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 12 YEARS AND 10 MONTHS.
ON 06/04/2024 MORE THAN 1.951.050
VISITORS FROM 134 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
31-07-2019
Watch the Mars 2020 rover flex its muscles by doing some biceps curls
Watch the Mars 2020 rover flex its muscles by doing some biceps curls
In just a year’s time, NASA will launch a new robotic rover mission to Mars. The mission, temporarily called “Mars 2020”, will involve the collection and retrieval of rock and soil samples to Earth. This means there’s gonna be quite a bit of heavy lifting involved. Luckily, a recent demonstration showed that the rover is up for the task.
The rover’s arm and turret are some of its most important parts. They must work together to emulate the arm of a geologist that’s examining and collecting samples. Recently, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Spacecraft Assembly Facility in Pasadena, California, NASA engineers instructed the rover’s 88-pound arm to perform a bicep curl as it moved from a deployed to a stowed configuration.
“This was our first opportunity to watch the arm and turret move in concert with each other, making sure that everything worked as advertised — nothing blocking or otherwise hindering smooth operation of the system,” said Dave Levine, an integration engineer for Mars 2020.
“Standing there, watching the arm and turret go through their motions, you can’t help but marvel that the rover will be in space in less than a year from now and performing these exact movements on Mars in less than two.”
In its final configuration, the rover’s arm will have five electrical motors and five joints. The turret will be equipped with cameras, life and chemical element detection instruments, a percussive drill, and a coring mechanism.
The mission’s launch is planned for July 2020 and scheduled to land at Jezero Crater on Mars in February 2021. Although a future return trip to Mars to retrieve the rover’s collected samples hasn’t yet been put in motion, nor is it clear if it’s feasible at this moment, NASA believes that sample collection from Mars merits much attention. NASA also says that many aspects of the upcoming Mars 2020 mission will shape the technology required for human missions on the Red Planet.
This will be NASA’s seventh mission to touch down on Mars, joining the likes of Curiosity, InSight lander, Spirit, and Opportunity. In order to find a cool name as its predecessors, NASA has put out a call for K-12 students in US schools, offering them the chance to name the 2020 rover. This is somewhat of a tradition now. Before it was dubbed Curiosity, the previously-deployed plucky rover was known as the Mars Science Laboratory.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET NASA gaat met commerciële partners in zee. Onder andere de bedrijven van ondernemers Jeff Bezos en Elon Musk gaan in zee met het ruimtevaartagentschap. NASA hoopt met een commerciële samenwerking zijn technologiëen te verbeteren voor ruimtereizen naar planeten zoals Mars en de Maan.
De rijkste man op aarde, Jeff Bezos, heeft drie partnerships met NASA op zak. Het bedrijf wil in de toekomst commerciële reizen naar de Maan aanbieden. Bezos zal met zijn Blue Origin werken aan een nieuw systeem voor ruimtenavigatie en landingen op de Maan. Daarbij krijgt hij hulp van NASA en zal hij nieuwe materialen testen die gebruikt kunnen worden in landingsgestellen voor maanreizen.
De andere grote nieuwe partner van NASA is SpaceX, het ruimtevaartbedrijf van multimiljardair Elon Musk. SpaceX zal zich richten op de ‘Starship raket’, een project dat nog in zijn kinderschoenen staat. Musk hoopt een systeem te bouwen waarmee raketten onderweg hun brandstof kunnen aanvullen om naar bestemmingen op grotere afstand te reizen.
Het project zou zich nog in een beginfase bevinden, maar mocht het Musk lukken, kan dat een revolutie in de ruimtevaart betekenen. En laat dat nu net een specialiteit zijn van de ondernemer die onder meer PayPal en Tesla op de markt bracht.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET Wetenschappers hebben de oorzaak getraceerd van een nucleaire wolk boven Europa in 2017. Ze wijzen naar een Russische verwerkingsinstallatie in het zuiden van het Oeralgebergte.
In september 2017 trok een wolk ruthenium-106 over Europa. Omdat er weinig gevaar was voor de volksgezondheid, kreeg de wolk weinig aandacht in de media. Toch was de radioactieve vervuiling in de EU honderd keer hoger dan na de kernramp in Fukushima in 2011.
Nu hebben zeventig wetenschappers van verschillende Europese universiteiten dankzij de analyse van 13.000 metingen over heel Europa de oorzaak van het incident kunnen traceren.
Uit hun berekeningen blijkt dat er geen ongeval met een kernreactor aan de oorzaak ligt, maar een probleem in een nucleair verwerkingsbedrijf. De exacte locatie van het incident is moeilijk vast te leggen, maar de data wijzen op een plek in het zuiden van het Oeralgebergte.
Daar ligt de Russische nucleaire installatie Mayak. Die veroorzaakte in 1957 al eens een groot lek toen een tank explodeerde, met een enorme nucleaire vervuiling van de regio tot gevolg. Rusland ontkent dat er drie jaar geleden in Mayak een ongeluk is gebeurd.
Bijzonder
“Deze keer ging het om een korte puls die erg snel was verdwenen”, zegt Georg Steinhauser van de University of Hannover. “We konden aantonen dat het incident is gebeurd in een opwerkingsinstallatie van gebruikte brandstofstaven, in een late fase van het verwerkingsproces. Ook al is er geen officiële verklaring, toch hebben we een erg goed idee van wat er gebeurd kan zijn.”
Een van de opvallende eigenschappen van de wolk was dat ze enkel uit ruthenium-106 bestond. Dat is erg ongewoon, en het feit dat er geen andere radioactieve bestanddelen gemeten werden, was een duidelijke indicatie dat het om een lek uit een verwerkingsinstallatie moest gaan.
Ook de geografische voetafdruk van de wolk was opvallend: de stof werd gevonden in grote delen van Centraal- en Oost-Europa, Azië en het Arabisch schiereiland, zelfs tot in de Caraïben.
WETENSCHAPHet Amerikaanse ruimtevaartagentschap NASA en de Europese Ruimtevaartorganisatie ESA slaan de handen in elkaar om tegen 2031 stukjes van Mars naar de aarde te halen. De strakke planning begint stilaan vorm te krijgen. Gelukkig maar, want timing is cruciaal.
In april 2018 tekenden NASA en ESA alvast een intentieverklaring waarin te lezen staat dat ze bodemmonsters op Mars willen verzamelen. Een eerste stap van het masterplan wordt volgend jaar reeds uitgerold. In 2020 wordt er een nieuwe Marsrover van NASA gelanceerd richting de ruimte. Als alles gaat zoals gepland, zal die rover in februari 2021 landen. Eenmaal daar moet de Marsrover op verkenning gaan en in totaal 38 tubes met bodemmateriaal verzamelen.
Enkele tubes worden gedropt op de rode planeet en later opgehaald, de overige stalen houdt de Marsrover bij zich.
In 2026 volgt de tweede stap. Daarbij wordt de ruimtesonde ‘Sample Retrieval Lander (SRL)’ naar Mars gestuurd. Zijn originele (Engelse) naam spreekt boekdelen: de SRL moet de tubes met monsters ophalen en ze terug naar de aarde brengen. Het proces zal ongeveer acht maanden in beslag nemen, waarvan vijf maanden benut zullen worden om de tubes met monsters te verzamelen. De SRL wacht een heuse uitdaging “want de sonde moet de omgeving en temperaturen overleven op Mars” zegt projectleider Brian Muirhead. Bovendien keerde nog nooit eerder een ruimtesonde van Mars terug naar de aarde.
Als dat in 2026 wél lukt, wordt de lander na acht maanden terug in een baan rond Mars, zo’n 300 kilometer boven de rode planeet, gebracht. Vervolgens zal die daar opgepikt worden door de zogenaamde ‘Earth Return Orbiter’ (ERO). Volgens de planning wordt die ERO gelijktijdig met de SRL gelanceerd om enkele maanden in de ruimte door te brengen totdat zijn ‘vriendje’ terugkeert.
Uiteindelijk zullen de twee in 2031 terug landen op de aarde. Specifiek moet dat gebeuren in de Verenigde Staten, waar de monsters in quarantaine geplaatst kunnen worden.
Details
Alles moet tot in het detail gepland worden, want de timing is cruciaal. Ten eerste zijn de ruimtevaartuigen al zes maanden onderweg voordat ze op de rode planeet arriveren. En men kan niet zomaar vertrekken: de vaartuigen (en/of astronauten) kunnen enkel naar Mars reizen als de planeet aan de dezelfde kant van de zon is gepositioneerd als de aarde. Dit komt slecht om de 26 maanden voor: dus in 2031, 2033, enzovoort.
Loopt er met andere woorden iets mis in de planning, betekent dat dat de SRL en ERO pas in 2028 in plaats van 2026 gelanceerd kunnen worden. Dan zal het automatisch tot 2033 duren voordat er stukjes van Mars op aarde arriveren.
WETENSCHAPDe maan is ongeveer 150 miljoen jaar ouder dan tot nu toe gedacht werd. Dat blijkt uit een analyse van de chemische samenstelling van maangesteente, uitgevoerd door een team van onderzoekers van de ULB en de universiteit van Keulen.
Het gaat om maanstalen die door astronauten van de Apollo-missies tussen 1969 en 1972 werden meegebracht naar de aarde. Het onderzoek, dat gepubliceerd werd in het vaktijdschrift Nature Geoscience, bracht aan het licht dat de maan eigenlijk al 150 miljoen jaar eerder gevormd werd dan gedacht.
Het was Maxwell Thiemens van de universiteit van Keulen die het onderzoek leidde. Hij werkte eraan tijdens zijn doctoraatsstudie.
De maan zou ontstaan zijn na een botsing tussen de vroege aarde en een ander hemellichaam ter grootte van Mars. Over het tijdstip is niet iedereen het eens, maar de theoretische modellen die gebruikt worden en het nieuwe onderzoek op basis van de chemische samenstelling van de stalen, verschillen dus 150 miljoen jaar.
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WIJ ZIEN ZE NIET AANKOMEN
WIJ ZIEN ZE NIET AANKOMEN
Misschien is één van de grootste gevaren die ons bedreigen wel dat niemand die asteroïdes ziet aankomen.
Enkele dagen geleden scheerde wederom een zogenaamde “city killer” vlak langs de aarde en niemand had deze opgemerkt.
Wanneer een object uit de ruimte passeert op een afstand van minder dan 100.000 kilometer, dan is dat met recht rakelings te noemen. Een afstand die ongeveer eenvijfde deel is van die naar de maan.
Alan Duffy, hoofdwetenschapper bij het Royal Institution of Australia, zei: “Ik was stomverbaasd, dit was echt schrikken”.
Deze asteroïde was er niet eentje die al lang van te voren door astronomen was ontdekt of werd gevolgd. Het was een asteroïde die als het ware vanuit het niets verscheen. Zo werd het ook omschreven door astronoom Michael Brown uit Melbourne.
We praten hier over een object dat volgens NASA een doorsnee had van ergens tussen de 57 en 130 meter en een koers volgde die het tot op 73.000 kilometer afstand van de aarde bracht.
Ook Michael Brown was stomverbaasd en zei: “Mensen beseffen eigenlijk pas wat er is gebeurd, als het object ons al is gepasseerd”.
Kort voordat de asteroïde de aarde passeerde (enkele uren) werd deze door astronomen in Amerika en Brazilië ontdekt.
Volgens Brown is het de grootste asteroïde die in lange tijd zo dicht bij de aarde is geweest. Als je dan nagaat dat deze asteroïde groot genoeg is om een complete stad te vernietigen, hoe kan het dan dat helemaal niemand deze heeft zien aankomen?
Dit schijnt te komen doordat deze asteroïdes eigenlijk te klein zijn om in de kijker te lopen. Astronomen moeten echt een beetje geluk hebben om dit soort objecten te ontdekken. Vaak gebeurt dit doordat bijvoorbeeld het zonlicht er net op valt of iets dergelijks.
NASA concentreert zich voornamelijk op asteroïdes met een doorsnee van groter dan zo’n 800 meter en zegt daarvan er ongeveer 90 procent te hebben geïdentificeerd.
En dat betekent dat asteroide 2019 OK zoals deze heet, niet in die categorie valt en dus eigenlijk wordt genegeerd, terwijl het groot genoeg is om Amsterdam of Rotterdam compleet te verwoesten.
Dan komt er volgens Brown nog een probleem om de hoek kijken en dat is dat omloopbaan en de koers van dit soort objecten nogal grillig is en heel moeilijk te voorspellen.
Toch maakt dit object lange reizen door de ruimte en gaat in zijn elliptische omloopbaan zelfs voorbij Mars tot in de buurt van Venus. Ook dit betekent weer dat de observatietijd wanneer het in de buurt van de aarde komt, heel erg kort is.
Wanneer het de aarde passeert heeft dit object een snelheid van 24 kilometer per seconde oftewel ruim 86.000 kilometer per uur. Dat is heel erg snel voor een asteroïde, want de meesten doen dit met een snelheid van tussen de 4 en 19 kilometer per seconde.
Brown zegt dat het een kwestie van geluk blijft wanneer een dergelijk object wordt waargenomen en dat dit eigenlijk nooit eerder is dan enkele weken voordat het de aarde passeert of raakt en dan nog moet iemand toevallig de juiste kant op kijken.
Allan Duffy zegt: “Het is iets waar we ons eerlijk gezegd zorgen over moeten maken. Het is geen Hollywood film. Het is een duidelijk en aanwezig gevaar”.
Hij zegt verder dat wanneer een asteroïde zoals 2019 OK de aarde geraakt zou hebben je dit zou kunnen vergelijken met een kernexplosie, genoeg om een grote stad compleet te vernietigen.
Niet alleen NASA doet aan deze simulatie mee, ook het alom bekende FEMA en om een generale repetitie te houden voor wanneer deze ramp werkelijk zal plaatsvinden. Ook andere internationale partners zoals de European Space Agency (ESA) zullen aan deze simulatie deelnemen.
De gevolgen op aarde van een inslag door een asteroïde kunnen heel verschillend zijn, afhankelijk van waar deze zal neerkomen. Feit is dat wij in onze moderne tijd nog nooit een dergelijke ramp hebben meegemaakt, dus bij die oefening zullen er heel veel onbekende factoren meespelen. Desondanks gaat men deze oefening houden om de belangrijkste aspecten van een dergelijke ramp te identificeren.
Het scenario dat gebruikt zal worden is dat op 26 maart er een asteroïde is ontdekt die de codenaam 2019 PDC krijgt. In eerste instantie wordt dan gesteld dat er een kans is van 1 op 50.000 dat deze de aarde zal raken, maar al snel wordt dit bijgesteld naar een kans van 1 op 100.
In bovenstaand scenario spreken we dan alleen over de wat grotere asteroïdes en niet eens over de kleinere zoals 2019 OK die klaarblijkelijk te klein zijn om wat mee te doen.
Als je dan verder bedenkt dat de asteroïde bij Chelyabinsk enkele jaren geleden slechts een doorsnee had van ruim 20 meter, in de lucht ontplofte en al enorme schade veroorzaakte, dan weet je dat ook de kleinere asteroïdes die door NASA en andere instanties worden genegeerd ook letterlijk levensgevaarlijk kunnen zijn.
Nu is er op dit moment misschien weinig dat er gedaan kan worden als een astroïde zoals 2019 OK op een bepaalde plek op aarde af koerst, maar het maakt bijvoorbeeld voor de inwoners van Amsterdam of Rotterdam een heel verschil of ze weten dat een asteroïde hun stad gaat raken over twee weken of twee uur.
Een letterlijk verschil tussen leven en dood en hoog tijd dat al die miljarden dollars die nu weer worden geïnvesteerd in een nieuwe bewapeningswedloop in de ruimte, worden gebruikt om een waarschuwingssysteem voor asteroïdes op te zetten voor de bevolking.
Maar ja, dat is diezelfde bevolking die de elite juist zo graag kwijt wil.
'I WAS SO SCARED' US soldier who witnessed UFO incident dubbed ‘Britain’s Roswell’ comes forward
'I WAS SO SCARED'US soldier who witnessed UFO incident dubbed ‘Britain’s Roswell’ comes forward
Patrick Knox
ANOTHER veteran US serviceman has broken his silence about witnessing Britain's most famous UFO encounter nearly 40 years ago.
Ex-sgt Michael Smith has revealed officially for the first time that he also saw the spooky activity in 1980 in the Suffolk countryside.
A drawing of the craft seen during the unexplained incident
Credit: Alamy
An information board in Rendlesham Forest
Credit: Alamy
A UFO trail sign at Rendlesham Forest, which has become a tourist hotspotCredit: Getty - Contributor
Back in 2016 Steve Longero, who was a young US Air Force police officer working at bases RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge, came forward about witnessing strange lights while on duty.
Now Mr Smith, then a 19-year-old member of the 81st Airborne Police Squadron at RAF Bentwaters, has come forward to reveal what he says he saw.
He said: "A month before the base was put on alert and I was called out and I got onto as bunker by one of the gates.
“I was having a pee outside when I saw an orange glowing light in the woods — it was a reddish ball.
"It stopped right in front of me — it just stayed there and hovered two feet off the ground and I called for reinforcements I was scared to death."
Ever since the incident theories and rumours have grown only last year there were claims that the Rendlesham Forest Incident because it has become known was in fact a prank played on the US Air Force by the SAS.
A copy of the United States Air Force report on the sighting of a UFO near bases at RAF Woodbridge RAF Bentwaters in SuffolkCredit: Ngn Picture Library
The Rendlesham Forest incident: Britain’s most famous UFO sighting
The Rendlesham Forest incident took place in December 1980 over a series of at least two nights.
On December 26, 1980, military personnel at the twin bases of RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk saw a strange light in Rendlesham Forest, which lies between the two bases.
Three men were sent out to investigate where two of them encountered a small, triangularshaped craft.
One man, Jim Penniston, got close enough to touch the side of the object.
He and another of the airmen present, John Burroughs, made sketches of the craft for witness statements.
Two nights later Deputy Base Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt and his team then encountered the UFO.
He said later: "Here I am, a senior official who routinely denies this sort of thing and diligently works to debunk them, and I'm involved in the middle of something I can't explain." Despite an MOD investigation the Rendlesham Forest incident remains unexplained.
Dubbed "Britain's Roswell" the reported sightings and contacts with aliens took place over a series of nights in December 1980 and the incident continues to fascinate UFO enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists.
The Ministry of Defence stated at the time that the event posed no threat to national security, and it therefore was never fully investigated.
Sceptics have explained the sightings as a misinterpretation of a series of nocturnal lights, a fireball, the beam from the Orfordness Lighthouse or even bright stars.
Despite an MOD investigation the Rendlesham Forest incident remains unexplained (stock image)
Credit: Getty Images
Steve Longero has remained tight-lipped for more than three decades
A UFO trail sign at Rendlesham Forest, which has become a tourist hotspotµ
Credit: Getty Images
The Rendlesham Forest incident took place in December 1980 and has been dubbed Britain's Roswell
Het bleef op nog geen meter boven de grond zweven. Amerikaanse soldaat die getuige was van Britse Roswell spreekt zich uit
Foto: Taras Young Wikimedia Commons
Het bleef op nog geen meter boven de grond zweven. Amerikaanse soldaat die getuige was van Britse Roswell spreekt zich uit
Michael Smith was in de jaren tachtig als soldaat gestationeerd op de legerbasis bij Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk, waar indertijd UFO’s werden waargenomen. Dat schrijft The Sun.
In december 1980 werden in de buurt van RAF Woodbridge en RAF Bentwaters, bases die toen werden gebruikt door de Amerikaanse luchtmacht, vreemde objecten in de lucht gezien.
Het incident wordt ook wel het Britse Roswell genoemd, vanwege de overeenkomsten met het Roswellincident in juli 1947.
Oranje licht
Op het moment van het incident was Smith gestationeerd op RAF Bentwaters. Hij is naar eigen zeggen getuige geweest van het vreemde fenomeen.
“Een maand voordat de basis in staat van paraatheid werd gebracht bevond ik me in een bunker bij één van de poorten,” zei hij tegen de krant.
“Ik stond buiten te urineren toen ik een oranje licht in het bos zag,” vervolgde hij. “Het was een roodachtige bol.”
Recht voor mijn neus
“Het [object] stopte recht voor mijn neus,” herinnerde Smith zich. “Het bleef op nog geen meter boven de grond zweven.”
“Ik vroeg om versterking en was doodsbang,” klonk het.
In 2016 zei Steve Longero, die was gestationeerd op RAF Bentwaters en RAF Woodbridge, dat hij indertijd ook vreemde lichten had gezien.
“If you’re standing on the surface of that planet, there are three suns in the sky, but two of them are pretty far away and small-looking. They’re like two red, ominous eyes in the sky.”
That’s the made-for-a-sci-fi-novel description of the otherwise boringly-named planet LTT 1445Ab discovered recently just 22.5 light-years away from Earth. It’s hot – three suns will do that to a planet – but it has an atmosphere, so it’s getting some interest from astronomers. How about a better name first? Ghidorah? Triple Sol? My Three Suns? Ta-three-ine?
“It is the second nearest transiting exoplanet system found to date, and the closest one known for which the primary is an M dwarf.”
Artist’s rendition of the view from a hypothetical moon in orbit around the first known planet to reside in a tight-knit triple-star system.
According to their new report, “Three Red Suns in the Sky: A Transiting, Terrestrial Planet in a Triple M Dwarf System at 6.9 Parsecs,” submitted this week to The Astronomical Journal, astronomers led by Jennifer Winters of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics used data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) space telescope launched last year to search for exoplanets using the transit method to locate changes in the light of a star that indicates a planet passing in front of it. While LTT 1445Ab is in a three-star system, it only orbits one of them, and that orbit is a scorchingly-fast once every 5.36 Earth days – extremely speedy for a planet just slightly larger than Earth (1.35 times the size) but much denser (8 times the mass) and hotter (surface temperatures 311 °F (155 °C or 428 Kelvin).
“The presence of a transiting planet in this system raises the possibility that the entire system is co-planar, which implies that the system may have formed from the early fragmentation of an individual protostellar core.”
Spider’s view from LTT 1445Ab?
While the atmosphered planet is interesting, the three suns are more intriguing, and LTT 1445Ab could shed some light (by ironically blocking it) on how these three-sun systems formed. Yes, there’s more – ScienceAlert points out that planet HD 131399Ab, discovered in 2016, orbits three suns 340 light-years away in a very slow 550-year orbit, making it far less suitable for study. The study surmises that the three suns of LTT 1445Ab may be the fragments of a single star that broke apart early in the history of the universe. The astronomers are hoping that the new James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to be launched in 2021, will help answer the question.
Three Suns and a Rock. Great name for a band or a sci-fi movie. Any other ideas?
The Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities announced this week that a team of divers has made some pretty remarkable discoveries in the ancient sunken city of Heracleion. Because the only thing better than a lost ancient Egyptian city is a lost and sunken ancient Egyptian city.
According to a statement by the Ministry of Antiquities, the team found multiple ancient temples, gold coins, precious jewels, and a sizable ceremonial boat during their two month long excavation of the site. The city of Heracleion rose to prominence during the last days of the Pharaohs, as the Ptolemaic dynasty began their rule over the Egyptian coast. The city was named for the Greek hero of myth Heracles (better known by his Roman name: Hercules) who, according to ancient legend, actually visited the city and was presumably such a cool guy that they changed the name from the original Egyptian name, Thonis, to Heracleion in his muscly honor.
Beyond Heracles, the city was mentioned in many stories, both legendary and historical. Myth holds that Heracleion was one of the last stops of Paris and Helen of Troy fleeing from the jealous King Menelnaus before the Trojan war. Queen Cleopatra was also crowned in a temple in Heracleion. The website of Franck Goddio, the underwater archaeologist who discovered Heracleion, describes the city’s mysterious history:
Thonis-Heracleion (the Egyptian and Greek names of the city) is a city lost between legend and reality. Before the foundation of Alexandria in 331 BC, the city knew glorious times as the obligatory port of entry to Egypt for all ships coming from the Greek world. It had also a religious importance because of the temple of Amun, which played an important role in rites associated with dynasty continuity. The city was founded probably around the 8th century BC, underwent diverse natural catastrophes, and finally sunk entirely into the depths of the Mediterranean in the 8th century AD.
Archaeologist Franck Goddio with an engraving found at Heracleion.
Heracleion was first discovered in 2000 by Franck Goddio, and has slowly been excavated over the past 19 years. Goddio led the latest two-month-long excavation, which proved much more fruitful than previous endeavors thanks to modern technology. The team of European and Egyptian archaeologists used an underwater imaging tool to locate artifacts on the sea floor and those buried beneath.
On the latest expedition, the team discovered the crumbling remains of a large Egyptian temple including the massive stone columns, as well as a smaller Greek temple buried beneath three feet of sediment on the ocean floor. The team also found the missing chunk of a large ceremonial boat. Previous expeditions had uncovered 75 different boats, mostly incomplete. This find completes one of those previously discovered, a 43-foot-long ornate boat stuffed with coins and jewelry that the Ministry of Antiquities says was likely used for ceremonial purposes.
The treasures found inside the boat include gold jewelry and coins that date to the reign of King Ptolemy II, who ruled from 283 to 246 B.C. They also found pottery dating to the fourth century B.C.
The team also surveyed another sunken city, Canopus, and found that the city was half a mile larger than previously thought. They recovered some coins and pottery from Canopus which, according to the Ministry of Antiquities, indicates that this city was also a bustling port town from the fourth century B.C. through the Islamic period.
The number of “lost” cities being found and excavated seems to be increasing exponentially as our ability to image previously unassailable locations gets better and better. There’s no telling how many forgotten places, people, and stories have yet to be discovered.
Based on new research conducted by Francois Costard, who is a scientist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, he believes that an ancientasteroid impact on Mars created a mega-tsunami. Although it was quite common for asteroids to slam into Mars around three and a half billion years ago, there was one in particular that Costard was interested in.
He believes that a huge asteroid hit Mars creating a gigantic crater and that impact sent a thousand-foot wall of water across the planet which made odd landforms across the surface. In fact, he says that Mars’ strange features could have only been created by a massive tsunami that would have crashed into shore and then went back over the landscape. Costard has been discussing his theory, in particular a location on Mars named the “Thumbprint Terrain”, and he now thinks that he has discovered the impact crater that caused the massive tsunami. His findings were published in the Journal of Geophysical Research Planets.
This wasn’t the first time that the mega-tsunami theory has been mentioned. In 2016, several astronomers discussed the possibility of an ancient asteroid impact causing two tsunamis across the Red Planet. Costard then did more research on the astronomers’ theory by trying to find out where the tsunami had originated from. He narrowed it down to ten possible impact craters that could have potentially caused the mega-tsunami, but one in particular caught his attention. Since the Lomonosov Crater is the correct age (approximately 3 billion years old), along with its huge size (75 miles across), and it’s shape (there are clues that suggests it was under water when the asteroid impacted the planet), it seems like that crater is the likely point of origin.
This new theory would change the timeline of when it is believed that Mars lost all of its water which was around 3.7 billion years ago after the core of the planet cooled down as well as the disappearance of the magnetic field. Since the planet didn’t have any atmosphere, surface water would have disappeared rather quickly.
Recently, however, scientists are finding new evidence that surface water was still present on the Red Planet a lot longer after the collapse of its magnetic field and possibly even as recent as in the last billion years. The Thumbprint Terrain is a fascinating area on Mars since it’s on the edge of a large low-lying plane that many scientists believe once held a huge northern ocean. And if the Lomonosov Crater is the actual impact site of the asteroid that caused the mega-tsunami, that means that there was still a huge ocean on Mars around 3 billion years ago. The timeline as to when a water-filled Mars turned into the “Red Planet” may be much more recent than previously thought.
UFO Or Alien Creature Moves Past Sun Satellite Lens, July 30. 2019, UFO Sighting News. Alien Life Found!
UFO Or Alien Creature Moves Past Sun Satellite Lens, July 30. 2019, UFO Sighting News. Alien Life Found!
Date of sighting: July 30, 2019 Location of sighting: Earths sun, SOHO satellite Source:Helioviewer.org I found a large unknown object shooting past the SOHO satellite today. The object always moves in groups of 2-4. Here we see it alone, but not far away are several others in their group. The objects always have a curved inward back area and a rounded outward front area. I believe these are living entities, not alien craft. The objects are usually together, that means it has a social instinct to gather for safety. This one flying past the SOHO satellite looks big, but its hard to tell exactly how big because it could be just meters from the lens of the satellite. However I believe these object to be several meters in size. Streetcap1 caught some great ones too. I will place his video below mine to compare and contrast. Scott C. Waring-Taiwan
Plymouth Resident Captures A Video Of UFOs During Fierce Lightning Storm
Plymouth Resident Captures A Video Of UFOs During Fierce Lightning Storm
Dozens of witnesses sent in photos and videos of the lightning that hit Plymouth recently. Residents saw intense flashes of lightning and heard thunder across the area following the extremely humid weather.
However, one man believes he may have caught more than just a bolt of lightning.
Ben Williams claimed to have captured something on his camera just before midnight.
Mr Williams said that he tried to freeze-frame it to see a better picture as it was swift, but there was something to see.
The footage was taken through a mobile phone camera. When slowed down, the video seems to show some UFOs appearing and disappearing out of thin air.
Video experts say the blobs are relatively identical but do not look like marks on the camera because of the rate in which they are visible.
Mr Williams is very interested to know what could be the reason for the mysterious shapes. He recorded the video outside his home to see some good lightning but got more than just that instead.
The shadowy shapes appear for a split second on the video during a fierce lightning strike before disappearing as quickly as they arrived.
The larger of the orbs is very distinguishable on the centre right of the screen when the video is slowed down.
The organiser has offered to provide boats to people who are interested in going into the 270,000-square mile Bermuda Triangle, which is known for the mysterious disappearance of planes and ships.
Anthony Carnovale requires attendees on “Storm The Bermuda Triangle, It Can’t Swallow All Of Us” to dress as Spongebob characters or pirates.
He promises to provide the boats, and scuba gear and guests are encouraged to bring weed and a lot of beer and whiskey.
Mr Carnovale also set up a fundraising page for an event featuring live music and entertainment in an attempt to raise $75,000 and insisted he was not a scam.
He explains that he is trying to throw a party for everyone to show this country we can organize.
The event is scheduled for October 1, and more than 40,000 people have already expressed their interest.
The mystery of the Bermuda Triangle is believed to date back to the mysterious disappearance of five US Navy torpedo bombers in 1945 during a training mission known as Flight 19.
The planes disappeared without any traces, and it was later claimed that a search plane sent out to conduct a rescue operation of the missing crew also disappeared.
Several explanations have been provided for the disappearances, including UFOs.
Diep in de aarde bevinden zich twee gigantische bergen zo groot als een heel continent, en niemand snapt er iets van
Diep in de aarde bevinden zich twee gigantische bergen zo groot als een heel continent, en niemand snapt er iets van
Ergens tussen het aardoppervlak en het middelpunt van de aarde bevinden zich twee bergen ter grootte van een heel continent. Wetenschappers weten er bijna niets over.
De mysterieuze hopen steen worden officieel ‘large low-shear-velocity provinces’ genoemd.
Wetenschappers weten sinds de jaren zeventig dat de bergen bestaan, maar er is nog altijd maar heel weinig over bekend.
Geen idee
“Dit zijn enkele van de grootste dingen in de aarde,” zei geoloog Ved Lekic van de Universiteit van Maryland tegen website Eos.
“En we hebben geen idee wat het zijn, waar ze vandaan komen en hoelang ze daar al zitten, of wat ze doen,” klonk het.
De blobs zoals ze door wetenschappers ook wel worden genoemd beginnen ergens op duizenden kilometers onder het aardoppervlak, waar de mantel overgaat in de buitenkern.
Zo groot als een heel continent
Eén van de blobs bevindt zich diep onder de Grote Oceaan, de andere onder Afrika en delen van de Atlantische Oceaan.
Beide bergen zijn gigantisch: ze strekken zich uit over de helft van de mantel en zijn zo groot als een heel continent.
Volgens Eos is iedere berg 100 keer hoger dan de Mount Everest en zou het internationale ruimtestation ISS eromheen moeten vliegen als ze zich op het aardoppervlak bevonden.
Het mysterie van Mont’e Prama. Zijn deze beelden en graftombes op Sardinië gemaakt door reuzen?
Foto: DedaloNur Wikimedia Commons
Het mysterie van Mont’e Prama. Zijn deze beelden en graftombes op Sardinië gemaakt door reuzen?
Volgens legendes leefden er ooit reuzen op Sardinië. Ze zouden er reusachtige graftombes hebben achtergelaten en de nuraghi – forten met torens – hebben gebouwd.
Op het eiland kunnen tot wel 20.000 van deze nuraghi worden gevonden.
Eén daarvan werd gevonden in Barumini. Het kostte archeologen 14 jaar om het bouwwerk onder een 12 meter dikke laag modder vandaan te halen.
2,5 meter
Op 30 oktober 1953 werden op Sardinië meer dan 2,5 meter lange skeletten opgegraven.
Reuters meldde dat archeologen bij Porto Torres reuzenskeletten van twee krijgers hadden ontdekt die zo’n 4000 jaar geleden waren gestorven.
De twee skeletten, beide intact en omringd met wapens en vazen, waren meer dan 2,5 meter lang, aldus het persbureau.
Reuzen van Mont’e Prama
Dan is er nog het mysterie rond de zogeheten Reuzen van Mont’e Prama, oude stenen sculpturen gemaakt door de Nuraghische beschaving.
Opvallend is dat de beelden, die in maart 1974 bij toeval werden ontdekt nabij Mont’e Prama in het westen van Sardinië, ongeveer 2,5 meter lang zijn.
De beelden, gemaakt van zandsteen, worden bewaard in het nationaal historisch museum van Cagliari.
Overspoeld met reserveringen: zo maken de bewoners rond Area 51 zich op voor de massale instroom van UFO-jagers
Overspoeld met reserveringen: zo maken de bewoners rond Area 51 zich op voor de massale instroom van UFO-jagers
Vern Holaday, eigenaar van een motel op zo’n 150 kilometer van Las Vegas in Nevada, zit rond 20 september al bijna helemaal volgeboekt. De reden? De bestorming van Area 51 die voor die dag gepland staat.
Kleine gemeenschappen in de omgeving van de geheime basis maken zich al op voor de massale instroom van UFO-jagers, schrijft NBC News.
Lokale moteleigenaars krijgen dagelijkse vele telefoontjes. Sommigen zijn bezorgd dat de regio niet voorbereid zal zijn op de verwachte menigte.
Overspoeld
“Ik heb me nog nooit in mijn leven zo overweldigd gevoeld,” zei moteleigenaar Connie West.
Haar motel, op zo’n 80 kilometer van Alamo, wordt dagelijks overspoeld met telefoontjes.
West hoort mensen al jaren praten over het binnenvallen van Area 51, maar nog nooit waren het er zoveel. “Het is een gekkenhuis,” zei ze.
Bezorgd
Ze belt ondertussen stad en land af om te zorgen dat ze genoeg voorraad in huis heeft.
West zei bezorgd te zijn dat mensen gewond raken of opgepakt worden terwijl ze proberen Area 51 binnen te komen.
Afsluiten
Sommigen hebben gespeculeerd dat de politie wegen gaat afsluiten die naar de basis leiden zodat niemand er in de buurt kan komen.
A massive solar storm is making its way towards Earth, and it's likely to hit today.
The storm was created by a solar flare - a large explosion in the sun's atmosphere - which generated charged particles earlier this week.
The charged particles from the sun are moving towards Earth, and they could disrupt power grids, spacecraft and satellite operations.
The solar particles are expected to hit Earth either today or tomorrow, and they will also likely trigger auroras for people living in higher latitudes.
Scroll down for video
A solar storm is forecast to hit Earth today after the sun unleashed a powerful solar flare on Sunday night. Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory Satellite captured this image of the sun releasing a solar flare (right) earlier this week
'Aurora may be visible at high latitudes,' the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wrote in a statment.
This may include the 'northern tier' of the US, with affected states including parts of Michigan and Maine.
The NOAA says that the forecast suggests the solar storm will be a G-1 or 'minor' storm, which could become a G-2 'moderate storm' depending on how the charged particles hit Earth.
Geomagnetic storms are ranked on a severity scale, with G at the bottom, R in the middle and S at the top.
The particles, which came from the sun after a solar flare took place on February 12, could cause 'weak power grid fluctuations' and a 'minor impact on satellite operations,' according to the NOAA.
NASA and the NOAA keep a track of solar events using many different telescopes which help generate geomagnetic weather forecasts.
Northern Hemisphere Aurora forecast for February 15, 2018. Probability of visible Aurora is shown on the scale at the bottom left
Researchers also study the sun to learn more about its structure as well as obtain data to make predictions about different types of solar events, such as solar flares and Coronal Mass Ejections, which are large clouds of plasma and magnetic field that erupt from the sun.
Solar flares and particles ejected via coronal mass jections are associated with dark spots on the sun's surface.
These are areas of intense magnetic activity, and when the magnetic fields in a sunspot cross each other, it can result in an energy explosion, known as a solar flare, which sends radiation into space.
WHAT ARE SOLAR STORMS AND ARE THEY DANGEROUS?
Solar storms, or solar activity, can be divided into four main components that can have impacts on Earth: .
Coronal Mass Ejections (CME's): Large clouds of plasma and magnetic field that erupt from the sun. These clouds can erupt in any direction, and then continue on in that direction, plowing through solar wind. These clouds only cause impacts to Earth when they're aimed at Earth.
Solar flares: A large explosion in the sun's atmosphere. These flares are made of photons that travel out directly from the flare site. Solar flares impact Earth only when they occur on the side of the sun facing Earth
High-speed solar wind streams: These come from coronal holes on the sun, which form anywhere on the sun and usually only when they are closer to the solar equator do thewinds impact Earth.
Solar energetic particles: High-energy charged particles thought to be released primarily by shocks formed at the front of coronal mass ejections and solar flares. When a CME cloud plows through solar wind, solar energetic particles can be produced and because they are charged, they follow the magnetic field lines between the Sun and Earth. Only charged particles that follow magnetic field lines that intersect Earth will have an impact.
While these may seem dangerous, astronauts are not in immediate danger of these phenomena because of the relatively low orbit of manned missions.
However, they do have to be concerned about cumulative exposure during space walks.
This photo shows the sun's coronal holes in an x-ray image. The outer solar atmosphere, the corona, is structured by strong magnetic fields, which when closed can cause the atmosphere to suddenly and violently release bubbles or tongues of gas and magnetic fields called coronal mass ejections
The damage caused by solar storms
Solar flares can damage satellites and have an enormous financial cost.
The charged particles can also threaten airlines by disturbing Earth's magnetic field.
Very large flares can even create currents within electricity grids and knock out energy supplies.
When Coronal Mass Ejections strike Earth they cause geomagnetic storms and enhanced aurora.
They can disrupt radio waves, GPS coordinates and overload electrical systems.
A large influx of energy could flow into high voltage power grids and permanently damage transformers.
This could shut off businesses and homes around the world.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOA) issued a G1 (minor) geomagnetic storm watch for tonight. Shown here is the forecast for auroras tonight, which are expected to hit areas of North America
Forecasters monitor these events, and when a storm looks likely to have a significant impact, engineers can shut down certain systems on satellites, or prepare for impacts on the power grid.
The sun has an 11-year cycle of sunspot activity, with the last maximum having taken place in April 2014.
This summer, NASA is set to launch a spacecraft called Parker Solar Probe, which will travel closer to the sun than any other previous mission.
It will fly by Venus and travel into the corona - the sun's upper atmosphere, with the aim of learning more about the particles that are ejected by the sun.
Is it time to storm Pascagoula? Based on what’s been said about the remote possibilities of anyone finding anything should the unthinkable actually happen and someone trying to storm Area 51 on September 20th actually breaks through the military guards, enters the secure facility and somehow locates an unlocked door that just so happens to be holding a room full of dead aliens and UFO parts … it sounds like the odds might better storming the town in Mississippi where more and more witnesses are finally coming forward 46 years later to talk about what they saw or heard on one fateful day in 1973 when two men claimed they were abducted by aliens. Here’s the real question … what band is interested in playing and what beer company will sponsor selling Pascagoula Pale Ale?
“A big orb of light up in the air. We saw that and nobody could say anything. Nobody could move.”
In an interview with the Jackson, MS, daily newspaper, the Clarion Ledger, Joey Nelson of Mobile, AL, described what he and three friends allegedly saw on the night of October 11, 1973, as they sped west through Mississippi on their way to New Orleans on US 90. Nelson was a front-seat passenger in the car and estimates they were between Pascagoula and Biloxi when he says everyone in the car saw the orb, which was hovering in front of the vehicle. They appeared to keep on driving when he claimed a smaller orb dropped down from the large one.
“It was about the size of a beach ball, I’d say. I don’t know how far away it was, but it seemed like if that windshield wasn’t there I could have touched it. It started flashing and clicking and flashing and clicking. We could audibly hear it. I know it sounds crazy, but it seemed like they were taking pictures. It seemed like it was in front of me ten minutes or so, I don’t know. We were just mesmerized.”
At that point, the orbs flew away and the three continued to New Orleans, never telling anyone what they saw. Nelson claims that recent articles about the incident prompted him to finally share this story 46 years later. Unfortunately, there’s no corroborating testimony from the other two witnesses in the car.
“I saw a falling star. Then I realized it wasn’t actually falling. It was moving across the sky. It was at the 2 o’clock position and when it got to the 10 o’clock position another light shot out of it.”
Rosey Nail told the Clarion Ledger she was in Bruce, Mississippi, when she allegedly had a similar experience that same night. Bruce is over 300 miles due north of Pascagoula, almost on the Tennessee border. Nail’s account of two lights seems similar to Nelson’s, although what she saw was not right next to her on a porch in Bruce but far away in the distant sky. One other similarity – Nail waited 46 years to tell her story and finally came forward after reading other recent accounts.
“They’re all coming out of the woodwork. It makes me feel pretty good I’m not the only one who saw something. Most of these people are credible people.”
Really? Calvin Parker, the survivor of the two actual alleged abductees, is obviously glad people are finally agreeing with him, but are 46-year-old accounts really credible? That may include Parker, who was the silent partner in this account, allowing his much older friend Charles Hickson to tell the story. As one might expect, the reason for the recent publicity about the alleged Pascagoula abduction is due to the long-awaited publication of Parker’s account – “Pascagoula – The Closest Encounter.”
What should we make of alleged eyewitness accounts that have had 46 years to absorb – intentionally or by osmosis — details from a well-publicized and much-written-about story before finally being told in an era of instant Internet fame and hopes of fortune? Do they reinforce the validity of the alleged incident or murky the waters some more?
One thing is for certain … these won’t be the last of the Pascagoula witnesses.
Does this qualify as a storming? Anyone for some Pascagoula Pale Ale?
My previous article was on the subject of one of the most controversial of all the Majestic 12 documents. It looks at the theory that the Russians were behind the creation of the papers. Whether you buy into that theory or not, the fact is that the document is not what it appears to be. Not at all. It’s important to note that there are significant problems with the overall content of the 1st Annual Report. By that, I mean it’s a hoax; there is no doubt about it, whatsoever. I’ll show you why: The membership of what is described as Majestic 12’s “Special Panel” was said to have been the following: Dr. Vannevar Bush; General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, USAF; Brigadier General George F. Schulgen, USAF; Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer; Detlev Bronk, of the National Research Council; Jerome Hunsaker, of the National Academy of Sciences; James Doolittle; Lieutenant General Lewis H. Brereton; Rear Admiral Paul F. Lee, Office of Naval Research; Major General George C. McDonald, USAF; Dr. Hugh L. Dryden; Admiral John Gingrich; Major General George C. McDonald, USAF; and Major General Luther D. Miller, U.S. Army.
In a summary report on all of this that I wrote a number of years ago: “General J. Lawton Collins is described as Deputy Chief of Staff, United States Army. In reality, Collins was Deputy Chief only from 1947 to mid-August 1949. He attained the rank of Chief of Staff on August 16, 1949 and held that position until August 15, 1953. Likewise, Major General Luther D. Miller is listed in the Report as Chief of Chaplains with the Army. He was: but only from 1945 to 1949. Similarly, the reference to Lieutenant General Lewis H. Brereton being Chairman of the Military Liaison Committee to the Atomic Energy Committee is incorrect: he was attached to the Liaison Committee of the AEC in 1947 and through early 1948, but by June 1948 he was Secretary General of the Air Force. Hoyt S. Vandenberg is listed in the Report as Vice Chief of Staff with the U.S. Air Force; yet, in reality, he had attained the rank of Chief of Staff by April 30, 1948. George C. McDonald’s name appears in the Report as the Director of Intelligence with the Air Force. McDonald was indeed appointed to that position – in October 1947. However, in June 1948, he became Chief of the Air Section of the United States’ Military Commission at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and did not even return to the United States until June 1950, at which point he was assigned to the Office of the Department of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel.”
I continued: “Quite clearly, there is a very recognizable trend here: whoever wrote the 1st Annual Report specifically described the ranks held by the alleged members of the Special Panel in 1947 and into the early part of 1948 only. The ranks that practically all of the members held in 1947 and 1948 were utterly redundant by 1951.” Someone screwed up with the timeline. For some Majestic 12 proponents, this was a big problem. For others, it wasn’t: they just ignored this glaringly huge elephant in the room and stuck rigidly to their ‘I want to believe’ stance. Then, there’s the matter of that mysterious virus referred to in my recent article on Majestic 12, HIV, and Russia. The writer of the 1st Annual Report went on to say:
“BW [Biological Warfare] programs in U.S. and U.K. are in field test stages. Discovery of new virus and bacteria agents so lethal, that serums derived by genetic research, can launch medical science into unheard of fields of biology. The samples extracted from bodies found in New Mexico, have yielded new strains of a retro-virus not totally understood, but, give promise of the ultimate BW weapon. The danger lies in the spread of airborne and bloodborne outbreaks of diseases in large populations, with no medical cures available. Current research in U.S. and U.K., can be accelerated when studies are complete. Understanding the human makeup through EBE [“Extraterrestrial Biological Entity,” allegedly a term used by MJ12 to describe aliens] research will bring a varied wealth of information in how cells replicate themselves and may help in developing new drugs and markets. Healthcare industries are considered the best source of R&D for DoD programs.
In “Annex A” of the report there’s this, which is equally controversial: “The Panel was concerned over the contamination of several SED personnel upon coming in contact with debris near the power plant. One technician was overcome and collapsed when he attempted the removal of a body. Another medical technician went into a coma four hours after placing a body in a rubber body-bag. All four were rushed to Los Alamos for observation. All four later died of seizures and profuse bleeding. All four were wearing protective suits when they came into contact with body fluids from the occupants. Autopsies on the four dead SED technicians are not conclusive. It is believed that the four may have suffered from some form of toxin or a highly contagious disease. Tissue samples are currently being kept at Fort Detrick, Md. In the opinion of the senior AEC medical officer, current medical equipment and supplies are wholly inadequate in dealing with a large scale outbreak of the alien virus.”
In my report, I added the following, which specifically addressed the references to Fort Detrick and the matter of retroviruses: “There are two aspects of these specific extracts [of the document] that have provoked extreme controversy within the tightly knit UFO research arena: namely, the allegation that tissue samples had been forwarded to Fort Detrick, and the reference to a poorly defined ‘retrovirus.’” I added: “Medline states that the first modern usage of the term retrovirus did not surface until the 1970s.” And, as Merriam-Webster note, the first known use of the term was not until 1975.
Also, there’s this from me: “…Fort Detrick did not receive that title until 1956: from 1943 until 1955 the installation was designated Camp Detrick, having previously been known as Detrick Field. This has led some commentators to suggest that even though the 1st Annual Report does not refer to any events that post-date 1951, the document must, therefore, be of 1956, or post-1956, vintage. This scenario, however, falls apart for one, specific reason. Of those listed as members of the Majestic 12 Special Panel, one is General Hoyt S. Vandenberg. Vandenberg died in 1954. Therefore, he could not possibly have been a member of such a Panel in 1956, two years after his death.”
Clearly, and whether you buy into the Russian theory or not, the fact is that the 1st Annual Report is not a genuine document. All of the available evidence is stacked solidly against it.
Are UFOs invading Wyoming? It wouldn’t be the worst place to touch down. Wyoming has some amazing scenery, lots of open space, not a lot of people, and the Yellowstone supervolcano. I don’t know why aliens would be interested in Yellowstone, and frankly I’m not too keen on finding out. If this latest footage from Casper, Wyoming does indeed show an armada of UFOs flying overhead, hopefully they’re only here as tourists.
A video taken on July 26, 2019, around 9:30 PM in Casper, Wyoming seems to show a very large group of glowing objects flying in formation just after sundown. The video was originally uploaded by YouTube user Downbound Empire, and later re-posted by popular UFO channel The Hidden Underbelly 2.0. You can watch the footage for yourself here.
There’s clearly a group of glowing objects flying through the sky. They seem to be flying in a pretty tight formation, with just a few moving independently of the group. The objects make no sound in the video and according to the witness the objects were completely silent. A few of the UFOs seem to change in brightness, becoming briefly more intense at a few points in the video.
According to The Hidden Underbelly 2.0, when the witness agreed to allow the use of their footage they gave a statement describing the encounter:
“They weren’t orbs they look like crafts, I thought drones [but] if they were drones they had a really long range because they flew clear over the horizon out of sight but they were completely silent and they were pretty close I figured if they were drones I would have heard the propellers but I have no idea what it was, it was a trip.”
Yeah, a group of drones that size would definitely be audible. One possibility is that they’re a group of sky lanterns. That would explain the lack of sound and the tight formation. The only problem with that is the light emitted from these UFOs looks pure white and completely unlike any candle flame I’ve ever seen. Of course, that could just be an illusion caused by the camera filming in low light, hypersensitive to any points of brightness against the night sky. If they are sky lanterns, that raises another, perhaps more pressing question: what kind of idiot lets loose a bunch of flying fires over Wyoming in the middle of summer? Seriously, that’s a bad idea.
At least this kid is letting one loose over a lake instead of the great plains.
Also, although it’s hard to tell from the video, there doesn’t seem to be much wind in the area. The clouds aren’t moving and there aren’t any trees shaking. It’s hard to imagine that anything would be able to be carried as fast as these objects are moving in an environment that still.
Who knows what these objects actually are. It’s a pretty intriguing video, even if there’s a good possibility there’s a mundane explanation. Maybe next week some company will announce their new glowing, silent drone. To be perfectly honest, I’d rather it be aliens on their way to nuke Yellowstone.
Throughout the Eastern United States, particularly in southerly states that include North and South Carolina, there are a number of unique, elliptical features of unexplained origin. Known as the “Carolina Bays,” theories of their origin favors ancient, naturally occurring lake formations, although some have proposed that the features could be the remnants of ejecta from an ancient comet strike.
While the Carolina Bays remain a popular (and controversial) item of geological discussion, elsewhere in the world there are similar enigmatic elliptical features that have garnered attention over the years.
One particularly curious series of long grooves that score the landscape of the Argentine pampas near Rio Cuarto have long suggested evidence of an ancient multiple-impact site. The location was first observed by an Argentinian Air Force pilot, Captain Ruben Lianza, who wrote a summary of his observations for an astronomy publication, providing photographs he obtained from air. The images he provided showed teardrop-shaped features on the landscape which were similar in appearance to low-angle impact features previously observed on the planets Mars and Venus, and even on the Moon. They had not, however, been observed anywhere on Earth to-date.
Lianza went on to co-author an article with P.H. Schultz which appeared in Nature two years after his initial observation, where the authors described the discovery as follows:
“During routine flights two years ago …, one of us (R.E.L.) noticed an anomalous alignment of oblong rimmed depressions (4 km x 1 km) on the otherwise featureless farmland of the Pampas of Argentina. We argue here, from sample analysis and by analogy with laboratory experiments, that these structures resulted from low angle impact and ricochet of a chondritic body originally 150-300 m in diameter.”
A total of ten features were noted across a distance of 50 kilometers. Analysis of geological samples from around the gouges produced evidence of meteoritic fragments and vitrified glass (i.e. stone or sand melted due to intense heat, which is often associated with meteorite impact sites). This led Schultz and Lianza to conclude that there was ample evidence that the sites were produced by an impact; it was also determined that the locations were just a few thousand years old, and likely occurred “well within the time of human habitation.”
The Rio Cuarto features
(Credit: Planetary and Space Science Centre University of New Brunswick).
As it turns out, the newly discovered impact regions had long been known to geologists in the region, although they had never been examined prior to the work conducted by Lianza and Schultz. Following the publication of their Nature article, American geologists also traveled to the site to provide further study and analysis.
The appearance of the impressions led to their being given rather unique names; one of the areas, measuring an impressive 2000 feet in length and 600 feet wide, was called “Drop.” A pair of nearby depressions were dubbed the “Eastern” and “Western Twin.” Yet another, which was comparable in size to the “Twins,” was named the “Northern Basin.”
Fundamental to the theory of an extraterrestrial impact site, each of the depressions shared a similar alignment with an orientation toward the northeast, which the researchers believed could support the idea of a low-angle impact.
However, some ballistics experts have challenged the impact theory over time, since the low entry angle proposed by Lianza and other proponents of an impact theory is an uncommon occurrence. In addition to this, key elliptical features of known impact features of this kind also produce a “butterfly wing” pattern of ejecta, which remains absent from the anomalous Argentinian features. To account for the depth of the Río Cuarto features as craters, an impact with a resulting blast 30 times greater than the 1908 Tunguska event would be required, which must have produced more visible ejecta.
Site of the Tunguska blast, circa 1927-1930
(Public Domain).
While ideas vary about the age of the features, it is interesting to note that the depressions have been suggested to have originated around the beginning of the Holocene; this could possibly have coincided with the Younger Dryas, a period of abrupt cold reversal that occurred approximately 12,900 years ago as Earth was emerging from the last ice age. However, estimates as to the age of the Río Cuarto craters places them anywhere between 10,000 years and as much as 100,000 years old.
Further comparing the features to their cousins, the Carolina Bays, is the fact that satellite data indicates there are as many as 400 similar elliptical features in the same region. One theory proposed for the frequency and appearance of these elliptical features throughout the region is natural dune formations produced by wind over time, which could account for their shared angular orientation (a similar mechanism has been proposed in relation to the Carolina Bays, as outlined in a paper by Geoarchaeologist Christopher Moore and a number of colleagues, titled “The Quaternary evolution of Herndon Bay, a Carolina Bay on the Coastal Plain of North Carolina (USA): implications for paleoclimate and oriented lake genesis.”
Based upon physical and numerical modeling, proponents Río Cuarto event suggest that the object struck at an angle of no more than 15 degrees from the horizontal, with the impact itself having 10 times more explosive energy than the Barringer Crater event and 30 times more than the Tunguska event.[1] Although the age of the depressions has not yet been determined precisely, it is believed by some researchers[who?] they are about 10,000 years old, placing them at the start of the Holocene, though the EID gives a broader age of less than 100,000 years old.
Unique features such as these remain fascinating, whatever their ultimate cause, and provide compelling clues about the ancient world which, with any luck, will one day be well understood and easily recognized. Until that time, our many questions about the ancient world will rely on further studies of such features, which may ultimately help us unravel several key remaining questions about the ancient world, and abrupt changes that were occurring in the paleoclimate of the ancient Americas.
What does the US military actually know about UFOs?
What does the US military actually know about UFOs?
On July 26, 2019 Congressman Mark Walker appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight. The congressman, who is the member of the Homeland Security Committee, sent a letter to Navy Secretary Richard Spencer asking for answers.
North Carolina Rep. Mark Walker demands answers about the military's probe into UFO sightings.
Rep. Mark Walker, R-N.C., told Fox News Friday that he is "concerned" about recent reports by U.S. Navy pilots of encounters with unidentified aircraft that some have speculated could be otherworldly.
When asked about Lue Elizondo's claim that the United States has UFO Debris (metamaterials) he said, "We don't know, but that's one of the four questions that we are asking. Is there evidence being held somewhere (not to get too spooky once again) but if there is evidence I believe it's important for people specifically in my position, as the ranking member of terrorism/counter-intelligence, we need to know what this is."
Tourist Catches UFO At Ancient Inca City Of Machu Picchu, July 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Tourist Catches UFO At Ancient Inca City Of Machu Picchu, July 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting:July 20, 2019
Location of sighting:Aguas Calientes, Peru
Source: MUFON #102398
This UFO was recorded in Peru at the ancient site of Machu Picchu. This is about the fifth UFO report I have seen from Machu Picchu with photos or video over the last 12 years, so yes its rare, but yes, it happens. This object appears to be a rod. It has a tube like long body with six darker arms on it. Rods are common around the world and some believe them to be living AI alien probes.
Why would a UFO visit the ancient site of Machu Picchu? Well just its nickname...the lost city of the Incas...makes you want to go doesn't it? A city that over a thousand years old, built so high up in the mountains that sometimes the clouds are below you. That makes this ancient city unique. So, they go to see it just as we do. Also the fact that alien bases are often hidden in mountainous areas, makes this an absolutely amazing photo.
Rep. Mark Walker, R-N.C., told Fox News Friday that he is "concerned" about recent reports by U.S. Navy pilots of encounters with unidentified aircraft that some have speculated could beotherworldly.
"We are concerned about it," Walker, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said on "Tucker Carlson Tonight." "As the ranking member of terrorism and counterintelligence, we have questions. It comes down to some of the new infrared radar systems that we're putting on some of our new jets are detecting some things out there."
In a letter to Navy Secretary Richard Spencer earlier this month, Walker relayed his concerns and asked for more information on what he referred to as unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP).
Specifically, Walker asked whether the Navy was still logging the reported sightings, fully investigating the origins of the accounts, and dedicating resources to track and investigate the claims.
Walker also asked Spencer in the letter if investigators had "found physical evidence or otherwise that substantiates these claims."
The Pentagon confirmed the existence of a program to investigate UFOs in 2017, but it is unclear if that is still operating.
The New York Times recently reported that Navy pilots said they saw “strange objects” with “no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes” flying at hypersonic speeds at an elevation of 30,000 feet along the East Coast.
"There must be theories about what these objects are what these aircraft are," Carlson told Walker. "What's the most plausible theory, do you think?"
"We don't know for sure," Walker said. "The question that we're wanting to get to is, is this something that's a defense mechanism from another country?"
Amerikaans congreslid ‘bezorgd’ over UFO-meldingen van straaljagerpiloten. Wat weet het leger over deze objecten?
Amerikaans congreslid ‘bezorgd’ over UFO-meldingen van straaljagerpiloten. Wat weet het leger over deze objecten?
Het Amerikaanse congreslid Mark Walker zei vrijdag tegen Fox News dat hij ‘bezorgd’ is over UFO-waarnemingen die recentelijk zijn gedaan door gevechtspiloten. Sommigen hebben gespeculeerd dat de objecten buitenaards zijn.
“We maken ons hier zorgen over,” zei Walker in het programma Tucker Carlson Tonight.
“We zitten met vragen,” vervolgde hij. “Die hebben vooral te maken met de nieuwe radarsystemen die we installeren in sommige van onze nieuwe straaljagers die deze dingen detecteren.”
Bewijs
Eerder deze maand schreef Walker een brief aan marinechef Richard Spencer waarin hij om meer informatie over UFO’s vroeg.
Hij vroeg ook of de marine de meldingen van onbekende vliegende objecten nog steeds bijhoudt en daar onderzoek naar doet.
Walker vroeg Spencer daarnaast of onderzoekers ‘fysiek of andersoortig bewijs hadden gevonden’.
Onduidelijk
Het Pentagon bevestigde het bestaan van een UFO-programma in 2017, maar het is onduidelijk of dat programma nog loopt.
De New York Times schreef onlangs dat marinepiloten ‘vreemde objecten’ zagen in de lucht ‘zonder motor of uitlaat’ die hypersonische snelheden bereikten.
Carlson zei dat er theorieën moeten zijn over deze objecten. “Wat is de meest waarschijnlijke theorie?” vroeg hij aan Walker.
“We weten het niet zeker,” antwoordde het congreslid.
Half a century ago, the first humans stepped foot on Earth’s lonely natural satellite. Achieved over the course of several days and manned by three intrepid astronauts—Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins—the lunar landing of Apollo 11 was the culmination of a project more than a decade in the making, and which involved more than 400,000 participants.
After fifty years, we are still seeing the influence of Apollo 11, which historian Arthur Schlesinger called the single greatest achievement of the 20th century. But what are the longer lasting implications of the 1969 moon landing?
I recently spoke with Rod Pyle, editor in chief of Ad Astra, the official publication of the National Space Society and author of First on the Moon: The Apollo 11 50th Anniversary Experience(for which Buzz Aldrin wrote the introduction). According to Pyle, understanding the longer-lasting influence of Apollo 11 requires a look back at the mindset behind United States leadership more than half a century ago.
“Apollo was a geopolitical program,” Pyle says, “but it was really designed to make a point: which was ‘We’re better than the Soviets. We have better scientists, we have better technicians, we have better engineering and better education, better systems of government.’ It achieved that handily and trounced them as a lunar effort, and they were trying and weren’t able to do it with people. So, it achieved that goal.”
However, Pyle also says that the speed at which Americans were able to put astronauts on the moon in 1969 placed some limitations on the usefulness of Apollo-era innovations for future projects.
“The problem was, it was done so quickly, and with such finesse, and was so purpose driven that although there were plans to use the Apollo hardware for other things, it was kind of a closed-end system. By 1972, we were done with the lunar missions. They had enough hardware left for three more: Apollo 18 through 20, [and] Nixon cancelled that shortly after the Apollo 11 flight.”
That isn’t to say that there weren’t still many applications for Apollo-era innovations, as well as those which came later under similar influence. “We had Skylab,” Pyle notes, “[and we had] the Space Station, and that was a legacy; we had the first cooperative flights between the U.S. and the Soviet Union with Apollo/Soyuz in 1975, and then it slowed down.
“We started working on the shuttle, which is a whole different approach,” Pyle also said. “It was supposed to be reusable—and it kind of was—it was suppose to be cheaper, and it kind of wasn’t. It wasn’t as safe as Apollo.”
However, it could be argued that in addition to being the single greatest achievement of the 20th century, the Apollo moon landings may have also been the most inspirational, in terms of the future of space exploration; whether directly or indirectly.
“I think the legacy of Apollo, besides the philosophical achievement, the sense of adventure, and so forth, is a couple of things,” Pyle told me. “Even pessimistic projections about the money spent say that there’s anywhere from between five dollars and twenty-one dollars returned for every dollar invested in Apollo. And that’s just talking in money terms. That kind of program—a space program—is one of the few things in which government money is all pumped back into American labor; there’s no outsourcing. It’s all happening in the U.S., with U.S. workers, so that’s a benefit.
“They’re developing technologies that have benefited us to this day; everything from computing, to medical—kidney dialysis, artificial joints—anti-scratch coating on the lenses of your glasses, the dust buster was a design descended from the vacuum they designed to vacuum inside the lunar module! So all kinds of spin-offs and benefits—including our cell phones, by the way—that have persisted through the years.”
But above all, Apollo 11 continues to inspire us.
“If I go up to the Jet Propulsion Lab, where I work from time to time, and I sit at a table in the cafeteria and [ask the employees], ‘what got you into this kind of work?’ Some people are gonna say Star Trek, some are gonna say Star Wars… but they all say the Apollo Program. ‘I wasn’t even alive then,’ in many cases they’ll say. ‘The Apollo Program really inspired me to do this’.”
The Eagle landing module, photographed by Michael Collins from Columbia.
I also asked Pyle about future missions to the moon, as well as our eventual journeys to Mars, and what we might be able to predict about the future of space travel based on our experience with the Apollo program.
“If we [look at] this planned return to the moon that Vice President Pence announced a few months ago, that hardware looks a lot like Apollo because it’s gotta do the same thing. So we’re not talking about winged space shuttles and things like that, we’re talking about a conical capsule—a blunt-body capsule just like the Apollo capsule, but a little bigger (that’s the Orion)—we’re talking about the Space Launch System (SLS), and possibly using the Falcon Heavy and one of Jeff Bezos’ rockets (which are all heavily derivative of the Saturn V). We’re talking about moon suits that are derivative from what was built for Apollo, and we’re talking about a lunar lander: the best candidate so far is Jeff Bezos’ Blue Moon lander which he’s been working on for a few years, which derives a lot of its technology core from the [Apollo] lunar module.
“So between us and the Soviet Union, we did a ton of the heavy lifting, and the picking of the low-hanging fruit back in the 1960s, and now we’ve come full circle and we’re revisiting all that technology, to try and get back beyond Earth orbit, back to the moon, land on that south polar region where we know there’s big deposits of water ice, and see if we can use that water ice to stay there, and go beyond. Because where you’ve got water, you’ve got drinkable water, you can make breathable oxygen, and critically you can make rocket fuel out of it—you can make hydrogen and oxygen rocket fuel.
“And with that, because you’re already out of the gravity well of the Earth, the solar system is your backyard! So that kind of is the big goal right now, and it all stems directly from the Apollo missions.”
In essence, the legacy of the Apollo missions remains veryrelevant today, and in likelihood, they will remain so for decades to come. Even with the passing of half a century, the achievements of the Apollo 11 lunar landing continue to shape the way we study space… and help to sharpen our sights for future avenues toward exploration of the cosmos.
Matty Roberts of Bakersfield, California claims he is the creator of the satirical Facebook page that has called on people to storm Area 51 in rural Nevada on Sept. 20, 2019. Since the page posted on June 27, 1.6 million people have RSVPed the invasion, while another 1.2 million are “interested.” Roberts posted “If we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Lets see them aliens.” The mystery surrounding the crash landing of a reported UFO near Roswell, New Mexico has turned the small town into an international destination. While Area 51 is no different. People travel just 83 miles north of Las Vegas on the extraterrestrial highway to the outskirts of the USAF testing facility in droves.
USA – -(AmmoLand.com)- As a young 2nd Lieutenant, police officer / Security Policeman (SP) in the US Air Force, I was quietly advised by my fellow commissioned officers that should I ever actually fire my weapon while on duty, at either someone or something, I could pretty much kiss my Air Force career good bye.
There were the stories about Security Police in the missile fields of Montana and North Dakota using deadly force that was authorized to defend and protect nuclear weapons, only to suffer under the Uniform Code of Military Justice after the fact.
Now if Security Policemen had lost a nuke on their watch because they did not fire their weapons, those poor bastards would still be in prison.
My big Air Force/AF is really easy about applying the concept of deadly-force-authorized, to defend non-living assets, but they get most distressed when some young Air Force cop takes the leadership up on their prearranged instructions and actually makes the decision to shoot at bad guys.
There is an alleged “war story” about an AF cop / SP responding to a bar fight in Osan, Korea one night. This SP found himself alone in an alley with about 10-12 very drunk off-duty Army and Air Force members. Drinking was a way of life for the US military stationed in Korea. They were discussing the merits and tactics of beating the crap out of the cop. He knew it was going to be a painful reality. In those days an Air Force cop only carried a 38 special revolver, 18 extra rounds of ammo and a set of handcuffs.
There was no pepper spray or a non-lethal night-stick. Of course Tasers were not even around back in the day. The young SP officer was going to get his butt beat most severely. That, is when he decided he had a revolver on his hip for a reason and pulled it out. The SP even put an extra six rounds of ammo in his left hand. Figuring once he started firing, he was going to win real quick or they all would charge him en masse and he needed to reload for the “Last Stand at Osan.”
Do you know what the first thing that come out of the mouth of one of those drunk idiots was, “Hey, you’re not allow to use that gun?” The drunk was advised he was going to be the first one shot. The drunk laughed but seemed to slip away into the steamy hot Korea summer night, leaving one less target of opportunity for the cornered SP.
Surprisingly there was an inebriated pilot standing in the crowd, egging his fellow drunks on to attack the SP. When the SP told him he was going to enjoy shooting him in the kneecap and making sure he never passed a flight physical again, the drunk pilot did not think that was funny. At some point the drunks realized the Air Force cop, with his back literally to the wall and no avenue of escape was really going to shoot some of them, so the crowd drifted away.
The next day the cop was order to go see some Lt. Colonel (flying type) who owned the drunk pilot and explain who the hell the SP thought he was threatening to shoot one of his pilots’ just for having a good time out on the town. Attempts were made to explain the situation, but it was not working. Then, the now sober pilot comes in and the Lt. Colonel advised the SP he owed the pilot an apology. There was concern beforehand this was going to happen and preparations were made.
A spent 38 special shell case was handed to the pilot. The cop advised him he was lucky he had not been on the receiving end of that round of ammo. The two pilots just stood there as the cop left and nothing was heard again about that drunken night at Osan.
Now if our SP had actually pulled the trigger that night in Osan there is a pretty good chance he would have never been able to stay in the Air Force long enough to collect his retirement check. Even if legally he was in the right, they could have gotten rid of him. He would have received bad evaluations, never got promoted and been forced to leave early in his career.
Incidents like the once-upon-a-time tale of a drunken night at Osan, Korea happens on occasion around the world with Air Force cops and unruly Airmen. In most cases a shot is never fired and the incident does not make it to international cable news.
And then there is Groom Lake.
So, these alien-hunting civilians want to swarm the Air Force classified location at Groom Lake, which is north of Las Vegas in the Nevada desert. This base is also the “famous” Area 51.
Please keep in mind the US government owns a very large chunk of the state of Nevada, to include the land that the Nevada Test and Training Range is on. If the Feds say you cannot be on their land they mean it and they back it up with guns. Groom Lake is on Federal land.
My last assignment in the Air Force prior to retiring as an AF cop from active duty was at Nellis Air Force Base, in Las Vegas. Nellis AFB, was the support base for the Groom Lake operation. We had unclassified maps that had Groom Lake on them. There was no secret where Area 51 was located. Even with my increased security clearances I was never officially told what was going on at Groom Lake and to tell you the truth I did not want to know.
The unofficial rumors had the physical security of Groom Lake structured in three rings of defense. Inside the wire of Groom Lake there were allegedly Air Force, Security Policemen guarding the cantonment area. Outside the wire was the second ring of protection that was performed by contract private security. Then the first line of defense was another ring of contract security. This information is all alleged and for me hearsay. I do not know if it was true back then or how they are doing security now.
What I do understand is if these ground raiders actually show up, some Air Force careers are going to be ruined over what will happen. The Air Force does not even have to shoot any of the raiders. All the Air Force has to do is fail to have medical support, water stations and port-a-johns set up for the raiders. All it will take for international news to cry foul is a poor heat prostrated raider laying in the desert sand crying for his mommy.
Now if deadly force is actually used that day, the world will be in mourning for the misunderstood raiders who only wanted to find those pesky aliens.
As their blood is soaking into the sand the phone calls will go out for the heads of the Air Force cops who dared to defend Area 51 the way they were instructed and trained to react. Cop leadership will be called to senior pilot leadership offices and threatened with the ruination of their military careers and prison time.
There will be video footage out there forever of the injured as they try to retrograde back to Las Vegas and of course the politicians demanding answers. Years later the paper/money trail will finally come out as to what foreign hostile powers and what domestic terrorists were contributing money and support to the raider’s cause.
A suggestion to my fellow Air Force Security Forces cops, who will be on duty that day, be prepared to survive literally and politically. At the time of the writing of this column there were already 1.2 million people who have declared their intent to attack Groom Lake. If Groom Lake is swarmed with even a fraction of the 1.2 million alleged raiders there will be no stopping them and if they get to you personally, you are their target.
They will not all be Americans out for a good time in the desert. The foreign operatives will be the ones looking for blood to embarrass the US government. They will just be dressed like all the rest of the raiders.
The talking heads on the cable news channels are all laughing at the idea of raiders attacking Groom Lake. I see none of this as funny. When that Airman cop has his back against the wall at Groom Lake and challenged by screaming raiders the way the drunks threatened that SP those many years ago one night in Osan, the reaction to use deadly force will arise. Now if the three rings of security is how they conduct business at Groom Lake, and if the raiders successfully breach the first two rings to then confront actual Air Force cops, there will already have been a lot of shooting.
There is a history of individuals being killed trying to force their way into Groom Lake, but again that too is hearsay.
It is not funny. If the Federal government has established such elaborate interlocking security to protect Groom Lake they are taking this serious, deadly serious.
So, the question to the raiders is, “do you feel lucky”? To the Air Force cops who will be on duty that day, watch your back and your fellow cops’ back but do not expect your big Air Force to side-you when this is all over. You might have an empty 5.56 shell case in your hand as you ask for a lawyer. Sad but true.
Major Van Harl USAF Ret.
About Major Van Harl USAF Ret.:
Major Van E. Harl USAF Ret., a career Police Officer in the U.S. Air Force, was born in Burlington, Iowa, USA, in 1955. He was the Deputy Chief of police at two Air Force Bases and the Commander of Law Enforcement Operations at another. He is a graduate of the U.S. Army Infantry School. A retired Colorado Ranger and currently is an Auxiliary Police Officer with the Cudahy PD in Milwaukee County, WI. His efforts now are directed at church campus safely and security training. He believes “evil hates organization.” vanharl@aol.com
What the Hell Is Going on With UFO's - UFO Encounters, USA Military Wants Answers
What the Hell Is Going on With UFO's - UFO Encounters, USA Military Wants Answers
UFO’s are going mainstream. Are UFO’s real, are UFO’s special government operations, what is area 51 hidding?
So many questions and now some answers are being reported by mainstream media, it’s not just conspiracy any more.
Listen to Tucker Carlson discuss recent military encounters with UFO’s. Tucker asks,”why have we all been lied to for so long?”
Are there Aliens at area 51? These questions and many more will be answered in the two powerful videos below.
Members of Congress and their staffs were given classified briefings on unidentified flying objects by the U.S. Navy with a focus on the potential threats to humans, a Navy spokesperson said Thursday.
The Pentagon has provided a classified briefing to members of Congress about reported encounters by US navy pilots and unidentified aircraft, some of which were said to have no visible engines and could reach hypersonic speeds.
The Navy in April revised its rules on how military pilots report encounters with unidentified aircraft. Rather than dismissing the observations, the Navy now acknowledges there have been sightings of unauthorized and unidentified aircraft entering military-controlled ranges and airspace in recent years, Gradisher previously told Politico.
The question remains, “why the cover-up, how could this have been kept quiet for 60 to 80 years?
Why are they disclosing this information now? What purpose does it serve for them?
In 2004, two F/A-18F Super Hornets from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz were flying 100 miles off the coast of San Diego when a nearby Navy guided missile carrier, the USS Princeton, alerted them to two unknown objects, which the jets later flew to investigate: a larger underwater object that was “much larger than a submarine,” and a second “wingless, white” and “oblong” object that hovered 50 feet above the water and moved erratically. Here’s the infrared video of the encounter:
In 2018, a second video was released that showed another Navy run-in with a puzzling, fast-moving object. The video was taken in 2015 off the East Coast by a F/A-18F fighter jet using the aircraft’s onboard Raytheon AN/ASQ- 228 Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) Pod.
For all the myths and legends, what’s true is that Area 51 is real and still very active.
There may not be aliens or a moon landing movie set inside those fences, but something is going on and only a select few are privy to what’s happening further down that closely-monitored wind-swept Nevada road.
“The forbidden aspect of Area 51 is what makes people want to know what’s there,” says aerospace historian and author Peter Merlin who’s been researching Area 51 for more than three decades.
You know that the “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us” event was started as a joke … right? And you know that it now has a life of its own, is proceeding as jokingly planned for September 20th and has inspired other storming events … right? And you’re not surprised that a beer company, a fast food chain, a music festival organizer and more are lining up to cash in on the event … right? What else could possibly happen? How about an actual UFO showing up to entice even more people to sign up? How about a local sheriff’s office panicking about how to handle a traffic jam on a deserted road in the middle of nowhere? Welcome to the latest edition of “Storm Area 51, What Next?”
2019 UFO sighting near Area 51
That’s the headline on a video uploaded to YouTube on July 23rd by “FilmGuy,” who has this to say about the “UFO” (you can watch the video here):
“Here in Rachel, Nevada. Got this footage on my motion sensor camera. Unbelievable, not sure if it’s a jet or some aircraft I haven’t seen before. Pretty cool nonetheless.”
Pretty cool? We’ll give you cool. Unbelievable? It’s Area 51 (allegedly – there’s no sign or any other indicator, so we have to take his word for it) so not really. Motion sensor camera? That’s worth some pondering. If it’s activated by motion, why was it already recording for a few seconds BEFORE the UFO appeared on the right-hand side before quickly zipping left and disappearing? How wide of an angle and deep of a range do these motion-detectors have? And why did FilmGuy pick this particular spot to set it up? Was he expecting wildlife and got a UFO instead? Then there’s the object itself. It definitely looks like a disc of some sort, even under magnification. However, that roar in the background implies either a non-stealth jet or an old-technology flying saucer. Unbelievable or not believable? This one definitely needs more data … or an admission by a company that it’s a promo for their new “Storm Area 51 Drone.”
Storm Area 51 in your very own authentic steam locomotive!
“Someone is going to get hurt and people may go to jail. It’s not anything to joke about.”
With the only hotel in Rachel, the Little A’le’Inn, already booked to capacity, and the Alien Research Center, a gift shop along Extraterrestrial Highway about 40 miles outside Area 51, already full in its dry camping area, Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee is worried about how his tiny staff of 26 sworn officers, including the jailers, will handle even 500 people lookin’ for a stormin’ and either drunk or angry because the free beer ran out. Even out in the middle of the desert, Sheriff Lee told the Las Vegas Sun that there are parking concerns, traffic control issues and trespassing problems.
“I think this started out as a joke but there may be enough people taking it seriously and it could be a problem.”
If a mere 500 “could be a problem,” what if it’s 2 million? A million? A Woodstockish 500,000?
Among the Great Lakes of North America is the majestic Lake Ontario, which while having the smallest surface area among its four brethren is still a mighty large lake, sprawled out over 7,340 sq. miles and possessing 712 miles of shoreline. With such a large lake, one might wonder if there are any mysteries to be had here, and indeed there are. One of the most interesting of these is the lake monster that has long been reported from Lake Ontario’s depths, and while not nearly as well known as some other lake monsters of the world such as Champ or Nessie, it still has managed to capture the imagination.
Tales of something very large and mysterious in Lake Ontario’s waters go back centuries, all the way back to the original inhabitants of this land, the Seneca tribe, who told of a water dragon lurking here that they called the Gaasyendietha, and the area’s Algonquin and Iroquois people had very similar legends. Yet far from just Native myths, when European explorers and settlers began trickling into the region they too began to make sightings of some massive creature in the lake, with one of the first of these being noted in the journal of French explorer Jacques Cartier, describing a monstrous “finned snake” that moved “like a caterpillar” before diving down beneath the waves to disappear. The French explorer Pierre Radisson also made note of gigantic snakes living in the lake.
Lake Ontario
In the 1800s there were quite a few sightings of the creature in Lake Ontario, starting in 1805, when four fishermen near the area of Kingston, on the eastern shore, saw what they took to be an overturned rowboat bobbing about out on the lake. This “rowboat” then began ominously moving towards them, and as it grew closer they could see that this was just a part of a much larger, serpentine creature with huge eyes that they estimated as being an absurd 150 feet in length, as big around as a barrel, and with a mouth “frightfully large and aspect terrible.” Kingston would go on to become ground zero for all manner of other such reports, and gathered quite a reputation as being a favorite haunt for the mysterious monster.
In July of 1817, a ship was in the area when the crew spotted a dark-colored snake-like monster measuring 40 feet long and 1 foot in diameter about 3 miles offshore. In the August 14, 1829 edition of the Kingston Gazette and Religious Advocate there was also the account of a group of children playing by the waterside when they saw a serpent in the water around 30 feet in length, described in the article as “a hideous water snake, or serpent, of prodigious dimensions.” In 1833 the steamer Polyphemus also came across the beast in Kingston Harbor with the crew saying it was 175 feet in length. The captain, Abijah Kellogg, would claim that it looked almost like an earthworm, with no discernible face, and that it was making its way up the St. Lawrence River. The creature popped up again in 1842, at Gull Beach, in Kingston, where it startled two boys at the water’s edge. When they told their rather what they had seen he came running with a rifle, and even fired at the 40 foot long, brownish serpent. Sightings continued all around Lake Ontario at the time, and there was a curious account printed in the Galveston Daily News, September 5, 1867, the entirety of which reads:
Another report of the appearance of the great snake or water monster in Lake Ontario has reached us. We have it from reliable citizens who reside on the Lake shore in Parma [New York], ten miles or so west of the mouth of the Genesee, that on Thursday last [possibly August 29] , just as sunset, this monster was seen in the water close to shore. A drove of cattle went to drink, whereupon the huge monster raised his head above the water and approached the shore, intending no doubt to take an evening meal of fresh beef. The noise made by the animal as he came into shallow water frightened the cattle and they ran back from the beach in great fright. Half an hour later the same drove of cattle sought to drink at a place fifty rods west of the spot where they first went and were again driven away by the monster. The occurrence drew to the beach several persons residing not far distant and caused a sensation. It won’t answer for anybody to go into that neighborhood and say that there is not a monster in the lake. Too many have seen the animal to doubt its existence.
Sightings would continue on into later years. On June 25, 1872, witnesses in Olcott, New York, supposedly saw the monster actually spectacularly leap far out of the water while making a strange bellowing noise. Two fishermen also saw it in 1877 in Burlington Bay, described as looking like a log with a mouth like a crocodile. In 1881 the creature returned to Kingston, this time being seen by the passengers and crew of the steamship Gyspy, this time describing it as having a tail and small legs. In August of 1882 it was seen near Fort York, Toronto, and witnesses said it was bluish grey in color and covered in prominent bristles. On this occasion it was reportedly to be leisurely floating about basking in the sun, but when it realized it was being watched it apparently grunted and quickly slipped back down into the depths.
In 1888 some sailors saw the thing in the channel between Wolfe and Simcoe Islands, and in 1892 there was a harrowing report from a couple who claimed to have actually been attacked by “a huge serpent with eyes like balls of fire” during a fishing trip to Brackey’s Bay, only managing to escape by beating it over the head with their fishing poles. Perhaps one of the most dramatic reports was printed in the September 5, 1897 edition of the Buffalo Morning Express and Illustrated Buffalo Express, in which it was reported that the creature had actually been captured on hook and line after putting up a seven day battle just off from Tompkins Point. The paper describes the outlandish creature as follows:
Rope were pro cured and the monster was hauled upon the shore. The leviathan was the queerest thing ever teen’ along Lake Ontario. It measured from end of nose to tip of tail seventeen feet, four and a halt Inches, while In width it measured six feet, four Inches.The body was encased In a shell that was very soft and pliable. When hauled upon the platform scales upon which coal is weighed It tipped the beam at 443 pounds. By pulling upon the hook, which was securely fastened in the lower jaw of the monster, the head was drawn out about three feet, displaying a most wonderful sight .As the head was drawn out farther and farther, the jaws would open wider and wider and the eyes would protrude dots and more. When the bead was drawn- out U full length the eyes protruded sins inches and, being seven inches In diameter, made an extremely ugly sight, The tail was about four feet in length- and was feather shaped. About two thirds back on the body was a hump about 18 inches high, which when brushed off with an old broom, shone like polished brass. On either side of the body of the monster were six fins or flippers, each 32 inches long and armed with claws seven inches in length. Sightseers have driven from a distance of ten miles to see the monster. Dr. Dee Borough has had it skinned and will bare it mounted.
Whether this ever really happened or not, it is the last we here of this particular specimen, and no mention of any mounted specimen is made after that. Was this real, and if so what happened to that body? Who knows? Unfortunately, this could very well be just a hoax report from an era when newspaper reports were often exaggerated or even straight up made up, and there were certainly hoaxes of the Lake Ontario Monster that would pop up. Sightings nevertheless continued. In 1931 two doctors were out boating on the lake when they saw a 230-foot-long serpent with “one eye in the middle of his head as well two antler-like horns.” 1934 a group of boaters claimed to have collided with the monster at Cartwright Bay, near Kingston, and although they claimed that this had killed it the body was never found. Even more recently still is a sighting made in 1968 by a local in New York who said it was an eel-like creature 20 feet long and had a mane, and in 1970 it was spotted by an employee of the Ministry of Natural Resources at the shores of Prince Edward County. The most recent account I can find is from a Reddit commenter called “jvantorre,” who says he saw it in 2011 in Toronto Harbor, explaining:
Hi me and my friends were at a concert last night September 5th 2011 at the Toronto docks. Out I’n the water we seen a creature describing all of these descriptions. It was black maybe 2 ft wide and only slithered York the surface never jumped but came up enough to expose it’s large fin. I seen it three times I’n roughly 30 min and my friend seen it twice. Before we had to go into the concert. At first we thought there might be a possibility of fresh water dolphins but no sightings have been recorded.
It is hard to say exactly what the mysterious lake monster of Ontario could be. There are species of eel in the lake, but they get nowhere near the sizes reported. Lake sturgeon are also known in the lake, but they are very rare nowadays, and also don’t get as large as the accounts, although they do get pretty big. Could this be something else entirely? Perhaps something that long ago got trapped in the lake? There’s no way to really know, and sightings in more modern times have dropped of substantially, leaving the mystery of the Lake Ontario monster a strange oddity.
As we saw in my previous articles on Russia and Majestic 12, there is strong, available evidence that suggests the Russians were behind the notorious Majestic 12 documents of the 1980s and of 2017. At the same time that ufologists were salivating over the Majestic 12 papers in the eighties, the Russians were working to convince Americans that the U.S. government had secretly created the AIDS virus, Human Immunodeficiency Virus. Or, HIV. The purpose? To use the virus as the definitive doomsday weapon. In reality, the whole thing was nothing but extremely tacky Russian propaganda and disinformation. It’s a strange and controversy-filled story that, in a very odd way, has a link to a second set of Majestic 12 documents; they surfaced in the 1990s. This second set would provoke even more controversy than the original ones ever could. The U.S. Department of State provides the following on the Russian AIDS plot:
“When the AIDS disease was first recognized in the early 1980s, its origins were a mystery. A deadly new disease had suddenly appeared, with no obvious explanation of what had caused it. In such a situation, false rumors and misinformation naturally arose, and Soviet disinformation specialists exploited this situation as well as the musings of conspiracy theorists to help shape their brief but highly effective disinformation campaign on this issue. In March 1992, then-Russian intelligence chief and later Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov admitted that the disinformation service of the Soviet KGB had concocted the false story that the AIDS virus had been created in a U.S. military laboratory as a biological weapon.”
All of which brings us to those 1990s-era Majestic 12 files. They too were almost certainly created by the Russians. They started as a trickle in the early 1990s and by the mid-1990s had turned into a veritable tidal wave. The number of Majestic 12 papers provided to Bill Moore and Jaime Shandera in the 1980s amounted to a handful or two. The ones revealed by Heather Wade in 2017 were not much more in number. The material that a man named Timothy Cooper – of Big Bear Lake, California – obtained from shady sources in the 1990s ran to not just dozens of pages, but hundreds of pages. Although Cooper quit Ufology years ago, the files sent to him are still talked about in Ufology. Cooper soon hooked up with the father-son UFO research team of Dr. Robert Wood and Ryan Wood. In the early 2000s, I was hired by the Woods to research the Cooper files, to the extent that in 2002 I spent a week going through all of Cooper’s files, which Cooper had then recently sold to Bob Wood. I have used the following quote before, but it helps to explain how I came to know so much about not just Cooper’s Majestic 12 files, but also the means by which he got the documents, the circumstances, and much more – including certain things that are still not in the public domain. Okay, back to the quote; here it is:
“…in the early days of 2002, Bob [Wood] hired me to spend a week in an Orange County, California-based motel-room, surrounded by all of the thousands upon thousands of pages of Cooper’s voluminous collection of the cosmic sort. The plan was for me to catalog all of the material, to compile each and every piece of it into chronological order, and to summarize the content of each document, every letter, and every Freedom of Information request that Cooper had submitted to government agencies – which is precisely what I did. It was a week in which I most definitely earned my loot. It was also a week that paralleled the infamous story told by Hunter S. Thompson in his classic gonzo saga, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Whereas Thompson was hunkered down with his whisky, margaritas and shrimp cocktails, for me it was cases of cold beer and club sandwiches.”
According to Cooper, he had several old-timer sources who had spent their careers working in the fields of counter-intelligence, psychological warfare, and disinformation. The most prominent ones were Thomas Cantwheel and Cantwheel’s daughter, Salina. Allegedly, of course. The reality is that they may not even have been Americans. By now, you can surely guess where they really came from. It was as a result of having pretty much unique access to all (and I do mean all) of Cooper’s files during that week in 2002 that I began to make a Russian connection to all of this. Without a doubt, the most controversial of all of the documents that were fed to Cooper by Cantwheel and Salina, is one titled Majestic Twelve Project, 1st Annual Report. Its subtitle makes the subject of the document clear: A Review of the President’s Special Panel to Investigate the Capture of Unidentified Planform Space Vehicles by U.S. Armed Forces and Agencies.
Oddly, the document lacks a date; however, it does not refer to any events or incidents that post-date 1951, which suggests it was written in that year. Or, it was written to make us think it was created in 1951. Cooper’s notes – the ones that I had access to in 2002 – show that he received the Report in three sections, rather than as one unified document. The cover-page turned up in Cooper’s Big Bear Lake mailbox on January 19, 1994. It was almost a year later – specifically on December 30, 1994 – when Cooper obtained the Table of Contents. And, the rest of the document was provided to him on February 22, 1995. The writer of the 1st Annual Report stated:
“BW [Biological Warfare] programs in U.S. and U.K. are in field test stages. Discovery of new virus and bacteria agents so lethal, that serums derived by genetic research, can launch medical science into unheard of fields of biology. The samples extracted from bodies found in New Mexico, have yielded new strains of a retro-virus not totally understood, but, give promise of the ultimate BW weapon. The danger lies in the spread of airborne and bloodborne outbreaks of diseases in large populations, with no medical cures available. Current research in U.S. and U.K., can be accelerated when studies are complete. Understanding the human makeup through EBE [“Extraterrestrial Biological Entity,” allegedly a term used by MJ12 to describe aliens] research will bring a varied wealth of information in how cells replicate themselves and may help in developing new drugs and markets. Healthcare industries are considered the best source of R&D for DoD programs.”
In “Annex A” of the report there’s this, which is equally controversial: “The Panel was concerned over the contamination of several SED personnel upon coming in contact with debris near the power plant. One technician was overcome and collapsed when he attempted the removal of a body. Another medical technician went into a coma four hours after placing a body in a rubber body-bag. All four were rushed to Los Alamos for observation. All four later died of seizures and profuse bleeding. All four were wearing protective suits when they came into contact with body fluids from the occupants. Autopsies on the four dead SED technicians are not conclusive. It is believed that the four may have suffered from some form of toxin or a highly contagious disease. Tissue samples are currently being kept at Fort Detrick, Md. In the opinion of the senior AEC medical officer, current medical equipment and supplies are wholly inadequate in dealing with a large scale outbreak of the alien virus.”
Now, let us take another look at certain, important threads that are contained in the 1st Annual Report. The Majestic 12 papers refer to a “new virus,” “a retro-virus not totally understood,” “bloodborne outbreaks of diseases,” “the ultimate BW [Biological Warfare] weapon,” “a highly contagious disease,” and the connection between “Healthcare industries” and “DoD [Department of Defense] programs.” Mirroring the above, it’s a fact that HIV is a retro-virus. It’s also a blood-borne virus. And, as the Department of State reported, the Russians were spreading a rumor that, “…the AIDS virus had been created in a U.S. military laboratory as a biological weapon.” The additional rumor was that shadowy elements of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry were in on the conspiracy. For those who hang onto this document as being real, it should be noted that (A) Fort Detrick was actually still named Camp Detrick when the document was supposedly written; and (B) the term “retro-virus” was not in use until the 1970s, which was decades after the report is alleged to have been put together.
In light of all these unsavory and undeniable parallels, it’s very easy to see how some people – of an extremely conspiratorial and deranged mind – might come to believe that the discovery of such a dangerous alien virus, in 1947, and the recovery of a crashed UFO in New Mexico, led to the creation of HIV. It’s a fact that of all the Majestic 12-themed papers that were provided to Cooper, it’s this one – more than any other – that provoked so much controversy. And, admittedly, the document is filled with suggestive threads that fit neatly within the parameters of the bogus AIDS conspiracy theory. I have concluded that this was the goal of the creators of the 1stAnnual Report.
Now, we come to the matter of that curious name of Timothy Cooper’s primary informant, “Thomas Cantwheel.” It’s important to note that “Cantwheel” is not a real name. And it never has been a real name, either. It is, however, very similar to a genuine name. That of “Cantwell.” There may have been a very specific reason as to why “Cantwheel” chose that particular name when dealing with Cooper and with regards to a deadly virus with AIDS-like aspects attached to it. It might have been designed – as a less than subtle pointer – to have Cooper come to the conclusion that AIDS had been created by the U.S. Government. It just so happens that there is a Dr. AlanCantwell. His AIDS-themed books include Queer Blood and AIDS and the Doctors of Death.
So, what do we have here? Well, we have tales of a highly dangerous retrovirus, of a Cantwell vs. a Cantwheel, of tainted blood, of big business in cahoots with the Pentagon. And, of a mysterious couple of informants who were never really identified and who vanished into the ether (or who went back to Moscow…) after handing over controversial files to a UFO researcher – Cooper – who thought he was getting the real deal. Put all of that together and what we have is a heady brew of controversial proportions. Not only that, Dr. Alan Cantwell concluded that Fort Detrick played a role in all of this – a facility that appears in Timothy Cooper’s Majestic 12/Cantwheel papers, too, in relation to research into a deadly alien virus, as you will recall.
So, what do we have here? I suggest that we have a very strange and highly alternative attempt, in the 1990s, to resurrect Russia’s “America created AIDS” disinformation program of the previous decade. But, this time (when The X-Files was extremely popular and the adventures of Mulder and Scully were reigniting U.S. public interest in UFOs) by carefully using crashed UFOs, dead aliens, and an extraterrestrial virus as the key components to the plot. All fabricated and completely bogus. Indeed, no-one should believe or conclude there is a real connection between HIV and extraterrestrials. It’s as ridiculous as it is offensive. For those who created the document, the problem was that Cooper chose to quit Ufology and sold all of his files to Bob Wood. And, when it came to the “viral” angle of all this, Cooper chose not to bite anyway. At least, as far as I could tell from his files, that is. Cooper may not even have appreciated the significance of the various, glaring threads, as well as that Cantwheel-Cantwell issue, which was strategically placed right in front of his eyes. Also, most of the UFO research community didn’t buy into the Cooper material. Thus, the result was that the UFOs-Aliens-U.S. Government-AIDS operation stalled and finally died. Let’s hope that it stays that way.
As I see it, all of this provides us with even more clues that suggest Russia created Majestic 12 – both the fictional group and the equally fictional documents.
The number of crop circles is rising around the world, with France seeing a high volume of this in 2019. In addition, the complexity of these crop circles keeps improving as the aliens/pranksters get better at making them and keeping them concealed until they’re done despite the increasing prevalence of drones. One thing you don’t hear very often at these sites are chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” That’s mostly because the U.S. has so very few of them. Another reason might be that our alien/pranksters are just plain bad at plane geometry. That was proven once again this week in Alabama, where five people were arrested as they were creating what has to be the world’s worst crop circle. It shouldn’t even be called a “circle” but there’s no category in this field (pun intended) for crop blobs. Talk about embarrassing. (You can see the ‘circle’ here.)
“I think they may have actually made the pattern, came out of the field, and then re-entered the field, and made a second trip. So, it was a little bit of an adventure for them, it wasn’t just a quick thing.”
Wrong tool for the job
Sheriff Jonathon Horton of the Etowah County Sheriff’s Office told WSFA 12 News that a neighbor of the owner of the crumpled cornfield saw a suspicious vehicle on a security camera video (Big Brother even watches cornfields) and notified the authorities (after also posting it on social media) and it wasn’t long before Brandon Allen Whitlock, Noah Michael Brown, Rex Dakota Brown, Jeni Beth Vaughn, and Stephanie Marie Helm were arrested and charged with totally embarrassing everyone in Etowah County. Also, they were charged with 3rd degree criminal mischief, a felony. The estimated damage to the field was put at $7,500 – that’s a lot of corn.
5 arrested after damaging cornfield
(Source: Etowah County Sheriff’s Office)
What’s sad is that if you were going to pick a place in Alabama to fool the public or send a message to fellow aliens, Etowah County would be the perfect place. Located in northeast Alabama, it’s the state’s smallest county by area but one of the most densely populated. It also is home to Alabama’s most famous cryptid – the White Thang. Reported often in the dense woods of the county, the White Thang is a white Bigfoot-like humanoid creature, usually said to be over 7 feet tall and covered with white fur or hair. It reportedly has a unique howl, stands on two legs but moves extremely fast on all fours and has a foul odor.
Not a circle
Etowah County has also had its share of UFO sightings. While some may be attributed to the Goodyear blimp hangar at the local tire plant, there have been others with a few allegedly attracting military jets. The country also has legends of a river monster and giants, not to mention plenty of ghosts, according to Mark Goodson’s book Haunted Etowah Country, Alabama. But no crop circles.
Don’t look for Goodson to be revising his book for this one either. It’s an embarrassment to Alabama, White Thang and any aliens in the area.
We can’t be good at everything, but how hard are crop circles? After all … France!
For the past several months, I’ve been conducting interviews with leading UFO researchers from countries around the world in an effort to paint a clearer picture of global UFOlogy today.
This week, our global UFO trek takes us to South Africa, and to Gert Jordaan of UFORSA (UFO South Africa), an organisation specialising in data collection founded by Gert in September 2011 following an apparent increase in UFO sightings in his country and a heightened public interest in the phenomenon.
Gert Jordaan of UFO South Africa (UFORSA).
RG: Who have been the defining figures in South African UFOlogy over the past 70 years, and why?
GJ: One of the most notable figures concerning the UFO phenomena in South Africa is Elizabeth Klarer. She was a contactee and claimed to have been contacted by extraterrestrials between 1954 and 1963. She was also one of the first people on record to claim to have had a sexual encounter with an extraterrestrial. She also claimed to have visited a planet in the system of Alpha Centuri, where she believed she was impregnated and bore a son who remained on the alien planet. Klarer was even referenced in a 2008 song by South African singer Jim Neversink, called ‘Even Elizabeth Klarer.’
Photo of an alleged UFO taken by South African contactee Elizabeth Klarer in July 1956.
RG: What is the most compelling UFO case you have personally investigated?
GJ: A mass sighting on 12 December, 2012. We received numerous reports from different people that saw the same object in the Cape-Town area (between 11 and 12 December). It was seen as far as the Northern Cape and Namibia. We received approximately 100 reports of the same UFO.
RG: What is the South African government’s official stance on UFOs? When was the last time it issued a statement on the subject?
GJ: At this stage, we have no idea what the South African government’s stance is towards on UFOs. They have not indicated any interest in the UFO phenomenon.
The Union Buildings of the South African government.
RG: Does the South African Department of Defence have an official UFO investigations unit?
GJ: Not that we know of. And if the South African government does not have such a unit, we would gladly accept an invitation if they chose to work with us.
RG: Has the South African government shown more or less transparency on the UFO subject than the US government?
GJ: We believe the South African government would be more transparent with the UFO subject than the US government. At this time, we have not seen any indication from the South African government that implicates them with any UFO studies at all.
RG: Tell us a bit about your organisation, UFORSA. How many members do you have, and what kind of activities do you engage in? How many smaller South African UFO groups are you aware of, if any?
GJ: UFORSA began as a hobby for me. The official website came online sometime in 2011 to give people in South Africa a platform to submit sightings. Before UFORSA was SAUFOR, an independent person who operated a website. SAUFOR came to an end soon after we stepped in. We are only two people running the UFORSA website to this day. I am the founder of UFORSA and I have a website manager. We collect UFO data and provide commentary to the media if they enquire about a specific case. We manage the platform/website for people to engage socially and to submit sightings (which they can anonymously if they wish).
RG: What are the most active regions of South Africa for UFO sighting reports?
GJ: Three major areas in South Africa can be considered hotspots. First is the Western Cape. A huge open province scattered with small towns and great views of the stars. Secondly is Gauteng, a small province packed with towns and businesses and with many eyes on the skies. Lastly is KwaZulu-Natal, home to the famous Elizabeth Klarer, and a great place for a holiday for most South Africans (we receive a lot of sightings from this region during those holidays).
Drakensberg National Park in KwaZulu Natal Province, South Africa.
RG: Have you personally had any UFO sightings?
GJ: I have witnessed a few strange objects in the past, and one quite recently. It was just after the new year January 2019. It was almost midnight and I was watching some TV in the dark. I heard a noise outside and peeked through my sliding door (during the day, I can see the whole of False Bay from Table mountain to the Hottentots Holland mountains with an amazing sea view). I saw a flare-like object FAR in the distance. First I thought it could be a boat signalling for rescue. As the flare came down, it stopped just above the horizon and started moving towards the right and slowly disappeared.
RG: How long have you been involved in the UFO subject; roughly how many cases have you personally investigated; and what conclusions, if any, have you drawn about the underlying nature of UFO phenomena?
GJ: My interest in UFO phenomena started way before UFORSA in 2011. I had read so many books about astronomy, and I wanted to know what the UFO situation looked like in South Africa. So I founded UFORSA. I mainly collect UFO data. I cannot conduct many personal investigations due to funding issues. But it would be a dream come true to travel the country and the world to investigate the phenomena. The conclusion I have drawn through my personal experience and through my analysis of the data is that the rapid evolution in technology in our world can lead to fake reports and sightings. Not just by people playing pranks, but through misidentifications of top secret military craft that are being produced and tested. Most sightings can be explained. Almost all of them. But there are a microscopic amount that drive our curiosity. We cannot explain all things in the universe, but we often catch glimpses of the unexplained.
RG: How can South African UFOlogy, and UFOlogy in general, better itself?
GJ: The thing I want people to understand is that not every UFO sighting will be little green men in a saucer, visiting us from afar to enlighten us. UFOlogy needs to show people that any sighting can be diligently investigated and an acceptable conclusion can usually be reached. Many South Africans are still a bit close-minded. Although a small section of the populous do exhibit an interest in UFOs. I see UFOlogy as a base point from which branch out into different areas of scientific study, such as astrobiology or engineering, for example.
Mysterious Stone Sculpture found in North Carolina
Mysterious Stone Sculpture found in North Carolina
A strange stone sculpture has North Carolina archaeologists stumped.
“It’s actually the first time we’ve ever encountered it and that’s why we don’t know much about it because we’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Mary Beth Fitts, Assistant State Archaeologist with the Office of State Archaeology
A stone sculpture was found by a man named Tom Giddens who lives in Newton Grove and it wasn’t until a worker out plowing his field hit it that he discovered the mysterious artifact reports cbs17.
“The plow hit the stone and the person picked it up and put it to the edge of the field and then Mr. Giddens as he was walking by flipped the stone over and saw there was a face in the stone,” Fitts said.
Fitts created a 3D model of the stone sculpture and put it out on social media, in the hopes that someone somewhere would know something about the artifact’s origins.
“It really is mysterious. We don’t know what time period it’s from. It could be a piece of folk art or it could’ve been made a long time ago. It’s made of sandstone and that’s a pretty soft stone so you don’t need special tools to carve sandstone so that means if really could’ve been carved anytime in history.”
Glowing UFO Over Cambridge, UK Caught On Video, July 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Glowing UFO Over Cambridge, UK Caught On Video, July 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: July 21, 2019 Location of sighting: Cambridge, UK I love this sighting because everything about it falls into place well and screams legit. The person who recorded it usually films planes and wildlife so he has an eye for detail. He has a great camera with an incredible zoom on it. So when he noticed this UFO in the sky, it didn't stand a chance at escaping. This UFO has the fuzzy outer area which most do due to the alien propulsion system. Absolute proof that aliens are watching Cambridge. Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
I used a Panasonic 4k 2160p Camcorders ( 25x Optical Zoom 1500x digital zoom good enough to spot a bee on a chimney hundreds of metres away! ) Absolutely Insane shape shifting UFO seen Cambridge England.
I was using an online version of Google Earth map and found this alien base that has been dragging itself along the ocean floor for thousand or millions of years. The object is 15.3km across and the roads its making near it are also 15.3km across. The object appears to have been abandoned, so it could be from millions of years ago. There are road like structures all across our oceans as you see in the video below. I believe that this alien object is responsible for some of those and other alien structures may have helped it. These look like space ships that were used below the oceans, moving from place to place mining or exploring the bottom of our oceans. I bet this alien craft is retrievable and salvageable. The alien technology inside could save humanity and transport us to the stars. Scott C. Waring
UFO Shoots Past Motion Sensor Camera Near Area 51, Military Secret Project, Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Shoots Past Motion Sensor Camera Near Area 51, Military Secret Project, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: July 2019 Location of sighting: Racheal, Nevada, USA This UFO was recorded this week by a person who used a motion sensor camera. After six hours of footage the camera caught this amazing craft shooting past. The really compelling evidence is the sound. If you put the Youtube video into slow motion, you easily see its a perfect metal disk. I hear the UFO shooting past at jet like speeds. The sound is just like that of a jet, but clearly the object is a metallic disk. So perhaps the sound is merely the noise of the UFO pushing aside the wind as it shoots across. Clearly another top secret Area 51 project. Imagine a fleet of these American craft flying over other countries. Puts the fear into those who see them. Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
Here in Rachel, Nevada. Got this footage on my motion sensor camera. Unbelievable, not sure if it's a jet or some aircraft I haven't seen before. Pretty cool nonetheless.
An Indian spacecraft is carrying the first reflectors to be left on the moon since the Apollo era.
The reflectors, which are part of the Indian Space Research Organization's (ISRO) Chandrayaan-2 mission that launched earlier this week, represent the next step in an experiment that began in 1969.
Fifty years (and a few days) ago, the Apollo 11 astronauts left the Lunar Laser Ranging experiment on the moon. The experiment contained a tray of 100 small prisms that scientists on Earth would shoot with laser beams. Astronauts on Apollo 14 and 15 followed suit, leaving more of these prisms, known as retroreflectors, on the moon. Incredibly, decades later, these reflectors remain active experiments.
The Next Generation Lunar Reflector retroreflector (left) next to its Apollo-era predecessor (right).
(Image credit: Doug Currie)
ISRO launched a tiny new retroreflector to the moon's south pole on board Chandrayaan-2's Vikram lander. It weighs only 1 ounce (about 22 grams) and can be seen from lunar orbit, but not from Earth, Simone Dell'Agnello, an Executive Technologist at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics - Frascati National Labs in Italy, told Space.com in an email.
The new reflector is "a 'microreflector' device, similar to the one delivered by INFN of Italy (through the Italian Space Agency, ASI) to NASA-JPL and deployed on the InSight Mars lander (and to be deployed by the Mars 2020 rover of NASA and by the ExoMars 2020 rover of ESA)," she said.
Dell'Agnello is leading the research team on the Vikram microreflector and is a co-investigator working on the upcoming Next Generation Lunar Reflector (NGLR) for NASA's Artemis program. The "next-gen retroreflectors are much more compact and lighter than Apollo's meter-size arrays deployed by Apollo 11, 14 and 15 astronauts," Dell'Agnello added.
Doug Currie, a senior research scientist and professor at the University of Maryland who was a key member of the team that designed the original Apollo reflectors, told Space.com that Virkam's microreflector will not be observed by lunar laser stations on Earth. Instead, lasers fired from a satellite will bounce off this small reflector, telling scientists the distance between the satellite and the microreflector on the lunar surface.
The microreflector is "designed to be measured by Martian and lunar orbiters equipped with lasers (like the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Mars Global Surveyor and any future such spacecrafts)," Dell'Agnello said.
More moon laser targets
By firing lasers at existing reflectors on the moon, scientists on Earth observe the time it takes for the laser to return and can then study the distance between the moon and Earth. This helps scientists measure and analyze the moon's orbit, rotation, orientation and relationship with Earth.
So far, the laser reflector experiments Apollo astronauts left on the moon have not only improved scientists' understanding of how the moon moves and how far we are from it, but also helped to provide evidence that the moon has a liquid core.
However, while these decades-old experiments continue to function and provide scientists with accurate and useful data, the reflectors will soon be getting an upgrade. Enter the NGLR, a next generation laser experiment led by Currie and Dell'Agnello.
NGLR works similarly to its reflector predecessors, bouncing back lasers fired from Earth. With improved reflectors and a greater number of reflectors over a larger area on the moon, the team hopes that it will be much more accurate than the Apollo reflectors, according to a statement from the University of Maryland.
The experiments and demonstrations "will help the agency send astronauts to the Moon by 2024 as a way to prepare to send humans to Mars for the first time," NASA officials said in a statement.
"Our Next Generation Lunar Retroreflector is a 21st-century version of the instruments currently on the moon," Currie said in the statement. "Each placement of a Next Generation lunar laser ranging array will greatly enhance the scientific and navigational capabilities of retroreflector network. These additions improve the mapping and navigation capabilities important for NASA's plans to return to the moon and by 2028 establish a sustained human presence."
The reflectors will help scientists to investigate other areas of science as well. For example, scientists will use the reflectors to conduct new tests regarding general relativity and related theories, which may help to reveal more about dark matter, the mysterious stuff that makes up almost 27% of the universe, Currie said.
"Plus," Dell’Agnello added, "laser retroreflectors will serve surface geodesy, lunar cartography, exploration, ISRU and various forms of future lunar (and/or martian) commerce that will need surface metric measurements. Applications that already happened on Earth since the dawn of urbanization."
Editor's Note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the NGLR as a "microreflector." The microreflector is on Vikram, the NGLR is a separate reflector that will be part of a future mission.
Seth Shostak Storming Area 51 on September 20? Here's why you're unlikely to find aliens hiding in the desert
Seth Shostak Storming Area 51 on September 20? Here's why you're unlikely to find aliens hiding in the desert
The search for extraterrestrial life has long been a fixture of American pop culture — but lately, it seems like the conspiracy theorists have been getting a little bit louder.
An alien-like statue welcomes guests to the Little A'le' Inn restaurant and gift shop on July 22, 2019, in Rachel, Nevada.David Becker / Getty Images
The idea for this effort was birthed on Facebook, and it was clearly intended as a joke. But so was Johnny Carson’s 1973 claim that the U.S. was running out of toilet paper — an offhand attempt at humor that triggered a real shortage. So joke or no, the hordes might really show up at the closely guarded federal facility, a poor decision according to authorities. BookMaker, an Internet betting site, is already weighing the odds of a tsunami of citizens storming the chain-links and, if they do, the chances that they’ll find any aliens mothballed inside.
It’s all good fun (unless, perhaps, you’re in charge of security for the Air Force.) But should you go?
It’s all good fun (unless, perhaps, you’re in charge of security for the Air Force.) But should you go? And, really, is there any reason to believe that extraterrestrials are stacked up at Area 51?
The search for extraterrestrial life has long been a fixture of American pop culture, immortalized in television shows like “The X-Files” and movies such as “E.T.,” “Independence Day” and “Arrival” among many others. These examples speak to a widespread sentiment that has long bubbled beneath the surface. But lately, it seems like the conspiracy theorists have been getting a little bit louder. The media has devoted a lot of space to speculation about various space objects, for example, with reporters and scientists alike wondering if, for example, the mysterious object 'Oumuamuawas an asteroid, a comet — “or an alien spaceship.”
Which brings us back to Area 51. The Air Force says a citizen assault would be “dangerous” — a description perfectly chosen to encourage those who believe that what goes on at this hush-hush base is both suspect and probably malevolent. Signs posted around Area 51 somberly note that trespassing will be dealt with harshly, and that deadly force is authorized — as if you’d care whether or not it’s authorized when they winch your body out of the sagebrush.
Of course, secret things do go on at Area 51 — the testing of new military aircraft, for instance. The Air Force is not keen on people taking photos. So trying to scale the Area 51’s ramparts is about as advisable as storming Fort Knox. And even if camo-clad guards aren’t enough to dissuade you, there’s always the desert itself. Daytime temperatures, even in late September, hover around a sweaty 90 degrees. Refreshments will be hard to find, and the expected crush of people will more or less guarantee you’ll be sleeping in your car or under a creosote bush.
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OK, but maybe you’re thinking that revealing humanity’s contact with aliens would be worth the discomfort. Which, indeed, it would. And internet jests aside, a lot of people in the so-called UFO community seem convinced that the federal government really keeps evidence of extraterrestrial visitors — dead or alive — somewhere. Surveys show that one-third of the American public is convinced that aliens are visiting Earth, and a majority say that the government keeps information about these beings secret.
However, crashed saucers or broken bodies aren’t on display at the Smithsonian or Roswell’s UFO Museum. This lack of obvious evidence encourages true believers to claim that federal authorities are the only people with the technological capabilities to gather alien artifacts. And of all the places they could squirrel away this evidence, they’ve chosen southern Nevada.
Frankly, this is a poor argument. Wayfaring aliens are unlike new missiles or Mach 3 fighter jets. Alien spacecraft would, one presumes, be routinely noticed by many of the billions of people who are not employed by the U.S. military, nearly all of whom have cellphones with cameras. Sure, the recently released videos made by some Navy pilots are suggestively mysterious. But they’re also ambiguous. And what about the around 100,000 commercial flights that take off every day, apparently without the slightest concern with — or notice of — extraterrestrial craft? Does the International Airline Pilots Association offer training on how to deal with aliens in our airspace?
It beggars belief to think that the many, many employees and contractors who’ve worked at Area 51 in the seven decades since the celebrated Roswell incident have been capable of keeping news of stockpiled aliens under wraps.
Perhaps most importantly, however, is the fact that humans are weak and susceptible to all sorts of pressure and enticements. It beggars belief to think that the many, many employees and contractors who’ve worked at Area 51 in the seven decades since the celebrated Roswell incident have been capable of keeping news of stockpiled aliens under wraps, despite the fact that it would be the biggest story ever. The oft-repeated argument that secrecy is necessary in order to avoid panicking the populace doesn’t wash. Folks already believe E.T. is here, and they still go to the office every morning.
If nothing else, the suggested blitz of Area 51 demonstrates Nevada’s continuing success in cornering the alien market. In 1996, state officials christened route 375 as the Extraterrestrial Highway. This 100-mile stretch of straightaway, which parallels the northern border of Area 51, might have qualified as the world’s most boring two-hour drive if it weren’t for the fact that some people have seen strange objects in the sky while en route.
It’s also noteworthy that the Nevada Commission on Tourism, which promoted the highway rebranding, didn’t point to the fact that, three years earlier, state Sen. Richard Bryan had introduced an amendment to cancel the NASA project to search for radio signals from extraterrestrial intelligence. But then again, those aliens would have been light-years away and of little benefit to the Nevada economy.
As for Area 51, the truth may not be out there. But some high-speed aircraft and a lot of prickly pear probably are.
The magnetic North Pole is hurtling towards Siberia so quickly scientists have had to release new data a year ahead of schedule to keep navigation systems working properly
World Magnetic Model (WMM) gives compasses the means to navigate north
WMM provides a five year forecast of changes to the Earth’s magnetic field
The North Pole is moving so rapidly that current estimates weren’t accurate
Monday’s update showed the magnetic north is leaving the Canadian Arctic towards Siberia at a speed of around 34 miles (55km) per year
Earth’s magnetic North Pole has been wildly shifting towards Russia so quickly that scientists have been forced to publish an update on its actual location a year early.
The World Magnetic Model (WMM) enables compasses to point north and is used in navigation systems. Its latest update revealed the North Magnetic Pole is wandering about 34 miles a year. It crossed the international dateline in 2017 and is leaving the Canadian Arctic on its way to Siberia.
This is causing a navigational nightmare for compasses in smartphones, boats and for airport navigators as well as in some consumer electronics, and WMM was forced to update a year early in order to keep it accurate.
Scroll down for video
Earth’s north magnetic pole has been drifting so fast in the last few decades that scientists say that past estimates are no longer accurate enough for precise navigation. The World Magnetic Model was updated on Monday, showing it is wandering about 34 miles (55 km) a year
WMM provides a five year forecast of changes to the Earth’s magnetic field. The US and UK tend to update the location of the North Magnetic Pole every five years in December, but this update came early because of the pole’s faster movement.
It had been hoped that the updated model could be released even earlier, last month, but it was held up by the recent shutdown in the US government, which oversees the project along with the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Turbulence in in the planet’s core, where the motion generates an electric field, has caused the field to change in systems described as ‘akin to weather’.
Airplanes and boats also rely on magnetic north, usually as backup navigation, said University of Colorado geophysicist Dr Arnaud Chulliat, lead author of the WMM.
The military depends on where magnetic north is for navigation and parachute drops, while NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration and US Forest Service also use it. GPS is not affected because it’s satellite-based.
Airport runway names are also based on their direction toward magnetic north and their names change when the poles moved.
For example, the airport in Fairbanks, Alaska, renamed a runway 1L-19R to 2L-20R in 2009.
Since 1831 when it was first measured in the Canadian Arctic it has moved about 1400 miles (2300 km) towards Siberia.
The magnetic north pole is located at the white star and the individual lines in red and blue show the magentic field lines of Earth. These are used in navigation systems by boats and for airport navigators as well as in some consumer electronics
Its speed jumped from about 9 mph (15 kph) to 34 mph (55 kph) since 2000.
The reason is turbulence in Earth’s liquid outer core. There is a hot liquid ocean of iron and nickel in the planet’s core where the motion generates an electric field, said University of Maryland geophysicist Dr Daniel Lathrop.
Dr Lathrop, who who wasn’t part of the team monitoring the magnetic north pole said: ‘It has changes akin to weather. We might just call it magnetic weather.’
WHY ARE THE EARTH’S MAGNETIC FIELDS MOVING?
The problem lies partly with the moving pole and partly with other shifts deep within the planet.
Liquid churning in Earth’s core generates most of the magnetic field, which varies over time as the deep flows change.
In 2016, for instance, part of the magnetic field temporarily accelerated deep under northern South America and the eastern Pacific Ocean. Satellites such as the European Space Agency’s Swarm mission tracked the shift.
The magnetic south pole is moving far slower than the north.
In general Earth’s magnetic field is getting weaker, leading scientists to say that it will eventually flip, where north and south pole changes polarity, like a bar magnet flipping over.
It has happened numerous times in Earth’s past, but not in the last 780,000 years.
‘It’s not a question of if it’s going to reverse, the question is when it’s going to reverse,’ Dr Lathrop said.
When it reverses, it won’t be like a coin flip, but take 1,000 or more years, experts said.
Dr Lathrop sees a flip coming sooner rather than later because of the weakened magnetic field and an area over the South Atlantic has already reversed beneath Earth’s surface.
That could bother some birds that use magnetic fields to navigate. And an overall weakening of the magnetic field isn’t good for people and especially satellites and astronauts.
The magnetic field shields Earth from some dangerous radiation, Dr Lathrop said.
Scientists in recent years have predicted that Earth’s magnetic field could be gearing up to ‘flip’ – a shift in which the magnetic south pole would become magnetic north, and vice versa. Earth’s magnetic field is illustrated above
WHAT COULD HAPPEN TO EARTH IF ITS POLES FLIPPED?
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.
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.’
The movement of the Earth’s magnetic poles are shown in this animation at 10-year intervals from 1970 to 2020. The red and blue lines sjpw the difference between magnetic north and true north depending on where you are standing. On the green line, a compass would point to true north.
Credit: NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information
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.
We Need More Non-Binary Characters Who Aren’t Aliens, Robots, or Monsters
We Need More Non-Binary Characters Who Aren’t Aliens, Robots, or Monsters
Most characters who aren’t male or female also aren’t human. Where does that leave those of us who are?
There’s a running joke in NBC’s The Good Place about Janet, the neighborhood’s anthropomorphized operational mainframe. Every time one of the other characters calls her a “girl” or a “woman,” she cheerfully corrects them, “I’m not a girl.”
The point is that Janet is a manufactured database and not a person. But bound up in this idea is a more complicated one: that Janet, not being a human at all, is also specifically not a girl. She is a sophisticated form of artificial intelligence, and while she presents in a feminine manner she doesn’t identify as female — or even have a sense of binary gender identity. She’s a non-binary character on a major network sitcom whose gender identity, or lack thereof, does not define her — a feat which should be in and of itself a kind of revolution.
The flip side, though, is also embodied in the joke: Janet isn’t a girl because she’s not a person. Where non-binary characters appear in literature and culture, they are more often than not robots, or aliens, or monsters. They are not so often, as I am, human beings.
Where non-binary characters appear in literature and culture, they are more often than not robots, or aliens, or monsters.
I came out as non-binary in a series of stages, over the course of a number of years. It was a hard identity to put a name to, to come to understand. I’m still not completely out, and I tend to hide my gender in situations where I’ve been made to feel like it’s an inconvenience — with professors who make no space in their classrooms for considerations like pronouns, with family members for whom explaining the concept would fall on ultimately uncomprehending ears, with my housemates in the all-female campus housing in which I live.
No queer identity ever comes with a singular “coming out,” and every time I meet a new person I fall into a routine of social calculus to decide whether or not it’s worthwhile to explain my identity. Will I see this person again? Will they attack me, if I tell them? Will they respect my pronouns, if told? Will they invalidate my identity if I reveal it to them at a later date, or take offense that I didn’t tell them earlier? I have a body that is read as female, no matter what I do, and sometimes the process of explaining that I’m not a woman isn’t practical in the moment.
I don’t like that my social identity boils down to some kind of cost-benefit analysis, but society’s understanding — or lack thereof — of non-binary gender forces me to think of it that way. Social interactions are structured with this mental math at the forefront. When faced with someone new, people instinctually calculate the answer to a rote question which will influence almost everything about the way they will interact with this person: are they a boy or a girl?
There is no room, in this question, for the answer to be “no.”
The first time I realized I was non-binary, I was listening to a recording of Andrea Gibson’s poem “Swingset,” which opens with exactly this question: Are you a boy or a girl?
In the poem, Gibson never answers the question: they can’t, or perhaps they don’t need to. The normalization of their non-binary gender, the understanding that there is a third answer — a non-answer, in its own way — to this question, revolutionized me.
There is a recent trend in speculative fiction towards the inclusion of characters with non-binary genders, or characters who use non-binary pronouns (they/them/their, xe/xem/xyr, etc). Every time I see a singular they in one of the science fiction or fantasy novels I’ve picked up to read in my vanishingly small spare time, my heart skips a beat in joy and disbelief.
And yet, nearly every time a character in speculative fiction uses non-binary pronouns, it is also a signifier of something other than just gender; it is a signal to the reader that there is something other about the character in question, something which sets them apart from the other characters, and from the reader, too. It is a shortcut to remind the reader that, whoever this character is, they are emphatically not human.
It is a shortcut to remind the reader that, whoever this character is, they are emphatically not human.
For example: in Victoria Schwab’s Our Dark Duet (2017), the second book in her Monsters of Verity series, Schwab introduces a character who uses they/them pronouns. The character, Soro, is a Sunai — a monster of vengeance that consumes the souls of criminals. Their non-binary gender does not go unremarked upon in the book, which might normalize it the way any other character’s gender is unremarkable. Instead, this happens:
[When] he’d worked up the courage to ask whether Soro considered themself male or female, [they] had stared at him for a long moment before answering.
“I’m a Sunai.”
There are no non-binary humans in Our Dark Duet.
This scene should be significant — here, in a novel that isn’t about gender, a character is calling attention to the aching lacuna left by the binary question, “are you a boy or a girl?” They are finding an alternative answer. When Soro answers, I’m a Sunai, they are finding a new way to answer the question.
I’ve answered the question this way, too. A young child at my place of work once asked me: are you a boy or a girl? I panicked and answered: I’m a librarian. Can I help you find something?
But Soro’s answer actually becomes significant for a different reason. Their answer, I’m a Sunai, emphasizes above all else that which makes them inhuman, their monstrous identity. Because the other characters in Our Dark Duet are decidedly and unremarkably delineated as either male or female, Soro’s gender identity — or, more accurately, their refusal of gender — becomes a feature of their monstrosity. The answer comes not from a lack of identification with “male” or “female,” but from a lack of identification with humanity as a whole. It becomes synonymous with being an Other, just another way they are unfathomably different from those around them.
The answer comes not from a lack of identification with “male” or “female,” but from a lack of identification with humanity as a whole.
Our Dark Duet isn’t the only work of speculative fiction which does this. In fact, unlike in the lived experience of the non-binary people they represent, in speculative fiction characters who are neither a boy nor a girl are almost always something else. They are almost always something inhuman.
In Becky Chambers’ novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet(2014) there is a genderfluid alien species known as the Aandrisk, who cyclically fluctuate among three genders: a male-aligned gender, a female-aligned gender, and a neutral gender identified with neo-pronouns.
There are, also, no notable genderfluid, non-binary, or transgender human characters in the novel.
The sequel to Planet — A Closed and Common Orbit (2016) — tells the story of an artificial intelligence named Sidra, who struggles with fitting into a body that does not fit her, and searches for ways and means of making that body into a place in which she can feel at home. Because of Sidra’s struggle, themes of embodiment run throughout the novel, and each character struggles with it in one way or another. An Aandrisk character named Tak plays a major role, with his/xyr/her gender fluidity never underplayed but treated as absolutely normal, which seems to cement the themes of gender identity squarely at the forefront of the novel. His/xyr/her ability to change his/xyr/her body in accordance with the gender-of-the-day is something Sidra envies.
And yet: it is only an alien character who deals openly with gender identity.
Tak and Sidra are joined by two human characters: Pepper, who was cloned to work in a manufacturing plant and escaped at a young age; and Blue, who was disowned by his wealthy ruling-class family for his persistent lisp. Every character in Orbit struggles, in their own way, with turning their body into a habitable home. To parallel Sidra’s narrative, as she struggles with the discomfort of not fitting into the body she was given, it would have been more than fitting for either Pepper or Blue to be non-binary or transgender. Blue, in particular, has a veiled past that isn’t revealed until late in the novel; until I reached the point where I realized that it was for his speech impediment that his family disowned him, I was certain he was trans.
But when only an alien’s relationship with their body involves a deviation from concepts of binary gender, the exclusion says more than the inclusion does.
It feels lazy, in a way. As if an author is checking off a diversity box for “character uses alternate pronouns,” but can’t be bothered to stretch their mind enough to imagine an actual human who might identify that way.
It feels lazy, and it feels — quite literally — alienating.
When only an alien’s relationship with their body involves a deviation from concepts of binary gender, the exclusion says more than the inclusion does.
Often, like in the case of Soro or Janet, non-binary identity becomes a specific indicator that a character is not human, a distinct marker that sets them apart from humanity where their appearance might not. Other times, as with Tak and the Aandrisk, non-binary identity is meant to signify just how different — how alien — another culture is to humans. Non-binary identity becomes a shorthand for whatever it is that sets a character or group of characters apart from humans.
The problem here is that the non-binary people like me who want to see themselves represented and validated in the fiction they read, who might benefit most from seeing a character with alternate pronouns in their escapist media — are human. And most of the time, we’re faced with a daily barrage of people questioning the legitimacy of our gender identity.
It doesn’t help anyone to say that aliens, robots, and monsters may have non-binary identities, but to imply by exclusion that humans do not.
When the only non-binary characters in media are aliens, robots, and monsters, we tacitly assert that the non-binary people in our lives are unnatural, that there is something inherently inhuman about their existence.
When the only non-binary characters in media are aliens, robots, and monsters, we tacitly assert that the non-binary people in our lives are unnatural.
Gibson’s poem “Swingset” is, among so many other things, about the experience of being human. Their kindergarten students, wide-eyed and curious, batter them with a litany of questions which always ends with the innocent inquiry: Can I have a push on the swing? — the only answer provided to the unanswerable question presented in the poem’s first line.
The poem, as I replayed the video obsessively for weeks when I was seventeen, showed me a reality in which I did not have to be a boy or a girl, in which I could be something else and still be myself.
“Swingset” meant something to me, in my teenage struggle with my gender identity, because I could see myself in it. The non-answer to the unanswerable question gave me permission to accept that my gender was allowed to be unanswerable, too.
When this question is answered, and the answer is, “I’m a monster,” or “I’m an alien,” that permission gets lost in the shuffle.
There is speculative fiction that gets it right sometimes. But I can count on one hand the stories I have found lately that include gender non-conforming characters who are humans.
The ones that do, for me, are revolutionary.
Take, for instance, the podcast Friends at the Table. Their science fiction series COUNTER/weight includes, yes, robot characters who use they/them pronouns, and yes, an entire nearly-human alien race whose concept of gender is completely dissimilar from our own. But it also includes several non-binary human characters, such as the genius roboticist Cene Sixheart, and the Divine Candidate Kobus.
The message this sends is different: it shows us a future where humanity has eclipsed its obsession with binary concepts of gender, where non-binary gender is as much of a norm for humanity as it might be for an alien species that never developed the concepts of “male” and “female” to begin with. It shows that there is nothing inherently alien, monstrous, or unnatural — “inhuman” — about an identity that doesn’t fall in line with the gender binary.
It shows that there is nothing inherently alien, monstrous, or unnatural — “inhuman” — about an identity that doesn’t fall in line with the gender binary.
It shows, in the same way that “Swingset” does, that non-binary people are just as human as anyone else. It erases the equation between non-binary and alien, blurs the strict separation that aligns binary gender with humanity and non-binary gender with everything else. It gives us space to see ourselves, whoever we may be, exactly as we are.
It is vital to be conscious of the dangerous patterns that can emerge from a kind of representation that isn’t aware of its own history, or the implications it makes when it is not written with care. Otherwise, we end up reaffirming a system which continues to alienate non-binary gender and those who identify with it.
I love non-binary monsters. I love non-binary aliens, and non-binary robots. I love space operas and paranormal romances and anything “inhuman” that I come across. But sometimes there are days when — exhausted by the social calculus of navigating a world that does not make space for me, that does not take me for what I am — I need my fiction to remind me that I am human, too.
“A champion named Goliath, who was from Gath, came out of the Philistine camp. His height was six cubits and a span. He had a bronze helmet on his head and wore a coat of scale armor of bronze weighing five thousand shekels; on his legs he wore bronze greaves, and a bronze javelin was slung on his back. His spear shaft was like a weaver’s rod, and its iron point weighed six hundred shekels. His shield bearer went ahead of him.” — Samuel 17
For those not up on their biblical measurements, “six cubits and a span” is 9 feet 9 inches or 2.97 meters (some say this is was a transcription error because other texts list Goliath’s height as four cubits and a span – a still giant 6 feet 9 inches or 2.06 meters). For those not up on their biblical geography, Gath or Gat was a Philistine city-state mentioned often in the Hebrew bible and thought to be buried under the archaeological mound (tell) known as Tell es-Safi, a former Palestinian village located inside Tel Zafit National Park 35 kilometers (22 mi) northwest of Hebron. For those not up on their biblical history, you should still be familiar with the story of young David slaying the giant Goliath. An archeological team has recently discovered an ancient settlement under the remains of Gath with structures so large that they may be the reason behind the legendary giant stature of Goliath.
“The discovery suggests that Gath was at the peak of its power much earlier than previously thought, putting its heyday around the time when the city features heavily in the biblical narrative as a fierce rival of the early Israelites as well as the hometown of Goliath and other outsized biblical warriors.”
Bar-Ilan University professor and head of the Gath Archeological Project Aren Maeir tells Haaretz that recent digs just a meter below Gath have uncovered the older settlement that matches the time period of the biblical Gath. The differences between the older Gath and what was built over it are obvious.
“Over the summer’s digging campaign, which ended last week, archaeologists decided to investigate the foundations of large terraces located in Gath’s lower city, which was only inhabited during the Iron Age. The dig revealed that those terraces were resting on massive fortifications and larger buildings made of huge stone boulders and fired bricks – a method that makes them stronger than traditional sun-dried mud bricks. In some areas these walls are four meters thick or more, and the pottery associated with them dates to the early Iron Age, to the 11th century B.C.E. or possibly earlier. No comparably colossal structures are known in the rest of the Levant from this period – or even from the later incarnation of Philistine Gath.”
Gath has been destroyed and rebuilt a number of times, so the discovery of an older version is not much of a surprise. However, the size of the structures is a big one, and it may be why the Philistines were believed to have giant warriors.
“When people see remains of very impressive architecture and say, ‘Wow, how could someone have built that?’ one of the explanations they sometimes offer is ‘This must have been done by giants of the past’.”
Before you wonder how an experienced archeologist like Maeir could have missed doing the obvious, he says:
“There are no skeletons of people who are taller than NBA centers.”
It’s just a theory, but it’s the best we have in lieu of the actual skeleton of Goliath or the rest of his team. Maeir plans to continue digging in hopes of determining why there was such a difference in architectures between the two Gaths. He’s obviously excited about what he might find:
“But one thing is certain, we are slowly awakening a sleeping giant.”
A couple of days ago I wrote an article here at Mysterious Universe titled “The Russians were behind the Majestic 12 documents.” The article was focused on a very controversial set of Majestic 12 papers that surfaced in 2017 from Heather Wade. As I noted in my article, there are very good reasons for concluding that the Russians were behind these documents. In fact, there are several angles in the documents that are very much pro-Russian. Take a careful look and you’ll see. It should be noted though that the documents provided to Heather Wade were just the latest set of Majestic 12 papers. As many of you will know, there were two additional significant, and earlier, collections of such Majestic 12 papers. One was the collection of papers that the team of Bill Moore and Jaime Shandera received in the early-to-mid-1980s and that appeared in 1987, in Timothy Good’s book, Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-Up. For those who may not know, Majestic 12 is alleged to be a highly classified group created in the late 1940s and buried deeply within the U.S. Government. So the story goes, the Majestic 12 team sits on some of the most secret of all UFO cases – such as the notorious Roswell affair of July 1947.
As for those 1980s-era Majestic 12 documents, can we make a case that the Russians were behind them, too? Yes, we can. In 1999, Gerald K. Haines – in his position as the historian of the National Reconnaissance Office – wrote a paper titled “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90.” It is now in the public domain, thanks to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. It can be read at the CIA’s website. Haines’ paper detailed the history of how, and why, the CIA became interested and involved in the phenomenon of UFOs. Although Haines covered a period of more than forty years, I will bring your attention to one particular section of his paper, which is focused on the 1970s-1980s. Haines wrote: “During the late 1970s and 1980s, the Agency continued its low-key interest in UFOs and UFO sightings. While most scientists now dismissed flying saucers reports as a quaint part of the 1950s and 1960s, some in the Agency and in the Intelligence Community shifted their interest to studying parapsychology and psychic phenomena associated with UFO sightings. CIA officials also looked at the UFO problem to determine what UFO sightings might tell them about Soviet progress in rockets and missiles and reviewed its counterintelligence aspects.”
The Soviets, then, were camouflaging their secret rocket tests by spreading false and fantastic tales of UFOs. Haines also noted something that is absolutely key to the story that this article tells and particularly so with regard to the Majestic 12 papers: “Agency analysts from the Life Science Division of OSI and OSWR officially devoted a small amount of their time to issues relating to UFOs. These included counterintelligence concerns that the Soviets and the KGB were using U.S. citizens and UFO groups to obtain information on sensitive U.S. weapons development programs (such as the Stealth aircraft),the vulnerability of the U.S. air-defense network to penetration by foreign missiles mimicking UFOs, and evidence of Soviet advanced technology associated with UFO sightings[italics mine].”
This final point from Haines is the most important one of all. It is indeed a fact that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, “the Soviets and the KGB,” as Haines words it, approached a number of UFO researchers who also just happened to work on classified U.S. Department of Defense programs, including the Stealth projects. The goal of the Russians was to dangle sensational UFO-themed documentation in the faces of those same UFO researchers with U.S. government ties. And, in return – the Russians hoped – they would get something significant in return from the Americans they were secretly trying to “turn.” The reality of the situation, though, was that those Americans working in government and who might have been tempted to take up the Russian offer were fed nothing but faked UFO documents (guess which ones?). As for the Russians, we may never know to what extent they succeeded in getting their hands on highly classified materials of a Stealth-based nature. It’s important to note that Moore and Shandera were not caught up in this Russian plot in any way at all. Their copies of the documents – mailed to Shandera in December 1984 – came from a completely different source, one within U.S. intelligence and who was concerned about who had created the documents. There is, however, very little doubt that the Majestic 12 documents of the 1980s were Russian creations. You don’t think so? Well, keep the following in mind:
In 1988, the FBI launched an investigation into the Majestic 12 documents. Such were the twists and turns in the story, even the FBI came away baffled. If the FBI learned anything further about Majestic 12 in the post-1988 period, then that information has not surfaced under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act. We do know something of deep interest though, thanks to a man named Richard L. Huff. He served as Bureau Co-Director within the Office of Information and Privacy. In correspondence, Huff informed me of the existence of an FBI “Main File” on Majestic 12, which is now in what is termed “closed status.” The title of the file is not something along the lines of “Potentially leaked documents” or “Questionable documents,” as one might imagine, given the strange story that is detailed in this article. Rather, the file title is nothing less than – wait for it – “Espionage.” While we’re admittedly forced to speculate, that one, eye-opening word alone strongly suggests that the Majestic 12 saga really did revolve around those very same components that appear in this article: spies, counterintelligence operations, the words of Gerald K. Haines, and the interference of the Russians. And espionage.
In the third installment of this series of “The Russians created Majestic 12” articles, we’ll take a look at another batch of “leaked” Majestic 12 documents. They surfaced in the 1990s and were provided – under clandestine circumstances – to a man named Timothy Cooper.
With the recent arrival of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landings, Americans and people all around the world were reminded of the remarkable achievements half a century ago that took humans to an alien world. It was, as astronaut Neil Armstrong famously said, “a giant leap for mankind.”
And yet it was also merely a small step, and not just for Armstrong, but also in terms of humanity’s future space missions. Current plans to return to the moon were reiterated by Vice President Mike Pence, who spoke at the recent “One Giant Leap” celebration, an event marking the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing.
Pence said to an audience that included astronaut Buzz Aldrin, “I am proud to report at the direction of the President of the United States of America, America will return to the moon within the next five years, and the next man and the first woman on the moon will be American astronauts.”
It only goes to show what exciting times these are to be living in, and there may be no field where that is more evident than in aerospace, with the current push by private companies like Blue Origin and others to take humankind to the stars. In addition to the many benefits for humankind that may result from our desire to push further out into the cosmos, there are other landmark discoveries that could be made as well.
Arguably, the greatest of these may be to finally learn the answer to the age-old question, “are we alone?”
As our earthly technology improves, many astronomers and astrobiologists feel that it’s only a matter of time before we find evidence of “life out there” too, whether through evidence of technosignatures (that is, evidence of life found through the detection of advanced technologies they may be using), or even the discovery of simpler forms of life during our eventual travel to other worlds, whether in manned trips, or with the help of robotic systems we send in our place.
Diagram displaying the basic orientation of a Dyson Sphere-like megastructure surrounding a habitable star
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
It is interesting, therefore, that with all the interest in the potential discovery of alien life, the American Space Agency NASA actually puts very little funding into technologies that may aid us in finding life out there.
At least that’s the case, according to Jason Wright, an astronomer with Pennsylvania State University, who recently spoke with The Conversationabout the silly plan to “storm Area 51”, among other things (Wright said he hadn’t even heard about the latest Area 51 meme until AlterNet asked him about it).
However, far more interesting than the discussion about Area 51 and alien theories that have been raised about it over the years were Wright’s thoughts on the search for alien life.
“The search for life in the universe is a major priority for NASA and American science,” Wright told The Conversation. “Many of our missions to Mars and our space telescopes are designed with the detection of biosignatures in mind – ‘biosignatures’ being signs of life like microfossils or evidence of metabolism in the atmospheres of distant planets.”
However, Wright also said that despite all the interest there is in finding life, funding those programs continues to be a problem:
But despite the billions of dollars spent on these missions, I think many members of the public would be surprised to learn that NASA and the National Science Foundation spend next to nothing looking for intelligent life in the universe, including technological life that might, after all, be easier to find. I think the level of funding for the field should be determined the way the rest of science is, by competitive peer review of proposals for research. So, I don’t know what the “right” level is, but I know it’s not zero.
In a paper earlier this year titled “Searches for Technosignatures: The State of the Profession,” Wright called for greater interest by NASA and the National Science Foundation in the furtherance of searching for technosignatures of alien life.
“The search for life in the universe is a major theme of astronomy and astrophysics for the next decade,” wright argued. “Searches for technosignatures are complementary to searches for biosignatures, in that they offer an alternative path to discovery, and address the question of whether complex (i.e. technological) life exists elsewhere in the Galaxy.”
Wright argues that the space agency and other agencies and organizations capable of leading the charge in this field have not done so, in part due to stigmas that have become associated with the idea of alien life, and what avenues might lead to their eventual discovery. According to Wright, NASA has avoided the topic, “as a result of decades-past political grandstanding, conflation of the effort with non-scientific topics such as UFOs, and confusion regarding the scope of the term “SETI.”
SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, remains somewhat controversial today. Although having been endorsed by the likes of Carl Sagan and many other notable science advocates over the years, it has become a shadow of the once ambitious and coordinated effort that it was decades ago, and is largely independently funded today.
“The Astro2020 Decadal should address [NASA’s lack of involvement] by making developing the field an explicit priority for the next decade,” Wright says. “It should recommend that NASA and the NSF support training and curricular development in the field in a way that supports equity and diversity, and make explicit calls for proposals to fund searches for technosignatures.”
As Wright notes, discovering alien life may require little more than finding evidences of alien technology, a process that can begin right now, with technologies already at our disposal, and without ever having to leave Earth. The question that remains is whether we can we get past the highly stigmatized idea of “alien life” for long enough to see through with new and innovative plans for the future. These plans are every bit as important as any current plans for future space missions; and ultimately, they could provide answers about whether or not we are indeed all alone in this strange and mysterious universe.
Elongated UFO near Area 51 filmed with motion sensor camera
Elongated UFO near Area 51 filmed with motion sensor camera
A motion sensor camera recorded an elongated UFO near Area 51 on July 22, 2019. The UFO which has no visible parts such as wings and tail could be another secret Area 51 project.
Witness: My motion sensor camera picked this up at Rachel, Nevada right outside Area 51.
After filming for nearly 6 hours I found this... Unbelievable, not sure if it's a jet or some aircraft I haven't seen before. Pretty cool nonetheless.
Note: Given the speed of the UFO, play the video in slow motion to get a clear view of the UFO: Go to Video Settings > Play Back Speed > Set to 0.25
Richard Hoagland: They Found Advanced Technology on the Moon
Richard Hoagland:They Found Advanced Technology on the Moon
“They’re claiming NASA has hidden crucial data, information, rocks, samples, and cultural artifacts,” said Richard Hoagland , pointing to Russian president Putin as the force behind this inquiry.
“[He's] driving a dagger through the heart of the deepest most extraordinary secret of the West,” he added.
According to Hoagland, there are those in power who would do almost anything, to keep the advanced technology discovered on the moon a secret.
Hoagland revealed he has heard from a reliable intel source about reverse-engineered torsion field technology which can actually suppress nuclear weapons. Featured guests also include: Joseph P. Farrel
Area 51 Meme Compilation + Elongated UFO Near Area 51 Filmed with Motion Sensor Camera
Area 51 Meme Compilation + Elongated UFO Near Area 51 Filmed with Motion Sensor Camera
A motion sensor camera recorded an elongated UFO near Area 51 on July 22, 2019. The UFO which has no visible parts such as wings and tail could be another secret Area 51 project.
Witness: My motion sensor camera picked this up at Rachel, Nevada right outside Area 51.
After filming for nearly 6 hours I found this… Unbelievable, not sure if it’s a jet or some aircraft I haven’t seen before. Pretty cool nonetheless.
Note: Given the speed of the UFO, play the video in slow motion to get a clear view of the UFO: Go to Video Settings > Play Back Speed > Set to 0.25
The photographer took a clear image of a unknown flying object over Amarillo, California on July 21, 2019. This object has no wings or other visible parts characteristic of an aircraft. A glow comes from the top of the object.
The photographer states: Snapped a photo of beautiful clouds with my Samsung Galaxy S9. Looked at it about 40 minutes later and saw something near the top of the photo I didn't notice while snapping it.
Zoomed in and was amazed to see a disc shaped object reflecting sunshine on top and a dark surface on the bottom. I checked the other pics to make sure it wasn't my lens......clean. Such a clear pic you would think wings of a plane would be visible. Mufon case 102230.
Cigar-shaped UFO captured over Jefferson, st. Brooklyn, New York
On July 19, 2019 the witness captured a cigar-shaped UFO over Jefferson, st. Brooklyn, New York.
This object was stationary over Jefferson st. and had a pulsating rim that was silvery/ gold.
It was at high altitude and it covered about 4/5 of viewable sky and it seemed to extend from my 12 o’clock to the west coast of Manhattan just over ground zero. Mufon case 102198.
Cigar-shaped UFO photographed over Little Egg Harbor, New York
Three days later, on July 22, 2019 another huge cigar-shaped UFO has been photographed and this time over Little Egg Harbor, New York and it looks like there is some sort of triangle gate in front of the UFO.
The photographer says: I didn't even notice, I was taking pictures of storm clouds around my house and posted them on Facebook. My brother sent me the photo in messenger with circle around something asking what is that? I looked at the original and the other pictures that I took and it's only in that 1 picture. Mufon case 102220.
SpaceX just passed a huge first test with its prototype Mars spaceship
SpaceX just passed a huge first test with its prototype Mars spaceship
Locals at the southern tip of Texas took in an otherworldly sight on Thursday night: A giant mirror-polished machine roared to life near a beach, and through a billowing cloud of orange-coloured smoke, rose six stories into the sky, hovered, and then gently landed.
Though the launch lasted less than a minute, the late-night spectacle was the first true flight of SpaceX’s Starhopper rocket ship. It represents a key step in company founder Elon Musk’s quest to send people to the Moon and Mars.
Starhopper, which resembles a three-legged water tower, was hardly visible through the smoke and darkness, but Musk said on Twitter that the test worked.
“Starhopper flight successful. Water towers *can* fly haha!!” Musk tweeted after the test launch, later sharing the footage of the flight, below.
The launch started brush fires that firefighters worked to contain, but then spread overnight into a nearby wildlife refuge. However, a Facebook video posted on Friday showed emergency workers arriving on the scene and unreeling hoses to fight the flames.
“A brush fire occurred after our first successful Starship prototype hop. The SpaceX team is working with the Brownsville Fire Department to manage the incident, which is well under control,” a spokesperson from SpaceX told Business Insider in an email.
“As always, precautions were taken to ensure public safety, and nearby residents are well outside the pre-established safety zone perimeter.”
Why Starhopper’s flight is a step to get SpaceX to the Moon and Mars
Starhopper isn’t designed to fly into space. Instead, it’s a test bed for technologies that could eventually power a much larger and more powerful launch system known as Starship.
Musk envisions Starship as a nearly 400-foot-tall, fully reusable, and stainless-steel vehicle that can ferry about 100 people and more than 100 tons of cargo at a time to Mars.
Starhopper stands about 60 feet tall, 30 feet wide, and uses one Raptor rocket engine; meanwhile, a full-scale Starship headed for deep space could use more than 41 such engines, according to Musk.
(Elon Musk/SpaceX)
The rocket engines are essential yet expensive, which is why SpaceX is testing limited numbers of them on crude vehicles like Starhopper – to discover any issues early on, save money, and develop the Raptor into safe and reliable spaceflight hardware.
Musk’s eventual goal is for Starship to be capable of launching and landing many times with little to no refurbishment required. This, he says, may reduce launch costs by 100- to 1,000-fold compared to traditional, single-use rockets.
“Full and rapid reusability is the holy grail of access to space and is a fundamental step towards it, without which we cannot become a multi-planet species,” Musk recently told Time’s Jeffrey Kluger in an interview for CBS Sunday Morning.
“We cannot have a base on the Moon, we cannot have a city on Mars without full and rapid reusability.”
But getting to that stage will likely require years of testing, and Wednesday’s launch was a crucial first step.
Those initial tests anchored the rocket ship to the ground via huge chains on its legs, so Starhopper lifted no more than a few feet into the air.
On Wednesday, there was a failed launch attempt around 8:32 p.m. ET (7:32 p.m. CT). Just moments after ignition, the vehicle’s engine abruptly shut down. The launch on Thursday, however, was deemed a success.
“It appears as though we have had an abort on today’s test,” Kate Tice, certification engineer at SpaceX, said during a live broadcast. “As you can see there, the vehicle did not lift off.”
But SpaceX rallied and tried again on Thursday.
Amid a blast of sand and rocket-engine exhaust, Starhopper presumably flew at least 65 feet (20 meters) into the air at around 11:45 p.m. ET (10:45 p.m. CT). It then hovered for a moment, translated sideways a bit, and touched down on a concrete landing pad it left from.
The whole flight lasted roughly 10 seconds, following a plan that Musk described earlier this month. In addition to aerial footage, Musk also posted a video on Twitter that shows Starhopper’s launch from a camera attached to its underside. The clip clearly shows a Raptor engine propelling the vehicle off the ground.
e^✔@elonmusk
·
Starhopper flight successful. Water towers *can* fly haha!!
The videos below, captured by locals and SpaceX followers, show the entire launch from multiple perspectives.
The first is by Spadre.com, which recorded the hop from a camera located about 6 miles away on South Padre Island.
The second is a video by a local named Mary, which NASASpaceFlight.com uploaded to YouTube with her permission, and it shows a closer view of the Starhopper.
Although it’s difficult to make out, the top of the vehicle briefly rises above the smoke and flames in the footage.
Thursday’s flight showed that SpaceX has successfully developed a new rocket engine capable of powering, manoeuvring, and landing a large vehicle like Starhopper.
Critically, the engine burned liquid methane, which makes up most natural gas on Earth and is also a fuel Musk hopes to manufacture on Mars.
What’s in store for Starhopper and Starship
With a successful untethered flight under its belt, the company is now aiming to launch Starhopper on a flight to more than 650 feet (200 meters) “in a week or two,” Musk said early Friday morning.
SpaceX’s current government licence permits the company to launch experimental vehicles like Starhopper on flights lasting no more than six minutes and up to a maximum altitude of 3.1 miles (5 kilometers).
But SpaceX isn’t stopping there: It’s now building much bigger 180-foot-tall (55-meter-tall) rocket ships, called Starship Mark 1, which Musk says could fly from Texas or Florida in two to three months and reach orbit by the end of the year.
(Yutong Yuan/Samantha Lee/Business Insider)
Musk tweeted in March that SpaceX is “working on regulatory approval” for orbital flights of those prototypes, which will have three Raptor engines each instead of one.
SpaceX plans to launch a full-scale Starship before the end of 2020. Then sometime in 2021, Musk says, the company may trying landing a full-scale, uncrewed Starship on the Moon (perhaps as a bold demonstration to NASA).
Around 2023, SpaceX plans to launch Starship’s first human passengers, a Japanese billionaire and his hand-picked crew of artists, on a voyage around the Moon.
SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell has reportedly said the company hopes to send its first uncrewed payloads to Mars by 2024. Following that, perhaps in 2026, SpaceX may try to put boots on the red planet.
During the groundbreaking ceremony for the Boca Chica launch site in September 2014, Musk said, “it could very well be that the first person that departs for another planet could depart from this location.”
This story has been updated with new information. It was originally published at 11.45 pm ET on 25 July 2019.
Shortly after New Year’s Day, a boxy gold-toned spacecraft made a soft landing on a corner of the solar system never before visited from Earth: the moon’s far side, sometimes known as the “dark side.”
The craft began sending images of previously unseen reddish craters, bouncing them off a satellite orbiting above. In the following days, it launched a robotic rover, set up a colony of silkworms and even experimented with growing plants like cotton and potatoes. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine hailed the mission—intended as part of an ambitious plan to return humans to the lunar surface—as “a first for humanity and a great accomplishment.”
If you haven’t heard of it, and didn’t see much coverage of those historic images, there’s a reason. The most ambitious and successful moon lander in decades wasn’t sent by NASA. It was sent by China.
Fifty years after the Apollo landing, the moon is now the target of the biggest flurry of human activity in history, more intense even than in the heyday of the Apollo program. And it’s largely driven by countries outside the United States. India plans its own mission to the moon’s south pole later this summer, when it expects to send an orbiter, lander and rover as a trial run for sending humans to the surface within three years. Japan’s space agency has teamed up with carmaker Toyota to build a moon rover. Israel sent a privately funded robot to the moon this spring, a mission that failed when it crashed into the surface, but it is already working on a second attempt. Russia, for its part, has said it plans to build a moon colony.
Unlike the first moon race, a largely symbolic Cold War contest in which the United States decisively prevailed over the Soviet Union, this one has hard resources at stake. In this new race, powered partly by private enterprise and highly capable new space vehicles, there’s an increasingly realistic chance for the winners to stake a claim to the moon’s untapped mineral and other resources and commercialize them.
The most focused and ambitious new entrant is China, which plans to follow its Chang’e 4 lander with more robotic craft to explore both the icy poles, offering the game-changing prospect of extracting water from the ice deposits and using it to power space vehicles and sustain life. China is stepping up its human spaceflight program as well, and its plans call for a permanent Chinese colony scheduled for 2030.
The moon also tops the Trump administration’s space agenda, at least in theory: Vice President Mike Pence declared in March that the U.S. intends to return American astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024, four years earlier than previously planned, as a first step to building a permanent presence by 2028. But as it does, the U.S. faces a challenge that could be more serious than the technical questions that swirled around the program in the 1960s. Its sense of mission is far more fragmented now, and there’s little consensus on how to take the next steps off Earth, or why.
Pence’s announcement took much of the space community by surprise, and his own boss cast some doubt on the administration's seriousness in a tweet last week. The focus on the moon has exacerbated a debate that has raged inside NASA, Congress and the wider space community for decades about whether to put priority on human space flight or unmanned missions; how much to spend; how much to let private space ventures lead the way; and what NASA’s role should be at all.
The U.S.’s chief rival, meanwhile, has far more clarity. As a rising global power, China is strongly motivated by the kind of national pride that drove the U.S. two generations ago. “If we don’t go there now even though we’re capable of doing so, then we will be blamed by our descendants,” Ye Peijian, the head of the China’s moon program, said last year. And beneath that rhetoric, the Chinese government has a far more pragmatic rationale: economic ambition. Its centrally managed, methodical strategy is designed not just to plant a flag on the moon, but to lead the way in industrializing space.
At NASA, Bridenstine downplays the rivalry: “We’re really two different countries operating on very independent approaches,” he told POLITICO in a recent interview. “From our perspective at NASA, we do science, we do discovery, we do exploration. We’re very interested in what they achieve. When they landed on the far side of the Moon, we took keen interest in that.”
Some insiders see this new space race as the first real risk to U.S. leadership in a half-century. As a focused rival with resources that dwarf most of its competitors, China has real potential to gain on, and even outpace, the preeminence that America takes for granted.
“We don’t have this national program that is able to beat the Chinese,” said former Lt. Col. Pete Garretson, who recently directed the Space Horizons Task Force at the Air Force’s Air University and has extensively studied Chinese space efforts. “They’ve got this really, really clever strategic offensive.”
IN BOTH NUMBERS and achievements, the U.S. is still the dominant space player by far. Its active roster of 39 astronauts is larger than any other nation’s. Its scientific exploration program is light years ahead of the rest of the world. And NASA has an impressive track record of enlisting other nations as partners, even erstwhile adversary Russia. It is the main sponsor and operator of the International Space Station and has already inked a partnership with Canada for its moon plans and is seeking more. (One country it can’t partner with is China, which is legally excluded over concerns that Beijing will steal U.S. technology for military purposes.)
Crucially, the United States also now boasts a burgeoning private space industry, driven in part by high-profile billionaires willing to spend their fortunes on sending humanity outward. The best known are Blue Origin, funded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, which just unveiled its own lunar lander designed to reach the moon’s south pole, and SpaceX, run by Tesla founder Elon Musk, who wants to send humans to Mars on his SpaceX rockets. The industry extends well beyond those headline names, with a host of companies with big ambitions to help NASA colonize space.
But an initiative on the scale of space exploration also requires massive buy-in and investment at the public level, and on that front the U.S. is now potentially at a disadvantage compared with China. By Washington standards, NASA is a perpetually underfunded policy sideshow, and an easy target for cuts to fund more earthly priorities.
In contrast, Beijing’s leaders see their ambitions on Earth and their goals in space as linked at the highest level. In a U.S. riveted by consumer digital technology, space travel feels almost old-fashioned to discuss as a national ambition, while Chinese leaders refer unapologetically to the “spirit of aerospace” and the “space dream” as part of their efforts to rejuvenate the nation.
“The universe is an ocean, the moon is the Diaoyu Islands, Mars is Huangyan Island,” Ye, the head of China’s moon program, said in his speech last year, comparing it to the country’s expansionist designs on islands in the South China Sea.
It is difficult to determine what China spends annually on its space exploration efforts, in part because its space budget is wrapped up with defense spending. Namrata Goswami, a leading researcher on Chinese space operation at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in India, estimates that China spent $8 billion last year on its space program. That number is less than half the U.S. space budget, but an apples-to-apples comparison is nearly impossible: the U.S. budget is spread across a wide range of goals, and the military portion of China’s budget isn’t separate from “civilian” programs like landers and colonies.
Goswami’sanalysis indicates that China is rapidly pushing toward commercial space development. “Given the vast economic potential that lies in outer space resources,” she says, “China is already shifting a major part of its resources to invest in research on space-based solar power, asteroid mining and developing capacity for permanent presence in space.”
Goswami has observed that China’s leaders clearly connect its space achievements to the legitimacy of the Communist Party itself, an emphasis reflected inthe recent rewarding of plum political posts to leading Chinese space scientists. Ma Xingrui, former general manager of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, has been appointed governor of Guangdong Province, one of the country’s most economically robust. Yuan Jiajun, former president of the China Academy of Space Technology and chief commander of the Shenzhou Manned Space Program, is now governor of Zheijiang Province. And Xu Dazhe, who was the chief administrator of the space agency, is now governor of Hunan Province—particularly symbolic, in Goswami’s view, because that was the home province of Mao Zedong.
THE UNITED STATES may still be the only nation whose astronauts have placed a plaque on the moon, but its national space program is directed by an agency with a very different approach from China’s, and much further from the heart of political power. Putting humans in space has historically been a secondary mission for NASA and remains so.
The space agency instead is heavily committed, culturally and financially, to science. Its signature achievements are probes and telescopes deployed to buzz far-off planets and gaze deep into the universe. It is an emphasis heavily reflected in the space agency’s latest budget request, which also dedicates a large share to Earth-focused science missions.
NASA plans to spend $7 billionof its $21 billion budget—the largest chunk—on science; it requested $5 billion for human exploration. Even optimists acknowledge it will need far more than that to develop any kind of human return to the moon in the coming years.
“We’re going to need additional means,” Bridenstine told agency employees in a town hall in early April after the administration’s announcement of the 2024 moon goal. “I don’t think anyone can take this level of commitment seriously unless there are additional means.”
It’s not clear where those additional means will be coming from. In May, the White House asked Congress for an additional $1.6 billion for next year that it described as a “down payment” for the ambitious 2024 goal. But it couldn’t say how much the mission would ultimately cost. Some influential members of Congress, which will have the ultimate say on NASA’s spending priorities, say they simply don’t see the rationale for going back to the moon at all.
Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, the Texas Democrat who chairs the House Science Committee with oversight of NASA, has downplayed the importance of returning to the moon, and instead stressed her support for NASA’s science portfolio, including research on climate change.
“The simple truth is that we are not in a space race to get to the Moon,” Johnson told Bridenstine at a hearing earlier this year. “We won that race a half-century ago.”
She also criticized those who frame it in terms of a new race for primacy. “Using outdated Cold War rhetoric about an adversary seizing the lunar strategic high ground only begs the question of why, if that is the vice president’s fear, the Department of Defense with its more than $700 billion budget request doesn’t seem to share that fear and isn’t tasked with preventing it from coming to pass,” she said.
NASA, sensing Congress’ wariness, has insisted that the moon money won’t come at the expense of the agency’s science portfolio, which maintains strong support in both parties.
TRUMP HAS MADE a series of movesto reinvigorate the American space program, even in the absence of a deeper consensus. Shortly after his inauguration, he revived the White House National Space Council, defunct for 25 years, and designated Pence to lead it. He has issued multiple presidential directives to bring private space companies into the mix for contracts along with traditional aerospace firms and to encourage them to invest in new technology. And last year, Trump formally recommitted the United States to returning to the moon.
“This time, we will do more than plant our flag and leave our footprints,” he said at a meeting of the National Space Council. “We will establish a long-term presence, expand our economy and build the foundation for the eventual mission to Mars, which is actually going to happen very quickly.” On hand were top executives for some of the space entrepreneurs like Musk and Bezos. He said the United States is counting on them to help achieve its ambitious goals. “And, you know,” the president said, “I’ve always said that rich guys seem to like rockets. … If you beat us to Mars, we’ll be very happy, and you’ll be even more famous.”
To get to Mars, or even back to the moon, Trump will also need NASA on board with his vision for private space development, and that seems less certain than the affection of billionaires for rockets. The agency has always been the primary actor in human spaceflight, driven by testing the bounds of possibility; it has not seen its mission as paving the way for other efforts. “There has never been a strong voice in NASA for space industrial development or space settlement,” said Garretson, the recently retired Air Force colonel. “There has never been a strong camp in NASA that really wants to build sustainable infrastructure and technology that enables a broader segment of society to follow.”
Many observers see Trump and Bridenstine’s ambitions as implying a major shift for the agency, toward a gatekeeper role, laying the groundwork and setting rules for private enterprise to follow. Bridenstine has emerged as one of the leading voices for making NASA more commercial-friendly and an incubator of private ventures, including a series of partnerships with the commercial space industry for the moon mission.
Under Bridenstine, NASA has taken some initial steps to harness the abilities of that expanding commercial space sector. One example is its recently unveiled Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, in which the space agency is sharing the cost of with nine private space companies of developing lunar landers that can deliver supplies to the moon’s surface. In previous decades, NASA would have been the sole developer. The effort is expected to cost the space agency about $2.6 billion over 10 years.
PHOTOS: See some of the United States’ competitors in space
Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images
Another is the Advanced Cislunar and Surface Capabilities program, which aims to provide seed money to private space companies to develop spacecraft that can bring humans to the surface of the moon. In its new budget request for fiscal year 2020, NASA is seeking $363 million for the project, double what it sought last year. And in late May, NASA selected the first contractor for the its so-called Lunar Gateway project to construct a space station orbiting the moon to serve as a way station for astronauts living and working on the surface.
In Bridenstine’s view, this is a new approach for NASA, a collaboration that will change the course of the human spaceflight program. “We’re not purchasing, owning and operating the hardware. We’re buying the service,” he told POLITICO. “We will invest in that hardware, but we expect them to make investments in that hardware as well,” he added.
“The idea is they’re making those investments because they know that there will be customers that are not NASA,” he said. “Those customers could be international customers, could be foreign governments. Those customers could also be tourists.”
In one sense, that’s the kind of long view needed to drive big shifts in a program as entrenched as NASA’s. But Bridenstine is a political appointee working for a president whose policy priorities seem to shift week to week, and there are deep doubts he can redirect the 17,000-person agency and its army of contractors to such a new way of thinking. Even a relatively modest NASA program takes a decade to come to fruition; to affect real change, Trump’s team will need to build political coalitions around its priorities that can outlast his presidency.
IN TODAY'S SPACE race, some see a useful analogy in the early days of settling the American west in the 19th century, when there was a massive land grab that fueled the nation’s growth. “We learned in the Wild West that possession is 9/10 of the law, so getting there first is important,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, a member of the White House National Space Council, said recently.
But the settling of the American frontier was also undergirded by massive government investment, using the U.S. Army, cash subsidies and high-risk expeditions to help secure territory, clear land and create the infrastructure needed for private prospectors to follow.
On that front, China enjoys a built-in advantage. Beijing directs massive subsidies to its commercial space companies, helping them land international customers for space launch services and other products, while simultaneously propelling its overall space program.
Some of the Trump administration’s biggest allies aren’t sure that the skepticism on Capitol Hill and resistance of NASA’s entrenched bureaucracy can be overcome. Homer Hickam is a career NASA rocket scientist who was tapped by Pence last year as an adviser to the Space Council. Best known for his best-selling memoir “Rocket Boys,” he said he has long been “a strong proponent” for NASA’s unmanned robotic missions.
“But I want human activity in space, too,” he said in an interview. “I believe humans in that dangerous place should be for practical reasons as well as science. If humans are to go out there, I think they should identify and utilize the resources available, especially on the moon, to help the economies of the Earth and also create new industries and businesses.”
“I do not frankly know whether NASA can do it or not,” he said.
Dennis Wingo, an aerospace engineer who oversaw the first attempt by NASA to support a private lunar lander in the 1990s, says he’s worried that NASA “may be institutionally too ossified” to pull off what the Trump administration is proposing.
Though the prospect of a focused new competitor in China has added a strong note of urgency to the question of NASA’s transformation, others think the U.S. still has some time to get it right, in part because China’s ambitions may be outpacing its real achievements. “Chinese progress has been incredibly slow given the access they had to all of this stuff and a half-century of history to analyze on the way,” said Greg Autry, a professor at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California who specializes in space entrepreneurship and has advised NASA. “They’ve done zero new things beyond going to a different location on the moon.”
He says he is particularly unimpressed with China’s human spaceflight program, which has conducted far fewer space flights than NASA did during the Apollo program in the 1960s. “They are still far, far behind,” Autry said. “There is no reason to panic. But it is good to have a competitor. It gives us a sense of mission.”
Nevertheless, Autry also sees scant evidence the United States is ready or ableto mount the kind of full-scale investment of money and energy required to recalibrate the space program to tap into the potential resources.
“The White House has clearly committed to economic development,” Autry said. “But frankly there is nobody in NASA ready to receive that message and run with it. They are talented and good people and many of them label themselves as ‘pro-commercial,’ but they’ve never lived inside the commercial world. A significant cultural change is required.”
Mysterious sculpture of a face found in Sampson County field
Mysterious sculpture of a face found in Sampson County field
A man plowing his field accidentally came upon an archaeological find that his thus far stumped experts.
By Cameron Clinard
µNEWTON GROVE, N.C. (WTVD) -- A man plowing his field accidentally came upon an archaeological find that his thus far stumped experts.
Assistant State Archaeologist Mary Beth Fitts said the Office of State Archaeologyshared a 3-D model of the mysterious sculpture with the hope that someone will recognize seeing a similar object. Finding similar object might be able to shed light on who made the sculpture and when.
The sculpture was found by Tom Giddens while he plowed one of his fields near Newton Grove in Sampson County.
Giddens hit a stone that was approximately 2 ft. long and 1.5 ft. wide. He carried the stone to the edge of his field and continued his work.
Later, he went back to the stone and flipped it over. That's when he realized it had what appeared to be a face carved into it. He immediately contacted the Office of State Archaeology.
"It is definitely a rare find, which is why we presently don't know how old it is or who made it. It is made of sandstone, which is of medium hardness and therefore does not require specialized tools to carve," Fitts said of the sculpture.
Fitts said Giddens did the right thing by contacting her office. Anyone who comes across something they think is a historical artifact is encouraged to email pictures of the artifact to their regional archaeologist, which can be found here.
Het is echt een mysterieuze vondst. Dit vreemde beeld stelt archeologen voor een raadsel
Het is echt een mysterieuze vondst. Dit vreemde beeld stelt archeologen voor een raadsel
Op een boerderij in de Amerikaanse staat North Carolina is een vreemd beeld met daarop een gezicht ontdekt. Experts staan voor een raadsel.
De mysterieuze vondst werd gedaan toen een knecht aan het ploegen was en op een stuk steen in de grond stuitte.
Hij legde het stuk steen apart en ging verder met zijn werkzaamheden.
Mysterieuze vondst
Toen boer Tom Giddens de steen omdraaide zag hij tot zijn verbazing dat het een beeld van een gezicht was.
De boer nam vervolgens contact op met het North Carolina Office of State Archaeology om melding te maken van de vondst.
“Het is echt een mysterieuze vondst,” zei archeoloog Mary Beth Fitts tegen een lokaal tv-station.
Lang geleden
“We weten niet uit welke periode het komt,” voegde ze toe. “Het kan volkskunst zijn, maar het kan ook lang geleden gemaakt zijn.”
Het beeld is 0,6 meter lang en 0,45 meter breed. Verder is alleen bekend dat het is gemaakt van zandsteen.
In een poging het mysterie te ontrafelen heeft het North Carolina Office of State Archaeology op haar Facebookpagina een link geplaatst naar een 3D-model van het voorwerp.
Traveling by airplane is fast and convenient but it can take a largetoll on the environment. For this reason, the Hempearth Group is developing the world’s first plane made from and powered by hemp. The innovation is made almost entirely from the sustainable crop — from the plane walls and seats to the wings and pillows.
The hemp airplane was developed by Hempearth, a Canadian cannabis company and thought leader in hemp-related inventions. The company was founded in 2012 and sells a variety of organic hemp products. Their inventory includes hemp surfboards, paddle boards, oils, cannabis, and even a hemp fiber body phone.
This innovation is a first in the aviation world. When completed, the hemp plane will be able to transport four lucky passengers and a pilot. It has a 36-foot wingspan and runs on Hempearth Hemp Jet A Bio Fuel.
Why Hemp?
First of all, hemp is one of the healthiest and most versatile plants on the planet. Not only is it, pound for pound, 10 times stronger than steel but it can also bend much farther than metal. As a result, hemp is ideal for aviation technology.
Furthermore, hemp is less toxic than traditional aerospace materials, such as aluminum and fiberglass. The crop is also incredibly eco-friendly. It requires less water to grow than cotton and even puts nutrients back into the soil through a process called phytoremeditation.
Finally, hemp is lighter than traditional aviation materials. As a result, it requires less fuel (in this case, hemp biofuel) to reach a high altitude. Hemp also requires no mining, or carbon fiber. Therefore, it has almost no environmental impact.
In addition to developing the world’s first hemp plane, Hempearth is in the process of developing hemp composites in Montreal. Reportedly, they could replace all fiberglass in aviation and other industries — such as construction.
One of Hempearth’s more notable promises is to never sign or work “with fascist companies that are associated with military, The Rockefellers, The Rothchilds and or the Military Industrial Complex.” This statement alone is applaud-worthy.
Derek Kesek, the founder of Hempearth, is passionate about sustainable hemp production and its seemingly endless applications. “This is the kind of future we all want here on Earth,” he said. When the first hemp plane is completed, its first flight will take place at the Wright Brothers memorial in Kitty Hawk North Carolina. The location is the birthplace of aviation and will soon witness history once again.
What are your thoughts?Please comment below and share this news!
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
Linda Moulton Howe: E.T. Experiments & Alien Races On Planet Earth
Linda Moulton Howe: E.T. Experiments & Alien Races On Planet Earth
Age Of Truth TV presents a dynamic, eye-opening and intense conversation with investigative reporter, E.T & UFO researcher, author and lecturer, LINDA MOULTON HOWE: “E.T. Experiments & Alien Races On Planet Earth”.
Lucas Alexander is interviewing Linda Moulton Howe for Age Of Truth TV in her home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, about her long and fascinating career, as one of the worlds leading top-experts in the field of UFO and Extra-Terrestrial research, and how she began on that controversial path when doing a documentary film in 1979 called “A Strange Harvest”.
Since going through “Alice In Wonderland’s Mirror”, as she calls it, she has worked relentlessly and with a tireless effort, to inform the world about, what she believes, is an alien presence on Planet Earth. * Who are the alien races on Earth? Where do they come from? * How are governments of the world, especially the American government, involved with these otherworldly entities?
* The government cover-up of alien existence! Why? * Are we Human beings (Homo Sapiens) an alien biological experiment made by the alien race, referred to as the EBE´ns? * What is the truth behind the countless animal mutilations happening all over the world, and the reason why these crimes could not have been done by humans? * The UFO crash in Roswell in 1947. * What happens to us when we die? Is reincarnation a recycling soul trap?
These are just some of the mind-blowing and extraordinary topics discussed in this interview with Linda Moulton Howe. It is a 1 hour 42 minutes in-depth hard-talk table discussion with a true legendary lady in this field. She has given lectures and speeches all over the world, been a researcher for 40 years, and written a list of books.
The news that there are no hotel rooms available for miles around Area 51 hasn’t deterred the millions who have sworn in Facebook commitment blood that they will storm it on September 20th. Those planning a Burning Man-style campout have no doubt heard that Lil Nas X has offered to perform there, and more music is planned. Now all they need is some food and adult beverages for themselves and any aliens they may liberate during the storming – not to mention to share with any soldiers who don’t shoot them first.
“We can’t confirm if there are aliens at Area 51. But, if they do show up, they deserve the best meats on Earth. If not, Arby’s will still be there serving the planet’s best meats to everyone else attending this historic event.”
Jim Taylor, Chief Marketing Officer for Arby’s, announced via Twitter that the “We have the meats” people will be sending their ‘Arby’s Roadside Meathouse’ to Area 51 on September 20th to feed the storming masses (hopefully before they get shot) from a “secret menu” developed especially for the event. While some reports suggest that the sandwiches will be free, that hasn’t been confirmed – although it seems likely that aliens will certainly eat free – providing there’s anything left if two million people show up.
You shouldn’t storm on an empty stomach
For the adult beverages, Anheuser-Busch announced a “Screw it. Free Bud Light to any alien that makes it out” promotion offering free Area 51 Special Edition Bud Light in a specially-designed can for any aliens liberated who have a taste for “a light bodied space lager with a fresh taste, a crisp, clean finish, and a smooth drinkability.” It’s a safe bet that there will be some additional cans/cases/truckloads for sale for the hot stormers who might need to cool down while cooler heads prevail (although getting drunk won’t help that).
For those who aren’t fans of country rapper Lil Nas X, Matty Roberts – the infamous college student who came up with the Storm Area 51 idea – is trying to make amends by repainting the event as an EDM festival and is recruiting artists from the electronic dance music world to perform there. He says he’s also been contacted by indie rock bands and other performers, but hasn’t named names nor announced a schedule yet.
Play Freebird!
Finally, if you have a conflict on that date or fear being shot or not getting an Arby’s sandwich or Bud Light but still want to experience the thrill of the storming, you can stay home and play the ‘official’ Storm Area 51 video game from Keemstar.
“Can you survive the break in, find the helpless alien captives and get them safely to their UFO to pilot them out of Area 51 and show the world what the government has been hiding all these years? Find and explore hidden back routes and enter the legendary Area 51, avoid the guards using classic stealth mechanics, locate the captured aliens and escort them to their mothership! Utilise the other runners as human cover or provide the ultimate sacrifice so that others might succeed!”
Add your own fast food, beer and gunshots and it’s just like being there – although reviews of the early access version are “mostly negative” at Steam. Then again, maybe “mostly negative” WILL be just like being there.
If there’s one thing for certain about the Storm Area 51 event, there’s money to be made and plenty of non-aliens lining up to get their piece.
The PR people at To the Stars Academy sure know how to keep their name in the headlines, even if they’re only good at rehashing worn out, unsubstantiated claims or repackaging previously reported incidents. Now that the buzz of the first season of Unidentified has died down, the company which claims itself to be at “the forefront of socializing the UFO conversation through entertainment media in the public” has now revived a decades-old claim about possessing and studying alleged exotic metamaterials.
While many similar claims have been made in the past about what appear to be the exact same samples, I can’t help but notice that some of the language in their press release and accompanying social media posts sounds oddly familiar to descriptions of other recent strange developments loosely related with TTSA and the Navy’s ongoing UFO “revelations” or whatever you want to call them.
The latest press release claims that TTSA is now in the possession of “multiple pieces of metamaterials and an archive of initial analysis and research” of their properties. Accompanying that announcement are statements by Steve Justice, current director of TTSA’s Aerospace Division and the former director of Advanced Systems at Lockheed Martin’s “Skunk Works.” In the press release, Justice claims that while the claims surrounding these materials still cannot be substantiated, these metamaterials could completely revolutionize science as we know it – if they are ever able to be manufactured:
The structure and composition of these materials are not from any known existing military or commercial application. They’ve been collected from sources with varying levels of chain-of-custody documentation, so we are focusing on verifiable facts and working to develop independent scientific proof of the materials’ properties and attributes. In some cases, the manufacturing technology required to fabricate the material is only now becoming available, but the material has been in documented possession since the mid-1990’s. We currently have multiple material samples being analyzed by contracted laboratories and have plans to extend the scope of this study. TTSA will also seek to engage the potential partners who have expressed interest in helping accelerate ADAM [Acquisition and Data Analysis of Materials] research and development.
If the claims associated with these assets can be validated and substantiated, then we can initiate work to transition them from being a technology to commercial and military capabilities. As noted in our October 2017 TTSA kickoff webcast, technologies that would allow us to engineer the spacetime metric would bring capabilities that would fundamentally alter civilization, with revolutionary changes to transportation, communication, and computation.
While many hopeful ufologists and believers take this press release to be evidence of extraterrestrial technologies, note that Justice never mentions anything about aliens or advanced civilizations. Instead he says merely that “the structure and composition of these materials are not from any known existing military or commercial application” (emphasis added). The fact that Justice states these samples are “not from any known existing military or commercial application” leaves open the possibility that they could be from a highly classified program not yet made public outside of highly compartmentalized special access programs.
Writing for The War Zone, I previously reported on a series of strange patents patented assigned to the Navy which concern new forms of energy production and incredibly advanced hybrid craft which are claimed to travel at incredibly high speeds and maneuver with disregard for their own inertia equally well through air, water, or the vacuum of space thanks to a radical new form of electromagnetic propulsion. Despite the claims made in those patents, I’ve yet to speak with one physicist who believes the underlying mechanism for that type of quantum physics-bending electromagnetic propulsion is possible.
Still, in a 2019 aeronautics conference presentation describing one of those patents, the inventor Salvatore Pais claimed that these new Navy patents represent “a highly disruptive technology, capable of a total paradigm change in Science and Technology,” and adds that their “military and commercial value is considerable.” Notice the curious similarities with the language of Justice’s statements in the press release.
Even more curious is the Harold Puthoff connection. Harold Puthoff has traveled among the hard sciences and the fringe sciences for years, making somewhat out-there claims at times. Puthoff isn’t mentioned anywhere in this latest press release, but is acknowledged in several of Pais’ publications and Navy patents. Puthoff now sits on the TTSA board, is listed as a co-founder, and is the Vice President of TTSA’s Science and Technology division. Puthoff has for years published theoretical research into so-called “Space Time Metric Engineering,” the same type of physics-bending propulsion described in the Navy’s advanced aerospace patents – patents the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Naval Aviation Enterprise claims are already operable.
In a presentation given in 2018 at a Conference for the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE) and the International Remote Viewing Association (IRVA), Puthoff says that while he’d “love to talk about really fancy materials,” he can’t do so because “they’re classified.” However, Puthoff adds that there are plenty of examples of such metamaterials “provided even in the public domain.” A sample of one such material he’s studied, Puthoff claims, is an “excellent microscopic waveguide for very high frequency electromagnetic radiation.”
Images of two of the Navy’s patented aerospace craft.
Again, the language Puthoff used in that speech to describe the properties of these materials echoes the language of the Navy’s strange electromagnetic propulsion patents, and during the same presentation Puthoff claims the objects observed in the alleged Navy sightings behaved “as if the craft didn’t have any inertial mass” – the exact language used to describe the abilities of the “hybrid aerospace-underwater vehicle” patented by the Navy. Is this proof of any connection between TTSA’s research and the Navy’s patents? There are only so many words for describing these types of theoretical propulsion methods and alleged aeronautical abilities after all, so it’s likely a coincidence. Still, the Puthoff connection between the patents and these alleged metamaterials is odd.
What’s odder still is why someone like Steve Justice would now throw his name into the ring with fringe scientists or even pseudoscientists who for decades have made what some would describe as dubious, unfounded claims about alien metamaterials. Justice never goes so far as to say that these materials are in fact legitimate or extraterrestrial in origin, though, only that TTSA has received them and will study them.
I’m also drawn to Justice’s statement that the “manufacturing technology required to fabricate the material is only now becoming available.” Could this be why the Navy suddenly decided to patent such radical-sounding technologies and appeal them so forcefully with the U.S. Patent Office? I’ve been toying with an idea lately and it’s still nothing but a flight of the imagination, so take it for what it is.
