only machines all the way down.
Caleb Scharf is director of astrobiology at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of Extrasolar Planets and Astrobiology (2009), which won the Chambliss Astronomical Writing Award. His latest book is The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing (2017).
Why a data scienWhy a data scientist warns against always trusting AI’s scientific discoveriestist warns against always trusting AI’s scientific discoveries
Why a data scientist warns against always trusting AI’s scientific discoveries
Data-mining algorithms aren’t good at communicating uncertainty in results, Genevera Allen says
MACHINE EUREKA It’s risky to take scientific discoveries made by AI at face value until these computer programs get better at assessing their own uncertainty, says data scientist Genevera Allen.
DMYTRO VIKARCHUK/SHUTTERSTOCK
WASHINGTON — We live in a golden age of scientific data, with larger stockpiles of genetic information, medical images and astronomical observations than ever before. Artificial intelligence can pore over these troves to uncover potential new scientific discoveries much quicker than people ever could. But we should not blindly trust AI’s scientific insights, argues data scientist Genevera Allen, until these computer programs can better gauge how certain they are in their own results.
AI systems that use machine learning — programs that learn what to do by studying data rather than following explicit instructions — can be entrusted with some decisions, says Allen, of Rice University in Houston. Namely, AI is reliable for making decisions in areas where humans can easily check their work, like counting craters on the moon or predicting earthquake aftershocks (SN: 12/22/18, p. 25).
But more exploratory algorithms that poke around large datasets to identify previously unknown patterns or relationships between various features “are very hard to verify,” Allen said February 15 at a news conference at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Deferring judgment to such autonomous, data-probing systems may lead to faulty conclusions, she warned.
SELF-CONSCIOUS SYSTEMS Genevera Allen (pictured) and her colleagues are devising new uncertainty-measuring schemes to help AI programs estimate the accuracy and reproducibility of their discoveries.
TOMMY LAVERGNE/RICE UNIVERSITY
Take precision medicine, where researchers often aim to find groups of patients that are genetically similar to help tailor treatments. AI programs that sift through genetic data have successfully identified patient groups for some diseases, like breast cancer. But it hasn’t worked as well for many other conditions, like colorectal cancer. Algorithms examining different datasets have clustered together different, conflicting patient classifications. That leaves scientists to wonder which, if any, AI to trust.
These contradictions arise because data-mining algorithms are designed to follow a programmer’s exact instructions with no room for indecision, Allen explained. “If you tell a clustering algorithm, ‘Find groups in my dataset,’ it comes back and it says, ‘I found some groups.’ ” Tell it to find three groups, and it finds three. Request four, and it will give you four.
What AI should really do, Allen said, is report something like, “I really think that these groups of patients are really, really grouped similarly … but these others over here, I’m less certain about.”
Scientists are no strangers to dealing with uncertainty. But traditional uncertainty-measuring techniques are designed for cases where a scientist has analyzed data that was specifically collected to evaluate a predetermined hypothesis. That’s not how data-mining AI programs generally work. These systems have no guiding hypotheses, and they muddle through massive datasets that are generally collected for no single purpose. Researchers like Allen, however, are designing protocols to help next-generation AI estimate the accuracy and reproducibility of its discoveries.
One of these techniques relies on the idea that if an AI program has made a real discovery — like identifying a set of clinically meaningful patient groups — then that finding should hold up in other datasets. It’s generally too expensive for scientists to collect brand new, huge datasets to test what an AI has found. But, Allen said, “we can take the current data that we have, and we can perturb the data and randomize the data in a way that mimics [collecting] future datasets.” If the AI finds the same types of patient classifications over and over, for example, “you probably have a pretty good discovery on your hands,” she said.
Leaked video footage of a 12,000-year-old Anunnaki?
Leaked video footage of a 12,000-year-old Anunnaki?
The recently uploaded video allegedly shows “footage of a 12,000-year-old Anunnaki God…” The tomb of the ‘Anunnaki’ is said to have been discovered by chance in 2008. If anyone has more info about it please let us know.
Before everyone goes crazy about the title and the video, please watch it and let us know what you think. If anyone has more information about the video, please let us know.
The video uploaded to YouTube by Temple Of Mystery states that the video footage is an actual (real) leaked video of a 12,000-year-old Anunnaki.
The Ancient Anunnaki are probably the number one topic when it comes to the Ancient Alien theory and many people around the world remain skeptical when talking about the Anunnaki and their potential connection to the origins of mankind.
According to statements on the video, the footage „…Is real and they discovered it in Iran in 2008, but they move it to Israel“.
Users have rushed to YouTube to discuss the enigmatic video.
One user wrote on YouTube:
“…If you look at the depictions of the Annunaki in the art of the Sumerians, they are shown wearing what appear to be watches on their wrists. If this is not a hoax, then the years of reign by the Kings on the Sumerian Kings list is totally legit I would suppose. Seems to good to be true…”
Many others remain skeptical since there is little information about the origin of the video.
“…Looks a bit too good to be true, but we can dream that one day the truth will reveal. (like they said in Independence Day- I hope they bring back Elvis.)…”
Whether the video is real or not is something that will surely create an ongoing debate. While we cannot say for certain whether or not this is yet another hoax on the internet, it surely is a very interesting video worth to watch.
Based on numerous archaeological discoveries: artifacts, records and monuments found in the past by archaeologists and linguists, Sitchin indicates that the Anunnaki (Sumerian: “those who came down from the heavens), an extremely advanced civilization from an elusive planet in our solar system, came to Earth, landing in the Persian Gulf some 432,000 years ago. This advanced civilization colonized our planet, and their sole purpose was to mine large quantities of gold.
Approximately some 250,000 years ago, according to Sitchin, the ancient Anunnaki merged their Alien genes with that of Homo Erectus and created a species known as Homo Sapiens, obtaining. As a result, a genetically bicameral species. However, humans were a hybrid species and could not procreate. Since the demand for humans as workers became greater, the ancient Anunnaki once again manipulated ancient mankind so they could reproduce on their own.
In many depictions of the Anunnaki, we can see strange objects worn by “those who came from the stars,” one of the most interesting examples are “wrist watches” which appear in almost every single depiction of the Anunnaki.
Archaeologists find 12,000-year-old pictograph at Gobeklitepe
Archaeologists find 12,000-year-old pictograph at Gobeklitepe
Excavations being conducted at the ancient city of Göbeklitepe in Turkey have uncovered an ancient pictograph on an obelisk which researchers say could be the earliest known pictograph ever discovered.
A pictograph is an image that conveys meaning through its resemblance to a physical object. Such images are most commonly found in pictographic writing, such as hieroglyphics or other characters used by ancient Sumerian and Chinese civilizations. Some non-literate cultures in parts of Africa, South America and Oceania still use them.
“The scene on the obelisk unearthed in Göbeklitepe could be construed as the first pictograph because it depicts an event thematically” explained Director of the Şanlıurfa Museum, Müslüm Ercan, to the Hurriyet Daily News . Ercan is leading the excavation at Göbeklitepe. “It depicts a human head in the wing of a vulture and a headless human body under the stela. There are various figures like cranes and scorpions around this figure. This is the portrayal of a moment; it could be the first example of pictograph. They are not random figures. We see this type of thing portrayal on the walls in 6,000-5,000 B.C. in Çatalhöyük [in modern-day western Turkey].”
The ‘Vulture-Stone’.
Credit: Alistair Coombs
The artifacts discovered in the ancient city have provided information about ancient burial traditions in the area in which bodies were left in the open for raptors such as vultures to consume. According to Mr Ercan, this enabled the soul of the deceased to be carried into the sky. It was called “burial in the sky” and was depicted on the obelisks in Göbeklitepe. Such rituals were conducted in and around the city around 12,000 years ago. Many of the items discovered on the site have not been seen before anywhere else in the world and thus are the first of their kind to be discovered.
Göbeklitepe is situated on the top of a hill about 15 kilometres away from Sanliurfa in South-eastern Turkey. The city can be dated back to 10,000 BC and consists of a series of circular and oval shaped structures that were first excavated by Professor Klaus Schmidt supported by the German Archaeological Institute. Schmidt travelled to the site having heard about it from accounts of other previous visits by anthropologists from the University of Chicago and Istanbul University in the 1960’s. Both institutions ignored the site, believing it to be nothing more than a medieval graveyard.
Artifacts found on the site indicate that the city was intended for ritual use only and not as a domain for human occupation. Each of the 20 structures consists of a ring of walls surrounding two T-shaped monumental pillars between 3 metres (9 feet) and 6 metres high (19 feet) and weighing between 40 and 60 tons.
Enormous T-shaped pillars at Göbeklitepe.
Credit: Alistair Coombs
Archaeologists believe these pillars are stylised representations of human beings because of the human appendages carved into the stone. These images are accompanied by those of animals including foxes, snakes, wild boars, cranes and ducks.
The archaeologists believe Göbeklitepe was used as a religious centre. Geo-radar work has revealed evidence of 23 temple structures in the area. Two of the obelisks in the city were constructed in the form of a letter T and are positioned opposite each other within a circle of smaller, round obelisks.
Ercan said that the museum at Şanlıurfa contains a small sculpture of a pig that was discovered in front of the central stelas in the ‘C’ temple at Göbeklitepe. Such statues may have depicted sacred beings.
Work on the basic infrastructure of a roof to cover the site and help preserve its structures and artefacts has just been completed, ready for the construction of the roof itself. This is an EU project and the archaeologists aim to complete it in eight months’ time.
Featured image: Göbekli Tepe in Turkey is the oldest known temple in the world. Photo source: Wikimedia
You might be aware of one of Uranus' complexities: It spins on its side, and its moons orbit on that same rotated plane. New evidence strengthens the case that Uranus was smashed in a giant collision, resulting in its sideways orientation to its orbital plane and perhaps explaining some of the planet's other mysteries.
A new paper performs a series of simulations on Uranus early in its history, taking note of what an early impact may have done to its rotation rate, atmosphere and internal structure. The impact could have left a clear signature still visible inside the planet we see today.
Uranus really is strange. Not only does it rotate on an axis that sits at a 98-degree angle to its orbital plane, but, unlike the other giant planets, it doesn't appear to release more heat than it receives from the Sun. Its magnetic field, too, appears warped compared to the Earth's.
An impact could perhaps help explain some of these strange traits.
Scientists have been simulating giant impacts into Uranus since the early 1990s, according to the new paper published in the Astrophysical Journal.
This time around, researchers built a new simulation with the newest and best available data of the planet's composition. This allowed them to model how a giant impactor, perhaps one to three times the mass of Earth, would have deposited "material and energy inside Uranus", and how much debris would be left over from which moons could form.
"This study provides some great new insights into what might have happened all those billions of years ago, with material left over from the impact possibly even serving to trap some of that heat inside," Leigh Fletcher, Royal Society Research Fellow at the University of Leicester, told Gizmodo.
But this is just a simulation, and like we always say: All models are flawed, but some are interesting. Models can't tell us exactly what happened; it will take a lot more data to fully understand Uranus' story.
"Of course, what we really need next is an ambitious robotic mission to explore Uranus and its diverse satellite system," said Fletcher. "Gravitational, atmospheric, and magnetic field mapping, following what we've done at Jupiter with Juno, and at Saturn with Cassini, could provide some new clues to better constrain these models, by unlocking the secrets of an ice giant interior for the first time."
Uranus is truly a mystery. Will humans finally take up the task to explore it?
Symmetrical streaks in Venus' lower-level clouds as seen by the Akatsuki spacecraft (left) and reconstructed through simulation. A strong downflow is denoted by brighter parts of the images.
Surprise! New pictures show two symmetrical streaks hiding in the sulfuric acid clouds close to the surface of Venus.
The Japanese Akatsuki spacecraft spotted the twin phenomena in Venus' northern and southern hemispheres. Each streak is roughly 6,200 miles (10,000 kilometers) across. That's more than double the distance between San Francisco and New York City.
Venus is close to Earth's size but orbits closer to the sun than our home does. Venus isn't habitable by life as we know it, not by any stretch of the imagination. Its atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide. It has clouds made of sulfuric acid. The planet is, in fact, fully enveloped in clouds, and you cannot see its surface with the naked eye. Underneath the clouds lies a world shaped by the runaway greenhouse effect and featuring oven-like temperatures, possible active volcanoes and bone-crushing pressures.
This is all old news to researchers — after all,Soviet Union landersbriefly survived this surface environment in the 1970s and 1980s — but the streaks were previously unknown. And they may be unique to Venus.
The story of their formation isn't too alien, though: The streaks are related to polar jet streams, researchers from Japan's Kobe University, which led the study, said in a statement. Polar jet streams are found on Earth, but their results are different on Venus.
At Earth's mid and high latitudes, dynamic winds can form cyclones, high-pressure systems and jet streams — and the same thing is probably happening at the high latitude of Venus, the university's analysis shows. But at lower latitudes on Venus, things get a little weird. Large-scale flows in the Venus atmosphere, coupled with that world's planetary rotation, create huge vortexes starting at the equator and stretching as far as 60 degrees latitude north and south. On Earth, the equivalent vortex would stretch well into Canada in the north — and as far south as the ocean near Antarctica.
The planetary-scale streaks on Venus form using the process above. From the statement, "The giant vortexes caused by Rossby waves (left) are tilted by the high-latitude jet streams and stretch (right). Within the stretched vortexes, the convergence zone of the streak structure is formed, a downflow occurs, and the lower clouds become thin. Venus rotates in a westward direction, so the jet streams also blow west."
"When jet streams are added to this phenomenon, the vortexes tilt and stretch, and the convergence zone between the north and south winds forms as a streak," researchers said in the statement. "The north-south wind that is pushed out by the convergence zone becomes a strong downward flow, resulting in the planetary-scale streak structure." Planetary rotation and atmospheric fluctuations over the equator keep the hemispheres symmetrical.
Akatsuki captured the streaks using an infrared camera that can measure wavelengths of 2 micrometers (a tiny fraction of a millimeter). This allows the spacecraft to spy on the construction of lower cloud banks only 31 miles (50 km) from the surface. Researchers modeled the atmosphere using a program called AFES-Venus, developed before Akatsuki arrived at Venus in 2015. (The probe was supposed to get there in 2010 but missed the opportunity; the second attempt worked.)
The researchers noted that it is difficult to observe Venus' surface and lower atmosphere, which could affect the accuracy of the simulations.
A study based on the research was published Jan. 9 in the journal Nature Communications. The research was led by Hiroki Kashimura, a project assistant professor at Kobe.
This Ancient Map Challenges The Entire Human History
This Ancient Map Challenges The Entire Human History
The map of Piri Reis, which was made circa 1520, achieved a level of detail of American geography, which according to experts, would only be achievable using aerial photographs. This incredible map challenges every single thing we know about our past, yet history books have completely omitted this incredible ancient document.
There are a number of archeological discoveries that question our past, this is the case of the map which was found in 1929, during the restoration of the Topkapi palace in Istanbul Turkey, which describes in high detail the geography of the American Continent with such a precision that it looks as if it was put together with the aid of aerial photography. However, the map was made at a time when mainstream history tells us there were no flying vehicles on Earth and mankind’s technology was very limited. The map composed by Ottoman admiral Piri Ibn Haji Muhiddin Memmed, aka Piri Reis is in fact part of maritime navigation collection called Bahriye which is basically composed of 210 partial maps, dated around 1513 and 1528.
The perfection and details displayed on the map have been the subject of debate for years among scholars who cannot understand nor explain how this map even exists. Today, numerous enigmas remain about the Piri Reis map, especially in regards to Latin America and the Southern regions of our planet.
This Turkish Admiral did not only draw the outline of the nearly unexplored South American region, detailing rivers, mountains and lakes that were believed to be unknown at that time in history, but he managed to accurately depict the geography of Antarctica, a continent that wasn’t officially investigated until the twentieth century…
As a matter of a fact, the first exploratory navigation in search of Antarctica was led by British explorer James Cook, who launched the journey in 1772 and only managed to see snow and ice, 250 years after Pirir Reis had already drawn Antarctica on navigational charts. It wasn’t until 1819, when Fabián von Bellingshausen discovered the landmass of Antarctica for the first time, and it was in 1950 when American expedition Deep Freeze managed to “reveal” the geography of Antarctica.
So, how is it possible that Pirir Reis managed to accurately draw the geographical details of Antarctica in 1513? With details that were not discovered until 1952? But that isn’t even the most interesting part of the Piri Reis Map. Inexplicably, the Piri Reis map depicts Antarctica without Ice, yet the Antarctica has been frozen for at least 6000 years. How is it possible that Piri Reis drew Antarctica without Ice? Where did he obtain this level of details? No one has been able to answer the mysteries surrounding this enigmatic ancient map.
The only thing we can conclude is that, somehow, someone knew how our planet looked like thousands of years ago from the air… and the Turkish Admiral managed to obtain this information and create the most enigmatic map we have discovered to date, a map that challenges history as never before.
The Seventh Moon of Neptune Is Broken, it "Shouldn't Be There" Say Astronomers
Astronomers call it “the moon that shouldn’t be there.”
After several years of analysis, a team of planetary scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has at last come up with an explanation for a mysterious moon around Neptune that they discovered with Hubble in 2013.
The tiny moon, named Hippocamp, is unusually close to a much larger Neptunian moon called Proteus. Normally, a moon like Proteus should have gravitationally swept aside or swallowed the smaller moon while clearing out its orbital path.
So why does the tiny moon exist? Hippocamp is likely a chipped-off piece of the larger moon that resulted from a collision with a comet billions of years ago. The diminutive moon, only 20 miles (about 34 kilometers) across, is 1/1000th the mass of Proteus (which is 260 miles [about 418 kilometers] across).
This is an artist’s concept of the tiny moon Hippocamp that was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2013. Only 20 miles across, it may actually be a broken-off fragment from a much larger neighboring moon, Proteus, seen as a smaller crescent in the upper right. This is the first evidence for a moon being an offshoot from a comet collision with a much larger parent body.
Credits: NASA, ESA and J. Olmsted (STScI)
“The first thing we realized was that you wouldn’t expect to find such a tiny moon right next to Neptune’s biggest inner moon,” said Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. “In the distant past, given the slow migration outward of the larger moon, Proteus was once where Hippocamp is now.”
This scenario is supported by Voyager 2 images from 1989 that show a large impact crater on Proteus, almost large enough to have shattered the moon. “In 1989, we thought the crater was the end of the story,” said Showalter. “With Hubble, now we know that a little piece of Proteus got left behind and we see it today as Hippocamp.” The orbits of the two moons are now 7,500 miles (about 12,070 kilometers) apart.
Neptune’s satellite system has a violent and tortured history. Many billions of years ago, Neptune captured the large moon Triton from the Kuiper Belt, a large region of icy and rocky objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. Triton’s gravity would have torn up Neptune’s original satellite system. Triton settled into a circular orbit and the debris from shattered Neptunian moons re-coalesced into a second generation of natural satellites. However, comet bombardment continued to tear things up, leading to the birth of Hippocamp, which might be considered a third-generation satellite.
“Based on estimates of comet populations, we know that other moons in the outer solar system have been hit by comets, smashed apart, and re-accreted multiple times,” noted Jack Lissauer of NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, a coauthor on the new research. “This pair of satellites provides a dramatic illustration that moons are sometimes broken apart by comets.”
Hippocamp is a half-horse half-fish from Greek mythology. The scientific name for the seahorse is Hippocampus, also the name of an important part of the human brain. The rules of the International Astronomical Union require that the moons of Neptune are named after Greek and Roman mythology of the undersea world.
The team of astronomers in this study consists of M. Showalter (SETI Institute, Mountain View, California), I. de Pater (University of California, Berkeley, California), J. Lissauer (NASA Ames Research Center, Silicon Valley, California) and R. French (SETI Institute, Mountain View, California).
The paper will appear in the February 21 issue of the science journal Nature.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.
David Wilcock: Antarctica Stunning New Insiders! via Linda Moulten Howe
David Wilcock: Antarctica Stunning New Insiders! via Linda Moulten Howe
Linda Moulton Howe has just shocked the UFO community with two NEW insiders who report on ancient ruins in Antarctica, a modern-day secret space program and interactions with at least seven ET races. This is the biggest new development in the insider community since Emery Smith came forward.
Both whistleblowers are high-level military who have been fully vetted out, showing documentation. David Wilcock only found out about this yesterday and has already been in communication with Linda about it and watched all of her videos. Hear his initial reactions to this stunning new testimony!
We will review the material that has been disseminated in the first two of six planned live broadcasts on Linda’s own YouTube channel, Earthfiles. The confirmations with our material are literally stunning.
Op de bodem van het Fuxian-meer bevindt zich een piramidestad die ouder is dan het meer zelf. Door wie is deze stad gebouwd?
Foto: Zhangmoon618 Wikimedia Commons
Op de bodem van het Fuxian-meer bevindt zich een piramidestad die ouder is dan het meer zelf. Door wie is deze stad gebouwd?
Volgens sommige theoretici is het meest overtuigende bewijs voor buitenaards bezoek te vinden in China, het land van de vier grote uitvindingen: papier, boekdrukkunst, buskruit en het kompas.
Nieuw bewijs dat is gevonden in het land van de Grote Muur suggereert dat zich in een ver verleden aliens onder ons bevonden en dat ze ook nu nog onder ons zijn.
Maya’s
In een meer in de Chinese zuidelijke provincie Yunnan hebben onderzoekers enkele jaren geleden drie bouwwerken gevonden die lijken op de piramides die de Maya’s in Amerika bouwden, zo meldde de Chinese radio.
De archeologen troffen ze aan op de bodem van het Fuxian-meer, het op één na diepste meer van China.
Het complex van bouwwerken beslaat in totaal 2,4 vierkante kilometer en telt acht prominente bouwwerken, waarvan er drie sterk op piramides lijken die in Midden- en Zuid-Amerika voorkomen.
Nog veel meer
De onderzoekers denken dat de overblijfselen 2000 jaar oud zijn. Ze denken nog veel meer in het meer aan te zullen treffen, want alles wijst erop dat er ruïnes van een hele stad onder het wateroppervlak liggen.
Volgens sommige theoretici was de verzonken stad vroeger een buitenaardse basis.
“Gezegd wordt dat de piramides net zo oud zijn als de Egyptische piramides en misschien nog wel hoger,” zegt schrijver Paul Stonehill. “Dit is een ongelooflijke ontdekking.”
A species of giant tortoise believed to have gone extinct more than 100 years ago has been spotted in the Galapagos Islands.
Ecuador's environment minister Marcelo Mata made the announcement that an adult female Fernandina Giant Tortoise had been discovered.
Many species of giant tortoises were over-hunted for their meat by European and other colonists who travelled to the Galapagos archipelago.
Scroll down for video
A specimen of the giant Galapagos tortoise Chelonoidis phantasticus, thought to have gone extint about a century ago, is seen at the Galapagos National Park on Santa Cruz Island in the Galapagos Archipelago (pictured)
An adult female female Fernandina Giant Tortoise (Chelonoidis phantasticus) was discovered by members of the Galapagos National Park and the US NGO Galapagos Conservancy (pictured)
The sighting came during an expedition to the island of Fernandina in the western Ecuadorian region of the archipelago funded by Animal Planet for an upcoming documentary series titled 'Extinct or Alive'.
Expedition leader Forrest Galante crossed a three mile stretch of hardened lava flow and found the animal buried deep under a pile of brush.
'As a biologist and someone who has dedicated my life to the pursuit of animals believed extinct, this is by far my greatest scientific accomplishment and proudest moment,' said Mr Galante.
'Much like Lonesome George was an icon of extinction, I believe she can become an icon of wildlife hope. She's the rarest tortoise, if not animal, in the entire world and one of the largest discoveries in the Galapagos in the last century.'
Extinction looms large for the animal and its largest existential threat is considered to be volcanic activity and lava.
It is the youngest and most volcanically active of all the Galapagos islands.
The tortoise was found by members of the Galapagos National Park and the US NGO Galapagos Conservancy.
The Fernandina Giant Tortoise is one of 14 giant tortoise species in the Galapagos but only ten are thought to have survived human colonisation and over-hunting for food.
The female has a large body, smooth shell and a pink head but no other details have been revealed.
Susanna Dinnage, Global President of Animal Planet added: 'We are moved and excited about this historic news.
'As the rate of animal extinction is widely debated, it gives us great hope that some species are surviving against the odds and that at Animal Planet we can do our bit to celebrate and support them.'
A tweet from Mr Mata included an image of the reptile and the only other known specimen was collected in 1906.
A spokesman for Galapagos Conservancy said: 'While thought to be extinct due to volcanic eruptions in past centuries, there have been anecdotal observations indicating that there may indeed still be a very few left on the island.'
Anecdotal evidence and unconfirmed sightings have been reported ever since but it was formally listed on the IUCN red list as 'critically endangered (possibly extinct)'.
Surveys and expeditions have turned up evidence of scat previously.
'These sightings and signs, though needing verification through more extensive surveys, indicate the possibility that the species may remain extant in exceedingly small numbers,' IUCN said.
No other details have been revealed about the rediscovery of the species long-thought to be extinct. The female has a large body, smooth shell and a pink head
Anecdotal evidence and unconfirmed sightings have been reported ever since but it was formally listed on the IUCN red list as 'critically endangered (possibly extinct)'. Surveys and expeditions have turned up evidence of scat previously
The sighting came during an expedition to island of Fernandina in the western Ecuadorian region of the archipelago. It is the youngest and most volcanically active of all the Galapagos islands
Anecdotal evidence and unconfirmed sightings have been reported ever since but it was formally listed on the IUCN red list as 'critically endangered (possibly extinct)'. Surveys and expeditions have turned up evidence of scat previously
In 2015, Ecuador announced the discovery of a new species of tortoise on another island in the Galapagos, called Santa Cruz.
It was named Chelonoidis donfaustoi in honour of Fausto Llerena who took care of 'Lonesome George', a male Pinta Island tortoise (Chelonoidis abingdonii) and the last known individual of its species.
Lonesome George died in 2012 and scientists believe that tortoises first arrived in the Galapagos two to three million years ago after drifting 600 miles from the South American coast on vegetation rafts.
They were already large reptiles before arriving on the Islands.
Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos for five weeks on his second voyage and they appeared in his writings, playing a key role in the development of the theory of evolution.
He observed different finches on different islands but theorised they had evolved from the same species.
Differences in beak size and shape married up with the available food sources on the respective islands, birthing the theory of natural selection.
WHAT IS THE ENDANGERED 'RED LIST'?
Species on the endangered red list are animals of the highest conservation priority that need 'urgent action' to save.
An Amber list is reserved for the next most critical group, followed by a green list.
Red list criteria:
Globally threatened
Historical population decline in UK during 1800–1995
Severe (at least 50 per cent) decline in UK breeding population over last 25 years
Severe (at least 50 per cent) contraction of UK breeding range over last 25 years
Last year, in the UK, several more species were added to the list.
In November, 2018, a Chinese biophysicist named He Jiankui came into the international spotlight after reports that he used the CRISPR gene editing technology to create thefirst genetically modified humans. The genetically modified twins, known by the pseudonyms Lulu and Nana, were born on November 8, 2018, to widespread international condemnation of He’s actions, seen by a large part of the scientific community as reckless tinkering. He Jiankui says the genetic modifications done to the twin baby girls were to make them immune to the HIV virus. How could anyone be mad about that? Well, it turns out that besides HIV immunity, He Jiankui’s tinkering might have “accidentally” given the twins super intelligence, enhancing their cognition, memory, and ability to learn. Accidentally.
According to the MIT Technology Review, the HIV immunity and enhanced intelligence are inseparable from one another. To make Lulu and Nana HIV immune, He used CRISPR to delete a gene known as CCR5. HIV needs the CCR5 gene in infect blood cells. But there’s another interesting part of the CCR5 gene: it’s been known since 2016 that removing the gene from mice enhances their memories. What’s more, people who are naturally lacking CCR5 seem to recover better from strokes and perform better in school. A recent journal article names CCR5 as a “suppressor of memories and synaptic connections.”
CRISPR gene editing technology first came to prominence in 2015.
While there is no evidence yet that this was He Jiankui’s true intentions all along, it does seem awfully suspicious at a time when a new biotechnology race between the U.S. and China seems to be starting up. He Jiankui apparently reached out to other scientists around the world for advice and support, but there is no record of him asking any questions about the link between CCR5 and intelligence. Maybe it’s just a happy accident, after all. But it’s also likely that asking those sorts of questions might get you in a bit of hot water before you have your mad-scientist fun.
It is certain that He Jiankui at least knew about the research on CCR5 and cognition. He addressed it at a conference, dismissing it as needing it “more independent verification.” Questioned again on a separate occasion, He stated that he was against genetic modification for enhancements.
One of the authors of new paper on the link between the CCR5 gene and intelligence, Alcino J. Silva, a neurobiologist at the University of California Los Angeles, doesn’t buy it. When the news of the twins’ birth was announced on November 25, Silva immediately suspected that cognitive enhancement was the true aim of He Jiankui’s experiments:
“I suddenly realized—Oh, holy shit, they are really serious about this bullshit.
My reaction was visceral repulsion and sadness.”
Silva sees these kind of genetic experiments as irresponsible and morally repugnant. While we have evidence of what removing this gene does to mice, we have no idea what it will do to humans and even less of an idea what unchecked genetic tinkering would do to human societies. Silva says:
“Could it be conceivable that at one point in the future we could increase the average IQ of the population? I would not be a scientist if I said no. The work in mice demonstrates the answer may be yes. But mice are not people. We simply don’t know what the consequences will be in mucking around. We are not ready for it yet.”
Regardless of He Jiankui’s intentions, the proverbial cat has exited the proverbial bag, and only time will tell what the results of this “mucking around” will be.
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Glowing Orbs Hyper Jump To Island In Norway Turning Night Into Day, Feb 20, 2019 Photos, UFO Sighting News.
Glowing Orbs Hyper Jump To Island In Norway Turning Night Into Day,Feb 20, 2019 Photos, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: February 20, 2019 Location of sighting: Tromso, Norway Source: MUFON #98719 Strange glowing UFO appeared over the mountains of Norway this week. Its a very secluded part of Norway which is one of its islands. Glowing orbs were seen around the mountain tops, but when they appeared, they appeared in a flash of light, as if they hyper jumped to that location and went to an underground base from there. I have seen such things once when I was in the USAF back in 1989. I see why the guy was alarmed. Seeing these at night might cause a family to believe an alien invasion was taking place. When I saw a similar occurrence in Rapid City, SD it was during the day and about 2-5% of the entire city saw it. Those glowing orbs...they when they move, they have a very powerful glow. Awesome and exciting sighting. Scott C. Waring-Taiwan Eyewitness states:
Blinding pulsating lights in valley lighting up the complete mountain on and off for 30 second to a minute each time, observed for 15 minutes.
UFO caught on Channel 3 NBC Live Feed over Cleveland, Feb 21, 2019, UFO Sighting News.
UFO caught on Channel 3 NBC Live Feed over Cleveland, Feb 21, 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: February 21, 2019
Location of sighting: Cleveland, Ohio, USA
Source: MUFON
This UFO shot past on a TV news cast, apparently the newscaster didn't notice it, but an eyewitness watching did. At first I thought it was a rocket launch, but no rockets were launched from Cleveland...ever...so thats out. When I added contrast to the screenshot, a thick UFO disk came into focus. It has not wings, not visible propellers, no lights flashing, its pure UFO.
UFOs don't frequent any city in the world more than the next. They are everywhere, over all cities in the world watching, recording...their fascination with human activity is only second to our own with ourselves...like people watching TV shows, news, reading news, blogs, posts, social forums...to learn more. Same deal. They are curious about us and our primitive culture.
Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
Morning Cleveland News WKYC Channel 3 NBC Live Feed at 06:24 2/21/2019 showed object accelerate stop a split second and 90 degree turn take off upward.
This is the most detailed view of the distant object Ultima Thule. The photo is a processed composite combining nine individual images taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft just 6.5 minutes before the spacecraft's closest approach to Ultima Thule on Jan. 1, 2019.
The best-ever photos of Ultima Thule have made it down to Earth, and they heighten the intrigue about the frigid and faraway world.
On New Year's Day, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past the 21-mile-long (34 kilometers) Ultima Thule, setting a record for the most distant planetary encounter in history. (Ultima lies about 1 billion miles, or 1.6 billion km, beyond Pluto, which New Horizons flew by in July 2015.)
New Horizons has been beaming flyby data and imagery home to its handlers ever since, and will continue to do so for another 18 months. The early returns have been spectacular, revealing Ultima Thule to be a weird snowman-pancake hybrid with mysterious features, such as a bright "collar' where the body's two lobes meet. [New Horizons at Ultima Thule: Full Coverage]
And now we have our best look yet. New flyby photos released today (Feb. 22) show Ultima in even more stunning detail, capturing bright circular features and dark pits, whose origins remain mysterious.
"Whether these features [the pits] are craters produced by impactors, sublimation pits, collapse pits or something entirely different is being debated in our science team," New Horizons Deputy Project Scientist John Spencer, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement.
The newly released images boast a resolution of about 110 feet (33 meters) per pixel. They're the highest-resolution pictures New Horizons has ever taken, and may ever take during its operational life, mission team members said.
The photos were captured just 6.5 minutes before the craft's closest approach on Jan. 1. At the time, New Horizons was 4,109 miles (6,628 km) from Ultima Thule and 4.1 billion miles (6.6 billion km) from Earth, mission team members said. (Closest approach brought the probe within a mere 2,200 miles, or 3,500 km, of Ultima.)
There was no guarantee we'd ever get to see Ultima Thule — whose official name is 2014 MU69 — in this dazzling light. Capturing the newly released images was a "stretch goal" that demanded a precise square-up of Ultima in the narrow field of view of New Horizons' telescopic camera.
"Getting these images required us to know precisely where both tiny Ultima and New Horizons were — moment by moment — as they passed one another at over 32,000 mph [51,500 km/h] in the dim light of the Kuiper Belt, a billion miles beyond Pluto. This was a much tougher observation than anything we had attempted in our 2015 Pluto flyby," New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, also of SwRI, said in the same statement.
"These 'stretch goal' observations were risky, because there was a real chance we'd only get part or even none of Ultima in the camera's narrow field of view," Stern added. "But the science, operations and navigation teams nailed it, and the result is a field day for our science team! Some of the details we now see on Ultima Thule's surface are unlike any object ever explored before."
New Horizons launched in January 2006 to lift the veil on Pluto, which had remained largely mysterious since its 1930 discovery. The Ultima Thule flyby is the centerpiece of an extended mission that runs through 2021.
New Horizons is in good health and has enough fuel to fly by yet another distant object, if NASA grants another mission extension, Stern and other mission team members have said.
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated byKarl Tate) is out now.
Five Traits That Could Get You "Abducted by Aliens"
Five Traits That Could Get You "Abducted by Aliens"
Research suggests traits could lead to "alien abduction" experiences
Are you worried about being abducted by aliens? I suspect it will cross the mind of some of you reading this post that alien abduction is a possibility. After all, many people worldwide have claimed to have been abducted by aliens, been taken against their will to an alien spacecraft or enclosed place, questioned or physically examined, and they remember these experiences either consciously or through methods such as hypnosis. Indeed, many of those people who claim to be alien abductees are seemingly sincere, psychologically healthy, nonpsychotic people—so are their experiences real and their claims to have been abducted true?
Professor Rich McNally and his colleagues at Harvard University have spent over 10 years researching the psychology of alien abductees, and in particular why it is that some people embrace the identity of “alien abductee." His research has isolated a number of traits possessed by ‘alien abductees’ each of which he argues contributes to the experiences they recall when ‘being abducted’ and to the desire to cling on to their belief that aliens were responsible for their abduction experiences. Let’s look at each of these five traits in turn.
1. Regularly experiencing sleep paralysis and hallucinations when awakening:
Many people who have reported alien abduction suffer episodes of early morning sleep paralysis. On awakening from this paralysis, their terror gives rise to hallucinations of flashing lights and buzzing sounds. Some experience feelings of ‘floating’ around the room or seeing figures in the room. While many people interpret these post-sleep paralysis experiences as dreaming, some people interpret these experiences as seeing figures, ghosts, or aliens.
In an elegant set of experimental studies, McNally and colleagues found that individuals who claimed to have been abducted by aliens were prone to what is known as “false memory syndrome." That is, alien abductees regularly claimed to recall words, items, sentences, etc. in memory tests that they had never actually seen before. If this “false memory” affect can be generalized to autobiographical memories, then individuals who claim to have been abducted by aliens would be twice as likely to “falsely remember” things that had never happened to them than would non-abductees.
3. High levels of “Absorption”:
Alien abductees also score significantly higher than most people on the mental characteristic known as ‘absorption.' This is a trait related to fantasy proneness, vivid imagery, and susceptibility to hypnosis and suggestion. Because of this it is probably not surprising that many alien abductees recall their experiences under hypnosis, where memories of abduction can be induced through suggestibility—especially if the person leading the hypnosis session asks particularly leading questions about abduction.
4. New Age beliefs:
Being whisked up into space ships by tractor beams or light sources is not something that happens every day—nor is it something that is easily explainable within our existing knowledge of physics. Similarly, being subjected to imaginative medical procedures requires a tendency to accept unusual and non-mainstream ideas. This is also a trait possessed by ‘alien abductees.' They score highly on measures of magical ideation and endorse New Age ideas that encompass beliefs about alternative medicines and healing, astrology, and fortune telling. Such beliefs would certainly allow the individual to accept things happening to them that would be dismissed by existing scientific knowledge.
5. A familiarity with the cultural narrative of alien abduction:
As a cultural phenomenon, alien abduction has entered folklore and the images and descriptions of aliens and their spacecraft have become familiar to many people. Alien abductees tend to be very familiar with this cultural narrative which is one possible reason why their descriptions of aliens and their spaceships are so similar—being fuelled as they are by sci-fi films and numerous books about aliens and alien abduction.
As Professor McNally points out in a very readable review of his studies on alien abduction, it is still unclear whether all these characteristics are necessary ingredients in the recipe for ‘alien abduction’ or whether some are more necessary than others. Other researchers have also identified further traits that appear to be characteristic of ‘alien abductees’, such as paranoid thinking and weak sexual identity. There is still much more research to do to fully understand the motivations and thinking patterns of individuals who claim to have been abducted by aliens, but as McNally shrewdly points out, these people are not anxious nor depressed, they are not psychotic and do not appear to have any obvious mental healthproblems. ‘Alien abduction’ experiences often deepen spiritual awareness and give shape to the identities of abductees and provide a basis for their beliefs about the world and the universe. Whether the experiences of abduction were real or not, the experiences and interpretations adopted by ‘alien abductees’ are often psychologically helpful and can be spiritually comforting.
Finally, a note of caution. All of these studies of ‘alien abductees’ were carried out after they had their abduction ‘experiences’, so it’s difficult to know whether these five traits are consequences of the experience or were—as McNally suggests—factors that led individuals to interpret rather earthly experiences (such as sleep paralysis and hallucinations) as evidence of abduction. And then— perhaps fantastically—can we genuinely rule out the possibility that such traits are implanted in their victims by aliens in invasive medical procedures carried out on alien space ships! My skeptical, scientific mind says probably not—but who knows?!
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VIDEO: A unique discovery of giant skeleton. Giant Possibly Killed by a Snake
VIDEO: A unique discovery of giant skeleton. Giant Possibly Killed by a Snake
Giant Human Skeleton found at Khao Khanap Nam Cave Rimportant discovery made by paleontologists. Group of scientists digging up remains of a human skeleton of gigantic proportions. Do we finally have the irrefutable proof that human giants existed?
TwitterDe scheur in de Brunt-ijsplaat op Antarctica.
MILIEU Het Halley onderzoeksstation op Antarctica wordt bedreigd door een enorme scheur in het landijs. Een ijsberg die ongeveer acht keer zo groot is als Antwerpen dreigt af te breken.
Voor jaren hield de scheur zich gedeisd, maar in 2013 begon deze opeens te groeien. Wetenschapper Stef Lhermitte bestudeert de scheur, die Chasm 1 genoemd wordt, al jaren en schat dat de scheur nog ongeveer veertig kilometer heeft voordat het afbreekt. De gigantische scheur groeit elk jaar met vier kilometer.
Historisch gezien is de ijsberg van 1.700 km² eigenlijk niet zo groot, maar volgens NASA zou het de grootste ijsberg kunnen zijn die de Brunt-ijsplaat baart sinds de observaties in 1915 begonnen.
Wanneer de ijsberg zich afscheurt, dreigt het Halley onderzoeksstation te verdwijnen. Deze basis bestaat al sinds 1956. Metingen die er gedaan werden, hebben in 1985 onder andere geleid tot de ontdekking van het gat in de ozonlaag.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET Chinese wetenschappers van de universiteit van Zhejiang in Hangzhou hebben een cyborg-rat ontwikkeld die met behulp van menselijke breinsignalen een ingewikkeld doolhof kan opplossen. Het dier dat elektroden in de hersenen geïmplanteerd kreeg, is deels organisch, deels computer.
In het verleden is al gebleken dat brain-machine interface (BMI) mogelijk is. Dit is een technologie waarbij hersensignalen worden gedigitaliseerd om vervolgens door een computer in acties te worden omgezet. Zo is het bijvoorbeeld mogelijk om afgaande van hersenactiviteit een pijl op een computerscherm naar links of rechts te laten bewegen.
Een volgende stap is om met de hulp van BMI twee verschillende breinen met elkaar te linken (brain-brain interface, of kortweg BBI). In dit onderzoek proberen de wetenschappers het brein van een mens met dat van een cyborg-rat te verbinden.
Elektrodes
Het dier kreeg een aantal elektrodes in de hersenen geïmplanteerd en op zijn rug werd een draadloze micro-stimulator gebonden. Op deze manier kan de mens de bewegingen van de rat sturen.
Uit het onderzoek bleek dat met behulp van de signalen die van het menselijke brein kwamen, de cyborg-rat zich heel vlot door een complex doolhof kon navigeren. Het doolhof is driedimensionaal met allerlei trappen, tunnels en pilaren. De cyborg moest een bepaalde route afleggen binnen de vijf minuten. Daar slaagde het ook in. De wetenschappers zijn dan ook van mening dat hun onderzoek naar het versturen van multidimensionele informatie tussen twee breinen veelbelovend is.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:HLN.be - Het Laatste Nieuws ( NL)
23-02-2019
NASA has confirmed that UFO’s have existed throughout mankind’s history
NASA has confirmed that UFO’s have existed throughout mankind’s history
NASA has confirmed that UFO’s have existed throughout mankind’s history – in a bombshell document published on their very own website.
According to the author of a report entitled, ‘Unidentified flying objects in classical antiquity,’ ancient UFO observers described mysterious objects flying in the sky that cannot be attributed to natural phenomena.
A small number of the aerial objects that were described by ancient observers would be their interpretation of natural phenomena, like solar and lunar eclipses, comets, optical phenomena and new stars. However, as the author of the report clearly states, some ancient reports were describing unidentified flying objects that were similar to today’s modern UFO sightings:
My working hypothesis will be that most such reports can be explained by conventional scientific ideas and that, among all the reports, only those that defy reasonable interpretation after full analysis can be said to resemble the most puzzling reports made today.
The ancient UFO witnesses, often described these craft using known “military terminology.”
The military terminology reflects the most advanced technology known at the time, a tendency found also in modern UFO reports, in which a witness gropes for a familiar technical vocabulary—and perhaps a rationalization—to describe an unaccountable phenomenon. That many reports were made during wartime may partially explain the military terminology
The author then lists a number of ancient sightings, that describe “military objects” that were seen in the skies:
• At Rome in the winter of 218 BC “a spectacle of ships (navium) gleamed in the sky” • In 217 BC “at Arpi round shields (parmas) were seen in the sky” • In 212 BC “at Reate a huge stone (saxum) was seen flying about” • In 173 BC “at Lanuvium a spectacle of a great fleet was said to have been seen in the sky” • In 154 BC “at Compsa weapons (arma) appeared flying in the sky” (Obsequens 17). The term refers to defensive weapons, especially shields. In 104 BC “the people of Ameria and Tuder observed weapons in the sky rushing together from east and west, those from the west being routed.” • In 100 BC, probably at Rome, “a round shield (clipeus), burning and emitting sparks, ran across the sky from west to east, at sunset.” • In 43 BC at Rome “a spectacle of defensive and offensive weapons(armorum telorumque species) was seen to rise from the earth to the sky with a clashing noise.” • Historically, the most famous “sky army” appeared in the spring of ca. AD 65 over Judea. The historian Josephus reports:
On the 21st of the month Artemisium, there appeared a miraculous phenomenon, passing belief. Indeed, what I am about to relate would, I imagine, have been deemed a fable, were it not for the narratives of eyewitnesses and the subsequent calamities which deserved to be so signalized. For, before sunset throughout all parts of the country, chariots were seen in the air and armed battalions hurtling through the clouds and encompassing the cities.
The first cluster of reports of fiery globes falls during the Second Punic War. Livy reports that in 217 BC “at Capena two moons rose in the daytime … and at Capua a kind of moon fell during a rainstorm.”
In 168 BC, when L. Aemilius Paullus was waging war against King Perseus of Macedon, “a ball … was the form of a fire that appeared, as large as the moon.”
A more complicated object made its appearance sometime between 151 and 146 BC:
After the death of King Demetrius of Syria, … a little before the Achaean War, a comet blazed out, not inferior to the sun. At first it was a fiery red disk, 17 emitting a light so bright that it dissipated the night. Then, little by little, its size dwindled and its brightness faded; at last the light died completely.
Two parallel records of 91 BC preserved by Livy’s extractors Orosius and Obsequens refer to central Italy. Over the city of Rome “about sunrise a ball of fire shone forth from the northern region with a loud noise in the sky.”
In 74 BC, when a Roman army under L. Licinius Lucullus was about to engage the forces of King Mithridates VI of Pontus, thousands saw a molten silver object falling from the sky.
According to Plutarch:
But presently, … with no apparent change of weather, but all on a sudden, the sky burst asunder, and a huge, flame-like body was seen to fall between the two armies. In shape, it was most like a wine-jar (pithōi), and in color, like molten silver. Both sides were astonished at the sight, and separated. This marvel, as they say, occurred in Phrygia, at a place called Otryae. 23 The presence of thousands of witnesses, including Lucullus and Mithridates, vouches for the incident’s occurrence.
The date was ca. AD 285, in or near the Fayûm in the Egyptian desert. “St. Anthony saw on the desert floor a large silver disk that suddenly vanished like smoke.”
According to Livy, in 214 BC “at Hadria an altar was seen in the sky; around it were forms of men dressed in shining white.”
AD 150. On a sunny day, a “beast” like a piece of pottery (ceramos) about 100 feet in size, multicolored on top and shooting out fiery rays, landed in a dust cloud, accompanied by a “maiden” clad in white.
The author concludes that many ancient observers were describing a very advanced alien technology:
Embedded in the mass of relatively explicable ancient reports, however, is a small set of unexplained (or at least not wholly explained) reports from presumably credible witnesses. If these reports are examined statistically, essential features of what I will, for argument’s sake, call the ancient UFO phenomenon can be extracted:
• shape—discoidal or spheroidal; • color—silvery, golden or red; • texture—metallic or, occasionally, glowing or cloudy; • size—a meter to well over a meter; • sound—usually none reported; • type of motion—hovering, erratic or smooth flight, with a rapid disappearance
Read full NASA report: ‘Unidentified flying objects in classical antiquity.’ pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/
The Rosetta space mission revealed a comet as 2 icy balls apparently stuck together billions of years ago. Now scientists say the comet’s double-lobed structure guided its evolution.
Rosetta’s comet – aka 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko – as captured in March 2016, when the spacecraft was about 200 miles (329 km) away.
What are the factors that cause a world in space to evolve? In the case of Earth, plate tectonics– the movement of the great plates of land that compose Earth’s crust – played a major role. But what if the world is very tiny, like a comet? And what if it’s made of icy materials, not rocky materials like Earth? On February 19, 2019, the European Space Agency (ESA) described a new study pointing out a key process that shaped the evolution of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. This is the comet that was studied close-up, from orbit, by ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft for two years between August 2014 and September 2016. According to the new study, plate tectonics isn’t the driving process. Instead, ESA said, comet 67P/C-G likely evolved primarily due to geological stress arising from the comet’s dual-lobed shape.
Small, icy comets with two distinct lobes seem to be commonplace in the solar system, with one possible mode of formation a slow collision of two primordial objects in the early stages of formation some 4.5 billion years ago. A new study using data collected by Rosetta during its two years at Comet 67P/C-G has illuminated the mechanisms that contributed to shaping the comet over the following billions of years.
The researchers used stress modelling and three-dimensional analyses of images taken by Rosetta’s high resolution OSIRIS camera to probe the comet’s surface and interior.
Christophe Matonti of Aix-Marseille University, France, is lead author of the new study. He said:
We found networks of faults and fractures penetrating 500 meters (1,640 feet) underground, and stretching out for hundreds of meters.
Stress-formed fractures and terraces on Rosetta’s comet, via ESA.
According to the new study, these faults and fractures in the comet were created by shear stress, a mechanical force often seen at play in earthquakes or glaciers on Earth and other terrestrial planets. Shear stress happens when two bodies or blocks push and move along one another in different directions. Matonti commented:
This is hugely exciting: it reveals much about the comet’s shape, internal structure, and how it has changed and evolved over time.
These scientists said the model they developed found shear stress to peak at the center of the comet’s “neck,” the thinnest part of the comet connecting the two lobes. Co-author Olivier Groussin, also of Aix-Marseille University, France, said:
It’s as if the material in each hemisphere is pulling and moving apart, contorting the middle part – the neck – and thinning it via the resulting mechanical erosion.
We think this effect originally came about because of the comet’s rotation combined with its initial asymmetric shape. A torque formed where the neck and ‘head’ meet as these protruding elements twist around the comet’s center of gravity.
The scientists said their observations suggest shear stress acted globally over the comet and, crucially, around its neck. The fact that fractures could propagate so deeply into 67P/C-G also confirms that the material making up the interior of the comet is brittle, they said, something that was previously unclear.
But shear stress wasn’t the only factor at play on comet 67P/C-G. When comets come close to the sun, as this comet did in 2015, ices on their surface turn to vapor without ever going through a liquid phase. This process, known as sublimation, results in comet dust being dragged out into space. The scientists said this process of sublimation is a well-known process for deeply influencing a comet’s appearance over time. You can get a sense of some of the changes undergone by comet 67P/C-G in these images of dramatic outbursts captured by Rosetta.
Thus, these scientists said, their new study suggests that comet evolution is likely to result first from shear stress, acting over a timescale of billions of years following the formation of comets. Later in a comet’s life, especially if the comet falls into an orbit that takes it near the sun, sublimation erosion takes over.
Evolution of Rosetta’s comet over 4.5 billion years.
It’s good to bear in mind that comet 67P/C–G isn’t the only dual-lobed object known to astronomers. On January 1, 2019, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew close to an object beyond Pluto – nicknamed Ultima Thule – located in the Kuiper belt, where icy comets and other small bodies reside, far from our sun. New Horizons found that Ultima Thule also has a dual-lobed shape. See the image below.
There are similarities between the shapes of comet 67P/C–G and Ultima Thule, but there are also differences. The same stress structures aren’t as apparent in Ultima Thule, the scientists said. Time – and probably more visits to comets and Kuiper Belt objects by more spacecraft – will reveal whether comet 67P/C–G’s evolution is unique or common among the small bodies of our solar system.
Ultima Thule versus comet 67P/C-G. They look really similar, don’t they? Both are icy objects that likely formed far from the sun. It might make you wonder how many other dual-lobed objects we’ll find in the far outer solar system.
Bottom line:Rosetta’s comet – aka comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko – looks like 2 icy balls apparently stuck together billions of years ago. A recent study, based on computer modeling, showed how the comet’s double-lobed structure guided its evolution.
Forty-seven years ago, an incident occurred in the southwestern desert of the United States that could have significant implications for all mankind. The incident was announced by the U.S. military, subsequently denied by the U.S. military, and has remained veiled in government secrecy ever since.
Although it is in a category fraught with false claims and hoaxes, it is not a hoax or false claim, but rather a known event that is thoroughly documented. It is the objective here to summarize the details of that event, affirm the right of all people throughout the world to know the truth about what occurred, and propose a course of action that will allow that truth to emerge.
The event took place during the first week of July 1947 and involved the recovery of wreckage by the military from a remote ranch northwest of Roswell, New Mexico. There is now considerable testimony from former members of the military known to have been involved, including two brigadier generals, that the recovered material was not of terrestrial origin. Admittedly, such a claim taxes the limits of credibility for discerning and rational individuals. It also tends to evoke a response of immediate dismissal. The preponderance of evidence, however, indicates the event occurred.
On January 12, 1994, United States Congressman Steven Schiff of Albuquerque, New Mexico, stated to the press that he had been stonewalled by the Defense Department when requesting information regarding the 1947 Roswell event on behalf of constituents and witnesses. Indicating he was seeking further investigation into the matter, Congressman Schiff called the Defense Department's lack of response "astounding" and concluded it was apparently "another government coverup." Most people are not aware that there exists an event of this nature so well substantiated. In the next year public awareness of the Roswell incident should grow. A new hardcover book has been released, a television movie will premiere, and a serious documentary is forthcoming. Questions, controversy, and a general distrust of U.S. government policy in this area are bound to increase. Detailed information on the recovery of the wreckage at Roswell and of related events is extensive.
Some years ago investigators were able to obtain a copy of the 1947 Roswell Army Air Field yearbook. This enabled them to locate witnesses throughout the country. Newspaper accounts show that during late June and early July 1947, there was a wave of reports of "flying disks" (UFOs) throughout the United States and Canada. Many of those reports came from credible witnesses, including pilots and other trained observers.
Sometime during the first week of July 1947, a local New Mexico rancher, Mac Brazel, while riding out in the morning to check his sheep after a night of intense thunderstorms, discovered a considerable amount of unusual debris. It had created a shallow gouge several hundred feet long and was scattered over a large area. Some of the debris had strange physical properties. After taking a few pieces to show his neighbors, Floyd and Loretta Proctor, Brazel drove into Roswell and contacted the sheriff, George Wilcox. Sheriff Wilcox notified authorities at Roswell Army Air Field and with the assistance of his deputies, proceeded to investigate the matter. Shortly after becoming involved, the military closed off the area for a number of days and retrieved the wreckage. It was initially taken to Roswell Army Air Field and eventually flown by B-29 and C-54 aircraft to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio.
Roswell Army Air Field was the home of the 509th Bomb Group, which was an elite outfit--the only atomic group in the world.
On the morning of July 8, 1947, Colonel William Blanchard, Commander of the 509th Bomb Group, issued a press release stating that the wreckage of a "crashed disk" (UFO) had been recovered. The press release was transmitted over the wire services in time to make headlines in over thirty U.S. afternoon newspapers that same day.
Within hours, a second press release was issued from the office of General Roger Ramey, Commander of the Eighth Air Force at Fort Worth Army Air Field in Texas, 400 miles from the crash site. It rescinded the first press release and, in effect, claimed that Colonel Blanchard and the officers of the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell had made an unbelievably foolish mistake and somehow incorrectly identified a weather balloon and its radar reflector as the wreckage of a "crashed disk." One of those two press releases had to be untrue. There is now solid testimony from numerous credible military and civilian witnesses who were directly involved, that the "crashed disk" press release issued by Colonel William Blanchard of the 509th Bomb Group from Roswell was true and that the subsequent "weather balloon" press release from Eighth Air Force Headquarters in Fort Worth. Texas, was a hastily contrived cover story. Those who knew and worked with William Blanchard say he was a solid, nononsense, businesslike individual, and not someone who would make a fool of himself and the Air Force by ordering a press release about something as out of the ordinary and dramatic as the event at Roswell without being certain he was correct. In other words, if Blanchard issued a press release saying there was a crashed disk, there was a crashed disk. Colonel William Blanchard would later go on to become a four-star general and Vice Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force.
The first witness located by investigators "not of this earth. " Even if he had initially made such a gross misidentification, he would certainly have been able to see his mistake later after it had been brought to his attention. When returning to the base, he stopped by his house with a few pieces of the unusual wreckage to show his wife and eleven-year-old son. One piece, a small section of I-beam, had strange hieroglyphic like symbols on its surface. His son, Dr. Jesse Marcel, Jr., now a practicing medical doctor and qualified National Guard helicopter pilot and flight surgeon, remembers the incident well. He has been able to produce detailed drawings of some of the symbols.
During his career, Jesse Marcel Sr., went on to other important assignments, including the preparation of a report on the first Soviet nuclear detonation, which went directly to President Truman. The late General Thomas DuBose was a colonel and General Ramey's chief of staff at Eighth Air Force Headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1947. Before his death in 1992, General DuBose testified that he himself had taken the telephone call from General Clements McMullen at Andrews Army Air Field in Washington, D.C., ordering the coverup. The instructions were for General Ramey to concoct a "cover story" to "get the press off our backs." Retired General Arthur E. Exon was stationed at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, as a lieutenant colonel in July of 1947 during the time the wreckage from Roswell was brought in. In a 1990 interview, General Exon said of the testing, "Everything from chemical analysis, stress tests, compression tests, flexing. It was brought into our material evaluation labs. (Some of it) could be easily ripped or changed . . . there were other parts of it that were very thin but awfully strong and couldn't be dented with heavy hammers. . . ." Of the men that did the testing, he said, " . . . the overall consensus was that the pieces were from space."
The testimony of Mr. Glenn Dennis leaves little doubt about the nature of what was recovered in 1947. Glenn Dennis still lives in the Roswell, New Mexico, area and is a respected businessman and member of the community. He is down-to-earth and straightforward. In 1947 Glenn Dennis was a young mortician working for the Ballard Funeral Home, which had a contract to provide mortuary and ambulance services for Roswell Army Air Field. Prior to learning about the recovery of the unusual wreckage at Roswell, he received several telephone calls one afternoon from the mortuary officer at the air field. He was asked about the availability of small, hermetically sealed caskets and questioned about how to preserve bodies that had been exposed to the elements for several days. There was concern about possibly altering the chemical composition of the tissue. Later that evening, as a result of unrelated events, he made a trip to the base hospital. Outside the back entrance, he observed two military ambulances with open rear doors, from which large pieces of wreckage protruded, including one with a row of unusual symbols on its surface. Once inside, he encountered a young nurse whom he knew. At that same instant, he was noticed by military police, who physically threatened him and forcibly escorted him from the building. He met with the nurse the next day, and she explained what had been going on at the hospital. She was a very religious person and was upset to the point of being in a state of shock. She described how she had been called in to assist two doctors who were doing autopsies on several small nonhuman bodies.
She described the terrible smell, how one body was in good shape and the others mangled, and the differences between their anatomy and human anatomy. She also drew a diagram on a napkin showing an outline of their features. That meeting was to be their last-- she was transferred to England a few days later. The main part of the craft apparently came down some distance from the "debris field" at the Brazel ranch. Researchers were only recently able to confirm this second site because few people knew about it. According to witness testimony, this is also the site where the bodies were found. Most of the witnesses to this site have not, in fear of government reprisal, allowed their names to be used. A prestigious law firm has recently been retained to provide legal counsel to any such witnesses who might consider going public with their testimony. Attorneys from the firm have already met with several Roswell witnesses. In addition to Glenn Dennis, other witnesses were physically threatened or intimidated.
According to members of Sheriff Wilcox's family, he was told by the military, in the presence of his wife, that he and his entire family would be killed if he ever spoke about what he had seen. The rancher who originally discovered the wreckage, Mac Brazel, was sequestered by the military for almost a week and sworn to secrecy. He never spoke about the incident again, even to his family. In the months following the incident, his son, Bill Brazel, found and collected a few "scraps" of material, which he kept in a cigar box. The material was eventually confiscated by the military. Despite the fact that there has been publicity about the Roswell case since 1980, no witness involved in the recovery has ever come forward to corroborate the "weather balloon" story or to provide some other explanation for the wreckage, such as a V2 missile or experimental aircraft. (Both possibilities have been thoroughly checked out and eliminated.) If there had been a more mundane explanation for the unusual debris, it seems certain someone would have come forward with it by now. While it is possible that the Roswell witnesses, who live in diverse parts of the country, have been engaged in a perfectly orchestrated, long-term hoax with no clear motive, it is unlikely.
It is true there are a few minor gaps and inconsistencies in some of the accounts, but that is to be expected. There were many individuals involved and it has been a long period of time. Human memory is not perfect. For those familiar with the Roswell evidence, however, it would be hard to imagine a scenario in which the core event is not true. With Roswell so well documented, the question that arises is why the mainstream media has not pursued the story. Two factors stand out. The first is that of a negative mindset. There is a tendency in human nature to resist anything that challenges our preconceived perceptions of reality. In most cases, such an attitude serves us well and manifests itself as a healthy skepticism. In other instances, it may result in a close-minded refusal by otherwise intelligent people to consider compelling evidence--especially when that evidence seems to defy common sense or prevailing scientific theory.
Many past revelations of science, for example, have met such resistance--a round earth, evolution, relativity, continental drift, quantum theory, an expanding universe--to name a few. The second and most damaging factor is ridicule. Unfortunately, UFOs have long been associated with tabloid stories, hoaxes, and the "lunatic fringe." In addition, people tend to put UFOs in the same category as ghosts, mysticism, magic, and other forms of the occult or the supernatural. As a result, anything even remotely related to the area of UFOs is a difficult subject to broach without risking a loss of credibility. Consequently, members of the mainstream media rarely approach the subject, much less treat it with any degree of seriousness or depth. No one wants to make himself an easy target for cynicism or ridicule. Moreover, it is not necessary to resort to the supernatural to explain UFOs any more than it is necessary to resort to the supernatural to explain the Space Shuttle. UFOs could probably best be looked upon as an extrapolation of where our own technology might be thousands of years from now.
A television, jet aircraft, or nuclear bomb would have seemed magical or supernatural to a person from the Middle Ages. Similarly, by virtue of the fact that they apparently violate the laws of known physics, UFOs are perceived by us as an aberration of reality. They are, however, probably quite explainable under laws of science we aren't even close to discovering yet. Further exacerbating the credibility problem has been the extreme negative position taken by the U.S. government. Almost everyone has heard pronouncements from government officials claiming there is no evidence to support the existence of UFOs or extraterrestrial intelligence. Ironically, no matter how high their rank or position, those touting this line may be uninformed, yet telling the truth as they know it.
With the U.S. government's high degree of compartmentalization and need-to-know philosophy, chances are that few agencies or individuals would be briefed on or have access to such information. Agencies in which something might be known, such as the CIA, have refused to cooperate with investigators. When seeking Roswell or UFO-related documents through the Freedom of Information Act, researchers have been repeatedly stonewalled. Claims are made that documents don't exist or can't be released for national security reasons. The few documents that have been released have often been so blacked out that they are rendered meaningless. By way of contrast, in 1991 the Belgian Ministry of Defense released radar tapes from two Belgian Air Force F-16s that had been scrambled to pursue a UFO detected by four ground-based radar stations and seen by numerous citizens and by police. The tape was impressive--showing digital readouts of incredible altitude and speed changes made by the UFO. Under present government policy, it is hard to imagine such a scenario ever taking place in the United States. Perhaps the world's greatest democracy could learn a few things about a free and open society from its small NATO ally.
There was actually hope at one time that U.S. policy might change. It came when Jimmy Carter was elected President in 1976. In October 1969 while Governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter had reported a UFO sighting. Later, in 1976 as a presidential candidate, he pledged: "If I become president, I'll make every piece of information this country has about UFOs available to the public and the scientists." He then somewhat mystifyingly never said one more word about it publicly after taking office. If he found there was no information to release, why did he not announce it? Doing so would have been a natural and easy way to honor his commitment. Why the U.S. government defiantly maintains there is nothing to the UFO phenomenon and why it would want to withhold evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence remain a matter of speculation.
Three possible reasons have been suggested: fear of mass panic, perceived national security problems, and concern about offending religious groups. Whether arguments in any of these areas have merit is questionable. Most would agree, however, that whatever reasons there may be for withholding such information, they are far outweighed by those for releasing it. The classic argument for government withholding of information on extraterrestrial intelligence from the public is that it might cause a response similar to that of the famous 1938 Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast. (The program featured a simulated news broadcast announcing an attack by Martians on Grover's Mill, New Jersey, which panicked a small number of listeners who had tuned in late.)
The argument, however, is flawed and the comparison is invalid. It is not realistic to compare a simulated emergency news broadcast graphically describing a devastating, ongoing attack or invasion to a low-key, formal announcement confirming that other intelligent life exists in the universe and occasionally visits earth. Furthermore, we are nearly 35 years into the Space Age and at the brink of the 21st century. This is a generation that until recently lived for years under the threat of nuclear destruction and that now must deal with such threats as AIDS, rising rates of violent crime, international terrorism, etc. The possibility that the confirmation of extraterrestrial intelligence would cause mass panic in this day and age is so remote that it hardly merits mention. The arguments for maintaining secrecy based on national security are just as specious as those based on mass panic. Assuming the wreckage the military retrieved from Roswell was that of an extraterrestrial craft, it would be understandable that the U.S. Government would want to reverse-engineer the technology.
It would be reasonable that the government would want to keep certain details of that technology secret. As with any technology with the potential for misuse, such precaution would be prudent and justified. However, the very existence of such a craft would have profound implications. The mere knowledge by the public of that existence would not pose any kind of threat. Denying the public such knowledge would not be justified and would be an abuse of the power entrusted to those who oversee the country's national security. When the Carter campaign pledge was not carried out, it was speculated that concern about offending certain religious groups was the reason. If true, it would represent a violation of the principle of separation of church and state. It would also be placing the interests of a small minority above those of the majority.
Like the discoveries of Darwin and Copernicus, the Roswell evidence could have implications that challenge certain religious doctrines. Darwin's theory that there could be fossil evidence linking modern man and other present-day higher primates to a common primate ancestor conflicted with the creationist view on the exalted position of man with respect to other forms of life. Likewise, the Roswell evidence, which would imply the existence of a superior nonhuman intelligence, could be seen as equally threatening to the creationist viewpoint It could be interpreted as implying that on a scale comparing the evolutionary development of different advanced species throughout the universe, human beings may not rate very high. Such a humbling realization might bother some people, but probably not most. Copernicus' finding that the earth along with the other planets circled the sun contradicted the teachings of the time that the earth was the center of creation. That notion persists today in that many perceive the earth to be the center of intelligent life in the universe.
The Roswell evidence could dispel such an ethnocentric view by confirming that the human race is just one single member in a large community of other intelligent races in the universe. Specific effects, if any, that such a revelation might have on society would be purely a matter of speculation. Generally, however, when knowledge replaces ignorance, the long-term result is positive. There is no reason to think that that would not be the case here. If nothing else, the knowledge that it is possible for a civilization to survive the growing pains of becoming technologically advanced, without completely destroying itself and its environment in the process, would in a sense provide a renewed hope for the future of man and his environment. Despite the media's inattention to the matter, and contrary to what some in the U.S. government would like people to think, Roswell is not a figment of someone's imagination or the product of modern folklore. It involves real people and a real event.
The man who issued the press release announcing that event, Colonel William Blanchard, was not someone prone to making mistakes, much less monumental blunders. He would go on to achieve the highest peacetime rank attainable in the U.S. military, four-star general. Credible witnesses, including retired generals, have testified that the original press release issued by Blanchard was correct and that the Roswell wreckage was of extraterrestrial origin. A United States Congressman was recently stonewalled by the Defense Department on the matter and has expressed his belief that there is a coverup. Yet the U.S. government steadfastly maintains it has no evidence indicating extraterrestrial intelligence. Something does not ring true.
There is a gross inconsistency here, and it involves an issue of great magnitude, an issue that should transcend domestic politics and that demands an explanation. It is time to lay the cards on the table so that this matter can be resolved, one way or the other. History has shown that unsubstantiated official assurances or denials by government are often meaningless. Nevertheless, there is a logical and straightforward way to ensure that the truth about Roswell will emerge: an Executive Order declassifying any information regarding the existence of UFOs or extraterrestrial intelligence. Because this is a unique issue of universal concern, such an action would be appropriate and warranted. It is essentially what presidential candidate Jimmy Carter promised and then failed to deliver to the American people eighteen years ago in 1976. Additionally, it would cost nothing, offend no one, and be applauded by all. To provide positive assurance for all potential witnesses, the Order would need to be clearly stated and written into law. Security-clearance violations can bring heavy fines and long prison sentences. In addition to the original witnesses from 1947, there are most certainly individuals involved with the Roswell material today who would be affected by such a declassification.
Undoubtedly, many of them, along with the original witnesses, would want to see this information shared with others--be they friends, family, grandchildren, or all mankind. If, as is officially claimed, no information on Roswell, UFOs, or extraterrestrial intelligence is being withheld, a declassification order would be a mere formality, as there would be nothing for anyone to disclose. What legitimate concern could there be about declassifying "nonexistent" information? If, however, information is being withheld, there could be significant resistance to officially disclosing it.
This resistance could range from contriving excuses as to why an Executive Order should not be issued, to ignoring the matter altogether. In the end, however, whether information is being suppressed or whether it is not, the effect of an Executive Order declassifying it would be positive. If nothing is being withheld, the result of such an Order would be to set the record straight once and for all. Years of controversy and suspicion would be ended, both in the eyes of the United States' own citizens and in the eyes of the world. If, on the other hand, the Roswell witnesses are telling the truth and information on extraterrestrial intelligence does exist, it is not something to which a privileged few in the United States government should have exclusive rights.
It is knowledge of profound importance to which all people throughout the world should have an inalienable right. Its release would unquestionably be universally acknowledged as an historic act of honesty and goodwill.
A former Navy Seal and a Marine Corps special operator have just revealed in an interview their knowledge of a secret space fleet that operates out of Antarctica, which flew a landing mission to the recent interstellar visitor to our solar system, Oumuamua. They were interviewed by veteran UFO researcher Linda Moulton Howe who released their startling testimonies on herYouTube channel live streamingon February 20, 2019.
Howe had previously released Part 1 of her interview where Spartan 1, a former Navy Seal, described entering an octagon shaped structure covering approximately 62 acres near the Beardsmore Glacier in Antarctica. His account of what he witnessed and his mission there is described in my earlier article.
Spartan 1 had also shared his knowledge of the existence of a coalition of major nations that are signatories to the Antarctic Treaty, who operate a secret space program out of Antarctica.
This coalition that I talk about, it’s Great Britain, United States, France, Germany, Canada, Russia. There has been a space fleet in existence for the last 25 years” [Timestamp 9:01]
In response to Howe’s question about who is paying for and operating the space fleet, Spartan 1 asserted: “All these coalition countries”.
Spartan 1 went on to describe the different extraterrestrial races that collaborate with the space coalition and how Antarctica is the hub of operations:
Spartan 1: I have only been told about of at least seven different species of aliens that the coalition has been in contact with.
Howe: How have they been described?
Spartan 1: Anywhere from warlike to very peaceful… [Timestamp 17:20]
Howe: Do you have the impression that Antarctica is the central crossing hub for these seven species?
Next, Howe introduced the second whistleblower, Spartan 2, who is also a special operator, but whose service branch was instead the US Marine Corps.
Spartan 2 first contacted Howe on March 22, 2017 by email and wrote: “Antarctica contains wonders beyond what most can comprehend. It has ties to space and technology beyond belief”. [Timestamp 22:06]
He revealed that for the last decade he has worked with an official from U.S. Cyber Command, whose 8thfloor office is responsible for conducting trade with extraterrestrial races. The official, whose first name is Kim, told Spartan 1 and 2 about a secret mission to Oumuamua – the interstellar object that sparked scientific speculation due to its unusual cigar shape and how it accelerated as it began leaving our solar system, which Howe discussed in her live streaming session.
Spartan 2 then dropped a bombshell when he said:
We got confirmation that our buddies landed on Oumuamua like months before anybody even knew it was out there. Our guys were on Oumuamua, or whatever they call that thing. It’s not a rock … it’s an old derelict ship. At least that’s what they told us… and we boarded it months before anybody knew about it. [Timestamp 25:00]
In response to Howe’s question of who gave them their information, Spartan 1 disclosed:
“I can only tell you his first name is Kim, he worked for NSA, has worked for NSA for years. Then, just recently, in the last year he has been put in charge of a certain department in Cyber Command. All I know is that it’s on the 8th floor of the NSA building” [Timestamp 25:30]
Spartan 1 confirmed that the 8th floor of Cyber Command is like a communications department in charge of interstellar trade with extraterrestrials.
The revelations by Spartan 1 and 2 about the secret space mission to Oumuamua before its “official discovery” on October 19, 2017 corroborates an earlier account of this mission by secret space program insider Corey Goode. Goode says that on December 17, 2017, he was taken to a secret moon base called Lunar Operations Command where he received a briefing about the Oumuamua mission involving an alliance of space programs and nations.
Goode asserted that during the briefing he viewed a video of the Oumuamua mission, and that it was led by a senior USAF official he had dubbed “Sigmund”. Goode said:
Sigmund puffed up proudly and stated, “I led an expedition to see who this craft belonged to. Wait until you hear what we found.” Suddenly we started seeing all sorts of readings and telemetry on the monitor. I could also hear what sounded like an old NASA radio transmission. There were beeps along with a pilot calling in positions of his craft, as well as the one he was trying to dock with. That lasted for about five minutes as I saw the two craft spiraling closer and closer together.
As the pilot matched the spin of the object they were approaching, you could see a long cigar-shaped structure that had shiny patches of what looked like ice on the outside. It was obviously made of stone, and looked as if it had been through many meteor showers and collisions. The video broke to a scene where a few people who were suited up in space suits were pushing themselves through what looked like a bored-out hole going down into the rock.
More information about what Goode was told about the secret Oumuamua mission is available here.
Artist illustration of Oumuamua and visiting spacecraft.
Credit: Gaia TV/Sphere Being Alliance
Significantly, key elements of what Goode was told and publicly revealed back in January 2018 about the Oumuamua mission have now been independently corroborated by the two new whistleblowers, Spartan 1 and 2. This means that there are three individuals who have now gone on the public record about receiving first hand testimony of a classified mission to Oumuamua by a coalition of nations controlling a secret space fleet.
Goode has also spoken in the past about Antarctica being a hub for deep space operations by different groups, nations, and corporations, which is consistent with what Spartan 1 and 2 have revealed.
Goode has also described the creation of an international space fleet created in the early 1990’s that focuses on scientific research in deep space and other solar systems, which he dubbed the “Global Galactic League of Nations.” Again, this is consistent with what Spartan 1 and 2 have just revealed.
Howe has conducted due diligence on her two new whistleblowers in terms of reviewing documents confirming their military service. This makes their respective testimonies about Antarctica and Oumuamua difficult to dismiss, thereby corroborating what Goode had revealed more than a year earlier about the secret mission to Oumuamua.
Baltic Sea Anomaly BOMBSHELL: Diver team reveals Anomaly is CONCRETE 'moulded by someone'
Baltic Sea Anomaly BOMBSHELL: Diver team reveals Anomaly is CONCRETE 'moulded by someone'
THE Baltic Sea Anomaly could be an artificial concrete structure and not a natural formation, according to a diver who saw the Baltic Sea Anomaly up close.
The Baltic Sea Anomaly is a bizarre object discovered in 2011 at the bottom of the northern Baltic Sea. The mystery object, which measures roughly 210ft (70m) across has been likened to UFOs, World War 2 bunkers and ancient temples. The latest findings by a team of divers who explored the Anomaly up close, suggest the structure could be artificial and built from concrete. But the jury is still out on the exact nature of the Anomaly andconspiracy theoristsare attempting to unravel the mystery.
The Baltic Sea Anomaly was discovered eight years ago by a team of treasure-hunters, known as Ocean X Team.
Found in the Gulf of Bothnia between Sweden and Finland, the Anomaly stunned its founders and the conspiracy community at large.
Ocean X has now revealed a shocking documentary, where a team of divers explored the Anomaly at a depth of around 300ft (100m).
One of the Ocean X divers, Stefan Hogeborn, revealed the experience of approaching the submerged object did not compare to anything he has witnessed before.
Baltic Sea Anomaly: Divers found a bizarre ring of rocks at the Anomaly
(Image: OCEAN X)
Baltic Sea Anomaly: The unusual object was discovered in 2011 by Ocean X
(Image: OCEAN X)
He said: “The most peculiar thing, or the most strange thing, was a hole.
“It was like a circle, two or three metres in width and had like a frame around it.
“I mean like a square frame and like a circular hole and that’s kind of weird.”
What is even more amazing, the diver added, is the experience has left him with even more questions about the nature of the Baltic Sea Anomaly.
However, a 2018 study by Stockholm University claims to have unravelled the mystery of the Baltic Sea Anomaly, saying it was carved out by glacial processes.
Volker Brüchert, an associate professor of geology at Stockholm University, said: "I was surprised when I researched the material I found a great black stone that could be a volcanic rock.
“My hypothesis is that this object, this structure was formed during the Ice Age many thousands of years ago.
"Because the whole northern Baltic region is so heavily influenced by glacial thawing processes, both the feature and the rock samples are likely to have formed in connection with glacial and postglacial processes.
"Possibly these rocks were transported there by glaciers."
The European Space Agency (ESA) saidon February 20, 2019, that 20-year-old data from the space-basedSOHOobservatory has revealed an amazing fact about the Earth. The data have shown that the outermost part of Earth’s atmosphere – called its geocorona – extends beyond the moon’s orbit.
This gaseous geocorona – a cloud of hydrogen atoms, made faintly luminous in the far-ultraviolet via scattered sunlight – was known to exist. But no one knew it reached so far into space. It extends nearly twice as far as the moon’s orbit, nearly 400,000 miles (630,000 km), or 50 times Earth’s own diameter.
Igor Baliukin of Russia’s Space Research Institute led this research. He commented in a statement:
The moon flies through Earth’s atmosphere.
SOHO stands for Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. The mission was launched in 1995 as a joint project by ESA and NASA, with a projected two-year lifespan. Now, 24 years later, the craft is still in space and still studying the sun and sun-Earth environment. It orbits the L-1 point in the Earth-sun system.
One of SOHO’s instrument, called SWAN, provided the data on Earth’s geocorona. SWAN’s sensors traced the hydrogen in the geocorona and precisely detected where it dwindled to nothing.
Apollo 16 astronauts on the moon acquired this ultraviolet image of Earth and its hydrogen envelope, or geocorona, in 1972.
The evocative image above is a very interesting and historic one of Earth’s geocorona. It comes from the first telescope on the moon, placed by Apollo 16 astronauts in 1972. The image shows the geocorona surrounding Earth and glowing brightly in ultraviolet light. Jean-Loup Bertaux is the former principal investigator of SWAN, and he’s a co-author of the new paper. He commented:
At that time, the astronauts on the lunar surface did not know that they were actually embedded in the outskirts of the geocorona.
By the way, we skywatchers sometimes see a similar-looking corona around the moon or sun. But that’s an entirely different phenomenon, with the glow caused by Earth’s own air, not by any extended lunar or solar atmosphere.
Artist’s concept of the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), superimposed on a real image of the sun as seen by SOHO’s extreme-ultraviolet imaging telescope on in 1999.
Bottom line:Scientists used data from the SWAN instrument on the SOHO spacecraft to learn that the outermost part of Earth’s atmosphere – called the geocorona – extends outward almost twice as far as the moon’s orbit.
Keer op keer is de organisatie die ontkent dat er buitenaards leven bestaat degene die, per ongeluk, met het bewijs komt.
Zo ook nu duiken er weer door NASA gemaakte beelden op van bouwwerken op Mars.
Er zijn op aarde heel veel "bewegingen" die voor van alles strijden: Van een goede gezondheid, een beter klimaat tot "geen 5G", overal heb je wel “bewegingen” voor.
Maar, voor zover ons bekend heb je geen beweging die eist dat NASA na al die jaren bewijsmateriaal te hebben geleverd voor het bestaan van buitenaards leven, nu eens echt openheid van zaken geeft. Misschien een mooie taak voor iemand om dit te beginnen, want dit kan echt zo niet langer.
We hebben door de jaren heen zoveel bewijsmateriaal gepubliceerd over dat er veel meer is op Mars dan dat men ons vertelt en er komt maar geen eind aan. Iemand die absoluut een compliment verdient voor het vele speurwerk dat hij doet is Scott Waring. En opnieuw heeft hij wat gevonden.
De volgende opnames zijn gemaakt door de Curiosity Rover. Je ziet het vrij kale Mars landschap, maar in de verte op de heuvelrand zie je iets onnatuurlijks uitsteken.
Wat verder ingezoomd zie je iets dat zonder enige twijfel kan worden geclassificeerd als een gebouw, een door intelligente wezens gemaakte constructie.
Dit soort ontdekkingen zouden wereldnieuws moeten zijn, maar zijn dit uiteraard niet. Want, ook al zou er op dit moment geen leven op Mars zijn, dit bewijst dat er in ieder geval intelligent leven geweest is op Mars en dat buitenaards leven dus bestaat.
Voor wie denkt dat dit een toevalstreffer is, hierna een deel uit een eerder artikel, waar eveneens een gebouw wordt ontdekt op een foto van NASA. Een gebouw dat enige tijd later is verdwenen uit de archieven van NASA.
Wat als er nu een foto is van NASA uit 2013, genomen door één van de NASA rovers op Mars, waarop duidelijk een gebouw is te zien?
Het gaat om een zwart/wit foto die is genomen op 6 september 2013 en waarop je in de verte duidelijk een soort (flat)gebouw ziet staan, achter de heuvels.
Wanneer je wat verder inzoomt, dan wordt duidelijk dat daar iets staat wat niet anders omschreven kan worden dan als een constructie, een gebouw.
Wie de originele foto wil bekijken, kan dat hier doen. Dan wordt er enkele jaren later opnieuw een foto gemaakt van hetzelfde gebied op Mars en de datum op de foto is dan 11 februari 2017.
Dit keer is het een kleurenfoto en ziet er als volgt uit.
En wanneer we hier wat inzoomen, dan blijkt opeens het gebouw uit de foto van enkele jaren geleden te zijn verdwenen.
Wie deze originele foto wil bekijken, kan dat hier doen. Er bestaat geen enkele twijfel over de locatie en er bestaat ook geen enkele twijfel over dat er in de zwart/wit foto’s een soort gebouw is te zien. Ook in het geval het gebouw op de slooplijst heeft gestaan.... iemand heeft het dan dus gesloopt, Mars is dan bewoond en dat weet NASA dan ook.
If you thought the only place in the universe where you have to worry about predator capitalists is on Earth … think again. Two professors in Germany have written a new book detailing possib
le outcomes of a human encounter with an intelligent alien species and in it they warn that our SETI messages sent into space may be attracting the wrong kind of extraterrestrials – namely, the capitalistic kind who will see only the financial gains to be had by exploiting (or worse) the physically, technologically and intellectually weaker species they encounter on this wet blue planet. Does this scenario sound vaguely familiar? Even scarier, human capitalistic space explorers could find alien technology that gives them an advantage over other humans and use it against their fellow Earthlings. Cue the Twilight Zone music.
In an interview with Bild, Michael Schetsche, a Research Coordinator at the Freiburg Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health and an adjunct professor at the Institute for Sociology of the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, discussed the book “The Alien Society — Introduction to Exosociology” which he co-authored with his scientific assistant, Andreas Anton. He sees the second scenario – humans finding alien technology, whether current or an artifact – as the more dangerous one, because it could happen on the Moon or one of the asteroids we’re already visiting.
“Maybe it’s space debris that a strange probe has left on the moon or in the asteroid belt. But imagine, the artifact is still functional. Maybe it is a drive segment intended for free space. Of course we humans want to explore that, we bring it to earth, experiment with it, activate it with overflowing curiosity. And then it rips away a quarter of the planet’s surface.”
On the other hand, the discovery of this technology may not destroy humanity on its own but instead be used as a tool by greedy states or corporations. Even the quest to get it and bring it back could be deadly.
“(It could happen) that an artifact discovered somewhere in the asteroid belt provides the reason for warlike conflict on Earth.”
Schetsche recommends immediately setting up an international agreement to “subordinate extraterrestrial finds to the supervision of the United Nations” and let the U.N. determine how found alien technology is handled and when, if at all, it should be brought back to Earth. (A U.N. agreement on alien technology to prevent one nation or corporation from becoming almighty? Good luck with that.)
It’s the first scenario – that of contact with an extraterrestrial species with human capitalistic tendencies – that conspiracy thoerists like Alex Jones picked up on and screamed “GERMAN SCIENTISTS URGE TO STOP SENDING SIGNALS INTO SPACE TO ‘CAPITALIST ALIENS’.” (His all-caps headline.) Schetsche compares it to the European ‘discovery’ of America and the conquest of Africa. As Native Americans and Africans found out, overwhelming power changes everything.
“All action of nation states is based on power. The entire structure is obsolete in the moment in which an overpowering extraterrestrial actor appears in the sky. It would be a struggle between Bambi and Godzilla, and we would be Bambi in the case.”
Take me to your money.
Even if the aliens are benevolent, human response to no longer being superior to everything could cause chaos.
“Even if people do not kill each other, direct contact can destroy the social, economic, political and religious structures of countries.”
Based on these speculations, Schetsche obviously thinks it’s better to be the discoverer, not the discoveree, and recommends that we stop sending signals to superior aliens, especially ones that might have the same conquer and capitalize tendencies as their Earth counterparts once and most likely still have (sorry Trekkies).
It won’t be like this.
Should we stop sending signals and start sending more humans and exploration robots into space? That’s already happening. Should we fear contact with superior life forms? Look in the mirror. Should we trust those in power to do the right thing should alien technology be found? Look in the mirror again.
Either way, it looks like most of us will probably end up like Bambi.
I’ve often wondered whether future varieties of artificial intelligence might not help humans discover incredible new things about reality. Perhaps machines will even unveil little nuances that have been hidden beneath our noses all along, but which required the kind of critiques that only a computer mind could offer.
But while we are thinking about the ways ever-watchful A.I. may help us critique reality in the future, another question comes to mind which mirrors the old idea, “quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” proposed by Roman satirist Decimus Junius Juvenalis: in a world where we’re learning from the machines we’ve built, who fact-checks those machines, and more importantly, how do we know that what we learn from them even be trusted?
This might sound like a silly proposition, due in part to the sorts of stigmas we have about artificial intelligence and machine learning. On the one hand, many would ascribe to notions like, “of course we shouldn’t trust machines completely… they aren’t human!” In direct contrast to this, advocates of machine learning and A.I. might argue that this is precisely the reason they should be trusted: machines are, and will continue to be, capable of processing and synthesizing information in ways that often far exceed what the human brain can do.
Genevera Allen, a Rice University statistician recently made the argument that until machine learning systems can be designed in ways that allow for objective critiques of the information they provide, their trustworthiness remains flawed.
Allen spoke earlier in February at an Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where she addressed this problem as part of her lecture:
“The question is, ‘Can we really trust the discoveries that are currently being made using machine-learning techniques applied to large data sets?’ The answer in many situations is probably, ‘Not without checking,’ but work is underway on next-generation machine-learning systems that will assess the uncertainty and reproducibility of their predictions.”
Fundamental to the problem is the predictive nature of many (if not most) computational systems. Allen argues that because making a prediction about information is what these computers are designed to do, they are unlikely not to find data when tasked with doing so… even if a human observing the same data could easily discern that, in some instances, none exists.
“[Machines] never come back with ‘I don’t know,’ or ‘I didn’t discover anything,’ because they aren’t made to,” Allen said in a Rice University press release. However, the concerns Allen raises aren’t merely prospective: some instances already exist where it appears that questionable information may have been gleaned, at least in part, from studies that incorporated computational data that remained uncorroborated with relation to cancer research.
Allen explains:
“[T]here are cases where discoveries aren’t reproducible; the clusters discovered in one study are completely different than the clusters found in another… Because most machine-learning techniques today always say, ‘I found a group.’ Sometimes, it would be far more useful if they said, ‘I think some of these are really grouped together, but I’m uncertain about these others.'”
I recall a discussion I had with a futurist a few months ago, where we discussed the question over dangers stemming from interpretive issues that may arise from the way machine learning differs from our own. The example he gave was relevant here, although more in line with the “Hollywood” conception of potential problems we may one day have with A.I. (we might call this the “Terminator” model, which I think needs no further explanation here).
Imagine, he said, if we told A.I. to find a way to destroy a particular human disease. We input the information, and the computer outputs the following solution: “destroy all carriers of the disease.” In other words, rather than finding a cure, the machine interprets the problem in simple terms of its elimination… whereby the machine makes no distinction between “solving” the problem and committing murder.
This is a dramatic example, but it works analogically in comparison with what we already see in studies where machine learning is involved. Computers, in other words, function and respond to data sets in ways that differ vastly from human reason. Thus, we do need to be aware of these kinds of issues as more and more computational systems are affecting the knowledge science is acquiring and working with in the future.
Mayotte Meteor: Panic as ‘Fireball' Causes Huge Outburst Above French Islands
Mayotte Meteor: Panic as ‘Fireball' Causes Huge Outburst Above French Islands
Mayotte meteor: Residents reported hearing a huge explosion in the sky
Initial reports indicated an explosion had taken place somewhere on the island. The local authorities said on Twitter: “Tonight, several testimonies reported a noise that would have occurred in the Mahorais sky. At this stage no explanation could be provided. All states are mobilised to find an explanation of this phenomenon.”
It later became clear a meteor had entered the Earth’s atmosphere above Mayotte.
One resident said: “It’s gone int he direction of the sea. It was a ball of fire that had a kind of tail and was going very fast.
“The fire was very bright on the front. The fireball travelled from Labattoir to head offshore.”
A dash-cam video also appeared to show the meteor streaking towards the ground in a huge blaze of light.
Mayotte meteor: Residents reported hearing a huge explosion in the sky
(Image: TWITTER/ZykaDeRetourV2)
A meteor has exploded above the French islands of Mayotte(Image: TWITTER/ZykaDeRetourV2)
Cloud Tunnel Making UFO Seen Over East Sussex, Great Britain In Amazing Video, UFO Sighting News.
Cloud Tunnel Making UFO Seen Over East Sussex, Great Britain In Amazing Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: 7- 27-2018, but reported today. Location of sighting: East Sussex, Great Britain Source: MUFON #98681 This UFO is seen in only three frames of this video, but it is mind-blowing that something could fly that fast. The UFO is a retangle shape from the side, but a diamond shape from a tilted position. Also the fact that unusual tunnel clouds appear in the background make me believe this is a UFO and it may be responsible for making that cloud tunnel. The cloud tunnels are used for moving from one base to another on Earth. They allow the UFOs to travel from the locations they want when they want and still keep them unseen by human eyes. However this cloud maker was caught. Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
The kids at school spotted this strange cloud formation this afternoon in East Sussex. No idea how this thing formed.
Mars has sand dunes, as Earth does. But now, NASA’s Odyssey orbiter has revealed something odd: a large dune field shaped roughly like a hexagon. The finding is expected to provide more clues as to how dunes form in Martian winds.
Unusual dune field on a crater floor in Terra Cimmeria, part of the heavily cratered southern highland region of the planet Mars. The interesting patterns of the dunes themselves are contained within a boundary that is roughly hexagon-shaped.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/Arizona State University.
Mars can be a weird place sometimes. Although there are many of the same atmospheric and geological processes as on Earth, they can take on unusual forms not seen on our planet. The Mars rovers have discovered, for one example, verythin and delicate rock formationsthat are common in Mars’ lower gravity and thinner atmosphere (although similar ones can be found on Earth as well). Mars is also covered in sand dunes, much like those in earthly deserts. NASA’sMars Odysseyorbiter recently took photos of a dune field that – unlike any dune field seen on Earth – has a strange-looking, roughly hexagonal shape. It’s not a perfect hexagon, but close enough to make you take notice.
The dune field is on a crater floor in the Terra Cimmeria region, 68 degrees south of the equator, towards the south polar cap. This location on Mars, scientists believe, figures into the appearance of the dune field. As explained on ASU’s Flickr page:
Dunes at high latitudes – near the polar caps – are affected by seasonal frost and ice. The interactions with frost/ice reduces the amount of movement of sand grains within the dunes. This changes the morphology of near-polar dunes when compared to dunes at lower latitudes where ice/frost do not occur as frequently.
Wider view of the strange hexagonal dune field on Mars. Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/Arizona State University.
There are also many dust-devil tracks visible in the images. Dust devils are common on Mars, just as they are on Earth, despite Mars’ thinner atmosphere. They have even been photographed in-action by the Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity rovers, as the dust devils raced across the Martian landscape.
Lori Fenton is a planetary aeolian geomorphologist at SETI Institute. She studies wind-formed features such as sand dunes. She commented on the hexagonal dune field on Twitter:
Lori Fenton@LoriKFenton
Southern high latitude dunes seriously get their freak on. Nobody has yet tried to understand them. They know they're too cool for us anyway.
RidingWithRobots@ridingrobots
A dune field on a crater floor in Terra Cimmeria. From Mars Odyssey, which has been in orbit for 18 years.
Yep. @jmars_gis has got your back, here's a view. If you look at the whole dune field, it's not entirely hexagonal. I also included another crater nearby that also has an odd-shaped dune field. DTM is from MOLA, rainbow goes from elevations 300 to 2700 m. pic.twitter.com/vcDnu3kupW
As to how the dune fields formed the way they did, Fenton expressed some ideas via Twitter:
Yeah, the crater shape is one factor shaping the dune field, and it also affects incident winds (blocks them or enhances them). The dunes this far south are partially stabilized, which interferes with that interpretation (which is already complex).
Dunes are common on Mars, just as they are in deserts on Earth, and come in various shapes and sizes. Smaller sand drifts are also common. Most of the landers and rovers on Mars have seen dunes and drifts up close, a chance to study them in detail as to their composition and how they can form – even up to about 20 feet (6 meters) tall, like ones in the Bagnold Dune Field seen by Curiosity – in such a thin atmosphere.
Close-up view of the dunes themselves, from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Image via NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.
What makes these new dunes seen by Odyssey so peculiar is the overall shape of the dune fields themselves. Scientists, including Fenton, will examine them closely to figure out the processes involved in their formation.
Fenton had also recently written about another dune field on her blog that has similar crisp edges, but a different shape. She proposed two ideas for how these types of southern latitude dune fields – slower and more eroded – form:
1. (Less interesting) Dunes and ripples are forming and moving at high southern latitudes, but because of the ground ice, they do so more slowly than dunes at lower latitudes. They’re born that way, baby. (On second thought, that’s still interesting, because it means high latitude dunes would then record wind patterns over a longer time period than low latitude dunes. But they’d be hard to interpret.)
2. (More exciting) Dunes and ripples in the high southern latitudes formed long ago, in a climate state where the ground ice wasn’t yet formed, and have since become mostly locked in place. We’re essentially looking at fossil dunes. That means their shape would record ancient wind patterns, which we could compare with modern winds to see how the climate state on Mars has changed. It means we could use dunes to study climate change on Mars.
The huge, near-perfect hexagon at Saturn’s north pole, as seen by the Cassini spacecraft in 2014.
Image via NASA.
And what about that hexagonal shape? Are we surprised? Yes and no. Hexagons can be found in other places in nature. Another striking example is the jet stream formation at Saturn’s north pole, which is a massive, near-perfect hexagon centered at the pole itself. It’s absolutely astonishing.
Bottom line: These odd dune fields seen by the Odyssey orbiter – with one having a roughly hexagonal shape – are an interesting puzzle for planetary scientists, and are expected to help provide more clues about wind-driven dune formation processes on Mars.
An Israeli moon lander just took to the skies, but we'll all have to wait nearly two months for its historic touchdown try.
The robotic lander, called Beresheet,launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocketyesterday evening (Feb. 21) from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. If everything goes according to plan, Beresheet will zip around Earth for about six weeks in ever-widening orbits before heading toward its final destination. The craft will arrive in lunar orbit in early April and attempt a landing on the 11th of that month.
Beresheet will end up putting about 4 million miles (6.5 million kilometers) on its odometer when all is said and done. That's more than any other moon-landing mission, said the spacecraft's builders, the nonprofit group SpaceIL and the company Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI).
Beresheet's lengthy stay in Earth orbit may seem surprising. After all, China's Chang'e 4 farside lander reached lunar orbit just 4.5 days after its Dec. 7 liftoff (though Chang'e 4 didn't actually touch down until Jan. 2).
But the 5-foot-tall (1.5 meters) Beresheet cannot take a direct path to the moon, project team members said, because the lander shared a rocket ride with two other payloads. Also aboard the Falcon 9 last night were an Indonesian communications satellite and an experimental U.S. Air Force craft, both of which are making Earth orbit their home.
A graphic showing the Israeli lunar lander Beresheet's path to the moon. Dates correspond with Israel Standard Time.
"This is Uber-style space exploration," SpaceIL co-founder Yonatan Winetraub said Wednesday (Feb. 20) during a prelaunch news conference.
The strategy is cost-effective, helping keep Beresheet's total price tag, including launch, at about $100 million — quite low for a mission to another world. But there is a trade-off.
"The problem with that is, it doesn't allow us to choose the orbit completely," Winetraub added. "We have to consider the requirements from the other payloads" on the rocket.
And you can't just jet straight off to the moon from Earth orbit, Winetraub said; the two celestial bodies must be lined up properly before Beresheet — whose name means "in the beginning" in Hebrew" — can make its move.
"The moon is coming around, and we're doing our own orbit, and we need to synchronize everything," Winetraub said. "For that, we need to do something that's called 'phasing loops,' to make sure that the moon comes around in the right position so you can capture with it. And that takes time."
Mission team members won't just be sitting on their hands while they're waiting for this sync-up. The time in Earth orbit will allow them to test Beresheet's various systems and make sure they can track and communicate with the spacecraft. [The 21 Most Marvelous Moon Missions]
"Only after we will be sure that everything is OK, we will jump — make the lunar-capture maneuver, what we call it — and jump to the moon," Yigal Harel, the head of SpaceIL's spacecraft program, said during Wednesday's news conference.
The touchdown process will be fully automated and take about 20 minutes, team members said. Beresheet will land on the moon's near side, within the large basaltic plain called Mare Serenitatis ("Sea of Serenity").
A successful touchdown would be a huge deal. Beresheet would become the first privately funded craft to land on the moon. And the SpaceIL/IAI team would be the first nonsuperpower entity to pull off the feat: To date, only the Soviet Union, the United States and China have done it.
Beresheet will study the local magnetic field during its lunar approach and its two-Earth-day mission on the moon's surface. It will also investigate lunar craters, project team members have said. But the main mission goal is to inspire young people, especially kids in Israel, to become more interested in science, technology, engineering and math.
Indeed, team members have already met with many kids around the world, to bring the mission — and spaceflight in general — down to Earth.
"It is rocket science, but our goal is to show them that it's not magic — it's something they can understand," SpaceIL co-founder Kfir Damari said during Wednesday's briefing. "If they can understand that, and if they can meet engineers and hear their story and see that they come from all different kinds of backgrounds, they can understand that they themselves can be those who will build the next spacecraft."
Beresheet is toting an Israeli flag and a time capsule. Among the capsule's contents is the "Lunar Library," a collection of materials that includes the full English-language version of Wikipedia. The library is a project of the Arch Mission Foundation, which aims to help preserve human knowledge and culture by storing bits and pieces of it in off-Earth locales.
Beresheet began life as a moon-race robot. SpaceIL is a former competitor in the Google Lunar X Prize, a $30 million contest to put a robot on the moon and have it perform a few basic tasks. The Prize ended in 2018 without a winner, but SpaceIL — and several other former teams, including the American company Moon Express — have kept developing their moon missions. µ
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated byKarl Tate) is out now.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Israel's first space mission is on its way to the moon!
A used SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launchedan Israeli moon landeralong with an Indonesian communications satellite from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida tonight (Feb. 21). After deploying its two payloads into orbit, the Falcon 9's first stage returned to Earth and aced a landing (the third for this booster) on SpaceX's drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You," which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.
Liftoff occurred at 8:45 p.m. EST (0145 Feb. 22 GMT) just as the moon rose above the horizon here.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the SpaceIL moon lander and satellites for Indonesia and the U.S. military streaks into space from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida on Feb. 21, 2019.
Although the primary payload for this mission was Indonesia's satellite, named Nusantara Satu, the tiny moon lander that hitched a ride with the satellite as a secondary payload stole the show today. It became not only the first Israeli spacecraft to venture beyond Earth's orbit, but also the first-ever privately funded moon mission.
Today's launch was a momentous occasion for Israel, a small country that has never launched a mission into space, save for a handful of communications satellites and Earth-observation satellites that never left Earth's orbit.
The lander, named Beresheet (meaning "in the beginning" in Hebrew), was built by the Israeli nonprofit organization SpaceIL, which began working on this mission in 2011 as a contestant in the Google Lunar X Prize. That international competition offered $30 million to whichever privately funded team could land a robotic spacecraft on the moon. When none of the teams were able to reach that goal before the deadline, the competition ended without a winner. But that didn't stop SpaceIL from pursuing its goal.
"We have a vision to show off Israel's best qualities to the entire world," Sylvan Adams, a SpaceIL donor and Canadian-Israeli philanthropist, said during a pre-launch briefing in Orlando, Florida, on Wednesday (Feb. 20). "Tiny, tiny Israel is about to become the fourth nation to land on the moon, and this is a remarkable thing because we continue to demonstrate our ability to punch far above our weight and to show off our skills, our innovation [and] our creativity in tackling any difficult problem that could possibly exist."
If the mission is successful, Israel will be both the fourth nation and the fourth-largest nation to land on the moon, he added.
Beresheet will spend seven weeks making its way to the moon, swinging by Earth a few times and using our planet's gravity to build the momentum it needs to get to its destination. If Beresheet successfully executes a soft landing on the lunar surface, Israel will become the fourth nation to achieve such a landing on the moon, following in the footsteps of the world's "space superpowers" — the United States, Russia and China.
The first soft landing on the moon was achieved by the Soviet Union's Luna 9 spacecraft in 1966. NASA's Surveyor 1 spacecraft touched down on the lunar surface later that year. China joined the scene in 2013 with its Chang'e 3 lander and Yutu rover.
"We thought it's about time for a change, and we want to get little Israel all the way to the moon," Yonatan Winetraub, a co-founder of SpaceIL, said during the briefing. "This is the purpose of SpaceIL."
When Beresheet approaches the lunar surface, it will aim to touch down in a region called Mare Serenitatis, meaning "Sea of Serenity." The spacecraft will survive for only about two days before running out of power. During that time, it will study the moon's magnetic fields and take photos of the lunar surface — along with some out-of-this-world selfies, Yigal Harel, head of the SpaceIL Spacecraft Program, said in the briefing.
Once Beresheet's two days are up, the dead spacecraft won't be entirely useless. Mounted on the spacecraft is a laser retroreflector, a mirroring device that requires no power and can be used for space-to-ground communications via NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN). NASA contributed the device to this mission as part of an agreement with SpaceIL that would allow the startup company to utilize the DSN for its moon mission.
Part of the time capsule on SpaceIL's Beresheet mooon lander, this small coin contains the text of the entire Hebrew Bible laser-etched onto its surface.
The retroreflector is not the only payload on board Beresheet that is designed to stand the test of time. SpaceIL has also included a time capsule in the spacecraft packed with digital files that hold information about the spacecraft and a variety of Israeli memorabilia. That includes a copy of Hebrew Bible, Hebrew songs, artwork created by Israeli children and a photo of Ilan Ramon, Israel's first and only astronaut.
Inside the time capsule is an enormous digital database known as the Arch Lunar Library, a project of the nonprofit Arch Mission Foundation. The library contains "millions of documents from all around the world, different dictionaries [and] encyclopedias" on three laser-etched coins each about the size of a nickel, Winetraub said. "It's going to be the most densely packed artifact to reach the moon from information point of view, and it's going to stay there for future generations to see what is it like on Earth here in 2019."
Nusantara Satu
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launches two satellites and Israel's first moon lander on Feb. 21, 2019.
While Beresheet may be dominating the publicity for today's launch, the mission wouldn't be heading to the moon if it weren't for Indonesia's Nusantara Satu satellite and SpaceX's ability to offer ride-share missions. "We can't afford a full rocket ... so we basically do a ride share," Winetraub said. "This is Uber-style space exploration, so we're riding shotgun on the rocket."
Also known as PSN-6, Nusantara Satu is a geostationary communications satellite built by the California-based aerospace company SSL for Pasifik Satelit Nusantara, Indonesia's first private telecommunications company.
"Nusantara Satu is Indonesia's first high-throughput satellite that will serve to improve internet connectivity in the region," SpaceX officials said in a statement. "Additionally, the satellite's C-band and Ku-band transponders will be used for voice and data communications and video distribution throughout the Indonesian archipelago.
One booster, three missions
Beresheet and Nusantara Satu launched on a used Falcon 9 booster that had already traveled into space for two separate missions. Its maiden flight was for the Iridium-7 mission on July 25, 2018, when it launched 10 new Iridium communications satellites into orbit. After the booster stuck a drone-ship landing in the Pacific Ocean, SpaceX refurbished it and used it to launch Argentina's SAOCOM-1A Earth-observation satellite 11 weeks later. After successfully delivering SAOCOM-1A into orbit, the booster returned to Earth once more to touch down at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
This is the second Falcon 9 booster to execute three successful launches and landings. In December 2018, a twice-flown booster launched 64 small satellitesinto orbit for the SSO-A Smallsat Express mission. That booster landed on SpaceX's West Coast drone ship, named "Just Read the Instructions," and could be refurbished for a historic fourth flight. By reusing rocket boosters, SpaceX aims to reduce the cost of spaceflight.
Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience.
Wallace’s giant bee is about four times larger than a honeybee.
Credit: Global Wildlife Conservation.
After being missing in the action for more than four decades, Wallace’s giant bee (Megachile pluto) has been found in a remote part of Indonesia. The huge insect with enormous jaws — about the size of a human thumb — is the largest bee species in the world.
The ‘flying bulldog’
The giant bee, also known as the ‘flying bulldog’, was first discovered by British naturalistAlfred Russel Wallace, famous for independently proposing the theory of evolution through natural selection alongside Charles Darwin. When Wallace first came across the beefy insect in Indonesia’s North Moluccas islands in 1858, he described it as a “large black wasp-like insect, with immense jaws like a stag-beetle.”
Despite its conspicuous size, Wallace’s giant bee likes to keep to itself. For more than a century it hadn’t been spotted by Western scientists, only to be seen again by entomologist Adam Messer in 1981, who called it the ‘king of bees’. The lack of sightings, despite scientists’ best efforts, coupled with wide scale habitat loss, has led many to believe that the insect had gone extinct. Although Indonesia has abundant flora, it’s also a country where regulations are weak and forests are being cut down for agriculture.
But then Clay Bolt, a specialist bee photographer, did the unimaginable: he found Wallace’s giant bee, where many others had failed before him. Several months prior to the discovery, Bolt was introduced to a museum specimen of the giant bee by Eli Wyman, an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History. The two quickly bonded through their shared interest of seeing the bee in the wild and hatched a plan for an expedition.
Natural history photographer Clay Bolt takes the first ever photos of a living Wallace’s giant bee.
Credit: Simon Robson.
In January, the two had arrived with a search party in Indonesia where they explored the rainforest in North Moluccas. For a week, the crew braved extreme heat, humidity, and thunderstorms, as they looked for the giant bee’s nests that are typically carved into termite mounds in trees. They were down to their last day with nothing to show when a guide spotted a promising low-lying termite mound. When they peeked inside the resin-covered enclosure, the explorers thought they had spotted a snake. To everyone’s surprise, they found that the creature making a racket inside was a Wallace’s giant bee. They quickly blocked the nest’s exit and collected the bee.
“We were just basically freaking out after so many years of planning and almost giving up hope,” Bolt told Earther. “It was an incredible moment to realize that we came all this way, other people have looked for it, and here we were: filthy and sweaty and we somehow found this insect. For me, it was a moment of tremendous gratitude and humility that I was a part of this moment and this team.”
Rediscovering the giant bee is certainly a breakthrough — yet the real tough part is only just beginning. Now, researchers will have to work on plans designed to protect the species, which will require more studies that might estimate how many individuals are left and what the state of their habitat is. The fact that the bees live in very remote locations is reassuring, but there is still a lot we don’t know about this elusive species.
“I hope this rediscovery will spark future research that will give us a deeper understanding of the life history of this very unique bee and inform any future efforts to protect it from extinction,” Wyman said in a statement.
Virgin Galactic’s supersonic space plane, the VSS Unity, took off on its fifth test flight today. Mothership WhiteKnightTwo released the suborbital space plane at around 44,000 feet — and VSS Unity reached a new maximum altitude of 55.85 miles (89.9km.)
The second generation SpaceShipTwo, dubbed VSS Unity, reached an altitude of 51.4 miles (82.7 km) during its fourth test flight in December 2018. This time, the space plane traveled with a much heavier payload — close to full commercial weight — and a third crew member, Beth Moses, the first woman to enter space on a commercial US spacecraft.
“Although we passed a major milestone in December, we still have a way to go in testing the many factors that can affect a flight,” reads a press release. “So, for this flight, we will be expanding the envelope to gather new and vital data essential to future tests and operations, including vehicle center of gravity.”
Take a look at the flight path our SpaceShipTwo will take during our fifth supersonic powered test flight. The flight window opens again tomorrow. More info on our flight test program can be found here https://virg.in/UpU
Virgin Galactic is developing the SpaceShipTwo platform to be part of its space tourism fleet, giving those who can afford a ticket — $250,000 isn’t cheap — a taste of micro-gravity.
But it’s not quite a ride to the International Space Station — that’d require it to fly to more than four times its current maximum altitude.
Former Navy Officer Tells The Truth Behind Antarctica
Former Navy Officer Tells The Truth Behind Antarctica
A naval officer came clean about the biggest secrets he saw in the no-fly area in Antarctica. Among everything, he mentioned an enormous gap in the ice within a region they were traversing with the medical emergency. He also carried a group of scientists who vanished for an entire period of two weeks and were terrified after that.
Antarctica is a place that never stops surprising with its secrets. Starting from the mystery of its ancient past and ending with the numerous alleged accounts suggested during the years, this remote continent remains to be a real enigma.
According to many authors, Antarctica is a place full of secrets beneath its surface. They further claim that this is the exact reason this place is so isolated from the public.
One of the theories circling around this continent is that once, it was resided by an ancient civilization.
Much evidence supports the hypothesis that the icy continent wasn’t as frosty as it is now in the distant past. On the contrary, it could have had a blooming vegetation and people could have lived there, building advanced structures.
The main question, however, is why Antarctica has become the heart of all kinds of fascinating conspiracy theories? We will try to explain this question with the simplest answer. This continent is the most detached place on Mother Earth, thus, people can’t just easily go there and study its past.
Moreover, there are multiple ancient maps that illustrate Antarctica not as we see it today but rather iceless.
For instance, the 1513’s map by Turkish Admiral Piri Reis is one of the most polemical of them all, still causing debates in our contemporary society even today.
This map, namely, draws Antarctica which was only, in fact, discovered between 1818-1820.
According to the mainstream claims, the first journeys to the continent happened in 1820. The Russian travel’s leaders were Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev, while the British journey’s leaders were Edward Bransfield and an American sealer Nathaniel Palmer.
On the other hand, the first landing likely happened one year later, when the American sealer Captain John Davis set foot on the icy surface.
Norwegian Ronald Amundsen ultimately reached the Pole on December 14, 1911. He managed to defeat the British Robert Falcon Scott during a dramatic contest.
What the stories above have in common is that they all originate, less or more, from recent times.
Then again, the maps we mentioned date back 5 centuries ago, yet, they clearly do depict the continent. Some of them even show it without ice.
In 2012, a satellite picture of the icy continent was the reason for the rise of many unanswered questions. It showed a bizarre oval-shaped structure arranged in such a remote place on Earth.
Measuring 400-feet across, this structure imposed the dilemma whether it emerged naturally or it was man-made.
Anyway, this structure is just a part of the whole collection of many unusual things that exist there.
And they only add to the stories of numerous informants who claim the society doesn’t own a clue about the real deal going on in Antarctica.
What is mentioned as a ‘truly shocking and astonishing video on extremely strange events in the Antarctic continent’ has recently been uploaded to YouTube, prompting a large discussion?
“A naval officer tells us what he remembers, including seeing a huge opening in the ice in a no-fly area they were crossing with a medical emergency on board. Then he ferried a group of scientists who had disappeared for two weeks, and has specifically been warned not to refer again to this subject. As he put it, they looked scared. When they returned to McMurdo, their gear was isolated and they were flown back to New Zealand in special plane. He discusses what he saw and experienced in detail. This is the most provocative story about what is going on in Antarctica ever presented anywhere.”
WETENSCHAPHet ruimtetoerismebedrijf Virgin Galactic heeft vandaag vanuit de Amerikaanse Mojave-woestijn opnieuw en met succes een supersonische test verricht met zijn ruimteschip SpaceShipTwo, zo was op Twitter te volgen.
Het moedervliegtuig Eve steeg met het SpaceshipTwo op in de Mojavewoestijn om het ruimtevliegtuig op 40.000 voet zoals een bom los te laten. Het ruimtevliegtuig bereikte op eigen kracht tegen drie keer de snelheid van het geluid 93 kilometer hoogte, of boven de grens van de ruimte zoals die in de VS is vastgelegd: 80 kilometer hoogte. Het toestel had die arbitraire grens ook al in december bereikt, en streek na rechtsomkeert te hebben gemaakt probleemloos weer neer in de Mojave-woestijn.
Het SpaceShipTwo, alias Unity, voerde voor het eerst drie mensen mee: naast de piloten Dave Mackay en Michael Masucci ook astronautentrainer Beth Moses. Haar rol was niet alleen om voor het eerst een derde opvarende te zijn, maar ook om delen van de cabine te testen vooraleer Virgin Galactic zijn eerste klanten even in de ruimte laat vertoeven.
Het ruimtevliegtuig van de Britse miljardair Richard Branson kan naast de twee piloten zes passagiers vervoeren. Volgens zender CNBC kost een ticket 250.000 dollar en hebben er al meer dan 600 mensen een contract ondertekend. Al met al leunde het gewicht kort aan bij wat het bij een commerciële vlucht zal zijn, aldus Branson.
De Unity voerde tijdens zijn vijfde supersonische vlucht ook vier wetenschappelijke experimenten van het Amerikaanse ruimtevaartbureau NASA mee.
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Stonehenge's bluestones 'were NOT made in Wales': Archaeologists at war over claim prehistoric man chipped rocks from the site before dragging them 140 miles to Wiltshire
Stonehenge's bluestones 'were NOT made in Wales': Archaeologists at war over claim prehistoric man chipped rocks from the site before dragging them 140 miles to Wiltshire
Last week, a UCL-led study claimedthe bluestones were transported from Pembrokeshire in south west Wales by our prehistoric ancestors
Found two sites in the Preseli Hills said to be where stones were quarried
But a separate team has slammed the claims, saying there's no traces of man-made 'engineering features' at the site
The enigma of how the 'bluestones' arrived at Stonehenge was said to have been solved last week when experts claimed the blocks had been transported to Wiltshire from Pembrokeshire.
The team pinpointed two sites in the Preseli Hills - Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin - where the researchers said the stones had been quarried before being dragged 140 miles (225 km).
But their assertions have been branded 'all wrong' by another team of scientists which claim there are no traces of man-made 'engineering features' at the site which would indicate it was a quarry.
Last week, a team of experts claimed Stonehenge's bluestones had been transported from Pembrokeshire in south west Wales by our prehistoric ancestors, having been originally used for a different monument. An image of what they claim is the prehistoric quarry is shown above
It has long been thought the bluestones, which form Stonehenge's inner ring came from Wales, and were transported to Wiltshire using primitive Stone Age technology.
And last week, a team of archaeologists and geologists led by academics from University College London (UCL) claimed Stonehenge was originally built in Pembrokeshire, hundreds of years before the monument was taken down and rebuilt in its current location.
The UCL team said it has discovered two prehistoric quarries in the county, 140 miles (225km) away from Stonehenge, which appear to be the origin of the bluestones used to build the monument.
Carbon dating suggests the stones were dug out 500 years before the famous monument was erected in Wiltshire.
One archaeologist suggested that the new evidence shows Stonehenge was 'a second-hand monument', with the site where its stones were quarried being 'the Ikea of Neolithic monument building'.
But their assertions have been branded 'all wrong' by another team of earth scientists who claim there are no traces of man-made 'engineering features' at the site. A stock image of Stonehenge is shown
The group does not accept the idea of a Neolithic quarry in the Preseli Hills and said the supposed signs of 'quarrying' by humans at Craig Rhos-y-Felin (pictured) were entirely natural
WHY SCIENTISTS CLAIM UCL-LED RESEARCH IS 'ALL WRONG'
Dr Brian John, Dr Dyfed Elis-Gruffydd and John Downes said there are 'no traces of human intervention' at the two sites in the Preseli Hills, indicating it wasn't a quarry used for Stonehenge.
In particular, they said there is no evidence to prove how the site was used - with no artefacts, bones or tools discovered at the site.
They believe rhyolite deposits linking the site and Stonehenge don't prove the stones were carried to Wiltshire by humans, but that the fragments may have been moved there by glaciers.
The team claims the UCL archaeologists behind the report may have inadvertently created certain features during five years of 'highly selective sediment removal'.
Their study says: 'It is suggested, on the basis of careful examinations of this site, that certain of the "man-made features" described have been created by the archaeologists themselves through a process of selective sediment and clast removal.
'An expectation or conviction that "engineering features" would be found has perhaps led to the unconscious fashioning of archaeological artifices.'
In particular, the researchers said they had discovered a series of recesses in the rocky outcrops of Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin that match Stonehenge's bluestones in size and shape.
They even said they found similar stones that the prehistoric builders extracted, but left behind, and 'a loading bay' from where the huge stones could be dragged away.
But these claims have been disputed by a separate team writing in the the journal Archaeology in Wales.
Dr Brian John, Dr Dyfed Elis-Gruffydd and John Downes said there are 'no traces of human intervention in any of the features that have made the archaeologists so excited'.
Writing on his blog, Dr John said: 'We have no argument with the geological work that links this site with Stonehenge.
'But we cannot accept the idea of a Neolithic quarry here without firm evidence - and in our considered opinion there is none.
'The archaeologists admit that there are no artefacts, bones or tools at the site.'
Specifically, the group does not accept the idea of a Neolithic quarry in the Preseli Hills and said the supposed signs of 'quarrying' by humans at Craig Rhos-y-Felin were entirely natural.
They also believe the archaeologists behind the report may have inadvertently created certain features during five years of 'highly selective sediment removal'.
'This site has been described by lead archaeologist Prof Mike Parker Pearson as "the Pompeii of prehistoric stone quarries" and has caused great excitement in archaeological circles,' the report said.
'The selection of this rocky crag near the village of Brynberian for excavation in 2011-2015 was triggered by the discovery by geologists Richard Bevins and Rob Ixer that some of the stone fragments in the soil at Stonehenge were quite precisely matched to an unusual type of foliated rhyolite [a type of extrusive rock] found in the crag.
They also believe the archaeologists behind the report may have inadvertently created certain features during five years of 'highly selective sediment removal'. A picture of the UCL-led dig is shown
The UCL team claims the stones were transported 140 miles (225km) from Pembrokeshire to Salisbury Plain in around 2900 BC, but the conflicting study said debris used to link the sites was caused by glaciers
'This led the archaeologists to conclude there must have been a Neolithic quarry here, worked for the specific purpose of cutting out monoliths for the bluestone settings at Stonehenge.'
But Dr John is convinced the rhyolite debris at Stonehenge, studied by both groups, instead comes from glacial erratics.
These are stones and rocks that were transported by a glacier and then left behind after the glacier melted - which were eroded from the Rhosyfelin rocky crag.
This happened almost half a million years ago by the overriding Irish Sea Glacier and the fragments were then transported eastwards by ice towards Salisbury Plain, he explained.
The study continued: 'It is suggested, on the basis of careful examinations of this site, that certain of the "man-made features" described have been created by the archaeologists themselves through a process of selective sediment and clast removal.
'An expectation or conviction that "engineering features" would be found has perhaps led to the unconscious fashioning of archaeological artifices.
'While there appears to be no landform, rock mechanics or sedimentary evidence that this was a Neolithic quarry site devoted to the extraction of bluestone' for use at Stonehenge, or anywhere else.
But the team accepts there may have been temporary Mesolithic, Neolithic or later camp sites here over a very long period of time at the site.
The team accepts there may have been temporary Mesolithic, Neolithic or later camp sites here over a very long period of time at the site. The 'quarry' site is shown above
Commenting on the UCL-led research, Dr John said: 'The new geological work at Rhosyfelin and Stonehenge is an interesting piece of 'rock provenencing' - but it tells us nothing at all about how monoliths or smaller rock fragments from West Wales found their way to Stonehenge. Here, Workers sort through stones at the site
Commenting on the UCL-led research, Dr John said: 'The new geological work at Rhosyfelin and Stonehenge is an interesting piece of "rock provenencing" - but it tells us nothing at all about how monoliths or smaller rock fragments from West Wales found their way to Stonehenge.
'We are sure that the archaeologists have convinced themselves that the glacial transport of erratics was impossible. We are not sure where they got that idea from.
'On the contrary, there is substantial evidence in favour of glacial transport and zero evidence in support of the human transport theory.'
'We think the archaeologists have been so keen on telling a good story here that they have ignored or misinterpreted the evidence in front of them.
'That's very careless. They now need to undertake a complete reassessment of the material they have collected.'
Further excavations of the 'quarries' are planned for 2016.
'We think the archaeologists have been so keen on telling a good story here that they have ignored or misinterpreted the evidence in front of them,' Dr John said. Craig Rhos-y-felin (pictured) is set in the picturesque Pembrokeshire countryside
THEORY ROCKS WERE USED ORIGINALLY FOR ANOTHER MONUMENT AND TRANSPORTED FROM PEMBROKESHIRE BY ANCIENT PEOPLE
A team of archaeologists and geologists, led by academics from UCL, last week claimed Stonehenge was originally built in Pembrokeshire, hundreds of years before the monument was taken down and rebuilt in its current location.
They said they have discovered two prehistoric quarries in the county, 140 miles (225km) away from Stonehenge, which appear to be the origin of the bluestones used to build the monument, with carbon dating suggesting the stones were dug out 500 years before the famous monument was erected in Wiltshire.
One of the quarry's excavators compared it to a 'Neolithic Ikea' because of the way the raw materials were used elsewhere. An aerial view of the site is shown
The stone is formed into 'pillars' which would have made it easy for ancient men to chisel them off
They said a series of recesses in the rocky outcrops of Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin, in Pembrokeshire, match Stonehenge's bluestones in size and shape.
And that they found similar stones that the prehistoric builders extracted, but left behind, and 'a loading bay' from where the huge stones could be dragged away.
Professor Mike Parker Pearson of UCL, the director of the project, said: 'We have dates of around 3400 BC for Craig Rhos-y-felin and 3200 BC for Carn Goedog, which is intriguing because the bluestones didn't get put up at Stonehenge until around 2900 BC.
'It could have taken those Neolithic stone-draggers nearly 500 years to get them to Stonehenge, but that's pretty improbable in my view.
'It's more likely that the stones were first used in a local monument, somewhere near the quarries, that was then dismantled and dragged off to Wiltshire.'
He said it was a 'possibility' that the evidence could mean Stonehenge is older than previously thought.
The function of Stonehenge (stock image) remains a long-standing mystery, although it is believed to have something to do with religious ceremonies revolving around the solstice.
But he added: 'We think it's more likely that they were building their own monument, that somewhere near the quarries there is the first Stonehenge and that what we're seeing at Stonehenge is a second-hand monument.'
The research was published in the journal Antiquity alongside a new book by the Council for British Archaeology, titled Stonehenge: Making Sense of a Prehistoric Mystery.
There is also the possibility that the stones were taken to Salisbury Plain around 3200 BC and that the giant sarsens in the outer ring, which come from within 20 miles of the site, were added much later.
The function of Stonehenge remains a long-standing mystery, although it is believed to have something to do with religious ceremonies revolving around the solstice.
Stonehenge is the gift that keeps on giving employment to minions of archeologists, historians, reality show hosts and the like by keeping its origin, purpose and other mysteries mysterious. Every once in a while, a piece of the Stonehenge puzzle is solved – usually closing one hole but, unlike conventional puzzles, opening a few more. One puzzle that would seem to be easy to solve is finding the original quarry where the stones were cut. And yet, it’s taken until now to find that quarry (make that quarries) … where the monument’s smaller bluestones came from. A second piece of the puzzle may also have been solved – how they were transported to their final standing place. What new holes have these pieces opened? Anxious archeologists with bills to pay are awaiting.
“What’s really exciting about these discoveries is that they take us a step closer to unlocking Stonehenge’s greatest mystery – why its stones came from so far away. Every other Neolithic monument in Europe was built of megaliths brought from no more than 10 miles away. We’re now looking to find out just what was so special about the Preseli hills 5,000 years ago, and whether there were any important stone circles here, built before the bluestones were moved to Stonehenge.”
In press release from University College London and a paper published in Antiquity, UCL Archaeology professor and study leader Mike Parker Pearson explains that the bluestones (found in the inner horseshoe and outer circle of Stonehenge) have now been proven to come from almost 180 miles away in Wales from the stone outcrops of Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-feli. These outcrops are made of natural vertical pillars of stone with cervices or vertical joints that would have made things easy for Neolithic carvers to simply insert wedges, pound, yell “Look out!” and watch them fall. Being incredibly hard stones, breakage was minimal.
That obviously was the easy part. The rest of this contract involved getting the bluestones from the Preseli hills to Salisbury. While much credence has been given to the theory that the heavy stones were floated up the Bristol Channel and along the Bristol Avon towards Salisbury on rafts (similar to the way pyramid stones were transported in Egypt), study co-author Professor Colin Richards (University of the Highlands and Islands) says the researchers found the remnants of man-made stone and earth platforms at the bottom of the outcrops.
“Bluestone pillars could be eased down onto this platform, which acted as a loading bay for lowering them onto wooden sledges before dragging them away.”
And co-author Professor Kate Welham (Bournemouth University) points out that the quarries are on the north side of the Preseli hills which gives a relatively flat route for them to be pulled on rollers by cattle and men overland all the way to Salisbury Plain.
Even this far is a long way to pull these giants.
Pulled from Wales to Salisbury? Perhaps that’s the new hole opened by fitting this study’s “the bluestones are definitely from Wales” piece into the Stonehenge puzzle.
Rest easy all you archeologists, historians and druid priests – your jobs are safe … for now.
It was 2 in the morning on a placid summer night of 1996 in Catalonia, Spain, and the only activity inside the luxurious country house of Rafael Farriols was focused inside his semi-circular study, located at the top floor. There, Farriols had locked himself in after his family had retired to bed, and was circling around his broad work table, whispering. But he wasn’t praying or conducting a meditating practice; instead the elderly Catalonian gentleman was doing something far more unconventional: trying to communicate with extraterrestrials, as they had expressly invited him to do so in a letter he had just received in the mail.
Rafael Farriols, during a UFO conference
Just by these early brushstrokes of the larger picture I’ll be trying to paint, you might be left with the impression that the man was just another crackpot, and yet nothing could be further from the truth. Rafael Farriols (1928-2006) was a respected, bright and wealthy industrialist from Barcelona, who had successfully applied his studies in chemistry in order to make his company one of the biggest exporters of acrylic plastic in Europe. He was an animal lover and his fortune allowed him to raise horses, raptor birds and other kinds of exotic pets. He also had a passion for photography and philosophy; but without a doubt the reason his name transcended the frontier of his business interests and numerous friends was his active interest in “platillos volantes”(flying saucers), a mystery which found fertile ground in Spaniard soil, with regular news of sightings and even close encounters of the 3rd kind reported by newspapers printed all across the Iberian peninsula ever since the modern age of UFOs began –and even way before that, as dogged Spanish researchers have found out, when looking for witnesses of those elusive objects and their occupants amid remote villages where people could barely read or write, and such sightings were often regarded as supernatural portents rather than otherworldly visits.
One such researcher is Juan José Benítez, an author I’ve mentioned in previous articles, who has published more than 50 books about UFOs and other topics. It is in one of those books that Benítez mentioned the incident with Farriols –who was a dear friend of his– as part of a larger tapestry of weirdness, deception and half-truths that constitute the infamous UMMO affair. Just like Roswell symbolizes the ‘American-ness’ of the UFO narrative —“Them aliens crashed in the desert and we retrieved the wreckage, Yee-ha!”— UMMO is perhaps the most Spanish example of alleged contact with Extraterrestrials you will be able to find in the Literature –“Rediez! The extraterreshtrialsh want to keep correshpondenze with me”– which is probably why to this day what most people in the anglophone side of UFOlogy know about this fascinating series of cases is just the iconic )+(glyph, faintly reminiscent of the astrological symbol of Uranus, or a Cyrillic letter
Explaining the whole UMMO enchilada (um, paella?) would take way too many pages and it’s not the real point of the present article, so to make a really REALLY long story short: in February 8th of 1966 a newspaper from Madrid published the story that a landing of a UFO had reportedly taken place in the neighborhood of Aluche two days earlier. The ground of the site was burned, and later inspections found deep rectangular impressions with a weird cross mark in the middle, along with faint traces of radioactivity. One of the witnesses, a man by the name of José Luis Jordán Peña, wrote a letter to the press describing the sighting of the object, which had the typical shape of a flying saucer except for one detail –a strange, dark emblem in its underside that resembled a vertical line between two inverted parenthesis symbols.
Around the same time several individuals in Spain started to receive letters with postage stamps from all over the world, displaying a similar marking as a form of a rubber stamp. Among them was Fernando Sesma, a flying saucer enthusiast who in 1954 had created the “Sociedad de Amigos del Espacio”(Society of Space Friends) and was very interested in the topic of contactees. Sesma said that in January of 1965 he received a call from an unknown individual with a strong foreign accent, who told him he would soon receive “items of an extraterrestrial order.” Sesma’s dream of interacting with entities from other planets had come true, and soon he would be joined by other similar contactees, who began a series of regular salons at the Café Lion in the Madrilenian street of Alcalá, to exchange impressions on the astonishing information they were getting through the post mail. Among them was Jordán Peña, the Aluche witness mentioned above.
The authors of the lengthy typewritten letters introduced themselves as extraterrestrial emissaries who had come from a planet called UMMO, orbiting the red dwarf star Wolf 424, located in the constellation Virgo (some 14.2 light years away from the Earth). Unlike most Contactee cases, these nordic-like visitors were more than forthcoming in describing themselves, their culture and technology to their astonishing recipients using highly detailed explanations that were peppered with words supposedly written in the aliens’ native tongue —OYAGAA was for example the name they had given to planet Earth, and all the rest of the Ummite language made anyone sound as if they were suffering a stroke if spoken out loud.
Here, it seemed, was the holy grail UFO enthusiasts had been waiting for. Instead of the psychic means like channeling employed by American contactees –which was too resemblant of spiritual mediumship, for the taste of both the scientifically-oriented and the religiously conservative– to get in touch with the Venusian space brothers who seemed to be only interested in spreading the gospel of interplanetary peace among the warmongering people of Earth (rather than dabbling in the finer points of advanced Cosmology) the rational explorers from UMMO were more pragmatic and preferred to get in touch with their chosen ones (the recipient of the letters eventually expanded from Madrid to Barcelona, and then to France, Argentina and Italy) through more conventional methods; aside from the mail, sometimes they would also use the phone to call their contacts, like they did with Sesma, and their voices sounded nasal and aphonic; the explanation being that Ummites were so advanced their main form of communication was telepathy (duh) and so their vocal cords were severely atrophied. The Ummites were even incapable of typing their long epistles themselves, due to their high sensitivity in the fingertips, so they had to rely on terrestrial secretaries who were handsomely paid for their transcribing services, as well as their discretion.
(The above clip is an alleged recording Farriols made of a telephone call with a ‘Ummite’ in 1969)
These extraterrestrials’ science and theorems, delivered in an extremely dry and technical style and accompanied by elaborate hand-drawn diagrams and illustrations, seemed not to be too far-fetched and in conflict with our own scientific knowledge. Even the stern admonitions of the Ummites to nottake their revelations at face value had a certain whiff of plausibility, since that sounded like the kind of cautionary approach real aliens would take during a gradual acclimation program, in order to establish a formal relationship with humanity without causing a total social disruption by their arrival. At least that was what I believed when I first read about UMMO as a very young boy in the pages of a 1978 book written by Alejandro Vignati, a little-known Argentinian UFOlogist –their computers, for example, stored vast quantities of information in quartz crystals instead of magnetic disks; something that sounded like Flash Gordon stuff in the late 1960’s, but is now a reality as incredibly as it may sound.
I even thought the photos of a white disk sporting the now-famous )+( symbol, allegedly taken near a castle in San José de Valderas on June 1st, 1967, were indisputably authentic, even though they had been sent to the press by an anonymous photographer (a clear red herring, but back then I hadn’t learned of such things). This particular close encounter of the second kind, by the way, had actually been announced by the Ummites on a previous letter received by their “OYAGAAbrothers” in Madrid the previous month, and near the place where the disk had supposedly touched ground a mysterious metallic tube was said to have been found by a local child who carelessly opened it, revealing a green plastic film inside it marked with the typical UMMO logo. The San José de Valderas case was seen as confirmation by the Madrilenian circle that the documents were real, and it attained international attention thanks to the book “Un Caso Perfecto” (A Perfect Case) originally published in 1969 (a second, revised edition was printed in 1973), co-written by legendary UFOlogist Antonio Ribera and Rafael Farriols, the same Catalonian industrialist I introduced in the first paragraph of this article, who eventually became a key figure in the UMMO affair and a recipient of many letters himself –when Ribera passed away, Farriols became the repository of all his UMMO files, and he also ended up buying the original San José de Valderas negatives for the pricey sum of $30,000 pesetas.
“Don’t believe in us, and don’t disseminate these letters to the masses” was the counter-intuitive mantra repeated again and again in the UMMO letters. And yet, how could their growing number of adepts not believe, when they had been chosen as grassroots liaisons between our world and a superior civilization? How could they not shout the good news to the winds?? The popularity of the UMMO topic grew, more books were written, and conferences were organized where the true converts and the mere curious gathered, much to the annoyance of ‘serious’ UFO investigators who thought the whole thing was pure nonsense –an echo of the contempt NICAP and other groups in the United States always showed to the contactees (and later to abductees) because they stole the media spotlight and scared away the few scientists genuinely interested in the phenomenon.
In his book “The Invisible College” (1975) Vallee devotes the entire fourth chapter to UMMO (“The Function of OEMII”) where he speculates whether it could have been some sort of experiment in socio-psychological manipulation, perpetrated perhaps by a military intelligence group. His reasoning was backed by the analysis of the metal and plastic samples from the San José de Valderas case, which had been obtained by Farriols through a third party –the man who had allegedly obtained them and told the story of the kid who found the metal cylinder, Antonio Pardo, was never interviewed– and were sent to the Spanish National Institute for Space Research (INTA) whose president happened to be an uncle of Farriols. The laboratory analysis concluded the metal was a very pure (99%) alloy of nickel, and the plastic film was polyvinyl fluoride, which was only manufactured by the DuPont company with the commercial name of TEDLAR, and was used by NASA (and the military!) due to their very special chemical and dielectric properties. So even though the material was not found to be of otherworldly origin, neither it was something you could purchase in any hardware store in Madrid.
The years passed. The supply of new letters ebbed and flowed, which was explained as the result of the Ummites leaving and returning to Earth. Unlike most contactee groups, there was never a centralized leader who was the sole repository of information, and the mail recipients formed groups that would later dissolve or split –one of those groups, Eridani, was presided by Jordán Peña, who took a very skeptical approach to UMMO and UFOs in general. Also unlike typical contactee groups in the United States, there was never any grand prophecy foretelling a massive arrival of OAWOLEA OUEWA(the alien word for their lenticular spacecraft) at the major cities of the world. The Ummites were bound by a strict ‘cosmic law’ –a sort of ‘prime directive’– which forbade them from overtly meddling and interfering with human society.
Only once or twice did the UMMO affair took an apocalyptic spin, by warning their followers in one of their collective messages (meant to be read during a general assembly at a predeterminate date) that there was a very high chance of a global nuclear conflagration due to the Yom Kippur war of 1973, and they even offered refuge to their terrestrial allies inside a nuclear shelter they had prepared under the Sierra de Gredos mountains in Salamanca; the catch though, was that each follower could only bring nine other companions to the extraterrestrial base, mortifying those who took the warning seriously and were waiting for final confirmation from the Ummites, while trying to determine who among their friends and family to save, and who to leave behind! Fortunately this ‘orange alert’ did not devolve into a true tragedy, and to my knowledge no one ended up committing suicide or selling all their possessions, like in the book “When Prophecy Fails” –perhaps because the Ummites didn’t claim to know the future with absolute certainty, so instead their predictions were the result of mathematical and sociopolitical probabilities. Or maybe because all those typewritten “don’t believe us!” had actually sunk in after all…
By 1993, when nobody cared about the Space Brothers of the ’60s and the UFO scene started to be monopolized by Roswell, alien abductions and Area 51, José Luis Jordán Peña –the skeptical president of the Eridani group, and one of the witnesses of the Aluche landing– gave the biggest ‘mea culpa’in the history of Spanish UFOlogy, by claiming he was the sole mastermind behind the entire UMMO affair. It was him, he announced, who had written all the letters and drawn all the diagrams illustrating them. Not only that, but he also claimed to have fabricated the Aluche landing, and hoaxed the San José de Valderas photos using a small model made out of translucent picnic plates and suspended through a thin nylon wire.
“Case closed!” announced the hard-line skeptics… Or was it?
In UFOlogy the will to believe is only superseded by the will to disbelieve, depending on where you stand on the issue of alien life. No matter how tenuous and improbable a debunking explanation may turn out to be, that’s always a better alternative than opening the Pandora’s Box of a true anomaly for people who adopt the “it can’t be, therefore it isn’t” posture (what we call “big ‘S’ skeptics”). Remember the Belgian flap of the 1990’s? It only took one person to claim he had been the one who had faked that famous ‘triangle UFO’ photo, which has been considered by some to be one of the best graphic evidences in history –without providing ANY sort of evidence to back up his claim, mind you– for skeptics and the media to buy it without question, and use that as an excuse to dismiss the entire series of sightings of unidentified objects that occurred in that country, which were reported by both citizens as well as civilian and military authorities.
A similar thing happens with the self-proclaimed culpability of Jordán Peña, who could very well be compared to Richard Doty both in infamy as well as trustworthiness. Without providing any claim of evidence whatsoever, he bragged that his little ‘social experiment’ as he called it, had been supported and financed by none other than the CIA (“Joder, tío!”). They were the ones who had provided the scientific expertise needed to fabricate the illusion of the highly advanced UMMO technology, and who also mailed the forged letters at post offices scattered all around the world, in order to give them more believability.
The Aluche landing marks and burned ground? He and a couple of friends –who were the ones who entered a bar to report their alleged sighting of the flying saucer– dug up the rectangular prints using a beach bucket and burned the ground with a blow torch, he said; he had even acquired a small amount of radioactive sand (provided by the CIA, of course) that he spread around the site. The problem is Jordán Peña leaves out the fact that he and his accomplices were not the only witnesses of the landing: they were also some soldiers who claimed to have seen the object that day. Even after the incident, Jordán Peña and his wife received the visit of a man in uniform who claimed to be an officer of the Spanish Air Force, to interrogate him about the event. The officer told him he had also seen the object, which completely surprised Jordán. How could this military officer claim to be a witness of something he had made up? He thought. The officer advised Jordán not to talk about the incident any further “because it could all be the work of the Americans.” To complete the MIB tone of the incident, the man gave Jordán Peña a card with phone number where he could be reached, but months later when Jordán tried to call the officer, he found out the name and number were completely fictitious! Was the CIA ‘experimenting’ with their own operative?
With regards to the San José de Valderas photos, Jordán Peña claimed to have traveled to the site a few days beforehand with one of his accomplices (Vicente Ortuño) and took the photos of the model when there was no one in the area, they processed the photos themselves and sent them to the press anonymously. ‘Antonio Pardo’ –the guy who supposedly took photos of the nickel cylinder and sent them to the press with the metallic and plastic samples– had been him using an alias, and the samples had been fabricated by “the Institution” as he referred to the CIA. But once again, Jordán dismisses the fact that there were more witnesses that observed a strange object with an orange glow that evening, who were interviewed by Antonio Ribera and Rafael Farriols for their book “Un Caso Perfecto.” Were they all liars? “Yes,” said Jordán, dismissing the whole thing all too conveniently.
Which leaves of course the big, lenticular-shaped elephant in the room? WHY did he do it?? “I wanted to study the behavior of sects, masochistic conducts and leader figures,” he told Juan José Benítez when he interviewed him years later. “It was clear to me the UFO subject was a fallacy –meaning a deception or lie intended to harm a person. Thus was born UMMO as an experiment to prove the extraterrestrial issue was just another falsehood.” Which is why the name he coined sounded just as the Spanish word for ‘smoke’ (humo).
With this in mind, Jordán said, is that he put himself in touch with two American anthropologists, to see if they would be interested in helping him both professionally and financially with his social experiment –he was after all, a lay person with no scientific degrees in psychology. According to him, one of the academics rejected the idea and considered it completely unethical. The other one was not as dismissive but didn’t agree to it either; yet months later –according to Jordán’s testimony to Benítez– that same anthropologist (who was never named) contacted him again out of the blue, telling Jordán his proposal had been discretely sent to the CIA, who had conducted a study of his profile and background (in the 1950’s he had worked for Fé Católica, an intelligence service run by the Jesuit order) and the Intelligence organization was willing to fully support his project.
What could the Yankees possibly get out of his little UFOlogical deception, though? According to him, the “Institution” was capable of sending ciphered messages within the letters to infiltrated agents behind the Iron Curtain –East Germany and Romania, predominantly. Even though such a notion does not sound totally implausible, to this day there’s never been anynews of UMMO letters received in Germany.
‘Project UWW’, which was supposed to be the codename given to the contactee deception, ended in 1989 “coinciding with the fall of the Berlin wall,” in the words of Jordán. Yet it’s far more likely the real reason the UMMO megalomaniac stopped sending letters to the still-expectant UMMO fans was the fact that in 1988 he suffered from a stroke caused by a brain clot which left half of his body paralyzed (hemiplegia), rendering him incapable to keep typewriting the letters or drawing the Ummite diagrams –perhaps it was a fitting punishment, that the man behind the guttural language of UMMO ended up having a difficulty to properly communicate phonetically for the rest of his life…
José Luis Jordán Peña, after he suffered his stroke
Juan José Benítez interviewed Jordán Peña several times for many months, as it is stated in his book “El Hombre que Susurraba a los Ummitas” (The Man who Whispered to the Ummites), and it is clear from his ‘testimony’ that the man was a pathological liar with delusions of grandeur, who kept changing his story again and again –on one occasion he told Benítez his first meeting with CIA representatives took place by late 1965, but on another occasion he said the offer to support the UMMO project happened on November of 1966. Sometimes he explained the San José the Valderas maquette was held with a fishing pole held by Vicente Ortuño, and another time he said the model was supported by a frame resembling a soccer goal. As Ortuño, his old accomplice, told Benítez: “Jordán makes a sport out of lying.”
Should we dismiss then the idea that the CIA could have been involved in the UMMO deception? Here’s where things get even more messy: you see, contrary to what Jordán claimed, people were still getting letters allegedly sent by the Ummites after 1989. One of them was none other than Rafael Farriols, who still thought Jordán’s ’93 confession was not enough to explain the whole UMMO affair. He had, after all, used some of the scientific descriptions explained in those documents to attain a couple of patents; other scientists and engineers, like Jean-Pierre Petit –senior researcher at National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) as an astrophysicist in Marseille Observatory– to this day still find the UMMO ideas to be very ingenious and too advanced for their time.
On July 15, 1996, Farriols received a letter signed by “OOLEEOO 2, son of EEWAANII 1”, who had just been stationed on Spain with the mission of re-establishing liaisons with the old network of like-minded Earthlings with whom his Ummite comrades had been in touch in years past. OOLEEOO 2 was requesting Farriols’s aid in this matter, and should he accept, he had but to express it by way of openly voicing it out loud inside his studio, as they had instructed him how to do so on previous communications –the Ummites had not only told Farriols they had conveniently tapped his phones (which he seemed to be okay with him) but also that they had installed a minuscule microphone inside his studio with which they could listen and record his voice.
The letter also warned him about a new outbreak of equine fever, and urged him to take the necessary precautions. Remember Farriols was an animal lover and horse breeder, and at that particular date he was considering the possibility of exporting some of his horses to Germany, so that equine fever recommendation was certainly an interesting ‘coincidence’. But what really caught Farriols off guard was that in the letter the UMMO beings were praising him for his book “El Hombre, El Cosmos y Dios” (Man, the Cosmos and God) even though they politely encouraged him to re-examine the paragraphs he’d written with regards to Marx’s theories and Gauss’s mathematical theorem. What Impressed Farriols wasn’t the fact his buddies from the Virgo constellation had taken the trouble to read his book –what else are you gonna do to pass the time during an interdimensional trip, right?– or that they were correct in their assessments regarding the Marx and Gauss segments (he later corrected them) but the fact that the book hadn’t even been published yet! The manuscript, which was kept as a word processing file inside his computer, had yet to be sent to his publisher for approval, and the only hard copies in existence had shared with a small circle of close friends and family members. How could Jordán Peña (who never set foot inside Farriols’s country home) have known of its existence??
Home of Rafael Farriols. Notice the UMMO symbol at the top of the round study
Which brings us full circle to the beginning of our story: with Farriols pacing around his studio, completely alone, gently whispering questions to his Ummite friends, instead of uttering them out loud like he had done so on other, numerous occasions. Perhaps this time he was ‘testing’ to see if, despite all evidence to the contrary, this crazy adventure that had consumed so many decades of his life wasn’t a total fabrication spawned by a sick individual. Well, proof that there was something else afoot came in the form of a new letter –received on August 26th, 1996– in which the Ummites courteously requested of him to formulate his answer to their previous query at a tone of voice louder than 17 decibels, since they could hardly hear him the last time! How could anyone have known that this time he whispered his response?
When confronted with the question, Jordán responded to Benítez: “It was the CIA the ones who were spying on Farriols. They have the means to detect voices by way of the vibrations in the glass of windows.” In his book (published in 2007) Benítez didn’t sound too convinced by this explanation, and attributed it to yet another one of Jordán’s lies. But thanks to the Snowden’s revelations of 2013 we now know using laser beams in order to snoop conversations inside closed rooms is more than possible. When googling ‘laser microphones’Wikipedia tells you the first concepts existed since 1947 (using infrared beams, since the laser wasn’t invented until the 1960s) and a US patent for a device that uses a laser beam and smoke or vapor to detect sound vibrations in free air was issued in 2009.
Could the CIA have the same technology 13 years earlier? That’s highly probable. Could it have been used to spy on a harmless Spanish civilian who thought he was in touch with benevolent aliens? That sounds more unlikely, but not entirely impossible. What these spooks might not have known, though, is that all the windows in Farriols’s studio were not made out of glass. Instead, the plastic industrialist had used bullet-proof acrylic that was 20 millimeters thick (¾”) which also insulated the room against outside noises. Could that have rendered his voice to low for the glass-calibrated laser microphone employed by the CIA?
What about the ‘hacked’ computer and the ‘leaked’ book? In 1996 the Internet was in its diapers yet email was already a reality. Although Benítez never mentions whether Farriols’s PC was connected to a modem or not, the idea of accessing the contents of an Internet-less computer is not within the realm of possibility. Again, in the case of a man whispering things to imaginary (or imaginal) extraterrestrial beings, it is not so much a matter of ‘How’ but ‘Why’. Why the hell bother?
Psy-ops shenanigans or true anomalous phenomena, Farriols went to his grave believing there still remained a kernel of truth at the heart of his beloved UMMO. He published his book, which I hope to get my hands on some day, and eventually died of lung cancer (his Ummite friends, unfortunately, never warned him of the dangers of tobacco). At the top of his countryside home there always remained the cryptic symbol as a proof of enduring loyalty. Where he managed to get the inspiration from said symbol, and what else was buried beneath the mountain of lies and deceit he had built for more than 4 decades, is something Jordán Peña –who himself passed away in 2014– never satisfactorily answered in the eyes of his critics. Such a mountain seems so big, so murky and so fetid most UFO investigators today dare not to touch it with a ten-foot pole; those are the kind of naive individuals who still dream of that unquestionable silver bullet –a ‘perfect case’, like in the title of Ribera and Farriols book– that will finally set the record straight on the reality of UFOS, and let them say “I told you so!” to their critics (Tic-tac anyone?)
Jordán Peña´s obituary. The incluson of the UMMO symbol was his son’s idea, and not according to some post-humous wish
But unfortunately for them, not only is there no such thing as a ‘perfect’ case in the world of UFOlogy, but those things they call ‘imperfections’ are –paraphrasing Robin Williams’s character in “Good Will Hunting”— the ‘good stuff’ for the open-minded Fortean.
Because the open-minded Fortean acknowledges that, despite the fact the UMMO letters are more than likely a hoax, that does not discount the fact that the UMMO symbol has been reported in dozens of other genuine UFO cases all around the world –a point for which Benítez provided ample evidence in his book. Some of those cases even preceded the UMMO activity of 1966-1967, but the best example of is without a doubt the famous Voronezh encounters of 1989 –when ‘project UWW’ officially ended, according to Jordán– in which the witnesses (most of them children) reported the )+( emblem. Even Jacques Vallee himself acknowledged this confounded contradiction in one of his later books as an example of the trickster-like nature of the phenomenon. And HEREis where we might start getting some answers…
Drawings from the Voronoezh witnesses
If we accept the more-than-likely possibility that one or more intelligence agencies were involved in the UMMO affair –perhaps the CIA or maybe even the KGB, which would actually help to explain Jordan Peña’s cagey attitude and proclivity to change his story, since being in bed with the communists would have been an unforgivable sin in the ultra-conservative Spain of Francisco Franco– perhaps said agency or agencies were the ones who encouraged Jordán to use the UMMO symbol in the first place; a theory Benítez himself puts forward in his book.
But here I’m daring to go even one step forward than Benítez, and speculate that perhaps the REAL purpose of the project was not to discredit the UFO phenomenon and the UMMO symbol, as Benítez believes, but to actually MANIFEST genuine UFO events! In which case the symbol could be used as some sort of ‘marker’ to try to determine which activity was the direct result of the experiment, and which one was ‘natural’ or ‘uncorrelated’.
In this outlandish hypothesis hereby proposed, I’m not only invoking the ideas I’ve learned by reading such books as “Mutants and Mystics” and “The Super Natural”, but also the parapsychological possibilities explored in the famous ‘Philip experiment’ as well as the ‘Entity Letters’ experiences, which have been the subject of previous Mysterious Universe episodes. I ask you: what could be the result of so many people starting to devote so much time and energy focusing on a given belief system, which was syncretized by a particular symbol which may have already had a deep, esoteric significance? Could that actually translate into actual ‘eclosions’ of trueparanormal energy? Critics would say that such a theory would be discredited by the fact that at the time of the Aluche and San José de Valderas case, not too many people were cognizant of the UMMO affair to begin with; to which I would reply those are only contradictions from a primitive ‘linear’ interpretation of Time –psychic investigations in phenomena like remote viewing, however, have amply proven Time does not flow on a straight line as we would normally perceive it, and even cutting-edge physics theories are comfortable with future events affecting the past.
Not only that, but in this kind of framework –as will surely be appreciated by seasoned MU fans– hoaxes are an important (but misunderstood) component in the scaffolding of high strangeness phenomena.
In the Philip experiment and Alexandra David-Néel’s famous story of the tulpa she allegedly created, the invented thoughtforms started to get a life of their own, and got out of the control of their originators until they sought to ‘starve’ their creations of energy. Could the UMMO Frankenstein monster seek to set itself free from its arrogant maker, and look to subsist within the minds and energy of the still-faithful followers of the Ummite doctrine? At this point I’m willing to bet the Discordian friends of Robert Anton Wilson, Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley, would have giggled at how the Trickster sought to prick Jordan Peña in the ass with a H-like shaped fork once or twice, as I have mentioned on previous paragraphs.
And with this final stroke I see this UMMO portrait complete and ready to be hung. I hope you found it enjoyable enough –if you got this far, chances are you probably did!– and as a final admonition I will leave you with this: Do not throw the entirety of this affair in the wastebasket, for hoaxes do have a frustrating role to play in the unfolding of these confounding mysteries. And be on the lookout, because you never know when and where that pesky old symbol (sigil?) will pop its cryptic head once again in the future –remember: signs don’t shout. They whisper.
Hayabusa-2: Japan spacecraft touches down on asteroid
Hayabusa-2: Japan spacecraft touches down on asteroid
By Paul Rincon - Science editor, BBC News website
Image copyrightREUTERSImage captionArtwork: Hayabusa-2 successfully touched down on asteroid Ryugu
A Japanese spacecraft has touched down on an asteroid in an attempt to collect a sample of rock from the surface.
The Hayabusa-2 probe was trying to grab the sample from a pre-chosen site on the asteroid Ryugu just before 23:00 GMT on 21 February.
The spacecraft reached asteroid Ryugu in June 2018 after a three-and-a-half-year journey from Earth.
Hayabusa-2 is expected to return to Earth in 2020 along with its rocky hoard.
During sample collection, the spacecraft approached the 1km-wide asteroid with an instrument called the sampler horn. On touchdown, a 5g "bullet" made of the metal tantalum was fired into the rocky surface at 300m/s.
The particles kicked up by the impact should have been be caught by the sampler horn.
"We made a successful touchdown, including firing a bullet," said Hayabusa-2 project manager Yuichi Tsuda.
"We made the ideal touchdown in the best conditions," he said.
Image copyrightAFPImage captionThere were celebrations in the control room in Sagamihara, Japan
The spacecraft began descending from its "home position" of 20km above the asteroid's surface in the early hours of 21 February (GMT) - several hours later than planned.
Ryugu belongs to a particularly primitive type of space rock known as a C-type. The near-Earth asteroid (NEA) is a relic left over from the early days of our Solar System.
Image copyrightJAXA ET ALImage captionThe red arrow shows the location of the target marker on the surface
Prof Alan Fitzsimmons, from Queen's University Belfast, told BBC News: "We think we understand how carbon-rich asteroids migrate from the asteroid belt to become near-Earth asteroids, but the samples from Ryugu will allow its history to be explored.
"After the Rosetta mission, it's now clear that most of Earth's water did not come from comets in the early days of the Solar System. We believe carbon-rich (C-type) asteroids may have significant amounts of water locked up in their rocks. It's possible such asteroids may have brought to Earth both the water and the organic material necessary for life to start.
"These samples will be crucial in investigating this possibility."
Hayabusa-2 had earlier dropped a small, reflective, beanbag-like "target marker" on to Ryugu. This was used as a guide as the spacecraft descended to the rough surface of the asteroid.
Controllers were aiming for the centre of a circle, some 6m in diameter, located about 4-5m away from the target marker.
The Japanese space agency (Jaxa) had originally planned to carry out the touchdown operation in October last year. But the asteroid's surface was found to be much more rugged than expected, with numerous, hefty boulders making it hard to find a location that was large and flat enough to sample.
Controllers had hoped they would have an area of about 100m in diameter to target. But because of the surface properties, this had to be reduced to a 6m circle for what team members are calling a "pinpoint touchdown".
The sampler horn that extends out from the bottom of the spacecraft has a length of 1m. It's therefore vital that there are no boulders more than 50cm in height at the landing site, to reduce the chances that the body of the spacecraft could hit a rock.
Image copyrightJAXAImage captionThe sampler horn will be used to collect material for delivery to Earth in 2020
Unexpected surface properties also have the potential to affect the amount of material collected. Before arriving at Ryugu, researchers had expected the surface to be covered in a powdery layer of fine-grained material - the regolith.
In fact, the upper layer turned out to be akin to gravel, consisting of rocky chunks that are centimetre-sized or larger.
Prof Fitzsimmons told BBC News: "This was a surprise, as other near-Earth asteroids we have visited previously have shown areas dominated by small particles.
"It might be due to the carbon-rich composition, as the previous NEAs are composed of silicate rock, which are more Earth-like. But the shape of Ryugu also implies it was spinning much faster in the past, so it's possible this could have affected the particles' sizes in some fashion."
Scientists carried out additional tests in Japan to determine whether the sample material could still be gathered by the spacecraft.
They used a container of artificial gravel with a similar size distribution to that on Ryugu. In a vacuum chamber, they fired a tantalum bullet identical to that used by Hayabusa-2 into the gravel.
According to Jaxa, the results of the test exceeded expectations, with the tantalum projectile yielding fragments of rock in size ranges that should easily pass through the sampler horn.
This suggests that Hayabusa-2 should have been able to collect a sample.
In September, Hayabusa-2 deployed two robotic "hoppers" that propelled themselves across the surface of Ryugu, sending back images and other data.
Then, in October, the "mothership" despatched a French-German instrument package called Mascot to the surface.
Later this year, perhaps in March or April, Jaxa plans to detonate an explosive charge that will punch a crater into the surface of Ryugu.
Hayabusa-2 would then descend into the crater to collect fresh samples of material that have not been altered by aeons of exposure to space.
"We know that the surfaces of asteroids are changed over time by bombardment with energetic particles from the Sun and interstellar space," said Alan Fitzsimmons.
"Yet studies with telescopes show that this 'space weathering' affects the surfaces of carbon-rich asteroids differently to those mostly made from more rock-like silicate minerals. We don't know why this is, and the fresh sub-surface samples from Ruygu will play a very important role in understanding how this happens."
Artist’s impression of Earth’s magnetosphere and leaky upper atmosphere. Illustration credit: ESA/ATG medialab.
Earth’s atmosphere is leaking. Every day, around 90 tonnes of material escapes from our planet’s upper atmosphere and streams out into space. Although missions such as ESA’s Cluster fleet have long been investigating this leakage, there are still many open questions. How and why is Earth losing its atmosphere – and how is this relevant in our hunt for life elsewhere in the universe?
Given the expanse of our atmosphere, 90 tonnes per day amounts to a small leak. Earth’s atmosphere weighs in at around five quadrillion (5 × 1015) tonnes, so we are in no danger of running out any time soon. However, understanding Earth’s atmosphere, and how it escapes to space, is key to understanding the atmospheres of other planets, and could be crucial in our hunt for habitable planets and extraterrestrial life.
We have been exploring Earth’s magnetic environment for years using satellites such as ESA’s Cluster mission, a fleet of four spacecraft launched in 2000. Cluster has been continuously observing the magnetic interactions between the Sun and Earth for over a decade and half; this longevity, combined with its multi-spacecraft capabilities and unique orbit, have made it a key player in understanding both Earth’s leaking atmosphere and how our planet interacts with the surrounding solar system.
Earth’s magnetic field is complex; it extends from the interior of our planet out into space, exerting its influence over a region of space dubbed the magnetosphere.
The magnetosphere – and its inner region (the plasmasphere), a doughnut-shaped portion sitting atop our atmosphere, which co-rotates with Earth and extends to an average distance of 20,000 kilometres – is flooded with charged particles and ions that are trapped, bouncing back and forth along field lines.
At its outer Sunward edge the magnetosphere meets the solar wind, a continuous stream of charged particles – mostly protons and electrons – flowing from the Sun. Here, our magnetic field acts like a shield, deflecting and rerouting the incoming wind as a rock would obstruct a stream of water. This analogy can be continued for the side of Earth further from the Sun – particles within the solar wind are sculpted around our planet and slowly come back together, forming an elongated tube (named the magnetotail), which contains trapped sheets of plasma and interacting field lines.
Artist’s impression of Earth’s magnetosphere. Image credit: ESA/ATG medialab.
Weaknesses in our magnetic shield
However, our magnetosphere shield does have its weaknesses; at Earth’s poles the field lines are open, like those of a standard bar magnet (these locations are named the polar cusps). Here, solar wind particles can head inwards towards Earth, filling up the magnetosphere with energetic particles.
Just as particles can head inwards down these open polar lines, particles can also head outwards. Ions from Earth’s upper atmosphere – the ionosphere, which extends to roughly 1,000 kilometres above the Earth – also flood out to fill up this region of space. Although missions such as Cluster have discovered much, the processes involved remain unclear.
“The question of plasma transport and atmospheric loss is relevant for both planets and stars, and is an incredibly fascinating and important topic. Understanding how atmospheric matter escapes is crucial to understanding how life can develop on a planet,” said Arnaud Masson, ESA’s Deputy Project Scientist for the Cluster mission. “The interaction between incoming and outgoing material in Earth’s magnetosphere is a hot topic at the moment; where exactly is this stuff coming from? How did it enter our patch of space?” Initially, scientists believed Earth’s magnetic environment to be filled purely with particles of solar origin. However, as early as the 1990s it was predicted that Earth’s atmosphere was leaking out into the plasmasphere – something that has since turned out to be true.
Observations have shown sporadic, powerful columns of plasma, dubbed plumes, growing within the plasmasphere, travelling outwards to the edge of the magnetosphere and interacting with solar wind plasma entering the magnetosphere.
More recent studies have unambiguously confirmed another source – Earth’s atmosphere is constantly leaking! Alongside the aforementioned plumes, a steady, continuous flow of material (comprising oxygen, hydrogen, and helium ions) leaves our planet’s plasmasphere from the polar regions, replenishing the plasma within the magnetosphere. Cluster found proof of this wind, and has quantified its strength for both overall (reported in a paper published in 2013) and for hydrogen ions in particular (reported in 2009).
Artist’s impression of the plasmasphere in Earth’s magnetosphere. Illustration credit: ESA/ATG medialab.
Overall, about 1 kg of material is escaping our atmosphere every second, amounting to almost 90 tonnes per day. Singling out just cold ions (light hydrogen ions, which require less energy to escape and thus possess a lower energy in the magnetosphere), the escape mass totals thousands of tonnes per year.
Cold ions are important; many satellites – Cluster excluded – cannot detect them due to their low energies, but they form a significant part of the net matter loss from Earth, and may play a key role in shaping our magnetic environment. Solar storms and periods of heightened solar activity appear to speed up Earth’s atmospheric loss significantly, by more than a factor of three. However, key questions remain: How do ions escape, and where do they originate? What processes are at play, and which is dominant?
Where do the ions go? And how? One of the key escape processes is thought to be centrifugal acceleration, which speeds up ions at Earth’s poles as they cross the shape-shifting magnetic field lines there. These ions are shunted onto different drift trajectories, gain energy, and end up heading away from Earth into the magnetotail, where they interact with plasma and return to Earth at far higher speeds than they departed with – a kind of boomerang effect.
Such high-energy particles can pose a threat to space-based technology, so understanding them is important. Cluster has explored this process multiple times during the past decade and a half – finding it to affect heavier ions such as oxygen more than lighter ones, and also detecting strong, high-speed beams of ions rocketing back to Earth from the magnetotail nearly 100 times over the course of three years.
More recently, scientists have explored the process of magnetic reconnection, one of the most efficient physical processes by which the solar wind enters Earth’s magnetosphere and accelerates plasma. In this process, plasma interacts and exchanges energy with magnetic field lines; different lines reconfigure themselves, breaking, shifting around, and forging new connections by merging with other lines, releasing huge amounts of energy in the process.
The four Cluster spacecraft crossing the northern cusp of Earth’s magnetosphere. Image credit: ESA/AOES Medialab.
Here, the cold ions are thought to be important. We know that cold ions affect the magnetic reconnection process, for example slowing down the reconnection rate at the boundary where the solar wind meets the magnetosphere (the magnetopause), but we are still unsure of the mechanisms at play.
“In essence, we need to figure out how cold plasma ends up at the magnetopause,” said Philippe Escoubet, ESA’s Project Scientist for the Cluster mission. “There are a few different aspects to this; we need to know the processes involved in transporting it there, how these processes depend on the dynamic solar wind and the conditions of the magnetosphere, and where plasma is coming from in the first place – does it originate in the ionosphere, the plasmasphere, or somewhere else?”
Recently, scientists modelled and simulated Earth’s magnetic environment with a focus on structures known as plasmoids and flux ropes – cylinders, tubes, and loops of plasma that become tangled up with magnetic field lines. These arise when the magnetic reconnection process occurs in the magnetotail and ejects plasmoids both towards the outer tail and towards Earth.
Cold ions may play a significant role in deciding the direction of the ejected plasmoid. These recent simulations showed a link between plasmoids heading towards Earth and heavy oxygen ions leaking out from the ionosphere – in other words, oxygen ions may reduce and quench the reconnection rates at certain points within the magnetotail that produce tailward trajectories, thus making it more favourable at other sites that instead send them Earthwards. These results agree with existing Cluster observations.
Another recent Cluster study compared the two main atmospheric escape mechanisms Earth experiences – sporadic plumes emanating through the plasmasphere, and the steady leakage of Earth’s atmosphere from the ionosphere – to see how they might contribute to the population of cold ions residing at the dayside magnetopause (the magnetosphere-solar wind boundary nearest the Sun).
Both escape processes appear to depend in different ways on the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF), the solar magnetic field that is carried out into the solar system by the solar wind. This field moves through space in a spiralling pattern due to the rotation of the Sun, like water released from a lawn sprinkler. Depending on how the IMF is aligned, it can effectively cancel out part of Earth’s magnetic field at the magnetopause, linking up and merging with our field and allowing the solar wind to stream in.
Plumes seem to occur when the IMF is oriented southward (anti-parallel to Earth’s magnetic field, thus acting as mentioned above). Conversely, leaking outflows from the ionosphere occur during northward-oriented IMF. Both processes occur more strongly when the solar wind is either denser or travelling faster (thus exerting a higher dynamic pressure).
Magnetic reconnection in the tail of Earth’s magnetosphere.Illustration credit: ESA/ATG medialab.
“While there is still much to learn, we’ve been able to make great progress here,” said Masson. “These recent studies have managed to successfully link together multiple phenomena – namely the ionospheric leak, plumes from the plasmasphere, and magnetic reconnection – to paint a better picture of Earth’s magnetic environment. This research required several years of ongoing observation, something we could only get with Cluster.”
Applying what we learn to other planets Learning more about our own atmosphere can tell us much about our planetary neighbours – we could potentially apply such research to any astrophysical object with both an atmosphere and a magnetic field. We know that planetary atmospheres play an essential role in rendering a planet habitable or lifeless, but there remain many open questions.
Consider the diversity seen in the planets and moons of our solar system, for example. In our small patch of the universe we see extreme and opposite worlds: the smog-like carbon dioxide atmosphere of Venus, the much-depleted tenuous atmosphere of present-day Mars, the nitrogen-rich atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan, the essentially airless Jovian moon Callisto, the oxygen-bearing atmosphere of Earth.
How do we know if these planets could support life, or whether they may once have done so? Mars, for example, is thought to have once had a thick, dense atmosphere that has been considerably stripped away over time. Although the Red Planet is unlikely to be habitable today, it may well have been so in the past.
“Understanding more about our own atmosphere will help us when it comes to other planets throughout the Universe,” said Escoubet. “We need to know more. Why does Earth have an atmosphere that can support life, while other planets do not?”
Cluster is a unique mission; it comprises four spacecraft – a format that NASA recently used for their Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, launched in 2015 – which allow continuous study of Earth’s magnetic field and the solar wind from multiple locations and orientations. Cluster has been operating since 2000, and in that time has compiled a wealth of information about our magnetic environment across various periods of solar and terrestrial activity.
“Additionally, Cluster’s orbit is truly unique amongst all current missions; the fleet is on a polar orbit, meaning they can explore our planet’s dynamic polar regions – specifically the cusps and polar caps – up close and in unprecedented detail,” added Escoubet.
“Overall, long-term space missions like Cluster are helping us to understand a whole lot more about our planet, its atmosphere, and atmospheric loss in general – which in turn will help us to understand the solar system in which we live.”
WETENSCHAPDe sonde Hayabusa2 is erin geslaagd om vrijdagochtend Japanse tijd kort neer te strijken op asteroïde Ryugu. Dat zegt het Japanse ruimtevaartagentschap Jaxa, dat de delicate missie met extreme voorzichtigheid aanpakt.
“We moeten nog de diverse gegevens analyseren die we geleidelijk aan binnenkrijgen vooraleer we kunnen bevestigen dat het een succes is, maar we denken dat dit het geval zal zijn”, zei een Jaxa-woordvoerder. De asteroïde Ryugu bevindt zich op 340 miljoen kilometer van de aarde, wat verklaart waarom het enige tijd duurt voor de gegevens in het controlecentrum van de missie binnenkomen.
De Hayabusa2 zette de landing op Ryugu donderdag in om 13.15 uur, 5.15 uur in België, met enige vertraging. Maar de sonde raakte de asteroïde uiteindelijk één uur eerder dan gepland. Zoals de bedoeling was, bleef ze maar enkele seconden op Ryugu. Het zou pas binnen een paar dagen moeten duidelijk worden of de stalen die van de bodem zijn gemaakt bruikbaar zijn.
Drie jaar en tien maanden
Het avontuur van de Hayabusa2 begon op 3 december 2014. De sonde begon toen aan een lange reis van 3,2 miljard kilometer, een reis die nog lang niet voorbij is.
Het duurde exact drie jaar en tien maanden om de bestemming te bereiken. In juni 2018 stabiliseerde de sonde op 20 kilometer van Ryugu, een zeer oude asteroïde in de vorm van een diamant, die ten tijde van de vorming van het zonnestelsel zou ontstaan zijn.
De sonde wierp in oktober een kleine Duits-Franse robot af op de asteroïde, Mascot. Die werkte meer dan 17 uur om de samenstelling van de bodem van het primitieve rotsachtige lichaam te analyseren. Gehoopt wordt om zo beter de vorming van het zonnestelsel te begrijpen.
Het ultieme doel is om de kennis over ons zonnestelsel te versterken “om beter het ontstaan van leven op aarde te begrijpen”, zegt Jaxa.
APVreugde in de controlekamer van het Japanse ruimtevaartagentschap Jaxa.
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Open Secret - Uncovering The Global UFO Cover-Up
Open Secret - Uncovering The Global UFO Cover-Up
RT’s Sophie Shevardnadze discusses with Dr. Steven Greer, director of the Centre for the Study of Extra-terrestrial Intelligence on the global UFO cover-up.
OPEN SECRET
UNCOVERING THE GLOBAL UFO COVER-UP
Testimonies, documents, photos, biological specimens here to prove alien life’s existence
43% of Americans believe that we’re currently being visited by non-human civilizations
Govts reluctant to acknowledge existence of alien life, fear disruption to status quo UFO sightings increased dramatically after humanity developed weapons of mass destruction
Most info about UFOs is disinformation created by Intelligence agencies to mislead the public
Alien technologies go beyond the speed of light and across different dimensions
As long we don’t bring WMDs into space, alien civilizations pose no threat to us
Secrecy over UFOs not alone one-country endeavor, transcends through geopolitical borders
Military footage available showing UFOs chased by Chilean and Mexican fighter jets
ETs covered up over fears that they’ll bring energy technologies that would ruin oil industry
Climate change can be tackled with brand-new tech, but studies are covered up from public
Disclosure of ETs would undermine Bretton-Woods economic system tied to petrodollar
Alien life is the biggest non-secret that everybody knows, but few have access to it
Level of secrecy over whole range of issues is criminal, threat to U.S. democrasy
Alien life disclosure offers solutions to many existential problems humanity is facing
World leaders and top brass kept in the dark about extraterrestrial intelligence projects
Media prevented from investigating into physical evidence of alien life’s existence
I was looking through a gigipan photo of Mars and discovered loads of old cement rock structures that had small light blue tiles affixed to them. There were at least a two dozen of them. I am posting only a few. This is not sapphires because they don't grow this way, perfectly sized and perfectly spaced. There is no logical explanation for such an occurrence in nature, its just not possible. So the only logical explanation is that someone created a wall or floor with these tiles. Now those tiles sit in ruins of whats left after hundred of thousands of years. NASA knows it they reveal the truth to the public, it will also be revealed to companies that want to benefit and send rovers, rockets and basically beat NASA to Mars to claim rights to areas of it for mining, scavenging, or whatever. Just like Elon Musk is doing right now.
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UFOS, Warp Drives, and Stargates Are On The Secret List Of Pentagon Research Projects
UFOS, Warp Drives, and Stargates Are On The Secret List Of Pentagon Research Projects
The United States Defence Intelligence Agency has one great fear, and that is someone, somewhere has a secret advantage in the form of an unknown weapon that could wipe out the world’s superpower or even the world itself. So, it takes the talk of UFOs, warp drives and stargates seriously. In fact, it spent some serious money on it.
DIA went full secrecy and formed teams to deeply examine every single outlandish idea it encountered, according to files released under a freedom of information request.
Project on Government Secrecy director Steven Aftergood of Federation of American Scientists said that these kinds of topics need more money than you know to pursue.
The existence of research projects on nuclear-powered deep space propulsion, wormholes through space, invisibility cloaking, biomaterials and among others involving the likes of NASA, DARPA and private firms investigating these subjects are already known. However, their potential ties to black money of US Defence Department wasn’t.
In 2008, for example, NASA had serious studies on the potential of interstellar warp drive engines. In 2013, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA had engaged in serious studies on creating a warp field. Conspiracy theorists argued that it was a farfetched idea for NASA to be studying these subjects but not so much if DIA prodded and funded them.
Conspiracists believe the secret research funding of the DIA is a murky affair when it comes to spending defence funds. The New York Times wrote a report in 2017 revealing that much of the Pentagon’s $US22 million of black money research into UFOs could not be traced.
New moon discovered circling Neptune spotlights solar system's violent past
New moon discovered circling Neptune spotlights solar system's violent past
Hippocamp is thought to be a fragment of a neighboring moon shattered by the impact of a comet.
Artist's concept of Hippocamp, a tiny moon that was first seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2013.
NASA / ESA/J. Olmsted (STScI)
By David Freeman
Say hello to Hippocamp, a celestial pipsqueak that's making big waves at the edge of our solar system. With help from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have confirmed the existence of this tiny moon in orbit around Neptune.
Hippocamp was first seen in photos taken by Hubble in 2013. But its presence — situated close to a much larger moon known as Proteus —posed a mystery: Why hadn't Hippocamp coalesced with or been cast aside by Proteus, an irregularly shaped, 260-mile-wide moon that is roughly 1,000 times more massive?
But after several years of sleuthing — including a fresh look at photos of the Neptune system taken by Hubble and NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft — astronomers led by Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, determined that Hippocamp is a piece of Proteus that had been sheared off from the larger moon when a comet struck it billions of years ago.
There's no smoking gun for a collision so ancient. But as Showalter and his colleagues say in a paper about their research, published Thursday in the journal Nature, a large impact crater consistent with a comet strike can be seen in photos of Proteus taken in 1989 by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft.
"The origin scenario we discussed in the paper is consistent with everything we know about the history of the Neptune system," Showalter told NBC News MACH in an email. "It is the only workable scenario that we have identified. On the other hand, if somebody else in the astronomy community comes up with an alternative explanation, we would love to hear about it."
It's a big backstory for such a puny moon, but other astronomers agree it's probably the correct one.
Sara Seager, a planetary scientist at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said in an email that the explanation made sense. She called it “a fascinating hypothesis for the tiny moon’s origin — with solid support from Hubble data gathered over the last few years."
This diagram shows the orbits of several moons close to the planet Neptune. All were discovered in 1989 by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft, with the exception of Hippocamp (S/2004 N 1). It was discovered in archival Hubble Space Telescope images taken from 2004 to 2009.NASA / ESA/A. Feild (STScI)
Hundreds of moons have been found in our solar system. But the Proteus-Hippocamp pair "provides a dramatic illustration that moons are sometimes broken apart by comets," Jack Lissauer, a scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and a coauthor of the paper, said in a written statement.
The discovery of Hippocamp brings to 14 the number of moons discovered in orbit around Neptune. There are seven inner moons, including Hippocamp, along with six outer moons and Neptune's largest moon, Triton.
Triton is a bit of an oddball because it's the only moon in the solar system with a so-called retrograde orbit, meaning it orbits in the opposite direction of its planet's rotation.
Showalter said that we've learned just about all we can about Hippocamp, at least for the time being. But he added that if NASA or the European Space Agency were to put a spacecraft in orbit around Neptune or its planetary neighbor, Uranus, "we could learn more in a few days that the sum total of everything we have ever learned about either planet so far!"
The World's 8 Best Places To Hunt For Extraterrestrials And Search For UFOs
The World's 8 Best Places To Hunt For Extraterrestrials And Search For UFOs
It was a clear summer afternoon in Lake Tahoe, California in the late 70's when I saw my first UFO. The rough-hewn cigar-shaped craft hovered for a long period of time at a distance over the lake. It was so obvious that all of my neighbors joined me on the street watching it until it suddenly disappeared. Despite over a dozen witnesses, it was never reported, most people keep UFO experiences to themselves for fear of being labeled crazy. According to the National UFO Reporting Center, there were over 4,881 reported sightings in the United States in 2017, imagine how many were not reported.
What was once a subject of clandestine conversation has now become an international fascination with tourists visiting famed sighting areas and governments from around the world organizing extensive exploration. Even the U.S. Pentagon admitted it ran a secret program to investigate sightings by military pilots of countless unidentified flying objects. The Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program officially ended six years ago, but many believe the program is still active.
My fascination with the unknown compelled me to explore unique areas from around the world where visitors can discover the mysteries of the universe, as well as be entertained by historical sightings. Here are my 8 favorite locations for your own out of this world experience.
Alien landscape in ChileCASCADE TRAVEL
CHILE
Chile is often mentioned as the country with the highest recorded number of UFO sightings. Due to its low humidity, high altitude ridges, and clear skies with little pollution, Chile has become a favorite among UFO-seekers from around the world.
The country has even launched the CEFAA (Committee for Studies of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena (CEFAA), a government body which investigates UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon) under the control of the Chilean Air Force.
Cerro Paranal in the Chilean Atacama DesertESO PHOTO AMBASSADOR YURI BELETSKY
Located in the Atacama Desert of Chile, ESO’s Paranal Observatory is one of the best astronomical observing sites in the world and is the flagship location for Europes ground-based astronomy. It contains several major telescopes including the Very Large Telescope, the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy, and the VLT Survey Telescope.
The ESO Hotel and La Residencia adjacent to Paranal Observatory provide accommodation for staff and media only. Tourists are not allowed to stay overnight. In order to visit the observatory, it is a two-hour drive from Cerro Moreno airport and opens on weekends only with an advance reservation.
The Alma Observatory at Chajnantor PlateauCARLOS PADILLA -AUI -NRAO
ALMA Observatory is the most ambitious radio observatory on Earth. Unlike optic telescopes, radio telescopes are designed to capture radio waves emitted by sources in space. This is a segment of the electromagnetic spectrum that allows researchers to take a closer look at the Universe. ALMA has 66 antennas: fifty-four 12-meter diameter antennas and twelve 7-meter diameter antennas.
It is open every Saturday and Sunday to members of the public who want to visit its facilities located in northern Chile (30 miles from San Pedro de Atacama). Visitors get to see the ALMA Operations Support Facility (OSF), where ALMA personnel work and where you can observe the control room, laboratories, and the antenna transporter. The area of Chajnantor Plateau (where the massive number of antennas are located) are not open to visitors.
San Clemente, Chile is considered to be the unofficial UFO capital of the world. Researchers say that hundreds of UFO sightings have been reported there, as much as one per week. So popular is the area that the Chilean tourism board established an official UFO trail in 2008. The 19-mile trail runs through the Andes mountains covering sights where close encounters have been reported. Included in the experience are Colbún Lake, which has proved popular with UFOs because of its high mineral content, along with various areas highlighting historic sightings. But the trail's must-see location is El Enladrillado, a huge, bizarre flat area formed by 200 perfectly cut volcanic blocks that were reportedly laid by ancient civilizations. It takes four hours to get to the location on horseback and is believed by many to be a landing pad for extraterrestrials.
Elqui Domos Astronomical Hotel is a small 10-year-old hotel located in the heart of the Elqui Valley, a narrow valley stretched in between the Andes Mountains. The hotel is equipped with a restaurant, an astronomical observatory, an outdoor pool and 11 air-conditioned and centrally-heated rooms. The rooms are divided into 7 geodesic domes and 4 observatory-style cabins.
The domes have a private bathroom, a living room on the first floor and a bed on a mezzanine floor, from where you can uncover the roof of the domes and search the skies.
The Elqui Valley is well known for its perfectly clear skies and nice weather, as well as for its great potential for UFO spotting and studying astronomy.
Take this excursion on horseback to the Andes along the trails of the local cowboys, an adventure that will take you through a natural and wild landscape under a perfect blue sky and along the Cochiguaz river. You will be accompanied by a trained guide who will educate you on the skies using a 12" telescope while sitting around a campfire and drinking pisco sours.
The next morning is a trip to the scientific observatory of Cerro Tololo, which includes a visit to the observatory’s facilities and a guided tour introducing the research done at the complex. That evening check-in to a hotel in Vicuña before a night tour to the observatory.
Mysterious patterns have appeared in the fields of Wiltshire, just one mile from the equally bizarre Stonehenge. Many sightings have occurred here including a large disc-shaped object hovering above the site. The prehistoric monument includes a ring of massive stones dating back to around 3100 BC and is listed as a World Heritage site. Supporters of the theory that ancient aliens built the landmark also consider the area a landing pad for spaceships or a location marker for extraterrestrials.
Sign for Little A'Le'Inn and flying saucer near Area 51. (Getty Images)
AREA 51, NEVADA (S4 Papoose Mountain Facility)
This U.S. military installation is located almost 100 miles north of Las Vegas and is commonly known to UFO conspiracy theorists as a location the U.S. government refused to acknowledge. They believe that the area is a storage facility for the examination of a crashed alien spacecraft including its occupants both living and dead as well as materials recovered at Roswell. They also believe the area is used to manufacture aircraft based on alien technology.
Some UFOlogists are now claiming a secret underground facility has been discovered in the base of the Papoose Mountains, in Lincoln County, Nevada, where recovered alien space crafts and extraterrestrial beings are kept hidden away and no longer at Area 51.
This tour takes you to locations near the famed Area 51, departing from Las Vegas for nighttime explorations. Area 51 is a highly classified remote detachment of Edwards Air Force Base so visitors are limited on how close they can get.
Sedona, Arizona is one of America's most popular destinations for spotting U.F.O.s. Nightly tours go out with visitors equipped with night vision glasses, binoculars, and telescopes. The amount of activity recorded is staggering including reported sightings of; Orbs, portals, aliens, and even Bigfoots all within the high desert.
The mysterious Bradshaw Ranch also draws numerous tourists. Located deep within the national forest, it is reported to have been confiscated by the U.S. Government because it housed one of the most powerful inter-dimensional portals on the planet. Visitors are not allowed in the National Forest at night, but several tour operators will take you there and stay until dusk. According to accounts, it’s in the last hour of twilight when many of these phenomena take place. There are even more outrageous reports of a top-secret underground base at the ranch as well as an elaborate tunnel system, possibly used by both extraterrestrials and the U.S. military.
This tour begins with a two-hour meditation walk starting at the Amitabha Stupa, Sedona’s most spiritual vortex. Guides will take you through a guided meditation and even offer a paranormal video tour. After sunset, you can visit a well known hot spot of UFO activity where the company guarantees sightings of UFO’s, using special night vision goggles.
UFOs are not an uncommon sight in Wycliffe Well. They are known to appear at the beginning of the dry season, from May to October. Wycliffe Well is located in the Northern Territory along the Stuart Highway between Alice Springs and Tennant Creek and considers itself the UFO capital of Australia. Wycliffe Well is said to be one of the top five UFO hotspots in the world and guarantees a sighting every couple of days. Visitors can stay in cabins at the Wycliffe Well Holiday Park located 236 miles from Alice Springs.
Ural Mountains Perm Anomalous Zone (Shutterstock)
M TRIANGLE, RUSSIA
This famous Perm Anomalous Zone is located in a remote area near the Ural Mountains in Russia. The M Triangle is one of the most mysterious places in the world and was discovered in the 1980s. Reports of watches that stop, and bright glowing and colored lightning appearing in the sky. Ufologists consider this a sign of underground fractures where strong energy emits. This wave duct for electromagnetic energy usually results in color, sound, and other phenomena.
The village of Molyobka sits on the border of the Perm and Sverdlovsk regions. Opposite the village, on the left bank of the Sylva River, is the famous Molyobka Triangle. When Perm geologist Emil Bachurin found a circular, 206-foot impression in the snow in the 80's, the location quickly became a location for enthusiasts to explore Yetis, UFOs, shining spheres, and plasmoids.
The area is currently developing a UFO park, and local businesses are building hotels and observatories for tourists as well as installing gravity meters, infrared cameras, and magnetic-field sensors. UFO tourism is also popular in nearby Tolyatti, where visitors can see some of the world’s largest crop circles.
Joshua Tree SunsetCONTACT IN THE DESERT
JOSHUA TREE, CALIFORNIA
Joshua Tree is on 29 Palms Highway, about a three-hour drive from LAX. The area is known to have many underground waterways all featuring a high mineral content. Joshua Tree National Park was once home to 300 mines and includes a unique white crystal quartz hill behind Giant Rock. Visitors often go searching for the hidden alien base that is rumored to be located somewhere beneath the expansive desert.
UFOlogists believe that Joshua Tree sits on the 33rd North parallel just like Roswell. The research behind the 33rd North parallel provides the location for the most UFO sightings.
Dr. Steven Greer is a controversial UFOlogist who founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI) and the Disclosure Project, which seeks the disclosure of allegedly suppressed UFO information. Each week-long expedition is limited to about 25 and includes an intensive training program with Dr. Greer. At night the group meets under the stars for 4-5 hours to make contact using Greer's CE-5 Contact Protocols. During the intensive training program, visitors learn how to make contact with ET civilizations and how to really become an Ambassador to the Universe.
For the past five years, UFO researchers ranging from professionals to fans converge on the California High Desert for a long weekend of lectures and workshops on the unexplained. The Woodstock of UFOlogy is a weekend of education into the Science of UFOs & Extraterrestrial Life, Ancient Aliens, Human Origins, Crop Circles, Government Disclosure, UFO Sightings and Interplanetary Living.
UFO Festival in RoswellROSWELL UFO FESTIVAL
ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO
Roswell has been at the heart of the UFO scene since July 1947 when the military announced it had found the remains of a crashed UFO in the desert nearby. Ever since the legendary Roswell UFO crash of July 1947 alien conspiracy theorists have claimed the remains of a flying saucer, and even dead aliens, were secretly taken into storage.
Visits to the crash sites are difficult to navigate deep in the desert, so many tourists visit the Roswell Spacewalk and the International UFO Museum and Research Center.
Every Fourth of July weekend the city of Roswell organizes the UFO Festival, a celebration of all things extraterrestrial. Thousands of people meet on Main Street for the Comic-Con of UFO devotees. Costume contests, and a long weekend of lectures and book signings put on by Roswell’s International UFO Museum.
PROFESSIONAL ALIEN EXPLORATION
Aside from the numerous tourist locations around the world, the scientific community is ramping up efforts to discover the unknown and to hopefully make contact with extraterrestrials. The following are the top satellite and research programs that are currently active with a few offering tourists to visit their facilities.
A planned space telescope for NASA's Explorers program, designed to search for exoplanets using the transit method is planned to launch in March 2018. The conclusion is that Europa or Enceladus are both possible life planets as well as the discovery of Kepler-452b. It is the first near-Earth-size world to be found in the habitable zone of a star that is similar to our sun. And, in 2015, NASA announced strong evidence that liquid water flows intermittently on present-day Mars.
The James Webb Space Telescope is a large infrared telescope with a 6.5-meter primary mirror. The telescope will be launched on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana in Spring 2019 and will study the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth.
(NExSS) is a NASA research coordination network dedicated to the study of planetary habitability. The goals of NExSS are to investigate the diversity of exoplanets and to learn how their history, geology, and climate interact to create the conditions for life.
Project Breakthrough Co-Founders Mark Zuckerberg (L) and Yuri Milner
Billionaire Yuri Milner, physicist Stephen Hawking, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg have launched the $100 million Breakthrough Listen program. The program is focused on astronomical observations in search of evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth. It is by far the most comprehensive search ever undertaken for artificial radio and optical signals encompassing a complete survey of the 1,000,000 nearest stars, the plane and center of our galaxy, and the 100 nearest galaxies.
The CNES French Space Agency service is funded by the French government. Its mission is to collect reports of UFO or UAP (Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena) sightings that have occurred over the French territory, to provide an explanation when possible, and to answer questions from the public.
SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is located in Mountain View, California and seeks evidence of life in the universe by looking for some signature of its technology. More than 90 scientists work at the Institute looking for life beyond Earth. The Allen Telescope is sometimes available for tours and is located 350 miles North of the Institute.
Great Refractor Telescope in CaliforniaUC OBSERVATORY
UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley have given the Lick Observatory's 40-inch Nickel Telescope a new pulse-detection system capable of finding laser beacons from civilizations many light-years away. The automated planet finder (APF) is the world's first robotic telescope capable of detecting rocky planets that might support life in other solar systems. Located one hour from San Jose in the Santa Clara Valley, visitors are allowed inside the dome of the36-inch great refractor Thursday-Sunday.
Operated by the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii. A strange oblong asteroid named Oumuamua was recently detected by Pan-STARRS through its collection of telescopes perched high above the Hawaiian island of Maui. The SETI Institute began scanning Oumuamua with its Allen Telescope Array on Nov. 23, 2017. So far, they have spent 60 hours checking for transmissions over a wide range of frequencies. Another SETI project, Breakthrough Listen, will soon devote 10 hours to investigating Oumuamua using a large antenna in West Virginia.
Chinas five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), is located in a rural part of China’s Guizhou province and will be used to try to solve some of the universe’s biggest mysteries. One of its primary missions is to detect communication signals or messages from alien civilizations.
New NASA Team Tackles Next Challenges in Detecting Life Beyond Earth
New NASA Team Tackles Next Challenges in Detecting Life Beyond Earth
The question, "Are we alone?" has been a subject of speculation for centuries. The answer may soon lie within the grasp of science.
Decides of research have led scientists to look deeply into the nature of life itself — what it is, how it began on Earth, and what other worlds might also support it. A shift in focus is now emerging as scientists recognize that with a strategic push the possibility of detecting life beyond Earth could be on the horizon.
To support NASA’s growing emphasis on detecting life beyond Earth, NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley has established the Center for Life Detection Science. CLDS brings together a diverse group of researchers at Ames and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland to tackle the next set of challenges science must overcome to be able to one day detect life beyond Earth.
“We now have the scientific and engineering expertise to address this profound question with the clarity of scientific evidence — and we have a great community of scientists ready for that grand challenge,” said Tori Hoehler, the principal investigator of CLDS and a researcher at Ames
The center’s formation comes at a critical moment in the field of astrobiology, the study of the origin of life and its potential in the universe. A recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found that NASA should ramp up efforts to develop technologies capable of detecting life beyond Earth to use on future missions. The report, intended to help NASA develop its science strategy and research goals for the next 20 years, also urged the agency to seek collaboration with a diverse expertise outside of traditional space sciences to get more out of space mission opportunities.
In this spirit, the center is playing a foundational role in establishing a new consortium of researchers from within and outside of NASA with expertise in the physical sciences, biology, astrophysics and more. The Network for Life Detection, or NfoLD, will drive research in ways that inform where NASA should best invest its resources and the design of future missions with the capabilities of detecting life.
CLDS is joined by competitively selected teams from Georgetown University in Washington, DC and Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia to comprise the founding membership of NfoLD.
The Laboratory for Agnostic Biosignatures asks how we can recognize life “as we don’t know it.” Led by principal investigator Sarah Stewart Johnson of Georgetown University, this team of international researchers will lay the groundwork for detecting biosignatures of lifeforms that could be very different than those found on Earth, allowing for yet-to-be-conceived biochemistries that could produce exotic biomolecules.
The Oceans Across Space and Time team will investigate the possibilities of past or present life in the oceans of the icy, outer moons of our solar system, or on ancient Mars. By studying the conditions of aquatic systems that control their habitability, the team, led by principal investigator Britney Schmidt of Georgia Tech, will determine possible means of detecting biological activity in those systems.
Meanwhile, the center is connecting this new community of NfoLD researchers by building an interactive repository of information where researchers can explore and debate approaches in life detection that may one day be used to search for evidence of life on other worlds.
“The search for life beyond Earth cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach,” said Hoehler. “To give ourselves the best shot at success, we need to develop tools and strategies that are tailored to detecting life in the unique conditions of other worlds, which are very different not only from Earth but also from each other.”
NfoLD’s three founding teams are expected to be joined in the coming year by dozens of new teams that are pursuing life detection-themed science or technology development. It represents a relatively new organizing model supported by NASA, called a research coordination network. NASA’s Astrobiology Program organized its first successful one in 2015 — the Nexus for Exoplanet System Science, which was formed to study the habitability of planets beyond our solar system. NfoLD is the second one to come online with at least three more expected to form in future years in areas of astrobiology.
Top Image: This image is an artist's conception of what life could look like on the surface of a distant planet. Credit: NASA
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For news media: Members of the news media interested in covering this topic should get in touch through the NASA Ames media contacts page.
There are lots of reasons why colonizing space seems compelling. The popular astronomer Neil deGrasse Tysonarguesthat it would stimulate the economy and inspire the next generation of scientists. Elon Musk, who founded SpaceX, argues that “there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multiplanetary…to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen.” The former administrator of NASA, Michael Griffin, frames it as a matter of the “survival of the species.” And the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking hasconjecturedthat if humanity fails to colonize space within 100 years, we could face extinction.
Illustration by NASA/JPL-Caltech
To be sure, humanity will eventually need to escape Earth to survive, since the sun will make the planet uninhabitable in about 1 billion years. But for many “space expansionists,” escaping Earth is about much more than dodging the bullet of extinction: it’s about realizing astronomical amounts of value by exploiting the universe’s vast resources to create something resembling utopia. For example, the astrobiologist Milan Cirkovic calculates that some 1046 people per century could come into existence if we were to colonize our Local Supercluster, Virgo. This leads Nick Bostrom to argue that failing to colonize space would be tragic because it would mean that these potential “worthwhile lives” would never exist, and this would be morally bad.
But would these trillions of lives actually be worthwhile? Or would colonization of space lead to a dystopia?
In a recent article in Futures, which was inspired by political scientist Daniel Deudney’s forthcoming book Dark Skies, I decided to take a closer look at this question. My conclusion is that in a colonized universe the probability of the annihilation of the human race could actually rise rather than fall.
The argument is based on ideas from evolutionary biology and international relations theory, and it assumes that there aren’t any other technologically advanced lifeforms capable of colonizing the universe (as a recent study suggests is the case).
Consider what is likely to happen as humanity hops from Earth to Mars, and from Mars to relatively nearby, potentially habitable exoplanets like Epsilon Eridani b, Gliese 674 b, and Gliese 581 d. Each of these planets has its own unique environments that will drive Darwinian evolution, resulting in the emergence of novel species over time, just as species that migrate to a new island will evolve different traits than their parent species. The same applies to the artificial environments of spacecraft like “O’Neill Cylinders,” which are large cylindrical structures that rotate to produce artificial gravity. Insofar as future beings satisfy the basic conditions of evolution by natural selection—such as differential reproduction, heritability, and variation of traits across the population—then evolutionary pressures will yield new forms of life.
But the process of “cyborgization”—that is, of using technology to modify and enhance our bodies and brains—is much more likely to influence the evolutionary trajectories of future populations living on exoplanets or in spacecraft. The result could be beings with completely novel cognitive architectures (or mental abilities), emotional repertoires, physical capabilities, lifespans, and so on.
In other words, natural selection and cyborgization as humanity spreads throughout the cosmos will result in species diversification. At the same time, expanding across space will also result in ideological diversification. Space-hopping populations will create their own cultures, languages, governments, political institutions, religions, technologies, rituals, norms, worldviews, and so on. As a result, different species will find it increasingly difficult over time to understand each other’s motivations, intentions, behaviors, decisions, and so on. It could even make communication between species with alien languages almost impossible. Furthermore, some species might begin to wonder whether the proverbial “Other” is conscious. This matters because if a species Y cannot consciously experience pain, then another species X might not feel morally obligated to care about Y. After all, we don’t worry about kicking stones down the street because we don’t believe that rocks can feel pain. Thus, as I write in the paper, phylogenetic and ideological diversification will engender a situation in which many species will be “not merely aliens to each other but, more significantly, alienated from each other.”
But this yields some problems. First, extreme differences like those just listed will undercut trust between species. If you don’t trust that your neighbor isn’t going to steal from, harm, or kill you, then you’re going to be suspicious of your neighbor. And if you’re suspicious of your neighbor, you might want an effective defense strategy to stop an attack—just in case one were to happen. But your neighbor might reason the same way: she’s not entirely sure that you won’t kill her, so she establishes a defense as well. The problem is that, since you don’t fully trust her, you wonder whether her defense is actually part of an attack plan. So you start carrying a knife around with you, which she interprets as a threat to her, thus leading her to buy a gun, and so on. Within the field of international relations, this is called the “security dilemma,” and it results in a spiral of militarization that can significantly increase the probability of conflict, even in cases where all actors have genuinely peaceful intentions.
So, how can actors extricate themselves from the security dilemma if they can’t fully trust each other? On the level of individuals, one solution has involved what Thomas Hobbes’ calls the “Leviathan.” The key idea is that people get together and say, “Look, since we can’t fully trust each other, let’s establish an independent governing system—a referee of sorts—that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. By replacing anarchy with hierarchy, we can also replace the constant threat of harm with law and order.” Hobbes didn’t believe that this happened historically, only that this predicament is what justifies the existence of the state. According to Steven Pinker, the Leviathan is a major reason that violence has declined in recent centuries.
The point is that if individuals—you and I—can overcome the constant threat of harm posed by our neighbors by establishing a governing system, then maybe future species could get together and create some sort of cosmic governing system that could similarly guarantee peace by replacing anarchy with hierarchy. Unfortunately, this looks unpromising within the “cosmopolitical” realm. One reason is that for states to maintain law and order among their citizens, their various appendages—e.g., law enforcement, courts—need to be properly coordinated. If you call the police about a robbery and they don’t show up for three weeks, then what’s the point of living in that society? You’d be just as well off on your own! The question is, then, whether the appendages of a cosmic governing system could be sufficiently well-coordinated to respond to conflicts and make top-down decisions about how to respond to particular situations. To put it differently: If conflict were to break out in some region of the universe, could the relevant governing authorities respond soon enough for it to matter, for it to make a difference?
Probably not, because of the immense vastness of space. For example, consider again Epsilon Eridani b, Gliese 674 b, and Gliese 581 d. These are, respectively, 10.5, 14.8, and 20.4 light-years from Earth. This means that a signal sent as of this writing, in 2018, wouldn’t reach Gliese 581 d until 2038. A spaceship traveling at one-quarter the cosmic speed limit wouldn’t arrive until 2098, and a message to simply affirm that it had arrived safely wouldn’t return to Earth until 2118. And Gliese 581 is relatively close as far as exoplanets go. Just consider that he Andromeda Galaxy is some 2.5 million light-years from Earth and the Triangulum Galaxy about 3 million light-years away. What’s more, there are some 54 galaxies in our Local Group, which is about 10 million light-years wide, within a universe that stretches some 93 billion light-years across.
Illustration by NASA/JPL-Caltech
These facts make it look hopeless for a governing system to effectively coordinate law enforcement activities, judicial decisions, and so on, across cosmic distances. The universe is simply too big for a government to establish law and order in a top-down fashion.
But there is another strategy for achieving peace: Future civilizations could use a policy of deterrence to prevent other civilizations from launching first strikes. A policy of this sort, which must be credible to work, says: “I won’t attack you first, but if you attack me first, I have the capabilities to destroy you in retaliation.” This was the predicament of the US and Soviet Union during the Cold War, known as “mutually-assured destruction” (MAD).
But could this work in the cosmopolitical realm of space? It seems unlikely. First, consider how many future species there could be: upwards of many billions. While some of these species would be too far away to pose a threat to each other—although see the qualification below—there will nonetheless exist a huge number within one’s galactic backyard. The point is that the sheer number would make it incredibly hard to determine who initiated a first strike, if one is attacked. And without a method for identifying instigators with high reliability, one’s policy of deterrence won’t be credible. And if one’s policy of deterrence isn’t credible, then one has no such policy!
Second, ponder the sorts of weapons that could become available to future spacefaring civilizations. Redirected asteroids (a.k.a., “planetoid bombs”), “rods from God,” sun guns, laser weapons, and no doubt an array of exceptionally powerful super-weapons that we can’t currently imagine. It has even been speculated that the universe might exist in a “metastable” state and that a high-powered particle accelerator could tip the universe into a more stable state. This would create a bubble of total annihilation that spreads in all directions at the speed of light—which opens up the possibility that a suicidal cult, or whatever, weaponizes a particle accelerator to destroy the universe.
The question, then, is whether defensive technologies could effectively neutralize such risks. There’s a lot to say here, but for the present purposes just note that, historically speaking, defensive measures have very often lagged behind offensive measures, thus resulting in periods of heightened vulnerability. This is an important point because when it comes to existentially dangerous super-weapons, one only needs to be vulnerable for a short period to risk annihilation.
So far as I can tell, this seriously undercuts the credibility of policies of deterrence. Again, if species A cannot convince species B that if B strikes it, A will launch an effective and devastating counter strike, then B may take a chance at attacking A. In fact, B does not need to be malicious to do this: it only needs to worry that A might, at some point in the near- or long-term future, attack B, thus making it rational for B to launch a preemptive strike (to eliminate the potential danger). Thinking about this predicament in the radically multi-polar conditions of space, it seems fairly obvious that conflict will be extremely difficult to avoid.
The lesson of this argument is not to uncritically assume that venturing into the heavens will necessarily make us safer or more existentially secure. This is a point that organizations hoping to colonize Mars, such as SpaceX, NASA, and Mars One should seriously contemplate. How can humanity migrate to another planet without bringing our problems with us? And how can different species that spread throughout the cosmos maintain peace when sufficient mutual trust is unattainable and advanced weaponry could destroy entire civilizations?
Human beings have made many catastrophically bad decisions in the past. Some of these outcomes could have been avoided if only the decision-makers had deliberated a bit more about what could go wrong—i.e., had done a “premortem” analysis. We are in that privileged position right now with respect to space colonization. Let’s not dive head-first into waters that turn out to be shallow.
Phil Torres is the director of the Project for Human Flourishing and the author of Morality, Foresight, and Human Flourishing: An Introduction to Existential Risks.
A citizen astronomer looking for Planet 9 found something that actually exists but still has professional astronomers scratching their heads and mouthing the words, “This changes everything.” It’s an ancient white dwarf star with rings like Saturn that is far older and colder than any other ringed white dwarf star, which may force astronomers to change their theories on how white dwarfs form, age and die. Will Planet 9 be forced out of hiding due to jealousy over the publicity this discovery is getting?
“This object was found by Melina Thévenot of Germany using the Backyard Worlds project. She originally thought it might be a cold brown dwarf, something the project is very interested in and has had a lot of success finding.”
In a press release by Arizona State University, (and in a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters), ASU astronomer Adam Schneider announced the discovery which he had verified as part of NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project which was launched two years ago as a way to get free research assistance by using volunteer astronomers to sort through infrared data available online and look for anomalies. Citizen astronomer Thévenot was hoping for a cold brown dwarf (no Snow White jokes, please) because they’re rare and unusual objects that are too big to be a planet but too small for a star – the perfect key to fame when your project has no fortune.
“When Melina investigated further, she found that although the object had significant infrared brightness; it was not a nearby brown dwarf. The team looked at it together, and we determined it was likely a white dwarf with infrared excess.”
An illustration of LSPM J0207+3331 )
Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / Scott Wiessinger)
The ringed white dwarf (located 145 light-years away in the constellation Capricornus) still brought Melinda fame because the infrared excess is a sign the rings are warmer than normally seen around a white dwarf and highly unusual because of its advanced age — LSPM J0207+3331 (the dwarf’s official non-Disney name) is 3 billion years old, which is three times older than any other white dwarf with a ring or disk.
Is this a big deal? Schneider didn’t know because he’s a brown dwarf expert (who knew NASA astronomers were such specialists?) so he sent it to John Debes, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and a white dwarf expert. As such, he was gushing with astronomical excitement when he saw the data.
“This white dwarf is so old that whatever process is feeding material into its rings must operate on billion-year timescales. Most of the models scientists have created to explain rings around white dwarfs only work well up to around 100 million years, so this star is really challenging our assumptions of how planetary systems evolve.”
But wait … there’s more! Debes looked at follow-up observations taken by the Keck II telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and discovered that the ring or disk around this old white dwarf was made of multiple components. Normally, as a ringed white dwarf dies, the particles in the ring fall to the surface of the old star and the ring eventually disappears. LSPM J0207+3331 is far too ancient to still have rings of any kind.
Artist’s impression of a baby star still surrounded by a protoplanetary disc
Put all of those anomalies together and Melina Thévenot gets a “this changes everything” merit badge and a laurel and hardy handshake. Believe it or not, Schneider says that’s enough incentive for Backyard Worlds: Planet 9’s estimated 150,000 volunteers to have discovered over 1,000 potential brown dwarfs in just two years.
What about Planet 9? Are these dedicated citizen astronomers being used by NASA for free research under the guise that it really wants them to find the elusive and yet-unproven Planet 9?
Melina Thévenot is probably back on her computer trying to prove them wrong.
One of the problems with UFO reports from over the years actually has to do with their diversity. That is to say, some of the already far-fetched sounding reports of “flying saucers” might be more easily accepted by scientists if they all described essentially the same thing, rather than a seemingly endless variety of unusual aerial vehicles in our skies. The fact that such variety does exist, according to many accounts, lessens the likelihood that a majority of those cases represent some legitimate phenomenon.
Another problem is that very few of the so-called “flying saucers” appear to be anything that actually resembles saucers or discs at all. Even Kenneth Arnold’s famous 1947 sighting, which led to this first unofficial name for what later became known as unidentified flying objects or UFOs, raises some doubts: Arnold initially described objects that more closely resembled some variety of flying wing or delta shaped craft, on par with some of our modern stealth aircraft. His memory of the incident appears to have changed slightly within a few months, after the proliferation of the “flying saucer” meme in American newspapers.
However, there have been plenty of incidents from over the years that did involve alleged objects resembling pancakes, flattened spheres, doughnuts without holes, and other similar disc-shapes. Often, these more traditional “saucers” that appear in UFO literature from time to time are fitted with something akin to a spherical dome on the top and/or the bottom of the craft. Many of these unusual objects also produce light from one or more locations, usually on the underside of the craft.
It is one such alleged “saucer” along these lines that also comprises what may be, arguably, one of the most unusual UFO incidents of the 20th century. The sighting occurred on September 10, 1976, shortly before 1 AM at a farm outside Colusa, California, where Bill Pecha was awake and watching television that morning. His viewing was interrupted with what began as some kind of interference, followed by his television turning off completely. Moments later, his air conditioner also quit running, leading Pecha to think that a circuit breaker might be to blame.
As Pecha went outside and headed in the direction of the breaker, he began to notice his hair standing on end, as though some source of high-voltage electricity could be felt nearby. This concerned Pecha, since he now suspected there might be faulty cabling to blame, presenting a potential electrocution hazard. It was about that time that something in the sky a short distance away caught Pecha’s attention.
“I glanced up and saw this big object,” Pecha recalled. “And I saw these objects hanging down, like cable-like fixtures hanging down below it.” The main body of the craft was a disc shape, which appeared to be rotating in a clockwise orientation, with a large dome that remained stationary on top. The object made little or no sound, and was silver or gray in color, except for the very bottom of the craft, which Pecha described as having a “porcelain” look about it. Light could also be seen emanating from below the craft. The object appeared to be hovering directly above a television antenna at the top of a telephone pole nearby, which Pecha presumed to be the cause of the power disturbance inside his home a few minutes earlier.
Pecha’s description of the weird aircraft sounds more like something from War of the Worlds than from other UFO literature around that time. “As I watched it,” Pecha said, “these tentacle-like things went up and these lights came out of this saucer-like thing, and these big lights came on which was a shaft of lights two of them.”
Pecha went back to his house and awakened his wife, who was still asleep inside. By the time she was able to look out the window at the craft, she described seeing the lights which reminded her of traditional landing lights on a plane. Bill Pecha then went into his 10-year-old son’s room, the window of which provided a view to the west of their home, where Pecha says he was able to see two more similar craft in the distance, also positioned directly over power lines as the initial object had been.
Badly frightened, Pecha and his wife reportedly left with their children and went to the home of a nearby friend named Gail Arrant, speeding despite having their pickup truck’s lights off, for fear that the object would see them. Arriving at the Arrant home, Gail came outside and was able to see a distant object which the Pechas identified as the large, domed saucer that had hovered over their home.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Arrant said in an ABC news interview the following year. “No question whatsoever, it was there. I thought, it doesn’t matter to me if anyone believes me or not I know what I saw and Bill too. I mean, it was frightful.”
The National Enquirer, who at the time investigated UFOs fairly often, sent Bob Pratt to look into the case, but the story never made it to print. The Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) also investigated the incident, of which the following detailed information about Pecha’s observation of the distant objects over the power lines was given, appearing later in a write up by Brad Sparks in the February, 1977 APRO Bulletin:
Each of these far encounter UFOs emitted two light-like beams that hit the tops of the power transmission towers each object was between. The right hand UFO’s beams were blue and all four towers were lit up in blue light. The beams were emitted upwards at 30 to 45 degrees below the horizontal. The towers held up six power lines. One or both of the highest two of these lines glowed bright red from the insulators oftowers-1 and 2 out to an estimated fifty to one hundred feet on both sides of the towers, Pecha reported. (These were the same towers lit up in blue light by the UFO on the Left.) The beams on towers 1 and 2 had “darker” (by this Pecha said he meant brighter, or more intense) blue “jerky” light streams inside them, Pecha said. He said the “jerkiness” was unlike lightning or a zig-zag and it did not seem to have a phase velocity or motion. He could not determine if the beams from the UFO on the right had these “jerky” light-streams or if the power lines near towers-3 and 4 glowed red. The towers and the UFO on the right were more distant than the ones on the left. The left-hand towers were about 4,450 and 5,150 feet away (towers-1 and 2, respectively)—the lines between these towers pointed about 53 degrees off Pecha’s line of sight (so he had a good view of them). The right-hand towers were about 6,200 and 7,320 feet away (towers-3 and 4 respectively). But the lines on these latter towers are pointed only 4 1/2 degrees off Pecha’s line of sight—hence they would have been difficult to see. (The lines from towers-1 and 2 run southeast to northwest, but turn almost due west at tower-2.)
Despite the specificity of the information about Pecha’s observation in the APRO bulletin, finding corroborating data from agencies in the nearby vicinity was more difficult. Allan Hendry, who at the time of the Colusa incident was a full time investigator at J. Allen Hynek’s Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), followed several potential lines of interest, and was unable to find any additional data, as he noted in The UFO Handbook: A Guide to Investigating, Evaluating, and Reporting UFO Sightings:
I checked with the following agencies to see if they could account for the event, with no success: Sacramento Air Traffic Control, Chico Air Traffic Control, the Oakland Air Route Traffic Control Center, Colusa County Airport, and Beale Air Force Base. On the outside chance that a helicopter with a bright searchlight was somehow behind the sightings, I checked with the California Highway Patrol, the California Forestry Air Coordinator, and the Sacramento National Guard, with negative results; still, there are other sources of helicopters, both civilian and military, within an hour of Colusa. I even tried balloon launch sites; the National Weather Service balloon launched at 4 P.M. bursts after two hours and is not illuminated—if the UFO was one, it would have departed against the wind.
Hendry also contacted the Central Valley Project to see if they had registered any outages in the area coinciding with the disturbances Pecha described, and none were logged by the company. Nonetheless, Hendry noted that “Everyone from the policemen to the publisher of the local paper vouched for Pecha’s reputation of honesty and calmness,” and found no reason to believe he had misreported or sensationalized his family’s experience in any way, strange though it was.
The following year Pecha, family friend Gail Arrant, and even J. Allen Hynek and Allan Hendry of CUFOS, were featured in an ABC news segment which covered the case, as featured in the video below:
By some measures, one might say that the circumstances Pecha and the other witnesses described were the least unusual aspect of the entire affair. The description of the object, however, seems to fall squarely into the realm of early 20th-century science fiction; seldom are “tentacles” or other similar appendages reported elsewhere, even in the more colorful reports of actual saucer-shaped unidentified flying objects. In that regard, the Colusa, California UFO incident remains one of the most intriguing, and yet also truly perplexing cases of unidentified structured aircraft seen in the last century.
WARMED FROM WITHIN? Mars has frigid polar ice caps. But a theoretical underground chamber of magma could help melt ice near the south pole, creating what some scientists think is a lake hiding under the ice.
NASA, ESA AND STSC
If Mars conceals a lake beneath its south polar ice cap, the planet must also have a hidden chamber of magma to keep the water liquid, a new analysis suggests.
Signs of a 20-kilometer-wide lake, buried beneath about a kilometer and a half of ice near Mars’ south pole, were first reported in 2018 by a team led by planetary scientist Roberto Orosei (SN: 8/18/18, p. 6). The discovery kicked off a debate over what it would take to keep the lake liquid in such a frigid environment.
Planetary scientists Michael Sori and Ali Bramson considered various scenarios, including dust mixed in the ice cap to improve its insulating abilities and episodes of past volcanism on the Red Planet. The only way to create enough heat to explain the lake is if a subsurface pool of magma under the ice also exists, the duo reports in the Feb. 12 Geophysical Research Letters.
“We tried to do our due diligence and think of all sorts of alternative factors that could raise the temperature,” Sori says. “The magma stuff was the only one that did it. None of the other factors really even came close.”
The possible lake — the first report of so much liquid water existing on Mars today — appeared as a bright reflection to the radar of the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter. The Martian environment, though, is too cold for water to remain liquid on its own. Orosei, of the National Institute of Astrophysics in Bologna, Italy, and his colleagues had suggested that salts dissolved in the water could keep its melting point low, allowing the lake to exist as a briny sludge.
Conditions beneath the ice are still too cold — an average of –68° Celsius — to explain the lake’s existence just with salts, argue Sori and Bramson, both of the University of Arizona in Tucson. But their calculations show that if around 300,000 years ago, a volcano released magma into a chamber at least five kilometers wide and buried about 10 kilometers beneath where the lake appears to be, that pool could generate enough heat to still be melting salty ice today. Without salt, the magma chamber would have to be larger or closer to the surface, the researchers say.
If the magma chamber is real, it would mean that Mars has been geologically active much more recentlythan planetary scientists think (SN: 3/4/17, p. 12). Previous studies suggested that the most recent geologic activity near Mars’ south pole was millions of years ago, at least.
The chamber’s existence could also be a blow to the purported lake’s habitability: If the lake is only a few hundred thousand years old, that doesn’t give life much time to have gotten started.
Sori and Bramson remain neutral on whether their findings make the lake more or less likely to exist. “Honestly, we’re not sure,” Bramson says. The researchers suggest that future searches look for either the magma chamber or the lake. So far, other radar searches using NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have not spotted the lake (SN: 12/22/18, p. 29).
The jury is out among other researchers too. The new research doesn’t rule out the role of salts in melting ice, says planetary scientist Bethany Ehlmann of Caltech who was not involved in either study. But “this paper is a nice contribution that explores an alternative hypothesis,” she says.
Orosei stands by his team’s observations. Theoretical arguments showing how difficult it is for liquid water to be present beneath the ice, he says, do not prove the water is not there. “I think that we are just entering a long and exhausting debate,” he says.
CHIP OFF THE OLD BLOCK A massive collision that left Neptune’s second largest moon, Proteus (as seen in the background of this illustration) with a huge crater may have spawned its smallest moon, Hippocamp (foreground).
NASA, ESA, AND J. OLMSTED/STSC
Neptune’s smallest moon may be a chunk of a neighboring moon that was knocked off by a comet.
In 1989, Voyager 2 flew by Neptune, right, and spotted six small inner moons, represented in the composite at left. A tiny moon between Proteus and Larissa went undetected at the time, but Mark Showalter discovered the moon in 2013 using the Hubble Space Telescope and has now officially named it Hippocamp. (Image not to scale.)
One of seven moons that orbit closer to Neptune than the planet’s largest moon, Triton, the newly dubbed Hippocamp is just roughly 34 kilometers across, researchers report in the Feb. 21 Nature. The second-largest moon, Proteus, is Hippocamp’s nearest neighbor, orbiting about 12,000 kilometers away.
“Why would such a small moon be so close to such a big moon?” wondered astronomer Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. He and his colleagues used more than a decade’s worth of observations with the Hubble Space Telescope to find the new moon, which was first reported in 2013 (SN Online: 7/16/13). Bigger moons tend to gobble up small ones as the moons form. Stranger still, the pair was probably even closer in the past, because the physics of their orbits suggests that Proteus is slowly migrating away from Neptune.
Pale gray dot
Neptune has seven inner moons (illustrated here with the planet’s rings), and the smallest now has a name: Hippocamp.
C. CHANG
Source: A.J. Verbiscer/Nature 2019, M.R. Showalter et al/Nature 2019
Showalter thinks Hippocamp is a piece of Proteus that was chipped off by a massive collision with a comet. Proteus has a massive crater, called Pharos, which is so big that the impact that made it nearly broke Proteus apart. The collision could have kicked up a cloud of debris that eventually coalesced into a smaller moon.
“They’re far away now, but they were part of the same object in the past,” Showalter says.
The name Hippocamp references a half-horse, half-fish creature from Greek mythology, which pulled a chariot for the god Poseidon (the Roman Neptune). All of Neptune’s moons have names related to the sea in Greek and Roman mythology.
That suits Showalter, who is a scuba diver. “The true story is, I’m very fond of sea horses,” he says.
Editor’s note: This story was updated February 20, 2019, with a new artist’s illustration of Hippocamp.
Citations
M.R. Showalter et al. The seventh inner moon of Neptune. Nature. Vol. 566, February 21, 2019, p. 328. doi: 10.1028/s41586-019-0909-9.
Around this time of year – if the western horizon stays clear – the last few minutes of daylight fall perfectly on Horsetail Falls, making it glow as if on fire. Photographers call it the firefall …
For two weeks out of the year, a spectacular event known as the firefall takes place within Yosemite National Park. Hundreds if not thousands of photographers flock to the valley in hopes of capturing the elusive moment, that is, if the weather, snow and light cooperate. If Yosemite receives an ample amount of snowfall throughout the winter, and if the western horizon stays clear, the last few minutes of daylight fall perfectly upon Horsetail Falls and illuminate it in a vibrant orange and red. The waterfall glows so fiercely that it appears to be on fire. Yesterday, after the valley received several feet of snow for a few days, one last clearing snowstorm led to the perfect mix of ingredients. Water flowing from the beautiful Horsetail Falls and a dazzling mix of broken clouds floating past El Capitan as the sunset set the fall ablaze.
Thank you, Mike!
Bottom line: Fireball at Yosemite National Park, February 17, 2019.
It’s a question that has grabbed the attention of humanity since long before history has been recorded. What life exists outside of this little ball that we call Earth? Whether we’re talking about the gods of Olympus or the Klingons ofStar Trek, it is a theme that has appeared consistently throughout all of human history.
As science expands our knowledge of the universe every year, we half expect the news that extraterrestrial life has been found. But what if we’ve been looking in all the wrong places?
Science predicts many examples of counterintuitive forms of life. While impossible on Earth, they could very well exist elsewhere in the universe. So, without further ado, here are the top 10 scientifically possible extraterrestrial life-forms.
Silicon is a molecule whose structure and chemical properties are remarkably similar to the properties of carbon—the element on which most life on Earth is based. An important part of life as we know it is the ability of carbon to form complex chains of atoms and molecules sufficiently large to contain biological programming such as DNA.
Silicon, also commonly used in computer chips, is the closest that humanity has ever come to designing their own intelligent system. It would have the potential to organically form its own version of DNA under the right circumstances.
Additionally, there are examples on Earth of organisms using silicon in biological structures, specifically in a form of algae known as diatoms. They are responsible for the usage of over six billion metric tons of silicon each year in Earth’s oceans as well as the production of almost 20 percent of the planet’s oxygen.[1]
As a result, it is likely that silicon might exist as a stage of early life on other planets, converting their atmospheres into oxygen and getting them ready for more advanced life later on.
9. Arsenic-Based Life
Although it seems counterintuitive that one of the most iconic poisons on Earth has a basis in forming life, science suggests that it is entirely possible for arsenic to be incorporated into complex biomolecules.
The argument for arsenic in life-forms stems from its chemical similarity to phosphorus, a staple part of DNA in Earth life. Some studies suggest that arsenic may have once been a part of the DNA in early life on Earth, taking the place in DNA that phosphorus does now.
In an early stage of life before microbial activity was able to leech phosphorus from rocks in the ocean, arsenic would have been far more available to organisms living near hydrothermal vents deep in the ocean.[2]
Although evidence suggests that phosphorus is a more efficient chemical than arsenic in advanced life, the poisonous element would likely be good enough for early, simple forms of life. Creatures made of this substance may lurk in the depths of alien oceans.
8. Ammonia-Based Life
Water is an essential part of all Earth life. Our bodies use the liquid as a solvent, which is necessary for almost all chemical reactions that create energy and sustain functions. This is seen in humans and all the way down to the smallest microbes.
But what if there was an alternative to water? Recent science suggests that there is.
For life to exist in a substance other than water, it would be necessary for it to either have a large temperature range at which it is liquid or exist on a planet with little, if any, temperature change over the course of its year. Water exists in a liquid form between 0 degrees Celsius (32 °F) and 100 degrees Celsius (212 °F), a range of 100 degrees Celsius (180 °F).
Ammonia is liquid between -77.7 degrees Celsius (-107.86 °F) and -33.3 degrees Celsius (-27.94 °F), a relatively large range of 44.4 degrees Celsius (79.92 °F). While one might think that such temperatures would be too cold to sustain life, it is likely that the reactions and processes necessary for life could still exist, albeit at a slower speed.[3]
As such, organisms using ammonia rather than water as a chemical solvent would likely live longer but metabolize and evolve more slowly than water-based life.
7. Methane-Based Life
There are some environments in which methane would be far more prevalent than water. Saturn’s moon Titan is a prominent example.
According to a computer model, life which relies on methane would be able to exist in extremely cold areas as well as regions entirely without oxygen. The model revealed that a cell wall could be constructed that would work in liquid methane at -180 degrees Celsius (-292 °F).
Along with the fact that cell membranes could be created with nitrogen, carbon, and hydrogen molecules, which are known to exist in Titan’s oceans, this function means that simple organisms could exist in the frozen depths of methane oceans.[4]
As with ammonia-based organisms, life in methane oceans would inherently be paced much slower than life on Earth. Slow evolution and metabolism would occur due to the frigid temperatures necessary to maintain the ocean of liquids.
Carbon-based life-forms are the only type which we, being carbon-based ourselves, know anything about. Thus, we’re sure that hundreds of planets exist within the potentially habitable zones of their stars. These planets would be able to support life as we know it with oxygen, liquid water, and even the chemicals and reactions necessary to jump-start life.
Additionally, carbon-based life is the only type that we are sure exists, as evidenced by our own planet.
This isn’t to say that carbon-based life on other planets would look at all like Earth’s. Through evolution, it is possible for extraterrestrial carbon-based life to take on a dramatically different form by adapting to fit its environment.
Just look at the massive number of life-forms that exist on Earth. They live everywhere from frigid oceans to the mouths of active volcanoes and fault lines. The existence of organisms on Earth in such extreme environments is proof that it is entirely possible for this kind of life to exist on a wide variety of other planets, including some that we would consider uninhabitable for humans.[5]
5. Hybrid Life
If creatures could hypothetically evolve using an entirely different basis for life than that on Earth, why couldn’t they combine multiple methods? For example, life could be based primarily in silicon, contain elements of carbon or arsenic, and use ammonia as a solvent.
As previously mentioned, some life-forms on Earth incorporate silicon structures into their cells. So why not take it a step further? If an organism evolved on a planet with a relative abundance of multiple elements that could be used in the processes of life, why not take those two and make them into a composite whole?
Silicon and carbon can bond with each other as well as silicon and oxygen, carbon and oxygen, and silicon and fluoride. So it is possible for these molecules to react and form complex chains that would store and transmit information in a manner similar to DNA.
This could also work if a planet had a biosphere with a subset of creatures which used an element such as carbon as their base and another subset which used a different element such as silicon. Rather than a creature being based in two different elements, the biosphere as a whole could contain two different elemental bases for life.[6]
By modeling conditions that are possible in space, a 2007 study found that plasma and dust can function in a way that may qualify as life. They may even form microscopic double helix strands of solid particles through the polarization of plasma and dust. Sound familiar?
Even more fascinating, the study found that these strands can undergo changes such as those associated with organic molecules, specifically DNA. They can divide, copy, and even evolve as less stable strands break apart and more stable ones endure.[7]
These life-forms could exist as chilling entities formed of nonorganic materials in the void between stars inside massive dust clouds or in plasma or dust rings surrounding stars. Through continued evolution, it is entirely possible for such clouds to one day achieve sentience.
Although science does not currently suggest that stars or galaxiesthemselves could form life, it does indicate that life with organic compounds can form outside of a home planet with the help of nearby stars and star structures.
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, organic compounds have been detected in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way. Complex organic molecules such as methanol, dimethyl ether, and methyl formate, all of which are essential in organic life, were detected in two nebulae in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
This suggests that given time and the right circumstances, these compounds could eventually form into self-replicating molecules that would become the basis of life in such nebulae. Later, they could create more complex biological structures. As they would evolve without the basic function of gravity such as on Earth, we have no idea what these creatures might look like.[8]
2. Panspermia
A popular theory is that life propagates through the universe through planetary ejection caused by large impacts on previously populated planets. This theory states that life can be distributed by dust, debris, asteroids, and comets carrying microorganisms from other planets.
For panspermia to be plausible, the organisms must be able to survive intense forces and extremely hot and cold temperatures for extended durations. This is due to the inherent forces involved in an asteroid impact, the heat from friction with a planet’s atmosphere, and the extended time when the organism is in transit through space—potentially thousands or millions of years.[9]
Organisms like that exist on Earth already. These extremophiles can resist extreme cold and heat as well as UV rays and intense forces. Although they are among the most basic known forms of life, they have an unparalleled ability to survive conditions that would kill most other organisms.
Thus, it is entirely plausible that life could have spread throughout the universe via asteroid impacts and the extremophiles that were carried on these alien asteroids.
Even if life was based on the extremophiles from another planet, the simplistic nature of these organisms makes it unlikely that they would evolve into anything that looked like the more complex creatures on the original planet. This is due to the different traits necessary to survive on the two planets.
1. Not At All
Unfortunately, it is entirely possible that we are the only planet in the universe that has life. Due to the vastness of space and the limit that light speed imposes on intergalactic travel, it may be impossible for us to ever discover other life or even determine if it exists at all. In the observable universe, we have not found any concrete evidence that life does or has ever existed on other planets.
With that being said, the universe is only about 13.8 billion years old. While this may seem like a long time, we have no way of knowing how old the universe will become. Perhaps we are the first planet to evolve life, with many others to follow in the future.
We estimate that the universe’s heat death (a state in which there is no longer any free thermal energy) will occur somewhere in between 1 and 100 trillion years. In the worst-case scenario, we are only 1.38 percent of the way through the universe’s expected life span. At best, we are about 0.01 percent of the way there. That is a lot of time for life to happen.[10]
Still, we can’t help but wonder if our signals will ever be received by someone or something out there or if they will just shoot forever through the cold, dark void of space.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
'No cause for alarm, Captain!': NASA confirms mysterious blue light spotted in InSight photos by actor William Shatner is just a lens flare, as the robotic lander plays cup-and-ball on Mars- PART I
'No cause for alarm, Captain!': NASA confirms mysterious blue light spotted in InSight photos by actor William Shatner is just a lens flare, as the robotic lander plays cup-and-ball on Mars - PART I
InSight played Martian game of cup-and-ball over the weekend as it attempted to stow its grapple instrument
The InSight lander placed its seismometer closer to the ground to better hear faint Marsquakes days prior
The InSight lander deployed its first instrument onto the surface of Mars around the end of December
NASA says instruments have been positioned to lowest point yet for the best possible listening opportunity
It might be some time before NASA’s InSight lander starts churning out data, but the new Mars explorer is steadily trucking on with its preparations.
A new animation shared by the space agency shows InSight getting its grapple instrument in place, in a process that looks much like the age-old cup-and-ball game.
InSight has spent the last two months slowly setting up its instruments and conducting equipment health assessments ahead of its mission to listen for underground marsquakes.
In the meantime, the lander’s social media account has attracted the attention of many space enthusiasts – including Star Trek actor William Shatner, who questioned the source of a peculiar blue light that has appeared in some of the photos.
Scroll down for video
A new animation shared by the space agency shows InSight getting its grapple instrument in place, in a process that looks much like the age-old cup-and-ball game. The grapple is one of the many instruments that will help InSight collect unprecedented data about the red planet
‘After a few tries, I’ve successfully stowed by grapple, by grabbing a small restraint mounted on my arm,’ the InSight Twitter account shared this weekend.
‘Sort of a Martian twist on the classic cup-and-ball game.’
An animation posted alongside the update shows the claw-like gripper chasing around a small ball before finally catching it.
The grapple is one of the many instruments that will help InSight collect unprecedented data about the red planet.
InSight’s Twitter updates sparked curiosity on social media last week when actor William Shatner noticed a blue light in one of the animations.
The lander’s social media account has attracted the attention of many space enthusiasts – including Star Trek actor William Shatner, who questioned the source of a peculiar blue light that has appeared in some of the photos
But, NASA says there’s nothing unusual (or alien-related) about the dancing light.
‘Just a bit of lens flare as the sun dips low on the horizon,’ NASA explained on Twitter. ‘(Both photos were taken shortly before sunset.) No cause for alarm, Captain!’
Earlier this month, the InSight lander leaned in for a better listen of Mars’ underground tremors. The robotic explorer placed its seismometer on the surface at the end of last month, and is now getting even closer ‘for a better connection with Mars.’
This will help its instruments pick up fainter signals that may otherwise have been missed.
Days prior, InSight leveled out its seismometer and adjusted the internal sensors ahead of lowering everything down toward the ground.
NASA’s InSight lander is leaning in for a better listen of Mars’ underground tremors. The robotic explorer placed its seismometer on the surface at the end of last month, and is now getting even closer ‘for a better connection with Mars.’ Before and after images show its instrument at its lowest position yet
INSIGHT'S THREE KEY INSTRUMENTS
The lander that could reveal how Earth was formed: InSight lander set for Mars landing on november 26th
Three key instruments will allow the InSight lander to 'take the pulse' of the red planet:
Seismometer: The InSight lander carries a seismometer, SEIS, that listens to the pulse of Mars.
The seismometer records the waves traveling through the interior structure of a planet.
Studying seismic waves tells us what might be creating the waves.
On Mars, scientists suspect that the culprits may be marsquakes, or meteorites striking the surface.
Heat probe: InSight's heat flow probe, HP3, burrows deeper than any other scoops, drills or probes on Mars before it.
It will investigate how much heat is still flowing out of Mars.
Radio antennas: Like Earth, Mars wobbles a little as it rotates around its axis.
To study this, two radio antennas, part of the RISE instrument, track the location of the lander very precisely.
This helps scientists test the planet's reflexes and tells them how the deep interior structure affects the planet's motion around the Sun.
‘It’s always good to be centered and balanced,’ the InSight Twitter account shared.
The lander also released the slack in its cable to keep it from fluttering around in the wind.
Now, NASA says the instruments have been positioned to the lowest point yet for the best possible listening opportunity.
‘My seismometer has now crouched down to its lowest level, for a better connection with Mars,’ the InSight Twitter account posted this week. 'Faint signals are easier to hear if you keep your ear close to the ground.’
The InSight lander deployed its first instrument onto the surface of Mars around the end of December.
Images from the lander show the seismometer on the ground, after it was lifted onto the surface by the lander's robotic arm.
It will record the waves traveling through the interior structure of the planet, and could help explain mysterious 'marsquakes' scientists believe occur regularly.
At the time, NASA said the lander war performing flawlessly, and was ahead of schedule.
New images from the lander show the seismometer on the ground, after it was lifted onto the surface by the lander's robotic arm. It will record the waves traveling through the interior structure of the planet, and could help explain mysterious 'marsquakes' scientists believe occur regularly. This was the first time a science instrument had ever been placed onto the surface of another planet.
WHAT WILL THE SEISMOMETER DO?
The seismometer allows scientists to peer into the Martian interior by studying ground motion — also known as marsquakes.
Each marsquake acts as a kind of flashbulb that illuminates the structure of the planet's interior.
By analyzing how seismic waves pass through the layers of the planet, scientists can deduce the depth and composition of these layers.
'InSight's timetable of activities on Mars has gone better than we hoped,' said InSight Project Manager Tom Hoffman, who is based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
'Getting the seismometer safely on the ground is an awesome Christmas present.'
The InSight team has been working toward deploying its two dedicated science instruments onto Martian soil since landing on Mars on Nov. 26.
Engineers tested the commands for the lander, making sure a model in the test bed at JPL deployed the instruments exactly as intended.
Scientists also had to analyze images of the Martian terrain around the lander to figure out the best places to deploy the instruments.
On Tuesday, Dec. 18, InSight engineers sent up the commands to the spacecraft.
On Wednesday, Dec. 19, the seismometer was gently placed onto the ground directly in front of the lander, about as far away as the arm can reach — 5.367 feet, or 1.636 meters, away).
'Seismometer deployment is as important as landing InSight on Mars,' said InSight Principal Investigator Bruce Banerdt, based at JPL.
'The seismometer is the highest-priority instrument on InSight: We need it in order to complete about three-quarters of our science objectives.'
NASA InSight✔@NASAInSight
Whew – winding down after a long day, but I’ve done it: I’ve placed my seismometer on the surface of Mars! With SEIS, I’ll be able to listen in for marsquakes and help reveal the heartbeat of
The 'Martian rock garden' it built in a Pasadena warehouse to test its InSight rover Engineers practice deploying InSight's instruments in a lab at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Several of them are wearing sunglasses to block the bright yellow lights in the test space, which mimic sunlight as it appears on Mars.
The seismometer allows scientists to peer into the Martian interior by studying ground motion — also known as marsquakes.
'Having the seismometer on the ground is like holding a phone up to your ear,' said Philippe Lognonné, principal investigator of SEIS from Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP) and Paris Diderot University.
'We're thrilled that we're now in the best position to listen to all the seismic waves from below Mars' surface and from its deep interior.'
In the coming days, the InSight team will work on leveling the seismometer, which is sitting on ground that is tilted 2 to 3 degrees.
The first seismometer science data should begin to flow back to Earth after the seismometer is in the right position.
'We look forward to popping some Champagne when we start to get data from InSight's seismometer on the ground,' Banerdt added.
'I have a bottle ready for the occasion.'
Meanwhile, the Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment (RISE), which does not have its own separate instrument, has already begun using InSight's radio connection with Earth to collect preliminary data on the planet's core.
Not enough time has elapsed for scientists to deduce what they want to know — scientists estimate they might have some results starting in about a year.
This image shows some of the instruments visible in the selfie image sent back to Earth by InSight early last Tuesday morning
NASA also recently has finally pinpointed the exact landing location of its new Mars explorer, thanks to a powerful camera on its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
While the space agency knew InSight had landed within an 81-mile-long (130 km) ellipse on the red planet, there was no way to determine exactly where it touched down within this region.
Now, a series of images captured this week by MRO's HiRISE camera have confirmed that the lander, heat shield, and parachute all sit within 1,000 feet of each other on a lava plain called Elysium Planitia.
NASA has finally pinpointed the exact landing location of its new Mars explorer, thanks to a powerful camera on its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. While the space agency knew InSight had landed within an 81-mile-long (130 km) ellipse on the red planet, there was no way to determine exactly where it touched down within this region
In the images released today by NASA, InSight and its parts appear as bright teal specks on rust-colored landscape.
But in reality, this is only a trick of the light.
'Light reflected off their surfaces causes the color to be saturated,' NASA explains.
'The ground around the lander appears dark, having been blasted by its retrorockets during descent. Look carefully for a butterfly shape, and you can make out the lander's solar panels on either side.'
Just days ago, NASA's new InSight lander snapped its first selfie from the red planet, giving the mission team (and the rest of the world) a good look at its solar panels and deck now that it's settled in.
InSight also sent back the first complete view of the 14-by-7-foot swath of land that will soon serve as its 'workspace.'
In the images released today by NASA, InSight and its parts appear as bright teal specks on rust-colored landscape. But in reality, this is only a trick of the light
A series of images captured this week by MRO's HiRISE camera have confirmed that the lander (red dot), heat shield, and parachute all sit within 1,000 feet of each other on a lava plain called Elysium Planitia. Previously, the space agency only knew they'd landed within an 81-mile ellipse (blue)
Each of the new images is a mosaic of several captures stitched together.
While the selfie, captured by the robotic arm, is a composite of 11 pictures, the workspace view includes 52 individual photos.
This is allowing scientists to get a good look at the area well before InSight starts putting down its instruments and digging into the ground.
'The near-absense of rocks, hills, and holes means it'll be extremely safe for our instruments,' said InSight's Principal Investigator Bruce Banerdt of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
'This might seem like a pretty plain piece of ground if it weren't on Mars, but we're glad to see that.'
NASA has confirmed the landing sites for InSight, its parachute, and other components thanks to new images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
InSight previously sent back the first complete view of the 14-by-7-foot swath of land that will soon serve as its 'workspace,' indicated in the blue crescent. The team says it looks 'extremely safe'. Its parachute, back shell, and heat shield all landed about 1,000 feet away
Even Mars robots act like tourists every once in a while. NASA's new InSight lander has snapped its first selfie from the red planet, giving the mission team (and the rest of the world) a good look at its solar panels and deck now that it's settled in
Over the last week or so, InSight has sent back the first of its observations – including a clip of light passing over the surface, and recordings of Martian winds.
All of this comes as the lander and the team behind its operations prepare for it to begin work in the next few months.
For now, however, InSight is taking baby steps.
The lander flexed its 6-foot-long arm this week, snapping images of the terrain directly in front of it.
'By carefully swinging my arm out in front of me, I'm starting to get a better look at the ground in front of me where I'll be doing my work', the Nasa InSight account tweeted.
'Meanwhile, kind of hypnotized by the play of light and shadow on my arm'.
'By carefully swinging my arm out in front of me, I'm starting to get a better look at the ground in front of me where I'll be doing my work', the Nasa InSight account tweeted this week. 'Meanwhile, kind of hypnotized by the play of light and shadow on my arm'. This effect can be seen in the clip above
'No cause for alarm, Captain!': NASA confirms mysterious blue light spotted in InSight photos by actor William Shatner is just a lens flare, as the robotic lander plays cup-and-ball on Mars - PART II
'No cause for alarm, Captain!': NASA confirms mysterious blue light spotted in InSight photos by actor William Shatner is just a lens flare, as the robotic lander plays cup-and-ball on Mars - PART II
'By carefully swinging my arm out in front of me, I'm starting to get a better look at the ground in front of me where I'll be doing my work', the Nasa InSight account tweeted this week. 'Meanwhile, kind of hypnotized by the play of light and shadow on my arm'. This effect can be seen in the clip above
The data collected by InSight's Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) in the months before it's moved onto the ground will eventually be used to cancel out background noises as it works to detect marsquakes
Just days prior, NASA revealed the InSight lander captured the sound of a Martian 'dust devil' during its first days on the red planet.
According to the space agency, this is the first time we've ever heard Martian winds.
The low rumble detected by InSight's sensors are estimated to be blowing between 10 to 15 mph (5 to 7 meters a second) from northwest to southeast – and, the recordings are within the range of human hearing.
NASA says the sounds recorded on December 1 line up with dust devil streaks observed in the landing area.
The vibrations were recorded at a very low pitch, though those with sharp ears will be able to hear it as is, using headphones or subwoofers.
To make it clearer, NASA boosted the pitch by two octaves, making it audible on laptops and mobile devices.
The space agency shared a series of high-resolution photos captured this week. InSight will soon begin snapping images of the terrain directly in front of it, so the team can select the best location to drill down. The solar panel that will help power the machine is pictured
While InSight didn't set out to record Martian winds, specifically, the team says this type of data collection comes with the territory.
The lander detected wind vibrations with two of its sensors: one designed to measure air pressure, and with a seismometer on the deck.
'Capturing this audio was an unplanned treat,' says Bruce Banerdt, InSight principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab.
'But one of the things our mission is dedicated to is measuring motion on Mars, and naturally that includes motion caused by sound waves.'
According to the InSight team, the two different instruments recorded the noise in different ways.
While the Auxiliary Payload Sensor Subsystem's air pressure sensor recorded the vibrations directly, the seismometer picked up vibrations caused by the wind passing over the lander's solar panels.
The data collected by InSight's Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) in the months before it's moved onto the ground will eventually be used to cancel out background noises as it works to detect marsquakes.
Its short period (SP) silicon sensors can detect vibrations with frequencies of up to 50 hertz, which sits at the lower range of human hearing, NASA says.
'The InSight lander acts like a giant ear,' said Tom Pike, InSight science team member and sensor designed at Imperial College London.
'The solar panels on the lander's sides respond to pressure fluctuations of the wind.
'It's like InSight is cupping its ears and hearing the Mars wind beating on it. When we looked at the direction of the lander vibrations coming from the solar panels, it matches the expected wind direction at our landing site.'
InSight touched down in a region known as Elysium Planitia. Its location can be seen in the map above, not far from the landing site of the 2012 Curiosity mission, the last NASA probe to land on Mars
NASA's InSight lander has finally removed the lens cover from its cameras, allowing the robotic explorer to take its clearest pictures yet of its new home
The team has released both a raw, unaltered audio sample of the seismometer recording and a second version that's been raised two octaves to make it easier to hear.
For the latter, the APSS sample was sped up by a factor of 100.
According to the experts, the source of the sound is pretty straightforward; vibrations detected by the instruments are much like the air pressure changes you hear when a flag whips around in the wind.
'That's literally what sound is — changes in air pressure,' said Don Banfield InSight's science lead for APSS from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
'You hear that whenever you speak to someone across the room.'
Illustration of InSight probe with its two main instruments deployed, a heat probe (left) and seismometer (bell-shaped, right).
Credit: NASA.
NASA’s InSight lander arrived on Marsin late 2018 tasked with the mission of studying the planet’s geology. Its main instrument is a seismometer which the probe will soon use to listen to marsquakes. However, the probe is also equipped with sophisticated meteorology gear like a highly sensitive air pressure sensor that is already revealing some unexpected surprises.
The Martian surface is very thin — less than one percent of Earth’s surface pressure — but it’s enough to accommodate weather and significant air pressure differences that cause the soil to slightly tilt and rumble. Therefore, InSight’s air pressure sensor data is essential to the probe’s missions since it calibrates the seismometer.
InSight’s mission is unlike that of any spacecraft we’ve ever sent to Mars. All of our past probes have studied the planet’s environment above ground, but InSight is focused on what happens beneath the surface by listening to ‘marsquakes’. By studying these slight seismic waves, scientists want to determine what makes up the planet’s mantle and core. Basically, InSight will study seismic waves as they pass through the Red Planet, using that information as a sort of ultrasound to find out what is lurking underneath the crust.
While the seismometer isn’t operational yet, NASA scientists have been busy studying data from other sensors, including those on temperature and air pressure. Some interesting discoveries include the presence of gravity waves, the displacement of a fluid from its position of equilibrium. These are not to be confused with gravitational waves, which are disturbances in the curvature (fabric) of spacetime, and most commonly during the evenings. And in the last 72 hours, researchers measured infrasound waves with a period of only one-hundredth of a hertz over a period of 100 seconds — that’s several octaves well below the range of human hearing. According to a Forbes report, the infrasounds may be caused by a meteor crashing into the red planet’s atmosphere, a landslide, or airflow over an underlying stable local atmosphere.
The most surprising finding is a strange pattern in the air pressure data, which shows surface pressure dipping slightly twice a day, at around 7 AM and 7 PM local time. Ars Technica reports that NASA has ruled out causes linked to the sensor or heating source.
Three-day weather data for Mars at the site of InSight probe. Notice dips at 7 AM and 7 PM in air pressure section.
Credit: NASA,
Scientists think that this feature may be due to some atmospheric wave generated by the sunrise and sunset on Mars. Alternatively, downslope air flow passing by irregular topography might lead to brief atmospheric changes.
Perhaps this anomaly may be important in answering some questions regarding the formation of dust devils on Mars. These low-pressure whirlwinds can spin at up to nearly 60 miles an hours and reach colossal heights of 10 kilometers.
A dust storm ultimately sealed the fate of the iconic Opportunity rover, which was officially declared defunct last week. Most importantly, these atmospheric disturbances could threaten human lives when astronauts finally arrive on Mars. Before any boots touch Martian soil, NASA wants to understand what are the minimum winds required to lift dust off the surface in order to forecast dust storms and dust devils.
On a different note, NASA now also has an updated page where you can monitor the weather around InSight’s landing site at Elysium Planitia. This week temperatures varied between -17°C and -10°C (3°F and 15°F) during the day and hovered around -94°C (-140°F) during the night.
“What is clear is that it is a cylindrical object of two meters in length. No doubt it is not part of a terrestrial technology so it could be a sort of robotic probe programmed to monitor what happens on our planet.”
We’ll let you draw your own conclusions after watching videos that surfaced on YouTube recently – the first showing a high-speed cylindrical UFO and the second showing night-vision images of what appear to be orbs exiting from a hole or cave in the ground near where the first was taken in La Rioja in northern Spain. The source claims there are more. Let’s see if the next one is worth waiting for.
The videos come from YouTube channel Verdad Oculta (Hidden Truth) and the first was published on January 25, 2019. Taken by drone, it shows something flying by the camera at a high speed that most people would initially consider to be an insect. However, Verdad Oculta’s analysis puts it as being too big and too fast to be a bug and speculates that it could be “a new type of UFO that takes off from an extraterrestrial base hidden somewhere in Spain.” That’s an awfully big stretch from this one video that again, most would say is a bug or possibly CGI. Some comments refer to a “Utah drone video” which appears to be this one (see it here) posted on January 12 showing a similar UFO that similarly could be a bug or CGI.
Inspired by the excitement said to have been generated by the video (over 1 million views – not too shabby), Inexplicada reports this week that another crew of investigators led by Nacho Rojo met with the authors of the original video and visited the UFO site. There they found “La Grieta” (the Crack), a “vast” cavern “20 meters in length,” which mean either a diameter (big) or a circumference (not so big) of 65 feet which the authors were now saying was the origin point of the UFO. Not seeing anything during the day (but picking up some nice drone shots), this team set up infrared night vision cameras and … well, here’s what they said:
“(We captured) something no one was prepared to see. We couldn’t believe it. Not just one UFO, but two, and they crossed each other’s path in the sky. These are anomalies that shine like stars in a linear travel path, but they are not airplanes,” concludes the researchers, adding that “this is the first video-program of all the material we have, and believe me, the best is still to come.””
While not jumping to any conclusions, Nacho Rojo says “many have questioned the veracity of the recordings and many believe there is no extraterrestrial base. Our research points out the truly extraordinary nature of that place.”
Could these be something other than alien UFOs? The websiteplanetanovosti.com says this:
“According to experts, it could be orbs – energy entities from another dimension. The human eye can not notice these objects, while the equipment is under force. Orbs most often appear around similar dips. For example, they “chose” the Cave of the Swallows in Mexico. People who jump into such holes and shoot it on video, often notice mysterious lights on the recordings.”
As of this writing, there don’t seem to have been any more videos released and no reports of Spanish UFO investigators climbing into (or disappearing in) “La Grieta.” That’s usually not a good sign. Let’s hope the investigations continue (we’ll try and keep an eye out for them) and someone gets better evidence one way or the other. The orbs angle may bear more fruit than the alien base.
Aliens? Orbs? CGI? Something else? Are these alleged sightings being blown way out of proportion?
Now that the CIA has placed a trove of its dirty laundry online for all to see, all sorts of strange chapters of the intelligence agency’s past are beginning to be revealed. Since 2017, journalists and amateurs alike have been poring over the CIA’s CREST database in search of the truth about the many dark, twisted research projects and activities the Central Intelligence Agency has gotten into over the years.
Already, some interesting and somewhat unexplained things have been found. Earlier this month, files were discovered showing the CIA hunted the elusive Yeti and a mysterious “metallic disc” in the Nepalese Himalayas, while another set of files appeared to depict unexplained shadow people with curious numbers stamped on them. Who knows what else may be waiting to be discovered in the CREST databases?
This week, American government watchdog site Muckrock found an interesting set of documents outlining the CIA’s interest in and fears of psychic abilities. Many of the files describe experiments into telekinetic abilities conducted throughout the U.S., Europe, and the USSR, including experiments involving famous psychic Uri Geller. In many of these experiments, the files note, individuals were able to “evidence a new form of energy that moves and perhaps alters matter.” The documents claim that British scientists witnessed objects appearing or disappearing during some of these tests, leading to CIA fears that enemy psychics might create “poltergeist phenomena” in order to terrify and confuse their adversaries’ leadership with psychic attacks.
This aspect of the CIA’s research into possible uses of psychic phenomena is well-documented by our own Nick Redfern and others, but these documents show that the CIA’s fears went even deeper, involving worries that its greatest adversary at the time was developing psychic abilities that could be used as weapons which could cause “a massive change which will alter the direction, time, space and energy-matter relationship of our world.” Yikes.
According to these files, the CIA began tracking Soviet research into parapsychology in the 1970s. While some CIA analysts believe the KGB’s research may have been a counterintelligence ruse designed to confuse American spies, many elements of America’s intelligence agencies took the threat of Soviet psychic weapons seriously. Some analysts even feared that if enough Soviet psychics were combine their powers, they could potentially cause mass destruction with their minds:
With the above scientific speculation and laboratory experiments in mind, a weapon or weapons could be theorized. […] If we see awareness in a psychic framework and you concentrate ten individuals in one area – all of whom are evidencing disruptive telekinetic phenomena – do you cause a chain reaction, causing much matter to reverse direction and sink back into a sea of energy or be displaced in time and space? Could such a ‘critical mass’ affect a whole city?
Could such a psychic weapon exist? Have any actually been deployed? Would we know it if they were? Perhaps the “disruptive telekinetic phenomena” and mind manipulation mentioned in these files could explain our recent shift into a bizarre dystopian timeline.
While these files are a tantalizing glimpse behind the veil of government secrecy, I firmly believe that the really secret, spooky stuff will never see the light of day or was never documented on paper at all. Still, these CREST files are beginning to show that the many conspiracy theories and allegations made about the CIA’s paranormal research over the years are perhaps more true than we realize.
Yep, that probably is the strangest title I have ever applied to one of my articles. Back in 2005, I did some filming for a TV show on the world’s most famous UFO event. Yeah, you know the one: the desert, little bodies, 1947. That one. Roswell, New Mexico. Anyway, for some odd reason that I don’t think was ever really explained to me, the company chose to do the filming high in the mountains of Mexico. I actually wondered afterwards if they had mistaken Mexico for New Mexico. But regardless of the reasons behind the shoot-location, Mexico it was. And, for effect no doubt, the filming was done outside a small astronomical observatory that sat high in the mountains.
As the crew set up their equipment, I wandered around, looking for exotic lizards and a bar and something cold and potent to drink. Well, not long before we started filming, an American man – in his 50s or early 60s – strolled past, saw the cameras being set up, and engaged us in conversation. When he heard we there to film a show for a new mystery-based series, he asked – in totally casual terms – something like: “Oh, is it about the pterodactyl?” The what???!!! Yep, a pterodactyl. That got me much more interested than bloody Roswell ever could. It may surprise many to know that for absolutely years numerous reports of creatures sounding suspiciously like pterosaurs have surfaced from various parts of the worlds. Controversial? Of course!
Pteranodon
Consider the following: From 1982 to 1983, a wave of sightings of such a creature – presumed extinct for million of years – occurred in an area called the Pennines, also known as the “backbone of England.” It’s a story that, in much lengthier fashion, can collectively be found in Jenny Randles’ excellent 2002 book, Supernatural Pennines and in issue 9 of UFO Brigantia, a much-missed magazine of the 1980s and 1990s and which was edited and published by Andy Roberts.
There are also longstanding reports of sightings of such creatures in Papua New Guinea. Locally, the beasts are known as Ropen. Unlike the huge pterodactyls of yesteryear, today’s Ropen appears to be a scaled-down equivalent of its ancient ancestor. Its wingspan is often described as being in the region of four to six feet, which is not large for a pterosaur, since some of them were immense creatures. That does not stop today’s alleged equivalents from being formidable predators, however. By all accounts the Ropen has a mouth filled with vicious-looking fangs, a tail that is reptilian in appearance, and is a beast that can fly at fantastic speeds.
Back to the story…
So, I asked the man for more information. He explained he worked in the tourism industry and had heard – some two months earlier – a story of a visitor to the area who claimed to have seen a huge, leathery-looking flying monster only mere feet from where we were filming. I asked the man how he knew the exact location, and he replied along the lines of: “The guy said it was right above the observatory in the hills.” Which was exactly where we were filming. He proceeded to point to the direction of the mountains in which the monstrous creature disappeared. The man knew no more, went on his way, and I tried to think of something new and worthwhile to say for the cameras about Roswell. But to be filming a documentary on Roswell outside an astronomical observatory above which a pterodactyl was supposedly seen only mere months earlier was just plain surreal. I suppose I should not have been surprised though. I have come to learn over the years that there’s very little in this game that isn’t surreal!
Future moon settlers could produce all the water they need — by capturing solar winds.
Image via Pixabay.
Streams of charged particles propelled from the surface of the sun (known as ‘solar wind’) slam into the Moon’s surface every day. It’s not a gentle process — these particles reach speeds in excess of 450 kilometers per second (nearly 1 million miles per hour) — but it does enrich the lunar surface with the building blocks of water, a new study reports.
Water from a stone
“We think of water as this special, magical compound,” said William M. Farrell, a plasma physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, one of the study’s co-authors. “But here’s what’s amazing: every rock has the potential to make water, especially after being irradiated by the solar wind.”
The team ran a computer simulation to see what chemical changes take place in lunar rocks under the effect of solar winds.
Solar wind is basically a flow of protons. It continually blasts the Moon’s surface, breaking the bonds among molecules in regolith — lunar soil — pulling apart the atoms of silica (SiO2, basically sand) and iron oxides found within the majority of the Moon’s soil. Some of these protons also grab onto electrons in the lunar surface, producing hydrogen atoms. These atoms then work their way up through the regolith leeching the released oxygen. Together, hydrogen and oxygen make the molecule hydroxyl (OH), which is two-thirds of the water (H2O) molecule.
The findings should help further our goal of sending humans up to the Moon to establish a permanent presence there, says Orenthal James Tucker, a physicist at Goddard who led the research.
“We’re trying to learn about the dynamics of transport of valuable resources like hydrogen around the lunar surface and throughout its exosphere, or very thin atmosphere, so we can know where to go to harvest those resources,” he explains.
The research drew on infrared measurements performed on the lunar surface by several spacecraft — including NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, and India’s Chandrayaan-1. These readings offered us insight into the chemistry of the lunar surface, all of them finding evidence that water or its components — hydrogen and hydroxyl — were present in the regolith.
Exactly how such compounds wound up on the moon, however, was still a matter of debate. It was possible that they arrived on the back of meteorites impacting its surface, or that these impacts initiated the chemical reactions that created hydrogen, hydroxyl, and water. Tucker’s simulation, which traces the life cycle of hydrogen atoms on the Moon, supports the solar wind hypothesis.
“From previous research, we know how much hydrogen is coming in from the solar wind, we also know how much is in the Moon’s very thin atmosphere, and we have measurements of hydroxyl in the surface,” he says. “What we’ve done now is figure out how these three inventories of hydrogen are physically intertwined.”
The findings also helped us understand why spacecraft have found fluctuations in the amount of hydrogen in different regions of the Moon. All the hydrogen atoms created by solar wind bombardment eventually escape into space (since it’s much less dense than all other compounds). However, hydrogen tends to accumulate predominantly in the Moon’s colder areas since it gets energized by sunlight, making it escape much faster.
“The whole process is like a chemical factory,” Farrell said.
A key implication of the findings, Farrell said, is that every exposed body of silica in space — from the Moon down to a small dust grain — has the potential to create hydroxyl and thus become a chemical factory for water.
The paper ” Solar Wind Implantation Into the Lunar Regolith: Monte Carlo Simulations of H Retention in a Surface With Defects and the H 2 Exosphere” has been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
Pictured: one of Mary’s offspring in the aquarium at School of Life Sciences, University of Nottingham.
Credit: Laura Dean.
Stickleback fish (Gasterosteus aculeatus) make babies without having sex. Like most other fish, the female lays unfertilized eggs which the males later fertilize with sperm in the nest. But somehow, one such female got pregnant and produced offspring through an emergency C-section. The female, aptly named Mary, shows that evolution is fluid and that nature doesn’t always play by the rules.
“We were astounded at what we found when we examined Mary in our lab in the Outer Hebrides. She looked like an ordinary egg-bound fish so we couldn’t believe it when we found she had almost completely developed embryos inside her ovaries. This is pretty much unheard of in an egg laying species. The embryos were perfectly healthy, not deformed in any way, and most have gone on to live a normal adult lifespan,” Dr. Laura Dean, a researcher at the University of Nottingham and lead author of the new study, said.
This isn’t the first time that scientists have come across developing embryos inside unfertilized egg-laying fish. Previously, only two such cases were known to science and both also involved stickleback fish. This most recent case is even more striking because this time, the embryos survived and many of the pups grew into adults that are still alive today.
Researchers found Mary while surveying egg-bound sticklebacks in Scotland — and she wasn’t in great shape. She was swollen with her young and very close to dying. Researchers euthanized Mary with drugs and then opened her up to extract the eggs. A total of 56 eggs hatched and survived to adulthood inside a laboratory aquarium. Twenty of these individuals are still alive today, three years later, the authors wrote in the journal Scientific Reports.
VIDEO: Embryos moving showing beating hearts just before hatching.
Credit: University of Nottingham.
Stickleback males don’t just contribute sperm. They have an active parenting role, helping eggs develop by fanning them with their fins for two weeks until they hatch. But it seems like the environment inside Mary was good enough to ensure healthy embryo development.
“Although this almost accidental find revealed a vanishingly rare phenomenon, it might help us to understand a really important change that has happened throughout the tree of life,” Andrew MacColl, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Nottingham in England, said in a statement. “Most animals lay eggs, but some (including almost all mammals, but few fish) retain their eggs inside and give birth to live young. Although this appears to be a difficult thing to achieve in evolution, this one little fish seems to have got there almost by itself.”
As to how Mary got pregnant in the first place, that’s a mystery that might never be solved. Researchers thought that perhaps Mary had cloned herself or that maybe she was a hermaphrodite with both male and female sex organs. However, the authors ruled these two possibilities out since genetic testing showed that the offspring had versions of genes that could only have come from a father.
What probably happened is that Mary strayed by a nest where a male had just recently ejected sperm to fertilize normal eggs. Some of that sperm must have traveled up Mary’s egg tube, fertilizing some of the un-laid eggs inside her.
Researchers are now planning to go the site where they found Mary, hoping the catch similar specimens. Some fish, such as guppies pupfish, are livebearers and this ability may have evolved independently. In this regard, Mary may offer researchers with a glimpse of how such an evolutionary leap might occur.
The Most impressive UFO sighting of the last decades over area 51
The Most impressive UFO sighting of the last decades over area 51
For decades, a US military installation located approximately 161 kilometers north of Las Vegas has been one of the greatest secrets on the planet. We are talking aboutArea 51, a strange place where supposedly prototype tests of military spy planes are carried out, although it also has a certain relationship with extraterrestrials.(UFO sighting Area 51)
But in August 2013, secret information about Area 51 was finally declassified. The documents made references to Area 51 and detailed how the mysterious installation served as evidence for the CIA, the US Air Force and the aerospace company Lockheed. Even these documents included a map confirming their exact location. However, he mentioned absolutely nothing about experiments or extraterrestrial technology. This “revelation”It caused an earthquake in the conspiracy community, which publicly denounced how the government of the United States had eliminated this information in the disqualified documents thanks to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA for its acronym in English). But the reclassification did not prevent news and publications from continuing to spread, as in Area 51, tests were made with aircraft created with extraterrestrial technology.(UFO sighting Area 51)
As expected, the US government did not confirm any of that. Fortunately, and thanks to the Internet, we can already enjoy evidence that shows how Area 51 is much more than a simple military installation. As a recently published video, it clearly shows a UFO at an incredible speed near Area 51. And for many, it is the best sighting of the last decades.(UFO sighting Area 51)
The incredible UFO of Area 51
The drone pilots Sam Chortek and Jimmy Chappie were in the US city of Beaver, Utah, near Area 51, with the intention of filming an extensive video for a documentary. But when they reviewed the images, they discovered that they recorded something more than the simple landscape.(UFO sighting Area 51)
In the video you can clearly see a strange silver-colored object that suddenly appears from a mountain and passes in front of the drone. It moves at a speed so fast that the shape of the object seems to deform, which makes it difficult to identify it.
According to the OVNI File portal , this incident occurred in October 2016, and both Chortek and Chappie decided not to make it public. But they have changed their minds, since earlier this year they contacted Huffington Post journalist Brian Hanley , who normally covers content related to politics. After watching the video, he was so impressed with the UFO sighting that he shared it on his YouTube channel.
“Normally I cover politics, but when Sam Chortek and Jimmy Chappie came to see me with this exclusive material, I had to change the story,” explains Hanley. “This video has never been seen by anyone until now.”
And after its publication in social networks, many users said that it is one of the best videos of UFOs, not only of the last decades, but also of history . Some experts in the field have considered that it has a saucer shape, others consider that it seems to change shape, but it is clear that it takes a second to leave behind the mountain and then pass in front of the drone, so its speed oscillates between 750 and 800 kilometers per hour.(UFO sighting Area 51)
Although the skeptics have another opinion about the strange unidentified flying object. Because airspace near or over Area 51 is used for test flights and training missions, it could be an experimental aircraft. Sometimes the aircraft can be strange, maybe even not identifiable.
Skeptics point out that many UFO sightings near Area 51 are secret aircraft training exercises, both manned and unmanned. The other possibility offered by “non-believers” is that it is an image generated by a computer program or an insect. Although, as noted by the experts of the UFO File , it can be clearly seen that the mysterious object turns and performs impossible movements , ruling out that it is an insect.
It is a really impressive video, and certainly the strange object does not look like any known aircraft and no insect. And if we discard the possibility that it is a computer generated image, we are facing one of the best UFO videos in history. Now we only need to know your opinion.
Is it the best UFO video in history? Or do you have another explanation?
Voor de kust van Cape Brett, bij het Nieuw-Zeelandse Noordereiland, filmde duiker Ben Laurie (21) een enorm wezen van maar liefst tien meter lang. “Het leek op een soort condoom of buis die dreef in het getij”, vertelt Laurie. “Een deel van mij wilde dichterbij en het aanraken, maar ik was ongerust dat het mogelijk giftig was, dus ik hield afstand.”
Het bleek een pyrosome die opdoemde uit de diepte. Die bestaat uit honderden tot duizenden manteldieren die samengehouden worden in een gelatine-achtige cilindrische of conische structuur. De wezens zijn zelden te zien omdat ze doorgaans heel diep leven.
Honderden fotografen en natuurliefhebbers trekken dezer dagen naar Yosemite National Park in de Amerikaanse staat Californië, want daar is deze week de zogenaamde “firefall” te bewonderen. Tussen december en april ontstaat langs de berg El Capitan een tijdelijke waterval door smeltende sneeuw. Als die waterval in februari al stroomt, zorgt de ondergaande zon voor een lichtspektakel met een bijzonder effect.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETEen team van Britse archeologen heeft achterhaald waar een aantal van de massieve stenen vandaan komen waaruit Stonehenge is opgebouwd, een van de bekendste monumenten van Groot-Brittannië. Dat staat deze week te lezen in het wetenschappelijk tijdschrift Antiquity.
De blauwe hardsteen – genoemd naar de blauwgrijze kleur – zou uit twee steengroeven komen in het westen van Wales en over een afstand van maar liefst 290 kilometer versleept zijn. Daarvoor werden houten sledes gebruikt, die voortgetrokken werden door teams van sterke mannen.
Chemische studies hadden eerder al aan het licht gebracht dat de stenen ergens uit de Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire moesten komen omdat dat type gesteente alleen daar te vinden is, maar de precieze plaats was nog niet ontdekt. Tot nu dus.
Archeologische opgravingen in 2014 en 2016 brachten 5.000 jaar oude houtskool en stenen werktuigen aan het licht in de steengroeven van Carn Goedog en Craig Rhos-y-felin. Op sommige plekken was het houtskool vermengd met modder en stenen om platformen te vormen, die gebruikt werden om massieve blokken op te laden.
Het uitgraven gebeurde rond 3.000 voor Christus – 5.000 jaar geleden dus – uit gesteente dat miljoenen jaren geleden gevormd was door grote blokken versteend magma die in de loop der eeuwen afsleten. Het uitgraven zou overigens vrij eenvoudig gegaan zijn. (lees hieronder verder)
University College LondonDe steengroeve van Carn Goedog.
Het gesteente had al de vorm van verticale zuilen, die door breuken gescheiden werden. In de breuken werden wiggen gedreven, waarna de stenen er met behulp van touwen en eenvoudig werkgerei konden worden uitgehaald als een losse tand. Met lasso’s rond de bovenkant werden de gevaartes van bovenuit neergelaten. De blokken van bijna 2 meter hoog en 2 tot 4 ton zwaar werden vervolgens op de sledes geladen en weggesleept.
De blokken werden in Salisbury Plain gebruikt om de binnenste ring van Stonehenge te vormen. De structuren van twee verticale stenen met daarbovenop een horizontale werden errond gezet. Dat zou 500 jaar later gebeurd zijn. En de zandstenen zouden een meer lokale origine gehad hebben. Waar die precies vandaan komen, is nog niet duidelijk.
Mensen
Opmerkelijk: de mensen die begraven zijn in Stonehenge kwamen waarschijnlijk uit dezelfde regio als de stenen. De resten bevatten namelijk isotopen uit de buurt van de steengroeven in Wales.
Volgens auteur en archeoloog Michael Parker Pearson van het University College Londen zou het monument een symbool geweest zijn dat de Britse stammen moest verenigen tijdens een periode dat het economisch en demografisch slecht ging. “Het zal gemeenschappen samengebracht hebben die uit elkaar aan het groeien waren”, zegt hij.
A few months ago, NASA held a conference on ways to detect artificial “technosignatures” of alien life, byproducts of civilization like radio waves, pollutants, and garbage. They seem to be taking the search for extraterrestrials seriously and have announced the creation of anew department dedicated to the search for alien life.
The department, called the Center for Life Detection Sciences (CLDS), is composed of scientists from inside NASA and from outside institutions including Georgetown University and Georgia Tech. The goal of CLDS is, in their words, to answer the question “are we alone?” CLDS principle investigator Tori Hoehler says:
“We now have the scientific and engineering expertise to address this profound question with the clarity of scientific evidence — and we have a great community of scientists ready for that grand challenge.”
Acknowledging that alien life probably won’t look like a spacier version of life on Earth, the CLDS says it aims to investigate all possibilities of alien life, noting that extraterrestrial life may not look like anything we would even recognize. According to Hoehler:
“The search for life beyond Earth cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach.
To give ourselves the best shot at success, we need to develop tools and strategies that are tailored to detecting life in the unique conditions of other worlds, which are very different not only from Earth but also from each other.”
Another CLDS investigator, Sarah Stewart Johnson of Georgetown University, defines the goal of her team as finding “life as we don’t know it.” It’s good to know that scientists are finally coming to grips with the idea that alien life might be far weirder than we can imagine. That’s a long ways from the earlier attempts at contact that included things like launching a gold record into space with an avant-garde sound collage on it, hoping that it made sense.
That weird alien life may be closer than we think too. Recent surveys of the planets and moons in our solar system have shown enticing leads in the search for life. The subsurface oceans of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter are the most likely candidates, but other work has shown that there may still be life on Mars, or even on the boiling hot surface of Venus.
The Center for Life Detection Sciences will start small, with only a few teams to lay the groundwork, but they say that as the project matures, more scientists from broader fields will be added.
NASA is still operating the SETI project which scans the skies for radio waves of unknown extraterrestrial origin. Alien radio waves have been in the news again lately as the second anomalous “fast radio burst” was observed coming from the same source in January of this year. The website TechnoSearch archives the data from SETI and is open to the public and allows users to submit their own searches and keep the data updated.
It seems NASA is actually invested in the search for alien life. Perhaps they have some leads they haven’t shared with the public yet. Or perhaps it’s all just a red-herring. Either way it’s exciting to be living in a time when the search for alien life is treated seriously. Who knows, we might get a picture of a weird space whale sometime in the near future.
Some cases within the world of cryptozoology, UFOlogy, and the paranormal have managed to become almost legendary in their fields. These are the rockstar cases that seem to have defied all attempts to dispute or debunk them, refusing to die and managing to live on and even transcend mere eyewitness reports to become legendary. One such case that is as well known and persistent as it is mysterious is that of a very strange creature that appeared one evening in a small U.S. town amid stories of a UFO landing, and would go on to catapult itself into the annals of great cases of the paranormal.
The setting for this very bizarre tale is the small rural town of Flatwoods in Braxton County, West Virginia. It is a quiet town pretty much in the middle of nowhere, where everyone knows each other and not much typically happens, but on September 12, 1952, all that would change, and the peace would be disrupted by a world changing event for them. On this evening, at around 7:15 PM, brothers Edward and Fred May were outside playing a friendly game of football when they were surprised to see what looked like a pulsating, blazing ball of fire go streaking across the sky to come down and seemingly crash in some hilly woods at a nearby farm owned by a G. Bailey Fisher.
Not quite believing what they had just witnessed, the excited boys ran to the house of a neighbor named Kathleen May, to whom they breathlessly told of what they had seen. May gathered up a flashlight and called together a group of people composed of local children Neil Nunley and Ronnie Shaver, as well as 17-year-old West Virginia National Guardsman Eugene Lemon, to go investigate the area where the strange ball of fire had gone down, along with Lemon’s dog. As they followed the beam of the flashlight out into the night past the dancing, flickering trees they still had no idea what they were dealing with or what to expect out there, and there was a sense of apprehension and even fear as they stumbled along up a hill on the farm. Little did they know that things were about to get very bizarre indeed.
When they reached the top of the wooded hill they could see through the trees what seemed to be a pulsating red light, and they were overcome by a sudden, nauseating metallic stench that they would later describe as a “pungent mist.” In the meantime, the dog snarled and barked before retreating with its tail between its legs, leaving them stabbing about in the darkness with the flashlight beam, searching for whatever it was that he chased the animal away. As they peered through the darkness trying to make out just what the light ahead was and what lie out there in the gloom, they could see glinting in the light of the flashlight what looked like the shining eyes of some nocturnal animal, but it soon became apparent that this was no animal any of them had ever seen before.
The mysterious eyes seemed to be set within a massive humanoid figure standing around 10 feet tall, with a round, fiery red face with glowing yellow eyes set within it, framed in some sort of hood or cowl shaped like “the ace of spades” embedded with flickering lights, and possessing small clawed hands, and a dark green, possibly black cylindrical body with what appeared to be folds upon it like some sort of draped fabric or molded metal, the whole of which was wreathed in some mist or fog. None of them got much of a chance to examine it for too long, because after a few moments whatever the entity was emitted “something between a hiss and a high-pitched squeal,” and then glided right towards them with a “thumping, throbbing noise” to send the terrified witnesses running for their lives down the hill, dropping the flashlight in the process to send them into near total darkness. Upon returning home they would all experience severe nausea, swelling of the throat, and even convulsions, compared with the symptoms of mustard gas by the doctor who examined them.
The next day, local law enforcement checked out the site of the purported incident, but were unable to find any corroborating evidence for anything the group said they had seen. There was no trace of any pulsing light, no sign of the creature or its odiferous stench, and nothing at all to suggest anything out of the ordinary. That was the official consensus, but of course word got out and it was not long at all before the media was stoking the fires of UFO rumors by claiming that signs of a landing, such as “skid marks” and an “odd, gummy deposit,” as well as strange pieces of a plastic like material, had been found at the scene by a reporter named A. Lee Stewart, Jr., and it was also discovered that numerous people in the area had also seen an object streak across the sky on the night in question. The case took off as a real UFO landing, and the media went with it, splashing it all over newspapers as various UFO enthusiasts and paranormal investigators descended on the area as well, including esteemed Fortean writers Gray Barker, Ivan T. Sanderson, and John Keel arriving to investigate.
Various strange accounts began to come out of the woodwork at the time, such as one woman who claimed to have seen the same monster that had been described just a few weeks before, and another witness who said that her house had reverberated and been shaken by some mysterious force on the night in question. Another report came from a couple who claimed that just hours after the original sighting they had been driving down the highway when they had noticed a horrible metallic smell and been assaulted with what felt like an electrical charge, before witnessing an otherworldly reptilian creature float across the road in front of them.
There were other odd accounts as well. Mrs. May would claim that the day after the incident she had been approached at her home by two mysterious men who said they were reporters and had asked to be shown the site, after which they would emerge from the trees with strange oily stains on their clothes. In later years even more strange accounts would surface, such as a commander of the West Virginia National Guard named Captain Dale Leavitt, who in the 1990s would say that he had examined the area with 50 Air Force personnel after the “crash” and find an oily substance and a mysterious “6m circle of depressed grass.”
There would also turn out to have been numerous other sightings of UFOs on the night of September 12 across several states. Indeed, in an account compiled by investigator Frank Feschino, Jr. in 2004, there would be hundreds of reports of unidentified flying objects and landings reported on from the same night as the incident. Adding to all of this were the odd physical symptoms reported by the witnesses and their doctors, as well as the subsequent strange death of the dog who had been with them, which allegedly began vomiting uncontrollably and dropped dead for no clear reason. All things told, the weird incident sparked UFOmania in the small rural town, and many were convinced that what had been seen was an actual alien spacecraft landing and its unearthly occupant. Indeed, Ivan T. Sanderson was sure that this was the case, and that the numerous other UFO reports from the same time frame implied perhaps a whole fleet of the objects passing the area.
In the years after the Flatwoods encounter the original witnesses would stick by their story, insisting on what they had seen, and it became one of the most famous alien encounters in the annals of the paranormal. So what was it they saw out there? What was that light, the noxious odor, and indeed that looming, glowing eyed beast? What connection did this have to the lights that so many people saw shooting across the sky on that same exact evening? Just what is going on with the case of the Flatwoods Monster? That depends a lot on who you ask.
A very persuasive skeptical argument is that the whole mysterious event is the result of a unique convergence of a mixture of misidentification and coincidence. In this theory the light, or lights as the case is often described, was perhaps a meteor, which was mistakenly thought to have crashed behind that wooded hill by the witnesses. There were indeed many people who reported the light seen as not a UFO, but as a meteor, so perhaps the witnesses saw this celestial event and jumped to a different conclusion. They then warily went up that dark hill in a state of fear, the atmosphere made more ominous by a blanket of fog that was covering the area at the time. In this state of dread, they saw one of the three aircraft warning hazard beacons in the area visible from that hill, and considering the meteor they had seen mistook it for a UFO.
But what about the horrible monster they saw, you ask? The skeptical take on it is that this was no monster at all, but rather a large barn owl perched atop a high branch. In the murky darkness, with fear pervading the air and low visibility and that sinister light visible through the trees, the witnesses misidentified the owl and its perch as being part of a single entity. The owl, just as startled as the witnesses, had then flown off past them into the night, letting out one of the bird’s distinctive shrill cries in the process. In their panic and surprise, the witnesses had mistaken it for an alien entity flying towards them, sending them running. Many of the features of a barn owl match up with the description of the creature, and looking at artistic representations comparing the monster and an owl it is easy to see the similarities, especially considering that they had only seen it fleetingly for a few moments in dim lighting before fleeing in terror.
This all seems to make sense so far, but then we are left to ask just what about the other evidence found, such as the oily residue and the strange track marks? Some have pointed out that these tracks could have been caused by a tractor that was in the area at around the time of the sighting, the oil perhaps leaking from it, or even from the truck of a local man who had gone driving through hoping to see the creature. The foul odor had been suggested as being exuded by a type of grass native to the area with a distinctive smell. And the negative physical symptoms are claimed by skeptics to have been simply caused by deep fear and over exertion. Skeptic Joe Nickell wrote a whole deconstruction of the case for the Skeptical Enquirer, which you can read here, and it is so convincing that even many paranormal researchers and UFOlogists have conceded that this is probably what actually happened.
Joe Nickell’s sketch comparing a barn owl and the alleged “monster”
It certainly seems to be open and shut when looking at all of the clues and evidence that this may have just been one big misunderstanding seen through the lens of anxiety and fear, later sensationalized by the media and embellished with countless books and articles in the lore of the paranormal. Yet there are many who think that the case is far from solved, pointing out that there are still aspects that don’t fit in neatly with the skeptical theory, such as the pulsing quality of the “meteor” and the fact that a whole group of people saw the creature and maintained that it was no owl.
Whatever the answer may be, whether this was some alien entity or the product of misidentification and overactive imaginations, the tale of the Flatwoods Monster still gets plenty of play in paranormal circles, and is still talked about and debated to this day. It has become such a legendary case that the town of Flatwoods has a museum dedicated to the creature and an annual weekend festival to commemorate it called “Flatwoods Days,” which features live music, and food and craft vendors. There is even a sign on the road leading into town that reads “Welcome to Flatwoods / Home of the Green Monster,” so it seems that whatever the Flatwoods Monster was or wherever it went, it has been ingrained in the town’s culture and in the world of Forteana, and in a sense is here to stay.
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Golden Sphere and Disc-shaped UFOs photographed over Mexico, Hawaii, Utah and Albert
Golden Sphere and Disc-shaped UFOs photographed over Mexico, Hawaii, Utah and Albert
Case 1:Golden sphere with transparent shield photographed near Roswell, New Mexico
Witness:
I was enjoying a bright sunny spring day, in an area not frequented by people. I was enjoying a small waterfall and sitting down in a bowl shaped hill, hidden from a nearby road.
I heard 2 small short sounds that I noted were different that the other sounds I had been enjoying. Like whoosh-whoosh, displaced air.
Something inside me broke through and said "look behind you very fast" like an animalistic response. I looked over my left shoulder and saw a glowing golden orb, perhaps a little bigger that a grapefruit.
It had a transparent shield or covering that was reflecting the very green grass of the hills around me.
I observed it travel over the horizon. I saw it for perhaps 4 seconds. I immediately tried to rationalize it saying "well that was done of course" but something in me said "No. That was not like any drone I'd ever seen"
Case 2: Flying Saucer appears above Ala Moana Center, Honolulu, Hawaii
The witness:
we were standing on the Alo Moana veranda watching the sunset and the different hues, when we sighted this object appear for approx. 10 seconds in which I had enough time to go inside get my camera and take the picture.
Then in a brief second this object disappeared in no certain direction.as you zoom in on this picture you will see port windows alongside.
Case 3: Disc-shaped UFO photographed over Provo, Utah
Witness:
While driving east of Provo Utah driving by fire in mountains no one could stop I took 8 pictures and had 2 pictures with a object in them.
Case 4: Two possible cloaked flying saucers photographed by plane passenger over Alberta
Plane passenger: we were at cruising altitude of 41,000 ft, Edmonton to Victoria , still over Alberta only about 5 minutes out due West (take-ff slowed by de-icing prior to the flight)
My camera makes object appear smaller, these were definitely larger objects though distant from my perspective on a jet. I definitely know they were much much larger than the craft I was flying on. Or any craft that we can fly on.
These objects were large in size and unusual shape.
I have submitted the 3 consecutive photos , all taken within second showing both objects, one dissolving and then both gone- these photos were literally within seconds of each other as quick as my camera would allow me to photo them. Photos are raw images as taken by my cell phone, an Iphone 7.
All witnesses have submitted their images to Mufon for further investigation.
UFO Attack: Five Extraterrestrials Petrified 23 Russian Soldiers
UFO Attack: Five Extraterrestrials Petrified 23 Russian Soldiers
23 Russian soldiers lost their lives during a UFO attack in Siberia. The CIA declassified report describes this event as a “horrific picture of revenge on the part of extraterrestrial creatures, a picture that makes one’s blood freeze”. The frightful information was one of the many published online by the CIA. Chiefly, it involves a horrible event about a UFO alien attack which turned into stone 23 Russian soldiers.
This infamous report, created on March 27, 1993, is a translation of a report from the Ukrainian newspaper Ternopil vechirniy.
Namely, this newspaper claims that after Mikhail Gorbachev lost his leadership, many KGB files ended up in CIA.
Among them, allegedly there was a 250-page portfolio on the strange UFO attack. The report included pictures and witness statements as well.
The declassified CIA report which indeed contains shocking claims.
The report explains how a low flying saucer rose up a military unit in Siberia. One of the Russian soldiers fired a missile in the air, which shut it down.
It said: “Five short humanoids with large heads and large black eyes got out.”
There were two other soldiers, among the other 23, who survived the incident. They described that after the UFO got down, five eerie creatures blended into a huge glowing ball that buzzed and fizzed. Following this, there was a huge explosion which petrified 23 Russian soldiers who were curiously observing the shocking event.
The report said: “The KGB report goes on to say that the remains of the ‘petrified soldiers’ were transferred to a secret research institution near Moscow.”
Experts strongly believe that an unknown source turned the whole living structure of the soldiers into stone. A CIA representative stated: “If the KGB file corresponds to reality, this is an extremely menacing case.”
However, we have to admit one thing. If this is true than extraterrestrials own technology that goes beyond our imagination.
And while there are certainly many doubts regarding the report, one of the biggest enigmas is why the CIA held a translation of the Ukrainian newspaper report.
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Military Computer Hacker Proves A “Space Force” Existed Long Before Donald Trump
Military Computer Hacker Proves A “Space Force” Existed Long Before Donald Trump
IN BRIEF
The Facts:
In 2002, Gary McKinnon hacked the Pentagon and Department of Defence in the largest publicly disclosed military computer hack of all time. He discovered strange 'off world' findings that hint the existence of a space force before Trump.
Reflect On:
Do we really live in a democracy when transparency doesn't exist? How can we know what's really going on? Is reality far different than what we are presented with? Why is our world plagued with secrecy?
Donald Trump’s presidency has been one of the best opportunities for the collective to see into how politics has been working all of these years. Regardless of what you think of him, he’s an outsider who has threatened the interests of many powerful bodies like the pharmaceutical companies, and other corporations that control federal regulatory agencies like the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency).
He’s legalized hemp, appears to be taking action steps to combat sex trafficking, and is trying his best to pull out of Syria. The American empire has always enforced their will on other countries for ulterior motives, and have, for decades, used lies in order to infiltrate foreign lands and governments for their own purposes. It’s not just America, it’s the entire Western Military-Industrial Complex, the ‘powers that be’ who completely control nations.
To some extent Trump may be compromised and compelled to play a part in that agenda, but so far it seems he’s been a disruptor more than anything. This is why mainstream media is constantly jumping on every opportunity to vilify him. If you think he has been widely criticized because he is truly ‘racist’ or ‘sexist,’ you may be missing the boat. This post from Richard Dolan right after the 2016 election is still one of the best explanations as to why Donald Trump continues to be incessantly disparaged by mainstream media.
Trump Sought To Create An Independent Space Force
The creation of a ‘Space Force’ announced by Trump several months ago is another great example of how Trump is making waves with the established order.
Prior to Trump announcing it, the House Armed Services Committee voted to break off the United Air Force Space Command from under the US Air Force, leading to the creation of a new independent branch called the US Space Corps. It would be the first new military branch created in the U.S. since 1947, and would make America the only nation with a branch of military publicly known to be dedicated solely to space.
A lot of work and planning was put into this shift in power over the space command. As Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL), Chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces stated, “This is an issue the subcommittee has studied for months and I can’t even tell you how many meetings with space experts and leaders [Democratic Rep.] Jim [Cooper] and I have had on this subject.”
It’s Not Independent Yet
However, recent developments that are now making their rounds around the internet state that Trump is expected to sign an order that directs the Defense Department to establish a U.S. Space Force as a sixth branch of the armed forces, but remaining within the Department of the Air Force.
Previously, Trump had stated that the ‘Space Force’ would be a new division alongside the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard. However, it seems things have changed and the desire to wrest this unit away from the Air Force has failed–for now. As Space News points out:
The Pentagon is wrapping up a legislative proposal and budget request for fiscal year 2020 that it will submit to the White House for approval. The proposal recommends creating a Space Force with its own four-star chief of staff and a civilian undersecretary of space under the umbrella of the Department of the Air Force. This setup, however, is only a “first step toward a future military department for national security space,”
says a draft of Space Policy Directive-4. A copy of the draft labeled “predecisional” was reviewed by SpaceNews.
Time will tell if Trump will actually be able to establish a Space Force as its own military department in the future.
The Secret Space Program
While this would be the first known government department to be solely devoted to space, it’s important to note that the United States has a history of government agencies existing in secret for years. The National Security Agency (NSA) was founded in 1952, but its existence was hidden until the mid 1960’s. Even more secretive is the National Reconnaissance Office, which was founded in 1960 but remained completely secret for 30 years.
Not all information is made public, especially when it comes to space activities. This was made clear by the Pentagon’s recent disclosure of a secret program that they were running to track unidentified flying objects in and around our atmosphere. The cost of this program was $22 million, but deeper research into black budget programs reveals that they have been taking in multiple trillions of dollars. This is not debatable. You can read more about that and examine the sources here and here.
It is ironic that the U.S. should be fighting monstrously expensive wars allegedly to bring democracy to those countries, when it itself can no longer claim to be called a democracy when trillions, and I mean thousands of billions of dollars have been spent on projects which both congress and the commander in chief know nothing about.
– Paul Hellyer, Ex Canadian Defense Minister
You can read more about that and the latest updates on ‘mainstream UFO disclosure’ in an article I published about it here approximately 8 months ago.
Strange happenings in space came to light more than a decade ago, when the largest military computer hack ever was made known to the public. A man by the name of Gary McKinnon was charged with causing $700,000 dollars worth of damage to government computer systems. He hacked the Pentagon, Department of Defense and Air Force computers. Gary faced extradition to the United States for 10 years, but was eventually given other punishments. His story was receiving mainstream media attention, and perhaps an extradition would have brought unwanted attention to what Gary found. As with most disclosures, Mainstream Media focused on the crime rather than the provocative information that was discovered.
According to Mckinnon, he found a list of “non-terrestrial off-world officers” of rank. He was unable to tell what department of the military they represented. He also found multiple pictures of UFOs and lists of “fleet-to fleet transfers” of materials from ship to ship. You can watch an interview with Gary in this article we published years ago.
Dealing With Extraterrestrials
One of the main reasons for developing a ‘space force,’ and to keep a ‘secret space program’ is, in my opinion, to deal with the extraterrestrial/UFO phenomenon. These ‘secret’ agencies within our government have been quite involved with this phenomenon, while at the same time, for decades, they’ve been actively engaged in concealing by subversion and ridicule.
Behind the scenes, high ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.”
- Former head of CIA, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, 1960 (source)
Unfortunately the actual protocols, according to Paul Hellyer, are often to ‘shoot first and ask questions after.’ There is a lot of evidence for this. Dr. David Clarke is an investigative journalist, reader and lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University in England, who was also the curator National Archive UFO project from 2008–13. He uncovered files that reveal the UK was “desperate to capture this technology – wherever it came from – before the Russians or the Chinese got hold of it first.” You can read more about that here.
According to Hermann Oberth, one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics, “flying saucers are real and…they are space ships from another solar system. I think that they possibly are manned by intelligent observers who are members of a race that may have been investigating our Earth for centuries.” (source 1)(source 2)
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. That it behooves us, in case some of these people in the future or now should turn hostile, to find out 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)
Below is an excellent lecture by Richard Dolan that elaborates upon the idea I’m referring to above. This issue/topic goes far beyond Donald Trump and what we are spoon-fed by mainstream media. Transparency left this world long ago, and it’s slowly returning as more people start to become aware that all is not as it’s been presented to us. This shift in thinking alone is contributing to changing our human experience from one of secrecy to one of transparency. If you’d like to read more articles about the UFO/extraterrestrial phenomenon, you can visit the disclosure section of our website and sift through them, they’re all archived there.
The Takeaway
What we are seeing here is a battle between powers within the US Government to control space. Prior to Trump’s arrival, it seems (based on my research), that the secret space program was in the hands of the Deep State. What we’ve observed here at CE is that Donald Trump, and those he works with, seem to be in somewhat of a battle with this Deep State, which would explain his disclosure and initiation of a space force, when it’s quite clear that one has already been in existence.
The realization that we are not alone has huge implications and the disclosure of this information would leave no aspect of humanity untouched.
The Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) telescope is quickly making good on its promise.
The Netherlands-based array picks up low radio frequencies, including the traces of radiation that form when galaxies merge. Now, an international team of scientists has published the first research made possible by LOFAR — and it adds 300,000 previously unknown galaxies to our map of the universe.
Data Flush
On Tuesday, the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics published a special edition dedicated to 26 research papers produced from LOFAR’s first space survey.
Because LOFAR can detect low radio frequenciesinvisible to other telescopes, it was able to record huge quantities of previously undetectable data during its survey of the sky — about 10 million DVDs worth. According to Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) researcher Timothy Shimwell, processing that data to generate maps featuring these 300,000 additional galaxies was a team effort.
“We have been working together with SURF in the Netherlands to efficiently transform the massive amounts of data into high-quality images,” he said in a press release. “These images are now public and will allow astronomers to study the evolution of galaxies in unprecedented detail.”
Next Up
Astronomers are likely to use the new map to study black holes.
“If we take a radio telescope and we look up at the sky, we see mainly emission from the immediate environment of massive black holes,” Leiden University researcher Huub Röttgering said in the press release. “With LOFAR we hope to answer the fascinating question: where do those black holes come from?”
Others might use the new images to support research on magnetic fields or the relationships between galaxies — and ultimately, ASTRON Director General Carole Jackson sees nothing but potential for the new maps.
“This sky map will be a wonderful scientific legacy for the future,” she said in the press release. “It is a testimony to the designers of LOFAR that this telescope performs so well.”
Archaeologists Discover a Long-lost Illyrian City ‘Mistaken for Natural Rocks’ in Albania
Archaeologists Discover a Long-lost Illyrian City ‘Mistaken for Natural Rocks’ in Albania
Polish archaeologists have uncovered a long-lost city, in north-east Albania according toScience in Poland . The city was found unexpectedly, and it is believed to be the ancient Illyrian city of Bassania. This discovery is generating a great deal of excitement among archaeologists because it can provide insights into the once mighty Illyrian civilization that dominated much of the Balkans in Antiquity.
Who Were the Illyrians?
The Illyrians were a powerful group of tribes who were the preeminent power in the western Balkans for several centuries. They had many contacts with the Greeks and they were influenced to an extent by the culture of their southern neighbors. The Illyrian region was usually divided into several kingdoms who struggled for supremacy with each other. In 168 BC, the Romans defeated and captured the powerful Illyrian king, Gendaius and they created a series of client republics in his kingdom. The area eventually became a province of the Roman Empire and the local Illyrian culture was over time Romanized. According to the Britannica Encyclopaedia , Illyria ‘became a principal military bulwark of Rome and its culture in the ancient world’.
Bassania was known to historians mainly through the work of the great Roman historian Livy. In the historian’s account, the city was a very important one in the last Illyrian kingdom and was an important fortress. The city was destroyed by the Romans in 168 BC and it was presumed that it was later abandoned, its exact location forgotten.
The city, which was located on some hills, had been lost for so many centuries because its ruins have been mistaken for natural rocks. After centuries of erosion, the stone remnants of the city’s surviving walls were so weathered that they looked like natural stones. There are no traveler or local accounts of the ruins and they were completely forgotten despite the scale of the site. This may have helped to preserve the ruins of Bassania, which was entirely forgotten - unlike nearby ancient Shkoder another Illyrian settlement.
In May, a Polish team of archaeologists from the Antiquity of South-eastern Europe Research Centre of the University of Warsaw, led by Professor Piotr Dyczek, re-discovered Bassania. In a routine dig, they discovered part of its walls and a gateway, made of well-made blocks of hewn stones. The gate was flanked by two bastions and the walls were 3 meters (10 feet) wide, whose spaces were packed with clay and stones.
Cut rock were used to construct substantial walls.
After a survey of the site, it was established that Bassania was larger than ancient Shkoder and its walls encircled an area of approximately twenty acres. This indicates that the city had a large population and was an important urban center in Illyria.
During the investigation of the site, the Polish team discovered coins, pottery and ceramic vessels near the walls. The style of these would indicate that they are from the third to first century BC and shows that the city was part of the Illyrian kingdom that would later be annexed by Rome. An investigation of the site showed that it was constructed in a manner that was undoubtedly influenced by the Hellenistic kingdoms to the south. According to Science in Poland , the walls and gateway of Bassania are ‘typical for Hellenistic defensive structures’.
The Polish team began an intensive investigation of the site and they soon established that the city was abandoned much later than thought. Research in recent years has indicated that Bassania was only abandoned late in the reign of Emperor Augustus (1 st century AD). The initial archaeological investigation would support the view that the city was occupied much longer than previously believed.
Rediscovering Bassania
The rediscovery of Bassania is one that allows archaeologists and other experts to gain a better understanding of ancient Illyria. The city which had largely been forgotten will yield up its secrets and allow us to have a better understanding of the Illyrians and how they became Romanized. One of the most exciting aspects of the discovery of the lost city is that it raises the prospect that there are many more Illyrian ruins waiting to be rediscovered.
Top image: Discovery of an ancient city in Albania. Source: M. Lemke/ Science in Poland
Colonizing the moon, and beyond, has always being a human aspiration. Technological advancements, and the discovery of a considerable source of water close to the lunar poles, has made this idea even more appealing.
But how close is China to actually achieving this goal?
If we focus on the technology currently available, China could start building a base on the Moon today.
The first lunar base would likely be an unmanned facility run by automated robotics — similar to Amazon warehouses — to ensure that the necessary infrastructures and support systems are fully operational before people arrive.
The lunar environment is susceptible to deep vacuum conditions, strong temperature fluctuations and solar radiation, among other conditions hostile to humans. More importantly, we have yet to fully understand the long term impact on the human body of being in space, and on the Moon.
Seeds taken to the Moon by the Chang'e-4 mission have now reportedly sprouted. This is the first time plants have been grown on the Moon, paving the way for a future food farm on the lunar base.
Building a lunar base is no different than building the first oil rig out in the ocean. The logistics of moving construction parts must be considered, feasibility studies must be conducted and, in this case, soil samples must be tested.
China has taken the first step by examining the soil of the lunar surface. This is necessary for building an underground habitat and supporting infrastructure that will shield the base from the harsh surface conditions.
3D printed everything
Of all the possible technologies for building a lunar base, 3D printing offers the most effective strategy. 3D printing on Earth has revolutionized manufacturing productivity and efficiency, reducing both waste and cost.
China's vision is to develop the capability to 3D print both inside and outside of the lunar base. 3D printers have the potential to make everything from daily items, like drinking cups, to repair parts for the base.
But 3D printing in space is a real challenge. It will require new technologies that can operate in the micro gravity environment of the Moon. 3D printing machines that are able to shape parts in the vacuum of space must be developed.
We know that Earth materials, such as fibre optics, change properties once they are in space. So materials that are effective on Earth, might not be effective on the Moon.
Whatever the intended use of the 3D printed component, it will have to be resistant to the conditions of lunar environment. So the development of printing material is crucial. Step-by-step, researchers are finding and developing new materials and technologies to address this challenge.
On a larger scale we have seen houses being 3D printed on Earth. In a similar way, the lunar base will likely be built using prefabricated parts in combination with large-scale 3D printing.
Examples of what this might look like can be seen to entries in the 3D printed habitat challenge, which was started by NASA in 2005. The competition seeks to advance 3D printing construction technology needed to create sustainable housing solutions for Earth, the Moon, Mars and beyond.
NASA's Habitat Challenge: Team Gamma showing their habitat design.
So far, we've focused on the technological feasibility of building a lunar base, but we also need to consider the long term effect of lunar living on humans. To date, limited studies have been conducted to examine the the biological impact on human physiology at the cellular level.
We know that the human organs, tissues and cells are highly responsive to gravity, but an understanding of how human cells function and regenerate is currently lacking.
What happens if the astronauts get sick? Will medicine from Earth still work? If astronauts are to live on the Moon, these fundamental questions need to be answered.
In the long term, 3D bioprinting of human organs and tissues will play a crucial role in sustaining lunar missions by allowing for robotic surgeries. Russia recently demonstrated the first 3D bioprinter to function under microgravity.
Can China build a lunar base? Absolutely. Can human beings survive on the Moon and other planets for the long term? The answer to that is less clear.
What is certain is that China will use the next 10 to 15 years to develop the requisite technical capabilities for conducting manned lunar missions and set the stage for space exploration.
This article has been updated. The original story referred to the "dark" side of the moon when it should have said "far."
NIST Physicist Scott Diddams views the NIST frequency comb designed to ensure the precision of starlight analysis at the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas. Credit: NIST
The hunt for Earth-like planets, and perhaps extraterrestrial life, just got more precise, thanks to record-setting starlight measurements made possible by a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) "astrocomb."
NIST's custom-made frequency comb—which precisely measures frequencies, or colors, of light—ensures the precision of starlight analysis by an instrument called a spectrograph at the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas. The project is a collaboration involving NIST, the University of Colorado Boulder (CU) and Pennsylvania State University, the primary partner in the telescope and spectrograph.
The new comb apparatus for the first time provides the precision needed for discovering and characterizing planets orbiting M dwarf stars, which comprise 70 percent of the stars in the galaxy and are plentiful near Earth, the research team reported in Optica.
"The comb immediately allowed our Penn State colleagues to make measurements they could not otherwise make," NIST Fellow Scott Diddams said. "These improved tools should allow us to find habitable planets around the most ubiquitous stars in our galaxy."
A star's nuclear furnace emits white light, which is modified by elements in the atmosphere that absorb certain narrow bands of color. To search for planets orbiting distant stars, astronomers look for periodic changes in this characteristic "fingerprint," that is, very small variations in the apparent colors of starlight over time. These oscillations in color are caused by the star being tugged to and fro by the gravitational pull of an unseen orbiting planet. This apparent wobble is subtle, and measurements are limited by the frequency standards used to calibrate spectrographs.
Hundreds of exoplanets have been discovered using star wobble analysis, but a planet with a mass similar to that of Earth and orbiting at just the right distance from a star—in the so-called "Goldilocks zone"—is hard to detect with conventional technology.
Data collected by the NIST-CU-Penn State research team show the astrocomb will make it possible to detect Earth-mass planets that cause color shifts equivalent to a star wobble of about 1 meter per second—the approximate speed of a person walking across a room, and at least 10 times better than previously achieved in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Infrared light is the main type emitted by M dwarf stars.
Over the past 20 years, NIST researchers in Boulder, Colorado, first invented and then pioneered further advances in optical frequency combs. The comb delivered to Texas is unique in having about 5,000 widely spaced "teeth," or specific color calibration points. It's tailored to the reading capability of Penn State's Habitable Zone Planet Finder sprectrograph and spans the target infrared wavelength band of 800-1300 nm. Just 60 by 152 square centimeters in size and made of relatively simple commercial components, the comb is also robust enough to withstand continuous use at a remote site.
In providing tailored light to the spectrograph, the NIST comb acts like a very precise ruler to calibrate and track exact colors in a star's fingerprint and detect any periodic variations. The comb, made with new electro-optic laser technology, provides strong signals at accurately defined target frequencies that can be traced to international measurement standards.
The project has been in the works for years. The NIST-CU-Penn State research team did a test run in 2012 that showed the promise of the new approach. The new comb was delivered and saw "first light," as they say in astronomy, in February 2018, and has been running nightly since May of 2018. The new comb has a broader light range and is more stable than the earlier demo version.
While the idea of using frequency combs to aid planet discovery has generated a lot of interest around the world, the new NIST astrocomb is the first in operation at near-infrared wavelengths. Other combs currently operating on a telescope, such as the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) in Chile, are dedicated to visible light measurements.
More information: Andrew J. Metcalf et al, Stellar spectroscopy in the near-infrared with a laser frequency comb, Optica (2019). DOI: 10.1364/OPTICA.6.000233
NASA wants to probe deep into Uranus in search of smelly gas
NASA wants to probe deep into Uranus in search of smelly gas
Rob Waugh
Scientists stunned the world this year with the revelation that Uranus actually does smell like farts – and a NASA probe could soon actually ‘breathe in’ the fumes.
Amy Simon of NASA’s Ice Giants Pre-Decadal Study group told the Gravity Assist podcast the next mission to Uranus should use an atmospheric probe.
Amy Simon said, ‘I think the primary thing we’d add to any mission is an atmospheric probe, because we want to understand what the layers are in the atmosphere, what the temperatures are.’
Sniff sniff sniff (Getty)
Simon told New Scientist last year that the space agency hoped to launch a probe to either Uranus or Neptune in the 2030s, A Science Enthusiast reports.
One of the proposed missions includes a fly-by of Uranus, which would include a narrow-angle camera – and a probe which would drop into Uranus’s atmosphere to measure gas and heavy elements.
Simon said that the mission could also use an orbiter, ‘ We have also looked at orbiters, and these are nice because it gives you a chance to explore that whole system – the rings, the moons, Triton in particular – to see what’s going on on all sides of those different moons.’
Has Uranus been probed?
NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft flew closely past distant Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, in January 1986.
At its closest, the spacecraft came within 81,500 kilometres (50,600 miles) of Uranus’s cloudtops on January 24, 1986.
Voyager 2 radioed thousands of images and voluminous amounts of other scientific data on the planet, its moons, rings, atmosphere, interior and the magnetic environment surrounding Uranus.
A map of the outer solar system
(Picture: AFP/Getty)
Since launch on August 20, 1977, Voyager 2’s itinerary has taken the spacecraft to Jupiter in July 1979, Saturn in August 1981, and then Uranus. Voyager 2’s next encounter was with Neptune in August 1989. Both Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, will eventually leave our solar system and enter interstellar space.
Voyager 2’s images of the five largest moons around Uranus revealed complex surfaces indicative of varying geologic pasts. The cameras also detected 10 previously unseen moons.
The 11 rings of Uranus, opaque and a few kilometres wide each, are relatively young in space terms – not more than 600 million years old. They were probably formed by collisional fragmentation of several moons that once orbited the planet
(Picture: BSIP/UIG Via Getty)
Several instruments studied the ring system, uncovering the fine detail of the previously known rings and two newly detected rings.
Voyager data showed that the planet’s rate of rotation is 17 hours, 14 minutes.
The spacecraft also found a Uranian magnetic field that is both large and unusual. In addition, the temperature of the equatorial region, which receives less sunlight over a Uranian year, is nevertheless about the same as that at the poles
In this stereographic projection, the Milky Way curves around the entire image in an arc, with the newly discovered river of stars displayed in red and covering almost the entire southern Galactic hemisphere.
One billion years ago, a cluster of stars formed in our galaxy. Since then, that cluster has whipped four long circles around the edge of theMilky Way. In that time, the Milky Way's gravity has stretched that cluster out from a blob into a long stellar stream. Right now, the stars are passing relatively close to Earth, just about 330 light-years away. And scientists say that river of stars could help determine the mass of the entire Milky Way..
Astronomers have seen these stars before, mixed in with lots of stars all around them. But until now, they didn't realize the stars were part of a group. The river, which is 1,300 light-years long and 160 light-years wide, winds through the Milky Way's vast, dense star field. But 3D-mapping data from Gaia, a European Space Agency spacecraft, showed that the stars in the stream moved together at roughly the same speed and in the same direction.
"Identifying nearby disk streams is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Astronomers have been looking at, and through, this new stream for a long time, as it covers most of the night sky, but only now realize it is there, and it is huge, and shockingly close to the sun," João Alves, an astronomer at the University of Vienna and second author of the paper, said in a statement. [Large Numbers That Define Our Universe]
Though space is full of these stellar streams, they're often difficult to study because they're well-camouflaged amidst surrounding stars. Typically, these stellar streams are also much farther away.
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"Finding things close to home is very useful, it means they are not too faint nor too blurred for further detailed exploration, [an] astronomer's dream," Alves said.
Scientists suspect that star clusters, like the one that eventually became this stellar stream can reveal how galaxies get their stars. But in a big, heavy galaxy like the Milky Way, those clusters usually end up shredded, with gravity pulling individual stars in different directions. [Amazing Astronomy: Victorian-Era Illustrations of the Heavens]
This stream is big enough though, and heavy enough, that it's remained intact (albeit stretched) in the billion years it has circled the galactic center. And there may be more stars in the stream than those found in the initial Gaia data.
Say you need to prepare to shoot bullets into anasteroidand suck up the debris kicked up from the blast, then tuck it away for safekeeping. There's no better way than toshoot bullets into a fake asteroidhere on Earth and watch what happens in slow motion.
So, that's precisely what the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) did at the end of December in preparation for its spacecraft Hayabusa2's sampling run at the asteroid Ryugu later this week. Using the data gathered over months spent surveying the space rock, they created a model of the asteroid, put it in a vacuum chamber and used a copy of the spacecraft's sampling system in a test run.
An Earth copy of the sampling instrument that was loaded onto the Hayabusa2 spacecraft.
The trial tackled two main concerns. The team wanted to be sure that the instrument copy still worked after sitting in storage since about the time the spacecraft launched, in December 2014. The test run also addressed a discovery Hayabusa2 made: On close inspection, the probe saw that Ryugu's surface was covered in gravel, rather than the fine dust that JAXA had expected when the mission was designed.
In order to address these concerns, the JAXA team designed a replica experiment using a flight-spare sampling instrument, which is an exact copy of the instrument on the spacecraft. Scientists mimicked the gravelly structure of Ryugu and the chemical composition of the class of meteorites they believe originate in similar asteroids. The researchers put the entire apparatus into a vacuum chamber to better mimic conditions at the asteroid (although they still had to work within Earth's gravity).
JAXA's model of the asteroid Ryugu used in the practice run.
The Hayabusa2 team was pleased with the results of the trial; they were able to confirm that the bullet mechanism did indeed create samples that the spacecraft could collect. In fact, although the test run on gravel produced a smaller crater than a test run on dust had done, the sampler was able to collect more material. And the team said it expects that without gravity's interference, the real Hayabusa2 mechanism will fare even better.
With the dress rehearsal a success, all that's left to do is wait for the real thing. JAXA has scheduled the maneuver for 6 p.m. EST on Feb. 21 (2300 GMT; 8 a.m. local time on Feb. 22 for mission control staff).
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETWetenschappers waarschuwen de inwoners van Cuba voor de radioactieve straling van fragmenten van een meteoriet die begin deze maand neerkwam in de provincie Pinar del Río.
Deskundigen hebben sindsdien honderd fragmenten gevonden, maar ook de lokale bewoners hebben enthousiast stukjes meteoriet verzameld. Die bewaren ze als aandenken. De wetenschappers drukken de Cubanen echter op het hart om de hemelstenen wegens de straling vooral niet als sieraad te dragen.
De stukken steen zijn mogelijk afkomstig van van de planetoïde Vesta die ruim 372 miljoen kilometer van de aarde verwijderd is. ze is de op twee na grootste planetoïde in ons zonnestelsel.
A previous sighting of a 'UFO' over Gloucestershire, similar to those seen by the pilots
If there is one group of people who don’t immediately shout ‘UFO’ every time there is a strange light in the sky, it is pilots.
After all, it’s very much their job to know what kind of thing are up in the air and to keep a cool head.
So, it is no surprise that there has been a lot of interest in reports by pilots from Air Midwest, a flight training and aviation service company, of a unidentified flying object over Gloucestershire.
While stressing they are not saying the UFO is part of an alien scouting party, or the initial stage of an Earth invasion, they have been baffled by what they saw.
And they would very much like to hear from people what the orange-coloured objects were.
Described as ‘unidentified nocturnal lights’, the company said they were seen south of Gloucester on Thursday between 8.15pm and 8.45pm.
What did they see?
This is how they reported the sighting, which happened as two of their aircraft were conducting night navigation exercises.
“At approximately 8.15pm one of our aircraft was tracking south towards Gloucester at 7,000ft after leaving the Birmingham air traffic zone.
“At the same time one of our other aircraft was also tracking south towards Gloucester at 4,000ft when both aircraft observed one red and one orange lights in the the sky south of Gloucester.
“Our aircraft approached the lights on an interception track but were unable to gain on the objects as they appeared to move further south of Gloucester as our aircraft approached.
“We were unable to identify the lights.”
The company, based in Wolverhampton, stressed that the lights “defied our normal expectation of standard aircraft or meteorological activity”.
It has ruled out hot air balloons and said they have not come across any explanation of what the objects could be.
And it said it would welcome any explanation for what the pilots, with more than 25,000 flying hours between them, actually say.
Pilot describes his close encounter
I observed initially two large square orange lights.
One on top of each but slightly off set, however, there was a gap in height between them.
The top ‘orb’ was constantly orange.
The lower one occasionally flicked white but majority of time was orange.
In addition to that on two occasions I observed five orange lights but that was momentary.
I initially observed them when leaving Birmingham control zone. I thought they were just south of Gloucester and definitely a lot higher then us.
We then climbed 5000 ft and they seemed level at that height and stationary.
As we approached Gloucester, it became apparent they were now further south maybe beyond Bristol even as far as Weston-super-Mare but directly south of Gloucester[shire] airport.
On our return leg up to EGBO (our home base) by Worcester we climbed 7,000 ft and commenced a turn to observe the lights.
At this point they seemed lower than us in the same place and stationary.
I have no idea what these objects were.
Night glow balloons? But unlikely as these do not move very fast at all.
So what they were?
We have no idea.
An interesting event.
After the pilots shared their experiences on social media, others people also reported seeing strange lights.
One person said on Facebook: "We saw that UFO while we were driving along the M5 bright light and VERY STRANGE movements
"It looked like a fighter jet diving for low level it dropped very quickly while performing a series of tight turns then it just hovered."
Another person reported seeing it in Caerleon, near Newport in Wales, saying: "I saw this! I was in Caerleon and I noticed that there was nothing on radar and the fact that it was moving at a very fast pace."
While another person reported seeing something similar, but further south on the M3.
Do you know what the lights were? You can contact us at citizen.news@glosmedia.co.uk, in the comments below, or via our social media channels.
Piloten maken melding van grote vierkante UFO’s boven Engeland. Lees hun verbaasde reactie
Piloten maken melding van grote vierkante UFO’s boven Engeland. Lees hun verbaasde reactie
Twee piloten hebben vorige week donderdagavond UFO’s gezien boven Engeland. De piloten van Air Midwest zagen de onbekende vliegende objecten toen ze op weg waren naar de stad Gloucester.
De maatschappij maakte op Facebook melding van het incident. Het bericht trok al snel de aandacht van vele geïnteresseerden, waarna Air Midwest extra gegevens over het voorval verschafte.
Rond 20.15 uur lokale tijd zagen de piloten vanuit twee verschillende vliegtuigen ‘één rood en één oranje licht in de lucht ten zuiden van Gloucester’.
Twee grote, vierkante oranje lichten
Eén van de piloten probeerde de raadselachtige lichten te onderscheppen, maar de mysterieuze objecten waren hem te snel af.
Hij omschreef de objecten als ‘twee grote, vierkante oranje lichten. De één bovenop de ander’.
De getuige merkte op dat één van de lichten steeds oranje kleurde, terwijl het andere licht zo nu en dan wit werd.
Korte duur
“Ik zag op een gegeven moment vijf oranje lichten, maar dat was van korte duur,” zei de piloot.
De piloten hebben niet kunnen vaststellen wat ze hebben gezien.
“Ik heb geen idee wat het kan zijn geweest,” klonk het.
Zeer ervaren
Air Midwest zei niet te beweren dat de piloten een buitenaards vaartuig hebben gezien, maar dat er gesproken wordt van een UFO omdat er geen verklaring is voor de lichten.
De maatschappij wees erop dat de twee piloten zeer ervaren zijn en samen 25.000 vlieguren hebben, maar dat ze toch nog erg verbaasd waren.
The world’s inevitable march towards a war in space continues this week as China’s state-owned Science and Technology Daily newspaper reports plans for terrifying-sounding orbital solar power stations. According to the paper, Chinese scientists have developed plans to construct small orbiting solar plants which could be put into orbit in the stratosphereas early as 2021 or as late as 2025.
Unlike solar power farms down here on the surface of the Earth, solar farms in orbit could collect solar radiation 99% of the time as opposed to only when the Sun is out and unobscured by cloud cover. In addition, the higher altitude means the plants could generate up to six times the amount of power as solar farms on the surface do. “So wait, what’s so scary about space-based solar farms,” you ask? The fact that the plants will send the Sun’s energy back down to Earth via massive lasers or microwave energy beams. Say it with me now: what could go wrong?
The concept is somewhat reminiscent of the theoretical Dyson sphere, a massive structure which orbits a star and harvests 100% of its radiant energy.
I’ll tell you what could go wrong. For one, the risk of accidents would be enormous. A giant laser shooting gigawatts of energy downward from 36,000 kilometers above the ground doesn’t sound like the kind of thing I’d like above my head, thanks. The same technology that could direct energy into power plants on the ground could theoretically also be used to do what lasers and other directed energy weapons do best: light stuff on fire in magnificent fashion. Still, whether or not the power plants will be used or even could be used as a weapon remains unknown. I’m probably just being hyperbolic and overly skeptical of China’s plans for space; so far, these solar farms have only been discussed in terms of their ability to produce clean, renewable energy.
Still, the possibility of weaponization of this technology, however small, is there. Furthermore, this announcement comes on the heels of many recent developments which seem to suggest that China, like the rest of the space-faring nations, is actively militarizing or weaponizing space under the guise of scientific development.
Already, military intelligence agencies in the United States suspect that China’s plans to develop scientific research stations on the far side of the moon may have ulterior motivesand that China’s plans to clean up space debris with laser-equipped probes may be a ruse to develop killer satellitescapable of bringing other nations’ communications and defense capabilities to their knees. Is this solar farm idea an entirely peaceful way to harvest clean energy, or might these some day turn out to be solar-powered superweapons?
The rising number of people who believe that the Earth is flat is often used as proof that you can get humans to believe anything. Now it can also be used as proof that you can get humans to fund anything. Researchers have completed a study on … you guessed it … Flat Earthers and found that the population boom in pizza planet proponents can be traced to and thus blamed on … YouTube! Who do we blame the proliferation of studies on … and how can we get in on it?
“There’s a lot of helpful information on YouTube but also a lot of misinformation. Their algorithms make it easy to end up going down the rabbit hole, by presenting information to people who are going to be more susceptible to it.”
Yes, someone paid for that seemingly obvious analysis from Asheley R. Landrum, PhD, a psychologist and Assistant Professor specializing in strategic science communication at Texas Tech in Lubbock. The Guardian reported this week on the study conducted by Landrum which involved questioning participants in two different conferences of Flat Earthers, one in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the other in Denver, Colorado (two cities whose citizens could look at each other with telescopes if the Earth was flat – just saying). Of the 30 people asked how they came to their belief in a flat Earth, 29 said they were convinced after watching YouTube videos on the theory and the 30th learned it from relatives who were persuaded after (don’t get ahead of me here) watching YouTube videos.
Landrum presented her study at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held last week in Washington DC in order to plead with the scientists in attendance to create their own YouTube videos explaining why the Earth is round – an idea that undoubtedly had many of them facepalming and shaking their heads.
“We don’t want YouTube to be full of videos saying here are all these reasons the Earth is flat. We need other videos saying here’s why those reasons aren’t real and here’s a bunch of ways you can research it for yourself.”
Even if this were to happen, it may have the opposite effect. Landrum pointed out that many of the believers say they were round Earthers at first and only went to the Internet to look for evidence supporting their case. In the process, they found videos like “200 proofs Earth is not a spinning ball” and were convinced to go flat. (See the video here — if you dare.)
“Believing the Earth is flat in of itself is not necessarily harmful, but it comes packaged with a distrust in institutions and authority more generally. We want people to be critical consumers of the information they are given, but there is a balance to be had.”
Landrum’s study is good but that’s the real issue here. People who are predisposed to a distrust of authority – government, science or otherwise – will find plenty to support their arguments on the greatest repository of conspiracy theories ever invented. The real question is – would they feel the same way or come to the same conclusions if there was no YouTube?
If anyone has the funds, I know someone willing to do that study.
Fastwalker UFOs – UFOs travelling over 20,00 MPH are so fast they appear as mere streaks to unaided human eye
Fastwalker UFOs – UFOs travelling over 20,000 MPH are so fast they appear as mere streaks to unaided human eye
They are called Fastwalkers (or Fast Walkers) and travel at speeds well over 20,000 miles per hour making these UFOs mere “streaks” of light to the unaided human eye. Their name comes from a 1984 NORAD incident which tracked an unidentified Fastwalker UFO moving at speeds over 22,000 MPH as it screamed towards earth.
The May 1984 NORAD Fastwalker event
In May of 1984 at 1400 hours Zulu time, an alert was triggered at the North America Air Defense Command (NORAD) when ultra-sensitive orbiting USDSPmilitary satellites (highly-classified satellites that serve as early ICBM launch detection systems) spotted a mysterious UFO heading towards earth at a mind-boggling 22,000 miles per hour. As is passed in front of Earth and less than 20 miles from the USDSP satellite, officials determined it was not a ballistic missile nor a meteor. After classifying it as “unknown”, it was given the code name “Fast Walker”.
NORAD data revealed the unidentified object was a hot, fast, solid object that swept in quickly from space, approached Earth, then sped off into space. The event was intended to be kept secret but an official (a retired military official) leaked details about the event to an investigator (special agent Joe Stefula) along with a diagram of the incident. According to Stefula:
“I haven’t been able to determine that the document’s absolutely authentic but I have been able to confirm that the DSP printout for that date shows an event at the same time with the same characteristics. What makes this particular Fast Walker so peculiar is that it came in from outer space on a curved trajectory, passing within three kilometers of the satellite platform, and then disappeared back into space. Whatever it was, it was tracked for nine minutes.”
The 1984 Fastwalker event obviously alarmed government officials – the sighting resulted in a 300-page internal report which basically “looked at every possibility and couldn’t explain [the unidentified object] by natural or man-made means.” A researcher explained whey the NORAD sighting was significant:
“Where it appeared in the (satellite’s) sensor field would indicate that the object came into the sensor field from outer-space, went in front of the sensor, and left, departing back into deep space. It would indicate that it was some type of craft that had the ability to maneuver. And there you have hard evidence. You have telemetry from that satellite, you have information, you have systems, you have data that you can go back and investigate and check and verify. In the past, usually UFO events are of just eye-witness testimony… There you have a very sensitive defense system that sent you information to the ground. I don’t even know if you can solve it… maybe it’s one of those enigmas that’s just gonna be with us forever. What type of craft would have that ability? Some people might say, ‘A UFO’.”
In 1993, after word of Fastwalkers had leaked to the public, the Department of Defense declassified unrelated satellite information which confirmed that satellites were routinely picking up unidentified hi-speed moving objects in space which were neither missiles nor meteorites/asteroids. According to the official who leaked the documents, an average of two to three Fastwalkers are detected each month.
The Observatory Journal documents a “candidate for an alien probe”
Additional stunning evidence was presented in April 1995, when The Observatory journal published an article by Duncan Steel (University of Adelaide, Australia), an expert on the danger of near-Earth objects, that described a recently sighted Fastwalker. The article revealed that a December 1991 object passing near earth was designated a “candidate for an alien probe”. For all intents and purposes, the object looked and moved like an artificial satellite – only much faster.
Fastwalkers – alien surveillance probes
Many in the UFO community theorize the Earth may be under surveillance by advanced alien races whose motives are unclear. They believe Fastwalkers are alien surveillance vehicles or probes which conduct routine surveillance missions gathering data on our planet and its inhabitants. The surmise that governments know of their existence, and their intent, but choose to keep details of their activities from the public.
Additional information
FOIA request confirms Fastwalkers
Below is a FOIA request submitted in 2013 which confirms NORAD’s search for “Fastwalkers” and “Slowwalkers” in internal document databases produced a representative hit. However, as noted in the response below, information on Fastwalkers is still classified and unavailable for public review.
Fastwalkers speed compared to other space objects
For reference, Fastwalkers travel much faster than orbiting satellites but much slower than deep space asteroids. When discussed together, slower anomalous flying objects are termed “Slowwalkers”.
On February 14, 2019 Wilbur Allen has captured a strange red band of light that travels through space.
Given the speed of the object, it seems that the sky-watcher has filmed a fastwalker.
Fastwalker is a code name created by the North American Aerospace Defense Command to classify Unidentified Flying Objects which moving and changing directions at high speed and enter or leave the atmosphere at a great velocity.
Fastwalker captured on a DSP satellite.
Sometimes Fastwalkers have been captured on the Defense Support Program satellite system as happened on May 5, 1984 when a DSP satellite captured a FastWalker while it was traveling a 22,000 mph.
The footage shows a satellite and the fastwalker, characterized by a strange ‘red band of light, in one picture and compare the difference in speed at the moment the fast walker passes the satellite.
Open Minds UFO Radio: John Alexander is a retired Army Colonel who has been a critical figure in the field of non-lethal weapons and also played a role in U.S. Army Intelligence research in the paranormal. In the 1980s John put together a group of intelligence officials, members of all branches of the military and the defense aerospace industry to investigate UFO secrecy. His group was called the Advanced Theoretical Physics (ATP) project. In this episode, we discuss the similarities between John’s ATP and the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). Due to the attention the disclosure of the existence of AATIP has garnered, there is a resurgence of interest in the UFO topic in Washington D.C. Relying on John’s insider knowledge on how the government works, we also discuss the difficulties a UFO research program would have functioning inside the government, the concerns the military or other credible organizations may have hosting a UFO program, and whether a government UFO program is the best option for resorcin into the UFO Phenomenon.
John began his Army career in 1956, and he retired a colonel in 1988. His Army career included positions in special operations, intelligence, and research and development. From 1966 to 1969 John commanded special forces teams in Vietnam and Thailand. His last military assignment was as Director, Advanced System Concepts Office, U.S. Army Laboratory Command. After retiring from the Army, John joined Los Alamos National Laboratory. As a program manager, he conducted non-lethal warfare briefings at the highest levels of government including the White House Staff, National Security Council, Members of Congress, Director of Central Intelligence, and senior Defense officials. John also met with heads of industry, presented at academic institutions, including Columbia, Harvard, and MIT. He has advised the CIA, US Special Operations Command, and the National Intelligence Council. In 2003, John served as a mentor to Afghan Ministry of Defense senior officials through the Office of Military Cooperation – Afghanistan, (Coalition Forces) Kabul. Academically, he holds an M.A., Pepperdine University, Ph.D., Walden University, and later attended the Anderson School of Management at UCLA, the Sloan School of Management at MIT, and the Kennedy School of Government general officer program “National and International Security for Senior Executives” at Harvard University.
Our sun’s solar flares are an incredible natural phenomenon, but now astronomers have observed a flare on a young star that almost defies belief. It’s 10 billion times more powerful than any seen on our sun!
Red dwarf star JW 566 (inside circle) was seen to produce its colossal solar flare on November 26, 2016.
Image via Rogelio Bernal Andreo/CC BY-SA 3.0.
Solar flares – huge erupting jets of gas – are common on our sun, but what about on other stars? It turns out other stars produce them as well, as astronomers have known for a long time now. Red dwarf stars, in particular, can have massive solar flares. But now, astronomers have observed a new solar flare on a young star that almost defies belief – 10 billion times more powerful than any ever seen on our own sun.
Astronomers using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii reported the discovery on February 11, 2019. The peer-reviewed paper has been published in The Astrophysical Journal (full paper is online at arXiv). The initial detection of the flare was on November 26, 2016. As noted by astronomer Steve Mairs, lead investigator of the discovery team:
A discovery of this magnitude could have only happened in Hawaii. Using the JCMT, we study the birth of nearby stars as a means of understanding the history of our very own solar system. Observing flares around the youngest stars is new territory and it is giving us key insights into the physical conditions of these systems.
This is one of the ways we are working toward answering people’s most enduring questions about space, time, and the universe that surrounds us.
The region of the Orion Nebula where the solar flare was detected. It’s a dust-filled region of the galaxy, and a place where new stars are forming.
Image via Rogelio Bernal Andreo/CC BY-SA 3.0.
The flare was detected by JCMT using the telescope’s state-of the art high-frequency radio technology and sophisticated image analysis techniques. The telescope uses a special super-cooled 10,000-pixel camera called SCUBA-2, which needs to be kept at a very cold -459.5 degrees Fahrenheit (-290 Celsius).
From the paper:
The event may be the most luminous known flare associated with a young stellar object …
Solar flares occur when the magnetic field lines of a star get twisted and tangled with each other until they snap, releasing huge amounts of energy and charged particles into space. A typical solar flare on the sun releases energy equivalent to millions of 100-megaton hydrogen bombs exploding at the same time.
The flare seen on this other young star, however, was 10 billion times more powerful than that.
The region in the Orion Nebula as seen by SCUBA-2 where the immense solar flare was detected on the young star JW-566.
Image via HECK/East Asian Observatory.
The flare was observed on a very young star called JW 566, about 1,269 light-years away in the Orion Nebula. Lasting only a few hours, it is thought to be have been caused by a disruption in a powerful magnetic field that was funneling material onto the young, growing star as it gradually gained mass from the surrounding gas and dust.
JW 566 is a variable star – specifically, a T Tauri star – less than 10 million years old. It is going through a period of growth before it is massive enough for hydrogen fusion to ignite in its core.
JCMT – operated by the East Asian Observatory – is the only telescope in the Northern Hemisphere capable of finding this kind of solar flare activity, these astronomers said. JCMT has been observing nearly 1,000 very young nearby stars as part of a monthly tracking program.
The team said it will continue to monitor JW 566 as part of the JCMT Transient Survey, to see if any additional flares can be observed.
The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
Image via JCMT.
By the way, solar flares would be dangerous to unshielded human space travelers because very high-energy particles result from them. They can also negatively affect some earthly technologies, for example, satellites in Earth orbit.
At the same time, however, some scientists believe solar flares might have played a role in helping to “jump-start” life on the early Earth. Some of the energy required for early life might have come from solar flares, according to Vladimir Airapetian, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in a study from 2016:
To make organic stuff out of inorganic stuff, you need a lot of energy.
The same thing – a jump-start for life, provided by solar flares – might happen on planets orbiting other stars. In particular, Earth-sized or super-Earth exoplanets that in the habitable zones of their stars might get a benefit, in terms of life starting, from solar flares.
The same may be true for red dwarf stars, like JW 566. But nature is complex, and – from what we can tell – the conditions needed for life may be delicate. Red dwarfs are known to be very active in terms of solar flares, perhaps too active. The same intense solar flare bombardment that might jump-start life might also make life difficult to continue on a planet’s surface.
A huge solar flare on our own sun.
Image via NASA/GSFC/SDO.
Bottom line:Solar flares on our sun are an amazing phenomenon, but this discovery shows that some stars, especially younger ones, can have flares much more powerful than those – mind-bogglingly so.
When astronomers add up the mass of all the normal matter in the present-day universe, about a third of it can’t be found. Where is it?
The background of this image is from a supercomputer simulation. It shows a honeycomb-like structure of the universe, sometimes called the “cosmic web.” The simulation reveals how key components of the universe – including large filaments of warm and hot gas known as the WHIM – evolved over time. Scientists think the missing normal matter of our universe might be in the WHIM.
You might know that much of our universe is thought to exist in the form of dark matter anddark energy, both of which are still exceedingly mysterious. But that’s not what this story is about. It’s about another question about the mass, or matter, of our universe that’s also puzzled astronomers for decades. That is, about a third of the “normal” matter in the universe – hydrogen, helium and other ordinary elements, created in the first billion years or so after the Big Bang – have been missing. Now, however, new results from theChandra X-ray Observatorymight have helped locate this elusive expanse of missing matter in giant strands of gas in intergalactic space known to astronomers as the WHIM.
NASA explained in a statement on February 14, 2019:
From independent, well-established observations, scientists have confidently calculated how much normal matter — meaning hydrogen, helium and other elements — existed just after the Big Bang. In the time between the first few minutes and the first billion years or so, much of the normal matter made its way into cosmic dust, gas and objects such as stars and planets that telescopes can see in the present-day universe.
The problem is that when astronomers add up the mass of all the normal matter in the present-day universe about a third of it can’t be found …
One idea has been that this missing normal matter gathered into gigantic strands or filaments of warm and hot gas in intergalactic space. These filaments are known to astronomers as the warm-hot intergalactic medium, or WHIM. The gas filaments are invisible to telescopes that see in visible light, but some of the warm gas in the filaments has been detected in ultraviolet light.
Now, using a new technique, researchers have found new and strong evidence for the hot component of the WHIM based on data from Chandra and other telescopes. Orsolya Kovacs of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is the lead author of the new study, which was published in The Astrophysical Journal on February 13. She said in a statement:
If we find this missing [matter], we can solve one of the biggest conundrums in astrophysics. Where did the universe stash so much of its matter that makes up stuff like stars and planets and us?
These astronomers used Chandra to look for and study the gas filaments lying along the path to a distant quasar. This particular quasar is located about 3.5 billion light-years from Earth, and it also emits X-rays. The astronomers were looking to see if the quasar’s light had been absorbed by the WHIM. A statement from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics explained:
One of the challenges of this method is that the signal of absorption by the warm-hot intergalactic medium [WHIM] is weak compared to the total amount of X-rays coming from the quasar. When searching the entire spectrum of X-rays at different wavelengths, it is difficult to distinguish such weak absorption features – actual signals of the warm-hot intergalactic medium – from random fluctuations.
Kovacs and her team overcame this problem by focusing their search only on certain parts of the X-ray light spectrum, reducing the likelihood of false positives. They did this by first identifying galaxies near the line of sight to the quasar that are located at the same distance from Earth as regions of warm gas detected from ultraviolet data. With this technique they identified 17 possible filaments between the quasar and us, and obtained their distances.
Because of the expansion of the universe, which stretches out light as it travels, any absorption of X-rays by matter in these filaments will be shifted to redder wavelengths. The amounts of the shifts depend on the known distances to the filament, so the team knew where to search in the spectrum for absorption from the warm-hot intergalactic medium.
Akos Bogdan, also from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is a study co-author. Bogdan said:
Our technique is similar in principle to how you might conduct an efficient search for animals in the vast plains of Africa. We know that animals need to drink, so it makes sense to search around watering holes first.
Bottom line: Astronomers have been unable to account for about a third of the normal mass created in the first billion years after the Big Bang. A new study suggests it might be hiding in gigantic strands of gas in intergalactic space, known as the WHIM.
As Yellowstone Awakens, Dr. Michio Kaku Wans That it Could “Literally Tear the Guts Out of the United States of America”
As Yellowstone Awakens, Dr. Michio Kaku Warns That it Could “Literally Tear the Guts Out of the United States of America”
One day it will happen. Scientists assure us that one day the absolutely massive Yellowstone supervolcano will once again experience a Category 8 eruption, and if it happened today it would “literally tear the guts out of the United States of America”. That is why what has been happening at Yellowstone in recent months is so alarming. We know that the ground has been rising and that “a 465-mile-long piece of molten rock”is moving upwards directly under Yellowstone. And we also know that the major geysers at Yellowstone were more active last year than in any other year in any of our lifetimes. Are these signs that an eruption is coming? We better hope not, because as Dr. Michio Kaku recently told Fox News, there is“a sleeping Godzilla underneath Yellowstone”…
Dr Kaku told Fox News: “Forget the image of Yogi Bear representing Yellowstone.
“We’re talking about a sleeping Godzilla underneath Yellowstone, that if it erupts in a maximum eruption called Category 8, it can literally tear the guts out of the United States of America.
“Instead of having 50 states of the Union, we would have 30 states of the Union.“
We live at a time when seismic activity has been increasing all over the world, and Yellowstone has also been exhibiting very unusual behavior.
“Unlike a meteor from outer space, where you get no warning whatsoever, we get warnings.
“If you see movies like Pompeii, you know that there are days, in fact, weeks of eruptions building up, rumbling inside, underneath the pocket of lava.
“So there would be enough time, several weeks, to begin evacuation if and when such an unlikely event were to take place.”
But what if we have been ignoring the warnings that we have already been getting?
For example, Steamboat geyser erupted more times in 2018 than in any other year in history. The following comes from National Geographic…
The Yellowstone Volcano Observatory reports that Steamboat has now set a record by erupting a whopping 32 times in 2018, a personal best for the geyser for a single calendar year. Previously, this geyser made it as high as 29 paroxysms back in 1964.
Other nearby geysers have also been behaving fairly interestingly of late. Ear Spring Geyser, for example, has been pretty quiet since 1957, but it erupted spectacularly a few months back—and sprayed human garbage from the 1930s everywhere.
Prior to last year, there had not been an eruption of the Steamboat geyser for three and a half years.
In addition, the ground under Yellowstone has been steadily rising for the last few years, and the area was hit by 121 earthquakes in the month of December alone…
“In the area of Norris Geyser Basin, GPS data indicate a minor amount of uplift over the past few months, with a total uplift of about 2cm during 2018, also continuing the trend that has been ongoing since 2015.”
In the same Yellowstone update, the USGS revealed a total of 121 earthquakes were recorded in the Yellowstone area in December 2018 alone.
It is indeed possible that when Yellowstone finally erupts that we will get more of a warning than this.
But it is also possible that we will not.
When Yellowstone blows, life as you have known it will instantly be over. If you are not in the immediate kill zone, you will have an opportunity to try to survive, but it won’t be easy. One survivalist expert suggests that everyone should “head east as fast as you can”…
He added: “Zone one, which is a radius of 100 miles, could see 70,000 people die instantly.
“Zone two, which starts after 100 miles, would be covered in 10ft of volcanic ash at 450C.
“After the second zone, your chances of surviving increase, but still head east as fast as you can.
“Beyond zone six is where you would be the safest in the US for the short term, but the wind will greatly determine where ash falls.”
Personally, I don’t know if that is the best approach. The roads will be absolutely clogged, and there is no way that you are going to outrun the volcanic ash. If you get completely buried in volcanic ash in your vehicle, it will all be over.
Of course the truth is that if Yellowstone experiences a Category 8 eruption most Americans will eventually die no matter what they do. The following is an extended excerpt from one of my previous articles…
Hundreds of cubic miles of ash, rock and lava would be blasted into the atmosphere, and this would likely plunge much of the northern hemisphere into several days of complete darkness. Virtually everything within 100 miles of Yellowstone would be immediately killed, but a much more cruel fate would befall those that live in major cities outside of the immediate blast zone such as Salt Lake City and Denver.
Hot volcanic ash, rock and dust would rain down on those cities literally for weeks. In the end, it would be extremely difficult for anyone living in those communities to survive. In fact, it has been estimated that 90 percent of all people living within 600 miles of Yellowstone would be killed.
Experts project that such an eruption would dump a layer of volcanic ash that is at least 10 feet deep up to 1,000 miles away, and approximately two-thirds of the United States would suddenly become uninhabitable. The volcanic ash would severely contaminate most of our water supplies, and growing food in the middle of the country would become next to impossible.
In other words, it would be the end of our country as we know it today.
The rest of the planet, and this would especially be true for the northern hemisphere, would experience what is known as a “nuclear winter”. An extreme period of “global cooling” would take place, and temperatures around the world would fall by up to 20 degrees. Crops would fail all over the planet, and severe famine would sweep the globe.
In the end, billions could die.
Let us hope and pray that nothing like this happens any time soon. Those of you that regularly follow my work already know that I am far more concerned about an eruption of Mt. Rainier, and we should also keep a very, very close eye on Mt. Fuji in Japan.
As our planet becomes increasingly unstable, there will be unprecedented natural disasters in the years ahead, and multitudes of people will die in those disasters.
Unfortunately, most of the “experts” continue to assure the public that everything is going to be “just fine”, but meanwhile the shaking of our planet just continues to get even worse with each passing year.
IN BEELD. De grootste supermaan van het jaar - HLN.be
IN BEELD. De grootste supermaan van het jaar - HLN.be
EPASantiago de Compostela, Spanje.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET De grootste en felste volle maan van 2019 heeft zich laten zien en was op verschillende plekken prachtig waarneembaar. Een selectie van de mooiste kiekjes wereldwijd.
InstagramDe indrukwekkende foto van het drakenpoollicht boven IJsland.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETDe Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA heeft een ongebruikelijke foto vrijgegeven van het noorderlicht boven IJsland. Op de foto, gemaakt door de Australische professionals Jingyi Zhang en Wang Zheng, lijkt het natuurverschijnsel op een vuurspuwende, vliegende draak die woest de vleugels uitslaat.
Volgens NASA is de dramatische, Game of Thrones-achtige foto een maand geleden gemaakt onder omstandigheden die eigenlijk helemaal niet hadden moeten leiden tot een spectaculair noorderlicht. Op het moment dat de foto werd genomen was de atmosfeer rond de zon - veroorzaker van het noorder- of poollicht - namelijk stabiel. Het noorderlicht wordt veroorzaakt door sterke uitbarstingen aan het oppervlak van de zon. Geladen deeltjes worden met grote kracht het heelal in geslingerd. Als de deeltjes met extreem hoge snelheid de atmosfeer bij de Noord- en Zuidpool raken, komt op 80 tot 1000 kilometer hoogte zoveel energie vrij dat gekleurd licht kan ontstaan.
In een verklaring van NASA wordt gesteld dat de woest lijkende hemeldraak mogelijk ook nog geluid heeft gemaakt. “Als mensen het poollicht zien, horen ze meestal niets omdat het zachte ‘klappende, knetterende of ploppende’ geluid alleen hoorbaar is vanaf een hoogte van circa 70 meter.” Volgens de fotografen waren ze hoe dan ook behoorlijk onder de indruk van wat ze noemen de dragon aurora: het drakenpoollicht. De persoon die op de foto te zien is, is de moeder van één van de twee. “Zij rende keihard naar buiten toen ze het mythische monster zag.”
HBO/Game of ThronesNormaal gesproken zijn draken alleen te zien in fantasieboeken of -films, zoals Game of Thrones.
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15 Area 51 Facts You Should Know
15 Area 51 Facts You Should Know
Since its launch in the 1950s, Area 51 has attracted thengreat interest of a huge number of people, very keen to find out what lies behind the perimeter of the tightly guarded military airbase.
The top-secret location in Nevada desert has remained off-limits to the public for about sixty years, including a large no-fly zone in airspace nearby.
The lack of basic information has led to weird speculation about its primary purpose. Actually, to most, Area 51 has become a term related to outlandish conspiracy theories about government cover-ups and extraterrestrial life.
Eventually, the wild speculations have diverted public attention away from some of the magnificent developments which have occurred at the base over the many years, things that have remained relatively mysterious among the public.
There is still high confusion among the members of the public concerning the driving forces behind this facility since no photos have been released publicly in the recent years.
Area 51 has been the location of on-going secret programs managed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) since its establishment. Used mainly to test fresh technologies, some of the most high-level air capabilities of military started their working life at the base.
Work at the location continues to be improved today, with the recent satellite images revealing that new structures are being constructed. Nonetheless, their purpose stays unclear.
Therefore, to attempt and assist you separate reality from myth, here are 15 things about Area 51 you probably don’t know.
1. Foreign Aircraft Were Present At The Base
The US used the Area 51 location to test captured technology acquired from aircrafts of enemy nations.
The earliest foreign plane to land was the Russian-built MiG-21 that had been captured by the Israeli forces in 1966 when one of the members of the Iraqi air force defected.
The primary purpose of the investigations was to reveal weaknesses in design and performance so that United States forces could exploit them during the combat. In 1970, further examinations of Area 51 began – this time on secretly developed Soviet radar systems.
Some speculate this method of examination goes on with the intergalactic spacecraft allegedly being kept somewhere inside the compound.
2. The CIA Only Acknowledged Its Existence In 2013
Until 2013, the CIA declined to acknowledge the presence of Area 51 in the official documents since the United States government deemed the work undertaken at the base to be very sensitive.
This secrecy gave rise to the elusive nature of the base and without doubt fed the thousands of myths surrounding it.
At first, all the secrecy was as a result of the Cold War. Washington became super paranoid about its military programs alleging that it might fall into the hands of the Soviet Union. Fair enough, it would have been pretty shitty if that would occur, so paranoia warranted.
The existence of Area 51 was eventually admitted in a secret report which covered the first 2 decades of operations at Area 51. It was released in 2013 as a result of a freedom of information request by a popular professor at the George Washington University.
Obama also made an impromptu comment regarding the Area 51 in 2013, making him the first president to openly acknowledge its existence.
3. First Drone Test Flight
Even though the use of drones by the United States military is currently widespread in conflicts in different countries, their development started some time ago.
Area 51 was the site of the earliest test flight of the unmanned drone in 1964. The aircraft was known as D21 and was designed for use as the surveillance aircraft.
It had taken quite some time before the drone was launched individually. However, by 1966, the D21 model had flown to the heights of 90,000 feet.
But during its 4th test flight, something went wrong when a particular drone was released from its primary carrier plane and both aircraft’s were damaged, killing one crew member. The D21 drone continue to conduct 4 spying missions over China, from 1969-1971.
4. United States Army Accused Of Using Lethal Substances At Area 51
Suggestions have emerged that the military misused secrecy surrounding Area 51, and the confidentiality obligations assigned to those who work there to dump huge quantities of poisonous waste at the site.
The workers who became sick, and the widows of those who lost their lives, brought together evidence of huge drums of deadly waste being dumped in the trenches prior to being set alight.
A court case was arranged but could not proceed because of national security considerations. Claims were also made that due to the remoteness of Area 51, it was used to dispose of the waste gathered from some other military locations.
5. Area 51 Was Accidentally Disclosed
Area 51 is the well-known secret military base of operations in the entire world. However, a 1967 government memo is the single reason we know of its presence at all.
Protocol meant each reference to the Area 51 had to be redacted from each document but, enquiringly, in this memo that was sent by CIA Director Richard Helms and concerned the positioning of surveillance aircraft in the Vietnam, one slipped through.
The mistake did not reach the public, but the big question stands: was this leak actually accidental?
6. U2 Spy Plane Involved in First Area 51 Operation
The site started in 1955 as a top test center for the U-2 spy plane an aircraft established after WWII. It was able to conduct surveillance over the Soviet Union, and even practice flights were performed using the runways constructed onsite.
When it kicked off the operations over the Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, a cover story was made to display it as a weather research plane.
7. Photos Were Once Accidentally Taken off the Base
During the flight on board Skylab in 1974, a certain group of inexperienced astronauts unintentionally took photographs of the Area 51 site.
The incident prompted a national security debate and the likelihood of formally acknowledging the base was regarded. William Colby, retired director of the CIA, was drawn into a huge controversy within the intelligence service that eventually choose not to release the photograph to the public.
Confidential documents since released, show that Area 51 was the only location in the world which CIA had prohibited from being photographed from the space. This offers an indication of how valued the work done there was seen.
8. Area 51 May Have Tested The Helicopters Used In The Bin Laden Raid
The conspiracy to kill Osama Bin Laden in 2011 was conducted by a team of Navy Seals that were flown to his Pakistan site by 2 Blackhawk helicopters.
Nonetheless, when one helicopter crashed during the mission, aviation professionals recognized that this was no normal helicopter.
Some speculate it was the Blackhawk model which had undergone considerable modification; others claim it was a totally new and formerly unknown model, perhaps one which was purpose-built for this mission.
It is believed the testing grounds for this modern chopper would’ve been Area 51. The improved Black Hawk was regarded near invisible to the radar. Judging by the success of the mission, the aircraft was clearly much harder to sense than its predecessors.
9.The Recent Project May Be A Next Generation Spy Plane
Rumors are circulating, after the appearance of recent satellite data displaying Area 51 which a significant new project is under way. A huge, hangar-like building is supposedly being developed at the end of one of the runways.
According to the defense journalist Tyler Rogoway, the United States air force has indirectly admitted that the prototype of a long-range and the unmanned surveillance aircraft exists that’s believed to be a possible candidate for testing.
The hangar developed at Area 51 has been equipped with large doors, nearly 170 feet wide, suggesting that they’ve been precisely designed to deal with a massive object like an aircraft.
10. Entertainment Options at Area 51
If you are planning an enjoyable getaway to Area 51, you may need to pack some books since you are going to be bored.
Insiders have shown that, early on, the only entertainment choices at Area 51 were a small bowling alley and a single cement tennis court. There was no radio, and TV signals only made it through the nearby mountains in the evening.
However, the good news is that Area 51 workers ate very well. The mess hall occasionally served oysters and lobsters, and they enjoyed a weekly steak night.
11. Aliases of Area 51
During its early construction, Area 51 was given codenames atertown’, room Lake’, the Edgar Allen Poe-inspired reamland’ and, lastly, aradise Ranch’. It is unclear if Michael Jackson had a contributed any of these naming choices.
The primary idea behind “Paradise Ranch” was that it would eventually make the mission appear more desirable to the contracted construction workers.
Arguably, there was not necessary since months of back-breaking labor in the remote Arizonian desert certainly sounds like an idea of a great time.
“Paradise Ranch” is also the name of the campy Korean TV drama. Does it tells the story of the construction of Area 51? It certainly seems like it.
12. Most Ridiculous Conspiracy Theory of Area 51
There are no deficiencies of these to select from, but perhaps the most disgraceful appeared in the 2011 book, on the history of the top-secret base by Annie Jacobsen.
According to her, Area 51 was an active center of a United States cover-up which went into motion after the alleged crashing of the UFO at Roswell, in 1947.
Refuting that it was a UFO, she alleges that the craft was the Soviet mission, piloted by genetically engineered kids to make people in the United States believe that it was the alien craft, to spread fear.
In this imaginary tale, Area 51 was used as a storage location for the oviet’ ship and the remains of its crew. As if this wasn’t going far enough, she also claimed that the fugitive Nazi scientist had conducted the genetic engineering of these kids, Josef Mengele, who is ill-famed for his experiments on the concentration camp prisoners during the WWII.
13. Alien Reports
In 1952, a spectacular spike in the UFO sightings had the CIA admitting the remote prospect that interplanetary aircraft were used. The government considered the phenomenon seriously and even investigated every sighting.
90 percent of reported sightings were simply debunked –whatnot and weather balloons – but the other 10 percent were categorized as “incredible reports from credible observers.”
More than half of the UFO reports from the late 1950s through to the Swingin’ 60s were accounted for by the manned reconnaissance flights over the US. Nearly all of these came from Area 51.
Despite the reasonable explanations, several still claim that the alien aircraft are being kept at Area 51 and reverse-engineered to build new weapons and aircraft.
A recent poll confirmed that more than 70 percent of Americans believe UFOs are real. A number that believes in unicorns stays unconfirmed.
14. Hoax Moon Landing Twist
It is no secret entire hoards of people believe America did fake the moon landing in order to win the coveted Space Race. Most of them believe the staged event happened at Area 51 that’s ground zero for each wild conspiracy theory.
What you may not realize is the sliver of evidence corroborates this specific conspiracy. A huge variety of space equipment – including life-support systems and land rovers – were discovered at adjoining nuclear testing grounds of Area 51.
It is possible these were mainly used for test purposes by various astronauts, but it is still very suspicious.
15. Crashed A-12 Spy Plane
The A-12 is a super-sonic spy plane which was built and tested behind the black curtain of Area 51.
It was almost undetectable to the radar and could cross-continental the USA in only 70 minutes, capturing footage at a remarkable altitude of 90,000 ft.
Pushing the aviation limits came with some risks, still, and finally led to a terrible crash outside of Area 51 in 1963. When fragments of the crashed A-12 were revealed in Utah, the CIA chose to release and even publish photos of the plane.
Reportedly, pilot Ken Collins had managed to parachute to the ground where he was shocked to be meet 3 civilians in a pickup, who provided him a ride to the wreckage of his plane.
Instead, Collins asked them to take him in an opposite direction by informing them the plane had a nuclear weapon on board. In fact, this was a pre-arranged cover story in order to keep the craft secret and even proves the lengths officials were ready to go to.
While it holds a predominant place in Australian Aboriginal mythology as well as in tales by European settlers, the cryptid known as the bunyip has been rarely seen. That makes the news of both the discovery of Aboriginal cave paintings of bunyips as well as a possible video of one a two-fer for their fans. If you’re not one yet, you may become one after hearing one of the origin stories, and if you believe the video, you may want to avoid rivers and billabongs for a while.
The word bunyip comes from the Wemba-Wemba or Wergaia language of Aboriginal people of Victoria, but tales of similar creatures are found throughout Aboriginal folklore. Most say it’s a water spirit, usually evil, with a wide variety of characteristics, including a dog-like face, a crocodile-like head, dark fur, a horse-like tail, flippers, and walrus-like tusks or horns, or a duck-like bill – many of these coming from unidentified fossils attributed to the bunyip.. The National Library of Australia has a famous drawing by an unknown artist illustrating the strange combination of features. Since the sightings are always in water, there’s some speculation the creature is based on a seal, a prehistoric ancestor to the platypus or even an aquatic prehistoric marsupial.
Bunyip by C.D. Richardson
The Aboriginal people have their own ideas, which brings us to the cave paintings. They were rediscovered in 2016 during an expansion of the Grampians Peaks Trail in a shallow cave atop a cliff in the Mt. Difficult Range in Grampians National Park Victoria. Four red-ochre bunyips, well-worn but still identifiable possibly tens of thousands of years after they were drawn on the sandstone wall, have been kept secret until now for their protection – in fact, the exact location of the caves has not been revealed to anyone but traditional owners, park rangers and archaeologists. (See the photos here.)
The rock art of the Grampians is rich in symbols, some of which are found nowhere else and much of which has meanings yet to be relearned.
Picture: JUSTIN MCMANUS
Though faded after years of neglect, park rangers and archaeologists are using new technology to reveal traces of ochre which may be tens of thousands of years old.
Picture: JUSTIN MCMANUS
The traditional owners tell an interesting tale of the bunyip. Bunjil, the creator spirit, lived on a cliff in the Mt. Difficult Range. One day he jumped from it safely with his wife and two children in his arms. However, when his mother-in-law jumped, he couldn’t catch and she broke into pieces. Still alive, she crawled to a waterhole where a bunyip attacked her. She offered her clumsy son-in-law instead and the bunyip killed Bunjil.
I told you some people would become fans of the bunyip after hearing this story!
The Bunyip
That brings us to the recent video. (See it here.) There is very little information on it, other than it was allegedly shot in the western Australia outback, far from Victoria, and the barely visible creature swimming in the water allegedly ate a horse. The explanation refers to it as possibly a rainbow serpent, which is sometimes used to describe a bunyip but with more benevolent characteristics – it came with the great mother from the sea, brings the wet seasons and deposits spirit-children in pools where women swim to impregnate them. Sounds better than eating a horse, doesn’t it? The word “bunyip” has entered common usage as a synonym for “imposter” or “pretender” and that also seems to fit this video.
The cave paintings of the bunyip are truly an historic find and will add to the heritage of Mt. Difficult and the Grampians National Park. Of course, all of that changes if a better video of a surfacing bunyip surfaces.
I was looking through this weeks uploads made by the Curiosity Rover and found that in the distance was a ancient temple structure built on a hilltop. The structure has five or more levels, each one getting smaller than the one before it. The top level being the highest. The main structure at the top of the levels looks like a pyramid with the top built flat. Each level has a flat perfectly horizontal top so that someone or something can walk on it. I believe the rover will not investigate this because NASAs true mission is to drop feed the public boring information about space so it satisfies them, but keeps the public in the dark about the true nature of the surface of Mars.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Harvard Professor Claims The First Interstellar Object In The Solar System Could Be Alien Ship
Harvard Professor Claims The First Interstellar Object In The Solar System Could Be Alien Ship
A Harvard professor has proposed that Oumuamua, which is the first to arrive interstellar object in our solar system, could be alien in origin.
University of Hawaii astronomers spotted the cigar-shaped object entering our solar system on October 19, 2017. Astrophysicists named it Oumuamua, which means a scout or messenger in the Hawaiian word.
The extraterrestrial visitor has a strange spaceship shape, and its origin is still unknown, which instantly fired wild speculations around the world.
Among several dozens of considered outlandish theories is that it’s an advanced alien technological equipment. However, this theory may not be as far-fetched as initially thought.
The chair of Harvard’s astronomy department Professor Avi Loeb argues it’s scientifically imperative to entertain the Oumuamua alien probe story until the evidence proves otherwise.
The Professor says that the scientific community stays away from discussing the search for alien civilisations because of the baggage from science fiction and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).
Professor believes that it is the wrong attitude because it’s like putting blinders on our eyes. He explains that it might not be the case, but it should be discussed as a possibility. He suggests collecting as much data on the next object class that we see to verify if this possibility is ruled out or ruled in.
He stresses that it is imperative not to dismiss any other hypothesis to check whether we are right in saying that something is just a rock.
Professor Loeb points out the strange thing about the Oumuamua. He says that it deviates from an orbit dictated by the gravity of the Sun and it shows no cometary tail or gas around it.
A transnational intelligence conspiracy has been keeping the public in the dark over extraterrestrial visits for decades, an ufologist told RT claiming that 43% of Americans believe in contacts with non-human civilizations.
No matter how divided the nations may be in politics, there is a thing that makes the government stick together: covering up existing contacts with the aliens. At least that’s according to Steven Greer, director of the Center for the Study of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence and the Disclosure Project, who spoke with RT’s SophieCo show.
The retired traumatologist who has been looking for non-human presence on Earth for almost 30 years claims that he has “documents to show” that the Soviet KGB and the US intelligence cooperated on the issue “back in the darkest days of the Cold War.”
Today, data on alien life is allegedly kept by top-secret projects in Canada, UK, Russia, China, with the US being the “crown jewel.”
Greer himself claims to have collected enough testimonies, documents, photos and even biological specimens to suggest there’s “incontrovertible evidence” of alien life existence. While not disclosing specifics, he mentions apparently peculiar footage apparently handed over by “Chilean generals” which shows fighter jets chasing a UFO and a similar one from Mexico.
Greer believes the alien technologies go beyond the speed of light but they won’t hurt humans until they bring weapons of mass destruction into space.
While “43% of Americans” believe in contacts with non-human creatures, the CIA is spreading disinformation to mislead the public, the UFO enthusiast goes on to say. He adds that the governments won’t reveal the truth because it will disrupt the current “macroeconomic petrodollar system.”
Modern science seems to agree that there are no confirmed traces of alien presence on Earth, and every study of bodies that may have carried extraterrestrial life – like meteorites found buried in Antarctic ice – receives keen interest from the media. This is usually linked to the theory of panspermia – that life on Earth may have been seeded from space.
But Greer insists that whole “civilizations” and “species” of extraterrestrial beings from different star systems have already been documented in secret. The reason this is not out in the open, he suggests, is because of far-going implications of confirming the existence of the “cross-dimensional” technologies that they possess.
Whether it’s true or not, the US government seems to have put out feelers for aliens. It recently emerged that in 2007-2012, the Pentagon spent a hefty $22 million on a secretive program to study UFOs.
Researchers who haven’t found evidence of aliens on Earth are not giving up either, as they look for new ways to tackle the issue. In late 2018, a NASA scientist suggested that there is a need to rethink the quest for evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations as “life” may have visited Earth in forms beyond our comprehension.
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3 people from my team, including ex-CIA director, were assassinated – ufologist
3 people from my team, including ex-CIA director, were assassinated – ufologist
Dr Steven Greer, director of the Center for the Study of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence and the Disclosure Project
Talks of UFOs hovering in the skies have been exciting researchers and the general public for decades. Are we being watched from above, and are we ready for encountering the unknown? We ask Dr Steven Greer, director of the Center for the Study of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence and the Disclosure Project.
Sophie Shevardnadze:Dr. Steven Greer, director of the Centre for the Study of Extra-terrestrial Intelligence, welcome to the show, great to have you with us. So Dr. Greer, you say that we are not alone in the universe, and there have already been many contacts between us and aliens. You got to admit, though, that for most people this claim is pretty far out. What can be done to prove once and for all that the aliens are real and already discovered?
Steven Greer: Well, that’s a great question, and, in fact, that has happened. If you look it, there’s a documentary that’s just been released in 2017 called Unacknowledged. And it’s the first word in Unacknowledged Special Access Projects, which is a term used in the military of the United States for very top-secret projects dealing with the UFO and extraterrestrial issue. And you’ll see that there we have over 950 top-secret military people who come forward with testimony documents, photographs, we have even done analysis on an extra-terrestrial biological specimen. And there’s incontrovertible evidence that we’re being visited. And frankly, everyone in very high-ranking classified projects know this. The public hasn’t been told because they wanted to keep these secret for reasons of technology and the macroeconomic petrodollar system. The secrecy has really nothing to do with the, quote on quote, aliens, it has everything to do with the geopolitical power and money, as usual.
SS: We’re going to get to geopolitical power and why we’re covering up the aliens because of that, but still, wouldn’t you expect an event of this cosmic magnitude to be pretty much impossible to cover up?
SG: It hasn’t been. I mean, one of the interesting things, at least in the United States and most countries, more than half the people believe we’re being visited, 65% of the public believes that there’s intelligent life out there. In fact, 43% of Americans believe that we’re currently being visited, actively, by non-human advanced civilizations. So people use the word cover-up, but in reality, it’s hidden in plain sight. You need to make a distinction between official acknowledgement of something and what the public already knows. My job… I’m an emergency doctor, trauma, but I left my medical career to expose this big cover-up, as you call it, some years ago, and we’ve put together this positive proof and evidence. You can go to our website, siriusdisclosure.com, and you will see thousands of pages of government documents and dozens of top-secret military testimonies of the facts. And so I tell people, this is not about a belief system, it’s about what the facts are. Now, the question that you’re asking is why haven’t official governments acknowledged this. That is a different question from whether or not the subject has been disclosed. We’ve been working for over 25 years to disclose this information, and the public has accepted the fact that we’re not alone in the Universe, the vast majority. In fact, if you look at the, even on Unacknowledged, this documentary, it’s on Netflix now, around the world, it’s had tens of millions people see it. And on pirated sites, probably a hundred million people. So what I point out to people is that this information is out there, but the governments have not seen fit to officially recognize it because it would disrupt the status-quo.
SS: Alright, so let’s take a look at the world picture that you are painting, and ask some questions about that. First, are aliens just visiting Earth, or they have settled here permanently?
SG: No, these are reconnaissance, and civilizations that are visiting the planet certainly increased after we started detonating atomic weapons, there’s clear evidence that they have a concern about our destructive capabilities and weapons of mass destruction, and if you look at the modern era of sightings of so-called UFOs, those increased markedly after we developed atomic and nuclear weapons, and the hydrogen bomb. That’s a fact, and we have many top-secret witnesses who were present at nuclear facilities where these extraterrestrial vehicles would come in to observe and to see what we’re doing. So I think there’s… There are a lot of people, like, of course, the science fiction, who’d make you think that there’s a risk of some kind of alien invasion or threat. It’s the other way around, we’re viewed as the threat, the human civilisation right now is viewed as a very unstable civilisation that has not attained a peaceful world situation, which should have happened at the end of World War 2, and has not yet happened. So I think that these civilisations are waiting for us to grow up as a civilisation, and until then, there’s not going to be any overt action by them unless some catastrophic event was to happen.
SS: So how many different alien species are here, visiting Earth? What do they look like? What’s their culture like? What methods of communication do they prefer or use?
SG: Well, these are all really complex questions, number one… The last I heard is that there was documentation of more than five dozen different civilisations or different species, and they range from all kinds of shapes and sizes. Many of the spacecraft that have been seen are not the typical round UFOs, some are triangular, some are circular spheres. These civilisations range from hundreds of thousands to millions of years more developed than ours, and it appears that they are working somehow together in observing the planet. But the caricature of, so to say, an alien that’s been put out there, that’s mostly a counter-intelligence perspective that has been done by the CIA. To be honest with you, I would say that most of the information people see out there on the subject is disinformation created by the intelligence community for its psychological warfare value. But the ETs themselves, these civilisations range in… Some have been documented to be as short as a foot, foot and a half tall, and some that are more than 12 feet tall. And there are many different species from different star systems. Now, the communications, this is where it gets interesting. Because you and I are talking at the speed of light, basically, electromagnetic, or less. If you’re dealing with civilisations from another star system, certain technologies are phasing trans-dimensionally, across dimensions, beyond the speed of light. Now, this has been something that is not wanted to be exposed, because it has huge implications technologically. For example, we often would say, the state of the art method of communication for us is an iPhone or a telecommunication system, or a satellite system. Those are actually very antiquated systems based on mid 18-hundreds to late 18-hundreds telecommunication radio frequencies etc. We’re dealing with civilisations that are communicating with technologies that go beyond the speed of light, but also interface interestingly with directed and coherent thought. So you have to ask the question: what is the speed of consciousness and thought? So this gets into some very advanced concepts and post-quantum mechanics, and so-called entanglement, where you can go beyond the speed of light, which has theoretically been stated by Western scientists not to be possible. But I would argue that it’s only being argued from the point of view of the myopia of the current scientific paradigm. You’re dealing with civilisations that are so far advanced than us that almost any manifestation of how they might appear could appear magical, but it’s not, it’s science.
SS: So if they’re so advanced, and you are saying that the aliens have visited Earth with reconnaissance missions, is it just that, or do they want something from the planet? If a civilisation that manages interstellar flights exists, then, that makes us a real backwater of space...
SG: Yes, it is, except, here’s the problem: we’re going into space, aren’t we? We have a space station, we’re going to Mars with unmanned and, eventually, manned vehicles, we’ve landed on the Moon. My uncle helped design the thing that landed on the Moon with Neil Armstrong in it, the lunar module. What I tell people is that when we start going into space, combined with weapons of mass destruction, a red flag went over the Earth that said: we are at the point where this civilisation could potentially be a problem. So I believe that we’re viewed as a problem civilisation that’s in evolution. And the big task for humanity is to go from a fractured, you know, ape-like civilisation where we’re fighting each other over stupidity to a peaceful civilisation that goes to space peacefully. When we reach that hallmark, that milestone, then you’re going to see a much more open contact occur from these other civilisations and the human species.
SS: So, according to your words, there’s this special organisation that keeps the lid on the UFO story. But surely aliens would not just stick to America, and if they are out there, other major governments of the world should have been aware of aliens too. So is there an international secrecy agreement, or each government has their own alien policy line?
SG: They are. It’s a transnational organisation, so let me make a distinction between international, something like the United Nations, and transnational. Transnational, it sort of transcends geopolitical boundaries, and, for example, we have documents that show that the old KGB in Soviet USSR had cooperation with US intelligence on this issue back in the darkest days of the Cold War. So, in fact, secrecy on this issue has been maintained by a cooperative entity that is multinational and transnational for many decades. Now, the crown jewel of the activity on this subject has been in the United States because of the technology and just, frankly, the macro-economic clout that the United States possesses. But other countries have certainly had… I mean, we’ve had, for example, Chile and Brazilian military files have opened up recently, where they have acknowledged chasing these objects with their jet fighters. We have footage that has been given to us from Chilean generals recently, of these ET objects being chased by their jet fighters. In Mexico, we have similar footage. So a number of countries have actually cooperated with opening up their files, but the real research and development projects have been centred in the high-tech corridors in the United States and in the very classified projects which are properly known as the Unacknowledged Special Access Projects, or USAP. And there are corollaries to those in Canada and the United States, the United Kingdom, and, I would suppose, to some extent, in Russia and China, although to a lesser degree. Certainly, countries all over the world have a prevalent interest in having this information come out, because the big talk is about climate change, the so-called global warming and resource depletion. The fact of the matter is, the technologies for going from one star system to another involves very advanced science and physics, that would get us off oil, gas and coal very quickly. But therein lies the problem: it’s a multi-trillion dollar economic question of bringing out this information. If you acknowledge that we’re not alone in the Universe, and they’re here, the first thing a scientist is going to say to any government official is: what technology are they using to get here? When they ask that question, it will be answered, when it’s answered, it’s the end of oil.
SS: The documentary based on your book, “Sirius”, starts with the premise that the power of oil corporations is what is behind an unfair financial system that benefits the few - and leaves the American middle class in the dust. Is this whole UFO thing really your way of expressing extreme frustration with what is going on in the normal world?
SG: No, it’s just an acknowledgement that the world is a faint shadow when it could be if the technologies that we’ve been developing over the last fifty years in classified projects were being used. I mean, we’re all using jets and cars, oil and gas, and we don’t need them. We haven’t needed them for decades. It’s the decision that has been made because to bring out these new technologies would be too disruptive to the current macroeconomic system. And I think, this is the debate that needs to be joint because people are increasingly getting concerned over the climate change and pollution and deaths related to air pollution. These are all solvable problems, but they are not going to be solved by tinkering around the edges with solar power or wind power. We need really bold new scientific discoveries that have been studied for many decades in classified projects brought forward to benefit the human species.
SS: In one of your main theories you suggested that the powers that be don’t want the public to know because of oil revenues - alien technology would kill oil business. But some governments like oil revenues and others don’t, for instance, China would be very happy if it didn’t have to buy oil, so it can’t all be about that, can it?
SG: It’s about the macroeconomic system that is dependent on the petrodollar system, and that’s from Bretton-Woods at the end of World War II, if you look into history… Even countries who are not oil net exporters, for example, China or Japan, tied into the macroeconomic system that is very dependent on the current energy and industrial paradigm and in particular the petrodollar. These are the things that would change very quickly with the disclosure of the fact that we’re not alone in the universe. We’ve been studying and we’ve figured out how these machines operate. Let’s be very frank: they’re not using Exxon ot Jet-A fuel, or Russian or Saudi oil to go from one star system to another, this is common sense. And the people, I’ve spoken to in the research and development world in classified projects, and as I’ve mentioned, we have over 900 of these top-secret whistleblowers on our team, it’s quite clear that these technologies have been fully developed, but bringing them out would disrupt the status quo. So, the big economic interest all over the world would have to adapt very quickly to a whole new economic system.
SS: You also say that American president is not being told about all such findings. You even prepared a special briefing for President Obama and you spoke before Congress - how did it go?
SG: You know, what I found is that everyone wants to know. I’m in Washington right now about this issue. It’s the biggest non-secret that ever was. Everyone knows that this is going on. All the way back to when I was first putting the briefing together for President Clinton and his CIA director, it was well-known that there are deep secrets on this issue. But for the most part the elected officials at least in this country aren’t given control over these projects. If you doubt that, go remember what Jimmy Carter said after he became president, when he tried to look into this. When someone asked what it’s like being the most powerful man in the world he said: “I wasn’t that man because there were things that they wouldn’t tell me about and I had no control over.” So this is a really big problem for a democracy and for governance all over the world - this level of secrecy. And it’s reached the point at least in the United States, in UK and a number of other countries where the secrecy isn’t in itself criminal, I’m saying this very specifically, and has subverted the constitution, the rule of law and proper oversight. And this is what we found with President Obama, with Clinton. And also if you look all the way back to the time of Eisenhower, he got very frustrated dealing with this issue, and this is why he made his famous speech “Beware the military industrial complex”. He was a general, he wasn’t anti-military, nor am I, I’m from a military family. However, there are interests that have become very undemocratic and have been a threat to the world freedom and also now to our geophysical existence in terms of the biosphere that have been allowed to go on for way too long. And this has been a problem all the way back to President Eisenhower in this country and similarly in other countries around the world - this level of secrecy.
SS: Alright, tell me this, if this story is kept so secret that even presidents are not informed about the issue, why are you still alive? Why are you allowed to make documentaries that stream on Netflix? The CIA has killed people for way less than disclosing a huge government cover-up…
SG: Yeah, and there were three people on my team who had been assassinated, who had been helping me, including a former CIA director… And I don’t want to go into that right now. However, we have systems in place to protect what we’re doing. I have a lot of information that if something happened to me it would hit the internet and it would be catastrophic for those folks. That’s just something we put put in place about 20 years ago. My view is, and this is the other thing, there are people in Pentagon and CIA that I dealt with who are very much in favour of disclosing this information. So this is not a monolithic us vs. them, there is a huge number of people who are on the side of bringing this out all over the world. I have a friend of mine, Carol Rosin, who’s worked very closely with senior Russian contacts who want to see this disclosed for the same reasons we do. So we have similar people in China, United Kingdom and Canada. So I don’t think it’s a monolithic issue, it’s a very much in flux. What I’m seeing is that this isn’t going to happen until people become aware that this is a serious problem, but it also has within it serious solutions for the world’s environmental and governance issues and economic problems around the world.
SS: There have been high ranking military and government officials coming forward talking about aliens for about 60 years. I spoke personally with a former defense minister of Canada...
SG: Oh yes, he’s a friend of mine.
SS: Right, he told me there are dozens of alien species visiting this planet. None of them were able to provide hard, undisputable, evidence, but I just want to know, how many witnesses there needs to be? Does it really take an alien saucer landing on Red Square or Pentagon for everybody to acknowledge the existence of outer civilisations?
SG: No, it doesn’t take that. However it does take people get educated in a way that’s meaningful. This is why we’re putting out this educational films and products. I think that Paul Hellyer, the Minister of Defense of Canada, a very good friend of mine, he and I held a press conference in Toronto, and I was one of the people to introduce him to this subject. And he knows this for a fact that he was kept in the dark as Minister of Defense of Canada. I’ve dealt with the Minister of Defense of Great Britain, Lord Hill-Norton, a 5-star admiral, who also was lied about these projects. Now, in terms of hard evidence, we have them. I have radar traces, and I have traces of physical material. When you say we don’t physical material and evidence, we do, but who’s looking at it? Who’s exposing it? There should be a series of shows that does nothing but putting that forward. That’s what we’ve started to do because those exist - not just government documents and testimonies, but physical evidence such as radar tracings. Recently the Pentagon released a radar case off the coast of California where one of our fighter jets tracked one of these objects moving in a way that no conventional aircraft could possibly move, and this was in The New York Times, and CNN and elsewhere. My point is that there’s a huge amount of evidence like this and even physical hard evidence. We have it, I’ve been accumulating it for decades. The question is who’s going to do a story on this? Ultimately what happens is that at least in the United States if you start doing a deep dive into the evidence on this that show is going to be cancelled. Everyone thinks we have a free press in America, we do not. We have a managed press. And if CNN started drilling on this subject they would be told to stand down off of it. And I’ve seen it happen. ABC News was pursuing this with us, I gave them 35 hours of digital tape of top-secret testimony and hard evidence, and the executive producer of ABC News was told: “You will not be allowed to do this story.” So there’s a myth around the world that the media is somehow completely free, the big mainstream media are free to do this. And this is not the case. If you look at the documentary “Unacknowledged” we have an Air Force intelligence official who said: “We used to bring in US bags of cash to people in the media to secure their co-operation in keeping this stuff secret.” This is the fact. This guy’s testimony is there for everyone to see. And he worked for many years in a classified project on the Kirtland Air Force Base managing counter-intelligence in trying to stop leaks on this issue. These facts are out there for the public to see. Now I hope, people will look at it. And I think, people need to understand that we need to create a new type of media that actually is honest and will tell the truth to the public about this.
SS: Alright, Dr. Greer, thanks a lot for this insight and the interview. We were talking to Dr. Steven Greer, director of the Center for Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, talking about alien civilisations and our prospects to get in contact with them any time soon.
Researchers studying the brain have stumbled upon a mysterious, previously unknown form of neural communication that has stunned the scientific community.
Despite major scientific breakthroughs, the brain largely remains a mystery, and the team from Case Western Reserve University have added to it with their latest paper on a self-propagating ‘wireless’ communication they encountered that can jump across different sections of the brain.
While we’re asleep, the cortex and hippocampus in the brain send out mysterious neural ‘waves’. Scientists have previously observed a low-level, slow periodic activity in the brains of decapitated mice by studying slices of their hippocampuses.
“We’ve known about these waves for a long time, but no one knows their exact function and no one believed they could spontaneously propagate,”says neural and biomedical engineer Dominique Durand from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
This slow periodic activity can generate electric fields which ‘switch on’ neighboring cells briefly, allowing for chemical-free communication across gaps in the brain. The team managed to simulate communication across completely severed brain tissue while the separate pieces remained in close proximity.
“It was a jaw-dropping moment for us and for every scientist we told about this so far.”
The review committee at The Journal of Physiology required the researchers to replicate their results again before they would consider publishing. The researchers were happy to oblige and their paper was subsequently published in the October issue.
When many neurons fire they create a weak electric field, which we can observe on an electroencephalogram (EEG); think of a Mexican wave that keeps going despite breaks in the crowd.
The team has yet to decipher how exactly the discovery works, or what its applications may be.
Onze mond viel open van verbazing. Wetenschappers ontdekken mysterieuze, nog onbekende vorm van communicatie in het brein
Onze mond viel open van verbazing. Wetenschappers ontdekken mysterieuze, nog onbekende vorm van communicatie in het brein
Wetenschappers die het brein bestuderen, hebben een mysterieuze, nog onbekende vorm van communicatie ontdekt. Ze staan voor een raadsel.
Ondanks wetenschappelijke doorbraken blijft het brein grotendeels een mysterie.
Onderzoekers van deCase Western Reserve Universityin de Amerikaanse staat Ohio hebben nu een vorm van ‘draadloze’ communicatie in de hersenen ontdekt die naar verschillende hersengebieden kan ‘overspringen’.
Mysterieuze ‘golven’
Op het moment dat we slapen, zendt de hippocampus mysterieuze ‘golven’ uit.
“We weten al heel lang van het bestaan van deze golven, maar niemand weet precies wat hun functie is,” zei onderzoeker Dominique Durand.
“Niemand geloofde dat ze zich spontaan konden voortplanten,” voegde hij toe.
Van elkaar gescheiden
De golven genereren elektrische velden die naburige cellen korte tijd ‘aanzetten’, waardoor communicatie mogelijk wordt.
Het team kwam tot de ontdekking dat zelfs stukken hersenweefsel die van elkaar gescheiden waren, nog met elkaar konden communiceren op deze manier.
The Journal of Physiology wilde de onderzoeksresultaten pas publiceren nadat de wetenschappers hun onderzoek hadden herhaald.
Mond viel open
“Onze mond viel open van verbazing en datzelfde geldt voor iedere wetenschapper die we hierover hebben verteld,” klonk het.
Het team gaat nu proberen te onderzoeken hoe deze vorm van communicatie precies werkt en wat het doel ervan is.
A strange orange glow was visible over Leicester last night
(Image: John Bonell)
A strange orange glow was spotted in the skies over Leicester last night.
The eerie light was seen illuminating the clouds around 7.30pm and overLeicester Forest Eastand the source is unknown.
It was still visible around three hours later from Leicester Forest East and could even be seen from the National Space Centre according to eyewitnesses.
John Bonell, from the Leicester Astronomical Society took a picture of the glow.
He said: "What is the strange orange glow visible over Leicester?
"Saw this first from Leicester Forest East when we left at 7pm for tonight's meeting of the Leicester Astronomical Society at the National Space Centre.
"It was still clearly visible from the NSC when the meeting finished at around 9.30pm.
"This was taken looking east from LFE circa 10pm.
"Has anyone else seen it? What is the cause?"
There are suggestions on social media that it could have been caused by light pollution.
As the number of UFO sightings increase all across the globe, conspiracy theorists strongly argue that these incidents are authentic proof of alien existence. To add heat to their claims, local media in the Philippines have reported a hugeUFO sighting above the ocean.
The video uploaded by GMA News soon went viral, and it made many people believe that aliens are living secretly in the oceans. It should be noted that the majority of UFO sightings usually happened above the oceans, and conspiracy theorists argue that extraterrestrials could be using water bodies as a hiding platform.
After analyzing the clip, popular extraterrestrial researcher Scott C Waring wrote on his website stating that the glowing object spotted above the ocean is not a plane or helicopter.
"The video was on local TV news and uploaded by the TV news agency, so you know it is not been faked. The UFO is huge, I mean its 747 size, and has a glow that can only be compared to looking directly into the sun. There is no technology I know of that can produce a flying light like that, not LEDs, not a plane or helicopter. This is an alien craft from a nearby underwater base," wrote Waring on his website UFO Sightings Daily.
In his website post, Waring also added that underwater alien bases are located 3 to 6 kilometers beneath the ocean.
The report about the UFO sighting the Philippines came just a few days after local residents spotted a mysterious glowing light in Wellington and Taunton Deane. Even though no videos or photos of the sighting are available as of now, witnesses strongly argued that the object they spotted is not a meteorite nor a star. As the news went viral, some conspiracy theorists claimed that governments across the world are involved in an extraterrestrial coverup.
Conspiracy theorists across the world strongly believe that NASA is well aware ofalienexistence and they are intentionally covering up the secrets of extraterrestrial life fearing public panic. Adding heat to their claims, an Amazon Prime documentary, Secret Space, has quoted the words of a Russian scientist and hinted that NASA is involved in a possible alien coverup.
The documentary shows how a Russian scientist figured out a meagre 20-second delay in NASA's International Space Station (ISS) live feed.
"The pre-docking manoeuvres of Russian cargo freighter Progress 18 in June 2005 left no doubt there was a delay. In fact, that delay has been shown to be no less than 20 seconds. As Progress was approaching the station for docking, a ground controller at Moscow Mission Control mildly complained that the live video feed they were getting included this delay," said the narrator in the documentary, Express.co.uk reports.
The documentary narrator also added that this 20-second delay in the live feed is primarily used to correct anomalies which might come under public attention.
"NASA instituted this delay in their live broadcasts from space. They do this to obscure anomalies in space from getting to the public. However, some things still slip through," said the narrator.
A few months back, several conspiracy theorists had alleged that Elon Musk's SpaceX is also working hand-in-glove with NASA to hide dark secrets about aliens. To substantiate these claims, conspiracy theorists released a video in which a triangular shaped object can be seen zooming past SpaceX's Dragon during its early December 2018 mission.
Even though many people consider the UFO sighting near Dragon a concrete proof of alien existence, experts revealed that it might be the reflection of objects inside the International Space Station that might have caused this visual deception.
Locals in Taunton Deane and Wellington in the UK were pulled to a state of panic on Valentine's Day after they spotted a bright round unidentified flying object (UFO) hovering in the skies. Even though no videos or photos of the apparentUFO sighting are available as of now, local media outlets have reported the incident, and they have even quoted statements from witnesses.
"I wonder if anybody else saw the big white glowing ball shape object that went over Taunton last night? Possible UFO sighting? I live in Hillcommon and my son lives in Wellington, he spotted it too. It seemed to come over from Taunton at great speed then it just disappeared," said Kevin Midwood, a local resident who saw the UFO flying above his home, Somerset Country Gazette reports.
Kevin Midwood's son James Vasey said that the UFO was not a meteorite or shooting star. The eyewitness also made it clear that the object was hovering too low before disappearing.
"I was walking from my home in Wellington and a bright yellow object shot across the sky at rapid speed. It wasn't a meteorite or shooting star as it was flying too low and whatever it was disappeared," Vasey revealed.
As the news of the alleged UFO sighting went viral online, many people started arguing that alien life is a reality, and these extraterrestrial beings might be gearing up for an invasion.
Some conspiracy theorists even went a step ahead and claimed that governments all around the world and space agencies like NASA and ESA are covering up the bitter facts fearing public panic.
Popular extraterrestrial researcher Scott C Waring has also joined the party and urged the authorities to conduct further investigations to unveil the mysteries surrounding this UFO sighting.
SpaceX and NASA alien cover-up? Triangular UFO spotted near Dragon during ISS mission
SpaceX and NASA alien cover-up? Triangular UFO spotted near Dragon during ISS mission
As the video of the triangular UFO surfaced online, conspiracy theorists have started arguing that NASA and SpaceX are covering up the truth behind aliens.
Conspiracy theorists have long been alleging that NASA, the United States space agency, is well aware of alien existence and they are intentionally covering up the truth behind extraterrestrials fearing public panic. Adding heat to their beliefs, eagle-eyed conspiracy theorists have spotted an apparently triangular-shapedUFOzooming past SpaceX's Dragon during its early December 2018 mission that successfully ferried 2.5 tonnes of supplies to the orbiting International Space Station (ISS).
Interestingly, conspiracy theorists spotted the triangular UFO from NASA's ISS live feed, and in the video, a triangular object with glowing lights on its well-defined edges can be seen moving slowly in the background.
A video about the triangular UFO sighting was uploaded by conspiracy theory channel 'UFO Today' a few weeks back. In the video, the conspiracy theory channel argued that the triangular flying object spotted in the footage could be actually the alleged TR-3B, an anti-gravity military vessel developed by the United States Air Force during the peak of Gulf War.
Many conspiracy theorists believe that the United States Air Force developed this sophisticated military vessel using alien technology and some of them even went a step ahead to argue that friendly extraterrestrials from deep space have built these ships from Area 51.
A section of other conspiracy theorists believe that the triangular UFO might be either from an alien world or sometimes it might be the part of Donald Trump's space force.
As the video uploaded by UFO Today went viral, many people have started claiming that SpaceX is also a puppet in the hands of NASA and they are also covering up alien secrets for sinister intentions.
However, sceptics soon dismissed the alien claims and made it clear that the lights could be actually the reflection from objects inside the ISS.
A couple of days back, two men from Bend, Oregon spotted glowing UFOs in the night sky and it made them claim that humans are not alone in the universe. These men revealed that the unidentified object spotted in the skies was hovering almost 500 feet above the ground.
Alien UFO or secret military drill? Strange lights over Texas sparks debate
Alien UFO or secret military drill? Strange lights over Texas sparks debate
Even though many people consider this UFO sighting as proof of alien existence, a section of conspiracy theorists argue that these are all secret military vessels.
An apparently diamond-shaped UFO with flashing lights spotted above Burleson, Texas, is now the hottest debating point among conspiracy theorists and alien enthusiasts. The video was originally uploaded on YouTube by a user named 'UFO Casebook', and gained popularity after it was shared by popular conspiracy theory channel 'UFOmania'.
In the video, strange glowing lights can be seen hovering in the night skies of Texas, and its body emanates lights from well-defined corners.
"Driving down I-35 westbound and Rendon Crowley Rd., next to Texas Health Huguley Hospital, I was on the phone with my girlfriend, driving ahead of me, and we both witness strange red/white flashing lights in the sky a little in the distance," wrote the eyewitness.
The video uploaded by UFOmania soon went viral on online spaces, and viewers started putting forward various theories explaining the weird sightings. Most of the people who watched the video argued that these flying objects which appear in the skies are actually alien spaceships from deep space.
Some of these alien enthusiasts even went a step ahead and argued that these extraterrestrials are now gearing up for an invasion.
"Been patiently waiting for concrete proof of space creatures (people). It's bound to happen and the world will instantly change, guaranteed," commented Jefferey Blagus, a YouTube user.
Pixabay
In the meantime, a section of other conspiracy theorists claimed that these strange UFOs might be actually secret military vehicles tested by the United States Air Force.
"It's probably clear indication when objects are seen with flashing lights it is not an extraterrestrial craft... Don't think they would need to signal lane changes... Most likely man-made craft," commented Lorena A, another YouTuber.
The new UFO was spotted just a few days after an apparently humanoid flying object was seen hovering in the skies of Canada in broad daylight. This video soon went viral, and people claimed this sighting an authentic proof of extraterrestrial existence.
FINALLY: LIE DETECTOR TEST PROVES BUZZ ALDRIN SAW ALIEN UFOS IN SPACE
FINALLY: LIE DETECTOR TEST PROVES BUZZ ALDRIN SAW ALIEN UFOS IN SPACE
A glance at some of the world’s most-read news websites will have left many readers under the impression Buzz Aldrin had confirmed he saw an alien craft. But he has almost certainly not.
The institution behind the claim will not reveal how the claim has been proven, Aldrin himself has denied it, and at least some of the astronauts named didn’t actually take part in the study, since two of them are dead.
The claim, originally published in the Daily Star, has now been repeated by many of the world’s biggest websites and across the world. The reports – many of which cast little doubt on the initial claims – have been shared thousands of times.
The report trades on the idea that Nasa is secretly keeping evidence of aliens under wraps.
While some Apollo astronauts have claimed to have seen UFOs during their missions, Mr Aldrin, the second man on the moon, has not – repeatedly denying reports suggesting he spotted an alien craft during the historic 1969 mission.
The original report said Apollo 11 astronaut Mr Aldrin had “passed lie detector tests over claims they experienced alien encounters”. It said experts had examined astronauts’accounts of “strange space sightings”, using the “latest technology” and that they had proven the astronauts were convinced about what they saw.
It claimed that the experts came from the Institute of BioAcoustic Biology and Sound Health, a non-profit in Albany, Ohio. The organisation had used “top-secret” technology, it said, which scans people’s voices to understand them.
As well as Mr Aldrin, the report claims that four Nasa astronauts have been studied and found to be telling the truth about their claims. It appears that the group did that with recordings, since two of the astronauts being studied are now dead.
But there’s no proof that the wild claims of that organisation have been tested or proven. While “bioacoustics” is a legitimate scientific exercise – it explores how living things make and are changed by sound – that is not what the organisation is doing.
A website that appears to belong to the institute claims that it “quietly goes about changing the future”. “This tiny non-profit research institute has provided supporting evidence for the ancient claims that the sounds of the voice can act as a holographic representation of health and wellness,” the website claims.
It goes on to suggest that the institute can not only tell whether people are lying, but also can be used to “reverse diseases and traumas previously thought to be incurable, to reveal the secrets of our true nature, to enhance our lives, to predict what may be our fate through the frequencies of our voice”.
None of those claims have been tested and many of them appear to be impossible according to modern science. It is theoretically possible that it could be possible to understand whether someone is lying by listening to their voice, but previous examples have been unreliable and the institute reported on by the Daily Star did not make its working available to the public or to other scientists.
Mr Aldrin has repeatedly dismissed suggestions he has seen a UFO. He has spoken about seeing a light out of the window as he was heading towards the Moon – but has always said he is sure that what he saw was either the rocket the crew had separated from, or panels that had come off when the lander and the rocket were detached.
“It was not an alien,” he wrote in an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit three years ago. He explained that he had told Nasa about what he had seen and presumed that information had been sent out into the world – until he mentioned what he had seen in a TV interview, which many now point to as proof that Mr Aldrin had seen an alien craft.
The Daily Star repeated this claim in its report, writing that “Aldrin has always maintained he spotted a UFO on the way to the moon”. While it is true that what he said is in some sense unidentified – in that it’s not clear what part of the spacecraft it was – the suggestion that he thinks it might be alien was false and he has repeatedly denied it.
But the institute and the Daily Star suggested that Mr Aldrin had seen a UFO and that its tests had shown that he knew it, even if he wasn’t aware of it. He continues to believe otherwise because his logical mind “cannot explain it”, the Daily Star reported.
The second installment of this winter's trio of supermoons, sometimes nicknamed the Super Snow Moon, will peak today (Feb. 19), so don't forget to step outside and look up tonight.
The full moon technically occurs on at 10:53 a.m. EST (1553 GMT), but don't despair if the morning light washes out the moon at the time: to the unpracticed eye, it will still lookfull tonight. In fact, of the three "supermoons" that start 2019, today's full moon will be the biggest of the year.
If your weather looks threatening, you can also catch sight of the full moon online, thanks to live broadcasts from the Virtual Telescope Project based in Rome, beginning at 11:30 a.m. EST (1630 GMT), and from Slooh, beginning at 7 p.m. EST (000 GMT).
And it will be a particularly splendid sight, since the moon is at perigee just a few hours before it is full, hence the "supermoon" moniker. It will appear about 10 percent larger than an average full moon on account of being relatively close to Earth, just 221,681 miles (356,761 kilometers) away. [How the 'Supermoon' Looks (Infographic)
A so-called super moon appears a fraction larger than a typical full moon.