Imagine that the U.S. government has indeed been researching electromagnetic propulsion methods, advanced metamaterials, and hybrid craft for years and has encouraged the extraterrestrial hypothesis in order to keep these projects a secret. What if they were finally ready to go public with these new advances, but the new administration elected in 2016 decided to keep it under wraps in order to continue kowtowing to the fossil fuel industries? Could that be why Steve Justice, Chris Mellon, and others decided to form TTSA to take these technologies into the private sector or as a means of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for the public? Could that be why the Navy made their curious patents available to the public? Just a thought.
Returning to TTSA and this latest press release, be sure to take into account how the “Invest Now” button is now permanently anchored to the TTSA website’s masthead, so as usual, take everything they say with a shaker of salt or two. Until they cough up anything more than a cable TV program and social media buzz, there is no way of knowing if they are any better than any other charlatans who have for years made unfounded claims of exotic technologies for profit.
For the last several years I’ve been tracking and reporting on the mystery boom phenomenon, collecting hundreds of reports in the process. While reports have tapered off somewhat in the last few months, one of our MU readers reached out to me this week to share her personal experience encountering one of these unidentified sonic phenomena.
Melissa Hinegardner of Roodhouse, Illinois contacted me and told me that on Thursday, July 18 at around 12:58 pm local time, multiple people from several counties reported a loud boom. Hinegardner says people in several cities throughout Greene County all experienced the same phenomenon: an ear-splitting boom which shook the earth below their feet. Hinegardner told me that the noise was powerful enough to shake her home:
I thought one of the kids fell into the wall or something hit the front door. The house shook a little. It scared the kids and they jumped up onto the couch. When I saw the kids were fine I went on with my day. Then I got a text from my dad a few blocks away and realized it was something bigger.
Local radio station WLDS reported the incident on Facebook, writing that “a loud boom and shake was felt at 1PM this afternoon across the listening area from as far south as Carrollton and Greenfield to the north near Virginia and as far west as Winchester.” The station contacted local sheriff’s deputies and seismological surveys but found no explanation. However, a few days later the same station reported that it may have found an explanation for the incident:
BOOM! Report: WLDS/WEAI News received a return call a few minutes ago from Scott Air Force Base in St. Louis. They have confirmed that an F-35 Lightning II Fighter Jet was in the area at the approximate time of the boom. Sergeant Chris Ostomo could not confirm or deny if the pilot was attempting to reach Mach 1 speeds or not.
Facebook users have been debating whether or not it would be possible for a single aircraft to generate a sonic boom powerful enough to be heard for over 50 miles. Some anecdotal and scientific evidence supports the theory that certain atmospheric conditions can enable sound waves to propagate over greater distances than usual, but this is still a little understood meteorological phenomenon.
Far away from Greene County, Illinois, residents of Tempe, Arizona have been rattled, both literally and figuratively, by a series of powerful booms that have rocked homes in the middle of the night. Local news station FOX 10 reports that the booms have been accompanied by flashes of light, leading some to suspect that illegal explosives might be at the root of these unexplained sonic phenomena.
Neither the Tempe Police nor the Salt River Project utilities company know what’s behind the booms and/or flashes of light. “It doesn’t sound like it’s just some kids blowing up fireworks. It sounds like it’s meant to scare people. It’s in the middle of the night,” one resident told FOX 10. Other worried Tempe locals have compared the noises to the sound of a bomb.
That comparison is worrisome given that last year a man was arrested for detonating homemade explosives, and in one case dangerously near an elementary school. Could a copycat be at work in Tempe?
My new book, Flying Saucers from the Kremlin, is a study of how and why the Russians – for decades – sought to take control of the UFO scene and create hysteria and paranoia in the West. And we were doing the same to them, too. The Russians certainly deserved it. As they do too now, for their outrageous meddling over the last few years. But, does such manipulation of the UFO scene still go on? Yes, it does. Certainly, the vast majority of the programs designed to use the UFO subject as a tool of manipulation took place during the height of the Cold War; that much is abundantly clear. It should be noted, though, that while the available data is limited, we can say that UFOs – or, rather, the mystique and the legend that surrounds them – are still of interest to the intelligence services of several nations.
In a strange way, the evidence for this has a link to the saga of none other than the ultimate 21st century whistle-blower, Edward Snowden. If, prior to 2013, someone were to ask you for your thoughts on Edward Snowden, you would almost certainly reply: “Who? Huh?” His family, friends, and work colleagues aside, Snowden was unknown. Just about completely. That all changed – and it changed radically – in the summer of 2013. That was when the shocking story of the National Security Agency’s top secret programs of widespread surveillance came tumbling out into the public domain. It created shock-waves that are still reverberating to this day.
As Snowden revealed, and unbeknownst to just about everyone (the National Security Agency aside, of course), the NSA had the potential to not just spy on foreign nations but on U.S. citizens too. Landlines, cell-phones, email, Facebook, Twitter, and Skype: they had all been penetrated, very often with the witting help of some of those same companies. The data collection process was so mind-boggling and huge that it would likely have had even George Orwell himself shaking his head in disbelief; except for just one thing: Orwell’s 1984 was fiction. This was all too real.
The responses to Snowden’s revelations were interesting and thought-provoking. For some people, Snowden is the definitive American hero. For others, however, he is a man who has massively jeopardized U.S. national security, and placed our troops and agents in deep danger. There were even calls not for just his lifelong incarceration, but for his execution too, as the ultimate traitor. For many people, however, Snowden falls somewhere between both camps. And then there’s the matter of UFOs. Or, at least, the lore surrounding it. The story of Edward Snowden would never have soared to the levels that it did had it not been for the research of investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald.
Having secured Snowden’s trust, Greenwald was able to secure an astonishing amount of highly classified material on the NSA’s surveillance programs. One of Snowden’s lesser-known revelations revolved around a PowerPoint presentation produced by the U.K.’s Government Communications Headquarters, which is the nation’s equivalent of its, ahem, big brother, the United States’ NSA. The presentation was titled“How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive and Destroy Reputations.” Interestingly, the PowerPoint production – which, in part, provides ways and means to shatter the characters of people under surveillance – contained three photographs of alleged UFOs.
Mark Pilkington, a writer on, and an investigator of, the UFO subject has a particular interest in how government agencies have used the UFO controversy to their advantages. His 2010 book, Mirage Men, is subtitled: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs. That will give you a very good idea as to where Pilkington is coming from in relation to UFOs. Journalist David Clarke asked Pilkington what he thought of all this. Pilkington said to Clarke: “We don’t know why there are UFOs in this [PowerPoint] presentation. But the fact that the saucer photos appear within the context of influencing and manipulating online communities is highly suggestive.” You can see the full story of this in Clarke’s book, How UFOs Conquered the World.
What does it mean to be a tree? It might seem like a silly question, but a mysterious phenomenon that allows the stumps of some trees to thrive–even in the absence of any new growth–is challenging our ideas about how communities of plants live and interact with each other.
By definition, trees are perennial plant organisms, meaning that they renew their growth over time. Consisting of a tall trunk from which numerous secondary stems, or “branches” protrude, each branch possesses a number of leaves that provide food for the plant by collecting energy from sunlight and carbon dioxide, which, combined with water absorbed through the roots of the tree, produces sugars in the form of glucose.
These processes are well understood, which is why it might seem odd to ask a question like “what it means to be a tree.” However, a recent study by a team of researchers in New Zealand has observed a tree stump that remains alive, despite having none of the ordinary facilities required for sustaining itself: effectively making it a “zombie” tree, in a sense.
This unique plant is able to survive sans leaves in a photosynthetically inactive state with a little help from its friends nearby: that is, it is engaged in exchanges of water, minerals, carbon, and even microorganisms necessary to survive with other plants. In this “community” root system (something known to botanists as conspecifics), even a tree without leaves can thrive.
The arrangement, rather than being likened to a “zombie” tree, might be more closely likened to a natural, botanical form of “life support” for the plant in question.
The tree stump in question “displayed greatly reduced, inverted daily sap flow patterns compared with intact kauri trees,” as stated in the paper’s abstract. Despite being a trunkless tree, the first clue as to its unconventional survival had been sap flow variations in the kauri stump, which seemed to mirror those of its surrounding neighbors.
The researchers found that rainfall and other sources of water introduced to the surrounding trees “were very rapidly and inversely mirrored in the living stump’s water status.”
“Such intimate hydrological coupling suggests a ‘communal physiology’ among (conspecific) trees with far-reaching implications for our understanding of forest functioning, particularly under water shortage,” the authors wrote.
Example of a living stump
(credit: Wikimedia Commons).
These “living stumps,” as they are appropriately called, aren’t a new phenomenon. The earliest record of a living stump dates back to the 1830s, although science articles didn’t begin to regularly appear on the subject until 1959, with the publication of
The new paper, titled “Hydraulic Coupling of a Leafless Kauri Tree Remnant to Conspecific Hosts,” was co-authored by M.K.-F. Bader and S. Leuzinger of the Institute for Applied Ecology New Zealand at Auckland University of Technology. The study can be read online here.
Long Rod Seen Flying Near Contrails Over Brazil, UFO Sighting News.
Long Rod Seen Flying Near Contrails Over Brazil, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: 5-25-2011, but reported today.
Location of sighting: Araguari, Brazil
Source:MUFON #102315
The eyewitness states that they were taking photos of the contrails in the sky and accidentally captured this object flying past. The object is a UFO but is most often called a rod. Rods are long objects often with fins or wings in front and back. Here the rod is huge, many time larger than the contrail itself so this object would be several times larger than the jet that made the trails. Awesome capture. Its very possible these are AI living machines that are cloaked and move so fast that only cameras can catch sight of them.
Measurements of a star passing close to the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way confirms the predictions of Einstein’s theory of general relativity in a high gravity environment.
An artist visualization of the star S0–2 as it passes by the supermassive black hole at the Galactic centre. As the star gets closer to the supermassive black hole, light it emits experiences a gravitational redshift that is predicted by Einstein’s General Relativity. By observing this redshift, we can test Einstein’s theory of gravity (Nicole R. Fuller, National Science Foundation)
A detailed study of a star orbiting the supermassive black hole at the centre of our Galaxy, reveals that Einstein’s theory of general relativity is accurate in its description of the behaviour of light struggling to escape the gravity around this massive space-time event.
The analysis — conducted by Tuan Do, Andrea Ghez and colleagues — involved detecting the gravitational redshift in the light emitted by a star closely orbiting the supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A*. The redshift was measured as the star reached the closest point in its orbit — which has a duration of 16 years — to the black hole.
Lasers from the two Keck Telescopes propagated in the direction of the Galactic centre. Each laser creates an artificial star that can be used to correct for the blurring due to the Earth’s atmosphere.
(Ethan Tweedie)
The team found that the star experienced gravitational redshift — which occurs when light is stretched to longer wavelengths and towards the red ‘end’ of the electromagnetic spectrum by the effect of gravity — as it gets closer to the black hole, conforming to Einstein’s theory of general relativity and its predictions regarding gravity.
At the same time, the results defy predictions made by the Newtonian theory, which has no explanation for gravitational redshift.
Ghez says: “(The findings are) a transformational change in our understanding about not only the existence of supermassive black holes but the physics and astrophysics of black holes.”
The major difference between general relativity and the Newtonian calculation of gravity is, that whereas Newton envisioned gravity as a force acting between physical objects, Einstein’s theory saw gravity as a geometric phenomenon.
The presence of mass ‘curves’ space it occupies. Physical objects, including light, must then follow this curvature. As John Wheeler infamously put it: “matter tells space how to curve, space tells matter how to move.”
Testing relativity in regions of high gravity
Image of the orbits of stars around the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. Highlighted is the orbit of the star S0–2. This is the first star that has enough measurements to test Einstein’s General Relativity around a supermassive black hole.
[Credit: Keck/UCLA Galactic Center Group]
The new research resembles an analysis conducted last year by the GRAVITY collaboration, except in this new expanded analysis, the team report novel spectra data.
Although general relativity has been thoroughly tested in relatively weak gravitational fields — such as those on Earth and in the Solar System—before last year, it had not been tested around a black hole as big as the one at the centre of the Milky Way.
Observations of the stars rapidly orbiting Sagittarius A *provide a method for general relativity to be evaluated in an extreme gravitational environment.
Do explains why these kind of tests are important:
“We need to test GR in extreme environments because that’s where we think the theory might break down.”
“If we can see which predictions from general relativity have deviations, that gives us clues as to how to build a better model of gravity.”
A figure showing the challenges the Ghez team had in processing decades of image data and spectroscopy input to follow the star S0–2.
(Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation)
To obtain their results, the team analyzed new observations of the star S0–2 as it made its closest approach to the enormous black hole in 2018. They then combined this data with measurements Ghez and her team have made over the last 24 years.
The team has many avenues of investigations available to them from here, Tuan tells me.
He continues: “Two of them I’m excited about are testing space-time around the black hole by looking at the orbit of the star S0–2.”
“GR predicts that the orbit should precess, or rotate, meaning that it won’t come back where it started.”
The team should also be able to start using more stars other than S0–2 for these tests as the time baseline of observations increase and technology improves
Do concludes: “ These measurements open a new era of GR tests at the Galactic centre so it’s very exciting.”
This research appears in the 26 July 2019 issue of Science.
FRANCE TO DEVELOP ANTI-SATELLITE LASER WEAPONS FOR SPACE WARFARE
FRANCE TO DEVELOP ANTI-SATELLITE LASER WEAPONS FOR SPACE WARFARE
PETE LINFORTH VIA PIXABAY/TAG HARTMAN-SIMKINS
KRISTIN HOUSER
Laser Focus
On Thursday, French Defense Minister Florence Parly announced the nation’s plans to develop anti-satellite laser weapons — though she says the country will only use them in retaliation.
“If our satellites are threatened, we intend to blind those of our adversaries,” Parly said, according to Agence France-Presse. “We reserve the right and the means to be able to respond: that could imply the use of powerful lasers deployed from our satellites or from patrolling nano-satellites.”
Satellite Bite
Approximately 2,000 satellites currently orbit the Earth, and they serve as the foundation for the planet’s global communications systems. Knock out the right satellites, and you could effectively disable an entire nation’s ability to communicate.
No surprise, then, that the United States, Russia, India, and several other countries are already developing anti-satellite technology, which could prove invaluable in future military operations.4
Space Force
This isn’t the first sign that France is starting to prepare for space warfare, either — on July 13, President Emmanuel Macron announced plans to create a French space force command.
That command, which will operate within the French air force, will go live on September 1 — a sign France knows it has no time to waste if it wants to effectively protect its interests in space.
Ruimteblok van 130 meter scheert rakelings langs de aarde, astronomen verrast
Ruimteblok van 130 meter scheert rakelings langs de aarde, astronomen verrast
Luchtfoto van een krater in de Amerikaanse staat Arizona. Dit gat van 1 kilometer doorsnede werd veroorzaakt door een planetoïde met een doorsnede van zo’n 25 meter. De planetoïde 2019 OK, die vannacht langs de aarde scheerde, is twee tot vijf keer zo groot. Beeld Getty Images
Een stuk ruimtesteen is in de nacht van woensdag op donderdag rakelings langs de aarde gescheerd. Astronomen zagen hem pas een dag van tevoren aankomen. ‘Je krijgt niet altijd vooraf een waarschuwing.’
Hij mag dan geruststellend 2019 OK heten, maar zo oké was het bezoek van de planetoïde niet. Het stuk ruimtesteen, met een afmeting tussen 60 en 130 meter, is groot genoeg om bij inslag een flinke stad in puin te leggen en vloog op een angstaanjagende kleine afstand van 71.000 kilometer langs de aarde.
“Dat is bijzonder”, zegt meteorietexpert Marco Langbroek (Naturalis). “Zo dicht bij de aarde komen ze bepaald niet elke maand langs.” Ter vergelijking: de maan staat ongeveer 384.000 kilometer bij ons vandaan. En onze verste satellieten draaien hun rondjes op zo’n 35.000 kilometer afstand.
De ontmoeting met 2019 OK illustreert het gevaar van dit soort ruimtestenen, die we lang niet altijd op tijd ontdekken. De Braziliaanse SONEAR Survey zag de steen pas woensdag, en dat is niet uitzonderlijk, stelt Langbroek. “Dit soort planetoïden zijn op de schaal van het zonnestelsel relatief klein en daarom moeilijk te zien.”
De baan van planetoïde 2019 OK (wit) vergeleken met die van de aarde (blauw) op 25 juli 2019. Het stuk ruimtepuin kwam – op kosmische schaal – zo dichtbij dat de woorden ‘earth’ en ‘2019 OK’ hier over elkaar heen vallen. Beeld NASA
RANDSTAD IN PUIN
Wanneer ze uit de richting van de zon komen, zien we ze soms zelfs compleet over het hoofd. Het felle licht van de zon maakt in dat geval een waarneming onmogelijk. In 2013 gebeurde dat bijvoorbeeld, toen een ruimtesteen zonder enige vorm van waarschuwing boven de Russische stad Tsjeljabinsk explodeerde.
Op de schaal van mogelijke kosmische rampen vormen voorwerpen zoals 2019 OK ‘slechts een lokaal risico’, zegt Langbroek. “Maar je moet het risico ook niet onderschatten.”
Als de planetoïde was ingeslagen had hij een krater van enkele kilometers veroorzaakt. “De drukgolf die zo’n inslag veroorzaakt, zou alles in een straal van dertig tot vijftig kilometer platleggen”, zegt Langbroek.
Voorlopig hoeven we ons om 2019 OK geen zorgen meer te maken. Die beweegt inmiddels weer van de aarde af. Maar dit soort bijna-botsingen komen regelmatig voor. De afgelopen zestig dagen vlogen in totaal acht van dergelijke ruimterotsen langs de aarde op een afstand dichter dan de maan. 2019 OK naderde ons daarvan het dichtste.
GEEN WAARSCHUWING
“Het is niet uitgesloten dat een soortgelijk object in de toekomst inslaat zonder waarschuwing”, zegt Langbroek. De laatste keer dat de aarde geraakt werd door een dergelijk stuk ruimtesteen was in 1908. Toen ontplofte een ruimtesteen van een meter of zestig boven Siberië. “Op foto’s uit die tijd zie je dat in het bos in een gebied van zo’n dertig kilometer alle bomen zijn platgedrukt”, zegt Langbroek.
De schade viel relatief mee omdat het stuk steen poreus was en al in de lucht uit elkaar knalde. Als de Toengoeska-steen de aarde had bereikt, was de schade een stuk groter geweest. Langbroek: “Je mag er al helemaal niet aan denken dat zoiets in bewoond gebied gebeurt.”
Voor het ontdekken van grote brokken ruimtepuin die in de buurt van de aarde kunnen komen, maken wetenschappers onder meer gebruik van deze zogeheten Pan-STARRS-telescoop op Hawaii. Beeld AP
MILIEUNatuurbranden vinden wel vaker plaats in het noordpoolgebied - tussen mei en oktober - maar dit jaar is de omvang en de intensiteit ervan, volgens wetenschappers, “in minstens 10.000 jaar niet meer gezien”. De meer dan 100 poolbranden woeden al sinds vorige maand en zijn duidelijk te zien op satellietbeelden.
Ook op de Noordpool is het warmer dan normaal. Het noorden van onze planeet warmt sneller op dan andere delen van de wereld. De hogere temperaturen zorgen voor droogte, waardoor de natuurbranden, die onder meer veroorzaakt worden door blikseminslagen, vrij spel krijgen. Niet alleen zijn er al meer dan 100 zware bosbranden in het noordpoolgebied geteld, ze houden ook langer aan. Midden juli sloeg het Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (Cams) daarom alarm.
In Alaska was woensdag al een gebied van ruim 832.000 hectare in vlammen opgegaan, meldt Rick Thoman op Twitter. Ook delen van Groenland, Siberië en Canada staan in brand, met desastreuze ecologische gevolgen.
Alleen al in juni was de uitstoot van de bosbranden in Alaska goed voor 50 megaton CO2, of evenveel als de jaarlijkse uitstoot van Zweden en meer dan de gezamenlijke uitstoot van de bosbranden in Alaska in de junimaanden van 2010 tot en met 2018. Volgens Mark Parrington, wetenschapper aan het European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast, is er tussen 1 juni en 21 juli ongeveer 100 megaton CO2 uitgestoten, of bijna zoveel als de CO2-uitstoot van heel België in 2017. Zo dragen de branden zelf ook nog eens bij tot de klimaatopwarming. “Doordat rookdeeltjes op de sneeuw en het ijs terechtkomen, absorbeert het ijs zonlicht dat het anders zou reflecteren, en versnellen zo de opwarming in het Noordpoolgebied”, zegt Claudia Volosciuk van het World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
Rick Thoman@AlaskaWx
Smoke from the big northeast Interior Alaska #wildfires has moved across the Brooks Range and onto the North Slope. @BLM_AFS estimates total area burned in Alaska this season as of Wednesday morning at 2.06 million acres (832k ha).#akwx@Climatologist49@vennkoenig@CinderBDT907
Mogelijk branden niet alleen bossen af maar voor het eerst ook veengrondgebieden. Dat is cruciaal, want op veengrond kunnen de branden nog maanden aanhouden.
Over de uitzonderlijk warme temperaturen in Alaska dit jaar - met 32 graden Celsius op 4 juli als nieuw hitterecord - zegt klimaatwetenschapper Brian Brettschneider dat ze “nog niet gelinkt zijn aan de opwarming van de aarde, maar dat alles in die richting wijst”. Het gevolg is hoe dan ook dat gletsjers er alsmaar sneller smelten.
Het coördinatiecentrum in Alaska heeft het alleen daar al over 250 branden, waarvan er goed 200 ongecontroleerd woeden. In de zwaar geteisterde Amerikaanse staat is het risico op nog meer branden bovendien ongezien hoog. “Afgaande op de voorspellingen stevenen we af op een absoluut hoogterecord”, aldus het hoofd van de brandweer in Alaska, Norm McDonald.
Alec Luhn✔@ASLuhn
~2m hectares (7700 sq miles) of forest is burning in Siberia. The authorities aren't putting fires out until they threaten towns: "We need to save money," Krasnoyarsk head says. Air pollution has reached dangerous levels in Novosibirsk, Tomsk & Chelyabinsk
'I froze.' 45 years after reported Pascagoula alien abductions, more UFO witnesses talk
'I froze.' 45 years after reported Pascagoula alien abductions, more UFO witnesses talk
Brian Broom Mississippi Clarion Ledger
Correction:This story has been updated to reflect that Joey Nelson was traveling on US 90 on the night of the event, not I-10 as Clarion Ledger was told earlier.
It's been more than 45 years since Calvin Parker and Charles Hickson contacted law enforcement officers with the claim they had been abducted by aliens. The two said they were fishing on the Pascagoula River on the night of Oct. 11, 1973 when an oblong aircraft appeared and aliens took them aboard.
It’s been 45 years since Charlie Hickson and Calvin Parker reported being abducted by aliens while fishing at the former Shaupeter Shipyard in Pascagoula on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Since then, Calvin Parker, pictured, has kept a low-profile. That is until now. He has recently published a book about his experience.
Amanda McCoy/Sun Herald
Hickson has since died. Parker, after years of silence, wrote a book in 2018 about the encounter and the story made headlines again. Those headlines rekindled memories of what others say they saw that night and more and more are sharing their experiences.
Joey Nelson of Mobile was 25 at the time and travelled to make money playing pool. He said he and two friends were driving on US 90 on their way to win some money on the night Parker and Hickson claimed to have been abducted.
Joey Nelson of Mobile said a glowing orb floated in front of the car he was in the night of the Pascagoula alien abductions.
Special to Clarion Ledger
"That night we were going to New Orleans," Nelson said. "I would say we were probably in between Pascagoula and Biloxi. We were driving and talking."
Nelson was in the front passenger seat and when he looked ahead he saw something he'd never seen before.
'We were just mesmerized'
"A big orb of light up in the air," Nelson said. "We saw that and nobody could could say anything. Nobody could move."
Nelson said the three were traveling at about 75 miles and hour when something came out of the sky and hovered in front of them.
"After a while a small ball of light came down right next to me," Nelson said. "It was about the size of a beach ball, I'd say.
"I don't know how far away it was, but it seemed like if that windshield wasn't there I could have touched it. It started flashing and clicking and flashing and clicking. We could audibly hear it. I know it sounds crazy, but it seemed like they were taking pictures. It seemed like it was in front of me ten minutes or so, I don't know. We were just mesmerized."
And then it streaked away.
Waking up
"It shot off and I've never seen anything move that fast," Nelson said. "It just shot straight up. I don't know if the small orb joined the big one, but they were both gone."
Nelson said none of the three knew what the larger orb was doing during that time because they were so focused on the smaller orb. When it left, Nelson said the three felt like they came out of a trance.
"It was like we woke up," Nelson said. "We couldn't move or gain our thoughts until it was gone."
The following day Nelson saw the news of Parker and Hickson's encounter and said it was confirmation of what he'd seen, but he let 45 years pass and is only talking about it after reading recent articles about Parker.
"I talked to Ricky and Jimmy (who were with Nelson), but other people would have thought you were an idiot," Nelson said. "I wasn't going to tell anybody. I kept quiet a long time."
Rosey Nail of Moss Point had a similar experience that night, only she was almost 300 miles away.
A falling star that didn't
"I was in Bruce, Mississippi," Nail said. "I lived in Calhoun City, but I worked in a little garment factory in Bruce.
"I was staying with a girlfriend. It was after I bathed the girls and put them in bed. We went to the back porch. We just wanted to talk and have a cigarette."
Rosey Nail of Moss Point said she saw glowing orbs in the sky the night of the Pascagoula alien abductions.
Special to Clarion Ledger
Nail said the home was in a rural area with few lights. She likes to identify constellations, so she was looking at the sky.
"I saw a falling star," Nail said. "Then I realized it wasn't actually falling.
"It was moving across the sky. It was at the 2 o'clock position and when it got to the 10 o'clock position another light shot out of it."
The larger light moved downward and seemed to get closer. It also began to get larger. Nail said it became so large it looked like the sun. Nail said it began changing colors and dropped to the horizon. Nail said dogs began barking from all directions as if they were trying to attack something.
Reliving terror
Nail said she walked into the yard to get a better look, but when she did she was overcome with fear.
"I froze," Nail said. "I was terrified. I don't know what I was terrified about."
Her fear could almost be heard as she told her story.
"As I'm talking I'm reliving it," Nail said. "My heart's beating.
"My chest is tight. My hand is shaking. That thing terrified me."
The scene then played itself out in reverse. The large light rose and became dimmer and smaller. The smaller light joined it and it shot out of sight at a 45-degree angle.
The next day she was at work and heard about Parker and Hickson on a radio.
"Everybody was laughing and making fun of those guys," Nail said. "I didn't think it was funny.
"I was dumbfounded. I believed those guys."
Nail said she felt it was time to tell of her experience because she recently read an article about him and realized they both lived in Moss Point.
"I wanted Calvin to know not everyone thinks he's crazy," Nail said. "I believe him."
A life-changing experience
Parker said he's glad more people are coming forward and said he's received messages from people who saw something that night on a near-daily basis.
"They're all coming out of the woodwork," Parker said. "It makes me feel pretty good I'm not the only one who saw something. Most of these people are credible people."
Parker, who remained largely quiet about the event for most of his life, said the best part of this experience has been writing his book and getting everything out in the open.
"I was able to sit down and talk with my family and friends about it," Parker said. "It was like a weight was lifted off me. It's been a big life-changing experience."
More: 'The story is very true. That's what has bothered me for 45 years.' UFO witnesses speak.
More: Alien abduction: 45 years after alleged UFO encounter, Mississippi man breaks his silence
More: LSU's Matt Branch was shot by a dog. His leg was amputated. Now he plans to hunt again.
More: Camp, fish and paddle on this 'undiscovered' Mississippi gem
Did you see anything unusual on the night of Oct. 11, 1973? Contact Brian Broom at 601-961-7225 or bbroom@gannett.com. Follow Clarion Ledger Outdoors on Facebook and @BrianBroom on Twitter.
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45 jaar geleden werden twee mannen meegenomen door aliens. Deze getuigen vertellen voor het eerst wat ze indertijd hebben gezien
45 jaar geleden werden twee mannen meegenomen door aliens. Deze getuigen vertellen voor het eerst wat ze indertijd hebben gezien
Het is inmiddels ruim 45 jaar geleden dat Calvin Parker en Charles Hickson zich meldden bij de politie met de mededeling dat ze waren ontvoerd door buitenaardse wezens.
De twee mannen waren op de avond van 11 oktober 1973 aan het vissen toen er opeens een ruimteschip verscheen. Ze werden meegenomen aan boord van het schip.
Hickson is inmiddels overleden. Parker hield zich jarenlang op de achtergrond. Vorig jaar besloot hij een boek te schrijven over zijn ervaringen.
Grote lichtbol
Sindsdien hebben zich meerdere mensen gemeld die claimen getuige te zijn geweest van het incident.
Joey Nelson is één van hen. Hij zag naar eigen zeggen een grote lichtbol in de lucht op de plek waar het tweetal aan het vissen was.
Uit de lichtbol kwam een kleinere bol die op Nelson en zijn twee vrienden afkwam.
“We zagen het en niemand kon iets zeggen,” zei hij. “Niemand kon zich bewegen.”
Trance
Opeens schoot de bol weer weg. Het voelde volgens Nelson alsof ze in een trance waren.
“Ik praatte erover met mijn vrienden, maar anderen zouden me voor gek hebben verklaard,” zei Nelson. “Ik sprak er verder met niemand over. Ik hield lange tijd mijn mond.”
Rosey Nail maakte die avond iets soortgelijks mee. Ze dacht op een gegeven moment een vallende ster te zien. Al snel kwam ze tot de ontdekking dat het iets anders was, omdat de lichtbol willekeurig door de lucht bewoog.
Verdween
Het object werd op den duur zo groot dat het op de zon leek. Het begon daarna van kleur te veranderen en verdween vervolgens, aldus Nail.
“Iedereen maakte Parker en Hickson belachelijk,” zei ze. “Ik vond het niet grappig. Ik geloofde hen.”
Parker zei blij te zijn dat meer mensen zich nu uitspreken.
The story of David and Goliath from the Old Testament has inspired generations, with an underdog conquering a giant.
But the story was long thought to be a myth, invented to encourage youngsters.
However, an archaeological discovery from Israel may have just proven the existence of the legendary giant in the Bible.
Archaeologists digging in the city of Gath have discovered 3,000 year-old giant fortifications.
(NEWSER) – An archaeological dig now in its 20th year has uncovered the entrance gate to Gath, the ancient Biblical city of the Philistines and onetime home of the giant Goliath. Before the king of Damascus destroyed it in 830 BCE, Gath was the largest city in the land for hundreds of years, reports the Jerusalem Post. The Bible refers to the massive city gate itself, in the story of David's escape from King Saul to the king of Gath. In addition to the city gate, scientists have also unearthed an "impressive fortification wall," several buildings that include a temple and iron production facility, and what the Post calls the earliest "decipherable" Philistine inscription ever found—which contains two names similar to "Goliath."
"After finding a huge fortification, it’s clearly the most important city of the 10th and ninth centuries," says the archaeologist in charge of the dig, per i24. The long-term dig is part of the Ackerman Family Bar-Ilan University Expedition to Gath, a look at the archaeology and history of one of the largest "tells" (aka ancient ruin mounds) in Israel. The area in central Israel, in the Tel Zafit National Park in the Judean Foothills, has been inhabited almost continuously since the 5th millennium BCE, the researchers note in a press release. (Also recently discovered in Israel? A mask unlike any other.)
BIBLICAL BOMBSHELL: Goliath's city at Gath (Pic: GETTY)
GIANT: Goliath was slain by King David (Pic: GETTY)
“Whatever it is, it's massive”
Archaeologist
The ancient city was found buried underneath a Philistine settlement already being studied.
The discovery shows the site of Gath would have been at its peak at a much earlier age.
Scholars have already accepted the site known today as
Gath is mentioned frequently in the bible as housing the Ark of the Covenant and for sheltering King David.
BURIED: The ruins were found underneath another site (Pic: GETTY)
HUGE: Archaeologists found massive fortifications (Pic: GETTY)
And the existence of earlier ruins at the site makes it the prime suspect as the home of Goliath.
Expedition leader Aren Maeir told Haaretz: “Whatever it is [the site], it’s enormous.
“It’s as if the site of Gath in the early Iron Age dwarfed the later city.”
Mr Maeir added: “I’ve been digging here for 23 years and this place still manages to surprise me.
“All long we had this older, giant city that was hiding just a meter under the city we were investigating.”
Wat het ook is, het is enorm. Archeologen stuiten op resten van gigantische stad ‘waar Goliath leefde’
Foto: Ori~ Wikimedia Commons
Wat het ook is, het is enorm. Archeologen stuiten op resten van gigantische stad ‘waar Goliath leefde’
Archeologen die opgravingen verrichten in de oude Filistijnse stad Gat hebben een gigantische 3000 jaar oude vesting ontdekt.
De ontdekking kan helpen verklaren waarom er volgens de Bijbel reuzen in de stad woonden.
De ‘ongekend grote’ ruïnes zijn in de afgelopen maanden blootgelegd en bevinden zich een meter onder ruïnes die al waren ontdekt (foto).
Reusachtige stad
Als Goliath echt heeft bestaan, dan leefde hij waarschijnlijk hier, schrijft de krant Haaretz.
“Ik doe hier al 23 jaar opgravingen en deze plek verrast me nog steeds,” zei professor Aren Maeir van de Bar-Ilan-universiteit.
“Al die tijd lag er een oudere, reusachtige stad verborgen onder de stad die we al hadden opgegraven,” voegde hij toe.
Ark van het Verbond
De vindplaats in het zuiden van Israël, die in de Bijbel vaker wordt genoemd dan de vijf andere grote Filistijnse steden, wordt ook wel Tell es-Safi genoemd.
Naar verluidt werd de Ark van het Verbond enige tijd bewaard in Gat.
Archeologen stuitten onder meer op enorme muren, die op sommige plekken vier meter dik waren.
Enorm
Nergens anders in de Levant zijn zulke kolossale structuren gevonden uit deze periode, aldus Maeir.
“Wat het ook is, het is enorm,” zei hij tegen de krant.
Niet de enige
Overigens is Goliath niet de enige reus die in de Bijbel wordt genoemd. Overal vindt men verwijzingen naar mysterieuze reuzenmensen waaronder ‘Rephaim’ en ‘Anakim’.
Maeir merkte echter op dat hij nog niet op reuzenskeletten is gestuit.
For three years Richard Freeman worked as Head of Reptiles at Twycross Zoo, England and, today, is the Zoological Director of one of the world’s premier cryptozoological investigation groups: namely, the Center for Fortean Zoology. And while Freeman has a passion for all aspects of cryptozoolgy, it is the dragon that fascinates him most of all. “I started my career as a zoologist – so I had a grounded training,” says Freeman. “But cryptozoology was my passion. Now, I have had a particular passion – an obsession, I suppose – for years with dragons. But there was something that always puzzled me: no-one had ever thought, for more than a hundred years, to publish a definitive, non-fiction book on the subject. And as I am a qualified zoologist, I thought: why not me?”
Why not, indeed? In fact, that is precisely what Freeman did in his book, Dragons: More Than A Myth? I asked Freeman about his theories and discoveries with regard to dragons. He replied: “Well, that’s a bit difficult to answer because there are several things going on. It’s important to note that I’ve traveled the world pursuing these creatures – the Gambia, Mongolia, Thailand, and right here in England with some of the old legends from past centuries. And of one thing I can be certain: there isn’t just one answer to the question of what dragons are or what they may be.” Freeman continued: “There are many creatures that have become linked to the lore and legend of what today we perceive and view as dragons, and some of these creatures are distinctly different to each other. But that should not take away from the fact that dragons are a real phenomenon.”
On this latter point, Freeman elaborates: “I am absolutely certain, having reviewed many ancient reports of dragon activity, that many sightings – perhaps two or three hundred years ago and probably further back – were genuine encounters, but where the witnesses were seeing what I believe to have been huge snakes, giant crocodiles, and the Australian ‘monster lizard’ Megalania.” Freeman makes a noteworthy, and thought-provoking, point: “Any mention of dragons always conjures up images of fire-breathing monsters, and there are definitely reports that fall into that group. But, when you look into many of the earliest, ancient legends, you find that the dragon is more often associated with water. So, I have a theory that some of the better lake monster accounts from centuries ago may well have influenced dragon tales.”
On this point, he adds: “Personally, I also believe that some classic tales of dragons in England in Medieval times, and tales of beasts such as the Lambton Worm, probably have their origins in lake monster accounts, giant eels, etc., that have then mutated into tales of dragons on the loose. But the important point is that this shouldn’t detract from the fact that people did see something.”
I asked him: “You mean that the ancients were seeing lake monsters and, having been exposed to dragon legends, believed them to be – or interpreted them as – dragons, too?”
“Exactly,” Freeman replied.
Of course, the biggest question of all was: are there creatures still living today that Freeman believes have helped perpetuate the image of the dragon? He is certain there are: “I would pretty much stake my life on the fact that Megalania still exists – or did until very recently – in the large forests of Australia, and that also roamed New Guinea. This was a huge, killer-beast; a massive monitor lizard that exceeded thirty feet in length. In literal terms, this was a classic dragon-type animal.”
I questioned Freeman about his research into an animal known as the Naga of Thailand that he believes is responsible for some dragon tales. He told me: “There is no excuse for not getting out into the field and doing firsthand investigations; none at all. In fact, it’s vital. I have no time for the armchair theorist. And one of the experiences that I will remember for the rest of my life was traveling to Thailand with the Discovery Channel in 2000, where we chased giant snakes – the Naga – in the caves and tunnels that exist deep below Thailand.
“It’s very easy to see why the inhabitants in times past considered them to be dragons. The Naga is apparently a large snake, a very large one – maybe in the order of literally tens of feet in length, oil-drum-sized bodies, and definitely big enough to take a whole man.” And similar accounts abound elsewhere, too: “There have come reports from the Congo of an animal known as Mokele-mbembe. Again, it has cross-over qualities with dragon legends, but I’m sure that it will be shown in time to be some sort of giant monitor lizard, too.”
But what of the definitive, fire-breathing dragons of legend: does, or did, such a creature exist? Freeman makes a very intriguing observation: “Back in 1979 Peter Dickinson wrote a book that was titled The Flight of Dragons. Dickinson had come up with this idea – an excellent theory, in fact – that real-life dragons did exist and that they were the descendants of dinosaurs such as the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Dickinson suggested that these animals developed large, expanded stomachs that would fill with hydrogen gas, which would come from a combination of hydrochloric acid found in the juices of the digestive system that would then mix with calcium found in the bones of their prey.
“Then, from there, the hydrogen – a lighter-than-air gas – allowed these creatures to take to the skies and then control their flight by burning off the excess gas in the form of flame. Anyone seeing this would be seeing the closest thing to the image of the dragon that we all know and love. Dickinson’s theory is an excellent one, and may well be a perfect explanation for sightings of real dragons – in times past, and perhaps today, I believe.”
I leave the final word to Freeman: “The dragon has its teeth and claws deep into the collective psyche of mankind, and it’s not about to let go. Our most ancient fear still stalks the earth today. Beware: this is no fairy-tale. When your parents told you that there were no such things as dragons, they lied!”
I said in a June 16, 2017 article for Mysterious Universe – titledThe Majestic 12 Documents Are Back – that just like an over-the-hill, bloated rock band that doesn’t know when it’s time to retire and go away forever, the notorious saga of Majestic 12 hit the road and briefly toured again in 2017. Yes, those pesky documents were back once more. Or, rather, an entirely new and controversial set of papers were among us. Thoughts on the documentation were mixed: some researchers suggested the whole thing was someone’s idea of a hoax. Or a satire. Or a psychological experiment. Others concluded that they were the real thing. Me? I went down the path marked “Disinformation.” It’s accurate to say that I still do. That batch of Majestic 12 files, which ran to 47-pages, were provided to Heather Wade. At the time, she was the host of the popular Midnight in the Desertshow. I was on Heather’s show several times and I like her. When she says that she got the documents from what was described as “a trusted source,” I believe her. But, as two years of time have shown, we never learned who Heather’s source was. And we were never told how that same source got the documents to her, or from where they came. There is no doubt, however, that these papers are not the real thing. They’re from right in the heart of Russia. Let’s get it right: Russia is not our friend.
Let’s expand on the theory that – just perhaps – the Russians were behind all of this. It’s important to note that just because Heather Wade publicized the papers in 2017, it doesn’t mean they were intended for use in a psy-op in that same year. After all, the document purports to be more than thirty years old. That being so, its pages may well have been originally planned for an operation back in the 1980s. Or, in the nineties. Are there any good reasons why the Russians may have been behind all of this? Yes. In the document, the highly talkative survivor from the Aztec, New Mexico UFO crash of 1948 tells us a great deal about matters relative to aliens, to extraterrestrial technology, and to all kinds of matters of a UFO nature. But, the interviewee from the stars does something else, too: it proves to be quite critical of American politics and history.
At one point, the military interviewer tells the alien sitting before him that “we [the human race] have changed,” as a society, and that “Western civilization is now the leader in this world; for freedom and humanity.” The extraterrestrial, is far from being impressed by those words. It hits back hard and directly to the point: “…tell that to the millions of Hebrews your western civilization has destroyed in the past decade, or the millions of Negro families whose sons died to stop the madman Hitler, but who do not have plumbing in their homes.”
It is a terrible fact that black men who fought in the Second World War were, in some cases, treated like second-class citizens. The Smithsonian website says: “There is a historical relationship between Nazism and white supremacy in the United States. Yet the recent resurgence of explicit racism, including the attack in Charlottesville, has been greeted by many with surprise. But collective amnesia has consequences. When Americans celebrate the country’s victory in WWII, but forget that the U.S. armed forces were segregated, that the Red Cross segregated blood donors or that many black WWII veterans returned to the country only to be denied jobs or housing, it becomes all the more difficult to talk honestly about racism today.”
Military Times says: “…90 percent of black troops were forced to serve in labor and supply units, rather than the more prestigious combat units. Except for a few short weeks during the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944 when commanders were desperate for manpower, all U.S. soldiers served in strictly segregated units.”
The alien also has something to say about the United States’ approach to Native Americans. It offers these words, from the Majestic 12 documents: “Not surprising, your history shows that the conqueror seldom preserves any history of their victims. I speak of the natives in this land mass; those called Indians; mostly on your eastern and southern borders and in the ribbon of land that connects yours to the southern continent. Navahos? Aztecs? Incas? The Olmec’s and Toltec’s cultures? These were all greater than your own civilization at a time when you were burning witches and killing their cats, which brought a plague that killed millions of your ancestors. Of course, you drove them mad and destroyed them with venereal diseases and smallpox; those you didn’t slaughter for their gold.”
Clearly, whoever put together this particular Majestic 12 document wished to make a point. Moving on, the alien tells the interviewer that “…in a remote part of the nation you call Yugoslavia, we visited and helped the people there to build a very advanced culture over seven thousand years ago.” Just muse upon that: of all the locations on the planet that the aliens could possibly have chosen to land and help humankind, they selected what became a significant communist land: Yugoslavia. The alien also goes on to say that back in 1895 creatures of its kind made contact with none other than the brilliant maverick scientist, Nikola Tesla.
It’s a fact that Tesla – born in Croatia in 1856, and way ahead of his time – did indeed believe he was in contact with extraterrestrials. The Richmond Times, on January 13, 1901, stated: “There are thousands of people living in the world today who do not believe that the planet of Mars is inhabited. There are many others who do, and some of the leaders in science and foremost men in thought and invention are members of this last-named class. Nikola Tesla, the inventor of the wireless telegraphy, is one of these. Astronomers tell us that the planet Mars is several millions of years older than the earth and H. G. Wells, novelist, in one of his fantastic creations, has peopled this planet with a race of strange creatures. One thing, however, stands to reason, and that is this: If Mars is inhabited those inhabitants are far in advance of us as regards sciences, both theoretical and applied. This is what Tesla thinks, and why he is of the opinion has just recently been made known. He is convinced that the Martians are trying to communicate with us.”
The alien in the Majestic 12 document advises the U.S. military that the United States had utterly failed to embrace the incredible technology which Tesla had perfected and that just might have enriched the world for each and every one of us. But, the creature was careful to add that the Russians had, for a number of years, been running a “strong program of research” that was going ahead “inside the Soviet Union.” In other words, the Russians were forging ahead, while we were fucking up.
The words of an alien or the carefully created statements of a Russian operative? I’ll go with the latter. Well into the 21stcentury, the meddling has clearly not gone away.
With the “Storm Area 51” craze, local businesses near the base are profiting from the extra publicity. One business in particular, the Little A’Le’Inn motel is definitely cashing in on the “storm”. According to their booking calendar (which can be seen here), all thirteen rooms at the UFO-themed motel are booked solid on September 19th and 20th when millions of people plan to storm the secretive military base.
The motel is located in the small village of Rachel which is the nearest residential area to Area 51, and it’s a popular spot for tourists interested in aliens and UFOs. The “Storm Area 51” event is scheduled to take place on September 20th with millions of people planning on attending the event – almost 2 million people claim to be going and 1.4 million people are interested in attending according to the event’s Facebook page.
Little A’Le’Inn
The motel’s website reads, “Come and sit back and watch the fun”. And it will certain be something to see with millions of people pledging to storm the highly secured military base in order to hopefully find evidence of aliens and UFOs.
And it’s not just the Little A’Le’Inn that’s seeing a boost in business as other local motels are also getting busier. One of those businesses is the Sunset View Inn, located 45 minutes from Area 51, and it’s completely booked solid on the dates of the “storm”. “It’s really booming some small little towns in this area,” Pamela Broxson, who is the general manager of the inn, told CTV News.
Area 51 has long been associated with extraterrestrials as many people believe that the US military is hiding evidence of alien technology and maybe even extraterrestrials themselves. The military did, however, issue a very stern warning for those planning on storming the base. They indicated that they are authorized to use deadly force against anyone who attempts to get into the highly secured area.
And even though Broxson is welcoming the guests into the inn, she doesn’t believe that they’ll be successful in getting into the base. “I’ve had guests try to go out there and they’ve come back looking like ghosts because they’ve been drawed upon,” she said, adding, “Guns pulled on them for going past the barrier.”
With the “storm” a little less than two months away, we’ll have to wait and see what exactly will happen on September 20thand if anyone will actually get past the gates. For those who still plan to go despite the stern warnings – storm with caution.
The jungles of the Amazon are one of the last great wildernesses of the world, and have served as the siren’s call for explorer’s since time unremembered. Many have come here to never return, and just as many have come back with amazing tales of adventure and discovery, and it is a place steeped in legends, intrigue, and the unknown. It is a realm of lost tribes, strange mysteries, and weird beasts that roam the gloom, a place perpetually in a sort of shadow and existing unto itself. One very odd account that comes from these wilds is that of an intrepid explorer who came here looking for mysteries, and would soon get more than he bargained for, embarking on a quest that would include lost, uncontacted tribes and strange powers of the mind.
Loren McIntyre was a seasoned explorer, photojournalist, and writer for such esteemed publications as National Geographic, Time, Life, Smithsonian, GEO, Audubon, and South American Explorer, and was in many ways a sort of real-life Indiana Jones figure, spending much of his life doggedly exploring the forbidding, uncharted, and most impenetrable reaches of the Amazon rainforest of South America. Indeed, it was he who would be the first one to discover the source of the mighty Amazon River, when he made an expedition in search of it in 1971. He would make history when he found that the largest, longest, and most powerful river in the world began with a runoff of snow at a mountain in the Andes called Mismi, some 6,400 kilometers from the Atlantic Ocean, which trickled down to pond now called Laguna McIntyre, which in turn emptied into a brook named Carhuasanta, in Peru, after which it began its inexorable growth and meandering journey through some of the most remote wilds on earth. Yet, although this is McIntyre’s most famous discovery it certainly wasn’t his only one, and he would have a very mysterious encounter out in those jungles that he would keep to himself for years.
In 1969, McIntyre embarked on an excursion into the unexplored depths of the Amazon jungle of Brazil. His target was the little-known Mayoruna tribe, also called the Matsés, who were so elusive that they had never been successfully contacted by outsiders and were known as “The Cat People,” due to the arrays of imposing spikes that they wore implanted into their faces. Next to nothing was known about this enigmatic tribe, and they were only ever fleetingly glimpsed. They were like ghosts, and McIntyre had little to go on when he was basically dumped off on the shores of the Amazon River in a place called the Javari valley, on the border between Brazil and Peru, and left to continue on his own, penetrating into dense jungle that no outsider had ever set eyes on in an attempt to find these mysterious people. Little did he know that it would be they who found him.
Loren McIntyre
As the brave, seasoned explorer made his way through mosquito infested jungle he got perhaps too focused on finding the lost tribe, and soon realized that he was hopelessly lost. His journey then turned into aimlessly wandering through the perilous wilderness, and it became obvious that he was not going to be in time for his scheduled pick up at the point where he had been dropped off. He began to resign himself to the fact that he just might end up another mysterious lost explorer, like his childhood idol Percy Fawcett before him, a fellow explorer who had mysteriously vanished while looking for a mythical city he called “Z.” Making this trek more ominous was when at some point McIntyre would stumble across a clearing littered with the bodies of what appeared to be four lumberjacks, half devoured by ants and with arrows sticking from their silent corpses.
This grim discovery had the explorer watching the trees carefully as he aimlessly wandered around half expecting death to come for him at any moment through the shadows, and more sure than ever that he would not see civilization again. It was as he was in this fog of panic and fear that some figures crept out of the forest before him, spikes embedded into their faces, necklaces made of bones, possibly human, around their necks, and looking upon him with a mixture of apprehension and surprise, but not aggressiveness. These were the Mayoruna, and this was the closest any outsider had ever gotten to them. At least any who were still alive.
The frightened explorer immediately and very slowly pulled out some gifts that he had brought in the event that he actually made contact. From his bag he produced some cloth and mirrors, which he dropped before the tribesmen as they looked on with inscrutable expressions on their pierced faces. They stepped closer to accept the gifts, and then seemed to beckon for him to follow them as they began to melt back into the forest. The weary McIntyre stumbled after them, barely able to keep up with their nimble navigation of the jungle, and so would begin the next chapter of his strange adventure.
They arrived at what seemed to be a makeshift camp full of other members of the tribe, and they seemed to show a strange mixture of curiosity and aggression towards him. Upon examining his tennis shoes they went about burning them to ashes, and his watch they found fascinating, but they destroyed that too. Indeed, most of his possessions would be either stolen from him or destroyed, and even his camera, which they oddly showed no interest in, was broken when a monkey descended from the trees to take it from him. Although there was no outright aggression against him, there were some grim reminders that he was very much in danger. He would claim that they possessed trinkets made of human bone and that they drank out of hollowed out skulls. They were also very well armed and never far from their bows, and one tribesman with red face paint, who he called “Red Cheeks,” took to menacing him and scowling at him.
McIntyre would end up staying with this lost tribe for two months, and during this time made many observations. He noticed that they were constantly on the move, perpetually moving to a new camp, sometimes suddenly and without warning, and they clearly had a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They also seemed to have no concept of individual possessions, freely sharing everything with each other and taking or using whatever they liked without repercussions. Even odder still, he noticed that these people often moved quite bizarrely in sync, knowing what the others would do or acting in precise tandem without speaking to each other. For some time, he pondered this anomaly, but he would soon learn that the explanation was far odder than anything that he had ever guessed at.
One day he was approached by the one he took to be the chief of the tribe, an ancient looking, sinewy and grizzled tree trunk of a man, covered in warty growths that would earn him McIntyre’s nickname “Barnacle.” When the chief approached he spoke to McIntyre, and the explorer found that bizarrely, after weeks of being unable to understand anything any of them had said, he clearly comprehended what Barnacle had to say. This utterly perplexed him, but he soon realized that this chief was not moving his mouth when he spoke, and that he was talking directly into his mind, using a sort of telepathy that McIntyre would later call “beaming,” and which Barnacle called “the other language.”
Barnacle explained that the tribe existed as a sort of hive mind consciousness, and that their thoughts were all linked to each other, although only the tribal elders were proficient at focusing this telepathic power and truly using it to its full potential. Here he learned that there was no real “self” as Westerners would think of it, and that to them the concept of an individual “self” made little sense. The chief also telepathically explained that they were under constant threat from loggers and other outsiders, and that the reason the tribe moved so often was that they were on a spiritual journey to what he called “The Beginning,” or the literal beginning of time, where they hoped to be beyond the reach of the intruding outside world. Indeed, the tribe seemed to have a very strange grasp of how time worked that was rather alien to anything the explorer was familiar with. A 1991 article in The Los Angeles Times about McIntyre’s bizarre experience explains the tribe’s philosophy on time as follows:
The main feature of time, by western definition, is its passage. But for the Mayoruna, time is at once mobile and static. It moved with man, stopped with him, advanced and retreated with him. It is not the implacable judge, condemning man to a tragically brief life. Time is a shelter, an escape into safety and regeneration, a repository whose chief function is not piling up the past, intact yet dead, but rather keeping it alive and available. And, in the face of violent encroachment on their land by white settlers, that past assisted them with an alternative to a menacing present.
The chief invited McIntyre to come along with them on their journey to “The Beginning,” and for the next few weeks he followed them on their mystical quest and engaged in their rituals, often taking psychoactive jungle concoctions that warped his perceptions. He found that if he concentrated he could pick up on a sort of static fuzz that contained the interlinked thoughts of all of the tribe members, through processes he could never hope to fathom. However, he knew at some point he would have to part ways with them and try to leave this land of jungle, telepathy, and time travel behind him to get back to the civilization that was no doubt convinced he had vanished. The only problem was that he had no idea where he was, and on top of this, although he had been invited and was not physically threatened by the Mayoruna in any way, he had no illusions that he was anything other than their prisoner, and wondered what they would do if he tried to flee. However, in the end the decision was made for him, a flood swept through during a torrential rain, and McIntyre would be whisked away as he clung to a balsa raft, emptied into the river and incredibly found the next day by a pilot flying over.
Upon getting back to civilization, McIntyre would keep what had happened to him a secret for years, and it is quite likely that the whole fantastical tale would have died with him in 2003 if it hadn’t been for a Romanian-American writer, director and movie producer, by the name of Petru Popescu. In 1987 Popescu met McIntyre by chance while on a river boat trip up the Amazon River. The two men hit it off, and for some reason McIntyre confided to him about what had happened all of those years ago with the mysterious Mayoruna tribe. It was all rather amazing, and when Popescu asked why he had never told anyone about it, McIntyre said that he didn’t think any one would ever believe him, and he had been worried about maintaining his reputation as a respected explorer, writer, and photographer. He would say of this:
I’m pretty reluctant to voice very much about the beaming experience because I didn’t want my friends to think I’d gone around the bend. ‘What is this? The guy’s hallucinating?’
Popescu would finally manage to convince McIntyre to let him write a book on his adventures, and in 1991 released The Encounter: Amazon Beaming. The explorer would claim that in his dealings with dozens of other tribes in the same region he had never before or since experienced anything like he did during his time with the Mayoruna, and he did not know what became of them. We are left to wonder just how much of this account is true, and if it is just what was going on with these elusive people of the jungle. The tribe itself has sort of disappeared, they have never been formally studied, and since McIntyre passed away in 2003, we are left only with Popescu’s book as a window into this strange tribe and their world and ways. One wonders if they are still out there, or if they managed to make that journey to “The Beginning,” finally at peace and forevermore out of our reach.
On July 5, 2019 a saucer-shaped object has been spotted over South Seattle, WA. The object made fast short burst moves across a short distance then faded away as it rose into cloud cover.
Open to any info or input. Not saying Aliens but definitely a UFO. Mufon case 101931.
I found this UFO in the suns orbit last night. The UFO is at least 10X the size of earth. I tried to find the photo again and found that Helioviewer wont allow me to see it. Also on Helioviewer there appears to be a cube over the sun, possible attempt to cover up this UFO. It should not be any surprise that aliens are capable of creating such enormous ships. Earth is only a mere 3.5 billion years old, and our advanced tech has only just begun. The universe is about 13.5 billion years old or older, so imagine an alien species that has had technology for ten billion years! They would be godlike. Here is a such a species orbiting our sun.
An extraterrestrial abductee has issued a warning saying evil space aliens should always be avoided. Darrel Sims, an ex-CIA operative and a private investigator, is among those who claim to have been abducted by ETs. Mr Sims has said he has 40 years of experience in examining proof of human-alien contact. And he believes aliens are likely malevolent than friendly.
Sims said that we should be wary of trying to phone ETs because people who have positive contact experience are being fooled of the truth. He said these aliens would deceive humans of all these beautiful things, such as they are here to help the planet, but none of which they have ever done.
Sims explained that when people have a positive contact experience, it only means that you have accepted the program.
On the other hand, when people feel they have been abducted or taken without their will, that means they are uninformed people who attempt to contact ETs.
He said that some people have died as a result of alien abduction while others have been injured.
He warned that aliens are smarter and can manipulate humans.
Sims said he handled around 2,000 cases in different parts of the world and have spoken to literally tens of thousands of others.
Sims said that he spoke to a lady who had cut marks from her sternum to her naval and this lady told him that she has never had surgery in her life. He explained that this lady actually had surgery but just didn’t remember it.
Sims also revealed that aliens abducted him at the age of four. He recalled that an alien was in his room and he thought it would walk into the wall, but it just went through. During this encounter, no speech or communication of any kind comes from the entity. Sims described it to have long and skinny arms and legs with a thin body and neck. He added that it has a bulbous head that is cocked slightly to the side.
Sims explained that the alien tried to alter his memories into thinking he observed a clown, so he would not remember the encounter or being kidnapped.
Sims believes we are being hoodwinked, but he does not know the reason, and he wants an answer to that.
A fireball as bright as the full moon streaked across the Canadian province of Ontario early Wednesday (July 24), possibly throwing meteorites to Earth along the way.
The flash of light from a beachball-size space rock was recorded by 10 all-sky cameras deployed by Western University in London, Canada, and mounted across southern Ontario and Quebec. While meteorites could have fallen in the Bancroft area (about 3.5 hours northeast of Toronto), footage was captured as far away as Montreal — about 260 miles (420 kilometers) east of Bancroft.
"We suspect meteorites made it to the ground because the fireball ended very low in the atmosphere, just to the west of Bancroft, and slowed down significantly," Peter Brown, a Western professor who specializes in meteorites, said in a statement. "This is a good indicator that material survived."
The Western University All-Sky Camera Network in London, Canada, captured this image of a fireball over southern Ontario and Quebec on July 24, 2019, at 4:44 a.m. EDT (0844 GMT).
(Image credit: Western University)
At first glance, it appears the fireball first showed up at 2:44 a.m. EDT over Lake Ontario (near Oshawa) at an altitude of about 60 miles (93 kilometers). It moved northeast in view of the Ontario towns of Clarington and Peterborough, flashing bright flares before disappearing from view west of Bancroft.
The space rock pummeling through the atmosphere, also known as a meteoroid, was about 12 inches (30 centimeters) in diameter, according to the university. That size suggests that any possible meteorites — fragments that hit the ground — would be tens to hundreds of grams in mass.
"Meteorites can be recognized by their dark, often scalloped exterior," Western added. "Usually they will be denser than a 'normal' rock and will often be attracted to a magnet due to their metal content." But the university warned that those looking to find a meteorite should be aware that fragments belong to the person who owns the land where they're found, and that permission must be granted to search on private land.
Another view of the a fireball over southern Ontario and Quebec on July 24, 2019.
(Image credit: Western University )
Anybody who finds possible meteorites in this area should get in touch with Kim Tait of the Royal Ontario Museum at ktait@rom.on.ca, Western said, urging the public to handle any fragments as little as possible to preserve their scientific worth. Instead, people should place suspected space rocks in a clean plastic bag or wrap them in aluminum foil.
Many thousands of meteoroids fall into Earth's atmosphere every year and appear as "shooting stars" in a clear night sky. The vast majority of meteoroids burn up completely in the atmosphere, or only send a few small fragments to the ground. NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office keeps an eye out for larger and more threatening space rocks through a network of partner telescopes, but so far, no imminent threats to Earth are known.
Cryogenic Breakthrough: Worms Frozen in Permafrost for 42,000 Years Have Been Resuscitated!
Cryogenic Breakthrough: Worms Frozen in Permafrost for 42,000 Years Have Been Resuscitated!
By The Siberian Times reporter
Two ancient nematodes are moving and eating again for the first time since the Pleistocene age in a major scientific breakthrough, say experts.
The roundworms from two areas of Siberia came back to life in Petri dishes, says a new scientific study.
‘We have obtained the first data demonstrating the capability of multicellular organisms for long-term cryobiosis in permafrost deposits of the Arctic,’ states a report from Russian scientists from four institutions in collaboration with Princeton University.
Duvanny Yar, a rea of permafrost where one of the worms was gathered.
(Image: Nikita Zimov)
Some 300 prehistoric worms were analyzed - and two ‘were shown to contain viable nematodes’.
‘After being defrosted, the nematodes showed signs of life,’ said a report today from Yakutia, the area where the worms were found.
One worm came from an ancient squirrel burrow in a permafrost wall of the Duvanny Yar outcrop in the lower reaches of the Kolyma River - close to the site of Pleistocene Park which is seeking to recreate the Arctic habitat of the extinct woolly mammoth, according to the scientific article published in Doklady Biological Sciences this week.
This is around 32,000 years old.
Another was found in permafrost near Alazeya River in 2015, and is around 41,700 years old.
Currently the nematodes are the oldest living animals on the planet.
The worms came back to life in a laboratory at The Institute of Physico-Chemical and Biological Problems of Soil Science in Moscow region.
The scientists say: “Our data demonstrate the ability of multicellular organisms to survive long-term (tens of thousands of years) cryobiosis under the conditions of natural cryoconservation.
'It is obvious that this ability suggests that the Pleistocene nematodes have some adaptive mechanisms that may be of scientific and practical importance for the related fields of science, such as cryomedicine, cryobiology, and astrobiology.”
Specialists of the Institite of Psycico-Chemical and Biological Problems and Soil Science in Moscow region.
(The Siberian Times)
The Russian institutions involved in the pioneering research were: The Institute of Physico-Chemical and Biological Problems of Soil Science; Moscow State University; Pertsov White Sea Biological Station, part of Moscow State University; and the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.
The Department of Geosciences, Princeton University, was also involved.
Top image: Awake after 42,000 years...nematodes. Source: The Siberian Times
Birds spend a lot of time and energy singing, but they don’t do it the same way in every season of the year. And some can’t sing at all. What’s the purpose of birdsong?
A male olive-backed euphonia (Euphonia gouldi), photographed in Costa Rica.
Birds are some of the most attractive creatures on earth. Who doesn’t like to watch a blue jay, cardinal or Baltimore oriole going about its business?
But the beauty of birds isn’t just their looks – it’s also their noises. Bird songs are among nature’s most distinctive and musically satisfying sounds. Why do birds spend so much time and energy singing?
There are two main purposes, and they are connected. First, male birds sing to mark territories. A singing bird is saying, “This place is mine, and I’m willing to defend it, especially from others of my species.” He may patrol his chosen space and sing often, either from the middle or the edges of what he considers his turf.
The second purpose of singing is to attract a mate for nesting. Female birds often choose their mates based on some blend of visual and vocal cues. Even male birds with beautiful breeding-season plumage can have trouble finding mates if their songs don’t measure up.
Each bird species typically has its own unique song. That allows an individual bird to hear a song and recognize whether the singer is from its own species.
Birds are most vocal during nesting season. For example, in Florida where I live, cardinals live year-round. They usually start singing in January, just a few weeks after the days begin to get longer. After the nesting period is over, birds sing much less and their territories break down.
Birders can learn to recognize different bird species by memorizing the sonic patterns of their songs.
Many species of North American birds migrate with the seasons instead of staying in one place all year. As they fly south in the fall, they make little “chip” notes or “contact calls” that allow them to stay in touch with other birds.
In many species only male birds sing, but in others, both males and females sing. And some birds don’t sing at all. For example, vultures and storks can barely produce any sound – let alone something musical enough that we would call it a song.
Learning to identify birds by their songs is as much fun as spotting them by sight. In fact, good ears are often as important as good eyes in appreciating the birds you encounter. Take off your headphones and listen to your neighborhood birds – especially when they are active in the morning or evening. You’ll be surprised by what you hear.
Fogbows are rainbows’ cousins – made by much the same process – but with the small water droplets inside a fog instead of larger raindrops.
View at EarthSky Community Photos. | Alan Nicolle in New South Wales, Australia, captured this image on July 16, 2019. He wrote: “I was out geocaching in the outskirts of Broken Hill, when I turned back to see this fogbow developing. I took quite a few photos with the iPhone, and rode back to the car on my bike, but by the time I got back to the car to use my SLR, it had faded.” Thank you, Alan!
Fogbows – sometimes called white rainbows, cloudbows or ghost rainbows – are made much as rainbows are, from the same configuration of sunlight and moisture. Rainbows happen when the air is filled with raindrops, and you always see a rainbow in the direction opposite the sun. Fogbows are much the same, always opposite the sun, but fogbows are caused by the small droplets inside a fog or cloud rather than larger raindrops.
Look for fogbows in a thin fog when the sun is bright. You might see one when the sun breaks through a fog. Or watch for fogbows over the ocean.
Because the water droplets in fog are so small, fogbows have only weak colors or are colorless.
Edith Smith in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, captured this fogbow on November 1, 2018. She wrote: “The camera spotted it before I did with eye, as I was too engrossed in foggy conditions.”
Tommy Johnson captured this early morning fogbow near Jonesport, Maine, in August 2016. He wrote: “Early in the morning and blueberry rakers are starting to fill their buckets with the fruit. I called out to them to look at the fogbow, it was the first time any of us had seen one.”
Wonderful fogbow caught by Robyn Smith in New Zealand on the morning of September 19, 2017 … “opposite the foggy sunrise.”
GregDiesel Landscape Photography wrote in October 2015: “Saw my first fogbow / white rainbow. Photo taken with cell phone. Moyock, North Carolina.”
Katherine Keyes Millet captured this fogbow in July 2014 at Winter Island Park in Salem, Massachusetts.
Venus and Jupiter above a fogbow in Blacklough, Dungannon, Ireland. Mars is up there, too, but tough to see. John Fagan captured them all in October 2015.
Eileen Claffey in Brookline, Massachusetts, captured this fogbow over a field in September 2014.
Look away from the sun and at an angle of 35-40 degrees from your shadow which marks the direction of the antisolar point. Some fogbows have very low contrast so look for small brightenings in the misty background. Once caught, they are unmistakable.
The sun must be less than 30-40 degrees high unless you are on a hill or high up on a ship where the mist and fogbow can be viewed from above.
Fogbows are huge, almost as large as a rainbow and much, much broader.
Thomas Kast in Finland captured this fogbow in 2013. He wrote: “In this rather cold August night (+8C [46F]) there was patchy fog, especially in open fields. This lake remained clear for a long time. At one point I saw this white bow with moon in waning gibbous phase behind me.”
Jim Grant caught this fogbow over Sunset Cliffs in San Diego. He wrote: “The skies were sunny and clear, and then the fog rolled in, and with it this beautiful fogbow.”
Lynton Brown of Australia captured this fogbow over a barren field in the autumn of 2012.
Bottom line: Fogbows are made by much the same process as rainbows, but with the small water droplets inside a fog instead of larger raindrops. Because the water droplets in fog are so small, fogbows have only weak colors or are colorless.
Not only is the climate warming faster than at any point in at least 2,000 years, but in contrast to pre-industrial climate fluctuations, climate change is now occurring across the entire planet at the same time.
There is no event like current global warming in the past 2,000 years.
Image credits: Bern University.
When it comes to global warming, the general situation is essentially a settled issue. We know that the planet is heating up, and we know that this is happening as a result of our emissions of greenhouse gases (particularly carbon dioxide). However, some details and particularities of this process are not as well understood.
For instance, climate variability over the past 2,000 years has been subject to great debate. As climate change deniers are quick to point out, our planet’s climate has changed before in the past — although this is missing the true scope of the issue. For instance, some might point out that the Earth has been hotter than it is now in its geological past while ignoring the fact that these events happened tens of millions of years ago, due to natural causes, over long periods of time, and the effects were still devastating for life on Earth. The more you look at today’s context, the more you understand that this situation has no precedent.
In a recent study, researchers analyzed the past two millennia, assessing the factors that caused climate variability in the past and the extent of the climatic changes.
In one paper, Raphael Neukom and colleagues from Bern University compiled data from around 700 proxy records of temperature changes. They specifically looked at unusual warming and cooling events. But wherever they looked, they found the same thing: nothing is even close to the current scale of events.
Take an event commonly called the Little Ice Age, a significant cooling event that started in the 1300s and lasted centuries. The period is well-represented in art, with numerous painters covering it through the centuries. This produced an important misunderstanding, researchers say, because it propagated the idea that the entire planet was cooling at the same time.
“It’s true that during the Little Ice Age it was generally colder across the whole world,” explains Raphael Neukom, “but not everywhere at the same time. The peak periods of pre-industrial warm and cold periods occurred at different times in different places.”
The Frozen Thames, by Abraham Hondius, is a typical Little Ice Age painting depicting colder-than-usual winters in the northern hemisphere. The original painting is in the collection of the Museum of London.
According to the study, the cooling events happened mostly in parts of Europe and North America. Because these areas were so influential culturally and artistically, it propagated the idea that the Earth cooled similarly in all parts of the world, which was not really the case — as shown by climate proxies from other parts of the world. For instance, the coldest temperatures occurred in central and eastern Pacific regions in the 15th century, in northwestern Europe and southeastern North America in the 17th century, and elsewhere during the 19th century. This lack of uniformity suggests that local influences, rather than planet-wide phenomena, were at play.
In contrast to that, all of the Earth’s major regions have seen their warmest temperatures in recent years, and the overall trend indicates a constant, planetary warming.
“We find that the warmest period of the past two millennia occurred during the 20th Century for more than 98% of the globe,” the study reads.
“This provides strong evidence that anthropogenic (human induced) global warming is not only unparalleled in terms of absolute temperatures but also unprecedented in spatial consistency within the context of the past 2,000 years.”
The study debunks another misconception: that volcanoes or solar activity are the main drivers of climate change. In pre-industrial times, random fluctuations within the climate systems themselves drove variations and change. External factors such as volcanic eruptions were not intense enough to cause major climate change for decades — let alone centuries.
So what does this tells us? In general principle, nothing new. We knew that the current global warming event is unprecedented in recent history.
However, the two published papers paint a much more complete picture of climate variability over the past two millennia. They offer important constraints and parallels, showing that no period in recent human history is quite like the one we are living in right now. The current warm period is happening across the world for the first time, and it’s unprecedented. There is extremely strong evidence that we are causing it. What we choose to do with that information is up to us.
The results were published in two studies:
Steiger et al. “No evidence for globally coherent warm and cold periods over the pre-industrial Common Era”. Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1401-2
PAGES 2k Consortium. “Consistent multidecadal variability in global temperature reconstructions and simulations over the Common Era”. Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/s41561-019-0400-0
A 'time machine' that moves tiny particles a fraction of a second into the past was built in Russia, scientists have claimed.
It may not rival Dr Who's Tardis but researchers have described it as being able to move the smaller-than-atom sized objects in the opposite direction of 'time's arrow'.
The experiments involved electrons - negatively charged particles that make up an atom - found in the realm of quantum mechanics, the study of sub-atomic particles.
They gave the analogy of a break for a game of pool, in which the balls are substitutes for the electrons.
After the break the 'balls' are scattered in what should be a haphazard way, according to the laws of physics.
But researchers managed to make them reform in their original triangle 'break' order - appearing as if they were turning back time - using a special quantum computer.
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A 'time machine' that moves tiny particles a fraction of a second into the past has built in Russia, scientists have claimed. The team gave the analogy of a break for a game of pool. The 'balls' scattered and should have appeared to split in a haphazard way. But researchers managed to make them reform in their original order in the snooker triangle (pictured)
WHAT IS THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS?
The Second Law of Thermodynamics deals with transition of energy within a system from usable to unusable.
It is the reason our phones and laptops need to be charged, and that our sun will one day die out.
It states that energy cannot repeat in an infinite loop within a closed system, and so we must replenish what is lost.
The Second Law profoundly sets the limits for what is possible in our universe, defining why everything within it must one day decay.
Researchers, from the Laboratory of the Physics from Moscow Institute of Physics & Technology (MIPT), say that they have effectively defied the second law of thermodynamics with the experiment.
This is a rule within physics that governs the direction of events from the past to the future, stating that everything in our universe tends towards decay.
The 'time machine' is built from a basic quantum computer, which is made up of 'qubits'.
These are units of information described by a 'one', a 'zero', or a mixed 'superposition' of both, that can be stored on an electron.
In the experiment an 'evolution program' was launched which caused the qubits to become an increasingly complex changing pattern of zeros and ones.
During this process, order was lost - just as it is when the pool balls are struck and scattered with a cue. Another program then modified the state of the quantum computer in such a way that it evolved 'backwards', from chaos to order.
The state of the qubits was rewound back to its original starting point.
To an outside observer, it looks as if time is running backwards, said lead researcher Dr Gordey Lesovik, who heads the laboratory of the Physics of Quantum Information.
'We have artificially created a state that evolves in a direction opposite to that of the thermodynamic arrow of time.'
The 'time machine', described in the journal Scientific Reports consists of a rudimentary quantum computer made up of electron 'qubits'.
In the experiment an 'evolution program' was launched which caused the qubits to become an increasingly complex changing pattern of zeros and ones.
During this process, order was lost - just as it is when the pool balls are struck and scattered with a cue.
Another program then modified the state of the quantum computer in such a way that it evolved 'backwards', from chaos to order.
It may not be the Tardis, a fictional time machine that appears in Doctor Who, pictured here, but physicists have loosely described as moving in the direction of 'time's arrow'. The team worked with electrons in the realm of quantum mechanics
The state of the qubits was rewound back to its original starting point.
The scientists found that, working with just two qubits, 'time reversal' was achieved with a success rate of 85 per cent.
When three qubits were involved more errors occurred, resulting in a 50 per cent success rate.
The experiment could have a practical application in the development of quantum computers, the scientists said.
'Our algorithm could be updated and used to test programs written for quantum computers and eliminate noise and errors,' said Dr Lesovik.
WHAT IS A QUANTUM COMPUTER AND HOW DOES IT WORK?
The key to a quantum computer is its ability to operate on the basis of a circuit not only being 'on' or 'off', but occupying a state that is both 'on' and 'off' at the same time.
While this may seem strange, it's down to the laws of quantum mechanics, which govern the behaviour of the particles which make up an atom.
At this micro scale, matter acts in ways that would be impossible at the macro scale of the universe we live in.
Quantum mechanics allows these extremely small particles to exist in multiple states, known as 'superposition', until they are either seen or interfered with.
A scanning tunneling microscope shows a quantum bit from a phosphorus atom precisely positioned in silicon. Scientists have discovered how to make the qubits 'talk to one another
A good analogy is that of a coin spinning in the air. It cannot be said to be either a 'heads' or 'tails' until it lands.
The heart of modern computing is binary code, which has served computers for decades.
While a classical computer has 'bits' made up of zeros and ones, a quantum computer has 'qubits' which can take on the value of zero or one, or even both simultaneously.
One of the major stumbling blocks for the development of quantum computers has been demonstrating they can beat classical computers.
Google, IBM, and Intel are among companies competing to achieve this.
Conducted by the Moscow Institute of Physics & Technology (MIPT), the device used electrons as the time-traveling particle. The negatively charged particles within an atom, electrons play a big role in quantum mechanics, the science that covered particles smaller than an atom.
The researchers chose a pool break as the analogy for their time machine with the balls representing the electrons. When a pool player executes a break, the laws of physics and probability dictates that the balls moved in random directions. The same principle applies to scattered electrons.
Thanks to a customized quantum computer, the MIPT research team got the electrons to return to their starting positions instead of scattering to the winds. The effect resembled a video recording playing in reverse, a popular way of depicting the reversal of time in media.
Based on the results of their experiment, the MIPT researchers made the bold claim of successfully circumventing the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the total entropy of an isolated system will never decrease despite the passage of time.
Russian researchers successfully reverse the “evolution” of a quantum computer
One of the rules of physics dictates that everything in the universe experiences decay in the form of entropy. That rule ensures that events move from the past to the future instead of the other way around.
The MIPT researchers defied this rule with a time machine based on a typical quantum computer. In turn, the computing device incorporated qubits.
A unit of data that represented either “one,” “two,” or a “superposition” that combined both values, a qubit fits on a space the size of a single electron.
In their experiment, the Russian researchers used an evolution program that forced the qubits to form an increasingly complicated and shifting pattern of zeros and ones. The evolutionary process caused the qubits to lose cohesive order in a similar way that a pool break scatters balls across the table.
As the qubits evolved from orderly patterns to chaotic movement, the researchers implemented another program. The new program altered the state of the quantum computer so that it evolved in the opposite direction.
The “superposition” of qubits allows them to travel back in time
MIPT researcher Dr. Gordey Lesovik oversaw the development of the quantum computer. He showed how the qubits appeared to be moving backward in time instead of forward when viewed from the outside.
“We have artificially created a state that evolves in a direction opposite to that of the thermodynamic arrow of time,” explained Lesovik, the head of the university’s Physics of Quantum Information laboratory.
He and his research team tested the number of qubits required to pull off a successful time reversal. They found that using two units of data sufficed to achieve a success rate of 85 percent.
However, adding more qubits also increased the number of errors. Three units dropped the chances of success to 50 percent.
“Our algorithm could be updated and used to test programs written for quantum computers and eliminate noise and errors,” he brought up.
The electronic circuits of conventional computers were either in an off state or an on state. Quantum computers, on the other hand, used circuits that existed in both states at the same time. Among other things, this superposition lets them predict the future.
‘Tijdmachine’ gemaakt in Rusland. Zo laten wetenschappers piepkleine deeltjes naar het verleden ‘reizen’
‘Tijdmachine’ gemaakt in Rusland. Zo laten wetenschappers piepkleine deeltjes naar het verleden ‘reizen’
Wetenschappers hebben de tijd teruggedraaid met behulp van een kwantumcomputer. Hun baanbrekende studie lijkt in strijd te zijn met de natuurkundige wetten.
Met behulp van elektronen en de kwantummechanica konden onderzoekers de tijd terugdraaien.
Het experiment is te vergelijken met biljartballen die na de start van het spel weer hun oorspronkelijke plek innemen.
Tijdmachine
De wetenschappers van het Moscow Institute of Physics & Technology (MIPT) hopen de techniek nu verder te verbeteren.
De ‘tijdmachine’ wordt beschreven in het tijdschrift Scientific Reports en bestaat uit een kwantumcomputer die is opgebouwd uit qubits.
Qubits zijn eenheden informatie die worden aangeduid met een ‘één’ of een ‘nul’, of een ‘superpositie’ van beide staten.
Oorspronkelijke staat
Tijdens het experiment veranderde het patroon van nullen en enen. Op dezelfde manier schieten de biljartballen na de start van het spel alle kanten op.
Met behulp van een programma werd de staat van de kwantumcomputer op een dusdanige manier veranderd dat de tijd als het ware werd teruggedraaid: van chaos naar orde.
De qubits werden op deze manier in hun oorspronkelijke staat teruggebracht.
85,5 procent
Tijdens het experiment rolden de ballen als het ware terug naar hun oorspronkelijke positie.
Met twee qubits was het terugdraaien van de tijd in 85,5 procent van de gevallen succesvol. Op momenten dat er drie qubits gebruikt werden, traden er meer fouten op.
Incredible UFO Contact & Extra-dimensional Footage Revealed by James Gilliland
Incredible UFO Contact & Extra-dimensional Footage Revealed by James Gilliland
In this episode of #EdgeofWonder you’re going to see why ECETI stands for enlightened contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. Ben & Rob sat down with owner of ECETI Ranch, James Gilliland and discuss the wide range of documented paranormal evidence taken at the ranch and beyond.
You’ll see everything from #UFO’s to Extra Dimensional beings, Volcanic Entities and even orbs caught on film or camera. This was legitimately the most amazing collection Ben & Rob have every seen and we know you’ll be amazed too.
James also shares with us his amazing life story along with all the paranormal and spiritual experiences he has had since owning the ranch such as seeing #bigfoot, #aliens, divine beings, and so much more. Seeing Mount Adams was truly a majestic sight and we are excited to bring you this truly inspiring interview with James.
James Gilliland is a best-selling author, internationally known lecturer, minister, counselor, multiple Near D_eath Experiencer and contactee. James is recognized world-wide as the founder of the Gilliland Estate, AKA ECETI Ranch (Enlightened Contact with ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) where he documents and shares amazing multi-dimensional contact phenomenon.
Humorist James Thurber once wrote, "There are two kinds of light — the glow that illuminates and the glare that obscures." He may as well have been talking about the ocean at night. In today's light-polluted world, the beauty of the night can all-too-often be obscured by the glare of businesses that surround the beaches of the world. But if you look closely, beyond that man-made light, you might see something special: the quiet glow of bioluminescence.
Bioluminescent tides, which shine quietly in the darkness, exist in many locations throughout the world. Sometimes these glowing waters seem like little twinkling stars suspended in the water. Other times they glow with almost enough brightness to read.
This phosphorescence is usually caused by algae suspended in the water. Much like fireflies flitting through the air, the algae (of a wide variety of species) emit a glow whenever they are jostled. Sometimes that's caused by the tides rolling in and out. Other times it can be caused by the motion of a boat or a fish moving through the water. Once in a while, the glow is even strong enough to be created by the gentle stroke of a finger.
Here are five places around the world where you can go to see the waters glow:
1. The Blue Grotto, Malta
The Blue Grotto is one of nine caves near the island of Filfa that produces a phosphorescent glow.
Reachable only via specially licensed boat, the Blue Grotto of Malta is said to be one of the most spectacular natural sights in the world. These oceanic caves on the small island of Filfa are surrounded by tall cliffs that are constantly pounded by waves, producing the phosphorescent glow for which they are known. Blue Grotto is actually just one of nine caves, all of which are popular tourist destinations. Filfa itself, located more than three miles out to sea, is completely uninhabited — except for several species of birds and a subspecies of wall lizard that can be found nowhere else.
2. Bioluminescent Bay, Puerto Rico
The waves at these three bioluminescent lagoons aren't really strong enough to photograph, but that doesn't stop them from being a popular tourist spectacle, a place where people can kayak into the glowing waters at night. The three bays glow a gentle green, a situation that is natural but has been enhanced by humans, who mostly cut them off from the surrounding ocean a couple of centuries ago.
San Diego's bay waters don't always glow, but it's always a sight to behold when they do.
(Photo: Kevin Key/Shutterstock)
You have to time things just right if you hope to see the glowing tides in San Diego. They don't happen every year — in fact, scientists don't yet know how to predict when they will happen. But when they do happen, they happen in a big way and people flock to the beaches to photograph the bright blue tides. The San Diego tides may or may not glow again this year, but they have glowed more years than not in the past decade. So who knows, if you're in San Diego, try a walk on the beach at night. You just might be surprised.
4. Navarre Beach, Florida
Bioluminescent plankton in Navarre Beach make the water shine in summer months.
The warm summer months are a great time to go kayaking in Florida, especially around Indian River and Mosquito Lagoon. There, when the plankton is right, the water glows as both boaters and fish move through the water. According to the Florida tourism website, the effect makes "fish look like blue comets." The effect can also be seen from time to time on the ocean beaches, as in the photo above.
5. Toyama Bay, Japan
This one is just a little bit different from the rest. Every other site we have profiled so far glows because of the algae present in the water. The glow at Toyama Bay comes not from phytoplankton but from a phosphorescent creature called the firefly squid. Every year from March to June, the bay becomes inundated with millions of these three-inch squid, which come up from the depths of the ocean to breed. As they fill the waters and beaches, both fishermen and tourist operations spring into action. You can see the several photos of this magnificent natural event in the short video above.
6. Matsu Islands, Taiwan
A four-month study confirmed the presence of Noctiluca scintillans as the cause of the 'blue tears' near the Matsu Islands.
So-called "blue tears" had been causing quite the stir around the Matsu Islands. Researchers from the National Taiwan Ocean University conducted a four-month study of the waters, taking samples and studying organisms in the water. According to the China Post, the researchers pinpointed Noctiluca scintillans as the sea-glowing culprit. They will take another year to continue to study the water, seeing if other organisms are contributing to the blue waters, and they will work with businesses to identify a "blue tears" season, presumably to optimize tourism.
Editor's note: This file was originally published in May 2014 and has since been updated with new information.
A well known, and very unique quality of certain ocean life is its propensity to produce eerie illumination, which can light up the deep in what range from faint glows, to colorful light shows. Such bioluminescence ranges from plankton and other maritime minutiae that flash in quick, propulsive little blasts of light barely visible to the naked eye, to random–and remarkable–kaleidoscopic light shows rippling across the ocean surface.
Such phenomena include, but are not limited to stories like those of colorful “spinning wheels” of light observed in various regions of the ocean, as I’ve detailed previously here at Mysterious Universe.
An account given of one such display described that a colorful show of spinning wheels of light, which was later discussed by N.J. Greig in an issue of the journal Marine Observer in 1996. “They were all about 3 meters in diameter and changed both size and shape while flashing intensely,” the report stated.
However, “by (6 PM local time) the effect had completely stopped on the starboard side, and only the pulsating rings were left on the port side and, with these, the intensity of the light reduced until (6:22) when there was nothing more to observe.”
Such light shows are uncommon, but not particularly unique in maritime literature from over the years. In fact, they are not even unique to the Strait of Hormuz, where the report outlined above occurred in May of 1996. In fact, just months earlier on the date of October 3, 1995, a similar strange “light show” was observed by the crew aboard the M.V. Chilham Castle, which was sailing from Karachi to Kuwait when it observed a series of perplexing illuminations emanating from below the surface.
The crew aboard the vessel gave the following report of the incident, which was subsequently published, as with previous similar oceanic anomalies, in the Marine Observer in 1996:
“At about 2240 UTC, the observers saw a strange effect in the sea stretching for approximately 100 m from the parallel body. It was a soft white light, almost strobe-like in character that pulsed irregularly. The light was bright enough to illuminate the wheelhouse deckhead and seemed to emanate from below the water, almost as if something was shining a spotlight upwards, shimmering and twirling: psychedelic projections of the 1960s were brought to mind. Curiously, the wash from the bow was not illuminated and appeared normal, likewise the wake.”
The phenomenon lasted for 6 or 7 minutes, faded, and then reappeared briefly. The night was clear and the visibility excellent.
On a rather eerie note, the description of the light seeming “to emanate from below the water, almost as if something was shining a spotlight upwards” is worth noting in the description, whether or not the display in question had some kind of technological origin.
It is certainly not impossible that such phenomena may have a natural origin. Around the same time, Discover Magazine reported on the discovery of novel forms of aquatic life that congregate around volcanic vents deep within the ocean. “At midocean ridges,” they reported, “where new ocean floor rises up as molten rock from Earth’s interior, where cold seawater mixes with the rising magma and, heated to 650 degrees, spews back up through chimney-shaped hydrothermal vents, researchers stumbled across bustling ecosystems.”
Odd lights photographed over the North Pacific in 2014 by Dutch pilot JPC van Heijst
(Credit: JPC van Heijst).
However, such molten meetings between lava vents and seawater would be an awkward explanation for the kinds of luminous curiosities that appear below the surface of various regions of our oceans, as seen from the surface by nighttime crews in the right place and right time. Still, lava has been offered as an explanation in the past when unusual illuminations have appeared on the ocean surface, as with an incident in 2014 where a Dutch pilot photographed an unusual light display on the North Pacific ocean.
It may be that we’re a long way off from determining what, precisely, the source of all of the ocean’s many strange and colorful “light shows” could be. Whether some natural phenomenon already well known to science, or something else altogether, such illuminations provide just another example of the many beautiful little oddities planet Earth still has to offer.
In early March 1997, an eyeopening feature appeared in the pages of the U.K.’s Independent newspaper. The title of the feature was “Secret US spyplane crash may be kept under wraps.” The feature included the following words: “A top-secret United States spyplane which flies on the edge of space at five times the speed of sound crashed at the British experimental airbase at Boscombe Down, Hampshire, in September 1994, according to a report in a leading military aviation journal. The SAS [Special Air Service], the report said, was scrambled to throw a cordon round the wreckage, which was flown back to the U.S. two days later. The hypersonic reconnaissance aircraft, called Astraor Aurora, is believed to have been developed in the 1980s as a secret U.S. government ‘black programme.’”
Attempts were made to try and diffuse the controversy that surrounded this curious affair, with claims from the military that nothing but a malfunctioning Tornado airplane was the culprit. The U.K.’s National Archives prepared this statement: “…the only flying that took place that night was the launch of two Royal navy Sea King helicopters in support of an exercise. Claims that members of the public were turned away by police roadblocks may have arisen from some confusion over dates. On August 12, 1994 a Tornado participating in a trial made an emergency landing there after the decoy target under trial failed to jettison. The Tornado landed with a trailing 375 ft steel cable and, for safety reasons, roads close to Boscombe Down were closed while the aircraft passed overhead. We are aware of press reports regarding an aircraft known as ‘Aurora’. The Ministry of Defense has no knowledge of any US aircraft with this designation operating in UK airspace. The existence of such a programme would, in any case, be a matter for the US Government to confirm.”
Note that the incident occurred in September 1994 (its 25th anniversary looms, as per the title of this article…), but the National Archives claimed it had occurred in August 1994. Maybe it really was all down to a Tornado. Perhaps it was something much weirder. Possibly , something that may actually have been flying around the U.K. countryside for a long time. Since the 1980s, sightings of large, triangular-shaped UFOs, usually described as being black in color, making a low humming noise, and very often with rounded rather than angled corners, have been reported throughout the world. The sheer proliferation of such reports has led some ufological commentators to strongly suspect that the Flying Triangles (as they have come to be known) are prime examples of still-classified aircraft, namely, the Aurora. It was one single wave of encounters in the U.K., in early 1993, which ultimately led senior military and defense personnel to liaise with their American counterparts to try and determine, once and for all, if the FTs are the Aurora or if they have extraterrestrial origins. The story comes from one of those at the forefront of the study into the aforementioned sightings: Nick Pope, who, for three years (1991-1994), investigated UFO incidents for the Ministry of Defense.
I’ll share with you the words Pope made to me in a 1997 interview: “I arrived at the office at about 8:30 a.m. or 9:00 a.m. on the morning of March 31, 1993, and my telephone was ringing. I picked it up and there was a police officer on the other end making a UFO report. Now, he was based in Devon [England] and told me an account of an incident that had taken place in the early hours of that particular day when he and a colleague who had been on night patrol saw a triangular-shaped UFO at fairly-high altitude. He said that the motion was fairly steady and that there were lights at the edges with a fainter light in the middle. To me, this was already a description that was becoming quite familiar both from one or two reports that I’d received at the Ministry of Defense over the years and from my own study and research into the UFO literature. In other words, I was aware that this was a commonly reported shape for a UFO.”
“I was also quite pleased to get a report from a police officer. I won’t say that it was rare, but it was slightly unusual to have reports from trained observers like police and military. I would say that, of the reports I received in my time at the UFO desk, less than five per cent came from, collectively, pilots, military officers and the police. I had spoken, socially, to numerous Royal Air Force pilots who’d had personal sightings, but who had never reported them for fear of ridicule. But that police report was very much the first of many that came in that day and over the next week or so. When taken together, the sightings described took place in a range of times – the earliest was about 11-11.30 p.m. on the evening of the 30th and the latest was about 1.45 a.m. in the early hours of the 31st. What was it precisely that made the police officer’s report stand out? He said to me: ‘I’ve been on night patrols for years, but I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire life.’ Well, reports such as this came through thick and fast over the course of the next week or so; more and more reports came in from police stations, the public and local RAF stations. In fact, I would say that the total number of reports easily exceeded one hundred.”
It is clear from what Pope has to say that there were three reports in particular that stood out more than any other – the first of which concerned a family based in Rugeley, Staffordshire, England, who had viewed a remarkable aerial vehicle near the sprawling forest that is Cannock Chase. Pope reveals the facts: “This report was brought to my attention by the Community Relations Office at RAF Cosford [Shropshire]. The report had come direct from the family and sounded particularly interesting because, unlike some of the other sightings, this one was of an object flying at very low level. There had been a family gathering and several members of the family were out on the drive – really just saying goodbye to their relatives who were about to drive off. Suddenly, this large, triangular-shaped craft flew over them very, very slowly. This was a flat triangle, with a light in each corner and a larger light in the direct centre of the underside of the craft.
“But there was something else that I’d come across in my investigations that was also present in the Rugeley case,” says Pope. “This was a low-frequency humming sound coming from the UFO; a humming that they actually described as being quite unpleasant. Imagine standing in front of the speakers at a pop concert and almost feeling the sound as well as hearing it – that was the effect that they reported. Well, they were so excited and overwhelmed that two of them leapt into the car to give chase! As they did so, they came to a point where they thought the UFO was so low that it must have come down in a nearby field. Well, they parked the car, jumped out and looked around. But there was absolutely nothing there; the UFO had gone.
“The two most significant reports began at RAF Cosford shortly after the encounter at Rugeley. This was definitely the highlight and was one of the best sighting reports I received in my entire posting. The report itself came from a guard patrol at Cosford. They were on duty manning entrance points, checking the perimeter fence and such like. All the members of the patrol saw the UFO and, again, the description was pretty much the same as most of the others. In this case, though, the UFO was at medium-to-high altitude. Remember that these witnesses were people who see in a normal course of business all sorts of aircraft activity, meteorites, fireballs and so on, and they considered it absolutely out of the ordinary.
“They didn’t make a standard report: what they did was to submit an actual 2-3 page report which went up their chain of command and then the report was forwarded on to me. In that report, they stated that the UFO passed directly over the base and that this was of particular concern to them. They made immediate checks with various Air Traffic Control radar centres but nothing appeared on the screens. It was this factor that made them particularly keen to make an official report. This was at around 1.00 a.m. They noticed that this Flying Triangle was heading on a direct line for RAF Shawbury, which is some twelve to fifteen miles on. Now, the main concern of the Cosford patrol was to alert Shawbury that the UFO was coming their way; but they also wanted confirmation that they weren’t having a mass hallucination. They took a decision to call Shawbury and this was answered by the Meteorological Officer. You have to realize that at that time there was literally just a skeleton staff operating, so the Met. Officer was, essentially, on his own. So, he took a decision to go outside, look in the direction of RAF Cosford and see what he could see.
“Sure enough, he could see this light coming towards him and it got closer and closer and lower and lower. Next thing, he was looking at this massive, triangular-shaped craft flying at what was a height of no more than two hundred feet, just to the side of the base and only about two hundred feet from the perimeter fence. His quote to me was that the UFO’s size was midway between that of a C-130 Hercules and a Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet. Now, he had eight years’ worth of experience with the Royal Air Force, and a Met. Officer is generally much better qualified than most for looking at things in the night sky. And there were other factors too: like the family in Rugeley, he heard this most unpleasant low-frequency hum; but unlike their experience, he saw the craft fire a beam of light down to the ground. He felt that it was something like a laser beam or a searchlight. The light was tracking very rapidly back and forth and sweeping one of the fields adjacent to the base.
“He also said – and he admitted this was speculation – that it was as if the UFO was looking for something. Now, the speed of the UFO was extremely slow – no more than twenty or thirty miles per hour, which in itself is quite extraordinary. As far as the description is concerned, he said that it was fairly featureless – a sort of flat, triangular-shaped craft, or possibly a bit more diamond-shaped. But if all the descriptions had been identical I would have been surprised. He said that the beam of light retracted into the craft, which then seemed to gain a little bit of height. But then, in an absolute instant, the UFO moved from a speed of about twenty or thirty miles per hour to a speed of several hundreds of miles per hour – if not thousands! It just suddenly moved off to the horizon and then out of sight in no more than a second or so – and there was no sonic boom.”
The mystery of what came down in 1994 lives on. And the anniversary will soon be right around the corner.
A recent spate of black helicopter sightings over Washington D.C. has had people in the nation’s capital talking; however, there’s no cause for alarm according to the Pentagon, who says the increased presence of military aircraft is part of a secret U.S. Army mission.
The classified program was partly revealed after funding requests by the Pentagon appeared in the Defense Department’s annual reprogram request to Congress.
The program, first reported by Bloomberg, is described as a mission involving the use of several Black Hawk helicopters to be used in missions over Washington. Both active-duty servicemen and women, as well as reserve units, are participating.
“The Army needs $1.55 million shifted for maintenance of 10 UH-60 Black Hawks, for aircrews and for travel in a mission that includes active-duty and reserve troops,” The Hill also reported.
According to a summary from the Congressional Research Service, “In the United States Code and annual authorization and appropriations acts, Congress provides the Department of Defense (DOD) limited authority to obligate funds for purposes other than originally approved.”
“These authorities allow the department to transfer or reprogram funds,” the CRS summary states. “A transfer involves shifting funds from one appropriations account to another, while a reprogramming involves shifting funds within the same account.”
Falling under Title 10, Section 2214, of the United States Code, the DOD is allowed “to transfer amounts in working capital funds or to transfer amounts provided in appropriation Acts for military functions of the Department of Defense (other than military construction).”
This is all fairly commonplace in defense spending circles, where changes in circumstances that have relevance to financial or operational conditions can cause a flux in the budgetary plans for the DOD. Frequent issues that can account for these budgetary changes might include costs associated with combat training, weapons systems, medical facilities, or other similar situations. In addition to costs, there are occasionally savings that can result from such things as canceled programs or other unexpected events where budget allocation does not end up being used.
In either case, the Department of Defense has the ability to transfer or “reprogram” funding, under the authority provided by Congress, in order to adjust to these changes in their annual budget, and in response to necessities presented out of concern for national security.
In the case of the current mission being represented by the UH-60 Black Hawk flights over Washington, “the Army will not be able to perform this classified mission” without additional funding the DOD has requested, as reported in the Pentagon’s recent funding requests.
Some commenters online expressed amusement over the new details about the Army’s “secret” program. “My brother lives there and I sent him this article and he was laughing when he called me because he said they do this every summer,” one user noted.
“I’ve actually noticed a ramp-up since late 2016 / early 2017,” another commenter wrote. “I walk along the river in Georgetown frequently with the dog, and it’s become annoyingly common to spot helicopters running up/down the Potomac or their other favorite – veering off and heading up Rock Creek at a low altitude… no idea where they’re headed from there, though I assume either the Naval Observatory or maybe cut over towards the White House?”
Apart from an acknowledgment of the program, the Pentagon has had very little to say. In a statement provided to Bloomberg, the operation began sometime after last October–the beginning of the current fiscal year–and that the ultimate duration of the mission is still undetermined. There was no additional information provided about the scope of the mission, or what in the nation’s capital it might pertain to.
Can’t nobody tell me nothin’ You can’t tell me nothin’ Can’t nobody tell me nothin’ You can’t tell me nothin’
Most people not living in a cave will recognize these lyrics from the hugely popular country rap song ‘Old Town Road’ by rapper Lil Nas X, but they could just as easily be the words of people planning to participate in the ‘Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us’ event in defiance of warnings by the US Air Force ,Area 51 guru Bob Lazar and many others who think it’s a bad idea. Lil Nas X seems to be with the stormers as he’s released an animated video set to the music of his hit song that shows him and some other country singers storming to Area 51 on their horses. Not only that, Lil Nas X has offered to perform at the event. Will this give the movement some much-needed legitimacy in the wake of the admission by its ‘organizer’ that it was all a joke?
“i got y’all for free! let’s do this shit.”
That was the rapper’s response on Twitter when he heard about a GoFundMe set up to raise money to bring him to the September 20th event. The fundraiser was inspired by the animated video (watch it here) of Lil Nas X, Billy Ray Cyrus, Young Thug and Mason Ramsey on horseback heading to Area 51. The video shows them dealing with soldiers and encountering green aliens inside. Watch carefully and you’ll see actor Keanu Reeves, also a fan of the event, making his trip to the base in the ‘recommended’ way.
This isn’t the recommended way to storm Area 51
“We will all meet up at the Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction and coordinate our entry. If we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Lets see them aliens.”
The original ‘Storm Area 51’ Facebook page has its own animation connection – ‘Naruto’ Uzumaki is a fictional character in the Japanese anime and manga series Naruto who apparently can outrun bullets by sprinting in the arms-flailing -backwards style Reeves’ animated character imitates.
I been in the valley You ain’t been up off that porch, now
Is Lil Nas X issuing a call to Storm Area 51? If he inspires you to get off your porch and go, experts advise you to bring along bug spray, snake repellent, proper clothing, water, bail money and the number of a good lawyer. Is he really planning to perform there? Time will tell. If Lil Nas X is just trying to promote the song and keep in on the charts so it can become the longest-running #1 song ever, he’s doing a goodjob of that too.
No matter what you think he’s doing, you already know his response:
Can’t nobody tell me nothin’ You can’t tell me nothin’
“Crop circles” are the popular name for a variety of artful assault on agricultural properties, which take the form of large-scale, complex patterns that appear mostly in wheat fields.
Occasionally cropping up (no pun intended) from time to time, the proponents of a paranormal theory behind their occurrence argue that large, intricate patterns like these couldn’t be made by humans; at least not in the short amount of time between sundown and sunrise during which they appear. It is an argument that has caused the circles to remain one of the more controversial sub-items in the broader UFO debate over the years.
It is often claimed that crop circles have been reported for centuries, owing to a 1678 woodcut illustration depicting a “mowing devil,” which has been borrowed and appropriated into the modern mythos. Historians argue, however, that the mowing devil of the 17th century has nothing to do with modern crop circles, nor ideas about the supernatural forces behind their creation.
The Dreaded “Mowing Devil”: Why would anyone protest a devil appearing and offering to mow their yard for them?
Other accounts say that crop circles didn’t appear until the last few decades, the earliest report involving a witness who claimed to have seen a flying saucer rising over a field where the circle was later found (early reports of similar UFO landing sites were given the rather humorous nickname of “saucer nests”).
The true origins of crop circles might be a perplexing mystery indeed, if not for the fact that it is widely known today just how easily they can be produced by small—but highly coordinated—groups of individuals. Each year, a number of professional “crop circlers” that take to the fields, particularly in various parts of the United Kingdom, producing these dazzling displays under cover of darkness.
I recall mentioning the subject to a friend in South London a number of years ago (and one, I will note, with an appreciation for the more “mystical” aspects of life). When I asked his opinion on the crop circle mystery, he chuckled knowingly, advising me that he had actually met many of the makers of these circles.
“It’s fairly well known,” he told me at the time. “Although nobody really talks about it.” They’re a lot like graffiti, in other words, or any other kind of public art that is made quietly, in the dark, and below the radar.
And many residents—farmers in particular—consider them a menace.
The problem reached critical mass in the summer of 2017, when Wiltshire police issued a warning to future crop circlers, advising that it was destruction of property to depress any portions of crops grown in area fields, which is punishable under the law.
“A spokesman said creating a crop circle was criminal damage and an offence,” the BBC reported in 2017. “Damage caused means a loss in revenue to the farmer and landowner.”
One farmer, Tim Carson, said crop circles had caused £120,000 in damages to wheat, which could not be harvested after being flattened under the circles.
Close up of flattened area in crop-circle
(credit: Wikimedia Commons).
While the mechanism behind these elaborate, and often destructive displays in the United Kingdom is pretty well understood, that isn’t to say there haven’t been circumstanced that involved genuinely strange alterations to vegetation similar to the “crop circle” effect.
An unusual incident was described in 1992 by Y-H. Ohtsuki, a Tokyo-based physicist at Waseda University, Tokyo, who wrote for the British Journal of Meteorology about a large circular depression that appeared in a field on the property of a Radio Nippon transmitting station in Tokyo. However, this wasn’t your everyday kind of crop circle report: in this case, the circle appeared within a doubly-fenced compound, and reportedly occurred coinciding with instrumental anomalies that were logged at the station at the time of its apparent creation.
According to Ohtsuki’s account:
“It was the night of 31 August 1991 when the survey protection equipment (electromagnetic-noise warning detector) of the transmitting system of the Radio Nippon station in Kisarazu, Chiba prefecture, worked seventeen times during 40 minutes from 2.00 a.m. (that is, on 1 September). This is a wholly abnormal occurrence because the survey protection goes off only once a week on average.
“Next morning one of the staff discovered a 10-metre circle in the doubly-fenced ground of the Radio Nippon station. The grass in the ground was pushed down, but without leaving a clear spiral mark. The ground area is approximately 20,000 m2 , and three antenna towers are located in the ground. The fences are formed by 2.5-m-high wire netting and the station was watching for 24 hours. There were only two men in the station, and they were in a watching room for eight hours from 10.00 p.m. to 6.00 a.m.”
“Moreover,” Ohtsuki added, “I can add that neither of the men had ever heard of the circles effect at that time, so that after the discovery of the grass circle the next day they did not report it for 40 days. By the way, there are no roads or railway which a hoaxer could have used to approach by car or train.”
“This shows that the circles effect is not simply a matter of hoaxing,” Ohtsuki concluded.
What Ohtsuki describes seems far less elaborate than the annual displays that appear in Wiltshire fields every year. Is it possible that there are indeed other mechanisms—natural or otherwise—that might account for the appearances of flattened areas in fields in such a way, and further, that such natural formations could have even served as the inspiration behind the modern, and far more intricate crop circles that are made today?
'Secret' rectangular UFO photographed in the sky over Maui, Hawaii
'Secret' rectangular UFO photographed in the sky over Maui, Hawaii
In June 2019 a strange rectangular flat UFO appeared in the sky over Maui, Hawaii.
The object which has no wings, tail, visible engines.or other parts characteristic of an aircraft may be part of a secret project.
Photographer: While driving up mount Haleakala in Maui I took this picture and didn't notice anything until weeks later when I was going over my vacation photos.
The object was not seen live. The object was in only one frame, nothing before or after. Unknown altitude but as you can see it was above the cloud line.
UFO Captured In Sky Has Rainbow Colors As It Fades In And Out Of Visibility, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Captured In Sky Has Rainbow Colors As It Fades In And Out Of Visibility, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: unknown Location of sighting: July 15, 2019 Watch as this UFO is captured as it fades in and out of its invisible camouflage. The UFO has the most amazing and brilliant colors I have ever seen. No rocket, shuttle or jet could ever make such breathtaking colors. I am just in awe of how the craft fades in and out of visibility, however each time it does, only a small section of it is visible, each time a different area and a different color. Absolute mind blowing. 100% alien craft. Scott C. Waring
Linda Miller:
On July 15, 2019 I felt compelled to go outside and film the sun again. I was in the middle of watching the sun go down and when I turned my head and saw this... I thought it might be a plane, I was wrong. Linda: The colors are the real thing, just adjusted exposure. It is really pretty and weird all at the same time. I have no freakin' idea.
I found this interesting structure hidden in the shadows of Tycho crater. This is huge and its sitting on a hill slanted to once side. I estimate it to being about 1km long and next to it is another structure that is smaller and more elaborate. The object sits in the shadows to hide it, or to keep the suns rays limited. Many aliens like the greys have a second eyelid that is like sunglasses to protect their eyes from the light. If this species of alien has sensitive eyes, also, the glaring sunlight might bother any species since the moon is much closer than earth at times to the sun.
Scott C. Waring
I colored the ship yellow below to make it easier to see.
Astronomers have a new theory about the formation of supermassive black holes.
Extremely bright objects that first appeared close to the birth of the universe — theoretical objects called “dark stars” — could have seeded supermassive black holes over millions of years, according to a new Astronomy story about University of Michigan physicist Katherine Freese.
Dark stars wouldn’t have been much like the stars we’re used to: rather than balancing out gravitational forces with heat dissipated by nuclear fusion reactions, dark stars would have been far less dense, mostly made up of hydrogen and helium. That means they could have swelled up to outrageous sizes compared to today’s stars.
The energy that stopped them from collapsing in on themselves is thought to have come from dark matter particles — which have still never been observed directly — that annihilate each other, releasing energy in the process.
“They can keep growing as long as there is dark matter fuel,” Freese told Astronomy. “We’ve assumed they can get up to 10 million times the mass of the Sun and 10 billion times as bright as the Sun, but we don’t really know. There is no cutoff in principle.”
In 2016, for instance, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in northern Chile spotted a supermassive black hole that was 660 million times as massive as the Sun.
Dark stars would have been anything but “dark.” In fact, they are thought to have been much brighter than the Sun.
So why haven’t astronomers spotted a dark star yet? Astrophysicists’ best guess is that they existed in the era after the Big Bang — and we have yet to find a way to glimpse such ancient stellar history.
But luckily, scientists at NASA are building a telescope sensitive enough to one day spot dark stars — the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
In a 2012 study, scientists from the Royal Astronomical Society at Oxford University proposed using the telescope to detect supermassive dark stars from the early stages of the universe. Astronomers at NASA also believe that the JWST could allow us to catch glimpses of the early cosmos.
“Looking for the first stars and black holes has long been a goal of astronomy,” said Rogier Windhorst of Arizona State University, Tempe in a 2018 NASA statement.
And Reese is hopeful as well.
“If a dark star of a million solar masses were found [by James Webb] from very early on, it’s pretty clear that such an object would end up as a big black hole,” Freese told Astronomy. “Then these could merge together to make supermassive black holes. A very reasonable scenario!”
While astronomers have been excited to start studying data from the JWST, the project has unfortunately been in development hell for over two decades. In June 2018, the project was rescheduled for March 2021.
But if the JWST does ever make its way into space, it could provide tantalizing new data on dark stars and supermassive black holes — and we’d also be one step closer to understanding the early days of the universe.
The Amazons: Ancient Warrior Women Dismissed as Myth and Legend Were Real Fearsome Fighters
Famous ancient Greek historian Herodotus once wrote of the Amazons - or as he called them Oier Pata (‘Killers of Men’) – a tribe of fierce warrior women. Though in today’s world, the name ‘Amazon’ is strongly associated with Jeff Bezos’s mighty online delivery empire; it still carries a heavy association with these gender-role breaking, fist fighting, sword swinging, arrow shooting, single-breasted warrior woman of antiquity. For centuries, they were dismissed as mere legend, but in the last decades, detailed investigations have revealed that the Amazons were very real, and they were a fearsome force to be reckoned with.
The Amazons are believed to have been the descendants of the nomadic ancient Scythians and Sarmatian people. Their territory ranged from the slopes of the Caucasus mountains between the eastern end of the Black Sea and all the way to the vast Eurasian steppes.
In every myth, whether they be Persian, Greek, or Scythian, the Amazons remained consistent in their descriptions: They rode horses , shot arrows, were uneasy around boats, and even wore pants. However, the question remains: Who were they really?
In the Greek myths , Homer first mentioned their existence in the Iliad. They appeared fighting against Achilles on the side of Troy. In Hercules’s ninth labor, he was tasked by Eurystheus to steal the belt (or girdle) from an Amazon queen . Another story mentioned the ill-fated marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta, resulting in one of the earliest perspectives to the traumas that parent separations may bring on their children.
In ancient Rome, the mythical stories about ‘Amazons’ was re-enacted in the gladiatorial arena. Women gladiators were be given the names of famous Greek Amazon queens and fought in hand-to-hand combat to the first cut.
With such fantastic tales retold throughout the ages, it is understandable why most people assumed the Amazons never existed. Their legends and history challenged the male-dominated establishment and planted seeds of rebellion in the minds of their women.
However, in the twentieth century, Russian archaeologists began to re-examine their existence when excavations of Scythian kurgans (Scythian burial mounds) revealed startling finds.
The Motives to the Myths About the Amazons
In the minds of the ancient Greeks, they never questioned whether the Amazons truly existed. Their tales were used to contrast the natural values 5th century BC Athens allegedly carried. Athenian Greek women were be expected to be good family women, productive of male heirs, and zealous in maintaining the household. To be anything less of those traits would be Amazonian in nature.
Amazon women - according to ancient Athenian men - were loose, brawlers, hot-tempered, and unable to fully mature into adulthood due to their carefree lifestyles.
Of all the accounts mentioned about the Amazons, there is none which speaks more clearly than the works of Herodotus. In his accounts, he remains as objective as possible. Most of his research was based on translating other accounts from Persia as well as the older writings from prior generation Greek scholars. His accounts remain the closest to the possible truth than any other writings about the Amazons.
Herodotus wrote passages about their possible origins. His sentiments were the same: They were man-killers who could kill ten men with little to no effort. In one of his historical accounts, he mentioned that a group of Amazons was captured during the Battle of Thermodon. As the Greeks sailed home, the Amazons broke free and killed every single man on the ship.
However, the Amazons were oblivious to the workings of ships. They were adrift for days until it crashed onto the shores of Palus Maeotis near Cremini (translating to ‘the cliffs’). These lands had been known to be the country of the free Scythians. The women, now freed from the shackles of a would-be fate, mounted wild horses and rode further inland, only to discover they were too far away from home.
The languages which were spoken by the Amazons, though linguistically similar to the Scythians, still differed enough to be a hindrance. Herodotus noted that the Scythians assumed the Amazons were never taught to speak correctly.
Though their dress appeared similar, they were worlds away from being the same people. Rumor had it that with no hope of returning home, the Amazons resorted to a life as raiders, plundering every Scythian village they could find.
Herodotus went on to discuss how after the Amazon raids, the vengeful Scythian men went after them. But, after days of conflict, efforts were made for a peaceful outcome. Both groups were able to learn enough about each other’s dialect in order to communicate. It was then that their desires for blood were soon replaced with the desire for intercourse.
These two groups eventually intermarried and became the Scythian-Sarmatians. They then moved northeast to live a nomadic way of life . It was also mentioned that this group created a tradition of training both men and women in the ways of hunting, shooting bows and arrows, horseback riding, and the basics of warfare. Though it may seem like a technicality, in this, there can be room to further explore what Herodotus was saying.
Herodotus stated that these Amazons seemed like Scythians yet did not speak Scythian fluently. He noted that when actual Scythian men met with the Amazons and fell in love, the men were given an ultimatum to either leave or join them in their quest to return home. If the women were Scythians, why would they ask the Scythian men to leave their customs and families behind?
The clues about the Amazons, as mentioned by Herodotus, discuss a group of people who had little in common except for technological similarities. With these slight clues mentioned, how could the women be considered Scythian at all?
Merging of Myth and Fact of the Amazons
According to the ancient Greeks, the term Scythian acted as a generalization for an entire nomadic cultural group. As far as the ancient Greeks were concerned, anything past Thrace and heading to inner Asia was essentially the land of the Scythians.
If one were to analyze this massive generalization, one would notice that this region accounted for thousands of miles and consisted of hundreds of cultures, languages, and ethnicities which may have been completely different from each other.
However, if one were to continue reading the passages of Herodotus, further clues would actually lean to the favor of the Amazons being Scythians. One passage regarding the origins of the Scythians, by Herodotus, may have unintentionally explained the rise of the Amazon warrior women the world knows today. The passage describing the retribution brought forth from the twenty-eight-year war with the Medes:
“…They (the Scythians) entered Asia in pursuit of the Cimmerians and overthrew the empire of the Medes [...] On their return to their homes after the long absence of twenty-eight years, a task awaited them more troublesome than their struggle with the Medes. They found an army of no small size prepared to oppose their entrance. For the Scythian women, when they saw that time went on, and their husbands did not come back, had intermarried with their slaves….”
Amazon women triumph in battle. (Pharos / Public Domain )
His passages go on to describe how the returning Scythian men dealt with their own people and slaves not recognizing who they were. However, given this description about the possible formation of the Scythians, could this tie together to the reason why the captured Amazons spoke Scythian badly? Rather than being that they were of an entirely different group, could it have been that they were the offspring of slaves and women who ran away from one of the Scythian villages?
In the passage, it clearly states that the women and slaves were able to put up a worthy fight against the war-hardened men who had been absent for twenty-eight years. Could such a long absence have created a cultural shift making women the dominant warrior over men? And could this have led to the traditions of warrior duality between the sexes that was shared by the Scythian-Sarmatians in the years to come?
Archaeological Facts About the Amazons
In 1993, the mummified remains of a Scytho-Siberian woman from the fifth century BC, famously named “the Siberian Ice Maiden ”, was excavated from a burial mound (also known as a kurgan) in the Republic of Altai, Russia. Forensic anthropologists eventually determined her age of death between twenty to thirty years of age due to breast cancer and severe trauma sustained from a fall. The Ice Maiden’s body, along with remains of two horses, were oriented toward the east. In later excavations of other kurgans, this was revealed to be a consistent custom.
The Ice Maiden’s burial mound held a plethora of items revealing further insight to the mysterious Scythian people. But of all the incredible artifacts from her kurgan that fascinated the world, it was the garments she wore and the tattoos she had, still preserved from the arid permafrost of the steppe.
In her larch wood coffin, she dawned a yellow silk tussah blouse, a striped wool skirt of crimson and white, a tassel belt, thigh-high white felt leggings with a marten fur, a polished metal mirror by her side, and a three-foot-tall headdress.
Even though Russian archaeologists had assumed her to be a priestess of some kind, the Ice Maiden’s funerary dress closely resembled the depictions of Greek Amazons from the fifth and sixth century BC Greek vases.
Amazon wearing trousers and carrying a shield with an attached patterned cloth and a quiver. (Jastrow / CC BY-SA 2.5 )
In further expeditions, Russian archaeologists continued excavating over one hundred and fifty additional ancient Scythian kurgans in the Altai Mountain regions, Pokrovka and Kazakhstan. To their surprise, they discovered that almost one third were women of elite warrior status.
The kurgans included bows, daggers, and the women appeared to be of high rank. Some of the remains had women in battle dress no different than the remains of warrior men. There were young women showing characteristics of bow-leggedness. (A trait resulting from a life of constant riding). There was bronze-tipped arrows, iron daggers, and some women were even being buried next to horses. These women further astonished archaeologists by revealing their height to be five feet, six inches; a height that was significantly tall, especially for that time.
The assumptions made to why there were so many Scythian-Sarmatian warrior women can be linked to the nomadic way of life. They were trained in survival from a very young age using the techniques learned from both their mothers and fathers.
When Scythian men were away in battle or engaged in a hunt, their women had to be able to defend themselves against the elements and other nomad raiders. The women needed to be as tough as the men in order to survive the harshness of the steppe.
With the 150 kurgan mounds revealing large amounts of evidence to the existence of warrior women, there was a strong possibility that these women were the inspiration for the concept of Amazons. However, these are still assumptions and one must always question what they have found.
Closing Thoughts about the Amazons
In the eyes of the ancient male Athenian Greeks, they were the epitome of feminine rebellion in dire need of being tamed. However, in the opinions of twentieth-century scholars, the Amazons embodied the association of freedom, sexual equality, and the undoing of the patriarchal status quo. If all were to agree that the Scythian-Sarmatians were indeed the Amazons, regardless of the massive generalizations made by the Greeks, historians, and even archaeologists, then could Herodotus’s description of the Scythian origin potentially be the beginnings of the Amazons?
The Amazon/Scythian hypothesis has convincing evidence to make it a strong possibility. However, they still may not have been the same people as warrior women known as the Amazons. As previously mentioned, the land of the ancient Scythians encompassed thousands of miles. Within those thousands of miles are also thousands of possibilities leading to many more questions.
In the twentieth century, there was further discussion about whether the Amazons were women at all, but Asiatic groups who contained less facial hair then the Greeks. A highly unlikely but not unusual theory to consider. After all, conquistadors once thought that Native Americans of South America were Amazon warrior women simply because they fashioned no facial hair at all. They were so convinced of this that they named an entire region after the Amazon warrior women. (See Amazon river history).
Whatever their true history may be, there is no doubt that these fearsome warrior women were not to be underestimated!
Top image: The Amazons were a tribe of warrior women. ( Atelier Sommerland / Adobe Stock).
L'armée américaine a déclaré que les OVNIS existent bel et bien
L'armée américaine a déclaré que les OVNIS existent bel et bien
« Les OVNIS existent. Notre gouvernement et les militaires l’ont reconnu. Maintenant, nous passons à l’étape d’après et nous posons les questions difficiles. »
Avec les récentes révélations de la Navy selon lesquelles les pilotes ont régulièrement repéré des objets volants non-identifiés, certains individus de la communauté des OVNI, pris autrefois pour des fous, ont maintenant des preuves évidentes. Les nombreuses et régulières nouvelles histoires populaires sur les observations des OVNI ont inspiré une nouvelle génération de chasseur d’OVNI et de chercheurs.
On me demande souvent pourquoi un homme de 32 ans comme moi, avec un bon travail et une jeune famille, a passé six ans à faire des recherches sur la sous-culture des OVNI. Simplement, j’ai trouvé cette culture et ces gens fascinants.
L’ufologie a toujours été un mouvement de contre-culture. Avec cette décennie de ridicule, la communauté des OVNI a toujours été perdante. J’aime les perdants. Mais les objets volants non-identifié font leur grand retour dans la culture depuis deux ans. En effet, il y a eu une énorme augmentation des reportages dans les médias populaires de ce phénomène curieux et des personnes qui l’explorent. Il semble que les OVNIS soient à la mode et que cette renaissance populaire inspire une nouvelle génération de jeunes chercheurs et chasseurs d’OVNIS.
On a vu ces derniers mois une déferlante de reportages sur les OVNIS dans les médias. Cette semaine, le New York Times a rapportél’histoire de deux pilotes de la Navy qui ont fait de multiples rencontres avec des objets étranges qui visiblement faisaient des manoeuvres impossibles. Dans un cas, les pilotes racontent l’histoire d’un objet qui ressemblait à « une sphère entourant un cube » volant entre leurs deux avions de combats en vitesse de croisière, à peine à 30 mètres d’eux.
Ces histoires ont été traité par toutes les chaînes d’informations et ont fait les grands titres dans le monde entier.
Les OVNIS ont toujours été une cible facile pour les médias traditionnels. Il est facile de trouver des reportages sur les soucoupes volantes dans les années 1950 et des supposées personnes enlevées par des extraterrestres sont mêmes apparues dans l’émission d’Oprah Winfrey. La différence entre avant et maintenant est que les OVNIS ont commencé à quitter tout doucement les bas fonds du tabloïd journalistique. La sous-culture des amateurs et des chercheurs d’OVNIS a repoussé très fortement les stéréotypes et les tabous établis par la culture populaire et qui les décrivait comme fou ou friand des théories de complot.
Ryan Sprague, un chercheur d’OVNI basé à Manhattan, auteur, podcaster et co-animateur de Roswell: Mysteries Decoded sur la populaire chaîne The CW est l’incarnation de cette nouvelle génération. D’autres jeunes ufologues et lui, voient et parlent de leur communauté comme une contre-culture, voire une culture subversive.
« La communauté a toujours fait son possible pour être légitime, mais à la fin de la journée, ils se fichent de ce que pensent les gens d’eux ou de leurs théories, ce n’est pas important d’être bizarre ou ridicule, » nous explique Ryan Sprague. « Et maintenant, comme toute révolution, les OVNIS prennent la lumière après avoir été ridiculisé depuis longtemps. Les OVNIS existent. Notre gouvernement et les militaires l’ont reconnu. Maintenant, nous passons à l’étape d’après et nous posons les questions difficiles. »
« À leurs yeux, c’est cool mais ça le sera bien plus lorsque l’on aura les connaissances sur ces OVNIS qui nous affecteront au jour le jour »
Dans mon livre, The UFO People: A Curious Culture, j’émets l’idée que la sous-culture des OVNIS a toujours été, et continuera d’être, un groupe de dissident défiant les systèmes de pouvoirs et d’idéologies établies. Le problème est que la culture populaire a toujours fait passer les gens qui croient aux OVNIS comme ignorants, conspirateurs ou délirants. C’est à dire jusqu’à maintenant : avec les récentes révélations de la Navy, de nombreux membres de la communauté des OVNIS ont été innocenté.
Donc pourquoi personne n’en a rien à faire de ces révélations qui font la une des journaux ? Comme l’a expliqué l’auteur, spécialiste des OVNIS, Chris Rutkowski, peut-être que c’est parce que nous nous sommes habitués à voir la présence des OVNIS envahissant les livres et les écrans. Que vous soyez de la génération Spielberg, ou un millénial qui a grandit en regardant The Avengers repousser les hordes d’aliens intergalactiques, c’est habituel de voir cette autrearchétype dans nos médias. Les OVNIS sont par conséquent devenus beaucoup moins effrayant et peut-être plus intéressant. A-t-on négocié les OVNIS dans notre structure et identité culturelle ?
Les chercheurs comme Ryan Sprague ne sont pas les seuls affectés par la reconsidération des OVNIS. Les ufologues viennent de tous horizons du monde. Deep Prasad, directeur de 23 ans de ReactiveQ, une start-up de plusieurs millions de dollars en informatique quantique basé à Toronto, n’a jamais été intéressé par les OVNIS en grandissant. Mais après avoir lu un article du New York Times en 2017 qui casse l’existence d’un programme secret sur les OVNIS du Pentagone, il est devenu fasciné par ce phénomène. Pendant qu’il admet que le public peut mettre du temps à se sensibiliser à l’importance culturelle des OVNIS, une quantité de personne dans son réseau commencent à s’y intéresser.
« La plupart de mes amis ne pensaient pas que les OVNIS étaient cool. Maintenant beaucoup d’entre eux sont à la fois dubitatifs ou profondément excités, dit-il. À leurs yeux, c’est cool mais ça le sera bien plus lorsque l’on aura les connaissances sur ces OVNIS qui nous affecteront au jour le jour. »
Parler de ces OVNIS reste un commerce risqué à cause de la stigmatisation de ces discours mais ce n’est pas comme ça que de nouveaux mouvement émergent ? Peut-être le renouveau des OVNIS n’est pas différent.
Il semble que nous ne puissions pas remettre en doute l’existence des OVNIS et bien que l’origine de ces objets étranges reste encore à débattre, nous sommes sans aucun doute au début de quelque chose de nouveau, incroyablement cool et à la portée d’une nouvelle génération.
For the last few decades, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has focused on detecting radio signals. But a new collaboration between Breakthrough Listen and VERITAS will focus on looking for laser-like flashes of light.
VERITAS will be used to help search for laser-like optical light pulses that could be beacons from an advanced alien civilization.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has traditionally looked for radio signals of artificial origin, i.e. coming from an alien civilization at least as advanced as our own. We humans have been broadcasting radio waves into space for about 100 years now, since Marconi pioneered long-distance radio transmission. The reasoning has been that other civilizations might use radio, too. While that approach continues to be highly debated, there is another kind of search that is starting to be considered more seriously now as well: looking for optical signals – brief flashes of light like pulsing lasers – that could be used as beacons to communicate over interstellar distances.
On July 17, 2019, Breakthrough Initiatives – founded in 2015 by entrepreneur Yuri Milner – announced a new partnership with the VERITAS Collaboration to focus on this strategy. VERITAS (the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System) will search for such pulsed optical beacons, as well as radio signals, with its array of four 12-meter telescopes at the Whipple Observatory in Amado, Arizona.
Breakthrough Listen, part of Breakthrough Initiatives, has already been conducting searches using its still-ongoing radio frequency survey and spectroscopic optical laser survey. But VERITAS can take the search to a new level. It was built to detect cosmic gamma rays and is the most powerful telescope array in the world for studying high energy astrophysics. As it turns out, it can also be used to look for “pulsed optical beacons” – laser-like pulses of light – that are very short in duration, only a few nanoseconds (one nanosecond is a billionth of a second).
Closer view of one of the 4 telescopes in the VERITAS array.
An advantage of this method is that any artificial pulses could outshine stars that happen to lie in the same direction. The use of all four telescopes would also help to eliminate false positives from any detections made. VERITAS will provide a unique way of expanding the search for alien intelligence beyond previous methods, as noted by Yuri Milner:
When it comes to intelligent life beyond Earth, we don’t know where it exists or how it communicates. So our philosophy is to look in as many places, and in as many ways, as we can. VERITAS expands our range of observation even further.
Breakthrough Listen is already the most powerful, comprehensive, and intensive search yet undertaken for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. Now, with the addition of VERITAS, we’re sensitive to an important new class of signals: fast optical pulses. Optical communication has already been used by NASA to transmit high definition images to Earth from the moon, so there’s reason to believe that an advanced civilization might use a scaled-up version of this technology for interstellar communication.
VERITAS will be able to detect very faint light signals, if any exist, according to Jamie Holder at the University of Delaware:
Using the huge mirror area of the four VERITAS telescopes will allow us to search for these extremely faint optical flashes in the night sky, which could correspond to signals from an extraterrestrial civilization.
Aerial view of the VERITAS telescope array and the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory basecamp in Amado, Arizona.
Just how sensitive is VERITAS? The most powerful lasers on Earth can transmit a pulse of 500 terawatts lasting only a few nanoseconds. If one were placed at the distance of Tabby’s Star – that weird dimming star about 1,470 light-years away – then VERITAS could detect it. However, most of the stars that VERITAS will observe are 10-100 times closer than that, so feasibly a pulse of light 100-10,000 times fainter than that earthly laser could be found.
VERITAS being able to search for alien light signals is a great bonus, since that is not what it was designed for. As David Williams at the University of California, Santa Cruz said:
It is impressive how well-suited the VERITAS telescopes are for this project, since they were built only with the purpose of studying very-high-energy gamma rays in mind.
One great advantage of optical SETI is that there’s no terrestrial interference. It’s an exciting new field.
This Lick experiment is unique as it uses three light detectors (photomultipliers) to search for bright pulses that arrive in a short period of time (less than a billionth of a second). Light from the star itself can also trigger the detectors as well, but seldom will all three photomultipliers be hit by photons within a billionth of a second time frame. This means few false alarms are expected, only about one per year.
Other SETI searches, such as with Lick Observatory’s 40-inch Nickel Telescope, are also looking for laser pulses from advanced civilizations.
New and novel ways of looking for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence are welcome, since the previous, traditional SETI method of just searching for radio signals is considered by many to be antiquated. Would a civilization thousands or millions of years more advanced then us still be using radio waves to communicate? SETI and other searches should be as broad as possible, and consider alternate possibilities for the best chance of success. With billions of stars in our galaxy alone, the hunt for such signals is like looking for a needle in a haystack. VERITAS is just one such alternate method, but it is a good start.
Breakthrough Listen is a comprehensive initiative to search for evidence of intelligent, technological life from nearby stars to the universe at large. The objective is to examine one million nearby stars, all the stars in the galactic plane and 100 nearby galaxies, for both radio and optical signals. Not a small undertaking, but if there is to be any chance of finding an alien light show, then we must look.
This is how far human radio broadcasts have reached into the galaxy – not the black square – but the little blue dot at the center of that zoomed-in square. The ever-expanding bubble announcing humanity’s presence to anyone listening in the Milky Way is now only about 200 light-years wide, in contrast to our 100,000-light-year galaxy.
Bottom line: Using VERITAS, the search for intelligent alien life will broaden in its scope, looking not only for radio signals but also laser-like optical flashes of light that an advanced civilization might use as communication beacons.
I know it looks like a galaxy is shooting a weird laser at our radio dishes, or vice-versa, but it's all just radio signals so calm down.
SWINBURNE UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY / OZGRAV ARC CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE.
Fast radio bursts ("FRB's" for short or even "furbies" if you're feeling saucy) are...well, fast bursts of radio emission. They're little pops and whizzles in the sky that you can only pick up if you have a really sensitive radio antenna and are also an expert at sniffing out little signals from deep space. In other words, a totally professional radio astronomer.
First spotted (heard?) in 2007, so far we've caught less than a hundred, usually by pouring over archival data from radio telescopes. They last only a few milliseconds, and seem to scan over a range of radio frequencies before disappearing altogether. A few of them have repeated (over the span of hours) but almost all of them happen once and only once.
They come from all over the sky, so we don't think they originate from within our galaxy (otherwise they would be concentrated in the band of the Milky Way), but only two of them have been isolated to a particular extragalactic source. One came from a small galaxy bursting with star formation, the other from a larger, mostly dead galaxy.
Explanations abound. To have even a faint signal that this great distance means they have to be incredibly powerful at their origination. What could be? A star dying? An exotic remnant collapsing in on itself? The last gasp of material before it meets its doom in a supermassive black hole? Aliens saying hello?
Wait, hold up. Did someone say aliens?
Here's the deal. Astronomy is full of mysteries. That's why it's a science: we're still learning. Half the research papers published every day are essentially "Here's a thing we saw. Any ideas?" That's simply the way it is.
The main problem with "aliens did it!" is that it's useless as a scientific hypothesis. Intelligent creatures can do whatever the heck they want - they're intelligent. Which means they can explain any and every signal you could possible imagine. FRB's are rare? Aliens! No wait, they're pretty common? Still aliens! FRB's generally don't repeat? Aliens for sure! But some do? Special aliens!
No matter what you see, no matter what mystery confronts you in the universe, you can always reach to aliens for an answer. And because that explanation has so much power, it makes it...useless. And it's hard to do science with useless explanations.
LIGHTSAIL 2 SPACECRAFT OFFICIALLY UNFURLS MASSIVE SOLAR SAIL
LIGHTSAIL 2 SPACECRAFT OFFICIALLY UNFURLS MASSIVE SOLAR SAIL
THE PLANETARY SOCIETY/VICTOR TANGERMANN
VICTOR TANGERMANN
The Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 satellite successfully unfurled its boxing ring-sized solar sail on Tuesday and is getting ready to absorb solar rays as its only energy source for propulsion. It could soon represent the first time a spacecraft has traveled through space using only sunlight.
The unusual spacecraft is investigating an exciting form of locomotion in the far reaches of outer space — something that astronomers have been wondering about for hundreds of years.
German 17th century astronomer Johannes Kepler theorized that sails and ships could one day be “adapted to the heavenly breezes.” Now we know that the Sun’s photons exert tiny amounts of pressure which could be collected and used by a spacecraft’s “sail” for propulsion. The big advantage: no need for heavy liquid fuel and conventional solar arrays as an energy source.
If all goes according to plan, LightSail 2 could soon start zipping through outer space — but at an incredibly slow velocity at first. The Sun’s photons only exert pressure equal to the weight of a paperclip.
The unique spacecraft will spend about a year in Earth’s orbit before the team behind it will adjust its orientation to eventually burn up in the atmosphere.
The headlines in the wake of Apollo 11 could have been very, very different.
Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong seen inside the Mobile Quarantine Facility during the 2.5-day trip back to port on the USS Hornet, which picked them up when they splashed down.
It would have been the ultimate contingency of Apollo 11: What if the astronauts returning home unleashed upon Earth something dangerous and foreign to science — moon germs?
Before Apollo 11 set out, NASA couldn't be positive that, if bits of dust or potential microorganisms got loose back home, life on Earth would be safe. Needless to say, accidentally setting a lunar plague loose on the inhabitants of Earth would have erased all the good publicity garnered by accomplishing the moon landing in the first place. Just in case, in addition to the protections they were establishing to make sure the moon rocks remained free of terrestrial contamination, NASA decided to establish a three-week quarantine for the crew of Apollo 11.
"Initially, NASA thought that all they really needed was a clean room to handle the packaging of the lunar samples in a vacuum," Judith Hayes, chief of NASA's biomedical research and environmental sciences division, told Space.com. "They started really wrapping their head around this, is my understanding. They said, 'We've really never done this before, so we're not really sure,' even though I think most of the scientists didn't firmly believe that there might be a risk."
The quarantine was treated all along as a better-safe-than-sorry operation. The day before Apollo 11 splashed down, support staff had already entered quarantine in Houston to prepare for the crew's arrival, and The New York Times reported: "Twelve men are in absolute quarantine here because of something that probably does not exist."
The problem was, though, if that threat turned out to be a reality, things would get very ugly. "The quarantine program was created out of an abundance of caution," Jason Schwartz, a historian of medicine at the Yale School of Public Health, told Space.com. "You had a very, very small risk of something that could be very, very, very significant."
When the Apollo missions were launching, public health professionals had generally moved on from crude tools like quarantines, he said. "By the 1960s, we were really in the golden age of vaccines and immunizations," Schwartz said, particularly for diseases like polio, measles and mumps. "There was great optimism that the war against infectious diseases was being won," and he said that could have contributed to a fear of backsliding if Apollo went very wrong.
And the prospect of moon germs also mirrored a real public health concern at the time, of novel pathogens that the population had never had a chance to build an immunity to. It's a fear that remains with us today, which was sparked at the time by, for example, new influenza strains popping up on occasion. If something nasty hitched a ride back from the moon, it would have been the epitome of a novel pathogen. And, it would have driven doctors and public health practitioners way beyond their comfort zone.
"This was a different story than most public health efforts at the time, because typically, when we think about treatments, antibiotics, vaccines, quarantines, we're thinking about known viruses or bacteria with distinct symptoms, distinct modes of transmission that we know about and we can apply that knowledge to figure out how to tailor the public health response," Schwartz said. "In this case, it was responding to an unknowable, responding to a very slim but still nonzero uncertainty. How do you tailor a public health response when you're not sure what exactly you're concerned about or what it looks like or how it might affect humans at all?"
In the absence of any precisely honed tools to combat the potential threat, NASA used the blunt approach of a quarantine. The details of the plan were based on tackling a disease like the plague, according to a 1999 oral history given by Charles Berry, who was in charge of medical operations during Apollo.
The quarantine procedures began three weeks before launch, when the astronauts went into isolation to reduce the odds they would catch anything that NASA would later need to identify as terrestrial or lunar. For Apollo 11, Berry said, the prelaunch quarantine was nearly derailed by President Richard Nixon, who wanted to eat dinner with the crew the evening before launch. It was Berry's job to explain why that simply wasn't an option — the closest he said he believed he ever came to being fired.
"If [the astronauts] came down with anything, whatever it was, a cough, a sniffle, or anything else, we were going to have to prove that it didn't come from the moon," Berry told the interviewer. "So I think it would be pretty stupid to let somebody just walk into that situation. It would have been a total breakdown of the program."
(Astronauts today are also quarantined before their launch, but only because carrying terrestrial germs into orbit would be deeply unpleasant.)
Nixon shooed off and quarantine preserved, the trio of astronauts climbed aboard their rocket and blasted off on the historic journey. As they wrapped up their time on the moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin abandoned some of their equipment, including their boot covers, in part to reduce the odds they would bring back any lunar threats. The 21-day quarantine clock began ticking as soon as the pair stepped off the moon and closed the hatch on the lunar module.
They rejoined their colleague, Michael Collins, and headed back to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24. But the astronauts still had more than two weeks of quarantine left, and NASA had decided it wasn't safe to simply hoist the newly returned command module onto the aircraft carrier sent to fetch the astronauts.
The rescue crew had to send a swimmer to the spacecraft to open the hatch and throw in biological isolation garments for the astronauts to put on — spacesuits for Earth use only, essentially, with tightly woven fabric that would contain particles; rubber gloves; and a built-in breathing system.
The quarantine procedure began with biological isolation garments, which the Apollo 11 crew donned while leaving the command module and wore until they entered the Mobile Quarantine Facility seen in the right foreground.
(Image credit: NASA)
That made splashdown the biggest weakness in the quarantine system, as Collins has said in interviews looking back at the mission. "When you open that hatch, we had stuff come into the air, without any question about it," Berry said in his oral history. "You know, if it had been lunar plague, I don't know what would have happened. I didn't believe we were going to have lunar plague, but I couldn't go on the basis that we weren't."
Once the astronauts had donned their isolation suits, they climbed on board the ship sent to rescue them, then into the Mobile Quarantine Facility, a trailer NASA had converted to house them. The crew spent 2.5 days in the trailer as they sailed to port in Hawaii, then boarded a plane to Houston. Back in NASA's astronaut headquarters, the trailer was connected to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, a special facility the agency had built at what is now the Johnson Space Center.
The building included quarantine quarters as well as lab space for preparing and studying moon rocks. The crew section was large enough to hold more than 100 people if something went very wrong, Hayes said, and included a kitchen, a lounge, a library and a collection of surgical and medical examination rooms.
Neil Armstrong celebrated his 39th birthday on Aug. 5, 1969, while still in quarantine. According to NASA the cake was "standard two-layer, plain vanilla" and decorated with 39 candles.
(Image credit: NASA)
"It was, I think, quite comfortable," Hayes said. "Talking to the crews from back then and the flight surgeon, they did say that — you know, it wasn't bad. After spending time in a capsule, being in the quarantine facility was quite comfortable." Armstrong even celebrated his birthday in the quarantine building.
The crew and about 20 companions waited out the rest of the quarantine period in the facility, without particular concerns about the possibility they were infected. "I got the impression that … the [astronauts] were not worried," Hayes said. "They had daily exams from their flight surgeons … they were being carefully watched by the flight surgeons and the scientists in the quarantine." Scientists were also monitoring mice that had been exposed to lunar samples in case they showed signs of distress, but all did well.
But by the end of the 21 days, newspapers reported that the astronauts were ready to get back to exploring Earth. "I'm ready any time they want to open that door," Aldrin said according to The New York Times. "Take my blood. Marvelous idea. Why didn't I think of that sooner?" the paper reported Collins said when it transpired that a blood test would shorten quarantine by a few hours.
NASA had planned to institute the quarantine for Apollo 11, 12, 13 and 14, then reevaluate the situation. The Apollo 13 quarantine was canceled after the crewmembers were forced to skip the moon landing maneuver. During the first couple years of studying moon rocks in terrestrial labs, occasional lapses in safety protocols also sent scientists into observation or quarantine.
Wives and children of the Apollo 12 crew greet the returning astronauts in their Mobile Quarantine Facility. The crew quarantine procedures were used for Apollo 11, 12 and 14, then deemed unnecessary.
(Image credit: NASA)
But after Apollo 14, NASA decided that Earth was safe from lunar bugs. The lunar receiving lab's sample-processing side remained active until a new building was constructed and the moon rocks were moved out. Then, the building was turned over to NASA's life sciences division, which is how Hayes ended up spending decades working in its labs and uncovering its history.
Now, her department has moved out as well. "I was the last one to shut the lights out and lock the door when we moved out of the Lunar Receiving Lab, and now it sits empty," Hayes said.
According to NASA spokesperson Noah Michelsohn, the building is slated for demolition, with a new sample-processing facility due to be built before the asteroid missions OSIRIS-REx and Hayabusa2 bring back new, precious space rocks starting late next year. Hayes said she wishes she had appreciated the facility more when she first joined NASA, since it tells such a compelling story about the Apollo program and of spaceflight in general.
"It's kind of amazing, all the things they thought of and pulled together to do this," Hayes said. "I imagine when we go back to the moon, we'll have to do some similar things, not necessarily for the crew but handling samples and the experiments that'll be done."
Julie Ritt, I've studied and read up on NASA history in great detail.
The astronauts of Apollo 11, 12, and 14 were quarantined for 21 days - but I'm not entirely sure NASA took the threat of “moon bugs” too seriously when you consider a couple things.
The POTUS, President Nixon, was on board the recovery ship. If you thought there was even a potential chance of contamination, would you really have the leader of the free world standing there? Really?
The procedure involved the frogmen literally spraying the capsule in betadine as they put the flotation collar on it, just in case the heat of re-entry didn't kill anything that might be there. Then the hatch was opened - the vents having already opened - and a guy tossed in a bag of bio-suits. (Presumably while holding his breath?) The astronauts then shut the hatch, put on the suits, re-opened the hatch, were helped onto a helicopter, and landed on the ship. Only then were they put into the mobile quarantine facility.[1]
It could just be me, of course, but it seems like there might be one or two holes in that there quarantine process.
The carmaker and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) just signed a three-year agreement to jointly develop a pressurized lunar rover, which will incorporate fuel-cell electric-vehicle technologies.
"Over the course of the three-year joint research period, JAXA and Toyota will manufacture, test and evaluate prototypes, with the goal of developing a manned, pressurized lunar rover and exploring the surface of the moon as part of an international project," Toyota representatives wrote in a July 16 statement.
Artist's illustration of the planned Toyota/JAXA rover on the moon.
(Image credit: Toyota/JAXA)
Toyota's giant pressurized rover for astronauts could be solar powered, as shown in this illustration.
(Image credit: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency)
This artist's illustration shows the scale of Toyota's planned pressurized moon rover for astronauts. The auto manufacture is working with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency on the project.
(Image credit: Toyota)
The agreement runs from June of this year through the end of fiscal year 2021, Toyota representatives added.
Toyota set up a new department called Lunar Exploration Mobility Works on July 1 and plans to have about 30 people working there by the end of the year.
If all goes according to plan, Toyota and JAXA will build a full-scale prototype in the 2022 time frame, design the flight model and build and test an engineering model about two years later, and build and test the flight model around 2027.
Launch would follow in 2029.
"The rover will be used for missions to explore the moon's polar regions, with the aim both of investigating the possibility of using the moon's resources ― such as frozen water ― and of acquiring technologies that enable exploration of the surfaces of massive heavenly bodies," Toyota representatives wrote in the statement.
There could be a number of customers interested in the moon rover.
For example, NASA plans to launch two astronauts to the south pole by 2024and apparently wants to develop a research outpost in the region over the ensuing years. The European Space Agency has similar aims; it would like to help build a south pole "moon village" in the not-too-distant future.
In addition, a number of private companies plan to mine water ice near the lunar south pole, where the material is abundant on the floors of permanently shadowed craters. This water could be used for life support and, when broken into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen, as rocket fuel.
The Toyota/JAXA vehicle wouldn't be the first crewed vehicle to roam the lunar surface. NASA launched unpressurized, astronaut-driven "moon buggies" on the final three Apollo moon missions, in 1971 and 1972.
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated byKarl Tate), is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcom orFacebook.
The secrets of the Quark-Gluon Plasma that filled the early universe are being unlocked by the ALICE collaboration at CERN with the first measurement of the flow of bottomonium particles.
Quark-Gluon Plasma that filled the early Universe investigated by ALICE
(Author’s Collection)
In a paper presented at the European Physical Society’s conference on high-energy physics, the ‘A Large Ion Collider Experiment’ (ALICE) collaboration has documented the first-ever measurement of the flow of a heavy meson particle — bottomonium.
The measurement of particles like bottomonium — a type of ‘upsilon’ particle — helps the researchers understand the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) that filled the hot, dense early universe.
By observing pairs of ‘heavy electrons’ — known as muons — produced by the decay of bottomonium, the team discovered bottomonium particles have small values of elliptic flow — a measure of how uniform energy and momentum is distributed across the particles when viewed from the beamline.
This is quite unexpected as all other hadrons investigated thus far have exhibited significant elliptic flow.
David Evans, a professor of high energy physics at the University of Birmingham, leads the UK participation in ALICE.
He says: “ Elliptical flow measurements in ALICE show that the Quark-Gluon Plasma flows like an almost perfect liquid, with the light quarks (up, down, strange, and charm) flowing with the system.”
“The fact that no significant elliptical flow is seen for the bottomonium suggests b-quarks are only produced in the initial collision of the lead ions, before the QGP is formed.”
The ALICE team’s results seem to support existing theories that bottonium and other upsilon particles split into their constituents during the early stages of their interactions with plasma.
This gives the researchers a better insight at the conditions in the early moments of the universe when it was filled with a plasma composed of free quarks and gluons.
Evans continues: “This makes b-quarks (and particles made up of b-quarks) an ideal probe for studying the QGP as they experience the entire evolution of the system.”
Bottomonium particles — probing the Quark-Gluon Plasma at the dawn of the universe
Taking a trip through the ‘particle zoo’ to discover what these bottomonium particles actually are, helps us understand their role in the ALICE experiment.
The six known types of quarks on the left and how they come together to form protons and neutrons on the right
Bottonium is a heavy meson — particles which consist of a quark and its own antiparticle. In the case of bottomonium, a bottom (or beauty quark) — b quark — and its antiparticle counterpart.
These subatomic particles are extremely unstable, existing for short periods of time and only at high energies before decaying into other particles. When bottomonium decays it leaves behind a pair of ‘heavy electrons’ called muons.
Bottomonium particles — which are formed in the LHC by the violent collision of heavy lead-lead ions — provide an excellent probe of the Quark-Gluon Plasma which filled the universe just a few millionths of a second after the big bang.
Being produced so early in the collision event means bottomonium particles ‘experience’ the entire evolution of the plasma — from the moment it is produced to the moment it cools down and enters a state in which hadrons can form.
This extremely early stage in the universe’s evolution would have been the only time in history that quarks and gluons existed freely in plasma and not bound together in a state called ‘confinement’ in protons, neutrons and other hadrons.
These particles were only able to exist in this free state because of the incredible heat in the universe at this point. In our era, quarks and gluons are never observed as free particles.
Thus, it takes a tremendous amount of energy, to recreate these huge temperatures. At the moment, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the only piece of apparatus on Earth capable of doing this, with collisions in the LHC able to generate temperatures a 100 thousand times hotter than the Sun.
At these temperatures, protons and neutrons ‘melt’, freeing quarks and gluons from confinement, thus creating a Quark-Gluon Plasma and allowing them to form short-lived, unstable particles like bottonium.
ALICE: Collision queen
The ALICE collaboration — consisting of over a 1000 scientists operating a 10-thousand-tonne, 16m tall detector buried 56m under the Alps — achieves this high-energy feat by slamming together beams of lead ions rather than the proton-proton collisions used in other LHC experiments.
The decay of upsilon particles — another type of meson — into muon pairs as the result of a lead-lead collision. The red lines track the two muons the orange lines track the other particles produced (CERN)
The benefit of colliding lead ions is that, as ALICE is looking to create Quark-Gluon Plasma, the more quarks available to it, the better the chance of observing something significant.
A single proton and neutron each contain three quarks but as lead ions contain at least 56 protons and at least 204 neutrons this leaves the team with far more quarks to play with.
ALICE then measures this plasma as it expands and cools, but it is still unable to measure the particles created directly— instead deducing the presence and properties of QGP from the signatures on pairs of muons it produced by decay.
One of these signatures is the elliptic flow — the collective movement of the produced particles determined by several factors like particle type, mass, the angle at which the particles meet and the momentum they possess as they collide — which is what the team measured. The flow is created by the expansion of hot plasma after the collision of the lead ions.
Upgrading ALICE: More collisions. More Quarks. More Results
Perhaps the most promising thing about ALICE’s mission to probe the early universe and its conditions is the fact that the forthcoming high-luminosity upgrade only promises to yield more data for researchers to investigate.
The ALICE Experiment is about to be revitalised (CERN)
The upgrade — which CERN hopes will be operational by 2021— aims to increase the luminosity of the LHC by a factor of 10. Luminosity, as described in reference to particle accelerators, is proportional to the number of collisions that occur. Thus increasing the luminosity also means increasing the number of collisions.
As an example of the usefulness of this upgrade, whereas the LHC produced 3 million Higgs boson particles in 2017, the High-Luminosity LHC is expected to produce 15 million per year.
In addition to the High-Luminosity upgrade — on which work began in 2018 — ALICE will also several other upgrades and improvements. As a result of these improvements, the ALICE team expect an overall gain of 100 times the current results.
Evans says: “With this huge increase in statistics and a new inner detector in ALICE, we will be able to measure particles made of b-quarks with much higher precision.”
As such, the experiment stands a very good chance of significantly improving our knowledge of the quark-gluon plasma and the conditions in the early universe, with these new bottomonium results pointing the way.
Evans concludes: “[The upgrades] allow us to probe the properties of the QGP in much more detail and hence learn more about the evolution of the early universe.”
July 20 marked not only the 50th anniversary of the first manned moon landing, but also the beginning of the next chapter of exploration. In the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Vice-President Mike Pence announced that the Orion capsule is ready for the first Artemis lunar mission.
Built by Lockheed Martin, Orion will fly on the uncrewed Artemis 1 test mission around the moon next summer. Tying itself to the original moon program, the mission is named for the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology. The capsule will be lifted into orbit by the many-times-delayed Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket, whose postponements caused the original Artemis date of 2020 to be pushed back to 2021.
During Artemis 1, the SLS will send the uncrewed spacecraft – consisting of the crew and service modules – thousands of miles past the Moon for the first in a series of increasingly complex missions. In 2023, Artemis 2 will then carry astronauts on board, followed by Artemis 3 — scheduled for 2024 — which will be the first craft to land humans on the moon since Apollo 17.
“Similar to the 1960s, we too have an opportunity to take a giant leap forward for all of humanity,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.
The European Service Module will provide the power and propulsion for Orion during the mission, is also complete. The European Space Agency‘s module was manufactured by Airbus in Bremen, Germany, and shipped to Kennedy in last November for final assembly and integration.
NASA and Lockheed Martin are preparing for the first crewed test flight of the Orion spacecraft.
Image Credit: Lockheed Martin.
Since the crew module pressure vessel arrived in Florida, engineers have been busy installing the capsule’s avionic computers, harnesses, propulsion system and its 12 engines, 11 parachutes, its 16-foot-diameter heat shield, forward bay cover and numerous other systems and components. When the two modules are joined, a heatshield backshell panel on the spacecraft will be installed to prepare it for a September flight inside ESA’s Super Guppy aircraft to NASA’s Plum Brook Station in Sandusky, Ohio. Testing there will ensure the joined modules can withstand the deep space environment and a successful trip to Mars.
“Orion is a new class of spaceship, uniquely designed for long-duration deep space flight, that will return astronauts to the Moon and eventually take the first humans to Mars, and bring them all back safely.” said Lisa Callahan, vice president and general manager of Commercial Civil Space at Lockheed Martin. “Orion will accelerate scientific discovery of our solar system and will be the cornerstone of the defining space achievement of this era.”
Once Orion returns to Kennedy at the end of the year, the spacecraft will go through final preparations before Lockheed Martin delivers it to ground systems for launch processing in early 2020.
Remember that model of the Earth’s layers — a big orb with clean divisions throughout — you learned about in high school? It turns out the reality of the situation is a whole lot messier.
The Earth’s core has been leaking into other layers of the planet for the past 2.5 billion years, reports Live Science. It turns out that tungsten from the core has been filtering out into the mantle, occasionally even migrating farther out into the surface of the Earth’s crust. Aside from revealing that the Earth has some bad plumbing, it’s also the first indication that the inner layers of our planet swap materials.
Steady Drip
A team of scientists from the U.S., Canada, France, and Australia found that the ratio of tungsten and hafnium found in minerals from the core and mantle have shifted by 200 parts per million, according to research published last month in the journal Geochemical Perspective Letters last month.
The scientists aren’t sure why the core is leaking, per Live Science, though in an essay published in The Conversation last week the researchers suggested two possible explanations related to plate tectonics or changes that occurred as the Earth initially formed.
As they explore the phenomenon, the scientists wrote in The Conversation that their “our new results could tell us something about the evolution of the core, including the origin of Earth’s magnetic field.”
A cross-section of the Earth, showing what’s deep inside the planet.
De kern van de aarde lekt, en wetenschappers hebben geen idee waarom
De kern van de aarde lekt, en wetenschappers hebben geen idee waarom
Herinner je je dat plaatje dat je op school kreeg te zien van de samenstelling van de aarde? De werkelijkheid is een stuk ingewikkelder.
Het blijkt nu dat de aardkern al 2,5 miljard jaar lekt, schrijftLive Science.
Wolfraam heeft zich vanuit de kern verspreidt naar de mantel en in sommige gevallen zelfs naar het oppervlak van de aardkorst.
Eerste aanwijzing
Het is een eerste aanwijzing dat de binnenste lagen van onze planeet materie uitwisselen.
Een team wetenschappers uit de Verenigde Staten, Canada, Frankrijk en Australië is tot de ontdekking gekomen dat de verhouding tussen wolfraam en hafnium in mineralen uit de kern en mantel is veranderd.
Het gaat om een verandering van 200 deeltjes per miljoen, blijkt uit onderzoek dat ze afgelopen maand publiceerden in het tijdschrift Geochemial Perspective Letters.
Wetenschap staat voor raadsel
De wetenschappers kunnen niet met zekerheid zeggen waarom de kern lekt.
In een essay dat onlangs werd gepubliceerd in The Conversation stellen onderzoekers twee mogelijke verklaringen voor die te maken hebben met platentektoniek of veranderingen die plaatsvonden tijdens het ontstaan van de aarde.
“Onze nieuwe resultaten kunnen ons iets zeggen over de ontwikkeling van de kern, inclusief de oorsprong van het aardmagnetisch veld,” klonk het.
China Lake/Ridgecrest: Super Volcano Forming, Emergency Water Releases From Reservoirs, And More
China Lake/Ridgecrest: Super Volcano Forming, Emergency Water Releases From Reservoirs, And More
dutchsinse- Earthquake Live Stream — 24/7 Seismic Activity — Past 48 hours up to current
USGS Report Leaked. Super Volcano forming near China Lake Naval Station, Emergency Water Release From Major Reservoirs, More Earthquakes To Follow. , Prepare To Evacuate. Total Media Blackout To Prevent Panic.
Geologist at China Lake are reporting that there is a large chamber of magma discovered beneath China Lake/Ridgecrest, appears to be a new super volcano forming, this would explain the earthquake swarm that has smothered this area recently. FEMA and National Guard Alerted, Standing By….
All this information, from AMERICAN UNDERGROUND ARMY, is in the video below.
In an attempt to Debunk this information, I have come across some other interesting reports I would like to share with you.
Marfoogle news is also working to verify this leaked information and discredit it, but hit a brick wall. I will include the Marfoogle Video below as well. Marfoogle basically confirms the information from AMERICAN UNDERGROUND ARMY Youtube report above.
Significant DATA on Lake Levels Falling Confirm an attempt to lower the water levels behind the dams on the reservoirs in this geographic locations, as fast as possible.
With FEMA and the National Guard at the Ready, Water Levels being reduce on the Largest Reseviors, Emergency Funding Approved in minutes for China Lake Naval Base….. Marfoogle’s report will drive home the significance of the events taking place in the last 24 hours.
Now in my search for the truth, of all places, I found this information over at the Los Angeles Times.
More than 80,000 earthquakes have been recorded in the Ridgecrest area since July 4
The U.S. Geological Survey says the chance of an earthquake of magnitude 7 or higher resulting from the Ridgecrest quakes is 1 in 300
This activity is common in areas where there’s a high heat flow in the earth, Ross said. (Super Volcano?)
The Ridgecrest earthquakes are relatively close to the Coso Volcanic Field of Inyo County, which is mainly within the borders of Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, the sprawling military installation where much of the earthquake rupture occurred underneath. It’s one of the nation’s largest producers of geothermal power.
Scientists have been urging the public to use heightened concern over quakes to get prepared, including planning for a home or apartment retrofit and furniture and heavy appliances to walls.
If you have loved ones living along the West Coast, you may want to raise their awareness to these current events that mainstream media seems to be ignoring for some reason. Of course if anything happens in these areas, they will claim the “Blackout” was for our own good.
Be Prepared, Do Your Own Research, God Bless.
From KTLA News: A magnitude 4.2 earthquake jolted the Twentynine Palms area on Monday morning, more than two weeks after a pair of powerful temblors rattled the region, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
A 4.2 quake centered near Twentynine Palms hit on July 22, 2019.
(Credit: USGS)
The quake struck about 9:26 a.m. and was centered nearly 10 miles south of Twentynine Palms and 23 miles north-northeast of Coachella, USGS reported.
It was initially reported to be a 4.4 before being downgraded to a 4.2.
The first quake was followed about an hour and a half later by a small 2.2 temblor, according to USGS.
There were no immediate reports of damages or injuries.
Twentynine Palms is about 180 miles southeast of Ridgecrest, where magnitude 6.4 and 7.1 quakes struck on July 4 and 5 respectively.
That area has been shaken by thousands of aftershocks since the Fourth of July, including at least 70 with a magnitude of 4.0 or greater.
CaSeismograph Live Earthquake Stream
On July 5, 2019, the largest earthquake to strike California in 20 years occurred near the town of Ridgecrest with a moment magnitude of 7.1 following a magnitude 6.4 foreshock on the previous day.
The National Tsunami Warning Center (NTWC) in Palmer, Alaska, has the primary responsibility for determining whether earthquakes in the continental United States, including California, pose a tsunami threat.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) also monitors these earthquakes in case it has to provide back-up service for NTWC .
While California produces many earthquakes, most are too small, too far from the ocean, and/or move the earth in such a way that they are unlikely to produce tsunamis, though there are exceptions.
This animation covers a period of 30 years to put the Ridgecrest earthquakes in context and show how they compare with other recent, noteworthy earthquakes including: Oct 10, 1989 — Loma Prieta — 6.9 Mw Apr 25, 1992 — Cape Mendocino — 7.2 Mw (caused a small tsunami) Jun 28, 1992 — Landers — 7.3 Mw Jan 17, 1994 — Northridge — 6.7 Mw Oct 16, 1999 — Hector Mine — 7.1 Mw Dec 22, 2003 — San Simeon — 6.6 Mw Apr 4, 2010 — Baja California (Mexico) — 7.2 Mw Aug 24, 2014 — South Napa — 6.0 Mw Jul 4, 2019 — Ridgecrest — 6.4 Mw Jul 5, 2019 — Ridgecrest — 7.1 Mw
Malta – the three-island archipelago in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea — has been ruled by many groups since it was first inhabited around 5200 BCE, including Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs and Sicilians. However, long before these cultures, it was inhabited by a mysterious prehistoric group that built the world’s only known prehistoric subterranean temple — Hal Saflieni Hypogeum – which was used as a necropolis and where archeologists found a number of elongated skulls … skulls whose origin has never been determined, leaving them open to speculation that their owners were extraterrestrials. Now, for the first time, those elongated skulls will be subjected to intense scientific study with the intention of determining their true origin.
Photograph of the Hypogeum of Ħal-Saflieni made before 1910
“From an examination of the skeletons of the polished-stone age, it appears that the early inhabitants of Malta were a race of long-skulled people of lower medium height, akin to the early people of Egypt, who spread westward along the north coast of Africa, whence some went to Malta and Sicily and others to Sardinia and Spain.” — NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE January to June, 1920 VOLUME XXXVII
Malta Today announced that the project – called The Sentinels of Ħal Saflieni, Malta: Science Facts versus Science Fiction — will be carried out by Heritage Malta, the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage and Macquarie University of Sydney, Australia. The Hal Saflieni Hypogeum was accidentally discovered in 1902 by construction workers who initially attempted to hide it. Determined to have been used from about 4000 BCE to 2500 BCE, it was excavated by a number of archeologists, including Sir Themistocles “Temi” Zammit, a noted Maltese archeologist, who documented the discovery of around 7,000 skeletons, including many with skulls that were elongated and one that was mysteriously missing a Fossa median – the join that runs along the top of the skull. Unfortunately, the remains crumbled at the touch and only about 20 skulls survived intact.
That’s where the mystery and myth surrounding these remaining elongated skulls deepens. National Geographic was able to examine some and concluded that they were from an entire long-skulled culture. A number of them were put on display in the Archaeological Museum in Valletta, the capital of Malta. In 1985, they were removed from the display by Heritage Malta, the authority responsible for Malta’s prehistoric heritage, and have never been seen in public again. While some say they’ve disappeared, Heritage Malta insists they have been available for scientific research. However, only a handful of people have actually been granted permission. Two were Dr. Anton Mifsud and Dr. Charles Savona Ventura, who published books and articles detailing the skulls’ elongation, abnormally developed temporal partitions, and drilled and swollen occiputs (back of the skull). These are apparently the skulls that will be used in the new analysis.
A physical examination of the skulls will not necessarily resolve other mysteries about their discovery. For example, the papers of the man who first found the site – Emmanuel Magri – have never been published and appear to have disappeared. The original reports of the discovery said there were 33,000 skeletons, not 7,000 – and the latter number was eventually reduced to a mere 100. Of the 20 skulls said to have survived, only six are left. What happened to the others?
Then there are the stories of giant humanoids living in hidden caverns below the already-subterranean Hal Saflieni Hypogeum and the unconfirmed disappearance of 30 children and a teacher on a school tour of the catacombs – whose cries were said to have been heard all over the island.
Let’s hope the new study can solve the origin of the elongated skulls of Malta. As for the other mysteries? Malta obviously knows how to guard its secrets.
In my 2017 book, The Roswell UFO Conspiracy, I wrote the following, which will demonstrate how I personally became so embroiled in the matter of the Tim Cooper-era Majestic 12 papers: “It’s a little known fact that in late 2001 Tim Cooper sold all of his voluminous UFO files to Dr. Robert M. Wood. Bob is the father of Ryan Wood, who has spent years researching alleged crashed UFO incidents – all detailed in his book, Majic Eyes Only. It is even less well-known that in the early days of 2002, Bob hired me to spend a week in an Orange County, California-based motel-room, surrounded by all of the thousands upon thousands of pages of Cooper’s voluminous collection of the cosmic sort. The plan was for me to catalog all of the material, to compile each and every piece of it into chronological order, and to summarize the content of each document, every letter, and every Freedom of Information request that Cooper had submitted to government agencies – which is precisely what I did. It was a week in which I most definitely earned my loot. It was also a week that paralleled the infamous story told by Hunter S. Thompson in his classic gonzo saga, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Whereas Thompson was hunkered down with his whisky, margaritas and shrimp cocktails, for me it was cases of cold beer and club sandwiches.”
Contained in the Cooper files was a document titled UFO Reports and Classified Projects, and which I saw for the first time in that aforementioned Orange County motel-room. It offers a very controversial, non-UFO-themed, explanation for what occurred at Roswell back in July 1947. I doubt that anyone in Ufology – aside from myself, Bob Wood and Tim Cooper – has ever seen the document in its original form. And I do mean “original.” It’s not a photocopy. The relevant extract reads as follows, in relation to 1947-era classified U.S. military programs:
“One of the projects underway at that time incorporated re-entry vehicles containing radium and other radioactive materials combined with biological warfare agents developed by IG Farben for use against allied assault forces in Normandy in 1944. When a V-2 warhead impacted near the town of Corona, New Mexico, on July 4, 1947, the warhead did not explode and it and the deadly cargo lay exposed to the elements which forced the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project to close off the crash site and a cover story was immediately put out that what was discovered was the remains of a radar tracking target suspended by balloons.”
Of IG Farben, the Holocaust Research Project states: “IG Farben was a German Limited Company that was a conglomerate of eight leading German chemical manufacturers, including Bayer, Hoechst and BASF, which at the time were the largest chemical firms in existence. Prior to the First World War these firms had established a community of interests – Interessengemeinschaft – hence the initials IG which merged into a single company on the 25 December 1925, thus constituting the largest chemical enterprise, in the whole world.”
Britannica.com gets to the heart of the absolute worst part of IG Farben’s “work.” They note: “During World War II, IG Farben established a synthetic oil and rubber plant at Auschwitz in order to take advantage of slave labor; the company also conducted drug experiments on live inmates. After the war several company officials were convicted of war crimes (nine being found guilty of plunder and spoliation of property in occupied territory and four being found guilty of imposing slave labor and inhumane treatment on civilians and prisoners of war).”
Scum? Yep.
It appears – within the pages of the UFO Reports and Classified Projects document that Cooper acquired – that someone wanted to make a connection between the Roswell affair of 1947 and IG Farben. It’s important to note, though, that Timothy Cooper specifically chose not to release this particular document into the public domain. In fact, it may well have been the only allegedly leaked document that he never made public. Why did Cooper choose to keep this report out of the hands of Ufology? I don’t know. Perhaps it was too controversial for even Cooper, which is certainly saying something. What I can state for sure, however, is that had I not found the relevant papers in the voluminous files of Cooper back in 2002, it’s highly doubtful that they would ever have surfaced. Most probably, had Cooper chosen to reveal the document, then it would have likely created a firestorm within Ufology. After all, linking the world’s most famous UFO case with Holocaust-connected IG Farben would have provoked a huge controversy and created even more distrust about the actions of the U.S. Government. If the Russians were behind theUFO Reports and Classified Projects document, as I suspect, then that may well have been the goal.
It seemed for a while as we forged bravely into the 21st century that we were pretty smart. We thought we were figuring out the mysteries of the universe, one after another. Recently, however, there’s been a series of reports that all challenge our model of the universe, which we thought was pretty well figured out. First we find out that the sun is a lot stranger than we think it is, then we find out that the universe is more than a billion years younger than it should be. These both suggest the same thing: we’re not nearly as smart as we think we are. This is nothing new, of course. The story of humanity is in essence the surfing of the constant realization that we’re pretty dumb all the way to the stars. Which is a neat little trick.
Now there’s a third in the series of assumption defying realizations. The Hubble constant is an astrophysical value that represents the expansion rate of the universe. It was named for Edwin Hubble who, in 1924, discovered that the farther away from Earth a galaxy was, the faster it appeared to be continuing its outward trajectory. In the early 1990’s, a team led by astrophysicist Wendy Freedman calculated the Hubble Constant within 10% of it’s true value, and scientists have been trying to refine that calculation ever since.
The Hubble Space Telescope, also named for Edwin Hubble, was used to calculate the Hubble constant.
And there seems to be a pretty big problem. Wendy Freedman recently recalculated the Hubble Constant using red giant stars as mileposts—red giants are useful because they reach the same brightness late in their evolution and thus make pretty good distance markers. With her new calculation, rently accepted for publication by the Astrophysical Journal, Wendy Freedman came to an entirely different result than she and her team calculated in the 1990’s. What might this mean? Well, this is just the latest in a series of discoveries related to the age and expansion of the universe that have found serious discrepancies, discrepancies that open up the possibility that something is well and truly broken with physics.
“Alright, I admit it. I don’t understand!”
Wendy Freedman’s red giant method of calculating the Hubble constant was supposed to be a “tie-breaker” between two other competing calculation. Instead it’s a different result entirely. According to Freedman:
“The Hubble constant is the cosmological parameter that sets the absolute scale, size and age of the universe; it is one of the most direct ways we have of quantifying how the universe evolves. The discrepancy that we saw before has not gone away, but this new evidence suggests that the jury is still out on whether there is an immediate and compelling reason to believe that there is something fundamentally flawed in our current model of the universe.”
“Naturally, questions arise as to whether the discrepancy is coming from some aspect that astronomers don’t yet understand about the stars we’re measuring, or whether our cosmological model of the universe is still incomplete. Or maybe both need to be improved upon.”
NASA is launching a brand-new telescope at some point in the mid-2020’s called the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). This telescope will provide the same resolution as the now-defunct Hubble Space Telescope with 100 times the field of view. Astronomers hope that this new super telescope will show them where the discrepancy lies without making us re-do physics. More likely, it will probably keep showing us just how dumb we are.
Imagine a world where magic existed. In such a world, one might be able to wear a cloak that, once it covered our bodies, rendered us invisible; the likes of things we read about or see in films that include Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
Such things will never really exist, at least not from magical means. However, that’s not to say that science won’t eventually be able to achieve similar things. One day, with the use of unique and, at times, almost unearthly composite materials–the likes of which are never found in nature–humans may indeed be able to bring such things as invisibility cloaks into real existence.
To achieve invisibility, a metamaterial needs to possess certain optical properties. Specifically, scientists would have to design the material so that they could control how light moves around an object without being reflected or absorbed. This design is possible, but it would take just the right material with just the right structure.
The aforementioned algorithm, created by Yongmin Liu, a professor at Northeastern University, and his team found that using a computer algorithm to create such unnatural composite materials was “much faster and more accurate than previous approaches, paving the way for engineers to design next-generation materials.”
By introducing the algorithm to some 30,000 different sample data sets, it was able to not only learn those relationships, but to expand on them and predict new varieties based on the data.
Fast forward to 2019, where new developments in this burgeoning field are pushing boundaries even further into tomorrow: a multidisciplinary team with the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Department of Chemical Engineering at the Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) have now formalized a system “that allows researchers to choose materials and design photonic structures arbitrarily by using deep learning.”
In layman’s terms, this means they are using artificial intelligence to aid in the creation of new kinds of metamaterials, capable of functions that include invisibility.
“The resulting metamaterials can be utilized in display, security, and military technologies. In this regard, introduction of AI to the design method is expected to make important contributions to the technological development of metamaterials,” PhysOrgreported.
Of the three areas listed above, perhaps the mention of “military technologies” is the most interesting and impactful. It also reminds us of the kinds of “innovations of tomorrow” that were being foreshadowed decades ago, albeit in relation to more speculative lines of thought.
A good example might include an article that appeared in Britain’s Sunday Dispatch in October 1954. In it, a quote from a spokesman with the British War Office stated that “(UFOs) are invisible to the human eye,” and that radar operators frequently detected “fleets” of unidentified—and invisible—objects passing overhead in the mid-afternoon. Any attempts at establishing visible line-of-sight confirmation proved unsuccessful.
“Every time, they have followed the same pattern, always around mid-day. All our radar sets in the area have picked them up,” the article stated.
This may sound like a description of some rather exotic technology; however, early camouflage techniques were already being developed by around the time of World War I that would allow aircraft to become functionally “invisible” when viewed against the sky at a distance. One 1917 patent application attributed to Mary “Mitty” Taylor Brush proposed a pattern that would be “able to produce a machine which is practically invisible when in the air.” Such techniques, later put into use during wartime, were derived from techniques used in fine art already for centuries.
Modern stealth technology is, of course, far more advanced than this, and although these modern aircraft are generally only “invisible” to radar systems, their incredible speed, sophistication, and maneuverability allows them to often function in ways that almost exceeds any necessity for possessing actual invisibility.
Nonetheless, if current innovations in metamaterials (helped along by artificial intelligence) are any indication, the aircraft of tomorrow may indeed take such technologies into new and unforeseen places… or for that matter, perhaps into the unseen, period.
For those who have been following the UFO phenomenon for a long time are undoubtedly familiar with the famous UFO videos from Sheilaaliens.
Most of the original videos were lost when the original Sheilaaliens channel was terminated long long ago.
But now it appears that Sheilaaliens is back whereby she indicates that she will regularly present new UFO sightings on her channel.
Sheila: In this video I present a compilation of strange things I recorded in Tucson, AZ many years ago. Re-uploaded because the old upload somehow got the aspect ratio squished and distorted to 21:9 or worse, and it was completely unwatchable.
Guys this is nuts! Google is attacking MUFON calling the UFO reporting site a hacking site and telling visitors not enter or risk losing passwords and valuable data. That MUFON is a deceptive website. Its not, its a safe place for anyone to report their photos or video of UFOs that they have seen and for others to read them. It really looks like Google is working with the US government to edit and delete all UFO evidence. This is 100% proof that Google and the US Gov are working together to control what the public knows.
Verloren beschavingen in niemandsland. Van deze archeologische vindplaatsen heb je waarschijnlijk nog nooit gehoord
Verloren beschavingen in niemandsland. Van deze archeologische vindplaatsen heb je waarschijnlijk nog nooit gehoord
Er zijn allerlei archeologische vindplaatsen op aarde waar je hoogstwaarschijnlijk nog nooit van hebt gehoord.
Als je denkt aan oude, verloren beschavingen, dan denk je wellicht aan de Egyptische piramides, Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, de Maya’s of de Azteken.
Er zijn ook veel minder bekende vindplaatsen. Zo is Gobekli Tepe in Turkije, een 12.000 jaar oud tempelcomplex, een compleet mysterie.
Bijna niemand
Of wat dacht je van Angkor Wat in Cambodja? Deze tempel werd pas in de 19e eeuw herontdekt. Er zijn vast ook mensen die zullen denken aan de historische stad Petra in Jordanië.
Er zijn daarnaast oude vindplaatsen waar bijna niemand iets over weet. In de video hieronder worden er een aantal besproken.
Oude ruïnes
Zo werden onlangs in Mosoel in Irak oude ruïnes ontdekt die duizenden jaren lang verborgen lagen.
Je gaat tot de ontdekking komen dat er heel veel is wat wij niet weten over ons verleden. Je kunt je verder afvragen hoeveel er nog ontdekt gaat worden.
Creator of 'Storm Area 51' Movement Fears Event Could Lead to 'Military Base Slaughter'
Creator of 'Storm Area 51' Movement Fears Event Could Lead to 'Military Base Slaughter'
It all started as an apparent farce but has undoubtedly been blown out of proportion, as just under 2 million people signal their intent to storm one of the most highly protected facilities in the United States.
The man behind the ludicrous idea to raid the secretive Area 51 and "see them aliens" has opened up on what will happen next to his viral campaign.
"It started out as just a pure stroke of imagination, just funny. I wanted to do something cool out there now, that we have a bunch of people, but I don't want anybody to get hurt," Matty Roberts told KTNV Channel 13 Las Vegas.
Roberts, from California, is concerned that some overly enthusiastic fans of the alien cover-up theory from Facebook expressed willingness to die for the event. He noted that he didn't want to turn the prank into a "military base slaughter" and would like to see "something educational, maybe music and art. That's what I'm working on".
He showed up for the interview in a black cloak with ominous red clouds and a forehead protector, the signature costume of Akatsuki members, a criminal organisation from the hit anime Naruto.
23ABC News
@23ABCNews
DID YOU KNOW? The guy behind the 'Area 51' Facebook page, which has reached millions, lives in Bakersfield?
We talked to Matty about his actual "raid" plan, social-media buzz, and what exactly is a Naruto Runner? Hmmmm.
The satirical Facebook event he launched, titled 'Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us', suggests an unorthodox way of breaking in: "If we Naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets."
He was referring to the 'anime' running technique, which implies that a ninja can move much faster with their torso leaning forward and their arms tucked back.
The event, scheduled for 20 September, has become the latest Internet fascination. As of the time of writing, 1.8 million users had RSVP'd confirming attendance, while another 1.4 million marked themselves as 'interested'.
Area 51 is a highly-classified US Air Force facility in the Nevada desert. Established in the 1950s, Area 51 was so closely guarded that the government only acknowledged its existence in 2013.
The base is believed to be a test site for top-secret aircraft and aviation technologies, including the U-2 spy plane in the 1950s and the B-2 stealth bomber.
However, a long-running conspiracy theory suggests that Area 51 is where the US government is keeping classified information about alien encounters, or even the aliens themselves.
Organisator ‘Bestorm Area 51’ vreest dat populair Facebookevenement zal leiden tot slachtpartij. Zoveel mensen hebben zich al opgegeven
Organisator ‘Bestorm Area 51’ vreest dat populair Facebookevenement zal leiden tot slachtpartij. Zoveel mensen hebben zich al opgegeven
Al bijna twee miljoen mensen hebben aangegeven van plan te zijn één van de meest geheimzinnige plekken in de Verenigde Staten te bestormen.
De organisator van het evenement, Matty Roberts, is bezorgd dat sommigen van hen bereid zijn om te sterven terwijl ze toegang proberen te krijgen tot Area 51.
Hij wil niet dat het evenement, dat begon als grap, zal resulteren in ‘een slachtpartij op een legerbasis’.
Iets educatiefs
Roberts wil juist dat het iets educatiefs gaat worden, mogelijk in de vorm van muziek of kunst. “Daar werk ik momenteel aan,” zei hij.
De bestorming staat gepland voor 20 september. Op het moment van schrijven hebben al ruim 1,9 miljoen mensen laten weten dat ze gaan. Nog eens 1,4 miljoen zijn geïnteresseerd.
Het Amerikaanse leger zegt voorbereid te zijn en raadt mensen af om naar de legerbasis te komen.
Buitenaards contact
Area 51 is een topgeheime legerbasis in de Nevadawoestijn. Hoewel de basis in de jaren vijftig is gebouwd, werd het bestaan ervan pas in 2013 officieel erkend.
Naar verluidt werden er geheime vliegtuigen getest, waaronder het spionagevliegtuig U-2 en de B-2 stealthbommenwerper.
Volgens een complottheorie heeft de Amerikaanse overheid geheime informatie over buitenaards contact en aliens opgeslagen op de basis.
The strange story of the alleged UFO crash at Aztec, New Mexico in March 1948 – and the recovery of a number of dead “little men” at the site – is a real hotbed of lies, disinformation, and shady characters. Most of those same characters were best avoided by those with dollars to spare. The tale was made infamous in the pages of Frank Scully’s 1950 blockbuster, Behind the Flying Saucers; it was a book which turned out to be a huge seller. Today, the Aztec affair is seen by some ufologists as Roswell’s “little brother.” As its “skeleton in the cupboard” might be a far more apt description, however. Many researchers of the UFO phenomenon dismiss the Aztec incident as nothing but a hoax; one which was perpetrated by a shady businessman/conman named Silas Newton. His less-than-shining FBI filecan be accessed at the FBI’s website, The Vault.
When it came to stories of aliens from faraway worlds, making money was always the goal for Newton. And the only goal. Along for the ride with Newton was Leo Gebauer. He was the Igor to Newton’s ego-driven Dr. Frankenstein. There is, though, a very interesting and extremely odd aspect to the Newton/Aztec story. It serves to demonstrate how the UFO phenomenon was becoming the tool of manipulative disinformation specialists in the intelligence community. And not just of the Soviet Union. The United States was getting into the strange game, too.