We humans enjoy the full moon because the entire near side, the half of the moon that faces us, is bathed in sunlight. But that of course means that the opposite side of the moon, the far side, is experiencing its night — and on the moon, that lasts about two terrestrial weeks.
During lunar night on the far side, temperatures can drop as low as minus 310 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 190 degrees Celsius), as China's Chang'e- 4 lander and Yutu-2 rover have learned from their stay on the moon, which began on Jan. 3.
Both robots shut themselves down each night to wait out the cold. So tonight, as you look up at the full moon, spare a thought for the side of the moon you can never see directly and the two machines hard at work to solve its mysteries.
Editor's note: If you capture an amazing photo of the February Full Moon and would like to share it with Space.com for a story or gallery, send images and comments to at spacephotos@space.com.
As if Stonehenge wasn’t impressive enough, its rocks were quarried from a very, very long distance away. Now, researchers have zoomed in on the source of the rocks, identifying it at an outcrop in Wales, 180 miles away from the site.
The Welsh quarry where the rocks were brought from.
Image credits: UCL.
Stonehenge, which lies firmly in England, used rocks quarried from Wales. Geologists have long known that at least 42 of Stonehenge’s smaller stones, known as ‘bluestones’, came from the Preseli hills in Pembrokeshire, west Wales. The new study shows exactly where these rocks were quarried from.
“This was the dominant source of Stonehenge’s spotted dolerite, so-called because it has white spots in the igneous blue rock. At least five of Stonehenge’s bluestones, and probably more, came from Carn Goedog,” said geologist Dr. Richard Bevins from the National Museum of Wales.
This is rather unusual, as most megaliths of the time are built with rocks from no more than 10 miles away — which is very reasonable, considering how difficult it would have been to carry these big rocks over miles and miles. Especially in Europe, Neolithic megaliths were built with local rocks, says Professor Mike Pearson. Scientists have been trying to understand what makes Stonehenge such a remarkable outlier.
“We’re now looking to find out just what was so special about the Preseli hills 5,000 years ago, and whether there were any important stone circles here, built before the bluestones were moved to Stonehenge.”
According to the study, the bluestone outcrops consist of natural, vertical pillars. It wouldn’t have been all that difficult to extract from the outcrop, particularly compared to the stone quarries in ancient Egypt, which often consisted of much more solid rocks like basalt or granite. The tools they had, however, were woefully unfit for this type of job.
The Stonehenge workers actually left some traces of their work behind. Archaeologists have discovered tools such as hammer stones and stone wedges, but these wedges were much softer than the rocks.
“The stone wedges are made of imported mudstone, much softer than the hard dolerite pillars. An engineering colleague has suggested that hammering in a hard wedge could have created stress fractures, causing the thin pillars to crack. Using a soft wedge means that, if anything were to break, it would be the wedge and not the pillar,” said Professor Parker Pearson.
Transportation, however, would have been even more difficult. Excavations around the outcrop have uncovered the remains of man-made platforms of stone and Earth. Archaeologists also suspect that the builders used perishable ropes and levers.
“Bluestone pillars could be eased down onto this platform, which acted as a loading bay for lowering them onto wooden sledges before dragging them away,” said Professor Colin Richards (University of the Highlands and Islands), who has excavated Britain’s only other identified megalith quarry in the Orkney islands, off the north coast of Scotland.
The new discovery also works against a popular theory, which claimed that the rocks were carried on water, using rafts.
“Some people think that the bluestones were taken southwards to Milford Haven and placed on rafts or slung between boats and then paddled up the Bristol Channel and along the Bristol Avon towards Salisbury Plain. But these quarries are on the north side of the Preseli hills so the megaliths could have simply gone overland all the way to Salisbury Plain,” said Professor Kate Welham (Bournemouth University).
So some of the Stonehenge rocks were quarried with soft tools and carried using rudimentary platforms over 180 miles, an absolutely grueling journey — and we’re really not sure why.
The team now believes that Stonehenge was initially a circle of rough, unworked bluestones set in shallow pits (called the Aubrey holes). Over time, more rocks were added, finessed, and re-arranged.
The findings have been published in the journal Antiquity.
The scientific team that used YouTube videos to determine the trajectory of the Chelyabinsk meteor used the same method to track the trajectory of the bright meteor that crossed the sky over Cuba on February 1.
Picture from a cruise ship deck leaving the Havana Harbor at the exact time of the Cuba meteor.
Image via Rachel Cook.
On February 1, 2019,a bright meteor crossed the sky over Cubain the middle of the day. The phenomenon, followed by a smoke trail (a characteristic cloud left by a meteor burning up in the atmosphere) and a sonic boom, was witnessed by thousands of locals and tourists in the region of Pinar del Rio (western side of the island).
Almost at the same time of the impact, a cruise ship was leaving Havana Harbor and on board, Rachel Cook, an American tourist and vlogger, was making a timelapse of the undocking process. Without knowing it, she was recording one of the few videos known to date of the falling meteor. Meanwhile, about 250 miles (400 km) away, in Ft. Myers, Florida, a webcam of the EarthCam network was filming the midday activities on the beach. Luckily, the camera was aimed in the right direction to record the meteor.
Just a couple of minutes after the event, social networks, especially Instagram and Twitter, received a flood of dozens of videos and pictures taken from Cuba, most of them showing the smoke trail left by the meteor. One of those videos was particularly interesting. It was recorded in one of the main streets of the city of Pinar del Rio, and showed dozens of people in the street contemplating the remnant cloud in awe (see the video here). Although the video does not show the meteor, it was full of details about the place and time when it was recorded.
These events recalled the Chelyabinsk meteor of February 2013, when a super bolide, 400 times brighter than the Cuba meteor (according to NASA data released a few days after the Cuba impact), hit the atmosphere over a populated area in western Russia. The Chelyabinsk meteor was the first event of its kind witnessed by humans in almost a century.
Only a couple of days after the Chelyabinsk impact, a team of astronomers of the Institute of Physics of the University of Antioquia, led by Jorge I. Zuluaga, reconstructed the trajectory of the Chelyabinsk meteor exclusively using videos of the phenomenon published on YouTube.
Although many other teams in Russia, the Czech Republic, Canada and the U.S. also managed to reconstruct the trajectory using more sophisticated methods and data, the Colombian astronomers’ use of information available on the internet was well received. The study demonstrates the role that social networks and citizen science in general could have for investigating this type of phenomenon.
A week after the Cuba meteor event, and almost exactly six years after the February 15, 2013, Chelyabinsk impact, the same Colombian scientific team, again using information available on the internet, applied their methods to reconstruct the trajectory of the Cuban meteor. Their results are reported in a scientific paper. Read the preprint here. Zuluaga explained:
We were very lucky that at least three relatively reliable videos, including one of incredible quality, were available on the internet in such a short time. Reconstructing the trajectory of a meteor requires at least three observers on the ground. Although several satellite images were recorded and also available online, without observations from the ground a precise reconstruction is not feasible.
According to the reconstruction made by the Colombian astronomers, the object producing the meteor over Cuba started its trajectory inside the atmosphere at an altitude of about 47.5 miles (76.5 km) above the Caribbean Sea, over a point 16 miles (26 km) to the southwest of the San Felipe Keys (Cuba).
The speed of the rock at the time of its contact with the atmosphere was 11 miles (18 km) per second, or 40,260 miles (64,800 km) per hour. With such a velocity, the thin air of the high atmosphere was not enough to stop the object, although it was enough to heat it until the rock began to glow.
The meteor trajectory followed an almost straight line until it descended to an altitude of around 17 miles (27.5 km). It was at about that altitude that the smoke trail, observed by thousands in Cuba and visible in satellite images, started to develop. Zuluaga and co-authors estimate that the cloud seen in Pinar del Rio represents a small part of the trajectory of the meteor (corresponding to altitudes between 16 and 14 miles or 26 and 22.5 km). According to the footage from Pinar del Rio and the reconstruction of the Colombians, the airburst suddenly ended at about 13.7 miles (22 km) altitude.
Trajectory of the meteor falling over Cuba on February 1, 2019, as reconstructed by a team of Colombian astronomers.
From there on, hundreds of small fragments which survived the atmospheric ablation (friction) fell in many directions without emitting any light. Although most of these small rocks probably ended up in the forests of the Viñales Natural Park, some of them hit several houses in the Viñales Valley, close to a tourist landmark, El Mural de la Prehistoria, 3.7 miles (6 km) away from the main path of the object. If a big fragment survived the ablation, it probably landed in the ocean on the northwestern coast of the island.
After reconstructing the trajectory in the atmosphere, the Colombian astronomers “played back” the impact and found that the culprit, a rock with an estimated size of several meters and a weight of about 360 tons, came from an eccentric orbit around the sun with an average distance to our star of 1.3 astronomical units (one astronomical unit = about 93 million miles or 150 million km). Before impacting the Earth, the rock completed a turn around the sun every 1.32 years. All that came to an end on February 1, 2019, when both the rock and the Earth found themselves at the same point in space at the same time. All the worse for the rock!
Bottom line:A team of astronomers used YouTube videos to determine the trajectories of the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor and the bright meteor that crossed the sky over Cuba on February 1, 2019.
On February 15, 2013, a small incoming asteroid created a meteor – brighter than the sun – over Russia. It exploded in the air over the city of Chelyabinsk.
Six years ago today, a small asteroid with an estimated size of 65 feet (20 meters) entered Earth’s atmosphere. The February 15, 2013, asteroid was moving at 12 miles per second (~19 km/sec) when it struck the protective blanket of air around our planet, which did its job and caused the asteroid to explode. The bright, hot explosion took place only about 20 miles (30 km) above the city of Chelyabinsk in Russia and carried 20 to 30 times the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Its shock wave broke windows and knocked down parts of buildings in six Russian cities and caused some 1,500 people to seek medical attention for injuries, mostly from flying glass.
Large and small bodies from space strike Earth’s atmosphere continuously. The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, which operates a network of sensors that monitors Earth around the clock listening for the infrasound signature of nuclear detonations, said in 2014 that it had recorded 26 atom-bomb-scale asteroid impacts to Earth’s atmosphere since 2000.
Still, the February 15, 2013, Russian superbolide was extremely powerful. It was later said to be the most powerful explosion caused by an asteroid since the Tunguska event, which flattened a wide area of forest and killed reindeer in Siberia in 1908.
The Tunguska event happened in a sparsely populated part of Siberia. It remained mysterious to scientists throughout the early part of the 20th century. By contrast, across a wide swath of Russia on February 15, 2013, dashboard cameras and amateur photographers captured images of the incoming meteor.
Bright fireball over Russia on the morning of February 15, 2013. Scientists later said the light from the meteor was brighter than the sun. It was visible up to 60 miles (100 km) away.
Vapor cloud trail left by the Chelyabinsk, Russia, asteroid as captured by M. Ahmetvaleev on February 15, 2013.
After the 2013 meteor exploded, it’s said that local residents and schoolchildren found meteorite fragments left in its aftermath, many located in snowdrifts. An informal market emerged for meteorite fragments.
A large number of small meteorites fell on areas west of Chelyabinsk, and, within hours of the visual sighting of the meteor, a 20-foot (6-meter) hole was discovered on the frozen surface of Lake Chebarkul in the Russian Ural Mountains. Scientists from the Ural Federal University collected 53 samples from around the hole that same day.
In June 2013, Russian scientists reported further investigation by magnetic imaging below the location of the ice hole in Lake Chebarkul. They had identified a larger meteorite buried in sediments on the lake floor.
Following an operation lasting a number of weeks, on October 15, 2013, a large fragment of the meteorite was lifted from the bottom of Lake Chebarkul. It had a total mass of 1,442 pounds (654 kg) and to date remains the largest found fragment of the Chelyabinsk meteorite.
Largest-discovered fragment of Russian meteorite, lifted from the bed of Lake Chebarkul in the Urals, via Voice of Russia.
NASA satellites were also able to track the meteor plume in Earth’s atmosphere. As the video below describes, they tracked and studied the meteor plume for months.
Bottom line: On February 15, 2013, a small asteroid created a bright meteor over Russia, which exploded over the city of Chelyabinsk.
Gigantische gletsjer twee keer zo groot als België dreigt los te komen van Antarctica: zeeniveau kan tot 3 meter stijgen
Gigantische gletsjer twee keer zo groot als België dreigt los te komen van Antarctica: zeeniveau kan tot 3 meter stijgen
IllustratieFOTO: GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO
Een gletsjer die twee keer zo groot is als de oppervlakte van België dreigt te verdwijnen door de opwarming van de aarde. En als dat gebeurt, kunnen de gevolgen catastrofaal zijn. “In het worstcasescenario is er sprake van een stijging van de zeespiegel met 3 meter”, klinkt het.
De Thwaitse-gletsjer is 600 kilometer lang, 120 kilometer breed en is een van de grootste gletsjers van West-Antarctica. Maar zal die nog lang blijven bestaan? Geavanceerde radars van NASA hebben binnenin de gletsjer een enorme holte waargenomen, waar er al een massa ijs is weggesmolten. Het gaat om een holte van 300 meter hoog, 10 kilometer breed en 4 kilometer lang. Die holte verwarmt de gletsjer van binnenuit, waardoor die verder wegsmelt. Het zeewater binnenin de gletsjer is nu al verantwoordelijk voor 4 procent van de totale stijging van de zeespiegel.
Maar de gletsjer dreigt dus volledig te verdwijnen, en in dat geval zou het waterpeil met 65 centimeter stijgen. Sommige modellen spreken zelfs van een stijging van het water met 3 meter. Volgens Eric Rignot hoogleraar Earth Science aan Universiteit van Californië is West-Antarctica gedoemd om te verdwijnen. Rignot bestudeerde het fenomeen in de Thwaitse-gletsjer en zegt dat hij denkt dat het publiek niet beseft wat er op Antarcticata en in de poolgebieden echt aan het gebeuren is. “We doen het niet goed. Dit fenomeen is onmogelijk te stoppen”, zegt hij. “Maar het kan wel vertraagd worden, als we de opwarming vertragen. De gletsjer zal zich wellicht blijven terugtrekken, maar door iets aan het klimaatverandering te doen, kunnen we dat proces héél traag laten verlopen.”
Ook Emmanuel Le Meur, docent aan de Universiteit van Grenoble, bevestigt dat: “De grote vraag is nu of dit het geval is de komende decennia, de volgende paar eeuwen of zelfs volgende millennia. Hoe snel dit zal lopen, hangt af van onze manier van leven en van wat onze besluitvormers zullen doen.”
Mars is the fourth planet from the sun. Befitting the Red Planet's bloody color, the Romans named it after their god of war. In truth, the Romans copied the ancient Greeks, who also named the planet after their god of war, Ares. Other civilizations also typically gave the planet names based on its color — for example, the Egyptians named it "Her Desher," meaning "the red one," while ancient Chinese astronomers dubbed it "the fire star."
Physical characteristics
The bright rust color Mars is known for is due to iron-rich minerals in its regolith — the loose dust and rock covering its surface. The soil of Earth is a kind of regolith, too, albeit one loaded with organic content. According to NASA, the iron minerals oxidize, or rust, causing the soil to look red.
The cold, thin atmosphere means liquid water likely cannot exist on the Martian surface for any length of time. Features called recurring slope lineae may have spurts of briny water flowing on the surface, but this evidence is disputed; some scientists argue the hydrogen spotted from orbit in this region may instead indicate briny salts. This means that although this desert planet is just half the diameter of Earth, it has the same amount of dry land.
The Red Planet is home to both the highest mountain and the deepest, longest valley in the solar system. Olympus Mons is roughly 17 miles (27 kilometers) high, about three times as tall as Mount Everest, while the Valles Marinerissystem of valleys — named after the Mariner 9 probe that discovered it in 1971 — reaches as deep as 6 miles (10 km) and runs east-west for roughly 2,500 miles (4,000 km), about one-fifth of the distance around Mars and close to the width of Australia.
Scientists think the Valles Marineris formed mostly by rifting of the crust as it got stretched. Individual canyons within the system are as much as 60 miles (100 km) wide. The canyons merge in the central part of the Valles Marineris in a region as much as 370 miles (600 km) wide. Large channels emerging from the ends of some canyons and layered sediments within suggest the canyons might once have been filled with liquid water.
Mars also has the largest volcanoes in the solar system, Olympus Mons being one of them. The massive volcano, which is about 370 miles (600 km) in diameter, is wide enough to cover the state of New Mexico. Olympus Mons is a shield volcano, with slopes that rise gradually like those of Hawaiian volcanoes, and was created by eruptions of lavas that flowed for long distances before solidifying. Mars also has many other kinds of volcanic landforms, from small, steep-sided cones to enormous plains coated in hardened lava. Some minor eruptions might still occur on the planet.
The solar system's largest volcano Olympus Mons on Mars, seen by Viking 1.
Channels, valleys and gullies are found all over Mars, and suggest that liquid water might have flowed across the planet's surface in recent times. Some channels can be 60 miles (100 km) wide and 1,200 miles (2,000 km) long. Water may still lie in cracks and pores in underground rock. A study by scientists in 2018 suggested that salty water below the Martian surface could hold a considerable amount of oxygen, which would support microbial life. However, the amount of oxygen depends on temperature and pressure; temperature changes on Mars from time to time as the tilt of its rotation axis shifts.
Many regions of Mars are flat, low-lying plains. The lowest of the northern plains are among the flattest, smoothest places in the solar system, potentially created by water that once flowed across the Martian surface. The northern hemisphere mostly lies at a lower elevation than the southern hemisphere, suggesting the crust may be thinner in the north than in the south. This difference between the north and south might be due to a very large impact shortly after the birth of Mars.
The number of craters on Mars varies dramatically from place to place, depending on how old the surface is. Much of the surface of the southern hemisphere is extremely old, and so has many craters — including the planet's largest, 1,400-mile-wide (2,300 km) Hellas Planitia — while that of northern hemisphere is younger and so has fewer craters. Some volcanoes also have a few craters, which suggests they erupted recently, with the resulting lava covering up any old craters. Some craters have unusual-looking deposits of debris around them resembling solidified mudflows, potentially indicating that the impactor hit underground water or ice.
In 2018, the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft detected what could be a slurry of water and grains underneath icy Planum Australe. (Some reports describe it as a "lake," but it's unclear how much regolith is inside the water.) This body of water is said to be about 12.4 miles (20 km) across. Its underground location is reminiscent of similar underground lakes in Antarctica, which have been found to host microbes. Late in the year, Mars Express also spied a huge, icy zone in the Red Planet's Korolev Crater.
Polar caps
Vast deposits of what appear to be finely layered stacks of water ice and dust extend from the poles to latitudes of about 80 degrees in both hemispheres. These were probably deposited by the atmosphere over long spans of time. On top of much of these layered deposits in both hemispheres are caps of water ice that remain frozen year-round.
Additional seasonal caps of frost appear in the wintertime. These are made of solid carbon dioxide, also known as "dry ice," which has condensed from carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere. In the deepest part of the winter, this frost can extend from the poles to latitudes as low as 45 degrees, or halfway to the equator. The dry ice layer appears to have a fluffy texture, like freshly fallen snow, according to a report in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets.
Climate
Mars is much colder than Earth, in large part due to its greater distance from the sun. The average temperature is about minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 60 degrees Celsius), although it can vary from minus 195 F (minus 125 C) near the poles during the winter to as much as 70 F (20 C) at midday near the equator.
The carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere of Mars is also about 100 times less dense than Earth's on average, but it is nevertheless thick enough to support weather, clouds and winds. The density of the atmosphere varies seasonally, as winter forces carbon dioxide to freeze out of the Martian air. In the ancient past, the atmosphere was likely thicker and able to support water flowing on its surface. Over time, lighter molecules in the Martian atmosphere escaped under pressure from the solar wind, which affected the atmosphere because Mars does not have a global magnetic field. This process is being studied today by NASA's MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) mission.
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter found the first definitive detections of carbon-dioxide snow clouds, making Mars the only body in the solar system known to host such unusual winter weather. The Red Planet also causes water-ice snow to fall from the clouds.
The dust storms on Mars are the largest in the solar system, capable of blanketing the entire Red Planet and lasting for months. One theory as to why dust storms can grow so big on Mars is because the airborne dust particles absorb sunlight, warming the Martian atmosphere in their vicinity. Warm pockets of air then flow toward colder regions, generating winds. Strong winds lift more dust off the ground, which, in turn, heats the atmosphere, raising more wind and kicking up more dust.
The elongated cloud above Arsia Mons on Nov. 12, 2018.
The axis of Mars, like Earth's, is tilted with relation to the sun. This means that like Earth, the amount of sunlight falling on certain parts of the Red Planet can vary widely during the year, giving Mars seasons.
However, the seasons that Mars experiences are more extreme than Earth's because the Red Planet's elliptical, oval-shaped orbit around the sun is more elongated than that of any of the other major planets. When Mars is closest to the sun, its southern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun, giving it a short, very hot summer, while the northern hemisphere experiences a short, cold winter. When Mars is farthest from the sun, the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun, giving it a long, mild summer, while the southern hemisphere experiences a long, cold winter.
The tilt of the Red Planet's axis swings wildly over time because it's not stabilized by a large moon, such as Earth is. This led to different climates on the Martian surface throughout its history. A 2017 study suggests that the changing tilt also influenced the release of methane into Mars' atmosphere, causing temporary warming periods that allowed water to flow.
Perihelion (closest): 128,400,000 miles (206,600,000 km). By comparison: 1.404 times that of Earth.
Aphelion (farthest): 154,900,000 miles (249,200,000 km). By comparison: 1.638 times that of Earth.
Composition & structure
Atmospheric composition (by volume)
According to NASA, the atmosphere of Mars is 95.32 percent carbon dioxide, 2.7 percent nitrogen, 1.6 percent argon, 0.13 percent oxygen, 0.08 percent carbon monoxide, with minor amounts of water, nitrogen oxide, neon, hydrogen-deuterium-oxygen, krypton and xenon.
Magnetic field
Mars currently has no global magnetic field, but there are regions of its crust that can be at least 10 times more strongly magnetized than anything measured on Earth, which suggests those regions are remnants of an ancient global magnetic field.
Chemical composition
Mars likely has a solid core composed of iron, nickel and sulfur. The mantle of Mars is probably similar to Earth's in that it is composed mostly of peridotite, which is made up primarily of silicon, oxygen, iron and magnesium. The crust is probably largely made of the volcanic rock basalt, which is also common in the crusts of the Earth and the moon, although some crustal rocks, especially in the northern hemisphere, may be a form of andesite, a volcanic rock that contains more silica than basalt does.
Internal structure
Scientists think that on average, the Martian core is between 1,800 and 2,400 miles in diameter (3,000 and 4,000 km), its mantle is about 900 to 1,200 miles (5,400 to 7,200 km) wide and its crust is about 30 miles (50 km) thick.
This view of the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos comes from a set of photos taken by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity on Aug. 1, 2013, as Phobos (the larger one) passed in front of Deimos from Curiosity's perspective.
The two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, were discovered by American astronomer Asaph Hall over the course of a week in 1877. Hall had almost given up his search for a moon of Mars, but his wife, Angelina, urged him on. He discovered Deimos the next night, and Phobos six days after that. He named the moons after the sons of the Greek war god Ares — Phobos means "fear," while Deimos means "rout."
Both Phobos and Deimos are apparently made of carbon-rich rock mixed with ice and are covered in dust and loose rocks. They are tiny next to Earth's moon, and are irregularly shaped, since they lack enough gravity to pull themselves into a more circular form. The widest Phobos gets is about 17 miles (27 km), and the widest Deimos gets is roughly 9 miles (15 km).
Both moons are pockmarked with craters from meteor impacts. The surface of Phobos also possesses an intricate pattern of grooves, which may be cracks that formed after the impact created the moon's largest crater — a hole about 6 miles (10 km) wide, or nearly half the width of Phobos. They always show the same face to Mars, just as our moon does to Earth.
It remains uncertain how Phobos and Deimos were born. They may have been asteroids captured by Mars' gravitational pull, or they may have been formed in orbit around Mars the same time the planet came into existence. Ultraviolet light reflected from Phobos provides strong evidence that the moon is a captured asteroid ,according to astronomers at the University of Padova in Italy.
Phobos is gradually spiraling toward Mars, drawing about 6 feet (1.8 meters) closer to the Red Planet each century. Within 50 million years, Phobos will either smash into Mars or break up and form a ring of debris around the planet.
Research & exploration
The first person to watch Mars with a telescope was Galileo Galilei. In the century following, astronomers discovered the planet's polar ice caps. In the 19th and 20th centuries, researchers believed they saw a network of long, straight canals on Mars, that hinted at possible civilization, although later these proved to be mistaken interpretations of dark regions they saw.
A number of martian rocks have fallen to the surface of Earth over the eons, providing scientists a rare opportunity to study Martian rocks without having to leave our planet. One of the most controversial finds was Allan Hills 84001 (ALH 84001) — a Martian meteorite that in 1996, was said to contain shapes reminiscent of small fossils. The find garnered a lot of media attention at the time, but subsequent studies dismissed the idea. The debate was still ongoing in 2016, the 20th anniversary of the announcement. In 2018, a separate meteorite study found that organic molecules — the building blocks of life, although not necessarily life itself — could have formed on Mars through battery-like chemical reactions.
Robotic spacecraft began observing Mars in the 1960s, with the United States launching Mariner 4in 1964 and Mariners 6 and 7 in 1969. The missions revealed Mars to be a barren world, without any signs of the life or civilizations people had imagined there. In 1971, Mariner 9 orbited Mars, mapping about 80 percent of the planet and discovering its volcanoes and canyons.
The Soviet Union also launched numerous spacecraft in the 1960s and early 1970s, but most of those missions failed. Mars 2 (1971) and Mars 3 (1971) operated successfully, but were unable to map the surface due to dust storms. NASA's Viking 1 lander touched down on the surface of Mars in 1976, the first successful landing on the Red Planet. The lander took the first close-up pictures of the Martian surface but found no strong evidence for life.
The next two craft to successfully reach Mars were the Mars Pathfinder, a lander, and Mars Global Surveyor, an orbiter, both launched in 1996. A small robot onboard Pathfinder named Sojourner — the first wheeled rover to explore the surface of another planet — ventured over the planet's surface analyzing rocks.
In 2001, the NASA launched the Mars Odyssey probe, which discovered vast amounts of water ice beneath the Martian surface, mostly in the upper 3 feet (1 meter). It remains uncertain whether more water lies underneath, since the probe cannot see water any deeper.
Artist's rendition of the InSight lander on the surface of Mars.
In 2003, Mars passed closer to Earth than anytime in that past 60,000 years. That same year, NASA launched two rovers, nicknamed Spirit and Opportunity, which explored different regions of the Martian surface. Both rovers found signs that water once flowed on the planet's surface.
In 2008, NASA sent another mission, Phoenix, to land in the northern plains of Mars and search for water which it succeeded in doing.
In 2011, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission sent the Mars Curiosity rover, to investigate Martian rocks and determine the geologic processes that created them. Among the mission's findings was the first meteorite on the surface of the Red Planet. The rover has found complex organic molecules on the surface, as well as seasonal fluctuations in methane concentrations in the atmosphere.
In September 2014, India's Mars Orbiter Mission also reached the Red Planet, making it the fourth nation to successfully enter orbit around Mars.
In November 2018, NASA sent a stationary lander called Mars InSight to the surface. InSight will examine the planet's geologic activity by burrowing a probe underground.
NASA plans to launch a successor rover mission to Curiosity, called Mars 2020. This mission will search for ancient signs of life and, depending on how promising its samples look, it may "cache" the results in safe spots on the Red Planet for a future rover to pick up.
ESA is working on its own ExoMars rover that should also launch in 2020, and will include a drill to go deep into the Red Planet, collecting soil samples from about 2 meters (6.5 feet) deep.
Lost missions
Mars is far from an easy planet to reach. NASA, Russia, the European Space Agency, China, Japan and the Soviet Union collectively lost many spacecraft in their quest to explore the Red Planet. Notable examples include:
1992 — NASA's Mars Observer
1996 — Russia's Mars 96
1998 — NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter, Japan's Nozomi
1999 — NASA's Mars Polar Lander
2003 — ESA's Beagle 2 lander
2011 — Russia's Fobus-Grunt mission to Phobos with the Chinese Yinghuo-1 orbiter
2016 — ESA's Schiaparelli test lander
Human missions to come
Robots aren't the only ones getting a ticket to Mars. A workshop group of scientists from government agencies, academia and industry have determined that a NASA-led manned mission to Mars should be possible by the 2030s. However, in late 2017, the Trump administration directed NASA to send people back to the moon before going to Mars. NASA is now more focused on a concept called the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway that would be a moon-based space station and headquarters for further space exploration.
Robotic missions to the Red Planet have seen much success in the past few decades, but it remains a considerable challenge to get people to Mars. With current rocket technology, it would take several months for people to travel to Mars, and that means they would live for several months in microgravity, which has devastating effects on the human body. Performing activities in the moderate gravity on Mars could prove extremely difficult after many months in microgravity. Research on the effects of microgravity continues on the International Space Station.
NASA isn't the only one with Martian astronaut hopefuls. Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, has outlined multiple concepts to bring people to Mars. In November 2018, Musk rebranded SpaceX's future "Big Falcon Rocket" to "Starship". Other nations, including China and Russia, have also announced their goals for sending humans to Mars.
Can Artificial Intelligence (AI) Help In Finding Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI)?
Can Artificial Intelligence (AI) Help In Finding Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI)?
The existence of intelligent life forms beyond Earth has been speculated on for centuries. However, with the recent advancements in the field of science and technology, this speculation is becoming much more intense. We have already sent Voyagers out into the cosmos to find if anyone is out there and detect any traces of extraterrestrial habitation.
In our quest for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), we have typically looked for empathetic signs of intelligence, physiology, and communication like our own. Many researchers, like Jill Tarter, who specialize in searching for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), opine that a conventional approach like transmitting electromagnetic signals might be good for detecting technosignatures, but not necessarily intelligence.
For that reason, scientists are now attempting to use artificial intelligence (AI) to find alien intelligence in ways we as humans cannot achieve. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a specially designed type of software that mimics the way humans learn and solve complex problems. Machines running AI programs learn activities like speech recognition, planning, problem-solving, perception, and planning all by themselves, and can work efficiently without getting lost in the labyrinth of data. You can learn everything you want to know about AI here.
Understanding ‘Intelligence’
To earnestly go out and find extraterrestrial intelligence, we must eliminate the dogma of human beings as a supremely intelligent species.
There are many examples in the wild demonstrating that animals can be incredibly smart in their own ways. For instance, spiders are known to process information through their webs, crows understand analogies, cetaceans like dolphins have their own dialects, and primates like chimpanzees skillfully use tools to complete tasks. In other words, ‘non-human’ forms of intelligence and culture are all around us.
Extraterrestrial intelligence might look like a dinosaur, an ant, a shark or a robot—or something radically different from any forms or ideas found on Earth.
The SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute is toiling day and night to uncover alien intelligence elsewhere in the universe. However, the conventional SETI approach suffers from two limitations: First, they surmise that extraterrestrial creatures are smart and ready to communicate with us or other species; Second is the assumption that we are intelligent enough to recognize the messages if they (aliens) send them to us in some raw or encoded form.
(Photo Credit : Denys/Wikimedia Commons)
However, thanks to recent discoveries in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning, we can now re-examine existing data to uncover any minute traces of extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI researchers are convinced that artificial intelligence could turn out to be the game changer in the search, as AI algorithms are ideal for spotting differences and forming patterns out of the massive sea of data.
That is why researchers at the SETI Institute are partnering with the tech giants like Intel, IBM, and others to discuss ways in which AI can be used to solve pertinent space and science problems, including the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence.
AI Anomaly Engine
One of the ways in which the discovery of alien existence could be achieved is by designing an AI anomaly engine. The idea at the heart of this strategy is to scan for anomalous patterns that may not necessarily be communication signals sent by aliens, but rather subtle manifestations of technological advancement that have been achieved in other parts of the universe. The main motive of the AI anomaly engine is to discern a data set that is aberrant to the standard baseline. This strategy helps to curtail futile efforts, such as making vague assumptions about what an extraterrestrial intelligent species would look like, which is inherently filled with our own biases.
The best part of the AI anomaly engine is that it is often seen as a win-win proposition. Even if an unusual discovery is not related to an extraterrestrial civilization, it demands an explanation that might propel our researchers to understand the universe in an even more profound way.
Autocorrelator
That being said, designing an efficient AI anomaly detection engine that ingeniously works with the multivariant data remains a dark art for even the best minds working in the SETI field. Despite the potential it holds, designing an AI anomaly engine continues to be highly challenging. Another approach is to train a deep neural network to be an autocorrelator, capable of finding unusual examples of data.
For the uninitiated, a deep learning neural network is a paradigm of AI that derives inspiration from the structure of the human brain; it consists of a set of complex units (equivalent to neurons in our brain). Each unit combines a set of input values to generate an output value, which in turn is passed on to other neurons in the deeper layer of the network. In other words, a deep neural network involves the use of neural networks—computer programs that are structurally inspired by the dense network of neurons in the human brain.
(Photo Credit: Pixabay)
To successfully implement an autocorrelator, the input data needs to be compressed so that it can flow through a pinch-point in the neural net—like sand flowing through an hourglass.
By design, AI algorithms are fast learners, so the more they sift through data of a similar nature, the better the AI program becomes at compressing and categorizing that information. Furthermore, if it encounters data that is unusual by set standards, it would notify the researchers about the discovery of this incongruous data.
The limitation of autocorrelators, at the moment, is that they work best with limited data size and still lack the flexibility needed to correctly spot the outliers that could provide some hint of extraterrestrial intelligence.
However, research in the niche field of AI is going full steam ahead. It is expected that researchers will come out with many more ways to further enhance the capabilities of AI. AI algorithms could potentially spot anomalies within the huge data repository collected after years of research in space science disciplines.
It is possible that proof of alien intelligence could be lurking within the petabytes of space data we’ve already gathered, and the sophisticated AI of the future will reveal all the secrets hiding there!
ALERTE AUX ALIENS AU PAYS DE GALLES : Un expert en OVNI affirme que la lumière bleue étrange est liée à une “base extraterrestre souterraine”
ALERTE AUX ALIENS AU PAYS DE GALLES : Un expert en OVNI affirme que la lumière bleue étrange est liée à une “base extraterrestre souterraine”
Des images effrayantes d’une mystérieuse lumière bleue et éclatante au-dessus de l’A55 seraient reliées à une “base extraterrestre souterraine” dans le nord du Pays de Galles, a déclaré un enquêteur sur les OVNI.
Des séquences de l’étrange lumière flottante ont été prises par un membre du Service aérien de la Police nationale, ce qui a déclenché une réaction de l’enquêteur Russ Kellett, qui a dit que c’était un signe d’une forme de vie extraterrestre. Il a dit à North Wales Live : “Je pense que la lumière est probablement connectée à une base souterraine. Je ne sais pas ce que c’était, mais c’est peut-être un OVNI qui s’est écrasé, quelque chose qui a atterri dans la région ou même quelque chose qui a été amené dans la région. Ça pourrait être un signe avant-coureur que quelque chose d’autre est sur le point d’arriver.”
La lumière est apparue près de Northop où elle a brillé avant de s’estomper tandis que des chauffeurs de poids lourds et automobilistes affluaient sur la route pour leurs déplacements matinaux.
La source de la lumière demeure inconnue.
D’autres théoriciens pensent que la lumière, qui éclairait tout le tronçon de route très fréquentée, pourrait être le résultat d’un phénomène naturel comme la foudre.
La théorie de M. Kellett n’est cependant pas la première à lier ce type de phénomène aux extraterrestres. En décembre dernier, il a dit qu’il ne doutait pas que quelque part au Pays de Galles, il y avait une base secrète extraterrestre.
Il a également prétendu avoir été enlevé à plusieurs reprises dans le passé et croyait qu’une opération militaire secrète avait eu lieu dans la mer d’Irlande entre le nord du Pays de Galles et Liverpool le matin de l’incident des montagnes Berwyn, qu’il sonde depuis trois décennies, ce qui est étonnant.
Il a dit : “Le nord du Pays de Galles est considéré comme un point chaud pour les OVNI depuis l’incident des Montagnes Berwyn. J’ai regardé de très près cette zone, et il se passe quelque chose.”
L’incident des Montagnes Berwyn s’est produit en 1974 quand le ciel s’est embrasé avec des lumières vives à la suite d’un tremblement de terre.
Le tremblement a été enregistré à une magnitude de 3,5 et a été ressenti jusqu’à Liverpool.
Cela a donné lieu à un certain nombre de théories, dont celle d’un OVNI qui s’est écrasé sur terre. D’autres disent qu’il est possible qu’une météorite se soit écrasée dans la région.
If liquid water indeed exists under the south polar ice cap of Mars, it has to be due to volcanic activity, a new study suggests.
The researchers behind the new work argued that there needs to be an underground source of heat to melt ice under an ice cap — although they didn't weigh in on whether that liquid water (or the volcanic heat, for that matter) actually exists on Mars.
The new study follows up a controversial finding published in the journal Science last July, in which a European Space Agency orbiter, Mars Express, spotted signs of what could be a slurry or a liquid-water lake under the polar ice. At the time, the idea was that a high concentration of salt could keep the water from freezing despite Mars' chilly temperatures. What's strange about that finding is that NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter didn't see any sign of a lake, even though that craft's ground-penetrating radar vision should theoretically be able to spot such a feature. [Photos: Red Planet Views from Europe's Mars Express]
If the water is indeed there, the new study said, a magma chamber must have formed sometime in the past few hundred thousand years under the Martian surface in order to melt the water; salt wouldn't do the trick. (The scientists also pointed out that if the water does not exist, the magmatic activity would also be absent.)
"Different people may go different ways with this, and we're really interested to see how the community reacts to it," co-lead author Michael Sori, an associate staff scientist in the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, said in a statement from the American Geophysical Union (publisher of Geophysical Research Letters, the journal in which the new study appeared.)
If volcanic activity is happening on Mars, scientists say it's a strong sign that Mars is active — and a good omen for finding life on the Red Planet, as well. (A new NASA mission called InSight is examining the possibility of current volcanic activity on the Red Planet, but the instrument only just deployed its seismometer shield and results will be months or years in coming.) Life would require a source of water, a source of energy and some sort of protection from the radiation bathing Mars.
"We think that if there is any life, it likely has to be protected in the subsurface from the radiation," said Ali Bramson, the paper's other co-lead and a postdoctoral research associate at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, in the same statement. "If there are still magmatic processes active today, maybe they were more common in the recent past and could supply more widespread basal melting. This could provide a more favorable environment for liquid water and thus, perhaps, life."
On Earth, it's common to see liquid water under ice sheets, but scientists know why this occurs: because our planet produces enough internal heat to melt ice that rubs against the Earth's crust. But Mars is much cooler than Earth; it is farther from the sun and smaller than our planet, so it generates less internal heat. On Mars, it's unclear what phenomenon could melt its two polar ice sheets, which are each a couple of kilometers thick.
The new study started with the assumption that liquid water could exist under the Martian polar ice, then modeled how much heat is generated in the planet's interior to determine whether there is enough salt at the bottom of the ice cap to melt the ice. Salt lowers the freezing point of water and has been used in Mars modeling before to argue that dark streaks appearing on crater walls came from liquid water. Some scientists say salt allowed a briny water to flow down the crater, while others argue the features represent dry dust flows. [Mars' South Pole May Hide a Large Underground Lake]
In the new paper, the scientists discovered that salt alone couldn't raise the temperature of water high enough to melt ice if salt is nestled underneath the ice cap. So, an additional heat source is required — hence, the volcanic idea. Perhaps, the paper suggested, magma flowed from the inside of Mars to near the surface roughly 300,000 years ago. The magma didn't erupt, but instead pooled in a chamber just underneath the surface. Over the eons, this magma chamber gradually cooled off and the evaporated heat melted the ice at the bottom of the south polar sheet, this scenario continues.
Mars hosts numerous old volcanoes, including Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system. But there's no compelling evidence showing that these volcanoes are active. In fact, many scientists argue that volcanism on Mars could have stopped millions of years ago, according to the journal's statement.
Jack Holt, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, said the paper does address one reason why water could exist under the south polar ice cap. However, Holt, who talked to the authors before they submitted the new paper for publication but did not take part in the research, added that more research is required to better narrow down the answer.
"I think it was a great idea to do this type of modeling and analysis, because you have to explain the water, if it's there, and so it's really a critical piece of the puzzle," Holt said in the statement. "The original paper [about the polar water find, in Science] just left it hanging. There could be water there, but you have to explain it, and these guys did a really nice job of saying what is required and that salt is not sufficient."
The new research is described in a paper published yesterday (Feb. 12) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Mysterious Flash of Light in Wales Sky Triggers 'Alien Warning' Speculation
Mysterious Flash of Light in Wales Sky Triggers 'Alien Warning' Speculation
Conspiracy theorists claim that a strange bright blue light that emanated in the sky over North Wales earlier this month marked the descent of aliens at a secret underground base.
The footage that fuelled this alien speculation was filmed by a member of the Hawarden-based National Police Air Service on 7 February, though some commenters suggested that the eerie phenomenon was caused by a ball lightning or power outage.
For some of our local followers who also saw a blue flash of light at 6:30am today this was my dashcam view captured on the A55 E/B at Northop #NPAS999 ^CRS
However, UFO investigator Russ claims that the light was connected with an underground facility he believes to be lying beneath the North Wales coast
"I don't know what it was, but it could have been a UFO that came down, something that landed in the area or even something that was brought to the area," he told North Wales Live.
"I've not had any reports of any UFO sightings since the flash which is very strange, but it could be a precursor that something else is about to happen — something like a mass sighting or maybe something is preparing to land.
"We've not had any landings for a while so it would be good to know if anyone sees anything," he said.
Commenters on social media came up with some more down-to-earth-explanations.
"That's what happens when a transformer blew up," a user wrote.
Another added, "I saw that in Chicago a few years ago. No one knew what it was. The cops said it was probably a 'blown transformer'".
Finally, humanity gets the tools needed to find life on other planets
Finally, humanity gets the tools needed to find life on other planets
In the "Star Trek" universe, humans made contact with aliens in 2063. In the real world, scientists could beat that mark by decades, at least when it comes to detecting signs of life beyond this rock.
Exactly four centuries ago this year, Galileo sent a letter to theGrand Duchess of Tuscanyto implore the powers-that-be of the time to accept the scientific fact that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the reverse.
It was not a new idea -- the ancient Greek Aristarchus made the same argument almost 2,000 years earlier, as did Copernicus in the 16th century -- but it was Galileo who finally had observations made with the newly invented telescope to prove the case.
Of course, that didn't save Galileo from persecution and spending the last decade of his life under house arrest, but eventually this fundamental idea became the foundation of astronomy and forever changed our view of the universe and our place in it.
Just as Galileo's telescope helped prove what had been suspected for centuries, now, exactly 400 years later, many scientists and observers believe a new generation of telescopes -- both under construction on Earth and planned for launch into space in the coming years -- will bring new discoveries that will again fundamentally alter humanity's view of our role in the wider cosmos. Specifically, it's believed these instruments could offer concrete evidence of what many suspect to be near a mathematical certainty: that we are not alone in the universe, that life exists in some form on other distant planets.
"I expect that in the next 10 to 20 years we might be able to determine with the future ground and space telescopes that some exoplanets are likely habitable or even habitable (not just potentially habitable) but not yet to confirm that any is inhabited; that might take longer than 30 years," Abel Méndez, who directs the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, told CNET's Crave blog. "I hope I'm wrong and we do it earlier."
"(We are) embarking on the 'real search for alien life' by being the first generation capable of finding signs of life," Seager said on Twitter last year.
Alberto Conti✔@albertoconti
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@ProfSaraSeager What excites you the most about the search for life? What do you think we will find over the next 10 years #search4life
Sara Seager@ProfSaraSeager
.@albertoconti#search4life Embarking on the "real search for alien life" by being the first generation capable of finding signs of life
The new capability that Seager is referring to is the next generation of space telescopes that will succeed the likes of the Hubble, Kepler and Spitzer to better identify smaller, Earth-size planets and search for biosignatures emanating from their surfaces or atmospheres. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), with a mirror almost three times larger than Hubble's, and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) are scheduled for launch in 2018 and 2017, respectively, and will team up to identify and then study potentially habitable or even potentially inhabited exoplanets.
Since the 1990s, there has been a boom in data confirming that our galaxy, our universe and even the unexplored corners of our solar system are utterly littered with planets and other large chunks of rock, some hosting ice, water, lakes, oceans and the building blocks of life.
Most of these discoveries -- from the possibly warm "soda ocean" beneath the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus to Kepler 186-f, an Earth-size planet in the constellation Cygnus some 500 light-years away that may hold water -- have been made with telescopes and technology designed and built pre-Facebook and pre-iPhone. The Hubble space telescope, a veteran workhorse of space exploration, was built in the 1980s.
When it comes to searching the cosmos for signs of life, it's kind of like we're living in the age of Google, but still relying on the microfiche machine in the back of the library to help us find what we're looking for.
"If we want to study (many more) potentially habitable terrestrial planets around nearby stars, there are a couple of things that we need. First, if we plan to observe them with JWST we need to find planets eclipsing bright, nearby, low-mass stars," Heather Knutson, an assistant professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology, told CNET's Crave blog. "TESS is a crucial step in this process because it will find the closest, brightest transiting planet systems that will make ideal targets for JWST to characterize."
Astrobiologists won't look through the JWST and see real-life Wookiees orKlingons waving back at us, but it will allow distant rocky planets and their characteristics to begin to come into focus, in a manner of speaking. Right now, Hubble has a hard time characterizing smaller planets, so this is an important step toward identifying far-off Earth cousins and their characteristics.
The 7 confirmed exoplanets most likely to host life (pictures)
The next step to ID'ing E.T., even in microscopic form, would be to get a positive hit for biosignature gases -- such as methane, oxygen or carbon dioxide, just to name the familiar ones -- from one of these planets.
While Knutson believes "we certainly won't be able to detect biosignatures" with JWST, Seager is not quite so pessimistic, having said it could be the telescope's most exciting discovery, but would require good luck.
But we've mentioned just two of the planned new telescopes to come in the next decade. NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST); the European Space Agency's Gaia (launched 2013) and planned PLATO satellites; new ground-based telescopes in Hawaii, Chile (the Giant Magellan Telescope) and elsewhere, as well as Seager's own Starshade project, which she explains in the TEDx talk embedded below, will all contribute to the search for distant life over the next 15 years or more.
Not surprisingly, much of this equipment will be far more powerful than what's been used to make the exciting exoplanet discoveries of the last few years, giving us exponentially more capability than ever before. But even optimists like Seager caution that there's still a scientific process to be performed before we can point to a star in the night sky and tell our children that it hosts life in its solar system (something she does believe she'll be able to do in her lifetime).
Once biosignatures have been detected on exoplanets, those atmospheres will need to be observed in more detail to eliminate "false positives," and that may require yet another generation of telescope technology.
Here's the illustration Mendez likes to use in his presentations showing how he expects the search to progress against a timeline of new telescope and satellite launches along the bottom
PHL/UPR-Arecibo
Even if it took more than 40 years, that still puts us ahead of the schedule for first contact used in the "Star Trek" universe, where humans meet aliens for the first time in 2063.
NASA astronomer Kevin Hand is even more optimistic. Hand said last year that he expects we'll find life elsewhere by 2034. After all, it seems increasingly likely that we may not have to scan all the heavens, using advanced telescopes to intricately discern the molecules floating around on planets light-years away.Curiosity could find bacteria in Martian soil tomorrow. Cassini might spy biosignatures in Enceladus' plumes next week. Our own solar system looks livelier all the time. Perhaps it will turn out that it is literally so.
In a best-case scenario, the next decade could see near-simultaneous discoveries of life on Europa -- thanks to NASA's planned mission to the Jovian moon -- and on a distant exoplanet emitting oxygen picked up by JWST.
Even if the most conservative estimates by scientists (and "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry) that we're still decades away from discovering E.T. prove true, these are nonetheless exciting times to be conducting the search. It's the rapid and accelerating pace of discovery since the launch of Hubble in 1990 and the identification of the first exoplanet in the mid-1990s that really capture the imagination.
PHL/UPR-Arecibo
It took almost two centuries for the heliocentric model of the solar system proved by Copernicus and Galileo to be accepted by the powers that be, but these are very different times.
Consider that in just about two decades, we've gone from a universe in which we could point to not a single other planet like ours to keeping a catalog of them, a catalog it now seems could eventually contain billions of entries. And in just the past two years, we've made discoveries both about those distant planets and about the many fascinating rocks in our own solar system that prove that the building blocks of life, including water, are much more abundant than we might have thought.
After millennia, we are just beginning to be able to see the true nature of the cosmos and our place within it. We are squinting at the universe right now, and at distant signs of potential life. The blurry visions we're currently grasping at are already pretty amazing, but in the next few years we will turn on telescopes and other technology that will allow us to finally bring this broader picture more clearly into focus.
Dr. John Alexander - UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities
Dr. John Alexander - UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities
This is retired Army Col. John Alexander's International UFO Congress lecture from 2011.
Alexander’s presentation will include an insider’s view of how the U.S. government deals with UFOs and other phenomena with detailed explanation about specific events. While supporting the physical reality of UFOs, he will discuss some of the myths that have been built up over time. Noting that real disclosure has happened yet gone unnoticed, Alexander will examine disclosure and address its actual confirmation.
John Alexander is a retired U.S. Army Colonel and a leading advocate for the development of non-lethal weapons. For the first time anywhere his new book, UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities, which provides a government insider’s look at the UFO phenomena, will be available. In his book, Alexander discusses the organization he created while on active duty to explore this topic. Comprised of members across the Department of Defense and aerospace industries, Alexander was surprised at what he learned when he briefed the leaders of many of these agencies. A very important aspect of this book is a description of how government agencies really work, and how an individual’s belief system impacts the organization’s operations.
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Er is een nachtelijk spektakel in aantocht. Zet je schrap voor de supersneeuwmaan, de grootste en felste maan van het jaar
Er is een nachtelijk spektakel in aantocht. Zet je schrap voor de supersneeuwmaan, de grootste en felste maan van het jaar
Als het weer het toelaat is er vanavond een zogenoemde supersneeuwmaan te zien. De volle maan lijkt dan veel groter dan normaal. Ook is het maanlicht feller dan bij een gebruikelijke volle maan.
Dit komt doordat het hemellichaam dichter bij de aarde staat dan een gemiddelde volle maan.
Vanwege de elliptische baan van de maan om de aarde verandert de afstand tussen de maan en onze planeet gedurende het jaar.
Goede kans
Gemiddeld is de afstand tussen de maan en de aarde 384.000 kilometer, maar bij een supermaan staat de maan ‘slechts’ 357.000 kilometer van ons vandaan.
Er is een goede kans dat de maan te zien is, want er zijn dinsdag opklaringen. De supermaan lijkt het grootst aan het begin van de avond, wanneer de zon net onder is.
De tweede volle maan van het jaar wordt de sneeuwmaan genoemd. Volgens de Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA begon een indianenstam in de Verenigde Staten met die benaming.
Drie supermanen
Vorige maand viel de supermaan samen met een maansverduistering, waardoor de maan rood kleurde. We spraken toen van een superbloedmaan.
De volgende supermaan zal te zien zijn op 19 maart, wat betekent dat we dit jaar op maar liefst drie supermanen worden getrakteerd.
Scientists have found footprints that could have possibly been made by Neanderthals thousands of years ago. The footprints were discovered in Gibraltar – more specifically, the area of Catalan Bay Sand Dunes – which is located on Spain’s southern coast. The sand sheets from the dunes above Catalan Bay were from the last glacial period when the water levels there were around 120 meters below where they are today.
An international journal called Quaternary Science Reviewspublished a paper with help from scientists from the Gibraltar National Museum, as well as their colleagues from Japan, Portugal, and Spain. Their work began ten years ago when they discovered footprints that were created by vertebrates that lived in Gibraltar. Those footprints were made from red deer, leopards, ibex, aurochs, and straight-tusked elephants.
What’s even more exciting is that they discovered footprints of a young human who could very well have been a Neanderthal. This human is said to have been between 106 and 126 cm tall which is between 40 and 50 inches in height. Since it is believed that this human lived around 29,000 years ago, that would mean that he was most likely a Neanderthal from Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar.
The researchers used Optically-Stimulated Luminescence (or OSL) to figure out the dates of the sediment deposits that were found on the lower cliff foot dunes above Catalan Bay. OSL was able to date the quartz sediment deposits by figuring out when it was last exposed to sunlight.
If these footprints are proven to be from a Neanderthal, it would be only the second location on the entire planet that has confirmed footprints made by these ancient human ancestors. The second location is Vartop Cave which is located in Romania. It would also be extremely important information regarding the Gibraltar Pleistocene heritage.
Discovering ancient footprints of animals and perhaps even a Neanderthal is an incredible find in regards to the history of Gibraltar. “This is extraordinary research and gives us an incredible insight into the wildlife community of Gibraltar’s past. We should all take a moment to imagine the scene when these animals walked across our landscape. It helps us understand the importance of looking after our heritage,” Minister for Heritage John Cortes MP said. He added, “I congratulate the research team on uncovering this fascinating, hidden evidence of our Rock’s past.”
When is a comet a UFO? When it makes impossible changes in short amounts of time. Comet 41P slowed its rotation speed by 3X or 300% when it was closest to Earth. And why you say? Because its not a comet, its an alien probe that was scanning Earth. This is not a comet, but an alien probe sent to pass all the planets and moons in our solar system and scan them for advancements in life, technology, and to detect any changes in those places since it last passed by. You can even see that when I add contrast to the photo of Comet 41P, along the lower edges is seen large rectangular wall of structures. Comets don't have structures, only alien ships would have structures. It sounds like NASA is not telling us the full truth about this one. Scott C. Waring NASA states:
Observations by NASA's Swift spacecraft, now renamed the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory after the mission’s late principal investigator, have captured an unprecedented change in the rotation of a comet. Images taken in May 2017 reveal that comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák — 41P for short — was spinning three times slower than it was in March, when it was observed by the Discovery Channel Telescope at Lowell Observatory in Arizona. The abrupt slowdown is the most dramatic change in a comet's rotation ever seen.
Triangle UFO within Disk Recorded By Australian Police During Lightning Storm, Feb 16, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Triangle UFO within Disk Recorded By Australian Police During Lightning Storm, Feb 16, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: February 16, 2019
Location of sighting: Broome, Australia
This UFO appeared during a lightning storm over Australia this week and was caught on CCTV cameras in a police car. The glowing white object looks like a disk, but then a bright white triangle appears in its center as it moves away. That is why the camera didn't follow it is that it was a dashboard camera on the police car. At first seeing the disk, I had doubts, but when this object lit up with a triangle within it...I knew it was 100% real.
I also noticed on their Twitter feed that the police try to downplay the earlier tweet by tweeting again saying it was probably a reflection, but know this, police are not UFO experts. They are just down playing the UFO sighting to keep their jobs, security and some are probably close to retirement and don't want to risk losing the benefits it comes with. Talking about UFOs is still seen as taboo...forbidden among many. I get that, they have families to think of, but know this. Thats a real UFO, and its causing the lightning storm to appear, not the other way around.
Scott C. Waring-Taiwan
Eyewitness states:
"After reviewing CCTV at town beach of last nights storm, it appears we were not alone," the police's official Twitter feed wrote, followed by a string of UFO emoji.
Are Aliens Secretly Studying Life on Earth from Afar? The Zoo Hypothesis Says Yes
Are Aliens Secretly Studying Life on Earth from Afar? The Zoo Hypothesis Says Yes
Written byJoanie Faletto
Running into an alien on the bus would be strange — but it's almost equally strange that humankind has never encountered aliens. The universe is vast. Can we really be alone in it? (Cue "X-Files" theme song.)
The Fermi Paradox
Think about it: What are the chances that life on Earth is the only life in the impossibly gigantic universe? There are probably 100 Earth-like planets for every grain of sand in the world, yet we've never even heard from an extraterrestrial life form. No "Hey" — not even a "U up?" Why?
We're not the first people to wonder. Enrico Fermi, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, also thought it was odd. As he famously put it to his friends in the cafeteria one day: "Where is everybody?" In 1950, this became formalized as the Fermi paradox. How can we have not one scrap of evidence aliens exist, when it's overwhelmingly likely that they do?
You might assume aliens are just too far away, but Fermi wasn't swayed by that argument. An alien civilization with a solid space program could make rapid imperial progress, Fermi argued. He estimated it would take just 10 million years for an alien civilization to take over our entire galaxy. They've had tons of chances when you consider that the Milky Way Galaxy has been around for 10 billion years.
(This isn't what Fermi won the Nobel for, FYI; that was for his research into radioactivity and nuclear reactions. Feeling excluded from the universe's social scene was a side project.)
The Spooky "Zoo Hypothesis"
One explanation of the Fermi paradox is the zoo hypothesis. It's admittedly a freaky situation to consider, but here it is: aliens know we earthlings are here, but they're purposely avoiding contact with us, opting to study us from afar instead.
This hypothesized answer to the Fermi Paradox was proposed by MIT astronomer John A. Ball in 1973. It's named the zoo hypothesis because it suggests that all life on Earth is just like an animal (or, you know, a few billion animals) at the zoo — look, but don't touch! Ball suggests that maybe alien civilizations are advanced enough to know not to influence our primitive society, or not to get involved with other intelligent lifeforms (the Prime Directive, anybody?).
Overall, Ball laid out 10 possible solutions to Fermi's Paradox. The zoo hypothesis covers just two of them: in one, aliens find us "of some interest" and study us casually; in the other, aliens find us "interesting" and pay closer attention. In both scenarios, though, they're actively avoiding us. Harsh.
In an even harsher solution, outside the zoo hypothesis, aliens know about us and don't care. In this scenario, "We pose no threat, and we have nothing they want," Ball writes. "This is a likely but a very unpopular answer, for it seems to downgrade mankind's importance, and we do like to feel important."
A more popular answer to the Fermi Paradox is that alien life is still very primitive or has already come and gone. At this point, it's really anyone's guess. So if you want to assume we're a Very Important Species, at this point, go ahead. Why not?
I write about archaeology, cultural heritage, and unusual claims
Rover and Pyramids on MarsGETTY
NASA’s Martian rover Opportunity breathed its last digital gasp this week. What was a busy scurrying robot picking over and investigating the Martian landscape is now a slowly decaying pile of metal and circuitry. That is to say, Opportunity has entered my world, the world of abandoned things that is archaeology.
Humans have been dreaming about Martian archaeology for well over a century now. When the Italian Astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli described seeing canali on the surface of the red planet in 1877, many in the English-speaking world began to speculate that Schiaparelli was referring to artificially constructed canals. Percival Lowell became the largest champion of this interpretation. In his 1895 book “Mars,” Lowell claimed that the canals of Mars had been built by a desperate alien race seeking to salvage what water they could from the planet’s melting ice caps.
A drawing by Percival Lowell (1896) depicting "canals" and dark areas on Mars.
GETTY
As telescopes continued to improve, the Martian canals evaporated as quickly as the water they were meant to contain, but Mars’ association with fantastical archaeology was only beginning. In an 1898 science fiction novel, “Edison’s Conquest of Mars,” author Garrett P. Serviss told of a human expedition to the Red Planet that was sent as a counter strike against the Martian invaders depicted in H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” (which was plagiarized by Serviss in his own book “Fighters from Mars”). During the assault on Mars, the invaders encountered an encampment of human slaves whose ancestors had been captured in a Martian raid on Earth 9,000 years earlier. These slaves related a great secret to their liberators, when visiting Earth the Martians had built the Great Pyramid of Egypt along with the Sphinx.
As the era of Pulp Fiction boomed, stories of the inhabitants of Mars abounded. Most successful were Edgar Rice Burroughs’ stories about the adventures of John Carter, a Civil War veteran who magically found himself on the surface of Mars. Carter encountered a Martian landscape filled with fantastical cities and alien races. The theme of ancient ruins on Mars continued to echo as Burroughs’ hero regularly found himself in long abandoned cities.
Martian ruins took on a decidedly more sinister appearance in, noted Weird Tales author, Clark Ashton Smith’s 1932 story “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis,” which tells the story of human archaeologists visiting an ancient Martian city. As the archaeologists approached the tumbled monoliths, the story’s narrator proclaims “I have seen the hoary, sky-confronting walls of Machu Picchu amid the desolate Andes; and the frozen, giant-builded battlements of Uogam on the glacial tundras of the nightward hemisphere of Venus. But these were as things of yesteryear compared to the walls upon which we gazed.” Without revealing the ending, it should be noted that the archaeologists do not fare well when they pass within these ancient walls.
In the ensuing decades, it seemed ever clearer that Lowell’s dreams of an ancient Martian race building canals and other structures across the planet was best left to fiction, but in 1976 NASA’s Viking 1 orbiter arrived in Martian orbit and the planet’s story shifted yet again. Among the pictures sent back to Earth by Viking 1 was a photograph of a region of Mars known as Cydonia, which included a massive geological feature that appeared to resemble a humanoid face. Controversy swirled as NASA officials insisted the face was simply a geological oddity, while others began to speculate that at long last Martian monuments had been found.
Image of the Cydonia region taken by the Viking 1 orbiter.
NASA/JPL
Vincent DiPietro and Gregory Molenaar lead the charge in proclaiming the importance of Cydonia to the public. Together they authored “Face in Space,” an article for Omni Magazine (April, 1982), as well as a book, “Unusual Martian Surface Features,” which argued that the Cydonia photos revealed not only a monumental sculpted face but also pyramids and other artificial structures. DiPietro and Molenaar attracted a great deal of attention with their claims, but ultimately it was a difficult case to prove. People either believed the official NASA statements that these were simply natural features, or they indulged their itch for conspiracy and imagined that perhaps Mars had been home to an ancient race.
As NASA began carrying out more missions to Mars, many eagerly waited to see what new images might come from Cydonia. Finally, in 2001 the Mars Global Surveyor sent back a high-resolution image of the “Martian Face.” To the disappointment of many, the face had faded to a simple rocky outcrop. The structure was photographed again in 2007 by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, further dashing our hopes and dreams for an ancient Martian monument as the rocky ridges and eroded slopes came into ever clearer resolution.
HiRISE captured this image (PSP_003234_2210) of an eroded mesa made famous by its similarity to a human face in a Viking Orbiter image with much lower spatial resolution and a different lighting geometry.
NASA/JPL/UNIV. OF ARIZONA
Yet all along this journey, the Martian landscape has become populated by actual human-made objects. Fourteen separate missions from four different space agencies have littered the surface of Mars with not only landers and rovers, but heat shields, parachutes, and an untold number of broken bits. As an archaeologist, I love broken bits.
The things that people make and leave behind tell a different story than written history. A physical examination of landing sites on Mars would reveal critical details about why some landers arrived safely while others crashed to never be heard from again. Even the crashed landers tell a story of human triumph and ingenuity. One day, an astronaut will walk up to the original Viking 1 lander and marvel at the accomplishments of their ancestors. The material heritage we are currently scattering across the Martian surface will stand for centuries to come as a symbol of what we as human beings can do.
This mosaic of the bright spot known as Cerealia Facula inside the dwarf planet Ceres' Occator Crater is based on images obtained by NASA's Dawn spacecraft during its second extended mission, from an altitude as low as about 21 miles (34 kilometers).
Some parts of the dwarf planet Ceresharbored pockets of near-surface water for millions of years in the recent past, a new study suggests.
Researchers analyzed observations of Ceres' Occator Crater made byNASA's Dawn spacecraft, which studied the dwarf planet from orbit from March 2015 to October 2018, when the probe ran out of fuel.
The 57-mile-wide (92 kilometers) Occator sports dramatic bright spots, which Dawn team members determined are salts left behind when briny water boiled away into space. This water likely began as subsurface ice, which was melted by the intense heat of the impact that created Occator about 20 million years ago. Once liquefied, some of it bubbled up to the surface via fissures and was lost. [In Pictures: The Changing Bright Spots of Dwarf Planet Ceres]
Such sublimation occurred as recently as 4 million years ago; that's the apparent age of the youngest deposits on Occator's floor. And that 16-million-year gap is puzzling, researchers said.
"It’s difficult to maintain liquid so close to the surface," study co-author Julie Castillo-Rogez, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. Indeed, previous research has estimated that "cryomagma" could stay liquid in Occator's near subsurface for just 400,000 years or so.
But the new study provides at least a partial answer. Modeling work by Castillo-Rogez and study lead author Marc Hesse, an associate professor at the University of Texas' Jackson School of Geosciences, suggest that Occator's near subsurface contains insulating materials, which could have kept the "cryomagma" liquid for about 10 million years.
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).
"Now that we're accounting for all these negative feedbacks on cooling — the fact that you release latent heat, the fact that as you warm up the crust it becomes less conductive — you can begin to argue that if the ages are just off by a few million years, you might get it," Hesse said in the same statement.
"They used more up-to-date data to create their model,” said JPL planetary geologist Jennifer Scully, who was not involved in the new research. "This will help in the future to see if all of the material involved in the observed deposits can be explained by the impact, or does this require a connection to a deeper source of material. It’s a great step in the right direction of answering that question."
The Dawn spacecraft enjoyed a long and very productive life. Before its work at the 590-mile-wide (950 km) Ceres, Dawn orbited the protoplanet Vesta, which is about 330 miles (530 km) wide. Vesta and Ceres — the two largest objects in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter — are considered leftovers from the solar system's planet-formation days, and Dawn's mission was designed to help shed light on this mysterious, long-ago epoch (hence the name, which is not an acronym).
Dawn was the first probe ever to orbit a dwarf planet, and the first to circle two celestial bodies beyond the Earth-moon system.
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate) is out now.
A View for the Future: Sending an xCT Scanner to Mars
NASA is digging ever more deeply into understanding the makeup of the surfaces of Mars and our Moon. A lot can be learned by sending instruments to land on these places, but vastly more can be discovered by bringing back samples for analysis here on Earth thanks to increasingly capable laboratory instruments. The only difficulty with that is, “every gram back from Mars will cost millions of dollars to transport,” said James B. Garvin, Chief Scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. With that in mind, Dr. Garvin and colleagues have proposed “triaging” the samples in place to decide in advance which would be most valuable to transport back to Earth. Recently, Garvin turned to NASA engineers Justin S. Jones and Ryan Kent to investigate the feasibility of achieving instrumentation to do that on the surfaces of the Moon and Mars. Their solution is to use x-ray Computed Tomography (xCT) to obtain 3D images of the interiors of potential samples as a first step in “high-grading.”
WILL IT WORK?
They first needed to demonstrate that xCT could indeed obtain x-ray images of Mars-like or lunar rocks. To investigate whether it could work, Jones used an industrial CT to evaluate volcanic rocks from a newly formed island in the South Pacific as well as other specimens, such as two lunar brecciated meteorites that fell in Northwest Africa. “Even with samples encased in protective glass and metal cases filled with nitrogen, the scanner revealed previously undetected minerals and 3-D arrangements at extremely fine scales,” said Garvin.
Figure 1. Lunar meteorite ready for xCT scan.
INDUSTRIAL VS MEDICAL SCANNERS
CT scanners used for imaging people and for imaging objects are conceptually the same: in both, you're utilizing x-ray beam projections from multiple angles around the sample. The main difference is, in the medical side, the CT technique is what's called a helical CT scan — you're taking a line scan of x-rays through a helical sweep around the body, which is stationary. With an industrial CT, the only moving part is the sample, which rotates; the x-ray source and the detector are stationary. Rather than a helical line scan, the industrial CT uses a planar, full screen digital detector to capture a two-dimensional radiograph from different angles as the sample rotates. The rotation stage is incremented perhaps a tenth or a quarter of a degree, another image is captured, and so on until you get all the way around. The raw data is a series of two-dimensional radiographs that are used to assemble a 3D image through a process known as filtered back-projection reconstruction.
Figure 2. 3D xCT view of the lunar sample showing the bright, highly x-ray absorbing mineral, believed to be barite (barium sulfate) or possibly Fe-based. (Sample borrowed from the Dr. Jay Piatek Meteorite Collection)
That wasn't always the case. According to Jones, CT computers have significantly evolved, partly due to the gaming community. The key development was improved graphics processing units (GPU) that can process multiple reconstruction paths simultaneously. This means it is no longer necessary to capture industrial CT data using incremental slice scans, which was very time consuming.
EXTRATERRESTRIAL CT SCANNING
So, getting a CT scanner to Mars, or even to the lunar surface, or the International Space Station, would be a good way to determine the most valuable samples to transport. There's just one difficulty with this plan: today's CT scanners are typically large, high-power devices that generally require human assistance for sample setup. To send one into space, it would have to be drastically down-sized — a daunting challenge. “There are some hurdles we would have to encounter, the power source is the big one,” said Jones. But Garvin and Jones think it can be done and are working with experts within and outside of NASA to find workarounds for these hurdles. “And if so, what a tool for future astronauts and robotic rovers to use to select the most compelling samples,” said Garvin.
Figure 3. Lava sample.
“Once the CT is in place, picking up the sample and rotating it is achievable,” said Garvin. He explained that “right now, the sample handling system on the Mars Curiosity Rover has all kinds of motions and spinning cells and 'shake and bake’ things to do what it does, so, going the next step: putting marble-sized samples of Mars or the moon or an asteroid for example, into one of these miniaturized X-ray computed tomography devices on another planet is not inconceivable.” All that has to be done is put a little piece of rock into a chamber on a rover spacecraft like Curiosity, align, and rotate it.
THE ADVANTAGES OF XCT
As you explore the surface of an extraterrestrial body, it's hard to decide just by the look of things what might be useful to examine further. The trouble is knowing, “is this a useful sample, this gray grungy thing from the Moon or Mars — most rocks kind of look gray and grungy,” said Garvin. So, it would be a great help to have an advance idea of what the sample might have to offer internally.
Figure 4. 3D/volumetric view of the lava sample. The bulk of the rock has been shaded as translucent. The bright inclusions within this volume are a highly x-ray absorbing phase of material within the rock. The plane intersecting this volume is a “cutting plane” (2D slice). It shows what the rock would look like if you were to cut it open along that plane.
There are other ways to examine the interior of a sample, so why CT? One option could be to cut open a small sample of a specimen. The trouble with that is that since the sample is just a small part of a larger object, it is impossible to use it to accurately judge the structure of the whole. In one sample that the team recently studied, “The state of the art published data, gleaned through destructive physical cross-sections, says certain features are 100 microns in scale (0.1 mm). Then, when you look at the scale of the whole rock, all of a sudden there are ones that are 100 times that — that changes the interpretation,” Garvin said. Even with samples that have been brought to earth, a CT could be used to precisely locate features you want to study so that you know in advance where to slice.
WHAT COULD WE LEARN FROM A 3D X-RAY?
The X-Ray CT is like a three-dimensional picture that can be enhanced by adding pseudo-colors and analyzed with the help of 3D rendering software. “It's not telling us: this is iron, or this is manganese, but it will tell you: this element, or this grain, or this structure in the rock is a higher density than the neighboring grain,” said Jones. It shows relative densities by virtue of the fact that x-rays are absorbed as a function of the atomic number in the periodic table — the higher the atomic number, the higher the absorption. “The chemistry of the way the rock forms, produces 3D signatures that are definitive,” added Garvin.
THE XCT — ENGINEERING TOOL IN SPACE
There are other uses for an extraterrestrial CT: inspection and maintenance of equipment. For example, there is now a 3D printer on the International Space Station and there is talk of employing one in a future human habitat on the Moon to create tools and instruments. Computed Tomography is the only practical method for inspecting parts created with 3D printers, due to their inherent complexity. If a part fails, the CT can be used to analyze the fault. It gives you a virtual three-dimensional view, including any pores, inclusions, cracks, or crack-initiators. Especially in a habitat on the moon, resources are very limited so it will be valuable to know whether it is safe to reuse a component from a failed mechanism.
WHAT IS THE FUTURE FOR 3D CT SCANNING IN SPACE?
“An exciting step would be to put one of these things into the next generation crew-vehicle we're hoping to send to cislunar orbit as part of the president's new space policy and have samples come to it, but not back to Earth,” Garvin said. He explained that robots and people could go to the Moon and bring the samples back to this orbiting gateway. We would then see a three-dimensional image and triage for the most interesting samples for return to Earth. “This would save the expense of bringing home samples that have mass and need care and feeding to do it right — a big step when you bring something home to earth, particularly if it's with a crew, as we did so well with Apollo,” said Garvin. “xCT and other innovations (e.g. laser confocal microscopes) that permit detailed studies of the interiors or surfaces of samples in 3D, at micrometer scales, could revolutionize planetary sciences in the upcoming decades, especially for the Moon and Mars.”
This article was written by Ed Brown, Associate Editor of Photonics & Imaging Technology. For more information, Click Here.
Printed Sensors Could Simplify NASA’s Extraterretrial Scanning
Printed Sensors Could Simplify NASA’s Extraterrestrial Scanning
It’s no secret that remotely scanning extraterrestrial environments requires quite a lot of state-of-the-art technology. Aside from the space travel tech, there is the problem of building the actual sensors that will be picking up light traces of water vapor, gases or temperature changes. Luckily however, NASA is looking to develop 3D printed sensors that are lighter and more compact than ever. The sensors will serve as the basis for a potentially revolutionary, nanomaterial-based detector platform.
Mahmooda Sultana is the lead technologist for the project, having won funding to advance this concept through a $2 million technology development award. Potentially, the system will be capable of sensing everything from minute concentrations of gases and vapor, atmospheric pressure and temperature. It will then transmit all this data, using a wireless antenna, back to NASA’s ground controllers.
What’s most impressive about the project is that it could do all this from a single, self-contained platform. It’s also a marvel that the platform could measure just two-by-three-inches in size. The potential for miniaturisation that printed sensors provide is a major boon to simplifying NASA’s extraterrestrial terrain scanning capabilities.
Currently, the team is busy measuring which set-up is best for the design. This reequires determining which combination of materials can best measure minute (down to parts-per-billion) concentrations of water, ammonia, methane and hydrogen.
Miniaturization & Space Exploration
The miniaturization of technologies is a crucial aspect of modern space travel. Compact and lighter equipment allows for the economisation of space and fuel costs. Thus, it’s been on NASA’s mind for a while and 3D printing is definitely playing a part in multiple ways. The team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center are working with could simplify both the production and the packaging of these essential platforms.
The project is looking into nanomaterials, like carbon nanotubes, graphene, etc. as the basis. Another unique aspect of the proposed method is that it will print all the necessary sensors on the same substrate using a single process. They are even looking int printing a part of the wireless communication circuitry needed for the platform and the printed sensors to relay the data to ground controllers.
Nanomaterials, such as carbon nanotubes, graphene, molybdenum disulfide and others, possess useful physical properties. They display high sensitivity and can remain stable in extreme conditions, thus they are ideal candidates. As one would imagine, they are also lightweight, resistant against radiation and require less power.
Once finalised, Northeastern University will use their Nanoscale Offset Printing System to apply the nanomaterials. Sultana’s group, meanwhile, will functionalize individual sensors by depositing additional layers of nanoparticles, enhancing their sensitivity. They will also integrate the sensors with readout electronics and package the entire platform.
Featured image courtesy of NASA.
About the author | Rawal AhmedRawal Ahmed is a freelance journalist and politics correspondent with an avid interest in futurism, science and technology.
A composite image of Kepler's final view. The missing tiles are due to parts of the camera that failed.
NASA
The final thing NASA's Kepler Space Telescopecaptured was everything, or at least it looks that way.
NASA ran out of fuel last year and was put into a permanent sleep mode on Oct. 30. Thefinal full-field image it took can be seen in the above mosaic captured Sept. 25. You can see the telescope's full view of the sky and an abundance of stars within.
This is Kepler’s view of the TRAPPIST-1 system, an ultra-cool red dwarf star with seven rocky planets, at least three of them believed to be temperate worlds.
Credits: NASA/Ames Research Center
Some blocks of the composite image are blacked out due to failures by parts of the camera. Fortunately, the device had a modular design that allowed for other parts of the image to be retained.Kepler's view of K2-138 with its six planets sized between Earth and Neptune. It was the first multi-planet system entirely discovered by citizen scientists.
Kepler's view of K2-138 with its six planets sized between Earth and Neptune. It was the first multi-planet system entirely discovered by citizen scientists.NASA/Ames Research Center
But it struggled to make some of those discoveries. A few years into its mission, the parts that help it stay pointed at a target began to fail. Engineers had to come up with a work-around that basically used the subtle pressure coming off the sun itself to keep the telescope steady. Kepler went on making more findsfor half a decade before finally running out of gas.
To the right is one of the later star systems Kepler helped discover called K2-138. It is believed to host six planets roughly between the sizes of Earth and Neptune. The GIF shows images collected of the system during Kepler's last day of photography.
The pixelated view might not be much to look at, but Kepler played a pivotal role in pointing the way towards promising systems like this so that future telescopes might provide a clearer view one day, and perhaps even find evidence of alien life.
NASA turns 60: The space agency has taken humanity farther than anyone else, and it has plans to go further.
Crowd Control: A crowdsourced science fiction novel written by CNET readers
A harpoon designed to capture orbital junkhas been successfully tested in space for the first time as part of the active debris-removal demonstration mission calledRemoveDebris.
The pen-size titanium harpoon developed by Airbus engineers in the U.K. was fired on Feb. 8 into an aluminum target, which extended from the spacecraft attached to a carbon-fiber boom. During the test, it successfully snagged the target out of orbit and reeled it back to the main spacecraft.
"It's been a really successful test and gives us really good confidence in the harpoon technology that has been developed," Alastair Wayman, advanced project engineer at Airbus who was responsible for the design of the experiment, told Space.com."We have tested it extensively on the ground but obviously, there are things that we can't completely simulate on the ground." [Photos: Space Debris Images & Cleanup Concepts]
The ground-control team, based at Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (which built the spacecraft) in Guildford, the U.K., had to wait for three days to download all the data to make sure that the experiment, which was captured in slow-motion video, went as planned. "The ground-control team had to upload a series of commands for the harpoon and the spacecraft, which the spacecraft then autonomously executed when it was at the right angle to the sun so that we could get a good video of the experiment," Wayman said.
The harpoon's design was tested on the ground before the technology was launched.
Once the engineers could review all that data, they confirmed that the harpoon hit the target at a speed of 65 feet per second (20 meters per second). After the tip of the harpoon penetrated the panel, a spring-loaded mechanism deployed an array of barbs to secure the harpoon firmly in place. The carbon-fiber boom the target was attached to didn't withstand the force of the impact and snapped. Wayman said the engineers expected this could happen and they secured the harpoon with a tether to make sure the experiment didn't create additional space debris.
The vacuum environment and the thermal conditions in orbit could also have had an impact on the equipment, Wayman said. "The tether may have ended up being stiffer than we anticipated due to the temperature, and the interaction between the projectile and the target may have behaved differently than we have anticipated," Wayman said. "But actually, the behavior in orbit and in the ground testing was very similar. We got the same accuracy that we expected, we got the same firing speed and we successfully captured the target, and doing that in space didn't have an impact on the operation."
The RemoveDebris satellite's harpoon is designed to skewer and reel in pieces of orbiting space junk.
Wayman said that the Airbus team will continue developing the technology, which was originally considered for the European Space Agency's planned active space-debris-removal mission e.Deorbit. That mission is expected to launch in the mid-2020s and remove a defunct Earth observation satellite called Envisat, which is one of the largest and therefore most dangerous pieces of space debris cluttering low Earth orbit. The agency, however, eventually decided to redesign the mission as a multipurpose vehicle and use a robotic arm instead.
The harpoon test this month was the penultimate experiment of the $18.7 million (15.2 million euros) RemoveDebris mission. The spacecraft, the first in history to demonstrate active space-debris-removal technology in orbit, was released into space from the International Space Station in June 2018. It commenced its test campaign in September with another Airbus-led experiment, which demonstrated how a small cubesat could be captured with a net. Shortly after that, RemoveDebris tested optical navigation technology that could be used to locate and target debris in orbit. [Latest News About Space Junk and Orbital Debris]
"The harpoon was RemoveDebris' most demanding experiment and the fact that it was a success is testament to all involved," Guglielmo Aglietti, the mission's lead investigator and the director of the Surrey Space Centre at the University of Surrey, said in a statement. "The RemoveDebris project provides strong evidence of what can be achieved with the power of collaboration — pooling together the experience across industry and the research field to achieve something truly remarkable."
The mission will conclude in the next few weeks with the deployment of a drag sail that will speed up the RemoveDebris spacecraft's deorbit. The ground-control teams will attempt to maintain contact with the fridge-size spacecraft for as long as possible to gather data about the drag sail's performance.
Active space-debris-removal technologies are becoming critical as the environment around the Earth becomes more and more cluttered. Experts say that it will be necessary to remove five large objects from low Earth orbit per year to prevent a dangerous cascade of collisions predicted by NASA scientist Donald Kessler in the 1970s and now known as the Kessler syndrome.
They claim that the deep Issik Kul lake in Russia is populated by a race of giant humanoids
They claim that the deep Issik Kul lake in Russia is populated by a race of giant humanoids
Russia is home to a large number of enigmas and mysteries, each one more strange than the other. The next case, on Lake Issik Kul, is no exception. Are there giant humanoids in the deep lakes of this cold country?
Although these particular events have been going on for thousands of years, our story begins in the 1930s, when a paranormal investigator named Ilya Grabovsky was exploring strange events surrounding Lake Issik Kul, a water 'well' of great depth located in the mountains of northern Tian Shan. "Issik Kul" means "Hot Lake", a reference to the fact that the lake never freezes, despite being surrounded by icy mountains.
Grabovsky had heard legends about hidden caves in the area so he contacted a local. At first, the man was reluctant to describe his experience, but the paranormal investigator finally convinced him to pass on his knowledge. He told Grabovsky that he and his friends were fishing on the northwest shore of the lake, when they saw a cave. It was inaccessible so they decided to return the next day with ropes, lanterns and picks.
The next day, the men began to explore the cave and made a surprising discovery within its innermost sector. They discovered three human skeletons, more than ten feet tall each. Around their necks, each skeleton had a silver amulet in the shape of what men described as "bats." An interesting aspect, since there have been several reports describing UFOs in this particular way, not only in Russia, but also in the rest of the world.
Even more intriguing is a local Kyrgyz legend that refers to a sunken city at the bottom of the Issik Kul lake. The last ruler of the ancient city had been King Ossounes, a giant with "long ears". The legend also mentions that Ossounes was able to fly between the peaks of the mountains "in the blink of an eye".
This discovery scared the men enough to keep quiet about it for years, but not enough to leave the silver amulets behind. They melted the jewels and sold the silver, but they kept a small fragment as a souvenir. No photograph of this fragment survived to this day, but Grabovsky later wrote that the Soviet scientists who had the opportunity to examine it were unable to determine its exact age.
Intrigued by the fisherman's confession, Grabovsky decided to go deeper into the mystery. Scanning through local archives, he came across the first mention of similar giant creatures, dating back to the mid-1800s. A group of Georgian children (at that time, Georgia was part of the Russian Empire) were diving for mussels in Lake Issik Kul when they passed over the entrance to an underwater cave inside the nearby mountain. As you probably guessed, the cave was the home of the last mortal remains of several giants. Despite his best efforts, Grabovsky never found this cave. Or maybe he did, but he remained silent. Either way, the official version is that he died without sharing the results of his work with the rest of the world. But this is not the end of the story.
In the early 1980s, Lake Issik Kul became the site for Soviet tests of torpedoes, submarine missiles and military diving equipment. It was also one of the places where the Soviet army carried out the continuous training of reconnaissance divers known as 'the frogmen'. Another place was the now famous Lake Baikal.
It is said that in 1982, during a 'frogmen' training exercise on Lake Baikal, divers encountered a strange group of 'swimmers' underwater. Those aquatic humanoids were huge (more than 3 meters high) and, despite swimming in icy waters, they wore nothing but tight silver suits. Although the beings were seen at a depth of more than 45 meters, none of them wore anything resembling a diving equipment. They only had helmets in the shape of a sphere that hide their heads.
This meeting supposedly led the Soviet military leaders to attempt an expedition to catch one or all of the humanoids under water, and a group of seven frogmen was sent to the area. Former Afghan war veteran and author Mark Shteynberg, who has extensively investigated this case, recalls:
"As the frogmen tried to cover the creature with a net, the entire team was propelled out of the deep water to the surface by a powerful force. Because the autonomous team of submariners does not allow surfacing from these depths without strict adherence to the process of decompression stops, all members of the unfortunate expedition were attacked by the disease of diver, or floating gate disease . The only curative treatment available consisted of an immediate seclusion under conditions of decompression in a pressure chamber. They had several pressure chambers as in the military region, but only one was in operational conditions. That could contain no more than two people. These local commanders had forced four divers to enter the chamber. As a result, three of them (including the CO of the group) perished, and the rest were disabled. "
As a direct result of this incident, General V. Demyanko, the commander of the Buso Military Service of the USSR, was transferred to the Issik Kul military base to inform local officials about the dangers of trying to capture giant underwater humanoids. This serves as evidence that the Soviet high command was well aware of the presence of such creatures, both on Lake Baikal and Issik Kul. Had an order been issued against his capture if the creatures were not real?
Not long after that, the Defense Forces of the Ministry of Defense issued a bulletin addressed to the headquarters of the Turkmenistan military region. The bulletin pointed to many other lakes where sightings of similar aquatic humanoids have been reported, along with the usual flying discs and spheres that ascend and plunge into the depths. This leads us to believe that the incidents on Lake Baikal and Issik Kul were not singular events, but rather expressions of a much broader phenomenon.
The veracity of this incident is supported by the admission of the Russian writer Mikhail Demidenko. After becoming familiar with Shteynberg's account in 1992, Demidenko recalled spending some time at Lake Baikal in the mid-1980s, on a mission of the Union of Writers of the USSR. It was there that the Irkutsk fishermen told him how they saw the Soviet divers being thrown out of the water and continued their ascent to a height of 9-15 meters above the surface. The fishermen did not know about the underwater humanoid episode and had been wondering why the Soviet military subjected their divers to this type of evidence.
So, is this case definitive evidence that the Russian lakes are home to a race of giant aquatic humanoids? Not enough, since a more palpable test is needed. But the continued existence of legends and confessions of retired high-ranking military officers, such as Colonel Vladimir Azhazha, seems to suggest that something is lurking in the unexplored depths of our planet. What do you think about this? Leave your comment below!
Pilots in southwestern England have reported multiple sightings of strange, unidentified lights above Gloucestershire county. Several instances of these “unidentified nocturnal lights” were witnessed by aviators with Air Midwest within the last few weeks and so far, pilots and social media are mystified by the sightings. What could these lights be?
Gloucester, England.
The lights were last seen in the skies south of Gloucester on February 15 between 8:15 and 8:45 pm local time. Air Midwest posted its pilots’ descriptions of the sightings to its Facebook page, adding that despite being experienced aviators, the company’s pilots are still baffled by the experiences:
At approximately 8.15pm one of our aircraft was tracking south towards Gloucester at 7,000ft after leaving the Birmingham air traffic zone. At the same time one of our other aircraft was also tracking south towards Gloucester at 4,000ft when both aircraft observed one red and one orange lights in the the sky south of Gloucester. Our aircraft approached the lights on an interception track but were unable to gain on the objects as they appeared to move further south of Gloucester as our aircraft approached. We were unable to identify the lights.
Pilots described the lights as “large square orange lights” which seemed to occasionally flicker white. Many Facebook users commented on Air Midwest’s post, adding that they too have seen strange lights and aircraft in the sky above Gloucestershire, some of which appeared to perform otherworldly feats of aerial agility not typically seen in conventional aircraft.
There are several Royal Air Force bases in the nearby vicinity of these sightings including RAF Fairford, pictured.
With so many sightings of anomalous aircraft, mysterious vapor trails, and unidentified phenomena occurring lately, it’s no wonder that the British press is beginning to speculate about secret government UFO programs. Of course, I’m more inclined to believe these lights stem from the Royal Air Force testing new experimental aircraft; after all, the RAF just announced last week that it’s planning on deploying ‘swarms’ of new unmanned drones by the end of the year. Could these be what pilots have been seeing in the skies above England lately, or might something
FIRST COMMERCIAL SPACE STATION FOR TOURISM FEATURED IN AN EPIC NEW TRAILER
FIRST COMMERCIAL SPACE STATION FOR TOURISM FEATURED IN AN EPIC NEW TRAILER
The rotating space station will allow for tourism as well as low-gravity needed for scientific experiments.
"The future is in rotation.”
At least that’s what the Gateway Foundation will have you believe for their newest project: the world’s first commercial space station orbiting the moon.
A brainchild of a former Boeing pilot John Blincow and retired NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory architect Tom Spilker, the rotating station, called the Von Braun Rotating Space Station, would allow for space tourism as well as low-gravity environments for scientific experiments conducted by national space agencies.
The concept is explained by the President of the Gateway Foundation in a new YouTube video.
The spaceport looks like something straight of a sci-fi series – a futuristic vision of what a visit to space for a holiday might look like.
The gateway has five gates that are connected to the transport hub, where shuttles from the Earth and Moon can dock to the port.
"It will allow us to take our first steps toward colonizing the Moon, Mars, and ultimately, will usher in a new age of exploration as we travel throughout our solar system and discover what lies beyond," the Foundation’s website reads. Also part of the concept is a Hilton space hotel module.
Screengrab of the Gateway's concept.
Image: Youtube/Gateway Foundation
The rotating nature of the spaceport will allow an adjustable degree of gravity at the station depending on the needs of space tourists, astronauts and researchers onboard at any given time.
But will the station ever get built?
The Gateway is an ambitious plan that needs an astronomical amount of funding to get built. And while NASA has its own plans forthe Deep Space Gateway, which is slated for assembly in 2024, commercial space travel is a whole different ballgame.
Apart from commercial investors, the Gateway has also opened doors to private investors as part of an “annual membership”. Members of the Gateway Foundation get informational emails, updates, event discounts and a chance to win a free trip to the Gateway.
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Are demons real, or are they a construct of religion? Exactly what are demons?
Are demons real, or are they a construct of religion? Exactly what are demons?
The concept of evil spirits has been around pre-Christianity. There are a number of references in ancient writings, however, one example is the term Asura. Asura is a sanskrit word that refers to good or bad spirits, and derives from ancient Hinduism. However, the concept of Satan and his demonic followers is an idea that was later developed by Christianity. This development stemmed from the early days of Christianity when people still believed Roman statues possessed gods or spirits. As more and more people began to adopt Christian tenets and reject old Roman polytheism, concepts of evil were assigned to the older gods and spirits. Thus, demonology was born. So, what are demons, and what does the Christian religion tell us about them?
The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea. William Blake, 1805
What Are Demons?
There are numerous theories that attempt to answer the question of what are demons. The subject of evil demonic spirits is shrouded in fear and great controversy, and is very complex and ever-changing. There are countless opinions and beliefs, with numerous historical references.
Satan fighting archangel Michael
What are demons to the non-secular world? Some people believe evil spirits and hell are a psychological state of mind, and that the devil is a voice of negativity forever tempting us to do and think bad things. In contrast, others believe they are inter-dimentional beings or aliens that find portals of entry into our dimension to create chaos and destruction of mankind. Even ghosts and human spirits of a negative influence are sometimes identified as demonic entities.
The Biblical Answers To What Are Demons
However, the most common conception of demonic spirits stems directly from The Bible. In the Christian faith, The Bible says that Satan, once the most beautiful and powerful of all the angels, became prideful and wanted the same glory as God. He rebelled against God and convinced one third of all the angels to follow him. Subsequently, there was a war. Satan and his angels fought against the archangel Michael and God’s angels. Satan and his followers lost the battle and God cast them out of Heaven down to Earth. These evil spirits are all the bad angels that were no longer welcome in heaven, and Satan is their demonic leader.
Encyclopedia.com gives a description of the general view of demonic spirits in the Bible:
Demons have an expansive role in the biblical record. They can affect the behavior of swine (Matt. 8:30-32) and speak with a knowledge beyond that of an ordinary person (Mark 1:23-24). Biblical authors did understand demons as objectively present in the world and pictured the apostles as trying to drive them away…By the third century, the angel Lucifer, who fell from heaven (Isa. 14:12), was identified with Satan, and the fallen angels with demons.
Depictions of Demonic Entities Over Time
1739 Apotheosis of Charles VI, Alberto Fernandez Fernandez, Wikimedia Commons
There have been many classical depictions of Satan and his army of evil spirits throughout the ages. There are different types of demonic entities and each type possesses its own demonic name. Although they are normally formless as evil spirits, some people claim to have seen them manifest into physical form. The descriptions vary from a large scaly creature to a cloaked, formless being with black voids for eyes. Some people believe that these evil beings and the devil may appear intentionally as something fearsome just to frighten it victims, because they want desperately to feed off strong negative emotions.
Demonologists teach that demonic spirits may reveal themselves as a deceased loved one or beneficent guide from the other side. Their goal is to manipulate victims into trusting them, only to become gruesome the next moment. Some people report a dark mist that filled them with dread. The beings may be small or very large. Demonologists consider demonic spirits to be shapeshifters, which means they can basically take on any form for their purpose.
What Do Satan’s Followers Want?
Exactly what are demons trying to accomplish? The best answer to this question also comes from a religious standpoint. According to Christianity, Satan hates God and is vengeful and jealous of him, so he desires to harm humans, because they are God’s creation. Satan will stop at nothing to destroy all that God has created on Earth, so Satan employs his evil army to help him inflict pain, despair, violence, and fear onto mankind. They also aim to tempt mankind into sin to drive him away from God in order to hurt God. According to this tenet, Satan and his minions ultimately will not prevail and, thus, their reign upon the Earth will end. At that time God will cast Satan and all his demonic followers into Hell, and there they will serve out an eternity of punishment.
How Do Demonic Spirits Enter Our World?
According to many demonologists and clergymen, humans create portals for evil to enter our world and, perhaps later, even our minds and bodies. One theory holds that demonic entities exist on a different dimension. However, we may intentionally or unintentionally invite them into our dimension in a number of ways. Engaging in demonic rituals, playing games such as the Ouija board, conducting seances, ghost hunting, and making deals with the devil are all possible ways of opening the door to demonic spirits. According to this theory, any means of communicating with spirits, even those of deceased loved ones, can be dangerous.
Another way people may open a portal for evil entities is through strong negative energy, which is very attractive to demonic spirits. Therefore, persisting emotions of anger, grief or depression, fear and disappointment may draw them in. Drug and alcohol can cause a person to open to evil forces – especially when someone uses methamphetamine. Even family conflict, depraved or perverse behaviors may attract them.
What is Demonic Haunting?
Once a doorway opens, demonic entities may enter. This may start out subtly, with bumps or scraping in the night, things moving on their own, or strange shadows and friendly apparitions. Demonic hauntings may escalate quickly into more intense events, such as physical afflictions to people (scratches, bites, hits), objects flying through the air, religious items being thrown off walls or being damaged by an unseen force, audible growls or voices, strong sulfuric or vile odors, visions, and emotional manipulation. One theory holds that demonic entities initially haunt people to break down their wills and to create an atmosphere of dread and confusion. This weakens a person on a psychological and spiritual level. Hence, once a person becomes weak to this extent, it becomes easier for a demon to take possession of a person.
What is Demonic Possession?
“Le dernier exorcisme” the film. Wikimedia Commons
According to demonologists, real demonic possession differs from a demonic haunting in that a person’s spirit and body become possessed. He may fall under the mental, emotional, and physical control of demonic spirits. Also, demonic control may take place in any degree from mild to complete. Symptoms of possession may include speaking in foreign languages never studied, knowledge of secret or hidden truths, and super human strength. Additionally, the possessed may say vile things, perform vulgar acts, or engage in disgusting behaviors. The demon may even speak through the individual to embarrass, discredit, confuse, shock, or expose an exorcist’s prior sins or temptations.
According to many experts, a person does not have to be of any particular religion or even believe in God to become haunted or possessed by demonic spirits. Anyone who opens a doorway may become susceptible, and because demonic spirits do not possess their own physical bodies, they desperately want to possess the human body. Keep in mind that possession may not always be as extreme and obvious as this article describes above, hence, signs and symptoms can be much more subtle. Experts in demonology may be necessary to identify hauntings of a demonic nature and true possession.
Demonic Exorcism
Demonologists teach that once demonic entities possess an individual, exorcism can often be a difficult and dangerous process. Therefore, an expert exorcist may have to conduct the purification. Although there are exorcists who do not belong to the Catholic faith, the Vatican insists that only a Catholic priest should perform exorcism. They are thoroughly trained in the perils that surround such a ritual. Thus, a priest should even be able to discern mental illness from true possession.
According to many accounts of exorcism, unseen evil forces or the possessed individual can frequently injure an exorcist. Typically, priests us a stole, holy water, Catholic crosses, prayers and a prayer group during exorcism. In addition, the exorcist prepares by undergoing a spiritual and physical cleanse to purify himself through fasting and praying beforehand. Otherwise, he himself may become spiritually weakened, and subsequently harmed or influenced, due to a demon’s great powers of manipulation.
Exorcism Prayer
The following is an excerpt of an exorcism prayer that a priest would say:
We drive you from us, whoever you may be, unclean spirits, all satanic powers, all infernal invaders, all wicked legions, assemblies and sects[…]
Thus, cursed dragon, and you, diabolical legions, we adjure you by the living God, + by the true God, + by the holy God, + by the God “who so loved the world that He gave up His only Son, that every soul believing in Him might not perish but have life everlasting;” [St.Jn. 3:16] stop deceiving human creatures and pouring out to them the poison of eternal damnation; stop harming the Church and hindering her liberty.
Pope Leo XIII
Good vs. Evil
Stefan Lochner circa 1400 Wikimedia Commons
According to the book of Revelations, good will triumph over evil after much violence and persecution of Christians. Until then, Satan and his followers will continue to possess and torment humans in his vengeful need to create as much chaos and destruction as possible.
Are Demons Real?
Whether or not demons are real is a very subjective issue that each individual answers. Undoubtedly, they are very real for people who claim to have had direct experiences with them. However, many people cannot accept or grasp concepts of angels and devils, because the beings are not of this world. This is the case for all paranormal subjects, which are not intuitive and logical for our rationale minds. But nonetheless, the mystery keeps us intrigued.
On a more commentary note, it doesn’t matter if you believe the tenets about Satan and his demons as described by Christianity. The fact is, most people believe in concepts of goodness and evil – of positivity and negativity. As humans, perhaps it would behoove us all to live proper, moral lives, aiming to do good, be kind, think positively, and offer ourselves to the service of others and God; the least it can do is benefit ourselves and mankind. And perhaps there is a possibility that in the end, it will make the world a better place, and it just may save our souls.
The Mars One project has beencanceled due to bankruptcy.Now, other future Mars projects may be in jeopardy as well when potential astronauts find out about a series of tests involving volunteers living for months in a space ship simulator which showed that one of things they’ll need to survive the long journey relatively stress-free is … clowns! Will using clowns also allow NASA to cram a lot more astronauts into the tiny ship?
“These are people that have the ability to pull everyone together, bridge gaps when tensions appear and really boost morale. When you’re living with others in a confined space for a long period of time, such as on a mission to Mars, tensions are likely to fray. It’s vital you have somebody who can help everyone get along, so they can do their jobs and get there and back safely. It’s mission critical.”
That’s not exactly a conventional definition of “clowns” but it’s the kind of funny people with the ‘Light’ Stuff that University of Florida anthropologist Jeffrey Johnson concluded will be necessary on long space flights after he spent four years studying scientists and workers at isolated bases in Antarctica. Johnson found that base workers from various nationalities — US, Russian, Polish, Chinese and Indian – worked and played together better when some of the crew members were class clowns, jokesters and funny storytellers.
To infinity and beyond … with cream pies!
He’s using those findings to prepare analog astronauts (astronauts who work in ground simulators) for long-mission simulations at NASA’s Human Experimentation Research Analog (HERA) project at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and the SIRIUS (Scientific International Research In a Unique terrestrial Station) mission in the NEK analog located in the Institute for Bio-Medical Problems (IBMP) in Russia. (Shouldn’t that be Not-Sirius? Asking for a friend thinking about applying for the clown job.)
“That’s when people start to feel like, ‘I don’t want to play anymore.’”
Leslie DeChurch, a psychologist with the HERA project, describes the circumstances when a clown will come in handy on a long mission. Her research has found that, no matter how long it is, the crew is generally most vulnerable during the third quarter of a mission. On a Mars mission, that would be during the trip home when the fun part is over and there’s still a long way to go. Think about those long stints in the back seat coming home from a childhood vacation listening to your parents arguing and you get the idea on a small scale. DeChurch and Noshir Contractor, a professor of behavioral science at Northwestern also working with HERA, will be testing their models and recommendations on the latest HERA crew which entered the simulator on February 15.
“Is the right stuff still the right stuff for a team that would go to Mars? I think we’re pretty confident that it is not.”
Thanks a lot, Dr. Contractor. What are we going to call the movie about the Mars mission? Clowns in Space starring Will Ferrell and Mellissa McCarthy? Star Shecky? (Ask your grandfather.) Armageddon Laughs? Would David Bowie cringe at Is There Laughs on Mars?
The latest terrifying artificial intelligence development to foreshadow humanity’s future under the cold, steel boots of ruthless robots comes by way of OpenAI, a San Francisco-based research institute funded in part by Elon Musk. OpenAI has reportedly created an AI capable of generating realistic-but-fake news stories that are credible enough to fool most human readers. In fact, the AI is so good at what it does that its own creators believe it’s too dangerous to release. How much longer until one of these systems is let loose on an unsuspecting public?
And how long until it decides humanity is a plague?
OpenAI’s newest hellish creation is called GPT2. The program is essentially a text generator which can analyze existing text and then produce its own based on what it expects might come after it. What separates GPT2 from other natural language bots is the fact that it can produce realistic texts in perfect prose – and that’s where the danger comes in.
Jack Clark, policy director at OpenAI, says that because the program writes such realistic-looking text, it could be easily used to fool or mislead readers with fake news stories. “We started testing it, and quickly discovered it’s possible to generate malicious-esque content quite easily,” Clark told the MIT Technology Review. “It’s very clear that if this technology matures—and I’d give it one or two years—it could be used for disinformation or propaganda. We’re trying to get ahead of this.”
Real-life Bond villain Elon Musk is also trying to get ahead of the dangers of GPT2 by distancing himself from OpenAI altogether. Musk left the company this week, citing his commitments to his other endeavors. While Musk is without a doubt a busy man, many suspect his departure might be due to the terrifying possibilities GPT2 foreshadows.
As artificial intelligence networks continue to get better at fooling humans, the line between what is real and what is fake is beginning to blur. Already, sophisticated AI programs can produce perfectly real-looking video and audio content depicting people saying or doing things which never actually happened. What’s going to happen when these start flooding the news cycle? Are we destined to lose our ability to tell what is real and true?
“Shhh. Too many questions. Just sit back and smash that ‘Subscribe’ button. It’ll all be over soon.”
Perhaps we already have. Many technologists and historians believe we may already be controlled by AI. Could that explain the geopolitical high strangeness of the last few years? Is it all a carefully curated illusion designed to manipulate the minds of the masses?
Kill your TV before it’s too late. And your phone and computer while you’re at it. Better yet, just gouge your own eyes out and rip your ears off. It’s not as difficult as it may sound. It’s the only real way to avoid the hellish nightmare the future is turning out to be.
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NASA is shooting an asteroid with a giant DART to help save the world – CNET
NASA’s DART spacecraft will blast off to the asteroid 65803 Didymos to crash into its moon.
NASA
NASA is shooting an asteroid with a giant DART to help save the world – CNET
If an asteroid was shooting towards Earth, what would our options be?
Sure, we could send up a ragtag team of miners to drill into the asteroid, plant a nuke and blast it to smithereens.
But if NASA has its way, we won’t need to train miners to be astronauts — it has other plans to deflect those deadly asteroids. (A lucky thing too, because it makes far more sense to teach already-trained astronauts to use a drill rather than putting miners through astronaut school, but that’s another matter entirely).
NASA is prepping for a (potential) doomsday outcome with the Double Asteroid Redirection Test — a mission that will test whether we can crash a spacecraft into an asteroid and knock it off course, thus saving humankind and preventing us from ever sending Bruce Willis into space.
Two different views of the DART spacecraft bus. The DRACO (a tortured acronym that is the Didymos Reconnaissance & Asteroid Camera for OpNav) is based on the LORRI high-resolution imaging instrument from New Horizons. The left view also shows the Radial Line Slots Array (RLSA) antenna with (solar arrays rolled up). The isometric view on the right shows a clearer view of the NEXT-C ion engine.
Overview of the DART spacecraft with the Roll Out Solar Arrays (ROSA) extended. With the ROSA arrays fully deployed, DART measures 12.5 meters (494 inches) by 2.4 meters (98.1 inches).
Brought up on Space X’s eleventh Dragon flight (CRS-11) to ISS, the ROSA array was tested on Expedition 52 on board the International Space Station (ISS) in June 2017. This was the first in-space test of ROSA. This image shows ROSA attached to the ISS’ CanadaArm2 initially in the ‘rolled-up’ position.
Brought up on Space X’s eleventh Dragon flight (CRS-11) to ISS, the ROSA array was tested on Expedition 52 on board the International Space Station (ISS) in June 2017. This was the first in-space test of ROSA. This image shows the ROSA fully extended.
DART will be co-manifested on either commercial or military launch to geosynchronous orbit between December 2020 and May 2021 and released. Using the NEXT-C ion thrust engine, DART will spiral out beyond the orbits of the geosynchronous satellites and the Moon to reach an escape point to depart the Earth-Moon system en route to Didymos.
Fourteen Arecibo radar images of the near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos and its moonlet, taken on 23, 24 and 26 November 2003. NASA’s planetary radar capabilities enable scientists to resolve shape, concavities, and possible large boulders on the surfaces of these small worlds. Photometric lightcurve data indicate that Didymos is a binary system, and radar imagery distinctly shows the secondary body.
Simulated image of the Didymos system, derived from photometric lightcurve and radar data. The primary body is about 800 meters in diameter and the moonlet is approximately 150 meters across. They are separated by just over a kilometer. The primary body rotates once every 2.26 hours while the tidally locked moonlet revolves about the primary once every 11.9 hours. Almost one sixth of the known near-Earth asteroid (NEA) population are binary or multiple-body systems.
Credits: Naidu et al., AIDA Workshop, 2016
The near-Earth asteroid (185851) 2000 DP107 in many ways is an analog to Didymos. 2000 DP107 was the first binary asteroid ever imaged by radar. This animation is derived from planetary radar observations. In this example (2000 DP107), the primary and secondary are about 850 meters and 300 meters in diameter. They are separated by about 2.7 km. The primary rotates once every 2.77 hours while the tidally locked secondary orbits the primary about once every 42 hours.
Schematic of the DART mission shows the impact on the moonlet of asteroid (65803) Didymos. Post-impact observations from Earth-based optical telescopes and planetary radar would, in turn, measure the change in the moonlet’s orbit about the parent body.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
In this week’s episode of Watch This Space, we take a look at the DART mission to 65803 Didymos — a binary asteroid (complete with its own companion “moonlet”) that’s currently orbiting the sun out past Earth.
According to NASA, the moonlet (or “Didymoon” as it’s been nicknamed) is a perfect example of an asteroid of the size and type that could crash into Earth. So, the space agency wants to send its DART spacecraft up there as early as Dec. 2020 to blast towards the 150-metre-wide moonlet and crash into its surface.
Imagine it like a game of pool. If you need to knock the 8 ball in the corner pocket, you knock the cue ball into its side and it’ll shoot off on an angle. By sending its cue ball careening into the moonlet, NASA will measure how the impact changes the moonlet’s momentum and hopefully get a better idea of how asteroids can be redirected in future.
To learn more about the DART, the partner mission being run by the European Space Agency and what all this has to do with Elijah Wood and the film “Labyrinth” (there are connections, we promise) then check out this week’s episode of Watch This Space. You can get your space fix every other Friday with new episodes, or catch up with the whole series on CNET or YouTube.
'We may not be alone': Police release eerie footage of a UFO-like object hovering in the sky during an intense thunderstorm in Australia's remote northwest
'We may not be alone': Police release eerie footage of a UFO-like object hovering in the sky during an intense thunderstorm in Australia's remote northwest
Broome police have shared bizarre CCTV footage of a UFO hovering in the sky
The object appears as lightning strikes before disappearing into the distance
Police have now decided that it was probably the reflection of a car's lights
Eerie footage of an unidentified bright light shining in one of Australia's most remote areas has sparked claims it could be a UFO.
Broome police, in Australia's far north-west, shared CCTV footage of a bizarre looking object in the sky on Twitter- and many were quick to claim it was a UFO.
The video shows a bright object tilted on its side during a thunderstorm on the Saturday night.
Police captioned it saying: 'After reviewing CCTV at town beach of last night's storm, it appears we are not alone.'
The round illuminated object appears in the corner of the screen as lightning strikes.
It hovers in the sky during the storm before disappearing into the distance just seconds later.
Twitter users have been trying to come up with possible explanations, with some saying it is probably just the reflection of a car's headlights on the camera at the beach.
'Not sure if it's area 51 replica vehicle or an intergalatic vehicle. Insane footage!' one Twitter user said.
Another asked: 'A nice bit of video! How does this optical illusion occur? Refraction, reflection, ionosphere?'.
Another commented:'You know it's just light refraction from the reversing 4WD right?'
CCTV footage shows the UFO in the distance. It appears in the left corner as lightning strikes
The round illuminating object hovers back and forth in the air for a couple of seconds during the storm
The UFO than disappears into the distance. Police have said it could possibly have been the headlights of a car
Aliens in OZ: The five most bizarre UFO sightings in Australia
1. In 1966, over 300 school students and teachers at Westall High School in Melbourne said they saw a UFO flying in the sky before it disappeared behind some trees.
2. In 1966, a farmer claims he saw a UFO when he was riding his tractor. He said an hour prior to his sighting, his dog had been acting very strange.
3. In 1978, the disappearance of Pilot Frederick Valentich led to questioning whether UFO's exist. He departed Moorabbin in Victoria and was planning to fly to King Island. Frederick reported something flying over him: 'It seems to be playing some sort of game. He's flying over me.'
4. In 1988, the Knowles family were driving through outback South Australia and claimed there was a UFO flying above them for 90 minutes before landing on the roof of the car and pulling them into the air.
5. In 1993, Kelly Cahill was driving home in Melbourne and claims she saw a beam of lights hovering ahead of her. She than said when she woke she had lost an hour of time.
Study blames YouTube for rise in number of Flat Earthers
Study blames YouTube for rise in number of Flat Earthers
Conspiracy theories shown on video-sharing site persuade people to doubt Earth is round
Science editor
All but one of those interviewed said they had changed their minds after watching videos promoting conspiracy theories on YouTube. Photograph: Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images
Researchers believe they have identified the prime driver for a startling rise in the number ofpeople who think the Earth is flat: Google’s video-sharing site, YouTube.
Their suspicion was raised when they attended the world’s largest gatherings of Flat Earthers at the movement’s annual conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 2017, and then in Denver, Colorado, last year.
Play Video
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Flat Earth rising: meet the people casting aside 2,500 years of science – video
Interviews with 30 attendees revealed a pattern in the stories people told about how they came to be convinced that the Earth was not a large round rock spinning through space but a large flat disc doing much the same thing.
Of the 30, all but one said they had not considered the Earth to be flat two years ago but changed their minds after watching videos promoting conspiracy theories on YouTube. “The only person who didn’t say this was there with his daughter and his son-in-law and they had seen it on YouTubeand told him about it,” said Asheley Landrum, who led the research at Texas Tech University.
The interviews revealed that most had been watching videos about other conspiracies, with alternative takes on 9/11, the Sandy Hook school shooting and whether Nasa really went to the moon, when YouTube offered up Flat Earth videos for them to watch next.
Some said they watched the videos only in order to debunk them but soon found themselves won over by the material.
Landrum said one of the most popular Flat Earth videos, “200 proofs Earth is not a spinning ball” appears to be effective because it offers arguments that appeal to so many mindsets, from biblical literalists and conspiracy theorists to those of a more scientific bent.
One way or another, the interviewees found themselves believers and before long were asking “where is the curve?” and “why is the horizon always at eye level?”
The Flat Earth conference in Denver, Colorado, in November 2018. Photograph: Josiah Hesse/The Guardian
Landrum, who presented her results at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC, said she did not think YouTube was doing anything overtly wrong, but said that if the site wanted to help it could tweak its algorithm to show more accurate information.
“There’s a lot of helpful information on YouTube but also a lot of misinformation,” Landrum said. “Their algorithms make it easy to end up going down the rabbit hole, by presenting information to people who are going to be more susceptible to it.”
“Believing the Earth is flat in of itself is not necessarily harmful, but it comes packaged with a distrust in institutions and authority more generally,” she added. “We want people to be critical consumers of the information they are given, but there is a balance to be had.”
Landrum called on scientists and others to create their own YouTube videos to combat the proliferation of conspiracy videos. “We don’t want YouTube to be full of videos saying here are all these reasons the Earth is flat. We need other videos saying here’s why those reasons aren’t real and here’s a bunch of ways you can research it for yourself.”
But she conceded that some Flat Earthers may not be swayed by a scientists’ words. When the US astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson explained how small sections of large curved surfaces will always appear flat to the little creatures that crawl upon it, his message was seen by some Flat Earthers as patronising and dismissive, Landrum said.
“There’s always going to be a small percentage of people who will reject anything that scientists put out there but maybe there’s a group in the middle that won’t,” she added. “The only tool we have to battle misinformation is to try and overwhelm it with better information.”
In his celebrated book On Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau wrote: “We need the tonic of wildness.... At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
Thoreau raises a fundamental question in space exploration. Should we allow ourselves to terraform planets in an effort to make them habitable and seed objects in space with life as we know it, or should we leave nature out there to its own devices, intact and pure?
On the one hand, it would be prudent not to keep all our eggs in one basket; we might choose to spread terrestrial life to other worlds in an effort to reduce the risk of it being eliminated by catastrophes on Earth. But at the same time, one might worry that by doing so we could unleash unforeseen forces that would modify natural ecosystems in ways that could get out of hand. Moreover, artificial seeding of Earth life would muddy the waters in extraterrestrial “Walden-like” ponds. It would deprive us from the opportunity to find out if other life-forms may have existed before our arrival.
Such an impact might resemble the effect of the Spanish invasion of South and Central America, which decimated the rich culture of local populations such as the Maya. For this reason, NASA enforces tight regulations on the sterilization of space vehicles in an effort to avoid contamination of space targets with terrestrial microbes.
As we explore nature in extraterrestrial ponds, the key question is whether life there resembles what we see on Earth or takes new forms. Could it follow a different chemical network? Could it flourish in liquids other than water? Could it adjust to conditions more extreme and last longer than on Earth? But most important, how intelligent is it? It would be particularly shocking to find out that our expanded habitat includes creatures that are far smarter than we are.
Our loyalty to Thoreau’s legacy would depend on whether we are alone, for if alien civilizations had been already engaged in such activities, then nature had been contaminated by artificial intent and there is no way to find it pure and primitive. Any artifacts could be considered as completing an expanded exhibit of the full scope of nature with no need to separate the biological from the technological. But there is no denying that it would be more poetic to find nature unspoiled.
As Thoreau added: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that nothing done by humans really matters in the big scheme of the universe. Humans have access to an extremely limited fraction of the cosmic reservoirs of energy and mass, and to potential places for life; there are 1020 habitable Earth-like planets in the observable volume of the universe, so the human imprint on the cosmic stage is destined to remain negligible. Perhaps we should limit our cosmic ambitions in light of this perspective.
As Thoreau said: “Let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves."
Cosmic modesty would leave us with the sole desire of embedding ourselves in nature, soaking in its beauty as spectators, not reformers, and suppressing ego-motivated plans for space colonization.
As we venture into space we could follow the wisdom of Thoreau: “Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.” Here, “morning” should be interpreted more broadly than its limited meaning on Earth. For example, it could mean “forever” in the permanent dayside of the nearest habitable planet, Proxima Centauri b.
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The Mystery of the Gods “half fish” that came from Space(Dogon tribe)
The Mystery of the Gods “half fish” that came from Space(Dogon tribe)
One of the most important mysteries of antiquity is the Dogon tribe, a people that has maintained for centuries a complex knowledge about the universe and especially the existence of the star Sirius, from where a highly developed civilization would come who contacted them in the past.(half fish)
The town or Tribe Dogon inhabits in the Republic of Mali, – African country located in the border of the Sahara with the savannas of Western Africa, and to about 1,500 kilometers of the Atlantic – specifically in the plateau of Bandiagara and the Mounts Homburí. According to an oral tradition, they arrived in Mali some 600 years ago and built the houses on the cliffs to protect themselves from the attacks of the tribes that already inhabited the region.(half fish
The practically uncultivable zones raise a rocky sector where almost 450,000 Dogons live, each family has a unique care with the approach of foreigners since they are generally not accepted. For them, life has a sacred nature, so that any conflict is solved peacefully.
Knowledge of the Dogon culture has been taken to pictograms that are printed on plates, but the largest archive is still cultivated orally, trying not to distort its history and worrying that this is the purest possible.
According to the tradition of the Dogon people, about a thousand years ago you reached the area of the plateau of Youga Dogurou in broad daylight a very bright star which they called “ie-pelu-tolo”: the star of the tenth moon. This object was covered by a very reddish light that they related to the blood. After this great star came a second that turned on itself, was large and emitted a deafening noise.
The curious thing is that when arriving at earth, this star no longer had a circular shape, but it looked like a large basket or pyramid with a square base, and on each of its faces a staircase with six steps was opened. Its color changed from red to bright white. The people -according to the Dogones- ran away since the landing of that “ark” had generated a lot of fear in them.
For example, eight Nommos “di-tigi” who had the body of a fish, although some traditions mention some snake characteristics, would have descended from ie-pelu-tolo. They had 40 very sharp teeth, which explains why the Dogons used to sharpen them. The contact with these beings that supposedly were sacred, generated an approach of the Dogon people, with a great amount of knowledge of the universe, which until today cannot be explained rationally.
According to the belief, the Nommos had come down to Earth to evangelize the people, helping them and teaching them techniques to cultivate the savanna, to fish, in addition to brewing beer and making the outbreak of tree fruits simpler. However there are reports that present the Nommos as murderers and not as teachers of goodwill, it is even believed that there were hundreds of Dogons who perished because of the evil of this race that supposedly came from space. However, it is important to keep in mind that oral narration is always distorted through the passage of time.(half fish)
Within the information poured by the Nommos to the Dogon tribes, is the existence of the star Sirius, from which they came. “Sigi Tolo” is the name given to the brightest body in the sky and according to these beings was the star of the foundation. The funny thing is that they did not present it alone, since they claimed it was triple, that is, they were three stars far from each other. Astronomy at that time had no notion of a second star on Sirius, and less than a third.
In 1995 the French Diventy and Benest discovered a third body in the Sirius system. According to the Dogon, the fish men told him about Sirius B as “po tolo” and said that it was a small star but of a very heavy mass called “sagala”. For the first time, in the year 1862, the American astronomer Alvan Clark managed to see in the star of Sirius, that it was not only one, but two stars. With a goal of 47 cm. in diameter he could distinguish the one that was known from that moment as Sirius B.
Today it is known that this body is a white dwarf very inferior in size to Sirius and in which a cubic meter can weigh more than seventy thousand tons. Then there is the Sirius C star which they know as “emme ya” and it would be four times lighter than Sirius B, it would have a satellite spinning around it called “nyan tolo”: the star of women. Its orbit is 50 years, which coincides with the party of “Sigui”, which is held to remember the arrival of the gods of Sirius (according to official science his calculations are estimated at present in 50,040 years).
In spite of the isolation in which this town lives and the little culture they receive from civilization, the information they handle about certain cosmic themes is really incredible, especially considering that they have dominated them for many centuries, which undoubtedly has put in check to the most orthodox science, which is not explained as this is possible, but for the actual manifestation of certain extraterrestrial beings in the past have contacted this African culture.
The Dogons knew about the spiral structure of the Milky Way, and they claim that there are more than a billion solar systems equal to ours in the universe. They also knew Jupiter and its four inner satellites, Saturn and its rings, many centuries ago. They even speak with much authority about the Moon, presenting it as a dead star unlike the Sun, which is the most important manifestation of life in our system. They propose that our system does not have nine planets, if not eleven, besides the existence of only one omnipresent God which they call “Amma”.
It is necessary to emphasize that the strange coffers and their main characteristics have a lot of relation with what we know today of the UFO phenomenon since the changes of color and the forms used are part of the continuous sightings of this striking phenomenon.(Dogon tribe)
Nowadays, important investigations are being carried out that would lead to a deeper unraveling of data related to the presence of the Nommos in the history of the Dogon people, which would confirm that in the past there was an extraterrestrial manifestation on Earth, and not only with this African tribe, if not with many other cultures of the world.
Strange cloud over Stonehenge : A strange vertical unexplainable ‘cloud’ appears
Strange cloud over Stonehenge : A strange vertical unexplainable ‘cloud’ appears
Stonehenge is an emblematic monument for people from all over the world. Built about 5,000 years ago, it represents the mysteries and forgotten secrets that await deciphering. Located in Wiltshire, England, three kilometers west of Amesbury, archaeologists have suggested that it could have been built using the Pythagorean theorem. Interestingly, Stonehenge dates back to 2,750 BC, long before the time of Pythagoras. It was after two millennia that Pythagoras was born to present his theory that states that the square of the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of the squares of the respective lengths of the legs.(Strange cloud over Stonehenge)
And the truth is that there are triangles perfectly aligned in Stonehenge , so it would show that the ancient humans knew perfectly the Pythagorean equation years before the legendary mathematician presented this theory. It is for this reason that one can not speak of Stonehenge without mentioning the theory of the ancient extraterrestrials. The Swiss author Erich von Däniken suggested in his book “Cars of the gods” published in 1968 that ancient religions and technologies were taught by extraterrestrial beings , who were received as gods.
Moreover, von Däniken states that Stonehenge was built by these visitors from other worlds, or at least that they provided the knowledge and technologies necessary to build it, as happened with the Pyramids of Giza and the moáis on Easter Island, between other things. And perhaps this would explain the large number of UFO sightings and supernatural phenomena at Stonehenge. But now the mystery that surrounds this place returns. Expert meteorologists and the British Ministry of Defense have been baffled by the presence of a strange cloud in an upright position on Stonehenge.
The mysterious vertical cloud
A strange spiral cloud similar to the vapor trail left by the planes has left the experts surprised. So far no one understands how the trail was formed, a kind of rippling cloud near Stonehenge and a few installations of the British Ministry of Defense (MoD).(Strange cloud over Stonehenge)
Weather experts and MoD officials are trying to find an explanation for the unusual phenomenon. The incredible photo was taken by David Hargrave, of Sidbury Hill in Salisbury Plain, on Tuesday night. He was walking with his dogs when he saw the trail of steam , which also looks like the trail left by the launch of a rocket. David said he appeared about 50 kilometers from where he was, heading for Westbury at the northwest corner of Salisbury Plain.(Strange cloud over Stonehenge)
“I also have no idea what it is, I hope someone has an answer,” Hargrave, 66, told MailOnline . “It’s a mystery.”
Apparently, nearby there are MoD facilities where weapons are tested and military maneuvers are carried out. However, the Defense Infrastructure Organization, which is part of the British Ministry of Defense, said that no military tests or maneuvers were conducted in the entire area . For their part, meteorologists from the University of Bristol and experts from the drone company Somerset Drone have not been able to explain the unusual phenomenon.(Strange cloud over Stonehenge)
Extraterrestrial evidence
Because of this, there were many who said that it was clearly the trace left by the takeoff of a UFO in Stonehenge . In addition, this would show that this ancient structure was actually built by aliens who visited our planet in the past. Moreover, its true function, debated for decades, would be to hide an extraterrestrial base within it.
These beings from other worlds were in contact with our ancestors , helping them in their technological and spiritual development, and those who worshiped them as gods. Several cave paintings around the world also confirm the theory that aliens visited Earth in the past.
Without a doubt, we are facing a really disconcerting phenomenon, as it is possible for a “cloud”to form vertically. And if we add that the meteorologists and the British Ministry of Defense have not been able to find a logical and rational explanation, we have one of the best evidences of how the Stonehenge continues to be some kind of “landing strip” for ships from of other worlds or dimensions.(Strange cloud over Stonehenge)
What do you think about the mysterious cloud? Is it a strange and unusual natural formation? A secret military test? Or is it the trace left by a UFO?
A new paper describes a remarkable set of fossil spiders found in South Korea. Two of the fossils – from an extinct spider family called Lagonomegopidae that lived between 110 and 113 million years ago – feature reflective eyes for nighttime hunting.
University of Kansas paleontologist Paul Selden is co-author of the paper, published in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology on January 28, 2019. Seldon said in a statement:
Because these spiders were preserved in strange silvery flecks on dark rock, what was immediately obvious was their rather large eyes brightly marked with crescentic features. I realized this must have been the tapetum — that’s a reflective structure in an inverted eye where light comes in and is reverted back into retina cells. This is unlike a straightforward eye where light goes through and doesn’t have a reflective characteristic.
Flint rock preserved characteristics of the spider fossils differently than the more common amber-preserved spiders.
Selden said that some contemporary spiders feature eyes with a tapetum, but the new paper is the first to describe the anatomical feature in a fossilized spider. He said:
In spiders, the ones you see with really big eyes are jumping spiders, but their eyes are regular eyes – whereas wolf spiders at nighttime, you see their eyes reflected in light like cats. So, night-hunting predators tend to use this different kind of eye. This was the first time a tapetum had been in found in a fossil. This tapetum was canoe-shaped – it looks a bit like a Canadian canoe. That will help us place this group of spiders among other families.
Soft-bodied species like spiders aren’t usually fossilized in rock like animals with bones and teeth. More often, ancient spiders and insects are discovered preserved in amber. The researchers said these spiders, who lived between 110 and 113 million years ago, must somehow have been protected from deterioration to allow them to be so well-preserved in the shale formation. Seldon said:
This is so rare because they’re very soft – they don’t have hard shells so they very easily decay. It has to be a very special situation where they were washed into a body of water. Normally, they’d float. But here, they sank, and that kept them away from decaying bacteria – it may have been a low-oxygen condition.
These rocks also are covered in little crustaceans and fish, so there maybe was some catastrophic event like an algal bloom that trapped them in a mucus mat and sank them but that’s conjecture. We don’t really know what caused this, but something killed off a lot of animals around the lake at one time or on an annual basis.
The spider fossils were found in South Korea, in an area of shale called the Lower Cretaceous Jinju Formation, when the shale containing the fossils was exposed during a construction project.
According to Selden, the shale preserved the spider fossils in a manner that highlighted the reflectivity of the tapetum, a feature that may have been missed had the spiders been preserved in amber instead, as is more typical. He said:
Amber fossils are beautiful, they look wonderful, but they preserve things in a different way. Now, we want to go back and look at the amber fossils and see if we can find the tapetum, which stares out at you from rock fossils but isn’t so obvious in amber ones because the mode of preservation is so different.
Locality map of the study area. A, distribution of Cretaceous sedimentary basins around the Korean Peninsula; rectangular area is magnified in B. B, simplified geological map of the Gyeongsang Arc System; the sedimentary rocks represent the Gyeongsang Backarc Basin, while the volcanic rocks represent the Gyeongsang Volcanic Arc; rectangular area is magnified in C (modified from Chough & Sohn 2010; the displacement by the Yangsan Fault has been recovered). C, road map of the study area showing the two fossil localities (stars).
Credit: Paul Selden.
Bottom line: A remarkable set of fossil spiders found in South Korean shale display reflective eyes.
A new study suggests that Europe’s ancient megaliths, including Stonehenge, might have stemmed from a single hunter-gatherer culture in what’s now northwestern France.
Stonehenge – on the Salisbury Plain in England – as captured by EarthSky Facebook friend Buddy Puckhaber of South Carolina. Thank you, Buddy.
Stonehenge is just one example – the most famous example – of Europe’s tens of thousands of ancientmegalithic structures. Early people in what’s now Europe built these structures, which date back thousands of years. Many appear to be grave sites. Many – like Stonehenge – feature giant stones in intricate and strange arrangements. What early culture built these structures? Did the idea originate, as some have believed, in the Near East or the Mediterranean? Could various ancient cultures have invented the idea for the structures independently? A new study published February 11, 2019, in the peer-reviewedjournal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences sheds light on these mysteries.
The new study was conducted by Bettina Schulz Paulsson, a prehistoric archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Her work suggests these European megaliths can be traced back to a single hunter-gatherer culture that originated nearly 7,000 years ago in what’s today the Brittany region of northwestern France.
The study also argues for a cultural exchange over sea routes emanating from northwest France, suggesting a more advanced seafaring technology for that ancient time than was previously believed.
Stonehenge specialists Michael Parker Pearson at University College London, who was not part of the study, supports the new work. He said:
This demonstrates absolutely that Brittany is the origin of the European megalithic phenomenon.
The Dolmen di Sa Coveccada is an archaeological monument – thought to be a gravesite – in Sardinia. The structure, whose massive stones weigh many tons each, is thought to have been built around 3500 – 2900 B.C.
Image via Bettina Schulz Paulsson.
Schulz Paulson spent 10 years creating what she called a megalith evolution using radiocarbon dating from thousands of historic sites across Europe. She wrote in her study:
We have thus been able to demonstrate that the earliest megaliths originated in northwest France and spread along the sea routes of the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts in three successive principal phases.
What she did was sift through radiocarbon dating data from 2,410 ancient sites across Europe to reconstruct a prehistoric archaeological timeline. The radiocarbon dates came mostly from human remains buried within the sites. The study looked not just at megaliths, but also at so-called premegalithic graves that featured elaborate, earthen tombs but no huge stones. Schulz Paulsson also factored in information on the sites’ architecture, tool use, and burial customs to further narrow the dates.
Price also pointed out that there’s more to be explored here. He wrote:
Karl-Göran Sjögren, a fellow archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg, says he accepts that northwest France was among the first builders. But he isn’t fully convinced there aren’t still earlier megaliths yet to be uncovered, or more evidence that might push back the dates of some known megaliths. Future studies that include ancient DNA and other bioarchaeological evidence on population movements could clear things up, he says.
Bottom line: A new study suggests that tens of thousands of European megaliths, including Stonehenge, can be traced back to a single hunter-gatherer culture originating nearly 7,000 years ago in what’s today the Brittany region of northwestern France.
New Questions About Latest UFO Footage Answered and Why You Must Read Every Word of This Report
New Questions About Latest UFO Footage Answered and Why You Must Read Every Word of This Report
Some reports state it is a ping, although some claim it is a beep. The fantastic news for those who would like to have an out-of-body experience (OOBE), but haven’t yet done so is that there are tons of astral projection techniques out there. All submitted stories need to be validated first, which normally happens within 72 hours. Today, there are various stories surrounding ghosts that seem to live in the haunted cemetery. There are quite a lot of tales of individuals foretelling the Titanic’s demise.
UFOs are many times related to aliens and conspiracy theories. At some stage, you’re most likely to encounter a UFO. At some stage, you will run into a UFO. Throughout that period of time, there were two triangle UFOs sighted in the same site.
These days, UFO sighting has been an issue of amusement in the place of a concern, though there are ample evidences about their scary look. Many reported UFO sightings actually end up being something as simple as a balloon. UFOs are frequently associated with aliens and conspiracy theories. They have been observed through telescopes. Sometimes, however, they cannot be identified because of the low quality of evidence related to their sightings. UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object and they’ve been seen since the start of recorded history. There are various UFOs that perform various functions.
In order to acquire the absolute most out of a ghost tour, it’s vital that you have things which will help you in capturing evidence that supports the simple fact that ghosts are real. It is a bit shaky on account of the simple fact the witness had to use full-zoom to concentrate on the craft. The truth is that they do. Maybe the truth is actually out there. It is that they do.
You may have a look at the footage below. It’s possible that you look at the footage below. You’re in a position to have a look at the video below. It’s possible to have a peek at the video below.
The mountain can be found in a particularly remote and inhospitable subject of the Tibetan Himalayas. The whole area facing them, along with the entire interior of the car, was awash in the white light. There are several more places like Myrtle’s Plantation, which could offer much-needed evidence. Attending a UFO conference gives an ample chance to do that, and to connect with like-minded men and women. You are able to even get a 1 day pass to test it all out. There are also a number of tours that enable you to walk from one haunted place to another.
You might actually watch videos all day long for many years about aliens. It’s possible to watch the video produced by the late Jim Ragsdale a day or two before his death. The quick video below, for example, is just one of several contemporary sightings. Almost all the videos are uncomplicated to comprehend and you may follow them step-by-step. You’re able to have a look at the video below. The video can be seen on the TTS Academy Community of Interest site by click on this link. Hypnosis video is merely one of the absolute most helpful approaches to do hypnosis without the use of a true hypnotist.
WETENSCHAPOnderzoekers van de Texas Tech University zijn ervan overtuigd dat ze ontdekt hebben waarom steeds meer mensen ervan overtuigd zijn dat de aarde niet rond, maar plat is. Volgens hen is YouTube verantwoordelijk voor de verspreiding van de samenzweringstheorie.
De onderzoekers trokken naar een grote ‘Flat Earth’-conferentie in Raleigh, North Carolina in 2017 en eentje in Denver, Colorado in 2018. Ze spraken er met 30 aanwezigen over de manier waarop ze tot de overtuiging kwamen dat de aarde in feite een platte schijf is.
29 van de 30 ondervraagden gaven aan dat ze die mening vormden na het bekijken van YouTube-video’s die deze theorie verspreiden. “De enige persoon die dit niet aangaf was daar met zijn dochter en schoonzoon en die hadden het op YouTube gezien en hem erover verteld”, zegt Asheley Landrum, die het onderzoek leidde.
Uit de interviews blijkt dat de meeste ondervraagden video’s hadden bekeken over andere samenzweringstheorieën, onder andere over 9/11, de schietpartij in de basisschool van Sandy Hook en of NASA wel echt naar de maan ging. YouTube raadde hen vervolgens zelf ‘Flat Earth-video’s’ aan.
Landrum was verrast over de achtergrond van de respondenten. “Er was een grote spreiding en daar waren we erg verrast over. Velen hadden een hoger diploma. Er was een ingenieur, een sociaal assistent, een interimleerkracht”. Alle ondervraagden bleken ook te geloven in andere complottheorieën.
Algoritme aanpassen
Volgens Landrum, die de resultaten van het onderzoek voorstelde tijdens de jaarlijkse meeting van de Amerikaanse Vereniging voor de Bevordering van Wetenschap in Washington, DC, doet YouTube niet opzettelijk iets verkeerds, maar zou de site haar algoritme kunnen aanpassen om meer accurate informatie te tonen. “Er is veel bruikbare informatie op YouTube, maar ook veel misinformatie”, aldus Landrum. “Hun algoritmes maken het makkelijk om meegezogen te worden (in samenzweringstheorieën, red.) door informatie te presenteren aan mensen die daar meer vatbaar voor zijn.”
Wetenschappelijke video’s
“Geloven dat de aarde plat is, is op zichzelf niet noodzakelijk problematisch, maar het gaat gepaard met een wantrouwen in instellingen en autoriteit in het algemeen”, voegde ze eraan toe. “We willen dat mensen kritische consumenten zijn van de informatie die ze aangereikt krijgen, maar er moet een evenwicht zijn.”
Landrum riep wetenschappers op om hun eigen YouTubevideo’s te creëren en zo de verspreiding van samenzweringstheorieën tegen te gaan. “We willen niet dat YouTube vol video’s staat die alle redenen geven waarom de aarde plat is. We hebbe andere video’s nodig die uitleggen waarom die redenen niet echt zijn en hoe er verschillende manieren zijn waarop je dat zelf kan onderzoeken.”
WETENSCHAPDe vorige is net geweest of er dient zich dinsdagavond alweer een supermaan aan. Jammer genoeg zonder rode gloed deze keer, maar het zou wel om de grootste supermaan van 2019 gaan.
Een supermaan is een volle maan die veel groter lijkt dan normaal. Ook is het maanlicht feller dan bij een gebruikelijke volle maan. Dat komt omdat de afstand tussen de maan en de aarde morgen een beetje kleiner is dan normaal.
De afstand tussen de maan en de aarde verandert gedurende het jaar. Dat komt doordat de maan geen cirkelvormige, maar een elliptische baan om de aarde heeft. Gemiddeld is de afstand tussen de maan en de aarde 384.000 kilometer. Bij een supermaan staat de maan ‘maar’ 357.000 kilometer van ons vandaan.
De supermaan lijkt het grootst aan het begin van de avond, wanneer de zon net onder is. En je kijkt maar beter onmiddellijk omhoog wanneer de maan opkomt want dan zorgt een kleine optische illusie ervoor dat ze nog een beetje groter lijkt. Goed nieuws: voorlopig laten de weersvoorspellingen het toe om de maan in al haar glorie te bewonderen.
Bloedmaan
Vorige maand was er ook een supermaan te zien. Door de gehele maansverduistering die tegelijkertijd plaatsvond, kreeg de maan toen een rode gloed: een zogenoemde ‘bloedmaan’.
These are not the words of the proud new owner of a tiny house but of former astronaut Scott Kelly, who should know something about space after having spent a total of 520 days there, including 340 consecutive ones on the International Space Station. As a result, Kelly’s body knows a lot about being in space too – things researchers and future space travelers should find helpful. Fortunately, Scott Kelly is a willing subject for study and so is his identical twin brother, Mark, who is also a former astronaut who flew on four space shuttle missions. Both donated genes for research and that molecular level study is close enough to completion that researchers presented their preliminary findings last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference. Did they give Scott Kelly any good news?
Astronauts Mark (left) and Scott Kelly
“It’s as if the body is reacting to this alien environment sort of like you would a mysterious organism being inside you.”
That doesn’t sound too good. The Associated Press reportsthat geneticist Christopher Mason of New York’s Weill Cornell Medicine led the study which found that Scott’s immune-related genes remained hyperactive and seemingly on high alert for at least six months after he returned to Earth. While it’s not surprising that the body would increase its defenses in a hostile environment – a gene in Kelly’s bloodstream also increased abnormally – the researchers also saw a puzzling decrease in a group of cells that fights viruses. Also surprising was the discovery that the genes didn’t change permanently but instead turned on and off, thus regulating the amounts of proteins they created.
“There are no major new warning signs. We are seeing changes that we didn’t necessarily anticipate. We also aim for more than just possible. We want our astronauts to do more than just survive.”
Craig Kundrot, head of space life and science research for NASA, gave that somewhat encouraging news to future astronauts. On the other hand, Jerry Linenger, an American medical doctor who spent four months on the Mir space station in 1997, thinks the problem may be that the immune system gets weakened in the sterile environment of space and the major changes occur when you get back. Unlike Kelly, he felt good in space but when he returned, “I was probably more sick than I was in my life.” Perhaps that explains why Scott Kelly, despite not feeling normal in space, is ready to go to Mars.
“(It) wouldn’t be worse than what I experienced. Possibly better. I think the big physical challenge, radiation aside, will be a mission where you are in space for years.”
You can take the boy out of space but you can’t take the space out of the boy.
Mars may be more active than we had originally thought. A new study suggests that Mars could very well be volcanically active and the proof is in the water. While there isn’t any solid evidence of volcanic activity, such as magma or eruptions, researchers believe that there is still activity on the Red Planet.
Although Mars is still home to ice and vapor, an August 2018 study revealed that there is a 20-kilometer-wide lake which holds liquid water that’s underneath ice located at the south pole of the planet. At first, the authors of the study believed that the water was still in liquid form by dissolved salt, as well as pressure from above it.
However, new studies conducted seem to suggest that the salt and pressure wouldn’t have been able to keep the water from freezing and that it could only be volcanic activity that keeps it in liquid form. They suggested that the heat would have to come from the interior of the planet and a magma chamber was the most obvious source.
Ali Bramson, who is a postdoctoral research associate at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, as well as the co-lead author of the new paper, explained, “We think that if there is any life, it likely has to be protected in the subsurface from the radiation.” She went on to say, “If there are still magmatic processes active today, maybe they were more common in the recent past, and could supply more widespread basal melting. This could provide a more favorable environment for liquid water and thus, perhaps, life.”
Mars is home to numerous volcanoes that were active in the past. In fact, the largest volcano in our Solar System is located on the Red Planet and it’s called Olympus Mons. In addition, there are three other shield volcanoes that are located close to Olympus Mons and they are called Tharsis Montes.
Olympus Mons volcano on Mars
The authors of the paper suggest that around 300,000 years ago, magma from the interior of Mars rose to the surface of the planet but instead of creating another volcano, it ended up being trapped in a magma chamber located under the South Pole. Eventually the magma chamber would have cooled down but it still would have released enough heat to have melted the ice that was underneath the polar ice sheet. The end result is that the water would continue to be there because of the heat that’s being released slowly, thus keeping the sub-surface lake in liquid format.
The authors also indicated that if there was volcanic activity on the planet 300,000 years ago, it may still be happening even to this day. Bramson added to that thought by stating, “This would imply that there is still active magma chamber formation going on in the interior of Mars today and it is not just a cold, sort of dead place.”
Project Blue Book has been all the rage lately, with the popularity of History’s eponymous program based loosely on the real-life USAF UFO study, and its equally real science advisor, J. Allen Hynek. (Apparently, the show has been really popular, since it was recently announced that the saucers have been cleared for landing… landing another season, that is.)
However, all the interest in Project Blue Book lately has brought something to mind from the Blue Book years that has always bothered me.
More on that in a moment. To lead off, I’ll quote an interesting passage from Bill Yenne’s excellent book Area 51 Black Jets: A History of the Aircraft Developed at Groom Lake, America’s Secret Aviation Base, in which he brings to mind a question that has remained on many minds since the beginning of the UFO era: how many of the “unknowns” are actually ours?
Bill writes:
One area where the interests of the black airplane and flying saucer enthusiasts has intertwined is in the suggestion that the flying saucers actually were black airplanes, disc-shaped craft created here on earth. Back in 1947, General Nathan Twining had mentioned a “possibility that these objects are of domestic origin—the product of some high security project not known to [the Headquarters Air Staff].”
If so, what were they?
It’s an interesting question (as is the quote from General Nathan Twining he cites, since Twining, and a particular memo associated with him, have pertinence to some of the most contentious information to arise in relation to UFOs during his era; but that’s a story for another time, and one that’s already all-too-often talked about anyway).
This brings us back around to that issue I had with the Blue Book years, which actually has to do with a report from July 24, 1952, which was described by Edward J. Ruppelt, first chief of Project Blue Book, as being “a good UFO report,” in his words. I’m not here to dispute that, and in fact, I would agree: what we’re about to look at really probably is, as Ruppelt said, a good UFO report… and the very reason why is because I think it may be explainable, at least partially, in hindsight. Hence, it may also be a case representative of a reliable description offered by pilots at the time, who legitimately could not identify the objects they had seen.
In his The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, Ruppelt describes the incident as follows:
On July 24, 1952, two Air Force colonels, flying a B-25, took off from Hamilton Air Force Base, near San Francisco, for Colorado Springs, Colorado. The day was clear, not a cloud m the sky.
The colonels had crossed the Sierra Nevada between Sacramento and Reno and were flying east at 11,000 feet on “Green 3,” the aerial highway to Salt Lake City. At 3:40 P.M. they were over the Carson Sink area of Nevada, when one of the colonels noticed three objects ahead of them and a little to their right. The objects looked like three F-86’s flying a tight V formation. If they were F-86’s they should have been lower, according to civil air regulations, but on a clear day some pilots don’t watch their altitude too closely.
In a matter of seconds the three aircraft were close enough to the B-25 to be clearly seen. They were not F-86’s. They were three bright silver, delta wing craft with no tails and no pilot’s canopies. The only thing that broke the sharply defined, clean upper surface of the triangular wing was a definite ridge that ran from the nose to the tail.
We have to stop here for a moment, and ask the relevant question: do these “UFOs” sound familiar at all?
I dunno… maybe?
I don’t think any serious aficionado of military aircraft (which I don’t claim to be, by the way) could read this incident report and not think about our various existent stealth aircraft today, most notably the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit, otherwise known as the Stealth Bomber. It’s not the only aircraft to have been developed over the years which bears a remarkable similarity to the aircraft described in this early Blue Book era report, either. This general design which incorporates a tailless, delta-shaped aircraft with a “definite ridge” running from “nose to the tail” (the location of the cockpit, in essence) dates all the way back to hypothetical World War II-era designs produced by the Horton brothers.
To quote Bill Yenne again:
As with revelations about secrets within Area 51 that invited speculation about “what else is out there,” the revealed advances in German aeronautics begged the same question. Among the myriad projects in wartime Germany was the Horten IX, a tailless flying wing created by the brothers Walter and Reimer Horten. This aircraft was built by Gothaer Waggonfabrik under the designation Go 229, and made its first powered flight in February 1945. Like most of the German experiments, the Horten aircraft was largely forgotten over time. That is, until 1988, when the US Air Force rolled out the B-2, which was a flying with no vertical tail surfaces. There was now a renewed interest in the “what else?” of wartime German secrets.
By all accounts, it sounds a lot like that “what else” might have been in our airspace well in advance of 1988, the year that the Stealth Bomber was finally given its first public showing.
Kenneth Arnold displays a rather un-saucer-like artist’s conception of one of his “saucers” that, again, reminds us of modern stealth aircraft.
To note these similarities between descriptions of a classic “good UFO” and known stealth technologies today is not to claim that all such reports of unusual things seen in U.S. airspace (or anywhere else) can be identified and explained. It’s also noteworthy that there are some dissimilarities between the B-2 and some of the Blue Book era “deltas” that Ruppelt and others described.
However, in this instance, those similarities that do exist are almost too much to ignore… and in such cases, we must concede that the most likely solution is that, as Nathan Twining suggested, these objects probably were “of domestic origin,” and thus “the product of some high security project,” which obviously was not known to Headquarters Air Staff… not at that time, at least.
Another UFO has been spotted in the Orion Nebula sector. On February 11, 2019 'Moonshot23' captured via Stellarium program a huge cigar-shaped UFO flying through space next to the Nebula.
The footage shows a huge streak of light, which is the supposed UFO, moving from the top to the bottom of the screen.
Glowing Red UFO As Big As 747 Lights Up Night Sky Over Philippines, Gets On Local News. Feb 17, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Glowing Red UFO As Big As 747 Lights Up Night Sky Over Philippines, Gets On Local News. Feb 17, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: February 17, 2019 Location of sighting: Pulupandan, Philippines A glowing red UFO sphere showed up over the ocean in the Philippines this week. Many eyewitnesses caught it on cell phones and others actually caught it on news cameras. The video was on local TV news and uploaded by the TV news agency, so you know its not been faked. The UFO is huge, I mean its 747 size and has a glow that can only be compared to looking directly into the sun. There is no technology I know of that can produce a flying light like than, not LEDs not an plane or helicopter. This is an alien craft from a nearby underwater base. If UFOs can travel in space, then it just figures that they should be able to travel through water. And since 75% of the Earth is covered in water, than this also tells us that 75% of the alien bases are also in underground bases 3-6km below the ocean floor. Scott C. Waring News states:
Mysterious light, spotted in the sky of Negros Occidental The UFO or unidentified flying object is suspected to be a strange light in the sky at Pulupandan, Negros Occidental. What do experts say about it?
UFO Caught Flying Over Suisse, Switzerland Ion Feb 15, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Caught Flying Over Suisse, Switzerland Ion Feb 15, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: February 15, 2019, 6:11 am Location of sighting: Suisse, Switzerland This is a great capture of an orb flying over the city of Suisse in Switzerland this week. The orb moves very fast and has no wings and shows not con trail. The object appears oval shape and traveling at high speed. Remarkable capture. Glad to UFO researchers in Switzerland are capturing evidence first hand. Often these orbs are semi transparent, but in the day at a distance of 50 meters or more...they appear white, cloud like. This camera was using infrared and no cloak can hide from that. Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
Diamond Spaceship-Looking Objects Spotted on the Massive Space Rock
Diamond Spaceship-Looking Objects Spotted on the Massive Space Rock
Conspiracy theorists have claimed that alien spaceships have been observed on Asteroid Vesta, one of the largest asteroids in the solar system. The theory leads some to believe space aliens used to live on the huge space rock.
Vesta is the second biggest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter having a mean diameter of 525 kilometres. Some even considering to change its status to a dwarf planet due to its massive size. Conspiracy theorists believe that the asteroid is so vast that it could have once hosted life. The theory was provided a boost when alien hunters observed what they think are two spaceships on Vesta.
One of the alleged UFOs seems to be covered in a layer of dust, which theoretically suggests that it has been in the location for a considerable amount of time.
Both strange objects are the same in length and width and both diamond looking. Some conspiracy theorists believe these unknown objects could come from the same alien civilisation.
One object appears to be shinier and metallic than the other, which makes many observers believe there’s a thick layer of dust on one of the craft.
German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers discovered Vesta in 1908 and NASA has since intensely studied it with the help of its Dawn space probe.
Twitter Photo of A NASA Astronaut From ISS Sparks Claims Of UFO Monitoring Space Station
Twitter Photo of A NASA Astronaut From ISS Sparks Claims Of UFO Monitoring Space Station
A former NASA astronaut posted a photo from the ISS that seemed to show a UFO. The picture sent conspiracy theorists into a frenzy.
Scott Kelly commanded the International Space Station (ISS) on Expedition 26,45 and 46. While he launched in Soyuz TMA-16M on March 27, 2015, he detailed his journey on social media, providing regular updates.
However, he appeared to snap a photo on board the ISS a small, white object in the top right. Mr Kelly tweeted a picture of India from outer space on November 15. At first glance, the photo shows merely Southern India lit up during the night. However, some space enthusiasts were quick to notice the UFO in the top right of the picture that looked out of place.
They said that Scott did a great shot of a UFO, but many others quickly debunked the UFO theories. Debunkers noted that the UFO was actually part of the space station. They explained that the High Definition Earth-Viewing System was mounted on the outside of the European Space Agency’s Columbus module and it resembled the same shape to that in the photo.
However, many others suggested that it was a UFO and these debunkers were just finding ways to cover up the truth or commissioned by NASA to drive away the public to the fact on the existence of aliens and UFOs monitoring the ISS.
A former defence chief believes the British government could be running a secret UFO study.
Illustration of a flying saucer
This is despite Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson claiming he has 'no plans' to open the secret department.
Britain's UFO desk, which probed notorious sighting such as Shropshire's 'Cosford Incident', closed in 2009.
But Nick Pope, who ran the former Ministry of Defence desk from 1991 to 1994, believes parts of the government could still be investigating the phenomena.
Nick Pope when he lead Britain's UFO desk at the ministry of defence
This is because, he says, UFOs are a real 'threat to Britain skies' and should be taken serioushttps://www.shropshirestar.com/ly.
And he said sightings might not just be 'extra-terrestrial visits' - but 'drones, Russian aircraft and atmospheric phenomena'.
Mr Pope told the Express & Star: "There are no circumstances where the MoD, the Royal Air Force and indeed the government as a whole shouldn't be making every effort to identify anything unusual operating in our airspace.
"It doesn't matter if you're a sceptic or a believer and it doesn't matter if you think UFO sightings are generated by drones, Russian aircraft, exotic atmospheric plasma phenomena, or extraterrestrials.
"If there's something in our skies, there are clear defence, national security, and air safety implications."
Official stance
The official stance from the government says something different. There is, they say, no need to have an official desk operating any more.
"There is certainly no plans to open up the UFO desk at the MoD," Mr Williamson told the Express & Star.
As recently as November, airline pilots reported seeing red lights whizzing into the sky over Ireland, which some linked to alien visitors.
Perhaps the most famous sighting in the West Midlands is the Cosford Incident, which happened in 1993.
On March 31 that year, an RAF patrol reported seeing a UFO over the base. They described the object moving ‘at great velocity and at an altitude of around 1,000 feet’.
The UFO consisted of two white lights and a faint red glow at the rear, with no engine noise being heard, the report said.
What made the incident more bizarre was that dozens of triangular-shaped UFOs were reported on the night, travelling at speed across Western Britain.
A UFO was also reported at RAF Shawbury, in Shrewsbury, not long after.
“All the things the MoD would need are already funded, for example our military radar network and imagery analysis capabilities,” he said.
“It would be a cost-neutral proposal and the work could be done concurrently with existing intelligence analysis tasks.”
In December 2017, US-based journalists uncovered a secret Pentagon study which ran between 2007 and 2012.
It probed around 12,000 sightings dating back decades.
Staff based on the project avoided using the term ‘UFO’ in their work to stay below government radar.
Mr Pope adds: “The intriguing irony is that there might already be a new UFO project, unknown even to the Secretary of State for Defence.
“In the US, the Pentagon’s UFO project AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program) was hidden by a combination of factors: they carefully avoided any mention of ‘UFOs’, while much of the work was contracted out to the private sector.
“The whole thing was described using language that implied they were studying future aviation threats from aircraft, missiles and drones.
“I strongly suspect MoD intelligence staff have done a similar thing and are looking at ‘unknowns’ in parallel with more conventional next-generation aerospace threats.
“As long as you use terms such as ‘unusual aircraft’, ‘unconventional helicopter’ and suchlike, you can probably spin this as not having a UFO project at all, especially if most of your work involves conventional foreign aerospace threats.
“Those involved might not even have briefed defence ministers about the existence of such a project, which would give them ‘plausible deniability’.”
The Cosford Incident was probed by the MoD at the time, under Mr Pope’s watch. He says: “I had a major UFO event on my hands.”
Mr Pope believes public scepticism about aliens is the reason why many UFO sightings are not taken seriously – and many people are quick to talk about drones appearing in the sky.
He says: “Perhaps we should review the double standards implicit here, and take all reports of unidentified objects in our skies seriously, whatever we think they are.”
Un gigantesque “Vaisseau Mère bloque le soleil’ dans une vidéo de SpaceX
Un gigantesque “Vaisseau Mère bloque le soleil’ dans une vidéo de SpaceX
Un astronome aux yeux de faucon a repéré un objet mystérieux bloquant une partie du soleil lors du feed en direct de SpaceX.
Les images montrent ce qui semble être un grand objet sombre qui bloque une grande partie du soleil.
Le chaîne complotiste The Grimreefar a trouvé le point noir en regardant en direct le satellite Es’hail-2, qui a été lancé à bord de la SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket la semaine dernière.
En parlant de l’objet, ils ont dit : “À mon avis, si c’était un objet bloquant le soleil, il serait trop grand pour être compris.”
La vidéo a été visionnée des centaines de fois depuis qu’elle a été publiée hier, et des théoriciens ont affirmé que l’objet pourrait être extraterrestre.
Une personne a écrit : “c’est un vaisseau mère extraterrestre. Si énorme.”
Un autre a fait des commentaires : “C’est un objet massif ! Dieu seul le sait !”
“Peut-être que certains fanatiques religieux ont raison ? Peut-être qu’il y a une guerre dans les cieux.”
Un troisième s’étonne : “C’est beaucoup trop grand pour être une tache solaire, alors qu’est-ce que c’est ? Ça ne peut pas être un astéroïde massif, c’est si bizarre.”
C’est la deuxième observation étrange depuis le lancement de la fusée Falcon 9 dans l’espace le 15 novembre.
Juste après le lancement, les téléspectateurs ont affirmé avoir vu le tristement célèbre satellite Black Knight se déplacer sur leurs écrans.
Pas plus tard que la semaine dernière, les autorités américaines ont autorisé SpaceX d’Elon Musk à mettre en orbite une constellation de 12 000 satellites.
À ce sujet, Musk a dit : “Le diable est dans les détails, et SpaceX semble repousser les limites de ce qui a déjà été fait sur plusieurs fronts simultanément.”
According to Plutarch: “Ra departed to the heavens and Osiris became pharaoh of Egypt with Isis and they built Thebes [the present Luxor]”.
Have you ever wondered about Pre-Pharaonic Egypt and its rulers, not according to mainstream scholars but according to ancient texts written thousands of years ago? In Ancient Egypt, long before the first ‘mortal’ Pharaoh known as Menes-Narmer ruled over the lands of Egypt there were other kings, deities and “those who came from above” who ruled over the land known as Egypt today. This time in history, the pre-pharaonic period remains a great mystery for most scholars and Egyptologist, mostly because they cannot accept that what is written since it goes directly against the beliefs of most historians, archaeologists, and Egyptologists. The time before 3000 BC, the date when the first official Pharaoh appeared in Egypt is a great enigma.
It is not a secret that the ancient Egyptians consider their civilization as the legacy of Gods who came not from Earth but from elsewhere in the cosmos, and Pre-Pharaonic Egypt seems to back up this theory.
One of the most important ancient texts that can tell us more about this time in history is the Papyrus of Turin, which lists all the Pharaohs who ruled over Ancient Egypt.
Not only does this list include all of the ‘official’ historic Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt, but it also includes the deities or “Gods” who came from above and reigned over the lands of Egypt before the first mortal Pharaoh of Egypt with a lineage that spreads over 13,000 years. It is a great enigma why mainstream scholars consider this ancient text as pure myth and why most details of the ancient text have been overlooked and omitted from the history books.
“They seem to have no ancestors or periods of development; they seem to have appeared overnight.” – English Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson (source)
There are some researchers who believe that by calculating the decrypted information obtained from the Papyrus of Turin, we obtain the initial period, referred to as the kingdom of Ptah, creator and first ruler of ancient Egypt, dating back 39,000 years.
Egyptology and the official historiography tells us that everything to the pre-dynastic era is regarded as a myth, without much historical value.
The Palermo stele is another incredible ancient text that mentioned the pre-dynastic rulers of Ancient Egypt. This ancient Stele even makes reference to Egyptian God Horus, suggesting that he was a physical ruler of the Ancient Egypt thousands of years ago. Another Egyptian God, Thoth is said to have reigned over the lands of Ancient Egypt from 8670 to 7100 BC. Interestingly, Egyptian High Priest Manetho, who had access to unlimited ancient texts from the Ancient Library of Alexandria, and who wrote for the Pharaoh the history of Ancient Egypt in 30 volumes makes reference to the divine beings that ruled during Pre-Pharaonic Egypt. (source)
If you look at today’s Egyptologists, you will find out that they too make use of Manetho’s dating considering it as a very reliable tool when studying the officially recognized dynasties, yet for some mysterious reason, the same Egyptologists have decided to avoid anything related to Pre-historic dynasties, carefully selecting certain details and adopting them as their own while rejecting anything that does not fit into their view of history.
We can trace back the rulers of Egypt in a series of ancient “Royal Lists”. The Royal List of Abydos for example, located on the wall of the Temple of Sethos I in Abydos offers us a chronological order of seventy-six rulers of ancient Egypt that range from Menes to Sethos I. In addition to this list we have the Royal List of Karnak which can be found in Louvre, which has sixty-one rulers, ranging from Menes to Tuthmosis III. These two lists offer us insight into the tradition of Upper Egypt. The Royal list of Sakkara displays forty-seven kings previous to and including, Ramses II. (source)
More important than any of the above mentioned is the Turin Papyrus: This ancient text written in hieratic on the verso of the papyrus, with accounts of the time of Ramesses II. on the recto (which gives the approximate date, c. 1200 B.C.). In its original state, the papyrus must have been an artistically beautiful exemplar, as the script is an exceptionally fine one. It contains the names of kings in order, over 300 when complete, with the length of each reign in years, months, and days; and as the definitive edition of the papyrus has not yet been issued, further study is expected to yield additional results.^ The papyrus begins, like Manetho, with the dynasties of gods, followed by mortal kings also in dynasties. The change of dynasty is noted, and the sum of the reigns is given: also, as in Manetho, several dynasties are added together, e.g. ” Sum of the Kings from Menes to [Unas] ” at the end of Dynasty V. The arrangement in the papyrus is very similar to that in the Epitome of Manetho. (source)
Manetho provides us with a number of interesting details about the so-called “divine” rulers of Ancient Egypt and their dynasties which he divides into three different categories: The Gods, Heroes and “Manes” but many other authors, Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, and Syncellus speak of a lineage of Gods who reigned on Earth for a total of 36,600 years. After this period of rule come the mortal Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt.
Bartley is one of many Americans, who were abducted by aliens. After his experiences with aliens he decided to work and do researches and he worked with Barbara Bartholic which did most of the work dealing with more than 700 abductees executing hypnosis-sessions in order to de-traumatize the victims and, to find out the truth behind the abductions.
Bartley helped and posted some conclusions and results on the internet.
The abductions are usually carried out by the so-called “Grays”. However, the hypnosis-sessions opened that the grays are executing organs, and a fake memory is being implanted to the abductees about their abduction. These implanted memories contains general statement that the aliens are helping people, and want to improve the astral and physical body of the abductees and prepare them for any particular tasks which is good for them.
And through the hypnosis the Screen-memory could be broken, the Grays showed up with their actual intents:
To abuse, traumatize and manipulate,
to be able to use them for their main purpose:
to subjugate mankind.
But even if one will feel bad at first, it is better to know how this trap looks, than to ignore it.
There are few other people who worked with Bartley. But they didn’t have any memories of being abducted, but worked intensively suffered from the Grays influences.At that time that they didn’t yet know what kind of beings they were.
The Grays wanted to ruin our relationship, put stones into our projects, prevented success and surrounded us with manipulated people.
When reading Bartleys articles, they noticed that he writes very much the same and experienced the same with abductees. But it is still the same no one will believe or maybe they are under the control of the Grays. To deny or researches
Here some key-statements of Bartleys articles:
CAPABILITIES OF THE REPTILIANS
Here is a small of the known capabilities of the Reptilians.
The reptilians are para-physical beings who can alter their vibrational density to operate within the confines of our three dimensional world both in and out of the normal visual spectrum.
The reptilians can manipulate the human “dreamscape” and install certain manners. They specialize in manipulating with erotic imagery specifically designed to promote certain behaviors and alternative lifestyles given to the abductee population to suit the agendas.
These reptilian hosts are geared to put confusion, discordance and disinformation amongst the abductee population.
Dr. Richard Boylan is a Host for a reptilian entity. He said that he lost count of the number of websites placed on the internet by reptilian hosts. There is a new one that was put in place quite recently.
The reptilians do not need spaceships to travel. They create a portal entry to the house of the abductee they need to work with. And they walk through this space/time opening and appearing in your bedroom in full physical looks.
Dr. Richard explained the abduction looks like:
The Grays or the Reptilians carry out the kidnapping through manipulation. The Reptos usually don’t appear. But some of them did.
And a part of the “abductee” senses himself lying in bed, and another part (probably the energy-body) appears in subterranean installations. There they inject and operate in impertinent manner. The part lying in the bed senses the interventions in his body.
Later the memory of the abduction and the manipulation is changed or is deleted.
And they do it through some steps:
Mind control for the exploitation
Manipulation of the collective-consciousness
Manipulation of the consciousness
So.. Did something appear in your bedroom suddenly or looked like a strange creature? Maybe it was real and most of us are under this manipulation agenda.
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Video: Why The Universe May Be Full Of Alien Civilizations featuring Harvard Theoretical Physicist Dr. Avi Loeb
Video: Why The Universe May Be Full Of Alien Civilizations featuring Harvard Theoretical Physicist Dr. Avi Loeb
In The Event Horizon Telescope’s first episode of John Michael Godier’s Event Horizon, we discuss the possibility of Alien civilizations moving to Galaxy Clusters to make the best use of mass and energy, why making copies of ourselves may be the key to interstellar travel and colonization, the habitability of planets around red dwarf stars such as Proxima Centauri, Black Holes, and so much more with our first guest Harvard Theoretical Physicist Dr. Avi Loeb, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University.
Mars has long been thought to be a geologically dead world. Could there still be volcanic activity beneath its surface? A subsurface lake at Mars’ south pole suggests that possibility.
Is there current volcanic activity on Mars? A subsurface lake beneath the south polar ice cap may indicate that there is.
Image via NASA.
Mars has the largest known volcanoesin the solar system, which show that it was once very geologically active. But so far, the available evidence has suggested that the planet’s period of volcanic activity ended millions of years ago – that those massive calderas have been dormant for a very long time.
Recent radar observations from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft have been interpreted as evidence for melting beneath the ice at the south pole of Mars. We model the temperatures in the subsurface to determine the necessary conditions to achieve liquid water at the base of the ice cap. Salts lower the melting point of ice, with calcium perchlorate generating the lowest temperatures at which melting can be achieved. However, even if there are local concentrations of large amounts of these salts at the base of the south polar ice, typical Martian conditions are too cold to melt the ice. We find that a local heat source within the crust is needed to increase the temperatures, and a magma chamber within 10 km (6 miles) of the ice could provide such a heat source. This result suggests that if the liquid water interpretation of the observations is correct, magmatism on Mars may have been active extremely recently.
First-ever liquid water lake discovered on Mars? The bright horizontal feature in this image represents Mars’ icy surface. The south polar layered deposits – layers of ice and dust – are seen to a depth of about a mile (1.5 km). Below is a base layer that in some areas is even brighter than the surface reflections, highlighted in blue. Analysis of the reflected signals suggests liquid water.
Image via ESA/NASA/JPL/ASI/Univ. Rome; R. Orosei et al. 2018.
The study’s findings are tied into those of a previous paper from last year, which presented evidence for a large subsurface liquid water lake currently existing beneath the south polar ice cap. The new study says that in order for such a lake to exist, there must be a source of heat deep below the surface – basically recent magmatic activity within the past few hundred thousand years. That is very recent geologically-speaking, and such heat could still be there today. Michael Sori, an associate staff scientist in the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) at the University of Arizona and a co-lead author of the new paper, acknowledges that the new paper will be cause for some debate:
Different people may go different ways with this, and we’re really interested to see how the community reacts to it.
The big question of course is what this may mean for the search for life. If there is both liquid water and a source of heat, that would greatly increase the chances of some kind of life – albeit probably still just microbial – existing below the surface. According to Ali Bramson, a postdoctoral research associate also at LPL and a co-lead author of the new paper:
We think that if there is any life, it likely has to be protected in the subsurface from the radiation. If there are still magmatic processes active today, maybe they were more common in the recent past, and could supply more widespread basal melting. This could provide a more favorable environment for liquid water and thus, perhaps, life.
The suspected subsurface lake on Mars is thought to be similar to Lake Vostok in Antarctica. But the Martian lake would likely need heat from volcanic magma to remain liquid.
A liquid water lake beneath the south polar ice wouldn’t be too surprising, actually, since they also exist beneath the polar caps on Earth. But scientists aren’t sure how they would remain liquid on Mars, since the planet is generally a lot colder than Earth. As Sori noted:
We thought there was a lot of room to figure out if [the liquid water] is real, what sort of environment would you need to melt the ice in the first place, what sort of temperatures would you need, what sort of geological process would you need? Because under normal conditions, it should be too cold.
So if the water really is there, as announced last year, what keeps it liquid? The research team for the new paper did modeling experiments of Mars’ subsurface – in particular, looking at whether salts alone would be sufficient. They concluded that salts by themselves would likely not be able to raise the temperature enough at the base of the ice cap, and that additional heat would be required.
So where would that heat come from? The most plausible source would be volcanic activity below ground – a magma chamber below the ice cap. The team estimated that magma rose toward the surface from deep below about 300,000 years ago, but didn’t reach the surface, instead remaining in the chamber. The heat from the chamber melted the bottom of the ice cap, forming the lake. But most significantly, it would still need to be providing that heat today, not just hundreds of thousands of years ago. As Bramson noted:
This would imply that there is still active magma chamber formation going on in the interior of Mars today and it is not just a cold, sort of dead place, internally.
Illustration showing how a magma chamber feeds volcanoes on Earth. Similar magma chambers may sustain subsurface lakes of water on Mars.
The new paper will help scientists to better understand how the water in the subsurface lake got there – if confirmed – and how it is able to remain liquid, according to Jack Holt, a professor at LPL:
I think it was a great idea to do this type of modeling and analysis because you have to explain the water, if it’s there, and so it’s really a critical piece of the puzzle. The original paper just left it hanging. There could be water there, but you have to explain it, and these guys did a really nice job of saying what is required and that salt is not sufficient.
Bottom line: A new study says that volcanic activity could still be present underground on Mars, which would help to explain the findings from a previous study providing evidence for a large subsurface lake beneath the ice at Mars’ south pole. Both findings could have significant implications in the search for life on Mars.
UFO sighting? 'Black square UFO' over USA sparks alien conspiracy FRENZY
UFO sighting? 'Black square UFO' over USA sparks alien conspiracy FRENZY
A UFO sighting over a town in the United States has sparked a frenzy of alien conspiracy claims after the video was uploaded online by a prominent UFO hunter.
The mysterious “black squareUFO” was filmed hovering over Conyers, Georgia, in January this year and shared online. Eye-witness accounts of the bizarre phenomenon suggest the UFO was comparable in size to a Boeing 727 and moved against the wind. The UFO video was uploaded to YouTube by notorious UFO investigator and alien conspiracist Scott Waring. Mr Waring, who runs the website UFO Sightings Daily, believes the incredible evidence is proof of extraterrestrial activity.
UFO sighting: Conspiracy theorists believe this could be a genuine UFO
(Image: SCOTT WARING)
According to Mr Waring, a second UFO briefly makes an appearance in the video but seems to be hidden behind some cloaking technology.
The UFO hunter said: "Wow, I really hope we get more footage from more people in Conyers.
"I'm sure others must have seen it, but believe it or not, only one out of six will actually think about recording the UFO on their phone at the time of any sighting.
However, filmed from afar and from group level, it is hard to judge how big or just how far away the supposed UFO is.
Some viewers who saw the UFO video suggested it could be an advertising banner pulled by a small aeroplane or a remote-controlled balloon.
Rand Burkey commented on the video: “Years ago this guy was putting out videos of UFOs in deep space that were so real-looking that there’s no way they could have been so I don’t know what to think these days to be honest with you.”
User D Stew said: “Hmmmmm. Hard to get excited with drones all around now.”
UFO sighting: The supposed spacecraft slowly drifted across the sky
(Image: SCOTT WARING)
And Edgar Garcia said: “Looks like a banner being pulled by a plane.”
An eyewitness recorded this dark, square-shaped UFO over Conyers yesterday
Scott Waring, UFO hunter
But this has not stopped UFO enthusiasts from believing the rectangular, slow-moving object is the real deal.
YouTuber Wutangkilla1 said: “I have seen this craft personally. It’s not a square, it’s a giant black rectangle and at night it blends into the sky with the white star-like lights at each corner.”
Another person, Liz M, wrote online: “This is fantastic footage. Humans since with alien technology or fallen angles, whichever you like.”
UFO sighting: Not everyone was convinced the object is alien in origin
(Image: SCOTT WARING)
The UFO sighting also sparked shock confessions from people who claim to have seen similar objects in the past.
Claire Pounder said: “I’ve seen that over 10-years-ago un the UK. It’s had my heads in bits ever since.”
YouTube user Lets Do It Class A Tag Axle said: “The speed is exactly how the flying saucer I’ve seen was going and it was also very huge.”
And user Red White and Disclosure said: “Fantastic video my friend. I have seen this same thing in the sky once before over my house a few summers back.”
Observation d’OVNI ? Un “OVNI noir en forme de carré” aux USA déclenche une frénésie de théories du complot sur les Extraterrestres
Observation d’OVNI ? Un “OVNI noir en forme de carré” aux USA déclenche une frénésie de théories du complot sur les Extraterrestres
Une observation d’OVNI au-dessus d’une ville aux États-Unis a déclenché une frénésie d’affirmations selon lesquelles des vaisseaux spatiaux extraterrestres visitent la Terre, selon une vidéo étonnante.
Le mystérieux “OVNI noir rectangulaire” a été filmé au-dessus de Conyers, en Géorgie, en janvier de cette année et partagé en ligne. D’après des témoins oculaires, l’OVNI était d’une taille comparable à celle d’un Boeing 727 et se déplaçait contre le vent. La vidéo d’ovni a été uploadée sur YouTube par le célèbre enquêteur ufologue et conspirationniste Scott Waring. M. Waring, qui anime le site Web UFO Sightings Daily, croit que ces preuves incroyables sont la preuve d’une activité extraterrestre.
Il a dit : “Un témoin oculaire a filmé cet OVNI sombre et en forme de carré à Conyers hier.”
“Des vents violents, mais cet objet ne pivote pas ou ne tourne pas comme un ballon, il n’a pas de dards.”
“C’est énorme, comme un 727, mais j’ai remarqué une légère oscillation.”
Dans la vidéo, le mystérieux objet noir est vu en train de se faufiler lentement du côté droit vers la gauche, passant au-dessus de la ville de Conyers.
Cependant, filmé de loin et au niveau de la bande, il est difficile de juger de la taille ou de la distance de l’OVNI supposé.
Certains téléspectateurs qui ont vu la vidéo de l’OVNI ont suggéré que ce pourrait être une bannière publicitaire tirée par un petit avion ou une montgolfière télécommandée.
Rand Burkey a commenté la vidéo : “Il y a des années, ce type diffusait des vidéos d’OVNIs dans l’espace si réalistes qu’elles n’auraient jamais pu l’être, alors je ne sais pas quoi penser ces jours-ci pour être honnête avec toi.”
L’utilisateur D Stew a dit : “Huuummmm. J’ai du mal à trouver des drones intéressants de nos jours.”
Et Edgar Garcia a dit : “On dirait une bannière tirée par un avion.”
Mais cela n’a pas empêché les amateurs d’ovnis de croire que l’objet rectangulaire, qui se déplace lentement, est la bonne affaire.
Le YouTuber Wutangkilla1 a dit : “J’ai vu ce vaisseau personnellement. Ce n’est pas un carré, c’est un rectangle noir géant et la nuit, il se fond dans le ciel avec les lumières blanches en forme d’étoile à chaque coin.”
Une autre personne, Liz M, a écrit en ligne : “C’est une vidéo fantastique. Des humains avec des technologies extraterrestres ou anges déchus, comme vous voulez le voir.”
L’observation d’OVNI a également engendré des aveux choquants de la part de personnes qui prétendent avoir vu des objets similaires dans le passé.
Claire Pounder a dit : “J’ai vu ça il y a plus de 10 ans au Royaume-Uni. Depuis, j’ai la tête en miettes.”
L’utilisateur Youtube Lets Do It Class A Tag Axle a dit : “La vitesse est exactement celle d’une soucoupe volante que j’ai vue et qui se déplaçait et elle était aussi très imposante.”
Et l’utilisateur Red White et Disclosure a dit : “Fantastique vidéo, mon ami. J’ai déjà vu la même chose dans le ciel au-dessus de ma maison, il y a quelques étés.”
Ancient Pyramids in an Icy Landscape: Was There an Ancient Civilization in Antarctica?
Ancient Pyramids in an Icy Landscape: Was There an Ancient Civilization in Antarctica?
The images show what appears to be three pyramids with four sides similar to the famous Giza pyramids in Egypt. Could these be authentic man-made pyramids created by an ancient civilization?
The World Wide Web is all abuzz with Google Earth images of Antarctica that appear to show pyramids in the icy landscape.
Who Made the Pyramids?
There are numerous theories about the origin of these pyramids. Some of the more controversial suggestions are that the pyramids were remnants of an earlierAtlantean civilization in Antarctica, or that they were built by extraterrestrials.
One of the so-called pyramids of Antartica. Source:
Other researchers have suggested a natural geological explanation for the Antarctica pyramids. These scientists have suggested that the “pyramids”, may actually be nunataks.
Nunataks are the peaks of mountains that protrude through the ice and are higher than the surrounding terrain.
Two of the ‘Antarctica pyramids’ can be found 10 miles (16 kms) from the coast. The third pyramid is located near the shoreline.
The discovery of these pyramids suggests that Antarctica may have been inhabited by humans sometime in the past 6,000 years. It was around this time that man was building pyramids in the Old World.
Charles Hapgood’s research supports the possible existence of an ancient civilization on a continent which is now covered by ice.
The Piri Reis map was found in Turkey. A Turkish Navy officer sent the map to the U.S. Navy Hydro Graphic Bureau in 1953.
M.I. Walters, the Chief Engineer of the Bureau, sent the map to Arlington H. Mallery to be evaluated. Mallery determined that Piri Reis map was completely accurate and may have been copied from a map made 6,000 years ago.
Map of the world by Ottoman admiral Piri Reis, drawn in 1513.
The Piri Reis map of Antarctica is very accurate. Using seismic soundings and sonar, researchers found that underneath the ice-cap the coastlines, mountain ranges, plateaus etc. on the Piri Reis map matched the Queen Maud land, Antarctica.
Olhmeyer, leader of the British-Swedish expedition to Antarctica wrote Hapgood the following letter:
“Dear Professor Hapgood, Your request of evaluation of certain unusual features of the Piri Reis Antarctica map of 1513 by this organization has been reviewed. The claim that the lower part of the map portrays the Princess Martha Coast of Queen Maud Land, Antarctic, and the Palmer Peninsular, is reasonable. We find that this is the most logical and in all probability the correct interpretation of the map. The geographical detail shown in the lower part of the map agrees very remarkably with the results of the seismic profile made across the top of the ice-cap by the Swedish-British Antarctic Expedition of 1949. This indicates the coastline had been mapped before it was covered by the ice-cap. This part of Antarctica ice free. The ice-cap in this region is now about a mile thick. We have no idea how the data on this map can be reconciled with the supposed state of geographical knowledge in 1513.” - Harold Z. Olhmeyer Lt. Colonel, USAF Commander
The letter from Ohlmeyer confirmed Dr. Charles Hapgood’s theory that the Piri Reis map was probably copied from a map made in ancient times.
Dr. Charles Hapgood wrote in Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings that he was sure that although the Piri Reis Map contained latitudes and longitudes plotted out at right angles in a traditional plane geometry, it had to have been based on an earlier map.
Hapgood was sure the map was ancient in origin because the Piri Reis map’s creator used spheroid trigonometry which was thought to have been invented in the 18th Century, even though the Piri Reis map has been dated to 1513.
No matter what the origin of the snow pyramids may be, the discovery of these mysterious features will increase speculation on the possible human habitation of Antarctica in recent history.
Antarctic pyramids. Location of the pyramid making the news: 79°58'39.2"S 81°57'32.2"W. (Google Maps)
I've Seen Antigravity, Faster Than Light Craft! They're Real!
I've Seen Antigravity, Faster Than Light Craft! They're Real!
A former engineer with General Dynamics goes over the incredible things he and others he knows have seen. There is no doubt we’ve been kept in a completely false reality where the liars on TV and in our government tell us we need rockets to get into space! The reality is people of Earth are exploring the universe, have bases on probably hundreds of other planets and moons and of course use zero point energy for all of it. Using gasoline for fuel is only used to milk the rest of us they consider their “free range” slaves.
As you listen to this incredible testimony by a man who brings forth the evidence US companies have antigravity craft that can travel faster than light! Scientists have found a way to do this. They found a way to cancel the mass of these craft which means they can take right angle turns and some of them can go faster than light!
This video is based on eye-witness accounts and insider information, This video takes the audience through a series of revelations as to how remarkable breakthrough technology, may have been back-engineered from recovered or captured off-world vehicles, enabled aerospace corporations to create a special access only, secret space program and develop a break-away civilization with its own goals and agenda.
We are talking about Special Access Programs (SAP). From these we have unacknowledged and waived SAPs. These programs do not exist publicly, but they do indeed exist. They are better known as ‘deep black programs. Some of these vehicles have been seen by ground observers flying at mach 17 in the atmosphere!
De ‘ruimteharpoen’ waarmee wetenschappers in de ruimte rommel willen vangen, heeft de eerste test goed doorstaan. Op vrijgegeven beelden is te zien hoe de harpoen van het RemoveDebris-systeem een stuk metaal doorboort. Het apparaat kan ook rommel vangen met een net. Naar schatting zweeft zo’n 7.000 ton afval rond de aarde, een gevaar voor satellieten en ruimtetuigen. Het RemoveDebris-systeem, dat weliswaar nog lang niet operationeel is, stuurt gevangen afval met een zeil naar de atmosfeer om op te branden.
Vanuit verschillende steden in Siberië komen steeds meer meldingen van mensen die zwarte sneeuw zien. Letterlijk dan: het giftige goedje bedekt straten, bomen, auto’s en daken. De foto’s op sociale media spreken boekdelen. Er wordt met een beschuldigende vinger gewezen naar de mijnbouw en de kolencentrales in de buurt. De baas van zo’n bedrijf gaf al toe dat een van zijn filters niet meer werkte.
BFMTV✔@BFMTV
De la neige noire (et toxique) recouvre plusieurs villes en Sibérie
Of dat de enige uitleg is, valt te betwijfelen. Het fenomeen is immers niet nieuw. “In de winter ziet de sneeuw hier sowieso eerder zwart dan wit”, stelt Vladimir Slivyak van milieuorganisatie Ecodefense. “Er zit altijd veel koolstof in de lucht. Maar dat wordt pas zichtbaar als het sneeuwt.”
Deze keer werd er blijkbaar nog een flinke schep bovenop gedaan. De meldingen komen vooral uit Prokopyevsk, Kiselyovsk en Leninsk-Kuznetsky, samen goed voor enkele honderdduizenden inwoners. “Ziet sneeuw in de hel er zo uit?”, klinkt het onder meer op Twitter.
De regio Koezbass staat bekend als een van de grootste steenkoolwinningsgebieden ter wereld. Uit een rapport blijkt dat inwoners er gemiddeld drie à vier jaar minder lang leven dan in Rusland. Ze lopen bovendien bijna dubbel zo veel risico om tuberculose te krijgen.
Absoluut een gevaar voor de gezondheid dus, maar de overheid wil dat potje toch vooral toedekken. Twee maanden geleden werd in de stad Kemerovo zelfs nog een poging ondernomen om de sneeuw wit te... verven.
Khodorkovsky Center@mbk_center
#Russia is a country of outstanding natural beauty and diversity. But the sheer lack of environmental regulations is a devastating effect for residents in #Kuzbass, where last night there was BLACK SNOW.
In juli viel er in Norilsk dan weer ‘bloedregen’ uit de lucht. Even werd gevreesd voor een ramp van Bijbelse proporties, maar al snel bleek ook hier een bedrijf de boosdoener: een stevige storm had het slecht opgeslagen industrieel afval over de stad verspreid. In Yakutia zorgde mysterieus stof er dan weer voor dat de zon drie uur lang niet meer te zien was.
Black snow recently fell in Siberia, thanks to pollution from the many coal factories in the region.
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Eerie black snow falls over Siberian region triggering acute pollution concerns from locals
Eerie black snow falls over Siberian region triggering acute pollution concerns from locals
Ghostly pictures of dark snowscapes - which should be pristine white - as blame pointed at failure to filter fumes at coal plant.
Eerie black snow.
Picture: nataseife, Typical Kemerovo
Prosecutors in Kemerovo region are reportedly checking the cause of black snow over three cities in the coalmining region - Prokopyevsk, Kiselyovsk and Leninsk-Kuznetsky.
Pictures shared by locals show alarming black winter scenes with one comment reading: ‘Is this what snow looks like in hell?’
Others have claimed there is a beauty in the bleak snowscapes.
Local media have blamed the gloom on local plants processing coal.
Director general of Prokopyevskaya factory Anatoly Volkov explained to Vesti-KUzbass TV channel that a shield stopped working at his plant protecting the air from coal powder.
Ghostly pictures of dark snowscapes - which should be pristine white - as blame pointed at failure to filter fumes at coal plant.
Pictures: Typical Kemerovo
Deputy governor of Kemerovo region Andrei Panov - in charge of ecology - is to meet local environmentalists to discuss the matter.
He suggested this plant was not the only cause of the problem.
Coal boilers, car exhausts and other coal-burning plants were also to blame.
On social media residents point the finger at other plants too, alleging there is a long-term lack of environmental protection in an region that’s lifeblood is coal.
‘No cleansing systems, all the waste, dust and dirt, coal lay in the area. Our children and us are breathing it. It's just a nightmare,’ said one.
Another commented: ‘The government bans smoking in public. But let us inhale coal dust all together and let it reside in our lungs.’
Black snow falls over Siberian region triggering acute pollution concerns from locals.
Pictures: Nataseife, kamenkseni, Typical Kemerovo
Many on social media concerns about pollution.
The region ‘is just a place for extracting resources’ with the authorities not caring about ‘living conditions (and) culture’, was one angry comment.
’It is not surprising that our people have no taste in art, it simply can't form when you live around ugly sculptures covered with black snow, and slide down a black slide, and see dirty monuments.’
Cars were seen covered in grime but many expressed most concern over young lungs.
‘The future of our children is terrifying.’
Pictures from Kemerovo region by Orlovprklife, Willravilov, Typical Kemerovo
Wetenschappers ontdekken gigantische bergen op 660 kilometer onder onze voeten. Zo hoog zijn ze
Wetenschappers ontdekken gigantische bergen op 660 kilometer onder onze voeten. Zo hoog zijn ze
Sciencefictionschrijver Jules Verne stelde zich een ondergronds landschap voor in het binnenste van de aarde, waar allerlei verloren prehistorische diersoorten konden worden gevonden.
Hoewel we daar misschien geen dinosaurussen zullen vinden, blijkt uit nieuw onderzoek dat de onderwereld niet overal een kolkende massa gloeiendhete magma is.
Wetenschappers van de Princeton-universiteit en de Chinese Academie van Wetenschappen hebben na een zware aardbeving in Bolivia iets bijzonders ontdekt.
Niet vaak
Op 9 juni 1994 vond in de Amazone een aardbeving plaats met een kracht van 8,2 op de schaal van Richter.
De schokken konden tot in Canada worden gevoeld.
“Zulke zware aardbevingen doen zich niet vaak voor,” reageerde aardwetenschapper Jessica Irving.
Voor het eerst
Het epicentrum van de beving bevond zich op een diepte van maar liefst 650 kilometer.
Dankzij de seismische golven konden de wetenschappers een beeld krijgen van het binnenste van de planeet.
De onderzoekers hebben nu voor het eerst de overgangszone in de mantel op zo’n 660 kilometer diepte in kaart gebracht.
In het niet
Op de plek waar de bovenmantel overgaat in de ondermantel zagen ze een gebergte waarbij zo’n beetje alle bergen op aarde in het niet vallen.
“Op 660 kilometer diepte bevinden zich hogere bergen dat de Rocky Mountains of de Appalachen,” zei hoofdonderzoeker Wenbo Wu.
Afgedaald
Het lijkt erop dat oude tektonische platen zijn afgedaald in de mantel en daar bergen hebben gevormd.
Most schoolchildren learn that the Earth has three (or four) layers: a crust, mantle and core, which is sometimes subdivided into an inner and outer core. That’s not wrong, but it does leave out several other layers that scientists have identified within the Earth, including the transition zone within the mantle.
Princeton seismologist Jessica Irving worked with then-graduate student Wenbo Wu and another collaborator to determine the roughness at the top and bottom of the transition zone, a layer within the mantle, using scattered earthquake waves. They found that the top of the transition zone, a layer located 410 kilometers down, is mostly smooth, but the base of the transition zone, 660 km down, in some places is much rougher than the global surface average. “In other words, stronger topography than the Rocky Mountains or the Appalachians is present at the 660-km boundary,” said Wu.
NOTE: This graphic is not to scale
Image by Kyle McKernan, Office of Communications
In a study published this week in Science, Princeton geophysicists Jessica Irving and Wenbo Wu, in collaboration with Sidao Ni from the Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics in China, used data from an enormous earthquake in Bolivia to find mountains and other topography on the base of the transition zone, a layer 660 kilometers (410 miles) straight down that separates the upper and lower mantle. (Lacking a formal name for this layer, the researchers simply call it “the 660-km boundary.”)
To peer deep into the Earth, scientists use the most powerful waves on the planet, which are generated by massive earthquakes. “You want a big, deep earthquake to get the whole planet to shake,” said Irving, an assistant professor of geosciences.
Big earthquakes are vastly more powerful than small ones — energy increases 30-fold with every step up the Richter scale — and deep earthquakes, “instead of frittering away their energy in the crust, can get the whole mantle going,” Irving said. She gets her best data from earthquakes that are magnitude 7.0 or higher, she said, as the shockwaves they send out in all directions can travel through the core to the other side of the planet — and back again. For this study, the key data came from waves picked up after a magnitude 8.2 earthquake — the second-largest deep earthquake ever recorded — that shook Bolivia in 1994.
“Earthquakes this big don’t come along very often,” she said. “We’re lucky now that we have so many more seismometers than we did even 20 years ago. Seismology is a different field than it was 20 years ago, between instruments and computational resources.”
Seismologists and data scientists use powerful computers, including Princeton’s Tiger supercomputer cluster, to simulate the complicated behavior of scattering waves in the deep Earth.
The technology depends on a fundamental property of waves: their ability to bend and bounce. Just as light waves can bounce (reflect) off a mirror or bend (refract) when passing through a prism, earthquake waves travel straight through homogenous rocks but reflect or refract when they encounter any boundary or roughness.
“We know that almost all objects have surface roughness and therefore scatter light,” said Wu, the lead author on the new paper, who just completed his geosciences Ph.D. and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology. “That’s why we can see these objects — the scattering waves carry the information about the surface’s roughness. In this study, we investigated scattered seismic waves traveling inside the Earth to constrain the roughness of the Earth’s 660-km boundary.”
The researchers were surprised by just how rough that boundary is — rougher than the surface layer that we all live on. “In other words, stronger topography than the Rocky Mountains or the Appalachians is present at the 660-km boundary,” said Wu. Their statistical model didn’t allow for precise height determinations, but there’s a chance that these mountains are bigger than anything on the surface of the Earth. The roughness wasn’t equally distributed, either; just as the crust’s surface has smooth ocean floors and massive mountains, the 660-km boundary has rough areas and smooth patches. The researchers also examined a layer 410 kilometers (255 miles) down, at the top of the mid-mantle “transition zone,” and they did not find similar roughness.
“They find that Earth’s deep layers are just as complicated as what we observe at the surface,” said seismologist Christine Houser, an assistant professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology who was not involved in this research. “To find 2-mile (1-3 km) elevation changes on a boundary that is over 400 miles (660 km) deep using waves that travel through the entire Earth and back is an inspiring feat. … Their findings suggest that as earthquakes occur and seismic instruments become more sophisticated and expand into new areas, we will continue to detect new small-scale signals which reveal new properties of Earth’s layers.”
Seismologist Jessica Irving, an assistant professor of geosciences, sits with two meteorites from Princeton University’s collection that contain iron thought to come from the interiors of planetesimals. Irving uses seismology to investigate the interior of our own planet, recently finding mountain-sized topographic roughness on the 660-km boundary at the base of the mantle’s transition zone.
Photo by Denise Applewhite, Office of Communications
What it means
The presence of roughness on the 660-km boundary has significant implications for understanding how our planet formed and continues to function. That layer divides the mantle, which makes up about 84 percent of the Earth’s volume, into its upper and lower sections. For years, geoscientists have debated just how important that boundary is. In particular, they have investigated how heat travels through the mantle — whether hot rocks are carried smoothly from the core-mantle boundary (almost 2,000 miles down) all the way up to the top of the mantle, or whether that transfer is interrupted at this layer. Some geochemical and mineralogical evidence suggests that the upper and lower mantle are chemically different, which supports the idea that the two sections don’t mix thermally or physically. Other observations suggest no chemical difference between the upper and lower mantle, leading some to argue for what’s called a “well-mixed mantle,” with both the upper and lower mantle participating in the same heat-transfer cycle.
“Our findings provide insight into this question,” said Wu. Their data suggests that both groups might be partially right. The smoother areas of the 660-km boundary could result from more thorough vertical mixing, while the rougher, mountainous areas may have formed where the upper and lower mantle don’t mix as well.
In addition, the roughness the researchers found, which existed at large, moderate and small scales, could theoretically be caused by heat anomalies or chemical heterogeneities. But because of how heat in transported within the mantle, Wu explained, any small-scale thermal anomaly would be smoothed out within a few million years. That leaves only chemical differences to explain the small-scale roughness they found.
What could cause significant chemical differences? The introduction of rocks that used to belong to the crust, now resting quietly in the mantle. Scientists have long debated the fate of the slabs of sea floor that get pushed into the mantle at subduction zones, the collisions happening found all around the Pacific Ocean and elsewhere around the world. Wu and Irving suggest that remnants of these slabs may now be just above or just below the 660-km boundary.
“It’s easy to assume, given we can only detect seismic waves traveling through the Earth in its current state, that seismologists can’t help understand how Earth’s interior has changed over the past 4.5 billion years,” said Irving. “What’s exciting about these results is that they give us new information to understand the fate of ancient tectonic plates which have descended into the mantle, and where ancient mantle material might still reside.”
She added: “Seismology is most exciting when it lets us better understand our planet’s interior in both space and time.”
“Inferring Earth’s discontinuous chemical layering from the 660-kilometer boundary topography,” by Wenbo Wu, Sidao Ni and Jessica Irving, appears in the Feb. 15 issue of the journal Science. The research was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program, grant 2014CB845901), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (grant XDB18000000), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant 41590854), and the National Science Foundation (grants EAR1644399 and 1736046).
White snow, depending on its depth, is usually considered to be a good thing. Often song-inspiring, kids around the world never fear catching flakes on their tongues or scooping up a cupful and drizzling it with a flavored syrup to make a true snow cone. This type of colored snow, depending on your blood sugar level, is usually considered to be a good thing. Eating any other color of snow, especially the song-inspiring yellow kind, is never a good thing. Hues of pink, red, orange, blue, green and other rainbow shades can be caused by bacteria, algae or chemical spills. What about black snow? Inquiring Siberians want to know after several cities in the Kemerovo Oblast reportedblack snowfall for a number of days last week. Some call it eerie, some call it beautiful … what do the parents of kids carrying cups of it call it?
Before you make an educated and obvious guess, take a look at the pictures collected from social media by The Siberian Times. Finished? Are you ready for a dose of Siberian irony?
Cough, cough.
“The government bans smoking in public. But let us inhale coal dust all together and let it reside in our lungs.”