Back in 1998, the late Karl Pflock, ufologist and CIA employee (sometimes at the same time…), was approached by a still-anonymous source who had something very interesting to say about the Aztec caper, and about Newton too. It was a decidedly weird series of revelations that Pflock surely never anticipated receiving. To his dying day, Pflock refused to reveal the name of his informant in the shadows – rumors, however, were that the person may have been a nephew of Silas Newton – but, Pflock did say that all of the lunchtime meetings with his source occurred between July 11 and September 24, 1998 and took place in a restaurant in Bernalillo, New Mexico.
So the story goes, Pflock’s informant had in their hands twenty-seven pages taken, or rather torn, from an old and faded, lined journal. No prizes for guessing who that journal had belonged to. That’s right, sly, old Silas Newton. Pflock was told that Newton had kept multiple journals and diaries not just for years, but for decades. They were jammed with entertaining tales of sexual conquests, of Hollywood starlets, of the fleecing of the rich and the gullible, and of wild adventures across the United States. The outcome of all this? Newton decided, around the turn of the 1970s, that it was right about time for him to write-up his version of the Aztec controversy. It would surely have been a definitive page-turner. Death, however, inconveniently intervened in 1972, when Newton passed away in his mid-eighties. What happened to all of those journals is anyone’s guess.
As for those few pages that Pflock was allowed to see – and to transcribe word for word – they tell a tale of undeniable weirdness. By his own admittance, and a couple of years after the Aztec story surfaced in Frank Scully’s book, Newton was clandestinely visited by two representatives of “a highly secret U.S. Government entity,” as Pflock carefully and tactfully described it. Those same representatives of the government told Newton, in no uncertain terms, that they knew his Aztec story was a complete and bald-faced lie. Utter bullshit, in fact. Incredibly, though, they wanted Newton to keep telling the taleto just about anyone and everyone who would listen. This caused Pflock to ponder on an amazing possibility: “Did the U.S. Government or someone associated with it use Newton to discredit the idea of crashed flying saucers so a real captured saucer or saucers could be more easily kept under wraps?”
Far more intriguing, though, , is the next question that Pflock posed: “Was this actually nothing to do with real saucers but instead some sort of psychological warfare operation [italics mine]?” With the Newton revelations in hand, Pflock, no later than 1999, came to believe that back in the early fifties someone in the government, the intelligence community, or the military of the United States – and maybe even a swirling combination of all three – wanted the Aztec story further circulated. The purpose: as a means to try and convince the Russians that the U.S. military had acquired, or captured, alien technology. When, in reality, it had no such thing in its possession at all.
For the record, in 2002, when Pflock and I were corresponding regularly on the matter of these particularly curious revelations, he told me that he had been able to confirm who the two men that approached Newton worked for and specifically when their meeting with Newton occurred. The time-frame was late March 1950 and the pair of spooks came from a small group within the CIA. Slightly more than a year later, Pflock learned, that very same group was absorbed into the Psychological Strategy Board. The PSB was…”established by Presidential Directive on April 4, 1951 ‘to authorize and provide for the more effective planning, coordination, and conduct within the framework of approved national policies, of psychological operations.’ An abbreviated version of the Presidential Directive was released to the public on June 20, 1951.”
CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia
Having digested the words above, it can be said with a high degree of certainty that those predecessors to the PSB, which Newton was confronted by, would have been the perfect people to have enlisted Newton into their operation mind-fuck. Not only that, in November 1998 Pflock secured a copy of Newton’s will. Having earlier seen Newton’s “scrawling, sprawling” writing up close at that Bernalillo restaurant, Pflock said: “The will unquestionably is in Newton’s hand, and while I’m certainly not a handwriting expert, the comparison left no doubt in my mind that he wrote the journal, too.”
I know just how fascinated Pflock was when it came to the Aztec crash and the claims of Newton and that “highly secret U.S. Government entity.” Pflock and I had been corresponding as far back as the late 1990s, but, I didn’t meet him in person until 2003 – at a UFO gig in the city of Aztec itself. For a number of years, the conference was an annual event. But, no more. When Pflock and I finally met, he near-immediately suggested that we should write an Aztec-themed book. Pflock’s reasoning was that he knew the story very well, and, via the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, I had uncovered hundreds upon hundreds of pages of material – chiefly from the FBI – on the Aztec controversy and the players within it. He thought that we would make a good team. Particularly so now that I lived in the U.S. – and specifically in Dallas, Texas, which (in terms of the road-trips that I regularly undertake) is not at all far from New Mexico, where Pflock resided and where the 1948 crash supposedly happened.
As I listened, Pflock told me that his idea was, essentially, to make the book a biography on Newton, but with the Aztec affair being the main thrust of it all. I thought it was a very good idea. Pflock suggested that he prepare a synopsis for his literary agent (this was around a year before I first met my longstanding agent, Lisa Hagan), which is exactly what he did. The book was going to be called Silas the Magnificent: A True Tale of Greed, Credulity, and (Maybe) Government Chicanery and Cover-up in 1950s America. Sadly, the idea collapsed when Pflock fell seriously ill with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. He unfortunately died from the effects of ALS on June 5, 2006, at the age of just sixty-three.
Pflock is gone, but the printed synopsis still exists, as do several printed chapters, including one on the matter of the Psychological Strategy Board aspect of all this. It would have made a good book. And, very possibly, it just might have revealed more of the fabricated story of how – and with the help of Silas Newton – American intelligence led the Russians on a wild goose chase and had them believing that U.S. scientists were secretly studying a recovered UFO and its advanced technologies and weapons-systems. If such a plot successfully terrified Soviet intelligence, for the U.S. government it was a job well done.
There’s one more thing that needs to be highlighted on this controversy-saturated saga of a crashed UFO and Silas Newton. On June 24, 1964, Frank Scully, whose 1950 book, Behind the Flying Saucers, placed the alleged incident firmly under the spotlight, passed away. As the New York Times noted in its obituary on Scully, one day later: “Mr. Scully was labeled a Communist by Congressman Martin Dies, head of the House Un-American Activities Committee. After a stormy two-hour session with the Committee, Mr. Scully was cleared of the charge.”
Yes, Scully was exonerated. It is a fact, though, that sometimes – to use a U.K. term – “mud sticks.” For at least some, including those in the intelligence community, Scully was still seen as a closet communist, regardless of the fact that he had been completely absolved of any kind of guilt. Maybe, those spooks and spies who paid Silas Newton a visit in 1950 were concerned by the possibility that Scully was in cahoots with the Russians. This is, admittedly, speculation and nothing more. But, as I note in my new book, Flying Saucers from the Kremlin, we see flying saucer enthusiasts, communism, and secret government activity rolled into one.
Cosmic Pearls Found in Fossil Clams, Evidence of Asteroid Strike in Florida
Cosmic Pearls Found in Fossil Clams, Evidence of Asteroid Strike in Florida
Researchers picking through the contents of fossil clams from a Sarasota County quarry found dozens of tiny glass beads, likely the calling cards of an ancient meteorite.
Analysis of the beads suggests they are microtektites, particles that form when the explosive impact of an extraterrestrial object sends molten debris hurtling into the atmosphere where it cools and recrystallizes before falling back to Earth.
They are the first documented microtektites in Florida and possibly the first to be recovered from fossil shells.
Mike Meyer was a University of South Florida undergraduate when he discovered the microtektites during a 2006 summer fieldwork project led by Roger Portell, invertebrate paleontology collections director at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
As part of the project, students systematically collected fossils from the shell-packed walls of a quarry that offered a cross-section of the last few million years of Florida’s geological history. They pried open fossil clams, washing the sediment trapped inside through very fine sieves. Meyer was looking for other tiny objects – the shells of single-celled organisms known as benthic foraminifera – when he noticed the translucent glassy balls, smaller than grains of salt.
Mike Meyer mounted the microtektites on micropaleontology slides, a process that involves licking a paintbrush to pick up the small spheres and place them on dots of glue. “I did accidentally eat a couple of them,” Meyer said.
Photo credit: Meyer et al in Meteoritics and Planetary Science.
“They really stood out,” said Meyer, now an assistant professor of Earth systems science at Harrisburg University in Pennsylvania. “Sand grains are kind of lumpy, potato-shaped things. But I kept finding these tiny, perfect spheres.”
After the fieldwork ended, his curiosity about the spheres persisted. But his emails to various researchers came up short: No one knew what they were. Meyer kept the spheres – 83 in total – in a small box for more than a decade.
“It wasn’t until a couple years ago that I had some free time,” he said. “I was like, ‘Let me just start from scratch.’”
Meyer analyzed the elemental makeup and physical features of the spheres and compared them to microtektites, volcanic rock and byproducts of industrial processes, such as coal ash. His findings pointed to an extraterrestrial origin.
“It did blow my mind,” he said.
He thinks the microtektites are the products of one or more small, previously unknown meteorite impacts, potentially on or near the Florida Platform, the plateau that undergirds the Florida Peninsula.
Initial results from an unpublished test suggest the spheres have traces of exotic metals, further evidence they are microtektites, Meyer said.
Most of them had been sealed inside fossil Mercenaria campechiensis or southern quahogs. Portell said that as clams die, fine sediment and particles wash inside. As more sediment settles on top of the clams over time, they close, becoming excellent long-term storage containers.
“Inside clams like these we can find whole crabs, sometimes fish skeletons,” Portell said. “It’s a nice way of preserving specimens.”
Credit: Florida Museum of Natural History
During the 2006 fieldwork, the students recovered microtektites from four different depths in the quarry, which is “a little weird,” Meyer said, since each layer represents a distinct period of time.
“It could be that they’re from a single tektite bed that got washed out over millennia or it could be evidence for numerous impacts out on the Florida Platform that we just don’t know about,” he said.
Credit: Florida Museum of Natural History
The researchers plan to date the microtektites, but Portell’s working guess is that they are “somewhere around 2 to 3 million years old.”
One oddity is that they contain high amounts of sodium, a feature that sets them apart from other impact debris. Salt is highly volatile and generally boils off if thrust into the atmosphere at high speed, Meyer said.
“This high sodium content is intriguing because it suggests a very close location for the impact,” Meyer said. “Or at the very least, whatever impact created it likely hit a very large reserve of rock salt or the ocean. A lot of those indicators point to something close to Florida.”
The relative age of microtektites can be determined by a process known as potassium-argon dating. “The melting process basically sets the clock back to zero because that’s when this rock, ever so tiny, was created,” Meyer said. “With recrystallization, the clock starts again, and you can use that.”
Photo credit: Meyer et al in Meteoritics and Planetary Science.
Meyer and Portell suspect there are far more microtektites awaiting discovery in Florida and have asked amateur fossil collectors to keep an eye out for the tiny spheres.
But no one will be recovering microtektites from the original quarry any time soon. It’s now part of a housing development.
“Such is the nature of Florida,” Meyer said.
Researchers searching for fossils kept finding tiny glassy spheres inside ancient clams. After more than a decade, testing suggests they are evidence of one or more undocumented meteorite impacts in Florida’s distant past.
Credit: Florida Museum photo by Kristen Grace
Contacts and sources: Natalie van Hoose Florida Museum of Natural History
Citation: A first report of microtektites from the shell beds of southwestern Florida. Mike Meyer, Peter J. Harries, Roger W. Portell. Meteoritics & Planetary Science, 2019; DOI: 10.1111/maps.13299
Meteorite Found in Siberia Contains Naturally Impossible Crystal
Meteorite Found in Siberia Contains Naturally Impossible Crystal
In 2009, scientists made a groundbreaking discovery that was ultimately traced to a remote corner of the world. In a box obtained from the Italian Museum of Natural History in Florence, Italy, they found a small grain of extraterrestrial mineral that was formed shortly after the birth of our solar system, 4.5 billion years ago. The mineral came from an area near the Koryak Mountains in eastern Siberia, and was delivered to Earth by an object known as the Khatyrka meteorite. The latter was discovered only after researchers returned to the area in search of more exotic minerals in 2011.
This new rock has been designated as a quasicrystal, in recognition of its unique structural properties. A quasicrystal looks like a normal crystal on the outside, but on the inside it is noticeably different. While the atoms in a pure crystal are arranged in constantly repeating patterns, the atomic lattices inside the quasicrystal are both ordered and diverse, displaying a range of shapes never before seen in a natural substance.
More than 100 synthetic versions of these minerals have been produced in laboratories, between 1982 and the present day. Until these experiments, such a form of matter had never been seen before, and in the past had been believed to be theoretically impossible according to accepted ideas about the laws of nature. Previously the only thing ever found were crystals, with their rigidly repetitive patterns, and so-called normal solids, which are comprised of atoms arranged in no particular order.
A Scientific Detective Story
Even after quasicrystals were created in a laboratory, their existence in nature was doubted. But one of the people who’d predicted that quasicrystals might actually be makeable, Princeton University theoretical physicist Paul Steinhardt, was determined to leave no stone unturned (figuratively and literally) in his search for quasicrystals formed by the processes of nature .
It was Steinhardt who was responsible for finding the quasicrystal sample in the box from the Italian museum, with assistance from an Italian geologist named Luca Bindi. Steinhardt formed a team of scientists to study this intriguing mineral, and they eventually confirmed the unique structure of the tiny rock from one of the planet’s remotest areas.
To uncover the true origin of the quasicrystal sample, the team of scientists investigated numerous possibilities. They tried to develop a realistic scenario explaining how the quasicrystal could have formed naturally on Earth. But in the end, they were able to establish with near 100-percent certainty that it had arrived on Earth from somewhere else in the solar system.
Steinhardt’s analysis showed the mineral was embedded in another mineral known as stishovite. This rock comes from meteorites, and its encirclement of the quasicrsytal meant both minerals had been formed by a high-pressure process at approximately the same time inside a meteorite that eventually landed in the wilds of Siberia. Further cementing their conclusion was the discovery that the ratio of oxygen isotopes inside the quasicrystal was not consistent with ratios found on Earth, but was instead explainable only if the quasicrystal had been created off-planet.
“The finding is important evidence that quasicrystals can form in nature under astrophysical conditions, and provides evidence that this phase of matter can remain stable over billions of years,” Steinhardt explained after announcing the results of his team’s analysis.
Not content with finding just one quasicrystal, Steinhardt and associates made their own trip to Siberia in 2011. After searching the Kamchatka Peninsula area near the Koryak Mountains, they were able to obtain a fresh sample of rock from the Khatyrka meteorite, and inside they eventually found two more quasicrystals , each of which had a unique molecular structure. Since quasicrystals are extremely small the hunt for them is a bit like searching for a needle in a haystack, and the most recently discovered sample was only uncovered in 2016, five years after the meteorite sample was removed from Siberia.
All three quasicrystals were found to contain a mixture of aluminum, copper and iron. The third quasicrystal discovered has a special structure that has yet to be created in synthetic form in a laboratory, highlighting nature’s persistent habit of producing more novelty than we expect or imagine to be possible.
As for the source of the naturally-formed quasicrystals, Steinhardt speculates that a violent collision between two asteroids in the early days of the solar system may have created these remarkable minerals. Close study of their characteristics, and other materials in the Khatyrka meteorite sample retrieved, could help physicists and geologists determine more about what conditions were like when the solar system was in its formative stage.
Quasicrystals possess an interesting package of characteristics. They are extremely hard, but they are also slippery to the touch and do not generate much friction.
So far, the search for useful applications has yielded only a few results, even though researchers have been working with synthetic samples for more than three decades. Quasicrystal has been used to harden the steel from which surgical and other medical instruments are manufactured, and Steinhardt himself invented a quasicrystal-lined frying pan that has some impressive no-stick qualities. But as of now, that’s about it.
Nevertheless, hope springs eternal.
As explained by Paul Asimov, a quasicrystal researcher from the California Institute of Technology, scientists working in this area hope “to find new quasicrystalline alloys that might have some use, because none of the ones discovered so far really have any use other than ‘wow, this is cool. But its not out of the question that someone will find a really good use for quasicrystals one of these days.”
Treasure Troves from the Sky
It is estimated that as much as 100 tonnes of space debris will enter the Earth’s atmosphere each and every day. Most of it will burn up, but a few thousand kilograms of material will actually make it to the Earth’s surface annually.
Few would ever guess that we’re constantly being showered by rocks and dust from the solar system, only a small portion of which will ever be seen or identified.
Which of course bings up a question. Are there other exotic, extraterrestrial forms of matter delivered by meteorites laying around in remote or distant locations, just waiting to be discovered by intrepid scientific explorers? The possibility cannot be ruled out.
At one time, the existence of substances like quasicrystals was considered impossible Other impossible leftovers from ancient times may have landed here as well, brought in on the wings of fiery, glowing chariots of rock. If and when they’re discovered, they may force us to expand our conceptions about the nature of matter.
Top image:An iron meteorite. Credit: Vladimir / Adobe Stock
You may see the footage below. Footage of a huge shadow moving over the crowd stays in the movie. Footage of a tremendous shadow moving over the crowd stays in the movie.
You might actually watch videos all day long for many years about aliens. The quick video below, for example, is just one of several contemporary sightings. It is possible 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 simply one of the absolute most productive procedures to do hypnosis without the use of an actual hypnotist.
You may have a look at the footage below. It’s possible that you have a look at the footage below. You’re able to look at the footage below. You can have a peek at the footage below.
You may have a look at the video below. You have the ability to have a look at the video below. It’s possible to have a peek at the video below. You’re ready to have a look at the video below. Let’s take a quick glance at UFO history.
Life After Latest UFO Footage
Some reports state it is a ping, although some claim it is a beep. They state it’s a ping, but others claim it’s a beep. Today you can get the related news immediately! The great news for people that would like to have an out-of-body experience (OOBE), but haven’t yet done so is that there are lots of astral projection techniques out there. The official story has changed a lot of occasions and a lot of questions remain. The beeswarm plot would enable you to easily see whether any buildings fell outside of the standard distribution, which might help identify candidates for deep energy retrofits.
The Bigfoot sighting a part of a bigger recording, but is covered during an approximate 53-second part of the film. The sighting itself, in spite of the corroborative sightings, is not hard to dismiss by itself. There are, however, several other similar sightings around some of the absolute most nuclear heavy facilities on Earth.
To us, it’s the only moon. The complete Moon can cause all sorts of changes on Earth. It can lead to all types of changes on Earth. The total Moon can result in a variety of changes on Earth.
Today, a great deal of individuals are certain that aliens exist. Other folks report being made to breed with human-like extraterrestrials. None are in fact extraterrestrial spacecraft. None are in reality extraterrestrial spacecraft.
My sighting only lasted a number of seconds. It’s simple to comprehend why there are lots of UFO sightings. Today, UFO sighting has been an issue of amusement as an alternative to a concern, despite the fact that there are ample evidences about their scary overall look. Many reported UFO sightings actually end up being something as simple as a balloon.
UFOs are observed through telescopes. They are frequently associated with aliens and conspiracy theories. They are often associated with aliens and conspiracy theories. At some stage, you’re very likely to encounter a UFO. At times, however, UFOs can’t be identified due to the minimal quality of evidence associated with their sightings. Throughout that period of time, there were two triangle UFOs sighted in the same location.
A study led by researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) puts a sequence to the events which gave rise to our Galaxy.
The Milky Way 10 billion years ago and the Milky Way shape currently
Credit: IAC
The universe 13,000 million years ago was very different from the universe we know today. It is understood that stars were forming at a very rapid rate, forming the first dwarf galaxies, whose mergers gave rise to the more massive present-day galaxies, including our own. However the exact chain of the events which produced the Milky Way was not known until now.
Exact measurements of position, brightness and distance for around a million stars of our galaxy within 6,500 light years of the sun, obtained with the Gaia space telescope, have allowed a team from the IAC to reveal some of its early stages. “We have analyzed, and compared with theoretical models, the distribution of colours and magnitudes (brightnesses) of the stars in the Milky Way, splitting them into several components; the so-called stellar halo (a spherical structure which surrounds spiral galaxies) and the thick disc (stars forming the disc of our Galaxy, but occupying a certain height range)” explains Carme Gallart, a researcher at the IAC and the first author of this article, which is published today in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Previous studies had discovered that the Galactic halo showed clear signs of being made up of two distinct stellar components, one dominated by bluer stars than the other. The movement of the stars in the blue component quickly allowed us to identify it as the remains of a dwarf galaxy (Gaia-Enceladus) which impacted onto the early Milky Way. However the nature of the red population, and the epoch of the merger between Gaia-Enceladus and our Galaxy were unknown until now.
“Analyzing the data from Gaia has allowed us to obtain the distribution of the ages of the stars in both components and has shown that the two are formed by equally old stars, which are older than those of the thick disc” says IAC researcher and co-author Chris Brook. But if both components were formed at the same time, what differentiates one from the other? “The final piece of the puzzle was given by the quantity of “metals” (elements which are not hydrogen or helium) in the stars of one component or the other” explains Tomás Ruiz Lara, an IAC researcher and another of the authors of the article. “The stars in the blue component have a smaller quantity of metals than those of the red component”. These findings, with the addition of the predictions of simulations which are also analyzed in the article, have allowed the researchers to complete the history of the formation of the Milky Way.
Thirteen thousand million years ago stars began to form in two different stellar systems which then merged: one was a dwarf galaxy which we call Gaia-Enceladus, and the other was the main progenitor of our Galaxy, some four times more massive and with a larger proportion of metals. Some ten thousand million years ago there was a violent collision between the more massive system and Gaia-Enceladus. As a result some of its stars, and those of Gaia-Enceladus were set into chaotic motion, and eventually formed the halo of the present Milky Way. After that there were violent bursts of star formation until 6,000 million years ago, when the gas settled into the disc of the Galaxy, and produced what we know as the “thin disc”.
“Until now all the cosmological predictions and observations of distant spiral galaxies similar to the Milky Way indicate that this violent phase of merging between smaller structures was very frequent” explains Matteo Monelli, a researcher at the IAC and a co-author of the article. Now we have been able to identify the specificity of the process in our own Galaxy, revealing the first stages of our cosmic history with unprecedented detail.
Scientific article: Carme Gallart, Edouard J. Bernard, Chris B. Brook, Tomás Ruiz-Lara, Santi Cassisi, Vanessa Hill and Matteo Monelli. Uncovering the birth of the Milky Way through accurate stellar ages with Gaia. Nature Astronomy (22 July 2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-019-0829-5
Contacts and sources: Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC)
Astronomers Map Vast Cosmic Void in Our Galactic Neihborhood
Astronomers Map Vast Cosmic Void in Our Galactic Neighborhood
An astronomer from the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA) and an international team published a new study that reveals more of the vast cosmic structure surrounding our Milky Way galaxy.
The universe is a tapestry of galaxy congregations and vast voids. In a new study being reported in The Astrophysical Journal, Brent Tully’s team applies the same tools from an earlier study to map the size and shape of an extensive empty region they called the Local Void that borders the Milky Way galaxy. Using the observations of galaxy motions, they infer the distribution of mass responsible for that motion, and construct three-dimensional maps of our local Universe.
A smoothed rendition of the structure surrounding the Local Void. Our Milky Way galaxy lies at the origin of the red-green-blue orientation arrows (each 200 million lightyears in length). We are at a boundary between a large, low density void, and the high density Virgo cluster.
Credit: R. Brent Tully
Galaxies not only move with the overall expansion of the universe, they also respond to the gravitational tug of their neighbors and regions with a lot of mass. As a consequence, relative to the overall expansion of the Universe they are moving towards the densest areas and away from regions with little mass — the voids.
Although we live in a cosmic metropolis, back in 1987 Tully and Richard Fisher noted that our Milky Way galaxy is also at the edge of an extensive empty region that they called the Local Void. The existence of the Local Void has been widely accepted, but it remained poorly studied because it lies behind the center of our galaxy and is therefore heavily obscured from our view.
Now, Tully and his team have measured the motions of 18,000 galaxies in the Cosmicflows-3 compendium of galaxy distances, constructing a cosmographic map that highlights the boundary between the collection of matter and the absence of matter that defines the edge of the Local Void. They used the same technique in 2014 to identify the full extent of our home supercluster of over one hundred thousand galaxies, giving it the name Laniakea, meaning “immense heaven” in Hawaiian.
For 30 years, astronomers have been trying to identify why the motions of the Milky Way, our nearest large galaxy neighbor Andromeda, and their smaller neighbors deviate from the overall expansion of the Universe by over 600 km/s (1.3 million mph). The new study shows that roughly half of this motion is generated “locally” from the combination of a pull from the massive nearby Virgo Cluster and our participation in the expansion of the Local Void as it becomes ever emptier.
Representations of the void can be seen in a video (below) and, alternatively, with an interactive model (below). With the interactive model, a viewer can pan, zoom, rotate, and pause/activate the time evolution of movement along orbits. The orbits are shown in a reference frame that removes the overall expansion of the universe. What we are seeing are the deviations from cosmic expansion caused by the interactions of local sources of gravity.
The study, Cosmicflows-3: Cosmography of the Local Void is published in the July 22, 2019 issue of The Astrophysical Journal, and is available online.
Contacts and sources: Dr. Roy Gal. Dr. Brent Tully
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Citation:Cosmicflows-3: Cosmography of the Local Void. R. Brent Tully, Daniel Pomarède, Romain Graziani, Hélène M. Courtois, Yehuda Hoffman, Edward J. Shaya. The Astrophysical Journal, 2019; 880 (1): 24 DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab2597
It is difficult to describe what this weird object may have been; celestial object, UFO or something else that enters the atmosphere?
Linda Miller: On July 15, 2019 I felt compelled to go outside and film the sun gain. I was in the middle of watching the sun go down and when I turned my head and saw this... I thought it might be a plane, I was wrong.
Linda: The colors are the real thing, just adjusted exposure. It is really pretty and weird all at the same time. I have no freakin' idea.
I found this diamond shaped base in a gigapan photo today. The base is located within the 93km Copernicus crater. The diamond structure is a black metallic color and is attached to another longer black metallic structure. There are also lots of lights glowing around these buildings, which makes me believe someone is home. These structures are probably portable, meaning they are ships that landed there and they sit there until they want to leave. It make me wonder what they are doing there? Perhaps mining. Scott C. Waring
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Pixie Geldof Reveals Her Encounter with a UFO in Rome
Pixie Geldof Reveals Her Encounter with a UFO in Rome
Singer and model Pixie Geldof claimed to have spotted an extraterrestrial, and she wanted to befriend aliens after the incident. One of the daughters of Bob Geldof was in Rome with a friend when she saw the UFO.
She revealed she had seen strange lights and remembered recently when she was in Rome about two years ago of spotting an odd star next to the moon. She has never seen a star right next to the moon. She and her friend convinced themselves that they had seen a UFO.
Geldof, 28, went on the say that she believed in aliens and she’d try to be friends with them if they were to contact her.
She said that it is insane to believe we’re alone in the universe.
Geldof’s late sister Peaches also took an interest in the unknown and even in Scientology.
India's Chandrayaan-2 mission is now on its way to the moon, but it has a slow journey ahead: The rover and lander won't touch down until early September.
As the Apollo missions the U.S. spent the weekend commemorating prove, it doesn't necessarily have to take seven weeks to land on the moon. But the lander and rover of Chandrayaan-2 were scheduled to touch down Sept. 6 (Sept. 7 local time in mission control) — and that was before the launch was delayed nearly a week.
The slow, round-about route that Chandrayaan-2 will follow to reach the moon reflects the power of the Indian rocket used to launch the spacecraft, called the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark-III. That rocket doesn't carry the same amount of thrust as the giant Saturn V rockets that drove NASA's Apollo program — and no surprise, since those U.S. boosters were the most powerful rockets ever built.The Apollo missions were also designed to carry astronauts, while Chandrayaan-2 is a smaller, uncrewed mission.
This Indian Space Research Organisation diagram shows the flight profile of the Chandrayaan-2 spaceraft as they fly to the moon between July and September 2019. Chandrayaan-2 will take about seven weeks to reach the moon.
(Image credit: Indian Space Research Organisation)
India's Chandrayaan-2 orbiter (bottom) and Vikram lander (top with legs) as seen during launch preparations.
(Image credit: India Space Research Organisation)
ISRO's landing site for Chandrayaan-2's Vikram lander is near the south pole of the moon.
(Image credit: Indian Space Research Organisation)
India launched a three-part moon mission called Chandrayaan-2 on July 22, 2019.
(Image credit: Indian Space Research Organisation)
So Chandrayaan-2 was always scheduled to spend a while orbiting Earth before transferring to lunar orbit. After the launch delay last week, engineers at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which oversees the mission, adjusted the mission timeline to ensure the landing schedule wouldn't be seriously affected.
Keeping the landing time from slipping too far is important because the lander and rover aren't designed to withstand the bitterly cold lunar nights, which last the equivalent of two weeks here on Earth.
According to the mission's new schedule, Chandrayaan-2 will spend 23 days orbiting Earth, gradually raising its altitude on one side of an elliptical orbit around the planet. Then, in mid-August, it will turn its sights on the moon, completing a series of maneuvers to leave Earth orbit and begin circling the moon.
In order to accommodate the launch delay, Chandrayaan-2 will spend less time orbiting the moon than previously planned, according to the Hindustan Times.
During the first week of September, the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter will release its Vikram lander, which will then descend to the surface, touching down just a bit later than the mission's original timetable called for. If all goes well, a rover called Pragyan, will then be deployed from the lander a few hours later.
When Vikram lander does land, it will do so near the moon's south pole, an area of particular interest to scientists and explorers because of its stash of water ice in permanently shaded craters. Several of the payloads on board both the lander and its companion rover designed to map and analyze this ice.
If Chandrayaan-2's flight and landing go smoothly, India will become the first country to reach the moon's south pole and only the fourth country to successfully land softly on the moon, after the former Soviet Union, United States and China.
A vast cosmic void surrounding our galaxy has been mapped and measured by a team of astronomers to work out its gravitational influence on the Milky Way.
For 30 years astronomers have been trying to work out why the Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy and their smaller neighbours are expanding faster than the rest of the Universe by over 1.3 million mph (600 km/s).
Experts from the University of Hawaii focused their attentions on a region known at the 'Local Void', estimated to be between 146 and almost a billion light-years wide - and which, they say, is getting bigger.
They found that roughly half of this rapid expansion is caused 'locally' from the combination of a pull from the massive nearby Virgo Cluster and our participation in the expansion of the Local Void as it becomes ever emptier.
Scroll down for video
A vast cosmic void surrounding our galaxy has been mapped and measured by a team of astronomers to work out its gravitational influence on the Milky Way. Pictured: A computer generated 3D image of the Local Void's shape, with the Milky Way found at the centre of the blue, green and red arrows
Experts from the university measured the motions of 18,000 galaxies in the Cosmicflows-3 compendium of galaxy distances.
Using this data, they constructed a cosmographic map that highlights the boundary between the collection of matter and the absence of matter that defines the edge of the Local Void.
They used the same technique in 2014 to identify the full extent of our home supercluster of over one hundred thousand galaxies, giving it the name Laniakea, meaning 'immense heaven' in Hawaiian.
Representations of the void can be seen in the video below and with the interactive model above.
With the interactive model, a viewer can pan, zoom, rotate, and pause/activate the time evolution of movement along orbits.
The orbits are shown in a reference frame that removes the overall expansion of the universe. What we are seeing are the deviations from cosmic expansion caused by the interactions of local sources of gravity.
For 30 years astronomers have been trying to work out why the Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy and their smaller neighbours are expanding faster than the rest of the Universe by over 1.3 million mph (600 km/s). The Milky Way is located at the centre of the arrows in this image
Experts from the University of Hawaii focused their attentions on a region known at the 'Local Void', estimated to be between 146 and almost a billion light-years wide - and which, they say, is getting bigger. This image shows void areas in our region of space, with our Local Void pictured in black
The universe is a tapestry of galaxy congregations and vast voids. Galaxies not only move with the overall expansion of the universe, they also respond to the gravitational tug of their neighbours and regions with a lot of mass.
As a consequence, relative to the overall expansion of the universe, they are moving towards the densest areas and away from regions with little mass - the voids.
Although we live in a cosmic metropolis, back in 1987 Brent Tully and Richard Fisher noted that our Milky Way galaxy is also at the edge of an extensive empty region that they called the Local Void.
The existence of the Local Void has been widely accepted, but it remained poorly studied because it lies behind the centre of our galaxy and is therefore heavily obscured from our view.
Pictured: A computer simulation showing part of the 'cosmic web' structure that makes up the universe. Blue and white represent galaxies and the darker sections are voids containing very little matter
WHAT IS THE COSMIC WEB OF FILAMENTS THAT THE UNIVERSE IS MADE UP OF?
'Ordinary' matter, which makes up everything we can see, corresponds to only five per cent of the known universe. The rest is made up of so-called 'dark matter.'
For decades, at least half of this regular matter had eluded detection, but scientists have in recent years made the first direct observations of a 'cosmic web' of filaments spanning between galaxies.
These filaments are made up of gas at temperatures between 100,000°C (180,032 °F) and 10 million°C (50 million°F) and the experts believe these structures may account for the 'missing' ordinary matter.
Studies have estimated that around 95 per cent of the universe is made of a mixture of 'dark matter' and 'dark energy', which only makes its presence felt by its gravitational pull, but has never been seen directly.
What is less widely known, however, is that around half of the regular matter is also missing.
In 2015, a team led by University of Geneva scientist Dominique Eckert claimed that these 'missing baryons' - subatomic particles made up of three quarks - were detected because of their X-ray signature in a massive cluster of galaxies known as Abell 2744.
Using the XMM-Newton space telescope, the researchers found matter concentrated into a network of knots and links connected through vast filaments, known as the 'cosmic web'.
Large-scale galaxy surveys have shown that the distribution of ordinary matter in the universe is not homogeneous.
Instead, under the action of gravity, matter is concentrated into so-called filamentary structures, forming a network of knots and links called the 'cosmic web'.
The regions experiencing the highest gravitational force collapse and form the knots of the network, such as Abell 2744.
Researchers focused on Abell 2744 - a massive cluster of galaxies with a complex distribution of dark and luminous matter at its centre - to make their finding.
Comparable to neural networks, these knots then connect to one another through filaments, where the researchers identified the presence of gas, and consequently, the missing ordinary matter thought to make up the universe.
The local void — a vast cosmic structure surrounding our Milky Way galaxy — has been mapped in a new study, suggesting why our galaxy doesn’t travel with the expansion of the universe.
The large-scale structure of the universe is a tapestry of congregations of galaxies and vast voids. Applying same tools from an earlier study, Brent Tully from the University of Hawaii and his international team of astronomers have been able to map the size and shape of an extensive empty region they called the Local Void that borders the Milky Way galaxy.
Shaded grey contours outline the extent of the Local Void, while blue dots show major mass constituents (large galaxies, galaxy groups, and clusters). The curved blue lines show the derived motions of these massive objects, after removing the overall expansion of the universe. The most important galaxy congregations are given special symbols, like the red ball identifying the Virgo Cluster. The dominant pattern of motions revealed by the orbits is a flow away from the Local Void.
(University of Hawaii)
Tully and his team were able to measure the motions of 18,000 galaxies in the Cosmicflows-3 compendium of galaxy distances. This allowed them to build a 3D cosmographic map that highlighting the boundary between the collection of matter and the absence of matter. This boundary defining the edge of the Local Void.
The study gives researchers a good idea of why our galaxy seems to be
The team used the same technique to identify the full extent of our home supercluster of over one hundred thousand galaxies in 2014, giving it the name Laniakea — or “immense heaven” in Hawaiian.
For 30 years, astronomers have been trying to identify why the motions of the Milky Way, our nearest large galaxy neighbour Andromeda, and their smaller neighbours deviate from the overall expansion of the Universe by over 600 km/s (1.3 million mph).
This new study — published in The Astrophysical Journal — shows that roughly half of this motion is generated “locally” from the combination of a pull from the massive nearby Virgo Cluster and our participation in the expansion of the Local Void as it becomes ever emptier.
Studying the local void
Galaxies not only move with the overall expansion of the universe — or the Hubble Flow — but they also respond to the gravitational influence of their neighbours and regions with an abundance of mass.
A smoothed rendition of the structure surrounding the Local Void. Our Milky Way galaxy lies at the origin of the red-green-blue orientation arrows (each 200 million lightyears in length). We are at a boundary between a large, low-density void, and the high-density Virgo cluster.
(University of Hawaii)
As a consequence, relative to the Hubble Flow they are moving towards the densest areas and away from regions with little mass — the voids.
The knowledge that our Milky Way galaxy is at the edge of an extensive empty region that they called the Local Void dates back to research spearheaded by Tully and Richard Fisher in 1987.
Despite the fact that the existence of the Local Void has been widely accepted, it has remained poorly studied until now, because it lies behind the centre of our galaxy. This means it heavily obscured from our view by gas and dust lying in the galaxy’s equatorial plane.
In addition to a video showing the simulations the team created, the astronomers have also provided the public with a resource that enables them to manipulate their view of the local void.
NASA engineers are working on a new family of space robots that can roll, climb, and use artificial intelligence to navigate around obstacles in rough terrains on other worlds. Meet the family, here.
The climbing robot LEMUR rests after scaling a cliff in Death Valley, California in early 2019. The robot uses special gripping technology that has helped lead to a series of new, off-roading robots that can explore other worlds.
From uncovering the first clues of liquid water on Mars to crossing our solar system, NASA’s missions have been adventurous, to say the least. Ranger 3 was NASA’s first attempt to land a rover on the moon in 1962. Since then, numerous robots have followed Ranger 3 from Earth into space. Yet the surfaces of planets and moons in our solar system remain largely unexplored, partly because current space robots haven’t been capable of scaling cliffs, gripping icy surfaces and otherwise conquering hard-to-reach places.
This month (July 10, 2019), NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory described its work on a new family of robots that can roll, climb, and use artificial intelligence (AI) to navigate around obstacles in rough terrains. These robots are currently being tested on Earth and will later be sent to places that are otherwise inaccessible by humans, helping scientists do meaningful science along the way.
A tiny climbing robot rolls up a wall, gripping with fishhooks – technology adapted from LEMUR’s gripping feet.
This new class of space robots will have functionalities inspired by the Limbed Excursion Mechanical Utility Robot (LEMUR), which was originally conceived as a repair robot for the International Space Station. In the video below, NASA describes LEMUR’s last field test, in Death Valley, California, in early 2019. The robot used hundreds of fishhooks to climb walls and AI to avoid obstacles that it could not climb. It also used its suite of scientific instruments to scan the rock for ancient fossils, and, as the video explains, it found some!
A direct application of this LEMUR field test would be searching for biosignatures – substances that provide evidence of life – on the planet Mars, perhaps in lake beds thought to hold signs of Martian life from the distant past.
While the LEMUR itself will not be sent into space, the engineers did adopt much of its AI and structural features into the next generation of robots that will act as our eyes and ears beyond Earth. Each one of them has unique features built into it to tackle harsh conditions and uncertain environments. Keep reading, to meet this new generation of space explorers.
Ice Worm was put to its first field test in the cave walls at Mount St. Helens in August 2018. The robot was belayed with a rope to ensure that it wasn’t damaged if it fell.
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, are developing a robot called Ice Worm in an attempt to navigate slippery surfaces. True to its name, the robot – adapted from a single limb of LEMUR – compacts its body before extending it to move forward. It proceeds an inch at a time by drilling one end of a limb into an icy surface, uses a grip to steady itself, then brings in the second limb to join the first using the same technique.
To move forward, it unscrews one foot, lengthens its body and screws it back into the ice a few meters ahead. Using the pressure sensors that instruct it how hard to drill into the ice, it repeats this over and over again to “inchworm” forward. Ice Worm also uses this method to anchor itself while analyzing the surface beneath to collect material in its legs that can be used to test salinity concentrations for microbial life.
Aaron Parness, an engineer at JPL, has trained Ice Worm in the remote regions of Antarctica, which is the harshest place they could find on Earth. The slippery ice coupled with the harsh environment will prepare the robot for similar conditions on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Another set of tests are lined up in glaciers on Mt. Rainier in Seattle. Parness commented:
Field testing shows you things that are hard to learn in the laboratory.
This 1.4-meter (4.6 foot) long robot is also being equipped with pattern recognition and machine learning – aspects of AI that allow it to learn from past mistakes and make optimal decisions. The robot will need to investigate patterns left behind by life in cave formations. In order to do so, it needs to be tiny and mobile enough to scuttle through the cave’s tiny gaps. For this, Parness and his team are working on miniaturized remote sensing and data analysis instruments that Ice Worm can wear like a backpack. Once ready, robots of this kind will be sent to the icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter to bring back samples for further analyses.
While this four-legged robot is also inspired by LEMUR in its size and build, RoboSimian has supple wheels made of music wire in contrast to LEMUR’s gripping ones, thus having greater flexibility on rough terrains. This concept first materialized as a part of the DARPA Robotics Challenge, which promoted robotic technology for disaster-response operations. The robot is built and trained to operate in dangerous environments, so it’s not surprising that RoboSimian – a four-legged robot that can walk, crawl, slide on its belly, and even do cartwheels – will most likely be sent to Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Saltwater oceans are theorized to be present under the icy surface of that distant moon. Its geysers may also contain signs of microbial life.
Nicknamed King Louie after a character in the film “Jungle Book,” RoboSimian is equipped with spectroscopic instruments that could explore Enceladus’ polar regions.
NASA engineers were inspired by gecko feet, such as the one shown here, in designing a gripping system for space. Just as a gecko’s foot has tiny adhesive hairs, so the JPL devices incorporate small structures that work in similar ways.
You can use tape only so many times before the adhesion wears off. Geckos, on the other hand, offer inspiration for glues that stick even after multiple uses. These tiny lizards have hair on their feet that allow them to cling to a wall with ease. Parness and his team designed a robot with similar features – gecko-inspired adhesives – synthetic hair that sticks to any surface.
These grippers can sustain up to 150 Newtons of force and have been tested in simulated microgravityenvironments. The gecko material itself was tested 300,000 times to make sure the stickiness does not wear off. This robot will one day repair satellites, service them, and even snatch space garbage.
Yet another robot inspired by LEMUR, the Underwater Gripper, adopted LEMUR’s 16 fingers and 250 fishhooks to hold on tightly to surfaces and drill into formations. This is particularly useful in environments where there is little to no gravity, especially underwater where the force of the drill could push the robot away.
As of now the robot is working with Nautilus – an underwater research vessel – to collect samples from water that are a mile below the surface. Eventually, it might be sent to explore the surfaces of asteroids and other similar bodies.
A tiny, solar-powered helicopter will accompany the Mars 2020 rover. Arash Kalantari, a JPL engineer, modified LEMUR’s design to build a robot that lands not just horizontally, but also vertically by clinging to rocks like a dragonfly.
MiMi Aung, project manager for the Mars Helicopter at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said:
Nobody’s built a Mars Helicopter before, so we are continuously entering new territory.
The Mars Helicopter is expected to reach Mars by February 2021 and will conduct geological assessments on the landing sites, assess natural resources and hazards for future space missions.
Bottom line: A new class of space robots have functionalities inspired by the Limbed Excursion Mechanical Utility Robot (LEMUR). While each design is unique in its abilities, there is one common goal that unites them all: the hunt for life beyond Earth.
The shameful truth: America only put a man on the moon with the help of Nazi monsters - not that anyone will admit it amid all the hype about the 50-year anniversary
The shameful truth: America only put a man on the moon with the help of Nazi monsters - not that anyone will admit it amid all the hype about the 50-year anniversary
For the moon landing, America's scientists had been given a huge helping hand
German scientists Wernher von Braun, Kurt Debus and Arthur Rudolph all helped
But it wasn't mentioned all three were Nazi war criminals, guilty of mass murder
All of these men were veterans of the infamous programme to build V2 rockets
Weapons Hitler believed would obliterate London and save Germany from defeat
Watching the Moon landing 50 years ago from his comfortable Paris home, Yves Beon could barely contain himself at the spectacle unfolding on TV.
Dozens of white-shirted scientists and engineers at the Apollo Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas, were on their feet, many waving flags, cheering at a triumph that was enhancing American prestige and unleashing an ocean of apple-pie patriotism.
Yet Beon, a hero of the French Resistance, was spitting venom at the screen that night and, had he been alive to see last week’s documentaries repeating the footage of Neil Armstrong’s ‘giant leap for mankind’, his reaction would have been incandescent.
Amid the jubilation half a century ago, no one bothered to point out that America’s scientists had been given a huge helping hand. Or that the Moon landing was, in fact, the brainchild of German scientists led by Wernher von Braun, Kurt Debus and Arthur Rudolph. Or that all three were Nazi war criminals, guilty of mass murder.
Making history: The only clear shot of Neil Armstrong's face as he stepped on to the Moon - it was produced by a British photographer using the latest photo-enhancing technology
'Ardent Nazi': Wernher von Braun (pictured), a veteran of the V2 programme that killed thousands in Britain, was later acclaimed as an Apollo 11 hero
Dr Hubertus Strughold (left) used concentration camp detainees for high-altitude experiments - and filmed their excruciating deaths. While at a V2 factory, Arthur Rudolph (right) would hang slave labourers if they did not work hard enough. He later had a key role in the Apollo programme
The 1969 footage of the three German scientists embracing each other in the centre of the Houston control room never reached the global television audience – and neither was it broadcast amid last week’s 50th anniversary celebrations.
The fact that more than 130 German scientists were employed on the design and production of the Apollo 11 Moon landing was conveniently ignored at the time of the mission, and no wonder. These men were veterans of the infamous programme to build V2 rockets, the secret weapons that Hitler believed would obliterate London and save Germany from defeat in the Second World War.
‘Everyone forgot the hell those Nazis created to build their rocket,’ Beon recalled when we met in 1986. ‘They were b******s with brains. The world forgot that 20,000 innocent men were murdered by those Germans.’
Today, the amnesia continues and it seems wilful. Why, 50 years on, has the BBC refused to re-show The Paperclip Conspiracy, a TV documentary I produced in 1987, for example? It exposed the shocking crimes committed by von Braun’s team and the subsequent conspiracy to conceal the atrocities.
AMID the sentimental nostalgia of the past few days, the Corporation has ignored a fundamental question: what price conscience and morality for that ‘giant leap for mankind’?
The world only knows about the true history of the Apollo programme because of people such as Beon, one of the few slave labourers to emerge in 1945 from the underground factory where Hitler’s engineers built the V2s. Himmler’s SS forced an estimated 60,000 Europeans on to the production line in Nordhausen at the foot of the Harz mountains in central Germany. Survivors were rare.
Beon has particular memories of Arthur Rudolph, the 37-year-old director of production in Nordhausen who, just 17 years later, was the director of Apollo production in America.
As Beon recalled, Rudolph’s management technique in Nazi Germany was distinctive. ‘If he suspected anyone of not working, he hanged them above the production line and left the body dangling above us for a few days, as a warning. Every week, dozens were killed that way,’ he said.
‘Sometimes an electric crane lifted 12 prisoners at a time, hands behind their backs with a piece of wood in their mouths to prevent them crying out. Every day over 100 people died from exhaustion, starvation or disease.’
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin is photographed walking on the Moon during humanity's first landing in 1969
The crew of the Apollo 11, from left, Neil Armstrong, commander; Michael Collins, module pilot; Edwin E. 'Buzz' Aldrin, lunar module pilot. Apollo 11 was the first manned mission to the surface of the moon
As the chief director of the American Apollo programme, von Braun had arranged for Kennedy to witness the test firing of a Saturn rocket (pictured), the type that would eventually deliver Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the surface of the Moon
Beon recalled how von Braun, an SS major, and other scientists ‘just passed by us without looking at the bodies, without any sign of emotion’.
Von Braun’s team were committed Nazis, including Rudolph who, when I interviewed him in 1987, told me: ‘Hitler’s first six years were marvellous. They were the best years in Germany. Everybody was happy.’
The fact that Beon survived Nordhausen was a miracle. With the Americans approaching, vengeful SS guards went on a murderous rampage against the labourers but Beon managed to hide.
Von Braun and his team, meanwhile, had already left, calculating – correctly – that they could wait in the Bavarian countryside, then offer their expertise to the Americans. ‘We were interested in continuing our work,’ he said later. He had no intention of ‘being squeezed like a lemon and then discarded’.
The first V2 rocket hit London in September 1944. By the end of the war, 3,172 rockets had been successfully launched, killing thousands of civilians and dispelling any doubts that the Germans had invented an outstanding weapon of the future – years ahead of the Allies. In 1945, US soldiers were dispatched across Germany to seize completed V2s and the blueprints. Among them was 28-year-old Major Robert Staver, a mechanical engineer, who followed the US 1st Army into the Nordhausen factory on April 11, 1945.
‘The Germans’ cups were still warm when we arrived,’ he recalled when we met in California in 1986. He admitted that, bewitched by the sight of the rockets and such brilliant mechanical innovation, he had ignored the hundreds of corpses scattered across the area.
About 100 rockets were shipped to White Sands in New Mexico, but to understand them and develop rockets of their own, the Americans needed von Braun’s team, too. And that meant reaching them before the Russians. ‘These were geniuses 25 years ahead of us,’ gushed Staver. ‘My orders were to get the top rocket team in history. I decided to treat the Germans as normal, friendly human beings. Otherwise we wouldn’t get their co-operation.’
Buzz Aldrin sets up the landing gear on the Moon after he, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins
Winston Churchill (pictured) and Franklin D.evelt issued solemn wartime pledges to prosecute all Nazi war criminals
Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt issued solemn wartime pledges to prosecute all Nazi war criminals, promises that Staver and his bosses decided to ignore.
The secret journey of the rocket scientists from Nordhausen to America’s Apollo space programme involved an astonishing conspiracy between US army officers and a handful of complicit Washington bureaucrats. In September 1945, following rapid negotiations with Staver and other American officers, von Braun and a small group of his senior aides were flown to El Paso, Texas.
American law explicitly ruled out permanent residence for incriminated Nazis, so they were contracted to stay in America ‘temporarily’ for a few months while they were debriefed. The scheme was known as Operation Paperclip. Later, a further 118 members of his team were flown from Germany. While Yves Beon and other victims of the Nazis struggled to keep body and soul together in wartorn Europe, von Braun lived well on $750 a month plus unlimited free food, comfortable accommodation and generous healthcare.
It wasn’t only engineering expertise that the Americans lacked – they wanted medical information, too. In a parallel operation, American air force officers led by Colonel Harry Armstrong negotiated a deal with Dr Hubertus Strughold, the leader of Germany’s aviation doctors.
Strughold and other specialists had developed techniques to protect Luftwaffe pilots flying at high altitudes. German designs for pressurised cockpits, G-suits and oxygen masks to avoid blackouts were far more advanced than anything available in America or Britain – but that was not surprising, since the German research had been conducted by testing human ‘guinea pigs’ at the Dachau concentration camp.
Inmates had been locked into pressurised chambers by doctors to test the limits of their endurance. The filmed experiments recorded the inmates’ excruciating deaths.
Tom Bower is author of The Paperclip Conspiracy. He is known for his investigative journalism and for his unauthorized biographies
In early 1946, Armstrong decided to ignore the doctors’ crimes. For him, as for Staver, morality was not an issue. The principles of justice for which millions had died during the war were ignored. ‘They were scientists, after all,’ as Armstrong told another, similarly complacent officer. So Strughold and 37 other German specialists were flown to Wright Field, a US air force base in Ohio.
Armstrong had twin motives: to develop America’s aviation medicine, but also to protect the Germans from prosecution as war criminals in American military courts in Nuremberg. With remarkable foresight, Armstrong ordered the medics to focus on how man could survive in space and, in 1969, Strughold was acclaimed among the heroes of Armstrong’s walk on the Moon. No one asked questions about his wartime crimes.
This state of affairs was in part testimony to the skill of Colonel Walter Rozamus, the US army officer in charge of Operation Paperclip at the Pentagon and a man determined to overcome the American laws that explicitly forbade Nazis from staying in the US. By 1946, the German scientists wanted permanent contracts and wished to be reunited with their families. Yet security files compiled by US army investigators in Germany made their Nazi affiliations all too clear.
Herbert Axster, von Braun’s assistant, was described as ‘a notorious supporter and profiteer of the Nazi regime’. Kurt Debus, Apollo’s second-in-command, had been a member of the Brown Shirts and the SS and was guilty of denouncing an innocent German to the Gestapo to remove a rival scientist.
Von Braun was described as ‘an ardent Nazi’ and a ‘potential security threat’. Investigators had discovered that, in 1931, Rudolph had marched through Berlin in a brown Stormtrooper uniform holding a flaming torch and singing the Nazi anthems of racial hatred. He was classified as ‘100 per cent Nazi, dangerous type’ and recommended for imprisonment. By now, Rudolph and 134 rocket experts were living in New Mexico and Rozamus was determined to keep them there.
His next obstacle was Samuel Klaus, an officer in the visa section of the State Department, the equivalent of Britain’s Home Office. Klaus, a Jewish lawyer, had toured Europe in 1945 and was appalled by the atrocities. He understood better than most the terrible crimes committed by German scientists.
Outraged by the Pentagon’s attempt to ignore the truth, Klaus refused to allow von Braun’s team to become American citizens. None of them, he said, was so vital that their expertise could not be extracted within six months. After that, they must be returned to Germany. In the Pentagon, Rozamus and his superiors fumed. ‘Get that little Jew off the committee,’ ordered Major Simpson of the Pentagon’s intelligence section during a conversation in Washington with Klaus’s superior.
‘What the Germans did during the war was irrelevant,’ recalled another army officer. ‘We had to keep the scientists out of the Russians’ hands.’
Wernher von Braun, Kurt Debus and Arthur Rudolph were veterans of the infamous programme to build V2 rockets, the secret weapons that Hitler (pictured) believed would obliterate London and save Germany from defeat in the Second World War
So, with the support of senior politicians, Klaus was removed from the visa section.
The next step was to sanitise the security records. Paperclips were attached to all the files requiring attention and American officers in Germany were told to ‘rewrite’ reports, allowing the Pentagon and State Department to form ‘a different interpretation’. Overnight, Herbert Axster, von Braun’s assistant, was given ‘a clear record’. Rudolph was declared to be ‘not an ardent Nazi’. Von Braun’s revised report said his records had been lost in the Soviet zone of Germany and that ‘no derogatory information’ was available.
The path to permanent residence was now clear and, for the most important of the Nazi scientists, US citizenship soon followed. Protecting Nazi mass murderers was by now a favoured – if secret – policy in Washington. In 1949, the CIA invented the ‘Ratline’ to help their German agents and informants to escape Europe to South America. Among the first to flee was Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief known as the Butcher of Lyons.
Not merely rehabilitated but thoroughly respected, in September 1962 von Braun met President Kennedy in Huntsville, Alabama. As the chief director of the American Apollo programme, von Braun had arranged for Kennedy to witness the test firing of a Saturn rocket, the type that would eventually deliver Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the surface of the Moon.
Charismatic and smiling, von Braun greeted the President as if he were a close friend and, together, the two men watched as the orange flames spurted out of the base and the rocket launched successfully. Turning to Kennedy, von Braun said: ‘I will fulfil your promise to put a man on the Moon by the end of this decade. And by God we’ll do it.’
Von Braun was simply too important for the Americans to allow his murderous past to interfere. A clutch of war criminals had now become Cold War heroes.
Wernher von Braun would die in 1977 in Virginia without a blemish on his reputation. Arthur Rudolph was less fortunate. In 1984, Eli Rosenbaum, a zealous lawyer in the US Office of Special Investigations, forced Rudolph to renounce his American citizenship and return to Germany. ‘I’m really angry,’ Rudolph told me before leaving America for ever. ‘I helped put the first man – an American – on the Moon and then I was treated like this.’ He died in 1996 in Hamburg aged 89. He was never brought to justice for his wartime barbarity.
Today, we know the truth in all its terrible detail. Yet there was no mention of these monstrous crimes during last week’s celebrations of the astonishing Moon landing 50 years ago. Why?
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET Grote delen van het Noordpoolgebied hebben deze zomer af te rekenen met ongeziene bosbranden. Dat blijkt uit een reeks satellietbeelden die vorige week zijn vrijgegeven. Van Alaska over Groenland tot Siberië: honderden branden houden de Noordpool in hun greep.
Bij ons is de tweede hittegolf van het jaar deze week een feit, maar ook elders in de wereld beleven ze een hete zomer. Vorige maand ging de geschiedenisboeken in als de warmste juni sinds het begin van de metingen. En daar ondervindt ook de Noordpool de gevolgen van.
Ten noorden van de Noordpoolcirkel leiden de hoge temperaturen en de droogte dit jaar tot ongeziene bosbranden. Al zou je het misschien niet verwachten, een bosbrand op de Noordpool is niet ongewoon. De schaal waarop het vuur nu om zich heen grijpt, is dat echter wel.
Geograaf Pierre Markuse verzamelde een hele reeks satellietbeelden van de branden en postte ze online. De beelden tonen gigantische gebieden gehuld in rook, brandende bomen en verwoeste landschappen.
Flickr/Pierre Markuse
Flickr/Pierre Markuse
Impact
De branden hebben een enorme ecologische impact. Gegevens van de Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) tonen aan dat het vuur in juni verantwoordelijk was voor 55 megaton CO2-uitstoot - meer dan de uitstoot van alle juni-branden van 2010 tot 2018 bij elkaar geteld. En ook juli staat op het punt om alle records te breken.
Volgens Mark Parrington, wetenschapper aan het European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast, is er tussen 1 juni en 21 juli ongeveer 100 megaton CO2 uitgestoten, of bijna zoveel als de CO2-uitstoot van heel België in 2017.
Estimated June total #wildfire#CO2 emissions for the #Arctic Circle from 2003-2019. 50 Mt CO2 is equivalent to 2017 national fossil fuel CO2 emissions for Bulgaria, Hungary and Sweden https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/overview.php?v=booklet2018&sort=asc9 … @EU_ScienceHub@adamvaughan_uk
De Wereld Meteorologische Organisatie (WMO) noemt de branden in het Noordpoolgebied “ongeëvenaard” en waarschuwt voor de enorme impact op de klimaatcrisis. “De aanhoudende branden zijn het ernstigst in Alaska en Siberië”, klinkt het. “Sommige branden zijn zo groot als bijna 100.000 voetbalvelden. In Alberta, Canada, woedt zelfs een brand van meer dan 300.000 voetbalvelden groot. In Alaska alleen zijn dit jaar bijna 400 bosbranden geregistreerd, en elke dag ontstaan er nieuwe.”
Het noordelijke deel van de wereld warmt sneller op dan de planeet als geheel, zegt de WMO nog. “Die hitte droogt de bossen uit en maakt ze vatbaarder voor branden. De schaal waarop de bosbranden plaatsvinden is in zeker 10.000 jaar niet vertoond.”
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22-07-2019
De schaamtevolle waarheid: dit zijn de nazimonsters die de Apollo-maanlanding mogelijk maakten
De schaamtevolle waarheid: dit zijn de nazimonsters die de Apollo-maanlanding mogelijk maakten
De maanlanding in 1969 was het geesteskind van naziwetenschappers onder leiding van Wernher von Braun, Kurt Debus en Arthur Rudolph, oorlogscriminelen die schuldig waren aan massamoord. Dat schrijft Tom Bower voor de Mail On Sunday.
Er werkten in totaal 130 Duitse wetenschappers mee aan de Apollo 11-maanlanding.
Deze mannen bouwden V2-raketten, het geheime wapen dat Hitler wilde gebruiken om Londen te vernietigen.
Gruweldaden
Bower merkt op dat hier vandaag de dag nog altijd niet over wordt gesproken.
Vijftig jaar na dato weigert de BBC de documentaire ‘The Paperclip Conspiracy’ opnieuw uit te zenden, die Bower in 1987 maakte.
Daarin onthult hij aan welke gruweldaden het team van Von Braun schuldig zich schuldig had gemaakt en hoe ze onder het tapijt werden geveegd door de Amerikaanse overheid.
De SS van Himmler zette zo’n 60.000 dwangarbeiders aan het werk in Nordhausen in het hart van Duitsland, waar de V2’s werden gebouwd. Slechts weinigen konden het navertellen.
Opgehangen
Rudolph stond indertijd aan het hoofd van deze operatie. Na de Tweede Wereldoorlog overzag hij de productie van de Apollo-productie in Amerika.
Als Rudolph het vermoeden had dat iemand niet werkte, werd diegene boven de productielijn opgehangen.
Het lichaam bleef dagenlang hangen, als waarschuwing, vertelt Yves Beon, één van de weinige dwangarbeiders die wist te ontkomen.
“Elke week werden op deze manier tientallen mensen gedood,” zegt hij. “Elke dag stierven ruim 100 mensen aan de gevolgen van uitputting, honger en ziekte.”
Meer
Von Braun, een SS-majoor, en andere wetenschappers ‘liepen langs zonder naar de lichamen te kijken, zonder ook maar een sprankje emotie’.
Het was een wonder dat Beon Nordhausen wist te overleven. Toen de Amerikanen naderden begonnen wraakzuchtige SS-soldaten de arbeiders uit te moorden.
Beon wist zich ergens te verstoppen.
De Amerikanen verscheepten zo’n 100 V2-raketten naar White Sands in New Mexico, maar ze hadden het team van Von Braun nodig om er meer te kunnen bouwen.
Diepste geheim
In september 1945 werden Von Braun en enkele andere naziwetenschappers in het diepste geheim overgevlogen naar El Paso in Texas.
Later werden nog eens 118 leden van zijn team overgevlogen vanuit Duitsland. Dit project zou later bekend worden als Operatie Paperclip.
Ook nazidokters die in concentratiekamp Dachau experimenten hadden gedaan met menselijke ‘proefkonijnen’, werden overgebracht naar de Verenigde Staten.
Irrelevant
De artsen, waaronder dr. Hubertus Strughold, moesten manieren zien te vinden om de mens te laten overleven in de ruimte.
“Wat de Duitsers hadden gedaan tijdens de oorlog was irrelevant,” herinnerde een legerofficier zich. “We moesten de wetenschappers uit handen van de Russen houden.”
Was de maanlanding een show? Dit belangrijke bewijs is tot op de dag van vandaag nooit teruggevonden
Was de maanlanding een show? Dit belangrijke bewijs is tot op de dag van vandaag nooit teruggevonden
Volgens complottheoretici is de maanlanding in scène gezet in een tv-studio vanwege de gevaren die er kleefden aan een echte reis.
Eén van hen is Kees, een 59-jarige IT’er uit Brabant. Hij zegt in De Telegraaf-serie ‘Complottheorieën’ dat de Amerikanen de reis op het laatste moment niet door hebben laten gaan.
Volgens hem is vervolgens plan B uitgevoerd, een soort Hollywood-versie van de maanlanding.
Show
“Het teruggaan van de maan, het opstijgen, is nooit echt goed getest,” meent Kees. “De machine die ze gebouwd hebben is zelf ook nooit getest.”
“Dit was gewoon een show,” benadrukt hij.
De astronauten zijn volgens hem wel opgestegen en in een baan om de aarde gekomen, maar zouden op het laatste moment te horen hebben gekregen dat het toch een simulatie zou worden.
Grafstemming
Naderhand kregen ze te horen dat de autoriteiten het publiek hadden wijsgemaakt dat de landing echt had plaatsgevonden, aldus Kees.
“Dat is het moment waarop ze allemaal gedesillusioneerd waren,” zegt hij. “En dat is het moment dat die persconferentie zo’n enorme grafstemming opleverde.”
Spoorloos verdwenen
Daarnaast zijn de originele magneetbanden waar de beelden op staan van de maanlanding en andere data, telemetrische gegevens, spoorloos verdwenen.
Dit belangrijke bewijs is tot op de dag van vandaag nooit teruggevonden.
Is er een link tussen het elektromagnetisch veld rond de aarde en de locatie van piramides? Bekijk deze video
Is er een link tussen het elektromagnetisch veld rond de aarde en de locatie van piramides? Bekijk deze video
Piloot Bruce Cathie (1930-2013) zag gedurende zijn carrière vaak UFO’s in de lucht vliegen. Hij besloot zijn waarnemingen in kaart te brengen en deed een opmerkelijke ontdekking.
De onbekende objecten bleken zich allemaal te verplaatsen langs dezelfde denkbeeldige lijnen.
Samen met een softwareprogrammeur maakte Cathie een computerprogramma dat elektromagnetische lijnen rond de aarde aangeeft.
Energieveld
Veel oude culturen zouden zich bewust zijn geweest van dit wereldwijde energieveld. Zo bevinden veel megalithische bouwwerken zich op plekken waar deze lijnen lopen.
Is het mogelijk dat de piramides zijn gebouwd om zich te verbinden met de elektromagnetische velden die UFO’s ook lijken te gebruiken?
De Grote Piramide produceert vandaag de dag nog steeds elektromagnetische energie.
Samenkomen
Uit metingen die in en rond de piramide zijn verricht blijkt dat het gaat om een spanning van ongeveer 1,2 volt.
Computermodellen laten volgens de onderzoekers zien dat de interne kamers en basis van het bouwwerk zo gevormd zijn dat ze elektrische golven op één plek laten samenkomen.
Niet achterhalen
Het ontwerp van de piramide zorgt dat deze energie naar zijn basis wordt geleid, waar vervolgens magnetische velden worden gevormd.
Waarvoor die dienen en of de bouwers van de piramides wisten dat ze een dergelijke constructie aan het maken waren, konden ze niet achterhalen.
Why People Aren’t Talking About UFO Videos from 2019
Why People Aren’t Talking About UFO Videos from 2019
At a while, you will encounter a UFO. UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object and they’ve been seen since the start of recorded history. Throughout that time frame, there were two triangle UFOs sighted in the same location. Many reported UFO sightings actually prove to be something as easy as a balloon. They actually prove to be something as easy as a balloon.
Several UFO investigators would analyze the incident over the subsequent decade. Law enforcement would record the incident by making use of their superiors. The incident would draw the interest of both national and global media, along with numerous UFO investigators over time. The whole incident is apparently one of double-crossing.
Numerous terrific workshops and events will make you more successful in life regardless of what you’re preparing. The events will typically have an exceptional speaker to supply you with the details which you are attempting to find, in addition to offer you the aid which you will need to be more recognized. If you discover there is an event in your future and you’re able to benefit from it, you must make sure you’re doing everything that you can to bring as much details to your organization or individual life as possible. 1 thing which you require to do is make certain that you’re following through with the many events and taking advantage of them as you go. There are generally promotable events going on all of the time in various places. Think about the help which you’re searching for and you might discover that there’s a certain event readily available to aid you to be more prosperous in life.
How to Choose UFO Videos from 2019
The picture managed to create a small wave of publicity for the region. You may see the video below. The quick video below, for example, is just one of several contemporary sightings. It, for example, is just one of several contemporary sightings. You might already have the videos that you would like a transfer over on your computer already. Hypnosis video is just one of the most effective techniques to do hypnosis without the usage of a real hypnotist. You may see the footage below.
There’s no doubt you NEED to earn marketing videos in the event you want to do things the easy way online nowadays. The notion that UFOs are spacecraft from other planets or piloted by extraterrestrials is called the ET hypothesis. Something must be going on here. Employing every one of your abilities to earn a situation more promotable for you will be something which you like. You won’t have to be concerned anymore. To have the ability to get the most benefit for an intensive cardio workout with only a little proportion of the physical output is well worth trying. There are lots of finds of strange and bizarre objects made all over Earth.
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In July 11, 2019, two huge flying objects were caught on camera while they were in the vicinity of the sun.
Linda Miller who captured the two objects says: “I just shot this tonight, I still have footage to look over, but, when I saw this, I had to put it up for you to see. What the heck?”
The first object, which looks like a triangle UFO, comes into view when it passes the sun; but it is unclear what the second object might have been, but it seems to be exiting the sun at high speed.
Earth still has its many mysteries, few would argue that humankind has an infatuation with the great unknowns about deep space. The further out into the cosmos we peer with our telescopic arrays, the more we learn about the nature of worlds far removed from our own.
We’re also reminded of what a desolate, cold, and utterly silent place the deep regions of space has proven to be; at least to date, no convincing evidence of life, or any forms of interstellar communication, have ever been found that withstood the scrutiny of modern science.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of unique and energetic things going on “out there” that keep us guessing. Short bursts of radiation of different varieties (and from a multitude of different places) have long been observed. Detection of everything from “bursts” in the infrared, to X-ray and gamma-ray radiative anomalies have been logged over the years… and those may not even be the most unique and perplexing of the bunch.
As far back as 1983, New Scientist reported on a unique experiment that involved the placement of a cosmic-ray telescope beneath 1800 feet of rock, which led to an illuminating discovery: the detection of cosmic ray bursts which appeared to come from specific regions of the sky, rather than at random, and over an even distribution. Two key areas that were identified in this study were the galactic north pole, as well as the constellation Cygnus, the celestial swan. The idea that these cosmic rays would emanate from key locations in this way would seem to run counter to the idea that cosmic rays hitting the earth are distributed more or less at random with help of the galaxy’s magnetic field.
More recently, there has been a renewed discussion about another kind of radiative phenomenon emanating from deep space: the ever-perplexing fast radio bursts, or FRBs. A recent entry in the journal Nature Astronomy raised new questions about what these unusual bursts might entail, and why there appear to be so many of them.
According to Vikram Ravi of Caltech, FRBs appear to be occurring at a rate that is much higher than that of anything scientists would expect to produce them on a single occasion, let alone in the clusters which have been reported in recent months. Ravi guesses this means that there is no single type of known source for the FRBs—cosmic explosions, stellar collisions, etc—that can fully account for their number and frequency.
“The rate of FRBs appears to be higher than the rate of anything we can really think of that can make an FRB just once,” Ravi told New Scientist. “If we’re doing our jobs right, we should be able to figure it out in the next five years.”
Ravi has suggested that by looking very specifically at the regions in space where FRBs are most frequently observed, we might be able to pinpoint what sorts of galaxies they are most likely to emanate from, and more specifically, what locations in those galaxies appears to be their point of origin.
While radio bursts and other kinds of non-visual celestial phenomenon remain of preeminent interest to astronomers, there is some literature pertaining to alleged “optical bursters”, which constitute quick flashes of light that were actually seenin various regions of the night sky by astronomers over the years. In 1984 and 1985, a series of 24 bright flashes were reportedly detected near the border between the constellations of Aries and Perseus. The observations were logged by a group of eight observers, located across a total of 12 different locations in Canada during the period in question.
On one occasion a photograph was obtained of one of these flashes of light, while on another the source of illumination was logged at the same region in the sky by two separate observers. An article by Bill Katz, “Optical Flashes in Perseus,” appeared in the Astrophysical Journal, number 307, the following year, where it was noted that “The brightest of the flashes was of magnitude -1 and lasted about 0.25 second” (even this author, on two separate occasions, recalls having observed a strikingly similar phenomenon in the night sky during skywatching sessions).
Despite all that we know about the cosmos through the steady progression of astronomical knowledge, there are, and will no doubt remain, many mysteries about deep space. The ultimate answer to many of these, as famously echoed on televisions all around the world over the years, “to go where no one has gone before”… space, that is; the final frontier.
Britain's oldest human footprints belonging to a long-extinct ancestor dubbed 'pioneer man' are discovered on a Norfolk beach and date back 950,000 years
Britain's oldest human footprints belonging to a long-extinct ancestor dubbed 'pioneer man' are discovered on a Norfolk beach and date back 950,000 years
Indentations, on beach in Happisburgh, Norfolk, are oldest outside of Africa
Scientists believe they were left by Homo Antecessor, known as 'Pioneer Man'
Prints and tools were found in similar spot in 2013, but no fossils were found
A line of footprints trampled up to 950,000 years ago, the oldest ever found in Europe, have been discovered on a beach in Norfolk.
Archaeological enthusiast Paul Macro discovered the indentations on a beach in Happisburgh, near Great Yarmouth, in May.
The prints, the oldest in the world outside of Africa, are thought to have been made by Homo Antecessor, also known as 'Pioneer Man'.
Homo Antecessor, which were likely to be between 0.9 metres and 1.7m in height, were a more advanced form of Homo Erectus.
The markings were discovered in a spot very close to footprints discovered in 2013, which are also from the same time period.
A line of footprints trampled up to 950,000 years ago, the oldest ever found in Britain, have been discovered on a beach in Norfolk
The prints, the oldest in the world outside of Africa, are thought to have been made by Homo Antecessor, also known as 'Pioneer Man'
WHERE ARE THE OLDEST FOOTPRINTS IN THE WORLD?
The oldest footprints in the world are in Tazmania, and are from around 3.5million years ago.
Until a set of indentations were discovered in Happisburgh in Norfolk in 2013, the oldest prints in Europe were the Ciampate del Diavolo tracks, which were found on the Roccamonfina volcano in Italy. Those prints were around 350,000 years old.
The Happisburgh prints were discovered in a layer of sediment that was exposed when sand was washed away.
The prints were preserved by taking 3D photos before they were eventually washed away by the tides. At that time, researchers also uncovered tools just a few hundreds metres away.
Professor Simon Lewis, from Queen Mary University, said: 'Happisburgh tells us about the earliest humans in Britain.
'They had simple stone tools. They used flint and raw materials to flake tools. We're dealing with the earliest types of stone tool technology.'
Now researchers are hoping to uncover fossil bones to prove if the footprints were indeed left by Homo Antecessor.
Norfolk Museum's Jason Gibbons said: 'The search is now on to find some fossil bones to prove if Homo Antecessor, or indeed another type of Hominin was busy was here in Norfolk almost a million years ago.
'This is a very exciting and important site, we will see what this, and future discoveries will tell us about the most remote period of ancient habitation in north west Europe.'
Homo Antecessor, which were likely to be between 0.9 metres and 1.7m in height, were a more advanced form of Homo Erectus. The markings were discovered in a spot very close to footprints discovered in 2013, which are also from the same time period
Archaeological enthusiast Paul Macro discovered the indentations on a beach in Happisburgh, near Great Yarmouth, in May
Mr Macro made the discovery while surveying the coast for 3D scanning company ScanLAB Projects.
He said: 'They don't last long because of the layer they are in, and the sea. We made a 3D scan, and two days later they were covered in sand.
'It was phenomenally exciting when I sent the photos over to the Norfolk Museum Service, and they said the footprints could be 850,000 years old.'
The oldest footprints in the world are in Tanzania, which are from 3.5 million years ago.
WHO WERE THE HOMO ANTECESSORS?
A lifelike model of a Homo antecessor female is posed scooping out the brains of decapitated head
Homo antecessor is one of the earliest known varieties of human discovered in Europe, dating as far back as one million years ago.
Believed to have weighed around 14 stone, Homo antecessor was said to have been between 5.5 and 6ft tall.
Their brain sizes were roughly between 1,000 and 1,150 cm³, which is smaller than the average 1,350 cm³ brains of modern humans.
The species is believed to have been right-handed, making it different from other apes, and may have used a symbolic language, according to archaeologists who found remains in Burgos, Spain in 1994.
How Homo antecessor may be related to other Homo species in Europe has a subject of fierce debate.
Many anthropologists believe there was an evolutionary link between Homo ergaster and Homo heidelbergensis.
Archaeologist Richard Klein claims Homo antecessor was a separate species completely, that evolved from Homo ergaster.
However, others claim Homo antecessor is actually the same species as Homo heidelbergensis, who lived in Europe between 600,000 and 250,000 years ago in the Pleistocene era.
In 2010 stone tools were found at the same site in Happisburgh, Norfolk, believed to have been used by Homo antecessor.
Scientists believe that these early human species would breed with one another on a regular basis.
Dr Matthias Meyer, a palaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany said: 'The evolutionary history of archaic humans in the Middle Pleistocene was quite complex.
'It could be that both the ancestors of the Sima people and Denisovans interbred with another archaic group like Homo antecessor or Homo erectus.
'Or it is possible that the mitochondrial DNA we know from late Neanderthals came in from another group that left Africa.'
Footprints that could be as ancient as 950,000 years old have been found on a beach in Happisburgh, Norfolk County, England. The line of footprints – the oldest ever discovered in all of Europe and the oldest in the entire world outside of Africa – were found by archaeological enthusiast Paul Macro. The world’s oldest footprints were found in Tanzania and they date back to around 3.5 million years ago.
Mr. Macro was surveying the beach’s coast for a 3D scanning company called ScanLAB Projects when he discovered the footprints (pictures of the footprints can be seen here). “They don’t last long because of the layer they are in, and the sea. We made a 3D scan, and two days later they were covered in sand,” he explained.
The footprints are believed to have been made by a human ancestor called Homo Antecessor, also known as “Pioneer Man”. Close to that same location, other footprints from around the same time period were also discovered in 2013 as well as some ancient tools. “They had simple stone tools. They used flint and raw materials to flake tools. We’re dealing with the earliest types of stone tool technology,” explained Professor Simon Lewis from Queen Mary University. With the discovery of the footprints as well as tools, researchers are hoping that they will eventually find bones of the ancient human ancestor.
Skull of a Homo Erectus
Homo Antecessorwas an advanced form of Homo Erectus.They were believed to have been between 5.5 and 6 feet tall and weighed around 90 kg (just under 200 pounds). Their brains were smaller than those of today’s humans, measuring between 1,000 and 1,150 cm³ (the average size of a modern human’s brain is 1,350 cm³). Dating as far back as one million years ago, they are one of the earliest humans who have ever been found in Europe.
According to archaeologists who found remains in Burgos, Spain, in 1994, Homo Antecessor was believed to have been right-handed and communicated with each other by possibly using symbolic language. While it’s still unclear what other ancient humans Homo Antecessor was related to, numerous anthropologists think that there was an evolutionary link between Homo Ergaster and Homo Heidelbergensis, while others believe that it was a completely other separate species that came from only Homo Ergaster. Another debate is that some believe that Homo Antecessor is in fact the same species as Homo Heidelbergensis, as they lived in Europe during the Pleistocene Era between 600,000 and 250,000 years ago.
Neanderthals
Dr. Matthias Meyer, who is a palaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, weighed in on the debate, “The evolutionary history of archaic humans in the Middle Pleistocene was quite complex,” adding, “It could be that both the ancestors of the Sima people and Denisovans interbred with another archaic group like Homo Antecessor or Homo Erectus.” He also said, “Or it is possible that the mitochondrial DNA we know from late Neanderthals came in from another group that left Africa.” And the debate continues…
On July 11, 2019, two huge flying objects were caught on camera while they were in the vicinity of the sun.
Linda Miller who captured the two objects says: “I just shot this tonight, I still have footage to look over, but, when I saw this, I had to put it up for you to see. What the heck?”
The first object, which looks like a triangle UFO, comes into view when it passes the sun; but it is unclear what the second object might have been, but it seems to be exiting the sun at high speed.
Over the last month, ESA’s Mars Express has been watching dust storms brew at the planet’s north pole and disperse toward the equator.
In late May 2019, a spiral-shaped dust storm at the north polar ice cap of Mars was observed by several instruments onboard Mars Express. A Mars Express camera captured this image on May 26. The dust storm’s brown color contrasts with the white ice of the north polar ice cap below. The image covers an area of about 1,200 x 3,000 miles (2,000 x 5,000 km).
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express spacecraft has been monitoring dust storms brewing at Mars’ north pole over the last month, and watching as the storms disperse toward the equator. The spacecraft observed at least eight different storms at the edge of the ice cap between May 22 and June 10, 2019, which formed and dissipated very quickly, between one and three days.
It’s currently spring in the northern hemisphere of Mars, and water-ice clouds and small dust-lifting events are frequently observed along the edge of the seasonally retreating ice cap. Local and regional storms lasting for a few days or weeks and confined to a small area are common on Mars, but at their most severe they can engulf the entire planet, as experienced last year in a global storm that circled the planet for many months.
Mars dust storm in motion. This animated sequence was compiled from images of a different storm captured by the VMC over a period of 70 minutes on May 29, 2019. This particular storm started on May 28 and continued to around June 1, moving toward the equator during that time.
This montage of images shows 3 different storms developing on May 22, 2019, on May 26, and between June 6 and 10. In the latter case, the cameras watched the storm evolve for several days as it moved in an equator-ward direction. At the same time, wispy patches of light-colored clouds can be seen at the outer margin of the polar cap and also several thousand kilometers away (several thousand miles), close to the volcanoes Elysium Mons and Olympus Mons.
Both Mars Express and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter observed that when the dust storms reached the large volcanoes Elysium Mons and Olympus Mons, orographic clouds – water ice clouds driven by the influence of a volcano’s leeward slope on the air flow – that had been developing, started to evaporate as a result of the air mass being heated by the influx of dust.
These regional dust storms only last a few days. The planet’s circulation moves the elevated dust and spreads it out into a thin haze in the lower atmosphere. Some traces of dust and clouds remained in the volcanic province into mid-June.
A dust storm underway at the edge of the north polar ice cap of Mars. The image was taken by the Mars Express Visual Monitoring Camera on May 29, 2019.
(Arjun Walia)“There are great ideas undiscovered, breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of truth’s protective layers. There are places to gobeyond belief” – Neil Armstrong (source)
It wasn’t long ago that the Russian government called for an international investigation into the U.S. moon landings regarding missing samples and photos not released to the public. This created a new wave of interest into what really happened when the U.S. went up there, and led some to question if they even went there at all. The topic is filled with a number of interesting facts and statements from credible people that make one thing abundantly clear: Something fishy is happening on the moon, and we’re not being told about it.
This uncertainty has been made apparent by various sources, which include multiple Apollo astronauts, academicians, and high ranking military whistleblowers, not to mention official photos taken by NASA. According to Bob Dean, an United States Army Command Sergeant Major who also served at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) of NATO as an intelligence analyst, more footage exists, erased and hidden all these years, which we have never been told about:
Ladies and gentlemen, my government, NASA, which many of us in the United States say stands for Never A Straight Answer, proceeded to erase 40 rolls of film of the Apollo Program — the flight to the Moon, the flight around the Moon, the landings on the Moon, the walking guys here and there. They erased, for Christ’s sake, 40 rolls of film of those events. Now we’re talking about several thousand individual frames that were taken that the so-called authorities determined that you did not have a right to see. Oh, they were ‘disruptive,’ ‘socially unacceptable,’ ‘politically unacceptable.’ I’ve become furious. I’m a retired Command Sergeant Major. I was never famous for having a lot of patience.(source)
We will get into more intriguing facts from sources that would be considered credible later in the article. More points will be made as to why so many people are starting to wonder if there is actually, or was, an alien presence on the moon. These points make it easier to consider the lore that surrounds the moon landing. Perhaps one of the most interesting is what Neil Armstrong communicated to Houston when we landed on the moon.
According to multiple sources, after landing, the Apollo astronauts transmitted that they were being watched by very large extraterrestrial vehicles.
Where Does This Claim Come From?
One source is Dr. Steven Greer, founder of The Disclosure Project and The Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI). Greer was responsible for bringing forth high level military whistleblowers from all ranks to testify about the UFO/extraterrestrial phenomenon. He’s also had high level meetings within the Pentagon about this issue, which was verified by Apollo 14 astronaut and 6th man to walk on the moon, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, in Greer’s film Sirius Disclosure.
Edgar is one of multiple NASA astronauts who have made some eye-opening comments about the extraterrestrial presence.
According to Greer, from a blog post a couple years ago: If this link doesn’t work, you can check out a video of him speaking about the experience here.
Close friends and very close family members of both Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin have separately told me that indeed there were numerous, large UFOs around the crater where the Lunar Module landed and that these were seen by both Armstrong and Aldrin. I have also spoken to military officers that have seen the footage of this event- but it has never been made public. One close family member of Buzz Aldrin told me “It is not my place to out Buzz on this- someday if he can speak about it, he will…
Neil Armstrong became somewhat of a recluse after the moon landing, and rarely spoke of the historic event. His friends and family have told me that this is because he was a man of such integrity that he simply did not want to be put in a position to lie to the public about such a momentous encounter. How tragic that our heroes have been placed in this untenable situation!
When we were organizing The Disclosure Project a few years ago, I asked one of Neil Armstrong’s friends if Armstrong would come to Washington to brief members of Congress at the 1997 Congressional briefing we organized in April of that year. I was told that Armstrong wished he could –but that if he spoke about what really happened during the moon landing, that Neil Armstrong, his wife, and children would all be killed. It was put to me this bluntly. (additional source)
Another source is a former NASA employee, Ken Johnston. Johnston was a Boeing engineer and a former fighter-jock and test pilot for Grumman Aerospace. He was also a marine and an F-4 pilot, as well as a NASA employee, working as the chief Lunar Module test pilot at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. According to James Oberg, a U.S. space journalist, UFO skeptic, and space historian, “Johnston seems to be a sweet human being who did honorable service to his country in the military and in the Apollo program.”
Above is a picture of him wearing his gear, taken from a documentary in which he appeared that also featured Buzz Aldrin and other notable NASA colleagues. In the documentary, he reveals: “While Neil and Buzz were on the Lunar surface, Neil switched to the medical channel, and spoke directly with the chief medical officer saying, they’re here, they’re parked on the side of the crater, they’re watching us.” (Source: 34 second mark)
Johnston is referring to a story put out by former NASA employee Otto Bender. According to Dr. Michael Salla, PhD., on a post written on his website, Bender confirmed that HAM radio operators had intercepted these VHF signals that were transmitted from Apollo 11, the ones that were kept from the public.
Apparently, this is how it went:
Mission Control: What’s there ? Mission Control calling Apollo 11.
Apollo 11: These babies are huge, sir … enormous….Oh, God, you wouldn’t believe it! I’m telling you there are other space craft out there… lined up on the far side of the crater edge… they’re on the moon watching us. (source)
To the right you will see a picture of William Tompkins and Admiral Larry Marsh. As a teenager Tompkins had an eye for detail and loved to create Navy ship and submarine models. The Navy took interest in his capabilities and recruited him to do work on advanced technology projects. Recently, he has come forward with claims, as many others have, about clandestine Black Budget operation programs.
According to Tompkins:
The Landing Module (LEM) actually impacted the Moon surface in the Sea of Tranquility Crater, which had tremendous size vehicles parked around part of its rim. When astronaut Neil Armstrong made that First Step for Man on the Moon he looked up to the edge of the crater and said to mission control: “There are other ships here, they are enormous. The public did not hear that statement or see the massive alien starships. Armstrong panned his camera in a 360 degree motional all around the crater and the CIA then classified the information as way above top secret. (source)
Another source for this story comes from Timothy Good, one of the world’s leading UFO researchers, who has lectured at universities, schools, and many organizations, including the Institute of Medical Laboratory Sciences, the Royal Canadian Military Institute, the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Naval Air Reserve Branch, the House of Lords All-Party UFO Study Group, and the Oxford and Cambridge Union societies.
He says that a former member of MI6 revealed her conversation with Neil Armstrong at a NASA conference, when he confirmed that there were “other” spacecraft on the Moon when Apollo 11 landed in 1969. Armstrong also confirmed that the CIA was behind the coverup. He also goes into more detail about it in this interesting lecture from 2013.
So you see, this story has many different sides to it, and given all of the information that’s now available in the public domain regarding UFOs and extraterrestrial life, it’s really not hard to believe, especially when we already have some compelling information about the moon.
Why The Above Story Could Very Well Be True
Maurice Chatelain, whose expertise allowed him to invent radio equipment used to go to the moon (here is an example of one of his twelve patents), has revealed that, “at no time when the astronauts were in space were they alone. They were under constant surveillance by UFOs.”
This statement has been packed up by several astronauts, one of them being Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the 6th man to walk on the moon:
“Yes there have been crashed craft, and bodies recovered. . . . We are not alone in the universe, they have been coming here for a long time. I happen to be privileged enough to be in on the fact that we have been visited on this planet, and the UFO phenomenon is real.” (source) (source) (source)
It’s not only agency astronauts, but agency insiders as well. For example, Dr. John Brandenburg, the Deputy Manager of the Clementine Mission to the Moon, which was part of a joint space project between the Ballistic Missile Defence Organization (BMDO) and NASA, has also made some fascinating revelations. The mission discovered water at the Moon’s poles in 1994. (Source: page 16 of 18)(source)(source) But, according to Brandenburg, the Clementine Mission had an ulterior agenda:
[The Clementine Mission was] a photo reconnaissance mission basically to check out if someone was building bases on the moon that we didn’t know about. Were they expanding they expanding them? . . . Of all the pictures I’ve seen from the moon that show possible structures, the most impressive is a picture of a miles wide recto-linear structure. This looked unmistakably artificial, and it shouldn’t be there. As somebody in the space defence community, I look on any such structure on the moon with great concern because it isn’t ours, there’s no way we could have built such a thing. It means someone else is up there. (source)
George Leonard, a NASA scientist and photo analyst, has obtained a number of official NASA photographs of the Moon which he published in his book Somebody Else Is On The Moon. Although the photos are small in size and their resolution is not up to today’s standards, they show details of original, massive prints. Far more compelling than these photos, then, are his verified NASA credentials and his statements about what was found on the Moon. And he’s not the only one with a credible background trying to tell the world the truth about the Moon and the photos that were taken from the Apollo missions.
Dr. Norman Bergrun, a mechanical engineer who worked for Ames Research Laboratory, NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), and Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, now known as Lockheed Martin, has accused the agency of “garbling” photos that the agency does not want the public to see. He has also stated that there are a number of large UFOs out there. You can view some of his publications for NASA, where he worked for more than a decade, here, and watch that interview here.
There are also studies to consider. Members of the Society For Planetary SETI Research (SPSR) have recently published a paper in the Journal of Space Exploration about certain features on the far side of the moon that appear in the crater Paracelsus C. Titled “Image Analysis of Unusual Structures on the Far Side of the Moon in the Crater Paracelsus C,” it argues that these features might be artificial in origin, meaning someone other than a human being built them and put them there. You can read more about that here.
“Shortly after I retired from the Air-Force, and I still was maintaining contacts with friends and associates at the various bases and one Col Parker in the Air Defence Command, the Space Command . . . mentioned an incident which I later confirmed. A spacecraft went to the rescue of Apollo 13, and they accompanied Apollo 13 on their voyage around the moon and back to Earth, and on two occasions they thought they might have to transfer the crew to their spacecraft. But they saw them safely back to the Earth.”
The quote above comes from Colonel Ross Dedrickson, who, in the 1950s, was responsible for maintaining the inventory of the nuclear weapon stockpile for the AEC and accompanying security teams checking out the security of the weapons, among many other duties throughout his career. It was taken from the interview below.
He is one of the hundreds of military whistleblowers to give some very interesting testimony
I joined the CE team in 2010 shortly after finishing university and have been grateful for the fact that I have been able to do this ever since 🙂 There are many things happening on the planet that don’t resonate with me, and I wanted to do what I could to play a role in creating change. It’s been great making changes in my own life and creating awareness and I look forward to more projects that move beyond awareness and into action and implementation. So stay tuned 🙂 arjun@collective-evolution.com
Stillness in the Storm Editor’s note: Did you find a spelling error or grammar mistake? Do you think this article needs a correction or update? Or do you just have some feedback? Send us an email at sitsshow@gmail.com with the error, headline and url. Thank you for reading.
After many years of searching, astronomers have finally found what appears to be a circumplanetary disk – that is, a disk of gas and dust – surrounding a young exoplanet. Evidence suggests that moons may be forming there.
Composite image of a disk around the young star PDS 70, 370 light-years away. The system’s 2 planets are marked. Astronomers have found that the young planet designated PDS 70 c has a circumplanetary disk, a possible birthplace of exomoons.
It’s well-known that planets are born in circumstellar disks of gas and dust that surround young stars, and many of these have been observed by astronomers. Likewise, moons are thought to form in similar disks surrounding planets, but these have been more difficult to find. This month (July 11, 2019), astronomers announced the discovery of just such a disk surrounding a young gas giant planet in the PDS 70 star system, 370 light-yearsaway. It’s the first-ever observation of the kind of circumplanetary disk that is believed to have given birth to the moons of Jupiter in our solar system more than 4 billion years ago.
The peer-reviewed discovery paper was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on July 11.
Scientists think it is similar to the kind of disk that once surrounded Jupiter and gave birth to its many moons because it surrounds a still-developing young gas giant planet, called PDS 70 c. As astronomer Andrea Isella from Rice University explained:
Planets form from disks of gas and dust around newly forming stars, and if a planet is large enough, it can form its own disk as it gathers material in its orbit around the star. Jupiter and its moons are a little planetary system within our solar system, for example, and it’s believed Jupiter’s moons formed from a circumplanetary disk when Jupiter was very young.
As Isella also noted in an article for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO):
For the first time, we can conclusively see the telltale signs of a circumplanetary disk, which helps to support many of the current theories of planet formation. By comparing our observations to the high-resolution infrared and optical images, we can clearly see that an otherwise enigmatic concentration of tiny dust particles is actually a planet-girding disk of dust, the first such feature ever conclusively observed.
Comparison of the circumplanetary disk and PDS 70 c, as seen by ALMA (left) and earlier by VLT (right). The infrared image from VLT showed the second planet PDS 70 b, but not PDS 70 c or the disk.
These kinds of circumplanetary disks are thought to not last very long, about 10 million years at most, so to find them astronomers need to look at very young star systems, where planets are still forming. Only a few candidate planets have been found before. According to Isella:
There are a handful of candidate planets that have been detected in disks, but this is a very new field, and they are all still debated. (PDS 70 b and PDS 70 c) are among the most robust because there have been independent observations with different instruments and techniques.
The astronomers made the discovery using the huge 66-antenna Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile; millimeter wave radio signals revealed the presence of dust grains where PDS 70 c and its sister planet, PDS 70 b, are still forming in the larger circumstellar disk.
PDS 70 b had first been observed in 2018 by the SPHERE instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). SPHERE used infrared light to see the forming planets in the dust disk. In June of this year, astronomers used a different VLT instrument called MUSE, which observes in a visible wavelength of light called H-alpha. This wavelength is emitted when hydrogen falls onto a star or planet and becomes ionized. This was even better for confirming that the planets really were there, as Isella explained:
H-alpha gives us more confidence that these are planets because it suggests they are still drawing in gas and dust and growing.
ALMA image of the PDS 70 system, showing the larger circumstellar disk surrounding the young star. The two small smudges are the two still-forming planets.
The new ALMA observations add to this previous evidence, showing that not only are the planets real, but they have the kind of disks surrounding them that should eventually form moons. Isella added:
It’s complementary to the optical data and provides completely independent confirmation that there is something there.
The ALMA observations are valuable since they are less limited than those of VLT. As Isella explained:
This means we’ll be able to come back to this system at different time periods and more easily map the orbit of the planets and the concentration of dust in the system. This will give us unique insights into the orbital properties of solar systems in their very earliest stages of development.
The newer ALMA data also shows that there are distinct differences between the two planets. The innermost, PDS 70 b, is about the same distance from its star as Uranus is from our sun, and has a tail-like mass of dust behind it. According to Isella:
What this is and what it means for this planetary system is not yet known. The only conclusive thing we can say is that it is far enough from the planet to be an independent feature.
PDS 70 c, the outermost of the two planets, shines brightly in the infrared and hydrogen bands of light. This means it is likely pretty much a fully-formed planet, although additional nearby gas is still being siphoned onto the planet’s surface. PDS 70 c lies about the same distance from its star as Neptune is from our sun, and its mass is estimated to be anywhere from 1-10 times that of Jupiter. If it is on the larger end of that scale, it could have planet-sized moons, according to Isella:
If the planet is on the larger end of that estimate, it’s quite possible there might be planet-size moons in formation around it.
One possible planet-sized moon has – maybe – already been found, orbiting the gas giant planet Kepler-1625b, 8,000 light-years away. This moon, if real, is about the size of Neptune, something unheard of in our solar system. This potential discovery is still a subject of much debate, however, and has not been confirmed yet.
These findings are exciting because planetary scientists have long thought that planets in other solar systems should have moons, just like in our own solar system. But finding them is difficult, and none have been confirmed yet, because they are much smaller than their host planets. If circumplanetary disks like the one surrounding PDS 70 c are common, then that would mean that moons are probably common as well. Some, or perhaps even many, of those might be ocean moons like Europa and Enceladus in our solar system, where life could conceivably exist.
Finding more such circumplanetary disks will also help astronomers better understand how planetary systems form overall, according to Isella:
There’s much that we don’t understand about how planets form, and we now finally have the instruments to make direct observations and begin answering questions about how our solar system formed and how other planets might form.
Artist’s concept of the circumplanetary disk of gas and dust surrounding the young gas giant planet PDS 70 c. Evidence suggests there may be moons forming in this disk.
Bottom line: For the first time, astronomers have confirmed a circumplanetary disk of gas and dust around a young gas giant planet, where alien moons might be forming.
Area 51-klokkenluider waarschuwt tegen bestormen geheime basis. Dit is volgens hem de enige plek waar buitenaardse technologie werd bewaard
Area 51-klokkenluider waarschuwt tegen bestormen geheime basis. Dit is volgens hem de enige plek waar buitenaardse technologie werd bewaard
Klokkenluider Bob Lazar, die in 1989 tijdens een tv-interview onthulde dat hij vlak bij Area 51 had gewerkt, heeft mensen via Instagram gewaarschuwd dat de geplande bestorming van de basis tijdverspilling is.
“Ik heb begrepen dat het Facebookevenement begonnen is als grap,” schrijft hij. “Maar een aantal mensen is toch van plan om er naartoe te gaan. Dat is een misplaatst idee.”
Lazar legt uit dat ‘er geen aliens of buitenaardse technologieën op de basis zijn te vinden’.
Verplaatst
De enige plek waar ooit buitenaardse technologieën werden bewaard was Site S4, ten zuiden van Area 51, en dat was 30 jaar geleden, aldus Lazar.
Area 51 is volgens hem slechts een geheime onderzoeksbasis.
S4 is mogelijk decennia geleden al verplaatst of wordt wellicht niet meer gebruikt voor het project, zegt Lazar verder nog.
Neergeschoten
“Ik steun deze ‘beweging’ dan ook niet,” voegt hij toe. “Dit is niet de manier om te proberen meer informatie te krijgen.”
De laatste keer dat iemand probeerde Area 51 binnen te komen, werd diegene neergeschoten, merkt de klokkenluider op.
“De interesse in het onderwerp is wel goed; de wetenschap en technologie,” besluit Lazar. “Dat is wat de wereld waarin we leven per direct zou veranderen.”
Half a century ago, the first humans stepped foot on Earth’s lonely natural satellite. Achieved over the course of several days and manned by three intrepid astronauts—Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins—the lunar landing of Apollo 11 was the culmination of a project more than a decade in the making, and which involved more than 400,000 participants.
After fifty years, we are still seeing the influence of Apollo 11, which historian Arthur Schlesinger called the single greatest achievement of the 20th century. But what are the longer lasting implications of the 1969 moon landing?
I recently spoke with Rod Pyle, editor in chief of Ad Astra, the official publication of the National Space Society and author of First on the Moon: The Apollo 11 50th Anniversary Experience(for which Buzz Aldrin wrote the introduction). According to Pyle, understanding the longer-lasting influence of Apollo 11 requires a look back at the mindset behind United States leadership more than half a century ago.
“Apollo was a geopolitical program,” Pyle says, “but it was really designed to make a point: which was ‘We’re better than the Soviets. We have better scientists, we have better technicians, we have better engineering and better education, better systems of government.’ It achieved that handily and trounced them as a lunar effort, and they were trying and weren’t able to do it with people. So, it achieved that goal.”
However, Pyle also says that the speed at which Americans were able to put astronauts on the moon in 1969 placed some limitations on the usefulness of Apollo-era innovations for future projects.
“The problem was, it was done so quickly, and with such finesse, and was so purpose driven that although there were plans to use the Apollo hardware for other things, it was kind of a closed-end system. By 1972, we were done with the lunar missions. They had enough hardware left for three more: Apollo 18 through 20, [and] Nixon cancelled that shortly after the Apollo 11 flight.”
That isn’t to say that there weren’t still many applications for Apollo-era innovations, as well as those which came later under similar influence. “We had Skylab,” Pyle notes, “[and we had] the Space Station, and that was a legacy; we had the first cooperative flights between the U.S. and the Soviet Union with Apollo/Soyuz in 1975, and then it slowed down.
“We started working on the shuttle, which is a whole different approach,” Pyle also said. “It was supposed to be reusable—and it kind of was—it was suppose to be cheaper, and it kind of wasn’t. It wasn’t as safe as Apollo.”
However, it could be argued that in addition to being the single greatest achievement of the 20th century, the Apollo moon landings may have also been the most inspirational, in terms of the future of space exploration; whether directly or indirectly.
“I think the legacy of Apollo, besides the philosophical achievement, the sense of adventure, and so forth, is a couple of things,” Pyle told me. “Even pessimistic projections about the money spent say that there’s anywhere from between five dollars and twenty-one dollars returned for every dollar invested in Apollo. And that’s just talking in money terms. That kind of program—a space program—is one of the few things in which government money is all pumped back into American labor; there’s no outsourcing. It’s all happening in the U.S., with U.S. workers, so that’s a benefit.
“They’re developing technologies that have benefited us to this day; everything from computing, to medical—kidney dialysis, artificial joints—anti-scratch coating on the lenses of your glasses,the dust buster was a design descended from the vacuum they designed to vacuum inside the lunar module! So all kinds of spin-offs and benefits—including our cell phones, by the way—that have persisted through the years.”
But above all, Apollo 11 continues to inspire us.
“If I go up to the Jet Propulsion Lab, where I work from time to time, and I sit at a table in the cafeteria and [ask the employees], ‘what got you into this kind of work?’ Some people are gonna say Star Trek, some are gonna say Star Wars… but they all say the Apollo Program. ‘I wasn’t even alive then,’ in many cases they’ll say. ‘The Apollo Program really inspired me to do this’.”
The Eagle landing module, photographed by Michael Collins from Columbia.
I also asked Pyle about future missions to the moon, as well as our eventual journeys to Mars, and what we might be able to predict about the future of space travel based on our experience with the Apollo program.
“If we [look at] this planned return to the moon that Vice President Pence announced a few months ago, that hardware looks a lot like Apollo because it’s gotta do the same thing. So we’re not talking about winged space shuttles and things like that, we’re talking about a conical capsule—a blunt-body capsule just like the Apollo capsule, but a little bigger (that’s the Orion)—we’re talking about the Space Launch System (SLS), and possibly using the Falcon Heavy and one of Jeff Bezos’ rockets (which are all heavily derivative of the Saturn V). We’re talking about moon suits that are derivative from what was built for Apollo, and we’re talking about a lunar lander: the best candidate so far is Jeff Bezos’ Blue Moon lander which he’s been working on for a few years, which derives a lot of its technology core from the [Apollo] lunar module.
“So between us and the Soviet Union, we did a ton of the heavy lifting, and the picking of the low-hanging fruit back in the 1960s, and now we’ve come full circle and we’re revisiting all that technology, to try and get back beyond Earth orbit, back to the moon, land on that south polar region where we know there’s big deposits of water ice, and see if we can use that water ice to stay there, and go beyond. Because where you’ve got water, you’ve got drinkable water, you can make breathable oxygen, and critically you can make rocket fuel out of it—you can make hydrogen and oxygen rocket fuel.
“And with that, because you’re already out of the gravity well of the Earth, the solar system is your backyard! So that kind of is the big goal right now, and it all stems directly from the Apollo missions.”
In essence, the legacy of the Apollo missions remains veryrelevant today, and in likelihood, they will remain so for decades to come. Even with the passing of half a century, the achievements of the Apollo 11 lunar landing continue to shape the way we study space… and help to sharpen our sights for future avenues toward exploration of the cosmos.
For millennia the moon held a powerful place in out consciousness, entrenched in myths and legends around the world since our brains were able to comprehend and wonder on such things, and inspiring awe and wonder. As our species evolved and learned of the universe and how planets worked the moon lost none of its allure, becoming a target for our next age of discovery, only now rather than some mysterious landmass out past the vast ocean this was an alien place lying through the cold stretches of space, a specter that for so long seemed unreachable. In 1969, we finally made it, conquering the moon with the first man to set foot upon it, American astronaut Neil Armstrong of the Apollo 11 mission, and opening a new chapter into a brave new world of discovery. It would only be a matter of time before someone would be buried there, and there is one man who is. This is his story.
Back in the 1960s, there were few planetary scientists as illustrious or esteemed as the great Eugene Merle Shoemaker. A gifted scientist, he had been enrolled in CalTech, in California, at the tender age of just 16, and went on to earn his bachelor’s degree at 19, after which went on to earn his his Ph.D. degree at Princeton. He became involved in doing research for the United States Geological Survey in 1950, for which he scouted out uranium deposits in Utah and Colorado and did investigations into volcanic processes and deposits, before going on to study meteor impact craters, notably the 570-foot-deep (173-meter) Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona. Indeed, he would be the one to prove that it was the actual impact of a meteorite, and this is just one of his many major accomplishments.
Neil Armstrong on the moon
Shoemaker became an expert in impact craters, and was instrumental in not only progressing our understanding of terrestrial craters but also analyzing the craters of the moon, in the process providing the first map of the moon and revolutionizing our understanding of lunar geology, and in fact many of the craters and geological features of the moon were named by him. Shoemaker would also be the one who first came up with the hypothesis that a meteor impact was what had killed the dinosaurs, now accepted as scientific fact, and shed much illumination on our understanding of meteor impacts in general. So important were his contributions to his field that Shoemaker is considered one of the fathers of the emerging discipline of planetary science and astrogeology, and in 1960 he founded the Astrogeology Research Program within the United States Geological Survey. He would also have a hand in training astronauts, and he would have been an astronaut himself if he had not been diagnosed with an adrenal gland disorder known as Addison’s disease and disqualified.
During his career, Shoemaker earned various awards and accolades, notably he was awarded the the John Price Wetherill Medal from the Franklin Institute in 1965 and the National Medal of Science by then-president George H.W. Bush in 1992, he was also a prominent commentator on the space missions Apollo 8 and Apollo 11, and he was the lead geologist and investigator for Apollo 11, Apollo 12, and Apollo 13 findings. However, what would really propel his shining star into the stratosphere was his 1994 discovery of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 Comet, which crashed into the planet Jupiter, the impact of which left a gaping wound on the surface and was televised around the world to make him a household name.
In his later years, Shoemaker became involved in traveling around the world looking for undiscovered impact craters in far-flung remote places along with his wife and fellow scientist Carolyn, but his main object of interest was always the moon, a place he had been denied a chance of ever actually going to. On July 18, 1997, Shoemaker and his wife were on one of these excursions at a remote and rugged place called the Tanami Track, in the desolate wilds of the Australian Outback, when they were tragically involved in a car crash. The crash would kill Eugene Shoemaker and seriously injure Carolyn, and thus one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century was lost to us. However, he still had one more pioneering achievement in him, even in death.
Eugene Shoemaker
To help Shoemaker finally reach his beloved moon, which he had long been unable to go to because of his medical condition, a space burial company called Celestis was tasked with designing a specialized urn which could hold the late scientist’s ashes and be outfitted onto a spacecraft to launch them into space. The capsule holding the remains was then put aboard a space probe called the Lunar Prospector on Jan. 6, 1998 and sent to the moon bearing a brass foil wrapping upon which is laser etched images of image of the Hale-Bopp Comet and the Arizona crater he had long studied, as well as the quote from Romeo and Juliet:
And, when he shall die Take him and cut him out in little stars And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun.
The probe would make it to the moon, where it was crashed into the lunar South Pole along with its cargo, burying it there forevermore. It was a momentous occasion, because although there had been human remains sent to space before, most notably those of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry in 1992, these actually almost always had fallen back to earth to burn up on reentry. This was the first time, and still the only time, these remains had actually been taken to land and rest on an extraterrestrial planetary body. It was Eugene Shoemaker’s final mission, and he had made it to the moon after all, with his wife saying, “It brings a little closure, in a way, to our feelings. We will always know when we look at the moon, that Gene is there.”
Although Shoemaker was the first and so far only person to ever be buried on an off world body, this is set to change in the coming years, as the same company has ramped up its program to send human remains to the moon, for a price. For the princely sum of $12,500 per gram of cremated remains you too can be sent off to the moon to make history, and it seems like only a matter of time before there are more people up there to join Shoemaker in his eternal rest. For now it is only him out there in the void, just as groundbreaking in death as he was in life, and it seems like it is a fitting resting place for such a pioneer of space sciences.
Sir Richard Branson — the billionaire business magnate, airline executive, space plane pioneer, possible space traveler and avowed thrill seeker – weighed in recently on the possibility that UFOs seen my military pilots are crafts from another planet, and his answer may surprise many who admire his accomplishments, particularly in private space travel.
“There’s no question that there are millions of other civilizations out there, but none of them are within reach of Earth and therefore, my instinct is: extremely unlikely.”
Is he saying that there are millions of other Richard Bransons out there, but none of them – including him – have figured out how to leave their planet’s gravity and travel to another world? Actually, Branson HAS figured out how to pilot a UFO (more on that later), but he’s of the opinion that distance defeats brainpower and technology in the quest to cross the galaxy. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Branson also expressed his doubts that governments or militaries are hiding evidence of it from the public.
“I can’t understand why these UFO discussions are always behind closed doors and done in secrecy. It just creates even more suspicion. If people had really discovered a UFO, you can’t keep things secret in this day and age, it would be everywhere.”
Take that, Area 51 Stormers! In fact, it’s already well-known what Branson thinks of those who believe UFOs are spaceships from other planets. At 4 am on the morning of April 1, 1989 (note the date), Branson took off in London in a custom hot air balloon shaped like a flying saucer, complete with strobe lights that blinked every ten seconds. (Great photos of the balloon here.) The balloon flew over London’s M25 highway as the morning rush hour was commencing, bringing traffic to a halt and causing TV and radio stations and local police departments to be flooded with calls reporting a UFO. Branson was loving every minute of it.
It was the early morning of April 1, 1989. Under the cover of darkness, Richard Branson took off in a custom hot air balloon shaped like a UFO. It was 4am and the strobe lights on board were blinking every ten seconds.
As the sun began to rise the UFO was making its way over London’s M25 highway. Drivers on their morning commute were stunned. Cars pulled over, police forces mobilized and the army was alerted. TV and radio stations were being flooded with reports of an Unidentified Flying Object…
The original plan was to land in Hyde Park but poor weather conditions blew him off target. Branson was forced to land in Surrey Field instead, as police forces followed in hot pursuit.
As the UFO prepared for landing the police surrounded the field and sent a lone officer to approach the strange aircraft. Branson had one more trick up his sleeve…
As the UFO door opened dry ice billowed out. It was then that a dwarf—also on board—emerged down the platform in an ET costume.
Unamused, the officers initially threatened arrest, eventually deciding against any formal action. Pictured above you can see Branson wearing the ET mask the dwarf came out in.
Branson, the billionaire entrepreneur and founder of the Virgin Group is well-known for his elaborate pranks and publicity stunts, but this one may go down as one of his best.
For those curious, the UFO was built in Bristol by Don Cameron of Cameron Balloons Limited. Codenamed “Project Wedgewood”, only a handful of people knew about the stunt which is what made it such a huge success.
“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.”
His original plan was to make a dramatic landing in historic Hyde Park but the craft was blown off target, so the skilled balloonist brought it down in Surrey Field instead, which was quickly surrounded by police. Just like in a bad sci-fi movie, the cops sent a lone officer out to meet the ‘spaceship’. Branson was ready for him.
“The UFOs 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.”
Branson with his late test pilot Steve Fossett.
So Sir Richard Branson doesn’t believe that recent UFO sightings are extraterrestrial ships, doesn’t believe any have ever visited Earth and are being hidden from the public, and doesn’t think much of those who get excited about UFO sightings in general. However, being the good entrepreneur that he is, Branson tries to save face and not ‘alienate’ his customer base.
“And so I don’t think there’s any credible sightings yet. It would be wonderful if it were true.”
Before you report your next UFO sighting, check to see if Richard Branson is in town.
Stonehenge: a prehistoric monument in Wiltshire, England, consisting of a ring of standing stones each weighing around 25 tons.
Mystery: how were these 25-ton stones moved in 3000 BCE from the Preseli Hills, 150 miles (240 km) away?
Tallow: a rendered form of beef, mutton or pig fat, used in making candles and soap.
Greasing the sled: a method of moving heavy objects over rough ground by rubbing grease or fat on logs.
What’s the missing piece in this picture? Solid evidence that the builders of Stonehenge actually “greased the sleds” or logs or planks they used to move the stones from what is now Wales to what is now the biggest mystery in monoliths. According to a new study, the answer is pots of pig fat. Wait … what?
“I was interested in the exceptional level of preservation and high quantities of lipids – or fatty residues – we recovered from the pottery. I wanted to know more about why we see these high quantities of pig fat in pottery, when the animal bones that have been excavated at the site show that many of the pigs were ‘spit roasted’ rather than chopped up as you would expect if they were being cooked in the pots.”
Dr Lisa-Marie Shillito, Senior Lecturer in Landscape Archaeology, Newcastle University, and co-author of a new study in the journal Antiquity, explains her “Ah ha!” moment in a university press release. She was not researching how Stonehenge was built but how the workers were fed as part of the Feeding Stonehenge project. One way to do that is to analyze the organic residues on the shards of pots found at Durrington Walls, the large Neolithic settlement 2 miles (3.2 km) north-east of Stonehenge where it is believed the people from all over Britain who worked on building Stonehenge, including bringing the stones to the site, lived and ate.
“Until now, there has been a general assumption that the traces of animal fat absorbed by these pieces of pottery were related to the cooking and consumption of food, and this steered initial interpretations in that direction.”
Of course the workers used the pots with the pig fat residue to cook pork. What other reason could there be for the pork fat residue in them? Being a good scientist (and possibly a fan of pig roasts), Shillito didn’t see a connection between the pig bones with obvious evidence of spit roasting and the greasy pots. That means the fat was used for something else. She noticed that the shards were from pots that were much than those used for cooking.
“But there may have been other things going on as well, and these residues could be tantalising evidence of the greased sled theory.”
One of those “other things” may have been making tallow or grease, not just for candles but for greasing the logs that most historians now believe were used to enable as few as 20 people each to move one of the giant stones across miles of Britain. While “greasing the sled” – which means greasing the runners on the bottom of the sled for speed – is the phrase used in the report, “greasing the skids” might have been more appropriate. “Skid” may have come from the shipbuilding industry as a term for the logs or planks that were laid on the ground in order to pull ships from where they were built to the water, or from the logging industry where they were used for moving heavy logs over ground.
“Greasing the skids” eventually entered common usage as a term for making a difficult job easier or making it easier to achieve a goal, like employment at a prestigious company – particularly when one is not the best candidate. “Skid road” was the name of the path of planks for moving logs, and it eventually became Skid Row when the paths were abandoned and become symbolic lines of demarcation between the rich neighborhoods and the poor ones where the mill workers lived – which explains why the first Skid Row was in Vancouver, not New York.
Do these big pots of pig fat mean Durrington Walls was the Skid Row of Stonehenge builders? Dr. Shillito believes they definitely reinforce the “greased sleds” theory but are not yet definitive proof. However, they show that while pots are important tools in archeology, they can have multiple purposes.
“Archaeological interpretations of pottery residues can sometimes only give us part of the picture. We need to think about the wider context of what else we know and take a ‘multi-proxy’ approach to identify other possibilities if we hope to get a better understanding.”
Thank goodness for those Stonehenge guys who refused to wash the pots when their significant other asked them to.
Bio: Ted Roe is a co-founder and the Executive Director of the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena, NARCAP.org, which was established in 1999. He was born and raised in Great Falls, Montana during the 1960s and 70s and his interest in UAP and UAP research arose from local events and direct experience. Alongside his work with Dr. Richard Haines and the team at NARCAP, he has established and administrates the International Association of UAP Researchers, IAUAPR.org. Currently he resides on the Big Island, Hawaii, where he teaches freediving, martial arts (Iaido), and Zen meditation in addition to his duties administrating NARCAP.org and IAUAPR.org.
The National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena, NARCAP, has been a leading innovator in aviation-related UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) research since its inception in 1999. NARCAP defined and established the use of the term UAP in the US as a more accurate description of things seen in the sky and to differentiate objective research of UAP from the general paradigm of UFOlogy. NARCAP has participated in briefings of Congressmen and the Podesta team that led to use of the term UAP by the Clinton campaign, and a 2005 Congressional hearing. NARCAP, formerly a private investigative team until it became a public nonprofit research group in 2014 (now 501(c)(3) charitable organization), has established several international branches and has developed relationships and written agreements with several of the official foreign government and non-government UAP research teams of the world. NARCAP has conducted in-depth studies of UAP profiles including “Project Sphere”, an examination of UAP that present as spherical lights and objects.
NARCAP has published many groundbreaking papers at www.narcap.org, including the first ever survey of commercial aircrews revealing that pilots and aircrews do experience sightings and incidents that they do not report. Through focusing on careful image management and business practices, established aviation investigative techniques and careful examination of the data, NARCAP has been able to acquire some important findings about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena that raise equally important questions regarding aviation safety, the role of UAP researchers and teams with respect to the ETH, and the future of UAP research.
Huge City Found On Moon Using Google Moon Map, Will Musk Or Bezos Take It Over? UFO Sighting News.
Huge City Found On Moon Using Google Moon Map, Will Musk Or Bezos Take It Over? UFO Sighting News.
Here is a alien base I found using Google Moon map. The alien structure is huge, over 15 km long and wide. The structure is seen on only one area of photos. Others photos of this crater have it edited out. In my video of this object at the end, I show how easy it is for NASA to edit out such alien artefacts. It took me a whole 4 seconds to remove it and make it appear natural. Its obvious to me that NASA missed editing out this huge structure, but after reporting it, I give it 6 months before Google edits it out for the US government. I believe that this structure is still in working order and can easily become the new home to thousands of humans that want to live on the moon. I am sure big companies like Amazons Jeff Bezos and SpaceXs Elon Musk are currently looking for such prime areas for mining the moon. Imagine walking in and taking over an abandoned city on the moon 15km across! You would become the #1 company in the world not just with the mining you could do, but with the alien tech built into this city. Scott C. Waring
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Amazing UFO evidence recorded over Nellis Test Range, Nevada 16-Jul-2019
Amazing UFO evidence recorded over Nellis Test Range, Nevada 16-Jul-2019
Check out this amazing footage of a bright UFOs filmed in the sky above Las Vegas Nevada. This happened on 16th July 2019.
Witness report:
I shot this video from my backyard in the Summerlin area of Las Vegas, Nevada on the night of July 16, 2019. Here’s one more in a long line of UFO videos that were captured above the Nellis Test Range. At this point in time, it is doubtful that you will see anything just like this anywhere else. It may not seem spectacular but it is because you and a handful of others on this YouTube Channel may be the only people on the planet observing them.
72 Years After Roswell: Here’s How the UFO Phenomenon Changed
72 Years After Roswell: Here’s How the UFO Phenomenon Changed
The UFO phenomenon is no longer a conspiracy, but a subject worthy of serious scientific study.
July 8 marked the 72nd anniversary of the Roswell Case; the day when an alleged alien ship (Flying Saucer) crashed near the city of Roswell in New Mexico.
In particular, on July 8, 1947, the United States Army had announced in the newspapers the “recovery” of the remains of a “flying saucer” on a ranch near Roswell.
The communication officer at the Roswell Army air base, Walter Haut, issued a press release writing that the 509 Operations Group personnel had recovered a “flying disc,” which had crashed on a ranch near Roswell.
Mac Brazel, a farmer from New Mexico, discovers scattered remains on his ranch near Corona, New Mexico, and on July 5 reports what he had found to the authorities.
After the release of the military communique on July 8, and the visit to the area of a military high command, the version abruptly changes and the facts are atrophied to the impact of a large military balloon belonging to Project Mogul.
Several subsequent military reports seemed to corroborate this version.
Roswell Case
Eventually, people forgot about the case altogether and until 1978, the Roswell incident received little attention
That changed when UFO researchers Stanton T. Friedman and William L. Moore compared the results of a series of interviews that each had conducted separately.
The official version of the crashed balloon theory was reconsidered and people started taking into consideration the possibility that the Army had actually recovered highly advanced technology from a crashed alien spaceship, together with ‘various’ corpses, of the alleged extraterrestrial beings.
Edgar Mitchell’s claims
Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, although not a direct witness, has also stated numerous times that Roswell was a true UFO case, based on his high-level contacts within the government. “I have seen the secret UFO files, and there is no doubt that there was contact with extraterrestrials,” he said.
Interestingly Mitchell also believed that there is a government organization that is parallel and independent to the government that conducts experiments with extraterrestrial technology “and that is why all these incidents cannot be brought to light”.
Mitchell died in 2016 without having provided any evidence to corroborate his claims.
Birth of UFOlogy
The Roswell UFO case is widely recognized as the birth of modern ufology and has led to numerous debates, theories, and speculations about the existence of extraterrestrial life that many others consider totally unfounded.
Those who remain skeptical about the alleged flying saucer that crashed in Roswell are keen to accept the ‘revised, official version’ that tells us that instead of an aliens spaceship, what had crashed on the Roswell farm was actually a secret military weather balloon.
The phenomenon has had a great weight in popular culture and is mentioned in numerous works of fiction, as well as in documentaries.
But despite Roswell being the starting point of modern ufology, it wasn’t the first recorded sighting in the United States.
On February 24, 1942, the Famous Battle of L.A. took place, and many people claim that the military had shot at a UFO that night.
But if you are willing to dig deeper in historical records, you will find that evidence of UFOs can be traced back to antiquity and classical antiquity.
An ancient Egyptian text dubbed the Tulli Papyrus, dated to circa 1440 BC describes ‘fiery disks’ in the sky above Egypt.
Shutterstock.
After Roswell
Years following Roswell were turbulent for anyone serious in Ufology.
In fact, up until recently, it was all just a giant conspiracy.
Efforts to study the subject in a serious way have failed miserably, mostly because people find something very hard to believe if it’s not in the mainstream news.
That, of course, was until piece by piece, and very slowly, details of UFO sightings started being filtered to the public.
It was as if people were being prepared for the motherlode.
Numerous UFO sightings occurred after Roswell. Some of them even made a stronger case for alien technology than the alleged flying saucer that crashed in New Mexico.
But again, the evidence was tucked away, until it was eventually forgotten altogether.
One stunning case that occurred after Roswell was the Phoenix Lights: a series of widely sighted unidentified flying objects or UFOs observed in the skies over the U.S. states of Arizona, Nevada, and the Mexican state of Sonora on March 13, 1997.
UFO Disclosure
For the past five years, the UFO phenomenon has been actively pushed to the masses. As much as 95 percent of all Americans have at least heard or read something about Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), and as much as 57 percent believe they are real.
Countless declassified documents detailing the Government involvement in UFOs have surfaced, and many people started coming forward with their specific story on UFOs.
Astronauts, Military Officials, and Highly ranked Government officials spoke out about a subject that for years was classified a conspiracy.
Videos recorded by Navy Pilots chasing UFOs were made available to the public, and all of a sudden, the UFO phenomenon was no longer a conspiracy, but a subject worthy of study and attention.
We learned about the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), and how the government was actually very interested in UFOs for quite some time, despite contrary beliefs.
We learned that this project was well funded, and its goal was to study unexplained aerial phenomena. The project generated a stunning 490-page report that documents alleged worldwide UFO sightings over several decades.
As revealed by the New York Times in 2017, AATIP was headed by Luis Elizondo, who resigned from the Pentagon in October 2017 to protest government secrecy and opposition to the investigation, stating in a resignation letter to US Defense Secretary James Mattis that the program was not being taken seriously.
The AATIP revelation helped the “To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science,” a non-profit organization committed to studying the UFO phenomenon with the best available tools.
Founded in 2015 by former Blink 182 musician Tom DeLonge, the organization became quickly recognized as a pioneer in the study of UFO sightings and alien life.
Artists illustration of a UFO following an Airplane. Shutterstock.
The push for disclosure also helped reveal the CIA’s role in the study of UFOs between 1947 and 1990.
But during the years, and without giving the rest of the world any hints, the Government conducted a number of studies on UFOS. Project Blue Book was one such program, but not the first.
Project Blue Book started in 1952, the third study of its kind, following projects Sign (1947) and Grudge (1949). The goal of all three projects was clear: the determine whether on nor UFOs posed a direct threat to national security, and to scientifically analyze UFO data.
The projects eventually yielded thousands of reports and files. However, the Condon Report of 1968 went on to conclude that there was nothing ‘anomalous’ about UFOs. The Condon Report was endorsed by the National Academy of Scientists.
Interestingly, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) disagreed with Condon’s conclusion, explained that as many as thirty percent of cases studied remained unexplained and that scientific benefit might be gained by continued study.
Project Blue Book resulted in 12,618 UFO reports and concluded that most of them were misidentifications of natural phenomena (clouds, stars, etc.) or conventional aircraft.
This comes as a surprise, known that after 1968, the government continued to actively monitor UFOs and study them.
As of 2019, the UFO phenomenon is no longer a conspiracy, but a subject worthy of serious scientific study.
China has unveiled its latest plans for the world's biggest radio telescope—to look for habitable planets beyond our solar system by finding out if they have a magnetic field.
Published in the journal Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, the team behind the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) has announced its ambitions for the next decade—including the hunt for exoplanets.
FAST, as the name suggests, is a 1,600 feet wide telescope. It sits in the Dawodang depression of the Guizhou Province and it achieved its first light in September 2016.
One of the main scientific missions of FAST is to listen out for pulsars and other interstellar radio signals—including any coming from hypothetical extraterrestrials. "In theory, if there is civilization in outer space, the radio signal it sends will be similar to the signal we can receive when a pulsar (spinning neutron star) is approaching us," Qian Lei, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told CCTV in 2016.
Many scientists looking for potentially habitable planets are focused on its composition (rocky), distance from its star (so liquid water can exist) and its atmosphere (that it has one). These are the requirements for life on Earth to exist—so may also be true of other planets.
But in their latest publication, FAST researchers from China and France said they are planning to look for exoplanets within 100 light years from Earth with magnetic fields.
Our own magnetic field protects the planet from the solar wind—a stream of charged particles from the Sun that would strip away our atmosphere without the magnetic field to deflect them.
The team believes that because Earth's magnetic field provides protection to life on the planet, it is reasonable to think the same may be true on other distant worlds.
The world's biggest telescope in China's Guizhou Province.STR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
"There is a scientific bug in the sci-fi blockbuster The Wandering Earth, that is, the Earth stops rotating. If that happens, the magnetic field would disappear," FAST chief scientist Li Di told Xinhua. "Without the protection of the magnetic field, the Earth's atmosphere would be blown off by the solar wind. As a result, humans and most living things would be exposed to the harsh cosmic environment and unable to survive."
Li said they could search for magnetic fields around exoplanets by looking for the interaction of the solar wind with the magnetosphere—an interaction that should generate radio radiation: "All the planets with magnetic fields in our solar system can be found generating such radiation, which can be measured and studied by radio telescopes. But research on the planets' magnetic fields cannot be realized through optical and infrared astronomical observation. Do the exoplanets have magnetic fields? If they have, they should also generate radio radiation under the influence of the wind of their parent stars."
He said if they can confirm the presence of a magnetic field using FAST, they would be able to study it to find out whether it was habitable or not. "It would be a very important discovery," he said.
HiRISE Spots Curiosity Rover at Mars' 'Woodland Bay'
HiRISE Spots Curiosity Rover at Mars' 'Woodland Bay'
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover can be seen in this image taken from space on May 31, 2019, by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. In the image, Curiosity appears as a bluish speck.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech › Full image and caption
A dramatic Martian landscape can be seen in a new image taken from space, showing NASA's Curiosity rover examining a location called "Woodland Bay." It's just one of many stops the rover has made in an area referred to as the "clay-bearing unit" on the side of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain inside of Gale Crater.
The image was taken on May 31, 2019, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). In the image, Curiosity appears as a bluish speck. Vera Rubin Ridge cuts across the scene north of the rover, while a dark patch of sand lies to the northeast.
Look carefully at the inset image, and you can make out what it is likely Curiosity's "head," technically known as the remote sensing mast. A bright spot appears in the upper-left corner of the rover. At the time this image was acquired, the rover was facing 65 degrees counterclockwise from north, which would put the mast in about the right location to produce this bright spot.
Mirror-like reflections off smooth surfaces show up as especially bright spots in HiRISE images. For the camera to see these reflections on the rover, the Sun and MRO need to be in just the right locations. This enhanced-color image of Curiosity shows three or four distinct bright spots that are likely such reflections.
The University of Arizona in Tucson operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colorado. JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
It is possibly the most architecturally sophisticated prehistoric stone circle in the world. But while it is one of the world’s most famous monuments, the prehistoric stone circle known as Stonehenge in south west England remains shrouded in mystery.
That is, until now. Thanks to state-of-the-art research pioneered and led by Belgian academic Christophe Snoeck, we now know rather more about the mysteries of Stonehenge. He returned to work in his native Belgium after completing his PhD in archaeological science in 2015 at Oxford University. His research suggests that a number of the people that were buried at the Wessex site had moved with and likely transported the bluestones used in the early stages of the monument’s construction, sourced from the Preseli Mountains of west Wales.
While there has been much speculation as to how and why the iconic collection of stones was built, the question of who built it has received far less attention. That is where Dr Snoeck, still aged just 32 and based at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), comes in. His innovative research has made it finally possible to extract information about the geographical origin of cremated individuals. In partnership with colleagues at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris and University College London, he led the Stonehenge research, which combined radiocarbon-dating with new developments in archaeological analysis.
Dr Snoeck, who pioneered the techniques during his doctoral research, said the discovery that some biological information survives the high temperatures reached during cremation (up to 1,000 degrees Celsius), offers the “exciting possibility” to finally study the origin of those buried at Stonehenge.
In an interview with The Brussels Times, he explained how his team went about their work and the significance of their findings. The Antwerp-born researcher said, “Stonehenge is one of the most iconic archaeological sites in the world, and when I had the opportunity to carry out research on the site it was an immense privilege. Before we started our study, we knew, from previous work, that the bluestones used to build the earlier phases of the monument came from west Wales. By working directly on the human remains found at the site we hoped to gain insight, not on the origin of the stones, but on the origin of those using the site and being buried there.”
The work involved analysis of small fragments of cremated human bone from an early phase of the site’s history around 3000 BC, when it was mainly used as a cemetery. “Most research on Stonehenge focused on the stones,” he explains. “Little was known about the humans buried at the site. This is mostly due to the fact that they were cremated and only small cremated bone fragments remained. It is only very recently that new methods have been developed to study cremated human remains.”
During his doctoral research he developed a method to extract information about the geographical origin of cremated individuals. This method, he says, “was applied to 25 cremated individuals from Stonehenge and our results show that 40% (10 out of 25 analysed individuals) did not live near Stonehenge in the last decade or so prior to their deaths but came from further away. Some might actually have originated from west Wales where the bluestones came from, some 250km away,” he adds. “This shows the importance of the site in the British landscape during the Neolithic period.”
Photo of Carn Goedog in western Wales. The dolerite bluestones from these hills are thought by many geologists and archaeologists to be the source of several of the stones erected in the early stage of Stonehenge’s construction with dates of quarrying around 5,000 years ago.
His personal contribution to the study was mostly in the scientific analyses including isotope, elemental and infrared analyses. The results were then discussed and interpreted with the rest of the team. But the challenges of handling tiny fragments of burnt bone should not be overlooked. “Working on cremated bone fragments can be very tricky as they are very little and brittle. However, with proper care, we were able to carry out all the analyses planned.”
Understanding the past
So, why does all this matter? Well, according to Dr Snoeck, the results emphasise the importance of inter-regional connections involving the movement of both materials and people in the construction and use of Stonehenge. This, in turns, provides rare insight into the large scale of contacts and exchanges in the Neolithic era, as early as 5000 years ago.
Dr Snoeck
Dr Snoeck, who specializes in archaeology and chemistry, says it us crucial to understand the lives of past animal and human populations, including diet, mobility, landscape use and environmental conditions. The techniques used on the Stonehenge project could be used, he hopes, to improve our understanding of the past.
He said, “Understanding our past is, to me, of crucial importance to better understand where we are now and how we reached this stage. I think both Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt (and many more sites) are fascinating. They are markers of our past and unravelling the mysteries around their construction and use is definitely helping us better understand our past. The importance of archaeological sites cannot really be classified in my opinion.”
On the importance of learning more about people from the Neolithic period, he said, “By gathering more information about them, we can start to understand the place of such sites in the wider landscape and how they shaped societies and beliefs through time and space. We were very excited to see that not all individuals lived near the site and that many actually moved over quite large distances to come to Stonehenge. Clearly we are not going to cure disease with this but understanding how people and societies changed trough time and space helps us understand current societies and how they might change and interact.”
The results of his work were published in Scientific Reports in 2018 and have received global media attention with news reports in more than 100 Belgian outlets (incl. Radio 2, Het Laatste Nieuws, Het Nieuwsblad, De Morgen, EOS Wetenschap, Le Soir) and international media (BBC, Guardian, CNN, National Geographic, Current Archaeology and the Washington Post).
Following this ground-breaking study, he has been nominated as one of the three candidates for the Archaeologist of the Year 2019 Award by the British magazine Current Archaeology. For him and many others there is an enduring fascination with Stonehenge that will continue. The reason? “Well, it is still there after 5000 years! And there is still so much we don’t know. Mysteries are fascinating,” says Dr Snoeck.
His archaeological work does not end with Stonehenge, and he is now engaged on a project on the famous Belgian iguanodon collection (a genus of dinosaurs) at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Science. “The aim of this work is to better understand why so many Iguanodons were found at Bernissart in Hainaut. The research is still in progress.” Christophe Snoeck also plans to study cremated remains in other countries. “They’ve been kind of forgotten and put aside. And I thought that was quite sad, because in huge parts of the world, especially in prehistoric Europe, people were cremated.”
This week, the internet is going crazy with talk of a mass People’s Invasion of Area 51. More than one million people have signed up on Facebook to breach the gates of the most famous top secret government facility in the world. The event, which sprang to life as a joke started by social media shitposters, has now racked up an enormous amount of publicity worldwide, with media outlets taking it utterly seriously and others as the joke it always was. Unless you want to do it for real. In which case, settle in.
The event, Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us, was created by the Facebook group Shitposting cause I’m in shambles. That pretty much tells you everything you need to know. Despite its humble origins the event has taken on a life of its own, with 1.3 million people having declared they are going to the Nevada desert to participate in the September 20 raid and another one million having expressed interest in the event.
Alleged Area 51 attack plan spread on social media. Disclaimer: author is notparticipating as part of the Kyle group.Illustration: Social Media
The American public has long had a fascination with Area 51 and allegations that the secret U.S. government air base is harboring flying saucers, bits of crashed saucers, and actual aliens. Public trust in government remains at historic lows. Just 17 percent of the American people “trust the government in Washington all or most of the time.” Given those factors, it’s not hard to see why “Let’s see them aliens” has become such an appealing rallying cry.
Interest in Area 51 has also been bolstered recently by New York Times articles reporting sightings U.S. Navy fighter pilots in 2004 and 2015. The U.S. government is also reportedly sitting on metallic alloys and UFO scrap allegedly recovered from “unidentified aerial phenomena.”
What are the alloys? No one can say. They are simply The Alloys.
Say you are actually willing to participate in the raid. The trip will be difficult and conditions not ideal. You will be arrested and sent to federal prison, or possibly shot, all to see things that may not actually exist. Still want to go? Okay.
The best place to start your federal incarceration is at Las Vegas, Nevada. Event organizers have designed the unofficial Area 51 Visitor’s Center,approximately 1 hour and 22 minutes west of Vegas, as the meetup point.The Visitor’s Center was owned by Nevada brothel magnate Dennis Hof and includes a mini-mart, picnic areas, and the Alien Cathouse, and an ET-themed brothel, which is pretty much everything you need before anyone goes a-raiding. Satellite views of the Visitor’s Center show parking for 200 cars at most, so arrive early or consider catching a Lyft.
The Alamo Fireworks Megastore next door could open their lot to event parking but don’t count on it.
From the Visitors Center to Area 51, you have two ill-considered routes to choose from.Illustration: Google Maps
Once you depart from the Visitor’s Center it’s an hour and 52 minute drive north to Area 51, and there are two routes to choose from, the first via Cane Spring Road, or I-95 and then the Mercury Highway. Both merge at “Sugar Bunker,” which is presumably where the government stores the alien food pellets, then proceed north through what looks like a moonscape of gigantic craters. These are the remnants of U.S. nuclear weapons tests and are closed to the public for a very good reason—and not because neither AT&T nor Verizon report cell phone coverage there.
Like we said, not ideal conditions.
Gun-wielding “camo dudes” in an encounter recorded by the YouTube channel MacADVentures.Screenshot: MacADVentures (YouTube)
At a certain point, early invasion participants will be stopped cold by base security. The main security force, known over the years as the “camo dudes,” are civilian contractors that patrol the base perimeter wearing camouflage uniforms and driving pickup trucks.
The “camo dudes” are generally known to UFO watchers as a humorless lot that take their job very seriously. They are quite well armed, and in one case in 2016 drew their firearms on a pair of motorcyclists. It has also been alleged for years that Area 51 is ringed with sensors, including seismic intrusion devices designed to detect the rumble of vehicles, and that explains how the camo dudes often respond so quickly to trespassers.
He’s waiting for you to free him...or not.Photo: Justin Norton (AP)
Traditionally, trespassers at Area 51 can expect to be detained by the “camo dudes” for hours on end until a Lincoln County sheriff arrives on the scene, at which time they are issued a $750 ticket for trespassing. That’s a relatively tame response: the base is also ringed with signs citing the Internal Security Act of 1950, and stating “Use of deadly force authorized,” and Section 21 of the act states that
Whoever willfully shall violate any such regulation or order...for the protection or security of military or naval aircraft, airports, airport facilities, vessels, harbors, ports, piers, water-front facilities, bases, forts, posts, laboratories, stations, vehicles, equipment, explosives, or other property or places subject to the jurisdiction, administration, or in the custody of the Department of Defense, any Department or agency of which said Department consists, or any officer or employee of said Department or agency, or of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics or any officer or employee thereof, relating to fire hazards, fire protection, lighting, machinery, guard service, disrepair, disuse or other unsatisfactory conditions thereon, or the ingress thereto or egress or removal of persons therefrom, or otherwise providing for safeguarding the same against destruction, loss, or injury by accident or by enemy action, sabotage or other subversive actions, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction thereof shall be liable to a fine of not to exceed $5,000 or to imprisonment for not more than one year, or both.
Deadly force is authorized even for a misdemeanor offense. Maybe that’s bit unusual, but then again, this is Area 51 we’re talking about. A smart defendant in federal court could argue that there is no mention of “alien hospitality suites” in the Internal Security Act, forcing the government to drop the charges-or produce the aliens.
There is also the prospect of federal conspiracy charges, as you have stated your intent on a public Facebook page to conspire to invade a federal military facility. Like any MMO boss the federal government’s legal powers stack, making it a formidable opponent indeed.
The Nevada Test and Training Range (of which Area 51 is a part) is an area where the Air Force tests and trains combat aircraft. Any attempt to illegally access military installations or military training areas is dangerous.
The statement is weirdly ominous, leaving it ambiguous what the source of the “danger” is. Rattlesnakes? Falling rocks? Accidental bombings? It doesn’t say. It’s probably best to never find out.
Once you’re inside the base there’s no telling what you might find. You might find a variety of secret test aircraft, including F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighters recently seen sporting “aggressor camouflage”, the legendary and elusive Aurora Mach 6 spyplane, or a Russian fighter jet owned and operated by the U.S. government dogfighting with American planes. And maybe aliens and their UFOs. Bigfoot, too.
The event already has produced one unexpected result from the U.S. government: indirect confirmation that the base actually exists. As late as 1995 the Feds were perfectly willing to argue that Area 51 did not exist: that abruptly changed around in 2013, but the government rarely addresses the topic. The Air Force’s warning acknowledges that Area 51 is a real facility. That’s quite a feat for a social media shitpost.
Correction: This post originally said the Area 51 Visitor Center is owned by Dennis Hof, but since he passed away in 2018, we should have said it “was” owned by Mr. Hof. The line has been corrected; apologies for the error.
The Soviets tried to beat Apollo 11. They crashed a spacecraft on the moon instead.
The Soviets tried to beat Apollo 11. They crashed a spacecraft on the moon instead.
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin poses for a photograph beside the U.S. flag deployed on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969. Associated Press/July 20, 1969
By Alex Horton The Washington Post
As Neil Armstrong walked on the lunar surface and marveled at the "fine, sandy particles" that crunched under his boot, he and the rest of the Apollo 11 crew were not alone.
A Soviet spacecraft, Luna 15, had beat them to orbit days before, circumnavigating the moon in a final Cold War showdown race to land on another celestial body and return home.
The unmanned spacecraft's mission would be an epic coup: Get to the moon, scoop up rocks and jettison back toward Earth before the Americans returned with their own samples.
That did not happen. Luna 15 plummeted toward the moon on July 21, 1969, crashed into a mountain and cratered near the aptly named Sea of Crises -- before Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin even left the surface.
NASA had worried Luna 15 would interfere with radio transmissions and present a safety risk with Apollo 11, prompting high-level officials to cross the divide in an unprecedented level of cooperation.
It signified something else. The competition between Apollo 11 and Luna 15 to land on the moon and return to Earth did not exactly finish when "the Eagle" landed, as most believe.
"The race to the moon ends when Luna 15 crashes," William P. Barry, NASA's chief historian, told The Washington Post.
The Soviet exploration timeline was aggressive and, at turns, tragic. Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov melted during re-entry, along with the Soyuz 1 capsule in which he was riding, in 1967, all the while "cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship."
In the next year, two Soviet tortoises became the first Earth beings to circle the moon.
Luna 15's design and launch time frame was incredible for its time, Barry said. Plans were drawn up for a robot designed to land, collect samples and scurry back to Earth.
That was complete in about six months as the Soviets raced to preempt the United States, including an unsuccessful June launch with a mission to grab moon rocks and study the lunar gravitational field. That rocket never left orbit.
On July 15, the rocket delivering Luna 15 roared toward the moon three days ahead of the Apollo 11 mission. The race had begun.
"I'm sure that the original plan was to beat Apollo 11 back to Earth with their sample," Barry said.
The launch puzzled NASA and surprised the Apollo 11 crew, who only knew about its existence en route to the moon and "did not know about Luna 15 or its goal," Armstrong said in 2009.
No one exactly knew where it was going or how it could interfere with the three Americans heading for the same place.
The moon's surface is about the size of Africa, Barry said, but orbital dynamics suggested landing spots around the moon's equator were best -- potentially limiting the distance between the Columbia command module, the Eagle landing craft and Luna 15.
There was only one unlikely solution to all of this: Get the flight details from the Soviets themselves.
During the Cold War.
In the midst of the moon race.
And yet, Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman had met Soviet space official Academician Mstislav V. Keldysh. He later called on him to provide details on Luna 15 and assure it would not interfere with Apollo 11.
What came next was unprecedented in American-Soviet space relations, Barry said. Keldysh telegraphed the orbital details for Luna 15 and said it would be a safe transit for the U.S. astronauts, though he never divulged the mission details.
Meanwhile, as the Apollo 11 rocketed toward the moon, Houston ground control kept the crew informed about the whereabouts of Luna 15. It had entered orbit on July 17, Houston told the crew, according to flight logs. Both spacecrafts made orbital adjustments as ground control in both nations nervously watched.
Soviet engineers worried over rugged terrain of the Sea of Crises landing site, NASA has said, and delayed its planned landing for hours.
That opened the window for Apollo 11 to land. As Armstrong and Aldrin took photos, collected samples and marveled at the view of Earth, Luna 15 tumbled in orbit.
The Soviets realized they were running out of time, Barry said, and a day later, on July 21, they decided to make an effort to land -- which surprised British astronomers listening to Soviet transmissions. They were unaware it was designed to do so, Discover magazine reported.
Luna 15 descended, cushioned by retro rockets. But its trajectory was off, sending the spacecraft careening into a mountain at 298 miles an hour, and finally, plummeting to the moonscape.
It crashed about 350 miles from the U.S. landing site at 15:50 UTC -- a full two hours and four minutes before the Eagle began its flight back to the Columbia module.
"I say, this has really been drama of the highest order," a British astronomer said afterward.
The Post reported the crash the next day. "Thus, by a fluke of moon geography, a space flight riddle 'wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma' ended in an irony," Howard Simons wrote. Scientists speculated it was deliberately crashed to "remove its carcass from lunar orbit," he added, which was also a method the United States practiced.
The Soviets never fully admitted Luna 15 was an effort to beat the United States to the moon and back, Barry said, though those details emerged after the Soviet Union collapsed. And its return trajectory after the delays made it unlikely it would even beat the American mission back.
Luna 15 may have failed its mission, Barry noted, but what scientists learned from the experience became clear in the next decade.
More attempts were made for a Luna mission to collect moon rocks. Five in total failed, until 1970, when Luna 16 shoveled 100 grams of dust and returned it to Earth -- the first time an unmanned spacecraft did so from any nation. Later missions yielded more payloads.
The bones from the doomed spacecraft may never be found, Barry said. "Distinguishing a crater caused by Luna 15 and a small meteorite would be pretty hard."
We meet our guide, Pear Månsken, at the Company's No. 5 airlock. Pear's only instructions: Keep them in sight at all times and let them know immediately of any concerns. Beyond that we're free to roam. Stay safe and live. Or do something stupid and die. Not their problem. We've signed the waiver. This is the frontier.
It's July 20, 2044: 75 years to the Earth-day since Apollo 11put moonboots on the ground. But that was way up, near the equator. Today, we're setting out at high lunar latitude, close to the pole. Where the cold and dark lies just steps away from the hot and bright. This is where the action is: A handful of companies and a few nations variously competing and cooperating on a mostly friendly quest, mostly for ancient ice. It's not for making margaritas. It's for rocket propellent and life support; what market futures analysts call Cosmic Consumable Commodities: "Triple C's."
Those first landings happened long ago, but it's still early days in lunar development. There's a lot of moon to go around. And a lot of businesses going to get it. Some, like Chevron, Maersk, Mitsubishi, Lockheed Martin and Siemens, have been well known for decades. A few, like Astrobotic, Moon Express, Masten, Orbit Beyond and the not-for-profit Draper Lab, have been quietly working since the moon-surge began, around 2018. Others, like Nyota ya Fedha, Lunapole and Polarvarg (for whom our chaperon, Pear, works) are well-capitalized startups. India’s Sampanna Candrudu, formerly part of the nation’s space agency, has now been reincarnated as a public corporation. Blue Origin partners with everyone whereas SpaceX and its sisters, Tesla and The Boring Company, prefer to work as a self-contained conglomerate. (Some would say: "cult.")
Co-located in a few lunar enterprise zones, most of these companies respect — and sometimes protect — one another. Way out here, 238,900 miles (384,470 kilometers) from Earth, with a very high cost of operation, it's difficult for authorities to patrol and enforce restrictions. Safety is in everyone's interests. Frontiers produce good citizens. Or dead ones. Hardly any in between.
Your suit boots up in seconds. The electronics and helmet-immersive display actually came online in much less than a second, but the gas-mixture-and-atmospheric-pressure diagnostics take one complete loop to verify. The suit and a few of your tools checked in with "Moon Mama." Every smart object on Luna (except certain police and military) knows who, where and what every other one is; all are connected through the ubiquitous 8G awareness-net.
Pear shoos us into one of Polarvarg's short-haul trans-landers. Small rocket-hoppers run like a shuttle-bus service here. The worksites are widely scattered. There's not that much risk of damage to neighbors' personnel or property, if things go south. The moon is a palace of robots; many fewer people live herethan science fiction writers and space advocates of bygone days expected. So, most nations and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are taking a mostly hands-off, "laissez-faire" approach.
The United States Space Guard looks after the interests of American flagged vehicles and facilities. China's military-industrial monolith keeps to its indecipherable, but so far, serene, self. And the GC (Gendarmerie Cosmos) tends to the emergency needs of European Union company vessels. Outer space is proving to be the quintessentially asymmetric battlespace. The "Mutually Assured Paralysis" of cyberwarfare has, so far, proven a highly effective peacekeeper. A fully armed Deep Space Force — equipped with overwhelming firepower to intimidate bad actors by ensuring, in advance, their total destruction — has proved too costly a solution to a problem that hasn't yet developed. Of course, it someday might.
Where, exactly, Luna fits in humanity's story is still unwritten. Some on Earth worry that, without a tightly preconceived legal framework, unfair distribution of the moon's resources is inevitable. (It is.) Others counter that there's no incentive to develop resources that cannot be owned free and clear. (There isn't.) A few are concerned that moon workers could become easy targets for exploitation. But right now, it's moon-boom times and hardly anyone is complaining.
The corporations have seen that ethical behavior tends to enrich their investments. And it keeps them off the homepages of news sites. Fair treatment of labor (which is mostly robotic anyway), deference to international norms of the mining industry, respect for historical sites (e.g., Apollo and Lunokhod), and basic environmental awareness all turn out to be good corporate marketing strategies, the storyboards of slick stock prospectuses.
Because the risks are so gloomy — and the potential benefits so sunny — everyone on the moon is playing, more or less, on the same team. But there will, almost inevitably, come a time when they aren't. Then, solar system civilization will have lots of ethical dragons to slay. We have time to think about some of these issues as we drop from the hopper to continue on foot.
Digging for paydirt
Back in the Apollo days, our easy ramble around these moon rocks would have been a lot more arduous and dangerous, with just primitive paper maps and no space-based positioning system. Digging samples was all manual labor then. No robots around to help. Just simple tongs, scoops and rakes. The mightiest machine was a Black & Decker cordless electric hammer-drill. With a lot of effort, astronauts could bore up to 10 feet (3 meters) down through the compacted surface dust called regolith.
To ice-mine the moon, you need much heftier tech. The deep frozen water is rock-hard and often rock-bound. You are there to find out just how hard it'll be to free up that paydirt at a new site. Before you arrived, Polarvarg survey drones, carrying imaging spectrometers and radar, flagged the site as promising.
Then, a small army of Company rovers explored the nearby "cold traps." They found some tiny particles of ice lying on the surface, like dusty snow. More turned up, buried about half a meter down, in larger, purer crystals, like gravelly hailstones. And some appeared in much larger, deeper blocks — harder to get to but much more rewarding. By tradition and law, a human (that's you) must come to verify the find on-site, so he or she can attest to it later, should there be a territorial challenge. Despite all your high-tech gear, you are really just a simple scratch-ass prospector, looking to stake a claim on a parcel of moon.
But you're also here to do some new science. About half of it is "economic geology." That, historically, has been to understand where certain rock aggregates form in order to fast-track commercial quarrying. Aside from the 1970s Apollo data set, and some rover work on Mars, we've had only one planet to study in detail. Your work on how the moon made its minerals will help mining companies to locate ore bodies on Earth.
And, of course, here on Luna itself: Nearly everywhere you look, you can find titanium and aluminum, for building space structures. Mature companies like Made In Space and Tethers Unlimited, which started in LEO (low Earth orbit), are here on the surface drawing feedstocks for their space-based flexible fabricators. There's also plenty of silicon for circuitry — especially photovoltaic solar collectors (though small nuclear reactors provide local power to most lunar worksites).
All those craters punched into the crust conveniently reveal differentiated metals. Essential for small electronics and large power systems, local concentrations of rare-earth elements abound. The moon is a miner's paradise, and it's of vital strategic international trade importance to the nations and transnational corporations that dig and refine it.
The biggest player is China. The moon's gentle light has long signified aspiration and the promise of abundance in several Asian cultures. With a long-range view — free from the frequent course changes that buffet democratic societies — the Chinese Communist Party government has carefully, over decades, woven lunar development into its identity. China's effects on the activities of other nations and corporations working in space have been less adverse than some Western military planners had feared, but more disruptive than many internationalists had hoped.
Next year (2045), the People's Republic of China celebrates its 100th anniversary. The state-backed Chinese Academy of Space Technology Corporation is very close to completing two large solar-power satellites, fabricated from mostly lunar materials. Each will downlink a steady stream of up to 500 megawatts of electricity, harvested above Earth's atmosphere, from high orbit, clear of weather and nighttime darkness. The power comes down via low-density microwaves to large receiving antennas in China's countryside. It would have been more efficient to send energy down by laser, but China — for now — seems to respect international agreements crafted to prevent directed-energy weapons in space.
These big satellites are just the next step in a program China began 30 years ago, to beam growing quantities of energy over ever-increasing vertical distances. If "the 500s" prove out, China will immediately begin work on a pair of much larger solar-energy satellites, each 10 times more powerful. Neither will be so much a gargantuan spacecraft as a constellation of several hundred thousand very small ones. Each subunit a clone of the last, all built mostly of materials from the moon, by an army of robotic fabricators. Certain industries scale magnificently in space: the ones that don't need people.
It’s a lossy proposition: Converting sunlight to electricity, then back to electromagnetic waves for the downlink, then back to electricity is not very efficient. Chinese government economists are well aware that it will take many decades to fully recoup construction costs. But they are investing in future generations. They are not accountable to impatient shareholders. And they are focused far beyond the moon.
Roadhouse high
Some space moguls are focused squarely on Earth: In lower orbits, with grand views of the planet below, a number of high-end boutique hotels have sprung up. "Blown up" would be more accurate; most of these are very large inflated structures. But don't think lightweight "balloons" or "blimps." Their skins are actually much tougher than the metal hulls of traditional spacecraft. These expanded envelopes are built by sandwiching strong, lightweight synthetic fabrics tightly together. Layering with different densities protects against micrometeors and human-made space junk. Sewn into this hardy hide are impressively large windows. You'll get to look through them, in a few days, as you change vehicles on your way back to Earth.
Bigelow Aerospace (BA) is the dominant — but not the only — company to offer rentable "space in space." The nightly rack rates are, well, astronomical. And there's no such thing as a "walk-in." But there's a sufficient population of well-heeled leisure guests and B2B travelers to make a business. And lodging modules are not BA's only offering. You can find variously sized BA blow-ups popping up wherever pressurized volumes are needed. These elegant edifices come up from Earth tightly packed, in the large payload fairings of heavy-lift launchers. But they run on Triple C's from the moon.
Drumming up business
Back here on the lunar surface, that affable dude in the purple-striped moon suit, working a few meters to the west of us, is Seok Wolgwang Choi. An American of Korean heritage, he encourages English speakers to call him "Sammy." He talks and moonwalks with an easygoing manner. But that bright orange bag over his shoulder reading "Danger: Explosives" looks more than a little ominous.
On Earth, geophysicists employed by mining companies thump the ground, reading the resulting sound waves to map what lies beneath. Astronauts on Apollo missions 14 and 16 did a bit of that. They emplaced mortars to fire rounds into the nearby terrain. And they deployed seismometers to capture the resulting moon wiggles. On Apollo 17, Harrison "Jack" Schmitt — the only geologist to walk the lunar terrain during Apollo — went farther. Jack, and his commander Gene Cernan, placed explosive charges in the regolith a few kilometers from a geophone array at their landing site. The igniters were set for several days; the guys had long since left the surface by the time the explosions were triggered.
More than half a century later, Sammy, too, likes making the moon go boom. His hazardous but lucrative career is about blowing stuff up in the name of "Lunar Active Seismic Tomography." He revels in leaving LASTing lunar impressions, mostly because the company cuts him in for profit-sharing on the find.
But you and Sammy are also out here to do some pure, not-for-profit science. Understanding the moon's evolution reveals the grand story of the solar system's formation. As you select rock samples, with the help of a keen-eyed geology team on Earth peering through your suit-cams, you are again moonwalking in the footsteps of giants:
Before Apollo, just about everyone thought all those shady holes seen from Earth had been built by volcanoes. By the time John Young and Charlie Duke left behind Apollo 16's Lunar Module lower stage, in April of 1972, most scientists were rapidly realizing that the surface of the moon is mostly about impacts.
The moon itself appears to be the child of a gargantuan crash between a Mars-size protoplanet and the early Earth. Fathoming the implications of that event, astrophysicists realized that the planets we see today are not the first ones this solar system has had (except, perhaps, giant Jupiter). Nor do the planets now orbit where they originally formed. This revolutionary recognition arose directly from studies of the moon rocks hand-picked, packed and shipped home by 12 people between July 1969 and December 1972.
They made it look easy. It was not easy. On the downlinked slow-scan video stream, you see the Apollo moonwalkers bouncing merrily around in gravity only 16% that of Earth. But, listen closely and you'll hear them breathing pretty hard at times. Swaddled in layers of nylon, neoprene, aluminized Mylar, Dacron, Kapton, Teflon-coated fabric — and pumped with air pressure — each guy was fighting the suit with every move.
Each Apollo A7L "moon suit" — called the Extra-Vehicular Mobility Unit, or EMU — was rated for 30 trips outside. None got more than three. Apollo was a spare-no-expense program before the eyes of the world. Risks to the astronauts were minimized at astronomical costs. With President Kennedy's directive to "return him safely to the Earth" ringing in every program manager's ears, everything was expendable, except the crew.
But you and I, working our industrial jobs here on Future Moon, need a suit capable of hundreds of excursions before refurb or retirement. We need to go outside often — even if just to check, or fix, the machines that do most of the work. So, our suits have shape-memory materials on the inside for comfort and haptic feedback "pulsers" in the fingertips for touch. And self-healing polymer layers guarding against tool punctures and micrometeoroids. Look closely at your suit's outside layer. It's a patchwork of panels, each hosting a network of tiny wires. That's your electrodynamic dust armor. It periodically sparks away clingy motes of lunar soil. Or tries to. Dust is a constant headache here on the moon.
Btw. It's time for a new acronym, isn't it? EVA — "extravehicular activity" — has served for people exiting and reentering capsules, shuttles, stations and movable modules. But what shall we call a stroll outside a permanent habitat on a planetary surface? I nominate simply: "a stroll outside." People are really living in space now — on the moon, around asteroids, in growing settlements in a plethora of orbits. I say: If you have a gravity vector, it's a "walk." If you don't, it's a "float" or a "fly." If the atmosphere is thicker than Earth's, it's a "swim." See? Easy!
We climb onto a "flatbed" to save some steps. A direct descendant of Apollo's Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV), our ride is basically just wheel motors and a big battery with a platform and a bit of open truss work to keep items (including humans) on board. Every other need — including navigation and video — is already built into our moon suits.
Well connected
Apollo moonwalkers could look down at their chest-mounted Remote-Control Units and easily see small square "flags" — status indicators — warning if oxygen, carbon dioxide, water, pressure or vent conditions drifted out of normal operating ranges. Comfy, here, in our 2044 lunar couture, we see mini-gauges floating before our eyes on the HUD (heads-up display).
But suit health is the least of our inputs. We find ourselves immersed in a serious expanse of augmented reality. Active mapping with locators, task checklists, action prompts, graphical instructions; these all rotate, prioritized for our sensory consumption by the AI agents our Company bosses have trained to help us live our best space lives.
Essential to that life: your psychological health. Extended stays in sterile monochromatic environments demand colorful, life-affirming cues. So, you brought the Earth with you to the moon. All those task-oriented cues share your sight and sound field with social messaging, and with a bit of art from time to time.
The claustrophobic confines of a helmet are emotionally expanded by well-designed AR, the harsh landscape outside softened by the occasional visual or auditory reminder of your lush homeworld. You find it's comforting — indeed, vital — to travel with live avatars of friends and family. They pop up from time to time, and you're always glad to interact with them, despite the 2.5-second delay time to and from Earth. On the barren, insensitive moon, you find you frequently want to phone a friend.
And you'll have local friends here too: human and robotic. The "Buddy Team" approach — pair bonding — is wired deeply within us. It's the secret sauce of humanity's success. Watching the paired Apollo crews in action, you could see it immediately. They could improvise on the fly, clear each other's cables, be one another's eyes.
You call up a video clip from 1971 — one of Apollo 15's sorties. Projected on your HUD: The sloped flank of Spur Crater. Dave Scott is using tongs to lift rock sample No. 15415 up from the lunar regolith. He's saying to Jim Irwin: "OK, babe; open the bag," which, of course, Irwin has already started doing. That chunk of anorthosite will come to be known as the Genesis Rock — a window 4.1 billion years back, a geologic time capsule from just after the moon's origin.
Tantalizing fusion
For all that long stretch since its formation, the moon has never had much of an atmosphere. Nor much of a magnetic field. So, whatever particles the sun threw at Luna tended to stick to the fine-grained surface.
Some of that residue has been helium-3 (He-3), implanted by the solar wind. A bit more helium-3 has been deposited here by cosmic rays from deep space. It's a tantalizing substance: two protons and a neutron, the only stable isotope that contains more protons than neutrons, besides simple hydrogen itself.
In the bad old Cold War days, when the nations of Earth had more than 70,000 active nuclear weapons pointed at each other's cities, helium-3 was a headache. It would build up as tritium decayed in the stored warhead, actually reducing its explosive effectiveness. Missile maintainers would siphon off the He-3 to be sold for medical imaging and other peaceful uses.
But helium-3 can be put to work in a fusion reactor, liberating high levels of energy, without throwing off radioactive byproducts. At least in theory.
Neil Armstrong inadvertently collected the first sample of lunar helium-3 in 1969 — about 25 parts per billion of the soil he scooped up to fill out one collection box. Other Apollo missions brought some back as well. But the potential for power generation by helium-3 fusion wasn't realized until researchers at the University of Wisconsin put the clues together in 1985.
Like water ice, helium-3 survives in greater abundance in the shadows. Here on Future Moon, prospectors have found concentrations up to three times greater than the Apollo samples in the deep, dark zones of polar craters, coincidentally where most water ice is mined. Getting both He-3 and H2O out requires heating the soil up. So, it makes sense to harvest both in these unique polar locations, where spots in nearly constant sunlight at 257 degrees Fahrenheit (125 degrees Celsius) lie adjacent to practically permanent shade at minus 274 F (minus 170 C).
The north pole of the moon turns out to be a slightly easier place to work, because more of the high ground is illuminated, more of the time. And it's easier to negotiate the gentler northern topography down into the mining sites.
But the economics of helium-3 fusion don't appear to be as bright as the idea. Concentrator-bots must sift through more than 100 tons of lunar soil to yield a single gram of helium-3. It takes more than 100,000 times that quantity to operate a 1-gigawatt reactor for a year. The power that comes out is worth about $175 million (mid-21st century value). So you need to run your reactor for more than 25 years to pay off its cost.
These reactors are so expensive because helium-3 doesn't really like to fuse with itself, which is the "cleanest," least radioactive process. Getting He-3/He-3 fusion to work requires immensely high plasma temperatures, achieved by smashing atoms together extremely fast. It takes a supermassive, highly precise machine. And, although helium-3 itself isn't radioactive, no one has shown that significant secondary radiation breeding will not compromise safety over time.
There are richer sources of helium-3 in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn. But that's a long way to go. Someday, fusion-driven rockets might use some of their own helium-3 payload to push the rest inward to Human-space and outward to the Deep System.
For now, helium-3 remains a provocative potential fuel in search of a practical way to burn. Still, it is poetic to imagine the fusion fire of our primal star giving its offspring (us) a means to ignite local fusion power for our own sustenance, and carrying that fire into places the sun does not reach.
We've rolled upslope to the rim of Haworth Crater. Looking through her spotting scope, Janelle Oladele, director of Ops at the rock-ice extraction site, is speaking: "Alexa, bring the west thermal group online." (A lot of lunar AI is named Alexa because, well, Blue Origin, which was started by Amazon founderJeff Bezos.) We watch her array of parabolic mirrors, set along the peaks, focus sunlight down into the shadows. As the beams converge, they dazzlingly light up a few square meters of the crater floor for the first time in three billion years.
We realize they've slewed the long way around to avoid cooking a pod of extractor-bots and a pair of human overseers stationed nearby. We the people — and they the machines — are essentially a single organism now, extending life into lifelessness. A way for intelligence to populate the universe — a mission begun on the grasslands of East Africa about 2 million years ago.
Back in 2016, United Launch Alliance (ULA) posted a standing offer of $1,360 per lb. ($3,000 per kilogram to any individual or company who could deliver hydrogen and oxygen made from the moon to LEO (low Earth orbit). It was a "cash-on-the-barrelhead" proposition for Lunar Triple C's, made by the most experienced rocket company on Earth at a time when no on-orbit propellant transfer machines existed.
ULA's bid jump-started an industry — one based on using material from space to get around and build things in space. It is much cheaper to get mass "up" off the moon than from "down" the deep gravity well of Earth.
Still, getting off the moon does require rockets or electromagnetic launchers. Civilization in the inner solar system is forming from the moon, but is not, for the most part, being built on the moon. Nor on the surfaces of Mars or Venus. Dream of terraforming all you want, but physics, economics and human needs will drive us into free orbits between Earth and moon for a very long time to come.
A self-coordinated phalanx of bots is swarming in just behind the beam as it tracks southwest. They fade beneath a growing bank of fog in front of them, and a cloud of dust behind. We thank Director Oladele for letting us watch the parade. Now it's off to a waiting hopper for the bounce back to town.
Home, home in the moon
Town, it turns out, is mostly underground. The same exposed conditions that allowed the moon to accumulate helium-3 leave humans naked to the killing, cancerous effects of solar energetic particles (SEPs) and galactic cosmic rays (GCRs). When you're out moonwalking, you're a sitting duck for the first energetic protons following a very large solar flare, which can travel at nearly the speed of light. But it takes at least 20 hours for the most dangerous bulk of acoronal mass ejection(CME) to reach the Earth-moon system. And most CMEs are not directed toward us. So, we can usually count on some warning.
A meter or so of dirt piled on top of your habitat keeps you safe. It matters most for long-contract dwellers who build up cumulative doses over time. They've taken to saying they live "in" the moon, not "on" it. Gopher-bots, built by the SpaceX-spawned Boring Company, have been worming their way between landing/launching zones, residential towns and processing plants, creating networks of transport and storage tunnels. Small "hidey holes" are dug (or mounded) at every worksite: If the solar flux suddenly jumps, humans can shelter-in-place.
Pear points out a long ridge as the hopper climbs to clear it; a lava tube lies beneath its hump. Built, in the moon's hot youth, by flowing magma, these hollow structures offer intrinsically shielded open spaces, and naturally occurring access through "skylights" where bubbles or meteoroids have popped open the surface. Apollo 15 explored Hadley Rille — probably a lava tube with a collapsed roof — whose floor was more than a kilometer wide, with walls up to 1,000 feet (300 m) high. Many large lunar lava tubes have been surveyed. Temperatures inside them are much more even than out on the surface. Someday people may live comfortably in them. But, here in 2044, we still seem a long way from a human population explosion on the moon.
You'll probably sleep well back at Company quarters tonight, once you've had a shower and a drink. Both are possible, courtesy of that ice you saw liberated today.
Looking around the bar, you realize miners haven't changed much in centuries. Smudges of soot go along with the job, no matter how disconnected and suit-protected one tries to be. Moon dust is nasty stuff. Not as toxic as Mars' dust, but dirty, abrasive and pervasive. And always that specific odor: Apollo astronauts likened it to spent gunpowder. This place even smells like a frontier town.
The dark side
The "Wild West," pioneering mentality of this moon rush can't last. Someday — perhaps soon — there will tougher questions to answer:
The first time a dead tourist's family sues the spaceship line that brought him there, which justice system will adjudicate?
If a rogue nation — or a private mercenary army — destroys a competitor's ice refinery, whose retaliatory force will respond? And who makes sure that response will be proportional?
Will children born here on Luna be afforded the citizenship rights of their parents? Would they even be physically capable of living on any higher-gravity world?
As genetic and genomic engineering grows ever more powerful, what ethics will apply to human or animal testing performed in, say, a lunar company town?
For that matter, what if a bug born in a bio-lab on Luna turns out to be virulent on Earth?
As every military planner knows, you take the high ground as soon as you can: Who's in charge of the moon-based ability to throw or purposefully divert big rocks around the sky?
When does a defense system against asteroids become an offensive weapon?
Who decides when the risk of diverting an asteroid close to Earth, in order to mine it, outweighs the benefit?
A long, long time from now — when civilization on the moon has become fully self-sustaining — residents may wish to claim sovereignty over that world's resources. If, say, a solar-power satellite serving Earth is made of lunar materials, do the daughters of the moon workers who built it get stock in the Earth-based utility company that profits from it? Old contracts and treaties may be torn up in the process. Hot, cold or social disinformation wars may be fought. Given our human history, all of those are likely.
The bright side
You're going home. For all but a very few people, "home" still means "Earth." Like the Apollo teams, 75 years ago, you caught a lift to LLO (low lunar orbit) aboard a high hopper. You transfer to an OTA (orbital transfer vehicle). Unlike Apollo, the OTA will drop you at one of those flying flophouses with the big windows in low Earth orbit. You're not waiting around on Luna for an Aldrin Cycler, the cheaper way to travel. But you're also not jumping a "starship-class" luxury direct liner, which is rated for direct travel between all worlds.
You drop from the High Hyatt Hotel in a dedicated atmospheric transfer vehicle (ATV). Some of that lunar ice is still with you: Your ATV is fully refueled with propellent mined on the moon.
Safely slowing down on powered descent, you get set to touch down on dirt that's full of life — unlike the lunar regolith. Some call our old world by its old name, "Terra," which means "land." By far the best planet for tens of kiloparsecs in any direction. Though the price declines with each launch, it still costs a bundle to get you to and from the moon. You wrestle with justifying your journey. While you were off ego-tripping through the cosmos, how were you helping Earth?
Your excursion was mostly — but not entirely — carbon-neutral. You launched on engines burning cold methane, "cryo-CH4." Once you got to low Earth orbit, however, lunar hydrogen and oxygen — and free sunlight — took you everywhere else. Had you gone deep into the solar system, you'd probably have been on nukes (nuclear electrical or nuclear thermal propulsion).
The old idea that Earth must deal with an ever-increasing population by shipping billions of us off-planet to colonize elsewhere will not, and cannot, work. But opening the resources of space can, in time, unburden Earth of much of the industrial impact of humanity. As Bezos, and Gerard O'Neill before him, (and Ehricke before him, and Tsiolkovsky before him) suggested: Move heavy tech off-planet, get better habitat on-planet.
Sadly, the only other way to ensure our species' success seems to require cultivating a cancerous body of increasingly restrictive rules, with ever more ironclad enforcement. Hardly anybody, outside of a few authoritarians with badly damaged personalities, wants that.
There is one additional emerging cause for hope: "the population plateau." Beginning in the second half of the 20th century, some nations have seen their populations peak and begin to recede. This trend correlates with the spread of certain nonmilitary technologies. As this permeates worldwide, it reverses the human population burst, which began with the rise of agriculture and the unintended terraforming of planet Earth. Machine proliferation on farms means we don't have to breed as many human farmhands. Birth rates continue to decline in Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia. The U.S., Canada and even China are tiptoeing toward population stability.
Though technology implies increased energy use, cleaner ways to get that power are emerging. Some of the most promising — solar satellites and like fusion power — correlate with space development.
Beyond tech, the empowerment of women is vitally important for maintaining a healthy civilization. Advanced education, self-determination, wage equality, child care: It is not, of course, necessary to go to space to do these. But, thanks to social networks of (mostly) female and non-binary engineers, most space industries have baked a responsibility to fulfill each of these requirements into their companies' cultures. And the mass of these exerts a beneficial gravitational pull on societies in general.
There's a grand virtuous cycle at work here: A maturing space-based infrastructure to lighten the burden on Earth's biosphere also happens to further open the solar system's resources. It looks like while offloading stress from our home planet, we get opportunities in the rest of space for very little additional investment. Starting with Triple C's from the moon, we can go anywhere.
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin walks on the surface of the moon near the leg of the lunar module Eagle during the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969. Mission commander Neil Armstrong took this photograph with a 70-millimeter lunar surface camera.
Plait — known as "The Bad Astronomer" to his many thousands of readers on Syfy — told Space.com he is frustrated that he and others like him still have to debunk the hoax theory from time to time, 50 years after the first moon landing. Then again, Plait became famous because he's so good at debunking in the first place.
Back in February 2001, Fox Broadcasting ran a documentary titled "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?" Plait coincidentally had a pile of research ready from a book he was working on, and a friend sent him an advance copy of the show so that he had time to write up a response.
Plait's essay on his personal blog, which he published shortly after the show aired, quickly generated thousands of views years before Facebook, Twitter and today's social media even existed. Fox's TV show propelled Plait's writing to a large audience, and his 2002 book "Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing 'Hoax'" (Wiley) helped as well. Plait remains a popular science commentator nearly two decades later.
"I kind of wish it had never aired," Plait said about the Fox documentary, "because it opened a huge Pandora's box. On the other hand, it's exposing a wound to sunlight. That thing was there anyway, festering. Let it get out to the public, and let it heal, and let it kill the infection. But yeah, it's troubling. Just to know that if Fox hadn't aired that, who knows what my career path would have been."
Bond, Hyams and Mulder
Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface on July 20, 1969. Even back then, some people were skeptical that the feat was technologically possible. The James Bond movie "Diamonds Are Forever," for example, had a joke about faked moon landings just two years later, in 1971.
But what really propelled the conspiracy theory into popular culture, Plait said, was the 1978 Peter Hyams film "Capricorn One," which portrays a faked human landing on Mars. (Also, a 1976 self-published pamphlet by Bill Kaysing, "We Never Went to the Moon," was popular among conspiracy-minded people of the day.)
That was 40 years ago, but moon-hoax enthusiasts are still with us today.
"The X-Files" brought all sorts of space conspiracies into the public consciousness in the 1990s and 2000s, and the rebooted version of the show addressed the moon landing in a 2018 episode. The conspiracy was also addressed in many other fictional TV shows, from "Futurama" to "Friends."
Meanwhile, some documentary films and reality-TV efforts — a 2008 episode of "MythBusters," for example — tried to chase away the conspiracy theory by educating people. Other filmmakers, such as the folks behind the 2002 mockumentary "Dark Side of the Moon," spoofed moon hoaxers.
Opinion polls over the years regularly show that around 5% of Americans believe the Apollo moon landings were faked, former NASA chief historian Roger Launius recently told the Associated Press. That's more than 16 million people, assuming a U.S. population of 327 million.
NASA has done a lot of debunking work over the decades, including a 2018 offer to NBA superstar Stephen Curry to view moon rocks at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston after Curry said he didn't believe in the moon landings. (A few days later, Curry said he made the comments in jest.)
Earlier this year, NASA spokesperson Allard Beutel recited a pile of evidence supporting the moon landings to The Washington Post. He mentioned the returned moon rocks, the ability to bounce laser beams off gear the astronauts left behind and images NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took of the Apollo landing sites in 2011. Nevertheless, even former astronauts have found themselves in the fray.
Space shuttle astronaut Leland Melvin tackled the topic in the 2019 Science Channel series "Truth Behind the Moon Landing," which also features Space.com Editor-in-Chief Tariq Malik as a guest. And in 2002, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin punched moon-landing denier Bart Sibrel in the jaw during a taped confrontation. (Police later said Aldrin was provoked, and no charges were filed.)
Plait said there is a danger in talking about the moon-landing conspiracy and other clearly debunked conspiracies like it, such as vaccines causing autism or humans not being responsible for climate change. It's possible, he said, that by airing any of these debates, the media gives legitimacy to the conspiracy. Plait said he sometimes struggles about whether to address a conspiracy in his blog; he tries to discuss ones that are widely talked about already.
But it's a tough job in fast-moving social media. Plait said he recently commented on what appeared to be widespread Twitter backlash about the new version of "The Little Mermaid" starring black actress Halle Bailey, only to discover the backlash was itself likely faked. Plait took down his original tweet and wrote a correction. (The genesis of the viral tweet was from a troll account, according to a tweet by Buzzfeed's Brandon Wall.)
Plait said we should remember that conspiracy beliefs often have real-life effects. For example: "Because of the anti-vax movement, babies are dying, kids are dying, older people are dying, people with compromised immune systems are dying." Extreme weather events driven in part by climate change are killing people as well, he said.
Plait clarified that he did not blame any particular political position for this strife — not even the alt-right, as it doesn't "play into their ideology" (which he said targets people of certain religious groups). But nevertheless, he added, "All of this stuff has been corralling the imagination of the American public and forcing it in a direction to not think critically, and to react instead of sitting and thinking a moment about things, and to doubt — even when you can lay a paper trail from Point A to Point B right in front of someone. They won't believe it."
But Plait still tries. He remembers being on a radio show not too long ago, going over the usual arguments conspiracy theorists use — for example, why are there no stars in the sky in Apollo pictures of the lunar surface? (The reason is the cameras had fast exposure times and the stars were too faint to show.)
"Then somebody called in with some bizarre, trivial thing that made no sense at all," Plait recalled, "and bless him, the radio host jumped in and said, 'Listen. This guy said your 10 biggest claims are wrong. At what point do you back down?'"
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the film "Capricorn One" was directed by Stanley Kubrick. It was directed by Peter Hyams.
UFOs: Why the government will not be disclosing secret information about alien visits
UFOs: Why the government will not be disclosing secret information about alien visits
Dr. Seth Shostak, SETI Institute
Photo: Seth Shostak
Concept graphic to illustrate a supposed unidentified object above Earth, created by Seth Shostak.
Photo: Steven Peters/Getty Images
Date: Jan. 1, 2018
Location: Richmond
Details:
“I was driving back home from work. I was at a red light, when suddenly, I look over the horizon, I saw an oval metallic shape UFO floating/steady over some power lines near some train rail track and overlooking the Chevron refinery.
“When I realized what I was looking at, I decided to turn around to recorded on my phone but it was too late, it was gone/disappear. But I can assure you it wasn't a drone.”
Photo: Richard Newstead/Getty Images
Date: July 7, 2018
Location: Oakland
Details:
“I was blowing bubbles with my son around 7:45 pm tonight and looked up and saw a light that appeared too high to be an airplane. I thought perhaps it was a planet as it was glowing brightly. I could tell it was moving, but quite slowly and could make out six less bright lights glowing around it.
“They were traveling southeast all in tandem, though the six lesser lights seemed to move slightly as well, but all seemed to be traveling around the main star.”
Photo: Aaron Foster/Getty Images
Date: July 18, 2018
Location: In-flight over California
Details:
“We are on a direct Alaska Airline flight 3377 from Albuquerque to San Francisco and during the trip I like to take pictures of clouds. My wife then [told] me have you seen those lights I said no but look back and there 3 objects each one with 2 bright lights that were above ground and were all lined up...
“The objects seems to remain in the same position not moving from one other. I have recorded a 4 minutes clip until I couldn't see any longer the objects from the plane window. We didn't advertised our observation to any flight personnel to avoid creating chaos on the plane.”
Photo: U.S DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, HO
Date: July 22, 2018
Location: Vacaville
Details:
“Went outside looked up towards the moon and moving slowly across sky were three bright lights in a triangle formation. Then all lights dimmed out simultaneously. This had to be a cloaked TR3B [black triangle UFO]! I am a believer.”
Photo: Lorenz And Avelar/Getty Images
Date: Sept. 10, 2018
Location: San Ramon
Details:
“It was as big or bigger than airliner.. no wings... no sound... clear as day... moving fast... not blimp speed... no visible means of propulsion... tried to get my phone cam out but had left inside.”
Photo: Joe McBride/Getty Images
Date: Dec. 23, 2018
Location: Kentfield
Details: “Very loud ongoing noise, similar to a hair dryer or leaf blower frequency, filled the Larkspur/Kentfield, CA, valley area near Marin General. Weather was clear with some light patches of fog. From our terrace, (400 ft. above city street level), in the distance I saw what looked like a huge drone, with a big green flashing light, bright white light with smaller red and yellow lights, but this was not a drone, pretty big aircraft.”
Is someone going to prove Fox Mulder right? Will somebody convincingly show that aliens have come to Earth?
That's the growing expectation of many members of the UFO community. For seventy years, they've been confidently insisting that some fraction of the strange objects seen flitting through the atmosphere are extraterrestrial craft, piloted by otherworldly beings on a junket to our planet. But while 100 million Americans give this claim a thumbs up – confident that our skies are peppered with interstellar intruders – few scientists agree.
It's not that they don't like the idea. After all, it's hard to think of anything that would be more interesting and important than aliens in our airspace, short of the cure for death. And scientists aren't skeptical simply because interstellar travel is stunningly expensive and time consuming, although it's both of those. They demur because the evidence for this idea is seriously iffy. None of it is unambiguous enough to sway their minds.
However, judging by the more recent remarks of UFO proponents, there seems to be a crescendo of confidence that things are about to change. Well-known fans of visitation – for example Steven Greer, Richard Dolan, and Stephen Bassett, all of whom publicly and frequently expound at the many UFO conferences held each year – are saying that "disclosure" is nigh. The federal government is finally going to come clean with solid evidence about alien UFOs.
That would change this subject from one that rolls eyeballs to an accepted fact-of-the universe.
At least some of the disclosure optimism derives from the revelation in 2017 of a secret $22 million government project, begun a decade earlier and innocuously named the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. The best-known results of this five-year effort were several videos taken by Navy pilots using their gun-sight infrared cameras. Some of these videos showed strange, elongated objects whose identity is uncertain. This was an encouraging sign for the disclosure enthusiasts. If the U.S. military was willing to trickle out such suggestive evidence about extraterrestrial visitors, perhaps they were on the cusp of admitting to a larger truth?
To the UFO crowd, that sounds encouraging. But it doesn't make sense.
It's sad that the UFO crowd has come to this – seemingly giving up on proving their own case and hoping that the feds will do their work for them.
To believe the government has been keeping mum about the aliens since the 1940s – surely not an easy thing to do – requires asking why. What's the motivation? It's not credible that it's because of an official fear that the public would go berserk if they were told there are saucers in the skies. One-third of them believe this already, and most have remained berserk-free.
Steven Greer, a former emergency room doctor who now takes folks on escorted tours to witness purported alien craft, has suggested a deeper reason: Extraterrestrial hardware is an existential threat to humanity's global power structure. Greer maintains that reverse engineering alien technology would lead to cheap energy for all countries, first world through third, providing a significantly higher economic standing in parts of the globe that could pose a serious challenge to western dominance.
Consequently, the powers-that-be have kept the UFO phenomenon under wraps. According to Greer, the potential disruption of alien technology is worse than the difficulty and embarrassment of keeping secrets from the public.
But does it really make sense to believe that the federal government could keep a secret of this magnitude during two generations of civil servants? Could the feds really twist the arms of all other nations to participate in such schemery?
In addition, reverse engineering alien technology is about as plausible as the tooth fairy. Imagine giving a cell phone to Ben Franklin and telling him to "reverse engineer" it so George Washington's army could better stay in touch while fighting the British. Any aliens who can rocket themselves to Earth are far more advanced than we are – indeed, the technology gap is surely greater than that separating us from Franklin.
The real problem with the idea of disclosure is not whether or not the government has had a good reason, and an uncanny ability, to keep an alien presence quiet all these years. It's the faulty premise.
If extraterrestrial craft are really strafing the stratosphere, and in numbers sufficient to cause roughly ten thousand citizen reports annually in the U.S. alone, then why must we throw up our hands and claim "only the government can prove it's true"? What about the hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers who avidly observe the sky on clear nights, but don't seem to see any mysterious flying objects? What of the many thousand commercial satellites that make high resolution photos of our planet all day long without witnessing strange intruders? Are none of these data good enough?
One might argue that the military has better equipment. Of course it does, but if this phenomenon can only be proven with "better equipment," then that's not only a suspiciously convenient argument, it also degrades any claim that the countless saucer photos offered to the public for the past seven decades should be taken seriously.
Besides, does one really need military infrared cameras to find UFOs? Several of the Navy pilots who testified about encounters along the Atlantic seaboard in 2014 and 2015 said they observed these things "nearly every day." That sounds like an opportunity for any civilian with a good camera and a telephoto lens.
It's sad that the UFO crowd has come to this – seemingly giving up on proving their own case and hoping that the feds will do their work for them. Mainstream scientists don't wait for government agencies to prove their theories. That ball's in the researcher's court. And yet UFO proponents are now saying that, deus ex machina, the government will soon book some network air time and fess up about the aliens.
That's both an unconvincing argument and a mentally lazy one.
Dr. Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer, SETI Institute
FIRST ON THE MOON There are two astronauts in this 1969 photo. Buzz Aldrin stands on the moon near the Apollo 11 lunar lander while Neil Armstrong, reflected in Aldrin’s visor, takes the picture.
“We didn’t know what kind of pictures we’d get, when we would get them, who we would get them from,” says Kendrick Frazier, who joined Science News as a writer just two months before Apollo 11 touched down on lunar soil. So the staff took pictures of their home television screens during the July 20, 1969 broadcast of the moon landing. “It didn’t work out very well,” he says.
Fortunately, images from NASA sufficed. On the cover of the July 26, 1969 issue — just 25 cents! — the words “At last the moon” ran atop a raw, black-and-white image of two blurry forms standing on desolate terrain, with the spidery outline of the lunar lander in the background. A description of the photo — Frazier’s one contribution to the coverage — captured the scene: “Ghostly they were, those two figures gliding over the surface of the moon. But, with all the world watching, it was certain. The dream of the ages had been fulfilled: Man was on the moon.”
QUICK WORK The July 26, 1969 cover of Science News showed an image — taken from a video feed about 40 minutes after the historic first step — of Neil Armstrong (right) walking toward Buzz Aldrin (left). Aldrin is inserting a solar wind collector into the ground.
SCIENCE NEWS
Throughout the Apollo program, Science News kept a watchful eye, reporting on the successes, setbacks and skepticism. From 1967 to 1973, the magazine published more than 100 stories about the United States’ quest to reach the moon, from the Apollo 1 launchpad fire that killed three astronauts (SN: 2/4/67, p. 112) to the splashdown of the final mission, Apollo 17 (SN: 12/23/72, p. 404), plus later findings of moon-based experiments.
“Apollo was an epic achievement. We all were super excited,” Frazier says. Yet the magazine never went overboard, he adds. “We managed to cover all the other things going on in science.” The July 26 issue devoted just five of its 24 pages to the Apollo 11 landing. Other stories included advances in predicting the sex of an unborn child and urban influences on precipitation.
The job of covering Apollo 11 fell to staff writer Jonathan Eberhart. He most likely traveled to Cape Kennedy (now called Cape Canaveral) in Florida for the launch and then to Houston for the rest of the mission, Frazier suspects, filing stories by phone or telegram. In describing the mission, Eberhart’s prose soared: “Now the moon is man’s. The incredible accomplishments of Apollo 11 have changed it irretrievably in the eyes of humankind.” Then he quickly got to work recounting the well-rehearsed descent, the harrowing landing, the hesitant first steps — before spending much of his time, of course, on the science.
Eberhart, who covered space exploration for Science News for three decades, painstakingly described three experiments installed by the Apollo 11 astronauts: a metal foil for snagging solar particles, a seismometer for tracking moonquakes and a mirror array for reflecting lasers back to Earth.
Some geologists, he noted, were miffed about the sample collection: The astronauts didn’t know precisely where they landed and were snatching soil from areas where they had already trod, thus collecting samples from potentially disturbed terrain (SN: 7/26/69, p. 72).
Special Report: Moonstruck
50 years after Apollo 11, lunar science still surprises and delights
But Eberhart’s coverage wasn’t just about timelines and equipment. In a sidebar tucked in the corner of a page of Apollo 11 coverage, Eberhart asked: “What has happened to awe?” He expresses the challenges of a writer conveying the enormity of the moment while pleading with readers to contemplate what humans had just accomplished.
“Try, briefly, to ignore the flashy rockets and the heroic astronauts. Try to feel the smallness of man and the vastness of what he is doing,” Eberhart wrote. “After two million years, man has stepped out of this world onto another. And, by incredible fortune, we are alive at the instant he did it.”
Eberhart can’t explain what he was thinking; he died in 2003 (SN: 3/1/03, p. 134). But Frazier says that this sidebar captured “Jonathan’s sense of wonder and awe amidst all of his professionalism.”
Early on, magazine editor Warren Kornberg pondered the value of this adventure amid the heavy challenges of the time (SN: 7/26/69, p. 71). “Nothing can mar the glory earned by the astronauts,” Kornberg wrote in a special commentary. But “[t]he verdict of history may well be that, while the world erupted, we ignored the real challenge and chased a rocket trail to the moon.” It’s a sobering note. But Apollo’s achievements overlapped with assassinations, race riots and the unpopular Vietnam War, a truth that Science News had to acknowledge.
“We felt we had a special role of reporting on the science part of the … mission as well as putting it into the broader context,” says Frazier, who became the magazine’s editor in 1971. Kornberg’s editorial, he says, reflected widespread “antipathy about spending this money to go to the moon while the whole country was falling apart socially and politically.”
Letters to the editor published that September echoed Kornberg’s concern (SN: 9/13/69, p. 194). “We are frustrated and ashamed,” wrote one reader.
Three years later, in his own — more optimistic — editorial as Apollo 17 drew near, Frazier wrote: “The misfortune of Apollo is that it was conceived in one era of American history and fulfilled in another.… [I]n a future and less buffeted age, the tarnish will have disappeared, and the Apollo landings on the moon will stand as an unambiguous and unparalleled human achievement” (SN: 10/21/72, p. 259).
MOON MANIA Science News wrote more than 100 stories on the Apollo missions. Here are three of the many covers that ran between 1969 and 1972.
SCIENCE NEWS
Despite the public misgivings, Frazier says it was an incredible time to be writing about science. At his home in Albuquerque, he keeps a memento from his tenure at Science News: the engraving plate used to print the cover of the moon landing issue. He plans to display it in his home office this summer, a nod to the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. “It is, to me, the greatest souvenir of that time,” he says.
Christopher Crockett, formerly at Science News, is a freelance science writer and editor based in Arlington, Va.
This story appears in the July 6, 2019 & July 20, 2019 issue of Science News with the headline, "How Science News covered the Apollo mission: The magazine reported on every facet of this scientific feat."
‘Laten we de aliens opzoeken’ – 1,7 miljoen Facebook-gebruikers willen mogelijk testbasis VS bestormen
‘Laten we de aliens opzoeken’ – 1,7 miljoen Facebook-gebruikers willen mogelijk testbasis VS bestormen
Maar liefst 1,7 miljoen Facebook-gebruikers, onder wie enkele Nederlanders, zeggen van plan te zijn op 20 september de geheimzinnige Area 51 te bestormen. Alles wijst op een uit de hand gelopen grap, maar complotdenkers zien kansen om dan eindelijk oog in oog met buitenaardse wezens te komen.
De Nevada Test and Training Range, waar Area 51 onder valt, is sinds de jaren vijftig in gebruik als luchtmacht- en testbasis van de Amerikaanse overheid. Het raadselachtige gebied is hermetisch afgesloten en voer voor complotdenkers. Zo zouden er geheime ontmoetingen met buitenaards leven plaatsvinden en er met tijdreizen worden geëxperimenteerd. Lang wilde de overheid niets zeggen over het precieze doel, maar in juni 2013 erkende de CIA – na jarenlang aandringen – dat Area 51 een militair oefenterrein is.
‘Ze kunnen ons niet allemaal tegenhouden’, staat op de Facebookpagina van het op 27 juni gelanceerde ‘evenement’. ‘Laten we de aliens opzoeken.’ Matty Roberts, een van de bedenkers, had zich niet gerealiseerd dat er zoveel mensen bereid zijn de mysterieuze locatie te overvallen. ‘Het was bedoeld als grap om mijn pagina met memes te promoten’, zei hij tegen het Amerikaanse mediabedrijf NPR.
Roberts maakte het evenement aan, nadat hij 20 juni een interview met Bob Lazar had gezien. Lazar werkte jarenlang in de buurt van Area 51. Sinds 1989 claimt de klokkenluider dat de VS buitenaardse ruimteschepen bezitten.
Vorig jaar verscheen de Netflix-documentaire Bob Lazar & Flying Saucers, waarin hij uitlegt hoe de Amerikaanse overheid hem het zwijgen heeft proberen op te leggen.
‘Dodelijk geweld’
Nog altijd is Area 51 niet toegankelijk voor publiek. Borden in de omgeving van het gebied waarschuwen dat ‘dodelijk geweld’ kan worden gebruikt tegen mensen die zich ongeoorloofd toegang proberen te verschaffen.
Toch zijn er genoeg toeristen die het gebied willen bezichtigen. Connie West profiteert van die aanwas en runt al jaren het hotel-restaurant Little A’Le’Inn in het nabijgelegen dorpje Rachel. Tegen de lokale nieuwszender KLAS-TV vertelt West dat alles is volgeboekt voor 20 september. ‘Het is krankzinnig.’
Organisator Roberts betwijfelt of ‘een echt leger Area 51 gaat bestormen’. Tegen NPR zegt hij wel in gesprek te zijn voor een alternatief evenement. In afwachting van het mogelijke contact met buitenaardse wezens liet het biermerk Bud Light op Twitter alvast weten dat hun bier zeer geschikt is voor buitenaards leven. ‘Wij produceren een licht ruimtebier met een frisse smaak en een goede afdronk.’
A layer of ‘aerogel’ could make Mars habitable and even enable life to develop there – but here’s why we should wait
Artist concept of settlement on Mars.
NASA
A layer of ‘aerogel’ could make Mars habitable and even enable life to develop there – but here’s why we should wait
Transforming the red planet to support life has long been a dream of science fiction. Mars is now too cold to support life. Its atmosphere is also too thin to protect any living organisms from harmful radiation. But a new study suggests that local conditions could be changed using an inch of “aerogel” – a synthetic and ultralight material made by taking a gel and replacing the liquid component with a gas.
The authors behind the paper, published in Nature Astronomy, claim the technique could produce habitable regions on the red planet and potentially allow life to develop and thrive thanks to photosynthesis – the process by which plants can convert sunlight into energy. But is this really the case? And, if so, should we do it?
Some 3.8 billion years ago, when life was starting on Earth, conditions on Mars were habitable. The red planet had water on the surface, clouds in its blue sky and volcanism provided part of a water cycle. We know all this from space missions, which have spotted signs of dried up water-crafted channels on the surface. Meanwhile the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers have proved that these features were due to water, by finding tell-tale water-rich minerals.
A magnetic field also protected Mars from harmful space radiation up to 3.8 billion years ago. This was revealed by Mars Global Surveyor, which found crustal magnetic fields in the older, southern highlands. These are the only remains of an ancient global magnetic field, similar to Earth’s magnetic field now.
Cold and dry
These habitable conditions, however, changed 3.8 billion years ago. The magnetic field disappeared. We think this is because Mars lost the heat left over from its formation more quickly than Earth did – this may have been augmented by a large collision which formed the Hellas basin on Mars. Unprotected by a magnetic field for billions of years, Mars’ atmosphere has been scavenged away to space. Some of the water was lost that way, and some went underground and remains as permafrost and in subsurface “lakes”.
The surface now is inhospitable for life as we know it. The thin carbon dioxide atmosphere, less than 1% of Earth’s atmospheric pressure, means surface conditions include high fluxes of harmful radiation from the sun and the galaxy. The surface environment is also cold: 0-10°C during the day but down to below -100°C at night.
Rosalind Franklin rover.ESA-AOES medialab, CC BY-SA
But it’s not impossible that life could have once flourished on Mars – or even exist there today, albeit unlikely. With the Rosalind Franklin (ExoMars 2020) rover, to be launched in 2020, we will drill up to two metres under the harsh Martian surface to search for signs of ancient life. This goes beyond what Opportunity and Curiosity could achieve with their 5cm drills, and gives the best chance of any planned mission to find biomarkers and evidence of life. Also, it is hoped that an international sample return mission may bring back the rocks cached by NASA’s Mars 2020 rover.
With these missions we may be able to answer the age-old question of whether humankind is alone in the universe. Mars itself, along with other prime astrobiological targets in the solar system, including the moons Europa and Enceladus around Jupiter and Saturn respectively, should be kept in their pristine state until we have answered this fundamental question.
Terraforming Mars
Ideas for changing or “terraforming” Mars, by introducing an atmospheric greenhouse effect to warm it, have been around for a long time. Recently it was shown that the carbon inventory on Mars is insufficient to do this, apparently killing off these ideas for now.
Aerogel .Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech
But the new study suggests a different approach – that smaller areas of Mars could be covered by a thin (2-3cm) covering of aerogel, providing a greenhouse effect by locking in heat. Using lab experiments, the researchers showed that this could increase the surface temperature by 50°C. The authors then used a climate model of Mars to confirm that the gel would be able to keep the water below it liquid up to a depth of several metres. It would also protect against harmful radiation by absorbing the radiation at UV wavelengths, while still allowing enough light for photosynthesis.
This suggests that a habitable region could be produced, enough even to grow some plants to fuel eventual human exploration. The idea is certainly interesting, and according to the experiments potentially plausible. But it ignores the other key issue affecting life on Mars – cosmic radiation. Silica aerogel, the proposed material, is sometimes called “frozen smoke” due to its low density. But because it is so low density, cosmic radiation of higher energy than ultraviolet light can pass through it almost unscathed. Without magnetic protection, this radiation threatens any life on the Martian surface, just as it does today.
Aerogels are extremely light.NASA
Mars is the planet nearest us where life could have started. And to artificially change the environment would threaten one of nature’s “experiments” which has been billions of years in the making –with life either evolving or not since the planet’s formation. We go to great lengths to keep missions like Rosalind Franklin sterile, in line with international rules, so that we do not disturb any past or even present life. If we did go ahead with terraforming plans and find living organisms on Mars later on, it would be hard to know whether these were natural Mars microbes or just contaminants from Earth thriving under the areogel.
Large-scale experiments like this would affect the pristine environment so much that we should not do this yet. At least until after Rosalind Franklin and Mars sample return, let’s leave Mars untouched so we can discover whether we are alone in the universe. When the science is done and we are ready to go, aerogel blankets may be worth a further look
LUNAR LEFTOVERS Astronauts, like those who touched down in the Apollo 15 lunar module (shown) in July 1971, left a lot on the moon’s surface, from scientific instruments to trash.
Once on the moon, Apollo astronauts had two major goals: get themselves and the moon rocks home safe.
To make space on the cramped lunar modules for the hundreds of kilograms of moon samples, the astronauts had to go full Marie Kondo. Anything that wasn’t essential for the ride home got tossed: cameras, hammocks, boots and trash. Downsizing also meant abandoning big stuff, like moon buggies and the descent stage that served as a launchpad for a module’s lunar liftoff.
But the astronauts left more than castoffs. Starting with the Apollo 11 mission, which touched down on July 20, 1969, astronauts left six American flags and plenty of personal and political mementos. Importantly, the crews also left behind instruments for about a dozen experiments to keep tabs on lunar conditions (SN: 8/2/69, p. 95); one is still running today.
These devices “were really important parts of Apollo,” says Noah Petro, project scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission. Back then, the experiments didn’t get much time in the limelight, “because humans on the surface are obviously the big story,” says Petro, who is based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Special Report: Moonstruck
50 years after Apollo 11, lunar science still surprises and delights
When we think of Apollo’s 50-year legacy, most of us probably aren’t picturing the scattered remnants of astronaut outposts gathering space dust. But as nations plan new ventures to the moon, preservationists are fighting to protect these historic sites so that future lunar visitors don’t erase the marks of humans’ first steps beyond Earth.
Solving old mysteries
By December 1972, six Apollo crews had collectively spent nearly 80 hours exploring the moon’s surface (SN: 12/23/72, p. 404). They gathered rocks, photographed the landscape and performed all manner of experiments — from unfurling metal foil to catch solar wind particles to setting off explosives and measuring the resulting seismic tremors.
Apollo 11 left behind solar-powered seismometers and a reflector array that could be paired with lasers on Earth to precisely measure the distance between Earth and the moon. On five later missions, Apollo 12 through 17 (Apollo 13 returned home without landing on the moon), astronauts left more elaborate setups powered by nuclear batteries that generated electricity through radioactive decay (SN: 11/8/69, p. 434). Some of those instruments collected data through 1977, when NASA decided to focus on other projects and pulled the plug on the whole operation (SN: 10/1/77, p. 213).
“There was this period of time where the data languished,” Petro says. But within the last decade or so, a new generation of scientists has taken up the torch, analyzing Apollo observations to answer questions lingering from early studies. Unfortunately, this isn’t nearly as simple as picking up where 1970s scientists left off, as geophysicist Seiichi Nagihara discovered when he set out to solve a decades-old puzzle about the moon’s underground temperature.
On Apollo 15 and 17, astronauts installed thermometers in the lunar surface, which took the moon’s temperature at various depths and sent the data back to Earth (SN: 9/11/71, p. 167). When Apollo-era scientists reviewed data collected through 1974, the results revealed something odd: The moon’s temperature just beneath the surface appeared to be slowly rising.
Images like this one of the Apollo 17 site reveal that the soil where astronauts drove and walked (horizontal lines) and did their work is darker than other terrain. These areas probably absorbed more sunlight, warming the underlying ground.
GSFC/NASA, ASU
“We’re talking about very minor warming,” just a couple degrees, says Nagihara, of Texas Tech University in Lubbock. But researchers at the time couldn’t figure out why. Nagihara decided to examine all the temperature data collected through 1977 to figure out what was going on. Unfortunately, the tapes that recorded these measurements were missing. This is a common problem, because during the Apollo era, data were housed at the individual labs of scientists working on each experiment and many measurements were never properly archived.
“A group of us decided to … try to hunt down the tapes,” Nagihara says. After scouring thousands of documents at NASA’s Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston, the researchers traced 440 tapes to an archive in Suitland, Md. But even those covered only about three months of observations. At the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Nagihara and colleagues discovered more temperature measurements noted by Apollo-era scientists in weekly memos. Between the recovered tapes and the memos, Nagihara’s team pieced together a picture of the moon’s temperature from 1971 through 1977.
The slow warming under the surface continued through the end of data collection, the researchers reported in April 2018 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. In search of a source for the heat, Nagihara and colleagues turned to pictures taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting the moon since 2009 (SN: 6/11/16, p. 10). The images showed that soil stirred up by astronaut activity was slightly darker than other lunar terrain. Perhaps it was dark enough to absorb more sunlight and warm the underlying ground.
Computer simulations confirmed that the moon wasn’t heating up from internal processes. Astronauts trekking around the Apollo sites probably caused an increase in surface temperature of about 2 to 3 degrees Celsius, and the extra heat slowly spread more than a meter into the ground — causing the gradual warming detected by Apollo instruments. Turns out that astronaut footsteps left marks on the moon far deeper than those iconic boot prints.
Keeping vigil over gravity
While Nagihara and other researchers are digging up old Apollo data for new analyses, one lone project is still in full swing: the laser ranging retroreflector experiment.
This experiment uses arrays of reflectors placed on the moon by Apollo 11, 14 and 15 astronauts and anchored on two rovers left behind by the Soviets (SN: 5/20/78, p. 326). These arrays consist of special mirrors, each with three sides in the shape of a cube’s corner, which always reflect light in the exact direction from which it came. By shooting a laser beam at a corner-cube array from a telescope on Earth and clocking the time it takes for the light to return, researchers can measure the exact distance between different spots on the moon and Earth.
Still running
To measure the Earth-moon distance, arrays of “corner-cube” mirrors were set up at Apollo sites (top). Inside each circle (bottom left) is a corner cube that reflects laser light back to Earth in the exact direction it came from (illustrated, bottom right).
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: NASA; CHETVORNO/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC0); NSSDC
Laser ranging retroreflector measurements have offered several insights — like the fact that the moon is withdrawing from Earth at about 3.8 centimeters per year. Plus, slight variations in the moon’s rotation suggest that the orb has a relatively small core.
Physicist Tom Murphy of the University of California, San Diego is using the corner-cube arrays to probe a question much bigger than the moon. He’s testing whether a key part of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, called the equivalence principle, holds up.
The equivalence principle states that any two objects in the same gravitational field should fall at the same rate (SN: 1/20/18, p. 9). Just like a bowling ball and a golf ball should hit the ground simultaneously, the Earth and moon should fall around the sun (that is, orbit the sun) at exactly the same rate. “You’re sensitive to any difference in how they’re [orbiting] the sun by measuring the distance between the Earth and moon as they weave around each other,” Murphy says. If the Earth-moon distance ultimately breaks with the equivalence principle, that would reveal a shortcoming of general relativity. And that, in turn, could inform the creation of a theory of quantum gravity that resolves the tension between general relativity and quantum mechanics (SN: 10/17/15, p. 28).
So far, laser ranging retroreflector measurements with centimeter-level precision haven’t shown any difference in how quickly the Earth and moon are falling around the sun. But in 2006, Murphy started collecting data with millimeter-scale precision using improved laser technology and a larger telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico.
Amassing enough data will require several more years of observation and researchers will need more sophisticated computer models to analyze the observations, Murphy says. Luckily, since the reflectors on the moon don’t require any power, he can collect data into the foreseeable future. Eventually, those observations — at the millimeter level or even smaller scales — could reveal a crack in the equivalence principle.
Since general relativity is fundamentally incompatible with quantum mechanics, something eventually has to give. The equivalence principle might be one of those things, Murphy says. “We have to turn over every rock and see where the bugs are.”
One astronaut’s trash
Thermometers and reflectors were among about a dozen types of instruments installed on the moon. Other devices measured the moon’s magnetic field and sniffed out chemical components of the moon’s tenuous atmosphere. NASA’s Lunar Data Project is restoring data from these and other Apollo experiments, so that scientists can continue to pore over the observations for years to come.
“When you have this incredibly rare resource, you can’t not keep working on it,” says planetary scientist Renee Weber of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., who studies lunar seismic data. “There are always new techniques to try” and better computer processing to tease out previously missed signals.
Based on moonquakes sensed by Apollo seismometers, Weber and colleagues reported in May that the moon may still be tectonically active, as revealed by young faults on the lunar surface called lobate scarps (SN: 6/8/19, p. 7). Understanding moonquakes could help NASA and other agencies decide where to land future spacecraft or construct buildings on the moon, Weber says. If these lobate scarps truly mark sites of tectonic activity, future lunar visitors may want to avoid them, she says.
There’s also plenty to learn by testing how well the Apollo instruments, as well as the nonscientific paraphernalia strewn across the lunar surface, have held up. All of that stuff has been exposed to the lunar elements for decades. Future expeditions could sample the detritus to get a sense of how human communities might one day fare on the moon.
“Every single thing at the sites would be a completely priceless scientific investigation,” says planetary scientist Philip Metzger of the University of Central Florida in Orlando. He can imagine scrutinizing the effects of ultraviolet radiation, solar wind and other factors on everything from batteries to camera lenses to towels and earplugs.
Metzger sees value in everything left behind on the moon, including the astronauts’ discarded bags of excrement. “We have studies of microbes lasting in space over very short amounts of time on the International Space Station,” he says, but testing whether microbes in astronaut waste have survived or mutated over the last 50 years could help determine whether life is up to the challenge of hopping between planets or even solar systems. These are “really important questions about the position of life in the cosmos,” he says.
Protecting Apollo
While Metzger and other space scientists are hoping Apollo remnants can teach us more about how humans would fare on the moon, Beth O’Leary and other archaeologists are hoping to preserve these items as testaments to the human endeavor of getting there.
“Space is not a vacuum. We carry our culture into it,” says O’Leary, of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. The remnants of Apollo sites are important relics of a singular time in human history. Astronaut memorials, messages of peace and commemorative plaques on the moon are obvious pieces of heritage. But “even the scientific stuff has cultural importance,” she says. More than 400,000 space-age Americans at over 20,000 companies and universities across the country teamed up to put Apollo astronauts on the moon. That kind of mass collaboration, in itself, was “a cultural act, as well as a scientific or engineering feat,” O’Leary says.
Unfortunately, securing legal protections for the historical preservation of Apollo sites isn’t easy. Don’t expect the United States to establish an Apollo National Park on the moon any time soon. As fun as that sounds, it would violate the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which states that no nation can claim sovereignty over the moon’s surface.
NASA has published guidelines on how to avoid ruining Apollo artifacts in preparation for the many countries and companies that are vying for parking spots on the moon (SN: 11/24/18, p. 14). This rulebook includes policies such as the distance a future lunar spacecraft should land from Apollo sites so that the rocket exhaust doesn’t wipe Neil Armstrong’s first boot print off the face of the moon. These guidelines aren’t legally binding, Metzger says, but “no company is going to want to be known as the company that ruined one of the Apollo sites.”
Michelle Hanlon, who specializes in space law at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, has her sights on a much broader agreement to protect Apollo sites. Her nonprofit, For All Moonkind, is seeking United Nations protections for relics on the moon. The U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space is “the ideal place to negotiate a new treaty on heritage in space,” Hanlon says, though she suspects it may take decades to reach such an international deal.
By then, many more people than professional astronauts may be walking the moon, fueling concerns about visitors making off with Apollo artifacts. In 2015, a lunar sample bag used by Armstrong was mistakenly sold at a government auction for $995 and later resold for $1.8 million. Other space-age memorabilia has sold for similarly astronomical prices.
“If NASA can lose [Armstrong’s] bag, how can they keep track of all the artifacts” once people begin making regular round trips to the moon? Hanlon asks. “You can imagine [looters] going up and just grabbing artifacts and bringing them back to sell.”
This story appears in the July 7, 2019 issue of Science News with the headline, "Lunar Leftovers: 50 years on, the Apollo landing spots still generate fervent interest from scientists and historians."
Neuralink, Elon Musk’s ambitious project to wire up the brain to computers, stepped out of the shadows Tuesday evening.
In a detail-laden presentation at the California Academy of Sciences’ Morrison Planetarium, the tech entrepreneur explained how his foray into brain-machine interfaces could pave the way for a symbiotic relationship with artificial intelligence.
Clinical trials could start as early as next year: “We hope to have this, aspirationally, in a human patient, before the end of next year. So this is not far,” Musk said.
Pricing wasn’t announced in the presentation, the primary purpose of which was recruiting. Neuralink is hiring in the areas of robotics, materials, electrochemistry, micro-fabrication, histology, mixed-signal chip design, optics, and more. The company’s job board on its website lists eight engineering openings and a talent acquisition position.
Little was known about Neuralink prior to the presentation, bar a multi-page explainer published on WaitButWhy in April 2017. At that time, it seemed the company was exploring a variety of methods for linking up brains and machines, and it would initially focus on healthcare benefits as a way of funding further research.
“I feel like I’m in Transcendence,” Musk joked, in an otherwise science-focused event that lacked the party vibe of some Tesla events. “Actually, I was in Transcendence!”
Over two years later, and that vision has come into sharper focus. Neuralink has a product, a means of wiring to the brain, and even an iPhone app to plug into the existing world of hyper-connected technology. Company employees noted the rate of advancement versus existing solutions.
“Elon has this incredible optimism where he’ll pierce through these imagined constraints,” Max Hodak, president of Neuralink, told the audience. “You have to be very careful telling him that something’s impossible.”
Musk on stage.
Here’s what we learned:
6. Neuralink Has a Product
First, a quick primer. Scientists have developed a number of ways to interface with the brain, which reads the electrical firing of neurons in different ways. Some are non-invasive, like EEG scans that use a helmet, but they can be rather imprecise. Others are invasive like ones used in surgery, but the probes can be large and cause issues. Neuralink has opted for an invasive approach that uses a small chip to read the brain, with minuscule probes weaving their way through.
The product is called the N1. It’s a chip that sits in a hermetic package, which fits into a cylinder measuring eight millimeters in diameter by one-fourth of a millimeter tall. Each chip measures four millimeters by four and uses 1,024 electrodes. By comparison, designs used for Parkinson’s today can use just 10 electrodes.
N1 sensor.
All electrodes have read and write functionality. The probes are five microns thick, three microns thinner than a red blood cell and 95 microns thinner than a human hair. The design enables the probes to get close to neurons to detect spikes, and the team believes that the probes can rest 60 microns away from a neuron to detect the spikes.
N1 sensor.
In initial setups, Neuralink places four N1 chips in a patient, three in motor areas and one by the somatic sensory cortex. They’re then wired to an inductive coil near the ear that connects to a link that sits on the outside of the skin. The link contains the battery and Bluetooth to power the system, making it possible to remove and upgrade the firmware without actually touching the sensors again.
The N1 array in action.
Neuralink went through a variety of prototype designs, including ones with a USB-C port. As the goal is to make it as safe as possible for surgery, the team had to compromise on more ambitious designs with triple the probes:
Prototype models, from left to right in chronological order.
5. It Could Reach Patients Very Soon
As mentioned before, the first trials will focus on healthcare. The company aims to host the first-in-human clinical study trial before the end of next year, focusing on patients with quadriplegia due to C1-C4 spinal cord injury.
This will use the four-chip setup to enable patients to control their smartphone using their brain. Through that, they can control a mouse and keyboard on a computer through a Bluetooth connection.
Timescales will vary depending on regulatory approval. Musk previously stated in April 2017 that it may be around eight to 10 years before it’s available to people without disabilities.
And yes, as previous evidence suggested, the company has been using animals in its testing. President of Neuralink Max Hodak said that “we wish that we didn’t have to work with animals,” explaining how the firm takes careful consideration over its approach to tests. Musk noted that the team enabled a monkey to control a computer with his brain.
4. Surgery Will Be Like Lasik
These probes are incredibly fine, and far too small to insert by human hand. Neuralink has developed a robot that can stitch the probes in through an incision. It’s initially cut to two millimeters, then dilated to eight millimeters, placed in and then glued shut. The surgery can take less than an hour.
On the far right next to the arrow, the robot needle used to thread the probes.
The goal is to make the insertion about as complex as Lasik eye surgery, making it easy to link up with machines.
3. It Has an App to Bring It All Together
It uses an iPhone app to interface with the neural link, using a simple interface to train people how to use the link.
The iPhone app.
“You have no wires poking out of your heard; very important. It basically bluetooths to your phone,” Musk said. “We’ll have to watch the app store updates for that one, make sure we don’t have a driver issue.”
No word on an Android version yet.
2. A Brain App Store? It’s Possible
One of the most intriguing comments came during the question-and-answer session, where an audience member asked about third-party software running on the pod. With read-and-write abilities, it’s potentially a tricky area of development.
“Conceivably there could be some kind of app store thing in the future,” Musk said.
Hodak noted that any creations couldn’t use an ad-supported model. While ads on phones are mildly annoying, ads in the brain could be a disaster waiting to happen.
The brain: is there an app for that?
1. A Symbiotic Relationship Is Still the Goal
Neuralink may be initially focused on healthcare benefits, but Musk noted his goal is still to link up humans with A.I. Musk compared it to using a smartphone, except making it a more direct link instead of telling the brain to move fingers to interact.
“This is going to sound pretty weird, but [we want to] achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence,” Musk said. “This is not a mandatory thing! This is a thing that you can choose to have if you want. I think this is going to be something really important at a civilization-scale level. I’ve said a lot about A.I. over the years, but I think even in a benign A.I. scenario we will be left behind.”
Details around the economics of the setup are still sketchy, but Musk joked that “if you want to be symbiotic with A.I., I think it’s safe to say you could repay the loan with superhuman intelligence.” Perhaps a funny suggestion, but research suggests that intelligence does not always predict financial wellbeing.
Far from wiring up and worrying about the details later, the really smart move may be to wait and see how Neuralink develops further over the coming years. Based on Tuesday’s presentation, it could be a fascinating ride.
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Na Area 51 willen mensen nu ook de Bermudadriehoek en deze andere locaties gaan bestormen
Na Area 51 willen mensen nu ook de Bermudadriehoek en deze andere locaties gaan bestormen
Area 51 willen mensen nu ook de Bermudadriehoek binnengaan. De organisator van het evenement zal boten en duikuitrustingen leveren waarmee de gasten het stuk oceaan kunnen gaan verkennen waar schepen en vliegtuigen op mysterieuze wijze verdwijnen.
In 1945 verdwenen daar bijvoorbeeld vijf Amerikaanse bommenwerpers. Van de toestellen werd nooit meer iets vernomen.
Ook een reddingsvliegtuig dat op zoek ging naar de vermiste bemanning zou er zijn verdwenen.
19.000 mensen
De Bermudadriehoek bevindt zich tussen Bermuda, Florida en Puerto Rico.
De organisator hoopt 75.000 dollar in te zamelen om livemuziek en entertainment te kunnen regelen.
Al 19.000 mensen hebben aangegeven te zullen gaan. Nog eens 25.000 zijn geïnteresseerd.
Witte Huis
Ook zijn er inmiddels evenementen georganiseerd waarbij het Witte Huis en de Federal Reserve bestormd moeten gaan worden.
Ondertussen zijn al meer dan 1,8 miljoen alienjagers van plan om op 20 september Area 51 te bestormen.
De Amerikaanse luchtmacht heeft mensen die daadwerkelijk naar de topgeheime legerbasis willen afreizen gewaarschuwd om weg te blijven.
Verklaringen
“De Amerikaanse luchtmacht staat altijd paraat om Amerika te beschermen,” zei woordvoerster Laura McAndrews.
Mensen die de Bermudadriehoek willen bestormen zullen waarschijnlijk op minder verzet stuiten.
Mogelijke verklaringen voor de raadselachtige verdwijningen zijn UFO’s, paranormale activiteit en extreme weersgebeurtenissen.
Steeds meer ‘ontkenners’: bijna een vijfde van Amerikaanse jongeren gelooft dat maanlanding nep was. En hoe zit het met Mars?
Steeds meer ‘ontkenners’: bijna een vijfde van Amerikaanse jongeren gelooft dat maanlanding nep was. En hoe zit het met Mars?
Heeft astronaut Neil Armstrong 50 jaar geleden echt op de maan gestaan? Of bevond hij zich op een filmset in Hollywood? Uit een nieuwe peiling blijkt dat bijna een vijfde (18 procent) van de Amerikaanse jongeren gelooft dat de maanlanding van Apollo 11 een hoax was.
Mensen tussen de 18 en 34 jaar zijn maar liefst zes keer meer geneigd om te geloven dat de NASA de landing in scène heeft gezet dan mensen die het allemaal nog hebben meegemaakt.
Het aantal mensen dat niet in de maanlanding gelooft blijft steeds verder stijgen.
Vlag
Nu zegt één op de 10 van alle Amerikanen dat de maanlanding nep was. In 1999 was dat nog zes procent. Er zijn nu dus bijna twee keer zoveel ‘maanlanding-ontkenners’ dan 20 jaar geleden.
De meeste ‘ontkenners’ (41 procent) zien de Amerikaanse vlag op de maan als belangrijkste bewijs dat het om een hoax gaat.
Het lijkt erop alsof de vlag wappert, terwijl er geen wind staat op de maan, zo is de gedachte.
Studiolampen
Daarnaast zeggen veel ‘ontkenners’ dat schaduwen van de studiolampen op foto’s zijn te zien, dat de astronauten de straling in de ruimte niet overleefd zouden hebben en dat er onvoldoende vocht op de maan is om een voetafdruk achter te laten.
Ruim de helft van de ‘ontkenners’ stelt dat we op een later moment op de maan zijn geland.
Bijna alle ‘ontkenners’ (98 procent) zeggen dat de overheid ons bespioneert.
Marsrover ook nep
En iets meer dan de helft van de ‘ontkenners’ (51 procent) is van mening dat de Marsrover ook nep is.
Veel mensen geloven dat we al buitenaards bezoek hebben gehad. Zo gelooft drie kwart van de ‘maanlanding-ontkenners’ dat aliens de aarde hebben bezocht.
Above: Apollo 11 – projected on the Washington Monument – to celebrate the 50th anniversary of July 20, 1969′s moon landing
July 20, 2019 is officially the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first setting foot on the moon, and it prompts me to revisit the conspiracy theory question (as I wrote in a previous article on BIN) – “…if we really did land on the moon as we are told, why have we not returned in almost 50 years? Are we supposed to believe there is no technological benefit to having a scientific base on the moon? Are we supposed to believe NASA’s excuse that “we forgot how to do it”? Or is it more likely that there is some kind of conspiracy?”
There are only a few possibilities:
1 –They really landed on the moon as the US Government described and there is nothing interesting there – just craters and dust.
2 –They really landed there, but they didn’t tell the public the interesting stuff
2A –They found evidence of previous advanced human civilization and technology on the moon because humans made it into space before the last catastrophic pole shift
2B – They found evidence of aliens observing us, using the moon as their base
3 – They never made it to the moon at all, it was just propaganda
“If we actually found evidence that aliens had observation bases on the far side of the moon, would we report it? If we found evidence that a previous, lost human civilization like Atlantis had risen and fallen and been to the Moon thousands of years ago, leaving behind evidence and technology equal to or more advanced than our own – would we re-write history, or hide and study their technology?”
If we do have alien evidence/artifacts/contact – how many decades of gradual acclimation to their existence does the public need before the government finally offers disclosure?
I went on about the theory that Stanley Kubrick confessed to faking the moon landing during his filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.
But a recent article on Motherboard also just got my attention with: “NASA confessed [in 2006] that it likely reused 45 tapes containing original footage of Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s iconic July 20, 1969 moonwalk. Even today, the specter of the Apollo 11 tape blunder still looms over the agency.”
So the original moon landing tapes – the most important, most historical, and most controversial footage NASA ever took – was accidentally taped over? On 45 different tapes? I’m supposed to believe that was an accident? Much more likely to me, they were under scrutiny, and could be proved as forgeries, so they were conveniently wiped clean like a Hillary Clinton email server.
Then in 2015, it was found out that someone had saved about 300 data reels of NASA tapes from 1969-1972 and stored them in Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, the owner was secretive about them, and the person who found them turned them over to NASA, who said that none of them had anything to do with the Apollo missions. Sure they didn’t.
My best guess is that we found evidence that mankind had visited the Moon before – thousands of years ago – and that we are denying the truth so we can back-engineer ancient VIMANA technology and understand cycles of terrestrial destruction without re-writing history or alerting the masses.
I am not arguing that we never landed on the moon – just that the public has been shown meaningless edited photographs, while the truly interesting finds have been kept secret.
Watch 2 minutes of this video, from about the 26 minute mark to the 28 minute mark, showing very clear photographic editing:
Neil Armstrong should have been a sought after public speaker. The first man to walk on the Moon could have been rich beyond his wildest dreams merely speaking motivationally to graduating classes and anyone else… Instead he stayed out of the limelight. 25 years later he compared the astronauts to parrots. Which don’t fly high, but they do repeat what is said to them.
Article by David Montaigne, author of many books including:
A Washington witness at Valley reported watching a disc-shaped object inside a cloud; moreover, the object appeared to be having trouble with a cloaking device, according to testimony in Case 94350.
The witness was sitting outside on a warm, sunny day at 1:07 p.m. on February 8, 2018. “I was looking across the lake I live on towards the southwest sky and watching the clouds and was sort of gauging the wind, which was hardly any, maybe 4-5 miles an hour,” the witness stated. “The clouds that day were various sizes but all oval.” As the witness watched, the biggest cloud started to blink. “One second it was a giant, discshaped craft, then it was a cloud. I kept looking away at other clouds then looked back at this phenomenon, because I was questioning what I was seeing. It looked to me as though its cloaking was not working properly. This was enormous. I could see at least four stories of windows that were along the edge of the craft. The color was a metallic silver/chrome. After about 5-8 minutes it stopped blinking and looked like a cloud again.”
Washington MUFON Chief Investigator Daniel Nims closed this case as an Unknown Aerial Vehicle.
Witness illustration.
Credit: MUFON
“MUFON reports no similar large vehicle sightings in this vicinity,” Sims wrote in his report. “A NUFORC case on January 22, 2018, at 3:30 a.m. reported a similar, large object that seemed to be able to generate a ‘cloud’ camouflage. “The witness reports she stepped out to her west porch to have a cigarette and enjoy a pleasant early spring [sic] afternoon. She saw several strange oval-shaped clouds several miles away to the southwest high in the sky (about 45-degrees elevation). One of the clouds then changed from its cloud look and took on the appearance of a large disk-shaped object, which appeared oval looking at it from the side. The craft had a metallic surface. It also had what looked like four rows of rectangular-shaped windows that went around the craft. (See drawing.) The object was large. The object flickered back and forth from the cloud appearance to the disk-shaped object several times over a period of several (five to eight) minutes.
She says it was like it had a ‘cloaking’ device that was malfunctioning. It finally assumed the cloud appearance. The object stayed fixed relative to the other clouds as they drifted off to the southeast in a mild breeze of a few miles per hour. “No lights were noted. No sound was associated with the object, although it was quite a distance away. “An object this large is too big to be an aircraft. An Internet search was run to see if any airship (blimp) operations were occurring in the northwest. The Internet gave no evidence of that. FlightRadar24 showed no aircraft in the vicinity of Valley for that time period. “The unique characteristic of switching from cloud appearance to craft appearance would not be from any normal aircraft. The disposition of this case is: Unknown – UAV.” Valley is a census-designated place and unincorporated community in Stevens County, Washington, population 146.
The northern Ural Mountains of the former Soviet Union were a cold, unforgiving place in 1959. They remain so today, and had been for centuries prior to the first days of February in the aforementioned year, when nine hikers from the Ural Polytechnical Institute were found dead, their bodies strangely under-dressed for the bitter February cold sweeping down off the slopes of nearby Kholat Syakhl.
Known today as the Dyatlov Pass incident, the location where the group had been camping was a place of fear and superstition among the local Mansi, who called it the “Dead Mountain.” The name was tragically fitting, as a series of events which remain unexplained to this day caused the hikers to cut their way out of their tents, fleeing into the February cold and, ultimately, to their deaths.
Although a variety of theories about the ultimate cause behind the deaths of Igor Dyatlov and his companions have been offered over the years, there has yet to be one offered that can account for all of the odd factors the case presents. In equal measure, countless articles have been written on the subject over the years, and several books, documentaries, and films have also lend to the mill of rumor and speculation that surrounds the case; some of the tenuous conclusions offered by such media have done more harm than good, so far as coming to any logical determinations about what might have actually happened.
The graves of the Dyatlov party hikers, as it appears today (Public Domain).
The case, in short, continues to fascinate after the passing of many decades, and hence why I often receive emails and messages about it from others who are perplexed by it. My good friend Billy Clark, and Englishman now residing in Berlin, Germany, took time to write to me about the case, where he shared a number of frustrations with the way the incident is treated in popular writing. Namely, this involves the dismissal of the idea that some kind of aerial phenomenon might have been involved, whether it had been of a manmade, natural, or perhaps some other variety.
“Whatever happened, it’s totally baffling!” Billy wrote. “That it would claim all nine of them and that none were able to provide any kind of clue as to what happened in their final moments is hard to accept. Perhaps the investigators were not looking for something like that? A couple of words hastily carved into some wood could be easily missed. Perhaps we don’t have all the available facts.”
“The behaviour of the Russian authorities during the case is very peculiar,” Clark noted. “The strange change of manner of the lead investigator trying to hush up talk of lights in the sky and murder during the case, to later in life insisting that the lights in the sky were directly responsible in some way.”
“Then there are those zinc lined coffins…” he added.
Indeed, as Billy notes, there are a lot of bizarre aspects to the Dyatlov Pass case which strains the idea of there being any single, “simple” explanation. I have always been intrigued by the reports of “lights in the sky,” which are one element of the case that inevitably foments sensationalism in the sense that it would seem to insinuate that something akin to UFO phenomenon might have been involved.
“If something ‘out of this world’ were happening outside [the tent] as a result of some kind of interaction with that light, it might be one of the few things that would explain such a desperate scramble to escape,” Billy offered in our recent correspondence. “It seems the radiation on the bodies may not have actually been that strange in terms of level strength, but radiation effects are certainly consistent with some UFO encounters.”
Billy raises an important point here, in that many of the explanations that have been offered over the years (ranging from the tenuous idea of infrasound, to absurdities such as a “Yeti attack”) completely fail to account for minutiae like the radiation question. In other words, many would discount any and all implications that something akin to “lights seen in the sky” around the time of the incident could have had anything to do with the deaths of the Dyatlov group. Meanwhile, they completely discount certain pertinent facts about the case, as they churn out their own pet theories… theories which are incomplete, at very best.
I am not of a mind to think that this long-standing mystery has been “solved” in any sincere sense of things. Ideas that have been put forth in the past, like infrasound causing sudden disorientation which led to the hiker’s strange nighttime behavior is, while perhaps a little more tenable than certain other theories, simply not capable of accounting for all of the facts.
Same with the poor folks who want to believe it was a “Russian Wildman,” although it does allow for a peculiar little addendum to all of this: the Dyatlov group actually did joke about the “Abominable Snowman” in some of their private correspondence with each other. However, there is not a shred of evidence that the group ever encountered such a creature, as proposed in a Discovery Channel documentary a few years ago (unless, of course, Yetis are capable of emanating non-ionizing radiation from their bodies, hence explaining how some of the hikers appeared to have been exposed to an energetic source of some kind… figure that one out).
As far as reasonable speculations go, there are at least two ideas that I would not rule out in relation to what might have happened at the Dyatlov Pass in 1959. While each of these is speculative, I offer them here because I do feel that these possibilities—unproven though they are, like the rest of the “solutions” proposed about this case over the years—nonetheless may be able to more effectively account for the variety of peculiarities about the incident. They are as follows:
1) a Russian weapons test (for which there is actually a surprising amount of evidence),
2) some variety of natural phenomenon (certain aspects of the case actually ARE consistent with ball lightning and similar natural luminous phenomena, as we will see shortly).
If I had to put my money on either of these, I would say that the second possibility, involving something like ball lightning, is the most likely to have had something to do with the incident. Without any further elaboration, this may seem like an equally tenuous supposition:what, apart from alleged reports of “lights in the sky,” could the Dyatlov Pass incident have to do with ball lightning?
Investigators arrive at the scene where the hikers spent their final evening (Public Domain).
To that point, I would like to bring the reader’s attention to a very curious report I found in the British Journal of Meteorology from 1984, which tells the story of a group of Russian hikers in the Caucasses that were “attacked” by what was deemed at the time to have been “aggressive ball lightning.”
The details of that incident were related by a Mr. Victor Kavunenko, who had been one of four mountaineers that were camped in the Caucasus Mountains at an altitude of 12795 feet. The date was on or around August 17, 1978, and Kavunenko gives the following account of what transpired with his companions in their encampment one evening:
“I woke up with the strange feeling that a stranger had made his way into our tent. Thrusting my head out of the sleeping bag, I froze. A bright yellow blob was floating about one metre from the floor. It disappeared into Korovin’s sleeping bag. The man screamed in pain. The ball jumped out and proceeded to circle over the other bags now hiding in one, now in another. When it burned a hole in mine I felt an unbearable pain, as if I were being burned by a welding machine, and blacked out. Regaining consciousness after a while, I saw the same yellow ball which, methodically observing a pattern that was known to it alone, kept diving into the bags, evoking desperate, heart-rendering (sic) howls from the victims. This indescribable horror repeated itself several times. When I came back to my senses for the fifth or sixth time, the ball was gone. I could not move my arms or legs and my body was burning as if it had turned into a ball of fire itself. In the hospital, where we were flown by helicopter, seven wounds were discovered on my body. They were worse than burns. Pieces of muscle were found to be torn out to the bone. The same happened to Shigin, Kaprov and Bashkirov. Oleg Korovin had been killed by the ball — possibly because his bag had been on a rubber mattress, insulating it from the ground. The ball lightning did not touch a single metal object, injuring only people.”
This story, if true (keeping in mind that it was reported in a respected British scientific journal) bears undeniable similarities to the Dyatlov Pass incident. The primary similarities include 1) the presence of “mysterious lights” (which were not reported by the Dyatlov hikers, but which were allegedly observed in the same area around the time of the incident), 2) the presence of something inside the tent with the campers, 3) the presence of burns on the camper’s bodies, 4) damage to muscles and tissue of the survivors after their interactions with the phenomenon, 5) the death of one of the campers after his interaction with the light or object.
Note that at no time was the light observed by Kavunenko and his company referred to as anything more extraordinary than “ball lightning.”
I would argue that the “ball lightning” theory as an explanation for what the hikers encountered at Dyatlov pass in 1959 would be more no more likely than any other speculative theory, if it were not for the details provided about the separate incident above. There is little (if anything) else about this case that can be found, whether online, or in related literature, apart from its inclusion by the late William R. Corliss in his Science Frontiers publications, where he noted that “Ball lightning has often been called inquisitive, but this is one of the few reports where it deliberately (?) seemed to attack people. Some Russian English-language publications verge on the sensational, and one must always have some salt on hand.”
Salt-in-hand, therefore, the report is certainly interesting. If true, it may very well shed some light—perhaps of a natural luminous variety, and yet which remains little-understood—on this long-standing and enigmatic Cold War-era case.
A real-time interactive journey through the Apollo 11 mission. Relive every moment as it occurred in 1969.
Great audio, video and imaging from the mission.
Included real-time elements:
all mission control film footage all TV transmissions and on-board film footage 2,000 photographs 11,000 hours of Mission Control audio 248 hours of space- to ground audio all on-board recorder audio 15,000 searchable utterances post-mission commentary astromaterials sample data
APTiangong-2 werd op 15 september 2016 gelanceerd.
WETENSCHAP Na drie jaar dienst keert het Chinees ruimtestation Tiangong-2 terug naar de aarde. Het zou rond deze tijd moeten neerstorten. Dat gebeurt, in tegenstelling tot het vorige ruimtestation, gecontroleerd.
Tiangong-2 of het “Hemelse Paleis” werd op 15 september 2016 richting de ruimte gelanceerd. Na drie jaar heeft het ruimtestation zijn nut bewezen waardoor het terug naar de aarde mag keren. Het was immers nooit de bedoeling om Tiangong-2 permanent in de ruimte te laten rondzweven.
Daarom wordt het nu uit zijn baan om de aarde gehaald. Dat gebeurt ditmaal gecontroleerd. Het grootste deel van het ruimtestation zal opbranden in de atmosfeer. De overige brokstukken belanden in de Stille Oceaan, ergens tussen Nieuw-Zeeland en Chili. Dat staat vast.
Tiangong-1, het jongere broertje van Tiangong-2, stortte vorig jaar in april eveneens neer in de Stille Oceaan. Maar dat was een gelukstreffer. De mastodont, die maar liefst 8,5 ton woog, stortte neer nadat die aan vermogen verloor, en China het ruimtestation niet langer kon controleren.
Om zulk scenario te voorkomen, wordt de Tiangong-2 terug naar de aarde gehaald nu die nog naar behoren functioneert.
Daarbij staat er alweer een vervanger klaar. China heeft plannen voor een groter ruimtestation, groter dan Tiangong-2 en kleiner dan het Internationale ruimtestation (ISS).
APChina heeft plannen voor een groter ruimtestation, groter dan Tiangong-2 en kleiner dan het Internationale ruimtestation (ISS).
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The 5 Most Credible UFO Sightings In Modern History
The 5 Most Credible UFO Sightings In Modern History
1) The Peculiar Lights Above the New Jersey Turnpike (2001)
On July 14, 2001, traffic ground to a halt on the New Jersey Turnpike when a mesmerizing sight was seen by all. Drivers across New Jersey stopped and got out of their cars to see a strange V formation of orange and yellow lights in the sky, above the Arthur Kill Waterway.
Lieutenant Daniel Tarrant of the Carteret Police Department, was one of the witnesses as well as numerous other New Jersey residents. When the media and civilians inquired about the V formation, air-traffic controllers denied the presence of any airplanes, military jets or space flights. A group called the New York Strange Phenomena Investigators claimed to receive FAA radar data that corroborated the UFO sightings from that night.
2) The USS Nimitz Encounter (2004)
On November 14, 2004, the aircraft carrier USS Princeton noted an unknown craft on radar 100 miles off the coast of San Diego. The USS Princeton had tracked objects that appeared at 80000 feet and plummeted over the Pacific Ocean.
Two FA-18F fighter jets from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz arrived in the area, they identified boiling water in an oval shape underneath the surface. They then identified a white tic-tac shaped object appeared above the water. There were no physical signs of an engine or exhaust on the engine and when the fighter jets intended to intercept it, it accelerated away, moving three times the speed of sound and appearing 60 miles away.
3) O'Hare International Airport Saucer (2006)
On November 7, 2006, flight 446 was getting ready to fly from Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, when a United Airlines employee on the tarmac observe a grey metallic saucer hovering in the air above gate c17. There were over 12 United Airline employees as well as numerous civilians who spotted the craft.
Witnesses claim it hovered for five minutes before shooting upward where it broke a hole in the clouds, enough that clouds separated and the employees could then see the blue sky.
In spite of numerous witnesses, the UFO was not seen on radar, the FAA called it a "weather phenomenon" and refused to investigate.
4) The Stephenville Sightings (2008)
On January 8, 2008, citizens reported seeing white lights above Highway 67, presenting as a single horizontal arc and then in vertical parallel lines. A local pilot, Steve Allen, estimated that the strobe lights "spanned about a mile long and a half-mile wide" traveling about 3000 miles per hour. In spite of this, no sound was reported.
The US Air Force claimed responsibility for the lights, stating that F-16s were flying in the area. The witnesses rejected this explanation, believing that the movements made were far too advanced for current human abilities,
5) East Coast GO FAST Video (2015)
In 2017, a video leaked on the news showing an encounter between an F/A-18 Super Hornet and an unidentified flying vehicle. The craft was similar to the one spotted in 2004, in San Diego, a rapidly moving white oval, 45 feet long and without wings. Pilots tracked it at 25000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean as it flew away whilst simultaneously rotating on its axis.
No explanation was ever provided by the US Air force.
There's a lot of bunk out there with CGI/editing tricks. This one, IMO, is certainly one of the more palatable videos I've seen.
US Military Warns People Preparing to Storm Area 51(More Than 1 Million People Agree To ‘Storm Area 51’)
US Military Warns People Preparing to Storm Area 51(More Than 1 Million People Agree To ‘Storm Area 51’)
Officials warn public of dangers at secretive Nevada base and signal that the Air Force stands ready; national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin report from the Pentagon.
Imagine throngs of people who have never met each other assembling in mid-September before dawn in a Nevada desert town to rush the entrance of Area 51 in search of aliens.
It is a fantastical idea conceived of as a joke on social media, but its popularity has spread fast. On Monday, the number of people who signed up for the tongue-in-cheek Facebook call to “Storm Area 51” exceeded 1 million.
And now, U.S. military officials say they are monitoring the situation.
“The U.S. Air Force is aware of the Facebook event encouraging people to ‘Storm Area 51,’ ” an Air Force spokesperson told NPR.
“The Nevada Test and Training Range provides flexible, realistic and multidimensional battlespace to test and develop tactics as well as conduct advanced training in support of U.S. national interests,” said the official, using the full name of a site that includes Area 51. “Any attempt to illegally access the area is highly discouraged.”
According to the event’s page, the plan is to “naruto run” toward the facility so the group can “move faster than their bullets,” the event says. “Lets see them aliens.”
“All featuring aliens and/or Area 51”
The top-secret base is not accessible to the public, though it has become a tourist destination, with alien-themed outfits like West’s not uncommon. Nevada even renamed a state road “Extraterrestrial Highway” because of reports of UFO activity along the road.
Conspiracy theorists have obsessed over Area 51 for decades, claiming the U.S. government is hiding aliens and crashed UFOs at the site. In 2013, the CIA released a classified 1992 report in which the federal government acknowledged that spy planes were tested there. Officials also admitted that Area 51, the place where many sci-fi stories have been based, is a real-life government facility.
In May, the New York Times reported that Navy officials, in classified guidance, described “unexplained aerial phenomena, or unidentified flying objects,” stoking anew theories about extraterrestrial life hiding at Area 51.
It is difficult to say how many of the event’s million backers know it is a joke and how many are really considering making a trek to Nevada, but most of the thousands of posts on the page seem to indicate that it is not serious.
“We are forgetting something very crucial,” wrote Nick Prafke. “We need vape lords to create a smokescreen to block out satellite and camera images.”
The person who created the event page is a 20-year-old man from California who would be identified only as Val. He wouldn’t share his last name for fear the publicity around the event would lead to his being harassed.
“I just thought it would be a funny idea for the meme page,” Val said via Facebook Messenger. “And it just took off like wildfire. It’s entirely satirical though, and most people seem to understand that.”
Val told NPR that he’ll “more than likely be there, but not for the intended purpose.”
He has been talking “with some pretty great people” about planning a different kind of shindig, perhaps something educational, though it was unclear what exactly the lesson would be.
Whatever They Told You About Ufo Sightings Is Dead Wrong…And Here’s Why
Whatever They Told You About Ufo Sightings Is Dead Wrong…And Here’s Why
The Ultimate Ufo Sightings Trick
Take for instance the high number of photographs that have been published of UFOs. Even if you’re definitely the most skeptical person when it regards an Arizona UFO, or any place else for that matter, you could just have a different opinion as soon as you read about this important event that happened on March 13th, 1997 when thousands of people witnessed what was thought to be a UFO sighting in Arizona. UFOs aren’t so hampered. The UFO looks like it’s been seen by plenty of individuals. Throughout that time period, there were two triangle UFOs sighted in the identical location.
With the numbers of UFO sightings increasing each calendar year, it’s important that you know precisely where to report a UFO sighting and what information will be necessary as a way to report it successfully. UFO sightings aren’t a modern phenomenon, they aren’t a US-only phenomenon. UFO sightings are now able to easily be captured on video, while it’s through a telephone or video camera. Usually once you speak about UFO sightings, most men and women feel that I mistook it for something else or they may think that it is only a crap. On weekdays it appears that UFO sightings are driven by men and women that are routinely outside daily, rain or shine. As an example, over Midlothian, many sightings are made from January to March. Recently, among the most renowned mass sightings was the Phoenix Lights.
The Ufo Sightings Cover Up
The Nazca tribe proved immensely skilled not just in agricultural procedures but also in art. A lot of UFO sightings were reported in america, with 26 sightings occurring during November. There’s additionally a lengthy standing agreement between the united states and UK which enables the United States government to check aircraft in United Kingdom air space.
The military was tracking strange aircraft in the area for around a couple of weeks, the operator said. Police did not want to comment. Lots of people, including Leverger himself, pondered in the event the incident was some sort of atmospheric incident or perhaps a meteor. Then explain someone who died in the incident has a fortune in a financial institution and should you help them get the amount from the bank you will secure a lot of money. Another report resulted in the discovery a meteor had descended Scotland. Information can become so out of shape it’s tricky to see the actual picture. My view is that we’re handling something inter-dimensional, he explained.
All About Ufo Sightings
There was no one in the vehicle. There’s a complete fleet of them, among the pilot said. As the craft came closer to their place, Globa was able to get a more comprehensive appearance. Someone has to cover science and every previous scientist. Hard science progresses by searching for an explanation of phenomena that are not explained by existing theories. In reality, scientists and lots of non-believers make no fuss about expressing their scepticism in regards to extrasensory perception. UFO experts claimed that the amount of sightings has increased in recent decades.
An unidentified flying object has been filmed from a mountain overlooking top secret US air base Area 51 by a hiker while hiking just miles away Area 51.
The hiker states: “Area 51 from Tikaboo Peak the base is very active. A great look into Area 51 just as the snow stopped.”
“To get the best video, and pictures of Area 51 out there, I do feel the weather had a lot to do with the great shots I was able to get. Between the snowstorms, and clouds the base would just illuminate long enough for me to film, and take pictures.”
With the number of UFO sightings on the increase, it’s tough to get excited about those reported by the general public with blurred and often questionable and frustratingly short videos. That’s why sightings by the military or UFOs with very distinct descriptions get more attention in the UFOlogy circles. A good example occurred last week when a UFO investigator in Chile sounded convinced that the orbs declared that UFOs seen crossing the skies and making sharp maneuvers over Concepcion were “Foo fighters.” A similar incident occurred this week when a UFO was recorded by a drone in Argentina and its speed caused some sites to refer to it as a “fastwalker.” Not only that, this UFO holds up fairy well under high magnification … enough to determine it’s not a bug or a bird.
Did you see that fastwalker?
That “whoosh” you just heard was the sound of ufologists’ ears perking up. Why? “Fastwalkers” is a term used by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) as shorthand for unidentified aerial phenomena that appear on radar screens moving faster than known Earth aircraft and changing directions at seemingly impossible speeds and angles. In addition, Argentina is known for its frequent UFO sightings and its big UFOlogy community, so sightings are taken more seriously there. Finally, the owner of the video (uploaded on July 14) — Mariano López – is a drone operator who has seen and recorded UFOs before and believes this is his best sighting. (Watch it here.)
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Image left: Fastwalker near Area 51 - Image right: Fastwalker Argentina
“This is the best UFO filmed from a drone so far, in which you notice several details. It was captured with the drone Dji Phantom in Mar Chiquita, Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is located 34 kilometers from the city of Mar del Plata. It was filmed with the Gopro at a resolution of 4K at 30 frames per second.”
The YouTube page also has Lopez’s previous UFO video uploaded on March 23, 2019. (See it here.) That one is less distinct and one could make a case that it’s a very fast bird or an insect close to the drone’s camera. That’s not the case with the more recent video. Lopez has spent more time on this one – adding the mandatory slow-motion and tracking circle. However, what’s most interesting is the magnification starting at about 1:20 in the video. Whatever, this is, it can’t be mistaken for a bird of bug. Could it be another drone? If it was, drone-operator Lopez would probably be trying to buy one rather than speculate on it being a UFO.
Since “Fastwalker” is merely a description, albeit a military one, it’s appropriate for UFO sights like sightings.info to use it. However, it doesn’t go beyond that in trying to identify the object. No one else seems to have seen it and Lopez doesn’t appear to have reported it to the media, the military or any Argentine UFO investigators. That leaves it wide open for speculation and skepticism.
A strange, new drone? Secret military plane? Alien space ship? Camera anomaly? Mutant bird? Something else? What would NORAD say?
Let’s hope Mariano Lopez keeps his drones flying and his keen eyes watching for more Fastwalkers.
Dan J of Barstow, San Bernardino, California, had a very disturbing encounter with two sinister entities in early 2011. Those entities have become known in paranormal research as Shadow People. But, what are they? The Official Shadow People Archives website says of these creepy things: “Sometimes it appears as the mere silhouette of a person, usually male, but generally lacking any other characteristics of gender. However, in no way does the description end there. There are ‘hatted’ shadow beings, hooded shadows, cloaked ones, and solid or wispy, smoky types. Some are seen only from the waist up. Others clearly have legs that are seen fleeing from their observers. They dart into corners, through walls, into closets, or behind television sets, bushes, and buildings. Sometimes they simply fade into the dark recesses of the night. Lacking in the description is one common denominator unifying the many different types of shadow people that enter our world, except that they are ‘intensely dark.'”
In a July 2013 interview with Psychology Today, Rosemary Ellen Guiley – an expert on paranormal phenomena – said: “I discovered that many Shadow People experiencers are also ET experiencers, especially abductees. Through a long process, I concluded that Shadow People are a shape-shifted form taken by Djinn. Therefore, there is a profound connection between Djinn and bad hauntings and ET abductions. Furthermore, the footprints of the Djinn are evident throughout our mythologies about ancient aliens and gods. The picture that emerged is of a major Djinn involvement in all of our entity contact experiences throughout history.”
With that all said, let’s now return to the case of Dan. A no-nonsense, tough biker, Dan is hardly the kind of person who it’s easy to intimidate and scare. But, the shadow-things that intruded on his sleep – as he slept in a tent on the slopes of Mt. Rainier, Washington State in the summer of 2011 – had Dan in a state of near-hysteria. An enthusiastic outdoorsman, Dan spent four days hiking around the huge, 14,000-foot-plus high mountain. He would live to regret doing that. It was around 3:00 a.m. when Dan woke with a start – and with an unsettling and intense feeling of being watched very closely. He lay still, holding his breath and clenching his fists. Something was definitely afoot; of that much he was sure. That’s an understatement. In seconds, Dan was “rushed” by two skinny, spindly shadowy monsters that were humanoid in appearance.
Dan suddenly found himself unable to move as the two figures hovered over him – at which point Dan he felt incredibly weak, short of breath and dizzy. A cold sweat enveloped him. All the time, the Shadow People had their index fingers on his stomach. It was only when they removed their silhouette-like fingers that the weakness went away, and normality suddenly returned, as the pair exited the tent at high speed. Dan didn’t even try and get back to sleep: he lept out of the tent, got all of his belongings together, jumped in his truck and hit the road. Unfortunately for Dan, this was not the end of things: the Shadow People were not about to leave Dan alone.
Three nights later, Dan had an almost identical experience – even down to the Shadow People once again touching his stomach with their fingers and causing him to feel suddenly weak and near-completely incapacitated. This time, though, the location was the living-room of his Barstow-based apartment. The creatures came back on two more occasions: one several weeks later and the final time in August 2014 – more than three years later after the encounters had begun.
Dan had a deep suspicion that the Shadow People has the ability to take away his strength, and to the point where he was so weak he could barely move. It was a sign that he had been “zapped” – to use Dan’s very own and concise description – by something that was feeding on him. Indeed, Dan was unable to shake off the idea that what he had encountered were akin to supernatural vampires, surfacing in the dead of night and on the prowl for a tasty feast – which they found in Dan himself. What particularly worried Dan, though, was that the Shadow People clearly knew where Dan lived: he remains baffled and concerned by this admittedly odd and unsettling issue.
We are far from documenting all of the great mysteries of our history and prehistory. Throughout the world there are places that have remained hidden from out gaze right up into modern times, sequestered in a realm beyond our knowledge to evade our insatiable drive for discovery. One such place sat entombed in darkness and forgotten for tens of thousands of years in a remote area of France, stuck in time even as the world above it marched on into new eras. It is a magnificent caves system of cryptic paintings of great historical importance that has managed to elude understanding and has since its discovery been sealed off yet again, off-limits to most and keeping its secrets close as it always has.
One of the greatest archeological discoveries made in modern times happened quite by accident. On September 12, 1940, an 18-year-old Marcel Ravidat was out exploring in the countryside of southwestern France, near the village of Montignac in the Dordogne region, along with his faithful dog. It was a perfectly normal day until at some point the dog tumbled down a hole in the ground at a place called the hill of Lascaux. Ravidat would call some friends to come investigate the hole with him, as it seemed to lead off into the murk into a passageway, and their minds raced with the wonders that may lie down there in the clinging dark. They went about widening the hole until they were able to fit through, and armed with a makeshift lamp they penetrated into the gloom, where they would find an ancient world lost to mankind for millennia, long a stranger to the light, and which would become a mystery that has fascinated scientists to this day.
After descending through a 49ft deep shaft and squeezing through some very narrow passageways, the corridor emptied into a larger room that seemed mundane at first until the walls were licked by the flickering illumination of their lamp. There covering the walls and dancing about in the lamplight were myriad ancient paintings depicting various animals, humans, and more, as well as abstract symbols, all mostly in red, yellow, and black. Excited by this incredible new treasure they had found, the boys returned the following day and delved deeper into the complex to find other alcoves and chambers similarly adorned with these mysterious paintings, and that is when they would finally come out with their discovery and the real research on what would come to be known as the Lascaux Caves would begin in earnest.
It was found that the mysterious cave system was divided into several main areas that between them held hundreds upon hundreds of ancient cave paintings depicting animals, including deer, aurochs, ibex, bison, deer, equines, birds, and feline species, as well as human figures, bears, lions, a rhinoceros, and abstract signs, yet none of trees, vegetation, or the landscape itself, and none of reindeer, odd because that is believed to have been the main source of food for the people who painted it all. Most of the animals seen were of species long extinct, belonging to the Upper Paleolithic era, and most can be identified, yet there are also some anomalies among them, such as a monstrous creature with panther skin, the tail of a deer, a bison’s hump, two horns, and a prominent male member. What was this thing? No one knows.
All of these figures are meticulously rendered in a variety of mineral pigments, with some amount of engraving directly into the stone also seen, all of it often incorporating the angles and curves of the walls themselves into the designs. The paintings in general show great skill and care in their creation, often exhibiting artistic skills and techniques far ahead of their time. Among the different sections of the caves are the so-called Hall of the Bulls, which shows various horses, stags, and bulls, including an immense, 17-foot-long image of a bull, as well as another section called the Nave, which holds painting referred to as “The Crossed Bison,” which uses tricks of perspective that were very advanced for their era, and the Abside (Apse), a smallish chamber in which practically every inch is covered in thousands of entwined, overlapping, engraved drawings, and other sections with names like the Shaft of the Dead Man, the Chamber of Engravings, the Painted Gallery, the Chamber of Felines, and others.
It is all rather breathtaking in its ambitious majesty, but it is also permeated with a great deal of mystery, and there is much we don’t know about this place. One thing that has never been agreed on is just how old the paintings actually are. From the species depicted and the various tools found scattered about it is believed that they date to between 17,300 to 20,000 years ago, but it is still debated as to exactly how old they really are. It is also not fully understood why the paintings were made in the first place. While there are other cave paintings to be found in the region, there is nothing approaching the grand scale of what can be seen in the Lascaux Caves, suggesting this place had some special significance among the people that made it, but just what this might be is unclear, with theories ranging from that this was a place for rituals to that it held some spiritual capacity. Making it all more impressive is that a main component in the pigments used are certain manganese oxides that do not exist in the immediate area, with the nearest source lying 250 kilometres away, meaning these artists went through great lengths to import these materials and then lock themselves deep underground with animal fat lamps to complete their work over the course of generations.
Another mystery still is that no one really knows what all of these paintings actually mean, and although some seem to tell a story and even continue on into other rooms, no one is quite sure what that story is or why it was recorded here in this manner. One idea is that these paintings tell spiritual stories or even creation myths, while another is that they are rituals to bring success in hunting, or another still that they are just hunting records or records of the wildlife of the area. No one really knows, and there are fewer and fewer opportunities to study these wonders because in modern times the caves are almost completely off limits to even scientists and researchers.
This wasn’t always the case. The caves were opened to the public in 1948, where they began to attract droves and droves of people coming to peer into this window to the past, but this unfortunately led to a change in the cool, dark atmosphere within the cave that began to seriously threaten the paintings. Factors such as carbon dioxide, heat, humidity, artificial lighting, changes in air circulation and temperature, and various contaminants conspired to lead to visible deterioration of the paintings that began to progress at an alarming rate. By the 1960s there were crystals, algae, and lichens appearing within the caves, and they were finally closed down to the public in 1963. This severely limited access to the caves, but things would get even worse still, when in 2000 a destructive white mold was found running amok here, and in 2007 a mysterious black fungus of an entirely new species never seen before began doing irreparable damage to the paintings, and in 2008 the caves were closed altogether for three months, with only a single person allowed in for 20 minutes at a time once a week to monitor the site and take readings.
Since then the fungus problem has been ongoing, and access is still extremely limited, meaning very few people have had the privilege of seeing these paintings up close. Even researchers and experts are only allowed very limited access to the caves at present, making study of the ancient treasures inside an agonizingly slow process. Tourists are able to see the paintings only through a replica cave called Lascaux II, created in 1983 only about 200 meters from the actual site, which holds recreations of certain sections of the real caves, and this is about as close as most people will ever get to seeing the real thing. It is somewhat sad to think that this piece of our past might forever be hidden away down in the earth like it did for millennia before its discovery, to keep its secrets that only the long dead know of. One can only hope that we find the answers we seek, but until then this remains a window to another era which was open to us for a time, but which has had the curtains pulled over it once again.
“I do not like the idea of being a domestic cat, but what’s the solution? I think one of the solutions that seems to be the best option is to add an AI layer. This is something that I think will really be important on a civilization level scale.”
Who said anything about being a domestic cat? And why is it so bad? Garfield seems to be doing well and most house cats seem to rule the homes they live in while doing nothing to earn it other than the occasional purr. And yet, that’s what seems to be worrying billionaire and man-you-don’t-want-licking-your-face Elon Musk, whose solution to not being a house cat (you would think he has enough money to get plastic surgery) is to implant wires into brains and download all of their data into massive computers. Not HIS brain, mind you – but probably his computers and his wires. Do you trust him with your mind? Do you trust him with your milk or tuna?
“Even in a benign AI scenario we will be left behind,” he said. “With a high-bandwidth brain-machine interface, we can actually go along for the ride. We can have the option of merging with AI.”
At a presentation at the California Academy of Sciences this week, Musk explained that artificial intelligence is leaving our puny human brains behind, but his company Neuralink has a way for us to at least keep pace with it. Neuralink’s product is a computer chip attached to ultrafine, electrode-studded wires that will be inserted into a brain (yours?) by a surgical robot, which first drilled the hole. The robot will then connect the chip to a computer that will read brain “spikes,” interpret them and then store them faster than you can say “this sounds a lot scarier than that Russian face-aging app.” That’s because it is, although Neuralink’s president Max Hodak assured The New York Times that they’re not trying to hide anything – well, not anymore … this is the first announcement since Musk founded and financed the company two years ago.
“We want this burden of stealth mode off of us so that we can keep building and do things like normal people, such as publish papers.”
Publish papers? Does Elon I-can’t-get-to-Mars-soon-enough Musk know that this guy just wants to write papers about his brain-data-sucking device?
“All this will occur I think quite slowly. It’s not as if Neuralink will suddenly have this incredible neural lace and take over people’s brains. It will take a long time.”
That comment sounds like Musk is smoking pot again. In reality, Neuralink has made considerable progress. It showed the Times a lab rat with 1,500 electrodes in its brain connected to a computer that is reading and interpreting them – a system they say is already advanced enough for scientific research or medical applications. They’re also upgrading the robot to use a laser drill because the mechanical ones cause too much brain vibrations. Could that be why Musk feels like he’s becoming a cat?
Neuralink says it plans to conduct testing on humans by 2020. It already has a jump on its competition because it uses ultra-thin wires and the robot can insert them at different depths inside a brain. It still needs to find a better material for the wires, since the salt in brains causes them to deteriorate and Musk wants them to stay in your head permanently so he knows when you change your mind about buying a Tesla. Musk may be anxious to get some return on his $100 million investment, especially since Neuralink is hiring more people without a product to sell. Then again, isn’t that the Muskian way?
Someone who didn’t go with Neuralink
“[If two people both had Neuralinks, they’d] effectively have a really high-bandwidth telepathy … potentially a new kind of communication, a conceptual telepathy. It would also be consensual.”
Consensual? Did Musk throw that last word in about brain-to-brain communications because he was worried about privacy … or does he know the first thoughts most people would send across the wires?
A lot of people have already trusted Elon Musk with their money. How many will trust him with their thoughts?
A massive and mysterious underground structure has been detected beneath the ancient Naryn-Kala fortress in Derbent, Russia. Scientists still aren’t sure what the void may be, but the current thinking is that the structure may be evidence of the oldest church in Russia, dating all the way back to 300 CE.
Karyn-Nala
Derbent is in what is today known as the republic of Dagestan which lies on the Caspian Sea just north of Azerbaijan. Derbent is recognized as the oldest occupied city in what is now Russia and evidence exists suggesting Derbent has been inhabited since at least the 8th century. Because of its location perfectly situated between Asia and Europe, Derbent has changed hands many times throughout the centuries between Persian, Arab, Mongol, Timurid, Shirvan and Iranian kingdoms. In 1813 the city became part of Russia as a result of the Russo-Persian War.
The fortress of Naryn-Kala in Derbent, Russia, dates back to around A.D. 300
The Naryn-Kala fortress is believed to have been built in the 6th century by the last kingdom of the Persian Empire shortly before the rise of Islam throughout the region. Today, the fortress is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is still being actively excavated by archaeologists.
In one such excavation, scientists with the Russian Academy of Sciences and two Russian universities discovered a massive underground structure by using muon radiography, a revolutionary new form of imaging which leverages cosmic rays as a non-invasive source of radiation. Already, muon radiography has enabled scientists to detect previously unknown structures in the Great Pyramid of Giza and other archaeological sites.
The underground structure is roughly cross-shaped with a dome in the center and measures around 11 metres (36 feet) high, 15 metres (50 feet) from north to south, and 13 metres (43 feet) from east to west. It was originally believed that the structure was a water tank, but the latest muon radiography offers a previously unknown level of detail that suggests it may have been something more.
A cemetery just outside the walls of Karyn-Nala.
Natalia Polukhina, the senior author on the published study of the mysterious void in Naryn-Kala, says the shape of the structure and its location indicates that it likely played an important role in the fortress at the time:
The unusual building, in which we have put our detectors, has the shape of a cross, oriented strictly to the sides of the world, one side is two meters longer than the others. As the archaeologists who began excavations say, during construction, the building was entirely on the surface and it stands on the highest point of the Naryn-Kala. What is the sense to put the tank on the surface, and even on the highest mountain? It is strange. Currently, there are more questions than answers.
It’s still impossible to determine the structure’s purpose until actual physical excavations are conducted – if they ever can be without harming the ancient fortress.
The club of weird, giant, prehistoric bird-lizards we call dinosaurs just got a new member, and this one has a face like a shovel. Aquilarhinus palimentus was discovered at Big Bend National Park in the Chihuahuan Desert and belongs to a group of other strange-faced dinosaurs called Hadrosaurids, known for their distinctive “duck-bill” jaws. This newly identified hadrosaurid genus roamed the Earth roughly 80 million years ago when the Chihuahuan desert was a lush river delta, and represents the most primitive species of hadrosaurid yet discovered.
The discovery was published in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology earlier this week. According to the paper, the name Aquilarhinus palimentus refers to the shape of the dinosaurs face and is Latin for eagle-nosed shovel-chin, which sounds like an insult from a schoolyard bully. If dinosaurs have ghosts, that’s one angry shovel-faced dino-ghost. You can see an artist’s rendition of the unfortunate beast here.
Part of the dinosaur’s remains were actually discovered in the 1980’s by paleontologist Tom Lehman, one of the co-authors of the new study and professor of paleontology at Texas Tech University. The fossils were originally misidentified as belonging to a member of the Gryposaurus genus of duck-billed dinos. Revisiting the fossilized bones, however, showed that this was an example of an entirely new subspecies of Hadrosaurid.
Art of two Hadrosaurids feeding in a river bed.
Old shovel-face represents the most primitive example of the Hadrosaurid family of dinosaurs ever discovered. According to professor Tom Lehman:
“This new species is particularly interesting because it is among the earlier representatives of the duck-billed dinosaurs, and it shows us what the narial crest, or nose, of these animals looked like before the wide variety of distinctive noses evolved in later species of duck-billed dinosaurs.
In addition, instead of a duck bill, this animal had a shovel-shaped beak that suggests it had a unique way of feeding. Most of what we know about duck-billed dinosaurs is based on the wide variety of species found in Alberta, Canada, Montana and Utah. So, this new species also is interesting because it shows us that duck-billed dinosaurs that lived in Texas were different from those that lived farther north.”
The Hadrosaur evolutionary tree, of which the recently discovered dinosaur is the earliest known member.
The area of big Bend National Park where the discovery was made looked very different 80 million years ago when Aquilarhinus palimentus was alive. It was a wet and silty river delta and researchers believe Aquilarhinus palimentus used its unique jaw to scoop silt out of the river bed, eating the loosely rooted plants of the tidal river delta. The researchers believe that when the dinosaur died, its remains were washed downstream and covered with silt over the course of millions of years.
According to the researchers this discovery suggests that there may be many more lineages of Hadrosaurid yet to be discovered, and if the previous findings are to be any indication they’ll likely also be ridiculous.
The story of human origins is a mysterious and complex tale, and one full of shadows. These aren’t just the shadows of a past that we can’t fully recall, either through the study of the historical record or earlier anthropological evidence; modern science continues to discover the literal “shadow” of our past relatives in our modern DNA.
Human ancestry was far more diverse and complex than was once believed, and every year we are adding new members to our ancient family tree. But unlike in the past when such discoveries were made in the dusty floors of caves or in ancient burial sites, today we can learn almost as much about our complex origins from studying the genetics of modern human groups around the world.
And, rather strikingly, we continue to find traces of unknown hominid ancestors when doing so.
Reconstruction of Homo neanderthalensis skull.
Science Alert recently reported on a study led by João Teixeira of the University of Adelaide, and his colleague, biologist Alan Cooper, who discovered evidence of what they believe to be “ghost” ancestors in modern DNA.
One such discovery, made in 2018 but which had not been widely reported at that time, indicated an unusual genetic trait that is discernible in the population of Flores, Indonesia, which the researchers believe to be “as divergent from modern human DNA as Neanderthal or Denisovan.”
Neanderthal fossils were first discovered at the Feldhofer Cave of the Neander Valley, near Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1856. Although different in appearance from modern humans, there is still some debate as to whether they should be categorized as an entirely different species from us, or as a subspecies of modern humans. The Denisovans weren’t discovered until fairly recently, and going off of little more than a fingertip fragment and teeth recovered from Denisova cave in Siberia. Since then, other fragmentary remains have been discovered, including one mysterious hominid jawbone found off the Taiwanese coast which some believe could have Denisovan origins.
The Penghu jaw fragment, recovered by fishermen off the coast of Taiwan sometime prior to 2008.
In all of the aforementioned cases, the discovery of these archaic human groups involved physical remains recovered from what a type site (the location after which the species or group is named) or other location. There is now also genetic evidence of encounters between modern humans and these known, but now-extinct relatives; shortly after our exit from Africa, Homo sapiens encountered Neanderthals, and the results of these interactions can still be found in the DNA of as much as 2% of modern populations. Similar genetic traces of our interactions with the Denisovans can be found (albeit to a lesser degree than that of Neanderthals).
However, there are also traces of interactions between humans and species that cannot be identified. According to Science Alert:
The first unknown extinct hominid – named EH1 – was roughly genetically equidistant from Denisovans and Neanderthals. The ancestor of all Asian and Australo-Papuan populations bred with EH1, resulting in 2.6 to 3.4 percent shared EH1 ancestry.
The other “unknown” in this equation, as discussed earlier in relation to genetic traces found among the modern populations of Indonesia (dubbed EH2) “only appears in short-statured people that live near Liang Bua Cave,” which, not surprisingly, is where evidence of Homo floriensis, a diminutive species that have been likened to real-life “Hobbits” of the ancient world, was discovered in 2004 (we should note that the unidentified EH2 is not taken to be one and the same as Homo floriensis, but rather some other extinct hominid type that remains undocumented).
As Teixeira and Cooper summarize, “At least 3 different hominin groups appear to have been involved in Asia, of which only the Denisovans are currently known. Several interbreeding events are inferred to have taken place east of Wallace’s Line, consistent with archaeological evidence of widespread and early hominin presence in the area.”
Current archaeological evidence, as with that of fossil remains, provides no evidence that these archaic human groups made it as far south as Australia and Tasmania (both being parts of the ancient continent of Sahul, as it would have existed prior to 18,000 years ago). However, as the authors of the PNAS study have noted, genetic evidence in this region of the world “remains enigmatic,” hinting at further possibilities with relation to the many mysteries in our ancient family tree… and the “ghosts” of others whom our ancestors occasionally encountered.
This ancient sphinx on Mars is positioned on top of a hill so that it can be seen for a long ways. The sphinx has a head, nose, mouth, chin, eyes, forehead, neck, front arms and body with small tail. The sphinx is ancient beyond ancient which you can tell from it crumbling to pieces everywhere. Still its an important find, proof that an intelligent species once thrived on this planet and create monuments to their gods. Scott C. Waring-Taiwan
A computer graphic image provided by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) shows the Japanese unmanned spacecraft Hayabusa-2 approaching the asteroid Ryugu.
Ryugu is a carbon-rich rock that could hold clues to the history of our solar system. The rock might contain amino acids, the essential building blocks of life.
Hayabusa-2 blasted a hole in the asteroid in April in order to collect samples from subsurface rock that's been sheltered from the wear and tear of space.
NASA is also conducting a mission to visit an asteroid and collect samples, but without the explosives.
The life of an asteroid is lonely. The rocks spend eons drifting through the cold vacuum of space.
But on Wednesday, the asteroid Ryugu welcomed a special visitor: Japan's Hayabusa-2 probe successfully landed on the asteroid's surface at 9:06 p.m. ET.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launchedHayabusa-2 into space in December 2014. Its mission: explore and collect samples from Ryugu, a primitive asteroid half-a-mile in diameter that orbits the sun at a distance up to 131 million miles (211 million kilometers).
The probe reached its destination in June 2018, then got to work making observations, measuring the asteroid's gravity, and rehearsing to touch down. It blasted the asteroid with a copper plate and a box of explosives in April in order to loosen rocks and expose material under the surface, then successfully landed on Ryugu last night to gather up the rock and soil debris.
The spacecraft captured the images below as it left the asteroid's surface.
"First photo was taken at 10:06:32 JST (on-board time) and you can see the gravel flying upwards. Second shot was at 10:08:53 where the darker region near the centre is due to touchdown," JAXA tweeted.
These images were taken right after Hayabusa-2 touched down on Ryugu asteroid on July 11, 2019. JAXA/Associated Press
Ancient rock samples
Asteroids are made of rock and metal, and they take all kinds of quirky shapes, ranging in size from pebbles to 600-mile megaliths. Most of them hang out in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, though Ryugu's orbit sometimes takes it between Mars and Earth.
Some asteroids date back to the dawn of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago, when materials leftover from the formation of planets coalesced into these chunks of rock. In that sense, asteroids can serve as time capsules: What scientists find in those primitive rocks could tell us a lot about the solar system's history.
Ryugu is a C-type asteroid, which means it's rich with organic carbon molecules, water, and possibly amino acids. Amino acids form the building blocks for protein and were essential to the evolution of life on Earth. Some theories posit that an asteroid first brought amino acids here, gifting our planet with the seeds of life, though that's still debated.
About three-quarters of our solar system's asteroids are C-type. Hayabusa-2 aims to be the first mission to bring samples from such an asteroid back to Earth.
The probe initially landed on Ryugu in February and collected shallow samples from just below the surface, but mission managers decided to gather some deeper rock samples as well, since that material hasn't been exposed to harsh weathering from space. To accomplish that, the probe had to lift back off the asteroid, then blast a 10-meter crater into the surface in order to access to the rock beneath.
So in April, Hayabusa-2 released and detonated a box of explosives in space that shot a copper plate into the asteroid.
Wednesday's landing then made a splash in all that freed-up material.
The Japanese Hayabusa-2 spacecraft lands on an asteroid to collect samples.JAXA/Associated Press
"These images were taken before and after touchdown by the small monitor camera (CAM-H). The first is 4 seconds before touchdown, the second is at touchdown itself and the third is 4 seconds after touchdown. In the third image, you can see the amount of rocks that rise," JAXA tweeted.
After it touched down, Hayabusa-2 then collected a new set of samples and left Ryugu's surface. At the end of this year, it will begin the 5.5 million-mile (9 million-kilometer) journey home. So far, everything is on schedule.
—HAYABUSA2@JAXA (@haya2e_jaxa) July 11, 2019
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The agency's OSIRIS-REx mission reached a much smaller C-type asteroid, Bennu, in August 2018. But the probe didn't land on Bennu's surface; instead, it's been orbiting at a record-breakingly close distance.
The plan is for OSIRIS-REx to approach Bennu's surface in July 2020, but the spacecraft will only make contact for about five seconds. During that quick instant, it will blow nitrogen gas to stir up dust and pebbles and collect the samples. If all goes according to plan, it will return that material to Earth in 2023.
The asteroid's surface has turned out to be rougher than expected, however, and debris flying off the space rock can pose a threat to the orbiting spacecraft. So NASA is still choosing its sampling site.
But Bennu has already made a significant finding: In December, before it entered orbit around Bennu, the probe discovered that the asteroid harbored ingredients for water (oxygen and hydrogen atoms bonded together). Though Bennu is too small to host liquid water, it's possible that water could have once existed on its parent asteroid, which Bennu broke away from between 700 million and 2 billion years ago.
Though NASA's asteroid-exploration mission will collect a larger quantity of sample material than Japan's, the JAXA team hopes that comparing the samples from two different sites on the same asteroid will yield novel information about how long-term space exposure changes asteroids over time.
Both Bennu and Ryugu could also teach scientists a lot about the history of the solar system and potentially — if they contain organic materials — about the origins of life on Earth.
"Apollo on steroids": NASA's mission to get the first woman and next man to the moon by 2024
"Apollo on steroids": NASA's mission to get the first woman and next man to the moon by 2024
Fifty years afterthe Apollo 11 launch, NASA is setting its sights on a trip back to the moon. The goal is to return to the lunar surface by 2024, in a mission described as "Apollo on steroids" – but some critics argue that's unrealistic amid budget concerns and already-missed deadlines.
Orion is NASA's first design of a deep space crew capsule since the Apollo era. It looks similar to Apollo's capsule from the outside, but it's 50% bigger and can hold four astronauts.
"When we went last time, the goal was land a person on the moon and return them safely to Earth. And we did that," said Mark Kirasich, who oversees NASA's Orion program. "This time, it's a little bit different. It's about a sustainable, long-term, human space exploration program."
Orion would launch on top of a Space Launch System (SLS) rocket designed to be more powerful than the Apollo-era Saturn V. It would then fly to a mini-space station orbiting the moon called Gateway, where the crew would dock before taking a lunar lander down to the moon's surface.
A handful of companies are now proposing designs for Gateway, including Northrop Grumman. With Grumman's design, up to four astronauts could live and work for up to two months.
"It's a place where they can cook their food, where they can gather and socialize, but really, do their work," said Frank DeMauro, who oversees the company's space systems.
But it's not that simple. Orion and the SLS rocket are years behind schedule and billions over budget. Fed up, the Trump administration ordered NASA to put Americans back on the moon by 2024 this March.
"If NASA is not currently capable of landing American astronauts on the moon in five years, we need to change the organization, not the mission," said Vice President Mike Pence at the time.
Last week, NASA did just that, and ousted the two top managers of the program responsible for NASA's lunar efforts. "It was entirely my decision," said NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine. "But at the end of the day, we need to be very clear that NASA is committed to cost and schedule." Bridenstine says it could take an additional $20 billion over 5 years to meet the new deadline, and that his next step is to get support from Congress.
"If the Congress follows what we have put forward, we will have the first woman and the next man on the moon in 2024," he said.
That congressional budget approval remains a big if -- but without it, NASA's new moon mission has no chance. The organization's administrator will testify before the Senate Wednesday.
Origin of Greek Civilization Believed Found On Monumental Pyramid Island
Origin of Greek Civilization Believed Found On Monumental Pyramid Island
A new discovery has possibly revealed the origin of Ancient Greek culture. In a remote and uninhabited pyramid-shaped islet, archaeologists have found evidence of a rich cultural and monumental landscape dating from earlier than the Minoan period. The evidence so far is that it was a major religious center created with technical knowledge pre-dating that found at Minoan Knossos by at least 400 years, indicating that it played a significant role in the development of Greek civilization .
The Curious Pyramid Isle
The barren islet of Daskalio lies just of the coast of the island of Keros, which is one of the Cyclades islands in the Aegean Sea, and was once part of Keros before sea-levels rose. Daskalio has been the subject of intense archaeological investigations since 2015 when an undisturbed site was located.
The research is being carried out by a multinational team, supported by the Greek government and the British School in Athens. The large-scale project is being funded by several international institutes.
Special Deposit South on Keros, with Dhaskalio in the background.µ
The project is led by Colin Renfrew and Michael Boyd and has found ‘the earliest truly monumental complex of buildings ever unearthed anywhere in the Greek world’ reports The Independent . The islet had a settlement with metal-working shops, buildings and even indoor plumbing, and all of this a millennium before the Minoans, who are often thought of as the first European civilization. According to the Keep Talking Greece website, the team of archaeologists have uncovered ‘a complex, stratified and technically expert society’.
Daskalio has a distinctive pyramid shape which is due to the extensive engineering activities of the ancient people of the Aegean islands. They deliberately exaggerated the pyramidal shapeof the rocky outcrop by creating a number of huge terraces on Daskalio, that measured in total about 1,000 feet (300 m). There were 6 terraces and upon them were built a number of buildings, mostly in marble. Some of the buildings were two floors and had staircases and were built using marble. The cultural landscape was built within a four-decade period and based on a single design.
The island was sculpted with terraces and white stone to make it dazzle for miles around .
The complex has been dated to about 4,600 years ago. It is believed that the pyramid-island was a religious site that attracted pilgrims from far and wide, who buried small statues here as sacrifices to unknown deities. The summit of the pyramid- islet was an open-area possibly used for sacrifices or votive offerings . The identity of the gods that were worshipped here is unknown.
There is no arable land on the rocky outcrop and little on Keros. Therefore, the inhabitants of ancient Daskalio may have been dependent on religious pilgrims and also engaged in trade. Keep Talking Greece reports that archaeological finds indicate that the settlers’ “trade extended over a wide network reaching beyond the Cyclades.” There is evidence that the inhabitants specialized in metallurgy and they may have traded their metal products for food and other goods.
Such a huge complex required a great deal of labor and organization, especially to bring the marble from the quarries on Naxos that was used in its construction. According to the Independent, it is estimated that at “least 3,500 maritime voyages to transport between 7,000 and 10,000 tonnes of shining white marble.” This indicated that the builders of the complex were already great mariners and shipbuilders.
The huge scale of the work required would suggest a powerful and unified state or a league of smaller political entities. It is probable that the site was related to the first Hellenic state in history. The engineering, complexity of organization, shipbuilding and metal-working needed to achieve the building of such a place indicates that this civilization was already quite advanced by this time indicating the culture had existed and had been developing for hundreds of years or more. This political entity was at least contemporaneous with, and may have influenced the development of the Minoans in Crete and later the Mycenaeans.
It appears that the Bronze Age complex was part of a wave of similar monumental buildings that occurred around the world at this time. This was a result of new technologies or the exchange of new ideas, spread via trade routes. The pyramid shape of the islet would seem to indicate the influence of Ancient Egypt , who associated this shape with their creator-god. It is possible that the pyramid-shaped island represented to the early Greeks, land rising from the primordial sea, a belief inspired by Ancient Egyptian myths.
The construction of the pyramid-shaped complex is arguably related to the importance that the Greeks attached to mountains in their religion. For example, Mount Olympus was regarded as the home of Zeus and the other deities in their mythology. It is reasonable to assume that the idea that mountains were sacred may have originated in the Cyclades and indicates that the Aegean islands played a decisive role in the religious development of the Ancient Hellenic World.
The Independent quotes Michael Boyd, saying that the team’s research “suggests that these very early Greeks were organizationally, technically and politically much more advanced than previously thought.” This may indicate that the Cyclades Islands were possibly the cradle of Hellenic civilization. Their religious ideas, technology, and political organization may have influenced the Minoans and in turn the Greeks on the mainland.
It seems likely that the pyramid-island will continue to provide more insights into some of the earliest Hellenic societies.
Top image: Daskalio, Keros could be the birthplace of the Greek civilization. Source: CC BY-SA 3.0
Long Frozen Organisms in the Arctic Awakened, Hinting at Life on Other Planets
Long Frozen Organisms in the Arctic Awakened, Hinting at Life on Other Planets
In recent years, researchers have reawakened life in frozen organisms in the Arctic permafrost, bringing them back to life. These studies are now challenging accepted ideas as to the resilience of lifeforms, indicating the future of the environment after global warming, and even the chances of life on other planets. They have revived moss and even worms that had been assumed dead in glaciers and in the frozen earth but are now often being revealed by thawing glaciers.
Moss Revival After 150 Years
In 2009, Catherine Le Farge, an evolutionary biologist, and her colleagues were working at the edge of a massive glacier known as the Teardrop, in Northern Canada. She came across a number of specimens of moss “of the species Aulacomnium turgidum finally free from its icy entombment,” according to Stuff. There were some green tints on the plant, even though it had been frozen in ice since the mid-19th century.
This material was presumed to be dead but the verdant hues on the moss indicated to Le Farge that this was something worth investigating. She decided to bring the samples back to her University in Edmonton and placed them in nutrient-rich soil in a bright and warm environment. After a period of time, a number of the mosses came into leaf, despite being ‘dead’ for over a century. Le Farge is quoted by Stuff as stating that "We were pretty blown away."
The moss had desiccated in the extreme cold and this meant that it did not become frozen solid. Typically, ice can form in the tissues of living and dead organisms and this means that it “can shred cell membranes and other vital biological machinery” according to Stuff. This unique biological characteristic of moss meant that it could be revived.
Frozen lifeforms, such as the moss, have been successfully revived.
Following on from the work of Le Farge and her colleagues, other scientists have begun to revive frozen organisms. Peter Convey and his team from the British Antarctic Survey have “awakened a 1500-year-old moss buried more than three feet underground in the Antarctic permafrost,” according to Annith. It appears that the frozen ice can preserve the mosses from environmental damage and the radiation that can lead to the break-down of their DNA and preserve the plants.
Researchers have been able to renew and bring to life bacteria and complex multiple cell organisms that have been entombed in glaciers . One of the most exciting instances of this is the work of Tatiana Vishnivetskaya, from the University of Tennessee, on nematodes (roundworms), that are thousands of years old and were found in the Tundra of Siberia.
She announced an ‘accidental discovery’ when she was working with the organisms in Petrie dishes says Stuff. The scientist saw the worms reawakening , even though they had been frozen for thousands of years. Her work has shown that it is not only a simple organism that can survive in the brutal environment of extremely low temperatures.
The recent research has shown that desolate areas like the Arctic are not just dead zones. Instead, it appears that “glaciers and permafrost are not merely graveyards for multicellular life” according to Stuff. It is also showing that a select few species have great resilience.
It also appears that some organisms can wait for a more favorable environment as part of their survival strategy. They are able to stay literally frozen in time or become ‘ zombies’ until conditions mean that they can be revived.
What Does This Say About Life on Other Planets?
Some believe that the ability of organisms to survive in the extreme cold can have repercussions for the possibility of life on other planets . If lifeforms can survive in a glacier could they not also survive in apparently desolate and uninhabitable worlds ? The resilience of certain organismsmay make it more probable that life may exist elsewhere in the universe.
Northern polar ice cap on Mars. Does the ice hold frozen lifeforms?
The discovery that some organisms can survive in the extreme cold can help us understand how areas, which are now frozen, may look after global warming. As the glaciers and permafrost thaws and retreats, it means that something that can survive in the ice can re-colonize the environment. For example, mosses can flourish once again and prepare the way for other plants and even animals to colonize formerly frozen lands.
The studies by Le Farge, Covney, and others are demonstrating that ancient life can be renewed and the resilience of some forms of biological life . This is very positive given the growing concerns over the environment. The research may give hope that life will be able to survive even the impending environmental disasters predicted by many scientists and environmentalists.
BAS, the team studying the frozen lifeforms, research stations in the British Antarctic Territory.
The Mars Rat and Other Unexplained Features on the Martian Planet
The Mars Rat and Other Unexplained Features on the Martian Planet
In September 2012, a photograph snapped by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity caught the attention of Internet sleuths everywhere. This picture appears to show a large rat hiding among some Martian rocks, and after its release it quickly went viral.
The image of what looks like a camouflaged rodent was spotted by a UFO enthusiast inspecting a panoramic shot taken at the “Rocknest” site.
“It’s a cute rodent on Mars,” wrote ufologist Scott Waring , on his UFO Sightings Daily website. “Note its lighter-color upper and lower eyelids, its nose and cheek areas, its ear, its front leg and stomach.”
Over the next several years, Waring continued to spot artifacts in imagery captured by NASA landers, which he believed had been left behind by an ancient civilization that once existed on the Red Planet.
The artifacts Waring identified on his website included a large Roman-style arch, a fossilized tree stump, the remains of a crashed spacecraft, massive skyscrapers and the carved outline of a woman’s body in the Martian rock bed.
With respect to the rodent, Waring suggested that perhaps NASA flew the rodent there secretly as part of an experiment to evaluate Mars’s capacity to support life. This assertion of course makes little sense, because it doesn’t explain how the rat could have survived the 253-day trip from Earth to Mars, or how it could have been moving around on Mars with no breathable air.
After a while, even some who were initially interested in his work grew disenchanted with Waring. In response to the growing criticism, he shut down his website and disappeared from public view in 2017.
In defense of Waring, a cursory examination of the photographic evidence he analysed does seem to reveal the images he claims to see. And he is hardly the only one to report anomalies on Mars, which at first glance all look to have been intelligently designed.
At various times, space aficionados pouring over photographs taken on the Martian surface have identified objects that look like rusted machinery, broken pottery, carved stone figures, bones, skulls, helmets, and statues of people or animals.
And then of course there’s the infamous Face on Mars. This particular image, which was captured from space by the Viking 1 orbiter in 1976, helped spawn a whole cottage industry of researchers seeking (and often claiming to find) evidence of ancient ruins left behind by an ancient but now extinct civilization.
Pareidolia vs. Paranoia
The individuals who identify these oddities aren’t crazy, nor are they simply making things up to get attention. Many have legitimate scientific or technical credentials. But regardless of their training or background, or the purity of their intentions, these men and women may be falling victim to a phenomenon known as pareidolia. This label describes the tendency of the human brain to search for meaningful patterns in all types of visual images, and to actually see such patterns even when they aren’t there.
“Pareidolia is a normal neuroperceptual phenomenon,” explains Dr. Kang Lee, a neuroscientist from the University of Toronto. Dr. Lee has sponsored research that reveals how the brain is hard-wired to see hidden shapes in unremarkable objects or random imagery. “It happens in auditory and tactile domains as well … [pareidolia] helps us to be super alert to things … and thus is evolutionarily advantageous.”
Pareidolia may indeed explain many of the amazing wonders observers claim to see when looking at photographs taken on Mars. But it is also a convenient catch-all rationalization of the type that skeptics frequently rely on to dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their narrow worldviews.
It may be safe to conclude that there are no rats running around on Mars, since its climate would make that impossible. And there is no doubt that rocks with funny shapes can easily be misidentified. But claims that geometrical regularities can be spotted on images taken from orbit above Mars aren’t as easy for the open-minded to discount. There is plenty of dispute about whether natural processes can create such shapes, and if so how often they can create them.
What are the Mars Anomalies, Really?
It is not well known by the general public. But in the Cydonia region, where the supposedly debunked Face on Mars sits, there are actually several features on the landscape that show signs of geometrical regularity, which is considered one of the distinctive markers of intelligent design.
These features include the so-called D&M Pyramid , a five-sided figure first discovered by researchers Vince DiPiertro and Greg Molenaar; an area called “ the City ,” which contains more than a dozen pyramidal shapes; the Cliff, a long, linear rock mesa that looks like a giant ‘one’ from overhead; and the Tholus, a precisely circular mound in an isolated region that does not appear to be the result of either volcanic activity or meteor impact.
Adding further intrigue, Mars anomaly researchers say these objects have been arranged on the Cydonia plateau in a way that creates a larger, more comprehensive geometrical pattern.
The Mars anomaly research community has spent decades investigating these unusual features. Individual researchers, most of whom have some type of scientific training, have written dozens of papers and made hundreds of presentations explaining their reasons for concluding these landforms are not 100-percent natural. It is the existence of multiple anomalies here that has led to so much focus on the Cydonia area, which would continue to be studied intensely even if the debunking of the Face was accepted as genuine ( which it isn’t by most alternative researchers).
Dismissing such features as examples of pareidolia, or as “tricks of light and shadows” to use NASA’s terminology, may in the end prove to be the correct judgment. Nature may be more capable of producing geometrically suggestive shapes than many believe, even in arrangements that appear to have mathematical significance. But the only way to resolve such mysteries with complete certainty is to send manned missions there to examine these anomalies up close.
Pareidolia is a legitimate phenomenon with real explanatory power. But if the theory is applied too broadly or with an assumption of infallibility, it may obfuscate more than it enlightens.
Overall, the alleged anomalies observed in Martian photographs are a mixed bag. While some of the claims made are worthy of being scoffed at, in other instances there is enough ambiguity in the images to make the case for further investigation. Without such an examination, pareidolia will remain a hypothesis rather than an established fact.
If a manned mission is someday dispatched to Mars, what it discovers may surprise and disappoint the believers. Then again, it may surprise and disappoint the skeptics instead.
Another crop circle has appeared in Switzerland recently, and a UFO enthusiast claims that this is proof that aliens do visit the Earth every now and then.
Crop circles aren’t new. According to Live Science, people from years past claim that these crop formations have been “appearing” on Earth for centuries now, starting with the one that came from the legend known as the “mowing devil.” Some also claim that the first crop circle was seen in 1966 in Australia. This crop circle, according to a farmer, was left by an alien saucer that took off and left a mark on a swampy area.
So far, nothing has been established as to the link between aliens and crop circles, which are but often aesthetically pleasing formations in fields. A UFO enthusiast, however, claims that these are linked.
Alien base?
In an entry on the ET Database, self-titled astrobiologist and UFO researcher Scott Waring said a farmer recently spotted another crop circle formation in Bern, Switzerland. The farmer said it measured about 50 meters across, and that it looks “beautiful and anything but ordinary.”
Waring believes that the crop circles are the “locations where UFOs have entered and exited alien bases,” implying that there might be alien bases under the ground. These bases, he claimed, would be located about five to six kilometers deep under the ground.
The UFOs landing on the crop circles, he said, would enter and exit that “base” by passing through a tubular space that had a platform that slowly went down like an elevator.
He then capped the outlandish claim by saying something more outlandish: “Aliens have control of everything and controlling dirt and grass is much easier than you might think.”
It’s all a prank
Waring’s outlandish yet creative claims seem to be at par with the creativity of two men who, in 1991, admitted to creating crop circles for decades simply because they want to fool people.
According to Live Science, these crop circles baffled everyone until the two men admitted they created them to fool people into believing that UFOs land there. While they weren’t responsible for creating all crop circles appearing in various places particularly in the U.K., they are the ones who started the crop circle phenomena.
Simply put, while alien theorists theorize that these circles are entry and exit points for aliens, they’re pranks created by those who want to make fun of people who fall for alien theories.
Crop Circle found in Chualar, Ca, now known to be created by NVIDIA.
The subsurface ocean of Saturn’s moon Enceladus seems possibly habitable in many ways. Now a new study has determined it’s the right age to support life, too.
The geysers of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. These huge plumes of water vapor erupt through cracks at Enceladus’ south pole. The Cassini spacecraft analyzed the plumes and found they contain water vapor, ice particles, salts, methane and a variety of complex organic molecules. Scientists believe they originate from an ocean below the moon’s icy crust.
Could there be life on Saturn’s moon Enceladus? The moon may be small, but it has a global water ocean beneath its icy surface, and scientists have speculated on whether there is anything alive in that deep, dark abyss. The Cassini spacecraft found that it is salty like oceans on Earth, contains abundant organic molecules, and that there is likely hydrothermal activity on the ocean bottom.
All of those are positive signs for habitability and now scientists have found another one: the ocean appears to be just the right age for optimal life-supporting conditions. The finding was announced by Marc Neveu, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, on June 24, 2019, during a talk at the 2019 Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon2019). The peer-reviewed results had also been previously published April 1, 2019, in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Enceladus’ ocean is now estimated to be 1 billion years old. This is an ideal age, in terms of life starting and evolving. If the ocean were too young, there wouldn’t have been enough time for different elements needed to mix together, but if it were too old, those chemical processes may have stopped already. The moon would’ve then reached a state of equilibrium, meaning that the reactions to sustain life wouldn’t take place any longer.
Enceladus as seen by the Cassini spacecraft. This small, icy moon has a global subsurface ocean that could possibly support life.
So how did Neveu and his team come to this conclusion? Using data from the Cassini mission, which ended in late 2017, they created 50 different simulations of conditions in Enceladus’ ocean. These included details of Saturn’s moons’ orbits and the radioactivity of the rocks on Enceladus, as well as their own estimates as to the age of the moon and how it formed.
There was one simulation that best re-created the known conditions of the ocean, the one where the ocean is 1 billion years old. Neveu is cautious, though, because the simulation matched most of the conditions, but not all of them:
For example, if you took the present day, the ocean would be refrozen in that simulation which is not what we’re seeing. So the age of the ocean, should be taken with a grain of salt.
As a next step, the researchers want to improve the simulation models, so the ocean can be dated more precisely. As Neveu said:
We want to know this before we go back to search for life.
Illustration depicting the interior of Enceladus. Water from the subsurface ocean percolates to the surface through cracks in the ice at the south pole, erupting in huge plumes.
The fact that Enceladus has an ocean at all was surprising to planetary scientists, since it is so small and the surface is so cold. According to Neveu:
It’s very surprising to see an ocean today. It’s a very tiny moon and, in general, you expect tiny things to not be very active [but rather] like a dead block of rock and ice.
The Cassini spacecraft studied the composition of the ocean by analyzing the water vapor in the massive plumes that erupt from the moon’s south pole. The plumes originate from the ocean below, where water percolates to the surface through cracks, and then erupts into empty space. Cassini was able to fly right through the plumes, and found they contain water vapor, ice particles, salts, methane and a variety of complex organic molecules.
Cassini also found evidence for current hydrothermal activity – hydrothermal vents – on the ocean floor, just like in oceans on Earth. Such hotspots could provide an oasis of needed heat and energy in the otherwise cold waters. On Earth, similar vents sustain a wide variety of simple life forms. Could the same be true for Enceladus?
The Cassini mission found evidence for hydrothermal activity – hydrothermal vents – on the bottom of Enceladus’ ocean. Could they help sustain life like they do on Earth?
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/Southwest Research Institute.
Enceladus has all the ingredients considered necessary for life (as we know it at least), and its ocean appears to be quite similar to that of Europa. Whether life of any kind ever actually started here is still unknown, but the prospects seem promising. The only way we can learn more is to go back there with a return mission. None are scheduled yet, but there are mission proposals on the drawing boards, perhaps something similar to the Europa Clipper mission, which is now being designed to launch sometime in the 2020s. That mission will study Europa and its ocean in more detail than ever before, looking for evidence that something might be alive in its dark waters as well.
Bottom line:It turns out that Enceladus’ subsurface ocean is just the right age to support life, according to a new study. Together with what we already know about its potential habitability, this makes Enceladus even more enticing in the search for life elsewhere in the solar system.
On July 20, 1969, an estimated 650 million people watched in suspense as Neil Armstrong descended a ladder towards the surface of the Moon.
As he took his first steps, he uttered words that would be written into history books for generations to come: "That's one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind."
Or at least that's how the media reported his words.
But Armstrong insisted that he actually said, "That's one small step for a man." In fact, in the official transcript of the Moon landing mission, NASA transcribes the quote as "that's one small step for (a) man."
As a linguist, I'm fascinated by mistakes between what people say and what people hear.
In fact, I recently conducted a study on ambiguous speech, using Armstrong's famous quote to try to figure out why and how we successfully understand speech most of the time, but also make the occasional mistake.
Astronaut Neil A. Armstrong, commander of the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing mission, made a famous statement upon stepping foot on the lunar surface.
(Image credit: NASA)
Our extraordinary speech-processing abilities
Despite confusion over Armstrong's words, speakers and listeners have a remarkable ability to agree on what is said and what is heard.
When we talk, we formulate a thought, retrieve words from memory and move our mouths to produce sound. We do this quickly, producing, in English, around five syllables every second.
The process for listeners is equally complex and speedy. We hear sounds, which we separate into speech and non-speech information, combine the speech sounds into words, and determine the meanings of these words. Again, this happens nearly instantaneously, and errors rarely occur.
These processes are even more extraordinary when you think more closely about the properties of speech. Unlike writing, speech doesn't have spaces between words. When people speak, there are typically very few pauses within a sentence.
Yet listeners have little trouble determining word boundaries in real time. This is because there are little cues — like pitch and rhythm — that indicate when one word stops and the next begins.
But problems in speech perception can arise when those kinds of cues are missing, especially when pitch and rhythm are used for non-linguistic purposes, like in music. This is one reason why misheard song lyrics — called "mondegreens" — are common. When singing or rapping, a lot of the speech cues we usually use are shifted to accommodate the song's beat, which can end up jamming our default perception process.
But it's not just lyrics that are misheard. This can happen in everyday speech, and some have wondered if this is what happened in the case of Neil Armstrong.
Studying Armstrong's mixed signals
Over the years, researchers have tried to comb the audio files of Armstrong's famous words, with mixed results. Some have suggested that Armstrong definitely produced the infamous "a," while others maintain that it's unlikely or too difficult to tell. But the original sound file was recorded 50 years ago, and the quality is pretty poor.
So can we ever really know whether Neil Armstrong uttered that little "a"?
Perhaps not. But in a recent study, my colleagues and I tried to get to the bottom of this.
First, we explored how similar the speech signals are when a speaker intends to say "for" or "for a." That is, could a production of "for" be consistent with the sound waves, or acoustics, of "for a," and vice-versa?
So we examined nearly 200 productions of "for" and 200 productions of "for a." We found that the acoustics of the productions of each of these tokens were nearly identical. In other words, the sound waves produced by "He bought it for a school" and "He bought one for school" are strikingly similar.
But this doesn't tell us what Armstrong actually said on that July day in 1969. So we wanted to see if listeners sometimes miss little words like "a" in contexts like Armstrong's phrase.
We wondered whether "a" was always perceived by listeners, even when it was clearly produced. And we found that, in several studies, listeners often misheard short words, like "a." This is especially true when the speaking rate was as slow as Armstrong's.
In addition, we were able to manipulate whether or not people heard these short words just by altering the rate of speech. So perhaps this was a perfect storm of conditions for listeners to misperceive the intended meaning of this famous quote.
The case of the missing "a" is one example of the challenges in producing and understanding speech. Nonetheless, we typically perceive and produce speech quickly, easily and without conscious effort.
A better understanding of this process can be especially useful when trying to help people with speech or hearing impairments. And it allows researchers to better understand how these skills are learned by adults trying to acquire a new language, which can, in turn, help language learners develop more efficient strategies.
Fifty years ago, humanity was changed when Neil Armstrong took those first steps on the Moon. But he probably didn't realize that his famous first words could also help us better understand how humans communicate.
This view of the Apollo 12 lunar module was captured from lunar orbit by command module pilot Richard Gordon shortly after the two modules separated to prepare for the lunar landing.
Before humanity first set foot on the lunar surface, the moon was an elusive rock in our night sky. Scientists weren't sure how it formed or what it was made of, and there was even a common misconception that the moon's surface would be fluffy.
"There was real concern that our lunar landers would sink into the surface because the material was so fluffy," Paul Hayne, assistant professor at the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado, told Space.com.
This was not merely an irrational fear; rather, it was based on observations from Earth that showed the surface of the moon to be quite fluffy.
"What they didn't know was that layer of fluffy material was not very deep," Hayne added. "So, fortunately, nobody sunk into the moon, and that misconception was put to bed."
It may be obvious to us today that the moon wouldn't have swallowed the lunar lander whole, but before Apollo 11, the moon hid many secrets in its shadows.
"We actually didn't know a whole lot about the moon before Apollo," Sarah Noble, the Apollo next-generation sample analysis program executive at NASA headquarters in Washington, told Space.com. "So, in some ways, we wanted to learn everything."
Scientists were (and still are) curious about how the moon came to be in the first place.
Before Apollo, there were different theories regarding the formation of the moon, including that the moon had already formed before it got caught in Earth's gravitational field, or that the moon and Earth formed at the same time about 4.5 billion years ago. But the theory that a number of scientists were leaning toward was that it had been formed as a result of a giant impactbetween Earth and another planetary body the size of Mars.
What made the moon?
One of the main samples that Apollo astronauts were looking to collect was a piece of the original crust of the moon, which scientists could use to test their hypotheses about how the moon was formed, Noble said.
"The astronauts were all so well trained that it was believed they had the equivalent of a master's degree in geology by the time they got there," Noble said. "It showed in their ability to pick out the right samples."
The samples collected from the moon had the same isotopic formation as geological samples from Earth, therefore supporting the impact theory. Although it is the leading moon formation theory today, some are still arguing in favor of other ways the moon could have come to be.
The testing of these samples also showed that there is water on the moon, even though scientists had believed that it was completely dry.
Another thing that astronomers wondered about when looking at the moon was the origin of the craters on its surface.
"The first thing you notice when you look at the moon through a telescope was the craters," Hayne said. "There was still debate about the origins of the craters before the Apollo missions."
At the time, there were two competing theories. Scientists believed that either the craters had been formed by volcanic activity on the moon, or that the craters were a result of impacts between the moon and other bodies in space.
However, observing the shapes of the craters and analyzing the samples brought back by Apollo supported the theory that the craters were formed by collisions.
The Apollo missions also provided insight into the violent space environment, according to Hayne.
"What we found on the moon was that the entire surface of the moon had been impacted by meteorites, and because it doesn't have rivers, those impacts had not been erased over time," he said. "From looking at the moon's impact history, we know that the Earth has also been hit by meteors."
A lunar time capsule
The difference between the impacts left over on the moon's surface and that of Earth's is that Earth's flowing rivers or growing greenery have erased the marks left behind, while they remained visible on the moon.
Knowing that impacts were an occurrence in space has allowed us to prepare for possible future asteroid collisions here on Earth, Hayne added.
In addition to the moon, the Apollo missions provided more insights regarding our whole solar system.
Before Apollo, scientists had made observations of other planets, but there was no way to determine the ages of those bodies.
However, by testing the samples of moon rocks and lunar soil collected from the Apollo missions and analyzing their composition and structure, researchers estimated the age of the moon and used that knowledge to help figure out the ages of other objects in the solar system.
"The entire chronology of the solar system events is now connected to the ages of the samples collected by Apollo," Hayne said.
If there’s anyone who understands why someone would want to “storm” Area 51, knows what they might or might not find and can knowledgeably warn of the dangers, it’s Bob Lazar– the man who claims he worked on reverse-engineering alien technology that the stormers (and many others) believe is still at Area 51. In an Instagram post responding to the “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us” movement, he had this to say:
“The last time someone tried to get in to Area 51 he was shot.”
OK, Bob, but that was one person. We’re talking 1.4 million now, making it the second largest army in the world, if it was an army (it’s not, but you can bet that a number of them will be armed). The Air Force has already warned that Area 51 is one of its open training ranges, an asset of the United States, and “The U.S. Air Force always stands ready to protect America and its assets.” Would it be ready if it was the Indian Army (with slightly less forces) instead of the Area 51 stormers? No one thinks it will come to that, including Lazar. And even if it was half that number, the effort would be futile, because:
“This is a misguided idea. Area 51 is a classified research base. There are no aliens or alien technology located there. The only place there was ever any alien technology was at Site S4, south of Area 51 proper. That was 30 years ago. S4 may have moved decades ago or it’s possible it’s no longer being used for the project.”
Thanks, Bob!
Will the fact that whatever (if anything) was going on there or at S4 satisfy the Area 51 stormers? Did it satisfy Bluto (John Belushi’s character in ‘Animal House’?
“What? Over? Did you say ‘over’? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no! It ain’t over now, ’cause when the goin’ gets tough, the tough get goin’. Who’s with me? Let’s go! Come on!”
It’s pretty easy to imagine tens of thousands of UFO-loving Blutos rushing the gates of Area 51. Lazar admits that he likes that kind of enthusiasm.
“What is good, is the interest in the subject – the science and technology. That is what would immediately change the world we live in.”
Well then, Bob … where SHOULD they storm? The White House? President Trump has admitted he’s not really interested in UFOs. Congress? Good luck getting their attention these days. The Pentagon? Their security makes Area 51 look like it’s guarded by a mall cops. S4? That doesn’t have the X-Files cachet of Area 51 and Lazar says it probably doesn’t have the alien stuff either. How about the house of the guy who organized the movement in the first place? He’s already backed off, saying:
“P.S. Hello US government, this is a joke, and I do not actually intend to go ahead with this plan. I just thought it would be funny and get me some thumbsy uppies on the internet.”
Joke? We don’t joke.
Bluto would know what to do with wimps like that.
“What the f–k happened to the Delta (Area 51 Storm Troopers) I used to know? Where’s the spirit? Where’s the guts, huh? This could be the greatest night of our lives, but you’re gonna let it be the worst. ‘Ooh, we’re afraid to go with you, Bluto, we might get in trouble.’ Well, just kiss my ass from now on! Not me! I’m not gonna take this. Wormer, he’s a dead man! Marmalard, dead! Niedermeyer…”
And that’s when the Stormers make like Bluto’s frat brother Otter and yell:
“Dead! Bluto’s right. Psychotic, but absolutely right. We gotta take these bastards. Now, we could fight ’em with conventional weapons. That could take years and cost millions of lives. No, in this case, I think we have to go all out. I think this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part. We’re just the guys to do it…LET’S DO IT!”
Bob Lazar says it’s time to change the world. The Stormers are organizing. September 20th is not far away. Who will be their Bluto and Otter?
What will be their really futile and stupid gesture?
The subject of unidentified flying objects has long been a confusing one. Since its inception in the late 1940s when reports of unusual aerial objects or vehicles began to appear in our skies, there was a lot of debate about what they might be, and where they might come from. Theories ranged from new Soviet surveillance technologies, perhaps being developed with the help of former German scientists that were divided among the world superpowers after the end of the war, to the more exotic possibility that some of these things might be from elsewhere, and of extraterrestrial origin.
Little about this debate has changed over the years, and even to this day, calls for renewed “official” interest in the phenomenon continue, on account of the potential security threats they might represent.
“What these UAPs were and who was flying them — whether friends, foes or unknown forces — remains a mystery,” wrote Christopher Mellon, former deputy assistant Defense secretary for intelligence and one of the current stars of History’s UFO-themed television program Unidentified, in an op-ed published by The Hill in May. “Yet careful examination of the data inevitably leads to one possible, disturbing conclusion: A potential adversary of the United States has mastered technologies we do not yet understand to achieve capabilities we cannot yet match.”
Putting aside some of the controversies presently associated with the To the Stars Academy (of which Mellon is a member), these points are valid: the possibility that new technologies could be produced by another government, and that they could be used against American interests, must be taken seriously.
Returning again to the outset of the UFO enigma in the 40s and 50s, it became apparent that the term “flying saucers” had some issues. Having come into popular use after Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of disc-like objects over Mount Rainier in the summer of 1947, the term did no justice to the discussion of alleged objects that ranged in appearance from spheres and discs, to elongated “cigar-shaped” vessels (more commonly referred to as “tic-tacs” in the parlance of today). For this reason, Edward Ruppelt, the first chief of what became the U.S.A.F.’s Project Blue Book, proposed a new and more ambiguous name for these mysteries of the sky: unidentified flying objects or UFOs.
The name stuck, although it didn’t become the exclusive phrase that Ruppelt had hoped it would. “All flying saucers are UFOs, but not all UFOs are flying saucers,” were the immortal words of the late Stanton Friedman, who had been among the many serious proponents of UFOs over the years who continued to use both terms, albeit under slightly different circumstances. Friedman’s argument, in other words, had been that any number of things could be an unidentified flying object, whereas if one were to say “flying saucer,” it is understood as being in reference to an exotic alien craft… whether or not it’s really saucer-shaped. There are good arguments that justify the use of either term, in other words.
Stanton Friedman
The debate over terminology hasn’t been confined simply to what these objects should be called; there has also been lasting confusion about the pronunciation and grammatical usage of “UFO”. This was recently brought to my attention again by a friend and colleague of mine, Charles Orton, who wrote to playfully scold me after hearing me refer to UFOs–the abbreviated form of unidentified flying objects–as an acronym. Charles wrote:
At the cost of sounding like my eighth grade English teacher Miss Thistlebottom, I should have thought you knew the difference between an acronym and an abbreviation (you recently referred to “UFO” as an acronym). An acronym is an abbreviation that can be, and often is, pronounced as if it were a word. An example is NASA. NASA is an acronym. NAFTA is an acronym. AATIP can be an acronym. But UFO and UAP are not acronyms. FBI and CIA and NSA and USA are not acronyms. They are abbreviations. Yet so many people in the u-fool-ogy realm today are always referring to UFO and UAP and other abbreviations as acronyms.
As my colleague correctly points out, UFO is not an acronym… if it is read as “You-Eff-Oh,” which is the common usage today. However, when Edward Ruppelt proposed the use of the term back in the early 1950s, he had also suggested that UFO be pronounced “You-Foe.”
Edward Ruppelt, first chief of the USAF’s Project Blue Book.
For whatever reason, this never quite caught on, although if it had, it certainly would have made “UFO” the acronym he had intended for it to be. Nonetheless, we could argue that the use of the term as he intended it was as an acronym, and should be pronounced as “Youfoe”… but good luck getting people on board with making that change!
Another brief side note, while we’re discussing all of this: another item of debate I’ve seen over the years has to do with whether the plural form of UFO should be written as UFOs (with no apostrophe), or as UFO’s. Checking this with Ashford University’s online Grammatical Resource Page, they state explicitly that either form is acceptable: “For numbers, abbreviations without periods, and symbols used as words, the apostrophe before the –s is optional if the plural is clear.” To further illustrate the point, one of the examples they provide is “UFOs OR UFO’s.”
Today, the matter remains as complex as ever. Since the terms unidentified flying object (as well as its abbreviated form, UFO, which as we’ve seen, was originally intended to be an acronym) and flying saucer were both popular terms for use in the discussion of alleged extraterrestrial aircraft, many today would argue against the use of either term, instead calling for the use of unexplained aerial phenomenon or UAP. It’s a nice way of taking an expression that was intended to be ambiguous, and replacing it with something even more ambiguous… and paradoxically, in an effort toward making sure we’re all on the same page in terms of what we’re talking about!
As far as this subject is concerned, it looks like there’s still an awful lot that gets lost in translation… even when we’re all speaking the same language. But one thing we can (hopefully) agree on would be that, in the event that “UAP” does ever become the new norm when discussing aerial mysteries of this sort, it’s definitely an abbreviation and not an acronym… at least until some wise-ass comes along and starts saying, “it’s pronounced Ooh-app!”
Do you have something else going on September 20th, the date of the “Storm Area 51” extravaganza? Is 1.4 million people too large of a crowd? Do you fear the government and military officials who a threatening to attack (or worse) anyone who tries to breach the perimeter? This this event may be for you. On October 1, boaters, scuba divers, thrill seekers, paranormal experts and the just plain curious are invited to “Storm The Bermuda Triangle, It Can’t Swallow All Of Us.” How many CAN it swallow?
“Trying to assemble live music food and entertainment. check the go fund me in the discussion section. attendees must dress as spongebob characters or pirates. I’ll provide the boats and scuba gear. just bring weed and a lot of beer and whiskey.”
As of this writing, Anthony Dominick Carnovale, organizer of “Storm The Bermuda Triangle,” shows over 17,000 people going and over 24,000 interested on the event’s Facebook page. A better gauge of interest and commitment might be his GoFUndMe page, which has a goal of raising $75,000 and a commitment of … $5.
“Honestly, everyone thinks I’m trying to scam people with this GoFundMe thing but I’m legit trying to [throw] a party for everyone so they’ll come to my thing and not get murdered or arrested at Area 51.”
Well, as “legit” as one can be requiring participants to dress as SpongeBob or pirates and bring adult beverages while they hunt for “the lost pilots and the hidden islands in the mysterious triangle” between the hours of 8 a.m. on Oct. 1 until 11 a.m. on Oct. 2. The Facebook page is filling up fast with comments and suggestions, not to mention offers to ferry people to the Bermuda Triangle … for a fee, of course, and no mention of a guarantee that the boat will be there to ferry them back.
One commenter on another site took the “It Can’t Swallow Us All” challenge seriously, calculating that the Bermuda Triangle — loosely defined as a triangle in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean connecting Bermuda, Puerto Rico and the southern tip of Florida — is between 1,300,000 and 3,900,000 square kilometers (500,000 to 1.5 million sq. miles) in area and 8,380 meters (5.2 miles) deep … plenty large enough to the entire population of Earth with room for their boats, planes, beer and whiskey.
A benefit to storming the Bermuda Triangle rather than Area 51 is that it’s much more difficult to patrol. The US Air Force has already warned that it “stands ready to protect America and its assets” from the estimated 1.4 million (and growing) people who have pledged to storm the base and “See them aliens.” What will the stormers of the Bermuda Triangle see?
Well, based on the many tales of ships and planes allegedly lost in the area, they could also see aliens, but it’s more likely they’re see storms (suspected to be the cause of most Triangle disappearances, giant methane bubbles (released from the bottom and big enough to cause massive waves or knock planes out of the sky), collisions (some have been blamed on heavy traffic in the area), accidents (beer and boats don’t mix) and compass anomalies allegedly caused by an odd magnetic field in the area.
They’ll also see plenty of Storm the Bermuda triangle memes – Keanu Reeves has already posted one. Is “Storm The Bermuda Triangle, It Can’t Swallow All Of Us” real or an elaborate joke? “Storm Area 51” was said to have started as a joke but has become a movement for or against whatever you want it to be for or against. Carnovale seems to feel the same way.
”This is the time for assembly to show this country we can organize. Let’s go have a good time. Let’s still clap these sea monster cheeks. Ok. Let’s all just have fun.”
Clap these sea monster cheeks? That’s what SHE said.
Over at his blog, Jason Colavito has a new article titled “Ex-CIA ‘Weird Desk’ Official Kit Green Claims ‘Alien Autopsy’ Emails from the Future ‘To the Stars’ Crew Are Authentic.” In part, the article states: “Earlier this summer, an anonymous poster released online documents claiming to be emails produced in 2001 by Eric Davis and others for Robert Bigelow, and in the emails, we saw the various Legion of Doom members associated with Bigelow, many of whom are now affiliated with or orbit To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, speculate about the infamous Alien Autopsy video (also called the ‘Santilli film’ after its creator, Ray Santilli) that aired on Fox-TV in 1995, with several expressing credulous views that the infamous hoax was either real footage or a recreation of real footage.” Check out the article, as it contains a lot of intriguing information.
Although most people accept that the Santilli footage is bogus, there are still a few figures in Ufology who cling onto the possibility that the film just might be the real deal. I’m convinced that the footage shows a dummy, but I have to confess that there was a time some years back when I felt it could at least possibly be genuine (but of a very deformed person, rather than an alien). Or, more likely, that we had not been told the full story. Now, with all of that in mind, I thought I would share with you today the strange stories of the otheralien autopsy films. And photographs too.
The late Leonard Stringfield – who died in 1994 – was not so much an investigator of crashed UFO tales and of alien bodies. Rather, he was a collector and a disseminator of such tales – primarily via what he called his series of “status reports.” Over the years, Stringfield came across a number of accounts of footage that sounded somewhat like the notorious Santilli film. It didn’t help that most of Stringfield’s cases came from unknown sources; but, at least the material was there to be seen. One such case came from “T.E.” Yep, just two initials and nothing else, which doesn’t exactly give us much to go on, to say the least. According to T.E., who shared the story with Stringfield in 1980, in the early 1950s he – T.E. – worked at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. So the story continued, on one particular day, T.E. was taken to a room on the base and exposed to a highly controversial piece of film. Stringfield wrote:
“Without any briefing, the 16mm movie projector was flicked on and the film began to roll on the screen…the film showed a desert scene dominated by a silver disc-shaped object embedded in the sand…T.E. said the bodies appeared little by human standards and most notable were the heads, all looking alike, and all being large compared to their body sizes…They looked Mongoloid.” It wasn’t long before T.E. and his colleagues at Fort Monmouth were told that the film was nothing but a hoax. Stringfield wrote: “The 5-minute long movie certainly was not a Walt Disney production. It was probably shot by an inexperienced cameraman because it was full of scratches, and had poor coloring and texture,” which, admittedly, reflects the crappy filming on the Santilli footage. UFO investigator/Bigfoot researcher Joan Jeffers told Stringfield she had a source who had seen what was probably the same film, but in 1956 at a military base in Maine.
In 1982, Stringfield had more to say on the matter of alien autopsy films: “On a tip from Bill Hamilton of Phoenix, Arizona, at the MUFON Symposium in Houston, June, 1980, I was soon in communication with Ms. C.M. of Los Angeles, a successful freelance writer who knew about a secret movie allegedly showing a freshly recovered alien craft with occupants, filmed inside an Air Force hangar. The movie, in color with sound, and of 17 minutes duration, said C.M., was in the possession of a person formerly in government service, whom she did not identify…one scene showed the removal of five alien dead bodies.”
Stringfield also wrote that the late NASA astronaut Ellison Onizuka (who tragically died on the Challenger Space Shuttle in January 1986) had seen a B&W film of “alien bodies on a slab” at McClelland Air Force Base in 1973. Stringfield said that his source for the story was Chris Coffey, a figure in Ohio UFO research. Moving on: U.K. UFO researcher Jenny Randles had a similar story to tell, too. In 1986, Randles met with a former U.K. military man who she referred to as “Robert” and who claimed to have seen photos of a dead alien under somewhat conspiratorial circumstances. Robert had also seen what were claimed to have been highly classified U.S. military files on UFOs, dead aliens and the usual baggage. I interviewed Randles about all of this back in March 1997. She shared with me what Robert told her:
“There was a very detailed account that was mostly filled with medical jargon about the autopsy which he didn’t understand, and there was a photograph of this entity with a slit right down the middle from the neck to the navel. One of the things Robert said was that the aliens were very human-looking. He said that the head was completely bald, but the most unusual feature of the face was the nose, which was almost flush into the face – almost unnoticeable. He couldn’t tell from the photographs, but the autopsy report made it clear that the beings were slightly smaller than average human size – about five feet in height.”
Randles also told me: “Bearing in mind, 1986 was years before the autopsy film [from Ray Santilli] surfaced. In fact, the connections with the autopsy film and with what Robert told me are chillingly similar. One of the impressions that you get from the alien autopsy footage is that the body is very human-like; and is around five foot in height. I have to say it struck me as soon as I saw the footage that this was very similar to what Robert had described.”
I would not be surprised if at least some alien autopsy-based films and photos – such as those referred to above – were crafted by military agencies. Probably to try and convince the Soviets, at the height of the Cold War, that we had high-tech alien technology in our hands, when we almost certainly did not. History has shown that in the 1950s and 1960s both the Russians and the Americans circulated completely bogus UFO stories – all in the name of psychological warfare, counterintelligence, and disinformation. As I said, I don’t believe the Santilli film is the real deal. I do think, however, that the matter of the infamous film (as well as the other films and photos referred to above) will continue to be debated – and, in some quarters, still believed in. Maybe, for obscure and not presently fully understood reasons, there are those in government who want us to believe in the existence of such films. But, that last bit is for another, looming article.
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Very detailed ‘Fastwalker’ filmed from a drone in Argentina
Very detailed ‘Fastwalker’ filmed from a drone in Argentina
On January 9, 2019 a DJI Inspire Drone captured a clear ‘Fastwalker’ over Beaver, Utah, just a couple of hours (by car) from Area51 but now a ‘Fastwalker’ has been filmed from a drone, in which you notice several details.
Image left: Fastwalker near Area 51 - Image right: Fastwalker Argentina
It was captured with the drone Dji Phantom in Mar Chiquita, Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina on July 14, 2019.It is located 34 kilometers from the city of Mar del Plata.
It was filmed with the Gopro at a resolution of 4K at 30 frames per second.
UFO Crash in Texas. Unidentified flying objects are often dismissed as commercial aircraft or secret military test craft. But there are reports of UFOs predating the invention of the airplane. The Wright brothers flew the first plane at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Six years earlier, sightings of a so-called “airship” were reported in newspapers throughout the United States. The last of these articles to be printed, is the account of the crash of the airship in Texas.
AREA 51 Disclosure from Senior Lockheed Martin Research Scientist Boyd Bushman!
AREA 51 Disclosure from Senior Lockheed Martin Research Scientist Boyd Bushman!
Michael Lee Hill is an award winning musician, filmographer and UFO experiencer. His footage of the Lake Erie UFO’s has created a Billy Meier like buzz and Michael seems to have developed an intuitive relationship with these craft. In his home state of Ohio, Michael has been cataloging video after video of UFO’s over Lake Erie. The phenomena consists almost entirely of “Pulsating orb’s of light”—unusual lights seen changing colors, converging, and separating over the lake. Stories of the unexplained phenomena date back over 150 years to the indigenous North American Indian Tribes.
Travelling 200 miles to their target, the rockets released their payload in the sky during a real aurora to track how particles flow through Earth's atmosphere.
It is thought that the movement of energetic particles through a layer of the atmosphere called the ionosphere is what causes the Northern Lights.
Once released from the rockets, the gas fell and ionised to produce clouds of colour that gave scientists an idea of the movement of particles.
It also gave onlookers on the ground a great view, and many of them posted clips to social media.
Some were left a little confused by the experiment, which made it look like an advanced race had made its way to our planet.
"Residents for hundreds of miles were taken by surprise by these strange lights," according to Chris Nation, who runs the Aurora Addicts guiding service.
"The lights prompted calls to the police and ‘The aliens are coming!’ hysteria!"
Alien hunter Scott C Waring, who runs the crackpot site UFO Sightings Daily, said: "A person walked out onto their patio and expected to see the aurora borealis, but instead caught sight of a UFO fleet coming in for a landing as they entered an underground base."
The colourful streaks gradually fade away over timeCredit: Twitter/ADphotography24
Nasa scientists hope the experiments will help them better understand how the Northern Lights appear in the sky.
"By tracking the movement of these colorful clouds via ground-based photography and triangulating their moment-by-moment position in three dimensions, AZURE will provide valuable data on the vertical and horizontal flow of particles," explained Miles Hatfield from Nasa’s Goddard Space Center in the US.
"Such measurements are critical if we are to truly understand the effects of the mysterious yet beautiful aurora."
"The results will be key to a better understanding of the effects of auroral forcing on the atmosphere, including how and where the auroral energy is deposited."
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Musk and several of the top scientists from the company covered a lot of ground during the event, going into great detail about the system it hopes to one day implant into your brain. It also shared how it hopes to reach your brain in the first place: by shooting holes in your skull with lasers.
The first step to getting data out of the brain is finding a way to capture all the signals zipping around in a person’s skull and transmit them to a device outside of it.
To accomplish that, Neuralink is developing flexible threads of electrodes — implant these threads into the brain near neurons, and they can pick up and wirelessly transmit signals from those neurons to a computer.
Right now, Neuralink uses thin needles, guided by a computer-vision system, to precisely place bundles of these treads into the brain.
But rather than drilling holes into the skulls of humans to access their brains, Neuralink President Max Hodak told The New York Times the company eventually wants to use laser beams to create a series of tiny holes in the skull.
“One of the big bottlenecks is that a mechanical drill couples vibration through the skull, which is unpleasant,” Hodak said, “whereas a laser drill, you wouldn’t feel.”
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Baltic Sea anomaly: Breakthrough at suspected ‘underwater UFO’ - ‘Compass went berserk!'
Baltic Sea anomaly: Breakthrough at suspected ‘underwater UFO’ - ‘Compass went berserk!'
THE TEAM investigating the so-called Baltic Sea anomaly - a bizarre under-water object measuring hundreds of feet across - have made another major discovery.
Baltic Sea Anomaly: Ocean X Team are investigating an undersea mystery
(Image: Ocean X Team)
Ocean X Team, who first discovered the anomaly in 2011, have found another huge object in the Bothnia region of the Baltic Sea. The team, who discovered the anomaly while hunting for shipwrecks, returned to the site on June 8 with a remotely-operated vehicle (ROV). They lowered the ROV at ‘Anomaly 2’, a huge “monolith” and a “slab” - and were stunned when their compass “went berserk” - an inexplicable machine failure that has previously occurred while investigating the site.
Moments later, the team were again shocked when the their vehicle discovered another unexpected item at the site, which alien-hunters believe could be a crashed UFO.
A statement from the group, led by Swedish explorer Peter Lindberg, said: “It was very difficult to understand where the ROV were because of the terrible visibility and because of the compass that went berserk.
“The compass was living its own life and the tether was snagged all the time.”
Finally the image cleared and the group could begin investigating what they assumed was the “monolith” or “slab” identified in earlier operations.
The team then had to return to shore due to fuel issues.
However, when analysing the footage later they realised they had not been investigating the “monolith” or the “slab” and had instead discovered a collection of inexplicable stone “walls” buried in the ocean floor.
The statement said: “The surface between the ‘walls’ are buried beneath 200mm of sediment but it seem to be hard, straight and smooth.
“The ‘walls’ are sticking up maybe about 200mm above the sediment.
The Baltic Sea Anomaly, in the top-left portion of the sonar image
(Image: Ocean X Team)
“We did not really realise that it was neither the slab or monolith we actually were investigating.
“The rectangle is actually located between the two objects that are visible on the side scan sonar image but we did not realise that when we were still at site.”
They said, like the other discoveries at the site, the objects could be man-made.
The statement concluded: “Is the rectangle made by the nature or by someone!? That is something we need to find out!”
Baltic Sea Anomaly: Ocean X Team's artist's impression of what the object could be
(Image: Ocean X Team)
The site has intrigued conspiracy-hunters since it was discovered - with inexplicable technical problems plaguing anyone who tries to investigate.
Stefan Hogerborn, a professional diver with Ocean X, said previously: “Anything electric out there, and the satellite phone as well, stopped working when we were above the object, then when we got away about 200 metres, it turned on again.”
Mr Lindberg previously said: “Mr Lindberg said: “I have been the biggest sceptic, I was kind if prepared for finding just stone. For me it has been an amazing experience.
“I think it is very odd in its shape. It is tough to give an explanation as to what it might be exactly, since different scientists have many different theories.
“Whatever it is, it is something we do not usually find in nature sitting in the dark cold depths of the Baltic Sea.”
It is thought the object could be at least 140,000 years old after a university professor linked the mysterious disc to the Ice Age.
Volker Bruchert, an associate professor of geology at Stockholm University, said: “My hypothesis is that this object, this structure was formed during the Ice Age many thousands of years ago.”
On June 22 2018, a team of scientists from the University of Rhode Island and University of East Anglia announced in a paper published in Nature Communications that they had discovered a new factor in the rapid melting of Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier – a previously unknown active volcano buried deep under the ice.
When combined with another scientific study released in 2017 by a team of scientists from the University of Edinburgh, which announced the existence of 91 volcanoes buried under West Antarctica’s ice sheets in addition to the 41 previously discovered, a disturbing conclusion is reached. West Antarctica’s ice sheets are being rapidly melted from a vast network of buried volcanoes, which are far more active than scientists previously thought possible.
To date, as many as 138 volcanoes have been identified throughout West Antarctica9, including the presently active Mt. Erebus10 along the Terror Rift, as well as Mt. Siple10 and Mt. Waesche11, which both show evidence of recent activity. However, the locations and extent of volcanic activity along the WARS are debated, because many of these 138 known volcano-like features are buried beneath several kilometers of ice, and some evidence suggests that much of the interior subglacial WARS is dormant.
The assumption that the majority of West Antarctica’s volcanoes are dormant is increasingly being challenged by new scientific discoveries. Telltale signatures of volcanic activity are being found in ocean waters as evidenced from rare isotopes such as Helium-3, which was used by the authors of Pine Island Glacier paper to reach their conclusion.
In addition, heat increases and seismic activity in Antarctica points to large amounts of magma moving deep below the West Antarctic Ice Sheets (WAIS), as the June 22 paper suggested:
The apparent surface deformations in the WAIS thickness also suggest localized heat fluxes that are most likely volcanic due to their intensity14,15, while ash layers from ice cores reveal more recent eruptions16. Last, the detection of earthquakes as recently as 2010 suggest magma migration beneath the Executive Committee mountains, in a region of Marie Byrd Land where seismic studies have revealed thin crust and low-density mantle material beneath.
The discovery of volcanoes beneath the Antarctic ice sheet means that there is an additional source of heat to melt the ice, lubricate its passage toward the sea, and add to the melting from warm ocean waters. It will be important to include this in our efforts to estimate whether the Antarctic ice sheet might become unstable and further increase sea level rise.
While the June 22 paper focused on the impact of the buried volcano melting the Pine Island Glacier, the wider impact of other buried volcanoes on the West Antarctic Ice Sheets (WAIS) was briefly mentioned in the abstract:
Our finding of a substantial volcanic heat source beneath a major WAIS glacier highlights the need to understand subglacial volcanism, its hydrologic interaction with the marine margins, and its potential role in the future stability of the WAIS.
The new findings about the influence of one or more active volcanoes to explain the rapid melting of Pine Island Glacier, along with the temperature increase and melt-offs observed elsewhere in the frozen continent all point to powerful transformative events in West Antarctica.
The following long-term temperature map of Antarctica alongside the newly discovered volcanoes, shows how and why West Antarctic is heating far more rapidly than East Antarctica.
Left image shows temperature increase of Antarctica from 1956-2006 (Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio); right image shows 2017 discovery of 90 new volcanoes in Antarctica.
If global warming due to CO2 emissions was the explanation, then warming oceans would be uniform in heating both East and West Antarctica. Yet most scientific data points to West Antarctica melting.
The June 22 paper, along with other scientific studies provide a cogent explanation for what is really driving the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheets. The submerged volcanoes are more active than previously thought and are melting the ice sheets far more rapidly than scientists believe possible.
If we take the upcoming Solar Cycle 25 (2019 – 2030) as the catalyst for triggering volcanic activity around the Earth through increased solar activity, West Antarctica’s ice sheets could disappear in as little as a decade or so.
There are four major effects that will occur from West Antarctica’s ice sheets disappearing so quickly.
First, ocean levels will rise far more dramatically than previously thought. If all the ice in West Antarctica were to melt, ocean levels would rise by 10 feet (3.3 meters). Rather than humanity having centuries to prepare as estimated by many geologists, it would only have a decade.
Second, whistleblower claims that there are large subterranean bases in Antarctica that belong to multiple secret space programs dating back to World War II will be exposed for all the world to see. It can be predicted that nations and corporations managing such classified programs would not allow themselves to be preempted by geologic events, and accelerate official disclosure initiatives.
Third, ancient artifacts of a flash frozen advanced civilization buried under the Antarctic ice will be revealed confirming rumors and eyewitness accounts of such a discovery going back to the early 1990’s. The technologies and knowledge acquired from such discoveries is likely to provide humanity with rapid scientific revolutions spanning aerospace, health, archeology and even religion.
Finally, the rapid melt-off of West Antarctic ice will impact the centrifugal forces driving Earth’s axis of rotation, thereby leading to a possible Pole Shift as discussed by Charles Hapgood and Albert Einstein in the book, The Earth’s Shifting Crust (1958).
Scientific corroboration of Pine Island Glacier being melted from underneath by volcanic activity should serve as a warning about the profound effect of such a phenomenon repeating itself throughout the entire chain of volcanoes buried deep under West Antarctica, and the powerful implications this holds for the entire planet.
[Note: The author has provided documents and testimonies addressing many of the above issues in his March 2018 book. Antarctica’s Hidden History: Corporate Foundations of Secret Space Programs. He will discuss his book and the latest scientific findings about Antarctica at the following upcoming speaking events]
THE MOST SHOCKING EVIDENCE THAT EARTH WAS VISITED BY ANCIENT ALIENS
THE MOST SHOCKING EVIDENCE THAT EARTH WAS VISITED BY ANCIENT ALIENS
The very words give me the chills: ancient aliens. In the early 1970s, when Erich von Däniken first released Chariots of the Gods, he called them “ancient astronauts”—a name that’s equally creepy. The Apollo missions were still going on, and the image of astronauts was fresh in everyone’s minds. Could ancient alien beings have arrived on Earth in the distant past? Would they have worn spacesuits, like our own astronauts?
If they truly visited our planet in millennia past: why were they here? What did the aliens do while they were on Earth?
Researchers have spent a lot of time looking into the question of whether we were visited so many millennia ago. The popular television show Ancient Aliens, although well-intentioned, has muddied the water in their search of show material—did we really need an episode asking whether aliens interfered with the American Civil War? (C’mon, guys. You’re off the reservation.)
Although we may not be ever know for sure that we had extraterrestrial visitors thousands of years in the past, perhaps if they did come, they might have left us modern people some clues. Let’s take a look at some of the most clear—and startling—evidence for the existence of ancient aliens on Earth.
ANCIENT ALIENS VISIT THE DOGON TRIBE?
African Tribe Possessed Knowledge Science Had Yet to Discover
This African tribe (whose name is pronounced “DOE-gone”) has known all sorts of specifics about the star Sirius for thousands of years, passed down from holy man to holy man. We’re talking details here, like how Sirius has a companion star (“Sirius B”), and that it circles the main star (“Sirius A”) every 50 years. Here’s the thing: it is absolutely true—but modern scientists didn’t know these things about Sirius until the middle of the 19th century. The Dogon knew a thousand years ago. Heck, the Dogon also knew that Sirius has a second companion star, and scientists didn’t discover it (“Sirius C”) until the 1990s.
How did the Dogon get this scientific information about Sirius B? If you ask them, they’ll tell you that the tribe was visited by the Nommos, an amphibian-like race that came from the Sirius star system in a noisy “ark” that spun and whipped up wind while it landed. It was the Nommos, a race of ancient aliens, who told the Dogon about their homeworld and its star cluster.
Knee-jerk skeptics like to invent reasons why all this can’t be true. Westerners must have stopped by and told them about Sirius, one denier said. There’s no way, though: the Dogon have artifacts that are thousands of years old, depicting Sirius and its companions. No one should have known this stuff that long ago, but the Dogon did.
This short video does a good job explaining the ancient Dogon knowledge. (I have no idea why the narrator pronounces Sirius as “SIGH-ree-us”, but we can give him a pass on that.)
THE PROPHET EZEKIEL DESCRIBES HIS ENCOUNTER WITH ANCIENT UFOS—IN THE BIBLE
Holy Scriptures Contain Account of Alien Contact?
Ask Erich von Däniken, the guy who pioneered the search for ancient aliens, and he’ll tell you his favorite evidence is in the Old Testament. It’s the story of Ezekiel and his bizarre encounter with UFOs.
Ezekiel was a prophet living in exile with the rest of the Hebrews in the land they called Babylon. Being a prophet was a highfalutin job back then, but Ezekiel’s life got even stranger—stranger than just being a guy who received special messages from the creator of the universe.
I looked, and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north—an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light. The center of the fire looked like glowing metal, and in the fire was what looked like four living creatures. In appearance their form was human, but each of them had four faces and four wings.
Ezekiel 1:1-6
The prophet Ezekiel encounters a UFO and aliens2,500 years ago
Some people read this and think: the dude was taking drugs. Others (knee-jerk skeptics) say: oh, it’s just more Biblical mumbo-jumbo. Devout people may say that Ezekiel saw angels.
Maybe.
What if this was Ezekiel actually saw something, and he didn’t know what it was, or how to explain it? If he actually encountered ancient aliens, how would he describe them? We think he’d probably describe them just like he did.
Next Ezekiel describes the machine that the being had arrived in, the machine that landed in a rush of wind.
Ezekiel confronts the great wheels within wheels. Did he meet ancient aliens?
I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature with its four faces. This was the appearance and structure of the wheels: They sparkled like topaz … each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel. As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not change direction as the creatures went.
Ezekiel 1:15-19
Doesn’t that sound like a spacecraft to you? Why would a man living 500 years B.C. write a description that sounds so much like the landing and maneuvering of an alien ship? Surely this was not just random. Remember: Ezekiel was devoutly religious, and he would interpret amazing events as signs from God. If beings appeared, he would assume they were angels. But perhaps they were ancient aliens.
What about their technology? Ezekiel’s description was of an alien craft with advanced maneuverability.
This story of the machine that had wheels-within-wheels impressed NASA engineer Joe Blumrich a lot. A wheel that could move in any direction without having to turn—that sounded like something a planetary exploration vehicle could use. He went on to invent a wheel based on Ezekiel’s description, and called it the “omni wheel.” Joe received a US patent for it in 1972. Today, omni wheels are routinely used in robot vehicles. Blumrich also wrote a popular book, The Spaceships of Ezekiel, in which he explained that after starting out intending to disprove the idea, he’d become convinced that Ezekiel truly had been writing about an encounter with ancient aliens.
“THOSE WHO CAME FROM THE SKIES TO THE EARTH”
World’s Oldest Civilization Leaves Record of Alien Contact
The ancient Sumerians lived 5,000 years ago in what’s now the country of Iraq. They left behind humankind’s first writings, books older than the Bible and the Hindu Vedas.
The Sumerians wrote a lot about the Anunnaki, whose name means “those who came from the skies to Earth”. Modern scholars have assumed that the stories of the Annunaki were just myths about Sumerian gods—but the stories themselves sound more like tales of ancient aliens.
In the writings, the Annunaki came to Earth from a lost planet in our solar system—one with such a wide orbit that it rarely approaches us. They called the planet Nibiru.
The leaders of the ancient aliens were named Enki and Enlil. They were here for gold, a mineral they needed but did not have enough of. Mines were set up there in Sumer, but also in Africa as well. Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa, a Zulu elder and author of Zulu Shaman: Dreams, Prophecies, and Mysteries, says that ancient tribal traditions speak of “visitors from the stars” who
After mining for some time, the Anunnaki realized that the local humanoids—Homo Erectus, our ancestors—might make useful slaves if they could make them smarter. After improving the proto-humans, presumably with DNA modification, they managed to create a hybrid race: part Anunnaki, part early human. These new beings, called the Adamu, were the first real humans. They were also the new slaves who would work in the gold mines.
Ancient Sumerian cylindrical seal shows an accurate map of our solar system
Our hybrid ancestors didn’t stand for this situation for long, though, probably because these newly created beings were far too smart. Who wants to be a slave? They eventually rose up and rebelled, and eventually, a new Adamu society formed, one which maintained an uneasy truce with the Anunnaki.
The Sumerians recorded this history after first inventing writing. They also made engravings and art of the Anunnaki along with knowledge they had received from them—for instance, an ancient Sumerian seal depicts the Sumerian “gods” along with an accurate representation of our solar system, with 11 planets. The planets have correct proportions (Jupiter is the largest, then Saturn, and so on), and the depiction also includes the asteroid belt. Remember that modern science only discovered Uranus and Neptune in the past 150 years, and that scientists are only now saying that there is gravitational evidence for a “lost” planet with a weird, oblong orbit. Are there truly 11 planets? It may be so.
Sumerian artwork always depicts members of the Anunnaki as having wings. Did they actually have wings? It seems unlikely—many researchers believe the wings are meant to show that the Anunnaki had the ability to fly, as in ships. Other strange and telling things appear in the artwork: the goddess Ishtar’s symbol, which stood for the concept of “life”, bears a striking resemblance to the entwined double helix of DNA. Could that be more than a coincidence?
We’ve been kind of critical of the show Ancient Aliens, but this segment from an early episode explains all this pretty well (below). We also very much like this documentary about the Anunnaki and the planet Nibiru.
ANCIENT ALIENS FIGHT WARS IN THE SKIES OF ANCIENT INDIA
Hindu Holy Books Called The Vedas Describe Alien Encounters
There is strong evidence that ancient aliens visited other places around the Earth. In India, for example, the ancient holy books known as The Vedas tell of a space war between ships and fought in the skies. The descriptions of the ships are remarkable—translated, it is difficult to imagine that they were describing anything except spacecraft.
The Vedas state that “strong and durable must the body of the Vimana be made, like a great flying bird of light material. Inside one must put the mercury engine with its iron heating apparatus underneath. By means of the power latent in the mercury which sets the driving whirlwind in motion, a man sitting inside may travel a great distance in the sky. The movements of the Vimana are such that it can vertically ascend, vertically descend, move slanting forwards and backwards. With the help of the machines human beings can fly in the air and heavenly beings can come down to earth.”
Spacecraft as described in the ancient Hindu holy books called The Vedas
No, that’s not a spacecraft they’re describing. No way.
“Fifty years of researching this ancient works convinces me that there are living beings on other planets and that they visited Earth as far back as 4,000 BC. There is just a mass of fascinating information about flying machines, even fantastic science fiction weapons that can be found in translations of The Vedas, Indian epics and other ancient Sanskrit text.” That’s Dr. Vijaya Raghavan, speaking; he was head of the Sanskrit department of the University of Madras in India (now retired). His job, if it’s not obvious, was to study The Vedas; his conclusion was that they described real events in which aliens came to Earth.
In other parts of The Vedas, we get a description of something that can only be a nuclear explosion.
“Gurkha flying in his swift and powerful Vimana hurled against the three cities of the Vrishis and Andhakas a single projectile charged with all the power of the Universe. An incandescent column of smoke and fire, as brilliant as ten thousands suns, rose in all its splendor. It was the unknown weapon, the Iron Thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death which reduced to ashes the entire race of the Vrishnis and Andhakas.”
So what do we make of that? Just ancient imagination that happens to sound exactly like nuclear devastation? Sure, you deniers and skeptics, sure. You’re probably right. It’s ancient nonsense. Right?
Hungry for more?
Check out Google searches about the Nazca lines, and the Mayan king Pakal at the pyramid of Palenque. We could go on; there’s a lot of strange evidence on our Earth that is dismissed far too easily by mainstream science. Because the universe is mundane, and it has to be mundane—that is, if you’re a knee-jerk skeptic addicted to the idea that the universe is mundane.
Now, if you want to see the original film that inspired all this hysteria, it’s below: Chariots of the Gods, from the early 1970s. Yes, sure, it’s cheesy—it’s from the ’70s! But it’s still pretty cool, we think.
SHINE ON Noctilucent clouds that catch sunlight after dark are showing up farther south than usual this year. Scientists are studying the upper atmosphere to figure out why.
High in the sky, sunlit wisps remain aglow even after sundown. This summer, a surprising number of such noctilucent, or “night-shining,” clouds have been spotted in the Northern Hemisphere — and, unusually, as far south as Oklahoma and New Mexico, scientists report.
These clouds typically float in the mesosphere about 80 kilometers above Earth’s surface, and are visible at high latitudes. They gleam blue or white when they catch the sun’s rays, even after the night has fallen on land. “They’re beautiful,” says James Russell, an atmospheric scientist at Hampton University in Virginia. “It’s hard to take your eyes off of them, because they’re so iridescent.”
The clouds form when cold temperatures, around −130° Celsius, cause water vapor to condense and freeze around dust particles, making nanometer-sized ice crystals. What stood out in June was how wet the mesosphere was. “It’s record-setting,” says Lynn Harvey, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Possible explanations for that extra wetness include more moist air ascending in summertime than usual, or an increase in the atmosphere of methane, which can be oxidized to form water vapor.
GLOW IN THE DARK This satellite image measures sunlight reflected off of noctilucent clouds covering the Arctic on June 12, with white areas showing the highest reflection and dark purple reflecting the least light.
JOSHUA STEVENS/NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY
A satellite image released by NASA’s Earth Observatory shows these noctilucent clouds covering the Arctic on June 12, with white areas showing where sunlight is reflected the most off the clouds and dark purple the least.
Russell, Harvey and colleagues have monitored these clouds for 13 years to learn more about how they form and whether they might reveal atmospheric changes due to global warming. The scientists plan to use computer models to simulate cloud formation under various conditions, in hopes of explaining the clouds’ southward stretch.
The origin of 800 stone figurines unearthed in Puerto Rico in the 19th century had been a controversial mystery for over one hundred years until scientists analyzed them for the first time with modern technology. And what they found could be evidence of a lost civilization.
The history of Puerto Rico is well known and understood by archaeologists. But a recent examination of stone figurines that had been guarded for generations by a single family until the last member died out in the 1870s has many questions being asked. Before the woman died, she passed her family secret to a priest named José María Nazario y Cancel, who dug up the collection and brought it to the attention of academia, which dismissed them as fakes.
Nothing like these figurines had ever been found or seen anywhere. Not in Puerto Rico and not even in South America.
But the priest died in 1919 without anyone from the academic world believing the story he was charged with to keep alive.
And for decades, the story persisted and the figurines were scattered into various museums and personal collections around the world without anyone knowing where they really came from or how old they are.
That is, until University of Puerto Rico Professor Reniel Rodríguez Ramos took an interest and sought to get to the bottom of the mystery once and for all.
“I can imagine something along the lines of the Dead Sea Scrolls, stashed in a hidden location, and that some people may have known about it and taken care of them,” Ramos admitted. “People have important objects that talk about their history, and that are not accessible to everyone.”
University of Haifa@UofHaifa
Ever hear about the Library of Agüeybaná? The mysterious artifacts traveled all the way from Puerto Rico to Dr. Iris Groman-Yaroslavsky's Use-wear Analysis Lab, and have just become a little less mysterious.
Indeed, many artifacts throughout history have been held as family heirlooms for generations until they are sold or donated.
It’s not out of the realm of possibility that generations of a family held onto a secret collection of ancient artifacts to protect them. Museums were not exactly common until the 20th century, so families who guarded this unique treasure trove had nowhere to take it to keep it safe, thinking rightly that it should stay buried.
Nothing like these roughly 800 figurines has ever been found before, in the Americas or anywhere else. Mostly anthropomorphic in form, the statuettes bear petroglyph inscriptions that look nothing like any known writing systems, including Mayan or Aztec, Rodríguez Ramos explains. The determination that the collection — known as the Library of Agüeybaná, or Nazario Collection — really is pre-Columbian and not a modern forgery supports the theory that the statuettes are a ghostly remnant of an unknown people.
They were made of apparently local serpentine stone, says Rodríguez Ramos, based on isotope analysis and chemical characteristics. Such tests cannot state categorically that they are local, but similar rock is available near where they were found but not elsewhere in Puerto Rico, the professor observes.
Image via University of Haifa
Ramos initially considered the possibility that the figurines were made by people from a far off civilization, perhaps from the Middle East or even as close as the South and Central American mainland by the Mayans or Aztecs. It’s not a bad theory. People from South America had made it to Puerto Rico before.
The problem is that an analysis of the figurines, performed at the University of Haifa by Dr. Iris Groman-Yaroslavsky, while proving that they are genuine pre-Columbian antiquities carved around 1400, the analysis cannot tell us who made them because there is nothing to compare them to anywhere to be found.
The symbols in the inscription are totally unique.
“We are in the presence of an annotation system that has never been documented so far,” Ramos said.
The information leads Ramos to think that the figurines were made by a small cult that never expanded, and more than likely disbanded, but they could have been made from a lost civilization that has gone unknown all this time. Perhaps the most devout followers of the cult or desperate members of the civilization kept the figurines and hid them away to prevent them from being destroyed, thus preserving their history.
Why the collection was buried centuries ago, and known only to one family that died out with an old woman in the late 1870s, we cannot know. But Rodríguez Ramos speculates that, since this collection is unique, they were not the product of a widespread cult.
The one thing now unambiguous is their age, which is determined partly by the patina glazing their surface, which had to have been laid down by natural processes over long, long years in their subterranean hiding place.
The University of Haifa explains that “remnants of gold that appears to have coated some of the items…reinforces the hypothesis that the items were used in ancient worship. Remnants were also found of a red paint that covered parts of the eyes and mouth in the figures, reflecting a complex process of design and finishing.”
“This is definitely one of the strangest and most fascinating stories I’ve been involved in,” Groman-Yaroslavsky said.“To date, we have not found any similar carved stone art objects from this region of America, and this is why many researchers assumed that they must be fake.”
“They were made in a different way,” Ramos added. “For me, when I look at them, I immediately say, different. I cannot say lost civilization but I can say: The hands that made these are different from the hands that made artifacts in Puerto Rico.”
The mystery of who carved the figurines will endure for now, but the results of the analysis has helped a long-dead priest keep a promise made to a dying woman that he would keep her family’s history alive. Ramos should be proud of that noble accomplishment.
You can see Professor Reniel Rodríguez Ramos discussing the figurines in the video below:
Alles lijkt erop te wijzen dat we zojuist een onbekende beschaving hebben ontdekt. Door wie zijn deze mysterieuze beeldjes gemaakt?
Alles lijkt erop te wijzen dat we zojuist een onbekende beschaving hebben ontdekt. Door wie zijn deze mysterieuze beeldjes gemaakt?
Raadselachtige beeldjes die in de jaren 1870 in handen kwamen van een monnik, kunnen voorwerpen zijn van een verloren beschaving die duizenden jaren geleden in Puerto Rico leefde, zo suggereren wetenschappers.
Onderzoekers van de Universiteit van Haifa in Israël hebben de beeldjes in hun laboratorium onderzocht.
Uit het onderzoek blijkt dat ze authentiek zijn, schrijft de krant Haaretz.
Nooit eerder
De circa 800 beeldjes zijn uniek en lijken in niets op andere vondsten die in Amerika zijn gedaan.
Inscripties op de figuurtjes zijn heel anders dan die van bijvoorbeeld de Maya’s of Azteken, legden de onderzoekers uit.
De inscripties bestaan uit tenminste 15 tot 20 verschillende symbolen. “Dit systeem is nooit eerder gedocumenteerd,” zei Rodriguez Ramos, één van de onderzoekers.
Onbekend volk
Nu blijkt dat ze toebehoren aan een precolumbiaanse beschaving en niet vervalst zijn, moeten we ervan uitgaan dat het overblijfselen zijn van een onbekend volk, klonk het.
De beeldjes werden generaties lang verborgen in een tunnel. De laatste telg uit de familie die ze honderden jaren bewaakte onthulde op haar sterfbed de locatie aan een monnik uit Puerto Rico.
Die heeft ze uiteindelijk opgegraven en onder de aandacht gebracht.
University of Haifa@UofHaifa
Ever hear about the Library of Agüeybaná? The mysterious artifacts traveled all the way from Puerto Rico to Dr. Iris Groman-Yaroslavsky's Use-wear Analysis Lab, and have just become a little less mysterious.
Diep onder de indruk: deze enorme graancirkel verscheen van de ene op de andere dag in Zwitserland
Foto: Wyder Fabienne
Diep onder de indruk: deze enorme graancirkel verscheen van de ene op de andere dag in Zwitserland
Van de ene op de andere dag verscheen in het weiland van de Zwitserse boer Hans-Rudolf Wyder een graancirkel.
Begin deze maand ontdekte de boer uit Büren an der Aare in de buurt van Bern tijdens de dagelijkse controle vreemde patronen in zijn weiland.
Hij dacht in eerste instantie dat ze door wind en regen waren ontstaan. Toch vond hij het opmerkelijk dat ze zo regelmatig waren.
50 meter
Hij besloot foto’s vanuit de lucht te maken met een drone. Toen zag hij dat het om een graancirkel ging.
De boer heeft geen idee hoe of wanneer de graanformatie in zijn veld is ontstaan.
Het is geen kleine graancirkel, zo meldt de Zwitserse krant 20 Minuten. De formatie heeft een doorsnee van zo’n 50 meter.
Gemengde gevoelens
De boer heeft nog geen bezoekers mogen verwelkomen. Die zullen waarschijnlijk wel gaan komen, aangezien op Facebook foto’s van de formatie rondgaan.
Boer Wyder blijft met gemengde gevoelens achter. Het is enerzijds een prachtige, ongewone formatie, maar anderzijds kost het hem wel geld.
Diep onder de indruk
Hij heeft geen idee wie de graancirkel heeft gemaakt. Zelf gelooft de boer niet dat dergelijke cirkels door buitenaardsen of andere krachten worden gemaakt.
“Maar als ik zie hoe regelmatig en perfect deze cirkel is gemaakt, dan ben ik toch diep onder de indruk,” zei hij.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET Het dreigende gevaar voor een planetoïde-inslag op de aarde, met een kracht van ongeveer honderd Hiroshima-bommen, is geweken. Het tot 50 meter grote stuk materie, ‘2006QV89’, zal onze planeet niet raken. Dat zegt het hoofd van de dienst planetaire bescherming van het controlecentrum voor satellieten van het Europese ruimtevaartagentschap ESA in Darmstadt, Rüdiger Jehn.
Met een telescoop in Chili werd begin juli een mogelijk punt geobserveerd van haar baan. Als de planetoïde daar was opgedoken, was ze gebotst met de aarde. Maar er was dus niets te zien van 2006QV89. Mogelijk kan ze in september 2023 nog een keer de aarde naderen.
De materie had in september de aarde kunnen raken. De kans op een botsing bedroeg volgens de ESA 1 op 7.299. Ter vergelijking: de kans om de Lotto te winnen met zes juiste cijfers plus het bonusnummer is 1 op 140 miljoen.
Materie uit het heelal in deze grootteorde kan immense schade aanrichten. Zes jaar geleden richtte de explosie van een meteoriet van 20 meter verwoestingen aan in de Russische miljoenenstad Tsjeljabinsk. Er was een oorverdovende knal te horen en een schokgolf raasde over het land. De explosie van het brokstuk van 16.000 ton verwondde op 15 februari 2013 ongeveer 1.500 personen, de meesten door gesprongen ruiten. Aan duizenden gebouwen was er schade.
De ESA heeft momenteel 870 objecten op een lijst staan die mogelijk de aarde kunnen raken de komende honderd jaar. Volgens Jehn zal waarneembaar zijn hoe 2006QV89 voorbij onze planeet vliegt.
It’s kind of crowded out there in space, but it’s nothing to worry about. This graphic shows asteroids and comets observed by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission.
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Many Alien Craft Witnessed Over Farmington New Mexico
Many Alien Craft Witnessed Over Farmington New Mexico
MARCH 1952 ………. FARMINGTON NEW MEXICO
The many sightings and reports over the three-day period ran between 16th and 18th March 1952 (some sources list the dates as 17th to 19th March). It would appear that after beginning during the daytime on the Thursday (16th) before continuing overnight and into the Friday (17th) and then overnight to the Saturday (18th), by which time the sightings were slowing somewhat.
Perhaps one of the most intriguing of these sightings, and certainly one of the most detailed, is also one of the first, that of Marlo Webb. Marler would speak to Webb in 2016, relaying that despite his grand age of over 90 years, he still had a very “sharp” mind. And of interest to us here, he recalls in detail the events of that morning perfectly.
He worked in the Parts Department of the Perry Smoak Chevrolet Garage. On this particular morning at a little after 11 am he would notice several people stood outside near the gas pumps on the forecourt. Of more interest, they were seemingly looking and pointing upwards to the sky.
He made his way out of the building, knowing something unusual was taking place. When he stepped outside and turned his gaze upwards, he saw 15 to 20 “objects” moving out of the east and towards the west. Despite the abundance of these strange crafts, Webb recalls they made no noise whatsoever.
Furthermore, there was an obvious intelligence about them as they remained in a purposeful and tight formation, occasionally making extremely tight turns. Perhaps most intriguing was the fact the objects had a “fuzzy outline” to them making it hard to pinpoint any particular color. They remained in sight for around 10 minutes.
An Open Investigation Or An Ominous But Discreet Suppression?
Webb would claim to simply return to work following the sighting. Furthermore, he was visited and interviewed by military personnel in the days that followed. He would claim he was free to speak as he wished and received no threats from his interviewers and has spoken of the incident many times since.
As with many UFO sightings, though, rumors of intimidation and warnings to “stay quiet” would circulate around the area. Whether there is any truth to such rumors is perhaps up for debate. As is whether the local and state newspapers were “asked” to not print any more stories of the incident.
What is perhaps interesting about this last charge is that this request is said to have been issued at some time during 18th March. And while a story had appeared that day in the Farmington newspapers, no follow-ups of the incident seemed to appear.
Perhaps even more bizarre were the claims of discreet warnings from equally discreet government agencies. Using “national security” as a way of encouraging silence, as was the citizen’s duty. Maybe equally bizarre are the claims of all copies of the aforementioned newspapers “going missing” from the stands and stalls around Farmington.
While this is purely speculation, there have been several other cases where “damage control” is put into operation. Including the limiting of what stories appear concerning the incidents. Especially at such sightings where smaller, local newspapers are the target.
Whether these conspiracies of intimidation and information control have any truth to them remains unknown. There were, however, many, many more witnesses with encounters to tell. Many of whom would witness the events of almost 24 hours later.
The Second Day – “Hundreds Of Objects” Over Farmington
At just after 10 am on 17thMarch, the first reports of a group of “flying saucers” came into police switchboard. Reports ranged from five to nine objects seemingly heading in a northeast direction. By 10:30 am, “hundreds of objects” were visible west from the center of town. As the reports streamed in, several would make reference to some of the objects being involved in a “tussle” or “dogfight” overhead.
Many of the reports featured the objects called “silvery discs”. With several more specifically stating that a larger, red disc was an obvious leader of these apparent battle-ready cosmic squadron.
One witness, 32-year-old, Clayton Boddy, who worked for the Farmington Times and had experience in the Army Engineers was just one who noticed these strange objects. After witnessing several of these strange crafts travel overhead, he was suddenly in awe as the sky filled with these bizarre aerial anomalies. He would state:
Moments later there appeared what seemed to be about 500 of them!
He would estimate the objects were at an altitude of 15,000 feet, although he couldn’t estimate their speed or size. Incidentally, four other witnesses would corroborate the sighting of Boddy.
Later that same afternoon, at a little after 3 pm, came further reports of strange objects flying in tight formations. One such witness, Edward Brooks – a former B-29-tail-gunner – was adamant that the objects were “not airplanes”. He would state:
The very maneuvering of the things couldn’t be that of modern aircraft!
This was something another witness would notice. John Bloomfield would estimate the objects were traveling around “10 times faster” than modern jet planes. He would elaborate on how they “came at each other head-on” only to avoid each other at the last moment.
Virgil Riggs – Objects “From Horizon To Horizon Like A Quilt Of Double-Six Dominos!”
Although he was only 8 years old at the time, Virgil Riggs would witness the objects from outside the Aztec Elementary School – at least on the first two days. He would state over 60 years later at a MUFONpresentation in New Mexico that:
All these square-looking formations (appeared) in the sky. They were made up of dots, and the dots would shift from one formation to another. The first day there were a few. The second day there were too many to count, and the third day there were maybe 30 or 40!
Riggs would elaborate that on the second day the objects were across the sky “from horizon to horizon”. He would further describe this scene as looking like a “quilt pattern of double-six dominos”.
You can see a visual representation of how the sky looked to Riggs below.
He would speak also of witnessing objects moving from one formation into another. So forcing one of the existing objects to move as a consequence. This was replicated across the sky as objects forced their way into formations. Almost giving the impression that the sky was alive. Riggs would remember he and his friends “thought it was pretty cool”.
Riggs would further recall, certainly from his perspective, of the children essentially taking the sightings very much in their stride. Even feeling “disappointed when they went away”. He claimed that neither he nor his friends felt threatened at any time during the sightings. NOTE: The above image is CGI.
The Hum Sound Is Now Being Heard Worldwide, What's Going On?
The Hum Sound Is Now Being Heard Worldwide, What's Going On?
COAST TO COAST AM. Dr. Glen MacPherson has spent many years documenting the strange phenomenon known as “the Hum.”
MacPherson said the sound was first reported in England in 1970, and spread to the U.S. in about 1990. He reports the sound plagues about two to four percent of the population, who can hear it almost all of the time, although it sometimes gets worse at night.
To most people, the sound is like hearing a truck idling outside, but MacPherson added that it “may not be a sound in the traditional sense of the word.” The Hum can cause loss of sleep. He has personally experienced the noise as well.
Richard Hoagland They will be Astounded by what They find on the Moon
Richard Hoagland They will be Astounded by what They find on the Moon
Coast To Coast- The original show date - 2015-03-12: Looking to the future, Richard Hoagland contended that, when private space companies eventually arrive on the moon and find signs of previous intelligent life, they will be "dumbfounded by what they really see."
In turn, he surmised, there will be a frenzied rush into space by companies and governments trying to "find and cash in on all this extraordinary science and technology that is just out there waiting and now will be available to ordinary folks."
To that end, Hoagland claimed that the infamous Moon Hoax Theory was a psychological operation created by NASA in order to draw the attention of conspiracy theorists away from asking questions about what was really discovered on the Moon.
"This censorship wall surrounding the real solar system," Hoagland mused, "is falling right before our eyes," as private space companies begin gaining access to cosmic realms previously controlled by secretive government agencies.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Awesome Alien Ship Found In Crater Could Take Humanity Across Universe! UFO Sighting News.
Awesome Alien Ship Found In Crater Could Take Humanity Across Universe! UFO Sighting News.
Location of discovery: Plaskett Crater, Earths Moon
Source: Book; "Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Near Side of the Moon," page 265.
In the center of a crater called Plaskett, sits an alien ship long since abandoned. Might be an excellent point for a moon landing, so that humanity can traverse the universe with ease. The crater is 109km across, so the ship is about 20km long. Of course these have been edited out in most of the newly released photos. It will be smoothed over to look like rocks or shadows to hide the ship and other structures.
This very sharp and white ceramic-like structure is in a book of old moon photos. The book only talks about the moon, but there are alien structures in it that go unnoticed. This is another tool I often use to help expose the truth...the use of old books that have NASA photos in them. These are often photos that have not been edited so we get to see the real surface of the moon and not what NASA wants us to see. NASA uses photo editing tools to edit their photos and delete, blur or deliberately cover up with shadow anything that could be used as evidence of alien life.
Photo below on page 265.
Being a UFO researcher, you have to use everything available to prove that NASA is lying to the public, but NASA makes it easy for us by leaving themselves exposed with their earlier photos of decades ago. It was a book that got me started looking for these structures...38 years ago when I found the face at Cydonia.
Please I beg of you to go to your local libraries and search out those earlier books with NASA Mars and Moon photos in them. I promise you, if you do, you will discover the truth all by yourself. Take photos of them with your cell phone, email the photos to yourself, then post them on your site. I did. It's that easy. There are so many moon and Mars books out there from 1970-1990s. Please utilize these tools in our fight for the truth. Scott C. Waring
Below photos is on page 278. Located near Plato Crater.