Fans of government deregulation usually support ending the former and conveniently ignore the latter, but it’s hard to ignore black snow covering the streets, fields, buildings and statues in Prokopyevsk, Kiselyovsk and Leninsk-Kuznetsky that caused one citizen to wonder:
“Is this what snow looks like in hell?”
That assumes hell has frozen over, which is a subject for a different article. It should come as no surprise that these three cities are the heart of Siberia’s coal mining and processing industries. Kuzbass, short for Kuznetsk Basin, is home to 2.6 million people and one of the world’s largest open-pit coal fields. How big is the coal business there? It’s home to an indoor/outdoor coal mining museum which is one of the area’s most popular tourist attractions. Do kids get a free cone of black snow at the end of the tour?
It should also come as no surprise that this black snowfall is being blamed on the coal industry. Director general of Prokopyevskaya factory Anatoly Volkov admitted that a shield that was supposed to catch coal powder before it entered the atmosphere stopped working at his plant. Is that all?
“It’s harder to find white snow than black snow during the winter. There is a lot of coal dust in the air all the time. When snow falls, it just becomes visible. You can’t see it the rest of the year, but it is still there.”
It should come as no surprise that these same government officials are pointing their sooty fingers in every direction but towards themselves. Deputy governor of Kemerovo region Andrei Panov, the official in charge of ecology, says other coal-burning plants, coal boilers in homes and buildings and car exhausts were also to blame. He can’t blame smoking, because that’s banned in public. Sadly, inhaling the coal dust through a filtered cigarette might actually clean it.
Is this the future … or the present?
The mystery of this Siberian black snow of death is not the cause but how the government can keep covering it up (literally and figuratively) while the life expectancy in the area drops, quality of life worsens and residents worry about how it’s affecting their children – and no, they don’t let them eat it. This social media comment sums it up well:
“It is not surprising that our people have no taste in art, it simply can’t form when you live around ugly sculptures covered with black snow, and slide down a black slide, and see dirty monuments. The future of our children is terrifying.”
There are no songs about black snow. Stop making excuses, Siberians … hell has frozen over.
Historians in England have identified a massive new collection of symbols intended to ward off evil spirits and demonic forces. If confirmed, this new set would be England’s largest known set of apotropaic marks or “witch marks,” symbols used to defend against dark supernatural forces. What were these marks guarding, and who put them there?
The new collection of “witch marks” was found in the Creswell Crags, an enclosed limestone cave system on the border of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, England. The marks include hundreds of letters, symbols, and strange patterns carved deep into the walls of a large limestone cave which contains a “deep, dark hole” that remains unexplored. The marks were identified by Hayley Clark and Ed Waters of Subterranea Britannica, a research group devoted to the study and investigation of man-made and natural underground places throughout the UK.
A typical witches’ mark.
Clark and Waters were on a guided tour of the Creswell Crags when they spotted the marks hiding in plain sight. The Creswell Heritage Trust which operates the site has for years thought the marks were graffiti made in the Victorian period, but Clark and Waters immediately suspected them to be apotropaic marks. Experts from nearby universities confirmed their suspicions soon after, and have dated the marks to the 17th and 18th centuries.
Alison Fearn, a Leicester university expert on protective marks, told The Guardian that the marks were likely intended as protection against whatever foul things local people believed were at the bottom of this cave system. “It could be fairies, witches, whatever you were fearful of, it was going to be down there,” Learn adds. Whatever these symbols’ creators were afraid of, they were very afraid of it: the cave system appears to be full of thousands of them.
Paul Baker, director at Creswell Crags Museum and Heritage Centre, told The Week that these symbols were likely intended to keep what local people historically viewed as an entrance to the evil underworld. “These marks were either to keep something in, or to keep something out,” says Baker. “I think over a period of time this hole was blamed or associated with a series of events, illnesses or crop failures to the point in which they hoped the marks would protect them.”
While this discovery is being hailed as one of the most significant developments in the study of these “witch marks”and other apotropaic symbols, I’m more interested in what may lie at the bottom of the dark, mysterious hole in Creswell Crags. Did 17th and 18th century people know something we don’t?
'Gateway to hell' discovered in cave with hundreds of 'anti-witch marks' lining walls
'Gateway to hell' discovered in cave with hundreds of 'anti-witch marks' lining walls
The markings - thought to protect from evil spirits - were found on walls and ceilings of the caves at Creswell Crags, on the border between Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire
By Emily Beament
The discovery at Creswell Crags was made by enthusiasts Hayley Clark and Ed Waters from the Subterranea Britannica group
(Image: PA)
An 'unprecedented' number of 'anti witch marks' have been found in caves at a limestone gorge in the Midlands, experts have said.
The marks are said to prevent evil spirits rising from the underworld - and there are hundreds of them carved on walls and ceilings of the caves at Creswell Crags, on the border between Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.
It's thought to be the largest collection of its kind in one place in the UK.
Witches' marks, or "apotropaic" marks, from the Greek word apotrepein, "to turn away", are most commonly found in historic churches and houses, near doorways, windows and fireplaces, to protect the inhabitants from evil spirits.
The discovery at Creswell Crags was made by enthusiasts Hayley Clark and Ed Waters, from the Subterranea Britannica group, during a cave tour when they noticed the rare protection marks on the walls.
Experts said the number and variety of the marks found in the caves is unprecedented.
There are said to be hundreds of the marks(Image: PA)
The marks were previously thought to have been graffiti from the time before the caves were shut off.
Among the most common are the double VV engravings, thought to reference Mary, Virgin of Virgins, and PM or Pace Maria, while other symbols are believed to be devices for capturing or trapping evil, including diagonal lines, boxes and mazes.
The marks appear to have been added to over time and may indicate a need to strengthen the protection against underworld spirits in response to unexpected sickness, death or poor crops, the experts said.
Until now the largest known quantity of witches' marks in caves in Britain was 57 in Somerset, but the number at Creswell Crags is far higher - with hundreds in one cave alone and marks now found in all the caves at the site.
It was initially thought that the marks were graffiti(Image: PA)
There may even have been more in the past, as the caves were excavated by archaeologists during the 19th century and were widened in the process, potentially accounting for some surfaces featuring no marks.
It is the latest significant discovery at the caves, which provided shelter for Neanderthal and anatomically modern people through a crucial period of human evolution between 130,000 and 10,000 years ago.
The site has been a rich source of archaeological finds and even features Britain's earliest cave art, with 13,000-year-old pictures of birds, deer, bison and horses.
John Charlesworth, heritage facilitator and the tour leader at the time of the discovery of the protective marks, said: "These witches' marks were in plain sight all the time.
"Being present at the moment their true significance was revealed will stay with me forever. This remarkable place continues to give up its secrets."
The marks were found on walls and ceilings in caves(Image: PA)
Academic and TV presenter Professor Ronald Hutton, an authority on folklore, said: "This discovery is significant because it looks like the largest assemblage of protective marks ever found in British caves, and possibly anywhere in Britain.
"This is a suddenly a large new area of research for historians and archaeologists, and so adds appreciatively to the importance of the Crags as a world resource."
The team who look after Creswell Crags are now working with academics and experts from Historic England to better understand the significance and extent of the discovery at the site, which is a scheduled monument.
Duncan Wilson, chief executive of Historic England, said: "Creswell Crags is already of international importance for its Ice Age art and ancient remains.
"To find this huge number of protection marks from the more recent past adds a whole new layer of discovery.
"Even 200 years ago, the English countryside was a very different place; death and disease were everyday companions and evil forces could readily be imagined in the dark.
"We can only speculate on what it was the people of Creswell feared might emerge from the underworld into these caves."
Creswell Crags will be launching tours of the areas containing witches' marks for the first time, from late February.
In late 2018 scientists discovered evidence of a hidden 19-mile-wide craterbelieved to have been made by a meteorite impact underneath Greenland’s Hiawatha Glacier. The discovery was surprising as scientists have long believed that the erosion caused by melting or shifting glacial ice would wipe away all underlying geological features as it scrapes unrelentingly across the Earth’s surface. However, revolutionary new images provided by NASA’s Operation IceBridge has revealed a new wealth of new discoveries about what lies under Greenland and other large ice sheets.
One of those new discoveries was announced this week in a NASA press release stating that glaciologists have found what may be a second impact crater lying under a mile of ice. The new crater measures over 22 miles across and a half a mile deep and if confirmed as an impact crater would be the 22nd largest on Earth.
The discovery was a surprise to NASA glaciologist Joe MacGregor, who says that finding two of these new craters so close together and in such a short period of time is the scientific equivalent of winning the lottery:
I began asking myself ‘Is this another impact crater? Do the underlying data support that idea? Helping identify one large impact crater beneath the ice was already very exciting, but now it looked like there could be two of them. We’ve surveyed the Earth in many different ways, from land, air and space – it’s exciting that discoveries like these are still possible.
Naturally, much more data is needed to definitively identify this new geologic structure as impact crater. If it is confirmed, though, it could turn out to be a discovery which has the potential to rewrite the history of the Earth and humankind as we know it.
I know, I know: every week there’s some new scientific study or archaeological discovery which claims to have the potential to “rewrite history.” These meteorite craters are somewhat different, though, because preliminary data about their ages suggests these impacts may coincide with the Younger Dryas, a period of radical climate change which altered the face of the Earth forever and in some ways led to the creation of modern human civilization. Scientists have long suspected that an unknown meteorite impact may have been the mechanism which brought about this period of sudden cooling and allowed humans to flourish. Could these newfound meteorite craters be related to the Younger Dryas?
Famed whistleblower Bob Lazar has recently been in the news witha new documentaryabout his groundbreaking experiences at Area 51’s highly classified S-4 facility. In his initialTV interviews with George Knappback in 1989, Lazar first discussed element 115 (Moscovium) and how it was used in the propulsion system of the alien craft hidden at the S-4 facility. He said that aliens had supplied 500 pounds (227 kg) for reverse engineering purposes.
In 2014, Lazar did another interview with Knapp where he discussed Element 115 and how it is created both synthetically and naturally through supernova, which is the cataclysmic explosion of a star.
Given recent studies showing that suns regularly undergo micronova or “solar flash” events, we have another process by which a star can produce and eject heavy elements, which are subsequently mined by advanced extraterrestrial civilizations in a cyclic manner.
Lazar further explained in his interviews that bombarding Element 115 with protons leads to it creating Element 116 (Livermorium) which immediately decays and produces antimatter. The antimatter collides with normal particles creating a massive energy burst, which can be used for propulsion. It’s quite likely Element 115 could also be the famed exotic matter that is needed to create traversable wormholes that physicists such as Drs. Kip Thorne and Carl Sagan have speculated, and was the subject of a recently leaked Defense Intelligence Reference Document titled “Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy” .
What follows is a post from May 21, 2005 where I first discussed Element 115 and how its discovery had provided scientific corroboration for Lazar’s earlier claims.
I wish to focus on some recent scientific advances that vindicate some of the information that Bob Lazar provided from his alleged experiences at S4, and respond to some of his critics. The most important criticism concerned Lazar’s initial claim in 1989 of the existence of a stable form of element 115. The existence of such an element was initially dismissed by some of his critics and became a factor in Lazar not being taken seriously. For example Stanton Friedman wrote in 1997:
“There is no evidence that any 115 has been created anywhere. Based on what we know about all other elements over #100, it would certainly have been radioactive with a short half life, and 500 pounds could not have been accumulated. His scheme sounds good, but makes no real sense especially in view of how difficult it would be to add protons to #115.” (http://www.v-j-enterprises.com/sflazar.html )
However, in February 2004 scientists announced that they were able to reproduce an isotope of 115 in a laboratory, and said that a stable isotope is possible. Dr Joshua Patin, one of the creators of the 115 isotope, confirmed in an interview with Linda Moulton Howe that with sufficient technological advances, the creation of a stable form of 115 is possible:
“[Howe:] Could there be an element 115 isotope that is solid and can be held in the hand? [Dr Patin:] “Some day down the road, I think so. If it’s true that we find something that is long enough lived. To hold something in your hand, you would need a significant quantity of these atoms. We’ve produced four atoms of Element 115 in a month. It would take you don’t have enough time in the rest of the universe to create enough that you could hold in your hand through these same kinds of production methods (that we are using).
That’s why I say a future technology might allow us advances in terms of how much can be produced and the target material, maybe a better way of producing but somewhere down the road, there might be a possibility, sure (see http://www.intalek.com/Index/News/Element115.htm ).
As to how element 115 is formed, Lazar claimed it is formed in massive stars. In an article he wrote:
“[M]any single star solar systems have stars that are so large that our Sun would appear to be a dwarf by comparison. Keeping all this is mind, it should be obvious that a large, single star system, binary star system, or multiple star system would have had more of the prerequisite mass and electromagnetic energy present during their creations.
Scientists have long theorized that there are potential combinations of protons and neutrons which should provide stable elements with atomic numbers being higher than any which appear on our periodic chart, though none of these heavy elements occur naturally on earth.” http://members.fortunecity.com/groom51/interstellartravel.html
Lazar’s idea that element 115 is formed in stars led to more criticism this time by astronomers and physicists that Lazar was incorrect since stars could not produce heavy metals with atomic numbers greater than iron (atomic number 26) in stable stars. This criticism was raised by Dr David Morgan in 1996 whose critique was kindly sent to me by Stanton Friedman.
Dr Morgan says:
“[Lazar] SEEMS to be suggesting that his element 115, the alien fuel source, which doesn’t exist on the Earth, should be present in those solar systems that were more massive at their inception. The implication here is that a star system which condensed out of a more massive primordial cloud should have a greater abundance of heavier elements.
This is quite incorrect. Heavy elements – all elements heavier than iron – are not formed during the normal life cycles of stars. The only time when these nuclei are “cooked” is during the collapse and subsequent explosion of supernovae.
The supernova explosion then spreads heavy elements throughout the galaxy. For this reason, the abundances of heavy elements in any particular star system depend NOT upon the properties of the current star, but on the properties of the nearby stars of the PREVIOUS GENERATION!
Therefore, all of the star systems in a particular region of the galaxy will have essentially the same abundances of heavy elements, regardless of the mass of star. If element 115 is STABLE, as Lazar claims it to be, then it should be created in supernova explosions and it should exist EVERYWHERE!” (http://www.serve.com/mahood/lazar/critiq.htm).
Dr Morgan’s criticism of Lazar is not supported by recent breakthroughs in understanding the formation of heavy metals in stars.
It has been discovered for example that heavy metals with higher atomic numbers than iron (26) can and are found in stars in their normal cycle rather than just through supernova which was the ‘old understanding’.
A NASA astronomer reflecting on this new theory answers a question concerning the existence of heavy metals with higher atomic metals forming in massive stars and answers:
This new theory has been recently confirmed with the recent discovery of three massive stars that have ‘lead’ (atomic number 82) in them:
“The theory has now been supported by data from the three binary, or “double” stars, studied by French and Belgian astronomers using the European Southern Observatory 3.6 metre telescope at La Silla, Chile.
The process by which some stars develop high concentration of heavy metals such as lead towards the end of their lives is called the ‘slow fusion’ or ‘s-process’ and is described as follows:
“The high abundance of Lead in these otherwise low-metallicity stars also provides detailed clues on how the s-process operates inside the AGB stars. When a Carbon-13 nucleus (i.e. a nucleus with 6 protons and 7 neutrons) is hit by a Helium-4 nucleus (2 protons and 2 neutrons), they fuse to form Oxygen-16 (8 protons and 8 neutrons).
In this process – as can be seen by adding the numbers – one neutron is released. It is exactly these surplus neutrons that become the building-blocks for making heavier elements via the s-process.” (http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0108/30heavy/ – thanks to Stan Friedman for notifying me of this article)
It is estimated that half of all metals heavier than iron are caused by supernova explosions where these are rapidly formed through nuclear fusion (r-process) and the other half in stable stars with low metallicity that slowly build up heavy metals in a more gentle fusion process.
The new understanding of the formation of heavy metals in stars and discovery of large quantities of lead in some stars basically negates Dr Morgan’s criticism and shows that Lazar’s idea that some massive stars in the normal stellar cycle may have element 115 developed in them is a very real possibility.
What are the exopolitical implications of this given Lazar’s claims that extraterrestrials use 115 for their propulsion systems?
If element 115 is naturally formed in the core of some massive stars and element 115 is used in the propulsion system of extraterrestrial races, then it would be fair to assume that some extraterrestrials may have discovered how to mine stars of their heavy elements to use as a propulsion fuel.
Indeed, extraterrestrials with sufficient knowledge in mining suns of element 115 and other elements may be using this as part of an interstellar trade. Indeed, such knowledge and possession of large quantities of 115 and other elements may lead to interstellar conflicts over certain star systems.
Indeed, the Earth’s sun or nearby stars may have heavy elements that may attract extraterrestrial races who seek to mine these precious natural resources. We are now slowly moving to an understanding of how certain star systems might be highly prized by extraterrestrial races that seek to gain control and mine stars of heavy elements such as element 115.
With new advances in physics and astronomy, Bob Lazar’s information so widely dismissed in the early 1990’s appears to have more relevance than ever.
Inlichtingendiensten verdoezelen buitenaards leven op aarde al decennia. Luister naar deze ufoloog
Inlichtingendiensten verdoezelen buitenaards leven op aarde al decennia. Luister naar deze ufoloog
Inlichtingendiensten spannen wereldwijd al decennia samen om buitenaards bezoek te verdoezelen. Dat heeft een ufoloog gezegd tegen zender RT.
Op één punt zijn alle landen het met elkaar eens: contact met aliens moet in de doofpot worden gestopt, aldus Steven Greer, directeur van het Disclosure Project, in het programma SophieCo.
De gepensioneerde traumatoloog zegt te beschikken over documenten die laten zien dat de KGB, de staatsveiligheidsdienst van de voormalige Sovjet-Unie, en de Amerikaanse inlichtingendiensten samenwerkten op dit punt.
Diepste geheim
Vandaag de dag doen onder meer Canada, Groot-Brittannië, Rusland, China en de Verenigde Staten in het diepste geheim onderzoek naar buitenaards leven, stelde dr. Greer.
Volgens hem is er onweerlegbaar bewijs voor het bestaan van buitenaards leven.
Hij verwees naar incidenten in Chili en Mexico, waarbij straaljagerpiloten een UFO probeerden te onderscheppen.
Sneller dan het licht
Greer zei verder dat buitenaardsen beschikken over technologie die hen in staat stelt sneller dan het licht te reizen.
Ze zullen voorkomen dat mensen massavernietigingswapens in de ruimte brengen, aldus de ufoloog.
“Terwijl 43 procent van de Amerikanen gelooft in contact met niet-menselijke wezens, verspreidt de CIA desinformatie om het volk te misleiden,” zei hij.
Enorme belangen
Hij voegde toe dat de overheid de waarheid niet zal onthullen vanwege de enorme belangen die hiermee gemoeid zijn.
Greer legde uit dat er in het geheim al vele ‘beschavingen’ en ‘soorten’ afkomstig uit verschillende zonnestelsels zijn gedocumenteerd.
Recentelijk onthulden Amerikaanse media dat het Pentagon van 2007 tot 2012 jaarlijks zo’n 22 miljoen dollar investeerde in een geheim onderzoek naar UFO’s.
Get ready to celebrate, you Hollow Earthers … science may have given you the proof you’ve been waiting for that there a vast underground land filled with mountains just like on the surface. Well, the mountains part has been validated – you’ll have to keep digging (literally and figuratively) for the rest. A new study using data from one of the most massive earthquakes in recent history found mountains and other topographical features 410 miles deep between the upper and lower mantle. Could there be life forms down there? Does anyone have an original French copy of Jules Verne’s’ Journey to the Center of the Earth (Voyage au centre de la Terre)?
“You want a big, deep earthquake to get the whole planet to shake.”
Well, you do if you’re a geophysicist like Princeton University professor Jessica C. E. Irving who conducts seismological studies of the deep Earth. One such big, deep quake occurred in Bolivia in 1994. Measuring 8.2 on the Richter scale, this was the second-largest deep earthquake ever recorded (fortunately, it occurred in a sparsely populated area), sending shock waves as far north as Canada. However, Irving is more interested in the waves that deep quakes send through the center of the Earth to the other side of the planet. These seismic waves travel straight through homogenous rocks but reflect or refract when they encounter any boundary or roughness.
In particular, the researchers are interested in how the waves pass through the so-called “transition zone”, the boundary at a depth of 660 km (410 miles) in the area between the upper and lower mantle. Wenbo Wu, a fifth year graduate student in geophysics at Princeton and co-author with Irving of the study published in Science, was shocked when they fed the 1994 data into Princeton’s modern Tiger supercomputer cluster to simulate the quake and what its waves encountered.
“In other words, stronger topography than the Rocky Mountains or the Appalachians is present at the 660-km boundary.”
These subsurface mountains may be the same size as their surface counterparts and are separated by smooth area that could be the equivalent of ocean floors. Furthermore, the “rough” mountains only exist at the 660 km bottom boundary – there was nothing like it at the 410 kilometers (255 mile) top boundary of the “transition zone.”
In Verne’s novel, German professor Otto Lidenbrock and his team traveled through volcanic tubes beginning at the Icelandic volcano Snæfellsjökull and surfacing at the Stromboli volcano in southern Italy. Along the way, they found vast caves filled with prehistoric animals, plants, giant insects and a 12-foot-tall giant humanoid creature. They walk, travel on water by raft and are eventually propelled back to the surface by the force of magma and steam.
Jules Verne
A Jules Verne-style trip is obviously still science fiction today, but the discovery of the mountains in the transition zone show that the upper and lower areas of mantle truly are different and are separated by … something. Many geophysicists believe the layers are chemically different and don’t mix thermally or physically, which makes the area in between them a true transition zone. But of what? Could any form of life exist there?
“What’s exciting about these results is that they give us new information to understand the fate of ancient tectonic plates which have descended into the mantle, and where ancient mantle material might still reside. Seismology is most exciting when it lets us better understand our planet’s interior in both space and time.”
So, Irving thinks ancient surface plates sank into the mantle and their ancient materials could still exist down there – 440 miles beneath the surface.
Drillers, Hollow Earthers and sci-fi writers … it’s your move.
It’s that time again: the weekly mystery boom round-up. Unexplained and powerful explosions continued to shake the ground throughout the United States this week with seemingly little attention paid to them by elected officials and law enforcement agencies. What on Earth (or off) could be causing these booms?
On February 5, the Tucson News Nowreported an Earth-rattling explosion felt throughout Tucson. Residents took to social media to share their experience with the booms, which apparently have been baffling residents of southern Arizona for years. Several of the noises have been powerful enough to register on seismograph. The Tucson News Now reached out to the three closest military installations to Tucson, and while Luke Air Force Base confirmed that their exercises produced sonic booms in the area on the same day, the times at which the base reported those booms occurred did not correspond with the times of the noises reported by residents.
Tucson, Arizona
A few days later on February 7, residents along the Wake County-Franklin County line in North Carolina reported sudden and terrifying loud booms. According to CBS 17, many homeowners “walls rattled and floors shook when mysterious blasts occurred nearby.” While the nearby Seymour Johnson Air Force Base was a prime suspect, officials there denied all responsibility for the booms. As in many other modern cases of mystery booms, explosive firearms targets containing tannerite were also suspected, although gun store owners interviewed by CBS 17 say it’s doubtful the small targets could cause such loud booms heard throughout such large areas.
Seymour Johnson AFB is home to the F-15E Strike Eagle Team, 4th Fighter Wing.
On February 11, residents of Davidson, North Carolina were also frightened by a mysterious loud boom. “I swear it like shook our entire house,” Davidson Jacqueline Hawtin told local NBC affiliate WCNC. “I was scared.” Construction sites in the area were suspected, but the similarity with the innumerable other cases over the last several years likely suggests this one will remain unsolved.
The Week in Booms ended on Valentine’s Day as mystery booms were reported in East Louisville, Kentucky. People in several neighborhoods have been hearing booms for months without any official explanation, and some witnesses even report bright flashes of light which coincide with the anomalous sounds. Local news station WLKY reached out to the University of Louisville Geology Department and nearby rock quarries, but so far the booms remain unexplained.
While I personally feel that sonic booms are to blame, that leaves the question of why they seem to be occurring with increasing frequency all throughout the country. If these are sonic booms, what might the Air Force be up to? Is American airspace being threatened by an adversary or unknown force, prompting bases to scramble jets at supersonic speeds? Or are these merely exercises or training drills? If so, again, why the sudden increase in frequency?
So many questions, and so few answers. Will we ever find out what’s behind these unexplained booms? The silence of federal law enforcement agencies is deafening given the frequency and scope of the phenomenon. Who knows something we don’t know, and why aren’t they telling us?
The universe runs according to a perfect plan and consciousness appears to be on going when the brain is shut down are some of the realities they have experienced during their NDE.
Inspirational experiences of Dr. Anthony Cicoria, Dr Sam Parnia, David Bennet and Anne Horne who have had Near Death Experiences and their thoughts and insight into who we are and our place in the universe.
Anne Horne "I was alone in the light and it was surrounding me. The feeling of love was like a bliss,total ecstatic bliss! There was love, joy, knowledge, Wisdom, an incredible feeling of beauty. The light was me, I was the light!"
There is no video or photos of this sighting however, I have heard of such UFOs over England, back in 2014 an eyewitness recorded over Cambridge, England of several glowing yellow white orbs during the day. I will include the video below. Even without the photos, this is a serious UFO case that needs further investigation. Scott C. Waring
News states:
DID a UFO fly over Taunton Deane last night? Some residents believe so! At around 6.30pm last night (February 14), the object, which looked like a 'big white golf ball', was seen flying over Taunton. Kevin Midwood, who lives in Hillcommon, says he spotted the object flying over his home. He said: "I wonder if anybody else saw the big white glowing ball shape object that went over Taunton last night? Possible UFO sighting? "I live in Hillcommon and my son lives in Wellington, he spotted it too. "It seemed to come over from Taunton at great speed then it just disappeared." James Vasey, Mr Midwood's son, said: "I was walking from my home in Wellington and a bright yellow object shot across the sky at rapid speed. "It wasn't a meteorite or shooting star as it was flying too low and whatever it was disappeared." Did you see anything flying across the sky yesterday evening? Let us know!
Boven grote delen van Nederland en Vlaanderen hebben tientallen mensen gisteravond iets na negen uur een enorme vuurbal gezien. Niets ongewoons evenwel.
De vuurbal werd door een twitteraar op beeld geschoten. Zie jij het?
Ⓒ TWITTER 675DAAN
Vooral in Nederland maakten vele mensen melding van het spektakel in de lucht.
Verslaggever Martin Drent van RTV Noord zag een ‘ hele heldere, blauwe lichtkogel die naar beneden viel’. ‘Ik dacht eerst dat het vuurwerk was, maar hij was veel hoger. Zag hem in zuidelijke richting. Was wat lager in de lucht, dus niet recht boven Groningen, maar wel heel helder en duidelijk.’
Het weerstation Zoersel bijvoorbeeld verzamelde de waarnemingen op zijn facebookpagina.
Weerman Frank Deboosere kwam snel met een logische verklaring voor het verschijnsel. Het ging om een gewone vallende ster of meteoor.
‘Omdat het een heel helder exemplaar was, en het bovendien ook helder en droog weer was, was deze heel goed zichtbaar. En dat verklaart waarom zoveel mensen gisteravond het verschijnsel gezien hebben.’
Een vallende ster of meteoor is een stofdeeltje uit de ruimte dat de dampkring van de aarde binnenkomt en daar verbrandt. Het botst dan met hoge snelheid tegen moleculen in de lucht. Hierbij komt op zo’n 100 kilometer hoogte energie vrij in de vorm van een lichtflits die we vanaf de grond kunnen zien als een vallende ster.
There is no video or photos of this sighting however, I have heard of such UFOs over England, back in 2014 an eyewitness recorded over Cambridge, England of several glowing yellow white orbs during the day. I will include the video below. Even without the photos, this is a serious UFO case that needs further investigation. Scott C. Waring
News states:
DID a UFO fly over Taunton Deane last night? Some residents believe so! At around 6.30pm last night (February 14), the object, which looked like a 'big white golf ball', was seen flying over Taunton. Kevin Midwood, who lives in Hillcommon, says he spotted the object flying over his home. He said: "I wonder if anybody else saw the big white glowing ball shape object that went over Taunton last night? Possible UFO sighting? "I live in Hillcommon and my son lives in Wellington, he spotted it too. "It seemed to come over from Taunton at great speed then it just disappeared." James Vasey, Mr Midwood's son, said: "I was walking from my home in Wellington and a bright yellow object shot across the sky at rapid speed. "It wasn't a meteorite or shooting star as it was flying too low and whatever it was disappeared." Did you see anything flying across the sky yesterday evening? Let us know!
Entrance To Underground Alien Base Found In La Rioja, Spain On Feb 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Entrance To Underground Alien Base Found In La Rioja, Spain On Feb 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: February 11, 2019
Location of sighting: Lea, La Rioja, Spain
In Spain some UFO investigators went to look into a hole in the ground that was recently found. The hole led down into a tunnels below the ground. The investigators set up their cameras and that night they were surprised to record some glowing lights in the area, which they believe came from the cave opening. This leads them to believe that this may be an entrance to an underground alien base. That is really possible. If aliens do want to see the light of day, they will have to traverse long underground tunnels but they could of course use their technology to transport to that location, but I think most would go for a walk for the sake of walking and getting some fresh air...seeing the blue sky. Being underground must be rather...closed in and depressing. Yes, I do believe they are 100% correct on this. Its an entrance to an underground base.
Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
It has been too long to explain, you must see it yourselves, we wanted to investigate the area of the alleged extraterrestrial base located in Leza (La Rioja) Spain, but we discovered much more.
WETENSCHAPHet stamcelonderzoek, in-vitrofertilisatie (ivf) en jumbojets zijn volgens Indiase wetenschappers helemaal geen recente ontwikkelingen of uitvindingen. De hindoes zouden duizenden jaren geleden reeds op de hoogte zijn geweest van de recente wetenschappelijke ontwikkelingen.
Tijdens het jaarlijkse Indiase Wetenschapscongres in de deelstaat Punjab, werd er niet gesproken over recente ontwikkelingen in de ruimtevaart of innovatieve technologieën. In plaats daarvan ging het over een vrouw die duizenden jaren geleden honderd kinderen baarde: het bewijs dat de oude Indiase hindoes de hedendaagse voortplantingstechnologieën al onder de knie hadden.
“India was duizenden jaren geleden al bezig met het stamcelonderzoek”, zei Nageshwar Rao, vicerector van de Andhra University in Visakhapatnam, tijdens het congres. Maar omdat stamcelonderzoek en –therapie nog in kinderschoenen staan, is het niet meteen geloofwaardig dat Indiase wetenschappers duizenden jaren geleden al over zulke innovatieve technieken beschikten.
Toch waren de oude Indiërs volgens de vicerector Rao zelfs nog straffer dan dat. Zo beschikten de Indiërs zo’n duizend jaar geleden al over jumbojets en raketten. Verder nog zouden Einstein en Newton de wetten van de zwaartekracht nooit goed begrepen hebben, maar de Indiërs wel.
(Lees verder onder de foto)
AFPIndiase hindoes
Pseudowetenschap
Dergelijke claims zijn een voorbeeld van de religieus geïnspireerde pseudowetenschap, diep geworteld in het hedendaagse hindoenationalisme in India. Sinds het aantreden van minister-president Narendra Modi in 2014 lijkt het zelfs alsof die pseudowetenschap zegeviert.
En terwijl sommige wetenschappers de (lachwekkende) statements spottend navertellen , waarschuwen anderen dat ze een bedreiging vormen voor de wetenschap, het onderwijs en de algemene ontwikkeling in India.
Die bekommernissen lijken terecht, want vorig jaar nog verklaarde de Indiase minister van Hoger Onderwijs Satyapal Singh dat de evolutietheorie van Charles Darwin niet klopt en uit het curriculum van de middelbare scholen geschrapt moet worden.
WETENSCHAPHet stamcelonderzoek, in-vitrofertilisatie (ivf) en jumbojets zijn volgens Indiase wetenschappers helemaal geen recente ontwikkelingen of uitvindingen. De hindoes zouden duizenden jaren geleden reeds op de hoogte zijn geweest van de recente wetenschappelijke ontwikkelingen.
Tijdens het jaarlijkse Indiase Wetenschapscongres in de deelstaat Punjab, werd er niet gesproken over recente ontwikkelingen in de ruimtevaart of innovatieve technologieën. In plaats daarvan ging het over een vrouw die duizenden jaren geleden honderd kinderen baarde: het bewijs dat de oude Indiase hindoes de hedendaagse voortplantingstechnologieën al onder de knie hadden.
“India was duizenden jaren geleden al bezig met het stamcelonderzoek”, zei Nageshwar Rao, vicerector van de Andhra University in Visakhapatnam, tijdens het congres. Maar omdat stamcelonderzoek en –therapie nog in kinderschoenen staan, is het niet meteen geloofwaardig dat Indiase wetenschappers duizenden jaren geleden al over zulke innovatieve technieken beschikten.
Toch waren de oude Indiërs volgens de vicerector Rao zelfs nog straffer dan dat. Zo beschikten de Indiërs zo’n duizend jaar geleden al over jumbojets en raketten. Verder nog zouden Einstein en Newton de wetten van de zwaartekracht nooit goed begrepen hebben, maar de Indiërs wel.
(Lees verder onder de foto)
AFPIndiase hindoes
Pseudowetenschap
Dergelijke claims zijn een voorbeeld van de religieus geïnspireerde pseudowetenschap, diep geworteld in het hedendaagse hindoenationalisme in India. Sinds het aantreden van minister-president Narendra Modi in 2014 lijkt het zelfs alsof die pseudowetenschap zegeviert.
En terwijl sommige wetenschappers de (lachwekkende) statements spottend navertellen , waarschuwen anderen dat ze een bedreiging vormen voor de wetenschap, het onderwijs en de algemene ontwikkeling in India.
Die bekommernissen lijken terecht, want vorig jaar nog verklaarde de Indiase minister van Hoger Onderwijs Satyapal Singh dat de evolutietheorie van Charles Darwin niet klopt en uit het curriculum van de middelbare scholen geschrapt moet worden.
WETENSCHAPNederlandse wetenschappers hebben een speciale camera ontwikkeld waarmee ze op grote afstand het bestaan van levende planten kunnen aantonen. De techniek moet in de toekomst buitenaards leven kunnen opsporen, meldt de Universiteit Leiden.
Het gaat om een camera met speciale lenzen en ontvangers die de draaiing kan meten in licht dat planten reflecteren. De basisidee is dat moleculen waaruit leven is opgebouwd, het invallende licht gedraaid weerkaatsen. “Dit zogeheten circulair gepolariseerde licht verplaatst zich als een soort kurkentrekker en kan met de juiste apparatuur van grote afstand worden waargenomen”, aldus de universiteit.
De onderzoekers werken nu aan een versie van de zogeheten TreePol die geschikt is voor het Internationaal Ruimtestation ISS of voor een Maanlander.
De afgelopen 20 jaar zijn bijna 4.000 exoplaneten ontdekt, planeten die draaien om andere sterren dan onze Zon. Astrobiologen kijken nu vaak of er water, zuurstof en koolstof aanwezig is.
Maar die methode is volgens de Leidse wetenschappers minder nauwkeurig voor de opsporing van leven. “Als TreePol in de toekomst een buitenaards signaal opvangt, dan duidt dat zeer waarschijnlijk op leven.”
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DE ORANGE BOLLEN ZIJN WEER TERUG ( VIDEO )
DE ORANGE BOLLEN ZIJN WEER TERUG ( VIDEO )
Ongeveer zes jaar geleden schreven wij een aantal artikelen over vreemde oranje bollen in de lucht die zich toen overal vertoonden, ook in ons land.
Daarna werd het een aantal jaren wat rustiger, maar ze zijn nooit weg geweest en nu komen er opnieuw meldingen van oranje bollen in de lucht.
Al jarenlang breken wij ons het hoofd over de merkwaardige oranje of soms ook witte bollen die door mensen overal ter wereld worden waargenomen. Ze maken geen geluid, lijken een soort verkenners te zijn en helemaal niemand heeft tot nu toe een logische verklaring kunnen bedenken voor dit soort objecten.
Nu zijn ze weer terug:
Er komen meldingen vanuit diverse plaatsen in Amerika waar men deze oranje bollen in de lucht ziet. In de video die hierna volgt zie je een mooie opname die is gemaakt op 9 februari in een plaats die Stacy heet in de Amerikaanse staat Californië.
De opname is gemaakt door een vrouw die thuis komt aanrijden en het vreemde verschijnsel in de lucht waarneemt. Het oranje object blijft enige tijd rond het huis hangen en verdwijnt dan plotseling recht de lucht in.
Daarnaast zijn er meldingen uit andere plaatsen waar men ook deze vreemde bollen heeft gezien. In de meeste gevallen zijn er ook meer dan één te zien en vaak worden ze in een soort formatie waargenomen.
Door diverse mensen worden de oranje bollen omschreven als energiebollen, omdat ze als het ware pulseren wanneer je wat verder inzoomt.
"Omstreeks 23.15-23.30 uur gisteravond, thuis, maandag 8 juli, was ik buiten een luchtje aan het scheppen. Naar de lucht kijkend zag ik een onverklaarbaar verschijnsel. Iets wat ik nog nooit eerder zo heb meegemaakt. Ik heb op het punt gestaan om de buren er bij te halen, maar vond het te laat om ze nog te storen.
Het betrof een serie helder verlichte objecten, constant licht, kleur geel-oranje, die zich met grote snelheid in een baan van Noord naar Zuid bewogen. Ik schat enkele tientallen stuks.
Ze bewogen zich met een constante snelheid in een strak formatieverband, dat onderweg qua verband en snelheid niet waarneembaar veranderde. De onderlinge afstand was naar ik schat een tot een paar honderd meter, de hoogte schat ik op 1 tot 2 km. De formatie was niet in lijn maar zat binnen een baan van enkele honderden meters. De eerste objecten waren al aan de Zuidelijke kant uit zicht verdwenen, terwijl nieuwe nog enige tijd vanaf de Noordkant in zicht kwamen.
Het was donker en een heldere, onbewolkte hemel. Het geheel voltrok zich in absolute stilte. Geen enkel motorgeluid was te horen. Het fenomeen duurde minuten lang.
Ik heb geen foto's genomen omdat de geloofwaardigheid ervan even discutabel is als mijn verhaal. Bovendien hechtte ik meer aan de analyse er naar kijkend dan aan de fotografische opname. Gezien de duisternis was er buiten het lichtverschijnsel eigenlijk niets te zien. De doorsnee van de lichtvlek per object was optisch 2-3 centimeter, wat op die hoogte een object van een aantal meters in doorsnede zou moeten betreffen. Een fenomeen als afgeleide van laserbeams lijkt me onmogelijk.
Ik heb verder verschillende mogelijkheden figuurlijk tegen het licht gehouden, maar kan er geen sluitende verklaring voor vinden. Wat er als optie over blijft is raadselachtig. Intussen heb ik de politie gebeld om te kijken of er andere meldingen waren. Bovendien heb ik het Radarcentrum in Nieuw Millingen van de Luchtmacht, dat in het kader van luchtverdediging 7 dagen per week, 24 uur per dag het NL luchtruim bewaakt, gebeld. In beide gevallen was er geen bevestiging van waarnemingen of meldingen hunnerzijds".
En nu we het toch over getuigenverklaringen hebben, hierna volgt er één van een lezer (dank!) naar aanleiding van het artikel dat wij eerder deze week schreven over de Engelse nachtwaker die 40 jaar geleden een mooie opname wist te maken van een sigaarvormige ufo boven een Engelse stad.
Naar aanleiding van dit bericht op jullie site vind ik het noodzakelijk om ook mijn enige alles overtuigende waarneming van een UFO te melden.
Ook in mijn geval is het al enige tijd geleden, ik schat een jaar of 12. Ik stond buiten bij mijn sportvereniging te roken- ik ben inmiddels gestopt :)- en vanuit mijn positie zag ik de vliegtuigen die boven Den Haag hun landing op Schiphol inzetten, duidelijk op hun aanvliegroute. Bij druk verkeer en bij een bepaalde windrichting volgen deze vliegtuigen dezelfde route met een interval van een slechts een aantal minuten.
Het was een heldere avond en donker. Wanneer de vliegtuigen gaan landen wordt het landingslicht aangezet en verschijnen de vliegtuigen zichtbaar boven het Westland als een enkel wit/geel licht. Pas als ze naderen boven Den Haag worden ook de rood en groen knipperende navigatielichten met het blote oog zichtbaar. Als verstokte roker had ik dit al vele malen gezien.
Op de bewuste avond viel mij op dat een “vliegtuig” niet alleen van de gebruikelijk route afweek, maar dat ook het landingslicht feller en witter van kleur was. Ik volgde het licht en verbaasde mij over het feit dat hoewel het bijna boven mij was, de navigatielichten ontbraken. Gek genoeg verbaasde mij het niet dat het licht plotseling tot stilstand kwam precies op een plaats waarmee het mijn zicht op een ster of planeet- ik heb hier geen verstand van- maar die tevoren duidelijk zichtbaar was, blokkeerde.
De felheid en kleur van deze ster of planeet was vergelijkbaar met die van het “vliegtuig”. Na enkele seconden bewegingloos te hebben gehangen, schoot het in een lichtflits met een ongekend hoge snelheid recht omhoog waarna het in een fractie van een seconde in een, wat ik niet anders kan omschrijven dan een soort van naflits, in het heelal verdween.
Ook de ster of planeet was verdwenen waardoor ik op hetzelfde moment concludeerde dat ze op één af andere manier waren samengevoegd. Pas na deze gebeurtenis ben ik me gaan verdiepen in vliegtuigen en UFO's en leerde zodoende van landings- en navigatielichten, aanvliegroutes enz.
Ook speurde ik het internet af naar gelijksoortige meldingen. De beste die hiermee overeenkomt en waar beeldmateriaal van is, bleek de volgende:
Hierbij merk ik op dat bij mijn waarneming het licht niet daalde en nog sneller wegschoot. De reden waarom ik dit pas nu deel, heeft te maken met het gegeven dat de waarnemer in het bovengenoemde artikel spreekt over het gevoel dat hem is bijgebleven dat als hij en ik (wij gewone burgers) dit soort waarnemingen doen, de overheid dit zeker doet en het kennelijk niet nodig vindt om dit te openbaren of redenen heeft dit te verbergen.
Earlier this month, I wrote about an Indiana man’svery mothman Christmas, in which he saw a large flying humanoid near the Prairie Creek reservoir. Like many other big-name paranormal entities—bigfoot, fairies, the greys—where there’s mothman, there’s a heavy dose of high strangeness with him. After the recent mothman reports began circulating, other witnesses have come forward with their experiences in the Great Lakes region, including a man who has allegedly observed glowing orbs of light near the Prairie Creek reservoir for decades.
The witness contacted the Singluar Fortean Society to relate his experience. According to the 51-year-old man, his first experience with the mysterious orbs was in 1981 when he was 12:
“It was a clear summer night sky. I saw an orange/amber colored ball of light about 20 feet above the trees. It started towards me slowly so I ran in and got my mom, when we came back out it was over our trees. The actual size is hard to say but I’d guess three feet across. It was totally silent, and it moved off to the west out of sight behind the trees.”
Since the, the witness says, he has observed this phenomenon approximately 12 times since 1981. The balls of light vary in colors, sometimes appearing as orange and sometimes as white. They also appear to have an intelligence behind them, the man says, as they change color, move around, and seem to react to observers.
Or maybe it’s Indiana’s newest disco sensation lighting up the dance floor: Mothman and the Orbs.
An alleged intelligence becomes sort of a sticky wicket, as evidenced by the man’s most recent experience with the orbs in the summer of 2016:
“I was driving east coming home at night, when I spotted an orb that was orange, and it seemed like a second one right next to it was changing back and forth from red to orange and dimming to dark and back. So I got to my road turning south and I came to a stop to watch. The car window was down, so I fumbled with my phone to hit record…snap, gone.”
It’s the old joke: what if bigfoot is just blurry? The problem is that a lot of these experiences do suggest an intelligence behind them, and an intelligence—especially an intelligence with a trickster inclination—would certainly make it as difficult as possible to take a picture of it. But it also becomes an easy out when you’re just making stuff up. Which, again, fits the M.O. of a trickster intelligence. As I said, a sticky wicket.
If we are to believe—or at least entertain—this witness however, it’s another piece of a large and unbelievably complex phenomenon. According to the Singular Fortean Society, these encounters occurred near a one-acre-large, 2,000-year-old Native American burial ground, on a direct line with Prairie Creek reservoir and Mounds State Park to the west, another ancient ceremonial site with legends of trickster spirits called Pukwudgies.
Most times someone calls anything an Indian burial ground, I can’t roll my eyes hard enough. Nine times out of ten, it’s a pile of rocks left by a 19th century farmer who found he had more than he needed for his stone wall. But there are actual Native American burial and ceremonial grounds. Mounds state park is one of them. However, lines are easy to draw.
These phenomena seem to be necessarily proof proofed. Yet some of the strangeness lies in how similarly the phenomena tend to defy documentation. That similar tendency can be seen as evidence for its existence, or evidence or its nonexistence. Which could be seen as by design. Or it could be seen as an interesting psychological phenomenon. It spirals infinitely. Which could be seen as….nope, that way lies madness.
Maybe the best we can hope for is a continued collection of these stories, both genuine and otherwise, and a more complete (but never finished) picture of our strange world.
Mysterious Balls of Light Reported Near Recent Indiana Mothman Sightings Sequoyah Kennedy February 16, 2019 FACEBOOK TWITTER GOOGLE+ Earlier this month, I wrote about an Indiana man’s very mothman Christmas, in which he saw a large flying humano
Mysterious Balls of Light Reported Near Recent Indiana Mothman Sightings
Earlier this month, I wrote about an Indiana man’svery mothman Christmas, in which he saw a large flying humanoid near the Prairie Creek reservoir. Like many other big-name paranormal entities—bigfoot, fairies, the greys—where there’s mothman, there’s a heavy dose of high strangeness with him. After the recent mothman reports began circulating, other witnesses have come forward with their experiences in the Great Lakes region, including a man who has allegedly observed glowing orbs of light near the Prairie Creek reservoir for decades.
The witness contacted the Singluar Fortean Society to relatehis experience. According to the 51-year-old man, his first experience with the mysterious orbs was in 1981 when he was 12:
“It was a clear summer night sky. I saw an orange/amber colored ball of light about 20 feet above the trees. It started towards me slowly so I ran in and got my mom, when we came back out it was over our trees. The actual size is hard to say but I’d guess three feet across. It was totally silent, and it moved off to the west out of sight behind the trees.”
Since the, the witness says, he has observed this phenomenon approximately 12 times since 1981. The balls of light vary in colors, sometimes appearing as orange and sometimes as white. They also appear to have an intelligence behind them, the man says, as they change color, move around, and seem to react to observers.
Or maybe it’s Indiana’s newest disco sensation lighting up the dance floor: Mothman and the Orbs.
An alleged intelligence becomes sort of a sticky wicket, as evidenced by the man’s most recent experience with the orbs in the summer of 2016:
“I was driving east coming home at night, when I spotted an orb that was orange, and it seemed like a second one right next to it was changing back and forth from red to orange and dimming to dark and back. So I got to my road turning south and I came to a stop to watch. The car window was down, so I fumbled with my phone to hit record…snap, gone.”
It’s the old joke: what if bigfoot is just blurry? The problem is that a lot of these experiences do suggest an intelligence behind them, and an intelligence—especially anintelligence with a trickster inclination—would certainly make it as difficult as possible to take a picture of it. But it also becomes an easy out when you’re just making stuff up. Which, again, fits the M.O. of a trickster intelligence. As I said, a sticky wicket.
If we are to believe—or at least entertain—this witness however, it’s another piece of a large and unbelievably complex phenomenon. According to the Singular Fortean Society, these encounters occurred near a one-acre-large, 2,000-year-old Native American burial ground, on a direct line with Prairie Creek reservoir and Mounds State Park to the west, another ancient ceremonial site withlegends of trickster spiritscalled Pukwudgies.
Most times someone calls anything an Indian burial ground, I can’t roll my eyes hard enough. Nine times out of ten, it’s a pile of rocks left by a 19th century farmer who found he had more than he needed for his stone wall. But there are actual Native American burial and ceremonial grounds. Mounds state park is one of them. However, lines are easy to draw.
These phenomena seem to be necessarily proof proofed. Yet some of the strangeness lies in how similarly the phenomena tend to defy documentation. That similar tendency can be seen as evidence for its existence, or evidence or its nonexistence. Which could be seen as by design. Or it could be seen as an interesting psychological phenomenon. It spirals infinitely. Which could be seen as….nope, that way lies madness.
Maybe the best we can hope for is a continued collection of these stories, both genuine and otherwise, and a more complete (but never finished) picture of our strange world.
It’s not every day that a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist says he got to take a ride on a flying saucer… but that’s precisely what happened to Hal Boyle, a syndicated columnist who wrote articles that appeared in more than 700 newspapers during World War II.
Well, that’s sort of what happened, but we’ll get to all that.
A journalist who, during his three-decade tenure with the Associated Press wrote more than 7,500 columns, Boyle’s career began in Kansas City in 1928 as a copy boy with the AP Bureau. He was serious enough to pursue his journalistic talent, and enrolled at the Junior College of Kansas City, later heading on to the University of Missouri, where he completed his studies in journalism. Shortly thereafter, Boyle began working for the Associated Press out of Saint Louis, and then transferred to New York in 1936.
Boyle continued his correspondence throughout the Second World War, for which he received his Pulitzer Prize in May 1945. It was not the last award he would receive for his reporting: Boyle went on to receive the Omar Bradley Award for his coverage of the Korean War.
Hal Boyle in a press photo during the war years.
However, it was shortly after World War II that the “flying saucer” craze erupted onto the American scene, with Kenneth Arnold’s now-legendary report of seeing a group of objects dodging and weaving between mountain peaks near Mount Rainier in June of that year.
A story as juicy as this was hardly anything Boyle could resist.
Tuesday, July 8, 1947, was an important day in the history of flying saucers, to say the least. That morning, the mysterious discs had been front page news in a number of American papers, although one particular story–that of an alleged saucer wreckage recovery in New Mexico that appeared in the Roswell Daily Record–would ultimately stand out among them.
However, that same day the Associated Press carried another story that, in many ways, even rivaled the curiosity of the Roswell story. It was now Hal Boyle who was reporting on the saucers, and not just sounding off about them in his syndicated column. Having reportedly been missing for two days, Boyle now claimed he had been aboard one of these remarkable aircraft.
“Our Hal Boyle, returning from a two-day absence, insists he is the first man to come back alive from a trip on a ‘flying saucer’,” an Editor’s Note read at the beginning of Boyle’s regularly syndicated column.
Here, it would only do Boyle’s story justice to hear how it all went down in his own words:
“Here I am in the middle of [a flying saucer], zooming around the American landscape like a boomerang. These things aren’t discs or saucers at all. They’re built like a cowboy hat seven-stories tall.
“The reason you folks down below have been disagreeing about the size is you haven’t seen the whole thing. All you have seen is the reflection of the sides where patches of the infra-invisible paint were burned off these huge space ships as they passed too close to the sun on their way here from Mars.
“Yes. Mars! I am a prisoner aboard a 1947 model “flying saucer” from another planet.”
Boyle’s fantastical adventure began in, of all places, the New York Public Library (was this a possible nod to Forteans in his readership? After all, this was the very same locale where Charles Hoy Fort spent his long hours looking for clippings that smacked the face of modern science, as he saw it, offering plausible proof of anomalies in our midst).
In another of Boyle’s dispatches, he detailed just how it came to pass that he would end up aboard a flying saucer:
I left the New York Public Library at dusk the other day and dropped into a quiet bar to wash down a warm vitamin pill with a cold bottle of beer.
Finishing it, I turned to a silent figure sitting next me—the only other customer at the bar—and all but fainted. I saw a thing some eight feet tall, covered with thick green hair, with one eye a hard-boiled egg in the center of his forehead, and no visible mouth at all. He was naked, his hands were three-clawed and big enough for a Brooklyn center fielder.
Up until this point, it still seems plausible at least that Boyle had merely run into a New York regular… albeit one who had perhaps done a few extra laps in the Hudson, and bathed in the wastewater microbes dwelling there. However, what transpires next removes all doubt that Boyle’s new acquaintance was of the extraterrestrial variety:
The Green man’s yolk – yellow eye burned menacing red. One hand twisted one of a series of knobs on his chest marked “slang, American,” and noiseless words drifted to me:
“Scram, Mac. But take along some beer. You’re going on a long ride.”
Then I found myself lifted and tossed sprawling. There was the sound of a door closing and a sense of lifting rapidly into space. I scrambled to my feet and looked out the window—its infra-invisible paint is only invisible when you look at it from the outside. Manhattan was falling away beneath us like a toy town. “Well, how do you like your first ride in a flying saucer, Orson Welles?” leered the green man. “You’re on the way to a place where there are more Martians than there ever were in New Jersey.”
“You may take his story or leave it,” Boyle’s editors wrote of his alleged ordeal. “But we are turning down his expense account for $2,880 — which is what five cents a mile comes to after 48 hours in his 1,200-mile-an-hour conveyance.”
Whether you’re a hopeful skeptic or a doubter among believers, it would be awfully hard not to see the humor in a yarn of this magnitude.
Of course, while Boyle was merely poking fun at the flying saucer stories, this no doubt was met with distaste by the hopeful, early UFOlogists trying to see past the novelty of these reports, and discern whether a genuine mystery might have been present. However, there are a few interesting takeaways from our look at Boyle’s once famous, and now nearly-forgotten flying saucer “hoax” (I use quotes here since, while Boyle’s story was not true, he no doubt expected his readership would know this, and hence had not intended to mislead anyone).
Of course, there is some debate as to when, precisely, the flying saucers (which, being in the pre-Blue Book era, were not yet called UFOs at this time) began to be almost explicitly associated with the idea of extraterrestrials. Many suggest that this wasn’t truly the case until after publication of a lengthy article by Donald Keyhoe in True Magazine in 1950, where he laid out the case that an extraterrestrial source seemed most likely.
However, as with Boyle’s saucer “hoax,” we see that even before the public had time to speculate about what had (or hadn’t) happened at Roswell, New Mexico, in early July, people were insinuating that the occupants might be extraterrestrials right off the bat. In fact, even prior to Boyle’s spoof column, a June 30th, 1947 UPI article made reference to a silver-ball-shaped aircraft observed over Lexington, Kentucky, as being “Martian-like.” Indeed, it seems that insinuations about extraterrestrials were indeed taking off with the saucers almost in tandem with Arnold’s initial report, and subsequent reports of similar things in the days that followed.
Legendary newspaperman though he was, many today are probably unaware of Hal Boyle, apart from those still alive who may have read his columns decades ago (many of which were later anthologized and published as books). In his prime, however, Boyle was one of the most prolific and revered writers in American journalism, which makes it all the more interesting that he was, essentially, also one of the very first major media personalities to poke fun at UFOs, and even speculate about their “extraterrestrial” nature, in the early days of the 1947 saucer craze.
Over the years I have written a number of books on the Men in Black phenomenon. They include The Real Men in Black, On the Trail of the Saucer Spies, and The Black Diary. If there’s one thing we can say about the MIB in the real world, it’s that they are nothing like their Hollywood counterparts. I am, of course, talking about Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. And, Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson, who will be starring in this year’sMen in Black: International movie. The Men in Black of the movies are portrayed as agents of a secret group that defends the world from hostile aliens. As for the MIB of Ufology, well, they are quite another thing altogether. People describe them as looking pale, emaciated, sometimes extremely tall and with long, spidery fingers. Bizarrely, they are occasionally described as wearing bad wings and even make-up. Their goal: to silence those who dare to dig into the UFO subject, whether witnesses to UFO activity or researchers of the phenomenon. Then there’s the matter of who or what the MIB really are.
Ironically, the least likely explanation for the presence of the Men in Black is that they are “secret agents” of the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon or…well…the list goes on. Government people they most definitely are not. There are multiple different theories to try and understand what the MIB are and who (or what) they represent. Some researchers have suggested they are time-travelers from a distant future. Others maintain they have demonic origins. There is also the possibility that the Men in Black are biological robots, dispatched to silence those who get too close to the ufological truth. There’s another scenario that may explain a significant part of the phenomenon. It’s a theory that Thomas E. Bearden detailed in his 1980 book, Excalibur Briefing.
In his book, Bearden focused deeply and extensively on the matter of Tulpas, about which Tulpa.info state the following: “A tulpa is an entity created in the mind, acting independently of, and parallel to your own consciousness. They are able to think, and have their own free will, emotions, and memories. In short, a tulpa is like a sentient person living in your head, separate from you. It’s currently unproven whether or not tulpas are truly sentient, but in this community, we treat them as such. It takes time for a tulpa to develop a convincing and complex personality; as they grow older, your attention and their life experiences will shape them into a person with their own hopes, dreams and beliefs.”
Psychonaut Wiki provide the following: “Tulpas are seemingly sentient, autonomous mental companions subjectively experienced by the psychonaut as a separate being with their own agency, emotions, preferences, thoughts, and character. They can be likened to a separate mental consciousness, existing alongside the psychonaut. Tulpas can be considered as a type of autonomous entity distinguished by their persistence and continuity over time.”
All of which brings us back to Tom Bearden. In Excalibur Briefing, he states this: “The kindling of virtual state tulpoidal forms into the zeroth bioframe of a physical reality (materialization) can result in the materialization of living, breathing, functioning forms. There is essentially no limit on the format that may be obtained. Sasquatch, Nessie, fairies, demons, angels, mothmen, skunkmen, yeti, kangaroos, etc. are just a small sampling.” On this same matter of Tulpas, Bearden addresses the MIB in this fashion. He says: “The men-in-black syndrome is based on our own unconscious tuning; since each of us has some unpleasantness in the unconscious, sometimes the tuned-in-men-in-black can be very nasty indeed.”
The question of who built Stonehenge and for what purpose remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in archaeology. Researchers continue to study the mysterious ancient megalith and publish sometimes contradictory claims about the structures. Were the stones brought from far away using a sophisticated transportation system, or were the stones already in place? Was Stonehenge a party spot used for orgies and fertility rituals, or could it have been the site of human sacrifices?
So many questions, and unfortunately, despite the many studies conducted on the stones, we’re not too closer to answering any of them than we were decades ago. However, a new study published this week may help place Stonehenge in context with other known ancient structures and may offer a clue as to what inspired the mysterious stone monument. The latest new theory to be put forward about Stonehenge and other ancient megaliths claims that an unknown ancient culture from northwest France may have started building these structures over 7,000 years ago and inspired the entire practice of building these stones throughout Europe.
The new “Out-of-France” theory was developed by Bettina Schulz Paulsson of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden after a 10-year study of monument sites throughout Europe. Paulsson and her colleagues conducted exhaustive radiocarbon dating of over 2,000 of these structures and found that they appeared to have been built in three successive phases, the first of which seems to have originated in France.
According to Paulsson’s new publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, the practice of building stone megalithic monuments likely spread along sea routes throughout the Mediterranean and Atlantic coast of Europe. Paulsson argues that the gateway-like construction of these monuments along with their chronological distribution seems to imply that these structures were involved in passage grave burial rites:
Their distribution emphasizes the maritime linkage of these societies and a diffusion of the passage grave tradition along the seaway. The passage graves mark a radical change of burial rites, along with other economic and social changes in Europe. […] These are exceptional grave forms for this period in their respective regions, at a time when subterranean cists, pit burials and hypogea (dug-out subterranean burial chambers) were still the most common burial rites.
If this theory is confirmed with further research, Paulsson notes that it could radically change our conception of Stonehenge and other megaliths:
The megalithic movements must have been powerful to spread with such rapidity at the different phases, and the maritime skills, knowledge, and technology of these societies must have been much more developed than hitherto presumed.
Were Stonehenge and other monuments used as elaborate grave sites which reflected the maritime heritage of their creators? How did the knowledge of megalith construction spread so rapidly throughout Europe? Like all things Stonehenge, we’ll likely never know for sure. Hard data like radiocarbon dates are one thing, but trying to understand the meaning of ancient monuments from our modern perspective will always be problematic. How can we possibly hope to understand what ancient people were thinking from studying a pile of rocks? Ultimately, any theories about Stonehenge will reflect our thinking about the monument, not necessarily its creators’.
Cube UFO Shaped Object Exits Earths Sun. February 9, 2019
Cube UFO Shaped Object Exits Earths Sun. February 9, 2019
Date of sighting: February 9, 2019
Location of sighting: Earths Sun
Source: NASA
Now another cube was caught exiting our sun last week. I say exit, because as you see from the photo gif below...there is a big ejection of solar material shooting out the the sun that is tightly focused on the other end. Look carefully and you will see a cube inside the material coming out of the sun. The cube is not on top of the material, but rather...inside of it. You can only see about 80% of the cube and the other 20% is under the solar material. That is evidence that this UFO cube is a 3D object and not a glitch in the photo. This UFO has been seen entering and exiting our sun, sometimes 100% visible and other times its 3D and blended into the solar surface of the sun as it entered or exited. Its not a rare occurrence either. It happens several times a week or more. Its hard to believe NASA has managed to hide such information about giant alien ships using our sun...and yet, they pull it off. At a size of several times bigger than earth, the only reason its managed to stay a secret so long is that its just so far away from Earth.
A glaciologist has discovered a possible 2nd impact crater buried under more than a mile of ice in northwest Greenland.
Scientists think that a newly-discovered bowl-shaped feature buried under more than a mile of ice in northwest Greenland might be another impact crater.
This followsthe finding, announced in November 2018, of a 19-mile (30.5-km) wide crater beneath Hiawatha Glacier – the first meteorite impact crater ever discovered under Earth’s ice sheets.
Though the newly found impact sites in northwest Greenland are only 114 miles (183.4 km) apart, at present they do not appear to have formed at the same time.
If the second crater, which has a width of over 22 miles (35.4 km), is ultimately confirmed as the result of a meteorite impact, it will be the 22nd largest impact crater found on Earth.
Joe MacGregor is a glaciologist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who participated in both findings. MacGregor reported the discovery of this second possible crater in Geophysical Research Letters on February 11, 2019. He told NBC News:
Once we knew from Hiawatha that there could be craters under ice sheets, it was quite easy to find the next one using an ensemble of publicly available NASA data.
Before the discovery of the Hiawatha impact crater, scientists generally assumed that most evidence of past impacts in Greenland and Antarctica would have been wiped away by unrelenting erosion by the overlying ice.
Following the finding of that first crater, MacGregor checked topographic maps of the rock beneath Greenland’s ice for signs of other craters. Using satellite imagery of the ice surface, he noticed a circular pattern some 114 miles (183.4 km) to the southeast of Hiawatha Glacier. He said:
I began asking myself ‘Is this another impact crater? Do the underlying data support that idea?’ Helping identify one large impact crater beneath the ice was already very exciting, but now it looked like there could be two of them.
To confirm his suspicion, MacGregor studied the raw radar images that are used to map the topography of the bedrock beneath the ice. What he saw under the ice were several distinctive features of a complex impact crater: a flat, bowl-shaped depression in the bedrock that was surrounded by an elevated rim and centrally located peaks, which form when the crater floor equilibrates (bounces back up) post-impact. Though the structure isn’t as clearly circular as the Hiawatha crater, MacGregor estimated the second crater’s diameter at 22.7 miles (36.5 km). MacGregor said:
The only other circular structure that might approach this size would be a collapsed volcanic caldera. But the areas of known volcanic activity in Greenland are several hundred miles away.
By analyzing ice layers and rates of erosion, the researchers suggest that although the two newly-found impact craters in northwest Greenland are only 114 miles (183.4 km) apart, they were not formed at the same time. Read more here about how the team made this determination. MacGregor said:
On the whole, the evidence we’ve assembled indicates that this new structure is very likely an impact crater, but presently it looks unlikely to be a twin with Hiawatha.
The structures come in various shapes and sizes, including one that curves off into the horizon (shown here). Credit: Copyright Nick Brooks and Joanne Clarke
Archaeologists Are Not Sure What Many of Them Were Used For
by Owen Jarus Live Science Contributor
Hundreds of stone structures dating back thousands of years have been discovered in the Western Sahara, a territory in Africa little explored by archaeologists.
The structures seem to come in all sizes and shapes, and archaeologists aren’t sure what many of then were used for or when they were created, archaeologists report in the book “The Archaeology of Western Sahara: A Synthesis of Fieldwork, 2002 to 2009” (Oxbow Books, 2018).
About 75 percent of the Western Saharan territory, including most of the coastline, is controlled by Morocco, while 25 percent is controlled by the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. Before 1991, the two governments were in a state of war. [See Photos of the Stone Structures in Western Sahara]
Between 2002 and 2009, archaeologists worked in the field surveying the landscape and doing a small amount of excavationin the part of Western Sahara that is controlled by the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. They also investigated satellite images on Google Earth, they wrote in the book.
“Due to its history of conflict, detailed archaeological and palaeoenvironmental research in Western Sahara has been extremely limited,” wrote Joanne Clarke, a senior lecturer at the University of East Anglia, and Nick Brooks, an independent researcher.
“The archaeological map of Western Sahara remains literally and figuratively almost blank as far as the wider international archaeological research community is concerned, particularly away from the Atlantic coast,” wrote Clarke and Brooks, noting that people living in the area know of the stone structures, and some work has been done by Spanish researchers on rock art in Western Sahara.
Mysterious structures
The stone structures are designed in a wide variety of ways. Some are shaped like crescents, others form circles, some are in straight lines, some in rectangular shapes that look like a platform; some structures consist of rocks that have been piled up into a heap. And some of the structures use a combination of these designs. For instance, one structure has a mix of straight lines, stone circles, a platform and rock piles that altogether form a complex about 2,066 feet (630 meters) long, the archaeologists noted in the book.
Though the archaeologists are unsure of the purpose of many of the structures, they said some of them may mark the location of graves. Little excavation has been done on the structures, and archaeologists have found few artifacts that can be dated using a radiocarbon method. Among the few excavated sites are two “tumuli” (heaps of rock) that contain human burials dating back around 1,500 years.
Research suggests that Western Sahara was once a wetter place that could sustain more animal life than it does today. Archaeologists documented rock art showing images of cattle, giraffe, oryx and Barbary sheep while environmental researchers found evidence for lakes and other water sources that dried up thousands of years ago.
Security problems
At present, security problems in the region mean that fieldwork has stopped, Clarke and Brooks told Live Science. The terrorist group al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb operates in the desert regions near Western Sahara, and in 2013 they kidnapped two Spanish aid workers at a refugee camp in Tindouf, Algeria, just across the border from Western Sahara.
While the Sahrawi people and Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic strongly oppose the terrorist group, it’s extremely difficult for authorities to effectively patrol the vast desert areas where the stone structures are located, Clarke and Brooks said. This means archaeologists can’t work there safely right now. This problem is not unique to Western Sahara, as the security risks posed by terrorist and extremist groups in the region mean that archaeologists can’t work in much of North Africa right now, they said.
Cheetahs are the fastest animals on land, and they owe their speed in part to thedesign of their skeletons— the tibia and fibula in their legs are fused, helping them maintain stability while sprinting after prey.
However, this unique characteristic also prevents cheetahs from being effective climbers like many other cats. If it could somehow separate its leg bones at will, the animal would be far more formidable.
Alas, the cheetah is stuck with the skeleton evolution gave it. But a new robot out of Colorado State University (CSU) doesn’t suffer from the same limitation. It can melt and solidify its bones on the fly — changing its skeleton to best suit whatever task it currently faces.
Mighty Morphing Robo Joints
In a new paper published in the journal IEEE Robotics & Automation Letters, the CSU team describes how it gave its robot the ability to adapt to different challenges by equipping it with “shape morphing joints.”
Each of these joints starts out rigid, but when heated up with electricity, it becomes pliable within about 10 seconds. Stop the flow of electricity, and the joint once again becomes rigid.
In a video, the researchers demonstrate how their robot can use its SMJs to lower itself enough to slink below an obstacle it would otherwise hit.
Next Steps
The CSU team plans to work on building a robot capable of more than just one type of locomotion next — a bot that can both swim and walk, for example, or one that can walk and fly. However, it already sees a number of potential uses for its technology as is.
“Our morphing technique is ideal for robots that are small but need to perform different tasks or adapt to different environments” researcher Jianguo Zhao toldIEEE Spectrum. “Those robots can be used for a wide range of applications including environmental monitoring, military surveillance, as well as search and rescue in disaster areas.”
The latest episode ofProject Blue Bookreturns to the possibility that some UFOs may be alien spacecraft, although it seems the U.S. Air Force is convinced its the Russians. Either way, Hynek decides to team up with the person he trusts the most to figure it out, his wife, Mimi.
This episode starts with military personnel setting up a fake neighborhood setting in the Nevada desert. It is an area used for testing nuclear bombs. Suddenly, an alarm blasts and a voice begins a countdown for launch. This strikes terror into the hearts of the men, and they scramble to get out of there. Luckily, when the clock hits zero nothing happens. In the control room, the technicians don’t know why the launch sequence began. As the men at the test site get on their knees and pray, strange green lights are seen zipping around the sky. We are left believing these “green fireballs” must have had something to do with the mishap.
Back home, Hynek is working hard on a camera system that will track motion in the sky so he can prove the green fireballs are meteorites. Fuller’s death still frazzles him. Mimi is concerned about him working so hard and not spending time with the family. When she presses him on it, he yells at her that he cannot share with her what he's working on and that what he is doing is important. Before he can adequately apologize for yelling, he has to leave to Nevada with Quinn to investigate the green fireballs using his new system.
Meanwhile, Mimi is left concerned about Hynek’s work with Project Blue Book. Her friend Susie (the Russian spy), suggests Mimi has the right to look through her husband's papers. They go to Hynek’s den, and Susie happens to find a set of keys. They use them to get into a locked box that has a journal in it. It is Hynek’s Project Blue Book journal. Mimi discovers Hyenk saw Fuller commit suicide and had tried to stop him.
In Nevada, Hyenk and Quinn see the light and Hynek eventually does catch them on his camera equipment. It also turns out Hynek had gone over General Harding and Valentine’s heads and got approval for his camera system from the secretary of defense. Harding and Valentine tell Quinn they did not approve Hynek’s request because the green fireballs are advanced Russian technology used to spy on American nuclear testing. They do not want the public to know about this.
Hynek runs into the man in black again after he has visions of Fuller and gets confused and dizzy. It is not the first time this has happened. Hynek asks the man in black why he is there and is told Hynek sees him when he needs to and vice versa. Later, while meeting in a church, the man in black gives Hynek a set of keys.
Hynek then goes to Valentine and Harding, who are not happy he went around them and hands them a report concluding that the green fireballs are just meteorites. They are satisfied with the report, but Harding threatens Hynek he should never go over their heads again. While talking with the man in black, Hynek admitted the green fireballs do not appear to be meteorites. He speculates they could be advanced human technology, but feels they are too advanced for that.
After meeting with the generals, Hynek unlocks the gate to a secured area of the Nevada base. He goes down into a warehouse, reminiscent of the one at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. He finds a row of small boxes, similar to a safe deposit box and opens one with another key. Inside is an alien looking artifact. It looks kind of like a blocky wand. Back home, he shows it to Mimi and tells her he is going to share everything with her from now on and that they will work together.
What I like about the way the series handles the UFO phenomenon is that it offers up several possibilities. Although it is very loosely based on real Project Blue Book cases, it keeps the audience guessing. Valentine and Harding seem to believe the Russians are to blame for most UFO incidents, even the green fireballs. However, in this episode we find Hynek moving closer to the idea it might be more complicated than that. It is also hinted that Hynek may be a victim of mind control. The show does keep me wanting to see more, and apparently, I am not the only one. History recently announced Project Blue Book is getting a second season.
There are some great real UFO cases referenced in this episode. The green fireballs were a real phenomenon occurring in the southwest in 1950, especially New Mexico. They were seen so often that the U.S. Air Force set up a special study to investigate them called Project Twinkle. The conclusion to the investigation was that the fireballs were misidentifications of human-made objects, meteorites or other natural phenomena. However, not everyone agreed.
In 1952, Life Magazine featured a story on UFOs that gained a lot of attention. In fact, in his book, Project Blue Book chief Edward Ruppelt claims the article gained so much attention that it helped influence the creation of Project Blue Book. The article featured cases from previous UFO investigations, including Project Sign, which was often referred to as Project Saucer by the media. It also included information about Project Twinkle.
One of the experts quoted in the article was Dr. Lincoln La Paz, who Life described as a “mathematician, astronomer and director of the Institute of Meteoritics at the University of New Mexico.” He investigated the green fireballs.
“[Dr. LaPaz] points out that normal fireballs do not appear green, they fall in the trajectory forced on them by gravity, are generally noisy as a freight train, and leave meteorites where they hit,” according to Life. “The green New Mexican species does none of these things. Neither do the green fireballs appear to be electrostatic phenomena—they move too regularly and too fast.”
Although the Life article only mentions La Paz in the section regarding the green fireballs, what readers did not know was La Paz, and his family witnessed another UFO sighting referenced in the article. The article reviews several UFO incidents and “Incident 2” was witnessed by “one of the U.S.'s top astronomers.”
This astronomer, who turned out to be La Paz, chose to remain anonymous regarding the sighting. He described what he saw as a “sharp and firm regular outline, namely one of a smooth elliptical character much harder and sharper than the edges of the cloudlets... The hue of the luminous object was somewhat less white than the light of Jupiter in a dark sky, not aluminum or silver-colored... The object clearly exhibited a sort of wobbling motion... This wobbling motion served to set off the object as a rigid, if not solid body."
Another UFO incident indirectly referenced in the show was from the testimony of Robert Salas, who was a missile launch officer in March 1967 when UFOs were spotted above ground, while in the underground missile control bunker, nuclear-armed ICBMs were going offline. According to researchers, UFOs are often seen around nuclear facilities. Similar reports have also come from France and Russia.
The U in UFO stands for unidentified. In some of these cases, whatever was seen remains unidentified. It is very entertaining to watch Hynek try to discover the answer to the UFO mystery. However, he seems to be realizing there may be more than one answer. The 1952 Life article appeared to conclude that UFOs pose a real problem and that solutions may be far off. Will Hynek discover more answers in season 1, or will we have to wait for season 2?
Life concluded, “Before these awesome questions, science – and mankind – can yet only halt in wonder. Answers may come in a generation – or tomorrow. Somewhere in the dark skies there may be those who know.”
Using an optical technique, researchers have identified numerous mammal footprints in Gibraltar — including one that seems to come from a Neanderthal.
The place where the footprint was found.
Image credits: Universidad de Sevilla.
“In this work we present the first record of fossil footprints of terrestrial mammals in the Late Pleistocene coastal aeolian deposits of Gibraltar (southern Iberian Peninsula),” researchers write.
For the past 10 years, researchers from Gibraltar, Spain, Portugal, and Japan have been analyzing aeolianites — rocks formed by the solidifying of sediment deposited by aeolian processes (that is, wind). Most such rocks come from coastal limestones, just like is the case in Gibraltar.
The Gibraltar aeolianites are riddled with footprints from vertebrates that used to inhabit the area some 28-31,000 years ago. The footprints correspond to Red Deer, Ibex, Aurochs, Leopard and Straight-tusked Elephant — iconic mammal megafauna that lives alongside early humans. In a new study, researchers describe what they believe to be the footprint of another mammal that inhabited the area: Neanderthals.
A 3D model of the single track described as Hominipes isp. seen from different angles. A and D. Different oblique views of the microtopographic representation of the track with false colors (hot colors represent higher areas, cold colors the lower areas and the dark ones correspond to the printed horizon).
Image credits: Muñiz et al.
Of course, much of the sediment in and around the footprint has been eroded, and it’s not clearly visible to the naked eye. So the team used a technique called Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) to date the footprint and get a better view of it. OSL is somewhat analogous to radiocarbon dating, the main difference being that radiocarbon dating is used to date organic materials, while OSL is used to date minerals.
The Neanderthals in Gibraltar are well known, being among the first to be discovered by modern scientists. They’ve been thoroughly studied, and most anthropologists believe that the Iberian Peninsula and Gibraltar acted as a “refuge” for the shrinking Neanderthal populations in the area.
If the footprint is confirmed to be Neanderthal, it would only be the second one in the world, the other being Vartop Cave in Romania. There are rare documented examples of human footprints in coastal aeolianites, but Neanderthal footprints have turned out to be much more elusive.
Researchers hope that this can be another piece of the puzzle that allows us to understand these close relatives of ours, their culture, and ultimately — what led to their demise. In a way, though, Neanderthals still live through us: it is suggested that 20 percent of Neanderthal DNA survived in modern humans, notably expressed in the skin, hair, and diseases of modern people.
Journal Reference: Fernando Muñiz et al. Following the last Neanderthals: Mammal tracks in Late Pleistocene coastal dunes of Gibraltar (S Iberian Peninsula). Quaternary Science Reviews, 2019; DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2019.01.013
In 1955, writer and astronomer Morris K. Jessup received two letters from a man named Carlos Miguel Allende, who claimed to have witnessed military time travel.
In the correspondences, Allende described a supposed secret experiment at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, in which the Navy used a variation of Albert Einstein's unified field theory to render the destroyer escort USS Eldridge (DE-173) invisible. He wrote that the ship teleported through time and another dimension sometime around October 1943 in what is now known as "The Philadelphia Experiment."
While Jessup wrote off Allende's claims as the ramblings of a crazy person, he was unwittingly drawn into the bizarre story again when two years later, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in Washington, D.C. got in touch with him.
Somebody had sent them a copy of Jessup's book, "The Case for the UFO." It had been filled with annotations referencing Allende's earlier claims, leading Jessup to assume he was behind it. The ONR ended up funding a printing of 100 copies of the annotated version, known as the Varo edition, which helped spread the story of the alleged experiment.
Different versions of the story have circulated ever since. One of the most common claims is that researchers believed uniting the fields of electromagnetism and gravity into a single field to bend light around an object would make it invisible.
Supposedly, the Navy thought this would gives their ships an advantage over submarines by keeping them hidden from sight during World War II, so they began testing on the USS Eldridge in 1943.
In one test, the ship allegedly disappeared with a green fog in its place and then reappeared with some sailors physically fused to certain parts of the ship. In a later one, it was said to have teleported 200 miles away to Norfolk, Virginia, and then returned to Philadelphia, going back 10 minutes in time.
The story eventually grew so popular that it was made into a 1984 movie, "The Philadelphia Experiment." Six years after its release, a man named Alfred Bielek claimed he knew its portrayal of the story was true because he was a former crew member of USS Eldridge and that he'd been a part of the experiment.
However, the U.S. Navy has and continues to assert that these claims are false, stating that the USS Eldridge was on its first shakedown cruise in the Bahamas during the time period when the alleged experiment happened. Navy veterans who had actually served aboard the ship have also said they never made port in Philadelphia.
The ONR has also stated they've "never conducted any investigations on invisibility, either in 1943 or at any other time," and that the ONR wasn't even established until 1946. They added that "in view of present scientific knowledge, ONR scientists do not believe that such an experiment could be possible except in the realm of science fiction.
The Philadelphia Experiment is widely regarded as a hoax now. You have to admit, though, it's still a very fascinating and entertaining story to say the least.
WETENSCHAPHet Amerikaanse ruimtevaartagentschap NASA zal in 2023 een nieuwe veelbelovende missie lanceren die een van ’s werelds grootste mysteries moet oplossen: hoe het heelal ontstond, maar vooral waardoor het zo snel evolueerde.
SPHEREx is de bijnaam die de nieuwe ruimtemissie krijgt. En het instrument dat wordt ingezet om tal van data te verzamelen is werkelijk een technologisch hoogstandje. Zo is het in staat om op zoek te gaan naar nabij-infrarood licht, alsook kan het de sterrenhemel afspeuren op optische golflengten.
Op die manier is het in staat om de gegevens van meer dan 100 miljoen sterren en stervormingsgebieden in ons eigen Melkwegstelsel te verzamelen, en daarnaast de gegevens van zo’n 300 miljoen andere sterrenstelsels op een afstand van tot tien miljard lichtjaar. Hallucinante cijfers die samen het drieledige doel van de missie moeten dienen.
Allereerst moet de missie de ruimtelijke verdeling van de donkere materie – een ongrijpbare en onzichtbare stof in het heelal die zich zo onderscheidt van zichtbare materie – in kaart brengen. Op die manier wil men ook meer te weten komen over de uitdijing of evolutie van die materie. Astronomen hopen zo een van ’s werelds grootste mysteries te ontrafelen: waardoor dijde het heelal zo snel uit, slechts een (nano)seconde na de oerknal?
(Lees verder onder de foto)
REUTERSSatellietbeeld van NASA
Daarnaast zal de totale lichtproductie van sterren en sterrenstelsels worden gemeten om zo hun geschiedenis te bepalen. Tot slot zullen de astronomen tijdens de missie onderzoeken in welke mate de cruciale elementen van leven (koolstof, waterstof, stikstof, zuurstof, zwavel en fosfor) in de Melkweg voorkomen.
Galactische kaart
“Deze verbazingwekkende missie zal een schat aan unieke gegevens voor astronomen zijn”, aldus Thomas Zurbuchen, administrator voor het Directoraat Wetenschapsmissies van NASA. “De missie zal resulteren in een ongekende galactische kaart met daarop de allereerste ‘vingerafdrukken’ van ons bestaan.”
SPHEREx zal in 2023 gelanceerd worden en zal twee jaar lang belangrijke data verzamelen. De veelbelovende missie zal zo’n 242 miljoen dollar (214 miljoen euro) kosten, exclusief de opstartkosten.
Over the course of the last 70 years or so, the world of Ufology has spawned a truly huge number of books. Many are very good indeed, a not-insignificant number are very bad, and some hover somewhere in between. Just occasionally, however, a title comes along that is truly revolutionary, ground-breaking and – as far as its potential implications are concerned – thought-provoking in the extreme. For me, personally, Jacque Vallee’sMessengers of Deceptionand John Keel’s UFOs: Operation Trojan Horseboth fall into that latter category. Both books argue – albeit in different ways – that we should look beyond the extraterrestrial hypothesis for answers. Of course, for many of the longstanding players within Ufology, any talk of deceptive messengers, or of Keel’s super-spectrum, is dismissed as mere speculation and not much else. For them, UFOs have to be extraterrestrial. After all, they have upheld such notions and beliefs for decades; and to relegate them to the rubbish-bin is not an option.
Well, I have a few choice words for those people who are so rigidly set in their ways: the extraterrestrial hypothesis is itself entirely speculative and totally lacking in hard evidence. All we really know for certain is that there most assuredly is a genuine UFO phenomenon. But, as for definitive proof of its actual point of origin or origins? Please! There is none. At all. There is merely a lot of data clearly demonstrating the presence of unidentified “others” among us.
Vallee and Keel most assuredly and astutely recognized this (Vallee still does). They understood that a puzzle which – at first glance – seemed to be defined by the presence of nuts-and-bolts spacecraft and flesh-and-blood aliens in our midst, was far, far stranger than many within Ufology wanted to admit. And there was someone else who also recognized this ufological factor: Mac Tonnies. Mac was someone who I met once, corresponded with on seven or eight occasions, and chatted with now and again. We were becoming good friends when Mac’s life came to an end. Like all of his friends I was shocked when Mac passed away suddenly and tragically in 2009, at the age of only 34. But, I was pleased that Mac’s third and final book, The Cryptoterrestrials, got published – all thanks to Anomalist Books.
Like Vallee and Keel, Mac rightly recognized that not all UFO encounters could dismissed as the ravings of lunatics, the tales of the fantasy-prone, or the lies of those seeking fame and fortune. But, he was also careful not to get sucked into the near-viral mindset that practically screams (take a deep breath): UFOs = alien spaceships piloted by little gray chaps from across the galaxy, who are on a mission to save their dying race by stealing our DNA, eggs and sperm. Rather, Mac – right up until the time of his death – was chasing down the theory suggesting that the UFOnauts may actually represent the last vestiges of a very ancient race of distinctly terrestrial origins; a race that – tens of thousands of years ago – may have ruled our planet, but whose position of power was thrown into overwhelming chaos by two things: (A) the appearance of a “debilitating genetic syndrome” that ravaged their society; and (B) the rising infestation of a violent species that threatened to eclipse – in number – their own society. They are, said Mac, the Cryptoterrestrials. And that violent species that blusters around like an insane, unruly and spoiled child, and that has done more damage in its short life-time than can ever be truly imagined, is, of course, us.
With their society waning, Mac suggested, their health and ability to even successfully reproduce began to collapse. As a result, their absolute worst nightmare came true: the Human Race became the new gang in town. The Cryptoterrestrials followed what was perceived as the only viable option: they quietly retreated into the shadows, into the darkened corners of our world, below the oceans, into the deeper caverns that pepper the planet. And, in their own uniquely silent and detached way, set about a new course of action. That course of action – given that they were in some fashion genetically related to the Human Race – was to eventually resurface; to move among us in stealth; to pass themselves off as entities from far-off worlds (as part of a concerted effort to protect and hide their real point of origin); and to use and exploit us – medically – in an attempt to try and inject their waning species with a considerable amount of new blood: ours.
In addition, Mac believed, the Cryptoterrestrials were – and, by definition, still are – subtle-yet-brilliant, cosmic magicians. For them, however, there is no top-hat from which a white-rabbit is pulled. There is no hot babe sliced in half and then miraculously rejoined at the waist. No: their tricks are far more fantastic. As well as deceiving us about their origins, the Cryptoterrestrials have – via, perhaps, the use of advanced hologram-style technology, mind-manipulation and much more – led us to conclude that they have an infinite number of craft, resources and technologies at their disposal. And that, Mac added, is the trick, the ruse: in actuality, their numbers today may be very small. They may well be staging faked UFO events to try and convince us that they have a veritable armada at their disposal when, perhaps, the exact opposite is the case. And, most important of all, they desperately want us to think of them as visitors from the stars. If their plan to rejuvenate their species is to work, then stealth, subterfuge and camouflage are the essential orders of the day. Of course, the above all amounts to a theory – just like the ETH. And, Mac’s book makes it very clear that he was only theorizing, rather than being able to provide the reader with definitive proof for such an extremely controversial scenario. He did, however, offer a logical, and at times powerful, argument in support of the theme of his book.
“Alien abductions” and the clumsy, intrusive means by which ova and sperm are taken by a race of beings we are led to believe are countless years ahead of us, were also addressed by Mac. That the ability of the aliens to wipe out the memories of those they abduct is constantly and regularly overturned by nothing more than simple hypnosis was highlighted. And the unlikely scenario that our DNA would even be compatible, in the first place, with extraterrestrial entities was also firmly dissected. Mac’s conclusion: all this points not to the presence of highly-advanced aliens who are thousands of years ahead of us, but to the actions of an ancient Earth-based society whose technology may not be more than a century or so in advance of our current knowledge. Mac also noted how the “aliens” seem to spend a hell of a lot time ensuring they are seen: whether its taking “soil-samples” at the side of the road; equipping their craft with bright, flashing lights; or hammering home the point to the abductees that they are from this planet, from that star-system, or from some far off galaxy. Just about anywhere aside from right here, in fact.
For Mac, Roswell came into the equation, too: and in ingenious fashion. Those who do not adhere to the extraterrestrial hypothesis for Roswell point to the fact that many of the witness descriptions of what was found at Roswell, arecollectively suggestive of some form of large balloon-type structure having come down at the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico on that fateful day in the summer of 1947. The possibility that ET would be flying around New Mexico in a balloon is absurd. But, as Mac noted, a race of impoverished, underground-dwellers, highly worried by the sudden influx of military activity in New Mexico (White Sands, Los Alamos etc), just might employ the use of an advance balloon-type vehicle to secretly scope out the area late at night. Perhaps, when elements of the U.S. military came across the debris, they really did assume it was balloon-borne material and probably of American origin. Until, maybe, they stumbled across something else amid the debris, too. Unusual bodies, maybe…
The Cryptoterrestrials continued in a similar vein, to the extent that we are left with a stark and surreal image of a very ancient – and very strange – race of beings who may once have been the masters of this planet; who were sidelined thousands of years ago; and who are now – under cover of darkness and while the cities sleep – forced to grudgingly surface from their darkened lairs and interact with the very things they fear (and perhaps even hate and despise) most of all: us. Survival, Mac said, is the name of their game. And deception is the means by which it is being cunningly achieved. Whether you agree with Mac’s theorizing or not, The Cryptoterrestrials is a book that is expertly and beautifully written. It challenges the reader to throw out old, rigid views. It represents the careful studies of a man who knew he was going out on a limb – but who, thankfully, didn’t give a damn about appeasing the UFO research community in fawning style. And, for me, it truly is a Messengers of Deception for the 21st Century and for Generation-Next.
These were the words of Kenneth Arnold, according to one of the many quotes attributed to him during national coverage of his famous observation of nine “discs” flying in formation near Mount Ranier, Washington, in June of 1947. According to most accounts, this was the incident that brought the public into awareness of the so-called “flying saucers.”
Hence, in the days after Arnold’s account went to print across the nation, several other reports of unusual aerial phenomena from other parts of the country began to appear. That is to say, once the news about “saucers” was on people’s minds, it was no big surprise that similar reports began to crop up elsewhere.
This is one reason why reports from prior to Arnold’s initial sighting are so interesting, where incidents involving unusual aerial phenomenon were less likely to have been influenced by all the press Arnold and his story were getting at the time.
Kenneth Arnold
Arguably, one of the most notable incidents of this kind was reported by Captain Jack Puckett of Strategic Air Command on August 1, 1946. Early that morning, Puckett was flying a twin-engine C-47 from Langley Field to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, reported having a near-collision with a large, rocket-like aircraft that blazed past him. Only weeks prior to that, numerous reports out of Scandinavia detailed similar encounters with smaller, rocket-like objects seen streaking through the skies, which resulted in the first government inquiry into unidentified flying objects.
Another instance of pre-Kenneth Arnold UFO sightings (which, remember, weren’t actually called UFOs until a few years later, with the institution of Project Blue Book) involved sightings of unusual nighttime lights that were being seen over Richmond, Virginia, in the weeks leading up to Arnold’s sighting.
The reports, which didn’t begin to surface until well after Arnold’s sighting made news, were first logged by staff members with the Weather Bureau in Richmond, where they had begun to receive calls over several successive evenings from people in the Richmond area that were claiming to have seen odd aerial lights.
On June 30, 1947, an Associated Press article out of Washington, D.C., described that the reports of the lights had preceded news of Arnold’s sightings by several weeks, quoting Samuel S. Trotter, an assistant meteorologist at the Richmond Weather Bureau.
“Mr. Trotter added the reports here started before anything was printed about the ‘flying saucers’,” the report states.
However, Trotter and his colleagues apparently weren’t particularly impressed with the reports. “[Trotter] said he was convinced ‘that what they see is a spotlight somewhere playing on the clouds.”
“When I tell them so, nobody believes me,” the meteorologist complained.
Apart from the fact that the “mystery lights” over Richmond provide a somewhat less than compelling UFO report from the pre-Kenneth Arnold era, it helps illustrate a few other things, too. Apparently, even prior to the “arrival” of flying saucers over Mount Rainier in June 1947, people were reporting unusual things they were seeing in the skies. And as Trotter laments in the quote above, even when he advised that these lights were probably just spotlights reflecting off clouds, people seemed to disagree, preferring to believe that they were seeing something else instead.
We can’t rule out that latter possibility, especially in light of the other reports of objects in the skies at that time. Regardless, this is interesting, particularly since it is often asserted that people were more inclined to express doubt about conventional things they had seen in the skies after the “flying saucer” craze had already begun. If Trotter’s account of people’s disbelief is accurate, at least a few folks in the Richmond area had seemed to be exhibiting this tendency several weeks before Kenneth Arnold put flying saucers on the map.
Could it be that there are psychological reasons for why some people gravitate toward belief in extraordinary things? Maybe so, although I certainly don’t think that this idea alone can “explain” or roundly debunk all UFO reports.
However, noting such things in relation to the history of UFOlogy may be useful in helping us remove certain stigmas and preconceptions about what people have seen, and how they may have interpreted it in relation to other things that were going on in the world at a given time. Hence, the Pre-Kenneth Arnold reports like these remain some of the most interesting in the collected literature from the early years of UFO research.
In late 2017, the UFOlogy and conspiracy circles were somewhat vindicated by the not-so-surprising revelation that the Pentagonoperated a secret research programto investigate anomalous aerial phenomenon. While some of us are beginning to believe that those so-called “revelations” about the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP, may actually be a smokescreenor publicity stunt, the program’s former director Luis Elizondo continues to hint that more secrets will soon be revealed.
The latest revelation about Pentagon UFO research didn’t come from Elizondo or anyone else at the “To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences,” but instead were brought to light by Keith Basterfield at the blog “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena – Scientific Research.” With so many headlines being written about the Pentagon’s UFO research program, Basterfield began digging through older texts and documents to see if AATIP might be the tip of a much older iceberg.
Basterfield may have found something, if his sources are to be taken at their words. After re-reading the 1990 book Out Thereby New York Times reporter Howard Blum, Basterfield discovered a few anecdotes concerning Major General James C. Pfautz, Chief of Air Force Intelligence who oversaw a $5 million UFO research program within the Pentagon.
Major General James C. Pfautz, USAF
According to Blum’s book, the program ran from 1983 to 1985 and was kept off the Air Force’s official books to hide its massive price tag. Pfautz reportedly told Blum that the program was established to study and identify the many anomalous phenomena the Air Force regularly encounters as it carries out its principal mission of protecting America’s skies:
In 1983, six months after taking command of Air Force Intelligence [Pfautz] decided to investigate the heavens. To Pfautz’s way of thinking, the decision to establish this secret UFO task force was not that extraordinary. The primary job of the Air Force of the United States of America was to protect and defend the airspace of this country. No intrusions could be tolerated. It was his job, he reasoned, to investigate whether unidentified objects of any sort, of any origin, were penetrating this airspace. He was simply fulfilling the responsibility of his office.
According to anonymous sources Blum cites, Pfautz was invited to address the Defense Intelligence Agency’s alleged “UFO Working Group” which went by the characteristically uninteresting name “Advanced Theoretical Physics.” While addressing the group, Pfautz is said to have become emotional in describing the threats Earth faces from unknown phenomena, even going so far as to suggest attempting to forge an alliance with the extraterrestrial beings visiting Earth.
Pfautz was eventually outed from his leadership post at Air Force Intelligence for what can be described as political reasons. Blum writes that Pfautz had initially agreed to a private interview with him to discuss the program, but cancelled suspiciously at the last minute after allegedly being notified that the program’s research remained classified. The fate of the alleged program is ultimately unknown, but it could be that it in some ways morphed into the more recent AATIP.
What’s to be made of Howard Blum’s tale? On one hand, this is merely an unconfirmed anecdote, but then again Blum is one of the most respected journalists in America and has published several New York Times best-selling works of non-fiction including Out There. Could this 1990 book contain one more crumb of truth which suggests our government may actually know more about anomalous aerial phenomena than they’re letting on? Be sure to head over to Basterfield’s blog and read the full account for yourself.
It’s unusual when the U.S. government reveals information about unusual occurrences or events in space … especially without the intervention of a rock star. It’s even more unusual for the Russian government to do it. Yet that’s what’s happening in Moscow where a leading scientist revealed that a Russian satellite has picked up strange explosions of light that researchers are unable to explain. Инопланетяне? (Russian for “Aliens?” – at least that’s what Google Translate claims.)
“With the help of the telescope, we have obtained even more important results than we expected. It looks like we have encountered new physical phenomena… We do not yet know their physical nature… For example, during Lomonosov’s flight at an altitude of several dozen kilometres, we have registered several times a very powerful ‘explosion’ of light. But everything was clear underneath it, no storms, no clouds.”
“We do not yet know their physical nature.” That’s not the kind of thing Russians are accustomed to hearing from officials, but that’s exactly what Mikhail Panasyuk, the director of the Research Institute of Nuclear Physics at the Russian State University, told Sputnik News this week. An ultraviolet telescope installed on the Russian satellite Lomonosov — launched in 2016 and named for Mikhail Lomonosov, the Russian mathematical genius and scientist whose discoveries include the atmosphere of Venus and the law of conservation of mass in chemical reaction – picked up light “explosions” in the upper atmosphere where Lomonosov was supposed to be observing gamma-ray bursts, high-energy cosmic rays and transient (short-duration) atmospheric phenomena.
Sprite
Technically, “transient phenomena” describes the mysterious lights observed by the Lomonosov satellite, but Panasyuk and other scientists are concerned because they can’t identify them beyond “light explosions.” Sprites are similar light flashes that appear above thunderstorms, but there were no storm clouds under these lights and so little is known about sprites that it’s not even a certainly that they can be picked up by a UV telescope. The researchers have eliminated ground explosions and missile or rocket launches. It’s possible that the explosions could be the result of secret weapons testing, but good luck getting the Russian government to admit to that. By process of elimination, that leaves … Инопланетяне!
Before you toss out the possibility of “Aliens!”, there’s one more strange occurrence to report:
“On June 30, 2018, the Head of Nuclear Physics Institute of Moscow State University, NIIYaF MGU, Mikhail Panasyuk, confirmed the report by the RIA Novosti news agency that Mikhailo Lomonosov, one of only two dedicated scientific satellites operated by Russia, had suffered a failure of its data transmission system.”
Any ideas?
These light explosions occurred some time before June 30, 2018, when Russian space watchers the satellite suffered a malfunction and has been shut down ever since. So, the news of the event has been hidden for almost a year, the Lomonosov mysteriously malfunctioned and was shut down, and suddenly the same head scientist has decided to talk about it with the media. Is he worried? Are the Russians? Should we be?
If you have read my2010 book, Final Events, you’ll know that for years, a small element of the U.S. Government (very small) has secretly investigated the UFO phenomenon from the perspective that – rather than being alien in nature – it has literal demonic origins. And, while the idea that UFOs could be anything less than extraterrestrial is most assuredly not what the vast majority of people within the realm of Ufological research want to hear, the demonic theory is one that attracts a faithful following. As for me, I pretty much gave up the extraterrestrial theory more than a few years back, but I still don’t fully rule it out. But literal demons, overseen by the Devil, and from a literal Hell? Admittedly, I find that extremely hard to buy into. In fact, almost impossible. It’s important to note, though, that there’s nothing new about all this. The reason I say that is because I often get correspondence from people who assume the demonic angle is something recent, something of modern day times. It isn’t. A perfect example is a highly controversial1955 book titledRound Trip to Hell in a Flying Saucer. It was written by a man named Cecil Michael.
So, what does the book tell us? Well, I’ll tell you. If you have not read Michael’s book, then you should. It’s part horror-story, highly Contactee-themed, and infinitely weird in the extreme. Replete with strange tales of ethereal, human-like entities that manifest before Michael; out-of-body experiences; a cosmic trip in a UFO to the Planet Hell (yes, really!); and tales of alien wisdom, this is a highly entertaining, rip-roaring read that absolutely typifies much of the early-1950s Contactee movement. We may never really know to what extent Michael’s story had a basis in some form of non-human reality, if his experiences were purely internal and subjective, or if it was a gigantic hoax. Personally, I go for theory number two. Whatever the truth, Michael was personally sure he had been to a hellish realm and that it was one tied to the UFO phenomenon.
The issue I have with most of the people who have written books on the UFO-demonic angle – and that includes Cecil Michael – is that they are absolutely sure they have the answer to the riddle. They don’t. What they do have, however, is a strong belief that they are right. And there’s nothing wrong with having a belief-system, providing that you recognize it as that and as nothing else – at all. Just a handful of pages into Final Events, I wrote the following, which sums up my approach to all this: “…it’s important to note that the accounts, beliefs, theories and conclusions that I uncovered are strictly those of the people who have been willing to have them publicized. As the author of the book, I am only the messenger for those who adhere to the message. In view of this, it is perhaps wise and apposite for me to cite the words of Sir Walter Scott: ‘I cannot tell how the truth may be; I say the tale as ’twas said to me.'”
Next year will be ten years since Final Events was published. I still stand by what I said back then: there is a real UFO phenomenon. It’s probably not extraterrestrial. And I find it hard to accept it’s all down to dangerous and manipulative demons and the work of the Devil. But, I felt – and I still feel – that telling the story of a group of people in government who fully believe the scenario is worth doing, even though I don’t personally buy into their beliefs. Far more relevant information has come forward since 2010; some of it is arguably beyondcontroversial. Will there be a sequel one day? Yes, there will, but not from me. I’m leaving that in the hands of someone who has taken the story – and the investigation – to new and amazing levels…
With the advancement of technology, drones have become quite popular and very useful. One example is that Ordnance Survey has introduced a solar-powered mapping drone that will be able to fly for 90 straight days and will take high quality pictures of Earth. This new unmanned aircraft will travel at a height of 67,000 feet which is twice the height of a commercial airliner.
Ordnance Survey (a mapping firm) owns 51% of Astigan, which is a firm based in Bridgwater, Somerset, England. Astigan is also the name that was given to the unmanned solar-powered aircraft that is scheduled to complete the last of its endurance tests before the end of this year. Brian Jones, who is Astigan’s managing director, said, “By the end of 2019 we aim to be completing endurance flight testing, building up to 90 days non-stop, which is the operational capability we’re striving for.”
The aircraft, which is controlled remotely, weighs 330 pounds with a wingspan of nearly 130 feet. According to Mr. Jones, the mobility of this aerial vehicle makes it much cheaper and a lot more flexible than using satellite imagery. “It’s incredibly exciting that the UK has developed this kind of technology, delivering satellite capabilities, unparalleled flexibility and improved efficiency, all at a vastly reduced cost,” he explained.
In other news, the Colorado sky has been lit up with giant light paintings of Pokemon characters, the Batman symbol, and a large cube, just to name a few. An artist and photographer named Russell Klimas attached a powerful LED light called Lumecube to his drone and created bright white streaks in the sky which formed several images. In order to map out a detailed flight plan for his drone to make the images in the sky, he used Google Earth as well as a navigation app named Litchi. The images took him less than fifteen minutes to create in the sky. Now that’s definitely a unique and eye-catching way to show off one’s artistic talents.
“A few months ago I was inspired to try and see what shapes I could create while attaching a Lumecube to my drone,” Klimas said. He then explained the process involved in making these images by manually drawing in waypoints one at a time in order to create more detail in the images. “A shape can consist of a few waypoints or hundreds to thousands,” adding, “My current record when writing this article is 633 for Santa and his reindeer but you can definitely have much more.”
Click here to see pictures and a video of the images created by the drone, as well as the article written by Russell Klimas himself on how he created them.
There are extra pictures by clicking here of the Batman and cube images that Klimas created in the sky.
The Cold War may be over (or not), but Space War I is clearly heating up as the world’s major superpowers continue to appear to be scrambling to get as many weaponized satellitesand secret space dronesinto orbit as they can before the other sides do the same. We cannot afford a killer satellite gap!
Many nations are now believed to have some type of “killer satellite” in orbit.
The latest development to suggest we’re heading towards a war in space comes in the form of a new Pentagon publication which was quietly released this week. The 46-page report is titled Challenges to Security in Space and was published by the Defense Intelligence Agency. According to the document, the Pentagon believes “some foreign governments are developing capabilities that threaten others’ ability to use space” and “developing jamming and cyberspace capabilities, directed energy weapons, on-orbit capabilities, and ground-based anti-satellite missiles that can achieve a range of reversible to non-reversible effects” on other satellites and spacecraft. Clearlyit’s only the other guys doing these things, too; the US wouldn’t be up to the same shenanigans, no way!
“Oh that X-37B? It’s merely a weather balloon.”
One of the threats the document cites is a new laser technology China is developing which it claims is intended to zap space debris. Orbital pollution is becoming a serious issue after all, one which threatens every nation’s ability to conduct safe operations in orbit around Earth. While China’s anti-debris lasers certainly seem like they could clean up space if they wanted to, the Pentagon notes (as I did last year when the technology was unveiled) that these seemingly peaceful technologies could easily also function as full-on space weapons:
These systems could include payloads such as kinetic kill vehicles, radio frequency jammers, lasers, chemical sprayers, high-power microwaves, and robotic mechanisms. Some of these systems, such as robotic technology for satellite servicing and repair and debris removal, have peaceful uses but can also be used for military purposes.
The document outlines several technologies the People’s Liberation Army is known to be testing which could pose a threat to other nations’ space-based defense and surveillance capabilities. It makes you wonder what type of reports the Chinese and Russians are publishing concerning the same types of technologies being developed here in the West.
It sure is looking more and more like the next major conflict between superpowers will look like something straight out of the science fiction of the mid-20th century. Space lasers, space-to-surface missile strike capabilities, cyberwarfare conducted by artificial intelligence constructs – nothing is off the table for the oncoming struggle over Earth’s dwindling natural resources. Who will come out on top?
Other than the irradiated super-cockroaches, that is.
Bend, Oregon is a very heavily forested area with beautiful mountains surrounding it. Its an excellent location for an underground base in the back woods location where most people wont go. I've been to Bend, its heaven for a nature love like me. These orbs are strange. I see three in the screenshot above, two red and one white. They look about the same size and shape. Because there is three of them, I am writing off drones, because usually drones are flown alone, but here we have several. Also, way out there in the forest is not a drone hotspot. They are usually seen in city and monument areas. So, its unlikely its human RC toys. Its not Chinese lanterns because they glow yellow or orange and usually the candle at the bottom will burn out in just 3-5 minutes. They move slowly and only in the direction of the wind. Their lights color never change. So these are not Chinese lanterns. All around this one is strange. Alien...yeah, I believe so. But why there, at that time, that moment? What were they doing? And should we be concerned with this sudden UFO activity? Scott C. Waring
News states:
BEND, Ore. (KOIN) -- From stunning snow-capped mountains to wide open skies -- Central Oregon is home to some incredible views -- including some that are seemingly out of this world. "There are a lot of things out there that are completely unexplainable, they're baffling," said Jim Friedman, who spotted one of those sights.Friedman saw strange lights outside his Bend home in late January and caught it on video. "And I thought it was odd because it was over a meadow and there shouldn't have been anything out there," he said. Friedman, a self-admitted fan of the unknown, said he's the "guy that looks and never finds [UFOs.]" He said he's confident what he saw was a not a plane or a planet. It was hovering just 500 feet above the ground -- so Friedman reported what he saw to the Mutual UFO Network. Tom Bowden, the director of Oregon's chapter of MUFON, confirmed Friedman's thoughts after an extensive review. "To me it's exciting," Friedman said. "It's hard to tell someone without even getting excited about it." Then, two days after Friedman recorded whatever he saw -- a friend of his saw something eerily similar flying above the Cascades. "I had my motorhome parked up here and stepped outside. I saw this bright light. I mean it was a brilliant bright light that was in the sky," Coty Alexander said. Alexander called Friedman to compare their videos. "I called Jim that same night and said 'You won't believe this' and told him about exactly what had happened," Alexander said. Alexander captured two red dots that were coming in and out of the picture alongside the bright white light. He said it stayed for more than two minutes. "And it just went out. Totally," Alexander said. He thinks the light was somewhere above Mt. Bachelor and that it had some kind of tower-like structure on top of it. "Either you can believe it or discount it but I know what I saw," Alexander said. Both men say whether you're in town or our in the country, there is no doubt there are secrets in the sky. "I know there's something out there," Friedman said. "I just don't know what it is exactly." "We're not alone," Alexander said.
If we're going to head out into interstellar space one day, we might want to go equipped with some heavy-duty degreaser. New research has found that the vast intervals of space aren't always filled with dry dust, but often contain a mist of greasy molecules.
And there's a lot of space grease out there. The Milky Way galaxy alone holds some 10 billion trillion trillion tonnes of cosmic butter. Although, it's actually more like a greasy sort of soot, and not at all edible.
"This space grease is not the kind of thing you'd want to spread on a slice of toast," said chemist Tim Schmidt from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia.
"It's dirty, likely toxic and only forms in the environment of interstellar space (and our laboratory). It's also intriguing that organic material of this kind - material that gets incorporated into planetary systems - is so abundant."
The researchers, from UNSW and Ege University in Turkey, were actually investigating the presence of carbon in interstellar space.
Carbon is a vital ingredient for organic life as we know it - all known life on Earth is carbon-based - but we're not entirely sure how much of it is out there.
Only half the expected carbon is floating around in its pure form. The rest is in one of two forms: aromatic, like mothballs, the researchers said; and aliphatic, or grease-like.
To help bring us closer to understanding how much carbon is out there, the research team recreated a space dust analogue in the lab to figure out its composition.
They replicated the outflows of carbon stars that create organic molecules by expanding carbon-laden plasma into a low-temperature vacuum. They then collected and analysed the resulting material.
When aliphatic carbon in space is viewed against a background radiation source, it produces a specific infrared spectral absorption feature. Using spectroscopy and magnetic resonance, the team was able to determine how closely their lab-created material matched the dust in interstellar space.
"Because then we have it in our hands, we were able to use a variety of techniques to figure out how strongly that greasy carbon absorbs light," Schmidt told the ABC.
"And we can then tell you how much carbon there is in the line of sight to different stars, and then that gives us a picture of how much carbon there is in space in total."
The results indicated that there are roughly 100 greasy carbon atoms for every million hydrogen atoms - that greasy carbon makes up somewhere between a quarter and half of all the available carbon in the Universe.
However, this still leaves a substantial proportion of the carbon to be found in mothball-like form.
Finding out how much aromatic carbon is out there is the next thing the researchers want to tackle.
It's going to be a challenge, but the results will be worth it: figuring out how much carbon is bound up in the interstellar medium will allow more accurate calculations for the amount of carbon that is left over and available for the creation of life.
If you're holding out hope that Mars may have once been an inhabited world, two new studies should put a little spring in your step.
NASA'sMars rover Curiosityhas identified a variety of organic molecules, the carbon-based building blocks of life as we know it, in 3.5-billion-year-old Red Planet rocks, one of the papers reports.
"But there is a possibility that [the organics] are from an ancient life source; we just don't know," Eigenbrode told Space.com. "And even if life was never around, they [the molecules] tell us there was at least something around for organisms to eat."
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover took this self-portrait on Jan. 23, 2018, on the slopes of the towering Mount Sharp.
The other new paper also details a Curiosity find: that methane concentrations in Mars' atmosphere cycle seasonally. The discovery suggests that this gas, which here on Earth is produced primarily by living organisms, is seeping out from underground reservoirs, study team members said.
Again, these results are not evidence of life — methane can also be produced by geological processes — but they are consistent with the presence of Martian organisms, which is exciting in and of itself.
"We cannot rule out the possibility that it was created biologically," said study lead author Chris Webster, a senior research fellow at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. "We can't say that it was, but we're certainly not dropping that idea. So, in a sense, that's positive for the astrobiologists in the world."
Both new studies were published online today (June 7) in the journal Science.
The building blocks of life
The serious hunt for organics on Mars has a long and complicated history. It starts with NASA's twin Viking landers, which touched down on different parts of the Red Planet in 1976 to search for signs of life. The Vikings' science payload included an instrument called a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer (GCMS), which heated Martian soil and studied the molecules that boiled off.
While the Vikings' life-hunting experiments returned intriguing but ambiguous results, the GCMS found no organics. Indeed, the instrument spotted little of note, save for two chlorinated chemicals — chloromethane and dichloromethane — that were thought to be contaminants from Earth. This result convinced most scientists at the time that Mars is a dead planet; life as we know it is impossible without organic molecules, after all.
But that thinking began to shift a bit in 2008, when NASA's Phoenix lander found chlorine-containing chemicals called perchlorates in the Martian soil. Some researchers noted that perchlorates can destroy organics in a heated sample, and suggested that such reactions may have been responsible for the Vikings' null GCMS result.
In 2011, this hypothesis got some experimental backing. In a lab here on Earth, researchers heated perchlorate-spiked soil and spotted chloromethane and dichloromethane boiling out of the sample.
Then, Curiosity came onto the scene. The rover touched down inside Mars' huge Gale Crater in August 2012, kicking off a quest to determine if the Red Planet has ever been capable of supporting microbial life. Curiosity mission scientists quickly answered that question in the affirmative, finding that Gale hosted a long-lived, potentially habitable lake-and-stream system billions of years ago. [Photos: Ancient Mars Lake Could Have Supported Life]
The rover also found organics in relatively short order, using its Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument. SAM identified chlorinated hydrocarbons, such as chlorobenzene and dichlorobutane, in powdered samples drilled out of rock at a spot called Yellowknife Bay, which is near Curiosity's landing site.
The discovery confirmed the existence of native Martian organics. It was tough to know their full story, however, given the seeming ubiquity of perchlorates in the red dirt. For example, did these chlorinated compounds exist as-is in the rock, or were they created from other indigenous organics in a reaction inside SAM, which also heats its samples?
"We were a bit puzzled; we weren't sure what those molecules really meant in the bigger picture of the search for life," Eigenbrode said. "But it gave us a lot of anticipation that, if we can find these molecules here, perhaps we're going to come across other layers of rock that have more organics in them. And that's exactly what happened."
Climbing the mountain
In July 2013, Curiosity left the Yellowknife Bay area and started heading for Mount Sharp, the 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers) mountain that rises from Gale's center. The six-wheeled robot made it to Mount Sharp's base 14 months later, then set to studying its environs.
In the new study, Eigenbrode and her colleagues looked closely at SAM's analyses of samples from the first two Mount Sharp rocks Curiosity drilled — powder collected from targets called Confidence Hills and Mojave in September 2014 and February 2015, respectively.
The researchers considered only the gases that boiled off at temperatures greater than 930 degrees Fahrenheit (500 degrees Celsius) — high enough to take possible perchlorate reactions out of the mix. They found several new organics, as well as a number of molecules that are probably fragments of much larger carbon-containing compounds.
The new observations increase the inventory of known Mars organics and "are more consistent with what we would expect if the organics were from life, from meteorites or from geological processes," Eigenbrode said.
SAM's measurements also suggest that the concentration of organic carbon in the drilled rocks is hundreds of parts per million, she added.
"When you get up to that level, now we're approaching the abundances of carbon that we find in rocks of similar age here on Earth," she said. "So the expectation is, if the stuff here on Earth was largely biological around 3 billion years ago, then there's a consistency there. But it doesn't really tell you anything specific. It's just, OK — it's not weird; it's not anomalous." [Ancient Mars Lakes & Laser Blasts: Curiosity Rover's 10 Biggest Moments in 1st 5 Years]
Methane mystery
Astrobiologists are also keen to better understand the distribution of methane in Mars' air, because the stuff is a potential "biosignature" gas. This is tough to do using Earth-based instruments, because there's a lot of methane in our planet's atmosphere — about 1,850 parts per billion (ppb) — to complicate matters.
So the new study led by Webster presents some landmark results. He and his colleagues report baseline atmospheric methane concentrations over about five Earth years, as measured by Curiosity's Tunable Laser Spectrometer (TLS) instrument. Gale Crater's levels are representative of the Red Planet as a whole, Webster said, given how much mixing goes on in Mars' air.
The researchers found that these concentrations ranged a great deal, from a low of about 0.24 ppb to a maximum of 0.65 ppb. And the variation is seasonal, with the peak coming near the end of the northern hemisphere's summer.
This strong seasonality rules out meteorites or infalling dust as the primary source, Webster said. He and his team instead think the methane is leaking continuously from underground reservoirs and then getting bound to soil particles when it reaches the surface. During warmer weather, more of the methane is freed from these particles and released into the air.
Methane gets destroyed by ultraviolet light within a few hundred years of the gas's appearance in Mars' atmosphere, so the stuff Curiosity detected must have been emitted relatively recently. But that doesn't mean those particular molecules formed recently, Webster said.
"These underground reservoirs — they can be made up of old methane, ancient methane, or they can be made up of modern, or new, methane that's being created today," he told Space.com. "We can't distinguish that."
Nor does the team know the methane's origin, Webster stressed. It could be produced by microbes, but geological processes — namely, the reaction of hot water with certain types of rock — are also a possibility. And the new study deals only with background levels of Mars methane; it doesn't offer any significant insight into one-off surges of the stuff, such as the spike to 7 ppb that Curiosity observed over a few weeks from late 2013 to early 2014
This illustration shows the ways in which methane from the Martian subsurface might find its way to the surface, where its uptake and release could produce a large seasonal variation in the atmosphere as observed by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover.
The Mars-methane picture could get clearer in the relatively near future. The Trace Gas Orbiter — part of the European-led ExoMars program — recently began sniffing the Red Planet's air from above, in an effort to map global concentrations of methane and other gases.
"The big question is, will they see plumes or patches or spikes?" Webster said. "If they could tell us there's a region of Mars where the methane seems to be coming from, that would be huge. Now we can direct future missions in that direction."
For example, the life-hunting ExoMars rover, which is scheduled to launch in 2020, could be sent to sample such a source. The rover might be able to get a carbon-isotope measurement, which would go a long way toward revealing the gas's origin. (Biologically produced methane here on Earth is depleted in the heavier carbon-13 isotope, which contains one more neutron in its nucleus than the "normal" carbon-12 atom.) Curiosity could theoretically make such a measurement as well, Webster said, but the ExoMars rover's TLS instrument will be more sensitive than Curiosity's.
Future missions will also take advantage of the new study by Eigenbrode and her team, Curiosity project scientist Ashwin Vasavada said.
"This gives us a really important insight into how organic molecules can be preserved over time, and what types might be better preserved than others," Vasavada, who's based at JPL, told Space.com. (Vasavada is a co-author of the new methane study but not the organics one.)
Curiosity's results show that lake beds are good collectors and concentrators of organics, he and Eigenbrode said. So an ancient lake wouldn't be a bad place to send a life-hunting rover, such as the ExoMars vehicle or the Mars 2020 rover, which NASA plans to launch two years from now.
"What this does, at the very least, is increase our confidence that there will be something to find with those future missions," Vasavada said, referring to interesting organics.
The Dolmen di Sa Coveccada, a megalithic grave found in northeastern Sardinia.
Credit: Bettina Schulz Paulsson.
Stonehenge is arguably the most famous prehistoric monument in the world. However, not a lot of people know that this megalithic style is far from being unique. There are literally tens of thousands of such ancient sites all across Europe, many of which are thousands of years older than Stonehenge. Now, a new ambitious study took on the massive task of finding the common thread among all these sites. The analysis suggests that a single hunter-gatherer culture founded the megalithic phenomenon in the Brittany region of northwestern France nearly 7,000 years ago.
Standing stones
The debate surrounding the origin of megaliths can be divided into two trains of thought: either they appeared in a single place then spread across Europe through sea routes or they developed independently by different cultures.
Bettina Schulz Paulsson of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden and colleagues combed through a mountain of archaeological data for 35,000 sites, including standing stones as well as tombs and temples. The research team narrowed their analysis down to 2,410 sites across Europe which had human remains buried within them that had been previously radiocarbon dated. To further narrow the dates, the study also took into account the site’s architecture (some pre-megalithic graves involved elaborate structures but not huge stones), tool use, and burial customs. Finally, using statistical methods, the authors were able to paint a clearer picture of where the first monuments were built and in what order.
The Ring of Brodgar in Orkney Islands, UK.
Credit: Bettina Schulz Paulsson.
Dolmen de las Ruines, Catalonia.
Credit: Bettina Schulz Paulsson.
Dolmen in Goosefeld, Germany.
Credit: Bettina Schulz Paulsson.
Paulsson found that the very earliest megaliths were in northwestern France — and not in the Near East as previously suggested — dating to about 4700 B.C.E. The region is also home to gravesites with intricate earthen tombs that date to about 5000 B.C.E, further cementing Brittany as the origin of the megalithic phenomenon. Some standing stones at Brittany sites depict sperm whales and other marine life, suggesting that these hunter-gatherers were also involved with some kind of sea travel. Some of these early standing stone sites — table-like structures that look like the Greek letter Pi called dolmens — were also some of the largest. For instance, the Grand Menhir once rose more than 20 meters high.
From there, megaliths spread across Europe over the next 2,000 years, concentrating around coastal regions of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coasts. Stonehenge, for instance, is thought to have been first erected in 2400 B.C.E., although the oldest such structures in the British Isles date back to about 4000 B.C.E.
“We argue for the transfer of the megalithic concept over sea routes emanating from northwest France, and for advanced maritime technology and seafaring in the megalithic Age,” the authors wrote in the journal PNAS.
Map showing dates estimated for the start of megaliths in the different European regions. Credit: PNAS.
The emergence of the stone monuments around coastal areas suggests that the practice was spread by prehistoric sailors. If this true, then advanced seafaring in Europe could be pushed back by 2,000 years. This is highly plausible: ancient carvings on Brittany megaliths, such as engravings of many boats, are large enough for a crew of 12.
Of course, there are many other megaliths that have been either destroyed or not discovered yet — some of them may be older and found in a different location than Brittany. But right now this looks like our best bet. Further studies that also include DNA analysis and ancient population movements might shed further light on these mysterious structures.
A new study found that the Earth’s magnetic shield beats like a drum when it’s hit by external impulses. This confirms a decades-old theory
Artist rendition of a plasma jet impact (yellow) generating standing waves at the magnetopause boundary (blue) and in the magnetosphere (green). The outer group of four THEMIS probes witnessed the flapping of the magnetopause over each satellite in succession, confirming the expected behavior/frequency of the theorized magnetopause eigenmode wave.
Image credits: E. Masongsong/UCLA, M. Archer/QMUL, H. Hietala/UTU.
The Earth’s magnetic field is driven by convection currents in the Earth’s outer core. Differences in temperature, pressure, and compositionwithin the outer corecause some parts of the core to move around. The flow of this liquid iron generates electric currents, which in turn produce magnetic fields. The resulting magnetic fields produce further electric currents, which then generate their own magnetic fields, and so on. This natural self-sustaining loop is called a geodynamo, and produces a magnetic field that loops around the entire planet.
This magnetosphere is essential for life on Earth, as it protects the atmosphere from being eroded by the solar wind and deflects cosmic rays (high-energy charged particles that are mostly from outside the Solar System). However, we’re still learning a lot about the magnetosphere. Obviously, no one has gone down to the inner core to actually see how it is formed, and measurements of its overall structure remain challenging. In a new paper, researchers describe a feature of this field which had been predicted mathematically 40 years ago, but never previously observed.
Essentially, when an impulse strikes the outer boundary of the magnetopause, ripples can travel along its surface. These then get reflected back when they approach the magnetic poles. It’s a bit like how acoustic waves are absorbed and reflected by a drum. When the impulse interacts with the Earth’s magnetosphere, the interference the waves leads to a standing wave pattern in which specific points appear to be standing still while others vibrate back and forth — it’s exactly the way a drum resonates when struck.
Dr. Martin Archer, a space physicist at Queen Mary University of London and lead author of the paper, explains:
“There had been speculation that these drum-like vibrations might not occur at all, given the lack of evidence over the 45 years since they were proposed. Another possibility was that they are just very hard to definitively detect.”
“Earth’s magnetic shield is continuously buffeted with turbulence so we thought that clear evidence for the proposed booming vibrations might require a single sharp hit from an impulse. You would also need lots of satellites in just the right places during this event so that other known sounds or resonances could be ruled out. The event in the paper ticked all those quite strict boxes and at last, we’ve shown the boundary’s natural response,” said Archer.
In order to finally prove this theory, researchers used data from five NASATHEMIS satellites, designed specifically to study the magnetosphere. These five satellites were ideally located when a strong isolated plasma jet slammed into the magnetopause.
The probes were able to detect the boundary’s oscillations and the resulting sounds within the Earth’s magnetic shield, which confirmed the drum model and ruled out any alternative explanations
The Earth isn’t alone in having a magnetosphere. Other planets like Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn, have also been found to have similar magnetic shield — which means that drum-like vibrations may be possible elsewhere. However, further research is needed to understand just how often these vibrations occur and what their significance is.
Movements of the magnetopause can have wide-ranging effects on space weather, potentially damaging technology like power grids, GPS, and even passenger airlines.
Journal Reference: ‘Direct Observations Of A Surface Eigenmode Of The Dayside Magnetopause’. Archer et al.Nature Communications.
The mystery behind the “disappearances” in Alaska (Video)
The mystery behind the “disappearances” in Alaska (Video)
In Alaska they are used to disappearances. Each year, around 3,000 people disappear in the peninsula, an even more striking figure if we take into account that 736,732 people live there, according to the 2014 census.
In many cases, these people appear, alive or dead: many explorers and suicides opt for the solitude of these places. In others, the natural conditions of the American State, plagued by rivers, glaciers and extreme cold, complicate the search. Almost all its inhabitants know someone who disappeared without a trace.
In an area of northwest Alaska, which covers 300,000 square miles, more than 20,000 people have mysteriously disappeared. Most of these disappearances have occurred in an area they call the Alaska Triangle.
Some people got lost in the wild landscape, others disappeared in plane crashes. But in all these cases, bodies are discovered in mysterious ways.
Who or what is behind this? Some believe it is the work of local predators. Others point to legendary creatures like the Kushtaka, or the monster of Lake Iliamna. And some believe it's a supernatural force called "the vile vortex."
The American Indians did not walk with compasses, at least for a long time, but they know from time immemorial that strange things happen in that territory. The Eskimo tradition and other autochthonous cultures are full of legends about the place.
Perhaps the excess of clarity, at least during part of the year, is contributing to the occurrence of the dark phenomena that occur in the Alaska Triangle. The sun almost permanently bathes the territory for three months a year and it is believed that there is a greater electromagnetic activity that is the cause of the abnormalities.
But it is not a very convincing explanation, since the disappearances do not stop during the long winter months.
Another hypothesis that has ventured is the position of the territory on the confluence of two tectonic plates; this reasoning also has its weak flank, since it would justify a greater seismic activity but not on its own just such a high index of disappearances.
The truth is that the world still does not know if the case of the Alaskan Triangle is a matter of force majeure or simply legends that have been fed on a few people disoriented in a complicated area.
Meanwhile, many people will not return from that land every year. What do you think? Leave your comment below.
The Secret UFO Conference That No One Knows About via Ufologist Jacques Vallee (Video)
The Secret UFO Conference That No One Knows About via Ufologist Jacques Vallee (Video)
COAST TO COAST AM. George Knapp was joined by legendary ufologist Jacques Vallee, who discussed a recent discrete gathering of international UFO experts that was not mentioned to the public. He revealed that the two-day conference was organized by the French version of NASA, known as CNES, and featured 30 presentations to about 100 attendees.
According to Vallee, the focus of the conference revolved around determining the best way to gather and research UFO cases as well as how to synthesize that data. He attributed the event to a change in the French scientific community, where a new generation has emerged that is willing to take a fresh look at the UFO phenomenon. Unlike UFO research in the United States, which is beset with ideological disputes, Vallee noted, this examination of the phenomenon centered around “a good long look at the data.”
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET Lange tijd ontweek Elon Musk de vraag hoeveel het zou kosten om in de toekomst naar Mars te reizen, maar nu maakt de Tesla- en SpaceX-topman op Twitter toch een richtprijs bekend. Wie naar de planeet wil vliegen met ruimteschip Starship, zal diep in de buidel moeten tasten.
De 47-jarige topman legde uit dat het prijskaartje afhankelijk zal zijn van de vraag. “De prijs is afhankelijk van de vraag, maar ik ben er vrij zeker van dat een reis naar Mars (retourticket is gratis) ooit minder dan 500.000 dollar (omgerekend zo’n 441.540 euro) zal kosten en misschien zelfs minder dan 100.000 dollar (omgerekend zo’n 88.308 euro). Zo laag dat mensen uit welgestelde landen hun huis op Aarde kunnen verkopen en naar Mars kunnen verhuizen, als ze willen”, schreef Musk op Twitter.
SpaceX is van plan om rond 2024 de eerste mensen al naar Mars te laten reizen.
What are the estimated costs for tickets to Moon/Mars accounting for reusability?
Elon Musk✔@elonmusk
Very dependent on volume, but I’m confident moving to Mars (return ticket is free) will one day cost less than $500k & maybe even below $100k. Low enough that most people in advanced economies could sell their home on Earth & move to Mars if they want.
Het bedrijf van de topman wil de Starship, een roestvrijstalen ruimteschip, gebruiken om naar de maan en naar Mars te vliegen. Deze eerste versie van de raket is overigens nog maar een prototype dat alleen omhoog en omlaag kan. Die testversie wordt door Musk de ‘test hopper’ genoemd.
Musk toonde vorige maand op Twitter dat de Starship hopper op eenzelfde manier zal getest worden als de Falcon 9 vijf jaar geleden. De raket kan dus niet naar een baan om de aarde. Dat moeten latere versies wel kunnen. Die hoopt SpaceX later dit jaar te presenteren.
WETENSCHAPHij hield het bijna zestig keer langer uit dan verwacht, maar vandaag wordt er na vijftien jaar toch afscheid van hem genomen: de Marsrobot Opportunity zal dan aan zijn einde komen op de planeet Mars. Het hoogtechnologische wagentje kwam acht maanden geleden in een zware stofstorm terecht en geeft sindsdien geen teken van leven meer.
Verdriet en treurnis alom gisteren op het NASA-hoofdkwartier, waar de wetenschappers een laatste keer probeerden contact te maken met Opportunity, zonder succes. De storm van vorig jaar, de zwaarste in tientallen jaren, heeft de robot allicht het leven gekost. Het marsoppervlak was door de storm maandenlang in dikke stofwolken gehuld, waardoor Opportunity’s zonnepanelen geen dienst meer konden doen.
Maar naast verdriet overheerst toch vooral trots dat het Marswagentje het zo lang heeft uitgehouden. Oorspronkelijk was het de bedoeling dat Opportunity en zijn broertje Spirit, die begin 2004 op de andere kant van de planeet landde, een missie van ongeveer drie maanden zouden uitvoeren. Spirit kon het tot 2011 uitzingen, Opportunity kon daar dus nog enkele jaren bij doen.
Dr. Tanya Harrison✔@tanyaofmars
Spent the evening at JPL as the last ever commands were sent to the Opportunity rover on #Mars.
There was silence. There were tears. There were hugs. There were memories and laughs shared.#ThankYouOppy#GoodnightOppy
De afgelopen maanden deden de ingenieurs bij NASA er alles aan om Opportunity tot leven te wekken. Er werden ongeveer duizend signalen verstuurd om hem opnieuw op te starten, maar tevergeefs. Allicht zal straks het einde van de Marsrobot officieel worden verkondigd. Projectmanager John Callas noemt het “als een liefje dat plots vertrekt en waarvan je hoopt dat ze ooit toch nog voor je deur zal staan, gezond en wel”. “Maar elke dag vermindert je hoop en uiteindelijk moet je beseffen dat dat niet meer zal gebeuren en verdergaan met je leven.”
Opportunity, zo groot als een golfwagentje, legde in totaal 45 kilometer af op Mars en is daarmee nog altijd de absolute recordhouder voor een menselijk object op een andere planeet dan de Aarde. Hij bestudeerde de bodem van de rode planeet, stond aan de basis van de bevestiging dat er ooit water stroomde en ontdekte de eerste meteoriet ooit op een andere planeet. Tussendoor nam hij de prachtigste foto’s, onder andere van een wervelstorm of een panoramisch uitzicht van de kraters op de planeet.
Het einde van Opportunity betekent niet het einde van NASA’s aanwezigheid op Mars. Op de planeet rijdt sinds 2012 ook nog altijd de dubbel zo grote Curiosity rond, en in november vorig jaar landde de nieuwste robotwagen, Insight.
REUTERSIn 2012 plakte de NASA 800 foto's samen die Opportunity had genomen om dit prachtige panoramabeeld te maken.
“No animal is more elusive. Nobody I knew had ever seen one in the wild and I never thought that I would either.”
Figures from May 2018 show that over 170 million people worldwide saw the blockbuster movie “Black Panther.” Figures from the past 100 years show that no one has seen an actual black panther (also called a black leopard) in Africa and has a movie or photo to prove it … until now. UK photographer Will Burrard-Lucas revealed stunning images of a live black panther he photographed in Kenya, not far from the mythical land of Wakanda, home of the ‘other’ Black Panther. How cool is that?(The images can be seen here.)
Slinking through the darkness, these stunning images show an ultra-rare black leopard in action. The mythical creature was captured by British wildlife photographer Will Burrard-Lucas, 35, while it was prowling around Laikipia in Kenya in the dead of night
Its wide eyes can be seen looking eagerly for prey, while leopard-like spots can vaguely be seen on its dark coat, which is the result of melanism
Working in collaboration with biologists in the area, Burrard-Lucas went about installing camera traps. These were placed in areas the black leopard was rumoured to frequent
Nicholas Pilfold PhD, a biologist with San Diego Zoo Global who is currently researching leopards at the Loisaba Conservancy and helped Burrard-Lucas with his photography project, confirmed that the recent on-camera sighting was extremely rare
Summing up the black leopard in three words, Burrard-Lucas said: 'They are truly stunning, beautiful and elusive'
Dr Pilfold said: 'We had always heard about black leopard living in this region, but the stories were absent of high quality footage that could confirm their existence.' This grab from San Diego Zoo's video shows the black leopard clambering over rocks. The video footage was shot over a period of a year
“We had always heard about black leopard living in this region, but the stories were absent of high quality footage that could confirm their existence. This is what Will’s photos and the videos on our remote cameras now prove, and are exceptionally rare in their detail and insight.”
A normal African leopard
(Wikipedia)
The black panther or African leopard (Panthera pardus pardus) was suspected of living somewhere in the Loisaba Conservancy, a 57,000 acre wildlife conservancy and working ranch located in Northern Laikipia, Kenya, by Nicholas Pilfold PhD, a biologist working there for the San Diego Zoo Global. According to his study published in January 2019 in the African Journal of Ecology, Pilford’s video cameras captured a young female black panther five times in February, March and April of 2018. (A video can be viewed here.) Those sightings brought photographer Burrard-Lucas to the area with his specially-designed camera traps using wireless motion sensors, high-quality DSLR cameras and multiple flashes. Despite Pilford’s videos, he wasn’t certain he could capture sharp photographs of the black panther.
“I can’t believe it really. I think when I started this project I didn’t actually think I was going to be able to achieve a shot of a black leopard in Africa but that it is exactly what is here on the back of my camera. Just the most stunning, spectacular creature I think I’ve ever photographed!”
Pilford shared with National Geographic some of the mythology behind the black (or melanistic, which is the opposite of albino) panther, whose last known photograph had been taken in 1909.
“These are the first confirmed images of a panther in Africa in nearly 100 years. Almost everyone has a story about seeing one, it’s such a mythical thing. Even when you talk to the older guys that were guides in Kenya many years ago, back when hunting was legal [in the 1950s and ‘60s], there was a known thing that you didn’t hunt black leopards. If you saw them, you didn’t take it.”
The juvenile female was traveling with an older normal female believed to be its mother, so Pilford thinks its color was not a problem with the rest of the cat’s family, even though melanism is extremely rare in African big cats.
Or is it?
Shortly after the photographs were released, researchers at the Ol Ari Nyiro Conservancy 30 miles west of Loisaba unveiled another high-quality photograph of a black leopard reported to have been taken in 2007. Are there more hiding in drawers around Kenya and Africa? Are there more black panthers than the experts believe to exist there? Will this revelation put them in danger?
DIERENIn Kenia is een zeer zeldzaam zwart luipaard gespot. Dat blijkt uit een recente publicatie in het African Journal of Ecology. Het dier heeft haar opvallend donkere tooi te danken aan een zeldzame aandoening genaamd melanisme. Het is de eerste officiële waarneming van het illustere beest sinds 1909.
Het luipaard is een bijzonder exemplaar; hij is bijna volledig zwart gedurende de dag, maar in de nacht zijn andere kleuren zichtbaar. Het dier werd gezien in Laikipia County, een gebied van ongeveer 8.700 vierkante kilometer groot.
Het zwarte luipaard is één keer gespot door camera‘s die door onderzoekers van de San Diego Zoo werden geplaatst in het gebied. Het vrouwtje werd gezien in aanwezigheid van een soortgenoot met een normale vacht. De onderzoekers vermoeden dat dit mogelijk de moeder van het donkere exemplaar is. Eerder waren er al meldingen van mensen die het zwarte luipaard in 2017 en 2018 zeggen gezien te hebben.
Egyptian Ministry of AntiquitiesHet meisje was vermoedelijk 13 jaar oud en lag in foetushouding in de graftombe in Meidoem.
WETENSCHAPIn Egypte hebben archeologen het skelet van een 13-jarig meisje ontdekt dat vlakbij een mysterieuze piramide begraven lag. Het meisje lag in foetushouding in de lege tombe van een oude begraafplaats.
De piramide vlakbij de begraafplaats is zo’n 4.600 jaar oud – net als het meisje - en bevindt zich in Meidoem, een plaats ten westen van de Nijl in Egypte.
Het meisje lag moederziel alleen in de graftombe, al vonden de archeologen in de rest van het grafmonument wat meer attributen waaronder twee dierenhoofden (waarschijnlijk afkomstig van stieren) en versierde vazen. Vermoedelijk gaat het om offers, maar of die voor het jonge meisje bestemd waren, betwijfelen de onderzoekers. Verder nog werden de restanten van een stenen muur gevonden. Waarschijnlijk scheidde die muur de begraafplaats van het volk duidelijk af van de potentiële graftombe van de farao.
De piramide in Meidoem is al vaker onderwerp van archeologisch onderzoek geweest. Dat onderzoek kon slechts een tipje van de sluier lichten. Wat archeologen (vrijwel) zeker weten, is dat de piramide gebouwd werd in opdracht van farao Snofroe. Die farao liet tijdens zijn heerschappij maar liefst vier piramides bouwen, waarvan twee grote en twee kleinere. Dat zijn er uitzonderlijk veel. Archeologen konden nog geen concreet antwoord formuleren op de vraag waarom hij dat deed. Met vallen en opstaan, testte de farao vermoedelijk de beste manier uit om een mooie graftombe te bouwen.
De piramide van Meidoem lijkt die theorie te bevestigen. De piramide werd eerst als trappenpiramide gebouwd, het geheel had dus de vorm van een trap. Het getrapte uitzicht van de piramide transformeerde doorheen de tijd tot een ‘echte piramide’ met gladde oppervlaktes die over de trappen gebouwd werden. Waarom en hoe dat precies gebeurde, is niet duidelijk.
(Lees verder onder de foto)
Getty Images/iStockphotoWat er overblijft van de piramide in Meidoem is een torentje en wat puin.
Oorspronkelijk was de piramide zo’n 93 meter hoog. Het glorieuze complex stortte echter in waardoor er momenteel slechts een torentje en wat puin te ‘bewonderen’ is.
Grootste piramidebouwer
Farao – en berucht piramidebouwer – Snofroe zou trouwens een uitstekende leermeester zijn geweest. Hij was immers de vader van farao Cheops. Die slaagde erin om ’s werelds grootste en bekendste piramides (piramides van Gizeh) te bouwen.
Egyptian Ministry of AntiquitiesEr werden in de graftombe ook dierenhoofden teruggevonden, vermoedelijk zijn die afkomstig van stieren.
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Lost village 2,000 years old found hidden in dense ‘virgin’ forest
Lost village 2,000 years old found hidden in dense ‘virgin’ forest
EWAN JONES
The archeologists from Toruń made the stunning discovery in northern Poland using Aerial Laser Scanning which revealed an entire estate hidden in the heavily forested region.J. Czerniec
Archeologists have uncovered a completely intact ancient village, the only one of its kind in Europe, dating back almost 2,000 years.
The stunning discovery in northern Poland revealed farming land complete with boundary strips, homesteads, buildings and even roads.
Hidden in dense forests in the Bory Tucholskie region, the area is one of the least explored by archeologists.
The discovery revealed farming land complete with boundary strips, homesteads, buildings and even roads.
M. Jankowski
Archeologist Mateusz Sosnowski from the NCU (Nicolaus Copernicus University) Institute of Archeology in Toruń told PAP: "When it comes to research, it was virgin territory.
“It was a great surprise to discover there not only individual elements of a former settlement, but also its surroundings: fields surrounding the hamlet, traces of single homesteads and even tracts connecting them probable with other settlements."
The remains come from the first centuries of the modern era, Sosnowski and fellow reasearcher who made the discovery, Jerzy Czerniec, believe.
Archeologist Mateusz Sosnowski from the NCU (Nicolaus Copernicus University) Institute of Archeology in Toruń said: "When it comes to research, it was virgin territory. We have an entire estate together with its surrounding farmland in the form of fields and pastures, where all the elements come from the same period. It's unique!"
Mateusz Sosnowski
Sosnowski explained that the discovery is unique because archeologists usually only discover individual elements of settlements or other constructions left over from the activities of ancient people.
Such discoveries usually occur during the building of houses or roads and the digs are rescue efforts. As a result, research is limited to a small area.
In such cases there is also not usually an opportunity to search more widely to see whether there are other remains or interesting artefacts in the vicinity.
Sosnowski explained: "Here we have an entirely different situation.
"We have tracked down unknown traces of an ancient Bory Tucholskie settlement. It's not a matter of one house or a fragment of a settlement.
“We have an entire estate together with its surrounding farmland in the form of fields and pastures, where all the elements come from the same period. It's unique!"
The remains come from the first century of the modern era, researchers believe.
M. Jankowski
The archeologists discovered the find using Aerial Laser Scanning (ALS), a tool ever more frequently used by researchers.
As part of a project aimed at creating anti-flood defences among other things, the whole of Poland was covered. ALS enables very thorough inspection of territory, even if it is overgrown with forest and the differences in height are invisible to the naked eye, as was the case in Bory Tucholskie.
The settlement together with its surrounding fields covers an area of over 170 hectares and the fields are surprisingly regular.
Sosnowski said: "Their shape brings to mind the three-field system of farming, known in Poland only from the middle ages. Was it already in use several hundred years earlier? we hope our research will answer that question."
Archaeologists uncovered an ancient village dating back almost 2,000 years hidden in the dense forest in the northern part of Poland. Surprisingly enough, the village was completely intact and is believed to be the first of its kind ever to be discovered in all of Europe. It was found in the very dense forests in the region of Bory Tucholskie which is one of the less explored areas by archaeologists.
The discovery of the ancient village included buildings, homesteads, boundary strips, and roads. Mateusz Sosnowski, who is an archaeologist from the NCU (Nicolaus Copernicus University) Institute of Archaeology in Toruń, provided further details on the discovery, “It was a great surprise to discover there not only individual elements of a former settlement, but also its surroundings: fields surrounding the hamlet, traces of single homesteads and even tracts connecting them probable with other settlements.”
Forest in Poland
Sosnowski, along with another researcher named Jerzy Czerniec, believe that the settlement dates back to the first centuries of the modern era.
While the majority of discoveries include only individual findings of ancient settlements, such as the remains of an old building, etc…, this discovery is quite unique. “Here we have an entirely different situation,” Sosnowski explained, “We have tracked down unknown traces of an ancient Bory Tucholskie settlement. It’s not a matter of one house or a fragment of a settlement. We have an entire estate together with its surrounding farmland in the form of fields and pastures, where all the elements come from the same period. It’s unique!”
The ancient village was found by using Aerial Laser Scanning (ALS) which researchers use quite often. Since the forests are so dense, the village would have been invisible from the ground, and that’s why the discovery using the extremely thorough ALS is such an incredible find. The settlement, as well as the surrounding farmland, covered more than 170 hectares of land.
Forest in Poland
Quite a few of the archaeological discoveries that have been previously found around the Polish village are thought to be from the modern era or maybe even during the Middle Ages. Sosnowski described the formation of the newly discovered ancient village by saying, “Their shape brings to mind the three-field system of farming, known in Poland only from the Middle Ages. Was it already in use several hundred years earlier? We hope our research will answer that question.”
Secret Rocket Launches and A Mysterious Vapor Trail in England Brett Tingley February 14, 2019 FACEBOOK TWITTER GOOGLE+ With the eyes of the world’s superpowers turned towards space in search of new war-fighting domains, more and more aerospace
Secret Rocket Launches and A Mysterious Vapor Trail in England
With the eyes of the world’s superpowers turned towards space in search of new war-fighting domains, more and more aerospace mysteries keep stacking up. Further evidence of clandestine rocket launches was found in England this week as a witness managed to catch a picture of a mysterious “spiral-shaped cloud” which looks an awful lot like a rocket’s vapor trail, implying that someone in the UK may be putting spacecraft into space on the sly. David Hargrave from Sidbury Hill on Salisbury Plain says he was walking his dog around 5:00 pm local time last Tuesday, February 5 when he spotted the strange cloud and, luckily for us, had the presence of mind to snapa compelling picture of the event.
Despite witnessing the event first-hand, Hargrave says he has no idea what the picture may show:
I haven’t got a clue what it is either – hopefully someone out there will have an answer. I saw it when walking the dogs, looking up and seeing the smoke-like air go up vertically. As it got dark we were then no longer able to see it. It is a mystery.
The cloud in the photograph glows red in the setting sun appears to rise out of the ground in what Hargrave says is the direction of Westbury along the northwestern edge of the Salisbury Plain. Nearly half of the plain is taken up by Defence Training Estate Salisbury Plain (DTE SP), a military training area which includes the Boscombe Down experimental airbase and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down, one of the United Kingdom’s most secretive military research facilities.
If secret rockets were being launched in the UK, chances are high they could be launched from one of these facilities. However, The London Economicreports that neither the nearby University of Bristol nor the Ministry of Defence claim to know anything about the mysterious vapor trail. Publicly, that is.
Still, the vapor trail in these photos quite strongly resembles other images of known rocket launches and while the official silence surrounding the mysterious cloud is unusual, it’s not unprecedented. Evidence of seemingly secret “black” launchesis being caught on camera around the world with increasing frequency even as government officials deny knowledge of the obvious.
Literally every nation’s government right now.
What’s going on in space that’s requires so much secrecy? Do we really want to know? Furthermore, who owns the air above us? Should governments or private aerospace corporations be allowed to launch whatever they want into the air above our heads without the public’s consent?
“When you join the ‘*** Community,’ which happens automatically if you applied as a candidate, they start giving you points. You get points for getting through each round of the selection process… and then the only way to get more points is to buy merchandise from *** or to donate money to them.”
Without knowing the name of the group running this “community,” you might say it resembles a multi-level marketing program. When you find out this statement is from someone who was a finalist for Mars One, the private Dutch organization promoting the idea of building a permanent human colony on the Red Planet, you realize this was more of a multi-level Martian-ing scheme. And “scheme” seems to be the operative words as the news hit this week that the for-profit arm of Mars One was declared bankrupt in January. The “finalists” may have lost all of their money, but at least they didn’t breathe their final breath while stuck on Mars.
“”By decision of 15 January 2019, the Civil Court of the City of Basel declared the company bankrupt with effect from 15 January 2019, 3.37 p.m., thus dissolving it.”
“The company” was Mars One Ventures, the Swiss-based for-profit arm of Mars One, which was valued at $100 million. That’s not much, considering the company formed in 2012 by Dutch entrepreneur Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp claimed to need $6 billion to meet its mission statement: “Human settlement of Mars is the next giant leap for humankind. Exploring the solar system as a united humanity will bring us all closer together.”
Line up by how much you donated.
When you think about it, $6 billion doesn’t seem like enough to set up a Mars colonization expedition when it’s close to the figure being bandied about to build just a small portion of a certain wall on Earth. That should have been one of the many warning signs to anyone thinking about signing up. In fact, anexposé in 2014found a lot of unusual problems, starting with that $6 billion budget which seemed too low – and yet, after crowdfunding and donations, Mars One barely raised one percent of it. Then there was the alleged 200,000 people signing up, which quickly became just 2,600 actual participants who sent in videos (and probably some money). An alleged deal with SpaceX to provide the transport was just that … alleged.
Then there was the real big flashing neon warning sign – Mars One proposed to turn the whole application process, training program and trip to Mars into a giant reality TV show that was alleged (there’s that word again) to be run by the creators of the Big Brother franchise. As Howie Mandel likes to say on his show with the models carrying briefcases – no deal.
And yet, Mars One did have some investors and volunteers who bought the pitch (and the starter kit) but not the old adage: “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” Engadget points out that it was obvious from the start that the money needed to fund a reality TV show was far less than one rocket launch and even if it made it to Mars, a group of scientists at MIT who studied the plan said it would quickly kill off the colonists … not exactly good for ratings.
“Once out of administration, Mars One will redirect its focus. For the execution of the actual voyage to Mars, the company will continue to seek strategic collaboration with renowned companies and organizations involved with the travel to Mars. Mars One itself will focus on the even more inspiring “being there”, the adventurous story of humans actually living on Mars, making The Red Planet their new home. Utilizing its new investment plan, Mars One Ventures will establish a marketing machine, creating continuous content about these activities, evaluated from all angles, including technological, psychological, economical, and ethical aspects. The new investor will present its plans at a press conference on Wednesday, March 6, 2019, at a location to be determined.”
Being there? Forget Mars. Let’s see what “investor plans on “being there” March 6.
“So, what do you think about theBerwyn Mountains UFO crash?” I was recently asked. The strange affair in question dates back to 1974 and the mountains of North Wales. And, it’s now time for me to answer that opening question. Back in the 1996-1999 period, when UFOs were all-dominating on the newsstands of the U.K., and when Mulder and Scully were still flying high, much page space was devoted to a strange and genuinely intriguing event that had occurred on a Welsh mountain one dark, winter night in January 1974. For many people of a “The Truth Is Out There” persuasion (in the 1990s, at least), this curious affair was seen as being nothing less than a potential “British Roswell” – or a “Welsh Roswell” would be far more accurate. Stories of whistle-blower testimony collectively suggested that perhaps an alien spacecraft had crashed on North Wales’ Berwyns Mountains range. The craft and crew were said to have been retrieved undercover of the utmost secrecy by elements of the British military and government. And, I have to admit, that at the time in question (’96-’99) I was a fully paid up member of the “I Want To Believe” club, and I gave space to the incident in my books A Covert Agenda. I was most certainly not against the idea that E.T. might have really crashed and burned on the Berwyns all those years ago. But, times and minds change.
It was, as the ’90s breathed their last, that Andy Roberts (to some – including me – a genuine Fortean sleuth, to others a spoiler of ufological fun, and to more than a few, a tool of disinformation agents in the government…YAWN) came along with a preliminary paper on the Berwyns affair. Andy suggested that the Berwyn affair was nothing more than the result of mistaken identity, coupled with a localized earthquake and a meteor shower – on the same night and in approximately the same time-frame. Of course, the true-believers moaned that Andy was following some nefarious agenda, courtesy of the Men in Black – the dreaded “them,” in other words. And, those of a different persuasion gave Andy a collective pat on the back. Especially so when Andy’s book UFO Down? was published.
I have to say, that – given the fact that UFO Down? still represents the only full-length book on the case – Andy did an excellent job of finally digging deep into the many and varied complexities of the affair and coming to a satisfying conclusion. Interestingly, though, it actually leaves the door open to one or two potentially Fortean anomalies having played some sort of presently-unclear role in the case. But, with that said, Andy’s was an excellent study of how and why myths, legends and rumors all played roles in carefully creating and nurturing an admittedly fascinating series of separate events into the tale of a crashed spacecraft from a far-away world.
Easily worthy of a case for Holmes and Watson – and, particularly so given its ingredients of a dark, imposing and windswept mountain-range; little isolated villages; “phantom helicopters” prowling the moonlit skies; claims of deep and dark secrets; and shadowy and sinister Men in Black-like figures said to be roaming the landscape by day and night – the Berwyn story is one that is truly as fascinating as it is one filled with wild twists and turns. All that’s missing is a ghostly black hound with glowing red eyes! Packed with accounts of strange lights on the mountain, an alleged heavy British Army presence, alien bodies recovered at the “crash” site, meteorites, earth tremors, ghost-lights, official files and more, this is a book that anyone and everyone interested in UFOs (and particularly tales of crashed UFOs) should acquire a copy of at the earliest opportunity.
UFO Down? demonstrates how an investigation of such an event should be undertaken, even if the conclusions aren’t what some solely belief-driven souls wish to hear. Well, too bad. Andy went to the places, spoke to the witnesses, chased down the government files, and traveled to where the evidence led him. And, if and when someone else decides to do likewise and comes to a different conclusion, then I’ll take a look at that evidence in its own right. But, right now, we have in my opinion a first-class, true-life detective-style story that tells the truth of the Berwyn affair (or, as close to the truth as we’re likely to get) and reveals its complexities to the extent that we’re able to.
Crashed UFO-themed books are filled with tales of Hangar 18, alien bodies on ice, and extraterrestrial autopsies. UFO Down?is a very different addition to the field of crashed UFO titles, but in a refreshing, welcome and – most important of all – informative and illuminating fashion. Whatever your views on all things saucer-shaped and crashed, you should buy this book. You will learn a lot – about those aforementioned crashed UFOs, but also about why and how the British UFO research community of the 1990s arguably needed its very own Roswell, and how and why belief systems and eyewitness perception may be the most important facets of certain, challenging, alleged UFO events.
Could lightning have literally been the ‘spark’ which ignited all life here on Earth? New bizarre-sounding research published by scientists at Tel Aviv University has found that lightning may give off a unique type of extremely low frequency (ELF) electromagnetic field which actually serves to protect the cells of living organisms. While these fields are quite weak and difficult to detect, scientists think they already have enough data to show the lightning may be one of the key factors which allowed or helped life to flourish on our mysterious planet.
Lightning is known to create what are known as Schumann resonances, a phenomenon in which the Earth’s electromagnetic field resonates at very low frequencies due to the lightning activity worldwide. According to Professor Colin Price of Tel Aviv University’s Porter School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, this new study is among the first to find a connection between lightning and the electromagnetic fields of living things:
It is the first study that demonstrates a link between global lighting activity and the Schumann Resonances and the activity of living cells. It may explain why all living organisms have electrical activity in the same ELF spectral range, and it is the first time such a connection has been shown. This may have some therapeutic implications down the line, since these ELF fields appear to protect cells from damage, but this requires further research.
Researchers found that environmental electromagnetic fields can actually protect cells under stress conditions such as a lack of oxygen. Cells in these stress states seem to respond to the types of electromagnetic resonances given off by lightning activity in ways that suggest these fields can help reduce the damage cells experience while under stress.
While on one hand this study provides one more fascinating hint that all things living and non-living on Earth may be more connected than we know, it also may foreshadow future therapies which harness these mysterious effects of electromagnetic fields. It’s already suspected that the electromagnetic fields given off by today’s telecom devices may be affecting living things in harmful ways, so it makes sense that natural electromagnetic fields may likewise be able to affect living cells. Much more data is needed before definitive conclusions can be drawn about this phenomenon, but if confirmed, it may demonstrate that electromagnetic energy plays a vital role in the natural processes of living things. Could lightning be a vital part of life on Earth?
I’m also left to wonder if perhaps ancient cultures were aware of this phenomenon given some of the claims made about the pyramids and electromagnetic radiation. Could the pyramids have been healing centers?
Be Aware of The Archons The Secret Controllers of the Human Rac
Be Aware of The Archons The Secret Controllers of the Human Race
Many people have heard the term “Archon” but would be hard-pressed to define it. What is an Archon?
The Archons are a genuine species with their own proper habitat, but they have a nasty tendency to stray from their boundaries and intrude on the human realm.
Archons are said to feel intense envy toward humanity because we possess the intentionality they lack. They are are type of collective unconscious energy forces with the intention of keeping humanity asleep. They are hidden negative controllers of humankind.
Archons were brought into our Universe by space-faring travelers from our Universe who violated an injunction against venturing through a wormhole/stargate to a dark Universe populated by Archons.
The real danger they pose to humanity is not invasion of the planet but invasion of the mind. They access human consciousness through telepathy and simulation. They infect our imagination and use the power of make-believe for deception and confusion and if humanity falls under the illusion of superhuman power, it becomes as good as real, a self-fulfilling delusion.
Millennium Falcon UFO appeared over a home In Canada, Feb 3, 2019, Photos, UFO Sighting News.
Millennium Falcon UFO appeared over a home In Canada, Feb 3, 2019, Photos, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: February 3, 2019
Location of sighting: Calgary, Canada
Source: MUFON #98454 A Millennium Falcon shaped UFO appeared over a home this week in Calgary, Canada. The UFOs dark silhouette really stands out as its position causes a gapping hole in the cloud floor. The UFO itself is most likely cloaked, however the UFO still has mass and that mass is pushing aside the clouds its using to hide in. I also wonder if the eyewitness looked up because they had an intuition...or feeling of being told to look up. This often occurs when eyewitness are this close to UFOs late at night or early morning. Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
Exited the garage and noticed something in sky appeared to be behind clouds so I ran and grabbed my cell phone and took 3 pictures.
Glowing Orb UFO Shows Up At Space Station Live Cam, Feb 7, 2019, Photos, UFO Sighting News.
Glowing Orb UFO Shows Up At Space Station Live Cam, Feb 7, 2019, Photos, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: February 7, 2019
Location of sighting: Space station, earths orbit
Source: MUFON #98463
This glowing orb was caught by an eyewitness who was watching the live Internet cam of the space station. The UFO is not a perfect circle, but lumpy and uneven. The dark center could be a window or viewing area for the pilots on it. This isn't the moon, because the moon is much larger, more clear and easy to make out. It could be a top secret military craft for the USA or Russia that comes near the orbit of the space station, but its shape is very odd, unlike most satellites. I would therefore conclude that it is very likely an alien craft investigating the space station.
Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
I was watching live feed of the international space station and before Christ Almighty this red looking ball and this almost cloud looking light started appearing and it caught my attention then this red ball comes flying from what would be northeast.
Here is something you don't see everyday. The newest Mars Curiosity rover photos shows a hand size tooth fossil near its wheels. Anyone who has ever found or bought or found fossils would recognize this right away. It can't be a coincidence that the rover stopped right in front of the fossil. Its just too obvious. I myself own two...one is a 7 inch Megaladon shark tooth and another 2.5 inch Megaladon baby tooth, but I also have many other fossils. When I saw this recent Mars photo I just knew instantly what it was.
By looking at the tooth we do know a few facts about the animal. First off its sharp, which means its a meat eater...a carnivore. Second its hand size...so that means its at least of a Megaladon shark here on Earth...thats about 17-18 meters, but it may have been a land animal so could be about 20-30% smaller than that. Was this an intelligent aliens tooth, probably not, most likely just a prehistoric period of Mars...far before any intelligent life even came about.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Crop circle
Crop circle
A crop circle or crop formation is a pattern created by flattening a crop, usually a cereal. The term was first coined in the early 1980s by Colin Andrews. Crop circles have been described as all falling “within the range of the sort of thing done in hoaxes” by Taner Edis, professor of physics at Truman State University.
Aerial view of crop circles in Switzerland
Although obscure natural causes or alien origins of crop circles are suggested by fringe theorists, there is no scientific evidence for such explanations, and all crop circles are consistent with human causation. A person who studies crop circles is known as a cereologist. The number of crop circles has substantially increased from the 1970s to current times. There has been little scientific study of them. Circles in the United Kingdom are not distributed randomly across the landscape but appear near roads, areas of medium to dense population and cultural heritage monuments, such as Stonehenge or Avebury. In 1991, two hoaxers, Bower and Chorley, took credit for having created many circles throughout England after one of their circles was described by a circle investigator as impossible to be made by human hand.
Formations are usually created overnight, although some are reported to have appeared during the day. In contrast to crop circles or crop formations, archaeological remains can cause cropmarks in the fields in the shapes of circles and squares, but they do not appear overnight, and they are always in the same places every year.
History The concept of “crop circles” began with the original late-1970s hoaxes by Doug Bower and Dave Chorley (see Bower and Chorley, below). They said that they were inspired by the Tully “saucer nest” case in Australia, where a farmer claimed to first have seen a UFO, then found a flattened circle of swamp reeds.
Before the 20th century A 1678 news pamphlet The Mowing-Devil: or, Strange News Out of Hartfordshire is claimed by some cereologists to be the first depiction of a crop circle. Crop circle researcher Jim Schnabel does not consider it to be a historical precedent because it describes the stalks as being cut rather than bent. In 1686, British naturalist Robert Plot reported on rings or arcs of mushrooms in The Natural History of Stafford-Shire and proposed air flows from the sky as a cause. In 1991 meteorologist Terence Meaden linked this report with modern crop circles, a claim that has been compared with those made by Erich von Däniken.
An 1880 letter to the editor of Nature by amateur scientist John Rand Capron describes how a recent storm had created several circles of flattened crops in a field.
20th century In 1932, archaeologist E C Curwen observed four dark rings in a field at Stoughton Down near Chichester, but could examine only one: “a circle in which the barley was ‘lodged’ or beaten down, while the interior area was very slightly mounded up.”
In 1963, amateur astronomer Patrick Moore described a crater in a potato field in Wiltshire, which he considered was probably caused by an unknown meteoric body. In nearby wheat fields, there were several circular and elliptical areas where the wheat had been flattened. There was evidence of “spiral flattening”. He thought they could be caused by air currents from the impact, since they led towards the crater. Astronomer Hugh Ernest Butler observed similar craters and said they were likely caused by lightning strikes.
In the 1960s, in Tully, Queensland, Australia, and in Canada, there were many reports of UFO sightings and circular formations in swamp reeds and sugar cane fields. For example, on 8 August 1967, three circles were found in a field in Duhamel, Alberta, Canada; Department of National Defence investigators concluded that it was artificial but couldn’t say who made them or how. The most famous case is the 1966 Tully “saucer nest”, when a farmer said he witnessed a saucer-shaped craft rise 30 or 40 feet (12 m) from a swamp and then fly away. On investigating he found a nearly circular area 32 feet long by 25 feet wide where the grass was flattened in clockwise curves to water level within the circle, and the reeds had been uprooted from the mud. The local police officer, the Royal Australian Air Force, and the University of Queensland concluded that it was most probably caused by natural causes, like a down draught, a willy-willy (dust devil), or a waterspout. In 1973, G.J. Odgers, Director of Public Relations, Department of Defence (Air Office), wrote to a journalist that the “saucer” was probably debris lifted by the causing willy-willy. Hoaxers Bower and Chorley said they were inspired by this case to start making the modern crop circles that appear today.
Since the 1960s, there had been a surge of UFOlogists in Wiltshire, and there were rumours of “saucer nests” appearing in the area, but they were never photographed. There are other pre-1970s reports of circular formations, especially in Australia and Canada, but they were always simple circles, which could have been caused by whirlwinds. In Fortean Times David Wood reported that in 1940 he had already made crop circles near Gloucestershire using ropes. In 1997, the Oxford English Dictionary recorded the earliest usage of the term “crop circles” in a 1988 issue of Journal of Meteorology, referring to a BBC film. The coining of the term “crop circle” is attributed to Colin Andrews in the late 1970s or early 1980s.
The majority of reports of crop circles have appeared in and spread since the late 1970s as many circles began appearing throughout the English countryside. This phenomenon became widely known in the late 1980s, after the media started to report crop circles in Hampshire and Wiltshire. After Bower’s and Chorley’s 1991 statement that they were responsible for many of them, circles started appearing all over the world. To date, approximately 10,000 crop circles have been reported internationally, from locations such as the former Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, the U.S., and Canada. Sceptics note a correlation between crop circles, recent media coverage, and the absence of fencing and/or anti-trespassing legislation.
Although farmers expressed concern at the damage caused to their crops, local response to the appearance of crop circles was often enthusiastic, with locals taking advantage of the increase of tourism and visits from scientists, crop circle researchers, and individuals seeking spiritual experiences. The market for crop-circle interest consequently generated bus or helicopter tours of circle sites, walking tours, T-shirts, and book sales.
21st century Since the start of the 21st century, crop formations have increased in size and complexity, with some featuring as many as 2,000 different shapes and some incorporating complex mathematical and scientific characteristics. The researcher Jeremy Northcote found that crop circles in the UK in 2002 were not spread randomly across the landscape. They tended to appear near roads, areas of medium-to-dense population, and cultural heritage monuments such as Stonehenge or Avebury. He found that they always appeared in areas that were easy to access. This suggests strongly that these crop circles were more likely to be caused by intentional human action than by paranormal activity. Another strong indication of that theory was that inhabitants of the zone with the most circles had a historical tendency for making large-scale formations, including stone circles such as Stonehenge, burial mounds such as Silbury Hill, long barrows such as West Kennet Long Barrow, and white horses in chalk hills.
Bower and Chorley In 1991, self-professed pranksters Doug Bower and Dave Chorley made headlines claiming it was they who started the phenomenon in 1978 with the use of simple tools consisting of a plank of wood, rope, and a baseball cap fitted with a loop of wire to help them walk in a straight line. To prove their case they made a circle in front of journalists; a “cereologist” (advocate of paranormal explanations of crop circles), Pat Delgado, examined the circle and declared it authentic before it was revealed that it was a hoax. Inspired by Australian crop circle accounts from 1966, Bower and Chorley claimed to be responsible for all circles made prior to 1987, and for more than 200 crop circles in 1978–1991 (with 1000 other circles not being made by them). After their announcement, the two men demonstrated making a crop circle. According to Professor Richard Taylor, “the pictographs they created inspired a second wave of crop artists. Far from fizzling out, crop circles have evolved into an international phenomenon, with hundreds of sophisticated pictographs now appearing annually around the globe.”
Smithsonian magazine wrote:
Since Bower and Chorley’s circles appeared, the geometric designs have escalated in scale and complexity, as each year teams of anonymous circle-makers lay honey traps for New Age tourists.
Art and business
A crop circle with the logo of Swedish Railways.
Since the early 1990s, the UK arts collective Circlemakers, founded by artists Rod Dickinson and John Lundberg (and subsequently including artists Wil Russell and Rob Irving), have been creating crop circles in the UK and around the world as part of their art practice and for commercial clients.
The Led Zeppelin boxed set that was released on 7 September 1990, along with the remasters of the first boxed set, as well as the second boxed set, all feature an image of a crop circle that appeared in East Field in Alton Barnes, Wiltshire.
On the night of 11–12 July 1992, a crop-circle making competition with a prize of £3,000 (funded in part by the Arthur Koestler Foundation) was held in Berkshire. The winning entry was produced by three Westland Helicopters engineers, using rope, PVC pipe, a plank, string, a telescopic device and two stepladders. According to Rupert Sheldrake, the competition was organised by him and John Michell and “co-sponsored by The Guardian and The Cerealogist”. The prize money came from PM, a German magazine. Sheldrake wrote that “The experiment was conclusive. Humans could indeed make all the features of state-of-the-art crop formations at that time. Eleven of the twelve teams made more or less impressive formations that followed the set design.”
Aerial view of a crop circle in Diessenhofen
In 2002, Discovery Channel commissioned five aeronautics and astronautics graduate students from MIT to create crop circles of their own, aiming to duplicate some of the features claimed to distinguish “real” crop circles from the known fakes such as those created by Bower and Chorley. The creation of the circle was recorded and used in the Discovery Channel documentary Crop Circles: Mysteries in the Fields.
In 2009, The Guardian reported that crop circle activity had been waning around Wiltshire, in part because makers preferred creating promotional crop circles for companies that paid well for their efforts.
A video sequence used in connection with the opening of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London showed two crop circles in the shape of the Olympic rings. Another Olympic crop circle was visible to passengers landing at nearby Heathrow Airport before and during the Games.
A 7-acre (2.8-hectare) crop circle depicting the emblem of the Star Wars Rebel Alliance was created in California in December 2017 by an 11-year-old boy as a spaceport for X-wing fighters.
Legal implications In 1992, Hungarian youths Gábor Takács and Róbert Dallos, both then 17, were the first people to face legal action after creating a crop circle. Takács and Dallos, of the St. Stephen Agricultural Technicum, a high school in Hungary specializing in agriculture, created a 36-metre (118ft) diameter crop circle in a wheat field near Székesfehérvár, 43 miles (69 km) southwest of Budapest, on June 8, 1992. On September 3, the pair appeared on Hungarian TV and exposed the circle as a hoax, showing photos of the field before and after the circle was made. As a result, Aranykalász Co., the owners of the land, sued the teens for 630,000 Ft (~$3,000 USD) in damages. The presiding judge ruled that the students were only responsible for the damage caused in the circle itself, amounting to about 6,000 Ft (~$30 USD), and that 99% of the damage to the crops was caused by the thousands of visitors who flocked to Székesfehérvár following the media’s promotion of the circle. The fine was eventually paid by the TV show, as were the students’ legal fees.
In 2000, Matthew Williams became the first man in the UK to be arrested for causing criminal damage after making a crop circle near Devizes. In November 2000, he was fined £100 and £40 in costs. As of 2008, no one else has been successfully prosecuted in the UK for criminal damage caused by creating crop circles.
Creation
Detail of a crop circle in a field in Switzerland
The scientific consensus on crop circles is that they are constructed by human beings as hoaxes, advertising, or art. The most widely known method for a person or group to construct a crop formation is to tie one end of a rope to an anchor point and the other end to a board which is used to crush the plants. Sceptics of the paranormal point out that all characteristics of crop circles are fully compatible with their being made by hoaxers.
Bower and Chorley confessed in 1991 to making the first crop circles in southern England. When some people refused to believe them, they deliberately added straight lines and squares to show that they could not have natural causes. In a copycat effect, increasingly complex circles started appearing in many countries around the world, including fractal figures. Physicists have suggested that the most complex formations might be made with the help of GPS and lasers. In 2009, a circle formation was made over the course of three consecutive nights and was apparently left unfinished, with some half-made circles.
The main criticism of alleged non-human creation of crop circles is that while evidence of these origins, besides eyewitness testimonies, is essentially absent, some are definitely known to be the work of human pranksters, and others can be adequately explained as such. There have been cases in which researchers declared crop circles to be “the real thing”, only to be confronted with the people who created the circle and documented the fraud, like Bower and Chorley and tabloid Today hoaxing Pat Delgado, the Wessex Sceptics and Channel 4’s Equinox hoaxing Terence Meaden, or a friend of a Canadian farmer hoaxing a field researcher of the Canadian Crop Circle Research Network. In his 1997 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan concludes that crop circles were created by Bower and Chorley and their copycats, and speculates that Ufologist’s willingly ignore the evidence for hoaxing so they can keep believing in an extraterrestrial origin of the circles. Many others have demonstrated how complex crop circles can be created. Scientific American published an article by Matt Ridley, who started making crop circles in northern England in 1991. He wrote about how easy it is to develop techniques using simple tools that can easily fool later observers. He reported on “expert” sources such as The Wall Street Journal, who had been easily fooled and mused about why people want to believe supernatural explanations for phenomena that are not yet explained. Methods of creating a crop circle are now well documented on the Internet.
Some crop formations are paid for by companies who use them as advertising. Many crop circles show human symbols, like the heart and arrow symbol of love, stereotyped alien faces, Hoaxers have been caught in the process of making new circles, such as in 2004 in the Netherlands for example.
Advocates of non-human causes discount on-site evidence of human involvement as attempts to discredit the phenomena. Some even argue a conspiracy theory, with governments planting evidence of hoaxing to muddle the origins of the circles. When Ridley wrote negative articles in newspapers, he was accused of spreading “government disinformation” and of working for the UK military intelligence service MI5. Ridley responded by noting that many cereologists make good livings from selling books and providing high-priced personal tours through crop fields, and he claimed that they have vested interests in rejecting what is by far the most likely explanation for the circles.
Alternative explanations Weather It has been suggested that crop circles may be the result of extraordinary meteorological phenomena ranging from freak tornadoes to ball lightning, but there is no evidence of any crop circle being created by any of these causes.
In 1880, an amateur scientist, John Rand Capron, wrote a letter to the editor of journal Nature about some circles in crops and blamed them on a recent storm, saying their shape was “suggestive of some cyclonic wind action”.
In 1980, Terence Meaden, a meteorologist and physicist, proposed that the circles were caused by whirlwinds whose course was affected by southern England hills. As circles became more complex, Terence had to create increasingly complex theories, blaming an electromagneto-hydrodynamic “plasma vortex”. The meteorological theory became popular, and it was even referenced in 1991 by physicist Stephen Hawking who said that, “Corn circles are either hoaxes or formed by vortex movement of air”. The weather theory suffered a serious blow in 1991, but Hawking’s point about hoaxes was supported when Bower and Chorley stated that they had been responsible for making all those circles. By the end of 1991 Meaden conceded that those circles that had complex designs were made by hoaxers.
Paranormal
Sketch of a “spaceship” creating crop circles, sent to UK Ministry of Defence circa 1998.
Since becoming the focus of widespread media attention in the 1980s, crop circles have become the subject of speculation by various paranormal, ufological, and anomalistic investigators ranging from proposals that they were created by bizarre meteorological phenomena to messages from extraterrestrial beings. There has also been speculation that crop circles have a relation to ley lines. Many New Age groups incorporate crop circles into their belief systems.
Some paranormal advocates think that crop circles are caused by ball lighting and that the patterns are so complex that they have to be controlled by some entity. Some proposed entities are: Gaia asking to stop global warming and human pollution, God, supernatural beings (for example Indian devas), the collective minds of humanity through a proposed “quantum field”, or extraterrestrial beings.
Responding to local beliefs that “extraterrestrial beings” in UFOs were responsible for crop circles appearing, the Indonesian National Institute of Aeronautics and Space (LAPAN) described crop circles as “man-made”. Thomas Djamaluddin, research professor of astronomy and astrophysics at LAPAN stated, “We have come to agree that this ‘thing’ cannot be scientifically proven.” Among others, paranormal enthusiasts, ufologist’s, and anomalistic investigators have offered hypothetical explanations that have been criticized as pseudoscientific by sceptical groups and scientists, including the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. No credible evidence of extraterrestrial origin has been presented.
Animal activity In 2009, the attorney general for the island state of Tasmania stated that Australian wallabies had been found creating crop circles in fields of opium poppies, which are grown legally for medicinal use, after consuming some of the opiate-laden poppies and running in circles.
Changes to crops A small number of scientists (physicist Eltjo Haselhoff, the late biophysicist William Levengood) have found differences between the crops inside the circles and outside them, citing this as evidence they were not man-made.
Levengood published papers in journal Physiologia Plantarum in 1994 and 1999. In his 1994 paper he found that certain deformities in the grain inside the circles were correlated to the position of the grain inside the circle. In 1996 sceptic Joe Nickell objected that correlation is not causation, raised several objections to Levengood’s methods and assumptions, and said “Until his work is independently replicated by qualified scientists doing ‘double-blind’ studies and otherwise following stringent scientific protocols, there seems no need to take seriously the many dubious claims that Levengood makes, including his similar ones involving plants at alleged ‘cattle mutilation’ sites.”.
A study by Eltjo Haselhoff reported that the pulvini of wheat in 95% of the crop circles investigated were elongated in a pattern falling off with distance from the centre and that seeds from the bent-over plants grew much more slowly under controlled conditions. Furthermore, traces of crop circle patterns are sometimes found in the crop the following year, “suggesting long-term damage to the crop field consistent with Levengood’s observations of stunted seed growth.”
Magnetism In 2000, Colin Andrews, who had researched crop circles for 17 years, stated that while he believed 80% were man-made, he thought the remaining circles, with less elaborate designs, could be explained by a three-degree shift in the Earth’s magnetic field, that creates a current that “electrocutes” the crops, causing them to flatten and form the circle.
Folklore
1678 pamphlet on the “Mowing-Devil”.
Researchers of crop circles have linked modern crop circles to old folkloric tales to support the claim that they are not artificially produced. Circle crops are culture-dependent: they appear mostly in developed and secularized Western countries where people are receptive to New Age beliefs, including Japan, but they don’t appear at all in other zones, such as Muslim countries.
Fungi can cause circular areas of crop to die, probably the origin of tales of “fairie rings”. Tales also mention balls of light many times but never in relation to crop circles.
A 17th-century English woodcut called the Mowing-Devil depicts the devil with a scythe mowing (cutting) a circular design in a field of oats. The pamphlet containing the image states that the farmer, disgusted at the wage his mower was demanding for his work, insisted that he would rather have “the devil himself” perform the task. Crop circle researcher Jim Schnabel does not consider this to be a historical precedent for crop circles because the stalks were cut down, not bent. The circular form indicated to the farmer that it had been caused by the devil.
In the 1948 German story Die zwölf Schwäne (The Twelve Swans), a farmer every morning found a circular ring of flattened grain on his field. After several attempts, his son saw twelve princesses disguised as swans, who took off their disguises and danced in the field. Crop rings produced by fungi may have inspired such tales since folklore holds these rings are created by dancing wolves or fairies.
Twitter Photo of A NASA Astronaut From ISS Sparks Claims Of UFO Monitoring Space Station
Twitter Photo of A NASA Astronaut From ISS Sparks Claims Of UFO Monitoring Space Station
A former NASA astronaut posted a photo from the ISS that seemed to show a UFO. The picture sent conspiracy theorists into a frenzy.
Scott Kelly commanded the International Space Station (ISS) on Expedition 26,45 and 46. While he launched in Soyuz TMA-16M on March 27, 2015, he detailed his journey on social media, providing regular updates.
However, he appeared to snap a photo on board the ISS a small, white object in the top right. Mr Kelly tweeted a picture of India from outer space on November 15. At first glance, the photo shows merely Southern India lit up during the night. However, some space enthusiasts were quick to notice the UFO in the top right of the picture that looked out of place.
They said that Scott did a great shot of a UFO, but many others quickly debunked the UFO theories. Debunkers noted that the UFO was actually part of the space station. They explained that the High Definition Earth-Viewing System was mounted on the outside of the European Space Agency’s Columbus module and it resembled the same shape to that in the photo.
However, many others suggested that it was a UFO and these debunkers were just finding ways to cover up the truth or commissioned by NASA to drive away the public to the fact on the existence of aliens and UFOs monitoring the ISS.
Planetary alignment beginning on Valentine’s Day has some earthquake forecasters on high alert, as they believe a massive “mega-thrust” tremor is on the way. Uranus, Mars, Venus and the sun are all said to be tugging on the Earth, combining to unleash a huge tremor. The planets will have a gravitational tug-of-war across our solar system and will pull from all sides on Earth’s tectonic plates.
The forecast was made by new age earthquake prediction website Ditrianum, run by researcher Frank Hoogerbeets. He said: “Critical lunar geometry later on the 10th and early 11th has the potential of triggering larger seismic activity, possibly into the mid 6 magnitude range, perhaps even higher.
“Overall, the second half of February, starting around the 14th is going to be very critical with the potential of a mega-thrust earthquake between the 20th and 28th.”
Mr Hoogerbeets fails to state where the “earthquake” might hit, but if it were to be a “mega-thrust”, it would surely be devastating for at least one country, if not worldwide.
The earthquake has "the potential of a mega-thrust earthquake between the 20th and 28th.”
(Image: GETTY)
The Dutch researcher said he reached his conclusion using his Solar System Geometry Index (SSGI) which “is the computation of a dataset for a specific time-frame of values given to specific geometric positions of the planets, the Moon and the Sun”.
He said: “After three years of observations, it became clear that some planetary geometry in the Solar System clearly tends to cause a seismic increase, while other geometry does not.”
But experts have consistently rejected Mr Hoogerbeets’ claims, saying that there is no way earthquakes can be predicted.
Earthquake WARNING: ‘Huge MEGA-THRUST to strike’ by end of February
(Image: GETTY)
John Bellini, a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey (USGS) has said: “We can't predict or forecast earthquakes.
"Sometimes before a large earthquake you'll have a foreshock or two, but we don't know they're foreshocks until the big one happens.”
UFO BOMBSHELL: Did the US Pentagon run a UFO program? Declassified document REVEALS all
UFO BOMBSHELL: Did the US Pentagon run a UFO program? Declassified document REVEALS all
THE US military operated a secret UFO research program according to recently unclassified intelligence documents, a top UFO investigator and former Ministry of Defence (MoD) insider has claimed.
Military intelligence documents describing the US Government's alleged attempts to identify UFOand extraterrestrial threats have been revealed to the public. The UFO revelation comes with the release of a Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) letter to the US Congress, dated January 9, 2018. The letter, shared with Express.co.uk by former MoD UFO investigator Nick Pope, sheds light onto the US' involvement with UFO research operations. Mr Pope's investigation into the matter supports claims the US investigated extraterrestrial reports under the cover of aerospace defence pretences.
According to Mr Pope the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which ran from 2002 to 2012 and was first made public in 2017, acted as this cover.
In his estimate, the DIA document, which he obtained through a Freedom of Information (FoI) act, proves this.
The UFO expert told Express.co.uk: "Ever since the existence of AATIP was first revealed in December 2017, there's been controversy about its true nature - was it a UFO program, as claimed by some of those involved, or simply a program aimed at assessing far-term aerospace threats, as some sceptics have suggested?
"Answering that question is difficult because we still have very few official documents about AATIP, but the Defense Intelligence Agency letter to Congress that I recently obtained from the DIA's Office of Corporate Communications gives us some clear pointers.
UFO news: A UFO expert believes US intelligence ran a covert UFO research program
(Image: GETTY/NNICK POPE)
"In the letter, the DIA describe AATIP's purpose as being 'to investigate foreign advanced aerospace weapon threats from the present out to the next 40 years'.
"But there's a total disconnect between that statement and the list of 'products produced under the AATIP contract' listed in the letter's attachment. This list sounds like Harry Potter meets Star Trek, with papers on anti-gravity, invisibility cloaking, stargates, warp drive and wormholes.
"The clincher is a paper on the Drake Equation, which was drawn up in 1961 by the radio astronomer Frank Drake."
Drake's Equation is a theoretical approximation on the number of intelligent and technologically advanced species throughout the Milky Way Galaxy.
The equation sets to answer one of the most fundamental questions of existence - are we alone in the universe?
There's no doubt in my mind that AATIP was researching and investigating UFOs
Nick Pope, UFO investigator
But its presence in unclassified military documents seems ill-placed, Mr Pope argued, and suggests AATIP was indeed involved in researching extraterrestrial threats.
Mr Pope said: "If AATIP was about aerospace threats and not UFOs, where are the papers about Russian and Chinese aircraft, missiles and drones? There aren't any.
"Taken collectively, the papers look as if they were drawn up to answer a question along the lines of 'if we're being visited by extraterrestrials, what technologies might they be using, and can we figure out these technologies ourselves?'"
UFO news: The obtained documents show the US investigated war drives, antigravity and invisibility
(Image: NICK POPE)
UFO news: Nick Pope, a former Mod UFO investigator, believes the document support the claim
(Image: NICK POPE)
The DIA letter, addressed to former United States Senator John McCain and Senator Jack Reed, outlines the AATIP's research tasks, goals and technologies.
Among the more bizarre items listed in the letter, are reports of invisibility cloaking research, "Antigravity for Aerospace Applications", "Warp Drive, Dark Energy and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions" and aforementioned Drake's Equation.
Mr Pope said: "The US Government seems to have been looking at all this in terms of assessing threats and opportunities, which is exactly what I would expect in an intelligence program of this nature.
"It's broadly similar to the way we looked at the issue in the Ministry of Defence. Whatever the true nature of the UFO phenomenon, the question is whether or not anything useful can be derived from a better understanding of what we're dealing with.
"Technology acquisition - including weaponisation - is at the heart of this.
"Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who was the key figure in getting AATIP set up and funded, spoke to this point in a 2009 letter to the Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn III.
"He wrote that the 'technological insight and capability gained will provide the US with a distinct advantage over any foreign threats and allow the US to maintain its preeminence as a world leader' while warning that the technologies 'have the potential to be used with catastrophic effects by adversaries'."
But the one missing piece of the puzzle is the complete lack of the term UFO through both letters - a practice, which is not at all uncommon across government departments investigating such issues.
The MoD for instance, Mr Pope said, would refer to Unidentified Flying Objects as UPSs - Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon.
Doing this would "reframe the debate" from associations with science-fiction associations surrounding the concept of UFOs.
Mr Pope said the pop-cultural baggage surrounding the term UFO is too counterproductive to entertain in a scientific and research environment.
He said: "While there's no doubt in my mind that AATIP was researching and investigating UFOs, describing the program in aerospace terms makes sense.
UFO news: The official explanation is aerospace defence against foreign powers
(Image: GETTY)
UFO news: AATIP looked into Drake's Equation, which estimates alien civilisations in the Milky Way
(Image: GETTY)
"Part of that may have been an attempt to hide the program, keeping it off the radar with Pentagon financiers looking for cuts, and making it more difficult for journalists and the public to find it using the Freedom of Information Act.
"That said, there are potential aerospace spin-offs too. As an example, if we can render an aircraft not just stealthy, but literally invisible, there are obvious military benefits.
"There are potential military applications with a lot of the other things AATIP was looking at too.
"Nowhere is this more true than in space, which along with cyberspace is probably going to be the key battlespace in any future war."
The ATTIP was born in 2007 under the direction of Nevada Senator Harry Reid, under the guise of exploring unexplained aerospace threats.
Between 2002 and 2012, the program received a research budget of £17million ($22million).
The US public was made aware of the program in 2017 when a number of high profile media outlets, including Politico and The New York Times, reported on it.
The ATTIP's 38 research initiatives were then revealed to the public on January 16, 2019, following a Freedom of Information request (FoI).
Life on Earth has sure come a long way in the past billion years, but one particular ability may have developed much earlier than we thought: mobility.
Fossilized traces of motility found in 2.1 billion-year-old rock. Scale bar: 1 cm.
Image credits: El Albani / IC2MP / CNRS – Université de Poitiers.
Unicellular life is clearly successful — it’s been around for more than 3 billion years and it’s still going as strong as ever. But that’s not to say that pluricellular life doesn’t have anything going for it. For starters, it’s immensely more complex and diversified, capable of filling more niches and developing entire ecosystems which would be impossible in the single-celled world.
Another advantage is mobility — or rather, potential mobility. Not all multicellular life is mobile (take plants for example), but much of it is. Now, researchers have found the earliest evidence of mobility, and it dates from a whopping 2.1 billion years ago.
Up until recently, paleontologists thought that the earliest multicellular life emerged some 600 million years ago. But geologist Abderrazak El Albani and his team at the Institut de chimie des milieux et matériaux de Poitiers found a geological deposit in Gabon with evidence of multicellular life, dating from 2.1 billion years ago. Now, analyzing fossils from the same deposit, El Albani and colleagues have found traces of mobility, showing that this ancient life was probably much more sophisticated than we gave it credit.
Micro-tomography is used to display the 3D morphology of tubes reflecting the paths of movement through the sediment. The tubes are filled with pyrite crystals (generated by the transformation by bacteria of biological tissue) found in layers of clay minerals. Parallel horizontal layers are fossilized microbial mats.
Image credits: A. El Albani.
More than 2 billion years ago, the world was a much different place than it is today, and one of the most striking differences was the lack of oxygen. Oxygen was only starting to accumulate in the atmosphere only around 2.2 billion years ago. Although it was produced by microorganisms for a long time, it couldn’t build up to any significant degree because of the vast deposits of unoxidized sulfur and iron — only after these sinks had been filled up and all the iron and sulfur oxidized, could the oxygen finally start to build up. The creatures that El Albani found traces of lived at the same time this transition was happening.
The evidence is a set of sinuous and tubular structures. Their diameter is about a few millimeters, running through what is now fine layers of sedimentary rock. During their lifetime, these creatures inhabited a simple, shallow marine environment. Chemical analysis revealed the biological origin of these structures and that they appeared at the same time the sediment was deposited.
The traces lie next to fossilized microbial biofilms, which formed thin layers in the sediments. It seems quite likely that the organisms behind this phenomenon moved around for nutritive elements and oxygen — both of which were produced by cyanobacteria.
So what exactly were these creatures? It’s hard to say. However, researchers suggest they may have been somewhat similar to colonial amoebae. Amoebae are generally single-celled animals, though some multicellular creatures have amoeboid cells. These cells can sometimes live individually, or, when resources are scarce, clump up together, forming a slug-like colony which moves in search of a favorable environment and more resources. This is what researchers believe they have come across — or at least a primitive manifestation of this phenomenon.
This study also casts an important question about the evolution of this mobility feature: why do we have this big gap, between most findings which date from 0.6 billion years ago, and this one, which dates to 2.1 billion years? Did mobility evolve back then and continuously develop but we just haven’t found traces of it, or was this experiment cut short by an unforgiving environment?
For now, the jury is still out.
The study “Organism motility in an oxygenated shallow-marine environment 2.1 billion years ago ” by Abderrazak El Albani et al has been published in PNAS. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1815721116
A new impact crater has been found under more than a mile of ice in northwest Greenland.
Credit: NASA Goddard.
Scientists didn’t think they would be able to find evidence of ancient impact craters in places such as Greenland or Antarctica, which should have been cleared away by erosion by underlying ice. But, in November,researchers founda huge 30-kilometer-wide crater (19 miles) beneath Greenland’s Hiawatha Glacier. It was the first meteorite impact found beneath an ice sheet, a breakthrough moment in geoscience that combined the latest imaging technologies. Now, researchers report finding an even larger crater beneath Greenland’s thick ice. With a width of 36.5 km (22 miles), if confirmed, the new crater would be the 22nd largest impact crater found on Earth.
Beneath the ice
The new site was identified just 183 km (114 miles) from Hiawatha, but, judging from current evidence, the two impacts weren’t likely made during the same time. Both are fairly recent though. Scientists estimate that Hiawatha is no more than three million years old, while the new impact site in northwest Greenland was likely formed by an asteroid impact within the past 2.6 million years. Although it doesn’t have a formal name yet, researchers are considering naming it the Paterson crater, in honor of the late glaciologist Stan Paterson, who helped reconstruct climate data for the past 100,000 years using ice cores from Greenland.
“We’ve surveyed the Earth in many different ways, from land, air, and space—it’s exciting that discoveries like these are still possible,” said Joe MacGregor, a glaciologist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who made contributions to the discovery of both craters.
MacGregor was inspired by last year’s discovery to scour topographic maps for more signs of other craters. He eventually noticed a circular pattern in an ice surface map made using data from NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. His suspicions were confirmed by raw radar data, including those collected by NASA’s Operation IceBridge, which were used to study the topography of the bedrock beneath the ice.
The images that MacGregor and colleagues assembled show all the hallmarks of an impact crater, including a flat, bowl-shaped depression in the bedrock, surrounded by an elevated rim and centrally located peaks. Measurements also revealed a negative gravity anomaly over the area, which is also characteristic of impact craters.
“The only other circular structure that might approach this size would be a collapsed volcanic caldera,” MacGregor said in a statement. “But the areas of known volcanic activity in Greenland are several hundred miles away. Also, a volcano should have a clear positive magnetic anomaly, and we don’t see that at all.”
Given the proximity of the two craters, it’s plausible that a double asteroid system impacted the area. In order to investigate this possibility, the researchers studied the erosion rates of the two craters. The findings suggest that the new crater is far more eroded than the Hiawatha crater, and consequently older. Previously, two pairs of geographically close craters in Ukraine and Canada were also found to be unrelated.
“The existence of a third pair of unrelated craters is modestly surprising but we don’t consider it unlikely,” MacGregor said. “On the whole, the evidence we’ve assembled indicates that this new structure is very likely an impact crater, but presently it looks unlikely to be a twin with Hiawatha.”
TEOTWAWKI: 6 Horrible Consequences of Earth Losing It's Magnetic Shield - Happening Now Before You Very Lives
TEOTWAWKI: 6 Horrible Consequences of Earth Losing It's Magnetic Shield - Happening Now Before You Very Lives
6 Horrible Consequences of Earth Losing its Magnetic Field – There is so much about the Earth that we undervalue in our daily lives. Though human civilization has spread to every region of the world, our existence still depends on the alignment of natural phenomena that are beyond our control.
I am currently living in Barrow, AK. The city that is farthest North of all U.S. cities. For months I hadn’t seen insects, birds, or any wildlife. It is usually below zero and the wind chill makes it much colder. I was outside the other day and saw a crow flying over my head. It was -20 with a wind chill of around -40. I don’t know where that bird came from, or how he was surviving here in the middle of Winter, but your mention of the waning magnetic field and bird navigation makes me think it had something to do with it. Ramosa999
Earth’s magnetic field, also known as the geomagnetic field, is the magnetic field that extends from the Earth’s interior out into space, where it meets the solar wind, a stream of charged particles emanating from the Sun. Its magnitude at the Earth’s surface ranges from 25 to 65 microteslas.Wikipedia
What do you think about this video? Seems like Earth is in travesty and change to me. Let us know what you think in the comments section. Thanks for stopping by.
WETENSCHAPHet Nederlandse bedrijf Mars One, dat enkele reizen naar Mars wilde verzorgen, is deels failliet. Het beursgenoteerde deel van het bedrijf is op 15 januari al failliet verklaard. Dat deel was verantwoordelijk voor het regelen van de financiering voor de missie. Het nieuws is bevestigd door medeoprichter Bas Lansdorp aan platform Engadget.
Lansdorp benadrukt dat het alleen Mars One Ventures betreft en dat het non-profitdeel van het bedrijf - Mars One Foundation - verantwoordelijk voor de begeleiding van de missie en de training van astronauten, niet failliet is. In 2015 leek de missie van Bas Lansdorp al voorbij toen bleek dat geldschieters ontbraken, de beoogde tv-producent zich terugtrok en een kandidaat-ruimtereiziger de selectieprocedure van Mars One bespotte.
Lees ook
Nog honderd mensen in de running om naar Mars te reizen
Mars One wilde oorspronkelijk in 2023 een kolonie op de Rode Planeet vestigen en dit laten vastleggen in een realityshow. Deelnemers aan de missie moesten echter wel de rest van hun leven op Mars blijven; het ging om een enkeltje Mars. Of de missie nog steeds doorgaat is niet duidelijk. Als het aan Lansdorp ligt, betekent het faillissement “voor de missie niks. Het ophalen van geld voor de missie staat nu wel on hold.” Het bedrijf zoekt met een curator naar een oplossing.
Duizenden geïnteresseerden
In slechts twee weken na het openstellen van het aanmeldformulier in mei 2013 waren er al 78.000 aanmeldingen voor de missie binnengekomen bij Mars One. In februari 2015 was dat aantal opgelopen tot 200.000 aanmeldingen. In juni 2016 had het selectieproces de massa gegadigden tot slechts 100 gereduceerd. De uiteindelijke ruimtereizigers moeten enkele belangrijke eigenschappen hebben: herstellingsvermogen, aanpassingsvermogen, nieuwsgierigheid, betrouwbaarheid en creativiteit.
A Russian satellite designed to monitor the atmosphere for high-energy cosmic rays has detected mysterious ‘explosions’ of light miles above Earth’s surface, Russian scientists say.