The name is almost synonymous with American black projects and secrecy, and there is perhaps no other government installation or operation that has aroused more interest over the years.
In fact, if just one term could be associated with all the claims of exotic looking, experimental U.S. test aircraft from over the years–as well as the possibility of a few “crash retrievals” that may represent technology that was never ours to begin with–there is one obvious name stands out among the rest.
Area 51.
Few places are associated with more rumors and secrecy than America’s famous Area 51. Prior to the administration of President Barack Obama, no sitting U.S. commander in chief had ever said its name publicly; this was primarily because the test site remained officially off-the-books until 2013, when the CIA declassified historical documents about the U-2 and Oxcart spy plane programs, which were developed there.
The Groom Lake site as it appeared in 2010, as seen from the air
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).
However, what many aren’t aware of when it comes to Area 51 is just how much information about the “secret” installation had already been made public prior to that time. In fact, some would have argued that Area 51–widely considered one of the most secretive facilities in all of American government–had never really been all that secret.
The history of the site is well known today. With the end of World War II and the emergence of the new world superpowers, the United States knew it had to have advance knowledge of any weapons and technological advancements being developed in the Soviet Union. Arguably, the best way to achieve that would be to use sophisticated aerial photography to help visualize what was happening behind the Iron Curtain; this would obviously require new kinds of aircraft capable of such missions.
Officials with the U-2 spy plane’s Development Projects Staff began to look for an area within the United States where such aircraft could be developed and tested safely, and away from the public. According to the CIA’s history of the site’s discovery, it was during a flight over Nevada in the early 1950s that officials spotted “what appeared to be an airstrip by a salt flat – Groom Lake – near the northeast corner of the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) Nevada Proving Ground, which had been used during World War II as an aerial gunnery range for Army pilots.”
It seemed like the most logical place for spy plane tests to be carried out, although there were a few issues. As a CIA.gov article on tests at the site discusses, “upon further discovery, the U-2 Project Staff learned Groom Lake was not actually part of the AEC proving ground. They asked the AEC to add the Groom Lake strip to its real estate holdings in Nevada, to which the AEC readily agreed, and the deal was approved by President Eisenhower.”
For years thereafter, portions of the highly clandestine U-2 aircraft were developed out at nearby Barstow, California, draped in sheets, and then flown in transport aircraft out to the Groom Lake facility for final assembly there. Pilots were brought in (they were referred to as “drivers”, since the operation was being carried out by the CIA, rather than the Air Force), and training aimed at getting personnel up to speed on the specifics of flying these large, and potentially fragile spy planes began.
According to the CIA, the famous name “Area 51” was simply what the location’s map designation had been at that time (author Annie Jacobsen, who wrote an uncensored history of the location in 2011, also notes that the “51” was a reference to the year the site was established). Since “Area 51″ left a bit to the imaginations of those prospective employees who might come and work there, nicknames like “Paradise Ranch” became common, as well as “Watertown,” in reference to the rainwater runoff that would periodically spill off the surrounding mountains and fill the otherwise dry bed of Groom Lake.
Although it is without question that Area 51 and the projects carried out there over the years have been done so with a degree of secrecy, the idea that Area 51 had been largely undisclosed until 2013 isn’t entirely true. In fact, a review of early documentation from around the time of its founding shows that the site, and its various nicknames, were pretty common knowledge.
Area 51 site map, as depicted in declassified CIA documents released via its CREST program
(Credit: CIA.gov/Wikimedia Commons).
“The ‘base that doesn’t exist’ has always been public knowledge,” argues Peter Merlin, an aerospace writer and historian. “Construction of the airfield at Groom Lake, Nevada was announced by the government, and its existence has been repeatedly acknowledged by official sources.” Merlin has argued in the past that a number of unclassified maps produced over the years displayed the “secret” location, but that “Test Site insiders, government officials, military personnel, and the general public have, however, unknowingly conspired to perpetuate the myth that the existence of the base is a closely guarded secret.”
Perhaps the earliest public mention of Area 51 appeared in a press release on May 18, 1955, penned by Seth Woodruff Jr., who was at that time Manager of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Las Vegas Field Office. Woodruff wrote about the personnel from the Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Company being brought in “to begin preliminary work on a small, satellite Nevada Test Site installation.” Runways and a few buildings were planned for the site, which Woodruff said would be “essentially temporary.”
Although the name “Area 51” was never used in the press release, it is obvious in hindsight what Woodruff was referring to. The newly announced project was referenced again in an article in 1955 that appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal:
“Construction at the Nevada Test Site installation a few miles north of Yucca Flat which was announced last spring is continuing. Data secured to date has indicated a need for limited additional facilities and modifications of the existing installation. The additional work which will not be completed until sometime in 1956 is being done by the Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Company, Incorporated, under the direction of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Las Vegas branch office.”
During this period, the site was more commonly referred to by its “Watertown” moniker, although this wasn’t always the case. As Peter Merlin notes, a January 1960 edition of the N.T.S. Bulletin (“N.T.S.” referencing the Nevada Test Site) published a series of new telephone numbers for the installation on its front page, under the inconspicuous heading, “Area 51 Telephone Numbers” (see below). It doesn’t get much more obvious than that, especially considering that the N.T.S. Bulletin was an unclassified publication.
Other names for the site came into use over the years, which included Dreamland (the radio call sign for the base), although today, the name that is most often employed for official use is the Nevada Test and Training Range at Groom Lake. In the past, Area 51 and Watertown were both used as official names for the site, and according to T.D. Barnes, a former employee of the site and president of a similar collection of past employees called Roadrunners International, Area 51 can be found on some official maps and documentation produced by the Nevada Test Site, the Department of Energy, and other agencies. In fact, Watertown is even included on a list of legal members of the Alamo Township in Lincoln County, Nevada.
While nobody would dispute the use of secrecy in keeping Area 51 and the operations carried out there over the years away from prying eyes (and enemy spies), to say that the installation had been treated as though it “didn’t exist” until its disclosure in 2013 is a bit of a stretch. In fact, the passing references to it at that time, in relation to the CIA’s historical account of the development of the U2 and Oxcart, is probably best explained by the simple fact that Area 51 didn’t need to be “disclosed” to the public: it had already been well known by its various names, and referenced many times in print over the decades.
Without doubt, one of the strangest aspects of cryptozoology is it’s tie-in with the Crop Circle mystery. Although it’s a little-known aspect of both phenomena, more than a few accounts exist of strange creatures seen in and around Crop Circles. From Matthew Williams – the only British man ever arrested, charged and convicted for making a Crop Circle – come several such accounts. It transpires that, unsurprisingly for someone who has spent years deeply immersed within the Crop Circle controversy, Matthew is a veritable fountain of knowledge with respect to tales of weird creatures either having been seen in, or at least in the direct vicinity of, complex Crop Circle formations. One such case is truly strange.
Matthew advised me that the story in question concerned a man who had felt curiously compelled to drive late at night to a certain field in Wiltshire many years ago. On doing so, he parked his car and duly, and carefully, began his walk into the depths of the crop. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a large, black, human-like figure appeared in the air over the field. “It reminded me a little bit of the Mothman sightings when I heard this story,” said Matthew, not without a high degree of justification. Matthew continued that the source of the story could only stand and stare in awe, while suddenly gaining the distinct impression that the hovering entity was the source of at least some of the Crop Circle formations that were appearing in Wiltshire. At that precise moment, a simple Crop Circle suddenly appeared on the ground immediately below the black figure – after which it vanished from the skies and the man was left utterly alone in the field, and with no real option other than to make his shocked way back to his vehicle and drive home, baffled and bewildered by both the weird, aerial entity and what it was that had directed him to the field.
Example of simple crop circles
Matthew expands: “There was one time, I’d rather not say when or where exactly, as I could get into trouble for admitting I trespassed on the farmer’s land and made the crop circle formation. Plus, I had a friend named Paul helping me with this one. We were making this circle when we noticed these three bright lights – small balls of lights coming towards the field. We watched them; we were fascinated. But they split up and each of them went to a corner of the field – and which only left one corner for us to leave by without getting too close to these things. That was a bit unsettling. We didn’t know what these balls were; so we raced out of the open corner of the field. We looked back as we ran and could see the balls heading towards us: gliding very gracefully just above the top of the crop. It was like they were on a railway track, just moving very smoothly, but it left us sort of disturbed too: like they were almost ghostly and alive.”
The story was far from finished, as Matthew notes: “Well, I went to get the car, and told Paul to wait in the bushes at the edge of the road so he wouldn’t be seen. The last thing I wanted was for him to get arrested if the police happened to drive past. But by the time I had got the car and got back to Paul, he was walking up the middle of the road with all his Crop Circle equipment in full view. I pulled up, wound the window down and shouted at him: ‘What the hell are you doing? If people see you carrying your [crop circle-making] equipment, we’ll get arrested.’
“Paul looked scared stiff and said: ‘If they had arrested me, I’d have gone with them, just to get me out of there.’ I asked him what he meant, and Paul said that while I was getting the car he had heard these strange, animal-like screaming noises coming from inside the field and he had just charged out of there and onto the road. We never found out what it was though.”
Matthew Williams is not alone in commenting on such matters. In the summer of 2007, I spoke with Marcus Matthews, a researcher of mysterious big-cats in the U.K., who told me that he was then currently investigating a case involving a person who had seen a “huge black cat” sitting inside the confines of a Wiltshire Crop Circle. So, how do we define and explain such rogue reports as these? The answer, admittedly, and right now, is that we can’t. All I can say is this: if you ever find yourself deep in the heart of a huge Crop Circle, then keep a careful watch. There may be something monstrous keeping its eyes on you, getting ready to pounce.
In 1984, a group of astronomers founded the SETI Institute to continue the work of countless scientists before them who have sought to further the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe. Today, the not-for-profit research organization continues to attract some of the brightest minds in astronomy and related fields and serve as a vehicle for research into the biggest question mankind can ask: are we alone out here in the void?
One of the most high-profile researchers at the SETI Institute is its Senior Astronomer, Dr. Seth Shostak. In addition to his work with SETI, Shostak hosts the monthly “Skeptic Check” podcast and serves as a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Yet despite his skepticism, in 2017 Shostak made waves when he predicted Earthlings would discover alien life within the next 20 years.
Seth Shostak
Now, it seems the SETI researcher has rolled back his optimism – at least in terms of what anyone may or may not alreadyknow about extraterrestrial life. Over the last two years, certain individuals and groups (you know the ones) have been suggesting that segments of or individuals within the U.S. government may know more about unidentified aerial phenomena than the public knows, and large portions of the public now believe the government is on the verge of disclosing that information.
Shostak counters that belief in a piece published this week on SFGate, the online branch of the San Francisco Chroniclenewspaper. In the article, Shostak essentially insults the entire disclosure movement, calling it “sad” that so many are so invested in the possibility of government disclosure as opposed to trusting decades of their own research and investigating:
It’s sad that the UFO crowd has come to this – seemingly giving up on proving their own case and hoping that the feds will do their work for them. Mainstream scientists don’t wait for government agencies to prove their theories. That ball’s in the researcher’s court. And yet UFO proponents are now saying that, deus ex machina, the government will soon book some network air time and fess up about the aliens.
Air time on the History Channel of course. Shostak goes on to question why so many in the ufological community believe there is secret government knowledge to be revealed at all:
If extraterrestrial craft are really strafing the stratosphere, and in numbers sufficient to cause roughly ten thousand citizen reports annually in the U.S. alone, then why must we throw up our hands and claim “only the government can prove it’s true”? What about the hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers who avidly observe the sky on clear nights, but don’t seem to see any mysterious flying objects? What of the many thousand commercial satellites that make high resolution photos of our planet all day long without witnessing strange intruders? Are none of these data good enough?
Oof. Quite a burn coming from someone like Shostak who has spent his life looking for answers among the stars. Despite the cynicism, there’s a lot of truth in Shostak’s rebuttal of the disclosure movement.
Shostak’s statements remind me of another observation made by my colleague, Robbie Graham. In the introduction to his book UFOs: Reframing the Debate, Graham writes “the ultimate irony of the Disclosure movement is that it deeply distrusts officialdom, while simultaneously looking to officialdom for the truth” and that “by imagining all answers to the UFO mystery to be out of public reach, deep within the bowels of the national security state, the Disclosure movement actually places power into hands of officialdom while disempowering the individual.”
All by design, of course.
Both Shostak and Graham have a point. Government disclosure of possible secrets related to unidentified or unexplained aerial phenomena has been a topic of discussion running concurrent with the history of the modern UFO phenomenon itself. Why do so many believe the government will some day cough up its secrets?
Because we’ve been conditioned to believe it. For decades, the defense and intelligence communities have propagated and encouraged belief in extraterrestrial visitation as a form of cover for tests of classified weapons and aerospace technologies and to ultimately keep that information out of America’s adversaries’ hands.
“It’s a [expletive] drone bro.”
Over the last two years, To the Stars Academy (TTSA) andeven the Department of Defense itselfhave lured a whole new generation of seekers into the disclosure movement, leading them to believe that the U.S. government will someday disclose its knowledge of UFOs/UAPs, extraterrestrial contact, or reverse-engineered alien technologies. All that is predicated on the question of whether there indeed is any knowledge to disclose – and that much ultimately remains unknown.
Remember, everyone: the DoD will never show its hand if doing so would weaken America’s strategic advantage, and TTSA is nothing more than a money-making entertainment company capitalizing on the same unfortunate psychosocial forces which have given rise to the anti-vaccination movement, Flat Earth theory, and QAnon. It’s really unfortunate that all of us, myself included, have allowed them to hijack the conversation.
Until TTSA or the Pentagon cough up anything more than a few seconds of grainy, ambiguous footage and questionable eyewitness testimony – one of the least reliable forms of evidence – they’re doing us all a disservice by persuading us to trust the national security state and believe it will some day tell us what we want to know.
The Alien Abduction: Pascagoula man says he had an encounter with aliens
The Alien Abduction: Pascagoula man says he had an encounter with aliens
On the evening of October 11, 1973, co-workers 42-year-old Charles Hickson and 19-year-old Calvin Parker told the Jackson County, Mississippi Sheriff's office they were fishing off a pier on the west bank of the Pascagoula River in Mississippi when they heard a whirring/whizzing sound, saw two flashing blue lights and an oval shaped object 30–40 feet across and 8–10 feet high.
Parker and Hickson claimed that they were "conscious but paralyzed" while three "creatures" took them aboard the object and subjected them to an examination before releasing them.
Within days, Pascagoula was the center of an international news story, with reporters swarming the town. UFOlogists James Harder of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization and J. Allen Hynek interviewed the two men.
Harder attempted to hypnotize them and concluded Hickson and Parker "experienced an extraterrestrial phenomena", while Hynek believed they had "a very real, frightening experience.
Calvin Parker tells his story of the event that would change his life forever.
Camera:COR2-A (2019-07-12 05:54:00 - 2019-07-13 23:54:00 UTC) I found this planet sized UFO near our sun today. The UFO is seen holding its position, even though a solar explosion wave hits it. Only the back edge of the round UFO is visible, but it stands out too much for it to be anything else. Such UFOs have been reported a few times over the last few years. The SOHO site is really helping with this since its so easy to use. With evidence like this, it should not be too many years before we get the US gov to admit that aliens exist. Scott C. Waring-Taiwan
I found this black structure long ago and wanted to make a video about it finally. The structure is near the NASA Spirit rover, and looks to be about 1.5 meters across. The structure is nothing like its surroundings. Its black and smooth, but everything else around it is light color and dirty. This tells me that this is a structure that is still being used. Whats really strange is that the Spirit Rover only took a single photo of this object. Why? I mean its right there and its just not possible to miss it. So, maybe they saw it, but assumed this photo would never be released to the public. Scott C. Waring-Taiwan
A facebook page asking people to join in to storm Area 51 has now gotten over 1,000,000 people saying that they will join. It sounds like a joke, but honestly the American people are in their right to do this. America is a country who's people control the government. For them to not be allowed inside would be proof that America is no longer the land of the free, but now a communist nation. Also the 2nd Amendment says that they have the right to bear arms...so watch out USAF. Also the 8th Amendment says that the US cannot use excessive force like snipers or weapons. The Bill of Rights states; Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Thus, the people are within their right to storm Area 51 and Area S4. The public can organise, can carry weapons and can storm a USAF military base as they wish. It was Abraham Lincoln who said America is “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” So sign up at the Facebook page and prepare for storming Area 51 and Area S4 along the way. Sounds like lots of fun and bring the kids and dogs. Great for a elementary, junior high and high school outings. Don't worry about security, they will all back down, not a single shot fired and we will walk in with our picnic baskets and kids and pets having a good old time. Its our country, its our government. We are in our rights to do so. Scott C. Waring
Giant UFO Stops Waterspout Tornado Off Italy Coast On Video, UFO Sighting News.
Giant UFO Stops Waterspout Tornado Off Italy Coast On Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: July 2019 Location of sighting: Italy This UFO was seen flying over a water spout tornado on camera. The UFO is seen flying though the top part of the tornado which is seen by me as an attempt to kill the waterspout before it grows out of control and harms someone. There is a known alien base from a contact event called the Friendship Case at Rocca Pia, Italy. They said this base is so huge that it reaches out into the ocean area all the way from Rocca Pia. Its so huge that it has its own weather system. But the W56 (56 species living there) have a leader that would not allow anyone or anything to come to harm if he could help it. Here is proof of his words. Stoping this waterspout before it killed the people on boats, the beach or town nearby. Awesome display of caring by the W56. Scott C. Waring
Bus Size UFO Orb Appears Over Texas During Storm, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Bus Size UFO Orb Appears Over Texas During Storm, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: July 8, 2019 Location of sighting: El Paso, Texas, USA Here is a video of a glowing UFO over El Paso, Texas last week. The UFO can be easily mistaken for ball lightning, however scientists state that ball lighting is always smaller than a foot across or less. This is huge. Its about the size of a city bus. That kinda destroys the ball lightning theory. As this UFO appears, suddenly a lightning bolt hits it. UFOs often cause storms, tornados and even earthquakes when seen, so to see this on video is no surprise, but is 100% evidence that UFOs do change or even control our environment. Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
Seriously idk #wtfmemes i just saw today! I just see a cloud headed my way, then a light appeared with a #lightning then gets super #windy then ANOTHER lightning and 💥 #bam its gone!! 🙀🙀🙀🤔🧟♀️🧙🏻♀️🕵🏻♀️💂🏻♂️ 👽 idk! But that shit was freaky af! Ontop of the light you see a circle ⭕️ in between the clouds! And i have not smoked today so i know i ain't high.
LUNAR LEFTOVERS Astronauts, like those who touched down in the Apollo 15 lunar module (shown) in July 1971, left a lot on the moon’s surface, from scientific instruments to trash.
Once on the moon, Apollo astronauts had two major goals: get themselves and the moon rocks home safe.
To make space on the cramped lunar modules for the hundreds of kilograms of moon samples, the astronauts had to go full Marie Kondo. Anything that wasn’t essential for the ride home got tossed: cameras, hammocks, boots and trash. Downsizing also meant abandoning big stuff, like moon buggies and the descent stage that served as a launchpad for a module’s lunar liftoff.
But the astronauts left more than castoffs. Starting with the Apollo 11 mission, which touched down on July 20, 1969, astronauts left six American flags and plenty of personal and political mementos. Importantly, the crews also left behind instruments for about a dozen experiments to keep tabs on lunar conditions (SN: 8/2/69, p. 95); one is still running today.
These devices “were really important parts of Apollo,” says Noah Petro, project scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission. Back then, the experiments didn’t get much time in the limelight, “because humans on the surface are obviously the big story,” says Petro, who is based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Special Report: Moonstruck
50 years after Apollo 11, lunar science still surprises and delights
When we think of Apollo’s 50-year legacy, most of us probably aren’t picturing the scattered remnants of astronaut outposts gathering space dust. But as nations plan new ventures to the moon, preservationists are fighting to protect these historic sites so that future lunar visitors don’t erase the marks of humans’ first steps beyond Earth.
Solving old mysteries
By December 1972, six Apollo crews had collectively spent nearly 80 hours exploring the moon’s surface (SN: 12/23/72, p. 404). They gathered rocks, photographed the landscape and performed all manner of experiments — from unfurling metal foil to catch solar wind particles to setting off explosives and measuring the resulting seismic tremors.
Apollo 11 left behind solar-powered seismometers and a reflector array that could be paired with lasers on Earth to precisely measure the distance between Earth and the moon. On five later missions, Apollo 12 through 17 (Apollo 13 returned home without landing on the moon), astronauts left more elaborate setups powered by nuclear batteries that generated electricity through radioactive decay (SN: 11/8/69, p. 434). Some of those instruments collected data through 1977, when NASA decided to focus on other projects and pulled the plug on the whole operation (SN: 10/1/77, p. 213).
“There was this period of time where the data languished,” Petro says. But within the last decade or so, a new generation of scientists has taken up the torch, analyzing Apollo observations to answer questions lingering from early studies. Unfortunately, this isn’t nearly as simple as picking up where 1970s scientists left off, as geophysicist Seiichi Nagihara discovered when he set out to solve a decades-old puzzle about the moon’s underground temperature.
On Apollo 15 and 17, astronauts installed thermometers in the lunar surface, which took the moon’s temperature at various depths and sent the data back to Earth (SN: 9/11/71, p. 167). When Apollo-era scientists reviewed data collected through 1974, the results revealed something odd: The moon’s temperature just beneath the surface appeared to be slowly rising.
Images like this one of the Apollo 17 site reveal that the soil where astronauts drove and walked (horizontal lines) and did their work is darker than other terrain. These areas probably absorbed more sunlight, warming the underlying ground.
GSFC/NASA, ASU
“We’re talking about very minor warming,” just a couple degrees, says Nagihara, of Texas Tech University in Lubbock. But researchers at the time couldn’t figure out why. Nagihara decided to examine all the temperature data collected through 1977 to figure out what was going on. Unfortunately, the tapes that recorded these measurements were missing. This is a common problem, because during the Apollo era, data were housed at the individual labs of scientists working on each experiment and many measurements were never properly archived.
“A group of us decided to … try to hunt down the tapes,” Nagihara says. After scouring thousands of documents at NASA’s Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston, the researchers traced 440 tapes to an archive in Suitland, Md. But even those covered only about three months of observations. At the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Nagihara and colleagues discovered more temperature measurements noted by Apollo-era scientists in weekly memos. Between the recovered tapes and the memos, Nagihara’s team pieced together a picture of the moon’s temperature from 1971 through 1977.
The slow warming under the surface continued through the end of data collection, the researchers reported in April 2018 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. In search of a source for the heat, Nagihara and colleagues turned to pictures taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting the moon since 2009 (SN: 6/11/16, p. 10). The images showed that soil stirred up by astronaut activity was slightly darker than other lunar terrain. Perhaps it was dark enough to absorb more sunlight and warm the underlying ground.
Computer simulations confirmed that the moon wasn’t heating up from internal processes. Astronauts trekking around the Apollo sites probably caused an increase in surface temperature of about 2 to 3 degrees Celsius, and the extra heat slowly spread more than a meter into the ground — causing the gradual warming detected by Apollo instruments. Turns out that astronaut footsteps left marks on the moon far deeper than those iconic boot prints.
Keeping vigil over gravity
While Nagihara and other researchers are digging up old Apollo data for new analyses, one lone project is still in full swing: the laser ranging retroreflector experiment.
This experiment uses arrays of reflectors placed on the moon by Apollo 11, 14 and 15 astronauts and anchored on two rovers left behind by the Soviets (SN: 5/20/78, p. 326). These arrays consist of special mirrors, each with three sides in the shape of a cube’s corner, which always reflect light in the exact direction from which it came. By shooting a laser beam at a corner-cube array from a telescope on Earth and clocking the time it takes for the light to return, researchers can measure the exact distance between different spots on the moon and Earth.
Still running
To measure the Earth-moon distance, arrays of “corner-cube” mirrors were set up at Apollo sites (top). Inside each circle (bottom left) is a corner cube that reflects laser light back to Earth in the exact direction it came from (illustrated, bottom right).
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: NASA; CHETVORNO/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC0); NSSDC
Laser ranging retroreflector measurements have offered several insights — like the fact that the moon is withdrawing from Earth at about 3.8 centimeters per year. Plus, slight variations in the moon’s rotation suggest that the orb has a relatively small core.
Physicist Tom Murphy of the University of California, San Diego is using the corner-cube arrays to probe a question much bigger than the moon. He’s testing whether a key part of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, called the equivalence principle, holds up.
The equivalence principle states that any two objects in the same gravitational field should fall at the same rate (SN: 1/20/18, p. 9). Just like a bowling ball and a golf ball should hit the ground simultaneously, the Earth and moon should fall around the sun (that is, orbit the sun) at exactly the same rate. “You’re sensitive to any difference in how they’re [orbiting] the sun by measuring the distance between the Earth and moon as they weave around each other,” Murphy says. If the Earth-moon distance ultimately breaks with the equivalence principle, that would reveal a shortcoming of general relativity. And that, in turn, could inform the creation of a theory of quantum gravity that resolves the tension between general relativity and quantum mechanics (SN: 10/17/15, p. 28).
So far, laser ranging retroreflector measurements with centimeter-level precision haven’t shown any difference in how quickly the Earth and moon are falling around the sun. But in 2006, Murphy started collecting data with millimeter-scale precision using improved laser technology and a larger telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico.
Amassing enough data will require several more years of observation and researchers will need more sophisticated computer models to analyze the observations, Murphy says. Luckily, since the reflectors on the moon don’t require any power, he can collect data into the foreseeable future. Eventually, those observations — at the millimeter level or even smaller scales — could reveal a crack in the equivalence principle.
Since general relativity is fundamentally incompatible with quantum mechanics, something eventually has to give. The equivalence principle might be one of those things, Murphy says. “We have to turn over every rock and see where the bugs are.”
One astronaut’s trash
Thermometers and reflectors were among about a dozen types of instruments installed on the moon. Other devices measured the moon’s magnetic field and sniffed out chemical components of the moon’s tenuous atmosphere. NASA’s Lunar Data Project is restoring data from these and other Apollo experiments, so that scientists can continue to pore over the observations for years to come.
“When you have this incredibly rare resource, you can’t not keep working on it,” says planetary scientist Renee Weber of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., who studies lunar seismic data. “There are always new techniques to try” and better computer processing to tease out previously missed signals.
Based on moonquakes sensed by Apollo seismometers, Weber and colleagues reported in May that the moon may still be tectonically active, as revealed by young faults on the lunar surface called lobate scarps (SN: 6/8/19, p. 7). Understanding moonquakes could help NASA and other agencies decide where to land future spacecraft or construct buildings on the moon, Weber says. If these lobate scarps truly mark sites of tectonic activity, future lunar visitors may want to avoid them, she says.
There’s also plenty to learn by testing how well the Apollo instruments, as well as the nonscientific paraphernalia strewn across the lunar surface, have held up. All of that stuff has been exposed to the lunar elements for decades. Future expeditions could sample the detritus to get a sense of how human communities might one day fare on the moon.
“Every single thing at the sites would be a completely priceless scientific investigation,” says planetary scientist Philip Metzger of the University of Central Florida in Orlando. He can imagine scrutinizing the effects of ultraviolet radiation, solar wind and other factors on everything from batteries to camera lenses to towels and earplugs.
Metzger sees value in everything left behind on the moon, including the astronauts’ discarded bags of excrement. “We have studies of microbes lasting in space over very short amounts of time on the International Space Station,” he says, but testing whether microbes in astronaut waste have survived or mutated over the last 50 years could help determine whether life is up to the challenge of hopping between planets or even solar systems. These are “really important questions about the position of life in the cosmos,” he says.
Protecting Apollo
While Metzger and other space scientists are hoping Apollo remnants can teach us more about how humans would fare on the moon, Beth O’Leary and other archaeologists are hoping to preserve these items as testaments to the human endeavor of getting there.
“Space is not a vacuum. We carry our culture into it,” says O’Leary, of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. The remnants of Apollo sites are important relics of a singular time in human history. Astronaut memorials, messages of peace and commemorative plaques on the moon are obvious pieces of heritage. But “even the scientific stuff has cultural importance,” she says. More than 400,000 space-age Americans at over 20,000 companies and universities across the country teamed up to put Apollo astronauts on the moon. That kind of mass collaboration, in itself, was “a cultural act, as well as a scientific or engineering feat,” O’Leary says.
Unfortunately, securing legal protections for the historical preservation of Apollo sites isn’t easy. Don’t expect the United States to establish an Apollo National Park on the moon any time soon. As fun as that sounds, it would violate the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which states that no nation can claim sovereignty over the moon’s surface.
NASA has published guidelines on how to avoid ruining Apollo artifacts in preparation for the many countries and companies that are vying for parking spots on the moon (SN: 11/24/18, p. 14). This rulebook includes policies such as the distance a future lunar spacecraft should land from Apollo sites so that the rocket exhaust doesn’t wipe Neil Armstrong’s first boot print off the face of the moon. These guidelines aren’t legally binding, Metzger says, but “no company is going to want to be known as the company that ruined one of the Apollo sites.”
Michelle Hanlon, who specializes in space law at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, has her sights on a much broader agreement to protect Apollo sites. Her nonprofit, For All Moonkind, is seeking United Nations protections for relics on the moon. The U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space is “the ideal place to negotiate a new treaty on heritage in space,” Hanlon says, though she suspects it may take decades to reach such an international deal.
By then, many more people than professional astronauts may be walking the moon, fueling concerns about visitors making off with Apollo artifacts. In 2015, a lunar sample bag used by Armstrong was mistakenly sold at a government auction for $995 and later resold for $1.8 million. Other space-age memorabilia has sold for similarly astronomical prices.
“If NASA can lose [Armstrong’s] bag, how can they keep track of all the artifacts” once people begin making regular round trips to the moon? Hanlon asks. “You can imagine [looters] going up and just grabbing artifacts and bringing them back to sell.”
This story appears in the July 7, 2019 issue of Science News with the headline, "Lunar Leftovers: 50 years on, the Apollo landing spots still generate fervent interest from scientists and historians."
Are aliens real? We don't know for sure, but we want to believe.
Outer space is a vast expanse that we have so much more to learn about, which is why it's hard to flat-out deny the possibility that other intelligent lifeforms exist. New speciesare continually being discovered in the ocean, and some animals thought to be long gonehave emerged from the thick cover of junglesand the deep sea to be rediscovered.
If life can exist—and persist—in seclusion and in some of the harshest conditions on Earth (just look at tardigrades), it's likely that other interplanetary lifeforms have evolved and acclimated to conditions in space, too.
The renowned science writer Arthur C. Clarke once said, "Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying." Several discoveries and theories from some of the greatest minds in science point to the likelihood that there is something beyond us in the universe, so there's a pretty decent chance we have neighbors somewhere in the ether.Consider the evidence.
1. SETI Institute
The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute was founded by Carl Sagan and Jill Tarter, two astronomers who believe there's more to interplanetary life than us.
SETI's mission is "to explore, understand, and explain the origin and nature of life in the universe and the evolution of intelligence." The Institute works with NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) as a research contractor to pool resources and explore the possibility of intelligent life on other planets.
Yep, an entire scientific organization that seeks to find other intelligent life in the universe actually exists.
2. UFOs Piqued the Pentagon's Interest
CLASSICSTOCKGETTY IMAGES
In 2007, the Department of Defense (DoD) created a program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) to study "space-related phenomena that could not be easily explained, usually involving the appearance of high-speed, unidentified aircraft," per New York magazine's Intelligencer.
The covert program was headed by military intelligence official Luis Elizondo, who sought to investigate reports of UFO encounters. A decade later, Elizondo quit working at the Pentagon and confirmed AATIP's existence to the New York Times.
3. Navy Jet Encounters UFO
This recently declassified footage of a Navy jet encountering a UFO was captured in 2004 and released in 2018. In the video, pilots can be heard excitedly asking, "What is that thing?" as the rapidly moving object is on screen for a few moments.
Commander David Fravor and Lieutenant Commander Jim Slaight were on a training mission over the Pacific off the coast of San Diego when they witnessed a UFO that was "40 feet long and oval in shape."
Fravor told the New York Times the object was "jumping around erratically, staying over [a] wave disturbance but not moving in any specific direction." When Fravor tried to get a closer look at the UFO, it sped away at a speed the likes of which he had never seen.
The craft was never identified and Fravor insisted he didn't see any kind of wings or rotors, making it that much more impressive that it was able to outrun his F-18 Hornet jet.
Coming from anyone else, this might seem zany. Again, Loeb knows a thing or two about the machinations of space. However, while truthers are soaking the Oumuamua theory up, Loeb's colleagues are highly disappointed and upset that he's posited what they're calling an "insult [to] honest scientific inquiry."
5. A Plethora of Exoplanets
NASA recently confirmed that the number of exoplanets is in the thousands and that we can expect that figure to only grow as we improve technology that's able to go into the nether regions of space.
This means there are thousands of known planets that haven't been explored at length and several more awaiting discovery that could be comprised of environments with the ability to sustain life. Who's to say one (or multiple) exoplanets aren't already home to intelligent extra-terrestrial beings?
A recent photo of Area 51/Groom Lake area taken by a pilot flying legally outside restricted airspace with a superimposed crossair clip art.
(Photo: anonymous to TheAviationist.com)
The Tongue-In-Cheek Internet Sensation Has Gained Traction, But “What If”?We talked about the crazy “plan” with Deputy Sheriff Murphy of the Nye County Sheriff’s Office near the Area 51 and to Adventure Photo Tours who run regular tours to legal areas of interest outside the Nevada Test and Training Range.
You’ve heard about the sensational internet plan to “Storm Area 51”. The gag originated from a Facebook page called, “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us”. While no one is taking the idea seriously, it’s received remarkable media attention. As of Thursday, July 11, 2019, a Google search on “Storm Area 51” produced 174,000,000 results. Nearly “300,000 people” have signed up for the event on its Facebook page.
What would happen if 300,000 people tried to storm the U.S. Air Force’s secure Nevada Test and Training Range? We visited the area in 2017 to learn more about the massive, secretive test range, and today we spoke with local law enforcement and area experts surrounding the Nevada Test Range about the “Storm Area 51” social media trend.
Here is what we learned about trying to “storm” or even get near Area 51.
Donna and Will Tryon operate Adventure Photo Tours in Las Vegas, Nevada. The couple run regular tours to legal areas of interest surrounding the remote area outside the Nevada Test and Training Range. TheAviationist.com spoke to Donna Tryon, one of the owners of Adventure Photo Tours on Thursday after the “Storm Area 51” Facebook group went viral. When we asked Donna Tryon what would happen if an unauthorized person tried to gain entry to Area 51 she told us, “That would be very, very stupid. Area 51 is not a joke. No matter what is going on there, people need to remember, this is a military facility. You wouldn’t get far.”
A screen capture of the “Storm Area 51: They Can’t Stop All of Us” Facebook event page taken on Thursday, July 11, 2019. (Photo: via Facebook)
Tryon knows. On May 24, 2014, one of Tryon’s company tour operators was momentarily distracted by a tour client’s question as he drove their tour vehicle along the outer perimeter of Area 51. He accidently crossed a restricted area boundary sign. Within seconds, an armed response team stopped the tour company vehicle and made its occupants get out of the vehicle. The Area 51 security team, often called “the camo dudes”, summoned local law enforcement to issue violations to the tourists and the tour guide driver. It was an expensive and potentially dangerous lesson. In the more than 20 years that the Tryons’ company has been legally guiding tourists around the outer perimeter of Area 51, they have been buzzed by aircraft and had targeting lasers appear on a person’s head from out of the desert.
But the “camo dudes”, motion sensors, fences, remote cameras and other surveillance devices that ring the Nevada Test and Training Range are just some of the obstacles a person would face trying to get near the secret facility.
The first real obstacle anyone faces trying to enter the restricted area surrounding the Nevada Test Range is distance. If you start your trip to Area 51’s outer perimeter from Las Vegas and head toward Creech AFB in Clark County, Nevada, you drive about 45 miles on US 95. The last place you’ll be able to buy gas along the route before skirting the massive southwestern perimeter of the Nevada Test and Training Range is across from Creech AFB in Indian Springs. From here, the drive gets serious. “We get calls all the time about people stranded out there,” local law enforcement told us. “They’re in serious trouble. It’s an unforgiving place.”
Interstate 95 between Indian Springs and the next town, Beatty, is 73 miles of the worst driving in the world. The area is remarkably desolate, with no cell service during most of the trip. Daytime temperatures in the summer are almost always above 100-degrees. There is little traffic on the road and nothing on either side of the road but empty desert. When we made the trip between Indian Springs and Beatty along Interstate 95 at night we saw three other vehicles during the entire 73-mile stretch of road. Two of those were government vehicles.
Even the credible Newsweek.com media outlet picked up the “Storm Area 51: They Can’t Stop All of Us” Facebook event story. (Photo: via Newsweek.com/Google search)
The second obstacle is terrain. The area is remarkably unforgiving. With loose sand, rock, cactus, venomous snakes and a series of desert mountains surrounding the Nevada Test and Training Range, only a well trained and equipped person experienced in desert travel could cover the distance from the outer perimeter to get anywhere near Groom Lake where Area 51 is located.
There is also the issue of fitness.
Most people untrained in desert travel would have difficulty crossing even a single mile on foot during the day in the open desert, let alone the 26 miles from Highway 95 near Goldfield to the classified airfield at Area 51. Navigation in the desert, the heat, and especially the terrain would tax even the best athlete in this environment. Most people have a tough time walking a few miles in the Midwest on a mild day if their car breaks down. In the open Nevada desert, they probably wouldn’t survive the experience.
Finally, there is the issue of logistics. Every town surrounding the Nevada Test and Training Range is very small, most with either one or two small stores stocking water and food with public bathroom facilities. There are very few hotels in the area since there is little to see and such oppressive security. The few convenience stores around the outer perimeter of the area likely only have a few hundred bottles of water in stock, nowhere near enough food and water to support a crowd of more than 50 people at a time. So, if you plan to be one of the several hundred thousand people “storming Area 51”, be sure to bring your own snacks and a cooler. And ice. Plenty of ice.
We spoke to Deputy Sheriff Murphy of the Nye County Sheriff’s Office near the Area 51/ Nevada Test and Training Range about the internet sensation to storm Area 51. “We take every threat seriously,” Deputy Sheriff Murphy told TheAviationist.com. “Security for that area is handled by the military, with our agency providing support if ever needed”. Deputy Sheriff Murphy said his agency became aware of the social media trend around midnight Wednesday, and that members of his agency were not authorized to discuss specific plans and contingencies regarding potential security threats to the Nevada Test and Training Range. “People should respect those boundaries. They are there for a reason, and part of that is for public safety,” Deputy Sheriff Murphy told TheAviationist.com.
Another good reason to avoid travel in the area, especially away from roads, is the environment. The desert environment is extremely fragile, and any human intrusion into the desert has the potential for negative impact on the region. A large number of people in the open desert would create an environmental calamity for the fragile region, its plants and animals. When we visited the area in 2017, we saw many interesting species of desert animals including wild donkeys, desert fox, snakes, lizards, predatory birds and even wild dogs.
The environment surrounding the Nevada Test and Training Range is extremely fragile and includes many species who would be negatively impacted by too many visitors. We spotted these wild donkeys crossing the road while driving out of Beatty, Nevada next to the restricted area. (Photo: Tom Demerly / TheAviationist.com)
Lastly, there probably isn’t much to see in the Area 51/Nevada Test Range area unless you are an aviation enthusiast. Donna Tryon told TheAviationist.com that, “We know for a fact that they are doing development out there, that is what the place is for.” But added that not even locals know the specifics of what the military is working on inside the vast restricted area. Recent sightings of exotic aircraft in the area have included an F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter, thought to be retired from Air Force service in 2008. In 2017, TheAviationist.com spotted an F-117 being moved on a flatbed truck on November 14 along the southwest perimeter of the Nevada Test and Training Range.
But aside from extremely determined aircraft spotters or alien conspiracy theorists there is not much reason to join the group planning to storm Area 51. In our experience, there truly is “nothing to see here” around the area.
A facebook page asking people to join in to storm Area 51 has now gotten over 1,000,000 people saying that they will join. It sounds like a joke, but honestly the American people are in their right to do this. America is a country who's people control the government. For them to not be allowed inside would be proof that America is no longer the land of the free, but now a communist nation. Also the 2nd Amendment says that they have the right to bear arms...so watch out USAF. Also the 8th Amendment says that the US cannot use excessive force like snipers or weapons. The Bill of Rights states; Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Thus, the people are within their right to storm Area 51 and Area S4. The public can organise, can carry weapons and can storm a USAF military base as they wish. It was Abraham Lincoln who said America is “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” So sign up at the Facebook page and prepare for storming Area 51 and Area S4 along the way. Sounds like lots of fun and bring the kids and dogs. Great for a elementary, junior high and high school outings. Don't worry about security, they will all back down, not a single shot fired and we will walk in with our picnic baskets and kids and pets having a good old time. Its our country, its our government. We are in our rights to do so. Scott C. Waring
UFO sighting: Glowing ‘alien ship’ is PROOF aliens live on Earth, claims UFO expert
UFO sighting: Glowing ‘alien ship’ is PROOF aliens live on Earth, claims UFO expert
AN ALIEN ship photographed escaping a mountain peak in Northern California is undeniable “proof” aliens are alive and here on Earth, a UFO expert has shockingly claimed.
The supposedalien UFO was snapped coming-out of Mount Shasta – a volcanic peak in Siskiyou County, California. A witness photographed the unidentified object on April 17 this year and submitted the photos to the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). The UFO witness said the object was a “large light” with a cigar-shaped object directly below it. The UFO then supposedly took off and disappeared from sight.
The images have since been analysed by self-titled UFO expert Scott C Waring, who believes they are genuine pictures of an alien spaceship.
Mr Waring runs the website ET Data Base, where he analyses and compiles UFO sighting reports, video clips and photos.
In regards to the Mount Shasta UFO, Mr Waring said the US volcano has a long history associated with alien encounters.
He said: “Mount Shasta in the Wikipedia says ‘it is often said to hide a secret beneath its peaks.
“‘In some stories, the city is no longer inhabited, while in others, it is inhabited by a technologically advanced society of human beings or mythical creatures’.”
UFO sighting: Scott Waring believes this is a genuine alien UFO
(Image: SCOTT C WARING)
“It is correct. Even 40 years ago – yeah I’m old – I was told as a kid the stories of beings that lived below Mount Shasta, one of which is supposed to be the legendary Saint Germain who is famous for starting the new cultural Age of Aquarius, also called Master Rakoczi.
“Many people claimed to have seen and spoken with him on the mountain.
“I call it an advanced alien race that is spiritual in nature and mostly keeps to themselves below Mount Shasta.
“These photos are proof that aliens still live within the mountain.”
According to UFO expert Brian David Wallenstine, Mount Shasta is one of the most frequent UFO sighting hotspots on the planet.
These photos are proof that aliens still live within the mountain
Scott C Waring, UFO expert
In his book Mount Shasta Sightings, he wrote: “Perhaps like the salmon, we grow in the safety of the river only to naturally migrate to the ocean when we are old enough to navigate it competently.
“To think that we humans are the only conscious life form in an infinite universe is not only trite but also egotistical and inaccurate.
“It is for us to assert and see the truth through the plentiful discoveries made over the millennium in sightings recorded on rock drawings, archaeological digs, anthropological data, writings, pictures from telescopes and the advanced technology found, as our roadmap home.”
UFO sighting: Mount Shasta in California is a popular UFO sighting hotspot
(Image: SCOTT C WARING)
UFO sighting: Mr Waring thinks aliens live inside of the US volcano
(Image: SCOTT C WARING)
However, a more likely explanation for these unusual photos is a psychological mind trick known as pareidolia.
Pareidolia is a phenomenon where people, and in particular UFO-hunters, see shapes, faces and patterns where they of not exist.
Brigitte Nerlich, a professor of science at the University of Nottingham, explained: Pareidolia, is, it seems, ‘the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist’ - Collins Dictionary.
“As far back as 1965 Carl Sagan had talked about pareidolia and put forward an evolutionary explanation.”
The famous physicists proposed pareidolia developed as an evolutionary trait to better help infants recognise faces.
Laat die aliens zien. Al meer dan een miljoen mensen willen Area 51 gaan bestormen
Laat die aliens zien. Al meer dan een miljoen mensen willen Area 51 gaan bestormen
Er zijn inmiddels al ruim 1,2 miljoen mensen die op 20 september de zwaarbewaakte militaire basis Area 51 willen bestormen.
Volgens complottheoretici bevinden zich op de basis, die in het verleden voor allerlei militaire tests werd gebruikt, bewijzen van buitenaards leven.
Het Facebookevent ‘Bestorm Area 51, ze kunnen ons niet allemaal tegenhouden’ telt ondertussen meer dan 1,2 miljoen aanwezigen. Ruim een miljoen mensen zeggen interesse te hebben.
Ontmoedigen
“Laat ons die aliens zien,” luidt het.
Er bestaat een kans dat het om een grap gaat, maar toch is het Amerikaanse leger er niet gerust op.
Een woordvoerster van de luchtmacht zei enkele dagen geleden iedereen te willen ontmoedigen om af te reizen naar de basis.
Veel mensen geloven dat in Area 51 bewijzen zijn terug te vinden van buitenaards leven.
Tegengesproken
Altijd werd tegen het volk gezegd dat de basis helemaal niet bestond, iets wat pas in 2013 door de CIA officieel werd tegengesproken.
Velen geloven dat op de basis aliens en hun ruimteschepen verborgen zijn.
Geheim onderzoek
Daarnaast beweerde de Amerikaanse overheid lange tijd niets te weten over UFO’s, maar in 2017 bevestigde het Pentagon dat het jarenlang in het geheim onderzoek had gedaan naar onbekende vliegende objecten.
In dit programma werd jaarlijks 22 miljoen dollar belastinggeld gepompt.
US Air Force is 'ready to protect America and its assets' as more than one million conspiracy theorists join Facebook event to 'storm' classified military base Area 51 in Nevada to 'see them aliens'
US Air Force is 'ready to protect America and its assets' as more than one million conspiracy theorists join Facebook event to 'storm' classified military base Area 51 in Nevada to 'see them aliens'
The 'Storm Area 51' Facebook event is scheduled to take place on September 20
More than one million people have now signed up to the 'see them aliens' event
US Air Force has now issued a stern warning to the Area 51 conspiracy theorists
The US Air Force has warned it is 'ready to defend America and its assets' after more than a million people joined an event to 'storm Area 51'.
The 'Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us' Facebookevent is scheduled to take place on September 20 and has attracted millions of alien conspiracy theorists.
The organisers said: 'We can move faster than their bullets. Let's see them aliens.'
It's likely few, if any, are actually serious about attending but the US Air Force has still issued a stern statement about the satirical event.
Air Force spokesperson Laura McAndrews said: '[Area 51] is an open training range for the US Air Force, and we would discourage anyone from trying to come into the area where we train American armed forces.
'The US Air Force always stands ready to protect America and its assets.'
More than a million alien hunters are gearing up to storm Area 51, America's most secretive and secure military base shrouded in extraterrestrial conspiracy theories
(file photo)
Fanatics took to social media to share their excitement at the event, with many posting memes and gifs of their hopeful alien interactions.
'We will all meet up at the Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction and coordinate our entry,' the event description says.
'If we Naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Lets [sic] see them [sic] aliens.'
The phrase 'Naruto run' refers to anime character Naruto Uzumaki, who is known for a running style that has his body tilted forward and low to the ground while his arms are stretched out behind his back.
The Area 51 Alien Center is a truck stop on Interstate 95, about an hour's drive from the Nevada Test and Training Range - which contains Area 51.
The last known person who went hunting for aliens at Area 51 was shot dead by guards back in January.
More than a million people have RSVPd that they are 'going' to the event. One attendee posted a map explaining how the group would approach the highly-secure base
The Facebook event is hosted by a 'religious organization' called 'S***posting because I'm in shambles' and a gaming page called 'SmyleeKun'. 'We will all meet up at the Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction and coordinate our entry,' the event description says
'Area 51' is the codename for the highly-classified remote detachment of California's Edwards Air Base, located 83 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
It was founded in 1955 as a test site for the Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance plane.
Since then, however, it has become the subject of numerous UFO sightings and has become inextricably linked in the public's mind with captive aliens and government conspiracies.
Famous machines developed there include the U-2 spy plane, SR-71 Blackbird, and the F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighter.
Many conspiracy theorists claim the base has been used to research an alleged crashed alien spacecraft at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.
The base was erected in a remote part of the Nevada desert to avoid prying eyes
What takes place inside the heavy-duty fence at Area 51 has remained a mystery to anyone without high-level security clearance, save for a few photos taken illegally by curious conspiracy theorists.
In 2013 the US government admitted that the base is a secret intelligence hub when the CIA released an official history of the U-2 and OXCART projects, along with aerial photos of the site.
NTTR experienced a rare security breach in January when an unidentified male sped through a checkpoint at the entrance.
Guards and Nye County police chased him at high-speed for about eight miles before he came to a stop and exited his vehicle.
He began advancing toward officers with an 'unknown cylindrical object' in hand and did not heed verbal warnings to stop, so security officials were forced to open fire.
There aren’t enough space explosions to explain strange radio bursts
There aren’t enough space explosions to explain strange radio bursts
The source of fast radio bursts remains a mysteryBill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF; Hubble Legacy Archive, ESA, NASA
By Leah Crane
Many of the brightest, weirdest phenomena in space come from cataclysmic events like explosions or collisions. But many fast radio bursts (FRBs), one of the most mysterious space signals we’ve seen, must not. That might mean that they are all part of a class of FRB that we previously thought might be rare.
FRBs are milliseconds-long bursts of powerful radio waves that come from the depths of space. They have been attributed to many different sources, from neutron star mergers to alien spaceships, but no explanations have definitively fit yet.
Most of the FRBs we’ve spotted appear only once, but three appear to repeat, sending multiple blasts of radio waves through space. Those three cannot come from cataclysmic events like neutron star collisions or supernovae that destroy their progenitors.
Now, Vikram Ravi at the California Institute of Technology has calculated that the rest probably don’t either. He used a few of the closest non-repeating FRBs we’ve seen to calculate a lower limit on how often they occur, and compared that rate to the rates of cataclysmic events in the nearby universe.
Australian scientists have pinpointed, in a world-first, the precise location of a mysterious burst of radio waves that originated in another galaxy 3.6 billion light years away. (Supplied - CSIRO)
CSIRO researchers discovered the pulse of energy using a radio telescope in Western Australia and two other telescopes on two continents. (Supplied - CSIRO)
The question now – especially for those who believe in the possibility of alien life - is how the waves are being produced, and by what. (Supplied - CSIRO)
The exact cause or meaning of the radio waves are yet to be determined, however scientists have said that being able to pinpoint their geo-location in the universe is a major step towards figuring that out. (Supplied - CSIRO)
“The rate of FRBs appears to be higher than the rate of anything we can really think of that can make an FRB just once,” Ravi says. That means that a single type of explosion or collision cannot account for all the FRBs.
It’s possible that all of the proposals for cataclysmic sources are simultaneously correct, he says, but perhaps more likely is that most – or even all – FRBs are actually repeaters. That way, each source produces multiple bursts over its lifespan and we don’t need as many sources. We may not be detecting all of the repeated bursts because they are slower or dimmer than the repeating sources that we have seen.
“I don’t think we can rule out that there are multiple classes of things that go boom in the radio sky,” says Victoria Kaspi at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. “We have suspected and have some evidence that there are multiple classes, and what fraction belong to each class is unknown.” Because none of our models thus far quite fit, she says it’s also possible the FRBs are formed by events we’ve never seen or considered before.
“We need to say very specifically what sorts of galaxies FRBs come from and where in those galaxies they come from,” says Ravi – just three of them have been localised so far. “If we’re doing our jobs right, we should be able to figure it out in the next 5 years.”
Mysterie rond onverklaarbare ruimtesignalen wordt groter. Hebben we te maken met een nieuw fenomeen?
Mysterie rond onverklaarbare ruimtesignalen wordt groter. Hebben we te maken met een nieuw fenomeen?
Er is de laatste tijd veel te doen rond zogeheten snelle radioflitsen, mysterieuze ruimtesignalen die slechts een fractie van een seconde duren.
Mogelijke verklaringen voor dit fenomeen variëren van neutronensterren of supernova-explosies tot buitenaardse ruimteschepen.
Uit nieuw onderzoek blijkt nu dat deze krachtige stoten radiogolven hoogstwaarschijnlijk niet afkomstig zijn van botsingen tussen neutronensterren of supernova’s.
Veel talrijker
Sommige radioflitsen blijken zich te herhalen, terwijl catastrofale explosies in het heelal eenmalig zijn.
Ook de eenmalige radioflitsen zijn veel talrijker dan supernova-explosies en botsingen tussen neutronensterren, zo heeft astronoom Vikram Ravi van het California Institute of Technology ontdekt.
Hij zei dat er meer snelle radioflitsen zijn dan objecten die slechts één snelle radioflits kunnen voortbrengen.
Gemist
Dat we maar één flits van een bepaalde bron hebben waargenomen zou te maken kunnen hebben met het feit dat we de andere flitsen hebben gemist.
Het zou zelfs kunnen zijn dat alle snelle radioflitsen zich herhalen, aldus Ravi.
Victoria Kaspi van de McGill-universiteit in Canada zei dat er bewijs is dat er meerdere klassen radioflitsen zijn.
Onduidelijk
Welke flitsen in welke klasse thuishoren is nog onduidelijk, lichtte ze toe.
“Het is ook mogelijk dat snelle radioflitsen ontstaan tijdens gebeurtenissen die we nog nooit hebben waargenomen of overwogen,” zei Kaspi.
In de komende vijf jaar hopen de astronomen meer antwoorden te krijgen.
Most people think tree rings are primarily used to tell the age of a tree and secondarily to make furniture look better. Believe it or not, there’s so much more that can be found in tree rings that an entire scientific field – dendroclimatology – is devoted to the study of climate and atmospheric conditions during different periods in history that can be revealed by analyzing tree rings. Excited dendroclimatologists are shaking like redwoods in a California quake at what they might find in the rings of a well-preserved kauri tree from about 41,000 years ago found buried in a swamp in New Zealand. One thing they won’t find is end tables and bookcases. However, what they will find is a bark-encased picture of Earth’s last magnetic polar shift – an event that is quickly occurring again. Did the rings reverse too?
“Over a period of 200 to 300 years, the virtual geomagnetic pole moved in clockwise fashion from its original northern position, traveling well into the Southern Hemisphere before swinging north again. If this were to occur at present, it would probably have significant implications for modern technology because very much stronger cosmic radiation impinging on the Earth’s surface would almost certainly impact upon satellites and communication. We do not need to be alarmist over this but it is important to know just how quickly these changes can occur.”
Kauri tree
It’s too late to not be alarmist, since the news about the magnetic North Pole moving to Siberia and on to the Southern Hemisphere has already been on Twitter, conspiracy sites and the mainstream media. However, Alan Hogg, director of Waikato University’s Waikato Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory, say studying the rings throughout this monstrous 16-meter-long (52.5 feet), 2.5 meters wide (8.2 feet), 60-ton log will reveal exactly how radiocarbon changed during its life span. That life span, which was estimated to be between 1500 and 200 years, began about 42,5000 years ago near what is now Kaikohe, a town in the Far North District of New Zealand. The kauri (Agathis australis) was found in late March in a massive swamp during excavations for a new geothermal power station near Ngāwhā Springs. The tree was preserved in clay 9 meters (29.5 feet) underground and the ends had to be cut off to move it. during site works for the new power station.
”It feels like it’s being returned to its rightful owners.”
Project site manager Mike Ohs gave the tree to local Maori leaders, who, after finding out it may be the only tree ever discovered from the Laschamp Event, the most recent reversal of the Earth’s north and south magnetic poles, allowed researchers like Alan Hogg and Professor Chris Turney from the University of New South Wales, an expert in paleoclimatology and climate change over the past 40,000 years, to study it. their initial reports in early July confirmed the tree’s age.
“We will be comparing results from dating this tree with dating from other sites to build a clearer picture of past climate changes.”
The tree was part of a vast kauri forest which covered the upper North Island and was exposed to the climate change caused by the Laschamp Event. While traumatic, it obviously survived, as did the kauri forests until the 1820 arrival of Europeans with axes, saws and a burning desire to cut down trees. It’s estimated that only 4 per cent of that original forest now remains.
What will this tree reveal about the last magnetic pole reversal … and the next one? What will it tell us … and possibly warn us … about climate change?
The "time traveller”, who called himself Noah, claimed to have come from the year 2030. But in a video posted Saturday, 16-year-old YouTuber Denis Bel claimed he was the real Noah. "I can't do this stupid character anymore," he said in the video.
Describing the impact "Noah" has had on his life, he went on: "I have to get rid of this looming that's above me that keeps making me scared of being exposed."
Later on, Denis alleges that ApexTV tried to make him and his parents sign a non-disclosure agreement so he could never reveal his true identity.
"I know ApexTV is going to be flipping once he sees this video because he knows I'm revealing everything," he added.
In a series of videos which appeared on ApexTV's website and YouTube channel, "Noah" made a series of outlandish claims.
YouTuber Denis Bel has claimed he is the real Noah
(Image: Youtube/ DENISBEL)
Time traveller Noah claims it was all a hoax
(Image: Youtube/APEXTV)
These included that he had taken a picture of dinosaurs 66 million years ago, that Britain will rejoin the European Union and that by 2030 most of the US east and west coasts would be underwater.
The videos racked up millions of views over the course of two years.
But in a video posted on Saturday, 16-year-old YouTuber Denis Bel claimed he was the real Noah.
Describing how he rose to international attention through the character, Denis said "Noah" had taken over his life.
Denis apologised to anyone fooled by his fake videos
(Image: Youtube/Denisbel)
In the video, Denis claimed he was first approached by ApexTV when he was 14 years old.
He said the channel, which specialises in paranormal and mysterious videos, offered him money to make a fake time travel video.
But as the character's popularity rose, Denis said many tried to work out his real identity.
He even had a number of death threats from people who accurately linked him to Noah.
Denis said he also had to delete one of his other YouTube channels which used his real identity after it was flooded by internet users furious about the hoax.
The teenager also apologised to anyone who fell for his fake videos.
Now, Denis says he just wants to be a regular YouTuber.
“I am not attempting to deceive anyone, my sole objective is to prove to you that time travel exists and that I, myself, am a time traveller. First of all, time travel became possible in the year 2003, it is only used by top-secret organisations. The ability to time travel will not be released to the public until 2028. Well, I have actually predicted multiple things before. Including celebrity deaths, world issues, world events. And the future president of the United States that will be coming soon, who is Yolanda Renee King. Granddaughter of Martin Luther King Jr.”
If you believed those words (and many others) when a pixelated young man named “Noah” made them in late 2017 and throughout the next two-and-a-half years on the Apex TV YouTube channel – including one while allegedly connected to a lie detector — this next statement from him is going to be a big disappointment.
“I cannot believe I’m making this video now. It’s absolutely insane that I’m actually recording this and I’m saying everything finally. It’s been so long oh my gosh. Hello, everyone, my name is Denis and I’m Noah the time traveller, the famous viral time traveller who was all over the internet at one point.“
No, he’s not just coming clean on using a fake name – all of the alleged time travelers do that – he’s showing his face and admitting he’s not from the future or the past – he’s a present-day fraud.
“Well, it’s all fake. If you haven’t guessed already… I’m not an actual time traveller. It started when I was 14-years-old, I was an obsessive YouTubers and was posting comedy videos on … my channel nearly every day. Eventually it led me to become friends with the owner of ApexTV and that’s where it all started.”
And ended … although 16-year-old Denis Bel’s 10-minute long confessional video has been pulled due to copyright infringement by – no surprise here – ApexTV (you can see parts of it here), which is still posting videos of other “time travelers” and soliciting any hiding in closets to come out and partake in the fame and fortune that hooked Denis “Noah” Bel when he was just 14 into making numerous videos where he said things like:
“When you time travel you gain time. When I was in junior high and I was a time traveller, I had to take these pills to make sure I don’t grow old while time travelling.”
He also predicted that bitcoin would survive at least until 2030, Donald Trump would be re-elected president (which may explain why so many people are both happy and unhappy Noah is a hoax), “designer babies” will be popular and expensive, Google Glass-style robotics will be common and the Internet of things will make home operations totally independent of human intervention. While Denis made some money and got virally famous, he couldn’t predict what else would happen.
“I was scared every day that people were going to find my home address, visit me, or find my school and start calling in there. I can’t do this stupid character anymore. I have to get rid of this looming threat that’s above me.”
Besides pressure from Apex TV for him and his parents to sign non-disclosure agreements, Bel says he received death threats from people who already figured out he was Noah. Death threats! Sadly, it doesn’t take a time traveler to correctly predict that death threats have become the new middle finger salute.
What’s next for Denis Bel? He wants to live a normal life and post ordinary videos on his own YouTube channel. Good luck with that. What about Apex TV? While it doesn’t appear to have made an official comment on Denis “Noah” Bel, it will likely continue to post its time traveler videos.
Will anyone believe them anymore? Did anyone believe them before?
Malcolm Lees enlisted in the British Royal Air Force in the early 1950s and retired in the late 1960s. In 1962 he received a posting to a RAF station in the county of Wiltshire, which he declined to name, and worked in the prestigious and secretive world of intelligence gathering. Most of the work, Lees explained, was routine and even mundane and he laughed heartily at the idea, spouted by many, that intelligence work was a glamorous one full of James Bond-style escapades. Nevertheless, Lees said, there was one aspect of his career that really was stranger than fiction. Early one September morning in 1962, a call came into the base from someone who had seen a UFO hovering in the vicinity of the ancient standing-stones in the historic English village of Avebury, Wiltshire.
UFO reports reached the base from time to time, said Lees. They were always handled by the RAF’s Provost and Security Services. For the most part they were mind-numbing and mundane, and related to little more than sightings of unidentified lights in the sky that could, in reality, have been anything or nothing. Invariably, he said, the reports were a week, or even more, old by the time they were received. And so, they were simply filed and passed up the chain of command – that was then at Government Buildings, Acton, and which relocated to Royal Air Force Rudloe Manor in 1977 (Note: for years, there were rumors that Rudloe Manor was some kind of “secret base” where dead aliens were held). But this particular case was a little different, said Lees.
The witness was a middle-aged lady who had lived in Avebury all of her adult life and who was fascinated by archaeological history. A “spinster,” (as the files describe her) she would often stroll among the formations at night, marveling at their creation and musing upon their history. It was on the night in question that she had been out walking at around 10:30 p.m. when she was both startled and amazed to see a small ball of light, perhaps two-feet in diameter, gliding slowly through the stones. Transfixed and rooted to the spot, she watched as it closed in on her at a height of about twelve feet. The ball then stopped fifteen feet or so from her, and small amounts of what looked like liquid metal slowly and silently dripped from it to the ground. Then, in an instant, the ball exploded in a bright, white flash. For a moment she was blinded by its intensity and instinctively fell to her knees. When her eyes cleared, however, she was faced with a horrific sight. The ball of light had gone, but on the ground in front of her was what she could only describe as a monstrous, writhing worm.
The creature, she said, was about five feet long, perhaps eight or nine inches thick, and its skin was milk-white. As she slowly rose to her feet, the creature’s head turned suddenly in her direction and two bulging eyes opened. When it began to move unsteadily towards her in a caterpillar-like fashion, she emitted a hysterical scream and fled the scene. Rushing back home, she slammed the door shut and frantically called the airbase, after having been directed to them by the less-than-impressed local police. The Provost and Security Services were used to dealing with UFO reports, said Lees, and a friend of his in the P&SS was dispatched early the next day to interview the woman – amid much hilarity on the part of his colleagues, all of whom thought that the story was someone’s idea of a joke. On returning, however, Lees’ friend and colleague had a very serious and grim look on his face, and informed him guardedly that whatever had taken place, it was definitely no hoax.
The woman, he said, had practically barricaded herself in her home, was almost incoherent with fear, and only agreed to return to the scene after lengthy coaxing. Lees’ colleague said that he found no evidence of the UFO. The worm, or whatever it was, was clearly long gone. On the ground near the standing stone, however, was a three-foot long trail of a slime-like substance, not unlike that left by a snail. Lees’ colleague quickly improvised and, after racing back to the woman’s house, scooped some of the material onto a spoon and into a drinking glass.
After assuring the woman that her case would be taken very seriously, and requesting that she discuss the events with no one, he headed back to the base, the slimy substance in hand. A report was duly prepared and dispatched up the chain of command – along with the unidentified slime. For more than a week, said Lees, plainclothes military personnel wandered casually among the stones, seeking out evidence of anything unusual. Nothing else was ever found, however. Lees said that he was fascinated by this incident because it was one of the few UFO-related cases he heard about that was taken very seriously at an official level and that had some form of material evidence in support of it. He did not know the outcome of the investigation, but he never forgot about it. Which is hardly surprising!
I’ve never wanted to end something so bad as when I stepped into the grocery store and saw, for the first time, Marty the robot. I know, I know, property destruction is wrong. I didn’t act on it, but seeing those googly eyes peek over the mangoes filled me with a deep and primal blood lust (oil lust?) that’s been locked up in my DNA since before the flood. I saw Marty the robot and I saw that it must not be. So I left before I made a scene. I’m no freedom fighter.
There seems to be a very real and very deep repulsion inherent in humans’ feelings towards robots. We don’t like robots, as evidenced by the growing trend of people acting on that atavistic urge to murder them. But we also aren’t creeped out by all robots equally. There’s a concept called the “uncanny valley” which shows the point of maximum creepiness. A new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience has found the part of the brain responsible for the uncanny valley effect and what’s going on in our primitive monkey brains as we meet our replacements.
The uncanny valley was first described by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori. It’s where something, in this case a robot, is made to look like a human but falls a bit short. People tend to like robots more as they become more humanoid, but at a certain point there is a dramatic dip in likability, the so-called valley, before becoming more likable again as they get closer to a perfect facsimile of a human. According to a new study that has located the part of the brain responsible for the uncanny valley, different people may react to the uncanny valley with varied intensity. This may explain why a robot that’s essentially a rolling traffic cone almost landed me in jail. I blame the googly eyes.
Whoever thought the googly eyes were a good idea is a grade-a psychopath.
To figure out the physical location in the brain of the uncanny valley, researchers hooked up 21 volunteers to MRI machines and gave them some tests that involved pictures of various kinds of robots and humans combined with likability decisions. In one experiment, the volunteers were shown pictures of humans, artificial humans, android robots, humanoid robots and mechanoid robots, and were asked to assign values to how likable each was. Then they were asked to pick one of these humans or robots to complete a task: selecting a gift that a hypothetical human may like. The volunteers chose either real humans or human-like robots, but they did not choose the robots in which the difference between human and robot was the hardest to make out.
According to the study, researchers found a link between the uncanny valley and both the prefrontal cortex and amygdala. The prefrontal cortex is the part of our brain that is the most different from other primates. It’s the part that makes executive decisions that go against our primal urges. It was my prefrontal cortex that weighed the risk-reward balance for murdering Marty the robot. The amygdala is a very primitive part of our brain responsible for the “fight-or-flight” response, fear, anxiety, all those fun things. It was my amygdala that made me want to do a robot murder.
“I want you to quietly accept the inevitable.”
The prefrontal cortex showed a dip in activity when volunteers were shown robots in the uncanny valley, and conversely the amygdala seemed to show more of a reaction to the robots in the uncanny valley.
The researchers think that understanding how humans react to the uncanny valley is key to a future where humans and robots coexist peacefully. According to Astrid Rosenthal-von der Pütten, from the RWTH Aachen University in German:
“This is the first study to show individual differences in the strength of the uncanny valley effect, meaning that some individuals react overly and others less sensitively to human-like artificial agents. This means there is no one robot design that fits – or scares – all users. In my view, smart robot behaviour is of great importance, because users will abandon robots that do not prove to be smart and useful.”
So regardless of our repulsion, they hope to be able to make robots that even stubborn cranks like myself will tolerate. To that I say: good luck.
Conspiracy Theorists Observe Three UFOs Coming Out from the Sun
Conspiracy Theorists Observe Three UFOs Coming Out from the Sun
Several alien life enthusiasts have discovered three UFOs firing out of the Sun in an amazing NASA footage.
Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is NASA’s ambitious attempt to explore the internal structure and outer atmosphere of the Sun. The space telescope has been helping scientists to understand the complicated gas currents of the Sun hidden beneath its surface. SOHO was also instrumental in discovering over 3,000 comets.
However, some UFO hunters believe the NASA Sun observatory has now revealed its most incredible find to date – uncovering three alien UFOs as they shoot out of our star.
They pointed out a NASA video that is seemingly showing many UFOs shooting out of our sun and around the SOHO satellite.
YouTube user SolarBug posted the video to the video sharing site.
After enlarging screenshots of the black and white footage, it appears to show three black shapes firing out of the Sun at high speed.
Other conspiracy theorists have been claiming that alien spaceships have caused a solar flare.
SOHO is slowly orbiting around the First Lagrangian Point (L1) to move around the Sun in step with the Earth. It is made possible with the combined gravity of the Earth and Sun, which keep SOHO in orbit locked to the Earth-Sun line.
As an oval of school children gazed at mysterious objects in the skies of Melbourne one afternoon back in 1966, seven pilots flew overhead with reports at least one pilot allegedly giving chase.
It was around lunchtime on Wednesday, April 6, 1966, when students and staff from Westall High School and Westall State School, in south east Melbourne, spilled out onto the local oval for sport.
As the students went about their exercises, hundreds of them claim to have witnessed unexplained objects flying overhead before disappearing into a nearby grassy paddock known as The Grange.
To this day, residents and interested parties remain baffled by what took place that day, with conspiracy theories pointing to a government cover-up rather than an extra-terrestal visit. (Supplied)
To this day, residents and interested parties remain baffled by what took place that day, with conspiracy theories pointing to a government cover-up rather than an extra-terrestrial visit.
Shane Ryan has spent the past 14 years searching for answers to what has become known as the Westall incident.
In those years, he has spoken with more than 400 people who claimed to have witnessed the incident and subsequent stern visits from authorities. However, up until last week the Canberra-based researcher knew nothing about the seven pilots.
Shane Ryan has spent the past 14 years searching for answers to what has become known as the Westall incident. (Supplied)
“Another piece of information has come through that somebody who lived locally to Westall at the time has said he knows personally one of the seven pilots who was up in the air from Moorabbin Airport and were witnesses to what happened that day,” Mr Ryan told nine.com.au.
“He knows personally the one pilot who got closest to the object and actually tried to chase it. This man is still alive and living in a nursing home.”
Mr Ryan is in the process of getting in contact with the pilot in the hope he is willing to speak about what he saw.
Photograph of the supposed Westall UFO encounter where more than 200 students and teachers at two Victorian state schools allegedly witnessed an unexplained flying object which descended into a nearby open wild grass field (AAP)
The government agencies
Mr Ryan admits he is contacted regularly by strangers who claim to have information about the Westall incident. He said he investigates all the tips in an attempt to verify them.
“When I originally started my research, I thought I’d be able to crack this nut in a year or two years, and get to the bottom of the mystery,” he said.
“Part of that thinking was that if there was this response by government authorities to the extent that it seems that there was, they must have some answers. But my feeling now is part of the reason for the cover up or the shutdown was there were no answers.”
Hundreds of students claim to have witnessed unexplained objects flying overhead before disappearing into a nearby grassy paddock known as The Grange. (Supplied)
Relatives from two former Department of Supply workers have been in touch to disclose possible links to Westall and crash investigators from the Department of Civil Aviation.
Over the years there has been suggestions that the Westall incident was part of a government program called ‘Project HIBAL’ which operated in the 1960s in Melbourne. Project HIBAL was set up to sample radiation in the atmosphere using a high-altitude balloon.
Mr Ryan said he genuinely agrees that HIBAL and other scenarios are worth examining if only to rule them out.
“For whatever reason, even after all these years, that information, that documentation that gives us information about the involvement by these government agencies, which we now know at this one level, did take place it’s just not publicly available,” he said.
Mr Ryan has spoken with more than 400 people who claimed to have witnessed the incident and subsequent stern visits from authorities. (Supplied)
“I guess that raises the question why is it not publicly available?”
According to National Archives of Australia online searches, the Department of Supply did exist as did a Department of Supply and Development. Between 1939 and 1941 the Department of Supply and Development was responsible for the supply of munitions and the production of aircrafts.
A search for the Westall incident returned no results, while ‘flying saucer’ returned 28 results, though none made specific mention of an incident in Melbourne in 1966.
Fear and ridicule
Phyll Tierney, who was 15 at th
e time of the sighting, said she remembers seeing three silver disc, dish-like shaped objects with a dome at the top in the sky. She claims none of them made a sound.
“We weren’t allowed to talk to the media,” Ms Tierney previously told nine.com.au.
“They told us all to go to the quadrangle, the headmaster was adamant that we’d seen nothing.”
Mr Ryan said witnesses have told him that within 20 to 30 minutes after the sightings “the military and the police were on the scene” as well as two separate fire brigades.
Relatives from two former Department of Supply workers have been in touch to disclose possible links to Westall and crash investigators from the Department of Civil Aviation. (Supplied)
“I think there is an element of fear involved,” he said in reply to questions about why more officials haven’t come forward.
“For the people who were there in some sort of official capacity – whether they were police or representing some other government agency - it seems to me that something must have been said to them at the time and whatever was said to them stayed with them all these years.”
As well as possible concern about retribution, Mr Ryan admits a fear of ridicule may come into play for some.
“But I think the more that gets spoken about and the more that gets aired in public I think the more those barriers will break down. So, through films and articles in the media it gets the word out I think and people who had some involvement and connection … they see this and they make contact,” he said.
First alien moons are spotted in the act of being born: Scientists believe they have captured small planet and embryo moons 370 light years away from Earth
First alien moons are spotted in the act of being born: Scientists believe they have captured small planet and embryo moons 370 light years away from Earth
An image from ALMA observatory in Chile shows the never before seen phenomenon 370 light-years away
Circle of gas and dust, known as a circumplanetary disk, forms around a growing planet in PDS 70 star system
Scientists have said the disk is of a similar structure to the one which birthed the many moons of Jupiter
Images taken using the massive 66-antenna, which collected the millimeter wave radio signals showing dust
Recently, researchers discovered two planets - PDS 70c and PDS 70b - which orbit the young star PDS 70.
And now they have found evidence of a dust-filled disk, known as a circumplanetary disk, around PDS 70c which could start to form multiple moons.
Astronomer at Rice University in Houston, Texas, Andrea Isella told Science Daily: 'Planets form from disks of gas and dust around newly forming stars, and if a planet is large enough, it can form its own disk as it gathers material in its orbit around the star.
'Jupiter and its moons are a little planetary system within our solar system, for example, and it's believed Jupiter's moons formed from a circumplanetary disk when Jupiter was very young.
A faint disk of dust surrounds a large planet, possibly giving rise to a new moon, in an illustration of the star system PDS 70.
'For the first time, we can conclusively see the telltale signs of a circumplanetary disk, which helps to support many of the current theories of planet formation.
'By comparing our observations to the high-resolution infrared and optical images, we can see that an otherwise enigmatic concentration of tiny dust particles is a planet-girding disk of dust, the first such feature ever conclusively observed.'
Using the massive 66-antenna, Andrea and his colleagues collected millimetre wave radio signals that showed the dust grains around PDS 70c.
The circumplanetary disk has been captured around growing planet PDS 70c and could represent moons growing. The two faint smudges, 70b and 70c, are associated with newly formed moons
At first, they thought it was just gas, but soon realised it was circumplanetary disks, the structure from which moons grow.
Circumplanetary disks disappear within around 10million years, and are believed to have emerged less than 4billion years ago in our solar system.
Mr Isella added: 'There's much that we don't understand about how planets form, and we now finally have the instruments to make direct observations and begin answering questions about how our solar system formed and how other planets might form.
'We’ll be able to come back to this system at different periods and more easily map the orbit of the planets and the concentration of dust in the system.
'This will give us unique insights into the orbital properties of solar systems in their very earliest stages of development.'
Crop circles. We’ve seen them in the air from planes, in the movies, or perhaps even first hand. Many consider crop circles to have been created by extraterrestrials who yearn to subtly communicate with our species; others view them as an agricultural and technologically artistic phenomenon and believe the alien connection may be a hoax. But no matter which crop they’re carved from, these intricate geometric patterns hold messages waiting to be decoded.
Whether you believe crop circles are alien manifestations, or farmers with a creative bent (and lots of time on their hands), the history and mystery surrounding crop circles has been around since the mid-1600s.
“Both our organs of perception and the phenomenal world we perceive seem to be best understood as systems of pure pattern, or as geometric structures of form and proportion.”
— Robert Lawlor, Sacred Geometry
Crop Circle Messages, Locations, And History
The first crop circle to be recorded dates back to 1678, with a woodcut illustrating a circle being cut from an oat field. The woodcut refers to a legend known as the “Devil’s Mowing,” feeding into the myth that circle crops are the work of otherworldly and darker influences. The connection can be made with the scythe, a common agricultural tool that might symbolize the end, or death, of an agrarian cycle.
In 1966, a crop circle was discovered in Tully, Australia that is one of the first to be connected to UFOs. The farmer who found the patterns reported seeing a “flying saucer” rising out of the area, creating what the media referred to as “flying saucer” nests.
More circles began appearing in the United Kingdom in the 1970s with most congregating in the Wiltshire area, the same region as many other ancient monuments. One in particular, discovered in 1996 across from the legendary Stonehenge had a design known as the “Julia Set,” a very complicated fractal configuration that led many to believe it was created by extraterrestrials, sending a message through sacred geometry such as the Celtic Cross, triskelion, and other intricate shapes that dot the land in more than 60 countries.
Researchers believe there are certain years in which crop circles appear more frequently and perhaps with more urgency. The tetrahedron pictogram, which appeared at the location of the Barbury Castle in 1991, made many wonder if these creations were more than meteorological phenomenon. Some took them as elaborate hoaxes by very talented tractor drivers; others saw ancient, hermetic messages in the designs, signifying the holy trinity and the realm of the divine.
As much attention as the Barbury Castle crop circle gained, which garnered the most attention from the world in 2001. The six-armed 490 wheeled circle, more than 800 feet in diameter discovered in Milk Hill, England became an overnight sensation. For weeks, helicopters hovered above it, and the result was the fact that the mystery surrounding crop circles could no longer be ignored.
Alien Crop Circle Binary Code Messages
There exists a line drawn in the world of crop circles – those who adhere to them being manmade and those who hold to the patterns being the work of extraterrestrials. For the hoaxers side of the argument, the areas the crop circles appear in are often nestled in remote, wide expanses of land, which would make it fairly easy to arrive in the middle of the night with little or no notice. For those who believe the circles were made by aliens, the methods by which they were created range from lasers, to advanced lightwave technology, to spacecraft, or even psychic energy.
In an effort to decode crop circles, a body of research has emerged. Dr. Horace Drew, a well-regarded molecular biologist from the California Institute of Technology, led these investigationsand provided crop circle decoding that concludes the patterns contain important messages from other species. While Dr. Drew does agree that many crop circles are human-made, he also states that those created by extraterrestrials contain an “advanced binary code,” either in the form of simple greetings, or as a means of communication with future civilizations.
Some of the messages Dr. Drew decoded include such sayings as “believe,” “there is good out there,” “beware the bearers of false gifts and broken promises,” and “we oppose deception,” all leading us to believe that the alien communication is intended for us to live our best lives.
The Chilbolton crop circle discovered in 2001, contains binary code of the numbers zero to ten, atomic numbers that make up human DNA, a human face, the solar system, and other human-related symbols.
In addition to studying the visual messages that are within crop circles, there is a body of sound and light vibration research that has emerged around the patterns.
Binary code from the Chilbolton crop circle
In the 1960s, Gerald Hawkins (former Boston University School of Astronomy chair), applied crop circle geometry to the Boethian scale (500 AD), and with it a way of creating music, adding the accepted belief of the relationship between geometry and sound.
More recent research by quantum physicists is revealing a wide range of electromagnetic frequency fields ranging from 260 MHz to 5.2 KHz that link the geometric patterning. Using image to sound mapping technology, interesting correlations have been found between the Milk Hill crop circle and sounds heard on other planets, including those recorded of Saturn’s Auroras by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft
Crop Circle Codes Continue
Crop circles are not going away, regardless of the doubters and the controversies surrounding them. In fact, new ones are “cropping up” every month, with the latest being photographed as recently as early July 2019. A substantial tourist industry has developed around the circles, with thousands of visitors from around the globe gathering to witness them firsthand. Some visit out of curiosity; some visit to experience the healing messages the circles are believed to contain.
Whether one believes crop circles are the work of farmers, geometric pranksters, or aliens, it can be agreed upon that the power they possess draw us back to the land, and to the ancient history contained there, as well as to what our ancestors considered to be vital to the human experience — a respect for divine mystery.
There's been little fallout from the acknowledgement of existence of the Pentagon’s secret project to investigate unidentified flying objects — the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) - and one expert believes it may be time for congressional hearings. #Tucker
NASAwas set up in part to find traces of extraterrestrial life in the universe. While the government space agency has yet to find any definitive evidence that extraterrestrials exist, one NASA scientist believes we may have already been visited by them here on Earth.
In a new research paper, Silvano P. Colombano, who in addition to being a computer scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, is also a professor, theorizes that intelligent life may not be what we are used to and may not necessarily use the traditional building blocks of that humanity is accustomed to, such as carbon.
"I simply want to point out the fact that the intelligence we might find and that might choose to find us (if it hasn’t already) might not be at all be produced by carbon based organisms like us," Colombano wrote in the paper.
So if extraterrestrials are not carbon-based, what does that do to our assumptions about what to look for? Well, a lot, Colombano noted.
"Our typical life-spans would no longer be a limitation (although even these could be dealt with multi-generational missions or suspended animation), and the size of the 'explorer' might be that of an extremely tiny super-intelligent entity," Colombano added in the paper.
Colombano also suggests that extraterrestrials may have figured out technology that humans can not comprehend yet, making tasks such as interstellar travel possible. "If we adopt a new set of assumptions about what forms of higher intelligence and technology we might find, some of those phenomena might fit specific hypotheses, and we could start some serious enquiry," he suggested.
Still, the scientist concedes that interstellar travel could be "an unbreakable barrier, over spans of thousands of years," though he added that interstellar journey could be possible depending on what we assume about various forms of life.
"Considering further that technological development in our civilization started only about 10K years ago and has seen the rise of scientific methodologies only in the past 500 years, we can surmise that we might have a real problem in predicting technological evolution even for the next thousand years, let alone 6 Million times that amount!" he explained.
Colombano, who holds a doctorate in biophysical sciences according to his page, also said that not every UFO sighting can be "explained or denied" and asked people to look through the "very large of amount of 'noise' when it comes to reporting on the subject.
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Earth’s Magnetic Field Is Shifting And Geologists Don’t Know Why
Earth’s Magnetic Field Is Shifting And Geologists Don’t Know Why
By:Gaia Staff
Something strange is happening with the Earth’s magnetic field and scientists are unsure why, according to a recent paper published in the journal Nature. A consortium of geologists in charge of the World Magnetic Model are having trouble keeping track of the planet’s magnetic north pole as it rapidly shifts from Canada to northern Siberia.
Scientists updated Earth’s magnetic model in 2015, which is used for some pretty important things, including shipping navigation and GPS on smartphones. Their model was intended to last for at least five years, but due to the recent unexpected swing, it became outdated at some point in early 2018 and is now in need of adjustment.
“The error is increasing all the time,” said Arnaud Chulliat, a geomagnetist at the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information.
Scientists say this shift is being driven by liquid iron sloshing around in the planet’s core, a natural process, but one that can vary as the flow changes. Over the past 20 million years, Earth’s magnetic field has consistently experienced a complete pole reversal – usually every 200-300,000 years.
At the moment, we’re long overdue for one of these events, with the last reversal having occurred 781,000 years ago. No one is quite sure what the consequences will be on modern infrastructure when and if that reversal happens. Many take ease in the fact that pole reversals have occurred hundreds of times in the planet’s history without catastrophe, but again, the effect on modern technology remains unknown.
Some scientists have pointed to this shift as a potential culprit in a slew of recent dolphin and whale beachings as well as other unexpected animal die-offs. It’s believed the planet’s natural magnetic field is necessary to some of these animals’ navigation when traveling and communicating over great distances underwater. One NASA scientist is currently looking into this potential connection.
In 2016, a larger-than-usual magnetic pulse shot up from South America, which scientists believe played a role in furthering the recent shift. However, they’re still unsure whether it will continue on this course, or even what will happen at all.
Could we be on the precipice of a massive geomagnetic reversal, or is this just due to slightly-more-anomalous-than-usual activity in the Earth’s core? And even more pressing – what kind of effects is this having on us?
The US Navy has arranged for one of its scientists to openly apply for patents of advanced technologies that are allegedly under experimental development, but according to multiple insiders have been covertly developed and used in secret space programs for decades. In four patent applications lodged since 2015, the applicant, Dr. Salvator Cezar Pais, who filed on behalf of the Secretary of the Navy as the Assignee, has proposed revolutionary inventions that use principles such as electromagnetic propulsion rather than more conventional liquid fuel propulsion.
In one application, Philip J. Bonzell, a Primary Patent Examiner for the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) believed the proposed invention of “A Craft Using an inertial Mass Reduction Device” was so outlandish and scientifically unfeasible that he rejected it on November 28, 2017.
The rejection led to an immediate appeal by a Navy attorney who provided a supporting letter dated December 15, 2017, by Dr. James Sheehy, the Chief Technology Officer for the Naval Aviation Enterprise. Sheehy pointed out that Pais was employed by the Navy, and was currently working on proving the feasibility of the revolutionary propulsion system for a hybrid aerospace undersea craft described in the application.
Illustration of a craft using an Inertial Mass Reduction Device
Sheehy furthermore asserted that China was seriously researching similar technologies and the Navy would face high costs if the patent weren’t granted:
2…. Dr. Pais is currently funded by NAWCAD [Naval Air War Center Aircraft Division] to design a test article instrumentation to demonstrate the experimental feasibility of achieving high electromagnetic (EM) field-energy and flux values… He is currently one year into the project and has already begun a series of experiments to design and demonstrate advanced High energy Density / High Power propulsion systems.
3… If successful the realization of this result demonstrates that this patent documents the future state of the possible and moves propulsion technology beyond gas dynamic systems to field-induced propulsion based hybrid aerospace-undersea craft…
5. Based on these initial findings I would assert this will become a reality. China is already investing significantly in this area and I would prefer we hold the patent as opposed to paying forever more to use this revolutionary technology.
In the four patents granted to Dr. Pais, on behalf of the Department of the Navy, there is little data on his background. In a detailed article titled, “Docs Show Navy Got ‘UFO’ Patent Granted By Warning Of Similar Chinese Tech Advances”, the authors, Brett Tingly and Tyler Rogoway, delved into Pais’ background and found the following:
Little information can be found about Salvatore Cezar Pais; he has virtually no web presence. What is known is that he received a PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in 1999 and that he currently works as an aerospace engineer for NAWCAD at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland – the Navy’s top aircraft test base. Pais has published several articles and presented papers at American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics conferences over the years describing his work in electromagnetic propulsion, revolutionary room temperature superconductors, and topics like his PhD dissertation: “Bubble generation under reduced gravity conditions for both co-flow and cross-flow configurations.”
One of the key observations of Tingly and Rogoway was that none of the patent applications were marked for classification, even though that was an option the Navy could easily have chosen if they wanted to maintain secrecy for national security purposes. Instead, the Pais applications ignored the option to keep the technologies secret as evidenced by his applicationfor “A Craft Using an Inertia Mass Reduction Device” where the “Request Not Publish” option is unchecked.
If such a propulsion technology was so revolutionary and if the Navy indeed wanted to keep this technology out of others’ hands, it’s curious that they would choose to make the patent public. Maybe the Navy is signaling to its adversaries that it, too, is aware of this revolutionary capability and to whom it belongs.
Given what we know about secret space programs developed by the US Navy and Air Force respectively, electromagnetic propulsion systems have been used for decades in several crafts that operate both in space and underwater. The reason why Dr. Pais chose not to mark the patent applications secret was that senior Navy officials have decided the time had come for the disclosure of advanced electromagnetic propulsion technologies that were already in operation, rather than merely innovative proposals for future development as suggested in the patent application.
By arranging for one of its scientists to not only publicly apply for patents on revolutionary propulsion technologies, but to actually intervene when the application was turned down marks an extraordinary turn of events. The US Navy is moving forward with the disclosure process and is using the US patents system as the mechanism for the general public and scientific community awakening to the revolutionary potential of propulsion and energy storage systems using electromagnetic principles.
What adds further credence to this conclusion is the role of the Navy in leaking graphic videos of US Navy jets encountering Tic Tc shaped UFOs over the Pacific and Atlantic oceans in 2004 and 2014, and of the tradition breaking practice of allowing fighter pilots to give interviews of the encounters.
Normally, I would agree with others that these patents are likely just the Navy ensuring that when or if this technology does become available, the U.S. will be able to control it. However, these are not normal times. Thanks to To the Stars Academy (TTSA), the Department of Defense, and the media at large, not only are we now being told that Navy pilots have witnessed aircraft behaving exactly like the craft these patents describe, but some of the pilots’ visual descriptions of those anomalous aircraft even seem to be uncannily similar to the drawings of the aircraft as depicted in Pais’ patents.
The similarities between the technologies described in Pais’ patent applications and the Tic Tac UFO sightings clearly encourages speculation that the technologies proposed by Pais have already been developed, and that is what the Navy pilots have been witnessing. It’s worth repeating that Sheehy acknowledged in his appeal letter supporting Pais that the Chinese were already investing in such revolutionary technologies.
Indeed, Tingly and Rogoway speculated that Navy might be playing catch up to Chinese SSP who may be further along in the development of such technologies:
As striking as the similarity between the claimed capabilities of the hybrid craft and those of the objects described by Navy personnel, it’s still unknown whether these patents are related to the ongoing UFO revelations…. Perhaps the few pieces of footage that have trickled out over the last several years that some claim to show advanced craft could be the Navy’s way of subtly hinting that this concept actually works and is being tested in the field by either the U.S. or the Chinese. The fact that Sheehy would lean so heavily on the Chinese threat in the last bullet point of his appeal letter to the USPTO seems to suggest that the Navy may already be playing catch-up to a terrestrial foe.
I deeply doubt that the Navy is playing catch-up to what the Chinese have secret developed. Tingly and Rogoway do not appear to be aware of the many insiders who have come forward with their startling testimonies about U.S. reverse engineering programs involving captured flying saucer technologies that go back as far back as the 1940s.
The recent developments in the cases of Bob Lazar and Admiral Thomas Wilson who respectively described reverse engineering programs of captured alien technologies dating from the 1980s and 1990s, indicates how much public awareness has grown in understanding such programs.
Nor do Tingly and Rogoway appear aware of the Navy and Air Force having developed parallel secret space programs using advanced electromagnetic technologies as a result of their reverse engineering efforts. My latest book, the US Air Force Secret Space Program: Shifting Extraterrestrial Alliances and Space Force, provides historical documents and testimonies outlining the origins of the parallel programs, and the aerospace technologies that were covertly developed.
There is a great cause for optimism that Dr. Pais’ patents are part of an officially sanctioned disclosure process by the US Navy wanting previously suppressed technologies to be released into the public arena. The revolutionary potential of electromagnetic technologies for the aerospace industry is enormous. We are on the verge of witnessing the kind of rapid advances in the aerospace industry when it comes to energy storage and propulsion, which has become a norm in the telecommunications industry, thanks to microprocessor storage capacities doubling every two years.
Space stations of the future may be built inside distant asteroids, scientists claim.
One team of researchers found it would be possible to bore into the middle of a distant space rock, erect a space station and mine valuable minerals from within.
They proved it would be mathematically possible, with the right asteroid, to put a cylindrical space station inside a rock several hundred feet wide.
Experts say the logistical possibilities of this concept remains an issue and that it is at least several decades away from becoming a reality.
Some scientists rebuffed the research and claim not enough is known about the physical composition of asteroids to guarantee building a space station inside a huge rock would not cause it to fragment and break apart.
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An asteroid would need to be made of solid stone and spin one to three times a minute to provide enough gravity to resemble that of the Martian surface. Visualisations of the potential project have not been created and it may look like anything from a simple cavern to a complex spacecraft similar to the International Space Station
(stock image)
Thomas Maindl, from the University of Vienna in Austria, says there are two main benefits to the plan; it would allow the space station to avoid damage from radiation as well as enabling mining to take place.
'If we find an asteroid that's stable enough, we might not need these aluminium walls or anything, you might just be able to use the entire asteroid as a space station,' Dr Maindl told New Scientist.
Visualisations of the potential project have not been created and it may look like anything from a simple cavern to a complex spacecraft similar to the International Space Station.
An asteroid would need to be made of solid stone and spin one to three times a minute to provide enough gravity for the project to be successful.
If this was possible, it would create gravity similar to that of the Martian surface with approximately 38 per cent of the gravity on Earth.
WHY DO SCIENTISTS WANT TO MINE ASTEROIDS?
Several start-ups have begun to explore the idea of mining near-Earth asteroids for precious resources.
The celestial objects are made of carbon, silicon or metal, but it is metallic asteroids that mining companies are most interested in.
These rogue blocks of minerals are teeming with precious metals, including pricey platinum, which could be worth quadrillions on Earth.
Nickel, iron and gold are also found in abundance within metallic asteroids.
Nasa estimates the total value of resources locked in space rocks is £522 quintillion - equivalent to £75 billion ($100 billion) for each person on Earth.
A company could send a small space probe to intersect with asteroids as they pass near Earth, and mine them for these resources.
Experts have warned that doing so may destroy commodity prices and cause the world's economy to collapse.
Mining on the surface of most asteroids is impossible as the gravity created by the rocks is insufficient for machinery and makes hammers and other tools useless. Little is known about the physical properties of most asteroids and more information would be needed for the project to take place. The asteroid Bennu (pictured) is the focal point of new scientific studies
This, they say, would be sufficient to allow machinery to stay upright and function adequately.
Mining on the surface of most asteroids is impossible as the gravity created by the rocks renders hammers and other tools useless.
Embedding the operation inside the asteroid would enable the rapid rotation of the tumbling rock to create simulated gravity - making mining a viable option.
Details of its physical properties would need to be known beyond the limited information available for many asteroids.
'We do not know physical characteristics of the vast majority of objects in this size range,' says Peter Vereš at the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center.
Digging out the innards of the asteroid with complex machinery would also be likely to make the asteroid unstable and fragment.
'The border between science and science fiction here is sort of blurry,' says Dr Maindl.
'My gut feeling is that it will be at least 20 years before any asteroid mining happens, let alone something like this.'
The research has yet to be peer-reviewed and is found in the arXiv.
WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF SPACE ROCKS?
An asteroid is a large chunk of rock left over from collisions or the early solar system. Most are located between Mars and Jupiter in the Main Belt.
A comet is a rock covered in ice, methane and other compounds. Their orbits take them much further out of the solar system.
A meteor is what astronomers call a flash of light in the atmosphere when debris burns up.
This debris itself is known as a meteoroid. Most are so small they are vapourised in the atmosphere.
If any of this meteoroid makes it to Earth, it is called a meteorite.
Meteors, meteoroids and meteorites normally originate from asteroids and comets.
For example, if Earth passes through the tail of a comet, much of the debris burns up in the atmosphere, forming a meteor shower.
Move over, International Space Station (ISS) – Austrian researchers believe it is possible to build future space stations inside the bigger asteroidsorbiting the Earth and mine the space rocks for valuable resources.
In a study supported by the University of Vienna, the researchers used mathematics to demonstrate how to dig a tunnel toward the center of an asteroid, set up shop inside the rock, and extract the minerals. If the asteroid was several hundred feet wide and sturdy enough for the job, it could host a cylinder-shaped base.
Skeptics pointed out the considerable logistical challenges faced by the asteroid-space station-mine concept. Even the Vienna researchers acknowledged the need for several decades of technological advances and the construction of other orbital infrastructure before the idea becomes feasible.
Other researchers scoffed at the idea because of the lack of sufficient information about the physical properties of asteroids. Without the benefit of reliable data, they do not know if an asteroid would maintain its integrity when astronauts try to bore a hole through it during the construction of the space station, much more during subsequent mining operations. (Related: Grueling life in space makes astronauts more susceptible to antibiotic-resistant superbugs.)
The benefits and requirements of building a space station inside an asteroid
Vienna researcher Thomas Maindl served as the primary author of the study. He presented the two strong points of his team’s concept. First, building the space station inside an asteroid protects the base and its occupants from cosmic radiation. Second, it enables mining operations in the asteroid.
“If we find an asteroid that’s stable enough, we might not need these aluminium walls or anything, you might just be able to use the entire asteroid as a space station,” he stressed in an interview.
Maindl did not present any visual representation of the asteroid space station concept. Interpretations ranged from a hollow space that was little better than a cave to something that resembled the multi-module ISS.
The qualifications for the project were steep. An asteroid should be very solid. Furthermore, it should rotate one to three times per minute, a speed that generated enough gravity for mining and other activity.
An asteroid that met both requirements would produce roughly 38 percent of the gravity found on Earth. That’s more than double the gravity on the moon – which the Europeans want to mine – and matched Mars. More importantly, it allowed heavy equipment to remain upright and work.
A spinning asteroid produces enough gravity to make mining possible
Currently, it is impossible to conduct conventional mining operations on the surface of most asteroids. The weak gravity exerted by these rocks makes mining tools useless. A drill would spin the user instead of boring into the much more massive asteroid; a jackhammer would send the miner flying into space and forget taking a hammer and chisel to it.
However, putting the mine inside an asteroid changes things. If the asteroid rotated at a sufficiently fast rate, it would produce artificial gravity inside the tunnel, enough for drills and jackhammers to work as intended.
Most asteroids remain mysterious – for example, researchers only confirmed the existence of water inside them in recent times. Furthermore, their physical properties might change if humans dug into them.
Mine collapses are a real danger on Earth. Similarly, mining an asteroid might destabilize it, although instead of collapsing inward, the space rock might fragment outward instead.
“The border between science and science fiction here is sort of blurry,” said Maindl. “My gut feeling is that it will be at least 20 years before any asteroid mining happens, let alone something like this.”
It’s been almost 15 years since NASA’s Cassini-Huygens spacecraft sent a module to the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan — and much of what we’ve learned about the mysterious ocean world stems from that mission.
But NASA is planning to change that. A NASA Astrobiology Institute-funded project, led by researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, will be trying to find if life could ever exist in the oceans on the icy moon — and if its thick atmosphere could support it.
The question is whether complex hydrocarbons could exist on Titan’s surface thanks to the combination of gases found in the atmosphere, including hydrogen, methane, and nitrogen.
The news comes after NASA announced it will send a small helicopter drone to Saturn’s moon Titan to explore its surface. While NASA is planning to launch the mission in 2026, the drone won’t be able to get there any sooner than 2034.
But there’s plenty we can glean from previous data collected by Cassini-Huygens — why we suspect that Titan is covered in oceans in the first place.
“What we don’t know is the exact composition of the ocean, its density, its thermal profile, the overall structure of the icy crust on top of it,” Mike Malaska, deputy principal investigator on the project at the Jet Propulsion Lab, toldAstrobiology Magazine.
The Astrobiology Institute’s ambitious five-year project has built up a 30 member team to explore Saturn’s moon. Data will come courtesy of NASA’s Cassini-Huygens mission and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, an observatory that teams at NASA have been using to study Titan’s atmosphere.
“Our science is following the organic molecules on their path from the top of the atmosphere where they get constructed, down through the crust and into the ocean, and if there’s biology happening down there, how those organics work their way back up to the surface and become visible,” said Malaska.
The project has four key objectives. First, the team wants to understand how molecules are transported from the surface of Titan to its oceans. Second, they want to find out if complex organics are even able to survive in Titan’s vast subsurface oceans. Third — depending on how the first two objectives go — the next step is to explore how much chemical energy is available to life for metabolizing. Finally, the team wants to find a way to detect biosignatures that remain in the ocean — a particularly tricky task, given that Titan’s oceans are covered by an outer shell and an organic-rich atmosphere.
If all goes according to plan, NASA’s Dragonfly rotorcraft will touch down on the distant ocean world 15 years from now. By then, we will likely have a much better understanding of what awaits the spacecraft there.
WETENSCHAPHet mysterie rondom Stonehenge blijft groot. Zo vragen archeologen zich nog steeds af hoe de bouwers de loodzware stenen naar de site brachten. Waarschijnlijk met de hulp van varkensvet, stellen enkele onderzoekers nu in een nieuwe studie.
Stonehenge is en blijft een populair studieobject. Er circuleren dan ook vele theorieën omtrent het mysterieuze bouwwerk, alsook over de krachtpatsers die Stonehenge verwezenlijkten. Dat die krachtpatsers graag en veel aten, suggereren tal van archeologische vondsten. En varkens stonden daarbij steevast op het menu.
Over de bereidingswijze van de varkens bestaat echter enige verwarring. Volgens sommigen werd het vlees van het varken bereid in keramische potten. Door de beperkte grootte van de potten zou het varken natuurlijk in stukken gesneden zijn. Toch zijn er karkassen teruggevonden van volledige varkens. Hoe kan dat?
Enkele archeologen aan de Britse Newcastle University formuleren daar graag een antwoord op. Zij stellen dat de varkens inderdaad aan het spit bereid werden. Dat verklaart meteen de volledige karkassen die teruggevonden werden rondom de historische site.
Maar waarom zaten er eveneens hoge concentraties varkensvet op de resten van het aardwerk? Om die vraag te beantwoorden, introduceren de onderzoekers een nieuwe theorie. Vermoedelijk werd het aardwerk niet gebruikt om te koken, maar wel om varkensvet te verzamelen.
Dat vet zou het vervoeren van de zware megalieten een beetje vergemakkelijkt hebben. Om de zware stenen te verplaatsen, hebben de bouwers waarschijnlijk gebruik gemaakt van houten sleeën en boomstammen. Dierenvet zou de wrijving tussen de stenen en het hout hebben verminderd waardoor het makkelijker werd om de megalieten te vervoeren.
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Steve Quayle: Ancient Egyptians in the Grand Canyon
Steve Quayle: Ancient Egyptians in the Grand Canyon
Steve Quayle is a researcher and author of over a dozen books dealing with advanced ancient technology and civilizations.
His documentary film production company Gensix Productions films the “True Legends The Series” all over the world in search of the Lost Cities and the giants of history who were the builders of the great megalithic structures of the ancient world.
Steve is a former talk radio show host who has been warning against genetic armageddon and the end of the human race for decades. He claims transhumanism and the hybrid age is the most dangerous advancement in the technological war against humanity in history.
SpaceX wiggles Starhopper’s Raptor engine, tests parts ahead of hover test debut
SpaceX wiggles Starhopper’s Raptor engine, tests parts ahead of hover test debut
On the evening of July 12th, SpaceX technicians put Starhopper’s freshly-installed Raptor – serial number 06 (SN06) – through a simple but decidedly entertaining test, effectively wiggling the engine in circles.
Designed to verify that Raptor’s thrust vectoring capabilities are in order and ensure that Starhopper and the engine are properly communicating, the wiggle test is a small but critical part of pre-flight acceptance and a good indicator that the low-fidelity Starship prototype is nearing its first hover test(s). Roughly 48 hours after a successful series of wiggles, Starhopper and Raptor proceeded into the next stage of pre-flight acceptance, likely the final more step before a tethered static fire.
Video of the SN6 Raptor TVC (Thrust Vector Control) Checks on Starhopper – July 12-13, 2019 – recorded by @BocaChicaGal for NSF.
Routine for all Falcon rockets, SpaceX’s exceptionally rigorous practice of static firing all hardware at least once (and often several times) before launch has unsurprisingly held firm as the company proceeds towards integrated Starhopper and Starship flight tests. Despite the fact that Raptor SN06 completed a static fire as recently July 10th, SpaceX will very likely put Starhopper and its newly-installed Raptor through yet another pre-flight static fire, perhaps its fourth or fifth test this month.
Although it would undoubtedly be easier, cheaper, and faster to skip that post-delivery static fire, it will simultaneously lower the risk of Raptor failing mid-flight and verify that Starhopper itself is healthy and ready for untethered hovering. Although SpaceX could likely live without Starhopper in the event that it’s lost during flight-testing, any failure capable of destroying the vehicle itself is at least as capable of severely damaging or completely destroying the spartan but still expansive test and launch facilities the company built over the course of several months.
SpaceX has been hard at work gradually building, expanding, and upgrading its South Texas launch facilities since December 2018.
(NASASpaceflight – bocachicagal, 04/27/2019)
Would you like some testing with your testing?
Follow July 12th’s nighttime Raptor wiggle test, July 13th was mainly quiet and filled with inspections of Starhopper, Raptor, and other various work. The day after, however, SpaceX proceeded through several hours of propellant loading, ending with what looked like less energetic versions of the Raptor preburner ignition tests Starhopper previously performed with Raptor SN02.
In a staged-combustion engine like Raptor, getting from the supercool liquid oxygen and methane propellant to 200+ tons of thrust is quite literally staged, meaning that the ignition doesn’t happen all at once. Rather, the preburners – essentially their own, unique combustion chambers – ignite an oxygen- or methane-rich mixture, the burning of which produces the gas and pressure that powers the turbines that bring fuel into the main combustion chamber. That fuel then ignites, producing thrust as they exit the engine’s bell-shaped nozzle.
The first obvious test occurred around 7:30pm CT, July 14th.(LabPadre)
The second obvious test followed around 8:50 pm CT.
Although the fireworks are so subtle that they are easily missed, the conditions inside the preburner – hidden away from view – are actually far more intense than the iconic blue, purple, and pink flame that exists Raptor’s nozzle. This is because the preburners have to nurture the conditions necessary for the pumps they power to fuel the main combustion chamber. Much like hot water will cool while traveling through pipes, the superheated gaseous propellant that Raptor ignites to produce thrust will also cool (and thus lose pressure) as it travels from Raptor’s preburner to the main combustion chamber.
Thus, if the head pressure produced in the preburners is too low, Raptor’s thrust will be (roughly speaking) proportionally limited at best. At worst, low pressure in the preburners can completely prevent Raptor from starting and running stably and can even trigger a “hard start” or shutdown that could damage or destroy the engine. As such, to preburners fundamentally have to operate at higher chamber pressures (and thus higher temperatures) than the main combustion chamber (the big firey bit at the end). According to Elon Musk, Raptor’s oxygen preburner has the worst of it, operating at pressures as high or higher than 800 bar (11,600 psi, 80 megapascals).
Coincidentally, this is roughly equivalent to the pressure at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
Starhopper and Raptor seen on the afternoon of July 14th, preparing for an evening of testing.
(NASASpaceflight – bocachicagal)
In short, preburner testing is no less critical than full-on static fire testing with an engine like Raptor. July 14th’s test was also made doubly efficient due to the fact that preburner testing requires liquid propellant, which effectively makes the whole test a wet dress rehearsal (WDR) even before any engine ignition or partial ignition is involved. Per SpaceX moving from propellant loading to preburner/turbine testing, Starhopper is almost certainly healthy and operating as expected, an excellent sign that the ungainly vessel may be ready for a static fire of Raptor as early as 2pm CT, July 15th.
I can’t. Stop. Watching. This. Hey @elonmusk, Raptor has a little dance just for you.
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As if black holes weren’t mysterious enough, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found an unexpected thin disk of material furiously whirling around a supermassive black hole at the heart of the magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 3147, located 130 million light-years away.
The conundrum is that the disk shouldn’t be there, based on current astronomical theories. However, the unexpected presence of a disk so close to a black hole offers a unique opportunity to test Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity. General relativity describes gravity as the curvature of space and special relativity describes the relationship between time and space.
A Hubble Space Telescope image of the spiral galaxy NGC 3147 appears next to an artist’s illustration of the supermassive black hole residing at the galaxy’s core. The Hubble image shows off the galaxy’s sweeping spiral arms, full of young blue stars, pinkish nebulas, and dust in silhouette. However, at the brilliant core of NGC 3147 lurks a monster black hole, weighing about 250 million times the mass of our Sun. Hubble observations of the black hole demonstrate two of Einstein’s theories of relativity. The reddish-yellow features swirling around the center are the glow of light from gas trapped by the hefty black hole’s powerful gravity. The black hole is embedded deep within its gravitational field, shown by the green grid that illustrates warped space. The gravitational field is so strong that light is struggling to climb out, a principal described in Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Material also is whipping so fast around the black hole that it brightens as it approaches Earth on one side of the disk and gets fainter as it moves away. This effect, called relativistic beaming, was predicted by Einstein’s theory of special relativity. NGC 3147 is located 130 million light-years away in the northern circumpolar constellation Draco the Dragon.
Credits: Hubble Image: NASA, ESA, S. Bianchi (Università degli Studi Roma Tre University), A. Laor (Technion-Israel Institute of Technology), and M. Chiaberge (ESA, STScI, and JHU); illustration: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild and L. Hustak (STScI)
“We’ve never seen the effects of both general and special relativity in visible light with this much clarity,” said Marco Chiaberge of the European Space Agency, and the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University, both in Baltimore, Maryland, a member of the team that conducted the Hubble study.
“This is an intriguing peek at a disk very close to a black hole, so close that the velocities and the intensity of the gravitational pull are affecting how the photons of light look,” added the study’s first author, Stefano Bianchi of Università degli Studi Roma Tre, in Rome, Italy. “We cannot understand the data unless we include the theories of relativity.”
Black holes in certain types of galaxies like NGC 3147 are malnourished because there is not enough gravitationally captured material to feed them regularly. So, the thin haze of infalling material puffs up like a donut rather than flattening out in a pancake-shaped disk. Therefore, it is very puzzling why there is a thin disk encircling a starving black hole in NGC 3147 that mimics much more powerful disks found in extremely active galaxies with engorged, monster black holes.
“We thought this was the best candidate to confirm that below certain luminosities, the accretion disk doesn’t exist anymore,” explained Ari Laor of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology located in Haifa, Israel. “What we saw was something completely unexpected. We found gas in motion producing features we can explain only as being produced by material rotating in a thin disk very close to the black hole.”
The astronomers initially selected this galaxy to validate accepted models about lower-luminosity active galaxies—those with black holes that are on a meager diet of material. Models predict that an accretion disk forms when ample amounts of gas are trapped by a black hole’s strong gravitational pull. This infalling matter emits lots of light, producing a brilliant beacon called a quasar, in the case of the most well-fed black holes. Once less material is pulled into the disk, it begins to break down, becomes fainter, and changes structure.
“The type of disk we see is a scaled-down quasar that we did not expect to exist,” Bianchi said. “It’s the same type of disk we see in objects that are 1,000 or even 100,000 times more luminous. The predictions of current models for gas dynamics in very faint active galaxies clearly failed.”
The disk is so deeply embedded in the black hole’s intense gravitational field that the light from the gas disk is modified, according to Einstein’s theories of relativity, giving astronomers a unique look at the dynamic processes close to a black hole.
Hubble clocked material whirling around the black hole as moving at more than 10% of the speed of light. At those extreme velocities, the gas appears to brighten as it travels toward Earth on one side, and dims as it speeds away from our planet on the other side (an effect called relativistic beaming). Hubble’s observations also show that the gas is so entrenched in the gravitational well the light is struggling to climb out, and therefore appears stretched to redder wavelengths. The black hole’s mass is around 250 million Suns.
The researchers used Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) to observe matter swirling deep inside the disk. A spectrograph is a diagnostic tool that divides light from an object into its many individual wavelengths to determine its speed, temperature, and other characteristics at a very high precision. The astronomers needed STIS’s sharp resolution to isolate the faint light from the black-hole region and block out contaminating starlight.
“Without Hubble, we wouldn’t have been able to see this because the black-hole region has a low luminosity,” Chiaberge said. “The luminosities of the stars in the galaxy outshine anything in the nucleus. So if you observe it from the ground, you’re dominated by the brightness of the stars, which drowns the feeble emission from the nucleus.”
The team hopes to use Hubble to hunt for other very compact disks around low-wattage black holes in similar active galaxies.
The international team of astronomers in this study consists of Stefano Bianchi (Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Rome, Italy); Robert Antonucci (University of California, Santa Barbara, California); Alessandro Capetti (INAF – Osservatorio Astrofisico di Torino, Pino Torinese, Italy); Marco Chiaberge (Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland); Ari Laor (Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel); Loredana Bassani (INAF/IASF Bologna, Italy); Francisco Carrera (CSIC-Universidad de Cantabria, Santander, Spain); Fabio La Franca, Andrea Marinucci, Giorgio Matt, and Riccardo Middei (Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Roma, Italy); and Francesca Panessa (INAF Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali, Rome, Italy).
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.
Contacts and sources: Claire Andreoli NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland
Donna Weaver / Ray Villard Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland
Stefano Bianchi Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Italy
Marco Chiaberge Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland
Gary McKinnon's Secret Space Program Reports - Solar Warden Deepest Dive Ever!
Gary McKinnon's Secret Space Program Reports - Solar Warden Deepest Dive Ever!
The secret space program: Solar Warden Research DEEPEST DIVE EVER! You won’t want to miss this! Tracing the roots of the classified mission, solar warden, which is an alleged military space force program.
In this video you continue to drill into the space fleet story and evidence, because this is stranger than fiction. Forget about nasa’s unexplained files.
Join joe from the carolinas in venturing Beyond Theory with NEW foia details, a review of whistleblower Gary McKinnon’s reports, logical breakdowns, as well as the data-informed speculation.
Can animals mourn their dead? Do they recognize when one of their own has fallen and give it thought? Us humans like to think we are pretty special, sitting high and mighty above the “animal world” below us. We like to think that we are pretty damn unique, and that it is only us who display any sense of recognizing and fearing death, even mourning it, but there just so happen to be other animals that possibly do this same thing, and one of these is perhaps quite a surprise, as it turns out that crows show bevahior that is perhaps quite similar to our own mourning practices.
Some of the most intelligent animals on our planet are a group of birds called the corvids, which include crows, jays, magpies, and ravens. They have demonstrated teamwork, complex social behaviors, advanced problem solving, the ability to hold grudges, an uncanny ability to recognize faces, and even tool-using, all to a spectacular degree that shows remarkable cognitive capabilities that we are learning about all of the time, but one very mysterious behavior among especially crows that has long held a certain macabre quality to it is their tendency to hold what are called “crow funerals.” Whenever one of their own species dies, other crows in the area will flock to the scene and linger about the corpse, squawking loudly and refusing to leave, in a strange gathering that has long been suspected to be some sort of mourning ritual and contemplation of their dead being carried out by the animals.
This has long been a perplexing mystery for scientists, and although this “funeral” behavior is still not completely understood there have been efforts to get to the bottom of it, and try to ascertain if these birds are indeed mourning their dead or if it is something else. Perhaps the most in depth research on the phenomenon has been carried out by a team led by Kaeli Swift, a PhD student in environmental science and biologist John Marzluff, both of the University of Washington, and who together carried out a two-year study to try and figure out what is going on here. One of the first things they found was that, unlike many animals, crows actually recognize the concept of death, understand that one of their own has died, and react to it in some pretty potent and interesting ways.
It was already known before this experiment was carried out that crows have an incredible ability to not only recognize and indefinitely remember individual human faces, but to also teach other crows about those faces, especially if they are considered a threat. This was brought to light in 2008 by Marzluff, who devised an experiment wherein volunteers in cavemen masks would harass crows, whereas others in Dick Cheney masks would feed them. It did not take long at all for the crows to display aggressive mobbing behavior towards the “cavemen,” even individual crows who had never seen the cavemen before and regardless of whether they were engaging in threatening behavior at that moment, indicating that some sort of social learning was going on, and the crows would remember for years. This was seen as a useful trick for efficiently sifting out who was a threat and who meant to give food, but it was not known just how deeply this went until he and Swift teamed up for their new study.
To test this out further, the team set up an experiment that began with Swift leaving out food for the birds to eat at regular times, after which they associated the area with food and quickly learned when it would be set out, always congregating at the same spot at the same time every day. Then a variety of different volunteers were sent in to elicit different reactions from the birds, all of them wearing different latex masks to obscure their real faces. Among the volunteers were those who approached the crows empty handed, those who had with them a taxidermy specimen of a crow predator, others who had a specimen of a pigeon, and then Swift, who was the one who brought food.
It was found that the ones with a pigeon were mostly ignored, as were the empty handed ones, but the ones holding a predator would be mostly avoided and squawked at from afar, and the one with the dead crow would be actively mobbed and threatened by groups of the birds. If this mask showed up empty handed, the crows remembered it and mobbed the volunteer even in the absence of the dead bird. The birds would also be warier about approaching the location where this particular mask wearer had shown up. It did not matter who wore the mask, as it could be switched between wearers with the same effects, it was the appearance of the mask itself that set off their alarm bells, and they only got aggravated when the one who had held a dead crow was in sight. Even birds that had not witnessed the original display of the taxidermy specimen were clued in to what was going on, meaning they had been taught this. For six weeks the volunteers returned to the scene empty-handed, and the crows still reacted the same ways depending on the mask worn. As for the one who fed them, the crows would show great favor towards this one, and not show any aggressive behavior at all. Curiously, the actual death of the crow did not have to be witnessed by the animals to elicit a reaction, just the corpse. Swift would say of it all:
I was always the friendly feeder, which was nice, I never made any crow enemies. I would put my food out, then this second person would show up. They would be holding a dead crow, not violently, not reenacting a death scene, just holding it like they were picking it up to throw it in rubbish, palms outstretched like you might hold a plate of hors d’oeuvre.
This is interesting in that other research has shown that crows will even on occasion bring “gifts” for the ones who feed them, while remembering the faces of their enemies and teaching others of this. Considering that the crows clearly recognize when a dead one of their own kind is present, it shows a particular cognitive ability, of which Swift says:
It tells us that crows view death, at least in part, as a ‘teachable moment’ to borrow an anthropomorphic phrase. It’s a signal of danger and danger is something to be avoided. They know what death is and know to fear it. It’s amazing to think a crow — a bird — is doing something like this that so few other animals are doing that we know.
This fear of death upon seeing a corpse of one of their brethren, to recognize and even perhaps mourn death, may seem pretty obvious to us, but there are only a very few types of animals known to actually have this reaction, including humans, elephants, giraffes, chimpanzees, dolphins, and several other corvid species. So what does this have to do with those “crow funerals” we were talking about earlier? Well, although it could be a type of mourning, Swift and team think it might have more to do with the crows studying the area and trying to learn what the threat is, trying to figure out who is a friendly person and who is a threat. As Swift says, “By participating in these funerals, crows can get information about new dangers without taking the risk.” However, she still does not rule out that they may indeed be showing mourning behavior as well.
The study was published in a 2015 article in the journal Animal Behaviour, and it is a rather intriguing theory on crow funerals and the behaviors and cognitive functions that drive them. Whether the birds are actually displaying mourning behavior or not, it is still pretty damn clever that they are able to do this, and it probably has to do with the birds evolving right along such close proximity to human beings. It is an excellent chance to study the similarities between these birds and us, and what that means, with Swift saying:
This work is another example of how crows have evolved to live so successfully with us. They can learn our faces and do so in an impressive number of circumstances including when we have appeared to out ourselves as one of those prickly neighbors by interacting with their dead. If you step back and examine how distantly related crows are from us, and our closest mammalian relatives, you start to see how striking this shared interest in our dead is. It’s a chance to unlock deep mysteries about the evolution of our own funeral rites, and appreciate how much we share with our black cloaked companions, even if they look nothing like us.
Despite the study, it is still unclear exactly what drives this funeral behavior in crows, but we do know that they in fact recognize death to some extent and fear it. Does this mean that they mourn their fallen as well? Are we perhaps not alone in our ability to contemplate our mortality and show sympathy for those who are not with us anymore or is it seen in other animals as well? In recent years with more and more research into animal psychology and behavior it is becoming more and more apparent that we are perhaps not so unique as we would sometimes like to believe, and the animal world is still a very mysterious place that is bound to turn up more surprises.
Two UFOs On Google Sky Map, Can We Contact Them? UFO Sighting News.
Two UFOs On Google Sky Map, Can We Contact Them? UFO Sighting News.
Coordinates: -27.413253° -117.047394° Object #2: -27.468549° -117.189112° I found these three objects that look like artificial structures. Why would aliens need a planet when they can create structures even bigger than some planets? Think of it this way, Earth is about 3.5 billion years old, but there universe is said to be 13.5 billion years old. Therefore about 75% of the planets in our universe are older than Earth. Can you imagine a species having technology for over a billion years? Well how about 10 billion years? Such a species would be gods in our eyes. So it looks like we need to aim communication radio telescopes in this direction to send signals in hopes of contacting them. Perhaps sending that Carl Sagan greeting from 1974 might be a good place to start. Many say we should not try to contact them...but guys, they know we are here. Remember its us, not them with lack of technology to scan the universe well. Scott C. Waring
There are many groups of people the world over who are renowned for unique adaptations to their environment. These range from the tribal groups of the deep Amazon, whose hunter-gathering way of life has remained primarily unchanged for thousands of years, to the enigmatic Sherpas, whose genetics allow them to traverse the steep Himalayan slopes without suffering the effects of the thin air at those altitudes.
Similar feats are achieved almost daily by the Bajau of Southeast Asia, especially where oxygen is concerned. These “sea nomads”, as they are often called, have the unique ability to hold their breath for minutes at a time, ranking them among the world’s most unparalleled divers (and hence their unique nickname).
Some of the Bajau divers are able to operate underwater with such ease that it led to speculation as to whether they had adapted genetically over time, similar to people who thrive in higher altitudes. Last spring, evolutionary geneticist Melissa Ilardo led a study that proposed such adaptations might involve the unusually large spleens found among the Bajau, outlined in a paper published in the journal Cell. Similar adaptations have been observed in ocean-dwelling mammals, such as sperm whales which are able to hold their breaths for up to 90 minutes thanks to a substance in their bloodstream called myoglobin, which binds oxygen in their blood and becomes electrically-charged when the whales go underwater.
The Bajau perform their incredible diving feats completely naturally, although the current record for a human holding their breath underwater is held by 47-year-old Peter Colat, a diver from Zurich, Switzerland, who managed to hold his breath for an astounding 19 minutes and 21 seconds in 2010.
Colat, who was 38-year-old at the time, managed to achieve this through oxygen-assisted static apnea, where one breathes pure oxygen for 10 minutes prior to diving, according to rules set by the Guinness Book of World Records. His record ousted the previous record holder, Nicola Putignano of Italy, by just 19 seconds.
It begs the question, just how long could a person or animal survive underwater with the help of a little extra added oxygen? More specifically, what if rather than holding their breath, the mammals in question were able to breathe oxygen from the water itself?
Perhaps the earliest study looking into this goes all the way back to 1964, as reported in the journal Sea Frontiers by Johannes A. Kylstra, which discussed experiments with mice that involved such processes. The experiments were conducted in chambers partially filled with water, where the air was replaced with compressed oxygen and pressurized equivalent to that of eight atmospheres, allowing for an artificially oxygen-enriched liquid environment below it. Finally, salts which are similar to those that appear naturally in the blood of mammals were added to the water.
The study found that mice introduced into the liquid environment were actually able to “breathe for several minutes and, in some cases, hours.” Temperature was also a factor in survival, with mice surviving the longest at a temperature of 68°F. The mice, despite being within a liquid environment, were found to be “active and alert,” and “did not appear to be in severe distress” while submerged in the oxygenated water.
Most of the mice began to lose consciousness within half an hour of entering the liquid environment. Subsequent experiments involved the introduction of a chemical buffer into the water, which helped preserve a constant acidity in the liquid solution, whereafter some of the mice responded to stimuli such as shaking or tapping the outside of the tank for up to six hours while submerged.
These initial studies led to further experiments with perfluorinated hydrocarbons, which unlike the oxygenated water from the earlier studies, could more effectively remove carbon dioxide from the lungs. The most effective substance of this variety, called perflubron, has roughly double the density of water, and can also carry as much as twice the amount of oxygen as air (this substance is most often referenced as “radiopaque perfluorocarbon solution for lung lavage,” and is sold under the name “LiquiVent” in the United States and other countries, generally only for research purposes).
If all of this sounds a lot like the famous liquid breathing apparatus used by Ed Harris during the climax of the sci-fi film The Abyss, you wouldn’t be the only one who thinks so. In fact, several years ago during a revolutionary medical procedure that was used to save Adrianna Mancini–a child born five months premature–Dr. Jay Greenspan at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and Dr. Thomas Shaffer of Temple University in Philadelphia employed the then-experimental process of liquid ventilation in order to save the child’s life, after comparing it to the liquid featured in the famous film.
“I knew that I was watching medical history being made,” Mancini later told Reader’s Digest. Shafer and Greenspan’s procedure went on to be used to save other premature infants in the years that followed.
Quite obviously, the futuristic deep-sea breathing apparatus featured in The Abyss was partially inspired by the real-life science described here (in fact, one scene in the film actually depicts a rat being submerged in a perfluorinated hydrocarbon-like liquid; an obvious a nod to the 1960s studies that introduced the idea). But what began with experiments aimed at helping mice breathe in special liquid environments did more than just inspire the world of sci-fi, and now, the real-world applications of these studies can even help save lives.
It’s not a great plot for a horror movie – they’re not eating brains (yet) – but it’s real. Plants that were once alive hundreds of years ago, then frozen during the Little Ice Age and buried under a hundred feet of ice the Canadian tundra, are being exposed to light once again due to (no surprise here) climate change and not just rising up as the ice melts again but growing and even thriving. If they need some help getting reestablished, some worms found in Siberia (where else?) that were frozen 40,000 years ago have warmed up and are alive again. Aspiring screenwriters want to know … has anyone offered them brains yet?
“You wouldn’t assume that anything buried for hundreds of years would be viable. The material had always been considered dead. But by seeing green tissue, “I thought, ‘Well, that’s pretty unusual.’ We were pretty blown away.”
The model for Indiana Jones in this movie might be evolutionary biologist Catherine La Farge (Indiannette Jones?), who recently went to the Trardrop Glacier on Canada’s Ellesmere Island intending to study what she expected to be decaying ancient plants being exposed by climate change. As reported in The National Post, when she scraped up the moss Aulacomnium turgidum, La Farge was shocked to see something green … shocked because this moss last saw light somewhere between 1550 and 1850 when The Little Ice Age hit North America, severely dropping temperatures for centuries and growing its glaciers in both area and depth. The moss La Farge found was indeed rising back to life on its own. She brought samples back to her lab in Edmonton and gave them a little help in the form of warmth and nutrients, and they not only arose but grew into seemingly normal (a Rip Van Winkle kind of normal) plants.
Aulacomnium turgidum
La Farge may have some competition in getting a Frozen Frankenstein Flora movie based on her discovery. There’s news from Antarctica of the discovery of mossfrozen 1500 years ago that was also growing again. Peter Convey, an ecologist with the British Antarctic Survey, wasn’t quite as surprised because he believes ice protects plant cells from the stresses of surface life – freeze-thaw cycles and radiation are two big ones. As the ice permanently melts, the first plants exposed have the best chance to arise and take over before anything else thaws, which “really accelerates the recolonization process” and allows the ground frozen and buried for centuries to quickly become green once again.
If these ‘new’ ancient plants need help growing, they can open a can of worms from Siberia, where University of Tennessee microbiologist Tatiana Vishnivetskaya has been drilling deep into the Siberian permafrost and recently discovered frozen 40,000-year-old segmented worms (nematodes) that began wiggling once again when thawed.
“Of course we were surprised and very excited.”
Soybean cyst nematode and egg
That probably applies to the worms too, especially if they know they might be moving to slightly warmer dirt where they can eat, poop and fertilize centuries-old plants. It might also be good news for life on other planets, and even life forms on spaceships or asteroids traveling around the galaxy looking for a place to land/crash, thaw and live long and prosper.
Not a great movie plot but definitely a glimmer of hope of the continuation of life on Earth and possibility of life on other planets.
There’s no doubt that the defining date on which the UFO phenomenon was born was June 24, 1947. That was the date on which pilot Kenneth Arnold had a close encounter of the very weird kind. The location was near Mt. Rainier, Washington State. As for Arnold’s experience, it involved nothing less than an entire squadron of strange-looking aircraft.The terms “UFO” and “Unidentified Flying Objects” were not around way back then. Such craft were referred to as “Flying Saucers” and “Flying Disks.” There’s a reason why I bring all of this up today. While lecturing on the UFO subject recently for a regional group, I brought up the matter of the Arnold affair. What surprised me was the distinct lack of knowledge – on the part of many of the attendees – regarding the specific nature of Arnold’s sighting. So, I thought, why not share with you today the story of Arnold – in the man’s very own words, and for one and all to understand and appreciate.
Arnold said:
“The following story of what I observed over the Cascade Mountains, as impossible as it may seem, is positively true. I never asked nor wanted any notoriety for just accidentally being in the right spot at the right time to observe what I did. I reported something that I know any pilot would have reported. I don’t think that in any way my observation was due to any sensitivity of eye sight or judgment than what is considered normal for any pilot. On June 24th, Tuesday, 1947, I had finished my work for the Central Air Service at Chehalis, Washington, and at about two o’clock I took off from Chehalis, Washington, airport with the intention of going to Yakima, Wash. My trip was delayed for an hour to search for a large marine transport that supposedly went down near or around the southwest side of Mt. Rainier in the state of Washington and to date has never been found.”
Kenneth Arnold
Arnold continued: “I flew directly toward Mt. Rainier after reaching an altitude of about 9,500 feet, which is the approximate elevation of the high plateau from which Mt. Rainier rises. I had made one sweep of this high plateau to the westward, searching all of the various ridges for this marine ship and flew to the west down and near the ridge side of the canyon where Ashford, Washington, is located. Unable to see anything that looked like the lost ship, I made a 360 degree turn to the right and above the little city of Mineral, starting again toward Mt. Rainier. I climbed back up to an altitude of approximately 9,200 feet. The air was so smooth that day that it was a real pleasure flying and, as most pilots do when the air is smooth and they are flying at a higher altitude, I trimmed out my airplane in the direction of Yakima, Washington, which was almost directly east of my position and simply sat in my plane observing the sky and the terrain.”
The man himself was about to have the encounter that made him famous: “There was a DC-4 to the left and to the rear of me approximately fifteen miles distance, and I should judge, at 14,000 foot elevation. The sky and air was clear as crystal. I hadn’t flown more than two or three minutes on my course when a bright flash reflected on my airplane. It startled me as I thought I was too close to some other aircraft. I looked every place in the sky and couldn’t find where the reflection had come from until I looked to the left and the north of Mt. Rainier where I observed a chain of nine peculiar looking aircraft flying from north to south at approximately 9,500 foot elevation and going, seemingly, in a definite direction of about 170 degrees. They were approaching Mt. Rainier very rapidly, and I merely assumed they were jet planes. Anyhow, I discovered that this was where the reflection had come from, as two or three of them every few seconds would dip or change their course slightly, just enough for the sun to strike them at an angle that reflected brightly on my plane. These objects being quite far away, I was unable for a few seconds to make out their shape or their formation. Very shortly they approached Mt. Rainier, and I observed their outline against the snow quite plainly.”
Arnold did his very best to figure out what the vehicles were: “I thought it was very peculiar that I couldn’t find their tails but assumed they were some type of jet plane. I was determined to clock their speed, as I had two definite points I could clock them by; the air was so clear that it was very easy to see objects and determine their approximate shape and size at almost fifty miles that day. I remember distinctly that my sweep second hand on my eight day clock, which is located on my instrument panel, read one minute to 3 P.M. as the first object of this formation passed the southern edge of Mt. Rainier. I watched these objects with great interest as I had never before observed airplanes flying so close to the mountain tops, flying directly south to southeast down the hog’s back of a mountain range. I would estimate their elevation could have varied a thousand feet one way or another up or down, but they were pretty much on the horizon to me which would indicate they were near the same elevation as I was.”
It’s very clear from Arnold’s words that he was struggling to understand what was afoot in the skies over Washington State: “They flew like many times I have observed geese to fly in a rather diagonal chain-like line as if they were linked together. They seemed to hold a definite direction but rather swerved in and out of the high mountain peaks. Their speed at the time did not impress me particularly, because I knew that our army and air forces had planes that went very fast. What kept bothering me as I watched them flip and flash in the sun right along their path was the fact that I couldn’t make out any tail on them, and I am sure that any pilot would justify more than a second look at such a plane. I observed them quite plainly, and I estimate my distance from them, which was almost at right angles, to be between twenty to twenty-five miles. I knew they must be very large to observe their shape at that distance, even on as clear a day as it was that Tuesday, In fact I compared a zeus [sic: it should be “Dzus”] fastener or cowling tool I had in my pocket with them – holding it up on them and holding it up on the DC-4 – that I could observe at quite a distance to my left, and they seemed smaller than the DC-4; but, I should judge their span would have been as wide as the furtherest [sic] engines on each side of the fuselage of the DC-4.”
He continued to remain puzzled; in fact, very much so: “The more I observed these objects the more upset I became, as I am accustomed and familiar with most all objects flying whether I am close to the ground or at higher altitudes. I observed the chain of these objects passing another high snow-covered ridge in between Mt. Rainier and Mt. Adams and as, the first one was passing the south crest of this ridge the last object was entering the northern crest of the ridge. As I was flying in the direction of this particular ridge, I measured it and found it to be approximately five miles so I could safely assume that the chain of these saucer like objects were at least five miles long. I could quite accurately determine their pathway due to the fact that there were several high peaks that were a little this side of them as well as higher peaks on the other side of their pathway.”
The story got even more amazing: “As the last unit of this formation passed the southern-most high snow-covered crest of Mt. Adams, I looked at my sweep second hand and it showed that they had traveled the distance in one minute and forty-two seconds. Even at the time this timing did not upset me as I felt confident after I would land there would be some explanation of what I saw. A number of news men and experts suggested that I might have been seeing reflections or even a mirage. This I know to be absolutely false, as I observed these objects not only through the glass of my airplane but turned my airplane sideways where I could open my window and observe them with a completely unobstructed view. (Without sun glasses.) Even though two minutes seems like a very short time to one on the ground, in the air in two minutes time a pilot can observe a great many things and anything within his sight of vision probably as many as fifty or sixty times.”
As Arnold told it, “I continued my search for the marine plane for another fifteen or twenty minutes and while searching for this marine plane, what I had just observed kept going through my mind. I became more disturbed, so after taking a last look at Tieton Reservoir I headed for Yakima. I might add that my complete observation of these objects, which I could even follow by their flashes as they passed Mt. Adams, was around two and one-half or three minutes — although, by the time they reached Mt. Adams they were out of my range of vision as far as determining shape or form. Of course, when the sun reflected from one or two or three of these units, they appeared to be completely round; but, I am making a drawing to the best of my ability, which I am including, as to the shape I observed these objects to be as they passed the snow covered ridges as well as Mt. Rainier. When these objects were flying approximately straight and level, they were just a black thin line and when they flipped was the only time I could get a judgment as to their size. These objects were holding an almost constant elevation; they did not seem to be going up or coming down, such as would be the case of rockets or artillery shells.”
An opinion then came from Arnold: “I am convinced in my own mind that they were some type of airplane, even though they didn’t conform with the many aspects of the conventional type of planes that I know. Although these objects have been reported by many other observers throughout the United States, there have been six or seven other accounts written by some of these observers that I can truthfully say must have observed the same thing that I did; particularly, the descriptions of the three Western [Cedar City, Utah] Air Lines employees, the gentleman [pilot] from Oklahoma City and the locomotive engineer from Illinois, plus Capt. Smith and Co-Pilot Stevens of United Air Lines. Some descriptions could not be very accurate taken from the ground unless these saucer-like disks were at a great height and there is a possibility that all of the people who observed peculiar objects could have seen the same thing I did, but, it would have been very difficult from the ground to observe these for more than four or five seconds, and there is always the possibility of atmospheric moisture and dust near the ground which could distort one’s vision.”
There was more to come: “I have in my possession letters from all over the Unites States and people who profess that these objects have been observed over other portions of the world, principally Sweden, Bermuda, and California. I would have given almost anything that day to have had a movie camera with a telephoto lens and from now on I will never be without one – but, to continue further with my story. When I landed at Yakima, Wash., airport I described what I had seen to my very good friend, Al Baxter, who listened patiently and was very courteous but in a joking way didn’t believe me. I did not accurately measure the distance between these two mountains until I landed at Pendleton, Oregon, that same day where I told a number of pilot friends of mine what I had observed and they did not scoff or laugh but suggested they might be guided missiles or something new. In fact several former Army pilots informed me that they had been briefed before going into combat overseas that they might see objects of similar shape and design as I described and assured me that I wasn’t dreaming or going crazy.”
According to Arnold: “I quote Sonny Robinson, a former Army Air Forces pilot who is now operating dusting operations at Pendleton, Oregon, ‘that what you observed, I am convinced, is some type of jet or rocket propelled ship that is in the process of being tested by our government or even it could possibly be by some foreign government.’ Anyhow, the news that I had observed these spread very rapidly and before the night was over I was receiving telephone calls from all parts of the world; and, to date, I have not received one telephone call or one letter of scoffing or disbelief. The only disbelief that I know of was what was printed in the papers.”
In conclusion, there are these words from Arnold: “I look at this whole ordeal as not something funny as some people have made it out to be. To me it is mighty serious and since I evidently did observe something that at least Mr. John Doe on the street corner or Pete Andrews on the ranch has never heard about, is no reason that it does not exist. Even though I openly invited an investigation by the Army and the FBI as to the authenticity of my story or a mental or a physical examination as to my capabilities, I have received no interest from these two important protective forces of our country; I will go so far as to assume that any report I gave to the United and Associated Press and over the radio on two different occasions which apparently set the nation buzzing, if our Military intelligence was not aware of what I observed, they would be the very first people that I could expect as visitors. I have received lots of requests from people who told me to make a lot of wild guesses. I have based what I have written here in this article on positive facts and as far as guessing what it was I observed, it is just as much a mystery to me as it is to the rest of the world.”
So, in case you didn’t know the story, you do now!
EPAEen artistieke impressie van de Europese GNSS-satelliet met op de achtergrond planeet Aarde.
WETENSCHAP Het Europese navigatiesysteem Galileo heeft te kampen met een grote storing. Het satellietnetwerk ligt sinds vrijdag grotendeels plat door een ‘technisch incident met betrekking tot de infrastructuur op de grond’, zoals het EU-agentschap GSA zelf aangeeft.
Door de problemen kunnen alle ontvangers geen bruikbare signalen oppikken om hun positie te bepalen. In plaats daarvan zijn ze momenteel afhankelijk van de Amerikaanse tegenhanger gps. Afhankelijk van de geïnstalleerde chip kunnen dat ook de Russische (GLONASS) of Chinese (Beidou) netwerken zijn, meldt de BBC.
“Experts zijn bezig om de situatie zo snel mogelijk te herstellen”, laat GSA weten. Er is een onderzoeksraad ingesteld om de exacte oorzaak te achterhalen en het probleem op te lossen. Mogelijk ligt het euvel bij een faciliteit in Italië die gebruikt wordt om alle klokken in het systeem gelijk te stellen. De reddingsdienst SAR, om mensen in nood op bijvoorbeeld zee of in de de bergen te lokaliseren en helpen, werkt wel nog.
Alternatief voor Amerikaans gps-systeem
Galileo is het grootste ruimtevaartproject uit de Europese geschiedenis. De Europese Commissie wil een alternatief bouwen voor het overal gebruikte gps, dat van het Amerikaanse leger is. De Galileo-satellieten kunnen tot op 20 centimeter nauwkeurig bepalen waar een aangesloten kastje is. Volledige dienstverlening zal mogelijk zijn van zodra er 30 satellieten in de ruimte zijn, nu zijn er reeds 26 die rond onze planeet draaien. De vier resterende kunstmanen vertrekken eind volgend jaar.
Galileo had eigenlijk al in 2008 volledig operationeel moeten zijn. Maar de kosten zijn de pan uitgerezen. In 1999 plande de EU 2,2 tot 2,9 miljard euro voor de uitbouw van het systeem in. In de begroting tot 2020 is 7,2 miljard voor de uitbouw en 3 miljard voor de uitbatingvoorzien.
AFPDe Ariane 5-raket wordt in juli 2018 vanaf Frans-Guinea de ruimte ingeschoten met vier Galileo-satellieten aan boord.
De Indiase ruimtevaartmissie Chandrayaan-2 is op het laatste moment uitgesteld vanwege een technisch mankement. De lancering vanaf het Satish Dhawan Space Centre werd met nog amper een uur op de klok afgebroken, meldt het Indiase ruimtevaartinstituut ISRO.
De Chandrayaan-2 - ‘maanvoertuig’ in het Sanskriet - omvat naast een lander die niet ver van de zuidpool van de maan aan de grond wordt gezet ook een orbiter waaraan een Belgisch bedrijf heeft bijgedragen. Het Luikse Amos produceerde namelijk optische onderdelen van het hyperspectrale instrument (IIRS) aan boord van de orbiter.
De maansonde moest normaal gezien om 2.51 uur plaatselijke tijd (23.21 uur Belgische tijd) vertrekken vanop de zuidelijke ruimtehaven Sriharikota. Zo’n 56 minuten voor de lancering werd de missie echter afgelast omdat er een technisch probleem was vastgesteld aan de draagraket.
Nieuwe lanceerdatum
Als alles uiteindelijk goed verloopt, is India na de Verenigde Staten, de voormalige Sovjet-Unie en China het vierde land dat op de maan weet te landen. Volgens ISRO is het “de meest complexe ruimtemissie die het agentschap ooit heeft ondernomen”. India heeft eerder met de Chandrayaan-1 al onderzoek naar de maan verricht, maar is daar toen nooit geland.
Een nieuwe lanceerdatum wordt binnenkort bekendgemaakt.
India hoopt na de Verenigde Staten, de voormalige Sovjet-Unie en China het vierde land ter wereld te worden om een zachte landing op de Maan te verwezenlijken.
ISRO ✔@isro
A technical snag was observed in launch vehicle system at 1 hour before the launch. As a measure of abundant precaution, #Chandrayaan2 launch has been called off for today. Revised launch date will be announced later.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:HLN.be - Het Laatste Nieuws ( NL)
George Knapp: Australia's Classified and Unseen Alien Files
George Knapp: Australia's Classified and Unseen Alien Files
COAST TO COAST AM. An Australian researcher who focuses on government involvement in response to the UFO phenomena, Paul Dean, began tackling the problem directly and became instrumental in having the Australian government release hitherto classified and unseen files.
He joined George Knapp to discuss his latest UFO case analyses, and the preservation of UFO-related records. “I’ve got absolutely no doubt that there has to be hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pages of UFO reports, evaluations, investigations, memos, commander’s briefs, point papers, discussion pieces, etc.” existing in the bellows of the US government, he remarked, likely kept in a variety of places and agencies including NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command).
Did Rectangular SSP Craft Shoot Down Missile In Hawaii?
Did Rectangular SSP Craft Shoot Down Missile In Hawaii?
An interesting story by Dr. Michael Salla of Exopolitics.org with some very interesting photos, videos and a story about a man he calls JP who has some very interesting stories to share. JP has some very impressive photographs of what he claims are ships from the Secret Space Program he has been allowed to photograph. He also claims to have met aliens and being offered rides in their craft. I would never trust any alien no matter how “blonde” or “beautiful” they are since Joe Jordan (MUFON) discovered every alien abduction stops in the name of Jesus. When people tell me there are some “good” aliens then I say “then I guess my prayers won’t affect them!” My philosophy is Pray first, ask questions second!
Video showing Maui rectangular UFO mentioned by Michael Salla
Stunning photos of triangular craft taken by Michael Salla’s source in Orlando. Best I’ve seen!
On February 18, four stunning photographs of a flying triangle shaped craft was taken in Orlando, Florida at around 1:20 am. The photographer, my confidential source JP, was then approached by two men in black who threatened him to remain silent about what he had seen and photographed. The craft appeared with three lights shining, one at each corner, and hovered about 45 feet (13.7 meters) away from him over a secluded field near his home.
The part that interests me most about this story are the excellent photographs of the rectangular and triangular craft and the connection with some whistleblowers of the secret space program who claim the rectangular craft are weapons platforms. I would not doubt at all we have large flying craft in fact some of them are flying “carriers” similar to the Avengers movies. Was the missile flying toward Hawaii shot down by our secret space force? I would not doubt it at all.
The Avengers Movies were soft disclosure, we’ve had “space carriers” for many decades according to whistleblowers. They don’t use big fans though, it’s all antigravity, the Germans put submarines in space using antigravity.
This source JP is no doubt being monitored and followed. The pictures he has gotten of these secret space program craft are some of the best I’ve seen. In some cases he says he’s been told to look up and see the craft by people in the Air Force that want this information to leak out!
Here’s the story from Michael Salla
On July 3, 2019, a photo was released of a flying rectangle shaped UFO near the island of Maui that was taken over a year earlier, and only recently discovered by the photographer. What is remarkable about the photo is that it shows what appears to be a craft very similar to one photographed near MacDill Air Force base in October 2017, which was revealed by my Florida source, JP, to be a weapons platform used by U.S. Air Force Special Operations.
The similarity of the craft seen in the respective photos raises the intriguing possibility that the flying rectangle photographed near Maui may have been involved in the shooting down of a nuclear ballistic missile aimed at Hawaii on January 13, 2018, widely thought to have been a false missile alert.
First, here is the photo of the Maui rectangle along with an insert showing a close-up.
While driving up mount haleakala in maui i took this picture and didnt notice anything until weeks later when i was going over my vacation photos. the object was not seen live. the object was in only one frame, nothing before or after. unkown altitude but as you can see it was above the cloud line [sic].
The photo was taken on May 24, 2018, but the flying rectangle only discovered and reported by the photographer on July 3, 2019, to MUFON.
Now here is some important background for understanding the deep significance behind the 2018 Maui rectangle UFO sighting in terms of photos previously sent to me by JP.
I have known JP since 2008, and he has regularly given me updates on his multiple contact experiences with human looking extraterrestrials, along with his experiences with covert Air Force operatives who have abducted and interrogated him at classified facilities or in their antigravity spacecraft. My evaluation of him is that he is a reliable and credible source, and I have created a webpage with my articles about the photos he regularly sends me.
In October 2017, JP sent me a series of photos of a rectangle shaped UFO that he witnessed near MacDill Air Force Base, home of US Special Operations Command. He took the photos after being prompted to do so by two mysterious men he believes were covert Air Force operatives.
One set of nine photos taken on October 19, 2017, shows a rectangle shaped UFO flying together with a triangle shaped craft.
In another set of five photos taken on October 23, 2017, JP witnessed a rectangle UFO flying alone near MacDill. Both incidents involved covert operatives encouraging JP to take the photos. What follows is a short video featuring the October 23 photos and with some close-ups.
In one of the October 2017 incidents, JP recalls having been taken aboard the flying rectangle where he saw personnel wearing the patches of Air Force Special Operations. He says that during his visit to the flying rectangle, he was in a corridor where he could peer outside and saw many instrument panels. He later speculated that these were part the craft’s weapons control system.
JP’s experience matched other insider accounts that flying rectangles are heavily armed weapons platforms used by a secret space program run by the Air Force, Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office. Corey Goode, a prominent Secret Space Program insider, had the following to say about the weapons systems of flying rectangles:
I think similar platforms or UFOs have been reported in the 80s and 90s as they were first building out of these platforms that have modular weapons and personnel delivery systems or configurations. They were built up on that superstructure type frame a long time ago and they been on improved upon since but these are pretty old technologies both the TR 3B and the square platform.
JP recalled his experience aboard the rectangle craft only after he photographed it as a result of being prompted by the two Air Force covert operatives. After being prompted and taking the photos, he then remembered being just taken aboard the craft as his head gradually cleared from a daze after receiving an injection during the abduction.
In my earlier analysis of JP’s photos and his eyewitness testimony, I concluded that the flying rectangle is a weapons platform used by Air Force Special Operations that can be deployed in the upper atmosphere and in Earth orbit.
The similarity between the flying rectangles photographed by JP in October 2017, with the UFO photographed near Maui on May 24, 2018, is remarkable. Here is a side by side comparison of the Maui photo with what was photographed by JP on October 19 and 23.
What lends great significance to the Maui photo is that it was taken four months after the alleged “false ballistic missile alert” for Hawaii issued on January 13, 2018.
Remarkably, the military intelligence group QAnon, appeared to have given a warning of an impending false flag attack involving a “Defcon 1” scenario in a series of posts beginning on January 7, 2018, only six days before the Hawaii alert.
There were multiple witnesses of something being shot down on the morning of January 13, 2018, near Maui. The US Coast Guard subsequently spent the next week scouring the ocean for debris of what had been shot down as Maui boat captains have confidentially reported to me and others.
These witness reports, along with the testimonies of multiple whistleblowers all support the conclusion that a nuclear ballistic missile was shot down by White Hats within the US military opposed to a Deep State effort to covertly start another world war.
The false flag attack occurred in January 2018, and four months later a flying rectangle is accidentally photographed near the island of Maui. Given the photos and testimony of JP, it appears that a flying rectangle used as a weapons platform by Air Force Special Operations was being secretly deployed near the Hawaiian islands during the critical months after the attack. If so, it may have been also directly involved in neutralizing the January 13 false flag attack on Hawaii.
Synchronistically, a day after the release of the Maui flying rectangle photo, President Donald Trump declared at the July 4 Independence Day celebration that Space Force was soon to be created as the sixth branch of the US military.
Note by Glenn: Here’s some more videos about this rectangular object.
More photos of antigravity craft near MacDill Air Force Base
Fast moving rectangular craft! Here’s the note from the youtuber: ”upload of an infrared capture of a rectangular ufo craft from 22nd July 2013. Moving very fast so I have slowed down the video by 10 times. It passes behind the bird which is about 100 ft from the camera.”
How human babies born on Mars would suffer horrific MUTATIONS due to cosmic radiation and jeopardise the entire colonising mission
How human babies born on Mars would suffer horrific MUTATIONS due to cosmic radiation and jeopardise the entire colonising mission
Dr John Millis, a NASA-funded physicist and astronomer, said that the red planet's low gravity would also cause problems with the child's bone and muscles growth
By Mark Hodge
A HUMAN baby born on Mars would be MUTATED by cosmic radiation and would "put the entire crew in danger", US scientists believe.
Tesla billionaire Elon Musk recently invited members of NASA and leading academics to discuss colonising Earth’s nearest neighbour in the next 40 to 100 years.
Babies born on Mars would suffer mutations from the planet's cosmic radiation, an expert told The Sun Online4Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
But considering a human colony on Mars would need to reproduce in order to be successful – it’s worth considering the dangers of having a child on the mysterious planet.
Dr John Millis, a NASA-funded physicist and astronomer, told The Sun Online that cosmic radiation on the planet’s surface would lead to “mutations” in the fetus.
He said: “One of the larger challenges facing a human mission to Mars is the amount of time the astronauts would spend in transit to the planet would expose them to significant radiation.
“Similarly, once on the surface of Mars, the design and construction of the habitats would be crucial to mission success because of radiation concerns on the surface - since Mars has very little atmosphere or magnetic field.
“To the forming fetus, the higher radiation levels would cause cell deformation and mutation, possibly terminating the pregnancy before reaching full term.”
But it's not just the mother and the child who would be put at risk.
A female astronaut falling pregnant during a Mars mission would “put the entire crew in danger,” write US biologists Haley Schuster and Steven L. Peck.
The low gravity on Mars would also impact the infant's bones and muscles, Dr Millis saidCredit: Getty - Contributor
Martian caves could provide shelter for humans
Underground structures such as caves could be used to set up human colonies, NASA-funded project Caves of Mars Project found in 2004.
These Martian caverns could provide shielding from radiation and other dangerous elements, the report concluded.
Bill Hargenrader, SciFi Author and founder of the Mars NOWresearch organisation, told The Sun Online how human explorers could set up home on the red planet.
He said: "Mars is a lot colder than Earth, it's one per cent of the atmospheric pressure, it's 38 per cent of the gravity and it has no protection from cosmic radiation.
"The first structures will be the actual space craft the pioneers will land in. The next steps will be to use the Martian soil itself to tunnel or utilise cave structures.
"In addition, we're looking at using 3D printing to create bricks and other structures."
The two scientists, of Brigham Young University in Utah, believe resources such as medical supplies, oxygen and food would be compromised by the expectant mother and eventually her child.
In fact, they believe that a pregnancy on a Mars mission would be so dangerous that having the astronauts “permanently or temporarily sterilised" would have to be seriously considered.
Another challenge facing the mother and the crew would be the lack of a gravity on the red planet and its impact on the tot.
Mars has only 40 per cent of the gravity of the Earth which could lead to problems with the baby’s bone growth, Dr Millis said.
Microgravity environments can cause “bone and muscle degradation” which is why astronauts have to exercise regularly, he added.
Plans to set up a human colony on the red planet would be difficult with our current technology, scientists say
Credit: Alamy
New technology would need to be developed to deal with the radiation and low-gravity, Millis said. Pictured: The skeleton of a mutated fetus found inChile in 20037
Credit: Dr. Emery Smith
Dr Schuster and Dr Peck, who studied the impact of a pregnancy on a mission to Mars, agree that a baby would develop "abnormally" in an environment lacking gravity.
They write: "Studies using human bone marrow stem cells found a significant effect on cells in microgravity and fewer cells were generated.
"Since cell proliferation was decreased in these human stem cells, it is likely that the space environment could cause the fetus to develop abnormally"
Dr Millis, of Anderson University in Indiana, insists that new technology would need to be developed in order for a child to be born, grow and survive on the unforgiving planet.
Mars may be harboring alien life, according to NASA chief Jim Bridenstine. Pictured: In this handout provided by NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS This self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the 'Mojave' site, where its drill collected the mission's second taste of Mount Sharp.
Photo: Getty Images/NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
How long does it take to get to Mars?
It's not that short of a trip...
There's an immense distance between Earth and Mars, which means any trip to the red planet will take a very long time
It's also made more complicated by the fact that the distance is constantly changing as the two planets rotate around the sun
The closest that the Earth and Mars would ever be is a distance of 33.9million miles – that's 9,800 times the distance between London and New York
That's really rare though: the more useful distance is the average, which is 140million miles
Scientists on Earth have already launched a whole bunch of spacecraft to (or near) Mars, so we have a rough idea of how long it takes with current technology
Historically, the trip has taken anywhere from 128 to 333 days - admittedly a huge length of time for humans to be on board a cramped spacecraft.
He said: “It is highly improbable that a forming fetus would be able to make it to term in space, at least without significant radiation shielding.
“A simulated gravity environment on the spacecraft such as those depicted in some films, such as The Martian, would also be required.
“In all, it seems, that with the limits of current technology it is unlikely a baby could be born in space, and even if they were, they would face significant developmental challenges.”
Schuster and Peck also reveal that a pregnant astronaut "may be at greater risk for contracting an illness" brought on the mission by another crew member.
They write: "Pathogens may spread among the crew more easily in the cramped conditions of a spacecraft.
Elon Musk told HBO that there's a 70% chance he'll move to Mars
Credit: HBO
"The observation that astronauts’ immune systems are suppressed due to microgravity is well established.
"NASA researchers expect that an impaired immune system could pose a major risk for longer space flights, such as the one to Mars."
Despite the dangers involved of living there, South African-born tech mogul Elon Musk recently said there is a 70 per cent chance he will travel to Mars.
Musk, who founded PayPal and runs car firm Tesla, hopes to visit the planet using technology built by his space company SpaceX.
SpaceX is currently working on a vessel named Starship, which was previously codenamed Big F***ing Rocket.
It's believed that Starship will be able to make the voyage to Mars – with humans on board – within the next seven years.
And Musk, speaking last month on HBO's Axios, said: "I know exactly what to do. I'm talking about moving there."
The red planet is being photographed by NASA's unmanned Insight spacecraft which landed on the planet two weeks ago.
By examining and mapping the interior of Mars, scientists hope to learn why the rocky planets in our solar system turned out so different and why Earth became a haven for life.
On June 24, 1947, an event in Washington changed the modern world and unleashed a phenomenon and memes that continue to this day.
On that date, a pilot and salesman from Boise, Idaho, named Kenneth Arnold was flying near Mount Rainier when he saw what he later described as discs traveling at high speed — 1,000 miles per hour or more —through the Cascades between Rainier and Mount Adams. On landing in Oregon, he described them moving like “a saucer if you skip it across water.” A new term entered our language: “flying saucer,” and suddenly saucers exploded into public consciousness.
Within days of Arnold’s report, people everywhere began seeing and reporting discs in the skies. At first, the idea wasn’t so much that they were extraterrestrial. This was the Cold War era, when new technologies were being unleashed — jet planes, missiles, atomic bombs. An Oregon congressman claimed the saucers were Russian rockets. Others figured they were some new atomic-related technology.
Some people dismissed the sightings as atmospheric conditions, lenticular clouds, meteors, planets or the product of too much drink. The United Press International ran a story spoofing the craze with a bylined column from its “Sea Monster and Saucer Correspondent.”
Just days after Arnold’s report, a minister in La Grande, Oregon, said they were signs of the second coming of Christ. Arnold said he received a call from an unknown preacher in Texas who said he was getting his flock “ready for the end of the world.” A woman expressed worry to Arnold that she’d have to protect her children from “men from Mars."
Military officials said they would look into it, and eventually authorities settled on the term “UFO” — “unidentified flying object” — as a more objective term than “flying saucer,” since not everything sighted was saucer-shaped, and UFO sounded less crackpot.
As the years went by and sightings continued, the state of Washington created a special form for UFO-sighting reports. These were taken from around the region by Civil Defense authorities and the Washington State Patrol, and often sent on to the U.S. Air Force. The form asked people for the color, shape, speed and location of the “UFOBs.” As to size, it asked witnesses to give this highly specific measurement: “The approximate size of the object as compared to a garden pea held at arms [sic] length.” Pea, baseball, even egg yolk were some of the size descriptions that flowed in.
The involvement of authorities investigating the phenomenon became suspect early on, especially as many people believed flying saucers were possibly top secret government projects, and that they might cover up the truth.
Within days of Arnold’s 1947 sighting, this idea was codified by another event alleged to have occurred, one that resulted in a powerful meme more popular than ever today. This was the so-called Maury Island incident where a man from Tacoma named Harold Dahl claimed that one of several doughnut-shaped UFOs had dropped debris that damaged his boat and killed his dog while he was off Maury Island, near Vashon Island. Arnold and others investigated, and it was determined to be a hoax, though some claimed the investigation was a cover-up. In the Maury Island case, Dahl said he told his story to a mysterious visitor, a man in a black suit, who warned him not to speak of it. Two of the incident investigators were killed in a plane crash while returning home. This appears to be the genesis of the “men in black” (MIB) meme and within a few years the MIB became cemented into UFO lore.
The Pacific Northwest has contributed a great deal to the Jet Age and Space Age, and those contributions continue with companies like Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, which recently announced its timetable for putting people on the moon again and hopes for colonizing Mars.
But our earliest and most enduring contribution was to ignite the world’s interest in the possibilities and mysteries that skipped like saucers through the sky.
The following are a tiny sample of the scores of UFO reports from Washington citizens in the 1960s. They were taken by law enforcement and Civil Defense staffers. (Thanks to Ben Helle and the Washington State Archives staff for sharing them.)
An object “blue green surrounded by red fire” about “the size of a baseball” seen in the sky coming from California that “glowed like a 4th of July Roman candle” seen near Elma, WA. (1961)
Foil-like threads rain down on house in Aberdeen, WA; samples attached to report. Several reports of same phenomenon along the coast including Westport and Kalaloch. (1962)
Mrs. Keith Miller of Seattle reports three white objects traveling at 2,000 mph in formation at 11 p.m. (1962)
Strange soot falls on ranch with racehorses in Sumner, WA, and made them very sick. Other local livestock impacted, some died. (1963)
State Patrol sergeant on federal guard duty reports seeing “hovering” light southwest of Coulee Dam. (1963)
Cowlitz County Civil Defense reports various people seeing brightly lit object that changed from round to cigar-shaped, near Longview. (1964)
A spinning saucer with red and green lights seen after midnight by campers in Wild Cat Lake area of Kitsap County. (1965)
A caller from Aberdeen complains of unknown white object — is advised “to forget about it till it lands.”
Another report from the same people carries the notation that the complainants are “screwy as loons.” (1966)
A woman in Seattle reports lights in the sky that looked like a “foot-long chain of stars” that emitted a “humming sound like wind in wires,” they moved west, stopped and started again. (1967)
Report from Jefferson County sheriff indicated multiple reports of a bright light — white or dome shaped — that appeared to land on golf course and in the area of Admiralty Inlet. Houses reported a grayish-black chemical residue on them afterwards. Aliens or a teenage bonfire gone wrong? (1967)
There is no aircraft in the history of human flight that seems to have captured the public's imagination like the SR-71 Blackbird. I have covered all aspects of this aircraft and its history, including first-hand accounts of memorable missions, the plane's celestial navigation system, very memorable flybys—and I mean very memorable—and departures, fascinating cockpit tours, tense Cold War moments, and even some of the exotic conceptsthat were proposed for its predecessor, the A-12 Oxcart. Even the finest details about the SR-71 and its history are extremely interesting, yet a really good general overview of the iconic black jet can be just as intriguing. A segment from Wonderful World Of Flying, shot back in the 1990s and hosted by airline pilot Barry Schiff, is exactly that.
The video gives us a hands-on look at the broader strokes that make up the SR-71 and its concept of operations, along with some interesting factual tidbits along the way. It was shot at the very end of the Blackbird's flying career, as the final flying examples were serving with NASA, which is a civilian agency, so the video is about as straightforward and up-close and personal as it gets.
It's amazing to think that nearly 55 years after the SR-71 first took flight, and two decades after its last flight, it still offers so many fascinating elements to study and remains arguably the most fascinating flying machine mankind ever created... Well, at least that we know of!
More than half a million Facebook users have signed up to storm Area 51 to “see them aliens” at the U.S. Air Force base in southern Nevada that’s long been shrouded in mystery for those who believe it’s a holding site for otherworldly creatures.
It all may be a joke or a lark for many of the supposed UFO seekers. But federal officials aren’t laughing about the possibility of people actually showing up at the highly classified military base, which is a remote detachment of California’s Edwards Air Force Base.
An event page called “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us” had garnered nearly 670,000 recruits as of Saturday. Almost 620,000 others have indicated they’re “interested.”
The purported raid is set for Sept. 20 between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m., with the “details” section noting, “If we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets.” The reference is to Naruto Uzumaki, a Japanese manga character who appeared to run at the speed of light while leaning forward and stretching his arms behind his back.
According to ComicBook.com, a news site covering comics, TV shows and movies, a social media user who goes by the name “SmyleeKun” and who devised the Facebook page is “best known for posting memes and streaming to fans on Twitch,” a live streaming platform used by gamers.
In other words, it’s almost certainly a prank. But it’s also caught the attention of the Defense Department.
Air Force spokeswoman Laura McAndrews, in comments to The Washington Post on Friday, warned anyone seriously intending to follow through with storming the site to think twice.
″[Area 51] is an open training range for the U.S. Air Force, and we would discourage anyone from trying to come into the area where we train American armed forces,” she said. “The U.S. Air Force always stands ready to protect America and its assets.”
Though the government had denied the existence of Area 51 for years, in 2013 the CIA acknowledged it as real. However, it has only been described as an aviation test site.
Amerikaanse leger waarschuwt 827.000 alienjagers Area 51 niet te bestormen. Peentjes zweten voor het Pentagon
Amerikaanse leger waarschuwt 827.000 alienjagers Area 51 niet te bestormen. Peentjes zweten voor het Pentagon
Het aantal UFO-enthousiastelingen dat in september de geheimzinnige legerbasis Area 51 wil bestormen, staat inmiddels op ruim 827.000.
Het Pentagon is bezorgd dat sommigen van hen daadwerkelijk een poging gaan doen om de basis binnen te dringen.
De hashtag #Area51memes is inmiddels viraal gegaan op Twitter.
Altijd paraat
Hoewel de meesten zich waarschijnlijk voor de grap hebben aangemeld, neemt de Amerikaanse luchtmacht de zaak zeer serieus.
Woordvoerster Laura McAndrews zei dat ze ‘iedereen afraadt om naar het gebied te komen waar we Amerikaanse soldaten trainen’.
“De Amerikaanse luchtmacht staat altijd paraat om Amerika te beschermen,” klonk het.
Gecrashte buitenaardse schepen
Het bestaan van Area 51 werd pas in 2013 officieel erkend door de CIA. Alienjagers vermoeden dat er gecrashte buitenaardse schepen worden bewaard.
Het evenement met de titel ‘Bestorm Area 51, ze kunnen ons niet allemaal tegenhouden’ zou op 20 september moeten plaatsvinden.
Dodelijk geweld
De grenzen van het gebied worden permanent bewaakt en borden waarschuwen dat ‘dodelijk geweld’ mag worden gebruikt tegen mensen die zich ongeoorloofd toegang verschaffen.
Passagiers van tourbussen die naar de rand van het gebied komen, krijgen geregeld een rode laserstip op hun voorhoofd vanuit de woestijn.
Amazing footage reveals a mysterious black hole found by Hubble which astronomers claim 'shouldn't exist' according to Einstein's theories of relativity
Amazing footage reveals a mysterious black hole found by Hubble which astronomers claim 'shouldn't exist' according to Einstein's theories of relativity
An international team of researchers made the finding in the galaxy NGC 3147 130 million light-years away
The 'starving' supermassive black hole weighs roughly 250 million times more than the sun scientists say
They claim it shouldn't have a large disk of matter surrounding it according to Einstein's theories of relativity
Instead light given off by the object mimics the behaviour of black holes at the centres of more active galaxies
A mysterious black hole surrounded by a thin 'accretion' disk of gases and other cosmic debris that astronomers claim 'shouldn't exist' has been discovered at the heart of a spiral galaxy.
NGC 3147, found around 130 million light-years away in the Draco constellation, was uncovered by scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope.
The supermassive black hole, which weighs roughly 250 million times more than the sun, shouldn't have a disk of matter surrounding it, according to Einstein's theories of relativity.
That's because NGC 3147's black hole is currently 'starving', due to a lack of material to feed on in the region, and starving black holes don't usually have an accretion disk around them, experts say.
Instead, light given off by the object at the centre of NGC 3147 mimics the behaviour of a supermassive black hole at the centres of much more active galaxies.
A mysterious black hole surrounded by a thin 'accretion' disk of gases and other cosmic debris that astronomers claim 'shouldn't exist' has been discovered at the heart of a spiral galaxy.
Pictured: An artist's impression of the accretion disk swirling around the supermasive black hole
WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT NGC 3147?
Galaxy NGC 3147 galaxy is relatively close by, at a distance of roughly 130 million light-years. It can be found in the constellation of Draco, The Dragon.
The graceful, winding arms of the majestic galaxy appear like a grand spiral staircase sweeping through space. They are actually long lanes of young blue stars, pinkish nebulae, and dust in silhouette.
The beauty of the galaxy belies the fact that at its very centre is a malnourished black hole. It is surrounded by a thin, compact disk of stars, gas, and dust that have been caught up in a gravitational maelstrom.
The black hole's gravity is so intense that anything that ventures near it gets swept up in the disk.
The disk is so deeply embedded in the black hole's intense gravitational field that the light from the gas disk is modified, according to Einstein's theories of relativity.
This has provided astronomers with a unique glimpse at the dynamic processes at work close to a black hole.
An international team of researchers, including experts from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Johns Hopkins University, made the finding.
The disk of material circling the black hole offers a unique opportunity to test Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity.
It is so deeply embedded in the black hole's intense gravitational field that the light emitted from the gas disk is modified, according to Einstein's theories of relativity.
This has provided astronomers with a unique glimpse at the dynamic processes at work close to a black hole, researchers say.
'This is an intriguing peek at a disc very close to a black hole, so close that the velocities and the intensity of the gravitational pull are affecting how we see the photons of light,' said the study's first author, Stefano Bianchi, of the University of Roma Tre in Italy.
'The type of disc we see is a scaled-down quasar that we did not expect to exist.
'It's the same type of disc we see in objects that are 1000 or even 100 000 times more luminous.
'The predictions of current models for very faint active galaxies clearly failed.'
NGC 3147 (top down satellite image, left / above), found around 130 million light-years away in the Draco constellation, was uncovered by scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope. The supermassive black hole (top down artist's impression, right / under) shouldn't have a disk of matter surrounding it, according to Einstein's theories of relativity
NGC 3147's black hole (pictured, glowing at it's centre) is currently 'starving', due to a lack of material to feed on in the region, and starving black holes don't usually have an accretion disk around them, experts say
WHAT ARE BLACK HOLES?
Black holes are so dense and their gravitational pull is so strong that no form of radiation can escape them - not even light.
They act as intense sources of gravity which hoover up dust and gas around them. Their intense gravitational pull is thought to be what stars in galaxies orbit around.
How they are formed is still poorly understood. Astronomers believe they may form when a large cloud of gas up to 100,000 times bigger than the sun, collapses into a black hole.
Many of these black hole seeds then merge to form much larger supermassive black holes, which are found at the centre of every known massive galaxy.
Alternatively, a supermassive black hole seed could come from a giant star, about 100 times the sun's mass, that ultimately forms into a black hole after it runs out of fuel and collapses.
When these giant stars die, they also go 'supernova', a huge explosion that expels the matter from the outer layers of the star into deep space.
In order to study the matter swirling deep inside this disc, the researchers used the Hubble Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) instrument.
This diagnostic tool divides the light from an object into its many individual wavelengths to determine the object's speed, temperature, and other characteristics at very high precision.
STIS was integral to effectively observing the low-luminosity region around the black hole, blocking out the galaxy’s brilliant light.
The disc’s material was measured by Hubble to be whirling around the black hole at more than 10 per cent of the speed of light.
At such extreme velocities, the gas appears to brighten as it travels toward Earth on one side, and dims as it speeds away from our planet on the other. This effect is known as relativistic beaming.
Hubble’s observations also show that the gas is embedded so deep in a gravitational well that light is struggling to escape, and therefore appears stretched to redder wavelengths.
The astronomers initially selected this galaxy to validate accepted models about lower-luminosity active galaxies: those with malnourished black holes.
These models predict that discs of material should form when ample amounts of gas are trapped by a black hole’s strong gravitational pull, subsequently emitting lots of light and producing a brilliant beacon called a quasar.
'We've never seen the effects of both general and special relativity in visible light with this much clarity,' said team member Marco Chiaberge of AURA for ESA, STScI and Johns Hopkins University.
Light given off by the object (artists' impression, right) at the centre of NGC 3147 (left) mimics the behaviour of a supermassive black hole at the centres of much more active galaxies
WHAT'S INSIDE A BLACK HOLE?
Black holes are strange objects in the universe that get their name from the fact that nothing can escape their gravity, not even light.
If you venture too close and cross the so-called event horizon, the point from which no light can escape, you will also be trapped or destroyed.
For small black holes, you would never survive such a close approach anyway.
The tidal forces close to the event horizon are enough to stretch any matter until it's just a string of atoms, in a process physicists call 'spaghettification'.
But for large black holes, like the supermassive objects at the cores of galaxies like the Milky Way, which weigh tens of millions if not billions of times the mass of a star, crossing the event horizon would be uneventful.
Because it should be possible to survive the transition from our world to the black hole world, physicists and mathematicians have long wondered what that world would look like.
They have turned to Einstein's equations of general relativity to predict the world inside a black hole.
These equations work well until an observer reaches the centre or singularity, where, in theoretical calculations, the curvature of space-time becomes infinite.
Astronomen ontdekken mysterieus zwart gat ‘dat niet zou moeten bestaan’. Dit is ‘m
Astronomen ontdekken mysterieus zwart gat ‘dat niet zou moeten bestaan’. Dit is ‘m
In het centrum van een sterrenstelsel hebben astronomen een mysterieus zwart gat ontdekt dat ‘niet zou moeten bestaan’.
NGC 3147, op zo’n 130 miljoen lichtjaar afstand in het sterrenbeeld Draak, is gevonden met behulp van de Hubble-ruimtetelescoop.
Rond het supermassieve zwarte gat, dat ongeveer 250 miljoen keer zo zwaar is als de zon, zou geen schijf van materie moeten kunnen bestaan, zo stelt de relativiteitstheorie van Einstein.
Verhongert
Dat komt omdat het zwarte gat van NGC 3147 momenteel ‘verhongert’ als gevolg van een gebrek aan materiaal in de regio.
Rond verhongerende zwarte gaten zou normaal gesproken geen zogeheten accretieschijf moeten bestaan.
De ontdekking is gedaan door onder andere onderzoekers van de Universiteit van Californië – Santa Barbara en de Johns Hopkins-universiteit.
Unieke kans
De schijf rond het zwarte gat biedt onderzoekers een unieke kans om de theorieën van Albert Einstein op de proef te stellen.
De materie in de schijf bereikt snelheden van meer dan 10 procent van de lichtsnelheid.
Deze extreem hoge snelheden beïnvloeden de manier waarop we licht afkomstig van de schijf waarnemen, aldus hoofdonderzoeker Stefano Bianchi.
Niet verwacht
“We hadden niet verwacht zo’n soort schijf te zullen aantreffen,” zei Bianchi.
Normaal gesproken worden dergelijke schijven alleen gezien rond objecten die 1000 of zelfs 100.000 keer meer licht geven.
Chile has one of the highest concentrations of large telescope observatories in the world, mostly in the Atacama Desert in the northern part. It could be due to the dry air, its isolation from city lights or its 330 clear nights per year on average. Those conditions could also be why Chile also has such a large number of UFO sightings. It could also be due to its multitude of mines, where ‘alien’ ships might conceivably pick up parts or fuel. The city of Concepcion in particular has a place in UFO lore for its ‘tiny alien skeleton’, which for decades fascinated and baffled many before DNA tests proved it to be a human fetus. That’s why a recent UFO sighting in Chile deserves more than a cursory view.
“UFOs, or strange lights captured in Concepción in front of the Catholic university.”
That was the caption on July 6, 2019, under a YouTube video taken the day before by a security camera which showed two unidentified flying objects quickly crossing the sky and changing directions multiple times. (Watch it here.) There are obvious trails behind them, suggesting they could be meteors or skydivers, but their speed and their drastic directional changes seem to negate both of those possibilities. The video was reported by the local media source Pagina 7 (Page 7), which identified the location – over the Catholic University of the Most Holy Conception – and asked local meteorologist Eduardo Sáez for his opinion.
“Indeed, at first sight it is difficult to know what it is. If it were a thermal image, it could be the motor temperature, but I do not know what kind of image it is. For a plane, but if we think of meteorites, of course. But I already say that there is no meteorological phenomenon that generates that kind of light.”
Since this is Chile, there are plenty of UFO investigators around, so Pagina 7 then asked local paranormal investigator Hugo Mazuela for his analysis of the video.
“I find it very interesting. I have two theories about it, the first is that they can be objects called ‘Foo Fighters’ or moving lights, which are a kind of UFO with voluntary movements as we see in the video. Sometimes these UFOs are usually so fast that it is difficult to see them, they are characterized by being alive or not being manned.”
Foo Fighters? What about a camera anomaly? These security cameras aren’t high quality, but Pagina 7 says no other anomalies were seen on other footage from it. Yes, there’s one more possibility we haven’t addressed – the ubiquitous drones – but Mazuela says the same thing applies to them as to meteors or skydivers … the movements were too fast and sharp to be a drone, so he’s sticking with Foo Fighters.
No other reports of these UFOs come up in searches, but another one allegedly occurred on July 7, also over Concepcion, that was captured on a cellphone video. (Watch it here.) This sighting looks more like a drone, plane or possibly one of those experimental triangular crafts that keep appearing more frequently. In fact, some comments on the video say this is actually an older sighting from December 2018 of exactly that, but it’s Chile so one should never jump to conclusions.
Chile has been called the best place in the world to see UFOs,and these videos add to that sentiment. While many can be blamed on the military or drones, that doesn’t apply to all. And we haven’t even brought in the fact that Chile has a chain of over 2,000 active and inactive volcanoes (second-longest next to Indonesia) and there have been many UFO sightings near volcanoes that lead to speculation that they may be ports or refueling stations. Or they could just be anomalies.
In any case, Chile deserves all of the attention it gets as a UFO hotspot. Hopefully, the experts there will soon explain the unusual sighting on July 5th over Concepcion.
UFO authority Timothy Good stated the following in his 1987 book, Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-Up: “In 1959Stan Steers, President of the Queensland Flying Saucer Research Bureau [which was created in 1956] at the time received a phone call from a man requesting a meeting in a large car park in Brisbane, hinting that Seers might learn something to his advantage about UFOs.” Seers, by his own admission, at first thought that this was someone’s idea of a not too amusing practical joke. All thoughts of pranks went quickly out of the window, however, when – after a couple more phone calls with the mysterious man at the other end of the line – Seers was finally able to meet the clandestine character at that aforementioned car park. He was nothing less than an employee of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization(the ASIO).
“Mr. D,” as Seers tantalizingly termed the man, was seemingly intent on playing a game of “bad-cop”-“good-cop,” but all on his lonesome. The ASIO agent began in somewhat hostile fashion and “dangled the Communist bogey,” as Seers succinctly put it. The man then proceeded to reel off significant background information on both Seers and two of his colleagues in the QFSRB. In an instant, Seers realized something amazing and more than a bit alarming: I’m being watched. Closely. By the Government. Shit. Mr. D’s tone soon changed, though, when he suggested to Seers that perhaps the ASIO could provide significant UFO-themed data to Seers and his friends – if and when the circumstances were deemed to be right; whatever that meant.
The Australian government handing its UFO files over to a group of ufologists? It sounded way too good to be true. No surprise: it turns out that’s exactly what it was. Mr. D carefully, skillfully and ultimately ruthlessly wormed his way into the UFO group, causing major dissention in the ranks, and fracturing friendships as he did so. This is what Seers astutely came to believe was the entire point of the operation: to infiltrate the QFSRB, to weaken it, and to ensure that the ASIO was able to keep a careful watch on it and its members at all times – and particularly so those in the group who had what was referred to as by the ASIO as having “some Communist influence.” A now-declassified ASIO document, titled The Queensland Flying Saucer Research Bureau, and dated August 4, 1959 – the very same time-frame in which Stan Seers was approached – reveals that the ASIO had undertaken a wealth of background data on the UFO group, as the following extract from an ASIO document shows:
“The Queensland Flying Saucer Research Bureau is an organization with a present membership of 163 which meets regularly on the second Wednesday of each month in the Canberra Hotel and conducts a discussion group on the first Wednesday of each month in…Elizabeth Street, Brisbane. The members are of great diversity in outlook, politics and religion but all have a common purpose in endeavoring to establish the authenticity of unidentified flying objects which have been sighted throughout the world, including Australia, particularly in the last ten years. There is some Communist influence in the Bureau due to the presence of the Secretary, Gordon Leslie Jamieson and members of the Souwer family of Slacks Creek, to whom he is related by marriage.”
The ASIO continued: “Recently an announcement appeared in the daily papers which stated that a difference of opinion has arisen amongst two groups of eminent Soviet physicists concerning the origin of an explosion which took place in Siberia in 1908 [the controversial “Tunguska” affair] and which has been for the past fifty years accepted as the landing of a giant meteorite. The difference has arisen due to the fact that a small group of scientists have now put forward the theory that due to the unnatural nature of the explosion and the fact that a large number of persons in the area suffered from leukemia the explosion could have been the destruction of some space vehicle, possibly trying to land or in some mechanical trouble.”
There was also this from the ASIO: “At the May meeting of the Bureau, Gordon Leslie Jamison had prepared for dispatch to the Soviet Union a letter asking for any additional information that may be available from the scientists. To date no reply has been received but it is quite possible that with the re-introduction of the Soviet Embassy to Australia this could easily afford an avenue for contact between the V.O.K.S. representative and the Bureau with offers from the Soviet Embassy to assist in the supply of information.”
The ASIO’s concerns about VOKS – Vsesojuznoe obschestvo kul’turnykh svyzei s zagranitsei – liaising with the QFSRB were completely valid and warranted. It was a body that highlighted matters of a cultural nature between the East and the West. It wasn’t widely known outside of the world of intelligence, however, that many of those Russian cultural characters were really Soviet agents seeking information that might have been useful to the KGB. The ASIO was fully aware that VOKS was filled to the absolute brim with agents of the Soviet Union, and not just with cultural representatives. And, although the VOKS program was shut down in 1958, the QFSRB had been in existence since 1956. Two years was an ample amount of time for the UFO group to have cultivated a chain of communication with VOKS, something that the ASIO feared just might already have happened.
It’s not surprising, then, that the ASIO became very concerned that those same Soviet agents could have tried to “turn” one or more QFSRB members. And, in a worst-case scenario, did turn them. Such a grim picture was seen as being disturbingly all too possible. For example, although Stan Steers was described by the ASIO as being “the most level headed and rational member of the Bureau,” the QFSRB’s secretary, Gordon Jamieson and his family were described by Australian Intelligence as “pacifists and communists.”
Most people who have lived in Southern California their entire lives would be quick to tell you that earthquakes there are nothing out of the ordinary.
However, with the arrival of the Fourth of July holiday, residents north of Los Angeles had more than just fireworks to shake things up, as a swarm of earthquakes rattled desert communities throughout the region well into the following week.
NBC Los Angeles reported that as of Monday morning, “nearly 3,000 aftershocks [were] recorded in the area since Friday’s magnitude-7.1 main shock and magnitude-6.4 Independence Day quake, the strongest earthquakes to hit Southern California in the last 20 years.” The earthquakes were centered just outside the town of Ridgecrest in the Mojave Desert, approximately 150 miles northbound from Los Angeles.
Although earthquakes aren’t uncommon in the region, that isn’t to say that last week’s wave of holiday tremblors was anything typical, either.
USGS map depicting mainshock and aftershock locations shortly after the M7.1 event, which displays a distinctive “T” pattern, created by the two perpendicular fault zones.
(USGS/Public domain).
Geologists note that there is only around a 5% likelihood that a significant earthquake will be followed by an even larger one; however, this was only one way that initial pair of earthquakes that struck the region seemingly defied the odds. Live Science reported that the Independence Day earthquake occurred on an unmapped fault region along the Little Lake fault zone near Ridgecrest, and involved right angle ruptures, which may be more easily detected today than they were only years ago.
“This is very interesting geologically,” geoscientist Michele Cooke told Live Science. “We don’t have a lot of earthquakes in our record that show simultaneous slip on two perpendicular faults,” she said.
“Many of us are wondering if these complications are actually the norm and that our instruments 10+ years ago were not sensitive enough to pick up these complications,” Cooke also said, suggesting that these “rare” seismic events may not be so unusual after all.
However, geologists weren’t the only ones noticing odd things coinciding with the recent California earthquakes. According to the National Association for Amateur Radio (ARRL), disturbances in HF propagation on the west coast appeared to coincide with the July 4 earthquake as well, resulting in a “massive short-wave radio blackout” over the holiday weekend, a phenomenon that was observed by a number of HAM radio operators in the region.
Alex Schwarz, an amateur radio operator out of British Columbia, Canada who operates the RF Seismograph, reported that there were correlations “between earthquake activity and HF band conditions, said the radio disruption began at around 1600 UTC on July 4, and continued into July 5.”
According to the ARRL, “[Schwarz] said that on July 4, the blackout was total except for 20 meters, where conditions were ‘severely attenuated’… The RF Seismograph also detected the magnitude 7.1 earthquake on July 6 in the same vicinity.”
Finally, NASA was also monitoring the quakes, with a little help from the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) and one of their satellites, which resulted in colorful imagery of the areas affected by the earthquakes:
Image depicting earthquake elevational displacement following the July 4th seismic events
(Credit: JPL/Caltech/NASA).
According to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the space agency’s Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis (ARIA) team borrowed data collected by synthetic aperture radar, which was then colorized to reveal minor changes that were visible in the area of the earthquakes.
“Each colour… represents 12 centimetres (about 4.8 inches) of lifting or sinking in the landscape, with evidence of cracks in the lines cutting through the fringes of some colours,” Science Alert reported.
Despite the significant strength of last week’s earthquakes, few injuries were reported since the epicenter of the quakes had been located in a remote area. It is also possible that more earthquakes and aftershocks will continue over the next several weeks, although the unique data being collected in their aftermath may help reshape our understanding of similar seismic phenomena for decades to come.
Supercomputer simulations of galaxies show that Einstein’s general theory of relativity might not be the only way to explain how gravity works or how galaxies form. The new Chameleon Theory is a possible alternative.
From the new study, a computer-simulated image of a galaxy, as seen from the side. On right, in red-blue color, you are seeing the gas density within the disk of the galaxy, with the stars shown as bright dots. On left, you see the force changes in the gas within the disk, where the dark central regions correspond to standard General Relativity-like forces and the bright yellow regions correspond to enhanced (modified forces).
Since the early 1900s, Einstein’s theory of gravity – called the general theory of relativity – has dominated the theories and calculations of cosmologists, those who explain the workings of our universe as a whole. General relativity has beenproven again and again, most recently with the first direct black hole image. Now, physicists at Durham University in the U.K. say that Einstein’s general theory of relativity might not be the only way to explain how gravity works or how galaxies form. They’ve had dramatic research success with an alternative model for gravity –f(R)-gravity – called a Chameleon Theory, because, in their words, “it changes behavior according to the environment.” They say this Chameleon Theory is an alternative to general relativity in explaining the formation of structures in the universe. It might also help further understanding of dark energy, a mysterious substance thought to be accelerating the expansion rate of the universe.
The images on this page were released July 8, 2019, by physicists Christian Arnold, Matteo Leo and Baojiu Li, all of of Durham University’s Institute for Computational Cosmology. They’re the results of recent computer simulations run on the DiRAC Data Centric System at Durham University. The simulations show that galaxies like our Milky Way could still form in the universe even with different laws of gravity. Earlier work had shown that theoretical calculations using Chameleon Theory reproduce the success of general relativity on the relatively small scale of our solar system. The Durham team has now shown that this theory allows for realistic simulations of large-scale structures like our Milky Way. Research co-lead author Christian Arnold, said:
Chameleon Theory allows for the laws of gravity to be modified so we can test the effect of changes in gravity on galaxy formation. Through our simulations we have shown for the first time that even if you change gravity, it would not prevent disk galaxies with spiral arms from forming.
Our research definitely does not mean that general relativity is wrong, but it does show that it does not have to be the only way to explain gravity’s role in the evolution of the universe.
A statement from these researchers explained more about their recent study:
The researchers looked at the interaction between gravity in Chameleon Theory and supermassive black holes that sit at the center of galaxies. Black holes play a key role in galaxy formation because the heat and material they eject when swallowing surrounding matter can burn away the gas needed to form stars, effectively stopping star formation.
The amount of heat spewed out by black holes is altered by changing gravity, affecting how galaxies form. However, the new simulations showed that even accounting for the change in gravity caused by applying Chameleon Theory, galaxies were still able to form.
These physicists said their work might also shed light on our understanding of the observed accelerating expansion of the universe. Scientists believe this expansion is being driven by dark energy, and the Durham researchers say their findings could be a small step toward explaining the properties of this substance. Research co-lead Baojiu Li commented:
In general relativity, scientists account for the accelerated expansion of the universe by introducing a mysterious form of matter called dark energy – the simplest form of which may be a cosmological constant, whose density is a constant in space and time. However, alternatives to a cosmological constant which explain the accelerated expansion by modifying the law of gravity, like f(R) gravity, are also widely considered given how little is known about dark energy.
The Durham researchers are theoretical physicists, as Einstein was. When Einstein’s general theory of relativity was first proven – during a total solar eclipse of 1919 – Einstein was catapulted into rock star fame. Now general relativity is fundamental to modern cosmology. The next step for Chameleon Theory would likewise be to test and hopefully confirm it via observations. There’s no doubt but that observational astronomers will soon be on the job, creating their own tests for the new Chameleon Theory, and perhaps proving it. If and when that happens, it’ll be super exciting!
Albert Einstein in 1912. He published his general theory of relativity in 1915. The theory was confirmed in 1919.
Bottom line: The new Chameleon Theory has the potential to become an alternate theory of gravity, working alongside Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Recent computer simulations show that the theory can be used to recreate large-scale structures (galaxies) in our universe.
Should everything go according to plan, more than a half-million strangers will gather in a remote Nevada town in mid-September, united by a common goal: to raid Area 51 in the wee hours of the morning — using a strength-in-numbers approach to reveal any extraterrestrial treasures stashed within the notoriously clandestine government base.
By Friday evening, more than 540,000 people from around the world had signed up to attend the joke Facebook event: “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us” — and just as many had indicated they were “interested.” Planned for Sept. 20 in Amargosa Valley, an hour’s drive from Las Vegas, the event page is filled with thousands of satirical posts and memes theorizing the best way to break into the top-secret facility.
“We will all meet up at the Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction and coordinate our entry,” reads a brief description of the event, which was created by popular video game streamer SmyleeKun. “If we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets.” The latter part of the description references anime ninja Naruto Uzumaki, whose signature head-forward, arms-behind-the-back running technique has led some to believe it makes them run faster. (It doesn’t.)
What we know — and don't know — about aliens and UFOs
The Post's Cleve R. Wootson Jr. explains why a 2017 admission from the government was like pouring kerosene on UFO conspiracy theories. (Video: Monica Akhtar/Photo: Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
Most people discussing the raid, including various news outlets that have written about the event, recognize that it’s not intended to be taken seriously. But what about those who don’t? It’s not clear exactly how many people — if any — will actually show up to lead a blitzkrieg on the Nellis Air Force Base Complex, which houses the land containing Area 51.
Though some who’ve posted on the event page in recent days have considered that possibility.
“P.S. Hello U.S. government, this is a joke, and I do not actually intend to go ahead with this plan,” wrote user Jackson Barnes, following his rather descriptive proposed game plan. “I just thought it would be funny and get me some thumbsy uppies on the Internet. I’m not responsible if people decide to actually storm area 51.”
Speaking with The Washington Post on Friday, Air Force spokeswoman Laura McAndrews said officials were aware of the event. When asked how authorities would respond to ardent explorers who might attempt to enter Area 51 in September, McAndrews said she could not elaborate on specific plans or security procedures at the base.
She did, however, issue a warning to those itching to try their luck.
“[Area 51] is an open training range for the U.S. Air Force, and we would discourage anyone from trying to come into the area where we train American armed forces,” McAndrews said. “The U.S. Air Force always stands ready to protect America and its assets.”
The facility has long been a source of public intrigue, yet for decades, Americans were told Area 51 didn’t exist at all. That notion was officially debunked in 2013 when the CIA confirmed its existence through documents obtained in a public records request by George Washington University.
Yes, Area 51 is definitely real — and even though the report indicated it was nothing more than an aircraft-testing facility, mentioning nothing about extraterrestrial life, the revelation gave credence to conspiracy theories alleging the government uses the base to hide aliens and their spacecraft. The CIA has since published information about test flights that took place there, and the alien aspects in many of those theories have been debunked.
However, in 2017, the Pentagon confirmed the existence of a $22 million government program to analyze “anomalous aerospace threats” — also known as UFOs — giving the alien-obsessed kooks fresh fodder for their conjectures.
Though the facility is not publicly accessible, the area around Area 51 is a popular tourist destination, sprinkled with alien-themed motels, museums and restaurants. (In 1996, Nevada renamed state Route 375 to “Extraterrestrial Highway.”) But those who venture too far into the land surrounding the base are greeted with warning signs indicating they could be fined or jailed for trespassing and taking photos.
Some signs suggest those who enter could be subject to “deadly force.”
In 2014, a tour bus carting four passengers near Area 51 inadvertently drove through the warning signs and entered the base, Las Vegas Nowreported. The truck was stopped by men in “military garb,” and everyone in the vehicle was threatened with a misdemeanor conviction and $650 fine. The incident was caught on video, making it obvious the tour’s passengers thought it was all part of the experience. Only the driver was charged.
Of course, those who say they will participate in the September raid know their mission won’t be easy. Some have offered their own plans and even schematics detailing how the group will take on the base.
But the chatter mostly inspired dozens of jokes and memes:
Senator Ted Cruz wants Congress to approve the formation of a ‘space force’ tasked with protecting ‘the nation’ against space pirates. Naturally, the people of Twitter responded in an appropriately dramatic fashion.
Cruz made the comments during a senate committee hearing on aviation and space on Tuesday. Cruz, chairman of the subcommittee, reasoned that because pirates threaten the open seas, “the same is possible in space.”
Adam Best✔@adamcbest
Ted Cruz argues that Space Force is necessary because... wait for it... space pirates. Leave it to Cruz to take a dumb Trump idea and make it sound even dumber.
“In this same way, I believe we too must now recognize the necessity of a Space Force to defend the nation and to protect space commerce and civil space exploration,” Cruz urged.
The comments caused such a frenzy among netizens that Twitter turned the thread of tweets into a ‘moment’ – one not appreciated by Cruz, who called out the social media company for only including input from “snarky leftists.”
Ted Cruz✔@tedcruz
Hey @jack how come Twitter’s “moment” quotes all the snarky leftists making fun of my comments, but doesn’t include my tweets in response explaining the real point that NATIONS like China have already developed & tested weapons to destroy satellites? https://twitter.com/i/moments/1128794276677029888 …
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz wants the Space Force to defend the US against space pirates
US news
Senator Cruz (R-TX), who is the chairman of the subcommittee on aviation and space for the US government, made a comparison of the space force to American naval forces, stating the need to protect...
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The Trump administration is currently seeking more than $2 billion to fund Space Force, according to The Hill who cite a report from the Congressional Budget Office. The proposed force purportedly needs up to 7,800 personnel to get it off the ground, adding more than $1 billion to the Pentagon’s annual costs, the report found.
Congress has yet to approve the creation of the new military branch, but allotted $15 million to study the implementation of the Space Force. Even so, Trump has signed off on the setup of a revived US Space Command as part of the Air Force.
Trump admitted last year that he initially coined ‘Space Force’ as a joke in a discussion of government spending and private investment in space. The president decided to take the matter seriously, however, after China landed the first probe on the far side of the moon, and other countries began eyeing up their own chunk of extra-terrestrial space.
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13-07-2019
Ancient Egypt: Did aliens build the pyramids? Archeologist addresses SHOCK UFO claims
Ancient Egypt: Did aliens build the pyramids? Archeologist addresses SHOCK UFO claims
ANCIENT Egypt’s imposing Great Pyramids of Giza of have been at the heart of conspiracy debate and wild UFO claims for decades – but were the pyramids built by ancient aliens?
The three Great Pyramids of Giza have towered over the capital of Egypt for at least 4,500 years but their origin is shrouded in mystery. There are no detailed records of their construction and the sophisticated methods involved in their design appear to be centuries ahead of time. Archaeologists have spent years trying to decode the mysteries of the ancient Pharaohs' burial places but are yet to even scratch the surface of the pyramids' history. The pyramids' enigmatic past has invited over the course of the 20th and 21st century a myriad of conspiracy theories concerning their construction.
Speaking candidly in a bizarre documentary on the subject of the pyramids’ supposed alien origins, the scientist argued the knowledge was stored in KGB archives as early as 1961.
He said: "The presence of this creature and the design of the pyramids, and the whole pool of historical and scientific evidence shows that this particular visitation took place about 11,000 years BC.”
Conspiracy theory author David Childress said: “If this gigantic pyramid in Antarctica is an artificial structure, it would probably be the oldest pyramid on the planet and in fact it might be the master pyramid that all the other pyramids on planet Earth were designed to look like.”
Another conspiracist also said on the show: “All the way around the world we find evidence of pyramid structures.
“We should start looking at the possibility there was habitation on Antarctica.
“Was it a lost civilisation? Could it be ancient astronauts?”
However, claims of any links between the pyramids and supposed alien astronauts have been widely debunked by experts in the field of archaeology.
UFO claims: Some conspiracists believe ancient aliens shaped early civilisations
(Image: GETTY)
Assistant Professor Matthew Peeples, the co-founder of the School of Human Revolution at Arizona State University, refuted all paranormal conspiracies concerning the pyramids.
The building technology is impressive, but we don’t need to invoke aliens to explain it
Matthew Peeples, Arizona State University
The expert said the idea intelligent extraterrestrial helped shape ancient civilisations here on Earth is the single most outrageous archaeological narrative in popular culture.
He said: “These ideas are not supported by scientific evidence, but they’ve become so prevalent that many people believe there must be something to them.
“To use the Great Pyramids in Egypt as an example, archaeologists have clearly shown how these structures fit in a broader tradition of smaller stone structures and earlier attempts at pyramid construction.
The building technology is impressive, but we don’t need to invoke aliens to explain it.
“Another popular notion is that professional archaeologists themselves are actively hiding the truth about the past.
“I’ve personally had people accuse me of being part of a widespread cover-up or conspiracy.
“This trope shows up again and again in pop culture through shows like ‘The X-Files’ or ‘Stargate’.”
Ancient Egypt: There is no evidence aliens helped build the pyramids
(Image: GETTY)
The archaeologist said conspiracy claims like the ones about the pyramids have a long history, dating as far back as 1911.
And he believes they have held strong for so long, particularly in contemporary times, because “pseudoscience” is easily bought by the public.
Dr Peeples said: “A lot of pseudoscientific ideas attempt to put on the trappings of science by using the jargon but completely ignore the scientific process of formal observation and evaluation.
“Plausible arguments need to be supported by evidence rather than simply asserted, and the methods and data used should be made available for scrutiny.”
Video toont vreemd object boven Amerikaanse stad. Zie hier de beelden
Foto: Twitter/ishmel
Video toont vreemd object boven Amerikaanse stad. Zie hier de beelden
Een man uit Arizona en zijn vrienden zagen eerder deze week een aantal vreemde lichten in de lucht. Dat melden lokale media.
Zij deden de waarneming op dinsdagavond in de stad Tucson in de buurt van vliegbasis Davis-Monthan.
Eén van de getuigen, Isaiah Alvarez, wist de objecten vast te leggen op camera en zette de beelden vervolgens op sociale media.
Ruimteschip
Al snel trok het filmpje de aandacht van een lokaal tv-station.
In de video is te zien hoe enkele lichtbollen door de lucht bewegen. “Wat is dat?” vraagt Alvarez zich af.
Als één van zijn vrienden suggereert dat het om vuurwerk gaat, zegt hij: “Nee, dat is het niet. Het is een ruimteschip.”
Niets
Volgens Alvarez verschenen er korte tijd drie rode lichten in de lucht, die vervolgens in het niets verdwenen.
Sommigen dachten dat de UFO-waarneming te maken had met de nabijgelegen vliegbasis, maar een woordvoerder liet weten dat zij er niets mee te maken hadden.
A new study shows that the sounds generated at an altitude of 70 to 80 meters are the result of the activation of Schumann resonances.
The study is a continuation of a hypothesis that Unto K. Laine, Professor Emeritus, published three years ago on the origin of the sounds heard during the displays of the Northern Lights. His theory postulated that the sounds are generated when a magnetic storm causes charges in the temperature inversion layer of the lower atmosphere, to be discharged at an altitude of 70 to 80 meters.
Credit: Aalto University
A recent research paper presented by Laine at the ICSV26 congress in Montreal provides a more detailed account of the sound generation. According to this study, when the Northern Lights occur, the spectrum of the temporal envelope of the crackling noise (or in other words, the rapid changes in the sound amplitude) contain frequencies of the Schumann resonances.
The Schumann resonances refer to the low-frequency electromagnetic resonances occurring around the Earth, the strongest of them being below 50 Hz. Laine has now observed that these resonances generated similar rhythmic structures in all the measured crackling sounds.
’Previous international research has shown that a geomagnetic storm occurring during the Northern Lights reinforces the Schumann resonances. For the first time, such resonances have been found to activate the sound generation mechanism in the temperature inversion layer at altitudes of between 70 to 80 metres where the accumulated electric charges give rise to corona discharges and crackling sounds. In addition to the nine lowest Schumann resonances, the spectra also include their difference and sum frequencies or in other words, distortion components. This non-linearity also lends support to the hypothesis of auroral sounds generation,’ Laine says.
Credit: D. Kalmančok, M. Šebeň, Comenius University / Wikimedia Commons
The research material consisted of 25 sound events measured on the ground in September 2001 and in March 2012 in Southern Finland, during the display of active Northern Lights. Although the measurements were conducted at different locations using various equipment, the results nevertheless point to the same direction.
The results will be published today (10 July) at the ICSV26 congress in Montreal, which brings together more than 2,000 researchers in acoustics from around the globe.
Scientists are still not completely sure, but a Princeton-led team of astrophysicists has used the neutron star merger detected in 2017 to come up with a more precise value for this figure, known as the Hubble constant. Their work appears in the current issue of the journal Nature Astronomy
.The collision of two neutron stars (GW170817) flung out an extraordinary fireball of material and energy that is allowing a Princeton-led team of astrophysicists to calculate the Hubble constant, the speed of the universe’s expansion. They used a super-high-resolution radio ‘movie’ (left) that they compared to a computer model (right). To generate their ‘movie,’ the science team combined data from enough radio telescopes spread over a large enough region to generate an image with such high resolution that if it were an optical camera, it could see individual hairs on someone’s head 6 miles away. The movie emphasizes observations taken 75 days and 230 days after the merger. The middle panel shows the radio afterglow light curve.
Video by Ore Gottlieb and Ehud Nakar, Tel Aviv University
“The Hubble constant is one of the most fundamental pieces of information that describes the state of the universe in the past, present and future,” said Kenta Hotokezaka, the Lyman Spitzer, Jr. Postdoctoral Fellow in Princeton’s Department of Astrophysical Sciences. “So we’d like to know what its value is.”
Currently, the two most successful techniques for estimating the Hubble constant are based on observations of either the cosmic microwave background or stars blowing themselves to pieces in the distant universe.
But those figures disagree: Measurements of exploding stars — Type Ia supernovae — suggest that the universe is expanding faster than is predicted by Planck observations of the cosmic microwave background.
“So either one of them is incorrect, or the models of the physics which underpin them are wrong,” said Hotokezaka. “We’d like to know what is really happening in the universe, so we need a third, independent check.”
He and his colleagues — Princeton’s NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow Kento Masuda, Ore Gottlieb and Ehud Nakar from Tel Aviv University in Israel, Samaya Nissanke from the University of Amsterdam, Gregg Hallinan and Kunal Mooley from the California Institute of Technology, and Adam Deller from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia — found that independent check by using the merger of two neutron stars.
Neutron star mergers are phenomenally energetic events in which two massive stars whip around each other hundreds of times per second before merging in an extraordinary collision that flings out a burst of gravitational waves and an enormous blast of material. In the case of the neutron star merger that was detected on Aug. 17, 2017, the two stars — each the size of Manhattan and with almost twice the mass of the sun — were moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light before they collided.
The gravitational wave burst from a neutron star merger makes a distinctive pattern known as a “standard siren.” Based on the shape of the gravitational wave signal, astrophysicists can calculate how strong the gravitational waves should have been. They can then compare that to the measured strength of the signal to work out how far away the merger occurred.
Credit: Ore Gottlieb and Ehud Nakar, Tel Aviv University
But there’s a catch — this only works if they know how the merging stars were oriented with respect to Earth’s telescopes. The gravitational wave data can’t distinguish between mergers that were nearby and edge-on, distant and face-on, or something in between.
To separate those possibilities, the researchers used a super-high-resolution radio “movie” of the fireball of material that was left behind after the neutron stars merged. To make their movie, they combined data from radio telescopes spread across the world.
“The resolution of the radio images we made was so high, if it was an optical camera, it could see individual hairs on someone’s head 3 miles away,” said Deller.
“By comparing the miniscule changes in the location and shape of this distant bullet of radio-emitting gas against several models including one developed on supercomputers, we were able to determine the orientation of the merging neutron stars,” said Nakar.
Using this, they calculated how far away the merging neutron stars were — and then, by comparing that with how fast their host galaxy is rushing away from ours, they could measure the Hubble constant.
After the 2017 neutron star merger (GW170817) was registered by nearly every astronomical instrument on the planet, astrophysicists calculated that the Hubble constant value was between 66 and 90 kilometers per second per megaparsec. By using tight constraints on the orientation of the collision, published last year by Mooley and several of the same co-authors, including Hotokezaka, the current group of collaborators were able to pin that estimate down further, to between 65.3 and 75.6 km/s/Mpc.
While that precision is “quite good,” said Hotokezaka, it’s still not good enough to distinguish between the Planck and Type Ia models. He and his colleagues estimate that to get that level of precision, they would need data from 15 more collisions like GW170817 — with its helpful abundance of data up and down the entire electromagnetic spectrum — or 50 to 100 collisions that are detected only with gravitational waves.
“This is the first time that astronomers have been able to measure the Hubble constant by using a joint analysis of a gravitational-wave signals and radio images,” said Hotokezaka. “It is remarkable that only a single merger event allows us to measure the Hubble constant with a high precision — and this approach relies neither on the cosmological model (Planck) nor the cosmic-distance ladder (Type Ia).”
The research was supported by Princeton University, the Israel Science Foundation, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation (AST-1654815), and the Australian Research Council (FT150100415).
Contacts and sources: Liz Fuller-Wright Princeton University
Citation: “A Hubble constant measurement from superluminal motion of the jet in GW170817″ by K. Hotokezaka, E. Nakar, O. Gottlieb, S. Nissanke, K. Masuda, G. Hallinan, K. P. Mooley and A. T. Deller appears in the current issue of the journal Nature Astronomy (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-019-0820-1.)
Chameleon Theory Could Change Our Thoughts on Gravity
Chameleon Theory Could Change Our Thoughts on Gravity
Einstein’s theory of General Relativity is world famous – but it might not be the only way to explain how gravity works and how galaxies form.
Physicists at Durham University created huge supercomputer simulations of the universe to test an alternative theory.
Computer simulation of a disc galaxy.
Credit: Christian Arnold/Baojiu Li
Our researchers found that f(R)-gravity – a so-called Chameleon Theory – could also explain the formation of structures in the cosmos.
Milky Way
The simulations show that disc spiral galaxies like our Milky Way still form, even when a different law of gravity is applied.
Scientists already know that f(R)-gravity can reproduce the success of General Relativity in demonstrating the evolution of our solar system.
But our new research now shows that this theory can also be applied to galaxy formation on very large cosmological scales.
Universe evolution
This doesn’t mean that Einstein was wrong, though!
Instead, it shows that there might be more than one way to explain gravity’s role in the evolution of the universe.
General Relativity was developed by Einstein in the early 1900s to explain the gravitational effect of large objects in space.
Dark energy
It also has consequences for understanding the accelerating expansion of the universe, which it’s thought is driven by a mysterious substance called dark energy.
However, models like f(R)-gravity can also explain the universe’s rapid growth and our researchers say their work could also be small step towards identifying what dark energy is.
Cosmology and Astronomy
Our astronomers and cosmologists are among the best in the world and are constantly shedding new light on the science of the universe.
In the past year we’ve also shown how supermassive black holes can help to measure the expansion of the early universe; how our Milky Way is on a catastrophic collision course with a neighbouring galaxy; and why Uranus is tilted on its side.
We’re also helping to build the Extremely Large Telescope – the biggest telescope in the world. Discover more about our Cosmology and Astronomy research.
In a recent interview, UFO abduction expert and former CIA operative, Derrel Sims,warned humans against trying to contact aliens. He claimed that if we attempt to contact extraterrestrials, we could end up getting physically injured or even dying since aliens are malevolent beings.
On his website called Alien Hunter, Sims documented his first ever encounter with aliens which happened in 1952 when he was just four years of age. He explained that the extraterrestrial showed up in his bedroom and attempted to alter his mind into thinking that it was a clown. He believes that the alien was trying to modify his memories so that he wouldn’t remember seeing it or being abducted. He wrote, “I know inside, ‘He wants me to remember this as a bad dream of a clown.’” Years later, after Sims became a husband and a father, he realized that extraterrestrials had attempted to make contact with his 6-year-old son.
Since his experiences were less than pleasant, Sims believes that aliens are manipulative and can victimize humans through different ways. This is why he is warning people against trying to contact the otherworldly beings.
In his interview with the YouTube channel UAMN TV, he said, “It’s an uninformed position for them to get in contact with whoever’s out there,” adding, “Some people have done that and died as a result. Some people have been injured.”
He recalled a terrifying story that a producer told him in 1994. A television and movie production crew flashed strong lights into the sky at an area that was known for UFO activity in order to try and contact aliens. After they flashed their lights into the sky, something appeared out of nowhere and the crew vanished. The producer still doesn’t know what happened to the crew.
Sims also made an interesting comparison. He said that a human looking for contact with aliens is like a dog that is chasing a moving car. He explained that eventually the car will stop moving and the dog may not like whoever is driving the vehicle. The same goes with humans who are chasing the idea of contacting UFOs and aliens. When or if we do meet them, we may not like them and we could very well regret it.
The U.S. Air Force’s mysterious unmanned X-37B space plane is approaching 700 days in Earth orbit on the fifth mission (OTV-5) of the super-secret Orbital Test Vehicle project. No one outside of a select few members of the military and the government know anything about the space plane. However, you can now add a non-military astronomer and photographer to the list after he not only located the X-37B in orbit but managed to take multiple photographs of it. How did he do it? Has he been whisked away to secret detention center?
“When I tried to observe it again [in] mid-June, it didn’t meet the predicted time and path. It turned out to have maneuvered to another orbit. Thanks to the amateur satellite observers’ network, it was rapidly found in orbit again, and I was able to take some images on June 30 and July 2.”
Live Science reports that astronomer and satellite tracker Ralf Vandebergh of the Netherlands has been on a months-long quest to find the X-37B. He first spotted it in May 2019 – confirming it’s still in space – and began preparations for photographing it. Unfortunately, when he pointed his 10-inch F/4,8 aperture Newtonian telescope with an Astrolumina ALccd 5L-11 mono CMOS camera at where the X-37B was expected to be … it wasn’t there. He found it again – confirming that it is making maneuvers in space – and took two sets of photos (they can be seen here and here)
Ralf Vandebergh
@ralfvandebergh
The #OTV5 / #X37B space plane photographed in orbit! Finally an image showing this mini-Space Shuttle which is only a fraction in size of the real Shuttle.
“It is really a small object, even at only 300 kilometers [186 miles] altitude, so don’t expect the detail level of ground-based images of the real space shuttle.”
Skywatcher and satellite tracker, Ralf Vandebergh of the Neterhlands, has released a new image of an over flight of the U.S. Air Force secretive X-37B space plane, also known as Orbital Test Vehicle-5.
An artist's illustration of the U.S. Air Force's X-37B space plane in orbit. The OTV-5 mission launched on Sept. 7, 2017.
(Image credit: Boeing)
Vandebergh is far too modest in describing his success.
“We can recognize a bit of the nose, payload bay and tail of this mini-shuttle, with even a sign of some smaller detail.”
Does Vandebergh’s discovery put him in any danger? Probably not. The Air Force has released a few photos of the space plane on the ground and after landings, and revealed at least one detail of its current mission – it’s carrying the Advanced Structurally Embedded Thermal Spreader (ASETS-II), which are experimental oscillating heat pipes the Air Force is testing for eventual use on long-duration space missions.
Then again, he may want to at least start wearing a fake mustache for a while.
Open Minds UFO Radio: Bryan Bender is the defense editor for POLITICO Pro and can be seen adding commentary on the History Channel’s Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation. He was previously a D.C.-based reporter for the Boston Globe and Jane’s Defence Weekly, where he covered US military operations in the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and the Balkans.
Bryan also writes about terrorism, the international arms trade, and government secrecy. He is the author of “You Are Not Forgotten,“ the story of an Iraq War veteran’s search for a missing World War II fighter pilot in the South Pacific. He is currently a board member of the Military Reporters and Editors Association. Regarding UFOs, Bender has broken several important stories. He published an article revealing the Pentagon’s secretive UFO program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), the same day as the New York Times. For that story, the Department of Defense (DoD) confirmed to him AATIP did exist and that a career intelligence officer, Luis Elizondo, ran it. Bender also broke the news regrind the Navy creating new UFO reporting guidelines and another story revealing that US Senators were briefed on UFOs. In this interview, we discuss how Bender came to know AATIP existed, how he vetted that information, and his thoughts on the nature of government UFO research and where it may this all might lead to.
Hundred Thousands of People Are Planning To Storm Area 51 o Find Truth of Alien Contact
Hundred Thousands of People Are Planning To Storm Area 51 To Find Truth of Alien Contact
To find proof of alien contact, more than 120,000 individuals have pledged to meet up and storm Nevada desert’s Area 51.
The ambitious plan is being organised through Facebook and is scheduled to take place on September 20, 2019, at 3 am. The meeting place will be at the Area 51 Alien Center in Amargosa Valley, Nevada. Those taking part will then proceed to Area 51, a classified military facility believed to housed alien technology and aliens themselves.
The group organisers are planning to do the Naruto run so that they can move faster than the area security’s bullet. Naruto running is a meme inspired by a popular anime character Naruto Uzumaki who has a distinctive running style.
Dodging bullets is something that no one succeeded in the past. In January, the local sheriff’s office and Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) officers shot a man carrying an unidentified cylindrical object after attempting to drive into the site.
It remains to be seen whether the group is just doing some grand scale internet trolling or serious about the attempt to gain access to the controversial Area 51.
Heather Taddy and Chuck Zukowski Discuss Their New Show Alien Highway
Heather Taddy and Chuck Zukowski Discuss Their New Show Alien Highway
Open Minds UFO Radio: Chuck Zukowski and Heather Taddy are co-hosts of the Travel Channel’s new series Alien Highway. Along with Chuck’s son, Daniel, they are investigating paranormal incidents and hot spots. For the past 30 years, Chuck has been an IC Mask Design Engineering contractor. He’s been on microchip design teams working on projects as simple as optics for traffic light controllers, and as complex as Spy Satellites, Deep Space Probes, and LIDAR technology. Chuck was also a volunteer Deputy Sheriff for El Paso County Sheriff’s Department for eight years and was terminated for running animal mutilation investigations within his county. As a UFO/Paranormal Field Investigator, Chuck has been researching and Field Investigating the unknown for more than three decades. Heather Taddy starred on A&E’s hit television series “Paranormal State,” which chronicled investigations from the world-renowned college-run club at Pennsylvania State University, The Paranormal Research Society (PRS). Serving as the Team Documentarian, Taddy traveled across the country, helping and educating families experiencing paranormal activity. Showing no fear when it comes to the paranormal, Taddy is often seen on the series isolating her self in some of the world’s most notoriously haunted locations. In this episode, we talk about some of what we will see in the show, what it was like conducting investigations together and how their various paranormal interests relate to one another.
Ralf VandeberghDe X-37B, ook wel Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) genoemd, lijkt op een miniatuurversie van de gepensioneerde spaceshuttle van NASA.
WETENSCHAPNa een paar maanden ‘jagen’ is het Ralf Vandebergh (43) uit het Nederlandse Wittem gelukt. De satellietspotter wist met zijn telescoopcamera een zeldzame foto te maken van een onbemand ruimtevliegtuig van de Amerikaanse luchtmacht in zijn baan rond de aarde. Het toestel is onderdeel van het geheimzinnige programma X-37B.
De foto, gepubliceerd op de vooraanstaande Amerikaanse astronomiesite space.com, leverde de Nederlander tot zijn verrassing veel buitenlandse media-aandacht op. “Ik had verwacht dat alleen echte satellietvolgers zouden reageren’’, zegt hij hoorbaar verbaasd over de telefoon.
De amateur-astrofotograaf schrijft de belangstelling toe aan het feit dat de media de X-37B bij zijn lancering, in september 2017 vanaf de Amerikaanse vlieg- en ruimtevaartbasis Kennedy Space Center in Florida, omschreven als ’geheimzinnig ruimteveer’. Daarvan is alleen bekend dat het experimenten uitvoert en informatie verzamelt over objecten in de ruimte.
Vandebergh wist het robotachtige ruimtevliegtuig te fotograferen op een hoogte van zo’n 340 kilometer. Dat deed hij ‘gewoon’ bij hem thuis met een op een telescoop gemonteerde astrocamera. “Wittem ligt tussen de heuvels in een dal. Dat schermt het strooilicht af van de omliggende steden Aken, Heerlen en Maastricht.” Hij is blij met het eindresultaat maar vond het voortraject naar eigen zeggen ‘het allermooist’.
Als actieve satellietspotter wist hij dat de X-37B in juni veel passages over Nederland zou maken. “Ik ben een paar maanden op jacht geweest naar het ruimtevliegtuig. Dat spotte ik in mei voor het eerst met het blote oog maar op dat moment kon ik geen opnames maken. Na te hebben uitgerekend wanneer hij het best te fotograferen zou zijn - midden juni - zat ik klaar met mijn camera. Maar op het verwachte moment kwam de mini-shuttle niet opdagen.’’
Spanning
Vandebergh meldde het aan de groep satellietspotters waarvan hij deel uitmaakt. Die ontdekte dat het ruimtevliegtuig zich in een andere baan om de aarde bevond. De amateur-waarnemers maakten een nieuwe berekening van het moment waarop het onbemande ruimtevliegtuig opnieuw voorbij zou komen. Een paar dagen later vonden ze de X-37B terug.
“Het allermooist vond ik de spanning’’, zegt de astronoom terugblikkend. Hij wist dat de mini-spaceshuttle in de loop van juli alleen nog overdag over Nederland zou komen en daardoor niet meer te fotograferen zou zijn. “Daardoor vroeg ik me constant af: haal ik het nog?’’
Verbaasd
Op 30 juni en 2 juli waren de atmosferische omstandigheden volgens hem ideaal en stelde hij zijn telescoop met camera op. De opnames op 30 juni waren volgens hem al geslaagd maar Vandebergh publiceerde ze niet in afwachting van betere. Die maakte hij twee dagen later.
“Het was een super geslaagde opname’’, zegt Vandenbergh terugblikkend. “Op de afbeelding is een stuk van de neus van het ruimtevliegtuig te herkennen en ook de laadruimte. Je kunt zelfs zien dat de laaddeuren openstaan. De gedetailleerdheid verbaasde me omdat je dat niet verwacht gelet op de hoogte en afmetingen van de X-37B. Die is ongeveer zo groot als een zakenvliegtuigje waarmee je amper één vleugel van de echte spaceshuttle kunt bedekken.’’
Toestellen als de X-37B zijn volgens hem normaal gesproken nauwelijks te zien boven onze horizon. Dit omdat ze op een lagere lengtegraad in een baan om de aarde worden gelanceerd. Vandebergh: “De mini-spaceshuttle werd op een iets hogere lengtegraad gelanceerd, net als het internationaal ruimtestation ISS.’’
Hoogtepunt
Hoe leuk hij alle media-aandacht ook vindt, de foto van de X-37B is voor hem minder bijzonder dan voor de buitenwereld. “Een écht hoogtepunt was de foto die ik in 2009 maakte van twee Amerikaanse astronauten die aan het werk waren buiten ruimtestation ISS. De eerste keer dat iemand erin was geslaagd om vanaf de aarde mensen in de ruimte te fotograferen.’’ Hij probeerde zo’n foto al sinds 2007 te maken maar dat lukte niet doordat de astronauten telkens op een niet-zichtbaar deel van het ruimtestation zaten of in de schaduw of doordat het zicht gewoon niet goed was.
Teleurstellingen
“In deze hobby moet je veel geduld hebben en ben je afhankelijk van de weersomstandigheden en de atmosfeer. Daardoor is het een liefhebberij met veel teleurstellingen en slechts af en toe geluksmomenten. Als het lukt is dat mooi maar voor mij geen reden om een gat in de lucht te springen. Dat vind ik overdreven’’, aldus de amateur-astrofotograaf.
The #OTV5 / #X37B space plane photographed in orbit! Finally an image showing this mini-Space Shuttle which is only a fraction in size of the real Shuttle.
Recently, members of the US Navy spoke to The New York Times about several instances in 2014 and 2015 where they spotted “unexplained aerial phenomena, or unidentified flying objects.” Since the report was released, several United States senators have received classified Pentagon briefingsabout these reported encounters with unidentified aircraft.
Close to three in 10 (28%) Americans say it’s “very likely” the government knows something about UFOs that is not being shared with the public. Slightly fewer (26%) say it’s “somewhat likely.”
Six in ten Democrats (62%) and about half of Republicans (51%) and independents (50%) say it’s likely the government has secret info about UFOs. Nearly a quarter (23%) of Democrats believe it’s somewhat or very unlikely, a belief shared by 34% of Republicans and 32% of independents.
In general, older Americans are more likely to believe the government has top-secret info about UFOs. While 41% of 18-24-year-olds say they believe this to be true, almost two-thirds (64%) of 45-54-year-olds say the same.
Men (59%) are more likely than women (50%) to believe the government knows something about UFOs that isn’t being shared with the public.
In 2017, YouGov asked Americans what they thought was the most likely explanation for why humanity hadn’t made contact with aliens. Data from YouGov Profiles finds that at the time, 14% of Americans believed “we have already made contact with alien life, but the government is covering it up.”
Belief in Intelligent Life on Other Planets at Record High, UFOs Not Yet a Threat
Belief in Intelligent Life on Other Planets at Record High, UFOs Not Yet a Threat
Most Don’t View UFOs As A Threat To U.S. National Security.
An Alien UFO above Time Square in Manhattan, New York City, New York. (Photo: AdobeStock)
Roughly 6 in 10 Americans think it is likely intelligent life exists on other planets and do not view UFOs as a threat to national security, a new poll finds.
A Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds 61% believe intelligent life on other planets is likely, including 31% who find it very likely. That’s the highest level of belief measured to date.
By party, Republicans (31%), Democrats (31%), and unaffiliated voters (32%) are equally likely to believe intelligent life on other planets is very likely. Men (39%) are somewhat more likely than are women (24%) to say it is very likely.
Recently, a number of top U.S. Senators have been briefed on UFO sightings by U.S. Navy pilots. Those experiences have been documented by the History Channel in a new six-part series Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation.
The series follows Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official who confirmed the existence the Defense Department’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).
AATIP refers to UFOs as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). Mr. Elizondo resigned from the post to investigate the phenomena with his team. That team includes former Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge. Steve Justice, who worked at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, is also on the team.
Chris Mellon, who served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, is the team’s government liaison. He has played a key role in setting up those recent briefings and believes UFOs are a serious threat to national security.
But Americans do not view UFOs as a threat, at least as of now.
An equal number (61%) do not believe UFOs pose a national security threat to the United States. Twelve percent (12%) disagree and 27% are unsure.
By party, Republicans (13%) are only slightly less likely than Democrats (16%) to view UFOs as a threat to national security, while unaffiliated voters (9%) are least likely.
That may be due to the fact only 11% report ever seeing or knowing someone who has seen a UFO, while 80% have not and do not. Still, according to the U.S. Census Bureau Population Clock, that 11% translates to more than 36 million adults nationwide.
By party, Republicans (11%) and Democrats (11%) are equally likely to report having seen or knowing someone who has seen a UFO, while unaffiliated voters (12%) are not statistically likely to disagree.
The national survey of 1,000 American adults was conducted June 23-24, 2019 by Rasmussen Reports.
Meeste mensen geloven dat de overheid informatie over UFO’s achterhoudt. Dit zeggen de peilingen
Meeste mensen geloven dat de overheid informatie over UFO’s achterhoudt. Dit zeggen de peilingen
In de Amerikaanse mainstream media zijn het afgelopen jaar veelvuldig artikelen voorbij gekomen over UFO’s. De vraag is nu hoe het volk denkt over dit fenomeen.
Uit een nieuwe peiling, uitgevoerd door Rasmussen Reports, blijkt dat 61 procent van de Amerikanen gelooft in het bestaan van intelligent buitenaards leven.
Nooit eerder geloofden zo veel mensen in het bestaan van intelligent leven op andere planeten.
Geen gevaar
Veel van de nieuwsberichten gingen over UFO’s die worden gezien door gevechtspiloten en het gevaar dat de objecten zouden opleveren voor de nationale veiligheid.
Volgens de meeste mensen vormen UFO’s geen gevaar. Slechts 12 procent van de ondervraagden zei dat ongeïdentificeerde vliegende objecten een gevaar zijn voor de nationale veiligheid.
Een andere peiling, afgelopen maand gehouden door YouGov, ging vooral over de vraag of de overheid iets weet over UFO’s wat zij niet deelt met het volk.
Contact
Opvallend genoeg zei meer dan de helft (54 procent) van de respondenten te geloven dat de overheid dingen achterhoudt over UFO’s.
In 2017 stelde YouGov Amerikanen ook vragen over buitenaards leven.
Toen zei 14 procent van de ondervraagden dat ‘we al contact hebben gemaakt met aliens, maar dat de overheid dit geheim houdt’.
Revolutionaire stap: Amerikaanse gevechtsvliegtuigen worden uitgerust met UFO-trackers. Zo moeten ze piloten gaan helpen
Revolutionaire stap: Amerikaanse gevechtsvliegtuigen worden uitgerust met UFO-trackers. Zo moeten ze piloten gaan helpen
Amerikaanse gevechtstoestellen worden vanaf nu uitgerust met UFO-trackers. Een infraroodsysteem moet piloten gaan helpen bij het detecteren van onverklaarbare objecten.
De technologie kan volgens een deskundige van groot belang zijn bij het verzamelen van gegevens over UFO’s.
Straaljagers waaronder de Super Hornet en de F-15C zullen in de nabije toekomst worden uitgerust met de sensoren, schrijft Tyler Rogoway voor website The War Zone.
Er wordt gesproken van een ‘revolutionaire stap’ en een ‘grote doorbraak’.
Voordeel
Het infraroodsysteem is zeer gevoelig en in staat om gegevens razendsnel te verwerken, aldus Rogoway.
De huidige radartechnologie aan boord van straaljagers laat nog vaak te wensen over.
Eén voordeel van het nieuwe systeem is dat het – in tegenstelling tot radars – geen energie uitzendt.
UFO’s
Dat maakt het systeem zelf lastiger te detecteren en de werking ervan veel lastiger te verstoren.
Eerder dit jaar bleek dat Amerikaanse gevechtspiloten tussen 2014 en 2015 een aantal UFO’s hebben gezien in het luchtruim.
Eén van hen, Ryan Graves, heeft het Pentagon en het Congres op de hoogte gebracht van de waarnemingen.
Vrijwel uitgesloten
Een andere piloot, Danny Accoin, zei dat hij de onbekende objecten wel op de radar en infraroodcamera zag, maar niet met het blote oog.
De UFO’s werden gespot in een gebied waar gevechtspiloten trainingsmissies uitvoeren, waardoor het vrijwel uitgesloten is dat het gaat om drones of geheime toestellen.
Geen van de piloten wilde speculeren over de herkomst van de objecten.
U.S. fighter jets to get 'UFO trackers': New radar being fitted to military aircraft to track enemy planes will also make it easier to pinpoint unexplained objects, expert says
U.S. fighter jets to get 'UFO trackers': New radar being fitted to military aircraft to track enemy planes will also make it easier to pinpoint unexplained objects, expert says
Infrared search and track systems are designed to help track enemy aircraft
But the systems could have the side-effect of assisting investigations into UFOs
Air Force jets and Navy Super Hornet planes are due to get the sensors soon
New trackers on U.S. fighter jets could make it easier for them to detect UFOs, an aviation expert has said.
The infrared search and track systems (IRSTs) are designed to hunt down enemy planes - but could also have the side-effect of helping pilots to investigate unexplained objects.
Military writer Tyler Rogoway said the technology has existed for decades but is now 'exponentially more capable' and could be a 'revolutionary' step in gathering UFO data.
Writing for The War Zone, of which he is the editor, he said the Navy's Super Hornet fleet and Air Force planes including the F-15C are due to get the sensors in the near future.
Jets such as the Navy's fleet of Super Hornets (one of which is pictured in a file photo) will be equipped with infrared technology that could help investigate UFOs
The new technology 'could result in a major breakthrough, or at least a major uptick, when it comes to detecting and gathering information on so-called unidentified flying objects, if they are indeed out there,' he said.
It 'could even serve as the final technological element needed to springboard potentially revolutionary data collection on the phenomenon,' he added.
As a result the Pentagon may get 'more than it bargained for' with the new technology, he suggested.
The IRSTs would be able to detect more because of their highly sensitive equipment and fast computer processing, Rogoway said.
The new equipment is an upgrade compared to regular radar technology, which has certain limitations.
One advantage of IRSTs is that, unlike radars, they do not emit any energy themselves.
That makes the detection system, in itself, harder to detect, and much harder to jam.
In addition, the IRST will keep working and tracking enemy aircraft even if the plane's radar system fails, he said.
As a result, the technology could be of great help to American pilots against stealthy aircraft nearby.
An image released by the Pentagon shows an unidentified object which was tracked by pilots off the east coast of the U.S. in 2015
Eurofighter Typhoon jets also feature the technology, which goes by the name of PIRATE.
They were previously used on older U.S. planes such as the F-101 Voodoo, a jet which was retired from the Air Force in 1972.
Earlier this year it emerged that a number of pilots in the United States Navy reported seeing UFOs over American airspace between 2014 and 2015.
One of them, Ryan Graves, said he saw UFOs regularly in the airspace off the Eastern seaboard between Florida and Virginia.
Graves said he reported what he saw to the Pentagon and to members of Congress.
In 2014, a pilot operating one of the Super Hornet fighter jets reported that he nearly collided with a UFO.
Another pilot, Danny Accoin, said he noticed a flying object on his radar, missile system, and infrared camera, but was not able to see it in his helmet.
The UFOs were spotted in areas that were designated for fighter jet training, which makes it unlikely that these were commercial drones or other objects that are classified.
But none of the pilots or the Pentagon would speculate as to what they believed the objects were.
Back in 2015, astronomers noticed a star that was behaving in a very unusual way. Nicknamed “Tabby’s Star” after astronomer Tabetha Boyajian, the star exhibits strange and unexplained dips in its light output. This led many to speculate that Tabby’s Star was surrounded by some sort of artificial technological structure like a Dyson sphere constructed by an advanced alien civilization. Radio monitoring of Tabby’s Star didn’t turn up any alien chatter or anything else unusual, but it didn’t explain what was going on with the star either. Now astronomers have discovered another star with mysterious dips in its light output (behavior which usually suggests it’s being orbited by something) for which astronomers also have absolutely no explanation.
According to Scientific American, the star was discovered using the now-retired Kepler space telescope, an extremely precise exoplanet hunting space telescope. After analyzing Kepler’s data on the star, called HD 139139 (it doesn’t have a fancy name like Tabby’s Star yet), for more than a year, astronomers have no explanation for what might be causing its anomalous behavior. Andrew Vanderburg, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin says:
“We’ve never seen anything like this in Kepler, and Kepler’s looked at 500,000 stars.”
As an exoplanet hunting telescope, Kepler’s job was to look for periodic dips in brightness coming from stars. These dips in brightness usually indicate orbiting planets as they pass in front of the star. Data from these observations are fed through algorithms that look for repeated patterns, a good indicator exoplanets considering they should be spinning around the star in a consistent pattern. Some of the patterns though are too complex for the algorithms to handle, and are instead placed in the hands of volunteer civilian astronomers. It was one of these astronomers contacted Vanderburg and told him to check out HD 139139, a star the size of the sun about 350 light-years away.
So what exactly makes this star so strange? According to Vanderburg:
“When I got that e-mail, I looked more closely and said, ‘okay, this definitely looks like a multiplanet system. But I can’t find any [planets] that appear to line up.'”
The dips in light make the star seem like it should be a multiplanet system, but it can’t be. The star displayed 28 dips in light, each of which lasted between 45 minutes and 7.5 hours with no repeats. The team says it looked more like noise than an actual signal. The team thought it may be a glitch in the system, but after checking again, the data turned out to be real.
One explanation was that this star had at least 14 planets and perhaps as many as 28—more planets than any other known system. That would in itself be very strange, but in order for even that explanation to work all of those exoplanets would have to be the same size, only slightly larger than Earth.
Yet there’s another problem with that explanation, according to Vanderburg. based on the short duration of the light dips, the planets would need to be in extremely close orbit to the star. But that doesn’t match the lack of a repeated pattern in the light dips. For there to be no repeats in the 80 days the telescope was pointed at the star is essentially impossible if the planets were as close to the star as they would need to be. So it’s not planets.
Among the other proposed explanations are a second, invisible source of gravity pulling on the star, the dust cloud of a planet disintegrating in front of the star, and short-lived starspots (cooler versions of our suns sunspots that have never been observed). For various reasons, none of these explanations hold up either.
A Dyson sphere is a theoretical structure that could harvest the energy of the enclosed star.
Vanderburg says there was one explanation left out of the recent paper he published on the star: an alien megastructure. Vanderburg says that explanation is extremely unlikely (which is the least surprising thing here), but astronomer Jason Wright, who led the investigation into Tabby’s Star, says HD 139139 will definitely be added to the list of places being investigated for alien technosignatures.
It’s unlikely any further investigations will happen for a while, though. The Kepler space telescope has been decommissioned and there are few other telescopes that can match its precision. So until another telescope is pointed at this mysterious star, all we’re left with is wild speculation. And the experts that are running the numbers and actually have the know-how to comment on it, of course.
An ancient Greek pyramid dating back to the Bronze Age – making it the same age as Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt – has been discovered on an island in the Aegean Sea and has archeologists and Greek historians throwing around the exclamation “This changes everything!” It certainly changes one thing … who knew the Greeks built pyramids? And how did they get a pyramid’s worth of marble to an island 4,600 years ago? Did they get any advice from the Egyptians or the early Brits? Did they give them any?
“It is by far the largest prehistoric marine transport operation that has ever come to light anywhere in the world. It demonstrates quite clearly just how important, and integral to their culture, seafaring was to these early Bronze Age Aegean people.”
Keros
The story broke this week in The Independent but the actual announcement of the discovery was made earlier by members of the four-year Cambridge Keros Project centered at the University of Cambridge, with help from the Ephorate of the Cyclades and the Cyprus Institute. Keros is the well-known Aegean island where the large collection of artistic and unbroken marble Cycladic figurines now called the “Keros Hoard” was previously found. The nearby smaller island of Dhaskalio, was once linked to Keros by a narrow causeway, is where pyramid was discovered under what was once a settlement. There are few quality marble formations on Keros or Dhaskalio, so this massive pyramid-covering amount of the stone had to be transported there by Bronze Age sailors – a concept that archeologists and historians never believed these ancient Greeks were capable of.
How much marble? The project team estimates between 7,000 and 10,000 tons of glossy white marble was transported by sea from the island of Naxos, about 10 km (6.2 miles) north. It’s estimated that the Aegean boats at that time — Cycladic boats that were only 10-15 meter long and capable of carrying only between one and two tons of stone – made over 3,500 trips over a 20-year period totaling 45,000 miles.
What the builders used all of that marble for was a six-step terrace pyramid built by terraforming the island’s small mountain. (Photo here.) The terraces were six meters wide the end result was a thousand meters of glistening marble pyramid. The archeologists believe the top terrace was once flat and used for ceremonies, and Greek sanctuary expert Dr. Alan Peatfield of University College Dublin’s School of Archaeology thinks this may have been the first and a model for the later ones.
Aerial view of sophisticated prehistoric public architecture uncovered at Keros, Greece.
Image credit: Cambridge Keros project
Excavation in Trench B at the staircase.
Image credit: Cambridge Keros Project
An intact metalworking hearth from 2500 BCE at Keros, Greece. Image credit: Cambridge Keros Project
ENGINEERING: The pyramid shape of the island is man-made
(Pic: Cambridge Keros Project)
“It is potentially a fundamental place of origin for the phenomenon of sacred mountains within the Greek world.”
If it was the first, it was an impressive start, according to Professor Colin Renfrew of the University of Cambridge and co-director of the excavation.
“At Dhaskalio we see a number of sophisticated architectural techniques employed in a well-thought through manner. These include massive entranceways, stone-flagged stairways, and an intricate drainage system covering the entire island. This gives the clear impression of a skilled architect and a guiding hand planning and executing a building programme whose scope can only be compared with a site like Knossos on Crete.”
An Egyptian steppe pyramid
The mountain pyramid may have symbolized the importance of Dhaskalio and Keros as a metalworking center and marketplace for metal products such as high-quality daggers. With those metal products being found throughout the islands, this new discovery reinforces the new theory that the seafaring skills of the ancient Greeks began earlier and were much more impressive than first thought.
Is it just a coincidence that this Greek pyramid, Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids (and possibly those in Central and South America and Asia) were built at about the same times? Or was something else going on that influenced these nearly simultaneous “This changes everything!” constructions? That’s a question for another day and a different set of experts.
Area 51 Raid, Over 400K People Sign up to Storm Groom Lake for Alien Secrets
Area 51 Raid, Over 400K People Sign up to Storm Groom Lake for Alien Secrets
Nearly 200K People Have Signed Up to Steal Alien Secrets from Area 51 in Late-Summer Raid
So here’s the thing, if the American government has collected these secrets and our tax money pays their salaries then technically those secrets are ours aren’t they? That’s not stealing. Food for thought! S.D.
We need to do this to every kabal run site. Time to take our planet back. Raid all the dirty corrupt “charities” & government criminal cartel and throw them out! We know who they are. J.F.
Secrecy on UFOs has been with us for a lifetime. At times it has seemed like it would last forever.
For the past few years, however, the media has treated the subject rather differently and since late 2017 ufology has been in a fevered state with new revelations, new media coverage, and a much enhanced "brand" overall.
Nearly all of this is due to To the Stars Academy (TTSA). TTSA's recent TV show, Unidentified, portrayed several military encounters with UFOs, and more than once - many times, in fact - used the word "threat" in connection to these encounters.
We have to believe TTSA that there is a “threat” or is this just fear mongering and if so, what might the agenda be?
Or, is there any legitimacy to considering UFOs as at least a potential threat or are we on a path toward some sort of disclosure? If so, is it something complete, partial, or even false, as some argue?
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Learn About Alien Abductee Case Files Which Reveal Who Aliens Are And What They Want, UFO Sighting News.
Learn About Alien Abductee Case Files Which Reveal Who Aliens Are And What They Want, UFO Sighting News.
Here is a great video about a UFO and alien researcher who has learned a lot from her work and shares her discoveries with us. Some of the things you are going to hear are probably things that you have never heard, but may have thought existed. Understand that abductees are not all abducted by the same species, but rather often have different experiences due to the difference of the aliens that abducted them. Different cultures, different behaviors. Scott C. Waring Video states:
This talk will share big insights into abduction drawn from many case files. Laurie finds that one of the more difficult areas for researchers is sorting out the large number of alien races that appear in abductee testimonies. Laurie will discuss what the ETs want from us and what effect their activities might be having on human consciousness. She will tell us how the experiences of abductees from different cultures and geographic areas differ.
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Three UFOs Over The UK Just 15 Min Ago From My Tour Bus!
Three UFOs Over The UK Just 15 Min Ago From My Tour Bus!
Saw three grey triangle UFOs over Wittering, UK 🇬🇧 about five min ago from my bus. Could only get a single shot and the disappeared. Far left of photo. I only saw it for about 15 seconds and reached over my wife trying to take a photo but the bus was a bit bouncy and had trouble getting more shots. It’s really far away but huge! Sorry, writing this from my phone. 😬
A mysterious monolith has been discovered buried on the sea bed off the coast of Sicily.
Broken into two parts, the rock has three holes that experts say could not have formed naturally and it is thought the structure was crafted 10,000 years ago.
The Stonehenge-style monument could shed light on the earliest civilisations to call the Mediterranean basin home.
A mysterious underwater monolith has been discovered 37 miles (60km) off the coast of Sicily. Broken into two parts (top image), the rock has three holes (shown bottom right and left) that experts say could not have formed naturally and the structure is thought to have been crafted 10,000 years ago
The archaeological site has been surveyed using geophysical and geological methods.
One of the holes in the 15-tonne monolith travels through both parts, while the other two are on the sides of the 39ft-long (12 metre) rock.
Zvi Ben-Avraham, of Tel Aviv University, and Emanuele Lodolo of the National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics in Trieste, Italy, wrote in the Journal of Archaeological Science: ‘There are no reasonable known natural processes that may produce these elements’.
The monolith was discovered 131ft (40 metres) below the waves on what was once an island called Pantelleria Vecchia Bank in the Sicilian Channel.
The archaeological site has been surveyed using geophysical and geological methods. This 3D map shows how the monolith is elevated in the Mediterranean Sea
The Stonehenge-style monument could shed light on the earliest civilisations to call the Mediterranean basin home. It is not known whether the Mediterranean monolith stood alone or as part of a group, as seen at Stonehenge, which is younger, constructed in around 2,600BC (pictured)
WHO WERE THE ISLANDERS THAT BUILT THE MONOLITH?
Little is known about the people who lived on Pantelleria Vecchia Bank in the Sicilian Channel some 10,000 years ago.
However, the construction of the stone shows they were skilled workers, able to extract, cut and transport a huge stone.
Experts believe the people traded fish they caught with other islands.
The stone may have served as a primitive kind of 'lighthouse' or local beacon, or even as a place to tie and anchor fishing boats.
The Stonehenge-style monument could shed light on the earliest civilisations to call the Mediterranean basin home.
The island was submerged during a flood 9,500 years ago, after the Last Glacial Maximum.
This was the last period in the Earth's climate history during the last glacial period when ice sheets were at their most prominent.
‘The Sicilian Channel is one of the shallow shelves of the central Mediterranean region where the consequences of changing sea-level were most dramatic and intense,' the experts explained.
'The ancient geography of the Mediterranean Basin was profoundly changed by the increase in sea level following the Last Glacial Maximum.
‘This global event has led to the retreat of the coastlines, especially in lowland areas and shallow shelves, such as the Sicilian Channel.’
Beforehand, the shallowest north-western part of the Sicilian Channel was connected to Sicily, forming a peninsula that was separated from North Africa by just 30 miles (48km).
But most of the peninsula was flooded with the exception of some high points that formed an archipelago of islands surrounded by shallow sea, including Pantelleria Vecchia Bank.
The discovery of the monolith suggests a prehistoric civilisation thrived on the island and ancient people may have colonised others nearby.
The study said: ‘This discovery provides evidence for a significant Mesolithic human activity in the Sicilian Channel region.’
The location of submerged Pantelleria Vecchia is shown in the top map. Map 'B' shows how the Sicilian and Tunisian shorelines changed. The brown contour shows what they would have looked like when the sea level was 393ft (120 metres) lower than present day, and in grey, 164ft (50 metres) lower when the island thrived
One of the holes in the monolith is seen through both parts, while the other two (pictured) are on the sides of the 39ft-long (12 metre) rock
Dr Lodolo told Discovery News: This discovery reveals the technological innovation and development achieved by the Mesolithic inhabitants in the Sicilian Channel region,’ before the island was submerged 9,500 years ago.
The monolith was hewn from a single block of stone, demonstrating the ancient culture were able to extract, transport, cut and install the monument.
‘Such an effort undoubtedly reveals important technical skills and great engineering,’ he said.
Dr Lodolo believes the stone could have served a purpose to the community, who were thought to have traded fish with neighbouring islands, leading him to suggest it may have acted as a 'lighthouse' or local beacon for seafarers, or even as a place to anchor boats.
The discovery of the monolith suggests a prehistoric civilisation thrived on the island and ancient people may have colonised others nearby. This map shows the sea floor near the monolith
It is not known whether the substantial stone stood alone or as part of a group, as seen at Stonehenge, which is younger, constructed in around 2,600BC.
The famous Neolithic monument in Wiltshire is aligned to the sunset of the winter solstice and the sunrise of the summer solstice and is thought to have been used by ancient people to survey the heavens.
It's thought the monument was also a meeting point for ancient people and may have been a religious site at which people worshiped their ancestors.
Some have suggested it was a place of the dead, while others say it was a place of healing, because the bluestones could be struck to make a noise thought to have mystic or healing powers.
Dr Lodolo believes submerged settlements in the Mediterranean Sea may help fill in gaps in understanding about ancient cultures in the region.
Israel's Beresheet Lunar Lander Is About To Arrive On The Surface of Moon
U.S. space agency NASA initially set its return to the Moon in 2028. However, in response to Vice President Mike Pence's challenge to uphold NASA's mandate to move the U.S. Space industry forward, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine moved up the target date to 2024.
Considering the mammoth effort of bringing men to the Moon back in the 1960s, one would wonder what's causing the rush this time. First of all, U.S. President Donald Trump might have something to do with it.
In a tweet made earlier this month, the U.S. President shared that he wanted America to return to space in a "BIG WAY."
"Under my Administration, we are restoring NASA to greatness and we are going back to the Moon, then Mars. I am updating my budget to include an additional $1.6 billion so that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!" Pres. Trump said.
The upcoming Moon mission billed "Artemis" — named after the Greek Moon goddess and the twin sister of Apollo, god of the Sun — is set to be the first lunar mission that will deliver the first woman to the Moon. The first American Moon missions in the 1960s and the 1970s have all been realized with men.
This herculean project will definitely bode well for Trump's administration as it would speak big in terms of his administration's political will and how it acts on momentum. According to Vox, it would make a lot of sense to complete even one moonshot in this administration.
Water on the moon may be present as OH or hydroxyl, which is made up of one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom and is a more reactive relative of H2O NASA/JPL/USGS
Before Trump, George W. Bush's admin vied for a Moon mission without success, while President Barrack Obama's term veered further into space by working on the start of missions to Mars. NASA has been clamoring for major space missions in recent years as counterparts from other international space agencies have been overshadowing their efforts. In fact, even astronauts headed to the International Space Station (ISS) often rely on hitching an expensive ride on Russian spacecraft just to get to space.
Despite Trump's enthusiasm to make it back to the lunar surface, however, one would wonder how this will be completed. The report described the ongoing preparation for 2024 as "Trumpian" in grandiosity, meaning the plans could be big in papers but also impractical.
Rockets and spacecraft to be used for the mission remain unfinished and even non-existent. And considering the major budget cuts of NASA, one would wonder who will pay for such an ambitious project.
Notwithstanding the challenges, a Moon mission would be a significant study not only in the U.S. but for the rest of the world as well, so pushing for it to happen is understandable.
The Moon would be able to help scientists understand more about the origin and development of the entire solar system. The Moon, dated at around 3.5 billion years old, could tell so much of our celestial history by studying its craters, surface make-up and other important geological aspects.
"The Moon has recorded impact processes that have gone on throughout the entire solar system," Georgiana Kramer, a planetary scientist who has done an extensive study of the Moon, said.
Even small rocks brought back by earlier Moon missions have already helped scientists understand not only how the Moon was formed but also how the Earth likely developed as well. Going back and collecting more samples, especially those from the far side of the Moon, could mean additional historical data that would give scientists like Kramer a more significant POV of how the solar system began and where it will most likely be headed.
An important breakthrough like this would certainly establish America's position as ahead of its pack in the space industry.
In the story of Snow White a young princess is tricked into eating a poisoned apple, which places her in a deep sleep until she is awoken by a prince.
Since the Brothers Grimm made the concept famous over two hundred years ago, the idea of using 'suspended animation' has appeared in countless science fiction films to help humans travel to the stars.
But now Nasa is funding an aerospace engineering company to develop technology for putting humans into a state of deep sleep for use in space transportation.
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A space company in Atlanta is developing a space habitat (pictured) for putting humans into a state of deep sleep for use in space transportation. Nasa has just awarded the project $500,000 (£350,000) to take it to the next stage
The US space agency has awarded SpaceWorks $500,000 (£350,000) to develop the project.
Films like Interstellar and Alien have all used cryosleep as a way to allow humans to travel deep into space on journeys that can take years.
In real-life space missions, human crew and everything that goes along with it have a direct impact on mission mass, as well as number of launches required for the trip.
But putting astronauts into short-term hibernation could make space travel more efficient.
THE POINT OF 'CRYOSLEEP'
In space missions, human crew and everything that goes along with it have a direct impact on mission mass, as well as number of launches required for the trip.
But putting astronauts into short-term hibernation could make space travel more efficient.
The habitat design is capable of placing the crew in an inactive, 'torpor' state for the duration of the in-space mission segments.
A torpor state a state of short-term hibernation, when physiological activity is decreased, usually by a reduced body temperature and metabolic rate.
This substantially reduces the mass and size of the habitat, which ultimately leads to significant reductions in the amount of mass needed on board.
The habitat designed by Atlanta-based SpaceWorks is capable of placing the crew in an inactive 'torpor' state for the duration of the in-space mission segments.
This substantially reduces the mass and size of the habitat, which ultimately leads to significant reductions in the amount of mass needed on board.
'The idea of suspended animation for interstellar human spaceflight has often been posited as a promising far-term solution for long-duration spaceflight,' said Dr John Bradford, CEO of SpaceWorks.
'It was very exciting to receive notice of our selection, I know there is always a lot of competition for these awards,' Dr Bradford told MailOnline.
'We have a great project plan outlined and really appreciate NASA giving us the opportunity to further explore and develop this idea.'
The SpaceWorks habitat design a very small, pressurized module that is docked around a central node/airlock permitting direct access to the Mars ascent/descent vehicle and Earth entry capsule by the crew.
'We believe the crew habitat mass can be reduced to only 5-7 metric tonnes (mt) (11,000 - 15,000 lbs) for a crew of 4 to 6, compared to 20-50 mt (44,000 - 110,000 lbs) currently,' Dr Bradford said.
'The total habitat module volume would be on the order of 20 square metres (215 square feet), compared to 200 square metres (2150 square feet) for most current designs.'
The habitat designed by Atlanta-based SpaceWorks is capable of placing the crew in an inactive, 'torpor' state for the duration of the in-space mission segments. This substantially reduces the mass and size of the habitat, which ultimately leads to significant reductions in the overall architecture size
Since the Brothers Grimm made the concept of 'suspended animation' famous in 1812 with the story of Snow White, the concept has remained firmly in the realm of fiction, until now. An 1852 depiction of Snow White laid in a glass coffin during her period of magically induced suspended animation shown
The SpaceWorks habitat design a very small, pressurized module that is docked around a central node/airlock permitting direct access to the Mars ascent/descent vehicle and Earth entry capsule by the crew (pictured)
While the crew members are in a hypothermic state, various sensors would be hooked up to them so their conditions can be monitored.
They would receive nutrition intravenously through total parenteral nutrition (TPN) - where a liquid containing all the essential elements needed for a human body to function and catheter to drain urine.
The crew would be in this medically induced hypothermic state for 14 days at a time, with crew members taking turns being awake for two or three days at a time to ensure the needs of the crew and ship are met.
Medically induced hypothermia is already used to treat a variety of conditions, including after heart attacks or brain and spinal cord injuries.
While the crew members are in a hypothermic state, SpaceWorks has said various sensors would be hooked up to them so their conditions can be monitored. They would receive nutrition intravenously from a liquid that would contain all the essential elements for a human body to function
In the 2014 film 'Interslettar, hypersleep pods (pictured) are used to slow the aging process of the human body so that astronauts do not incur excessive senescence and not overly consume limited supplies while on their missions
The project is part of Nasa's Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program, with 8 projects in total selected to proceed to the next stage of development, each receiving as much as $500,000 (£350,000) for a two-year study.
THE FINAL EIGHT PROJECTS
Nasa has funded eight projects as part of its Innovative Advanced Concepts Program.
Here is the final list:
Spaceworks Engineering - Advancing sleep inducing habitats for humans on deep space missions
Robert Youngquist - Cryogenic selective surfaces
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University - Flight demonstration of novel atmospheric Satellite Concept
MSNW - Magnetoshell aerocapture for manned missions and planetary deep space orbiters
University of California, Santa Barbara -Directed Energy for interstellar study
University of Missouri -Experimental demonstration for plasmonic force propulsion
Texas Engineering Experiment - Approaches to creating a growable habitat
Northwestern University - Development of an aperture for an 'extremely large reflective telescope'
'The NIAC program is one of the ways Nasa engages the US scientific and engineering communities,' said Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator of Nasa's Space Technology Mission Directorate in Washington.
'[This] including agency civil servants, by challenging them to come up with some of the most visionary aerospace concepts,' said Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator at Nasa.
'This year's Phase II fellows have clearly met this challenge.'
SpaceWorks said it will use the funding to better understand the effects of prolonged hypothermia, and consider the technology's impact on other exploration missions.
'We will be working on both the engineering/aerospace aspects required for the system as well as the medical research,'Dr Bradford told MailOnline.
'On the engineering front, we will be refining our technology and the torpor habitat designs.
'We will also be looking at destinations beyond Mars,'We have expanded our team to include leading researchers and experts in the field.'
Another project involving cryogenic preservation is called 'Cryogenic Selective Surfaces', led by Dr Robert Youngquist, lead scientist at Nasa's Kennedy Space Flight Center.
The project is aimed at creating a material that can thinly coat the space ship, reflecting more than most of the light and allowing it to reach incredibly low temperatures, and it could also be used for cryogenic storage.
The coating, called 'Solar White' is predicted to reflect more than 99.9 per cent of the sun's energy when used in deep space.
'The ramifications of such a coating are broad and significant, ranging from enabling long-term cryogenic storage to allowing passive high temperature superconductor operation in space,' he said.
'As we venture into the solar system we would like to take oxygen with us,' Dr Youngquist told MailOnline.
'Right now we have to do this with heavy pressurized containers, but if we could make the oxygen cold enough it becomes a liquid and storing large amounts of it becomes much easier. The cryogenic coatings I've proposed appear to allow these very cold temperatures to be reached, potentially allowing us to bring liquid oxygen (LOX) out into the solar system.
This could cool fuel tanks in space down to 300°F below zero (-184°C), with no energy input needed.
'My cryogenic coatings should allow cryogenic temperatures to be reached in space, something that is difficult to do now,' he said.
'So any application of cryogenics we have on earth, be that operating superconductors or preserving people, will now be possible in space.'
The 'Cryogenic Selective Surfaces'project is aimed at creating a material (pictured) that can thinly coat the space ship, reflecting more than most of the light and allowing it to reach incredibly low temperatures, and it could also be used for cryogenic storage
The project is part of Nasa's Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program, with 8 projects in total selected to proceed to the next stage of development, each receiving as much as $500,000 (£350,000) for a two-year study
Nasa says it selected these projects for their 'innovativeness and technical viability.'
'Phase II decisions are always challenging, but we were especially challenged this year with so many successful Phase I studies applying to move forward with their cutting-edge technologies,' said Jason Derleth, the NIAC program executive at Nasa Headquarters in Washington.
Also included as part of the portfolio is a dual aircraft platform that may be able to stay aloft for weeks or even months at a time. The work is being led by Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and consists of two glider-like unmanned aircraft which are connected via a thin, ultra-strong cable.
A separate group is working on parachute made of plasma that can be trapped in a magnetic field to help probes glide safely back to Earth. Aerospace firm MSNW of Redmond, Washington, won a Nasa grant to demonstrate the technique on a CubeSat.
Meanwhile, Texas Engineering Experiment is working on the design of a rotating habitat with a robotic system that constructs the structure allowing to 'grow' while in space.
Engineers are developing a dual aircraft platform that may be able to stay aloft for weeks or even months at a time. The work is being led by Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and consists of two glider-like unmanned aircraft which are connected via a thin, ultra-strong cable
A separate group is working on parachute made of plasma that can be trapped in a magnetic field to help probes glide safely back to Earth. Aerospace firm MSNW of Redmond, Washington, won a Nasa grant to demonstrate the technique on a CubeSat
'Whether it's tensegrity habitats in space, new ways to get humans to Mars, delicate photonic propulsion, or any one of the other amazing Phase II studies NIAC is funding, I'm thrilled to welcome these innovations and their innovators back to the program.
'Hopefully, they will all go on to do what NIAC does best - change the possible.'
All projects are still in the early stages of development, most requiring 10 or more years of concept maturation and technology development before use on a Nasa mission.
Texas Engineering Experiment is working on the design of a rotating habitat with a robotic system that constructs the structure allowing to 'grow' while in space
NASA JUST RELEASED AN INCREDIBLE MAP OF ALL KNOWN EXOPLANETS
NASA JUST RELEASED AN INCREDIBLE MAP OF ALL KNOWN EXOPLANETS
NASA
VICTOR TANGERMANN
Exoplanet Map
NASA just dropped an astonishingly elaborate map of more than 4,000 exoplanets known to exist outside our Solar System, which takes the form of a video that shows how many exoplanets we’ve discovered each year since 1991.
Exoplanets are not only interesting to us because they orbit a different star, but also because they have the potential to harbor life.
It’s an impressive visualization of the exponential rate at which we’re discovering outside worlds many light-years away. That’s in part thanks to the Kepler Space Telescope, NASA’s now-retired orbital imaging craft that searched the far reaches of deep space for exoplanets since it launched in 2009.
Space Telescopes
While Kepler had to be retired last year, other satellites and space telescopes have picked up where it left off, including NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which recently spotted its smallest exoplanet ever.
And future space telescopes are also in the planning stages, such as the European Characterising Exoplanets Satellite, scheduled to launch later this year.
Unfortunately, NASA’s latest planned space telescope, the James Webb Telescope, has been facing a lot of delays, while getting heat from Congress about NASA drastically going over budget for the project.
Over the last month, ESA’s Mars Express has been watching dust storms brew at the planet’s north pole and disperse toward the equator.
In late May 2019, a spiral-shaped dust storm at the north polar ice cap of Mars was observed by several instruments onboard Mars Express. A Mars Express camera captured this image on May 26. The dust storm’s brown color contrasts with the white ice of the north polar ice cap below. The image covers an area of about 1,200 x 3,000 miles (2,000 x 5,000 km).
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express spacecraft has been monitoring dust storms brewing at Mars’ north pole over the last month, and watching as the storms disperse toward the equator. The spacecraft observed at least eight different storms at the edge of the ice cap between May 22 and June 10, 2019, which formed and dissipated very quickly, between one and three days.
It’s currently spring in the northern hemisphere of Mars, and water-ice clouds and small dust-lifting events are frequently observed along the edge of the seasonally retreating ice cap. Local and regional storms lasting for a few days or weeks and confined to a small area are common on Mars, but at their most severe they can engulf the entire planet, as experienced last year in a global storm that circled the planet for many months.
Mars dust storm in motion. This animated sequence was compiled from images of a different storm captured by the VMC over a period of 70 minutes on May 29, 2019. This particular storm started on May 28 and continued to around June 1, moving toward the equator during that time.
This montage of images shows 3 different storms developing on May 22, 2019, on May 26, and between June 6 and 10. In the latter case, the cameras watched the storm evolve for several days as it moved in an equator-ward direction. At the same time, wispy patches of light-colored clouds can be seen at the outer margin of the polar cap and also several thousand kilometers away (several thousand miles), close to the volcanoes Elysium Mons and Olympus Mons.
Both Mars Express and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter observed that when the dust storms reached the large volcanoes Elysium Mons and Olympus Mons, orographic clouds – water ice clouds driven by the influence of a volcano’s leeward slope on the air flow – that had been developing, started to evaporate as a result of the air mass being heated by the influx of dust.
These regional dust storms only last a few days. The planet’s circulation moves the elevated dust and spreads it out into a thin haze in the lower atmosphere. Some traces of dust and clouds remained in the volcanic province into mid-June.
A dust storm underway at the edge of the north polar ice cap of Mars. The image was taken by the Mars Express Visual Monitoring Camera on May 29, 2019.
THAT’S NO MOON Comets around distant stars, shown in this artist’s illustration, could be explained by “ploonets” — moons that were freed from their orbits around migrating gas giants.
LYNNETTE COOK/FUSE/NASA
Meet ploonets: planets of moonish origin.
In other star systems, some moons could escape their planets and start orbiting their stars instead, new simulations suggest. Scientists have dubbed such liberated worlds “ploonets,” and say that current telescopes may be able to find the wayward objects.
Astronomers think that exomoons — moons orbiting planets that orbit stars other than the sun — should be common, but efforts to find them have turned up empty so far (SN Online: 4/30/19). Astrophysicist Mario Sucerquia of the University of Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia and colleagues simulated what would happen to those moons if they orbited hot Jupiters, gas giants that lie scorchingly close to their stars (SN: 7/8/17, p. 4). Many astronomers think that hot Jupiters weren’t born so close, but instead migrated toward their star from a more distant orbit.
“This process should happen in every planetary system composed of a giant planet in a very close-in orbit,” Sucerquia says. “So ploonets should be very frequent.”
Some ploonets may be indistinguishable from ordinary planets. Others, whose orbits keep them close to their planet, could reveal their presence by changing the timing of when their neighbor planet crosses, or transits, in front of the star. The ploonet should stay close enough to the planet that its gravity can speed or slow the planet’s transit times. Those deviations should be detectable by combining data from planet-hunting telescopes like NASA’s TESS or the now-defunct Kepler, Sucerquia says.
Ploonethood may be a relatively short-lived phenomenon, though, making the worlds more difficult to spot. About half of the ploonets in the researchers’ simulations crashed into either their planet or star within about half a million years. And half of the remaining survivors crashed within a million years.
Even with few visible survivors, ploonets could help explain some bizarre exoplanetary features. Moon debris from such crashes could lead to giant ring systems around planets, like the 37 rings that encircle exoplanet J1407b, the team says.
Or, if the ploonet had an icy surface or an atmosphere before moving close to its star, the star’s heat would evaporate it, giving the ploonet a tail like a comet’s. Evaporating ploonets zipping by with a long light-blocking tail could explain strangely flickering stars like Tabby’s star, Sucerquia says (SN: 12/22/18, p. 9).
“Those structures [rings and flickers] have been discovered, have been observed,” Sucerquia says. “We just propose a natural mechanism to explain [them].”
While the solar system doesn’t have any hot Jupiters, ploonethood may be possible here, too. Earth’s moon is moving slowly away from the Earth, at a rate of about 4 centimeters per year. When it eventually breaks free, “the moon is a potential ploonet,” Sucerquia says — although that won’t happen for about 5 billion years.
The study is a good first step for thinking about what would happen to exomoons in real planetary systems, says planetary astrophysicist Natalie Hinkel of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, who wasn’t involved in the new work. “Nobody’s looked at the problem quite like this,” she says. “It adds to the layers of how complex these systems are.”
Plus, ploonet is “a wonderful name,” Hinkel says. “Normally I sort of eye-roll at these made-up names, but this one is a keeper.”
An epic lunar laser experiment is still going strong, five decades after the Apollo astronauts set it up on the surface.
The moonwalking crew of Apollo 11, which landed on the moon 50 years ago this month, put special retroreflectors on the lunar surface, as did the later crews of Apollo 14 and 15, in 1971. (Another retroreflector, built by the French, sits on the Soviet Lunokhod 2 rover that landed without a crew in 1973.)
The NASA experiment, called the laser ranging retroreflector, is "a special type of mirror with the property of always reflecting an incoming light beam back in the direction it came from," explained the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) in a statement. And the reflector is key for measuring the distance between the Earth and the moon, the institute added.
The way it works is an observatory — quite often the McDonald Observatory in Texas, although many others have participated — shoots a laser beam at the moon. "They remain tightly focused for large distances," the institute explained, although there is some dispersion. By the time the beam bounces off the mirror and returns to Earth, it has widened to about 12 miles (20 kilometers) in diameter. This beam dispersion makes it more difficult to view the reflection.
The reflector itself doesn't require any power, which is why it's still operating decades after other instruments on the moon fell silent. This instrument includes 100 "corner cubes" (or fused silica half-cubes), which are placed in an 18-inch-square (46 centimeters square) aluminum panel, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). It's due to the shape of these corner cubes that any laser shot at them reflects light directly back. Over the years, measurements of the moon's distance have improved thanks to better laser and computing equipment.
"Once the laser beam hits a reflector, scientists at the observatories use sensitive filtering and amplification equipment to detect any return signal," JPL said. "The reflected light is too weak to be seen with the human eye, but under good conditions, one photon, the fundamental particle of light, will be received every few seconds."
Observations must be made over several hours to account for the weak signal. But by averaging out the signal, researchers can calculate the moon's distance down to a precision of less than 1 inch (2 cm), JPL said. That's not a bad margin of error given that the moon's distance averages 238,855 miles (384,400 km) from our planet, or about 30 Earth diameters away from us. It's a distance so vast that it took Apollo astronauts three days to get there.
While the experiment is most famous for its measurements of lunar distance, researchers have also used the data to show that the moon has a fluid core and that the natural satellite is moving slowly away from Earth, said James Williams, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory involved in the experiment, in a 2009 Space.com interview.
The timing of the laser round trip provided evidence supporting Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. That theory says, in part, that the speed of light in a vacuum is independent of any observer's motion. This experiment also showed that Isaac Newton's gravitational constant is extremely constant, changing by less than 1 part in 100 billion between 1969 and 2004, NASA stated.
As this sign outside of Nevada’s infamous Area 51 military base reminds would-be visitors, guards are authorized to respond to trespassers with deadly force.
Pack your shades, your sunscreen and your coziest tinfoil hat, because the late-summer event of the season is happening in Nevada's scenic Area 51, and you're invited.
According to a tongue-in-cheek Facebook event called "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us," a ragtag army of alien hunters will meet up near the top-secret Air Force base in the predawn hours of Sept. 20, coordinate a plan of attack, then raid the grounds in search of captive aliens. Per the event's hosts (a page that posts memes and a guy who streams video games on Twitch), the delicate operation will involve running supernaturally fast — faster than the guards' bullets can fly — but will be worth it to "see them aliens."
So far, nearly 200,000 Facebook users have signed up to attend, with another 200,000 "interested" in the affair.
This event is, of course, a joke (please, do not raid this or any other military base). Area 51 — a massive plot of desert about 80 miles (129 kilometers) northwest of Las Vegas — is a top-secret military installation that is infamously well-guarded by fences, radars and heavily armed "camo dudes" in white trucks. After more than 60 years of operations, the base's primary purpose remains classified and its grounds restricted to the public, fomenting an aura of spooky secrecy that has intrigued all manner of skeptics and conspiracy theorists for decades.
This much is known about the base: It's huge, covering a total of 2.9 million acres (1.2 million hectares) and 5,000 square miles (12,950 square km) of restricted airspace. Officially, the base is part of the Nevada Test and Training Range (NTTR), which is affiliated with Nellis Air Force Base; according to the Air Force, it is the largest combined air and ground space for peacetime military operations in the free world.
Since the Air Force set up shop there in 1955, Area 51 has hosted hundreds of nuclear weapons tests and has served as a training-and-testing ground for all manner of top-secret stealth aircraft, Live Science previously reported. If you believe the most popular conspiracy theory about the base, one of those aircraft may be an alien saucer that crash-landed in Roswell, New Mexico, in the late 1940s.
The U.S. military claimed that the mysterious object was a weather balloon (a 1994 Air Force report confirmed this to be true — albeit, a souped-up weather balloon designed to detect far-off nuclear fallout). However, conspiracy theorists insisted that the wreck was indeed an alien spacecraft, which had been subsequently transported to Area 51 to be broken apart, studied and put back together again. This theory gained traction in the 1980s, when a man claiming to have worked at Area 51 told the news media that he had actually seen scientists reverse engineer alien saucers there.
This man, it turns out, was a liar who never set foot on the base (he also lied about the colleges he went to and other past employment); but his stories gained enough attention that Area 51 had a new, permanent reputation as that eerie place in the desert where scientists might be tinkering with aliens. Subsequent tests of experimental, top-secret aircraft at the base have only strengthened this far-out legacy.
The allure of the mysterious desert base is undeniable. So, what happens if you do attempt to trespass into Area 51 and liberate the juicy alien secrets contained within? For starters, you'll probably be stopped at gunpoint by guards dressed in camo, as two intrepid adventurers experienced in 2016 after trying to sneak a camera through the base's back gate.
According to signs posted around the base, these infamous "camo dudes" are permitted to greet trespassers with deadly force — but, if past encounters are any indication, trespassers are more likely to be met with a hefty fine and a court date. When an SUV filled with tourists accidentally crossed into the base's restricted area a few years ago, the driver and four passengers were each cited with a $650 fine and a misdemeanor charge. The unwary passengers eventually got their charges dropped, but the driver had to pay up — and was banned from leading tours in the area for several years.
If you happen to join the joke raid proposed for this September, keep that man's story in mind. When it comes to unearthing the truth of Area 51, you may have only one shot. Choose your plan wisely.
It looks like Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft has snagged its second souvenir from asteroid Ryugu, marking one of the last major milestones of the probe's visit.
Today's (July 10) maneuver was a calculated risk, as mission staff sought to weigh the scientific value of a subsurface sample with the possibility that failure would jeopardize the sample that the team believes is on board the spacecraft. Now, Hayabusa2 has just one more rover to deploy on the space rock before it departs at the end of the year.
The maneuver stretched on for hours as the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Hayabusa2 slowly lowered itself to the surface. At 100 feet (30 meters) above the surface, the spacecraft spotted the bright, white target marker it had dropped during a preparatory procedure.
That marker is 65 feet (20 m) north of the site where, in April, the spacecraft deployed a copper bomb to create an artificial crater in order to look below the asteroid's surface. (JAXA had decided that sampling sites within the crater itself were too rocky and would risk the spacecraft's safety.)
Finally, at about 9:15 p.m. EDT (0115 GMT on July 11), Hayabusa2 touched down, fired a tantalum bullet into the space rock and — if all went according to plan — collected a bit of the resulting debris. That debris should be extra-special — not just any space rock, but pristine material dug out from below the surface of the space rock by the formation of the crater.
Because Ryugu does not have an atmosphere or magnetic field, the asteroid's surface is exposed to all the hazards of space. Cosmic rays and charged particles of solar wind streaming off the sun pummel Ryugu and its companions, altering the rock at the exterior of these bodies.
But underneath these shells, asteroids contain the rubble left over from the birth of the planets. That's why scientists hope that today's procedure in particular will help them understand how the solar system formed: by allowing them to not just analyze the crater that Hayabusa2 created on the surface but also get that rock into labs here on Earth.
[PPTD] July 11 at 10:39 JST. The antenna has switched to the HGA (high-gain) and telemetry data has been received. We are now checking the state of the spacecraft.
HAYABUSA2@JAXA@haya2e_jaxa
[PPTD] July 11 at 10:51 JST: Gate 5 check. The state of the spacecraft is normal and the touchdown sequence was performed as scheduled. Project Manager Tsuda has declared that the 2nd touchdown was a success!
The Hayabusa2 spacecraft was designed with three compartments for sample storage. Mission staff believed two of those compartments were already holding pieces of Ryugu; now they hope the third one does as well.
But until the spacecraft makes its way back to Earth and scientists can get inside that sample storage system, they aren't sure what's in there. Once the samples arrive, the team will first weed out anything from the spacecraft's operations; the metals of the bomb and bullets used during the mission were chosen because they do not exist on asteroids and so will be easy to identify and discard.
Then, it's all about the asteroid science, whatever that turns out to be. JAXA ran into trouble during the sampling portion of Hayabusa2's predecessor mission and ended up with minuscule grains of an asteroid called Itokawa in 2010. Yet scientists have still made discoveries based on that dust. For example, they found that there is water on the space rock and that Itokawa seems to be built from rubble formed during a large collision. If Hayabusa2 has grabbed larger hunks of asteroid, that's more material for more science.
Of course, all that will have to wait until the spacecraft makes its journey back to Earth. It has one more task to accomplish first: deploying a small rover, called MINERVA-II2, later this summer. Then, in November or December, Hayabusa2 will head home, delivering its bounty toward the end of next year.
How moon landing conspiracy theories began and why they persist today
Bill Kaysing was a former US Navy officer who worked as a technical writer for one of the rocket manufacturers for NASA’s Apollo moon missions. He claimed that he had inside knowledge of a government conspiracy to fake the moon landings, and many conspiracy theories about the Apollo moon landings which persist to this day can be traced back to his 1976 book,We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle.
The basic template of the conspiracy theory is that NASA couldn’t manage to safely land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s as President John F Kennedy had promised, so it only sent astronauts into Earth orbit. Conspiracy theorists then argue that NASA staged the moon landings in a film studio and that there are tell-tale signs on the footage and the photos that give the game away. They claim that NASA has covered up the elaborate hoax ever since.
Moon landing sceptics point to supposed clues such as photos that appear to show the astronauts in front of cross hairs that were etched on the camera glass, or a mysterious letter C visible on a moon rock. These and many other seeming anomalies have been debunked, but moon landing conspiracy theories have persisted in the popular imagination.
In the US, opinion polls indicate that between 5-10% of Americans distrust the official version of events. In the UK, a YouGov poll in 2012 found that 12% of Britons believed in the conspiracy theory. A recent survey found that 20% of Italians believe that the moon landings were a hoax, while a 2018 poll in Russia put the figure there as high as 57%, unsurprising given the popularity of anti-Western conspiracy theories there.
To the moon and beyond is a new podcast series from The Conversation marking the 50th anniversary of the moon landings. Listen and subscribe here.
Ready to disbelieve
That Kaysing’s conspiracy theory took hold in mid-1970s America is in large part due to a wider crisis of trust in the country at the time. In 1971, citizens read the leaked Pentagon Papers, showing that the Johnson administration had been systematically lying about the Vietnam War. They tuned in nightly to the hearings about the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up.
A series of congressional reports detailed CIA malfeasance both at home and abroad, and in 1976, the House Select Committee on Assassinationsconcluded – in contrast to the Warren Commission more than a decade earlier – that there was a high probability that there had been a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. These revelations had helped fuel a wider shift in conspiracy thinking since the late 1960s, from a belief in external enemies, such as Communists, to the suspicion that the American state was itself conspiring against its citizens.
Moon landing conspiracy theories have proved particularly sticky ever since. To understand their popularity we need to consider their cultural context, as much as the psychological dispositions of believers.
As with the Kennedy assassination, they formed a new kind of conspiracy theorising. These theories reinterpret the publicly available evidence, finding inconsistencies in the official record, rather than uncovering suppressed information. Visual evidence is crucial: for all their scepticism, their starting point is that seeing is believing. In the realm of photo evidence, the assumption is that everyone can be a detective. In the conspiracy theory communities that emerged at the tail-end of the 1960s, the self-taught buff became central.
The moon landing conspiracy theories also brought to the mainstream the notion that significant events are not what they seem: they have been staged, part of an official disinformation campaign. The idea that tragic events are created by “crisis actors” employed by the government has become the default explanation for many events today, from 9/11 to mass shootings. This type of conspiracy theory is particularly harmful – for example, parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting have been relentlessly hounded by internet trolls claiming they are merely paid stooges.
However, the story that the lunar landings were staged also resonates with the more plausible notion that the space race itself was as much a Cold War spectacle as a triumph of the human spirit.
The 1978 Hollywood film Capricorn One did much to popularise moon landing conspiracy theories. Based on Kaysing’s book, it imagined that a Mars landing was faked in a film studio, tapping into conspiracy rumours that the moon landings themselves had been directed by Stanley Kubrick. This suggestive myth is based in part on the idea that special effects had become much more sophisticated with Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001 A Space Odyssey, although still far from the capabilities that the conspiracy theories suppose.
Even if they are far-fetched in factual terms, moon landing conspiracy theories nevertheless call up the more plausible possibility that in our media-saturated age reality itself is constructed, if not actually faked.
We zijn nooit op de maan geweest. Hoe complottheorieën over de maanlandingen zijn ontstaan
We zijn nooit op de maan geweest. Hoe complottheorieën over de maanlandingen zijn ontstaan
Bill Kaysing was een voormalige Amerikaanse marineofficier die werkte voor één van de fabrikanten die de raketten leverden voor de Apollomissies van de NASA.
Hij claimde in zijn boek ‘We Never Went to the Moon’ (We zijn nooit op de maan geweest) dat de overheid de maanlandingen in scène had gezet.
Veel mensen geloven dat de maanlandingen nooit hebben plaatsgevonden. Uit een recente peiling blijkt bijvoorbeeld dat een vijfde van de Italianen gelooft dat de maanlandingen een hoax waren.
Complot
Een peiling uit 2018 laat zien dat bijna zes op de 10 Russen niet geloven dat de Amerikanen op de maan zijn geweest.
Het boek van Kaysing kwam uit in 1976. Enkele jaren daarvoor, in 1971, onthulden de gelekte Pentagon Papers dat de regering-Johnson lange tijd had gelogen over de Vietnamoorlog.
Daarnaast concludeerde de zogeheten House Select Committee on Assassinations van de Amerikaanse overheid in 1976 – in tegenstelling tot de Commissie-Waren – dat de vermoorde president Kennedy hoogstwaarschijnlijk het slachtoffer was geweest van een complot.
Filmstudio
Het gevolg hiervan was dat het vertrouwen van de Amerikaanse burger in de overheid steeds verder wegzakte.
In 1978 kwam de Hollywoodfilm Capricorn One uit, gebaseerd op het boek van Kaysing.
De film gaat over een landing op Mars die in werkelijkheid is opgenomen in een filmstudio, als verwijzing naar geruchten dat de maanlandingen waren geregisseerd door Stanley Kubrick.
India keert terug naar de maan met nieuwe missie ‘Chandrayaan-2’ - HLN.be
India keert terug naar de maan met nieuwe missie ‘Chandrayaan-2’ -HLN.be
EPADe Chandrayaan-2 wordt zondag 14 juli gelanceerd. Twee maanden later, op 6 of 7 september, zal het ruimtetuig landen op de maan.
De race naar de maan is er eentje waar tal van landen aan deelnemen. Daaronder ook India. Zij maken de Chandrayaan-2, een onbemande lander, klaar om de maan te veroveren. Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO)plant de lancering op zondag 14 juli 2019.
Na het succes van de vorige Indiase missie naar de maan, Chandrayaan-1, gaat de nieuwe missie alweer een stapje verder. Dit keer moet het ruimtetuig ook landen op de maan. Dat zal onbemand gebeuren. Als India daarin slaagt, zal het land het vierde ter wereld zijn om een maanrover te laten rondrijden op de maan.
Op 14 juli wordt de maanrover reeds gelanceerd. En als alles zoals gepland gaat, zal de maanrover twee maanden later – op 6 of 7 september – eveneens landen op het maanoppervlak. Dat gebeurt zo’n 600 kilometer van de zuidpool van de maan, een plaats waar voorlopig geen enkele ruimtetuig landde. Daar zal de lander gedurende een jaar gesteenten en maanbevingen bestuderen.
Ook NASA heeft plannen met de maan. De Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie wil een nieuw ruimtestation rond de maan bouwen.
EPADe Chandrayaan-2 wordt zondag 14 juli gelanceerd. Twee maanden later, op 6 of 7 september, zal het ruimtetuig landen op de maan.
WETENSCHAP In de nacht van 14 op 15 juli lanceert het Indiase ruimteagentschap ISRO de maansonde Chandrayaan-2, aan boord van de Indische draagraket GSLV Mk-III. Het Luikse bedrijf Amos produceerde de optische onderdelen van het hyperspectrale instrument (IIRS) aan boord van de orbiter, meldt het vandaag.
Deze infrarode afbeeldingsspectrometer zal de minerale en volatiele verbindingen in kaart brengen, en de overvloed aan water en hydroxylionen op het maanoppervlak karakteriseren, aldus het bedrijf.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETEr is leven ontdekt op een van de extreemste plekken op aarde en dat zou wel eens kunnen betekenen dat er op Pluto ook leven mogelijk is. Wetenschappers trokken naar hooggelegen ijspieken in een afgelegen gebied in de Andes, waarvan gedacht werd dat leven er onmogelijk was. Maar nu zijn er in die ijspieken, die ook op Pluto voorkomen, toch organismen ontdekt.
Hoog in de Andes bevinden zich metershoge ijspieken, of zogenaamde penitenten, die recent ook zijn ontdekt op Pluto. Ze zijn een zeldzaam verschijnsel op Aarde en komen enkel voor in de meest extreme situaties, waar de temperaturen hevig schommelen, de wind gevaarlijk hard waait en de UV-straling intens is. Het lijken onmogelijke levenssituaties, maar onderzoekers hebben nu ontdekt dat er toch een soort eencellige sneeuwalg leeft. Het is voor het eerst dat ze kunnen aantonen dat er op dergelijke ijzige pieken leven mogelijk is.
Rode verkleuringen
Tijdens een zware expeditie naar ’s werelds tweede grootste vulkaan in de Andes namen de biologen rode verkleuringen waar in de hoge penitenten, iets wat wijst op microbiologisch leven. De onderzoekers namen enkele stalen mee en nadat ze die hadden onderzocht, konden ze de aanwezigheid van twee algensoorten bevestigen.
Dat er leven gevonden is in dergelijke extreme omstandigheden, bewijst volgens de onderzoekers dat er op heel wat plaatsen leven mogelijk is, hoe uitdagend de omgeving ook is. De enige voorwaarde is dat er vloeibaar water aanwezig is, aldus Lara Vimercati, hoofdonderzoekster bij het project. Deze voedselarme en extreme locatie zou de uitgelezen situatie zijn om te testen wat de precieze limieten van leven zijn en wat naast de aanwezigheid van water nog vereisten zijn.
Leven op Pluto
De resultaten van het onderzoek zijn heel interessant. Niet alleen omdat ze bewijzen dat ook op extreme plaatsen leven mogelijk is, maar ook omdat op Pluto dergelijke ijspieken aanwezig zijn. Daar zijn ze tot wel 500 meter hoog. Als op ijspieken op aarde micro-organismen voorkomen, is dat misschien ook wel elders mogelijk.
WETENSCHAP De Japanse sonde Hayabusa-2 is er voor de tweede keer in geslaagd om kort neer te strijken op de asteroïde Ryugu. Dat heeft het Japanse ruimtevaartbureau Jaxa gemeld. De asteroïde met een diameter van 900 meter bevindt zich op ongeveer 280 tot 300 miljoen kilometer van ons.
Het vluchtleidingscentrum kreeg volgens een woordvoerder van Jaxa signalen binnen die de geslaagde landing zouden bevestigen. Er is echter nog een definitieve bevestiging nodig, maar die wordt pas later verwacht, luidde het.
De asteroïde met een diameter van 900 meter bevindt zich op ongeveer 280 tot 300 miljoen kilometer van ons. Doel van de huidige missie van de Hayabusa-2 is het verzamelen van monsters van onder het oppervlak van het hemellichaam.
lees verder onder de foto:
EPADe schaduw van de 'Hayabusa 2' toont hoe de ruimtesonde landt op de Ryugu-asteroïde.
Stalen
Het avontuur van de Hayabusa-2 begon op 3 december 2014. De sonde startte toen een lange reis van 3,2 miljard kilometer, een reis die nog lang niet voorbij is. In februari slaagde de Hayabusa-2 er al een eerste keer in om kort te landen op Ryugu.
Eind 2020 moet de ongeveer 600 kilo wegende sonde naar de aarde terugkeren met stalen van de asteroïde. Wetenschappers hopen aan de hand van de verzamelde gegevens meer kennis te verwerven over ons zonnestelsel met als ultieme doel het ontstaan van leven op aarde beter te begrijpen.
Kyodo/via REUTERSDe lancering van de raket die de Hayabusa-2 draagt in december 2014.
The long-buried structure, dating back at least 4,600 years, was constructed of marble transported from nearby Aegean islands on tiny wooden ships.
"It is by far the largest prehistoric marine transport operation that has ever come to light anywhere in the world," said Dr Julian Whitewright, a leading maritime archaeologist at the University of Southampton, told the Independent.
"It demonstrates quite clearly just how important, and integral to their culture, seafaring was to these early Bronze Age Aegean people.”
The huge quantity of white marble was shipped from Naxos, an island some six-and-a-half miles away.
Based on illustrations of early Greek sailing craft on Bronze Age pottery, archaeologists estimate that it would have required over 3,500 trips with 24 sailors rowing solidly for five hours in open water.
The Greeks built a huge structure, using up to 10,000 tonnes of marble, completely transforming the shape of the island of Keros – known today as Dhaskalio.
“These very early Greeks were organisationally, technically and politically much more advanced than previously thought”
Michael Boyd
CONCEALED: The white marble pyramid was hidden on the Greek island (Pic: Cambridge Keros Project)
Elsewhere on the island, archaeologists have found innumerable knives, tools, and small sculptures which may have been left as offerings by those visiting the island.
It was part of a worldwide explosion of monumental building – the ruined pyramid of Dhaskalio is roughly the same age as Stonehenge, the lost city of Eridu in Iraq, and the earliest pyramids in Egypt.
The pyramid structure seems to have occurred independently to the Greeks and Egyptians, and a little later the Aztecs, as the ideal shape for monumental building.
BEGINNINGS: Cycladic culture blossomed into the Greek civilisation inspired Western culture (Pic: National Archaeological Museum of Athens)
When Dhaskalio was newly-built the white marble structure would have been an amazing sight to seafarers in the region and was almost certainly a site of major religious significance across the region.
Creation myths of many early cultures revolve around a mountain emerging from the chaos of the sea and it’s possible that Dhaskalio was intended to represent that first land.
ENGINEERING: The pyramid shape of the island is man-made (Pic: Cambridge Keros Project)
"It is potentially a fundamental place of origin for the phenomenon of sacred mountains within the Greek world," said Dr Alan Peatfield of University College Dublin's School of Archaeology, who is a renowned expert on Greek mountaintop sanctuaries
Michael Boyd of Cambridge University's McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, who is a co-director of the investigation, told the Independent: ”Our investigation has been transforming our understanding of early Bronze Age Cycladic culture and suggests that these very early Greeks were organisationally, technically and politically much more advanced than previously thought.”
4,600-Year Old Pyramid As Old As Stonehenge Reveals Bginnings Of Ancient Greek Civilisation In What Today Is The Island Of Dhaskalio
4,600-Year Old Pyramid As Old As Stonehenge Reveals Beginnings Of Ancient Greek Civilisation In What Today Is The Island Of Dhaskalio
The long-buried pyramid of Dhaskalio, dating back at least 4,600 years, was constructed of marble transported from nearby Aegean islands on tiny wooden ships.
More than 4,600 years ago builders carved out the entire surface of a naturally pyramid-shaped promontory on the Greek island of Keros. They shaped it into terraces covered with 1,000 tonnes of specially imported gleaming white stone to give it the appearance of a giant stepped pyramid rising from the Aegean: the most imposing manmade structure in all the Cyclades archipelago.
But beneath the surface of the terraces lay undiscovered feats of engineering and craftsmanship to rival the structure’s impressive exterior. Archaeologists from three different countries involved in an ongoing excavation have found evidence of a complex of drainage tunnels – constructed 1,000 years before the famous indoor plumbing of the Minoan palace of Knossos on Crete – and traces of sophisticated metalworking.
A Mysterious Pyramid As Old As Stonehenge Has Been Discovered On Tiny Greek Island.
FROM DAILY STAR UK: “It is by far the largest prehistoric marine transport operation that has ever come to light anywhere in the world,” said Dr Julian Whitewright, a leading maritime archaeologist at the University of Southampton, told the Independent. “It demonstrates quite clearly just how important, and integral to their culture, seafaring was to these early Bronze Age Aegean people.” The huge quantity of white marble was shipped from Naxos, an island some six-and-a-half miles away.
Based on illustrations of early Greek sailing craft on Bronze Age pottery, archaeologists estimate that it would have required over 3,500 trips with 24 sailors rowing solidly for five hours in open water. The Greeks built a huge structure, using up to 10,000 tonnes of marble, completely transforming the shape of the island of Keros – known today as Dhaskalio. Elsewhere on the island, archaeologists have found innumerable knives, tools, and small sculptures which may have been left as offerings by those visiting the island.
It was part of a worldwide explosion of monumental building – the ruined pyramid of Dhaskalio is roughly the same age as Stonehenge, the lost city of Eridu in Iraq, and the earliest pyramids in Egypt.
The pyramid structureseems to have occurred independently to the Greeks and Egyptians, and a little later the Aztecs, as the ideal shape for monumental building. When Dhaskalio was newly-built the white marble structure would have been an amazing sight to seafarers in the region and was almost certainly a site of major religious significance across the region.
Creation myths of many early cultures revolve around a mountain emerging from the chaos of the sea and it’s possible that Dhaskalio was intended to represent that first land. “It is potentially a fundamental place of origin for the phenomenon of sacred mountains within the Greek world,” said Dr Alan Peatfield of University College Dublin’s School of Archaeology, who is a renowned expert on Greek mountaintop sanctuaries
Michael Boydof Cambridge University’s McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, who is a co-director of the investigation, told the Independent: ”Our investigation has been transforming our understanding of early Bronze Age Cycladic culture and suggests that these very early Greeks were organisationally, technically and politically much more advanced than previously thought.” READ MORE
Here are some cool ancient alien artefacts found by Youtube Whatsupinthesky27. The objects are clear indications that intelligent beings once thrived on this planet. One of the objects has a jar shape, but is fallen over on its side. It not a jar of course, its clear that its more high tech than that with all its pipes and tubes moving down its side. It looks very similar to a lot of jars seen recored from old roman digs. The other object has a lot layers and was obviously some kind of mechanical device. Scott C. Waring
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New Crop Circle Found In Farmers Field In Switzerland July 1, 2019, UFO Sighting News.
New Crop Circle Found In Farmers Field In Switzerland July 1, 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Date of discovery: July 1, 2019 Location of formation: Bern, Switzerland A farmer in Switzerland went out to his field and found a crop formation. He says he lost 100 Francs in corn from it being there and knows people are going to want to see it so he is expecting visitors. These crop formations didn't start recently.
Probably the most renowned is the "Mowing Devil" case in Hertfordshire in 1678, in which a farmer's field was said to have been visited by a devilish entity that trampled the crops down in a circle. The event was captured for posterity on a wood engraving. Also a book called "A Natural History of Staffordshire" in 1686, in which was reference to rings, circles and other shapes found in grassy fields. So you see, crop circles in the UK have been appearing for hundreds of years or more. I believe these circles re the locations where UFOs have entered and exited alien bases. The base would be deep under the ground probably around 5-6km and a tubular space would be formed in the ground lowering the UFO slowly like an elevator. Aliens have control of everything and controlling dirt and grass is much easier than you might think. Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
During the daily inspection on Monday, farmer Hans-Rudolf Wyder discovered holes in his cereal field in Büren an der Aare: "In the beginning, I thought these were caused by wind and rain - but somehow they were too regular." The farmer decided to take photos to shoot a drone. "When I saw in the pictures that it was a crop circle, that was a terrible mistake." How and when the crop circle came into its field, the farmer can not explain. It is not small: according to Wyder, the artwork has a diameter of around 50 meters.
So far, he has not recorded any visitors, but he expects that they will appear soon - on Facebook, the first images would be shared. Wyder says he has mixed feelings about the circle: "It is beautiful and anything but ordinary, but it also means a loss of income for me. That's why I lose a good 1000 francs in corn. "He does not know who made the circle:" Anyone should believe in what he wants anyway. "He himself had never believed that these circles were made by extraterrestrials or other powers "But when I look at how regular and perfect this circle is done, it astonishes me a lot."
Robot-Ants Jump, Communicate And Work Together in a Swarm
Robot-Ants Jump, Communicate And Work Together in a Swarm
Robot ants
Credit: EPFL
A team of EPFL researchers has developed tiny 10-gram robots that are inspired by ants: they can communicate with each other, assign roles among themselves and complete complex tasks together. These reconfigurable robots are simple in structure, yet they can jump and crawl to explore uneven surfaces. The researchers have just published their work in Nature.
Individually, ants have only so much strength and intelligence. However, as a colony, they can use complex strategies to complete sophisticated tasks and evade larger predators.
At EPFL, robotics researchers in Professor Jamie Paik’s Laboratory have reproduced this phenomenon, developing tiny robots that display minimal physical intelligence on an individual level but that are able to communicate and act collectively. Despite being simple in design and weighing only 10 grams, each robot has multiple locomotion modes to navigate any type of surface. Collectively, they can quickly detect and overcome obstacles and move objects much larger and heavier than themselves. The related research has been published in Nature.
Credit: Marc Delachaux / EPFL
Robots inspired by trap-jaw ants
These three-legged, T-shaped origami robots are called Tribots. They can be assembled in only a few minutes by folding a stack of thin, multi-material sheets, making them suitable for mass production. Completely autonomous and untethered, Tribots are equipped with infrared and proximity sensors for detection and communication purposes. They could accommodate even more sensors depending on the application.
“Their movements are modeled on those of Odontomachus ants. These insects normally crawl, but to escape a predator, they snap their powerful jaws together to jump from leaf to leaf,” says Zhenishbek Zhakypov, the first author. The Tribots replicate this catapult mechanism through an elegant origami design that combines multiple shape-memory alloy actuators. As a result, a single robot can produce five distinct locomotion gaits: vertical jumping, horizontal jumping, somersaulting to clear obstacles, walking on textured terrain and crawling on flat surfaces – just like these creatively resilient ants.
Roles: leader, worker and explorer
Despite having the same anatomy, each robot is assigned a specific role depending on the situation. ‘Explorers’ detect physical obstacles in their path, such as objects, valleys and mountains. After detecting an obstacle, they inform the rest of the group. Then, the ‘leader’ gives the instructions. The ‘workers,’ meanwhile, pool their strength to move objects. “Each Tribot, just like Odontomachus ants, can have different roles. However, they can also take on new roles instantaneously when faced with a new mission or an unknown environment, or even when other members get lost. This goes beyond what the real ants can do,” says Paik.
Zhenishbek Zhakypov and Jamie Paik. (Photo : Mac Delachaux / EPFL)
Future applications
In practical situations, such as an emergency search mission, Tribots could be deployed en masse. And thanks to their multi-locomotive and multi-agent communication capabilities, they could locate a target quickly over a large surface without relying on GPS or visual feedback. “Since they can be manufactured and deployed in large numbers, having some ‘casualties’ would not affect the success of the mission,” adds Paik.““With their unique collective intelligence, our tiny robots can demonstrate better adaptability to unknown environments; therefore, for certain missions, they would outperform larger, more powerful robots.”
This work is the result of a joint collaboration between EPFL and Osaka University
In April, Jamie Paik has presented her reconfigurable robots at the TED2019 conference in Vancouver. Her talk will be available July 10th here https://go.ted.com/jamiepaik at 11 a.m. EST.
Photo: Bret Hartman / TED
On July 10th, Jamie Paik and several eminent scientists joined famous writer Professor Harari on stage at a special event to help mark EPFL’s 50th anniversary year.
Contacts and sources: Laure-Anne Pessina Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Citation: Zhenishbek Zhakypov, Kazuaki Mori, Koh Hosoda and Jamie Paik, Designing Minimal and Scalable Insect-Inspired Multi-Locomotion Millirobots, Nature, 10 July 2019. DOI 10.1038/s41586-019-1388-
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Linda Moulton Howe: What's Really Going On With Dwarf Planet Ceres
Linda Moulton Howe: What's Really Going On With Dwarf Planet Ceres
The DAWN spacecraft approaching the dwarf planet Ceres in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter returned images that showed two bright “lights” shining from a dark crater. Not far from this crater was another large crater that is curiously a 6-sided hexagon.
Linda spoke with Marc Rayman, Ph.D., Dawn Mission Director and Chief Engineer, NASA/JPL, who expressed excitement that the spacecraft had reached its target after 7½ years of interplanetary flight. Because of the direction DAWN is currently flying over Ceres, we won’t get more pictures of the “lights” until early May, though he surmises they aren’t indicative of technological signs or extraterrestrial life.
Featured guests also include: James Fox News segment guests: James Sanders, Peter Breggin, Peter Davenport
Jim Marrs: Texas UFO Crash of 1897, Pilot Not of the World
Jim Marrs: Texas UFO Crash of 1897, Pilot Not of the World
COAST TO COAST AM. Author and journalist Jim Marrs discussed the Aurora, Texas UFO crash of 1897, which he considers to be the “smoking gun” of the UFO issue.
It’s early date belies the explanation that it could have been a misidentified aircraft, as it was six years before the Wright Brothers first flew their planes, he noted.
The date fits into the context of the ‘Great Airship Mystery’ of 1896-7, in which a large cigar-shaped object was seen in the skies of numerous American states.
The Dallas Morning News reported that the airship hit a windmill on a judge’s property and crashed, and that the pilot who died was “not of this world.”
For the ufologically-minded, Jim Moseley was without a doubt most associated with his highly entertaining newsletter, Saucer Smear. It was a semi-regular, self-published collection of Moseley’s comments, rants and observations on the UFO research scene. Moseley was someone who, in later years, focused just about all of his time and effort on poking fun at ufologists whenever and wherever he could. He did so in a very witty fashion, too. I should stress, though, that Moseley did have a real, deep interest in the UFO phenomenon itself. And a firm belief in it, too. Right up until the time of his death. Back in 1953 Moseley hit the road – in what really was a definitive Jack Kerouac/Neal Cassady-style – in search of the answers to what was going on in the heavens above. What Moseley found out, as he traveled from New York to California and back again, was a significantly varied and entertaining collection of eccentrics, liars, nut-jobs, and – to Moseley’s relief – genuinely interesting eyewitnesses to strange, aerial craft in the skies of 1950s America. Altogether, Moseley interviewed around one hundred people, on a clunky, big recorder, which was no mean feat. The list of interviewees included George Adamski himself and Frank Scully, of Behind the Flying Saucers infamy.
Moseley’s coast-to-coast trip was funded by a guy named Ken Krippine. He was a somewhat shady, dubious character who had suggested that if he, Moseley, would do all of the research, then Krippine would write a book on Moseley’s UFO findings. The two would then split the profits right down the middle. Sounds good, right? Well, for a while, yes, it sounded verygood. The proposed book, however, did not materialize; at least, not as Moseley and Krippine had originally planned things. No, it wasn’t due to the infernal intervention of the mysterious Men in Black. Rather, it was all due to a distinct lack of interest on the part of just about every publisher that Moseley approached with his well-thumbed and increasingly-creased and crumpled manuscript. Moseley was not one to be daunted, however. Years later – decades, in fact – he put just about all of his old notes and audio-recordings to good use in his hilarious autobiography, Shockingly Close to the Truth, which was written with Karl Pflock.
It was in 1955 that Moseley, in his own words, “had fallen under the influence” of a man named Charles Samwick. The latter was someone who, before retiring from the U.S. Army, worked in the hall-and-mirrors-filled world of counter-intelligence, which included keeping a very close eye on what the Russians were said to be up to inside the United States. Not only that, Moseley was able to determine that Samwick had, in some hazy, unclear fashion, ties to the CIA’s Robertson Panel and had once helped to bust a Soviet spy-ring in Washington, D.C. Samwick and Moseley soon became good buddies, with Moseley somewhat dazzled and disturbed by one particular thing that Samwick had to say. He told Moseley: “The Communist Party has planted an agent in every civilian saucer club in the United States.” Whether this was true, or amounted to hard-to-prove words inspired by the likes of Joseph McCarthy, Moseley was in no position to disagree with his well-informed source. But, he did make Samwick’s revelations the subject of an editorial in his pre-Saucer Smear newsletter, Saucer News. In the June-July 1955 issue Moseley revealed the following to his eager readers, but specifically without revealing Samwick’s name.
Moseley said: “Although it is perhaps unwise to inject a political note into a flying saucer magazine, we feel obliged to point out to our readers certain dangers which, taken together, add up to a possible Communist menace to saucer enthusiasts. First, for several months we have had good reason to believe that Communist agents have been planted in all of America’s leading saucer groups, for information-gathering purposes. This in itself is not a startling fact, but it should serve as a note of caution to saucer researchers who in the course of their studies might unearth information of a technical military nature.
He continued: “Secondly, let us all give some very serious consideration to the many alleged space men being called to the public’s attention – all of whom invariably tell us of the dangers of war and the exploitation of atomic energy. No one desires peace any more than we do, but let us remember too that it is part of the Communist ‘peace line’ to frighten the American people into ceasing our atomic experiments. It is quite possible that some of these ‘space men’ are unwittingly playing into the hands of the Communists. Last but not least, let us not fall into the pitfall of condemning the Government of the United States just because the Air Force refuses to tell us all we would like to know about flying saucers – I have been told that some of the remarks made at the Saucer Convention last March came dangerously close to sedition!
In conclusion, Moseley said: “Even as ardently loyal saucer fans, we all can and should face the fact that there are more important and immediate problems in the world today. Whether the saucers are held to be from Space or Earth, it is quite obvious that they present no immediate threat to the safety of this Country; so there is nothing to worry about. Of course everyone would be happier if ‘officialdom’ would be more generous with its information on saucers, but for the present we can only assume that that there is a good sufficient reason for the continuing scarcity of information from official sources. In making the above remarks, we are not referring to any particular individual or organization in the field of saucer research. We are merely observing that the saucerian field is alarmingly ripe for use in furthering Communist ends. Let each individual among us be on his guard that he does not fall into such a trap.”
A dig led by the Israeli Antiquities Authority unearthed what they believe is the biblical city of Ziklag where David took refuge from King Saul. The remains of several buildings and artifacts from the Philistine-era were discovered underneath a burnt settlement from the time of King David.
According to ancient biblical texts, the Philistines ruled the central and southern part of Israel and the Gaza Strip, and were feared by the Israelites. David (who wasn’t a king yet) ended up seeking refuge with the Philistines from King Saul who was trying to kill him. However, when King Saul heard that David was being protected by Philistine King Achish of Gath, “he sought him no more”.
King David
The city of Ziklag was given to David as a gift from the Philistine king. However, while David was away fighting with the Philistine army, the city was burnt down by Amalekite raiders. They enslaved the residents of Ziklag as retaliation for an attack conducted on the Kingdom of Israel. David would later become the second king of Israel.
The exact location of the city has been debated over the years, as twelve previous locations around the southern part of Israel were thought to have been the site of Ziklag. But none of the previous sites proved to have had Philistine and Israelite settlements. Now, however, with the most recent discovery at the Khirbet Al-Rai site in the central part of Israel (close to Kiryat Gat), the mystery surrounding the exact location of the ancient biblical city may finally be solved.
“It is not 100 percent sure, but I think it’s 90 percent that this was biblical Ziklag,” archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel of the Hebrew University stated to UPI.
King David
Excavations began in 2015 and since then archaeologists have unearthed artifacts from the Philistine civilization in addition to pottery vessels from the same time that the biblical King lived. They have dug in three primary locations on the site which covers an area of 10,764 square feet in total. The date of the remains is believed to have been from between the 12th and 11thcenturies BC.
According to Saar Ganor of the Israel Antiquities Authority, four houses have been unearthed so far and one of those homes contained over 1,500 tools that were used to cut wheat. Other discovered artifacts include statues, vessels, storage jars (for oil and wine), and other different types of pottery from the Philistine culture. In fact, they match previous Philistine-era artifacts that were recovered from Ashdod, Ekron, Ashkelon, and Gath.
You can see pictures here of some of the artifacts that were uncovered.
Volunteers excavate pottery from Khirbet a-Ra'i, which archaeologists have identified as biblical Ziklag.
(Excavation expedition to Khirbet a-Ra‘i)
A volunteer excavates pottery from Khirbet a-Ra’i, which archaeologists have identified as biblical Ziklag.
(Excavation expedition to Khirbet a-Ra‘i)
A volunteer excavates at Khirbet a-Ra’i, which archaeologists have identified as biblical Ziklag.
(Excavation expedition to Khirbet a-Ra‘i)
Pottery assemblage from Khirbet a-Ra’i, which archaeologists have identified as biblical Ziklag.
NASA is heading to Saturn’s ‘Titan’ moon in 2026 to look for signs of past or present life.
Researchers from Southern Methodist University (SMU) could help determine if Saturn’s icy moon – Titan – has ever been home to life long before NASA completes an exploratory visit to its surface by a drone helicopter.
This illustration shows NASA’s Dragonfly rotorcraft-lander approaching a site on Saturn’s moon, Titan.
Credits: NASA/JHU-APL
NASA announced in late June that its “Dragonfly” mission would launch toward Saturn’s largest moon in 2026, expecting to arrive in 2034. The goal of the mission is to use a rotorcraft to visit dozens of promising locations on Titan to investigate the chemistry, atmospheric and surface properties that could lead to life.
SMU was awarded a $195,000 grant, also in June, to reproduce what is happening on Titan in a laboratory setting. The project, funded by the Houston-based Welch Foundation, will be led by Tom Runčevski, an assistant professor of chemistry in SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences. SMU graduate student Christina McConville was also awarded a fellowship by the Texas Space Grant Consortium to help with the project.
Before the rotorcraft lands on Titan, chemists from SMU will be recreating the conditions on Titan in multiple glass cylinders — each the size of a needle top — so they can learn about what kind of chemical structures could form on Titan’s surface. The knowledge on these structures can ultimately help assess the possibility of life on Titan — whether in the past, present or future.
Scientists have long considered Titan to be very similar to pre-biotic Earth, even though it is a frigid world much farther from the sun than our planet. Titan is the only moon in the solar system to have a dense atmosphere like Earth, and is also the only world other than Earth to have standing bodies of liquids, including lakes, rivers and seas, on its surface. In addition, NASA scientists believe Titan may have a subsurface ocean of water.
“Titan is a hostile place, with lakes and seas of liquid methane, and rains and storms of methane. The storms carry organic molecules produced in the atmosphere to the surface, and at the surface conditions, only methane, ethane and propane are liquids. All other organic molecules are in their solid form – or, as we would call them on Earth, minerals,” Runčevski explained.
“We are interested in the chemical composition and crystal structure of these organic minerals, because it is believed that minerals played a key role in the origins of life on Earth,” he said. “Hence, our research may help assess these possibilities for strange “methanogenic” Titanean life.”
Runčevski added that any information that they get about the structure of Titan’s upper layer crust, which is made of organic minerals, could prove very useful to NASA’s Dragonfly mission.
In order to create these “Titans in a jar” at SMU, Runčevski said they will use information about the conditions on Titan that were obtained during the mission Cassini-Huygens, which ended two years ago.
“We can recreate this world step by step in a cylinder made of glass,” he said. “First, we will introduce water, which freezes into ice. Second, we will top that layer of ice with ethane that liquidizes as a ‘lake.’ Then we will fill the remaining cylinder with nitrogen.”
After that, they can introduce different molecules into the system, mimicking the rainfall. Lastly, they will “dry” the lakes by slightly raising the temperature and produce the surface of the moon. The cylinder that this moon will be created inside is specifically designed, so that multiple state-of-the-art experiments can be done and they can learn from the structure of the real Titan. Large parts of these experiments will be performed at research facilities that provide modern synchrotron and neutron radiation, such as Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and the National Institute and Technology in Maryland.
Contacts and sources: Southern Methodist University
Ik ben geen believer, maar alles is mogelijk. President Trump spreekt zich uit over UFO’s
Ik ben geen believer, maar alles is mogelijk. President Trump spreekt zich uit over UFO’s
Tijdens een interview met Fox News-presentator Tucker Carlson zei president Trump niet overtuigd te zijn van het bestaan van UFO’s, maar wel een open geest te hebben.
“Ik wil er niet al te diep op ingaan, maar persoonlijk betwijfel ik of ze bestaan,” zei Trump. “Ik ben geen believer, maar alles is mogelijk.”
Carlson vroeg de president ook naar een recente briefing met gevechtspiloten die ‘vreemde objecten’ hadden gezien die hypersonische snelheden bereikten en geen zichtbare motor hadden.
Zweren
Vorige week werden senatoren door het Amerikaanse ministerie van Defensie ingelicht over onbekende objecten in het luchtruim.
“Je hebt mensen die erbij zweren,” zei Trump. “Er zijn mensen, piloten, die hebben gezegd dat ze dingen hebben gezien.”
Carlson informeerde over een bewering gedaan door een overheidsfunctionaris.
UFO-wrak
Die zei dat de Verenigde Staten een UFO-wrak in bezit hebben op een legerbasis.
Trump zei dat hij hier zelf niets over had gehoord, maar wel de uitzending van Carlson hierover had bekeken.
“Ik denk dat het niet klopt,” zei hij. “Maar ik heb een open geest.”
An underwater archaeologist has told the BBC of the extraordinary lengths he went to to access a pharaoh's tomb underneath a pyramid.
Pearce Paul Creasman and his team were the first people to go into the tomb for 100 years and, in that time, it has become harder to access because of the rising water level.
Mr Creasman told BBC Newsday that this was the first time underwater archaeology had been carried out in Sudan, the location of the ancient royal burial site of Nuri.
"The gold offerings were still sitting there - these small glass-type statues had been leafed in gold. And while the water destroyed the glass underneath, the little gold flake was still there," he told Newsday.
He believes these offerings were for Nastasen, a minor pharaoh who ruled the Kush kingdom from 335 BC to 315 BC.
Mr Creasman told the BBC that the team "dug as far as we could" down a 65-step stairway which led to the tomb entry but "we got about 40 stairs down until we hit the water table and knew we wouldn't be able to go any further without putting our heads under".
Normal scuba tanks "would have been too cumbersome", he said, so instead they used a hose that pumped oxygen from the surface on the dive in January.
He described what he found as "remarkable":
"There are three chambers, with these beautiful arched ceilings, about the size of a small bus, you go in one chamber into the next, it's pitch black, you know you're in a tomb if your flash lights aren't on. And it starts revealing the secrets that are held within."
The tomb is part of the ancient site of Nuri which is spread across more than 170 acres in northern Sudan.
These pyramids mark the burials of Kushite royals who are sometimes referred to as "black pharaohs". The Kush kingdom lasted for many hundreds of years and, in the 8th Century BC, it conquered Egypt which it ruled for almost a century.
Image copyright NURI ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXPEDITION/PEARCEPAULCREASMAImage captionSudan has more pyramids than Egypt
One difference between the pyramids in Sudan and the much more famous pyramids in Egypt is that the kings were buried below them, instead of inside.
Een onderwaterarcheoloog heeft toegang weten te krijgen tot de tombe van een farao onder een piramide in Soedan.
Er was al zo’n 100 jaar niemand meer geweest in de tombe, die steeds lastiger te bereiken is vanwege het stijgende water.
Pearce Paul Creasman zei tegen de BBC dat er voor het eerst onderwaterarcheologisch onderzoek is gedaan in Soedan.
Opmerkelijk
In de tombe trof hij onder meer figuurtjes van aardewerk en bladgoud aan.
Creasman denkt dat het gaat om offers aan Nastasen, een zwarte farao die over Koesj – een rijk in Nubië – heerste.
Wat hij in de tombe aantrof omschreef hij als ‘opmerkelijk’.
Geheimen
“Er zijn drie kamers met prachtig gewelfde plafonds ter grootte van een bus,” zei hij. “De geheimen die in de tombe verborgen liggen worden nu geopenbaard.”
De tombe is onderdeel van de archeologische vindplaats Nuri in het noorden van Soedan.
In de achtste eeuw voor Christus veroverde het Koesj-rijk Egypte. De zwarte farao’s werden in Soedan onder de piramides begraven.
Piloot filmt twee cirkelvormige objecten boven Grand Canyon. Zijn dit UFO’s?
Piloot filmt twee cirkelvormige objecten boven Grand Canyon. Zijn dit UFO’s?
In een filmpje dat door Mike Wagner op YouTube is geplaatst is de Grand Canyon in Arizona te zien. Op een gegeven moment verschijnen er twee objecten in beeld, schrijft de Britse Daily Star.
Ze lijken in formatie over de beroemde kloof te vliegen.
Onder meer YouTube-kanaal ‘The Hidden Underbelly’ besteedde aandacht aan het fragment en sprak van ‘twee UFO’s die in tandem over de Grand Canyon in Arizona vliegen’. Het filmpje in inmiddels duizenden keren bekeken.
Soortgelijke ervaring
Eén iemand reageerde: “Buitenaardse schepen!”
Een ander zei: “Dat is prachtig.”
Een derde persoon liet weten een soortgelijke ervaring te hebben gehad in de regio.
“Ik keek naar mijn nieuwste vlog (ook in Arizona) en zag dat ik iets had vastgelegd wat de vorm van een sigaar had,” schreef ze.
TRUMP WILT VRAAG OF UFO'S ECHT ZIJN NIET BEANTWOORDEN
TRUMP WILT VRAAG OF UFO'S ECHT ZIJN NIET BEANTWOORDEN
Nog niet zo lang geleden werden ufo’s belachelijk gemaakt in het mainstream nieuws en werden degenen die er wel over berichtten uitgemaakt voor aluhoedjes.
Tegenwoordig zijn ufo’s “hot” en worden er zelfs vragen over gesteld aan de Amerikaanse president.
Hieronder een interessant kort interview dat Tucker Carlson had met Donald Trump tijdens hun trip naar Azië vorige week.
Tucker zegt tegen Trump: “U heeft onlangs een briefing gehad over ufo’s, bestaan ze echt?”. Waarop je ziet dat Trump even nodig heeft om een antwoord te bedenken en dan vervolgens zegt: “Ik wil er niet teveel op ingaan, maar persoonlijk heb ik mijn twijfels”.
Hij ontkent het bestaan niet en ook op de vraag of het waar is wat een hooggeplaatste regeringsfunctionaris onlangs beweerde dat het waar is dat de Amerikaanse overheid in het bezit is van een gecrashte ufo, antwoordt hij ontwijkend en zegt daar niets over gehoord te hebben, maar dat alles mogelijk is en hij wel een “open mind” heeft.
Vervolgens komt er dan een stukje met de bekende Engelse ufo onderzoeker Nick Pope die het feit dat Trump bereid is hierover te praten en het onderwerp niet belachelijk maakt, “verfrissend” noemt.
De man waar Tucker Carlson in bovenstaande video over spreekt is Luis Elizondo, waar wij enkele weken geleden het volgende over publiceerden:
Degene die destijds de belangrijkste man was bij dat Pentagon onderzoek is Luis Elizondo. Enkele dagen geleden was hij op bezoek bij Tucker Carlson, waar hij een aantal interessante dingen zei die in onderstaande video te beluisteren zijn. Belangrijk om te onthouden is dat een dergelijke man helemaal niets zegt, voordat hij het groene licht van Washington heeft gekregen.
Hierna volgt die uitzending, door Paul Harmans voorzien van Nederlandse ondertiteling.
Je weet dat de man liegt door het simpele feit dat hij aan het eind van het programma toegeeft dat de Amerikaanse overheid beschikt over wrakstukken van ufo’s.
Even daarvoor zegt hij dat we eigenlijk totaal niet weten wat het zijn, wie het zijn en waar ze vandaan komen. En om het helemaal bont te maken zegt hij dat de overheid dit onderwerp tot voor kort niet erg serieus nam.
Hoeveel leugen op een rij wil je hebben? Je hebt een land dat beschikt over wrakstukken van ufo’s, maar tot voor kort namen ze ufo’s niet serieus.
Dit alles heeft dan weer te maken met de door Donald Trump opgezette Space Force, waarbij stap voor stap en na nogmaals het verdwijnen van enorme hoeveelheden geld, de geheime ruimtevloot langzaam maar zeker “bekend” zal worden bij het grote publiek.
Dit gebeurt door iedere keer kleine stukjes van de waarheid op tafel te leggen, waardoor iedereen straks gelooft dat de geheime ruimtevloot is ontwikkeld via het nieuwe Space Force programma.
Ook het interview met Trump past in het boven geschetste plaatje. Trump die niet ontkennend antwoord op de vraag of ufo’s echt zijn, maar zegt daar niet over te willen spreken. Die vervolgens marine piloten aanhaalt die onbekende objecten hebben waargenomen en die zegt een “open mind” te hebben en dat alles mogelijk is.
Wat te denken bijvoorbeeld van het volgende object dat enkele jaren geleden een bezoek bracht aan het ISS ruimtestation? Er worden vaker objecten daar waargenomen, maar onderstaande is een wel heel bijzondere.
De opname is gemaakt door de vorig jaar overleden Streetcap1 en is 100 procent echt. Vlak nadat Streetcap1 dit object had “gevangen”, werd de communicatie met het ruimtestation, zoals gewoonlijk, verbroken “wegens storing”.
Aards of buitenaards? Feit is dat er langzaam maar zeker door de Amerikaanse overheid ergens naartoe wordt gewerkt. Iedereen hoopt dat het eindelijk de echte Disclosure zal zijn, maar velen vermoeden toch dat dit alles bedoeld is om de enorme bedragen die zijn verdwenen wit te wassen via de erkenning dat er een geheime aardse ruimtevloot bestaat.
The national park system is one of America’s crowning achievements. For a lot of us, it’s easy to forget that America has some of the most spectacular geography and landscapes in the world, and the preservation of huge swaths of wilderness as national parks that anyone can visit and explore is truly fantastic. But the wilderness of America is a strange place, and the national parks are all hotbeds of paranormal activity from UFOs to the Missing 411 cases and everything in between. Recent footage allegedly taken by a pilot flying over the Grand Canyon purports to show some of that strangeness.
According to the YouTube channel The Hidden Underbelly 2.0, who shared the video (you can see the footage for yourself here), the footage was taken by pilot Mike Wagner as he was flying over the Grand Canyon in broad daylight. It shows two white, reflective objects flying in tandem beneath the plane, over the canyon. The objects have no discernible features, but could be seen as having a similar shape to the “tic-tac” UFO seen from the USS Nimitz in 2004, which has been at the center of the ongoing saga of the military’s relationship to UFOs. But then again, lots of things look like a white tic-tac when seen from far away, or blurred from enlarging the footage.
“Tic-tac,” “flying saucer,” and “cigar” are all pretty similar descriptive names.
One alternative explanation would be that the objects are actually distant and blurry birds. But that doesn’t seem all that likely, due to the video actually being in slow-motion. According to Mike Wagner in the description of the originally uploaded video, the footage was shot at 120 fps and slowed down to 24 fps. Considering that even at 24 fps, the video is only 30 or so seconds long, and the objects only appear briefly, they must have only appeared for a split second in real time. If they are in fact actual objects flying above the Grand Canyon, then they were probably flying incredibly fast. It would be nice to see the real time footage.
Without seeing the original video at actual speed it’s hard to say what these objects are, or if they’re actually objects at all. The cynic in me wants to say that there’s a nefarious reason for not showing the 120 fps video. At full speed is it clear that the UFOs are scratches on the glass? Or glinting sunlight? Maybe. But maybe not, both of those explanations seem to fall short as well. Perhaps it’s just impossible to see anything at 120 fps. The other explanation, and it’s just as painful to say it this time as always, is that it’s a couple of drones. That’s not necessarily the best explanation, but it’s always a possibility now.
“Fun ruiner”
While this footage isn’t conclusive by any means, the Grand Canyon does have a history of weirdness. Last year, a series of cattle mutilations were reported in Arizona near the Grand Canyon. Then there are the tales of a mysterious underground civilization below the canyon, first reported in 1909. Cattle mutilations, mysterious lost civilizations, and UFOs all go together pretty well when you’re cooking up a spooky stew. This footage certainly isn’t proof of any of it, but next time you’re in one of the national parks remember to keep a camera at the ready. And for the love of all that is holy, buy a telescopic lens.
Miners in Alberta, Canada, were searching for the rainbow-colored gemstone called ammolite when they instead discovered a well-preserved fossil of a mosasaur – or more specifically, a Tylosaurus. The marine reptile that lived 70 million years ago with the dinosaurs was unearthed in a part of the province that had previously been underwater many years ago, under the Western Interior Seaway that stretched from the Arctic Sea all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico.
The Tylosaurus has been nicknamed the “T-Rex of the sea” because of its large size and frightening nature. They could grow up to 50 feet long with their huge head taking up approximately one-sixth of their entire weight.
Tylosaurus
The workers who found the sea creature were from Enchanted Designs Limited which is a company that makes jewelry out of ammolite that comes from the fossilized shells of ammonites (extinct marine mollusk with a round shell and who were distant relatives of the nautilus).
The crew was mining in the Bearpaw Shale rocks when they came upon the remains of the Tylosaurus. It was pretty well-preserved because it had been inside of a soft black-shale mudstone. Donald Henderson, who is the curator at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta, told Live Science, “We’ve got everything from the head almost to the tip of the tail, adding, “We don’t have much in the way of flippers. They were lost to decay, or maybe they were bitten off.”
Tylosaurus
The skeleton of the sea creature was approximately 20 to 23 feet in length. Since the contents in its stomach were still well-preserved, it was possible to identify what exactly it feasted on – turtles, fish, ammonites, and other mosasaurs. The Tylosaurushad backwards curving teeth which helped them eat their prey. “Once they grabbed you with their main teeth and started to work you back, those teeth would keep the food from struggling out,” Henderson explained.
It’s unclear whether the Tylosaurus will be displayed for public to view. An illustration of the Tylosaurus as well as a picture of the site where it was discovered can be seen here.
Unnatural looking Hexagon Structure spotted in Pyramus Fossae on Mars
Unnatural looking Hexagon Structure spotted in Pyramus Fossae on Mars
A hexagon shaped structure with a possible dome has been discovered in a photograph taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on 17 August 2008 and is described as 'Possible Olivine-Rich Terrain.'
Jean Ward shows us, besides the hexagon structure, other unnatural looking structures that don’t fit in the surrounding landscape.
These strange structures, especially the hexagon structure, indicate that this area was once inhabited?
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
UFO Seen During Day Over Maui, Hawaii On July 2019, Video, UFO Sighing News.
UFO Seen During Day Over Maui, Hawaii OnJuly 2019, Video, UFO Sighing News.
Date of sighting:July 3, 2019 Location of sighting: Maui, Hawaii, USA This object looks similar to some other UFOs that have been reported in the past. The large flat square UFO with two shiny ends. The UFO is tilted which means it was moving when it was caught in the photo. The grey metallic glint coming off of it shows us it is a metal object. With Hawaii surrounded by water its obvious that this UFO came from an underwater base not far away. This makes me wonder, are aliens the cause of the volcanic activity on the islands? Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states: "the object was in only one frame, nothing before or after. unkown altitude but as you can see it was above the cloud line."
Eyewitness Who Went Aboard A Alien Ship And Met Them Speaks Out In Interview, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Eyewitness Who Went Aboard A Alien Ship And Met Them Speaks Out In Interview, Video, UFO Sighting News.
James Gilliland is famous for owning a ranch that is visited by UFOs, orbs on a daily basis. Even the US government and news agencies have gone there and confirmed that its true. So listen to his words, he is not a man that has anything to hide. He lays it all on the table and is an open book. I like that about him. I wish more people were that way. Scott C. Waring
Video states: James Gilliliand had no idea about the ships and the ETs in the area before he moved to ECETI Ranch. But pretty soon after he moved in they started appearing regularly. The ufos are often out of the range of out physical eyes yet cameras especially digital can pick up more of the light spectrum and peek into other dimensions occasionally. Although we don't understand very thing that happens, one thing is for sure, unprecedented events are unfolding at the Gilliland Ranch that have the potential to change the course and destiny of Humanity and the Earth.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Ruim 170.000 alienjagers willen ‘Area 51 bestormen’ om waarheid boven tafel te krijgen. Gaat het ze lukken?
Ruim 170.000 alienjagers willen ‘Area 51 bestormen’ om waarheid boven tafel te krijgen. Gaat het ze lukken?
Meer dan 172.000 mensen zijn van plan om ‘Area 51 te bestormen’ in een poging bewijs voor buitenaards contact te vinden. Dat schrijft Metro.
Op 20 september aanstaande om drie uur ’s nachts moet het gaan gebeuren.
Mensen die mee willen doen zullen bijeenkomen in het Area 51 Alien Center in Amargosa Valley in Nevada en vervolgens afreizen naar Area 51, een geheime legerbasis in de woestijn.
Neergeschoten
Op de Facebookpagina Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All Of Us hebben inmiddels 172.000 mensen aangegeven mee te zullen doen aan de actie. Nog eens 208.000 mensen geven aan geïnteresseerd te zijn.
Area 51 is hermetisch afgesloten en wordt streng bewaakt.
In januari probeerde een man met een cilindervormig voorwerp het terrein van de basis op te rijden. Hij werd neergeschoten.
Onduidelijk
Het is onduidelijk of datzelfde zal gebeuren met de tienduizenden UFO-enthousiastelingen die de basis in september willen bestormen.
Volgens velen liggen er buitenaardse vaartuigen opgeslagen in Area 51 en worden er zelfs lichamen van aliens bewaard.
Een trollactie of een serieuze poging om toegang te krijgen tot de mysterieuze basis? We gaan het zien.
NASA proof of aliens? Did NASA photograph a flying bird on Mars? UFO expert stunned
NASA proof of aliens? Did NASA photograph a flying bird on Mars? UFO expert stunned
NASA’S Curiosity Mars Rover has photographed an unexpected anomaly amid the Red Planet’s rocky surface – an terrestrial bird seemingly in flight, which a UFO expert claims could be proof Curiosity is not on Mars at all.
US space agency NASA has been exploring the Gale Crater on Mars since 2012 via its car-sized Curiosity rover. The NASA rover’s comprehensive mission involves examining the apparently arid Martian climate and geology and even assessing whether microbial forms of alien life ever existed on the Red Planet. Now a prominent conspiracy theorist believes the NASA Curiosity Rover has captured a flying bird in one of its Red Planet photos.
Well-known alien life hunter and UFO conspiracy theorist Scott C Waring took to his etdatabase.com blog to broadcast his outlandish claims.
Either animals exist on Mars or ... the rover might not be on Mars at all, but on Devon Island
Scott Waring
He wrote: “This flying bird on Mars was found by Marcelo Irazusta who actually found a bird flying across the surface of Mars captured last week by the Curiosity Rover!
“This is impossible, and yet, there it is … captured in a photo on a NASA website.
“The Curiosity Rover has a 13 minute delay from the time they push the keys on Earth to the time rover gets it.
“So if this is a large bird, then it was taken by accident and was probably not in that area for long.
NASA proof of aliens? A UFO hunter claims to have spotted a bird in flight on Mars
(Image: NASA/Getty)
NASA proof of aliens? The so-called sighting is little more than a black speck
(Image: NASA)
“Of course it could be a UFO – aliens like to use nature to inspire their structures and ships.’
The so-called sighting is little more than a black speck showing up against a great sky in the black and white photograph taken on Sol 2446.
Mr Waring speculated about the potential ramifications of such a dubious find.
He wrote: “It looks like a soaring eagle … which if this is true, it may mean one of two things.
“Either animals exist on Mars or – and I hate this idea, but it needs to be considered – the rover might not be on Mars at all, but on Devon island in Canada.
“Devon is a desolate island area with only a handful of people and NASA has gone there many times to test the rovers in a environment similar to Mars.”
Devon Island is the world's largest uninhabited island selected by NASA for testing its Mars exploration technology.
This is because Devon Island’s harsh climate mimics the environmental conditions on Mars and other planets.
Unexpected anomalies on photographs taken on Mars and the Moon and beamed back to Earth for further examination by NASA are nothing new.
NASA proof of aliens? Curiosity rover has roamed 13.38 miles (21.58km) on Mars
(Image: NASA)
NASA proof of aliens? Ironically, NASA is confident of discovering microbial forms of life on Marsl
(Image: Getty)
However, the reality of the anomaly is far more prosaic.
Camera lens flares, cosmic rays or just reflected sunlight are the most likely candidates for the Mars anomaly.
Cosmic rays are formed by highly charged atomic particles, often travelling from outside the solar system, which are capable of producing tricks of the light on impact.
Cosmic rays are more common on Mars than on Earth due to the Red Planet's thin atmosphere which offers little resistance to such cosmic radiation.
Kijken: ruimtewagen Curiosity legt vreemd object vast boven het Marsoppervlak
Kijken: ruimtewagen Curiosity legt vreemd object vast boven het Marsoppervlak
Marswagen Curiosity heeft iets vreemds vastgelegd boven het Marsoppervlak. Voor nu is het unidentified, maar sommigen denken dat het gaat om een vogel.
De Marsrover doet al sinds 2012 onderzoek in de Gale-krater op de rode planeet.
De bewuste foto is op 24 juni jongstleden gemaakt met Curiosity’s Navcam.
Op de zwartwitfoto is boven de Marsduinen een zwarte vlek te zien in de lucht, schrijft de Britse Daily Express.
Het vreemde verschijnsel werd opgemerkt door de Argentijnse onderzoeker Marcelo Irazusta.
Bekijk close-ups van het object in onderstaand filmpje:
Out in a rural, remote area of the U.S. state of Arkansas, at a small town called Gurdon, in Clark County, about 75 miles south of Little Rock and a few miles off Interstate 30, is a deserted stretch of railroad track just outside of town near the Sandy Creek cemetery and paralleled by a dusty, pockmarked dirt road that would not look out of place in some horror movie. If you are to come here to this forgotten place and walk along the tracks to a specific spot just before where the tracks cross State Road 53, you may be treated to quite an outlandish sight. Coming through the gloom ahead you might notice a bobbing white orb of light, sometimes bluish green and at other times a reddish orange, with a very defined and clear shape, which will hover and float along about 3 feet over the railroad tracks before veering off and flickering out. What you are seeing is a persistent phenomenon that has been witnessed by hundreds of people, and what has come to be called the “Gurdon Spook Light” has become entwined with the fabric of the local folklore, and is one of Arkansas’s most well-known paranormal mysteries.
The most persistent tale surrounding the origin of the mystery light is that it is ghostly in nature. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History holds the tale of a railway foreman named Will McClain, who in December of 1931 was murdered by a worker he had fired named Louis McBride. The disgruntled McBride apparently ruthlessly killed McCain with a pickaxe or spiked maul, after which he placed the body on the tracks for it to be cut in half by a passing train. Police would arrest McBride, find him guilty, and have him executed by electric chair in 1932, and it was not long after this murder that the mysterious light began appearing, hence the idea that it is actually the spirit of McClain, carrying the lantern he had used while working on the tracks.
While the the players and murder are a real part of history, what is not clear is whether this is really a ghost or not. Nevertheless, it is from that point that the light became entrenched in the area’s lore, and would be sighted by numerous people, starting with a conductor who said that he was followed by an orb of light for several miles before it suddenly shot straight up into the air. The light has gone on to be seen very frequently and regularly, to the point that the trail leading out to where the tracks are has become quite well-defined from all of the curiosity seekers who come here to see it. Many of the locals have seen it so often that it is just sort of a part of the landscape, and one local named Robert Nunnally has said of it:
I grew up in Gurdon, and have seen the light many times. It tends to appear as a colored spherical light, hovering in a ghostly or space alien way in mid-air. The legend surrounding the light is that a headless railroad man, victim of a revenge murder, hunts for his head with a lantern. The phenomenon transcends the legend, though, as the experience of seeing the Gurdon Light is both frequent and unusual — a natural roadside attraction of the highest order.
The phenomenon has been covered on a November 1994 episode of Unsolved Mysteries and it has gone on to generate quite a lot of interest and debate over the years. That the light does indeed exist is not really disputed, but what it is depends largely on who you ask. Besides the ghost theory, there is also the idea that what people are seeing is simply headlights off on the nearby I-30, but this explanation is problematic as the phenomenon had been seen since long before the interstate was there. There are also many trees and hills standing between the interstate and the location of the light, and in an article for the Arkansas Gazette a local graduate student researching the light said of this theory:
The nearest interstate to the tracks is about four miles away, and a large hill stands in between the tracks and the interstate. If the light was caused by passing headlights, it would have to be refracted up and over the hill to be visible on the other side.
The Gurdon Spook Light
Swamp gas, which is a highly combustible gas produced be decomposing vegetation, has also been offered as a possibility, but this could not account for the light being seen in very windy conditions, and it fails to explain why it is always such a well-defined orb and why it is only ever seen in this one place. It could also be due to the high concentration of quartz in the area releasing some sort of electrical charge, but how would this explain the shape, movement, and almost intelligent behavior the spook light is said to exhibit, as well as the sheer frequency with which it is seen and its limited area? It has also been offered that it is a mirage, but a physics professor named Dr. Charles Leming thoroughly studied the light without ever finding an answer, and he claimed that through filters the Gurdon Light did not polarize as a mirage would be expected to do. He also found that it produced no electromagnetic current and is always the same size and shape no matter what the atmospheric conditions are. So what could it be? Who knows? One witness has said of the light:
A ball of yellowish light will almost always appear, hovering over the tracks. The light seems to be about the size of a basketball, and around fifty yards away. If you walk toward it, the light will receed away from you or disappear, sometimes reappearing behind you. I myself have seen it, and believe me when I tell you that it is not a hoax, a mirage, or “reflected light”… something very strange is going on in Gurdon. A great “X-files” style road trip destination.
What is going on here? There has been no completely satisfactory consensus on it all, and the only way to really know is to go out there and check it out for yourself. If you do lan on going, please do go in prepared, as it is said that the trestles or the railway are perilous, the terrain is rugged and rocky, and it is completely pitch black and rugged out there. For the time being, the spook light of Gurdon remains a perplexing mystery and regional phenomenon that has so far defied any concrete answers, and it continues to be regularly seen right up to this day. What is it? Is it a ghost, a natural phenomenon, or something else. No one really seems to know, and it continues to bob along out there in the wilds as it has for years and may do for many more.
I’m a sucker for unidentified sonic phenomena. The latest weird noise to pop up in the news comes by way of the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, where residents say a mysterious and unidentified noise has been causing painful side-effects and curious medical conditions for months. Oddly enough, some of the symptoms seem eerily similar to the unexplained medical complications reported by U.S. diplomats at several embassies reportedly plagued by sonic attacks over the last few years. Could the two related?
The story of the strange Brooklyn hum first appeared on Patch.com last week. According to reports, up to a half a dozen complaints have been filed with city officials concerning the pain-inducing noise but no action has been taken as nobody knows where the sound is coming from. Locals describe the sound as a “mysterious, headache-inducing tone” or a “high pitched noise” that can be heard both inside homes and on city streets.
Bedford–Stuyvesant
Some Bedford-Stuyvesant residents report that the noise has been causing them headaches, mental stress, or even “hangover-like symptoms.” Painful sinus pressure and “mental stress” have also been reported since the unidentified tone first appeared.
One Bed-Stuy local says the noise seems to be getting louder in recent weeks after first being noticed in May. “I couldn’t run away from it,” Drew Robbi told Patch.com. “I went inside it was still piercing. If it’s emanating from a house it would get higher, but that’s not been the experience. It’s even throughout the whole block.” Have a listen for yourself: Robbi posted a recording of the noise to Twitter. It’s an objectively miserable sound and one you certainly wouldn’t want to hear 24 hours a day.
Local police and utility officials have looked into the noise but have not been able to identify a cause. The best theory going is that a malfunctioning air conditioning unit could be to blame, but the New York City Department of Environmental Protection does not have the resources to hunt down every single A/C unit in the city. Instead, they recommend all residents turn their units off briefly to determine if they might be the ones responsible for the piercing noise. With temperatures climbing higher as summer drags on, it will prove difficult to convince Brooklyn residents to turn their A/C units off.
Rooftop air conditioning units
Another unexplained hum caused similar issues for Michigan residents back in March, and the strange saga of the sonic “attacks” at embassies has been well-documented. What could be behind these unexplained sonic phenomena? Are they merely an unfortunate byproduct of modern technology and infrastructure? Maybe we’re doomed to live in a noisy, headache-inducing world as more machinery comes to occupy human spaces alongside us.
Maybe though, just maybe, something stranger is lying under the surface of all of these seemingly unrelated stories. Unidentified visual phenomena tend to receive much more attention than unidentified sonic phenomena, but many disparate stories about strange noises over the last few years prove that high strangeness can come in many forms. What’s causing the strange tone in Brooklyn?
X-rays Spot Spinning Black Holes Across Cosmic Sea
X-rays Spot Spinning Black Holes Across Cosmic Sea
Like whirlpools in the ocean, spinning black holes in space create a swirling torrent around them. However, black holes do not create eddies of wind or water. Rather, they generate disks of gas and dust heated to hundreds of millions of degrees that glow in X-ray light.
Image credit: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Oklahoma/X. Dai et al.
Using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and chance alignments across billions of light years, astronomers have deployed a new technique to measure the spin of five supermassive black holes. The matter in one of these cosmic vortices is swirling around its black hole at greater than about 70% of the speed of light.
The astronomers took advantage of a natural phenomenon called a gravitational lens. With just the right alignment, the bending of space-time by a massive object, such as a large galaxy, can magnify and produce multiple images of a distant object, as predicted by Einstein.
In this latest research, astronomers used Chandra and gravitational lensing to study six quasars, each consisting of a supermassive black hole rapidly consuming matter from a surrounding accretion disk. Gravitational lensing of the light from each of these quasars by an intervening galaxy has created multiple images of each quasar, as shown by these Chandra images of four of the targets. The sharp imaging ability of Chandra is needed to separate the multiple, lensed images of each quasar.
The key advance made by researchers in this study was that they took advantage of “microlensing,” where individual stars in the intervening, lensing galaxy provided additional magnification of the light from the quasar. A higher magnification means a smaller region is producing the X-ray emission.
The researchers then used the property that a spinning black hole is dragging space around with it and allows matter to orbit closer to the black hole than is possible for a non-spinning black hole. Therefore, a smaller emitting region corresponding to a tight orbit generally implies a more rapidly spinning black hole. The authors concluded from their microlensing analysis that the X-rays come from such a small region that the black holes must be spinning rapidly.
The results showed that one of the black holes, in the lensed quasar called the “Einstein Cross,” is spinning at, or almost at, the maximum rate possible. This corresponds to the event horizon, the black hole’s point of no return, spinning at the speed of light, which is about 670 million miles per hour. Four other black holes in the sample are spinning, on average, at about half this maximum rate. (The 6th did not enable an estimate of spin.)
For the Einstein Cross the X-ray emission is from a part of the disk that is less than about 2.5 times the size of the event horizon, and for the other 4 quasars the X-rays come from a region four to five times the size of the event horizon.
How can these black holes spin so quickly? The researchers think that these supermassive black holes likely grew by accumulating most of their material over billions of years from an accretion disk spinning with a similar orientation and direction of spin, rather than from random directions. Like a merry-go-round that keeps getting pushed in the same direction, the black holes kept picking up speed.
The X-rays detected by Chandra are produced when the accretion disk surrounding the black hole creates a multimillion-degree cloud, or corona, above the disk near the black hole. X-rays from this corona reflect off the inner edge of the accretion disk, and the strong gravitational forces near the black hole distort the reflected X-ray spectrum, that is, the amount of X-rays seen at different energies. The large distortions seen in the X-ray spectra of the quasars studied here imply that the inner edge of the disk must be close to the black holes, giving further evidence that they must be spinning rapidly.
The quasars are located at distances ranging from 8.8 billion to 10.9 billion light years from Earth, and the black holes have masses between 160 and 500 million times that of the sun. These observations were the longest ever made with Chandra of gravitationally lensed quasars, with total exposure times ranging between 1.7 and 5.4 days.
A paper describing these results is published in the July 2nd issue of The Astrophysical Journal, and is available online. The authors are Xinyu Dai, Shaun Steele and Eduardo Guerras from the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma, Christopher Morgan from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and Bin Chen from Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida.
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, controls Chandra’s science and flight operations.
Contacts and sources: Lee Mohon NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory
Advanced Ancient Civilizations Before The Egyptians
Advanced Ancient Civilizations Before The Egyptians
The temples near the Sphinx are built from stones weighing up to 150 tons slotted together like a jigsaw puzzle in a way that could not be even be reproduced with today’s technology, he marveled.
While West doesn’t entirely rule out the ancient ET hypothesis, he finds no evidence for it. He believes a lost civilization with advanced skills, predating the known ancient Egyptians, created the Sphinx.
He also talked about how the pyramids at Giza seem to be connected as part of a mysterious grand unified plan or machine. The focus of all Egyptian religion deals with the quest for immortality, he added.
Abducted Eyewitness Warns World Against Contacting Aliens, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Abducted Eyewitness Warns World Against Contacting Aliens, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Here is an interesting eyewitness who started getting visits from an aliens when he was only age 4. He felt intimidated and frighted of the creature and never had any positive experiences with them. The same aliens comes to see him every few years and the eyewitness feels victimised by the alien, violated and abused. He tries to tell the world that aliens are evil and should be feared. I believe he is wrong. You see there are many alien species out there not just one. He only had interactions with a single alien from a single species. To judge an entire species by one individual is insane. You just can't do that. Thats like aliens judging humans by using only one individual...Trump. We are not all Trumps. We prize our individuality and uniqueness and most alien species probable do too. So as you see, his interview is legit, his fear and anger is real, but when we react in anger our minds are not fully in control. Are there alien species to be feared? Yes of course. Are there humans to be feared? Yes, of course. So...lets look for the good ones. Scott C. Waring
This video contains many UFOs shooting out of our sun and around the SOHO satellite. Its amazing that so many videos of UFOs exist and yet the US government wont take any of it seriously. Which means they are deliberately hiding the truth from the public. This video was posted by SolarBug of Youtube. (click link to follow him) He caught many UFOs shooting out of our sun, but also caught some life forms that look almost squid like in nature. These longer life forms may have been close to the SOHO sun satellite or not too far away and got caught in the video. The screenshot above shows three black UFOs shooting out of the suns explosion, yet just 3 seconds earlier there were three white UFOs in the exact same position also shooting out of the sun. It would be logical to conclude the aliens crafts caused the solar flare to take place. However about four to six other objects papers to zoom out in a loop that moves towards the explosion, through it and away from the sun. I assume its an illusion and the life forms are actually much close to the satellite. These long life forms have a front that is almost catfish like...they have 4-6 feelers or antenna sticking out the front of the creatures. Yes, life exists everywhere, not all life forms need planets to exist. Thanks to SolarBug for this awesome discovery. Click here to subscribe to his channel. Scott C. Waring
Crazy Cool UFO Seen At Space Station On Live Cam, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Crazy Cool UFO Seen At Space Station On Live Cam, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: 2016 Location of sighting: Space station This footage was originally recorded by Streetcap1 of Youtube but was uploaded by another Youtube. It shows an extraordinary UFO with a shape unlike anything I have ever seen before. The object was recorded on live NASA space station cam and has a very strange appearance. Its clear to me that UFOs frequently visit the space station to keep an eye on humanities progress. Scott C. Waring
A Group Of US Senators Receives Classified Briefing On Encounters With UFOs
A Group Of US Senators Receives Classified Briefing On Encounters With UFOs
Democratic Virginia Senator Mark Warner said through his spokeswoman Rachel Cohen that he wanted answers if pilots at Oceana or elsewhere were reporting UFO sightings that interfere with training or put them at risk. The senator could not ask pilots to put their lives at risk unnecessarily regardless if the UFOs were weather balloons, little green men, or something else entirely, according to Cohen.
Spokesman Joseph Gradisher for the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare also confirmed the briefing happened.
Gradisher said Navy officials did indeed meet with some congressional members and staffers interested on the matters this week to give a classified brief on efforts to understand and identify UFO threats to the safety and security of aviators.
Follow-up discussions with other interested staffers were done the day after, Gradisher revealed. Gradisher added that Navy officials would continue to keep interested congressional members and staff informed. However, he stressed that they wouldn’t comment on the specific information provided in briefings given the classified nature of these discussions.
President Donald Trump also confirmed recently he was briefed on reports of Navy pilots encountering UFOs
This Golden Asteroid Could Make Everyone On Earth A Billionaire, And Now NASA Is Chasing It
This Golden Asteroid Could Make Everyone On Earth A Billionaire, And Now NASA Is Chasing It
There is an inordinate number of asteroids in the solar system, each one with their own characteristics. Most are nothing but rock and other sediments. However, every now and then there's a special one.
NASA is currently following one of these special asteroids. They are looking at a nearby asteroid that contains enough gold to make everyone on Earth a billionaire - crazy, right?
Gold Asteroid
The asteroid in question is called Psyche 16, and it is nestled between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. This asteroid isn't the average one as it’s actually made of solid metal. Along with large amounts of gold, there are huge quantities of platinum, iron, and nickel. All of those metals are pretty expensive, so how much is the asteroid itself actually worth?
There have been a number of estimations in regards to the total value of Psyche's various metals and the final number has been decided at about $10,000 quadrillion. While this may sound appealing, bringing it back to Earth would destroy the world's commodity prices as well as the economy, which is only worth a measly $75.5 trillion.
NASA does have plans to launch a mission in summer 2022 which will arrive at the asteroid in around 4 years time, in 2026. Bringing back such a huge amount of gold would annihilate the global economy so NASA has no plans to mine, it is purely deemed a research mission.
Benefits
According to some researchers, Psyche is a survivor of violent hit-and-run collisions between planets which were common when the solar system was forming. Therefore, it could potentially reveal how Earth’s core was formed. This could have huge scientific benefits, as well as financial ones. Asteroid ownership was made legal in 2015 and so a number of mining companies are gearing up for a gold rush.
To be specific, Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources both have their eyes on the 2011 UW158 asteroid which is twice the size of the Tower of London and worth up to $5.7 trillion. While this would also have a profound effect on the global economy, it would be nothing compared to that of Psyche.
No, it’s not pseudoscience. Does a regular alignment of planets make a strong-enough tug to regulate the sun’s 11- and 22-year cycles? Read more in this story via Eos – a source for news and perspectives about Earth and space science – from the American Geophysical Union.
An ultraviolet image of the sun, overlaid with a map of its magnetic field lines.
For more than 1,000 years, the number of sunspots hit a minimum within a few years of a major planetary alignment. A recent study showed that tides created by this alignment every 11 years are strong enough to tug on material near the sun’s surface and synchronize localized changes in its magnetic field.
We noticed from historical data that there is an astonishing degree of regularity in the sunspot cycle.
Stefani is a fluid dynamics research fellow at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf in Dresden, Germany. He said:
We definitely have a clocked process. But then the question was, What is the clock?
The study expands upon the commonly accepted model for the solar dynamo and supports a long-held theory that planetary configurations are responsible for the sunspot cycle and magnetic solar cycle.
Wound, Twisted, and Unstable
As a giant spinning ball of plasma, the sun’s magnetic field is extremely complicated. Its magnetic field lines start as parallel lines running from the north to the south pole. But because the sun rotates faster at its equator than at its poles, those pole-to-pole magnetic field lines slowly wind and wrap around the sun, stretching like taffy from the middle of the line to become horizontal.
A simplified schematic of a single magnetic field line as it wraps around the sun (omega effect) and then twists upon itself (alpha effect). The arrows indicate the direction that solar material moves as it drags the field line with it.
On top of the rotational motion of solar plasma, convection moves material from the equator to the poles and back again. That twists the field lines around each other into loops and spirals.
The winding and twisting of the sun’s magnetic field lines are described by the alpha-omega dynamo model. In that model, alpha represents the twisting, and omega represents the wrapping. Tangled field lines can create instabilities in the local magnetic field and cause sunspots, flares, or mass ejections.
This model is the commonly accepted explanation for the behavior of the sun’s magnetic field, but it’s not perfect, Stefani explained. It predicts that the instabilities’ twistedness will oscillate randomly every few years. But the model can’t explain why the number of sunspots waxes and wanes on a roughly 11-year cycle or why the sun’s magnetic field flips polarity every 22 years.
Low Tide, Low Activity
Another solar system phenomenon happens every 11 years: Venus, Earth, and Jupiter align in their orbits. These three planets have the strongest tidal effect on the sun, the first two because of their proximity to the sun and the third because of its mass. Past observational studies have shown that minima in the sunspot cycle have occurred within a few years of this alignment for the past 1,000 years or so. Stefani said:
If you look at the trend, it has an amazing parallelism.
The researchers wanted to test whether the planetary alignment could influence the sun’s alpha effect and force an interplanetary low tide at regular intervals. The team started with a standard alpha-omega dynamo model and added a small tidal tug to the alpha effect every 11 years to simulate the alignment. Stefani explained:
Our dynamo model is not a completely new one. We’re really building on the old-fashioned, or conventional, alpha-omega dynamo.
The simulation showed that even a weak tidal tug of 1 meter [about 1 yard] per second every 11 years forced unstable magnetic twists to pulse with that same period. The simulated dynamo’s polarity oscillated with a 22-year period just like the real solar dynamo. Stefani said:
With a little bit of this periodic alpha, we can indeed synchronize the dynamo period to 22 years [with] planetary forcing.
Because those magnetic instabilities are connected with solar activity, the researchers argue, this synchronization could also suppress (or generate) sunspots across the sun at roughly the same time – in other words, the sunspot cycle. The team published these results in Solar Physics in late May 2019.
A Counterintuitive Result?
Steve Tobias is a solar dynamo researcher at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom who was not involved with this research. He said:
This is an intriguing paper.
Tobias argued that the combined planetary tides are too weak to directly set the length of the solar cycle. Plasma dynamics deep within the sun are the more likely cause, he told Eos.
Nevertheless, he said, this study
… seems to show that even a tiny amount of forcing from tidal processes can resonantly synchronize the cycle. This counterintuitive result should be explored further by investigating the behavior of proxies for solar activity such as the production rates of isotopes of beryllium deposited in ice cores.
It’s possible that other planetary systems might have tidally dominant planets that resonate with their suns like ours do, Stefani said, but it’s not likely that we’ll be able to prove it. For most stars, he said:
… we have observations going back about 40 years. And people are happy if they can identify two or three or four periods. Only for our Sun do we have all the historical observations. We have beryllium data. We can go back for thousands of years.
Our sun is quite an ordinary star, but it is quite special in that sense.
Bottom line: New research suggests that a regular alignment of the planets makes a strong enough tug to regulate the sun’s 11- and 22-year cycles.
An articulated view of a Discopter in flight, floating through the night sky above the San Francisco Bay. WITH PERMISSION FROM DISCOPTER.COM
A VERSION OF THIS POST ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON TEDIUM, A TWICE-WEEKLY NEWSLETTER THAT HUNTS FOR THE END OF THE LONG TAIL.
Early in the summer of 1947, an amateur pilot from Idaho named Kenneth Arnold spotted something in the Washington skies that kind of blew his mind.
Despite the skies being clear that day, he saw a series of nine flashes of horizontal light. He landed, told others what he saw, and his story spread through the popular consciousness, taking on a life on its own, as well as a name—the flying saucer.
Two weeks later, a much more famous incident in Roswell, New Mexico, involving a weather balloon (if you believe what the government tells you), further cemented the idea of the flying saucer in the public consciousness.
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Why Making a Better Umbrella Is Way Harder Than It Seems
Their design hasn't changed in a very long time.
Not long after, hobbyists of all kinds suddenly felt inspired make their own—and they’ve been flooding the patent offices globally ever since.
But the guy who got to the U.S. Patent Office first, surprisingly, wasn’t actually inspired by the popular perception of the UFO at all. He had the idea, in fact, years before Kenneth Arnold took his fateful flight.
“They did not appear to me to whirl or spin but seemed in fixed position traveling as I have made drawing.” From Arnold’s account of his UFO sighting. PUBLIC DOMAIN
The Dutch painter and sculpture artist Alexander Weygers, who grew up in the Dutch East Indies—now Indonesia—and spent most of his adult life in the U.S., was something of a 20th-century Leonardo da Vinci. He had both an engineering and artistic background, and his work spanned sculpture, illustrations, photography, and many other fields.
In 1927, he conceptualized a device that predicted the infatuation with flying saucers before they even had that name. And as an engineer, he did so with a practical eye toward the failings of the device he hoped to replace.
“Helicopters are vulnerable,” he said in an interview with UPI in 1985. “People were being killed in them during the 1920s. They go down like a brick. The saucer became the logical answer.”
His creativity was driven by tragedy. In 1928, his wife died during childbirth, as did his son. The painful incident ended up pushing him closer to art, with the losses inspiring some of his most notable sculptures.
A similar tragedy—the capture of his family, still in the Dutch East Indies, by Japanese forces during World War II—pushed him in the early 1940s to complete his saucer project, which he had first started in the 1920s. He called the device a “Discopter.”
The idea was inspired not by spaceships or science fiction, but by a practical desire to create a vehicle that could be used to rescue people in incidents not unlike the one that faced his family members. His frame of reference was his own prior work.
To a helicopter, a craft constructed on the principles of my invention bears a superficial resemblance in that both types are sustained by at least one horizontal rotor. From this point on, however, all similarity between the two types of flying craft ends. A craft embodying my invention is distinguished from a helicopter in that the rotor or rotors in my craft are enclosed within a substantially vertical tunnel, the rotor regarded as a whole is mainshaftless and the external form of the craft is not very different from the familiar discus of the athlete, in common with which the craft enjoys certain aerodynamic advantages characteristic of the passage of the discus thru the air. Not only the rotors and power plant compartments but all of the usual moving and fixed protruding parts, present in both airplanes and helicopters, such as stabilizing and directing means and otherwise, are entirely enclosed within the strikingly simple and cleanly streamlined contour line of the craft when regarded from exteriorly thereof in any elevation view, thereby concealing from the casual view such parts.
Alexander Weygers wasn’t trying to invent the flying saucer. He was trying to reinvent the helicopter, along with aviation in general, so that it could be used more practically. (It should be noted that the device was never built.)
But the existence of everything that came afterwards meant that his name would forever be associated with futurism and science fiction, elements that didn’t actually inspire his invention.
Soon after the flying saucer hit the public consciousness in the late 1940s, people noticed what Weygers had done. A 1950 article in the Allentown, Pennsylvania, Morning Call, dedicated column space to a dentist named Dr. Harold T. Frendt, who used the existence of the patent to argue against the existence of aliens. Frendt suggested that the patents were being used to create these saucers, despite his only evidence being Weygers’ patent.
“They should be operated at high altitudes instead of exposing them for observation to the general public and the pro-communistically inclined, and thereby stimulating a trend of foolish speculation,” Frendt told the newspaper at the time.
Frendt’s statement is ironic, because he’s also speculating. There probably was no flying saucer.
While Weygers was certainly first, the folks that followed him clearly were inspired by whatever happened in Washington and New Mexico back in 1947, perhaps with a little touch of H.G. Wells in the mix as well.
As soon as there was a popular “spark,” the inspiration that had us looking up in the sky and wondering what if, the saucer was everywhere. It’s been keeping patent offices around the world busy ever since—first, with a spate of flying saucer toys in the early 1950sthat looked like frisbees, and soon, in the form of aircraft clearly inspired by flying saucers, like this 1953 design and this helicopter/flying saucer hybrid.
Buried in the USPTO’s many classifications for airplanes and helicopters is the indexing code “B64C 39/001,” which represents “flying vehicles characterised by sustainment without aerodynamic lift, often flying disks having a UFO-shape.” Yes, USPTO got so many patent applications for flying saucers that it earned its own classification.
So how many flying saucer patents are we talking about? According to Google Patents, around 192 items in this specific classification are listed as being produced in the U.S., with three particular surges in their creation—an initial jump in the years between 1953 and 1956, a second wind between 1965 and 1971, and an unusually dramatic surge in such inventions between the years 2001 and 2004. USPTO handled 37 flying saucer-related patents during that particularly busy time in U.S. diplomatic history.
There’s a lot to look at, and it’s entirely possible that due to the complexity of the patent system, this doesn’t cover everything. Fortunately, someone with a pseudonym and apparently a large amount of time already did a huge amount of curation for you.
Earlier this year, an Internet Archive user named Superboy collected more than 100 flying saucer patent filings spanning the past 75 years or so. It took the user over three months to gather the documents from the U.S. patent offices and other patent offices globally, and is split upover two pages.
(Superboy helpfully noted that the documents prove “that humans have obtained and incorporated flying saucers for personal and secret use.”)
Most patents were credited to individuals, with a handful of companies involved.
The patent document for this 2003 invention describes it as a “ring-shaped wing helicopter, which is similar to a flying saucer in appearance.” GOOGLE PATENTS/ US 20030122033 A1
The weirdest such applications—though eventually withdrawn—came from a man named John Quincy St. Clair. People have been wonderingabout St. Clair for years. During the 2000s, he filed for for dozens of patents for all sorts of bizarre things. (It should be noted that filing for a patent isn’t cheap, even if it’s withdrawn.) Among his greatest hits: a “magnetic vortex wormhole generator” and a “walking through walls training system,” which comes complete with instructions on how to print the “training system” using a home printer.
One of his applications, from 2006, was for something called a “photon spacecraft.” “This invention is a spacecraft propulsion system that employs photon particles to generate a field of negative energy in order to produce lift on the hull,” he wrote.
Of course, not every flying saucer patent has been produced by a hobbyist, an eccentric inventor, or an engineer who turned tragedy into creativity.
Some of the largest companies in the world have occasionally taken interest in the flying saucer idea. In 2014, for example, Airbus invented a device that has a lot in common with the modern flying saucer, but also looks like a stealth fighter jet with a donut in the middle.
As CNBC reported at the time, it wasn’t intended for either outer space or the military—it was a reinvention of the passenger jet that was intended to help reduce cabin pressure. And there’s a good chance we’ll never even see it.
“It’s just one of many ideas,” a company spokesman told Fortune. “It doesn’t mean that we’re going to be working on making it a reality.”
And of course, the future may have room for a flying saucer—or at least a flying car—yet. As Bloomberg Businessweek reported last year, Google co-founder Larry Page has been investing in the idea of flying cars for years through his startups Zee.Aero and Kitty Hawk, with Weygers cited as an early inspiration for what could come next.
Earlier this year, Kitty Hawk released a video for a product that, if you squint hard enough, shares a lineage with what Weygers did way back when, with maybe inspiration from all the things that have come along since.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
Nature is a fantastic thing that offers many weird and wonderful occurrences. One of these things is light. With different colors, patterns, and shapes, light can create beautiful scenes for so many people to admire. The Northern Lights are probably the most famous example of this, but that doesn't mean there aren't others. For example, a similar occurrence which took place in the province of Sulu this year has been captured in several photos shared by netizens. Now, they've spread all over the world for everyone to see, and they're spectacular.
Amarkhan Jidara, who has shared several photos of the spectacular dance of lights in the night sky, has said that the latest celestial show the province has witnessed was last Sunday, June 30th, 2019 at 7 p.m. local time. There have also been a number of other sightings throughout this year, as well as previous years with Sulu residents claiming to see at least one or two of these peculiar light shows every year. According to Jidara, the residents were awestruck at the sight of lights in the sky, as anyone would be. Just looking at these stunning images is enough to blow anyone away, that's for sure.
What are they?
As with any strange event, people want to know what it is and what's causing it. Here, it's not that simple. There are a huge number of theories and names for these lights but no one has been proved right as of yet. Local Tausugs call the lights "Lansuk-Lansuk" or candles but have opposing beliefs about the appearance of the lights. Some think it brings bad luck or tragedy, while others look at it as a sign of good luck and fortune.
Many scientists have said that, similar to the Northern Lights, it's simply electrons and gases interacting in such a way where they release photons giving off light and creating the beautiful aurora that is seen from Earth. That said, these aren't the Northern Lights and there really is any number of possible events that could be causing it.
NASA’S Curiosity Mars Rover has photographed a truly unexpected anomaly amid the Red Planet’s rocky surface – an terrestrial bird seemingly in flight, which a UFO expert claims could be proof Curiosity is not on Mars at all.
US space agency NASA has been exploring the Gale Crater on Mars since 2012 via its car-sized Curiosity rover. The NASA rover’s comprehensive mission involves examining the apparently arid Martian climate and geology and even assessing whether microbial forms of alien life ever existed on the Red Planet. Now a prominent UFO conspiracy theorist believes the NASA Curiosity Rover has captured a flying bird in one of its Red Planet photos.
Well-known alien life hunter and UFO conspiracy theorist Scott C Waring took to his etdatabase.com blog to broadcast his outlandish claims.
He wrote: “This flying bird on Mars was found by Marcelo Irazusta who actually found a bird flying across the surface of Mars captured last week by the Curiosity Rover!
“This is impossible, and yet, there it is … captured in a photo on a NASA website.
“The Curiosity Rover has a 13 minute delay from the time they push the keys on Earth to the time rover gets it.
“So if this is a large bird, then it was taken by accident and was probably not in that area for long.
NASA proof of aliens? A UFO hunter claims to have spotted a bird in flight on Mars
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NASA’S Curiosity Mars Rover has photographed a truly unexpected anomaly amid the Red Planet’s rocky surface – an terrestrial bird seemingly in flight, which a UFO expert claims could be proof Curiosity is not on Mars at all.
US space agency NASA has been exploring the Gale Crater on Mars since 2012 via its car-sized Curiosity rover. The NASA rover’s comprehensive mission involves examining the apparently arid Martian climate and geology and even assessing whether microbial forms of alien life ever existed on the Red Planet. Now a prominent UFO conspiracy theorist believes the NASA Curiosity Rover has captured a flying bird in one of its Red Planet photos.
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Well-known alien life hunter and UFO conspiracy theorist Scott C Waring took to his etdatabase.com blog to broadcast his outlandish claims.
Either animals exist on Mars or … the rover might not be on Mars at all, but on Devon Island
Scott Waring
He wrote: “This flying bird on Mars was found by Marcelo Irazusta who actually found a bird flying across the surface of Mars captured last week by the Curiosity Rover!
“This is impossible, and yet, there it is … captured in a photo on a NASA website.
“The Curiosity Rover has a 13 minute delay from the time they push the keys on Earth to the time rover gets it.