While numerous examples of unusual space weather phenomena have been spotted in the upper atmosphere before, the team operating the Lomonosov satellite say what they’ve found may be something entirely new.
Despite the occurrence of several powerful bursts, Russian scientists say there were no signs of storms in the area, according to Sputnik.
Scroll down for video
A Russian satellite designed to monitor the atmosphere for high-energy cosmic rays has detected mysterious ‘explosions’ of light miles above Earth’s surface, Russian scientists say.
File photo
The satellite, named after scientist Mikhail Lomonosov, launched in 2016 and is integrated with the Kanopus-B spacecraft.
Its goal is to study high-energy cosmic rays, including gamma rays, magnetospheric particles, and transient light phenomena in the upper atmosphere.
And, the scientists now say it’s spotted something odd.
‘With the help of the telescope, we have obtained even more important results than we expected,’ Mikhail Panasyuk, Director of the Research Institute of Nuclear Physics at Moscow State University, told Sputnik.
‘It looks like we have encountered new physical phenomena. We do not yet know their physical nature.
‘For example, during Lomonosov’s flight at an altitude of several dozen kilometers, we have registered several times a very powerful “explosion” of light,' the director said.
The satellite, called Mikhailo Lomonosov, launched in 2016 and is integrated with the Kanopus-B spacecraft
‘But everything was clear underneath it, no storms, no clouds.’
In recent years, unusual electrical discharges have been captured on film by satellites and even astronauts aboard the International Space Station.
There are several types of luminous flashes, most notably red sprites and blue jets.
These bursts of electricity, however, are always associated with storm clouds, making the latest discovery all the more baffling.
The Lomonosov Project is working to get to the bottom of short-lived phenomena such as that recently detected in the upper atmosphere to understand processes beyond cosmic rays and gamma bursts.
While they may occur high above Earth, the effects of space weather can trickle down and interfere with activity down at the surface.
WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF 'SPACE LIGHTNING'?
While numerous types of space and weather phenomena have been spotted in the upper atmosphere before, the team operating the Lomonosov satellite say what they’ve found may be something entirely new.
The team reported 'explosions' of light, though no clouds were seen in the skies below.
In the past, similar luminous events have been linked to 'space lightning' - but, these events are always associated with storm clouds.
Blue jets are enormous bursts of electrical discharge spiking upward from storm clouds in the upper atmosphere.
They emerge from the electrically-charged cores of thunderstorms and rise up to 30 miles upwards in the shape of a cone.
Red sprites are electrical bursts of light that occur above highly active thunderstorms.
They only last a few milliseconds and are relatively dim compared with other lightning.
The late experimental physicist John Winckler accidentally discovered sprites, while helping to test a new low-light video camera in 1989.
They show up red at higher altitudes and fade to blue at lower heights.‘
We must take into account that the Earth’s radiation belts – the charged particles trapped by the magnetic field, can disappear, precipitate from the magnetic trap into the Earth’s atmosphere, producing in it extensive regions of ionization,’ the project’s website states.
‘The energy of the radiation belt particles is sufficiently high, for instance, there are relativistic electrons with energy of several MeV among them, which can penetrate deep in the atmosphere and by rate of ionization can easily compete against Auger showers.
‘Besides space factors physical processes near the Earth’s surface also have an effect on the atmosphere.’
Russian Satellite Registers Unknown Physical Phenomena in Earth's Atmosphere
Russian Satellite Registers Unknown Physical Phenomena in Earth's Atmosphere
MOSCOW (Sputnik) - An ultraviolet telescope installed on the Russian satellite Lomonosov has registered light "explosions" in the planet's atmosphere, whose physical nature has not been explained so far, the director of the Research Institute of Nuclear Physics at the Russian State University said in an interview with Sputnik.
"With the help of the telescope, we have obtained even more important results than we expected. It looks like we have encountered new physical phenomena… We do not yet know their physical nature… For example, during Lomonosov's flight at an altitude of several dozen kilometres, we have registered several times a very powerful 'explosion' of light. But everything was clear underneath it, no storms, no clouds," Mikhail Panasyuk said.
Russian astronomic satellite Mikhailo Lomonosov of Moscow State University was launched to the Earth's orbit in 2016.
It was designed to observe transient phenomena in the upper atmosphere of the Earth as well as studying the radiation characteristics of the planet's magnetosphere and for basic cosmological research. Its weight is 625 kilograms.
The satellite is equipped with a space telescope to measure the energy spectrum and chemical composition of high-energy cosmic rays from near-Earth orbit. Moreover, there are instrumental systems installed on board for studying cosmic gamma-ray bursts and the Earth's near-magnetosphere.
Russische satelliet legt volstrekt onbekend fenomeen vast in de atmosfeer. Wetenschappers staan voor raadsel
Russische satelliet legt volstrekt onbekend fenomeen vast in de atmosfeer.
Wetenschappers staan voor raadsel
Met behulp van een telescoop die is bevestigd aan de Russische satelliet Lomonosov zijn mysterieuze ‘lichtexplosies’ in de atmosfeer van de aarde vastgelegd.
Wetenschappers hebben nog geen verklaring kunnen vinden voor dit fenomeen, zo liet Mikhail Panasjoek van de Russische Staatsuniversiteit weten.
“Het lijkt erop dat we een nieuw fenomeen hebben ontdekt,” zei hij. “We weten nog niets over de aard hiervan.”
Niets te zien
Panasjoek zei dat Lomonosov op enkele tientallen kilometers hoogte verschillende zeer krachtige ‘lichtexplosies’ heeft gedetecteerd.
“Eronder was niets te zien,” zei hij tegen persbureau Sputnik. “Geen stormen, geen wolken, niets.”
De Russische satelliet Mikhailo Lomonosov van de Staatsuniversiteit van Moskou is in 2016 gelanceerd.
Vluchtige fenomenen
De satelliet, die 625 kilo weegt, is ontworpen om vluchtige fenomenen in de bovenste lagen van de atmosfeer te bestuderen.
De kunstmaan is uitgerust met een ruimtetelescoop die gebruikt wordt om hoogenergetische kosmische straling te meten.
Aan boord bevinden zich ook instrumenten om gammaflitsen en de magnetosfeer van de aarde te onderzoeken.
SOMS KOM JE JUWEELTJES TEGEN UIT EEN TIJD DAT NIET ALLES NEP WAS...
SOMS KOM JE JUWEELTJES TEGEN UIT EEN TIJD DAT NIET ALLES NEP WAS...
In de wereld waarin wij vandaag de dag leven, worden we gebombardeerd met van alles dat nep is; van nepnieuws tot nepbeelden.
Veertig jaar geleden was dat gelukkig anders en wanneer je naar een prachtige opname kijkt van een sigaarvormige ufo boven een Engelse stad, dan weet je dat mensen echt (vreemde) dingen zien vliegen.
Je wordt soms bijna moedeloos van de niet aflatende stroom nepbeelden van ufo’s op Youtube. Zo langzamerhand kan je gewoon je eigen zintuigen niet meer geloven, want zo goed als alles is te vervalsen.
En aangezien we in een maatschappij leven waar geld God is, zijn er talloze mensen die beroepsmatig niets anders doen dan beelden vervalsen, om zo argeloze bezoekers te lokken die dan geacht worden op advertenties te klikken.
Daarom is het soms een verademing als er iets opduikt van een aantal jaren geleden, uit een tijd dat niet alles nep was.
De volgende gebeurtenis vond plaats ergens rond 1980 en dat was zeker een tijd dat er nog geen, of in ieder geval veel en veel minder, professionele vervalsers actief waren met beelden.
De volgende opname is gemaakt door een beveiliger uit de plaats Cheadle in Staffordshire, Engeland. De man heeft onlangs zijn opname ingestuurd naar Mufon, met het volgende verhaal.
Ik ben een klein beetje laat met het melden van iets dat 40 jaar geleden gebeurde, maar ik had geen idee bij wie ik zoiets kon melden en wat misschien de echte reden is, is dat ik dacht dat niemand mij zou geloven.
Dit is wat er gebeurde:
Zoals ik zei was het ongeveer 40 jaar geleden toen ik als beveiliger nachtdienst had. Het was een bitter koude nacht geweest en de grond was bedekt met ijs en de lucht was heel erg helder.
Ik liep volgens mijn normale routine van het ene naar het andere gebouw. Toen opeens zag ik een licht in de lucht dat erg laag vloog en recht op mij af scheen te komen vanuit een noordoostelijke richting. Natuurlijk was mijn eerste gedachte: helikopter.
Maar, toch was er iets vreemds. Allereerst dat het één enkel wit licht was. Toen stelde ik vast dat het toch wel heel erg dichtbij kwam en min of meer recht op mij af.
Ik dacht dat ik nu toch wel het ding zou kunnen horen. Je kon zo in de heel vroege ochtend een speld horen vallen, zo stil was het. Er stond ook totaal geen wind. Ik was zo geïntrigeerd geraakt door de verschijning dat ik bleef staan om het object te observeren.
Het kwam heel langzaam op mij af, met een snelheid van minder dan 20 kilometer per uur. Het object naderde mij tot op een afstand van ongeveer 15 meter. Ik wist dat ik iets heel buitengewoons zag.
Vlak voor mij, kwam het volledig tot stilstand en bleef hangen boven het dak van het gebouw in totale stilte.
Plotseling schoot het weg met wat wel de snelheid van het licht leek. Het deed mij denken aan een soort komeet. Ik vond absoluut geen prettige ervaring.
Het was veertig jaar geleden en ik kan het mij nog herinneren als de dag van gisteren.
Eén ding blijft een feit. Wij worden bezocht en dat is een eenvoudig gegeven. Al die 40 jaar sinds het gebeurde is er door mijn hoofd gegaan dat als ik dat weet, dan weet ik honderd procent zeker dat onze overheid en zelfs onze wetenschappers dit ook weten.
As the New Horizons space probe bid goodbye to Ultima Thule (aka 2014 MU69 or the Snowman object in the Kuiper belt), it sent a set of pictures that caused a WTF heard around the solar system – or at least around the space centers monitoring the travels of the little spacecraft that has already given us stunning views of Pluto. The new images of Ultima Thuleshow that it’s not shaped like a spherical snowman but more like two odd-shaped flat pancakes connected at one end on a tight griddle. Or is it more like NASA’s description of a “giant pancake” attached to a “dented walnut”? Where are these engineers eating breakfast?
“This really is an incredible image sequence, taken by a spacecraft exploring a small world four billion miles away from Earth. Nothing quite like this has ever been captured in imagery.”
Mission Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of Southwest Research Institute admits this trans-Neptunian, contact-binary, Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) is unique … but a dented walnut? That’s the smaller “Thule” part, which seems to be a little thicker than Ultima. How did the researchers discover that Ultima Thule isn’t a snowman anymore? By its shadow, or more accurately, the blackout it made as it blocked out the light of the stars behind it as New Horizons was taking its parting shots. To make it look way cooler, NASA combined a dozen or so images into a video that simulated the New Horizons flyby.
“This will undoubtedly motivate new theories of planetesimal formation in the early solar system.”
Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, anticipated your next question, and yes, it’s a “this changes everything” moment … and there may be more. Even though New Horizons passed Ultima Thule over a month ago, it’s going to take up to 20 months for all of the data it captured to be sent back to NASA. In the meantime, the researchers will be crunching the current data, sharpening the pictures and trying to figure out how this odd-shaped, contact binary object happened. Undoubtedly, so will the Flat Earthers.
Does it mean a name change for Ultima Thule? It’s stuck with 2014 MU69 and Snowman doesn’t fit anymore, but Ultima Thule is an unofficial nickname that’s not permanent. What should it be? The Flying Tortilla Brothers? Interplanetary House of Pancakes and Walnuts? Flap-Jacked?
Astronomers using a new state of the art telescopic camera have detected a strange new asteroid which is adding to the growing number of known Earth-killing asteroids zooming around in near space. Researchers believe the curious object could be part of a massive unknown population of asteroids zooming around space near the Sun and inner planets. When will the next big one hit?
We have found an extraordinary object whose orbit barely strays beyond Venus’ orbit — that’s a big deal. In so many ways, 2019 AQ3 really is an oddball asteroid.
That’s according to Quanzhi Ye, a postdoctoral researcher at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) at the California Institute of Technology. Ye was part of the team which discovered 2019 AQ3, an asteroid some researchers have dubbed a “scary known unknown.” The object is one of the fastest known asteroids, orbiting the Sun every 165 days and is believed to be almost 1 mile (1.6 km) across – plenty big enough to kill every living thing on Earth were it to impact. More good news: 2019 AQ3 is also among the first asteroid to be found which stays within Venus’ orbit, meaning it stays relatively close to Earth, cosmically speaking.
The asteroid is called “scary” because it is in a class of near-Earth objects (NEOs) which are so small that they aren’t quite bright enough to be detected until they’re very close to Earth. If one were to be discovered on a collision course with our planet, it would likely be too late to do anything about it except party like its the end of the world. 2019 AQ3 is a “known unknown” because while we know that tens of thousands of similar objects are zooming around in the Solar System, we’ve only just begun to identify and track these potentially hazardous NEOs.
There could be many more thousands that we haven’t even gotten a glimpse of yet – some of which may pose a threat to Earth. Luckily, though, researchers believe 2019 AQ3 does not endanger Earth because its orbit keeps it tens of millions of miles out of our way.
Still, the discovery of 2019 AQ3 highlights why more and more attention is being paid to NEOs. Scientists discovered the enigmatic 2019 AQ3 last month while conducting a survey of the skies with the brand-new Zwicky Transient Facility, or ZTF. The ZTF instrument is designed to detect fast-moving or transient objects such as comets, asteroids, supernovae, gamma ray bursts, or neutron star collisions and can survey the entire northern sky in just three nights. Already, ZTF has detected almost 60 new near-Earth asteroids, one of which was detected only hours before it flew within 70,000 miles of Earth – just a third of the distance to the moon.
While space agencies and governments are beginning to track and identify more of these NEOs, the Earth still faces a grave threat from these potentially dangerous objects. Some scientists have even alleged that NASA and other space agencies are hiding the truth about deadly asteroids and that the Earth could be in greater immediate danger than we know. Will humanity be able to take to the stars before the Earth’s slate is once again wiped clean by a massive impact?
The road can be a strange place for sure, and there is no end to the accounts of weird happenings along the more remote roadways of the world. Among these are the numerous accounts of vehicles that seem to be beyond the normal, often with occupants every bit as bizarre and which defy all conventional attempts to explain. From ghost cars, flying cars, wheeled alien craft, and everything in between, here is a journey down a road towards a horizon of high strangeness.
There are all sorts of very bizarre accounts of phantom vehicles that seem to range widely from ghostly apparitions to something that toes the line between the supernatural and UFOs. In the 1920s we have tales of an enigmatic phantom car from the villages of Athleague and Mount Talbot, in Ireland. In the 1920s there was frequently reported a spectral “motor-car” that went far faster than anything available at the time and which could phase through whatever got in its way. One article from Jan 22, 1927 edition of WMN said of this mysterious vehicle:
Witnesses in the locality state that on many occasions about midnight a mysterious vehicle somewhat like a high-powered motor-car ablaze with light dashes noiselessly through the roads. There is apparently no driver, but seated in the car are a number of white-robed figures. Walls, ditches, fields, and plantations present no obstacle to the car. The superstitiously inclined connect the visitation with a tragic occurrence in a neighbouring estate when, during the recent troubles, a landlord and his wife were driving from their homes and died of fright. Local inhabitants are afraid to leave their homes after nightfall.
In later years we have reports from the 1950s of a ghostly car said to terrorize a stretch of desolate road in Kent County, in South East England. The car was usually described as black and of a very old fashioned make and model, but was said to have the speed, handling, and capabilities of something far more advanced. While a driver was usually not seen to be present in the vehicle, which seemed to be driving itself, there are other reports that speak of a fog-like wraith said to be its driver. One report from October of 1950 said of such an account:
Driving through Hildenborough at 7 a.m. on Sunday, a motorist observed another car parked by the roadside in a deserted spot. He saw the shadow of man outlined against the mist, in the driving seat. He got out of his own car and shook the other car violently but the huddled figure did not move. Tonbridge police were told but on investigation they could not find a car on that particular stretch of road, and now take the very material view that the silent driver was waiting for the mist to rise before proceeding.
Some such phantom cars seem to be more along the lines of something to do with UFOs or even inter-dimensional travelers. Take some very curious accounts related by the eminent researcher Albert S. Rosales in his series of books Humanoid Encounters: The Others Amongst Us, the first of which allegedly occurred back in 1954, when witnesses Gayle and Dave Rayburn were driving along a remote swath of road called the Alcan highway, in the Northern Yukon, Canada. The rugged road was very isolated and little travelled, surrounded by a vast sea of darkened trees, and they had been completely alone on this deserted stretch of bleak highway. They would report that suddenly they had been overtaken by two absurdly fast silvery vehicles, each perched atop just one wheel and with bright single headlights. As the two bizarre contraptions rapidly passed the Rayburns, they could see that each of the weird vehicles had sitting within it a humanoid figure decked out in some sort of tight fitting sliver suit. They would whiz past the car and go flying off down the highway at incredible speeds, leaving the Rayburns alone on that dark wilderness road in a state of shock.
The 50s had a few very bizarre reports similar to this, many of which are also compiled by Rosales. In August of 1956, a witness known only as Ms. Porta was driving along on a moped between Le Boulu and Ceret, in France, when she too was passed by two utterly unearthly vehicles, which appeared to be like motorcycles in appearance, but with a decidedly alien look to them. The two “motorcycles” were completely silent but very fast, zipping right by her without a sound, and when she looked to see who they were the frightened witness saw that each carried two passengers dressed in otherworldly satin outfits and strange helmets. At one point they let her pass them, but when when she looked back they were gone, despite there being no turnoff and nowhere they could have possibly gone.
In 1959 we have some cases originally published in a magazine called Exploring the Unknown, which allegedly occurred along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, in the United States. Two separate witnesses, a housewife and an unrelated business man in another car, claimed that they had been behind what appeared to be two vintage cars that were mostly normal except for how old they looked. They would soon prove to have a bit of something under the hood, though, when the two mystery vehicles suddenly lifted off the ground and began to hover, before shooting away out of sight. UFOs or something else?
One report from the 1950s that is also hard to classify was written of by the esteemed paranormal researcher John Keel, in his opus Our Haunted Planet. In June of 1955, the witness, a famous actor at the time named Telly Savalas, claimed that he had been driving along a roadway in Long Island, New York, when he suddenly ran out of gas. Marooned out there on the lonely highway, he had then gotten out to start walking, and that was when things would take a turn into the territory of the bizarre. Savalas claimed that as he walked, a ridiculously large and shiny black Cadillac had pulled up next to him, and a driver clad all in white had then asked him if he needed a ride. Savalas accepted, and during their drive the mysterious driver remained utterly silent, except to offer Savalas some money to help pay for gas. They stopped to get the gas and drove back towards the witness’ vehicle, the only conversation being when the driver suddenly mentioned out of nowhere to a perplexed Savalas that a man named Harry Agannis was a utility infielder for the Boston Red Sox. This meant nothing to Savalas, who didn’t even know who Agannis was, and it just lent to the overall creepy and surreal feeling that was beginning to unsettle him.
When they reached the car, Savalas was more than happy and eager to get out of that Cadillac, and he filled his car with gas as the stranger watched from within his silent black car. Savalas then insisted that the man write his phone number down so that he could be repaid, which the driver did, signing it “Bill,” before driving off into the night to whence he had come. Savalas would later by chance see on TV that the man the driver had mentioned, Harry Agannis, had died that very night, and when he tried to call the phone number on the paper he soon learned from a woman on the other end that her husband Bill had died 3 years previously. Unbelievably, he would learn that the man had been dressed in a pristine white suit when he was buried. Was the man in that Cadillac the ghost of this dead husband, one of the insidious Men in Black, or what? Who knows?
Moving into the 1960s we have a report from 1965 at a place called Cotswold Hills, in south central England. In this case a driver claims that he was suddenly passed by a vehicle that came speeding out of nowhere and which resembled a Land Rover, only far faster and more maneuverable than any such car had any right to be. This “Land Rover” also had no headlights, but rather a ring of glimmering lights on its roof. It veered in front of the startled witness and purportedly just vanished in a literal puff of smoke.
In the 1970s there is a bizarre account from St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1971, witness Tatiana Syrchenko was on foot when she saw a very strange car that was bright red in color and with rose tinted windows approaching her. It pulled up alongside her and a man wearing black coveralls then opened the door to greet her and to offer a ride, informing her that she was in no danger. Those must have just been different times or the stranger was controlling her thoughts, because without further question she hopped into the strange vehicle with its spooky black-clad occupant. Inside it was no longer a car, but a wide, brightly lit room with two humanoid figures wearing silver coveralls. She was told to put on a set of coveralls herself, after which she was introduced to a strange elderly bearded man they called “The Cardinal,” who merely greeted her before she blacked out. When she awoke she was back at where she had started, with no sign of the vehicle she had entered and with the clock at precisely the time she had left. Just what in the world was going on here?
In 1973 we have an account from Milroy, Indiana, where a preacher named Conner Corey was on his way home one night along a lonely road called State Road 3 when a large, dark green van swelled up out of the darkness behind him to begin to follow him very closely. Accompanying the vehicle was a droning buzz that pervaded the air all around him, and when he took a peek through the windshield he could see two passengers in the van with long hair. There was then a bright flash and Corey found himself flying through the air to be dumped in a brightly lit room with three very human-looking men who appeared to be wearing surgical clothes. The rest of the bizarre tale is explained on Phantoms and Monsters thus:
This scene faded and was replaced by a distant aerial view of an earth-like surface. A planet or moon came up between two mountains in the distance. Following this he viewed a water covered surface from a lower altitude. Situated in the middle of this surface was a huge dark cross-like area. Two man-like figures emerged from the center of this area and became luminous. They moved toward him as if they were on a conveyor belt, and steadily increased in size. The dark eyed figures were dressed in tight-fitting suits that had a cloak and sash tied in front. The on-coming figures seemed about to burst right out of his rear view mirror, and for the first time his intense desire to watch gave way to fear. At this moment he was released as his eyes dropped from the mirror and he found himself looking at a slow moving Amish buggy as he sped down the highway. The preacher’s radio and watch malfunctioned after this event. He does not know with certainty how much time he could have lost on his journey home. He thought he was driving about 50 mph, and he was sure he traveled ¾ of a mile during the contact.
Whatever is going on here is just about as trippy as it gets, and it is hard to even know where to begin with it. Also in the 1970s is a report from the town of Shabani, in Zimbabwe, Africa, and was first written of by UFO researcher Cynthia Hind. In August of 1975 two men driving along a remote road near the Ngesi River saw a large vehicle they at first took to be a bus, but which on closer inspection seemed to be no normal bus, with large domed windows and pillars within it. Inside the vehicle were two humanoid figures lounging about, their features indistinct due to a radiant white light that was nearly blinding in its intensity emanating from within. The two witnesses say the “bus” turned a corner and then just vanished into thin air.
Also in 1975 is an account from the U.S. state of Minnesota, where an unidentified couple were driving one evening and stopped at a pay phone when a large black Cadillac drove up out of nowhere to completely block their path. A man dressed all in black then silently ran up to the witness with the phone and rudely tore the receiver away. The frightened couple drove off away from this obviously potentially dangerous individual, but the Cadillac followed them to yet another phone booth, where the same scene would play out again, and then a third time. Whoever this guy was, he did not want them to use a phone. Then, almost as if he had gotten bored, the mysterious man in black tore off in his Cadillac, which oddly rose up off the ground and shot off into the sky and out of sight at great speed.
In more recent years there are some curious accounts from the 1990s, such as in December of 1993, when a witness in Vihtilajarvi, Kankanpaa, Finland was driving at night and suddenly became aware that the landscape was steadily brightening as if the sun were coming up, even though it was the middle of the night. A look up into the sky showed nothing out of the ordinary, and that was when he noticed that there were two very bright lights in his rear view mirror. These lights were blindingly bright as they came up fast behind the witness, and he could faintly make out what looked to be a red car behind them, which then went to pass him.
As the mysterious car passed, the witness looked into the vehicle to see three beautiful women, who were a pale white and even had pure white hair. They smiled at him as they passed, and then the car sped off into the night. However, this wasn’t the end of the surreal encounter, as the witness would run into the phantom car once again a bit down the road, this time roaring at him from the opposite direction on an apparent collision course. The terrified witness braced for impact, but it never came, with the vehicle suddenly blinking right out of existence just before it hit, a mere meter away from his car. He would then get out and investigate the area, but there was no sign of the car at all, as if it had never been there.
The following year, in September of 1994, a Radu N. Achim and his wife were driving along in Sibiu, Romania, on a perfectly clear day when they were passed by a black vehicle within which sat a pale humanoid figure wearing what appeared to be a parka that was made of some translucent material. The large car did not end up passing them at all, but rather paced them for some time. At one point Radu looked away from the strange car for a split second, and when he looked back it was just gone. There were no exits, nowhere it could have possibly gone in such a blink of an eye, but there was no sign of it anywhere. Both the witness and the wife have never been able to explain what they saw.
One very recent incident from 2012 allegedly happened to three MotoGP race car drivers heading from an event at Phillip Island, Victoria back to their home town in Adelaide, South Australia, a journey of about 560 miles, meaning they would drive all night in shifts. At the time of their incident, one of the drivers was asleep in the back while the other two were awake in the front. It was about 4:30 AM, and they were between the towns of Nhill and Kaniva, and the witness would explain:
I’d only seen a handful of cars between Horsham and Nhill, So I was surprised when I saw a car way off in the distance behind us, It was catching us up too. I was surprised at the speed this car was catching up, I was already going over the speed limit by 30 Km/h, I estimated it going probably 160 Km/h. Nathan suggested it might be the Police, So I dropped back to 100 Km/h, Kinda futile I know but at least we’d know if it was a copper. Eventually the car caught us up, But just sat behind us. There was no streetlights being country Australia so neither Me nor Nathan couldn’t accurately identify the car, But I did notice the headlights on the car were very old, Like what you’d find on a Model T Ford or Brum, If you’ve ever watched that TV show. They were round and fairly dim. By this stage, We’d worked out it wasn’t a Cop. But why wasn’t it trying to overtake us? It was a single lane each side, two-way road. So there was plenty of room to pass. And I hadn’t seen a car going the other way in about half an hour. An overtaking lane approached us, So Nathan suggested I move into that lane so the car behind us can overtake. I move into the lane and guess what? The car followed. I then slow down to 80 Km/h to try and convince him to overtake, But he doesn’t, he just stays behind, Although now I can’t see his headlights at all. The car is that close to ours.
The two increasingly worried men decided to open their windows to see if they could discern anything from the vehicle’s engine noise, but were surprised to hear that, although they were tearing along at 80 mph and the car was a mere inches from their bumper, they could hear no noise at all emanating from it, as if it were completely silent. The witness would go on to explain:
Back at 130 km/h and the car is still behind us, Matching our speed. Still inches away from our back bumper. Both Me and Nathan were freaking out a bit now. Why wouldn’t the car pass us? Why was he driving SO close? We were approaching Kaniva by this stage, There’s a big streetlight right on the edge of the Town and then streetlights all through the main street. Finally we’d be able to identify the car! We pass through the streetlights and look behind us, The car had stopped following. Right before the streetlight. It had simply stopped in the middle of the road. We still couldn’t work out what kind of car it was, But we didn’t want to turn around and find out!
These accounts run the gamut from the merely weird to the completely absurd, and there seems to be no easy answer for any of them, and such cases are obccured by such strange details and clues that it is hard to even know where to begin sometimes. Are they ghosts, aliens, or what? One possible explanation could be that some of these are glimpses of inter-dimensional beings, somehow pushing over into our reality for a brief time only to vanish again back to ours, our two worlds existing as one for that few seconds or minutes. It is quite possible that they are even as surprised to be here as we are, or maybe they are not the ones crossing over, but us? Other accounts could be ghosts or aliens, or of course even tall tales or hallucinations caused by tiredness, but whatever the case may be, these are some very bizarre accounts that just go to show that the road is definitely a place for weird encounters and experiences, and you never know just what you are bound to come across as you drive off down that horizon into the unknown.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered evidence of a mysterious “dark vortex,” and astronomers aren’t sure what to make of it. During Hubble’s annual survey of weather on our Solar System’s outer planets, NASA astronomers spotted a mysterious and incredibly powerful storm on Neptune and they’re unsure how it formed or what it may have in store for the eighth planet from the Sun.
Hubble’s images of the dark vortex, right, and polar region, left.
NASA has seen these unexplained dark vortices before, once in 1989 when the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by Neptune and again in 2018. The vortex appears to be a massive storm spanning some 6,800 miles across and powerful enough to churn up material from much lower in the planet’s atmosphere. Surrounding the storm are what NASA calls “companion clouds,” bright white formations of methane ice crystals formed as the dark vortex swirls the air above it with powerful winds.
These storms are thought to appear in Neptune’s atmosphere every four to six years at different latitudes, but as our observations of them are still limited at this point, that’s just a guess. It’s unknown how these dark vortex storms form, and they are so unpredictable and fleeting that NASA astronomers are barely able to collect data on them before they dissipate.
Neptune’s storms appear as massive dark spots similar to Jupiter’s.
That may change, though, because Hubble has embarked on a new long-term project known as the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy OPAL program, or OPAL. OPAL will create global maps of the solar system’s outer planets as they pass closest to Earth in their orbits around the sun in order to track seasonal changes in the planet’s atmospheres like these dark vortices .
With repeated observations of these outer planets’ weather, NASA may be able to shine light on the many mysteries surrounding these distant alien worlds. More attention is being paid to the outermost reaches of our solar system where new unknown objects or undiscovered planets may very well be hiding from us. As cool as mysterious dark vortices are, we have no idea what could be out there.
Let’s hope whatever it is doesn’t develop a taste for human flesh or any of Earth’s other natural resources.
She did not know WHAT it was - Got out of the car and started recording then it went UP!
She did not know WHAT it was - Got out of the car and started recording then it went UP!
A mysterious pulsating reddish Orb has been recorded over Tracy, California on February 11, 2019 before it went up. It is not the first time that these strange spherical objects in the sky have been spotted and actually there is no answer to what it could be.
They are perfectly spherical, and they are becoming more frequently witnessed. One witness states that he saw four of these objects about three weeks ago heading towards Pease Air force Base, Lexington area and they were completely silent.
Another witness said he saw exact the same color orb over his mothers house in Louisville, Kentucky, 35 miles from Fort Knox and when he drove around the corner he observed several people standing in their front yard looking up into the sky as well and he assumed they were looking at the same orb he observed. But instead there were three more identical orbs in the sky and a few seconds later the other orb that came from his mother's house joined with the other three orbs. Then they hover there silently for 30 to 40 seconds two of them merged into one making three orbs then they all departed straight up.
A resident of Ohio: "we see these objects...or similar...different color...they appear to "twinkle" at times and when we zoom in they look like a Spirograph, a ball of energy".
Another witness who lives in a remote part of the Arizona desert saw two of them not that far up in the sky until they just vanished into no where.
Most of the people who have witnessed these orbs are convinced that they are definitively not from our world.
UFO descended on Meadow Park football ground and seemed to watch the Women's League Cup, Feb 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFO descended on Meadow Park football ground and seemed to watch the Women's League Cup, Feb 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: February 2019 Location of sighting: London, England
This UFO was recorded by a London resident when he was watching a ladies sporting event on TV and a glowing object depended on the screen over head. I have to admit, with drones being in the hands of so many people across the globe and recording devices on them making video from above common place...I am worried this might be a RC drone from the TV station or an over exuberant fan. But I still wonder, is this an alien drone used to record humans close up but it got lit up by all the stadium lights around it, making it unable to cloak? Impossible to say for sure unless we get some close up footage. Scott C. Waring
Daytime Footage Of Dark UFO Over Colombia On Feb 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Daytime Footage Of Dark UFO Over Colombia On Feb 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: February 2019 Location of sighting: Colombia This dark UFO was seen in an overcast sky over Colombia this week. The UFO seems to move in an out of the clouds, trying to come closer, but still have the cloud cover to use as protection to hide in. The object is disk shape with a hump on the upper and lower center of the craft, which looks very similar to the classic UFO disk from the 50s. Also it was caught during sunset, which is one of the most common times of the day to catch a UFO due to the angle of the setting sun lighting them up. Scott C. Waring
Some fun multimedia from NASA, including (free) Exoplanet Travel Bureau posters, cool 360-degree visualizations, and a journey into the life and death of planetary system.
Explore the plethora of planets outside our solar system with cool multimedia experiences from NASA’sExoplanet Exploration Program. Here’s what’s new:
This Exoplanet Travel Bureau poster illustration shows futuristic explorers gliding in a protective bubble over the red-hot landscape of the exoplanet 55 Cancri e. Exoplanets are planets outside our solar system. Download this poster here.
Designed in the style of vintage travel posters, the Exoplanet Travel Bureau poster series imagines what it might be like to visit known planets outside our solar system, which are called exoplanets. The newest poster (above) shows futuristic explorers in a protective bubble, gliding over the red-hot landscape is 55 Cancri e, a planet that may be covered in a lava ocean.
It’s a fun collection of posters, and they are all free to download. See them all here.
360-degree visualization:
55 Cancri e is also now part of the Exoplanet Travel Bureau’s 360-degree visualization tool, which lets you take a virtual tour of what the planet’s surface might look like, based on the limited data available (no photos of the planet exist). Seen as a massive fiery orb on the horizon, the planet’s star is 65 times closer to 55 Cancri e than the sun is to Earth. On the planet’s cooler nightside, silicate vapor in the atmosphere may condense into sparkling clouds that reflect the lava below.
All of the 360-degree visualizations are viewable on desktop computers, mobile devices and through virtual reality headsets that work with smartphones.
This artist’s illustration from the Exoplanet Travel Bureau’s 360-degree visualization tool reveals what the surface of exoplanet 55 Cancri e might look like, based on the limited data available. This exoplanet (a planet outside our solar system) is thought to be covered entirely in molten lava.
How do stars and planets come into being, and what fate awaits planets after their stars die? The interactive web feature Life and Death of a Planetary System takes you on an in-depth journey through the formation, evolution and eventual demise of a solar system. This story offers insight into how our planet Earth formed, and what will happen to it when the sun dies.
This artist’s illustration of a planet in the TRAPPIST-1 system can be found in NASA’s Eyes on Exoplanets 2.0. The web-based program lets users virtually fly through the galaxy and visit any of the nearly 4,000 known exoplanets, all visualized in 3-D.
Bottom line: New multimedia from NASA includes (free) Exoplanet Travel Bureau posters, 360-degree visualizations, and a journey into the life and death of planetary systems.
When a NASA spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral on February 11, 2010, it destroyed a sundog in Earth’s atmosphere – bringing to light a new form of ice halo – and teaching those who love the sky something new.
On this date in 2010 – the coolest space launch ever! I ran into this image and video via a post onGoogle+and became interested when I saw a quote from the person who runs the world’s absolute best website for sky optics, Les Cowley of the websiteAtmospheric Optics. The story began with the 2010 launch of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), one of several observatories that keep an eye on our sun. It seems that when SDO lifted off from Cape Canaveral on February 11, 2010, on its mission to observe the sun, it first destroyed a sundog in Earth’s atmosphere – in the process bringing to light a new form of ice halo – and teaching those who love and study sky optics new things about how shock waves interact with clouds.
The video above shows SDO’s 2010 launch via an Atlas V rocket. Watch it now, and turn up the volume to hear people cheer when the spacecraft’s passage through the atmosphere destroyed the sundog – which is a bright spot in the sky, formed by refraction of sunlight through plate-shaped ice crystals, which drift down from the sky like leaves fluttering from trees. If you have to, watch it twice to see the luminous column of white light that appears next to the Atlas V.
When the rocket penetrated the cirrus, shock waves rippled through the cloud and destroyed the alignment of the ice crystals. This extinguished the sundog.
The sundog’s destruction was understood. The events that followed were not. Cowley said:
A luminous column of white light appeared next to the Atlas V and followed the rocket up into the sky. We’d never seen anything like it.
Cowley and colleague Robert Greenler at first couldn’t explain this column of light. Then they realized that the plate-shaped ice crystals were organized by the shock wave from the Atlas V. Cowley explained:
The crystals are tilted between 8 and 12 degrees. Then they gyrate so that the main crystal axis describes a conical motion. Toy tops and gyroscopes do it. The earth does it once every 26,000 years. The motion is ordered and precise.
View larger. | When the Solar Dynamic Observatory (bright streak in lower right quadrant of photo) lifted off from Cape Canaveral on February 11, 2010, its launch enabled optics experts to discover a new form of ice halo.
Image via NASA/Goddard/Anne Koslosky.
Bottom line: When NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory lifted off from Cape Canaveral on February 11, 2010, on its mission to observe the sun, it first destroyed a sundog in Earth’s atmosphere – in the process bringing to light a new form of ice halo – and teaching those who love and study sky optics new things about how shock waves interact with clouds.
Its currently speeding towards to sun in order to land the hottest ever high-five, effectively becoming the first spacecraft ever to attempt and ‘touch’ the sun.
On its way towards the Sun, the spacecraft has been gathering scientific data, and snapping images.
This image was taken on Nov. 8, 2018, at 1:12 a.m. EST, and comes from the Parker Solar Probe’s WISPR (Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe) instrument. Image Credit: NASA/Naval Research Laboratory/Parker Solar Probe. (That faint dot, seen in the middle of Mercury is most likely part of the background corrections made in the image.)
In October and November, the Parker Solar Probe crossed the Corona, the super-hot atmosphere that surrounds the sun. And while it was making history, it decided it would be a good idea to photograph what it was seeing.
The result? A stunning, never-before-seen image ‘inside’ the sun.
The photographed was captured by the probe’s WISPR (Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe) instrument, when the spacecraft was traveling at a distance of 16.9 million miles from the sun, inside our stars corona.
The image shows distinct jets of solar material which are dubbed coronal streamers, seen to the left/center of the image.
The bright spot you see in the above image is Mercury.
NASA explains that the black spots near planet Mercury are ‘artifacts’ of background correction.
This GIF image shows data from NASA’s Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory Ahead (STEREO-A) spacecraft. The bright point is actually NASA’s Parker Solar Probe as it flew through the sun’s outer atmosphere during its first flyby in November 2018. Image Credit: NASA/STEREO
The probe is a mere four months old, and while its still a baby ‘spacecraft’, it has already had a busy mission life.
Before it made its way towards the sun, on September 19, the probe snapped the first images from space, confirming that all its instruments were working flawlessly.
In October, the spacecraft already began breaking records.
It smashed two long-standing records becoming the closets man-made object to ever approach the sun and becoming the fastest spacecraft in history.
Parker Solar Probe is named after Eugene Parker, the physicist who first proposed the existence of the solar wind — the Sun’s constant outpouring of material — in 1958.
“This is the first NASA mission to be named for a living individual,” said Nicola Fox, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
“Gene Parker’s revolutionary paper predicted the heating and expansion of the corona and solar wind. Now, with Parker Solar Probe we are able to truly understand what drives that constant flow out to the edge of the heliosphere.”
The 1561 celestial phenomenon over Nuremberg was a mass sighting of celestial phenomena or unidentified flying objects (UFO) above Nuremberg, Germany. The phenomenon has been interpreted by some modern UFO enthusiasts as an aerial battle of extraterrestrial origin. This view is mostly dismissed by skeptics, some referencing Carl Jung’s mid-twentieth century writings about the subject while others find the phenomenon is likely to be a sun dog.
History
News notice printed in Nuremberg, describing 4 April 1561 Nuremberg mass sighting. Discs and spheres were said to emerge from large cylinders.
A broadsheet news article printed in April 1561 describes a mass sighting of UFOs. The broadsheet, illustrated with a woodcut engraving and text by Hans Glaser, measures 26.2 centimetres (10.3 in) by 38.0 centimetres (15.0 in). The document is archived in the prints and drawings collection at the Zentralbibliothek Zürich in Zürich, Switzerland.
According to the broadsheet, around dawn on April 14, 1561, residents of Nuremberg saw what they described as an aerial battle, followed by the appearance of a large black triangular object and then a large crash outside of the city. The broadsheet claims that witnesses observed hundreds of spheres, cylinders and other odd-shaped objects that moved erratically overhead.
The broadsheet describes objects of various shapes including crosses, globes, two lunar crescents, a black spear and tubular objects from which several smaller, round objects emerged and darted around the sky at dawn.
Phenomenon described The text of the broadsheet can be translated as giving the following description of the event:
“In the morning of April 14, 1561, at daybreak, between 4 and 5 a.m., a dreadful apparition occurred on the sun, and then this was seen in Nuremberg in the city, before the gates and in the country – by many men and women. At first there appeared in the middle of the sun two blood-red semi-circular arcs, just like the moon in its last quarter. And in the sun, above and below and on both sides, the color was blood, there stood a round ball of partly dull, partly black ferrous color. Likewise there stood on both sides and as a torus about the sun such blood-red ones and other balls in large number, about three in a line and four in a square, also some alone. In between these globes there were visible a few blood-red crosses, between which there were blood-red strips, becoming thicker to the rear and in the front malleable like the rods of reed-grass, which were intermingled, among them two big rods, one on the right, the other to the left, and within the small and big rods there were three, also four and more globes. These all started to fight among themselves, so that the globes, which were first in the sun, flew out to the ones standing on both sides, thereafter, the globes standing outside the sun, in the small and large rods, flew into the sun. Besides the globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour. And when the conflict in and again out of the sun was most intense, they became fatigued to such an extent that they all, as said above, fell from the sun down upon the earth ‘as if they all burned’ and they then wasted away on the earth with immense smoke. After all this there was something like a black spear, very long and thick, sighted; the shaft pointed to the east, the point pointed west. Whatever such signs mean, God alone knows. Although we have seen, shortly one after another, many kinds of signs on the heaven, which are sent to us by the almighty God, to bring us to repentance, we still are, unfortunately, so ungrateful that we despise such high signs and miracles of God. Or we speak of them with ridicule and discard them to the wind, in order that God may send us a frightening punishment on account of our ungratefulness. After all, the God-fearing will by no means discard these signs, but will take it to heart as a warning of their merciful Father in heaven, will mend their lives and faithfully beg God, that He may avert His wrath, including the well-deserved punishment, on us, so that we may temporarily here and perpetually there, live as his children. For it, may God grant us his help, Amen. By Hanns Glaser, letter-painter of Nurnberg.”
Modern interpretations
Flugblatt of Basel 1566
According to author Jason Colavito, the woodcut broadsheet became known in modern culture after being published in Carl Jung’s 1958 book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, a book which analyzed the archetypal meaning of UFOs. More recently, the event has been classified as a UFO sighting by many, and even named the “UFO Battle over Nuremberg” by a few enthusiasts.
Jung expressed a view that the spectacle was likely a natural phenomenon with religious and military interpretations overlaying it. “If the Ufos were living organisms, one would think of a swarm of insects rising with the sun, not to fight one another but to mate and celebrate the marriage flight.” A military interpretation would view the tubes as cannons and the spheres as cannonballs, emphasize the black spearhead at the bottom of the scene, and Glaser’s own testimony that the globes fought vehemently until exhausted. A religious view would emphasize the crosses. Jung thinks the images of four globes coupled by lines suggested crossed marriage quaternities and forms the model for “the primitive cross cousin marriage”. It could also be an individuation symbol. The association of sunrise suggests “the revelation of the light”.
Otto Billig made an effort to provide a historical context for the apparition in his comments. He notes Nuremberg was one of the most prestigious cities of the late Middle Ages, a “Free and Imperial City” known for its wealth and nobility. It tried to maintain a neutrality during the furious warring between Catholics and Protestants during the Reformation, but when one Protestant prince was rebuffed when he insisted on financial tributes to fund his battles, the city was besieged and its trade cut off. Though ultimately successful in defending itself, the rebuilding of fortifications in Nuremberg necessitated a new round of taxation and the city suffered hard times in its aftermath. On Good Friday, 1554 another siege happened and one broadsheet publisher described mock suns that prognosticated God’s will wanted confession of sinful ways – i.e. the victims brought it on themselves. Another sky apparition followed in July of knights fighting each other with fiery swords, thus warning a coming Day of Judgment. Very similar apparitions of knights fighting in the skies were frequently reported during the Thirty Years’ War. Many similar broadsheets of wondrous signs exist in German and Swiss archives and Nuremberg seems the focus of a number of them, presumably because of the hardships and conflicts of the ex-prosperous. Such conditions typically accentuate apocalyptic thought.
Other events
1566 celestial phenomenon over Basel [de; fr] A series of events on 27–28 July and 7 August
1566 reported in a Flugblatt (an early form of newspaper) as occurred in Basel, where red and black spheres have led an apparent battle in the sky.
A Physicist Has Proposed a Grim Explanation For Why We Never See Aliens
PETER DOCKRILL
The Universe is so unimaginably big, and it's positively teeming with an almost infinite supply of potentially life-giving worlds. So where the heck is everybody?
At its heart, this is what's called theFermi Paradox: the perplexing scientific anomaly that despite there being billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy – let alone outside it – we've never encountered any signsof an advanced alien civilisation, and why not?
It's a decent question, and one that generations of scientists and thinkers have grappled with since the paradox was formulated decades ago.
Now, theoretical physicist Alexander Berezin from the National Research University of Electronic Technology (MIET) in Russia has devised his own explanation for why we're seemingly alone in the Universe, proposing what he calls his "First in, last out" solution to the Fermi Paradox.
According to Berezin's pre-print paper, which hasn't as yet been reviewed by other scientists, the paradox has a "trivial solution, requiring no controversial assumptions" but may prove "hard to accept, as it predicts a future for our own civilisation that is even worse than extinction".
As Berezin sees it, the problem with some proposed solutions to the Fermi Paradox is they define alien life too narrowly.
"The specific nature of civilisations arising to interstellar level should not matter," he writes.
"They might [be] biological organisms like ourselves, rogue AIs that rebelled against their creators, or distributed planet-scale minds like those described by Stanislaw Lem in Solaris."
Of course, even with such a wide scope, we're still not seeing evidence of these things out there in the cosmos.
But for the purposes of solving the paradox, Berezin says the only parameter we should concern ourselves with – in terms of defining extraterrestrial life – is the physical threshold at which we can observe its existence.
"The only variable we can objectively measure is the probability of life becoming detectable from outer space within a certain range from Earth," Berezin explains.
The actual "First in, last out" solution Berezin proposes is a grimmer scenario.
"What if the first life that reaches interstellar travel capability necessarily eradicates all competition to fuel its own expansion?" he hypothesises.
As Berezin explains, this doesn't necessarily mean a highly developed extra-terrestrial civilisation would consciously wipe out other lifeforms – but perhaps "they simply won't notice, the same way a construction crew demolishes an anthill to build real estate because they lack incentive to protect it".
So is Berezin suggesting that we are the ants, and the reason we haven't encountered aliens is because we simply haven't had our own civilisation unthinkingly demolished by such unimaginably superior life forms yet?
No. Because we are probably not the ants, but the future destroyers of the very worlds we've been looking for this whole time.
"Assuming the hypothesis above is correct, what does it mean for our future?" Berezin writes.
"The only explanation is the invocation of the anthropic principle. We are the first to arrive at the [interstellar] stage. And, most likely, will be the last to leave."
Again, such potential destruction wouldn't need to be wilfully designed or orchestrated – it could just play out like a completely unrestricted system, bigger than any individual's attempts to control it.
"One rogue AI can potentially populate the entire supercluster with copies of itself, turning every solar system into a supercomputer, and there is no use asking why it would do that," Berezin writes.
"All that matters is that it can."
It's a pretty terrifying outlook on Fermi – basically, we may be the winners of a deadly race we didn't even know we were competing in, or as Andrew Masterson at Cosmos put it, "we are the paradox resolution made manifest".
But the physicist's views are just the latest scientific statement of why we may be destined to gaze at the stars alone in time and space, much as we might wish it were otherwise.
The year is 2030. You’ve just received an email: The dream job in Japan is yours. You start making phone calls, looking up the rent on Tokyo apartments, and getting ready to make the career move of a lifetime. There’s just one problem: Can your Siri get a visa?
It’s a potential roadblock that’s less farfetched than you’d think. In November 2018, Maltese government minister Silvio Schembri announced an initiative to grapple with questions like how many robots to let into the country at one time and more. Malta.ai is aimed at making Malta one of the top 10 countries in the world when it comes to readiness for advanced A.I.. One of its first tasks is to explore, along with SingularityNET, how to institute a kind of citizenship test for robots. SingularityNET CEO Ben Goertzel elaborated on the idea a few three days after the announcement in a blog post. His goal is to make sure that, as robots and A.I. continue to become more sophisticated and autonomous, they will still know how to follow and respect the laws of the land.
“I know what it means to be a citizen of the U.S. or Europe,” Goertzel tells Inverse. “If you’re a naturalized citizen of the U.S., you take a simple test on constitution and government and so forth. That’s what I was thinking, what tests can be given to an A.I., or robot controlled by an A.I., to make it reasonable to consider making that A.I. a citizen.”
Does Siri need citizenship?
Why Futuristic Siris May Need a Passport
The initiative strikes to the heart of humanity’s relationship with machines. Laws are designed to accommodate humans and organizations, the only ones capable of taking responsibility. But as our computers move from dumb servants to sophisticated setups capable of passing the Turing test, legislators worldwide will need to consider how these pseudo-people function in legal systems designed for yesteryear. Benoît Hamon made taxing robots a key plank of his run for the French presidency in 2017, and Andrew Yang is running for the American presidency on a “basic income” platform to offset the job losses from automation. The European Parliament has called for ethical standards to guide the development of such machines and, in the United States, the billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has called for a robot tax as well.
But as the line between simple tool and thinking-entity continues to blur, the legal designations separating life and artificiality will have to evolve.77
In Goertzel’s opinion, this means developing an A.I. that can understand the laws of a country, correctly answer questions about said laws, and apply those regulations to real-life situations. However, he readily admits that the task force will have to refine these ideas — and it may need to work through them fast.
“Artificial Intelligence is being seen in many quarters as the most transformative technology since the invention of electricity,” Francois Piccione, policy advisor for the Maltese government, tells Inverse. “To realize that such a revolution is taking place and not do one’s best to prepare for it would be irresponsible.”
Issues surrounding liability are already starting to emerge with autonomous cars. Current systems request users remain alert at all times, but once a computer can take full control, it raises a number of questions.
“Autonomy, inevitably, raises questions about responsibility and liability,” Piccione says. “To illustrate the point, if a driverless car causes an accident, who or what is liable? It could be the manufacturer, or the user of the system, or other intermediaries. But liability could also be attributed directly and solely to the robot or system itself.”
Maltese robots would not even be the first to gain citizenship. Sophia, the humanoid robot powered by SingularityNET, was granted honorary citizenship by Saudi Arabia in October 2017. The stunt was supposed to spark a conversation about robots in society. Instead, press attention focused on how Sophia seemed to enjoy more rights in Saudi Arabia than actual human women, as she didn’t need a male guardian in public.
Sophia the robot.
Which of course raises an even more complex question: In a world where humanrights are far from a settled issue, it seems somewhat tone-deaf to begin discussing robot privileges for machines that haven’t even been invented yet. But Goertzel has stood by the initiative as “a genuinely forward-thinking and positive act on the part of the Saudi government.”
A Marketing Play?
Other experts in the field remain unconvinced. David Gunkel, a Northern Illinois University professor whose book Robot Rights considers the ethics of granting such benefits to machines, tells Inverse that Sophia’s citizenship was “mainly about marketing,” aimed at attracting the tech industry to the country’s Future Investment Summit. After all, it was only an honorary citizenship, basically akin to an honorary university degree.
“I have yet to see a well-reasoned and/or persuasive argument for granting A.I. or robots citizenship,” Gunkel says. “I do see good reasons to consider questions of legal personality for A.I.s and robots, but that is an entirely different set of questions.”
The problem of Siri’s citizenship, then, actually encompasses two distinct debates. The first concerns what happens when an A.I. does something wrong, a debate already occurring around autonomous cars. But the second is much more complicated: Siri and others command respect to the point where society starts to consider granting such rights as “just.”
“Neither of these questions require that A.I./robots be citizens,” Gunkel says. “In fact, we have already addressed and answered these question for another class of artificial entity — the multinational corporation. Corporations are legal persons for the purpose of making them subjects of and subject to national and international law. This has and can done without granting the corporation citizenship.”
Goertzel, however, suggests that even corporate personhood has its issues. What if a decentralized autonomous organization, for example a cryptocurrency, wants to register itself as a corporation? Does it need a human to finish the task?
“The focus is on how to provide certification in Malta to these systems, which would also include limited rights and obligations,” Piccione says. “Taking this route would not, in fact, be a new concept as today companies and other registered entities carry liability but also have rights, for example to own property. This could be the same mechanism used for ‘robots’ or other A.I. systems including autonomous vehicles.”
Will the autonomous car need a passport?
Should Citizenship Imply Non-Legal Rights, Too?
Corporate personhood can only answer so many questions. Gunkel says that we are living in a “robot invasion” where machines “are now everywhere and doing virtually everything.” As they move from simple tools to an actor in society, consigning them to the status of human-run entities seems ill-fitting.
“I believe we will need consider — and in fact have already begun considering — the question of moral and legal personhood for A.I. and robots apart from issue having to do with citizenship,” Gunkel says. “And what is perhaps worse, I worry that speculation about ‘robot citizenship’ might eclipse the more immediate questions regarding the moral and legal standing of A.I./robots.”
Goertzel predicts that a human-level artificial intelligence could emerge as early as 2029. If that prediction holds true, it means something halfway human-like could launch as soon as 2025. That only leaves around six years before legislators will have to consider how to to treat entities with close to a regular citizen’s intelligence.
Whether the answer is citizenship itself, however, is less clear, but one thing’s for certain: The line between man and machine is about to look a lot blurrier. Films like Her and Ex Machina explore the interplay between human-seeming systems and the resultant relationship. Even if we solve all of Siri’s visa issues, the boundaries may still remain unsettled in more ways than just the legal question.
Singularity Sophia Interview from UN A.I. For Good Project
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
Here are 10 extremely old images of the Sphinx you’ve probably never seen
Here are 10 extremely old images of the Sphinx you’ve probably never seen
The images here displayed were taken prior to most of the restorations of the Sphinx.
This majestic structure believed to be up to 800,000 years old, (yup, it isn’t a typo) is one of the most mysterious monuments on Earth. It has no inscriptions, and there are said to be tunnels and passages leading below it.
The images here displayed were taken prior to most of the restorations of the Sphinx.
The images are extremely rare and old.
Scholars have no idea who erected this majestic monument only adds to the mystery of the Great Sphinx, which has already been the center for countless speculations connecting it to lost civilizations and extraterrestrial beings.
The Great Sphinx of Giza is one of the most appreciated monuments that is as mysterious as it is beautiful. Archaeologically speaking, it is one of the most enigmatic monuments ever found, since scholars have absolutely no idea who built it and what its original purpose was.
At 241 feet long and 66 feet high, the Great Sphinx of Giza holds the record as the largest monolith statue on the surface of the planet. The Great Sphinx is believed to have been discovered in AD 1817, when the first modern archaeological dig, led by Giovanni Battista Caviglia managed to uncover the Sphinx’s chest for completely. This marvelous ancient piece of architecture remains one of the few ancient pieces of work that nobody bothered to take credit for, and mainstream scholars have been perplexed by its mysterious history for years.
Many researchers consider the Sphinx to be an astronomically aligned monument.
Geological findings indicate that the Sphinx may have been sculpted sometime before 10,000 BC, a period that coincides with the Age of Leo, or the Lion, which lasted from 10,970 to 8810 BC.
According to Graham Hancock, computer simulations show that in 10,500 BC the constellation of Leo housed the sun on the spring equinox – i.e. an hour before dawn in that epoch Leo would have reclined due east along the horizon in the place where the sun would soon rise. This means that the lion-bodied Sphinx, with its due-east orientation, would have gazed directly on that morning at the one constellation in the sky that might reasonably be regarded as its own celestial counterpart.
Today there are countless images of the Great Sphinx of Giza, and nearly all of them show it as it is today, nearly completely restored to its full glory. However, the most interesting images taken of the Sphinx are those taken after its discovery.
While many people are unaware, there are numerous extremely old images of the Sphinx, which show this incredible ancient monument as it looked prior to its restorations in modern times.
The images depict numerous cavities, entrances and what appear to be tunnels that according to many leads below this majestic ancient monument.
This is a rare image of the Sphinx taken from a hot air balloon, in the early 19th century. This is before excavation and restoration.
The Great Sphinx of Giza before it was entirely excavated.
Ancient Code Pyramids and Sphinx Giza Egypt 1860. Image Credit: Photographium Historic Photo Archive
Profile view of Sphinx Giza Egypt 1900-1920. Image Credit: Photographium Historic Photo Archive
Sphinx in late 1800s. Image Credit: Photographium Historic Photo Archive
British soldiers posing at the Great Sphinx at Giza. Image Credit Unknown.
The Sphinx Giza Egypt circa 1850. Image Credit Unknown
One of the oldest photos of the Great Sphinx from 1880. Image Credit Unknown
This is a rare image of the Sphinx shows the surface of the head of the Sphinx. The images was taken in 1925. Image Credit Unknown
Almost half of all the world’s insect species are in decline, and a third are already endangered, a new metastudy found. These trends point to a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, it adds.
Image via Pixabay.
With the sixth mass extinction looming over the planet, it’s not the best of times to be an insect. The extinction rate among their species is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds, or reptiles. They’re struggling so much to make ends meet that some 2.5% of all insects (by weight) die year after year. Currently, over one-third of all insect species are endangered, and 40% of them are declining. If things don’t change, we could be looking at the end of insects (or at least, of insects as meaningful ecological actors) within a century.
These conclusions come from a massive meta-study looking at the state of insect species around the world.
Findings that should bug us
“If insect species losses cannot be halted, this will have catastrophic consequences for both the planet’s ecosystems and for the survival of mankind,” said Francisco Sánchez-Bayo, at the University of Sydney, Australia, corresponding author of the meta-study.
Sánchez-Bayo worked together with Kris Wyckhuys at the China Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing. The research was spurred by recent reports of insect population collapses in Germany and Puerto Rico, which paint a dire picture. Insects are essential for the healthy functioning of ecosystems, the team writes — serving as food, pollinators, and nutrient recyclers. Their value in nature can be seen in the sheer diversity and quantity that insect species have reached. They are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by an estimated 17 times.
Given these reported collapses and the rapid rate of extinction seen in larger animals (which are easier to study), the team wanted to find out how insects fare on a global level. To that end, they analyzed 73 studies on insect decline performed all over the world. Most of these were performed in western Europe and the US. A few looked at areas ranging from Australia to China and Brazil to South Africa, but very few treated other areas.
The findings, in short, are that it’s bad. It’s bad everywhere (we looked), and it’s bad because of us.
“The [insect] trends confirm that the sixth major extinction event is profoundly impacting [on] life forms on our planet,” the team writes. “Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades.”
“The repercussions this will have for the planet’s ecosystems are catastrophic to say the least.”
Orders Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera, and Coleoptera, are the worst hit groups. One of the studies included in the analysis shows that the number of widespread butterfly species on farmed land in the UK fell by 58% between 2000 and 2009. Bees are also struggling: Oklahoma lost half of its bumblebee species between 1949 and 2013. The number of honeybee colonies in the US was 6 million in 1947, but 3.5 million have been lost since. Beetle species are also declining, especially dung beetles.
In stark contrast to most humans, dung beetles actually love other people’s bullshit.
Image credits Baynham Goredema.
While there are large gaps in our data — especially pertaining to species of flies, ants, aphids, shield bugs, and crickets — there is virtually no data that would suggest they’re faring better than the other insects included in this study. Some species, however, aremaking the best of it and increasing in number, but these are the exceptions rather than the rule. In the US, for example, the common eastern bumblebee (Bombus impatiens) is increasing in numbers due to its tolerance of pesticides (and its newfound lack of competitors). These increases are far too modest to make up for the overall decline, the team cautions.
The UK has suffered the biggest recorded insect declines overall, although the team notes that the country was the most intensely-studied area in its analysis. That doesn’t mean other areas are faring well, just that they’re faring better. In Puerto Rico, for example, a recent study revealed a 98% decrease in ground insects over the last 35 years.
Intensive agriculture — particularly due to heavy use of pesticides — is the main culprit. Urbanization and climate change, which are destroying these species’ habitats and food security, are also significant factors. Overall, the annual rate of insect species loss over the past 25 to 30 years averages 2.5%, a figure that Sánchez-Bayo told The Guardian is “shocking”.
“It is very rapid. In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none.”
“The main cause of the decline is agricultural intensification,” he adds. “That means the elimination of all trees and shrubs that normally surround the fields, so there are plain, bare fields that are treated with synthetic fertilisers and pesticides.”
The team notes that more organic farms had healthy levels of insect inhabitants despite the occasional use of pesticides. The scale that insecticides are used on in industrialized farms, coupled with novel insecticide compounds such as neonicotinoids and fipronil, simply “sterilize[s] the soil”, Sánchez-Bayo explains. “Industrial-scale, intensive agriculture is the one that is killing the ecosystems,” he adds. This is deadly to insects living on the farms themselves, but also to neighboring ecosystems. One of the most worrying implications is that when insects die off, they take whole trophic trees along. Many species of birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish rely heavily on insects for food.
In the tropics, where industrial agriculture isn’t yet well established, the decline is primarily driven by climate change.
Given the results, the strong language used in the review isn’t alarmist, the team feels. Their reviewers and editor agreed.
“We wanted to really wake people up,” says Sánchez-Bayo. “When you consider 80% of biomass of insects has disappeared in 25-30 years, it is a big concern.”
The paper “Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers” has been published in the journal Biological Conservation.
She Did Not Know What It Was - Got Out Of The Car and Started Recording Then It Went Up
She Did Not Know What It Was - Got Out Of The Car and Started Recording Then It Went Up!
February 11, 2019: ~Sky Phenomenon~ Tracy, CA
Andrew Foreman: On 4th July 2016 I saw THE EXACT SAME color orb over my mothers house in louisville, Ky. 35miles from Fort Knox…..also I drove around the corner and observed several people standing in their front yard looking up into the sky as well and I assumed they were looking at the same orb I observed.
But instead there were three more identical orbs in the air over their house as well and a few seconds later the other orb came from my mother’s house and joined with the other three then they hover there silently for 30 to 40 seconds two of them merged into one making three orbs then they all departed straight up!! They are DEFINATELY NOT FROM THIS EARTH!!!🌍🌙🌞🌠and TRUST ME..they WERE NIT FIREWORKS EITHER!!😀
Description from the channel: We are living in very unique, changing times and during these times I have become more than intrigued by these changes and what is causing them. I’m referring to the earth changes, changes in our sun and how the earth’s atmosphere manages this what I believe to be a much different sunlight.
Over the last 10 years I have become very familiar with our planet, the mechanics of it and how it reacts to many different aspects of space weather and many other things as well. I monitor everything from the sea floor to the cosmos and everything in between. I am a full-time Watchman and as these uncertain times move forward I’ve got your back. When you really need to know…you’ll know. Your Earth Watchman, MrMBB333 #MrMBB333 #TeamUV #EarthWatchman @MrMBB333
Over a Thousand New Objects and Phenomena Identified in Night Sky
Over a Thousand New Objects and Phenomena Identified in Night Sky
Casual stargazers may look at the black area among stars and think that there’s nothing there except empty space. But the night sky hides many secrets invisible to the naked eye.
Less than a year into its mission, a sky-survey camera in Southern California shows just how full the sky is. The Zwicky Transient Facility, based at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, has identified over a thousand new objects and phenomena in the night sky, including more than 1,100 new supernovae and 50 near-Earth asteroids, as well as binary star systems and black holes. Operated by Caltech, the ZTF is a public-private partnership between the National Science Foundation and a consortium of nine other institutions around the globe, including the University of Washington. The ZTF collaboration’s six latest papers, which describe these discoveries as well as the ZTF’s data mining, sorting and alert systems, have been accepted for publication in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
A composite ZTF image of the Andromeda galaxy made by combining three bands of visible light. The image covers 2.9 square degrees, which is one-sixteenth of ZTF’s full field of view. Andromeda, also known as Messier 31, is the nearest major galaxy to our Milky Way galaxy, lying 2.5 million light-years away.
Credit: ZTF/D. Goldstein/R. Hurt/Caltech
Eric Bellm, the ZTF survey scientist and a research assistant professor of astronomy at UW, is lead author on a paper describing the ZTF’s technical systems and major findings since the survey began on March 20, 2018. Maria Patterson, a data scientist formerly with the UW Department of Astronomy’s DIRAC Institute, is lead author on another paper describing the ZTF’s alert system for notifying science teams of possible new objects in the sky or significant changes to existing objects.
“The ZTF mission is to identify changes in the night sky and alert the astronomical field of these discoveries as quickly as possible,” said Bellm, who is also a fellow with the DIRAC Institute. “The results and specifications reported in these six papers demonstrate that the ZTF has in place a pipeline to identify new objects, as well as analyze and disseminate information about them quickly to the astronomy community.”
Science teams need quick alerts so that they could, if needed, arrange for follow-up observations of individual objects by other observatories, Bellm added.
The ZTF accomplishes its survey goals through a digital camera, consisting of 16 charge-coupled devices, mounted to the 48-inch-aperture Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar. A single image from the camera covers an area about 240 times the size of the moon; in just one night, the ZTF could image the entire night sky visible from the Northern Hemisphere. So far, the ZTF camera has imaged more than 1 billion stars in our galaxy alone. By comparing new images to old, the ZTF can identify objects that are new, such as a supernova lighting up for the first time, or changes to existing objects, such as a star brightening in luminosity.
The ZTF undertakes surveys for public agencies such as the National Science Foundation, as well as private entities. The sheer volume of data generated by the ZTF necessitated a new approach to data analysis and alerts, according to Bellm.
“Every image that the ZTF takes contributes to at least one survey,” said Bellm. “We needed to put an automated alert system in place that would inform the relevant survey teams – in near-real time – of every potential change or new object that the ZTF would uncover, which could be more than a million in a single night.”
Patterson, Bellm and other UW scientists — including Mario Juric, associate professor of astronomy and senior data fellow with the eScience Institute — led the effort within the ZTF to craft the automated alert system. They utilized two open-source technologies: Kafka, a real-time data-streaming platform, and Avro, a framework to serialize data for transmission and storage. The completed alert system, which was first deployed in June 2018, has successfully generated and distributed up to 1.2 million ZTF alerts each night — with each alert going out to survey teams approximately 10 seconds after it was automatically generated.
The orbit of asteroid 2019 AQ3, discovered by ZTF, is shown in this diagram. The object has the shortest “year” of any recorded asteroid, with an orbital period of just 165 days
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
“Through these alert systems, the ZTF is sharing every change it finds with our survey partners,” said Bellm. “They are receiving every bit of data.”
Survey partners, in turn, are experimenting with machine-learning classification systems and other analysis tools to sort through the alerts.
The ZTF’s alert system is a proving ground for future “automated, time-domain astronomy” missions such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, said Bellm. The LSST, which is expected to begin its sky surveys in 2022, should generate about 10 million alerts per night, which is about 10 times the maximum alert volume of the ZTF. But the ZTF alert system could form the basis of a scaled-up alert pipeline for the LSST, according to Bellm.
“We are very pleased with the opportunities that the ZTF mission has provided us,” said Bellm. “It is reassuring to know that we have the tools at hand today that are useful not only for ongoing surveys at the ZTF, but also future missions like the LSST.”
The ZTF is funded by the NSF, Heising-Simons Foundation and the ZTF member institutions: Caltech, the University of Washington, the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Oskar Klein Centre at Stockholm University, the University of Maryland, the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, Humboldt University of Berlin, the TANGO Consortium of Taiwan, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Contacts and sources: James Urton University of Washington
“The Zwicky Transient Facility Alert Distribution System” Maria T. Patterson, Eric C. Bellm, Ben Rusholme, Frank J. Masci, Mario Juric, K. Simon Krughoff, V. Zach Golkhou, Matthew J. Graham, Shrinivas R. Kulkarni, George Helou. Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2019; 131 (995): 018001 DOI: 10.1088/1538-3873/aae904
Uranus and Neptune Dynamic Atmospheres Revealed by Hubble Space Telescope
Uranus and Neptune Dynamic Atmospheres Revealed by Hubble Space Telescope
Like Earth, Uranus and Neptune have seasons, which likely drive some of the features in their atmospheres. But their seasons are much longer than on Earth, spanning decades rather than months.
During its routine yearly monitoring of the weather on our solar system’s outer planets, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a new mysterious dark storm on Neptune (right) and provided a fresh look at a long-lived storm circling around the north polar region on Uranus (left).
Credits: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), and M.H. Wong and A. Hsu (University of California, Berkeley)
The new Hubble view of Neptune shows the dark storm, seen at top center. Appearing during the planet’s southern summer, the feature is the fourth and latest mysterious dark vortex captured by Hubble since 1993. Two other dark storms were discovered by the Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989 as it flew by the remote planet. Since then, only Hubble has had the sensitivity in blue light to track these elusive features, which have appeared and faded quickly. A study led by University of California, Berkeley, undergraduate student Andrew Hsu estimated that the dark spots appear every four to six years at different latitudes and disappear after about two years.
This Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3 image of Neptune, taken in September and November 2018, shows a new dark storm (top center).’
Credits: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), and M.H. Wong and A. Hsu (University of California, Berkeley)
Hubble uncovered the latest storm in September 2018 in Neptune’s northern hemisphere. The feature is roughly 6,800 miles across.
To the right of the dark feature are bright white “companion clouds.” Hubble has observed similar clouds accompanying previous vortices. The bright clouds form when the flow of ambient air is perturbed and diverted upward over the dark vortex, causing gases to freeze into methane ice crystals. These clouds are similar to clouds that appear as pancake-shaped features when air is pushed over mountains on Earth (though Neptune has no solid surface). The long, thin cloud to the left of the dark spot is a transient feature that is not part of the storm system.
It’s unclear how these storms form. But like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, the dark vortices swirl in an anti-cyclonic direction and seem to dredge up material from deeper levels in the ice giant’s atmosphere.
The Hubble observations show that as early as 2016, increased cloud activity in the region preceded the vortex’s appearance. The images indicate that the vortices probably develop deeper in Neptune’s atmosphere, becoming visible only when the top of the storm reaches higher altitudes.
This Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3 image of Uranus, taken in November 2018, reveals a vast, bright stormy cloud cap across the planet’s north pole.
Credits: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), and M.H. Wong and A. Hsu (University of California, Berkeley)
The snapshot of Uranus, like the image of Neptune, reveals a dominant feature: a vast bright stormy cloud cap across the north pole.
Scientists believe this new feature is a result of Uranus’ unique rotation. Unlike every other planet in the solar system, Uranus is tipped over almost onto its side. Because of this extreme tilt, during the planet’s summer the Sun shines almost directly onto the north pole and never sets. Uranus is now approaching the middle of its summer season, and the polar-cap region is becoming more prominent. This polar hood may have formed by seasonal changes in atmospheric flow.
Near the edge of the polar storm is a large, compact methane-ice cloud, which is sometimes bright enough to be photographed by amateur astronomers. A narrow cloud band encircles the planet north of the equator. It is a mystery how bands like these are confined to such narrow widths, because Uranus and Neptune have very broad westward-blowing wind jets.
Both planets are classified as ice giant planets. They have no solid surface but rather mantles of hydrogen and helium surrounding a water-rich interior, itself perhaps wrapped around a rocky core. Atmospheric methane absorbs red light but allows blue-green light to be scattered back into space, giving each planet a cyan hue.
The new Neptune and Uranus images are from the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, a long-term Hubble project, led by Amy Simon of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, that annually captures global maps of our solar system’s outer planets when they are closest to Earth in their orbits. OPAL’s key goals are to study long-term seasonal changes, as well as capture comparatively transitory events, such as the appearance of Neptune’s dark spot. These dark storms may be so fleeting that in the past some of them may have appeared and faded during multi-year gaps in Hubble’s observations of Neptune. The OPAL program ensures that astronomers won’t miss another one.
These images are part of a scrapbook of Hubble snapshots of Neptune and Uranus that track the weather patterns over time on these distant, cold planets. Just as meteorologists cannot predict the weather on Earth by studying a few snapshots, astronomers cannot track atmospheric trends on solar system planets without regularly repeated observations. Astronomers hope that Hubble’s long-term monitoring of the outer planets will help them unravel the mysteries that still persist about these faraway worlds.
Analyzing the weather on these worlds also will help scientists better understand the diversity and similarities of the atmospheres of solar-system planets, including Earth.
Contacts and sources: Claire Saravia NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Ray Villard Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland
Toch geen sneeuwman: verst waargenomen ruimteobject ooit heeft een andere vorm dan gedacht - HLN.be
Toch geen sneeuwman: verst waargenomen ruimteobject ooit heeft een andere vorm dan gedacht - HLN.be
rvUltima Thule blijkt veel platter dan eerst gedacht. "Een hoogst ongebruikelijke vorm", zegt de NASA.
WETENSCHAPBegin januari leek hij nog op een sneeuwman, of een bowlingkegel. Maar nieuwe beelden laten nu zien dat Ultima Thule, het verste ruimteobject ooit door de mens bestudeerd, veel platter is dan eerst gedacht. Ultima Thule bevindt zich op zowat 6,6 miljard kilometer van ons.
De ijsdwerg van 32 op 16 kilometer, die zich in de Kuipergordel bevindt, werd op nieuwjaarsdag gefotografeerd door de ruimtesonde New Horizons, die op 3.500 kilometer afstand van Ultima Thule beelden kon schieten.
Maar nieuwe foto’s, data en analyses laten nu een ander beeld zien dan toen. De twee delen van Ultima Thule blijken eerder plat dan rond te zijn. De NASA vergelijkt beide delen nu met een platte pannenkoek en een gekartelde walnoot.
“Dit is een ongelooflijke beeldenreeks, genomen door een ruimtetuig dat een kleine wereld laat zien op 6,6 miljard kilometer afstand van ons”, zegt hoofdwetenschapper Alan Stern van het Southwest Research Institute. “Onze eerste indruk werd gevormd door de weinige beelden die we begin januari kregen, maar nieuwe beelden en data hebben onze kijk veranderd. Belangrijker dan de nieuwe vorm is bovendien de vraag hoé Ultima Thule die vorm heeft gekregen. We hebben nog nooit zoiets gezien dat rond de zon draait.” De wetenschappers keken naar de sterren in de achtergrond, en meer bepaald welke sterren door de vorm van Ultima Thule geblokkeerd waren op de foto’s. Daardoor konden ze nu de vorm beter bepalen.
Ultima Thule is een zogenaamde “contact binary”, de eerste die ooit echt is waargenomen. Oorspronkelijk waren het verschillende objecten die rond elkaar wentelden en na verloop twee grotere ruimtelichamen vormden. Ook die bleven rond elkaar draaien, tot ze bij elkaar kwamen en aan elkaar ‘vastgroeiden’. Het grote deel is 19 kilometer in doorsnee. Dat heeft de naam Ultima gekregen. Het kleinste deel, Thule genaamd, heeft een diameter van ongeveer 14 kilometer.
De mensen achter de missie denken dat de twee delen van Ultima Thule al miljarden jaren aan elkaar vastzitten. Waarschijnlijk zijn ze al samengesmolten in de beginjaren van ons zonnestelsel, zo’n 4,6 miljard jaar geleden.
De wetenschappers verwachten dat New Horizons binnenkort nog meer beelden zal doorsturen.
New Data, New View Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
WETENSCHAPAls een veenbrand wordt het debat over het klimaatbeleid van onderaf brandende gehouden door een losvast netwerk van enkele tientallen klimaatsceptische geleerden, allen gepensioneerd en haast allen ingenieur. Hun klacht: we zijn veel te geobsedeerd door CO2, het is nog maar de vraag of de klimaatwetenschap wel klopt. Hebben ze een punt? We hielden vier van de steeds terugkerende kwesties tegen het licht - en gingen bij de heren op de koffie.
1. “Klimaatverandering is van alle tijden, de mens heeft daarop maar bitter weinig invloed”
Guus Berkhout en Dick Thoenes in Elsevier, 11 oktober
Laat het even inwerken. Zó zag Antarctica er 120 miljoen jaar geleden uit:
British Antarctic Survey
Kijk over je schouder naar het verleden, en al snel besef je dat klimaatverandering van alle tijden is. Dat geeft aan dat de planeet heus wel wat gewend is. Maar sceptici halen het verleden vooral van stal om aan te geven: zie je wel, het komt niet door de mens. ‘Klimaat verandert voortdurend, logisch dat het sindsdien dus weer wat opwarmt’, zoals Thierry Baudet pas nog twitterde in een bericht dat anderhalf duizend ‘likes’ kreeg.
“Natuurlijk, het klimaat verandert altijd”, zegt hoogleraar paleo-oceanografie Appy Sluijs (Universiteit Utrecht). “Maar belangrijker is de vraag: waardoor kwam dat? En je ziet dan dat er vaak op de een of andere manier CO2 bij betrokken is, als aanjager van de temperatuur.”
Neem het aflopen van de laatste ijstijd, zo’n twintig- tot tienduizend jaar geleden. De instraling van de zon veranderde, waardoor het warmer werd. Maar daarna kwam er CO2 vrij uit de diepzee en ging de wereldtemperatuur verder omhoog, hand in hand met de toename van broeikasgassen. Bij een andere bekende prehistorische warmteuitbraak, het ‘paleoceen-eoceen thermaal maximum’ van zo’n 56 miljoen jaar geleden, gaven waarschijnlijk vulkaanuitbarstingen de eerste duw, waarna er een enorme bel broeikasgas wegborrelde uit de zeebodem en de temperatuur in enkele duizenden jaren tijd met 5 of 6 graden steeg.
En het recente verleden? Sceptici wijzen hier doorgaans op warme periodes uit historische tijden. De Vikingen vestigden zich op Groenland omdat het er vriendelijk en ‘groen’ was, in de Alpen komen onder de gletsjers soms boomresten vandaan die groeiden in de dagen van de Romeinen, en de middeleeuwen waren zo warm dat men in Engeland wijn verbouwde. Zie de geschatte temperatuur op het noordelijk halfrond (groen en rood) en in Engeland (blauw) sinds het jaar 1000 tot 2000:
Realclimate
Maar duik in de achterliggende studies, en de wetenschap achter zulke aansprekende anekdotes blijkt genuanceerd. Inderdaad wijzen zaken zoals oude koralen en chemische afdrukken in ijskernen en sedimenten erop dat het van ongeveer 900 tot 1300 warmer was op aarde. Warmer dan halverwege de vorige eeuw werd het wereldgemiddelde echter niet, en de opwarming die er was, was ongelijk verdeeld. Zo blijkt uit een omvangrijke reconstructie in Science dat de zuidelijke kant van Groenland precies op een warme plek lag – de rode vlek hieronder. Maar op veel plekken werd het juist koeler (blauw):
Ook het zogeheten ‘holocene klimaatoptimum’, een warmte van zesduizend jaar geleden die de het-valt-wel-meeërs graag aanhalen, beperkte zich vooral tot het noordelijk halfrond, en dan nog vooral de zomers. “Feit is dat op wereldgemiddeld niveau het klimaat de afgelopen tienduizend jaar juist best stabiel was”, zegt Sluijs.
En dat blijkt inderdaad als je een temperatuurgrafiek van die periode erbij pakt, samengesteld uit een reconstructie van de prehistorie (de blauwe lijn) en de moderne temperatuurmetingen (de rode lijn). De bobbel lijkt heel wat, maar het gaat hier om tienden van graden:
Minstens zo belangrijk is een andere les van vroeger: klimaatverandering verandert de wereld. Tijdens de laatste echt hete episode – in de steentijd, zo’n 125 duizend jaar geleden – waren Antarctica en Groenland deels gesmolten en stond de zeespiegel zes tot negen meter hoger dan nu, een stand die veel kustgebieden in de problemen zou brengen.
Bovendien gaat de huidige temperatuurstijging, naar historische maatstaven, extreem snel. Zie de rode piek hierboven, die momenteel doorgaat tot één graad, ver buiten het grafiekje.
Na een ijstijd verandert de hoeveelheid CO2 met zo’n honderd deeltjes per miljoen (ppm) in tienduizend jaar, en dat is net zoveel als de afgelopen eeuw. “We schieten dus ongeveer 100 keer zo hard tegen de bal die we aarde noemen”, zegt ijskaponderzoeker Roderik van de Wal (Universiteit Utrecht). “Dat is ongekend. En we weten dat er een zekere traagheid in het systeem zit. Eén graad erbij in een eeuw tijd komt niet zomaar tot stilstand. Eigenlijk is iedereen het er wel over eens dat we om die reden alleen al sowieso nog een graad extra op ons dak krijgen.”
2. “CO2 zou de oorzaak zijn van alle problemen, wat gewoon niet klopt.”
(Berkhout in De Telegraaf, 29 december)
ONJUIST
Dat de aarde tegenwoordig ongeveer één graad warmer is dan anderhalve eeuw geleden, daarover zijn vriend en vijand het wel eens. Dit is momenteel het beeld van de gemiddelde wereldtemperatuur, gemeten volgens drie methoden:
Royal Society
Maar dan de oorzaak. Het officiële IPCC-standpunt is dat het ‘extreem waarschijnlijk’ is – meer dan 95 procent zeker – dat menselijke broeikasgassen ‘de dominante factor’ zijn van de opwarming. In oktober scherpte het IPCC dat aan. Om precies te zijn: er is meer dan twee derde kans dat de waargenomen opwarming nagenoeg helemaal is toe te schrijven aan de mens.
“Dat vertrouw ik niet”, zegt Berkhout. “Het IPCC zegt: het is allemaal nóg zekerder geworden, het staat nu helemaal vast. Op basis daarvan gaat de politiek nu honderden miljarden uitgeven. Maar hoe kun je dat nou zeggen? Het klimaat is altijd veranderd door natuurlijke oorzaken, en nu zou die natuurlijke kant opeens marginaal zijn?”
Alleen beweert geen wetenschapper dat. De afgelopen decennia was men druk in de weer met het ‘afpellen’ van de natuurlijke factoren die het klimaat beïnvloeden. Zoals de intensiteit van de zon (de blauwe lijn) tegenover de gemeten temperatuur (rood):
Skeptical Science
Zulke berekeningen voerde men ook uit voor de schommelingen in de aardbaan, omslagen in de zeestromen, ozon, kosmische straling, veranderend landgebruik enzovoorts. Al die natuurlijke omstandigheden leveren een wiebelende klimaatgrafiek op, die heel aardig meebeweegt met de werkelijk gemeten wereldtemperatuur. Met één verschil: het wordt niet, zoals in het echt, warmer. Alleen door CO2 en andere broeikasgassen toe te voegen aan de mix, gaat de wereldtemperatuur omhoog. Conclusie: CO2 is de hand die de wereldtemperatuur optilt.
Dit is zoals dat er, volgens een Zwitsers onderzoek in Nature Geoscience, uitziet. Met alleen natuurlijke factoren zou de temperatuur min of meer rechtdoor lopen (paars), maar de waarnemingen (zwart) gaan omhoog , samen met de voorspelde opwarming door broeikasgassen (rood)
Dat komt overigens niet onverwacht. Bekend is immers dat CO2 een broeikasgas is: het molecuul absorbeert (net als andere broeikasgassen) warmtestraling vanaf de aarde en straalt het weer uit naar alle kanten, waardoor er meer warmte blijft hangen in de dampkring. En het CO2-gehalte in de dampkring neemt toe door menselijke uitstoot, zoals deze metingen op Hawaii door het Amerikaanse onderzoeksinstituut NOAA laten zien:
Er is meer dat op CO2 wijst. De nachten warmen meer op dan de dagen, precies zoals verwacht op een planeet die meer moeite heeft zijn infraroodstraling kwijt te raken. Hogere luchtlagen koelen wat af, wat een aanwijzing is dat de opwarming niet van de zon komt, maar uit de dampkring zelf.
En anderhalve eeuw metingen brengen een ijzeren wetmatigheid aan het licht: hoe meer broeikasgassen, des te hoger de temperatuur. Dat ziet er dan zó uit - let op de vele recente jaartallen rechtsboven:
Voor de liefhebber: de twee correleren met een zogenoemde ‘r’ van 0,94, een bijna perfect verband. “Ik ken in het klimaat niets maar dan ook niets dat zo’n sterke correlatie vertoont”, zegt klimaatwetenschapper Geert Jan van Oldenborgh van het KNMI.
Maar zijn broeikasgassen ook de hoofddader? Kan er niet stiekem een andere, nog onbekende factor in het spel zijn? Klimaatwetenschappers achten dat hoogst onwaarschijnlijk. Zo wees een recente statistische analyse uit dat er geen aanwijzing is voor zo’n nog verborgen x-factor. “Geloof me, die is er ook gewoon niet”, zegt Van Oldenborgh. “Reken maar dat we ons allemaal gek hebben gezocht. Want als je hier een gat in kunt schieten, sta je meteen in Nature.”
“Mensen die beweren dat we alleen maar naar CO2 kijken en niet naar andere factoren, snappen er gewoon niets van”, zegt atmosfeerwetenschapper Bart Verheggen (Amsterdam University College). “Dat gaat er volledig aan voorbij dat we het systeem al heel lang bestuderen, en dat wat we zien en meten juist heel goed samenvalt met wat we al weten over CO2 en andere broeikasgassen. Er zijn meerdere bewijslijnen, en samen geven die een coherent beeld.”
De Britse atmosfeerwetenschapper Ed Hawkins vatte zijn frustratie over het onbegrip afgelopen zomer pesterig samen in een Twitterbericht:
Ed Hawkins✔@ed_hawkins
Answers to FAQs: 1) Yes, the sun's output varies slightly 2) Yes, the climate has changed before 3) Yes, we've considered that 4) Physics 5) No, we're not getting rich from this The answer is still: humans are responsible for nearly all of the warming over the past 150 years
3. “De IPCC-modellen overschatten de waargenomen opwarming”
(Kees le Pair, pamflet ‘Nieuw klimaat alarm’, augustus 2018)
ONDUIDELIJK
Vertrouwd refrein bij de tegenbeweging: de klimaatmodellen overdrijven de boel! De modellen, ingewikkelde computerprogramma’s die het opwarmende klimaat nabootsen, voorspellen dat de wereldtemperatuur oploopt tot zo’n anderhalve graad rond het jaar 2040. Maar tot dusver gaat de echt gemeten opwarming veel langzamer, stellen de critici.
In Elsevier illustreerde Berkhout dat, samen met emeritushoogleraar chemische technologie Dick Thoenes, met deze grafiek:
De grafiek komt niet uit een wetenschappelijk tijdschrift, maar van een omstreden presentatie die atmosfeerwetenschapper John Christy van de Universiteit van Alabama drie jaar geleden hield voor het Amerikaanse congres (PDF). Daar ziet de grafiek er al wat wetenschappelijker uit:
Let op dat Elsevier de onzekerheidsmarges wegliet, zodat de lijntjes meer los van elkaar lijken te staan dan ze in werkelijkheid doen. En zelfs dan is er op de grafiek veel aan te merken: het gaat alleen over de hogere luchtlagen, en technische zaken zoals de keuze van het nulpunt en de manier van gladstrijken zijn zo gekozen dat het verschil tussen waarneming en model extra groot lijkt. Toen NASA-klimaatwetenschapper Gavin Schmidt de grafiek hertekende, kreeg hij dan ook een grafiek waarin de satellietwaarnemingen veel minder achterlopen op de modellen:
Let wel: “De verschillen zijn niet verdwenen’, moet ook Schmidt toegeven. Dat heeft alleen waarschijnlijk meer te maken met de metingen dan met de modellen, vermoeden kenners. Zo zijn ballonmetingen berucht onbetrouwbaar, alleen al omdat men er goedkope wegwerp-apparatuur gebruikt. Ook satellietwaarnemingen zijn weinig precies, zegt satellietonderzoeker Stef Lhermitte (TU Delft). ’Onder die meetreeksen zitten zeer veel onzekerheden en aannames.”
Een andere kwestie speelt op de grond. Ook daar lopen de echt gemeten temperaturen sinds 1979 zo’n 35 procent achter op de modellen, volgens berekeningen van onder meer de onafhankelijke Britse wiskundige Nic Lewis. “Dit blijft een van de belangrijkste onderwerpen”, vindt klimaatpublicist Marcel Crok. “De mainstream weigert gewoon toe te geven dat de modellen de opwarming sinds 1979 met 35 procent overschatten.”
Dat ziet er, op een grafiek van het IPCC, zó uit. Kijk een beetje heen door alle details en let op de
blauwe lijntjes (de modellen): die lijken inderdaad wat sneller omhoog te gaan.
Geert Jan van Oldenborgh van het KNMI wijst er echter op dat het beeld wordt verstoord door twee afkoelende vulkaanuitbarstingen, de El Chichon in 1982 en de Pinatubo in 1994: die twee blauwe kuiltjes naar beneden die u hierboven ziet. De effecten daarvan zijn in de modellen sterker dan in het echt – met als gevolg dat de modelopwarming daarna wat steiler omhoog lijkt te gaan. “Waarschijnlijk schrijven we aan een vulkaanuitbarsting te veel afkoelende zwaveldruppeltjes in de atmosfeer toe”, zegt hij. “En als je lager begint, ga je harder omhoog.”
En bekijk bovenstaande grafiek vooral als geheel. Opvallend is dat de modellen de waargenomen trends (in grijs) over de hele eeuw juist prima berekenen. Sinds 2014 maakt de temperatuur bovendien een inhaalslag, waardoor de modellen minder achterlopen. “Ik ben juist iemand die de observaties heilig vindt’, zegt Van Oldenborgh. ’Maar in dit geval zitten de modellen opvallend goed.”
Maar in de discussie over de klimaatmodellen heeft elk argument een tegenargument. Zo wijst Lewis erop dat de 35 procent achterstand ook blijft als je de periode ná de vulkanen onder de loep neemt. “Geert Jan verdedigt het onverdedigbare”, mailt hij.
Zo kun je de zaak, afhankelijk van je aannames, op verschillende manieren bekijken. Volgens een recente analyse van de Amerikaanse klimaatwetenschapper Zeke Hausfather gingen de oudere IPCC-modellen 28 procent te langzaam en gaan de huidige modellen 9 procent te hard; volgens een andere, pas verschenen studie in Nature komen juist de klimaatmodellen die het ‘warmst’ staan afgesteld het beste overeen met de werkelijkheid.
De enige zekerheid is dat er nog veel onzeker is – en dat alle afwijkingen ten opzichte van de modellen tot dusver nog binnen de marges van het toeval vallen. Volgens een Britse statistische analyse zal het nog jaren duren voordat we echt kunnen zeggen of de modellen al dan niet te warm staan afgesteld.
Een ongemakkelijke situatie, vindt Lewis. “Natuurlijk zit er grote onzekerheid in de modellen. Maar het is de bovenkant en het gemiddelde van de verwachtingen waarop we ons klimaatbeleid baseren, niet de uitschieters aan de onderkant.”
U kunt natuurlijk ook zelf inschatten hoe de vlag ervoor staat, door onderstaande animatie van de Britse klimaatsite Carbon Brief te bekijken. In 40 seconden heeft u dan een aardig gevoel hoe de modellen het vroeger deden - en hoe ze het nu doen:
4. “Hoe meer CO2, hoe groener de aarde.”
(Berkhout in De Telegraaf, 25 januari)
WAAR, MAAR VALSE VERGELIJKING
In elk geval is er één voordeel. In een CO2-rijke, warmere broeikaswereld mag je meer plantengroei verwachten. Toch?
Die vreugdekreet ligt menig klimaattwijfelaar in de mond bestorven – en het is wat de wetenschappelijke studies inderdaad laten zien. Ongeveer een kwart tot de helft van de begroeide planeet werd de afgelopen dertig jaar groener, bleek enkele jaren geleden uit een omvangrijke satellietstudie, doordat de groeiseizoenen langer worden en planten een hoger tempo van fotosynthese krijgen bij meer CO2. Intussen breidden de bossen in Siberië en Canada noordwaarts uit, en neemt het Amazonewoud al zo’n dertig jaar lang meer koolstof op dan het uitstoot, misschien omdat de natuur toewerkt naar een nieuw evenwicht.
In totaal ziet dat er ongeveer zó uit:
Al met al zetten planten tegenwoordig zo’n 30 procent meer CO2 om in wortels, stengels, bladeren en vruchten dan vóór de industriële revolutie, blijkt uit de studie waaruit bovenstaande plaatje komt. Een gegeven, dat prompt werd opgepikt en als uithangbord werd gebruikt door rechts Amerika.
“De zogenaamde koolstofvervuiling heeft meer gedaan voor het groen op de planeet dan al het klimaatbeleid van de wereld bij elkaar”, aldus de openlijk klimaatsceptische denktank het Competitive Enterprise Institute in een persbericht. Sindsdien klinkt dat argument uit vele kelen. Zoals die van Thierry Baudet:
Thierry Baudet✔@thierrybaudet
Welnee, die film van Gore slaat echt werkelijk helemaal nergens op. Er is geen toename in extreme weersomstandigheden. Het klimaat warmt veel minder op dan altijd voorspeld. Meer CO2 heeft geweldig positief effect op plantengroei. Smog in India heeft niets met CO2 te maken. Etc.
Karin Burger #FBPE@Kariningroen
Replying to @thierrybaudet and 3 others
@KLM die een film over klimaat toont, is ironisch. Point taken. Maar de film van @algore is accuraat en integer. En doet wat hij beoogt:alarmeren en daarmee agenderen. Opletpuntje voor jou: docu’s zijn nooit objectief.
Maar zo simpel ligt het niet. Zo werd zo’n 4 procent van de begroeide planeet niet groener maar juist bruiner, en zijn er ook streken waar de bomen krompen, vermoedelijk door de stijgende temperatuur.
En niet alle vergroening komt door CO2, bracht een gedetailleerde analyse in november aan het licht. In Siberië, Europa en de VS profiteert de groene natuur vooral van CO2, in Australië is toegenomen regen de belangrijkste oorzaak, in Afrika en Azië zijn landbouw en bemesting hoofdreden. Zie onderstaand kaartje: de punten staan voor significante vergroening, de kleuren voor de hoofdoorzaak gunstigere temperatuur (roze), meer zonlicht (geel), meer regen (blauw), meer landbouw (groen), stikstofbemesting (oranje) en CO2 (groen):
Bovendien is het de vraag hoe lang de groene golf aanhoudt, zegt hoogleraar tropische bosecologie Lourens Poorter (Wageningen Universiteit). “We hebben het hier over een korte-termijneffect. Na een tijdje zijn de planten eraan gewend en zakt hun fotosynthese-capaciteit weer in.” Zie de groene natuur als een bak waarin CO2 wordt opgeslagen: in een broeikaswereld wordt de bak groter, maar ook die raakt uiteindelijk vol. Planten sterven en vergaan, en daarbij komt een groot deel van hun koolstof weer vrij. “In Italië zijn de bomen sneller gaan groeien“, noemt Poorter als voorbeeld. ‘Maar ze gaan er ook sneller dood.’
Afgezien daarvan zou je haast vergeten dat CO2 nog iets doet: namelijk, de wereld opwarmen en de oceanen verzuren. En terwijl de wereld vergroent, groeit ook de CO2-concentratie in de dampkring: de planten slagen er bij lange na niet in om de extra uitstoot te compenseren.
Een mooi moment misschien om het voorgaande nog even in 52 seconden op u te laten inwerken, in deze videosamenvatting van Nasa:
Goeiige opa’s die oprecht bezorgd zijn over de toekomst
Het is na afloop van het gesprek, in de hal van het deftige Haagse Marriott Hotel, als Guus Berkhout, emeritus hoogleraar geofysica en oud-bestuurslid van de TU Delft, de verslaggever nog even staande houdt.
“Weet je? Ik ben niet zo tevreden over dit interview”, bekent Berkhout, een hartelijke man met een rond gezicht en springerige witte krullen. “Kijk, wij hebben ruim dertig jaar ervaring, we hebben geëxcelleerd in de wetenschap, onze kennis wordt wereldwijd gebruikt en toegepast. Het zou mooi zijn als je zou schrijven: er zijn bezorgde wetenschappers met onze staat van dienst die erop wijzen dat we met het draaien aan de CO2-knop het klimaat niet naar believen kunnen veranderen.”
Berkhout is een van de drijvende krachten achter een netwerk van enkele tientallen gepensioneerde heren, allen met een exacte achtergrond en haast allemaal oud-prominenten uit wetenschap en bedrijfsleven, die nadrukkelijk afstand nemen van de huidige klimaatkoers. Die zal ons in ‘kou en ellende’ storten en zelfs uitmonden in een ‘volksopstand’ en ‘massasterfte’, voorspelde een van hen – natuurkundige en oud-directeur van onderzoeksfinancier STW Kees le Pair – afgelopen zomer in een pamflet. Een tekst, die ook Berkhout, De Groot en 25 anderen ondertekenden.
Ondertekenaars van het ‘Nieuw Klimaat Alarm’: Guus Berkout, Kees le Pair, Karel Wakker en Rutger van Santen. (van linksboven met de klok mee)
Onder hen mannen voor wie je vroeger nette kleding zou aandoen als je ze opzocht. Oud-rector van de TU Delft Karel Wakker. Oud-rector van de TU Eindhoven en winnaar van een Spinozapremie Rutger van Santen. Oud-onderzoeksdirecteur van Unilever B.G. Linsen. Emeritushoogleraren, zo’n twaalf in totaal. De meesten kennen elkaar van vroeger, van de universiteit of clubs als ingenieursvereniging KIVI-NIRIA. Soms lopen ze elkaar tegen het lijf op een reünie of academische plechtigheid; vaker vinden ze elkaar in praatgroepen of klimaatkritische weblogs als Climategate. (Bekijk hier een Excel-sheet met hun gegevens).
“Bekijk opwarming positief”. Enkele weken geleden maakte Berkhout bekend dat hij een financier heeft gevonden, in de persoon van vastgoedmiljonair Niek Sandmann, om ‘breed klimaatonderzoek’ te laten doen, ‘waarbij CO2 slechts één onderdeel is’. Meer financiers hebben zich gemeld, zegt hij.
Ach, laat ze, mopperende mannen van vroeger. Er zit geeneens een klimaatwetenschapper tussen. Een op de drie van hen werkte ooit voor Shell, turfde de linkse website Sargasso. Dit is de generatie van de jaren zestig en zeventig, de ingenieursgeneratie die ons land beveiligde tegen het water en het voorzag van stabiele energie. Niet gek dat ze in opstand komen nu de nieuwe generatie het weer helemaal anders wil. Windmolens, alsjeblieft zeg.
Maar dat zou te makkelijk zijn. “We zijn allemaal gepensioneerd, en financieel onafhankelijk”, zegt De Groot. “De enige reden waarom we ons hierover nog druk maken, is omdat onze wetenschappelijke integriteit ons ertoe verplicht.”
Hun onderliggende zorg is oprecht. We worden misleid, is hun stellige overtuiging. Door de Al Gores van deze wereld, de klimaatgoeroes met hun praatjes van hel en verdoemenis. “Maar zet daar vraagtekens bij, en je wordt meteen uitgemaakt voor klimaatontkenner”, zegt Berkhout.
De Groot: “Deniers. Dat zet ons meteen in de foute hoek. Bij de holocaustontkenners.”
Berkhout: “Terwijl we gewoon vragen hebben.”
De Groot: “Ik denk: laat het nu eerst eens een tijdje gebeuren, en laten we ons aanpassen aan de klimaatverandering. In plaats van hier op stel en sprong zoveel geld aan te besteden. We lijken wel vergeten dat we enorm goed zijn in ons aanpassen aan het zeeniveau. Dat hebben we altijd gedaan.”
Berkhout: “Onze boodschap is: beste politici, wacht even met die peperdure CO2-maatregelen. We dreigen wel onze betrouwbare energie-infrastructuur ten gronde te richten.”
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:HLN.be - Het Laatste Nieuws ( NL)
In dit filmpje van 4 minuten vernietigen 4 klimaatwetenschappers de global warming-mythe
In dit filmpje van 4 minuten vernietigen 4 klimaatwetenschappers de global warming-mythe
In onderstaand filmpje van vier minuten vernietigen vier klimaatwetenschappers de global warming-mythe.
Tom Harris, directeur van de International Climate Science Coalition, verwees naar een uitspraak gedaan door de Canadese klimatoloog Tim Ball.
Die heeft gezegd dat het in de afgelopen 10.000 jaar vrijwel altijd warmer is geweest dan nu.
1922
Meteoroloog Stanley B. Goldenberg citeerde uit een alarmerend rapport van de American Meteorological Society, waarin wordt gesteld dat het meeste ijs op aarde binnen nu en enkele jaren zal smelten en dat de meeste kuststeden als gevolg van de zeespiegelstijging onbewoonbaar zullen worden.
Het rapport is geschreven in november 1922.
“Raad eens wat er daarna gebeurde,” zei Goldenberg. “De aarde koelde af.”
Vijf tot 10 procent
Emeritus hoogleraar Richard A. Keen van de Universiteit van Colorado vulde de uitspraak van dr. Ball aan en wees erop dat het sinds het ontstaan van de aarde bijna altijd warmer is geweest dan nu.
Uit het geologische bewijs blijkt dat er in de afgelopen 4,65 miljard jaar gedurende vijf tot 10 procent van die tijd substantiële hoeveelheden ijs op aarde waren, aldus Keen.
Harris voegde daaraan toe dat de CO2-waarden niet eerder zo laag waren als nu.
Stelt niets voor
Hij zei: “440 miljoen jaar geleden, tijdens een zeer koude periode, zat er 1100 procent meer CO2 in de lucht dan nu.”
Dat de concentratie in de afgelopen eeuw met 40 procent is toegenomen, stelt dus niets voor, zei Harris.
This could be the plot of a new movie … or the start of a sci-fi-becoming-reality revolution. A gang of chimpanzees at the Belfast Zoo took advantage of some fallen branches to build a ladder and scale the wall around their living quarters. Is this an accident, a lesson … or a warning?
“I was petrified, obviously, having the kids, and I tried not to show fear but inside I was a bit like: what happens if it attacks us or tries to take the kids or runs over?”
What happens if it begins speaking, demands that the rest of the animals be released and calls for an end to meat-eating or the big kid gets peeled like a banana … which they don’t like anyway despite what you filthy humans think? A better movie, but fortunately (maybe) not what happened this past weekend after four chimps found trees knocked down by a storm, leaned them up against a wall and climbed them to freedom. Cue the triumphant John Williams score.
Well done!
“Don’t escape, you bad little gorilla.”
That’s not exactly an expression of terror, Mister Screenwriter, but it’s what a little girl commented in the video of the escape (see the video and photos here) which was posted on social media, much to the chagrin of Belfast Zoo officials who experienced their second escape in just two weeks. A red panda bolted when an electrical fence was disabled during a power failure. That creature was captured after roaming the streets of Belfast – possibly trying to convince stupid humans that it was not related to pandas at all but in fact is a rare and endangered species. Perhaps this is the escape that should be made into a movie, since it follows another red panda escape in 2017 from a zoo in Norfolk, Virginia. Should the defiant Ailurus fulgens (“don’t call us pandas”) and angry chimps (“don’t call us monkeys”) join forces next time?
Do I look like a bear?
“They’re intelligent primates and know they’re not supposed to be out of their enclosure, so got back in themselves.”
That’s what Belfast zookeeper Alyn Cairns hopes local residents believe – that the chimps knew they did something wrong and returned to their prison rather than realizing they did something right and upped their demands. It’s not that farfetched – in 2018, researchers discovered white-faced capuchins in Panama using stone tools as hammers to open nuts and shellfish, and another group in Japan taught chimpanzees how to play the human game rock-paper-scissors. Have primates entered their own Stone Age? Are we accelerating their evolution? Isn’t that a violation of the Prime Directive? Should we be mixing movie metaphors?
“But we just had to stay calm. It may have been a different story if it had been aggressive but it absolutely wasn’t. It made us feel at ease. We just walked past it and it was absolutely grand.”
Cue the sinister music as the humans dance and sing about how superior they are while the chimps tap messages to each other in their dark cages and plot their next move.
Are these escapes, coupled with the new evidence of primate intelligence, a sign that maybe it’s time we put an end to zoos and instead returned some of the land we’ve taken back to our fellow Earth creatures?
The Middle East is a land of rich traditions and deep culture going back millennia. Here is a place long considered to be one of the cradles of civilization itself, and which harbors a history steeped in the strange and the spiritual. It should perhaps not be so surprising at all that this region of the world should hold many unexplained mysteries and tales of the paranormal, and indeed it does. Here is a selection of cases of profoundly odd experiences by those who have made their way through this land of myth and legend, to come back with stories that defy all rational explanation.
A lot of the weirder paranormal encounters in the Middle East have been experienced by soldiers and servicemen, a topic which I have covered here at MU before, and it is a theme I have revisited on more than one occasion. Such reports are many, and one supremely creepy case comes to us from a military witness who tells of a tale his superior officer had to tell after being deployed in the region. The story is described as follows:
He was in the spooky, vague “Middle East” when there was a commotion from the soldiers watching the perimeter. Apparently, they could see a man about 100 yards away from the camp. He had appeared out of nowhere, no one saw him walking up. The man was just standing there, not doing anything threatening. But since it was a strange man in a war zone, they broke out all the high tech gear to see what was going on. They could see his face, his clothes, his height, but he looked bizarrely distorted and was not giving off a heat signature (they have infrared jimjams and whatnot, it’s the freaking military not a piddling ghosthunting troupe here). He was not the temperature of a human being, he was the temperature of the air around him. They had no idea what was going on and people were freaking out.
They called different people up to come look at the man, it wasn’t just a few soldiers who saw this- dozens of people came to look and everyone confirmed that it was definitely a person. Eventually they decided to send out a team to check this guy out. When they got about 50 yards away, the man started walking- only it didn’t look like he was walking toward or away from them, only walking in place. They froze, expecting an attack. But the man never got any closer..
It looked like it was trying to walk but instead of moving like a regular person, its bones were breaking and splintering backwards and forwards at the joints. I can’t think of a better way to describe it. Its head was jerking around like a puppet. When the convoy got a few yards closer, it disappeared entirely. The team hauled ass back to camp and as soon as they returned, the man-thing reappeared in its spot. Everyone took turns watching it for an hour or so until it disappeared for good. Didn’t walk away, didn’t fly or melt or explode, just stood there for a looooong time then vanished.
What was this specter? Why did it crawl out of the night to terrify these men before creeping back to from whence it came, wherever that may be? From the country of Iraq comes another bizarre account given by a witness who says he spent a total of 28 months deployed with the Army on and off in the country between the years of 2005 and 2009. His strange encounter would happen in the scorching summer of 2006, and it is hard to classify what it could possibly be. The witness says:
In the late summer of 2006 my unit was moved from Mosul to Sinjar, which as some of you may know is the home to the recently persecuted Yezidi tribe, they were an awesome bunch of people with more compassion than I was accustomed to seeing over there, they also had a unique set of beliefs and held Mt. Sinjar as a holy site. Mt. Sinjar just so happened to be the tallest terrain feature around and so it was also the best site for a communications re-transmission station, with a re-trans station come retrans security and that is where the weird begins.
I was on duty with another soldier pulling security on top of the mountain, basically watching avenues of advance to make sure no one got the drop on the commo guys. Around 0300 (3am) we saw very clearly in our nvg’s a person approaching us from the base of the mountain, just walking up this goat trail. Not knowing if it was a Yezidi or someone else we radioed it in and kept eyes on him. At this point I removed my night vision to give my eyes a break and looked down the hill there was no one there. My battle buddy confirmed he still had eyes on but even with good illumination and the fact that the figure was only about 150 meters away I couldn’t see him. Weirded out I looked through the TWS (thermal sight) and couldn’t see him there either. I put my nvg’s back on and there he was 100 meters out just watching.
So my question is what was it? What doesn’t show on thermals but can be effected by infra red? Shadow person? Ghost? Hallucination?
What was it, indeed? Another report from Iraq seems to suggest some sort of shape-changing spirit or demon, and apparently happened in Baghdad, Iraq. The witness describes himself as having been in the United States Army at the time during a deployment in Iraq, and on this evening he found himself on an extra guard shift through the wee morning hours. He was relieved at around 4 AM and headed back to his room, and it is then when something very bizarre would creep up out of the night. According to the witness:
I stopped dead in my tracks. In front of me about 30 feet or so was a black and white cat. I don’t know why but the sight of it caused me to jump and for some reason I was just afraid, not typical like “oh shit” kinda fear but more of like and overwhelming anxiety/paranoia. The cat just sat there and didn’t move but looked directly at me. Then I noticed something a little odd. I have a cat back in the states who’s the absolute light of my life. A black cat with white paws, a white chest and a little sliver of white running down the length of his face. This cat looked exactly like mine. Now obviously I knew that it wasn’t, but the sight of a familiar looking feline friend was enough for me to somewhat relax the jumpy feeling I had previously felt.
I took about three steps forward, slung my rifle to my side and crouched down with one arm outstretched in an attempt to coax the cat to come over. My lips pursed to make a little”tch-tch” noise when I became completely paralyzed with fear. From my eye level standing of about 6ft to my eye level crouching of about 3ft the animal I was seeing looked completely different as if my visual perspective completely changed the appearance of the animal. Like one of those optical illusion perspective based art sculptures. What I was looking at no longer looked like a cat but a large broad dog like animal crouched with its head lowered just inches off of the ground. All rationality abandoned me at this point all I could do was stare back at whatever it was. I couldn’t make out much of a face, the only light source around was from a street lamp about 50 meters behind me past the T-wall.
What I was able to make out were its eyes, which I could see clearer than day light and they were human. Look into a mirror and open your eyes as wide as you possibly can, that’s pretty much what I was looking at. It just stared at me and I stared back. I will tell you now that I have never been more terrified in my entire life. I slowly stood back up half expecting whatever I was looking at to take on the appearance of a cat once again but it didn’t. The thing did not move a fucking inch through this whole encounter. At this point my weapon wasn’t even enough to make me feel safe. I backed away slowly all the while keeping my eyes on what was in front of me. I had just about reached the gap in the T-wall again where the thing just disappeared. It didn’t back away and vanish into the shadows it just kind of steadily wasn’t there anymore. But right before it vanished entirely I heard what sounded like a low but somehow loud guttural growling noise that resonated off of the T-walls surrounding the area with the rooms. Needless to say as soon as I passed back through The T-wall I fucking bolted.
I ran as fast as my legs could carry me with all my gear on to my team leaders room across the gravel road. I took a moment to calm myself down before entering his room. I slept on his floor that night blaming it on the fact that we had to get up early and the alarm on my phone hasn’t been working lately. I haven’t seen anything since then but every other night or so when I’m by myself I’ll get that same horribly overwhelming sense of anxiety/paranoia that I got when I first saw the thing.
It is interesting to note that shape-shifting entities play a big role in many supernatural encounters throughout the Middle East region. One account was relayed to me personally in the wake of one of my former Middle East articles, and also comes from a soldier deployed in the Middle East at the time. He says that he was with out on a patrol mission in a bleak desert environment in an unspecified location when they saw what appeared to be a pack of hyenas roaming about the wilderness. This was already unnerving enough as it is, but what made it even odder was that amongst the yipping, growling pack seemed to be a dark, humanoid figure with glowing eyes. The witness told me:
I had no idea there were even hyenas out in those parts, and here is a whole pack of them just sort of scampering about. We sort of figured we’d scare them off with some shots, and then one of the guys said something like “What the hell is that?” and pointed out what looked like a dark figure like a man walking with them. The hyenas seemed to be cavorting about him, like pets, and it was surreal as fuck. Then we see that it seems that whoever it is has glowing eyes, you can see them sort of glinting in the night.
About now we are all pretty creeped up and our weapons are drawn. One of the guys calls out to this dude and tells him to halt. At first he just sort of ignored us, but when he called out again the guy froze and those goddam hyenas did as well. They all just sat there in the scrub looking at us. Then, and I shit you not, the human figure just sort of, I don’t even know how to describe it, he just sort of hunches over and then he is a hyena too. Me and the other guys just sort of noped it out of there after that.
If there is any truth to this encounter then it is interesting to note that some areas of the Middle East and surrounding regions and North Africa actually do have folklore tied to such creatures, so-called were-hyenas, often called the bouda in some areas of Africa. In Arab folklore, the were-hyenas were known as the kaftar, and said to be vampiric in nature, feeding off the blood of the living, especially that of children. Did this witness see these legendary creatures? What is going on here? Another very weird account of Middle Eastern shape-shifters comes from a commenter on Reddit, who tells of human/animal hybrids thus:
So basically when I was a kid there was an old folktale that many people kinda believed, but didn’t, but did… if you get my meaning. There were beautiful women, especially one in particular, that had the legs of a goat, and in some stories a horse or some other creature. A colleague from work even claimed that his family was visited by one back in the 80s when he was about 8 or 9. Personally I remember reading sometime back of a woman who encountered several people like this at a party who had these attributes. It seems that animal human hybrids, and sightings of them are still a thing, especially in Africa and here in the Middle East. Even globally, werewolves and vampires seem to exist outside of books and films.
Besides military high strangeness and shape-changing oddities, there are also some quite creepy accounts from haunted places apparently very saturated with some paranormal forces. One such place is called Jazirat Al Hamra, which translates to “Red Island” and is a ghost town in the United Arab Emirates founded in the 14th century as a thriving fishing and pearl-diving village, only to later be mysteriously abandoned in 1968 for unknown reasons. There have long been accounts of paranormal activity here, and it is considered to be a haunt for the nefarious djinn of Arab lore. One commenter on the site YourGhostStories says he decided to go investigate these claims of ghostly activity, and explains:
We reached there by 2.30 am. Most of my friends were spooked and unwilling to enter the village, but I convinced them to come along and told them that they could sit in the car while we explored the place. We were about 12 people in 3 cars: 2 SUVs and 1 sedan. We decided to leave the sedan outside near the main road in case the road is bad and the car gets stuck somewhere in the village. So we cramped into the 2 SUVs and entered the village. We found the very thing we were looking for.
“I couldn’t have mistaken the sheer neglect and the complete seclusion of the place. The crumbling walls of the once lived-in homes, the narrow, sandy alleys that meandered around the village. The walls of the derelict village were made up of shells and corals and sands were a peculiar red. It was very quiet, except for the sea crashing against the shore. The village is a maze of narrow streets and narrower alleyways, covered in a thick layer of sand, punctuated by mounds of ruble and prickly overgrown bushes. The place was truly very creepy. The alleys are so narrow that when you look out of the car window you are faced with the dark black interior of one of the abandoned house.
We reached a large clearing in the middle of the village where we decided to get out of the cars and snap some pictures of the old houses. We were entering houses together and taking pictures. It was funny to see how nobody wanted to be left alone. Even the ones that didn’t want to get out of the car came cause they didn’t want to be left alone in the car. Few of my friends decided to get their picture taken in front of the old fort. The camera was a digi-cam and when she clicked the picture, she showed us that there was what seemed like a shadow holding my friend around his waist with the head on my friend’s chest. We were freaked and tried to click a few more pictures of the same scene, trying to get that image to show up. Well nothing came up in the other pictures. There were no lights or lamps in the village and the only light that came was from the moon and the camera flash, so we didn’t know what to make of the picture.
Anyway we continued to explore the houses around the village. The atmosphere around that place was most unwelcoming. While exploring we came up on a house, which we entered and each and 5 of my friends and myself had the same reaction. We felt like we were punched in the gut and had the urge to throw-up. We ran out of the place as we could see shadows emerging from nowhere and thought that this was enough of ghost hunting for the day. We got in the car and everyone was still complaining about having the worst stomachache ever. We raced out of the village and came upon the main road when we started feeling a bit better. We drove away thinking that was one of the experiences that we would not forget easily.
Jazirat Al Hamra
There is also supposedly a very haunted house in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to which has gravitated all manner of strange tales and weirdness. The house itself is rather decrepit, filthy and nondescript, easily passed by amongst a myriad of other dwellings that look just like it. At first glance it seems to be just a graffiti covered hovel, but according to locals there is a sinister force residing within, of which the Arab News says:
Taxi drivers won’t go near it. It acts as a magnet for the “shabab,” who are drawn inexorably to its scarred and graffiti-covered walls but almost invariably stop short of crossing the threshold. Well-known among the expatriate community as a place of horror, Jeddah’s most haunted house has become a legend in its own lifetime. To date, the story goes, 16 people have entered the depths of this decaying pile, never to be seen again.
The derelict house stands a hundred meters or so from the seafront on the north Corniche. The braver members of the street-cruising society have daubed its facade with graffiti and the place is, quite literally, falling apart. As it deteriorates into its component parts, so the mystery and myth surrounding it increases in inverse proportion.
Certainly, just a look at it, even in daylight, produces an involuntary shudder. Crows flap untidily around the crumbling upper works like black rags tossed in the wind. Going through the rusting gates is to walk into a thick silence as the dull roar of the Corniche traffic fades into silence The eyeless window sockets of the house, once full of warmth and bustle, stare lifelessly at the derelict garden. She is an old lady now, ignored in her decline, but still standing proud though damaged by the vicissitudes of maltreatment by man and nature.
She still retains some of her former magnificence; the Italianate tile and plaster facade, where it still exists, towers over the remains of wrought iron railings that edge the marbled front patio. Ornate ironwork rawshans decorated with diamonds of blue and white translucent glass, once fixed over the main windows, lie buckled and rusting like iron lacework on a bed of wind-blown rubbish, slowly sinking into a sea of creepers.
The Haunted House of Jeddah
Sixteen people have entered to never return? Is this for real? What in the world is going on here? Who knows? Lastly we come to what seems to be a haunted villa in the United Arab Emirates, where a witness on YourGhostStories had just bought a one bedroom flat at a place called Sharjah, on the outskirts of Dubai. After a few days of living at the villa without incident, things would slowly creep into the realm of the strange, when the witness says:
Me and my wife used to sleep in one bedroom and the child on the other. It was on Friday night when this first incident took place. Me and my wife heard loud screams of our children and they had barged into our room terrified and sweating profusely. They were so terrified that it took us almost half an hour to calm them down. When asked, the children told us that they saw some shadow on the wall which was seen hanging from a ceiling fan and moving like a pendulum. We just shrugged it off saying it must have been a bad dream but the children were reluctant to go and insisted to sleep in our bedroom. The same day both the children were struck with high fever and it lasted for a week.
Second incident was at the swimming pool when we were having a night swim in this sweltering summer heat. I was sipping my beer and watching the children play with my wife, suddenly I saw my wife screaming on top of her voice. The children were also equally terrified. I immediately rushed to check what’s wrong and my wife was in a complete state of shock in an unconscious state. After some when she regained conscious, my wife told me that she felt two hands grab her legs and trying to pull her in the deeper section of the pool. This was amplified when I saw the imprints of 5 large fingers over her calf muscles on both the legs. Things were just getting out of hand and we finally decided to call a priest to do some purification. The moment the priest entered the house he could sense that that the house had a spirit which died of unnatural causes. He recited some spells and sprinkled some holy water and things seem to come back to normal which was only a temporary phenomenon.
One night when we were sleeping, we could hear an elderly couple quarrel in Arabic which was coming from my children bedroom, Children were fast asleep and I asked my wife not to leave the children alone and went myself to see what was happening. I opened the door slowly and was shocked to find no one in the room but the quarrel was getting louder and uglier. Me and my wife with the children rushed out in the middle of the night and as we rushed out we both could hear a very loud women scream and after that there was a pin drop silence. We spent until dawn in my 4×4 SUV. We approached the owner and after too much of argument, he told us that he had leased the house to a couple who were spending quite a few years. They used to indulge in frequent quarrels due to financial issued and one fine day, the man murdered his pregnant wife and killed himself by hanging from a ceiling fan. We immediately vacated the place and took a house somewhere else so as to avoid further incidences No wonder the owner was giving it at a dirt cheap rate.”
Here we have looked at shape-changing specters, ghosts, and maybe even demons and Djinn, all part of the landscape of Middle Eastern paranormal phenomena. Is there anything to these tales of high strangeness and paranormal mayhem? Do these things lurk in the periphery in this land steeped in legend and myth? We can only guess at the answers to such questions, but at the very least it seems that, although not quite as represented in mainstream paranormal lore, the Middle East has quite a few mysteries waiting to be uncovered by those who are brave enough to go and check it out.
The site of one of America’s mostlegendary and mysterious encounterswith the unknown has recently changed hands and is now under new private ownership. A 78-acre ranching property located in Lincoln County, New Mexico 75 miles northwest of Roswell has been sold to Dinwiddie Cattle Co. LLC for an undisclosed amount. The parcel of land is only part of a larger land transaction, but it’s what happened on this particular parcel that makes this real estate transaction so noteworthy – and potentially depressing for those of us who need to know the truth about what happened in Roswell.
The property sold in this transaction contains the lands that were once the J.B. Foster ranch, home to the 1947 crash of an object recovered by the U.S. Army Air Forces. The crash and ensuing investigation would become one of the most disputed and researched UFO incidents of all time and in many ways contributed the modern fascination with UFOs.
The site has changed hands several times in the decades since the infamous 1947 Roswell Incident but has remained exclusively privately owned, making investigations of the alleged crash site difficult. The previous owners, Bogle Ltd. Co. of Dexter, eventually allowed tours of the site last year in what was the first public access to the site in nearly 70 years. The new owners, however, so far seem nonplussed with the whole UFO crash thing.
“I just don’t know a whole lot about it,” new owner Tommy Dinwiddie told the Roswell Daily Record. “The guy who is running the ranch over there for me knows quite a bit about it, and after we kind of get our feet on the ground running it, we will do some more talking about it and figuring out what we want to do.”
Other countries have made public monuments or parks out of the sites of famous UFO incidents. Is the Roswell property remaining in public hands in order to discourage study of the site, or is all of this merely much ado about a wayward weather balloon and an empty stretch of desert?
Members of the Armed Forces get to witness or participate in all sorts of secret activities and events that the public is never told of. There’s a good reason a lot of the military’s activities stay under wraps, though. Now that the world’s superpowers have the ability to wipe out all life on Earth several times over, it’s far better to let people sleep at night by keeping things on a need-to-know basis.
But I need to know. I really need to know. Like a lot of us who read this site, I need to know what’s in the secret bunkers and hangars. I need to know what those strange lights and triangles in the sky are, and I need to know what types of secret apocalyptic weapons are being tested in remote missile ranges in the desert. Or do I? Maybe ignorance is bliss, particularly for those of us who have children.
Maybe those ostriches are on to something.
At any rate, we were given a small glance behind the curtain of terrifying military secrecy this week when a retired US Air Force spy plane pilot recounted his now-declassified experience witnessing a secret and long-rumored Russian technology known as the “dome of light.” Robert Hopkins shared his chilling experiences with Tyler Rogoway at The Warzone, and I’m once again genuinely creeped out about what this story may suggest about what the Russian military may possess that we don’t yet know about.
Hopkins witnessed the event while flying a US spy plane originating from the remote Shemya Air Force Base on the Aleutian Island chain near Alaska. At the time, the Soviets were conducting tests of intermediate-range ballistic missiles nearby, and US spy planes were there to keep an eye on their adversary’s missile capabilities. That’s when things got super weird.
Shemya Air Force Base was a key part of America’s missile defenses and intelligence operations during the Cold War .
According to Hopkins, both he and his copilot witnessed what can only be described as a “dome of light” moving through the air. At nearly the exact moment a Soviet missile launched, the pair saw a “translucent, milky white wall” moving outward from the launch site towards the Northern Pacific Ocean. The wall of light spanned from the ground to as far as Hopkins and his copilot could see and crossed directly over their aircraft, leaving only the night sky in its wake. The pair were mystified by the event but nonetheless continued their mission as planned.
Afterwards, both Hopkins and his copilot confirmed that they witnessed the same phenomenon, but neither one could explain what the saw. The two eventually reasoned that it was likely some type of atmospheric event like an aurora – until the pair witnessed the exact same phenomenon again prior to another Soviet missile launch.
The two pilots’ sightings would eventually spark the interest of US intelligence agencies and government officials. The Warzone provides a comprehensive breakdown of all that is publicly known about the “dome of light” phenomenon including several mentions by US Senators and intelligence review publications. I highly encourage readers to head over to The Warzone and read the full article -that is, readers who weren’t planning on sleeping tonight.
Was this some type of superweapon like Nikita Khrushchev alleged the Soviet Union possessed, a surveillance countermeasure, or something far weirder? Some of Nikola Tesla’s stranger research even touched upon or hinted at technologies which sound eerily similar to what US spy pilots witnessed during these “dome of light” events. To this day the rumored “dome of light” technology remains a mystery.
Strange flashing UFO lights caught on camera over Burleson, Texas
Strange flashing UFO lights caught on camera over Burleson, Texas
Driving down I-35 westbound and Rendon Crowley Rd., next to Texas Health Huguley Hospital, I was on the phone with my girlfriend, driving ahead of me, and we both witness strange red/white flashing lights in the sky a little in the distance.
We drove parallel to these lights and it looked like they were linked in a chain together 3 lights majority stay red followed by one majority staying white, then 2 more majority red (still flickering the opposite color red to white or white to red). They formed a broken V-shape, while spread out seemingly linked together somehow.
I wanted a better look so we exited the highway, turned around, and then came into the view of the strange lights. They were remaining still the first time we drove by them. As we approached they seemed to form a hexagonal shape, and started to glow the same color, but would randomly flicker the opposite light individually (red to white).
As we got closer to the spot we first witness them, they drifted away further and further ahead.
This is asteroid Vesta and on it I found two diamond shaped ships resting on its surface. NASA also happens to think that this might not be an asteroid, but a small planet...the size of the state of Arizona.
The two ships I found are both similar in length and width, but slightly different in design. One is more shiny and metallic than the other, which makes me believe there is a thick layer of dust on one of the craft make for a dull appearance. Just that fact that NASA states..."Even though Vesta is only the size of Arizona, the astroid may be a planet." This really is exciting news, and makes me wonder...just how many planet discoveries are going to be made in our solar system over the next few decades? Probably a lot.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
There are UFOs in the skies over Central Jersey
There are UFOs in the skies over Central Jersey
Mike Deak Bridgewater Courier News
If you've seen something strange in the sky over Central Jersey — and you haven't been enjoying an adult beverage or suffering from a lack of sleep — you're not alone.
According to the National UFO Reporting Center, Central Jersey residents have reported seeing objects in the sky that are mystifying and can not be explained. In short, they were seeing unidentified flying objects — UFOs.
And if you did see an UFO, you're not crazy. They may not be flying saucers or aliens taking a sightseeing trip to Earth, but simply objects you literally can not identify. UFOologists say that about 90 percent of all sightings turn out to have plausible explanations, yet about 10 percent remain perplexing.
A model of the UFO found in the house formerly occupied by Ed Walters, a Gulf Breeze man who claimed to have photographed UFOs on various occasions in 1987.
News Journal file photo
The National UFO Reporting Center, in Seattle, was founded in 1974 by UFO investigator Robert J. Gribble. The Center's mission is to be a central and transparent clearinghouse of UFO sightings throughout the United States, including Central Jersey. The center's website is updated daily.
More: Authorities investigating UFO sightings from 3 commercial pilots
More:These are the best cities for UFO sightings
Sightings
One of the UFO latest sightings in Central Jersey was in South Amboy where someone told the National UFO Reporting Center that at about 12:28 a.m. on Feb 1 "two circles in the sky changed colors several times from blue to orange."
That was the second UFO sighting in South Amboy since Dec. 1. At about 6:51 p.m. on Dec. 10, someone reported "a bright light beamed in the sky and descended in a linear pattern, then quickly disappeared."
Just three days before, there had been a detailed UFO sighting in Branchburg.
"On 12/07/2018 at 16:45 I was driving westbound on Burnt Mills Road in Branchburg, when I witnessed what first appeared to be a jet contrail, however instead of getting longer, it stayed the same size and began rotating in a clockwise direction. It was the shape of a line, or cylinder, and I could see that it was illuminated because the sun has already set and was behind the object, but it was fully illuminated bright white on its east side, opposite the sun.
"As I noticed it wasn't growing and instead rotating, another, smaller object appeared slightly to the north of it. I drove through a forested section of the road and came to a clearing and pulled off to the shoulder to view them some more.
"I then noticed 2 more similar shaped objects to the north of the first 2. They were moving very slowly in the sky, and as I tracked them, I could see movement relative to the other objects, and saw that they were traveling west towards the twilight. The first object I saw eventually disappeared to the west, followed by the 2nd, and finally the last 2 disappeared.
"I am certain they were not planes, helicopters or hot air balloons.
"I have never seen anything quite like these lights in the sky before. I have logged thousands of miles sailing offshore and many moonless nights at sea, and although I have seen some very strange things in the sky, nothing viewed has ever compelled me to write about before.
"I would like to know if there were any other witnesses as it was rush hour and there were many cars driving around at that time. This is a fairly rural area, the objects were traveling over farmland and possibly parts of Route 78."
Not all of the reports to the National UFO Reporting Center are as detailed.
On July 7, 2017 someone in Linden reported a "blinking light" in the sky at about 6:43 p.m. It was "first solid red...then blinking red...then blinking green six or seven times..then red twice."
Occasionally Peter Davenport, director of the National UFO Reporting Center, adds a comment to the reports. In response to someone on the New Brunswick campus of Rutgers University at 7:38 p.m. Nov. 29, 2017 seeing an aircraft "releasing white air," Davenport wrote, "Possibly contrails, we suspect."
The National UFO Reporting Center receives many of its reports through a telephone hotline at 206-722-3000 which is staffed 24 hours a day. You can also report a sighting online at www.ufocenter.com/reportform.html. The site warns that it doesn't tolerate nonsense: "If you are thinking of submitting a hoax or joke report, save yourself the time and trouble. It will be ignored and immediately discarded."
1970s comic depicting the UFO sightings over Wanaque.
northjersey
The National UFO Reporting Center makes all the reports open to the public on the website. And those who report UFOs are guaranteed anonymity. Every month summaries of recent sightings are posted.
Even with contemporary high-tech gadgets, it's difficult to gather evidence about sightings. A Stockton man going for a bike ride on the D&R Canal towpath with his kids at 3 p.m. Oct. 1, 2017 saw "a single, extremely bright, but small, white to pale yellowish light at very high altitude." For the next hour the light moved slowly across the sky and never reached the horizon.
"I did attempt to take a few pictures with my iPhone because it is all I had, but nothing can be seen in the photos," the person wrote.
In Piscataway at about 4:40 p.m. Aug. 1, 2017, someone was driving home from work when they saw a fast-moving disk-shaped object with a dome high in the sky. "It flew very smooth and faster than any plane I've seen."
Unfortunately, those words are the only account we have. "I wanted to try to take a picture but could not safely pull to the side of the road. Incident happened quickly and not enough time to get phone and take photo."
At about 5:10 p.m. June 17, 2017, someone saw a "black circular, ball-like object hovering in the sky over Old Bridge."
But, by the time the observer grabbed a camera from inside the house and ran back outside, the object was gone. "I hope someone in the area photographed it."
There were no other UFO reports around Old Bridge at that time. However, it should be noted that since Jan. 1, 2017, there have been more UFO sightings in Old Bridge — four — than any other Central Jersey town.
Sometimes the sightings come when you least expect it. Also in Old Bridge at about noon on Oct. 12, 2018, a person said "I took my usual walk on the usual route. I walked across the street and lifted my neck to stretch and there was an object above me. The best way to describe it. A jellyfish. It was moving quickly."
The report adds interesting details to fill out the picture. "Only saw a couple of birds on my walk and no leaves high in the air. The leaves were bristling on the ground because it was windy."
The author then adds facts to heighten the report's credibility: "My vision is excellent except I wear reading glasses. I'm in my 40s."
Someone taking out the garbage in Califon at 8:43 p.m. Oct. 4, 2017 saw a "craft hovering with amber, orange lights, for a few minutes and then completely disappeared like it had been vacuumed up into thin air."
Occasionally, a report will contain a personal, emotional response. A Somerville resident who was waiting for his Uber ride to work on the overnight shift reported seeing at about 10:33 p.m. Jan. 10, a triangular-shaped object "zoomed" about 1,000 to 1,500 feet above his house.
The sighting, the reporter wrote, was "not scary at all, but just mystifying." After looking at the reports on the the National UFO Reporting Center 's website, the resident wrote it was "humbling to know that all the other people who reports such things are not crazy like I thought I was."
"I am now a believer!"
Staff Writer Mike Deak: 908-243-6607; mdeak@mycentraljersey.comµ
Popular extraterrestrial researcher Scott C Waring is known for spotting anomalies on the images of other planets and moon released byNASA. In his website 'UFO Sightings Daily', the researcher has many times alleged that the United States space agency is the part of a major alien coverup. To substantiate his views, Waring has now claimed to have discovered a fossilized bone on the Martian surface.
Scott C Waring has made this finding after analyzing an image of Mars published on NASA's official website.
"I found this fossilized bone on Mars this week and it has been run over by the Mar rover. Now scientists at NASA often say how careful they are not to hurt or destroy their chances of finding life on Mars. If a person had found this at a park or beach...it would turn into an investigation into a murder...since it looks a lot like a leg bone. But since its Mars NASA makes it into their personal road, driving over and ignoring any real evidence of life on Mars," wrote Waring on his website.
In the latest web post, Scott C Waring also urged Donald Trump to make him the head of NASA, so that he can disclose all the dark secrets associated with alien life on the Red Planet. Waring also assured that alien life on Mars is a reality, and the evidence he found is too compelling that even NASA could not deny the bitter facts.
UFO Sightings Daily
Even though the findings of Scott C Waring used to generate the interest of conspiracy theorists, experts used to dismiss his claims all the time stating that the discoveries of the self-proclaimed researcher are pure cases of pareidolia. As per experts, pareidolia is the peculiar nature of the human brain to form known images on unknown patterns.
A few days back, John Brandenburg, a top American physicist had sensationally revealed that alien life had once thrived on Mars. The physicist also added that he has found the evidence of a nuclear war that might have wiped out life from the Red Planet.
Alien enthusiasts strongly believe that the UFO sightings which happen all across the world are solid proof of alien existence in dark nooks of the universe. To add authenticity to these claims, they now argue that a picture taken in 2015 by aNASA astronaut while aboard the International Space Station (ISS) shows a cylindrical UFO on the right corner. Interestingly, the anomaly appeared on the photo when NASA astronaut Scott Kelly tried to capture the image of India from the outer space.
Even though Kelly posted this image on Twitter long ago, on November 15, 2015, it was now that a section of conspiracy theorists found a glowing structure on the top right side of the image.
After analyzing the image, many conspiracy theorists strongly argued that the image of the UFO was accidentally clicked by Scott Kelly, and this picture indicates that aliens are visiting astronauts at the ISS regularly.
However, theories surrounding the alien UFO were quickly debunked after experts revealed the real secret behind the anomaly. Many experts who checked the image found that the UFO found on the right side of the image is actually a part of the ISS itself. To prove their theory, they even adjusted the brightness of the image and concluded that the image released by Scott Kelly is no way suspicious in any aspect.
This is not the first time conspiracy theorists are going crazy over UFO sightings near the International Space Station. Earlier, popular UFO researcher Tyler Glockner released a video that shows multiple flying objects hovering near the ISS when Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti was taking a tour inside the space station.
When Samantha opened up a hatch to show something outside the space station, two unidentified flying objects made a close flyby near the window, and it made many people believe that alien life is a reality. Some conspiracy theorists even went ahead and argued that space agencies like NASA, ESA, and ISRO are well aware of extraterrestrial existence, though these establishments refuted such speculations.
SpaceX COVER-UP? Videos resurface of live feeds being CUT 'as UFOs appear' on anniversary
SpaceX COVER-UP? Videos resurface of live feeds being CUT 'as UFOs appear' on anniversary
CLAIMS Elon Musk is covering up alien life have re-emerged on the first anniversary of SpaceX’s Falcon rocket launch.
Elon Musk launched the SpaceX mission 17 years ago, privatising the space race.
And today marks one year since the Falcon Heavy – a rocket with the highest payload capacity of any launch vehicle – was launched.
But – while it was a huge achievement – conspiracy theorists have been more interested in SpaceX’s live feed spotting some very mysterious objects.
Here, Daily Star Online takes a look at the most baffling videos.
‘Formation of lights’ captured before live feed CUT – January 2017
When a Falcon 9 rocket was launched two years ago, it sent the conspiracy world into a frenzy.
Live feed footage shows the rocket hovering in space when suddenly a set of lights appear in the top right of the shot.
Three objects can be seen in a triangular formation while another one is further to the left.
The strange phenomenon is only on screen for a couple of seconds before the feed is cut to an image of the globe.
SUSPICIOUS: SpaceX's live feed was cut when a set of lights was spotted moving in formation (Pic: SECURETEAM10/GETTY)
Tyler Glockner – of YouTube channel secureteam10 – posted the footage online, saying: “This is not debris coming from the rocket.
“Whatever they are, they move together as one, tight unit.
“You can clearly see a formation of three reflective objects.
“I found it very strange that the feed was cut so suddenly at the precise moment this formation of unknown objects were seen passing by.”
SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket ‘passes Black Knight satellite’ – November 2018
“You can clearly see a formation of three reflective objects”
Tyler Glockner, secureteam10
Viewers were left stunned once again last November when a strange rock-like object was spotted passing a Falcon 9 rocket.
YouTube conspiracy theorists Blake and Brett Cousins – of thirdphaseofmoon – claimed it could have been the infamous Black Knight Satellite.
That refers to the infamous conspiracy theory that there is a spacecraft orbiting the Earth of extraterrestrial origin and that NASA is engaged in a cover-up.
And many viewers seemed to agree.
"Awesome footage, there’s the Black Knight," one wrote.
Another added: "That's amazing, I want to know more about the Black Knight."
But a third had a different view, commenting: “Not the Black Knight satellite, just debris from re-entry.”
ALIEN LIFE? Viewers believed an alien ship had ben spotted on the live feed (Pic: YouTube)
‘TR-3B’ spotted before feed cut
It isn’t just Falcon 9 live feeds that have sparked conspiracists into meltdown.
Footage of the Dragon satellite in December appeared to show a dark triangular object moving past the craft.
Just moments after the object appears, the feed switches to a different angle.
Blake and Brett were the first to spot the incident once again and suggested the craft was a TR-3B.
The TR-3B is the name for a highly-speculated secret surveillance plane used by the US Air Force.
“Could this be the infamous TR-3B up in space visiting up close?” Blake asks.
Hidden World Under Antarctica Revealed: Scientists Find A World They’ve Never Imagined
Hidden World Under Antarctica Revealed: Scientists Find A World They’ve Never Imagined
The Discovery has been published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Despite the fact that satellites orbiting earth have helped map our planet’s surface in great detail, there was a gap around an area of the South Pole, which is not covered by satellites due to the inclination of their orbits.
Now, scientists have finally revealed what is there, and it comes as a surprise.
Scientists exploring Antarctica have found massive mountain ranges and vast canyons that run for hundreds of miles beneath the continents thick ice.
Hidden beneath south Antarctica, researchers used ice-penetrating radar to discover massive canyons cutting through three expansive subterranean mountain ranges under the Antarctic ice shelf.
The findings are the first to emerge from extensive ice-penetrating radar data collected in Antarctica as part of the European Space Agency PolarGAP project and have been published in the journal, Geophysical Research Letters.
Although there is extensive satellite data that helps obtain images of the surface of the Earth and its deep interior, there was a gap around the area of the South Pole, which is not covered by satellites due to the inclination of the orbits.
Therefore, the PolarGAP project was designed to fill the gap in the coverage of satellite data from the South Pole and, in particular, to acquire the missing data reports the British Antarctic Survey, which participated in the research.
Scientists warn as global warming advances, these massive valleys could play an important role in the flow of the ice.
“As there were gaps in satellite data around the South Pole, no one knew exactly what was there,” said Dr. Kate Winter, lead author of the study and a Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow in Northumbria University’s Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences.
“We now understand that the mountainous region is preventing ice from East Antarctica flowing through West Antarctica to the coast. In addition, we have also discovered three subglacial valleys in West Antarctica which could be important in the future.
“If the ice sheet thins or retreats, these topographically-controlled corridors could facilitate an enhanced flow of ice further inland and could lead to the West Antarctic ice divide moving. This would, in turn, increase the speed and rate at which ice flows out from the center of Antarctica to its edges, leading to an increase in global sea levels.”
Dr. Winter adds: “The data we have gathered will enable ice sheet modelers to predict what will happen if the ice sheet thins, which will mean we can start to answer the questions we couldn’t answer before.”
The mission marked the first time scientists were able to map three vast subglacial valleys in West Antarctica. The largest valley, known as Foundation Trough, is more than 350 kilometers long and 35 kilometers wide. Its length is equivalent to the distance from London to Manchester, while its width equals more than one and a half times the length of the island of Manhattan in New York.
Two of the remaining valleys are equally vast. The Patuxent canal is more than 300 kilometers long and more than 15 wide, while the Offset Rift Basin is 150 long and 30 wide.
Scientists warn that if climate change causes the ice sheet to be reduced, these valleys could increase the speed at which ice flows from the center of Antarctica to the sea, raising global sea levels.
Back in the day when the space race was the most competitive global phenomenon, human space landings were the most significant achievement. But today, the modern technological innovations have ruled in the favor of robotic space flights, and advanced technological tools are allowing scientists to identify new planets, discover signs of extraterrestrial settlements, and develop more insight about the universe and its mysteries.
Scientists and astronauts cherish the good old days of human space flights when nearly 40 astronauts were sent on space missions each year, and today, only 4 humans are sent on space flights. These astronauts are sent mainly to the International Space Station to conduct scientific research and maintenance purposes.
However, it is impossible to deny the great advancements that scientists have managed to undertake thanks to innovative new technologies, for instance the human landing on Mars that NASA is planning to launch during the 2030s. The private sector space agencies are also playing a significant part in facilitating spaceflight, and firms like Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, and Blue Origin amongst others, are competing against one another to provide new facilities and tools, and reduce the overall expenses incurred by the space industry.
On 5th May, 2018, NASA successfully launched its ambitious space mission, the Mars InSight Lander aboard the United Launch Alliance Atlas rocket, the mission took place at the Vandenberg Air force Base in Southern California. The Mars InSight Lander is all set to complete a 6 month journey, covering a route sprawling over 300 million miles in order to examine what rests underneath the surface of Mars.
Image Credit: NASA
InSight reached Mars at the end of 2018, and it is expected to accumulate insightful information about the wobbling movements of the red planet, marsquakes, heat flows, and other insightful data that will allow scientists to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the evolution and formation of rocky planets such as Mars.
InSight, which basically stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, happens to be the first space mission to lead an inquiry on the surface of the red planet, and its journey is scheduled to come to an end on the 24th November, 2020.
NASA, ESA and multiple other space agencies are planning to conduct exciting space missions and research probes into the universe that will feed the hunger of space addicts by allowing us to understand how the universe works, along with discovering how human landings and explorations on other planets can be made safer and more efficient. We have rounded up several leading planetary missions that will help reveal groundbreaking discoveries.
Here, take a look:
1. Parker Solar Probe
The Parker Solar Probe was scheduled for launch back in July, 2018, and it is expected to fly through the corona of the sun, which is measured to be a distance of 3.8 million from the surface. This probe is all set to be the closest probe conducted in the history of space sciences. The earth stands at a distance of 93 million miles from the sun, and the mission seeks to collect more insight about the characteristics of the sun, and how its solar winds are capable of influencing the atmosphere of planets across the solar system. The spacecraft will take several protective measures and instruments, which are housed in a carbon composite shield that is 4.5 inches thick, and capable of tolerating temperatures that are higher than 2,500 °F or 1,377 °C.
Image Credit: WLOS
2. Europa Clipper
Europa, one of the moons orbiting Jupiter, has been predicted to have certain atmospheric and topographical conditions that are favorable to sustain human life, for instance the presence of an ocean. Scientists need to conduct research to identify these conditions, which is why the Europa Clipper space mission has been designed.
Image Credit: TrekNews
The Europa Clipper space mission is expected to be launched between 2020 and 2025, however, certain budgetary challenges can created unwanted delays. Initially, the scientists planned to conduct a fly-by operation, however, it is more crucial to create a landing on the planet. The ambition of this mission is to identify the presence of an ocean underneath the frozen ice crust, which is essential to sustain human life.
3. OSIRIS-Rex
OSIRIS-Rex is an incredibly ambitious NASA mission that can bring about several groundbreaking discoveries. This space mission has a simple goal: extracting an asteroid sample and bringing it back to Earth, a feat that has never been achieved. The astronauts will be travelling to Bennu, an asteroid that is considered to be made up of elements that are part of the history of our solar system.
The OSIRIS-Rex is expected to return to Earth during the 2020s, and many other space missions and agencies are vying to mine the rich and rare resources that can be discovered on the surface of asteroids. For instance, a private firm, Planetary Resources, is planning to launch a spacecraft, Arkyd 301, in 2020 to remotely undertake an analysis of the surface of asteroids.
Image Credit: Phys
4. Mars 2020 Rover
The Mars 2020 Rover is an ambitious and innovative space mission that serves as a major milestone in preparing Mars for explorations conducted by humans. This mission was scheduled to launch in July or August, and scientists are waiting for Mars to be in a favorable condition that allows NASA to launch a robotic space mission.
A Rover vehicle is the most essential piece of the mission, which will be used to undertake a thorough analysis of the environment, surface composition, examine the traces of water, and conduct a range of other scientific activities, like extracting oxygen from the atmosphere that is currently consisting of 96% carbon. All these activities are vital to prepare Mars to receive human explorers.
The Rover is a car-like structure that is 3 meters long, 2.2 meters tall and 2.7 meters wide, with a lightweight structure of 1,050 kilograms, which is much lighter than even the most compact vehicles. The Rover features 23 different cameras and sensors that have been designed to examine and identify the features of Mars, along with featuring antennas that can send and receive information to and from the Earth within five to twenty minutes. The Rover will be fueled with heat generated by plutonium radioactive decay.
Image Credit: NASA
“Mars is intricate and complex, and it doesn’t have just one surface,” says Eric Ford, a professor for astrophysics at Penn State. “It’s worthwhile studying Mars.”
5. ISS
The US announced its decision to take back its assistance to the International Space Station in 2024, an announcement that has created a challengingly uncertain future for ISS. It happens to be the only manned space mission of today, and it can be put to a great many beneficial uses. NASA wouldn’t like anything more than using this space station for commercial purposes, or make a commercial takeover of the station. It can be used as a platform to give space training to astronauts, or even better, to host humans in the lower orbit rather than the moon.
There are multiple benefits associated with sending astronauts to ISS, and the major milestone should to be examining the health of the astronauts who are left to stay in space for longer periods of time, particularly longer than six months. Currently, ISS is proving extremely expensive to maintain, and it is being used for the services of exploring space, and conducting scientific activities.
Image Credit: Guiding Tech
6. TESS
TESS, stands for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, was launched on April 23 to analyze the closest and most vibrant stars, and identify the existence of thousands of exoplanets, including massive giant-sized planets and tiny rocky planets. TESS is also known as the Planet Hunter, and space scientists across the globe consider it one of the most important space milestones to be launched in recent years. This exploration is expected to play a significant role in analyzing the characteristics and atmospheres of other planets.
One of the biggest objectives of TESS is to identify planets transiting stars, which can be challenging to identify without launching a space mission. TESS will closely examine the brightness of more than 200,000 stars. When these stars start to dim down, it can happen because of a planet completing its orbit, which will give the astronauts a chance to discover a new planet.
Image Credit: NASA
TESS has a much more dynamic range of opportunities than the Kepler, its predecessor who identify 2,343 exoplanets, of which 30 were of the same size as Earth, and were discovered in a habitable region of a star. This space mission is also set to discover competent candidates for an insightful follow-up research with the help of mighty space telescopes, such as Hubble and the new James Webb Space Telescope to develop a stronger understanding of planets and their atmospheres.
7. BepiColombo
Space missions are launched by multiple space agencies aside from NASA. For instance, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and European Space Agency are collaborating to launch the BepiColombo, which will examine the characteristics of the least explored planet, Mercury, which happens to be closest to the sun.
Two orbiters are expected to be put into motion to reveal the mysteries of the planet, its characteristics, atmosphere and composition. Scientists will also examine the critical and urgent questions revolving around Mercury’s existence with such close proximity to the sun. In the past, scientists have conducted fly-bys that have captured several images of Mercury, however, there is need for further information on the core, weather and atmospheric conditions and chemical composition of the planet amongst other mysteries.
Image Credit: NASA
8. Chandrayaan 2
The Apollo missions have revealed a great deal about the moon, and now, space missions to the moon seem less mysterious and riveting given the discoveries of mind boggling new planets that may or may not harbor the existence of extraterrestrial beings. However, India is still engrossed in the space race and eager to catch up with the super powers by launching its very first space mission to the moon. This mission was scheduled for lunch in the end of 2018, but now, the country has delayed it until 2022. The mission will feature an orbiter, lander and rover, which aims to gather information on the topography of the moon, elemental characteristics, lunar mineralogy, lunar exosphere and the features of water-ice and hydroxyl.
Experts believe that the US must also take initiatives to launch more space missions to the moon, and it will be unfortunate if we cannot send in an inquiry until the 2020s. The lunar lander is a great challenge, and if the experts consider contracting a private firm for the lander construction, this challenge can also be resolved.
Image Credit: Guiding Tech
It is interesting to note that humans are not a necessary requirement for a successful space mission because robots are capable of performing much more efficiently in outer space environments. However, many organizations continue to send humans to space missions to the moon. For instance, five teams are competing to win the $30 million Lunar X prize by Google, which allows affordable transport to the moon.
9. James Webb Space Telescope
The James Webb Space Telescope is expected to be launched in 2020, and it is all set to replace the Hubble Space Telescope with a much more innovative, tech savvy and durable design. The James Webb Space Telescope will be placed at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth, giving it a dynamic depth of view to capture space and spatial beings as compared to Hubble, which was only 570 kilometers away from Earth.
The James Webb Space Telescope is armed with ultra-advanced optics and a powerful infrared telescope that is a modern solution for a deep view to discover new galaxies. NASA intends to use this dynamic device to examine the movements and formations of stars and galaxies. The spectrograph is a powerful feature of the James Webb Space Telescope, as it will provide greater insight by identifying the physical characteristics of spatial objects.
Reports reveal that the James Webb Space Telescope is said to the most important and expensive project in the history of space sciences, and it has cost more than $500 million. It is a significant development for the search of new planets outside our solar system, but moreover, it is vital in order to comprehend the characteristics of our universe, for instance, the distance between spatial objects, distances between planets and their moon, planet mass and a lot more.
Image Credit: Guiding Tech
10. ARIEL
Astronauts and space explorers have discovered thousands of exoplanets, which has fuelled the inquiries surrounding their existence. Space sciences are flooded with questions on how these exoplanets came into being and how their life is sustained across the solar systems.
ARIEL, which stands for Atmospheric Remote-Sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-Survey, is an initiative by ESA that is scheduled for launch in 2028 as an attempt to answer these questions surrounding the origins and operations of exoplanets.
Image Credit: NASA
This space mission will be dedicated to examining hot and cold planets, and studying their stars, atmospheres and compositions. The researchers will attempt to identify identical patterns that might answer the questions on the birth and evolution of planetary systems and their atmospheres.
This 3rd episode of an ongoing stargazing video series – called Chasing Darkness – is from Yellowknife, Canada. It features the magnificent northern lights.
Here’s the third episode in theChasing Darknessvideo series, a stargazing destination guide by astrophotographerJack Fuscoand adventure photographerJeff Bartlett.
Located in the Northwest Territories of Canada, Yellowknife is known as one of the best places in the world to see the aurora, or northern lights. On this adventure in October 2018, Jack Fusco went solo … which meant he didn’t get much rest. He spent the daytime hours scouting for locations, then returned close to sunset to start shooting.
Location of Yellowknife, Canada.
On the last night of the shoot, a geomagnetic storm predicted for the next day arrived early. The northern lights were active from sunset until sunrise. During this incredible all-night display, Jack said, the aurora was strong enough to capture real time video footage as opposed to timelapse. Jack told us:
One of my favorite parts of the video is around 1:05 in when it shifts to real time video of the aurora! It was my first time capturing aurora in real time and I still can’t believe it’s real when I look back at it.
Video – UFO Chased and Destroyed the Russian Meteor!
Video – UFO Chased and Destroyed the Russian Meteor!
Footage of what appears to be a UFO shooting down the meteor that crashed in Russia. “They” are protecting us, and this planet. The meteorite that crashed on Russia was hit by an unidentified flying object causing it to explode and shatter over the Urals, it has been claimed.
NASA wants to send humans to Venus – here’s why that’s a brilliant idea
NASA wants to send humans to Venus – here’s why that’s a brilliant idea
Popular science fiction of the early 20th century depicted Venus as some kind of wonderland of pleasantly warm temperatures, forests, swamps and even dinosaurs. In 1950, the Hayden Planetarium at the American Natural History Museum were soliciting reservations for the first space tourism mission, well before the modern era of Blue Origins, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic. All you had to do was supply your address and tick the box for your preferred destination, which included Venus.
Today, Venus is unlikely to be a dream destination for aspiring space tourists. As revealed by numerous missions in the last few decades, rather than being a paradise, the planet is a hellish world of infernal temperatures, a corrosive toxic atmosphere and crushing pressures at the surface. Despite this, NASA is currently working on a conceptual manned mission to Venus, named the High Altitude Venus Operational Concept – (HAVOC).
But how is such a mission even possible? Temperatures on the planet’s surface (about 460°C) are in fact hotter than Mercury, even though Venus is roughly double the distance from the sun. This is higher than the melting point of many metals including bismuth and lead, which may even fall as “snow” onto the higher mountain peaks. The surface is a barren rocky landscape consisting of vast plains of basaltic rock dotted with volcanic features, and several continent-scale mountainous regions.
It is also geologically young, having undergone catastrophic resurfacing events. Such extreme events are caused by the build up of heat below the surface, eventually causing it to melt, release heat and re-solidify. Certainly a scary prospect for any visitors.
Hovering in the atmosphere Luckily, the idea behind
NASA’s new mission is not to land people on the inhospitable surface, but to use the dense atmosphere as a base for exploration. No actual date for a HAVOC type mission has been publicly announced yet. This mission is a long term plan and will rely on small test missions to be successful first. Such a mission is actually possible, right now, with current technology. The plan is to use airships which can stay aloft in the upper atmosphere for extended periods of time.
As surprising as it may seem, the upper atmosphere of Venus is the most Earth-like location in the solar system. Between altitudes of 50km and 60km, the pressure and temperature can be compared to regions of the Earth’s lower atmosphere. The atmospheric pressure in the Venusian atmosphere at 55km is about half that of the pressure at sea level on Earth. In fact you would be fine without a pressure suit, as this is roughly equivalent to the air pressure you would encounter at the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. Nor would you need to insulate yourself as the temperature here ranges between 20°C and 30°C.
The atmosphere above this altitude is also dense enough to protect astronauts from ionising radiation from space. The closer proximity of the sun provides an even greater abundance of available solar radiation than on Earth, which can be used to generate power (approximately 1.4 times greater).
The conceptual airship would float around the planet, being blown by the wind. It could, usefully, be filled with a breathable gas mixture such as oxygen and nitrogen, providing buoyancy. This is possible because breathable air is less dense than the Venusian atmosphere and, as result, would be a lifting gas.
The Venusian atmosphere is comprised of 97% carbon dioxide, about 3% nitrogen and trace amounts of other gases. It famously contains a sprinkling of sulphuric acid which forms dense clouds and is a major contributor to its visible brightness when viewed from Earth. In fact the planet reflects some 75% of the light that falls onto it from the sun. This highly reflective cloud layer exists between 45km and 65km, with a haze of sulphuric acid droplets underneath down to about 30km. As such, an airship design would need to be resistant to the corrosive effect of this acid.
Luckily we already have the technology required to overcome the problem of acidity. Several commercially available materials, including teflon and a number of plastics, have a high acidic resistance and could be used for the outer envelope of the airship. Considering all these factors, conceivably you could go for a walk on a platform outside the airship, carrying only your air supply and wearing a chemical hazard suit.
Life on Venus?
The surface of Venus has been mapped from orbit by radar on the US Magellan mission. However, only a few locations on the surface have ever been visited, by the series of Venera missions of Soviet probes in the late 1970s. These probes returned the first – and so far only – images of the Venusian surface. Certainly surface conditions seem utterly inhospitable to any kind of life.
The upper atmosphere is a different story however. Certain kinds of extremophile organisms already exist on Earth which could withstand the conditions in the atmosphere at the altitude at which HAVOC would fly. Species such as Acidianus infernus can be found in highly acidic volcanic lakes in Iceland and Italy. Airborne microbes have also been found to exist in Earth’s clouds. None of this proves that life exists in the Venusian atmosphere, but it is a possibility that could be investigated by a mission like HAVOC.
The current climatic conditions and composition of the atmosphere are the result of a runaway greenhouse effect (an extreme greenhouse effect that cannot be reversed), which transformed the planet from a hospitable Earth-like “twin” world in its early history. While we do not currently expect Earth to undergo a similarly extreme scenario, it does demonstrate that dramatic changes to a planetary climate can happen when certain physical conditions arise.
By testing our current climate models using the extremes seen on Venus we can more accurately determine how various climate forcing effects can lead to dramatic changes. Venus therefore provides us with a means to test the extremes of our current climate modelling, with all the inherent implications for the ecological health of our own planet.
We still know relatively little about Venus, despite it being our nearest planetary neighbour. Ultimately, learning how two very similar planets can have such different pasts will help us understand the evolution of the solar system and perhaps even that of other star systems.
Chinese satellite snaps rare photo of moon's far side with Earth in the background
Chinese satellite snaps rare photo of moon's far side with Earth in the background
Eye-popping image evokes other iconic space photos, including the famous "Earthrise" portrait taken during the Apollo 8 mission.
China's LongJiang-2 satellite captured this rare view of the moon's far side, with Earth appearing tiny in the background.
CAMRAS/MingChuan Wei (HIT), CAMRAS, DK5LA
By Denise Chow
Ready to feel small? A striking new photograph taken by China’s Longjiang-2 satellite affords a rare view of the lunar far side — the side that’s impossible to see from the surface of our planet — with Earth visible in the background as a tiny blue marble.
Earth and the moon are tidally locked, meaning the same side of the moon always faces the planet.
NASA/NOAA
"Few pictures have been taken that show the entire far side of the moon, so we're pretty proud to have helped take this picture," Cees Bassa, an astronomer at ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, told NBC News MACH in an email. Bassa is a volunteer astronomer at the Dwingeloo Radio Observatory in the Netherlands, where the photo was processed.
The eye-popping portrait was taken Feb. 3 and beamed back to Earth the next day. Because the satellite’s camera lacks an infrared filter, the colors were distorted in the original photo (below). But the astronomers who processed the image created the color-corrected version seen above.
The colors in this photo are distorted because the camera aboard China's LongJiang-2 satellite lacks an infrared filter.CAMRAS/MingChuan Wei (HIT), CAMRAS, DK5LA
“We edited it to balance the colors, and make the moon greyscale,” Tammo Jan Dijkema, a software engineer at ASTRON who also volunteers at the Dwingeloo Radio Observatory, wrote in a blog post.
Longjiang-2, which has been circling the moon since last June, is a key part of China’s Chang’e 4 mission, which successfully placed a lunar lander and rover on the moon’s far side for the first time ever Jan. 3. In concert with Queqiao, a radio-relaying probe in orbit around Earth, Longjiang-2 has been providing the radio link between the Chang’e 4 lander and mission controllers in Beijing.
The Chang’e 4 mission is studying a part of the moon that previously had been explored only from afar. It has taken a series of dramatic photos of the surface and successfully sprouted a series of seeds that became the first plants ever grown on the moon.
Longjiang-2, which measures 20 inches across, is expected to operate until August. Dijkema said he expects to have even more photos of the moon from the Chinese satellite in the coming months.
The so-called far side of the moon is seen in an image taken by China's Chang'e-4 lunar probe on Jan. 3, 2019.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET Vijftig jaar nadat Neil Armstrong er als eerste mens voet zette, heeft de Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA nieuwe, ambitieuze plannen bekendgemaakt om weer een mens op de maan te krijgen. Grote baas Jim Bridenstine wil er zelfs een permanente menselijke aanwezigheid uitbouwen.
Bridenstine maakte de ambitieuze plannen bekend in een opiniestuk op nieuwssite OZY. Hij zegt daarin dat hij van president Donald Trump en het Amerikaanse Congres een mandaat kreeg, en roept “de beste en slimste koppen van de Amerikaanse industrie” op om te helpen bij het ontwerpen en ontwikkelen van maanlanders”.
The U.S. space agency's 13th administrator asks private American firms to help launch a bold new initiative.
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“Als een levenslange fan van NASA ben ik verheugd opnieuw te mogen praten over de landing van mensen op de maan”, aldus Bridenstine. “Dat betekent niet dat we hetzelfde gaan doen als wat we 50 jaar geleden al deden. We gaan naar de maan met innovatieve technologieën en systemen, om meer locaties op het oppervlak te onderzoeken dan we ooit voor mogelijk hielden”, legt de NASA-baas uit.
Meer dan twee derde van de Amerikanen waren nog niet geboren toen de zes succesvolle maanlandingen plaatsvonden, inclusief mezelf
NASA-baas Jim Bridenstine
“Meer dan twee derde van de Amerikanen waren nog niet geboren toen de zes succesvolle maanlandingen plaatsvonden, inclusief mezelf. Velen moesten erover lezen in geschiedenisboeken of verhalen horen van oudere familieleden. In tegenstelling tot de Apollo-missies gaan we ditmaal om te blijven”, aldus Bridenstine nog.
Volgens Bridenstine kan de uitbouw van de plannen volgende week al van start gaan, wanneer partners uit de industrie worden uitgenodigd op het hoofdkwartier van NASA. Bridenstine zegt ook dat de NASA al contracten heeft met negen verschillende bedrijven om vracht naar de maan te brengen.
Laatste landing in 1972
Na Neil Armstrong en Buzz Aldrin, die op 20 juli 1969 landden, zetten nog tien mensen voet op de maan. De laatste maanlanding dateert al van 1972. Op 7 december van dat jaar steeg de bemanning van Apollo 17 op voor een vlucht van 12 dagen. Astronauten Harrison Schmitt en Eugene Cernan verbleven toen drie dagen op de maan.
AFPAstronauten Buzz Aldrin en Neil Armstrong bij het planten van de Amerikaanse vlag op de maan op 20 juli 1969.
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WIJ LEVEN IN EEN BUITENAARDSE COMPUTERSIMULATIE
WIJ LEVEN IN EEN BUITENAARDSE COMPUTERSIMULATIE
Het universum waarin wij leven wordt gekenmerkt door entropie, alles verliest steeds meer energie en alles gaat richting wanorde en naar een einde.
Als we “dood” gaan komen we via een tunnel van licht terecht in een tweelingdimensie, waar alles precies omgekeerd is en alles steeds meer energie krijgt en “jonger” wordt.
Eigenlijk heeft de doorsnee mens geen flauw benul in wat voor wereld wij eigenlijk leven.
Velen denken dat er een God is die deze wereld heeft geschapen, al dan niet in zeven dagen, en dat wij daar verder ons hoofd niet over hoeven breken, omdat dit het terrein is van hogere machten.
Maar, natuurlijk zijn er altijd mensen die daar juist wel heel diep over nadenken en dan komen er hele verrassende zaken tevoorschijn. Wetenschappers raken er steeds meer van overtuigd dat ons universum echt niet het enige is en dat er vele parallelle universa zijn.
Zijn deze universa dan geschapen door God of Goden of zijn het misschien buitenaardsen die ze hebben gecreëerd als een soort experiment? Een experiment waar wij, gevangen in ons 3D lichaam, deel van uit maken?
Er zijn talloze aanwijzing dat dit inderdaad het geval is en ben je nieuwsgierig hoe zoiets dan zou werken, dan raden wij je aan om de onderstaande video te kijken, waarin Linda Moulton Howe een fascinerend verhaal vertelt over de verschillende mogelijkheden voor het type universum waarin wij leven.
In de video komen naast verschillende theorieën ook een aantal “real life” ervaringen aan bod, zoals een man die vertelt hoe hij via een deur ergens in Peru, in een andere dimensie terechtkwam.
Het is het verhaal van Jerry Wills en een plaats in Peru die ze deur van Arama Muru noemen. De lokale bevolking noemt het “de deur naar het land van de Goden en onsterfelijk leven” en via die deur kun je inderdaad in een andere dimensie terechtkomen.
In de video het verhaal horen van Jerry Wills die er via onderstaande deur in slaagde om niet alleen in een andere dimensie terecht te komen, maar ook om weer terug te keren en met antwoorden.
Ook komt in de video het fascinerende verhaal van Paul aan bod. Een jongeman van begin 30 die in de buurt van New York woont en een succesvol eigen bedrijf heeft. Na het vieren van 32e verjaardag met zijn ouders en zuster met haar man, rijdt het gezelschap ’s avonds net buiten New York als ze een aantal vreemde lichten aan de hemel ontdekken.
Paul voelt op een gegeven hoe hij uit zijn lichaam treedt en als het ware wordt geteleporteerd naar het ruimteschip wat daar hangt, terwijl zijn fysieke lichaam op de stoel in de auto blijft.
Alhoewel doodsbang, krijgt Paul daar een aantal fascinerende feiten te horen van de Gray Aliens die hem hebben ontvoerd. Te horen is eigenlijk niet het goede woord, want alle berichten worden telepathisch doorgegeven.
Een Gray Alien laat hem een 3D scherm zien en wijst hem op een groep van 10 universa, gekoppeld in vijf paren van twee en vertelt hem dat hij, Paul, afkomstig is uit één van die 10 universa.
Ons universum is gekoppeld aan een ander universum, eentje waar alles precies omgekeerd is ten opzichte van bij ons. Wanneer wij biologisch/fysiek doodgaan, komen we via een tunnel in dat andere universum terecht (redactie: is de deur in Peru een van die tunnels?). De Grays lieten Paul via dat 3D scherm zien hoe het eruit zag in dat universum dat is gekoppeld aan het onze en waar we allemaal ooit naartoe zullen gaan.
Hij zag een witte hemel met zwarte sterren en andere hemellichamen en kleuren die hij niet kende, maar die er fantastisch mooi uit zagen.
Waar in ons universum de energie steeds minder wordt en uiteindelijk alles kapotgaat, breekt en waar alles chaos wordt, zo is het daar precies andersom. In plaats van steeds minder krijg je steeds meer energie, in plaats van ouder wordt je steeds jonger en er gaat nooit iets kapot. Dit gaat door tot het moment dat je weer klaar bent om weer geboren te worden in dit universum en dan begint alles weer af te lopen. (redactie: in die zin leven we dus, zoals sommigen het noemen, inderdaad in een matrix gevangenis)
Wie nu de grote architect(en) is/zijn zijn achter dit alles is niet duidelijk. Eerder hebben wij al een artikel geschreven over hoe God misschien een IT specialist was die zijn eigen wereld heeft geprogrammeerd waar wij in rond lopen. De entiteit die wij God noemen lijkt in ieder geval degene te zijn die dit allemaal geprogrammeerd heeft. Op z'n minst knap te noemen en sadistisch ook (vinden wij).
Kijk en luister naar Linda Moulton Howe die je meeneemt op een fascinerende reis. Het is een video waar je je aandacht goed bij moet houden om het te kunnen volgen.
One of the most beloved yet puzzling books everyone reads in high school English class is The Little Prince by French writer, poet and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The little prince with the golden hair came from the house-sized asteroid “B 612” where he tended to plants and three tiny volcanoes. While English teachers focus on the puzzling ending and force students to write endless essays on whether the Little Prince survived or died, science and astronomy teachers should have borrowed the book on the day they discussed gravity and asked their students to determine what would really have happened to the Little Prince on his little asteroid – would he have lived or floated off into space. Researchers planning to mine asteroids for the expected treasure troves of rare and precious minerals it’s believed they hold (the plot for thriller movies rather than English class novels) have the answer, which is why (spoiler alert) they’re planning to build a space station INSIDE an asteroid.
“In this study we present how to estimate the necessary spin rate assuming a cylindrical space station inside a mined asteroid and discuss the implications arising from substantial material stress given the required rotation rate. We estimate the required material strength using two relatively simple analytical models and apply them to fictitious, yet realistic rocky near-Earth asteroids.”
Thomas Maindl, an astronomer at the University of Vienna, led the study which was published but not yet peer-reviewed in arXiv. The need for an internal rather than surface asteroid station stems from the ideas that asteroids have insufficient gravity to hold a mining station and even if one did, the lack of an atmosphere and magnetic field would expose workers to deadly radiation. The math behind the proposal certainly makes it feasible – Maindl estimates that a solid stone asteroid at least a few hundred meters in diameter rotating at a very fast rate of one to three times per minute would create sufficient sub-surface gravity to allow miners and mining tools to safely hammer out minerals in a gravity similar to Mars or about one-third that of Earth. The asteroid would need to be larger than the Little Prince’s house-sixed B 612 to keep it together as the space for the station was drilled out and the severe hammering caused asteroid-quakes far stronger than B 612’s little volcanic eruptions.
The proposal makes sense but, as David Letterman liked to ask, will it float?
“The border between science and science fiction here is sort of blurry.”
That’s not exactly a vote of confidence, Dr Maindl. Spacecrafts that have landed on asteroids to date are often tiny rovers designed for bouncing in extremely low gravity. That’s how Osiris-Rex is expected to pick up rocks and dust on Bennu later this year before returning to Earth. But that’s not the kind of mining the greedy minds of industry have in mind as they learn more about the mineral riches many asteroids hold. While Maindl estimates that it could be decades before a mission to build a space mining operation inside an asteroid takes place. Big business will no doubt push for much sooner. Who needs space hotels when there’s gold and diamonds to be dug up?
What would the Little Prince say?
“You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”
Numerous eyewitnesses in Flintshire county, Wales reported seeing a strange blue flash on the morning of Thursday, February 7. Welsh social media channels were inundated with posts and pictures of the event taken from dash cameras and cellphones along with a wide range of speculation about what could have caused the event. While industrial causes are suspected, some Flintshire residents aren’t so sure.
The flash occurred around 6:30 am and momentarily lit up a large portion of the early morning sky with a mysterious blue glow. A police officer based in Hawarden, Flintshire caught the glow on his cash cam, posting it to Twitter. As speculation began to veer into the “ALIENS!” direction, a spokesperson for the Hawarden Police helicopter team suggested the anomalous flash could have been the result of ball lightning.
Ball lightning is one of the most mysterious natural phenomena reported throughout history.
WHAT CAUSES BALL LIGHTNING?
Researchers from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, have proposed that the bright glow of lightning balls is created when microwaves become trapped inside a plasma bubble.
'At the tip of a lightning stroke reaching the ground, a relativistic electron bunch can be produced, which in turn excites intense microwave radiation,' the scientists said in a research paper published in Scientific Reports.
'The latter ionizes the local air and the radiation pressure evacuates the resulting plasma, forming a spherical plasma bubble that stably traps the radiation.'
Microwaves trapped inside the continue to generate plasma for a moments to maintain the bright flashes seen during ball lightning, they added.
The fireball eventually fades away as the radiation held within the bubble starts to dissipate - and when microwaves leak out, the lightning balls can dramatically explode.
Ball lightning is a little understood atmospheric electrical phenomenon often cited as an explanation for UFO or ghost sightings. There have been hundreds of eyewitness accounts and anecdotal reports over the centuries of fast-moving, luminous balls of electricity travelling along electrical conduits, down the sails of ships, running along the ground, in submarines or airplane cockpits, or even flying straight through people’s houses with no explanation. Ball lightning has even been reported to explode and leave behind a sulfur smell. Ball lightning is suspected to be behind the reports of “foo fighters” pilots witnessed during World War II.
“Sacré bleu! Un globe de feu!”
While the blue flash in Wales very well could have been caused by ball lightning, it would have had to have been a very large occurrence in order to light up such a large area of the early morning sky. According to local news reports, a high-voltage power line was severed by a fallen tree not far from where most of the reports of the blue flash came in. There are many accounts of ball lightning occurring in the vicinity of electrical infrastructure, so it may be that the two events are related. Unfortunately, most instances of ball lightning only last for a few seconds and rarely leave behind any physical evidence. Was this blue flash merely an electrical explosion due to a fallen line, or could it have indeed been one of the rarest natural phenomena on Earth? This one will likely remain a mystery.
Late in 2018, a series of anomalies appeared on weather radar systems over the US states of Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Florida, and Indiana. The anomalies were eventually blamed on a newexperimental type of chaff, an aircraft countermeasure designed to mask aircraft activity over a given area and generally confuse enemy radar systems.
While that explanation may have been sufficient for that week’s news cycle, many aviation experts noted that chaff usually doesn’t linger in place as these mysterious clouds seemed to. Were these anomalies indeed the product of chaff testing, or was military activity merely a convenient scapegoat as has been alleged in many other anomalies aerial phenomena?
A pair of B-1B Lancers deploy chaff and flares during a military exercise.
The mystery deepened this week as similar radar anomalies were reported in Australia and again blamed on chaff. Many Sydney residents were startled when they saw weather radar displaying what appeared to be ominous rain clouds heading their way when a glance outside revealed crystal blue skies. Australian Broadcasting Corporation meteorologist Graham Creed quickly explained the radar anomaly on social media, stating that like in the American radar anomalies, this was the product of chaff:
It’s the Williamtown RAAF base and they’re putting what’s known as chaff in the atmosphere. The idea of it is that it hides what they’re doing underneath it. They’re doing manoeuvres with their aircraft. They drop this chaff and it spreads out and then it creates an echo so you can’t see individual movements.
The Williamtown RAAF base and Australian Department of Defence were contacted by the ABC but did not comment on the anomaly. What was the RAAF hiding, and from whom?
Chaff canisters
Like in the case of last year’s radar anomalies in America, I’m left to wonder why experimental aircraft technology would be tested near densely populated areas where weather radar systems are so common. If you wanted to hide experimental aircraft tests, why not do it somewhere more secretive? Or was that the point: to determine how well civilian radar systems can be fooled? To what end?
Long Dark UFO Seen Over California Hills Two Day Ago, Feb 8, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Long Dark UFO Seen Over California Hills Two Day Ago, Feb 8, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Feb 8, 2019 Location of sighting: Lampoc, California, USA Source: MUFON This cigar shaped UFO was seen a few days ago over Lampoc, California hills. The UFO is very close to Vandanburg Air Force Base, so this could be a military craft or even a blimp. From this distance its really hard to tell, but if we use what we see...the details...then it tells us what its not. You see, the object is flying over the hill top and as you see there is a tall power line pole, not the usual pole, but the giant size all steel type...and this flying object is below the electical wire level and would have been insane for any blimp pilot to fly into those wires. So...its not a blimp. UFOs however are often seen above mountain ridges like this and also often seen along electrical and phone power lines...like this. So, I would conclude it really is a UFO...an unidentified flying object. But we need close up video of this craft from a different angle to be 100% sure. Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
Witness large object hovering and then moving along the horizon above a mountain or hill.
I was checking out the NASA Apollo 11 archives when I noticed a jar shaped object in a few photos. Four or five photos contained this object. The artefact is an ancient jar of unknown origins at the feet of Buzz Aldrin. The ancient jar is very similar to the ancient Aztec jar in the photo next to it. The shape and the size would be almost equal, but the age of the jar on the moon seems to be in the tens of thousands of years. The astronaut even stepped on it, but the tread marks on his boots made no impression on it due to the jars hardness.
I believe we are opening up an entirely new era of archeology. An era of scientists that will search for, discover and record ancient alien artefacts off world, on moons and planets in our own solar system.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Mysterious ‘Underwater Wall’ That Circles The ENTIRE Planet Found On Google Earth (Video)
Mysterious ‘Underwater Wall’ That Circles The ENTIRE Planet Found On Google Earth (Video)
A mysterious video posted on YouTube claims there is a supermassive wall located beneath Earth’s oceans, encompassing the entire planet.
This mysterious wall, found by a YouTube channel called ‘Flat Earth Arabic’ claims the massive wall tens of thousands of miles across beneath the ocean.
In the distant past, UFO enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists have found countless unexplained things on Google Earth. From pyramids to mysterious towers, petroglyphs, and even sunken cities, Google Earth has unleashed the imagination of people around the globe.
Not long ago we reported about a supposed discovered just off the coast of Mexico—12°8’1.5″N, 119°35’26.4″W—where a researcher discovered a humongous underwater pyramid. Among the many structures that are said to remain hidden beneath the ocean, ‘researchers’ have found things that—supposedly—challenge everything we know about our history.
Last year, a teenager using Google Earth ‘discovered’ what researchers are calling one of the largest, previously unknown ancient cities belonging to the Maya.
In similar ways, researchers all around the globe have been hunting for Pyramids and lost structures that have eluded experts for decades.
In 2012, American researcher Angela Micol discovered ‘Pyramids larger than those found on the Giza Plateau, using satellite images.
But countless different discoveries have been made using Google Earth.
Last year we reported about a complex of structures that stretch for a staggering 76 miles at its furthest points.
The formations found off the coast of Baja California include mysterious tube-like constructions that are roughly 2.4 miles in width. Given the curious shape and distinguishable lines, many believe these are just some of the many underwater structures on our planet.
However, these new claims go beyond anything we’ve probably ever come across.
This wall’s sheer size and its adherence to linearity indicate it is not a natural formation to many. In fact, many people are convinced that due to the numerous discoveries made across the globe which completely contradict history as we have been taught in school, something like this is entirely possible. After all—they say—Earth is millions of years old and we are begging to uncover evidence that suggests many ancient civilizations inhabited Earth in our planet’s long history.
BUT, HOLD ON A SEC, THIS CAN’T BE A WALL, RIGHT?
Zooming in on the provided coordinates you clearly see what seems to be a MASSIVE structure. But who could have erected such a wall? If it really is an artificial structure, how old is it? What was its purpose?
Many disagree and don’t believe we are looking at an actual wall. In fact, there even might be a perfectly reasonable explanation for the enigmatic finding.
What if we are looking at a Google Earth glitch?
Due to the fact that Google Earth uses different images while ‘mapping the planet’, it isn’t uncommon to encounter parts of the map that just didn’t quite match perfectly, resulting in a MASSIVE wall that encompasses the entire planet.
One of the most likely explanations for this ‘impressive find’ is that we are looking at a digital seam in the mapping of the Poles.
SATELLITE IMAGE STITCHING ERROR?
Image stitching or photo stitching is the process of combining multiple photographic images with overlapping fields of view to produce a segmented panorama or high-resolution image.
Commonly performed through the use of computer software, most approaches to image stitching require nearly exact overlaps between images and identical exposures to produce seamless results.
Image stitching is widely used in today’s world and was used in the satellite images we are seeing on Google Earth.
BUT AN ENTIRE WALL THAT ENCOMPASSES EARTH?
A lot of things can have played a role in creating such an effect. Illumination, point of view, reference, and many other things may have played a crucial role in this massive error. One of the most likely reasons for the seam appearing could be the background changing between two images for the same continuous foreground.
CHECK OUT THE VIDEO BELLOW:
What are we looking at there? A Supermassive wall as the above video claims? Or just another glitch in the image processing techniques in Google maps?
Sometimes it might seem like life on Earth has taken a few bizarre twists and turns in the last few years, but if it helps you feel better, it’s not just us. In reality, the entire galaxy is bent out of shape—literally. Astronomers have created a new 3D map of the Milky Way galaxy, and ina new paper published in Nature Astronomy, illustrate that the galaxy as a whole has a warped structure, progressively twisting out into a spiral.
This isn’t exactly the biggest surprise. For decades, astronomers have observed a twisting pattern of hydrogen gas out in the far reaches of the galaxy. But since that gas layer extends so far out, it was never really clear whether individual stellar bodies in the galaxy were exhibiting the same kind of warping, and whether there was a consistent warp throughout the Milky Way.
This new 3D map wasn’t even intended to trace the galaxy’s warp. “Most science is serendipitous,” says Richard de Grijs, an astronomer based at Macquarie University in Sydney, and a coauthor of the new study. It was his former graduate student, lead author Xiaodian Chen, now at the National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences, who had previously compiled a large collection of observations of over 50,000 stars in the galaxy, particularly in infrared. Chen decided to use observations of the Cepheids—a class of young, bright, pulsating stars—to attempt to outline the shape of the Milky Way.
The Cepheids are particularly useful for any astronomical investigation requiring you to trace distance through outer space. They show period changes in brightness over time, and measuring the cycles in those brightness can basically tell you the distance between two points down to an incredibly accurate scale. And since dust and gas doesn’t absorb much of the light on longer wavelengths, astronomers use infrared to look at those cycles.
Ultimately, the team ended up with 1,339 Cepheid observations made with NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, covering most of the Milky Way. “We knew their positions in the sky, and their distances—that means you have a three-dimensional distribution,” says de Grijs. “By simply plotting that with respect to the distance of the sun, we could see the shape of the Milky Way as constrained by the Cepheids.”
Because we don’t have a telescope sitting outside of the Milky Way, we have to figure out its shape from inside of itself; de Grijs and team analogizes this method as being akin to trying to figure out the shape of Australia from a garden in Sydney, or the shape of China from a park in Beijing. It’s much easier to determine the shape of almost anything if you can look at it from the outside.
Typically, the warped shape of a galaxy is caused by instabilities on the disk’s edge, where the galaxy’s gravitational forces are weaker and objects are more prone to bending and twisting. It’s a common phenomenon for spiral galaxies.
And while the warping of the galaxy isn’t a new revelation, Elena D’Onghia, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin who was not involved with the study, thinks it’s interesting how the team took advantage of the Cepheids in creating the new galactic map that can characterize the warp at a rather high accuracy.
D’Onghia does note, however, that the origin of the warp still needs a more detailed explanation, especially since the hydrogen gas still seems to twist more rigorously then the stars do. “It could be due to torques exerted by a large satellite galaxy like the Large Magellanic Cloud, or the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy that impacted the Milky Way disk not long ago,” she says. “It could be by torques exerted by the inner disk, as the authors claim. [They] do not really explore the different ways to generate the warp as compared to the data.”
Still, there are some larger astronomical questions the findings ought to help resolve, especially when it comes to dark matter. About 85 percent of the universe is thought to be made of dark matter. We can’t directly observe it, but its presence is implied because it gravitationally affects the movements of other celestial structures whirring around through outer space. “We know we need it to explain the motions of the stars in the Milky Way,” says de Grijs. Understanding the shape of the Milky Way means we can get a better handle on where that dark matter is located in the galaxy.
The findings also ought to help the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, which is tasked with making observations of approximately one billion astronomical objects (about one percent of the Milky Way galaxy). The new map could give the Gaia project a benchmark with which to compare measurements as they come in.
And let’s not forget that Chen’s catalog of 50,000 is ripe for more thorough analysis to unveil more mysteries of the Milky Way. “There’s a lot more we can do with this and continue to explore what’s in the data,” says de Grijs.
The truth is out there! Scientist who investigated UFOs for 20 years for the government coined the phrase Close Encounters of the Third Kind - and had a cameo in Spielberg’s hit film - turned from skeptic to believer, inspiring a new TV show
The truth is out there! Scientist who investigated UFOs for 20 years for the government coined the phrase Close Encounters of the Third Kind - and had a cameo in Spielberg’s hit film - turned from skeptic to believer, inspiring a new TV show
In the late 1940s, reports of 'flying saucers' flooded in from throughout the U.S.
In 1948, the air force was tasked with looking into the reports to calm the public
They brought on accomplished astronomer Dr J. Allen Hynek, who for nearly 20 years looked into the UFO reports and called for them to be scientifically studied
Hynek initially thought the sightings were a fad but eventually changed his mind
He coined the phrase ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,' had a cameo in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 hit movie, and later said he saw UFOs on two occasions
A new scripted TV show, 'Project Blue Book,' takes a fictionalized look at his life
Forty-five years before the catchphrase, The Truth is Out There, was on the tip of many tongues, a man searched for scientific explanations for the inexplicable lights and objects that streaked and whizzed and zoomed across the night sky.
Dr J. Allen Hynek was no Fox Mulder but rather the real deal: an accomplished astronomer the United States government tasked to help figure out what was happening in the skies after World War II.
Dr J. Allen Hyenk, pictured, was an accomplished astronomer who consulted for years on the U.S. Air Force's project to investigate UFO reports. In the late 1940s, reports flooded in from around the country
In the late 1940s, ‘flying saucer’ reports flooded in from across the country and the air force had no idea what to do with them. Hynek, a professor, was asked to consult for the air force’s Project Sign, which was to investigate them.
Initially, the man of science pegged the sightings as a fad, a manifestation of a country suffering from the aftereffects of the war and the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But as the unidentified flying object reports continued unabated, Hynek went from labeling them ‘sheer nonsense’ to calling for the phenomenon to be scientifically studied to declaring that he saw UFOs twice. In the process, he satisfied neither side of the UFO debate.
An encouraging father of five children, Hynek would become a celebrity of sorts, found the Center for UFO Studies, write several books, and coin the phrase ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ complete with a cameo in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 hit movie of the same name.
‘He was this very straight-laced, by-the-book scientist and astronomer who, you know, only believed what he could see,’ Mark O’Connell, author of ‘The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs,’ told DailyMail.com.
A new scripted TV series, ‘Project Blue Book,’ on HISTORY takes a fictionalized look at Hynek, his life, his investigations into UFOs during the early 1950s, a time period gripped by the Cold War and nuclear war fears, and the question that we are still wrestling with today: are we alone in the universe.
When Dr J. Allen Hynek, pictured, first heard about 'flying saucers' in 1948, he said he thought 'they were sheer nonsense, as any scientist would have.’ That year, the U.S. Air Force started Project Sign, which was to investigate the unidentified flying object reports that were coming in from around the country, according to Mark O’Connell's book ‘The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs.' Above, Hynek is at a press conference in 1966 where he said the flying saucer looked more like a 'chicken feeder'
At first, Dr J. Allen Hynek thought the sightings, which started pouring in during the late 1940s, were a fad. He thought they were a nervous public reaction to Pearl Harbor coupled with what was then a current worry about Soviet bombers attacking the United States, Mark O’Connell, author of ‘The Close Encounters Man,' told DailyMail.com. But Hynek started to change his mind after the reports continued unabated. Above, a newspaper clipping from 1947 about a 'mysterious object' that crashed near Roswell, New Mexico that the U.S. Air Force said was a weather balloon
Hynek, a professor, looked through unidentified flying object reports for the U.S. Air Force in 1948 and 1949, and then went back to teaching and ‘and kind of forgot about it,’ author O’Connell told DailyMail.com. But around two years later, the air force approached him again to consult on their UFO investigative project. ‘So he’s very surprised after a couple of years that the craze hasn’t faded away,’ O’Connell said. Above, a shot of an unidentified flying object taken in 1966
Born May 1, 1910 in Chicago, Hynek was just five days old when Halley’s Comet passed by the Earth – a celestial moment that would be repeated toward the end of his life when he died at aged 75 on April 27, 1986.
As a young boy, he battled a bout of scarlet fever, was restricted to bed for several weeks, and spent his time reading everything he could, including ‘Elements of Astronomy,’ according to O’Connell’s 2017 book.
The die was cast, and a telescope given to him at aged 10 sealed his pursuit of astronomy. In 1932, Hynek graduated with a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, and married his first wife, Martha Alexander. After getting his PhD in astrophysics, he started teaching at Ohio State University in Columbus three years later.
Strange sky sightings seeped into the public consciousness during World War II when pilots described seeing unusual lights and objects on missions – dubbing them ‘foo fighters’ – around 1944. (There were other stories and tales before then, of course.) But the dam broke after a private pilot and businessman Kenneth Arnold recounted that he saw nine ‘bright saucer-like objects’ race by at 1,200 miles per hour in June 1947, according to news reports at the time.
For almost 20 years, Dr J. Allen Hynek consulted for the U.S. Air Force's project to investigate UFO sightings. Afterwards, Hynek found the Center for UFO Studies and wrote several books. In his 1972 book, ‘The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry,’ Hynek detailed what he termed ‘close encounters:’ the first was a person seeing a UFO but from a distance; the second was UFOs ‘physical effect on the environment,’ such as crop circles; and the third was a person interacting ‘with beings that appear with the UFOs.’ Above, Hynek in his cameo during Steven Spielberg’s smash hit ‘Close Encounters of Third Kind,’ released in late 1977
A movie poster for ‘Close Encounters of Third Kind.' Hynek wrote director Steven Spielberg after he had heard the upcoming film and its title. Spielberg wrote the astronomer back, paid Hynek $1,000 to use his phrase and hired him as a technical advisor for the film at $500 a day, according to Mark O’Connell's book ‘The Close Encounters Man.' Hynek would have a cameo in the hit 1977 film
‘All summer long reports kept coming from every corner of the country… The trouble was there was not a soul on earth who knew what to do with them,’ O’Connell wrote.
‘”Confusion” was the watchword for the flying saucer phenomenon in those early days.’
In 1948, the government set up Project Sign, which would later be called Grudge and then Blue Book, to investigate the reports. It was headquartered at an air force base near Dayton, Ohio, which is not so far from Columbus, and O’Connell wrote that the air force ‘needed a professional astronomer to validate’ its conclusions. Enter Hynek.
By then, Hynek’s first marriage to Martha Alexander had ended in 1939 in divorce. He married Mimi Curtis in 1942, and they would stay together until his death in 1986, and have five children together – Scott, Roxane, Joel, Paul and Ross.
In his 1972 book, ‘The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry,’ Dr J. Allen Hynek detailed what he termed ‘close encounters:’ the first was a person seeing a UFO but from a distance; the second was UFOs ‘physical effect on the environment,’ such as crop circles; and the third was a person interacting ‘with beings that appear with the UFOs.’ When Hynek heard about Steven Spielberg's upcoming film and its title, 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind,' he wrote the director, according Mark O’Connell's book ‘The Close Encounters Man.' Hynek worked as a technical advisor on the movie, which was released in late 1977, and he is seen above in front of his trailer on the set
‘Our dad is known in some circles especially now for his work with UFOs, but first and foremost he was a scientist and an astronomer. One of the things that I think that he inculcated in us was just this love of science and learning about the world,’ Paul Hynek, who worked as a consultant on the TV show with his brother Joel, told DailyMail.com.
‘Our dinner table if it was not interrupted by phone calls from people reporting UFOs and whatnot, it was about ideas.’
Joel Hynek added: ‘One of the things my father instilled in all of us was this love of science and the idea that everyone should keep an open mind to whatever’s out there.’
Initially, Hynek buttressed the government’s findings and conclusions.
‘In 1948, when I first heard of the (flying saucers), I thought they were sheer nonsense, as any scientist would have,’ Hynek wrote, according to O’Connell’s book.
‘Most of the early reports were quite vague: “I went into the bathroom for a drink of water and looked out of the window and saw a bright light in the sky. It was moving up and down and sideways. When I looked again, it was gone.” ‘
Strange sky sightings seeped into the public consciousness during World War II when pilots described seeing unusual lights and objects on missions – dubbing them ‘foo fighters’ – around 1944. (There were other stories and tales before then, of course.) But the dam broke after a private pilot and businessman Kenneth Arnold recounted that he saw nine ‘bright saucer-like objects’ race by at 1,200 miles per hour in June 1947, according to news reports at the time. Above, Kenneth Arnold, center, looks at a photo of an unidentified flying object in 1947. To his left is E.J. Smith, and Ralph E. Stevens is to Arnold's right
In 1947, there was a sighting near Roswell, New Mexico - an event that lingered in the public's mind. The U.S. Air Force said that what was seen was a weather balloon that crashed. The next year, the air force started Project Sign, which was to investigate the sightings, and brought on Dr J. Allen Hynek to consult. Above, the air force's Brig. General Roger M. Ramey, left, and Col. Thomas J. Dubose, right, look at the metallic fragments found by a farmer near Roswell, New Mexico
After initially dismissing the UFO sightings as 'sheer nonsense,' Dr J. Allen Hyenk, center, would change his mind about the reports. The first time Hynek consulted for the air force in 1948, author Mark O’Connell said: ‘They just plopped a pile of case reports on a desk in front of him and said please go through all of these and tell us which ones are just misidentifications of astronomical objects.’ Hynek was able to explain away 80 percent of the reports, but not the other 20 percent, but he thought that with 'enough time and resources they could probably explain away those 20 percent also,’ O’Connell said. Above, Hynek, center, in 1956
After World War II, people saw things in the sky that they couldn't explain. Dr J. Allen Hynek, who investigated the sightings with the U.S. Air Force for years, was often a source of information for the public, and took part in press conferences, such as the one above in 1966. The photograph he is holding was reportedly taken in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Hynek said the sighting was swamp gas - an explanation that did not satisfy many at the time
Hynek thought the sightings were a nervous public reaction to Pearl Harbor coupled with what was then a current worry about Soviet bombers attacking the United States, O’Connell explained.
‘So of course they’re looking up in the sky and seeing things and getting nervous about what they see if it’s something that they can’t identify and they can’t explain,’ he told DailyMail.com.
The first time Hynek consulted for the air force in 1948, O’Connell said: ‘They just plopped a pile of case reports on a desk in front of him and said please go through all of these and tell us which ones are just misidentifications of astronomical objects.’
‘And Hynek thought, okay, easy work, he went through them all. He was able to explain away about 80 percent of them and the other 20 percent didn’t really bother him. He thought with enough time and resources they could probably explain away those 20 percent also.’