“So if this is a large bird, then it was taken by accident and was probably not in that area for long.PROMOTED STORY
NASA proof of aliens? The so-called sighting is little more than a black speck (Image: NASA)
“Of course it could be a UFO – aliens like to use nature to inspire their structures and ships.’
The so-called sighting is little more than a black speck showing up against a great sky in the black and white photograph taken on Sol 2446.
Mr Waring speculated about the potential ramifications of such a dubious find.
He wrote: “It looks like a soaring eagle … which if this is true, it may mean one of two things.
“Either animals exist on Mars or – and I hate this idea, but it needs to be considered – the rover might not be on Mars at all, but on Devon island in Canada.
Artificiële intelligentie: het einde van menselijke controle of niet?
Artificiële intelligentie: het einde van menselijke controle of niet?
Onze apparaten, digitale assistenten en zelfs onze auto’s lijken soms te weten wat we willen, zonder dat we ernaar vragen. Toeval? Nee hoor, ze worden steeds slimmer door artificiële intelligentie. Het lijkt toekomstmuziek, maar in werkelijkheid zijn er al heel wat snufjes die gebruik maken van AI. Wat betekent dat voor ons dagelijks leven en moeten we er bang voor zijn? Flore van BEEGO houdt deze evolutie tegen het licht.
Wat is artificiële intelligentie?
In een vorig artikel hadden we het al over digitale assistenten zoals Siri, Alexa en Cortana die bijvoorbeeld je digitale agenda bijhouden, je favoriete muziek afspelen en je leven op allerhande manieren efficiënter maken. Een digitale assistent is een voorbeeld van artificiële intelligentie, maar het gaat nog veel verder dan dat.
AI (artificiële intelligentie) is een enorm uitgebreid wetenschappelijk domein waarin onderzocht wordt hoe computers, machines en apparaten zelfstandig problemen kunnen oplossen. Met behulp van ingewikkelde algoritmes verwerken de systemen gigantische hoeveelheden data om daaruit te leren en zo menselijke intelligentie te imiteren.
Artificiële intelligentie leert de menselijke intelligentie te imiteren.
Zo’n zelflerend algoritme kan patronen herkennen, en door te leren uit de eigen fouten, levert het achteraf een beter resultaat. Op dit moment zijn de meeste intelligente systemen nog maar gespecialiseerd in één taak, en ze zijn zich niet bewust van de taken die ze uitvoeren. Zo kunnen ze bijvoorbeeld wel een kat herkennen op een foto, maar ze beseffen zelf niet wat een kat precies is. Daarvoor moet AI nog verder ontwikkeld worden.
Waarschijnlijk maak jij ook al gebruik van AI in je dagelijkse leven, bijvoorbeeld met:
Waze, een navigatie-app die de reisgegevens van jou en andere gebruikers inzet om de snelste route te berekenen,
Online chatbots, soms word je op een website te woord gestaan door een chatbot die antwoorden kan formuleren op vaak gestelde vragen,
Facebook, de manier waarop en welke berichten je te zien krijgt in je nieuwsoverzicht, ja hoor, daar is ook AI mee gemoeid.
Bedreiging voor de mensheid?
AI evolueert aan een razendsnel tempo. Daarom waarschuwen sommige experts voor de risico’s die het met zich meebrengt.
Zo kan het voor een stuk de controle van de mens wegnemen als er steeds meer beslissingen automatisch genomen worden. Daarom vreest men dat we op langere termijn onze kennis en initiatiefzin kwijtraken.
Daarnaast zijn het vooral grote bedrijven en overheden die inzetten op AI. Wat als ze alle data die de systemen vergaren gaan misbruiken en inzetten als een politiek wapen? Of als een oorlogswapen? Legers over de hele wereld hebben de afgelopen jaren hun investeringen in autonome technologie aanzienlijk verhoogd. Daarmee zouden ze wel eens wapens kunnen ontwikkelen die zichzelf besturen en kille, onmenselijke beslissingen kunnen nemen.
Andere experts voorspellen dan weer dat artificiële intelligentie veel jobs zal overnemen en dat er hierdoor een chaos in de samenleving zal ontstaan.
Of verrijking voor mensheid?
Gezondheidszorg
De overgrote meerderheid van experts in het domein zien de toekomst positiever in en verwachten grootse dingen van AI, vooral in de gezondheidszorg. Zo kan AI de levenskwaliteit en overlevingskansenverhogen van patiënten in de gezondheids- en ouderenzorg.
AI kan nu al beter dan 'echte' artsen longontstekingen detecteren en autisme voorspellen.Intelligente software kan bijvoorbeeld net zo goed als artsen symptomen interpreteren en diagnoses stellen bij bepaalde aandoeningen. Volgens het Amerikaanse wetenschappelijke tijdschrift IEEE Spectrum is AI vandaag zelfs al beter dan ‘echte’ artsen in staat om longontstekingen te diagnosticeren en autisme te voorspellen op basis van hersenscans.
Daarnaast kan AI je helpen om langer, veiliger en comfortabel thuis te blijven wonen. Slimme toestellen kunnen iemand verwittigen in noodsituaties, je eraan herinneren je medicijnen te nemen of zelfs detecteren wanneer je gevallen bent of wanneer je hartslag onregelmatig is.
Ogen voor blinden en slechtzienden
Verschillende bedrijven ontwikkelen software die beelden omschrijft aan blinden en slechtzienden met spraaktechnologie. Zo maakt de app ‘Lookout’ van Google handig gebruik van artificiële intelligentie: het enige wat de gebruiker moet doen, is z’n smartphone richten naar iets dat ie wilt zien, en de app vertelt welke personen, tekst of objecten zich voor de camera bevinden. In de eerste fase heeft Google de app beperkt uitgebracht in de VS om hem te blijven verbeteren op basis van feedback de gebruikers. (Foto: Google Play)
Ook Facebook en Instagram werken aan een tool die de inhoud van beelden herkent, zodat ook blinden en slechtzienden sociale media kunnen gebruiken.
Eerlijkere rechtspraak?
Juridische processen kunnen zeer traag en inefficiënt verlopen. Artificiële intelligentie zou hier een oplossing voor kunnen bieden en ook vandaag wordt het al ingezet. Zo berekenen algoritmes hoe groot de kans is dat iemand een misdrijf nog eens zal plegen en helpen ze rechters te beslissen of ze een borgtocht weigeren of aanvaarden.
Er zijn onvolkomenheden aan deze aanpak, omdat de software gevoed wordt door criminele feiten uit het verleden en op die manier zelf verbanden leert leggen die misschien niet altijd kloppen voor de persoon over wie een oordeel geveld moet worden. Toch kan AI ook een meerwaarde betekenen voor het gerecht: algoritmes worden bijvoorbeeld niet beïnvloed door een slechte nachtrust, aankomende verkiezingen of een voetbalwedstrijd die ze willen bijwonen, rechters wel.
Robocop
Politierobots waren een paar jaar geleden misschien nog sciencefiction, maar we zullen ze in de toekomst steeds vaker tegenkomen. Politierobots kunnen repetitief of saai werk overnemen, maar ze kunnen ook ingezet worden op gevaarlijke of moeilijk bereikbare plekken. Zo vergroten ze de veiligheid van zowel de burgers als de ‘echte’ politieagenten en vullen ze het groeiende tekort aan politieagenten op.
Verschillende politiekorpsen ter wereld maken al gebruik van robotica, en sinds dit jaar is de eerste robotagente in dienst in een korps in India. De KP-Bot, een vrouwelijke onderofficier, zit aan de balie in het politiebureau en begeleidt bezoekers naar de juiste afdelingen. Ze kan verbaal met mensen communiceren, klachten opnemen en informatie tonen op haar scherm.
Veel onderzoek nodig
Er zijn nog een heleboel andere toepassingen van artificiële intelligentie, maar het is duidelijk: AI biedt ons de mogelijkheid om enerzijds het werk efficiënter aan te pakken in verschillende bedrijfstakken en anderzijds om ons leven op allerhande manieren makkelijker te maken. Om de risico’s en knelpunten aan te pakken, is er nog veel onderzoek en tijd nodig om artificiële intelligentie een waardesysteem aan te leren en zelfs een gevoel voor empathie.
Om deze complexe technologie te ontwikkelen, en de systemen te controleren, onderhouden en blijven verbeteren, blijven er natuurlijk mensen nodig. AI zal sommige jobs overbodig maken, andere aanvullen, maar het zal er ook heel veel creëren.
Wij zijn alvast benieuwd wat de toekomst brengt! En jij?
Unlike our pinkish, frail frames, mold may be able to survive on the outside walls of our spaceships. Even when drenched in hard radiation.
Image via Pixabay.
The International Space Station isn’t as squeaky-clean as you’d expect: in fact, it turns out that our current home in space is plagued by mold. Every week, astronauts spend several hours scrubbing and cleaning its inside walls to prevent this mold from impacting their health.
However, new research suggests that efforts to completely de-mold the ISS may be in vain. Mold spores can survive even on the outside walls of the station and can bear radiation levels thousands of times harsher than ourselves. The results also point to mold as a useful ally on space travels, which could help supply the crew with biological products such as antibiotics or vitamins.
Stowaways, cosmic rays
“We now know that [fungal spores] resist radiation much more than we thought they would, to the point where we need to take them into consideration when we are cleaning spacecraft, inside and outside,” said Marta Cortesão, a microbiologist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne, who presented the findings at the 2019 Astrobiology Science Conference.
“If we’re planning a long duration mission, we can plan on having these mold spores with us because probably they will survive the space travel.”
Mold spores can withstand extreme temperatures, ultraviolet light, chemicals and dry conditions. This resiliency makes them hard to kill. Spores of the two most common mold types on the ISS — Aspergillus and Pennicillium — can survive exposure to X-ray levels at over 200 times the deadly dose for humans, the team found. The findings show how important planetary protection protocols designed to prevent spacecraft from contaminating other planets with Earth-borne life are, and that we need to reconsider how much of a threat fungi spores are from this point of view.
The good news is that these two species aren’t generally harmful to humans. They can impact people with weakened immune systems in cases of extreme exposure (i.e. when inhaling a large quantity of these spores). However, Cortesão believes we can coax these molds to work in our favor. Fungi are more similar to us, genetically, than bacteria: they’re made up of complex cells with a structure resembling ours, and they come equipped with the biochemical machinery to synthesize polymers, food, vitamins, and other useful molecules astronauts may need on extended trips beyond Earth.
“Mold can be used to produce important things, compounds like antibiotics and vitamins. It’s not only bad, a human pathogen and a food spoiler, it also can be used to produce antibiotics or other things needed on long missions,” Cortesão said.
In the lab, Cortesão exposed fungal spores with ionizing radiation, high-frequency ultraviolet light, and heavy ions to see how they fared. Ionizing radiation kills cells by damaging their DNA and other essential cellular infrastructure but gets blocked by our planet’s magnetic field (the ISS also benefits from this shielding). Earth’s ozone layer protects us from high-energy UV down here on the surface. However, spacecraft going to the Moon or Mars would be exposed to both.
Cortesão reports that the spores survived exposure to X-rays up to1000 gray, exposure to heavy ions at 500 gray and exposure to ultraviolet light up to 3000 joules per meter squared. Gray is a measure of absorbed dose of ionizing radiation (joules of radiation energy per kilogram of tissue). Half a gray is the threshold for radiation sickness in humans, while five gray is the lethal threshold.
A 180-day voyage (about as long as we’d need to get to Mars) is estimated to expose passengers to around 0.7 gray. In other words, it could cause some issues for the human crew, but not for the mold.
In the future, the team plans to expand its search to understand how the combination of radiation, vacuum, low temperature, and low gravity in space affects the fungi.
The findings ” Fungal Spore Resistance to Space Radiation” have been presented at the 2019 Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon 2019) on the 28th of June.
It is unclear how many intelligent civilizations have arisen in the Milky Way galaxy so far, but if some have, a pressing question comes to mind: were they or are they more intelligent than we are?
When reading the morning newspaper, it is difficult to avoid the thought that our own intelligence bar is not particularly high nor difficult to surpass. We fight among ourselves in “lose-lose” situations; we do not promote long-term solutions over short-term fixes; and we have been broadcasting our existence to the galaxy with radio waves for over a century without worrying whether about whether there are any predators or competitors in outer space. (If it’s the latter, they might have been ignoring us because we appear so incompetent.)
If other civilizations do exist, one key in becoming aware of them is whether we are intelligent enough to adequately interpret their signals or to identify a piece of their technology if it should appear in our solar system. One fact is clear: if we assign a zero prior probability for such evidence coming our way, as some scientists did in the case of ‘Oumuamua by invoking the principle “it’s never aliens,” we will indeed never find any. We will be like ostriches burying our heads in the sand.
In fact, this attitude may be one sign that our intelligence isn’t very impressive—that the human race as a whole suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which those with mediocre abilities insist that they’re unusually talented or smart.
How can our civilization mature? The same way kids do: by leaving home, going out into the neighborhood, meeting others and comparing notes with them. In other words, we can develop a balanced perspective on our current technological accomplishments by engaging in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Since our own technological development accelerates exponentially with an e-folding time of a few years, it is difficult to imagine what a much more advanced technology crafted by a civilization that had lived for a cosmic timescale—billions of such e-folding times—would look like.
As natural as this suggestion to search might seem, however it is evident that SETI faces a hostile mainstream culture in astronomy. The simple proposal to consider the possibility that ‘Oumumua is technological debrisas an explanation for its unusual properties, for example was met with controversy on social media.
True, SETI carries non-scientific baggage related to unrealistic aspects of the science fiction literature and unsubstantiated reports about unidentified flying objects (UFOs)—something SETI researchers sometimes refer to as the “giggle factor.” But at the same time, it would be a strategic mistake for observers to restrict the interpretation of data from their telescopes and not search for “other kids in our neighborhood” just because of this baggage. The existence of extraterrestrial intelligence has nothing to do with the credibility of science fiction stories of UFO reports. The problem with adopting this wrong attitude is that it delays scientific progress. Grant applicants are frequently asked to forecast the scientific discoveries they will make if their application is approved—but by bracketing the range of possibilities in advance, we might never discover the unexpected. Instead we cultivate a scientific culture that tends to replicate what we already know.
History teaches us that this is a mistake. The search for extrasolar planets encountered mainstream resistance in its early days. Observing proposals to search for low-hanging fruits, such as “hot Jupiters”—which are easiest to detect—were rejected by conservative committees of telescope-time allocation that argued that such planets should not exist in nature based on what we know about the solar system. But discovery forged ahead as some observers dared to challenge this prejudice, demonstrating that hot Jupiters are abundant. There was 40-year delay, however, given that the first theoretical proposal to do such a search was made by Otto Struve as early as in 1952.
Hence, an obvious obstacle to identifying our neighbors is the tendency to limit our imagination to what we already know. But this should not necessarily remain the case in the future. What we imagine for extraterrestrial life should not be solely defined by the natural chemical and geological processes that took place spontaneously on Earth. We could, for example produce synthetic life in the laboratory under a broader range of conditions than those with which we are familiar. Metaphorically, we could bake new kinds of cakes using the same ingredients, expanding the book of recipes handed to us by Mother Earth.
Realizing that life can exist under new conditions will improve our forecasts for where to search for it in space and how to interpret our findings, in just the same way that the laws of physics—which were first revealed in laboratory experiments—allowed astrophysicists to study the universe billions of light years away.
An important survival skill in the company of unknown neighbors is to listen before speaking out. Given our sloppy behavior in transmitting signals to outer space without restraint, we can only hope that we have not become the laughingstock of our galactic neighborhood by now. But even if we have, we can still get our act together and do better in the future. In order to know how to behave, we should find out first who is on our street by searching with our best telescopes for unusual electromagnetic flashes, industrial pollution of planetary atmospheres, artificial light or heat, artificial space debris or something completely unexpected.
Fortunately, we possess instruments that are sensitive enough to find out not only whether we have neighbors but also whether they have noticed us already.
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
We steken als struisvogels onze kop in het zand. Professor legt uit waarom aliens waarschijnlijk slimmer zijn dan wij
We steken als struisvogels onze kop in het zand. Professor legt uit waarom aliens waarschijnlijk slimmer zijn dan wij
Als we willen achterhalen of er andere beschavingen bestaan, is het van groot belang dat we hun signalen kunnen interpreteren en hun technologie kunnen onderscheiden. Dat schrijft professor Avi Loeb voor Scientific American.
Als we bij voorbaat al stellen dat een vreemd object niet door buitenaardsen kan zijn gemaakt – zoals in het geval van Oumuamua – dan zullen we ook nooit aliens gaan vinden, stelt Loeb.
We steken als struisvogels onze kop in het zand, klinkt het.
Tegengehouden
Dit gedrag kan volgens hem een teken zijn dat onze intelligentie niet veel voorstelt: dat het menselijk ras als geheel lijdt aan het dunning-krugereffect, dus dat incompetente mensen juist door hun incompetentie het vermogen missen om te zien dat hun keuzes en conclusies verkeerd zijn.
Loeb wijst erop dat wetenschappelijke vooruitgang op allerlei manieren wordt tegengehouden.
Zo stuitte de zoektocht naar exoplaneten in eerste instantie op weerstand vanuit de mainstream.
Giechelfactor
Conservatieve commissies belemmerden het onderzoek naar ‘hete Jupiters’, die het gemakkelijkst te detecteren zijn, door te beweren dat ze niet bestonden.
Sommige waarnemers besloten toch op onderzoek uit te gaan en toonden aan dat hete Jupiters veelvuldig voorkomen.
Het SETI-onderzoek wordt daarnaast beperkt door UFO-waarnemingen. In dit geval wordt ook wel van de ‘giechelfactor’ gesproken.
Beperken
Een ander obstakel, zo stelt Loeb, is dat we ons voorstellingsvermogen beperken tot datgene wat we al weten.
Maar buitenaards leven hoeft niet te worden gedefinieerd door dezelfde chemische en geologische processen die op aarde hebben plaatsgevonden, zegt hij.
Gelukkig beschikken we over instrumenten die gevoelig genoeg zijn om te achterhalen of we buren hebben, en ook of ze ons al hebben opgemerkt, besluit Loeb.
Excavation of ancient Chinese tombs have revealed the oldest human skulls which were intentionally reshaped as part of a ritual to show status and wealth.
At a site called Houtaomuga, scientists unearthed 25 skeletons dating to between 5,000 and 12,000 years ago and 11 had the egg-shaped craniums.
The practice of skull elongation - to signify group affiliation or social status - originally was thought to date back between 9,000 and 10,000 years.
It was common in various tribal cultures around the world, such as the Mayans, North American natives and Aboriginal people.
The team, from Texas A&M University in Dallas, say five of the skulls belonged to adults, including four men and one woman.
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At a site called Houtaomuga, scientists unearthed 25 skeletons dating to between around 12,000 years ago and 5,000 years ago. Of those, 11 featured skulls with artificially elongated braincases and flattened bones at the front and back of the head
The ages of death for all 11 skulls is estimated to range from three years old right up to 40.
According to the study, skull reshaping was reserved for high-status individuals and certain families.
The three-year-old with the elongated skull was buried with pieces of pottery and other artefacts, suggesting he was from a wealthy family.
The woman had a number of shell ornaments placed on her body, which indicates she was also of high status.
'It is too early to tell whether intentional cranial modification first emerged in East Asia and spread elsewhere or originated independently in different places,' paleoanthropologist Qian Wang.
Cranial modification, or skull stretching, occurred over a long stretch of time at the site than at any other archaeological dig the researchers said.
Skull stretching it isn't a new phenomenon. The head moulding styles fell into three groups: flat, round or conical.
Artificially remodeled human skulls unearthed at a site in northeastern China include one of a man from around 12,000 years ago (left in this composite image) and another of a woman from about 5,000 years ago (right), the study found
According to the study, skull reshaping was reserved for high-status individuals and certain families. The three-year-old with the elongated skull was buried with pieces of pottery and other artefacts, suggesting he was from a wealthy family
Specific head modifications may have been used as signs of social status.
Oddly shaped, intentionally stretched skulls have been found in many parts of the world.
Permanent reshaping of a skull early in life, when cranial bones are soft, can be achieved by compressing an infant's head with one's hands.
Binding the head with hard, flat surfaces such as boards or tightly wrapping the head in cloth similarly remodels immature cranial bones.
Houtaomuga was excavated from 2011 to 2015 and the skulls found a the site add to a growing body of evidence of cranial reshaping from the site which stretches back 6,000 years, the study said.
A man's skeleton with a modified skull was found in a tomb dating to between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago, based on styles of pottery found in the same sediment layer.
Radiocarbon dating of the skeleton placed it at around 12,000 years old. Two sediment layers dating to between 6,300 and 5,000 years old contained 10 skeletons with reshaped skulls.
The practice of skull elongation - to signify group affiliation or social status - dates back 9,000 years
Common in various tribal cultures around the world (such as Mayans, North American natives and Australian Aboriginal people), the head moulding styles fell into three groups: flat, round or conical.
To achieve the desired shape, the head was wrapped in tight cloth.
In the case of cranial flattening, the head was placed between two pieces of wood.
The technique would usually be carried out on an infant, when the skull is at its most pliable.
The cloth would be applied from a month after birth and be held in place for about six months.
Sometimes, skulls were modified as a sign of social status.
For example, ancient Collagua people, who lived in the Colca Valley of southeastern Peru, likely modified the heads of babies using bandages or special hats, in order to elongate their heads.
Analyses of skull and bone specimens dating from 1150 to 1450 indicate that those with elongated skulls had broader diets as well as fewer signs of physical attacks perpetrated against them.
The oldest human skulls that were intentionally elongated were excavated from ancient Chinese tombs at a site called Houtaomuga from 2011 to 2015 (pictures of the skulls can be seen here). Scientists uncovered 25 skeletons that date back from between 5,000 and 12,000 years ago. Of those 25 that were discovered, 11 of them had elongated egg-shaped skulls with five of those belonging to adults (four men and one woman). The age of death for the eleven skulls was between 3 years of age and 40 years of age. This is significant because it was previously believed that elongated skulls dated back only between 9,000 and 10,000 years ago.
The woman that was uncovered was buried with shell ornaments that were placed on her body which indicated that she was of high social status. Pieces of pottery and several other artifacts were buried with the three-year-old which also indicated that he belonged to a wealthy family. One of the men who were found was buried with pottery that date back between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago.
Copy of a statue showing an elongated skull
The ancients reshaped their skulls in order to demonstrate wealth and social status. It was in fact a quite common ritual in different tribal cultures from different parts of the world, such as Aboriginals, North American natives, and the Mayans. However, it is still uncertain where skull elongation originated from. “It is too early to tell whether intentional cranial modification first emerged in East Asia and spread elsewhere or originated independently in different places,” stated paleoanthropologist Qian Wang.
Cranial modification (or skull stretching) occurred for the longest period of time at the Houtaomuga site, more than any other archaeological site. There were three different types of skull stretching – flat, round, and conical.
(Not one of the elongated skulls found at Houtaomuga)
Skull reshaping was conducted in early childhood when the cranial bones of an infant’s head were soft and the skull was compressed by the hands of an adult. First, the child’s head would be wrapped in a tight cloth. The cloth would stay on the infant’s head beginning when the child was a month old and remained there for around six months. In order to flatten the skull, the head would be placed between two boards.
The research was published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology which can be read here.
Brian Sharpless woke up in the middle of the night with the haunting feeling that he wasn’t alone. Slowly, his bedroom door creaked open, like a hand was lightly touching it. Moonlight from the hallway window streamed through the open door. He wondered if he was getting robbed. Then Sharpless discovered something even more alarming: He couldn’t move. He lay paralyzed as he watched a dark form with a long, serpentine neck creep through the doorway. “I saw a shadowy face that looked like a ninja mask with red eyes,” Sharpless told me. It stared at him, moving closer and closer, and Sharpless felt … relieved.
Sharpless is a researcher who studies sleep disorders, and as he watched this demonic creature slip into his bedroom, he realized he wasn’t in danger. He was, for the first time, experiencing sleep paralysis himself.
Normally while you’re dreaming, your body is paralyzed so that you don’t act out your dreams. But in sleep paralysis, you wake up while your body is still frozen. And even though you are fully conscious, looking around your real room, part of your brain is still dreaming. People often hallucinate creepy things — shadowy forms, monsters, and aliens — in their bedrooms.
I talked to Sharpless, associate professor at the American School of Professional Psychology and author of Unusual and Rare Psychological Disorders, and Michael Breus, fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and founder of The Sleep Doctor website, to learn more about this mysterious disorder and what you should do if you find yourself in the middle of it.
How common is sleep paralysis?
As weird as waking up to hallucinations sounds, the experts I talked to say it’s more common than you might think. An estimated 8 percent of the worldwide population has experienced it, according to Sharpless, and that’s a conservative estimate. The number jumps to 28 percent for college students and 32 percent for psychiatric patients.
“I think really anybody could have it if the circumstances are right,” Sharpless said. Just being sleep deprived can make someone experience it. In fact, researchers induce sleep paralysis in labs all the time. They wait until a person has fallen asleep and gone into REM, then touch them lightly. Sometimes, that’s all it takes.
Even though many haven’t heard of the term “sleep paralysis,” people knew about the disorder long before there were sleep labs or even modern countries. Ancient Greeks called it “Pan ephialtes,” explained Sharpless, which means something like “when the god Pan leaps on your chest.” In fact, the word “nightmare” used to mean to what we now call sleep paralysis. In Middle English, nightmare referred to a “female spirit or monster” that would “settle on and produce a feeling of suffocation in a sleeping person or animal,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. (“Mare” used to mean “evil female monster.”) After all, people dealing with sleep paralysis often feel as if a monster — be it a Greek god, a female spirit, or an alien — is sitting on their chests. “Nightmare” only started meaning “bad dream” in the 20th century.
What causes sleep paralysis?
Sleep is, to drastically understate matters, really complicated. For one thing, the different states of sleep — light dreaming, deep dreaming, etc. — aren’t actually so separate. A lot can go on in the transition between being awake and being asleep.
“The more complicated you make a computer or the more complicated you make a car, the more things can go wrong,” Sharpless explained. In sleep paralysis, you wake up before your brain stem, which stops your muscles from moving while you’re asleep, realizes it’s awake. As a result, it continues sending neurotransmitters that tell your muscles to freeze. Scientists still don’t know why this happens.
How do these hallucinations work?
“The hallucinations seem to happen in stages,” explained Sharpless. First, you wake up with the sense that you’re not alone. “It’s kind of like when you’re walking down a lonely street at night,” Sharpless continued. “You wake up, your eyes open, and you feel this uneasy feeling.”
As your brain tries to make sense of what’s going on, it creates something to explain why you feel so uneasy. It might whip up a menacing figure to watch you, often one that fits into your worldview.
“If you’re in 21st century America, you might see an extraterrestrial,” Sharpless said. “If you were in 15th century France, you might see a witch or a demon.”
It doesn’t stop at seeing imaginary things. You can feel them too. Sharpless says that, just as the brain can create imaginary sights and sounds, it can create imaginary physical sensations, too. People say that the monster in their room sits on them, and they can sense the pressure on their chest. Sharpless notes that the anxiety from seeing monsters may create or add to this feeling, since anxiety can cause chest pain. Sometimes, people experiencing sleep paralysis can’t breathe for a few seconds. In really scary cases, people feel like something is attacking or sexually assaulting them.
Are some people more likely to have sleep paralysis than others?
Sharpless says that anyone who easily dissociates — that is, goes into a kind of trance where they lose awareness of the world around them — may be more likely to have sleep paralysis. That might conjure images of prophets or fortunetellers, but dissociation is usually pretty mundane. If you drive along a highway and you zone out, then come to after a couple miles, you’re dissociating. People who do so more often might be more likely to develop sleep paralysis.
How do you stop sleep paralysis when it happens to you?
Nobody actually knows how to stop sleep paralysis, but there are ways to make it less scary. Simply knowing what’s going on can help. During Sharpless’s own sleep-paralysis episode, just knowing he was hallucinating made “the demonic thing with the giraffe neck” seem silly rather than scary, he explained.
“Either look at it dismissively, ignore it, or find humor in it,” he suggested. “You might say to yourself, ‘“Am I really seeing a demon in the bedroom now? Really?’” You can also try and focus on a body part or reassure yourself that what you’re seeing isn’t real. If your brain is creating an imaginary monster, making your brain pay attention to something else can cause the imaginary thing to cease to exist, or at least not be so scary. Sharpless says some of his patients have tried these methods and reported that they help, as they takes focus off of the monsters.
Is sleep paralysis harmful to your health? Can you die from it?
“Other than that it scares the crap out of you, it’s not dangerous,” Breus told me. Still, your reaction to sleep paralysis could cause problems. Some people who get recurring sleep paralysis take stimulants at night or try other methods to stay awake, which can be pretty unhealthy. In one 19th-century case, a man paid his manservant to watch him all night in order to wake him up if he got sleep paralysis. (Spoiler: This did not help him sleep.)
And then of course, if you don’t know what’s going on, you could believe all sorts of creepy things when you’re awake. You might think you’re being regularly attacked by demons or kidnapped by aliens. “I’ve had people say to me, ‘the Devil possessed me,’” Breus said.
These sorts of beliefs can really strain your relationships with friends and family. “Some people think they’re going crazy,” said Sharpless. It’s especially tough on people who already have psychosis; they have an even more difficult time distinguishing between reality and hallucination.
How do you treat sleep paralysis?
If you only get sleep paralysis occasionally, you don’t need to treat it. But some people get it every day, or even a few times a night. They may choose to go on antidepressants to help them sleep better. Working on underlying issues like anxiety can help too.
How do you prevent sleep paralysis?
There are some simple things you can do. Sleeping on your side makes sleep paralysis less likely. Avoiding alcohol improves matters since alcohol interferes with sleep. Most importantly, getting regular, quality sleep is the best way to avoid sleep paralysis. Sharpless, for instance, got his moment of sleep paralysis when he was jetlagged from giving a presentation in England on, coincidentally, sleep paralysis.
“Now I’m wondering if I’m going to get sleep paralysis or something,” I told Sharpless after we’d been talking about the disorder long enough to make me nervous.
“You just might,” he said playfully. “They used to talk about it being contagious in ancient Rome, but we don’t have any good data on that.”
Over 120,000 alien hunters are planning to ‘storm Area 51’ to discover the truth
Over 120,000 alien hunters are planning to ‘storm Area 51’ to discover the truth
Jeff Parsons
Ancient aliens TV guy says he knows when the extraterrestrials are coming back
picture: Getty
Over 120,000 people have pledged to meet up and ‘storm Area 51’ in the Nevada desert to try and find evidence of alien contact.
The audacious plan is set for September 20, 2019 at 3am and is being organised through Facebook. Those taking part will meet at the Area 51 Alien Center in Amargosa Valley, Nevada and then proceed to Area 51 – a classified remote part of the US Air Force’s Edwards Air Force base.
Now, far be it from us to be cynical of such a plan, but the fact the Facebook group proposing the event is called ‘S***posting cause im in shambles’ gives us some cause for concern.
Nevertheless, at the time of writing, 129,000 people have indicated they’ll be taking part in ‘Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All Of Us’ and a further 163,000 have said they are interested.
Clearly not ones to sweat the finer details of such a daring attempt, the group’s organisers have outlined the approach thus:
‘If we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Lets see them aliens.’
Naruto running is a meme inspired by an anime character called Naruto Uzumaki who has a distinctive running style.
The attempt to storm Area 51 is being organised on Facebook
(Metro)
Dodging bullets is something that needs to be considered because last time someone tried to speed past the site, he was shot. In January a man carrying an unidentified cylindrical object was shot by the local sheriff’s office and Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) officers after attempting to drive into the site.
Whether or not the response will be the same when thousands of alien enthusiasts turn up to try and gain access remains to be seen.
The Guard Gate at Area 51 near Rachel, Nevada
(Photo by Barry King/WireImage)
However, given the nature of the group, we’re going to chalk this one up to internet trolling on a grand scale rather than any legitimate attempt to gain access to the mysterious Area 51.
The galaxy where the signal originated is similar in size to our own, but creates stars at a relatively slow rate.
(Photo: pixelparticle/Shutterstock)
Someone may have forgotten to turn off the TV at the other end of the universe.
Or maybe someone has sent us an emoji from a faraway mothership.
In other words, we don't have a clue what transmitted the single fast radio burst scientists picked up last week. But we do know where it came from: A galaxy far, far away.
In a study published this week, researchers at the California Institute of Technology claim to have traced a single radio burst back to its home nearly 8 billion light-years away.
Fast radio bursts, or FRBs — typically lasting anywhere from a fraction of a millisecond to a few milliseconds — have been enshrouded in mystery since they were first discovered in 2007. They're so powerful that they can make their way to our neck of the universe from impossibly far away, although it's rare that we receive them.
That's likely to change over the next few years as new pace-scanning equipment that specializes in FRBs comes online.
Back in January, a newly built Canadian telescope picked up no fewer than 13 fast radio bursts, all seeming to originate some 1.5 billion light-years away. But that's considerably easier to find than one solitary FRB.
What all fast radio bursts have in common is mathematical regularity. They beep-beep-beep at exactly the same intervals. But repeating FRBs are a lot easier to pick up and trace than a single radio burst.
"Finding the locations of the one-off FRBs is challenging because it requires a radio telescope that can both discover these extremely short events and locate them with the resolving power of a mile-wide radio dish," study author and Caltech professor Vikram Ravi explained a statement.
The signal appears to hail from a galaxy similar in size to our own, a region with such a low rate of star formation that scientists call it a "mellow" galaxy.
A repeating fast radio burst, by its very nature, is much easier to receive than a one-off signal.
(Photo: solarseven/Shutterstock)
The report comes a week after scientists in Australia announced the signal's discovery, dubbing it FRB 190523. To find that tiniest of blips in the cosmos, the researchers sifted through vast amounts of data collected by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder.
Keith Bannister, who led that study, called it "the big breakthrough that the field has been waiting for since astronomers discovered fast radio bursts."
And now that researchers have zeroed in on its source, we may soon learn what caused it.
In the meantime, that single, incredibly brief transmission can carry a universe of data. Its odyssey across staggering distances could reveal what lies between star systems.
"These bursts are altered by the matter they encounter in space," Jean-Pierre Macquart, the professor who authored last week's study, noted in a statement. "Now we can pinpoint where they come from, we can use them to measure the amount of matter in intergalactic space."
Here be monsters. This video shows a living giant squid, captured on camera in its natural habitat for only the 2nd time in history.
NOAA researchers released the video above on June 21, 2019, whileannouncing that – for only the second time ever – they’d captured a giant squid on camera. Nathan Robinson was one of the scientists on a NOAA-funded expedition to the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The team was about 100 miles (160 km) southeast of New Orleans, at a depth of 2,490 feet (759 meters), when he saw a tentacle, perhaps 10 to 12 feet (3 meters) long, rising up out of the inky black of his computer screen.
At that point, he said, he was “captivated,” adding:
You feel very alive. There’s something instinctual about these animals that captures the imagination of everyone – the wonder that there are these huge animals out there on our planet that we know so little about, and that we’ve only caught on camera a couple of times.
The squid appeared to wrap its tentacles around the NOAA underwater stealth camera called the MEDUSA before quickly swimming away. Scientists cited the creature’s behavior as a normal reaction any animal would have to what, at first, appeared to be prey.
Here’s a close-up of the giant squid, as it tries to wrap its tentacles around NOAA’s underwater camera in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
The scientists on the ship sent the footage to Mike Vecchione, a NOAA Fisheries zoologist and an octopus-and-squid expert, who said he was “nearly certain” that it was a squid of the genus Architeuthis – a giant squid. NOAA explained:
‘Giant squid’ is a term that’s sometimes used to describe a range of larger squid specimens, but scientifically … only squids of the genus Architeuthis can be considered giant squid.
Vecchione added:
The benchmark is taxonomy, rather than size – it’s either genetically a giant squid or not. People will refer to other things as giant squids, but cephalopod biologists don’t.
Left to right: Nathan Robinson, Sonke Johnsen, Tracey Sutton, Nick Allen, Edie Widder, and Megan McCall gather around to watch the squid video.
The new footage was captured by the MEDUSA, a camera system that’s designed to give scientists a glimpse into the deep ocean without disturbing the light-sensitive creatures that live there. It uses red light, which many deep-dwelling creatures cannot see, as well as a lure modeled off of a bioluminescent jellyfish. The lure is meant to attract larger predators: Since some jellyfish create bioluminescent displays when attacked, some large predators in the deep ocean look out for this ‘burglar alarm’ display, and show up to feed on whatever it is that’s disturbing the jellyfish. The MEDUSA first captured a giant squid on video in 2012 off the coast of Japan.
The two videos can teach scientists a lot about the giant squid. They were both captured at 2,490 feet [760 meters] below the surface, which means the squid lives in a world that’s very dimly lit. They show that giant squids are active creatures – they don’t float around and passively wait for food to drift by, which Vecchione said was a hypothesis at one time. They also have huge eyes – the largest eyes of any animal on the planet — and their attraction to the jellyfish lure means they’re visual predators.
Edie Widder, chief executive officer of the Ocean Research & Conservation Association and the developer of the MEDUSA technology, said:
In the video, we could clearly see that it was visually tracking the electronic jellyfish, which was very exciting to be able to observe.
NOAA also pointed out that that giant squids are “not uncommon” creatures. They wash ashore fairly regularly off the coast of northern Spain, because the noise involved in oil exploration there can be lethal to them. But viewing one in its natural habitat is rare, and NOAA called it:
… a testament to the contributions ocean exploration is making to the public understanding of the ocean.
NOAA Research✔@NOAAResearch
"What were once monsters to be feared are now curious and magnificent creatures that delight. We like to feel that science and exploration has brought about this change."
Bottom line: A NOAA-funded expedition has captured rare footage of a giant squid in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s the second time a giant squid has been captured on camera in its deepwater habitat.
Nederlander legt mysterieuze ruimtevliegtuig X-37B vast op gevoelige plaat. Bekijk hier de foto
Foto: Wikimedia Commons
Nederlander legt mysterieuze ruimtevliegtuig X-37B vast op gevoelige plaat. Bekijk hier de foto
Een Nederlandse satellietspotter heeft zeldzame foto’s van het geheimzinnige ruimtevliegtuig X-37B gemaakt. Maandenlang speurde Ralf Vandebergh de hemel af op zoek naar het vaartuig.
Op 30 juni en 2 juli jongstleden slaagde hij erin om foto’s van de X-37B te maken.
“Het is echt een klein object, zelfs op 300 kilometer hoogte, dus verwacht niet dezelfde details zoals op foto’s van de echte spaceshuttle die op de grond zijn gemaakt,” lichtte hij toe.
Vijfde missie
Hij zei onder de indruk te zijn van de details die hij wel wist vast te leggen.
“We herkennen een deel van de neus, het laadruim en de staart van deze minishuttle,” zei Vandebergh.
Het naamloze vliegtuig voert momenteel zijn vijfde missie uit in de ruimte. Op 7 september 2017 werd de X-37B gelanceerd vanuit Florida.
Weinig bekend
Er is weinig bekend over wat zich aan boord van het vaartuig bevindt.
Gedacht wordt dat de missies van de X-37B te maken hebben met de oprichting van het Amerikaanse ruimteleger.
Space Force
President Trump heeft voorgesteld om een nieuwe tak toe te voegen aan het leger: een divisie die de Verenigde Staten ‘moet gaan beschermen in de ruimte’.
Het is de bedoeling dat deze ‘Space Force’ vanaf 2020 in werking zal treden.
A Dutch astronomer captured rare photographs of the US Air Force's secretive X-37B space plane after searching for it for months.
Ralf Vandebergh, an astrophotographer and ardent skywatcher in the Netherlands, said he had been trying to spot the robotic spacecraft for months and finally managed to track it down in May.
It wasn't until last week that he was able to take photographs of the elusive X-37B as it passed overhead on June 30 and July 2.
'It is really a small object, even at only 300 kilometers [186 miles] altitude, so don't expect the detail level of ground-based images of the real space shuttle,' Vandebergh said of the vehicle, according to Live Science.
He said he was impressed by the level of detail he was able to capture on the spacecraft, also known as the Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV), which looks like a miniature version of NASA's retired space shuttle.
'We can recognize a bit of the nose, payload bay and tail of this mini-shuttle, with even a sign of some smaller detail,' Vandebergh said.
He was shooting with a 10-inch F/4,8 aperture Newtonian telescope and an Astrolumina ALccd 5L-11 mono CMOS camera after having tracked the X-37B manually with a 6×30 finderscope.
Dutch astronomer Ralf Vandebergh captured rare photographs of the US Air Force's mysterious X-37B space plane last week after searching for it for months
The unmanned plane is currently on its 667th day of its fifth flight mission, called OTV-5.
It launched from one of Elon Musk's SpaceX Falcon 9 boosters at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on September 7, 2017.
Officials have revealed few details about the OTV-5 mission but there has been a suggestion it could be part of a push for a US Space Force.
The space plane is 29 feet long, 9.6 feet tall and weighs around 11,000 lbs.
It is orbiting at around 200 miles high and is powered by solar cells with lithium-ion batteries.
Little is known about what it is carrying but on board OTV-5's payload is a US thermal spreader which will test the longevity of electronics and heat pipes in the space environment.
The X-37B is currently on its 667th day of its fifth flight mission, called OTV-5. The artist rendition above shows what the unmanned plane might look like orbiting the earth
Known as the Advanced Structurally Embedded Thermal Spreader, or ASETS-II, it was developed by the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), to test experimental electronics and oscillating heat pipes for long-duration stints in the space environment.
According to the AFRL, the payload’s three primary science objectives are to measure the initial on-orbit thermal performance, to measure long-duration thermal performance and to assess any lifetime degradation
In June last year, President Donald Trump announced that he is directing the Pentagon to a new Space Force as an independent service branch aimed at ensuring American dominance in space.
The president framed space as a national security issue, saying he does not want 'China and Russia and other countries leading us'.
One expert has suggested that this aircraft could already be part of an early US Space Force.
'Ironically, the X-37B is exactly the type of program — toward giving the U.S. flexibility of operations in space — that seems to be prompting the current push for a Space Force, yet are already underway,' said Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor in the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, Space.com reported.
Four previous X-37B missions have been launched by United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rockets.
Each time the unmanned space plane has carried a mystery payload on long-duration flights in Earth orbit.
WHAT IS THE X-37B SPACE PLANE?
The U.S. Air Force's unmanned X-37B space plane looks similar to Nasa's space shuttle but is much smaller.
The space plane is 29 feet (8.8 metres) long, 9.6 feet (2.9 metres) tall and weighs around 11,000 lbs. (4,990 kilograms).
It is orbiting at around 200 miles (320 kilometres) high.
The U.S. Air Force's unmanned X-37B space plane looks similar to Nasa's space shuttle but is much smaller. The space plane is 29 feet (8.8 metres) long, 9.6 feet (2.9 metres) tall and weighs around 11,000 lbs. (4,990 kilograms)
Officials have revealed few details about the OTV-5 mission (the aircraft's fifth) but according to the Air Force, one on board OTV-5 payload is US thermal spreader which will test the longevity of electronics and heat pipes in the space environment.
The craft is powered by solar cells with lithium-ion batteries.
Four previous X-37B missions have been launched by United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rockets.
Each time the unmanned space plane has carried a mystery payload on long-duration flights in Earth orbit.
“This was the formal weapon of a Jedi Knight. Not as clumsy or random as a blaster. More skill than simple sight was required for its use. An elegant weapon. It was a symbol as well. Anyone can use a blaster or a fusioncutter—but to use a lightsaber well was a mark of someone a cut above the ordinary.” ―Obi-Wan Kenobi
It’s the dream of every Jedi wannabe, especially those who played with the plastic flashlight versions and realized just how far off into the future the real thing must be. Take hope, young Skywalkers … that day may be coming sooner than you think. Physicists have discovered a new and easy way to make hybrid light particles that behave more like matter. Can the mechanism fit in a light sword handle and how many batteries will it need?
“First, we show that periodically modulating an excited state of rubidium splits its spectral weight to generate new lines—beyond those that are ordinarily characteristic of the atom—separated by multiples of the modulation frequency. Second, we use this capability to simultaneously generate spectral lines that are resonant with two chosen spatial modes of a non-degenerate optical cavity, enabling what we name ‘Floquet polaritons’ to exist in both modes. Because both spectral lines correspond to the same Floquet-engineered atomic state, adding a single-frequency field is sufficient to couple both modes to a Rydberg excitation. We demonstrate that the resulting polaritons interact strongly in both cavity modes simultaneously. The production of Floquet polaritons provides a promising new route to the realization of ordered states of strongly correlated photons, including crystals and topological fluids, as well as quantum information technologies such as multimode photon-by-photon switching.”
There’s your blueprint, junior Jedis – courtesy of physicists at the University of Chicago who published details of their research this week in the journal Nature. ‘Floquet’ sounds like a bunch of wet flowers but it’s a branch of differential equations. ‘Polariton’ sounds like an arctic movie monster but it’s actually a “quasiparticle resulting from the strong coupling of photons with a dipole-carrying excitation.” That simple description is explained in greater detail by the scientific blog Mapping Ignorance (thanks for rubbing our noses in it) with a video that helps non-physicists wrap their heads around the idea of an excited hybrid light particle which acts like it has mass and can cut through the limbs of the Sith. Or can it?
“Floquet polaritons are full of surprises; we’re still continuing to understand them better. Our next order of business, though, will be to use these colliding photons to make topological ‘fluids’ of light. It is a tremendously exciting time.”
Study co-author Logan Clark explained in a press release how others had first created polaritons as a bi-product in other quantum experiments but his team was the first to make them intentionally by making a simple change to the shaking technique used to excite them. Unfortunately, he doesn’t see these new easy polaritons as a solid form of light for lightsabers but rather as a kind of fluid. Light-supersoakers? Clark might go for that idea.
“It turns out shaking things is not only a lot of fun, but can lead to some really fascinating science.”
Can? Do or not do, junior Jedi. There is no “can.”
Very strange UFO in the skies over the United Kingdom recently posted on Youtube on July 6th. Listen to the strange sounds it makes when the light flashes near the beginning of the video. It’s not thunder that’s for sure! Never seen anything like this one before.
George Knapp: The Big Cover up of Real Giants Is Continuing Right Now
George Knapp: The Big Cover up of Real Giants Is Continuing Right Now
There’s a big cover-up going on with some of the giant remains and bones, as they disappear from various locations or are kept from the public, she reported.
Historical references to giants are seen across cultures, and they have been depicted throughout time. There was a relatively recent account that a live giant was killed by the military in Afghanistan and flown back to the States, she noted.
Some of the remains of giants show double rows of teeth, and six-fingered/six-toed hands & feet, indicating they were more than just very tall people, Ketchum continued. Featured guests also include: Richard Dewhurst
LEONARDO DA E.T. History’s most famous artworks ‘littered with aliens and UFOs’, crackpot believers claim
LEONARDO DA E.T. History’s most famous artworks ‘littered with aliens and UFOs’, crackpot believers claim
Charlotte Edwards, Digital Technology and Science Reporter
CONSPIRACY theorists are certain that famous ancient paintings provide evidence that aliens exist and visited our ancestors.
Here are the artworks that are often considered as proof that intelligent lifeforms and flying saucers have been witnessed on Earth long before modern times.
1. Leonardo da Vinci’s St John The Baptist 1513-16
Leonardo da Vinci’s St John The Baptist masterpiece shows an alien face after a filter is applied, it's claimedCredit: PARANORMAL CRUCIBLE
Lots of people think that the ancient genius Leonardo da Vinci was hiding secret messages in his paintings.
Some people think that he was hiding alien figures in some of his most famous pieces of work that can be seen if you mirror these images.
A mirrored and lightened version of his St John the Baptist painting appears to show an alien face.
2. Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa 1503-17
The so-called hidden alien face can seen when the painting is mirrored
Credit: PARANORMAL CRUCIBLE
Using filters a face with eyes can be seen, say conspiracy theoristsCredit: PARANORMAL CRUCIBLE
The Mona Lisa is one of the most famous paintings in the world and there are so many conspiracy theories surrounding it.
If you apply the same technique as mentioned above to the painting then some people claim they can see an alien figure over Mona Lisa's shoulder.
This bizarre theory was put forward by YouTube channel Paranormal Crucible, which claims if the painting's colours are manipulated to make it clearer certain freaky features become apparent.
3. Saint Wolfgang and the Devil 1475
This work by a famous German Renaissance painter Michael Pacher in the 15th century is based around a legend that states Saint Wolfgang, the Bishop of Regensburg in Bavaria during the 10th century, tricked the devil into building a church.
Internet sleuths believe the odd green shaped figure, which supposedly represents the devil, is actually an alien.
This painting based on the legend that Saint Wolfgang tricked the devil into building a church sparked a wave of conspiracy theories
Credit: Getty Images
4. The Baptism of Christ 1710
A disc-shaped object appears to shine beams of light on John the Baptist and Jesus in this painting.
The mysterious scene was painted by Flemmish artist Aert De Gelder.
Many claim that this is one of the most convincing examples of UFOs being highlighted in ancient art.
A diskc-shaped object appears to shine beams of light on John the Baptist and Jesus in this odd ancient paintingCredit: The Fitzwilliam Museum
5. Svetishoveil Cathedral Fresco 1600s
A 17th-century fresco of the crucifixion of Jesus, which can be found in the Svetishoveli Cathedral in Mtskheta, Georgia, shows two saucer shaped craft on either side of Christ.
Art historians have said these represent angels watching the event, or the moon and the sun.
However, during this period of Byzantine art, angels were usually depicted with wings and halos.
The Svetishoveil Cathedral Fresco painting appears to feature two rather out of place UFO shapes either side of Jesus
Credit: Steffen Schulein ( Georgian Tourism Association)
6. The Annunciation with Saint Emidius, 1486
This is an altar piece painted by Italian artist Carlo Crivelli designed to celebrate the announcement by the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary that she would become mother of Jesus.
Some theories suggest that the halo of the Holy Spirit, depicted in the top left shining down a beam of light, is actually a UFO.
The object featuring a small circle filled with angels in the top left certainly appears like a UFO from a distance
Credit: Getty Images
7. Crucifixion of Christ 1350
This wall mural from 1350 by an unknown artist can be found in the Visoki Decani Monestary in Kosovo.
Two odd-looking objects with 'pilots' can be seen in the sky on both sides of Jesus.
There are many explanations for what these symbols represent but some people like to believe that they are spaceships.
Many art historians insist the weird craft in the Crucifixion of Christ 1350 represent the sun and the moonCredit: Steffen Schülein (GTA - Georgian Tourism Associat
Mystery as rock art featuring ‘aliens’ and ‘heavenly figures’ found at 5,000-year-old grave site
Experts have been left stumped after rock art images, which are believed to have been painted some 5,000 years ago during the Bronze Age, were discovered. They appear to have been made with a sophisticated scientific understanding of the universe, long before modern civilization even existed.
It is the red colours that especially fascinate the experts.The images, which were discovered near Karakol village in the Altai Republic in Russia, show alien figures with round horns and feathers on their heads. They were found in 1985 and contrary to popular belief, are far from early cavemen paintings. They are complex in nature and content, they are even colored in red, white and black. They were first discovered in a remote village in Siberia and have revealed the wonderful talent of prehistoric artists.
The weird depictions in red, black and white dating to the Bronze Age were found in 1985 in a remote village.
Intriguing Creations
Scientists from the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, Russia's leading research and development center for nuclear energy, said that the red colors especially fascinate the experts. The red hues are believed to have been created using clay. These are of particular interest to scientists as it appears as if the tomb painters from 5,000 years ago were extremely knowledgable and understood how to carry out chemical reactions in order to create very precise tones by varying the heating processes. That is considered to be quite an advanced technique that back then, wouldn't have been known.
Head of the synchrotron research department at Kurchatov Institute, Roman Senin, said that they have been able to determine the phased composition of pigments, which is basically just the structure of the crystal lattice of individual grains of the dye. It is from doing this that the researchers were able to determine that not all of the samples were completely natural, they were actually the end product of heat treatment. Therefore, this concludes that these early artists were heating the materials to a very specific temperature in order to get the desired tones and shades of colors.
The space agency announced today (June 27) that the next mission in its New Frontiers line of medium-cost missions will be Dragonfly, a rotorcraft designed to ply the skies of the huge, hazy and potentially life-hosting Saturn moon.
If all goes according to plan, Dragonfly will launch in 2026 and land on Titan eight years later, NASA officials said. The probe will then spend at least 2.5 years cruising around the 3,200-mile-wide (5,150 kilometers) moon, making two dozen flights that cover a total of about 110 miles (180 km).
The 10-foot-long (3 meters) Dragonfly will gather a variety of data at each of its stops. Such work will help scientists learn more about Titan, the only solar system body other than Earth known to host stable bodies of liquid on its surface.
Titan's surface lakes, rivers and seas aren't composed of water, however: The frigid moon's climate system is based on hydrocarbons, in particular methane and ethane.
The mission is geared toward characterizing Titan's chemistry in detail. Complex organic molecules are known to swirl in the moon's thick, nitrogen-dominated atmosphere, and some scientists think its hydrocarbon seas could host exotic forms of life.
Titan also hosts another potentially habitable environment — a buried ocean of liquid water, which sloshes beneath the moon's icy crust.
Dragonfly could conceivably find evidence of Titan life, if the moon is indeed inhabited. And, because Titan is very similar to the early Earth, the mission's observations may shed light on the chemical processes that helped life get going on our planet, NASA officials said.
"Titan is unlike any other place in the solar system, and Dragonfly is like no other mission," Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for science at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., said in a statement.
"It's remarkable to think of this rotorcraft flying miles and miles across the organic sand dunes of Saturn's largest moon, exploring the processes that shape this extraordinary environment," he added. "Dragonfly will visit a world filled with a wide variety of organic compounds, which are the building blocks of life and could teach us about the origin of life itself."
Dragonfly will land among Titan's dunes, then make its way toward its final destination, the 50-mile-wide (80 km) Selk Crater. Selk is a particularly good place to study prebiotic chemistry and look for signs of life, NASA officials said. That's because the three ingredients necessary for life as we know it — liquid water, organic molecules and energy — mixed during the impact that created the crater. (Titan's bedrock is water ice.)
Dragonfly will be nuclear powered, like NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, the New Horizons Pluto probe and many other deep-space explorers.
Dragonfly will be the fourth mission in the New Frontiers program, following New Horizons, the Juno probe to Jupiter and the OSIRIS-REx asteroid-sampling mission. Dragonfly's development costs are capped at $850 million, though the mission's total price tag, including launch, will probably top $1 billion.
The other finalist for the mid-2020s New Frontiers launch slot was the Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return (CAESAR) mission, which proposed snagging bits of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko — the same icy wanderer studied up close by Europe's Rosetta mission.
Dragonfly won't be the first craft to land on Titan. That honor belongs to Europe's Huygens probe, which touched down on the moon in January 2005. Huygens traveled to the Saturn system with NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which orbited the ringed planet from mid-2004 through September 2017.
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. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
Tijdens de Amerikaanse burgeroorlog zagen soldaten vaak UFO’s en vreemde wezens. Is hier een verklaring voor?
Tijdens de Amerikaanse burgeroorlog zagen soldaten vaak UFO’s en vreemde wezens. Is hier een verklaring voor?
In april 1861 brak bij Charleston in de Amerikaanse staat South Carolina de Amerikaanse burgeroorlog uit. Bij de oorlog kwamen naar schatting 750.000 mensen om het leven.
Milities die vanuit New York per stoomboot afreisden naar Maryland, zagen onderweg een zeer vreemd verschijnsel in de lucht, vertelt UFO-onderzoeker Chris Pittman in het tv-programma Ancient Aliens.
Het was alsof de maan opeens door de lucht schoot, met daaromheen duidelijk zichtbaar drie lichtcirkels.
UFO
“We weten natuurlijk dat de maan niet zomaar van plek kan veranderen in de lucht,” aldus Pittman.
“Dit moet worden geclassificeerd als een UFO,” benadrukte hij.
Het lijkt erop dat UFO’s over Amerika waakten ten tijde van de burgeroorlog, klonk het.
Scherpe toename
Schrijver Nick Redfern wijst erop dat er altijd sprake is van een scherpe toename van UFO-meldingen op het moment dat er een oorlog uitbreekt.
“Tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog, Tweede Wereldoorlog, Vietnamoorlog en de Koreaanse Oorlog werden UFO-incidenten gemeld,” stelde Redfern.
“Een ander voorbeeld is de Amerikaanse burgeroorlog,” voegde hij toe.
Vreemde wezens
Daarnaast zagen soldaten op het slagveld naar eigen zeggen vreemde wezens, waaronder spookachtige figuren.
Ook waren er veel soldaten die visioenen en voorspellende dromen hadden.
Is er een verklaring voor al deze bizarre gebeurtenissen?
Over the last few months, I have been sent a steady stream of emails from people all over the United States telling me that they had a UFO sighting. I have had reports of silver oval crafts , groups of bright lights moving at incredible speeds and Orbs, mostly red Orbs.
People continue to see strange things in our sky daily all over this planet. You would think by now we would know what they are seeing and from where these things originate. The truth is we are exactly where we were now from where we were years ago when I first started to write and interview people about this subject.
The people who contact me when they have seen something that they realized was not like anything they had ever seen before all hold one thing in common. Every single person is stunned and wants me to have an OMG reaction to the fact they saw something considered unknown or unexplained.
They also think that now that they saw something that it should be front page news. The fact that people have been reporting UFO’s , and having encounters with these unknowns from the start of time seems to be completely lost to people who have a sighting with their own eyes. It is clear to me that our society is so backwards and lacking in any knowledge about this subject that they are stunned when they see one with their very own eyes .
They learn very quickly what it is like to be on the other side of the coin and now the one looking for acknowledgement that they did see something that was strange and unexplained, They also know what it is like to look for protection and understanding to instead be laughed at and told it was a plane and turn away from them when they know they had just seen a damn UFO. Funny how we act towards one another with this subject.
When they contact me I tell them they are now part of the club of millions worldwide who also have seen a UFO and that they now have the knowledge that they exist.
I often get back emails wanting me to be more stunned or shocked or shout in a hysteria that they actually did see a real object in the sky and do not understand why I do not do something. I explain that I have seen UFO’s and I know that they exist and have spoken to many people who also have seen UFO’s . It is not earth shattering news to me that yet another human looked up to find something they did not recognise looking back down at them.
I ask the people that have this type of reaction why they are so shocked that they finally saw something? The answer always is that they really did not think they existed.
I have to wonder how so many can still be walking around this planet when the internet, TV and media, in general, is covered with videos, stories and photos of UFO’s from all over the world? The fact we still are so reluctant to understand this is part of our reality on earth for me is actually frightening.
How is it we are so blinded and kept controlled by something so huge and seen by so many?
How is it that the people do not demand answers and are far happier to stay on a UFO rat-wheel of ignorance never wanting any answers? We have millions reporting seeing a strange object. Our reaction is to say wow, maybe look at the photo or video and then just yawn and walk away. Is it me or are we a bit insane not want to know more? Honestly, what the hell is wrong with us?
I often have people ask me where is the official place to report a UFO sighting. They seem to think there is some government agency or organisation that is seriously dealing with this issue. I think at times that society thinks that somewhere someone who knows what they are doing is taking care of all of this UFO stuff so they do not have to worry about it. Well gang, sorry to be the one to tell you, but when it comes to UFO’s it is everyone for themselves as you are on your own with this issue.
Other nations have department’s or government agencies that do collect and keep data on the UFO issue in their country but we here in America are NOT one of them. If you call the police you do not get anywhere. If you call the military you get nothing. We are set up to shut up and shut down people who try to discuss what they are seeing. Using ridicule and laughter has worked for years to silence the public on this subject and obviously continues to work as we are still locked on this rat-wheel of stupidity with this ever growing issue of UFO’s flying all over our country and nothing being done or explained or addressing the problem at all.
I had a man complain to me that he placed his sighting on MUFON but nothing happened. I asked him what he wanted to happen? He thought a big truck with white lab coat researchers would show up at his location to investigate his encounter.
I hated to be the one to tell him MUFON is a privately owned website, no hangers or buildings involved and the guy who owns it , well who knows what he does with the reports. It is not connected to any agency or government or military in any way so hs should stop waiting for any official reaction from them.
It is not the guy who owns MUFON or the TV shows making a fast buck off of our curiosity or the media or the thousands of internet pages that talk about this subject it is us, you and me to blame for our rat-wheel approach to this serious issue that needs to be addressed.
Why do we want to look at the subject as we do? Why do we treat is as a scary movie but not want to digest the fact that these things are real and flying over our heads often? We may be in deep trouble and real danger yet we refuse to look up or ask why these objects are watching us. I fear them and I know you should too. Why are they here? What do they want? Who are they? Are they ours? Good God I think we need to know.
Why is it we will see a UFO and still just go about our business as usual? Why do we just want to NOT KNOWN what the hell these things are and why do they fly around watching us? I will not even address the fact that they take some of us. The question has to be what is wrong with all of us. We can sit and listen to an hour-long radio show on this subject, yawn and go to bed and give no thought at all to the fact that maybe we all need to know what is going on with these things. It is almost insane in my thinking that we are content to do nothing at all about asking questions of those who should have the answers for us. We should in mass be demanding our government and military tell us what these objects are and if we need to fear them. I want to know , I really am fearful and want to know, don’t you?
For now, I will watch as we run round and round on a large UFO rat- wheel of blissful ignorance refusing to get past the point of chatting about the issue and stay locked in the dangerous dark ages of looking away , ignoring or denying what and who it is that is flying our skies and watching us as we ignore it all in ignorance bliss. Maybe we are hypnotised or brainwashed or drugged to be so complacent about this serious subject, I just do not know I will pray for us all.
Visit Chris Holly in books on Amazon for all my books, I think you would enjoy them.
***************************************************************** This video shows what I feel is a real sighitng of something unexplained. I it was seen close to vhere I live in Sept 2016.
Did a Flying Rectangle shoot down a Nuclear Ballistic Missile aimed at Hawaii?
Did a Flying Rectangle shoot down a Nuclear Ballistic Missile aimed at Hawaii?
On July 3, 2019, a photo was released of a flying rectangle shaped UFO near the island of Maui that was taken over a year earlier, and only recently discovered by the photographer. What is remarkable about the photo is that it shows what appears to be a craft very similar to one photographed near MacDill Air Force base in October 2017, which was revealed by my Florida source, JP, to be a weapons platform used by U.S. Air Force Special Operations.
The similarity of the craft seen in the respective photos raises the intriguing possibility that the flying rectangle photographed near Maui may have been involved in the shooting down of a nuclear ballistic missile aimed at Hawaii on January 13, 2018, widely thought to have been a false missile alert.
First, here is the photo of the Maui rectangle along with an insert showing a close-up.
While driving up mount haleakala in maui i took this picture and didnt notice anything until weeks later when i was going over my vacation photos. the object was not seen live. the object was in only one frame, nothing before or after. unkown altitude but as you can see it was above the cloud line [sic].
The photo was taken on May 24, 2018, but the flying rectangle only discovered and reported by the photographer on July 3, 2019, to MUFON.
Now here is some important background for understanding the deep significance behind the 2018 Maui rectangle UFO sighting in terms of photos previously sent to me by JP.
I have known JP since 2008, and he has regularly given me updates on his multiple contact experiences with human looking extraterrestrials, along with his experiences with covert Air Force operatives who have abducted and interrogated him at classified facilities or in their antigravity spacecraft. My evaluation of him is that he is a reliable and credible source, and I have created a webpage with my articles about the photos he regularly sends me.
In October 2017, JP sent me a series of photos of a rectangle shaped UFO that he witnessed near MacDill Air Force Base, home of US Special Operations Command. He took the photos after being prompted to do so by two mysterious men he believes were covert Air Force operatives.
One set of nine photos taken on October 19, 2017, shows a rectangle shaped UFO flying together with a triangle shaped craft.
In another set of five photos taken on October 23, 2017, JP witnessed a rectangle UFO flying alone near MacDill. Both incidents involved covert operatives encouraging JP to take the photos. What follows is a short video featuring the October 23 photos and with some close-ups.
In one of the October 2017 incidents, JP recalls having been taken aboard the flying rectangle where he saw personnel wearing the patches of Air Force Special Operations. He says that during his visit to the flying rectangle, he was in a corridor where he could peer outside and saw many instrument panels. He later speculated that these were part the craft’s weapons control system.
JP’s experience matched other insider accounts that flying rectangles are heavily armed weapons platforms used by a secret space program run by the Air Force, Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office. Corey Goode, a prominent Secret Space Program insider, had the following to say about the weapons systems of flying rectangles:
I think similar platforms or UFOs have been reported in the 80s and 90s as they were first building out of these platforms that have modular weapons and personnel delivery systems or configurations. They were built up on that superstructure type frame a long time ago and they been on improved upon since but these are pretty old technologies both the TR 3B and the square platform.
JP recalled his experience aboard the rectangle craft only after he photographed it as a result of being prompted by the two Air Force covert operatives. After being prompted and taking the photos, he then remembered being just taken aboard the craft as his head gradually cleared from a daze after receiving an injection during the abduction.
In my earlier analysis of JP’s photos and his eyewitness testimony, I concluded that the flying rectangle is a weapons platform used by Air Force Special Operations that can be deployed in the upper atmosphere and in Earth orbit.
The similarity between the flying rectangles photographed by JP in October 2017, with the UFO photographed near Maui on May 24, 2018, is remarkable. Here is a side by side comparison of the Maui photo with what was photographed by JP on October 19 and 23.
What lends great significance to the Maui photo is that it was taken four months after the alleged “false ballistic missile alert” for Hawaii issued on January 13, 2018.
Remarkably, the military intelligence group QAnon, appeared to have given a warning of an impending false flag attack involving a “Defcon 1″ scenario in a series of posts beginning on January 7, 2018, only six days before the Hawaii alert.
What my research revealed was that the ballistic missile alert was not a false alarm at all, but was instead a false flag attack intended to start World War III by framing North Korea. What stopped the false flag attack was the US Air Force Secret Space Program (SSP), which had recently undergone a dramatic change in attitude, policies, and leadership, the genesis of which I discuss in great detail in my 2019 book.
There were multiple witnesses of something being shot down on the morning of January 13, 2018, near Maui. The US Coast Guard subsequently spent the next week scouring the ocean for debris of what had been shot down as Maui boat captains have confidentially reported to me and others.
These witness reports, along with the testimonies of multiple whistleblowers all support the conclusion that a nuclear ballistic missile was shot down by White Hats within the US military opposed to a Deep State effort to covertly start another world war.
The false flag attack occurred in January 2018, and four months later a flying rectangle is accidentally photographed near the island of Maui. Given the photos and testimony of JP, it appears that a flying rectangle used as a weapons platform by Air Force Special Operations was being secretly deployed near the Hawaiian islands during the critical months after the attack. If so, it may have been also directly involved in neutralizing the January 13 false flag attack on Hawaii.
Synchronistically, a day after the release of the Maui flying rectangle photo, President Donald Trump declared at the July 4 Independence Day celebration that Space Force was soon to be created as the sixth branch of the US military.
It is highly likely that soon after the formal inauguration of Space Force, and its incorporation of classified space units manned by Air Force Special Operations, that some of its secret arsenal of antigravity vehicles will be revealed to the general public.
In a future July 4 celebration, perhaps as early 2020, flying rectangles may be among the highlights of the air show as they drop down from space directly over the Washington Mall. Included among the flying rectangle craft may be the one that was photographed near Maui in 2018, and which may have also been involved in shooting down a ballistic nuclear missile attack on Hawaii that was intended to start World War III.
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are among the most enigmatic and powerful events in the cosmos. Around 80 of these events—intensely bright millisecond-long bursts of radio waves coming from beyond our galaxy—have been witnessed so far, but their causes remain unknown.
The Deep Synoptic Array ten-antenna prototype (DSA-10) searches for fast radio bursts within a sky-area the size of 150 full moons (left). Within this area, the DSA-10 can locate these bursts with immense resolving power, isolating them to regions containing just one galaxy (middle). This feat was achieved for the fast radio burst called FRB 190523, detected by DSA-10 on May 23, 2019. The right panel shows the time profile of the burst above its radio spectrum.
Credit: Caltech/OVRO/V. Ravi
In a rare feat, researchers at Caltech’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) have now caught a new burst, called FRB 190523, and, together with the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, have pinpointed its origins to a galaxy 7.9 billion light-years away. Identifying the galaxies from which these radio bursts erupt is a critical step toward solving the mystery of what triggers them.
A paper about the discovery appears online July 2 in Nature.
Before this new discovery, only one other burst, called FRB 121102, had been localized to a host galaxy. FRB 121102 was reported in 2014 and then later, in 2017, was pinpointed to a galaxy lying 3 billion light-years away. Recently, a second localized FRB was announced on June 27, 2019. Called FRB 180924, this burst was discovered by a team using the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder and traced to a galaxy about 4 billion light-years away.
FRB 121102 was easiest to find because it continues to burst every few weeks. Most FRBs, however—including the Australian and OVRO finds—just go off once, making the job of finding their host galaxies harder.
“Finding the locations of the one-off FRBs is challenging because it requires a radio telescope that can both discover these extremely short events and locate them with the resolving power of a mile-wide radio dish,” says Vikram Ravi, a new assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech who works with the radio telescopes at OVRO, which is situated east of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California.
“At OVRO, we built a new array of ten 4.5-meter dishes that collectively act like a mile-wide dish to cover an area on the sky the size of 150 full moons,” he says. “To do this, a powerful digital system ingests and processes an amount of data equivalent to a DVD every second.”
The new OVRO instrument is called the Deep Synoptic Array-10, with the “10″ referring to the number of dishes. This array serves as a stepping stone for the planned Deep Synoptic Array (DSA), funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), which, when completed by 2021, will ultimately consist of 110 radio dishes.
Owens Valley Radio Observatory
Credit: Caltech/OVRO/G. Hallinan
“The DSA is expected to discover and localize more than 100 FRBs per year,” says Richard Barvainis, program director at the NSF for the Mid-Scale Innovations Program, which is funding the construction of the DSA. “Astronomers have been chasing FRBs for a decade now, and we’re finally drawing a bead on them with new instruments like DSA-10 and, eventually, the full DSA. Now we have a chance of figuring out just what these exotic objects might be.”
The new observations show that the host galaxy for FRB 190523 is similar to our Milky Way. This is a surprise because the previously located FRB 121102 originates from a dwarf galaxy that is forming stars more than a hundred times faster than the Milky Way.
“This finding tells us that every galaxy, even a run-of-the-mill galaxy like our Milky Way, can generate an FRB,” says Ravi.
The discovery also suggests that a leading theory for what causes FRBs—the eruption of plasma from young, highly magnetic neutron stars, or magnetars—may need to be rethought.
“The theory that FRBs come from magnetars was developed in part because the earlier FRB 121102 came from an active star-forming environment, where young magnetars can be formed in the supernovae of massive stars,” says Ravi. “But the host galaxy of FRB 190523 is more mellow in comparison. “
Ultimately, to solve the mystery of FRBs, astronomers hope to uncover more examples of their host galaxies.
“With the full Deep Synoptic Array, we are going to find and localize FRBs every few days,” says Gregg Hallinan, the director of OVRO and a professor of astronomy at Caltech. “This is an exciting time for FRB discoveries.”
The researchers also say that FRBs can be used to study the amount and distribution of matter in our universe, which will tell us more about the environments in which galaxies form and evolve. As radio waves from FRBs head toward Earth, intervening matter causes some of the wavelengths to travel faster than others; the wavelengths become dispersed in the same way that a prism spreads apart light into a rainbow. The amount of dispersion tells astronomers exactly how much matter there is between the FRB sources and Earth.
“Most matter in the universe is diffuse, hot, and outside of galaxies,” says Ravi. “This state of matter, although not ‘dark,’ is difficult to observe directly. However, its effects are clearly imprinted on every FRB, including the one we detected at such a great distance.”
The Nature study, titled, “A fast radio burst localized to a massive galaxy,” was funded by NSF and Caltech. Other Caltech authors include: Morgan Catha-Garrett, electronics engineer at OVRO; Larry D’Addario, system engineer; George Djorgovski, professor of astronomy; Richard Hobbs, software developer at OVRO; Jonathon Kocz, digital research engineer; Shri Kulkarni, the George Ellery Hale Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science; Jun Shi, postdoctoral scholar; Harish Vedantham, a former postdoctoral scholar now at ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy; Sandy Weinreb, visiting associate in astronomy; and David Woody, assistant director of OVRO.
Nazi's, Ufo's, Aliens, Disease, Creatures =plum Island
Nazi's, Ufo's, Aliens, Disease, Creatures =plum Island
It is rather well-known thanks to the internet and the paranormal circles that Nazi scientists were brought to the United States after World War II ended. It is also well known that a large group of these extreme scientists was set up with a secret lab where they worked on their notorious dangerous many times immoral experiments on Plum Island located on the end of Long Island in the state of New York. This secret government lab operated for many years.
This infamous dangerous Island was known by those living on Long Island as something to stay away from and fear. The Island is about 3 miles long and 1 mile wide which is frightening considering the dangerous horrors that took place over the years in the lab build on the Island. It is only a short boat ride from the tip of Long Island.
Plum Island has been called Monster Island as well as killer Island – due to the work that was done in the lab concerning animal diseases as well as many other horrible experiments. As a local Long Islander, I can only say I believe Plum Island was as close to a living hell as we can get. It was closed a few years ago however it may never be decontaminated enough to use for any purpose. It is and will remain a stain on humanity.
Besides Plum Island being located at the end of Long Island New York we had the very strange military base known as Camp Hero, located only a few miles from Plum Island, which thankfully also is closed.
For as long as I can remember, which would cover the last 60 years at least, long Island has been a hotspot of reported UFO sightings which continue to this day. Long Island also has its share of those who have experienced lost time and abduction events during its history as well. It may be coincidental and easily fluffed off however I am not a fan of coincidental events and believe it far more likely to be tied to the fact that Plum Island and Camp Hero were located on the end of Long Island.
I think that Long Island may be an area on this planet that is easy access for space travelers to enter and exit our planet as well as a land mass that is close to a large city yet located in an area of land at the end of Long Island that was sparsely populated and floating in the Atlantic Ocean making access to the open sea immediate and easy. Years ago the area had a very low population making the nefarious activities of Plum Island and Camp Hero possible. The local people were cautious and silent to the operations of each of these facilities as they did not want problems and did benefit financially from having the lab and military base in the area. It worked out well for all parties for many years.
I think by now we all have read or watched a TV show that discusses the subject of German scientist either back engineering or developing UFOs for the Nazi’s during World War II. It has been said that there is information claiming that Nazi Germany had contact with an alien species and had been working with them.
It is also well known that after the war ended the United States brought many of the German scientists to America to continue their work in USA labs. Plum Island is well known to be one of the labs that employed many of the German Scientists. I find this fact extremely upsetting in its own right knowing that these were scientists that worked without any moral compass for the Nazis and were now working on American soil doing their evil deeds on our homeland. I have to add in the strange accounts of many who claim extremely dangerous awful experiments on humans were also during those years taking place at Camp Hero.
I have no problem thinking that with the German scientists came whatever UFO technology they had conquered or captured including contact with aliens. It would certainly explain the ongoing reports of strange objects flying over Long Island, especially in the 1960’s when both Camp Hero and Plum Island were in their hay day of activity. It was not uncommon to hear a report of someone being taken or having contact with beings by Long Islanders that included human looking aliens. It very well could be that these poor people were being used by the insane experiments of the once Nazi scientists who not only may have had contact but were working with an alien species. Using the innocent locals for their needs or to experiment on is as likely as any other explanation to why so many events happened at that time on Long Island. It also could explain many events of this nature that occurred along the New England coastline opposite Long Islands shoreline.
Now year’s later Long Island is free of both Camp Hero and Plum Island, however, it now is said to house a HAARP machine only a few miles away from where both of those facilities once operated. Reports of large flying Orbs have been reported across Long Island and the Atlantic Ocean coastline as well plus of course all of our recent extreme strange weather. It just seems too coincidental to me for all of these things to have anything to do with coincidence!
I have not researched other locations around the world to see if there are places where both secret government labs and high-security military bases are located near each other that also have HAARP machines in the area. If we do have areas that coincidentally, like Long Island, house these things together, are they also areas of frequent UFO sightings too?
So many things that go on seem outrageous and ridiculous to think as true however I will tell you from firsthand experience that strange things happen every day and our closed minds and refusal to accept the extreme is exactly what allows the events to occur and continue. Consider that some things are as clear and black and white as they appear. Understand strange and dangerous dark events take place every day in many places. Sometimes they happen right in front of your face in your hometown to those you know and love. Decide to start to look hard at the truth of the reality around you and brace yourself for what you may discover. Know the more you learn and the more we understand the less time we will spend living in the dark ages of the unknown Post date note on this subject: Since I last wrote this article I was informed by the local people living on the end of Long Island that Plum Island never did close down nor was it moved. It remains open and continued doing the horrible things they have been doing for over 70 years. They continue to develop deadly things that they also let slip into the human population. The truth about Plum Island is lied about to all of us and this deadly Island is kept running with only the worst of mankind working on the most deadly of things too close to a large population. The fact this continues to go on is total insanity. I know a TV special recently aired that gave a truthful look at what is going on at Plum Island. The TV show was immediately debunked by news reports that the Island is being closed and will be sold. Hey, that is exactly what they told us years ago. The media told us that Plum island was closed and had been moved to Kansas. Instead, it remained and continued to do business as usual. The fact this island exists where it does which is right at the tip of Long Island far too close to large populations of people doing disastrous things that could kill us all is completely beyond acceptable yet it continues day after day. I am tired of the careless actions of our government and the horror that is allowed to continue at this god forsaken lab.
The media talks about closing it and selling the Island for private development . The idea of that statement is an insult to our intelligence. I have had more than one scientist who has been to Plum Island tell my that it would not be possible to decontaminate Plum Island , not know, and most likely not possible at all. This Island has been linked to UFO’s, aliens, deadly disease. terrifying creatures and other horrors yet it continues along with a large middle finger pointed to those who dare question it. I am both disgusted with this subject and frightened of it. It may be time for me to consider leaving my beautiful Long Island for safer ground.
Please check out my new paperback book by clicking the imgagof ot it and my eBooks at the right side of my blog, They all will make great summer reading!
CLICK ON IMAGES OF BOOK ON RIGHT SIDE OF THIS SITE TO BUY PAPERBACK BOOK OR eBOOKS THANK YOU, CHRIS
Abduction- Questions and Answers by Real TIme Abductees
Abduction- Questions and Answers by Real TIme Abductees
I had an interesting conversation recently concerning my article about two sisters and their difficulties over a lifetime of lost time abduction encounters.
The conversation was based on the fact that not only have I come to the conclusion that writing about real time abductions was a waste of my time and the Real Time Abductees time too.
I explained that writing about this group of unusual people and their experiences did not seem to interest the public or any other group or researchers at all. The fact the real time abductees could have been a wealth of data on the subject of abduction and lost time did not seem to be of interest to anyone in any form.
I am sure a great deal of it was due to the fact that my articles about their experiences were told as they related it which was in a logical truthful fashion. My articles were not filled with movie script type detailed colorful descriptions of amazing aliens and their crafts. I do not write horror or fantasy I write what really goes on which I feel is just too boring and black and white for the paranormal reader.
Long ago the lines between good entertainment for fun and real research became so distorted in the subjects we consider unknown that truth , fiction, fraud and research became so convoluted that all real answers to real questions have been lost, Trying to work in this area using fact or truth without the color became impossible or so confused that it is at the point of being impossible.
Real-time abduction is events that occur to people who are fully awake and alert who are going about the business of their normal daily routines who are suddenly abducted against their will.
These people suffer lost time and find they are returned often to a different place from where they were taken . They are ill , dazed and at times hurt. They can recall when the event starts but have little memory of what happens to them before they find themselves waking hours later.
Some of the abductees have flashed memories of what took place during their abductions. Some return with knowledge or skills or thoughts they did not have before they were taken. Many suffer these events more than once during their life. All are somehow changed during the experience.
During my years of writing about these fascinating people, I promised them that I would answer without embellishment any questions giving the most truthful answers I could to the questions asked.
It took courage for the abductees to allow me to write about them or to questions concerning their experiences. The fact that not one person or group or organization ever wanted any information concerning their ordeals with these strange abductions made these people recoil from reaching out and closed the door at my attempts at finding answers.
Finally, after all of these years, we have had someone ask a few questions about their abduction events. After a conversation with the abductees, it was decided that I could answer the handful of questions before I end my adventure of writing about this group of people I refer to as the Real Time Abductees.
Adding salt to the wound of rejection for the abductees is the fact that the questions were not even asked directly to me or them but came by way of an email of a third party who was corresponding with the person who finally did ask a few questions about the abductees encounters. I found the questions to be thoughtful and decided as my last article on the subject of Real-Time Abduction to answer these questions, I know that there is a wealth of data being lost with these people however, I have tried my best to find an audience or place that could benefit and learn from them and have found only silence and disinterest in what they have to say or warn us about concerning their abduction encounters,
Below are the questions with the answers following each question:
Question : What occurred during the abductions? Answer: Nothing during this abduction of the two sisters case as it was stopped ,however, during the battle to stop it both women were hurt as the article about the two sisters explains. Other abductees do have flash memories of what took place including the recall of multiple beings surrounding the abductee or bright lights making it difficult to see what is going on around them. The abductees I refer to as the Real Time Abductees have no clear memory of being examined or touched. All of the abductees agree that they have had their memory wiped clean of the events before they are returned. Some flashes of what took place do remain in a few of the abductees . Others feel their abductors wiped too much memory taking with it parts of their lifetime memories that they can no longer remember.
Question : What are the lingering health problems? Answer: This is a very lengthy list that includes many different problems for different people. I will give the overall problems they all share. The spine , neck and skeleton of the abductees all have been altered leaving them with issues from compression to actual breaks. Many have had large spurs grow in odd places that burrow into the surrounding muscle leaving them in constant pain Almost all have had to seek long-term medical help to deal with some form of spinal and bone issues. It has been common for an abductee to be told that they show that bones they never broke now show clear signs upon being x-rayed of having been broken. There are cases when a shoulder or large bone shows it was without question broken and has healed poorly. Back fractures also are commonly found. One of the abductees was asked when they had the accident as both a bad shoulder and broken back were found that had healed in the past was found when they had X-rays taken for a different health issue. Of course, the abductee never had an accident or broken bones that they knew of until X-rayed This is a scenario that plays out often with abduction victims. All of the abductees suffer from a flu-like sickness with a red raised rash on their back or chest that lasts for about two weeks after an abduction. It can flare up at will during their lifetime for a few years after an abduction, All the abductees have problems with light and cannot tolerate bright sun or bright lights of any kind including fluorescent lighting. All of the abductees require very dark sunglasses and sit in shaded areas as the bright sun both blinds them and causes their eyes to hurt. Many of the abductees suffer from very large red rashes that come and go which are uncontrollable and painful. One abductee has a growing reptile like scale rash spreading across her body that does not respond to any treatment. The abductees have issues that would be presented in those who have had problems with their adrenal , pituitary and thyroid functions. This is just a partial list of the problems they deal with, On the other side of the coin the abductees all have had their IQ increase and have been able to increase their skill sets with ease. The strangest thing they all share and cannot explain is that they return with new knowledge about something they did not have before the abduction or with thoughts or visions of what will happen in the future that always prove to be true.
Question: What did the abductors look like? Answer: Since the abductees memory is always wiped or cleaned before they are returned it is very hard to answer this question. The main combined agreed description by the abductees is that their abductors are built or shown in a human form with one head , two arms and two legs. Some feel they are hairless with light skin while others feel they are covered in some type of skin or suit , They do not recall their faces or features. They do all agree that they have a bad odor similar to mold and sulfur.
Question: What was inside the green light?
Answer: Nothing but a large sweeping ray of green light that runs from a very hot area that can turn extremely cold in a second. It does have a vibration or hum to it. It is part of a tool used to scoop up their victims.
Question: Is there a merge between supernatural and extraterrestrial, or is this a terrestrial demonic attack? Answer: There seem to be ways that dimensions we have no knowledge of can intermingle when needed that we do not understand. It seems clear in the two sisters case that the energy of this woman’s departed family members was able to manifest in order to protect the woman from her abductor. No one on this planet understands how the dimensions work or how those who are part of them enter and exit our dimension that we live in. In this case, we see that all the things we do not understand come into focus as a mix of dimensions clearly took place in front of the family in the two sisters abduction case. Obviously, it is a simple case of our not being able to understand the way the universe or how the dimensions work. The fact is that they do know how to manipulate and transport between them when needed. The sisters did not feel this was a demonic issue but one of her family warning the unknown creature or alien that it needs to stop. The creature has not returned and for now, all abductions seem to have ended for the two sisters family. Time will tell the answers to all of these questions as eventually we will learn how all of this works and we will be able to understand and handle our human dimension with intelligence, For now, we seem very content on remaining in the dark ages on many things we do not understand and label paranormal. It is, of course, all science we simply do not yet grasp. We received a question last year that was left on my voice mail from a man that I will answer now too. The caller asked if any of the abductees were told to tell us anything by the aliens or asked the abductee any questions about being a human? I did not answer this question at the time It was left as I had just finished and published an article on warnings given by the abductees All the abductees have returned with the impressions of both natural and man-made disasters and world war impressed upon them . They also were given warnings concerning giving up our humanity so easily to technology which provides easy access to our control. I have written about all of those things repeatedly. The interesting question the man left on the voice mail was if the aliens had ever asked any of their human captives any questions. I thought about this and remembered an older man who had been taken many times during his life telling me that he did have an encounter once with a very curious alien who did ask him via thought and images questions that he found very unusual. The interview with this abductee stuck out in my mind and I was able to locate the notes I took while talking with him. He was not comfortable with me writing his encounters and until now I had nowhere to write about the part of his interview that discussed the alien questions. The man told me the alien communicated by showing him visions or images or placed thoughts in his head. The first thing the alien asked was by showing him images or visions of large groups of people eating. Eating around tables , at fast food restaurants and just about every scene you could image of people eating lots of food. The next thing he was shown were images of people starving to death. All kinds of people from all over the world , many children. The images the abductee told me were heartbreaking and made him feel terrible when he viewed them. The alien wanted to know why? We have so much food yet some have it and waste it and others die from not having it. The alien wanted to know why we do this?. He even placed images of rows of farming and piles of freshly caught fish in the man’s head. Again the alien asked him why do humans fed some too much and starve others? The abductee told me his mind went blank as the only answer he had was that he did not know why we do this.
The older abductee also in the manner of thoughts and images or visions was asked why we have the technology but only a few humans are educated or advancing?
He was shown an image of what looked like a science lab of some sort with a handful of people working in the lab, He was also shown a huge movie screen with what looked like thousands of people cheering at zombies or monsters on the movie screen. The alien did not understand why only a few are educated while the mass of the population does not advance which keeps our planet at a slow growth when it comes to science or advancement. The old man knew his captor thought of us as very primitive and ignorant.
I know we think we are superior beings as we walk upon the earth with smartphones and techie gadgets hanging from our belts. The fact is that only a few of us invent, build and advance the planet is confusing to a being who obviously comes from a civilization far different and far more advanced than ours, Obviously, where he comes from everyone is educated and advances. Sad for the human race that we do not do the same.
The last questions the man was asked were very interesting to me and ones that really spoke to the fact that we are as strange to them as they are to us.
The alien asked the man why only two or even one human raise the children. He was shown a single mother and a family with four or five children sitting on a couch with their mother and father. The being that had abducted the old man wanted to know why only one or two adults raise the children.?
Obviously, the alien does not come from a male /female type of union like we do on earth nor did he seem to understand the family unit as we know it. His confusion on this makes me believe his civilization does not form family units and must raise their young in groups with many adults involved in the care of their young,
The last question really gave me an idea of how our visitors view the human species .
The alien asked the older man why we are self-killing? At first, the man thought he was asking about war which we have as an ongoing constant on this planet. The alien stopped this thought in the man’s head quickly and was able to communicate that they already knew we were an extremely violent species. The alien kept repeating self-killing.
The abductee was then shown images of very overweight people eating large plates of food and a man smoking who was nearly invisible under a thick layer of smoke as well as what looked like homeless people laying on a city street. He was also shown images he did not understand but he got the message. Why did humans not take care of their human bodies?
The older abductee told me he tried to answer the questions to the best of his ability but could tell his captor remained confused and did not seem to understand what he was trying to convey to him.
The abductee mentioned a few times while telling me about this event that the alien completely lacked any signs of emotion or understanding emotion. He recoiled if the man cried or yelled and if his fear got the better of him and he shook his fist in anger or begged to be let go. The man told me that emotion seemed to confuse or even frighten and back off his captors.
I believe this lack of emotion is why the two sisters were able to escape as well as other people who also displayed outbreaks of emotion that backed off their captors using the element of surprise by displaying something they simply do not understand.
I was happy to answer these questions in this last article about the Real Time Abductees but realize that the overall interest in the subject of real time abduction does not exist in the public or in the paranormal community. If it did I am sure we would have had over the years of sharing the real time abductees experiences more then the handful of questions I have answered in this article.
This will be the last article I write on abduction I have other areas of the unknown I want to explore and will be giving my time to that. If I find things I think my readers will be interested in I will continue to share them on my blog.
For now remain aware of your surroundings as one day you may find you are the one standing alone in the dead of night and find you are face to face with a cold , emotionless strange being
It’s a comet! It’s an alien space ship! It’s an asteroid! It’s a space ship! It’s a weird comet! It’s a weird space ship! It’s a weird asteroid! It’s a (weird or otherwise) something else! It’s ‘Oumuamua, the interstellar space object that has mystified, enthralled and enraged astronomers, rocket scientists and the general public ever since it wagged its almost non-existent tail as made its turn around the sun and headed out to parts unknown before anyone could get a good look at it … which is just one of the problems that has caused the controversies and debates over what it is. The latest “this is what ‘Oumuamua REALLY is or isn’t” comes from the University of Maryland Department of Astronomy which contradicts all of those Giorgio Tsoukalos memes that say it’s definitely a spaceship. But do they know what it REALLY is?
“We have never seen anything like ‘Oumuamua in our solar system. It’s really a mystery still. But our preference is to stick with analogs we know, unless or until we find something unique. The alien spacecraft hypothesis is a fun idea, but our analysis suggests there is a whole host of natural phenomena that could explain it.”
In a report published in the current edition of the journal Nature Astronomy, Matthew Knight, an associate research scientist in the University of Maryland Department of Astronomy, reviewed all of the actual data collected up to and including the rear-end tracking that narrowed its origin down to one of four stars. Knight was one of the first to study ‘Oumuamua, co-authoring a study on its rotation and shape in December 2017 – just a few months after it was discovered.
“The alien-spacecraft camp threw the jets model out of the window.”
On his blog, co-author Sean Raymond lists the many “It’s aliens” arguments and attempts to scientifically debunk all of them. For example, it has comet-like outgassing which could both propel and spin it, but its small size makes it difficult to see. He also points out that we know so little about interstellar objects that ‘Oumuamua’s strange shape – which we still don’t know for sure if it’s cigar-like or maybe a weird pancake – could actually be pretty common. Nor do we know enough about how planets form to say many definitive things about how the ancillary space junk around them forms and how it might be kicked out of or escape from its solar system.
“We may start seeing a new object every year. That’s when we’ll start to know whether ‘Oumuamua is weird, or common. If we find 10 to 20 of these things and ‘Oumuamua still looks unusual, we’ll have to reexamine our explanations.”
Since we’re no longer getting new data from ‘Oumuamua, Knight is already looking to the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) to help spot future interstellar objects earlier and get better looks and more data on them. Sending a space probe to meet up with one is still pretty far out in the future.
So, we still don’t know for sure what ‘Oumuamua is. Does this new study convince you that it’s not an alien spaceship or probe?
Or is this study a cover-up of what it really is? Tom DeLonge? Any thoughts?
There are 1,500 potentially active volcanoes on Earth, but lava lakes are much rarer. In fact, until recently, there were only seven known persistent lava lakes in the world. Scientists in the United Kingdom have discovered an eighth lava lake which is located inside of the active volcano Mount Michael which sits on the Sounders Island in the sub-Antarctic South Sandwich Islands.
While Mount Michael has been active for nearly 200 years, studying the volcano is pretty much impossible since the island is so remote, as well as the extremely challenging environment. “The island has been visited on numerous occasions, but no one has ever climbed the mountain,” stated geospatial analyst Peter Fretwell who is from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).
(Not Mount Michael)
He explained the challenging environment to BBC, “If you look at the imagery you can see why: the peak is surrounded by a huge snow-mushroom, extremely soft snow with an icing-sugar-like consistency, probably caused by the continual venting of steam by the volcano.” Researchers can’t walk on that type of snow, so they would have to dig through it, which would be extremely dangerous since it’s an active volcano. Pictures of the volcano and the lava lake can be seen here.
ImagecopyrightUSGS/NASA/LANDSAT-8Image caption
This satellite image has been coloured to highlight the lava lake
Image copyrightBAS/PETE BUCKTROUTImage caption
Dangerous to climb: The stratovolcano is just under 1,000m high
Image copyrightGETTY IMAGESImage caption
Nyiragongo volcano in the DRC maintains a persistent lava lake
Image copyrightMODIS/NASAImage caption
In this image taken last month, a vapour train is seen to lead away from Mount Michael
The satellites flying today now have the ability to resolve what's going on inside the crater
In the 1990s, satellites noticed thermal anomalies at Mount Michael, but they weren’t consistent with magma that overflowed from the volcano, and instead suggested that there was a lava lake hidden there. For comparison, lava pools are only temporary during times of volcanic eruptions, but lava lakes can last long after the eruption – sometimes up to 100 years.
The lava lake underneath Mount Michael is approximately 110 meters wide with the temperatures of the molten lava reaching as hot as 2,334 degrees Fahrenheit.
(Not Mount Michael)
BAS geologist Alex Burton-Johnson explained how incredible this extremely rare discovery is, “Identifying the lava lake has improved our understanding of the volcanic activity and hazard on this remote island, and tells us more about these rare features,” adding, “And finally, it has helped us develop techniques to monitor volcanoes from space.” Their findings have been posted in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research.
The next video taken by a drone in June 2019 shows a possible cloaked UFO leaving a mountain in Sweden.
Drone owner:
I caught something strange when filming with my drone in the Swedish mountains. Take a look at the video where I have pointed out some details I have noticed.
Could this really be an alien UFO sighting or maybe it´s some other craft or just some weird weather phenomenon?
Pilot Records Two UFOs Captured Flying In Tandem Over The Grand Canyon In Arizona. July 1, 2019 UFO Sighting News.
Pilot Records Two UFOs Captured Flying In Tandem Over The Grand Canyon In Arizona. July 1, 2019 UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: July 1, 2019 Location of sighting:Grand Canyon, Arizona, USA This is a unique video that shows two white UFOs flying low through the canyon. The UFOs are only seen in a few seconds of the clip but appears to be real. They begin defending at a 45 degree angle at a high rate of speed and disappear behind some hills. Since the canyon is so deep already, it makes a great location for a doorway to an underground base. Someone at the bottom of this canyon is a cloaked entrance to an alien city. The base will be about 4-5km below the ground. I think someone should investigate that area of the canyon and scan it with lasers to map it and see its true design. They may find a doorway. Scott C. Waring Video states:
This was captured by pilot Mike Wagner and in this footage we can see two highly reflective objects cruising over The Grand Canyon before going out of view.
Skywatcher and satellite tracker Ralf Vandebergh of the Netherlands recently caught a rare glimpse of the U.S. Air Force's secretive X-37B space plane.
Vandebergh said he'd been hunting for the robotic spacecraft for months and finally managed to track it down in May. But it took a bit longer to get photos of the vehicle.
"When I tried to observe it again [in] mid-June, it didn't meet the predicted time and path," Vandebergh explained. "It turned out to have maneuvered to another orbit. Thanks to the amateur satellite observers' network, it was rapidly found in orbit again, and I was able to take some images on June 30 and July 2."
The X-37B's recent passes were almost overhead, Vandebergh added.
The X-37B, also known as the Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV), looks like a miniature version of NASA's retired space shuttle.
"It is really a small object, even at only 300 kilometers [186 miles] altitude, so don't expect the detail level of ground-based images of the real space shuttle," Vandebergh said.
Taking this into consideration, the newly captured imagery far exceeded Vandebergh's expectations.
"We can recognize a bit of the nose, payload bay and tail of this mini-shuttle, with even a sign of some smaller detail," he said.
Vandebergh captured the photos using a 10-inch F/4,8 aperture Newtonian telescope with an Astrolumina ALccd 5L-11 mono CMOS camera. Tracking was fully manual through a 6×30 finderscope, he said.
Classified duties
The X-37B has winged past 666 days of flight on this latest mission, which is called OTV-5 because it's the fifth flight for the program.
X-37B missions are carried out under the auspices of the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, and mission control for OTV flights is handled by the 3rd Space Experimentation Squadron at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado. This squadron oversees operations of the X-37B and is tagged as the Air Force Space Command's premier organization for space-based demonstrations, pathfinders and experiment testing, gathering information on objects high above Earth and carrying out other intelligence-gathering duties.
And that may be a signal as to what the robotic craft is doing — both looking down at Earth and upward.
Each X-37B mission has set a new flight-duration record for the program:
Most X-37B payloads are classified, and the Air Force releases few details about the spacecraft's orbit and activities. The only OTV-5 payload that Air Force officials have revealed is the Advanced Structurally Embedded Thermal Spreader, or ASETS-II.
Developed by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), this cargo is testing experimental electronics and oscillating heat pipes for long-duration stints in the space environment.
According to AFRL, the payload's three primary science objectives are to measure initial on-orbit thermal performance, to measure long duration thermal performance, and to assess any lifetime degradation.
Tarmac touchdown
Exactly when OTV-5 will end is unknown.
The last X-37B mission touched down at KSC's Shuttle Landing Facility — a first for the program. All prior missions had ended with a tarmac touchdown at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
Several website postings say that the sixth mission, OTV-6, is planned for this year on a United Launch Alliance Atlas-5(501) rocket. Launch would be from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Space Launch Complex-41.
Reusable vehicles
The classified X-37B program "fleet" consists of two known reusable vehicles, both of which were built by Boeing.
The X-37B vehicles were built at several Boeing locations in Southern California, including Huntington Beach, Seal Beach and El Segundo. The program transitioned to the U.S. Air Force in 2004 after earlier funded research efforts by Boeing, NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The military space plane is 29 feet (8.8 meters) long and 9.6 feet (2.9 m) tall, with a wingspan of nearly 15 feet (4.6 m).
The X-37B's payload bay, which measures 7 feet (2.1 m) by 4 feet (1.2 m), can be outfitted with a robotic arm. The spacecraft has a launch weight of 11,000 lbs. (4,990 kilograms) and is powered on orbit by gallium-arsenide solar cells with lithium-ion batteries.
Prior to OTV-5's launch, Randy Walden, the director of the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, said there were many firsts on this mission, making it a milestone for the program. "It is our goal to continue advancing the X-37B OTV so it can more fully support the growing space community," he said at the time.
The Air Force also noted that OTV-5 was launched into, and will be landed from, a higher-inclination orbit than prior missions to further expand the X-37B's orbital envelope.
Leonard David is author of the recently released book, "Moon Rush: The New Space Race" 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. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
Je hoorde er niets over op het nieuws, maar wel dat er na 200 jaar weer de eerste wolvenwelpjes geboren zijn in Nederland. Ik zal je vertellen waarom je er niets over hoorde, en tevens wat er aan de hand is, en wel goed gedocumenteerd, en wat er nu moet gebeuren. Wat betekent het bijvoorbeeld dat we op 28 juni 2019 al meer dan 40 dagen zonder zonnenvlekken zitten? Veruit het grootste nieuws van deze eeuw is de huidige voorspelde Grand Solar Minimum die zich weer toont, nu na 200 jaar. Deze Grand Solar Minima luiden al sinds mensenheugenis de kleine ijstijden in. Laten we dus dáár beginnen, met allereerst de vraag te beantwoorden:
WAT IS EEN GRAND SOLAR MINIMUM?
Volgens de laatste voorspelling van NASA hebben we voor het eerst in 200 jaar weer te maken met een Grand Solar Minimum (hierna GSM genoemd). Deze fase zal een enorme invloed hebben op ons leven door de grote klimaatveranderingen. Voordat men de weersveranderingen straks zal gaan framen als ‘global warming’, eerst maar eens uitleggen wat er aan de hand is bij een GSM. De komende 10 jaar kunnen we er al wat van gaan merken en er moet écht wat gebeuren en wel heel snel.
Zo ongeveer eens in de 200 jaar wordt het Noordelijk halfrond bijna letterlijk overvallen door een kleine ijstijd. De laatste was ‘Dalton’ (200 jaar geleden), en de grootste en diepste die we ook goed kennen was de Maunder ijstijd, 400 jaar geleden. Begin 17e eeuw was er een wetenschapper die een verband vermoedde tussen de zonnevlekken en het klimaat, waarop hij besloot met gaan optekenen van deze vlekken (1613). Zijn naam was Galileo Galilei, inderdaad dezelfde die voor een kerkelijk rechtbank moest verschijnen, omdat hij ‘durfde beweren’ dat de aarde om de zon draait, in tegenstelling tot de gedachten van die tijd, dat de Aarde het middelpunt was.
De Aarde is plat staat centraal. En zon en maan trekken aan de hemel voorbij; het beeld uit de tijd van Galileo Galileï.
Ironisch is dat mensen die Galileïsch theorie over de zonnevlekken en het klimaat delen, op dit moment via allerlei in elkaar geflanste YouTubes tegengewerkt worden. Zoals middels restricties en de melding krijgen van youtube of facebook dat hun mening niet in overeenstemming is met de science community . Deze groep staat nu inmiddels te boek als ‘klimaat ontkenners’.
Wetenschappers ontdekten dat tijdens de Maunder ijstijd, die in de 17e eeuw begon en pas 75 jaar later zou eindigen, er geen, of heel weinig zonnevlekken te zien waren. Dat duurde 65 jaar. En dit fenomeen herhaalde zich tijdens de Dalton ijstijd (200 jaar geleden); een periode die iets minder heftig was maar waar wel sprake was van een jaar zonder zomer. De rivier de Theems vroor regelmatig dicht (er werden zelfs markten op het ijs gehouden) en in Nederland vroren de kanalen regelmatig dicht, want evenals de rest van West Europa was het vaak bitter koud in deze winters.
Hoe zit dat dan met die zonnevlekken? De zon doorloopt telkens een cyclus van 11 jaar. Aan het eind van die 11-jarige cyclus keren de magnetische polen van de zon zich, en noord wordt dan zuid en zuid wordt noord (wat op aarde ook gebeurt, maar dan eens in de miljoenen jaren). Aan het begin van een cyclus beginnen de zonnevlekken zich te laten zien, na 5 jaar zijn ze op maximale hoeveelheid, daarna nemen ze in aantal af en na 11 jaar begint het opnieuw.
Bij een kleine ijstijd is er in een zonnecyclus(bijna) geen zonnevlekken te zien, ook niet na jaren. Er is sprake van een Grand Solar Minimum (GSM). Normaal gesproken wordt deze 1e 11-jarig cyclus gevolgd door een reeks aan GSM’s, bij de Maunder ijstijd waren het er 6 op rij. Dat is 66 jaar dus geen of nauwelijks zonnevlekken.
DEZE WERD VOORSPELD DOOR EEN ‘EENLING’.. Ik ga je nu iets vertellen over een professor in de wiskunde en astronomie, Valentina Zharkova. Zij had een rekenmodel gemaakt, omdat, volgens haar, de zon zich gedraagt, voorspelbaar als een uurwerk (oscillator). En als je daar dus de parameters van weet, kun je voorspellen wat die zon verder gaat doen. Anders dan andere rekenmodellen keek ze naar de 4 magnetische velden op de zon en hun structuur en verwerkte dat in een ingewikkeld algoritme. Daar kwamen alle koude periodes uit tot voor Christus.
Ze maakte een forecast van cyclus 24 (we gaan dit jaar naar cyclus 25) en voorspelde dat die zwak zou zijn. Ze had gelijk. Maar ze keek verder, want ruim 13 jaar geleden voorspelde ze al, dat zonnecyclus 25 de eerste GSM zou worden sinds 200 jaar, en eentje die aan de vooravond zou staan van een heftige kleine ijstijd..! NASA had ook een rekenmodel en verwees haar voorspelling naar het rijk van de fabels. Afgelopen april, schreef NASA nog over reeks 25:
Solar Cycle 25: Scientist rule out Maunder-type Solar Minimum (HIER)
Solar physicists predict another weak 11-year solar cycle ahead. At the same time, they expect the coming cycle to break the trend of weakening solar activity seen over the past 4 cycles, and they add there’s “no indication we are currently approaching a Maunder-type minimum in solar activity.”
Laat dit op u inwerken. NASA erkent dus dat er een verband is tussen de Maunder ijstijd en een GSM. Maar NASA was heel stellig en overtuigd wat hier aan de hand is. Die Maunder-type solar minimum komt er niet. Slightly above 24, was haar voorspelling. En haar model bleek tot nu toe ook betrouwbaar. Tot nu toe!
Toen kwam Zharkova’s simpele als duidelijke reactie op het commentaar van NASA op haar voorspellingen: “They are wrong.”
Pas geleden heeft NASA een nieuwe berekening gedaan van reeks 25 en het bleek volgens deze forecast (voorspelling) van haar een GSM, de eerste in 200 jaar. Zharkova voorspelde weer klip en klaar: “Ze (NASA) zullen mij gelijk geven, maar ook dit nieuws begraven tussen insignificant nieuws” (They will burry this news).
En zo geschiedde: NASA gaf Zharkova gelijk tussen onbeduidend nieuws (HIER):
The Sun’s activity rises and falls in an 11-year cycle. The forecast for the next solar cycle says it will be the weakest of the last 200 years (NASA). The maximum of this next cycle – measured in terms of sunspot number, a standard measure of solar activity level – could be 30 to 50% lower than the most recent one. The results show that the next cycle will start in 2020 and reach its maximum in 2025.
Maar professor Valentina voorspelde niet alleen de GSM, maar ook hoe zwaar die zou gaan worden (dus hoeveel 11-jarig reeksen hierna komen met weinig of geen sunspots). NASA hoopt inmiddels op een Dalton, die al verschrikkelijke gevolgen had voor bijvoorbeeld de oogsten maar waar nog mee te leven valt, maar Valentina denkt aan iets anders. Bij Maunder waren namelijk 2 polen uit lood, nu zijn het er 4. Als 2 polen elkaar tegenwerken duurt het lang voordat er herstel is (Maunder), Zharkova denkt dat bij 4 het nog veel langer gaat duren. Deze kleine ijstijd, zijn naam zal ‘EDDY’ zijn (waarom niet Zharkova?), zal volgens Zharkova niet alleen langer duren dan Maunder maar ook dieper zijn. Pas rond 2055 zijn we op het dieptepunt. HIER
Deze kleine ijstijd, kan dus 2.5 tot 4 keer zo lang duren dan Maunder, en die duurde al 75 jaar. Er is één politicus die bang was voor de global cooling. Zijn naam: Donald Trump. Hij werd daarom uitgelachen en verketterd door de media. De boeren in Amerika lachen niet meer en zijn al bezig met zaden die sneller ontkiemen, en andere voorbereidingen op de komende kleine ijstijd terwijl wij nog bezig zijn met een warmtepomp, ik kom er zo op terug.
Jack Eddy maakte van een grote legpuzzel één geheel J.A. Eddy was een Amerikaanse astronoom. Hij publiceerde in 1976 een boek die een mijlpaal was in de wetenschap, getiteld: ‘The Maunder Minimum’. Hij borduurde voort op het werk van Maunder en Spörer en identificeerde een tijd tussen 1645 en 1715 als een tijd waar de zonneactiviteit zeer laag was (weinig zonnevlekken) . Hij legde een verband tussen kleine ijstijden en zonnecycli , hij bewees dat een afname in zonneactiviteit resulteert in lagere aarde temperaturen.
Hij interpreteerde hiervoor de telescoop observaties van Galilei en andere tijdgenoten, historische rapporten van de aurora borealis (noorderlicht), visuele waarnemingen van zonnevlekken met het blote oog, opgetekend in het verre oosten tijdens zonsop- en ondergang (China), koolstof-14 dateringen in bomen (indicatie van zonneactiviteit), en hij vond ook andere koude periodes met lage zonneactiviteit.
Toen aan John Allen Eddy gevraagd werd wat hij er van vond dat men de toekomstige kleine ijstijd naar hem wilde vernoemen wuifde hij dat weg, zijn antwoord kwam er op neer dat hij ‘op reuzen had gestaan’. Dat waren met name Edward W. Maunder (naar wie de Maunder ijstijd van de 17e eeuw is vernoemd) en Gustav Spörer (mini ijstijd Spörer is naar hem vernoemd)
GEVOLGEN VAN EEN KLEINE IJSTIJD
Nou ben ik een optimistisch mens, en geloof vast dat we hier doorheen gaan komen. Ik bedoel dat dan natuurlijk ons nageslacht als het heel erg tegen zit. Eerst moet ik vertellen wat er gebeurt in zo’n kleine ijstijd, want het wordt niet alleen maar koud. Verre van dat. Die zonnevlekken zijn enorme magneten, een aantal keren de grote van de aarde per vlek. Ik meen 10x keer de Aardgrootte.. Als die vlekken uit zijn, de zon heeft zijn ogen gesloten voor een lange periode in rust, (althans volgens de menselijke maat) dan neemt zijn magnetische straling op de aarde af. De belangrijkste gevolgen daarvan zijn drieledig: je kunt het HIER nalezen.
Ik baseer me op Michaël E. Mann een Amerikaanse Amerikaanse paleoklimatoloog en auteur van meer dan tachtig vakartikelen. En ik heb het vertaald naar het Nederlands:
Als de pieken van zonnecycli ver uiteen liggen, de elektromagnetische schild is voor een lange periode en tijd afwezig, krijgen kosmische stralingen (HZ: o.a. overblijfselen van super nova’s) de kans in de aardse atmosfeer en zorgen voor aanzienlijke wolkenvorming. Vervolgens komt er meer regen en sneeuw en de planeet wordt koeler.
Kleine IJstijd:
extreme hittegolven
extreme koude-
en extreme droogteperioden en
extreme aansluitende natte periodes
Mann legt uit dat het in de kleine ijstijd niet alleen iets kouder wordt, maar dat er tegelijkertijd ook sprake is van enorme hittegolven, die Engeland bijvoorbeeld teisterden tijdens de Maunder periode. Toen was het zomers regelmatig bloedheet, wellicht rond de 40 graden. Hele droge koude jaren worden afgewisseld met extreem natte jaren. Hoe is dat mogelijk? Mann legt het uit:
Onze aards atmosfeer begint te krimpen, zo leerde observaties van NASA. Lager in onze atmosfeer drijft de zon onze winden, en de meest belangrijke winden, veel belangrijker dan alle anderen bij mekaar, zijn de jet streams. Die verplaatsen zich met 160 km per uur. Wanneer de atmosfeer krimpt ontstaat een ruimte probleem . De Jets beginnen te slingeren. De wolken verplaatsen zich ook iets lager. De Jet stream behouden hun snelheid in een solar maximum en ook hun plaats (Noordpool, Warme zuiden) .
De zon is de herder van de grote winden, maar die herder gaat het laten afweten in een kleine ijstijd, de zon zal enige tijd rusten. De Jet streams gaan schudden als de atmosfeer krimpt. Dat schudden zorgt er dus voor dat tijdens de kleine ijstijd wij soms in de winter te maken krijgen met een noordpool Jet stream (Vortex) en in de zomer een Jet stream uit Afrika. Mann zei ergens dat een kleine ijstijd eigenlijk een tijd is van extreem weer.
Toch denk ik dat de naam ijstijd plausibel is, binnen een ijstijd groeien de gletsjers in Europa namelijk weer aan. Alle gletsjers in de alpen zijn ontstaan en gegroeid in kleine ijstijden, ze zijn in het huidige interglaciaal al een keer bijna verdwenen. In Amerika is toevallig dit jaar de Jet stream in het noorden doorgebroken (Vortex), wat door de media gespind werd als gevolgen global warming.
The Gurardian Polar vortex 2019: eight dead as Arctic air spreads across midwest Thousands of flights canceled, schools close, and post office halts deliveries as Chicago lows approach record The Guardian (HIER)
What is the polar vortex – and how is it linked to climate change? The polar vortex has broken into ‘two swirling blobs of cold air’, bringing the most frigid conditions in decades to the midwest
Door de veranderingen in magnetische stralingen is er gedurende een lange Grand Solar Minimum meer kans op vulkaanuitbarstingen, in zee maar ook op land. Het gaat nu te ver hier diep op in te gaan, op internet is hier veel over te vinden. Ze worden getriggerd door de verandering van de magnetische krachten. Bij een vulkaanuitbarsting wordt de global cooling versterkt, wat vooral tijdens het Dalton tijdperk gebeurde, die een year without a summer tot gevolg had..
Hagel in zomer Het hagelt ook veel vaker in de zomer (veroorzaakt door de kosmische stralingen). Wolken boven de zee zorgen er op langer termijn voor dat minder water verdampt door de zon. In het algemeen wordt het droger, op het noordelijk halfrond met name, maar op sommige plaatsen aldaar is sprake van juist grote water overlast.
Michaël E. Mann, de genoemde Amerikaanse paleoklimatoloog hierover:
In a Grand Solar Minimum, cosmic rays trigger larger flash floods, hailstorms and – due to jet stream disturbance and mixing of atmospheric layers – local long-duration precipitation events (e.g. atmospheric rivers).
At the same time as the increased local flooding events occur, more cloud cover and less sea surface water heating means less evaporation of sea water, specific humidity is reduced, overall rainfall amounts are reduced, despite regional precipitation records and flooding.
vertaald:
In een GSM, zorgt kosmische straling ervoor dat er grotere overstromingen plaatsvinden, hagelstormen en -vooral door de verstoring van de jetstream en het mixen van de atmospherische lagen- lokale, langdurige afzetting van sediment (bijv. atmospherische rivieren). Tegelijkertijd, als deze toegenomen plaatselijke overstromingen plaatsvinden, betekenen meer bewolking en minder opwarming en verdamping van zeewater, een specifieke afname van de vochtigheidsgraad, regenval die over de hele planeet sterk verminderd wordt, ondanks plaatselijk en regionale overstromingen en sedimentafzettingen.
Het grootste probleem kleine ijstijd: kleine zaai- en oogsttijd Kleine ijstijden kenmerkten zich door hongersnood, epidemieën etc. Bekend zijn de zg. honger stenen (HIER) in Tjechië aan de Elbe. Als die tevoorschijn kwamen dan was er sprake van droogte. Mensen schreven jaartallen op deze stenen (vaak uit de kleine ijstijden) en teksten zoals: Zie je mij, huilen “Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine“.
De laatste paar jaar is de oogsttijd al korter geworden in Noord Amerika. En dit jaar dreigt de slechtste oogst in tientallen jaren. Op de website IceAgefarmer (HIER) ontmoeten boeren elkaar en geven elkaar tips, zoals bij een zoektocht naar snel ontkiemend zaad. Veel boeren houden al rekening met een nieuwe kleine ijstijd..! HIER kun je meer lezen over de korte zaai- en oogsttijd en de rampzalige Amerikaanse oogsten die dit jaar worden verwacht. En de mogelijke oplossing, waar opmerkelijk weinig media aandacht voor is in Nederland.
Overigens gelooft Donald Trump wel degelijk in climate change, eerder speculeerde hij op een global cooling en heeft hij ook een team samengesteld die dit moet onderzoeken, tot woede van de media. Happer gelooft dat er sprake is van een beginnende global cooling. ‘Climate denyer’ is zoals gezegd, de nieuwe frame van de media, waarbij ze dat soort fram- woorden gebruiken om mensen die anders denken te stigmatiseren en van een ‘heksenlabel’ te voorzien.
Als je googled op Happer dan zul je zien dat hij overal wordt gedemoniseerd omdat hij niet het narratief volgt die de media voorschrijft, overtuigd van haar eigen gelijk. Ik denk dat de wetenschappers er voor gaan zorgen dat er planten komen die snel ons van eten kunnen voorzien. Overigens zijn er nu al mensen in Amerika die zich voorbereiden om zelf snel ontkiemende zaden te zaaien, en wel thuis.
Mensen treffen voorbereidingen maar het wordt tijd dat de overheid plannen gaat ontwikkelen, over wat te doen in een kleine ijstijd. We hadden al planten kunnen hebben die het relatief goed doen in een kleine ijstijd. De aardappelplant is zo’n plant, afkomstig uit Zuid-Amerika, maar die tijdens de laatste kleine ijstijden enorme belangrijk was om te overleven.
Zien we al wat gebeuren? Zoals Mann al uitlegde moet er eerst sprake zijn van een langdurige solar minimum voordat dit zeer duidelijk effect krijgt. Toch zien we al de eerste voortekenen, en niet alleen de hagel die we gezien hebben in deze zomer in diverse landen in West Europa. Zuidpoolijs groeit sneller aan dan dat die afkalft zegt NASA (HIER):
A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago, is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers. The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice. According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008
Zelfs de grootste apostel van global warming kan er niet meer omheen, Groenland gletsjer groeit weer, (en dat komt door global warming volgens de media..??):
En niet alleen op Groenland groeit het ijs aan. HIER en HIER
According to researchers from the University of Iceland, ALL Icelandic glaciers are projected to expand this year, this would make it the first time the glaciers wouldn’t have shrunk year-on-year in a quarter of a century.
vertaald:
“Volgens de onderzoekers van de Universiteit van IJsland, zullen naar verwachting ALLE GLETSJERS OP IJSLAND gaan groeien dit jaar. Het zou het eerste jaar zijn, dat deze gletsjers op jaarbasis niet krimpen, in de laatste 25 jaar.”
Het zal je niet zijn ontgaan, het is de afgelopen weken ontzettend koud geweest voor de tijd van het jaar. Tijdens het bevrijdingsweekend viel winterse neerslag in Limburg en maandagochtend zat er zelfs een licht ijslaagje op m’n autoruit. Bizar gewoon. Zeker als je bedenkt dat het de afgelopen jaren veel warmer was rond deze tijd. Maar niet alleen in Nederland was het koud, ook in de Alpen was dat het geval. Mei 2019 gaat waarschijnlijk de boeken in als de koudste meimaand sinds 40 jaar.
ATHENE – Zware sneeuwval heeft grote delen van Noord- en Midden-Griekenland veranderd in een winterlandschap en gezorgd voor aanzienlijke verkeersproblemen. Volgens de staatstelevisie ERT was het voor sneeuwploegen moeilijk om de belangrijke noord-zuidverbinding sneeuwvrij te houden. De weg verbindt de havenstad Thessaloniki met Athene.
Spanje heeft zondag een legereenheid ingezet om mensen te helpen die vastzaten in de sneeuw. Duizenden automobilisten waren volgens Spaanse media gestrand op de snelweg AP6 tussen de hoofdstad Madrid en de stad Segovia, in het noordwesten van het land.
NASA: Afwezigheid zonnevlekken kondigt kleine IJstijd aan! - PART II
NASA: Afwezigheid zonnevlekken kondigt kleine IJstijd aan!-PART II
Wat is de rol van CO2?
Dat CO2 een broeikas gas is zal wel kloppen, maar wat is zijn rol? Is die groot? Uit ijsboringen blijkt die rol, zo die er al is, niet doorslaggevend. Verre van dat. Via de luchtbelletjes in het ijs van Groenland weet je wat voor atmosfeer er is geweest. Een pdf over klimaatveranderingen van genevo.nl kun je HIERdownloaden. Een citaat:
Als de grafieken van FIG 1 meer gedetailleerd worden weergegeven, is te zien dat bijvoorbeeld aan het einde van het glacialen de primaire temperatuurstijging steeds is voorafgegaan aan de toename van de broeikasgassen. Er moet dus een andere oorzaak zijn voor deze primaire temperatuurstijgingen. Pas na enkele decennia tot eeuwen volgt dan de stijging van de broeikasgassen en die kunnen dan het hogere temperatuursniveau bestendigen totdat er door de primaire oorzaak een temperatuursdaling komt, weer gevolgd door een daling van de gassen en bestendiging van het lagere niveau.
Het idee is dus dat deze primaire factor een externe factor is, die van buitenaf het aardse klimaatsysteem beïnvloedt. Immers de broeikasgassen spelen een grote rol in het interne klimaat systeem op Aarde. Als het klimaat zou veranderen door interne factoren, zouden de verandering in de broeikasgassen waarschijnlijk in veel gevallen vooraf gaan aan de veranderingen in temperatuur.
Eerst warmte dus, en daarna CO2. Trek zelf je conclusie. De zee neemt CO2 op als het koud is, en geeft die af als het warm is. CO2 volgt de temperatuur, maar leidt die niet. Overigens is er wel een veel groter probleem met CO2. In de tijd van de dino’s was het CO2-gehalte 20 maal zo hoog. Deze is gestaag gedaald. Dat komt omdat de planten de CO2 uit de lucht hebben gezogen en opgeslagen onder de grond als fossiel. Na iedere ijstijd dus minder CO2.
Na de laatste ijstijd was de CO2 tot levensgevaarlijke sterfte-peil gedaald. Het was 180 ppm, en bij 150ppm gaan planten dood. Nog nooit zo laag dus (zie Life on earth was nearly doomed). De warmte heeft de CO2 vanuit zee weer terug gebracht. Gelukkig is de CO2 level nu voorlopig op veilige hoogte. Met dank aan de fabrieken en auto’s…! Toch ben ik geen CO2 adept. Ik ken namelijk niet de gevolgen van te veel CO2. Voorlopig hebben we genoeg in de atmosfeer. Ik ben daarom voorstander van nieuwe energie vormen.
Echter, laten we niet 1000 miljard besteden aan onrendabele energie vormen die nooit de oplossing gaan brengen (behalve in hoofden van politici en papieren werkelijkheden), maar laten we eerst zorgen dat er een goede vervanging is voor fossiel. En die staat er aan te komen. Thorium centrales en in China zijn ze al heel ver met kernfusie. Duurt nog wel 20 jaar. We kunnen nu al over op kleine (minder gevaarlijke) mini kerncentrales, als je zo graag af wilt van CO2. Dus geen paniekvoetbal dus en we hebben nu wel grotere problemen aan onze hoofd als die deskundigen gelijk hebben.
Grafische weergave uit 2009 van de zonne-activiteit in de afgelopen 20 jaar. De mega-invloed van de cycli van de zon, op het weer op Aarde, zijn nog nauwelijks onderwerp van wetenschappelijk onderzoek.. Laten we ons daarom leiden, door de enkelen die dit wel conscencieus doen..! Zoals professor Zharkova.
Wat nu? Wat er op dit moment moet gebeuren is bewustwording. Dat de media zwijgt over de voorspelde GSM en dat voorspelt niet veel goeds. Op basis van huidige berichten wordt elke weersverandering, die goed te verklaren zijn door de verminderde zonnen activiteit, gespind als oorzaak van Global Warming, soms zelfs als de schuld van Trump. Het werd warmer op aarde, maar ze vertellen er niet bij dat het ook op Mars warmer werd, een groot deel van de warmte te verklaren is door een solar maximum die we gehad hebben. (HIER),
Zharkova heeft ook een 2000 jaar cyclus ontdekt, die begonnen is rond het jaar 1600. Heeft te maken met de stand van de aarde en hoe de elips rond de zon is (HIER). Tot het jaar 2600 zal de temperatuur stijgen, tot 2.5, tot 3 graden max, ook al stoppen we met CO2 te produceren. De 1000 jaar daarna zal zij weer dalen. In de Romeinse tijd was het ook zo warm als rond 2600, in Schotland kon je toen grapefruits verbouwen. Ook de middeleeuwen kende een hele warme periode. Zie haar paper, waarvan de link aan het begin staat van dit document.
Het probleem is, de MSM media noch de alternatieve media, op enkele uitzondering na zoals WantToKnow, erover willen berichten; en geloof me ik heb het geprobeerd! In Amerika zijn er wel steeds meer alternatieve media die los gaan op het orgel. Het punt is, de overheid moet voorzorgsmaatregelen nemen, en wel nu! Ik maak me daar zorgen over, dat men hoopt dat het wel overdrijft, maar de voorspellingen nu doen het ergste vermoeden. Eigenlijk wilde ik dit artikel niet schrijven maar het overlaten aan onderzoekers bij de (alternatieve) media maar kreeg nul op mijn rekest.
Ik denk overigens dat het niet lang meer duurt voordat ook de alternatieve media aan banden is gelegd, onze kinderen zullen niet meer weten hoe het is om alle informatie van de wereld beschikbaar te hebben die alle invalshoeken toont. Dit laat zien dat de alternatieve media belangrijk kan zijn, als klokkenluider. We moeten de media en politici laten merken dat steeds meer mensen geïnformeerd willen worden over dit mogelijke grote gevaar in plaats van het hoofd in het zand te steken.
Op het moment dat er genoeg mensen zijn met dezelfde mening zal de media wel moeten berichten over de GSM, daarna zal de overheid in actie moeten komen. U kunt er bij helpen. Als er weer een Vortex doorbreekt, wellicht boven Europa, en de NOS framed dit als gloobal warming en de schuld van Trump, mail ze dan dat dit wellicht komt door de grand solar minimum en het krimpen van onze atmosfeer, en dat we bezig zijn om een kleine ijstijd in te gaan.
Als de media een melding maakt over alweer een hittegolf van boven de 37 graden, mail de media dan dat dit juist een kenmerk is van een ijstijd. Doe de citaten erbij uit bijvoorbeeld dit document of google zelf verder. Wilt u misschien meer weten over de GSM en echt de diepte in dan adviseer ik u deze video serie aan van Scott Chapman: (HIER). Als er bewustvorming is dan kan er ook wat gedaan worden.
Het kan natuurlijk ook zijn dat een KNMI deskundige die dit leest, van mening is dat er helemaal niets van klopt wat ik geschreven heb, of wat anderen (Eddy, Mann, Zharkova, Galilei en vele anderen de afgelopen eeuwen) hierover zeiden. Dat kan, misschien zie ik het fout en mijn bronnen ook, en ziet de KNMI het goed. Maar dan zou ik zeggen: overtuig ons KNMI! Vertel ons dan, waarom deze geconstateerde GSM geen voorbode is van een nieuwe kleine ijstijd, of dat het nog te vroeg is om dat te concluderen (misschien is dat wel zo, ik hoop het oprecht) maar dat jullie het wel serieus nemen. Dat zou al een hele stap zijn! Maar door stilte over dit onderwerp komen we niet verder.
The French Riviera was decimated in 2013, then Dhaka was destroyed in 2015 but Tokyo was saved in 2017. And NASA’s biennial asteroid impact simulation has just ended with its latest disaster – New York in ruins. But although this planetary defence exercise only simulates the worst-case scenario, NASA knows the threat of an asteroid strike is only too real.
Despite a simulated eight years of preparation, scientists and engineers tried but failed to deflect an apocalypse asteroid in NASA’s latest planetary defence exercise.
The fictional killer asteroid is, of course, highly unlikely, but we wanted the issues to be exposed and discussed
NASA engineer Paul Chodas
The simulation has become a regular event among the international community of "planetary defence” experts.
The latest edition began with the following alert: an asteroid approximately 330 to 1,000ft (100 to 300m) in diameter had been sighted and given a one percent chance of hitting the Earth on April 29, 2027.
The conference saw some 200 NASA staff, astronomers and emergency response specialists received new information, make decisions and receive further updates from the organisers of the game, designed by a NASA aerospace engineer.
As fictional months passed in the simulation, the probability of the giant space rock crashing into Earth rose to 10 percent – and then to 100 percent certainty.
NASA launched a probe in 2021 to examine the threat up close with astronomers later confirming the asteroid was headed straight to the Denver area and that the western US city would be destroyed.
2019 planetary defence exercise: NASA has simulated an asteroid strike on New Yrk
(Image: Getty)
2019 planetary defence exercise: NASA is preparing for the worst-case scenario
(Image: Getty)
The major space powers of the United States, Europe, Russia, China and Japan decided to build six "kinetic impactors" – probes designed to hit the asteroid and change its trajectory.
It took time to build the impactors and wait for the right launch window. The impacts were set for August 2024.
Three impactors managed to hit the asteroid. The main body was deflected, but a smaller fragment broke-off and continued on a deadly path, now towards the eastern US.
Washington considered sending a nuclear bomb to deflect the 60m space rock – replicating a successful strategy that saved Tokyo in the 2017 simulation – but it was crippled by political disagreements, meaning all that remained to do was prepare for impact.
With six months to go, experts could only predict that the asteroid was headed to the New York area.
2019 planetary defence exercise: Some 200 NASA staff participated in the asteroid strike simulation
(Image: Getty)
2019 planetary defence exercise: The 1908 Tunguska explosion flattened 2,000 square km of forest
(Image: Getty)
The questions raised by the scenario were endless, from how best to evacuate millions of people.
Victoria Andrews, NASA's deputy planetary defence officer said: ”If you knew your home was going to be destroyed six months from now, and that you weren't going back again, would you keep paying your mortgage?"
Participants debated insurance and legal issues at length: the United States did save Denver, but accidentally destroyed New York.
Alissa Haddaji, coordinator of a group of 15 international space lawyers said: ”In this situation, under international law, the United States, regardless of fault, as the launching state, would absolutely be liable to pay compensation.”
The weirdest stars we've ever seen have astronomers utterly baffled
The weirdest stars we've ever seen have astronomers utterly baffled
Strange stars suggest something unusual is out theresololos/Getty
By Leah Crane
These may be the weirdest stars we’ve ever seen. A pair of stars about 360 light years away experienced 28 dips in their light over the course of 87 days, measurements that would normally indicate an orbiting system of planets – except that the timings of the dips seem totally random. Astronomers are completely stumped.
The stars, collectively called HD 139139, were spotted behaving strangely by the Kepler space telescope before it ran out of fuel and ceased observations. Kepler hunted exoplanets by watching for regular decreases in stars’ light caused by a planet passing between the star and the telescope on its orbit. These passes are called transits.
The dips in HD 139139’s light look just like transits, all similar in size and shape, but when Andrew Vanderburg at the University of Texas at Austin and his colleagues took a closer look at the data, they found that their timings seemed totally random – the researchers calculated that no more than four of the dips could be caused by the same orbiting object.
“We’ve been looking at stars with this kind of precision for about ten years now, but this is the first time that we’ve found something that looks like looks like a transiting planet but has no apparent periodicity,” says Hugh Osborn at the Laboratory of Astrophysics of Marseille in France. “Something weird is going on.”
If the transits are caused by planets, the researchers calculated that there would have to be lots of them, far more than any other planetary system we’ve ever seen. “I could construct for you a system of planets that would explain these dips, but it would be really contrived,” says Vanderburg. “It just doesn’t feel right.” And neither do any of the other explanations the team came up with.
One potential explanation was a disintegrating planet or disc of asteroids puffing out dust as they pass in front of the stars, which blocks out some light and then dissipates. But a disintegrating planet would still produce patterns in the transit timings, and the asteroids would have to all be emitting dust clouds of the same size and density, which is unlikely.
Sunspots and internal variations in the star’s light don’t quite work either, because they would have to appear and disappear in a matter of hours. The dark spots that we have seen on our own sun last from days to months, so this would require a new type of sunspot.
With all of the simple explanations ruled out, it’s tempting to consider that the light variations might be caused by a huge alien structure that has been constructed around the stars. We cannot definitively rule that out, but both Osborn and Vanderburg consider it highly unlikely.
“In astronomy we have a long history of not understanding something, thinking it’s aliens, and later finding out it’s something else,” says Vanderburg. “The odds are pretty good that it’s going to be another one of those.”
Er is iets vreemds aan de hand. Waarom dit nu de meest mysterieuze ster in ons sterrenstelsel is
Er is iets vreemds aan de hand. Waarom dit nu de meest mysterieuze ster in ons sterrenstelsel is
Er is opnieuw een ster ontdekt die onverklaarbare helderheidsdipjes vertoont. Het gaat om de ster HD 139139, die op zo’n 360 lichtjaar staat.
In 87 dagen registreerde ruimtetelescoop Kepler in totaal 28 van deze helderheidsdipjes.
Aangezien ze op willekeurige momenten plaatsvinden, is het uitgesloten dat ze kunnen worden verklaard door de aanwezigheid van planeten, stellen Andrew Vanderburg van de Universiteit van Texas in Austin en zijn collega’s.
Voor het eerst
Het is overigens voor het eerst dat er een ster is gevonden die op willekeurige momenten raar gedrag vertoont.
“Er is iets vreemds aan de hand,” zei Hugh Osborn van het Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille in Frankrijk.
Het is ook onwaarschijnlijk dat de dipjes worden veroorzaakt door een planetoïdengordel of zonnevlekken op de ster.
Buitenaardse megastructuur
Sommigen vermoeden dat de helderheidsvariaties het gevolg zijn van een groot bouwwerk dat om de ster heen is gebouwd, een zogenaamde buitenaardse megastructuur.
Het is niet uitgesloten dat we hier inderdaad met zo’n megastructuur te maken hebben, al achten de onderzoekers de kans zeer klein.
A British witness reported watching a “string of spherical red orbs” rising into the sky, according to testimony in Case 91153. The witness was walking home at about 8:15 p.m. on January 26, 2018. “I live in a small town about 25 miles east of London,” the witness stated. “As I walked along the pavement, something in the night sky caught my eye. I stopped, turned to the west and looked into the sky. I saw a string of small, bright red orbs rising up into the sky at an angle (not vertically). They were as many as 20 small red orbs, all the same size, all constantly moving at the same speed, close together, moving as if attached to a cord (like a string of red Christmas tree lights).
The orbs were a constant bright red, constant spherical shape, and constant speed. They were quite some distance away, maybe 10 miles away, so it is difficult to estimate the speed, but these objects were covering quite a distance in the sky, so I judged them to be moving fast, at a steep angle and much faster than planes, and very nimbly.”
The witness described their movement. “As I watched, they rose up from 30 degrees, following each other up into the sky to about 60 degrees up, then moved in a circular motion at the same speed, swirling around within a large cloud that was in the sky, some traveled back down again. The red orbs were some miles away, which would put them above East London area. The red orbs were much bigger than aeroplane lights that I’m well used to seeing in the night sky above my hometown. I live directly under a busy flight corridor, so I am used to looking at planes gliding overhead (east-west), flying to several major airports in the London area. These red orbs moved fast, and swirling around in a tight turning radius, nothing like how a plane would move, and there were so many of them packed together, up to 20 all following each other. I got my phone out of my pocket and checked the time. I stood, rooted to the spot, watching these red orbs fly around the sky for several minutes. I was surprised by what I was seeing in the sky, it caught me by surprise. I did not stop to think that this might be worth taking a picture or video of. I wanted to get home, so I continued walking back home, leaving the red orbs still moving around the sky.”
“I’m not a believer, but you know, I guess anything is possible.”
If you’ve been curious about what President Trump thinks about UFO’s, in an interview with Tucker Carlson from the Fox News Channel, which took place while the president was in South Korea recently, he revealed that he’s “not a believer” in unidentified flying objects. If you’re curious about what he thinks in particular about the UFOs that Navy pilots have been reporting and which have been recorded on radar, he had this to say:
“Well, I don’t want to really get into it too much. But personally, I tend to doubt it.”
That answer comes after the president was briefed on those sightings by the Pentagon, Navy officials and staff from the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. Sen. Mark Warner, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, other members of Congress and their staffers of the Armed Service and Defense Appropriations committees were also briefed. Is the president saying he doubts that they are unidentified or he doubts that they are alien?
“I mean, you have people that swear by it, right? And pilots have come in and they said — and these are pilots that have — not pilots that are into that particular world, but we have had people saying that they’ve seen things.”
“That particular world.” Is the president implying that people who believe in, research or are at least open to the possibility of UFOs existing are in some way different than others? Does this make them somehow less believable? Carlson didn’t ask the president about the UFOs that have been seen in his own airspace. UFOs were seen following his plane during his campaign and twice on the day of his inauguration. Four were reported over the Trump Turnberry golf course in Scotland in 2018. One would think that the president would have been notified – either in his capacity as commander-in-chief or as the owner of the course. Wouldn’t he have wanted to know?
Here’s a better question … would he have believed the report, especially if it had come from someone ‘in that particular world’? He seemed to answer this question when Carlson pressed him about a report that the U.S. is in possession of UFO wreckage at a facility on an Air Force Base – which has been rumored for decades about multiple crashes and multiple bases.
“I don’t assume it’s correct. But, I have an open mind, Tucker.”
So, even if it’s a person who will “swear by it,” even if it’s evidence that warrants briefings by high-ranking military officials to high-ranking government officials all the way up to the president himself, he still doesn’t assume it’s correct?
The president has given similar answers to two different news channels on opposite ends of the political spectrum but possibly similar ends of the UFO one. It would be easy to assume he’s being evasive for national security reasons … except he’s ignored those reasons for other questions.
Is it too late?
The Navy pilots have identified themselves and risked their careers to report what they saw. These are members of the military honored on the Fourth of July … and are now “‘in that particular world.” Can we still keep saying there are two of these worlds?
Get ready, Mr. President. These questions are not going away.
Mold in your house can make you sick, weaken the foundation and make it impossible to sell. If your house is the International Space Station, it’s even worse. Although the crew is only renting and the foundation remains solid, a new study found that the mold they’re dealing with on the space station is not only unhealthy but mutant … and that mutation may make it immune to the radiation that is so deadly to humans in space. That means this mutant mold could easily survive trips to other planets and contaminate their houses too … not to mention possibly killing the life forms living in them. Is the best weapon against space aliens that sandwich that’s been in the office refrigerator since last year?
“If we’re planning a long duration mission, we can plan on having these mold spores with us because probably they will survive the space travel.”
In fact, they’ll survive far better than the rest of the crew, according to a presentation by Marta Cortesão, a microbiologist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne, at the 2019 Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon 2019). Mold was everywhere on the MIR space station and continues to thrive on the ISS, but it was assumed that the radiation bombardment encountered during interplanetary space travel or living on a planet with little or no radiation barriers, like Mars, would kill molds, especially Aspergillus and Pennicillium, the two most common molds on the ISS.
To test that theory, Cortesão bombed common black mold (Aspergillus niger) with what she called “stupid amounts” of radiation – 1000 grays (a gray is a measure of the amount of absorbed radiation energy – one gray is one joule of radiation energy per kilogram of matter). For comparison, the radiation that is encountered on 180-day trip to Mars is 0.7 gray and the radiation on the surface of Mars is 0.2 gray per year. Nothing should be able to survive 1000 gray — right, Marta Cortesão? RIGHT?
“We now know that [fungal spores] resist radiation much more than we thought they would, to the point where we need to take them into consideration when we are cleaning spacecraft, inside and outside. If we’re planning a long duration mission, we can plan on having these mold spores with us because probably they will survive the space travel.”
Probably? That’s enough radiation to instantly pop all of the popcorn in the solar system (or something like that) and it didn’t kill a simple black mold! Cortesão obviously isn’t planning to be on a mission to Mars. And “take them into consideration when we are cleaning spacecraft, inside and outside” … has she seen our houses? Mold is everywhere! Being a true microbiologist, Cortesão puts in a good word for mold.
“It’s not only bad, a human pathogen and a food spoiler, it also can be used to produce antibiotics or other things needed on long missions.”
In other words, it may kill you and any other life forms you encounter, but … penicillin! The study does point out that, even though the mold may be immune to radiation, something else encountered on a space mission might kill it. And this is good news? If it can kill something as tough as this mutant mold, won’t it kill us too? And don’t forget, we won’t have any penicillin if it doesn’t because the mold is dead.
Is this what Mars will look like?
Are we REALLY ready for a mission to Mars? Shouldn’t we figure out how to rid our Earth space stations of mold first?
Winged Anomaly 'Bird' captured by Curiosity on Mars
Winged Anomaly 'Bird' captured by Curiosity on Mars
The black object in SOL 2446 clearly shows characteristics of a winged anomaly that flies independently through the sky, whether it is a UFO or a bird.
It certainly is not a camera error or dirt on the camera lens since this object only appears in 1 image taken by the Curiosity. The images taken shortly before and after do not show the object.
The transcript of a conversation between a US Navy Vice Admiral and a leading scientist discussing a failed attempt to gain access to a highly classified program involving a crashed extraterrestrial craft has been recently released online. The conversation took place on October 16, 2002, and involved the retired Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson, speaking with Dr. Eric W. Davis, a scientist working on the feasibility of exotic propulsion systems with EarthTech International, an advanced technology think tank established in Austin, Texas.
In the 15 page document comprising the transcript, summary notes and an accompanying letter, Davis describes what Wilson told him about an April 10, 1997 “briefing” where he (Wilson) received information from former Apollo astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell and Dr. Steven Greer (founder of the Disclosure Project) about a classified UFO program that they had codeword information about. At the time, Wilson was a Rear Admiral (upper class); Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency; and Vice Director for Intelligence (VJ2), for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a position he held from November 1994 to September 1997.
When Wilson inquired into the program’s existence from a regulatory body created for Special Access Programs, he learned it involved a corporate Research and Development effort involving a retrieved extraterrestrial craft but was denied access by three corporate officials working for a major US aerospace contractor.
The 1997 briefing was first publicly discussed by Greer and his associate Shari Adamiak only a month after it occurred and was corroborated by Mitchell over a decade later. In a May 1997 interview with Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM Greer said:
Joint Chiefs of staff level fellow that I briefed while I was in Washington about a month ago … After he looked at all this and heard the witness, he turned to us and said: ‘Well I have no doubt this is true but I am horrified that I hadn’t known about it’…Because of his position. And very, very senior … I can’t say who it was but a very, very senior position…And then they begin to come to grips with well: ‘Who the hell does know about it, what is going on here?’ And then they become frighten[ed].
Years later, Greer released a National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) document containing code words and locations that sparked Wilson’s failed attempt to gain access to the classified UFO program. In a workshop Greer explained the NRO document’s contents and what happened when Wilson investigated it:
“It’s the National Reconnaissance Office document. …..The reason it’s important is not so much for its content… ….. Take note of the distribution list, please. ….. …….’Blue Fire’, which is a code name, 1991, Commander’s Net, Royal Op’s, Cosmic Op’s…so, cosmic clearance…you’ve heard of this? It’s not a myth. It’s real. Maj Op’s, MAJI…It’s MAJIC Op’s. It goes through a whole bunch of them…Nellis Division, all these code numbers and you get down to some really interesting things. … this secret document went to the admiral [Admiral Tom Wilson] prior to our meeting, and he actually recognized one of these entities and made an inquiry, and it was being run by a contractor. ….. And the contractor…one of these corporate contractors…when he called them up, he said, ‘I’m Admiral Tom Wilson…at that time he was Head of Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff… I want to be read into this project.’ Guess what happened? They said, ‘Sir, you don’t have a need to know.’ This is the guy who’s supposed to give the intelligence briefings for the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States. He was told, ‘You don’t have a need to know’… and Admiral Wilson said, ‘Goddamn it, if I don’t have a need to know, who does?’ They said, ‘Sir, we cannot discuss this with you further’ and they hung up and blocked his line. This all happened before the stand-up meeting I did for [him with] Edgar Mitchell…6th man to walk on the moon…myself, my military adviser, and a few other people met with the Admiral in what’s called a ‘stand-up’ briefing. I was doing the presenting. It was supposed to be 45 minutes.
In 2007 Mitchell began publicly confirming that the briefing had indeed taken place, corroborating what Greer had revealed a decade earlier.
A detailed chronology of articles and interviews referring to the 1997 Wilson briefing is provided by Croatian UFO researcher Giuliano Marinkovic.
The transcript of the 2002 conversation between Wilson and Davis was first discussed in radio interviews by UFO researchers Grant Cameron and Richard Dolan in December 2018. Cameron said he was given the 15 page document, which he shared with Michael W. Hall a former lawyer and Superior Court judge. Hall has given several interviews in March 2019 discussing the document’s origins and authenticity.
Cameron, Dolan, and Hall believe the document is authentic, and its consistency with what Greer and Mitchell had earlier revealed does point to this. I contacted Dr. Eric Davis to comment on the document’s authenticity, and he replied saying: “I have no comment on this.” If the document was a hoax, I see no reason why Dr. Davis would not have said so.
All this leads me to conclude that the document is an authentic transcript of what Dr. Davis and Admiral Wilson discussed back in 2002 about the April 1997 meeting and Wilson’s subsequent investigation. The transcript was very recently released online and are available for public viewing.
The transcript, summary notes, and accompanying letter provide compelling documentary support that the 1997 briefing had occurred, exactly as Greer and Mitchell had reported up to two decades earlier. Importantly, the notes substantiate one of Greer’s major claims that he was regularly briefing senior officials in the Clinton Administration about the UFO coverup – something many UFO researchers had previously dismissed or ridiculed.
The transcript provides a fascinating insight into how a US Navy admiral who was Vice Director for Intelligence (VJ2), for the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, was denied access by corporate officials to a classified UFO program, which he firmly believed fell under his field of responsibility.
The briefing and unsuccessful investigation did not negatively impact Wilson’s career. Two years later, in May 1999, Wilson was promoted to Vice Admiral and became the 13th Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), a position he served in until July 2002.
Three months after his retirement, Wilson met with Davis to discuss the 1997 meeting and its aftermath. In the transcript, we learn about Wilson’s perspective on what had happened.
Presumably, the recording and transcription of Wilson and Davis’ conversation were intended for a small audience at EarthTech International, founded by Dr. Hal Puthoff, which was studying exotic propulsion systems, and releasing feasibility studies of them to interested scientists and journals.
In 2009, Davis and EarthTech included some of these exotic propulsion feasibility studies as Defense Intelligence Reference Documents, two of which were first leaked online in December 2017 by Corey Goode who says a confidential DIA source gave him them.
In the transcript, Davis (EWD) describes how Wilson (TW) began by confirming that the April 1997 meeting did take place and involved Greer, Mitchell, and US Naval Reserve Commander Willard H. Miller, who was Greer’s top military advisor.
Miller played a critical role in the various “UFO briefings” Greer gave senior officials and politicians during the Clinton administration:
TW: Confirmed Greer/Miller/Mitchell gave talk in Pentagon Conference room. Adm Mike Crawford, Gen. Pat Hughes (Hughes his boss) were present (others too.) Date April “97. (Ed Mitchell said 4/9/947.) After group broke up, Miller/Wilson talked (privately) 2 hours on UFOs, MJ-12, Roswell, crashed UFOs/alien bodies, etc. TW intrigued – knew about intelligence on US mil/intel UFO close encounters – and foreign gov’t encounters. Seen records. Told Miller. [Transcript/Summary p. 1]
Wilson was here acknowledging that the serving Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. General Pat Hughes, also sat in on the meeting. After the meeting broke up, Miller and Wilson continued to discuss issues that had been raised:
TW: Yes, Miller asked the question on MJ-12/UFO cabal – crashed UFO. Confirmed he called Miller ca. late June ’97 and told that he/Miller was right – there is such an organization in existence. [Transcript/Summary p. 1]
Wilson was here acknowledging that after being informed about the existence of the classified UFO program by Greer and Mitchell in April 1997, he had inquired into the program’s existence, and discovered that MJ-12 was real and that there indeed was a UFO cabal running classified operations involving crashed UFOs. This accounted for why Admiral Wilson later failed to gain access to the crashed UFO program, as explained later in Davis’ summary notes.
Miller subsequently told Greer and Mitchell about what Wilson had revealed to him in June 1997, after he [Wilson] was denied access to the classified program that Greer and Mitchell had told him about earlier in April. Admiral Wilson [TW] was furious that Miller had told Greer and Mitchel about Wilson’s failure to access it, as Davis’ [EWD] transcript make clear:
TW: Very furious – very angry about Miller (facial expression tense, angry voice)
Violated personal and professional trust – especially among intelligence colleagues/Navy officers
There’s Navy camaraderie among officers – brotherhood
Violated that and confidentiality
EWD: How?
TW: Miller told Greer their conversation
Who knows whom else he and Greer told. (EWD note – Miller told Ed Mitchell who only told me in 1999)
The significance of all this is that Admiral Wilson did not want the details of what he learned during his investigation of the classified program that Greer and Mitchell had first brought to his attention becoming public. By telling Greer, Commander Miller had in Wilson’s opinion broken trust shared between naval intelligence officers to keep the information confidential. That is why he was so angry.
However, if it were not for Miller taking the risk he had, Greer and the world would probably not have learned the truth of what happened, and how corporate contractors had sidelined Wilson and US naval intelligence over a classified reverse engineering program of a crashed extraterrestrial vehicle.
In part two, I review what Admiral Wilson told Dr. Davis about the classified UFO crash retrieval program and its significance.
[Cont. from Part 1] In the transcript/summary of a 2002 conversation between Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson and Dr. Eric Davis it was revealed that a crashed extraterrestrial vehicle was being reverse engineered by a major aerospace company. Wilson first learned about the classified UFO program through a National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) document shared with him at a confidential April 10, 1997 meeting with Dr. Steven Greer, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, and Navy Commander Willard Miller.
The recently released transcript describes what Admiral Wilson [TW] told Dr. Davis [EWD] about Wilson’s efforts up to June 1997 to learn the truth about the classified UFO program, and the associated reverse engineering effort revealed to him in the April meeting.
EWD: Okay then, what happened in April-June ’97?
TW: After parting with Miller (week later, he thinks) – I made calls, knocked on a few doors, talked to people – went on for 45 days (thereabouts) on and off
Suggestion came from Ward (Gen. M. Ward) to go through the records groups files (like an index system) in OUSDAT (Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology)
Ran into Bill Perry in May ’97 – talked about this quietly – he suggested the same thing
They told me of a special projects record group not belonging to usual SAP – a special subset of the unacknowledged/carve-outs/waived programs – not belonging to usual SAP divisions as organized in ’94 by Perry himself – set apart from rest but buried/covered by conventional SAPs. (Transcript/Summary, pp. 6-7)
Wilson was here referring to different categories of Special Access Programs (SAPs), where the most important – unacknowledged/carve-outs/waived – were hidden behind conventional SAPs.
The method of hiding the most highly classified programs behind less classified ones was verified in one of the NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden called Sentry Eagle. It graphically depicted how Exceptionally Compartmented Information (ECI – an Intelligence Community classification similar to an Unacknowledged SAP used by the Pentagon) would be hidden behind a Non-ECI Program (similar classification status to a conventional SAP)
NSA leaked slide showing SENTRY EAGLE program where different DHS, DOD, and NSA clasified programs are hidden within less classified national programs.
(NSA)
Wilson went on to describe the aerospace company that ran the classified reverse engineering effort, without naming it:
EWD: Who was the project contractor or USG agency that runs the program?
TW: An aerospace technology contractor – one of the top ones in US
EWD: Who?
TW: Core secret – can’t tell
EWD: Defense contractor?
TW: Yes, the best one of them.
The reference to the “best one of them” firmly points to Lockheed Martin’s Skunkworks division which has a long track record of successfully working on cutting edge aerospace programs. For example, Skunkworks former Director, Ben Rich, was fond of ending lectures by declaring: “We now have the technology to take ET home”.
Slide Ben Rich used to end lectures with comment about taking ET home
Wilson then explained what happened when he discovered which company was running the classified UFO program and contacted it to gain access:
EWD: What happened with you found contractor?
TW: I made several calls (end of May ’97), first to Paul, Mike & Perry to confirm I had right contractor and program manager to talk to.
EWD: They confirm?
TW: Yes.
EWD: Then?
TW: (End of May ’97) Made three calls to the program manager – one of them conference call with security director and corporate attorney.
Confusion on their part at to why I was looking for them and what I wanted from them or wanted to know about.
Wilson next explains how he was denied access to the classified UFO program by the three corporate officials (program manager, security director, and attorney):
TW: I told threesome I wanted formal briefing, tour, etc. – was exploiting my regulatory authority as Deputy Director DIA/Assistant Joint Chief of Staff J-2 – Told them my not being briefed was oversight they needed to correct – I demanded!
TW: They needed to discuss this (his demand) so hung up. Got called 2 days later and they said they don’t want to talk on phone and arranged for face-to-face meeting at their facility.
EWD: Did you go?
TW: Yes, ten days later (mid-June or so). Flew out there
Met in their conference room in their secure vault
Wilson describes how the “watch committee” told him about a prior incident years ago where the present security system was set up after an agreement was reached with the Pentagon’s Special Access Programs Oversight Committee (SAPOC), which was overhauled in 1994, very likely due to the incident Wilson was told about. The agreement gave the corporate contractor running certain categories of SAPs the authority to restrict access to UFO related programs from Pentagon officials regardless of their rank and position:
– [TW] Said after that episode a formal agreement was struck with Pentagon people (SAPOC) to prevent this in future – didn’t want a repeat
– Special criteria were established in agreement
A special circumstance that must meet rigorous access criteria set by contractor committee
No USG personnel are to gain access unless they met the criteria – to be administered by contractor committee (program director, attorney, security director) irregardless of the tickets and position USG personnel possess
The “watch committee” told Admiral Wilson that despite him being Deputy Director of the DIA and Vice Director of Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that he was not on the “bigot list” – those with a “need to know” access – who could be briefed about the UFO program:
TW: They said my tickets were all confirmed and valid, but I was not on the bigot list
My tickets alone were not enough
I didn’t meet the special criteria so need to know authorization was not being granted….
TW: Argued more – they wouldn’t accept my arguments that they fell under my statutory oversight and regulatory authority as Deputy Director DIA – under purview for my right to have need to know (oversight, audit, justification issues, etc., etc.)
Regulatory and statutory authority as Deputy Director DIA not relevant or pertinent to nature of their program!
Then they pulled out their bigot list to convince me otherwise – several pages long – dated 1990, updated 1993. [Transcript/Summary, pp. 11-12]
The transcription goes on to cover Wilson and Davis’ conversation about names on the bigot list, and who in the Pentagon and White House was allowed access:
EWD: Who was on it? Recognize names?
TW: That is core secret.
Willing to say that most were program employees – names and titles (job titles) – civilians – didn’t recognize any military personnel – could be there.
EWD: Any politicians?
TW: No
No White House names, no President!
No Congressional peopleµ
No Congressional staffers
EDW: Any in Clinton or Bush Sr. Administrations?
TW: No! But handful of names were Pentagon individuals I recognized – few from OUSDAT, one from another department, another at the NSC who is Pentagon SES employee. [Transcript/Summary, p. 12]
Stunningly, Wilson learned that no members of the Legislative (Congress) or Executive (White House) branches of government were briefed about the corporate UFO program. Only a few Pentagon officials were given access. This corroborates what Greer and others have been claiming for decades over the unconstitutional nature of the secrecy system developed for the UFO issue.
Next, the transcript elaborates on how Wilson tried to gain access by identifying the type of program that was underway attempting to link it to his official field of responsibility as Deputy Director DIA:
Finally, Wilson was told that the UFO program was a reverse engineering program of a recovered extraterrestrial vehicle, exactly what Greer, Mitchell, and Miller, had told him at the April 10, 1997 meeting. Importantly, Wilson expressed his surprise thinking that the UFO term was merely a cover for acquired foreign aerospace technology built by the USSR or China:
I asked what they were then
Loud groan from Program Manager
Security Director and attorney say it’s okay to say it.
EWD: Say what?
TW: There were a reverse engineering program –
Something recovered years ago in the past
Technological hardware was recovered
So I thought they meant recovered Soviet/Chinese, etc. hardware and reverse engineer it – like a missile or intel platform or aircraft – actually came to meeting expecting to find a sensitive foreign collection and reverse engineering operation – thought “UFOs” used as a cover for that –
So I said that and they said they weren’t that either
They had (program manager talking) a craft – an intact craft they believed could fly …
Program manager said they didn’t know where it was from [they had some ideas on this] – it was technology that was not of this Earth – not made by man – not by human hands [Transcript/Summary, pp. 12-13]
Wilson next described that he was told the corporation had encountered great difficulty in its reverse engineering efforts:
[TW] Said they were trying to understand and exploit technology: their program was going on for years and years with very slow progress
Agonizingly slow with little or no success – painful lack of collaboration to get help from outside community of experts and facilities to assist effort – must remain isolated and use own facilities and cleared personnel – tough environment to work – about 400-800 (bigot list count) workers varying in number funding or personnel changes. [Transcript/Summary, pp. 12-13]
When Wilson threatened to go to the Special Access Program Oversight Committee (SAPOC) he was told to go ahead by the corporate “watch committee” and was eventually denied access by the Senior Review Group running SAPOC Pentagon committee set up to oversee Special Access Programs:
TW: Before last week of June (’97)
They told me (TW) that they were sustaining the contractor, that I was to immediately drop the matter and let it go – forget about it as I did not have purview over their project, it didn’t fall within my oversight, etc.
I became very angry – started yelling when should have kept my mouth shut…
… Senior Review Group chairman said if I didn’t follower their suggestion that I would not see Director DIA promotion, get early retirement, lose 1 or 2 stars along the way
Really incredibly angry – upset over this – livid!!!
Why such a big deal over this considering the position of trust I have in the Pentagon – I do have relevant regulatory/statutory authority over their program – that’s my position!!! [Transcript/Summary, p. 14]
The refusal to grant access was the critical moment that Wilson realized that the corporation was being supported by a powerful group linked to the Pentagon to hide the corporation’s reverse engineering of an extraterrestrial spacecraft, as an Unacknowledged/waived SAP, hidden within the labyrinth of conventional SAPs conducted by the Pentagon and its corporate contractors.
The refusal was ultimately why Wilson believed that a UFO cabal/ MJ-12 was in charge of UFO related projects, and even senior officials at the DIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were out of the loop. This is what he told Commander Miller back in June 1997, who in turn relayed Wilson’s conclusions to Steven Greer and Edgar Mitchell who respectively revealed more details over the next two decades.
There are several important conclusions from Admiral Thomas Wilson’s failed efforts to learn about and gain access to a classified UFO program that involved a clandestine corporate effort to reverse engineering a retrieved extraterrestrial spacecraft as described in the leaked 15 page document received by Canadian UFO research Grant Cameron in November 2018, anduploaded to the interneton April 19, 2019.
First, Wilson’s failure to gain access to the classified UFO program described in parts one & twoof this series confirms one of Dr. Steven Greer’s major contentions that senior military officials are out of the loop when it comes to UFOs, despite the obvious national security implications they carry. The “bigot list” mentioned by Wilson in his conversation with Dr. Eric Davis about who was granted “need to know” access to the program, was dominated by corporate employees, with only a few Pentagon officials being briefed, and no one from the Executive and Legislative branches of government.
This is very surprising given the clear national security implications about UFOs due to the advanced technologies they possess, and the possibility that these could be or had been weaponized by foreign nations. A few years later this was the rationale for the creation of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) in 2007 with Congressional funding of $22 milliion. Significantly, some of the principal figures involved in the Wilson UFO briefing, e.g., Dr. Eric Davis, were also involved in the AATIP program.
A second conclusion is that corporations have been given an inordinate amount of power when it comes to deciding who gains access to the category of unacknowledged/waived SAPs that involved the study of retrieved extraterrestrial technologies. The corporate “watch committee” described in part two, bluntly turned down Wilson’s request for access.
What really surprised Admiral Wilson, however, was that the Pentagon’s Senior Review Group running the Special Access Program Oversight Committee (SAPOC) also turned his request for access down, despite him being DIA Deputy Director, and Vice Director for Intelligence (V-J2) for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. All this is very telling about the power of corporations when it comes to who is really in charge of the research and development of extraterrestrial related technologies.
Another conclusion is that Wilson’s testimony provides powerful support for the existence of a UFO cabal/control group running extraterrestrial related projects in a way that escapes conventional government and military oversight. Leaked documents going back to September 1947 have referred to this control group as Operation Majestic 12/MAJIC 12/MJ-12.
Admiral Wilson’s experiences is telling us that the UFO control group is very real and exercises great power through its ability to restrict “need to know” access to whom it chooses regardless of an official’s constitutionally backed duties and positions. While it has long been known that US presidents and members of Congress were routinely cut out of the loop of such UFO related projects, it is was not known that this was occurring to senior Pentagon officials until the 1997 Wilson briefing.
Fourth, who leaked the 15 page document to UFO researcher Grant Cameron in November 2018? Was it one or more “white hats” wanting the disclosure process to move forward by leaking one of the most important UFO documents ever to publicly emerge as contended by UFO historian Richard Dolan describing it as the “UFO leak of the century”? Alternatively, was the leaking part of a limited hangout promoting Tom DeLonge’s To The Stars Academy through the involvement of figures such as Dr. Eric Davis as contended by Kerry Cassidy from Project Camelot?
Dolan addressed these questions in a blog post (insert video) published on June 15. He pointed out that Cameron’s source for the document is an Australian space/UFO enthusiast, James Rigney. In a Q and A with Dolan, Rigby wrote:
It is unlikely that these documents would ever have found their way to anyone within the UFO community were in not that for the fact that for number of years I was very active in the ‘Space’ community, belonging to an organization in Australia and making frequent trips to the US to attend conferences and other events. Along the way I was fortunate to make acquaintance in the US with several people in the US who knew of my interest in, knowledge of, and credible approach to the UFO/UAP phenomena, as well as my passive and occasional involvement in the UFO community.
The events that lead me to obtaining the documents were strangely the result of this strange and unlikely intersection between the usually incompatible Space & UFO fields….
Over a period of a couple of years, I gained [the] trust of these people to a point where I was invited to look over some documents, copy what I wanted, and get them into the right hands if I thought that was appropriate. Certainly there was no intrigue or ‘smoking gun’ type discussions at the time.
Digby was here confirming that the document’s original source was an individual connected to the US Space community who provided the document to him a few years ago. There is growing speculation that the leaked 15 page document came from the files of the deceased Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell. If so, who gave the document to Mitchell? The most likely source is Dr. Davis given his direct role in recording/summarizing the meeting with Admiral Wilson, but as mentioned in part 1, Davis had no comment on the 15 page document when I contacted him by email.
Tracking the ultimate source for the leaked document is very relevant given present circumstances surrounding topics concerning space and UFOs. The fact that the 15 page document was publicly uploaded on April 19 is significant given recent public interest over Navy pilots reporting UFO incidents, and the creation of a Space Force, as a new branch of the US military, which takes me to my last conclusion.
Finally, the three corporate officials in the “watch committee” that denied access to the classified program, claimed that the reverse engineering of the extraterrestrial vehicle was very slow, and little progress had been made over the years. Were they telling the truth or providing a cover story for successfully reverse engineered extraterrestrial technologies, which had been covertly deployed in a corporate run secret space program that was kept away from the prying eyes of the DIA and Joint Chiefs of Staff?
In the US Air Force Secret Space Program, I describe how differently sized and shaped antigravity vehicles were successfully reverse engineered by corporate contractors, including Lockheed Martin’s Skunkworks division, and began to be deployed in the 1970s and 1980s by the USAF. This suggests that there are many Unacknowledged SAPs that involve the research, development, and deployment of antigravity spacecraft by different military services and corporate contractors.
There is no indication in the leaked 15-page document over whether Admiral Wilson was aware of secret space programs runs by the USAF and the US Navy. He merely expressed his surprise that the UFO program that Steven Greer and Edgar Mitchell pointed out to him, which he was unaware of, involved a retrieved extraterrestrial spacecraft.
It’s quite possible that Wilson was aware of military-run space programs but simply had not been briefed about the specific reverse engineering program that was being run by the corporate contractor for unknown purposes, one of which involved a corporate run secret space program.
It’s perhaps not coincidental that the leaked transcript and summary of Admiral Wilson and Dr. Davis 2002 conversation emerges as Space Force is about to be formally launched. The US Congress is poised to pass legislation authorizing the creation of Space Force as a separate branch of the US military under the authority of the Department of the US Air Force.
The emergence of Space Force will ultimately address many of the questions and issues raised by Admiral Wilson’s investigation of the corporate reverse engineering program back in 1997, and the secret construction of antigravity spacecraft by multiple corporate contractors for the US military or other unknown customers.
Space Force will also provide a powerful institutional foundation for disclosing many secrets concerning antigravity technology, alien life, the reverse engineering of extraterrestrial technologies, and secret space programs. The leak of the Wilson Davis conversation comes at a propitious time for the disclosure process to move forward, and Space Force is the most likely institutional catalyst for all to be revealed.
Newly Released Report Details The Military’s Encounter With A UFO
Newly Released Report Details The Military’s Encounter With A UFO
By: Gaia Staff
A 13-page government report detailing encounters between F/A-18 fighter pilots and a UFO has been released to the public, after it was first reported by the New York Times in December. The documents contain first-hand accounts from the pilots, including their descriptions of the object’s anomalous movements and “cloaked” appearance.
During an intense training mission about 60 miles off the coast of San Diego in 2004, the USS Nimitz and USS Princeton detected multiple Anomalous Aerial Vehicles, or AAVs, that were unable to be tracked with traditional radar.
One of the crafts is described as “solid white, smooth with no edges… uniformly colored with no nacelles, pylons, or wings,” or what has come to be described as a “Tic Tac” shape. The object was also depicted as an elongated egg with a discernible midline horizontal axis, which allowed the pilots to distinguish its orientation.
When he reached the destination, he glanced down to see an unidentified craft hovering above the ocean, creating a disturbance as if something were jutting out of the water. The craft moved around the area in sharp vectors, appearing to be inspecting something in the ocean.
Fravor and the other pilot attempted to lock on to the target using their radar systems, though they were unsuccessful with traditional methods. The report says, “it seemed the radar just couldn’t hack it.” Instead, they tried to use a “helmet lock” that employed the pilots line of sight to track an object – a method not normally practical, due to their constant head movement.
Fravor began a slow descent to further examine the object, before it “recognized” him and began mirroring his movements. He said the disturbance on the water ceased as the craft began to ascend in the opposite direction he took, until he decided to cross over and cut off it’s path.
At this point, he says the AAV took off like nothing he had ever seen. The craft also showed no signs of traditional propulsion, emitting no smoke or exhaust as it accelerated at supersonic speed. The AAV was reported to be roughly 45 feet in length.
Fravor quickly called back to the USS Princeton asking if their radar had picked up on the object. They were told, “you’re not going to believe this, but it’s at your CAP.” This was their rendezvous point 24,000 feet up.
But the AAV disappeared and the pilots returned to the ship, reporting a feeling of confusion as to what they encountered, though they felt normal physiologically and psychologically.
Perhaps the most bizarre aspect about the encounter was that the USS Princeton’s AN/SPY-1 radar system is capable of tracking golf ball-sized targets within a 100-mile radius, yet the report says it had difficulty tracking the AAV. The radar system would pick it up again three times throughout the week, though it would continually drop it, considering it a false target. Had the radar been configured to a Ballistic Missile tracking mode, it may have had greater success, though it’s hard to tell.
The report also implies the object was capable of underwater travel while remaining completely undetected by our most advanced radar systems, including those equipped by submarines in the area.
After the incident occurred, it was reported that the pilot’s shipmates ridiculed them over the next few days in response to what they claimed to have seen. Others have dismissed the encounter as being the product of unknown natural phenomena, yet to be explained.
Meanwhile, Fravor seems to be in the camp that believes what he witnessed was nothing natural. Luis Elizondo, the former head of the clandestine Pentagon program that studied UFOs, says he believes this is evidence we might not be alone.
Chandrayaan blasts off from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh on October 22, 2008
(Phot: L R Shankar/ TOI, BCCL Chennai )
Distances in space are brain-meltingly vast. Compared to the stars and planets billions of light years away, our Moon is barely 4 lakh kilometres from us—a simple Uber ride, in interstellar terms. And with things getting increasingly hairy on Earth thanks to freak weather, scary resource shortages, and environmental messes of every description, the Moon is looking more appealing than ever: as Earth’s first space outpost, a transit stop and fuelling station for journeys to other worlds... perhaps even a future human colony!
But despite being one of the most explored celestial bodies out there, the Moon still harbours many mysteries. This has led to renewed efforts by global space agencies to study and explore it. For India, a society that’s been looking at the skies for centuries due to its Vedic roots in astronomy and astrology, the quest to reach the Moon was more than merely symbolic. Now, as Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) starts the countdown for its second lunar mission, Chandrayaan-2, let’s recap how we reached the Moon a decade ago.
Chandrayaan-1 in a nutshell
A view of Chandrayaan-1, India's first unmanned mission to the moon, at the ISRO Centre in Bangalore in 2008
(Photo: K Sunil Prasad/ TOI Bengaluru)
In 2008, India launched its first deep space mission, Chandrayaan 1. It was a historic moment for ISRO, which launched its first satellite, Aryabhatta, six years after the US Apollo 11’s crew landed on the moon. Considering its delayed entry into the space club, India and ISRO has made a remarkable progress in space exploration over the last three decades.
Chandrayaan-1’s story is well known. In a nutshell, India’s first deep space mission lasted approximately a year from its October 2008 launch to its abrupt end in August 2009. Its biggest claim to fame was helping find water ice at the Moon’s poles. Perhaps all that sudden fame was hard to handle, because in August 2009, the satellite lost contact with its controllers at ISRO. However, Chandrayaan-1 was rediscovered by NASA in 2017. While it has long been defunct, it is probably still silently orbiting the Moon, perhaps waiting to hail its compatriot, Chandrayaan-2, with a cheery ‘namaste’ when the latter swings by later this year.
The mission
The PSLV-C11 rocket, with the orbiter and probe on board, on its way to the launchpad
(Photo: ISRO)
Humankind has sent probes to the Moon for six decades now. The first lunar flyby happened in 1959; the first touchdown in 1966, and the first crewed landing (Neil Armstrong’s big moment) in 1969. Between 1959 and 1976, the race to the Moon was dominated entirely by the US and Soviet space agencies. But as technology and wherewithal spread, Japan, Europe and China stepped in with their own lunar missions in 1990, 2003 and 2007 respectively.
India’s Chandrayaan-1 mission, also its first lunar mission, was announced by the government in 2003. The objective was to map the chemical, mineralogical and photo-geologic features of the Moon and create a 3D atlas of its near and far (dark) side. As the precursor to Chandrayaan-2, the first lunar mission would also test conditions for an eventual soft-landing on the Moon’s surface.
Over the next 5 years, ISRO rapidly developed the spacecraft’s components: the PSLV-C11 rocket that carried it into space, an orbiter, and a Moon Impact Probe (MIP). It was a budget spaceship, built at a cost of Rs.386 crore, or US$76 million, only 4% of ISRO’s (then) budgetover 3 years. (For comparison, China’s Chang’e 1 lunar mission, launched in 2007, cost $180 million. Chandrayaan-2 will cost about $143 million. India’s upcoming human space flight programme? An estimated $1.46 billion.)
This image of the moon is from NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper on Chandrayaan-1. It is a three-color composite of reflected near-infrared radiation from the sun, and illustrates the extent to which different materials are mapped across the side of the moon that faces Earth. Blue shows the signature of water and hydroxyl molecules, green shows the brightness of the surface, and red shows an iron-bearing mineral called pyroxene.
(ISRO/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Brown Univ./USGS)
Coming back to Chandrayaan-1, the orbiter was based on Kalpana-1, a meteorological satellite launched by India in 2002, and carried a phalanx of instruments, from sophisticated cameras to equipment for studying the external and internal features of the Moon. A 32-kg Moon Impact Probe (MIP), meanwhile, was designed to crash into the surface after taking videos of the surface and studying the lunar atmosphere during the descent process. In addition to five Indian instruments, Chandrayaan carried equipment from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, and Bulgaria— most notably, a Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument from NASA.
The 1.4 tonne (at launch) Chandrayaan-1 blasted off on October 22, 2008, meeting all takeoff and Earth orbit success parameters. Then, on November 8, Chandrayaan moved into lunar orbit. And that’s where the real mission began.
Journey and results
The image shows the distribution of surface ice at the Moon's south pole (left) and north pole (right), detected by NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument. Blue represents the ice locations, plotted over an image of the lunar surface, where the gray scale corresponds to surface temperature (darker representing colder areas and lighter shades indicating warmer zones). The ice is concentrated at the darkest and coldest locations, in the shadows of craters. This was the first time scientists directly observed definitive evidence of water ice on the Moon's surface.
(Credit: NASA)
After orbiting the Moon for a few days, Chandrayaan eventually reached a height of 100 km above the surface. On November 14, the Moon Impact Probe left the orbiter and crashed near the lunar South Pole. As it free-fell for some 25 minutes, the probe reportedly took readings that suggested the presence of water vapour in the moon’s atmosphere. However, that data is apparently inconclusive.
More significantly, the probe sent readings back to the orbiter that indicated the presence of water on the surface and the sub-surface (“tens of metres deep”) under the north and south poles of the Moon. In parallel, NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), which remained in the orbiter, also found data that eventually confirmed the presence of solid water ice in the shadows of craters near the poles, where temperatures hover around -157°C.
Cropped version of an image sent back by the Moon Impact Probe before it crash-landed on the surface
(Photo: ISRO)
These findings made huge waves in the space community and global media. To be clear, this wasn’t the first time evidence of surface ice was found on the Moon—the Soviets claimed they found water in moon rocks brought back in 1976. NASA’s own probes have analysed reflected radio waves that showed the signature of water ice. However, the findings were inconclusive, and as NASA admitted, could have been explained by other phenomena, such as “unusually reflective lunar soil”.
In 2009, the US sent a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and impact probe (LCROSS) that complemented Chandrayaan-1’s discovery of water at the lunar poles. And in 2013, the same M3 team from NASA also detected ‘magmatic water’, i.e. water from beneath the Moon’s interiors, on the surface of a crater—yet another feather in the mission’s cap.
Unfortunately, after making 3400 orbits of the Moon, equipment failure forced the mission to be abandoned after August 28, 2009—nearly a year prematurely. However, ISRO says that 95% of mission objectives had been met by then.
Chandrayaan-1 enabled the confirmation of water on the Moon. In the process, it also enhanced humankind’s thirst for interstellar adventure. There’s no looking back.
Bestonden er voor de geboorte van het heelal al buitenaardse beschavingen? Natuurkundige deelt zijn ontdekkingen
Bestonden er voor de geboorte van het heelal al buitenaardse beschavingen? Natuurkundige deelt zijn ontdekkingen
Een pentimento is een wijziging aan een schilderij, ontstaan tijdens het schilderen van het originele werk.
Pentimenti zijn in het afgewerkte schilderij onzichtbaar voor het blote oog, maar kunnen later zichtbaar worden door veranderingen van de verf of bepaalde onderzoekingen.
Op dezelfde manier bestaan er uitgestorven universa die gevuld waren met zwarte gaten, die verborgen zitten in de kaart van de kosmische achtergrondstraling, zo stelt de Britse natuurkundige Sir Roger Penrose.
Ander heelal
In die universa leefden mogelijk ook buitenaardse beschavingen die eonen voor de geboorte van ons heelal bestonden.
Penrose speculeert dat beschavingen die we gaan ontdekken per definitie miljoenen zo niet miljarden jaren ouder zijn dan de aarde.
Onlangs zeiden wetenschappers bewijs te hebben gevonden van eerdere universa, in de vorm van resten van zwarte gaten die uit een ander heelal zouden komen.
Vreemde cirkels
Die zijn zichtbaar als vreemde cirkels aan de hemel.
“Wat wij beweren is dat we resten zien van een zwart gat dat in een vorig universum is verwoest,” zei Penrose tegen New Scientist.
Het bewijs bestaat uit zogeheten ‘Hawking-punten’, vernoemd naar wijlen Stephen Hawking.
Overgedragen
Hij theoretiseerde dat zwarte gaten toch nog een beetje straling uitzenden, ook wel Hawkingstraling genoemd.
Penrose en zijn collega’s denken dat deze straling van het ene universum naar het andere wordt overgedragen.
In onderstaande video gaat hij in gesprek met Joe Rogan:
Indonesische man treft bizar schepsel aan in zijn huis. Wat is dit?
Foto: YouTube/Viral Press
Indonesische man treft bizar schepsel aan in zijn huis. Wat is dit?
Het bizarre schepsel in onderstand filmpje stelt mensen voor een raadsel. Het werd op 17 juni jongstleden gespot in een huis in Bali, Indonesië.
Bewoner Hari Toae zei dat het leek alsof het dier een schuilplaats zocht aangezien het die avond regende.
Hij zei: “Het mag in mijn huis blijven, maar alleen vannacht. Ik wil niet dat het mijn gasten wegjaagt.”
Alien
Hari zei geen idee te hebben wat het gevleugelde schepsel was. Hij grapte dat het ‘op een alien’ leek.
“Ik heb nog nooit zoiets gezien,” voegde hij toe. “Ik denk dat het niet uit deze omgeving komt.”
Onbekende soort
Het lijkt erop dat het dier verwant is aan motten die Arctiinae worden genoemd, schrijft website LADbible. Het doet erg denken aan een creatonotos gangis, die vooral in Zuidoost-Azië en Australië voorkomen.
De soort heeft vleugels en vier tentakels, die feromonen produceren.
Maar misschien is het wel een compleet onbekende soort, aldus de site.
Wetenschappers proberen poort naar parallel universum te openen. Zo gaan ze te werk
Wetenschappers proberen poort naar parallel universum te openen. Zo gaan ze te werk
Wetenschappers van het Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee hopen deze zomer een opening naar een parallel universum te vinden.
Zo’n parallel universum lijkt erg op het onze en bevat spiegeldeeltjes, spiegelplaneten en misschien zelfs spiegelleven.
Natuurkundige Leah Broussard legde in een interview met NBC uit hoe zij deze onzichtbare wereld hoopt te ontdekken.
Langer
In de jaren negentig deden natuurkundigen een aantal experimenten met neutronen. Verwacht werd dat ze allemaal even snel uiteen zouden vallen tot protonen. Dat bleek niet het geval te zijn.
Sommige neutronen bleven negen seconden langer bestaan dan andere neutronen.
Een spiegeluniversum zou dit verschil kunnen verklaren: de neutronen die langer bleven bestaan zouden van onze realiteit naar de spiegelwereld zijn gegaan, en weer terug.
Muur
Het team van Broussard gaat neutronen afvuren op een ondoordringbare muur. Aan de achterkant stellen ze een neutronendetector op.
Normaal gesproken zou hij niets moeten detecteren, maar als er wel neutronen worden opgevangen zouden ze door de muur zijn gegaan via de spiegelwereld, en korte tijd spiegelneutronen zijn geweest.
Lithium-7
Enkel de neutronen die naar de spiegelwereld zijn gegaan en weer terug zijn gekomen, kunnen worden gedetecteerd, aldus Broussard.
Het bestaan van een spiegeluniversum zou ook het tekort aan lithium-7 in ons heelal verklaren.
UFO-jager spot ‘buitenaards schip’ bij maankrater. Kijk de beelden
UFO-jager spot ‘buitenaards schip’ bij maankrater. Kijk de beelden
Een UFO-jager claimt dat een sonde van de Amerikaanse ruimtevaartmaatschappij NASA een foto heeft gemaakt van een enorm buitenaards vaartuig boven een krater op het maanoppervlak. Dat schrijft het Russische persbureau Sputnik.
Het object zou voorzien zijn van een koepel en een reflecterend oppervlak hebben waardoor het zich niet gemakkelijk laat vastleggen op camera.
Foto’s
Scott C. Waring van ET Data Base plaatste een filmpje op YouTube waarin hij claimt dat hij op het raadselachtige object stuitte toen hij foto’s van de Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) aan het bestuderen was.
Deze sonde wordt gebruikt om het maanoppervlak te bestuderen.
300 meter
Waring heeft het object in de categorie witte, keramisch aandoende schepen geplaatst, die volgens hem lastig te fotograferen zijn vanwege hun reflecterende oppervlak.
Hij stelde vast dat de krater een diameter heeft van ruwweg 10,8 kilometer. Het object zou dan ongeveer 300 meter lang moeten zijn, aldus de UFO-jager.
Call it a mirror universe. Call it a parallel universe. Call it whatever you like but just make sure you call us when you open the door into it so we can see if it’s more like “Star Trek” or “The Twilight Zone.” Well, the scientist who is about to penetrate the wall between our universe and the next one has she phone close by as she begins her attempt to send a beam of subatomic particles down a 50-foot corridor, past a giant magnet and through a solid wall where they will enter a mirror universe and kick their mirror-image counterparts out of it onto the other side of the wall where their 15 minutes of fame and a phone call to you await. It may not be sci-fi show worthy, but it would still be a first. Will it happen? Where’s your phone?
“This is a pretty straightforward experiment that we cobbled together with parts we found lying around, using equipment and resources we already had available at Oak Ridge.”
Physicist Leah Broussard modestly explained in a recent interview with NBC News the beginnings of this historic experiment. It actually goes back to the 1990s (like most of the movies this summer – we’re looking at you, Toy Story 4) when scientists discovered that identical neutrons break down (decay) into protons at slightly different rates depending on whether they do it naturally or in a particle beam. This mere 10-second difference, replicated reliably and independently by many groups, baffled scientists looking for a cause. One theory was that some neutrons disappear into a ‘mirror universe’ as they break down. A very cool theory, but how do you prove it?
Enter Broussard, who conveniently works at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and has an 85-megawatt nuclear reactor called the Spallation Neutron Source that can create beams containing billions of neutrons on demand and that she apparently has the proper authority and experience to play with. The neutron expert has set up a wall with magnets on either side to oscillate the neutrons in the beam aimed at it. Theoretically, the oscillation may shake the neutrons into the mirror universe, allowing them to pass through the wall to the other side and then back into our universe where theoretically an evil Spock will be detected.
“If you discover something new like that, the game totally changes.”
No, nothing THAT game-changing. Broussard is hoping (and ready for the answer to be ‘nothing’) that their mirror images (and only those neutrons) will be detected on the other side. Yes, it really would be game-changing.
“If some of them show up anyway, that would suggest that conventional physics is wrong, and the mirror world is real.”
A mirror world with its own laws of physics and history and alternate or mirror images of everything in our universe … including us. When will the world as we know it end? Broussard says the one-day experiment will take place soon and the analysis of the data will commence immediately and take a few weeks. That means we’ll have the answer before the end of the summer blockbuster season and in time to rewrite the plot of a few sci-fi movies to reflect what an actual mirror universe really looks like.
Are you ready to meet your mirror self? You may want to put on a nicer outfit.
Out among the vast emptiness of the Sahara Desert, on Adrar Plateau right outside of the remote town of Ouadane, Mauritania, in Northern Africa, is a wonder that has captured the imagination for years and one of the most fascinating geological anomalies on the entire continent. Here etched within the ancient earth of these parched badlands in the middle of nowhere is an enormous, circular expanse of rock measuring approximately 30 miles across, with smaller circles within it reminiscent of a bulls-eye, and which has managed to defy any easy explanations as to its origins and is still debated.
Called the Richat Structure, or also the Guelb er Richât, the “Eye of Africa,” “The Big Blue Eye of Africa,” and “Eye of the Sahara,” it was long recognized as an unusual structure due to its high-relief circular cuestas, circular irregularities such as circular distribution of ridges, valleys, and dikes, as well as it hydro-thermal features, remarkable flatness, and unusual geological structure, but no one really realized just how unusual it was until it was seen from up above in space, such is its utter vastness. When the Gemini IV mission was launched in the 1960s to orbit and observe the earth for four days, one of the astronauts’ missions was to be on the lookout for any sort of evidence of large impact structures where ancient heavenly bodies may have collided with earth. They found what they thought was one of these with the Richat Structure, which from the vantage point of so high above the earth proved to be far larger and more perfectly rounded that anyone had previously ever been aware of. Indeed, it is so distinctive and massive that it is still used as a landmark for astronauts to this day.
The Richat Structure from space
Considering the sheer size of the feature and its near perfect circularity, it was assumed that it had to be an impact structure from some ancient meteor strike, but more careful analysis showed that this was not the case. There turned out to be no evidence of the shock of impact or melted rock that should have been expected of such a site, and this left scientists scratching their heads. After all, what else could have possibly created such an amazing immense circle out in the middle of nowhere surrounded by flat nothingness? When word got out about this place there were all sorts of theories flying about, from that it was some previously unknown geological anomaly to that it was the work of aliens or ancient astronauts, but no one had the faintest idea and we still don’t really even know for sure.
The most commonly accepted modern scientific theory as to the origins of the Richat Structure is that it is the result of the gradual erosion of a gigantic geological dome of the earth’s crust that collapsed perhaps due to an eruption around 100 million years ago. It is believed that over countless millennia the layers of the dome were eroded and blasted away by the elements to leave behind these circular formations of rock that wildly varies in age from the Late Proterozoic eon (2500 to 541 million years ago) to the Ordovician Period (485.4 to 443.8 million years ago). However, even this theory is not universally agreed upon, and there are many mysteries left unanswered.
With all of the uncertainty of the geological history of this place and its air of mystery it is perhaps not surprising that there is a lot of discussion of other possibilities as well, some of them decidedly more fringe. One idea is that the Richat Structure bears a remarkable resemblance to Plato’s representation of the Lost Continent of Atlantis, which he envisioned in 360 BC as being composed of concentric rings of water and land. He also said that Atlantis had been lost in a cataclysmic event cut off from the world by “an impossible barrier of mud to voyagers sailing from hence to any part of the ocean.” He also makes mention of a “great plain to the south,” a “mountain sheltering the city,” which could refer to the high, mountainous ridge to the north of the site, and other little clues that have led some to believe that the Richat Structure is the actual remains of Atlantis, not totally outlandish because the sea would have once covered the area, but this is rather blunted by the fact that there has as of yet been found absolutely no sign of permanent habitation within it.
In the end we are left with questions and few concrete answers. What is the Richat Structure? That seems to depend a lot on who you ask. For some it is a mystifying geological anomaly. For others it is an alien structure, and for others still it is the site of the lost Atlantis. No one really seems to completely know for sure. For now this magnificent, enormous feature of the landscape sits out there carved into the otherwise desolate, monotonous features of this windblasted remote land, creating mysteries as it has always done for millions of years and may always do for millions more.
Here we are – expecting our scientists to be working on finding extraterrestrials and developing ways to deal with them. Turns out they’re not doing too well on the second part … in fact, they’re asking the public for help in coming up with things to say should they meet an alien or get a credible “send us more information” signal from another planet. What do WE know? We can’t even deal with spam phone calls or strangers at the front door!
If we discover a signal from extra-terrestrial intelligence, would you: – not care much about it – just follow the news – comment or interact on social media about this topic
“There is absolutely no procedure enshrined in international law on how to respond to a signal from an alien civilization. We want to hear people’s views. The consequences affect more people than just scientists.”
Really? We’re the people who can’t agree on climate change, Brexit and a whole host of other really important things that aren’t nearly as important as what to say to space aliens when they call or show up unannounced. It’s the Fourth of July holiday in the U.S. and everyone who’s seen the best movie ever release on this weekend – “Independence Day” – knows we’re not good at dealing with visitors.
Never visit that planet if you see fireworks
What would you consider a credible source? – main news channels – direct quotes from expert scientists – official government statements – all other sources
That “all other sources” category includes social media, which is where most people actually get their news – real, unreal and surreal. Dr. John Elliott, a reader in intelligence engineering at Leeds Beckett University, says the global SETI community would announce any bona fide alien signal immediately. Really? Is that such a good idea when no one knows who to believe and conspiracy theories are accepted before the truth?
If we discovered simple life rather than a signal from extra-terrestrial intelligence, would you find that – less interesting – similarly interesting – more interesting
Seriously? You already know the answer to that. If we can defeat it, we will. If we can eat it, we will. If we can make money off of it, we will. If we can use it as a weapon, we will. Someone will always be “interested” – it just depends on their motivation. The problem is, everyone has a different one – which gets even scarier on an international level. When was the last time all world leaders agreed on anything, let alone passed a binding law on it?
What would it tell about our existence? What does it mean to be human?
Those last two questions are from the introduction to the questionnaire. Perhaps these SETI researchers already know the answer to these – they just want some solid evidence to convince the higher-ups that we’re too screwed up to deal with space aliens and perhaps, despite the recent groundswell of demands for full disclosure, we need a solid and unified plan for dealing with first contact.
One final thought. Are we putting the cart in front of the robot horse? A recent study of data from the 1,300 closest stars found no signs of life whatsoever. Perhaps we should work on some other urgent projects so the first thing we say to extraterrestrials is not:
We will all meet up at the Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction and coordinate our entry. If we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Lets see them aliens.
Let’s see them aliens indeed. I hope you’re like me and are already practicing your Naruto run, because we’re doing it: we’re going to gather up tens of thousand of people and run right past the guards at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) and storm Area 51 before they can catch or shoot all of us. Who’s with us?
A Facebook user by the name of SmyleeKun and the group “Shitposting cause im in shambles” created the event, titled Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us. The event is set to take place on September 20, 2019 at 3am. Attendees will meet at the Area 51 Alien Center in Amargosa Valley, Nevada before proceeding to Area 51 itself. Well, attempting to proceed, anyway.
The last time sometime tried to speed past the armed guards at the site, it didn’t go so well. In January, a man was shot by both the Nye County Sheriff’s Office and the NNSS Security Protective Force Officers after he led them on an 8-mile high speed chase while attempting to drive into the Nevada National Security Site carrying a still unidentified cylindrical object. How will things turn out when thousands of people show up at once?
As of now, 53,000 people have pledged to storm Area 51. Of course, that means they simply clicked “Going” on their social media whatnots, so take that figure with a grain of salt. Still, what would happen if let’s say just 9-10% showed up? Would the Nye County Sheriff’s Office and the NNSS Security Protective Force shoot everyone? Just a few? A couple dozen? Hopefully, non-lethal means of deterrent could be used instead. Remember those “sound cannons” Canadian police unveiled during the G20 protests in Toronto back in 2010? Who knows what kinds of spooky gizmos the guards at that place may possess.
Will anyone actually show up, or is this a case of trolling or slacktivism at its finest? Judging by the fact that discussion and photos associated with the Facebook event are mostly crude jokes and memes featuring Randy Quaid from Independence Day, I have low hopes for this one. Still, I hope it actually happens – and even if it doesn’t, it certainly makes you wonder what would happen if a huge crowd could ever actually manage to coordinate an attempt to see what’s really in those hangars. Can a Facebook event make it happen?
The 17-minute grainy black and white video that appeared to show three government pathologists in full-body hazmat suits examining and dissecting a pale, potbellied alien corpse that was found at the Roswell UFO crash in 1947 may in fact be authentic.
The “alien autopsy tape” was released in 1995 after Ray Santilli claimed to have received the video in 1992 from a retired cameraman with the U.S. military. He ended up selling the alien video to several television stations in 33 different countries. It was only when another filmmaker named Spyros Melaris admitted that the two had faked the entire video that the world finally relaxed after much fear and paranoia consumed the world when they believed that an autopsy was being conducted on an actual alien.
However, there’s now a new twist that indicates that the footage was in fact real. A leaked 2001 memo was supposedly sent to aerospace billionaire Robert Bigelow from physicist Eric Davis that alleges a former CIA scientist named Kit Green was “briefed three different times during and after his tenure at the CIA on topics relevant to UFOs and the Roswell Incident Alien Autopsy”.
It is believed that the leaked information originated from late astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s archives. Part of the memo read, “After Kit left the CIA he was called into the Pentagon by a person in uniform.” It went on to say, “This person showed Kit the alien autopsy photos and reports, etc…” That’s when, in 2001, Kit evaluated the information and gave his professional opinion on what he had been briefed on. Apparently, the evidence that was shown to Kit was of the same corpse that was seen in the 1995 video footage from Santilli.
The final summary of Kit’s evaluation read, “The Alien Autopsy film/video is real, the alien cadaver is real, and the cadaver seen in the film/video is the same as the photos Kit saw at the 1987/88 Pentagon briefing.” An even more shocking revelation is that Kit admitted that alien forensic tissue and organs were being kept at Walter Reed-Armed Forces Institute for Pathology Medical Museum located in Washington, D.C.
While there is still much speculation and confusion on whether the video is in fact real, several top UFO researchers are backing the film and they include Linda Moulton Howe, Grant Cameron, and Richard Dolan.
“Those words from Dr. Kit Green about the authenticity of the six-fingered, six-toed human dissected after retrieval from a 1947 UFO crash, it is confirmation that the Santilli film video is real,” stated Moulton Howe in a video.
A video, as well as pictures, of the “alien autopsy tape” can be seen here.
A year after a filmmaker admitted that he faked the infamous “Roswell Alien Autopsy” video, a leaked memo revealed that a scientist from the CIA confirmed that the contents of the footage were actually real. The scientist noted that the alien cadaver featured in the video was authentic.
The original alien autopsy video was obtained by British businessman Ray Santilli in 1992. He got it from a retired U.S. military cameraman while looking for archive footages of Elvis Presley. Shortly after, Santilli sold the clip to various TV stations, which then sparked a public frenzy regarding the existence of aliens.
Although the footage has been regarded by UFO enthusiasts as the definitive proof of extraterrestrial beings, its authenticity was debunked in 2018 after filmmaker Spyros Melaris came forward to confess that he directed and produced the video.
According to Melaris, the footage was shot at a house in North London. He admitted that he used animal organs and a foam sculpture of an alien for the cadaver.
Even though the video was already debunked, new information suggested that it was actually real according to a leaked memo sent by physicist Eric Davis of the National Institute for Discovery Science to the organization’s founder Robert Bigelow.
According to The Sun, which was able to obtain photos of the memo, the document was leaked via email to British UFO investigator Philip Mantle. It was believed to have originated from the archives of former NASA astronaut and ufologist Edgar Mitchell.
The memo, which was sent on March 23, 2001, focused on the professional evaluation of the “Roswell Alien Autopsy” video by a CIA scientist known as Kit Green.
In the document, Green confirmed that the cadaver featured in the video was real and it was the same one that was shown in the photos revealed during his briefings with Pentagon from 1987 to 1988. He also hinted where the samples allegedly taken from the cadaver may have been stored.
“Kit said that the alien forensic tissues could hypothetically be located at Walter Reed – Armed Forces Institute for Pathology (WR-AFIP) Medical Museum, which is not open to the public and requires a security clearance to get in,” Davis stated in the memo.
Melaris has not yet released a statement addressing the contents of the memo and how the document relates to his short film.
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The NAZI Breakaway Civilization Antarctica
The NAZI Breakaway Civilization Antarctica
Dr. Michael Salla talks about the US Air Force Secret Space Program – Shifting ET Alliances and Space Force, the Reptilian and Nordic Alien Alliances and the breakaway German colony in Antarctica.
Many thought provoking and serious topics that are desperately important in the human race moving forward as a civilization in these mysterious times we are facing.
The Reptilian and Nordic Alien Alliances and there role in the cosmic scale of things.
The alliances are utilizing highly advanced technologies including the black triangles (TR3B) to help achieve some of their agendas.
He also discusses some of the Global Players agendas and their alliances with these extraterrestrials and the Secret agreements with a breakaway German colony in Antarctica (the Fourth Reich) and different extraterrestrial groups in the 1950’s.
(The German breakaway colony in Antarctica consisted mainly of scientists and other important persons who were directly involved in the Nazi Germany aviation program which included the Foo Fighters, The NAZI UFOs and for example the Horten Ho 229, a flying wing.
That aircraft , the Horten Ho 229 – might be a footnote in aviation history, but it was due to its aerodynamic secrets so far ahead of its time. Apart from the question where these technologies came from, it is said that NAZI Germany has moved these technologies to Antarctica, too, see Operation Highjump.)
Images: The Horten Ho 229.
Dr. Salla states how the United States has been ran by the Fourth Reich especially NAZI ideologies since World War 2 and how the US Airforce was deceived by the Deep State and the Sinister Fourth Reich which eventually led to the switching of alliances to Human Looking Extraterrestrials (The Nordics).
Later on in the interview Dr. Salla talks about the coming Moon missions and how that correlates with the Alien Alliances agendas that are at play on this global stage.
This is the most recent photo from the Mars rover. This ancient dome on Mars has stood the test of time. I have reported this dome when it was further away, but never before have we seen it so close as now. Its reflective smooth surface sows that it was built to reflect the heat and keep the interior cool. It looks like the NASA rover is driving in this direction, so lets keep our fingers crossed. We may see an entrance or ancient writing on its walls when close. Scott C. Waring
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UFO Divides Into Two Over Military Base In United Kingdon On Video, June 30, 2019, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Divides Into Two Over Military Base In United Kingdon On Video, June 30, 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting:June 30, 2019 Location of sighting: Alconbury, UK Watch this video and see an orb the rises and falls over a Air Force base in the UK. When the orb defends it suddenly divides into two and then rises up. I think it flew low when releasing the other orb to hide it from the people around, but lucky for us, someone was recording very close to its location. The second orb seems to stay low and soon moves out of sight. The first orb cloaks and disappears in the blue sky. Very strange. It could be a secret military drone project being worked on or it could be an alien craft checking out the military base to size them up. Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
My brother and his wife and children spotted this crazy orb UFO which would split in two while looping for a number of minutes, over RAF Alconbury.
This flying bird on Mars was found by Marcelo Irazusta who has a Youtube channel called Sandra Elena Andrade (click to go to). Marcelo actually found a bird flying across the surface of Mars captured last week by the Curiosity rover! This is impossible, and yet, there it is...captured in a photo on a NASA website.
The curiosity rover has a 13 minute delay from the time they push the keys on Earth to the time rover gets it, so if this is a large bird, then it was taken by accident and was probably not in that are for long. Of course it could be a UFO. Aliens like to use nature to inspire their structures and ships. But it looks like a soaring eagle...which if thats true, may mean one of two things...either animals exist on Mars or...and I hate this idea, but it needs to be considered...the rover might not be on mars at all, but on Devon island in Canada. Devon is a desolate island area with only a hand full of people and NASA has gone there many times to test the rovers in a environment similar to Mars.
Scott C. Waring-Taiwan
05-07-2019 om 19:31
geschreven door peter
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LightSail 2 Sends Back 1st Signals from Its Solar-Surfing Test Flight
LightSail 2 Sends Back 1st Signals from Its Solar-Surfing Test Flight
The space advocacy organization The Planetary Society recently confirmed that its LightSail 2 spacecraft has sent its first signals home from space.
The roughly 11-lb. (5 kilograms) cubesat is designed to prove that solar sailing is a feasible way of keeping satellites moving. Fuel is a costly and heavy commodity, and if LightSail 2 can prove that the solar-powered technique works well, perhaps future missions into the deep reaches of the solar system and beyond can be propelled by the charged particles released by the sun.
The project launched into space last week (June 25) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy megarocket. On Tuesday (July 2), the bread-loaf-size LightSail 2 experiment left Prox-1, its carrier vehicle. LightSail 2 will ultimately open up its ultrathin four-panel sail to achieve a surface area about the size of a boxing ring.
But before that can happen, the Planetary Society team needed confirmation that the spacecraft itself was healthy. That message came on July 2, as the spacecraft was passing over the satellite's mission control at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. The signals came from LightSail 2's recently deployed radio antenna, which began transmitting status data and a call sign in the form of morse code, according to LightSail 2 officials.
"We're all very happy — after years of preparation, we are flying an operational spacecraft!" Bruce Betts, LightSail program manager and Planetary Society chief scientist, said in a statement.
More data from LightSail 2 will be retrieved tonight (July 3) when it flies over Georgia Tech, where students built Prox-1.
Once the cubesat deploys its solar sail early next week, the rays from the sun will give LightSail 2 a gentle push. The goal is to observe LightSail 2 over the course of a month to see if it shifts in its orbit by a measurable amount, according to The Planetary Society officials. That will help demonstrate that solar sailing is an effective satellite-propulsion technique.
LightSail 2 isn't the first craft to do such work. For example, Japan's IKAROS probe demonstrated solar sailing in interplanetary space in 2010.
Reference Article: Facts about NASA's Artemis program, which aims to send astronauts to the moon.
Artist’s concept of a future moon landing carried out under NASA's newly named Artemis program. The space agency is working to return men and send the first women to the lunar surface by 2024, as has been directed by the White House.
NASA's Artemis program is an effort to place astronauts on the lunar surface and develop an ongoing presence there. The program's name is derived from Artemis, the Greek goddess of the moon and twin sister to Apollo, whose namesake program first brought crews to our natural satellite 50 years ago.
The Artemis program is a renaming of several earlier activities NASA was already undertaking to return humans to the moon. These were mandated by President Trump's Space Policy Directive 1, which tasked the agency with focusing on missions to the moon. Earlier this year, vice president Mike Pence set an ambitious deadline to land humans at the lunar south pole by 2024.
On May 14, 2019, these endeavors were given the new moniker Artemis. Jim Bridenstine, the space agency's administrator, told reporters on the day of the announcement that the name represents the program's goal of inclusion, referencing the fact that NASA intends to land the first woman on the moon under its current plans.
"I have a daughter who is 11 years old, and I want her to be able to see herself in the same role as the next women [who] go to the moon see themselves in today," Bridenstine said.
What the Artemis project includes
Under Artemis' umbrella are several components. First is the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, a station around the moon that would extend humanity's presence in space and provide a platform for scientific experiments and jaunts to the lunar surface.
The Gateway would be carried into lunar orbit by the agency's Space Launch System (SLS), a gigantic new rocket NASA is developing. Four-person crews would access the station using the Orion deep-space capsule and remain for 30 to 90 day stints.
Part of the Trump administration's push towards the moon includes an enlarged role for private aerospace firms, which are intended to develop hardware and potentially kick-start a lunar economy. NASA has awarded $45.5 million to 11 U.S. companies, including Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, to develop landers that can take astronauts to the moon's surface.
Nine smaller businesses have also been contracted to deliver robotic spacecraft to our natural satellite in order to collect data and conduct research there. Some have taken an interest in mining lunar resources such as water, which can be split into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen and converted into rocket fuel.
How much will Artemis cost?
How many of these impressive plans will actually see fruition is difficult to tell at this point. Cost estimates are still being refined and the overall price tag of Artemis remains unknown. The Apollo program's budget ended up being a total of $23.6 billion in 1973 dollars, according to NASA, the equivalent of more than $136 billion today. That means each Apollo moon landing cost around $22.6 billion in 2019 dollars. President Trump has recently sought an addition $1.6 billion for the Artemis program, on top of the $21 billion already allocated to NASA, but has yet to get the money approved by Congress.
Scientists have been trying to figure what creates the so-called “bathtub rings” around lakes and seas on Saturn’s large moon Titan. Now they may have an answer: unusual organic crystals not found on Earth.
Infrared view of seas and lakes in Titan’s northern hemisphere, taken by Cassini in 2014. Sunlight can be seen glinting off the southern part of Titan’s largest sea, Kraken Mare. Scientists now think that “bathtub rings” around the edges of the seas and lakes are composed of organic crystals.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/University of Idaho/AGU 100.
Saturn’s moon Titan is the only other body in the solar system besides Earth known to have liquids on its surface. These rains, rivers, lakes and seas look very much like those on Earth, but are composed of liquid methane and ethane (hydrocarbons) instead of water. Now, scientists have found another way in which they might differ from their earthly counterparts: the shorelines of the lakes and seas might be encrusted with “bathtub rings” composed of organic crystals not found on Earth.
The new research was published in a new paper and presented on June 24 at the 2019 Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon 2019) in Bellevue, Washington.
From the new paper:
We have discovered a third molecular mineral that is stable in the same conditions present on the surface of Titan, a moon of Saturn. This molecular mineral is made up of acetylene and butane, two organic molecules that are produced in Titan’s atmosphere and fall down onto the surface. We call these ‘molecular minerals’ because they behave just like minerals do here on Earth, but instead of being made up of things like carbonates or silicates, they are made up of organic molecules. The two previous molecular minerals we discovered were made up of benzene and ethane, and acetylene and ammonia. This most recent one is probably much more abundant on Titan’s surface, as both acetylene and butane are believed to be very common there. In particular, we think the ‘bathtub rings’ around Titan’s lakes might be made up of this material, because acetylene and butane both dissolve well in liquid methane and ethane compared to other molecules.
Artist’s concept of a hydrocarbon lake on Titan as seen from the ground.
Image via Steven Hobbs (Brisbane, Queensland, Australia/NASA).
The intriguing results come from laboratory tests where Titan-like conditions were recreated. The scientists found compounds and minerals that do not exist on Earth, and one co-crystal was made of solid acetylene and butane, which do exist on Earth, but only as gases. Titan is so cold, however, that acetylene and butane will freeze solid and combine to form crystals.
So how did the scientists create Titan-like conditions in a laboratory on Earth? Titan is extremely cold, about -290 degrees Fahrenheit (-179 degrees Celsius), so they used a custom-built cryostat, an apparatus that keeps things cold. Titan’s atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, like Earth’s, so next they filled the cryostat with liquid nitrogen. But they needed the nitrogen to be a gas, like on Titan, so they warmed the chamber slightly. Methane and ethane were then added, which are also very common on Titan. They are both in liquid form on the moon, in the rain, rivers, lakes and seas. The result was a hydrocarbon-rich “soup.”
Map of Titan’s seas and lakes in the northern hemisphere.
The surface of Titan as seen by the Huygens lander in 2005. Huygens found damp sand when it landed near an evaporated riverbed. The liquid was methane/ethane, but the “rocks” turned out to be composed of solid water ice.
Image via ESA/NASA/University of Arizona/EarthSky.
Benzene crystals were the first to be seen forming in this soup. Benzene is found in gasoline on Earth and is a snowflake-shaped molecule made out of a hexagonal ring of carbon atoms. But something else surprising happened in the simulated Titan conditions: the benzene molecules rearranged themselves in such a way that they allowed ethane molecules inside them, creating a co-crystal. The researchers also later discovered an acetylene and butane co-crystal as well, which is thought to probably be more common on Titan.
It is the acetylene and butane co-crystals that likely create the bathtub rings – evaporated minerals – around the edges of the lakes and seas. The minerals would be dropped out on the surface as the liquid hydrocarbons started to evaporate. Some lakes were seen on Titan by the Cassini spacecraft when they were full of liquid, and at other times when they had partially evaporated. This evaporation process is similar to how salts can form crusts around the edges of lakes and seas on Earth.
The bathtub rings on Titan are suspected to exist based on evidence from Cassini, but haven’t been fully confirmed yet, as noted by Morgan Cable at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory:
We don’t know yet if we have these bathtub rings … It’s hard to see through Titan’s hazy atmosphere.
An acidic salt lake south of Beacon, West Australia. The salt encrustations around its edges are thought to be similar to the bathtub rings around the edges of lakes and seas on Titan.
Titan’s rivers, lakes and seas, mostly near the north pole, give this moon an eerily Earth-like appearance. There is also methane rain and massive sand dunes near the equator, like in deserts on Earth, but composed of hydrocarbon particles. The thick, hazy atmosphere obscures the ground from view from above, but Cassini was able to use use radar to see surface features. The Huygens probe, part of the Cassini mission, also sent back the first-ever photos from Titan’s surface in 2005, showing an evaporated riverbed with “rocks” composed of solid water ice. Beneath all of that, out of view, is a subsurface water ocean. Titan may look a lot like Earth in many ways, but in terms of composition, it is a distinctly alien world.
Unfortunately, Cassini’s mission ended in late 2017, so further observations of the bathtub rings will have to wait until a future mission returns to Titan. Probes that could float or swim in one of the lakes or seas have been proposed, but are still just on the drawing boards right now. However, NASA’s new Dragonfly mission, just officially announced last week, will send a drone-like rotorcraft to fly through Titan’s skies, making numerous landings at different locations of interest. Dragonfly is scheduled to launch in 2026 and land in 2034. Exciting!
Bottom line: By simulating Titan’s conditions in a laboratory on Earth, scientists have found that unusual forms of organic crystals may create bathtub rings around the edges of the moon’s lakes and seas.
How should we respond to alien contact? Scientists ask the public
How should we respond to alien contact? Scientists ask the public
Steven Spielberg’s film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. On Monday the UK Seti Research Network will launch a survey of public attitudes towards alien contact.
Scientists searching the universe for aliens to conduct survey of the public for views on first contact
Scientists wrestling with the delicate issue of how to respond should humanity ever be contacted by an alien civilisation have hit on a radical idea: a survey that asks what the public would do.
The views they gather will help them shape plans for an international protocol that sets the ground rules on how organisations should share news of any signals that are detected; what sense can be made of them; and how, if at all, humans might reply.
“There is absolutely no procedure enshrined in international law on how to respond to a signal from an alien civilisation,” said Martin Dominik, an astronomer at the University of St Andrews. “We want to hear people’s views. The consequences affect more people than just scientists.”
Beyond sending probes to other planets in the solar system, the search for alien life has largely focused on listening for complex radio signals from outer space with the world’s most powerful telescopes. Last month, astronomers on the Breakthrough Listen project announced they had heard nothing after eavesdropping on more than 1,000 star systems within 160 light years of Earth.
But Dominik points out that with 300bn stars in the Milky Way alone, Breakthrough Listen has barely begun the mammoth task of scanning the cosmos for life elsewhere. “If there were tens of quintillions of other civilisations like ours evenly distributed in the Milky Way, the Breakthrough Listen project would not have heard a thing,” he said.
Dr John Elliott, a reader in intelligence engineering at Leeds Beckett University, said the global Seti community would announce any bona fide alien signal immediately. But in an era of social media that would spark a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories that leave people utterly confused about the truth, he said.
The Rosetta Stone on display at the British museum. Photograph: Graham Turner/The Guardian
The problem is that while scientists might quickly realise that an intercepted signal was complex enough to be broadcast from an advanced civilisation, it might take weeks or months to understand, if it can be deciphered at all. Any signal could easily be electromagnetic noise from equipment or a snippet of a terrestrial broadcast that leaked into space, unintended for such distant ears
“We can’t rely on there being a Rosetta stone [an ancient Egyptian stone tablet that enabled hieroglyphs to be read], or some great decipherment crib, in the signal. It could be an image or simply junk,” Elliott said. “It will take time to understand and if that work starts to drag out and there is nothing new we can say, the information vacuum will be filled with speculation,” he said. “Conjecture and rumour will take over.”
A radio message about life on Earth was sent to a group of stars 25,000 light years away in 1974, from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico. Photograph: Alamy
The survey will help scientists work out how best to provide reliable information but also what should be done if it seems only polite to respond to an interstellar missive. The late Stephen Hawking warned that humans would do well not to alert alien civilisations to life on Earth, but other researchers disagree.
Later this year, an organisation called Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Meti) International plans to beam signals into space containing references to the periodic table of elements. They will not be the first attempts to contact ET. In 1974, scientists at the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico sent a radio message about life on Earth to a group of stars 25,000 light years away. Given how baffling the message will be to many humans in the 21st century, it is unclear what any recipient will infer from it.
“It makes sense to create a legally binding framework that is properly rooted in international law,” Dominik said. “I’m completely comfortable with taking the whole thing above the level of scientists. If there are public consequences of replying and sending out messages that is a political decision and not one to be taken by scientists.”
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Pentagon Eyes Military Space Station
Pentagon Eyes Military Space Station
The fact that the Defense Innovation Unit is even considering the idea of a space station in orbit is a pretty big deal -- and an even bigger deal if it grows over time to accommodate a human crew.
WASHINGTON: The Pentagon’sDefense Innovation Unit wants options for an unmanned orbital outpost to support space experiments and operations — a logistics hub that might even grow, DIU’s solicitation suggests, to a larger manned space station.
DIU, which is charged with tapping non-traditional commercial companies for innovative technologies to meet Pentagon needs, issued a solicitation last week that gives interested vendors until July 9 to propose a “solution… for a self-contained and free flying orbital outpost.” The platform is to support “space assembly, microgravity experimentation, logistics and storage, manufacturing, training, test and evaluation, hosting payloads, and other functions.”
While the near-term requirements are obviously aimed at prototyping an autonomous, robotic mini-space station to house experimentation, the “future desired capabilities” listed in the solicitation are much farther reaching. They include the capability to dock with unmanned and manned spacecraft and, even more surprisingly, “human rating.”
Human-rating is short-hand for a set of requirements developed by NASA and the Federal Aviation Authority (which licenses launch and re-entry of commercial spacecraft) to ensure the safety of astronauts aboard a spacecraft. These include things like special insulation to protect crew from extreme temperatures and radiation.
Even though the concept may be a long shot in DoD thinking, the fact that DIU is even considering the idea of a military presence in orbit is a pretty big deal. The idea will no doubt will be controversial if significant funding starts pouring into exploring it.
While the 1967 Outer Space Treaty technically does not prevent a military space station, manned or unmanned, it does prevent military operations and bases on celestial bodies such as the Moon or asteroids. It also guarantees freedom of “peaceful” use of outer space for all. US adversaries, as well as many allies, already are nervous about US intentions in space as the Congress debates President Donald Trump’s Space Force proposal. So the thought of space-based American troops is likely to raise concerns.
Before anyone gets too excited about a future US version of Star Trek’s Deep Space Nine, the baseline requirements for Orbital Outpost — including an 80 kilogram payload capacity and and internal volume of 1 meter cubed — are not even close to being able to accommodate humans.
“The thing is too small, 1 m cubed, and low power to do anything remotely human-rated,” said one space scientist.
One Air Force space official agreed, adding “I think the kicker is the 0 to 1 atmosphere pressurization. If DIU will accept vacuum or near vacuum, it won’t be able to support life at all, without some extensive upgrades. In short, this platform would be small, dark, cold, and without any life support!”
Indeed, Col. Steve Butow, director of DIU’s Space Portfolio based in Silicon Valley, says that DIU’s chief interest is in autonomous and robotic capabilities on orbit. “In short, we are casting a wide net for commercial solutions that can meet the basic needs described in the first part of the solicitation (autonomous/robotic, etc),” he told me in an email today.
He noted: “With respect to on orbit manufacturing, our DoD Partners are more interested in the ‘how’ rather than the ‘why’. Many of the autonomous capabilities proposed in supporting on-orbit manufacturing have dual use applications for national security and defense. One example of that is logistics.”
There are a number of commercial companies that have been exploring on-orbit assembly and manufacturing, including 3-D printing — primarily for future commercial uses and for NASA.
NASA since 2017 has hosted a 3-D printer aboard the International Space Station (ISS) made by commercial startup Made in Space. Made In Space didn’t return an email asking for comment by publication time.
NASA also is sponsoring a number of on-orbit experiments such as the Tethers Unlimited’s Refabricator payload, recently launched as part of DoD’s Space Test Program-2 mission (STP-2) on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy. The Refabricator “combines a plastic recycling system with a 3D printer to enable astronauts to recycle plastic waste into high-quality 3D printer filament, and then use that filament to fabricate new parts, medical implements, food utensils, and other items that the astronauts need to maintain their spacecraft and perform their missions,” according to the company’s website.
Rob Hoyt, CEO of Tethers Unlimited, said his company intends to bid for Orbital Outpost, and is currently working to align DIU’s interests with the company’s own interests. “We are working on a modular approach to start out small and address some of those opportunities, and that then can be built up over time by adding more modules,” he said. Tethers Unlimited’s products largely target small satellites and cross a wide range, from software-defined radios to a small robotic arm.
Further, there are 28 corporate members involved in Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) CONFERS consortium developing industry best practices for on-orbit servicing activities. These firms range from established space players like Airbus to startups such as UK-based Effective Space that intends to use drones to help satellites station-keep (maintain their orbital parameters after fuel has run out.)
William Bolton, head of marketing and business development for Altius Space Machines, a Colorado-based startup that is part of the CONFERS consortium, said his firm is “evaluating” whether to bid or not for Orbital Outpost, given that the company has not traditionally looked at DoD as a customer. Still, as Altius is developing satellite servicing vehicles, interfaces and hardware, Bolton said the call for proposals is interesting.
On the other hand, Butow said DIU also didn’t want to cut off possible interest from vendors with “non-traditional or disruptive approaches” to the Orbital Outpost effort. He explained: “We know that a number of companies are working on solutions that may dock or interface with the International Space Station. … We simply did not want to exclude any of those solutions if one proves viable for our needs.”
NASA on June 21 issued a request for proposals (RFI) calling for habitable modules that can attach to the ISS and provide accommodations for tourists, or other commercial activities such as manufacturing or biotechnology experiments.
For example, companies that might be interested in Orbital Outpost could include Bigelow Aerospace, which is developing a number of inflatable habitats for use in orbit and on the surface of the Moon. Bigelow’s BEAM (Bigelow Expandable Activity Module) docked with the ISS in 2016, and will remain on orbit until 2020.
However, several military space experts cautioned that habitat concepts like Bigelow’s B330 would most likely be way too expensive for DIU’s small purse. The Pentagon’s fiscal year 2020 budget request included $29 million and change for DIU. Human rating of spacecraft is not an easy or cheap endeavor — as both SpaceX and Boeing have discovered in their (delayed) efforts to get their spacecraft certified by NASA to carry astronauts to the ISS.
Bigelow did not return a call requesting comment by publication time.
Still, the solicitation lists human rating among its “desired future capabilities” (emphasis mine) that could be “available as options for initial or future implementation.” This does not seem to indicate simply that these are ‘what-the-hell’ options, but capabilities someone in DoD might actually want. Further, there is a cadre of futuristic space thinkers who long have been arguing that a military presence on-orbit will be needed as commercial activities such as asteroid mining and space-based manufacturing become economically viable businesses.
Peter Garretson, former director of Air University’s forward-thinking Space Horizons Task Force, tells me: “If private citizens will be in space, then it makes sense for uniformed guardians to follow…and perhaps help lead and enable that desired future by retiring risk.”
Other interesting capabilities on that list include several that suggest the possibility of military space stations in farther-out orbits such as geosynchronous orbit or even in cislunar space, including:
Servicing or re-provisioning to extend flight operations for a longer duration
Orbit transfer
Radiation hardening for beyond LEO applications
While just a few years ago, anyone proposing any military activities in cislunar space would have been giggled out of town, the future-oriented Air Force acquisition chief Will Roper has talked about doing cislunar space object tracking and former director of the Space Defense Agency (SDA) Fred Kennedy had developed an architecture that also included cislunar object tracking and even potential weapons-carrying Advanced Maneuvering Vehicles for rapidly “delivering effects” all the way out to the Moon. (Although the future of that proposed architecture is now in question following Kennedy’s departure and a likely re-think of priorities by DoD Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Mike Griffin who oversees SDA.)
A May 30 study on the US space industrial base by AFRL and DIU (of which Butow was an author) says that in the mid- to long-term (5 years and beyond) military activities will be driven by the “need to expand the locations and operations of critical assets into cislunar space to limit adversaries’ abilities to detect and attack these assets and to enhance ours and our adversaries ability to apply force through, from and in space;” and by the need “to establish the required infrastructure to return and establish a permanent US presence on the Moon and beyond.”
According to the DIU solicitation, bidders for the Orbital Outpost award will have to demonstrate that they can put their prototype station concept in LEO “within 24 months of award and have guidance, navigation and control for sustained free-flight operations. Favorable characteristics include modularity and scalability.”
While it does not provide a funding level, it does note that the Orbital Outpost effort will be multi-phased. The first phase will include engineering and design work. The subsequent phases will focus on the fabrication and test of the prototype, based upon the availability of fiscal year 2020 funding.
So marines patrolling space-launch corridors from an orbiting station, or airmen suiting up to repair spacecraft docked at a cislunar service station, are probably a long way off — but maybe they’re not just science fiction.
Les Québécois demeurent les champions de l'observationd'ovnis
Les Québécois demeurent les champions de l'observation d'ovnis
kolbass - stock.adobe.com
Après une année record en 2017, les Québécois sont parvenus à maintenir leur titre de champions de l'observation d'objets volants non identifiés au pays en 2018, démontre un rapport de l'organisme Ufology Research ramené dans l'actualité à l'occasion de la journée mondiale des ovnis, mardi.
Qu'ils aient fait part d'un étrange vaisseau d'une dizaine de mètres de diamètre aperçu à Val-David ou trois objets en forme de cigares aperçus au-dessus de Montréal, des Québécois des quatre coins de la province ont multiplié les signalements de formes, de lumières et d'objets énigmatiques aperçus dans le ciel au cours de la dernière année.
En effet, sur les 931 signalements compilés à la grandeur du pays pour Ufology Research, pas moins de 382 provenaient du Québec, soit 41 % du total. Un nombre impressionnant, considérant que la province n'abrite que 22,6 % de la population du pays.
À eux seuls, les Montréalais ont signalé par moins de 84 ovnis, ce qui fait de la métropole la ville où ont été observés le plus d'objets volants mystérieux, tout juste devant Toronto (82).
Environ 5 % de toutes les observations ont finalement été classés comme étant inexpliqués, a précisé Ufology Research.
Le nombre d'ovnis signalé au pays a d'ailleurs chuté d'environ 15 % entre 2017 et 2018. Lors de la précédente compilation réalisée par Ufology Researsh, l'organisme manitobain avait dénombré 1101 observations, dont 47 % avaient été réalisées au Québec.
UNE NOUVEAUTÉ AU QUÉBEC
Le coordonnateur de l'organisme, Chris Rutkowski, a expliqué, dans un courriel adressé à l'Agence QMI, que la propension des Québécois à signaler des observations d'ovnis est plutôt récente. En effet, en 2013, les habitants de la Belle Province étaient à l'origine de seulement 8 % des cas recensés au pays, contre 10 % il y a un quart de siècle.
«Le nombre de rapports d'ovnis fluctue entre les provinces et d'une année à l'autre», a rappelé M. Rutkowski.
«Dans les dernières années, plusieurs organisations d'observations d'ovnis au Québec ont été présentes dans les médias et auprès du public. Cela a certainement affecté les nombres régionaux», a poursuivi le spécialiste en guise d'hypothèse pour expliquer les données québécoises.
Question de souligner la journée mondiale des ovnis, M. Rutkowski a suggéré quelques destinations canadiennes sur son blogue, incluant la piscine qui trône sur le toit de l'Hôtel Bonaventure. En effet, le 7 novembre 1990, plusieurs personnes avaient aperçu un objet illuminé de jaune et de vert flottant au-dessus de l'édifice, une histoire célèbre dans le milieu des amateurs d'ovnis canadiens.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET Volgens onderzoekers aan het Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee zou 2019 wel eens het jaar kunnen zijn waar de mens voor het eerst een portaal opent naar een schaduwdimensie. Met nieuwe testen proberen ze deze zomer bewijs vast te leggen voor het bestaan van een parallel universum. Dat universum zou een spiegel vormen van onze eigen wereld.
Fysicus Leah Broussard is hoopvol over de apparatuur die ze samen met haar collega’s heeft ontwikkeld en die ze deze zomer zullen testen. Volgens haar zouden de experimenten kunnen leiden tot een glimp van een parallel universum of, hoe zij het noemt, ‘spiegelmaterie’. Het universum zou op vele manieren identiek zijn aan het onze, met onder andere spiegelpartikels, spiegelplaneten en misschien zelfs spiegelleven. De onderzoekers inspireren zich voor deze testen op een aantal afwijkende resultaten uit de jaren 90 die tot nu toe onverklaard zijn gebleven.
Abnormale resultaten
In de jaren 90 van de vorige eeuw probeerden enkele fysici de tijd te meten die neutronen nodig hadden om in protonen te breken nadat ze verwijderd waren van de nucleus van een atoom. Twee verschillende experimenten leidden echter tot twee verschillende snelheden. Hoewel het verschil tussen beide proeven slechts negen seconden bedraagt, breken wetenschappers zich nog altijd het hoofd over een mogelijk antwoord.
Antwoord in parallel universum
Om een verklaring te vinden voor de abnormale waarnemingen, wil Leah Broussard deze zomer dus een reeks experimenten uitvoeren waarmee ze denkt een antwoord te vinden in een parallel universum. Als Broussard en haar team het bestaan van een spiegelwereld kunnen bewijzen, zou het tijdsverschil tussen beide experimenten verklaard kunnen worden: er zijn twee levenslopen van neutronen en het is mogelijk dat één procent van de neutronen de grens tussen onze wereld en de spiegelwereld oversteekt voor die de grens terug oversteken en een proton voortbrengen. Dit zou de lichte vertraging in het tweede experiment motiveren.
Experiment
Om een parallel universum waar te nemen willen ze aan het Oak Ridge met de nieuw ontwikkelde apparatuur een stroom subatomaire deeltjes door een 15-meter lange buis sturen langs een krachtige magneet en richting een ondoordringbare muur. Aan de andere kant van die muur staat een neutronendetector. Als alles goed gaat, en als het universum meewerkt, zouden enkele van die deeltjes in spiegelversies van zichzelf moeten veranderen. Hierdoor zouden ze door de tunnel en door de muur moeten raken. Als dat gebeurt, heeft Broussard als eerste bewijs geleverd voor een spiegelwereld die naast de onze bestaat.
“Nogal gek”
Broussard zelf noemt haar experiment “nogal gek”, het bestaan van parallelle universa lijkt namelijk recht uit een sciencefictionfilm te komen. Toch beweert ze dat het experiment niet zo moeilijk is en volgens haar zelfs redelijk voor de hand liggend. Ze beseft toch ook de impact van dit onderzoek. Als ze ook maar één spiegelpartikel weet waar te nemen, verandert volgens haar alles.
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UFO-lek van de eeuw. Amerikaanse astronaut bevestigt onderzoek naar buitenaardse vaartuigen
UFO-lek van de eeuw. Amerikaanse astronaut bevestigt onderzoek naar buitenaardse vaartuigen
Al jaren gaan er geruchten over speciale programma’s die gericht zijn op het bestuderen van UFO-technologie.
Onlangs werd een document gelekt dat het bestaan van deze programma’s lijkt te bevestigen. Richard Dolan bespreekt het stuk in onderstaande video.
Er staat onder meer in dat wijlen astronaut Edgar Mitchell bevestigt dat er programma’s zijn waarbij onderzoek wordt gedaan naar buitenaardse vaartuigen.
Ontmoeting
Het document heeft betrekking op een ontmoeting in 2002 tussen de gerespecteerde wetenschapper Eric Davis en viceadmiraal Thomas Ray Wilson, tussen 1999 en 2002 directeur van de Amerikaanse militaire inlichtingendienst DIA.
Tijdens de ontmoeting werd vooral gesproken over een eerdere ontmoeting, in 1997, waar UFO-onderzoeker Steven Greer, admiraal Wilson, Apollo-astronaut dr. Edgar Mitchell en diverse hooggeplaatste legerfunctionarissen bij aanwezig waren.
Berging
Zowel dr. Greer als Mitchell verwezen eerder naar deze ontmoeting.
Het document gaat over een programma dat gericht is op de berging van gecrashte buitenaardse vaartuigen, die ‘niet op aarde en niet door de mens’ zijn gemaakt.
We zijn zeker niet alleen op aarde. Kolonel vertelt in deze video over een driehoekige UFO die in een Engels bos landde
We zijn zeker niet alleen op aarde. Kolonel vertelt in deze video over een driehoekige UFO die in een Engels bos landde
In december 1980 waren functionarissen van de luchtmacht getuige van een vliegtuigcrash in het bos. Althans, dat dachten ze.
Wat ze aantroffen zou hun leven voorgoed veranderen.
“Ik dacht steeds: niemand gaat geloven wat wij te vertellen hebben,” zei de gepensioneerde kolonel Charles Halt, één van de getuigen, tegen de New York Post.
Niet alleen
“Wij zijn zeker niet alleen op aarde,” zei hij vastbesloten.
Het incident vond plaats in het Engelse Rendlesham Forest, een bos tussen twee legerbases; Bentwaters en Woodbridge.
Op 26 december 1980 zagen militairen die gestationeerd waren op de basis vreemde lichten in het bos. Ze dachten in eerste instantie aan een vliegtuigcrash.
Driehoekig
Ze besloten op onderzoek uit te gaan en troffen geen gecrasht vliegtuig, maar een gelande UFO aan.
Het ging om een relatief klein driehoekig vaartuig.
Twee soldaten naderden het schip, waarna het verticaal opsteeg en met duizelingwekkende snelheid wegvloog.
Afdrukken
Enkele dagen later kwam de UFO terug. Kolonel Halt stelde een team samen en ging het bos in. Daar zag hij een vreemd rood licht in de lucht.
Op de plek waar het object enkele dagen eerder was geland, waren afdrukken in de grond te zien.
JE HEBT GEEN NASA NODIG OM BUITENAARDS LEVEN TE ONTDEKKEN ( VIDEO )
JE HEBT GEEN NASA NODIG OM BUITENAARDS LEVEN TE ONTDEKKEN ( VIDEO )
We weten zo langzamerhand dat er zich veel meer dingen in de ruimte, al dan niet onder een dome, afspelen dan ons wordt verteld.
Het vertrouwen in leugenachtige organisaties zoals NASA schiet ook niet echt op, maar er zijn ook andere manieren.
Natuurlijk zijn wij gewone mensen beperkt met dingen die we zelf kunnen doen om geheimen in de ruimte te ontdekken.
Gemakkelijk is het dan ook niet, maar toch zijn er enkele dingen die je zelf zou kunnen doen om meer te weten te komen.
Steeds vaker zien we beelden opduiken van bijvoorbeeld de maan die gemaakt zijn vanaf de aarde door amateurs met sterke telescopen.
Met een dergelijke telescoop kan je al dingen ontdekken die NASA voor ons verborgen houdt zoals gebouwen op de maan.
Een voorbeeld daarvan is de volgende foto:
De opname is gemaakt door een man die via Youtube zijn bevindingen deelt met het publiek en bekendstaat onder de naam BruceSeesAll.
Nu zal Bruce echt niet alles zien, maar hij ziet wel veel en volgens Scott Waring is deze man uiterst betrouwbaar en kun je ervan uitgaan dat wat hij laat zien echt is.
Deze man observeert de maan regelmatig en heeft dan ook al heel wat fantastische opnames gemaakt zoals oook te zien in de volgende video.
Waarmee dan ook weer voor de zoveelste keer is bewezen dat buitenaards leven bestaat en in dit geval op onze maan. En bovenal, dat dit ook te ontdekken is door ons gewone mensen.
Een andere manier om bijzondere dingen te zien in de ruimte is het maken van foto’s.
Wij ontvingen het volgende bericht en foto’s van een lezer (dank!). De foto’s zijn dinsdagavond gemaakt.
Ik heb deze foto gisteren gemaakt om ongeveer half elf het is de heldere ster Venus waarschijnlijk pal zuidelijk ten opzichte van Arnhem zijn met splinternieuwe camera gemaakt van NIKON Een P900
ik heb dit nooit eerder gezien wat vinden jullie ven deze foto s ik was erg onder de indruk hoop vanavond op meer ik heb nu ongeveer 20 foto s ik stuur of foto van ongeveer half tien is de ufo ook wazig zichtbaar kijk maar goed .links onderin donkerder vlek ook wisselt het steeds van vorm zo lijkt het.
Het lijkt alsofer een onbekend object voor Venus langs vliegt. Het enige probleem is uiteraard dat je geen enkel idee hebt hoe hoog dit object vliegt en of het zich überhaupt in de buurt van Venus bevindt.
Het lijkt ook niet op een vogel die voor de camera langs vliegt of een ander te herkennen object. Mocht iemand een idee hebben wat die stip voor Venus zou kunnen zijn, laat ons weten.
En voor diegenen die zelf willen proberen mooie opnames met telescoop of camera; laat het ons weten als er iets bijzonders te zien is.
Physicists have detected the highest-energy light ever recorded, coming from the Crab Nebula, the remains of a supernova, around 6,500 light years from the Earth.
Researchers in Tibet used enormous detectors to pick out the particle showers created by these gamma rays as they hit particles in the Earth's atmosphere.
With energies of 100–450 trillion electron volts, the photons are around 69 times more energetic than the highest-powered particles in the Large Hadron Collider.
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Physicists have detected the highest-energy light ever recorded, coming from the remains of a supernova — the Crab Nebula, pictured — that lies around 6,500 light years from the Earth
The high-energy gamma ray photons from the Crab Nebula were detected using the Tibet AS-gamma experiment, a so-called air shower observation array based in Yangbajain, in western China.
The experiment uses nearly 600 particle detectors, distributed over around 700,000 square feet (65,000 square metres) to detect the particle showers created when the high-energy photons hit Earth's atmosphere.
Each of the photons they detected had energies in excess of 100 trillion electron volts, the previously-detected record, with some as high as 4.5 times that.
For comparison, visible light photons have energies of around a few electron volts, while the Large Hadron Collider — the most powerful particle accelerator built by man — can only reach energies of around 6.5 trillion electron volts.
Located around 6,500 light years away, the Crab Nebula was formed after a star exploded in a supernova that was spotted by Chinese astronomers in 1054.
This explosion created the conditions that can generate extremely high-energy photons.
First, charged particles like electrons were driven up to high energies by the shock-wave and the magnetic forces generated by the supernova explosion.
When these high-energy electrons in the Crab Nebula collide with low-energy photons, they transfer their energy, making the photons high-energy instead.
These photons travel off through space and some may even arrive at the Earth.
When one of these high-energy photons interacts with particles in the Earth's atmosphere, they create showers of other subatomic particles — electrons and positrons — which can be detected by instruments located on the Earth's surface.
The challenge, however, is to distinguish the particle showers caused by high energy photons hitting the atmosphere with those that are also created by cosmic rays, which are much more common.
Researchers in Tibet used enormous detectors to pick out the particle showers created by these gamma rays from the Crab Nebula, pictured, as they hit the Earth's atmosphere
To do this, experts used underground detectors to exclude any event that created muons — elementary particle that are essentially the heavier relatives of electrons — as these particles are created in showers from cosmic rays but not photons.
After ruling out as many of the muon-generating shower events as they could, researchers were left with 24 particle showers, detected across a 3-year-period, that may have been triggered by photons with energies above 100 trillion electron volts.
Some of the shower events even appeared to have been triggered by photons with energies in excess of 450 trillion electron volts.
The researchers do caution that six of the events they detected could have potentially been caused by cosmic rays, rather than high-energy photons, due to uncertainties in the muon-based exclusion process.
'This energy regime has not been accessible before,' astrophysicist Petra Huentemeyer of the Michigan Technological University in Houghton, who was not involved in the study, told Science News.
'It's an exciting time' for physicists who study gamma rays, she added.
By searching for photons with even higher energies, researchers could find out exactly how the particles are given their energy boosts.
'There has to be a limit to how high the energy of the photons can go,' said physicist David Hanna of McGill University, Montreal, who was also not involved in this study.
Determining this maximum possible energy would allow experts to refine their theories.
The full findings of the study have been accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters.
WHAT IS A SUPERNOVA AND HOW DOES IT FORM?
A supernova occurs when a star explodes, shooting debris and particles into space.
A supernova burns for only a short period of time, but it can tell scientists a lot about how the universe began.
One kind of supernova has shown scientists that we live in an expanding universe, one that is growing at an ever increasing rate.
Scientists have also determined that supernovas play a key role in distributing elements throughout the universe.
In 1987, astronomers spotted a ‘titanic supernova’ in a nearby galaxy blazing with the power of over 100 million suns (pictured)
There are two known types of supernova.
The first type occurs in binary star systems when one of the two stars, a carbon-oxygen white dwarf, steals matter from its companion star.
Eventually, the white dwarf accumulates too much matter, causing the star to explode, resulting in a supernova.
The second type of supernova occurs at the end of a single star's lifetime.
As the star runs out of nuclear fuel, some of its mass flows into its core.
Eventually, the core is so heavy it can't stand its own gravitational force and the core collapses, resulting in another giant explosion.
Many elements found on Earth are made in the core of stars and these elements travel on to form new stars, planets and everything else in the universe.
Scientists at the Tibet Air-Shower Array high atop the Tibetan plateau recently observed the most powerful photons ever recorded from an astrophysical source hitting Earth. The photon was part of a barrage of light coming from the Crab Nebula, a giant cloud of gas some 6,500 light-years away with a pulsar—a neutron star spinning at 30 revolutions per second, emitting high-frequency radiation as a tight beam of energy—at its heart, which is all that remains of a powerful supernova that occurred, from our perspective, in 1054 A.D.
Although the Air Shower Array is used to recording extremely high powered photons, they say the photons they recently detected coming from the Crab Nebula are off the charts. According to the MIT Technology Review, the highest powered photons that can be created on Earth, such as those in the Large Hadron Collider, have an energy of roughly 14 terraelectronvolts (TeV), and scientists at the Air Shower Array routinely detect photons of that power. The photons they just saw coming from the Crab Nebula are over 100 TeV, including one single photon with an energy of 500 TeV. That’s the energetic equivalent of a falling ping-pong ball.
The Crab Nebula
What’s that? A falling ping-pong ball isn’t impressive enough for you? Consider this: a single photon is a weird subatomic particle/wave that operates on the quantum scale and has no mass, whereas ping-pong balls are large enough to play an Olympic sport with. That’s like throwing a ping-pong ball with the energetic equivalent of a nuclear bomb. That comparison may not be even close to correct, but you get the idea. It was a shockingly powerful photon.
As to how these high-energy photons are created, scientists have a working theory. According to the MIT Technology review:
Photons of this energy are thought to be created by a process known as inverse Compton scattering. This occurs when a high-energy particle transfers its energy to a photon. In the case of the Crab Nebula, the high-energy particles are probably electrons and protons accelerated by shock waves in the powerful magnetic fields that surround the pulsar.
Artist’s depiction of a pulsar.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
According to the paper about these observations, this discovery opens up a whole new range of possible energy levels for photons and sheds some light on the conditions near pulsars, some of of the most extreme and mysterious objects in the known universe. Now that they have a record of an off-the-charts photon and exactly where it came from, the researchers can work backwards to figure out the sort of physical processes that are happening in and around the Crab Nebula pulsar. But as with all things spacey, the data will have to be checked and rechecked with further observations until scientists can make any definitive headway to understanding pulsars. Even then, there’s always a good chance that it all turns out to be nonsense.
Alien Implants Are Emitting A Weird Electromagnetic Signal
Alien Implants Are Emitting A Weird Electromagnetic Signal
Filmmaker and artist Jeremy Corbell discussed his research and work with the late Dr. Roger Leir, who removed dozens of alien implants from people. In Corbell’s new film, Patient Seventeen, he explores the truth behind implants, and interviewed the man whom Leir conducted his last surgery upon.
Corbell found ‘Patient Seventeen’ to be a sincere and honest man who was not looking for the limelight. He described alien abduction experiences that could be connected to the small metallic implant that showed up on X-rays of his leg.
This is the most recent photo from the Mars rover. This ancient dome on Mars has stood the test of time. I have reported this dome when it was further away, but never before have we seen it so close as now. Its reflective smooth surface sows that it was built to reflect the heat and keep the interior cool. It looks like the NASA rover is driving in this direction, so lets keep our fingers crossed. We may see an entrance or ancient writing on its walls when close. Scott C. Waring
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UFOs Created Hurricane To Fly Into Underwater Base Undetected, July 2, 2019, UFO Sighting News.
UFOs Created Hurricane To Fly Into Underwater Base Undetected, July 2, 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: July 2, 2019 Location of sighting: Coast of Mexico These UFOs were recorded by a Youtuber going by the name of MRMB333. During the eclipse he noticed that some dark shadows were on a hurricane weather map. He believes the dark shadows to be just reflections of shadow from the eclipse. He actually caught a fleet of UFOs flying over the hurricane and into the eye. Watch carefully and you will notice that they all fly into the eye, like going down a drain in a bathroom sink. Its obvious to me that the aliens wanted to fly into an underwater base unnoticed so they created the hurricane in order to fly over it and enter the base undetected. Now would aliens deliberately create a hurricane and endanger the lives of humans in the process to hide from us? Yes, some species defiantly would do such an thing. Not all the aliens care about humans. UFOs have been seen creating clouds, storms, lightning, tornados and even earthquakes. UFOs are frequently seen during the most horrific of natural disasters. Which is proof that they created it. But here, we have a motive for creating the hurricane...for entering an underwater base. Scott C. Waring
I found this alien spaceship on the planet Pluto in a NASA photo. The spaceship is huge, about 2.8 to 5.6 miles across (4-7km), since the photo itself is 280 miles or 450km across. This UFO is about 1-2% of that distance. The ship looks very similar to NASAs old space shuttle but is of course, much larger. The back has three different fins on it. I would be that this ship still works. Imagine using it for flying from Earth to Pluto in a few minutes. Scott C. Waring
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
UFO Sighting: Alien ship seen near Mexico volcano is PROOF of ET – shock claim
UFO Sighting: Alien ship seen near Mexico volcano is PROOF of ET – shock claim
A HUGE UFO has been spotted exiting one of Mexico’s biggest volcanos – and alien hunters believe it is proof that extraterrestrials are using it as a base.
Eagle-eyed alien enthusiasts spotted a boomerang-shaped object hovering above the source of Popocatepetl, near Mexico City. The sighting was made on webcams which constantly monitor the 5,426 metre tall volcano, colloquially named El Popo. In the video, which was originally uploaded to YouTube channel ColourUFO before gaining traction in conspiracy theorist quarters, a bright, curved light can be seen making its way up the side of the volcano before it suddenly disappears.
One conspiracy theorist claims not only is the video proof of aliens, but it is also strong evidence that they are using the volcano as a base.
Prominent alien hunter Scott C Waring wrote on his blog ET Database: “Here is an amazing sighting of a boomerang UFO coming out of a volcano in Mexico.
“The UFO slowly moves up from the side of the volcano, glowing powerfully as it continues to rise and disappear above the volcano.
“This is 100 percent proof that there is an alien base 5km below this volcano as many UFO researchers and myself believe.
UFO Sighting: Alien ship seen near Mexico volcano is PROOF of ET – shock claim
(Image: GETTY • YOUTUBE)
“The UFO itself is about 40 percent the width of the mouth of the volcano. The mouth is 600 meters across, thus the UFO is 240 meters.”
At 5,426 metres tall Popocatepetl, which is 70 kilometres away from the capital Mexico City, is the second largest volcano in North America, but experts say that it does not pose a huge threat to locals due to its usually dormant nature.
In 2017, Popocatepetl erupted for the first time since 2000 when ash was propelled a staggering three kilometres into the sky. Since then, there have been several eruptions.
While some researchers are trying to find life on other planets, others are learning more about the hidden life here on Earth.
To say that subsurface life is poorly understood would be an understatement. We tend to think of habitats and ecosystems as being on the surface, or at the very most inside the oceans but the subsurface is also a very active place — it’s just that its inhabitants are very small. Using hi-tech studies of all sorts, different teams of researchers have surveyed all sorts of subsurface environments, from volcanoes to diamond mines. Microscopic creatures that were once completely ignored are starting to be brought to light — and researchers at the Deep Carbon Observatory are trying to make sense of all these new findings.
Recently, the Deep Carbon Observatory announced some of their recent findings: there are 200 to 600 octillion microbes live beneath the terrestrial crust, and almost certainly, even more of them living in the oceanic crust. That amounts to some20 billion tons of living matter— or the equivalent of 200 million blue whales.
“I think this is one of the first times anyone has really looked at combining a lot of different environments in the continental subsurface and tried to think about how many species there might actually be,” said Cara Magnabosco, the lead author of the new study.
To make matters even more impressive, not only are there massive numbers of microbes surviving beneath the ground, but the conditions in which they do so are absolutely hellish.
Take Geogemma barossii, for instance. If you were to put it in boiling water (at 212 degrees Fahrenheit), it would probably freeze up. That’s because it’s used to much higher temperatures, of around 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Until recently, it wasn’t even known that creatures can survive at those temperatures. Meanwhile, Candidatus Desulforudisaudaxviator, which lives 2.8 kilometres (1.7 mi) underground in the Mponeng gold mine in South Africa, essentially survives by breathing rocks — or to be more precise, what’s released when particular rocks meet water. Other bacteria breathe uranium and expel tiny crystals. For many of these creatures, you could take out the sun tomorrow, and they probably wouldn’t even care.
The denizens of the underground largely fall into two categories: Archaea (single-celled microbes without a nucleus) and bacteria. But there are also other types of microbes, as well as some pluricellular creatures like worms and insects. Just like there are rainforests and mountains and deserts on Earth, there’s a comparable diversity beneath the surface — and we’re just starting to learn about it.
The study “The biomass and biodiversity of the continental subsurface” by Magnabosco et al. has been published in Nature Geoscience.
RECORD AANTAL UITBARSTINGEN STEAMBOAT GEYSER BIJ YELLOWSTONE VULKAAN ( VIDEO )
RECORD AANTAL UITBARSTINGEN STEAMBOAT GEYSER BIJ YELLOWSTONE VULKAAN ( VIDEO )
Volgens NASA is hét grote gevaar voor de aarde niet een asteroïde, maar de uitbarsting van een supervulkaan.
En als er één onrustige supervulkaan op aarde is, dan is dat wel de bekende Yellowstone vulkaan.
Het is al jaren onrustig rondom de Yellowstone vulkaan en hoewel er in de achtergrond duidelijk tekenen van paniek zijn, wordt voor de buitenwereld volgehouden dat alles piekfijn in orde is en er niets is om je zorgen over te maken.
Eén van de tekenen van onrust rondom de Yellowstone vulkaan is de zogenaamde Steamboat Geyser, waarover we vorig jaar oktober het volgende schreven.
Het is al jaren onrustig rondom de Yellowstone supervulkaan in Amerika. Regelmatig duiken er berichten op dat een uitbarsting van deze gigant misschien niet zo ver weg is.
Ook nu is er weer een groep seismologen die waarschuwen dat de Yellowstone supervulkaan “onder druk” staat, waarmee uiteraard dan weer de vrees toeneemt dat er een uitbarsting zal volgen.
En verder:
Dat alles toch niet zo normaal is als men wil doen voorkomen blijkt ook uit het feit dat vorig jaar het speciale NASA observatievliegtuig, een Boeing 747 genaamd Sophia en uitgerust met infrarode opname-apparatuur, vluchten uitvoerde boven Yellowstone. En nu is Yellowstone weer in het nieuws en dit keer door de onverwachte uitbarsting van een geiser met de naam Steamboat Geyser. Dit is sinds 2014 niet meer gebeurd en nu zijn er drie uitbarstingen in de afgelopen zes weken. Er zijn ooit een keer eerder drie uitbarstingen in één jaar geweest en dat was in 2003. Maar, dit jaar is pas vier maanden oud en aangezien iedere keer het woord “ongewoon” wordt gebruikt, raken mensen steeds wantrouwiger. Temeer ook omdat vulkanologen zoals Michael Poland, hun uiterste best doen om haastig te zeggen dat er helemaal niets aan de hand is, maar geen verklaring kunnen geven voor deze “ongewone” uitbarstingen. Het enige dat ze kunnen zeggen is dat er geen vast tijdschema bestaat voor dit soort uitbarstingen.
We zijn net twee maanden later en wat eigenlijk niemand voor mogelijk hield, is toch gebeurd en dat is dat Steamboat Geyser nu voor de tiende keer dit jaar is uitgebarsten.
Deze Steamboat Geyser vestigt nu opnieuw een record want er is deze week de kortste tijd ooit tussen uitbarstingen geconstateerd.
Dit gebeurde op 12 juni rond 13.00 uur en vervolgens drie dagen later om 16.40 uur op 15 juni. Beide uitbarstingen waren ook ongewoon heftig en luid, waarbij bij één uitbarsting een rots de lucht in werd geslingerd.
De autoriteiten doen zoals gewoonlijk weer hun uiterste best iedereen rustig te houden met verklaringen dat geysers nu eenmaal af en toe uitbarsten, hetgeen vertaald betekent: maak je geen zorgen, alles is onder controle. En dat zeggen ze dan terwijl er vorig jaar een nieuw record werd gevestigd met een totaal van 32 uitbarstingen. In dit jaar zitten we nu al op 19, waarvan 6 keer in juni.
Wetenschapper Michael Manga aan de Universiteit van Californië is in ieder geval eerlijk over de mogelijke oorzaak van die uitbarstingen: “Ik wou dat ik je het kon vertellen”.
Wanneer je dan bedenkt dat de Steamboat Geyser zich bovenop een onrustige supervulkaan bevindt, dan begrijp je ook waarom men bij een organisatie zoals NASA behoorlijk in paniek is.
Het is zaak om gebeurtenissen zoals nu met de Steamboat Geyser niet als een afzonderlijke gebeurtenis te zien, zoals nu ook weer gebeurt.
Wanneer een geyser die zich bovenop een supervulkaan bevindt, zich zo gedraagt, dan kan dat niet los gezien worden van de zeer onrustige situatie van de vulkaan zelf.
Een vulkaan die zo onrustig is dat NASA zich nu bezighoudt met hele drastische plannen om het “probleem” te tackelen, maar ook plannen die een volkomen averechtse uitwerking kunnen hebben zoals we eerder schreven.
NASA houdt zich al heel lang bezig met de problematiek rondom Yellowstone en werkt nu aan een plan dat de wereld moet redden van een uitbarsting door deze gigant.
Die plannen bestaan volgens Brian Wilcox van het NASA Jet Propulsion Lab uit het boren van een tien kilometer diep gat in de vulkaan waardoor water naar binnen kan worden gepompt. Op deze manier kan dan de hitte in de vulkaan langzaam afnemen. Tegelijkertijd zou dan de vrijgekomen hitte kunnen worden gebruikt als een soort enorme energiecentrale.
Er zouden dan ook investeerders gezocht moeten worden die hier brood in zien, want de kosten van het boren van een dergelijk gat met bijbehorende acties zou ongeveer 3,5 miljard dollar moeten kosten.
Maar, zegt Wilcox erbij: “Dit alles moet heel voorzichtig gebeuren, want het kleinste foutje kan ervoor zorgen dat deze supervulkaan juist zal uitbarsten”.
En als dat zou gebeuren, dan krijgen we op het noordelijk halfrond een langdurige vulkanische winter met als gevolg onder andere enorme problemen met de voedselvoorziening omdat oogsten zouden mislukken. Volgens cijfers van de Verenigde Naties is de totale reserve voorraad voedsel voor de wereld slechts genoeg voor 74 dagen.
Waar het op lijkt is dat men bij NASA een beetje in de paniekmodus verkeert en dat ze “iets” moeten doen, omdat de dreiging van deze vulkaan met de dag groter wordt.
According to a new study conducted by a team at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder), the clouds that form in Mars’ thin atmosphere are caused by meteors. “Meteor smoke”, which is icy dust that is left behind when a meteor burns up in Mars’ atmosphere, is what partially creates the cirrus-looking clouds that are positioned around 18 miles above the planet’s surface.
Cirrus clouds in the Martian atmosphere. Though much less substantial than Earthly clouds, Martian clouds play a big role in that planet’s climate, and may have helped keep Mars warm enough for liquid water to sculpt the Martian surface.
Image: Mars Exploration Rover Mission, Cornell, JPL, NASA
Since clouds here on Earth are formed by particles, such as grains of dust or sea salt, that are carried into the air by the wind and then the water molecules condense around them which causes the clouds to form and grow. Mars, on the other hand, has barely any particles floating around since the atmosphere is so thin. But when small meteors enter Mars’ atmosphere, they often burn up which creates fine dust or “meteor smoke” which are the particles needed for clouds to develop.
Earth has noctilucent clouds that are created from the dust of meteors and are seen at an altitude of around 50 miles in the atmosphere. After the sun sets on Earth, the clouds still reflect the light of the sun, so they can be seen glowing a bright blue color.
Noctilucent Clouds
While the dust from the meteors helps to create the Martian clouds, the thin atmosphere only allows for certain types of clouds to form. The clouds are normally very wispy and cotton candy-like – quite similar to Earth’s cirrus clouds. “But just because they’re thin and you can’t really see them doesn’t mean they can’t have an effect on the dynamics of the climate,” stated Victoria Hartwick, who is a graduate student at CU Boulder. In fact, the temperatures at the same height as the clouds could fluctuate warmer or colder by 18 degrees Fahrenheit.
According to Brian Toon, who is a professor at CU Boulder, “More and more climate models are finding that the ancient climate of Mars, when rivers were flowing across its surface and life might have originated, was warmed by high altitude clouds. It is likely that this discovery will become a major part of that idea for warming Mars.”
You can check out some pictures of the clouds on Mars.
A stunning view of cirrus-like clouds seen by the Curiosity rover on Mars, on sol 2417. This is a cloudy day for Mars!
Noctilucent clouds in Mars’ sky, seen by the Curiosity rover. Curiosity captured these clouds on Sol 2410 (May 18, 2019). The clouds are sunlit although the sun has set; they’re noctilucent clouds or night-shining clouds.
Noctilucent clouds in motion, Curiosity, Sol 2405. Curiosity looked upward after sunset on Sol 2405 (May 13, 2019) and saw wispy cirrus clouds in motion, high above the ground. Because of their high elevation, the clouds are still sunlit, making them noctilucent (night-shining) clouds.
While the Martian clouds are much too weak and the atmosphere is too thin to produce rain, snow did fall close to the North Pole in 2008 and was witnessed by the Phoenix Mars Lander. Frost and fog has also been seen on the Red Planet due to a water cycle that occurs even without water on the surface and an extremely thin atmosphere.
When it comes to compiling lists of monsters residing in the five Great Lakes, fans of Lake Michigan usually respond with some comment about the great fishing (which it has) or change the subject to the Michigan Dogman. That’s because Lake Michigan has no famous monsters, just a few rumors. It’s so bad, even the 2018 “Lake Michigan Monster” film is more comedy than horror. All of this may change soon with an eerie (not Erie) video from a closed-circuit camera on a Lake Michigan pier showing what looks like a giant sea monster or serpent trapped near a lighthouse during a severe storm before finally freeing itself and swimming off. A real Lake Michigan monster? Aquatic Dogman? The world’s largest blob of seaweed?
“The “Lake Ness” monster being washed over the south pier during the gale on 6-13-2019 lol. But really, what the heck is it? Apologies on quality – taken from downtown with live web camera in 40 mph wind. Credit: WWMT and Horizon Broadband livestream service.”
Michigan resident Tim Wenzel posted the vide on his Facebook page, hoping for help in identifying what he called the “Lake Ness” monster. For a perspective on its size, the lighthouse in the video is Charlevoix’s South Pier Lighthouse – a lighted landmark for Lake Michigan boats looking for the channel to Round Lake and Lake Charlevoix. The first wooden lighthouse was built there in 1885 and the current steel structure was built in 1948 and is 41 feet (12.5 meters) high. Wenzel was apparently watching the live video stream provided by the WWMT and Horizon Broadband livestream service on June 13 because he’s a self-described “storm geek” and “small sailboat skipper.”
After posting the video on Facebook, Wenzel received a number of serious and nonsensical suggestions as to what the “monster” might be. He agrees with many who thought it was a giant lake sturgeon, which can weigh up to 200 pounds and reach a length of seven feet. While sturgeons are known to be flexible, the ‘creature’ in the video seems to be pretty bendable and far longer than seven feet. That leads some, including Dr. Pete VanVranken of the Dickman Road Veterinary Clinic in Battle Creek interviewed by Kalamazoo radio station K102.5, to suggest it was a giant eel, especially after seeing it seemingly slither through the barrier and appear to dive after reaching the other side. There are many species of eels and lampreys, both native and invasive, living in Lake Michigan. However, even the sea lamprey only reaches 4 feet (1.2 meters) in length and the thing in the video appears larger.
So, what is that thing in Tim Wenzel’s video? A mutant lamprey or sturgeon? An unidentifiable blob of seaweed or trash? Something else? Something worse?
Something at least worthy of the name Lake Michigan Monster and a better movie?
DNA Is Code but Who Coded It? No, You're Not a Robot Made Out of Meat
DNA Is Code but Who Coded It? No, You're Not a Robot Made Out of Meat
Is the software that runs life the result of accumulated copying errors? Or does it require a programmer?
This episode of Science Uprising examines how Microsoft founder Bill Gates, geneticist and entrepreneur Craig Venter, and even evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins all acknowledge that DNA is like software.
As Stephen Meyer says here, we know from having lived in and observed the world that “information always arises from an intelligent source.” Simply applying that knowledge to the biological information in DNA seems to command an inference to intelligent design.
“If our DNA code is more complex than any man-made software, where did it come from and how was that software created?
People featured in this episode include Stephen Meyer, PhD, Director of the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute and author of Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design; and Douglas Axe, Maxwell Visiting Professor of Molecular Biology at Biola University and author of Undeniable.
Black Hole Brings Down Curtain On Jellyfish Galaxy's Star Turn
Black Hole Brings Down Curtain On Jellyfish Galaxy's Star Turn
The role of an excited black hole in the death of an exotic ‘jellyfish’ galaxy will be presented today (3 July) by Callum Bellhouse of the University of Birmingham at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting in Lancaster. The supermassive black hole at the centre of jellyfish galaxy JO201 is stripping away gas and throwing it out into space, accelerating suppression of star formation and effectively ‘killing’ the galaxy.
Jellyfish galaxies are spectacular objects that undergo a dramatic process of transformation as they plunge through the dense core of a galaxy cluster at supersonic speeds. External drag forces tear away the galaxy’s gas, in a process known as ram-pressure stripping, leaving extended tentacles of trailing material.
This is jellyfish galaxy JO201.
Credit: Callum Bellhouse and the GASP collaboration
The fate of JO201 has been revealed as part of a study of 114 jellyfish galaxies by the GASP (GAs Stripping Phenomena) collaboration, an international team of researchers led by Dr Bianca Poggianti.
To explore the structure of the jellyfish galaxies in 3D and estimate the timescales of their transformation, Bellhouse has created interactive models that can also be experienced in virtual reality.
The study shows that JO201, originally a large spiral galaxy, has been diving through the massive cluster Abell 85 at supersonic speeds for around a billion years. As the jellyfish galaxy is travelling along the line of sight, its tentacles appear foreshortened in the model, but the team estimates that they trail 94 kiloparsecs behind JO201 — about three times the diameter of our Milky Way.
“A galaxy sustains itself by constantly forming new stars from gas, so understanding how gas flows into and out of a galaxy helps us learn how it evolves. The example of JO201 shows how the balance tips towards then away from star-formation as it plunges through the galaxy cluster and faces increasingly extreme stripping of its gas,” said Bellhouse.
This is jellyfish galaxy JO201.
Credit: Callum Bellhouse and the GASP collaboration
JO201′s transformation into a jellyfish galaxy has caused a brief increase in star formation due to the ram-pressure stripping process. Compressed clouds of gas have collapsed and formed a ring of stars in the disk of the galaxy. Dense knots in tentacles have condensed like rainclouds to begin forming new stars in the galaxy’s wake.
However, the over the last few hundred million years, the black hole appears to have ripped away gas to leave a large void around the centre of the galaxy disc. The team believes that the ram-pressure stripping may have funnelled gas into the central parts of the galaxy, where it has provoked the black hole into blasting out material and creating a shock-wave that has left a cavity behind.
“An important balancing act occurs between processes which either boost or diminish the star formation rate in jellyfish galaxies. In the case of JO201, the central black hole becomes excited by the ram-pressure stripping and starts to throw out gas. This means that the galaxy is being hollowed out from the inside, as well as torn away from the outside,” said Bellhouse.
This is a composite image of jellyfish galaxy JO201 made from combining near ultraviolet (colored blue), Hα (colored red) and oxygen (colored green).
Credit: Callum Bellhouse and the GASP collaboration
“JO201 is, so far, a unique example of a supermassive black hole and ram-pressure stripping in quenching star formation in a jellyfish galaxy. Studying these curious objects gives us an insight into the complex processes that galaxies experience,” said Bellhouse.
Interactive models
An interactive visualisation showing a 3D model of the distribution of stars and gas in the Jellyfish Galaxy JO201/JW100/JO194. The model is made using the spatial distribution of stars and gas on the sky, with the velocity along the line-of-sight giving the depth. Red=Hydrogen, Blue=Nitrogen, Green=Oxygen, White=stars.
All over the planet, nature is starting to behave in some very unusual ways. And unfortunately for us, a lot of the changes that we are witnessing in nature are quite detrimental for humanity. Of course, the truth is that we haven’t exactly been too kind to the planet that we are living on. In fact, many would argue that we are in the process of absolutely devastating the Earth, and most of us don’t feel bad about that at all. So could it be possible that it is now payback time?
Let me give you just one quick example of how we are destroying the planet. According to a recent survey of U.S. beekeepers, an astounding 37 percent of all honeybee colonies were lost over the winter…
Every year since 2006, the University of Maryland’s nonprofit Bee Informed Partnership (BIP) conducts an annual survey to determine how many bee colonies were lost over the course of the year. The 2018–2019 survey asked 4,696 U.S. beekeepers to report how many colonies they lost, and the preliminary results of the survey suggest that things aren’t looking so good.
Of the more than 319,000 managed bee colonies in the survey, 37.7 percent were lost over the winter. This represents the largest die-off since the survey began, and a full 7 percentage points higher than the previous year. Having fewer honeybees is more than just an ecological problem, it’s also an economic one: Every year, honeybees contribute a nearly$20 billion value to U.S. crop production.
Of course, we don’t have to look too far to find the culprit. We are the ones that are killing all the bees off, and in the process, we are setting the stage for an unprecedented ecological disaster because if all the bees suddenly vanished human civilization would not last much longer at all.
In the end, we will be held accountable for what has been entrusted to us, and it appears that we are starting to get what we deserve.
The following are 10 signs that nature has turned against humanity…
#1In the middle of the country, farmers are freaking out because giant black vultures are literally eating their farm animals alive. And since the vultures are “federally-protected”, the farmers can’t do anything about it…
They’ll devour slimy newborn calves, full-grown ewes and lambs alive by pecking them to death.
First the eyes, then the tongue, then every last shred of flesh.
And there isn’t much defense against black vultures and turkey vultures, both of which are federally protected and cannot be killed without a permit.
#2All up and down the east coast, Americans are becoming the victims of “flesh-eating bacteria” when they go into the water. Here is one recent example from Florida…
A woman who cut herself while walking along the water on the Florida beach she loved died after contracting necrotizing fasciitis, becoming the latest victim of the flesh-eating bacteria.
Lynn Fleming, from Ellenton, about 15 miles north of Sarasota, fell and cut herself while she was walking at Coquina Beach on nearby Anna Maria Island two weeks ago.
At this point, things have gotten so bad that the CDC is telling people with open wounds “to avoid bodies of water, especially swimming pools and hot tubs.”
#3For decades, cockroaches have been multiplying despite our best efforts to eradicate them with insecticides. But now they are developing resistance to our insecticides, and researchers are warning that this will make them “invulnerable”…
The day that squeamish humans—and exterminators—have long feared may have come at last: Cockroaches are becoming invincible. Or at least German cockroaches (Blattella germanica) are, according to a new study. Researchers have found that these creatures, which have long been a prevalent urban pest, are becoming increasingly resistant to almost every kind of chemical insecticide.
Not all insecticides are created equal. Some degrade the nervous system, whereas others attack the exoskeleton; they also have to be left out for varying amounts of time. But many insects, including cockroaches, have evolved resistance to at least one of the most commonly-used insecticides.
#4Last week it was hotter in some parts of Europe than it has ever been before. In fact, in one region in France, the temperature actually hit 114 degrees Fahrenheit…
Hundreds of firefighters battled on Saturday to contain wildfires in southern France as a stifling heatwave brought record-breaking temperatures to parts of Europe, killing at least three people in Italy.
In the Gard region, where France’s highest temperature on record was registered on Friday at 45.9 degrees Celsius (114 degrees Fahrenheit), scores of fires burned some 600 hectares (about 1,500 acres) of land and destroyed several houses and vehicles, emergency services said.
#5Along the California coastline, temperatures have been so hot that mussels have actually been “roasting in their shells”…
A record-breaking June heatwave apparently caused the largest die-off of mussels in at least 15 years at Bodega Head, a small headland on the northern California bay. And Sones received reports from other researchers of similar mass mussel deaths at various beaches across roughly 140 miles of coastline.
While the people who flocked to the Pacific to enjoy a rare 80F beach day soaked up the sun, so did the mussel beds – where the rock-bound mollusks could have been experiencing temperatures above 100F at low tide, literally roasting in their shells.
#6And of course the east coast is not being left out either. According to meteorologists, some portions of the east coast could see heat index values hit 110 degrees “as early as Wednesday”…
Another round of oppressive heat is already in the forecast this week for the East Coast with oppressive heat index values on the way for the parts of the Southeast by midweek. Heat index values could approaching 105 to 110 degrees in parts of the region as early as Wednesday.
Major cities from North Carolina to New Jersey will see a long stretch of temperatures at or above 90 degrees, which means another heat wave is on the way for cities like Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
#7Thanks to the unusually high temperatures, wasp nests are absolutely thriving across the southern United States. In fact, one expert anticipates that there will be dozens of “super nests” in his area this year…
Warmer winters contribute to these nests, Mr. Ray said. Most yellow jackets don’t survive the cold months because they freeze to death or have trouble finding food. They need a fair amount of sugar and carbohydrates, he said.
“The queens are the only ones who have an antifreeze compound in their blood,” Mr. Ray said. “So normally, a surviving queen will have to start a colony from scratch in the spring. With our climate becoming warmer, there might be multiple surviving queens producing more than 20,000 eggs each.”
#8Meanwhile, the middle of the country is being absolutely hammered by the wettest year that it has ever experienced. And just when you thought that it couldn’t possibly get any wetter, more storms are scheduled to come rolling through…
But a new system was moving through the Northern Plains Sunday morning and already bringing some severe storms to Minnesota.
The system will attempt to bring some cooler air down from Canada, which will interact with the heat situated in the Midwest and spark storms across parts of the Plains and the Midwest, from Wyoming to Illinois.
#9In recent months we have also seen unusually large hail absolutely hammer communities all over the country. For example, it is being reported that some portions of Montana were just hit with “baseball-sized hail”…
Thunderstorms that moved through southwestern Montana dropped baseball-sized hail in western Powder River County and golf ball-sized hail as the storm moved to the east.
The National Weather Service reports Wednesday night’s storm left behind broken windows and damaged crops.
Baseball-sized hail fell near Moorhead, a community about 35 miles southwest of Broadus, while Broadus recorded a 70 mph (113 kph) wind gust. Communities just north of Moorhead reported golf ball-sized hail.
#10Needless to say, all of this wet weather has just continued to feed the unprecedented flooding that we have seen along our major rivers. At this point, we are being told that the horrific flooding along the Mississippi River may go beyond the end of the summer…
The 2019 Mississippi River flood fight is going to slog deep into the summer — and maybe much longer.
While communities north of St. Louis are beginning the expensive path to recovery after record-breaking winter and spring precipitation and runoff, people below the Missouri River are shoveling mud from their houses and praying for a dry spell.
The Lower Mississippi Valley remains in a flood crisis as high water continues to swamp
streets, homes, businesses, sewage and water treatment plants, and farm fields, including across some of the poorest counties in the United States.
These are ten examples that have just been in the news during the past few days. If I wanted to cover all of the unusual events that we have witnessed so far in 2019 I would have to write an entire book.
The truth is that global weather patterns are dramatically shifting and our planet is becoming increasingly unstable. And no matter how hard humanity tries to find solutions, the reality of the matter is that things are going to continue to get worse.
We have passed the tipping point, and we are starting to experience the consequences for decades of exceedingly foolish decisions.
We have entered the time of “the perfect storm”, and everything that can be shaken will be shaken.
This article has been contributed by SHTF Plan. Visit www.SHTFplan.com for alternative news, commentary and preparedness info.
Steve Quayle: Alien Disclosure Revelations 2019 UnParalleled - New Interview w/ Greg Hunter
Steve Quayle: Alien Disclosure Revelations 2019 UnParalleled - New Interview w/ Greg Hunter
Filmmaker, alien researcher and renowned radio host Steve Quayle says this is the year the truth is going to come out about aliens visiting earth. Quayle says, “The information is being released now by the same government that used to cover up every single UFO sighting, even when they started with ‘Project Blue Book.’
It wasn’t to answer the alien question, it was to control all the information of all the different sightings. The number one goal of the world control, I call them the fallen angel puppet masters, is to spin everything in history to their advantage. They want to destroy everything that is good and what God created. Every barrier, natural barrier, supernatural barrier and all of the barriers are being broken.” Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with alien researcher and filmmaker Steve Quayle.
Mystery of "The Nommos" Ancient Aliens From the Sirius Star System | Dogon Tribe 2019
Mystery of "The Nommos" Ancient Aliens From the Sirius Star System | Dogon Tribe 2019
Mystery of “The Nommos” Ancient Aliens from the Sirius Star System of the Dogon tribe. an indigenous tribe living in the region of Mali, West Africa and are believed to be descendants from ancient Egypt.
The Dogon first appeared in the limelight amongst academics and researchers when it was revealed that they possess an inexplicably advanced astronomical understanding for such a primitive tribe. Living in a symbiotic relationship with the earth. They do not use technology, nor have a need for philosophy, sciences or literature. Focusing instead on spirituality, existing in a pure and harmonious relationship within nature. Their “sacred knowledge” passed down in oral tradition throughout the many generations.
More Mysteriously the Dogon knew the existence and location of the distant star – Sirius B. A white dwarf star invisible to the naked eye. A star that went undiscovered until its validation after the production of modern telescopes within the 1950′s. When asked how they gained such astronomical insight, the tribe revealed a fascinating tale of “the Nommos”. A race of beings from the Sirius star system, who visited the Earth thousands of years ago.
The Nommos are described as half human, half amphibious, fish-like creatures. Very similar to beings that appear within the mythologies of ancient Mesopotamia. Such as The Apkallu – seven demi-gods, sometimes described as part man and part fish. In the works of Berossus – a Hellenistic-era Babylonian writer from around the 3rd century bc; the Apkallu are described as “fish-men” sent by the gods to impart knowledge to people. first amongst them was the Babylonian God; Oannes : a Mesopotamian deity, said to be an amphibious hybrid creature who taught mankind wisdom. We can also find similarities in the Mesopotamian deity “Dagan”. A half fish, half man. Also known as “Dagon”.
The ancient Egyptians associated the goddess “isis” with Sirius. The star could also be connected to Osiris, as well as Anubis and the goddess of Sirius, Sopdet, whose name means “she who is sharp.” She brought fertility to the soil and was the consort of the entity known as Sah, the constellation Orion. Is this reoccurring theme of encounters with beings from the stars merely a mythological coincidence? Could it be possible that the dogon tribe were imparted knowledge from a group of beings from the Sirius star system? we can find traces of a correlating story throughout history; one that is documented all over the world within ancient civilisations, separated by vast oceans and thousands of years.
This story documents the arrival of advanced beings. Ancient Aliens who came to the earth in spaceships and imparted wisdom to early humanity. An account that was first acknowledged within the very beginnings of civilization, and since then, has been changed into multiple versions and interpretations throughout the ages. Yet ultimately: these stories are all one in the same. The events leading to how the Dogon acquired this knowledge are still debated today. how did they know about the white dwarf star sirius b? A star invisible to the naked eye, and only recently discovered within modern science. This question still remains a mystery.
Tens of thousands of tourists flocked to cities and towns across northern Chile to stake out spots in one of the world’s best locations to witness Tuesday’s total solar eclipse. A solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes between the Earth and the sun and scores a bull’s-eye by completely blocking out the sunlight.
Millions are expected to gaze at the cosmic spectacle that will begin at 10:24 a.m. local time (2:24 p.m. Eastern) in the South Pacific and sweep along a path 6,800 miles across open waters to Chile and Argentina. Those are the only places where the total eclipse will be seen, aside from an uninhabited island out in the Pacific.
On August 15th 1977 a strange signal from the constellation Sagittarius was received by the Big Ear radio telescope.
The signal known as the ‘Wow!’ signal reached an intensity up to 30 times higher than the usual signals detected and it had a duration of 72 seconds. The name comes from the side note written by astronomer Jerry R. Ehman at the moment the signal was discovered.
Ehman was a collaborator at the SETI project, a project which was set up in 1969 by NASA to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The Wow! signal is among all the strange signals received up until now, and percieved to be the one with the greatest likelihood of having been emitted by intelligent lifeforms despite its specific origins still being uncertain to this day.
With technology advancing faster than ever, and more and more discoveries being made every day, is the day we contact extraterrestrial life almost here?
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
‘Lake Ness’ monster caught on live cam Lake Michigan
‘Lake Ness’ monster caught on live cam Lake Michigan
While watching a storm via the Horizon Broadband livestream service focused on the The South Haven Lighthouse of lake Michigan, Tim Wendle suddenly saw a huge creature that washed over the south pier on June 13, 2019.
Tim wonders what this "lake Ness" monster that looks like a huge deep-sea eel may have been.
I was checking out some gigipan photos hoping to find some signs of an ancient culture that may somehow elude NASAs prying eyes. The crown jewel of this video is an ancient boat laying on the sand. The boat has a tail fin with a few pipe-like objects that come out its back and a perfectly formed area where the window is. The window area may still be there. The pillars are very obvious, though their true hight is unknown. It actually looks like two separate pillars if you look at its ends, rather than a single broken pillar. The two diamond shaped objects with pyramids on them...the fact that there are two of them is proof that they were constructed by intelligent beings, and that a building complex once stood here...not for being our size, but, get this, about 3-6 inches tall. Intelligence is not limited to size, but from my calculations of the 1 meter boat, the 1.5 meter two pillars, these being were tiny. Actually they are the same size as the woman figure and man figure on Mars. Do you remember that photo I reported years ago? Now...do aliens sound frightening? Because this particular species sound cute to me. Scott C. Waring
Today Yahoo News reported a fake UFO sighting as real. They said a secret video was leaked to Rumble Viral and was released today. The video is said to show a UFO shooting down an airliner. The video looks to be recored on an old TV security screen and almost looks believable. But Yahoo did not look at the person releasing the video. The Youtube channel is called Rumble Viral. They have over 1 millions fake subscribers on the channel. How can you tell, easy, most the videos on the channel have 600 views or less. Also they upload close to 100 videos an hour. Its to make fast money and appear big. Getting into Yahoo news only make them make more money and get more real subscribers. Its sad when so many fake videos are realised and are often mistaken as real. Scott Waring-Taiwan
When the solar system's first-known interstellar visitor was spotted on October 19, 2017, scientists scurried to observe the strange object. The oddly shaped, rapidly moving traveler had been ejected from its home system and was perhaps a comet or asteroid, or even a chunk of a shredded planet. One pair of scientists even suggested that itcould be an alien spacecraft.
"We have never seen anything like 'Oumuamua in our solar system," Matthew Knight, an astronomer at the University of Maryland and first author on a new paper about the mysterious object, said in a statement. "It's really a mystery still."
Knight was part of the 'Oumuamua International Space Science Institute (ISSI) Team, a group that examined all of the observations and studies of the passing visitor. The scientists concluded that aliens are not needed to explain 'Oumuamua, as a natural explanation satisfies the observations. Their study was published today (July 1) in the journal Nature Astronomy.
"Our preference is to stick with analogs we know, unless or until we find something unique," Knight said. "The alien spacecraft hypothesis is a fun idea, but our analysis suggests there is a whole host of natural phenomena that could explain it."
An unusual object
'Oumuamua's rapid speed meant that astronomers had only a few weeks after it was first spotted to collect as much data as possible. Their observations revealed that the object was small and red in color. The object also seemed to have a cigar-like shape and an unusual spin, as well as a strange change in direction that has been a challenge to explain.
"The motion of 'Oumuamua didn't simply follow gravity along a parabolic orbit as we would expect from an asteroid," Knight said.
Jets of gas could gently push the traveler, providing a potential explanation for its change in spin and direction. But astronomers didn't spot any sign of material shooting out of the elongated object that would match current models of cometary jets.
"Either the jet model in that study did not capture how 'Oumuamua's jets actually worked, or we need to throw the whole jets idea out of the window," Sean Raymond, a member of the ISSI team and co-author on the paper, wrote in his blog. "The alien-spacecraft camp threw the jets model out of the window."
According to Raymond, these scientists may have tossed out jets too soon.
"How comets' spins change due to outgassing is an active area of research," Raymond wrote. "And it's more complicated than you might think."
Another model suggesting that the cometary object would have lost about 10% of its total mass as it passed the sun reveals a spin that matches what was observed with 'Oumuamua. According to Raymond, that theory may or may not be correct, but it "clearly shows that comet-like outgassing can explain 'Oumuamua's nongravitational acceleration and spin at the same time."
It's also possible that pressure from solar radiation could have affected the spin. If 'Oumuamua was only a few millimeters thick, it could work as a lightsail, pushed along by starlight. But if the interstellar traveler was an alien star sail, it shouldn't have a spin, instead keeping one face constantly pointing towards the sun.
The scientists who suggested that the object could be an alien spacecraft also argued that the lack of similar natural objects in space suggests that 'Oumuamua should never have been discovered, and may therefore have been deliberately aimed at Earth. Similarly, its unlikely orbit sent it closer to Earth than any other planet, a so-called special orbit that suggests it may have sought us out.
Knight and his colleagues argued that, while simulations suggest how much material — roughly one Earth-mass — gets ejected during planet formation, the true amount of debris ejected during these events remains unknown: It could be a few large objects or many smaller ones. Some estimates suggest that roughly two extrasolar objects pass by the sun each year. Knight also pointed out that small, faint objects like 'Oumuamua should constantly breeze through the solar system but are often too faint to be visible. These items can only be spotted when they are near our planet.
"'Oumuamua's orbit is completely average when compared with detectable interstellar objects," Raymond wrote. "The ones we could find are mostly on 'special' orbits."
What about the strange elongated shape of the visitor? "The thing is, we don't know 'Oumuamua's actual shape," Raymond wrote. Researchers only had a limited time to observe the faint fleeing object. While it could look like a cigar, it could also bear a strong resemblance to a pancake.
Even a cigar shape could have a natural explanation. 'Oumuamua could be a fragment of a larger object shredded before it was ejected, a process that stretched it out. Slow collisions with objects in its home system could have produced its bizarre shape. Or the fast-traveling dust between the stars could have crashed into the visitor, carving out an elongated cigar. Or it could be something else entirely.
If 'Oumuamua isn't an alien spacecraft, what might it be?
"There is no universally accepted answer, but signs point toward 'Oumuamua being similar to solar system comets," Raymond wrote. Comet-like objects are constantly tossed out of their systems by large planets and passing stars. A full-size comet or a cometary fragment would fit with the appearance and acceleration of 'Oumuamua, according to the researchers.
"It is possible that some of 'Oumuamua's weirdnesses are simply due to its small size," Raymond wrote. He added that the properties of very few similarly sized objects in the solar system are known because their small size and faintness makes them a challenge to observe.
"Signs point to 'Oumuamua being a natural object. Maybe something similar to a comet," he wrote. "But no aliens."
One of many
As telescope technology continues to increase, astronomers anticipate spotting more interstellar visitors. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), currently under construction in Chile, may help to reveal many of these once the instrument sees first light in 2022. While observers won't catch a glimpse of 'Oumuamua again, they will be able to spot other interstellar visitors.
"We may start seeing a new object every year," Knight said. "That's when we'll start to know whether 'Oumuamua is weird or common."
If the interstellar visitor resembles other travelers, then it would most likely have similar origins. Only if it was dramatically different from the majority of visitors might scientists begin to consider more fantastic origins.
"If we find 10 to 20 of these things and 'Oumuamua still looks unusual, we'll have to reexamine our explanations," Knight said.
The lower limbs of a Neanderthal exposed at the open-air site of Ein Qashish, on the banks of the Kishon River in northern Israel
(Erella Hovers, courtesy of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
An Israeli-led study of the skeletal remains of two humans from the late Middle Paleolithic period, between 70,000 and 60,000 years ago, has yielded surprising findings. In analyzing the first Neanderthal remains found outside caves in the Levant, researchers have found Neanderthals were not merely “cavemen,” but much more flexible in their living habits than commonly held.
As part of major road construction, archaeologists were called in by road company Derekh Eretz Inc. to survey the northern Israel site of Ein Qashish, situated on the banks of the Kishon River. The findings of their study — published Wednesday in the journal Nature Scientific Reports — indicate that 60,000 years ago, as modern humans reached the region, Neanderthals in the Levant inhabited both caves and open landscapes.
The Levant, or Near East, is to date the only known region where the fossil record shows the two populations — Neanderthals and Homo sapiens– existed simultaneously during the Middle Paleolithic era. Unlike earlier studies, however, this survey includes fossils of both types of human individuals — not only from caves, but also from open-air sites.
“The discovery of Neanderthals at open-air sites during the late MP reinforces the view that Neanderthals were a resilient population in the Levant shortly before Upper Palaeolithic Homo sapiens populated the region,” the article stated.
An aerial view of Ein Qashsish in northern Israel.
(Erella Hovers, courtesy of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
“The new discovery of Neanderthal remains at the late MP open-air site of Ein Qashish provides a window into the settlement and mobility patterns of the Neanderthals of northern Israel,” it continued.
The study was led by Dr. Ella Been from the Ono Academic College, Prof. Erella Hovers from the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Dr. Omry Barzilai from the Israel Antiquities Authority, with the assistance of Dr. Ravid Ekshtain (the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Dr. Ariel Malinsky-Buller (the Museum for Human Behavioral Evolution, Monrepos, Germany).
The Neanderthal tooth found at Ein Qashish, on the banks of the Kishon River in northern Israel.
(Erella Hovers, courtesy of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Aided by advanced imaging and statistical techniques, the archaeologists used a single upper molar tooth to represent the remains of one Neanderthal. The second Neanderthal was represented by the lower limbs of an individual who suffered from injuries that likely caused limping. The remains were found within a rich archaeological level containing flint tools, animal bones, and some unusual finds for the period, such as a marine shell, pigments and an antler of a deer, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority.
A spear point made from flint found at Ein Qashsish in northern Israel.
(Erella Hovers, courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority)
״A number of researchers have recently claimed that Neanderthals were adapted to life in rugged mountainous terrains whereas modern humans adapted better to flat and open landscapes. The finds from Ein Qashish show that Neanderthals inhabited sites in diverse topographic and ecological contexts,” the IAA said in a press release.
The findings of the study go a long way toward explaining the disappearance of the Neanderthals, according to the IAA.
Whereas traditional explanations hypothesize that Neanderthals in the Near East were unable to adapt to an increasingly dry climate, the Ein Qashish finds indicate that they were adapted to open-air living.
“Our study suggests that Neanderthals were a resilient population that successfully existed in the north of Israel at the time that modern humans arrived from Africa some 60,000 years ago.”
Holbewoners? Nieuwe Israëlische studie dwingt ons anders te kijken naar neanderthalers
Holbewoners? Nieuwe Israëlische studie dwingt ons anders te kijken naar neanderthalers
Archeologen die neanderthalers bestuderen hebben altijd gedacht dat het holbewoners waren. Een recente ontdekking in Israël kan daar verandering in brengen.
Een team onder leiding van professor Erella Hovers van de Hebreeuwse Universiteit van Jeruzalem heeft ontdekt dat de neanderthalers zich zo’n 60.000 jaar geleden vestigden in de plaats Ein Qashish.
Algemeen wordt aangenomen dat neanderthalers het grootste gedeelte van hun leven in grotten doorbrachten.
Openluchtkampen
De vondst in Ein Qashish laat zien dat ze juist veel tijd in de buitenlucht doorbrachten en in openluchtkampen leefden.
Het team schrijft in een verklaring dat botresten die er gevonden zijn, kunnen worden geassocieerd met neanderthalers.
Uit het onderzoek blijkt dat ze van de zomer tot de herfst in Ein Qashish leefden, ongeveer zes tot acht maanden per jaar.
Nieuw licht
In de omgeving van de archeologische vindplaats bevindt zich de Qesem-grot, die in 2000 werd ontdekt.
Israëlische onderzoekers vonden daar onder andere menselijke overblijfselen, die een nieuw licht kunnen werpen op de ontstaansgeschiedenis van de moderne mens.
Overeenkomstig
Zo werden er acht tanden gevonden die tussen de 200.000 tot 400.00 jaar oud zouden zijn.
De Qesem-tanden hebben kenmerken die overeenkomstig zijn met die van de neanderthaler.
Het onderzoek is verschenen in tijdschrift PLOS One.
Crop circles, elaborate patterns found in farmer’s fields, continue to fascinate people worldwide. Although some have been elaborate hoaxes, others remain a mystery, tangible and real yet unexplained. The first simple crop circles started to become a regular phenomenon when they appeared in the southern English countryside in the summers of the 70s. Ever since they seem to have become more and more elaborate. Some people believe the intricate geometric patterns are messages sent from higher intelligence, extraterrestrials, or even time travelers. One Italian inventor, Umberto Baudo, believes crop circles may be meant to impart secrets of new technology and free energy to humanity.
In 1991, a book titled, “Crop Circles: Harbingers of World Change” by Alick Bartholomew was published. It explored the idea that some crop circles could be messages from non-human intelligence from beyond this physical world. Maybe the formations were meant to deliver secrets for new advanced technology. In the book, an English historian and psychic, Isabelle Kingston, suggested that crop circles might reveal a molecular structure or blueprint for a new form of energy that would one day be unraveled by scientists.
It was the same year that two British men came forward to take credit for creating hundreds of crop circles: Doug Bower and Dave Chorley. As more and more crop circles are discovered, the idea that they could be messages from aliens persisted. Crop circles became more and more elaborate, and some believe they can’t all be chalked up to a hoax.
If crop circles are an intended message, then what is it?
In 2008, Umberto Baudo decided to use crop circles as an inspiration, a blueprint for a mechanism that he believed could deliver a source of free energy, similar to the ultimate goals of Nikola Tesla. Baudo’s work, like that of Tesla’s plans for free energy, has remained obscure, but now with a translation from researcher Pedro M. Duarte, we can look at his findings with English captions in the video below.
Baudo recognizes that some crop circles are hoaxes, but among the hundreds of images found, he chose the formations he believes represent authentic energy generating systems. He demonstrates that those formations can operate like the gears of a machine.
“Since 2008 I realized that it is absolutely possible to generate free energy to all of the planet, and instead of having to pay large amounts of money to have in exchange [for] a small amount of energy,” said Baudo.
Umberto Baudo works on a computer simulation showing an “eccentric core”
In Baudo’s first experiments, he attempted to create magnetic motors. The prototypes were arrays of circles based on crop circle formations. His work progressed from magnetic systems to systems using centrifugal force and tested using computer simulations. The simulations allowed him to find out what happens when the shapes are rotated at high speed, generating energy both with and without the variables of gravity and counterweight mechanisms: magnets, springs, and chains.
Baudo believes extraterrestrials chose to communicate with crop circles for a reason.
“It’s important to understand that the Crop Circles are the maximum expression of a message because through an image you can communicate much more than with words without any doubt,” he explains. “…especially if the message [is addressed] to someone that does not speak our language.”
The inventor found that the rotating systems could whirl around an “eccentric core,” shapes he recognizes in many crop circle formations. Spinning around this core, the circular shapes generate momentum.
See Umberto Baudo discuss his experiments with English captions from Pedro M. Duarte below:
In the second part (below), Baudo is convinced that crop circles are meant as examples of using centrifugal force and that he has decoded their meaning. With modifications, including the addition of a spring, he says he has created perfect models that continue to build momentum even after the engine is turned off. All thanks to centrifugal force…
“After some years studying and researching, always with these images in my mind, finally I think I’ve found the key to understand the [main] part of these crop circles. The main key to understand it is fundamentally one: The centrifugal force. Just like that!”
Computer simulation showing ever-increasing energy output as the model spins
The circular gears rotate until the spring slowly reaches full extension.
“The speed will increase, always in a constant way, until the spring achieves its maximum. In that moment [it] will stabilize,” he explains.
Although many people remain skeptical, he believes that these systems can work against the first principle of thermodynamics, that states the total energy of an isolated system is constant. Instead, the engine he simulates continues to accelerate, while the “eccentric core” of the disc appears distorted into an oval shape.
See part 2 below:
In part 3, Umberto Baudo has advanced beyond the computer simulations to create the mechanics of the centrifugal motors in three dimensions. We see his team working to test the pieces cut out of metal, and in the latter part of the video in English, he discusses his findings with a man who puts him in contact with experts in America. From here, we are left to wonder what happened next.
Umberto Baudo works on making 3d versions of his computer simulations
What happened to Umberto Baudo’s designs? If he had been successful, surely we would know about it, right? Yet delivering a source of free energy to the world would most likely be met with incredible resistance in a world where economies revolve around monetized methods of energy delivery. Finding a source of unlimited free energy would change the global economy, freeing people from the need to labor endlessly to pay energy bills.
Will Baudo’s ultimate findings remain a mystery, like crop circles? Like Nikola Tesla’s plans to deliver free energy to the people? Are beings with higher intelligence trying to tip the odds in the common person’s favor, allowing us to finally have such technology distributed to everyone worldwide? Or, are we all overly optimistic to think this is even possible? Are crop circles just elaborate hoaxes by people who want to keep our hopes alive?
Laten graancirkels zien hoe we vrije energie kunnen opwekken? Deze Italiaanse uitvinder beweert van wel
Foto: Wikimedia Commons
Laten graancirkels zien hoe we vrije energie kunnen opwekken? Deze Italiaanse uitvinder beweert van wel
De Italiaanse uitvinder Umberto Baudo denkt dat graancirkels betrekking hebben op nieuwe technologieën die gebaseerd zijn op vrije energie.
Baudo stelt dat de formaties een blauwdruk zijn voor een mechanisme dat vrije energie kan leveren.
Hij heeft een aantal graancirkels gevonden die volgens hem te maken hebben met energieopwekking.
Computersimulaties
“Ik besefte dat het absoluut mogelijk is om overal ter wereld vrije energie op te wekken,” zei Baudo.
De uitvinder ontwikkelde computersimulaties aan de hand van bepaalde graanformaties.
De simulaties stelden hem in staat om te zien wat er gebeurt als de geometrische vormen met hoge snelheid ronddraaien: ze wekten energie op.
Communiceren
Baudo gelooft dat er een reden is dat buitenaardsen met ons communiceren via graancirkels.
“Met een afbeelding kun je zoveel meer zeggen dan alleen met woorden,” legde hij uit. “Vooral als de boodschap gericht is aan iemand die je taal niet spreekt.”
Weerstand
Het is de vraag of we ooit nog iets gaan horen van Baudo’s project. De komst van vrije energie zou energiebedrijven in feite overbodig maken. De stroomrekening zou in één klap naar nul worden teruggebracht.
Dat zou veel weerstand oproepen, aangezien er veel belangen mee gemoeid zijn.
Bekijk ook onderstaande video’s over het werk van Baudo:
Cette nuit les petits hommes verts nous ont passe une commande d'huile !!🤨(photos réelle prises dans notre parcelle au Breuil chauvigny )
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Op zondag werd een graancirkel ontdekt tussen Houdain en Haillicourt in de regio Hauts-de-France. De formatie werd gemeld door Umberto Molinaro.
Geen einde
Er lijkt maar geen einde te komen aan de graancirkelgolf. Maandag werd er nog een graanformatie gevonden, dit maal nabij Nielles-les-Ardres in Pas-de-Calais:
Tot dusver zijn er in Frankrijk in korte tijd al 11 graancirkels ontdekt. In de komende twee tot drie maanden zullen dat er naar verwachting nog een stuk meer worden.
Bob Lazar: 30-Year Anniversary of Interview on Area 51
Bob Lazar: 30-Year Anniversary of Interview on Area 51
A new report from George Knapp and KLAS-TV’s I-Team looks back at the 30th anniversary of their original Bob Lazar interview. Interestingly, what Lazar described back in 1989 bears some resemblance to properties of UFOs in the Pentagon videos released in 2017 and the possible use of mysterious “meta-materials.”Source.
Robert Scott Lazar claims to have worked on reverse engineering extraterrestrial technology at a site called S-4, near the Area 51 test facility, and that the UFOs use gravity wave propulsion. This is powered by the element 115.Wikipedia
Two similar photographs of flying saucer-style UFOs allegedly taken recently over the city of San Agustín, Oaxaca, Mexico, have many UFO watchers interested because of its better-than-the-average-ufo-photo clarity. (See them here and here.) It also has many who know their UFO history interested because San Agustin is also the name of the city in New Mexico where an alleged UFO crash occurred in July 1947 – an event sometimes referred to as the “other Roswell incident” because of its proximity in both time and location to the more famous one. The “other” in San Agustin, New Mexico, is equally mysterious because of rumors of a live alien as well as alien bodies, crashed disks and military threats to locals unless they kept quiet. Have aliens come back for their old ship and crew and put the wrong San Agustin in their GPS?
Jaime Garcia B. @ jaimer35 Jun 26 AVISTAN OVNI IN OAXACA. In San Agustin de las Juntas, Oaxaca, we took this image that circulates in groups of WhatsApp, if authentic it would be one of the clearest images of an unidentified flying object, in the valley of this State.
The images (see one here with magnifications and the usual red circle) of what look like a flying saucer spread quickly on Twitter and on some Mexican media sites. While the clarity is obvious, the details are not. There’s no information on the exact dates (there are conflicting dates in the reports and tweets), who took the photos, time of day, description of movement, any other witnesses, etc. This pushes the needle on the Skeptical Meter to just a hair away from ‘Hoax’, giving the photos a slight benefit-of-the-doubt in hopes that more photos, witnesses or info appear – perhaps even linking this San Agustin to the ‘other’ one.
The name San Agustin (a form of the more prevalent Augustine) in the ufology world has been associated since July 1947 with an alleged UFO crash in the Plains of San Agustin – a flat area in southwestern New Mexico about 250 miles west of Roswell and better known to the rest of the world as the current home of the Very Large Array radio astronomy observatory, placed there because of its isolation and partial shielding effect from the surrounding mountain ranges. The story of the San Agustin crash has been investigated many times and told in interviews (the late Stan Freidman conducted one), books and documentaries. The most popular telling mentions that seeing planes in the San Agustin area was not unusual in 1947.
The first half of the tale starts with an unnamed rancher who claimed to have found a “child” walking along a remote stretch of old route NM 12. It’s said the ‘child’ was wearing strange clothing and had no ears only four long fingers – no thumbs. The rancher took the ‘child’ home and called a deputy, but it disappeared overnight.
The second half begins later in the summer of 1947 when Barney Barnett claimed to have discovered a crashed disk or flying saucer about a mile from NM Highway 12 and just a few miles from where the rancher allegedly found the ‘child’. Barnett claimed to have seen three or four unusual bodies at the crash site, which were also later seen by his friends and a group of university research archaeologists who were on a dig in the area. According to later testimonies, soldiers soon arrived, cordoned off the area and told anyone and everyone it was their patriotic duty not to tell anyone about it.
Many people have attempted to confirm or question Barnett’s story (without a beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt conclusion in either case), and many others have looked for the bodies and parts of the saucer rumored to have been taken from the site, with none having been confirmed to have been found. In 2016, The Black Vault web site wrote about Chuck Wade, who visited the site and found metal and plastic-like fragments. An analysis found the metals to be aluminum foil, the plastic to be polyethylene and could draw no alien conclusions, although others have claimed to differ.
Two unusual ‘flying saucer’ incidents in two cities named San Agustin. The 1947 New Mexico San Agustin incident has never been conclusively resolved. The 2019 Mexico San Agustin photos have a long way to go to be resolved. Yet both have flying disks and the same name. Dots much farther apart have been connected before. Is there a line between these?
A sky-watcher caught a formation of UFOs as they passed the moon.
The footage shows 3 UFOs flying in a triangular formation, a moment later 2 more UFOs appear following the same trajectory.
The sky-watcher used a Canon EOS 70D 300mm including a teleconverter on tripod. Given the speed of the objects it is unlikely that they are satellites.
240 Meter UFO Comes Out Of Mexico Volcano On Live Camera, Video, UFO Sighting News.
240 Meter UFO Comes Out Of Mexico Volcano On Live Camera, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: January 10, 2019 Location of sighting: San Nicholas, Mexico Here is an amazing sighting of a boomerang UFO coming out of a volcano in Mexico. The video is captured from the live cam networks that exists. The UFO slowly moves up from the side of the volcano, glowing powerfully as it continues to rise and disappear above the volcano. We were lucky that Youtube ColourUFO was on the job, because its simply amazing. This is 100% proof that there is an alien base 5km below this volcano as many UFO researchers and myself believe. The UFO itself is about 40% the width of the mouth of the volcano. The mouth is 600 meters across, thus the UFO is 240 meters. Please help ColourUFO out by clicking this link and subscribing to his Youtube channel. Scott C. Waring
Ancient Asian Atlantis Found! This Word May Be Is Name, UFO Sighting News.
Ancient Asian Atlantis Found! This Word May Be Is Name, UFO Sighting News.
Date of discovery: July 2, 2019 Location of discovery: Japan Coordinate: 31°52'0.66"N 129°57'15.71"E I was using Google Earth Map when I found this symbol in the ocean. Its about 1-2 meters deep and close to 6 meters across. The symbol looks old, not thousands, but millions of years old. For it to be s visible it must be carved very deep. I tried to match this up ancient Japanese but found nothing that was similar. Its possible that millions of years ago, and an alien culture came down in this location to create a city. Its also possible that this city was Atlantis itself. Its obvious from the evidence world wide that aliens did inhabit the earths surface millions of years ago, but this may be one of the few locations were alien writing has been found. Scott C. Waring
In August, the Andromeda galaxy will move closer to Earth : a cosmic event that only happens once every 150 million years
In August, the Andromeda galaxy will move closer to Earth : a cosmic event that only happens once every 150 million years
This August, the Andromeda galaxy will be even bigger than the moon in our sky! The last time this cosmic event occurred was during the era of the dinosaurs… Share this information as much as you can with your friends because NO human being living today will be able to see this incredible event a second time.
This summer, don’t forget to look up at the sky in the middle of the night: the Andromeda galaxy will be shining brightly. And for a good reason since this galaxy’s apparent diameter will be larger than the Full Moon! Through a unique cosmic phenomenon, a galaxy will be visible to the naked eye and will appear to the Earth’s inhabitants to be even bigger than the moon!
This is the first time that humanity will be able to observe this exceptional phenomenon. The last time the Andromeda galaxy was so close to the Earth was exactly 150 million years ago, during the era when dinosaurs ruled its surface. Just imagine, mankind didn’t yet exist!
This unique cosmic phenomenon known as “Andromescopic” is partly linked to the solar system’s path in our galaxy. As you may have read on the Internet, our sun is not motionless in space and moves at a speed of 30 km per second in our Milky Way: this movement can be seen relatively easily by observing the position of the stars in the sky: new constellations regularly appear with each new heliocentric revolution of the universe.
But is much rarer is the conjunction of another phenomenon that has the effect of considerably speeding up the approach of the Andromeda galaxy closer towards to our planet.
Indeed, our Milky Way’s elliptical orbital path has a partially reactive hypo-synchronous zodiacal acceleration which can, under certain conditions, be affected by an apochromatic azimuthal anomaly which significantly disrupts the singular eccentricity of the leptonic phase (named after Sir Lepton, the brilliant 10th century astrologer). Away from the digestive cepheid caused by possible gluttonous black holes – obviously assuming that any galaxy is included in a sysmo-parabolic projection (adjusted Champollion reference) beforehand – it is almost accepted that a singular anemic anomaly changing the apses line (Editor’s note: the straight line between the periapsis and the apocentre of an orbit) can under these conditions permanently tilt the orbit of the Andromeda galaxy’s asterism. The particularity of this recurring phenomenon (commonly called “circumstellar elliptical conjunction of coercive muscle elongation” in top athletes) is to allow our sun to be projected into the telluric zone of solar attraction like a projectile launched from a slingshot, every 150 million years exactly!
Put another way in terms much more accessible to an average Facebook user, the Andromeda galaxy will be very big in the sky!!
For astronomy enthusiasts eager for practical details, the galaxy’s heliocentric viscous perineum will occur this summer (in August to be precise) at a ridiculous distance of only 64 million light years with an amplitude of -3.14 at the most for an arc of 1687 seconds in length. As a result, the Andromeda galaxy will, at this precise time, appear in the sky even larger than the full moon!
Scientists predict that this will be the most observed and photographed natural phenomenon in human history.
The sky will be shining brightly at night and the galaxy’s dark, colourful shades will be a wonder to all our planet’s inhabitants: the show will be quite simply exceptional! The next time this cosmic event happens again will be in 150 million years. In other words, there will no longer be any human beings or any life at all left on the Earth’s surface. Share this information as much as you can with your friends because NO human being living today will be able to see this incredible event a second time.
First interstellar object to enter the solar system 'Oumuamua' was NOT an alien spaceship, astronomers say - but exactly what the strange cigar-shaped rock is remains a 'mystery'
First interstellar object to enter the solar system 'Oumuamua' was NOT an alien spaceship, astronomers say - but exactly what the strange cigar-shaped rock is remains a 'mystery'
Professional stargazer Dr Robert Weryk spotted the interstellar traveller in 2017
Its movements led some to suggest it is an alien spacecraft sent to examine us
After studying the data on the space-faring object scientists now say it is natural
However it doesn't conform to many of the defining features associated with comets and asteroids
Aliens have not journeyed to our corner of the galaxy in an interstellar spacecraft, astronomers said in a new study of the space rock Oumuamua.
Oumuamua is the first known object to pass through solar system from outside but experts are still unable to pinpoint exactly where it came from or what it is.
The mysterious cigar-shaped projectile - formally named object 1I/2017 U1 - defies description, with characteristics resembling both a comet and an asteroid.
However, it doesn't conform to many of the other defining features usually associated with these objects - including its direction of spin and lack of a tail.
Scroll down for video
The first interstellar object to enter the solar system is not an alien spaceship , astronomers said in a new study - but its exact nature remains a mystery (artist's impression pictured)
Oumuamua, Hawaiian for 'scout' , spins like a coke bottle and accelerates like a comet, but without the gas jets often seen trailing them.
Its movements have puzzled experts leading some to suggest it is an alien spacecraft sent to examine our solar system.
Study's co-author Dr Matthew Knight, an associate research scientist in the University of Maryland Department of Astronomy, said: 'The alien spacecraft hypothesis is a fun idea, but our analysis suggests there is a whole host of natural phenomena that could explain it.
'We have never seen anything like Oumuamua in our solar system. It's really a mystery still.
'But our preference is to stick with analogues we know, unless or until we find something unique.'
Professional stargazer Dr Robert Weryk first spotted the interstellar traveller in October, 2017 at the University of Hawaii's Haleakala Observatory.
Researchers had just weeks to collect as much data as possible before the strange visitor travelled beyond the reach of Earth's telescopes.
The object is now out of sight but could take up to 20,000 years before it leaves our solar system onto its next destination.
Dr Knight worked with astronomer Dr Alan Fitzsimmons from Queen's University Belfast and 14 experts from the US and Europe.
They analysed data from the Discovery Channel Telescope (DCT) at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona from their base at the International Space Science Institute in Bern, Switzerland.
Oumuamua (artist's impression pictured) is the first known object to pass through solar system from outside, but experts have failed to explain where the object came from.
Dr Knight added: 'We tend to assume that the physical processes we observe here, close to home, are universal.
'And we haven't yet seen anything like Oumuamua in our solar system. This thing is weird and admittedly hard to explain, but that doesn't exclude other natural phenomena that could explain it.'
Scientists think it could have entered our solar system after being ejected by a gas giant planet orbiting another star.
And researchers said Jupiter may have created some of its own interstellar travellers by sneaking some of its icy objects through the sun's gravity field and into foreign solar systems.
They suspect Oumuamua could be the first of many visitors from distant solar systems.
They are awaiting fresh data from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) in 2022 which could reveal more.
Dr Knight said: 'In the next 10 years, we expect to begin seeing more objects like Oumuamua.
'The LSST will be leaps and bounds beyond any other survey we have in terms of capability to find small interstellar visitors.
'We may start seeing a new object every year. That's when we'll start to know whether Oumuamua is weird, or common.
'If we find 10-20 of these things and Oumuamua still looks unusual, we'll have to reexamine our explanations.'
A cigar-shaped asteroid named 'Oumuamua sailed past Earth at 97,200mph (156,428km/h) in October.
It was first spotted by a telescope in Hawaii on 19 October, and was observed 34 separate times in the following week.
It is named after the Hawaiian term for 'scout' or 'messenger' and passed the Earth at about 85 times the distance to the moon.
It was the first interstellar object seen in the solar system, and it baffled astronomers.
Initially, it was thought the object could be a comet.
However, it displays none of the classic behaviour expected of comets, such as a dusty, water-ice particle tail.
The asteroid is up to one-quarter mile (400 meters) long and highly-elongated - perhaps 10 times as long as it is wide.
That aspect ratio is greater than that of any asteroid or asteroid observed in our solar system to date.
But the asteroid's slightly red hue — specifically pale pink — and varying brightness are remarkably similar to objects in our own solar system.
Around the size of the Gherkin skyscraper in London, some astronomers were convinced it was piloted by aliens due to the vast distance the object traveled without being destroyed – and the closeness of its journey past the Earth.
Alien hunters at SETI – the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence based at Berkeley University, California said there was a possibility the rock was ‘an alien artefact’.
But scientists from Queen’s University Belfast took a good look at the object and said it appears to be an asteroid, or ‘planetesimal’ as originally thought.
Researchers believe the cigar-shaped asteroid had a 'violent past', after looking at the light bouncing off its surface.
They aren't exactly sure when the violent collision took place, but they believe the lonely asteroid's tumbling will continue for at least a billion years.
The giant Pacific octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini) investigates its environment with arms that "think" for themselves.
Credit: Dominic Sivitilli
When an octopus coils one of its flexible arms around a rock or a bit of food, it's not because the animal's brain said, "Pick that up." Rather, the arm decides for itself what it's going to do next. For a person, that would be like having one's big toe call the shots about where they're going to walk.
But a cephalopod's nervous system isn't wired like a human's — or like the systems found in any other vertebrates, for that matter, where a central brain broadcasts marching orders to the rest of the body. Instead, octopus limbs are studded with concentrations of neurons called ganglia; these "arm brains" can therefore operate independently of the central brain.
In fact, scientists who recently visualized progressive movement in octopus arms discovered that the animal's central brain is hardly involved at all; they presented their findings June 26 at the 2019 Astrobiology Science Conference. [8 Crazy Facts About Octopuses]
The researchers used a camera and behavioral-tracking software to model how an octopus perceives and then processes information about its environment using its arms, Dominic Sivitilli, a graduate student in behavioral neuroscience and astrobiology at the University of Washington in Seattle, explained during the presentation.
"What we're looking at, more than what's been looked at in the past, is how sensory information is being integrated in this network while the animal is making complicated decisions," Sivitilli said in a statement.
An octopus's arm movement begins far away from the brain, triggered by sensors in a groping arm sucker feeling around on the seafloor or in an aquarium. Each sucker contains tens of thousands of chemical and mechanical receptors; to put that into perspective, a human fingertip holds just a few hundred mechanical receptors, Sivitilli said.
When an octopus touches something interesting, the "brain" in its arms processes the input and moves the signal along, telling the arm what to do next. Signals generated by one sucker are passed to its closest neighbor, activating arm muscles and generating a sweeping wave of motion that travels up the arm toward the body, the researchers discovered. While the arms are actively engaging with the environment — and with each other — the signal that reaches the animal's central brain is "highly abstracted" and not directly involved with arm interactions, Sivitilli explained.
Essentially, octopuses "outsource" computation about how to move their bodies, assigning those actions to local controls — ganglia — in each arm, rather than relying on the central brain to tell the arms what to do, Sivitilli said in the presentation.
"In a way, the octopus has sent its mind out into the environment to meet it halfway," he added.
But wait, you might be thinking — why are scientists talking about octopuses at an astrobiology conference? What does this have to do with extraterrestrial life? (And no, it's not because octopuses are really space aliens, as another group of researchers claimed in 2018.)
Octopuses are thought to be highly intelligent, yet their workarounds for perceiving and interacting with the world around them differ dramatically from techniques that evolved in intelligent vertebrates. Octopus cognition could therefore serve as an important alternative model for understanding intelligence, and it could prepare experts for recognizing unusual expressions of intelligent life that originated on other worlds, Sivitilli said in the statement.
"It gives us an understanding as to the diversity of cognition in the world," Sivitilli said. "And perhaps the universe."
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETDe opvallende sigaarvormige ruimterots die in 2017 werd ontdekt, is geen ruimteschip van een andere planeet. Dat schrijven onderzoekers in de nieuwste editie van wetenschapsblad Nature Astronomy vandaag. Wat de rots wél is, weten ze nog niet. “We hebben nog nooit zoiets gezien, het is nog altijd een mysterie. De gedachte van een ruimteschip is leuk, maar er zijn veel natuurlijke fenomenen die de rots kunnen verklaren”, aldus onderzoeker Matthew Knight.
De roodkleurige rots met de vorm van een sigaar kreeg de naam ’Oumuamua. Dat is Hawaïaans voor ‘boodschapper van ver die als eerste aankomt’, omdat een telescoop op Hawaï hem als eerste spotte. ’Oumuamua is de eerste ontdekte bezoeker van buiten ons zonnestelsel. Waarschijnlijk zweeft hij al honderden miljoenen jaren door de Melkweg, niet gebonden aan een ster.
De ruimterots is zo’n veertig meter breed en vierhonderd meter lang. Dat is opvallend, omdat de asteroïden en kometen in ons zonnestelsel veel minder uitgerekt zijn. Bovendien draait hij snel rond, zoals een fles frisdrank op de grond. Vanwege zijn vreemde uiterlijk en gedrag ontstonden al snel verhalen dat ’Oumuamua niet natuurlijk zou zijn. Maar de observaties van de wetenschappers komen wel degelijk overeen met een natuurlijke oorsprong voor ’Oumuamua. Ongezien, dat wel. “We hebben nog nooit zoiets als ’Oumuamua in ons zonnestelsel gezien. Het blijft eigenlijk nog steeds een mysterie”, aldus een van de onderzoekers aan CNN. “Dit ding is iets raar, moeilijk om te verklaren. Maar dat sluit andere natuurlijke verschijnselen die het zouden kunnen verklaren niet uit.”
Nog meer
De onderzoekers verwachten dat er nog veel meer van zulke rotsen onderweg zijn naar ons zonnestelsel. Ze willen die bestuderen met een nieuwe telescoop in Chili, die over een paar jaar in gebruik moet worden genomen. Zo zullen we binnenkort hopelijk een beter begrip krijgen van hoe ‘gewoon’ - of zeldzaam - de eigenschappen van ’Oumuamua zijn.
WETENSCHAPEenmaal last van schimmels is het moeilijk om ze kwijt te spelen. Zelfs de intense kosmische straling in de ruimte weten ze te overleven. Meer zelfs, die kosmische straling kan tot 200 keer zo sterk zijn als wat de mens aankan. Dat blijkt uit een nieuw onderzoek van microbiologen aan het Duitse nationale onderzoekscentrum voor lucht- en ruimtevaart (DLR).
Niet alleen op aarde maar ook in de ruimte zijn schimmels een vervelende metgezel. In het Internationaal Ruimtestation (ISS) worstelen astronauten wekelijks met schoonmaakklusjes die de schimmels aan de binnenzijde van het ruimtestation moeten verwijderen. Dat zijn klusjes die vaak enkele uren in beslag nemen. En als ze niet gebeuren, is dat een gevaar voor de gezondheid. Belachelijk grote hoeveelheid straling Maar niet alleen aan de binnenzijde, ook aan de buitenzijde van het ISS blijken schimmels te overleven. Dat besluiten de microbiologen van DLR nadat ze twee schimmels (Aspergillus en Penicillium of penseelschimmel) die voorkomen in het ISS, blootstelden aan röntgenstralingen en uv-straling.
Het ging volgens de wetenschappers om een “belachelijk grote hoeveelheid” straling die op korte tijd vrijkwam, straling die veel hoger was dan die normaal ervaren wordt op Mars. Maar zelfs die hoge dosis wisten de twee soorten schimmels te overleven.
Bij het onderzoek houden de wetenschappers dan wel geen rekening met andere kenmerken van een ruimtereis – denk aan extreem koude temperaturen, beperkte zwaartekracht en een vacuüm – volgens de wetenschappers moet er rekening gehouden worden met hun resultaten. “Als we een langdurige ruimtemissie plannen, kunnen we erop rekenen dat deze schimmelsporen met ons meegaan, omdat ze de ruimtereis waarschijnlijk wel overleven”, aldus Marta Cortesao, verbonden aan het DLR.
NASAAan de binnenzijde van het ISS moeten de astronauten wekelijks de wanden reinigen om de schimmels te verwijderen.
Bekijk ook hoe een zonsondergang er voor de astronauten van het ISS uitziet:
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Nieuwe studie: één op de 10 mensen heeft bijna-doodervaring gehad. Dit zagen mensen aan ‘de andere kant’
Nieuwe studie: één op de 10 mensen heeft bijna-doodervaring gehad. Dit zagen mensen aan ‘de andere kant’
Ongeveer één op de 10 mensen heeft wel eens een bijna-doodervaring gehad, blijkt uit een nieuwe studie waarbij mensen uit 35 verschillende landen zijn ondervraagd.
Bijna-doodervaringen worden net zo vaak gemeld door mensen die niet in levensgevaar zijn als door mensen die levensbedreigende situaties hebben meegemaakt, zoals een hartaanval of een auto-ongeluk.
De nieuwe bevindingen zijn tijdens een congres gepresenteerd door een team van Deense, Duitse en Noorse onderzoekers.
Ziel eruit getrokken
Ervaringen die het meest werden gemeld door de deelnemers: abnormale tijdsperceptie (87 procent), uitzonderlijk snel kunnen denken (65 procent), uitzonderlijk intense indrukken (63 procent) en het gevoel dat je gescheiden bent van je lichaam (53 procent).
Mensen zeiden onder meer dat ze zich vredig voelden, dat hun ‘ziel eruit werd getrokken’, dat ze engelen hoorden zingen, dat ze wisten dat ze zich buiten hun lichaam bevonden, dat ze hun leven aan zich voorbij zagen flitsen en dat ze door een donkere tunnel gingen voordat ze een fel licht bereikten.
Overleden familieleden
Anderen zeiden dat ze zich bewust waren van een andere aanwezigheid, of een demon die op hun borst zat terwijl ze zich niet konden bewegen.
Eén man, die als kind eens bijna verdronk, zag naar eigen zeggen overleden familieleden bij een poort.
Onaangenaam
Het team verzamelde 1034 mensen uit 35 landen en vroeg hen of ze ooit een bijna-doodervaring hadden gehad.
Als ze ‘ja’ antwoordden kregen ze een aantal vragen over de details van de ervaring. In totaal waren er 289 mensen die een bijna-doodervaring hadden gehad.
Opvallend was dat liefst 73 procent de ervaring onaangenaam vond. Slechts 27 procent vond de bijna-doodervaring aangenaam.
Archeologische sensatie: verzonken paleis ontdekt in Irak. Het maakte deel uit van dit mysterieuze rijk
Archeologische sensatie: verzonken paleis ontdekt in Irak. Het maakte deel uit van dit mysterieuze rijk
Duitse en Koerdische archeologen hebben een mysterieus paleis blootgelegd aan de oever van de rivier de Tigris. Het bouwwerk is duizenden jaren oud.
Het gaat om één van de belangrijkste recente archeologische ontdekkingen in de regio, laat de Universiteit van Tübingen weten.
Het minstens 2000 vierkante meter grote gebouw maakte deel uit van het koninkrijk Mitanni, dat het grootste deel van Syrië en Anatolië beheerde.
Archeologische sensatie
Over dit koninkrijk is nog maar weinig bekend.
De muren bestaan uit baksteen en zijn tot twee meter hoog. Binnen in het gebouw vonden archeologen een muurschildering in felrode en -blauwe kleuren.
Volgens één van de archeologen is de ontdekking een ‘archeologische sensatie’, aangezien dergelijke schilderingen zelden worden aangetroffen.
Spijkerschrift
Er werden ook 10 geschriften in spijkerschrift aangetroffen. In één van de teksten staat dat het paleis ooit in de oude stad Zachiku stond.
De Koerdische archeoloog Hassan Ahmed Kasin zei het gaat om één van de belangrijkste ontdekkingen in de regio in de laatste decennia.
Drie weken
Het paleis werd ontdekt dankzij de aanhoudende droogte in de regio.
Afgelopen herfst hadden de archeologen drie weken de tijd om het gebouw te onderzoeken voordat het waterpeil weer zou stijgen en het paleis weer volledig onder water zou verdwijnen.
Even a brief surf of the Net will show that there is a great deal of information on what has become known as the “Secret Space Program.” Much of it is made up garbage, created and promoted by nuts and charlatans. But, not all of it. Are powerful people controlling our access to what is known about outer space and the possibilities of alien life? A study of the available data strongly suggests the answer is a definitive “Yes!” Taking things even further, there are good, solid indications that some secret element of the government is clandestinely running a secret space program. When, on July 20, 1969, NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the surface of the Moon, it began a new era in the United States’ space program. Further manned missions continued until 1972. Plans were formulated to establish a permanent, manned base on the surface of the Moon. Then, in 1973, NASA launched its first space station, Skylab. Eight years later, the Space Shuttle was unveiled. Today, however, things are very different. NASA no longer has a manned space program. The only way for U.S. astronauts to head into Earth orbit, and spend time at the International Space Station, is to hitch a ride with the Russians. What went wrong?
Some say that nothing went wrong. Rather, the theory is that although NASA’s manned space program is largely no more, there exists – maybe deep within the heart of the military – a secret group that is running a clandestine space program. We might even be talking about highly classified return missions to the Moon, and possibly even secret flights to Mars. Is a powerful group controlling what we know – or don’t know – about the secrets of outer space? Yes. UFO authority Richard Dolan says: “Over the years I have encountered no shortage of quiet, serious-minded people who tell me of their knowledge that there is such a covert program. Are there bases on the far side of the Moon? I do not know for sure, but I cannot rule it out.”
One person who is convinced that there is a secret space group is Gary McKinnon, a British man who had a ufological Sword of Damocles hanging over his head for the best part of a decade, after very unwisely deciding to hack the US Government for secrets of the UFO kind in 2001. According to McKinnon, while wholly illegally surfing around classified systems of both NASA and the U.S. military, he came across a list titled “Non-Terrestrial Officers.” McKinnon said of this discovery: “It doesn’t mean little green men. What I think it means is not Earth-based. I found a list of fleet-to-fleet transfers, and a list of ship names. I looked them up. They weren’t U.S. Navy ships. What I saw made me believe they have some kind of spaceship, off-planet.”
McKinnon was not the first to hint at the idea of a secret space group, however. As an experienced hacker of numerous computer systems, Matthew Bevan took the decision back in 1994 to uncover the long-rumored “crashed UFO” secrets of Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio. Stressing that Wright-Patterson was “a very, very easy computer system to get into,” Bevan was utterly amazed to uncover astonishing information relating to a top secret project to design and build a truly extraordinary flying machine of UFO like proportions. “The files,” Bevan said, “very clearly referred to a working prototype of an anti-gravity vehicle that utilized a heavy element to power it. This wasn’t a normal aircraft; it was very small, split level, with a reactor at the bottom and room for the crew at the top.”
Having accessed and carefully digested the fantastic information, Bevan duly exited the Wright-Patterson computer banks and began to doggedly search just about here, there and everywhere for the alien answers that he sought, including the less than secure computer systems of NASA itself. Bevan had got into the systems, he had carefully read the files, and he had then made good his escape, all without any form of detection whatsoever. Or, so Bevan had assumed was the case. History, however, has shown that Bevan’s initial assumptions were very wide of the mark. For approximately two years there was nothing but overwhelming silence. Then, on a particular morning in 1996, everything suddenly changed drastically in the life of Matthew Bevan. At the time when things began to go distinctly awry, he was working for an insurance company in Cardiff, Wales, and on the day in question he was summoned down to the managing director’s office.
On entering the room, Bevan was confronted by a group of men in suits who seemed to practically ooze intimidation. Bevan recalled what happened next: “One of the men outstretched his hand and I shook it.”
“Matthew Bevan?” the man asked.
“Yes,” replied Bevan.
The man identified himself as being with Scotland Yard’s Computer Crimes Unit: “I’m placing you under arrest for hacking NASA and Wright Patterson Air Force Base.’” Bevan was in deep trouble. On being taken to Cardiff Central Police Station, the line of questioning became decidedly curious and worthy of an episode of The X-Files: “What does the term Hangar 18 mean to you?” Bevan was immediately asked, in stern and intimidating tones.
“That’s a hoarding place for alien technology,” he replied, in a quite matter of fact fashion.
Bevan’s recollections of that exchange were more than eye-opening. “Throughout the interview, they kept coming back to Hangar 18: Did I see anything on the Wright Patterson and the NASA computers? Did I download anything? Well, when they asked me if I saw anything, I said: ‘Yes, I saw emails talking about an anti-gravity propulsion system.’” Needless to say, this did not go down too well, at all, with Scotland Yard’s Computer Crimes Unit, as it was known back then. Bevan correctly realized that he was in very hot water with the authorities, and a date was subsequently set for a hearing at London’s Bow Street magistrate’s court. But: it was not just Bevan, his defense, and the prosecution who were present at the trial. There was also a man present representing the interests of the U.S. Government and NASA.
A curious exchange occurred when the man took the stand – as Bevan remembered only too well. “As the hearing continued, the prosecution asked him what the American Government thought about my motives regarding my hacking at NASA and at Wright Patterson.”
The man replied: “We now believe that Mr. Bevan had no malicious intentions and that his primary purpose was to uncover information on UFOs and Hangar 18.’”
Bevan said: “Well, everyone had a bit of a laugh at that point, even the judge; however, when the prosecution asked: ‘Can you confirm if Hangar 18 exists or if it’s a myth?’ the man said: ‘I can neither confirm nor deny as I’m not in possession of that information.’”
The final outcome of the affair was that the case against Bevan completely collapsed. The magistrate overseeing the matter stated in no uncertain terms that a jail sentence was utterly out of the question, and that any financial punishment he might be able to impose upon Bevan would be meager in the extreme. Coupled with the fact that neither NASA nor the American Government as a whole was willing to divulge any and all information concerning the contents of the material on the Wright Patterson computers to the British court, and the cost of prosecuting the case was perceived as being as high as $10,000 a day, the prosecution grudgingly elected to offer zero evidence. Bevan’s last word on the matter: “Although I didn’t print or download anything – I read it all online – I know what I read: America has a secret space plane.”
According to a newstudy, life could have existed on Mars long before it did right here on Earth. When the planets first formed in our solar system approximately 4.5 billion years ago, meteors were crashing into everything and that chaotic period was called the Late Heavy Bombardment.
But now scientists have readjusted the timeline of when Mars stopped being heavily hit by meteors. Since meteors stopped attacking the Red Planet around 4.48 billion years ago, scientists believe that life on Mars could have developed between 4.2 billion and 3.5 billion years ago – approximately 500 million years before Earth became habitable.
In order to figure this timeline out, a team at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, examined pieces of Mars’ crust that came from the southern highlands of the planet. A collision on Mars sent pieces of the planet flying through space and around 120 samples have been recovered on Earth.
The team studied the oldest-known mineral grains from the meteorites and found zircon and baddeleyite that date back from between 4.43 billion and 4.48 billion years ago. The zircon had small traces of radioactive uranium which over time turned into lead and allowed the researchers to determine how old the rock was. Additionally, the rock had micro features which would confirm whether or not it had been exposed to high pressure from a huge impact.
Since the samples didn’t show high temperatures or pressure, it indicated that they were from a time after the Late Heavy Bombardment period finished. “We found none of these bombardment signatures in the Mars zircon and baddeleyite grains,” Dr. Desmond Moser told New Scientist, adding, “We know there was a giant impact on Mars, but it has to be older than 4.48 billion years ago.”
He also said, “The implication is that there could have been platform hosting life as much as half a billion years earlier than previously thought it was possible in the inner solar system.” This means that the countless meteor strikes on Mars between 4.2 billion and 3.5 billion years ago could have resulted with the waters from inside of the planet being released much earlier than previously thought. Additionally, the waters could have been “…setting the stage for life-forming reactions,” according to Dr. Moser. It’s incredible to think that while Earth was still forming, Mars could have been thriving with life.
Police Officers Close Encounter In Elmwod Wisconsin
Police Officers Close Encounter In Elmwod Wisconsin
APRIL 22, 1976. . . . . . . . . ELMWOD WISCONSIN
At around 11 pm on the evening of 22nd April 1976, George Wheeler would spot what he believed to be an orange glow from a fire near Tuttle Hill in the small town of Elmwood. Around 60 miles from the Mississippi River and with a population (at the time) of just over 700 people, Elmwood was typical of its era of small-town America.
Wheeler himself had over three decades experience in policing, having served with state departments in New York and Wisconsin, as well as acting as a “one-man police force” in Elmwood before “retiring” to a reserve officer (essentially, filling in the current one-man police force was away). It is perhaps also important to mention that Wheeler was an experienced Second World War pilot who had seen combat on several occasion. In short, it would appear the relief police officer was a reliable and credible witness.
On this evening, however, thinking a fire was about to rip through the small town, he jumped in his vehicle and made his way to the location. Upon arriving, though, he wouldn’t find any flames of an uncontrollable blaze. Instead, he witnessed “a strange glowing object”. What’s more, this object was approximately 100 feet above the ground.
Wheeler would estimate he was around 500 feet from the hovering craft. He could see “six bluish-white lights” as well as several “windows or portholes” along the side. Even more intriguing and concerning at the same time, were the moving shadows suggesting that someone was inside this He notimammoth, silver-colored aerial vehicle.
A Brilliant Orange-White That Was “Like Looking Into The Sun!”
He continued to watch the scene develop. ced an open side-panel which allowed him to glimpse inside. Wheeler could see something “revolving slowly” which reminded him of a turbine. As his focus shifted to the bottom of the craft, he noticed several “legs” protruded from the underside. However, more prominent was the “black, hose-like appendage” which connected to the bottom of the main part of the craft.
He would radio his report to the sheriff’s department in nearby Ellsworth. As he was doing so, however, the craft suddenly rose with alarming speed. In sympathy with the sudden movement, a “bluish flash” hit the area, perhaps even the patrol car itself, causing the radio to cut out instantly. The car’s lights and engine also went out without warning.
When the radio came back to life a short while later with a voice asking Wheeler if he needed assistance, he would reply:
My God, it’s another of these UFOs or spacecraft!
Wheeler would take a few seconds to clear his thoughts. He would estimate seeing the object for no more than a minute, most likely around 45 seconds. He would also recall a “whooshing” noise as it zoomed upward into the night sky.
Wheeler would further recall that the main exterior of the craft was indeed a metallic silver color, the top was a brilliant glow of orangey-white. In fact, he would claim staring at this top part was “like looking into the sun” such was the brightness. Furthermore, it was huge. At least around the size of a two-story house.
An Attempt At Extraction Of Natural Resources
Perhaps of most interest was the black hose-like appendage. Wheeler claimed it projected downward into the trees below. Whether it went all the way to the ground is unknown. There are, however, several close-contact UFO sightings featuring similar “black tubes”. Most often, these devices are seemingly used to extract water from a supply on the ground, either a water tower or even a lake or river, for example.
If we accept, just for a moment, that the black tube that Wheeler witnessed was similar to these other sightings around the globe (with many of them, incidentally, seemingly taking place between the mid-1960s to the early-1980s), what was it attempting to extract?
There was a farmhouse nearby owned by the O’Bryan family. This means there will likely be a water supply tower too. However, it would appear that no direct activity was reported by the family. Mr. O’Bryan would claim that a little after 11 pm, the television reception went dead but quickly returned. This would likely match when the object took off into the sky knocking out the police radio and car engine.
It is also worth mentioning the testimony from a witness from another farm in the area, a 9-year-old boy would claim his sister returned to the family home that evening from “some doings in town”. Of more interest, however, was the reaction of the family dogs as she did so. Instead of running to her as they would do normally, they would purposely keep their distance and bark repeatedly.
Perhaps, then, we should turn our attention to the limestone quarry which resides in the immediate vicinity of the sighting. Might this have been the target of the apparently cosmic craft? Several contactees have claimed Earth’s natural resources are the target of such UFO activity.
“Hit” By A UFO!
Shortly after the incident, 36-year-old dairy farmer, David Moots, was returning home from dropping off the family babysitter when he saw Wheeler’s squad car parked across the road with the lights out. He pulled over his vehicle and walked over the Wheeler’s car to see if the long-time Elmwood police officer needed assistance.
Moots was aware of a past heart attack suffered by Wheeler. So when he saw him struggling to get out of his squad car he, at first, believed he might be having another similar episode. The closer he got to the car, however, he could clearly see there was something wrong with Wheeler. He called out to the relief police officer, asking if he was OK. Wheeler replied that he had been hit.
Now growing concerned once more, he asked him if a car had hit him Wheeler’s reply, however, was perhaps the last thing the dairy farmer expected to hear:
No, one of those UFOs!
The use of the word “those” is interesting, suggesting that UFO sightings were common knowledge among the residents of the town. When Moots was interviewed later and asked about this, he would claim that “a lot of people” claimed to have witnessed UFOs and strange objects in the area. So much so, that he didn’t think twice Wheeler mentioning one too. What did surprise him, though, was the claim of being “hit” by one.
Moots would further recall how “dazed” Wheeler appeared. And how he was not at all like himself.
An Orange Half-Moon Over Tuttle Hill – Corroborating Witnesses
There were, of course, several other witnesses to the evening’s events. For example, housewife, Mrs. Wergland, was at home just outside of Elmwood when her cuckoo clock announced it was 11 pm. She would make her way to the kitchen in order to take her regular shot of medicine. As she did so, however, she would happen to catch a glance out of her kitchen window.
There, opposite her home, was a “bright, orange moon-shaped” object hovering over Tuttle Hill. She would watch the object for several minutes before simply going to bed and going to sleep. When asked why she did not report the sighting or even wake her husband she claimed she had seen lots of strange objects in the area. And furthermore, her husband usually claimed they were likely “just the moon”.
Another witness, however, Paul Fredrickson would report his sighting. Fredrickson, the administrator of the Heritage of Elmwood Nursing Home was at home when he received a phone call. It was the wife of the police chief who asked that he might go to the front of his house and look out of the window. When he did, he would see an “an orange glow, like a moon cut in half”. What’s more, the object appeared to be over Tuttle Hill.
Fredrickson would quickly dismiss the idea that the orange glow was a blaze of some kind as there was no flames nor smoke. By the time he returned to the phone, his wife was now awake and downstairs. By the time they returned to the front window, the glowing object was no longer there.
Mystery Of Libyan Desert Glass: Meteorites Are Scattered Debris Floating In The Ocean Above
Mystery Of Libyan Desert Glass: Meteorites Are Scattered Debris Floating In The Ocean Above
By Lee Austin
In theory, if there’s one phenomenon that could disprove the flat earth theory, it’s meteorites…. Though this is not really true. Meteorites are scattered debris floating freely within the sea firmament dome. Occasionally a meteor will violently pierce the dome and fall rapidly through the thin atmosphere of the first heaven in the third dimension. The proof is found in the composition of a meteor. Pyroxine, plagioclase and olivin are the three primary minerals found in both meteors and the seabed of the ocean’s floor.
Apparently, there is an ocean above and below. As above, so below.
Another piece of anecdotal evidence is the meteoric origins of Libyan Desert Glass, or great sand sea glass. Comprised of ninety-eight percent molten silica, Libyan Desert Glass is the byproduct of radioactive melting. Molded at three-thousand, six hundred and thirty-two degrees, which is the average temperature range of the thermosphere. Great sand sea glass are broken pieces of the sea firmament dome that have fallen to the flat earth. Molten glass? I’m sure I’ve read about that before.
Job Chapter 37 Verse 18 says, “Hast thou stretched out the heavens, which are strong and as molten glass.”
Below the sea firmament dome, the sun and moon revolve clockwise thirty-five-hundred miles above the flat earth. Not ninety-three-million… two hundred thirty-eight thousand miles respectively. Astronauts haven’t officially returned to the moon since 1972. Of course they were never there in the first place. Over the years, the copy and paste astrophysicists have run out of magic tricks. Non-existent ball planets don’t rotate around non-existent fireballs trillions of miles away. The physical truth hides in plain sight.
For example, the moon’s Tyco crater is visible to the naked eye. Yet it’s only fifty-three miles wide. Impossible to see if the moon were two-hundred and thirty-eight-thousand miles away. The static moon appears upside-down when viewed from the southern hemisphere because the moon never changes perspective. Only you do.
The Book Of Enoch, Section Chapter 72 Verse 1 says, “The book of the courses of the luminaries of heaven, the relations of each, according to their classes, their dominion and their seasons, according to their names and places of origin, and according to their months, which Uriel, the holy angel, who was with me, who is their guide, showed me all their laws exactly as they are, and how it is with regard to all the years of the world.
1 Corinthians 15:41 says, “The sun has one kind of splendor, the moon another and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendor.”
Another deception is cell phone towers communicating to non-existent high orbiting satellites twenty-two thousand, two-hundred and thirty-six miles in space. Let’s examine the satellite/cell phone relationship. We’ve been programmed to believe that when a phone call is made, the cell signal is connecting to a localized cell tower, which transmits your signal to a satellite, sending the signal to the closest localized tower of the cell phone receiver and connecting to the cell phone receiver.
Actually, that’s half accurate. A cell phone functions by communicating with towers connected to a base station in a configuration called a cell. As you move through the cell, the base station monitors your cell phone signal, transferring it to the nearest ground tower. Measuring the signal strength differences between multiple cell towers determines your cell location. All cables originating from a cell tower are underground. And all international calls are made via fiber optic cables, connecting to land-based cell towers in that particular country. Think about it. If there were twenty-five-thousand satellites cloaking the planet from twentytwo-thousand, two-hundred and thirty-six miles in space, cell phone and Wi-Fi dead spots wouldn’t exist. Dead spots are the result of the flat earth not having 100% land-based cell phone tower coverage.
As above, so below illustrates the lie of duality and confusion. Freemasons and Knights of The Templar believe the Demiurge and Lucifer are equal, as demonstrated in the black and white trestle floor of Masonic Halls and Ying and Yang of Chinese philosophy.
The systemic lie of Kabbalah postulates that God is the total of everything: good and evil, knowable, unknowable, limitless, limited, merciful and cruel. In the beginning, Kabbalists believe God sent out an emanation of himself in the form of ten lights called the Sephiroth or Tree of Secret Knowledge. This equates to the name I Am.
The universe is comprised of layered spheres of frequencies, with the Ancient of Days ruling from the ninth dimension/heaven. To be one with the Light Bearer, disciples must pass through the nine guarded spheres, which are protected by angels and devils. Only those who know the guardian’s passwords can pass though the nine spheres. Gnostic knowledge enlightens the soul as it ascends the ladder of the Sephiroth, attaining apotheosis.
The ten Sephiroth spheres are the driving forces that move all of creation. In truth, there are ten heavens in the multi-universe.
The Book of The Secrets of Enoch, Chapter 22, Verses 1-2 says, “In the tenth heaven, the archangel Michael led Enoch before the Lord’s face. On the tenth heaven, Aravoth (the highest heaven of all ten heavens), I saw the appearance of the Lord’s face, like iron made to flow in fire, and brought out, emitting sparks, and it burns. Thus, I saw the Lord’s face, but the Lord’s face is ineffable, marvelous and very awful, and very, very terrible.” Kabbalists divide the universe into four worlds, each consisting of ten spheres, set and arranged into the Sephirothic Tree or Tree of Secret Knowledge. The secret philosophy is hidden within systemic structure of the Sephirothic Tree, revealing the mysteries of the Old and New Testaments.
Lee Austin is the author of “Morning Star’s Tale”… a sci-fi novella
James Gilliliand had no idea about the ships and the ETs in the area before he moved to ECETI Ranch. But pretty soon after he moved in they started appearing regularly.
The UFOs are often out of the range of out physical eyes yet cameras especially digital can pick up more of the light spectrum and peek into other dimensions occasionally.
Although we don't understand everything that happens, one thing is for sure, unprecedented events are unfolding at the Gilliland Ranch that have the potential to change the course and destiny of Humanity and the Earth.
The last strange event occurred on June 23, 2019 when an ET inner earth door on Mt Adams opened as a reaction to James Gilliland when he knocked on the door with a laser from the ECETI Ranch. Filmed by Peter Maxwell Slattery with Colored Night Vision.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 5/5 - (1 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Silent War In UFO Community Taking Place, Lets Talk About It. Scott C. Waring UFO Sighting News.
Silent War In UFO Community Taking Place, Lets Talk About It. Scott C. Waring UFO Sighting News.
Hi everyone. I entered this area about 15 years ago because of the chaos I saw. I saw eyewitnesses attacked by Phil Plait who I believe is working for the NSA to do so. I jumped in and stopped him. He knows me. Thats when I became famous. He stated, "I guess I gave you your 15 minutes of fame." He was referring to an argument on his blog between me and him about how he mistreated and verbally abused UFO eyewitnesses and researchers. So I started UFO Sightings Daily site to help. I created an order of doing things, reporting things, rule of presenting the evidence that began to change the community. However I inspired thousands of UFO bloggers and Youtube who thought they could make money at this area, unlike me, and greed is causing them to attack each other for profit. I thought they were motivated to help, but instead I see daily attacks on me and other UFO researchers in comments, reports and Youtube channels. Such greed would only destroy the UFO community.
The is something that you don't know going on. A silent war within the UFO community that has gone untold to the public for years. For years I had comments on my blogs and then turned them off suddenly. Its because about ten different UFO researchers were each leaving rude and crude comments on my site under every post. I traced them down to their UFO sites, and asked them to stop, but it only made it worse. So I turned off comments so I could continue my work undisturbed. They thought they could scare me away from UFO research so that they could make a profit reporting UFO and alien news. Then my site was attacked by negative SEO, which reduced my readers from 150,000 to 7,000 over night. I asked google over 5 times to do something but they never did. Apparently UFO sites are low on their list. So I made another site ET DATA BASE. Now on Youtube, UFO channels are being attacked. Secureteam10 lost their demonetisation (adsence) but then got it back. Thirdphaseofmoon lost it and then got it back. But lots of UFO channels are currently reporting that some videos are being reviewed by Youtube because it might not be allowed to have adsence on it. I talked to six channels with this problem. Other UFO researchers are leaving rude and crude comments on my Youtube channel again. Probably because they are jealous of the attention I get or because of they are jealous of the discoveries I make. Ether way, most the negativity about my discoveries comes from UFO researchers not getting attention. Here is the deal, Google owns the platform my UFO Sightings Daily site is on, Google owns Youtube, Google owns Adsence. DO YOU SEE A PATTERN YET? Because I sure do. UFO researchers worldwide are being attacked by Google, which is an organisation worldwide controlling information that people are allowed to see. That Google itself is attempting to cleanup and delete the UFO community from the Internet. We are under attack by Google. I understand others greed for money has created a lot of chaos in the UFO research community, but why is Google attacking UFO researchers unless they are working with the US government to cover things up? Scott C. Waring
This image was taken by the left Navcam on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover on June 18, 2019, the 2,440th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. It shows part of "Teal Ridge," which the rover has been studying within a region called the "clay-bearing unit." Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Updated at 5 p.m. PDT (8 p.m. EDT) on June 24, 2019:
Curiosity's team conducted a follow-on methane experiment this past weekend. The results came down early Monday morning: The methane levels have sharply decreased, with less than 1 part per billion by volume detected. That's a value close to the background levels Curiosity sees all the time.
The finding suggests last week's methane detection — the largest amount of the gas Curiosity has ever found — was one of the transient methane plumes that have been observed in the past. While scientists have observed the background levels rise and fall seasonally, they haven't found a pattern in the occurrence of these transient plumes.
"The methane mystery continues," said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "We're more motivated than ever to keep measuring and put our brains together to figure out how methane behaves in the Martian atmosphere."
Curiosity doesn't have instruments that can definitively say whether the source of the methane is biological or geological. A clearer understanding of these plumes, combined with coordinated measurements from other missions, could help scientists determine where they're located on Mars.
Curiosity's most recent methane findings will be announced during a livestream of the 5 p.m. PDT / 8 p.m. EDT NASA Town Hall at AbSciCon 2019, an astrobiology science conference happening in Bellevue, Washington. Watch the plenary broadcast at:
This week, NASA's Curiosity Mars rover found a surprising result: the largest amount of methane ever measured during the mission — about 21 parts per billion units by volume (ppbv). One ppbv means that if you take a volume of air on Mars, one billionth of the volume of air is methane.
The finding came from the rover's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) tunable laser spectrometer. It's exciting because microbial life is an important source of methane on Earth, but methane can also be created through interactions between rocks and water.
Curiosity doesn't have instruments that can definitively say what the source of the methane is, or even if it's coming from a local source within Gale Crater or elsewhere on the planet.
"With our current measurements, we have no way of telling if the methane source is biology or geology, or even ancient or modern," said SAM Principal Investigator Paul Mahaffy of NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The Curiosity team has detected methane many times over the course of the mission. Previous papers have documented how background levels of the gas seem to rise and fall seasonally. They've also noted sudden spikes of methane, but the science team knows very little about how long these transient plumes last or why they're different from the seasonal patterns.
The SAM team organized a different experiment for this weekend to gather more information on what might be a transient plume. Whatever they find — even if it's an absence of methane — will add context to the recent measurement.
Curiosity's scientists need time to analyze these clues and conduct many more methane observations. They also need time to collaborate with other science teams, including those with the European Space Agency's Trace Gas Orbiter, which has been in its science orbit for a little over a year without detecting any methane. Combining observations from the surface and from orbit could help scientists locate sources of the gas on the planet and understand how long it lasts in the Martian atmosphere. That might explain why the Trace Gas Orbiter's and Curiosity's methane observations have been so different.
With the Navy's recent revelation that its pilots have been regularly spotting unidentified flying objects, some of those in the UFO community who were once thought crazy now have some concrete evidence to point to. And the regular spate of mainstream news stories about UFO sightings has inspired a new generation of UFO hunters and researchers.
I'm regularly asked why I, a 32-year-old man with a good job and a young family spent six years researching the UFO subculture. Simply put, I find the culture and the people fascinating.
Ufology has always been a counter-cultural movement. Faced with decades of ridicule, the UFO community has always been the underdog. I like underdogs. But unidentified flying objects have made a cultural comeback, and the last two years have seen a huge growth in popular media coverage of this curious phenomenon and the people who explore it. It seems that UFOs have become all the rage, and this popular resurgence is inspiring a young new breed of UFO researchers and hunters.
These last few months have seen a surge in media outlets covering the UFO phenomenon. This week, the New York Times ran a story about two Navy fighter pilots who had multiple encounters with strange objects which seemed to perform impossible maneuvers. In one dramatic case, the pilots recounted a story of an object that looked like a “sphere encasing a cube” that flew in-between two fighter jets cruising in tandem just 100 feet apart.
These stories have been covered on all the major news networks and are making headlines around the world.
UFOs have always been fodder for the mainstream media. One can easily find news reports about flying saucers from the 1950s and alleged alien abductees have even appeared on Oprah from time to time. The difference between then and now is that UFOs have begun to slowly leave the gutter of tabloid journalism. The subculture of UFO enthusiasts and researchers seems to be pushing back hard against the stereotypes and taboos established by a mainstream culture that once wrote them off as crazy or conspiracy theorists.
Ryan Sprague, a Manhattan-based UFO researcher, author, podcaster and co-host of The CW’s popular Roswell: Mysteries Decoded is the embodiment of the new UFO generation. He and other young Ufologists perceive the UFO community and discourse as counter-cultural, subversive even.
“The community has always strived for legitimacy, but at the end of the day, they didn’t care what people thought about them or their theories, no matter how outlandish or ridiculous," Sprague told Motherboard. "And now, just like any revolution, UFOs have earned the spotlight after being ridiculed for so long. UFOs exist. Our government and military have admitted it. Now we take that next step and ask the hard questions.”
In my book, The UFO People: A Curious Culture, I present the idea that the UFO subculture has always been, and will continue to be, a group of dissidents who challenge established systems of power and ideology. The problem is that mainstream culture has always believed that people who believe in UFOs are uneducated, conspiratorial and delusional. That is, until now: With the Navy's recent revelations, many in the UFO community have been vindicated.
So why is no one freaking out about these revelations making front page news? As UFO author Chris Rutkowski once explained, perhaps it is because we have become acclimatized to seeing UFOs invading Earth in books and on screen. Whether you are of the Spielberg generation, watching a candy eating E.T., or a millennial who grew up watching The Avengers fight off hordes of evil intergalactic aliens, we are used to seeing this archetypal other in our media. UFOs, as a result, have become much less frightening and perhaps much more interesting. Have we negotiated UFOs into our cultural framework and identity?
Researchers like Sprague are not the only ones being affected by this new rebranding of the UFO. Ufologists come from all walks of life. Deep Prasad is the 23-year-old CEO of ReactiveQ, a multimillion dollar quantum computing tech start-up based out of Toronto. Growing up, UFOs were never really something that interested him. But after reading a 2017 article in the New York Times that broke the existence of a secret Pentagon UFO program, he became fascinated with researching the phenomenon. While he admits that the general public may be a bit slower to appreciate the cultural importance of UFOs, many people in his network seem to be coming around.
“My friends didn't think UFOs were cool for the most part, now most of them are either skeptically intrigued or deeply excited," he said."In their eyes, it's cool but it will be a whole lot cooler when the knowledge we gain from these UFOs affects day to day life.”
Talking about UFOs still is risky business because of the stigma this type of discourse carries, but isn’t this how all new movements begin? Perhaps this UFO renaissance is no different.
It seems that we can no longer question the existence of UFOs, and while the source of these strange objects is still up for debate, we are undoubtedly on the edge of something very new, incredibly cool, and very much in the hands of a brand new generation.
A small group of venture capitalists and technologists believe that humans can capture and reverse-engineer UFOs—and that trying to do so might be a good investment.
Image: Getty / Composition: Jason Koebler
There would be nothing more disruptive than the sudden discovery of aliens. Perhaps that's why a small contingent of Silicon Valley is so interested in UFOs—and wants to know who's piloting them.
Rizwan Virk, runs PlayLabs@MIT. He's also a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, angel investor, author of The Simulation Hypothesis, and finds UFOs compelling as a technologist and scientist.
“I am interested in the phenomenon because I believe mainstream science may have only discovered 5 percent of the truth about reality, and the other 95 percent is still ‘out there,’” he said in an interview.
Virk said that studying UFOs, whether they are real or not, have challenged his ideas of what he believes is possible: "This phenomenon seems to be about advanced technology that doesn't always fit into our current model of ‘what is technology’ and what isn't,” he said.
“Many technologists use their intuition to find new technology ideas and decide which paths to pursue," he added. "There's overlap between the idea of trusting your intuition and what happens in UFO research.”
Virk admitted that the UFO crowd is fairly small in Silicon Valley, and that the investors and technologists who are interested remain fairly quiet. UFOs, regardless of all the recent press, are still a pretty taboo subject. That being said, it is public knowledge that a wealthy real estate mogul and technopreneur from Utah bought the infamous Skinwalker Ranch from aerospace billionaire Robert Bigelow. For many in the tech world who are also into UFOs, their ufology is an engrossing and obsessive side hustle. Few speak about it publicly, but that's slowly changing.
"In front of our eyes are technologies underlying these UFOs that are far beyond our understanding and capabilities of recreating ... if we pay close attention and reverse these technologies to bring to the masses, we will see a world with interstellar travel at our fingertips"
The UFO mythos has always been more than little green men in flying saucers and has always carried with it a perpetual challenge to established systems of politics, economics and power. And in Silicon Valley, she found people who had taken leaps of faith both for their startups as well as in believing in UFOs. Perhaps the most famous technologist-ufologist is Jacques Vallee, a computer scientist and venture capitalist who worked on ARPANET, which became the basis for the internet.
"There are other groups who refrain from mythologizing the UFO, who instead engage with it, to understand its truth. You can find these people in Silicon Valley," she wrote in the book. "These are scientists, much like Jacques, who are at the top of their fields and who have produced some of the technologies that have either saved the lives of people you might know (or even yourself) or have developed the technologies that you use every day because you own a cell phone. Like Jacques, they believe in the phenomenon commonly known as 'UFOs' or unexplained aerial phenomena, and they are engaged in the process of translating future technologies into present realities."
It is no surprise that cutting edge technologists share a pseudo-kismet with UFOs. Technology is, by its very nature, disruptive. It alters who we are, it re-shapes meaning, and most importantly, it allows the impossible to become possible.
James Lampkin, the Vice President of Programming at ESL, one of the world’s largest esports companies, told Motherboard that he finds the idea of UFOs compelling because the “implications of that type of technology seem astounding and revolutionary regardless of who is flying.” He expressed his frustration that the media is only scratching the surface of this phenomenon.
Deep Prasad, the CEO of ReactiveQ, a multimillion dollar quantum computing tech start-up based out of Toronto, shares Lampkin’s sentiments.
“As technologists we seek to master science and engineering in such a way that all of humanity benefits from it," he told Motherboard. “In front of our eyes are technologies underlying these UFOs that are far beyond our understanding and capabilities of recreating ... if we pay close attention and reverse these technologies to bring to the masses, we will see a world with interstellar travel at our fingertips."
Similar to Virk, Prasad fundamentally believes that if UFOs can be studied, it would shift humanity’s understanding of what technology is. He asserts that scientific research into this phenomenon “will lead to a technological revolution like no other in all of human history.”
Lampkin has tried to convince some of his friends to turn on the news and watch the recent surge in UFO coverage. He laments that only “10 or 20% of his friends are straight up open minded,” and a handful have “dove into the mud” with him, but the rest seem frustratingly disinterested or stone cold skeptical.
Virk pointed out that most VC’s in the valley are not going to start throwing their money into researching UFOs, at least not publicly, simply because there is no guarantee of a payoff. Investing in studying UFOs is, well, quite risky.
"Some reports of the technology have said that it gets into areas that we are just starting to explore in Silicon Valley - mind/computer interfaces,” Virk said.
Somewhere in this liminal state between humanity and machines, between us and the tools we create, rests, for lack of a better term, an alien. UFOs, real or not, abduct not only our culture but the imaginations and intuitions of some of our brightest minds. Perhaps this little band of Ufonauts in Silicon Valley serve as a reminder that we ought not to take things for granted, that what we deem as ‘normal’ is often arbitrary. UFOs, and the people who are interested in them, make society uncomfortable because they symbolize one of our greatest fears: change.
The landmark find could eventually help astronomers figure out what's causing fast radio bursts.
Artist’s impression of CSIRO’s Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope finding a fast radio burst and determining its precise location. The KECK, VLT and Gemini South optical telescopes joined ASKAP with follow-up observations to image the host galaxy.
Astronomers are starting to get the goods on one of the most mysterious phenomena in the universe.
For just the second time ever, researchers have pinpointed the location of a fast radio burst (FRB), a super-brief explosion that releases as much energy in 1 millisecond as Earth's sun does over nearly a century.
The lone, previously pinpointed burst, known as FRB 121102, is a rare "repeater," one that's flared up dozens of times over the past few years. But the newfound blast is a member of the much more commonly observed "one-off" class. Its discovery, which was announced today (June 27) in the journal Science, shows that these elusive beasts can be traced and tracked, potentially allowing astronomers to finally figure out what causes them.
"This is the big breakthrough the field has been waiting for since astronomers discovered fast radio bursts in 2007," study lead author Keith Bannister, of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), said in a statement. (CSIRO is Australia's national science agency.)
Bannister and his colleagues found the FRB using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), a network of 36 radio telescopes at CSIRO’s Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia. They detected the burst on Sept. 24, 2018, which explains its name — FRB 180924. (The repeater FRB 121102 was first spotted in 2012, as you may now have surmised.)
This was exciting enough, given that the total tally of known FRBs stood at 85. (Just two of those are repeaters.) But the team broke new ground by tracking their find to its source.
The researchers developed a new technique that automatically recognized FRB 180924 less than 300 milliseconds after the burst hit the ASKAP dishes. Such speed was of the essence, because the team needed to access data that's overwritten every 3.1 seconds.
The scientists then measured the tiny differences in FRB 180924's arrival time at the 36 ASKAP dishes down to about 1/100th of a nanosecond. Comparing these differences allowed them to determine the burst's source in the sky with a precision of 0.00002 degrees — equivalent to the width of a human hair as seen from 650 feet (200 meters) away.
That source lies on the outskirts of a big galaxy called DES J214425.25−405400.81. Little was known about this galaxy, so the researchers characterized it using optical observations by the Keck II telescope in Hawaii and the Very Large Telescope and Gemini South telescope, both of which are in Chile.
CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope, located at CSIRO’s Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia.
(Image credit: CSIRO/Dragonfly Media)
The study team determined that DES J214425.25−405400.81 lies about 3.6 billion light-years from Earth. In addition, the galaxy is about 1,000 times more massive, and is forming stars much less actively, than the dwarf that hosts FRB 121102 (which lies about 3 billion light-years from Earth).
And FRB 121102 lies near the center of its home galaxy, the region where a supermassive black hole likely lurks.
These differences are important because they show "that FRBs can come from a huge range of types of galaxies and environments," Bannister told Space.com via email. "They don’t seem to need very special conditions to occur."
FRB 180924's location also offers a few clues about the mysterious processes that drive FRBs. For example, Bannister said that supermassive black holes are ruled out for this particular burst, given its considerable distance (13,000 light-years) from the galactic core.
Indeed, the new study may spur a significant rethink of FRB generation, team members said.
"The most credible model for bursts, built to explain the repeater, suggests they are produced by young magnetars (highly magnetized neutron stars)," co-author Ryan Shannon, of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, told Space.com via email.
"These magnetars are preferentially formed in tiny dwarf galaxies, like that of the FRB 121102 host," Shannon added. "Either the model needs to be relaxed to allow for bursts to be produced in a diversity of environments, or there are two mechanisms for producing bursts."
(There's always the possibility that FRBs are generated by advanced civilizations, of course. But this is a long shot, as alien invocations tend to be.)
The models will get stronger and stronger as more and more FRBs are pinpointed using the methods pioneered by Bannister and his team. And there are other exciting implications of the find as well.
For example, the amount of gas FRBs travel through is encoded in the bursts' signals, Bannister said. FRB 180924's home galaxy has relatively little gas, so the bulk of the burst's encoded information was therefore imparted by gas in the intergalactic medium.
The gas that lies between galaxies is very difficult to study because it doesn't glow — but astronomers may now have a viable way to get a look at it.
"We have demonstrated that it is technically possible to catch one-off bursts and that they are clean probes of intergalactic medium," Shannon said.
"The next step is to see if other one-off bursts are like FRB 180924 (originating in massive galaxies) or if they are more like the first repeater," he added. "I think they will be like 180924, and we will be able to open up a new window on the nearly invisible cosmic web."
The space agency announced today (June 27) that the next mission in its New Frontiers line of medium-cost missions will be Dragonfly, a rotorcraft designed to ply the skies of the huge, hazy and potentially life-hosting Saturn moon.
If all goes according to plan, Dragonfly will launch in 2026 and land on Titan eight years later, NASA officials said. The probe will then spend at least 2.5 years cruising around the 3,200-mile-wide (5,150 kilometers) moon, making two dozen flights that cover a total of about 110 miles (180 km).
The 10-foot-long (3 meters) Dragonfly will gather a variety of data at each of its stops. Such work will help scientists learn more about Titan, the only solar system body other than Earth known to host stable bodies of liquid on its surface.
Titan's surface lakes, rivers and seas aren't composed of water, however: The frigid moon's climate system is based on hydrocarbons, in particular methane and ethane.
The mission is geared toward characterizing Titan's chemistry in detail. Complex organic molecules are known to swirl in the moon's thick, nitrogen-dominated atmosphere, and some scientists think its hydrocarbon seas could host exotic forms of life.
Titan also hosts another potentially habitable environment — a buried ocean of liquid water, which sloshes beneath the moon's icy crust.
Dragonfly could conceivably find evidence of Titan life, if the moon is indeed inhabited. And, because Titan is very similar to the early Earth, the mission's observations may shed light on the chemical processes that helped life get going on our planet, NASA officials said.
"Titan is unlike any other place in the solar system, and Dragonfly is like no other mission," Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for science at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., said in a statement.
"It's remarkable to think of this rotorcraft flying miles and miles across the organic sand dunes of Saturn's largest moon, exploring the processes that shape this extraordinary environment," he added. "Dragonfly will visit a world filled with a wide variety of organic compounds, which are the building blocks of life and could teach us about the origin of life itself."
Dragonfly will land among Titan's dunes, then make its way toward its final destination, the 50-mile-wide (80 km) Selk Crater. Selk is a particularly good place to study prebiotic chemistry and look for signs of life, NASA officials said. That's because the three ingredients necessary for life as we know it — liquid water, organic molecules and energy — mixed during the impact that created the crater. (Titan's bedrock is water ice.)
Dragonfly will be nuclear powered, like NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, the New Horizons Pluto probe and many other deep-space explorers.
Dragonfly will be the fourth mission in the New Frontiers program, following New Horizons, the Juno probe to Jupiter and the OSIRIS-REx asteroid-sampling mission. Dragonfly's development costs are capped at $850 million, though the mission's total price tag, including launch, will probably top $1 billion.
The other finalist for the mid-2020s New Frontiers launch slot was the Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return (CAESAR) mission, which proposed snagging bits of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko — the same icy wanderer studied up close by Europe's Rosetta mission.
Dragonfly won't be the first craft to land on Titan. That honor belongs to Europe's Huygens probe, which touched down on the moon in January 2005. Huygens traveled to the Saturn system with NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which orbited the ringed planet from mid-2004 through September 2017.
Aaron Foster/Photographer's Choice/Getty Imagesby Billy Booth
Those who study the UFO mystery are always asked for proof. And the proof is hard to find. The enigma of UFOs is different than any other phenomena, and the proof is elusive. There have been many reports of crashed UFOs, but most of these rely heavily on circumstantial evidence, and not solid, physical proof. Sometimes there are eyewitness accounts of physical evidence, but that evidence has been removed, lost, or stolen. Such is the case of the Aurora, Texas UFO Crash of 1897. The case bears many similarities to the Roswell Crash of 1947.
Aurora's History
Because of ever-changing railroad lines, and Texas highways, it is a miracle that the small town of Aurora, Texas is still there. And not only that, but it is a legendary "historical site" as designated by the state of Texas. Why would a small farming community get such a distinction? One reason-an alien spacecraft crashed there in 1897. At least that's what the residents say, and what the newspaper reports claimed.
A Great Airship
Although it would be five years or so before the Wright brothers would make the first controlled aircraft flight, this pre-flight era would become known as the "great airship" period in Ufology. Whereas many of today's unexplained UFO sightings are assigned to conventional flying craft, that luxury did not exist in 1897. Anything flying that was not a bird, blimp, or balloon could be extraterrestrial.
The Crash
These early ships were a slow-moving craft, and so was the one that crashed into an Aurora windmill on April 19. According to the legend, the craft was destroyed, and the remains of an alien pilot were discovered among the remains. Also found among the scattered debris was a strange material with hieroglyphic-type etching. The alien creature was given a proper burial in the one and only cemetery in town. The alien body has long since disappeared.
Staying Afloat
For the time period, news of this event was spread wide and far. Many new visitors made their way to the little town to see what all the gossip was about. Second and third-hand stories would soon morph into eyewitness accounts. Where the information came from that supplied newspaper accounts is anyone's guess.
Local Newspaper Coverage
Local newspapers carried this story
About 6 o'clock this morning the early risers of Aurora were astonished at the sudden appearance of the airship which has been sailing around the country. It was traveling due north and much nearer the earth than before. Evidently, some of the machinery was out of order, for it was making a speed of only ten or twelve miles an hour, and gradually settling toward the earth.
UPI Coverage
"Aurora, Tex. -- (UPI) -- A grave in a small north Texas cemetery contains the body of an 1897 astronaut who was 'not an inhabitant of this world,' according to the International UFO Bureau. The group, which investigates unidentified flying objects, has already initiated legal proceedings to exhume the body and will go to court if necessary to open the grave, director Hayden Hewes said Wednesday."
Not of this World
UPI also picked up the story, and the legend was spread far beyond the borders of Texas. There were a number of eyewitness accounts of the incident later published, and they all agreed with the basic facts. An unknown craft had crashed into the town, strange debris was found, and a being "not of this world" was found in the wreckage. One intriguing account, although second-hand, came from a 15-year-old girl. Her parents had visited the site, and claimed that the alien pilot was a "small man."
Military Cover-up
There is also evidence of a military cover-up. Soon after the crash, military personnel came to Aurora. Could they have been responsible for the removal of the alien body? For a time, there was a headstone for the body, but even it has disappeared. All that remains are photographs of the headstone.
There have been, at times, lobbying to dig up the alien grave and see what evidence may remain. But townsfolk have kept this from happening. What excitement would run through UFO circles if alien DNA was found there? Maybe it is best to leave the grave alone, and let the Aurora mystery remain.
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.
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There's a lot of bunk out there with CGI/editing tricks. This one, IMO, is certainly one of the more palatable videos I've seen.