In 1932, Hynek graduated with a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, and married his first wife, Martha Alexander. After getting his PhD in astrophysics, he started teaching at Ohio State University in Columbus three years later. By 1948, Hynek’s first marriage to Martha Alexander had ended in 1939 in divorce. He married Mimi Curtis in 1942, and they would stay together until his death in 1986, and have five children together – Scott, Roxane, Joel, Paul and Ross. Above, a photo of the family taken at the Hynek home in Evanston, Illinois in 1960. From left, Roxane, Mimi, Joel, Dr J. Allen Hynek, who is holding the cup, and Scott
Hynek and his wife, Mimi, had five children, shown above from left, Ross, Paul, Joel, Roxane, and Scott. The photo was taken at the Hynek family cabin in Ontario, Canada in 1973. Two of Hynek's children - Paul and Joel Hynek - worked as consultants for a new scripted TV show, 'Project Blue Book,' on HISTORY, that fictionalizes their father's life in the early 1950s. Paul Hynek told DailyMail.com: ‘Our dad is known in some circles especially now for his work with UFOs, but first and foremost he was a scientist and an astronomer. One of the things that I think that he inculcated in us was just this love of science and learning about the world’
After UFO sightings persisted, Dr J. Allen Hynek, pictured, started to call for the phenomenon to be scientifically studied. His son, Joel Hynek told DailyMail.com: ‘One of the things my father instilled in all of us was this love of science and the idea that everyone should keep an open mind to whatever’s out there.’ Hynek, above, is on the set of Steven Spielberg's hit film, 'Close Encounters of The Third Kind,' which was released in late 1977
Dr J. Allen Hynek started to change his mind about unidentified flying object reports after they continued unabated. ‘For several years I was saying there was nothing to it… I thought the whole thing was a fad, a craze – and would pass from the scene as fads invariably do. Back in 1948, when I first started, I would have taken just about any bet that by 1952 the whole matter would be forgotten. It was the persistence of the phenomenon, not in the United States, but over the world, that finally grabbed my attention,’ Hynek said, according Mark O’Connell's book ‘The Close Encounters Man.' Above, two photos showing possible UFO sightings
The UFO investigator who witnessed two sightings
Dr J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer who worked with the government for nearly 20 years to investigate sightings, saw UFOs on two occasions.
‘He didn’t see them very close up. They were brief, brief momentary sightings. He saw one through the window of a passenger airplane. He was able to take a couple of photos of that, but honestly, they just look like a blob of light in a black field, which unfortunately is often the case of UFO photos,’ Mark O’Connell, author of ‘The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs,’ told DailyMail.com.
The other sighting was at his family’s cottage in Ontario, Canada, he said.
‘But neither one of those sightings was a close encounter. He didn’t get close enough to actually see any detail or outline and shape or anything.’
In a 1981 radio interview, Hynek said: ‘It was obviously an object, it was flying, and has remained unidentified to this day. But I’ve never had a close encounter, that is never anything really close-by that I could say, ‘My gosh, this is really something!’
‘…I feel somewhat left out.’
In the TV show, ‘Project Blue Book,' almost right off the bat, Hynek, who is played by Aidan Gillen of ‘Game of Thrones’ fame, questions the government’s conclusions – meteors, a weather balloon – for the unexplained things people see and experience. He is also given a partner, a fictional Captain Michael Quinn, played by Michael Malarkey. The show is set in the early 1950s, a time when the Soviet Union, the Cold War and the possibility of nuclear war loomed large.
David O'Leary, the show’s creator, said that the real Project Blue Book looked at over 12,000 UFO reports and roughly 700 of those remain unexplained. Since childhood, he has had a fascination with the question of whether humans are alone in the universe.
‘I personally don’t think that you can look at that the question honestly without examining the UFO phenomenon,’ O'Leary, who conceived of the TV show as the ‘real life X-Files set in the time of Mad Men,’ told DailyMail.com.
‘I also became fascinated with, you know, America’s very strange and mysterious history with this phenomenon and, of course one of the big big pieces of that is the fact that we really did openly investigate unidentified flying objects in our skies officially though the U.S. Air Force.’
‘The show is a piece of entertainment but my goal always was for it to also spark curiosity, towards educating people about these real life cases and about this era.’
In the show, which airs on Tuesdays at 10pm Eastern time, Hynek and Quinn crisscross the country – from Fargo, North Dakota to Flatwoods, West Virginia to Lubbock, Texas – to investigate. Each episode is based on a real case or a collection of real incidents. In the series’ second episode, the pair looks into the Flatwoods monster, where a mother and her two young children insist they saw a spaceship and an alien creature. To quell panic in the town, Hynek puts the sighting down to an owl.
It took the real Hynek longer to come around. O’Connell said that after working for the air force in 1948 and 1949, he went back to teaching ‘and kind of forgot about it.’
But around two years later, the air force approached Hynek to consult again.
‘So he’s very surprised after a couple of years that the craze hasn’t faded away,’ O’Connell said.
‘He starts looking through this new batch of UFO reports and, surprise, there are still 20 percent that he can’t explain. So for him that 20 percent consistency that was a trend, that was something that piqued his interest and he wanted to find out more. And that was when he started to change his mind about UFOs.’
Hynek started to push for UFOs to be handled scientifically.
‘For several years I was saying there was nothing to it… I thought the whole thing was a fad, a craze – and would pass from the scene as fads invariably do. Back in 1948, when I first started, I would have taken just about any bet that by 1952 the whole matter would be forgotten. It was the persistence of the phenomenon, not in the United States, but over the world, that finally grabbed my attention,’ Hynek said, according to the book.
‘… It appears, indeed, that the flying saucer along with the automobile is here to stay.’
Hynek's sons, Paul, left, and Joel, right, worked as consultants on a new scripted TV show, 'Project Blue Book,' on HISTORY, and are seen above at its premiere in January. Both told DailyMail.com that their father instilled in them a love of science and keeping an open mind. Joel said that their father was in an awkward position when it came to UFOs and ‘he tried to be several things to different groups:’ the air force wanted him to find an explanation for what people saw in the sky while those that believed in UFOs and extraterrestrials wanted Hynek to come out and support that hypothesis
Above, the cast of 'Project Blue Book,' a new scripted TV series that takes a fictionalized look at Dr J. Allen Hynek, his life, his investigations into UFOs during the early 1950s, a time period gripped by the Cold War and nuclear war fears, and the question that we are still wrestling with today: are we alone in the universe. From left, Laura Mennell as Mimi Hynek, Aidan Gillen as Dr J. Allen Hynek, Neal McDonough as General James Harding, Michael Harney as General Hugh Valentine, Michael Malarkey as Captain Michael Quinn, and Ksenia Solo as Susie Miller
David O'Leary, the show’s creator, said that the real Project Blue Book looked at over 12,000 UFO reports and roughly 700 of those remain unexplained. Since childhood, he has had a fascination with the question of whether humans are alone in the universe. ‘I personally don’t think that you can look at that the question honestly without examining the UFO phenomenon,’ O'Leary, who conceived of the TV show as the ‘real life X-Files set in the time of Mad Men,’ told DailyMail.com. Above, Aidan Gillen portraying Dr J. Allen Hynek in Episode 104: Operation Paperclip
The new series, which premiered in January, has ten episodes and David O'Leary, the show’s creator, said that he looks at the show like a ten-hour movie. O'Leary told DailyMail.com: ‘The show is a piece of entertainment but my goal always was for it to also spark curiosity, towards educating people about these real life cases and about this era.’ Above, Laura Mennell as Mimi Hynek and Aidan Gillen as Dr J. Allen Hynek. The real couple married in 1942, and they would stay together until Hynek's death in 1986, and have five children together – Scott, Roxane, Joel, Paul and Ross
After the government shut down Project Blue Book in 1969, Hynek, who was then teaching at Northwestern University, launched the Center for UFO Studies in 1973 and penned books. In his 1972 book, ‘The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry,’ Hynek detailed what he termed ‘close encounters:’ the first was a person seeing a UFO but from a distance; the second was UFOs ‘physical effect on the environment,’ such as crop circles; and the third was a person interacting ‘with beings that appear with the UFOs.’
It was the last gradation that inspired director Steven Spielberg’s smash hit ‘Close Encounters of Third Kind,’ released in late 1977. By then, Hynek was a popular author who also had cachet within the scientific community.
O’Connell pointed out in his book that Hynek wrote Spielberg after he had heard about the director’s upcoming film and its title. Spielberg wrote the astronomer back, paid Hynek $1,000 to use his phrase and hired him as a technical advisor for the film at $500 a day, according to the book.
‘While on set, Hynek got to talking with Spielberg about making a “Hitchcok-type” cameo in the movie,’ O’Connell wrote, ‘and Spielberg loved the idea so much that he filmed a whole sequence with Hynek interacting with the childlike aliens who have emerged from the “mothership.” ‘
Paul and Joel Hynek fondly recalled their father’s brush with celebrity after the film came out.
‘All of my friends thought it was extra cool to have dad in the big Hollywood movie,’ Paul said.
Paul Hynek noted that while his father did think there was something to UFOs, he was not completely sold on the idea of extraterrestrials, and had other theories about them, ‘more likely something like interdimensional travel or something even perhaps more exotic.’
‘I think one of the biggest misconceptions of my father is that he went from a, you know, confirmed skeptic of the bunkum of flying saucers to a dedicated believer in extraterrestrials having visited us,’ he said.
Their father, Joel noted, was in an awkward position when it came to UFOs and ‘he tried to be several things to different groups:’ the air force wanted him to find an explanation for what people saw in the sky while those that believed in UFOs and extraterrestrials wanted Hynek to come out and support that hypothesis.
‘He walked a fine line there to keep the whole alive, if you will,’ Joel said.
By 1981, the man who had dismissed UFOs as ‘sheer nonsense,’ said in a radio interview that he had seen them twice.
‘I have seen, on two occasions, two things which satisfy the definition of UFO,’ Hynek said, according to the book. ‘It was obviously an object, it was flying, and has remained unidentified to this day. But I’ve never had a close encounter, that is never anything really close-by that I could say, ‘My gosh, this is really something!’
A Japanese asteroid probe will snag samples of its target space rock later this month, if all goes according to plan.
TheHayabusa2 spacecraft, which has been studying the 3,000-foot-wide (900 meters) near-Earth asteroid Ryugu up close since last June, will make its first sample-grabbing dive just two weeks from now.
"The touchdown operation to collect a sample from Ryugu will be between February 20th-22nd. Hayabusa2 is scheduled to begin the descent from February 21 and touch down on the surface of Ryugu around 8 a.m. on February 22 (JST). It is the pinnacle of the mission!" Hayabusa2 team members said via Twitter Wednesday (Feb. 6). [Japan's Hayabusa2 Asteroid Mission in Pictures]
The 3,000-foot-wide (900 meters) carbon-rich asteroid Ryugu, photographed by Japan's Hayabusa2 probe in June 2018.
Credit: JAXA, University of Tokyo, Kochi University, Rikkyo University, Nagoya University, Chiba Institute of Technology, Meiji University, University of Aizu, AIST
Japan Standard Time is 14 hours ahead of U.S. Eastern Standard Time, so the touchdown will take place on the night of Feb. 21 for folks in North and South America (and around midnight for people throughout Europe).
This month's operation was originally scheduled to take place in October, but mission team members delayed the activity to give themselves more time to take stock of Ryugu's unexpectedly complex and rugged surface.
HAYABUSA2@JAXA@haya2e_jaxa
The touchdown operation to collect a sample from Ryugu will be between February 20th - 22nd. Hayabusa2 is scheduled to begin the descent from February 21, and touchdown on the surface of Ryugu around 8am on February 22 (JST). It is the pinnacle of the mission!
Hayabusa2 will make two additional sample-grabbing sorties after this month's activity, including one trip to snag material from a fresh crater. The spacecraft will create this crater itself, sending a "kinetic impactor" barreling into Ryugu.
The various bits of Ryugu material will travel to Earth in a special return capsule in December 2020, if current schedules hold. Scientists around the world will then study the cosmic dirt and gravel, looking for clues about the solar system's early history and the role that carbon-rich asteroids like Ryugu may have played in life's emergence on Earth.
The mission has already touched Ryugu's surface multiple times. The Hayabusa2 mothership deployed two tiny, hopping rovers onto the space rock last September, then dropped a European-built lander called MASCOT onto the asteroid less than two weeks later.
NASA is operating an asteroid-sampling mission of its own, with similar goals to those of Hayabusa2. The U.S. space agency's OSIRIS-REx probe entered orbit around the 1,650-foot-wide (500 m) asteroid Bennu — a carbonaceous rock, like Ryugu — on Dec. 31.
OSIRIS-REx is expected to snag its samples in the middle of next year; this material will come to Earth in September 2023.
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published in November 2018 by Grand Central Publishing.
Officially, 2018 has been the 4th hottest year on record, fulfilling a dreadful pattern: the past five years have been the hottest since mankind started recording global temperatures in 1880. This is no coincidence — it’s a clear exemplification of the warming trend our planet is experiencing, and that we are causing.
Global average annual temperature anomalies from NASA’s global Land-Ocean Temperature Index data set (1951-1980 base period).
“The key message is that the planet is warming,” Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, told reporters at a news conference. “And our understanding of why those trends are occurring is also very robust. It’s because of the greenhouse gases that we[‘ve] put into the atmosphere over the last 100 years.
Both NOAA and NASA have confirmed that 2018 was the 4th hottest year on record. They also double-checked their data with other external and independent groups, further confirming the results: last year, global land- and ocean-surface temperatures were 1.42 degrees Fahrenheit (0.79 degrees Celsius) above the 20th-century average.
The warming wasn’t uniform, however. In North America, temperatures were closer to the century average, but the difference was more than made up for in other parts of the world.
Credits: NOAA.
Yet even without elevated temperatures, the effects of climate change were visible in the US. It was the third wettest year on record — yet at the same time, drought ravaged parts of the country. There were also much more extreme weather events than normal, something which is increasingly attributed to climate change.
Researchers also warned that the climate change and the damage will pale in comparison to what we will experience in the future, especially if we continue to spew carbon at the rate we currently are.
All models and measurements consistently show that the planet is warming.
Credits: NASA Earth Observatory / VOX.
The data in case is extremely reliable, and climate scientists have gone to great lengths to avoid any potential uncertainties. For instances, they factored in how different methodologies for data acquisition and processing may have changed over the years and factored in the “urban heat island” effect” in which cities are warmer than the surrounding environment. Nowadays, agencies collect most of the data from rural areas — which is also controlled for.
Overall, you could hardly imagine more convincing data to show that climate change is happening. So one can only wonder — for those people who don’t “believe” in climate change (although believing in a scientific reality doesn’t really mean anything), what would it take to convince them? Would that even be possible? Or is it a “hoax” or a “liberal conspiracy” no matter what the evidence says?
Now is a really good time to remember that science is non-partisan, and the science says we’re causing a lot of trouble for ourselves and the rest of the planet. It’s time to reduce emissions and start cleaning up after ourselves.
In July 2018, the UK space agency announced a competitionto name the rover, which is scheduled to launch in 2020 as part of the ongoing ExoMars mission. Over 36,000 people from all over the European Unionsent their proposals and suggestions. Apparently, the ESA learned from the previous “Boaty McBoatFace” experience and instead of choosing the most popular suggestion, they had a team of experts select from the proposals.
The ESA has a long tradition of naming its missions after famous researchers, and this was no exception. British astronaut Tim Peake announced the decision: the rover will be named Rosalind Franklin.
Rosalind was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer who contributed to unraveling the double helix structure of our DNA. However, her contribution was ignored and even denied in subsequent years. This is a well-deserved recognition of her contribution.
“This name reminds us that it is in the human genes to explore. Science is in our DNA, and in everything we do at ESA. Rosalind the rover captures this spirit and carries us all to the forefront of space exploration,” says ESA Director General Jan Woerner.
Rosalind herself was much enamored with space exploration, although unfortunately, she did not get to witness to much of it.
“In the last year of Rosalind’s life, I remember visiting her in hospital on the day when she was excited by the news of the [Soviet Sputnik satellite] – the very beginning of space exploration,” Franklin’s sister, Jenifer Glynn, said according to the BBC. ”She could never have imagined that over 60 years later there would be a rover sent to Mars bearing her name, but somehow that makes this project even more special.”
The new ExoMars rover will be the first of its kind, being able to combine the capability to roam around Mars and to study its subsurface. The mission is being run by the European Space Agency (ESA) and Russia’s Roscosmos. ExoMars was originally supposed to have three parts: an orbiter, this rover, and a lander, named Schiaparelli after an Italian astronomer. However, Schiaparelli crashed into Mars, a disaster that was likely caused by a software bug.
If everything goes according to plan, the mission will launch in 2020, and Rosalind Franklin will land on Mars in 2021, offering us a new understanding of the geological processes on the Red Planet.
“This rover will scout the martian surface equipped with next-generation instruments – a fully-fledged automated laboratory on Mars,” says Tim Peake.
Astronomers have just found an asteroid that zips around the sun every 165 Earth days.
That's the shortest year for any asteroid known to humankind, discovery team members said. And the space rock, called 2019 AQ3, could be part of a vast and virtually unknown population zooming through the inner solar system, quite close to the sun.
"We have found an extraordinary object whose orbit barely strays beyond Venus' orbit — that's a big deal," Quanzhi Ye, a postdoctoral researcher at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), an astronomy data and science facility at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, said in a statement. [Watch: Asteroid 2019 AQ3's Superfast Orbit Around the Sun]
2019 AQ3 is a "very rare species," Ye said, adding that "there might be many more undiscovered asteroids out there like it." To be clear, asteroid 2019 AQ3's orbit isn't the fastest of any object. The planet Mercury makes one trip around the sun every 88 days. But the space rock is unique, researchers said.
Ye spotted 2019 AQ3 on Jan. 4, in images captured by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a sky-surveying camera installed on the 48-inch (122 centimeters) Samuel Oschin Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California.
The orbit of the asteroid 2019 AQ3 is shown in this diagram. The object has the shortest year of any recorded asteroid, with an orbital period of just 165 Earth days.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The ZTF, which began operations in March 2018, scans the entire visible northern sky every three nights. Its wide field of view and rapid surveying frequency make the ZTF a great observer of supernova explosions, asteroids and other “transients” — astronomical objects and phenomena that are visible only temporarily.
Indeed, the camera has already spotted 60 new near-Earth asteroids, ZTF team members said.
Ye reported the discovery of 2019 AQ3 to the IAU (International Astronomical Union) Minor Planet Center, the organization responsible for collecting and coordinating data about asteroids and comets in our solar system.
Multiple research groups then observed the object on Jan. 6 and 7, using a variety of telescopes. Astronomers reviewed archived data as well, finding evidence of 2019 AQ3 in images captured by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) in Hawaii dating back to 2015.
Putting all this information together, Ye and his colleagues were able to map 2019 AQ3's orbit in detail. The asteroid zooms around the sun on an elliptical path that takes it inside Mercury's orbit at closest approach and slightly beyond Venus at its most distant point, the researchers determined. And 2019 AQ3's orbit is inclined, out of the plane of the paths taken by Earth and the solar system's other big planets.
2019 AQ3 therefore appears to belong to the Atira (also known as Apohele) class of asteroids, which have orbits interior to that of Earth. Just 20 or so space rocks, out of 800,000 known asteroids, are Atiras, researchers said.
"The origin of Atiras is an intriguing and open question," discovery team member Wing-Huen Ip, a professor of astronomy and space science at the Institute of Astronomy and Space Science at the National Central University in Taiwan, said in the same statement. "With every additional object, we get closer to formulating and testing models about that origin, and about the history of our solar system."
Many more Atiras likely exist and the ones that line up Earth in their crosshairs could be especially dangerous, the researchers said. That's because these asteroids would be coming from the direction of the sun and would thus be hard to spot because of our star's overpowering glare.
2019 AQ3 is not dangerous, however. Its orbit never brings it closer to Earth than about 22 million miles (35.4 million kilometers), the researchers said.
While the size of the newfound asteroid is unclear, observations suggest that it could be almost 1 mile (1.6 km) wide. If that's the case, 2019 AQ3 would be one of the biggest Atiras known.
"In so many ways, 2019 AQ3 really is an oddball asteroid," Ye said.
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate) is out now.
SpaceX's new astronaut taxi won't make its inaugural trip to the International Space Station (ISS) this month after all.
SpaceX and Boeing are developing commercial space capsules — called Crew Dragonand CST-100 Starliner, respectively — to carry NASA astronauts to and from the orbiting lab.
"The agency now is targeting March 2 for launch of SpaceX's Crew Dragon on its uncrewed Demo-1 test flight. Boeing's uncrewed Orbital Flight Test is targeted for launch no earlier than April," NASA officials wrote in the status update.
Artist’s illustrations of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner (left) and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsules in orbit.
Credit: Boeing/SpaceX
"These adjustments allow for completion of necessary hardware testing, data verification, remaining NASA and provider reviews, as well as training of flight controllers and mission managers," they added.
The next big box to check after these demonstration flights will be tests of the private vehicles' emergency escape systems, which would get the capsules away from danger if a problem arose during launch. Boeing plans to run this test in May, and SpaceX will perform its version in June.
Then will come huge milestones — crewed test flights to the ISS. Astronauts haven't launched to orbit from American soil since July 2011, when NASA retired its space shuttle fleet. Since then, the space agency has been dependent on Russian Soyuz rockets and spacecraft to perform this taxi service.
Crew Dragon's crew-carrying demonstration is currently scheduled for July, and Starliner's for no earlier than August, according to the new NASA update. Operational flights will begin sometime thereafter, assuming everything goes well.
The latest delay is far from the first for the commercial-crew program. When NASA inked its big multibillion-dollar deals with SpaceX and Boeing in 2014, for example, agency officials said they expected Crew Dragon and Starliner to be in operation by 2017.
"There still are many critical steps to complete before launch, and, while we eagerly are anticipating these launches, we will step through our test flight preparations and readiness reviews," Kathy Lueders, NASA's commercial crew program manager, said in today's update. "We are excited about seeing the hardware we have followed through development, integration, and ground testing move into flight."
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published in November 2018 by Grand Central Publishing.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured this view of China’s Chang’e 4 lander on Jan. 30, 2019. The area around the lander is enlarged by a factor of two relative to the native pixel scale; the bright speck between two arrows is the lander. The large crater in the center (just right and below arrows) is about 1,440 feet (440 meters) wide.
Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
China's history-makingChang'e 4 missionhas been spied by one of its robotic moon-studying brethren.
NASA'sLunar Reconnaissance Orbiter(LRO) recently caught a glinty glimpse of the Chang'e 4 lander, which on Jan. 2 became the first-ever spacecraft to make a soft touchdown on the moon's mysterious far side.
On Jan. 30, LRO rolled 70 degrees to the west as it approached Chang'e 4's landing site, the floor of the 115-mile-wide (186 kilometers) Von Kármán Crater. The maneuver brought the Chinese lander into view for LRO, though the mission's rover, named Yutu 2 ("Jade Rabbit 2"), escaped detection. [Photos from the Moon's Far Side! China's Chang'e 4 Lunar Landing in Pictures]
"Because LRO was 330 kilometers (205 miles) to the east of the landing site, the Chang'e 4 lander is only about two pixels across (bright spot between the two arrows), and the small rover is not detectable," LRO team members wrote in a description of the image, which was released today (Feb. 6).
"The massive mountain range in the background is the west wall of Von Kármán Crater, rising more than 3,000 meters (9,850 feet) above the floor," they added.
Arrows indicate the position of China’s Chang'e 4 lander on the floor of Von Kármán Crater in this image captured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) on Jan. 30, 2019. The sharp crater behind and to the left of the landing site is 12,800 feet (3,900 meters) wide and 1,970 feet (600 m) deep.
Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
The Chang'e 4 lander-rover duo carry a variety of scientific instruments, which they're using to characterize the surface and near-subsurface of Von Kármán Crater. (Yutu 2 rolled down twin ramps from atop the lander a few days after touchdown.)
The mission could help scientists understand why the moon's near and far sides are so different from each other, Chinese officials have said. For example, dark volcanic plains known as maria cover most of the near side but are rare on the far side.
The Chang'e 4 lander also totes a biological experiment, which contains fruit-fly eggs and seeds of a few plants, including cotton. The cotton seeds sprouted, becoming the first non-human organisms ever to live on the lunar surface (not counting the microbes that hitched a ride with NASA’s Apollo astronauts). The little plants froze to death soon thereafter, however.
And in case you were wondering: The moon has a far side and a near side because it's "tidally locked" to Earth, meaning it always shows the same face to our planet. (That would be the near side.)
LRO has been circling the moon since 2009. The spacecraft's high-resolution imagery assists a wide variety of scientific studies and also aids planning for future robotic and human missions to Earth's nearest neighbor, NASA officials have said.
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published in November 2018 by Grand Central Publishing.
With our busy lives and fairly stable day-to-day environment, it’s easy to forget that we’re actually sitting on a huge rock hurtling through space. Only a thin atmospheric and magnetic cushion is what separates us from total annihilation. This cushion is fairly good at keeping some cosmic intruders at bay, such as smallasteroids, but larger objects could wreak havoc if they were to collide with Earth. Throughout our planet’s history, this has happened countless times, the dinosaur extinction being a prime example.
For some time, NASA has been working on an asteroid-deflection strategy and will soon launch a test mission to asteroid 65803 Didymos — a pair made of a smaller object called Didymoon that orbits around the larger 780-meter Didymos asteroid. The Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) project involves slamming a small probe into Didymoon, which measures only 160 meters in diameter, about the size of the Great Pyramid in Giza. The impact would slightly veer Didymoon away from its normal orbit around Didymos, informing NASA what kind of punch would be needed to deflect a real threat to Earth.
Danger from above
An impact with an asteroid isn’t the likeliest thing to happen in the universe. However, despite its low probability, such a scenario is a high-consequence event which requires “some degree of preparedness,” according to the authors of the new 18-page document titled the “National near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan”.
NASA has so far cataloged about 18,310 objects of all sizes, of which just over 800 are 140 meters or larger. A 2005 congressional mandate tasked the agency with tracking 90 percent of the near-Earth objects larger than 140 meters. NASA is just one-third of the way there, however.
While big asteroids, such as the kind that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, are absolutely brutal, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be worried by anything smaller. For instance, a 40- to 60-meter asteroid that exploded over Tunguska, Russia, leveled 2,000 square kilometers of forest. If the same were to happen over New York City, it would cause millions of casualties.
Didymoon will be by far the smallest asteroid ever explored by us — but even at its seemingly puny size, it would be enough to cause a continental-scale catastrophy if it slammed into Earth. The plan is to launch DART in 2021, with the goal of ramming into Didymoon in 2022 in order to change the course of the tiny world. In 2022 the double asteroid system will be only 11 million km (about 7 million miles) from Earth, which is why NASA is in quite a hurry.
Illustration of Hera at smallest asteroid ever visited.
Credit: ESA.
If all goes well, the European Space Agency (ESA) will launch a follow-up mission called HERA in order to examine the impact.
“Such a binary asteroid system is the perfect testbed for a planetary defense experiment but is also an entirely new environment for asteroid investigations. Although binaries make up 15 percent of all known asteroids, they have never been explored before, and we anticipate many surprises,” Ian Carnelli, Hera project manager, told Earth Sky.
Using a small fleet of CubeSats, the HERA mission will measure the masses of the two asteroids, their surface properties, their new orbits, and the impact site itself. ESA hopes to launch the mission by 2026.
“This will give us a good estimate of the impact’s momentum transfer, and hence its efficiency as a deflection technique,” explains ESA’s Hera project scientist, Michael Küppers. “These are fundamental parameters to enable the validation of numerical impact models necessary to design future deflection missions. We will better understand whether this technique can be used even for larger asteroids, giving us certainty we could protect our home planet if needed.”
Scientists with NASA will unveil the latest climate trends and global temperature measurements for Earth today (Feb. 6) and you can follow the announcement live online.
SNASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) "will provide the annual release of global temperatures data and discuss the most important climate trends of 2018" in a teleconference today at 11:30 a.m. EST (1630 GMT). The audio will stream atNASA.gov/liveandwill be simulcast on Space.com here, courtesy of NASA.
The participants will include Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and Deke Ardnt, chief of the global monitoring branch of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, NASA officials said in a statement. [What Is the Temperature of Earth?]
Scientists with NASA and NOAA will discuss the Earth's 2018 global temperatures and climate conditions on Feb. 6, 2018. Shown here are 2017 global temperature data from satellites. Higher than normal temperatures are shown in red. Lower than normal temperatures are shown in blue.
Credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio
NASA and NOAA independently monitor the Earth's surface temperatures and changes based on observations of both land areas and oceans, using a network of satellites scattered in Earth orbit. While most people associate climate change with rising sea levels and melting glaciers, the effects of global warming are more profound than most realize.
For example, scientists from scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) – and five other organizations – discovered last year that human-induced climate change is even extending into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide emissions flow into the troposphere (the lowest level of Earth's atmosphere) and increase the contrast between cold winters and hot summers.
A separate University of Iowa-led 2018 study of hurricanes suggests that some of these massive storms throw down 10 percent more rainfall today, compared with the period before climate change. That's expected to worsen to up to 30 percent more rainfall, according to simulations. Peak wind speeds could also pick up by as much as 33 mph (53 km/h).
'Oumuamua, the first known visitor frombeyond our solar system, is long gone, but it's still leaving scientists guessing. A new explanation proposes that the strange object was a "monstrous fluffy dust aggregate" — that's a technical term, apparently — produced by a busted-up comet.
That's the explanation laid out by Zdenek Sekanina, an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a new, unpublished paper. The explanation draws on observations of comets breaking apart as they get closer to the sun.
'Oumuamua is the interstellar object that astronomers detected whizzing through our solar system in October 2017. It was the first interstellar object scientists ever spotted, although they expect thousands more have gone unnoticed. Ever since 'Oumuamua's appearance, scientists have debated what the object is: asteroid or comet, ripped-up planetesimal, or of course, the least likely explanation, an alien probe.
The new paper adds another loop to the already-knotty issue by suggesting that the object changed during its brief time in our solar system. Scientists caught sight of 'Oumuamua only when it was already on its way out of the neighborhood, after all. So, while the object appeared reddish, long and thin during its exit, it may have started out with different properties. ['Oumuamua in Photos: The Solar System's 1st Interstellar Visitor Explained]
An artist's depiction of the interstellar object now called 'Oumuamua.
Credit: M. Kornmesser/ESO
Starting with that idea, the new paper compared 'Oumuamua to other faint but more mundane comets that astronomers have observed. Typically, when these faint comets come within a quarter of Earth's distance from the sun, they don't survive the visit. And a comet's death is not a quiet process; instead, these comets experience a so-called outburst that triggers their disintegration.
Specifically, the paper considers a comet called C/2017 S3 (Pan-STARRS), which crept in from the Oort Cloud, which surrounds our solar system. This comet experienced two of these violent outbursts before finally falling to pieces. Observers gathered some strange data that suggested C/2017 S3's remains had become "a monstrous, extremely fluffy aggregate of loosely bound dust grains" before it even reached its closest approach to the sun.
While 'Oumuamua's precise origins and structure have confused scientists, this explanation offers a new complication: that the object wasn't actually a solid body when scientists first spotted it but was instead a clump of remnants. The new paper proposes that a similar fate to C/2017's befell 'Oumuamua, with its outburst coming before any scientific observations occurred, thus disguising the object's original structure.
The paper was posted to the pre-print server arXiv.org on Jan. 30.
US Coast Guard Discloses Unexplained Disappearances of Submarines After UFO Activity (Video)
US Coast Guard Discloses Unexplained Disappearances of Submarines After UFO Activity (Video)
There are many strange facts surrounding a number of missing submarines. Joseph was on duty on an Ocean Station patrol on the Coast Guard Cutter Mellon.
It was during this patrol that they had a number of unique UFO sightings that included radar and visual verification by a number of witnesses.
Three objects passed over the ship traveling at 3500mph having approached the ship from the direction of where the sub was lost. Flying time of note from OSV to that site at that speed recorded and verified was approximately 10 minutes.
It is highly possible that the UFO phenomenon, and what could have been a very dangerous “rogue” operation gone array, possibly leading to what could have been one of the most significant event.
Even thought this may only be anecdotal data it may help penetrate the veil of secrecy and mystery surrounding the Submarines.
Alexander Weygers, a Renaissance man in the mold of the tech industry’s stated ideal, inspired an art dealer to become an acolyte.
Alexander Weygers made numerous detailed drawings of an aircraft called the “Discopter”, a vertical liftoff aircraft that looked very much like what was to be later termed “flying saucer” and other drawings of an American cities specifically flying saucers in San Francisco and as well as a port in Chicago.
He sent these detailed plans to all the branches of the U.S. Military and was eventually told that they were intrigued by the concept and the design of the craft but were not prepared at that time because the war effort superseded its development.
However he did indeed patent the design for the “Discopter” in January 1944 with the U.S. Patent Office and it served as the prototype for other similar aircraft that have been developed up to the present day.
Ashlee Vance visits the dealer whose curiosity about Weygers has evolved into an obsession.
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WETENSCHAPRusland wil over twaalf jaar voor het eerst kosmonauten naar de maan brengen. Na 2031 zou er jaarlijks een bemande vlucht naar de satelliet van de aarde gestuurd worden. Dat blijkt ook uit een rapport van het Russische ruimtevaartagentschap Roskosmos, waarover het persbureau Ria Novosti vandaag berichtte. In 2032 zal naar verluidt de tweede bemanning op de maan landen en een speciaal voertuig meenemen voor excursies van toekomstige kosmonauten.
Rusland wil ook deelnemen aan het Amerikaanse project voor een ruimtestation, dat rond de maan draait. De constructie ervan zou in 2034 kunnen beginnen, aldus het rapport. Gehoopt wordt dat vanaf daar vluchten diep in de ruimte mogelijk zijn. Voor de bouw van een dergelijk station, ontwikkelt Rusland zware raketten, zei de baas van Roskosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, eind vorig jaar. Rusland wil met de maanmissie terug aanknopen waar de Sovjetunie tientallen jaren geleden stopte. Na technische ongelukken bevroor Moskou in de jaren zeventig zijn dure plannen voor een maanlanding. Deze keer werken de Russen bij de exploratie van de maan samen met de VS, Europa en China.
Two geologists who were on a field trip to study volcanic rocks in Namibia came upon another huge discovery –Africa once had ice streams. Graham Andrews and Sarah Brown, who are geologists at West Virginia University, were exploring the South African desert country when they noticed an odd land formation.
The land consisted of flat desert along with hundreds of steep, long hills. The landscape was shaped by drumlins which are hills that are commonly found in areas that once had glaciers. Needless to say, glaciers – even ancient ones – are not what one would expect in the desert.
Andrews explained that they knew exactly what they were looking at, “We quickly realized what we were looking at because we both grew up in areas of the world that had been under glaciers, me in Northern Ireland and Sarah in northern Illinois.”
Once Andrews returned home from the trip, he did some research on the drumlins in Namibia but found out that nobody had ever studied them. He said, “The last rocks we were shown on the trip are from a time period when southern Africa was covered by ice,” adding, “People obviously knew that part of the world had been covered in ice at one time, but no one had ever mentioned anything about how the drumlins formed or that they were even there at all.”
That’s when he partnered up with Andy McGrady, who is a geology senior at West Virginia University, and they used morphometrics to measure the shapes of the drumlins to see if they could find any regular patterns from when they were carved by the ice.
Normal glaciers don’t move a lot, but they discovered that there are big grooves in the drumlins that indicate that the ice must have been fast-moving in order to create the grooves. Those large grooves indicate that there was in fact an ice stream in the southern part of Africa around 300 million years ago during the late Paleozoic Age.
“The ice carved big, long grooves in the rock as it moved,” Andrews explained, “It wasn’t just that there was ice there, but there was an ice stream. It was an area where the ice was really moving fast.”
What they discovered shows that the southern part of Africa was over the South Pole during that time period. “These features provide yet another tie between southern Africa and south America to show they were once joined,” Andrews confirmed.
For some unknown reason, UFO reports seem to be on the decline even in the face of recent so-called “disclosures” of government research into unidentified aerial phenomena. What’s behind this mysterious decline? Have we become jaded and over-saturated with UFO reports thanks to the innumerable conspiracy YouTube channels publishing endless streams of shaky, out-of-focus videos of lens flares, or could something else be afoot?
As all things UFOs, it’s hard to say. Whatever the cause is, there seems to have been a sharp decrease in annual UFO sightings reported since 2014. That’s according to Cheryl Costa, a reporter with the Syracuse News Times who tracks NUFORC reports throughout the state of New York. According to her most recently published data, UFO sighting reports peaked in 2012 with 378, only to begin dropping in 2014. In 2018, only 103 sightings were reported in New York.
It’s important to remember that the term ‘UFO’ doesn’t necessarily imply an extraterrestrial craft, merely something unidentified in the skies.
New York’s downward trend is reflective of national data; UFO sighting reports nationwide in the US peaked in 2014 with 13,985 and fell to just 6,933 in 2018, a 50% decline. Despite the decrease, UFO hot spots Las Vegas, Nevada and Phoenix, Arizona once again remain at the top of the list of cities with the highest numbers of UFO sightings, with 52 and 40, respectively. What’s behind this decrease in UFO sightings? Is this a sociological phenomenon, or are anomalous objects actually disappearing from our skies?
One would think that UFO sightings would be increasing along with the rise of aerial drones, but the opposite is true. Could it be that drones have created a go-to explanation and have led to fewer anomalous aerial phenomena to be reported? Or are urban light pollution and the digital zombification caused by mobile technology keeping us from gazing up at the skies as much as we used to? Is that all by design? Any guess is as good as any at this point.
Shhh. Quit asking questions and keep your eyes pointed downward at your device. Always at your device.
Are people losing interest in UFOs due to over-saturation, or are these phenomena actually less frequent than they once were? For those of us who track and research anomalous phenomena for a living, either explanation should be worrying.
When the CIA released millions of declassified documents in 2017 and placed them in a searchable online database, it was expected that some seriously spooky stuff would turn up. It’s public knowledge that the CIA has conducted research into all sorts of paranormal or otherwise anomalous phenomena ranging frompsychic abilities to UFOs, but a new trove of documents discovered among the millions of files has revealed the US intelligence agency even once went looking for the legendary Yeti in the mountains of Nepal. Was the ever-elusive abominable snow man-ape ever found?
Who knows; after all, the CIA likely released these documents merely to placate the public under the guise of transparency and is withholding the really good stuff in dusty warehouses full of the world’s higher mysteries and secrets. Still, these new documents add to a growing body of evidence showing that the CIA may take paranormal phenomena or entities including the Yeti seriously – or at least purport to in order to cover its tracks.
The documents were unearthed and posted online by Amish Raj Mulmi at the Kathmandu Post. In addition to the Yeti documents, the files show that the CIA took interest in at least seven different sightings of unidentified flying objects above Nepal and Bhutan in 1968. The unidentified objects described in the reports range from a “white light” emitting “blasting sounds” and “white smoke” to fast-moving cigar shape objects reminiscent of many other UFO sightings from the time period. Here are the “Particulars of the Object” from one report from 19 February, 1968:
A fast-moving object, long and thin, emitting red and green bright light, as bright as to cause daylight. Thunder sound heard after few second of sighting object.
Sure sounds an awful lot like a ballistic missile test or high-altitude aircraft breaking the sound barrier (aircraft typically have red and green navigation lights on the left and right wingtips, respectively). That would make sense given the historical and political context surrounding these sightings, which happened at the height of US involvement in the Vietnam War and at a time when the relatively newly-formed People’s Republic of China was ramping up their missile research, nuclear weapons program, and domestic aircraft production.
An early Chinese Shenyang J-8 from the 1960s.
Naturally, then, the CIA would have wanted to document any sightings of anomalous aerial objects in case they might shed light on what the Chinese or Soviets were up to in the skies above the region. One report even mentions that “huge metallic disc-shaped object with a six-foot base and four feet in height was found in a crater” at the foot of the Himalayas. Could this have been a crashed Soviet or Chinese aircraft or missile, or something stranger?
China and Nepal share a mountainous border with several ports of entry like the “Crisscross road” seen here.
The documents discovered by the Kathmandu Post also contain a cable sent 30 November, 1959 from the American Embassy in Kathmandu to the Department of State in Washington, D.C. The document outlines America’s official “Regulations Governing Mountain Climbing Expeditions in Nepal – Related to Yeti” and describe what American personnel conducting so-called “Mountaineering and Scientific Expeditions in Nepal” should do in the event of contact with the Yeti:
1. Royalty of Rs. 5000/- Indian Currency will have to be paid to His Majesty’s Government of Nepal for a permit to carry out an expedition in search of ‘Yeti.’
2. In case ‘Yeti’ is traced it can be photographed or caught alive but it must not be killed or shot at except in an emergency arising out of self defence. All photographs taken of the animal, the creature itself if captured alive or dead, must be surrendered to the Government of Nepal at the earliest time.
3. News and reports throwing light on the actual existence of the creature must be submitted to the Government of Nepal as soon as they are available and must not in anyway way be given out to the Press or Reporters for publicity without the permission of the Government of Nepal.
While hardcore ‘Squatchers may point to this document as proof of the US government’s knowledge of the legendary Yeti, it very well may be that these cables were actually using the Yeti to hide the true nature of these alleged “Mountaineering and Scientific Expeditions.” In the late 1950s, the CIA and the US government were deeply concerned with the spread of Chinese communist forces throughout the region as the Chinese were actively asserting their presence along the border with Nepal. It could be that the Yeti hunt was actually a cover for spies to keep tabs on the PRC’s activities in the region. It’s known that the CIA and other intelligence agencies often use “scientific expeditions” as a cover to send agents into the field; if you replace every instance of “Yeti” in the document with “Chinese spies or scouts,” these cables begin to make a lot more sense.
It’s long been suspected that intelligence agencies intentionally muddy the waters by using alleged paranormal activity to cover their tracks.
While these documents are far from a smoking gun, they may show how the government study of anomalous phenomena can be used to mask the true purpose of the CIA’s or other agencies’ intelligence gathering activities. Could the CIA actually have been hunting the legendary Yeti and gathering reports of truly unidentified aerial phenomena? It’s possible – but it’s highly more probable that they were keeping tabs on the USA’s favorite frenemy, the PRC. What might these documents suggest about the Pentagon’s modern day study of UFOs?
Dulce Base 2019 - What REALLY Happens Deep Underground is Astounding!
Dulce Base 2019 - What REALLY Happens Deep Underground is Astounding!
Located almost two miles beneath Archuleta Mesa on the Jicarilla Apache Indian Reservation near Dulce, New Mexico was an installation classified so secret, its existence would be one of the most protected realities in the world.
In the following video we will look at the Secret Space Program: the ships of the Deep Space Fleet; interstellar/interspecies treaty conferences on Earth; non-human species who work with the military; Mark Richards' training with the Raptor Imperial Fleet; and, various missions on-and-off Earth to defend humanity.
In 1979 there was the human-extraterrestrial confrontation that took place at Dulce Base. The most detailed report comes from Phil Schneider, a former military geologist who worked on underground military bases.
Image left: Phil Schneider - Learn more about his experiments at the Dulce Base Here.
Philip Schneider, an explosive engineer who worked for the U.S. government, with high-level security clearance, claimed that in 1979 he participated in the building of a "secret underground base," in Dulce, New Mexico.
It was here that a horrific battle played out leaving 60 humans dead and countless subterranean aliens fighting for their life.
Schneider asserts that he was suspicious of the engineering operation while noticing the presence of Green Berets and Special Forces. His fears were realized when after drilling underground he came face-to-face with a 7-foot tall, stinky, gray alien.
Obviously he freaked out and grabbed a pistol he was carrying and shot and killed two aliens. Another alien shot some laser-plasma ball or whatever at him and blew off some of his fingers.
He was saved by a Green Beret who allegedly gave his life for him. In all, 60 human-people allegedly lost their lives that day at the "Alien-Human Battle of Dulce."
"There's a war under there and it's been going on since that time," he said. He spoke of 1,477 underground bases around the world, 129 of which were located in the United States. Each cost $17 billion or more.
He said the Black Budget, hidden from other U.S. government agencies and from the public, garners 25 percent of the gross national product. Military forces from multiple countries have been engaged in such warfare with aliens, he said.
In the video Jo Ann speaks about her knowledge of operations and secret meetings that these men were involved with. She shares information about numerous alien species, the secret space fleet, and battles with aliens on- and off-world.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Formation Cigar-shaped UFOs traveling through space next to the Orion Nebula
Formation Cigar-shaped UFOs traveling through space next to the Orion Nebula
On February 3, 2019 a sky-watcher using a telescope Skywhatcher 8” with camera ZWO-AS1174MM-USB3 captured a formation of three cigar-shaped UFOs traveling through space next to the Orion Nebula (M42)
The footage shows the Orion Nebula and surrounding space when suddenly a white colored large cigar-shaped UFO appears out of knowhere with two cigar-shaped UFOs on each side of the craft. The two UFOs are less visible, maybe they fly at a further distance from the white colored UFO.
Together they fly in a formation where a fourth cigar-shaped UFO follows at some distance behind the three huge alien craft.. Given the distance they cover in a very short time, the speed must be enormous.
With all the other older footage's of UFOs near the Orion Nebula, this footage is again proof that many of these interstellar alien spacecraft are present in the Orion Nebula sector.
The Orion Nebula (also known as Messier 42, M42, or NGC 1976) is a diffuse nebula situated in the Milky Way, being south of Orion's Belt in the constellation of Orion.
M42 is located at a distance of 1,344 ± 20 light years and is the closest region of massive star formation to Earth.
Scott Kelly is a formerNASAastronaut who commanded the International Space Station (ISS) on Expedition 26,45 and 46. On March 27, 2015, Mr Kelly launched in Soyuz TMA-16M in what marked the beginning of a year in space. He detailed his journey on social media, posting regular updates.
However, one photo he snapped on board the ISS received more attention than the rest.
On November 15, Mr Kelly tweeted a photo of India from outer space, captioned: “Day 233. Once upon a #star over Southern India #GoodNight from @space_station! #YearInSpace.”
At first glance, the photo appeared to simply show the South Asian country lit up during the night.
However, space boffins were quick to notice a small, white object in the top right of the snap, that appeared out of place.
One reply read: “What is that in the upper right corner?”
Scott Kelly sent the tweet in 2015
(Image: GETTY)
Scott Kelly's tweet shows the anomaly in the top-right
(Image: TWITTER/STATIONCDRKELLY)
Is that a UFO on the top of the frame?
Twitter user
Another added: “What is that in the TOP RIGHT-HAND CORNER?!”
A third questioned: “Is that a UFO on the top of the frame?”
And a four flat-out claimed: “Great shot of a UFO Scott.”
However, these theories were quickly debunked, with some revealing the “UFO” is actually part of the space station.
The High Definition Earth-Viewing System, mounted on the exterior of the European Space Agency’s Columbus module and resembles a similar shape to that in the photo.
A change in brightness quickly reveals the UFO is actually part of the ISS
(Image: TWITTER/@STATIONCDRKELLY)
Scott Kelly spent a year in space
(Image: GETTY)
The HDEV includes several HD cameras enclosed in two temperature-controlled canisters that are covered in reflective material.
Today marks 31 years since the first “human satellite” was launched.
On February 7, 1984, Bruce McCandless became the first human to fly untethered in space when he exited the US space shuttle Challenger and manoeuvred using a rocket backpack.
McCandless orbited Earth in tangent with the shuttle at speeds greater than 17,500 miles per hour and flew up to 320 feet away from the Challenger.
After an hour and a half testing and flying the jet-powered backpack and admiring Earth, McCandless safely reentered the shuttle.
Disc-shaped UFO that causes condensation is a small but very interesting object in the photo. It shows what I believe is the process of some kind of condensation at the bottom of this craft. The special feature with UFOs and condensation is evident throughout my photos on site. Extraterrestrial vessels cause condensation as terrestrial aircraft´s do, just in a different way.
As you can see in the above picture, the disc-shaped object is very small. But thanks to high-resolution DSLR photography, we can magnify the image more than normal before the object gets screwed in the pixels.
So far so good. The disc-shaped UFO has been magnified to a very satisfying extent, but it´s still very faint in the above picture. Let´s bring it into Adobe Photoshop and use some filters. First filter I use is Auto Contrast with some extra Brightness, see below.
Finally, the disc appears with a metallic finish on top and black in the middle at the bottom. At the absolute bottom of this disc, white material, or a substance, is emitted or is just there stationary. That´s how I see it. You might see something else?
The last picture above was processed with Auto Tone in Photoshop and shows a clear metallic round object.
The pictures here originates from a photo investigation inside a secluded pasture where I had a creature UFO sighting on May 24. And because of that UFO sighting, I decided to visit the site again on May 25. I had my Canon EOS 60D DSLR camera with me and it produced 173 images and this UFO gallery with 43 hi-res UFO photos.
Disc-shaped UFO is a paraglider?
The white material or substance that is beneath the disc-shaped UFO has a strange shape. It is bent downwards away from the craft? One should think that a paraglider just passed below the object. Well, I did not see any paraglider while I was there. I have seen a paraglider in the area before but not with a white parachute. Even if the paraglider was there, the disc above would still be a mystery!
Because of the high-resolution photography, it would have revealed the paraglider him- or her self including the ropes connecting her/him to the parachute. So the thing below the disc-shaped UFO is NOT a paraglider but something else.
Disc-shaped UFO and condensation?
I have a few photos with UFOs that emits what looks like condensation and in different ways. Sometimes it looks like they are using a cloud to hide in and I wonder if they create clouds for that specific purpose? And sometimes it looks like they emit, or cause condensation like an aircraft does, but different.
If the disc-shaped UFO here really causes condensation I cannot know for sure? But something strange is happening beneath the craft and it is not something on the lens. It is ON the object. What could it be? A field? I adhere to that some objects have this cloud-white material on them or it is trailing them. Some kind of additional phenomenon is maybe evident here?
Explore the “Condensation”-TAG to see the other unidentified flying objects related to possible cloud creation and condensation.
Basic photo-sighting data
Denmark, Odense May 25, 2017, at 3.08 pm local time
The latest episode of History’s Project Blue Book covers one of the most significant UFO mysteries, Foo Fighters. However, remember, this is a fiction program, so although it is true World War II pilots saw strange light they called Foo Fighters, not much else in the episode is real history. Much of the rest of the show is full of conspiratorial intrigue and adventure. Luck for you, to find out about the actual events in history and the mythology behind the show, you have my weekly reviews. Read my latest review to find out more about the real Foo Fighters, and, among others things, mysterious messages allegedly from aliens.
The U.S. Air Force may have some explaining to do when it comes to UFOs, but what is happening to their pilots and crew who spot UFOs inProject Blue Bookis downright terrifying.
In “Foo Fighters,” we see the return of Henry Fuller, the pilot who was the witness of the first UFO encounter investigated by Hynek and Quinn. Fuller has gone nuts and has been stalking Mimi, seeking to speak with Hynek. Now she has Russiansanda crazy pilot stalking her.
We also find out that the secret keepers in the Air Force, including Quinn’s bosses, Valentine and Harding, are looking for Fuller because he seems to hold secrets they cannot allow to be revealed.
In one encounter police officers have with Fuller he is stammering incoherently about a string of numbers. Fuller avoids capture, but word gets back to Hynek who recognizes the numbers. They were displayed to him on a screen at the end of the first episode. In that encounter, Hynek chased a man in black to a building in an abandoned amusement park. At the end of the chase, Hynek found himself in a room with a projector that was displaying strange symbols and numbers.
Hynek checked his notes on that encounter, and the numbers matched Fuller’s. He recognized them as a radio frequency, and when he tuned in, he heard a voice with a warning. It repeated a message saying “the arrival is upon us.” Using radio equipment, Hynek tracked where the signal to a photographer’s studio. The photographer says she was paid to set up the radio transmitter by someone she did not know.
It turns out the transmitter was set up by a former Air Force pilot who was part of a group of former pilots who had seen UFOs during World War II. They called the UFOs Foo Fighters - yup, same name as the band. They described the UFOs as glowing orbs of light. They said when they reported the encounters; the Air Force did something to make them forget the incidents and gave them dishonorable discharges. The group eventually banded together and began trying to communicate with the aliens they suspected were flying the Foo Fighters.
Hynek, unsure of what the pilots saw, begins to suspect the Air Force was using mind control on the men to blank their memories. But what is the Air Force hiding?
Hynek had not shared the incident with the man in black to Quinn, but now that he felt he was beginning to piece things together and was comfortable trusting Quinn, he spilled the beans. They decide to investigate the abandoned amusement park, but what Hynek had seen before was removed.
While wandering alone, Hynek finds Fuller. He shows Fuller one of the pictures he had seen on the screen at the park. Fuller had a strange reaction and grabbed a can of fuel and ran off. He stops in an open area and then began pouring the fuel on his head. Realizing what is about to happen, Hynek ran to stop him but was tackled by Quinn. At that moment Fuller went up in flames. The symbol triggered some sort of self-destruct command that someone programmed into Fuller’s mind. Scary stuff.
The more fear-inducing this show gets, the more exciting it gets. Project Blue Book also teeters between suggesting the UFO phenomenon is extraterrestrial to suggesting it is the result of nefarious military research. All of this makes for an exciting show. However, at this point, it is not representing the real Project Blue Book. It’s also becoming very dark. The men in black are jerks, the Air Force are jerks, the aliens - if they even exist - are no help, and every town Quinn and Hynek go to they get threatened by locals portrayed as country bumpkins. Fortunately, the majority of what happened in this episode is made up.
The dark turn this episode has taken made this episode a little less enjoyable for me. I contacted Paul Hynek, one of the real Dr. Hynek’s sons to get his opinion on the show’s portrayal of his mother being embroiled in Russian espionage.
“It's part and parcel of the show being set smack dab during the middle of the cold war,” Paul wrote via email. “Of course this didn't happen as far as I know, but it's part of the show that viewers, should they care, will likely realize to have been dramatized.”
While the suspense of the series has been amped up, the dark conspiracy turn is a bit cliché. The excitement of Project Blue Book and Hynek’s involvement inspires a scientific curiosity into an unknown phenomenon that is wondrous and baffling, which is how the series began. Although I enjoy the references to real mythologies related to the UFO phenomenon, I hope the show does not devolve into yet another dark alien/government conspiracy show.
The Project Blue Book Files
Let’s start with the Foo Fighters. During World War II allied aircraft personnel occasionally reported spotting round aircraft following them, often at their wingtips. Pilots assumed these were weapons, but none had caused any damage. In the daylight they looked like metallic balls, at night they appeared as glowing orbs of various colors. Investigations into the Foo Fighters have mostly been inconclusive, although a couple of them did conclude the Germans must have had a secret remote-controlled weapon.
Pilots who spotted Foo Fighters were debriefed, and several of their stories made it into newspapers. None of the airmen were reprimanded, discharged, or brainwashed. However, there is a case in which an Air Force Colonel believes his men were debriefed and possibly drugged after a UFOencounter.
In 1980, on the evening of December 26, strange lights were seen in the Rendlesham Forest outside the gates of Bentwaters Royal Air Force base. Bentwaters is in the UK who leased the base to the U.S. Air Force at the time. Three security personnel were sent to investigate. They approached a brightly lit object. Fearful, one of the men stayed with the jeep. Another made it close to the object but stopped short of walking up to it. The third walked right up to the object and described seeing a triangular craft about 6 feet long hovering a few feet off the ground. He had time to circle it and take notes before it moved up above the tree line and took off at an incredible speed.
Deputy base commander Charles Halt was skeptical the lights in the forest were unexplainable. He believed there was a mundane answer and planned to investigate personally if the lights should return. He got his chance a couple of nights later. The lights were seen again, and he took some men into the forest. This time he witnessed the lights firsthand. One of the bright lights broke into several lights and flew into the night sky. Another of the lights maneuvered over the base’s weapons storage area and beamed a light into it. The object then moved towards him and his men and shone a light down in front of their feet. Unable to explain what he saw, Halt believes they encountered alien technology that night.
Halt says he learned years later that “OSI [Office of Special Investigations] operatives harshly interrogated five young airmen…who were key witnesses.” Halt says “the agents told them not to talk about the UFO events, or their careers would be in jeopardy.” And that “Drugs such as Sodium Pentothal…were administered during the interrogations…” His concern is that “the whole thing has had a damaging and lasting effect on the men involved.”
Another bit of strangeness in this episode that is reminiscent of a real-life bit of weirdness is the weird radio transmissions Hynek heard. The real version is even more dramatic. In 1977, British television was interrupted by an extraterrestrial message. On November 26, during Southern Television’s evening news the picture “wobbled” and the audio was taken over by a voice with a message from aliens.
“This is the voice of Vrillon, a representative of the Ashtar Galactic Command, speaking to you,” the voice pronounced. “For many years you have seen us as lights in the skies. We speak to you now in peace and wisdom as we have done to your brothers and sisters all over this, your planet Earth.”
The message continued to warn humans that we need to get rid of our weapons and take care of our planet, primarily as the earth was about to enter the Age of Aquarius. The announcement continued for nearly 6 minutes.
The incident is widely regarded as a hoax, but no one has ever claimed responsibility for the event, nor have investigators figured out how it was pulled off. Some, of cou}rse, think it was aliens. But if it was, we certainly did not heed their warning.
On April 12th, 1961, a Russian man named Yuri Gagarin made history aboard a Soviet Vostok 3KA-3 spacecraft. For years, the United States and Soviet Union had been using the barrier between our world and beyond as a benchmark to test each nation’s greatest technological and engineering advances, and on that day, Gagarin achieved an incredible victory for the communist nation: he flew in space.
The space race was about far more than national pride, however, it was truly about global supremacy. Each nation recognized the final frontier as both a tactical advantage for military operations and a public relations necessity – competition put the American people behind spending the money required to go up against the Red giant, and victory would benefit morale nationwide. However, the Soviets did not need the public’s approval for expenditures, opting instead to announce each mission toward the unknown only after its successful completion, leaving their people under the impression that the Soviet program was incapable of failure.
In recent years, however, stories have begun to emerge about failed Soviet space missions and their policy of ensuring the media, the public, and their American competition never learned of their missteps.
Photographs surfaced in the 1970s depicting early Cosmonauts (Soviet Astronauts) at work and on vacation with one another, but because of confusion regarding which photographs had been published, Soviet news managers accidentally released never before seen versions of the images. When previously published images were compared to the images that were released in the seventies, inconsistencies began to surface. Most notable among these issues were missing Cosmonauts; the Soviet government had actually airbrushed entire people out of group photographs, opting to pretend these men were never a part of the program to begin with.
When confronted about these alterations, the Soviet Government made a number of fumbled attempts at explaining why they felt the need to forge the images released to the public. Finally, in the final years of Soviet reign, Gorbachev instructed Soviet journalists and historians to determine what truly happened to these “missing” and omitted men. Their research revealed that most had been expelled from the program for behavior that made them unsuitable to be seen as heroes for the nation or had developed medical conditions that prohibited them from participating in space flight. According to reports, the Soviet government had opted to remove them from records completely rather than explain away their failures in public.
All of this did little to sway American beliefs that the Soviets, even years after America claimed victory in the space race by landing on the moon, had more to hide than they were letting on. While some Americans have gone so far as to travel to Russia to meet with some of these redacted cosmonauts to verify Soviet stories, not all of the men can be accounted for officially.
American author and former NASA mission control scientist, James Oberg, was one of the first to notice the inconsistencies in the Soviet images and, although he has written at length about his beliefs regarding these “lost” cosmonauts in books like “Uncovering Soviet Disasters,” he seems fairly convinced in recent years that the Soviets were telling the truth about these redactions, and that most, if not all, of these missing cosmonauts were simply removed from the space program photographs to protect their flawless reputation.
Possibly the most damning, or at least the most controversial, evidence to suggest that the Soviet space program was not nearly as flawless as they contended at the time, were reports of a pair of Italian brothers that recorded radio transmissions prior to and after Gagarin’s historic flight that seemed to indicate manned orbital missions going awry.
The Judica-Cordiglia brothers were amateur hand radio operators that released a number of recordings in 1963 that they claimed were recorded during the Soviet’s most intense period of attempts to put a cosmonaut in space; attempts which they claim began in 1960, nearly a year prior to Gagarin’s successful mission.
According to the brothers, in May of 1960 they recorded a Morse code message indicating that a manned Soviet spacecraft had drifted dangerously off course. Then, on November 28th, 1960, another Morse code signal, this time an SOS distress call, was recorded as another spacecraft reportedly left Earth’s orbit. In February of 1961, they recorded a cosmonaut audibly suffocating to death while attempting to contact mission control, then in April, they tracked Gagarin’s vessel as it made three successful orbits around Earth before reentering. The Soviets announced Gagarin’s success three days after the brothers claim to have tracked his flight path.
The recordings did not stop there, however. In May, the brothers claimed to have recorded another craft’s distress call as it slipped out of orbit, then again in October and November. In November of 1963, the brothers said they recorded a female cosmonaut pleading for help as her craft burned up during reentry. A final death, according to these brothers, occurred in April of 1964, again due to failed heat shielding during the return flight.
There are confirmed reports of Soviets dying in their pursuit of space flight, but these reports were often not confirmed until after the fall of the Soviet Union and in the face of overwhelming evidence. Gagarin’s own best friend died in an orbital mission. According to claims, he was aware that his mission was likely to fail due to a number of structural issues on the vessel, but opted to fly anyway to prevent his friend and backup pilot, the Soviet hero Gagarin, from having to take the risk. While it is confirmed that Vladimir Kamarov died during the failed re-entry of his Soyuz 1 capsule, rumors continue to surface about his final minutes, in which many claim he railed against the Soviet regime and faulted them for his impending death.
Twenty-two Americans have died as a result of our own efforts to extend mankind’s reach beyond our tiny blue dot. The task is incredibly dangerous and the men and women of every nation’s space program should be heralded for their bravery, but if claims about Soviet efforts to erase the lives of men and women that were lost in pursuit of victory over America are even partially true, it would add a dark lens to how we perceive all Soviet accomplishments during the era.
The Hines Camp is part of the property northwest of Roswell where a mysterious object crashed in 1947. Some of the crash debris was stored in this structure. (John Dilmore Photo)
The 1947 UFO crash site is under new management.
Bogle Ltd. Co. of Dexter has sold the Lincoln County ranching property about 75 miles northwest of Roswell to Dinwiddie Cattle Co. LLC.
Something crashed in 1947 at what was then the J.B. Foster ranch, with the U.S. Army announcing it had recovered a “flying disc” but later saying the debris was merely the remnants of a high-altitude weather balloon. Speculation about extraterrestrials and government cover-ups has existed ever since, inspiring books, movies and TV shows as well as serious scholarship and research.
A deed filed with the Lincoln County Clerk’s Office shows that the crash-site property was transferred to the Dinwiddie Cattle Co. Nov. 26. The Lincoln County Assessor’s Office indicates the property is a bit larger than 78 acres.
Tommy Dinwiddie said the parcel happens to be part of a much larger land purchase for the cattle company’s ranching operations.
Without a strong personal interest in the UFO connection at this time, Dinwiddie said he can’t say for sure whether the crash-site property will be made available to the public.
“I just don’t know a whole lot about it,” Dinwiddie said. “The guy who is running the ranch over there for me knows quite a bit about it, and after we kind of get our feet on the ground running it, we will do some more talking about it and figuring out what we want to do.”
The Bogle family hosted tours of the site during the most recent UFO Festival in July, marking the first time that the group provided visitor access during its 66 years of ownership of the land. Prior to that, only researchers or documentary makers were given permission to be on the property.
The public’s fascination with the “Roswell Incident” and other UFO and extraterrestrial matters created a new tourism focus for the area, with numerous UFO-related businesses and events created as a result. The Roswell’s International UFO Museum Research Center now attracts more than 200,000 visitors worldwide each year, and the week-long UFO Festival brings in more than 30,000 tourists each summer.
It’s been 20 years since the release of the groundbreaking “found footage” movie,The Blair Witch Project, scared audiences everywhere, and changed the horror genre forever. Now, one of the men behind the phenomenon, co-writer and director, Daniel Myrick, returns to this unique horror style with a new “documentary” horror film revolving around UFO’s. Called Skyman, the “documentary” follows Carl Merryweather, who swears he was visited by a “Skyman” while camping when he was ten.
Now, thirty years later, something is calling him back to the same spot, for some kind of reunion, and he intends to document the whole thing. Needless to say, things may not go smoothly for Carl.
The first trailer for the film was debuted at the Slamdance Festival (kind of like the more ‘out there’ little brother to Sundance) in Park City, Utah, on January 28th. A fuller trailer will be coming later this year. The film itself is set to be released towards the end of 2019.
Myrick co-created The Blair Witch Project with Eduardo Sanchez, but even after the incredible success of the film, the two haven’t worked together on a project since, going their separate ways on various projects (none of which came within a fraction of the success of their first project). Now, going back to his roots, Myrick hopes to catch fire once again with this Aline based docu-drama.
The realistic feel of these “found footage” style movies have garnered success after Blair Witch, like Paranormal Activity and the alien based The 4th Kind, which was critically panned but it actually rather terrifying. As the Father of this style, hopefully Myrick can catch lightning in a bottle a second time and give us a scary alien film that feels all to real.
So illustratesTravis Barkerof a typical suggestion his one-time blink-182bandmateTom Delongewould utter to him on tour. In fact, the once and current blink drummer says that, back in the day, he and DeLonge would partake in various substances to fuel their sleepless UFO searches. All from the comfort of the blink-182 tour bus, of course.
“He used to get loaded and just look out the bus window,” Barker tells comedian Joe Rogan as a recent guest on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. “And I used to do it with him as, I don’t know, kind of a bonding experience.”
“With Tom, that was his thing,” Barker adds. “Like, fucking let’s get high and look for UFOs. So we would! We’d just sit there and, like, stare out the bus window, look at UFOs. He would even go as far as, when we were on tour, like, ‘Let’s go and fucking look for Bigfoot.’ Whatever it was, you know? He would assemble a crew and they would go do it.”
But does the drummer actually believe in the extraterrestrial beings he once sought with DeLonge? While Barker confirms he never attended one of the Angels & Airwavessinger’s apparent Bigfoot trips, he doesn’t deny that aliens might exist.
“I feel like it could be real,” he tells Rogan. “I believe. But I’m not dedicating my life to search for it, you know? And I give it to him, man. To, like, honestly … to walk away from your fucking very successful band to go do that shit? … I have nothing but respect for his passion. But I couldn’t do that. It really shows, like, he’s very, very passionate about it.”
And what else does DeLonge seem passionate about? Mermen:
Tom DeLonge✔@tomdelonge
Mermen are def real. Mermaids are fiction but Mermen are the supernatural leaders of our world. Pure in heart, strength through love and wisdom like a blazing glorious sunset. #MerFuckingMen
Justin@Justin79554989
Tom DeLonge, I am extremely interested to receive your input about the t.v. documentary, "Mermaid's" which, originally aired on Animal Planet...Many claim it is fake animation and they have done everything to discredit the scientists who were a part of the endeavor. What say u?
Syfyhas acquiredA+E Networks’ sci-fi historical drama “Project Blue Book” for the U.K., it was announced Thursday by Syfy’s parent company, NBC Universal International Networks.
Executive produced by Oscar-winning filmmaker Robert Zemeckis, “Project Blue Book” is based on a real-life U.S. government operation of the same name and centers on the investigation by the U.S. Air Force into UFO sightings in the 1950s and ’60s. It was created by writer David O’Leary, who also serves as an executive producer.
Aiden Gillen stars as a brilliant yet underappreciated college astrophysics professor who is recruited to head the clandestine operation. Along with his Air Force captain partner (Michael Malarkey), who is assigned to debunk the stories, he is summoned to investigate UFO sightings around the country and uses science to discover what really happened. However, when some encounters cannot be explained and cases remain open, he begins to suspect that he has been duped by the government into a larger conspiracy to cover up the truth.
“This acquisition is uniquely suited for Syfy U.K. and, with top talent both in front [of] and behind the camera, we know viewers will be instantly hooked by these compelling, mysterious case files,” said Lee Raftery, managing director U.K. & emerging markets and chief marketing & content officer, NBC Universal International.
Neal McDonough, Michael Harney, Laura Mennell, and Ksenia Solo co-star. Brad Van Arragon serves as producer with series executive producers also including Sean Jablonski, Jacqueline Levine, Jack Rapke, Arturo Interian, and Barry Josen.
The 10-part series will premiere on Syfy in March. It debuted in the U.S. on the History Channel on Jan. 9.
In The Event Horizon Telescope's first episode of John Michael Godier's Event Horizon, we discuss the possibility of Alien civilizations moving to Galaxy Clusters to make the best use of mass and energy, why making copies of ourselves may be the key to interstellar travel and colonization, the habitability of planets around red dwarf stars such as Proxima Centauri, Black Holes, and so much more with our first guest Harvard Theoretical Physicist Dr. Avi Loeb, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University.
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Zo wil een topastronoom bewijzen dat er op dit moment een buitenaards schip door ons zonnestelsel reist
Zo wil een topastronoom bewijzen dat er op dit moment een buitenaards schip door ons zonnestelsel reist
Avi Loeb blijft volhouden dat het interstellaire object Oumuamua, dat momenteel door ons zonnestelsel reist, onderdeel is van een buitenaards schip. Hij wil het nu ook gaan bewijzen.
In een interview met de Washington Post zegt het hoofd van de faculteit sterrenkunde van Harvard dat hij werkt aan een vergelijking die zal bewijzen dat het vreemde object deel uitmaakt van een buitenaards schip.
De astronoom denkt dat Oumuamua geen komeet of asteroïde is, zoals zijn collega’s suggereren, maar een lichtzeil.
Duwtje in de rug
Hij wijst erop dat het interstellaire object zich te snel voortbeweegt om een stuk steen te kunnen zijn. Het is alsof het een duwtje in de rug krijgt, aldus Loeb tegen de krant.
Hij denkt ook dat het geen komeet is, aangezien de karakteristieke staart ontbreekt.
Het klopt volgens Loeb ook niet dat Oumuamua sigaarvormig is. Hij zegt dat het een kilometer lang en één millimeter dik lichtzeil is, wat zo licht en zo dun is dat het de zonnestralen kan opvangen en gebruiken voor aandrijving.
Bewijzen
Veel collega’s van de topastronoom hebben hem aangevallen vanwege zijn theorieën over Oumuamua.
Zelf zegt Loeb dat ze eerst maar eens moeten bewijzen dat hij ernaast zit.
Eeuwen geleden is het al in de bijbel voorspeld: “Aan het einde der tijden zult gij vreemde gezichten zien”. Wanneer ik zo eens om me heen kijk en het internet rond speur kan ik niets anders concluderen dan dat wij leven in het einde der tijden. Ook de Maya’s hebben eeuwen geleden al voorspeld dat 2012 het jaar zou zijn van een groot omslagpunt, het einde van een langdurig tijdperk.
Het jaar is 2012 is daar ook goed omschreven, want we weten inmiddels dat dit jaar inderdaad een omslagpunt was, waarbij de aardbevingen letterlijk in een stroomversnelling gingen. We zijn inmiddels alweer jaren verder en de aarde gaat tekeer als nooit tevoren.
Wanneer je regelmatig beelden bekijkt van wat er zoal gebeurt, dan zou je bijna bang worden en iedere keer als je denkt dat het niet veel heftiger kan worden, dan gebeurt dit toch weer en wordt er wederom een of ander record gebroken.
We krijgen van meerdere kanten tekenen dat dit inderdaad wel eens de eindtijd zou kunnen zijn. Zoals bijvoorbeeld tekenen uit de natuur, zoals onlangs ook weer in Japan.
Iets waar men in dat land als de dood voor is, is de riemvis.
Riemvissen (Regalecidae) vormen een familie uit de orde van de koningsvissen. Riemvissen komen overal voor in het open water van de oceanen. De vissen kunnen zeer lang worden, de ('gewone') riemvis tot 11 meter. De vissen hebben geen aarsvin, wel een zeer lange rugvin die voor op de kop begint. De eerste acht tot tien vinstralen van de rugvin zijn helder rood gekleurd en opvallend lang. De vissen hebben kleine ogen en geen tanden.
Het is niet dat men zozeer bang is voor wat deze vis hen kan aandoen, als wel de boodschap die deze vis brengt. In Japan hebben deze vissen een heel speciale betekenis en het volgende is wat wij hier al eerder over schreven.
In maart 2010 viel Japanse vissers een sterke toename van het aantal riemvissen op die of aanspoelden of werden gesignaleerd. Dat was in dezelfde maand dat er een heel krachtige aardbeving was van 8.8 op de schaal van Richter in Chili. Een die zo heftig was, dat men vermoedt dat de aardas zelfs iets is verschoven.
Omdat normaal gesproken deze vissen op een diepte van zo’n 1.000 meter leven is het ongewoon als ze naar de oppervlakte komen en volgens de Japanse folklore gebeurt dit als waarschuwing voor een op handen zijnde aardbeving. Volgens sommige wetenschappers kan hier misschien wel waarheid in schuilen, omdat vissen die op de bodem van de zee wonen, gevoeliger zijn voor seismische veranderingen.
In de maanden voor de zware aardbeving in Japan in maart 2011, werden er meer dan een dozijn aangespoelde riemvissen gesignaleerd die of waren aangespoeld of die verstrikt waren geraakt in de netten van vissers. Dit gebeurde in de districten Ishikawa, Toyama, Kyoto, Shimane en Nagasaki. Allemaal vlak in de buurt van het epicentrum van de aardbeving.
Nu schijnt het echter weer te beginnen en zijn er aan de Japanse westkust de afgelopen weken drie exemplaren of aangespoeld of gevangen in de netten van vissers.
De lokale sociale media gaan in overdrive en veel Japanners zetten zich schrap voor wellicht een volgende grote aardbeving, al dan niet met tsunami.
Het is slechts één van de vele ongewone dingen die zich voor doen. Ook bij ons hebben we nu te maken met een onverklaarbaar verschijnsel in de natuur:
De afgelopen weken zijn ruim 20.000 zeekoeten doodgegaan. "Dat is veel", zegt onderzoeker Mardik Leopold van de Wageningse universiteit. "Zo'n massale sterfte kennen we alleen uit de jaren 80 en 90." Dagelijks wordt er op elke kilometer strand langs de Nederlandse kust zo'n dode vogel gevonden. En dagelijks worden tientallen zieke, magere en ernstig verzwakte dieren bij de vogelasiels langs de kust binnengebracht. "Er is sprake van een alarmfase." De doodsoorzaak is nog niet duidelijk, al wordt er wel gezocht naar een verklaring.
Natuurlijk komt er een verklaring met een oorzaak. Er komt altijd een verklaring met een oorzaak, ook al hebben ze geen flauw idee wat het heeft veroorzaakt. Een verklaring met oorzaak is nodig om ervoor te zorgen dat de bevolking rustig verder slaapt en geen lastige vragen gaat stellen.
Maar, wat misschien nog wel het meest indringende van alles is, zijn beelden. Neem heel even de tijd en kijk wat er zoal gebeurde aan heftige dingen in de laatste dagen van januari.
Naast beelden zijn er geluiden. Geluiden die ergens vandaan komen en niemand weet waar. Geluiden die door merg en been gaan en waarvan je instinctief voelt dat ze niet alledaags zijn.
En de mens die bezig is onder de ontzielende leiding van de Saoedische kroonprins Mohammed Bin Salman de bouw van een New World Order stad, genaamd Neom. Dat niet alleen, die stad wordt gebouwd precies bij de Sinaïberg, de plek waar Mozes de tien geboden kreeg. Dit stuk land en de bijbehorende historie wordt verstopt gehouden door de Saoedi's en het is zelfs afgezet en ontoegankelijk gemaakt voor het publiek.
In the paranormal reporting business, there are occasionally stories that make you want to pass because there’s no way they can be true. And yet, with many of them, it’s not the first time an incident like it has happened and there could be more to it. Such is the case of a small report in the Mountain Reporter about an accident on a California highway that the driver insists was caused by extraterrestrials. Does this sound familiar to you?
“The man was not transported for his injuries and his claims of “alien intervention” during the traffic accident are under investigation by the California Highway Patrol.”
That’s the most interesting line of the brief account in theMountain Reporter of a traffic accident on State Route 18, the main highway into the rugged San Bernardino mountains in Southern California. Three California Highway Patrol units arrived at the scene around 1:30 pm to find a white Ford E350 van overturned. (Photo of the van here.) Why were three CHP cars in such a remote area near Rimforest?
“According to CHP transcripts of the original 911 call, the driver adamantly stated that his van was flipped over by aliens.”
A similar white Ford van
No incident report was available and the Mountain Reporter didn’t say if the driver – never named — was tested for impairment … the logical first thought in these types of incidents. However, those who follow UFO reports will know that unidentified flying objects have sometimes been said to stop cars and cause accidents. A series of such incidents occurred in 1965 in England and became known as the ‘Warminster Thing’. Many people reported hearing mysterious booms and seeing an orange flame in the sky emitting hisses and crackles. Among the reports were incidents of moving cars stopping after either the boom was heard or the flash was seen. While investigated for over 50 years, the mystery of the Warminster Thing and its effect on cars has never been solved.
No question what caused this accident … or is there?
This year (2019) marks the 40th anniversary of a police car accident in Marshall County, Minnesota, which the driver, Deputy Sheriff Val Johnson, blamed on a UFO. Johnson never changed his story from his original report of a bright beam of light heading towards his car, then surrounding it and rendering him unconscious. He claimed to be out for 39 minutes, during which time his watch stopped for 14 minutes, his windshield was shattered, lights were damaged and an antenna bent. Johnson had bruises and eye damage which a doctor compared to welder’s burn – a severe irritation caused by staring at a welder’s flame. Johnson refused to take a lie detector test but his testimony was accepted because of his clean record as a sheriff and because examinations of the accident scene and the car (which is on display at the Settler’s Square Historical Museum in Warren, MN) by professionals and UFO investigators could not definitively identify the cause of the accident and damages. Non-believers say either Johnson concocted the story to hide an accident or he was a victim of a prank gone bad.
Will more information come out about the “alien intervention” accident in California? We’ll keep watching. Was it a DUI? Let’s hope not. Will it become a San Bernardino Thing or a Rimforest incident? Let’s hope so … we need some good new UFO stories.
We’ve always known that the wars of the future would be fought with laser weapons and, well, here we are in the future. The militaries of all three of the world’s superpowers – China, Russia, and the US – are busy developing laser weaponspresumably capable of zapping a human being into dust in mere seconds. Or at leastcausing an excruciatingly painful burn. I mean, it’s 2019 after all. If we can’t have flying cars we might as well have giant death ray lasers, right?
Or tiny handheld laser pistols, I’m not picky.
This week, government and technology watchdog site Nextgov spotted a curious document published by the Naval Surface Warfare Center at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The weapons research facility published a solicitation for contractors to bid on destruction services, a fairly common occurrence in top-secret research circles. However, the nature of the materials to be destroyed is somewhat conspicuous: the Navy needs someone to destroy 4,000 pounds of hard disks and other digital media related to its laser weapons research and to do so with the utmost secrecy and security. What does this mean for the US military’s research into directed energy weapons?
It’s hard to say, as all of the materials slated for destruction are classified. The call for bids states that for an incineration facility to be considered for the contract, it must be within ten driving hours of White Sands Missile Range, be capable of destroying the materials down to ash within eight to ten hours, and have “at the minimum, secure entry, 24-hour armed guards and 24/7 camera surveillance with recordable date and time capabilities.” What could be stored in these media that’s so sensitive?
The US Navy has for some time been looking into using “directed energy weapons” like lasers to shoot down drones and missiles.
According to Nextgov, the Navy’s call for bids disappeared within hours. Has someone won the contract to destroy all of this secret weapons research? What does this revelation mean for the Navy’s development of directed energy weapons? Have they perfected a design and no longer need all of the prototypes and test data produced along the way? As with all things related to secret weapons research, we’ll likely never know – until the laser beams start flying.
Thanks to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Acts of both the United States and the United Kingdom, we know with complete certainty that various military and intelligence agencies have opened secret files on countless people who claim to have encountered otherworldly beings. The evidence, we know, dates back to the early 1950s. That was when the Federal Bureau of Investigation quietly opened files on numerous people in the Contactee field. They included George Adamski,George Van Tassel, Orfeo Angelucci, and Truman Bethurum. All of them – and many more too – came under the careful and secret scrutiny of J. Edgar Hoover’s G-Men. The surveillance had very little to do with the claimed encounters of the characters above, but just about everything to do with the pro-Russian statements some of the Contactees made.
Of course, the Contactee experience didn’t involve people being abducted against their will. For the most part, the so-called Space Brothers would invite amazed people onto their craft. The Space Brothers were benevolent, human-looking figures who wanted nothing more than to help steer us away from worldwide, nuclear destruction and the extinction of life on Earth. This is in stark contrast to what erupted, all across the globe, just a few years after the likes of Van Tassel and Adamski were riding high. Suddenly, government agencies were faced with another non-human phenomenon – a very much unforeseen one. It was a phenomenon which concerned the governments of both the United States and the United Kingdom.
A stark and chilling realization hit government agencies square in the face: strange creatures from faraway worlds were kidnapping citizens of this planet. People were being subjected to medical experiments of kinds which puzzled those tasked with studying the situation; memories were being wiped clean; and there was a new threat to national security. Forget the Russians: sinister entities from an entirely different realm of existence to ours were using us like cattle. And, in the very early days – when the Betty and Barney Hill saga reached the media and the public – it seemed that nothing could be done to bring the onslaught to an end. Indeed, not only were government agencies confused and vulnerable to the activities of the new gang in town; they were hit by a terrible realization that they were unable to do anything about the growing intrusion in our very midst.
In other words, in the early years of the alien enigma, agencies were still very much in the dark, doing their utmost to come to grips with something that overwhelmingly baffled them. The military was used to dealing with enemies that wanted to destroy us. The United States Government knew that the Soviets were a major threat – and they knew how to handle them, in just the same way that the Soviets knew how to handle the Western world. The problem, as we have seen, though, is that the Grey abductors didn’t act like regular enemies: they didn’t attack us, they didn’t destroy our cities in Independence Day-style, and they never landed on the White House lawn and demanded worldwide surrender. Rather, they acted in a stealthy, odd way which agencies – particularly the military – had a hard time coming to grips with. There was no outright aggression, but there was no friendly approach either.
So, what did our leaders do? Agencies took what they felt was the best approach possible – maybe even the only approach possible, taking into consideration the fact that the aliens were infinitely years ahead of us, in terms of science and technology. There really was only one option available to governments. That was to watch – and watch closely – what was going on. To keep the abductees under surveillance.. To stay fully aware of the growing alien abduction epidemic – at least, to the extent that they were able to. And to stand ready and prepared for any significant changes in the clandestine actions of the Greys.
This is why, as the 1960s became the 1970s, we saw the rise of the black helicopter and “phantom helicopter” phenomena. It was in the early 1970s that elements of the government secretly assigned a significant budget towards creating helicopter-based quick-reaction teams that could respond to alien abduction events, and monitor the homes of abductees across the United States. The project even used those same helicopters to try and figure out the connection between abductions and the cattle mutilation phenomenon. That encounters involving alien abductees and those mysterious helicopters are still being reported is a very good indication that this particular kind of aerial surveillance is still very much afoot.
Let’s not forget that there is an even stranger aspect to all of this. It’s that of the MILABS controversy. We’re talking about Military-based abductor teams fabricating abduction events – such as the trauma-filled Charles Hickson-Calvin Parker abduction late one night in October 1973 in Mississippi – to try and place the aliens in an even more dangerous light than they already seem to be. Or, in the Brazilian affair of Antonio Villas Boas in October 1957, to make the whole abduction issue appear utterly ridiculous by bringing the issue of wild alien-human sex into the equation. Many researchers of the UFO issue outright dismissed the Villas Boas story when it first surfaced – which was exactly what the government wanted: keep Ufologists from investigating the real abductions, by trying to convince those same Ufologists that all of the tales of alien abduction – and sex with extraterrestrials – were ludicrous and the works of hoaxers.
From the 1950s to the present day, it has been an undeniably wild ride.
I was looking through some gigipan photos of Mars and found some really strange objects, each of which tells it own story from its detail. First is the skull above which has a lower jaw beak like a turtle or even the upper and lower beak of a triceratops dinosaur. The detail is extraordinary and had the rover spotted it, it would have intrigued world scientists for months. I believe this is a sculpture...since it lacks the upper face details most fossils would defiantly have. There was also a flat sculpture of a bearded face. I added color to it to more easily see the details due to its crude and aged appearance. It would appear that the culture that made these were of lower intelligence...like that of prehistoric earth. Did you notice his ear is lower than ours?
Then at the bottom of this post is a screenshot of another face...again a old male with an open mouth and high detailed lower teeth and jaw. His eyebrows, eyes, mouth nose, cheeks all highly stand out. These sculptures are undeniable proof that aliens...intelligent or not...once lived on Mars.
I would also like to add something...this ancient society on Mars...is a male dominate culture. I find very few female faces and most the faces I find are male with beards, crowns, moustaches, aged older males with wrinkles. That alone may account for a large reason why their species went extinct...they dismissed the intelligence and ingenuity of the females of their species, thus increasing the odds of destroying themselves and their society. Male and female combined intelligence creates a balance and increases the chance of survival of any species. Scott C. Waring-Taiwan
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UFO Sighting Video: Mysterious Objects Seen Flying In Formation Over China
UFO Sighting Video: Mysterious Objects Seen Flying In Formation Over China
Many UFO enthusiasts suggest that aliens are watching us after a fleet of unidentified flying objects were seen hovering over a Chinese city.
A video that was uploaded to YouTube appears to show multiple UFOs moving above China. While the details of the video may be scarce as the uploader doesn’t say which area of China they are spotted, the clip clearly shows something suspicious. The video shows three UFOs in formation moving overhead.
The strange aerial objects differ in size with the center one being by far the biggest.
The variation of size had led some to think that the UFOs were not human-made as the fleet would likely all have been of the same aircraft if they were terrestrial.
Some UFO enthusiasts believe that extraterrestrials are watching us across the globe. They say that UFOs are everywhere and they vary in size, some are big and some are as small as baseballs.
Certain quarters of conspiracy theorists say that China being the secretive nation has its own Area 51. They believe it is located in the middle of nowhere in the Gobi Desert where they see a series of strange structures.
Open Minds UFO Radio:Nick Pope investigated UFOs for the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) for several years in the early 1990s. He was skeptical about the phenomenon when he began looking into the matter. However, after having reviewed several credible cases Nick concluded that UFOs pose a real mystery, and unidentified vehicles in our airspace could pose a threat to national security. Since he has left the MoD, Nick has authored a book on the UK’s most credible and famous UFO case, Encounter in Rendlesham Forest: The Inside Story of the World’s Best-Documented UFO Incident. He is also a journalist and media commentator.
Recently, Nick was able to obtain Department of Defense (DoD) files regarding Advanced Aerospace Identification Program (AATIP), often referred to as the Pentagon’s secret UFO project. These are some of the very few official releases of documents related to AATIP that have surfaced. In this episode, we discuss what is in the files and how he received them. Nick also explains what we can infer from the documents, and why they are significant.
For more information about Nick, visit: NickPope.Net.
The observable universe is some 93 billion light-years across. The whole universe is almost certainly much larger than that. But we still don’t know whether or not it’s infinite.
It takes some mental gymnastics to wrap your head around how big the universe is — and we’re not even sure of its actual size is (we’ll get to that a bit later). Think of it this way: in a single second, light travels around 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles). The distance that light traveling at this speed travels in a year is called a light-year. The observable universe is 93 billion light-years across. What lies beyond that, we don’t know — we can’t observe it in any possible way and we’re not really sure. So we suspect that there’s still a lot of universe beyond that, though we’re not sure how much.
Although astronomers have frantically looked for an answer, we also don’t know if the universe is infinite or not — and to make matters even more complicated, “infinite” might also mean more than one thing.
Let’s see what we know so far, what the plausible possibilities are, and what we can guess off of that.
The observable universe
For starters, the fact that we know the observable universe to be 93 billion light-years across is astonishing — that’s a great story in itself, and you can read about it extensively here — but how do we know it? Well, the story starts out with an Austrian mathematician and physicist called Christian Doppler.
In the 19th century, Doppler tried to explain an unusual phenomenon about electromagnetic waves: if and observer moves towards or away from the source of a wave, the length of that wave decreases or increases respectively. This is now called the Doppler effect and was confirmed for essentially all types of waves.
For astronomers, this is extremely important. If you have some stars you can use as a reference (a sort of cosmic “candle“), you can look for all sorts of anomalies in the wavelengths you’re seeing. If you’re seeing increased wavelengths, the object is moving away from you (redshift), and if the wavelengths are getting smaller, it’s moving towards you (blueshift).
In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble discovered something unusual. Sure, some things are moving towards each other and others are moving away, but in a general sense, everything seems to be moving away from everything else. Simply put, the universe appears to be expanding. This was truly a groundbreaking moment — a paradigm shift from the universe which was once thought to be fixed and stable. Not only that, but this universal expansion also appears to be accelerating. We still don’t know exactly why or how this happens, but subsequent measurements have confirmed and refined this idea.
Studying redshift is fundamental for studying cosmic distances, especially for things which lie far away. But this is where things start to get a bit tricky.
If you’re looking at something that’s, say, 1 light year away, you see it the way it was 1 year ago. But in that year, the universe has expanded, so the distance between you and that object is now greater than 1 light year.
Astronomical observations have found the age of the universe to be around 13.7 billion years, and one of the farthest objects we’ve ever discovered is a galaxy called GN-z11. This galaxy is 13.4 billion years old, which is incredibly old. However, although it took light from it 13.4 billion to reach us, the galaxy lies way farther than 13.4 billion light-years away — in fact, astronomers believe it to be a whopping 32 billion light-years from Earth! So it’s misleading to think that the age of the universe (in years) also represents its size (in light years). But we can go even farther than that.
We can detect some photons which were formed before any other star or galaxy. These earliest photons come from the so-called cosmic microwave background (CMBR), faint cosmic background radiation filling all space. This is the earliest known electromagnetic radiation — and as far as we can tell, it’s the oldest thing we can detect.
Some of our most accurate estimates of the CMBR come from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which, along with other estimates, found that farthest observable photons come from 46.5 billion light-years away. This would mean that our observable universe is, at the very least, 93 billion light-years across (46.5 in both directions).
We have no idea where we are in relationship to the universe in general, but there’s no reason to believe that we occupy a special position. At any rate, the observable universe is estimated to be about 93 billion light years. But what lies outside our observable universe?
Wrap your head around this
The blunt answer is… we don’t really know. We can’t observe anything outside of the observable universe (doh!), so we can’t really know for sure — but that doesn’t mean we can’t make assumptions.
There are different studies attempting to calculate the real size of the universe. For instance, one statistical estimate carried out by Oxford researchers found that the universe might be 251 times larger than the observable universe, which would put it at 23,343 light-years across. Even so, that’s on the conservative side — one study reports that the universe is megaparsecs across, with one megaparsec being 3.26 million light years. That’s a number so big that the unit of measure doesn’t even count. Whether you express it in meters or light-years or megaparsecs, the different just gets lost in the final digits.
The structure of the Universe does not appear to repeat in some significant way. For all we know, it could very well be infinite.
If the universe were to be this big, then even if it’s not technically infinite, it could still be practically infinite — nothing from our location could reach its edge or vice versa. But it gets even weirder!
Remember, we live in an expanding universe — we know that from Hubble. But Hubble was off on his initial measurements: recent studies have converged on an expansion rate around 70/km/megaparsec. So if something is one megaparsec away, it’s moving away at a rate of 70 km/s. If it’s 2 megaparsecs, it’s receding at 140 km/s, at 3 megaparsecs it’s 210 km/s, and so on.
Let’s do a gross simplification: the observable universe is 93 billion light-years across — that’s 28.500 megaparsecs. This would mean that the points which are farthest away are receding at a speed of about 2,000,000 km/s — that’s almost 10 times higher than the speed of light! But the theory of special relativity tells us nothing can move faster than the speed of light, so what gives?
Well, technically, the universe isn’t moving. It’s not like something is moving at 2 million km/s — space itself is expanding at that rate. General relativity does a better job of dealing with this type of conundrum, but even general relativity is, in a sense, a local law — with “local” being limited to our universe. We have no idea what’s going on “outside” the universe, if such an outside exists, or if it even makes sense.
Furthermore, notice that the expansion rate isn’t a speed: it’s a speed per distance. So while cosmic objects are getting farther away from one another, they aren’t moving away from one another. But if you were to try to reach these far away places, you’d have to travel faster than the speed of light, which is impossible (according to our knowledge). You can even calculate that objects farther than 4,740 megaparsecs are moving away at a rate higher than the speed of light and could therefore never reach one another. Galaxies closer than that are still emitting light that can reach us. Of course, this all relies on the assumption that the universe will continue to expand, which may or may not be true. The universe could stop expanding and start collapsing onto itself for all we know, or it could expand faster and faster forever.
So even if the universe is not theoretically infinite, from a practical point — it quite likely is. But that still doesn’t really answer the question, does it?
To infinity… and beyond!
The universe may be infinite, but we can only analyze a finite part of it (the part in which light has had time to reach us). As far as we can see, there are galaxies in every direction with no sign of slowing down. Simply put, we’ve seen no sign of an edge of the universe.
Olber’s paradox says that if the universe extends infinitely, then no matter where you look, you would eventually fall on the direction of a star, so the night sky would completely light up. Since this doesn’t happen, then the universe can’t be infinite. However, Olber’s paradox might be explained by the fact that some objects are simply too far away for their light to reach us, or there is just too much dust in the universe obscuring our view. It could also be that stars aren’t distributed on random directions, but rather take on a fractal distribution — so Olber’s paradox doesn’t ultimately do all that much in the way of disproving an infinite universe.
Another argument attempting to debunk an infinite universe is that during the Big Bang, the universe was condensed into an infinitesimal point, so how can something infinite derive from something finite?
This, however, relies on an incorrect assumption: the Big Bang wasn’t an eruption in space, it was an eruption of space. Before it, space did not exist, so something could not be big or small. It was a point of infinite energy, which again, doesn’t do much to clear up whether the universe can be infinite or not.
Let’s approach things another way: if the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into? Well, as far as we can tell, it’s not that the universe is expanding into something — space itself is expanding. In other words, it’s not like the edge of the universe is always moving forward, but more like all points in the universe are moving apart. Think of it like raisins in a dough: you put it in the oven, and all the raisins are pushed apart by the expansion of the dough. But still, if the universe is finite, then it probably has an edge and an “outside” — what those things would be like, however, we don’t really know.
Here’s another intriguing question: if the universe really is infinite, does that mean there’s an infinite number of you’s out there? Are there different variations of you, like one in which you have cat ears, and another one in which you’re immortal? That may very well happen, surprisingly enough — but it’s not that simple.
The odds of someone exactly like you are infinitesimal — from a cosmic standpoint, the odds are so small that they’re essentially 0. If the universe is infinite, then the odds of a new you are basically infinity times zero — a type of problem which has haunted mathematicians for centuries.
0 × ∞ = ?
For the less math-savvy out there, this is a type of indeterminate problem: on one hand, the answer should be 0, because everything multiplied by zero is zero. But on the other hand, the answer should be infinity, because everything multiplied by infinity is infinity. The answer relies on how “zero” that zero really is, and how “infinite” that infinity really is. In our practical case, we don’t know how infinitesimal the odds of evolving a specific life form are, so the problem remains indeterminate. You could be the only you out there, or there could be an infinite number of variations — it’s also possible that there’s a finite number of you’s out there, which makes it even weirder.
Drawing the line
You’ve probably realized that there’s a lot of if‘s, maybe‘s, and we don’t know‘s in this conversation. That’s just the way things are right now — we’re still only starting to scratch the surface of cosmic truths.
There’s no clear-cut answer to whether the universe is infinite or not, but in this case, the reward is in the journey, not the destination.
The one thing we do know is that the universe is big. It’s a big and mysterious place, equally wondrous and terrifying. The fact that we, the results of stardust and physical forces, are trying to understand its nature is equally wondrous — and equally terrifying.
In Californië weten ze niet wanneer maar wel dat het zal komen; een allesvernietigende aardbeving die ze de Big One noemen.
Met tektonische platen die bewegen en 39 afzonderlijke aardbevingen in een tijdsbestek van 24 uur, begint men zich nu toch wel wat zorgen te maken.
Het is bijna niet voor te stellen dat de maatschappij gewoon iedere dag doorgaat met waar ze gisteren zijn gebleven en geen enkel oog heeft voor de tekenen die ons om de oren vliegen.
De mainstream media verkneukelden zich eind 2012 toen de wereld niet werd vernietigd door een Apocalyps.
Wat bijna niemand in de gaten had, was dat eind 2012 een enorm keerpunt voor de wereld betekende. Dit was het moment waarop aardveranderingen in een enorme stroomversnelling terechtkwamen en waarbij het aantal jaarlijkse aardbevingen letterlijk als een raket omhoog schoot.
Niet alleen worden dit soort dingen systematisch voor het publiek verborgen gehouden, ook is het naïef om te denken dat dit alles zonder verdere gevolgen zal blijven.
En zo komen we terecht in de Amerikaanse staat Californië, waar wetenschappers al heel lang zeggen dat The Big One zal toeslaan op “een kwade dag”. The Big One is een allesvernietigende aardbeving aan de westkust en plaatsen zoals Los Angeles en San Francisco.
Dit gebied ligt ook nog eens op de bekende Ring of Fire, waardoor de gevaren nog eens extra worden versterkt.
Er komen dan ook steeds meer aanwijzingen dat The Big One veel dichterbij is dan men graag zou willen. Afgelopen week is het heel erg onrustig geweest in dat gebied. Zoals in het weekend toen de kust voor Californië minimaal tien aardbevingen te verwerken kreeg van een kracht van minimaal drie op de schaal van Richter.
De lokale kranten brengen berichten waarin ze schrijven dat ze hopen dat dit niet de opmaat is naar iets veel groters en dat het hierbij zal blijven.
Het begon zaterdagochtend met de bevingen en het bleef maar doorgaan. Bevingen met een kracht van 3.0 tot en met 4.5. Iets verder naar het zuiden werd bij Mexico afgelopen vrijdag een beving gemeten met een kracht van 6.6 op de schaal van Richter.
En de miljoen mensen die wonen in en rondom de eerder genoemde steden gaan gewoon door met hun leven en hopen maar dat er niets zal gebeuren. Eigenlijk is dat vreemd zeker gezien de conclusie van een recent wetenschappelijk onderzoek.
Die conclusie is dat wanneer er echt een grote aardbeving in dat gebied voorvalt, er een aanzienlijke kans is dat grote delen van Californië in een oogwenk in zee zullen verdwijnen. En het sinistere is dat dit kan gebeuren zonder ook maar de geringste waarschuwing.
Volgens professor Matt Kirby van de Cal State Fullerton universiteit zal het zo snel gaan, dat tegen de tijd dat je in de gaten hebt wat er eigenlijk aan de hand is, het al te laat is en je het zeewater ziet binnenstromen.
Californië ligt op één van de meest bekende breuklijnen ter wereld, de San Andreas, en wanneer je naar het volgende plaatje kijkt, dan zul je zien dat het niet ondenkbaar is dat er een deel van deze staat zal afbreken en in zee terechtkomen.
Het volgende is wat we eerder schreven over de breuklijnen in Californië.
De tektonische platen van de aarde schijnen ook steeds meer in beweging te komen en op sommige plaatsen zelfs af te breken. Op het onderstaande kaartje zie je de situatie voor de kust van Californië.
Je ziet daar dat er twee van die platen langs elkaar schuiven. Hierdoor ontstaat volgens wetenschappers ooit de situatie dat Los Angeles naast San Francisco zal liggen. Dit soort bewegingen vindt plaats langs de San Andreas breuklijn.
Dan is er voor de kust daar ook nog een gebied waar de dunnere tektonische plaat van de oceaan onder die van het continent duikt. Men noemt dit de Cascadia Subduction Zone.
Hoewel minder bekend dan de San Andreas breuklijn, denken wetenschappers dat dit gebied de “Big One” zal gaan veroorzaken.
Autoriteiten nemen de dreiging in ieder geval wel serieus, want ze hebben afgelopen juni een enorme oefening gehouden met de naam Cascadia Rising waarbij de gevolgen van een 9.0 aardbeving werden gesimuleerd.
An incredible image was captured that shows the entire dark side of the Moon as well as Earth in the distance. Since we can’t see the dark side of the Moon from here on Earth, this is one spectacular photo to say the least.
The image was captured on February 3rd by a team of radio amateurs who were using the Chinese Longjiang-2 satellite. Once they took the picture, they downloaded it with the Dwingeloo Radio Telescope which is located in the Netherlands. The team, which is led by Harbin Institute of Technology, sent twin micro-satellites into space last spring along with China’s Queqiao satellite.
Previously taken picture of the Moon (not the photo indicated in this article)
After a quiet period in order to prevent interfering with the Chang’e 4 Lunar landing, the satellite started up again on January 13th. Then on February 3rd, the team sent a command to start taking pictures and that’s when they noticed that Earth, as well as the entire dark side of the moon, were seen together.
In a blog post, astronomer Cees Bassa wrote, “The first image from this time-lapse was downloaded with the Dwingeloo telescope on February 4, 2019. For the first time, the entire Moon and Earth are in view.” In previous photos, they were able to get images of Earth but only a portion of the moon, that’s why this photograph of the both of them is so stunning.
Previously taken picture of Earth from the Moon surface (not the photo indicated in this article)
The team explained that it’s an exhausting and very carefully planned procedure to set up the shots and receive the data from them. But it’s definitely worth it when they capture a picture like the one they took on February 3rd.
It’s only been in the past several decades that humans have seen for the first time the dark side of the Moon. Since it always faces away from Earth, nobody has seen it except for a very lucky few. In fact, it was only in 1959 that the Soviet Luna 3 spacecraft took the first pictures of the far side of the Moon. And it took another nine years, in 1968, before astronauts on the Apollo 8 spacecraft became the first ever humans to see its far side when they were orbiting our Moon. Then just this year, on January 2, 2019, China’s Chang’e 4 became the first spacecraft to touch down on the lunar’s far side.
‘Oumuamua has been on a long, strange journey not only in terms of its voyage from a distant corner of space and through our own Solar System, but also in terms of the discussion surrounding the mysterious interstellar object. Since its initial discovery in 2017, professional astronomers and amateur stargazers alike have put forward all manner of theories concerning the curious traveler, most prominent being the claim made by Harvard astronomy chair Avi Loeb who adamantly stands by his claim that ‘Oumuamua could be an alien spacecraft.
Loeb argues that ‘Oumuamua could be a type of solar sail which uses the radiation from stars to propel itself through space.
Naturally, dead-eyed, cynical astronomy professors in their ivory towers everywhere have been attacking Loeb’s theory. How dare a scientist consider all possibilities and acknowledge the possibility, however small, that intelligent life could exist somewhere other than Earth! While Loeb and other scientists publicly debate whether or not ‘Oumuamua could be an alien craft or probe traveling by means of solar sail, a NASA astronomer quietly published a paper this week with his own theory about the first known interstellar visitor to our Solar System.
Zdenek Sekanina, an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, believes that ‘Oumuamua could be a “monstrous fluffy dust aggregate” left behind by the violent destruction of a comet. According to a new study Sekanina published in the open source journal arXiv.org, ‘Oumuamua very well could be a loosely-bound cloud of dust zooming through the universe like a cosmic zombie after a “recent explosive event” destroyed what was once a comet.
Who knows, maybe alien civilizations somewhere can create spacecraft which look to us like fluffy clouds of dust. We have no clue what any alien races, if they exist, are capable of producing.
Sekanina cites an Oort Cloud comet known as C/2017 S3 which exploded and left behind another “monstrous, extremely fluffy aggregate of loosely bound dust grains” which continued to fly through the cosmos. Could ‘Oumuamua be another one of these comet corpse clouds? Ultimately, we may never know, as the object quickly sped past Earth and around the Sun on its way to eventually exit our Solar System in 20,000 years. Will we ever know the true nature of this interstellar visitor? Could ‘Oumuamua indeed be an alien probe or is it a fluffy cloud of dust?
On January 29, 2019 a giant anomaly, possible an alien mothership, suddenly appeared on the Secchi Cor2A satellite.
It is possible that the object is closer to the camera than the sun, even though the size must be enormous.
And it is not for the first time that UFOs have been spotted on NASA’s satellites.
Many UFOs, other unknown objects possible under intelligent control and even triangular craft like a TR-3B have been observed near the sun over the years and despite decades of denial by NASA we all know that it is not always a camera reflection or a cosmic dust particle.
The melting of the Arctic and Greenland ice sheets have long been known to be caused by climate change. Now, two new papers conclude that the effects of this melting have been overestimated: they may cause much less sea rise and climate shifts than we thought. However, ice will continue to melt at an accelerated rate, causing even more global warming.
Very young sea ice and sea smoke in from of the Stange ice shelf in the Ronne Entrance, Southern Bellingshausen Sea. Image credits: Mark Brandon.
While some media and politicians are still debating whether climate change is happening and what its causes are, the science is very clear on this: climate change is happening, and we are causing it. Moderate estimates find that temperatures will rise by 3-4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, and we are already feeling the effects.
However, the details of this warming are still being analyzed. For instance, we know that melting ice sheets will accelerate global warming largely due to the albedo effect: ice and snow are white and they reflect much of the Sun’s energy. When they melt, they leave behind something darker, which will absorb more solar energy and exacerbate the warming.
However, it’s still not clear just how much this accelerated melting will contribute to sea level rise. Two papers shed some new light on this phenomenon, concluding that things are (surprisingly) a bit better than we anticipated.
In the first paper, Nicholas Golledge and colleagues use satellite measurements of recent ice-mass changes to refine simulations of the melting Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets and their potential impacts. Their models suggest that the melted ice will form a freshwater lens on the surface, allowing rising water to spread out, causing further melting of ice underwater and furthering overall melting. However, even with this effect, we might not see the sea level rise all that much worldwide — contradicting some predictions from 2016, which claimed that this type of cliff collapse could add more than a meter to rising seas by 2100.
Renegar Glacier, Transantarctic Mountains, East Antarctica. Once considered inert, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is now showing increasing signs of change.
Image credits: Nick Golledge.
The reason for this contradiction is connected to ice collapse. Most previous studies analyzing sea level rise used ice-cliff collapses to explain the observed measurements. However, when Golledge and colleagues looked at ice-losses 3 million years ago, 125,000 years ago, and over the last 25 years in more detail, they found that the results can be explained without the need for such collapses. So it’s not clear if or how such collapses should be included in future predictions. Dr. Tamsin Edwards, Lecturer in Physical Geography at King’s College London who led the work, says:
‘We’ve shown that ice-cliff instability doesn’t appear to be an essential mechanism in reproducing past sea level changes and so this suggests ‘the jury’s still out’ when it comes to including it in future predictions. Even if we do include ice-cliff instability, our more thorough assessment shows that the most likely contribution to sea level rise would be less than half a metre by 2100.’
In the second paper, Associate Professor Nick Golledge from Victoria University of Wellington and colleagues including Dr. Edwards report that current climate models do not consider the full effect of melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.
Essentially, melting will slow the Atlantic ocean circulation, trapping warm water below the surface in the southern hemisphere and hereby causing more Antarctic loss. This also increases temperatures variability, resulting in more frequent extreme weather events. Golledge comments:
“Melt from these ice sheets is going to significantly disrupt the global climate making temperatures in some areas vary much more from one year to the next. This unpredictability is going to prove extremely disruptive for all of us, and will make adaptation and planning much more difficult.”
So while both papers suggest that sea level rise won’t be as dramatic as some models predicted, it’s quite likely that ice will melt at an accelerated rate, with severe consequences worldwide. It’s yet another reminder that climate change has diverse and often unpredictable effects.
Journal References:
“Global environmental consequences of twenty-first-century ice-sheet melt,” by Golledge et al. DOI 10.1038/s41586-019-0889-9.
“Revisiting Antarctic ice loss due to marine ice-cliff instability,” by Edwards et al. DOI 10.1038/s41586-019-0901-4
Amazing UFO fleet sighting in Denmark (video analysis) is about several unknown lights caught on video over Alleroed city on August 7th 2010. The sighting was recorded with an iPhone and the unknown lights seen in the video stands out pretty clear. What youtube user Femse filmed that night, is in my opinion one of the more interesting UFO sightings from Denmark.
You can hear the witnesses speak almost excitedly in the video (Danish language) which is fully understandable in relation to what they are seeing. There was real magic in the air that night, the unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) lasted for whole 20 minutes.
Amazing UFO fleet sighting
Then I first saw this video, I was amazed by the details of some of the lights. There are two large unidentified flying objects in the footage. The first large object shown in below picture has one big white light and four smaller more faint ones, also white. You will find it at the start of the video (above) at 0:12 where it is seen together with a smaller object that seems spherical.
The other large object shown in below picture has two big lights, one green, and one white. It is followed by a triangle with what appears to be three spherical objects. You will find it at the very end of the video (above) at 4:36
If you see the video to the end, you will notice that there are a whole fleet of UFOs. The partly shaken recording does not prevent us from discovering multiple lights in the footage.
SUFOI says chinese lanterns
Scandinavian UFO Information (SUFOI) immediately turned this UFO sighting down, claiming it was just Chinese lanterns. But the two pictures above with the two large objects seem not to resemble Chinese lanterns.
The lights on the first large object seem to render up an actual fixed structure behind the white glowing lights. The other large object has a clear green and white light, not really the typical Chinese lantern-profile with the orange-reddish glow.
I wonder why SUFOI chose to go with the lantern theory alone? Some of the small objects actually have a red glow more than orange. If they were the only type of objects seen I understand. But the small ones are seen together with the large ones. So why they chose to put the blind eye on the large objects is a mystery to me.
The witness account translated from Danish
I stood in my garden and smoked a cigarette when I suddenly saw a big ball come flying. It flew faster than a plane and was completely silent. Since I could not see it anymore, I looked back from where it first came, and then 2 more, and so it went on for approx. 20 min. There were maybe 50 of them. We filmed it on the phone and took pictures with a digital camera. They flew all along the same route and same height. They were all the same size but one that was maybe twice as big. It seemed like it flew closer, and not quite the same path as the others, but ended with flying the same course as the first and then disappeared into the horizon. It ended with I could not see them anymore because they were blocked from my field of view of trees and roofs.
The UFO sighting in Denmark is an interesting case, because the same type of mysterious light, specifically the large objects, were also observed in North Carolina in Hendersonville on October 17, 2011, one year and 70 days after the sighting in Denmark.
The North Carolina UFO was observed by three witnesses who recorded the object, as it traveled across the sky, exactly as the UFOs did in Denmark. I think the sighting in Hendersonville supports Femse´s sighting in Denmark, because it reveals that she was probably not the only one who saw this aerial phenomenon.
The UFO from North Carolina that was reported to MUFON under case number #32678, have the same profile as the one filmed in Denmark. It has one big light and two smaller ones. There is indeed some correlation in the characteristics here, please go and see for your self in the North Carolina UFO Sighting
UFO fleet sighting short video analysis
I made a short video analysis for the UFO fleet sighting in Denmark, pointing out the large vessels seen in the footage. Here you can see more about the North Carolina UFO relation. The video was made in relation to an old blog I do not author anymore.
What do you think about this UFO fleet sighting? Are they all Chinese lanterns or is this actually the UAP (unidentified aerial phenomenon) unfolding right in front of you? To say that the two large objects are real UFOs together with a flock of Chinese lanterns would also be quite an amazing thought.
In my humble opinion, this was one of the largest UFO sightings in Denmark caught on video, which should have had its own place in the history of Danish ufology. But our local reporting center SUFOI turned it down…
14 UFO REPORTS BY PILOTS AND ASTRONAUTS THAT WILL HAVE YOU CONVINCED
14 UFO REPORTS BY PILOTS AND ASTRONAUTS THAT WILL HAVE YOU CONVINCED
UFO encounters are often dismissed by skeptics as the product of attention-seekers, hoaxes, or simply overactive imaginations. But what happens when the UFO is seen by some of the most trained and trustworthy professionals around? Compared to encounters by ground-dwelling civilians, cases of UFOs seen by pilots and astronauts are some of the most credible UFO stories around.
These UFO sightings are, perhaps, the most convincing because these witnesses are highly respected professionals whom we trust with our lives. These individuals have nothing to gain by putting their careers and reputations on the line reporting bizarre happenings in the skies.
More shocking is the sheer volume of these reported incidents that happen every year. Here’s a list of some of the more notable sightings of alien spacecraft by pilots and astronauts.
1. Pilots Chiles and Whitted Reported a Double-Decker “Flying Cigar”
Photo: Clarence Chiles/United States Air Force
The granddaddy of all UFO encounters has been giving professionals the chills for decades because of the credibility of the witnesses and the fact that it proceeded “UFO mania” in the popular media.
The event happened in the early morning hours of July 24, 1948. Clarence Chiles, chief pilot, and John Whitted, co-pilot, were flying an Eastern Airlines passenger plane near Montgomery, Alabama, at about 5,000 feet altitude on a clear night.
At about 2:45 am, Chiles “saw a dull red glow above and ahead of the aircraft.” He told Whitted, “Look, here comes a new Army jet job.”
The object closed on their DC-3 in a matter of seconds, and flew past the right side of their plane before it pulled “up with a tremendous burst of flame out of its rear and zoomed up into the clouds.” The pilots said that the object looked like a flying cigar with two decks and windows.
One of the plane’s passengers, C.L. McKelvie, also reported seeing a “bright streak of light” that flashed by his window.
The military and scientific skeptics later challenged the account, saying that it was probably a meteor the pilots and passenger saw – although it must be pointed out that few meteors have windows for passengers or zoom straight up in a rapid climb, rather than falling down to earth. Additionally, both men claimed they got a good, long (10 to 15 seconds) look at the object. The event remains one of the most cited examples of credible “UFO” encounters.
2. Astronaut Leroy Chiao Reported a UFO While on a Space Walk with the ISS
In 2005, astronaut Leroy Chiao, commander of the International Space Station, reported a UFO encounter during a space walk. He and a colleague were installing navigation antennas when something unusual caught Chiao’s eye. Below him in the Earth’s atmosphere he saw a line of lights that looked like “an upside-down question mark.”
One non-UFO explanation for Chiao’s sighting offered by skeptics is that Chiao simply saw the bright lights of a fishing boat hundreds of miles below him. Of course, those would have to be some pretty insanely powerful fishing lights to be seen all the way in outer space – and why Chiao didn’t see the lights of other boats all over the ocean has never been explained.
One of the most well-known early UFO encounters involved Lieutenant George F. Gorman of the North Dakota Air National Guard, who said he had a twenty-seven minute “dogfight” with a UFO in the skies above Fargo.
On the night of October 1, 1948, Gorman was preparing to land his P-51 when he saw a light aircraft outlined plainly about 500 feet below him. He called the tower, but the operator there told him they knew of no other planes in the area.
Gorman informed the tower that he was going to investigate. He closed to within about 1,000 yards and took a good look at the object.
It was about six to eight inches in diameter, clear white, and completely round without fuzz at the edges. 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.
Gorman says the light suddenly charged him. When collision seemed imminent, the object suddenly shot straight up into the air in a steep climb-out, disappearing overhead. Gorman again attempted to pursue it, but his plane went into a power stall at about 14,000 feet, and the object was not seen again. It was then 9:27 pm.
In the airport control tower, traffic controllers Lloyd D. Jensen and H. E. Johnson also saw a strange light near the airfield. In a statement to Major D. C. Jones, commander of the 17th Fighter Squadron at Hector airport, Gorman said he was convinced that there was “thought” behind the maneuvers.
George F. Gorman retired from the Air Force in 1969 with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and settled in Texas.
4. Major Cooper Witnessed a UFO, But NASA Forbade Reporters to Ask Him About It
Photo: US Air Force/Public Domain
Even the original Mercury astronauts had strange encounters in outer space. Major Gordon Cooper (who was later famously played by actor Dennis Quaid in the blockbuster film The Right Stuff) had more than one UFO encounter.
The most well-known one took place on May 15, 1963, when he was shot into space in a Mercury capsule for a 22-day journey around the world. During the final orbit, Cooper told the tracking station at Muchea (near Perth, Australia) that he could see a glowing, greenish object ahead of him that was closing fast on his spacecraft. The UFO was picked up by Muchea’s tracking radar – so there is no doubt it actually existed.
Cooper’s sighting was reported by NBC, but when Cooper landed, reporters were told that they would not be allowed to question him about the UFO sighting.Major Cooper later testified before the United Nations on the subject, saying:
I believe that these extra-terrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets… Most astronauts were reluctant to discuss UFOs… I did have occasion in 1951 to have two days of observation of many flights of them, of different sizes, flying in fighter formation, generally from east to west over Europe.
5. Pilot Bethune Spotted a Gigantic Floating Object Over Canada
On February 10, 1951, US Naval Reserve Lieutenant and co-pilot Graham Bethune was occupying the captain’s seat near Newfoundland, Canada, when he spotted a huge floating object (he claimed it was 300 feet in diameter) on a near collision course with their aircraft.
The co-pilot stated in his official report:
I observed a glow of light below the horizon about 1,000 to 1,500 feet [330-470 meters] above the water. We both [the pilot as well] observed its course and motion for about 4 or 5 minutes before calling it to the attention of the other crew members…
Suddenly, the object changed direction at incredible speed, and began to pulsate and change its colors, as well. Then it somehow reversed its course and tripled its speed until it at last disappeared over the horizon.
Bethune’s report says that the object came within five miles of his aircraft – a fact proven by radar evidence provided by the DEW Line Ground Radar at the base in Goose Bay, Labrador, that tracked the object.
6. Two Turkish Pilots Saw a Mysterious Object – And So Did Citizens Below
Pilots from Turkish Airlines were flying from the Turkish resort town of Bodrum to the country’s largest city, Istanbul. Suddenly, a mysterious green light appeared over the plane. As the pilot later testified,“An unidentified object with green lights passed 2- to 3,000 feet above us. Then it disappeared all of a sudden. We are guessing that it was a UFO.”
The UFO was also reported to be seen around Istanbul’s Silivri district.
The General Directorate of State Airports Authority denied spotting any image that fitted the description of the pilot. Doubters claim that the pilots saw a green laser pointer that was reflecting off a cloud. However, it seems pretty hard to believe pilots would never have seen a laser pointer before – plus, that would have had to be a pretty huge laser pointer to create an effect such as they described.
For the record, pilots do not generally report fleeting flashes of light as UFOs.
7. Andrew Danziger Claims That Most Pilots Believe in UFOs
This famous encounter was recounted by pilot Andrew Danziger. It happened during a routine flight on April 10, 1989. It was about 8 pm on a clear night with a full moon. Shortly after take-off from the Kansas City International Airport, Danziger saw a white disc clearly visible through the clouds just off to his right. It appeared to be flying parallel to them, matching their speed and direction.
The captain of the flight admitted he had noticed the same thing since they had leveled off. The pilots describe the light:
It looked similar to the moon faintly visible though thin fog, except the two were visible at the same time on opposite sides of our cockpit…. The captain and I had cumulatively spent many years flying and were accustomed to seeing – day and night – all manner of airplane, blimp, hot air balloon, satellite, and bird. But neither of us had any idea what this disk could be.
All of a sudden, the white disk turned into a giant red ball of light. The red light hovered in the air and then disappeared into some clouds as the plane descended for landing.
Danziger explains how common this is for pilots:
I’m not going too far out on a ledge to say that virtually all pilots believe in UFOs. Little green men, ‘close encounters,’ alien kidnappings… not so much. But with billions of stars and trillions of planets out there, ‘ya gotta believe,’ and almost all of us do.
8. Reports Claim UFOs Met Astronauts During the Moon Landing
According to unconfirmed reports, both Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin saw UFOs shortly after that historic landing on the moon in Apollo 11 on July 21, 1969. Viewers listening to the broadcast heard Armstrong refer to lights above a crater before his audio feed went dead for a few minutes.
According to former NASA employee Otto Binder, unnamed radio hams with their own VHF-receiving equipment (that bypassed NASA’s broadcasting) picked up the following exchange:
NASA: What’s there?Apollo 11: 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!
Armstrong and Aldrin have denied the exchange took place, but other have insisted that off the record, the astronauts have admitted to many scientists that they did indeed see something.
9. Gemini Astronauts Reported a UFO to NASA in Orbit
In December 1965, Gemini astronauts James Lovell and Frank Borman also saw a UFO during the second orbit of their record-breaking 14-day flight.
Skeptics later pointed out that Cape Kennedy identified the object as the final stage of their Titan booster rocket… Which would make perfect sense, except for the fact that Lovell says he could also see the booster rocket nearby. Their exchange:
Lovell: Bogey at 10 o’clock high.
CAPCOM: This is Houston. Say again, 7.
Lovell: Said we have a bogey at 10 o’clock high.
CAPCOM: Gemini 7, is that the booster or is that an actual sighting?
Lovell: We have several… actual sighting.CAPCOM: …estimated distance or size?
Lovell: We also have the booster in sight….
10. Mercury Astronaut Slayton Tracked a Flying Saucer
Gordon Cooper wasn’t the only Mercury astronaut to report strange encounters.Deke Slayton revealed in an interview he had seen UFOs in 1951:
I was testing a P-51 fighter in Minneapolis when I spotted this object. I was at about 10,000 feet on a nice, bright, sunny afternoon. I thought the object was a kite, then I realized that no kite is gonna fly that high. As I got closer, it looked like a weather balloon, grey and about three feet in diameter. But as soon as I got behind the darn thing, it didn’t look like a balloon anymore. It looked like a saucer, a disk. About the same time, I realized that it was suddenly going away from me – and there I was, running at about 300 miles per hour. I tracked it for a little way, and then all of a sudden the damn thing just took off. It pulled about a 45-degree climbing turn and accelerated and just flat disappeared.
11. Pilots Reported a Flying Saucer Over Bariloche Airport During a Mysterious Blackout
In 1995, an Aerolineas Argentinas flight landing at Bariloche airport in Argentina reported that it was “buzzed” by a luminous disk moving in a way that defied the laws of physics. According to reports, the pilot was forced to take evasive maneuvers to avoid a collision. Strangely, at the same time, there was also a mysterious power shortage in Bariloche.
There was also a power outage at the airport. One Argentine newspaper reported the air traffic control personnel as saying, “The control instruments went crazy.”
The UFO was also seen by personnel on the ground, as well as the crew of a police plane flying 600 meters (2,000 ft) above.
12. The FAA Investigated a 1986 UFO Sighting by Japanese Pilots
Captain Kenju Terauchi and a crew of two were on a special flight delivering French wine when suddenly Captain Terauchi saw lights to the left and right of the plane. At first he thought it was US fighter planes patrolling the border with the Soviet Union, but his opinion changed when then the objects suddenly reappeared much closer to the aircraft.
“Two spaceships stopped in front of our face, shooting off lights,” Terauchi was quoted as saying. “The inside cockpit shined brightly, and I felt warm in the face.”
The captain described the objects as square-shaped spaceships with jet propulsion systems that had horizontal lines of circular exhausts clustered around a dark center. Terauchi also reported the spacecraft interfered with ground communications, jamming his signals.
Terauchi’s testimony was called into question because his testimony varied somewhat from what he originally said to the FAA during the encounter and his co-pilot and flight engineer described the objects as nothing more than lights – however, they did not dispute that they were UFOs.
The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry suggested that the phenomenon was caused by light refraction through ice crystals suspended in clouds. Well, at least they didn’t say it was a weather balloon!
13. Creepy Audio From American Airline Pilots Indicates They Think They Saw A UFO In 2017
On February 24, 2018, two pilots flying two separate planes both claim to have seen an unidentified flying object during flights to the American Southwest, not far from Roswell, New Mexico. One of the pilots reported the UFO flying overhead, above the plane, and denied that it could have been a weather balloon. Audio footage is an unsettling behind-the-scenes look at what the aircraft might have been
“I don’t know what it was. It wasn’t an airplane but it was, the path was going in the opposite direction,” the pilot reportedly told Air Traffic Control.
14. US Navy Pilots Were “Weirded Out” By Possible UFOs In 2004
When the Pentagon program was publicly revealed in 2017, indicating the US government had been keeping track of reported UFO and alien sightings for a number of years, many stories emerged based on the program’s reports and records. One told the story of Naval pilots who, in 2004, tracked a conglomerate of unidentified flying objects for several weeks. According to records reported in the NY Times, “The objects appeared suddenly at 80,000 feet, and then hurtled toward the [Pacific Ocean], eventually stopping at 20,000 feet and hovering. Then they either dropped out of radar range or shot straight back up.”
At one point after a few weeks of monitors, two fighter jet pilots — Cmdr. David Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight — were ordered to investigate further, and honed in on the crafts. One unidentifiable, white-colored aircraft reportedly hovered about 50 feet above the water, sending a roiling churn through the sea. According to the record it “around 40 feet long and oval in shape. The craft was jumping around erratically, staying over the wave disturbance but not moving in any specific direction.”
When the pilots headed toward a rendezvous point so they could figure out an approach to the UFOs, the object headed toward it at incredible speed before disappearing entirely. The objects were not seen again and the pilots claimed they were “weirded out” by the whole encounter. “It accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Commander Fraser said.
WVU researcher unearths an ice age in the African desert
WVU researcher unearths an ice age in the African desert
WVU's Graham Andrews' study of volcanic rocks in Namibia led to the discovery of drumlins, a type of hill often found in places once covered in glaciers.
While exploring the desert country in southern Africa, they stumbled upon a peculiar land formation—flat desert scattered with hundreds of long, steep hills. They quickly realized the bumpy landscape was shaped by drumlins, a type of hill often found in places once covered in glaciers, an abnormal characteristic for desert landscapes.
Drumlins, hills formed in places once covered by glaciers, were discovered in Namibia by WVU's Graham Andrews.
Credit: WVU
“We quickly realized what we were looking at because we both grew up in areas of the world that had been under glaciers, me in Northern Ireland and Sarah in northern Illinois,” said Andrews, an assistant professor of geology. “It’s not like anything we see in West Virginia where we’re used to flat areas and then gorges and steep-sided valleys down into hollows.”
After returning home from the trip, Andrews began researching the origins of the Namibian drumlins, only to learn they had never been studied.
“The last rocks we were shown on the trip are from a time period when southern Africa was covered by ice,” Andrews said. “People obviously knew that part of the world had been covered in ice at one time, but no one had ever mentioned anything about how the drumlins formed or that they were even there at all.”
Andrews teamed up with WVU geology senior Andy McGrady to use morphometrics, or measurements of shapes, to determine if the drumlins showed any patterns that would reflect regular behaviors as the ice carved them.
While normal glaciers have sequential patterns of growing and melting, they do not move much, Andrews explained. However, they determined that the drumlins featured large grooves, which showed that the ice had to be moving at a fast pace to carve the grooves.
These grooves demonstrated the first evidence of an ice stream in southern Africa in the late Paleozoic Age, which occurred about 300 million years ago.
Andrew McGrady.
Credit: WVU
“The ice carved big, long grooves in the rock as it moved,” Andrews said. “It wasn’t just that there was ice there, but there was an ice stream. It was an area where the ice was really moving fast.”
McGrady used freely available information from Google Earth and Google Maps to measure their length, width and height.
“This work is very important because not much has been published on these glacial features in Namibia,” said McGrady, a senior geology student from Hamlin. “It’s interesting to think that this was pioneer work in a sense, that this is one of the first papers to cover the characteristics of these features and gives some insight into how they were formed.”
Their findings also confirm that southern Africa was located over the South Pole during this period.
“These features provide yet another tie between southern Africa and south America to show they were once joined,” Andrews said.
“This is a great example of a fundamental discovery and new insights into the climatic history of our world that remain to be discovered,” said Tim Carr, chair of the Department of Geology and Geography.
IJstijd blootgelegd in de Afrikaanse woestijn. Onderzoekers doen onverwachte ontdekking
IJstijd blootgelegd in de Afrikaanse woestijn. Onderzoekers doen onverwachte ontdekking
Geologen Graham Andrews en Sarah Brown van de West Virginia University hebben in Namibië een onverwachte ontdekking gedaan.
Terwijl ze rondliepen in het woestijnachtige land in het zuiden van Afrika stuitten ze op een vreemde formatie in het landschap: honderden langgerekte, steile heuvels.
Ze beseften al snel dat het drumlins waren, heuvels die gevormd zijn door gletsjers.
Nooit eerder
“We herkenden ze gelijk omdat we zelf zijn opgegroeid in gebieden die onder gletsjers hebben gelegen,” zei Andrews.
Eenmaal thuisgekomen besloot Andrews onderzoek te doen naar de oorsprong van de Namibische drumlins.
Hij kwam er al snel achter dat ze nog nooit eerder waren bestudeerd.
Bedekt met ijs
“De stukken steen die we te zien kregen tijdens de trip dateren uit een periode waarin het zuiden van Afrika was bedekt met ijs,” zei Andrews.
Niemand heeft ooit iets geschreven over de manier waarop de drumlins zijn gevormd of het feit dat ze zich daar bevinden, aldus de geoloog.
IJsstroom
Aan de hand van metingen wisten Andrews en zijn collega Andy McGrady vast te stellen dat het ijs zich in rap tempo moet hebben verplaatst. Ze spreken van een ijsstroom.
McGrady gebruikte Google Earth en Google Maps om de lengte, breedte en hoogte van de drumlins te bepalen.
Het onderzoek is gepubliceerd in het wetenschappelijke tijdschrift PLOS ONE.
Two years ago, the Central Intelligence Agency declassified and released more than 12 million files as part of its new online CIA Records Search Tool, or CREST. Since then, journalists and sleuths have been poring over the documents in search of any new information or clues to some of the longstanding mysteries surrounding the CIA and some of the spookier stuffthe intelligence agency has gotten into over the years.
Already, strange files have been discovered among the millions of documents which shed some light on the CIA’s research into paranormal phenomena including a whole trove of UFO reports and documents pertaining to so-called “remote viewing” in which agents could be trained as telepathic spies. It may be a shocker, but that one didn’t exactly pan out – at least according to what’s been made public.
In 1978, the CIA established the Stargate Project to test how viable it would be to attempt to train spies to psychically “see” events, sites, or information from a great distance.
However, two curious and unexplained images were posted online this week which could be further evidence that the CIA’s remote viewing projects may be more extensive than we know of. The images were brought to light by non-profit watchdog site MuckRock which “brings together journalists, researchers, activists, and regular citizens to request, analyze, and share government documents.” MuckRock volunteers are currently sifting through the CIA’s CREST files in search of interesting evidence, and they’ve certainly found it in these images.
The images were found in a file from 1971 titled “PICTURE OF A MAN” and appear to depict the silhouettes of two individuals wearing suits. The silhouettes are composed of visual noise, almost like television static, and have empty voids where their faces should be. By far, the most curious aspect of the pictures are the two numbers emblazoned across the individuals’ torsos. One bears the number “1569” while the other figure, a mirror image of the first, sports the number “1572.”
CIA shadow man 1569
It’s unknown what the numbers may mean or what these images may have been used for. Why would the CIA have made and archived these images? Who, or what, do these pictures depict? Given the CIA’s history with MKULTRA and the Stargate Project and the like, there’s no telling what high strangeness these images were intended for. For now, this one remains a mystery – a creepy one.
Experts baffled by mysterious creature discovered in Kiwi's kitchen
Experts baffled by mysterious creature discovered in Kiwi's kitchen
An Auckland man and experts have been left baffled after his mother discovered alien-like looking creatures on her kitchen floor. / Supplied by Tim Clerke
NZ Herald
An Auckland man and experts have been left baffled after his mother discovered alien-like looking creatures on her kitchen floor.
On Facebook Tim Clerke shared a video on Facebook of the bizarre creatures on his mum's hands, asking if people knew what they were.
"My mother found these on the kitchen floor this morning," he wrote.
"One is still alive. Anyone know what they are? Nikki is horrified and will have nightmares for weeks!"
Many of Facebook speculated what the creatures could be, while others were freaked out by the video.
"Those are miniature bats. Duh," one person wrote.
"I was thinking more alien," Clerke replied.
Another guessed: "Ew gross mutant mice??"
"Arghh, they're horrible!! Kind of stingray-like," another suggested.
"What the ...!!!! That is like a horror movie!", one person said in disbelief.
Despite the video having over 3000 views, Facebook users could not identify what the animals were, even experts couldn't come to a conclusive decision.
Experts contacted by Yahoo7 News at University of Sydney and the Australian Museum could not identify the creature, however experts in New Zealand had differing opinions.
An Auckland man and experts have been left baffled after his mother discovered alien-like looking creatures on her kitchen floor. Photo / Tim Clerke Facebook
The Biosecurity New Zealand entomology team suggested the video showed the detached legs of a moth.
"They suggest that something [possibly a cat] had just recently eaten the body of the moth, which may explain why a few of the legs were still twitching," a spokesperson told Yahoo!7.
However, the Department of Conservation has other ideas.
Eric Edwards who is an insect expert, said it was possible the unknown specimens could be a rat-tailed maggots but he wasn't entirely sure.
The true identity of the animals is yet to be confirmed.
The creatures were found crawling on a kitchen floor in Auckland, New Zealand
Humans have long expressed a mixture of fascination and fear around the question, “Were there giants on Earth?” Whether in legends or life, giants have been worshipped, reviled, ostracized, and celebrated. While the existence of dinosaurs is largely accepted, and millions of people travel across continents to marvel at majestic, larger than life monuments, the facts about human giants, or giant races, are much debated. Regardless of whether they are dismissed as myth or accepted as fact, giants represent important aspects of our individual and collective psyche. They capture our imagination, appear in religious texts, and drive scientific endeavor. But the question still remains —did giants once roam the earth?
WHAT ARE GIANTS? A BRIEF LOOK AT GIGANTISM
Merriam-Webster defines a giant as being a “legendary humanlike being of great stature and strength,” as well as “a living being of great size.” In physical terms, a giant is a person over seven feet tall with a condition known as “gigantism.” The tallest person documented modern history was Robert Wadlow (1918-1940), known as the “Alton Giant,” or the “Giant of Illinois,” who stood 8 feet 11 inches tall.
Robert Wadlow, the Alton Giant
Wadlow intended to study law, but lived as a celebrity after traveling with the Ringling Brothers Circus and as a spokesman for giant-sized shoes. He died at a young age, an all too common end for those with gigantism — their weight and size puts constant strain on the heart and skeletal system.
Today genetic giants are gaining acceptance because overall, humans have evolved into a taller species. According to Max Roser, an economist studying global standards of living conditions, between 1810 and 1980 European male height grew from an average of 160 centimeters to 185 centimeters. But despite this acceptance, giants can still find life in a normal-sized world stressful and lonely, and like Wadlow, are treated as an oddity. This contradiction mirrors the way in which giant races have been regarded throughout history.
EVIDENCE OF GIANTS: DISCOVERED, DISREGARDED, AND DISCARDED
In the mid-1800’s, a flurry of activity emerged across North America in the fields of archeology and anthropology, triggered in part by the discovery of the Chickasawba tribal burial mounds of Oklahoma, in which were found human bones seven feet and longer in length. In fact, during the years ranging from the late 1800’s all the way to the 1990s, over 1000 reports of giant-sized human skeleton remains were found across North America. These stories were met by the general public with curiosity and an increased appetite for the possibility that giants once roamed the country.
In the United States, this period of archeological discovery took place during the Manifest Destiny period, which began in 1845 and was highlighted by rapid and aggressive territorial growth. A Puritan-led religious fervor fueled expansion across the West; Native Americans were looked upon as heathens, to be converted, civilized, or eliminated. Discoveries of ancient, pre-New World giant races directly contradicted the Manifest Destiny’s ideals of white racial, religious, and ethnic superiority; it was common for giant skeletal remains to be confiscated and destroyed.
According to Richard Dewhurst, author of “The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America,” The Smithsonian Institute, then in its early stages of establishment, administered the Manifest Destiny philosophy through the Powell Doctrine, named after John Wesley Powell, the first bureau head of the Smithsonian Department of Ethnology. The doctrine reflected the isolationist mindset of the times and mandated that no archeological or anthropological research would include mention of ancient tribal cultures. Despite the documented existence of ethnology reports stating that the Smithsonian was in possession of giant human remains, none can be found today.
But what else might have contributed to these attitudes and actions surrounding proof of giants on Earth? Was it megalophobia, the psychological fear of large objects or people, or something deeper that has been present since the time of ancient cultures?
LEGEND OF GIANTS AROUND THE WORLD
Ancient traditions overflow with legends of giants — St. Christopher, Goliath, the Nephilim, Gilgamesh, Viracocha, Sasquatch, and more, across continents, languages, and landscapes. Old Testament accounts of the Nephilim, a biblical race of giants and demigods, stated that they were so large they made the Israelites feel like, “Grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.” (Numbers 13: 28-33). The Paiute myth of Si-Te-Cah, is a tale of a giant tribe of cannibals who were eventually destroyed by their maker. This is similar to the myth of the first people created by Viracocha, the ancient Inca god, who he destroyed because of their uncontrollable and unruly behavior.
Carol Rose, author of Giants, Monsters, and Dragons: An Encyclopedia of Folklore, Legend, and Myth, writes that giants “exist beyond the realm of human order and had to be controlled, banished, or defeated,” and were considered “destructive entities.” Natural disasters were associated with mythical giants, who were also thought of as terrifying hybrids and mutations representing the darker side of our psyche.
Elusive proof of giants remains a compelling narrative fueling controversy and connecting us to aspects of Earth’s past. As more is discovered through scientific advancements with DNA and forensics, we can anticipate these conversations continuing now and into the future.
Bewijs voor reuzen op aarde weggemoffeld. Waar waren ze zo bang voor?
Bewijs voor reuzen op aarde weggemoffeld. Waar waren ze zo bang voor?
Leefden er ooit reuzen op aarde? Halverwege de 19e eeuw zorgden archeologische vondsten in Oklahoma voor consternatie.
In de Chickasawba Mound, die het Smithsonian-instituut de naam 3M55 heeft gegeven, werden menselijke skeletten gevonden die minstens 2,1 meter lang waren.
Tussen het einde van de 19e eeuw en de jaren negentig kwamen in heel Noord-Amerika ruim 1000 meldingen binnen van reuzenskeletten.
Manifest Destiny
Foto: 2,1 meter lang skelet zonder onderbenen
(Jeffrey Wilson)
In die tijd werden inheemse Amerikanen gezien als heidenen, die bekeerd of uitgeroeid moesten worden.
De Democratische Partij geloofde dat het lot de Verenigde Staten had voorbeschikt om uit te groeien tot een grote mogendheid. Deze stroming wordt ook wel Manifest Destiny genoemd.
De stroming heeft bijgedragen aan de Spaans-Amerikaanse oorlog en de verdrijving van de indianen.
Haaks
De ontdekking van een oud reuzenras dat leefde voor de komst van de eerste ontdekkingsreizigers stond haaks op alles waar Manifest Destiny voor stond: blanke, religieuze en etnische superioriteit.
Om die reden werden de reuzenskeletten in beslag genomen en vernietigd.
Volgens Richard Dewhurst, auteur van ‘The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America’, was het Smithsonian-instituut een fervent aanhanger van de stroming.
Nephilim
Hoewel er volgens krantenberichten talloze reuzenskeletten zijn gevonden, die vervolgens zouden zijn onderzocht door het Smithsonian, zijn ze vandaag de dag nergens meer te bekennen.
Oude geschriften staan vol met verhalen over reuzen. In het Oude Testament wordt gesproken over Nephilim, die zo lang waren dat de Israëlieten ‘in hun ogen sprinkhanen waren’.
“Wij hebben ook daar de reuzen gezien, de kinderen van Enak, van de reuzen; en wij waren als sprinkhanen in onze ogen, alzo waren wij ook in hun ogen.” – Numeri 13:33
Onderzoek naar één van de grootste mysteries uit Russische geschiedenis heropend. Wat gebeurde er in de Djatlovpas?
Foto: Dominikmatus Wikimedia Commons
Onderzoek naar één van de grootste mysteries uit Russische geschiedenis heropend. Wat gebeurde er in de Djatlovpas?
Het onderzoek naar één van de grootste mysteries uit de Russische geschiedenis wordt heropend: het ongeluk in de Djatlovpas, waarbij negen mensen onder bizarre omstandigheden om het leven kwamen. Het incident wordt omgeven met complottheorieën.
Sommigen denken dat de skiërs zijn aangevallen door aliens of de verschrikkelijke sneeuwman. Anderen zeggen dat ze in een militair testgebied waren beland.
Op de Russische tv is binnenkort een nieuwe serie te zien over het mysterieuze incident.
Heropend
Daarnaast heeft de Russische openbaar aanklager Andrej Koerjanov gezegd dat het onderzoek naar het ongeluk is heropend.
Er worden maar liefst 75 theorieën bestudeerd in de hoop de zaak na 60 jaar definitief te sluiten.
In 1959 reisden 10 skiërs (acht mannen en twee vrouwen) af naar de Dode Berg in het noordelijke deel van de Oeral.
Honderden meters
Slechts één persoon kwam levend terug.
Enkele groepsleden werden honderden meters van het tentenkamp dood en bevroren aangetroffen in hun ondergoed.
Bij een ander groepslid ontbrak de tong.
Pas twee maanden na het incident werden de resterende skiërs gevonden onder een dikke laag sneeuw.
Zwaar toegetakeld
Ze droegen de kleren van de expeditieleden die eerder waren gevonden.
De kleding zou besmet zijn met radioactieve straling en daarnaast waren de lichamen zwaar toegetakeld.
Nabestaanden zeiden dat de haren en huid van sommige groepsleden een bizarre oranje en grijze kleur hadden, wat wijst op radioactieve besmetting.
Maandenlang afgesloten
De Djatlovpas werd maandenlang afgesloten door de autoriteiten.
Een andere groep skiërs die in de buurt was claimde vreemde lichten te hebben gezien in de lucht.
Om deze reden vergelijken veel Russen het ongeluk met het Roswellincident in de Verenigde Staten in de jaren veertig.
Als we ervan uit gaan dat buitenaards leven bestaat en dat de aarde door hen wordt bezocht, dan is het logisch om aan te nemen dat ze ook op de maan zijn geweest.
En de recente ontdekking van een intact ruimteschip doet onmiddellijk weer denken aan de buitenaardse vrouw die tijdens de Apollo missies werd gevonden op de maan.
Alhoewel NASA haar uiterste best doet om zoveel mogelijk interessante informatie voor het grote publiek verborgen te houden, is er toch veel te vinden.
Je moet dan wel weten waar je moet zoeken en je moet ook weten waar je op moet letten. Iemand die daar in de loop der jaren een meester in is geworden is ufoloog Scott Waring. Als hij getrouwd is zal zijn vrouw waarschijnlijk niet echt blij met hem zijn, want de man schijnt niets anders te doen dan opnames van NASA doorspitten, op zoek naar juweeltjes.
Op één van de vele foto's die door NASA in de loop der jaren van het maanoppervlak zijn genomen, heeft Scott een vreemd object ontdekt in een krater.
De foto ziet er als volgt uit:
Zo op het eerste gezicht lijkt er niet zoveel bijzonders te zien in de rood omcirkelde krater. Totdat je wat verder inzoomt.
En dan begint zich iets af te tekenen dat hoe dan ook geen "natuurlijk object" is. Het is niet iets dat hoort bij het maanoppervlak, maar waar het wel veel op lijkt is een object zoals je die vroeger bij de Transformers tegenkwam.
En zeker als je nog wat verder inzoomt op het object op de maan, dan zie je dat het waarschijnlijk een ruimteschip is wat zich daar in die krater bevindt.
Een ruimteschip dat zich in opmerkelijk goede staat lijkt te bevinden.
Het zou ook niet het eerste ruimteschip zijn dat is gestand op de maan. Er is natuurlijk ook het verhaal van de geheime Apollo 20 missie, waarvan door officiële kanalen uiteraard wordt gezegd dat het een hoax is, maar gezien bovenstaande is dat helemaal niet zo zeker.
We hebben over die geheime missie eerder het volgende geschreven. Kijk en oordeel zelf of het een hoax is, of misschien toch de waarheid.
Het verhaal is afkomstig van een man die beweert dat hij meegeweest is op een speciale NASA missie: William Rutledge, gepensioneerd en woont nu in Afrika. Hij kwam naarvoren met een aantal verbazingwekkende feiten over zijn betrokkenheid bij NASA aan het eind van de jaren '70.
Rutledge claimt dat hij op tenminste twee missies naar de Maan is geweest, inclusief de mislukte Apollo 19 en de Apollo 20 missie, die naar hij zegt werd gelanceerd in augustus 1976 vanaf de VandenBerg luchtmachtbasis. Deze beide missies waren “geheime gezamenlijke ruimtemissies”, uitgevoerd door de Amerikanen en de Russen. Je vindt ze niet terug op de lijst van officiële missies en als het verhaal waar is, is daar een goede reden voor.
Het doel van deze missies was het onderzoeken van een groot object aan de achterkant van de maan in de Delporte_Iszak regio. Het was voor het eerst ontdekt door de Apollo 15 missie. Het lijkt op een neergestort gigantisch ruimteschip uit oude tijden. Op de volgende foto krijg je ongeveer een idee hoe groot het is:
Rutledge zegt dat hij samen met de Russische astronaut Lexei Leonov landde in een door Rusland gemaakte Lunar Module vlakbij het ruimteschip en dat ze daadwerkelijk naarbinnen gingen. Er werden voorwerpen ontdekt en meegenomen, inclusief twee lichamen van de “piloten”. Eén daarvan was in een verrassend goede conditie en bleek een vrouw te zijn. Deze vrouw heeft de naam “Mona Lisa” gekregen.
Zoals Rutledge vertelt:
“We gingen het grote ruimteschip binnen en ook in een kleinere met een driehoekige vorm (naast het grote schip was vlakbij ook nog een kleinere ontdekt). Het was een moederschip, heel erg oud, dat waarschijnlijk meer dan een miljard jaar geleden door het universum kruiste. Er waren veel aanwijzingen binnenin het schip over biologie, oude overblijfselen van een begroeiing in een “machinekamer”, speciale rotsen waar geelachtige vloeibare “tranen” uitkwamen die helende eigenschappen bezaten en natuurlijk de overblijfselen van wezens.
We vonden overblijfselen van kleine lichamen van ongeveer 10 centimeter groot die leefden in een netwerk van tubes door het hele schip, maar de grootste ontdekking was de twee lichamen, waarvan één helemaal intact.
Ik kan mij niet meer herinneren wie de naam voor de vrouw heeft bedacht, Leonov of ik. Het was een compleet intact humanoïde wezen, 1 meter 65 groot, met genitaliën, haar en zes vingers. Dit was de piloot, een besturingsorgaan was vastgemaakt aan de vingers en de ogen, geen kleren, we moesten twee kabels doorsnijden die verbonden waren met de neus. Geen neusgat. Leonov maakte het apparaat van de ogen los en er kwam bloed of biovloeistof tevoorschijn dat bevroor bij de mond, neus, ogen en sommige lichaamsdelen. Bepaalde lichaamsdelen waren in een buitengewone goede conditie”. Bovenstaande is een stukje uit een interview met William Rutledge, voor het volledige interview in het Engels, klik hier.
A fascinating new colour map of the world's river systems has revealed the flowing arteries of the planet as never seen before.
The guide, created by analyst Robert Szucs, shows every river basin on the globe with a different colour and width depending on water depth
The design has been several months in the making, with the 31-year-old saying he was desperate 'to do justice' to a subject he loves.
Mr Szucs has produced several national maps but has now completed his first world design (pictured). Every river basin is represented by a different colour, which is contrasted with a dark, black background
This map shows the United States of America and reveals the flow of rivers across the country. Mr Szucs collects his data with painstaking patience, assembling information from a variety of government and non-government agencies. He has created a system whereby the thicker lines represent higher stream orders, meaning the tributaries will be much smaller than the main river itself
The Hungarian native has no previous artistic background but says he was inspired by the 'boring nature' of textbooks. The images (pictured left is the United Kingdom and right Africa) have proved so successful that Robert is earning a steady income from them, although he still finds it odd when people refer to him as 'an artist'
In each map every river basin is given a different colour and width depending on water depth. And then thicker lines represent higher stream orders - such as in this image of the United Kingdom. It's a long process but Mr Szucs is adamant it's worth it
Mr Szucs, a geographic information system (GIS) analyst by trade, has spent most of his working life studying the geography of different countries.
In recent years however he has experimented at turning geographical maps into beautiful pieces of art.
He has produced several national maps but has now completed his first world design.
The result is a striking image which shows the veins of the world in stunning and eye-catching detail.
Every river basin is represented by a different colour, which is contrasted with a dark, black background.
Mr Szucs collects his data with painstaking patience, assembling information from a variety of government and non-government agencies.
The Hungarian native has no previous artistic background but says he was inspired by the 'boring nature' of textbooks.
He has created a system whereby the thicker lines represent higher stream orders. It's a long process but Robert is adamant it's worth it.
Mr Szucs, who lives in Birmingham, said: 'I am inspired by a determination to do justice to the beauty of rivers.
'Most river maps you see, especially in textbooks, are rather dull, so if there are any textbook publishers out there they can feel free to reach out.
'Assembling the data is a slow and painful process and as a perfectionist, I'm never 100 per cent happy. However, I am really pleased with this one.'
Rivers in Europe are shown in this remarkable map including the Ebro in Spain (bottom left in dark blue) and the Seine in France (in light blue). Mr Szucs has made a number of specific maps to areas of the world
Mr Szucs comes from a science background, having completed an MSc in Geography, and now finds it strange to hear people refer to him as an artist. His work (including this map of Europe) can be bought online and printed on to a number of surfaces including canvas, paper, metal, wood and glass
The world map can be bought online with prices starting at just £7.90 for a downloadable HD image.
The picture can then be printed on to a number of surfaces including canvas, paper, metal, wood and glass.
Buyers receive a digital, ultra-high resolution image and are then free to do as they wish with it.
The images have proved so successful that Robert is earning a steady income from them, although he still finds it odd when people refer to him as 'an artist'.
Mr Szucs said: 'The response has been completely positive and unexpectedly huge. It's rare that a hobby project does so well but I'm now trying to make a living out of this, so I'm more than thankful.
'I came from a scientific background, having an MSc in Geography so people calling me an artist now is still quite strange even now.'
Waist deep in the Big Mars-y And the big fool says to push on
If folk singer Pete Seeger were alive today (and don’t we wish he were), he might pen an update to his classic “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” to pay tribute to the news that a delta that might inspire similar folk or blues songs has been discovered far from Mississippi – on the surface of Mars.
It’ll be a little soggy but just keep slogging. We’ll soon be on dry ground.
In a joint press release by the European Space Agency (ESA) and Russia’s Roscosmos, a stunning panoramic photo (see it here) taken on November 16, 2018, by the Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS) on the ExoMars orbiter shows the Eberswalde crater delta in the southern hemisphere of Mars. The Roscosmos announcement almost waxed poetic (lyrics to a new song?) as it described the picture of a 31 km (19.25) wide swatch of the Martian surface.
This intricate structure of an ancient river delta once carried liquid water across the surface of Mars.
To best enjoy this image, produced with infrared and visible filters on the Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS) of the ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, view through red/green ‘3D’ glasses. To create a stereo view like this, the orbiter’s camera uses a motor to rotate its telescope and take photos from different angles. The two views can be put together to make a three-dimensional view. Click here to see one of the pair of images that comprise the ‘stereo pair’.
The distinctive form of a delta arises from sediments that are deposited by a river as it enters slower-moving water, like a lake or a sea, for example. The Nile River delta is a classic example on Earth, and uncannily similar features have been spotted on Saturn’s moon Titan and – closer to home – Mars. While liquid water is no longer present on the surface of Mars, features in the left portion of this image provide strong evidence of it having played an important role in the history of the Red Planet. Furthermore, water-ice is still stable on the surface today, and a recent discovery from Mars Express detected a pocket of liquid water below the surface.
The 100-metre-thick fan-shaped deposit seen in this image is found in Eberswalde crater in the southern hemisphere of Mars (326.33ºE/23.55ºS). The image covers an area of 31 x 7.5 km and was taken on 16 November 2018.
While presented in beautiful aqueous blues and greens, the image is false-colour. The layered rocks that comprise the delta deposits are indicated in white/yellow to purple/blue. The yellow represents the presence of oxidised iron deposits, indicating that the rocks were altered by the presence of water, while the blues signify less altered materials. This suggests that the influence of liquid water reduced over time, perhaps relating to a change in environmental conditions.
After the deposition of the delta sediments in the crater’s ancient lake, fresher sediments – some perhaps deposited by wind – accumulated to cover up a major part of the delta and its connecting channels. These secondary sediments were later eroded in the delta, exposing an inverted relief of the structure that is observed today.
This particular delta was first observed by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and has also been imaged by ESA’s Mars Express. It sits inside a 65 km wide impact basin called Eberswalde, which is almost completely buried by material ejected from the much larger and younger nearby Holden Crater.
Another example of a martian delta can be found in Jezero Crater, which was recently selected as the landing site for the NASA Mars 2020 rover. Meanwhile the ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars rover, also launching in 2020, will target the ancient, once water-rich plains of Oxia Planum. The ExoMars rover will drill down to two metres below the surface to search of clues for past life preserved underground.
ESA has been exploring Mars for more than 15 years, starting with Mars Express that arrived at the Red Planet at the end of 2003, and which continues to return results today. Meanwhile the Trace Gas Orbiterwill complete its first year of science investigations in April; it is sniffing the atmosphere to seek out the faint traces of gases that might be linked to active biological or geological process, and mapping the distribution of underground water-ice. It is also a data relay, providing essential communications infrastructure for current and future surface assets.
ESA and NASA are also preparing for the next stage of Mars exploration: returning a sample from the Red Planet. NASA’s 2020 rover is set to collect surface samples in small canisters that could later be retrieved by a second mission, and launched into Mars orbit. A third mission would rendezvous with the samples and return them to Earth, where they could be accessed by teams of scientists across the world.
Long-term planning is crucial to realise the missions that investigate fundamental science questions, and to ensure the continued development of innovative technology, inspiring new generations of European scientists and engineers.
Science is everywhere at ESA. As well as exploring the Universe and answering the big questions about our place in space we develop the satellites, rockets and technologies to get there. Science also helps us to care for our home planet. All this week we're highlighting different aspects of science at ESA. Join the conversation with #ScienceAtESA.
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“The layered rocks that make up the delta deposits are marked with white-yellow and purple-blue flowers. Yellow is the deposition of iron oxides, which indicates chemical changes due to exposure to water, blue is less modified deposits. The overall situation around the crater Eberswalde describes the smooth changes in the environment that occurred during times when the delta was still filled with water.”
If that doesn’t make you want to view it, the joint announcement points out that the photo is in 3D and recommends staring intently through 3D red-and-blue glasses for the maximum mind-blowing effect. (Links to the hi-res photo for 3D viewing here.) The delta on the left side is about 100 meters (328 feet) thick and the release compares its shape to the Nile River delta on Earth – without the water, of course. However, water was definitely the cause of the delta, with the liquid running through it from an ancient lake that once covered part of the crater.
The Sergeant said, “Sir, are you sure, This is the best way back to the base?” “Sergeant, go on! I forded this river ‘Bout a mile above this place.
This is not the first image taken of the Eberswalde crater delta – it was discovered in September 2011 by the ESA Mars Expressorbiter. These deltas are rare on Mars and – because of their obvious water-logged past – are attractive places to consider landing future missions and possibly building bases. A delta in the Jezero Crater is the targeted landing site for the NASA Mars 2020 rover and another in the Oxia Planum will be the landing site of the 2020 ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars rover mission.
Looks too deep from here, Big Fool
What might happen when these rovers attempt to ford these ancient river deltas? Let’s hope the programmers listen to the advice of Pete Seeger and his experience on the Mississippi.
We stripped and dived and found his body Stuck in the old quicksand I guess he didn’t know that the water was deeper Than the place he’d once before been
Waist deep! Neck deep! Soon even a Tall man’ll be over his head, we’re Waist deep in the Big Mars-y And the big fool says to push on!
What is behind themystery boom phenomenonNorth America is currently experiencing? I’ve been tracking reports of these unexplained explosions for a few years now, and they are without a doubt on the rise as this week a startlingly high number of mystery booms were reported throughout North America. It began on January 31 when residents of three separate counties in Tennessee reportedhearing a loud boomaround 11:30 a.m. Local chemical plants were contacted but reported nothing anomalous. Authorities in Bradley, McInn, and Polk counties are still investigating what could have caused such a powerful noise.
That same day, local news in North Carolina reported that people in Wake and Franklin counties have been calling law enforcement agencies to report unexplained loud blasts and booms that keep them awake at night. Two homeowners even reported that the booms are so powerful that they have briefly lost power as a result of the tremors. So far, the Wake County Sheriff’s Office has been unable to pinpoint the source of the booms.
People in Cranston and Johnston, Rhode Island reported strange booms loud enough to shake their entire houses on February 2.
The next night on February 3, residents of Park Slope, Brooklyn heard a powerful anomalous boom and notified the NYPD and FDNY. While a manhole explosion was suspected in that case, neither agency could identify the cause of the explosion-like sound.
On February 4, local CBS affiliate 4WWL reported that people in Harahan and River Ridge, Louisiana have been hearing “strange cannon-like sounds” that wake them up at night. Residents say the sounds have been going on for weeks, and nobody seems to know what causes them. River Ridge resident Crystal Roddy told 4WWL that the sounds sound like “something is dropping and something big landed on the ground.” According to the report, Louisianians say the booms are becoming more frequent.
Today, February 5, Philadelphians are once again wonderingwhat could be causing mysterious explosions, this time a series of them. Philadelphia was rocked by a series of mystery booms exactly one week ago, and both incidents have yet to be explained.
Day after day, local news stations around the country publish reports which show an endless stream of terrifying, ground-shaking explosions powerful enough to shake houses, wake people up in the middle of the night, and generally terrify everyone who hears them. Why isn’t more attention being paid to the phenomenon? Could it be that officials are paying attention and merely not telling us about it? Cryoseisms or “frost quakes” have been suspected in some incidents in cold climates, but the booms have been heard in areas where temperatures don’t typically plunge low enough for the phenomenon – not to mention the fact that the booms are heard throughout the year. Could these anomalous sounds be sonic booms caused by undisclosed aircraft activity? Any guess is as good as any at this point.
Deep within the Earth, a fierce molten core is generating a magnetic field capable of defending our planet against devastating solar winds.
The protective field extends thousands of miles into space and its magnetism affects everything from global communication to animal migration and weather patterns.
But this magnetic field, so important to life on Earth, has weakened by 15 per cent over the last 200 years. And this, scientists claim, could be a sign that the Earth’s poles are about to flip.
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The Earth's protective field extends thousands of miles into space and its magnetism affects everything from global communication to animal migration and weather patterns
Experts believe we're currently overdue a flip, but they're unsure when this could occur.
If a switch happens, we would be exposed to solar winds capable of punching holes into the ozone layer.
The impact could be devastating for mankind, knocking out power grids, radically changing Earth’s climate and driving up rates of cancer.
‘This is serious business’, Richard Holme, Professor of Earth, Ocean and Ecological Sciences at Liverpool University told MailOnline. ‘Imagine for a moment your electrical power supply was knocked out for a few months – very little works without electricity these days.’
The Earth's climate would change drastically. In fact, a recent Danish study believes global warming is directly related to the magnetic field rather than CO2 emissions.
The study claimed that the planet is experiencing a natural period of low cloud cover due to fewer cosmic rays entering the atmosphere.
Radiation at ground level would also increase, with some estimates suggesting overall exposure to cosmic radiation would double causing more deaths from cancer.
Researchers predict that in the event of a flip, every year a hundred thousand people would die from the increased levels of space radiation.
'Radiation could be 3-5 times greater than that from the man-made ozone holes. Furthermore, the ozone holes would be larger and longer-lived,' said Dr Colin Forsyth from the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at UCL.
The magnetosphere is a large area around the Earth produced by the planet's magnetic field. It presence means that charged particles of the solar wind are unable to cross the magnetic field lines and are deflected around the Earth
The magnetosphere is a large area around the Earth produced by the planet’s magnetic field. It presence means that charged particles of the solar wind are unable to cross the magnetic field lines and are deflected around the Earth.
Space agencies are now taking the threat seriously. In November, three spacecraft were launched as part of the SWARM mission to uncover how the Earth’s magnetic field is changing.
The mission plans to provide better maps of our planet's magnetic field and help scientists understand the impact of space weather on satellite communication and GPS.
‘Whilst we have a basic understanding of the interior of the Earth, there is much we still don’t know,’ said Dr Forsyth.
‘We do not fully understand how the Earth’s magnetic field is generated, why it is variable and the timescales of these variations.’
The mission will provide a current map of Earth’s magnetic field. But historic evidence of its decline has already been found in a surprising source – ancient pottery.
Scientists have discovered that ancient pots can act as a magnetic time capsule. This is because they contain an iron-based mineral called magnetite. When pots form, the magnetite minerals align with the Earth’s magnetic field, just like compass needles.
WHAT IS GEOMAGNETIC REVERSAL?
The Earth’s magnetic field is in a permanent state of change. Magnetic north drifts around and every few hundred thousand years the polarity flips so a compass would point south instead of north. The strength of the magnetic field also constantly changes and currently it is showing signs of significant weakening.
The Earth magnetic field is mainly generated in the very hot molten core of the planet. The magnetic field is basically a dipole (it has a North and a South Pole). Magnetic reversal or flip is the process by which the North Pole is transformed into the South and vice versa, typically following a considerable reduction in the strength of the magnetic field. However, weakening of the magnetic field does not always result in a reversal.
During a reversal, scientists expect to see more complicated field pattern at the Earth's surface, with perhaps more than one North and South Pole at any given time. The overall strength of the field, anywhere on the Earth, may be no more than a tenth of its strength now.
The Earth's magnetic field is generated in the very hot molten core of the planet. Scientists believe Mars used to have a magnetic field similar to that on Earth which protected its atmosphere
By examining pottery from prehistory to modern times, scientists have discovered just how dramatically the field has changed in the last few centuries.
They’ve found that Earth’s magnetic field is in a permanent state of flux. Magnetic north drifts and every few hundred thousand years the polarity flips so a compass would point south instead of north.
If the magnetic field continues to decline, over billions of years, Earth could end up like Mars - a once oceanic world that has become a dry, barren planet incapable of supporting life.
WHAT ARE THE DANGERS OF A MAGNETIC FLIP?
Life has existed on the Earth for billions of years, during which there have been many reversals.
There is no obvious correlation between animal extinctions and those reversals. Likewise, reversal patterns do not have any correlation with human development and evolution.
It appears that some animals, such as whales and some birds use Earth's magnetic field for migration and direction finding.
Since geomagnetic reversal takes a number of thousands of years, they could well adapt to the changing magnetic environment or develop different methods of navigation.
Radiation at ground level would increase, however, with some estimates suggesting that overall exposure to cosmic radiation would double causing more deaths from cancer. ‘But only slightly,’ said Professor Richard Holme.
‘And much less than lying on the beach in Florida for a day. So if it happened, the protection method would probably be to wear a big floppy hat.’
Electric grid collapse from severe solar storms is a major risk. As the magnetic field continues to weaken, scientists are highlighting the importance off-the grid energy systems using renewable energy sources to protect the Earth against a black out.
'The very highly charged particles can have a deleterious effect on the satellites and astronauts,' added Dr Mona Kessel, a Magnetosphere discipline scientist at Nasa.
In one area, there is evidence that a flip is already occurring. ‘The increasing strength of the South Atlantic anomaly, an area of weak field over Brazil, is already a problem,’ said Professor Richard Holme.
The Earth's climate could also change. A recent Danish study has found that the earth's weather has been significantly affected by the planet's magnetic field.
They claimed that fluctuations in the number of cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere directly alter the amount of cloud covering the planet.
Henrik Svensmark, a weather scientist at the Danish National Space Centre who led the team behind the research, believes that the planet is experiencing a natural period of low cloud cover due to fewer cosmic rays entering the atmosphere.
But scientists claim the rate of decline is too fast for the Earth’s core to simply burn out. Instead, the story told by ancient pottery suggests the Earth's poles could be about to undergo another flip.
According to the British Geological Survey, the Earth's magnetic field has on average four or five reversals in polarity every million years and we’re now overdue a similar event.
‘At the moment, we cannot accurately determine whether or not the Earth’s field is about to flip,’ said Dr Forsyth. ‘We have only been recording the Earth’s field for around 170 years; about 1-15 per cent of the time a flip is expected to take.’
If a flip occurs, it would cause the Earth’s magnetic shield to be weakened for thousands of years, opening up our defences and causing cosmic radiation to get through.
'We have a double layer defence shield,' said Jim Wild a space scientists at Lancaster University.
'Space is full of stuff that’s not great for biological tissue. If we didn’t have an atmosphere, that stuff would be hitting us. It’s the magnetic field protects atmosphere from the solar wind.'
Not all of the effects of a weak magnetic field will be bad. The much sought-after spectacle of an aurora would be visible every night all over the Earth as solar winds hit the atmosphere
‘Satellites flying over have far more problems than in other locations. Astrophysical satellite are just switched off in this location, but from my perspective, this isn’t much good if you want to study the Brazilian rainforest.’
'The very highly charged particles can have a deleterious effect on the satellites and astronauts,' added Dr Mona Kessel, a Magnetosphere discipline scientist at Nasa.
Scientists however, are quick to point out that while a magnetic flip could cause problems for mankind, the event won’t be a catastrophic.
‘We’ve had many reversals in the past, and haven’t been able to show that they had anything to do with, for example, mass extinctions,’ said Professor Holme.
And not all of the effects will be bad. The much sought-after spectacle of an aurora would be visible every night all over the Earth as solar winds hit the atmosphere.
There remains, however, much work yet to be done in understanding the properties of the deep Earth.
The Earth’s core is a hostile world where the crushing forces and temperatures, similar to that of the surface of the sun, take our scientific understanding and abilities to the limit.
'This isn't some crazy theory that might happen,' said Professor Wild. 'There is evidence, but we still need to do more science to understand the impact...I'm confident we can come up with a solution.'
WHAT IS THE SWARM MISSION?
Swarm is a ESA satellite mission which was launched on 22nd November 2013.
The mission consists of three identical satellites which will precisely measure the strength and direction of Earth's magnetic field. The new data will be processed by British Geological Survey to produce an accurate map of this field.
In order to best measure the field, the satellites will orbit in a unique configuration. Two satellites will fly side-by-side at height of 450 km, while the third satellite will fly at an altitude of 530 km.
The lower two satellites will allow very fine measurements of the magnetic field generated by the rocks in the Earth's crust, which are difficult to detect otherwise. The upper satellite will give a simultaneous measurement at a different location.
The classic children’s book image of the North Pole has it looking more like a barber pole – candy-cane red-and-white stripes with a bright ball on top. Those are also the colors of “Waldo of the ubiquitous Where’s Waldo series, that may be more than just a coincidence – a new announcement by NASA reveals that the magnetic North Pole has been on the move and is becoming exceeding difficult to find. The latest data actually has it moving towards Siberia. Should we also drop the search for Waldo and start watching for Yakov?
“Due to unplanned variations in the Arctic region, scientists have released a new model to more accurately represent the change of the magnetic field.”
The announcement comes from the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and carries the scary title: “World Magnetic Model Out-of-Cycle Release.” Out-of-cycle is never good news – whether it’s referring to reports, machines or ovulations. In this case, it refers to the World Magnetic Model, which is an official map of the Earth’s magnetic field created by the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the United Kingdom’s Defence Geographic Centre (DGC). It’s used by the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.K. Ministry of Defence, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and civilian organizations for navigation, attitude and heading referencing systems using the geomagnetic field. The model is produced at 5-year intervals, with the current model expiring on December 31, 2019.
(Wikipedia)
However …
The most famous element of the planet’s magnetic field – the magnetic North Pole which all compasses actually point to – has been moving unpredictably and inexplicably around the Northern Hemisphere for the past few years at speeds and increments so large that the NCEI decided not to wait until New Year’s Eve 2019 and instead issue an out-of-cycle state of the mag pole address. And what exactly IS its address these days? Well, what day is this? The pole is moving at a speed of up to 60 km (37 mi) per year towards Russia and has crossed the International Dateline into the Eastern Hemisphere. Beyond that, the formula is located somewhere deep inside the out-of-cycle release, while those in charge assure us that everything is now fine and your GPS won’t direct you over a cliff.
Except …
The out-of-cycle release was knocked even further out-of-cycle by the recent U.S. government shutdown, which the powers that be also assure us did not contribute to the problem.
Really? Then what is causing this mysterious pole migration anyway?
At the 2018 American Geophysical Union fall meeting, geophysicist Phil Livermore blamed it on an epic underground battle going on right now between a magnetic field in northern Canada and one in Siberia over the control of the magnetic pole. Canada is weakening and Siberia is winning, although he’s not really sure why. Nor does he say if this is linked to the prediction that the magnetic north and south poles are due to flip relatively (in terms of geology) soon. Good luck using your GPS when that happens (not for thousands of years, but it’s always good to be prepared, especially when dealing with government-related predictions).
Should we be worried about the on-the-move-to-parts-unknown-for-no-apparent-reason North Magnetic Pole? Geoff Reeves, a space scientist at Los Alamos National Lab, said this in National Geographic:
“We know that the pole now is moving faster than it has for decades, but how often does that happen in the long historical record? We don’t have any idea. What we know is what it’s doing now is different, and that’s always exciting scientifically.”
If you’re looking for Waldo, you might want to start at the bottom of a cliff, staring and swearing at his GPS.
"Leaked" footage of United Nations discussing giant UFO pyramid over the Pentagon, Feb 2019, video, UFO Sighting News.
"Leaked" footage of United Nations discussing giant UFO pyramid over the Pentagon, Feb 2019, video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: December 21, 2018 (4PM) Here is something mind-blowing. A speech was given by Aliya Prokofyeva in the United Nations building...yes its really at the United Nations. Its not faked. This is video taken at the United Nations podium. She gives witness testimony about a giant triangle UFO hovering over the Pentagon in Washington DC. Even thought the UN asked to not record...of course thats the time when you know something important is worth recording. So yes, its legit. What really is interesting here is that its a Russian woman, probably a spy that is releasing the information to the UN, not an American, not a US congressman or Senator or President...but a Russian! Scientists recently measured mysteriously repeating radio signals coming from a galaxy 1.5 billion light-years away. FRB 180814.J0422+73 was the signals name. The repeating signal was part of 13 fast radio bursts (FRBs) detected by a new telescope in Canada. This signal was the same signal received from the triangle UFO over the Pentagon. The meaning of the signal...still not divulged to the public...but must be very significant...maybe even a final warning before a cataclysmic event. Now hear me. Many will try to debunk and tell you that this video is a lie...but believe me...they base their words on optioning without a single fact to back them up. This...is 100% real. Scott C. Waring
In windmolens, zonnepanelen, batterijen en elektrische auto’s zitten metalen van vaak bedenkelijke herkomst. Om onze honger naar hernieuwbare energie te stillen, zullen we er veel meer van nodig hebben en Europa wil de handen zelf niet vuilmaken. 'We zijn naïef en hypocriet.'
Willen we de opwarming van het klimaat binnen de perken houden, dan moeten we tegen 2050 al onze elektriciteit klimaatneutraal opwekken. Daarvoor moet de hoeveelheid elektriciteit die we met zonnepanelen en windmolens opwekken volgens het volgens het Internationaal Energieagentschap (IEA) ongeveer vertwintigvoudigen.
De enorme aangroei van windmolens, zonnepanelen en elektrische voertuigen zal de vraag naar bekende en minder bekende metalen doen stijgen
Ook transport moet elektrisch. In 2017 kwamen iets meer dan een miljoen nieuwe elektrische auto’s op de weg, wat het totaal op ruim drie miljoen brengt. Ze worden steeds goedkoper. Experts schatten dat ze tussen 2020 en 2025 met de klassieke auto zullen wedijveren. Wetenschappers aan de Vrije Universiteit Brussel verwachten dat tegen 2030 een kwart van de wereldwijd verkochte auto’s hybride of volledig elektrisch rijdt, goed voor een kleine 140 miljoen nieuwe elektrische wagens per jaar.
Die enorme aangroei van windmolens, zonnepanelen en elektrische voertuigen zal de vraag naar bekende en minder bekende metalen doen stijgen. ‘Slagen we er niet in de stijgende behoefte aan metalen te dekken, dan kan dat stokken steken in de wielen van de energietransitie’, zegt Elmer Rietveld, ingenieur aan de Nederlandse Organisatie voor toegepast-natuurwetenschappelijk onderzoek (TNO).
De TNO identificeerde recent zeventien metalen die belangrijk zijn voor de energietransitie en waarvoor een ‘nooit geziene toename’ van de ontginning nodig is. Ook de Europese Commissie houdt nauwlettend een lijst bij met zogenoemde ‘kritieke grondstoffen’, waarvan de bevoorrading onzeker is. Voor sommige essentiële grondstoffen kan dat al tegen 2030 problematisch worden.
Volgens sommige schattingen moeten we tussen nu en 2025 jaarlijks een nieuwe lithiummijn openen om de vraag te kunnen volgen.
Dat is onder meer het geval voor lithium en kobalt, onderdelen van de populaire lithiumionbatterijen, en voor indium en zilver, nodig voor zonnepanelen. Ook de beschikbaarheid van neodymium, praseodymium en dysprosium kan een probleem vormen. Die zogenoemde zeldzame aarden zitten in magneten die cruciaal zijn in bepaalde types windmolens en in elektrische motoren. Een gemiddelde elektrische fiets bevat ongeveer 85 gram neodymium, een elektrische auto zo’n 800 gram.
We moeten rekenen op een forse toename van de vraag naar zulke grondstoffen. De Wereldbank verwacht dat de vraag naar batterijmetalen als nikkel, aluminium, lithium en kobalt tegen 2050 met meer dan 1000 procent zal toenemen, in een scenario waarin we de opwarming tot twee graden Celsius proberen te beperken. Volgens sommige schattingen moeten we tussen nu en 2025 jaarlijks een nieuwe lithiummijn openen om de vraag te kunnen volgen.Voor cruciale metalen in windmolens en zonnepanelen verwacht de Wereldbank ruwweg een verdubbeling van de vraag.
Niet zeldzaam, wel corrupt
Het probleem is niet zozeer dat de stoffen in kwestie schaars zijn. Als je enkel kijkt naar de voorraden die in de aardkorst aanwezig zijn, komen we voor de meeste elementen nog voor eeuwen toe. Zelfs de zeldzame aarden zijn, anders dan de naam doet vermoeden, helemaal niet zeldzaam. Wel zijn er niet zoveel ertsen die rijk genoeg zijn aan zeldzame aarden om ontginning economisch rendabel te maken.
Zeldzame aarden komen vaak samen voor met de radioactieve elementen thorium en uranium. De ontginning kan daardoor erg vervuilend zijn
Waarom zijn zoveel experts dan onzeker over de beschikbaarheid van kritische stoffen? Doorgaans heeft dat meer te maken met geopolitieke factoren dan met fysieke schaarste. De echte moeilijkheid is dat een aantal cruciale grondstoffen vooral uit politiek instabiele of corrupte landen komt. Uit een onderzoek van het International Institute of Sustainable Development (IISD) blijkt dat ongeveer 70 procent van de reserves aan kobalt, grafiet, molybdeen en seleen zich in staten bevindt die kwetsbaar zijn voor conflicten en politieke instabiliteit.
Bovendien zijn we voor sommige elementen afhankelijk van een beperkt aantal leveranciers. Zo’n 95 procent van de zeldzame aarden komt uit China, 65 procent van het kobalt komt uit Congo. Daar staan issues als mensenrechten en milieu doorgaans niet hoog op de agenda.
In Congo, ook een belangrijke leverancier van tantaal, tin, koper en goud, is de ontginning van kobalt gelinkt met uitbuiting, geweld en kinderarbeid. Volgens Amnesty International komt ongeveer een vijfde van het Congolese kobalt uit kleine, artisanale mijnen, waar de veiligheidsmaatregelen vaak te wensen overlaten.
Zeldzame aarden komen vaak samen voor met de radioactieve elementen thorium en uranium. De ontginning kan daardoor erg vervuilend zijn. De Bayan Obomijn nabij Baotou in Binnen-Mongolië is de grootste mijn voor zeldzame aarden ter wereld. De streek is er sterk vervuild door de chemicaliën die mijnbouwers gebruiken bij de ontginning en door thoriumhoudend afval uit bezinkingsbekkens. Voorts is een onduidelijke hoeveelheid zeldzame aarden afkomstig uit illegale mijnbouw, waarvan geen gegevens over mensenrechten en milieuzorg bekend zijn.
Waartoe de afhankelijkheid van één of een beperkt aantal leveranciers kan leiden, werd in 2011 duidelijk. China voerde toen strenge exportquota voor zeldzame aarden in. De prijs van sommige metalen vertienvoudigde. Inmiddels zijn die prijzen weer gedaald. ‘Die daling is vermoedelijk slechts tijdelijk’, zegt Koen Binnemans (KU Leuven). China voert een heel bewuste politiek rond zeldzame aarden, aldus de expert in kritieke metalen. ‘Door de prijzen aanvankelijk laag te houden, hebben buitenlandse mijnen en bedrijven die in recycling investeerden de deuren moeten sluiten. China heeft vervolgens handig gebruik gemaakt van zijn monopolie en de prijzen opgetrokken. Om ze daarna weer te laten zakken en zo nieuwe buitenlandse initiatieven te torpederen.’
‘Het lijkt officieel niet zo, maar China hanteert nog steeds exportquota’, zegt Binnemans. ‘Het land wil zijn grondstoffen zo duur mogelijk verkopen. Het verandert tegelijk van een exporteur in een importeur.’ China is momenteel de grootste koper van kobalt, lithium en nikkel. ‘Dat doet het deels om de enorme binnenlandse vraag te dekken: vandaag rijden naar schatting 200 miljoen elektrische fietsen rond in China. Verder exporteert het land liever afgewerkte producten als batterijen en motoren dan metalen. Dat vormt een bedreiging voor onze eigen clean tech-industrie.’
Harde les
De zeldzame-aardencrisis van 2011 is een wake-up call geweest. ‘Europa hoopte onafhankelijk te worden van China. Inmiddels is duidelijk dat ons dat absoluut niet zal lukken’, zegt Binnemans. ‘Het is mogelijk dat de crisis zich herhaalt’, besluiten ook experts van het European Rare Earths Competency Network (ERECON) in een rapport. Om onze afhankelijkheid van een beperkt aantal dubieuze leveranciers te verminderen, schuiven experts drie oplossingen naar voren: kritieke metalen zoveel mogelijk vervangen, recyclen, en nieuwe mijnen openen. Geen van die drie is evident.
‘We willen schone technologie, maar de nodige metalen mogen niet hier worden ontgonnen. Sta mij toe dat hypocriet te noemen’
Kritieke elementen vervangen door andere lukt maar tot op zekere hoogte. ‘Voor neodymium in magneten hebben we nog geen goed alternatief, en dat zal er wellicht ook niet snel komen’, denkt Binnemans. Hoewel elektrische-autobouwer Tesla voor zijn eerste modellen motoren zonder zeldzame aarden gebruikte, is de fabrikant daarvan afgestapt. Motoren met neodymium zijn compacter en efficiënter. En hoewel er ook batterijen zonder kobalt bestaan, lijkt het erop dat de li-ionaccu mét kobalt de dominante technologie wordt. De energiedichtheid en compactheid zijn hoger. Ook windmolens zonder magneten – of neodymium – zijn een optie, alleen zijn die minder efficiënt en vragen ze meer onderhoud. Dat maakt ze minder geschikt voor offshoretoepassingen.
Massaal recyclen dan maar. Al hebben we ook daar een aantal hindernissen te overwinnen. Om recycling rendabel te maken, moeten materiaalverwerkers genoeg afgedankte producten binnenkrijgen. Dat is voor de relatief jonge groene technologieën vaak nog niet het geval, al kan dat snel veranderen. Doorgaans zijn producten ook niet ontworpen om te worden gerecycled. ‘Fabrikanten focussen vrijwel uitsluitend op hoe hun groene technologie presteert, en niet op hoe ze die circulair kunnen ontwerpen’, zegt Rietveld.
Het kost te veel moeite om producten uit elkaar te halen en de waardevolle materialen te recupereren. Dat is onder meer het geval voor elektrische motoren. ‘Die belanden nu gewoon op de schroothoop en de zeldzame aarden zijn we kwijt’, zegt Peter Tom Jones, expert duurzaam materialenbeheer aan de KU Leuven. In het door de KU Leuven gecoördineerde Demeterproject ontwikkelden onderzoekers een prototype van een elektrische motor waarvan de magneten wél makkelijk te verwijderen en recyclen zijn. Het zal nog even duren voor die is opgeschaald en op de markt komt.
Dan is het nog de vraag of bedrijven interesse tonen. ‘Er is al heel wat technologie beschikbaar om zeldzame aarden te recyclen, maar het gebeurt nauwelijks’, zegt Jones. ‘Het is goedkoper om nieuw ontgonnen metalen te kopen.’ De zeldzame-aardencrisis is een harde les geweest, aldus Jones. ‘Europa heeft toen enorm geïnvesteerd in onderzoek naar recycling van zeldzame aarden. Dat heeft veel technische oplossingen opgeleverd. En hoeveel zijn er inmiddels commercieel toegepast? Niet één. Ze kunnen niet op tegen de goedkope zeldzame aarden uit China.’
Een laatste uitdaging is afgedankte producten op de juiste plek krijgen. Volgens Recupel, dat afgedankte elektronica inzamelt, slingeren bij Belgische gezinnen meer dan drie miljoen oude gsm’s rond, minstens één per gezin. Terwijl die waardevolle metalen bevatten. Het Belgische metaalbedrijf Umicore recyclet vandaag al kobalt, koper, nikkel en lithium uit batterijen en mobiele telefoons. De pilootinstallatie van het bedrijf in Hoboken kan jaarlijks 7.000 ton afgedankte batterijen en elektronica verwerken. Dat komt overeen met zo’n 35.000 autobatterijen, 2 miljoen fietsbatterijen, of 250 miljoen mobiele-telefoonbatterijen. ‘Jaarlijks produceren fabrikanten 1,5 miljard smartphones‘, zegt Marjolein Scheers (Umicore). ‘De afgedankte toestellen zouden genoeg kobalt kunnen opleveren voor 2 miljoen elektrische auto’s.’
Geen mijn in mijn tuin
Zelfs als we erin slagen veel beter te recyclen, zal er meer mijnbouw nodig zijn. Met de enorm groeiende vraag naar kritieke metalen kan dat niet anders. Hoe zorgen we er dan voor dat we duurzaam ontginnen? ‘Er bestaan richtlijnen voor verantwoorde mijnbouw, maar die moeten dan wel worden nageleefd’, zegt Rietveld. ‘In de praktijk is daar weinig toezicht op, en valt het moeilijk te achterhalen waar metalen precies vandaan komen.’ ‘We willen meer transparantie bij de toeleveringsketens’, zegt Clare Church van het IISD. ‘Nu weten we amper wie het goed doet en wie niet.’
De Europese Unie heeft een nieuwe regelgeving ingevoerd die moet garanderen dat Europese bedrijven vanaf 2021 geen conflictmineralen meer invoeren. Zulke mineralen liggen aan de basis van mensenrechtenschendingen, corruptie en geweld. Maar die regels gelden enkel voor tin, tantaal, wolfraam en goud. ‘De meeste groene conflictmineralen vallen niet onder de nieuwe regelgeving‘, merkt het IISD op. ‘Bestaande regels zouden ook op alle mineralen voor groene technologie van toepassing moeten zijn, in de eerste plaats op kobalt, zeldzame aarden en lithium.’
Jones is sceptisch. ‘In de praktijk komt er weinig terecht van die mooie ethische principes. De meeste bedrijven zijn in de eerste plaats geïnteresseerd in de prijs van hun grondstoffen. Het milieu en ethische principes komen helaas meestal pas op de tweede plaats.’
Waarom de grondstoffen dan niet gewoon dichter bij huis halen, waar verantwoorde ontginning meer voor de hand ligt? ERECON wijst op het potentieel om zeldzame aarden in Europa te winnen, onder meer in Zweden en Groenland. De ontginning zou er nog voor 2020 van start kunnen gaan. Ze zou de Europese vraag naar zeldzame aarden decennialang kunnen dekken. Europa beschikt ook over kobalthoudende ertsen in Griekenland, Cyprus en Macedonië. ‘Die zijn minder rijk en kunnen daardoor niet concurreren met kobalt uit Congo’, zegt Binnemans. ‘Dat kan veranderen als we bereid zouden zijn iets meer te betalen voor ons kobalt’.
‘In de huidige situatie kunnen we zonder overheidssteun geen nieuwe mijnen openen of de industrie voor de verwerking van de ertsen op poten zetten’, zegt Jones. ‘En dat is in strijd met de Europese regels rond vrije marktwerking. Terwijl één nieuwe mijn voor zeldzame aarden ons bevoorradingsprobleem in één klap zou oplossen. Als je ziet hoe andere landen zoals China, de Verenigde Staten en Japan wél effectief hun belangen beschermen, zijn we in Europa naïef.’
Nieuwe mijnbouwprojecten maken weinig enthousiasme los. Niemand wil een mijn in zijn achtertuin. De Zweedse Nora Kärrmijn zou in haar eentje de Europese vraag naar zeldzame aarden voor de komende vijftig jaar kunnen dekken. Een petitie met 45.000 handtekeningen stak – voorlopig – een stokje voor de ontginning. ‘In West-Europa willen we schone technologie, maar we willen niet dat de metalen die daarvoor nodig zijn hier worden ontgonnen’, zegt Jones. ‘Laat ze dat maar in China of Congo doen. Zo wentelen we de milieu-impact af op het Zuiden. Sta mij toe dat hypocriet te noemen.’
Volgens Jones moet het anders, en snel. ‘Als we de overgang naar een klimaatvriendelijke economie serieus nemen en minder afhankelijk willen zijn van de rest van de wereld, hebben we dringend nood aan beleid dat inzet op maximaal recyclen van kritieke metalen én verantwoorde mijnbouw in Europa.’
NASA Finally Explains the Origin of the Apocalyptic Noise Heard from the Skies!
NASA Finally Explains the Origin of the Apocalyptic Noise Heard from the Skies
Several days ago, we released the story about the spooky trumpet sound heard in different nations all over the world. The unusual sounds which supposedly came in the heavens played once again, but this time, the hair raising sound was heard last June 4th at around 3 P.M in Batangas, Philippines.
Although it’s quite funny the occurrence received minimal hoopla until this year, the odd sound were heard around in Germany, Russia, Australia, Usa, Canada, and in other components of the world since it was recorded in 2008. Those who’ve heard the sound on video related the baffling sounds to the apocalyptic prophesy while others believe these are coming from UFOs and extraterrestrial beings said in the bible, and personally.
View this video from Batangas:
No one has described the source of the sound–until now, although some have doubted the credibility of the records.
The National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) clarified that neither angels nor extraterrestrial beings have anything related to the occasion. The truth is, they said these sounds are but a natural phenomenon that happen on a regular basis.
A representative from NASA who was quoted by a nearby US media said, “We could really hear the typical tunes of symphony in the sound of unexpected thunderstorm coming from our planet, and no alien spaceship.”
The sounds are not audible to human ears unless the volume is high. This background noise” that is “ is not dissimilar to what we hear from sci-fi movies, although this comes from ground.
Dr. Steven Greer, a leading figure in the UFO disclosure movement, has just proposed an audacious idea concerning official disclosure of extraterrestrial life. In his expert opinion, acquired over more than 25 years of disclosure advocacy, continued secrecy is better than disclosing the truth about visiting aliens if they are depicted in any other way than peaceful nonviolent beings attempting to advance the evolution of human life on Earth.
In the February 5 installment of Gaia TV’s Disclosure series, Greer was interviewed on the topic of the “Architecture of Secrecy” and explained his view about how official disclosure should be handled. He asserted his controversial idea that continued secrecy is better than any disclosure scenario that depicts extraterrestrials as in any way constituting a threat:
My biggest concern is that there’s a hijacking of disclosure around a narrative of a threat, of an us versus them scenario. That is the sort of thing that can lead to the worst possible outcome. I wrote a paper called “When Disclosure Serves Secrecy”. Disclosure that would serve the secret agenda is not something that we need. I’d rather have the secrecy continue, frankly. But a disclosure that would be truthful and would be forward looking, and that would have an interplanetary peace initiative, and communication and contact initiative, and that would have the release of these technologies for peaceful energy generation, transportation and what have you, that would transform the planet very quickly (Video: 9:45)
Greer explicitly referred to Luiz Elizondo and Dr. Hal Puthoff, who are senior figures in Tom DeLonge’s To The Stars Academy, as a major part of the threat scenario that is being currently put out into the public arena through the major news media. On that score, I would agree with Greer that the “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program” (AATIP) which was created within the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2007, and headed by Elizondo up to 2017, was unnecessarily framing the UFO issue in terms of it being a threat to national security.
If Greer only limited himself to critiquing depictions of UFOs and all extraterrestrial visitors as a threat, which AATIP appeared to be doing, he would be on solid ground. However, Greer in the Disclosure interview, as well as in past public statements, made it clear that he is against researcher that depict any extraterrestrials, even if only a small percentage, as a threat in any way.
On May 2, 2006, Greer launched an extraordinary public attack on my exopolitics research for having committed the egregious sin of proposing that extraterrestrials could in any way behave similarly to humans in terms of a wide range of motivations. My research dividing extraterrestrials into different motivational categories, e.g., the good, the bad and the indifferent, was lambasted by Greer as fueled by disinformation.
Greer is no doubt correct that elements of the Military Industrial Complex are exaggerating the threat narrative when it comes to UFOs and extraterrestrial visitation, which AATIP appeared to be currently doing and which I acknowledged back in my 2006 response to Greer. In it, however, I also pointed out that Greer’s bold assertion that there is no evidence of hostile extraterrestrial behavior, can be easily shown to be wrong by examining multiple sources revealing the egregious behavior of some extraterrestrial visitors.
On July 26, 2010, Greer was confronted by Project Camelot founders, Kerry Cassidy and Bill Ryan, over the same issue, and they presented their own evidentiary sources that some extraterrestrial visitors were behaving unethically and maliciously.
In 2018, Greer attacked two of the insider sources I have cited extensively in my secret space program book series, Corey Goode and William Tompkins, as putting out disinformation about aggressive extraterrestrials, Draconian Reptilians, who are described as a prominent part of the planetary control system. In this case, he speculated that both Goode and Tompkins were implanted with false memories and were unwittingly spreading disinformation.
Again, I responded to Greer by pointing out the abundant evidence refuting his audacious assertion that no extraterrestrials behave in ways that are unethical or malicious. Indeed, I showed how his dismissal of Tompkins claims, in particular, ignored the impressive documentation substantiating his information.
With that brief background on Greer’s past public statements on the issue of some, not all, extraterrestrials being unethical and malicious, the context has been set for better understanding the implications of what Greer had to say next in the February 5 interview.
Greer repeated his assertion that continued secrecy is preferable to any official disclosure announcement describing aliens as a threat, even if only partially or a subset of the entire alien visitation scenario:
The disclosure of this subject is the most important announcement in the history of the human race. How it’s handled, it has to be handled with great wisdom and great care. If it is handled with the kind of buffoonery and clumsiness that is evolving, or with partial truths, mixed in with disinformation, with frightening scenarios that scare the hell out of the public, I actually prefer the secrecy. (17:34)
What makes Greer’s views significant is that he claims to be in touch with members of the oversight group of up to 200 members commonly referred to as the MAJIC committee. Greer asserts that he is providing them with an expert civilian perspective on disclosure, where, incredibly, he appears to be advocating continued secrecy if an official disclosure statement is not framed in the way he prescribes.
In short, what is widely regarded as “full disclosure”, where all the facts and evidence of visiting extraterrestrials – good and bad – along with the truth about secret space programs is publicly revealed in an official announcement, is not supported by Greer. On the contrary, he only supports a “limited disclosure” statement where all references to unethical or malicious aliens is sanitized.
It’s hard to envisage that a leading figure in the disclosure advocacy movement could support continued secrecy on any grounds, let alone the dubious grounds Greer asserts, which I and others have shown ignores a large body of evidence. As to why Greer is taking such an extreme position, there are a number of explanations that come to mind. One is that he is personally invested in a secret Vatican initiative to establish a “New Cosmic Esoteric World Religion” through a “false flag alien savior event” as described elsewhere. Another is that Greer has been co-opted or compromised by the MAJIC Committee in charge of extraterrestrial related projects and is sabotaging the disclosure movement by imposing unreasonable demands for a future official disclosure announcement.
Greer’s position that continued secrecy is better than an official disclosure announcement which contains reference to any extraterrestrial visitors as a threat, is a position that he will find increasingly difficult to defend given the public’s growing awareness of all the available evidence of visiting aliens, and the diverse motivations behind their activities. Full disclosure is already well underway through multiple public initiatives disclosing all aspects of visiting extraterrestrial life and secret space programs, and any effort to filter or curtail such information in ways favored by Greer, are certain to fail.
A giant, spiraling storm in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere is captured in this animation from NASA’s Junospacecraft. The storm, called Oval BA, is approximately 5,000 miles (8,000 km) across and moves counterclockwise. You can see similar rotation in Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot, at the top left of the animation.
Juno took the nine images used to produce this movie sequence on December 21, 2018. At the time the images were taken, the spacecraft was between approximately 15,400 miles (24,800 km) and 60,700 miles (97,700 km) from the planet’s cloud tops above southern latitudes spanning about 36 to 74 degrees.
Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran created this animation using data from the spacecraft’s JunoCam imager. You can peruse JunoCam’s raw images and process images yourself here.
Bottom line: Short movie shows a swirling storm on Jupiter.
An atmospheric scientist explains why water can do some strange-looking things at very cold temperatures, and what’s different about snowfalls on Mars.
Editor’s note: Extreme cold weather can produce unusual phenomena, from so-called sea smoke to slushy ocean waves. As atmospheric scientist Scott Denning explains, these striking events are caused mainly by the behavior of water at very cold temperatures.
Why do lake and ocean waters appear to steam during cold snaps?
There are three phases, or states, of water: solid ice, liquid water and gaseous water vapor. Even in extremely cold weather, liquid water can’t be colder than the freezing point – about 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees C) – so the surface of the ocean is much warmer than the air above it.
A lot of water evaporates from the warmer ocean into the colder dry air above. As soon as this invisible gas rises even just a little bit above the relatively warm water, it hits air that is much colder and can’t hold much vapor, so the vapor condenses into microscopic droplets of liquid water in the air.
Some people call the wispy clouds caused by condensation just above the winter ocean or lakes sea smoke. That’s a better term than steam. Real steam is very hot water vapor – that is, water in its gas phase, which is invisible.
Lake Michigan at 39th Street Harbor in Chicago, January 30, 2019.
Weather watchers seem to get very excited about thundersnow. What is it and why is it rare?
Thunder is a sonic boom created when a lightning bolt causes the air to expand faster than the speed of sound. Lightning is formed by sparks of static electricity between the clouds and ground. The friction that forms this static is usually caused by rapidly rising thermals of buoyant air on hot summer days, which is why thunderstorms are common in summer.
Air can’t rise from the cold winter ground because cold air is dense, so thunder in winter is pretty unusual. Thundersnow happens when really cold air blows in from up north. This cold air is denser than the air at the surface, so it literally falls down, pushing surface air up over the top of it. This can create exactly the same kind of static charge as a summer thunderstorm, and BOOM – thundersnow! This only happens with a really dramatic change in temperature, such as the approach of an Arctic cold front.
Thundersnow episodes in New England, March 8, 2018.
How common is it for the oceans to freeze outside of the polar regions?
Saltwater has a lower freezing point than fresh water, which is why we put salt on our streets and sidewalks to melt ice in winter. Seawater is salty enough that it has to get really cold to freeze – around 28 F (-2.2 degrees C). It’s pretty unusual for seawater to freeze in the continental United States, though it happens all the time in the Arctic winter.
When seawater freezes, most of its salt is pushed down into the ocean water underneath it. This is why people in the Arctic can melt sea ice for drinking water. As little bits of freshwater ice form at the ocean’s surface, the remaining water gets saltier and saltier, so it gets harder and harder for it to freeze.
But sometimes when it’s been extremely cold, little ice floes form at the surface of the ocean. Waves break them up, so that the surface can become like a wavy slurpee. For anyone willing to brave the cold, it’s wild to stand by the shore and watch the smoking slushy sea with its slow-motion surf. At the poles, it’s so cold that floating ice crystals eventually converge and solidify into sea ice.
Slushy surf off Nantucket, Mass., January 5, 2018.
Scientists have found that Mars has snowfalls too. How are they different from snow on Earth?
The atmosphere on Mars is nearly pure carbon dioxide, which we know as the main greenhouse gas that’s driving climate change here on Earth. But Mars’ atmosphere is much thinner than ours, so it doesn’t trap much heat. On a nice Martian summer day, temperatures can reach 70 degrees F (21 degrees C) and then fall to -100 degrees F (-73 degrees C) the same night.
Winters are even colder there. It gets so cold in polar winters on Mars that the air itself freezes, making tiny carbon dioxide snowflakes the size of red blood cells, which pile deep enough to make polar caps of dry ice.
A mesa of frozen carbon dioxide at Mars’ south pole.
During the long polar night, around 1/3 of Mars’ entire atmosphere falls as snow. This makes a partial vacuum, sucking the winds from the planet’s summer hemisphere to its winter hemisphere to make up the difference. In spring, these planet-scale winds reverse direction as the dry ice turns back to gas and starts to fall out on the other end of Mars.
Further out in the solar system, the “ice giant” planets and many of their moons have huge amounts of water and carbon dioxide ice – much larger quantities than all of our oceans. But on Earth, dry ice can’t form above -110 degrees F (-79 degrees C). So there will never be carbon dioxide snow on our planet – just frozen water in all of its many forms.
Bottom line: An atmospheric scientist explains some weird winter weather phenomena, such as thundersnow, steaming lakes, slurpee waves and why and what’s different about snowfalls on Mars.This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Yellowstone volcano Ground Rising after 121 earthquakes
Yellowstone volcano Ground Rising after 121 earthquakes
Yellowstone volcano Ground Rising after 121 earthquakes
YELLOWSTONE volcano’s ground is slowly creeping upward around its most active geyser basin, USGS officials have revealed after seismographs have confirmed more than 120 earthquakes across Yellowstone Park.
Yellowstone volcano officials are paying attention to an ongoing shift in the supervolcano’s landscape, which began as early as 2015. Yellowstone’s Norris Geyser Basin, Yellowstone’s hottest geyser basin, witnessed ground levels rise by almost an inch last year. Officials from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) confirmed in the latest Yellowstone activity update, the basin rose by 0.78 inches (2cm) in 2018. GPS data collected throughout the Yellowstone volcanic caldera suggests this part of the national park has been rising for at least three years now.
In the same Yellowstone update, the USGS revealed a total of 121 earthquakes were recorded in the Yellowstone area in December 2018 alone.
The earthquakes struck in rapid swarms and singular tremors throughout the park.
What Lies Beneath Area 51 + Man Who Spoke Out About Area 51 Has An Invention (Video)
What Lies Beneath Area 51 + Man Who Spoke Out About Area 51 Has An Invention (Video)
MYSTERIOUS crater-shaped hole in the ground near to Area 51 is “unlike anything ever seen” and has prompted theories that the bizarre crater could be an entrance to an underground military base.
A bizarre crater appeared on Google Earth earlier this week close to Area 51 and appears man-made with a strange tower emerging out of the huge ditch. The incredible discovery was revealed by Blake and Brett Cousins – of YouTube channel thirdphaseofmoon – who captioned the footage: “We Found Something Underneath Area 51.” In the footage, a large, thin object can be seen poking out of the middle of a large circular hole in the ground.
The shock revelaton has sparked a frenzy of theories, including that the huge tower inside the vent is the tower of a new top-secret underground military base.
Speaking about his discovery, Blake Cousins says: “Conspiracy theorists are going wild right now.
“This could be some sort of vent or a tower embedded within a crater close to Area 51. This not a natural phenomenon, it is quite a mystery.
He said: “It doesn’t relate to any of the other craters in the area – this one looks like a tower or a vent.
“It is a massive crater – the tower looks like it is dozens of feet tall.
“This crater doesn’t relate to any of the other craters. There is no measuring device coming out of it.
“There might be a base or something underneath. It has been dug out, carved out by humans. You hear about Area 51 as a massive city underneath the ground. This could be linked.
“It shouldn’t be there, it shouldn’t exist.
The crater is just miles from the top-secret military base Area 51, which has previously been linked to various alien experiments.
The Man Who Spoke About Area 51 And Was Ridiculed, Now He Invented A Car That Runs With Water,
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETEen vooraanstaand Amerikaans onderzoekscentrum is bezig met het ontwerpen van een raket die onze aarde moet beschermen tegen een potentiële en verwoestende inslag van een asteroïde. Het Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) van de Johns Hopkins University wil over twee jaar een eerste test doen. Het wordt de eerste grote missie van ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA die niet als doel heeft de ruimte te verkennen, maar om ons ertegen te beschermen.
Algemeen wordt aangenomen dat de bekendste en meest ingrijpende inslag van een asteroïde 65 miljoen jaar geleden plaatsvond in de Golf van Mexico en verantwoordelijk was voor het uitsterven van de dinosauriërs. Het ging om een asteroïde van 8 tot 10 kilometer diameter. “We hebben alle asteroïden van die omvang in onze buurt intussen gelokaliseerd en hoeven daar niet bang voor te zijn”, verzekert Paul Chodas van het Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) van de NASA aan het California Institute of Technology. Maar kleinere asteroïden kunnen ook grote schade aanrichten.
“Zelfs een asteroïde van 1 kilometer doorsnee kan wereldwijde verwoesting veroorzaken als hij op de verkeerde plaats inslaat. Het zijn eigenlijk de kleine asteroïden die het meeste risico inhouden”, aldus de wetenschapper in de Amerikaanse krant The Washington Post.
Amper 100 jaar geleden was het al een keer bijna prijs. Op 30 juni 1908 ontplofte een meteoor boven een verlaten gebied in Siberië en die vernietigde 1.200 vierkante kilometers bos. Volgens onderzoek zou de vuurbal even krachtig geweest zijn als 185 keer de atoombom op Hiroshima en zou de lucht verhit zijn tot een temperatuur van bijna 50.000 graden. Was de meteoor 3 uur later ingeslagen, dan had hij door de draaiing van de aarde de Russische hoofdstad Moskou volledig van de kaart kunnen vegen. En dat zou de geschiedenis van de 20ste eeuw volledig herschreven hebben. (lees hieronder verder)
RVEen beeld van meer dan een eeuw geleden toont de schade van de inslag van een asteroïde in 1908.
Maar ook recenter was er een incident. Exact 6 jaar geleden ontplofte opnieuw een meteoor boven Siberië, deze keer met de kracht van 1 atoombom. De meteoor had de grootte van een schoolbus en een snelheid van 64.000 kilometer per uur. De schokgolf vernielde bijna alle ramen in de stad Tsjeljabinsk. Meer dan 1.000 mensen raakten gewond.
Ramkoers
Wetenschappers overleggen al lang over wat er nu precies moet gebeuren als ze een asteroïde zouden ontdekken die op ramkoers met de aarde ligt. De NASA overwoog al om er kernkoppen op af te schieten, maar dan bestaat het risico dat brokstukken alsnog op aarde terechtkomen. Ander idee is om er met een ruimtetuig naast te gaan vliegen en de asteroïde door de zwaartekracht van zijn baan te doen afwijken. Maar er is nóg een optie en die wordt nu als eerste getest. (lees hieronder verder)
RVDe asteroïde die bijna alle ramen deed sneuvelen in de stad Tsjeljabinsk in 2013 werd gefilmd.
De wetenschappers van APL zijn begonnen met het ontwerpen en bouwen van een DART-ruimtetuig, wat staat voor ‘Double Asteroid Redirection Test’. Het doel is om het op een ruimterots af te sturen en het ermee te laten botsen: niet zo hard dat hij in stukken breekt, maar wel hard genoeg om hem van zijn koers te doen afwijken. Het ruimtetuig heeft de grootte van een Honda Civic en moet in de zomer van 2021 gelanceerd worden. Zijn bestemming: een kleine maan van een asteroïde.
De asteroïde en haar maan worden Didymos genoemd, wat Grieks is voor ‘tweeling’. Ze draaien rond de zon in een baan tussen de aarde en de Planetoïdengordel (ruwweg tussen Mars en Jupiter). De maan is maar een 150 meter in doorsnede: heel klein in astronomische termen.
Maan
Het DART-ruimtetuig zal energie krijgen van zonnepanelen die op vleugels zullen lijken en zal meer dan een jaar onderweg zijn naar zijn bestemming. “We zullen de maan pas zien als we er nog maar een uur van verwijderd zijn”, aldus de hoofdingenieur van de missie, Elena Adams. (lees hieronder verder)
NASA
DART zal een snelheid van 24.000 kilometer per uur halen en moet in oktober 2022 de maan bereiken. Een kleine satelliet die meevliegt, moet registreren wat het effect van de inslag is.
Doel is om op termijn met dergelijke ‘duwtjes’ een asteroïde van koers te doen veranderen. Als één duw niet genoeg is, kunnen er nog meer volgen. Volgens de betrokken wetenschappers is de missie momenteel de beste strategie om de aarde te beschermen tegen een potentiële inslag. Desalniettemin hopen ze dat ze haar nooit zullen moeten gebruiken.
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AMATEURASTRONOOM ONTDEKT VLOOT RUIMTESCHEPEN ( VIDEO )
AMATEURASTRONOOM ONTDEKT VLOOT RUIMTESCHEPEN ( VIDEO )
Vroeger waren we voornamelijk afhankelijk van NASA om ons beelden uit de ruimt te bezorgen.
Steeds vaker echter komen amateurastronomen, in het bezit van krachtige telescopen, met verbluffende opnames, zoals een vloot ruimteschepen.
Met moderne technieken en krachtige telescopen is tegenwoordig veel te ontdekken in de ruimte als amateur astronoom.
En steeds vaker komen er bijzondere ontdekkingen uit de buurt van de Orionnevel.
De Orionnevel, ook bekend als M42, is een prachtig diep-luchtobject in het sterrenbeeld Orion. Hoewel de meeste nevels (wolken van interstellair gas en stof) moeilijk of onmogelijk te zien zijn met het blote oog, is M42 vrij eenvoudig te zien aan de nachtelijke hemel gedurende een groot deel van het jaar. Met een beetje hulp kun je de Orionnevel zien met je ogen, een verrekijker of je telescoop.
Een groot Youtubekanaal zoals dat van Secureteam heeft het voordeel dat veel abonnee's leuke dingen insturen of hen ergens op attenderen.
En zo kwam Tyler aan beelden van een amateurastronoom die met een sterke telescoop de Orionnevel observeerde en via zijn camera iets merkwaardigs vastlegde.
Je ziet de beelden van wat in eerste instantie één langwerpig ruimteschip lijkt, maar wat volgens Tyler van Secureteam bestaat uit waarschijnlijk vier schepen die in een rechte lijn door de ruimte koersen.
In de video onderaan dit artikel zie je de bewegende beelden van deze objecten. Links zie je de Orionnevel en het is bijna onmogelijk om te schatten op wat voor afstand die schepen zich bevinden.
Alleen al het feit dat er duidelijk vanaf de aarde is te zien dat er ruimteschepen door het heelal koersen, zou reden moeten zijn voor onmiddellijke Disclosure. Planeten bewegen niet met grote snelheid noch met een kaarsrechte koers door de ruimte.
Met wat daar beweegt en hoe, is het redelijk om aan te nemen dat we hier te maken hebben met een object dat onder intelligente controle staat.
Het merkwaardige is dat er regelmatig vreemde objecten/ruimteschepen worden waargenomen in de buurt of richting van de Orionnevel.
Een voorbeeld daarvan is de volgende, eerder gemaakte opname (oktober 2017).
In de video van Secureteam zie je nog meer grote sigaarvormige schepen in de buurt van of zelfs in de Orionnevel.
Aan het einde van de video is er nog een interessant onderwerp en dat is dat er in een haven aan de Oostzee duizenden dode vissen zijn aangespoeld. Op zich niet zo bijzonder, want de laatste jaren gebeurt dit op talloze plaatsen op aarde, alleen hier is iets opvallends aan de hand.
De meeste vissen drijven in het water zonder kop. Dat niet alleen, als je goed kijkt dan zie je dat er iets is gebeurd waardoor die koppen met een soort chirurgische precisie/mechanisch zijn afgesneden.
These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before!
If only we knew what was the true mission of the “USS Enterprise” spotted above California this week. One of the most mysterious aircraft in the world, a U-2 Dragon Lady, was seen flying above California last weekbroadcasting the call sign NCC-1701A – the same registry as the legendary USS Enterprisefrom the Star Trek franchise. The U-2 spy plane took off from Beale Air Force Base in Northern California on January 30th then flew a trapezoidal pattern above Northern California for four hours, crossing into Nevada at one point before circling back. Beale Air Force Base is home to the USAF’s 9th Reconnaissance Wing which conducts high-altitude surveillance and intelligence missions in support of combat forces.
A U-2 Dragon Lady. Not exactly a Constitution-class starship but still very impressive.
What was the plane doing up there, and why was it broadcasting such an iconic, conspicuous call sign? In all likelihood it was merely a test flight or basic exercise and the call sign was someone’s way of making their work day slightly more interesting. However, it could very well be that the plane was conducting reconnaissance ahead of a mysterious and slightly unnerving special operations exercise which took place in California this week.
The U.S. Armed Forces are currently conducting urban operations drills in Los Angeles and Long Beach known as Emerald Warrior/Emerald Trident. The operations have seen military helicopters conducting mock raids in densely populated urban environments and all manners of spy planes circling overhead conducting electronic and visual surveillance of the ground below. Videos posted to social media show MH-6 Little Bird helicopters landing on L.A. rooftops to pick up and drop off special operators. Curiously, the public and LAPD were not notified of the operation until moments before the first helicopters started landing.
As aviation watchdog blogs have noted, those exercises have seen some of the American military’s most advanced and secretive spy planes fly curious circular routes above California. Again, it’s highly likely these are all just part of the Emerald Warrior/Emerald Trident drills, but I’m left to wonder why the military would risk conducting drills in such densely populated areas where the risk of harming civilians is so high. Is there something to these secretive operations the military isn’t telling us? Probably not, although how can we know for sure?
Odd cylinder UFO appears over Cheadle staffordshire, UK
Odd cylinder UFO appears over Cheadle staffordshire, UK
40 years ago a very strange cylinder UFO has been photographed over Cheadle staffordshire, UK.
The photographer who has submitted the image to Mufon states:
A little late on reporting something that happened 40 years ago, but then I had no idea who you would report it to, and perhaps more so.... who would believe it anyway.
So my experience. Well as I say.... it happened some 40 years ago when I was working a night shift on security.
It was a bitter cold night with the ground covered in ice, and the sky was very clear. I was walking from one building to another as my job routine. While walking I noticed a light in the air flying very low and head towards me from a north eastern angle. My first and obvious thought was of course... helicopter!
There was something that was a little odd though. First was the fact... one single white light. Then I conceded that it was now getting very close and heading more or less straight for me.
I thought that I should be able to hear the thing by now. You could have heard a pin drop in these early hours and it was very still with zero wind. It intrigued me enough to stop me in my tracks for me to observe.
It came towards me slowly, at around maybe 10mph. By the time it got to within around 50 feet away from me, I knew I was seeing something beyond the ordinary.
It came to a complete halt right in front of me, directly hovering in total stillness over the roof of the building.
Suddenly it shot of as fast as light. No noise no fuss. It looked for all the world like a comet. I did not like the experience one bit. 40 years ago and I still remember it as if it happened yesterday.
One fact remains.... we are being visited and that is a simple fact. I saw more than enough. For 40 years I have thought the same thing, that if I know.... I am dam sure the government and even our scientists must surely know.
I found this fossilised bone on Mars this week and it has been run over by the Mar rover. Now scientists at NASA often say how careful they are not to hurt or destroy their chances of finding life on Mars...and yet, we see the evidence of the rovers tire marks treading over this ancient fossil as if it were nothing. If a person had found this at a park or beach...it would turn into an investigation into a murder...since it looks a lot like a leg bone. But since its Mars NASA makes it into their personal road, driving over and ignoring any real evidence of life on Mars.
If president Trump wants real discoveries from Mars, then Trump needs to make me head of NASA and I will expose the truth, unmask all secrets held in their vaults and use the evidence to announce that evidence of alien life on Mars is real and also expose any and all evidence they hold of any life or intelligent beings living on any planet, moon or space in our solar system. That would be real change.
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Lost City Of Atlantis found in the North Sea?
Lost City Of Atlantis found in the North Sea?
Divers from oil companies in the North Sea have discovered the remains of a drowned ancient city that once stretched from Britain to Denmark. An ancient city so massive that its population is suspected has been estimated to be in the tens of thousands.
A team of climatologists, archaeologists and geophysicists have now successfully mapped the area. This has shown how large and far-reaching this once “lost land was .” Many specialists claim that this is once the “true heartland” of Europe.
This enormous civilization is thought to have declined about 8000 years ago and that the landmass was sunk over several thousand years, an immersion that began about 20,000 years ago.
Dr. Richard Bates, from St Andrews ‘ Department of Geosciences, who organized the Drowned Landscapes exhibition and covered the finds in the UK, says the data reveals the human history behind Doggerland, a now flooded one City of the North Sea, which used to be larger many modern European countries.
Could these discoveries expose Doggerland as the truly lost city of Atlantis?
Several hypotheses have placed the sunken island of Atlantis within modern northern Europe, among which Olaus Rudbeck is best known. Anyone who suspected that Doggerland, as well as Viking Bergen Island, which is said to have been swamped by a megatsunami after the Storegga slide in 6100, is the real setting for Atlantis, a suggestion he proposed as early as the 16th century.
Some have suggested the Celtic shelf as a possible location and there are certainly links to Ireland. Many places have been proposed for the possible location of the sunken city over the years, but no ruins worthy of such claims have been found. Many of these areas were too small to have hosted such a huge city.
Doggerland, however, fits the law, it could not only turn out to be the largest ancient civilization on earth, but is also located in a possible place based on historical investigations, because the city of Atlantis had at some point sunk in England its History, and it reveals amazing ruins of a once great and hitherto unknown civilization.
Dr Bates, a geophysicist, said: ‘ Doggerland was the real heartland of Europe until sea levels rose to give us today’s UK coastline.
“We have speculated for years about the existence of the lost land of bones dredged up by fishermen across the North Sea, but it is only since we worked with oil companies in recent years that we have succeeded in rebuilding the lost land. Create.
‘ When the data was first processed, I thought it was unlikely it would give us useful information. However, as more area was covered, a huge and complex landscape was revealed. “We have now been able to model its flora and fauna, build a picture of the ancient people living there and understand some of the dramatic events that have subsequently changed the country, including the rise of the sea and a devastating tsunami. ”
In what’s being called humankind’s 1st planetary defense test, space scientists are planning to visit a double asteroid – Didymos and its tiny moon – and crash into the moon in attempt to change its orbit.
NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft struck a 4-mile-wide (6-km-wide) comet – called Tempel 1 – on July 4, 2005. This image was acquired 67 seconds after impact.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally stated, erroneously, that NASA’s DART mission and ESA’s planned Hera mission both fell under the heading of a joint mission called AIDA. But the joint mission AIDA is no more, since ESA did not approve funding for its portion of the mission. However, NASA plans to push ahead with its asteroid-deflection test mission, called DART. And now a new ESA contribution is under study again – the Hera mission – as described in this article and in the video below. Our thanks to Linda Billings – a consultant o NASA’s Astrobiology Program and Planetary Defense Coordination Office (@lbillin on Twitter) – for setting us straight!
In the past several decades, astronomers have woken up to the reality that asteroids orbiting our sun do sometimes strike the Earth. It’s now know that the relativelylittle ones strike fairly often, mostly disintegrating in Earth’s protective atmosphere, and/or falling into the ocean. But larger asteroids have been known to pierce Earth’s atmosphere as well, such as the one that enteredover Russia in 2013, causing a shock wave that broke windows in several Russian cities. At present, astronomers do not expect any large, world-destroying asteroids to be on a collision course with Earth, in the foreseeable future. But smaller asteroids – those capable of causing destruction on a regional or city-wide scale, for example – are possible. And what if we learned that one was headed our way while there was still time to try to avert the collision? Could we deflect it? How?
Astronomers have been meeting and seriously talking about what might be needed to deflect an asteroid for at least a couple of decades. Those talks have evolved into action; NASA’s DART mission is planned to launch in 2021, with the goal of ramming an asteroid in 2022, and testing the asteroid’s response. Meanwhile, a planned ESA mission called Hera is currently under study. A February 4, 2019, statement from ESA explained:
The target of [both DART and Hera] is a double asteroid system, called Didymos, which will come a comparatively close 11 million km (about 7 million miles) to Earth in 2022. The 800-meter-diameter main body (about 2,600 feet) is orbited by a 160-meter-diameter moon (about 525 feet), informally called ‘Didymoon’.
DART is currently planned to launch in 2021. As being planned at present, Hera would arrive at Didymos a few years after DART’s impact. ESA explained:
…Hera will follow-up with a detailed post-impact survey that will turn this grand-scale experiment into a well-understood and repeatable planetary defense technique.
ESA also said the Hera mission will be the first spacecraft to explore a binary asteroid system – the Didymos pair. Also, the moon Didymoon will be the smallest asteroid ever visited by a spacecraft. It is about the same size as the Great Pyramid of Giza. Hera manager Ian Carnelli said:
Such a binary asteroid system is the perfect testbed for a planetary defense experiment but is also an entirely new environment for asteroid investigations. Although binaries make up 15 percent of all known asteroids, they have never been explored before, and we anticipate many surprises.
Check out the scale chart below – prepared by the Planetary Society – of all asteroid and comets so far surveyed by spacecraft. On this chart, the larger Didymos asteroid would form a modest dot, with its smaller moonlet struggling to make a single pixel.
View larger. | The Planetary Society created this comparison chart of all the asteroids and comets visited so far by spacecraft. On this chart, the larger Didymos asteroid would form a dot, with Didymoon struggling to make a single pixel.
ESA said Didymoon’s small size was one reason it was chosen for a pioneering planetary defense experiment. As it happens, this little asteroid moonlet is also in the riskiest class of near-Earth asteroids because of its size: larger bodies can more easily be tracked, smaller bodies will burn up or do limited damage, while a Didymoon-sized impactor could devastate an entire region of our planet.
Read more about the Hera mission from ESA, and the DART mission from NASA, or check out the video below:
Bottom line: In what’s being called humankind’s 1st planetary defense test, space scientists are planning send a spacecraft to a double asteroid – Didymos and its tiny moon – and crash it into the moon in attempt to change its orbit.
THE US ARMY IS EQUIPPING SOLDIERS WITH POCKET-SIZED RECON DRONES
THE US ARMY IS EQUIPPING SOLDIERS WITH POCKET-SIZED RECON DRONES
JON CHRISTIAN
Recon Drones
The U.S. Army has placed a $39 million order for tiny reconnaissance drones, small enough to fit in a soldier’s pocket or palm.
The idea behind the drones, which are made by FLIR Systems and look like tiny menacing helicopters, is that soldiers will be able to send them into the sky of the battlefield in order to get a “lethal edge” during combat,according to Business Insider.
Battlefield View
FLIR Systems is currently delivering its “nano-unmanned aerial vehicles,” which it calls Black Hornet Personal Reconnaissance Systems, according to a press release that says the Army is starting an “initial integration” of the drones.
“This contract represents a significant milestone with the operational large-scale deployment of nano-UAVs into the world’s most powerful Army,” said Jim Cannon, the CEO of FLIR Systems, in the press release.
NASA's InSight lander has deployed its first instrument onto the surface of Mars.
New images from the lander show the seismometer on the ground, after it was lifted onto the surface by the lander's robotic arm.
It will record the waves traveling through the interior structure of the planet, and could help explain mysterious 'marsquakes' scientists believe occur regularly.
Scroll down for video
New images from the lander show the seismometer on the ground, after it was lifted onto the surface by the lander's robotic arm. It will record the waves traveling through the interior structure of the planet, and could help explain mysterious 'marsquakes' scientists believe occur regularly. This was the first time a science instrument had ever been placed onto the surface of another planet.
WHAT WILL THE SEISMOMETER DO?
The seismometer allows scientists to peer into the Martian interior by studying ground motion — also known as marsquakes.
Each marsquake acts as a kind of flashbulb that illuminates the structure of the planet's interior.
By analyzing how seismic waves pass through the layers of the planet, scientists can deduce the depth and composition of these layers.
NASA said the lander war performing flawlessly, and was ahead of schedule.
'InSight's timetable of activities on Mars has gone better than we hoped,' said InSight Project Manager Tom Hoffman, who is based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
'Getting the seismometer safely on the ground is an awesome Christmas present.'
The InSight team has been working toward deploying its two dedicated science instruments onto Martian soil since landing on Mars on Nov. 26.
To deploy the seismometer (also known as the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, or SEIS) and the heat probe (also known as the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Probe, or HP3), engineers first had to verify the robotic arm that picks up and places InSight's instruments onto the Martian surface was working properly.
Engineers tested the commands for the lander, making sure a model in the test bed at JPL deployed the instruments exactly as intended.
Scientists also had to analyze images of the Martian terrain around the lander to figure out the best places to deploy the instruments.
NASA InSight✔@NASAInSight
Whew – winding down after a long day, but I’ve done it: I’ve placed my seismometer on the surface of Mars! With SEIS, I’ll be able to listen in for marsquakes and help reveal the heartbeat of #Mars. http://go.nasa.gov/2QGBeYX
On Tuesday, Dec. 18, InSight engineers sent up the commands to the spacecraft.
On Wednesday, Dec. 19, the seismometer was gently placed onto the ground directly in front of the lander, about as far away as the arm can reach — 5.367 feet, or 1.636 meters, away).
'Seismometer deployment is as important as landing InSight on Mars,' said InSight Principal Investigator Bruce Banerdt, based at JPL.
'The seismometer is the highest-priority instrument on InSight: We need it in order to complete about three-quarters of our science objectives.'
The 'Martian rock garden' it built in a Pasadena warehouse to test its InSight rover Engineers practice deploying InSight's instruments in a lab at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Several of them are wearing sunglasses to block the bright yellow lights in the test space, which mimic sunlight as it appears on Mars.
The seismometer allows scientists to peer into the Martian interior by studying ground motion — also known as marsquakes.
'Having the seismometer on the ground is like holding a phone up to your ear,' said Philippe Lognonné, principal investigator of SEIS from Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP) and Paris Diderot University.
'We're thrilled that we're now in the best position to listen to all the seismic waves from below Mars' surface and from its deep interior.'
In the coming days, the InSight team will work on leveling the seismometer, which is sitting on ground that is tilted 2 to 3 degrees.
The first seismometer science data should begin to flow back to Earth after the seismometer is in the right position.
INSIGHT'S THREE KEY INSTRUMENTS
The lander that could reveal how Earth was formed: InSight lander set for Mars landing on november 26th
Three key instruments will allow the InSight lander to 'take the pulse' of the red planet:
Seismometer: The InSight lander carries a seismometer, SEIS, that listens to the pulse of Mars.
The seismometer records the waves traveling through the interior structure of a planet.
Studying seismic waves tells us what might be creating the waves.
On Mars, scientists suspect that the culprits may be marsquakes, or meteorites striking the surface.
Heat probe: InSight's heat flow probe, HP3, burrows deeper than any other scoops, drills or probes on Mars before it.
It will investigate how much heat is still flowing out of Mars.
Radio antennas: Like Earth, Mars wobbles a little as it rotates around its axis.
To study this, two radio antennas, part of the RISE instrument, track the location of the lander very precisely.
This helps scientists test the planet's reflexes and tells them how the deep interior structure affects the planet's motion around the Sun.
'We look forward to popping some Champagne when we start to get data from InSight's seismometer on the ground,' Banerdt added.
'I have a bottle ready for the occasion.'
Meanwhile, the Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment (RISE), which does not have its own separate instrument, has already begun using InSight's radio connection with Earth to collect preliminary data on the planet's core.
Not enough time has elapsed for scientists to deduce what they want to know — scientists estimate they might have some results starting in about a year.
This image shows some of the instruments visible in the selfie image sent back to Earth by InSight early last Tuesday morning
NASA also recently has finally pinpointed the exact landing location of its new Mars explorer, thanks to a powerful camera on its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
While the space agency knew InSight had landed within an 81-mile-long (130 km) ellipse on the red planet, there was no way to determine exactly where it touched down within this region.
Now, a series of images captured this week by MRO's HiRISE camera have confirmed that the lander, heat shield, and parachute all sit within 1,000 feet of each other on a lava plain called Elysium Planitia.
NASA has finally pinpointed the exact landing location of its new Mars explorer, thanks to a powerful camera on its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. While the space agency knew InSight had landed within an 81-mile-long (130 km) ellipse on the red planet, there was no way to determine exactly where it touched down within this region
In the images released today by NASA, InSight and its parts appear as bright teal specks on rust-colored landscape.
But in reality, this is only a trick of the light.
'Light reflected off their surfaces causes the color to be saturated,' NASA explains.
'The ground around the lander appears dark, having been blasted by its retrorockets during descent. Look carefully for a butterfly shape, and you can make out the lander's solar panels on either side.'
Just days ago, NASA's new InSight lander snapped its first selfie from the red planet, giving the mission team (and the rest of the world) a good look at its solar panels and deck now that it's settled in.
InSight also sent back the first complete view of the 14-by-7-foot swath of land that will soon serve as its 'workspace.'
In the images released today by NASA, InSight and its parts appear as bright teal specks on rust-colored landscape. But in reality, this is only a trick of the light
A series of images captured this week by MRO's HiRISE camera have confirmed that the lander (red dot), heat shield, and parachute all sit within 1,000 feet of each other on a lava plain called Elysium Planitia. Previously, the space agency only knew they'd landed within an 81-mile ellipse (blue)
Each of the new images is a mosaic of several captures stitched together.
While the selfie, captured by the robotic arm, is a composite of 11 pictures, the workspace view includes 52 individual photos.
This is allowing scientists to get a good look at the area well before InSight starts putting down its instruments and digging into the ground.
'The near-absense of rocks, hills, and holes means it'll be extremely safe for our instruments,' said InSight's Principal Investigator Bruce Banerdt of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
'This might seem like a pretty plain piece of ground if it weren't on Mars, but we're glad to see that.'
NASA has confirmed the landing sites for InSight, its parachute, and other components thanks to new images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
InSight previously sent back the first complete view of the 14-by-7-foot swath of land that will soon serve as its 'workspace,' indicated in the blue crescent. The team says it looks 'extremely safe'. Its parachute, back shell, and heat shield all landed about 1,000 feet away
Even Mars robots act like tourists every once in a while. NASA's new InSight lander has snapped its first selfie from the red planet, giving the mission team (and the rest of the world) a good look at its solar panels and deck now that it's settled in
Over the last week or so, InSight has sent back the first of its observations – including a clip of light passing over the surface, and recordings of Martian winds.
All of this comes as the lander and the team behind its operations prepare for it to begin work in the next few months.
For now, however, InSight is taking baby steps.
The lander flexed its 6-foot-long arm this week, snapping images of the terrain directly in front of it.
'By carefully swinging my arm out in front of me, I'm starting to get a better look at the ground in front of me where I'll be doing my work', the Nasa InSight account tweeted.
'Meanwhile, kind of hypnotized by the play of light and shadow on my arm'.
'By carefully swinging my arm out in front of me, I'm starting to get a better look at the ground in front of me where I'll be doing my work', the Nasa InSight account tweeted this week. 'Meanwhile, kind of hypnotized by the play of light and shadow on my arm'. This effect can be seen in the clip above
The data collected by InSight's Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) in the months before it's moved onto the ground will eventually be used to cancel out background noises as it works to detect marsquakes
Just days prior, NASA revealed the InSight lander captured the sound of a Martian 'dust devil' during its first days on the red planet.
According to the space agency, this is the first time we've ever heard Martian winds.
The low rumble detected by InSight's sensors are estimated to be blowing between 10 to 15 mph (5 to 7 meters a second) from northwest to southeast – and, the recordings are within the range of human hearing.
NASA says the sounds recorded on December 1 line up with dust devil streaks observed in the landing area.
The vibrations were recorded at a very low pitch, though those with sharp ears will be able to hear it as is, using headphones or subwoofers.
To make it clearer, NASA boosted the pitch by two octaves, making it audible on laptops and mobile devices.
The space agency shared a series of high-resolution photos captured this week. InSight will soon begin snapping images of the terrain directly in front of it, so the team can select the best location to drill down. The solar panel that will help power the machine is pictured
While InSight didn't set out to record Martian winds, specifically, the team says this type of data collection comes with the territory.
The lander detected wind vibrations with two of its sensors: one designed to measure air pressure, and with a seismometer on the deck.
'Capturing this audio was an unplanned treat,' says Bruce Banerdt, InSight principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab.
'But one of the things our mission is dedicated to is measuring motion on Mars, and naturally that includes motion caused by sound waves.'
According to the InSight team, the two different instruments recorded the noise in different ways.
While the Auxiliary Payload Sensor Subsystem's air pressure sensor recorded the vibrations directly, the seismometer picked up vibrations caused by the wind passing over the lander's solar panels.
The data collected by InSight's Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) in the months before it's moved onto the ground will eventually be used to cancel out background noises as it works to detect marsquakes.
Its short period (SP) silicon sensors can detect vibrations with frequencies of up to 50 hertz, which sits at the lower range of human hearing, NASA says.
'The InSight lander acts like a giant ear,' said Tom Pike, InSight science team member and sensor designed at Imperial College London.
'The solar panels on the lander's sides respond to pressure fluctuations of the wind.
'It's like InSight is cupping its ears and hearing the Mars wind beating on it. When we looked at the direction of the lander vibrations coming from the solar panels, it matches the expected wind direction at our landing site.'
InSight touched down in a region known as Elysium Planitia. Its location can be seen in the map above, not far from the landing site of the 2012 Curiosity mission, the last NASA probe to land on Mars
NASA's InSight lander has finally removed the lens cover from its cameras, allowing the robotic explorer to take its clearest pictures yet of its new home
The team has released both a raw, unaltered audio sample of the seismometer recording and a second version that's been raised two octaves to make it easier to hear.
For the latter, the APSS sample was sped up by a factor of 100.
According to the experts, the source of the sound is pretty straightforward; vibrations detected by the instruments are much like the air pressure changes you hear when a flag whips around in the wind.
'That's literally what sound is — changes in air pressure,' said Don Banfield InSight's science lead for APSS from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
'You hear that whenever you speak to someone across the room.'
An artist's depiction of alien solar systems of exoplanets.
Credit: M. Kornmesser/ESO
Scientists peering at analien solar systemhave spotted a pair of planets so different that their traits may be evidence of a massive collision.
The key difference is in the planets'density— although the two neighboring planets are similar in size, one is more than twice as dense as the other. The researchers who measured the density imbalance suggest that the stark difference was most likely caused by a giant impact that stripped away much of the less-dense mantle from one of the planets.
The planets, which were first discovered in 2014, orbit a star called Kepler-107 with two other companions. The two innermost planets, Kepler-107b and c, seemed to be about the same size, and in the new research, scientists revisited them in order to try to determine their mass. [Gallery: A World of Kepler Planets]
Here's how that works. The planets were originally detected with the Kepler space telescope, which tracked small dips in a star's brightness that are caused by a planet coming between the telescope and the star. This approach is called the transit method, and those dips are proportional to the relative sizes of the star and the planet.
But a different technique commonly used to identify exoplanets is the radial velocity method, which tracks small wiggles in the star's movement that are caused by the tug of a planet's gravity. That means scientists can use it to estimate a planet's mass.
When the team combined the two types of measurements, they realized the two inner Kepler-107 planets were distinctly different. And the system is particularly intriguing because the denser planet is farther from the star than the less dense planet. In other pairs scientists have studied, the reverse has been true, and researchers have come up with a handful of different potential mechanisms that might result in a denser inner planet.
But those mechanisms don't make sense when the denser planet isn't the one that's closest to the star. That makes the researchers behind the new study suspect that Kepler-107c became so dense because a giant impact stripped away outer, less-dense layers of the planet.
Scientists even think they've watched relatively large collisions take place in distant solar systems: At last month's American Astronomical Society meeting, researchers argued that debris clouds twice observed around a star called NGC 2547-ID8 are best explained by large asteroids colliding.
Solar systems are just messy places, it turns out.
The research is described in a paper published today (Feb. 4) in the journal Nature Astronomy.
A pyramid in Indonesia is thought to be the oldest pyramid in the world, according to scientists. New research presented at the AGU 2018 Fall Meeting in Washington suggests it is could be more than 10,000 years old. It has been found to have layered foundations dating as far back as this after the hill on top of Mount Padang in West Java was found not to be natural as first thought, but in fact, made by humans. The team used a number of methods to gain information, such as archaeological digs and tomography.
What is previously seen as just surface building, it's going down — and it's a huge structure
Andang Bachtiar
Andang Bachtiar, an independent geologist who observed the discovery, told LiveScience: "What is previously seen as just surface building, it's going down — and it's a huge structure,"
One of the researchers explained: "Our studies proves that the structure does not cover just the top but also wrap around the slopes covering about 15 hectares area at least.
"The structures are not only superficial but rooted into greater depth."
It is thought the layers were built up over a number of periods over millennia.
The first layer has been dated back 3,500 years, with the second layer around 8,000 years old.
Oldest pyramid: Research in Indonesia has found a pyramid dating further back than the Giza
(Image: Danny Hilman Natawidjaja)
Oldest pyramid: Padang in West Java has revealed multiple layers dating thousands of years
(Image: Danny Hilman Natawidjaja)
The third layer has been measured as at least 9,500 years old, and could be as much as 28,000 years.
The pyramid is thought to have religious connotations, although this is currently speculation.
This is because of the current location being used by locals for praying, as it is seen as a sacred region.
It is also unlike other pyramids - instead of being symmetrical like many are, the elongated structure has a semi-circle on the front.
It predates the Great Pyramid of Giza which was thought to be around 4500 years old, built over 20 years during the 4th dynasty in Egypt.
A recent discovery in Egypt appears to reveal how the large structure was built so long ago.
A transport system leading from an alabaster quarry to the pyramid was found, made up of a ramp and two staircases.
This is thought to be the way the large blocks were moved to the site.
A statement explained: "Using a sled which carried a stone block and was attached with ropes to these wooden posts, ancient Egyptians were able to pull up the alabaster blocks out of the quarry on very steep slopes of 20 percent or more.”
This map shows the location of the north magnetic pole (white star) and the magnetic declination (contour interval 2 degrees) at the beginning of 2019.
Credit: NOAA NCEI/CIRES.
Earth’s northern magnetic pole isn’t fixed but, rather, is in a perpetual motion driven by the movement of the planet’s liquid outer core. In the last couple of decades, scientists have noticed that the northern magnetic pole has been shifting away from the Canadian Arctic toward Siberia at an unprecedented rate. This anomalous variation has forced scientists at the National Centers for Environmental Information to publish their update to the World Magnetic Model (WMM) a year early in order to avoid significant inaccuracies in navigation and positioning. The WMM is used by everything from smartphones to the military.
The planet’s outer core is formed of liquid iron which constantly moves as the planet’s interior gradually cools down. This motion creates electric currents as electrons move through the liquid and, in the process, the energy of the fluid is converted into a magnetic field. If we imagined that Earth’s magnetic field is similar to a bar magnet (or dipole), then we can locate a geomagnetic north and south pole. However, this is an oversimplification of the complexity and variation of Earth’s true magnetic field.
Confusingly, scientists refer to the places where the planet’s magnetic field is vertical as the north and south magnetic poles. If you were standing over the north magnetic pole with a compass, the needle would dip and point towards the south pole, hence its other name: the magnetic dip pole. Over the south magnetic pole, the compass needle would try to point upward.
The northern dipole is roughly off the northwest coast of Greenland and its position has changed very little over the last century. The same can’t be said about the northern dip pole (true magnetic north pole), which has marched north by hundreds of miles in the last couple of decades. Up until the 1950s, the north magnetic pole had been moving at a rate of about 11 km (7 miles) per year but since the 1990s, this rate has jumped to about 54 km (34 miles) per year. Strangely, the south magnetic pole has shifted very little during this time.
Credit: University of Kyoto.
Scientists aren’t sure what causes this anomaly but the leading theory is that surges and flows in the swirl of liquid iron in the core are creating a tug between two magnetic patches: one under northern Canada and one under Siberia. The latter patch seems like its exerting more influence, hence the rapid shift of the magnetic north towards it.
Historically, the WMM has been updated every five years in order to keep up with these movements. The most recent update was scheduled for 2020 but researchers at the National Centers for Environmental Information — a collaboration between NOAA and the British Geological Survey — decided that it had to be released much sooner so as not to disrupt navigation, especially over the Arctic. The new model was pre-released online in October 2018 but its official release was delayed by a 35-day government shutdown. It’s only recently, after President Trump temporarily lifted the shutdown on January 25, that the WMM has finally been updated.
The new model has the North Pole a good 25 miles away from the one previously predicted. This gross discrepancy means that updates in the future will have to be made much more often than before, preferably yearly. But while the WMM is also incorporated by things like Google Maps, regular folks shouldn’t worry too much since the north magnetic pole’s movements aren’t all that important for latitudes below 55 degrees.
A fossil hunter found a “golden cannonball” rock on a beach, and when he opened it, he discovered an ancient fossil dating back 185 million years. Aaron Smith discovered the rock covered in iron pyrite while he was exploring Sandsend Beach in Yorkshire, England. Interestingly enough, the 22-year-old already has a huge collection of fossils that he found.
These pyritic concretions – or cannonballs – are often found in shales along the Yorkshire coastline. They get their “golden cannonball” name because of the smooth polished finish of the pyritic crust which appears to be a golden color when it’s polished.
Since Mr. Smith has been collecting fossils for a while, he had a hunch that the rock may have a fossil inside of it and that’s when he opened it to find a spiral-shaped cleviceras fossil inside which is a form of ammonite. Cleviceras are an extinct genus of cephalopod which once belonged to the Hildoceritidae family during the Jurassic period. The most commonly known cephalopods from the present time are octopuses and squids.
These ancient sea creatures lived between 240 and 65 million years ago before becoming wiped out along with the dinosaurs. Ammonites fed on starfish, small marine creatures, and other small crustaceans like shrimp. They moved in a similar manner as our modern-day squid by using a tube located near their mouth that squirted water.
Cephalopods are hardly found as fossils as they do not have a hard shell, which is why fossils like cleviceras and ammonites are often found perfectly preserved in the limestone core of the cannonballs which protects them.
Mr. Smith posted a video online of his discovery. He said, “It still impresses me that these 185 million-year-old fossils are along our beautiful Yorkshire Coastline waiting to be found.” He went on to explain how much he loves searching for fossils by saying, “I go fossil hunting twice a week when I’m at home from university. Fossil hunting is a hobby of mine, or perhaps more like a serious passion.”
He explained that he got into fossil hunting because his dad was interested in it. “I remember very distinctly searching for our very first ammonite, when we cracked it open we were all so excited! This lit the fire for our future passion to develop,” adding, “Often we can tell that a rock contains a fossil because you can see the edge of the fossil around the outside of the rock.”
A fossil hunter has uncovered a 185-year-old fossil after cracking open a 'golden cannonball' limestone rock on a beach in Yorkshire. Aaron Smith spotted the rock coated in iron pyrite while exploring Sandsend Beach and realised it showed signs that it contained a fossil
Footage shows Aaron Smith, 22, opening the cannonball-shaped rock to reveal the palm-sized Elegantericeras inside before closing it up again. He regularly searches for fossils on the beach nearby his home and has built up a huge collection
The golden cannonballs are given their name because the pyritic crust's smooth polished finish can appear golden when polished
WHAT ARE AMMONITES?
Ammonites (artist's impression) sported a ribbed spiral-form shell, and lived between 240-65 million years ago
Ammonites are perhaps the most widely known fossil, particularly in the UK where hundreds are dug up along the Jurassic Coast every year.
The ancient sea creatures sported a ribbed spiral-form shell, and lived between 240-65 million years ago, when they were wiped out along with the dinosaurs.
Ammonites were cephalopods; their nearest living relatives are animals like squid, octopus and cuttlefish.
They ate starfish, small crustaceans such as shrimp and other small marine creatures, using their tentacles to probe the seafloor before snapping up prey.
The creatures moved using jet propulsion via a tube near their mouth that squirted water, much like some species of modern squid.
Archaeologists working in the Sahara have published their findings outlining the discovery of mysterious stone structures found scattered throughout the world’s largest desert. The structures come in various shapes and forms and appear to date back thousands of years, although researchers still aren’t sure when they were build or what their purpose may have been.
“The archaeological map of Western Sahara remains literally and figuratively almost blank as far as the wider international archaeological research community is concerned, particularly away from the Atlantic coast,” write the University of East Anglia’s Joanne Clarke and independent researcher Nick Brooks, authors of a new book outlining their work studying these unknown and mysterious structures. Clarke and Brooks spent the better part of a decade studying these structures between 2002 and 2009 and have cataloged hundreds of them ranging from straight lines to rectangular platforms to giant circles or crescents. One structure appears to be a combination of smaller forms including lines, stone circles, and platforms, forming a structure over 2,000 feet (600 meters) long.
Some of the structures are thought to mark the location of graves, although most of the structures remain a complete mystery until further research can be conducted. Due to security concerns, however, archaeologists are unable to venture into the area due to the fact that terrorist groups like al-Qaeda operate in the region and are known to kidnap outsiders. For now, these structures will remain an enigma until the Western Sahara can be effectively secured.
While we’re just beginning to scratch the surface of what may lie beneath the shifting sands of the Sahara, these preliminary discoveries only further highlight how many chapters of hidden or unknown history may have been lost to the sands of time. The Sahara is full of mysterious ruins like these stone structures which hint at long-lost knowledge and civilizations. Could the Washington Monument or Eiffel Tower one day fall into ruin only for the historians of the future to puzzle over?
What will future archaeologists make of these ruins near Tunisia?
Perhaps the sonnet “Ozymandias” (1818) by Percy Bysshe Shelley can sum it up best:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
What will the historians of the future make of our crumbling, irradiated stone and metal structures after we’re vaporized to dust?
Lake Vostok is the largest of Antarctica’s subglacial lakes, located to the east of the icy continent and beneath Russia’s Vostok Station. The surface of this freshwater lake is approximately 4,000m under the ice, which places it at approximately 500m below sea level. In 2012, a team successfully drilled through the ice to get to the lake and locate more than 3,500 species of life.
However, there was one strange thing they could not explain.
A bizarre magnetic anomaly on the east coast of the lake spanning 65 miles long and 47 miles wide was discovered, it was revealed during a documentary.
YouTube series “The Real Secrets Hidden in Antarctica” explained how the find was made.
The 2017 documentary detailed: “The Russians at Vostok station confirmed the discovery of a huge freshwater lake miles below the ice.
NASA are looking into studying the anomaly
(Image: GETTY)
Scientists often drill below the ice
(Image: GETTY)
Scientist think this may be due to the Earth’s crust thinning, but it may also signify a lost city hidden below the lake
The Real Secrets Hidden in Antarctica
“They successfully drilled through and found active biological samples of living bacteria, dating back almost 15 million years.
“Scientists claim they have found more than 35,000 life forms as well as rich fossil evidence.
“But there was also a huge magnetic anomaly.
“Scientist think this may be due to the Earth’s crust thinning, but it may also signify a lost city hidden below the lake.”
Antarctica is home to many mysteries
(Image: GETTY)
Now NASA is interested in studying the area in order to get a better understanding of Europa – Jupiter’s icy moon.
Kevin Hand, deputy chief scientist of solar system exploration for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told SPACE.com previously: "When it comes to Europa, there's no better analogy on Earth than Lake Vostok.
“In both cases, the liquid water envelope trapped beneath the ice is cut off from the sun.”
Samples of ice from the top of the lake revealed that iron and sulphur play a significant role in its ecosystem.
The Russians probed the lake in 2012
(Image: GETTY)
Dr Hand added: “The surface chemistry of Europa is riddled with sulphur.
"Chances are that sulphur is going to be an important component for how that ecosystem survives."
The discovery of life below the surface of Antarctica by the Russian team gives NASA an idea of what could develop on Europa.
A List of the DIA's Secret UFO Study Projects has been Revealed
A List of the DIA's Secret UFO Study Projects has been Revealed
The US Office of Information Services has released a Defense Intelligence Agency report addressed to the Senate Committee on Armed Services that lists the titles of more than three dozen research papers funded by the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), the secret UFO program run by the Pentagon between 2007 and 2012. The titles outlined in this newly-revealed report offer tantalizing clues into the cutting-edge aerospace concepts that AATIP was investigating, including warp-drive, invisibility cloaks, zero-point energy, and faster-than-light communications.
The report was released under a Freedom of Information Act Request made by Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. Addressed to both former Senator John McCain, then Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and ranking committee member Senator Jack Reed, the report contains "a list of all products produced under the AATIP contract for DIA to publish," according to the letter itself, dated Jan 9, 2018.
The list of attachments is comprised of 38 titles, with all except one being labeled "UNCLASSIFIED", meaning that while the majority of the documents aren't considered secret, strict controls were still required regarding their distribution. Indeed, some of these articles are freely available online, such as attachment five, Dr. Hal Puthoff's "Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering". Last October, it was reported that the DIA issued a list of AATIP study titles to the House Armed Services Committe; although the contents of that letter have yet to be disclosed, it is probable that it identical to the one sent to the Senate. This list is also similar to one released by Puthoff in July 2018, but now includes a previously-redacted title labeled "SECRET", and an accompanying letter addressed to Senators McCain and Reed.
One must bear in mind that it is unlikely that many of the more esoteric concepts alluded to in these titles have advanced beyond the theoretical, at least as far as their respective authors are concerned; indeed, if any of these ideas have been advanced to the point where they're in practical use, they're unlikely to be documented in reports of such a low classification level.
Regardless, the titles outlined in the attachment list appear to cover a broad range of topics relating to cutting-edge propulsion, communication, advanced materials and energy production technologies, such as "Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy", Dr. Eric Davis; advancements in nuclear fusion, "Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) Fusion", Dr. George Miley; "Invisibility Cloaking", Dr. Ulf Leonhardt; "Field Effects on Biological Tissues", Dr. Kit Green; and advanced materials, "Metamaterials for Aerospace Applications", Dr. G. Shvets, just to name a few.
Despite the government's official denial of the existence of the UFO phenomenon, this list of study titles illustrates the lengths that at least one project within the DIA, namely the AATIP program, needed to go to try to understand the science behind what made the anomalous objects that were being reported tick, concepts that would otherwise simply have been dismissed as belonging to the fanciful realm of science fiction.
The following is a list of links to the titles that are immediately available online, or papers published by the same authors with slightly different titles. A number of titles in the AATIP list, including #1, "Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) Fusion", and the majority of titles from EarthTech International appear to be issued in hardcopy, and would need to be ordered from their respective publishers. The remainder of the titles, except for numbers 12 and 15, "are available to Congressional staff access on the Capitol Network (CapNet)."
Harvard's top astronomer says an alien ship may be among us - and he doesn't care what his colleagues think
Harvard's top astronomer says an alien ship may be among us - and he doesn't care what his colleagues think
Since publishing his controversial paper, Avi Loeb has run a nearly nonstop media circuit, embracing the celebrity that comes from being perhaps the most academically distinguished E.T. enthusiast of his time. This has some of his peers grumbling.
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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Before he started the whole alien-spaceship thing last year, the chairman of Harvard University's astronomy department was known for public lectures on modesty. Personal modesty, which Avi Loeb said he learned growing up on a farm. And what Loeb calls "cosmic modesty" - the idea that it's arrogant to assume we are alone in the universe, or even that we're a particularly special species.
You can find a poster for one of these lectures in Loeb's office today, though it's a bit lost among the clutter: photos of Loeb posing under the dome of Harvard's enormous 19th-century telescope; thank-you notes from elementary schoolchildren; a framed interview he gave The New York Times in 2014; his books on the formation of galaxies; his face, again and again - a bespectacled man in his mid-50s with a perpetually satisfied smile.
Loeb stands beside his desk on the first morning of spring courses in a creaseless suit, stapling syllabi for his afternoon class. He points visitors to this and that on the wall. He mentions that four TV crews were in this office on the day in the fall when his spaceship theory went viral, and now five film companies are interested in making a movie about his life.
A neatly handwritten page of equations sits on the desk, on the edge closest to the guest chairs.
"Oh, this is something I did last night," Loeb says. It's a calculation, he explains, supporting his theory that an extraterrestrial spacecraft, or at least a piece of one, may at this moment be flying past the orbit of Jupiter.
Since publishing his controversial paper, Loeb has run a nearly nonstop media circuit, embracing the celebrity that comes from being perhaps the most academically distinguished E.T. enthusiast of his time - the top Harvard astronomer who suspects technology from another solar system just showed up at our door. And this, in turn, has left some of his peers nonplussed - grumbling at what they see as a flimsy theory or bewildered as to why Harvard's top astronomer won't shut up about aliens.
What you can't call Loeb is a crank. When astronomers in Hawaii stumbled across the first known interstellar object in late 2017 - a blip of light moving so fast past the sun that it could only have come from another star - Loeb had three decades of Ivy League professorship and hundreds of astronomical publications on his résumé, mostly to do with the nature of black holes and early galaxies and other subjects far from any tabloid shelf.
So when seemingly every astronomer on the planet was trying to figure out how the interstellar object (dubbed 'Oumuamua, Hawaiian for "scout") got to our remote patch of Milky Way, Loeb's extraordinarily confident suggestion that it probably came from another civilization could not be easily dismissed.
"Considering an artificial origin, one possibility is that 'Oumuamua" - pronounced Oh-mooah-mooah - "is a lightsail, floating in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment," Loeb wrote with his colleague Shmuel Bialy in Astrophysical Journal Letters in November - thrilling E.T. enthusiasts and upsetting the fragile orbits of space academia.
" 'Oumuamua is not an alien spaceship, and the authors of the paper insult honest scientific inquiry to even suggest it," tweeted Paul Sutter, an astrophysicist at Ohio State University, shortly after the paper published.
"A shocking example of sensationalist, ill-motivated science," theoretical astrophysicist Ethan Siegel wrote in Forbes. North Carolina State University astrophysicist Katie Mack suggested Loeb was trolling for publicity. "Sometimes you write a paper about something that you don't believe to be true at all, just for the purpose of putting out there," she told the Verge.
Most scientists besides Loeb assume 'Oumuamua is some sort of rock, be it an asteroid ejected from some star in meltdown hundreds of millions of years ago, or an icy comet wandering the interstellar void. But it's moving too fast for an inert rock, Loeb points out - zooming away from the sun as if something is pushing it from behind. And if it's a comet spewing jets of steam, the limited observations astronomers made of it showed no sign.
Loeb argues that 'Oumuamua's behavior means it can't be, as is commonly imagined, a clump of rock shaped like a long potato, but rather an object that's very long and no more than 1 millimeter thick, perhaps like a kilometer-long obloid pancake - or a ship sail - so light and thin that sunlight is pushing it out of our solar system.
And while he's not saying it's definitely aliens, he is saying he can't think of anything other than aliens that fits the data. And he's saying that all over international news.
"Many people expected once there would be this publicity, I would back down," Loeb says. "If someone shows me evidence to the contrary, I will immediately back down."
In the meantime, he's doubling down, hosting a Reddit AMA on "how the discovery of alien life in space will transform our life," and constantly emailing his "friends and colleagues" with updates on all the reporters who are speaking to him.
In a matter of months, Loeb has become a one-man alternative to the dirge of terrestrial news.
"It changes your perception on reality, just knowing that we're not alone," he says. "We are fighting on borders, on resources ... It would make us feel part of planet Earth as a civilization rather than individual countries voting on Brexit."
So now he is famous, styling himself as a truth-teller and risk-taker in an age of overly conservative, quiescent scientists.
"The mainstream approach [is] you can sort of drink your coffee in the morning and expect what you will find later on. It's a stable lifestyle, but for me it resembles more the lifestyle of a business person rather than scientists," he says.
"The worst thing that can happen to me is I would be relieved of my administrative duties, and that would give me even more time to focus on science," Loeb adds. " All the titles I have, I can dial them back. In fact, I can dial myself back to the farm."
Loeb grew up in an Israeli farming village. He would sit in the hills and read philosophy books imagining the broader universe, he says, a fascination that led him into academia and all the way to 'Oumuamua.
"I don't have a class system in my head of academia being the elite," he says, as he leads a reporter into the locked chamber of the Great Refractor - an enormous 19th-century telescope where he sometimes does photo ops. "I see it as a continuation of childhood curiosity - trying to understand what the world is like."
He joined Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study in the late 1980s ("Where Einstein used to be," he notes) and later took a junior position in Harvard's astronomy department, where "for 20 years no one had been promoted from within ... They tenured me after three years.")
As he tells it, his life story sounds like a cerebral version of "Forrest Gump" - Loeb always singemindedly pursuing his science and intersecting with the giants of the field, whom he regularly name-drops. Stephen Hawking had dinner at his house. Stephen Spielberg once asked him for movie tips. Russian billionaire Uri Milner once walked into his office and sat on the couch and asked him to help design humanity's first interstellar spaceship - which he is now doing, with a research budget of $100 million and the endorsement of Mark Zuckerberg and the late Hawking.
Loeb mentions casually that when he was 24 years old he got a private audience with the famed physicist Freeman Dyson - and then pauses for effect beneath the 20-foot shaft of the Great Refractor, grinning until he realizes the reporter doesn't know who Freeman Dyson is.
At midday, Loeb leaves the telescope and his office and descends to a bare white classroom to introduce the basics of astrophysics to a dozen new students.
If he's mastered the national news interview by now, his lecture begins a bit stilted. He looks down at the table as he speaks. He asks the freshmen at this most prestigious of universities to go around the table and list their hobbies.
Ten minutes later, Loeb goes off script.
"Did anyone hear the name 'Oumuamua?" he asks. "What did it mean?"
Almost everyone nods, and freshman Matt Jacobsen, who came to Harvard from an Iowa farm town, volunteers quietly: "There was speculation that it was from another civilization."
"Who made that speculation?" Loeb asks, smiling.
There's an awkward silence in the room, and then Jacobsen cries, "Was it you? Oh my gosh!" and the professor smiles wider.
Ten Earthquakes Strike the Coast of Northern California in Less Than 24 Hours | Is the “Big One” Coming?
Ten Earthquakes Strike the Coast of Northern California in Less Than 24 Hours | Is the “Big One” Coming?
Ten earthquakes of preliminary magnitudes between 3.0 and 4.5 struck off the coast of Northern California between Saturday and Sunday, the United States Geological Survey reports.
The series of earthquakes rumbled beneath the Pacific Ocean, between 3 miles and 27 miles west of Petrolia in Humboldt County.
The first earthquake struck early Saturday morning at a magnitude of 4.3, while a second earthquake, of 3.2 magnitude, rumbled about 30 minutes later. Three additional earthquakes hit between 4:30 p.m. and 5:38 p.m. Saturday in the same area, registering magnitudes between 2.9 and 3.6, USGS reported. A 3.0-magnitude earthquake struck that night, at 11:37 p.m.
The geological activity continued into Sunday. USGS reported four earthquakes near Petrolia between 2:18 p.m. and 4:05 p.m. The earthquakes ranged in magnitude from 3.4 to 4.5.
More than 240 people, from Mendocino to McKinleyville, said they felt the 4.5-magnitude earthquake that struck Sunday at 2:18 p.m., according to the USGS’s online “Felt Report” page.
There was no initial word on damage or injury resulting from the quakes. The National Weather Service office in Eureka said Sunday afternoon there was no tsunami danger.
If you live in California, you’ll know the Big One is coming:
a powerful earthquake of up to magnitude eight is headed for the state. Energy has been building up along the San Andreas Fault for more than a century. No-one knows exactly when or where, but that one day that energy will be unleashed.
It might strike at the heart of San Francisco, last devastated by a Big One in 1906. Or maybe it will tear through southern California like the magnitude 7.9 quake that hit in 1857 and ruptured some 225 miles of the San Andreas Fault.
More than 100 years on, it’s hard to predict exactly how hard the next Big One will hit. John Vidale, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center and affiliate professor at the University of Washington, told Newsweek it won’t look like in the movies—cities won’t collapse into rubble and tsunamis probably won’t sweep through California. But without adequate preparations, the Big One could “cripple” the finances of a state that just became the fifth largest economy in the world.
What exactly is a “Big One,” and where could such an earthquake hit?
A tectonic boundary between the North American and the Pacific plates cuts through California. It’s a big fault where the two sides are moving three or four centimeters a year sideways. Strain builds up for one or two hundred years along that boundary, and then finally that strain becomes so great that the fault can’t take it anymore. It breaks and moves 15 ft or so all at once, causing an earthquake.
There’s three, four, five sections, to this fault—and many other faults running in parallel—but we worry about a Big One striking in the north or in the south of the San Andreas. There’s a part between north and south in central California that seems act like a buffer. There’s some chance a rupture could go end-to-end, but we think it’s either unlikely or that it just doesn’t happen.
How often do these massive earthquakes hit?
It’s every few hundred years. The earthquakes that have happened in the meantime are still devastating to a local area, but instead of magnitude eight, they’re more like magnitude seven. It’s a logarithmic scale, so an eight has about 30 times more energy than a magnitude seven.
Don’t smaller quakes help to dissipate some of the energy that’s building up deep underground?
Those little earthquakes let out only a tiny amount of energy compared to the big ones. It would take 10 magnitude seven earthquakes to let out the strain of a magnitude eight. We don’t have that many, so those little earthquakes hardly slow the big ones at all.
Does that mean the next big one is inevitable?
That’s right. When we look at the history of the fault, we can see these big earthquakes have happened many times over the last few thousand years, so yeah, it’s an inevitability. We just don’t know if it’s going to be now or two hundred years from now.
What kind of impact would a northern or southern California Big One have?
The impact of the northern big one would be tremendous—I mean the San Andreas runs right through San Francisco. It’s quite a lot closer to San Francisco than it is to Los Angeles.
Downtown San Francisco is vulnerable—some of the oldest buildings survived the shaking back in 1906, but that doesn’t mean they’d be safe in the next earthquake by any means. Many of the buildings are built close to the fault and on kind of soft ground that might liquify.
A southern Big One would likely strike a little further away from the heart of Los Angeles, so the impact might be smaller. On the other hand LA has a lot more stuff to break than San Francisco—a lot of it is pretty old. So I think the net expectation is similar north and south. The fault is further away in the South, but it’s also riper, more ready, to go than the one in the north.
More generally, there’s a lot of disasters that come from the strong shaking of an earthquake. It would certainly cause landslides, and conceivably chemical spills. We’re also concerned about fires.
What about tsunamis?
Tsunamis aren’t a big worry here. For an earthquake to make a tsunami it would have to be offshore—not be on the main part of the San Andreas. The ground would move sideways, not so much vertically as in other places, and it’s hard to make a big wave moving sideways. But a lot of other things could happen.
When the Tōhoku earthquake hit Japan in 2011, it caused a disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Are there are any nuclear reactors at risk from a Big One in California?
Not around here—there’s one up by San Onofre but it’s been turned off. There’s been a lot of debate about nuclear reactors. Engineers argue they can make reactors safe, but there have been enough accidents over the years that for safety’s sake they are tending not to build them in most places anymore.
If infrastructure doesn’t rebound, what effects will this have on California?
It’s certainly in the realm of possibility that the earthquake causes something that cripples the economy for a long time. Nobody expected the Fukushima reactor to be a dominant problem in Japan’s 2011 earthquake, for example. There’s always a small chance of some very serious unexpected problems.
It’s also possible that a big earthquake might have less effect than we expect. It’s just very hard to predict.
The Big One is worrisome for the government because it disrupts a large area. But for individuals, the moderate-size earthquakes that are right under our feet are often the worst threat.
Los Angeles, for example is filled with faults, and many of them could have a magnitude seven earthquake. A magnitude seven on a smaller fault might well do more damage than the Big One on the San Andreas. The Big One is only part of the danger here.
NASAIn 2015 rees 'Hunga Tonga' plots op uit de oceaan.
WETENSCHAPVier jaar geleden doemde een eiland plots op uit de Stille Oceaan en ondertussen krioelt het stukje land al van het leven. Vooral de mysterieuze modder fascineert NASA-wetenschappers, die al een expeditie naar het eiland ondernamen: “We waren net enthousiaste schoolkinderen”, zegt NASA-wetenschapper Dan Slayback.
In 2015 steeg tussen de twee eilanden van Tonga door een vulkaanuitbarsting onder het wateroppervlak plots een nieuw vulkanisch eiland op uit de Stille Oceaan. Het plekje grond heeft nog altijd geen officiële naam, maar Tongalezen noemen het ‘Hunga Tonga’.
De afgelopen 150 jaar werden nog maar drie dergelijke ‘nieuwe’ eilanden geregistreerd, dus Hunga Tonga is een grote speeltuin voor wetenschappers. Onderzoekers van NASA zakten onlangs af naar het eiland om er de ondergrond, de fauna en de flora te gaan bestuderen. “We waren net enthousiaste schoolkinderen”, zegt Dan Slayback van het Goddard Space Flight Centre van NASA.
Veel leven en mysterieuze modder
Amper vier jaar nadat Hunga Tonga uit de oceaan rees, krioelt het eiland van het leven. In geen tijd begon er vegetatie te groeien en honderden verschillende soorten zeevogels maken hun nest langs de kliffen. Maar het is vooral de lichtgekleurde, kleiachtige modder die de onderzoekers fascineert: “De modder is heel kleverig, we weten niet goed wat het juist is”, zegt Slayback. “Ik weet nog altijd niet waar die modder vandaan komt.”
NASATussen de twee eilanden van Tonga steeg plots een nieuw stukje land op.
Eiland zal snel weer verdwijnen
Vraag is hoelang Hunga Tonga nog boven water zal blijven, want het duurt meestal slechts enkele maanden voor dergelijke nieuwe eilanden weer weg eroderen. Volgens Slayback ziet het er niet goed uit: “Het eiland erodeert veel sneller dan gedacht door de regen.” Maar voor Hunga Tonga opnieuw in de oceaan verdwijnt, verzamelen Slayback en zijn collega’s nog zo veel mogelijk informatie.
WETENSCHAPOnze planeet is het noorden kwijt en dat mag je letterlijk nemen. De magnetische noordpool van de aarder verschuift sneller dan ooit richting Rusland. Wetenschappers zijn genoodzaakt snel in te grijpen.
De magnetische noordpool is het punt waarnaar een kompas altijd wijst en niet te verwarren met de geografische noordpool. Het geografische noorden blijft altijd op hetzelfde punt liggen, loodrecht tegenover de zuidpool. Het magnetische noorden is een krachtveld ten noorden van Canada dat zich constant beweegt, het beïnvloedt het aardmagnetisch veld rond de aarde. Maar nu het krachtveld plots heel wispelturig wordt, dreigen wij er ook de gevolgen van te dragen.
Het magnetische noorden verschuift normaal met ongeveer 15 kilometer per jaar, maar de laatste twee jaar is de pool telkens met zo’n 55 kilometer verschoven. Naar de oorzaak van die plotse beweging is het gissen, maar een heel beweeglijke noordpool kan wel voor problemen zorgen.
Langeafstandsvluchten
De magnetische noordpool is belangrijk voor bijvoorbeeld de scheep- en luchtvaart. Hoewel GPS met satellieten de magnetische noordpool voor een groot deel overbodig heeft gemaakt, blijft hij wel belangrijk als back-up. Vooral bij langeafstandsvluchten kan een ontregelde noordpool grote afwijkingen veroorzaken. “Mocht men er geen rekening mee houden, zou men er snel 100 kilometer naast zitten”, vertelt de Leuvense geoloog Manuel Sintubin aan De Morgen.
Ook kompassen in elektronische apparaten hangen vaak af van magnetisme en zelfs het Amerikaanse leger gebruikt het magnetische noorden voor bijvoorbeeld parachutesprongen. Wetenschappers zijn dus genoodzaakt snel in te grijpen.
Britse en Amerikaanse wetenschappers brengen de magnetische polen in kaart met het World Magnetic Model (WMM). Het WMM krijgt doorgaans om de vijf jaar een update, maar nu zijn de wetenschappers genoodzaakt om de update al een jaar vroeger door te voeren. Door de shutdown in de VS liet die update even op zich wachten, maar gisteren werd het nieuwe WMM dan toch de wereld in gestuurd.
Poolwissel
Sommige wetenschappers zien in de verschuiving een voorbode van het omkeren van de magnetische polen van de aarde. Daardoor zou de magnetische noordpool de magnetische zuidpool worden en omgekeerd. Dat kan verregaande gevolgen hebben, onder meer voor het stroomnet en voor onze communicatiesystemen. Het zou ook het leven aan de aardoppervlakte blootstellen aan hogere dosissen straling van de zon en de ruimte doordat ons magnetisch veld erdoor verzwakt.
Dat omkeren is iets dat normaal gezien om de 200.000 tot 300.000 jaar gebeurt. De recentste ommekeer dateert echter al van 780.000 jaar geleden, waardoor sommige wetenschappers denken dat het niet lang meer zal duren eer er een nieuwe aankomt.
Hoe snel de ommekeer exact gaat? De wetenschap krijgt het voorlopig niet preciezer dan “in een paar duizend jaar”, maar de gevolgen zijn wel de hele tijd te voelen. “Er wordt algemeen aanvaard dat tijdens de ommekeer het magnetische veld verzwakt tot 10 procent van zijn volledige potentieel”, aldus Brad Clement van de Florida International University. “Als het verzwakt is, draaien de polen ongeveer 180 graden, waarna het magnetische veld weer sterker wordt in de omgekeerde richting. En dat kan dus duizenden jaren duren.”
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UFO Fastwalker is flying from a mountain in Rioja, Spain captured by a drone's camera
UFO Fastwalker is flying from a mountain in Rioja, Spain captured by a drone's camera
Last month a drone owner captured the amazing footage of a UFO fastwalker over Utah near Area51. Now a similar event has happened in Spain.
A drone owner in Rioja, Spain captured footage of a UFO fastwalker via the camera or his drone showing the UFO coming from a mountain then it makes a turn flying towards the drone upon which it makes again a turn before going upwards.
Like other fastwalkers the speed is enormous. This fastwalker moves 300 meters per second on which we can once again ask ourselves whether these UFOs are equipped with alien technology or not.
Het magnetische noorden is de voorbije decennia zo snel verplaatst dat vroegere schattingen volgens wetenschappers niet meer volstaan voor een precieze navigatie. Daarom hebben ze, een jaar vroeger dan gepland, een update gegeven over de exacte locatie. Wat blijkt: het magnetische noorden schuift almaar meer op richting Rusland. Voor de complotdenkers: ene Vladimir Poetin heeft hier niets mee te maken.
Volgens de wetenschappers verplaatst het magnetische noorden zich ongeveer 55 kilometer per jaar en werd de internationale datumgrens in 2017 overschreden. “Het noorden schuift op van het Canadese Noordpoolgebied naar het Russische Siberië.
Maar waarom is die verplaatsing zo belangrijk voor ons? “Het kan problemen veroorzaken met de kompassen in onze smartphones en andere consumentenelektronica. Ook vliegtuigen en schepen vertrouwen deels op het magnetische noorden als navigatiemiddel”, aldus geofysicus en hoofdonderzoeker Arnaud Chulliat van de universiteit van Colorado. Gps-systemen worden niet beïnvloed omdat zijn werken op basis van satellietgegevens.
Het Amerikaanse leger gebruikt het magnetische noorden voor navigatie en de namen van start- en landingsbanen voor vliegtuigen zijn gebaseerd op hun verhouding ten opzichte van het magnetische noorden. Als dat verandert, moeten ook de namen aangepast worden.
Turbulentie
Normaal gezien wordt de locatie van het magnetische noorden eens om de vijf jaar geüpdatet, maar door de snelle verschuiving zagen de wetenschappers zich genoodzaakt de aanpassing al een jaar vroeger dan gepland te doen.
Sinds de eerste meting in 1831 is het magnetische noorden al ruim 2.300 kilometer opgeschoven richting Rusland. Sinds 2000 is de snelheid gestegen van ongeveer 15 kilometer naar ongeveer 55 kilometer per jaar. De oorzaak daarvoor is turbulentie in de buitenste kern van onze aarde. Daar bevindt zich een hete, vloeibare “oceaan” van ijzer en nikkel waarvan de beweging een elektrisch veld tot stand brengt. “Dat kunnen we magnetisch weer noemen”, aldus geofysicus Daniel Lathrop.
Noord wordt zuid en andersom
Opmerkelijk: het magnetische zuiden beweegt trager dan het noorden. Over het algemeen bekeken wordt het magnetische veld van de Aarde zwakker. Volgens experts zou het na verloop van tijd uiteindelijk zelfs omkeren en zal het magnetische noorden het zuiden worden en andersom. In de geschiedenis van de Aarde is dat al meermaals gebeurd, al was de laatste keer wel meer dan 780.000 jaar geleden. Wanneer de volgende “flip” staat te gebeuren, kunnen de experts niet exact zeggen. “Binnen een 1.000-tal jaar?”
Mothman is the colloquial name given to the winged humanoid creature that reportedly appeared in Point Pleasant, West Virginia during 1966 and 1967. Besides the true strangeness of the mothman sightings, the point pleasant case is forever accented by the collapse of the Silver Bridge in 1967 that claimed the lives of 46 people, solidifying the mothman as a bringer of bad omens in modern American folklore. In 2017, mothman sightings began again, this time in Chicago, Illinois. Lon Strickler, owner of the website Phantoms and Monsters, collected 55 reports from the Chicago area during that period. Further investigation uncovered mothman sightings around lake Michigandating back to 1981.The reports described a large winged humanoid, with a face of some kind, and glowing red eyes. Described as either a bat-like or insect-like creature, the sightings matched the originaldescriptions of the mothmanfirst seen in Point Pleasant. Now it seems like this creature or specter or hoax orguy-with-a-jetpackis back again. Recent reports have come out of a very similar creature in Indiana on thesame highwaythat ran over the doomed Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant, West Virginia.
According to Lon Strickler who compiled the 2017 Chicago reports, the witness (identified by the initials TH) contacted him via telephone in January and described a sighting near Muncie, Indiana, just south of the Prairie Creek Reservoir. Muncie is just about halfway between Point Pleasant, West Virgina and Chicago, Illinois. According to TH, the sighting occurred on December 26, 2018. he and his wife were driving on U.S. 35 when he saw a “huge winged humanoid” fly overhead. According to the report:
TH is a military veteran, hunter, trapper and farmer who lives in the immediate area. His knowledge of military flying craft, wildlife and his keen sense of observance was apparent while I talked to him. The winged being that he was observing was unlike anything he had ever seen before. The creature was flying just above treetop level and was easily visible to the witness. His reaction was to slam on his brakes in wonderment, exclaiming to his wife ‘do you see that?’ His wife was shaken by the sudden stop and was unable to react fast enough to see the winged being.
TH stated that the being was humanoid in shape with an obvious ‘face.’ The body had a length of approximately 6-7 feet, with bat-like wings that were extremely wide. The being was dark-colored, and seemed to glide at a steady speed. He never noticed the flapping of wings while watching the creature.
Strickler also noted that the witness’ wife said that TH was “truly affected” by the encounter and constantly wanted to discuss the incident with her, yet had told no one outside his family. After hearing of other reports, he contacted Strickler with his own account.
The deep emotional imprinting is common with mothman sightings. If it is some sort of omen than that would make sense, of course. Whether this is an actual sighting of a winged, humanoid, supernatural creature is obviously pretty hard to prove even if it’s not simply a made up story. Witness testimony is notoriously unreliable. However, it should be noted that soon after this incident the great lakes region of the U.S was hit with the “polar vortex,” plunging temperatures into the -40 degree Fahrenheit range. According to the BBC, the cold snap was responsible for at least 22 deaths. Was the mothman again signalling bad times ahead? Likely not, but still it’s a weird sort of coincidence.
IT’S AN OARFISH! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! Okay, well not specifically because of the oarfish, but because of what it maypresage, of course. When the stinking, rotting carcasses of these mysterious and massive fish wash ashore, bad things tend to happen. At least, that’s according to numerous examples of folklore and legends from around the world which say that the oarfish can predict catastrophic natural disasters. Where is the next big one set to strike?
Hopefully not Fukushima again.
If oarfish legends are true, Japan. Japanese netizens have been taking to social media to speculate and digitally gesticulate about what this deep sea harbinger may mean for the land of the rising sun. The body of the fish was found tangled in a fishing net on January 28 near the city of Imizu along Japan’s northwest coast and quickly taken to a nearby aquarium for analysis. The fish measured 4 meters in length. Shortly thereafter, two more dead oarfish were found on nearby beaches, prompting some Japanese social media users to predict the worst.
However, Hiroyuki Motomura, a professor of ichthyology at Kagoshima University, says there’s nothing to worry about and the legends about oarfish are just that. “I have around 20 specimens of this fish in my collection so it’s not a very rare species, but I believe these fish tend to rise to the surface when their physical condition is poor, rising on water currents, which is why they are so often dead when they are found,” Motomura told AsiaOne.com. “The link to reports of seismic activity goes back many, many years, but there is no scientific evidence of a connection so I don’t think people need to worry.”
Oarfish can measure up to 11 meters (36 feet) in length.
Naturally, science blogs around the internet are clamoring to report on the oarfish in the name of “ANOTHER MYTH SMASHED!” as they do. Most scientists discount the belief that dead oarfish foreshadow oncoming natural disasters, although there is some anecdotal evidence of these incidents lining up. Of course, there are plenty of more examples of dead oarfish without any catastrophic earthquakes, so make what you will of these supposedly supernatural fish corpses.
Time will tell for Japan. Let’s hope this one is just a myth.
I found this structure in the center of a crater on Earths moon. The structure closely resemblers a ship from the Transformers movie. The craft is triangle in shape, but with a lot of odd bulges. The object is very shine, more so than anything in its surrounding area, which tells me its metallic. Also there is a shadow going across its front...its not broken, its front is lower so there is a shadow making that part of the alien ship darker. This is odd, I literally stared at this for 15 minutes trying to determine what it is, how old it might be and why its at the center of the crater. It seems it landed in the center of the crater to hide from Each telescopes....also it doesn't seem to be too old, under 250,000 years because there is not a thick layer of surface dust covering it...which would significantly reduce the shininess of the metallic surface.
I feel this craft may still be salvageable and possible could be used to transport humans to other planets in the Milky Way. This way if we spread our selves around...more of a chance our species will survive longer.
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Airplane passenger Records UFO over Phoenix, Arizona, VIDEO, Feb 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Airplane passenger Records UFO over Phoenix, Arizona, VIDEO, Feb 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: February 2019
Location of sighting: Phoenix, Arizona, USA
This is an alien drone that flew within a few meters of the airliner, stopped to scan, the shot off instantly. Notice in the video, the UFO does appear to stop for a 1-2 seconds and take off. What did it do for that time? Record of course...record data, scan the aircraft and its occupants, or just recorded the people looking out the windows, but it was there for a purpose. To gather data. These UFOs are out there 24/7 doing flybys of anything in the air and recording data about them.
These smaller UFOs are more common than you think and if you have aircraft flying nearby, just record an hour of footage of aircraft flying over head and I'm sure if you look at the footage and slow it down, you too will see the same shape UFO shooting past an aircraft...I did several time in my videos on my channel. I will place a video below of a UFO flyby I personally caught here in Taiwan.
Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
Object appears to quickly change direction in time lapse video.
Why Is Nikola Tesla Literally Erased From History Books?
Why Is Nikola Tesla Literally Erased From History Books?
Did Nikola Tesla’s Strange Obsession With UFOs, Antigravity and Aliens get him banned from History books? Did these crazy ideas get him banned from history? It seems that whenever someone talks about Nikola Tesla they wonder how did he go unnoticed in history books? Why was his legacy pushed out of society? And why is literally erased from history?
WHY IS HIS LEGACY PUSHED OUT OF SOCIETY?
Tesla was a man far ahead of his time, and his countless inventions are evidence that this man was, in fact, the most incredible inventor to ever live on Earth. If it weren’t for this man, things like smart phones, radio, remote controlled devices, etc… would be something completely unknown to us.
But a part of these ‘conventional’ intentions, Tesla had quite a few that seem to have come straight out of a science fiction movie script. UFO’s, Antigravity and Alien beings were anything but unfamiliar for Tesla who even claimed to have contacted beings not from Earth while working on one of his projects.
My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe, there is a core from which “We” obtain knowledge, strength, and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know it exists. – Nikola Tesla
Tesla was onto great things, technologies that most scientists today cannot even imagine. In 1928, Tesla registered yet another patent: number 1,655,144: A flying machine that resembled both a helicopter and an airplane. Before his death, Tesla had developed the blueprints for the propulsion system of his aircraft. He called it “SPACE DRIVE” or the anti-electromagnetic field propulsion system. Interestingly, according to William R. Lyne in “Occult Ether Physics”, in a conference that Tesla had prepared for the Migrant Welfare Institute on May 12, 1938, he spoke about the Dynamic Theory of Gravity. Tesla had discovered the secrets for creating the perfect vehicle that could get people into space, was relatively cheap to build, and had a propulsion system that did not use fuel. Tesla had discovered a way to harness unlimited energy which he claims was located everywhere around us. It was our job to harness this energy, and Tesla knew how to do it.
“I have worked out in all details and hope to give to the world very soon. It explains the causes of this force and the motions of heavenly bodies under its influence so satisfactorily that it will put an end to idle speculation and false conceptions, as that of curved space. Only the existence of a Weld of force can account for the motions of the bodies as observed, and its assumption dispenses with space curvature. All literature on this subject is futile and destined to oblivion. So are all attempts to explain the workings of the universe without recognizing the existence of the ether and the indispensable function it plays in the phenomena.”
Tesla discovered that the electrostatic emission surface of a conductor will always concentrate where the surface is curved, or where it has an edge. While steeper the curve, or corner, the higher the concentration of electron emission is. Tesla also noted that an electrostatic charge will flow over the surface of a conductor rather than penetrate it. This is referred to as the Faraday Effect or skin effect discovered by Michael Faraday.
This also explains the principles of the Faraday cage, which is used in high voltage research laboratories to protect humans and the electro-sensitive equipment from damage.
According to UFO reports, the inside of these “vehicles” is composed of circular channels or columns which go through the center of the craft. These serve, as a superstructure for the rest of the disk-shaped object and carry a high voltage and a high-frequency coil. It is believed to be a resonant transformer which gives electrostatic and electromagnetic load to the craft and its polarity. The coil inside the craft is what we know today as a Tesla Coil invented by Nikola Tesla in 1891.
Nikola Tesla said: “There is a difference between progress and technology, progress benefits mankind. Technology does not necessarily do that.”
ALIENS, TESLA, AND THE FIRST MAN-MADE FLYING SAUCER
One night, when he was alone in the laboratory, Tesla observed what he cautiously referred to as electrical actions which definitely appeared to be intelligent signals. The changes were taking place periodically and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they could not be traced to any cause then known to him.
This incident was the first of many in which Tesla intercepted what he felt were intelligent signals from space. At the time, it was surmised by prominent scientists that Mars would be a likely haven for intelligent life in our solar system, and Tesla at first thought these signals may be originating from the red planet.
While in Colorado Springs, Tesla intercepted strange radio signals that spread through the media incredibly fast. Tesla observed unusual signals from his receiver; Tesla concluded that these signals might actually be signals that have originated somewhere in space. He mentioned these signals in a letter to reporter Julian Hawthorne at the Philadelphia North American on 8 December 1899 and in a December 1900 letter about possible discoveries in the new century to the Red Cross Society where he referred to messages “from another world” that read “1… 2… 3…”.
But Tesla was not the only one who was able to intercept these mysterious signals. Guglielmo Marconi, 1st Marquis of Marconi, was an Italian inventor and electrical engineer, known for his pioneering work on long-distance radio transmission and for his development of Marconi’s law and a radio telegraph system. Guglielmo Marconi also intercepted signals originating from space a few years after Tesla; researchers have since claimed that Tesla and Marconi intercepted the same signals.
THE PERFECT UFO: MADE BY TESLA
The methods used in the design of the flying saucer matched the descriptions of those who claimed to have seen a from the UFO inside: with a discoidal capacitor with sufficient size to provide enough thrust to fly, while other small capacitors allowed to control the direction of the flying saucer, to which he added a gyroscopic stabilization system and an electric “drive” control. And if all of that isn’t enough, Tesla had more; the interior of the ship was equipped with flat screens and external video cameras for the pilot’s blind spots.
Tesla’s UFO has eyes, and these were made of electro-optical lenses, arranged in quadrants, allowing the pilot to see everything. Screens and monitors are placed on a console where the browser can observe all areas around the vehicle, and Tesla’s incredible invention included magnifying lenses, which could have been used without changing positions. Basically, it is an incredibly well-designed aircraft, one that we could actually manage to build today. Or have we already built it? What happened to this invention? Why are we not flying into space with Tesla’s incredible invention?
Third Snowy Pyramid Recently Discovered in Antarctica Could Rewrite History (Video)
Third Snowy Pyramid Recently Discovered in Antarctica Could Rewrite History (Video)
Though not everyone is willing to admit it, our planet is full of relics and monuments that prove Earth was once populated by extremely advanced civilizations. Point in case: the third ice-covered pyramid discovered in Antarctica!
Ever since the service was released, Google Earth been a boon not just for conspiracy theorists but also for anyone looking to uncover clues about what lies hidden beyond sight. If you need a good vantage point, you need good eyes and altitude. Satellites have both.
The latest in a group of three snow-covered pyramids was recently discovered through Google Earth satellite imagery and in a few days, the finding has taken the alternative history communities by storm. Two of the pyramids can be found approximately 10 miles inland while the third rests near the coastline.
The implications of this discovery are complex and if accepted, it could turn the scientific world on its head. No history book ever mentioned an Antarctic civilization with the skills and technology necessary to erect enormous pyramids. There is one apparent reason behind this situation and by the looks of it, it would suggest tech-savvy civilizations existed on Earth a long time before our own emerged.
Antarctica is now a frozen wasteland but it wasn’t always like this. It got to its current position through plate tectonics, inching closer to the geographic South Pole year after year. Millions of years ago, Antarctica’s climate was much warmer because its position was closer to the equator. This is established fact backed up by several accepted discoveries, not some wild speculation.
Some years ago, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) uncovered evidence that the antarctic climate was much different in the distant past.
Go back 100 million years ago,” BAS’s Dr. Vanessa Bowman said “and Antarctica was covered in lush rainforests similar to those that exist in New Zealand today.”
Another expedition –led by NASA and involving 11 other scientific organizations– discovered out-of-place microbial life forms in the depths of Antarctica’s Lake Vida, trapped under a sheet of ice 65 feet thick. The microbial colonies had been prospering in isolation for millions of years and scientists believe they are the descendants of microorganisms that lived in a much warmer climate. Who knows what other enigmas lay buried in ice, hopelessly waiting to be revealed.
The resemblance is unsettling.
Even with today’s technology, building structures as massive as the pyramids of Antarctica would be nearly impossible. There are simply too many problems relating to manpower and the logistics required for such a project. If building these mysterious monuments were to be a viable venture, it must have taken place in the past, when Antarctica was a favorable place for human life.
And this opens up a king-sized can of worms. The continent was habitable only in the very distant past, but mainstream science says the wheel wasn’t invented until some 6,000 years ago. At the same time, anatomically-modern humans are said to have mastered fire only 125,000 years ago. So where do these controversial pyramids fit in? Are they evidence of an ancient advanced civilization or do we need to stretch our imagination even further and regard them as proof of time travel? The mind boggles when we remain attached to our outdated beliefs.
Proponents of alternative history and fans of the ancient aliens hypothesis have no problem in accepting the parallel reality generated by such discoveries. It’s not hard to see and accept that we aren’t the first and though it may seem this way, we probably won’t be the last.
Thousands of years after they were built, we are still fascinated by the Egyptian pyramids. The monuments left behind by their society have stood the test of time and in more than one way, they’ve granted their builders immortality. Keeping that in mind, what could be said about pyramids that are millions of years old? Does that put our own lives into perspective and make us see the bigger picture?
For thousands of years, humans thought that Earth was at the center of the universe. It was only in recent centuries that it became an established scientific fact that Earth orbits the sun, and later that the solar system — along with hundreds of billions of other stars — orbits a common galactic center. Until very recently, it has been very difficult for scientists to visualize what the Milky Way looks like given that we are embedded inside it.
Artist impression of a warped Milky Way.
Credit: CHEN Xiaodian.
Thanks to observation, reconstruction, and comparison to other galaxies, researchers have a fairly accurate idea of what our galaxy looks like. If you were to travel outside the galaxy and look down upon it from above, what you’d see is a barred spiral galaxy with two spiral arms called Scutum–Centaurus and Carina–Sagittarius. But, the spiral disk is anything but stable, new research from China shows. The new study found that the farther away you travel from the galactic core, this disk becomes increasingly warped and twisted.
The Milky Way’s S-like appearance at its edges is due to the fact that gravity becomes weaker the farther you are from the galaxy’s inner regions. Since hydrogen atoms in the far outer disk are no longer confined to a thin plane, they get warped.
There were many challenges in this study. One of them is establishing distances from the sun to the Milky Way’s outer disk when you don’t know what the disk actually looks like yet. The research team at the National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), led by Chen Xiaodian, had to employ a new catalog of variable stars known as classical Cepheids. Such stars are hot and massive – five to twenty times the mass of our sun and up to 100,000 times as bright. They also pulsate radially for days to months at a time — and this period of pulsation can be combined with the Cepheid’s brightness to reliably establish its distance from the sun.
A 3D distribution of the classical Cepheids in the Milky Way’s warped disk.
Credit: CHEN Xiaodian.
Because they are so bright, Cepheids can be clearly seen millions of light years away and can be easily distinguished from other bright stars in their vicinity, making them indispensable tools in any astronomers’ kit. For instance, it’s thanks to Cepheids that Edwin Hubble and Milton L. Humason were able to prove that the Universe is in a state of expansion. Now, Cepheids have proven their worth once more, establishing an important physical characteristic of the Milky Way’s disk.
“Somewhat to our surprise, we found that in 3D our collection of 1339 Cepheid stars and the Milky Way’s gas disk follow each other closely. This offers new insights into the formation of our home galaxy,” says Prof. Richard de Grijs from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and senior co-author of the paper. “Perhaps more importantly, in the Milky Way’s outer regions, we found that the S-like stellar disk is warped in a progressively twisted spiral pattern.”
The same twisted spiral patterns have been seen before in more than a dozen other galaxies. Combined with these observations, the study’s results suggest that the likely culprit for the Milky Way’s warped spiral pattern is torque from the massive inner disk.
“This new morphology provides a crucial updated map for studies of our galaxy’s stellar motions and the origins of the Milky Way’s disk,” says Dr. DENG Licai, senior researcher at NAOC and co-author of the study published in Nature Astronomy.
We snappen steeds minder van hoe planeten ontstaan (en drie andere lessen na de ontdekking van vierduizend planeten)
We snappen steeds minder van hoe planeten ontstaan (en drie andere lessen na de ontdekking van vierduizend planeten)
Bijna vierduizend planeten zijn er al ontdekt en ruimtesonde Tess is net begonnen aan een nieuwe zoektocht. Al die werelden leveren voorzichtige inzichten op over hoe de aarde ontstond en of we alleen zijn in de kosmos. De belangrijkste lessen.
Een planeet zo heet dat hij letterlijk verdampt. Stevige werelden van harde rots. Plekken waar je net als in sciencefictionklassieker Star Wars aan de hemel niet één, maar twee ‘zonnen’ ziet. Zware superaardes, verstopt achter dikke sluiers van gas. En stelsels zo propvol planeten dat leven er van de ene naar de andere bol zou kunnen liften.
De buitenaardse plekken die astronomen de afgelopen jaren hebben ontdekt zijn gevarieerd en, bovenal, talrijk. Eeuwenlang, tot begin jaren negentig, kenden we er maar acht (of negen, als je het Pluto-fans vraagt): Venus, Aarde, Jupiter, enzovoort. De planeten die draaien om onze eigen zon. Maar sinds de ontdekking van de eerste planeet om een ándere ster gaat het hard. Duizenden van die zogeheten exoplaneten kennen we inmiddels, een definitief bewijs dat het heelal krioelt van de exotische werelden. De inzichten uit die hausse aan vondsten helpen bij het zoeken naar antwoorden op de grote levensvragen. Vragen als: waar komen we vandaan? En: hoe is de aarde ontstaan?
Bovendien zijn er tientallen werelden ontdekt in de zogeheten ‘leefbare zone’ rond hun moederster, de afstand waarop oppervlaktewater vloeibaar is en leven wellicht mogelijk. Dat voedt de hoop dat we ook op de grootste van de grote vragen antwoord krijgen: de vraag of we eenzaam door een kille kosmos dobberen, of dat leven ook elders in dit heelal wortel heeft geschoten.
Nu de belangrijkste exoplaneetjager van onze tijd – ruimtetelescoop Kepler – definitief met pensioen is gegaan en zijn opvolger (ruimtesonde Tess) net begonnen is met een nieuwe zoektocht, blijkt dat de inzichten die al die nieuwe werelden ons gaven verrassender zijn dan gedacht. Een overzicht van de belangrijkste lessen van, door en over planeten.
Beeld Vilain & Gai
Les 1: De nieuw ontdekte planeetstelsels lijken totaal niet op ons eigen zonnestelsel.
Het gaat er behoorlijk braaf aan toe in dat zonnestelsel van ons. Acht planeten, overzichtelijk gerangschikt. Rotsachtige werelden als Mars en de aarde staan vlak bij de zon, gasreuzen als Jupiter en Uranus zweven verderop in de kosmische leegte. Stuk voor stuk draaien die planeten keurige, vrijwel cirkelvormige banen. Af en toe kletst ergens met grote vaart een verdwaald stuk ruimtesteen op een planeet, maar verder is het hier goed toeven. Een kosmisch bedevaartsoord waarin de mensheid rustig tot wasdom kon komen.
Nee, dan de rest van het heelal. Dat zit tjokvol extreme werelden. Neem nu planeet Kelt-9b, een reusachtige gasplaneet die zó dicht op een loeihete ster zit dat hij letterlijk aan het verdampen is. Of kijk naar Wasp-12b, een gasmonster grofweg tweemaal zo groot als Jupiter. Die wordt door de gigantische zwaartekracht van zijn ster uitgerekt tot een soort planetair mega-ei. Al net zo gezellig gaat het eraan toe op PSR B1257+12 A (en B en C, overigens), planeten die draaien om een pulsar, een extreme ster die de oppervlakten van zijn metgezellen dag in dag uit bekogelt met een stralingsdosis die een mens direct tot stof zou reduceren. En dan hebben we het nog niet gehad over HD 189733b, waar het – nee, echt – gesmolten glas regent. Van opzij. Dan kun je toch beter op aarde zitten.
Planeten zoals Kelt-9b en HD 189733b zijn gasreuzen die in tegenstelling tot bijvoorbeeld Jupiter niet in de uiterwaarden van een planeetstelsel bivakkeren, maar vlak bij hun moederster. Met alle gevolgen van dien.
En dat soort hete Jupiters zijn lang niet de enige nieuwe planeetsoort die astronomen de afgelopen jaren ontdekten. ‘De belangrijkste les die we hebben geleerd, is dat de diversiteit aan planeten in de kosmos enorm is’, zegt exoplaneetonderzoeker Ignas Snellen van de Universiteit Leiden.
Zo bestudeer je de atmosfeer van een exoplaneet
Zonder leven op aarde, had onze atmosfeer nooit vol zuurstof gezeten. Op zoek naar aanwijzingen voor buitenaards leven, willen astronomen graag de atmosfeer van exoplaneten in kaart brengen. De chemische samenstelling daarvan, levert mogelijk een eerste voorzichtige aanwijzing dat zo'n planeet iets van leven bevat.
Wanneer een planeet voor zijn ster langs beweegt, krijgen astronomen de kans dat te meten. Licht dat vanaf de ster naar aarde komt, beweegt dan eerst door die atmosfeer. Onderweg absorberen bepaalde stoffen in de atmosfeer specifieke golflengten van het licht. Aan de hand van het licht dat overblijft, kun je dan concluderen wat de samenstelling van die atmosfeer precies moest zijn.
Kijk maar naar de zogeheten superaardes: rotsachtige werelden die een slag groter zijn dan onze eigen planeet en die in ons eigen zonnestelsel nergens te bekennen zijn. Of sub-Neptunussen, grofweg even groot als superaardes, maar dan met een fikse toef gas om hun stenen kern. ‘Vroeger dachten we dat planeten met weinig massa automatisch rotsplaneten worden en dat zwaardere planeten met hun sterkere zwaartekracht gas aantrekken en dus onherroepelijk gasreuzen worden’, zegt Snellen. ‘Dat blijkt niet zo te zijn. Er zitten vele subtiele schakeringen tussen.’
Al die nieuwe planeettypen suggereren bovenal dat het zonnestelsel niet de gouden standaard is waar we hem jarenlang voor hielden, een blauwdruk op basis waarvan we andere planeetsystemen kunnen begrijpen. Astronomen hebben zelfs nog nergens een stelsel gevonden dat op het onze lijkt. ‘Collega’s speculeren hardop dat het zonnestelsel heel zeldzaam is’, zegt Snellen. ‘Dat vind ik erg voorbarig.’
Ook astronoom Carsten Dominik, verbonden aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam, vindt het ‘te vroeg’ om te concluderen dat het zonnestelsel een uitzondering is. ‘We kunnen een planeetstelsel als ons zonnestelsel nu nog niet zo makkelijk detecteren’, zegt hij. ‘Onze gegevens zijn dus vertekend.’
Planeten dichter bij hun ster zijn nu nog gemakkelijker te vinden, onder andere doordat ze vaker voor hun ster langskruisen. Dat veroorzaakt geregeld terugkerende dipjes in de lichtsterkte van de ster, die astronomen door hun telescopen kunnen zien – alsof even een vuurvliegje voor een zaklamp langs vliegt en zo een fractie van het licht blokkeert.
Binnenkort komt daar dankzij de zogeheten Gaia-missie verandering in. Die levert astronomen een gedetailleerde 3D-kaart van ons thuissterrenstelsel, de Melkweg. Daarin kun je van miljoenen sterren de positie en snelheid vinden. Zo kunnen astronomen sterren ontdekken die flink wiebelen doordat een planeet er met zijn zwaartekracht aan trekt. ‘Dat wiebelen is in de Gaia-gegevens beter te zien wanneer zo’n planeet verder weg staat’, zegt Snellen.
Wel duurt het nog even voordat we de eerste verre planeet op die manier vinden. De meeste doen minimaal een jaar of tien over een rondje om hun moederster. ‘Gaia is nu pas twee jaar aan het meten’, zegt Dominik. ‘We moeten dus nog even geduld hebben.’
En zelfs dan is zoeken naar een exacte kopie van het zonnestelsel vermoedelijk een kansloze missie, zegt Snellen. ‘Een man van in de 40, zoals ik, is niet zeldzaam. Maar als ik op zoek ga naar een exacte kopie, met precies dezelfde oogkleur, lengte, gewicht, enzovoort – dan wordt het ineens heel lastig.’ Net als de mens is ieder planeetstelsel waarschijnlijk uniek.
Les 2: Tijdens de planetaire puberteit blijven werelden niet braaf op hun plek zitten.
Lang dachten we dat kosmische kolossen zoals het zonnestelsel vredige plekken waren, waarin alles rustig verliep. Planeten ontstaan op de plek waarop we ze in het zonnestelsel vinden: grote gasreuzen ver weg, kleine rotsplaneten dichtbij. En daarna blijven ze daar de rest van hun leven staan.
Dat beeld staat sinds de vondst van duizenden exoplaneten op z’n kop. Boosdoeners zijn de ‘hete Jupiters’: grote gasreuzen die zo dicht bij hun moederster staan dat ze er bijna op schoot zitten. En dat betekent dat grote planeten dicht bij hun ster kunnen ontstaan óf dat ze na geboorte alsnog heen en weer kunnen schuiven.
Zo’n planetaire puberteit, waarin jonge planeten tegendraads aan de wandel gaan, staat sinds kort in de boeken. Dat zware planeten ver weg ontstaan, lijkt namelijk onontkoombaar: verder weg is meer ‘spul’ beschikbaar. Net zoals een grammofoonplaat aan de buitenkant de meeste vierkante centimeters vinyl heeft. Verder weg is het ook kouder, zodat je gratis waterijs en bevroren CO2 als extra bouwblokjes krijgt. En je wint daar dan ook nog eens gemakkelijker het wedstrijdje gravitationeel touwtrekken met de ster. Terwijl de ster het stof met zijn zwaartekracht stevig in de schijf trekt, wil een beginnende planeet het er juist uit zuigen om een bolletje te maken. Dat win je makkelijker op een afstandje.
Hoewel zware planeten die dichter op een ster ontstaan niet uitgesloten zijn – ‘daarvoor zien we in computersimulaties wel opties’ – is dat dus vermoedelijk zeldzaam. Dominik: ‘Het zal véél vaker gebeuren dat een zware planeet verder weg ontstaat en daarna naar binnen beweegt.’
Beeld Volkskrant Infographics
Dat bewegen van planeten, ‘migreren’ zeggen astronomen, heeft ook in ons zonnestelsel plaatsgevonden. Geïnspireerd door wat ze in verre planeetstelsels zagen, besloten astronomen onze lokale geschiedenis te simuleren. Al snel bleek dat de grote gasreuzen in het jonge zonnestelsel driftig heen en weer schoven, al keerden ze hier uiteindelijk weer terug naar hun oorspronkelijke deel van het stelsel.
Ook in andere planeetstelsels zien astronomen de sporen van dat chaotische geschuif. Snellen: ‘Hete Jupiters draaien vaak de verkeerde kant op, in vergelijking met andere planeten. Gasreuzen die iets verder weg staan, maar nog steeds relatief dicht op de ster zitten, hebben juist elliptische banen. Dat moet wel het gevolg zijn van het geweld waarmee ze ooit naar binnen zijn geschoven.’
Het lijkt erop dat dergelijke verplaatsingen vaste prik zijn in de chaos van jonge sterrenstelsels. Die planetaire puberteit duurt meestal tien à honderd miljoen jaar. Op een plek als het zonnestelsel, dat met zijn vijf miljard jaar al eventjes mee gaat, is alles inmiddels rustig. ‘Een stelsel dat continu zo chaotisch blijft als in het begin, trekt zichzelf namelijk onherroepelijk aan stukken’, zegt Dominik. Ook bij planeetstelsels komt stabiliteit dus met de jaren.
Les 3: We snappen nog steeds niet goed hoe planeten ontstaan.
Astronomen verbonden aan de European Southern Observatory legden afgelopen september een bommetje onder ons beeld van hoe planeten ontstaan. Ze bekeken honderden stofschijven waarin planeten ontstaan met radiotelescoop Alma en zagen tot hun schrik dat er véél te weinig materiaal in zat om planeten te maken, zo schreven ze in het vakblad Astronomy & Astrophysics. ‘We moeten onze theorieën over planeetvorming herzien’, zei de Nederlandse astronoom Gijs Mulders (University of Chicago), niet bij het onderzoek betrokken, vervolgens tegen het vakblad Science.
Jarenlang gingen astronomen ervan uit dat werelden zoals de aarde, Jupiter, Kelt-9b en HD 189733b ontstonden in stofschijven waar ronddwarrelende stofkorreltjes en andere kleine deeltjes onder invloed van zwaartekracht aan elkaar plakten. Als een soort rollende sneeuwbal voegt steeds meer kosmisch ‘spul’ zich bij de vormende planeet, waardoor hij uiteindelijk kan uitgroeien tot planetaire proporties. Alleen staat die sneeuwbaltheorie door de recente waarnemingen nu plots op losse schroeven: het is lastig grote ballen draaien als je maar een klein beetje sneeuw hebt.
‘Gelukkig zijn er wel uitwegen’, zegt Ignas Snellen, die het artikel ‘heel belangrijk’ noemt. De auteurs beschreven die overigens zelf al in hun vakartikel. Allereerst zouden planeetkernen sneller kunnen groeien dan gedacht. Radiotelescoop Alma, een verzameling van 66 samenwerkende schotels in de Atacamawoestijn in Chili, is vooral goed in het zien van klein stof. Grotere korrels vanaf grofweg een centimeter ontsnappen daardoor aan zijn aandacht. ‘Dan denk je dus dat er te weinig materiaal is’, zegt Snellen. Het kan daarnaast ook nog dat het stof en gas in de schijven steeds wordt aangevuld, vanuit een nog onbekend reservoir, zodat je er bij één momentopname steevast te weinig aantreft. ‘Over dit soort ideeën wordt de komende tijd veel gediscussieerd, totdat we snappen hoe het zit. Zo werkt dat in onze wereld.’
Het artikel past bovendien in een trend, zegt Snellen. ‘Hoe meer waarnemingen we doen, hoe minder we begrijpen van hoe planeten zich vormen’, zegt hij. De stortvloed aan gegevens over exoplaneten en metingen aan de stofschijven waarin ze ontstaan maakt de vraagtekens almaar groter. En dat terwijl het vraagstuk zo cruciaal is: hoe planeten ontstaan, en welke materialen daarbij een rol spelen, raakt direct aan hoe onze eigen planeet, de aarde, werd gevormd. En waar de basisbouwstenen van het leven vandaan komen.
Zo ontdek je verre planeten
Zelfs de sterkste telescoop kan van een exotische wereld, draaiend om een verre ster, geen directe foto maken. Ze staan te ver weg en zijn relatief klein. En dan hangen ze ook nog eens in de buurt van een ster, een helder lichtbaken dat je het zicht ontneemt. Alsof je een vuurvliegje probeert te zien terwijl je recht in een bouwlamp kijkt.
Wie toch verre planeten wil ontdekken heeft dus een handige truc nodig. Astronomen hebben er een aantal, waarvan twee het populairst zijn. Bij de eerste speuren ze naar de regelmatige afname in de helderheid van het licht van een ster die wordt veroorzaakt wanneer een planeet voorlangs trekt. Een tweede optie is om sterren te zoeken die een beetje wiebelen. Dat komt vaak doordat een planeet er met zijn zwaartekracht aan trekt. De snelheidsverandering in de beweging van de ster die zo ontstaat kun je - via een omweg - meten. Op die manier betrap je, indirect, een planeet.
Een van de grootste raadsels waar astronomen mee worstelen is waarom planeten het vormingsproces überhaupt overleven. Nadat stofdeeltjes zijn samengeklonterd tot grotere objecten, bereiken ze rond een paar millimeter een kritische grens. ‘Vanaf dan zouden ze door interactie met de rest van de stofschijf moeten afremmen en in de ster moeten vallen’, zegt Snellen. Pas als ze een stuk groter geworden zijn - bollen met een diameter van een meter of tien - zijn de jonge planeten de stofschijf de baas. Snellen: ‘Maar daar tussenin snappen we er dus niet zoveel van.’
Ideeën zijn er wel. ‘We denken dat kleine deeltjes zich gaan gedragen als een soort peloton bij het wielrennen’, zegt Carsten Dominik. ‘Op die manier hebben ze minder last van het gas eromheen.’ Alleen is het daarvoor dan wel weer noodzakelijk dat er voldoende korreltjes voorhanden zijn, dat de dichtheid van de schijf hoog genoeg is. Of dat het geval is bij de stofschijven die astronomen tot nog toe hebben gezien, is nog een open vraag.
Voorlopig snappen astronomen nog niet waar al het materiaal voor de aarde (en andere planeten) vandaan komt én waarom ons thuis in zijn tienerjaren niet plotseling de zon in is gekukeld. Dat maakt ons bestaan tot een prachtig raadsel dat naar verwachting nog wel even op een oplossing moet wachten.
Beeld Vilain & Gai
Les 4: De kans is groot dat ergens een planeet bestaat met buitenaards leven.
‘Ik zal je één ding vertellen over het heelal’, zegt astronoom Ellie Arroway in een beroemd geworden scène uit sciencefictionfilm Contact (1997). ‘Het heelal is een behoorlijk grote plek. Het is groter dan iemand ooit gedroomd heeft. Dus als wij alleen zijn… dan voelt dat als vreselijke ruimteverspilling. Toch?’
Het is grofweg die redenering die alien-optimisten bezigen wanneer ze stellen dat het onvoorstelbaar lijkt dat de aarde in dit uitgestrekte heelal – dat naar verwachting gevuld is met miljarden en miljarden planeten – de enige plek zou zijn waar leven voorkomt. En dat idee heeft, sinds de meting van de eerste exoplaneet, alleen maar aan kracht gewonnen.
‘Toch hebben we uit het exoplaneetonderzoek strikt gesproken nog niets nieuws geleerd over het bestaan van buitenaards leven’, zegt Ignas Snellen. ‘Of nou ja… we weten natuurlijk wél dat rotsachtige planeten zoals de aarde op veel plekken voorkomen.’
Snellen vermoedt zelfs dat het de meest voorkomende planeetsoort in het heelal is, al zijn deze met de huidige methoden nog lastig te vinden. ‘Maar wanneer het technisch wel kan, vinden we ze eigenlijk altijd ook’, zegt hij.
Neem bijvoorbeeld Proxima b, de rotsachtige planeet die rond Proxima Centauri draait, de ster het dichtst bij de zon, op een afstand die vloeibaar water mogelijk maakt. Of, een stukje verderop, de rotsachtige superaarde die astronomen in november ontdekten rond de Ster van Barnard. Het zijn plekken waar leven overigens niet erg waarschijnlijk is. Zo is het op de planeet van Barnard zo’n 170 graden onder nul. Terwijl potentieel leven op Proxima b dankzij heftige steruitbarstingen continu wordt bestookt met naar aardse begrippen dodelijke straling.
Iets hoopvoller is het zogeheten Trappist-systeem, waar drie planeten in de leefbare zone draaien, de afstand waarop vloeibaar water mogelijk is. ‘Daar zou leven dus kunnen bestaan’, zegt Carsten Dominik. ‘Althans: als die planeten bijvoorbeeld een atmosfeer hebben.’
Kijk puur naar de astronomische feiten en je kunt bijna niet anders dan optimistisch zijn. Dominik: ‘We hebben tot nog toe geen enkele showstopper gezien die zegt dat leven minder vaak zou voorkomen dan gedacht.’ Planeten komen voldoende voor, naar verwachting óók om vriendelijkere sterren dan Proxima Centauri. Van die planeten zal een fractie vloeibaar water hebben. En daarvan zal een fractie naar verwachting leven bevatten. ‘Hier op aarde is het leven binnen een paar honderd miljoen jaar ontstaan’, zegt Snellen. ‘Waarom zou dat dan elders niet net zo gaan?
Naar dat leven zijn astronomen als Snellen en Dominik daarom hard op zoek. Het zou zelfs kunnen dat het in de buurt zit. Voor een bevestiging is het wel wachten op de volgende generatie telescopen. De geplande opvolger van Nasa’s ruimtetelescoop Hubble, de James Webb Space Telescope, kan bijvoorbeeld kijken of de planeten rond Trappist een atmosfeer hebben. En de Extremely Large Telescope, die ESO nu in Chili bouwt, kan speuren naar water op Proxima b.
Als leven echter zeldzamer is – zelfs als het bijvoorbeeld ‘slechts’ een op de duizend keer voorkomt – dan moeten we voorlopig geduld hebben. ‘Of je moet andere technieken gebruiken waarmee je nu al veel verder het heelal in kunt kijken’, zegt Dominik. ‘Dan wordt het toch speuren of je radiosignalen van intelligente beschavingen kunt opvangen.’
Die missie heeft tot nog toe geen succes gehad, al is dat ook weer niet zo vreemd. Het heelal is, zoals Ellie Arroway in Contact zei, nu eenmaal best wel groot. Je moet dan ook niet vreemd opkijken als het zoeken naar een planeet met leven in die kosmische hooiberg wat langer duurt dan gehoopt.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET Die merkwaardige ‘ruimtesigaar’ die vanaf Hawaï werd waargenomen, en de naam ’Oumuamua kreeg? ‘Ik denk dat die is gemaakt door een buitenaardse beschaving’, zegt Avi Loeb. Waarom het hoofd van de afdeling sterrenkunde aan Harvard dat een heel normaal idee vindt.
Avi Loeb gelooft er wel in. Op 19 oktober 2017 kreeg de mensheid voor het eerst bezoek van aliens. Op dezelfde dag dat in Florence een bezoeker van de Santa Croce-basiliek dodelijk wordt getroffen door een vallend stuk steen, en in Nederland presentator Frits Bom overlijdt, krijgt een telescoop op Hawaï een bizar voorwerp in zijn vizier. Een lang ding, zo’n honderd tot duizend meter. Niet bolvormig, zoals we gewend zijn van de kometen en asteroïden die door het zonnestelsel zoeven, maar langgerekt. Een kosmische scherf of, zo fluistert men op internet al snel: een soort ruimteschip.
Het voorwerp krijgt de Hawaïaanse naam ’Oumuamua, grof vertaald: boodschapper van ver. Journalisten en bloggers noemen hem vanwege zijn vorm liefkozend ‘kosmische komkommer’ of ‘ruimtesigaar’. Maar het opvallendst is de naam die hij van astronomen krijgt: Interstellar 1, de allereerste in een nieuwe categorie, een bezoeker van buiten ons zonnestelsel.
GettyAvi Loeb, hoofd van de afdeling sterrenkunde aan Harvard.
’Ik denk dat ’Oumuamua gemaakt is door een buitenaardse beschaving.’ Aan het woord is geen complotdenker of ufo-gelovige – Loeb is hoofd van de sterrenkunde-afdeling van Harvard, een van ’s werelds meest prestigieuze universiteiten. Daarnaast is hij directeur van het interdisciplinaire Black Hole Initiative en baas van het instituut voor theorie en berekening aan het Harvard-Smithsonian Institute for Astrophysics.
Een mooi cv, maar Loeb staat ook bekend om zijn uitgesproken ideeën en grote interesse in intelligent buitenaards leven. Zo vroeg hij zich in 2017 hardop af of de mysterieuze snelle radioflitsen die zijn collega’s in de ruimte waarnemen signalen zouden kunnen zijn van aliens. Ook zit hij in de adviesraad van het Breakthrough Starshot-project van de Russische miljardair Yuri Milner, dat met kleine ruimteschepen naar Proxima Centauri, de ster die het dichtst bij de zon staat, wil vliegen. Op die manier hopen ze op planeet Proxima Centauri b te ontdekken of daar buitenaards leven zit.
Dat juist hij in ’Oumuamua de invloed van buitenaardsen herkent, past dus in een patroon. ’Ik heb meerdere onderzoeken over ’Oumuamua gepubliceerd. Daaruit bleken allerlei vreemde feiten’, zegt Loeb. Zo zag hij hoe de helderheid van het object aan de hemel gedurende acht uur geregeld met een factor tien tot dertig veranderde. Dat betekent dat het voorwerp niet rond is, zegt hij, maar het hoeft ook geen langgerekte sigaar te zijn zoals iedereen lijkt te denken. ‘Onze analyse laat zien dat het meer op een pannekoek lijkt die om z’n lengteas draait.’
Een platte pannekoek van buiten het zonnestelsel… heeft u het soms over een vliegende schotel?
’Ik geloof niet in ufo’s, maar ik denk wel dat ’Oumuamua een overblijfsel is van een buitenaardse beschaving. We ontdekten een rare afwijking in zijn baanbeweging, eentje die je niet kunt verklaren door de aantrekkingskracht van de zon. Dat zie je wel vaker bij een komeet, wanneer het ijs op het oppervlak verdampt. Dan krijg je een soort raket-effect. Maar ’Oumuamua is geen komeet. Hij heeft niet de kenmerkende staart van een komeet en ruimtetelescoop Spitzer vond in de buurt van het object niet de koolstofmoleculen die je bij een komeet zou verwachten.
’De vraag is dus: waar kreeg hij dat extra zetje dan door? Het enige dat ik kan bedenken is stralingsdruk. ’Oumuamua kan een lichtzeil zijn. Net zoals een zeil op een boot vooruit wordt geduwd door deeltjes in de lucht, krijgt een lichtzeil vaart wanneer lichtdeeltjes erop botsen. Die technologie hebben we op aarde ook, maar staat hier nog in de kinderschoenen. Het kan dus best dat een buitenaardse beschaving, die meer tijd heeft gehad om die technologie te ontwikkelen, ’Oumuamua heeft gemaakt.’
Dat is niet iets dat je snel uit de mond van een wetenschapper verwacht…
’Het is natuurlijk nog speculatie. Maar het zou goed kunnen kloppen. Sommige collega’s zeggen: o, maar voor elk van deze vreemde eigenschappen kunnen we wel een excuus vinden of een ingewikkelde verklaring. Mij doet dat denken aan de volgende analogie: stel dat je een mobiele telefoon meeneemt naar een holbewoner. Die zal denken dat de telefoon een soort gekke steen is. Net zo zijn wij vanuit het verleden gewend om te denken in termen van kometen, asteroïden – stenen uit de ruimte, dus. We zijn vooringenomen.
’Maar in de wetenschap moeten we juist naar het bewijs kijken, zonder vooroordelen. Het is daarom jammer dat we niet meer meetgegevens hebben. Gelukkig verwachten we dat de geplande opvolger van de telescoop die ’Oumuamua vond, daarin veel kan betekenen. Die moet over drie jaar operationeel zijn en kan meer interstellaire voorwerpen ontdekken.’
Moeten astronomen er bij alles rekening mee houden dat het gebouwd kan zijn door aliens?
‘Ja, zolang dat logisch is op basis van het bewijs. Wat mij betreft is het bestaan van buitenaardse beschavingen helemaal geen speculatie. Het is een logische extrapolatie, gebaseerd op twee feiten. Allereerst het feit dat wij bestaan. En ten tweede het feit dat in de Melkweg veel planeten zijn met condities die vergelijkbaar zijn met die op aarde. We denken dat ongeveer een kwart van de sterren een planeet heeft zoals de aarde, met de mogelijkheid van vloeibaar water. Dat zijn in totaal miljarden planeten. Als je dan steeds weer de dobbelsteen gooit, is de kans heel klein dat het maar één keer raak was, dat wij alleen zijn in de kosmos.’
Toch voelt praten over complete beschavingen van intelligente buitenaardse wezens wel heel speculatief.
’Het bestaan van buitenaards leven is een hypothese als alle andere. We moeten daarover oordelen op basis van meetgegevens en feiten. Dat zou mainstreamastronomie moeten zijn. Maar in ons vakgebied heerst een taboe op dit onderwerp. Het doet mensen denken aan sciencefiction, roept het beeld op van ufo’s. Dat zou niets moeten uitmaken.
’Het is ook een beetje scheef. In de snaartheorie (een wiskundig bolwerk dat natuurkundigen optuigden in de hoop alle natuurkunde in één enkele beschrijving te vangen, red.) heeft men het bijvoorbeeld over het bestaan van meer dimensies of zelfs parallelle werkelijkheden. Daar is werkelijk geen enkel bewijs voor en tóch is het mainstream geworden. Voor het bestaan van buitenaardse beschavingen is maar een kleine extrapolatie nodig. En daar mag je het in serieus gezelschap dan ineens niet over hebben. Dat is toch compleet belachelijk?
‘Ik denk dat we hier vooral te maken hebben met een sociologisch effect. Niet met iets dat gebaseerd is op feiten. Men heeft oogkleppen op.’
Eugenia Loli
Zien ze door die oogkleppen nog meer over het hoofd?
’Jaren terug schreef ik al vakartikelen over mogelijke aanwijzingen voor het bestaan van buitenaardse beschavingen – technologische handtekeningen waar we te weinig naar zoeken. Zo liet ik zien dat wanneer je een stad als Tokio verplaatst naar de rand van het zonnestelsel, je hem met ruimtetelescoop Hubble nog gewoon kunt zien.
‘Ik vroeg vervolgens aan een astronoom die veel objecten aan de rand van het zonnestelsel had ontdekt, of hij weleens had gekeken of die voorwerpen kunstmatig licht uitzenden. Hij zei: nee, waarom zou ik dat moeten doen? Het is toch duidelijk dat ze alleen zonlicht weerkaatsen? Zo vooringenomen zijn sommige astronomen dus in de praktijk.’$
Bent u niet bang voor reputatieschade doordat u zoveel praat over aliens?
‘Ik ben niet bang voor de publieke opinie. Als iets klopt, zullen mensen dat uiteindelijk inzien. Ik ben directeur van twee instituten en hoofd van de afdeling sterrenkunde. In mijn instituten heerst een gezonde, open en wetenschappelijke sfeer, waar mensen risico’s mogen nemen. Toen ik jonger was en minder baanzekerheid had, werkten dit soort ideeën me soms wel een beetje tegen. Dat probeer ik jonge onderzoekers te besparen.’
In de wetenschap moet je een hypothese ook kunnen weerleggen. Kunnen we bewijzen dat er géén buitenaardse beschavingen bestaan?
’Nee. Deze zoektocht gaat eeuwig door. Als je op zoek gaat naar signalen zijn er zó veel mogelijkheden. Zelfs als je alleen kijkt naar elektromagnetische straling, zoals radiosignalen of licht, dan kunnen die net als de zenders op je radio allerlei frequenties hebben. Ook zenden ze misschien maar kort uit, zodat je het net mist. Wil je daarvoor compenseren, dan moet je steeds op een andere manier zoeken. We kunnen dus nog wel even doorgaan, ook als het bewijs uitblijft.
’Belangrijk is wel dat je alles kunt blijven toetsen aan waarnemingen. Natuurkunde is een dialoog met de natuur, geen monoloog. Zoals bij ’Oumuamua: ik kan mijn vermoeden dat het een buitenaards apparaat is nog niet sluitend bewijzen, maar we weten hoe we aan meer meetgegevens moeten komen.’
Als we uiteindelijk intelligent buitenaards leven vinden… wat dan?
‘Dan hebben we de belangrijkste ontdekking uit de geschiedenis van de mensheid gedaan. Belangrijker dan de eerste mens die een rondje om de aarde vloog. Belangrijker dan de ontdekking van Amerika. Het zou ons ineens op een kosmisch podium plaatsen, laten zien dat we allemaal voor hetzelfde team spelen. Dat we onze verschillen zo snel mogelijk moeten overstijgen. Ik wil dat tijdens mijn leven graag nog meemaken.’
Nu we bijna vierduizend planeten hebben ontdekt, hebben we vooral geleerd dat we blij moeten zijn dat we niet op een planeet wonen waar het van opzij gesmolten glas regent. We maken een tour langs de meest extreme en bijzondere bestemmingen in de kosmos.
WETENSCHAPHet ontstaan van de maan blijft wetenschappers boeien. De meest gangbare theorie is dat de maan gevormd is uit puin van Theia, nadat dit speculatieve hemellichaam meer dan vier miljard jaar op de aarde was ingeslagen. Maar een onderzoeker van NASA trekt dat in twijfel. Hij vermoedt dat de maan ontstaan is uit materiaal van de aarde.
De wetenschapper, Kevin Righter van NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, baseert zich op experimentele proeven en analyses van stalen die de Apollomissies bijna 50 jaar geleden meebrachten naar onze planeet. Na de enorme clash zo’n 4,5 miljard jaar geleden tussen de toen nog jonge aarde met een hemellichaam ongeveer zo groot als Mars werd de maan gevormd. Maar niet uit materiaal van Theia, dat door de impact in een baan rond de aarde zou zijn geslingerd, wél uit materiaal van de aarde zelf.
De studie simuleerde het proces van de maanvorming met behulp van veertien vluchtige, metaalminnende elementen die gevonden werden in monsters van de Apollomissies. Uit de simulatie kwam een “sterke” correlatie naar voren tussen negen van de veertien gebruikte elementen van de aarde en die van een gesimuleerde maan gemaakt uit materiaal van de aarde. Hetzelfde gold niet voor een maan gemaakt uit het vermeende ruimtegesteente Theia, met de omvang van Mars ongeveer.
Er is nog aanvullend onderzoek nodig om de hypothese van Righter te bevestigen, maar zijn studie vult alvast enkele gaten die er al sinds de jaren 70 in de wetenschappelijke data hierover zijn.
Antarctica is a place with so much ice and snow that they seem to go on forever. Animals, such as seals and penguins, have adapted to the freezing cold temperatures. However, millions of years ago, it wasn’t the blistering cold and icy continent that it’s known for today. Around 250 million years ago, Antarctica was full of forests and rivers with various species wildlife living there, including reptiles. As a matter of fact, the temperature on the continent hardly ever dipped below the freezing mark.
In addition to the nice weather and vast wildlife that thrived on the continent millions of years ago, a new species has been discovered that once lived there. Researchers uncovered the fossil of an iguana-sized reptile that was an early relative of the Antarctic dinosaurs. During a 2010-2011 expedition, the incomplete skeleton was taken from Graphite Peak in the Transantarctic Mountains. The fossil contained parts of its skull, backbone, and limbs.
The small creature was said to have been a carnivore that ate bugs, amphibians, and other early mammal relatives. It has been named Antarctanax shackletoni which translates to “Antarctic king” (for Antarctanax) and in honor of the Antarctic explorer named Ernest Shackleton (for shackletoni).
Dr. Brandon Peecook, who is the lead author of a study on the discovery as well as a paleontologist at Field Museum, said, “Antarctanax shackletoni was an archosaur, an early relative of crocodiles and dinosaurs.” He went on to say, “On its own, it just looks a little like a lizard, but evolutionarily, it’s one of the first members of that big group. It tells us how dinosaurs and their closest relatives evolved and spread.”
Approximately two million years prior to the Antarctanax shackletoni roaming Antarctica, the Earth suffered a huge mass extinction which killed off 90% of all animals on the planet. After the mass extinction, archosaurs (which included dinosaurs) experienced a lot of growth around the planet. Dr. Peecook explained, “Before the mass extinction, archosaurs were only found around the equator, but after it, they were everywhere.” This would indicate that Antarctica was an area where evolution and diversity happened quite fast following the end-Permian mass extinction.
While the exploration of the continent of Antarctica is still in its early stages, it’s very possible that more new and unique creatures will be discovered from millions of years ago. In relation to the process involved with exploring the continent, Dr. Peecook explained, “Antarctica is one of those places on Earth, like the bottom of the sea, where we’re still in the very early stages of exploration. Antarctanax is our little part of discovering the history of Antarctica.”
Iran is disappearing underground: While Tehran is sinking, giant sinkholes swallow parts of western Iran
Iran is disappearing underground: While Tehran is sinking, giant sinkholes swallow parts of western Iran
Tehran is sinking… And now gigantic holes as deep as 60 meters (197 feet) are appearing in western Iran. And that’s not because of missiles or meteors… No, no! They are the result of excessive water pumping.
A few weeks ago, new satellite measurements showed that Tehran was sinking about 10 inches (25 centimeters) per year.
Giant holes form in Iran due to excessive water pumping.
Pic via Youtube video
These gigantic holes in Iran were not caused by missiles or meteors.
Pic via Youtube video
A side effect of such impressive subsidence is the sudden appearance of giant cracks and sinkholes in some areas that may end up with some parts of Iran completely disappearing from world maps.
Pill-Shaped UFO Seen Pulsating In The Skies Above NC
Pill-Shaped UFO Seen Pulsating In The Skies Above NC
A UFO appearing in the sky just outside Greensboro, North Carolina was captured on video, which was also posted on social media. Moments after it made available online, the UFO sighting video has sparked an ongoing debate with many claiming to have seen the same random flashing object.
The 5-minute video, which was posted on Saturday, shows a pill-shaped object soaring through the sky and making a series of flashes.
The video, which is magnified and slowed down, has been viewed thousands of times and several YouTube channels devoted to UFOs and unsolved mysterious picked it up.
It is credited to YouTube username SpaceBret, also known as Bret Jones, who reveals in the video that the strange object was spotted on January 25 while he was trying to record birds outside Greensboro on video.
He claims that he noticed a mysterious flashing light in the sky close to an airplane. The UFO was moving slowly across the sky, slightly slower than the planes flying around, according to uploader Jones, who did not think he captured it at all.
He decided later to magnify and slow down the footage by 900 percent, which appears to reveal a glinting pill shaped object producing flashes from its two ends.
When Bret saw it, it just blew him away because it wasn’t what he expected at all. And until now, he does not have an idea of what it is.
One person has suggested that it is a Mylar balloon with string or WiFi extender antenna balloon because, at one point in the video, it looks like the UFO has a tether.
However, Jones does not agree with the suggestion as it cannot explain the flashing and vanishing. He also believes that the tether might be some kind of fuel ejected from the object.
Several people claim to have seen the same UFO. Julia Hejnar posted on YouTube that she saw the same object in Winston Salem in the late afternoon of the 25th. She said that the object also blinked out.
Another viewer SkyHound said that he had seen the flash at night for the past year now. He explained that he clearly knows the difference between helicopter, planes, meteorites, iridium flares, satellites, etc. but this is different. He added that the object appears to flash extremely bright with no pattern and it even occasionally fades out into a dull red light.
A UFO was spotted flying over Conyers, Georgia last week. Square in shape and black in color the mysterious object appeared to be the size of a 727. Is this proof that aliens are observing us?
A UFO was reported to the Mutual UFO Network a.k.a. MUFON on Jan. 30. It was seen flying over Conyers, Georgia which is a suburb of Atlanta. Footage of the object was captured on a cell phone.
Watching this unknown aircraft is eerie. From the eyewitness account, the UFO was the size of a 727. Plus, it looks like nothing that is currently flying around in our skies.
At first, if you slow the video down, you might think that it is a plane pulling a banner. Football fans know that the Super Bowl is being held in the state so that wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility.
However, that illusion is quickly stripped away. According to UFO Sightings Daily, this Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) isn’t alone. Another silvery object can be seen hovering above the black square. Which makes you wonder if it is an escort of some kind.
Before we jump to any conclusions, I must point out that Dobbins Air Reserve Base is in the vicinity and so is Lockheed. It has been rumored that Dobbins is a test site for “plasma and anti-gravity aircraft along with experimental vehicles and weapons.” However, it is also in the middle of a city on the outskirts of Atlanta.
If you are dealing with propulsion systems of that nature would you really be putting them on display? Or if you were doing test runs perhaps you want the general public to think that UFOs are in the vicinity so that can be a ruse for what is really going on.
Either way, both of those theories seem unlikely. Take a look at the video and see what you think the strange craft could be.
Oddly enough, there have been other sightings of this very specifically shaped craft in the U.S. Maybe this one will have to go into the file for the unexplained.
Left to right: Leah Tether, Laura Chuhan Campbell, Michael Richardson, and Benjamin Pohl with the books in Bristol Central Library’s Rare Books Room. The team of experts investigating further if the pieces hold any secret about the legends of Arthur, Merlin, and the Holy Grail.
If you’ve seen any of the many movies about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, you probably think you know the basics of the story … until you see another one. Throw in Monty Python and the whole legend and/or possible true account starts to get blurry. While the battles and loves of the Arthurian mortals are somewhat believable, the tales of the magician/wizard Merlin stretch the credibility of the stories. Now, some newly discovered manuscript pages dating back to the 13th century add a little more detail to the wizard who all future movie wizards are based on.
“These fragments of the Story of Merlin are a wonderfully exciting find, which may have implications for the study not just of this text but also of other related and later texts that have shaped our modern understanding of the Arthurian legend.”
"How Arthur by the means of Merlin got Excalibur, his sword of the Lady of the Lake", illustration for Le Morte Darthur.
Dr. Leah Tether is the President of the International Arthurian Society (British Branch) in the Bristol University Department of English and a leading scholar in the field, which explains why she was the person Michael Richardson, a colleague from the university’s Special Collections Library, called when he found seven odd parchment fragments among the pages of the works of the French scholar and reformer Jean Gerson which were printed in Strasbourg, France between 1494 and 1502. According to the Bristol University press release, Richardson recognized the name “Merlin” on the fragments and took them immediately to Tether.
The Gerson books, while published in the late 15th century, were not bound until the 16th century when they somehow were transferred from Strasbourg to Bristol. It’s believed the older pages were considered to be waste paper and were being reused as “pastedowns” – the sheets stuck to the inside of the covers used to connect the pages to the binding. That could explain why the pages are in fragments and an eighth is missing.
Tether recognized the pages as belonging to a 13th century Old French sequence of texts known as the Vulgate Cycle or Lancelot-Grail Cycle. The seven pages or leaves are continuous and come from a section of the Estoire de Merlin narrative known as the ‘Suite Vulgate de Merlin’ (Vulgate Continuation of Merlin). They recount the narrative of the Battle of Trèbes in which Merlin gives a speech to motivate the knights and then leads them into battle using a special sword belonging to Sir Kay (Cai), a superhuman knight whose sword radiated heat from his hands (or breathed fire) and whose inflicted wounds would not heal. They defeat the forces of King Claudas and then stay in the kingdom of Benoic where Merlin interprets dreams and falls in love briefly with a woman named Viviane before rejoining Arthur.
The fragments add some meaty details to this tale and some differ from previously discovered accounts. A number of names of the battle leaders have been changed and the wounds King Claudas suffered are different. Otherwise, it’s similar enough that Tether recognizes it as an important early account of the part Merlin played in the Arthurian legend.
“There are many more differences, too, but because of the damage to the fragments, it will take time to decipher their contents properly, perhaps even requiring the use of infra-red technology. We are all very excited to discover more about the fragments and what new information they might hold.”
During the 12th century, Arthur's character began to be marginalized by the accretion of "Arthurian" side-stories such as that of Tristan and Iseult, by John William Waterhouse.
What more will they find? The truth about whether Merlin really was a cambion – the child of a human mother and an incubus father? Was he really killed by the Lady of the Lake? The location of the Holy Grail? Details on the Knights who say “Ni!”? The real story of the Rabbit of Caerbannog?
Why did Merlin break up with Viviane … or did she dump him for a younger wizard?
Metamaterials, in this context defined as pieces of UFOs, debris, implants or other exotic items have been a huge topic since they were referenced in the New York Times pieceon December 16th, 2017 and long before that, as well. A lot of work has been done behind the scenes regarding these materials. Data and information will be coming to light viaTo the Stars Academy’s ADAM Research Projectand most likely other groups. Some of the work has been described in Dr. Diana Walsh Pasulka’s amazing book, “American Cosmic: UFOs Religion, Technology.” I can’t say for sure, but I have a hunch that behind the scenes, conclusions have been made about how these authentic Metamaterials were constructed in zero or microgravity and most likely not manufactured on Earth.
Mr. George Knapp has been reporting on this for years. As a primer, here is one of his heavy hitting reports on the subject.
Tom Delonge brought up the Metamaterials during his interview with Joe Rogan in 2017:
Delonge: “…looking at debris that they probably still have in a warehouse, going ‘we have no f*****g clue how to make this or back engineer this stuff.’ I mean, there’s a piece of metal, from a crash that I’ve seen, and I’ve seen the science on it, and it’s so… it’s atomically aligned and it’s layered in like eighty layers within just a few microns of purities of metal that aren’t even in our solar system and they think it needs to be made in an area where there’s no gravity. So, number one, it has to be made in space. Number two, even if we were to create a machine that can potentially do some of this stuff, 3D printing layers of different metals of obscene purities, it would cost hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. We don’t even have that.”
Rogan: “What did they think? That it was made without gravity?”
Delonge: “Because I think it’s the atomic structure. So what happens is when you radiate it with Terahertz, it loses mass, something weird. It resonates some kind of harmonic, and then it gets lighter and if you hit it with enough terahertz it’ll float. So we’re going to be showing people this stuff. We’re going to be bringing out the hardware, some of the hardware. We’re going to be bringing out implants. We’re going to be bring out videos. We’re going to bringing out some other stuff.”
Rogan: “So you are going to be showing people this actual piece of metal that was constructed in a zero gravity environment in space and if you hit it with enough energy it becomes weightless?”
Delonge: “I wouldn’t say weightless, I don’t know if we can make enough energy to do that, but yes, that is our plan, and show the experiment.”
Since Tom’s interview, not only was the New York Times article published, AATIP revealed, and military videos released, backing up some of his claims, but the ADAM Research Project was launched:
“James and Tyler believed they had evidence, not just faith, to support their belief in the extraterrestrial source of the artifacts and the authenticity of the crash site. Prior to this trip, Tyler had given James an analysis of some of the parts. James knew what he was looking at, and, according to him, if this analysis actually corresponded to the makeup of the artifacts, then they were one of two things: they were something that someone paid millions, if not billions, of dollars to fabricate or “something” made them somewhere other than on Earth with technologies we did not understand.”
“So let me give you an example of, how this stuff helps people who are chasing these really difficult problems. I’m choosing one here: metamaterials for aerospace use. I’d love to talk about really fancy materials, but they’re classified. However, there’s a lot of materials that have been picked up or provided even in the public domain. I’m going to give an example because it shows exactly what the structure is for how to deal with this. This is an open source sample. It was sent anonymously to talk show host Art Bell. The fellow claimed to be in the military. He said that this sample was picked up in a crash retrieval, and so he sent it by email. So what does that mean? Chain of custody non-existent. Provenance questionable. Could be a hoax. Could be some slag off of some foundry floor or whatever. However, it was an unusual sample, so we decided to take a look at it.
It was a multilayered bismuth and magnesium sample. Bismuth layers less than a human hair. Magnesium samples about ten-times the size of a human hair. Supposedly picked up in the crash retrieval of an Advanced Aerospace Vehicle. It looks like it’s been in a crash. The white lines are the bismuth; the darker areas are the magnesium separations. So the question was what about this material, so naturally we looked in all the national labs, we talked to metallurgists, we combed the entire structure of published papers. Nowhere could we find any evidence that anybody ever made one of these.
Secondly, some attempts were made to try to reproduce this material, but they couldn’t get the bismuth and magnesium layers to bond.
Thirdly, when we talked to people in the materials field who should know, they said we don’t know why anybody would want to make anything like this. It’s not obvious that it has any function.
Well, years later, decades later actually, finally our own science moves along. We move into an area called metamaterials, and it turns out exactly this combination of materials at exactly those dimensions turn out to be an excellent microscopic waveguide for very high frequency electromagnetic radiation terahertz frequencies. So, the wavelength is 60 microns, which is a pretty small size. But it turns out because of the metamaterial aspect of this material, those bismuth layers that act as waveguides can be one twentieth the size of the wavelength, and usually when you make a waveguide it’s gotta be about the size of the wavelength. So, in fact this turned out to be a material that would propagate sub-wavelength waveguide effects. Why somebody wants to do that we still don’t know the answer to that.
But anyway, it’s amazing we’ve gone through this and this is the kind of structure we go through a lot. You get a material sample with unusual characteristics to be evaluated, the method of manufacture is difficult to assess or reproduce, the purpose of the function is not readily apparent – as with our sample here, and then as our own technical knowledge moves forward we finally see a possible purpose or function comes to light. That sequence is repeated over and over in this particular area.”
Frank Statler: “Can you give us a little background on the nature of the recovered materials mentioned in the New York Times story?”
Dr. Garry Nolan: These are not your grandma’s alloys. If these materials truly exist– they are going to be found to be metamaterials. Though I call them metamaterials– it’s really for lack of a better term. They are probably even more engineered and subtle than that. The science of metamaterials is only a few decades old, but there is a whole ecosystem of new journals growing up around their unexpected and wondrous properties. One way to think about metamaterials is that is, basically, quantum engineering—working with “normal” matter in a way that takes advantage of properties we don’t fully appreciate yet. We draw the physical universe with only 80 elements. I would guess—just hypothesis– that “they” (an advanced civilization) that we might infer can accomplish some of the feats observed by the pilots understand the subtleties of isotopes and design with all 253 stable isotopes. The metamaterials “they” could design would be more subtle and likely encompass a greater understanding of reality and physics than we know now.
Remember, isotopes of a given element have the same electronic configuration, so they form covalent bonds similar to their sister isotopes (though with subtle differences in bond strengths). However, their nuclei have different spins for instance with, at times, unpaired neutrons. The various nuclear configurations gives rise to multiple fascinating opportunities in designing metamaterials. Want to know what your children should be studying in school? Physics, metallurgy, and advanced composite materials.
People interested in understanding the reality of what’s going on with these metamaterials (so-called alloys) need to understand this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotope . There are 253 isotopes that do not undergo radioactive decay in any reasonable time frame. This page has a table of nuclides where the grey boxes denote the 253 stable isotopes. Some elements, such as aluminum, have only 1 stable isotope. Titanium and nickel each have 5 stable isotopes. Tin (Sn) has eight! There are natural ratios of these isotopes that are largely governed by stellar decay processes, centrifugal forces (solar and other) during planetary formation, and proximity to gamma and other radiation sources. The ratios vary only slightly (maximum a couple percent) across a solar system. Significant variations in isotope ratios imply either engineering of the ratios for a purpose, or that the materials came from somewhere that does not “play by our rules”.
My suspicion is that a foundational difference is the nuclear spin of these isotopes (and other quantum features associated with different arrangements of the nuclear shells in the different isotopes) that affects how they behave/contribute in these composites or metamaterial structures.
The Times claimed that Bigelow Aerospace, under the contract of AAWSAP housed Metamaterials in their Las Vegas facility. We later found out that might not be the case, or the whole picture, but it’s my opinion that NIDS, BAASS and/or Bigelow Aerospace did in fact possess these samples.
Here is a statement from Robert Bigelow himself, almost exactly nineteen years ago to the date:
Non-Terrestrial Permutations and Impacts as Related to Access and Use of Terrestrial Resources
Robert Bigelow
January, 2000
In a round about way, I recently experienced a personal revelation. For the last several months I have been thinking of ways to enhance various business plans related to commercialization of space. These involve transportation systems and economically justifiable destinations.
Naturally, what you can do or produce on an orbiting system that creates special or unique value becomes very, very important for the business case. While reading and talking on this subject, I reinforced what I previously knew a little but not nearly enough; and, that was that many unique and often profoundly special reactions occur upon organic and non-organic substances in a microgravity environment that happen nowhere else. We all know of the usual cast of characters but, I’m talking about ones you normally don’t read about.
As it turns out in processes affecting non-organic substances for example, it is possible to create materials, components and products that are totally in a class by themselves. Nowhere, terrestrially, can any of these items with their unique performance capabilities be made. I’m getting closer to my revelation. What is the implication here? Well, I believe that components for advanced spacecraft can be manufactured in a microgravity environment that cannot be duplicated on the surface of a planet.
And now here is my theory. I strongly believe that at least some UFOs owe their beginnings to being manufactured whole or in substantial part from materials made in a microgravity environment. Competitively, we might well be working with a periodic table containing much fewer elements compared to a species that has access to those same elements but has fully achieved manufacturing and experimentation in space on a significant scale.
I believe, so long as a species remains planet-bound in their manufacturing processes, they will not avail themselves of the resource necessary to make interstellar craft. They will only develop what terrestrial processes allow.
As for our UFO friends, we will not begin to match their early craft until we also begin to exploit space for manufacturing purposes.
Thank you.
Robert T. Bigelow
Mr. George Knapp gave an update on Robert Bigelow’s progress during an interview with Phenomenon Radio in 2018. I would recommend listening to the entire interview, it is a blockbuster.
Linda Moulton Howe: “George do you think that Robert Bigelow’s blow-up units going to Mars, going to the moon, out to the lagrange points… that he, Robert Bigelow, through what he is manufacturing to be placed in these exoplanetary systems, that he will finally start? Have you ever talked with him about his learning more from deeper inside, the… we’ll call it the deep state, that is now bandied about so much?”
George Knapp: “Well, I most certainly have talked to him, at length, over many years about exactly that. I think that, I’d have to say that those conversations for now are private and when…I’ve tried to get the the okay to go forward on some of that, but our agreement was it would remain private. I think he has been… his understanding of it has greatly expanded in the last several years. His total focus now is on his space program, but I think that you’re on the right track there and asking whether the expandable habitats could be part of the mystery, part of getting to the bottom of it. And I’ll tell you how. It’s the Metamaterials that we have discussed. You know Hal Puthoff and Eric Davis and others are trying to figure out what those things are and how they work and why they would be so important to the kind of magical propulsion systems that we’ve seen on the videos that have come out of the Pentagon. I think one conclusion that has been reached is that these things were made somewhere else. That we can’t manufacture these things on earth, not using our current technology. The possibility is, and even maybe the likelihood is, they were created in in zero gravity. You need zero gravity to make them. Well, we don’t have any manufacturing facilities in space, so whoever made them, it’s not us. So maybe if we do have habitats, and a permanent presence in space, and larger and larger space stations, that eventually we’ll be able to make this kind of stuff ourselves in zero gravity. We can’t do it now, but Bob Bigelow, the central focus of his life is creating platforms where we might be able to do it someday.”
I spoke to one of the elite researchers in the field, Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell, about the Metamaterials. He was gracious enough to submit these exclusive comments that sum up the article eloquently. To follow Jeremy’s groundbreaking work visit ExtraordinaryBeliefs.com. I can’t thank him enough.
“On my journey as a filmmaker to grasp the UFO problem from a technological point of view, it’s my understanding that the current state of material science is the nagging barrier to our development.
The Earthy replication of exotic and seemingly “non-terrestrial” technologies – observed by military and civilians alike – is hindered by the physical materials we are capable of fabricating or procuring.
Metamaterials certainly represent fabricated technologies that provide new opportunities, unseen by humanity before. A simple example would be the super-superconductivity and strength of Graphene. A not-so-simple example might be on the horizon.
The concept of a micro-gravity production environment – as championed by Robert Bigelow and reported on by George Knapp – is one single aspect of a much larger push to unravel the physical blockades preventing us from utilizing an exotic physics that we are just starting to understand.
I suspect that with each leap in the development of our material science, we will discover new ways of accessing the fundamental nature of the physical universe. And that with each discovery will be a new vista – a plateau to view our past ignorance from. What today seems like magic, will seem commonplace tomorrow. We will quickly take for granted the discoveries of our ancestors with an irreverence – and with a hunger for the future.
Ultimately there might be a singular breakthrough-technology that forever launches us from the shores of the past. However, it might not be quite that dramatic.
As long as we continue to explore the physical mystery of the UFO and the Un-Funded Opportunities (as Ben Rich would say)… I imagine we will get there – in time.
And we are indeed exploring UFOs – currently – in every branch of the United States military and intelligence networks. We have seasoned programs attempting to tackle every aspect of the problem.
Maybe physical materials is the next to be revealed. And maybe it will be the Pandora’s Box that some are hoping for.
With curiosity comes discovery; and with discovery comes greater curiosity.
A mysterious "empty trash bag" object has been spotted floating above Earth.
The satellite is thought to be several metres across but is extremely lightweight, the astronomers who spotted it say.
The object is probably a piece of light material, such as metallic foil, that has been left over from a rocket launch. But it is not clear what rocket launch the object known as A10bMLz could have been launched from.
At the moment, the object is on a strange, highly elliptical orbit. Sometimes it comes as close as 600 kilometres from the Earth – but it swings around to be 1.4 times as far out as the Moon.
Because of its small mass, A10bMLz is very susceptible to radiation pressure from the Sun. That means its orbit changes "chaotically" on a scale of days to weeks, according to the London-based Northolt Branch Observatories (NBO) that analysed it.
It means that it is impossible to fully predict where it might be flying. It is being buffeted around in space like a plastic bag might be in the wind.
The object could re-enter Earth's atmosphere within a few motnhs, for instance, or might continue to fly around the Earth.
Such "empty trash bag" objects have been spotted before. But this is the first one that has ever been seen drifting at such a distant orbit.
The object was first seen by Hawaii's Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope. Further analysis by the NBO confirmed that the object was very light but relatively wide, as well as its strange orbit.
WHAT IS AN 'EMPTY TRASH BAG OBJECT'?
Empty trash bag objects, or ETBOs, tend to have unpredictable orbit patterns.
The objects are often very light-weight, with a mass of less than one kilogram, but stretch several meters across.
In the case of A10bMLz, it's likely a piece of metallic foil gone astray.
Astronomers have said it can be difficult to judge where ETBOs will drift next because, like a plastic bag, they have trajectories that 'zig and zag in unpredictable ways.'
Empty trash bag objects have been spotted many times by astronomers.
The Earth satellite, referred to as 'A10bMLz,' was first spotted by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope in Hawaii, on Friday. Northolt Observatories found that the object (pictured) is 'extremely light-weight' but several meters across
A10bMLz was moving in an unusual retrograde orbit, instead of prograde orbit. It's orbiting 600 km above the Earth's surface but drifted as far as 1.4 times out from the moon
Empty trash bag objects have been spotted by astronomers many times before, but A10bMLz surprised Northolt Branch Observatories due to its very distant and unpredictable orbit
WHAT IS SPACE JUNK?
There are an estimated 170 million pieces of so-called 'space junk' - left behind after missions that can be as big as spent rocket stages or as small as paint flakes - in orbit alongside some US$700 billion of space infrastructure.
But only 22,000 are tracked, and with the fragments able to travel at speeds above 27,000kmh (16,777 mph), even tiny pieces could seriously damage or destroy satellites.
However, traditional gripping methods don't work in space, as suction cups do not function in a vacuum and temperatures are too cold for substances like tape and glue.
Grippers based around magnets are useless because most of the debris in orbit around Earth is not magnetic.
Around 500,000 pieces of human-made debris (artist's impression) currently orbit our planet, made up of disused satellites, bits of spacecraft and spent rockets
Most proposed solutions, including debris harpoons, either require or cause forceful interaction with the debris, which could push those objects in unintended, unpredictable directions.
Scientists point to two events that have badly worsened the problem of space junk.
The first was in February 2009, when an Iridium telecoms satellite and Kosmos-2251, a Russian military satellite, accidentally collided.
The second was in January 2007, when China tested an anti-satellite weapon on an old Fengyun weather satellite.
Experts also pointed to two sites that have become worryingly cluttered.
One is low Earth orbit which is used by satnav satellites, the ISS, China's manned missions and the Hubble telescope, among others.
The other is in geostationary orbit, and is used by communications, weather and surveillance satellites that must maintain a fixed position relative to Earth.
Empty trash bag objects have been spotted by astronomers many times before, but A10bMLz surprised them due to its very distant orbit, Northolt Branch Observatories said.
Predicting the artificial satellite's trajectory is currently impossible. Astronomers believe the object may burn up upon reentry into the Earth's atmosphere within a few month
Remember the Malaysian Airlines plane MH370 which disappeared but left behind a mystery that has still not been solved? In a 2014 poll on the MH370 disappearance, five per cent of American respondents said they believed it had been affected by “alien activities”’. For many people, MH370’s inexplicable disappearance brought to mind one of the most famous and perhaps saddest mystery cases which grabbed worldwide media attention—that of Frederick Valentich, a young Australian pilot. Significantly, it was this case in particular which is credited with starting off a whole series of visual, radar, and filmed recordings of unidentified, unexplained flying objects or UFOs.
Fifty minutes after he had taken off on a solo flight across Bass Strait to King Island in a Cessna 182 aircraft, Frederick Valentich radioed, “It’s approaching from due east of me… It seems to be playing some sort of game. Flying at speed I cannot estimate…It is flying past. It has a long shape… coming for me right now… It has a green light and sort of metallic light on the outside…” Frederick was reporting to the Melbourne air flight service controller after he radioed a request for confirmation of a large craft with “four bright lights” and was informed that there were no reported aircraft in the area. “…. The thing is orbiting on top of me… Proceeding King Island…Unknown aircraft now hovering on top of me…” and Frederick signed off. A loud metallic sound was heard at ground reception for 17 seconds and then communications went dead. No sign of either Frederick Valentich or his plane was ever found, and the mystery, like that of MH370, remains unsolved to this day.
More recently, just a few weeks ago, the International Business Times carried a report with an intriguing headline: “Mountain collapses in Russia: Conspiracy theorists put forward UFO crash possibilities”. Russian president Vladimir Putin, said the report, has apparently asked soldiers to investigate a creepy incident where a mountain in Siberia collapsed completely due to unknown reasons… popular conspiracy theory YouTube channel ‘Secureteam10’ run by UFO researcher Tyler Glockner has suggested that the unexpected collapse of the mountain might be due to a UFO crash.
The video uploaded by Secureteam10 soon went viral, and quickly racked up more than 4,00,000 views, according to the IBT report. After watching the videos, most of the people claimed that the mountain collapse could be the result of an alien space ship crash. Some other people claimed that these events could be the aftermath of earth’s magnetic pole shift. However, Express.co.uk reported that Alexey Maslov, head of Verkhnebureinsky district where the incident happened said: “We are trying to find the explanation for this incident. I insist that it was a meteorite.” This incident stirred yet again the age old, undying debate between known, explainable physical phenomena and the phenomena of unexplained strange happenings. Such extraordinary occurrences often tend to fall between the supernatural and extraterrestrial theories as a possible key to the mystery.
The extraterrestrial “explanation” category is exceptionally fascinating. While the earliest “strange” sightings, believed to be more than 47,000 years old, seem to be carved on a granite mountain and rocks on an island in Hunan Province in China, one of the first written accounts of a strange sighting in the sky is part of an Egyptian papyrus—more than 3,400 years old—belonging to the period of Pharaoh Thutmose III, who ruled around 1504 to 1450 B.C.! Just like the references in the Mahabharata, excerpts from the ancient Egyptian account are worth reading. As I’ve written earlier, such sightings “with no single rational explanation” and often made by people of unimpeachable integrity in different parts of the world—Nicholas Roerich, the famous Russian painter with such close connections with India, Sir Francis Chichester, the well known flier, sailor and navigator, Jimmy Carter, former President of the USA—to name a few personalities of recent times—have continued down the centuries, right up to our present times.
Significantly, the majority of sightings has not come from illiterate, gullible people or people of unsound mind or prone to hallucinations. Experienced Air Force and private airline pilots, air traffic controllers, Captains of ships on the sea, professors, policemen, and other highly qualified, highly respected personages are amongst the witnesses. There have been single sightings but more of sightings by several people at the same time and sometimes even hundreds or thousands of people watched.
UFOs have been photographed quite extensively and the photographs subjected to thorough scrutiny for “fraud” but were almost always found to be genuine. Jimmy Carter, the former U.S. President sighted a UFO on January 6, 1969, when he was Governor of Georgia. The former President was quoted by the “National Enquirer” as saying, “I am convinced that UFOs exist because I’ve seen one…It was a very peculiar aberration but about 20 people saw it… It was big; it was very bright; it changed colours; and it was about the size of the moon. We watched it for 10 minutes, but none of us could figure out what it was…”
Some UFO witnesses have described personal contact with ‘occupants’ of strange crafts and even reported being detained. The book Real Aliens, Space Beings, and Creatures from Other Worlds by Brad and Sherry Steiger provides very informative reading. But as author and paranormal researcher Stephen Wagner rightly questions, “To account for the sheer number and variety of aliens and craft reported over the decades, the Earth would have to be visited by dozens of races from dozens of planets outside our solar system. Is this likely? What are these creatures and where do they really come from? Other dimensions? Our own imaginations and subconscious?…science has so far brought us knowledge of only the thinnest surface of our true reality. I suspect that the answers and explanations are, for the present, beyond our understanding…”
And whether they are physical, psychological, interdimensional, or something else in nature, emphasises Wagner, they cannot and should not be ignored… they should be reported, explored, and examined—objectively—to the fullest extent possible. How else, he asks, are we going to get to the bottom of it all? And that should include the numerous documented but not often reported UFO sightings in India as well.
The latest episode of History’s Project Blue Book takes the furthest deviation yet from the facts of the real Project Blue Book program. However, it is very entertaining and it mixes in real conspiracy theories expertly in a manner that is intelligent and makes the viewers think.
I have been reviewing the show for Den of Geek, and my review of the latest episode can be found here:
Project Blue Bookepisode 4 takes a nosedive into the rabbit hole, but the wild storylines follow real conspiracy and UFO mythologies that are popular on the web. It also presents an intriguing alternate theory to the idea that UFOs have anything to do with aliens at all.
Take an odd part of history, add a bit of conspiracy mythology, then sprinkle with magic Hollywood dust and up sprouts a huge, beautiful tree of fantasy. That would sum up my feelings on “Operation Paperclip.” I am a student of history, so I relish in historical accuracy. However, I am also a sci-fi buff, and this latest episode frustrated the history buff in me while exciting my sci-fi side.
Let’s get into it. The show begins with Hynek on an airplane. The first mystery presented was that the passenger cabin of the aircraft looked more like a train with curtains over the windows and seats that faced one another. However, in a tweet, show creator and writer David O’Leary wrote: “Yes, these old 1950s planes really did have train-like booths that faced each other. And lots more leg room!” Score one for historical accuracy! Granted, it’s one of the few points that I will award in this category for this particular episode.
Hynek then sees a UFO flying around the airplane. We are lead to believe Hynek is experiencing this sighting, but then he wakes from a dream. He was dreaming about his most recent UFO case - a sighting by the passengers and crew of a commercial aircraft near Huntsville, Alabama.
Quinn feels certain he knows who is responsible for this UFO incident and he is not very happy about it. Quinn explains that after World War II, German scientists were snatched up by the U.S. as part of Operation Paperclip. He says Huntsville was set up to house German scientists working on rocket technology, led by Werner von Braun. Having fought in World War II, Quinn is with the situation.
Hynek and Quinn travel to Huntsville to find out what the Germans are up to. Quinn is convinced that the UFO that buzzed the airplane was a rocket built by the former German scientists, who he believes were not concerned with endangering the lives of the passengers.
Security denies Hynek and Quinn access to the base, but Quinn crashes through the barricades anyway. This does allow them an audience with Von Braun but also lands Quinn a suspension. Von Braun says he is familiar with Hynek’s work, shows them a secret rocket launch and offers Hynek a job. He admits it was one of his rockets that buzzed the airplane, but Hynek doesn’t believe him.
To make a long story short, after leaving, Hyenk and Quinn break into the base again. This time they sneak around and find a body floating in a suspended animation container. It looks like an alien. The base alarms sound, so the two race off, only to be caught. Von Braun tells them what they saw was a monkey that had been sent into space and was undergoing testing as to the effects of space on its body. Hynek tells him he is suspicious of their project because the rocket explanation for the UFO sighting did not fit the witness testimony. There is something von Braun is hiding.
At the end of the show, we see what that is. After Quinn and Hynek have left, General Harding, Quin’s boss, shows up to join von Braun on a tarmac. A large saucer-shaped object is then wheeled out of a hangar, and a pilot in a flight suit is put into the craft. This pilot is complaining he doesn’t want to do this, but he seems drugged and unable to struggle. The craft looks like human technology, but when it is started up, a weird field surrounds it, then it disappears. The show is mostly full on science fiction with modern UFO and conspiracy mythologies expertly weaved into the story. The visuals are also stunning. It all makes for a fun and exciting show.
Project Blue Book, the TV show, is getting more exciting, and maybe that is due to its divergence from reality. Many feel the show does not need to move away from the real Project Blue Book investigations to be exciting, and that may be the case. I know first hand proving that to a producer is near impossible. However, I find this particular journey into conspiratorial sci-fi is intelligent in that it is expertly incorporating the UFO and conspiracy mythologies while making the viewers think about alternate explanations to the UFO mystery.
The Project Blue Book Files
Huntsville is a city built by rockets. It is the home of NASA’s Marshall Space Center, but before NASA was created, the military had been testing missiles in the area since World War II. After the war ended, rocket testing continued. Operation Paperclip was real, and Werner von Braun was a real rocket scientist brought to the U.S. The U.S. first brought the German rocket scientists to Fort Bliss, Texas, but in the ‘50s, von Braun and his team were moved to Huntsville.
Von Braun’s popularity was primarily due to his involvement in the development of the V-2 rocket. This rocket terrified the allies during the war because it was the first ballistic missile. While the space program was a real thing, the real importance to the military was the development of bigger and better rockets. Especially with the prospect that a ballistic missile would be the ideal delivery system for the newly developed atom bomb.
In UFO circles, there have been many rumors about von Braun. From the belief that he had to be in the know regarding alleged crashes of alien spacecraft such as Roswell, to a rumor that he knew the government was faking emergencies to distract the public and that one day a UFO scare would be used for that purpose.
The Nazi’s also have a UFO history according to many conspiracy theories. It is believed they communicated with aliens and were able to develop technologies based off of alien technology. You can even find pictures online of saucer-shaped craft with Nazi symbols and guns mounted on them. It is rumored that the Nazi’s tried to mount weapons on alien spacecraft and it disrupted the propulsion systems and would not work. There are also rumors that the Germans were developing anti-gravity. In particular, a bell-shaped craft creatively named The Bell. The propulsion system consisted of two cylinders filled with a mercury-like substance that spun in opposite directions.
The way the craft disappeared at the end of Project Blue Bookis reminiscent of another conspiracy theory, one known as the Philadelphia Experiment. This mythology was first brought forth in a UFO book, although the author did not find the story credible. Despite the author’s opinion, this theory has a wide following. The story was that the U.S. developed technology that could render a ship invisible. Allegedly in 1943, the USS Eldridge, a 300 ft long Navy destroyer, was used to experiment with the technology. When the invisibility machine was enabled, the ship disappeared. When it reappeared crewmen reported feeling sick, and some were killed by somehow being embedded into the steal of the vessel.
In reality, the Germans were undoubtedly ahead of their time. At the time, technology such as jet propulsion and rockets were very advanced, and the Germans were way ahead of the U.S. in these areas. They even had a jet shaped like a stealth bomber that did partially inspire some of the stealth bomber’s characteristics. However, beyond rumors, there is no evidence they developed anti-gravity or canoodled with aliens.
The end of this Project Blue Bookepisode seems to suggest UFO sightings are actually due to experimental aircraft. The CIA has suggested this as well. In a CIA report regarding the development of aircraft at Area 51, there is a section titled “U-2s, UFOs, and Operation Blue Book.” In this section, they claim that many UFO reports were due to unwitting civilians spotting test flights of the U-2 spy plane. The report claims, “This, in turn, led to the Air Force’s Operation Blue Book.” The problem with the last statement is that the U.S. Air Force began investigating UFO sightings in 1947 with Project Sign and Project Blue Book began in 1952. The U.S. did not conduct test flights of the U-2 until the mid to late 50s. It is highly likely U-2 test flights did cause UFO reports, but it is not possible for the U-2 test flights to have caused the creation of Project Blue Book.
Une mission spatiale secrète aurait été envoyée vers le vaisseau extraterrestre Oumuamua !
Une mission spatiale secrète aurait été envoyée vers le vaisseau extraterrestre Oumuamua !
Dans cette vidéo : Alors que les astronomes débattent de l'hypothèse de l'engin spatial Oumuamua, un initié et lanceur d'alerte affirme qu'une mission spatiale secrète a été envoyée pour l'explorer... ▼▼Suite ci-dessous▼▼
Autre vidéo à voir :
➨ Corey Goode révèle des documents secrets de la DIA sur des technologies avancées :
Saturn’s largest moon Titan has a thick nitrogen atmosphere – unique among all the moons in the solar system. A new study suggests Titan’s atmosphere originated from organics being “cooked” in its interior.
Saturn’s large moon Titan, with its smaller moon Mimas in the foreground, as seen by the Cassini spacecraft in 2013. Titan’s atmosphere is thick and hazy, and mostly nitrogen, like Earth’s. Where did the nitrogen come from? Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute.
Titan is Saturn’s largest moon and, in many ways, seems more like a planet than a moon. It is eerily Earth-like, yet a very different world from Earth, with extreme cold and rivers, lakes and seas of liquid methane/ethane. Also, Titan is the only moon in the solar system that has a thick atmosphere, and, in that way, too, it’s reminiscent of the major planets in our solar system. Titan’s atmosphere is composed primarily of nitrogen, like Earth’s. Just how Titan’s atmosphere developed has been one of the long-standing mysteries of this bizarre world.
A new peer-reviewed study sheds some light on this question. The study was published online in The Astrophysical Journal on January 22, 2019. The study – from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) – suggests that the nitrogen in Titan’s atmosphere originated from the “cooking” of organic material in the interior of the moon. Kelly Miller, a research scientist in SwRI’s Space Science and Engineering Division and lead author of the study, provided some background:
Titan is a very interesting moon because it has this very thick atmosphere, which makes it unique among moons in our solar system. It is also the only body in the solar system, other than Earth, that has large quantities of liquid on the surface. Titan, however, has liquid hydrocarbons instead of water.
A lot of organic chemistry is no doubt happening on Titan, so it’s an undeniable source of curiosity.
The main theory about Titan’s atmosphere has been that ammonia ice from comets was converted, by impacts or photochemistry, into nitrogen to form Titan’s atmosphere. While that may still be an important process, it neglects the effects of what we now know is a very substantial portion of comets: complex organic material.
Artist’s concept of the Huygens probe descending through Titan’s thick atmosphere before landing, in 2005.
Image via NASA.
Miller’s study was inspired by a mission to a very different object – comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko – studied in detail by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft. It turned out that the composition of the comet was about 1/2 ice, 1/4 rock and 1/4 organic material. The comet’s composition could be significant in terms of figuring out how Titan’s atmosphere came to be, according to Miller:
Comets and primitive bodies in the outer solar system are really interesting because they’re thought to be leftover building blocks of the solar system. Those small bodies could be incorporated into larger bodies, like Titan, and the dense, organic-rich rocky material could be found in its core.
Titan as seen by Cassini’s radar, showing methane clouds in the atmosphere.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.
How exactly does all this apply to Titan? Miller compared thermal models of Titan’s interior to data from organic material in meteorites. The idea was to see how much gaseous material could be produced from meteorite impacts into Titan when it was first forming.
The result was that about half of the moon’s nitrogen and perhaps also most of its methane could be accounted for in this scenario. The organics would be “cooked” into Titan as it was forming a few billion years ago.
While primarily nitrogen, Titan’s atmosphere also contains about 5 percent methane, which can form organic compounds. Those organics are all over Titan today – both in the atmosphere (as haze) and coating the surface (including massive “dunes” of organic material).
Structure of Titan’s atmosphere, which is composed primarily of nitrogen and methane.
Image via Anthony J. Colozza.
But Titan’s atmospheric methane supply still needs to be replenished somehow since the gas breaks down over time, and scientists are still not sure how that happens. On Earth, most methane comes from biology, but on Titan – given the extreme conditions – it is more likely to be primordial methane left over from when the moon first formed, similar to that found in the atmospheres of the ice giants Uranus and Neptune.
Some scientists, however, do think that primitive life of some kind is possible on Titan, perhaps in its methane/ethane lakes and seas or in the subsurface water ocean.
Bottom line: Titan’s thick nitrogen atmosphere is unique among moons in the solar system. The nitrogen may have been “cooked” inside Titan.
The space rock traveled over West Palm Beach, above the Florida Keys, and then to Viñales, a town in Pinar del Río, Cuba. It left a smoke trail seen by many. Images and video here.
The daylight meteor seen in Cuba on February 1 left a long smoke trail.
Image via Hatzel Vela
Several meteorites have been found in western Cuba after a huge meteor was seen by many – in broad daylight – on Friday, February 1, 2019. People in southern Florida also saw the meteor, as this space rock traveled over West Palm Beach, above the Florida Keys, and then to Viñales, a town in Pinar del Río, Cuba.
The event occurred at around 1:16 – 1:17 p.m. EST on Friday, February 1, 2019. Residents of Viñales, Cuba saw a very long smoke trail that lasted more than one minute, while the meteor itself was described as extremely bright, with amyellow-orange color, and lasted more than at least four seconds.
Several Cuban residents reported finding black rocks showing the characteristic fusion crust seen in ordinary chondrite meteorites.
One of several stony meteorites found in Cuba on February 1, 2019, shortly after the huge meteor was seen across the skies.
Image via Hatzel Vela.
Astronomers estimate that the space rock that disintegrated over Cuba was at least a few meters in diameter – likely, van-sized – before entering Earth’s atmosphere. That’s a lot smaller than the house-sized asteroid that entered Earth’s atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia – also in February- in 2013. The shock wave from the Chelyabinsk event broke windows in six Russian cities and sent some 1,500 people to seek medical treatment, mostly from flying glass.
One of the witnesses of the Cuba meteor was Juan Alberto Pérez Pozo, who, immediately after seeing the amazing meteor, started recording the smoke trail and was able to capture the huge sonic boom at 0:46 on this video:
Meteorological satellites also recorded the event:
Brendon@brendonme
Remnants of the meteor over Viñales in western Cuba evident in #Goes16 GLM, Split Window Difference, and Sulfur Dioxide views
The bright yellow-orange color seen in the meteor suggests the space rock probably contained sodium. A similar composition was also seen in the Chelyabinsk meteorites, which were later recovered in a lake.
Reports indicate the sonic boom of the Cuba meteor also shattered windows, much as the Chelyabinsk meteor did; however, the Cuba event was at a smaller scale.
A web cam in Fort Myers, Florida, captured the meteor as it was descending towards Cuba:
Other small asteroids passed very close to Earth in the past few weeks, including asteroid 2019 BZ3, a 23-foot (7-meter) space rock that came at just 0.1 or 10 percent of the Earth-moon distance, on January 27, 2019.
Good-sized meteors do strike Earth’s atmosphere frequently. Fortunately, Earth’s atmosphere causes most of these space rocks to disintegrate. According to astronomers who study asteroids, Earth is in no imminent danger of collision with any large, dangerous asteroid.
Bottom line: A small space rock exploded in midair over Cuba, and pieces of it (meteorites) have been found.
Astronomers studying a globular star cluster accidentally discovered a more-distant galaxy behind it. The little galaxy is 30 million light-years away and is nicknamed Bedin 1. The videos in this post take you there.
The computer animation above uses data from the Hubble Space Telescope, and from ground-based telescopes, to take you on a trip through the globular cluster NGC 6752. It shows a newly discovered dwarf galaxy – called Bedin 1 – hidden behind the globular cluster’s stars. Astronomers found this little galaxy while using the Hubble Space Telescope to photograph the globular star cluster, which is located 13,000 light-yearsaway in the halo of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. The newly known galaxy is approximately 2,300 times farther away than the foreground cluster. Still, on the vast distance scale used by astronomers, the newly discovered galaxy is said to be:
… in our own cosmic backyard, only 30 million light-years away.
These astronomers described their new discovery January 10, 2019, in the peer-reviewed journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society – Letters.
Below is another video, which also takes you on a journey to the globular cluster NGC 6752. The final view, from the Hubble Space Telescope, shows the bright stars of the cluster, as well as a collection of faint stars; these faint stars are part of the background galaxy.
The newly discovered object is classified as a dwarf spheroidal galaxy because it measures only around 3,000 light-years across at its greatest extent (barely 1/30th the diameter of our Milky Way). It’s roughly 1,000 times dimmer than the Milky Way. Dwarf spheroidal galaxies are defined by their small size, low luminosity, lack of dust and old stellar populations. Thirty-six galaxies of this type are already known to exist in our Local Group of galaxies, 22 of which are satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. The new galaxy is beyond the Local Group, however.
Because of its 13-billion-year-old age, and its isolation — which resulted in hardly any interaction with other galaxies — the dwarf is the astronomical equivalent of a living fossil from the early universe.
The discovery of Bedin 1 was a truly serendipitous find. Very few Hubble images allow such faint objects to be seen, and they cover only a small area of the sky. Future telescopes with a large field of view, such as the WFIRST telescope, will have cameras covering a much larger area of the sky and may find many more of these galactic neighbors.
Close-up of a part of the globular cluster NGC 6752. Look closely – left side of image – and you’ll see a previously unknown dwarf spheroidal galaxy, nicknamed Bedin 1, in the far background.
This composite image shows the location of the accidentally discovered dwarf galaxy Bedin 1 behind the globular cluster NGC 6752. The lower image, depicting the complete cluster, is a ground-based observation from the Digitized Sky Survey 2. The upper right image shows the full field of view of the Hubble Space Telescope. The upper left one highlights the part containing the galaxy Bedin 1. Image via SpaceTelescope.org.
Bottom line: Astronomers studying the relatively nearby globular star cluster NGC 6752 stumbled upon a more-distant galaxy behind it. The little galaxy is 30 million light-years away and is nicknamed Bedin 1.
Astronomers studying a globular star cluster accidentally discovered a more-distant galaxy behind it. The little galaxy is 30 million light-years away and is nicknamed Bedin 1. The videos in this post take you there.
The computer animation above uses data from the Hubble Space Telescope, and from ground-based telescopes, to take you on a trip through the globular cluster NGC 6752. It shows a newly discovered dwarf galaxy – called Bedin 1 – hidden behind the globular cluster’s stars. Astronomers found this little galaxy while using the Hubble Space Telescope to photograph the globular star cluster, which is located 13,000 light-yearsaway in the halo of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. The newly known galaxy is approximately 2,300 times farther away than the foreground cluster. Still, on the vast distance scale used by astronomers, the newly discovered galaxy is said to be:
… in our own cosmic backyard, only 30 million light-years away.
These astronomers described their new discovery January 10, 2019, in the peer-reviewed journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society – Letters.
Below is another video, which also takes you on a journey to the globular cluster NGC 6752. The final view, from the Hubble Space Telescope, shows the bright stars of the cluster, as well as a collection of faint stars; these faint stars are part of the background galaxy.
The newly discovered object is classified as a dwarf spheroidal galaxy because it measures only around 3,000 light-years across at its greatest extent (barely 1/30th the diameter of our Milky Way). It’s roughly 1,000 times dimmer than the Milky Way. Dwarf spheroidal galaxies are defined by their small size, low luminosity, lack of dust and old stellar populations. Thirty-six galaxies of this type are already known to exist in our Local Group of galaxies, 22 of which are satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. The new galaxy is beyond the Local Group, however.
Because of its 13-billion-year-old age, and its isolation — which resulted in hardly any interaction with other galaxies — the dwarf is the astronomical equivalent of a living fossil from the early universe.
The discovery of Bedin 1 was a truly serendipitous find. Very few Hubble images allow such faint objects to be seen, and they cover only a small area of the sky. Future telescopes with a large field of view, such as the WFIRST telescope, will have cameras covering a much larger area of the sky and may find many more of these galactic neighbors.
Close-up of a part of the globular cluster NGC 6752. Look closely – left side of image – and you’ll see a previously unknown dwarf spheroidal galaxy, nicknamed Bedin 1, in the far background.
This composite image shows the location of the accidentally discovered dwarf galaxy Bedin 1 behind the globular cluster NGC 6752. The lower image, depicting the complete cluster, is a ground-based observation from the Digitized Sky Survey 2. The upper right image shows the full field of view of the Hubble Space Telescope. The upper left one highlights the part containing the galaxy Bedin 1. Image via SpaceTelescope.org.
Bottom line: Astronomers studying the relatively nearby globular star cluster NGC 6752 stumbled upon a more-distant galaxy behind it. The little galaxy is 30 million light-years away and is nicknamed Bedin 1.
Book of Enoch: “Fallen angels are imprisoned in Antarctica” (Video)
Book of Enoch: “Fallen angels are imprisoned in Antarctica” (Video)
On March 14, Israel News Live published a story entitled "The fallen angels imprisoned in Antarctica and are still alive." The commentator, Steven Ben-Nun, analyzed Enoch's apocryphal book, which describes the experiences of Enoch, Biblical figure, who was taken to heaven to witness and play a key role in a greater heavenly conflict.
Enoch became the chief intermediary between the two sides of the conflict between the "fallen angels" and the "right angels" who served a deity known as "the Lord." There were multiple problems in the conflict, such as fallen angels, interbreeding and / or performing genetic experiments on humanity, and transmitting knowledge and technologies forbidden to human civilization still in development.
The Book of Enoch begins with the arrival of 200 Fallen Angels in the area of Mount Hermon, which borders modern Lebanon and Syria. The Fallen Angels began to cross and / or genetically modify the local inhabitants.
6.1 And it came to pass that when the children of men were increased, beautiful and beautiful daughters were born to them in those days.
6.2 And the angels, the children of heaven, saw them and wished them. And they said to one another, "Come, let us choose for us wives, for the children of men, and beget children for us."
6.6 And they were altogether two hundred, and they came down upon Ardis, which is the top of Mount Hermon. And they called to the mountain of Hermon, because in it they swore and bound one another with curses.
While the fallen angels had established an outpost on Mount Hermon, it was Antarctica that would be removed for finally after losing the celestial battle with the just angels, according to Ben-Nun's analysis of the Book of Enoch.
Ben-Nun quotes passages from the Book of Enoch that are very suggestive of Antarctica, as well as the place where Enoch was taken to witness heavenly events:
18.5 And I saw the winds on the earth that hold the clouds and I saw the ways of the angels. I saw the end of the Earth; The firmament of Heaven above.
18.6 And I went southward, and it burned day and night, where there were seven mountains of precious stones, three toward the east and three toward the south.
18.7 And those from the east were of colored stone, and one of pearls, and another of healing stone; And those of the south, of red stone.
18.8 And the means reached Heaven, like the throne of the Lord, from Estibio, and the top of the throne was sapphire.
What is interesting in the previous passage is that Enoch refers to a place that "was burning day and night." Ben-Nun believes that this fits the description of Antarctica during the southern hemisphere's summer season when there are 24 hours of sunlight.
As for the seven mountains, this seems to refer to Mount Vinson in the Sentinel Range of Antarctica, according to Ben-Nun. It also refers to six nearby mountains in the range that could qualify as the mountains described in the Book of Enoch.
Mt Vinson is the highest mountain in Antarctica, and is towards the center of the Sentinela Range. It would have stood out so spectacularly with its snow-capped peaks in antiquity, as it does today.
All this leads to an intriguing question. Is Goode himself a modern Enoch who is given a key role in witnessing and mediating between different human and extraterrestrial factions as the Sphere delegate that is the Alliance, which seems to be functionally identical to the omniscient deity described in the Book of Enoch? If so, this would suggest that Enoch himself was an extraterrestrial contactee of the Sphere Alliance Being or a similar group 13,000 years ago.
If the Pre-Adamite / Fallen Angels are awakened / liberated, then there will certainly be a need to deal with them and their hybrid springtime about what roles they should play while humanity awakens to the truth of their history, and manipulation by multiple extraterrestrial groups and elite families.
Norio Hayakawa, a resident of Rio Rancho, New Mexico, has been engaged in the study of UFOs for more than fifty years. An expert on Nevada’s Area 51 and the alleged underground base near Dulce, New Mexico, he was responsible for organising ‘The Dulce Base: Fact or Fiction?’ conference – the first event of its kind ever held – which took place in the town of Dulce in March 2009. During his many years as a UFO lecturer, activist, and researcher, he’s brushed shoulders with such well-known figures as the late William ‘Bill’ Cooper, Bob Lazar and the late Gabe Valdez.
Much of Hayakawa’s research focuses on the technological-militaristic and socio-political aspects of the UFO phenomenon – an area overlooked by most other UFO researchers. A unique and discerning voice in the field of UFOlogy, he suggests there’s been an effort on the part of the authorities, for reasons both disturbing and far-reaching, to manipulate the public’s beliefs concerning UFOs and aliens. Like Dr. Jacques Vallée and others, he isn’t afraid to point out the shortcomings of the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH), while at the same time maintaining an open-mind. Hayakawa kindly agreed to discuss his work with New Dawn magazine.
LOUIS PROUD (LP):Can you please describe your background and how you came to develop an interest in the UFO phenomenon?
NORIO HAYAKAWA (NH): I started getting really involved with UFO research around 1961, when I was a sophomore in high school. However, when I was in elementary school beginning in the early 1950s I had already known about ‘flying saucers’ because I used to listen to my father tell me of his sighting of a strangely manoeuvring green ‘ball’ of fire, which took place when he was fishing one summer night in 1947, in the Bay of Yokohama, Japan. My father was quite familiar with shooting stars and other astronomical phenomena, because he had spent years night fishing and was so used to looking at night skies. But that particular summer night in 1947 was definitely unforgettable to him, he used to tell our family at our dining table as he enthusiastically described his sighting to us.
From 1961, I started getting involved and began to subscribe to newsletters of NICAP [National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena] and APRO [Aerial Phenomena Research Organization] and other groups in the US, even though I was living in Japan. I also began to attend meetings of UFO investigation groups in the Yokohama and Tokyo areas. In 1964, when I was attending college in Tokyo, I became fascinated by a newspaper article about a strange encounter involving a highway patrol officer named Lonnie Zamora who claimed to have witnessed a flying saucer sitting on the desert, just outside of a sleepy little town in New Mexico, US, by the name of Socorro. Of course, that was the famous Socorro incident of 1964. The sighting really convinced me that I have to get to the bottom of this strange phenomenon.
LP: You say the authorities have exploited and benefited from the UFO phenomenon, by using it as a smokescreen for various top secret militaristic projects.
NH: Many defence contractors in the US periodically create ‘cover’ stories in order to detract attention away from covert military projects by some curious segment of the population. These ‘cover’ stories sometimes involve false UFO sighting reports. Such reports are frequently used when contractors come up with new military weapons systems or new military aircraft and so on – for example, new generations of remotely-controlled platforms for various programs. Creating the so-called ‘laughter curtain’ (i.e., bringing up the subject of UFOs or aliens) is one way to curtail serious scrutiny of certain military bases or programs. A very good example is how Area 51, a very important military research, development and testing location, has become associated with rumours of UFOs or aliens. This may well have been concocted by the Air Force itself, for example.
LP: You seem to disagree with the mainstream scientific notion that we have all the answers concerning UFO activity on Earth – or in other words there is no UFO “cover up.” In fact, you’ve stated the authorities are just as baffled by the UFO phenomenon as the general population. Moreover, you suggest the authorities have tried (and are still trying) to promote among the public certain beliefs concerning UFOs – namely, that UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft piloted by physical entities – as part of a sinister and elaborate psychological manipulation program.
NH: I am of the opinion that the government, or ‘authorities’, are just as perplexed about the nature of the UFO phenomenon as the public. The only reason they have not disclosed anything conclusive despite many years of research and collection of vital sighting report files is because they are unable to explain it to the public, having long known that the phenomenon cannot be sufficiently explained simply through contemporary, empirical science. The government has never been in the business of explaining anything that is outside of empirical scientific explanations. The UFO phenomenon seems to go beyond just being a physical phenomenon.
LP: What is your perspective on Operation Paperclip?
NH: We cannot underestimate the importance of Operation Paperclip in the aftermath of WWII. Operation Paperclip was a US sanctioned program through which hundreds of former Nazi German scientists and engineers (and even former SS intelligence officers) were brought to the US in order for the US to acquire some of the interesting military technologies that the Germans already had in the late 1930s and early 1940s, such as advanced rocket science and development of prototypes of flying wing aircraft – some of which were even equipped with ramjet engines and attained speeds of up to 500 or 600 miles per hour. New Mexico was one of the primary locations for these scientists because New Mexico already had important laboratories such as Los Alamos, and also important rocket testing ranges such as White Sands. Even today, White Sands Missile Range is the location of the most advanced testing of directed energy weapons systems, with the use of lasers and microwaves.
LP: What is Project Blue Beam and how does it tie into your research and the notion of a coming global crisis?
NH: Project Blue Beam is an alleged secret and futuristic NASA program in which advanced technologies (such as the use of airborne holographic projection devices and manipulation of various frequency waves) could be utilised to create fake visual/audio simulations to convince the public (or the enemy) that they are witnessing a real event – whatever that scenario may be.
The late Canadian investigative journalist Serge Monast (left), with whom I corresponded in 1993 and 1994, was the first to come up with the allegation that NASA will develop this technology in the near future. HAARP, which began to be talked about in the early 1990s, was basically another version of Project Blue Beam, utilising some of the Tesla technologies. According to some researchers, programs such as HAARP and the Blue Beam Project could be utilised in the future to generate panic (such as by creating a fake ‘extraterrestrial invasion’ scenario) so that the frightened and deceived public would clamour for some type of global authority and unity to fend off such ‘threats’.
LP: Could you please elaborate on the notion of a “fake ‘extraterrestrial invasion’ scenario,” using Project Blue Beam and HAARP technologies, as a way to enforce a totalitarian one-world government, or ‘New World Order’?
NH: If there really exists a global cabal whose long-term plan is to enforce a global government, the most logical way to carry out this plan would be to create an absolutely convincing need for such an authority. The ultimate means to achieve such a plan would be to artificially generate worldwide panic by staging a fake ‘extraterrestrial threat’ through the use of such technologies as HAARP and the alleged Project Blue Beam. An unprecedented series of global crises such as natural catastrophes or conflagrations (both of which could also be created) would be the final condition under which such schemes would be realised.
LP: During a recent interview on Truth Connections Radio you made a comment to the effect that there would no UFO history were it not for the US state of New Mexico.
NH: The importance of New Mexico can be seen from the fact that the atomic bomb was first tested in this state. New Mexico is the location of Los Alamos National Laboratory, probably the world’s largest conglomerate military/scientific research community. Los Alamos, by the way, has the world’s most advanced DNA, human genome, and genetics facilities in the world. Albuquerque, New Mexico is the headquarters of Sandia National Laboratories, which, located inside Kirtland Air Force Base, is probably the world’s largest military research, development and testing conglomerate.
New Mexico is such a huge state in size (the fifth largest in the Union), yet is scarcely populated in proportion to its huge area. Even today, the total population of New Mexico is about two million. It has enough space to conduct any kind of covert military research, development and testing programs. By the way, there are more scientists per population in New Mexico than in any other state. Yet the irony is that the level of public education in New Mexico ranks about 48th in the nation.
As I stated earlier, the White Sands Missile Range is today the location of the world’s most advanced directed energy weapons testing programs, involving lasers and microwaves. If aliens really exist, then this, for obvious reasons, would definitely be the primary place of interest to them. In fact, many people seem to believe that an extraterrestrial spacecraft has already crashed in New Mexico (the famous Roswell UFO incident of 1947).
LP: There is said to be a clandestine (and possibly extraterrestrial) underground facility near the town of Dulce, New Mexico – a topic on which you’ve conducted an extensive amount of research. What are some of the discoveries you’ve made concerning Dulce?
NH: Although I have been involved with investigations into the claims of an alleged underground joint US-alien base in Dulce (alleged biological laboratory) for many years, I have yet to see any solid, tangible, physical, irrefutable documentary evidence whatsoever of its existence. Yet, I can also say there seems to be lots of circumstantial evidence that there is ‘something’ there. What that ‘something’ is, I still do not know.
LP: What is your take on the cattle mutilation mystery?
NH: The cattle mutilation mystery, to my knowledge, began to be reported primarily in the mid-1970s in the Dulce, New Mexico and southern Colorado areas. It is my conjecture that it may have had something to do with the government’s monitoring of radiation levels of certain cows in the northern New Mexico region, especially in the aftermath of alleged radiation leaks that began to affect animals and even humans in the Dulce vicinity, after the US exploded an atomic device deep underground, about 22 miles southwest of Dulce in 1967. This experiment, codenamed Project Gasbuggy, was realised by the US Atomic Energy Commission, ostensibly to help ease the flow of natural gas trapped deep beneath hard rocks in the Dulce region. The high rate of cancer in the Dulce area as well as widespread fertility problems among young women in the area is quite noticeable, even today. Plus, there is a possibility the government may have used the Dulce area as a dumping ground for toxic waste materials, besides possibly conducting some form of bio-warfare research involving substances such as anthrax.
The cattle mutilation incidents may also have been a series of staged events by the government to cause local people and the public to believe that Dulce is somehow associated with alien visitation. The late Gabe Valdez, a former New Mexico state patrol officer in charge of the entire Dulce region for many years, also seemed to come to that conclusion. He further concluded that UFO incidents were staged by the government with the use of holographic projections and other mind-control technologies then being developed at places such as Sandia National Laboratories.
LP: Please shed some light on your association with the late Milton William Cooper (otherwise known as William ‘Bill’ Cooper) – the famous conspiracy theorist and author of Behold a Pale Horse – and how his work is of relevance to your own.
NH: When William ‘Bill’ Cooper first came on the scene in 1989 in Los Angeles, I was quite impressed with his speeches. He had brought a new, global conspiracy-type angle to the UFO phenomenon, which sounded very fresh and exciting to lots of us in the so-called UFO community, including myself. I even helped him launch his first public lecture at Hollywood High School in 1989.
As the years went by, Cooper began to disassociate himself from UFOlogy. He went into the ‘militia’ or ‘Patriot’ movement and, unfortunately, met a violent death in 2001 in Arizona. What I admired about Cooper, despite his well-known obnoxious and rather egotistical personality, was the fact that he began to admit that he may have been purposely shown disinformation by the Navy concerning UFOs. He also began to believe that in the future a secret global government could even stage a ‘fake’ extraterrestrial event to create panic in order to establish a forced global governance of some type.
LP: What do you make of the claims of Robert ‘Bob’ Lazar – who says he took part in a top secret government project, based at Area 51 [Nevada, USA], to reverse-engineer recovered extraterrestrial spacecraft – and others who’ve come forward with similar sensational stories?
NH: The claims of Bob Lazar are simply claims and cannot be verified. However, over all these years Lazar has never changed his story. The very fact that Lazar still has a scientific equipment business in Michigan (United Nuclear) and still seems to be doing occasional work indirectly with some defence contractors seems to indicate he is indeed knowledgeable in the scientific applications associated with military technologies. But there is also a theory that Lazar was intentionally manipulated by the government to strengthen the ‘extraterrestrial’ element to the Area 51 story, thus bringing about the ‘laughter curtain’ whenever discussion of this important military base is brought up by the public.
LP: In your opinion, the UFO phenomenon is non-physical in nature, having nothing to do with flesh-and-blood extraterrestrial beings. Alternately, you’ve expressed a strong appreciation of Dr. Jacques Vallée’s extra-dimensional hypothesis, which interprets UFO events in terms of other “dimensions” or “realities” existing alongside our own.
NH: The vast majority of the world’s scientists as well as the public at large seem convinced there has to be advanced extraterrestrial civilisations elsewhere in the universe. However, when it comes to the question of UFOs most of them do not support the theory that we have ever been (or are being) visited by physical extraterrestrial beings in physical spacecraft; physically it is impossible, they say. Even Stephen Hawking, one of the world’s most brilliant minds, while acknowledging the existence of extraterrestrial civilisations are almost certain, says that no aliens have ever come to earth in UFOs.
But the UFO phenomenon seems to be real. I totally agree with Vallée, who continues to support the extra-dimensional origins of UFOs. I also tend to believe that UFOs are not objects nor are they flying. I tend to believe they are temporarily materialising and dematerialising – in other words, intruding into our dimension for reasons unknown and receding back quickly into their dimension. UFO reports have existed from time immemorial. Even today we do not comprehend the true nature of this puzzling phenomenon.
LP: You once worked as a licensed funeral director, while some of your blog posts concern philosophical topics such as death and the afterlife. Do you believe these topics are of relevance to the UFO phenomenon and, if so, how?
NH: The world is filled with mysteries. There are things in this world that cannot be sufficiently explained. Life and death are mysteries unto themselves. So, in this sense, the UFO phenomenon is no different from the mysteries of life and death. The phenomenon, which has existed from time immemorial (i.e. sighting reports), has not been solved yet. This is the reason I am so fascinated with the topic. The world would be dull without such mysteries. In fact, as I’ve stated many times in my public presentations, the UFO phenomenon is perhaps the most important topic of mankind.
Verborgen 13e-eeuwse teksten vertellen verhalen over Merlijn de tovenaar en koning Arthur beetje anders - HLN.be
Verborgen 13e-eeuwse teksten vertellen verhalen over Merlijn de tovenaar en koning Arthur beetje anders - HLN.be
University of BristolVroeger werden oude teksten wel vaker hergebruikt als boekenkaft.
WETENSCHAPAan de universiteit van Bristol (Engeland) heeft een bibliothecaris zeven waardevolle pagina’s handgeschreven teksten ontdekt die vertellen over de avonturen van Merlijn en koning Arthur. Het zou gaan om documenten waarop Sir Thomas Malory, de auteur van de verhalen zoals wij ze kennen, zich baseerde.
Waarom de kostbare documenten nooit eerder werden ontdekt? Ze werden als boekenkaft gebruikt van een 16e-eeuws boek, aldus de bibliothecaris van de universiteitsbibliotheek Michael Richardson. Oude teksten werden vroeger wel vaker hergebruikt om boeken te binden. Richardson was eigenlijk op zoek naar middeleeuwse teksten voor enkele studenten toen hij op de bijzondere vondst stootte.
Toveren kan hij niet, maar de bibliothecaris voelde zich alvast betoverd nadat hij ontdekte dat de zeven onbekende handgeschreven perkamenten over Merlijn de tovenaar, koning Arthur, vrienden én vijanden handelden.
De verraste bibliothecaris herkende al snel enkele namen uit het tijdperk van koning Arthur en verwittigde bevoegde collega’s. Het team ontdekte dat de teksten oorspronkelijk deel uitmaakten van een vierdelige editie van de Oudfranse reeks van Jean de Gerson, een befaamd theoloog en kanselier van de Universiteit van Parijs. De reeks zou een eeuw later deel uitmaken van de “Lancelot-Graalcyclus”, een 13e-eeuwse tekst over de zoektocht van de ridder Lancelot naar de Heilige Graal. Vermoedelijk baseerde de al even bekende Sir Thomas Malory zijn verhalen over koning Arthur en zijn ridders (Le Morte d’Arthur) op de verhalen van zijn 13e-eeuwe voorganger.
“De verhalen in de Bristol-fragmenten zijn echter niet precies hetzelfde als de klassieke verhalen, zoals wij ze kennen, van koning Arthur”, aldus Leah Tether, Brits onderzoeksdirecteur van de International Arthurian Society. De fragmenten van Thomas Malory, die tussen 1494 en 1502 werden gedrukt in Straatsburg, bevatten subtiele maar significante verschillen”, vervolgt ze. “Deze fragmenten uit het verhaal van Merlijn en koning Arthur zijn een wonderbaarlijk spannende vondst die mogelijk gevolgen heeft voor het onderzoek. Niet enkel voor de interpretatie van dergelijke teksten, maar ook voor ons moderne begrip van de Arthur-legende.”
University of BristolVan links naar rechts: Leah Tether, Laura Chuhan Campbell, Michael Richardson en Benjamin Pohl in de universiteitsbibliotheek van Bristol.
Verschillen
Tot nu toe bestudeerden de onderzoekers slechts een fractie van de teksten. Zo konden ze alvast ontcijferen dat de tekst handelt over de strijd met de fictieve Frankische koning Claudas. Merlijn plande die aanval zorgvuldig, maar in werkelijkheid was de veldslag gruwelijker dan verwacht waarbij de manschappen van koning Arthur en vrienden heel wat tegenslagen te verwerken kregen.
In het heetst van de strijd zou Merlijn zelf met een vaandel met daarop een draak die vuur spuwt ten strijde zijn getrokken. Na heel wat escapades en beproevingen richt Merlijn zich met enkele wijze woorden tot de troepen waarna ze eindelijk zegevieren.
Koning Claudas zou volgens de gevonden teksten gewond geraakt zijn, maar hoe dat gebeurt, blijft onbesproken. In de klassieke vertellingen van Sir Thomas Malory staat echter te lezen dat hij in zijn dij geraakt wordt, een metafoor voor impotentie. “Er zijn veel meer verschillen, maar vanwege de schade aan de fragmenten, zal het tijd kosten om de inhoud correct te ontcijferen”, aldus Leah Tether.
In 1989, Ed Conroy, a San Antonio, Texas-based journalist, wrote a book titledReport on Communion. It was an independent study of Whitley Strieber and his incredible experiences, as told in Strieber’s 1987 best-seller Communion. In taking on the project, Conroy didn’t realize what he had got himself into. At least, not at first he didn’t. What began as an impartial investigation into Strieber’s claims, soon mutated into something very different: Conroy found himself under similar intimidation to that which would eventually hit the Strieber family. Weird phone calls, secret surveillance and – even – visits from our old friends, those mysterious black helicopters, whose crews keep more than a careful watch on alien abductees, abounded.
It was in the latter part of 1986 that Conroy was given a copy of the original manuscript of Communion. Initially, at least, Conroy didn’t display too much enthusiasm for the book. That is, until he read the book – as well as various other books from Strieber, too, including the truly chilling 1984 book, Warday, which is a hair-raising tale of a disastrous, limited nuclear exchange between the United States and the former Soviet Union. Conroy was now interested; very interested. Conroy was clearly destined to dig further, which he did. That Strieber was from San Antonio and Conroy worked there, made things easier, too. Conroy did an extensive interview with Strieber in April 1987, followed by a face to face meeting three months later. Conroy was, initially, planning to write an article or several on Strieber. He quickly realized, though, that there was enough material for a book – a book that would address the many and various intricacies from a detached, open-minded perspective. Conroy was destined not to remain detached though, and particularly so when he too was caught up in a definitive maelstrom of mystery and conspiracy.
On one occasion, at the height of his research into Strieber’s story, Conroy encountered in his very own bedroom what he described as “a kind of shadow man, completely black, poised in the classic pose of Rodin’s ‘The Thinker.’” This sounds very much like what, today, are known as the Shadow People – malevolent, supernatural entities that have clear and undeniable links to the equally sinister Men in Black, who have nothing to do with the government (despite what the phenomenally successful Men in Black movies might suggest…) and everything to do with the UFO phenomenon itself. Strange noises plagued Conroy, waking him from a dead sleep, almost in a manipulative, playful fashion, but which bordered upon the unsettling. Then, there was the matter of those infamous copters.
It was one particular morning in March 1987 that Ed Conroy found himself a target of whoever it is that flies the mysterious helicopters. It appeared to be a Bell 47, said Conroy, and it lacked an identifying markings – which is very curious, but absolutely typical of the helicopters of the phantom type. Notably, said Conroy: “What was remarkable about this particular helicopter was the inordinate amount of attention it seemed to be paying to my building.” In no time, and shortly after the Bell 47 finally exited the area, a totally black helicopter was on the scene too. Follow-up visits occurred – something which prompted Conroy to contact the Federal Aviation Administration for answers. No luck there. Things got even more intense in 1988 when Conroy was practically seeing helicopters here, there and everywhere. And particularly, again, in the direct vicinity of his apartment, including the huge, double-rotor, military Chinooks. Conroy even saw some of the helicopters vanish – as in literally vanish. Some kind of stealthy, cloaking technology, perhaps?
Then, in June 1988 something else happened: while Conroy was out of town, someone changed the message on his answerphone, in his apartment. And it was changed again. And again. Clearly, someone was screwing with Conroy – perhaps even trying to plunge him into states of paranoia and fear. On top of that, Conroy started to hear strange clicking noises on his phone. Weird, unintelligible voices would call, saturated in electric static and which echoed the tactics of the Men in Black when, in the 1960s John Keel was investigating the infamous wave of “Mothman” sightings in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Such are the strange situations that can occur when we delve into the UFO puzzle.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
UFOs shooting up into the sky and leaving huge holes in the clouds over Mt. Vernon, Washington
UFOs shooting up into the sky and leaving huge holes in the clouds over Mt. Vernon, Washington
On January 28, 2019 something strange happened over Washington and Mt. Vernon. Many people witnessed what they call "fallstreak holes" in the sky.
Now it is said that a "fallstreak hole" form in high altitude clouds when the temperature drops below 00 C but the water droplets in the cloud do not freeze, they remain in a super cooled liquid state. When suddenly a disturbance occurs, per perhaps a plane flies by, the sub-zero water droplets begin to crystallize in a wave expanding outwards from the point of the disturbance with as a result the ice crystals billow from the resulting "hole."
So far a reasonable explanation for the strange "holes' in the clouds. But what if such a "hole" in the clouds has been caused by something else.
On the same day, a person has not only photographed two enormous "holes' in the sky over Mt. Vernon WA but he saw two large objects moving approx. 150 mph; then turning sharply and ascended above the clouds and the clouds dispersed.
Huge "UFO" hole Mt. Vernon - January 28, 2019.
He made the following statement:
I was pulled over letting my dog run and I happened to notice something moving about 1000 ft up just above me. I immediately could tell it was something I had never seen before they were both cigar-shaped metallic and traveling approximately quarter mile apart but in the same exact direction.
They made a sharp kind of right and upward turn very quickly and headed straight up.
It's at that point when I started to grab my phone to take a picture. There seemed to be small puffs of smoke or vapor coming out from behind as they reached almost the cloud layer then disappeared above the clouds.
As I was setting my phone to camera after unlocking the phone and zooming out as far as it would zoom I looked up to aim and there were two huge holes if you will in the clouds.
Huge "UFO" holes Mt. Vernon - January 28, 2019.
I snapped the photos, which I have submitted to Mufon for further investigation, and literally within 2 minutes the clouds were back to normal.
I heard nothing during this whole instance. I was very excited and absolutely could not believe what I had just saw right after that instant I heard too low booms kind of like a sonic boom and had to think it had something to do with the two craft I saw basically disappear in front of me.
Huge "UFO" holes Washington - January 28, 2019.
In summary: It appears that these "holes" are not only caused by a natural phenomenon but by cloaked or de-cloaked UFOs too. At the moment a UFO shoots up into the sky, going through the cloud layer before disappearing above the clouds, it leaves a huge hole and a boom can be heard.
Meteoriet die tijdens maansverduistering op de maan insloeg, was zo groot als een strandbal
Meteoriet die tijdens maansverduistering op de maan insloeg, was zo groot als een strandbal
Vivian Lammerse
De ruimtesteen raakte onze natuurlijke satelliet met een snelheid van zo’n 47.000 km/u.
Vorige week maandag was er op veel plekken op de wereld, waaronder België en Nederland, eentotale maansverduistering te zien. Geschat wordt dat één op de vier mensen op aarde het bijzondere verschijnsel kon meemaken. Maar de maansverduistering was niet het enige wat men kon aanschouwen. Want terwijl miljoenen mensen hun ogen hadden gericht op de ‘bloedsuperwolfmaan’ merkten sommigen ook een mysterieuze lichtflits op. Was dit een meteoriet die op de maan insloeg? Hoewel experts in de eerste plaats wat sceptisch reageerden, kwam twee dagen later het verlossende antwoord: de maan was inderdaad tijdens de verduistering ook geraakt door een meteoriet!
Ruimtesteen Hoewel de maan eigenlijk permanent wordt geraakt door los slingerende ruimtestenen – geschat wordt dat er elk uur wel een klein stukje ruimtesteen op het onbeschermde oppervlak van de maan terecht komt – was het toch erg bijzonder, aangezien miljoenen mensen getuige waren. Dat er tegelijkertijd zowel een maansverduistering, als een meteorietinslag plaatsvond, is natuurlijk op zich al een uitzonderlijke gebeurtenis. Maar daarnaast hebben honderduizenden mensen het event ook nog eens op beeld vastgelegd. En dit bood een unieke kans om de impact op de maan in groot detail te bestuderen.
Precieze locatie van de impact op het maanoppervlak (rode stip).
Afbeelding: Jorge I. Zuluaga
Analyse Een analyse van de beelden door een Colombiaans en Dominicaans onderzoeksteam onthult de eerste aanwijzingen over de oorsprong en aard van het object dat op de maan insloeg. Zo zeggen de onderzoekers dat de waargenomen lichtflits geproduceerd werd door een meteoriet ter grootte van een strandbal (30-50 cm). De ruimtesteen was zo’n 20 tot 100 kilo zwaar en stortte neer op onze natuurlijke satelliet met een snelheid van ongeveer 47.000 km/u. De impact creëerde een wolk van warm, helder materiaal dat zich snel uitbreidde en in minder dan een derde van een seconde weer verdween. Als deze bevindingen kloppen, heeft de inslag waarschijnlijk gezorgd voor een een krater met een diamater van meer dan tien meter. Een toekomstige ruimtesonde zal dit moeten gaan controleren.
De onderzoekers benadrukken het belang van de samenwerking tussen wetenschappers en amateurs in de kwestie. “Sociale media en de gemakkelijke toegang tot technologie hebben de mensheid dichter dan ooit te voren bij wetenschap gebracht,” zegt onderzoeker Karls Peña. “Inspanningen zoals deze, waarbij wetenschappers en amateurs van verschillende plaatsen samenwerken om de menselijke kennis uit te breiden, is een effectieve manier om de wetenschappelijke interesse onder jongeren aan te wakkeren.” In de komende weken en maanden wordt verwacht dat ook andere wetenschappers met informatie over de meteorietinslag op de proppen komen. Deze zullen de bevindingen van de Colombiaanse en Dominicaanse astronomen moeten verifiëren.
Bronmateriaal:
"Impact on the Moon!" - University of Antioquia Afbeelding bovenaan dit artikel: Fritz Pichardo in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
Wat als...de magnetische polen van de aarde zich omdraaien?
Wat als...de magnetische polen van de aarde zich omdraaien?
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Het is in het verleden talloze keren gebeurd en staat ons ook in de toekomst weer te wachten. Maar wanneer en wat voor gevolgen heeft dat?
Het Scientias.nl-archief zit vol met ‘pareltjes’: artikelen waar we trots op zijn, die een interessante discussie hebben losgemaakt of waarin mensen aan het woord komen met een vernieuwende en verrassende kijk op wetenschappelijk gerelateerde kwesties. Het is eigenlijk zonde dat die artikelen naarmate de tijd vordert, wat stoffig worden. En dus stoffen we er zo af en toe eentje af en plaatsen ‘m opnieuw. Dit is zo’n ‘gouwe ouwe’. Enjoy!
2018 was nog maar net begonnen of het aardmagnetisch veld zorgde al voor de nodige beroering. De geomagnetische noordpool verplaatst zich momenteel namelijk opvallend snel richting Siberië. Veel sneller dan onderzoekers verwacht hadden en dus moest het World Magnetic Model – dat het aardmagnetisch veld beschrijft en veranderingen voorspelt – halsoverkop herzien worden. Hoewel al jaren bekend is dat het aardmagnetisch veld aan verandering onderhevig is, weet de geomagnetische noordpool ons dus nog steeds te verrassen. Waar deze zich voor de jaren negentig nog met een snelheid van zo’n 15 kilometer per jaar verplaatste, gaat dat tegenwoordig met een snelheid van zo’n 55 kilometer(!) per jaar. Maar de versnelde verplaatsing van de geomagnetische noordpool is niet de enige trend die onderzoekers kunnen ontwaren. Er zijn ook aanwijzingen dat het aardmagnetisch veld over het algemeen genomen steeds zwakker wordt. En sommige mensen vermoeden dat het de opmaat is naar een tamelijk dramatische verandering: een omkering van de aardmagnetische polen. Maar wat houdt dat precies in? En staat dat echt op korte termijn te gebeuren?
Het aardmagnetisch veld Om die vragen te kunnen beantwoorden, is het handig om eerst eens te kijken naar de manier waarop het aardmagnetisch veld tot stand komt. Het aardmagnetische veld wordt gegeneerd door de kern van onze aarde: een ijzeren bol waarvan het hart vast en de buitenste laag vloeibaar is. Dat vloeibare ijzer in de kern van onze aarde stroomt en creëert elektrische stromingen die op hun beurt weer het magnetisch veld creëren. Zo af en toe keert het magnetisch veld zich om. De magnetische noordpool verandert dan in de magnetische zuidpool en omgekeerd.
HOE WETEN WE DAT?
Hoe weten we dat het magnetisch veld van de aarde zich de afgelopen miljoenen jaren regelmatig heeft omgedraaid? Die kennis hebben we te danken aan sedimenten die zich op de bodem van de oceaan bevinden. Ooit waren deze sedimenten vloeibaar: lava, afkomstig uit de Mid-Atlantische Rug, een plek waar twee continentale platen uit elkaar bewegen. In het vloeibare gesteente zitten magnetische mineralen en deze nemen de richting van het aardmagnetisch veld aan. Wanneer de lava versteent, wordt die richting vereeuwigd. Sedimenten op de bodem van de oceaan kunnen ons dus vertellen welke richting het aardmagnetisch veld op het moment dat de steen tot stand kwam, had. Door verschillende stenen te dateren, kunnen onderzoekers de richting van het aardmagnetisch veld op verschillende momenten in de geschiedenis van onze planeet achterhalen.
In het verleden Volgens wetenschappers is het magnetische veld van de aarde in de lange geschiedenis van onze planeet regelmatig omgekeerd. De laatste twintig miljoen jaar gebeurde het gemiddeld elke 200.000 tot 300.000 jaar. Dat is geen abrupte gebeurtenis: daar zijn honderden zoniet duizenden jaren voor nodig. Het is zeker ook geen vloeiende beweging waarmee de noordpool zuidpool wordt en omgekeerd. Magnetische velden smelten samen, duwen en trekken aan elkaar. Tijdens dit proces kunnen meerdere polen op rare breedtes ontstaan alvorens de noordpool echt zuidpool wordt.
De laatste keer Het omdraaien van het magnetisch veld is eerder regel dan uitzondering. De laatste keer dat het magnetisch veld van de aarde zich omkeerde, was zo’n 780.000 jaar geleden. Men zou – met de kennis dat het magnetisch veld zich gemiddeld elke 300.000 jaar omkeert dan ook verwachten dat ons in de nabije toekomst weer zo’n omkering te wachten staat. Zou het binnenkort dan gaan gebeuren? Niemand weet het. Want een omkering van het magnetisch veld is nu eenmaal niet te voorspellen.
Verandering Wat we wel zeker weten, is dat het magnetisch veld van de aarde aan het veranderen is. Dat is echter niet iets van de laatste tijd, maar een voortdurend proces. Zo vond Roald Amundsen de geomagnetische noordpool in 1904 vijftig kilometer verwijderd van het punt waar James Ross deze in 1831 aantrof. En ook gedurende de twintigste eeuw is deze geomagnetische noordpool aan het schuiven geweest: gemiddeld zo’n tien kilometer per jaar en recent gaat het dus aanzienlijk sneller. En dat is niet de enige manier waarop het magnetisch veld verandert. Ook de kracht ervan fluctueert: zo is deze sinds de negentiende eeuw met zo’n tien procent afgenomen. Sommige mensen denken dat dat erop wijst dat het magnetische veld zich binnenkort omkeert. Bij die voorspelling wordt er echter flink geëxtrapoleerd: als de trend van het afzwakkende magnetische veld doorzet, zou dit over zo’n 1500 jaar resulteren in een dipoolmoment (een kwantitatieve maat om de intensiteit van het magnetisch veld weer te geven) van nul en dan zou het gaan gebeuren. Maar veel wetenschappers willen daar niets van weten. “Het veld neemt de hele tijd in kracht toe en af,” vertelt onderzoeker Gary Glatzmaier. “We weten dit van paleomagnetische studies (onderzoeken zoals beschreven in het kader hierboven, red.).”
Recent onderzoek Recente studies lijken de mening van Glatzmaier te onderschrijven. Zo verscheen in 2017 een onderzoek dat behoorlijk overtuigend aantoonde dat een omkering in ieder geval de komende 4000 jaar waarschijnlijk niet op de agenda staat. En vorig verscheen een interessant onderzoek dat een tweede bewijsstuk dat vaak wordt aangedragen om de voorspelling van een aanstaande omkering van de magnetische polen kracht bij te zetten, onderuit schoffelde. We hebben het dan over de South Atlantic Anomaly. Dit afwijkende gebied – gelegen op het zuidelijk halfrond – wordt vaak aangehaald als tweede aanwijzing dat een omkering van de geomagnetische polen aanstaande is. De South Atlantic Anomaly is namelijk de plek waar het aardmagnetisch veld momenteel het zwakst is. En als klap op de vuurpijl zijn er aanwijzingen dat eerdere omkeringen van het aardmagnetisch veld hier zijn begonnen. Maar het in 2018 verschenen onderzoek stelt dat de South Atlantic Anomaly helemaal niet hoeft te wijzen op een aanstaande omkering van het aardmagnetisch veld. De onderzoekers tonen namelijk aan dat het aardmagnetisch veld aldaar in de afgelopen 50.000 jaar wel vaker net zo zwak was als nu, maar zich elke keer weer hersteld heeft. “Afgaand op onze observaties van de afgelopen 50.000 jaar concluderen we dat de South Atlantic Anomaly niet geïnterpreteerd kan worden als een teken dat de omkering van de polen gaat beginnen,” stelt onderzoeker Monika Korte. Collega Richard Holme voegt toe: “In plaats daarvan suggereert ons onderzoek dat het huidige verzwakte veld zich zal herstellen.”
Doemscenario’s Het is al met al – ondanks de veranderingen die het aardmagnetisch veld ondergaat – dus zeker niet bewezen dat er op korte termijn een omkering van de aardmagnetische polen aan zit te komen. Dat neemt echter niet weg dat het wel interessant is om eens te kijken naar de impact die zo’n omkering kan hebben. Ook daarover doen zich wilde verhalen de ronde. Een mooi voorbeeld is het verhaal dat het magnetisch veld van de aarde tijdens een omkering tijdelijk even helemaal wegvalt. In die periode zou de aarde geen enkele bescherming hebben tegen deeltjes afkomstig van de zon, zonnevlammen en plasmawolken. En zonder die bescherming zou het er slecht uitzien voor het leven op aarde. Het klinkt heel logisch, maar toch klopt er niets van. Het magnetisch veld van de aarde kan inderdaad door de tijd heen sterker en zwakker worden. Maar er is geen enkel bewijs dat het magnetisch veld ooit helemaal weg is geweest. En zelfs al zou het magnetisch veld van de aarde even heel zwak worden, dan is dat nog niet direct een probleem. Wel komt er dan iets meer zonnestraling op aarde, maar we hebben het dan zeker niet over dodelijke hoeveelheden. Bovendien is het goed om te onthouden dat het magnetisch veld niet onze enige bescherming is: ook de atmosfeer houdt veel deeltjes afkomstig van de zon tegen. Overigens is er ook helemaal geen bewijs dat een omkering van het magnetisch veld resulteert in massa-extincties. Uit paleomagnetisch onderzoek weten we immers dat veranderingen in de ontwikkeling van mensachtigen en massa-extincties niet samenvallen met een omkering van het aardmagnetisch veld.
Technologie Wel is er een mogelijkheid dat de omkering van het aardmagnetisch veld het leven op aarde iets lastiger maakt voor ons moderne mensen. Een zwakker magnetisch veld maakt onze elektronica veel kwetsbaarder voor geladen deeltjes afkomstig van de zon. Die deeltjes kunnen zelfs als het aardmagnetisch veld behoorlijk krachtig is, grote schade aanrichten. Dat zagen we bijvoorbeeld tijdens een zonnestorm in 1859 toen telegraafsystemen in Europa en Noord-Amerika niet meer werkten en in 1989 toen een zonnestorm ervoor zorgde dat mensen in Quebec urenlang zonder stroom zaten. Stel je nu voor dat de zon die geladen deeltjes op ons afvuurt, terwijl het magnetisch veld zich omdraait en dus aanzienlijk zwakker is. Je kunt je voorstellen dat het leidt tot grote problemen in onze met technologie gevulde wereld. Satellieten kunnen uitvallen, communicatie- en navigatiesystemen vallen weg, elektriciteitsnetwerken liggen plat… De schade zou in de biljoenen euro’s kunnen lopen. “Hopelijk vindt deze gebeurtenis in de verre toekomst plaats, zodat we de tijd hebben om technologieën te ontwikkelen die de schade kunnen beperken,” aldus professor Andrew Roberts van de Australische Nationale Universiteit, die in 2018 ontdekte dat een omkering van het aardmagnetisch veld soms ook heel snel kan gaan.
Vogels Samenvattend hoeven we dus niet bang te zijn dat het geomagnetisch veld tijdelijk helemaal verdwijnt en het leven op aarde daardoor het veld moet ruimen. Maar het kan dus wel zijn dat we enigszins terug worden geworpen in de tijd. En niet alleen moderne technologieën werken na zo’n omkering wellicht niet langer naar behoren. Ook je kompas is van de leg. Na een omkering stelt het kompas dat de magnetische zuidpool zich in het noorden bevindt. Dat is dus even omschakelen. Hetzelfde geldt voor dieren die een soort ingebouwd kompas hebben en zich met behulp van het aardmagnetisch veld oriënteren op hun omgeving en route. Maar ook dat hoeft geen onoverkomelijk probleem te zijn. Onthoud dat een omkering van het aardmagnetisch veld al snel duizenden jaren in beslag neemt. In die duizenden jaren kunnen onder meer vogels en walvissen zich van generatie op generatie aanpassen aan de verandering die gaande is.
Een omkering van de aardmagnetische polen behoort dus tot de mogelijkheden. Sterker nog: het zou gekker zijn als het niet gebeurde. Maar wanneer? Niemand die het weet. Gelukkig is het ook geen reden om ’s nachts wakker te liggen: wij gaan het waarschijnlijk niet meer meemaken en bovendien heeft de mensheid ongetwijfeld wel eens voor hetere vuren gestaan.
Video of UFO-Like Object Near Greensboro Sparks Online Debate
Video of UFO-Like Object Near Greensboro Sparks Online Debate
GREENSBORO, N.C. -- Folks online are trying to determine the strange object in the skies just outside of Greensboro, captured in a video posted over the weekend.
The video was taken by Bret Jones, who enjoys snapping pictures of birds.
He initially described the object as a strange light in the sky near a plane.
Some people argue it's just a balloon, but Jones says the flashing silver and gold lights make him think otherwise.
The video was taken by Bret Jones, who enjoys snapping pictures of birds, but recently was rolling on something out of the ordinary on Saturday, January 25. He initially described the object as a strange light in the sky near a plane.
"I just saw this flash in the corner of my vision. I look over and there's a plane and I saw the flash again, but it was just near it. I already had my camera strapped to me and I started trying to capture it," he said. "I told my wife I just saw a UFO and she said 'oh yeah, again?' but then I look at the video and scroll and I was just like I have no idea what that is!"
Some people argue it's just a balloon, but Jones says the flashing silver and gold lights make him think otherwise.
"If I see evidence that it's indisputable for me that it would be balloon then yeah I would say it's just a balloon. But after 10 seconds, I couldn't see it in the sky anywhere. Why would a balloon, if it was just twisting around, why wouldn't I see it again," he said.
But what is it? A spaceship? Experimental aircraft? A balloon?
Underwater Extraterrestrials: Declassified Russian Navy Records Say They’re Real!
Underwater Extraterrestrials: Declassified Russian Navy Records Say They’re Real!
Unidentified submerged objects (USOs) are not as famous as UFOs although they are often encountered, according to declassified Russian Navy records. The common trait of all USO phenomena is that they involve unexplained and technologically advanced objects, far superior to anything we’ve ever built.
The recently declassified documents contain Soviet era reports detailing many cases of possible USO encounters. Former naval officer and Russian UFO researcher Vladimir Azhazha believes these documents are of great value. One of the most interesting cases he examined involved a nuclear submarine on a combat mission in the Southern Pacific. During the routine operation, the submarine detected six unknown objects traveling information at speeds in excess of 230 knots (265+ mph). In comparison, the fastest submarine was the Soviet K-222, which reached about 44 knots (51 mph).
The submarine’s sonar determined the objects were heading straight for it so the captain gave the order to surface. The USOs followed them to the surface then flew away. Similar instances have been reported in the region of the Bermuda Triangle, as retired submarine commander Yuri Beketov recalls. Onboard instruments often malfunctioned, indicating the presence of strong interference. Many believe this is a clear sign of USO/UFO presence.
“On several occasions, the instruments gave reading of material objects moving at incredible speed. Calculations showed speeds of about 230 knots or 265 mph. Speeding so fast is a challenge even on the surface. But water resistance is much higher. It was like the objects defied the laws of physics. There’s only one explanation: the creatures who built them far surpass us in development”, said Beketov.
Both UFOs and USOs seem to concentrate wherever military operations occur, indicating their interest in humanity’s military arsenal.
Another USO hotspot is Lake Baikal in Russia. The world’s deepest freshwater lake has always had a certain mysterious nature and fishermen tell tales of lights being spotted in its deep waters. Multiple folk tales describe swimmers being dragged down by creatures lurking beneath Baikal’s calm waves.
Another of the Russian documents described the encounter between a group of military divers and several humanoid beings in silver suits. The divers were training in Lake Baikal at a depth of 150 feet (50 meters) when they came upon a group of unknown creatures. The divers went deeper in the pursuit of the humanoids. Three men were killed, while the other four were severely injured.
Vladimir Azhazha believes the issue should be thoroughly investigated. “I think about underwater bases and say: why not? Nothing should be discarded,” says Azhazha. “Skepticism is the easiest way: believe nothing, do nothing. People rarely visit great depths. So it’s very important to analyze what they encounter there.”
The Link Between Pharaohs and ETs – The Alien Artifacts Discovered in Jerusalem! (2019)
The Link Between Pharaohs and ETs – The Alien Artifacts Discovered in Jerusalem! (2019)
The Link Between Pharaohs and ETs – The Alien Artifacts Discovered in Jerusalem!
The discovery of several remarkable relics could change the way we perceive ancient history. The artifacts were allegedly discovered in a former house belonging to Sir William Petrie, hidden in a secret chamber behind a bookshelf. A pioneer archaeologist, Sir Petrie excavated many of the most important ancient Egyptian archaeological sites.
His most famous findings are housed in the Petrie Museum in London but it seems he kept his most important ones to himself. It is believed he found them inside a secret chamber inside the Great Pyramid in Giza.
Among the many items found in the secret room were two small mummified bodies with long, slender arms and elongated heads with large eye sockets. Could these be the remains of extraterrestrial beings?
Another interesting relic was a disk-shaped gold object the size of a small plate. The object had a transparent top and an intricate mechanism inside. Unknown symbols were etched into its sides and they do not appear to be Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Last but not least and perhaps the most shocking is an item similar to a pharaoh mask. However, instead of the typical human face we might expect on such an item, this mask features a head that is identical to what we call ‘gray aliens’. The left side of the mask contains symbols that could very well be depicting alien encounters and what appears to be a spaceship.
Could these relics be the sought-after connection between the ancient Egyptians and an alien civilization? Strangely enough, Petrie mysteriously abandoned his efforts in Egypt and spent the remainder of his days excavating sites in Palestine. Perhaps he had uncovered clues that led him there.
It’s higly unlikely we’ll ever see these relics again as sources claim that shortly after their discovery, the artifacts were supposedly taken by representatives of the Rockefeller Museum.
Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab
Earth's north magnetic pole is so out of whack that scientists need to update the global magnetic-field model they released only four years ago. Could that be a sign that themagnetic pole will flipsoon?
The World Magnetic Model (WMM) — the name of the updated representation of the magnetic field of Earth — is expected to be released no earlier than Jan. 30. That's about two weeks later than planned, with the delay due to the government shutdown, according to a report in Nature.
The magnetic pole is moving erratically out of the Canadian Arctic and toward Siberia so unpredictably that it took scientists by surprise. That 2015 update was supposed to remain valid until 2020, Arnaud Chulliat, a geomagnetist at the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information, told Nature. [Earth's Colorful Atmospheric Layers Photographed from Space]
It's no news that the pole is moving; long-term records from London and Paris (kept since 1580) show that the north magnetic pole moves erratically around the rotational north pole over periods of a few hundred years or longer, Ciaran Beggan, a geophysicist with the British Geological Survey who is involved in WMM updates, told Space.com in an email. He cited a 1981 study from the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.
But what's really catching attention is the acceleration in movement. Around the mid-1990s, the pole suddenly sped up its movements from just over 9 miles (15 kilometers) a year to 34 miles (55 kilometers) annually. As of last year, the pole careened over the international date line toward the Eastern Hemisphere.
The chief cause of the movement comes from the Earth's liquid-iron outer core, which is also called the "core field." Smaller factors also affect the movement. Those influences include magnetic minerals in the crust and upper mantle (especially for local magnetic fields) and electric currents created by seawater moving through an "ambient magnetic field," according to the 2015 report of the WMM.
"One of the reasons we can update the map is that the European Space Agency launched a set of highly accurate magnetic-field satellites in 2013," said Beggan, referring to Swarm.
"We have a superb data set from which we can make very good magnetic-field maps and update them every six to 12 months," Beggan added. "We noticed that the specification of the WMM was not being met in the high-latitude region around the pole, as the error exceeded 1 degree of grid angle on average. This triggered us to examine whether it was worth issuing a new update."
Earth's magnetic field could flip sooner than expected
Flipping out
What's more, the core field appears to be weakening — which may be a sign that the planet's magnetic field will flip. To better understand how that would happen, here's how the core field works, according to Ronald Merrill, an emeritus professor of Earth and space sciences at the University of Washington, who spoke to Space.com's sister site Live Science.
One easy way to imagine the field is to think of a bar magnet that runs through Earth's center and has a north pole and a south pole, said Merrill, who was not involved in the new WMM research. That magnet is strong, representing roughly 75 percent of the intensity of Earth's magnetic field at the surface.
Of course, a bar magnet is not a perfect representation — it's actually electric currents that generate the Earth's magnetic field — but the model makes it easier to imagine what's happening to Earth, Merrill added. Specifically, the "bar magnet" is not only moving, but also getting weaker, by roughly 7 percent every 100 years.
As for the other 25 percent of the magnetic field, Merrill said that's generated from another field, which you can picture as another moving bar magnet. Here's an interesting bit: As the central bar magnet loses intensity, this second, weaker magnetic field generates more influence on Earth's global magnetism. "And that's what's causing this field to move in the direction [of Siberia]," Merrill told Live Science.
Earth's north and south poles periodically swap locations, with the last flip happening about 780,000 years ago. (The poles also weakened temporarily and rapidly about 41,000 years ago, Beggan added, but never underwent a full flip.)) A 2018 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggested that Earth's magnetic field got weaker before the big changeover.
While any magnetic-field flip would still be thousands of years away, the effects could be profound on technology, if similar to today’s technology. This is because the weaker magnetic field would be somewhat poorer at shielding Earth against the solar wind (the constant stream of charged particles emanating from the sun) and cosmic rays (blasts of radiation from deep space). Magnetic compasses would not be as accurate, and satellites that monitor the weather or carry telecommunications signals could be disrupted, said Monika Korte, head of GFZ Potsdam's working group on geomagnetic field evolution in Germany.
"Regarding increased radiation, that would go along with decreased shielding, [but] it seems that the atmosphere would still provide sufficient shielding at Earth's surface that humans and animals would not be significantly affected," she told Space.com in an email.
"However, all the effects we currently only see during strong solar/geomagnetic storms would likely increase and occur ... during moderate solar activity," she added. "This includes satellite outages or damage to satellites, increased radiation doses on long-distance aircraft and the ISS [International Space Station], [and] distortions of telecommunication and GPS signals."
Ongoing monitoring of the Earth's geomagnetic field (which includes the pole) will continue after the WMM release, principally through the European Space Agency Swarm mission, Korte said. But she noted that measuring the north magnetic pole's position is a challenge. That's because the pole is located in a remote area and the measurement of Earth's magnetic field is influenced by all magnetic-field sources — including the magnetic fields found in Earth's atmosphere (the ionosphere and magnetosphere).
"It will depend on the future magnetic field change, which we cannot predict, if another update to the model out of the usual schedule might be required," she added.
The next update to the WMM after this year's is expected early in 2020, Beggan said. You can read more about the WMM here.
NASA's Parker Solar Probe has completed its first full orbit around the sun.
7Credit: Steve Gribben/NASA/Johns Hopkins APL
NASA's Parker Solar Probe has completed its first loop around the sun and entered the second of 24 planned orbits.
The spacecraft launched on Aug. 12, 2018, andsurvived its first close flybyof the sun on Nov. 5 of last year, when it swooped within 15 million miles (24 million kilometers) of the star. As of Jan. 19, the probe has reached its farthest distance from the sun, called aphelion, before it goes in for another close pass on April 4.
"It's been an illuminating and fascinating first orbit," Andy Driesman, Parker Solar Probe project manager and a researcher at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab in Maryland, which built and manages the project, said in the statement. "We've learned a lot about how the spacecraft operates and reacts to the solar environment, and I'm proud to say the team's projections have been very accurate."
"We've always said that we don't know what to expect until we look at the data," added Nour Raouafi, a project scientist on the probe who's also at APL. "The data we have received hints at many new things that we've not seen before and at potential new discoveries. Parker Solar Probe is delivering on the mission's promise of revealing the mysteries of our sun."
The spacecraft's first approach broke distance records; humanity's previous record-holder for a close approach to the sun, Helios 2, dove to about twice Parker Solar Probe's distance from the star in 1976. Parker also busted speed records, blazing by at 213,200 mph (343,112 km/h) relative to the sun.
On its second pass, the spacecraft will fly by at a similar distance, but in future orbits, it will break its own records, getting closer and closer to the sun. By its final planned flyby, in late 2025, the spacecraft will dive within just 3.83 million miles (6.16 million km) of the sun, accelerated by the star's gravity to nearly 430,000 mph (690,000 km/h).
Data about the Parker Solar Probe as of Jan. 19, 2019, when it completed its first orbit of the sun.
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL
But for now, preparing for the spacecraft's second flyby, engineers are remotely emptying the probe of data that has already been transmitted to Earth. They're also sending updated position and navigation information, plus about a month's worth of command instructions, NASA officials said in the statement.
During Parker Solar Probe's 24 total flybys, its four instruments will help researchers understand the inner workings of the sun and how it accelerates solar material at high speeds, as well as what makes the star's outer atmosphere, called the corona, so much hotter than the solar surface.
Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains.
A scientist explains one of the most mind-blowing ideas in physics in under 5 minutes.
Matthew Headrick, an assistant professor of physics at Brandeis University, works on one of the most cutting-edge theories in theoretical physics —the holographic principle. It holds that the universe is a three-dimensional image projected off a two-dimensional surface, much like a hologram emerges from a sheet of photographic film.
It turns out that this idea of the holographic principle or the universe is a hologram … actually helps us to solve some of the thorniest puzzles that arise when you try to combine quantum mechanics and general relativity.
As theoretical physicists, we’re not satisfied to have two different theories. We need one, unified theory which encompasses both, and that’s a very hard problem.
There’s a step-by-step breakdown of the holographic principle here.
Since 2016, Headrick has served as deputy director of the It from Qubit: Quantum Fields, Gravity and Information project, an international effort by 18 scientists and their labs to determine whether the holographic principle is correct.
Third Snowy Pyramid Recently Discovered in Antarctica Could Rewrite History
Third Snowy Pyramid Recently Discovered in Antarctica Could Rewrite History
If you need a good vantage point, you need good eyes and altitude. Satellites have both.
The latest in a group of three snow-covered pyramids was recently discovered through Google Earth satellite imagery and in a few days, the finding has taken the alternative history communities by storm.
Two of the pyramids can be found approximately 10 miles inland while the third rests near the coastline.
The implications of this discovery are complex and if accepted, it could turn the scientific world on its head. No history book ever mentioned an Antarctic civilization with the skills and technology necessary to erect enormous pyramids.
There is one apparent reason behind this situation and by the looks of it, it would suggest tech-savvy civilizations existed on Earth a long time before our own emerged.
Antarctica is now a frozen wasteland but it wasn’t always like this. It got to its current position through plate tectonics, inching closer to the geographic South Pole year after year.
Millions of years ago, Antarctica’s climate was much warmer because its position was closer to the equator. This is established fact backed up by several accepted discoveries, not some wild speculation.
Some years ago, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) uncovered evidence that the antarctic climate was much different in the distant past.
“Go back 100 million years ago,” BAS’s Dr. Vanessa Bowman said “and Antarctica was covered in lush rainforests similar to those that exist in New Zealand today.”
Another expedition – led by NASA and involving 11 other scientific organizations– discovered out-of-place microbial life forms in the depths of Antarctica’s Lake Vida, trapped under a sheet of ice 65 feet thick.
The microbial colonies had been prospering in isolation for millions of years and scientists believe they are the descendants of microorganisms that lived in a much warmer climate.
Who knows what other enigmas lay buried in ice, hopelessly waiting to be revealed.
The resemblance is unsettling
Even with today’s technology, building structures as massive as the pyramids of Antarctica would be nearly impossible. There are simply too many problems relating to manpower and the logistics required for such a project.
If building these mysterious monuments were to be a viable venture, it must have taken place in the past, when Antarctica was a favorable place for human life.
And this opens up a king-sized can of worms. The continent was habitable only in the very distant past, but mainstream science says the wheel wasn’t invented until some 6,000 years ago.
At the same time, anatomically-modern humans are said to have mastered fire only 125,000 years ago. So where do these controversial pyramids fit in?
Are they evidence of an ancient advanced civilization or do we need to stretch our imagination even further and regard them as proof of time travel? The mind boggles when we remain attached to our outdated beliefs.
Two more possible pyramids in Antarctica
Proponents of alternative history and fans of the ancient aliens hypothesis have no problem in accepting the parallel reality generated by such discoveries.
It’s not hard to see and accept that we aren’t the first and though it may seem this way, we probably won’t be the last.
Thousands of years after they were built, we are still fascinated by the Egyptian pyramids.
The monuments left behind by their society have stood the test of time and in more than one way, they’ve granted their builders immortality.
Keeping that in mind, what could be said about pyramids that are millions of years old? Does that put our own lives into perspective and make us see the bigger picture?
Als er buitenaardsen op aarde zijn, waar zouden ze verblijven?
Als er buitenaardsen op aarde zijn, waar zouden ze verblijven?
Als er buitenaardsen op aarde zijn, al sinds mensenheugenis, wat zou dan de beste locatie voor hen zijn om zich gedurende tijden ongezien te vestigen? Natuurlijk is dat Antarctica, duizenden en duizenden jaren was er geen mens die daar ooit kwam. Antarctica steunt, anders dan de Noordpool, op solide rotsgrond, het drijft dus niet op water. Al lange tijd worden vreemde constructies op Antarctica gezien en de getuigenissen van UFO’s boven dat continent zijn ook talrijk.
Natuurlijk wordt dit allemaal door de gevestigde orde afgedaan als een complottheorie, maar er komen al tientallen jaren klokkenluiders naar voren die vertellen dat Antarctica veel meer herbergt dan uitsluitend sneeuw en ijs.
Misschien is het van een antieke menselijke beschaving die ooit op aarde leefde, ook in onze menselijke geschiedenis zitten grote gaten. De wetenschap zegt wel dat ze alles in kaart hebben gebracht, maar negeert al tientallen jaren het bewijs dat hoogstaande beschavingen hebben achtergelaten in de vorm van bouwwerken zo precies gebouwd en met talloze blokken graniet of basalt van tientallen tonnen (soms zelfs duizenden tonnen!) en dat onomstotelijk aantoont dat de mens van een paar duizend jaar geleden die bouwwerken niet gemaakt kan hebben, niet alleen vanwege het gewicht van de bouwblokken, maar al helemaal niet met het gereedschap van hooguit brons dat ze hadden.
De originele video van Linda Moulton Howe waaruit dit segment afkomstig is, is meer dan een uur lang. Voor meer informatie over Antarctica en wat daar gaande is, hier de link naar de volledige video: https://youtu.be/-zJW7W75Dyw
Al vele jaren vragen wij ons af wat er verborgen ligt onder het ijs en de sneeuw op Antarctica, de Zuidpool van de aarde. De Nazi’s hadden grote belangstelling voor dat continent en hebben er naar verluidt een eigen basis gevestigd genaamd Neu Schwabenland:
Voor buitenaardsen is Antarctica qua locatie om verborgen te blijven voor menselijke waarneming gelijk aan de achterkant van de Maan. Ook over die Maanlocatie beweren overheidsklokkenluiders dat er talloze constructies staan die op gebouwen wijzen en die daar duidelijk niet door de mens zijn geplaatst. De kans dat buitenaardsen op de achterkant van de Maan ontdekt zouden worden, was pas aanwezig toen de mens technisch gezien dichter bij hen kwam te staan en ruimtereizen kon maken.
Dan nog is de achterstand in kennis en techniek gigantisch groot, maar ook daar zullen de eventuele buitenaardsen wel een oplossing voor hebben en mochten ze ons niet vertrouwen (niet zo gek met onze oorlogszuchtigheid) dan zullen ze er beslist voor zorgen dat we niet te dichtbij komen, hetzij via bedreigingen aan enkele regeringsleiders, of het aanbieden aan hen van wat verouderde buitenaardse techniek en kennis in ruil voor het wegblijven van de Maan of Antarctica of in ieder geval van bepaalde locaties aldaar. En luisteren deze aardse machthebbers niet, dan desnoods maar het uit de lucht/ruimte halen van onze vliegtuigen en ruimteschepen.
Was Saturn the Sun in ancient times? Or seen in our ancient skies as a Sun like object?
The Saturn Theoryand the Thunderbolts Electric Universe theory suggest that Saturn may have been our first Sun or was at least associated as a Sun. Other EU theory variations may also suggest this.
The Sun and Saturn are two very different celestial objects. Yet the Babylonians appeared to 'confuse' the two... or was it just the translators of the Babylonian texts?
Thompson in his introduction to his collection of astrological reports has noticed that the planet Saturn was also designated as Šamaš, i.e. "sun" by the Babylonian-Assyrian astrologers and he quotes the statement of Hyginus to the effect that Saturn was called "the star of the sun". Sun and Saturn | Catastrophism
Was Saturn the original Sun?
Was ancient Saturn known as Sol, Kronos, Helios, Quetzalcoatl, Huracan, Atum-Ra etc?
Or should those identities be attributed to another planet, plasma event or the actual Sun in our skies?
And yet the profile of the great "sun" gods presents a fascinating dilemma. During the past century several authorities noticed that Greek and Latin astronomical texts show a mysterious confusion of the "Sun" — Greek Helios, Latin Sol — with the outermost planet, Saturn. Though the designation seems bizarre, the expression "star of Helios" or "star of Sol" was applied to Saturn! Of the Babylonian star-worshippers the chronicler Diodorus writes: "To the one we call Saturn they give a special name, 'Sun-Star.'"
Similarly, the Greek historian Nonnus gives Kronos as the Arab name of the "sun," though Kronos meant only Saturn and no other celestial body. Hyginus, in listing the planets, names first Jupiter, then the planet "of Sol, others say of Saturn." A Greek ostrakon, cited by the eminent classicist, Franz Boll, identifies the Egyptian sun god Ra, not with our sun, but with the planet Saturn. This repeated confusion of the Sun and Saturn seems to make no sense at all. Can you imagine any difficulty in separating the two bodies, or distinguishing the one from the other?
One fact beyond dispute is that the word Helios did become the Greek word for our Sun, just as the Latin Sol gave his name to our Sun. The same can be said for the older Shamash and Ra: the names of these gods became the names for the solar orb. But that's where the connection with our Sun ends and the mystery of Saturn, the Universal Monarch, begins. Saturn: the Ancient Sun God | David Talbott
Or is the Sun we see in our skies the same Sun that has always been there?
As strange as it may seem, early astronomical traditions identify the "primeval sun" as the planet Saturn, the distant planet which the alchemists called the "best sun" and which the Babylonians, the founders of astronomy, identified as the exemplary light of heaven, the "sun"-god Shamash. ("Shamash is the planet Saturn", the astronomical texts say.) In archaic copies of Plato's Timaeus, the word for the planet Saturn is Helios, the "sun" god. Popular Greek traditions identified Saturn as Kronos, alter ego of Helios, and Kronos is said to have ruled "over the pole". But only a handful of scholars have bothered to trace the parallel referents in other cultures, or to address the unanswered questions. Saturn in Ancient Times | thunderbolts TPOD
The Popol Vuh, lauded as the "Mayan Bible," attests to the same idea. There a previous sun god is described as follows: "Like a man was the sun when it showed itself…It showed itself when it was born and remained fixed in the sky like a mirror. Certainly it was not the same sun which we see, it is said in their old tales. The Saturn Myth | Maverick Science
A golden race of mortal men who lived in the time of Kronos when he was reigning in heaven. And they lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil: miserable age rested not on them Works and Days - Hesiod | The Velikovsky Archive
Peoples that remembered early tragedies enacted in the sky by the heavenly bodies asserted that Jupiter drove Saturn away from its place in the sky. Before Jupiter (Zeus) became the chief god, Saturn (Kronos) occupied the celestial throne. In all ancient religions the dominion passes from Saturn to Jupiter. In Greek mythology, Kronos is presented as the father and Zeus as his son who dethrones him. Kronos devours some of his children. After this act Zeus overpowers his father, puts him in chains, and drives him from his royal station in the sky. In Egyptian folklore or religion the participants of the drama are said to be Osiris-Saturn, brother and husband of Isis-Jupiter. The Worship of Saturn - In The Beginning | Immanuel Velikovsky
Here is a remarkable fact: though numerous figures of the Universal Monarch are translated conventionally as the "sun" god, the celestial power invoked by the world's first religions is not the body we call [the] sun today. In fact the star-worshippers specifically distinguished it from our Sun by calling it best sun, the primeval sun, the central sun.
Natives of Mexico recall that prior to the present age, an exemplary sun ruled the world, but this was not the sun of today. His name was Quetzalcoatl. The Maya maintained essentially the same idea, calling the primeval sun god Huracan. The Incas of Peru spoke of a former sun superior to the present sun. To the ancient Egyptians, the sun god Atum-Ra, the model ruler, reigned over the fortunate era for a time, then retired from the world. The Sumerian An, ruling with "terrifying splendor," was the central luminary of the sky, but not our sun, and later departed to a more remote domain.
When it comes to the well-known sun gods of early man, nothing in the mythical record seems to have unnerved the experts. As to the original solar character of the Greek Helios, Latin Sol, Assyrian Shamash, or Egyptian Ra, scholars have maintained an unwavering confidence. And surely you can see why: could it really be doubted that Helios, radiating light from his brow, is our sun? Saturn: the Ancient Sun God | David Talbott
Saturn did not move on its present remote orbit, but ruled as the central sun around which the other heavenly bodies visually revolved. The Saturn Myth | David Talbott
the words used by ancient civilizations that are interpreted today as “the Sun” – like the Egyptian “Ra”, the Greek “Helios”, and the Roman “Sol” – all originally referred to the gas giant Saturn! Was that planet our primordial parent? Was Saturn until recently a much larger brown dwarf? (The apparent size and color of an electric star is an electrical phenomenon. If Jupiter’s magnetosphere were lit up it would appear the size of the full Moon). Was ancient man around to see it as a sun? If not, why would anyone call a faint yellowish speck in the night sky – the Sun? Other stars, other worlds, other life? | Holoscience
Chronos was confused with, or perhaps consciously identified with, due to the similarity in name, the Titan Cronus already in antiquity, the identification becoming more widespread during the Renaissance, giving rise to the allegory of "Father Time" wielding the harvesting scythe. He was depicted in Greco-Roman mosaics as a man turning the Zodiac Wheel. Chronos, however, might also be contrasted with the deity Aion as Eternal Time. Chronos is usually portrayed through an old, wise man with a long, grey beard, such as "Father Time".
... In Greek mythology, Chronos in pre-Socratic philosophical works is said to be the personification of time. He emerged from the primordial Chaos. He is often mythologically confused with the Titan Cronus. He was depicted in Greco-Roman mosaics as a man turning the zodiac wheel. Often the figure is named Aeon (Eternal Time), a common alternate name for the god. His name actually means "Time", and is alternatively spelled Khronos (transliteration of the Greek), Chronos, Chronus (Latin version). Saturn in Mythology | Crystalinks
Saturn was named after the Roman god of agriculture and harvest. While the planet may have gotten its name from its golden color, like a field of wheat, it also had to do with its position in the sky. According to mythology, the god Saturn stole the position of king of the gods from his father Uranus. The throne was then stolen by Jupiter. Mythology of the Planets | Universe Today
The Cheonjiwang Bonpuri (Chronicles of Cheonjiwang) is a Korean creation myth, traditionally retold by shamans on the small island of Jejudo ... Despite its title, the supreme deity Cheonjiwang, whose name means "King of the Heavens and the Earth", serves mainly as a secondary character ... The protagonists of the myth are instead the two sons of Cheonjiwang, Great Star and Small Star. Cheonjiwang Bonpuri | Wikipedia
Nova Saturn or Jupiter as the Sun?
Or nova Jupiter as primordial Sun or a 'temporary star'?
Now, even though Velikovsky points out that Saturn was once a much more massive body than it is today, it is hard to imagine that it could have been massive enough to be a star in the context of the thermonuclear theory of stellar energy. If, however, it was an electrically fuelled star, its initial stellar state and its sudden demise seem readily explainable. Ralph Juergens- Earth as a satellite of Saturn | The Velikovsky Archive
New Dulce Base Documentary 2019 What Really Happens Deep Underground is Astounding
New Dulce Base Documentary 2019 What Really Happens Deep Underground is Astounding
Located almost two miles beneath Archuleta Mesa on the Jicarilla Apache Indian Reservation near Dulce, New Mexico was an installation classified so secret, its existence would be one of the most protected realities in the world.
Here we will look at the Secret Space Program: the ships of the Deep Space Fleet; interstellar/interspecies treaty conferences on Earth; non-human species who work with the military; Mark Richards’ training with the Raptor Imperial Fleet; and, various missions on-and-off Earth to defend humanity.
Jo Ann speaks about her knowledge of operations and secret meetings that these men were involved with. She shares information about numerous alien species, the secret space fleet, and battles with aliens on- and off-world.
In het westen van Cuba is gisteren een meteoriet ingeslagen. Dat melden lokale media. De inslag veroorzaakte een luide explosie, die te horen was in verscheidene gemeenten in de provincie Pinar del Río, zegt een specialist van het Nationaal Instituut voor Geofysica en Astronomie Efrén Jaimez Salgado.
Vele Cubanen deelden op sociale netwerken beelden en video’s van de meteoriet. Die stortte neer rond 14 uur lokale tijd - dat is 18 uur in België - en ging gepaard met een lichtflits. Journalisten van de lokale tv-zender Tele Pinar publiceerden foto’s waarop zwarte rotsen te zien zijn, een vuist groot, die gevallen zijn in Viñales, een stad die ook bij toeristen erg in trek is en bekend is om zijn tabaksplantages.
De verraste bewoners trokken de straat op, getuigde lokale mandataris Osmany Moseguí. Volgens hem raakte niemand gewond. Mosequí zegt dat de grootste steen “20 tot 30 centimeter” groot was. Hij liet “zijn sporen” na op een weg naar een van de toeristische attracties van de stad.
“We hebben te maken met een meteoriet van het rotsachtige type, met een legering van ijzer en nikkel. Ze bevat ook een grote hoeveelheid magnesiumsilicaat”, zegt expert Efrén Jaimez Salgado.
De meteoriet liet een spoor achter in de lucht, zo is te zien op beelden op sociale media. De Amerikaanse National Weather Service bevestigde ook dat er een meteoriet was gezien in de lucht boven de Keys in Florida. Die liggen niet ver van Cuba.
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UFO Fleet Over China Office Building On Jan 10, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Fleet Over China Office Building On Jan 10, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: January 10, 2019 Location of sighting: China This video was taken in China last wee and shows not one, but three UFO or more flying over a persons office building. There is no country that UFOs exclusively fly over. They are everywhere and they are big and some are as small as baseballs. This is a very though provoking video. Even the eyewitness didn't see the other UFOs. Scott C. Waring-Taiwan
Fast Moving White UFO Over Perth, Western Australia On Jan 10, 2019, VIDEO, UFO Sighting News.
Fast Moving White UFO Over Perth, Western Australia On Jan 10, 2019, VIDEO, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: January 10, 2019 Location of sighting: Perth Western Australia Wow, did you see how fast this object was moving in the video below? I thought, this has to be a balloon, but its moving way too fast. I also have never seen this shape before for an RC drone. This is great day time footage. It doesn't have a string, but does have a thick tube hanging down. Its moving so smoothly, so controlled, defiantly intelligently controlled craft. Australias outback is notorious for its UFO sightings at all hours of the day. It looks like this is more proof that alien underground bases exist in the Australian outback. Scott C. Waring
Multiple UFOs Sighted Over Okanagan Lake, Canada ( January 11, 2019 ) Video, UFO Sighting News.
Multiple UFOs Sighted Over Okanagan Lake, Canada ( January 11, 2019 ) Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: January 11, 2019
Location of sighting: Okanagan Lake, BC, Canada
This is just a amazing. This footage shows numerous white UFO flying over a lake in Canada. At first I thought they could be geese, but they are flying about 200-400 miles per hour...like a piper cub single engine plane, but these have no wings, no tail. Defiantly not balloons, unless they are in a hurricane, which they are not. Instead they look like thick white disks that are following each other. They come close to another, then shoot away. They do not fly in formation like geese or birds. From the evidence here, I can safely say that this is a fleet of UFOs, actual alien craft.
Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
Over Kelowna, BC on 7th Jan '19 - video from at least 3kms away. Captured with Pentax K50 with 105mm zoom.
China'sChang'e 4 lander and roverare in good shape following a cold spell on the moon. They were put to sleep as night fell roughly two weeks ago at the mission's Von Kármán Crater landing site.
The China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced on Thursday (Jan. 31) that thelander and roverboth survived their first trial by ice. The rover, Yutu 2 ("Jade Rabbit 2"), woke up at about 7:00 a.m. EST (8:00 p.m. China time) Tuesday (Jan. 29), and the lander followed suit 24 hours later, CNSA officials said.
China's Chang'e 4 farside moon lander, photographed by the mission's rover, Yutu 2.
Credit: CNSA/CLEP
CNSA officials also noted that communication and data transmission between mission control on Earth and the farside hardware via the relay satellite Queqiao ("Magpie Bridge") are stable.
Both the lander and the rover came out of dormant mode automatically, waking up after noting the elevation angle of the sunlight now available at Von Kármán Crater, which is part of the huge South Pole-Aitken Basin. Furthermore, key instruments have started to work again, mission officials said.
Presently, the rover is located about 60 feet (18 meters) northwest of the lander.
Farside temps
The Yutu 2 rover rolls away from the Chang'e 4 lander shortly after the mission's historic Jan. 3 touchdown on the moon's far side.
Credit: CNSA/CLEP
"According to the measurements of Chang'e 4, the temperature of the shallow layer of the lunar soil on the far side of the moon is lower than the data obtained by the U.S. Apollo mission on the near side of the moon," said Zhang He, executive director of the Chang'e 4 probe project, from the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), according to China's state-run Xinhua news agency.
"That's probably due to the difference in lunar soil composition between the two sides of the moon. We still need more careful analysis," Zhang added.
Chang'e 4's landing zone on the moon's far side, photographed by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
The lander and rover are outfitted with a radioisotope heat source.
The lander also carries an isotope thermoelectric cell and dozens of temperature data collectors to measure the temperatures on the surface of the moon during the lunar night, the Xinhua story notes.
This gear's data reveal that the lander experienced temperatures as low as minus 310 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 190 degrees Celsius) during its first lunar night, China's Global Television Network (CGTN) reported.
The huge UFO sighted on the coast of San Clemente arrives in Mexico and stops on Tijuana (Video)
The huge UFO sighted on the coast of San Clemente arrives in Mexico and stops on Tijuana(Video)
On January 25th, a huge UFO was seen passing on the coast line of the city of San Clemente, California, United States, to the south. On the same day, a Mexican citizen named Gerardo Choko Trompetas who resides in the city of Tijuana, Mexico, has seen an enormous object almost identical to that seen in San Clemente. We recall that Tijuana (Mexico) borders the United States and is only 123 km from San Clemente, where the cigar-shaped UFO was first seen.
The Tijuana witness has published on his Facebook channel the video of the object hovering above the sky of his city, filmed with his mobile phone.
Apparently, this would be the same object, since the distance between the two cities is very short, and the object spotted in the United States was going south. Ufologists who are investigating this sighting have ruled out that it could be a conventional aircraft. It can not be a helicopter or an airship, since it changed shape and had no wings or propellers. In the images below you can also see a small bright object passing near the UFO still on Tijuana.
The UFO has stationed for many minutes on Tijuana, exactly in the vicinity of the international airport, putting at risk the flights. Below is a video of the sighting in Tijuana, Mexico!
In de provincie Minya, ten zuiden van Cairo, zijn een reeks grafkamers gevonden met veel mummies. Dat heeft de Eyptische secretaris-generaal van de Hoge Raad voor de Oudheid gezegd. Volgens Mostafa Waziri dateren de sites mogelijk uit de Ptolemaïsche, vroeg-Romeinse en Byzantijnse periodes.
De mummies zijn van zowel mannen, vrouwen als kinderen, aldus het ministerie van Oudheden. “Ze verkeren stuk voor stuk in goede staat. Sommige zijn in linnen gewikkeld of gedecoreerd met Demotisch handschrift. Het Demotisch kwam op omstreeks 600 voor Christus als vervanger van het hiëratisch schrift.
AP
De jongste maanden heeft Egypte herhaaldelijk “grote archeologische vondsten” gemeld. Die vallen samen met verwoede pogingen van Cairo om opnieuw een toeristische trekpleister te worden. Sinds de opstand in 2011 tegen dictator Hosni Moebarak heeft het toerisme naar Egypte een flinke knauw gekregen.
A video uploaded to YouTube channel Gagare1952 shows FOUR separate UFO sightings over the course of a month hovering over one of the world’s most powerful volcanos. In the video, bright lights can be seen hovering above Yellowstone, and clouds which move too quickly to seem natural aren also present on another occasion. The footage was shot by an employee at the national park who sent it to his friend.
The original uploader of the video said: “My friend Shawn from the National Park In Yellowstone recorded live with his camcorder. Not one but four types of UFOs hovering the supervolcano in the caldera area.”
The Yellowstone National Park has long been a hotspot for alien enthusiasts, with sightings regularly reported there.
In late 2016, a sighting of a small drone-like object went viral when it was seen hovering above the supervolcano.
Jeanetta Foresta uploaded a video of the sighting under the heading "Things are flying all over - overnight".
One of the UFOs
(Image: YOUTUBE)
She posted: "There were more than four at the beginning and this is overnight so there is no sun to reflect off of a plane.”
Famed UFO blogger Scott C Waring picked up on the video on his website UFO Sightings Daily.
He wrote: "Here we have several glowing orbs moving about over Yellowstone and this is the same area as Old Faithful, which could of course attract alien tourists as well as humans.
"Why wouldn't aliens be interested in the Earths natural wonders?
Four UFO sightings at Yellowstone supervolcano spark claims of 'alien tourists'
(Image: GETTY)
"The movement is proof its not Venus or a hot air balloon. If you knew the truth about the abundance of alien ships, craft and species around us every day, it would blow your mind.”
Yellowstone has also piqued the interest of many around the globe over fears that it could soon erupt.
The Yellowstone Caldera supervolcano last erupted 70,000 years ago but a spike in seismic activity around the national park has unsettled nerves.
If the Wyoming volcano were to erupt it would kill an estimated 87,000 people immediately and make two-thirds of the USA immediately uninhabitable.
"Here we have several glowing orbs moving about over Yellowstone"
(Image: YOUTUBE)
The large spew of ash into the atmosphere would block out sunlight and directly affect life beneath it creating a “nuclear winter”.
The massive eruption could be a staggering 6,000 times as powerful as the one from Washington’s Mount St Helens in 1980 which killed 57 people and deposited ash in 11 different states and five Canadian provinces.
If the volcano explodes, a climate shift would ensue as the volcano would spew massive amounts of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, which can form a sulphur aerosol that reflects and absorbs sunlight.
Declassified documents reveal the Pentagon investigated UFOs
Declassified documents reveal the Pentagon investigated UFOs
By Chris Ciaccia, Fox News
Shutterstock; YouTube
Newly declassified documents from the Pentagon revealed the Department of Defense funded projects that investigated UFOs, wormholes, alternate dimensions and a host of other subjects that are often the topics of conspiracy theorists.
The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) released 38 research titles on Jan. 18, following a Freedom of Information Act request from Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. The research was funded by the Department of Defense under its Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).
Some of the more interesting projects include Invisibility Cloaking; Traversable Wormholes, Stargates and Negative Energy; Warp Drive, Dark Energy and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions; and An Introduction to the Statistical Drake Equation.
“The DOD and the DIA have previously sought to spin AATIP as being a program looking at ‘foreign advanced aerospace weapon threats,’ but the attachment to the DIA’s letter to Congress is difficult to reconcile with this, given that the ‘products produced’ under the AATIP contract are listed as including reference papers on topics which seem more concerned with space travel,” Nick Pope, a former employee at the British Government’s Ministry of Defence, said in comments obtained by Fox News.
Pope continued: “The smoking gun is the paper about the Drake Equation, which is used to estimate the number of civilizations in the universe. This supports the suggestion that AATIP was indeed a UFO program, as has been claimed and not an aviation program looking at aircraft, drones and missiles.”
The Drake Equation is a seven-term equation that attempts to look at the different variables that would be relevant for intelligent lifeforms. This includes factors such as formed stars and their planets, the average number of planets that can potentially support life. Other factors include a fraction of those planets that can develop life and a fraction of these civilizations that have become intelligent.
Some of the projects give details such as who was working on them — Dr. Eric Davis of EarthTech International participated in the wormhole project, for instance — but others are left with scant details.
The project titled “Metallic Glasses” says Dr. Todd Hufnagel from Johns Hopkins University worked on the research, but it could mean anything.
“I think anyone who looks at these titles will scratch their heads and wonder what on Earth the Defense Intelligence Agency was thinking,” Aftergood said in an interview with MotherBoard. “These are the kinds of topics you pursue when you have more money than you know what to do with.”
The existence of AATIP initially was described by the New York Times and Politico in 2017. It was subsequently reported on by Fox News and a number of other news outlets, due in large part to its investigation into the existence of UFOs at the urging of former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).
Following the Times report, Reid tweeted “the truth is out there” (a nod to the show “The X-Files), adding that if “anyone says they have the answers, they’re fooling themselves.”
Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program
The shadowy program began in 2007 and was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader, who has had a longtime interest in space phenomena.
nytimes.com
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Both the Times and Politico said Reid’s interest in UFOs was the result of friend and donor Bob Bigelow, who owns Bigelow Aerospace and has said before he is “absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and UFOs have visited Earth.
The New York Times said AATIP had a $22 million annual budget and “most of the money” went to Bigelow’s research company, which hired subcontractors and solicited research for the program.
A Pentagon spokesman said the UFO program ended in 2012, though the New York Times said the Defense Department still investigates potential episodes of unidentified flying objects.
UFO or Hoax? WATCH Mysterious Space Objects Buzz Across ISS Live Stream
UFO or Hoax? WATCH Mysterious Space Objects Buzz Across ISS Live Stream
The enigmatic objects were apparently caught on camera just as a pair of astronauts were doing a spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS).
An ISS live stream earlier this month captured what looked like a pair of fast-moving objects heading towards the earth, once again raising speculations about alien spacecraft and extraterrestrial lifeforms.
Both objects also emitted flashes as they moved, making it look like they were reflecting sunlight, though their exact nature could not immediately be confirmed.
As the Daily Express notes, what makes this sighting especially interesting is the fact that two astronauts can also be seen "working on the spacecraft during the live stream".
Commenting on this incident, ufologist Scott C. Waring claimed in his blog UFO Sightings Daily that alien craft "visiting the space station is actually a daily occurrence", and that "NASA always refuses to talk about these objects and instead take a stance to ignore any questions about them".
A Ukrainian Physicist Has Discovered The Secret About The Pyramids – And It Will Change The World
A Ukrainian Physicist Has Discovered The Secret About The Pyramids – And It Will Change The World
When we talk a bout Pyramids everyone immediately turns their thoughts to Egypt, the Giza plateau and the three pyramids standing tall just outside of Cairo.
However, did you know that there are more than 1000 pyramids in Central America alone? There are 300 Pyramids in China and over 200 Pyramids in Sudan. Egypt boasts only around 120 Pyramids.
But, no matter where you look, you’ll find pyramids scattered across the globe. But why? Why are these enigmatic structure located across the planet? Why did nearly all ancient civilizations across the globe, the Ancient Maya, Aztecs, Pre-Inca Cultures, Ancient Chinese, and many others build these supermassive structures? Furthermore, why are so many pyramids around the globe so eerily similar in design?
Why is it that we still can’t fully understand why the ancients built Pyramids? Were they meant to serve as eternal resting places for different Pharaohs and kings?
Or is it possible they served another, completely different purpose than what mainstream scholars are making us believe? Is it just a wild coincidence that there are thousands of Pyramids scattered all across the globe?
How are most of them so similar? Is it possible that ancient cultures were somehow interconnected thousands of years ago? And that somehow a pyramid building culture—that is now long gone—passed onto different civilizations the blueprints of building pyramids? What if after all, Pyramids were not used as tombs, but as something entirely different?
A Ukrainian scientist believes he may have finally solved the mystery behind the Pyramids and says he now understands what they were used for by ancient civilizations across the globe.
Dr. Volodymyr Krashnoholovets, a physicist from the Ukraine, who has curiously spent over a decade building and researching pyramids has been fascinated by these ancient structures for a long time.
Endorsed by the Russian government, he created a 144-foot-tall pyramid outside of Moscow. He is a man who believes to have finally cracked the mystery behind pyramids and why they were built, and according to him, this is a summary of his discoveries on the effects Pyramids:
1. Immune system of organisms improved (blood leukocyte composition increased). 2. Improved regeneration of tissue. 3. Seeds stored in the pyramid for 1-5 days showed a 30-100% increase in yield. 4. Soon after construction of the Lake Seliger pyramid a marked improvement of the ozone was noted above the area. 5. Seismic activity near the pyramid research areas are reduced in severity and size. 6. Violent weather also appears to decrease in the vicinity of the pyramids. 7. Pyramids constructed in Southern Russia (Bashkiria) appeared to have a positive effect on oil production with oil becoming less viscous by 30% and the yield of the oil wells increased according to tests carried out by the Moscow Academy of Oil and Gas. 8. A study was done on 5000 prisoners who ingested salt and pepper that had been exposed to the pyramid energy field. The test subjects exhibited a greatly reduced violence rate and overall behavior was much improved. 9. Standard tissue culture tests showed an increase in survival of cellular tissue after infection by viruses and bacteria. 10. Radioactive substances show a decreased level of radiation inside the pyramid. 11. There are reports of spontaneous charging of capacitors. 12. Physicists observed significant changes in superconductivity temperature thresholds and in the properties of semi-conducting and carbon nanomaterials. 13. Water inside the pyramid will remain liquid to minus 40 degrees Celsius but freeze instantly if jostled or bumped in any way.
All of the above-mentioned discoveries made by Dr. Volodymyr Krashnoholovets are explained in the following video presented by author and researcher David Wilcock.
Video:
What do you think? Is it possible that after all Pyramids were not used as tombs in ancient times? Is it possible that after all, these majestic ancient structures—scattered across the globe—have a purpose that mainstream scholars have not yet identified?
Did Dinosaurs Coexist with Humans? Yes, and here are the proofs (2019)
Did Dinosaurs Coexist with Humans? Yes, and here are the proofs (2019)
There are many examples of petroglyphs, rock paintings and figurines in which dinosaurs are represented alongside men.
Even when there is only a rock painting or petroglyph depicting a dinosaur, without being next to him represented a humanoid, it is clear that the job was accomplished by a man or a humanoid.
The figurines were tested with Carbon 14 testify antiquity of 6500 years old.
In the Ica stones, we have many examples of gliptolitic men alongside dinosaurs.
Navy Seal Military reveals secret mission in an Ancient Structure buried in Antarctica (2019)
Navy Seal Military reveals secret mission in an Ancient Structure buried in Antarctica (2019)
On January 23, 2019, Emmy Award-winning journalist, Linda Moulton Howe, released video testimony of a new informant discussing her highly classified mission in a large ancient alien structure, buried under the ice of Antarctica.
The informant states that on a classified mission conducted in 2003, he entered a very large octagonal-shaped structure located near the Beardmore glacier that extended deep into the icy interior of the glacier.
The informant is a retired US Navy Seal who was interviewed for the first time by Howe on July 19, 2018. He used the pseudonym Spartan 1 in the YouTube video recorded by Howe, where his face is shaded and his voice she is altered to protect her identity. Howe says he personally controlled Spartan 1, which provided extensive documentation to support his military career.
Earlier, Howe released the testimony of another military informant, Brian, who was a Navy flight engineer who had flown numerous support missions with the Antarctic Development Squadron from 1983 to 1997. He witnessed a number of anomalies that they indicate hidden structures or bases located deep beneath the Antarctic ice.
He says he witnessed the discovery of silver flying saucers in the Transantarctic Mountains, not so far away, as Howe pointed out, from where the Navy Seal had carried out his mission. The Navy Seal says that the ground-penetrating radar had discovered the structure that was an eight-sided octagon, as Howe elaborated.
In 2003, a group of special operations of the US Navy went to Antarctica to investigate a perfectly geometrical eight-sided octagonal structure discovered by a penetrating radar inside the Beardmore glacier, about 93 miles from the American station of McMurdo .
Another previous team of engineers and scientists had carved the top layer of an octagon made of a pure black substance that had been built over two other black octagonal structures that descended deep into the 2-mile-thick ice.
In the video, the Navy Seal (aka Spartan 1) described the launch of his mission from an aircraft carrier that traveled near the Ross Sea west of the Antarctic. He was taken by helicopter to McMurdo station, the largest American base in Antarctica.
Spartan 1 described entering a door about 50 feet below the ice. He estimated the walls of the structure about 18 to 30 feet thick (6-10 meters) and the height of the ceiling about 22-28 feet (7-9 meters). He said that the walls, the ceiling and the floor were made of a black basalt material that looked like polished black marble.
The interior was heated to about 68-72 degrees Fahrenheit (20-22 degrees Celsius), and was also lit by a lime green source projected from the ceiling and floor. He did not see any heating or lighting system, which was added to the mystery of the buried structure.
Only one part of the structure, the witness said, was discovered by the archaeological teams, with the remainder buried under the ice and which extended far below. The ground penetrating radar showed that the structure was octagonal in shape and covered an area of 62 acres (about 0.5 square kilometers).
Spartan 1 described the walls and doors covered with hieroglyphs about 20 cm high and about 5 cm deep. The hieroglyphics were neither Egyptian nor maya, but they appeared similar to both in terms of depiction of animals and other strange symbols.
Significantly, one of the symbols was very similar to the image of the Black Sun used by the Nazi SS, who had a large version built on the floor of their headquarters at Wewelsburg Castle. The image of the Black Sun continues to be banned in Germany with their Nazi propaganda law. Spartan 1 explained that part of his mission was to transport scientists who would document the buried structure and the hieroglyphic symbols, taking pictures and making drawings.
He said his team had to leave one of the scientists who insisted that more time was needed to make an adequate inventory of what had been discovered. Spartan 1 stated that the structure was built by a group of human-looking extraterrestrials who were involved in the genetic engineering of humanity.
The testimony of Spartan 1 is very significant because it provides a rare eyewitness account of what was actually found inside one of the buried structures, whose age extends into antiquity. The former eyewitness of the Antarctic, Brian, actually could not see or enter one of the artifacts. What Brian tells, was when he saw a large hole penetrate the South Pole, as it flew over his head through a restricted and controlled airspace.
To date, only two other informers / insiders have come forward to share their reports of being brought in or to witness the ancient artifacts buried under the ice caps of Antarctica. These are Corey Goode and Pete Peterson, who claim to have witnessed some of the artifacts buried during their respective visits.
Goode claims to have been taken to Antarctica in early 2016 and 2017, where he saw secret bases and remains of an ancient civilization buried deep beneath the ice caps. He claims to have witnessed some bodies of human alien hybrids, which were part of the genetic experiments conducted thousands of years ago, from an extraterrestrial race with a humanoid appearance.
Peterson claims to have been taken to Antarctica during classified missions, where he was given the task of understanding the advanced technologies found near three mother ships, one or more of which he witnessed during his missions. Peterson’s testimony confirms Goode’s account of an ancient extraterrestrial base that has been used as a center for a global civilization. This raises some intriguing questions.
Was the symbol of the Black Sun a pictorial representation of an ancient global civilization in which the South Pole was the fulcrum with the spirals heading towards its distant colonies? In the book, the Hidden History of Antarctica, I present evidence that German nationalists who use the symbol of the black sun have established a colony in Antarctica,
According to Howe’s analysis, the structure witnessed by Spartan 1 dates back to 33 million years ago, which is the general date given by conventional geologists when Antarctica was ice-free. The independent testimony of Spartan 1 corroborates important elements of what Goode and Peterson described, and what others claim lies hidden under the frozen continent.
As Spartan 1’s testimony is released through Howe’s video series, we can get important answers to questions about what lies deep beneath the Antarctic polar ice caps.
Despite the impression one gets from textbooks, our current knowledge of the universe represents a small island in a vast ocean of ignorance. The scientific enterprise is all about expanding the landmass of this island. And it is fun to engage in the activity of gaining knowledge; knowing everything in advance would have been much more boring. Still, it would be shocking to learn all at once of the discoveries of an alien civilization that been doing scientific and technological exploration for billions of years, in contrast to our mere few centuries. The eminent science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke codified this idea in the third of histhree laws : “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Put another way, members of such a civilization would appear to us as a pretty good approximation to God.
Meeting a piece of advanced technological equipment developed by an extraterrestrial intelligence might resemble an imaginary encounter of ancient cave people with a modern cell phone. At first, they would interpret it as a shiny rock, not recognizing it as a communication device. The same thing might have happened in reaction to the first detection of an interstellar visitor to the solar system, ‘Oumuamua, which showed six peculiar properties but was nevertheless interpreted as a rock by mainstream astronomers.
Because it would likely be relatively small, most advanced equipment could only be recognized in the darkness of space when it comes close enough to our nearest lamppost, the sun. We can search for technological “keys” under this lamppost, but most of them will stay unnoticed if they pass far away. More fundamentally, one may wonder whether we are able to recognize technologies that were not already developed by us. After all, these technologies might feature subtle purposes—like the cell phone communication signals that a cave person would miss.
Is there something we might be missing already here and now? When looking around us, the most mysterious phenomenon we encounter routinely is the sophistication of complex life. Some scientists wondered whether life itself was seeded on Earth by an alien civilization in a process called “directed panspermia.” One can imagine a probe that brought the seeds of life in the form of microbes or instead a 3-D printer that produced these seeds out of the raw materials on Earth based on a prescribed blueprint. The universal left-handedness (chirality) of all life-forms on Earth without exception can be interpreted as stemming from a single panspermia event, be it natural (through a rock arriving from space) or artificial in origin . Even in this context, our imagination of what aliens might do will improve once we are able to produce synthetic life in the laboratory.
The number of targeted probes that are needed to seed life artificially in the habitable zone of a planetary systems is far smaller than the number of natural rocks that serve the same purpose on random trajectories. The advantage of 3-D printing of life from raw materials on a target planet is that natural DNA samples live a finite lifetime and may eventually disintegrate in a few million years, whereas artificial machinery can be constructed to last much longer.
At this time, our civilization is highly vulnerable to annihilation by self-inflicted wounds, such as nuclear wars or climate change, as well as external threats such as asteroid impacts or evolution of the sun. As much as the Earth appears to be a comfortable home for us right now, it would be prudent not to keep all our eggs in one basket. We should venture into space and seed objects beyond the Earth with life as we know it, thus reducing the risk of complete destruction and securing the longevity of things we care about.
If we ever find evidence for life on other objects and it all looks the same, or if extraterrestrial life would appear to be unusually clustered in space, we might realize that it has a common ancestry and panspermia is at play. The situation would be just like recognizing that too many kids in the neighborhood resemble the milkman.
If life was seeded artificially on Earth, one may wonder whether the seeders are checking on the outcome. And if so, the fact that we have not heard from them may indicate that they are disappointed. The experiment may have failed, or we are simply too slow to mature. Well, this may not come as a surprise given the irresponsible way we behave sometimes. Perhaps if we only knew that someone is looking over our shoulders, we would do better. It is not too late for us to find out, by using the best telescopes at our disposal.
WASHINGTON — Boeing is on track to launch its new astronaut taxi to the International Space Station (ISS) next month.
Along with SpaceX, the private spaceflight company was contracted by NASA to begin launching astronauts from U.S. soil again for the first time since the space shuttle program ended in 2011. Boeing's CST-100 Starliner won't be taking any astronauts along for its first flight to the ISS, however. After docking robotically with the orbiting lab, it will return to Earth for a parachute landing in Texas.
If this test flight goes according to plan, Boeing will be ready to launch its first crew of astronauts to the space station in August, Boeing spokesperson Maribeth Davis told Space.com during a presentation of Boeing's future vision for space travel here. [How Boeing's Commercial CST-100 Starliner Spacecraft Works]
Boeing's CST-100 Starliner will launch on its first test flight to the International Space Station in March 2019.
Credit: Boeing
The mission, named Orbital Flight Test, will launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on an Atlas V rocket provided by the United Launch Alliance. It was originally scheduled to launch Aug. 27, 2018, but an anomaly during a test of the launch abort engines led Boeing to delay the mission while they worked out the issue. Although the Starliner has not yet flown in space, it has completed successful parachute drop tests within the confines of Earth's atmosphere.
The Starliner will be the second of two new astronaut taxis to debut for its maiden voyage in the coming months. SpaceX's Crew Dragon is currently scheduled to lift off on its first uncrewed test flight on Feb. 28, with a crewed flight to follow sometime in June.
Not only will the Starliner and Dragon become the first spacecraft to launch astronauts from U.S. soil in about eight years, but Boeing and SpaceX will also become the first private companies to launch people to the space station. Since the shuttle retired, NASA has been relying on Russia to launch astronauts to the space station using its Soyuz rocket-capsule combo.
Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience.
An artist's rendition shows Boeing's CST-100 Starliner heading for a rendezvous with the International Space Station.
Credit: Boeing
Boeing's CST-100 Starliner is a spacecraft under development for NASA's Commercial Crew Program. The space agency plans to use Starliner, as well as SpaceX's Dragon, to take astronauts to the International Space Station by 2019 or 2020. Uncrewed test flights are scheduled for March 2019, with crewed test flights tentatively set for August 2019.
The Starliner is similar in shape to the Apollo spacecraft, but its electronics are half a century more advanced. The spacecraft is designed to carry up to seven astronauts, with additional cargo also possible if fewer astronauts fly in a particular mission. Measuring 14.8 feet (4.5 meters) across at its widest point, the gumdrop-shaped spacecraft will first fly into space aboard Atlas V rockets.
Money from NASA
Money for the development of the spacecraft largely came through NASA's commercial crew program, which aims to replace the Russian Soyuz spacecraft flights required to take astronauts to the International Space Station.
In one phase of the program, called Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap), Boeing received $4.2 billion in September 2014. Competitor SpaceX received $2.6 billion for its Dragon spacecraft.
NASA is hoping to relaunch astronauts from American soil, which has not been possible since the space shuttle retired in 2011. The program has been pushed back several years, NASA has said, due to Congress not allocating as much money as what the agency requested.
Preparing for first flight
In 2011, the company put a 12-by-14 inch model of the CST-100 in a wind tunnel to determine the spacecraft's aerodynamic characteristics. The model was placed in several different positions to simulate different phases of an abort-mode landing.
In 2012, Boeing did parachute drop tests of the CST-100 to determine how well the spacecraft's parachutes and air bags worked. Unlike the Apollo missions, the CST-100 will touch down on land, making the air bags especially important for the job. Later in the year, the company and NASA determined what would be the basic layout of the spacecraft, which NASA considered an important milestone under the third round of CCDev.
In 2014, Boeing unveiled a full-scale mockup of the spacecraft at the Kennedy Space Center, showing the inside of it for the first time publicly. Airbag testing of the spacecraft proceeded successfully in February 2016, and in March 2017 it underwent a successful parachute test in the New Mexico desert.
Also in 2017, Boeing unveiled the spacesuit astronauts will wear aboard the Starliner. The spacesuit features several advancements over previous spacesuit designs. It is smaller and lighter, and includes special gloves designed to allow use with touchpad screens.
Due to a problem during an abort engine test in June 2018, Boeing announced in August that test flights would be pushed back to 2019.
A loud explosion was heard as a meteorite fell in western Cuba, shattering windows but causing no injuries, residents and U.S. officials say. Debris was found at multiple locations.
The incident happened at 1:20 p.m. local time on Friday when a loud boom was heard in parts of Pinar del Rio, a province at the western end of the island. A trail of smoke was visible in the sky.
“We’re receiving reports that a meteor was seen in the sky across the Florida Keys,” the U.S. National Weather Service said. “It appears that a meteorite impact occurred in western Cuba, near the town of Viñales.”
Multiple residents near Viñales, near the Mural of Prehistory, reported finding black rocks near their homes. A photo from the state-run Prensa news agency showed that one of the fragments went through a roof, and a reporter said a number of windows had been shattered.
There were no immediate reports of injuries.
Meteors occasionally survive the fiery passage through Earth’s atmosphere, but they usually go unnoticed because many fall in the ocean. A meteor fell in Russia in 2013, causing damage and injuring nearly 1,500 people.
Vooraanstaand sterrenkundige denkt een buitenaards ruimteschip te hebben gezien. Kreeg de mensheid in 2017 bezoek van aliens?
Vooraanstaand sterrenkundige denkt een buitenaards ruimteschip te hebben gezien. Kreeg de mensheid in 2017 bezoek van aliens?
De vreemde ruimtesigaar die in 2017 werd ontdekt en de naam Oumuamua kreeg, is gemaakt door een buitenaardse beschaving. Dat denkt Avi Loeb, hoofd van de afdeling sterrenkunde aan Harvard en directeur van twee instituten.
Het object is zo’n 100 tot 1000 meter lang en langgerekt.
“Ik heb meerdere onderzoeken over Oumuamua gepubliceerd,” zegt Loeb. “Daaruit bleken allerlei vreemde feiten.”
Platte vliegende schotel
Zo zag hij hoe de helderheid van het object gedurende acht uur geregeld met een factor 10 tot 30 veranderde.
“Onze analyse laat zien dat het meer op een pannenkoek lijkt die om z’n lengteas draait,” aldus Loeb. Een soort platte vliegende schotel dus.
De topastronoom zegt dat hij niet in UFO’s gelooft, maar wel denkt dat Oumuamua een restant is van een buitenaardse beschaving.
Holbewoner
Volgens hem kreeg het object in ons zonnestelsel een zetje door de stralingsdruk van de zon.
Daar maakt Loeb uit op dat het een lichtzeil kan zijn, dat vaart krijgt wanneer lichtdeeltjes ermee in aanraking komen.
De meeste wetenschappers denken dat Oumuamua een ruimterots is, maar volgens Loeb is dat veel te kort door de bocht.
“Stel dat je een mobiele telefoon meeneemt naar een holbewoner. Die zal denken dat de telefoon een soort gekke steen is,” klinkt het.
Oogkleppen op
“Op dezelfde manier zijn wij vanuit het verleden gewend om te denken in termen van kometen, asteroïden – stenen uit de ruimte dus. We zijn vooringenomen,” zegt Loeb.
Hij vindt het compleet belachelijk dat je het in serieus gezelschap niet over buitenaardse beschavingen mag hebben.
“Ik denk dat dat vooral te maken heeft met een sociologisch effect, niet met iets dat gebaseerd is op feiten,” zegt hij. “Men heeft oogkleppen op.”
In comments that will likely fuel ardent Ufologists worldwide, a senior NASA official has conceded that the existence of alien life is “much more likely to be out there than we thought before.”
Thomas Zurbuchen, an astrophysicist and associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, told Boston University he believes there is life beyond Earth for the simple reason that we once “doubted whether water or complex molecules would exist beyond Earth,” but in actuality “each one of those is much easier to achieve than we thought possible.”
“We find it right in front of our doorsteps, everywhere, including the polar craters of the planet Mercury,” he explained. “As for how that relates to the chain of life… well, life is much more likely to be out there than we thought before.”
Speaking about space tourism, Zurbuchen described it as a “really important experience to have” and claims it’s now “as easy to go to space as it is to go to Paris.”
However, he did go on to add that, for now, he is himself unwilling to spend the months of intense training required to undergo a journey into space.
While the race to colonize Mars and locate an Earth-like planet that can sustain human life is heating up, Zurbuchen is keeping his focus closer to home.
The NASA admin said he spends much more time thinking about our planet, and argues that any quest for exploration further afield will be completely futile unless we secure Earth’s future and address the ongoing damage caused by climate change.
What was the mysterious object that hit the ‘Super Blood Wolf Moon’? Now we have the answer
What was the mysterious object that hit the ‘Super Blood Wolf Moon’? Now we have the answer
Scientists have solved a mystery that has bothered stargazers in the wake of a total lunar eclipse on January 21, when a tiny object struck the moon as it captivated millions with its copper-red makeover.
A team of scientists from Colombia and the Dominican Republic have authored a paperoffering a detailed account of the object thatslammedinto the Moon during a recent lunar eclipse. The moment the suspected meteor hit the lunar surface was captured only by a few, but triggered a vivid guessing game regarding the object’s origin and size. The impact itself was very brief, with only a bright flash discernible in the top left quadrant of the Earth’s satellite at the time.
Drawing on images and videos by amateur astronomers from Colombia, the Dominican Republican and Morocco, the researchers sought to determine the size, orbit, energy and impact left by the meteor that caught eye of many sky-watchers.
Yes, it was indeed a small meteoroid, and they estimate that could have weighed anything from 20 to 100 kg (44 to 220 pounds). It was a bit bigger than a basketball and measured somewhere between 30 and 50 cm (11 and 19 inches).
Being relatively heavy for its size, the space rock left quite a trail of destruction when it smashed into the Moon at a speed of some 47,000 km/h. According to the researchers, the collision left a crater 7 to 14 meters wide that could be detected in the future by a lunar probe.
Researches note that such encounters are relatively common, but this one stands out because it was observed by numerous people around the world, providing a rare insight into the phenomenon. The surface of the moon is hit by an estimated 2,800kg worth of meteor material, predominantly rock and ice, each day.
Social networks and easy access to technology lent a big helping hand in the increased awareness of celestial events, argued Karls Peña, member of the Dominican Astronomical Society and coauthor of the work, stating that they “have brought humanity closer than ever to science (especially to non-experts).”
The ‘Super Blood Wolf Moon’ is a rare concurrence of three cosmic phenomena. “Wolf moon” is a name given by Native American tribes to a full moon that happens in January, whereas a total lunar eclipse is called a “blood moon.” It is also called a ‘supermoon’ due to the moon reaching its closest orbital point to Earth.
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.
It is unfortunate that the world of the paranormal manages to attract all manner of those who would hoax or fake evidence. Sometimes it is to fool everyone, at other times it is to prove a point, and still on other occasions it is to gain some bit of fame or simply just to see what will happen. Whatever the reasons may be, it sometimes seems that for every person who manages to capture what they truly believe to potentially be an authentic photo or video of unexplained phenomena, there is another trying to fake it all, making it sometimes very hard to figure out where the possibly real ends and the hoaxes and fakery begin. It muddies the waters, and requires a vigilance from those who would try and delve into the answers behind these phenomena. The area of UFOs, like many others, has seen its fair share of such hoaxes, and some of them have been not only rather particularly spectacular, but also surprising in just how thoroughly they were able to fool just about everyone. Here are a few of these cases, very much in the vein of Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 “War of the Worlds” broadcast, that are not only quite intricate and even funny in retrospect, but also show that a skeptical eye is not a bad thing to have.
One of the most notable and in retrospect quite hilarious such hoaxes was fittingly orchestrated for April Fool’s Day in 1989 by none other than the billionaire, Virgin Group founder, and incorrigible, unrepentant prankster Richard Branson. Branson was already well known for his elaborate April Fool’s pranks and tomfoolery, but on this day in 1989 he really outdid himself. Called “Project Wedgewood,” Branson commissioned Don Cameron, of hot air balloon manufacturer Cameron Balloons Limited, to create an immense, very realistic looking UFO complete with flashing strobe lights and a sliding door. Branson then boarded the balloon and took off on March 31 along with a dwarf dressed in an alien costume and a whole bunch of dry ice.
Richard Branson
The idea was to fly the balloon over to London’s Hyde Park and have it land there on April Fool’s Day, April 1st, after which the costumed dwarf would descend through a special sliding door amidst a cloud of dry ice smoke for the “Gotcha!” moment. It was all meant to be good fun, but it would quickly spiral out of control past Branson’s wildest expectations. As they floated over the English landscape along London’s M25 highway towards the destination, it became obvious that there were people stopping their cars and plenty of frightened bystanders gawking and pointing up at the sky at them, with Branson later saying, “We could see every single vehicle grinding to a halt and hundreds of people looking up at the UFO flying over them. It was great fun watching their reactions.” Good fun for them, perhaps, but for the people who were seeing this all it was a different story.
Indeed, everyone who saw the balloon took it to be a genuine UFO, and in no time at all there was footage being shown on the news, police and TV and radio stations inundated with calls from concerned witnesses, and residents working themselves up into a mass panic over an alien invasion. It was rapidly launching itself into a media sensation, everyone seriously took this to be an actual alien spaceship, and since Branson had only told a very small cabal of people what he had been up to on the top secret prank there was no one to tell anyone otherwise. It was all so realistic and people were so panicked that the police and military began mobilizing to intercept and deal with what they truly believed to be the real deal. What had started off as an innocent prank was quickly escalating into a perceived national emergency, but Branson and his dwarf friend were oblivious to all of this, not at all aware of the true gravity of the situation. They were up there gleefully giggling at the reactions like some schoolkids when a serious situation was brewing beneath them.
Adding to the escalating situation was that the unfavorable wind conditions at the time were blowing them off course, forcing them to make an emergency landing in a remote field in Surrey a day early. Police tracked the balloon, still believing it to be an actual UFO and planning intercept it at the field. As the balloon came down, it did so surrounded by police cars and with military one the way. Despite this, Branson, who still did not really realize just how seriously everyone believed this was a real UFO or how dire it had become, and went ahead with the rest of the prank, having the door open to disgorge a cloud of mist and the silver-clad dwarf, much to the horror of police, who took it to be a real alien and made to retreat. One of the police at the scene would say say “I have never been so scared in 20 years of being a policeman,” and Branson himself would later say of the whole, surreal scene:
The police surrounded us and then sent one lone policeman with his truncheon across the field to greet the alien. The UFO’s door opened very slowly, with tonnes of dry ice billowing from it. A dwarf that we had carried on board, dressed in an ET outfit, walked down the platform towards the bobby. He promptly turned and ran in the opposite direction! The police initially didn’t see the funny side of it and threatened to arrest us for wasting their time. But they soon joined in the general merriment of it.
Richard Branson’s fake UFO in action
It’s interesting to note that other than perhaps some police purchases of new underwear there were no real repercussions to any of this, and one can imagine that such a hoax in this day and age would at least have led to some arrests and charges. While Branson’s stunt was very well-funded and one of the more elaborate such hoaxes, this sort of large-scale prank had already been done before. In 1967, engineer Chris Southall and some colleagues at Britain’s Farnborough’s Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) decided to pull off a hoax that would take the nation by storm. They meticulously crafted six metal-coated, fibreglass saucers composed of two molded halves filled with electronic sound equipment, and Southall said, “We wanted to make something that looked really alien.” The discs were equipped with switches on them, that would flick on when the objects were turned over and start up the sound equipment inside and engage a battery to creating beeping and hissing noises, as well as with a flour and water mix that created a foaming, foul smelling slime when discharged for added effect.
When the six “UFOs” were completed, the team secretly went out in the middle of the night to deposit them at Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey, Bromley in south London, Ascot, the village of Welford, near Newbury, in Berkshire, Chippenham in Wiltshire and Clevedon in Somerset. They were then turned on and the team sat back to watch the fireworks commence. It did not take long before they were discovered, and they were thought to be very real, provoking an immediate police and military response to them. As shocked civilians looked on, the areas were locked down and the discs whisked away by military personnel and in some cases lifted away by helicopters, and it must have looked like some top secret government UFO extraction right out of a movie. Interestingly, the official response was rather bungled, and more like something out of the Keystone Cops than any sort of crack, Roswell style cover-up, as there were apparently no real guidelines in effect for this sort of thing and the authorities simply did not know how to handle it. One of the investigators would say in retrospect:
We thought the government should have some sort of plan if aliens did land. So we gave them a chance to try out whatever plan they had – but they didn’t have one. One of the saucers when they actually drilled into it, because it was full of this compacted, sort of papier-maché mess, actually exploded and showered the police officers with this stuff. If it had been some kind of radiation hazard, how would they have dealt with that? It would have been a disaster area. And what did they do? Just washed it down the drains.
Military personnel moving one of the discs
In the meantime, the “UFO landings” were all over the news along with numerous photographs of the discs being carted off by military personnel, and it was a sensation at the time. This was taken very seriously at the time, with bomb squads mobilized and a state of emergency in effect. People believed that these were real UFOs so wholeheartedly, that when authorities inevitably realized that they had been had and tried to tell the frightened public what had happened there were immediate rumors of a government cover-up. It all eventually died down, and amazingly the group who had perpetuated the whole fiasco were let off with nothing more than a slap on the wrist. Again, it’s amazing to think that this incident, which lasted a total of 12 hours, went virtually unpunished, and somewhat tellingly the bumbling response and inability to fully close the area down does not suggest a shadowy government conspiracy that knows of UFOs and has dealt with these things before.
Perhaps one of the most famous hoaxes ever was not one involving spaceships, but rather an alleged alien body. The stunt took the form of a video supposedly obtained from a retired military officer stationed at none other than Area 51 in Roswell, New Mexico, by a British music and video producer named Ray Santilli. Released in 1990, the footage is black and white and very grainy, purportedly showing a skinny alien body with large eyes and an oversized head being dissected by a team in biohazard suits at the top secret facility. Santilli was very precise in the details he gave about the video, explaining how many rolls of film it had been on and even how much it cost him to procure them, and the video was widely taken to be the real deal. The “documentary” spread to over 30 countries, capturing the imaginations of the countless people who thought that this was finally the real evidence of what was going on at Roswell, and the “Alien Autopsy Film” became an absolute sensation at the time.
A still from the “Alien Autopsy” video
Although there were obviously skeptics, there were also enough testimonies by supposed photographic experts and special effects wizzes proclaiming how real it all looked and how difficult it would be to fake it that a lot of people believed. It would alas be proved to be a hoax once and for all when Santilli himself admitted to the fraud. In 2006 he came forward to explain that the “Alien Autopsy” was all faked and even how he had done it, but even then there was some mystery remaining, as he claimed that although the “documentary” he had released was bogus, it had been a re-creation based frame by frame on real footage that had simply been too deteriorated to release. Hmmm. Whether there was ever another “real” video or not, this hoaxed footage has not aged particularly well, and looking back on it seems almost absurd that so many people were taken in by it, believing this now admittedly very fake looking alien dummy to be real, but believe it they did.
There are countless other UFO hoaxes such as this out there, and these are merely among some of the more far reaching, sophisticated, and indeed amusing of these. Although it is unfortunate that so many people fell for these, in the end they do serve a purpose in showing us that we need to keep our eyes peeled for trickery, and approach the paranormal with an open mind but also a skeptical eye. In order to be taken seriously and to not give into panic or false hopes, to not be fooled and duped by such fakes, there must be a calm, measured and analytical approach to these things. In the end it seems very important to remember one thing- keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out.
In 1987, Whitley Strieber’sbook Communionwas published. Five years later, in the latter part of 1992, the Strieber family started to receive disturbing, late-night phone calls. Sometimes, they were way after midnight. Of course, whenever any of us get a phone call in the early hours of the morning, we immediately think the worst: it’s someone calling with bad news. Thankfully, they weren’t those kinds of calls, but they were certainly traumatic in the extreme. Typically, the voice at the other end of the line did nothing but deliver a blast of what Strieber called “scary, sneering laughter.” The most obvious explanation would be that this was all the work of pranksters, or some deranged nut who had gotten hold of Strieber’s withheld number and thought it would be fun to shake him up a bit. Maybe a lot. Except, that wasn’t the case, as Strieber was able to prove.
Quickly tired by the calls, Strieber arranged to have Caller ID attached to the family’s phone-line. It was a very wise decision, as it revealed something remarkable. The calls were not coming from someone in Ufology, after all. Rather, they were coming from a particular facility owned by a company called E.G. & G. Understandably angered, and puzzled too, Strieber called them up to see what was going on. He came straight to the point and told the receptionist on the line that not only had he received intimidating calls, but that he had proof – via Caller ID – that the calls were coming from E.G. & G. In other words: take that.
What sounded like the voice of a very old man suddenly came onto the phone and assured Strieber that he would “look into it.” No further calls were made to Strieber’s home, which is extremely telling. Strieber didn’t stop there, though. He took on the role of detective and dug deeply into the world of E.G. & G. In the process, he discovered that the company had ties to NASA, to the Department of Energy, and even to the world’s most well-known secret base (which is surely the ultimate oxymoron), Area 51. Was someone at E.G. & G. trying to destabilize Strieber with all of those late-night calls? Maybe so. That Strieber hit back – and hit back hard, too – quickly put paid to the psychological-warfare techniques of those who were not happy with Strieber’s work and the tremendous amount of exposure he had been getting since 1987. There was, however, more to come.
One year later, in 1993, said Strieber, and after having been given apparently classified information on where the U.S. Government’s top secret UFO data could be found, “Spooks started prowling around my neighborhood upstate. A business associate was accosted on an airplane by a group of young men who flashed badges, claimed to be with the National Security Agency, and questioned him about our activities for a couple of hours.” Those same agents were reportedly looking at attempted penetrations of Department of Defense computers. Then, on one occasion in the following year, 1994, someone managed to stealthily get into Strieber’s cabin, skillfully disabling his security system in the process, and checking out the contents of his computer. Clearly, Strieber was a person of deep interest to more than a few people in the shadowy world of government espionage and clandestine operations. And, it wasn’t just Strieber, his family, and that friend accosted by the NSA who felt the brunt of all this. There was also a man named Ed Conroy.
In 1989, Ed Conroy, a San Antonio, Texas-based journalist, wrote a book titled Report on Communion. It was an independent study of Whitley Strieber and his incredible experiences. In taking on the project, Conroy didn’t realize what he had got himself into. At least, not at first he didn’t. What began as an impartial investigation into Strieber’s claims, soon mutated into something very different: Conroy found himself under similar intimidation to that which would eventually hit the Strieber family. Weird phone calls, secret surveillance and – even – visits from those mysterious black helicopters, whose crews keep more than a careful watch on alien abductees, abounded…
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Disc-shaped UFO captured on video over the Netherlands
Disc-shaped UFO captured on video over the Netherlands
A man from the Netherlands uploaded this video to Mufon. The footage was captured on January 19, this year. Hardly any details were given except that he saw the unknown object flying and caught it on camera.
You will see in the short clip the disc-like object enter the scene from the right and move toward the left and away.
At first glance it looks like a typical lens flare but lens flares and reflections normally do not move through the aperture faster than the camera is moving.
UFO casebook has put a slow-mo section in to get a better view.
OMG: Clear pictures of the BLACK KNIGHT UFO satellite!
OMG: Clear pictures of the BLACK KNIGHT UFO satellite!
The Black Knight is an artificial satellite of extraterrestrial origin which has orbited Earth for approximately 13,000 years; the “satellite” story is most likely a conflation of several disconnected stories about various objects and their interpretations, all of them well documented independently and none using the term “Black Knight” upon their first publication. According to senior education support officer Martina Redpath of Armagh Planetarium in Northern Ireland.
The origin of the Black Knight legend is often “retrospectively dated” back to natural extraterrestrial repeating sources supposedly heard during the 1899 radio experiments of Nikola Tesla and long-delayed echoes first heard by amateur radio operator Jorgen Hals in Oslo, Norway, in 1928. Brian Dunning of the Skeptoid podcast attributes Tesla’s 1899 radio signals to pulsars, which were not identified until 1968.
In 1954, UFO researcher Donald Keyhoe told newspapers that the U.S. Air Force had reported that two satellites orbiting Earth had been detected. At that time, no country had the technology to launch a satellite. Skeptics have noted that Keyhoe had been promoting a UFO book at the time, and the news stories were likely written “tongue-in-cheek” and not intended to be taken seriously.
A British rocket called the Black Knight rocket was used in conjunction with the Blue Streak missile program between 1958 and 1965, to test re-entry vehicles. A “Black Knight satellite launcher” project announced in 1964 was considered a priority by the Ministry of Aviation. The program never put anything into orbit, and it is unrelated to the Black Knight satellite legend.
In February 1960, TIME reported that the U.S. Navy had detected a dark object thought to be a Soviet spy satellite in orbit. A follow-up article confirmed that the object was “the remains of an Air Force Discoverer VIII satellite that had gone astray.”
In 1963, astronaut Gordon Cooper supposedly reported a UFO sighting during his 15th orbit in Mercury 9 that was confirmed by tracking stations, but there is no evidence that this happened. Neither NASA’s mission transcripts nor Cooper’s personal copies show any such report being made during the orbit.
In 1973, Scottish author Duncan Lunan analyzed the long-delayed radio echoes received by Hals and others and speculated that they could possibly originate from a 13,000-year-old alien probe located in an orbit around the Earth’s Moon. He suggested that the probe may have originated from a planet located in the solar system of star Epsilon Boötis. Lunan later retracted his conclusions, saying that he had made “outright errors” and that his methods had been “unscientific”.
An artist's image of the violent collision that formed Earth's moon. Such collisions could explain the surprising differences in more massive super-Earths and super-Neptunes.
Credit: NASA
Catastrophic collisions may explain differences in giant rocky planets around other stars.
A new study suggests that the heat generated by material smashing into a planet plays an important role in removing some or all of a planet's atmosphere. A wide variety of sizes for these deadly asteroids would explain differences seen in the more massive rocky worlds.
NASA's planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope revealed a surprising number of worlds with sizes that fall between Earth and Neptune in relatively short orbits. By calculating the densities of the planets, astronomers learned that many of them seem to boast massive hydrogen-helium atmospheres. However, these atmospheres seem to come in many different flavors, suggesting something was happening to the worlds after planetary formation. [Tales from the Exoplanet Archive: How NASA Keeps Track of Alien Worlds]
"Giant impacts are very effective at reducing or removing the hydrogen or helium envelope," John Biersteker told his colleagues last month at the 233rd semiannual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle. Biersteker, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studied how impacts by rocky debris affected the atmosphere of young planets. He found that impacts could create many different types of worlds.
"This process can also produce a wide range of outcomes," Biersteker said. "This makes giant impacts a nice explanation for some of the observed distributions for the compositions of super-Earths."
Planetary beatdown
After a star is born, the dust- and gas-filled ring left behind begins the planetary formation process. Once gravity pulls together enough pieces to create a core, the newborn planetesimal begins to collect hydrogen and helium from the leftover gas, building its primal atmosphere. Planets that are very close to their stars can be affected by stellar radiation, which heats the top layers of the gas so that it escapes into space, leaving a thinner atmosphere.
Eventually, the gas in the disk is either piled onto planets or swept away by the star, leaving behind only dust and rock. Mixed among the small and medium-size debris are the failed cores that weren't able to grow large enough to attract an atmosphere. When these massive objects slam into planets, the collision can blow the planet's atmosphere off into space. One such collision helped to form Earth's moon.
A young world still boasts a molten mantle that can make it easier for a collision to strip off its atmosphere.
Credit: M. Kornmesser/Hubble/ESO
"Giant impacts are an expected part of the formation of these systems," Biersteker said.
It turns out that you don't need a massive core to completely remove a planet's atmosphere. By simulating a variety of impacts, Biersteker found that an object only a tenth the mass of the planet can blow off anywhere from 50 to 100 percent of the hydrogen and helium surrounding the planet.
A planet's youth may also work against it when it comes to holding onto an atmosphere. When a planet is young — only a few tens of millions of years old — its core is still fully molten, with no crust to insulate it from the atmosphere. Since a hotter atmosphere is harder to hold onto, it doesn't take much of an impact to strip off some of the atmosphere. An object crashing into a planet raises the energy, in the form of heat, allowing more of the atmosphere to be blown away.
Biersteker also found that the energy created by the impact was more important than the mass of what crashed into it. That means a small, fast-moving asteroid could potentially strip off more hydrogen and helium than a slower, medium-size object. The angle the impactor hits the world can also affect the energy of the impact — a head-on collision is more dangerous than a sideswipe.
"We can expect a wide range of impacts," Biersteker said.
With each impact stripping off a different percentage of the atmosphere, collisions can create a wide variety of exoplanet densities. Incoming material with only a tenth of a planet's mass can strip off anywhere from half to all of the hydrogen and helium.
Five hundred and sixty-five million years ago, Earth's magnetic field almost disappeared.
But a geological phenomenon might have saved it, a new study suggests. Earth's then-liquid core likely began to solidify around that time, which strengthened the field, the group reported yesterday (Jan. 28) in the journalNature Geoscience. This is important because the magnetic field protects our planet and its inhabitants from harmful radiation and solar winds —streams of plasma particles thrown our wayby the sun.
Scientists figured out what our planet's core was like back then by looking at crystals the size of grains of sand.
They picked up samples of plagioclase and clinopyroxene — minerals that were formed 565 million years ago — in what is now eastern Quebec, Canada. These samples contain tiny magnetic needles about 50 to 100 nanometers in size, which, in molten rock, orient themselves in the direction of the magnetic field at the time. [Shine On: Photos of Dazzling Mineral Specimens]
"Those tiny magnetic particles are ideal magnetic recorders," said co-author John Tarduno, the chair of the Earth and Environmental Sciences department and a professor at the University of Rochester in New York. "When they cool, they lock in a record of Earth's magnetic field that's maintained for billions of years."
So, by sticking the crystals in a magnetometer, the researchers were able to figure out that the particles' charge was very low. In fact, 565 million years ago, Earth's magnetic field was over 10 times weaker than what it is today — the weakest ever documented.
Further, the measurements showed that the frequency of north and south pole reversals was very high. All of this suggests that "the field was extremely unusual," Tarduno told Live Science. "We were at this critical point where the dynamo almost collapsed completely." (The geodynamo is the process that maintains and grows the magnetic field.)
But then the geodynamo got a kick start once more — from the very core of our planet.
In Earth's early years, the core was all liquid. But at some point — guesses range from between 2.5 billion years to 500 million years ago — iron began to cool and freeze into a solid layer in the middle of the planet. As the inner core solidified, lighter elements like silicon, magnesium and oxygen were kicked out into the outer, liquid layer of the core, creating a movement of fluid and heat called convection. This movement of fluid in the outer core kept charged particles moving, creating an electrical current, which in turn created a magnetic field.
This convection drives and maintains the magnetic field even today. Earth's inner core is continuing to solidify and will do so for billions of years to come.
The researchers "present intriguing paleomagnetic measurements" that suggest a weak geodynamo existed 565 million years ago, which meant that the core was fully liquid, wrote Peter Driscoll, an earth and planetary scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., who was not a part of the research, in a commentary that accompanied the study. If their theory holds true, "the inner core may have occurred right in the nick of time to recharge the geodynamo and save Earth's magnetic shield."
Shortly after this time, the Cambrian explosion occurred and complex animals emerged across the planet. "One can speculate — and there have been some speculations — that a weaker magnetic field may have some relationship to these evolutionary events," Tarduno said. That is because a weaker field might allow more radiation to get through, which could cause DNA damage and higher mutation rates, which in turn, might have lead to more species evolving.
But this is mere speculation, Tarduno said. When Earth's magnetic field weakens a bit during events such as magnetic reversals (where the north and south poles flip), for instance, there's no evidence that species are affected, he added.
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity captured this composite image, which looks toward the higher regions of Mount Sharp, on Sept. 9, 2015.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
NASA'sMars rover Curiosityhas flexed some new scientific muscles, likely solving a Red Planet puzzle in the process.
Mission team members repurposed the rover's navigation gear to measure tiny variations in gravitational fields, a new study reports. This novel strategy allowed the researchers to figure out how the huge Martian mountain whose baseCuriosity is exploringformed — namely, that it was probably built up as a free-standing mound by the deposition of windblown sand and sediment.
"Going forward, I think this study shows the promise of making gravity measurements on the surfaces of other planets," said lead author Kevin Lewis, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. [Amazing Mars Photos by NASA's Curiosity Rover]
"It really gives you data about the subsurface, which is hard to get from any other instruments," Lewis told Space.com.
The car-size Curiosity rover landed on the floor of the 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater in August 2012, tasked with investigating the area's past potential to host life. This work has been incredibly fruitful; Curiosity's observations show that Gale harbored a lake-and-stream system for long stretches — perhaps hundreds of millions of years at a time — in the ancient past.
Gale Crater is intriguing for other reasons as well. For example, a mountain rises 3.4 miles (5.5 km) into the Martian sky from its center — a dramatic geological oddity that has no close parallel here on Earth.
Scientists have long debated just how this odd massif, known as Mount Sharp, took shape. Is it the remnant of a sedimentary structure that once filled Gale Crater but was worn away by erosion? Or did Mount Sharp coalesce in its current form, growing as Martian winds dropped dirt and sand into Gale Crater?
That's where the new study, which was published online today (Jan. 31) in the journal Science, comes in. Lewis and his colleagues mapped out the gravitational-field strength at more than 700 points along Curiosity's traverse, which has taken the rover from Gale's floor up into Mount Sharp's foothills. (Gravitational fields weaken as altitude, and therefore distance from a planet's core, increases.)
Measurements using the Curiosity Mars rover's engineering accelerometers (gray) show a decrease in the strength of gravity as the rover climbs Mount Sharp. The rate of decrease of the modeled gravity signal (black) allowed researchers to measure the density of the rocks that make up Mount Sharp.
Credit: Kevin Lewis
"It's probably more like a compacted soil than what you might think of as a nice, really well-cemented rock," Lewis said.
If these deposits had once been buried under 3 miles (5 km) of other sediments, they would almost certainly be much denser, he added. So, the new results argue that Mount Sharp was primarily built up by wind-blown deposits, not pared down from a crater-filling feature.
This isn't to suggest that a potentially habitable lake didn't once occupy Gale Crater's floor; Curiosity's observations of lakebed sediments have established this water body's past existence with high confidence, Lewis stressed. But those sediments apparently didn't go all the way to the crater rim. It remains unclear how high they got — where the transition between lake sediments and windblown deposits lies on Mount Sharp's slopes.
Orbital observations have identified an intriguing "unconformity" — a break in the previously continuous sedimentary-rock record — about 2,600 feet (800 m) above Curiosity's current location, Lewis said. So, that region is a candidate.
"We'll see if Curiosity makes it up there, or if we get pieces of that upper unit that roll down the mountain," Lewis said. "But we may have to do a bit more exploring to find such a transition."
But let's get back to the gravity data. Curiosity doesn't carry any dedicated gravimetry instruments, so how did Lewis and his team make their measurements?
By thinking outside the box. Curiosity has two "rover inertial measurement units" (RIMUs), a primary and a backup. Both RIMUs consist of three accelerometers and three gyroscopes, which the rover's handlers normally use for navigation and to determine Curiosity's orientation in space. But Lewis wondered if these engineering data could be recalibrated to capture information about gravitational fields.
"It's something that I had thought about it for a long time," he said. "I didn't expect to have precision that was high enough to be able to use for science purposes. But I started looking into the data and calibrating out some of the complicating factors, like temperature and some other variables. And, lo and behold, it got to the point where the precision was actually scientifically meaningful."
The team was therefore able to build up the first-ever "gravity traverse" on the surface of another planet. The only other such work done off Earth was performed on the moon, by the Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972, Lewis said.
Future rover missions to Mars and other planets could make similar measurements, Lewis said. But the strategy his team used isn't universally applicable. For example, researchers probably cannot dredge gravimetry measurements out of the engineering data gathered over the years by NASA's Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers. Those two golf-cart-size robots collected their engineering data in a slightly different way, Lewis said.
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate) is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall.
WATCH A SUPER-FAST 3D PRINTER SCIENTISTS CALL THE “REPLICATOR”
WATCH A SUPER-FAST 3D PRINTER SCIENTISTS CALL THE “REPLICATOR”
NATURE/UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
VICTOR TANGERMANN
Fabrication Station
3D printers work by laboriously printing objects layer by layer. For larger objects, that process can take hours or even days.
But now scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have found a shortcut: a printer that can fabricate objects in one shot using light — and which could, potentially, revolutionize rapid manufacturing technology.
The Replicator
The research, published in the journal Science yesterday, describes a printer the researchers nicknamed “the replicator” in a nod to “Star Trek.”
It works more like a computed tomography (CT) scan than a conventional 3D printer. It builds a 3D image by scanning an object from multiple angles, then projects it into a tube of synthetic resin that solidifies when exposed to certain intensities of light. In two minutes, for instance, the team was able to fabricate a tiny figurine of Auguste Rodin’s famous “The Thinker” statue.
3D Printing 2.0
The replicator might have groundbreaking implications, but it does have some inherent limitations as well: the objects it produces are small, and require special synthetic resin to produce.
But it’s an exciting new technology — and one that could lead to a “Star Trek” future.
Let’s face it: Antarctica may as well be another planet. While there are theories that the continent may have once been home to long-lost civilizations, we only know for a fact that humans have been exploring Antarctica since the late 19th century. We’ve barely even scratched the surface of an entire continent. Who knows what may lie frozen in the icy wastes of Earth’s most mysterious landmass?
NASA scientists may soon unlock those mysteries – although we probably won’t like what we find. Unless it’s Atlantis. Or the ancient wreck of an alien spacecraft containing a shapeshifting parasitic creature that may or may not take up residence inside Kurt Russell. Whatever is down there, scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory want to find it. JPL nerds have been studying the frozen southernmost continent with specially designed radar satellites since 2010 and have now announced the discovery of a mysterious, giant cavity opening up beneath the continent. Just the thing the world needs!
In a press release, JPL scientists say the cavity was discovered under Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. The mysterious void is two-thirds the size of Manhattan and is over 1,000 feet (300 meters tall) – much larger than any other known cavities. If the void continues to grow, it could allow more heat and water to accumulate under the Thwaites Glacier, accelerating ice melt to the point where sea levels could rise by 2 feet or 65 centimeters. The Thwaites Glacier plays an important role in holding other neighboring ice masses in place, so if it melts or falls into the sea, there could be devastating consequences for everyone on Earth. Yikes.
While JPL is focused more on how the cavity is related to ice melts and other effects of global warming, I’m more interested in the less inevitably apocalyptic side of this story: what might we find inside this cavity if we could somehow explore it? After all, Antarctica has recently been the site of all manner of unexpected and mysterious developments lately including the recent surprising discovery of unknown organisms lying at the bottom of an ancient unexplored underground lake. What secrets could this void be hiding?
Open Minds UFO Radio: David is an Emmy award-winning filmmaker and producer. He has also had a lifelong interest in UFOs. Like many of us, David was excited about the news that the Pentagon had a secret UFO project. He was also excited about the extraordinary UFO encounter that was also featured in the New York Times article that broke the Pentagon UFO news. The encounter involved the USS Nimitz carrier strike group and occurred in November 2004 near San Diego. During training exercises a white object described as looking like a Tic Tac was spotted, jets went in to get a closer look, and then things got weird. Some of the military personnel involved with the encounter have come forward since the NYT broke the story, including David Fravor, the lead pilot who got the closest look. As a filmmaker, David saw an opportunity to help tell the story by taking all of the details publicly available and recreating the encounter. In this episode, we talk to David about his inspiration to make the film, and the details and behind the scenes behind the film’s production.
Scientists Observe A UFO Orbiting Just 300 Miles Over Earth
Scientists Observe A UFO Orbiting Just 300 Miles Over Earth
A UFO erratically orbiting near the Earth has perplexed astronomers.
The extraterrestrial object is seen orbiting as close as 373 miles, or 600 km over Earth and researchers believe it could be an Empty Trash Bag Object (ETBO). Experts think it is remnants from a rocket launch, but they are not sure which one it came from. Due to their tiny size and light mass, ETBOs have random orbit pattern.
Experts say the strange UFO is likely a piece of flimsy material, such as rocket’s metallic foil.
Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope in Hawaii first discovered the bewildering UFO dubbed A10bMLz.
Astronomers at Northolt Branch Observatory in London further analysed the ETBO. The mysterious object was seen stretching several metres across.
Northolt Branch said that the UFO is what is known as an empty trash bag object, which is a piece of light material left over from a rocket launch. However, it is not known yet when this rocket has been launched.
The object is orbiting the Earth at an average distance of 262,000 km at strange retrograde orbit.
ETBOS are a relatively common sight, but the A10bMLz surprised Northolt Branch Observatories because of its very distant orbit.
Astronomical software company Project Pluto said that they have no idea of the origin of this object at present because its past trajectory is really uncertain.
The extraterrestrial object is expected to soon incinerate in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Geomagnetische noordpool verplaatst zich opvallend snel
Geomagnetische noordpool verplaatst zich opvallend snel
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Het gaat momenteel zo hard, dat onderzoekers het World Magnetic Model vroegtijdig moeten herzien.
Waar is de noordpool? Als je het hebt over de geografische noordpool kun je die plek vrij gemakkelijk aanwijzen. Het is de locatie waar de denkbeeldige as waar onze planeet omheen draait uit de aarde steekt. Bovendien kun je er van op aan dat de locatie van die geografische noordpool niet zo snel veranderen zal. Anders is dat wanneer je het over de geomagnetische noordpool hebt. Dat is de pool die je kompas aanwijst. En die pool is wel op vrij korte tijdschalen aan verandering onderhevig. Zo beweegt deze momenteel richting Siberië. En dat gaat behoorlijk hard. Zo hard zelfs dat onderzoekers zich genoodzaakt zien het World Magnetic Model vroegtijdig te herzien.
Te groot verschil Het World Magnetic Model wordt normaal gesproken elke vijf jaar gepubliceerd en beschrijft het aardmagnetisch veld. Bovendien voorspelt het hoe dat aardmagnetisch veld zich de komende vijf jaar gaat gedragen. De laatste keer dat er een World Magnetic Model werd gepubliceerd, was in 2015. De volgende editie staat dus gepland voor 2020. Maar zolang kan de nieuwe editie niet op zich laten wachten, omdat het verschil tussen wat de editie uit 2015 voorspelt en wat we nu daadwerkelijk zien, te groot is.
Map of magnetic variation through time from 1900 to 2015 – the magnetic poles are where the strong red and blue contours converge, and the north pole moves very quickly in recent years.
Magnetic variation in degrees – you really need to set your compass correctly when hiking!
The rate-of-change of magnetic variation in degrees per year – the changes are quickest near the north pole.
The change in the vertical component of magnetic field at the core-mantle boundary between 2015 and 2018 – the three intense patches in the northern hemisphere are related to changes like theLivermore et al (2017) “core jet” model
Waarom is dat een probleem? Het World Magnetic Model is heel belangrijk voor navigatiesystemen. Die kunnen je alleen vertellen waar je heengaat, als ze corrigeren voor het feit dat de geografische en geomagnetische noordpool niet samenvallen. Het World Magnetic Model reikt die correcties aan, maar zit er inmiddels dus behoorlijk naast, omdat het aardmagnetisch veld zich anders gedraagt dan verwacht.
Het aardmagnetisch veld wordt gegenereerd door wervelingen in de buitenkern van de aarde – die bestaat uit vloeibaar ijzer. Veranderingen in die wervelingen leiden ook tot veranderingen in het aardmagnetisch veld. Het is dus zeker niet vreemd dat de geomagnetische noordpool zich verplaatst. De snelheid waarmee dat gebeurt, heeft onderzoekers wel wat overvallen. Maar dat is niets iets om wakker van te liggen; de bewegingen van de geomagnetische noordpool zijn van nature behoorlijk grillig en doordat deze de laatste decennia sneller beweegt dan daarvoor, kunnen kleine afwijkingen ten opzichte van de voorspelling vrij snel uitmonden in grote verschillen tussen de voorspellingen en werkelijkheid. Met een nieuw World Magnetic Model kunnen we er naar verwachting echter weer even tegenaan. In ieder geval tot 2020, het jaar waarin het model sowieso ook weer een update zal krijgen.
Voor het eerst een 2,6 km groot object ontdekt aan de rand van ons zonnestelsel
Voor het eerst een 2,6 km groot objectontdekt aan de rand van ons zonnestelsel
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Het bestaan van dergelijke objecten werd meer dan 70 jaar geleden al voorspeld.
Maar nu pas zijn onderzoekers erin geslaagd om zo’n object te spotten. Dat is te lezen in het blad Nature Astronomy.
Kuipergordel Het betreffende object bevindt zich in de Kuipergordel, een flinke verzameling kleine hemellichamen die zich voorbij de baan van Neptunus bevindt. Aangenomen wordt dat deze Kuipergordel is opgebouwd uit puin dat na de vorming van het zonnestelsel overbleef. En in tegenstelling tot de kleine hemellichamen – zoals planetoïden – die zich in het binnenste van ons zonnestelsel wagen en aldaar beïnvloed worden door straling, botsingen en de zwaartekracht van de planeten, zijn de objecten in de donkere, afgelegen Kuipergordel vrijwel ongerept gebleven. Ze kunnen – als overgebleven bouwmaterialen van de planeten in ons zonnestelsel – dan ook een goed beeld geven van het planeetvormingsproces.
Missend puzzelstukje Aangenomen wordt dat planeten het levenslicht zien wanneer stof en ijs samenklontert. Gaandeweg ontstaat zo een steeds groter object dat – met zijn toenemende zwaartekracht – steeds meer materiaal naar zich toetrekt. Het eindresultaat van dat proces – planeten zoals onze aarde, maar ook Mars en Venus – hebben we al uitgebreid kunnen bestuderen. Maar het object dat onderzoekers nu gevonden hebben, kan gezien worden als een missend puzzelstukje in de evolutie van planeten. Het zit namelijk tussen die eerste samenklontering van stof en ijs en de planeten die we vandaag de dag zien, in.
Een artistieke impressie van het 2,6 kilometer grote object.
Afbeelding: Ko Arimatsu.
Gespot Het bestaan van Kuipergordelobjecten met een straal van één tot enkele kilometers werd meer dan 70 jaar geleden al voorspeld. Maar het daadwerkelijk waarnemen ervan is lastig gebleken. Zelfs de beste telescopen kunnen de kleine objecten die op zo’n grote afstand staan en zo weinig licht reflecteren niet direct waarnemen. Japanse onderzoekers besloten het daarom over een andere boeg te gooien. Ze plaatsten twee kleine telescopen op het dak van een Japanse school en monitorden 2000 sterren, in de hoop dat de helderheid van één van deze sterren af zou nemen doordat een Kuipergordelobject van hooguit enkele kilometers groot er voor langs zou bewegen. Een analyse van de data wijst uit dat de helderheid van één van de sterren inderdaad afnam en wel zodanig dat alles erop wijst dat een 2,6 kilometer groot Kuipergordelobject voor de ster langsbewoog.
Talrijk Dat de onderzoekers bij de eerste poging al een Kuipergordelobject van deze omvang vinden, suggereert dat dergelijke objecten behoorlijk talrijk zijn. Het onderschrijft de theorie dat ijs en stof langzaam samenklitte tot objecten van hooguit enkele kilometers groot alvorens een groeispurt door te maken door met vergelijkbare objecten samen te smelten.
De ontdekking smaakt natuurlijk naar meer. De onderzoekers zijn dan ook voornemens om de Kuipergordel opnieuw onder de loep te nemen. Ook zouden ze graag nog eens onderzoek doen naar de nog verder gelegen Oortwolk, die is opgebouwd uit miljarden komeetachtige objecten.
Antarctica hasn’t been doing so well lately. The continent is rapidly melting, and a large chunk of the snow and ice is only held back from the ocean by an array of glaciers and ice shelves guarding the coasts.None of these are doing well, but one of them—the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica—is rapidly crumbling. Now scientists have learned why it’s collapsing so quickly: There’s agiant underground cavern in the glacier almost as big as Manhattan.
The data comes from NASA’s Operation IceBridge, a program that flies radar-equipped planes over the poles to map out glaciers and ice sheets in three dimensions. These radar images are even capable of seeing through the ice to get a clear model of the glacier down to the bedrock. This information is extremely useful to scientists because how quickly a glacier melts depends a great deal on what’s going on near that bedrock.
In Thwaites’ case, that radar uncovered a gigantic cavern between the glacier itself and the bedrock below it. That cavern is likely filled with air much warmer than the surrounding ice, triggering faster melting of the glacier than would happen otherwise. Thanks to this nearly-Manhattan-sized gap in the ice, the entire glacier along with the surrounding ice sheet will likely disappear much more quickly.
A radar image of Thwaites from 2011 to 2017. The cavern is visible as the growing red blob in the center of the image. The noisy red and blue part in the bottom corner comes from ice breaking off into the sea.
NASA/JPL-CALTECH
So what happens if Thwaites melts? Immediately, we'd get about 2 feet of sea level rise. But the real danger is what happens after. Thwaites holds back a large portion of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and a handful of nearby glaciers; if Thwaites disappears, we could see an additional 8 feet of sea level rise from these sources, on top of the 2 feet from Thwaites itself.
Even more worrying to scientists beyond just the cavern existing is how quickly it appeared. The cavern first appeared in 2012 and most of the ice that once occupied it melted in the last 3. Most models of the Thwaites glacier don’t take into account rapid cavern forming, so the entire glacier is likely to be melting much faster than our predictions estimate.
In other words, there’s a good chance we could be looking at some serious melting in the near future, thanks to this glacier and the ice around it.
A fast-moving comet, C/2018 Y1 (Iwamoto), is nearing its February encounter with the sun and Earth. It’ll pass near some galaxies as seen from Earth, providing a great opportunity for astrophotographers. Charts and more info here.
Comet C/2018 Y1 (Iwamoto) is seen at the bottom of this beautiful image by Rolando Ligustri. Used with permission.
A new celestial visitor – a comet – wasdiscoveredby Japanese astronomer Masayuki Iwamoto in late 2018. It’ll provide nice opportunities for astrophotographers, as it will pass close to a couple of Messier objects in February 2019. It’s a fast-moving comet that will be closest to Earth on February 12, 2019, at around 2:57 p.m. ET (19:57 UTC;translate to your time zone). The celestial visitor will safely pass by Earth at some 28 million miles (45 million km). The comet has been designated C/2018 Y1 (Iwamoto).
This comet is fast! Comet C/2018 Y1 (Iwamoto) is traveling through space at the amazing speed of 147,948 miles per hour (238,099 km/h) or 66 km per second, relative to Earth.
The best nights for observing the comet (with binoculars and small telescopes) should be on February 11 and 12. Preliminary estimates suggest the newly found comet might reach a brightness or magnitude between 7 and 7.8 , which means it should be easily seen with small telescopes and binoculars. It will not be visible to the eye alone.
A closer look at comet C/2018 Y1 (Iwamoto)’s orbit.
Image via NASA/JPL.
During closest approach to Earth, comet Iwamoto will be located in front of the constellation Leo the Lion, which is visible late at night at this time of year.
Astrophotographers might be able to capture this comet passing close to some galaxies, as seen from our perspective. See the illustrations below:
Late on the night of Saturday, February 2, 2019, Comet C/2018 Y1 (Iwamoto) passes close to M104 (Sombrero Galaxy), providing a nice opportunity to astrophotographers.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
On February 2, 2019, comet Iwamoto passes close to Messier 104 (Sombrero Galaxy), while by February 10, 2019, the celestial visitor will appear passing very close to Messier 95, a galaxy in the constellation Leo.
Facing east on February 10, 2019 at around 10 p.m. CT as seen from the central US. Comet C/2018 Y1 (Iwamoto) will pass close to some galaxies in Leo, especially Messier 95.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
Location of comet C/2018 Y1 (Iwamoto) from February 10 to 12, 2019. Binoculars should provide a nice view of the fuzzy patch of light, while telescopes might allow seeing a hint of a green color. Facing east at 10 p.m. CT as seen from central U.S.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
The comet was detected in images taken on December 18, 2018.
Comet C/2018 Y1 (Iwamoto) looks great in this image taken on January 17, 2019, by Rolando Ligustri.
We will keep you updated …
The orbit of comet C/2018 Y1 (Iwamoto) is very elliptical (elongated). Its orbit suggests this comet came from the Oort cloud of comets surrounding our solar system.
Bottom line: A new comet soon to be within reach of binoculars and small telescopes is heading toward a February 2019 encounter with the sun and Earth. It’ll pass Earth safely on February 11-12.
Spooky ancient sculptures of ‘aliens and spaceships’ in Mexican cave spark claims extraterrestrials have lived on Earth
Spooky ancient sculptures of ‘aliens and spaceships’ in Mexican cave spark claims extraterrestrials have lived on Earth
ANCIENT sculptures depicting alien-like figures have been found in a cave in Mexico, it has been claimed.
The spooky artefacts which reportedly date back thousands of years show creatures with long faces and wide eyes.
ANCIENT sculptures depicting alien-like figures have been found in a cave in Mexico, it has been claimed.
The spooky artefacts which reportedly date back thousands of years show creatures with long faces and wide eyes.
A sculptor reportedly found in a Mexican cave appears to show an alien mother and her children
Other sculptures appear to show spaceships flying through the air.
The mystery objects are reportedly popular among locals who live near the caves in an unspecified area of Mexico, reports The Daily Star.
The clip showing the eerie pictures was uploaded to YouTube channel UFOmania yesterday and has already been viewed thousands of times.
Despite the channel not providing any background detail to when and where the sculptures were found, many online users appeared convinced by the clip.
A stone features drawing which resemble spacecrafts
Many of the artefacts depict long faces with oval-shaped eyes
The supposedly ancient sculptures have sparked claims that aliens visited earth thousands of years ago
A reportedly ancient sculptor appears to show a humanoid holding a bowl
One wrote: “Incredible evidentiary support of the fact that extraterrestrials have been engaging the human race for a very long time!”
Another said: “Best evidence yet !!!”
While others are were not so easily convinced.
One sceptical YouTuber user wrote: “If it looks too good to be true, it's probably not.”
The grainy black and white snap first appeared in a book by the Italian consul Alberto Perego in 1958 but have never been seen outside of Italy
Dr Roberto Pinotti, 72, said the otherworldly visitor, who wore dark shades to cover his eyes, let two of them on board his flying saucer.
The strange encounter allegedly happened in Francavillia, on the Adriatic Coast, in October 1957.
Dr Pinotti said a group of residents were regularly visited by human-like extraterrestrials who wanted to be "friends" with mankind - just like ET in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounter movie.
Un OVNI incroyable a été filmé à Greensboro, en Caroline du Nord
Un OVNI incroyable a été filmé à Greensboro, en Caroline du Nord
Un OVNI, qui émettait des flashs lumineux aléatoirement, a été filmé dans le ciel à l’extérieur de la ville de Greensboro, dans l’État de Caroline du Nord. Ces images ont déclenché de vifs débats sur les réseaux sociaux. Certaines personnes ont même affirmé avoir vu ce même objet mystérieux.
Cette vidéo, d’une durée de 5 minutes, nous montre un objet « en forme de pastille » planer dans le ciel et produire une série de flashs. L’homme, derrière la caméra, prend soin d’agrandir et de mettre en valeur cet incroyable engin.
La vidéo a été postée le samedi 26 janvier 2019. Elle a été visionnée des milliers de fois depuis sa diffusion sur diverses chaînes YouTube consacrées aux OVNI et aux mystères non résolus, dont The Hidden Underbelly 2.0.
Ces images ont été prises par Bret Jones, connu sous le nom de SpaceBret sur YouTube. Il explique dans la vidéo que cette « chose étrange » a été repérée le vendredi 25 janvier alors qu’il tentait de filmer des oiseaux en dehors de Greensboro.
« J’ai remarqué une étrange lumière clignotante dans le ciel près d’un avion. Elle se déplaçait lentement dans le ciel, un peu plus lentement que les avions qui volaient », explique Jones sur YouTube. « Je ne pensais pas l’avoir filmé du tout, car je ne parvenais pas à faire le focus avec mon objectif, ni à le verrouiller. »
Cependant, il dit qu’il a ensuite grossi la vidéo à 900% et l’a passé au ralentie. Cela a révélé un objet « en forme de pilule » qui produit des éclairs lumineux à partir de ses deux extrémités.
« Quand je l’ai vu, ça m’a complètement bouleversé parce que ce n’était pas du tout ce à quoi je m’attendais », déclare Jones sur YouTube. « Je ne sais pas ce que c’est. »
Une personne a suggéré que ce n’était rien de plus qu’un « ballon Mylar avec une ficelle ou un ballon avec une antenne d’extension WiFi ». Dans une partie de la vidéo, il semble que cet objet possède une attache.
Cependant, Jones affirme que cela n’expliquerait pas le clignotement et la disparition soudaine de l’objet. Le lien suspecté pourrait également être l’objet qui « éjectait une sorte de carburant ».
D’autres semblent être d’accord avec cette dernière théorie. Un internaute a, en effet, noté que cela semble « sortir puis se rétracter ». Plusieurs personnes ont déclaré avoir vu la même chose et avoir eu du mal à la filmer.
« J’ai vu un objet similaire à Winston Salem le 25, en fin d’après-midi ! », A commenté Julia Hejnar sur YouTube. « C’est arrivé si vite. Il clignotait comme ça ! »
« Je vois régulièrement ce flash la nuit depuis un an maintenant », a commenté SkyHound.
« Je… connais bien la différence entre les avions, les satellites, les torches à iridium, les météorites, les hélicoptères, etc. Ceci est différent… Il semble émettre des flashs extrêmement lumineux, sans motif. Il disparaît même parfois dans un feu rouge terne. »
La Caroline du Nord a été le théâtre de nombreuses observations d’OVNI ces dernières décennies. Certains cas ont été expliqués. Parfois, il s’agissait de dirigeables ou d’avions militaires.
"Out There," Space.com senior writer Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life (among other things), comes out Nov. 13, 2018.
Credit: Grand Central Publishing
In "OUT THERE: A Scientific Guide to Alien Life, Antimatter, and Human Space Travel (for the Cosmically Curious)," (Grand Central Publishing, 2018), Space.com senior writer Mike Wall tackles the most pressing questions about alien life. For example, how are scientists searching for ET? What might aliens look like, would they want to kill us, and are they likely to have sex? The book, which comes out Nov. 13 and was illustrated by Karl Tate, also talks about humanity's quest to get off its natal rock and spread out into the solar system. You can read an excerpt below.
Chapter 1: Where Is Everybody?
In 1950, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi — who led the team that created the first-ever nuclear reactor, the inadequately named Chicago Pile-1 — and a few of his colleagues were discussing UFOs during their lunch break. The conversation prompted Fermi to ask his companions, "Where is everybody?" [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens]
Fermi meant that the lack of visits by ET is distinctly odd. The Milky Way harbors hundreds of billions of stars and is about 13 billion years old, so there has been plenty of time and opportunity for alien civilizations to rise and spread throughout the galaxy. By some estimates, a colonization-minded species with propulsion technology not much more advanced than our own could island-hop its way to every corner of the Milky Way in just a few million years.
The physicist's simple question is enshrined now as Fermi's paradox — one of the two coolest paradoxes of all time, along with the crocodile paradox — and it continues to puzzle scientists to this day. Indeed, the mystery has deepened considerably over the years. For one thing, we're not just talking about the lack of visitation anymore. In 1960, 6 years after Fermi's death, astronomer Frank Drake pointed a radio telescope at West Virginia's Green Bank Observatory at the nearby sun-like stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, kicking off the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).Nearly 60 years later, SETI scientists are still hunting for the first confirmed peep from ET.
Then there's the exoplanet revolution. Alien worlds were purely hypothetical objects in Fermi's day and for decades afterward; scientists didn't announce the first confirmed detection of a planet beyond the solar system until 1992. But in the last decade or so, NASA's Kepler space telescope and other instruments have revealed that the cosmos is teeming with possibly life-supporting worlds. Kepler's discoveries suggest that about 20 percent of the Milky Way's sun-like stars host an Earth-sized world in the "habitable zone" — that just-right range of orbital distances that would allow you to walk around in flip-flops pretty much year-round. The proportion appears to be similar for red dwarfs, the small, dim stars that dominate our galaxy. (About 75 percent of Milky Way stars are red dwarfs, whereas just 10 percent or so are similar to our sun.)
"There's a lot of real estate out there, and we now know that," said radio astronomer Jill Tarter, who co-founded the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and served as the inspiration for Ellie Arroway, the lead character in Carl Sagan's novel Contact and the movie based on it.
Not all of this real estate is way out in the boonies, either. The sun's nearest neighbor, the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, hosts an Earth-size planet in the habitable zone. Seven rocky planets circle the dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, which isn't much farther away from us in the cosmic scheme of things — and three of those worlds may be able to support life as we know it. (Proxima Centauri and TRAPPIST-1 lie about 4.2 light-years and 39 light-years from Earth, respectively. The entire Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years wide.) [The 7 Earth-Sized Planets of TRAPPIST-1 in Pictures]
So, again: where is everybody? Nobody knows. The Fermi paradox is tougher than a Brazil nut, and scientists haven't cracked it yet. But it's not for lack of trying. They've advanced hundreds of hypotheses to explain it. As varied as these ideas are, they all encompass just a few basic possibilities, as physicist Stephen Webb noted in his book If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens, Where Is Everybody? Let's take a look at each of these three explanation families.
Possibility 1: What paradox? Intelligent aliens have already messed with us
You may already have wandered off, irritated or incensed that I put the Fermi paradox on equal footing with the beloved crocodile paradox. Perhaps you're now thumbing through a dog-eared copy of Chariots of the Gods? or watching YouTube clips of that "alien autopsy" TV special that Fox aired in the 1990s.
Indeed, one possible resolution of the Fermi paradox is that it's no paradox at all, because ET has already journeyed to Earth. Adherents of this explanation often point to UFO sightings and alien abduction stories, topics that you can read about in chapter 10. For our purposes here, suffice it to say that scientists generally don't regard any of these reports as convincing evidence of alien life. (If they did, you definitely would have heard about it.)
There are more subtle possibilities in play as well. For example, what if ET came to our planet long ago, before people were around to be probed? Unless the voyaging aliens were particularly interested in us, this is much more likely than a documented visit, given that our species has existed for just the last 200,000 years of Earth's 4.5-billion-year history and has been capable of capturing encounters on blurry, low-light video for only a few decades.
Let's indulge in some wild speculation, because it's fun! Say Earth has been colonized many times over the eons by greedy, grabby alien civilizations, each of which ground the planet's native species into the dust in the process. (Don't get too high and mighty: pioneering humans have tended to wreak ecological havoc as we've explored the globe.) As astrophysicist and sci-fi author David Brin has pointed out, a history of such oppression could explain why it took intelligent life so long to arise on our planet as well as the radio silence in our galactic neighborhood. Maybe Earth is the only planet for light-years around to have recovered from the ravages of invasion.
If you squint a little, this scenario lines up with the five mass extinctions that scientists have identified in the fossil record. These great purges occurred about 450 million years ago, 375 million years ago, 251 million years ago, 200 million years ago, and, most famously, 66 million years ago, when an asteroid strike wiped out three-quarters of all Earth's species, including the dinosaurs. "It may not be preposterous," Brin wrote in a seminal 1983 paper, to compare the intervals between these extinction events and the time it might take for different waves of invasion to wash over Earth. The dino-killing asteroid could even have been a weapon of war, slung by a space-dwelling alien faction with a beef against their brethren on Earth.
Brin didn't mean to suggest that any of this actually happened, and neither do I. There's no evidence that it did — no spacecraft entombed in ancient amber, no ruins of a 200-million-year-old city — and I certainly wouldn't put any money on it. But it's possible. [5 Bold Claims of Alien Life]
Credit: Karl Tate/Grand Central Publishing
Possibility 2: They're out there, but we haven't found them yet
As scientists and other logically minded people often point out, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. It's entirely possible that intelligent aliens are (or were) out there, and we just haven't spotted any signs of them yet.
For example, maybe ET hasn't visited Earth because getting here is just too hard. The distances involved in any interstellar trek are mind-boggling. Proxima Centauri is "just" 4.2 light-years from the sun. But that's almost 25 trillion miles — equivalent to circling Earth 1 billion times, going to Pluto and back 3,450 times, or jogging around the track at your local high school 100 trillion times. It would take a spacecraft about 75,000 years to get to Proxima Centauri using today's rockets.
There aren't enough honey-roasted peanuts and Sudoku books on Earth to make that trip bearable. Even if we assume that aliens, with their pulsating and extravagantly veined brains, have developed super-fast propulsion tech that puts our puny human gear to shame, there's still a big problem: energy. Say the aliens, like Starfleet engineers, know how to build matter-antimatter engines that can accelerate a ship to 75 percent the speed of light. Just making an Earth-Proxima Centauri round trip with this craft would require 100,000 times more energy than the United States uses in an entire year, physicist Lawrence Krauss wrote in his book The Physics of Star Trek. Is the aliens' desire to probe us, or to give the ancient Egyptians some killer pyramid blueprints, really that strong?
Or maybe ET just doesn't want to interfere with the development of life on other worlds — and has hewed to this noble "prime directive" far more successfully than Captain Kirk and his crew have managed to do in the Star Trek universe. (Remember when the Enterprise gang took it upon themselves to destroy the machine-god Vaal in an original series episode? Vaal seemed like a jerk, but still.) It's even possible that aliens are watching us right now, to monitor our technological progress, figure out how we tick, or keep their bratty kids occupied for a few hours.
Some thinkers take such reasoning a step further, suggesting that we and everything else in the observable universe — yes, even love — may be part of a simulation run on a very fancy alien computer. Before laughing this off, consider how much cooler Fortniteis than Burger Time. Those two games were released just 35 years apart, and the hypothetical aliens have had billions of years to come up with amazing graphics and compelling yet believable storylines. Indeed, philosopher Nick Bostrom has argued that the odds we're trapped in a Matrix-style pseudo-existence are actually quite high — provided there are a decent number of super-advanced civilizations out there and at least some of them are keen to create convincing virtual worlds, for fun or profit. Given these two assumptions, the number of artificially created universes, or patches of universe, will far outstrip the number of real ones, according to this line of thinking.
Along similar lines, perhaps ET's technical mastery has driven its focus away from the real world and into the virtual, sapping its desire to explore the cosmos or meet any potential neighbors. (Humanity may well succumb to this fate when high-quality virtual reality porn hits the marketplace.)
There are other reasons why advanced aliens may be keeping their heads down as well. Self-preservation springs to mind: what if they're trying to avoid being destroyed or enslaved by big-time cosmic jerks, like the Borg from Star Trek or the Galactic Empire in Star Wars? Scientists have even suggested that evil aliens may have sent fleets of intelligent, self-replicating "berserker" probes out into the galaxy to hunt for radio transmissions and other signs of intelligent life — and to exterminate any civilizations they find. [The Evolution of 'Star Trek' (Infographic)]
Extinction is another possibility. Maybe those berserkers have done a lot of exterminating over the eons. Or perhaps alien civilizations tend to off themselves in relatively short order. Humanity has come perilously close to a nuclear holocaust several times, after all, and we've recently spurred a global mass extinction that may end up claiming our species as well. And yet, with all that, we've been capable of sending signals to other stars for only a century or so.
If a 100-year messaging life span is the norm for civilizations, "then it's as if there are two fireflies that each flick on once during the course of a long night," said Douglas Vakoch, president of METI International, a San Francisco-based nonprofit dedicated to astrobiology and SETI research. (METI stands for messaging extraterrestrial intelligence — the controversial notion that humanity should reach out to potential alien civilizations, rather than just passively listen.)
The odds that these cosmic fireflies will flash at the same time are, of course, not good. That's sad for them, and sad for any giant space monsters that want to catch them and put them in jars.
It's also possible that ET is trying to get our attention, and we just haven't noticed yet. After all, humanity has been searching for alien transmissions for less than 60 years — the last 0.000001 percent of Earth's history — and always on a shoestring budget.
How shoestring? Well, the US government hasn't bankrolled a SETI operation for a quarter-century. NASA began an ambitious observing project in 1992 but had to stop a year later when Congress cut off the money. (The leader of the defunding push, Nevada senator Richard Bryan, painted the SETI effort as a Mars safari for some reason. "The Great Martian Chase may finally come to an end," Bryan said in 1993. "As of today, millions have been spent and we have yet to bag a single little green fellow. Not a single Martian has said, ‘Take me to your leader,' and not a single flying saucer has applied for FAA approval.")
The SETI Institute and other such groups generally rely on private donations to keep the lights on and the telescopes listening. These donations don't always come through. The SETI Institute had to idle its main ear to the universe, the forty-two-dish Allen Telescope Array in Northern California, for four months in 2011, and the original plan called for the ATA to consist of 350 telescopes, but there hasn't been enough cash to complete the build.
Given this situation and the huge scale of the Milky Way galaxy, scientists have not yet been able to mount a comprehensive SETI survey. They haven't even come close.
Tarter often relies on an analogy to get this point across: imagine that you're searching for fish across the entirety of Earth's oceans, and you wade into the surf and scoop up a single glass of seawater. "If you did that experiment and your glass didn't contain a fish, you probably would not conclude that there aren't any fish," Tarter said. "Well, numerically, the amount of searching that we've done versus the amount that we might have to do is equivalent to that one glass of ocean."
We may not even be looking for the right kinds of signals. The SETI search to date has focused heavily on radio waves and to a lesser extent laser-light pulses, because those are technologies that humanity has mastered. But we're already weaning ourselves off radio-wave transmission just a century after inventing it; when's the last time you sharpened your TV's picture by crumpling some tinfoil onto rabbit ears? Would a billion-year-old alien civilization really still be communicating like this, or in any way we could understand? Maybe ET sends messages via neutrinos, the bizarre and unfathomably numerous particles that zoom through planets unimpeded like subatomic Houdinis. (Trillions of solar neutrinos passed through your body in the time it took to read that last sentence.) Maybe the aliens are telepathic. Who knows?
Our current strategy may be akin to trying to eavesdrop on people via walkie-talkie, according to astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch, who's a professor at the Technical University of Berlin in Germany and an adjunct professor at Arizona State University and Washington State University.
"You probably won't get anything, because everyone is on Facebook," Schulze-Makuch said.
As this discussion shows, many of the ideas bandied about to explain Fermi's paradox basically amount to ET psychology. And that's not the most promising path for a breakthrough: getting inside the heads of super-advanced aliens is beyond us, at least until we stop devoting most of our creative energies to meme generation. (Thank you for indulging this "get off my lawn" moment.)
Credit: Karl Tate/Grand Central Publishing
Possibility 3: We are alone
The last alternative is the most depressing: the cosmic silence speaks volumes.
Maybe Earth is the only inhabited world in the entire galaxy. God loves us that much! Or, if you want to get all science-y about it, the jump from complex organic chemicals to wriggling microbe may be so improbable that it occurred just once, and we hit the jackpot.
This could be a stretch, given how quickly life got a foothold on Earth. Microbes were here by at least 3.8 billion years ago, and perhaps even earlier; some evidence pushes life's emergence back to 4.1 billion years ago, pretty much as soon as Earth had cooled down enough to be habitable. But even if microbes are common throughout the cosmos, intelligent life could still be vanishingly rare. (Astronomers and astrobiologists do actually crack the obligatory joke from time to time: "Hey, we're still searching for intelligent life on Earth!" or "You won't find it on Capitol Hill!") Why? Well, maybe not many planets can offer the long-term TLC required for complexity and smarts to evolve. For example, Earth boasts a large moon that stabilizes its tilt (and thus its climate), and it enjoys the protection of a giant outer planet (Jupiter) whose powerful gravity nudges some dangerous comets away. Perhaps such characteristics are rare for rocky worlds in the habitable zone.
Also, forget what those cartoons showing apes marching toward a proud, pants-wearing future may suggest; there's no "arrow of progress" inherent in evolution. Natural selection favors whatever works, so if simple is successful, simple stays simple. Indeed, that was the story for most of Earth's history. Multicellular organisms don't show up in the fossil record until nearly 600 million years ago — meaning single-celled microbes had the planet to themselves for at least 3 billion years. And there was another long gap before super-smart animals — modern humans — came along.
So it might take a really special set of circumstances to jolt life out of its simple, slimy origins and eventually reach the point where it can invent radio transmitters, spaceships, wheely shoes, and other cool stuff. After all, Earth might still have reptilian overlords if not for that asteroid strike 66 million years ago, which allowed our mammalian ancestors to scurry out from the shadows. [Images: Potentially Dangerous Asteroids]
There are some other important things to keep in mind as well. For example, not all intelligence is the same, as the diversity of life on Earth clearly shows. Chimps, ravens, dolphins, sea otters, octopi, and a number of other species are smart enough to use tools, but only humans have built radio transmitters, spaceships, and wheely shoes. (As far as we know. But if chimps had wheely shoes, you'd think Jane Goodall would've said something.) We can't assume that every intelligent alien species would be technologically smart or able to communicate with us.
The circumstances of their birth may cut many smart aliens off from the rest of the universe. If our own solar system is any guide, the most common life-supporting worlds in the galaxy may be frigid moons and planets with liquid-water oceans beneath their icy shells — places like Saturn's moon Enceladus and the Jupiter satellite Europa. If complex, intelligent life has evolved in such environments — and that's far from a sure thing, given the likely dearth of energy in those dark depths — we might never hear from it.
"How long would it take sentient beings, confined to their pitch-dark liquid habitat by a solid sky hundreds of kilometers thick, to discover that there was a vast universe beyond their world's apparently impenetrable roof?" theoretical physicist Paul Davies wrote in The Eerie Silence, his 2010 book about the Fermi paradox. "It is hard to imagine that they would ever ‘break out' of their ice prison and beam radio messages across space."
Getting an answer
You've made it through the Fermi Paradox Hypothesis Sampler Platter! Did any of the ideas jump out at you? Perhaps the berserkers, for violence and action, or the buried-ocean dwellers, for poignancy? (I picture sallow, eyeless mercreatures sadly strumming lutes.) If so, that's nice, but you probably shouldn't get too attached. We just don't have enough information at the moment to know what's actually going on.
"I find it silly that so many people leap to shout, ‘Aha! I know the answer!'" Brin said. "All we can do is catalog them for now, and maybe rank a ‘Top Ten.'"
But we could start getting at that answer, and soon. Say scientists discover a "second genesis" of microbes — tiny organisms completely unrelated to any kind of life as we know it — on Mars, Enceladus, or another solar system body. We would then know that life is not a super-lucky one-off affair, and we'd strongly suspect that it's widespread throughout the galaxy. This news, combined with a continued SETI silence, would also be troubling for anyone who cares about humanity's future, for it would suggest that the bottleneck limiting the number of intelligent civilizations still lies ahead of us. (There could be a benefit, though: if we think we're the only technologically smart creatures in the galaxy, the resulting sense of responsibility may provide the nudge we need not to destroy ourselves.)
By the same reasoning, getting even a single SETI ping would be a real pick-me-up.
"The detection of a signal—even a cosmic dial tone, with no information — goes on to tell us that we can have a long future," Tarter said. "If somebody else made it through, we can, too."
David Wilcock: Everything You Need to Know About Aliens and UFOs (Video)
David Wilcock: Everything You Need to Know About Aliens and UFOs (Video)
Art By Graham Ganson
David Wilcock and Emery Smith will expand on his experiences underground in one of the worlds best kept secrets.
Emery also disclosed the fact that beings, be they biological, robotic, or a mix of the two do have the ability shape-shift to other forms.
Emery is bringing forward other scientists who have worked on similar projects. There are a lot of people out there or insiders who are older than Emery.
Emery led a lonely life, not being able to get this information out to the public. David Wilcock’s code name for Emery was Paul, before Emery came out in public. If not for David, Emery wouldn’t have come forward.
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Linda Moulton Howe: Extraterrestrials Are Likely Someone Else's Machines via Artificial Intelligence (Video)
Linda Moulton Howe: Extraterrestrials Are Likely Someone Else's Machines via Artificial Intelligence (Video)
Linda Moulton Howe starts off with Elon Musk’s comments to American governors at a meeting in Rhode Island: “Artificial Intelligence is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization and I don’t think people really appreciate that.” With video and images, Linda will lay out the emerging problems of applying A. I. to robots, especially those under development for military applications with weapons, and those problems include the potential for robots to lethally turn on their human makers.
As humanity is rapidly moving to depend on A. I. robot support, people in the UFO/E.T. abduction syndrome have been saying for decades that some of the beings they have dealt with were clearly Someone else’s programmed androids and robots.
COAST TO COAST AM. George Knapp welcomed abductee Niara Isley as she recounted her experience which began after she witnessed a mysterious craft at the military’s secretive Tonopah Test Range in Nevada.
She explained that, soon after being sent to the base to train pilots on how to avoid being detected by radar, she spotted a UFO in the sky, which she thought might be a back-engineered US test craft.
Strangely, she noted that there were armed guards standing nearby and their intent seemed to be to ensure that Isley and her colleagues saw the UFO.
The group was then herded onto an old school bus with blacked-out windows, and they were taken to a medical facility.
At a later date, she said, her superiors forced her to board a craft, which was manned by both a grey and reptilian alien, and she was actually taken to the moon.
rvDe eerste ontmoeting tussen de Spaanse overheerser Hernan Cortez en de Azteekse leider Moctezuma.
WETENSCHAP Door de kolonisatie van het Amerikaanse continent stierven er zo veel mensen dat het klimaat van de aarde erdoor verstoord werd. Dat suggereert alvast een team wetenschappers van de University College London in een nieuwe studie, dat de oorzaak onderzocht van de Kleine IJstijd in de 15de en de 16de eeuw.
De verklaring achter de these die de wetenschappers uit de doeken doen is eenvoudig gesteld de volgende: doordat er na de kolonisatie door de Europeanen zoveel inheemse volkeren door ziektes en geweld om het leven kwamen, bleven miljoenen landbouwgronden in Centraal-, Zuid- en Noord-Amerika onbewerkt liggen. De gronden raakten opnieuw begroeid door vegetatie, en de bossen die ontstonden haalden op een abnormaal hoog tempo zo veel CO2 uit de lucht, dat de temperatuur wereldwijd daalde.
Dat er in de jaren na de aankomst van de Europeanen in 1492 miljoenen inheemse inwoners stierven, staat vast. Schattingen over het inwoneraantal van het volledige Amerikaanse continent op het einde van de 15de eeuw lopen uiteen, maar tegenwoordig gaan wetenschappers uit van ongeveer 60 miljoen, tien procent van de wereldpopulatie. Honderd jaar later bleven er daar amper 5 tot 6 miljoen van over.
Inwoners werden naar Europa verscheept als slaven of stierven bij massaslachtpartijen, maar de overgrote meerderheid kwam om het leven omdat ze geen enkele weerstand hadden tegen de ziektes die de Europeanen meenamen, zoals de mazelen. Mexico, dat rond 1500 bijvoorbeeld nog 22 miljoen inwoners telde, hield er daar tegen 1600 nog amper 1 miljoen van over.
Dat de temperatuur op aarde in diezelfde periode plots daalde, staat eveneens vast. Wetenschappers spreken over de Kleine IJstijd, waarbij de temperatuur wereldwijd plots daalde met een halve graad, en in Europa zelfs met 1 tot 2 graden. Ook in onze streken was het plots veel kouder en waren de winters veel strenger.
Verband
Beide fenomenen blijken nu wel eens meer met elkaar te maken te hebben dan eerder werd gedacht. Want samen met de miljoenen oorspronkelijke Amerikaanse inwoners lag 56 miljoen hectare aan landbouwgrond er plots ongebruikt bij en kon de natuur in een gebied zo groot als heel Frankrijk opnieuw zijn gang gaan. En de miljoenen bomen en planten die daar opnieuw konden groeien, haalden zo veel CO2 uit de lucht dat de aarde wel eens onnatuurlijk snel afkoelde.
“De grote sterfte van de inheemse volkeren van Amerika leidde tot het achterlaten van zoveel land dat de koolstofopname door bomen en planten een duidelijke impact had op het wereldwijde CO2-niveau en op de wereldwijde temperatuur”, schrijven de onderzoekers Alexander Koch en zijn collega’s in de studie.
rvDe Spaanse veroveraar Cortez bij de bestorming van de Teocalli-piramide in het huidige Mexico.
Antarctica
Aanwijzingen voor het verband vonden de wetenschappers op Antarctica, waar ze via ijsboringen te weten kwamen dat er in de 16de eeuw plots een abnormale afname van CO2 in de lucht te merken was. Bovendien laten opzoekingen op het Amerikaanse continent tegelijkertijd variaties in steenkool en pollenafzettingen zien. Dat wijst er op dat er minder gronden in brand werden gestoken om ze opnieuw klaar te maken voor landbouw, en dat de natuur opnieuw zijn gang kon gaan.
Ed Hawkins, klimaatwetenschapper aan de Reading University en zelf niet betrokken bij de studie, zegt aan de BBC dat “wetenschappers ervan uit gaan dat de Kleine IJstijd veroorzaakt is door verschillende factoren”. “Een daling van de CO2, een reeks vulkanische uitbarstingen, veranderingen in het landgebruik en een tijdelijke daling van de activiteit van de zon. Deze nieuwe studie toont aan dat de daling van de CO2 deels veroorzaakt is door de ontdekking van Amerika en de ineenstorting van de inheemse bevolking.”
Volgens de onderzoekers toont hun studie aan dat de menselijke invloed op het klimaat al begon voor de Industriële Revolutie. De huidige klimaatopwarming werkt omgekeerd: door het verbranden van fossiele brandstoffen en de uitstoot van broeikasgassen wordt er meer CO2 de lucht in gebracht dan planten er weer uit kunnen halen, waardoor de aarde opwarmt.
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VN TOESPRAAK NEP, MAAR WEL PIRAMIDE UFO BIJ ISS RUIMTESTATION ( VIDEO )
VN TOESPRAAK NEP, MAAR WEL PIRAMIDE UFO BIJ ISS RUIMTESTATION ( VIDEO )
Als iets te moois is om waar te zijn, dan is dat vaak ook zo en dit geldt ook voor de Disclosure toespraak bij de Verenigde Naties.
Desalniettemin wordt er een piramidevorming ruimteschip waargenomen bij het ISS ruimtestation en hebben auto's in een Canadees stadje opeens elektriciteitsproblemen.
Enkele dagen geleden publiceerden wij een artikel over een aankondiging bij de Verenigde Naties betreffende buitenaards contact. Daar stond onder andere het volgende:
Op dit moment doet een video opname de ronde die als deze echt blijkt te zijn niets anders is dan full Disclosure.
De herkomst van de opname is onduidelijk omdat de originele beelden in sneltreinvaart door de censuurcommissie van Youtube werden verwijderd. Gelukkig zijn een aantal mensen erin geslaagd de video te kopiëren zodat deze nog steeds te bekijken is.
Wat daardoor wel ontbreekt zijn de mogelijkheden om te kunnen controleren waar deze opname vandaan komt en of deze echt is. Coen Vermeeren, lang werkzaam bij de Technische Universiteit (TU) in Delft en met jarenlange ervaring als het gaat om ufo's, spreekt zich uit over de VN beelden en denkt/hoopt dat ze echt zijn.
In de gelekte video zien we een deel van een sessie bij de Algemene Vergadering van de VN. Wanneer is niet duidelijk en er wordt aan de aanwezigen gevraagd om niets te filmen of om audio opnames te maken en absolute geheimhouding te bewaren over wat er bekendgemaakt gaat worden. Verder een waarschuwing dat als mensen toch proberen opnames te publiceren zij vervolgd zullen worden.
Dit is de betreffende video:
We hadden in dat artikel al onze twijfels uitgesproken over de echtheid van dit alles en onze lezers gevraagd te helpen om verder uit te zoeken.
En dat is gelukt. Meerdere lezers hebben ons laten weten (dank!) dat het in werkelijkheid gaat om een toespraak bij de VN door de Turkse president Erdogan.
Dit is wat een lezer schrijft:
Hierbij stuur ik jullie een link naar de originele video die waarschijnlijk gebruikt is bij het vervaardigen van de UN hoax video.
Ik had graag gehad dat het echt was, maar zoals meestal werd ik na wat speurwerk weer teleurgesteld.
Er is wel werk van gemaakt, want de militair in de originele tape loopt een beetje en bij de hoax staat hij stil.
De schaduwen op de grond, de stenografe aan de linkerkant, de gebaren van de man, alles komt 1 op 1 overeen met het bezoek van Erdogan aan de UN.
De opname is gevonden doordat ufoloog Scott Waring ging snuffelen in de archieven van NASA en de volgende beelden vond die dateren uit 1992.
Een blauwe piramidevormige ufo, waarvan Scott denkt dat deze onderdeel vormt van het geheime Amerikaanse Aurora project.
Het is een bekend gegeven dat ufo's in de buurt van mensen dikwijls voor problemen zorgen. Wij hebben hier al vaker over geschreven en nu doet dit fenomeen zich voor in een klein stadje in Canada.
Overal zijn er problemen met auto's die niet willen starten, deuren die weigeren open te gaan met de afstandsbediening en meer van dit soort dingen.
Op dit moment heeft men er nog geen verklaring voor, maar er wordt dan ook niet echt gekeken of er ergens in de buurt misschien een (piramidevormige) ufo hangt.
Archaeologists from the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa have been studying a site within the Suikerbosrand National Park ever since artifacts were discovered in the 1960s and ‘70s which suggest a lost human civilization once lived there. Thanks to developments in LiDAR technology which enables researchers to essentially ‘see’ underground, the archaeologists now say they’ve discovered the ruins of a sprawling metropolis lost to the ravages of time. What secrets might lie among this lost city?
Artist rendering of the long-lost Tswana city of Kweneng.
The ruins are believed to be evidence of Kweneng, a long-rumored city which was inhabited by no less than 10,000 members of Bantu-speaking tribes which migrated into the area around 900 AD. Little is known about the ancient history of these tribes, but the ruins of Kweneng may change that. Fern Imbali Sixwanha, a PhD candidate working at the site, says that the ruins of Kweneng could potentially rewrite the history of the region:
One of the most enlightening things is, as I’ve been able to understand what we were doing in our past you know, it gives us more broader idea of the people of southern Africa who they were and the types of activities that they did because you can now rediscover that activity line and just general interaction within the society.
Photo of SKBR (Karim Sadr)
Lidar imagery of SKBR (Karim Sadr)
The ruins span around 20 square kilometers or 8 square miles and appear to show that Kweneng was once a prosperous and bustling city. Researchers have found numerous pairs of parallel rock walls which they believe shows Kweneng boasted a sophisticated network of passageways, some designed specifically for moving cattle in and out of the city. In the center of the ruins is a large enclosure estimated to be 10,000 square meters (108,000 square feet), and its purpose currently remains unknown.
The Kweneng District of Botswana today
With every discovery of a new lost city comes more and more evidence that there could be entire chapters of human history we’ve yet to uncover. Is the idea of an Atlantis or El Dorado so far fetched when we’re finding new lost cities all the time? Who knows what LiDAR will enable us to find?
Ever want to send a message into deep space that will travel forever? Now You can for free, UFO Sightings Daily.
Ever want to send a message into deep space that will travel forever? Now You can for free, UFO Sightings Daily.
I found a great way to send messages into deep space at the speed of light forever! Yes, light will travel forever across the universe all the way to the end 14 billion light years away, then probably bounce back again. Send you regards, warnings, complaints, prayers, wishes, or anything you want for free. You can even send larger files with photos for a small fee of $1.50 US. I haven't done that yet with this service, but will soon. Just go over to https://www.spacespeak.com and hit send, then type a message, max size is 2k characters or about 10 sentences. Then hit send, and instantly its sent to their radio transmitter to send your message into deep space with radio waves...which travel at the speed of light. I am not sponsoring this site, nor do I make anything or benefit from any way telling you about this. I just want to let those who want to send aliens messages...to do so. Scott C. Waring-Taiwan
The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification program was a government project started over 10 years ago at the instigation of then-Senate Majority LeaderHarry Reid, a Democrat of Nevada, to study the truth about UFOs. Much of the money was directed to a constituent of Reid, Robert Bigelow, a hotel magnate who also is the owner of an aerospace company that builds inflatable modules for NASA. Even though Bigelow is a believer in the notion that aliens have been regularly visiting Earth, the results of the study were inconclusive at best.
Now, Motherboard reports that alien visitations were not the only area of study for the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
“On Wednesday (Jan 16), the Defense Intelligence Agency released a list of 38 research titles pursued by the program in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy.”
The areas of research that were being funded by the program seemed to be things out of “Star Trek.” One grant was for the study of “Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy” conducted by Eric W. Davis of EarthTech International Inc. Another grant was for the study of “Invisibility Cloaking” by German scientist Ulf Leonhardt, at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Yet another area of study was “Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions” conducted by Richard Obousy, a theoretical physicist and director of the nonprofit Icarus Interstellar.
No one has revealed how or why these studies were given grants under the AATI program. Since only $22 million is reported to have been spent through the known life of the program, it could not have been a lot of money. Nor are the results of the study publically known. Possibly the criteria is that warp drives and stargates would be technologies that would be useful for aliens traversing interstellar distances to visit Earth.
Aftergood is not amused that such seemingly esoteric fields of study had received government funding. The grant recipients are lucky that William Proxmire, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, is no longer alive. Proxmire regularly handed out his “Golden Fleece Award” to science projects he didn’t like. He had a special ire in his heart for anything that seemed too much like science fiction. The senator was instrumental in ending government funding for the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), a project to listen for signals from alien civilizations.
On the other hand, none of the fields of study could be considered crackpottery, at least according to our current understanding of physics. All of the people who received grants were legitimate scientists. According to Futurism, NASA has conducted low-level warp drive studies for the past couple of decades. Technologies like those the Advance Aerospace Threat Identification program funded are theoretically possible. However, the current state of engineering means that their reality is many decades, perhaps centuries, in the future.
Should the United States government even be spending money on possible technologies that are unlikely to become reality during current human lifetimes? The problems of travel to Mars, not to speak of Alpha Centauri, have not yet been solved.
Still, studies into such subjects as warp drives, stargates, and manipulation of extra dimensions would possibly lead to further insights into the nature of the universe. Knowledge is better than ignorance and can, in turn, lead to unforeseen practical applications that perhaps don’t involve interstellar travel.
Besides, when a real-life Zefram Cochrane is ready to build the first warp drive, he will have a solid basis of theoretical work to inform his history-making project. Just as the art of rocketry dating back to ancient China led to the Apollo missions to the moon, people today working in scattered labs across the planet could lead to that “Star Trek” future that has captured the imagination of generations of TV and film audiences.
Between 1952 and 1969, the U.S. Air Force conducted a series of studies on UFO sightings called Project Blue Book. Not only is there a new History Channel series about the program, this year also marks the 50th anniversary of the project’s termination. Get to know the secretive program better.
1. PROJECT BLUE BOOK WASN’T THE GOVERNMENT’S FIRST UFO STUDY.
In 1947, a private pilot named Kenneth Arnold reportedly spotted nine glowing UFOs zooming over Washington's Mount Rainier. The public went wild for the so-called “flying saucers.” Shortly after, the U.S. government launched Project SIGN to determine if such objects were a threat. In 1948, Project SIGN purportedly published a document called the “Estimate of the Situation,” which suggested that extraterrestrials were a possible explanation for UFO sightings. As the story goes, Air Force officials destroyed the document and launched a more skeptical investigation in the late 1940s called Project GRUDGE. Blue Book came a few years later.
2. THE “ESTIMATE OF THE SITUATION” WAS INSPIRED BY A MIND-BOGGLING EVENT.
In the 1960s, Air Force officials denied that the “Estimate of the Situation” document ever existed. Those who vouch for its authenticity, however, say the report was inspired by a 1948 UFO sighting in Alabama, after two experienced pilots saw a torpedo-shaped “glowing object” zip past their aircraft and rocket into the clouds. The report shocked and baffled many of Project SIGN’s researchers, though scientists would later claim the sighting was consistent with a bolide, or bright meteor.
3. “BLUE BOOK” WAS NAMED AFTER A COLLEGE TESTING STAPLE.
Whether UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin is debatable. What’s undeniable is that, during the 1950s, people routinely spotted (or thought they spotted) objects flying over the United States—and it was the onus of the U.S. military to figure out what they were and whether they posed any danger. Blue Book would earn its name because, at the time, Air Force officials equated studying the phenomenon with preparing for a collegiate “blue book” final exam.
4. OFFICIALS DEVELOPED A SPECIAL PROTOCOL FOR HANDLING UFO SIGHTINGS.
A central part of Project Blue Book was the creation of a standardized questionnaire for UFO sightings. Some sample prompts: “Draw a picture that will show the shape of the object or objects … What was the condition of the sky? ... Did the object: Suddenly speed up and rush away at any time? Change shape? Flicker, throb, or pulsate?” Eventually, every U.S. Air Force base ended up designating a special officer to collect these UFO reports.
5. THOUSANDS OF REPORTS WERE COLLECTED—AND SOME HAVEN’T BEEN EXPLAINED.
By the time Project Blue Book was closed, officials had gathered 12,618 UFO reports. Of those, 701 were never explained. Nearly half of those unidentified UFOs appeared in 1952 when a whopping 1501 UFOs were sighted. (Interestingly, that following year, it became a crime for military personnel to discuss classified UFO reports with the public; the risk of breaking the law could mean up to two years imprisonment.)
6. PROJECT BLUE BOOK SAW FIVE LEADERSHIP CHANGES.
Each person in command saw the purpose of Project Blue Book differently. Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, for example, treated the job as a serious scientific quest and is often lauded as the project’s most impartial leader. (Notably, he is responsible for coining the term UFO.) Major Hector Quintanilla, who took over the project in 1963, was more interested in turning Blue Book into a PR front and focused on quelling the public’s interest in UFOs—a desire that would eventually lead to charges of a government cover-up.
7. BLUE BOOK MADE SUCH BAD SCIENTIFIC MISTAKES THAT CONGRESS HAD TO GET INVOLVED.
In 1965, Oklahoma Police, the Tinker Air Force Base, and a local meteorologist using weather radar independently tracked four unexplained flying objects. Under Quintanilla’s advisement, Project Blue Book would claim that these witnesses had simply observed the planet Jupiter. The problem with this explanation? Jupiter wasn’t even visible in the night’s sky. “The Air Force must have had its star finder upside-down during August,” Robert Riser, an Oklahoma planetarium director, said at the time. A series of more badly botched scientific explanations eventually led to a congressional hearing.
8. THE PROJECT’S DESIRE TO DISMISS UNIDENTIFIED PHENOMENA BOTHERED ITS SOLE SCIENTIST.
Project Blue Book had one consistent scientific consultant, astronomer Dr. J. Allen Hynek. In 1968, Hynek wrote: “The staff of Blue Book, both in numbers and in scientific training, is grossly inadequate … there is virtually no scientific dialogue between Blue Book and the outside scientific world … The statistical methods employed by Blue Book are nothing less than a travesty” [PDF]. Hynek held Quintanilla in particularly low regard, saying, “Quintanilla’s method was simple: disregard any evidence that was counter to his hypothesis.”
9. IN 2007, A NEW GOVERNMENT INQUIRY INTO UFOS WAS LAUNCHED.
Between 2007 and 2012, the U.S. government spent $22 million on a new UFO study called the “Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program.” (Nowadays, UFOs are called UAPs, or "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena": You can watch one here.) This January, more than three dozen of the program’s studies became publicly available, revealing the government’s interest in everything from warp drives to invisibility cloaks.
Archive Hour: UFO sightings locally are great balls of China
Archive Hour: UFO sightings locally are great balls of China
Archive Hour: UFO sightings locally are great balls of China
REPORTS of extra-terrestrial happenings in the skies above Dumbarton have been getting UFO watchers excited.
But the eerie orb of orange light seen hovering above the Kilpatrick Hills may have links closer to China than Mars.
It seems Chinese flying lanterns could be responsible for countless similar UFO sightings across the country. The Khoom Fay lanterns, linked to Chinese New Year celebrations, can fly at least a mile high in the sky.
And it appears that people seeing them have been left believing they had witnessed alien activity and posted details of the incidents on sky-watchers’ websites.
On one site, ufoinfo.com, one unnamed witness reported a ‘sighting’ in Old Kilpatrick.
They wrote: “I was at a house party and me and another left to go out the front of the house, shortly after the bells. The two of us saw an orange light, moving very slowly at low altitude. It was in our field of vision for about five minutes.”
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
THE RACE OF GIANTS THAT INHABITED EARTH BEFORE THE GREAT FLOOD
THE RACE OF GIANTS THAT INHABITED EARTH BEFORE THE GREAT FLOOD
The Nephilim were a race of giants that came to dominate before the Great Flood; These mysterious beings are mentioned in ancient texts as Giants, descendants of the Fallen Angels.
They were the product of illicit relationships between fallen angels and human women before the flood and Noah’s Ark.
The word ‘NEPHILIM’:
It is the untranslated pronunciation of non-translated Hebrew. Nephilim: feline fallen: a tyrant or bully, giant and in some English translation the Nephilim are known as giants. Interestingly, in the Greek Septuagint ‘Nephilim’ was used to describe the giants.
However, the name ‘Nephilim’ is also frequently used when describing the race of the giants that inhabited Canaan at the time of the Israelite conquest according to Numbers 13:33.
When looking at ancient texts, we note that in the Hebrew Bible, the word ‘Nephilim’ appears twice, both times in the Torah, the first in Genesis 6: 1-4, just before the story of Noah’s ark. And the second in Numbers 13: 32-33 when the spies sent to Canaan reported seeing “fearsome giants”.
Genesis 6: 4:
The Nephilim were on earth in those days and also later when the sons of God entered into the daughters of men and gave birth to them; They were the powerful ones that were in ancient times, the men of renown.
Numbers 13:33
And there we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who came from the Nephilim, and we were in our sight like locusts, and thus we were in full sight of them.
In the Bible, it clearly states (and is used as a traditional interpretation) that “celestial beings” mated with humans; an extremely controversial claim rejected by many.
From all the above, we can understand that, although there are numerous documents that refer to the Nephilim, it is clear that these beings were not native to the Earth and that, in fact, they were a hybrid species, of a half human nature.
BARELY BLEMISHED Kuiper Belt object MU69, nicknamed Ultima Thule, is relatively free of craters, despite being billions of years old. That smooth face may mean there are few small Kuiper Belt objects.
JHUAPL, NASA, SWRI
Ultima Thule has a new mug shot.
The closest-yet image of the ancient Kuiper Belt object, captured as the New Horizons spacecraft flew by January 1, shows a relatively smooth face unmarred by impact craters.
“The thing is just not covered in craters,” says planetary scientist Kelsi Singer of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., of the image, released January 24.
That lack of impact scars suggests that the Kuiper Belt, a reservoir of ancient space rocks beyond the orbit of Neptune, has fewer small objects than scientists expected. If true, that could mean that the precursors to planets grew up fast, without leaving many protoplanetary crumbs behind.
Snapshots taken when New Horizons flew past Pluto and its moons in 2015 showed that those bodies are surprisingly smooth, too. Many of Pluto’s craters could have been covered by geologic activity on the dwarf planet, such as the movement of glaciers (SN Online: 10/15/15). But Pluto’s largest moon Charon is thought to be less active and so shouldn’t erase its craters (SN Online: 7/13/18). Singer and her colleagues have argued that lack of craters meant there were just not that many small objects available to smack into Pluto and Charon.
“If you can’t get geology to erase the craters on Charon, in particular, it’s kind of an inescapable conclusion that you have to just not make the craters in the first place,” Singer says.
The real test of this idea came with New Horizons’ flyby of Ultima Thule, whose official name is MU69. If MU69 lacked small craters that would mean relatively few small objects exist in the outer solar system for it to collide with, Singer and colleagues argue in a paper posted at arXiv.org in December.
The latest picture of MU69 shows just a few small craters along its top edge — where shadows make crater rims stand out in relief — probably left by objects about 100 meters wide. A large depression on the smaller of the object’s two lobes could be an impact crater left by an object about 700 meters wide.
A shortage of small objects that could dent bodies like MU69 could rule out some theories about how the planets and their predecessors formed. One idea about this time in the early solar system is that dust grains slowly glommed together to gradually build larger bodies. Another theory suggests that larger objects collided and smashed each other to smithereens. But both scenarios would probably have left many small objects floating around the Kuiper Belt today, Singer says.
If protoplanets congealed directly out of the nebula of gas and dust that preceded the formation of the solar system, however, they could have grown to between tens and hundreds of kilometers wide relatively quickly, Singer says. That means there would be few small cosmic kibbles and bits left over.
Planetary scientist Alessandro Morbidelli of the Côte d’Azur Observatory in Nice, France, says it’s premature to draw any conclusions. Crater counts on Pluto and Charon are not reliable, he says. And while he agrees that MU69 is the “ultimate test,” he says higher resolution pictures are needed to see if its barely marred visage holds up under closer scrutiny. The current best image was taken seven minutes before New Horizons’ closest approach to MU69, when the spacecraft was still 6,700 kilometers away. Better images are on the spacecraft’s computer, waiting to be transmitted to Earth.
New Horizons will continue sending back data on MU69 until September 2020.
Nasa has released a stereo image of Ultima Thule that you can view through 3D glasses
NASA/DR BRIAN MAY
If you don't have 3D glasses, cross your eyes while looking at this image until the two objects overlap. You should see a 3D rendering of Ultima
AP:ASSOCIATED PRESS
The object has been described as looking like a 'snowman' by an investigator with New Horizons, which captured this extraordinary image released Thursday
Pictured left is the first image of Ultima Thule taken by Nasa's New Horizons probe. Pictured right is an artist's impression of what the dwarf planet could look like, with the axis of its spin shown in red
Project Blue Bookepisode 4 takes a nosedive into the rabbit hole, but the wild storylines follow real conspiracy and UFO mythologies that are popular on the web. It also presents an intriguing alternate theory to the idea that UFOs have anything to do with aliens at all.
Take an odd part of history, add a bit of conspiracy mythology, then sprinkle with magic Hollywood dust and up sprouts a huge, beautiful tree of fantasy. That would sum up my feelings on “Operation Paperclip.” I am a student of history, so I relish in historical accuracy. However, I am also a sci-fi buff, and this latest episode frustrated the history buff in me while exciting my sci-fi side.
Let’s get into it. The show begins with Hynek on an airplane. The first mystery presented was that the passenger cabin of the aircraft looked more like a train with curtains over the windows and seats that faced one another. However, in a tweet, show creator and writer David O’Leary wrote: “Yes, these old 1950s planes really did have train-like booths that faced each other. And lots more leg room!” Score one for historical accuracy! Granted, it’s one of the few points that I will award in this category for this particular episode.
Hynek then sees a UFO flying around the airplane. We are lead to believe Hynek is experiencing this sighting, but then he wakes from a dream. He was dreaming about his most recent UFO case - a sighting by the passengers and crew of a commercial aircraft near Huntsville, Alabama.
Quinn feels certain he knows who is responsible for this UFO incident and he is not very happy about it. Quinn explains that after World War II, German scientists were snatched up by the U.S. as part of Operation Paperclip. He says Huntsville was set up to house German scientists working on rocket technology, led by Werner von Braun. Having fought in World War II, Quinn is with the situation.
Hynek and Quinn travel to Huntsville to find out what the Germans are up to. Quinn is convinced that the UFO that buzzed the airplane was a rocket built by the former German scientists, who he believes were not concerned with endangering the lives of the passengers.
Security denies Hynek and Quinn access to the base, but Quinn crashes through the barricades anyway. This does allow them an audience with Von Braun but also lands Quinn a suspension. Von Braun says he is familiar with Hynek’s work, shows them a secret rocket launch and offers Hynek a job. He admits it was one of his rockets that buzzed the airplane, but Hynek doesn’t believe him.
To make a long story short, after leaving, Hyenk and Quinn break into the base again. This time they sneak around and find a body floating in a suspended animation container. It looks like an alien. The base alarms sound, so the two race off, only to be caught. Von Braun tells them what they saw was a monkey that had been sent into space and was undergoing testing as to the effects of space on its body. Hynek tells him he is suspicious of their project because the rocket explanation for the UFO sighting did not fit the witness testimony. There is something von Braun is hiding.
At the end of the show, we see what that is. After Quinn and Hynek have left, General Harding, Quin’s boss, shows up to join von Braun on a tarmac. A large saucer-shaped object is then wheeled out of a hangar, and a pilot in a flight suit is put into the craft. This pilot is complaining he doesn’t want to do this, but he seems drugged and unable to struggle. The craft looks like human technology, but when it is started up, a weird field surrounds it, then it disappears. The show is mostly full on science fiction with modern UFO and conspiracy mythologies expertly weaved into the story. The visuals are also stunning. It all makes for a fun and exciting show.
Project Blue Book, the TV show, is getting more exciting, and maybe that is due to its divergence from reality. Many feel the show does not need to move away from the real Project Blue Book investigations to be exciting, and that may be the case. I know first hand proving that to a producer is near impossible. However, I find this particular journey into conspiratorial sci-fi is intelligent in that it is expertly incorporating the UFO and conspiracy mythologies while making the viewers think about alternate explanations to the UFO mystery.
The Project Blue Book Files
Huntsville is a city built by rockets. It is the home of NASA’s Marshall Space Center, but before NASA was created, the military had been testing missiles in the area since World War II. After the war ended, rocket testing continued. Operation Paperclip was real, and Werner von Braun was a real rocket scientist brought to the U.S. The U.S. first brought the German rocket scientists to Fort Bliss, Texas, but in the ‘50s, von Braun and his team were moved to Huntsville.
Von Braun’s popularity was primarily due to his involvement in the development of the V-2 rocket. This rocket terrified the allies during the war because it was the first ballistic missile. While the space program was a real thing, the real importance to the military was the development of bigger and better rockets. Especially with the prospect that a ballistic missile would be the ideal delivery system for the newly developed atom bomb.
In UFO circles, there have been many rumors about von Braun. From the belief that he had to be in the know regarding alleged crashes of alien spacecraft such as Roswell, to a rumor that he knew the government was faking emergencies to distract the public and that one day a UFO scare would be used for that purpose.
The Nazi’s also have a UFO history according to many conspiracy theories. It is believed they communicated with aliens and were able to develop technologies based off of alien technology. You can even find pictures online of saucer-shaped craft with Nazi symbols and guns mounted on them. It is rumored that the Nazi’s tried to mount weapons on alien spacecraft and it disrupted the propulsion systems and would not work. There are also rumors that the Germans were developing anti-gravity. In particular, a bell-shaped craft creatively named The Bell. The propulsion system consisted of two cylinders filled with a mercury-like substance that spun in opposite directions.
The way the craft disappeared at the end of Project Blue Bookis reminiscent of another conspiracy theory, one known as the Philadelphia Experiment. This mythology was first brought forth in a UFO book, although the author did not find the story credible. Despite the author’s opinion, this theory has a wide following. The story was that the U.S. developed technology that could render a ship invisible. Allegedly in 1943, the USS Eldridge, a 300 ft long Navy destroyer, was used to experiment with the technology. When the invisibility machine was enabled, the ship disappeared. When it reappeared crewmen reported feeling sick, and some were killed by somehow being embedded into the steal of the vessel.
In reality, the Germans were undoubtedly ahead of their time. At the time, technology such as jet propulsion and rockets were very advanced, and the Germans were way ahead of the U.S. in these areas. They even had a jet shaped like a stealth bomber that did partially inspire some of the stealth bomber’s characteristics. However, beyond rumors, there is no evidence they developed anti-gravity or canoodled with aliens.
The end of this Project Blue Bookepisode seems to suggest UFO sightings are actually due to experimental aircraft. The CIA has suggested this as well. In a CIA report regarding the development of aircraft at Area 51, there is a section titled “U-2s, UFOs, and Operation Blue Book.” In this section, they claim that many UFO reports were due to unwitting civilians spotting test flights of the U-2 spy plane. The report claims, “This, in turn, led to the Air Force’s Operation Blue Book.” The problem with the last statement is that the U.S. Air Force began investigating UFO sightings in 1947 with Project Sign and Project Blue Book began in 1952. The U.S. did not conduct test flights of the U-2 until the mid to late 50s. It is highly likely U-2 test flights did cause UFO reports, but it is not possible for the U-2 test flights to have caused the creation of Project Blue Book.
Take me to your leader… Gevleugelde klassieke woorden, maar wie is onze leider? De Verenigde Naties? De sterksten van deze wereld? Dan kijken we dus naar New York (U.N>) en Washington (Pentagon).
Er circuleert nu een filmpje van een mogelijk geheime sessie in de VN, waarbij aan het begin op straffe van wordt gezegd dat audio- en video-opnamen verboden zijn!
Iemand met een telefoon houdt zich daar kennelijk niet aan en maakt een opname. Een opmerkelijk boodschap volgt:
[opname start] “Speaker: Stel alstublieft geen vragen tijdens deze presentatie. Zet alle camera’s uit. Het opnemen van de volgende speech is niet toegestaan. Alle kanalen en bedrijven: als de video wordt uitgezonden, dan zal er tot vervolging worden overgegaan! Geen video, geen audio!
Welnu, Ik verwelkom Aliya Prokofyeva, een visionair op het gebied van ruimtevaart, van het international ruimtevaartplatform Galactica.
“Zeer Geëerde voorzitter van de United Nations General Assembly, Maria Fernanda Espinosa Garces. Dames en Heren. Ik moet u iets mededelen.
December [datum?] om 16:07 uur is er buitenaards contact geweest. Een metalen object, in de vorm van een piramide, verscheen boven het Pentagon, Washington DC, in de VS. Een ongeïdentificeerd vliegend object, met een diameter van ongeveer 100 meter, roteerde rond zijn eigen as op een hoogte van zo’n 500 meter.
NASA Operational Task Group, gespecialiseerd in het ontvangen en verwerken van ruimte data, ontving inkomende data van dat object. Op dit moment, terwijl ik hier spreek, wordt die data verwerkt en onderzocht door NASA. Alle gegevens, de informatie van de radarinstallaties, de visuele informatie, en het vastleggen van de radiosignalen van de ufo zijn verzameld.
Gebaseerd op die data kunnen we zeggen dat het object dat zich boven het Pentagon bevond, geïdentificeerd kan worden als een object van onbekende oorsprong. Hypothetisch, buitenaards. Echter, er waren geen signalen van agressiviteit.
De herhalende radio signalen onder de naam FBR 180814.J0422+73, vastgelegd door specialisten van de CHIME Sterrenwacht, Okanagan Valley, in British Columbia, komen overeen met het patroon van de signalen van het object boven het Pentagon, zoals vastgelegd door NASA.
Op dit moment wordt reeds gewerkt aan het berekenen van de coördinaten van dat signaal en het bijbehorende bewoonde sterren…. ” [opname afgebroken]
Alles op de video, de personen, het onderwerp, de hele setting, ziet er zeer authentiek uit. De vraag is in deze post-waarheidstijd dit echte beelden zijn. Als het niet zo is betekent het dat iemand grote moeite doet om professioneel het grote publiek te misleiden.
We weten dat diverse instanties daar toe in staat zijn, maar iets kunnen en doen zijn twee verschillende dingen.
OVereind blijft staan dat het onderwerp ufo’s serieus genomen moet worden. Teveel getrainde waarnemers, piloten, militairen, luchtverkeersleiders en zelfs astronauten (inclusief Apollo-maanreizigers) hebben zich hierover al tientalleen jaren over uitgesproken.
V.N.
Persoonlijk zou ik uiteraard niet verbaasd zijn dat men over ufo’s tot op de hoogste niveaus kennis heeft, dat er over discussies plaatsvinden etc. etc. Reeds lang wordt gewacht op aankondigingen van onze leiders – sommigen zouden ‘leiders’ graag tussen aanhalingstekens zetten – omtrent buitenaards contact dat reeds decennia gaande is, maar slechts voor privaat gewin wordt aangewend, ten koste van planeet en bewoners (platen, dieren en mensen).
Het feit dat dit filmpje -echt of fake- staat wat mij betreft symbool dat er in de breedte, ook bij politici inmiddels grote behoefte is aan eerlijkheid op dit terrein. Daarvoor lekken er op dit moment teveel geheimen naar buiten over allerlei belangwekkende onderwerpen.
Wellicht ten overvloede: alles gaat veranderen zodra contact met buitenaardse beschavingen wordt toegegeven. Techniek is daarbij een van de belangrijkste gamechangers, niet alleen omdat energie en transport het allerbelangrijkste is op het gebied van de immense planetaire vervulling, maar ook dat grondstoffen al eeuwenlang redenen zijn geweest en nog steeds zijn voor conflicten.
Nu de rijken nog steeds rijker worden en de groep armen groeit – zie maar weer eens het recente rapport van Oxfam – wordt ook de ongelijkheid groter. Ongelijkheid ook op het gebied van kennis en informatie. Op het terrein van buitenaards contact wordt vals gespeeld. Politiek en wetenschap vervullen op dat terrein ook een uiterst bedenkelijke rol, door onwetendheid (volstrekt onacceptabel in 2019), onkunde en criminele geheimhouding.
Ik hoop dat er van dit soort filmpjes naar buiten gaan komen en eindelijk eens behoorlijke staartjes krijgen, maar ik ben bang van niet. Immers het geheim van de waarheid wordt het beste in stand gehouden door die waarheid gewoon op straat te gooien. We zijn allemaal gepuppytraind om er gewoon omheen te lopen.
Wie wil weten waarom het onderwerp ufo’s – debunkers en fake news verspreiders op de koop toenemend – een serieus onderwerp is, koopt hier mijn boek UFOS BESTAAN GEWOON, dat alweer naar de 7e druk gaat!
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 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.
Matt Curnock / TropWATERJCU
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over Mount Kinabalu (19.02.2019). Photo not taken by me just sharing this beautiful shot 
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Giant UFO-like rotating ice disk in Maine increases in size...
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BREAKING
Can you solve some of the world’s biggest UFO mysteries?...
US government spent MILLIONS researching invisibility...
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Since the “Gimbal” video was released in December 2017 and the “Go Fast” video was released in March 2018, many people have been trying to figure out where they took place.
Lue Elizondo spoke about a fleet of craft, referring to The Gimbal:
TTSA’s Chris Mellon made the comment about fifteen encounters off the east coast since 2015, as well as the fleet, in his Washington Post article. There have been rumors circulating behind the scenes of at least five videos filmed during the encounter. They were referenced openly by Keith Basterfield on Coast to Coast AM. Pilot Dave Fravor and investigative filmmaker Jeremy Corbellhave given us some of the best hints and information about what occured. Creator of The Nimitz Encounters, Dave Beaty, has also been on the forefront of citizen investigators who are looking into this occurrence. There are claims that more witnesses from The Gimbal Events will come forward and speak in March at a conference. If more Gimbal Event videos and data is released soon, the witnesses will tie into this perfectly.
Like always, some of the most powerful comments and corroboration have been stated by George Knapp. Hours ago, on Coast To Coast AM, while interviewing defense and aviation writer and expert, Tyler Rogoway, George Knapp said this: