Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS NEARLY 13 YEARS AND 4 MONTH.
ON /30/09/2024 MORE THAN 2.230.520
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
29-02-2020
A Great American Astronaut, UFO Encounters, and Government Disclosure
A Great American Astronaut, UFO Encounters, and Government Disclosure
A lot of people seem to like to poke fun at UFO witnesses and believers. The field has unfortunately drawn to it some amount of skepticism from those who think it is all a bunch of quacks and weirdos out in the boondocks. Yet, this could not be further from the truth. Many of the staunchest supporters of not only UFOs being taken seriously by the public, but also full government disclosure on what might be kept secret from the public at large, are top, eminent members of the fields that matter most.
This particular tale revolves around the legendary astronaut Leroy Gordon “Gordo” Cooper Jr., an American aerospace engineer, test pilot, United States Air Force pilot, an astronaut pioneer, who was also involved in the first human spaceflight program of the United States, Project Mercury, running from 1958 through 1963, piloting the longest and last Mercury spaceflight, Mercury-Atlas 9, and would have numerous accolades and notable achievements throughout his career. He would later go on to join several corporate boards and as technical consultant for more than a dozen companies, and he is widely considered a legend in his field. As respected as he was, he also had his share of stories to tell of strange UFO encounters in space.
Gordon Cooper
Cooper seems to have had a long history of UFO sightings, which he has spoken of in interviews and in his autobiography Leap of Faith. His earliest well-known UFO encounter apparently occurred in 1951, when he saw a circular formation of “metallic, saucer-shaped vehicles” while flying over East Germany. These objects would apparently frequently appear, and he would say, “We never could get close enough to pin them down, but they were round in shape and very metallic looking.” Shortly after this, he was transferred to the Edwards Air Force Base Flight Test Center in the California desert, where the weirdness would continue. In May of 1957, Cooper was a Project Manager at Edwards Air Force Base. He says that he and some of the other crew would sometimes see a strange object come down to hover over the nearby lake bed, of which he would say, “It was a typical circular-shaped UFO. Not too many people saw it, because it took off at quite a sharp angle and just climbed straight on out of sight!” This object would apparently come to rest on the lake bed upon an array of three “legs” that extended from the bottom.
They apparently took a lot of footage of this particular event, and it was allegedly very unnerving for all those present, all of them experienced airmen who were used to seeing experimental aircraft and whatnot. Cooper went about alerting the Pentagon as to what was going on, and he was purportedly subsequently told to send all of the negatives of what they had captured on film in a locked courier pouch. That was the last he would hear about it, with the photos just vanishing and no apparent action taken, no explanation given, despite the fact that this had been an obvious foreign craft in U.S. military airspace. Even though the government had apparently swept it all under the carpet, Cooper would have none of it. He appeared on several high profile programs such as the Merv Griffin Show, where he insisted that the incident was real and said:
I think it was definitely a UFO. However, where it (the object) came from and who was in it is hard to determine, because it didn’t stay around long enough to discuss the matter – there wasn’t even time to send out a welcoming committee! I think it’s fairly credible. I would like to see the time when all qualified people could really work together to properly investigate these stories and either refute or prove them.
Cooper’s UFO experiences would continue, when on May 15, 1963, he would allegedly witness one during his solo space mission above the Earth’s surface, saying that it was an anomalous “greenish object.” This would only add to his suspicions that something weird was going on, and in 1978 he penned a letter to the United Nations begging them to release any information they had. In the letter he expressed the importance of making contact with these entities and finding a way to “resolve our problems by peaceful means, rather than warfare.” Cooper would go on to become a major proponent of full government disclosure on the UFO phenomenon, and believed there was a massive government conspiracy covering it all up. He would claim that he knew of hundreds of cases from fellow pilots and astronauts of seeing something beyond understanding, which were subsequently kept hush hush. He would claim that there had been all sorts of evidence that had been buried as well, and he said in one interview in the late-1990s:
For many years I have lived with a secret, in a secrecy imposed on all specialists in astronautics. I can now reveal that every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us. And there are thousands of witness reports and a quantity of documents to prove this, but nobody wants to make them public. Why?
Why, indeed. The public reaction to such allegations by such a well-respected icon of the military and space travel was to merely shrug its shoulders, after all what are you going to do when the guy is an aeronautic legend? In the meantime, Cooper continuously and tirelessly pressed for more information on what was being kept from the public, right up to his death in 2004 from complications of Parkinson’s disease, appearing in the documentary “Out of the Blue” about it and even writing at length about it all in his autobiography Leap of Faith. His whole message later in life was that the mass UFO cover-up that conspiracy theorists drone on about was all completely real, and he was a major champion of full disclosure in this area. It is hard to know how much of an effect he had, and he gained many critics, such as space historian Robert Pearlman, who wrote:
While no one can argue with someone’s experiences, in the case of Cooper’s own sightings, I found some difficulty understanding how someone so connected with ground breaking technology and science could easily embrace ideas such as extraterrestrial visits with little more than anecdotal evidence.
Cooper joins the ranks of very qualified, respectable UFO witnesses and ambassadors of disclosure who have mostly been either met with shrugged shoulders, raised eyebrows, or flat out disdain. Yet what are we to make of the claims and statements of such a well-respected member of the NASA community? Can his accounts an assertions really be written off as the ramblings of someone off their rocker, or do they perhaps deserve a little more consideration? Whether you believe him or hate him, Cooper has earned a place where he represents a certain type of witness and champion of UFOlogy that is hard to ignore.
When it comes to natural explosions on Earth, nothing tops a volcano and, in modern times, few top the Mt. St. Helens blast. In space, the biggest blasts beyond the original Big Bang belong to the supernovas – stellar explosions that usually collapse into a black hole. Now, imagine the Mt. St. Helens of supernovas. Having trouble picturing it? You don’t have to – astronomers have discovered what they believe to be the largest non-Big Bang explosion ever. How big is (or was) it?
“In some ways, this blast is similar to how the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 ripped off the top of the mountain. A key difference is that you could fit fifteen Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster’s hot gas.”
Mt. St. Helens
In a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal and summarized in a NASA press release and at Phys.org, Simona Giacintucci of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, and lead author of the study described the discovery of the blast in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster about 390 million light-years from Earth. A supermassive black hole in that cluster was first detected in 2016 astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, but at the time they couldn’t believe the even-more-massive cosmic hole in the gas surrounding the black hole was the result of an explosion. More recently, astronomers paired the Chandra X-ray data with that of the ESA’s XMM-Newton, the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Western Australia and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India and confirmed that it was indeed a big blast.
“The radio data fit inside the X-rays like a hand in a glove. This is the clincher that tells us an eruption of unprecedented size occurred here.”
This extremely powerful eruption occurred in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, which is located about 390 million light-years from Earth.
Co-author Dr. Maxim Markevitch from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center rightly called the explosion “unprecedented” – it’s at least five times larger than the previous largest explosion. The supermassive cosmic hole was caused by explosive jets shooting away from the erupting supermassive black hole and through a cloud of gas. The radio emissions detected by the telescopes came from electrons traveling at almost the speed of light filling the hole.
While the blast took hundreds of millions of years to carve a void that 15 Milky Ways could fit into, it’s all over now. Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, the director of the MWA, an expert in galaxy clusters and a co-author of the study, compares the discovery to finding dinosaur bones and then recreating the living beast. Knowing what to look for, she expects to find more massive explosions – possibly breaking the record. Putting the discovery in terms non-astronomers can understand:
New research suggests that early humans in Africa interbred with a ghost population that likely split from the ancestors of humans and Neanderthals between 360,000 and 1.02 million years ago.
Homo rhodesiensis is an example of an archaic human.
One of the more startling discoveries arising from genomic sequencing of ancient hominin DNA is the realization that all humans outside Africa have traces of DNA in their genomes that do not belong to our own species.
The approximately six billion people on Earth whose recent ancestry is not from Africa will have inherited between 1% and 2% of their genome from our closest but now extinct relatives:the Neanderthals. East Asians and Oceanians have also inherited a small amount of ancestry from the Denisovans, another close relative of Homo Sapiens.
Now a new study, published in Science Advances, suggests that early humans living inside Africa may also have interbred with archaic hominins. These are extinct species that are related to Homo sapiens.
The interbreeding outside Africa happened after our Homo sapiens ancestors expanded out of Africa into new environments. It was there they had sex with Neanderthals and the related Denisovans.
This led to new discoveries. Early genetic studies of people from across the globe had previously suggested that our current distribution was the result of a single expansion out of Africa around 100,000 years ago. But the identification of Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry in modern Eurasians complicated things.
We still think that most – anywhere between about 92% and 98.5% – of the ancestry in people not living in Africa today does indeed derive from the out-of-Africa expansion. But we now know the remainder came from archaic species whose ancestors left Africa hundreds of thousands of years before that.
What was happening inside Africa?
Insights into interbreeding have been driven by the much greater availability of modern and ancient genomes from outside of Africa. That’s because the cold and dry environments of Eurasia are much better at preserving DNA that the wet heat of tropical Africa.
But our understanding of the relationship between ancient human ancestors within Africa, and their connection with archaic humans, is beginning to deepen. A 2017 study of ancient DNA from southern Africa investigated 16 ancient genomes from people alive over the last 10,000 years. This showed that the history of African populations was complex. There wasn’t just a single group of humans around in Africa when they expanded out 100,000 years ago.
It’s a result that was supported earlier this year by a paper examining ancient DNA from four individuals from what is now Cameroon. Taken together, this research suggests there were geographically diverse groups in Africa well before the main expansion out of the continent. And many of these groups will have contributed to the ancestry of people alive in Africa today.
In addition, it now appears that there was potentially gene-flow into ancient African Homo sapiens populations from an archaic ancestor. One way in which this could happen is for people to expand out of Africa, have sex with Neanderthals, and then migrate back into Africa. Indeed, this has been demonstrated in one recent study.
The new paper provides evidence that there may also have been gene-flow into the ancestors of West Africans directly from a mysterious archaic hominin. The researchers compared Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA with that from four contemporary populations from West Africa. Using some elegant mathematics, they then built a statistical model to explain the relationships between the archaic hominins and modern Africans.
Interestingly, they suggest that 6%-7% of the genomes of West Africans is archaic in origin. But this archaic ancestry wasn’t Neanderthal or Denisovan. Their model suggested the additional ancestry came from an archaic population for which we don’t currently have a genome.
This ghost population likely split from the ancestors of humans and Neanderthals between 360,000 and 1.02 million years ago. That was well before the gene-flow event that brought Neanderthal DNA back into West Africa around 43,000 years ago – although the value of this could be anywhere between 0 and 124,000 years ago.
These dates position this ghost species as something akin to a Neanderthal, but that presumably was present within Africa, during the last 100,000 years. An alternative explanation is that the archaic hominin was present outside of Africa and interbred with populations there before they migrated back in.
Despite a raft of analyses that show that this result is not an artifact of either their methodology or some other genetic process, the authors are cautious about this result. They call for further analysis of both contemporary and ancient DNA from diverse populations in Africa.
Nevertheless, this research contributes to the ever-growing canon of research demonstrating the promiscuous, species-crossing and complicated behaviors of the ancestors of all of us.
Bottom line: New research suggests that early humans in Africa interbred with a ghost population that likely split from ancestors of humans and Neanderthals.
The United States made a “Secret Agreement” with the Gray Aliens for the Preservation of Humanity
The United States made a “Secret Agreement” with the Gray Aliens for the Preservation of Humanity
Many researchers endorse the theory that the United States government has signed a secret deal with Gray aliens. The exact date is unknown, but most researchers indicate that the deal was made in 1954. At that time, a team of (gray) aliens would reach Edwards Air Force Base, for the sole purpose of contacting the then U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower.
Former USAF and US Army officers have testified in the past that that pact was known as the Edwards Agreement or as Dr. Dan Burisch defines it as the IX-Tau Treaty (9 TAU) for the Preservation of the Humanity.
A common goal was established following the discussions of the Treaty. The agreement states that the United States government would let the Grays kidnap or withdraw people regularly with the promise that they would return to their homes unscathed, and with the knowledge that the kidnapped people would be erased from his memory, or the memory of the abductions.
But, as many abductees were able to confirm, the situation was slightly different. More often than not, those who were kidnapped by aliens would remember the accident in detail. In return for allowing the Grays to gain possession of human guinea pigs, the government does not have advanced knowledge and alien technology in its hands. Another clause in the contract ‘was the exchange of ambassadors from both sides. However, it is not clear how many have been involved in this exchange program, but the most renowned are the Etherians, the Crills, the Reptiles and the J-Rod Draco of the constellation Zeta Reticuli and finally the Grays of Tau Ceti.
The Edwards agreement was the culmination of a series of events that began in 1947, when the remains of an alien spacecraft were recovered near Roswell, New Mexico. Among the remains, several alien bodies have been found. This incident certainly sensitized the UFO phenomenon and certainly gave rise to modern ufology. In 1949, another accident took place in New Mexico, but this time there was a survivor among the recovered aliens. One of these called EBE, is the abbreviation for extraterrestrial biological entity.
In 1951, the Grays helped build a communications device for the United States and a year later, extraterrestrial communications were underway, paving the way for the 1954 treaty. On the night of February 20-21, 1954, in California, President Dwight Eisenhower had disappeared for a short period of time. He is believed to have gone secretly to Edwards Air Force Base for a meeting with the gray aliens. His official statement was that he had to undergo a dental emergency and then visit a local dentist.
While the meeting did not go as planned, there were some unexpected consequences. The landing was kept secret to see how people could react when faced with a technologically advanced alien race. The hundreds of soldiers present at Edwards AFB (ex Muroc base) during the first contact did not receive any briefings, no preparation before the demonstration.
This approach has become disastrous, since a high percentage of those present began to suffer from various psychological illnesses, ranging from dysfunctional behavior to psychosis, criminal intent and suicide. People who said they witnessed the alien interaction event including Gerald Light, a famous leader of the metaphysical community of the time, said that his participation was to measure the effect of this development. which could have on the general public, or the socio-cultural and psychological impact on the masses during a possible First Contact.
“Just returned from Muroc [Edwards Air Force Base] . Gerald declares – everything was incredibly true, devastating! During the two-day visit, I saw five different types of alien aircraft being studied and analyzed by our Air Force officials – with the assistance and permission of the humanoid alien race called Etherians! I have no words to express my reactions. Yes, it has finally happened. Now it’s a matter of history, Gerald Light wrote.
Other important figures were present at the meeting. Among them was Eisenhower’s chief and economic adviser, Dr. Edwin Nourse, who offered his experience in the potential economic outcome of a first contact with extraterrestrial intelligent life. Gerald Light also said that several trusted religious leaders had attended the meeting.
The leaders all presented their credentials, participating in two types of meetings with different groups of extraterrestrials. According to former naval intelligence officer William Cooper, large objects travel to Earth of which a huge spacecraft was seen in 1953. They were believed to be asteroids in the first place, but it was later determined that they were actually huge. spaceships. Two different missions, Sigma Project and Plato Project have been able to establish contact with aliens through binary code.
Cooper distinguishes between two alien races: the Nordics who are very kind to humanity, the Grays of Tau ceti, who had different goals with humans. According to him, the Nordic aliens contributed to the signing of a non-aggression treaty between humanity and the grays. The Nordics did not offer any technology, but rather the opportunity for the spiritual advancement of our present to the next dimension. The new treaty with the Nordics and the Grays stated that aliens are not always in our business, nor should they interfere with the human race. Their presence on Earth remained a secret. They could kidnap humans on a regular basis for medical and scientific purposes, as long as they were supposed to keep them safe from harm. The kidnapped humans were then returned to their kidnapping point, without any memory of the demonstration. None of the kidnapped have ever been treated badly or tortured.
Their main demands have been that humans must eliminate the arsenal of nuclear weapons. They recalled humanity’s self-destructive potential and also condemned the fact that we are killing each other, damaging the planet and wasting natural resources. The Committee interpreted the requests very suspiciously, in the belief that nuclear disarmament was not in the best interest of the United States, such as that which could have left the world defenseless against an alien threat. Eisenhower finally rejected the disarmament proposal.
Another witness to the meetings was John Lear, son of the creator of Lear Jet, William Lear. According to him, the Nordic aliens offered a hand to build a space defense against the threat of the Grays, but President Eisenhower refused this aid without explaining the reasons. There are many alien races in space, many of them are neutral, many races are available for dialogue and ready to help the human race, but hostile alien races also exist and not all grays are the same. There are various types of grays such as those of the Pleiadians Grays who are a sort of workers at the service of other breeds, therefore performers and that’s it. But then did this meeting really happen? If so, it would seem to confirm the current global UFO phenomenon and the subsequent confirmation by the Pentagon regarding the encounters with UFO TIC-TAC. However, more than 60 years have passed since the alleged First Contact took place, but his official statement is still missing.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Secret Space Antigravity Propulsion Technology That Could Get Us to Mars in Five Days
Secret Space Antigravity Propulsion Technology That Could Get Us to Mars in Five Days
Reveals antigravity propulsion which could get us to Mars in five days. A handful of cutting edge scientist have already produced results making use of the ether and the model of subquantum kinetics and they are struggling to bring forward the fruits of their labor.
Some of this has already been revealed by the works of Thomas Townsend Brown, Project Winterhaven and the Philadelphia Experiment.
This is where science is going and as this mans states he thinks the ancients have already been? Still want to question how the pyramids were built and whether or not they were using electricity. I think we have are answer. We need more people persuing this Theory. Marlow
Secret Space Antigravity Propulsion Technology That Could Get Us to Mars in Five Days
The blast is five times bigger than any other known explosion.
Evidence for the biggest explosion seen in the universe comes from a combination of X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Europe’s XMM-Newton space telescope, and the Murchison Widefield Array and Giant Metrewave Telescope, as shown here. The eruption is generated by a black hole located in the cluster's central galaxy, which has blasted out jets and carved a large cavity in the surrounding hot gas. Researchers estimate this explosion released five times more energy than the previous record holder and hundreds of thousands of times more than a typical galaxy cluster.
Astronomers have spotted a cosmic blast that dwarfs all others.
A gargantuan explosion tore through the heart of a distant galaxy cluster, releasing about five times more energy than the previous record holder, a new study reports.
"In some ways, this blast is similar to how the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 ripped off the top of the mountain," study lead author Simona Giacintucci, of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., said in a statement. "A key difference is that you could fit 15 Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster's hot gas."
The explosion occurred in the Ophiuchus cluster, which lies about 390 million light-years from Earth. Giacintucci and her colleagues think the source was a supermassive black hole in one of the cluster's constituent galaxies — specifically, jets of radiation and material spewing from the light-gobbling monster, which are powered by inflowing gas and dust.
The possibility of an incredibly powerful Ophiuchus explosion was first raised in 2016 in a study led by Norbert Werner, which examined images captured by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Werner and his colleagues reported a strangely curved edge in the cluster, which could be part of the wall of a cavity formed by a blast. And what a blast it would be: The scientists calculated that it would take about 5 times 10^54 joules of energy to create such a cavity. (For perspective, humanity's total global energy consumption each year is about 6 times 10^20 joules.)
But the 2016 study didn't establish that an explosion actually was responsible for that curved edge. Giacintucci and her colleagues just made that determination, after analyzing additional X-ray data from Chandra and Europe's XMM-Newton space telescope, as well as radio information gathered by the Murchison Widefield Array in Australia and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India.
The combined data show that the curved edge is indeed part of a cavity wall, because it borders an area rich in radio emission. That emission likely resulted when the black hole's outburst accelerated electrons to nearly the speed of light, the researchers said.
"The radio data fit inside the X-rays like a hand in a glove," study co-author Maxim Markevitch, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in the same statement. "This is the clincher that tells us an eruption of unprecedented size occurred here."
The energy released by the Ophiuchus blast is hundreds of thousands of times greater than explosions typically seen in galaxy clusters, the researchers said. And it's about five times higher than the previous record holder, an eruption in the cluster MS 0735.6+7421.
The Ophiuchus fireworks appear to be over, by the way; the radio data show no evidence for ongoing jet activity, the scientists said.
The Chandra data reveal just one region of radio emission. That's a bit odd, because black-hole jets usually go off in two different directions. It's possible that the jet-feeding gas on the other side — the one opposite the detected cavity — was less abundant and the radio emission there dissipated more quickly as a result, the researchers said.
The newly found bones were close to the site of the famous ‘flower burial’ in Shanidar Cave, which overturned notions of Neanderthals as brutish subhumans and suggested they buried their dead.
Can you see the flattened skull and neck bones in this rock? They are part of an incomplete Neanderthal skeleton – called Shanidar Z by scientists – newly discovered in famous Shanidar Cave. Shanidar Z’s skull is thought to have been flattened by the weight of overlying sediment.
One of the most significant archaeological sites of the 20th century is Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan. At this site, over 60 years ago, scientists unearthed the bones of 10 Neanderthalindividuals. It was a discovery that changed the way we look at this extinct hominid species. The Neanderthal individuals found at Shanidar Cave are thought to have died about 70,000 years ago and to have been deliberately buried there. Now archaeologists have discovered new, partial skeletal remains of an additional Neanderthal individual at Shanidar Cave. The first new bone, a rib, was unearthed in 2016, followed by a lumbar vertebrate and a right hand that was still clenched after thousands of years. In 2018 and 2019, more bones were extracted from the ground. A skull, flattened by the weight of sediment above it, was carefully removed. Beneath the head was a left hand. They also found upper body bones, down to the waist.
These findings were reported in the February 2020 issue of the journal Antiquity.
So much research on how Neanderthals treated their dead has to involve returning to finds from 60 or even 100 years ago, when archaeological techniques were more limited. And that only ever gets you so far.
To have primary evidence of such quality from this famous Neanderthal site will allow us to use modern technologies to explore everything from ancient DNA to long-held questions about Neanderthal ways of death, and whether they were similar to our own.
Anthropologist Emma Pomeroy working at the Shanidar Cave excavation site.
The original Shanidar Cave Neanderthals – recovered between 1951 and 1960 by a team led by Ralph Solecki – challenged conventional ideas of Neanderthals as primitive brutish subhumans. One of the Neanderthals showed signs of disabling injuries, indicating that others had cared for him. Another showed a rib puncture wound, suggesting he met a violent end. And in the sediment around one individual, researchers found clumps of pollen, leading to speculation of a burial adorned with flowers.
In 2011, Graeme Barker, also of Cambridge University, was invited by the Kurdistan Regional Government to conduct further excavations at Shanidar Cave. The original plan was to collect soil samples at the spot where the original bones were found and use the latest analysis techniques, not available 60 years ago, to figure out the age of the remains, as well as the climate and ecology of the Shanidar Neanderthals’ world.
Work that began in 2014 had to be suspended because of nearby ISIS activity, but the archaeologists were able to safely resume excavations in 2015. Barker said:
We thought with luck we’d be able to find the locations where they had found Neanderthals in the 1950s, to see if we could date the surrounding sediments. We didn’t expect to find any Neanderthal bones.
Shanidar Z’s left hand being uncovered in Shanidar Cave.
Pomeroy described the newly found bones as “heartbreakingly soft,” while Baker said they had the consistency of a wet biscuit. The archaeologists worked painstakingly to scrape away sediment around the bone, sometimes using bamboo kebab sticks. Before sections containing bone were removed and wrapped in foil, the bone was brushed with a glue-like consolidant to harden it. In an article by the University of Cambridge, Baker said:
Emma’s got an eye for where the various protuberances of bone are likely to be. It took her weeks of intense concentration working in what is pretty much a sauna in terms of heat and humidity.
Shanidar Z’s spinal column in a block of sediment, right after it was removed from the ground.
Researchers have not yet been able to determine the sex of this individual. The condition of its teeth suggest a middle- or older-aged adult. And since the scientists are not yet sure if this is a completely new individual, or the missing parts of an incomplete skeleton collected by Solecki’s team over 60 years ago, they called these remains Shanidar Z.
An intriguing question, posed when the Shanidar Cave Neanderthals were first discovered: was the cave a burial site? Speculation about Neanderthals laying flowers on graves, based on the presence of pollen clumps in the sediment, is still controversial. But the researchers now think there is compelling evidence that Shanidar Cave was used to inter the dead. That some bones were found articulated – still attached – suggests bodies were not left in the open where scavengers could get to them. Baker also commented on supporting evidence seen in the site’s geological features:
The new excavation suggests that some of these bodies were laid in a channel in the cave floor created by water, which had then been intentionally dug to make it deeper. There is strong early evidence that Shanidar Z was deliberately buried.
Graeme Barker at the Shanidar Cave excavation site, holding a soil block that will undergo microscopic analysis at Cambridge University.
Bones uncovered by Solecki in the 1950s were found in different layers. And during the new excavation, the archaeologists found a rock that may have served as a marker for the burial site. Pomeroy said:
We have Neanderthals at different levels, as well as this cluster of bodies next to a very large rock, perhaps some kind of marker. Not only are they returning to the same cave, but they appear to be putting bodies in the same spot.
While it’s common across human cultures to have places in the landscape earmarked for the dead, maybe we are seeing traces of this behavior in a different species.
Archaeologists working at the site in Shanidar Cave where Neanderthals were found in the mid-20th century by Ralph Solecki.
In recent decades, scientists have learned that Neanderthals and humans once interbred. Much of this evidence comes from DNA found in Neanderthal remains from northern sites, where colder climates helped preserve DNA. Little is known about Neanderthal-human interbreeding in southwest Asia, where Iraq is located, as modern humans radiated out of Africa. Shanidar Z may provide some answers. CT scans of the fossils show there’s a petrous bone, a pyramid-shaped bone at the base of the skull. It’s one of the densest bones in the body, and if there’s any hope of DNA being preserved in the hot dry conditions of Iraqi Kurdistan, that bone is their bet bet.
We still don’t understand why Neanderthals went extinct. Some scientists think they were outcompeted for resources by modern humans. Others have suggested that they could not adapt to a changing climate. Shell fragments from snails and bone shards from mice in the sediment around the bones could provide some clues. Barker explained:
Small animals are particularly sensitive to climate change. Greenland ice cores give us a general global picture, but these tiny bones can tell us about changing climates in Kurdistan at the time when Neanderthals were roaming its mountains.
The new Neanderthal bones are currently on loan to Cambridge University for conservation and further study. Pomeroy reflected on our current knowledge of Neanderthals:
In recent years we have seen increasing evidence that Neanderthals were more sophisticated than previously thought, from cave markings to use of decorative shells and raptor talons.
If Neanderthals were using Shanidar Cave as a site of memory for the repeated ritual interment of their dead, it would suggest cultural complexity of a high order.
The entrance to Shanidar Cave, at the foothills of the Baradost Mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Bottom line: Archaeologists have found new Neanderthal remains at a famous possible burial site in what’s now Iraqi Kurdistan. The site – Shanidar Cave – became famous in the mid-20th century for the discovery of bones belonging to 10 individual Neanderthals. Preliminary findings indicate that the Shanidar Cave Neanderthals died about 70,000 years ago and that they were deliberately buried there.
Late in the day on Thursday, astronomers released this new image of 2020 CD3, a small object now confirmed to be orbiting Earth temporarily. It was apparently captured into Earth orbit 3 years ago. Its fate, here.
Earth’s new mini-moon – officially labeled 2020 CD3 – is the point source in the center of this February 24, 2020, image, obtained with the 8-meter Gemini North telescope in Hawaii. The image combines 3 images each obtained using different filters to produce this color composite. 2020 CD3 remains stationary in the image since it was being tracked by the telescope. The colored streaks are background stars.
Image via international Gemini Observatory/ NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory/ AURA/ G. Fedorets.
Astronomers have released the new image above of 2020 CD3, the new “temporary captured object” announced by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center (MPC) on February 25, 2020. This tiny object was apparently captured into Earth orbit three years ago. Now that more astronomers are trying to catch sight of it, they’ve released a new image and they’ve determined its fate.
µJohn Blakeslee, Head of Science at the international Gemini Observatory, commented:
Obtaining the images [see above] was a scramble for the Gemini team because the object is quickly becoming fainter as it moves away from Earth. It is expected to be ejected from Earth’s orbit altogether in April.
In what’s called a Minor Planet Electronic Circular – or MPEC, on February 25 – astronomers said that multiple observations had confirmed:
… this object is temporarily bound to the Earth … no link to a known artificial object has been found. Further observations and dynamical studies are strongly encouraged.
2020 CD3 was discovered on February 15 by astronomers at the Catalina Sky Survey, based in Tucson, Arizona. More than 30 observations were made of the object by February 17, according to asteroid- and comet-hunter Kacper Wierzchos, one of its discoverers along with astronomer Theodore Pruyne. Those observations were needed to refine an orbit for the object, and to confirm it does appear to be orbiting Earth.
What we know about the object so far is that it is orbiting Earth, and that it is very small and faint. Sunlight reflected from it helps provide an estimate of its diameter. The estimate is about 6 to 12 feet (1.9-3.5 meters) at this time, but that could easily change. Still … it’s small! It’s amazing astronomers can identify something so small orbiting Earth.
If it is natural in origin – a captured asteroid – then it is only the second known rocky satellite of the Earth ever discovered in space other than Earth’s large natural moon. The other body, discovered in 2006, has since been ejected out of Earth orbit.
Much of the information we have at this time about the object comes from Wierzchos, who is actively tweeting about it; you’ll find him at @WierzchosKacper. The following tweets are from February 25. Apparently, these astronomers were holding off a bit in speaking openly about the object until the MPEC was published, but now they are telling what they know. Expect more info as the days pass!
Kacper Wierzchos@WierzchosKacper
BIG NEWS (thread 1/3). Earth has a new temporarily captured object/Possible mini-moon called 2020 CD3. On the night of Feb. 15, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Teddy Pruyne and I found a 20th magnitude object. Here are the discovery images.
(2/3) The object has just been announced by the MPC and its orbit shows that it entered Earth's orbit some three years ago. Here is a diagram of the orbit created with the orbit simulator written by Tony Dunn:
(3/3) The object has a diameter between 1.9 - 3.5 m assuming a C-type asteroid albedo. But it's a big deal as out of ~ 1 million known asteroids, this is just the second asteroid known to orbit Earth (after 2006 RH120, which was also discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey).
Bottom line: Earth apparently has a new natural satellite – albeit a temporary one – captured into orbit around our planet three years ago. The object has been designated 2020 CD3.
Scientists have reported the discovery of “the first protein from an extraterrestrial source,” marking the only time that this important component of life has ever been found in a meteorite.
Tiny traces of a novel protein called “hemolithin” were detected inside the meteorite Acfer 086, according to a study recently published on the preprint archive arXiv and spotted by Futurism. The find could have big implications for understanding the origins of life on Earth or elsewhere in the universe, though it must be corroborated by other researchers first.
“At this point, we need other scientists to employ our careful methods to repeat our results,” said study co-author Julie McGeoch, a molecular biologist at Harvard University, in an email. McGeoch’s team has submitted the study to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, but it has not yet been peer-reviewed.
Though other teams will need to confirm the results, it’s worth noting that the new detection of a “meteoritic protein,” as it is described in the study, is the culmination of more than a decade of research.
In 2007, McGeoch and her frequent collaborator Malcolm McGeoch, who is CEO of a company called PLEX that supplies the semiconductor industry, were studying interactions between water and proteins. The experiments got McGeoch thinking about possible water-protein reactions that might have occurred inside the interstellar clouds that eventually coalesced into our solar system.
These early chemical reactions and presolar ingredients are essential clues about how Earth came to host life, and how common habitable conditions might be in other star systems. Meteorites, which are space rocks that land on Earth, are godsends for scientists studying these problems because they are time capsules that often date back to the infant solar system.
Meteorites have been known to contain amino acids, organic compounds that make up proteins, for decades. But to figure out whether meteorites can contain full proteins, as opposed to just amino acids, McGeoch’s team needed to isolate potential proteins from samples, analyze their chemical makeup, and characterize their molecular structure.
This required access to “the very best mass spectrometry,” McGeoch said, which was provided by the company Bruker. With that data, the team was able to characterize a protein they call hemolithin in the Acfer 086 meteorite, which was found in Algeria in 1990.
To make sure that the protein wasn’t simply contamination from an earthly source, the researchers calculated its deuterium/hydrogen (D/H) ratio, which is a value that contextualizes the origins of materials. The results revealed “very high extraterrestrial D/H ratios,” according to the study, suggesting that the protein was formed in the proto-solar disc or perhaps even earlier, in interstellar molecular clouds that existed long before the Sun’s birth.
Given that some meteorites contain stardust grains that are older than our solar system, it is not outlandish to imagine that they could also preserve proteins that date back billions of years. Hemolithin is a particularly intriguing example because it might be able to split water into its constituent oxygen and hydrogen parts, which is a process that played a major role in the development of life on Earth.
Hemolithin’s water-splitting behavior “is only speculation at this point,” McGeoch noted. “If true, this could be a chemical energy source, which is the most important ingredient for a biochemical process leading on to life.”
To that end, McGeoch and her colleagues plan to continue testing hemolithin’s properties, while also trying to pin down the protein’s exact crystal structure. Those lines of research, combined with any confirmed detections of meteoritic proteins by other teams, will shed light on the extraordinary conditions that led to life on Earth.
Looking at sightings reports, it seems people have encounters with UFOs all of the time, and sometimes they even see occupants of these mysterious craft. Yet rising above even this weirdness are those cases in which individuals have claimed to have actually communicated wit and even literally sat down and had a chat with these enigmatic entities. What did they have to say? Well, here we will look at a few of the more bizarre cases of people claiming to have talked with alien beings, and they are really quite outlandish to say te least.
A few surreally bizarre cases come to us from the 1950s, and one of the more colorful and memorably absurd accounts comes from someone who is actually probably what one would consider to be the most traditionally reliable witness on this whole list. In 1954, we have the very curious encounter of an Air Marshal Sir Peter Horsley, who had quite a long, illustrious military career and who would eventually be the deputy commander-in-chief of RAF Strike Command, of the United Kingdom. Horsely would write in his autobiography Sounds From Another Room, which actually talks a lot about UFOs and also tells of a bizarre chance encounter he had one day in a London waiting room while waiting to meet with a Mrs. Markham. As he sat there, Horsley says that he met the acquaintance of a man calling himself “Mr. Janus,” and who was partially obscured by shadows at another end of the room. This Mr. Janus seemed to be very interested in Horsely’s knowledge of UFOs, and he would write:
Mr. Janus dived straight into the deep end by asking me to tell him all I knew about UFOs. He listened patiently… At the end I thought I might be equally as direct and asked Janus what his interest was? He answered me a quite simply, ‘I would like to meet the Duke of Edinburgh.’
Sir Peter Horsley
OK, then. Weird for sure, but it would get weirder when he began talking about humankind’s desire to reach the stars and ow their technology was bringing them closer to this goal. He said since humans were moving along so rapidly, we were bound to discover the true mysteries of the universe awaiting us, saying:
Just as tribes found other tribes and Christopher Columbus discovered on his travels unknown centers of ancient civilizations so Man in his journeys through the universe may find innumerable centers of culture far more ancient than his own…He will discover a wealth of experiences infinitely more startling and beautiful than can be imagined: and infinite variety of agencies and forces as yet unknown: great fields of gravity and anti-gravity where objects are accelerated across space like giant sling shots, even other universes with different space and time formula. Why does Man reach for the stars? His energies have never been solely directed towards material benefits alone. From the beginning of Man’s history he has striven… towards a spirituality and grace of which he was aware but could not fully comprehend.
However, he also warned that humanity was in a sort of “Dark Age,” and that if we continued in our ways we would never live to see that achievement fulfilled. Mr. Janus would apparently say, “In his greedy quest for more complex machines Man is prepared to sacrifice almost anything – his natural environment, animals and even his fellow humans. The dreadful specter of blowing up his world hardly makes him falter in this headlong rush,” and it all seemed quite dire. Mr. Janus also complained about mankind’s nuclear weapons, and through it all he apparently displayed an incredibly deep knowledge of the military. Horsely seemed to think that he had actually met a real alien in that waiting room, and would credit his rise through the ranks to this chance encounter.
Another off-the-wall case is the story of Italian mechanic Luciano Galli. On July 7, 1957, Galli was allegedly on his way back to his small, humble workshop on his lunch break when he was approached by an enigmatic stranger in the streets, who had “piercing eyes” and asked if the business man remembered him. Galli realized that he did indeed recognize the man, recalling seeing him several times around town staring at him only to melt away. The man, who was described as “a rather tall gentleman of the dark type, with regular features and very dark eyes,” spoke perfect Italian, and invited Galli to take a ride with him in his fancy black Fiat 1100. Someone apparently never gave Galli the memo to not just go off getting into the cars of strangers they’ve just met on the street, and he accepted.
Fiat 1100
They then rode in silence in the car, where Galli claims he felt remarkably calm, until they came to an isolated place called the Croara ridge, where Galli claimed a large saucer-shaped UFO was hovering. Galli was invited aboard, and presumably figuring why not, he accepted and walked up into the craft via a metallic cylinder that descended down from it. He was then taken to a “pilot’s cabin,” which was described as “spacious” and filled with flashing lights and myriad instrument panels, and told to sit on a seat that was firmly bolted to the floor. He then noticed that a good portion of the floor was actually a window looking down, and he could see that they were rising rapidly through the atmosphere, until he could actually see the earth shrinking into the distance. Galli himself would say of this all in an interview with Italian journalist Renato Albanese:
The pilot’s cabin was spacious and round with a lot of instruments around, panels with many lights. There were also hatches, and the seats were fixed somehow to the floor. In the middle of the floor was a kind of circular window, about one meter wide. Through it we could see the earth fall away from us. First the earth looked like from one of our own planes, then – when we were already in the dark zone – it looked like the moon and later like Venus or Mars.
It only gets weirder from there. Galli would claim that they approached an immense, cigar-shaped “mothership,” reminiscent of a blimp, which dwarfed the craft they were on, and as they approached he could see hundreds of people walking about in the hangars dressed in some sort of shiny one-piece outfits. They would actually board this mothership, where Galli learned that they had come from the planet Venus, and he was shown through a massive hall to the commander’s area. After this tour was finished, he was once again asked to board the smaller craft and was taken back to where they had started, where he saw that the whole thing had lasted approximately 3 hours and 10 minutes. Galli would swear an oath that all of this was true, insisting that he was not making it up, and whether it is true of not it is still a more interesting lunch break than most people have.
We seem to have had a lot of visitors from Venus in the 1950s, because that very same year there was another rather far-out account, this time from a journalist named Hubert Lewis. He claims that he was out cycling in the countryside of Church Stretton, in Shropshire, England when he came across a metallic disc floating not far away and a very tall, human looking being approaching him. The stranger told Lewis not to be afraid, and the two began to chat for around a half an hour while that mysterious craft hovered in the background. The being told him during this conversation that he was from Venus, and that there were many of his kind living on Earth among humans, and after their talk this stranger got into the disc to shoot off into the sky. In the days after, Lewis claimed that he had been approached by mysterious military personnel who told him to forget about what had happened and to not tell anyone. It is an interesting account, given that Church Stretton is considered to be a UFO hotspot.
Coming along into the 60s, we have the insane story of German businessman Ludwig Pallman. His weird tale begins in 1966, when he was in the jungles of Peru looking for medicinal plants, operating in a very remote area south of the Colombian River port of Leticia on the Amazon River. It was here in this mosquito choked untamed wilderness that he claims to have been brought to an area that was unexplored even by the native peoples, who told him that there were savages that lived in that jungle, as well as a mysterious group of white men. This was very intriguing to Pallman, and although his native guides refused to travel further up the river, he continued on alone, thus entering a new chapter of oddness.
He soon came across the “savages” he had been told about, but rather than attack him as he had been led to believe, they instead took him to their village. Here he found some very strange dwellings, reminiscent of upside down cones and made of an unusual smooth plastic-like material. Pallman then saw that among the Natives were others who were very white looking and wearing clothing that resembled togas. Thinking they might be Americans Pallman tried speaking English to them but they showed no comprehension of what he was saying, and he got the same response when he tried Spanish and German. One of the light-skinned strangers then produced a small device and handed it to Pallman. It turned out to be some sort of translator device, and with it he could understand what they had to say, and what they had to say was bonkers.
They allegedly explained that they were from the planet Itibi, and were here to cultivate and experiment with earth plants in order to cross breed with those of their home world to create hardier species. According to them, this site was sort of like a plantation, and they hoped to take some samples for mass production on their own planet. Pallman explains that he lived with these aliens for a whole month, during which time he learned that these aliens had been living on earth since 1946, moving there when they had heard of the planet from another alien race, and that they had other such plantations as well. He also apparently saw them using disc-shaped shuttle craft to come and go. He claims that they also gifted him a ring that would glow when their kind was present. Eventually he left to head back to civilization, sadly with no evidence whatsoever other than his wild tale.
We have the weird tale of Walter Rizzi, of Bolzano, Italy just a few years later. In 1968 he says that he stopped his car after a long drive to take a nap, but would wake to the startling sight of a UFO hovering nearby and some humanoid beings approaching his car, described as being smaller than a human being, with grey skin, round hairless heads and slanted eyes. These entities communicated with him telepathically, and told him that they were there to collect samples of various species of Earth plant life, as well as tracking the evolutionary progress of the planet. They also explained that they could not stay on Earth for too long, because our planet made them somehow age faster, and oh yeah, that we were going to all die in the near future because of a cataclysmic polar shift that would cause extinction level climatic catastrophes. Was any of this real? Who knows?
There are certainly other cases of people claiming to have had communications with actual alien beings, and this is by no means a comprehensive listing of them, just some of the more curious that I have found. Were any of these beings real, and if so what did they want? Why did they choose to reveal themselves in such strange ways? Are these aliens, interdimensional travelers, or just the ravings of the imagination? Whatever the case may be, they are certainly entertaining at the very least.
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Why Are More People Seeing UFOs?
Why Are More People Seeing UFOs?
Why Are More People Seeing UFOs?
In recent times we have seen more UFO sightings reported around the world. This is becoming a very serious issue for all of us in terms of the impact this phenomenon has on our future plans and technologies. No one wants to see events that will cause the world to end, so it is imperative that we take a look at what is happening in this sector of the world.
For instance, many people believe that people have been seeing these things for decades, but no one has seen anything until now. If you do the math, it only takes about one minute per day in this world to have many sightings. The best proof of the fact that UFO sightings are actually happening is when thousands of people report something.
There are many recent and modern day incidents that have all occurred close to the same point. Many people believe that this happens because they are being broadcast via satellites to the people in space. These people claim that they are able to see the different UFO’s that appear in the sky and feel as if they are watching someone else in the control of an aircraft or spacecraft.
While there are those who believe that there are UFOs that are landing, they don’t know what they are yet, since the system hasn’t been released. Perhaps the best piece of evidence for this is when there are people who claim to be in contact with aliens and are able to communicate. Of course, this would be difficult if these visitors were still in the primitive stages of construction, as they would need to communicate somehow using telepathy and other means.
There are many other witnesses that have reported strange lights that look like stars in the sky that have been out for hours and did not leave. There are also witnesses who claim to have seen vehicles that they can’t explain in many cases. These individuals also claim that they have been on several different flights and haven’t seen anything yet.
All of these UFO sightings are being coordinated by the extraterrestrial groups and are proof that there is something out there and humans are participating in it. They may not be aware of what they are doing, but there is some type of intelligence that is involved and they are calling for help. So far, there is no evidence of communication between the alien groups and humans, but this is just another discussion for another time.
At the moment, we need to get more information that will lead us to where the truth is, on the UFO topic. Many of these witnesses are already in on the mystery behind what is happening and there are many that have never even seen a UFO. We have to start asking the right questions that will lead us to the truth.
Once this comes out, then we will know for sure if they really have landed, are they piloting them or are they using them for some other purpose. It doesn’t matter what the answers are, it is important that we at least find out what is going on and learn from it. Hopefully, we all learn from this and our civilization progresses further.
Linda Moulton Howe: Antarctica Incredible Secret Discoveries Beneath The Ice
Linda Moulton Howe: Antarctica Incredible Secret Discoveries Beneath The Ice
Most of Antarctica has been covered with vast layers of ice ranging from 1 to 3 miles deep. And yet, military whistleblowers tell Linda they have been on missions to investigate vast acres of ancient, alien archaeology beneath the thick Antarctic ice.
Are the structures older than 33 million years? How were they built? And who exactly built them? Presented by Linda Moulton Howe at Contact in the Desert Annual Conference.
Linda Moulton Howe: Antarctica Incredible Secret Discoveries Beneath The Ice. What do you think? Let us know in the comments section.
A cigar-shaped UFO, which is similar to several ones seen across the US in 2019, has been observed over Florida.
The clip was taken in a hotel in the city of Kissimmee on February 10.
It shows a bright white object flying into the clouds, having a resemblance to another UFO spotted back in October 2019.
It seems to flash at one point and then disappear moments later.
The video was shared by u/vinker1 to Reddit, revealing that his daughter took the video.
Viewers offer a variety of suggestions in the comment section.
Some believed the extraterrestrial theory, saying the UFO was a grey spaceship.
Others thought it could be a rocket launch, but experts dismissed it as there should have been cloud plumes nearby.
Another touted explanation was that it could be a Mylar weather balloon, and the flashing could be the sun reflecting off the metal structure.
Similar UFOs were reported across eight states in the US in 2019, with a range of explanations from military craft to space alien technology.
Back in October last year, a video showing what seems a USAF hybrid air, land, and sea craft had made the rounds online. It came after another set of lights was seen hovering over Arizona, in what conspiracy theorists believed the Space Force training.
The magnetic field in one zone on Mars is about 10 times stronger than scientists expected, and it's changing rapidly.
New data gathered from NASA's InSight lander, which has been on the Red Planet for a little over a year now, shows that the planet's magnetic field fluctuates rapidly. InSight is the first landing mission to carry a magnetic sensor, which allows it to measure these fields from up close.
"The ground-level data give us a much more sensitive picture of magnetization over smaller areas, and where it's coming from," lead author Catherine Johnson, a professor at the University of British Columbia and senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, said in a statement. "In addition to showing that the magnetic field at the landing site was ten times stronger than the satellites anticipated, the data implied it was coming from nearby sources."
InSight is designed to collect data that helps scientists to reveal more about how rocky planets form by looking at the planet’s interior. Before the lander touched down in November 2018, magnetic fields were measured by satellite and often averaged a distance from the epicenter that was more than 90 miles across.
Billions of years ago, Mars used to have a global magnetic field, but it shut down for reasons that are still unknown, about 4 billion years ago, leaving the atmosphere unshielded to radiation and causing it to bleed over time into space. Any residual fields are likely coming from older rocks buried several feet or miles underneath the planet's surface, these new results from InSight suggest. The team plans to continue to study Mars using InSight to better identify what different types of rocks there are and where they are.
These observations from InSight also showed that the sun influences the Martian magnetic field. The sun sends out charged particles across the solar system in a phenomenon known as the solar wind. These particles carry an interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) that can cause fluctuations in the local magnetic field when it hits the Martian atmosphere. That's because Mars, unlike Earth, has no global magnetic field to act as a buffer against these solar storms.
There is also some strange data that InSight has collected, revealing things like fluctuations in the magnetic field around midnight, which are likely related to how the solar wind and IMF move around Mars, inducing electrical currents and magnetic fields on the planet. Future observations will help to inform researchers exactly why this is happening, with InSight providing data from the surface at the same time that NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) examines the atmosphere above the landing site.
"Because all of our previous observations of Mars have been from the top of its atmosphere or even higher altitudes, we didn't know whether disturbances in solar wind would propagate to the surface," said Johnson. "That's an important thing to understand for future astronaut missions to Mars."
50 years ago, scientists were studying why the sun’s corona is so hot
50 years ago, scientists were studying why the sun’s corona is so hot
There’s still a lot we don’t know about why the corona reaches extreme temperatures
Astronomers on the U.S. East Coast used the 1970 solar eclipse (shown) as a chance to learn more about the sun’s superhot corona, which becomes visible when the moon blocks the most of the light from the sun.
An accommodating sun, Science News, February 28, 1970 –
This year’s eclipse [offers] an important opportunity for observation…. The temperature of the main body of the sun is about 6,000° Celsius, but the temperature in the corona goes up to millions of degrees. Some observers will seek to determine … the nature of the heating mechanism and the possible role of magnetic fields in keeping hot regions separated from cool ones.
Update
We still don’t know how the corona, the sun’s outer atmosphere, reaches such extreme temperatures. Theories suggest the sun’s magnetic field somehow shifts solar energy to the corona, more than 2,000 kilometers above the sun’s surface. Plasma tendrils erupting from near the sun’s surface might transfer energy to the corona in conjunction with magnetic field realignments (SN: 12/7/19, p. 14).
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, launched in 2018, will measure the magnetic field from within 6 million kilometers of the sun’s surface (SN: 7/21/18, p. 12). Until then, a detailed infrared image of the corona taken during the 2017 solar eclipse could shed more light on the magnetic field.
Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing have started analyzing data collected by the country’s Yutu-2 Moon rover’s ground-penetrating radar. The instrument peered 40 meters (131 feet) below the lunar surface — and found it was sitting on top of a mountain of fine dust.
China’s Chang’e 4 lander touched down on the far side of the Moon in January 2019, becoming the first man-made object to do so. Shortly after, it deployed the rover Yutu-2 from its belly. The rover has been exploring the South Pole-Aitken basin, the largest and oldest crater on the Moon, ever since.
Using high-frequency radar to look beneath the surface, it found that it was sitting on top of 12 meters (39 feet) of fine Moon dust, as detailed in a paper published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.
“That’s a lot of regolith,” David Kring, senior scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston who was not involved in the research, told The New York Times. “That’s food for thought.”
The fine particles were likely the result of many small meteorite collisions and a ton of solar radiation, as New Scientist reports.
Below the dust, between 12 and 24 meters (39 and 79 feet), the rover spotted larger rocks, likely what’s left of larger asteroid and meteorite impacts. Further below that, the rover detected alternating layers of fine and coarser soil.
Most noteworthy is the striking difference between the new readings and the ones taken at Chang’e 4’s landing site, where measurements suggested it landed on top of a dense lava layer buried below the surface, the remains of a volcanic event.
“The subsurface structure at the Chang’e 4 landing site is more complex, and suggests a totally different geological context,” Yan Su, co-author from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told New Scientist.
Nasa films mystery UFO following the International Space Station for 20 minutes
Nasa films mystery UFO following the International Space Station for 20 minutes
Jeff Parsons
The strange ‘cone-shaped’ UFO following the ISS
(YouTube/ET Data Base)
Cameras on board the International Space Station (ISS) have picked up a strange, cone-shaped object in orbit around Earth.
The unexplained object seemingly keeps pace with the space station as the cameras remain locked on it for over 20 minutes.
Naturally, the footage has been picked up and circulated around parts of the internet dedicated to discussing alien technology. Fanning the conspiracy flames even further, the camera zooms in on the object at one point suggesting that Nasa is aware of its presence.
For the bus-sized object to keep pace with the ISS, it would need to be travelling at around 7.8 kilometers-per-second.
The footage was picked up and shared on a YouTube channel called ET Data Base hosted by noted UFO-watcher Scott C. Waring
‘That is NASA zooming in on the UFO, not me,’ Waring notes of the footage. ‘They are as baffled by it as I am. They don’t know what it is or why it is there.’
While it’s highly unlikely to be evidence of any kind of alien encounter, the idea of it being military technology isn’t that far fetched.
The US Air Force has a small, autonomous plane called X-37B that conducts intelligence operations from orbit. Built by Boeing and flown remotely, the craft – also known as Orbital Test Vehicle – is on a mission the U.S. will only describe as ‘classified’.
It is able to stay aloft for months at a time and comes down infrequently for servicing.
Personnel in self-contained atmospheric protective ensemble suits conduct initial checks on the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle
(Reuters)
In Britain, the RAF took the decision to wind up its UFO unit in 2009, after concluding that in more than 50 years, no received report had ever disclosed any evidence of a potential threat.
Nothing scares the powers that be who create the power that’s being consumed by everyone more than free power for all. Well, if you’re one of those powers, get ready for the non-electrical shock of your life … engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have invented a generator that runs on air. Air is still free … right? Better start filling up some balloons, just in case.
“It’s the most amazing and exciting application of protein nanowires yet.”
Who knew there were ANY applications for protein nanowires? This is truly a ‘making something from almost nothing’ story from the very beginning. As described in an article in the journal Nature, electrical engineer Jun Yao and microbiologist Derek Lovely were actually working on something else two years ago when a graduate student working with protein nanowires in their lab noticed that nanometer-width rod-shaped proteins called Geobacter sulfurreducens (created by the bacteria Geobacter) seemed to be emitting electrical current without being connected to a power source. These Geobacter sulfurreducens had a truly humble beginning – they were first isolated in Norman, Oklahoma, from materials found around the surface of a contaminated ditch.
After further experimentation, Yao and Lovely determined that the nanowires were pulling moisture from the air and pushing it through a film of nanowires pressed between two electrodes. That push varied the amount of electrical charge in the film, which generated a charge that the electrodes picked up. The team found that between 40-50 percent relative humidity is ideal for the nanowire generators, but they can produce detectable voltages between 20-100 percent relative humidity (even the Sahara Desert falls in that range). According to their summary in Device & Materials Engineering, one pair of electrodes generates .5 volts and a string of five puts out 2.5 volts. Would that scale hold true if thousands or even millions were chained together?
Yes … provided that could find sufficient amounts of Geobacter sulfurreducens nanowires. There aren’t enough contaminated ditches in Norman, so Lovely is leading separate research to use E. coli for something good for a change – growing protein nanowires. So far, the E. coli nanowires are as conductive as those produced with G. sulfurreducens. With E. coli everywhere, how far are we from giant air-sucking generators?
“The ultimate goal is to make large-scale systems. For example, the technology might be incorporated into wall paint that could help power your home. Or, we may develop stand-alone air-powered generators that supply electricity off the grid. Once we get to an industrial scale for wire production, I fully expect that we can make large systems that will make a major contribution to sustainable energy production.”
Lovely predicts this will happen soon. The team is so confident, they’ve already named the environmentally-friendly nanowire device “Air-gen.” All they need now is funding for the development, funding for the marketing and funding for the inevitable lawsuits by the conventional non-renewable energy power companies.
Did the whale oil makers sue when oil was discovered? Probably.
It hasn’t been six months since the fiasco that was Storm Area 51 – even if you personally enjoyed the music portion of what was originally (albeit satirically, at least in its initial form) supposed to be a mass human mob crashing the gates of the secret base in numbers that the military could not deal with nor exterminate without raising some suspicions. The movement’s mission was to free captive aliens, but there didn’t seem to be much of a plan as to what to do after getting past the first gate/fence – the only person to actually “storm” was a 60-year-old woman who was arrested, charged with trespassing and released. Well, stormers, you now have some secret entrances to target for your next gate-crashing. Who’s bringing the alien beer this time?
Google Earth (Area 51 Facility) Coordinates: • 37°14′0″N 115°48′30″W
Those coordinates come from Google Earth by way of the YouTube site FindingUFO, which didn’t find any UFOs but did locate three suspicious spots that appear to be secret tunnel openings near the main grounds of Area 51. However, it didn’t just post and run – the folks at FindingUFO did some serious digging and located previous satellite images of the three mysterious sets of openings and put together a reverse time-lapse video showing their evolution from today back to 1998. (Watch it here.)
“Yep, there are a lot of those underground hangers or storage bunkers out there around Area 51 and S4. The cover story is that they are openings to large industrial mines.”
Uploaded on February 21, the video, entitled “Hidden Underground Area 51 Base Entrances Discovered in Mountains (Google Earth),” immediately generated comments ranging from the subterranean to the ridiculous. It seems reasonable to suggest that this former mining area could still have open entrances which would save the government the trouble of digging more tunnels for … what? Nuclear waste storage (one suggestion) doesn’t make sense in an area so close to large manned facilities.
An “underground transport network” is an interesting idea, considering there are vehicles parked around the openings. Quick escape routes in case of some catastrophe in the secret hangars or labs? If that’s the case, these would be more recent projects, not repurposed mines. And wouldn’t the openings be much larger to possibly handle experimental aircraft? The apparent size of the openings suggests they’re not for large-scale escapes or secret launches either.
Could these tunnels be used for another Storm Area 51 event … assuming the masses get past the main gate? (BTW — we’re not promoting a storming, just asking questions.) The photos don’t seem to show any external protection or guards, but anyone with imagination or cable TV knows that they’d probably encounter massive doors of super-strong metals and security systems that locksmiths, dynamite or AI-generated fake IDs wouldn’t likely allow them past.
So, not good openings for storming, but definitely good openings for discussions on what else they might be … not to mention more searches of Area 51 with Google Earth. Which leads to the obvious question … if the lace is so secret, why let Google Earth satellites take pictures of it?
Begin “it’s a decoy to lure eyes away from Site S4” discussion here. Paging Bob Lazar. And thanks again to FindingUFO.
In November of 2004, the U.S. Navy USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was on combat training maneuvers in the Pacific Ocean, just about 100 miles off the coast of San Diego, California, in order to prepare for upcoming deployment to the Persian Gulf. This was not unusual in and of itself, and it was a perfectly normal series of operations they were engaged in, but things would soon get very weird indeed, and would launch one of the strangest and most talked about military UFO encounters on record.
It was all supposed to be a routine combat training exercise, but things would soon get strange when over a period of several days the Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser USS Princeton began picking up frequent radar signatures of unidentified aircraft of some sort on their cutting edge AN/SPY-1B passive scanning phased array radar. These objects were very odd in that they were numerous and seemed to be travelling at an altitude of up to 80,000 feet, far beyond what any normal aircraft would be operating at. The radar hits were very persistent and happened often, with well over 100 of the objects supposedly tracked over the course of the week, usually in formations of up to 8 to 10 at a time, and it was so odd that the radar operators at first thought it had to be some sort of equipment glitch, yet they recalibrated everything and it was all found to be in working order. At times the crew would try and get some sort of visual confirmation of what they were picking up but it was difficult to make out clearly even with binoculars. Whatever it was, it was certainly strange, and one of the radar operators, Petty Officer 3rd Class Gary Voorhis, would later say of the objects:
Once we finished all the recalibration and brought it back up, the tracks were actually sharper and clearer. Sometimes they’d be at an altitude of 80,000 or 60,000 feet. Other times they’d be around 30,000 feet, going like 100 knots. Their radar cross sections didn’t match any known aircraft; they were 100 percent red. No squawk, no IFF (Identification Friend or Foe). When they’d show up on radar. I’d get the relative bearing and then run up to the bridge and look through a pair of heavily magnified binoculars in the direction the returns were coming from. I couldn’t make out details, but they’d just be hovering there, then all of a sudden, in an instant, they’d dart off to another direction and stop again. At night, they’d give off a kind of a phosphorus glow and were a little easier to see than in the day.
The crew continued to keep their eye on the phenomena until they were alarmed to see that some of the objects seemed to at times carry out rapid descents in altitude that took them well into commercial airspace, and this was where things would get weird. On November 14, 2004, it was decided that some sort of action should be taken, and two F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jets from the USS Nimitz piloted by Commander David Fravor and Lt. Commander Jim Slaight were told to break off from their training maneuvers in order to go investigate an object that had appeared to drop towards the ocean surface on radar. Although they were not carrying live weaponry, the fighters were told to fly by and see if they could make visual confirmation of anything out there and report back. It was clear, calm weather, and the pilots were certain that if there was anything to this then they would soon figure out what the mysterious object was, and they were not wrong. The problem is, it was far from what any of them had imagined.
As they scanned the area the pilots allegedly saw something causing a disturbance in the water, where it seemed as if the waves were breaking over an oval shape under the surface. At precisely the time they noticed this odd sight, a bright, white object shaped like a “Tic-Tac” reportedly suddenly appeared nearby, hovering around 50 feet over the water. This startling object was estimated as being around 30 to 46 feet long, and oddest of all was that it had no noticeable ports, windows, rotors, wings, or any visible method of propulsion. The pilots attempted to approach the craft, after which it launched into a breathtaking display of maneuvers and erratic movements which seemed to defy physics, of which Fravor would say, “This thing would go from one way to another, similar to if you threw a ping-pong ball against the wall.” It then sped away with a rate of acceleration that left the experienced pilots in awe.
The pilots tried to pursue the “Tic-Tac,” but it accelerated at an astronomical rate, and according to Fravor “was just gone.” Oddly, the object soon after appeared around 60 miles away near the combat air patrol (CAP) rendezvous point “within seconds,” suggesting that it was travelling at speeds twice as fast as the F-18s and an estimated three times the speed of sound, the whole time demonstrating what was called “an advanced acceleration, aerodynamic, and propulsion capability.” Other fighters were launched in response, but the object soon sped away again to disappear. Fravor was so impressed by the object that he would later say, “I have no idea what I saw. It had no plumes, wings or rotors and outran our F-18s. But I want to fly one.” Another wingman who was with them at the time would comment, “It was so unpredictable—high G, rapid velocity, rapid acceleration. So you’re wondering: How can I possibly fight this?” Other witnesses to the event were equally as baffled as the pilots, with one Petty Officer 3rd Class Jason Turner later saying of the object and its physics defying display:
This thing was going berserk, like making turns. It’s incredible the amount of g forces that it would put on a human. It made a maneuver, like they were chasing it straight on, it was going with them, then this thing stopped turning, just gone. In an instant.
The whole incident was causing a big stir at the time, and making it all even more impressive was that one of the fighters in the second wave of pilots had managed to capture footage of the object with an infrared camera system, called a FLIR pod, but this would be kept under wraps for years. In fact, the USS Nimitz UFO encounter would largely be buried and kept from the public until 2017, when a clip of the footage was acquired and leaked by a UFO organization called the To the Stars Academy, which co-founded by Blink-182 frontman and kajor UFO buff Tom DeLonge, followed by an article the New York Times ran on the incident, and it all immediately caused a firestorm of debate and discussion. Was it real, was this a hoax? No one knew, but everybody seemed to be talking about it.
The footage made major waves at the time, and this was all ramped up when the U.S. Navy finally admitted that the footage was indeed real, that it had indeed been taken by infrared cameras aboard their aircraft, and even released further clips of the incident, complete with audio of the pilots marveling over what they are looking at. The Navy also said that they were putting new protocols into effect for dealing with unidentified craft encountered by pilots in incidents such as this and others like it, as well as that they were funding a program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
Even with this official release of information the conspiracy theories swirled that this was only the tip of the iceberg, and that they were in possession of longer video footage and other data on the incident. This would only be fanned by an investigation into the incident carried out by Popular Mechanics, which interviewed numerous people who had been involved in the event and uncovered evidence that there were some shady things going on in the wake of the incident. One anonymous witness they managed to track down identified as an Operations Specialist aboard the USS Princeton at the time would give a comment on the incident and explain that much of the data was suddenly seized and whisked away, saying:
I do remember the events of 2004 very well. The decision was made to scramble two fighter jets to investigate. From what the pilots described, the movement of the UFO was defying the laws of physics. What really made this incident alarming was when a Blackhawk helicopter landed on our ship and took all our information from the top secret rooms. We were all pretty shocked and it was an unspoken rule not to talk about it because we had secret clearances and didn’t want to jeopardize our careers.
A still from the USS Nimitz footage
This was corroborated by others who were present, such as the radar operator Voorhis, who also said that a helicopter landed and he was told to hand over all the data recordings for the AEGIS system. Others have also insisted that a substantial amount of the 8mm footage of the incident was confiscated by this unknown party, and insist that what was released is only snippets. This has only furthered conspiracy theories and discussion surrounding the event, and the USS Nimitz UFO encounter is just as mysterious as it has ever been, the Navy very tight-lipped about offering any official statement on what is seen in the videos and wary of any speculation on the matter, merely saying that what is seen in the videos is unidentified.
This of course has not stopped widespread speculation on the incident, and various theories have been proposed for the mysterious object and what the pilots experienced. One idea is that this is indicative of perhaps some sort of top-secret aircraft or advanced reconnaissance drone test, utilizing never-before-seen technology. This seems plausible on the surface, but if that were the case why would it be tested so close to where a carrier fleet was in the middle of performing military combat exercises? There is also the fact the most researchers, journalists, and military personnel willing to talk about it are adamant that no one has technology anywhere near what was reported and what is seen in the videos. Other ideas are that this was all due to equipment malfunction, pilot error, or even weather balloons or some misidentified natural atmospheric phenomena, but this is all still unsatisfactory as the incident was witnessed by numerous highly qualified personnel and pilots and was observed both visually and with corroborating radar. It is this perfect blend of photographic evidence and highly reliable witnesses that has made the case so persistent. What happened out there during that training mission? Was this drones, experimental aircraft, pilot error, or something not of this world? No matter what the real answer may be, the USS Nimitz UFO encounter remains one of the most spectacular, well-documented military accounts there is, and has remained very much discussed.
It's summer in Antarctica, which means record-high temperatures, jarring glacial melt and — in a very metal symbol of our changing climate — a bit of blood-red snow spattered across the Antarctic Peninsula.
Over the past several weeks, the ice around Ukraine's Vernadsky Research Base (located on Galindez Island, off the coast of Antarctica's northernmost peninsula) has been coated in what researchers are calling "raspberry snow." A Facebook post by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine shows the scene in full detail: streaks of red and pink slashing across the edges of glaciers and puddling on the frosty plains.
Blood-red algae blanket the snow near Antarctica's Vernadsky Research Base. (Image credit: Andriy Zotov)
That blood (or "jam" as the researchers whimsically call it) is actually a type of red-pigmented alga called Chlamydomonas Chlamydomonas nivalis, which hides in snowfields and mountains worldwide. The algae thrive in freezing water and spend winters lying dormant in snow and ice; when summer comes and the snow melts, the algae bloom, spreading red, flower-like spores.
This phenomenon, which Aristotle noticed way back in the third century B.C., is known as "watermelon snow," "blood snow" and a host of other less poetic names.
The phenomenon's red color comes from carotenoids (the same pigments that make pumpkins and carrots orange) in the algae's chloroplasts. In addition to their crimson hue, these pigments also absorb heat and protect the algae from ultraviolet light, allowing the organisms to bask in the summer sun's nutrients without risk of genetic mutations.
That's good for the algae but not great for the ice. According to the Ukrainian researchers, it’s easy for these blooms to kick off a runaway feedback loop of warming and melting.
"Snow blossoms contribute to climate change," the team wrote in the Facebook post. "Because of the red-crimson color, the snow reflects less sunlight and melts faster. As a consequence, it produces more and more bright algae."
The more heat the algae absorbs, the faster the surrounding ice melts. The more ice that melts, the faster the algae can spread. That, in turn, leads to more warming, more melting, and more algal blooming.
A similar feedback process is driving more extreme algal blooms in oceans all over the world, resulting in surreal scenes like an invasion of sea foam in Spain and blue, bioluminescent "tears" clinging to China's coasts. While watermelon snow has existed for millions of years, algal blooms thrive in warm weather, meaning we can probably expect to see more events like this as the climate changes.
The year 2020 has not started off well for the continent of Antarctica. In early February, the highest temperature in recorded history was reached 64.9 degrees Fahrenheit (18.3 degrees Celsius). A few days later, an iceberg the size of the U.S. city of Atlanta broke off of the Pine Island Glacier – one of the most watched chunks of ice on the planet because it has been calving frequently and these plus future icebergs are raising the ocean level. If that weren’t enough, this week the Ukrainian Antarctic station “Academician Vernadsky” was hit by the classic Fortean phenomena of blood red snow. Are these signs? Should we be worried? Who do we believe?
“For a few weeks, the Ukrainian Antarctic station “Academician Vernadsky” has been otočena… raspberry snow!” (Google translation)
The Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine posted pictures and information about the red snow on its Facebook page on February 24. (Other pictures here.) To prevent any panic or misinterpretation of the “raspberry” snow and ice, the Ministry gave the biological explanation for the phenomena.
“Our scientists have identified them under a microscope as Chlamydomonas nivalis chlamydomonas.”
“Because, besides green pigment – chlorophyll, their cells contain also a red carotene layer, red spots occur on snow as if from raspberry jam. By the way, this layer protects algae from ultraviolet radiation.”
Chlamydomonas nivalis chlamydomonas
Yes, red snow is a good thing … at least for the algae giving it that color. Summer is nearing an end in Antarctica, so the algae needs all the red color it can generate to protect itself. That’s especially true this summer with the record high temperatures. Climate change?
“”Blossom” of snow contributes to climate change. Because of red-raspberry coloring, snow less hitting sunlight and melts faster. As a result, it forms more bright seaweed.”
It’s both a cause and effect of climate change. If anyone would know this, it’s the scientists at Vernadsky Research Base, the only Ukrainian Antarctic station, whose mission is research geophysics, meteorology, and ionospherics using meteorology, upper atmospheric physics and studies of geomagnetism, ozone, seismology, glaciology and more. The 12-person base was opened by the UK in 1947 as Faraday Station and is a center for long-term temperature studies. According to a 2013 report on daily observed temperatures from 1947 to 2011, we’ve got bigger problems than raspberry snow.
“Faraday/Vernadsky is experiencing a significant warming trend of about 0.6°C/decade (1.1°F) over the last few decades. Concurrently, the magnitude of extremely cold temperatures has reduced.”
So yes, the red snow is biological, not Fortean, and it’s a sign.
WETENSCHAPDe aarde is een tweede maan rijker, al is het ding niet veel groter dan een auto. Bovendien verlaat ze haar baan rond onze planeet al over twee maanden.
Astronomen Kacper Wierzchos en Teddy Pruyne, van het door de NASA gefinancierde project Catalina Sky Survey, stootten in de nacht van 15 februari op een object met een grootte van 1,90 op 3,50 meter dat rond onze planeet draait. “GROOT NIEUWS. De aarde heeft een nieuw gevangen/mogelijke minimaan met de naam 2020 CD3”, twitterde Wierzchos. Het zou kunnen gaan om een koolstofhoudende asteroïde.
Kacper Wierzchos@WierzchosKacper
BIG NEWS (thread 1/3). Earth has a new temporarily captured object/Possible mini-moon called 2020 CD3. On the night of Feb. 15, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Teddy Pruyne and I found a 20th magnitude object. Here are the discovery images.
Voor de astronoom is de vondst belangrijk, want “het gaat om slechts de tweede asteroïde waarvan bekend is dat ze rond de aarde draait”, na 2006 RH120, een object dat ook dankzij het Catalina Sky Survey werd gevonden en tussen september 2006 en juni 2007 rond de aarde draaide. Het nieuwe object zou drie jaar geleden door de zwaartekracht van onze planeet zijn gevangen, zegt de astronoom.
Volgens het Centrum voor Planetoïden van het Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory is er geen enkele link met een gekend artificieel object gevonden, waardoor het wel zeker een object moet zijn dat we met onze zwaartekracht hebben ingepalmd.
Weg in april
De baan van onze nieuwe maan is niet stabiel en 2020 CD3 is zich al aan het verwijderen uit het systeem aarde-maan. In april zou de maan alweer moeten verdwenen zijn, zegt Grigori Fedorets van de Queen’s University in Belfast tegenover het populair-wetenschappelijke magazine New Scientist.
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What if Planet X Enters Our Solar System? Mysterious Lights Around World, Aliens or Plasma? Astrophysicist, Dr. Massimo Teodorani
What if Planet X Enters Our Solar System? Mysterious Lights Around World, Aliens or Plasma? Astrophysicist, Dr. Massimo Teodorani
Dr Massimo Teodorani, Astrophysicist, Best Selling Author & Electronic Artist is Our Guest Today at Leak Project, We discuss the Electric Universe, Plasma, Mysterious Lights Around the World, Such as the MARFA lights, Brown Mountain Lights and More. UFO’s and the Paranormal. Dr Massimo Teodorani is a plethora of knowledge, make sure to listen to the full series, for even more incredible, cutting edge information.
Totemtag is the pseudonym in music of Dr. Massimo Teodorani, who is an Italian Ph.D. astrophysicist. He is strongly inspired by the Berlin School of classical electronic music. Lastly he attempts to approach Ambient and Chillout music. At present he plays three hardware professional synthesizers/sequencers and five software synthesizers. That is during his free time, which he tries to use in the most decent way, when life conditions permits. Thanks for your listening.
Erich Von Daniken Explains Why the Ancient Aliens Never Left Us
Erich Von Daniken Explains Why the Ancient Aliens Never Left Us
COAST TO COAST AM -
Erich von Däniken updated his theory of ET contact with the ancient world, first explored in his bestselling book “Chariots of the Gods,” which has had a far-reaching influence on entertainment and science. His newest work,a sequel, called The Gods Never Left Us,talks about how with current scientific advancements in biotechnology and other fields, humanity is embarking on the same trajectory of interplanetary colonization that our ET ancestors did when they initially visited Earth.
He reminisced about his first visits to Nazca, Peru in 1960-61, when he saw the Nazca Lines, large ancient geoglyphs (the Nazca Spider is pictured) that take shape when seen from above. He proposed that these might have have been used as airstrips for the ETs.
Researchers at Tel Aviv University (TAU) have discovered a non-oxygen breathing animal. The unexpected finding changes one of science’s assumptions about the animal world.
A study on the finding was published on February 25 in PNAS by TAU researchers led by Prof. Dorothee Huchon of the School of Zoology at TAU’s Faculty of Life Sciences and Steinhardt Museum of Natural History.
TEM image of H. salminicola mitochondrion-related organelle with few cristae.
Credit: TAU
The tiny, less than 10-celled parasite Henneguya salminicola lives in salmon muscle. As it evolved, the animal, which is a myxozoan relative of jellyfish and corals, gave up breathing and consuming oxygen to produce energy.
“Aerobic respiration was thought to be ubiquitous in animals, but now we confirmed that this is not the case,” Prof. Huchon explains. “Our discovery shows that evolution can go in strange directions. Aerobic respiration is a major source of energy, and yet we found an animal that gave up this critical pathway.”
Some other organisms like fungi, amoebas or ciliate lineages in anaerobic environments have lost the ability to breathe over time. The new study demonstrates that the same can happen to an animal — possibly because the parasite happens to live in an anaerobic environment.
Its genome was sequenced, along with those of other myxozoan fish parasites, as part of research supported by the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation and conducted with Prof. Paulyn Cartwright of the University of Kansas, and Prof. Jerri Bartholomew and Dr. Stephen Atkinson of Oregon State University.
The parasite’s anaerobic nature was an accidental discovery. While assembling the Henneguya genome, Prof. Huchon found that it did not include a mitochondrial genome. The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell where oxygen is captured to make energy, so its absence indicated that the animal was not breathing oxygen.
Until the new discovery, there was debate regarding the possibility that organisms belonging to the animal kingdom could survive in anaerobic environments. The assumption that all animals are breathing oxygen was based, among other things, on the fact that animals are multicellular, highly developed organisms, which first appeared on Earth when oxygen levels rose.
“It’s not yet clear to us how the parasite generates energy,” Prof. Huchon says. “It may be drawing it from the surrounding fish cells, or it may have a different type of respiration such as oxygen-free breathing, which typically characterizes anaerobic non-animal organisms.”
According to Prof. Huchon, the discovery bears enormous significance for evolutionary research.
“It is generally thought that during evolution, organisms become more and more complex, and that simple single-celled or few-celled organisms are the ancestors of complex organisms,” she concludes. “But here, right before us, is an animal whose evolutionary process is the opposite. Living in an oxygen-free environment, it has shed unnecessary genes responsible for aerobic respiration and become an even simpler organism.”
American Friends of Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv University
Publication:
A cnidarian parasite of salmon (Myxozoa: Henneguya) lacks a mitochondrial genome Dayana Yahalomi, Stephen D. Atkinson, Moran Neuhof, E. Sally Chang, Hervé Philippe, Paulyn Cartwright, Jerri L. Bartholomew, Dorothée Huchon.. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020; 201909907 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1909907117
Border Patrol Officer Talks About the High Strange Encounters on the Border
Border Patrol Officer Talks About the High Strange Encounters on the Border
Border Patrol Officer Rocky Elmore talks about the strange encounters that have happened along the border of the United States.
Rocky Elmore is a retired United States Border Patrol Agent from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. After engaging in a full career in the private sector, he joined the Border Patrol when he was 34 years old and served for the next 20 years. Rocky was assigned to Border Patrol stations in San Diego, Calif., Kingsville, Texas, and Tucson, Ariz.
At the age of 54, he became a first-time father, at which time he decided to retire from duty and embark on his next adventure as an author.
Surviving the Toba Super-Eruption 74,000 Years Ago
Surviving the Toba Super-Eruption 74,000 Years Ago
New archaeological work supports the hypothesis that human populations were present in India by 80,000 years ago and that they survived one of the largest volcanic eruptions in the last two million years
Credit: NASA / Wikimedia Commons
Remains of the Toba volcano eruption seen in satellite image of Lake Toba
In a study published in Nature Communications, researchers from the Department of Archeology at the Max Planck Institute for Human History, together with international partners, provide evidence that before and after the super eruption of the Toba volcano in India 74,000 years ago, users of Middle Paleolithic stone tools in India were present. The results support the assumption that Homo sapiens had reached South Asia even before the great waves of expansion of humans 60,000 years ago and that human population groups survived climatic and ecological changes there.
The Toba super eruption on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, was one of the most violent volcanic events of the past two million years, about 5,000 times larger than the eruption of Mount St. Helen in the 1980s. This eruption occurred 74,000 years ago. Long-standing theories claim that it caused a “volcanic winter” of six to ten years that led to a 1,000-year cooling of the earth’s surface and major catastrophes, including the decimation of Asian hominin and mammalian populations and the almost complete eradication of our own Species. The few surviving Homo sapiens are said to have survived in Africa through the development of sophisticated social, symbolic and economic strategies. These strategies, so the assumption
Field research in southern India conducted by some of the authors of this study in 2007 questioned these theories and sparked major debates in archeology, genetics, and geosciences on the timing of modern humans’ spread beyond Africa and the effects of the Toba Super Eruption on climate and the environment. The current study continues this debate and provides evidence that Homo sapiens was present in Asia earlier and that the Toba supereruption was less apocalyptic than previously thought.
The Toba volcano eruption and human evolution
The current study reports on a unique, 80,000-year stratigraphic record from the archaeological site of Dhaba in the Middle Son Valley in northern India. Middle Paleolithic stone tools found in Dhaba provide strong evidence that there were human populations using tools in India before and after the Toba eruption 74,000 years ago. Professor JN Pal, senior researcher at the University of Allahabad in India, notes that “although the Toba ash in the Son Valley was first identified in the 1980s, we have had no relevant archaeological evidence so far, so the archaeological finds from Dhaba to fill a large gap in time. “
View over the Middle Son valley in the north of India from the archaeological site Dhaba. The archaeological excavation can be seen on the left side of the picture.
Professor Chris Clarkson of the University of Queensland, lead author of the study, added: “The stone tools used in Dhaba are similar to the tool sets used at the same time by Homo sapiens were used in Africa. The fact that these tool sets neither disappeared at the time of the Toba super outbreak, nor changed significantly shortly afterwards, indicates that the human population survived the so-called catastrophe and continued to create tools for changing their environment. “This new archaeological evidence underpins fossil fuels Evidence suggests that humans emigrated from Africa earlier than 60,000 years ago and spread across Eurasia, and it is in line with genetic evidence that humans crossed archaic hominin species like the Neanderthals more than 60,000 years ago ,
Stone tools from the Dhaba archaeological site. They were found in the layer that corresponds to the eruption of the Toba volcano. The molds typical of the Middle Paleolithic are shown here.
Although the Toba super eruption was a gigantic event, only a few climatologists and geoscientists continue to represent the previously formulated scenario of a “volcanic winter”. This suggests that the cooling of the earth was less serious and that the Toba eruption may not have caused the subsequent cold period. Recent archaeological research in Asia, including the findings reported by this study, does not support the belief that the hominin populations died out due to the Toba Super Outbreak.
Instead, archaeological evidence suggests that the human population in the region survived and coped with one of the most violent volcanic events in human history. This proves that small groups of hunters and gatherers were able to adapt to environmental changes. Nevertheless, the population groups that lived in the region around Dhaba more than 74,000 years ago do not seem to have contributed significantly to the gene pool of today’s population groups. It is likely that these hunters and gatherers faced a number of challenges for their long-term survival, including the dramatic environmental changes that followed over the millennia.
Contacts and sources:
Michael PetragliaMax Planck Institute for Human History
Publication:
Human occupation of northern India spans the Toba super-eruption ~ 74,000 years ago
Chris Clarkson, Clair Harris, Bo Li, Christina M. Neudorf, Richard G. Roberts, Christine Lane, Kasih Norman, Jagannath Pal, Sacha Jones, Ceri Shipton, Jinu Koshy, MC Gupta, DP Mishra, AK Dubey, Nicole Boivin, and Michael Petraglia
Mysterious Objects Flying in Japan, United States, Brazil and Mexico
Mysterious Objects Flying in Japan, United States, Brazil and Mexico
The topic of mysterious objects flying is one on which everyone has an opinion. From the strong believer to the condescending skeptic, everyone has deep rooted beliefs regarding the subject. Some believe UFOs are travelers from other planets or dimensions. Others believe them to be experimental military aircraft. Mystics are claiming it to be an angels. Some are meteorites.
Below strange flying objects caught on tape: What is it?
In my latest post from February 26, 2020, I wrote about the several rectangular shaped UFOs in wing formation flying at high speed through space and wondered whether these UFOs are man-made or extraterrestrial.
Now again such a mysterious craft has been captured on February 25, 2020 while another footage from November last year shows similar crafts flying in formation at an incredible speed through space.
I have no explanation for these strange objects, but perhaps someone can provide more clarity about these 'ghosts' UFOs.
Triangular UFO Over Texas Makes a Comeback After a Month
Triangular UFO Over Texas Makes a Comeback After a Month
Online alien hunters and conspiracy theorists had debates over a video showing a mysterious, shining triangular object over Houston, Texas. The footage was reportedly taken on New Year’s Day. Some suggested alien interference, while others believed the strange object had something to do with a secret military program.
Just recently, the UFO apparently made a comeback after a month of a similar sighting. A video, which reportedly captured in the sky over the city of Bogata by a motorist, shows three flashing lights moving in a geometric formation toward the cameraman before zooming off.
The sighting was first reported to Mutual UFO Network along with the clip of it. According to the report, the UFO was flying at the reporting witness at around 75mph and then it hovered over his car for a second and disappeared. YouTube conspiracy channel UFOmania posted the video on the video-sharing site.
While the footage’s authenticity has not been confirmed, some conspiracy theorists believe it shows an alien UFO. Others suggested the UFO could be a supersonic stealth surveillance plane of the US Air Force. A few also provided a mundane explanation saying that it was nothing more than a drone.
The latest video surfaced a month after the same clip showing what seems to be a large triangle UFO over Houston, Texas, on New Year’s Day. The bizarre object appeared to have three lights dancing in the dark sky and maintaining formation. It prompted conspiracy enthusiasts to offer alien and military-related theories as an explanation as well
Your daily horoscope: If it's your birthday today (or any other day), congratulations! You are very lucky. You were born into a universe of endless mystery and wonder — a vast and busy place where galaxies eat each other for fun and old suns explode into majestic rainbows of gas whenever they get too tired. (May we all hope for a similar end.)
Your home planet, Earth, is surrounded by billions of twinkling stars. A long time ago, ancient Earthlings connected the dots on a bunch of those stars, forming the 12 constellations of the zodiac. Many Earthlings still look to those constellations today, hoping to find relationship advice and existential guidance hidden in the cosmos. We cannot promise they will find it. But, if you look closely enough at any sign of the zodiac, you may see something even better: a wonder of the universe.
What astronomical oddities lurk in your sign? Follow the stars, and find out below.
An illustration of the alien planet 30 Ari Bb. (Image credit: Image copyright: Karen Teramura, UH IfA)
Aries love competition, and the gas giant 30 Ari Bb — nestled about 146 light-years from Earth in the constellation Aries — is no exception. The massive exoplanet has not one, not two, but four suns in its sky. Take that, Tatooine!
How does one planet score four suns? In this case, 30 Ari Bb orbits a star in a binary system, a star system where two stars orbit around a common point. It turns out that this binary system orbits the same center of gravity as another binary system about 100 million miles away, making all four stars part of one big quadruple-star system. Astronomers have discovered only one other quadruple-star system like it in the universe, making 30 Ari Bb extremely rare… not that it's a competition or anything.
2. Taurus: a supernova graveyard
The Crab Nebula. (Image credit: NASA Goddard)
It's fortunate that Taurus and Cancer are such compatible signs, because there's a big, gassy crab nipping at the space bull's horns.
The Crab Nebula (aka Messier 1, or M1) is the remnant of a thousand-year-old supernova explosion — the violent death of star that can no longer support its own mass — located over the southern horn of Taurus. Beauty-loving bulls will be happy to know that such explosions create bright blasts of gas that can linger in the sky for tens of thousands of years or more; even now, the gas in M1 is expanding outward at about 3 million mph (4.8 million km/h).
3. Gemini: the great clown in the sky
The Clownface Nebula. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, Andrew Fruchter (STScI), and the ERO team (STScI + ST-ECF))
Geminis are youthful, curious and fun. Add "horrific and menacing" to that list, and you've got a pretty apt description of the Clownface Nebula, a cackling gas cloud located in Gemini about 5,000 light-years from Earth.
Also known as the Eskimo Nebula, the Clownface Nebula is a planetary nebula (a bright cloud of ionized gas surrounding a dying star) made of two enormous, concentric rings. The rings are rimmed with furry filaments that stretch on for light-years, making the nebula resemble a tiny head wrapped in a parka hood — or a clown's creepy, painted visage. Laugh (or cry) if you like, but those fuzzy puffs of gas are so complex that scientists struggle to explain why they exist (much like real clowns).
4. Cancer: a world of diamond (or lava)
The alien world 55 Cancri E. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Cancers can be hard to get to know, and astronomers are having the same problem with the constellation's most famous exoplanet. Located just 40 light-years away, 55 Cancri E's is roughly twice as large as Earth and orbits its home star every 18 hours or so. That means the planet is superhot — thousands of degrees Fahrenheit on its night side alone — and probably has a pretty extreme composition. How extreme? Nobody really knows. Prior studies have hypothesized that the inscrutable planet is made completely of diamond, or else has only half an atmosphere, or maybe a surface perpetually oozing with lava. Alas, we'll just have to get closer to the planet before it opens up to us.
5. Leo: a runaway star
The runaway star CW Leo. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Stubborn like a true Leo, this runaway star in the lion constellation is literally shoving space aside as it tries to escape its neighborhood at 204,000 mph (329,000 km/h). The star, named CW Leonis and located about 310 light-years from Earth, is moving so fast, you can see it creating a bow shock (a wave of energy that pushes interstellar matter aside like the front of a boat cutting through water) in this satellite image taken in ultraviolet light. Where are you going, little star? Astronomers are too intimidated to ask, but they think CW Leonis has been charging forward for about 70,000 years now. It shows no signs of stopping.
6. Virgo: the biggest hat in the universe
The Sombrero Galaxy. (Image credit: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))
It's not often that you see a Virgo making a scene ... or a black hole wearing a hat. Well, behold Messier 104, the Sombrero Galaxy. This quirky galaxy is a bright bulge of stars surrounded by a perfectly symmetrical ring of dust reminiscent of a sombrero's rim. This dust serves as an enormous nursery for baby stars (aww), but the real hotspot is at the sombrero's center, where a black hole with 1 billion times the mass of the sun constantly spills electromagnetic radiation into space. It's rare to see a Virgo spill anything without cleaning it up, but at least this galactic mess is 29 million light-years away.
7. Libra: two mirages of Earth
Gliese 581d and 581g may just be mirages. (Image credit: Credit: Copyright Alan Friedman)
Two Earth-like worlds circling the distant star Gliese 581 could have the right stuff to sustain life. Or, they could be illusions. Gliese 581 is a red dwarf about 20 light-years into the constellation Libra, and may have as many as six planets spinning around it. Two of those potential planets — Gliese 581d and 581g — appear to sit in the star's habitable zone, or the Goldilocks sweet spot where a planet is neither too hot nor too cold to have liquid water. Worlds like these are rare, and some astronomers believe the pair of planets may not exist at all. According to one 2014 study, Gliese 581d and 581g might just be a mirage caused by flickering sunspots on their local star's surface.
So, these two worlds are either hugely exciting or hugely disappointing. Let's settle this like a Libra and just agree they're hugely something.
8. Scorpius: the nonstop nova
A white dwarf star leeches energy from a red giant before exploding in a supernova. (Image credit: NASA Goddard)
Passionate and persistent, a Scorpio does not give up on a relationship. Nor do the stars of U Scorpii, a stellar partnership where one star is endlessly giving — and the other star is dead.
U Scorpii is a recurrent nova, a rare class of double-star system where a white dwarf (the shriveled husk of a dead star) continuously pulls in matter from a neighboring star, then sneezes it out again in a brilliant blaze every few decades or so. The result is a constantly brightening and dimming twinkle in the sky that's easily mistaken for the birth of a new star but is actually just the perverse dance of a stellar corpse and its captive mate. U Scorpii is an especially active romance, lighting up the sky at least seven times in the past 150 years, most recently in 2010.
9. Sagittarius: the monster at the center of the galaxy
The center of the Milky Way. (Sag A* is in the glowing white region to the right). (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScI)
Sagittarians like to keep a tight circle of friends, and there's no tighter circle than the black hole at the center of the Milky Way — also known as Sagittarius A*.
Nestled deep in the hunter constellation, our supermassive black hole is sort of like the glue that holds the galaxy together. The region around the galactic center is about 1 billion times denser with stars than our corner of the Milky Way, and all that gas and dust makes Sagittarius A* impossible to see directly from Earth. However, scientists can see the structure's throbbing energy signature as it gulps down surrounding matter at near light speed. Sometimes it eats too fast and burps up gargantuan bubbles of radiation. Sometimes it plays with its food and returns it to the kitchen, pulling stars in just close enough to transform their composition and then sending them on their way. Like many Sagittarians, the hole is fickle and uncompromising — and we'd be very sad without its company.
The galaxy group HCG 87. 4(Image credit: GMOS-S Commissioning Team)
If you're expecting order from a constellation that's half-goat and half-mermaid, prepare to be disappointed. Consider Capricornus's most handsome galaxy group, HCG 87. The cluster of three gravitationally bound galaxies looks nice and tidy in family portraits like this one, but astronomers know that the familial harmony is only temporary. Within the next billion years, the three figures will rip each other to bits in a chaotic pileup, turning the galactic trio into one giant mess of stars. After a billion years staring at the same galaxies every day, there could be worse outcomes.
11. Aquarius: the Eye of God/Sauron
The Helix Nebula. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ.of Ariz.)
Aquarians are an observant lot. A crafty Aquarian could probably look at this photo of the Helix Nebula, for example, and see an enormous, terrifying eye staring into the depths of their souls. (Don't feel bad if you don't see it.)
The Helix Nebula (located 700 light-years away, in Aquarius) has been compared to the Eye of Sauron and the Eye of God. It's actually just a dead star cloaked in dust, and it takes on a fearsome pupil shape thanks to the star's infrared glow. It's spooky, though not nearly as spooky as the Skull and Crossbones Nebula lurking in the Puppis constellation. (Are you observant enough to guess what that one looks like?)
12. Pisces: a perfect whirlpool
The Phantom Galaxy (M74). (Image credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration)
A romantic Pisces will probably try to woo you with a line about how you are made of stardust. That's very nice (nothing is sexier to an astronomy fan than dust), but for a more rewarding cosmic encounter, we suggest turning your attention to the Phantom Galaxy — aka M74 — nestled 32 million away in the constellation Pisces.
The Phantom Galaxy has been described as the perfect spiral galaxy, but really it's just the perfect view of one. From Earth, astronomers can see the galaxy's golden center and graceful spiral arms head-on, offering an unobstructed look at the galaxy's 100 billion stars. It's a gorgeous sight ... but not nearly as gorgeous as you. ;)
But me being me, my mind went straight to Mars. I have long been aware of science fiction's vision of Earth receiving space souvenirs that carry organisms that might be dangerous to Earth's fragile biosphere — that's me, and you, too! Such arrivals could be accidental, or they could be purposeful.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump's budget request for NASA supports the development of the Mars sample return mission, a robotic program that would haul back the goods from the Red Planet.
What if such samples turned out to be dangerous, and contagiously so? Are there some Mars-oriented lessons to be learned from COVID-19 and other major infectious diseases?
In 1973, Carl Sagan published "The Cosmic Connection — An Extraterrestrial Perspective," offering this view of Martian pathogens:
"Precisely because Mars is an environment of great potential biological interest, it is possible that on Mars there are pathogens, organisms which, if transported to the terrestrial environment, might do enormous biological damage — a Martian plague, the twist in the plot of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds, but in reverse. This is an extremely grave point. On the one hand, we can argue that Martian organisms cannot cause any serious problems to terrestrial organisms, because there has been no biological contact for 4.5 billion years between Martian and terrestrial organisms. On the other hand, we can argue equally well that terrestrial organisms have evolved no defenses against potential Martian pathogens, precisely because there has been no such contact for 4.5 billion years. The chance of such an infection may be very small, but the hazards, if it occurs, are certainly very high."
Concern and ignorance
What might happen if such an infection does occur? "I think that it might be instructive to consider the climate of concern that accompanies the current situation with coronavirus," John Rummel, a senior scientist at the SETI Institute in California and NASA's planetary protection officer from 1986 to 1993 and 1997 to 2006, told Space.com.
For example, the diagnostic tests available for coronavirus right now aren't perfectly accurate, and it can take more than a week after infection for symptoms to develop. And while a terrestrial infection might be limited by the change of seasons, that wouldn't necessarily hold true for a foreign disease vector.
"I think that the challenge for a Mars sample return activity is to be open about precautions taken in the face of ignorance," Rummel said, "which is what we have … when we discuss life on Mars."
Schools of thought
Scientists have various schools of thought on hauling Mars samples back to our planet, Rummel said. But the planned, precautionary approach, based on strict containment and testing for life and biohazards, is compatible with the potential to discover life in a sample, or elsewhere on Mars by other means, as it would still allow for a sample to be returned.
"If one finds life in the sample, one has a good chance of being able to study it in containment," Rummel said. "The downside of this approach is that it is more expensive [in terms of establishing the containment facility], up-front, than ignoring life on Mars."
Rummel said that, if something like the coronavirus situation pops up, then any other containment facility may not be available in a timely way, and may not be able to meet the cleanliness requirements that will ensure that any organisms discovered in the sample came from Mars, and not from Earth after the sample arrives.
Precautionary steps
Is the emergence of a new epidemic here on our planet a cue about taking precautionary steps regarding planetary protection?
Catharine Conley was NASA's planetary protection officer from 2006 until November 2017. "As with historical infectious disease epidemics, the coronavirus that's spreading currently is another example of why it's so important to understand the consequences of interacting with environments humans rarely contact and then distributing widely whatever [they] picked up," she said.
"In the case of Mars exploration, it's most likely that Earth organisms transported to Mars could cause problems for future inhabitants," Conley said. "If Mars life exists and is brought to Earth, it's more likely to cause effects on the environment, like the algae recently found to be warming the ice in Greenland, than that it would be a virulent human pathogen."
However, if Mars life is related to terrestrial life, Conley said, "that makes it much harder to distinguish from Earth contamination — and also, just like diseases that jump species, more likely to affect us, too."
The magnetic field in one zone on Mars is about 10 times stronger than scientists expected, and it's changing rapidly.
New data gathered from NASA's InSight lander, which has been on the Red Planet for a little over a year now, shows that the planet's magnetic field fluctuates rapidly. InSight is the first landing mission to carry a magnetic sensor, which allows it to measure these fields from up close.
"The ground-level data give us a much more sensitive picture of magnetization over smaller areas, and where it's coming from," lead author Catherine Johnson, a professor at the University of British Columbia and senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, said in a statement. "In addition to showing that the magnetic field at the landing site was ten times stronger than the satellites anticipated, the data implied it was coming from nearby sources."
InSight is designed to collect data that helps scientists to reveal more about how rocky planets form by looking at the planet’s interior. Before the lander touched down in November 2018, magnetic fields were measured by satellite and often averaged a distance from the epicenter that was more than 90 miles across.
Billions of years ago, Mars used to have a global magnetic field, but it shut down for reasons that are still unknown, about 4 billion years ago, leaving the atmosphere unshielded to radiation and causing it to bleed over time into space. Any residual fields are likely coming from older rocks buried several feet or miles underneath the planet's surface, these new results from InSight suggest. The team plans to continue to study Mars using InSight to better identify what different types of rocks there are and where they are.
These observations from InSight also showed that the sun influences the Martian magnetic field. The sun sends out charged particles across the solar system in a phenomenon known as the solar wind. These particles carry an interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) that can cause fluctuations in the local magnetic field when it hits the Martian atmosphere. That's because Mars, unlike Earth, has no global magnetic field to act as a buffer against these solar storms.
There is also some strange data that InSight has collected, revealing things like fluctuations in the magnetic field around midnight, which are likely related to how the solar wind and IMF move around Mars, inducing electrical currents and magnetic fields on the planet. Future observations will help to inform researchers exactly why this is happening, with InSight providing data from the surface at the same time that NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) examines the atmosphere above the landing site.
"Because all of our previous observations of Mars have been from the top of its atmosphere or even higher altitudes, we didn't know whether disturbances in solar wind would propagate to the surface," said Johnson. "That's an important thing to understand for future astronaut missions to Mars."
Earth has picked up a tiny asteroid hitchhiker, according to astronomical observations made this month.
Called 2020 CD3, the space rock was captured from deep space by our planet’s gravity, making it only the second temporary “mini-moon” that astronomers have spotted orbiting Earth.
Kacper Wierzchos@WierzchosKacper
BIG NEWS (thread 1/3). Earth has a new temporarily captured object/Possible mini-moon called 2020 CD3. On the night of Feb. 15, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Teddy Pruyne and I found a 20th magnitude object. Here are the discovery images.
The asteroid was discovered on February 15 by Theodore Pruyne and Kacper Wierzchos, a pair of astronomers based at the University of Arizona. On Tuesday, Wierzchos described the find as “a big deal” on Twitter and revealed that the object appears to have been tugged into orbit around Earth about three years ago.
The newly identified asteroid is only a few meters wide, but Pruyne and Wierzchos were able to detect it thanks to the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey (CSS), which is specially designed to flag and track near-Earth objects (NEOs). CSS was also the facility that spotted the first captured asteroid, called 2006 RH120, which got sucked into Earth orbit in 2006 and was ejected back out into heliocentric orbit in 2007.
The International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, which manages the official catalogue of small celestial bodies, confirmed that 2020 CD3 is a temporary satellite on Tuesday.
Though only two of these captured asteroids have been imaged so far, there are likely more of them out there that are simply too faint and small to be detected. A 2012 study in the journalIcarus predicted that, statistically, there is at least one meter-scale asteroid orbiting Earth at any particular time.
For more than a century, skywatchers have claimed to have spotted these temporary satellites but CSS is the only facility so far that has captured definitive observations of them. The introduction of next-generation telescopes, such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, will likely lead to many more detections of these orbital stowaways.
GOOGLE LEGT ONYVOERING VLIEGTUIG DOOR UFO VAST ( VIDEO )
GOOGLE LEGT ONYVOERING VLIEGTUIG DOOR UFO VAST ( VIDEO )
Door de jaren heen zijn er verhalen geweest van vliegtuigen die spoorloos verdwenen. Soms zijn daar ufo’s bij betrokken en het lijkt alsof Google per ongeluk zo’n moment heeft vastgelegd.
Je kunt het eens zijn of niet met ufo onderzoeker Scott Waring, maar feit is dat hij iedere dag opnieuw op zoek gaat naar aanwijzingen dat er buiten-/binnenaardsen actief zijn op onze planeet en een onderwerp dat dan ter sprake komt is uiteraard ufo’s.
Hij heeft in zijn lange carriere als ufo onderzoeker naar eigen zeggen duizenden verhalen gehoord van mensen die dingen hebben meegemaakt en daarnaast bestudeert hij ook zelf dagelijkse allerlei mogelijke bronnen om iets bijzonders te ontdekken.
En dit keer wordt hij op zijn wenken bediend door Google waar via hun Maps of Earth iets bijzonders te zien is bij de Fiji Eilanden.
Het ziet er zo uit:
Het is een vliegtuig dat volgens Scott heel laag boven zee vliegt, net voor de kust van één van de eilanden. Hij denkt dat dit misschien wel één van de vliegtuigen is die voor drugssmokkel wordt gebruikt, omdat het zo laag vliegt.
Recht voor het toestel zie je iets waarvan Scott 100 procent zeker is dat het een ufo betreft. Scott denkt dat we hier te maken hebben met een ontvoering van dit vliegtuig door de betreffende ufo. Dat wil dan niet zeggen dat het toestel compleet verdwenen is, hoewel dat ook voor komt, maar het kan ook zijn dat ze het als het ware “bevriezen” in de tijd, waarna de bemanning later opeens een x aantal uren tijd kwijt is en zich niets kan herinneren.
Hierna volgt het verhaal van Scott en zijn gedachten en bedenk dat deze man heel veel ervaring heeft in het beoordelen van de dit soort situaties, ook al klinken ze soms wat vergezocht voor sommigen.
Via deze link kun je zelf het object bekijken via Google Maps.
Om aan te tonen dat wat Scott beschrijft niet zo ongeloofwaardig is, hierna een eerder door ons gepubliceerd waar gebeurd verhaal over een piloot in Australië die met vliegtuig en al is verdwenen en waar nooit meer iets van is vernomen.
Fredrick was die dag vertrokken van het vliegveld van Melbourne in zijn blauw witte Cessna 182, voor een vlucht naar het eiland Tasmanië. De trip verliep rustig voor het eerste uur tot 6 minuten over 7 uur 's avonds toen Frederick de verkeersleiding opriep met de mededeling dat hij een groot vliegtuig in zicht had, wat op een hoogte vloog van ongeveer 1500 meter.
Om een goed beeld te krijgen, van wat er precies gebeurde volgt hier het laatste gesprek tussen de verkeersleiding (Control) en het vliegtuig van Frederick (Delta Sierra Juliet, DSJ).
7.06 Control: Wat voor type vliegtuig is het? DSJ: Dat weet ik niet. Ik zie vier heldere.... uh, het lijken wel landingslichten.
7:07 DSJ: Melbourne, dit is Delta Sierra Juliet. Het vliegtuig is net over mij heen gevlogen; het bevond zich zeker tweeduizend voet hoger dan ik. Control: Delta Sierra Juliet, begrepen. Kunt u bevestigen dat het een groot vliegtuig was? DSJ: Eh.. weet ik niet, vanwege de hoge snelheid. Is de luchtmacht soms actief in deze omgeving?
7:08 DSJ: Melbourne, het komt nu vanuit het oosten op mij af.... het lijkt wel alsof het een soort spelletje speelt. Het vliegt nu over mij heen... twee, drie keer... snelheid moeilijk in te schatten.
7:09 DSJ: Melbourne, Delta Sierra Juliet. Het is geen vliegtuig. Het is..... Control: Delta Sierra Juliet, kunt u het eh... vliegtuig beschrijven? DSJ: Delta Sierra Juliet, wanneer het voorbijvliegt heeft het een langwerpige vorm.... kan het niet beter identificeren vanwege de hoge snelheid..... het is nu vlak voor me Melbourne.
7:10 Control: Delta Sierra Juliet, en hoe groot is dit... object ongeveer? DSJ: Delta Sierra Juliet, Melbourne. Het lijkt nu stil te hangen. Ik draai nu rondjes en dit ding boven mij doet precies hetzelfde. Het heeft een groen licht en lijkt een soort metallic. Het glinstert helemaal aan de buitenkant. Control: Delta Sierra Juliet. DSJ: Delta Sierra Juliet (er is een pauze van 5 seconden). Het is verdwenen. Control: Delta Sierra Juliet.
7:11 DSJ: Melbourne, hebben jullie enig idee wat voor soort vliegtuig dit kan zijn? Is het een militair toestel? Control: Delta Sierra Juliet, kunt u bevestigen dat.. eh.. het vliegtuig is verdwenen? DSJ: Kunt u dit herhalen?. Control: Delta Sierra Juliet, is het vliegtuig nog steeds bij u? DSJ: Delta Sierra Juliet, het nadert nu vanuit het zuidwesten. Control: Delta Sierra Juliet. DSJ: Delta Sierra Juliet: Mijn motor draait maar net stationair (dit komt overeen met ongeveer 700 toeren). Ik heb drieëntwintig- tot vierentwintighonderd toeren geselecteerd en het ding sputtert. Control: Delta Sierra Juliet, "roger". Wat gaat u doen? DSJ: Mijn bedoeling is... eh... om naar King Eiland te gaan... eh... Melbourne. Dat vreemde vliegtuig hangt weer boven mij. (twee seconden pauze). Het hangt boven mij en het is geen vliegtuig. Control: Delta Sierra Juliet. DSJ: Delta Sierra Juliet, Melbourne (de microfoon bleef 17 seconden open en daarna werd het radiocontact verbroken).
Er werd zeven dagen lang door de luchtmacht gezocht boven het gebied met twee Orion vliegtuigen; er werd geen enkel spoor gevonden. Noch het vliegtuig, noch Frederick Valentich werden ooit gevonden.
Hierna volgt een video met daarin een gesprek met de verkeersleider van die avond en zie je wat er precies gebeurde.
Those pesky “greys” – only two movies, but lots of sightings anyway
Those pesky “greys” – only two movies, but lots of sightings anyway
Copyright 2020, InterAmerica, Inc.
Here are images from and for Invasion of the Saucer Men, an almost obscure movie that can’t account for an imbedded memory to explain what alleged flying saucer witnesses think they saw near Roswell and many other places:
However, Spielberg’s 1977 CloseEncounters of the Third Kind was extremely popular, with the “greys” meme taking hold after it opened in many theaters, the entities of the movie filling in for Stanton Friedman and the Roswell story-tellers’ descriptions of little bodies recovered from a flying disk crash in the area:
Since the 1951 Man From Planet X was seen by few moviegoers, I suspect that the Lotti-Italy account of her experience (pictured here with a similar ship) was not the inspiration for her story, which I explained* a while back. But the illustrator of her tale may have seen it:
Some flying saucer [UFO] beings in early sci-fi movies (the 1950s) seem not to have registered as ET visitors among persons who say they encountered humanoid beings getting out of a landed flying disk or standing nearby one:
The Thing (From Another World) had humanlike form and Klaatu was a personification of an advanced human-like being but, except for some reports of ETs with facial gear and Nordic-like ETs in the lore, the greys still prevail.
The inside of Klaatu’s ship – in The Day the Earth Stood Still – does seem similar to some UFO abductee [experiencer] tales describing the “ship” they were supposedly taken to, and some UFO accounts indicated robotic-like movements of entities or robots themselves, but none like Gort:
Since movie ETs don’t seem to explain possible memory corruption or enhancement, how about TV programs in which extraterrestrials [ETs] were featured?
Here is what Betty Hill says her capturing alien looked like (after discarding her initial description of a being with a Jimmy Durante nose), alongside a TV ET (from The Bellero Shield airing from a television sci-fi series:
TV shows, of the 1950s and 1960s with alien (extraterrestrial) beings would be better as a source for UFO creatures some say they encountered, but none of those TV entities were depicted as small, frail grey-tinted humanoids.
So, the source for UFO witness reports of “greys” came from, and still come from, the Roswell tales, confabulated by various Roswellians who wanted in on the hubbub stirred by Stan Friedman and other UFO researchers after 1978, and which media accounts and ufologists continue to hype and reference by way of “grey ET” depictions.
RR
http://ufocon.blogspot.com – The UFO Iconoclast(s)
Mystery crafts in wing formation moving at hypersonic speed though space
Mystery crafts in wing formation moving at hypersonic speed though space
There has been a lot of activity in space lately, now on February 23, 2020, Wilbur Allen captured several rectangular shaped UFOs in wing formation flying at high speed through space.
It is always the question whether these UFOs are man-made or extraterrestrial. Whatever these are, they're large!
UFO Reports, Early and Contemporary: Interview with Peter DavenporT
UFO Reports, Early and Contemporary: Interview with Peter DavenporT
Richard interviews Peter Davenport, who since 1994 has been the Director of the National UFO Reporting Center, a repository on the web for UFO reports numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Peter is one of the most knowledgable (and reasonable) students of UFOs, having experienced a dramatic childhood sighting in the 1950s and investigated countless cases. Here they discuss a combination of very early reports dating back to the 1930s, as well as 21st century cases of orbs, triangles, and more.
I found this strange object when I was looking at some gigapan photos of Mars. The strange object has a color that doest match anything around it. No to mention its strange porcupine like shape. From the thickness of its parts and the size I would guess that this is some kind of living creature...like a ground hog pushed back into the crevice of this structure. Its clearly living from the shape of it. I just don't believe a deposit of copper or gold might appear like this...especially because metals have a more reflective surface. I can even see what looks like a rodent head, black nose and little ears. This looks like an animal.
Its hard to believe that NASA could keep such life forms a secret, but then again...Mars is 225km from earth...so its makes it hard to get hard poof...but thankfully we have photographic evidence.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
THIS GIGANTIC NEPTUNE-SIZED EXOPLANET IS INCREDIBLY CLOSE
THIS GIGANTIC NEPTUNE-SIZED EXOPLANET IS INCREDIBLY CLOSE
NASA
VICTOR TANGERMANN
Planet Hunter
A team of astronomers at Penn State just confirmed the existence of G 9-40b, a gigantic super-Earth only about 90 light years from Earth — making it one of the closest known exoplanets.
The exoplanet is at least twice as massive as Earth and may even be as large as Neptune. It was first spotted by NASA’s planet-hunting space telescope Kepler during its K2 mission in 2019.
Howdy Neighbor
The team used The Habitable Zone Planet Finder (HPF), a low-mass planet-hunting instrument attached to the 10-meter Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas.
But this particular planet isn’t very habitable. Its surface experiences scorching temperatures of over 3,100 degrees Celsius (5,600 Fahrenheit) — hot, but still substantially cooler than the Sun.
Backyard Bash
The fact that it’s only about 90 light years away means that it is “among the 20 closest transiting planetary systems known, and is currently the second closest transiting planets discovered by the K2 mission to date,” according to a statement by Gudmundur Stefansson, lead author of a paper about the planet published in The Astronomical Journal earlier this month.
The astronomers believe the exoplanet is an excellent candidate for a much closer look by NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope that is scheduled to launch in March 2021.
Tucked away among rolling hills in the quaint countryside of western Wiltshire, England, about two hours west of London, is the sleepy, historical town of Warminster. It is a typical quiet rural English town, with charming little streets and not much typically going on, but starting from the 1960s this would become ground zero for a series of intense UFO phenomena and high strangeness that has never fully been explained and which remains a bizarre mystery talked about to this day.
While various UFO phenomena had already been reported from the area for years, it would all begin in earnest in 1961, when there was a report by four witnesses who claimed to have observed a cigar shaped object fly across the sky leaving a trail of sparks in its wake, and there would be a steady stream of reports over the ensuing years of similar phenomena in the sky, but things would really begin to get strange towards the end of 1964. On Christmas day of that year, residents were alarmed at a cacophony of strange, eerie noises that took different forms depending on the witnesses but which were rather frightening in every case. Some reported a loud booming noise, while others complained of sounds that sounded like twigs or branches being dragged across their roof or of something pounding on the top of their homes. One local named Mildred Head would say of her own experience, “Our ceiling came alive with strange sounds that lashed our roof… as if twigs were brushing the tiles… ended up with a noise [like] giant hailstones.” Some cases were rather dramatic, such as that of local woman Marjorie Bye, who heard booming noises on her way to church that were so intense she felt paralyzed and complete helpless. At least 30 people would hear these eerie aural phenomena and there was no discernible cause for any of it.
Warminster, England
The strangeness would continue on into the new year, with a glowing cigar-shaped object seen by at least 17 residents on June 3, 1965, and on August 10 a local woman known as Mrs. Atwell would claim to have seen a bright object like a “brilliant star” travelling across the sky after being woken by a deafening droning noise. On August 17, 1965 there was a frightening incident when a thunderous boom echoed out across the country side, described as sounding like a massive bomb going off, after which scared locals saw in the sky “a monstrous orange flame was seen in the sky, crackling and hissing.” At the time there were other reports of sporadic booming noises, with some rumors saying that at times the shockwaves of these were so potent that they had actually killed off flocks of pigeons or other birds, causing them to simply drop dead from the air to flutter down lifeless, and in some cases even human beings had suffered negative physical symptoms or had even been knocked down by the blasts. Some people were also claiming that their cars had stopped operating in the presence of the phenomenon, or that it had damaged buildings, and it was all very dramatic.
The frightened residents would actually call a town meeting on August 27, 1965, to discuss what to do about all of this oddness, and the town hall would be packed with hundreds of spooked locals and town officials. Here the panic and fear would be fanned by a man named David Halton, who verified that pigeons were mysteriously dying and also claimed that rats had been turning up mutilated without any explanation. It was at this meeting that we make the acquaintance of local news reporter and editor for Warminster Journal Arthur Shuttlewood, who would become instrumental to really launching the phenomena, now being called “The Warminster Thing,” into the public consciousness at large. He would claim to have gathered reports from dozens of people who had heard the noises or seen strange things in the sky since the early 1960s, and as soon as his articles began hitting the papers there would be a deluge of new reports as people wrote or called in with their own stories. Within the coming year there would eventually be around 1,000 reports gathered of all manner of UFO activity in the skies of Warminster, and most of these were compiled and kept in a dossier by Shuttlewood himself.
Through all of this there was even a photo of one of the UFOs offered up to Shuttlewood by a man named Gordon Faulkner, after which it gained wide publicity when it was printed in an issue of The Daily Mirror in September of 1965, and this would truly catapult the local phenomena to worldwide attention. Unfortunately, Shuttlewood would become a quite obsessed with it all and not a little unhinged as the months went by. He began giving increasingly bizarre, possibly embellished accounts of the phenomena and he really derailed into the realm of bizarre when he made the claim that he had actually been contacted and subsequently met up with the aliens responsible.
The whole weird affair apparently began on September 25, 1965, when Shuttlewood claimed that he had received a call from an individual calling himself “Karne,” and who claimed to be an alien from the planet Aestsa. Shuttlewood then apparently told the individual to prove it, and almost at that very instant there was a knock at the door. Shuttlewood claimed that the person at the door was Karne, and that he had blotchy skin and unnerving eyes without pupils. The two had then allegedly had a chat, during which Karne warned of an impending catastrophic war and warned that humankind was on the fast track to doom. The conversation would apparently come to an end when Karne, who was having an increasingly tough time breathing and had been fidgety from the start, looked at a gold device on his wrist, excused himself, and then left to never be seen again. Oddly there would be other reports of mysterious figures in the area at the time, including a hodgepodge of faceless humanoids, very tall humanoids dressed in white, strangers wearing balaclavas, helmeted figures, and a grey-clad figure with “streaming fair hair,” making it all even weirder still.
In the meantime, many curiosity seekers and UFOlogists had flocked to the region and were engaging in “sky watches,” mostly concentrated on Cradle Hill, Starr Hill and Cley Hill, where most of the sightings had occurred, and through it all Arthur Shuttlewood was reporting and spinning tales. By all accounts he had devoted his life to the phenomena, and was the one largely responsible for keeping the hysteria going. He would go on to write two books on the Warminster Thing, and he would also insist that he had met the aliens on several other occasions, making it unclear if he was honestly reporting all of this stuff or had gone off the deep end, how much of his reporting was based on actual sightings and how much he made up. Whatever one may think, Shuttlewood would stand by his stories and insist it was all true right up until his death in 1996.
Arthur Shuttlewood
The Warminster UFO flap would remain strong right up into the 1970s, during which time the town added crop circles to its long list of oddities, after which it seems to have died down, although there have been sporadic UFO sightings right up into the present. Although it has faded with time and slipped somewhat into obscurity, the whole affair Warminster Thing affair is still remembered locally and by UFOLogists. In 2015 there was a conference held in Warminster to mark the 50-year anniversary of the original sightings, during which several prominent researchers were in attendance, and later that same year a wall coated with murals was erected to commemorate the incident. To this day the name Warminster has been closely linked to UFOs, with the region still considered to be one of England’s premiere hotspots for UFO sightings.
What happened in this quiet rural town and why did it attract so much activity? There have been lots of ideas, the most popular of which is that this all had something to do with the nearby military base on Salisbury Plain, although why an Army barracks would have anything to do with unexplainable aerial activity or the testing of experimental aircraft is anyone’s guess. Other ideas include that it all has something to do with Stonehenge or of course that this was really aliens, drawn here because of the base or for any number of inscrutable reasons we may never understand and are perhaps not meant to. It is unclear what could have been going on here, or how credible Shuttlewood or any of the other witnesses ever were. Was this the doing of aliens, military experiments, or simply the product of panic and mass hysteria? There is no way to know, and the area of Warminster remains a place steeped in mystery and with a reputation of having one of the most intense UFO flaps England has ever seen.
But me being me, my mind went straight to Mars. I have long been aware of science fiction's vision of Earth receiving space souvenirs that carry organisms that might be dangerous to Earth's fragile biosphere — that's me, and you, too! Such arrivals could be accidental, or they could be purposeful.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump's budget request for NASA supports the development of the Mars sample return mission, a robotic program that would haul back the goods from the Red Planet.
What if such samples turned out to be dangerous, and contagiously so? Are there some Mars-oriented lessons to be learned from COVID-19 and other major infectious diseases?
In 1973, Carl Sagan published "The Cosmic Connection — An Extraterrestrial Perspective," offering this view of Martian pathogens:
"Precisely because Mars is an environment of great potential biological interest, it is possible that on Mars there are pathogens, organisms which, if transported to the terrestrial environment, might do enormous biological damage — a Martian plague, the twist in the plot of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds, but in reverse. This is an extremely grave point. On the one hand, we can argue that Martian organisms cannot cause any serious problems to terrestrial organisms, because there has been no biological contact for 4.5 billion years between Martian and terrestrial organisms. On the other hand, we can argue equally well that terrestrial organisms have evolved no defenses against potential Martian pathogens, precisely because there has been no such contact for 4.5 billion years. The chance of such an infection may be very small, but the hazards, if it occurs, are certainly very high."
Concern and ignorance
What might happen if such an infection does occur? "I think that it might be instructive to consider the climate of concern that accompanies the current situation with coronavirus," John Rummel, a senior scientist at the SETI Institute in California and NASA's planetary protection officer from 1986 to 1993 and 1997 to 2006, told Space.com.
For example, the diagnostic tests available for coronavirus right now aren't perfectly accurate, and it can take more than a week after infection for symptoms to develop. And while a terrestrial infection might be limited by the change of seasons, that wouldn't necessarily hold true for a foreign disease vector.
"I think that the challenge for a Mars sample return activity is to be open about precautions taken in the face of ignorance," Rummel said, "which is what we have … when we discuss life on Mars."
Schools of thought
Scientists have various schools of thought on hauling Mars samples back to our planet, Rummel said. But the planned, precautionary approach, based on strict containment and testing for life and biohazards, is compatible with the potential to discover life in a sample, or elsewhere on Mars by other means, as it would still allow for a sample to be returned.
"If one finds life in the sample, one has a good chance of being able to study it in containment," Rummel said. "The downside of this approach is that it is more expensive [in terms of establishing the containment facility], up-front, than ignoring life on Mars."
Rummel said that, if something like the coronavirus situation pops up, then any other containment facility may not be available in a timely way, and may not be able to meet the cleanliness requirements that will ensure that any organisms discovered in the sample came from Mars, and not from Earth after the sample arrives.
Precautionary steps
Is the emergence of a new epidemic here on our planet a cue about taking precautionary steps regarding planetary protection?
Catharine Conley was NASA's planetary protection officer from 2006 until November 2017. "As with historical infectious disease epidemics, the coronavirus that's spreading currently is another example of why it's so important to understand the consequences of interacting with environments humans rarely contact and then distributing widely whatever [they] picked up," she said.
"In the case of Mars exploration, it's most likely that Earth organisms transported to Mars could cause problems for future inhabitants," Conley said. "If Mars life exists and is brought to Earth, it's more likely to cause effects on the environment, like the algae recently found to be warming the ice in Greenland, than that it would be a virulent human pathogen."
However, if Mars life is related to terrestrial life, Conley said, "that makes it much harder to distinguish from Earth contamination — and also, just like diseases that jump species, more likely to affect us, too."
One of the games that the both the mainstream and the conspiracy theory media play is connecting the dots. One of the biggest dots today is the spread/epidemic/pandemic of the coronavirus. Some of the connections make sense, other make you go “Hmm,” like a recent story that the virus was brought to Earth by a meteorite which dropped it (accidentally or intentionally – different dots) over Wuhan before crashing elsewhere in China. Today’s story may be a little beyond “Hmm” to the realm of “Wha-at?” before coming back to settle between “You know …” and “Uh-oh.” A video of the feed from the live cam on the International Space Station shows 22 minutes of what appears to be a large UFO parked nearby. One thought offered by the person who uploaded it is that it could be aliens fleeing Earth because of the coronavirus. Where does that push YOUR Needle to … “Hmm,” “Wha-at?”, “Uh-oh” or “I thought aliens were supposed to be protecting us from destroying ourselves”?
Meanwhile, are they watching the ISS?
“I was watching the NASA live space station cam when I noticed the camera zooming in on a strange object coming from below the space station. At first I thought it was a capsule or satellite, but its speed increased and after 22 minutes it shot up and into deep space.”
Those quotes are from the video (watch it here) uploaded by Scott C. Waring, the always controversial owner of the YouTube Channel and website ET Data Base. Waring is well known for seeing aliens in every UFO sighting, ISS feed or Mars rover video he posts, but this latest ISS feed video has a few twists that make it a little unusual. For one thing, it’s much longer than most ISS videos of strange anomalies (22 minutes). That’s primarily because NASA doesn’t cut it off or cut away as is normally the case in these situations. In addition, at one point the camera zooms in on the UFO, an action Waring says was NASA’s doing, not his. There is no recognition of any of this on the accompanying audio feed. While Waring offer thoughts on the shape, it’s tough to imagine this is a spaceship. However, it acts like one at the end as it seems to suddenly fly off, out of the camera’s range.
“Also … this coronavirus is spreading like a wildfire out of control, it’s possible that aliens know what going to happen and they decided abandon the earth. The virus may be very dangerous to aliens too. If this is true, expect to see a big rise in UFO sightings as they appear from underground bases and leave Earth’s atmosphere.”
We’re outta here!
While the astronauts don’t seem to have any comments about the UFO, Waring has a great one connecting UFO sightings in general with the coronavirus. Aliens fleeing Earth is a seldom-heard theory in comparison to the more popular ones like the zoo theory (aliens are observing without interfering) and the benevolence theory (UFOs around nuclear plants are protecting us from destroying ourselves). In fact, the more common virus theory is that the aliens would infect Earth and its inhabitants with something they’ve already developed an immunity to – like the diseases brought by Europeans that nearly wiped out the indigenous people of the Americas. It’s much more believable that an advanced civilization capable of interplanetary or intergalactic space travel would be better prepared to deal with viruses and diseases in the places they visit than vice versa.
On the other hand … who knows?
Thank you to Scott C. Waring at ET Data Base for the thought-provoking dot connection.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union was in full effect, with each of these superpowers pushing the limits of technology and rushing to be the first one to put a man into this new frontier of the unexplored. The Soviets had had some issues in their pursuits, plagued by a series of tragedies that seemed to have left them grounded. On one occasion in October of 1960 a Soviet rocket exploded upon take off, killing around 150 people, and this was followed by a cosmonaut who was immolated within his space capsule during a fire, but despite these setbacks on April 12th, 1961, the Soviets were proud to announce that they had put the first man in space. 27-year-old Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had been put into orbit, becoming the first man to circumnavigate Earth orbit in an artificial craft, the Vostock 1, and he became a media sensation because of it, making headlines all over the world. However, there has long been talk that there were others up there before even this, and that they managed to vanish into a dark history of conspiracies and cover-ups, with the ultimate fates of these lost cosmonauts swept under the carpet to fall between the cracks of history.
There has long been talk that the Soviets had actually managed more excursions into space before and after Gagarin’s flight than they have let on. Indeed, not long before Gagarin’s launch there had been rumors that a successful space flight had already been made, with a news crew allegedly even on the ground covering it, but this story oddly just sort of disappeared and never aired, with focus instead directed solely to Gagarin’s mission. According to the news source that had been set to cover it, they insisted that a flight had been successful, piloted by decorated ace pilot and cosmonaut Vladimir Ilyushin, but that it had gone off course upon re-entry, leading to his capture by the Chinese government and was therefore unsuitable for showing the world the technological mastery of the Soviet Union. This was backed up by several journalists, most notably Denis Ogden of the British Daily Worker and French journalist Eduard Bobrovsky.
Yuri Gagarin
Ilyushin was soon being unofficially deemed the first man in space, but curiously the pilot himself was completely silent, according to official reasons because he was recovering from an automobile accident. The Soviet government was having none of it, denying that he was even a cosmonaut at all, and all the while details of the Illyushin incident were being changed all the time, making it all murkier. The Soviet government would also change its stance on the pilot’s absence, changing its story on several occasions, saying he was in a coma or other tales, and no one had any idea what was going on. In the end skepticism would be laid squarely on Ogden’s shoulders, as his article in the April 11 edition of the British communist The Daily Worker is the origin of every other article on the matter, and although he claimed that he was being provided information by an “inside source” there is no concrete verification as to who this could have been, and it may have all been pure stipulation and speculation for all we know.
There were also several reports from as early as 1959 that seemed to point to some amount of secrecy from the Soviets in relation to their space program. In one case, an alleged high-ranking Czech Communist created a stir when he leaked supposed top secret information concerning several unofficial space forays carried out by cosmonauts Alexei Ledovsky, Andrei Mitkov, Sergei Shiborin and Maria Gromova, all ending in tragedy, although the Soviets would not admit to this. There was also a report from space theoretician Hermann Oberth, who claimed that the Soviets had put someone in suborbital flight as early as 1958, but that the cosmonaut had died in the process, and he also related several other Soviet pre-Gagarin failed space missions, apparently from information kept by intelligence agencies. In 1959 there was also an article that appeared in the news publication Ogoniok, which claimed that high altitude parachutists Colonel Pyotr Dolgov, Ivan Kachur, and Alexey Grachov had all been involved with testing high altitude space flight equipment when they either died or mysteriously vanished to never be heard from again.
More well known are the allegations made by famed science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein in 1960. According to Heinlein, on May 15, 1960 he was informed by members of the Soviet Army that a man had been put into space on that day aboard what was called the Korabl-Sputnik 1, which had experienced mechanical problems to leave the cosmonaut stranded in orbit, but that officials had quickly shut the story down, backtracking to claim that it had been an unmanned flight. If there was a cosmonaut aboard, then whoever it was is forever lost in space without even being officially recognized, more or less erased from history.
Adding weight to such claims was a pair of Italian brothers by the names of Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia, who were ham radio enthusiasts and had supposedly been monitoring Soviet and American space transmissions since 1957. According to them they would eventually record thousands of hours of communications from Sputnik, Vostok, Explorer, and many other Soviet and American missions over the years, but some of these were more chilling than most. In 1960 they came forward to make the claim that they had picked up Morse code transmissions from outer space which they believed conclusively proved that the Soviets had someone up there, in a craft they deemed to be moving away from the Earth, suggesting that something had gone wrong to send the poor cosmonauts hurtling out into the far reaches of cold space. The brothers would claim to have captured at least nine separate emergency transmissions from various doomed cosmonauts, with one supposedly of a cosmonaut asphyxiating during his final transmission, one of cosmonaut seemingly in the midst of a cardiac arrest, and another of an alleged unidentified female cosmonaut who apparently burned up on re-entry. Her haunting last transmission would reportedly say:
Come in… come in… come in… Listen! Come in! Talk to me! I am hot! I am hot! Come in! What? Forty-five? What? Fifty? Yes. Yes, yes, breathing. Oxygen, oxygen… I am hot. This… isn’t this dangerous? Transmission begins now. Forty-one. Yes, I feel hot. I feel hot, it’s all… it’s all hot. I can see a flame! I can see a flame! I can see a flame! Thirty-two… thirty-two. Am I going to crash? Yes, yes I feel hot… I am listening, I feel hot, I will re-enter. I’m hot!
This particular recording is notable because it would have not only been a cosmonaut who had beaten Gagarin to space, but would have also been the very first woman in space, and yet if she was real we do not know her name or who she was. Indeed, at the time the brothers’ recordings made headlines and were widely publicized despite continued Soviet statements that they were false. Over the years there would be much doubt cast on the recordings of “lost cosmonauts” made by Judica-Cordiglia brothers, with much of the skepticism based on the fact that not only were the transmissions blatantly not conforming to usual communications protocols and were often inaccurate with relation to technical and operational details, but these transmissions were not picked up by the numerous audio monitoring arrays set up by the Americans, British, French, and Germans, and additionally often featured Russian that was sloppy and not grammatically correct, suggesting that it was all an elaborate hoax or that the brothers had been tricked.
Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia
Stories of mysterious lost cosmonauts continued well into later years as well, with the most famous of these perhaps being the claims that the Soviets were the first to put someone on the moon, or at least try. A long running rumor and conspiracy theory is that just before the historic Apollo 11 landing on the lunar surface the Soviets had desperately thrown together their own mission to beat the Americans to the punch. Allegedly, on July 3, 1969, the Soviets attempted to launch a crewed Soyuz 7K-L3 craft, but it would spectacularly explode on the launch pad, killing all aboard and quickly covered up by the government and officially explained as an unmanned test of lunar hardware. More mysterious is a claim that in early 1969 cosmonaut Andrei Mikoyan and another crew member had been successfully launched towards the moon, but that technicl glitches and miscalculations had conspired to make sure that they had then overshot their target to go hurtling out into the blackness of space.
There have also allegations made by Russian fiction writer Pelevin that the Soviet unmanned Luna, Korabl-Sputnik 1, and Lunokhod rover missions were actually crewed by cosmonauts on suicide missions, which would have technically put cosmonauts on the moon before the Americans, although there is no evidence whatsoever of this ever happening, and the craft involved were not designed to hold hman beings. In 2001, a senior engineer on the Soviet space program came forward to allege that the Judica-Cordiglia brothers had been on the mark, and that pilots named Ledovskikh, Shaborin and Mitkov were launched from the Kapustin Yar cosmodrome in 1957, 1958 and 1959 only to vanish off of the face of the earth. Is there any truth to this all?
This is the problem with most of these reports, a lack of any real confirmed evidence, plus the fact that the United States would have been very quick to jump any any such Soviet failures yet there is nothing to suggest they ever did. In the meantime, the first official man in space would remain Yuri Gagarin, who in later years would spiral into alcoholism and before dying in 1968 in a jet crash he would for his part deny the rumors that anyone had been put into actual space by the Soviets before him. Interestingly, Gagarin would also make some rather odd claims along the supernatural, saying that had had a weird space encounter in April of 1961. At two points during his spaceflight aboard the Vostok-1, Gagarin allegedly had inexplicably gone silent and lost contact, and when he was asked about it later he was not sure what had happened, thinking he may have just briefly lost consciousness. In later years during hypnotic regression, Gagarin would come out to claim that he could remember seeing an enormous, mysterious figure floating in space in front of him, and that he had heard a voice in his head saying, “Do not worry, everything will be fine. You’ll come back to Earth,” before the apparition vanished into thin air right before his eyes. Had he lost his mind or was this just one more strange oddity to add to the rest?
In the end we are left with quite a mess of conflicting reports and allegations concerning the darker side of the Soviet’s space program. Were there really all of these cosmonauts who perhaps predated Gagarin and beyond who just sort of were erased from the records, in some cases with their identities never known at all? On the face of it it certainly seems plausible that such things might get buried under the copious amount of secret files and hidden documents from the Cold War era. It would also make sense that the Soviet Union would want to erase their missteps and mistakes, after all, this was a time of intense back and forth bravado and competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, when there were certainly instances when nothing could be taken at face value. Yet, there has been nothing truly concrete dug up on lost cosmonauts or any evidence of cover ups of their deaths or disappearances. If they ever really did make history, then it is buried history, they are perhaps forever lost to the mists of time, with no posthumous awards or recognition and faded away and forgotten. Whatever the truth may be, the story of the lost phantom cosmonauts has been discussed and debated to this day, and shows no signs of going anywhere.
One of the lesser-known aspects of the UFO subject is that which revolves around what we might accurately call “UFO impostors.” As a perfect example of more than a few, Brad Steigertold me the following bizarre story just a few years before he died: “On a unfortunate number of occasions, I received letters complaining of my outrageous and insulting behavior while speaking at a conference. There were claims that I had openly berated my audience, calling them stupid for accepting the very premise of UFOs. A close friend happened to arrive on the scene after one pseudo-Steiger had departed and tried his best to assure the sponsors of the event that the rowdy, disrespectful speaker could not have been the real Brad. In his letter, my friend warned me that he had visited a number of lecture halls where the impostor had damned his audiences. ‘Someone seems out to damage your reputation,’ he advised.”
Steiger continued on with his story: “In a most bizarre twist, dozens of men and women have approached me at various lectures and seminars, congratulating me about the manner in which I bested Dr. Carl Sagan in debate. The event allegedly occurred after a lecture when I happened to bump into the great scientist in a restaurant. The eatery, according to the witnesses, was crowded with those who had attended the seminar, and they egged on a debate between myself and Dr. Sagan. I mopped up the floor with him, countering his every argument against the reality of UFOs. The truth is that I never met Dr. Sagan, therefore, neither had I ever debated him. But from coast to coast, there are those who claim to have witnessed my triumphal bout.”
That a number of people claimed to have seen Steiger debating with Sagan suggests that this mysterious man was not just an impostor, but a downright doppelganger! Now, there is the mysterious matter of John Keel’s secretary – who turned out to be nothing of the sort at all. Keel found himself reluctantly dragged into the mysterious mix of UFO impostors in a very weird fashion. Of the turbulent times from 1966 to 1967 – when his research in and around both West Virginia and Ohio, in relation to the Mothman mystery, was at its height in the town of Point Pleasant – Keel had some very interesting things to say:
“A blond woman in her thirties, well-groomed, with a soft southern accent, visited people in Ohio and West Virginia whom I had interviewed. She introduced herself as ‘John Keel’s secretary,’ thus winning instant admission. The clipboard she carried held a complicated form filled with personal questions about the witnesses’ health, income, the type of cars they owned, their general family background, and some fairly sophisticated questions about their UFO sightings. Not the type of questions a run-of-the-mill UFO buff would ask. I have no secretary. I didn’t learn about this woman until months later when one of my friends in Ohio wrote to me and happened to mention, ‘As I told your secretary when she was here …’ Then I checked and found out she had visited many people, most of whom I had never mentioned in print. How had she located them?”
How, indeed? There really was no definitive answer to that question. It’s worth noting, however, that Keel uncovered additional cases that involved clipboard-carrying characters who would turned up at people’s homes in Point Pleasant, all asking the same kinds of questions that Keel’s “secretary” asked, but this time posing as census takers. They were nothing of the sort. But, you knew that, right? Of course you did.
Over the years I’ve had a number of weird phone calls revolving around the UFO phenomenon: strange electronic noises, crazy threats; the list goes on. Somewhat related to this is the issue of phone interference, which is a regular phenomenon in the field of UFO research. A perfect example concerns my June 2011 book, The Real Men in Black. When I was promoting the book on radio shows, one of the things I discussed with the hosts was the matter of UFO encounters and telephone interference. We’re talking about strange voices on the line, odd buzzing and bleeping noises, and hang-up calls. Several people contacted me to report they were experiencing the exact same thing – but only after they had read the book back in 2011. The number of such cases I have on file (some involving me, but with most of them coming from UFO witnesses and other researchers) is so many that I could write an entire book on the phenomenon of UFOs and phone calls of the strange type. Today, however, I will share with you the saga of a strange situation that occurred back in the summer of 1968.
The story tells of UFO researcher “Dan O.,” who told the story to the late writer on all-things paranormal, Brad Steiger. It was the night of July 13, 1968 when Dan crossed paths (or lines) with a mysterious woman on the other end of his phone At the time, Dan was on the phone, speaking with a colleague in the UFO field, when their phone call was suddenly, and mysteriously, interrupted. Dan told Steiger: “The third party identified herself as a Mrs. Slago, who, as she said, was accidentally connected with our line. She had been listening to our conversation strictly out of curiosity.”
Despite the fact that Mrs. Slago was a complete stranger and had, according to her, intruded upon the conversation by mistake, Dan decided to tell her about his UFO research, since she had at least heard snippets of what he and his friend had been talking about. As the conversation between Dan and Mrs. Slago progressed, however, the likelihood that her intrusion was all a big mistake, and nothing else, quickly evaporated. Dan’s words make that extremely clear. He told Steiger that Mrs. Slago suggested investigating UFOs was not a wise thing to do, and that the matter of UFOs possibly being of alien origin was a matter Dan should steer well clear of. Dan continued: “She also stated that UFO organizations should not attempt to further the investigation and study of UFOs, because as she put it, ‘Earth people do not understand.’ She suddenly stopped short of what she was about to say, as if she caught herself about to say something that I should not hear.”
Things then got even odder, and somewhat troubling: the woman warned Dan that he should cease his UFO investigations, that it was not wise to speak on the phone about such matters, and that her name was not Slago, after all. It was Nelson, and she worked as a “researcher” for the local police. At that point. Mrs. Slago – or Nelson – abruptly left the conversation. The story wasn’t over, however, as Dan demonstrated to Brad: “When we checked with the police headquarters, the officers told us that they had no knowledge of either a ‘Mrs. Nelson’ or a ‘Mrs. Slago’ being connected with any phase of police research. Following this incident, we had a complete check made on our telephone lines, but the check revealed no evidence of wire-tapping or anything of that sort. A check with the telephone company revealed that a misconnection of this type could not possibly have been made.”
This is just one example of many that connect UFO researchers and curious phone calls. For those who want to find out more about the story of Dan O. and Mrs. Slago, you can do so in the pages of Timothy Green Beckley’s book, UFO Silencers, which tells the whole story.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET De InSight robot van NASA, die zich op Mars bevindt, heeft voor de eerste keer vastgesteld dat Mars seismisch actief is. Daarmee zijn marsbevingen een feit.
Wetenschappers hebben op maandag laten weten dat de InSight sinds november 2018, toen de robot landde op de rode planeet landde, 450 bevingen op Mars heeft geregistreerd.
De bevingen komen door de afkoeling van de planeet, die 4,5 miljard jaar geleden startte. “Als de planeet afkoelt, trekt hij samen waardoor de buitenste lagen breken”, aldus Bruce Banerdt van Jet Propulsion Laboratory van NASA in Californië. De bevingen zijn verschillend van de onze op de Aarde, omdat de buitenste laag van onze planeet uit tektonische platen bestaat, die Mars niet heeft.
Het bestaan van de marsbevingen werd al lang verondersteld maar is nu pas voor de eerste keer ook gedetecteerd.
This Former NASA Employee Knows What Is Really on the Moon
This Former NASA Employee Knows What Is Really on the Moon
Dr. R. Ken Johnston, Sr. is a retired aerospace engineer, US Marine. He was asked to destroy a nearly-complete collection of 8″ x 10″ glossy photo-prints from the Apollo program, photos that are not available from NASA. He refused and even kept some of the evidence.
“Absolute Full disclosure” will never happen, way too many humans involved from Terra III (Earth) that have done horrifying things to their own kind like human trafficking and for super advanced technology and $ et cetera. PP
Giant UFO Or Moon Passes In Front Of Sun Then Turns Around! UFO Sighting News.
Giant UFO Or Moon Passes In Front Of Sun Then Turns Around! UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Feb 23, 2020 Location of sighting: Earths sun
I was using SOHO helioviewer to look at the sun and found this very interesting object passing front of the sun and then do a 180 degree reversal. Its odd, I have never seen that before. The object reversed directions like it was on rails. Since it didn't orbit the sun we know its not a planet like Mercury, Venus or Earth. Perhaps its a moon? Because the moons of these three planets do rotate and could perhaps be seen at a curving edge of the rotation around a planet...poking itself in front of the sun for a quick selfie...but that just a guess. There are a lot of UFOs out there, some planet size and this is crazy cool. I just don't know...the fact that it reversed itself really makes me think massive UFO...but my theory of the moon could hold up. I guess we will never know for sure. Scott C. Waring
Dark Round UFO In Low Orbit Over Moon, Feb 25, 2020, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Dark Round UFO In Low Orbit Over Moon, Feb 25, 2020, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Feb 25, 2020 Location of sighting: earths moon Here is a great video by Youtube user Skywatch International. He caught a round UFO flying in low orbit over the moons surface. He said he used a Nikon P900 camera to catch it and the detail is amazing. Check out the video below and see for yourself. There is a lot of alien activity this week on our moon. Scott C. Waring
Sky-watcher spotted Secret Base in the Apenine Lunar Mountains
Sky-watcher spotted Secret Base in the Apenine Lunar Mountains
Constructed lines running parallel to one another in the Apenine Lunar Mountains could be an indication that someone has built a secret space base on the moon.
Coincidence or not but almost similar constructed lines running parallel to one another have also been spotted in in Antarctica.
This enormous structure of 600 x 600 meters also could be an operational base, but who has built it and why in the middle of nowhere? Is it a research station or is it used for other more secret purposes?
Not only you have to zoom all the way to the surface to find this structure but normally Google Earth mentions the name of the base, but not in this case which is very strange if you have nothing to hide.
The video below shows the moon base and more surface close up's in 5K. high quality.
This is an old UFO footage recorded on 3rd August 2018 but it was just now submitted to MUFON. This happened in Denia, Spain.
Witness report:
Unknown Orb/Light object travelling at steady speed along the coast of Denia, Spain. My wife, my son (7 years old at that time) and I were on the beach in Denia (38°51’02.3″N 0°05’59.5″E) having a relaxing afternoon while on holidays, when at around 17:30, my wife noticed on her right-hand side, a bright object cruising slowly just around above the Castle of Denia (38°50’50.6″N 0°06’49.0″E) towards our position, following the coastline in a South-East North-west path (38°53’53.9″N 0°03’54.0″E). In the beginning, we thought it was just a drone, but the object seemed too big and too bright from the distance to be just a drone, despite the sun could well reflect on metallic objects depending on the angle and position. As the object was approaching, the brightness didn’t seem to change but rather pulsate, which we started to think about something unusual. A commercial flight was around at that time but it was at a much further and a higher altitude and didn’t interfere in any way with the object. I decided to get my phone and record it. I was a bit frustrated because in previous years I bring my camcorder with me for holidays and I like to record events and fun times. That particular year I decided not to get the camcorder and rely on solely on my smartphone. With the camcorder, I could have used the powerful optical zoom and better quality image to record the event.
The object was travelling on a steady speed and steady path position (The object didn’t move on the sky up and down, it was me trying to steady my phone). I estimate the object was travelling in between 100-200 miles/h and an altitude of around 3000 feet or possibly less, with an angle with respect of the horizon of around 35 degrees.
The object seemed to be pulsating and was really quickly intermittently disappearing and appearing with black shades in contrast with its brightness.
As the sky was so clear cloudless, there is no appreciation of the object moving. Only at 2:21 in the video, I did a quick shot of the beach as a point of reference because I didn’t want to lose track of it.
It took my attention that while we were on the beach, no one noticed anything or no one noticed that we were very excited looking and filming this object in the sky like they weren’t aware that we were there. There was a couple just sitting 4 meters in front of us, facing nearly our direction and they didn’t seem to care about our excitement or our finding in the sky…. They didn’t even bother to look at what was going on in the sky… Weird! In fact, no one on the beach, and there were quite a few people, seemed to notice the strange event.
We believe we sighted a very good case of an unknown object of unknown origin but you can prove us wrong of course.
The object seemed to be flickering even more as it was disappearing in the distance towards Valencia. At one point we couldn’t see it anymore.
SCIENTISTS REVEAL 3 STEPS TO DEFEND EARTH FROM CATASTROPHIC ASTEROID IMPACTS
SCIENTISTS REVEAL 3 STEPS TO DEFEND EARTH FROM CATASTROPHIC ASTEROID IMPACTS
t is time to get serious about our plans to save the world.
In 1998's Armageddon, humanity’s only chance of survival hung on Bruce Willis blowing up an asteroid in space, seconds before it collided with Earth and ended the human race. Unfortunately, back in the real world and more than two decades on, the real-life plans to deflect any potential asteroid on a collision course with Earth are not much more advanced — and Bruce Willis tends to get lucky.
Now, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed three strategies that could help save Earth — and our species — from a devastating asteroid impact. And here's the thing: One of them might actually work.
Armageddon may be fiction, but the fact is we have good reason to worry about asteroid impacts. Some 65 million years ago, a massive asteroid hit Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs. It could happen again — and, if it does, it would have catastrophic consequences for life on Earth. Teams of scientists monitor the skies for these giant asteroids, tracking the objects that zip through our Solar System and their chances of collision with Earth.
Current deflection methods rest on a one shot, one-opportunity style strategy that bets life as we know it on the success of a first, and only, try. But in a new study, the MIT researchers advocate scrapping this all-or-nothing approach and outline three steps that could help deflect asteroids bound for Earth.
THEY ARE:
A remote-sensing orbiter to characterize the asteroid's shape, mass distribution, surface properties, and materials.
A sensor to measure its trajectory.
An impactor (i.e. a missile of some kind) to nudge the asteroid off course and back out into space.
“Most of the research in understanding and deflecting asteroids that could threaten the Earth, this goes under the heading of planetary defense,” Olivier de Weck, professor at MIT and lead author of the new study, tells Inverse.
“Most everything you will find there is predicated on the idea of a one shot. You get one shot at this and that is it. That is what we wanted to challenge, no you don’t just get one shot at it,” he says.
The new guidelines are detailed in a paper published this week in the journal Acta Astronautica.
3-STEP PLAN
Rather than relying on the success of one, all-or-nothing mission, the ideal asteroid deflection mission is instead a three-step process, the researchers say.
“If you have enough time and you want a high probability of success, what you do is you send three missions,” de Weck says.
MISSION ONE: CHARACTERIZE
The first mission would involve a preliminary remote-sensing orbiter to characterize the asteroid's shape, mass distribution, surface properties, and the material that it’s made of.
This initial step would be similar to NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, which launched in 2016 and is currently orbiting around Bennu, a potentially hazardous asteroid that could one day threaten Earth. OSIRIS-REx is designed to map the asteroid and bring back a sample from its surface to Earth for scientists to study.
OSIRIS REx is orbiting around asteroid Bennu to characterize this threatening rock.NASA
Once the orbiter characterizes the asteroid, step two begins.
MISSION TWO: TRAJECTORY
The next step involves a small impact mission designed to hit the asteroid just enough to measure its trajectory — this impact would not be powerful enough to actually deflect the asteroid or change its course.
These two first steps are crucial before the final step to fully deflect the asteroid. Together, they will help scientists account for different variables and uncertainties, the researchers say.
“Nobody has really seriously looked at the impact of uncertainty, what if you don’t know the asteroid really well?” de Weck says.
“You could actually make things worse instead of making them better.”
In the worst case scenario, he compares the asteroid to an apple getting shot by a bullet. The bullet would go straight through, and have very little impact on the apple itself.
In the best case scenario, scientists would know enough about the asteroid ahead of time to enable phase three — the impact.
An artist's impression of the 3-step plan to defend Earth from asteroids in action.MIT
MISSION THREE: IMPACT
Once steps one and two are complete, step three is to launch a counter defense. The ideal impactor is a basic kinetic impactor, the researchers say, which works by shooting a projectile into space to nudge the asteroid in a different direction.
This would essentially be a missile capable of creating a large enough impact on the asteroid that it would not blow through it, but instead would throw it off course and back out into space.
This last and final phase will hopefully rescue the fate of humanity and not lead to our fiery deaths by asteroid (or by accident).
But this strategy still depends on how much time you have before collision.
WARNING TIME
The researchers based the new 3-step plan on two asteroids, Bennu and Apophis.
Apophis is a near-Earth asteroid that stretches 370 meters in diameter. Named after the ancient Egyptian god of chaos, the asteroid caused panic in December 2014, when scientists estimated a 2.7 percent chance that it might hit Earth in 2029.
This animation shows how close Apophis will get to Earth during its 2029 approach.NASA, JPL
These fears rested on the idea that Apophis would pass through a gravitational keyhole — an area in Earth’s gravitational field that would essentially tug on the asteroid’s trajectory.
Once an asteroid goes through a keyhole, that means it is almost guaranteed that it will collide with Earth during its next orbit around the Sun. Which, in the case of Apophis, would be the year 2036.
“The optimal strategy depends on how much warning time you have before keyhole passage,” says de Weck.
Thankfully, subsequent observations have put these fears to rest — Apophis is not on a collision course with Earth. But six years ago, the odds of a collision were 1 in 300 — worryingly close, if you ask us.
If there is ample time, the biggest hurdle would be to change the general attitude around space missions, de Weck says.
Planetary defense research is a young field, spanning just the last two decades, he says. As a result, it is not that far advanced. More time means more hard science to base any Earth-saving missions on — and a higher chance of success.
At the same time, there is a cultural problem in how we conceive of space missions — we tend to send out only one spacecraft at a time, wait for the results, and then send a follow-up mission. This one-by-one approach may hold scientists back in the event of an emergency.
“Part of the work here is to change the thinking and basically think about it with a campaign approach, where you are sending multiple satellites to accomplish a goal that a single satellite couldn’t accomplish,” de Weck says.
“As soon as you think of it as a campaign, you have a lot more degrees of freedom, there’s a lot more possibilities on how you can solve a problem.”
The first official science results from NASA's quake-hunting InSight Mars lander just came out, and they reveal a regularly roiled world.
"We've finally, for the first time, established that Mars is a seismically active planet," InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said during a teleconference with reporters Thursday (Feb. 20).
Martian seismicity falls between that of the moon and that of Earth, Banerdt added.
"In fact, it's probably close to the kind of seismic activity you would expect to find away from the [tectonic] plate boundaries on Earth and away from highly deformed areas," he said.
Probing the Martian subsurface
InSight touched down near the Martian equator in November 2018, kicking off a two-year, $850 million mission to probe the Red Planet's interior in unprecedented detail.
The stationary lander carries two main science instruments to do this work: a supersensitive suite of seismometers and a burrowing heat probe dubbed "the mole," which is designed to get at least 10 feet (3 meters) below the Red Planet's surface.
Analyses of marsquake and heat-transport measurements will allow the mission team to construct a detailed, 3D map of the Martian interior, NASA officials have said. In addition, InSight scientists are using radio signals beamed from the lander to track how much Mars wobbles on its axis over time. This information will help researchers determine how big and dense the planet's core is. (The mission's full name — Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport — references these various lines of investigation.)
Overall, InSight's observations will help scientists better understand how rocky planets such as Mars, Earth and Venus form and evolve, mission team members have said.
The mission's initial science returns, which were published today (Feb. 21) in six papers in the journals Nature Geoscience and Nature Communications, show that InSight is on track to meet that long-term goal, Banerdt said. (We have gotten a taste of these results over the past year or so, however, as mission team members have released some findings in dribs and drabs.)
The new studies cover the first 10 months of InSight's tenure on Mars, during which the lander detected 174 seismic events.
These quakes came in two flavors. One hundred and fifty of them were shallow, small-magnitude tremors whose vibrations propagated through the Martian crust. The other 24 were a bit stronger and deeper, with origins at various locales in the mantle, InSight team members said. (But even those bigger quakes weren't that powerful; they landed in the magnitude 3 to 4 range. Here on Earth, quakes generally must be at least magnitude 5.5 to damage buildings.)
That was the tremor tally through September 2019. InSight has been busy since then as well; its total quake count now stands at about 450, Banerdt said. And all of this shaking does indeed originate from Mars itself, he added; as far as the team can tell, none of the vibrations were caused by meteorites hitting the Red Planet. So, there's a lot going on beneath the planet's surface.
But that activity is quite different from what we're used to on Earth, where most quakes are caused by tectonic plates sliding against, over or under each other. Mars doesn't have active plate tectonics, the researchers said, so both types of quakes are caused by the long-term cooling of the planet since its formation 4.5 billion years ago.
"As the planet cools, it contracts, and then the brittle outer layers then have to fracture in order to sort of maintain themselves on the surface," Banerdt said. "That's kind of the long-term source of stresses."
And some Martian locales are more stressed than others. One particularly active region is the Cerberus Fossae fracture system, which lies about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) east of InSight's Elysium Planitia landing site.
The mission team traced two of the largest detected marsquakes to Cerberus Fossae, which "contains faults, volcanic flows and liquid water outflow channels with ages as recent as 2-10 Ma [million years ago], and possibly younger from impact crater counts," Banerdt and his colleagues wrote in one of the new studies.
"So, it's possible that there's actual magma at depth that's cooling," InSight deputy principal investigator Sue Smrekar, also of JPL, said during Thursday's teleconference. That cooling would lead to the contraction of the magma chamber, causing deformation of the crust, she added.
But Smrekar stressed that this is a hypothesis, not a definitive determination of what's going on at Cerberus Fossae. Indeed, though mission team members think they understand Martian seismicity in broad strokes, they're still trying to nail down how it works in detail.
A wealth of information can be gleaned from InSight's quake measurements. For example, analyses of how the seismic waves move through the Martian crust suggest there are small amounts of water mixed in with the rock, mission team members said.
"Our data is consistent with a crust which has some moisture in it, but we can't say one way or the other whether there [are] large underground reservoirs of water at this point," Banerdt said.
The new papers report a variety of other discoveries as well. For example, InSight is the first mission ever to tote a magnetometer to the Martian surface, and that instrument detected a local magnetic field about 10 times stronger than would be expected based on orbital measurements. (Mars lost its global magnetic field billions of years ago, however. This allowed solar particles to strip away the once-thick Martian atmosphere, which spurred the planet's transition from a relatively warm and wet world to the cold desert it is today.)
InSight is also taking a wealth of weather data, measuring pressure many times per second and temperature once every few seconds, Banerdt said. This information helps the mission team better understand environmental noise that could complicate interpretations of the seismic observations, but it also has considerable stand-alone value.
"This is really going to, I think, revolutionize our understanding of the interaction of the atmosphere with the surface of Mars," Banerdt said. "That's one of the things that's really going to open up a whole new window of research on Mars."
Mole update
Not everything has gone smoothly for InSight, however. Notably, the mole has been unable to get down to its prescribed depth because the Martian dirt is proving more slippery than mission team members had anticipated. (The mole's self-hammering burrowing system requires a certain amount of friction to work.)
The mission team has tried several strategies to get the mole moving, including pressing on the side of the probe with InSight's robotic arm to generate the required friction. This latter tactic has generated some halting success, but the mole remains stranded too close to the surface.
So, in the next six to eight weeks, mission team members aim to try a modification of the arm-pressing strategy, in which they'll push on the mole's back rather than its side. The goal is to get the mole about 16 inches (40 centimeters) down, at which point it will hopefully be able to start digging on its own, Banerdt said.
The InSight team would also like a bit more cooperation from Mars on the seismic side of things, if possible. The lander has not yet spotted any truly big quakes, which have the potential to paint a clearer picture of the planet's deep interior for mission scientists.
The lack of powerful quakes is no surprise, Banerdt stressed; big tremors are much rarer than their smaller counterparts here on Earth, after all. So, the team may have to wait a while to get one.
But such issues aren't derailing the mission; the team is excited about how things have gone thus far, Banerdt said.
"I think we're well on our way to getting most, if not all, of the goals that we set for ourselves 10 years ago when we started this mission," he said.
Just like any small child, a tiny star had a huge yet unexpected temper tantrum.
The little star, which is only about 8% of the sun's mass, belched a huge "superflare" of X-rays. It's a strange thing to observe for astronomers, who thought a star that small couldn't create such a large emission in that wavelength of light.
This star is very diminutive by cosmic standards. Known as J0331-27, the star is an L dwarf, the category of star so small that each star's mass is just barely enough to allow for nuclear fusion. ("Failed stars" that don't meet the mass threshold are called brown dwarfs.)
The strange flare also went unnoticed for more than a decade after it happened on July 5, 2008. It was caught by the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, but lay in an archive until a search turned up the event. It was quite the event, too, since the little star sent out more than 10 times the energy of the most intense flare sent out by our own sun.
"This is the most interesting scientific part of the discovery, because we did not expect L-dwarf stars to store enough energy in their magnetic fields to give rise to such outbursts," Beate Stelzer, a co-author on a new paper describing the event and an astrophysicist at Germany's Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics and at Italy's Astronomical Observatory of Palermo, said in an ESA statement.
Scientists don't really understand how this flare could have arisen. L dwarfs only have a surface temperature of about 3,320 degrees Fahrenheit (1,830 degrees Celsius). That's about a third of the sun's surface temperature of 10,340 F (5,730 C). At the lower temperatures of an L dwarf, astronomers' models suggested that there isn't enough energy to fuel a star's magnetic field, which would govern the flare. "We just don't know — nobody knows," Stelzer said of why the event happened.
But the astronomers did point out that XMM-Newton observed the star for 40 days and only saw the one flare, which suggests that an L dwarf takes a longer time to build up energy than the sun does — perhaps contributing to the size of the flare.
"A number of similar stars had been seen to emit super flares in the optical part of the spectrum, but this is the first unambiguous detection of such an eruption at X-ray wavelengths," ESA added in the same statement. "The wavelength is significant because it signals which part of the atmosphere the super flare is coming from: optical light comes from deeper in the star's atmosphere, near its visible surface, whereas X-rays come from higher up in the atmosphere."
Over 100 Stars Are Missing! Sky Quakes, Artificial Dimensions, Machine Elves & Ghosts
Over 100 Stars Are Missing! Sky Quakes, Artificial Dimensions, Machine Elves & Ghosts
Anyone looking for something to binge watch? Here’s some MIND BLOWING stuff! Full version of a new 5 part series… Where are the stars going? Does Time exist? The 33rd Parallel, Megaliths, Missing stars, New Constellations, 13th sign of the zodiac, Strange sounds in the sky,
A.I. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, machine elves, deepDream machine art, chakras, dimensions, New Age Horoscopes, light workers and energy workers, bad trips, the “trip” gatekeeper… and so much MORE! (Please stick around to the end… saved the best for last
Inexplicable Ancient Artifacts... Experts Are Still Trying to Explain These Relics
Inexplicable Ancient Artifacts... Experts Are Still Trying to Explain These Relics
One of the world’s leading experts on ancient Artifacts shares his unique collection of relics from long lost civilizations that appear to have been more advanced than we thought.
This information is amazing , where did you find this guy he’s a gift from the gods.I never realized how many private collectors are out there hording our history , the same history that has been hidden from us for thousands of years , but i’m glad they do because they preserve it instead of the establishment destroying it! Tim O’Ney
Inexplicable Ancient Artifacts…Experts Are Still Trying To Explain These Relics
Black Disk Shoots Past Moon While Youtube Livestreams! Feb 10, 2020, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Black Disk Shoots Past Moon While Youtube Livestreams! Feb 10, 2020, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Feb 10, 2020
Location of sighting: Earths moon
This was brought to my attention by a Youtuber named Willease. He posted this video of a persons live streaming...where a UFO suddenly appears for a split second. The UFO is oval shaped and looks like a disk. Its only visible for a second so you have to watch the video carefully. Stop the video at 57 sec mark to see the UFO well. An awesome example of a disk. This is not a satellite, because it has no antennas or solar panels, its not the space station, because its totally the wrong shape...wow, just wow!
UFO On The Coast Of Denia, Spain 2018-08-03, UFO Sighting News.
UFO On The Coast Of Denia, Spain 2018-08-03, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: 8-3-2018 Location of sighting:Denia, Spain Source: MUFON 106337 Here is a great UFO video. Why is it great? I was taken in the daytime with a high quality camera and has an excellent eyewitness description to go with it. Three things I really like. This person was at the beach in Spain and noticed a flying object in the sky. Its whitish silver and highly reflective as it changes its shape. The shape and the movement of the object reminds me of some UFO videos released by the military in infrared. These are drones...able to change shapes at whim. Sent by aliens to record and retrieve data...and they record everything...ocean temps, pollutants, animals, insects wind speed...everything. So don't think we are so important they are here for us all the time...because there are other things on earth too they are highly interested in learning about. This drone was heading out into the ocean, probably towards the location of an under the ocean alien base not far off the coast of Spain. Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
My wife, my son (7 years old at that time) and I were on the beach in Denia (38°51'02.3"N 0°05'59.5"E) having a relaxing afternoon while on holidays, when at around 17:30, my wife noticed on her right-hand side, a bright object cruising slowly just around above the Castle of Denia (38°50'50.6"N 0°06'49.0"E) towards our position, following the coastline in a South-East North-west path (38°53'53.9"N 0°03'54.0"E). In the beginning, we thought it was just a drone, but the object seemed too big and too bright from the distance to be just a drone, despite the sun could well reflect on metallic objects depending on the angle and position.
As the object was approaching, the brightness didn't seem to change but rather pulsate, which we started to think about something unusual. A commercial flight was around at that time but it was at a much further and a higher altitude and didn't interfere in any way with the object. I decided to get my phone and record it. I was a bit frustrated because in previous years I bring my camcorder with me for holidays and I like to record events and fun times. That particular year I decided not to get the camcorder and rely on solely on my smartphone. With the camcorder, I could have used the powerful optical zoom and better quality image to record the event.
The object was travelling on a steady speed and steady path position (The object didn't move on the sky up and down, it was me trying to steady my phone). I estimate the object was travelling in between 100-200 miles/h and an altitude of around 3000 feet or possibly less, with an angle with respect of the horizon of around 35 degrees. The object seemed to be pulsating and was really quickly intermittently disappearing and appearing with black shades in contrast with its brightness.
As the sky was so clear cloudless, there is no appreciation of the object moving. Only at 2:21 in the video, I did a quick shot of the beach as a point of reference because I didn't want to lose track of it. It took my attention that while we were on the beach, no one noticed anything or no one noticed that we were very excited looking and filming this object in the sky like they weren't aware that we were there.
There was a couple just sitting 4 meters in front of us, facing nearly our direction and they didn't seem to care about our excitement or our finding in the sky.... They didn't even bother to look at what was going on in the sky... Weird! In fact, no one on the beach, and there were quite a few people, seemed to notice the strange event. We believe we sighted a very good case of an unknown object of unknown origin but you can prove us wrong of course. The object seemed to be flickering even more as it was disappearing in the distance towards Valencia. At one point we couldn't see it anymore.
This is an old UFO footage recorded on 3rd August 2018 but it was just now submitted to MUFON. This happened in Denia, Spain.
Witness report:
Unknown Orb/Light object travelling at steady speed along the coast of Denia, Spain. My wife, my son (7 years old at that time) and I were on the beach in Denia (38°51’02.3″N 0°05’59.5″E) having a relaxing afternoon while on holidays, when at around 17:30, my wife noticed on her right-hand side, a bright object cruising slowly just around above the Castle of Denia (38°50’50.6″N 0°06’49.0″E) towards our position, following the coastline in a South-East North-west path (38°53’53.9″N 0°03’54.0″E). In the beginning, we thought it was just a drone, but the object seemed too big and too bright from the distance to be just a drone, despite the sun could well reflect on metallic objects depending on the angle and position. As the object was approaching, the brightness didn’t seem to change but rather pulsate, which we started to think about something unusual. A commercial flight was around at that time but it was at a much further and a higher altitude and didn’t interfere in any way with the object. I decided to get my phone and record it. I was a bit frustrated because in previous years I bring my camcorder with me for holidays and I like to record events and fun times. That particular year I decided not to get the camcorder and rely on solely on my smartphone. With the camcorder, I could have used the powerful optical zoom and better quality image to record the event.
The object was travelling on a steady speed and steady path position (The object didn’t move on the sky up and down, it was me trying to steady my phone). I estimate the object was travelling in between 100-200 miles/h and an altitude of around 3000 feet or possibly less, with an angle with respect of the horizon of around 35 degrees.
The object seemed to be pulsating and was really quickly intermittently disappearing and appearing with black shades in contrast with its brightness.
As the sky was so clear cloudless, there is no appreciation of the object moving. Only at 2:21 in the video, I did a quick shot of the beach as a point of reference because I didn’t want to lose track of it.
It took my attention that while we were on the beach, no one noticed anything or no one noticed that we were very excited looking and filming this object in the sky like they weren’t aware that we were there. There was a couple just sitting 4 meters in front of us, facing nearly our direction and they didn’t seem to care about our excitement or our finding in the sky…. They didn’t even bother to look at what was going on in the sky… Weird! In fact, no one on the beach, and there were quite a few people, seemed to notice the strange event.
We believe we sighted a very good case of an unknown object of unknown origin but you can prove us wrong of course.
The object seemed to be flickering even more as it was disappearing in the distance towards Valencia. At one point we couldn’t see it anymore.
What is dark matter? Posted by Andy Briggs in ASTRONOMY ESSENTIALS | SPACE | February 23, 2020 Dark matter doesn’t emit light. It can’t be directly observed with any of the existing tools of astronomers. Yet astrophysicists believe it and dark
What is dark matter?
Posted by Andy Briggs in ASTRONOMY ESSENTIALS | SPACE
Dark matter doesn’t emit light. It can’t be directly observed with any of the existing tools of astronomers. Yet astrophysicists believe it and dark energy make up most of the mass of the cosmos. What dark matter is, and what it isn’t. here.
Since the 1930s, astrophysicists have been trying to explain why the visible material in galaxies can’t account for how galaxies are shaped, or how they behave. They believe a form of dark or invisible matter pervades our universe, but they still don’t know what this dark matter might be.
Dark matter is a mysterious substance thought to compose perhaps about 27% of the makeup of the universe. What is it? It’s a bit easier to say what it isn’t.
It isn’t ordinary atoms – the building blocks of our own bodies and all we see around us – because atoms make up only somewhere around 5% of the universe, according to a cosmological model called the Lambda Cold Dark Matter Model (aka the Lambda-CDM model, or sometimes just the Standard Model).
Dark matter isn’t the same thing as dark energy, which makes up some 68% of the universe, according to the Standard Model.
Dark matter is invisible; it doesn’t emit, reflect or absorb light or any type of electromagnetic radiation such as X-rays or radio waves. Thus, dark matter is undetectable directly, as all of our observations of the universe, apart from the detection of gravitational waves, involve capturing electromagnetic radiation in our telescopes.
Yet dark matter does interact with ordinary matter. It exhibits measurable gravitational effects on large structures in the universe such as galaxies and galaxy clusters. Because of this, astronomers are able to make maps of the distribution of dark matter in the universe, even though they cannot see it directly.
They do this by measuring the effect dark matter has on ordinary matter, through gravity.
This all-sky image – released in 2013 – shows the distribution of dark matter across the entire history of the universe as seen projected on the sky. It’s based on data collected with the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite. Dark blue areas represent regions that are denser than their surroundings. Bright areas represent less dense regions. The gray portions of the image correspond to patches of the sky where foreground emission, mainly from the Milky Way but also from nearby galaxies, prevents cosmologists from seeing clearly.
There is currently a huge international effort to identify the nature of dark matter. Bringing an armory of advanced technology to bear on the problem, astronomers have designed ever-more complex and sensitive detectors to tease out the identity of this mysterious substance.
Dark matter might consist of an as yet unidentified subatomic particle of a type completely different from what scientists call baryonic matter – that’s just ordinary matter, the stuff we see all around us – which is made of ordinary atoms built of protons and neutrons.
The list of candidate subatomic particles breaks down into a few groups: there are the WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), a class of particles thought to have been produced in the early universe. Astronomers believe that WIMPs might self-annihilate when colliding with each other, so they have searched the skies for telltale traces of events such as the release of neutrinos or gamma rays. So far, they’ve found nothing. In addition, although a theory called supersymmetry predicts the existence of particles with the same properties as WIMPs, repeated searches to find the particles directly have also found nothing, and experiments at the Large Hadron Collider to detect the expected presence of supersymmetry have completely failed to find it.
Several different types of detector have been used to detect WIMPs. The general idea is that very occasionally, a WIMP might collide with an ordinary atom and release a faint flash of light, which can be detected. The most sensitive detector built to date is XENON1T, which consists of a 10-meter cylinder containing 3.2 tons of liquid xenon, surrounded by photomultipliers to detect and amplify the incredibly faint flashes from these rare interactions. As of July 2019, when the detector was decommissioned to pave the way for a more sensitive instrument, the XENONnT, no collisions between WIMPs and the xenon atoms had been seen.
Although WIMPs have long been the favored candidate for dark matter, they’re not the only candidates. The failure to find WIMPs, and the attendant frustration with not being able to account for a significant percentage of the universe’s mass, has led many scientists to look at possible alternatives.
At the moment, a hypothetical particle called the axion is receiving much attention. As well as being a strong candidate for dark matter, the existence of axions is also thought to provide the answers to a few other persistent questions in physics such as the Strong CP Problem.
Astronomer Fritz Zwicky first predicted the existence of dark matter in the 1930s following his observations of the Coma galaxy cluster.
The idea that there might be things in the universe which are invisible to us, that emit no light, has a long history going back hundreds of years to the days of Newton. With the discovery of so-called “dark nebulae” – clouds of interstellar dust blocking the light from background stars – and Pierre Laplace’s 18th-century speculations about objects which might swallow light, later to become known as black holes, astronomers came to accept the existence of a so-called “dark universe.”
But in modern times, it was astronomer Fritz Zwicky, in the 1930s, who made the first observations of what we now call dark matter. His 1933 observations of the Coma Cluster of galaxies seemed to indicated it has a mass 500 times more than that previously calculated by Edwin Hubble. Furthermore, this extra mass seemed to be completely invisible. Although Zwicky’s observations were initially met with much skepticism, they were later confirmed by other groups of astronomers.
Thirty years later, astronomer Vera Rubin provided a huge piece of evidence for the existence of dark matter. She discovered that the centers of galaxies rotate at the same speed as their extremities, whereas, of course, they should rotate faster. Think of a vinyl LP on a record deck: its center rotates faster than its edge. That’s what logic dictates we should see in galaxies too. But we do not. The only way to explain this is if the whole galaxy is only the center of some much larger structure, as if it is only the label on the LP so to speak, causing the galaxy to have a consistent rotation speed from center to edge.
Vera Rubin, following Zwicky, postulated that the missing structure in galaxies is dark matter. Her ideas were met with much resistance from the astronomical community, but her observations have been confirmed and are seen today as pivotal proof of the existence of dark matter. In honor of this crucial and historic piece of detective work toward establishing the existence of dark matter, the revolutionary Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, currently under construction in Chile and scheduled to see first light next year, was recently renamed the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
Dark matter pioneer Vera Rubin (1928-2016). This image – taken at Lowell Observatory – is from 1965.
Some astronomers have tried to negate the need the existence of dark matter altogether by postulating something called Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND). The idea behind this is that gravity behaves differently over long distances to what it does locally, and this difference of behavior explains phenomena such as galaxy rotation curves which we attribute to dark matter. Although MOND has its supporters, while it can account for the rotation curve of an individual galaxy, current versions of MOND simply cannot account for the behavior and movement of matter in large structures such as galaxy clusters and, in its current form, is thought unable to completely account for the existence of dark matter. That is to say, gravity does behave in the same way at all scales of distance. Most versions of MOND, on the other hand, have two versions of gravity, the weaker one occurring in regions of low mass concentration such as in the outskirts of galaxies. However, it is not inconceivable that some new version of MOND in the future might yet account for dark matter.
Although some astronomers believe we will establish the nature of dark matter in the near future, the search so far has proved fruitless, and we know that the universe often springs surprises on us so that nothing can be taken for granted.
The approach astronomers are taking is to eliminate those particles which cannot be dark matter, in the hope we will be left with the one which is.
It remains to be seen if this approach is the correct one.
Bottom line: Dark matter makes up some 27% of the universe according to astronomical theories. It cannot be seen or detected directly via the existing tools of astronomers, but its effect can be measured via its gravitational pull on ordinary matter.
Molecular oxygen has been spotted beyond the Milky Way for the first time
Molecular oxygen has been spotted beyond the Milky Way for the first time
The elusive molecule turned up in a quasar more than half a billion light-years from Earth
Astronomers finally found molecular oxygen beyond the Milky Way, but they had to look at a galaxy far, far away: the quasar Markarian 231, shown here in an image from the Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA, ESA, THE HUBBLE HERITAGE TEAM (STSCI/AURA)-ESA/HUBBLE COLLABORATION, AND A. EVANS (UVA/NRAO/STONY BROOK UNI.)
For the first time, astronomers have found molecular oxygen — the same gas humans need to breathe — in a galaxy outside the Milky Way.
Oxygen is the third most common element in the cosmos, after hydrogen and helium. So astronomers once thought molecular oxygen, O2, would be common in the space between the stars. But despite repeated searches, no one had ever seen molecular oxygen beyond our galaxy — until now.
Junzhi Wang, an astronomer at Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in China, and his colleagues spotted the molecule’s calling card in a galaxy named Markarian 231. Lying 560 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major, Markarian 231 is the nearest galaxy to Earth that contains a quasar, where gas whirls around a supermassive black hole and gets so hot that it glows brilliantly. (SN: 8/31/15).
Using radio telescopes in Spain and France, the astronomers saw radiation at a wavelength of 2.52 millimeters, a signature of O2’s presence, the team reports in the Feb. 1 Astrophysical Journal. “This is the first detection of molecular oxygen in an extragalactic object,” Wang says.
It’s also the most molecular oxygen ever seen outside the solar system. Previously, astronomers had seen the molecule in just two star-forming clouds within the Milky Way, the Orion Nebula and the Rho Ophiuchi cloud (SN: 1/28/20). Astronomers think the shortage of interstellar O2 is due to oxygen atoms and water molecules freezing onto dust grains, locking up the oxygen. In these stellar nurseries, though, shocks from bright newborn stars can rip water ice from the dust, freeing oxygen atoms to find each other and form molecules.
But even in the Orion Nebula, molecular oxygen is rare, with hydrogen molecules outnumbering oxygen molecules a million to one. Hydrogen also dominates in Markarian 231. But molecular oxygen spans the outskirts of the galactic disk at abundances more than 100 times greater than in the Orion Nebula.
That’s “very high,” says Gary Melnick, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who was not involved in the work. “There is no known explanation for an abundance of molecular oxygen that high.” To confirm that the radiation really arises from O2, Melnick says the observers should look for a second wavelength from the molecule.
That won’t be easy, Wang says, because other molecules also emit radiation at those wavelengths. To shore up the case for O2, the scientists went through the many molecules that give off wavelengths similar to the one detected and found that nobody had ever seen any of those molecules in space — except for O2. “It is guilt by elimination, if you will,” says team member Paul Goldsmith, an astronomer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. One possible explanation for all the O2 is that Markarian 231 goes through a more vigorous version of the Orion Nebula’s oxygen-forming process. The galaxy is a prolific star factory, spawning new stars 100 times as fast as the Milky Way and spewing out 700 solar masses of gas per year. High-speed gas from the galaxy’s center may slam into gas in the disk, shaking water ice from dust grains so that molecular oxygen can form.
In turn, that oxygen could keep the galaxy hyperactive: Radiation the molecule emits helps cool the gas so that some of it can collapse and create even more new stars in the galaxy.
The earliest known hominid interbreeding occurred 700,000 years ago
The earliest known hominid interbreeding occurred 700,000 years ago
Neandertal-Denisovan ancestors migrating to Eurasia heralded hookups with a resident Homo group
A Homo erectus skull dating to around 1.8 million years ago, found at the Dmanisi site in the nation of Georgia, may come from a population that later interbred with ancestors of Neandertals and Denisovans, researchers say.
Ancestors of Neandertals and Denisovans left Africa for Eurasia around 700,000 years ago and then interbred with a Homo population that had exited Africa long before, according to a new genetic study. The finding reveals the oldest known case of interbreeding among members of the genus that includes people today, Homo sapiens.
Evidence of genetic exchanges between distinct hominid populations roughly 400,000 years before H. sapiens evolved highlights a role for interbreeding in Homo evolution long before ancient people occasionally mated with Neandertals and Denisovans.
The scenario begins with an early Homo species making its way into Eurasia roughly 1.9 million years ago, in what was probably the first Homo migration out of Africa, scientists report February 20 in Science Advances. Those now-extinct travelers may have been members of Homo erectus, a species that includes Eurasian fossils dating to about 1.8 million years ago (SN: 10/17/13), or Homo antecessor, a controversial species designation based on 1.2-million- to 1.1-million-year-old fossils found in Spain (SN: 3/26/08). Or they could have been part of another Homo population unknown from any fossils.
Then ancestors of Neandertals and Denisovans trekked out of Africa about 700,000 years ago, say the researchers, led by anthropologist and population geneticist Alan Rogers of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. That timing would also have allowed for the evolution of Neandertals or their direct ancestors in what’s now northern Spain around 430,000 years ago (SN: 3/14/16). Some previous research had suggested that Neandertals originated roughly 300,000 years ago, raising questions about the evolutionary identity of older, Neandertal-like fossils in Spain.
Rogers refers to ancestors of Neandertals and Denisovans as “neandersovans.” That genetically distinct population existed for a brief period of perhaps 15,000 years, Rogers estimates. Neandersovans’ numbers declined sharply after they left Africa around 700,000 years ago, he suspects. Survivors interbred with members of the Homo population that had long inhabited Eurasia, before largely replacing them and separating into eastern and western populations — Denisovans and Neandertals, respectively. Neandersovans inherited at least 2 percent of their DNA from the older Eurasian Homo population, Rogers calculates.
“It’s interesting that signals of interbreeding that far back can be seen in our genomes,” says UCLA geneticist Sriram Sankararaman. Further research needs to look for genetic links between members of that probable first Homo departure from Africa, identified in Rogers’ study, and a previously unknown Homo population that lived 1 million years ago or more and left a genetic mark on present-day West Africans, Sankararaman suggests (SN: 2/12/20). A genetic analysis by the UCLA researcher’s team identified the latter Homo group.
The new findings rest on a novel analysis of particular sets of gene variants found in people today, as well as in Neandertal and Denisovan fossils. Rogers previously determined that these gene forms had not undergone recent changes and thus could be traced back to ancient populations. A software program compared frequencies of the gene variants in DNA from three modern West African Yorubans, five French individuals, two English people, a Neandertal from Croatia’s Vindija Cave, a Neandertal from Siberia’s Denisova Cave and a Denisovan from the same Siberian site.
The researchers identified the best of eight simulations of how ancient interbreeding could have produced the shared genetic variants observed in both the modern and ancient individuals. Estimates of the rate at which genetic mutations accumulate enabled the scientists to gauge the timing of the ancient African departures.
While the newly proposed timing of interbreeding around 700,000 years ago seems reasonable, Rogers’ genetic data deserve closer scrutiny with alternative statistical techniques, says zoologist and evolutionary geneticist Peter Waddell of the Ronin Institute, a nonprofit research center in Montclair, N.J. Waddell previously found signs of a small amount of ancestry in Denisovan DNA from a much older Homo species, possibly H. erectus.
Rogers and his colleagues also suggest that a third major expansion out of Africa, involving H. sapiens, occurred around 50,000 years ago. As with the neandersovan expansion, the genetic evidence is consistent with H. sapiens arriving in Eurasia and then interbreeding with resident Neandertals and Denisovans before replacing those populations, the scientists say. Other fossil and ancient DNA studies, though, indicate that some H. sapiens reached Southeast Asian islands more than 60,000 years ago (SN: 8/9/17).
There was a lot of activity in the skies this past week, including some which directly affected our own planet, so let’s check things out and see if we need to open a metal umbrella.
“Empirical evidence indicates that at least one supernova has rained heavy elements on Earth in the past. Supernovae are known to release significant quantities of dust at sub-relativistic speeds. We also see evidence of clumpiness or ‘bullets’ in supernova ejecta.”
That astronomer-speak comes from astronomer Amir Sira, co-author of the paper (submitted to the submitted to the Astrophysical Journal) “Observational Signatures of Sub-Relativistic Meteors” with Abraham Loeb, who’s made a name for himself recently with his theories on extraterrestrial life forms, alien space ships and more. Sira and Loeb’s latest theory is that Earth’s atmosphere is being bombarded by large meteors – 1 mm to 10 cm (0.04 to 4 inches) – that are traveling at a tremendous speed – up to 1% of the speed of light or 100 times faster than most meteors.
Sira and Loeb refer to clumps of them with a scary “bullets” description and proposed a way to detect them with a global network of 600 infrasound microphones and optical-infrared instruments to detect the acoustic signature and optical flashes and physical explosions created by these “bullets” as they enter our atmosphere. Are we in any danger? Only of learning more about our solar system and universe. Kudos to Sira and Loeb for promoting more ways to entice kids to become astronomers and create jobs for them.
Moving on to the colliding black holes …
Astronomers who study colliding galaxies refer to something known as the “final parsec problem.” While they can see the massive physical destruction of the merger, they are unclear about what happens when the central black holes of each galaxy are within one parsec (3.26 light-years) of each other. The good news (maybe) is, they may find out in April. Scientific American interviews astrophysicists Daniel D’Orazio and Rosanne Di Stefano who in 2017 predicted that the black holes entering the area of the final parsec would produce a flare that could be detected by gravitational lensing if the black holes line up with earth as one passes in front of the other, thus distorting and magnifying the light of the black hole in the rear. A 2018 study of Kepler space telescope data found an active galactic nuclei (AGN) called KIC 11606854 that appears to be a pair of merging black holes. The astronomers were so excited, they called it “Spikey.”
It gets better. According to their preprint paper, “Spikey” may flare again in April 2020, so the astronomers have reserved NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to watch it. Are we in any danger? Only of disappointment should Spikey not live up to its name. On the other hand, a flare will push the theory closer to fact and give future space telescope missions better data to work with and more likely locations to point to.
Then there’s the mysterious Milky Way gas …
“The absence of stellar counterparts indicates that the point-like object may be a quiescent black hole. This discovery adds another intermediate-mass black hole candidate in the central region of our Galaxy.”
Astrophysicist Shunya Takekawa of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and colleagues were studying the motion of a high-velocity gas cloud in the center of the Milky Way called HCN-0.085-0.094 when they noticed that one of the three clumps that made up the cloud appeared to be swirling around a black hole. Its actions suggested this is an unusual quiet black hole, but its size is what got them excited — 100 to 100,000 solar masses. That would make it an intermediate-mass black hole, something that has been theorized but never actually proven or seen. In this case, that’s because it’s quiescent – giving off no detectable radiation because it’s not feeding. As they write in their preprint paper, this is the closest potential intermediate black hole ever found and that discovery itself is amazing, considering the possible event horizon (outer boundary) of this black hole is only the size of Neptune or Uranus.
Yes indeed, it was a busy week for black holes, supernovas and astronomers.
Secret chamber found inside King Tut’s famous tomb may solve hunt for Nefertiti
Secret chamber found inside King Tut’s famous tomb may solve hunt for Nefertiti
Egyptologists are on the verge of solving one of history’s biggest mysteries — the location of Queen Nefertiti’s elusive tomb.
Jamie Seidel
Tantalising radar shadows have revived hopes that one of history’s most beautiful, and controversial, women — Queen Nefertiti — may indeed be buried in secret chambers within King Tut’s famous tomb.
British and Egyptian Egyptologists earlier this week conducted a three-day radar scan of the world-famous tomb discovered by Howard Carter in 1922.
Upon opening its still-sealed door, he declared he saw “wonderful things”. Everywhere was the glint of gold and priceless examples of some of history’s most exquisite art.
But, since then, the tomb has presented something of a mystery.
It was immediately odd that so many of the statues attributed as Pharoah Tutankhamun had hips and breasts. And more recent, closer, examination reveals a significant proportion of the artwork to have been rebadged, and repurposed, from previous rulers.
In 2015, a ground-penetrating scan of the 3300-year-old tomb was conducted by controversial radar technician Hirokatsu Watanabe. He declared he had detected, with “90 per cent certainty”, several hollow spaces along with “metallic” and “organic” objects.
The world erupted in excitement.
Could another extraordinary discovery be tantalisingly within reach?
Would one of Egypt’s greatest mysteries finally be solved?
Egyptologists were immediately doubtful. His radar scan images seemed uninterpretable — just a mass of blue lines with the occasional red dot. Nobody other than Watanabe seemed able to determine what the scans revealed.
So, the Egyptian Antiquities department organised a second scan — this time with the assistance of National Geographic — in 2016. It found … nothing.
“If we had a void, we should have a strong reflection,” geophysicist Dean Goodman of GPR-Slice software told National Geographic News. “But it just doesn’t exist.”
The locations of speculative chambers have been supported by infra-red and radar scans of Tut’s tomb.
Egyptian technicians from the Centre for Sound Vibration and Smart Structures at the Faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams University, joined a team from the English Terravision Centre to scour the rock for any trace of hidden chambers.
It’s part of an assessment that is due to be completed by the end of the year.
Egyptian archaeologist Francis Amin told the Egypt Independent the most recent radar survey, conducted by the University of Turin, had revealed spaces behind the walls.
But the resolution of the images did not confirm if these were man-made or natural cavities in the rock.
“The results of previous radar surveys have found evidence of the existence of spaces and organic material behind the walls of the cemetery,” Amin said. He added that specialist chemists will need to help analyse the radar survey results.
BOY KING OR PR STUNT?
Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb doesn’t follow the well-established pattern applied to other Egyptian god-kings. It’s unusually small. And it is shaped more like a burial chamber intended for a queen. And why do so many of the statues and images attributed as King Tutankhamun have feminine hips and breasts?
Some have theorised Tutankhamun suffered from his royal inbreeding and had deformities such as breasts and female hips.
Source:Supplied
British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves put these clues together, including the discovery of partially erased royal names, to suggest the tomb — and much of its contents — was initially intended for Tut’s stepmother, Nefertiti.
About the same time, a high-resolution 3D laser scan made to help preserve the tomb indicated there may be “hollows” hidden behind the tomb’s plasterwork and paintings. Were these sealed doors?
“The implications are extraordinary: for, if digital appearance translates into physical reality, it seems we are now faced not merely with the prospect of a new, Tutankhamun-era storeroom to the west; to the north appears to be signalled a continuation of tomb … and within these uncharted depths an earlier royal interment — that of Nefertiti herself, celebrated consort, coregent, and eventual successor of pharaoh Akhenaten,” Dr Reeves wrote.
While the evidence was circumstantial, it was enough to pique the interest of the Egyptian Antiquities department to invite Dr Reeves — and others — to examine the tomb more closely.
“Each piece of evidence on its own is not conclusive but put it all together, and it’s hard to avoid my conclusion,” Dr Reeves said. “If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but if I’m right, this is potentially the biggest archaeological discovery ever made.”
British archaeologist Nicholas Reeves believes the new chamber could be the last resting place of Queen Nefertiti, King Tut's mother-in-law.
Source:Supplied
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Dr Reeves has been chasing Nefertiti’s ghost for almost two decades.
In 2000, Dr Reeves led a radar examination of the ground around Tutankhamun’s tomb in a search for Nefertiti’s burial. He reported finding a “void”. But digs failed to locate anything.
His continued enthusiasm, however, has proven contagious.
In 2016, Egypt’s tourism minister enthused: “We do not know if the burial chamber is Nefertiti or another woman, but it is full of treasures … It will be a ‘Big Bang’ — the discovery of the 21st century.”
An interior view of the King Tutankhamun burial chamber in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt.
Source:AAP
So far, the Big Bang hasn’t happened.
And Egyptian Antiquities Minister Khaled El-Enany has insisted no invasive exploration would be allowed to damage the priceless tomb. “It is essential to perform more scans using other devices and more technical and scientific methods,” Mr El-Enany said.
The challenge has since been one of developing the technology capable of achieving that task.
Former Egyptian antiquities minister and high-profile archaeological personality Zahi Hawass has long been a sceptic of the hidden chamber theory.
“If there is any masonry or partition wall, the radar signal should show an image,” he reportedly told National Geographic News.
“We don’t have this, which means there is nothing there.”
Jamie Seidel is a freelance writer. Continue the conversation @JamieSeidel
One of the great mysteries of ancient Egypt is the whereabouts of Nefertiti – she of the famous bust. Her tomb has never been found, leading to various theories that the sparse records of her time as a powerful partner in the reign of her husband, Pharaoh Akhenaten, and her own reign as pharaoh may have been covered up for some reason. The small size of her stepson King Tut’s tomb have caused many to believe it has hidden chambers, resulting in many unsuccessful searches using various non-invasive methods, including an extensive search with ground-penetrating radar in 2018. However, it’s never say never with Nefertiti, so yet another search was just completed and this time they found a hidden chamber. Is this the big one?
Queen Nefertiti
“Clearly there is something on the other side of the north wall of the burial chamber.”
In a review by Nature of an unpublished report by archaeologist Mamdouh Eldamaty, a former Egyptian minister of antiquities, Ray Johnson, an Egyptologist at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute who wasn’t involved in the research, confirmed that the radar found something, but what that ‘something ‘ is will require further scans. So far, it looks like a corridor a few meters east of Tut’s burial chamber. The space is 2 meters (6.5 feet) high, 10 meters (33 feet) long and at the same depth and direction as the tomb’s actual entrance.
The depth and location of this new chamber suggest a number of things. Being parallel to the entrance tunnel and perpendicular to the main chamber puts in in the tomb’s orientation, which would indicate it’s a part of the tomb and not an extension of another tomb – nearby tombs generally don’t line up with each other. The depth reinforces that theory and implies that the chamber was (or perhaps still is) connected to the main chamber at one end. Which leads to the obvious question: what’s at the other end?
“If Nefertiti was buried as a pharaoh, it could be the biggest archaeological discovery ever.”
British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves has long supported the idea that Tut’s tomb is bigger and Nefertiti is buried somewhere in it. However, he thought the location was north, not east. Could this mean there are hidden chambers all around KV62, the un-sexy Egyptological designation for Tut’s tomb? Eldamaty plans to find out, especially since his ground-penetrating radar search was more successful than previous scans from inside the tomb. Still smarting from being replaced as Minister of Antiquities by a cabinet reshuffling, he plans to test Reeves’ north chamber theory after failing on his previous attempt due to not a mummy’s curse but a modern curse — interference from nearby air-conditioning units.
As always, it’s important to note the tremendous effort the government of Egypt puts into preserving these historic tombs and their artifacts from destructive physical invasions by even the most careful archeologists. Let’s hope this continues without interference from those with money who want to make more money on these priceless historical locations. They should be preserved for all, not just for the rich.
Nefertiti would certainly approve of this message.
Some of the most remarkable UFO encounter reports are those that have left behind some sort of physical evidence for us to look at and try to make sense of. Such accounts have occurred all over the world, always leaving something behind, although this has not necessarily led to any concrete answers. One place that has its share of cases like this is the country of France, and here we will take a look at some of the more well-known perplexing cases of UFOs that not only baffled, but left something physical behind.
Our earliest report comes from the year 1954, at Quarouble, Nord, France. On the night of September 10, 1954, railroad worker Marius Dewilde was woken by his dog barking frantically at something in the night. Dewilde groggily got out of bed, grabbed his flashlight, and ventured outside to see what was going on, not really expecting to find much other than maybe a stray cat or some other animal running around. He decided to walk out towards the nearby railway tracks and that is when he would claim he saw something large resting on the ground not far away. Almost as soon as he noticed this anomalous object he heard footsteps behind him, which caused him to whip his flashlight around.
There, standing in the beam were allegedly two small humanoid beings only about 3 feet tall, which were wearing some sort of helmets on that reflected the light of the beam. Things would get intense when he says that the large landed object then suddenly emitted a beam that trained on him and seemed to paralyze his entire body. It was also noticed that his flashlight flickered out as if it’s batteries had been suddenly drained. He collapsed to the ground, but was able to witness the two figures make their way towards the craft and board it, after which the object changed colors and hot off into the sky. Shortly after, Dewilde would gain control of his limbs once again and make his way home to frantically tell his wife about what had happened. He would later lead police to the scene, but found that he was unable to approach the site, as he was overcome with an incapacitating nausea every time he tried to do so, although no one else experienced such symptoms.
They were nevertheless able to find some odd details, such as a deep indentation and small rocks under the site that were all carbonized on the depression. Spookily there were also later found cows in the area that had been killed and drained of blood. Dewilde himself would go on to suffer from myriad health problems such as respiratory problems and chronic headaches throughout his life, and it would later be found that other locals had seen something odd in the sky as well, and some even said they had seen the same strange entities wandering around. What are we to make of this odd case?
In July of 1965 a very weird series of events went down in the quaint region of Valensole, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France. It all started near the small village of Valensole, and on July 1, 1965, a farmer by the name of Maurice Masse was taking a cigarette break before starting his morning chores. As he puffed out wisps of smoke into the air, something caught his attention through the haze of cigarette smoke, and he could see some sort of strange object descend from the sky to land in a field of lavender flowers not too far away. At this point he did not take it to be a UFO, thinking it instead to be a helicopter, but when he extinguished his smoke and took a look out across the field, his eyes met with an oval shaped object perched up on four leg-like apparatuses. Stranger still was that there appeared to be two humanoid figures standing in front of it.
The figures were described as standing approximately 4 feet high, and dressed in tight gray-green clothes, seemingly not human. Their heads were oversized and bald, holding within them large, almond shaped eyes and small, pointed chins, and they seemed to be making some sort of low grumbling noise. As the farmer stood there mouth agape in awe, one of these curious figures allegedly turned to him and raised into the air a device of some kind, which looked cylindrical and “pencil-like” in nature. Before Masse could even really register what was going on he says that the device projected some sort of beam that caused him to lose all control of his limbs and go crumpling to the ground in a heap. He would claim that as he lay there in a daze the figures boarded their craft and then flew off at great speed. It would later be found that the ground had a deep indentation in it and a hardened area like concrete. It would also be found that Masse was honest, very sincere, and was considered to be telling the truth.
A rather similarly weird alien encounter report would be made in 1967, with a 13-year-old boy and his 9-year-old sister in Cussac, Cantal, France, who claimed that they had seen four small, black entities in a field measuring a mere 3 feet high. Above them was apparently a large disc hovering, towards which the mysterious figures floated up off the ground towards, disappearing within. The object then took off with great speed, and when the children brought back investigators it was found that the area was redolent with a “sulfur odor” and that the grass beneath was oddly all dried out for reasons that could not be explained.
Another famous French case supposedly occurred at Trans-en-Provence,Var, France, in January of 1981. Another farmer, this one by the name of Renato Nicolaï, who on January 8, 1981 at 5pm was at work on his property when an eerie whistling sound caught his attention. When he looked around to see what was going on he apparently witnessed a large, saucer-shaped craft come down to rest upon a parch of nearby field, before once again lifting off to fly away. The farmer would describe it as follows:
The device had the shape of two saucers, one inverted on top of the other. It must have measured about 1.5 meters in height. It was the color of lead. This device had a ridge all the way around its circumference. Under the machine I saw two kinds of pieces as it was lifting off. They could be reactors or feet. There were also two other circles which looked like trapdoors. The two reactors, or feet, extended about 20 cm (8 in) below the body of the machine.
When the area was later investigated it was found that the location where the mysterious craft had landed held within it strange scorch marks that could not be identified. It was also found by authorities that there was a patch of ground that had been heavily compressed by something weighing several tons, and had been heated to around 300 and 600 °C (572 and 1,112 °F). A two year investigation into the incident would fail to turn up any definitive answers, and the case remains unsolved.
The very following year, in 1982, one of the most famous UFO cases in French history would go down in the region of Nancy, France. On October 21, 1982, an anonymous cell biologist known only as “Mr. Henri” was with his wife in the modest garden of their home in the small town of Laxou, near Nancy in northeast France, on a clear day when a highly reflective, glinting ovoid object came floating down out of the sky. The object apparently headed straight toward them, causing them to step back warily, before it came to a hovering position right over their home. It was described as being very smooth and metallic, “similar to Beryllium,” as well as completely silent the entire time. Mr. Henri would claim that he had tried to take a photograph as it hovered there, but that something had caused the device to malfunction. The object would descend to just three feet over the ground and simply stay there for a full 20 minutes before ascending again to fly off into the distance, seeming to pull up the grass beneath it as it did so. The plants of the garden were then found to be dried up and withered as if some sort of force had affected them, with some of the fruit of the trees burst open and “cooked” as if by some high heat. Investigators at the scene would come to the conclusion that the vegetation had been affected by some sort of intense “electromagnetic wave of energy.” What was going on here? Who knows?
This has been just a selection at some of the stranger UFO reports to come out of France, and which are remarkable in that they all left behind some sort of physical evidence, although that that entails is largely open for debate. In the end we are merely left with more truly weird cases of possible brushes with things from beyond our understanding and possibly from beyond our world, adding to the mystique of the UFO phenomenon in general and still without solid answers.
UFO Abducts Plane Over Fiji Islands! Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Abducts Plane Over Fiji Islands! Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of discovery: Feb 22, 2020 Location of sighting: Fiji islands Google coordinates: 18° 3'22.84"S 178°41'8.51"E I was looking at Google Earth map when I found this mysterious glowing object in front of a plane. The objects color is what really stands out. It the back of the UFO its pinkish like a half circle and in the front its glowing white. I believe this is because the UFO has lowered part of its shield so that they could bring things in and out of the plane into the UFO. This may be a frozen in time event, a moment in time frozen because the aliens erase the memories of the people on board and then put them back hours later. This is an example of an alien abduction taking place over the ocean in a plane. 100% proof that aliens are abducting humans. Scott C. Waring
NASA tracks cone-shaped UFO before it disappears into deep space
NASA tracks cone-shaped UFO before it disappears into deep space
The ISS live feed cam captures a cone-shaped metallic object for about 22 minutes before it moves upwards and disappears into deep space.
The stunning footage, recorded on February 21, 2020, has led to many speculations about what the object could be.
While many people suggest that it is a real UFO, whether alien or a man-made spacecraft belonging to the space fleet, others say that the cone-shaped object is a satellite or a probe intended for experimental purposes in deep space, released by the ISS.
The Top Secret Area 51 Military Base with UFOs and Experimental Aircrafts
The Top Secret Area 51 Military Base with UFOs and Experimental Aircrafts
Area 51, secret U.S. Air Force military installation located at Groom Lake in southern Nevada. It is administered by Edwards Air Force Base in southern California. The installation has been the focus of numerous conspiracies involving extraterrestrial life, though its only confirmed use is as a flight testing facility.
For years there was speculation about the installation, especially amid growing reports of UFO sightings in the vicinity. The site became known as Area 51, which was its designation on maps of the Atomic Energy Commission. Conspiracy theories gained support in the late 1980s, when a man (Bob Lazar) alleging to have worked at the installation claimed that the government was examining recovered alien spacecraft.
Lenticular cloud over Mount Shasta. February 12, 2020.
Photo Credit: Shasta-Trinity National Forest.
Unusual UFO-shaped formations were observed in the skies over Mount Shasta.
These were actually lenticular clouds that often look like lenses or flying saucers.
This volcano peak in California has long been the subject of conspiracy theories.
Mount Shasta in California has become a nexus of conspiracy theories and unusual events. The latest viral sensation from the area has been a UFO-shaped object that appeared in the skies above the potentially active volcano peak of 14,179 feet on the morning of February 12th.
Upon closer look, this was not an alien spaceship but a beautiful lenticular cloud, the kind that is often shaped like lentils or UFOs, depending on your perspective. It was so convincing, however, that the U.S. Forest Service had to deny its extraterrestrial origins in a statement.
The flying saucer or lens shape of these clouds is caused by their development along the downwind sides of mountains. When moist and stable air goes over a mountain, oscillating waves are created. The crest of the waves causes condensation of vapor, which evaporates through the troughs, explains Weather Underground. These evaporations take the form of lenses and spaceships, looking layered.
Mount Shasta, in particular, has seen its share of lenticular cloud sightings, leading to its status as a new focal point for alien hunters much like Roswell, New Mexico. The latest UFO cloud quickly became a social media sensation, as you can see in these posts of the enigmatic formations:
Mount Shasta has also seen other unusual happenings, with a mysterious side hole that appeared over 10 years ago becoming the subject of a documentary. Its sudden emergence connected with local legends about a lost continent of Lemuria supposedly hidden under the mountain. This mythical kingdom would be there along with its capital city Telos.
The first thought of the documentary filmmaker Elijah Sullivan about the giant hole was that it was from people trying to find Lemuria.
"You'll hear a lot of people talking about Lemuria, maybe even asking for directions," he told the news in 2018. "People make pilgrimages here — it's like a New Age mecca."
It is also known to be sacred to the Native American Winnemem Wintu tribe, indigenous to this area.
If you're in the mood to check out the stunning area for yourself and see some aliens in the skies above, you can come to the nearby town of McCloud for the "Meet the Venusians — We Are in Contact" conference from August 25-30 of this year. It promises to be a "tribute to honor of all the Venusians & Pleiadean's who have taken the time to present themselves" with a schedule of speakers and events focused on healing and consciousness.
USS Nimitz captain reveals Navy pilots DO have to watch out for UFOs after one of the carrier's planes captured secret unreleased video of 2004 encounters with a 'Tic Tac-shaped' mystery aircraft
USS Nimitz captain reveals Navy pilots DO have to watch out for UFOs after one of the carrier's planes captured secret unreleased video of 2004 encounters with a 'Tic Tac-shaped' mystery aircraft
Captain Max Clark, commanding officer of the USS Nimitz, tells DailyMail.com it is important his ship and everybody on it is kept safe from UFOs
'From my perspective we have an obligation to make sure the airspace is clear, whether it's UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon) or UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle),' he says
This comes just weeks after the Office of Naval Intelligence revealed the existence of a classified, unreleased video of a UFO
The video was related to the notorious USS Nimitz carrier group's 2004 encounters with a 'Tic Tac'-shaped UFO
The encounters remain a mystery and the object's incredible speed and movements have led to speculation that it was extraterrestrial
The commanding officer of the US Navy supercarrier, the USS Nimitz, has revealed his crew has an 'obligation' to make sure the airspace is clear of UFOs.
In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, Captain Max Clark said it's important his ship and everybody on it is kept safe from Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) - the term for UFOs used by the Navy.
This comes just weeks after the Office of Naval Intelligence revealed the existence of a classified, unreleased video relating to the Nimitz carrier group's 2004 encounters with a 'Tic Tac'-shaped UFO.
The existence of the video was revealed in a response to a Freedom of Information Act request made by researcher Christian Lambright, and published by Lambright's friend Paul Dean.
The video is likely the full version of a leaked 76-second video clip that the Defense Department admitted in 2017 was authentic.
Captain Max Clark, commanding officer of the USS Nimitz, tells DailyMail.com it is important his ship and everybody on it is kept safe from UFOs after the Nimitz carrier group had an encounter with a UFO in 2004
This comes just weeks after the Office of Naval Intelligence revealed the existence of a classified, unreleased video of a UFO. The classified video is likely the full version of the leaked 76-second clip (above) which circulated online from 2007, and was confirmed as authentic in 2017
The footage was taken by a pilot using a Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) gun-pod camera on an F/A-18 Super Hornet flying over the Pacific Ocean.
Speaking to DailyMail.com on the bridge of the Nimitz, Captain Clark said of the bizarre encounter: 'From my perspective we have an obligation to make sure the airspace is clear, whether it's UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon) or UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle), this is part of the air space.
Nick Pope, who investigated UFOs for Britain's Ministry of Defence in the 1990s, said Captain Clark's comments come as a surprise because there are 'huge sensitivities' over the Nimitz incident
'It adds another level of... from a pilot's point of view, to see and avoid, and also our radar systems looking for things like that too, just to make sure everybody's safe.'
Philadelphia native Captain Clark, who assumed command of Nimitz on August 1, 2019, wasn't on board the Nimitz when the unusual sighting was recorded 16 years ago.
And the experienced officer wouldn't be drawn further on the video or the Navy's close encounters of the third kind.
Nick Pope, who investigated UFOs in an official capacity for Britain's Ministry of Defence in the 1990s, said Captain Clark's comments come as a surprise.
The commentator told DailyMail.com: 'These are fascinating comments and it's interesting they were made at all, because the Department of Defence recently took over responding to all UFO-related questions from the media, following some tension between them and the US Navy.
'But ship's captains are strong-willed characters who don't take kindly to being muzzled.
'That said, the captain was totally on-message, because the official line involves talking in general terms about the need to guard against unauthorized incursions into restricted military airspace, with the aim of promoting safety.
'What's being downplayed by everyone is the staggering fact that the US government still doesn't know what these objects are.
'The DOD's line is that the objects seen by naval aviators during the USS Nimitz incident remain "unidentified".'
Pope added that there are 'huge sensitivities' over the Nimitz incident and the recent admission by the US Navy that it has the secret unreleased video has put the affair back in the spotlight. And Captain Clark's comments further fuel the speculation surrounding the footage which has baffled the world.
At least six Super Hornet pilots made visual or instrument contact with the UFO on November 14, 2004.
The encounters, which are documented in numerous interviews with first-hand witnesses, remain a mystery, and the object's incredible speed and movements have led to speculation that it was extraterrestrial in origin.
Chad Underwood, the former Navy aviator who shot the famous leaked video clip, broke his silence last month in an interview with New York Magazine
Underwood was flying in an F/A-18F Super Hornet as part of the USS Nimitz (above) carrier group when he encountered an 'unidentified aerial phenomena'
A map shows the rough location of the USS Nimitz carrier group during the 2004 encounter
The original FLIR video from the Nimitz encounters leaked online as early as 2007.
Witnesses say that clips of the video had been circulated widely on the Navy's intranet - used to communicate between ships in the carrier group - and an unknown sailor in the group likely first leaked it.
The clip became one of the most-touted pieces of evidence in the UFO community when the Pentagon confirmed its authenticity in 2017.
Last month, Chad Underwood, the former Navy aviator who shot the famous leaked video clip, broke his silence in an interview with New York Magazine.
He said the oblong, wingless 'Tic Tac' shaped object was spotted off the coast of Mexico over the Pacific.
He also revealed that for about two weeks, the Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser USS Princeton, part of Carrier Strike Group 11, had been tracking mysterious aircraft intermittently for two weeks on an advanced AN/SPY-1B passive radar.
The radar contacts were so inexplicable that the system was even shut down and restarted to to check for bugs - but operators continued to track the unknown aircraft.
Then on November 14, Commander David Fravor says he was flying in an F/A-18F Super Hornet when he made visual contact with the object, which seemed to dive below the water, resurface, and speed out of sight when he tried to approach it.
As Fravor landed on the deck of the Nimitz, Underwood was just gearing up to take off on his own training run.
Fravor told Underwood about the bizarre encounter, and urged Underwood to keep his eyes open.
He recalls how he suddenly saw a blip on his radar before tracking it on his FLIR camera.
'The thing that stood out to me the most was how erratic it was behaving,' Underwood told the magazine.
'And what I mean by “erratic” is that its changes in altitude, air speed, and aspect were just unlike things that I’ve ever encountered before flying against other air targets.'
The FOIA response letter above revealed that Office of Naval Intelligence has 'TOP SECRET' briefing slides and 'SECRET' video related to the 2004 USS Nimitz carrier group encounters
Underwood says the object wasn't obeying the laws of physics and dropped from 50,000 feet altitude to 100 feet in seconds, which he says, 'isn't possible'.
Underwood added that he saw no signs of an engine heat plume or any sign of propulsion.
The pilot refuses to speculate as to whether the object is an alien spacecraft or not, however.
'That’s not my job. But I saw something. And it was also seen, via eyeballs, by both my commanding officer, Dave Fravor, and the Marine Corps Hornet squadron commanding officer who was out there as well.'
DailyMail.com spoke to Nimitz commanding officer Captain Clark about the incident after being invited onboard the awesome 95,000 ton vessel earlier this month.
We joined the crew on a five day training mission in the Pacific Ocean and witnessed first hand it's awesome capabilities.
Capable of reaching more than 30 knots (35mph) the Nimitz-class supercarrier is one of ten nuclear-powered aircraft carriers in the US Fleet.
We observed flight operations as F/A-18 Super Hornets, EA-18G Growlers and a handful of F-35C stealth strike fighters were launched off the ship and brought in to land.
The Nimitz is the lead ship of her class, one of the largest warships in the world and the flagship of Carrier Strike Group Eleven (CSG-11) with Carrier Air Wing Seventeen (CVW-17) embarked.
Its homeport is Naval Base Kitsap in Washington and the vessel is named for legendary fleet admiral Chester W. Nimitz (1885–1966), who helped the US defeat the Japanese Navy in World War II.
A new study from the Planetary Research Institute suggests that briny water could temporarily form on Mars’ surface in the shadows of boulders for just a few days each Martian year.
Field of large boulders as seen by the Mars Pathfinder lander on Mars in 1997. A new study suggests that small pools of liquid water may be able to briefly form in the shadows of such boulders at mid-latitudes in the springtime.
Mars is a cold, very dry, desert world. Although it has ice caps of water ice (as well as carbon dioxide ice) and vast amounts of ice below its surface, no liquid water has been found on Mars’ surface. But there might be some. We might just need to look behind large boulders, in springtime.
A new study from the Planetary Science Institute (PSI) in Tucson, Arizona – announced on February 12, 2020 – adds to previous evidence that small amounts of briny (salty) water might be able to form on the Martian surface under just the right conditions.
The possibility of liquid water on present-day Mars has been debated for half a century. Melting is physically difficult under Martian environmental conditions, because with the total pressure of the atmosphere near the triple point pressure of water, evaporative cooling of ice is high near the melting point.
According to the study, the briny water might be possible for only a few days of each Martian year. The trick is that this can only happen under just the right circumstances. Schorghofer said:
Mars has plenty of cold ice-rich regions and plenty of warm ice-free regions, but icy regions where the temperature rises above the melting point are a sweet spot that is nearly impossible to find. That sweet spot is where liquid water would form.
Three-dimensional computerized view of the Martian surface temperature around a boulder at latitude 30° south. On the side opposite to the sun, temperatures are around -128 degrees Celsius. As the sun rises, this area heats up rapidly, melting frost on the salty ground. This could briefly create small amounts of briny water that later goes back into the atmosphere, via sublimation.
This sweet spot would involve protruding topography, such as boulders, at mid-latitudes. During the winter, a boulder might cast a continual shadow, where water ice can accumulate as frost. When spring came again, the temperature can increase quite quickly. In the computer models used, temperature would rise from -198° Fahrenheit (-128° Celsius) in the morning to -14° Fahrenheit (-10° Celsius) at noon. That is a short enough time that not all the frost would sublimate – pass directly from the solid to vapor state – as it normally does in the very thin, cold atmosphere. From the paper:
Protruding topography creates locations that experience a rapid transition from conditions where water frost accumulates to high solar energy input. Beyond the pole-facing side of a boulder, carbon dioxide and water frost can accumulate seasonally, and once the sun reemerges and the carbon dioxide frost disappears, the water frost is heated to near melting temperature within one or two sols [days on Mars].
The scientists said it is dust within the carbon dioxide frost that helps keep it from sublimating back into the atmosphere as temperatures rise. From the paper:
Overall, melting of pure water ice is not expected under present-day Mars conditions. However, at temperatures that are readily reached, seasonal water frost can melt on a salt-rich substrate.
The whole cycle would repeat, year after Martian year.
In 2008, what appeared to be small drops of briny liquid water were seen on the legs of the Phoenix Mars Lander. These images show changes in the drops over 36 days.
As mentioned above, carbon dioxide ice can also form behind large boulders on Mars. That ice, too, will sublimate in the spring. Scientists have a name for the first day in spring when the carbon dioxide ice disappears. They call it the crocus date.
Water ice melting also occurs either on or just after that date. Thus it is referred to as crocus melting. According to Schorghofer:
Answering the question whether crocus melting of seasonal water ice actually occurs on Mars required a slew of detailed quantitative calculations, the numbers really matter. It took decades to develop the necessary quantitative models.
Today, Mars’ atmosphere is too cold and too thin for water to last long on the surface, even briny water. But there have been other hints that it may occur when conditions are right.
The famous recurring slope lineae on Mars may be evidence of seasonal briny water on Mars. The slope linae are dark streaks that occur on steep slopes during the warmer months and keep recurring in the same locations each year. It still isn’t known exactly what causes them, but theories have ranged from small amounts of flowing briny water to dust slides. If water is involved – not a certainty yet – it could come from the atmosphere, ice pockets or subsurface aquifers.
Norbert Schorghofer at the Planetary Science Institute.
During the Mars Phoenix Lander mission, which landed near the north pole in 2008, images showed small droplets forming on the legs of the spacecraft. While not proven, they certainly looked like drops of briny water that later sublimated away.
Last year, NASA’s InSight lander found possible evidence of current reservoirs of liquid water below the surface. If confirmed, that would be an exciting discovery, in particular for the potential of subsurface life, which would be protected from the severe conditions on the surface. In 2018, it was announced that the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter had found evidence of a salty subsurface lake beneath the ice at the south pole.
If there really are brief pools of liquid water hiding behind Martian boulders at times, that also would be exciting, as Mars would then be the only place other than Earth in our solar system where water would be known to be able to exist on the surface. This could have significant implications for the possibility of microbial life on an otherwise dry and hostile world.
Bottom line: A new study from the Planetary Research Institute suggests that briny water could temporarily form on Mars’ surface under certain conditions.
Whales are masters of the oceans, the marine mammals are the largest of living creatures found on the planet, they cover huge distances in their migrations.Sadly from time to time, things do not go as they should for these with the animals ending up beached.Everything from changes in the tides, melting icebergs and shifting food sources have been claimed o force whales to veer off course. This causing them to swim into unfamiliar and shallow waters and possibly even beach themselves.Some say human involvement is to blame, in some cases, a whale may end up beached because it has already died and the tide washed its body ashore. So how could the remains of an animal of such size be found miles from a beach, why are whales showing up in random locations?Let’s take a look.
Starting here in Thailand and the sad news that the rotting carcass of a Bruda whale was found by local residents deep in a mangrove forest in tambon Bang Poo Mai of Samut Prakan's Muang district.The Bruda whale is a cetacean that can reach 40- 55 feet in length it is found worldwide in warm temperate and tropical waters, just like those of the Gulf of Thailand which Samut Prakan is located near.Samut Prakan is a stone’s throw from the capital city of Bangkok and is at the junction of the Phraya River and the Gulf of Thailand.On Januray 26th the carcass of a female whale, measuring in at around 12 meters long and weighing over 15 tonnes.
The remains were examined and found to be free from injury.Namanok Bancherdhiransamut, of the Upper Gulf of Thailand Conservation Group, said he was told three days prior that a deceased Bruda whale had been seen floating in the Gulf near the river mouth, some 15 kilometres from the Samut Prakan coastline. He and team Members had searched for it, but were unsuccessful in finding the animal.It then came to his attention that villagers had found a large whale carcass washed aground in a mangrove swamp about 500 metres from the road to tambon Bang Poo Mai.
The following Monday, the Chon Buri-based 2nd Marine and Coastal Resources Office coordinated with volunteers for marine protection in tambon Bang Poo Mai to remove the whale carcass to an appropriate area for examination to establish the cause of death.The investigation is still ongoing.Now this report does not seem too extraordinary even with a suspicious cause of death but it sent me on the search and I hit upon two more stories of beached whales, the difference with these marine mammals is that their remains were found miles from the ocean.Digging deeper I uncovered a theory that possibly points to alien involvement!The first case did receive a lot of attention online, a dead humpback whale left researchers dumb founded after it was discovered deep in Brazil’s Amazon jungle.The whale lay approximately 15 metres from the shore of Araruna Beach along the Marajó Bay in Soure, Brazil.
Local authorities commented when quizzed on the whale saying that the spotting a whale in the region at that time of year was quite rare.This whale was of a similar size to the animal found in Thailand measuring about eight meters long and 10 tonne in weight.And in yet another similarity with the Thai whale a team from the region’s Municipal Secretariat of Health, Sanitation, and Environment said the carcass didn’t appear to have any visible injuries.The two prevailing theories as to how the whale ended up in the brush are either:A powerful tide launched the whale inland, orThe whale died at sea and was carried onto the land by peopleCould there be a third choice? A choice which would need us to look to the stars to find an answer?Before I look at the extraterrestrial connection let’s hear the about the third whale.
A dairy farmer from the small town of Farmington near the Great Salt Lake in Utah made an unexpected and remarkable discovery on his property while out looking for a cow that had wondered off.The 69-year-old farmer a one Michael Woodson, found a 12-meter-long humpback whale laying lifeless in the middle of one of his fields, hundreds of kilometers away from its natural habitat.Again an animal around the same dimensions, there seems to be a pattern forming here!Police were called as the man thought this maybe a creepy prank by some neighborhood kids.
This idea was quickly put to bed as there were no traces of vehicles or movement of the beast.The police admitting that they were at a loss as to how the carcass got there. “We have to admit that we find this case very puzzling,” said Captain Terry Dawson from the Farmington police. “It is certainly the first time that we see anything like this in our city, and we have very little information for now as to how the animal got there.”And this is when are old friends from outer space enter the story.A few witnesses reported seeing some strange flying object in the area over the last two days and the authorities have confirmed that the 911 operators have received a few dozen calls from all over the region reporting such sightings.
“We are verifying every clue and information that we have, and I assure you that we will explore every other possibility before we conclude that a UFO has anything to do with the case” added Captain Dawson.A team of biologists from the nearby University of Utah were called to the site to examine the remains of the whale. The scientists are trying to determine if the animal could have actually lived in the Great Salt Lake which is only a few kilometers away from the farm.This case taking a turn for the cryptid as lake living whales have been proposed as an answer to the many sighting of lake monsters around the globe. As for what killed the animal, you guessed it, no injuries were found and the biologists are still testing the whale to find out what killed the humpback whale.Let’s look at the alien angle to this story, the practice of cattle mutilation has long been reported and it is not just bovine animals that are targeted, everything from horses to people have been said to be victims of extraterrestrial abduction and experimentation.Aliens abducting whales to analyze them, fits with the pattern of reported behavior.Ufologist and youtuber Scott C Waring, wrote in his blog UFO Sightings Daily: “Whales are often taken by UFOs, analyzed, and then returned.“But sometimes animals are returned to a location that is not hospitable to them.
Apparently the alien who took this whale had no idea that they only live in the water.“It looks like aliens make a lot more mistakes than I thought.”This alleged mistake of returning the whales to the wrong place makes no sense, the extraterrestrials would understand the animals need to be in a certain environment to survive, I think it shows more of a disregard for the animal.Once they had learned what they needed they unceremoniously dumped the carcass, this also highlighting the lack of concern that they have in regards to us (humanity) learning of their existence and what they are doing.Some more down to earth reasons have been given, these include stranded calves.
These animals may have been travelling with mothers and could have gotten lost or separated during the migratory cycle between the two continents.These animals alone failed to survive died and were washed in land along rivers by the tides and weather, maybe large waves pushed the bodies far inland?Now that has me more confused, it would have to be some wave to carry the remains of a humpback whale 5 miles in land through a populated area and deposit it on a farm in Farmington Utah all with no witnesses!!What do you think is moving these whales to locations they have no place being, is it extraterrestrials bad weather or just pranksters?Let me know what you think in the comments below.
Jupiter appears to have more water than anyone expected.
Newly released data from NASA's Juno probe shows that water may make up about 0.25% of the molecules in the atmosphere over Jupiter's equator. While that doesn't sound like much, the calculation is based on a prevalence of water's components, hydrogen and oxygen, three times more than at the sun. The new measurements Juno obtained are much higher than a previous mission suggested.
The surprise result has scientists delving deep again into results from NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter, which obtained drier results in 1995 when engineers deliberately threw the spacecraft into Jupiter's atmosphere. (Galileo was low on fuel and NASA didn't want to take the chance, even if it was a slight one, of the spacecraft accidentally crashing on a potentially habitable icy moon.)
Reconciling the results from Galileo and Juno is key for scientists to better understand how our solar system came together, NASA said in a statement. Since Jupiter was probably the first planet to form, it could have sucked up most of the gas and dust that the sun's formation left behind. How much water Jupiter soaked up, then, should help scientists identify the most plausible theories to explain its formation.
And understanding Jupiter's birth would in turn help scientists understand how the planet's wind currents move and what its insides are made of. Scientists should be able to generalize findings at Jupiter to certain kinds of large exoplanets to learn how other solar systems formed.
Galileo's results were a puzzle even back in the 1990s. The spacecraft sent back data showing 10 times less water than scientists predicted, and more weirdly, the amount of water appeared to increase the deeper Galileo went into Jupiter's atmosphere, according to the NASA statement. Scientists had expected that by the time it stopped transmitting data, at a depth of about 75 miles (120 kilometers), the atmosphere around it should have been well-mixed with an unchanging composition.
A ground-based infrared telescope was able to measure water concentrations at Jupiter at the same time as Galileo's plunge and showed that Galileo may have accidentally hit a dry spot, meaning water is not well-mixed deep in Jupiter's atmosphere.
Juno's first eight flybys also showed a lack of atmospheric mixing. The spacecraft's radiometer obtained data even deeper than Galileo's measurements, at 93 miles (150 km) down, and found more water at the equator than Galileo did.
Scientists are now waiting to compare Juno's equatorial measurements with observations at the north of the planet; Juno's 53-day orbit is gradually moving northward to examine more of that hemisphere with each flyby. The spacecraft's next science flyby will be on April 10.
"Just when we think we have things figured out, Jupiter reminds us how much we still have to learn," Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute, said in the NASA statement. "Juno's surprise discovery that the atmosphere was not well mixed even well below the cloud tops is a puzzle that we are still trying to figure out. No one would have guessed that water might be so variable across the planet."
The new research is described in a paper published Feb. 10 in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Russia Strange UFO Encounters and Weird Submerged Discoveries
Russia Strange UFO Encounters and Weird Submerged Discoveries
COAST TO COAST AM –
UFO and paranormal expert Paul Stonehill discussed ongoing strange encounters and discoveries in Russia, as well as previous Soviet incidents. Recently, on the volcanic island of Matua in the Sea of Okhotsk, the Russian army found a sunken submarine that may be either American or Japanese, he reported. The nearby area has seen a lot of UFO and USO (unidentified submerged object) activity-more in this video from his YouTube channel.
A media phenomenon, Coast to Coast AM deals with UFOs, strange occurrences, life after death, and other unexplained (and often inexplicable) phenomena.
The subsurface offers a protected, and possibly habitable, environment.
The U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) Astrogeology Science Center has released the locations of more than 1,000 cave-entrance candidates on Mars. The dots indicate the location of possible caves in the Tharsis region on Mars.
The search for present-day life on Marsis heating up. And for good reason: An improved knowledge of Mars' geologic diversity and history, a better appreciation of life in extreme environments here on Earth, and a sharp focus on sensitive life-detection measurement methods are all bolstering the Mars-life hunt, giving scientists more reason to think that they just might find something.
Still, the issue of life on Mars demands new scientific concepts and knowledge concerning where to explore on the Red Planet and what to measure.
Astrobiologists and other experts tackled some of these issues last November during a conference at the National Cave and Karst Research Institute in Carlsbad, New Mexico.
On the meeting agenda was a discussion of how best to test for extant life on Mars, with or without the benefit of collection systems. Such systems include a complex and pricey Mars sample-return effort that officially kicks off this summer with the launch of NASA's Mars 2020 rover.
Geological environments
ls there life on Mars today? It's a credible query in search of an answer, said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program at agency headquarters.(Image credit: Barbara David)
Conference attendees generally agreed that the best places to look for extant Mars life are in the deep subsurface caves, and in salt and ice.
While the cold, dry surface of Mars, with its harsh radiation environment, is widely considered to be uninhabitable, the subsurface has been hypothesized to be a viable, long-lived habitable environment, protected from the punishing surface conditions of Mars and a place where water could be stable.
Vlada Stamenković, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, backed the underground approach at the conference.
"The surface of Mars is a very oxidizing, radiation-heavy environment where liquid water is not really stable for an extended amount of time," Stamenković said. "It's the worst place to look for life-sites on Mars. Groundwater might be the only habitat for extant life on Mars, if it still exists today."
To that end, Stamenković outlined at the meeting two potential Mars lander missions: Volatiles And Life: Key Reconnaissance & In-situ Exploration (VALKYRIE) and TH2OR (Transmissive H2O Reconnaissance), a small impact-lander platform that would remotely sense and study liquid subsurface groundwater via low-frequency electromagnetic waves. (Stamenković is the TH2OR principal investigator.)
Lava tubes, cave entrances
Over the years, researchers have spotted pit craters on the surface of Mars. These features are locations where the roof of a lava tube has partially collapsed and created a "skylight."
Researchers at the meeting pointed out that Mars-circling spacecraft have imaged numerous potential cave entrances. Shielded underground as they are, could lava tubes be prime microbial real estate on Mars?
Here on Earth, cave-exploring scientists have gathered evidence of microbial activity in the form of biofilms, slime, and microbially induced or precipitated minerals. Conditions in caves, the researchers have found, are typically far different, more consistent and more benign than on the surface.
An international group of experts recently met in Carlsbad, New Mexico, to discuss what's next in the effort to determine if life has been, or is now, resident on the Red Planet. (Image credit: Barbara David)
Systematic campaign
"It's pretty clear to me that there's much to be done to seek extant life, and certainly extinct life, in a variety of environments on Mars," said Penny Boston, senior advisor for science integration at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.
As an astrobiologist, Boston has been a "cave diver" for some 25 years. "I think we all recognize that there's not just a single way to go" to search for life on Mars, she told Space.com.
"My own personal opinion is that it's time to line up missions with what the community is seeing in terms of return on investment versus the difficulty of accessing any particular environment," Boston said. "It has been shown, with Mars, a campaign to systematically look for the water and now probe other aspects of habitability have yielded a tremendous amount of science."
And caves aren't as dangerous to explore as some people think, she added.
"I think people are often leery of the idea, because they may think of caves as mines. Mines are dangerous because we've recently made those mines and they are shored up by human structure," Boston said.
"But in the case of natural caves, they have had geologically long periods of time to stabilize," she added. "It's probably more likely that a cathedral is going to collapse on you than a natural cave. There are some exceptions to this. Obviously, caves in a pretty seismically active area, you'd have to be more leery."
Caves are some of the most exciting environments in the search for signs of present and past life on Mars, said Kevin Webster, a research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona.
Webster is studying cave air as a biosignature, looking into the concentration of trace gases in caves he has measured across the United States.
When thinking about caves on Mars, a biological signature might come in the form of the removal of reactive components from the atmosphere, Webster explained. Researchers have found several candidates for lava tube caves on Mars and continue to detect them. The exploration and the measurement of cave air on Mars might be pursued through either remote means or on-the-spot methods, he said.
The Small High-Impact Energy Landing Device (SHIELD) is a proposed new technology for inexpensively bringing small payloads to the Martian surface. (Image credit: JPL/Corby Waste)
How life may be operating
Biosignatures in the air offer a way to search for life that does not depend on genetics "but something that is broad enough to how life may be operating, even if it doesn't share our same biochemistry," Webster said.
So, Martian caves should be pursued, Webster said.
"I have spent my time trying to develop one particular biosignature that people may use in the search for life," Webster told Space.com. "I'm trying to understand how cave air differs from that of the atmosphere on Earth and why we might want to look at that on Mars. I love seeing new ways to find life. That's really exciting and in the vein of what I've been doing."
Leonard David is the author of the 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@SpacedotcomorFacebook.
LightSail 2 has been orbiting Earth for eight months now, and it has captured some stunning shots of our home planet during that time.
The Planetary Society built the spacecraft, which launched in June 2019 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, to prove the potential of solar sailing. Rather than relying on conventional fuel, LightSail 2 uses a massive sail to catch photons (light particles) from the sun to power the spacecraft's orbit. The goal is for LightSail 2 to remain in orbit for about a year.
Spacecraft personnel have been evaluating LightSail 2's success throughout the mission and recently summarized what they've learned from the flight and how they've handled the anomalies that have occurred.
Based on the flight to date, those personnel have recommended that future solar sails feature solar panels on both sides of the sail, rather than on only one side. That's becauseLightSail 2 uses the one-sided design, and it's caused a few power-production problems for the spacecraft, according to the new report from the team.
The LightSail 2 mission team also recounted the spacecraft's difficulty in navigating Earth's cushy atmosphere, even at altitudes of 450 miles (720 kilometers). Those struggles suggest that solar sail missions will be most successful when targeting even higher altitudes around Earth or venturing into deep space.
But these missions might not be able to take quite as nice photos of Earth.
(Image credit: The Planetary Society)
An image from LightSail 2 shows the west coast of India on Jan. 21, 2020.
(Image credit: The Planetary Society)
An image of the northeast coast of South America taken by LightSail 2 on Jan. 11, 2020.
(Image credit: The Planetary Society)
A LightSail 2 image shows the Himalayas, Tibet and India on Jan. 31, 2020.
(Image credit: The Planetary Society)
An image of the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf taken by LightSail 2 on Dec. 14, 2019.
(Image credit: The Planetary Society)
An image of the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden taken by a camera on LightSail 2 on Jan. 19, 2020.
China's Yutu-2 lunar rover has discovered what appear to be relatively young rocks during its recent exploration activities on the lunar far side.
The Chang'e-4 mission's rover imaged the scattered, apparently lighter-colored rocks during lunar day 13 of the mission, in December 2019, according to the Chinese-language 'Our Space' science outreach blog.
The specimens, which are quite different from those already studied by the rover, could round out the team's insights into the geologic history and evolution of the area, called Von Kármán crater.
Closer inspection of the rocks by the rover team revealed little erosion, which on the moon is caused by micrometeorites and the huge changes in temperature across long lunar days and nights. That anomaly suggests that the fragments are relatively young. Over time, rocks tend to erode into soils.
The relative brightness of the rocks also indicated they may have originated in an area very different to the one Yutu-2 is exploring.
Chang'e-4 made a historic, first-ever soft landing on the far side of the moon in January 2019. Von Kármán, a roughly 110-mile-wide (180 kilometers) crater, is around 3.6 billion years old. Lava has flooded it multiple times since its formation, leaving it relatively smooth and dark. The crater itself lies within the South Pole-Aitken Basin, an even more massive and more ancient impact crater.
A rock fragment viewed by a Yutu-2 obstacle-avoidance camera. (Image credit: CNSA/CLEP/Our Space)
Dan Moriarty, NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said the size, shape and color of the rocks provide clues to their origin.
"Because [the rocks] all look fairly similar in size and shape, it is reasonable to guess that they might all be related," he told Space.com. "Chang'e-4 landed on a volcanic mare, [a] basalt patch, and those volcanic materials are much darker than normal lunar highlands crust. If these rocks are indeed brighter than the soil, it could mean that they are made up of a higher component of bright, highlands crust materials than the surrounding volcanic-rich soils."
Image of the surface of Von Kármán crater from Yutu-2, released in February 2020. (Image credit: CNSA/CLEP)
Moriarty noted that higher-resolution images of the rock would provide more information. "If the rock has the appearance of many heterogeneous fragments 'welded' together, this would indicate a regolith breccia," which are formed by the immense heat of a meteorite impact, he said. "If the rock appears more coherent, then it might be a primary crustal rock excavated by the impact."
China recently published a huge batch of data and amazing images from the Chang'e-4 lander and Yutu-2 rover. However, the release did not include data from day 13, meaning high-resolution images of these intriguing specimens are not yet public.
Regarding the age of the rocks, Moriarty said that "fresh" is a relative term: In this case, it means that the rocks formed after the major resurfacing events in Von Kármán crater. "So that could be 10-100 million years [ago] or 1-2 billion years. It's really hard to say definitively."
To learn more, the Yutu-2 team navigated the rover in order to analyze one of the specimens with its Visible and Near-infrared Imaging Spectrometer (VNIS) instrument, which detects light that is scattered or reflected off materials to reveal their makeup.
Because the fragments are small and the lunar terrain is very challenging, the team made careful calculations and fine adjustments in order to get the rocks into the VNIS field of view, according to Our Space. This may account for the relatively short distance Yutu-2 traveled during lunar day 13: 41.3 feet (12.6 meters). Overall, Yutu-2 has driven 1,170 feet (357 m) since arriving in Von Kármán crater.
Yutu-2 looks back over tracks it made in the lunar soil. (Image credit: CNSA/CLEP)
Earlier in 2019, Yutu-2 made numerous approaches to an unidentified rock sample, which Our Space described as "gel-like."
The Chang'e-4 lander and Yutu-2 completed their 14th lunar day of science and exploration on Jan. 31, ahead of sunset over the landing area in Von Kármán crater. Day 15 began on Feb. 17, with Yutu-2 due to head to the northwest and then southwest to reach a designated target point.
China plans to launch Chang'e-5, a sample-return mission, in the second half of this year. It will collect around 4 lbs. (2 kilograms) of samples from Oceanus Procellarum on the moon's near side before returning to Earth. If this is successful, the backup Chang'e-6 mission could attempt to retrieve samples from the South Pole-Aitken Basin or the lunar south pole around 2023.
Third Navy crew saw 2004 Nimitz UFO 'forming' – but were 'ordered to stay quiet'
Third Navy crew saw 2004 Nimitz UFO 'forming' – but were 'ordered to stay quiet'
The Nimitz UFO encounter in November 2004 is one of the most famous sightings in history. Now, a previously-unknown witness has come forward to say he saw it "form" in front of his Navy craft
A third US Navy craft witnessed the infamous tic-tac UFO in 2004 “form” in front of them, but the crew on board were ordered to “never talk” about what they saw.
It is widely believed two F/8-18E Super Hornets from the USS Nimitz were the first to witness the infamous UFO off the coast of San Diego on November 14, 2004, before a second team were sent out later and caught the object on camera.
Commander David Fravor, piloting one of the Super Hornets, has gained worldwide fame after his testimony was included in a bombshell New York Times article exposing the encounter in 2017.
The Nimitz UFO supposedly moved at speeds never seen before(Image: YOUTUBE)
But there are now claims a third aircraft was in the area at the time of the original sighting, with those onboard supposedly witnessing the craft “form in front of them”.
Dave Beaty – who has interviewed several pilots and witnesses of the UFO as part of his Nimitz Encounters documentary – told Jim Breslo on The Hidden Truth Show that the crew were on the surveillance plane E-2 Hawkeye.
“The gentlemen I spoke to, I checked his background and he did fly in the Hawkeye,” he explained.
“The reason he didn’t want to come forward was because he had to sign a document right after the incident saying to not talk about.
“Even going out on a limb and speaking to me was sketchy for him.”
Dave explained that the Hawkeye crew heard the radio calls from Princeton … Kevin Day instructing Fravor to intercept the tic-tac.
“At that time, the entire air crew noticed one of these objects form up on their plane before taking off,” he continued.
“All five aircrew would have seen that object.”
But when the crew landed, things took a weird turn. The director says they were led to a secure briefing room different to the normal one after training exercises.
They were then told to sign non-disclosure agreements.
“It wasn’t really a volunteer process, it was more a ‘sign this and don’t ever talk about what you saw’,” he explained.
It comes after Daily Star Online revealed how a US Navy submarine also spotted the same UFO some four years later underwater.
Third Navy crew ‘ordered to stay quiet’ about 2004 USS Nimitz UFO incident
Third Navy crew ‘ordered to stay quiet’ about 2004 USS Nimitz UFO incident
A screenshot from a Navy video published by former Blink-182 guitarist Tom DeLonge's company "To the Stars Academy" shows what the Navy is now calling an "unidentified aerial phenomenon." (U.S. Navy/San Diego Union-Tribune/TNS)
There is possibly a third aircraft to have witnessed one of the most infamous UFO sightings in recent history, according to a person familiar with the matter.
As part of his Nimitz Encounters documentary, Dave Beaty told Jim Breslo on The Hidden Truth Show on Feb. 10, that he interviewed witnesses of the UFO that were “ordered to stay quiet” and signed non-disclosure type agreements immediately after the incident occurred on Nov. 14, 2004, off the coast of San Diego.
See the full interview below:
“The gentlemen I spoke to, I checked his background and he did fly in the [surveillance plane E-2 Hawkeye],” Beaty said.
The Hawkeye would be the third aircraft to have been in the area to witness the event, with the other two being the F/8-18E Super Hornets, one of which Commander David Fravor piloted, as the Daily Star reported.
Fravor brought the incident to the public’s attention in 2017 in a New York Times report that detailed his experience in the encounter.
Since Fravor’s report, others have come forward as witnesses of the incident on that day.
Beaty said that the individual he interviewed didn’t want to come forward because he signed a document that compelled him to stay quiet.
“Even going out on a limb and speaking to me was sketchy for him,” Beaty explained. “It wasn’t really a volunteer process, it was more a ‘sign this and don’t ever talk about what you saw.’”
In what is possibly the most credible UFO sighting in human history, five other former sailors have also come forward as witnesses to the “Tic Tac” occurrence.
These five witnesses, Gary Voorhis, Jason Turner, Patrick Hughes, Ryan Weigelt and Kevin Day, say more evidence beyond the publicly available footage was destroyed by unknown officials.
The only footage available is a grainy black and white video that shows the “Tic Tac” shaped object moving in a way that defies known physics.
As Commander Fravor put it, the strange object he saw was “something not from this world.”
“A white Tic Tac, about the same size as a Hornet, 40 feet long with no wings,” Fravor described, according to The Washington Post. “Just hanging close to the water.”
“As I get closer, as my nose is starting to pull back up, it accelerates and it’s gone,” he said. “Faster than I’d ever seen anything in my life. We turn around, say let’s go see what’s in the water and there’s nothing. Just blue water.”
While Fravor doubts the story of the five sailors, Hughes and the others were ordered to turn over data they collected while performing routine tasks.
Hughes stored hard drives that had the extra footage, but claimed that his commanding officer and two unknown individuals asked him to turn over the data.
“They were not on the ship earlier, and I didn’t see them come on. I’m not sure how they got there,” said Hughes of the two men.
Voorhis said he had a similar encounter, but he was also asked to wipe the tapes clean.
“These two guys show up on a helicopter, which wasn’t uncommon, but shortly after they arrived, maybe 20 minutes, I was told by my chain of command to turn over all the data recordings for the AEGIS system,” he said. “They even told me to erase everything that’s in the shop—even the blank tapes.”
Although Fravor has been ridiculed for his theories, and was even asked by people close to him to not tell it because of the perception and backlash that it would create, the U.S. Navy has admitted that a series of UFO videos are real, WDTV reported.
Fravor has been witness to another, less well-known incident. Speaking on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast on Oct. 5, Fravor described a mystery “dark mass” that emerged from the ocean depths and swallowed a torpedo whole when a sailor was diving in the water to inspect a torpedo.
“This big object, kind of circular, is coming up from the depths and [a sailor] starts screaming through the intercom system to tell them to pull the diver up, and the diver’s only a few feet from the water,” he said.
“They reverse the winch and the diver’s thinking: ‘What the hell is going on?’ And all of a sudden he said the torpedo just got sucked down underwater, and the object just descended back down into the depths.”
The torpedo “didn’t sink,” it “literally looked like it got sucked down,” Fravor said a witness claimed.
UFO At Space Station 22 Mins! Shoots Out Into Space, UFO Sighting News. Amazing Footage!
UFO At Space Station 22 Mins! Shoots Out Into Space, UFO Sighting News. Amazing Footage!
Date of sighting: Feb 22, 2020
Location of sighting: Earths orbit, space station
Source: NASA Live Cam
I was watching the NASA live space station cam when I noticed the camera zooming in on a strange object coming from below the space station. At first I thought it was a capsule or satellite, but its speed increased and after 22 minutes it shot up and into deep space. I believed if it was a capsule it would have gone into low earth orbit then lower to land. But when this object shot upward into deep space, it literally blew my mind. This could be USAF top secret alien tech fused craft, but I don't think so, the person on the camera seemed dismayed and unprepared for its sudden appearance.
The objects shape is more like an ice cream cone...pointy in the back and rounded in the front. It matches perfect speed with the space station for over 22 min. Also, on the next video I release it the full 22 minutes and I hear them talking about replacing the battery but I don't hear them say a single thing about the UFO floating outside the station.
Also...this coronavirus is spreading like a wildfire out of control, its possible that aliens know what going to happen and they decided abandon the earth. The virus may be very dangerous to aliens too. If this is true, expect to see a big rise in UFO sightings as they appear from underground bases and leave earths atmosphere.
A curious landing report, in New York state on Aug. 19, 1965, has been thoroughly checked by NICAP, state police, and a five-man AF team. This sighting, which occurred on the William Butcher dairy farm near Cherry Creek, N.Y., involved three members of the Butcher family and a fourth witness. Here is their report:
At 8:20 PM, Harold Butcher, 16, was operating a milking machine in a dairy barn housing 17 cows. A portable radio on the wall was turned to a newscast, when a sudden static-like interference drowned it out.
Then the tractor which ran the milking machine abruptly stopped. A moment later, a Holstein bull secured outside began to bellow and pull at a steel bar to which it was chained.
Young Butcher ran to a window and saw a large elliptical object near the ground, a fourth of a mile away. A reddish vapor could be seen underneath, and he heard a steady beep-beep sound. The UFO was on the ground only a few seconds, then it shot straight up, disappearing in low clouds.
When the other witnesses came out, after Harold Butcher phoned the house, they noticed a strange odor, also a greenish glow in the clouds where the UFO had vanished. Meantime, it was found that the bull had bent the steel bar in his efforts to get loose.
Half an hour later, when the strange craft reappeared, circling the area, Mrs. Butcher called the State police. Two troopers investigated, notified the AF. Next day, Capt. James Dorsey, Operations Officer, 4621st AF Group, arrived with four AF technicians.
When they examined the ground, an odd, purplish liquid substance was discovered at several places. Small unexplained marks, two inches wide and two inches apart, also were found, along with patches of singed grass and foliage.
After the AF team left, NICAP member Jeffrey Gow obtained samples of the purplish substance and singed foliage, and samples were studied by the Kawecki Chemical Co., whose president is a NICAP adviser.
Spectrographic analysis showed the main elements of the liquid to be aluminum, iron and silicon. Some phosphorous was found in the weed samples, which the analyst said might cause a phosphate smell, explaining the odor.
On the night following the Cherry Creek incident, State Trooper Richard Ward, a few miles from this area, watched an object with eight circular lights in line flying twice as fast as a jet. It emitted a faint, unfamiliar, purring sound.
Dr. Fred C. Fair and John Maxwell, of NICAP New York Subcommittee No. 2, carefully checked the Cherry Creek site and questioned the witnesses.
On the basis of present evidence, they believe the report is genuine. Dr. Fair has confirmed that two state troopers who investigated also seem to be convinced.
Animal Reaction Feature:
A 3-year-old Holstein bull was secured to a steel bar outside of a dairy barn containing 17 cows. About 8:20 PM, Harold Butcher, 16, was operating the milking machine when the radio had static-like interference and the tractor motor running the milking machine cut off.
The bull made a noise “like I have never heard come from an animal before.”
Harold looked out the window at the bull, which was trying to get lose, and he saw an elliptical object nearing the ground with a “beep-beep” sound about a quarter of a mile away (1320 feet). After hovering briefly on or near the ground, the object shot up into low clouds.
As the object rose, the noise pitch increased to a level approximating a sonic boom. The cows produced only one can of milk that evening rather than the normal 2 ½ cans. Later examination of the bar to which the bull was secured found it bent.
Joan Woodward, Animal Reaction Specialist:
The object was metallic-looking, football shaped, and estimated to be 50 feet long and 20 feet thick. A reddish vapor was emitted from the bottom area and when the object rose, the red vapor shot toward the ground and bounced back toward the object.
The clouds had a greenish glow where the object had vanished.
At 9 PM, the object was seen again by several people at the farm. It now had a glowing yellow vapor trail.
The clouds still appeared to have a green glow. State police were called and investigated and the Air Force investigated. This incident involved EM effects. A tractor motor shut down, the barn radio and house radio had static-like interference, but a telephone between the barn and house apparently worked.
Physical traces included an odor, ground marks, a purple liquid, and grass bent over and singed.
Physiological effects included Harold and his younger sister having upset stomachs, and the cows giving less than normal amounts of milk.
The U.F.O. Investigator (NICAP), Vol. III, No. 4, August-September 1965, page 7:
The Unexplained Cherry Creek UFO Landing Incident in 1965
The Unexplained Cherry Creek UFO Landing Incident in 1965
In the summer of 1965, an apparent landing of a UFO would unfold in Cherry Creek, New York, witnessed at first by a teenage son, Harold Butcher, of the farm’s owners, and then, when it reappeared, by the entire family. What’s more, the incident was investigated by the New York police, the United States Air Force, and the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomenon (NICAP). At around 8:20pm on the evening of August 19th 1965, 16-year-old Harold Butcher had been in a barn milking cows when he spotted a silver saucer-shaped object in the sky outside. Describing it as a “football-shaped object hovering just above tree-level”, Butcher watched as the craft descended slowly emitting a red vapor downward from around the edges. He later described it as having a pair of vertical seams running up and down the side, said retired transportation safety researcher Robert Galganski who has extensively analyzed the case.
Meet Arrokoth – the most distant object yet visited by earthlings – seen by the New Horizons spacecraft in early 2019. It’s very old, one of the first generation of objects in our solar system. Here’s why it looks like a snowman.
Arrokoth, formerly known as 2014 MU69. Astronomers call it a primordial contact binary: it’s old, and it’s 2 objects stuck together. It’s also the most distant object yet visited by an earthly spacecraft (New Horizons, January 2019). This composite image was featured on the cover of the May 17, 2019, issue of the journal Science. The image shows Arrokoth’s color as close to what the human eye would see.
Image via NASA/ Johns Hopkins/ Southwest Research Institute/ Roman Tkachenko.
By Monica Grady, The Open University
Just over a year ago, courtesy of NASA’s New Horizons mission, we were treated to images of 2014 MU69, a small object 6.6 billion kilometers (4.1 billion miles) from the sun – making it the most distant object to have ever been visited by a spacecraft. It was described, variously, as a snowman, a bowling pin or a peanut. What we were seeing was a picture of one of the oldest and most primitive bodies in the solar system.
New Horizons took only a handful of minutes to fly past the object at its closest approach of about 2,200 miles (3,500 km), but those minutes were well spent, recording a huge amount of information. It has taken many months to download the data from the spacecraft because of its distance from Earth and slow rate of data transfer.
Now, though, a series of papers from the mission team, published in Science (see here and here), illustrate what can be learned with a few minutes of carefully planned and coordinated recording time. The papers give a detailed description of the object. It hasn’t changed in shape, but now we know why it has the shape it does. And the explanation will help us understand more about the most unaltered objects in the solar system.
The object resides in the Kuiper Belt. “Kuiper Belt Objects” form a belt of small bodies that extends way out beyond the orbit of Neptune. They are the cold and rocky remnants of solar system formation. The body in question is dark and a bit reddish in color. Its double-lobed appearance resembles comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the target of ESA’s incredibly successful Rosetta mission.
But before we get into what the 36-km-long (22-mi-long) body can tell us, we should know how to refer to it correctly. What is it called? Its official name is still 2014 MU69, but, as is common with important astronomical objects, it has been given a more memorable label. For many months following the fly-by, 2014 MU69 was referred to as Ultima Thule, meaning a far distant land, and 2014MU69 certainly was (and is) a far distant land.
But this nickname was rather controversial, as it has links to Nazism, with “Thule” referred to as the original origin of the “Aryan race” according to far-right mythology. The New Horizons team also wanted something more specific. In November 2019, the International Astronomical Union (the organization that oversees the naming of astronomical objects) agreed to name 2014 MU69 Arrokoth.
Why Arrokoth? The beauty of the night sky has inspired generations of poets and songwriters; it is the backdrop for myths and legends and is a “free-to-view” panorama of celestial entertainment. The sky is, of course, a boundless horizon, which is why, when the New Horizons mission team was searching for a name for their latest target, they turned to the sky for inspiration.
Arrokoth is a Native American term meaning “sky,” and as Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission, explained::
The name ‘Arrokoth’ reflects the inspiration of looking to the skies and wondering about the stars and worlds beyond our own.
Gentle merger
Back to what Arrokoth has shown us. It is described as a contact binary, which means that it has two lobes that are stuck together. We have known that since the flyby, but now that higher-resolution images have been received, we can see that the surface of Arrokoth is quite smooth and has very few craters.
One of the most important aspects, though, is the way the two lobes are joined. The neck between the two lobes is well defined, but now also seen to be smooth. There is no indication of any fracturing. This is important, as fracturing would be the case if the two lobes had smashed together in an energetic impact or were collisional fragments from a larger body.
The implication is that the individual lobes were already bound to each other by gravity, rotating slowly before coming together in a gentle collision at a velocity of only a few meters per second. At the time of the collision, there would still have been sufficient gas present to slow down the rotation and help to move the bodies together, hence the gentle impact.
Even though the lobes are thought to be single bodies, and not accretions of smaller units, they can still be mapped into different terrains marked by changes in color, slope and smoothness. We do not have sufficient information to determine whether these units have differing mineralogies, but data show that even though the changes in color are quite subtle, they can be distinguished.
Deposits of methanol ice and complex organic compounds cover Arrokoth’s surface. The organics are likely to be material derived directly from the primordial cloud from which the sun was born, mixed with more complex compounds produced by radiation-driven reactions on the surface. Although water and ammonia ices have not been identified, they might be present below the surface layer of dust and organics. However, given the freezing temperatures in the Kuiper Belt, Arrokoth is very unlikely to host any life.
Arrokoth’s two lobes would each have formed by aggregation of dust in the primordial cloud. This makes Arrokoth a first-generation occupant of the solar system, having been little disturbed for 4,567 million years.
The sky is not the limit for the New Horizons mission. Even though the data from Arrokoth have not yet all been downloaded, planning is in progress for the spacecraft’s next target. I wonder what shape that might turn out to be – snowman, bowling pin or peanut?
Bottom line: Images from NASA’s New Horizons mission of 2014 MU69, aka Arrokoth. It’s been described, variously, as a snowman, a bowling pin or a peanut. What we were seeing was a picture of one of the oldest and most primitive bodies in the solar system.
Our solar system could have hosted ancient alien civilizations
Our solar system could have hosted ancient alien civilizations
Written by Luca Praderio
Is it possible that our solar system hosted other developed civilizations and if so when would it happen and what would happen to them?
To wonder if there is the possibility that the solar system has hosted another developed civilization, from which the human race may have originated, was the astronomer Jason Wright, of the Penn State University.
In a paper the astronomer exposed his theory: advanced civilizations could have lived in our solar system well before the appearance of man on earth.
INDIGENOUS TECHNOLOGICAL SPECIES IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM
Wright called these civilizations “indigenous technological species” underlining that if these civilizations really existed they would have to leave “technosignatures”, i.e. remains of their ancient technology that can withstand deterioration far more than organic materials.
These “technosignatures” would be over millions of years buried under the surface of the earth or other planets like Mars or Venus. The “indigenous technological species” should have developed during the Cambrian period.
At times on earth complex life forms spread in a sort of acceleration of the evolution that could be the answer to some cosmic cataclysm that destroyed the previous forms of life, obliging the terrestrial biosphere to generate new forms of living organisms.
TECHNOSIGNATURES HID FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS
We know moreover, notes Wright, that on Mars millions of years ago there were oceans of water in the liquid state and maybe even Venus presented conditions suitable for the development of life, before seeing temperatures rise and become that hell that is today.
Although there is no evidence to support Wright's theory, one can not but admit the appeal of his hypothesis.
According to Wright, it is also possible that we have already come into contact with the remains of some “technosignatures”, but that we have not been able to recognize them for such.
Or that some evidence is still traceable on some rocky satellites around Saturn or Jupiter as Encedalus or Europe, under the frozen surface of which oceans of water are kept in the liquid state.
Who knows, then, if we will find evidence in the next few years or decades of any “ancient aliens” that preceded the man in the colonization of the solar system and, maybe, have had a direct or indirect role in the origin of our species. Any reference to myths and legends could be not purely coincidental.
DEFORMED OBJECT IN THE KUIPER BELT DEFIES PLANETARY FORMATION THEORY
DEFORMED OBJECT IN THE KUIPER BELT DEFIES PLANETARY FORMATION THEORY
Arrokoth is weird — it is also proving revelatory.
As it flew by Pluto in 2015, NASA’s New Horizons mission spotted something weird: An ancient, deformed planetary body the size of Seattle swam into view, perplexing scientists here on Earth.
This strange encounter turned out to be a scientific boon. Data from the object reveals new details about how planetary bodies, including our own Earth, formed in the early Universe, offering rare insight into the ancient cosmos.
Dubbed Arrokoth, this weird rock is the furthest, most primitive object ever visited by a spacecraft.
Located some billion miles from Pluto, the object lies in the Kuiper Belt, a region beyond the Solar System. The Belt is believed to contain the leftover remains of the Solar System's early formation.
On New Year’s Day, 2019, New Horizons approached Arrokoth at a distance of 2,200 miles, flying directly past it. For reference, New Horizons was four billion miles away from Earth at this point.
NASA's data from the close encounter were published Thursday in three studies in the journal Science. Together, the research supports an unlikely theory of how planetary bodies formed in the early universe.
CLOSE ENCOUNTER
Arrokoth is around 22 miles wide, and is a binary object made up of two lobes that sort of looks like a misshaped, red snowman. It is classified as a "planetesimal" — an object believed to have formed around 3.8 billion years ago, during the Solar System's infancy.
Arrokoth is not the only object that dates to the time. Ancient comets and asteroids which also date from this febrile time have come closer to Earth, but because their orbits bring them near the Sun, they have also been affected by the star's radiation. As a result, they have been severely altered, obscuring some of the data scientists might gain on how they formed. But the Kuiper Belt is cold, and far from the Sun's harmful rays. It also contains some of the first planetary bodies ever formed in the Solar System, making it a potential astrophysics goldmine.
This brief animation moves between two New Horizons spacecraft views of Arrokoth, the spacecraft's New Year's 2019 flyby target in the Kuiper Belt.NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Roman Tkachenko
“These Kuiper Belt objects are a much better preserved sample or window back into the formation stage of planets, or planetesimals,” Alan Stern, principal investigator of New Horizons, said during a press conference to announce the findings on Thursday.
Arrokoth not only reveals some of the secrets of this process, but the data also defy the conventional theory of how planets form.
SLOW AND STEADY
The argument over how planets form has various competing theories, but the two at the center of this new research are the theory of hierarchical accretion and the cloud collapse hypothesis. Hierarchical accretion is a process whereby planetary bodies formed through high speed collisions of small rocks and grains. Cloud collapse, by contrast, is an altogether more gentle process.
Cloud collapse suggests that particles were gradually drawn to each other, until they suddenly collapsed under their gravitational pull, forming massive bodies over time.
The uniform color and composition of Arrokoth’s surface shows the Kuiper Belt object formed from a small, uniform, cloud of material in the solar nebula, rather than a mishmash of matter from more separated parts of the nebula. The former supports the idea that Arrokoth formed in a local collapse of a cloud in the solar nebula.NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Roman Tkachenko
According to the new data dump, the science supports the second theory. Arrokoth's two lobes were formed from the same cloud of material — as separate entities, they orbited around each other before they fused together to form the binary shape, the scientists reveal.
To make the conclusion, the researchers looked at different numerical simulations of interacting bodies at different speeds and angles. The models suggest that an object of this size most likely came together at a low speed — consistent with cloud collapse theory, and not hierarchical accretion.
Other data collected during the flyby jibes with this result: Arrokoth has no signs of a violent origin, and no large craters or fractures — suggesting that it had a rather gentle birth.
“The only way to account for this body is the merger speed was very low,” William McKinnon, NASA's deputy leader of the Geology and Geophysics Investigation team for New Horizons, said Thursday.
“The shape is simply inconsistent with higher velocity accretion, but it does match what we expect to see in the low velocity merger.”
New Horizons launched in January, 2006. The spacecraft was designed to peer into the outskirts of the Solar System by flying by Pluto and venturing on into the Kuiper Belt. Arrokoth was not on the original agenda for the mission, but in this one flyby, the misshapen object ca now be added to its magnificent scientific legacy.
NASA'S JUNO CORRECTS A 25-YEAR-OLD MISCONCEPTION ABOUT JUPITER
NASA'S JUNO CORRECTS A 25-YEAR-OLD MISCONCEPTION ABOUT JUPITER
The gas giant's atmosphere contains way more water than scientists previously thought.
Some 4.5 billion years ago, gravity pulled swirling gas and dust together to form a giant planet more than twice as massive as all other planets in the Solar System — Jupiter.
And, unlike the other planets, Jupiter formed from the leftover material that created the Sun. Shrouded in its gaseous layers are secrets of the Solar System's earliest years. Now, new data from NASA's Juno mission to study the planet reveal just how little we really know about this iconic giant. Turns out that on one crucial point — whether Jupiter's atmosphere contains water — we have been dead wrong for decades.
In a study published this week in the journal Nature Astronomy, scientists reveal the most-accurate measurements of the water in Jupiter's atmosphere ever taken. The data come from NASA's Juno satellite, which began to study the planet in 2016.
For 25 years, scientists believed that water was very scarce in Jupiter's atmosphere — even less than the amount of water in the Sun’s atmosphere. But the new measurements put paid to those assumptions, showing that, far from being scarce, Jupiter has three times as much water in its atmosphere as the Sun.
"Just when we think we have things figured out, Jupiter reminds us how much we still have to learn," Scott Bolton, Juno's principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in a statement.
In the new observations, Juno's cameras captured images of Jupiter's equatorial zone with its thick white clouds. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill
Cracking the mystery of how much water truly exists in Jupiter’s atmosphere could provide a rare glimpse at the conditions in the Solar System during its earliest years.
WATER WORLD
As it orbits Jupiter, Juno looks for water in the planet’s atmosphere by tracing oxygen and hydrogen molecules. Based on Juno's data, water makes up around 0.25 percent of the molecules in Jupiter’s atmosphere. That is almost three times the amount of water in the Sun’s atmosphere.
The data clear up a conundrum in Jupiter's origin story: Earlier measurements suggested that water was largely missing from Jupiter's atmosphere — which ran contrary to theories about how the planet formed.
Hydrogen and helium are the most common elements in Jupiter, followed by oxygen. Scientists believe that oxygen may have been the primary evaporating gas of the protoplanetary disk, which is a rotating disk of gas and dust that surrounds a newly formed star. As a result, Jupiter should have at least some water in its atmosphere.
But in 1995, data from NASA’s Galileo mission to Jupiter suggested the planet's atmosphere contained 10 times less water than expected.
STORMY PLANET
This wasn't the only problem with the old data — the amount of water in Jupiter's atmosphere also controls its weather.
In March, 1979, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft flew by Jupiter, detecting a strange, Earth-like phenomenon — lightning.
For there to be lightning on a planet, there needs to be an abundance of water in its atmosphere. Other key characteristics of Jupiter’s meteorology also rely on water, such as its powerful storms.
Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot is the largest storm of its kind in the entire Solar System. It has been raging on for years. The winds on Jupiter can reach up to 335 miles per hour, according to NASA.
Jupiter's Giant Red Spot storm has been observed for the past 300 years.NASA
In addition, the lines that seem to swirl around the giant planet are thought to be cold, windy clouds of ammonia and water.
ENTER, JUNO
Juno launched in 2011. One of the mission’s main objectives is to determine how much water is in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Doing so will give scientists a better understanding of how planets formed early on in the Solar System.
Juno has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016. NASA, JPL
The spacecraft orbits Jupiter every 53 days, using its Microwave Radiometer instrument to observe the planet from above. The tool features six antennas that measure atmospheric temperature at multiple depths simultaneously. Because both water and ammonia absorb microwave radiation, these temperature measurements show their abundance in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
These most-recent — and revealing — measurements were conducted at Jupiter’s equator. It is a unique region to the planet that may have its own distinct weather and atmospheric features, so further measurements are needed in order to determine whether they apply to the planet as a whole.
Juno has been a game-changer for astronomers studying the giant planet. Among its recent findings have been the first views of Jupiter's moon Ganymede's north pole, and documenting a particularly chaotic region of the planet's storms, suggesting that wind systems similar to those found on Earth run deeper and last longer on Jupiter than they do on our own planet.
ESAEen simulatie van een exoplaneet die dicht rond zijn ster draait.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET Wetenschappers hebben een exoplaneet ontdekt die wel heel snel rond haar moederster draait. Dat staat te lezen in het wetenschappelijk tijdschrift Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Een ‘jaar’ op NGTS-10b - dat is de tijd die nodig is om één keer rond de zon te draaien - duurt er maar achttien uur.
NGTS-10b bevindt zich op zowat 1.000 lichtjaar (ongeveer 9,5 biljoen kilometer) van ons. De ontdekking werd gedaan met de transitmethode, die gebaseerd is op het feit dat de helderheid van een ster afneemt als er een object of planeet voor passeert.
Het oog van wetenschappers van de universiteit van Warwick viel nu op een ster waarvan de helderheid heel frequent even afnam. Ze kwamen tot de vaststelling dat dit veroorzaakt wordt door een planeet die zeer dicht rond haar moederster draait. NGTS-10b zou maar zo’n 2 miljoen kilometer van haar ster verwijderd zijn. Ter vergelijking: Mercurius, de planeet die in óns zonnestelsel het dichtste bij de zon staat, is er wel 58 miljoen kilometer van verwijderd. En de Aarde bevindt maar liefst bijna 148 miljoen kilometer van de zon.
Het gevolg is dat NGTS-10b maar achttien uur nodig heeft voor een omloop rond haar zon en dat is een nieuw record. Ons ‘jaar’ duurt een pak langer: 365 dagen, 6 uren, 9 minuten en 10 seconden.
De planeet zou twintig procent groter zijn dan ‘onze’ Jupiter en ongeveer twee keer zoveel massa hebben. Eén kant van NGTS-10b is wellicht de hele tijd naar de ster gericht en dus de hele tijd heet. De temperatuur bedraagt er waarschijnlijk meer dan 1.000 graden.
Toekomst
Doordat NGTS-10b zo dicht bij haar zon staat, is het mogelijk dat de zwaartekracht van de ster de planeet op termijn uiteen rukt. De wetenschappers willen de exoplaneet de komende jaren in de gaten blijven houden om te zien of ze verzwolgen wordt door haar ster dan wel of hij erin slaagt alsnog rondjes te blijven draaien.
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Vlaanderen ziet ze vliegen: ’UFO-treintje’ blijken satellieten van Elon Musk - HLN.be
Vlaanderen ziet ze vliegen: ’UFO-treintje’ blijken satellieten van Elon Musk - HLN.be
astroblog.nlDe lichtjestrein was ook te zien in Zeeland.
WETENSCHAPHet Belgisch UFO-meldpunt kreeg vrijdag meer dan tien meldingen van over heel Vlaanderen over een lichtjestrein die minutenlang aan de hemel stond. De mysterieuze lichtjes blijken geen UFO’s, maar satellieten van Starlink, gemaakt door SpaceX, het ruimtevaartbedrijf van Elon Musk.
“De weersomstandigheden waren natuurlijk ideaal, er was geen wolkje aan de lucht”, zegt Frederick Delaere, coördinator van het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt. “Aan de beschrijving te horen, was mij meteen duidelijk wat al die mensen tijdens de vroege ochtendspits hadden waargenomen: op Cape Canaveral in Florida heeft SpaceX met een Falcon raket opnieuw 60 satellieten gelanceerd en die konden we nu toevallig zien vanuit Vlaanderen. Het is al de vijfde lancering, er draaien er dus al 300 rond de aarde. Wat we zien is de reflectie van de zon op de satellieten van 260 kilogram per stuk.”
Volgens de website Heavens Above is de kans groot - als de weersomstandigheden meezitten - dat we nog wel vaker dat treintje aan het Vlaamse firmament zien passeren. “Starlink wil in totaal12.000 satellieten op enkele honderden kilometer boven de aarde rondjes laten draaien want Musk wil dat snel internet in 2024 voor iedereen in de wereld bereikbaar wordt”, zegt Delaere. Musk krijgt behoorlijk wat tegenwind van wetenschappers van onder meer NASA omdat er al zoveel satellieten en ruimtetuigen in een baan rond de aarde draaien en de kans op botsingen daardoor alleen maar groter wordt.
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Noah’s Ark Found? A Researcher's Journey to Mount Ararat, Turkey
Noah’s Ark Found? A Researcher's Journey to Mount Ararat, Turkey
Technology and ancient lore converge in an attempt to unearth the final resting place of Noah’s ark. Satellite imaging and ground penetrating radar may give credence to anecdotal accounts attesting that the legendary ark rests atop Mt. Ararat. Aaron Judkins recounts the trials and tribulations of his valiant quest in search of Noah’s Ark.
Noah’s Ark is the vessel in the Genesis flood narrative through which God spares Noah, his family, and examples of all the world’s animals from a world-engulfing flood. The story in Genesis is repeated, with variations, in the Quran, where the ark appears as Safina Nūḥ.
Noah’s Ark FOUND? A Researchers Journey to Mount Ararat, Turkey
Archeologen vinden in Wichelen grootste grafcirkel ooit in Vlaanderen: "Hij is even oud als de piramides"
Archeologen vinden in Wichelen grootste grafcirkel ooit in Vlaanderen: "Hij is even oud als de piramides"
Archeologen hebben twee grafcirkels gevonden onder de voetbalterreinen van KVV Schelde in Schellebelle bij Wichelen. De oude grafmonumenten stammen uit de bronstijd en zijn meer dan 3.000 jaar oud. Een van de gevonden grafcirkels is de grootste ooit gevonden in Vlaanderen.
Manon Dupont
Duizenden jaren geleden woonden in Schellebelle, bij Wichelen, al mensen. Dat bewijzen gevonden grafmonumenten uit de bronstijd. Ze bevatten verbrande restanten van botten.
Geen skeletten, wel urnen
Archeologenbedrijf Ruben Willaert voert de opgravingen uit en is erg enthousiast over de vondsten. "Ze zien er misschien niet zo spectaculair uit, je ziet eigenlijk enkel verkleuringen op de bodem maar ze wijzen wel op eeuwenoude beschaving. Ze leren ons ook veel over de begraafrituelen toen", zegt Clara Thys van het archeologenteam. “In die tijd werden doden gecremeerd. We vinden wel urnen, assen en verbrande botten terug.”
De grafcirkels zijn even oud als Stonehenge en de piramides van Gizeh
Grootste grafcirkel ooit
In Vlaanderen zijn er al vaker grafcirkels gevonden, maar toch zijn die in Schellebelle opmerkelijk, zegt Thys: “Een van de gevonden cirkels heeft een diameter van 55 meter, dat is de grootste ooit in Vlaanderen.”
(Lees verder onder de foto.)
Radio 2
Voetballen op heilige grond
Ondanks de ongebruikelijke vondst kunnen de spelertjes van KVV Schelde binnenkort toch weer voetballen op de site. “Wij meten alles op en houden dat netjes bij. Iedereen zal kunnen nalezen wat er hier ooit heeft gestaan of gelegen”, zegt Thys. Voor alles opnieuw onder de voetbalvelden verdwijnt, mogen alle scholen van Wichelen wel nog langskomen voor een rondleiding door de archeologen.
UFO Recorded Flying Over Car In Santa Clara, California, Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Recorded Flying Over Car In Santa Clara, California, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting:Feb 16, 2020 Location of sighting: Santa Clara, California, USA Source:MUFON #106274 Here is an interesting video just into MUFON a few hours ago. Someone was recording themselves in the car and accidentally caught something white moving above him. The object shoot across the sky and has a white cloud like color, although its shape and speed is nothing like a cloud. The long shape and the reflective white surface of the craft reflects the details of many past UFO reports. Also compounded with the fact that Santa Clara is connected to the ocean, its highly probable that this UFO came from an under water base not far away. There is a very high probability that this is a real UFO. Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
Strange space vehicles seem to appear out of flashes of light - There is a big cover up underway?
Strange space vehicles seem to appear out of flashes of light- There is a big cover up underway?
Strange things going on in space lately.
The following video recorded from the ISS live feed cam shows multiple flashes of light in space on which several unidentified flying objects seem to appear out of these flashes.
Where do these strange space vehicles come from and who are the pilots? They were teleported through time from another dimension?
And could it be that these advanced machinery have anything to do with the strange green / yellow anomalies / craft that have been seen in space in recent weeks? if so, then what could be the reason for their arrival?
Now, there are rumors that there is a big cover up underway, these green/yellow craft and the strange space vehicles are but a few of of these types of alien spacecraft. It seems there are larger spacecraft en route to Earth and the global military powers, British, USA, China, Russia, etc. are gearing up for a code red alert "Status unknown spacecraft."
The following video recorded by Jujubee's Adams last week, using the ISS live feed app, shows at first the green/yellow anomalies/craft, then (starting around the 5.45 mark till the end of the video before NASA shut down the live feed) a series of flashing lights on which several UFOs seem to appear out of these flashes.
UFOs caught on tape over Seattle, Washington 20-Feb-2020
UFOs caught on tape over Seattle, Washington 20-Feb-2020
This footage of a multiple unidentified flying objects flying over Seattle, Washington was submitted to me through our Facebook page. This happened on 20th February 2020.
USS Nimitz captain reveals Navy pilots DO have to watch out for UFOs after one of the carrier's planes captured secret unreleased video of 2004 encounters with a 'Tic Tac-shaped' mystery aircraft
USS Nimitz captain reveals Navy pilots DO have to watch out for UFOs after one of the carrier's planes captured secret unreleased video of 2004 encounters with a 'Tic Tac-shaped' mystery aircraft
Captain Max Clark, commanding officer of the USS Nimitz, tells DailyMail.com it is important his ship and everybody on it is kept safe from UFOs
'From my perspective we have an obligation to make sure the airspace is clear, whether it's UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon) or UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle),' he says
This comes just weeks after the Office of Naval Intelligence revealed the existence of a classified, unreleased video of a UFO
The video was related to the notorious USS Nimitz carrier group's 2004 encounters with a 'Tic Tac'-shaped UFO
The encounters remain a mystery and the object's incredible speed and movements have led to speculation that it was extraterrestrial
The commanding officer of the US Navy supercarrier, the USS Nimitz, has revealed his crew has an 'obligation' to make sure the airspace is clear of UFOs.
In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, Captain Max Clark said it's important his ship and everybody on it is kept safe from Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) - the term for UFOs used by the Navy.
This comes just weeks after the Office of Naval Intelligence revealed the existence of a classified, unreleased video relating to the Nimitz carrier group's 2004 encounters with a 'Tic Tac'-shaped UFO.
The existence of the video was revealed in a response to a Freedom of Information Act request made by researcher Christian Lambright, and published by Lambright's friend Paul Dean.
The video is likely the full version of a leaked 76-second video clip that the Defense Department admitted in 2017 was authentic.
Captain Max Clark, commanding officer of the USS Nimitz, tells DailyMail.com it is important his ship and everybody on it is kept safe from UFOs after the Nimitz carrier group had an encounter with a UFO in 2004
This comes just weeks after the Office of Naval Intelligence revealed the existence of a classified, unreleased video of a UFO. The classified video is likely the full version of the leaked 76-second clip (above) which circulated online from 2007, and was confirmed as authentic in 2017
The footage was taken by a pilot using a Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) gun-pod camera on an F/A-18 Super Hornet flying over the Pacific Ocean.
Speaking to DailyMail.com on the bridge of the Nimitz, Captain Clark said of the bizarre encounter: 'From my perspective we have an obligation to make sure the airspace is clear, whether it's UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon) or UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle), this is part of the air space.
Nick Pope, who investigated UFOs for Britain's Ministry of Defence in the 1990s, said Captain Clark's comments come as a surprise because there are 'huge sensitivities' over the Nimitz incident
'It adds another level of... from a pilot's point of view, to see and avoid, and also our radar systems looking for things like that too, just to make sure everybody's safe.'
Philadelphia native Captain Clark, who assumed command of Nimitz on August 1, 2019, wasn't on board the Nimitz when the unusual sighting was recorded 16 years ago.
And the experienced officer wouldn't be drawn further on the video or the Navy's close encounters of the third kind.
Nick Pope, who investigated UFOs in an official capacity for Britain's Ministry of Defence in the 1990s, said Captain Clark's comments come as a surprise.
The commentator told DailyMail.com: 'These are fascinating comments and it's interesting they were made at all, because the Department of Defence recently took over responding to all UFO-related questions from the media, following some tension between them and the US Navy.
'But ship's captains are strong-willed characters who don't take kindly to being muzzled.
'That said, the captain was totally on-message, because the official line involves talking in general terms about the need to guard against unauthorized incursions into restricted military airspace, with the aim of promoting safety.
'What's being downplayed by everyone is the staggering fact that the US government still doesn't know what these objects are.
'The DOD's line is that the objects seen by naval aviators during the USS Nimitz incident remain "unidentified".'
Pope added that there are 'huge sensitivities' over the Nimitz incident and the recent admission by the US Navy that it has the secret unreleased video has put the affair back in the spotlight. And Captain Clark's comments further fuel the speculation surrounding the footage which has baffled the world.
At least six Super Hornet pilots made visual or instrument contact with the UFO on November 14, 2004.
The encounters, which are documented in numerous interviews with first-hand witnesses, remain a mystery, and the object's incredible speed and movements have led to speculation that it was extraterrestrial in origin.
Chad Underwood, the former Navy aviator who shot the famous leaked video clip, broke his silence last month in an interview with New York Magazine
Underwood was flying in an F/A-18F Super Hornet as part of the USS Nimitz (above) carrier group when he encountered an 'unidentified aerial phenomena'
A map shows the rough location of the USS Nimitz carrier group during the 2004 encounter
The original FLIR video from the Nimitz encounters leaked online as early as 2007.
Witnesses say that clips of the video had been circulated widely on the Navy's intranet - used to communicate between ships in the carrier group - and an unknown sailor in the group likely first leaked it.
The clip became one of the most-touted pieces of evidence in the UFO community when the Pentagon confirmed its authenticity in 2017.
Last month, Chad Underwood, the former Navy aviator who shot the famous leaked video clip, broke his silence in an interview with New York Magazine.
He said the oblong, wingless 'Tic Tac' shaped object was spotted off the coast of Mexico over the Pacific.
He also revealed that for about two weeks, the Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser USS Princeton, part of Carrier Strike Group 11, had been tracking mysterious aircraft intermittently for two weeks on an advanced AN/SPY-1B passive radar.
The radar contacts were so inexplicable that the system was even shut down and restarted to to check for bugs - but operators continued to track the unknown aircraft.
Then on November 14, Commander David Fravor says he was flying in an F/A-18F Super Hornet when he made visual contact with the object, which seemed to dive below the water, resurface, and speed out of sight when he tried to approach it.
As Fravor landed on the deck of the Nimitz, Underwood was just gearing up to take off on his own training run.
Fravor told Underwood about the bizarre encounter, and urged Underwood to keep his eyes open.
He recalls how he suddenly saw a blip on his radar before tracking it on his FLIR camera.
'The thing that stood out to me the most was how erratic it was behaving,' Underwood told the magazine.
'And what I mean by “erratic” is that its changes in altitude, air speed, and aspect were just unlike things that I’ve ever encountered before flying against other air targets.'
The FOIA response letter above revealed that Office of Naval Intelligence has 'TOP SECRET' briefing slides and 'SECRET' video related to the 2004 USS Nimitz carrier group encounters
Underwood says the object wasn't obeying the laws of physics and dropped from 50,000 feet altitude to 100 feet in seconds, which he says, 'isn't possible'.
Underwood added that he saw no signs of an engine heat plume or any sign of propulsion.
The pilot refuses to speculate as to whether the object is an alien spacecraft or not, however.
'That’s not my job. But I saw something. And it was also seen, via eyeballs, by both my commanding officer, Dave Fravor, and the Marine Corps Hornet squadron commanding officer who was out there as well.'
DailyMail.com spoke to Nimitz commanding officer Captain Clark about the incident after being invited onboard the awesome 95,000 ton vessel earlier this month.
We joined the crew on a five day training mission in the Pacific Ocean and witnessed first hand it's awesome capabilities.
Capable of reaching more than 30 knots (35mph) the Nimitz-class supercarrier is one of ten nuclear-powered aircraft carriers in the US Fleet.
We observed flight operations as F/A-18 Super Hornets, EA-18G Growlers and a handful of F-35C stealth strike fighters were launched off the ship and brought in to land.
The Nimitz is the lead ship of her class, one of the largest warships in the world and the flagship of Carrier Strike Group Eleven (CSG-11) with Carrier Air Wing Seventeen (CVW-17) embarked.
Its homeport is Naval Base Kitsap in Washington and the vessel is named for legendary fleet admiral Chester W. Nimitz (1885–1966), who helped the US defeat the Japanese Navy in World War II.
An illustration of Lightsail 2 being tested above Earth.
JOSH SPRADLING / THE PLANETARY SOCIETY
It has long been a dream of humanity to travel among the stars. Perhaps someday, if we survive as a species, we can explore the galaxy on great starships. It's a big dream, and it would be a tremendous engineering feat.
One of the greatest challenges is how we could even reach other stars. Our solar system is vast, but it is dwarfed by stellar distance. Even light takes years to reach the nearest stars. For humans to make such a journey in a reasonable timeframe, our starships will need to travel at relativistic speeds. But this would take far more energy than we currently produce.
While engineers have envisioned powerful rockets to reach relativistic speeds, they have also looked at alternatives such as solar sails to harness the momentum of light, or ways to capture the stream of charged particles that stream through interstellar space. After all, there are powerful natural energy sources in the universe. Why not harness them?
Recently a team looked at these ideas and explored one step further. If humans someday use natural powerhouses to travel the stars, wouldn't other advanced civilizations? If they did, could we see evidence of advanced aliens sailing between the stars?
Their paper looks at two technologies: light sails, which use light to push a starship into space, and electric sails, which use an electric field to deflect charged particles in space to accelerate the starship. They found that with light sails, the maximum speed of a starship depends upon the luminosity of the light source. By harnessing the light of a star, a light sail ship could only reach a small fraction of light speed. However, harnessing the light of microquasars or supernovae could accelerate a ship up to a few percent of the speed of light. An electric sail could achieve similar speeds from a star but performs better with powerful sources. By harnessing a microquasar, for example, an electric sail could achieve more than 10% of light speed.
Even at these speeds, a starship would take decades or centuries to reach another star. But forward-thinking species, it could be worth doing. If aliens are using such technology, how might we detect them? The team notes that one way would be to focus on powerful astrophysical sources such as microquasars. If aliens are reflecting light with a solar sail, or deflecting streams of ionized gas with an electric sail, there could be signatures in the light spectra hinting at an artificial source. But the team also notes that the best way to see these starships would be to look for radio signals.
Finding evidence of aliens in this way is a long shot. Even a galactic fleet would be very difficult to detect. But it is interesting to speculate about what we might find. And someday we might be pleasantly surprised.
Reference:
Lingam, Manasvi, and Abraham Loeb. "Propulsion of Spacecrafts to Relativistic Speeds Using Natural Astrophysical Sources." arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.03247 (2020).
Chris Mellon: Our Government Is “Lethargic And Risk Averse” In Assessing Possible Threat From UFOs
Chris Mellon: Our Government Is “Lethargic And Risk Averse” In Assessing Possible Threat From UFOs
JAZZ SHAW
Chris Mellon was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. He’s also a policy advisor for To the Stars Academy. The guy has been working on military intelligence and policy for a long time from both inside and outside of the halls of the federal government. In other words, when it comes to the military, he knows a thing or two.
One thing that Mellon knows now is that he’s getting frustrated with the seeming lack of coherent response on the part of the Pentagon to the revelations of incredible craft that have been seen violating our military airspace, first revealed to the public in December of 2017. These UFOs (and we should just be calling them that because that’s what they are) are described in detail by Mellon in a new article he’s published at the website of the American Legion titled “A threat unmet.” But despite all of the available data and expert military witnesses, Mellon finds that almost everyone in the United States government and the upper echelons of our military is turning a blind eye to what he sees as a very real, potential threat to our national security. The lack of action on the part of so many agencies that should be cooperating in the collection and analysis of data has led to a condition Mellon describes as “paralysis.” (Emphasis added)
This paralysis is occurring at a time when the scientific community increasingly recognizes the possibility of humanity encountering probes from spacefaring civilizations. In fact, last year the House Committee on Space, Science and Technology directed NASA to begin looking for “technosignatures,” by which it means alien space probes. This is happening because many exobiologists now recognize probes are more efficient and effective than radio waves for purposes of space exploration or contact. As unlikely as it may seem, there is no denying the possibility that some UFO/UAPs encountered by our military are probes launched by distant civilizations.
While military personnel such as [Cmdr. David] Fravor and Lt. Ryan Graves – an F-18 pilot who said UFOs followed his Navy strike group for months – are awed by the technology they observed, they are undeterred, eager to give chase both literally and figuratively. Reflecting on his encounter, Fravor told me, “I want to fly that thing!” He naturally expects his country to figure out where these things come from, why they are here and how they work. Fravor and his colleagues at least still have the right stuff, even if the hierarchy above them is lethargic and risk-averse.
I wanted to highlight that portion of Mellon’s article in particular because you’ll notice that he’s coming out and saying what so many people have been thinking since this story first began developing. At least some of the UFO/UAPs our military has been running into may indeed be “probes launched by a distant civilization.” In other words… aliens. There. We said it.
This is something that a few of us were batting around on social media this week. Virtually nobody with a deep background in either science or the military really thinks that those things were built by the Russians or the Chinese at this point. If either of those countries had developed the technology to build aircraft that can defy gravity and fly at Mach 25 deep in the atmosphere without us catching up, they’d have attacked us by now. Or at least shown off their cool new technology to impress everyone. And the Navy and the Pentagon have already said they aren’t ours.
So if that’s not our hardware and it’s not Russia’s and it’s not China’s… then what? I don’t care if you want to say it’s aliens, time travelers from the future or humans from some parallel dimension. As Mellon says when quoting Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for the deputy chief of naval operations, “whatever they are, they are real, they aren’t ours, and they continue to violate U.S. airspace with impunity.” We have identified a technology gap between us and someone (or something) and our government has an obligation to try to close it.
For my part, I will just say that I’m not entirely convinced that the Pentagon is doing as little as Mellon says. He’s been out of the loop there for a while and there could well be things going on that he’s simply not aware of. Of course, that’s because they keep this huge veil of secrecy over everything and anything to do with the UFO topic, as we’ve discussed here repeatedly. And even when they do tell us something, they frequently contradict themselves and obfuscate when they’re not flat-out lying.
So what does Mellon want to see happening? He would like to see a coordinated effort across multiple agencies including NASA, the National Reconnaissance Office, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, the DIA, and DHS to develop a process for collecting and integrating pertinent information about UFO/UAPs. We need to assess the level of the risk that’s presented. (The pilots who went up against the tic-tac during the Nimitz encounter told Mellon “We didn’t stand a chance against it.”) And then, with all the available data being coordinated, figure out a plan as to what we’re going to do about it.
If I can add one more item to Mellon’s wish list it would be to tell the government that the public has a right to know what’s going on and what they’re doing, particularly if they’re fairly sure it’s not the Russians or the Chinese. They should come out and tell us everything they know short of exposing sources or methods.
One hundred million years ago, a bee got trapped in tree resin. Over time, geological forces converted the resin to amber. Now a scientist arrives on the scene, to tell us this bee’s story.
Primitive bee trapped in amber. It lived in a tropical jungle 100 million years ago, when flowering plants were just beginning to diversify. It’s thought that bees and flowering plants co-evolved. This specimen has traits from modern bees and their evolutionary ancestors, the carnivorous apoid wasps.
About 100 million years ago, a femalebeewith young beetle larvae crawling all over her body flew haplessly into a glob of sticky tree resin where she became trapped. Over time, the resin fossilized to become amber, preserving the bee and its parasites in exquisite detail within the clear honey-colored rock. As rare as it is, this fossil bee isn’t the first to be found entombed in amber. But it is the only known known amber-encased bee that has pollen on it. And it’s the only fossil bee with parasites, providing a fascinating glimpse into a predator-prey relationship that continues to this day. And the entomologist who studied this doomed bee? He is George Poinar Jr. of Oregon State University (OSU), whose work helped inspire the movie “Jurassic Park.”
Poinar’s work also showed that the bee – which he named Discoscapa apicula – belonged to a new family, genus, and species. His findings were published in the January 29, 2020, issue of BioOne Complete.
George Poinar, Jr. is a renowned expert in animals and plants fossilized in amber. He’s also credited with popularizing the idea of extracting DNA from these primitive insects. This idea received widespread attention when Michael Crichton incorporated it into his blockbuster Jurassic Park franchise. In the movie, dinosaur blood is extracted from mosquitoes encased in amber from the age of dinosaurs, and DNA in the blood is used to clone living dinosaurs.
In the real world of science, researchers study insect pollinators, such as bees, because they’re critically important to the reproduction of flowering plants, some of which are key to humans’ food supply.
There are more than 16,000 known bee species worldwide, from seven taxonomic families. Bees feed primarily on nectar and pollen, in contrast to their evolutionary ancestors, apoid wasps, that preyed on other insects.
A new species of bee, trapped in amber for about 100 million years. Can you spot the parasitic beetle larvae it carried?
The newly studied bee fossil, from Myanmar, dates to the mid-Cretaceous period. This bee’s world was a tropical forest of mostly conifers, ferns, cycads, ginkgo, and horsetails. Angiosperms – flowering plants – were just beginning to diversify, along with the primitive bees that pollinated their flowers. These ancient bees shared traits seen in both modern bees and their evolutionary forebearers, apoid wasps.
In a statement about this new research, Poinar commented on one of the most interesting features of the bee:
Something unique about the new family that’s not found on any extant or extinct lineage of apoid wasps or bees is a bifurcated scape.
The scape is a base section of the antenna, closest to the bee’s head. In this bee, it branches into two sections, one ending as a small spur. This feature has never before been seen in either living or fossil bees.
An image of the “scape” on one of the bee’s antennae, divided into 2 parts. This bifurcated scape has not seen before, in any known fossil or living bee. The scape is labeled “Sc” and appears divided into 2 branches, with 1 side ending as a small spur, labeled “S.” Other labeled parts are “T” for torulus (basal socket joint that allows antenna movement), “R” for radicle (antenna joint attached to the head), and “P” for pedicle (antenna segment that creates an elbow-like joint with the scape).
The fossil record of bees is pretty vast, but most are from the last 65 million years and look a lot like modern bees. Fossils like the one in this study can tell us about the changes certain wasp lineages underwent as they became palynivores, or pollen eaters.
There were pollen grains on the bee, indicating it had visited some flowers not long before it died.
Also present were very young beetle larvae on the bee. These parasitic larvae were not feeding on it, but were hitching a ride from one of the flowers visited by the bee to its nest. At the nest, the parasitic beetle larvae would continue to develop, feeding on bee larvae and the food left by the adult bee.
Microscopic imaging reveals pollen on the bee’s pollen-catching hairs. It had visited flowers shortly before becoming trapped in tree resin.
Additional evidence that the fossil bee had visited flowers are the 21 beetle triungulins – larvae – in the same piece of amber that were hitching a ride back to the bee’s nest to dine on bee larvae and their provisions, food left by the female.
It is certainly possible that the large number of triungulins caused the bee to accidently fly into the resin.
One of the young larval beetles. Poinar counted a total of 21 larvae on this bee. These larvae are carried by the adult bee from a flower to the nest, where the larvae parasitize bee larvae and eat the food collected by the adult bee.
Bottom line:A bee that lived during the age of dinosaurs became entombed in tree resin about 100 million years ago. It was identified as a species new to science, and is the only known fossil bee encased in amber to carry parasitic beetle larvae and pollen.
Ancient ‘megasites’ may reshape the history of the first cities
Ancient ‘megasites’ may reshape the history of the first cities
Some early urban areas may have been spread out and socially egalitarian
Farmland in Ukraine now covers most of an ancient settlement called Nebelivka that some researchers consider to be one of the earliest known cities. Here, Nebelivka’s site plan is superimposed over where it once stood.
Nebelivka, a Ukrainian village of about 700 people, sits amid rolling hills and grassy fields. Here at the edge of Eastern Europe, empty space stretches to the horizon.
It wasn’t always so. Beneath the surface of Nebelivka’s surrounding landscape and at nearby archaeological sites, roughly 6,000-year-old remnants of what were possibly some of the world’s first cities are emerging from obscurity. These low-density, spread-out archaeological sites are known as megasites, a term that underscores both their immense size and mysterious origins. Now, some scientists are arguing the settlements represent a distinct form of ancient urban life that has gone largely unrecognized.
Megasites were cities like no others that have ever existed, says archaeologist John Chapman of Durham University in England.
For decades, researchers have regarded roughly 6,000-year-old Mesopotamian sites, in what’s now Iraq, Iran and Syria, as the world’s first cities. Those metropolises arose after agriculture made it possible to feed large numbers of people in year-round settlements. Mesopotamian cities featured centralized governments, bureaucratic agencies that tracked and taxed farm production, and tens of thousands of city dwellers packed into neighborhoods connected by dusty streets. Social inequality was central to Mesopotamia’s urban ascent, with a hierarchy of social classes that included rulers, bureaucrats, priests, farmers and slaves.
Over the last decade, however, researchers have increasingly questioned whether the only pathway to urban life ran through Mesopotamian cities. Chapman, along with Durham colleague Marco Nebbia and independent, Durham-based scholar Bisserka Gaydarska, is part of a movement that views low-density, spread-out settlements in several parts of the world as alternative form of early city life.
An artist’s reconstruction shows what an assembly house may have looked like at Nebelivka. Communal gatherings were likely held in these structures.C. UNWIN (BASED ON DATA FROM S. JOHNSTON), B. GAYDARSKA, M. NEBBIA AND J. CHAPMAN/CAMBRIDGE ARCHAEOLOGICAL JOURNAL 2020
Ukrainian megasites were built by members of the Trypillia culture between about 6,100 and 5,400 years ago. Typically covering a square kilometer or more, some of the sites are bigger in area than Manhattan.
Megasites may have been built so that people could better defend against invasions by rival villages or foreign forces. Based on that assumption, some estimates of population at these places run into the tens of thousands. But recent work by Chapman, Nebbia and Gaydarska indicates megasites in general may have had only a few thousand inhabitants.
And Nebelivka appears to have lacked a class of elites ruling over hordes of common folk who did the dirty work. Instead, excavations suggest that the site was organized to promote shared rule among groups of equal social standing. Thus, Nebelivka demonstrates that urban development doesn’t automatically split people into haves and have-nots, Chapman and colleagues argue, a common assumption among those concerned about social and economic inequality in modern societies.
Nebelivka novelty
In the 1970s, archaeologists began excavating several Trypillia megasites in fertile soil between the Southern Bug and Dnieper rivers in Ukraine. Aerial photography and geomagnetic surveys on the ground revealed outlines of buried structures. At least two dozen megasites have been located in the country since then.
Ukrainian archaeologists have excavated small parts of several of the sites. But it’s a daunting task. Researchers working at one location have unearthed about 50 houses over the last 25 years, Chapman says. “They have another 2,150 houses to go.”
At Nebelivka, Chapman, Gaydarska and Nebbia have reconstructed the megasite’s entire layout. This settlement blueprint, the first of its kind for a megasite, appears in the February Cambridge Archaeological Journal.
Over six years of fieldwork since 2009, the researchers have excavated and mapped Nebelivka structures located over more than a square kilometer. Aerial photos, satellite images and geomagnetic data, supplemented by excavations of 88 test pits, identified 1,445 residential houses and 24 communal structures dubbed assembly houses. Residential houses, some intact and most in ashes after having burned, were grouped into 153 neighborhoods, a majority containing three to seven houses. Neighborhoods, in turn, formed 14 quarters, each with one or more assembly houses situated in an open area.
This blueprint of the Nebelivka megasite is based on excavations and geomagnetic surveys (orange lines mark the areas of those surveys). About two-thirds of houses had been deliberately burned at different times, perhaps as part of ceremonial burnings, researchers say. Purple lines denote borders of residential quarters made up of neighborhoods.Y. BEADNELL (BASED ON DATA FROM D. HALE), B. GAYDARSKA, M. NEBBIA AND J. CHAPMAN/CAMBRIDGE ARCHAEOLOGICAL JOURNAL 2020
During about 200 years of occupation, Nebelivka served as both a dwelling site and, oddly enough, a kind of cemetery for incinerated houses, Gaydarska says. About two-thirds of Nebelivka houses had been deliberately burned at different times, creating mounds of charred debris across the site. Sediment and pollen excavated in and around Nebelivka display no signs of wildfire, a clue that the houses were intentionally set aflame.
In 2015, the researchers built and then burned a replica of a Trypillia house, producing lumps of ashy clay residue like those found where actual Nebelivka houses once stood. Only after filling the replica with much more dry timber than had been used to build the house did the experimental conflagration reach temperatures high enough to raze the entire structure and produce Nebelivka-like residue mounds. Nebelivka’s ancient residents must have gone to great lengths to gather enough wood for what was likely ceremonial house burnings, Chapman says.
“Burning a house down in this way created a spectacle that could be seen from many kilometers away,” he says.
Scientists built a wooden version of a Nebelivka house and set it on fire (left) to investigate how and why ancient residents burned down many of their houses. Burned remains of the experimental house were examined in a 3-D image (right).FROM LEFT: B. GAYDARSKA; M. NEBBIA
No signs of a centralized government, a ruling dynasty, or wealth or social class disparities appear in the ancient settlement, the researchers say. Houses were largely alike in size and design. Excavations yielded few prestige goods, such as copper items and shell ornaments. Many examples of painted pottery and clay figurines typical of Trypillia culture turned up, and more than 6,300 animal bones unearthed at the site suggest residents ate a lot of beef and lamb. Those clues suggest daily life was much the same across Nebelivka’s various neighborhoods and quarters.
Although Chapman and colleagues agree Nebelivka’s city life differed from that of Mesopotamian metropolises, the researchers disagree about the details.
Chapman suspects the megasite was a permanent settlement in which, at any one time, 2,000 to 3,000 people occupied up to 400 houses. Residents likely came from 10 regional groups, known from previous investigations of smaller Trypillia villages, that had traded goods and formed some common cultural beliefs and practices, he says. Members of the 10 groups established the neighborhoods and quarters outlined in Nebelivka’s site plan, Chapman speculates. Given the need to ease inevitable tensions among groups living unusually close together, a council recruited from throughout Nebelivka may have made political decisions. Council leadership might have even shifted annually from one group to the next, he says.
Nebbia thinks it’s more likely that perhaps 3,000 to 4,000 people inhabited Nebelivka for around one month each year. During that time, people who assembled at the megasite made new contacts, shared knowledge and goods, and conducted communal activities such as house building and burning. Perhaps 100 to 150 guardians lived at and maintained Nebelivka year-round, he speculates.
Yet another possibility, favored by Gaydarska, portrays Nebelivka as a large center for religious pilgrims from throughout the Trypillia world. Over a roughly eight-month pilgrimage season, presumably scheduled for seasons when the weather permitted long-distance journeys, between 1,000 and 2,000 pilgrims per month inhabited Nebelivka. Ritual leaders from various Trypillia communities maintained the settlement and organized construction projects, she suspects, including the raising of assembly houses where religious ceremonies were held.
Middle Eastern sites for large, periodic gatherings date back at least 10,000 years and could have set the stage for similar but larger get-togethers at Nebelivka, however they were organized, Gaydarska says. While Nebelivka’s site plan can’t unveil the exact nature of social life there, it reveals a large open space in the center of the megasite where researchers previously assumed many people lived. Earlier estimates that Nebelivka housed 10,000 people or more are thus way too high, the three researchers contend.
Power sharing
As at Nebelivka, an increasing number of archaeological sites in Asia, Europe and the Americas are being classified as low-density urban settlements, says archaeologist Roland Fletcher of the University of Sydney. For instance, settlements comparable in size and population to megasites, known as oppida, emerged elsewhere in Europe more than 2,000 years ago. Whether people inhabited oppida year-round or seasonally, these sites contained households of roughly equal status that participated in collective decision making, Fletcher says.
Aerial laser mapping has uncovered much larger examples of urban sprawl that date to around 1,000 years ago at Greater Angkor in Cambodia (SN: 4/29/16) and roughly 2,000 years ago at Maya outposts in Central America (SN: 9/27/18). In those cases, kings and other power brokers ruled spread-out populations that cultivated crops such as rice and maize using sophisticated irrigation techniques.
Aerial laser mapping has revealed much larger examples of urban sprawl around Maya outposts in Central America than previously thought. Here, a representation of the site of Naachtun in what’s now Guatemala is shown. Yellow dots indicate ancient structures.M.A. CANUTO ET AL/SCIENCE 2018, L. AULD-THOMAS AND M.A. CANUTO
Though some of these sprawling sites had social inequality, egalitarian cities like Nebelivka were probably more widespread several thousand years ago than has typically been assumed, says archaeologist David Wengrow of University College London. Ancient ceremonial centers in China and Peru, for instance, were cities with sophisticated infrastructures that existed before any hints of bureaucratic control, he argues. Wengrow and anthropologist David Graeber of the London School of Economics and Political Science also made that argument in a 2018 essay in Eurozine, an online cultural magazine.
Councils of social equals governed many of the world’s earliest cities, including Trypillia megasites, Wengrow contends. Egalitarian rule may even have characterized Mesopotamian cities for their first few hundred years, a period that lacks archaeological evidence of royal burials, armies or large bureaucracies typical of early states, he suggests.
Megasite mystery
Not everyone views Nebelivka as emblematic of an alternative branch of early city life.
“Nebelivka may be an interesting example of a ritual, ceremonial or defensive gathering place rather than an ‘all-purpose’ city or a distinctive pathway to urbanism,” says archaeologist Monica Smith of UCLA.
Unlike bustling Mesopotamian cities, which featured walls or other prominent structures along their borders, Nebelivka contained lots of apparently open space and was encircled by only a ditch, Smith observes. And from the start, cities brought together large numbers of people who had to cooperate with strangers and heed the edicts of political and religious leaders, Smith argues. Ancient cities typically included massive official structures and were densely occupied for thousands of years, unlike megasites that drew smaller crowds for several hundred years at most, she says. Smith reserves judgment on the nature of city life at Greater Angkor and the Maya sites, where further excavations might reveal higher-density occupations than currently suspected.
Some investigators regard densely populated Mesopotamian settlements from around 6,000 years ago, such Tell Brak in Syria, as the world’s oldest cities. The remains of a Tell Brak palace are shown.BERTRAMZ/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY 3.0)
Smith suggests calling permanent and temporary gathering spots — a category that, in her view, includes Trypillia megasites — “collective settlements.” In her 2019 book Cities: The First 6,000 Years (SN: 4/16/19), Smith provisionally identifies the oldest known city as Tell Brak, a roughly 6,000-year-old Mesopotamian site in northeastern Syria.
But Nebelivka and other Ukrainian megasites transcended Trypillia village life too dramatically to be classified simply as gathering places, Gaydarska argues. Trypillia people, she maintains, engaged in one of several early experiments in large-scale urban living, even if for only part of the year. It’s time to revamp traditional ideas of what makes an ancient settlement a city, she says.
For now, the next challenge is to explain why the Tyrpillia megasites arose in the first place and lasted no more than around 700 years. To get a better grip on that mystery, Gaydarska plans to excavate Trypillia villages dating to just before and after Nebelivka’s heyday. “We have nothing to compare Nebelivka to at this point,” she says.
It was a hot and humid evening on August 19, 1952, and hardware store clerk and Boy Scout Scoutmaster Dunham Sanborn “Sonny” DesVergers was driving a group of Boy Scouts home on a coastal highway near West Palm Beach, Florida, that winds right alongside the vast swamp wilderness of the South Florida Everglades. As he made his way down a darkened side road towards the home of one of the boys, his attention was captured by a bright flash in the sky out over the gloomy swamp near a dense grove of palmettos. His first thought was to just keep on driving, but then it occurred to him that an airplane had possibly gone down out there in the wilderness, so he turned back, stopped the car, and after some moments of thought peering into the dimness of the swamp he decided to grab a machete and start hacking his way through towards where he believed the accident to have occurred. And so would begin a strange odyssey that has remained one of the weirder UFO encounters on the books.
DesVergers told the Boy Scouts to stay behind, and if they did not hear from him in 15 minutes they were to make their way to a farmhouse off the road and fetch help. He then gripped his machete, hoisted his flashlight, and began penetrating the murky, snake and alligator infested wilderness. As he progressed through the choking brush he allegedly noticed an unpleasant smell in the air, which got steadily worse as he progressed. He continued hacking his way through the vegetation and thickets through the fog of stench that pervaded the air until he reportedly came to a clearing, where he signaled to the boys with his flashlight and then turned to notice what he would describe as an intense heat, as if an enormous oven door had suddenly opened to belch forth its fire. Disoriented, he looked up to see something blocking out the sky above, which he claimed was a large disc-like object measuring around 30 feet in diameter and ringed with glowing lights, and when the beam of his flashlight hit it he could ascertain that it was smooth, metallic, and had a concave bottom. This is where things would get really weird.
As the frightened scoutmaster started backing up in a growing panic, he claims that he heard a grinding sound like metal upon metal, which he soon realized was a hatch of some sort opening on the side of the unearthly craft. From within emerged what he describes as an intense red light that approached him and then transformed into a red mist, which engulfed him and caused him to instinctively cover his face. According to him, he then lost consciousness. Back at the car, the Boy Scouts, who had been tracking their scoutmaster’s progress by watching the glow of his bouncing flashlight beam in the gloom, purportedly saw a “big red ball of fire” through the trees, as well as “a series of red lights … a lot like flares.” That was when they decided to go for help.
Police arrived on the scene not long after, and were about to launch a search through the swamp for DesVergers when he came stumbling out of the thicket in a kind of daze, disoriented, mumbling incoherently and quite obviously very shaken, to the point that deputy sheriff Mott Partin would later say, “In all my 19 years of law-enforcement work, I’ve never seen anyone as terrified as he was.” Closer inspection of the man showed that his skin seemed lightly burned and the hair on his forearms singed, as well as a strange series of three burn marks in his scoutmaster’s cap. Making it all even odder still was that when some of the officers went to the clearing that DesVergers had come from they found his flashlight lying on the ground and a flattened ring of grass they could not explain.
DesVergers would be brought back to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s office and that was when the case would attract the attention of Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, who was at the time part of the U.S. Air Force Project Blue Book, which was with investigating and analyzing UFO-related incidents in the name of national security. Ruppelt, who would later call it “one of the weirdest UFO reports that I came up against,” took his team to Florida in order to interview the witnesses and investigate the area of the alleged UFO encounter. Talking to the Boy Scouts he learned that they stood by their story of seeing bright red lights, and DesVergers also seemed very sincere, which impressed Ruppelt at first and of which he said he had the “immediate impression he was telling the truth.” The team also were able to find anomalous singed grass in the clearing where it had all gone down, which lab tests were unable to find an answer for, especially since in many instances the samples showed burned roots but intact upper leaves. Nor was there any conventional medical explanation for the victim’s singed hair, slightly burned skin, which was determined to have been caused by a “flash heat source,” or his damaged cap, thought to have been the work of “sparks of some kind,” all of which made it all even more promising, but cracks would slowly start to reveal themselves.
Red flags started going up when DesVergers began drumming up media attention for his alleged encounter, even going so far as to hire a press agent, and the story got more and more exaggerated the more he told it, adding in details such as that he had seen alien beings and even fought with them. A little digging into DesVergers’ past also brought up some warning signs, as he was found to be an insufferable teller of tall tales and as well as having gone AWOL during military service and also a convicted car thief. In other words, honesty was not really his thing, and although dishonest people can still potentially have a strange UFO encounter, Ruppelt was starting to get suspicious. Although there were certainly many oddities that could not easily be explained, and he couldn’t see how they could have been faked, Ruppelt would nevertheless eventually label it “the best hoax in UFO history.” He would go on to write of the account in his 1956 book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, and as much as he liked to think of it as a hoax, some of the aspects have never been satisfactorily explained, such as the weirdly singed grass roots and physical evidence, and so the debate has remained open as to whether it really happened or not, with one researcher Jeffrey Wilson saying:
Something unusual happened to the guy, and the physical evidence backed him up. That’s why I put the effort into checking this out. Why would you go to the trouble of faking something like this?” Why, and how, would he stage that? It doesn’t make any sense.
The case is still quite remarkable for the physical evidence left behind and the assertion by the witness even in later years in the face of withering criticism that this was all real. Regardless of whether DesVergers was a known liar or not, there seems to be a lot to unpack here, and it is important to remember that strange phenomena do not always necessarily happen to the most honest or reliable of people. What are we to make of his burns or the scorched grass, or the corroborating reports of the Boy Scouts he was with at the time? Was this perhaps a real event that he merely embellished and took advantage of over time, or was it merely the rantings and scheming of a known liar? The case was certainly enough to catch the attention of Project Blue Book and other researchers since, still unexplained, and whether it is real or not has managed to lodge itself firmly within some of the more curious and puzzling UFO cases there are
A great name for a band, an intriguing plot for a movie … but a scary thing to find out your military has developed. Yes, they claim it’s for bomb-sniffing … just like gunpowder was originally developed for medicinal purposes. What could possibly go wrong? Let’s find out.
“Finally, we developed a minimally-invasive surgical approach and mobile multi-unit electrophysiological recording system to tap into the neural signals in a locust brain and realize a biorobotic explosive sensing system. In sum, our study provides the first demonstration of how biological olfactory systems (sensors and computations) can be hijacked to develop a cyborg chemical sensing approach.”
“Hijacked to develop a cyborg chemical sensing approach” means the brains of locusts – made famous by so many plagues – are connected via electrodes in their brains to tiny packs on their backs which transmit sensory images picked up by the locusts’ antennae and send them to a computer, which monitors the signals and sees when the grasshoppers detect the vapors of one of many different explosives, a process that takes a mere few hundred milliseconds, thanks to the 50,000 olfactory neurons in those sensitive antennae. That’s a brief summary of “Explosive sensing with insect-based biorobots,” a non-peer-reviewed paper published this week in BioRxiv describing four years of research by a team led by Baranidharan Raman, associate professor of biomedical engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis.
If you refuse to let them go, I will bring locusts into your country tomorrow. They will cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen. They will devour what little you have left after the hail, including every tree that is growing in your fields. They will fill your houses and those of all your officials and all the Egyptians—something neither your fathers nor your forefathers have ever seen from the day they settled in this land till now. — Exodus 10:3–6
7- They will come out of the graves with downcast eyes like an expanding swarm of locusts. (54- The Moon, 7)
And as when beneath the onrush of fire locusts take wing to flee unto a river, and the unwearied fire burneth them with its sudden oncoming, and they shrink down into the water; even so before Achilles was the sounding stream of deep-eddying Xanthus filled confusedly with chariots and with men. The Iliad
Yeah, yeah, yeah … they know all about your biblical, Quran and Iliad locust plagues, but that didn’t stop the U.S. Office of Naval Research from investing $750,000 back in 2016 to develop cyborg locusts … or was that the reason for the investment? While it’s accepted that cheap bomb detectors are in demand by police, the military and airport security for dealing with terrorists, and by governments like Vietnam and South Korea who still have active minefields left over from not-so-recent wars, it’s easy to imagine other uses for these bionic bugs whose main claim to fame is not bomb-detection but swarming crop devastation of the plague kind. Back in 2016, Raman saw other uses for the cyborg locusts as well.
“But the real key, he says, is the relative simplicity of the locust’s brain. That’s what allows it to be hijacked, which, if all goes right, will allow for remote explosive sensing. Raman believes that eventually cyborg locusts could be used for other sniff-centric tasks, even medical diagnoses that rely on smell.”
Send them to countries with bombs and mines right before the crops are ripe. Have them do their jobs detecting the explosives, then reward them by letting the cyborg locusts detect the wheat fields and let the destruction begin.
What could possibly go wrong?
“Something neither your fathers nor your forefathers have ever seen from the day they settled in this land till now.”
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
DE MAGISCHEGEBEURTENISSEN RONDOM MOUNT SHASTA ( VIDEO )
DE MAGISCHEGEBEURTENISSEN RONDOM MOUNT SHASTA ( VIDEO )
Er zijn van die speciale plekken op aarde en één daarvan is de Amerikaanse vulkaan Mount Shasta in Californië. Er wordt gezegd dat er zich onder de vulkaan een buitenaardse basis bevindt en de Indianen die ooit het gebied bevolkten spraken van de mystieke krachten van Mount Shasta.
Voor veel mensen is Mount Shasta een heel bijzondere plek en zij schrijven dan ook dingen zoals het volgende:
De vijfde chakra (gerelateerd aan onze keel), is gelegen in het gebied genaamd Mount Shasta, Noord-Californië. De eigenschappen van de keelchakra zijn communicatie, uitdrukking en verbinding tussen je geest, emoties en ziel. Wij hebben veel mensen horen vragen waarom Amerika het centrum van nieuwe ideeën en gedachten lijkt te zijn. De energie van Mt. Shasta is de poort waardoor communicatie kan worden gechanneld in ons collectief bewustzijn. Wij hebben het nu over communicatie van een hoger bewustzijnsniveau, communicatie over de geest en communicatie over het menselijk potentieel. Enkele van de zeer fundamentele leringen kwamen uit de streek van Mt. Shasta. Dus, de verantwoordelijkheid van Mount Shasta is het kanaliseren van de energie van wereldwijde communicatie.
De Mount Shasta is een vulkaan in de Cascade Range in Noord-Californië, VS. Hij heeft een hoogte van 4.317 m. De kegelvormige top is in sterke mate vergletsjerd en vertoont een zeer symmetrische vorm. In de buurt van de top vindt men verschillende zeer hete zwavelbronnen.
Er zijn vele engelen, lichtmeesters en hoger dimensionale wezens aanwezig en er is een sterke verbinding met Lemurië voelbaar, welke je ook kunt voelen en ervaren in Nederland op de Elohim Krachtplaats.
Zes jaar geleden schreven wij het volgende over Mount Shasta:
We hebben het afgelopen jaar veelvuldig voorbeelden gezien van UFO activiteit rondom vulkanen. Zoals de spectaculaire opnames rond de Popocatepetl vulkaan in Mexico.
In Amerika hebben we ook een vulkaan die veelvuldig in verband wordt gebracht met UFO activiteiten en dat is de Mount Shasta in de Amerikaanse staat Californië. Het is niet alleen bekend vanwege UFO’s, maar wordt ook wel één van de heilige plaatsen op deze planeet genoemd. Dit was reeds het geval in de tijd dat de indianen dit gebied bevolkten en ook vandaag de dag worden er mystieke krachten toegeschreven aan Mount Shasta.
Ook hier gaan al decennialang geruchten dat er zich onder Mount Shasta een buitenaardse basis zou bevinden en er worden uiteraard ook regelmatig UFO’s waargenomen.
Een voorbeeld hiervan zie je op de volgende foto, die geloof het of niet, gemaakt is door Google.
En nu komt Mount Shasta weer in het nieuws vanwege een bijzondere foto die op sociale media werd geplaatst door een medewerker van de Amerikaanse overheid.
Het is een foto die valt in de categorie: wolken die allesbehalve wolken lijken te zijn en waarvan we recentelijk meerdere voorbeelden hebben gezien. Wolken in een meestal wolkeloze hemel soms helemaal geen wolken blijken te zijn.
Wat het ook moge zijn, het is een prachtige opname en voor ufo onderzoeker Scott Waring bestaat er dan ook geen enkele twijfel en hebben we hier te maken met een gecloakt buitenaards ruimteschip.
In het licht van alle mysterieuze zaken rond Mount Shasta, geen vreemde conclusie en in de volgende video vertelt hij meer waarom hij denkt dat we hier te maken hebben met een ruimteschip.
Hij vertelt verder over het enorme ondergrondse gangenstelsel dat zich onder Mount Shasta bevindt en hoe daar op mysterieuze wijze mensen zijn verdwenen. Compleet verdwenen zonder dat er ooit iets van hen is teruggevonden.
Soms komen er volgens Scott mensen uit de tunnels die geheel in het wit gekleed zijn en omringd door een vreemd gloeiend licht. Deze mensen worden in verband gebracht met Saint Germain en er schijnt zelfs een soort complete religie te zijn rondom Mount Shasta.
Voor Scott is duidelijk dat degene die voor Saint Germain wordt aangezien niemand anders is dan een buitenaardse die afkomstig is van de ET basis diep onder de vulkaan.
En tot slot nog een deel uit een eerder artikel over iemand die een buitenaardse ontmoeting heeft in de buurt van Mount Shasta.
Ik reed op Highway 31, afkomstig van Klamath Falls. Toen ik het stadje Merril binnenreed zag ik een fel vierkant licht dat vanuit "iets" naar buiten scheen. Het licht leek te fel om afkomstig te kunnen zijn van een keukenvenster ofzo.
Op de achtergrond zag ik de silhouetten van een aantal huizen. Het licht leek afkomstig te zijn uit een veld dat ongeveer 25 meter bij mij vandaan lag, langs de kant van de weg. Alhoewel het donker was kon ik zien dat er een object stond dat de vorm had van een bord/schotel met een doorsnee van ongeveer 7 meter waarbij het leek alsof het aan één kant een soort inkeping had.
Het was ook aan die kant van het object dat ik meer dan twee, maar niet meer dan vier, kleine personen ontdekte. Ik kreeg de indruk dat ze aan het werk waren. Ik besteedde er niet al te veel aandacht aan, maar begon toch langzamer te rijden om beter te kunnen kijken.
Plotseling kreeg ik een gevoel dat ze geschrokken waren omdat ik ze had gezien. Ik tuurde in het donker, maar kon ze niet goed zien. Ik dacht dat het misschien een mix was van volwassenen en tieners. In ieder geval stopten ze met wat ze aan het doen waren en bleven stilstaan.
Ondertussen was ik de stad ingereden en verloor ik ze even uit het zicht. Ik reed in een gehuurde bestelbus met daarachter een aanhanger. Waarom weet ik niet, maar ik besloot om te keren en terug te gaan om beter te kunnen kijken. Het viel niet mee om om te keren met die aanhanger en tegen de tijd dat ik weer op die plek terug was, waren er ongeveer drie minuten verstreken.
Tot mijn verbazing was het object weg, er hing alleen nog een soort mist. Ik hing met mijn hoofd uit het raam om naar de lucht te kijken en ik zag een rood knipperend licht zoals je dat ziet op torens en dergelijke, als waarschuwing voor vliegtuigen. Het hing ongeveer op een hoogte van twintig meter. Ik staarde ernaar en besefte dat er niets was waar dit licht aan vastzat, het was alsof het los in de lucht zweefde.
Toen stopte het licht met knipperen en verschenen er rode en witte lichten rondom de hele omtrek van het object. Ze flitsten aan en uit in een bepaalde volgorde, waardoor het leek alsof de lichten bewogen rondom het object. Dat was het moment waarop ik zeker wist dat het een schotel was.
De voorkant, tenminste ik neem aan dat het de voorkant was, hing onder een hoek van 20 graden naar beneden en toen begon het langzaam weg te vliegen, ongeveer met de snelheid van een helikopter. Ik moest lachen in mijzelf, want ik bedacht dat ze dit misschien wel deden om mij te laten geloven dat het een helikopter was. Ik luisterde met gespitste oren om te horen wat voor soort geluid het maakte, maar er was nauwelijks iets te horen.
Eerst vloog het naar het zuidwesten. Toen een paar kilometer verder veranderde het van koers naar een richting waar Mount Shasta ongeveer ligt, schat ik. Ik kon het object nog een tijdlang volgen en toen verdween het uit zicht.
Ik bleef nog een beetje in de buurt rondrijden aan de rand van de stad, de plek waar het object was geland. Ik merkte toen nog een paar dingen op die ik vreemd vond, maar die misschien niets met mijn waarneming te maken hadden.
Zoals een man die voor een groot raam zonder gordijnen zat in het huis dat het dichtst bij de landingsplek stond. Hij leek totaal niet te merken dat ik probeerde met een grote combinatie een honderdtachtig graden draai te maken op zijn gazon. Het leek alsof hij in een soort trance was of iets dergelijks.
Ik vervolgde mijn trip. Toen ik een stukje verder was verloor de auto bijna alle vermogen en was niet vooruit te branden. Ik ging zo langzaam dat ik bijna stilstond. Ik had nog nooit eerder in dat gebied een probleem gehad met een signaal voor mijn mobiele telefoon, maar nu was dit wel het geval. Ik kon niet bellen en ook geen sms versturen.
Tijdens het vervolg van de rit naar Reno voelde ik dat ik geobserveerd werd en dat ik niet alleen was. Ik heb dat gevoel nog steeds, tot op de dag van vandaag. Als ik nu ’s morgens vroeg in het donker buiten loop voel ik me niet op mijn gemak. Ik begrijp dat niet want toen ik die ontmoeting had voelde ik helemaal geen angst.
Sinds die ontmoeting werkt mijn nieuwe camera ook niet meer. Ik had er die dag helaas geen batterijen in en die heb ik nu al een paar keer vervangen, maar hij doet helemaal niets meer. Ik denk dat ze die op de één of andere manier kapotgemaakt hebben.
Tot zover het verhaal van die vreemde ontmoeting in de buurt van Mount Shasta.
Iemand die ook veel ervaringen heeft met UFO’s rondom Mount Shasta is de auteur Brian Wallenstein. Hij heeft er een dik boek over geschreven van ruim 600 pagina’s met de titel “Mount Shasta Sightings”.
Hieronder volgt een vorig jaar opgenomen interview met hem over zijn boek en zijn eigen UFO waarnemingen.
What's wrong with this satellite image of Saunders Island?
What's wrong with this satellite image of Saunders Island?
There is a list of satellite map images with missing or unclear data. Some locations on free, publicly viewable satellite map services have such issues due to having been intentionally digitally obscured or blurred for various reasons.
Now take a look at the imagery of Saunders Island, a crescent-shaped island 8.8 km (5.5 mi) long, lying between Candlemas Island and Montagu Island near Antarctica and you see that the images having been intentionally digitally obscured by Google Earth.
We may wonder why they have digitally obscured a part of the island or it must be that they have to hide something!
Something like a never-seen-before lake of bubbling lava under the island?
The shocking discovery was made by the British Antarctic Survey using powerful satellite imagery of the Southern Hemisphere.
The Antarctic survey confirmed not only the presence of molten lava in the crater of Mount Michael, an active volcano on Saunders Island but this lava lake is the eighth of its kind to be found on Earth.
This UFO video was just submitted through our Facebook page. It was recorded over Winnipeg, Canada on 13th February 2020.
Witness report:
My daughter and I recorded a UFO last Thursday night in the sky to the west of our home. It was a sphere of light in the sky. Two other light spheres appeared as well shortly after we began recording. The lights would fade in and out. White lights seem to briefly shoot out from one side of the middle light. The lights stayed in the same location until a military aircraft began flying toward it. The lights started to fade more to the west after 9 minutes or so when the plane was flying toward it. We stopped recording when it wasn’t visible. If I edited it to shorten the clip, could I send somewhere for someone to look at it? I apologize in advance for my daughters disgusting language.
Amysterious event takes place, in a land considered “far away” by most. Hundreds of children witness something they cannot explain, but no one believes them. The few adults present, teachers no less, are coerced into silence. Students vanish into thin air. The presence of a foreign unknown military force. An idealistic American scientist travels to the under side of the world looking for answers, eventually disgraced, he takes his own life. UFO sightings fluctuate, a man reports a UFO sighting and unusual experience, claiming that his car is being sucked into ethereal lights on an isolated road. Three days later, a fatal car accident occurs at the exact location where the strange event took place. You might be thinking I’m describing the events of some sci-fi drama series, only a great many individuals, to this day, would attest that all, if not most of these claims were entirely true. The least disputed detail of all the strangeness, is the sighting of an unidentified flying object, a flying saucer.
It was 11:00 am, Wednesday, April 6th, 1966, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. What no doubt may have presented itself as an ordinary day at Westall High school, would have drastically changed the moment voices began to shout, “look up in the sky, it’s a flying saucer!”
Immediately, a sense of frenzy, fear, wonderment and exhilaration resonated among the students, because as many eyewitnesses will tell you, as they looked to the clear blue morning sky, there was a silver flying saucer performing aerial feats beyond the capabilities of the (publicly known) aircraft of the day.
As hundreds of students charged toward an area nicknamed ‘The Grange’ where a paddock converged onto a grove of pine trees (today a nature reserve) beyond the edge of the school, numerous eyewitness reports claim that the flying saucer actually lowered into the tall grass. Causing a circular impression that remained after the UFO ascended, some noting also a swirling inner pattern. The UFO was not alone in the sky, according to many eyewitnesses, a number of small airplanes (claims as high as 5) were tailing it. (Though there were no reports of any unusual activity made by Air traffic control or the Royal Australian Air force. To this day, the alleged ‘5 pilots’ have never come forward).
There have since been claims that children, one girl identified only as “Tanya” and others that were closest to the unidentified object when it made its descent, passed out and lay unconscious on the ground around it. Eyewitnesses make the claim that even an ambulance attended the scene to see to the students seemingly suffering physiological effects of the experience. It is claimed by one eyewitness, that “Tanya” was never seen again, after succumbing to some physiological effect from the experience, never returning to school after the event on April 6th.
All up, it is believed the aerial chase, the landing and high speed escape/disappearance happened within a window of approximately 20 minutes. 20 minutes, according to most of the vocal eyewitnesses that has profoundly effected their lives.
(Dr. James E. McDonald)
In interviews conducted by American Physicist/Ufologist, Dr. James E. McDonald roughly one year later, he managed to speak with science teacher Andrew Greenwood who was there that fateful day. Greenwood upon realizing the frenzy sweeping up outside among the students, headed outside to get a look at what they were reacting to. Andrew Greenwood described the UFO as a “round, silver object about the size of a car with a metal rod sticking up in the air.” He then remarked that one of the first things to occur after the event took place, was the headmaster instructed all students to return to their classrooms, after which Greenwood said “he [the headmaster] gave the school a lecture and told the children they would be severely punished if they talked about this matter and told the staff they could lose their jobs if they mentioned it at all.”
From there, according to those who tried to speak out about the event, an element of secrecy and suppression arose. Military vehicles were seen around the area, the site was under total lockdown. Ironically, exactly as virtually every film surrounding such an event would have you believe. Men in camouflaged uniforms were reportedly seen by dozens of the eyewitnesses still vocal on the issue now more than half a century on. The unusual thing about men in camouflage is that in Australia during the 1960’s, neither the Australian nor the British had incorporated it into the military uniforms. Suggesting a possible involvement of either a group, outside of a national government, or even the U.S government which did/does have a presence on Australian soil.
There is talk of suppression of information surrounding this incident. I don’t know how things were managed at the time, perhaps due to the nature of news in the 1960’s it simply did not receive the coverage it might if it occurred today. Though, anecdotally, I would have to agree that something does seem unusual about the records. In researching the event through the usual channels, archives of Australian public newspaper records, the entire year of 1966 in Australia seems oddly slim. Searching terms like “UFO”, “Westall”, “Flying Saucer” were actually proving fruitless. So then I changed the search purely based on date.
In Melbourne, 1966, possibly by coincidence, 1966 draws a blank. So then I started checking other states, in case stories made it to further away Newspapers. When I looked up ‘The Canberra Times’, checking through dates around early April I didn’t find any mention of the Westall UFO event (though perhaps I was just lazily looking in all the wrong places). I did however, find this story, reported in Canberra, about a story that happened in Victoria, approximately 2 hours NW from the Westall incident, mere days after the UFO was sighted at the back of the school:
“MELBOURNE, Monday. — The current world-wide spate of sightings of flying saucers was brought closer to home today by a report by a Maryborough man. Mr Ronald F. Sullivan, a 38-year-old builder of Victoria Street, Maryborough, said he had seen an unidentified flying object on the Bendigo to St Arnaud Road last Monday. Three days later a youth was killed when his car ran off the road at the place where Mr Sullivan said he had seen the object.
Mr Sullivan said, “the headlights on my car were suddenly diverted to the right, for no apparent reason. And if I had followed them I would have run off the straight stretch of road. The fact that I am an experienced driver, and know the district well, saved my life. I managed to stop before I crashed.
Then I saw a display of gaseous lights in all colours of the spectrum in a nearby paddock. The object rose about 10 feet in the air. It later disappeared”, Mr Sullivan said.
Mr Sullivan said he drove on to Wycheproof where his headlights were checked and found to be in perfect order. He went to the crash scene with police on Friday. “We all noticed there was a depression about five inches deep in the freshly ploughed paddock, about 50 feet from the fence. It was about five feet in diameter.” Mr Sullivan said. Police at Maryborough, Castlemaine, Bealiba and Newstead said today they had all heard reports of flying saucers in the area. They have not been able to find the cause of the accident in which the youth, Gary Taylor, 19, of Carnegie, died.”
—THE CANBERRA TIMES, TUESDAY, APRIL 12, 1966
It’s also claimed that the chemistry teacher at Westall High, Barbara Robins, had access to a camera and was hastily snapping photographs of the UFO during the 20 minute frenzy. There are a great many photographs claiming to be taken during this event, but when I cross referenced them (reverse google search) every single one was linked to other UFO sightings, though that is common in many news stories, surrounding issues even outside of the paranormal. It’s been suggested that Barbara Robins had her camera and film confiscated and was coerced into silence.
Ultimately, in my opinion, this is more a story about suppression than anything else. It has endless possible explanations, but these are the top four I could come up with.
Mass Hysteria, somehow something potentially non-existent has been blown way out of proportion. Disingenuous recollections of a misinterpreted reality. This is actually the least likely scenario, in my mind.
Extraterrestrial or Ultraterrestrial life with access to highly advanced technology, presented itself to hundreds of Australian schoolchildren. For whatever reason, some “agency” (government or otherwise) wants to keep it a secret, suppressed knowledge.
Certain groups on this planet have access to technology that far surpasses what is currently available to the masses. Information is power, and the power is being kept from the general people. Those that rule the world don’t want individuals to be self-sufficient and able to thrive off of the nipple of “the system“.
The whole thing was setup. The entire experience was orchestrated. “They” wanted to test how a group would react to something like this, then how they could suppress it.
Some estimations to the total number of witnesses of UFO phenomenon (of varying levels and vicinity of encounters) in Victoria around the 6th of April, 1966 are approximately 300 individuals. 300 individuals that saw “a flying saucer” at a very low altitude. This wasn’t a craft people were squinting to see through the clouds, this was something narrowly avoiding telegraph poles (as one witness claimed). All said and done, in this account of strange events, there is one major thing to ask yourself. Someone in all of this is lying, that much is certain. The question that only you can truly ask yourself is, who? Did the students decide to create some charade? For the fun of it? For fame? They didn’t achieve any, the story barely got out. Or is the reason that seemingly “military” types were involved almost instantly, liaising with the powers that be, because certain people know certain things, that the rest of us are not allowed to understand.
If you think time will reveal the answers naturally, that the truth will rise to the surface on it’s own accord, like cream, remember this event happened over half a century ago. Many of the eyewitnesses have spent their entire lives waiting to make sense of what they saw, like something would emerge from the woodwork and link the pieces together. That day, unfortunately, has yet to come. Unless something changes, something gives out, the secrets will remain secrets, dormant and unknown.
According to UFO-Hunters.com as of the year 2020, there are over 200220 sightings reported and that number expected to continue to grow as more people around the world continue to more avidly monitor and record the activity of the skies.
Iron Age Temple Uncovered in Jerusalem Challenges Biblical Claim
Iron Age Temple Uncovered in Jerusalem Challenges Biblical Claim
The famous Temple of Solomonmight not have been the first or only temple in the Holy Land.
Dating to around 900 BC, an Iron Agetemple located near Jerusalem negates the long-held idea the ancient Kingdom of Judah (southern Israel) only had one temple, the First Temple, better known as Solomon's Temple, which was operational between 10th century BC until it was destroyed in 586 BC.
The Iron Age site of Tel Motza, about 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) outside Jerusalem, has been known of since the early 1990s and archaeologists found the remains of a settlement dated to the Neolithic period (about 6000 BC). In 2012 a settlement from the First Temple period was discovered containing a cultic structure and 36 wheat granaries, indicating that Motza was part of an ancient economic center, and it is the presence of this one ancient religious complex that challenges the history of Judah presented in the Bible.
The Tel Motza Iron Age temple excavation site in Jerusalem.
Judah Was Not As Well Established As The Bible States
A new study of the temple by co-researcher Shua Kisilevitz, a doctoral student of archaeology at Tel Aviv University in Israel and an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), and review co-author Oded Lipschits, the director of the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, was published in the January/February issue of the Biblical Archaeology Review magazine. In the article the researchers say the temple had been built about 900 BC and that they think it operated until the early 6th century BC.
And where this discovery is controversial is that the existence of this temple means that people living close to Jerusalem had their own place of worship, a cultic temple, which in itself suggests the rule of the Jerusalem high priests was “not so strong”, and that the kingdom was “not so well established” as the Bible leads us to believe, Kisilevitz and Lipschits, told Live Science .
Oldest Known Horse Depictions In Judah
A report in the Daily Mail detailing the study says the ancient temple could have held about 150 congregants who worshiped the god Yahweh, but they also used idols to communicate with the divine in the same period as the First Temple. This contradicts the Jewish Bible that details the religious reforms of King Hezekiah and King Josiah, who consolidated worship at Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, and allegedly stopped ‘all’ cultic practices out of its walls.
Kisilevitz told Live Science that the temple was a rectangular building with an open courtyard at the front that would have been a focal point for cultic worship, and inside they found a stone built sacrificial altar near pits for dead animal bodies. Two human-like and two horse-like clay figurines were discovered smashed and buried in the courtyard, which was thought to have been associated with a rainfall, fertility and harvest ritual of some kind. The researchers added that the horse-like figurines may be the “oldest known depictions of horses from the Iron Age of Judah.”
Figurine of a horse found in Tel Motza Iron Age temple in excavation site.
The teams of archaeologists at Tel Motza unearthed dozens of grain storage silos (granaries) and associated administrative and religious buildings. This informs us that Tel Motza sold grain to the nearby Jerusalem. Over time, the settlement is believed to have become an agricultural and economic “powerhouse,” the researchers wrote in the magazine piece. They also speculate that perhaps the temple was permitted to exist by the high priests at Solomon’s Temple, because it was part of the granary and didn’t threaten centralized control of the kingdom.
During the time this temple was functional, new political groups and alliances emerged in the Levant, and it is believed that in the face of these changes people maintained traditional religious practices. The researchers said this was evident in the temple’s artifacts and architecture, which they say are reminiscent of religious traditions from the ancient Near East that had been practiced since the third millennium BC.
Figurine of a ram found in Tel Motza Iron Age temple excavation site.
The discovery and analysis of this ancient Iron Age temple not only enlightens historians on the state formation of Judah during this period. It also determines that the state was nowhere near as centralized as it would later become and that in its formative days it depended not solely on the administrative elite at Solomon’s Temple, but on trading relationships with nearby settlements like Tel Motza, and maybe others yet to be discovered.
Top image: Main: The Tel Motza Iron Age temple excavation site in Jerusalem. Source: Skyview / Israel Antiquities Authority . Inset: Ancient figurines of people found at Tel Motza. Source: Clara Amit / Israel Antiquities Authority
De neanderthalers waren een stuk verfijnder en beschaafder dan eeuwenlang werd aangenomen, blijkt eens te meer uit een nieuw onderzoek.
De wetenschap verwijst het cliché van de neanderthaler als een menselijke ondersoort in alle betekenissen van dat woord almaar nadrukkelijker naar de prullenmand. Nieuw onderzoek stelt dat beeld van een primitief wezen, dat alleen maar met een steen in een hand gruizige keelklanken zou brommen, nog wat meer bij aan de hand van een gelijkenis met een wel erg menselijk aanvoelend ritueel.
Bloemen en kransen
Voor het eerst in twintig jaar werd in het eldorado van de neanderthalexperts, de Shanidargrot in de Koerdische Autonome Regio in Irak, weer een geleed skelet opgegraven: een geraamte waarvan botten, beenderen en andere lichaamsdelen nog grotendeels met elkaar verbonden waren. En dat opent nieuwe onderzoeksperspectieven rond een hypothese die specialist Ralph Solecki in de jaren 50 van de vorige eeuw formuleerde. Uit de aanwezigheid van pollen in begraafplaatsen leidde deze Amerikaanse archeoloog toen af dat neanderthalers, net zoals de mens, met bloemen afscheid namen van een overledene.
De botten van de linkerhand van een neanderthaler, gevonden in de Shanidargrot. Credits: Graeme Barker
Dat leidde tot een decennialange controverse, want niet alle wetenschappers waren ervan overtuigd dat de bloemen wezen op doodsrituelen, laat staan begrafenissen tout court. En bij uitbreiding twijfelden zij sterk aan de veronderstelling dat neanderthalers ook maar enige culturele verfijning van die orde hadden. De nieuwe vondst door een team van de universiteiten van Cambridge, Birkbeck en Liverpool (John Moores) maakt het nu mogelijk dit stukje neanderthalerbeschaving verder te verkennen met de nieuwste technieken, zoals CT-scans en DNA-onderzoek.
Culturele complexiteit
‘Inscripties in grotten, decoratieve schelpen en klauwen van roofvogels… De voorbije jaren zijn er steeds meer aanwijzingen en bewijzen gekomen dat neanderthalers een stuk gesofisticeerder waren dan werd gedacht,’ stelt onderzoekleidster Emma Pomeroy. ‘Wat hun dodenrituelen betreft waren we tot nog toe aangewezen op decenniaoude resten en onderzoeken met intussen verouderde technieken. Maar als nu blijkt dat zij de Shanidargrot inderdaad gebruikten als een kerkhof, met bijhorende rituelen bovendien, dan wijst dat op een culturele complexiteit van een nog net iets hogere orde en een grotere gelijkenis met de mens dan verondersteld.’
Findings From NASA's Juno Update Jupiter Water Mystery
Findings From NASA's Juno Update Jupiter Water Mystery
The JunoCam imager aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft captured this image of Jupiter's southern equatorial region on Sept. 1, 2017. The image is oriented so Jupiter's poles (not visible) run left-to-right of frame. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill › Full image and caption
The mission publishes its first stream of data on the amount of water in Jupiter's atmosphere - the first findings on the gas giant's water since the agency's 1995 Galileo mission.
NASA's Juno mission has provided its first science results on the amount of water in Jupiter's atmosphere. Published recently in the journal Nature Astronomy, the Juno results estimate that at the equator, water makes up about 0.25% of the molecules in Jupiter's atmosphere - almost three times that of the Sun. These are also the first findings on the gas giant's abundance of water since the agency's 1995 Galileo mission suggested Jupiter might be extremely dry compared to the Sun (the comparison is based not on liquid water but on the presence of its components, oxygen and hydrogen, present in the Sun).
An accurate estimate of the total amount of water in Jupiter's atmosphere has been on the wish lists of planetary scientists for decades: The figure in the gas giant represents a critical missing piece to the puzzle of our solar system's formation. Jupiter was likely the first planet to form, and it contains most of the gas and dust that wasn't incorporated into the Sun.
The leading theories about its formation rest on the amount of water the planet soaked up.Water abundance also has important implications for the gas giant's meteorology (how wind currents flow on Jupiter) and internal structure. While lightning - a phenomenon typically fueled by moisture - detected on Jupiter by Voyager and other spacecraft implied the presence of water, an accurate estimate of the amount of water deep within Jupiter's atmosphere remained elusive.
Thick white clouds are present in this JunoCam image of Jupiter's equatorial zone. At microwave frequencies, these clouds are transparent, allowing Juno's Microwave Radiometer to measure water deep into Jupiter's atmosphere.
The image was acquired during Juno's flyby on Dec. 16, 2017. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill Full image and caption
Before the Galileo probe stopped transmitting 57 minutes into its Jovian descent in December 1995, it radioed out spectrometer measurements of the amount of water in the gas giant's atmosphere down to a depth of about 75 miles (120 kilometers), where the atmospheric pressure reached about 320 pounds per square inch (22 bar). The scientists working on the data were dismayed to find ten times less water than expected.
Even more surprising: The amount of water the Galileo probe measured appeared to be still increasing at the greatest depth measured, far below where theories suggest the atmosphere should be well mixed. In a well-mixed atmosphere, the water content is constant across the region and more likely to represent a global average; in other words, it's more likely to be representative of water planetwide. When combined with an infrared map obtained at the same time by a ground-based telescope, the results suggested the probe mission may have just been unlucky, sampling an unusually dry and warm meteorological spot on Jupiter.
"Just when we think we have things figured out, Jupiter reminds us how much we still have to learn," said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "Juno's surprise discovery that the atmosphere was not well mixed even well below the cloud tops is a puzzle that we are still trying to figure out. No one would have guessed that water might be so variable across the planet."
Measuring Water From Above
A rotating, solar-powered spacecraft, Juno launched in 2011. Because of the Galileo probe experience, the mission seeks to obtain water abundance readings across large regions of the immense planet. A new kind of instrument for deep space planetary exploration, Juno's Microwave Radiometer (MWR) observes Jupiter from above using six antennas that measure atmospheric temperature at multiple depths simultaneously. The Microwave Radiometer takes advantage of the fact that water absorbs certain wavelengths of microwave radiation, the same trick used by microwave ovens to quickly heat food. The measured temperatures are used to constrain the amount of water and ammonia in the deep atmosphere, as both molecules absorb microwave radiation.
The Juno science team used data collected during Juno's first eight science flybys of Jupiter to generate the findings. They initially concentrated on the equatorial region because the atmosphere there appears more well-mixed, even at depth, than in other regions. From its orbital perch, the radiometer was able to collect data from a far greater depth into Jupiter's atmosphere than the Galileo probe - 93 miles (150 kilometers), where the pressure reaches about 480 psi (33 bar).
"We found the water in the equator to be greater than what the Galileo probe measured," said Cheng Li, a Juno scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. "Because the equatorial region is very unique at Jupiter, we need to compare these results with how much water is in other regions."
Northward Bound
Juno's 53-day orbit is slowly moving northward, as intended, bringing more of Jupiter's northern hemisphere into sharper focus with each flyby. The science team is eager to see how atmospheric water content varies by latitude and region, as well as what the cyclone-rich poles can tell them about the gas giant's global water abundance.
Juno's 24th science flyby of Jupiter occurred on Feb 17. The next science flyby takes place on April 10, 2020.
"Every science flyby is an event of discovery," said Bolton. "With Jupiter there is always something new. Juno has taught us an important lesson: We need to get up close and personal to a planet to test our theories."
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The Italian Space Agency contributed the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper and the Ka-Band translator system. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built and operates the spacecraft.
The Very Large Array observatory in New Mexico will gather data to be analysed by the Seti Institute. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty
Astronomers will sweep the entire sky for signs of extraterrestrial life for the first time, using 28 giant radio telescopes in an unprecedented hunt for alien civilisations.
The project is a collaboration between the privately-funded Seti Institute and the Very Large Array observatory in New Mexico, one of the world’s most powerful radio observatories. Gaining real-time access to all the data gathered by VLA is considered a major coup for scientists hunting extraterrestrial lifeforms and an indication that the field has “gone mainstream”.
Normal astronomy operations will continue at the VLA, which was featured in the 1997 film Contact, but under the new arrangement all data will be duplicated and fed through a dedicated supercomputer that will search for beeps, squawks or other signatures of distant technology.
“The VLA is being used for an all-sky survey and we kind of go along for the ride,” said Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley Seti centre. “It allows us to in parallel conduct a Seti survey.
“Determining whether we are alone in the universe as technologically capable life is among the most compelling questions in science, and [our] telescopes can play a major role in answering it,” said Tony Beasley, director of The National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which runs the VLA.
The first phase of the project, installing new cables, has been funded by John Giannandrea, a senior Apple executive and trustee of the Seti Institute, and Carol Giannandrea.
The VLA project is one of a wave of upcoming Seti initiatives sketched out at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference in Seattle on Friday.
Jill Tarter, an emeritus researcher at the Seti Institute, gave updates on Panoseti, a proposed observatory in the prototype stage of development designed to continuously watch a large portion of the sky. If funding is secured, Panoseti will comprise two geodesic domes covered in half-metre lenses, giving it the appearance of a giant pair of insect eyes. The ability to simultaneously watch a vast expanse of sky would make it uniquely suited to spotting transient signals, such as the flash of a distant powerful laser. “To catch that kind of thing you really do want to be looking when the signal comes your way,” said Tarter ahead of her talk.
The veteran Seti scientist said the field had been boosted in the past decade by the discovery that about a fifth of stars host planets in the “habitable zone”.
“Now that there might be more habitable real estate out there than we ever imagined early on … it seems to make this next question about intelligent life more realistic,” she said. “It’s not as far on the fringes as it once was – it’s almost mainstream.”
Others are hunting for less intelligent varieties of alien life. Speaking at the same session at AAAS, Victoria Meadows, who leads Nasa’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory at the University of Washington, described observations planned with the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch next year.
Three Earth-sized planets orbiting a cool, dim star called Trappist-1 in the constellation of Aquarius will be high up on the hit list. Computer models suggest the Trappist-1 system is among the most promising for finding planets with atmospheres and temperatures that would enable liquid water to exist on the surface.
“The James Webb Telescope will be able to tell us whether they have atmospheres like the Earth or Venus,” said Meadows. “It gives us our first real chance to search for gases given off by life on another planet. We’re basically going to get to study Earth’s cousins.”
Siemion also announced the second tranche of results from the $100m (£76m) Breakthrough Listen Initiative: no alien transmissions have been detected so far.
The latest survey, the most comprehensive to date of radio emissions, included the first search of the “Earth transit zone”. The transit zone search targeted 20 stars in positions where the hypothetical inhabitants of these solar systems would be able to observe the Earth’s shadow flickering across the sun. This method of detection has allowed astronomers to identify thousands of exoplanets and determine whether their conditions are potentially habitable.
“This turns that around and says, ‘What if some other civilisation were watching our sun?’” said Siemion.
If there is, it is either watching quietly or watching from some of the other 200bn stars in the Milky Way.
As the latest technology advances bring scientists a step closer to answering the question of whether anyone or anything is out there, there are still issues to be ironed out over best practice in the event that an alien civilisation is detected.
Stephen Hawking warned against attempting any form of contact, suggesting the outcome for humans would not necessarily be good. Siemion disagrees. “Personally I think we absolutely should and I think without a doubt, we would,” he said. “Part of being human is wanting to reach out into the unknown and wanting to reach out and make connections.”
He is less decisive about what Earth’s message should be, however. “I don’t know … I spend absolutely zero time thinking about that,” he said. “I guess I would just say, ‘Hello’.”
Saturn's most Earth-like moon looks a bit less likely to host life, thanks to quantum mechanics, the weird rules that govern subatomic particles.
Titan, the second largest moon in our solar system after Jupiter's Ganymede, is unique in two ways that have convinced some researchers that this moon might host extraterrestrial life: It's the only moon in our solar system with a dense atmosphere, and it's the only body in space, besides Earth, known to definitely have pools of liquid on its surface. In Titan's case, those pools are frigid lakes of hydrocarbons, closer to the gasoline in a car than the oceans on Earth. But some researchers have suggested that complex structures could arise in those pools: bubbles with special properties that mimic ingredients found to be necessary for life on our planet.
On Earth, lipid molecules (fatty acids) can spontaneously arrange themselves into bubble-shaped membranes that form the barriers around the cells of all known life-forms. Some researchers think this was the first necessary ingredient for life as it formed on Earth.
On Titan, researchers have speculated in the past, an equivalent set of bubbles might have emerged, these consisting of nitrogen-based molecules called azotosomes.
But for those structures to arise naturally, the physics has to work just right in the conditions actually present on Titan: temperatures of about minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 185 degrees Celsius), without liquid water or atmospheric oxygen.
Previous studies, using molecular dynamics simulations — a technique often used to examine the chemistry of life — suggested that such bubble structures would arise and become common on a world like Titan. But a new paper, published Jan. 24 in the journal Science Advances, suggests that those earlier simulations were wrong.
Using more complex simulations involving quantum mechanics, the researchers in the new paper studied the structures in terms of their "thermodynamic viability."
Here's what that means: Put a ball at the top of a hill, and it's likely to end up at the bottom, a position of lower energy. Similarly, chemicals tend to arrange themseIves in the simplest, lowest-energy pattern. The researchers wanted to know whether the azotosomes would be the simplest, most efficient arrangement for those nitrogen-bearing molecules.
Titan represents a "strict test case for the limits of life," the researchers wrote in their paper. And in this role, the moon fails. Azotosomes, the simulation showed, just aren't thermodynamically viable on Titan.
This work, the researchers said in a statement, should help NASA figure out what experiments to include on its Dragonfly mission to Titan, planned for the 2030s. It's still theoretically possible that life emerged on Titan, the researchers said in the paper, but such life would likely not involve anything we'd recognize as a cell membrane.
The ever-growing number of satellites and orbital debris in space prompted calls for change at a House hearing, although how this will be legislated is still under consideration.
At issue is the rise of privately owned satellite constellations by companies such as SpaceX and OneWeb. Satellites today are smaller and more affordable than the big machines of past decades, thanks to advancements in technology. But with fleets of small satellites comes other risks, such as more chances for them to slam into each other. And high-profile near misses are starting to become more common.
"This is one of the most important and rapidly evolving issues facing our ability to operate in space," said Kendra Horn, D-Okla., chair of the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, in her opening statement at the hearing in Washington, on Feb. 11.
Two large, defunct and uncontrollable satellites nearly collided in orbit two weeks ago, passing about 60 feet (18 meters) from each other — narrowly avoiding a collision that could have sent thousands of pieces of "space junk" into low Earth orbit. And in late 2019, the European Space Agencyhad to redirect one of its satellites to reduce the risk of a collision; the other satellite operator, SpaceX, did not respond to requests to move its own machine out of the way.
This doesn't even mention the numerous confirmed examples of space collisions and space junk over the decades that in some cases, are still causing problems today. For example, the International Space Station has changed its orbit in the past to dodge dangerous space debris. Space assets such as weather satellites, telecommunications links and the GPS navigation system for the United States are among the vital links of space infrastructure that could be knocked out if collisions continue.
The U.S. Department of Defense has a catalog of more than 20,000 known space objects, Horn said, although this number has a couple of limitations. The catalog only represents unclassified satellites or objects, and it also indicates the number of trackable objects. There are some things in space that are just too small to be tracked with current technology.
"Space is going to get more crowded," Horn said, as thousands of new objects join what's already in space. The SpaceX Starlink constellation could have more than 12,000 satellites alone in a few years, and (besides the collision concern) it already is raising concerns from astronomers for its bright objects blocking night-sky observations.
The House subcommittee commissioned a few experts to speak on how lawmakers can address this problem, under a provision in the 2020 NASA budget to carry out research and development activities concerning space debris mitigation, and to consider a strategy for space situational awareness research and technology.
The solutions proposed were diverse, but for the most part, the experts said it will likely involve using several government entities that could include NASA, the Department of Commerce and other possibilities. There may be some private industry involvement as well.
Public-private partnerships
One possibility is finding more sources for satellite data outside of the Department of Defense. "We need better data," said subcommittee ranking member Brian Babin (R-Texas), adding that the Department of Defense cannot release all data for national security concerns — and it does not see everything.
Babin suggested that the Department of Commerce could form a partnership with the private sector. It already has experience with regulating standards such as export controls, he said. It also already gives a "light touch" to emerging industries, he pointed out — such as its careful relationship in the 1990s with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) that assigns internet addresses, among many other functions.
Brian Weeden, the Secure World Foundation's director of program planning, testified as a witness for the subcommittee. He said alerts are already coming from private industry nonetheless. It was LeoLabs, a private American company, that first sent out the alert about the possible 2020 collision in a tweet three days before the event, he said — based on ground-based tracking radars. But he warned the current infrastructure is "dangerously insufficient to face the growing number of space challenges."
But Commerce is not the only federal entity that could step up to help solve the space junk crisis.
International collaboration
Much of space law rests on precedent, taking into account how things are done in international waters or on the continent of Antarctica (where multiple countries have jurisdiction). For that reason, scholar Ruth Stilwell called for considering the "high seas" as one area where space policymakers could turn for legislation. (Stilwell is an adjunct professor at Norwich University and a senior non-resident scholar at the Space Policy Institute of George Washington University.)
Stilwell called for an "international agreement on standards and behaviors," with a transition to new space traffic management taking into account the needs of various space players. Whatever the framework is, however, it would need government oversight of some sort. "You can only be a good actor with rules to follow," Stilwell added later in the hearing. "You can't expect somebody to be a good actor if rules do not exist."
There is also concern that by handing space traffic control to big entities like Commerce and a few private companies, other voices (such as smaller companies) could be lost in the space world. "We need to ensure the expertise developed in small communities is not lost in the transition phase," Danielle Wood, the director of the space-enabled research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said at the hearing.
While NASA does have expertise in the space domain, the agency doesn't have all the expertise that other ones have — which is why Joanne Gabrynowicz, professor emeritus of space law at the University of Mississippi Law Center, called for an interagency solution. "There is no one agency who has it all," Gabrynowicz said at the hearing, referring to other government agency possibilities for managing space traffic.
NASA also has numerous other things to think about, Weeden said in a separate piece of testimony — including its mandate to land astronauts on the moon by 2024 and then move on to Mars. "NASA could do it, but my sense is they will be overwhelmed by all the other things," Weeden said.
If people don't act quickly, there is the risk that space debris could lock out the possibility of future missions for a while, if a collision creates pieces of debris that slam into other satellites and break them up, too. (This is known as the Kessler Syndrome.)
Over time the collisions would stabilize, noted Daniel Oltrogge, who is founder and administrator of the Space Safety Coalition, but the effects would still be felt. "By the time it does [stabilize], you have a huge number of small particles out there, and some fragments … that are quite large," said Oltrogge, who is also chair of the space traffic management space governance task force for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
More subcommittee hearings will be coming up to discuss what to do next.
Are They Alive... Antarctica Melting Ice Is Revealing Something No One Thought Possible!
Are They Alive... Antarctica Melting Ice Is Revealing Something No One Thought Possible!
As the ice melts, through volcanic activity and human intervention, the world will be watching as this mysterious land reveals the secrets it has held for so long.
Any artifacts recovered that would give us free or clean energy will be covered up and hidden away under the Vatican for sure until they can dumb it down make it dirty and charge us monthly for it! AC
The military hires private companies to do the research so they don’t have to disclose what’s going on. Private companies don’t have to answer to congress. Kens32052
It’s called nuclear destruction and guess what, never trust the miss leading information given here, they lie and withhold info because too much knowledge to the public will disrupt these governments agenda to control all our minds. Drygrass
SPACEX WANTS TO SEND REGULAR CITIZENS INTO SPACE — HERE'S HOW
SPACEX WANTS TO SEND REGULAR CITIZENS INTO SPACE — HERE'S HOW
A human-carrying capsule will help a lucky few live out their space travel dreams.
SpaceX has teamed up with a private space tourism company to send up to four private citizens into space.
Space Adventures, a Washington, D.C.-based firm, announced Tuesday that it will work with Elon Musk's firm to host a voyage using the Crew Dragon capsule. The mission, the Crew Dragon's first free-flying mission, could be the first such space tourism trip powered entirely by American spaceflight technology. A launch could take place as early as 2021.
“This historic mission will forge a path to making spaceflight possible for all people who dream of it, and we are pleased to work with the Space Adventures’ team on the mission,” Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, said in a statement.
The mission will use SpaceX's Falcon 9 reusable rocket to send up a Crew Dragon capsule. The rocket will launch from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, a common launch site for SpaceX's missions. Timing is unclear, but the company suggests a window stretching from late 2021 to mid-2022. Following "a few weeks" of training in the United States, the group will lift off and fly for up to five days.
It could mark a momentous occasion in commercial spaceflight history. Over the course of 2001 to 2009, Space Adventures flew over 36 million miles in eight separate missions. Its clients have non-professional astronauts like Dennis Tito, Richard Garriott, Mark Shuttleworth and others. But all successful orbital missions used Roscosmos Soyuz rockets, and this arrangement was put on hold after the rockets became the only means of reaching the International Space Station.
SpaceX, a private company founded by Musk in 2002, routinely sends satellites and cargo into space but has never flown a human. The Crew Dragon, developed as part of NASA's Commercial Crew program, is designed to send astronauts to and from the International Space Station. With this new announcement, the Crew Dragon could also expand human spaceflight and bring tourists along for the ride.
The Space Adventures website failed to load in the wake of the announcement, but the team also shared a video with more details via its YouTube account:
"Honoring our combined histories, this Dragon mission will be a special experience and a once in a lifetime opportunity – capable of reaching twice the altitude of any prior civilian astronaut mission or space station visitor,” Eric Anderson, chairman of Space Adventures, said in a statement.
The company has big plans for the trip. Its official announcement states that the trip will offer the chance to "break the world altitude record for private citizen spaceflight," offering a chance to see Earth like no other human since NASA's Gemini program in the 1960s.
It's not the first time SpaceX has announced plans to send private citizens into space. Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa plans to use the under-development Starship to fly around the moon with a team of six to eight artists. The "Dear Moon" voyage is expected to take around five days, and passengers will be encouraged to create art capturing their experience. The mission is scheduled to take place in 2023.
But like the Starship, the Crew Dragon is still under development. The first manned flight could take place as early as the first half of 2020, with SpaceX reportedly looking at May 7 as a possible launch day. But as the project has already experienced delays during development, a further delay is not entirely out of the question.
AFPSpaceX-CEO Elon Musk tijdens een persconferentie over de SpaceX Crew Dragon demo-missie in maart 2019.
WETENSCHAPIn samenwerking met een Amerikaanse firma voor ruimtetoerisme zoekt de Amerikaanse raketbouwer SpaceX vier privépersonen voor een ruimtereis. De prijs van het ticket is nog niet geweten.
Bouwer van de Falcon-draagraket SpaceX heeft een overeenkomst gesloten met Space Adventures, met zetel nabij Washington. Die firma werkte samen met het Russische ruimtevaartbureau Roscosmos om acht ruimtetoeristen met een Russische Sojoez naar het Internationaal Ruimtestation ISS te brengen en terug te halen.
SpaceX, het bedrijf van Tesla-kopstuk Elon Musk, biedt nu de kans om mee te vliegen met zijn door een Falcon-9 gelanceerde Crew Dragon, of de bemande versie van zijn onbemande cargo die voor rekening van het ruimtevaartbureau NASA instaat voor vervoer naar en van het ISS. Die Crew Dragon moet binnen enkele maanden - echt bemand - voor het eerst vliegen, maar wanneer precies is nog niet bekend.
De raketbouwer beklemtoont ruimtetoeristen geen verblijf in het ISS aan te bieden. SpaceX geeft geen details over de datum, de duur en het programma van de trip. Voorzitter Eric Andersen van Space Adventures zei dat de vlucht twee keer zo hoog kan gaan als voorgaande missies van een amateur-astronaut of bezoeker van het ruimtestation. Dit wentelt op ongeveer 400 km hoogte rond onze planeet.
Concurrentie
Ook werkzaam in de sector van het ruimtetoerisme zijn Virgin Galactic en Blue Origin. Zij werken aan trips tot 80 à 100 km hoogte of de grens van de ruimte, voor enkele minuten, voor 250.000 dollar of meer. SpaceX zal ongetwijfeld duurder zijn.
Met een Falcon-9 heeft SpaceX maandag nog eens 60 satellieten tegelijk voor zijn Starlink-constellatie voor wereldwijd breedbandinternet gelanceerd. Het netwerk omvat zodoende al 300 kunstmanen.
Voor de eerste keer sinds 2016 kon de teruggekeerde eerste rakettrap echter niet landen op een droneschip in de Atlantische Oceaan. Die trap werd ook al gebruikt bij drie eerdere lanceringen. Het lijkt onwaarschijnlijk dat het in zee geplofte ding nog eens gebruikt zal kunnen worden.
Archaeologists say a group of people tunnelling into the side of a country road in search of a race of pre-Polynesian giants' skeletons could be damaging the archaeological record.
A representative of local iwi, Ngāti Taahinga, who have tīpuna and taonga buried in the limestone-rich north Waikato area's caves, has described the group's actions as "disturbing".
The group say this bone belongs to a giant pre-Polynesian human and could be more than 2500 years old. Experts say it's likely from a moa. Photo / Supplied
RNZ understands one member of the group is a caver, but none are trained archaeologists.
Since 2016, the group has recorded progress of the dig by sharing photos, videos and written updates on a blog that has been viewed more than 88,000 times.
Otago University associate professor of bioarchaeology Dr Siân Halcrow worries about the number of people who might come across the blog and believe the information being put out on it.
"It does really highlight what some New Zealanders think, in terms of pre-Māori conspiracy theories, with really racist undertones. It's not grounded in fact, so people should be aware."
Though the group has tried to keep the location of the cave secret, RNZ has been able to confirm its whereabouts and contact the landowner, who was unaware of the dig and said the group did not have his permission to be tunnelling into his property.
Under cover of darkness
The secretive group has been sporadically digging out the tube-like cave for close to four years, often under the cover of darkness. They are yet to find any real evidence of the supposed giants they call the "tall ones", although they say they have already found several bones in the cave.
The group has determined one is the leg bone of an 8 foot tall human and could be up to 2500 years old. "This here, my friends, is a human bone of a pre-Polynesian inhabitant," a male voice says in a video of the hollow bone posted online by the group. "You can tell by the triangular shape. It's most likely a tibia, which would make this… individual 8ft 4 inches tall… Regardless of its length, this is an older bone than any human being in New Zealand. What do our detractors say now, we wonder?"
Experts say the bone probably belongs to a moa.
The lack of evidence hasn't hampered the enthusiasm of the group's apparent leader, who does not reveal his name online but goes by the initials 'IJ'.
"Providing proof of 8' humans to the world will be bigger than finding Tutankhamen," he tells RNZ, via email, adding that the discovery will be "the most talked about worldwide story of the millennium."
Tuakau man Maurice Tyson says the cave may contain the skeletons of Spanish flu victims. Photo / RNZ, Claire Eastham-Farrelly
A spokesman for Heritage New Zealand - the government entity tasked with protecting New Zealand's historic and cultural heritage - is less excited. Although it's illegal to modify or destroy any part of an archaeological site without authority from Heritage New Zealand, the spokesman says he has "no reason to believe that the purported cave is an archaeological site". In other words, the experts don't think the cave contains any evidence of pre-1900 human activity - giant human bones or otherwise.
The farmer who owns the land is fuming. Despite writing on the blog that "the land owner knows and approves of what we do", the property owner told RNZ he was unaware of the dig, and the group did not have his permission.
The 'Tall Ones'
There are many myths, rumours and oral histories pertaining to what lies beneath the crumpled farmland that spreads along the west coast, between Port Waikato and Raglan. Some are more far fetched than others.
Al Mannering, who grew up on a farm in the Waikaretu Valley where the tunnel is being dug, recalls stories of a pou whenua (carved wooden post) being found near a sharp bend when the road was cut, which he says may have signified a nearby urupā. He also recalls seeing a human femur about 2cm longer than his own. "And I am 6ft."
Another story comes from 88-year-old Maurice Tyson, who has lived in nearby Tuakau since he was a teen. He tells of a 'crypt' filled with 14 or more 8ft tall skeletons being uncovered by road workers, then quickly reburied by archaeologists, as part of a wider conspiracy to keep New Zealand's true history a secret.
Tyson doesn't claim to have seen the skeletons, or their reburial - but says the story was told to him by the road workers who found them. He has multiple theories about who the skeletons belong to - from victims of the Spanish flu to WWII Japanese soldiers.
On self-proclaimed "astro-archaeologist" Martin Doutre's CelticNZ website, an article describes a tribe of tall "Aztec type Maoris" [sic] referred to as the "Tall Ones" who lived in north Waikato caves and were eaten to extinction. The article mentions a "secret burial cave" that is "packed with the dead of the tribe."
It is these stories that seem to have inspired IJ and his crew, (who use the initials BM, YM, RL Davidson and MD on their blog,) to tunnel into the limestone cave in a bank on the side of Waikaretu Valley Rd.
"In the following pages and over the next three years or so you will find digital photos and information, along with video, that will prove that the 'tall ones' actually existed and that they were here long before Maori ever arrived and took the land from them," the blog reads.
"Maori, as we know them, did not possess an empty land as taught in the school books these days or as printed these days in the media - Polynesian's, in fact, came to a land already occupied and then they conquered it [sic] … What is inside our cave, when we finally reach the cavern part, will eventually prove this".
Disturbing approach
Though some believe the group is motivated by racism, Eru Whare of Ngāti Taahinga, who is chairman of Pukerewa Marae which is near the cave, is giving IJ and his crew the benefit of the doubt. "I wouldn't put it down to racism. I think it would be a lack of education and understanding of cultural values," he says.
But it's still hard for Whare to understand how or why something like this would be done without talking to iwi first - especially if it's human bones the diggers are searching for. "We have a number of caves back home [in the Waikaretu Valley] and there's still some of our loved ones buried in there. In our history and our culture we always talk about our bones. Where we come from, that's where our bones are. So in an urupā, or this case a cave, when you remove the bones from a place where we laid our dead or our loved ones, it removes that whole spiritual, tapu essence.
The group tunnel into the limestone caves. Photo / Supplied
"It's very hard for our people to try and decipher why people would do such things. And whether they are looking for, you know, big giants or moas. I mean I can understand... But for guys just going in there without any consultation. Well, that's something else. That's a pretty disturbing approach."
Grounded in racist ideologies
Despite the group's raison d'etre being the search "for those here long before the Polynesian migrations occurred," there is no evidence of human habitation of Aotearoa New Zealand prior to the arrival of Polynesians. "Every professional archaeologist will tell you the same," Waikato-based archaeologist Sian Keith says.
The pervasive myth that an earlier population of Moriori was displaced by Māori has been repeatedly rejected by academics. So have suggestions that, prior to the arrival of Polynesians, the country was settled by Egyptians, Celts, Greeks, Chinese, Melanesians, or Phoenicians by people like Doutre and Ross Baker of the One New Zealand Foundation (which opposed the return of land to Māori under the Treaty of Waitangi), Bryan Mitchell who believes New Zealand was first settled by a Scottish cattle farmer in the 12th century, Ross Wiseman, Noel Hilliam, Gary Cook and former National Front secretary Kerry Bolton.
More recent stories by writer Barry Brailsford of a mystical, peace-loving, non-Māori race which colonised New Zealand 2000 years before Polynesians arrived, were described as "virulent myth" by archaeologist Atholl Anderson. As with stories of Moriori pushed to justify British colonisation, Brailsford describes the purported peace-loving race as having been killed by Māori.
"These conspiracy theories are really grounded in racist ideologies. They need to be pulled apart for what they are," bioarchaeologist Siân Halcrow says. "There's no cover up."
University of Waikato teaching fellow Dr M Dentith, who studies conspiracy theory, fake news, and secrecy, agrees. "Quite a lot of these theories are used to make some variation of the claim 'Well, if white people were here first, then the Treaty is null and void', or 'We did to Māori only what they did to our distant ancestors'," Dentith says. "My interest is largely in the kinds of 'evidence' people like this put forward in support of their conspiracy theory that the government and Māori are hiding the existence of a pre-Māori, white civilisation here." Like Eru Whare, Dentith links the prevalence of these ideas back to a lack of education about the history and prehistory of Aotearoa.
IJ and his crew appear to loosely subscribe to Brailsford's theory. On the blog, IJ writes of his belief that the "true ancient history" of this country has been "covered up, secreted away, and legislated against" by academics, iwi and archaeologists.
Canterbury Museum curator Paul Scofield calls alternative theories about pre-Polynesian inhabitants of New Zealand "crackpot" and says the north Waikato cave dig reminds him of a low-cost version of a Dutch-American textiles magnate's 20 year search for gold buried by Spanish pirates on Juan Fernandez Island, off the coast of Chile. But he says nothing can be done about the removal of moa bones from the cave if it is on private land, as there is no legislation protecting the extinct birds' remains.
Talk of cover-ups and academic conspiracies frustrates archaeologist Sian Keith. "One of our jobs as archaeologists is to assess, retrieve and analyse the data from historic sites," she says. "We work with tangible evidence, scientific dating, environmental analysis, and engaging with iwi and hapu who have a rich oral tradition. There are many specialists working in the archaeological field who are passionate and thorough.
"The evidence for pre-Māori inhabitants, of any origin, simply isn't there. If it was, the professional community would have identified it and it would be common knowledge. Archaeologists are not secretive, the work we do is carefully managed under the Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Act, and investigations and excavations have to be formally reported on."
It doesn't matter to the diggers. The most recent update on their progress was posted online by IJ and MD last week. They expressed surprise at the lack of social media reaction to the bone they found. The tunnel they have excavated is now about 14 metres into the hillside. There is still no cavern in sight.
A secretive group who spent four years tunnelling into the side of a country road in search of a mythical race of pre-Polynesian giants' skeletons have called off their dig.
But one of the diggers, who has revealed his identity via Facebook, has warned a "reiki protection is on the cave dig".
The diggers have excavated a tunnel bout 14 metres into the hillside.
Photo: Supplied
Last week, RNZ revealed iwi, academics and the landowner were concerned by the anonymous group's dig in the Waikaretu Valley, west of Huntly.
The group say this bone belongs to a giant pre-Polynesian human and could be more than 2500 years old. Experts say it's likely from a moa.
Photo / Supplied
The group, who updated their progress on a blog, were searching for evidence of pre-Polynesian inhabitants of New Zealand.
They believed they had found a bone in the tunnel that belonged to a giant human up to 2500 years old.
But after viewing photos and a video of the bone, multiple experts told RNZ it likely belonged to a moa.
The dig was done without the consent of the landowner, or consultation with iwi who have tīpuna and taonga buried in the north west Waikato area's limestone caves.
Archaeologist Dr Siân Halcrow expressed concern that the group's fossicking behaviour could damage the archaeological record.
In a blog post on Saturday, the group announced they would abandon the dig, writing that the world will "now never know for sure if this cave was filled by hand specifically to hide some fourteen 8'+ pre-Polynesian skeletons."
In the post, the group said they would focus on three other locations in their search for proof that a race of eight foot humans beat Polynesians to become the first humans in Aotearoa, which they told RNZ would be "the most talked about worldwide story of the millennium."
Today, Rodney Davidson, a reiki practitioner from Northland, confirmed he was involved in the dig.
He posted a warning on Facebook: "Be aware that a Reiki protection is on the cave dig and has been since the start too. It has made it,s [sic] presence felt on at least two occasions to great benefit in fact. Abuse it in anyway and there will be a ' result ' ! I have no control over this so all your choice!"
There is no evidence of human habitation of Aotearoa New Zealand prior to the arrival of Polynesians.
The pervasive myth that an earlier population of Moriori was displaced by Māori has been repeatedly rejected by academics.
The 1916 and 1946 editions of the School Journal taught generations of school children many myths about Moriori. They include that they were wiped-out by Māori during an 1835 invasion, and that they were conquered due to their inferiority.
A true account of the history of the iwi is about to be entrenched in law.
Other alternative histories suggest that prior to the arrival of Polynesians, the country was settled by Egyptians, Celts, Greeks, Chinese, Melanesians, or Phoenicians.
Halcrow said "conspiracy theories" about the settlement of New Zealand by non-Polynesians were "grounded in racist ideologies."
She raised concerns about the number of people following the group's blog, saying, "It does really highlight what some New Zealanders think, in terms of pre-Māori conspiracy theories, with really racist undertones. It's not grounded in fact, so people should be aware."
Eru Whare of Ngāti Taahinga, chairman of Pukerewa Marae which is near where the group was digging, said, "I wouldn't put it down to racism. I think it would be a lack of education and understanding of cultural values."
"It's very hard for our people to try and decipher why people would do such things. And whether they are looking for, you know, big giants or moas. I mean I can understand... But for guys just going in there without any consultation. Well, that's something else. That's a pretty disturbing approach."
University of Waikato teaching fellow Dr M Dentith, who studies conspiracy theory, fake news, and secrecy, said theories about pre-Polynesian inhabitants of New Zealand were often used to make some variation of the claim, "'Well, if white people were here first, then the Treaty is null and void', or 'We did to Māori only what they did to our distant ancestors'".
“(The world will) now never know for sure if this cave was filled by hand specifically to hide some fourteen 8’+ pre-Polynesian skeletons.”
There’s a mini war of sorts underway in New Zealand over … giants! A reporter for Radio New Zealand (RNZ) has brought to light a hunt that has been underway for some time for evidence of giants that the searchers believe lived on the island prior to the Polynesians who arrived between 1250 and 1300 and developed the Māori culture. The group calls itself Tangata Whenua (Māori for “people of the land”) and, according to its website, has been secretly digging (often at night) a cave or tunnel since 2016 in the Waikato region in northern New Zealand for evidence of the 8-foot tall giants that they believe have been found before in 16 locations. The website states that the group knows of four of these sites and, earlier this month, they found what they claim is part of a femur from what would have been a being 7’10” to 8’4″ tall and lived 2500 years ago. (You can read the account and see a photo here.)
“But after viewing photos and a video of the bone, multiple experts told RNZ it likely belonged to a moa.”
Moa
RNZ reporter Susan Strongman has been reporting on the secret dig that has annoyed the landowner, who says they never asked permission, and archeologists and indigenous people, who say the hunters are not archeologists and risk harming historical artifacts and human remains. Strongman raised the heat on the group by revealing the name of one member — Rodney Davidson, a reiki practitioner from Northland. In a response on the group website and on his Facebook page, he defended the hunt, criticized Strongman and admitted that the group has stopped looking in that area, so no one will ever know for sure in the cave has giant skeletons in it. He said they will continue their clandestine searches in the other caves whose locations are apparently still secret.
“Be aware that a Reiki protection is on the cave dig and has been since the start too. It has made it,s [sic] presence felt on at least two occasions to great benefit in fact. Abuse it in anyway and there will be a ‘ result ‘ ! I have no control over this so all your choice!”
Along with the warning that a reiki aura or shield is protecting the cave, Davidson also gave out her twitter and email addresses for his supporters to send their responses – supporters whose numbers he claims have risen since she broke the story.
Meanwhile, experts like Otago University associate professor of bioarchaeology Dr Siân Halcrow agree that the bone is probably from a moa (a large extinct flightless bird resembling the emu), there is no evidence of any humans or human-like species of any size on New Zealand prior to the Māori (thus, no evidence that the Māori killed them off – a popular but unproven theory), and any searches for pre-Polynesian giants are disconcerting.
“It does really highlight what some New Zealanders think, in terms of pre-Māori conspiracy theories, with really racist undertones. It’s not grounded in fact, so people should be aware.”
Māori
Archaeologist Sian Keith told RNZ that archeologists seek evidence and are passionate and thorough, so talk of coverups and secrecy in his field are upsetting. That may be true among his own colleagues, but there are plenty of stories from Egypt, Central America and other archeology sites that would disagree.
As with any war of words, deep-seated beliefs, secrecy, conspiracy theories and conflicting information, this one is far from over.
UFO encounters happen all over the world, to people from all walks of life. It is an all-encompassing phenomenon that includes a wide range of different reports that run the range from the slightly odd to the downright insane. Some of the most exciting and intriguing of these are those encounters that have occurred between aircraft pilots and something seemingly not of this world, and one of the best known and most mysterious cases of this is the time Iranian fighter jets engaged something very weird and seemingly aggressive in their skies.
It all began with a series of strange phone calls. On September 19, 1976, at approximately 11:30 PM, the Imperial Iranian Air Force command post at Tehran, Iran, began receiving panicked calls from concerned citizens in the Shemiran city district, who claimed to be witnessing unusual bright lights moving about in the sky. The Iranian Air Force at first assumed this to be conventional aircraft or helicopters, but it was soon found that there was nothing scheduled to be in the sky at that time that could be creating the phenomena, and so assistant deputy commander of operations General Yousefi personally contacted the control tower at Mehrabad International Airport and then looked out over the landscape to see with his own eyes a very bright object like a star travelling across the sky, only far too large and bright to be a regular aircraft or star.
In the meantime, more calls were coming in from frightened citizens, and the commander felt it would be prudent to investigate the disturbance further. To this effect he authorized an F-4 Phantom II jet to be scrambled at Shahrokhi Air Force Base in Hamadan and sent to go take a look and possibly intercept. As the jet approached it began to experience various technical malfunction and glitches, with the instrument panel falling to work properly and communications ripped through with heavy static, which all got bad enough that the pilot was forced to abort and head back towards base. Oddly, the plane supposedly began to function normally as soon as he left the area, suggesting that perhaps the unearthly object had been responsible. Undeterred, the Iranian Air Force sent up another F-4, which was able to get a radar signature for the mystery object, which they estimated was similar to that of a passenger jet, although the blinding nature of the light it emitted prevented an accurate judgement of size. Whatever it was then reportedly shot away from the approaching fighter with a sudden, breathtaking burst of speed and acceleration, and the chase was on.
F-4 Phantom
The fighter was able to pace the fleeing UFO but not gain on it, yet the crew, composed of a Lieutenant Parviz Jafari and Lieutenant Jalal Damirian, was able to make some observations. Other than the immense, nearly blinding brightness of the object, it was also noticed that it had an array of rectangular lights upon it that alternated between red, blue, green, and orange in some inscrutable rapid pattern. As they stared in awe and tried to catch up to it, the mysterious unidentified aircraft reportedly at several points ejected into the air a total of four smaller objects, one of which headed right for its pursuers, causing the alarmed pilot to try to lock onto it with a missile, but he would later report that the targeting system suddenly went haywire and all communications with base were cut off. This aggressive smaller object showed no signs of slowing down, inexorably approaching at very high speed, and thinking that this was perhaps a missile of the unidentified object’s own, the fighter took emergency evasive maneuvers. According to the crew, they took a deep dive, and the smaller object followed their movement to chase them some distance before turning around to join its larger brethren. The large UFO then shot off at mind-boggling speed and the jet’s instruments went back online. On their way back to base they apparently would see another smaller object, which apparently descended to the desert below. The pilot Jafari would later say of these objects in a press conference:
Four other objects with different shapes separated from the main one, at different times during this close encounter. Whenever they were close to me, my weapons were jammed and my radio communications were garbled. One of the objects headed toward me. I thought it was a missile. I tried to launch a heat seeking missile to it, but my missile panel went out. Another followed me when I was descending on the way back. One of the separated objects landed in an open area radiating a high bright light, in which the sands on the ground were visible. We could hear emergency squash all the way, which was reported by other airliners flying at the time and continued for another couple of days.
It would indeed later turn out that a passenger airliner had also had their equipment disrupted, and additionally the large object had also apparently been visually observed by air traffic control on the ground. Rather eerily, air traffic control claimed that as the F-4 made its approach to land they observed another object or craft, this one cylindrical and with a light on each end and a flashing light in its center, appear and follow the fighter back towards base. This second object would then apparently pass dangerously close over the fighter and do a fly by over the base, causing the control tower to lose all power as it did, only for everything to return to normal when it was gone. It would then reportedly be seen again some time later by a pilot over the Mediterranean, as well as by the crew and passengers of a passenger airliner over Lisbon, Portugal, and also over Morocco. An Iranian air traffic control officer at the time would later say of the incident:
When they heard our report and the report of the pilots, they concluded that no country is capable of such technology, and all of them believed it was a strange object from outer space.
Another odd little detail is that when the area where the “probe” was claimed to have been dropped was investigated, locals claimed that they had heard a loud noise and seen a bright light on the evening in question, although no physical evidence was apparently found. The whole strange incident would be investigated by not only the Iranian authorities, but also the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group in Tehran, the U.S. Air Force, and U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and there have been many attempts to try and explain it all over the years. There have been many conventional explanations offered, such as that what was seen was a rocket, meteor, or the re-entry of a decaying satellite, or that this was a misidentified astronomical body such as Venus or Jupiter, but none of these really seem to fit all of the odd features of the case. These objects were witnessed by numerous experienced, qualified personnel such as pilots, military officers, and air traffic control workers, which makes it unlikely they would make such an observational mistake. There is also the detail that something was jamming equipment aboard the jets, which is hard to explain away and has left authorities and researchers of the case puzzled. It has been suggested that this could have been the result of pilot error and faulty, under-maintained equipment, but there is also the report that an air control tower was temporarily disabled as well.
Was this all explainable with mundane explanations? Is it all a perfect brew of witness error and malfunctioning equipment? Or was this something more bizarre? The Tehran UFO incident has become a very exciting case for several reasons. The object was seen by multiple witnesses, ranging from residents to military personnel and pilots, many of whom are highly reliable observers and all of whom describe the same thing within the same time frame. There is also the strange anomaly that at least three separate aircraft experienced technical malfunctions and equipment jamming similar to electromagnetic effects during the event. Finally, it was very well investigated, with no official explanation ever offered. Whatever is going on here has remained very much discussed in UFO circles, and it remains a true unexplained case for the files, perhaps doomed to remain locked in a limbo of debate and speculation for a very long time.
The entire saga of the US military’s modern investigations into UFOs has been clouded in confusion, obfuscation, and a whole alphabet soup of acronyms—AATIP, AAWSAP, UAP, etc.—which has enabled the Pentagon to avoid actually answering the real question: is there something weird going on or not? Since the story of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program broke in 2017, the Pentagon’s story has gone from acknowledging that AATIP investigated “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAPs, not UFOs, which is rather important to them), to saying AATIP had nothing to do with UAPs. Add to this the strange list of AATIP funded projects and the former head of AATIP starting a side-project with Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge and you’ve got the dumbest possible byzantine labyrinth that could maybe lead to “soft disclosure.”
This week, however,Popular Mechanics reported that they had obtained leaked documents dating to 2009 which show that not only did AATIP investigate UFOs, but they also investigated them as possibly otherworldy or interdimensional phenomena and continued to do so beyond 2012, the year AATIP was “officially” shuttered. Furthermore, AATIP took an interest in the paranormal phenomena at Utah’s famed Skinwalker Ranch with an interest in harnassing whatever’s going on there for defense purposes. Paranormal weaponry, that’s just what we need, right?
It even looks like a UFO.
The leaked documents come from Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS). It is a 494-page “Ten Month Report” compiled by BAASS for the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Applications Program (AAWSAP), the contracting division of the broader AATIP program. Bob Bigelow, the billionaire founder of Bigelow Aerospace, is a well-known figure in the UFO world. Bigelow’s private research group the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) was stationed at Skinwalker Ranch for years after the billionaire purchased the property. Bigelow Aerospace’s involvement with AATIP has also been well-publicized.
In 2008, BAASS was awarded a $10 million contract by AAWSAP for a guaranteed year with a 5-year option. According to Popular Mechanics, the “Ten Month Report” was one of many such reports given by BAASS to AAWSAP through the duration of the contract. Throughout the document, it is clear that what is being investigated is not an unknown foreign weapons system. From the Popular Mechanics piece:
From cover to cover, the BAASS report references the government’s new buzzword for UFOs: UAP. However, nowhere could Popular Mechanics find a single reference to foreign (terrestrial) advanced aerospace weapon systems, or projected technological innovations based on current industry trends.
Contrary to the Pentagon’s recent sidestepping, it seems clear that what was being investigated was something not just unidentified but completely unknown. Here’s an incomplete list of topics covered in BAASS’s “Ten Month Report” as summarized by Popular Mechanics:
●Overview of the BAASS Physics Division’s efforts to conduct research on advanced aerospace vehicles, including the development of standardization for measurement of physical effects and signatures associated with UAP.
● Overview of BAASS research for measuring and gleaning the effects on biological organisms from UAP.
● Mention of Skinwalker Ranch in Utah as a “possible laboratory for studying other intelligences and possible interdimensional phenomena.”
● Strategic plans to organize a series of intellectual debate forums targeted to broad audiences pertaining to the “potential disclosure of an extraterrestrial presence.”
● Mention of BAASS program dubbed “Project Northern Tier,” which involved securing documents related to instances where dozens of UFOs flew over restricted airspaces of facilities housing nuclear weapons.
● Project databases of UAP-related materials compiled through various partnerships, and the intent to expand these databases by coordinating with foreign governments.
● Summaries of multiple UAP events both inside the U.S. and in foreign countries.
● Photographs of UAPs provided by various sources, including foreign governments.
Cover of the BAASS “Ten Month Report”
These reports are technically the property of BAASS and, due to the Economic Espionage Act of 1996, are conveniently excluded from FOIA requests. Attorney Josh Budray told Popular Mechanics:
“Unfortunately, the government attempting to evade FOIA by contracting out its responsibilities is nothing new. Both federal and state FOIA statutes strive to eliminate such obvious gamesmanship—avoiding transparency and disclosure obligations by contracting out functions—but whether they are successful in doing so is an entirely different story.”
There’s honestly too much in the Popular Mechanics report to summarize here, and it is recommended that you take a read for yourself. Seriously, it’s huge. Other leaked documents obtained include a 54-page report on the physiological effects of exposure to UFOs, as well as proof that AATIP operated beyond its official closure in 2012.
While much of what is in the leaked documents have been in the realm of solid assumptions since the AATIP story first broke, they have still been assumptions. The Pentagon has admitted that footage such as that from the USS Nimitz does show “unidentified aerial phenomena,” it has always been delicately handled from a position that “unidentified” might mean “we just don’t know who built it.” While these leaked documents reveal nothing about the nature of these phenomena (because of course not), they do show that whatever AATIP and BAASS were, and likely are, studying is completely weird and has been treated accordingly by the Pentagon.
Disc-shaped UFOs spotted on mountain ridge in Antarctica
Disc-shaped UFOs spotted on mountain ridge in Antarctica
There have been a number of unexplained Google Earth sightings in Antarctica recently and now zooming in on a mountainous region, we found what appears to be several disc-shaped UFOs on a mountain ridge of the Victory Mountains.
Whether the UFOs have crash landed, part of a secret military project or may be of extraterrestrial origin, is not clear, but there is clearly a lot of activity around these disc-shaped objects.
First location:
2 UFOs and operational base
UFOs: 40 meters in diameter
Coordinates: 73° 4'46.72"S 73° 4'46.72"S
Second location:
3 UFOs and operational base
UFOs: 10 meters in diameter
Coordinates: 73° 4'50.32"S 167°41'36.31"E
How many hours of scouring Google Earth must it take to find these things?
The mountain range where the object was found lies on Antarctica‘s northern coast near Australia.
Huge bright object recorded over Lake Mary, Florida 17-Feb-2020
Huge bright object recorded over Lake Mary, Florida 17-Feb-2020
This stationary unidentified flying object was seen and filmed in the sky above Lake Mary in Florida on 17th February 2020.
Witness report:
Observed Orange Star like object. Driving into work on Lake Mary Blvd. stopped at traffic light on Lake Mary Blvd and Lake Emma and witnessed a star like orange object, so I decided to record it, not realizing that there was a object above it with all kinds of lights, a long cigar shape. (Attached recording) Got to work at 3300 Exchange Place, Lake Mary and decided to get my camera and started recording to see if I could find the object and I got it on camera. Then I saw another object to bottom right, plus the orange one, and cigar one which was high. Then all of a sudden an object (green) appears above the cigar object, and beams down at something in the ground and then disappears! I continued to record until I had to go into work.
Massive UFO Fleet Appears Over Pennsylvania, Expert Claims
Massive UFO Fleet Appears Over Pennsylvania, Expert Claims
KEY POINTS
A fleet of UFOs appeared over a community in Pennsylvania
Some of the bright objects appeared in large clusters
The objects could be satellites orbiting Earth
Anew video shows an alleged fleet of UFOs flying over a community in Pennsylvania. As seen in the clip, the strange objects were moving slowly in the same direction.
The video was taken by an eyewitness as he was driving with his family in King of Prussia. It was shared on YouTube by Scott Waring of ET Data Base.
In the video, clusters of bright orbs can be seen in the sky. Although they did not appear to follow a specific formation, all of them were moving in the same direction. Some of them were moving slowly while the others remained stationary.
“Personally observed with my family on the way home from the King of Prussia Mall, heading eastbound multiple bright lights in the sky remaining stationary,” the eyewitness stated. “Have video taken in car while observing. This is unexplainable unless there is some type of unknown military aircraft I am unaware of.”
Interestingly, the bright orbs appeared in different parts of the sky. Some of the objects were grouped in large clusters. Based on the brightness of the objects and since there were no stars in the sky when the video was taken, Waring noted that other people most likely saw the strange objects too.
Hopefully, videos taken by other eyewitnesses of their sightings could shed light on the nature of the strange objects.
“The UFOs were moving slowly, glowing and following the same path,” Waring wrote in a blog post. “I do not hear the objects over the sound of the cars on the freeway. This must have been recorded by others. Thousands of people must have seen this so I am expecting a few more videos to come in.”
Although it is not yet clear what the objects were, it is possible that the bright orbs were only satellites. Back when SpaceX launched the first batch of Starlink satellites in May last year, the event sparked numerous UFO sightings due to the formation of the satellites. As seen in the photos, the satellites orbited Earth together and appeared like a “train of stars” in the sky.
A photograph of a screen shows infra-red video of taken from a Mexican Air Force patrol aircraft of 7 bright objects flying over the eastern coastal state of Campeche on March 25, 2004.
From 2007 to 2012, a small team of military investigators looked into sightings of unidentified flying objects—yes, UFOs—from an office deep inside the Pentagon. The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, championed by former U.S. senator Harry Reid, paid contractors to analyze close encounters between military pilots and mysterious airborne objects.
Some of those close encounters probably involved secret military prototype front-line pilots didn’t know exist. Others, however, remain unexplained — and could be revolutionary for human civilization.
“Just because something’s unexplained doesn’t mean that it’s extraterrestrial, of course, but I never say never,” Nick Pope, who ran the British military’s own UFO investigative unit in the early 1990s, told me via email. “Extraterrestrial visitation might be unlikely, but if a single case turned out to be true, it would be a game-changer.”
One 2004 incident, in particular, has befuddled skeptics. Two U.S. Navy fighter pilots flying off the coast of southern California tracked an airliner-size, cigar-shaped object that appeared to hover and maneuver in ways that seem to exceed conventional aeronautics. “I have no idea what I saw,” David Fravor, one of the pilots, told The New York Times.
“There are still those observations that defy explanation—observations by highly trained individuals such as fighter or airline pilots who would recognize aircraft shapes and aircraft movements,” Luis Elizondo, the head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program and related UFO efforts until his October resignation, told me via email.
“The basic instinct of intelligence personnel looking at the most convincing UFO sightings is to assume that they’re secret prototype aircraft or drones, developed either by another nation, or by another part of the government—but in a situation where the information is so compartmentalized nobody else can get access,” Pope said.
“Another theory is that some of these sightings are attributable to some sort of atmospheric plasma phenomenon that science doesn’t yet fully understand,” Pope added, using the scientific term for electrified air.
“Many UFO sightings in the southwest United States during the 1980s were actually secret advanced military aircraft such as the Lockheed F-117 and Northrop Grumman B-2,” Elizondo said.
There has been no shortage of rumored or confirmed, high-performance military prototypes in recent years that could account for UFO sightings. The U.S. Air Force secretly developed the RQ-170 stealth spy drone in the early 2000s, finally admitting to its existence only after a photographer spotted one at an airfield in Afghanistan in 2007. It’s unclear whether sightings of the RQ-170 explain any recent UFO reports.
More recently, the Air Force has been working on a bigger and ever stealthier spy drone called the RQ-180, along with the new radar-evading B-21 bomber. In 2014, a mysterious, wedge-shaped aircraft—possibly an early technology demonstrator for the B-21 program—was photographed flying over Kansas.
The military and the defense industry have also been hard at work on so-called “hypersonic” aircraft and space-planes capable of flying at speed exceeding Mach 5. Some of those efforts are public. Others, such as Lockheed Martin’s self-funded SR-72 hypersonic spy plane, remain cloaked in secrecy.
The abundance of secret prototypes plying American skies gives plenty of cover to government investigators and skeptical outsiders whose impulse is to dismiss possible evidence of alien life. “That said, there are those in government—including, clearly, some of the intelligence officials who worked in the AATIP—who are prepared to think the unthinkable, and say that some of these things might be extraterrestrial,” Pope said.
The 2004 video seems unexplainable now. But remember, many similarly mysterious UFO sightings in the past turned out to be military prototypes. Maybe aliens really are buzzing Planet Earth. But if history is any guide, it’s more likely the Pentagon’s own advanced aircraft that are making surprise appearances in front of baffled pilots.
Remarkable new details about secretive research into UFOs produced for the Pentagon has been revealed in a bombshell new report.
In a lengthy and detailed report published on Friday, Popular Mechanics delved into the Defense Department's cryptic Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).
Using black-budget money under the auspices of the Defense Intelligence Agency, in 2008 AATIP contracted private space technology company Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) to provide the government with technical reports and research into UFOs, according to the magazine.
BAASS also controlled 'Skinwalker Ranch' in Utah - which the company proposed as a 'possible laboratory for studying other intelligences and possible interdimensional phenomena.'
A 494-page report that BAASS delivered to the Pentagon in July 2009 goes into heavy detail about reported UFO encounters, it was revealed on Friday
In 2008, the Pentagon awarded a $10 million contract to BAASS under a contracting program known as the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program
The investigative report offers an unprecedented look inside the AATIP, the existence of which was first publicly revealed with the publication of the USS Nimitz encounter video in 2017.
The AATIP program was officially de-funded by 2012, though many familiar with the matter believe it may have continued on under different auspices.
Mysteries at Skinwalker Ranch may have helped inspire the DIA research program
In 2008, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) awarded a $10 million contract to BAASS under a contracting program known as the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP).
BAASS, today known as Bigelow Aerospace, was founded in 1999 by Robert T. Bigelow, the owner of hotel chain Budget Suites of America.
A lifelong enthusiast of space travel and the paranormal, Bigelow had in 1996 poured some of the fortune he made in business into BAASS and the purchase of the Skinwalker Ranch in Utah, after various strange and paranormal events were reported there.
Bigelow proposed to use the ranch to study paranormal phenomenon, and a visit to the ranch by a DIA scientist in 2007 may have inspired the creation of the AATIP, according to Popular Mechanics.
Robert Bigelow, founder and president of Bigelow Aerospace, speaks during a tour of Bigelow Aerospace in North Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S. September 12, 2019
Former AAWSAP contractor and astrophysicist Eric Davis shared what colleagues had told him of the DIA scientist's experience in an interview with researcher Joe Murgia.
'In the living room of the former NIDS double wide observation trailer/staff quarters. A 3D object appeared in mid-air in front of him and changed shape like a changing topological figure. It went from pretzel-shaped to Möbius strip shaped. It was 3D and multi-colored. Then it disappeared,' he said.
According to former Senator Harry Reid, whatever happened at Skinwalker was enough to convince the DIA to seriously investigate paranormal and UFO phenomena.
'Something should be done about this. Somebody should study it.' I was convinced he was right,' Reid told New York Magazine.
The gate to Skinwalker Ranch is seen prior to its 2016 sale. A visit to the ranch by a DIA scientist in 2007 may have inspired the creation of the AATIP
In 2016, Bigelow sold Skinwalker Ranch for $4.5 million to a shell corporation, and concrete barriers and heavy security were erected around the perimeter
A 2009 BAASS report commissioned by the Pentagon mentions Skinwalker Ranch in Utah as a 'possible laboratory for studying other intelligences and possible interdimensional phenomena.'
In 2016, Bigelow sold Skinwalker Ranch for $4.5 million to 'Adamantium Holdings', a shell corporation whose true owners have never been traced.
After this sale, all roads leading to the ranch were blocked, the perimeter was secured with cameras and barbed wire, and signs went up warning strangers not to approach.
Anyone who does approach the ranch now reports being immediately confronted by guards and ordered to leave.
Project Northern Tier: BAASS report details high frequency of UFO contacts near nuclear missile silos
Under the DIA contract, BAASS was tasked with providing the Pentagon with technical reports, surveys and studies related to 'future aerospace weapon systems.'
The language in the DIA's $10 million contract with BAASS - and its objectives - seem purposely vague, obscuring the fact that the AAWSAP contract was focused on what the Pentagon now calls Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP).
But a 494-page report that BAASS delivered to the Pentagon in July 2009, and revealed by Popular Mechanics, is explicitly focused on UAP.
The 'Ten Month Report,' as it's called, is filled with strategic plans, project summaries, data tables, charts, descriptions of biological field effects, physical characteristics, methods of detection, theoretical capabilities, witness interviews, photographs, and case synopses, all related to UAP.
Robert Bigelow, (left) founder and president of Bigelow Aerospace, and NASA astronaut Mike Gernhardt, are seen on September 12, 2019
BAASS, today known as Bigelow Aerospace, was founded in 1999 by Robert T. Bigelow, the owner of hotel chain Budget Suites of America
The report mentions a BAASS program called Project Northern Tier, which involved securing documents related to instances where dozens of UFOs flew over restricted airspaces of facilities housing nuclear weapons.
One chart published in the report details the alarming frequency of UAP encounters near four current and former key ICBM facilities: Malmstrom AFB in Montana, Minot AFB in North Dakota, former Wurtsmith AFB in Michigan and former Loring AFB in Maine.
The time period of the study seems to focus on a five-month window from July through November of 1975, when the BAASS report claims Malmstrom reported an alarming 61 unexplained encounters.
The BAASS report, directly quoting the book Clear Intent, describes one astonishing encounter on November 7, 1975 at the K-7 ICBM missile silo attached to Malmstrom.
A map shows the location of two still-active ICBM facilities mentioned in the BAASS report
One chart published in the report details the alarming frequency of UAP encounters near four current and former key ICBM facilities
Responding to an intrusion alarm, a Sabotage Alert Team raced in a vehicle to the silo, where they encountered a 'brightly glowing, orange, football field-sized disc' hovering in the air.
'It began to rise, and at about 1,000 feet, NORAD picked up the UFO on radar,' the report states. Two F-106 fighter jets were scrambled to intercept the object, but were never able to get a visual. 'At about 200,000 feet, it disappeared from NORAD's radar.'
Specialists were brought in to do a systems check on the missile, and discovered that the computer in the warhead had 'mysteriously changed the target numbers.'
UFO enthusiasts have long noted the apparent connection between sightings and nuclear activity. The famous 2004 USS Nimitz carrier strike group encounter with the 'Tic Tac' object is also connected in that regard, as the air craft carrier is nuclear-powered.
The BAASS report (above), directly quoting the book Clear Intent, describes one encounter on November 7, 1975 at the K-7 ICBM missile silo attached to Malmstrom
One astonishing encounter is described in the BAASS report from November 7, 1975 at the K-7 ICBM missile silo (above in satellite image) attached to Malmstrom AFB
A Minuteman III missile is seen in its silo. In 1975 there is a report that the onboard targeting computer of such a missile inexplicably changed coordinates after a UFO encounter
Medical study examines possible physiological effects of UFO encounters
Popular Mechanics also published in full a previously unreleased technical paper listed as one of AATIP's products, .
The paper titled 'Clinical Medical Acute & Subacute Field Effects on Human Dermal & Neurological Tissues' examines injuries that have been reported after contact with UFO/UAPs.
'This focused on forensically assessing accounts of injuries that could have resulted from claimed encounters with UAP,' the study's author, Christopher 'Kit' Green, told Popular Mechanics.
'I didn't work for BAASS, other than as a contractor for my paper, and I wasn't a part of AAWSAP. However, it is my understanding this program was a UFO study that outwardly was not supposed to look like it had anything to do with UFOs,' he said.
Green also told the magazine that while his work focused on encounters with unknown or unidentified aerial objects, all of the injuries he assessed could be accounted for by known terrestrial means, and did not provide any evidence for extraterrestrial or non-human technologies.
By now you’ve probably read the New York Times article detailing a UFO research program run by the Pentagon which received $22 million — a tiny amount by Defense Department standards — from 2007 to at least 2012. The disclosure of the program is the biggest such reveal since Project Blue Book of the 1950s and 1960s and the French government’s 1999 COMETA Report.
If that wasn’t strange enough, the article included declassified footage from a U.S. Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter’s AN/ASQ-228 sensor display as it trailed a still-unidentified flying object over the Pacific near San Diego on Nov. 14, 2004.
In the footage, the Super Hornet pilot, while traveling at 252 knots at nearly 20,000 feet, switched between his display’s infrared and visual modes as the sensor tried to lock onto the blurry, oblong or pill-shaped object. The flying object appeared white in IR mode, and black in TV mode — indicating that whatever it was, the sensor had picked up on the object’s emission, temperature or reflection.
The video comes from the same incident when Cmdr. David Fravor, a veteran Navy pilot assigned to the USS Nimitz carrier fighter squadron VFA-41 Black Aces, was on a training mission off San Diego. “It was a real object, it exists and I saw it,” Fravor told the Washington Post. Telling the paper that he believes it was “not from the Earth.”
During an exercise, commanders ordered Fravor to intercept an object that was appearing at 80,000 feet — above the range of Ticonderoga-class cruiser USS Princeton’s SPY-1 air-search radar — before dropping suddenly to 20,000 feet. “Officials told they had been tracking a couple dozen of these objects for a few weeks,” the paper reported.
The story that followed has circulated in the military aviation world and fighter community for several years, including this write-up by former Navy F-14A Tomcat pilot Paco Chierici at Fighter Sweep. With orders to intercept the object, Fravor in his jet — callsign FASTEAGLE 01 — headed toward with aid from an E-2 Hawkeye early warning and control plane.
The Hawkeye’s sensors, however, couldn’t detect the object and vector him toward it, so Princeton directed FASTEAGLE 01 and Fravor’s wingman, FASETEAGLE 02 to the location, and even asked Fravor whether he was carrying weapons — he wasn’t. He just had two training missiles. Below the jets, Fravor saw whitewater sloshing in the blue ocean.
All four aircrew were eyes out from this point forward. The first unusual indication Dave picked up was the area of whitewater on the surface that Cheeks was looking at over his shoulder as he flew away. He remembers thinking it was about the size of a 737 and maybe the contact they had been vectored on had been an airliner that had just crashed. He maneuvered his F-18 lower to get a better look. As he was descending through about 20K he was startled by the sight of a white object that was moving about just over the frothing water. It was all white, featureless, oblong and making minor lateral movements while staying at a consistent low altitude over the disk of turbulent water.
In his debrief comments, Dave, his WSO and the two other crews stated the object had initially been hovering like a Harrier. They described it as uniformly white, about 46 feet long (roughly fighter-sized), having a discernible midline horizontal axis (like a fuselage) but having no visible windows, nacelles, wings or propulsion systems.
There was no apparent exhaust or rotor wash, either. The pill-shaped object then “oriented one of its skinny ends towards him,” and rose in a “right 2-circle flow” — fighter speak for when each aircraft have their noses pointed at each other’s tails. The object then accelerated away at “multi-Mach” speed.
The video of the AN/ASQ-228 sensor display occurred later in the day with a different set of fighters. The object at this point appeared stationary before taking off.
This is consistent with a U.S. Navy report obtained by To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a UFO research company which published the footage. The Navy pilots, apparently, first believed the object could have been a classified missile test from a submarine. The Navy report cited a source who indicated the object maneuvered in a manner “that seemed to defy the laws of physics” and “‘tumbled’ into nonsensical angles that made any engagement by the F-18 impossible.”
So what was it? A secret U.S. test project? A classified drone or hypersonic weapon? A maneuverable reentry vehicle or something like DARPA’s Falcon Project? Naval Air Systems Command, which tests airborne weapons, has 36,000 square miles of controlled sea and airspace off the Southern Californian coast. And the Falcon Project’s Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 has reached Mach 22 — albeit six years after the 2004 object sighting in the Pacific.
Or perhaps it was an elaborate hoax, or a software or sensor error. Maybe an atmospheric disturbance? Or let’s say it was an alien spacecraft powered by technology impossible for our tiny primate brains to understand. I hope it’s the last one, but I’m not counting on it. Your guess is as good as mine.
Eyewitnesses, even fighter pilots, are prone to human error. Pilots also know how aircraft operate, and the belief that there is something unusual in the skies is more common in that community than you might assume. Fravor certainly believes what he saw, and many fighter pilots believe him.
The Pentagon UFO-hunting mission, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, is still partially classified. In any case, even if the explanation is as mundane as a weapons test, the eyewitness accounts and FLIR footage make this an interesting mystery worth further study. Whether Fravor saw an object of extraterrestrial origin is beside the point.
It’s also worth reading the comments section at Fighter Sweep:
I was on board the USS Princeton (2001-2005) when this all went down. We actually went to GQ (General Quarters) for about 4 hours as all if this was going down. I’ve been telling everyone about this even, but have gotten the usual “yeah right” look when I tell them about it. I saw the video after it happened, but didn’t think that it would somehow make it’s way to the public, considering all of the “security” that surrounded the issue.
Crazy how the world turns, isn’t it?!
Thank you for giving this event life! I no longer look like a tin foil hat wearing idiot!
In the description to the sighting, which was posted to the Mutual UFO Network, the user explained that the “aircraft” was hovering 30 feet above the ground.
The triangle-shaped UFO seen over Texas(Image: MUFON)
“It was flying right at me going 75mph and then it hovered over my car for one second and disappeared,” they said.
The footage has been seen more than 5,000 times since it was shared by YouTube conspiracy channel UFOmania.
Many viewers claimed the object was more proof of the infamous TR-3B spy plane.
The TR-3B is the name of a surveillance plane of the United States Air Force, speculated to have been developed under a black project.
It is said to be a supersonic stealth spy plane with a triangular design but its existence has never been acknowledged.
“That's a TR-3B, or a for real ET craft,” one viewer commented. “I just wish he could have stopped the car, got out and took more footage.”
Another added: “TR-3B… secret Space Force.”
A third agreed, simply writing: “TR-3B, look it up.”
But others weren’t as convinced. One noted that even though the lights were in a triangular pattern, it didn’t mean the object itself was triangular.
And other sceptics suggested it was nothing more than a drone.
The Neanderthal skull, flattened by thousands of years of sediment and rock fall, in situ in Shanidar Cave, Iraqi Kurdistan. Credit: Graeme Barker
The first articulated Neanderthal skeleton to come out of the ground for over 20 years has been unearthed at one of the most important sites of mid-20th century archaeology: Shanidar Cave, in the foothills of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Researchers say the new find offers an unparalleled opportunity to investigate the "mortuary practices" of this lost species using the latest technologies.
Shanidar Cave was excavated in the 1950s, when archaeologist Ralph Solecki uncovered partial remains of ten Neanderthal men, women and children.
Some were clustered together, with clumps of ancient pollen surrounding one of the skeletons. Solecki claimed this showed Neanderthals buried their dead and conducted funerary rites with flowers.
The 'flower burial' captured the public imagination, and prompted a reappraisal of a species that—prior to Shanidar Cave—was thought to have been dumb and animalistic.
It also sparked a decades-long controversy over whether evidence from this extraordinary site did actually point to death rituals, or burial of any kind, and if Neanderthals were really capable of such cultural sophistication.
More than 50 years later, a team of researchers have reopened the old Solecki trench to collect new sediment samples, and discovered the crushed skull and torso bones of another Shanidar Neanderthal.
The discovery has been named Shanidar Z by researchers from Cambridge, Birkbeck and Liverpool John Moores universities.
View of the entrance to Shanidar Cave, in the foothills of the Baradost Mountains of North-East Iraqi Kurdistan. Credit: Graeme Barker
The work was conducted in conjunction with the Kurdistan General Directorate of Antiquities and the Directorate of Antiquities for Soran Province. The find is announced today in a paper published in the journal Antiquity.
"So much research on how Neanderthals treated their dead has to involve returning to finds from sixty or even a hundred years ago, when archaeological techniques were more limited, and that only ever gets you so far," said Dr. Emma Pomeroy, from Cambridge's Department of Archaeology, lead author of the new paper.
"To have primary evidence of such quality from this famous Neanderthal site will allow us to use modern technologies to explore everything from ancient DNA to long-held questions about Neanderthal ways of death, and whether they were similar to our own."
Ralph Solecki died last year aged 101, having never managed to conduct further excavations at his most famous site, despite several attempts.
In 2011, the Kurdish Regional Government approached Professor Graeme Barker from Cambridge's McDonald Institute of Archaeology about revisiting Shanidar Cave. With Solecki's enthusiastic support, initial digging began in 2014, but stopped after two days when ISIS got too close. It resumed the following year.
"We thought with luck we'd be able to find the locations where they had found Neanderthals in the 1950s, to see if we could date the surrounding sediments," said Barker. "We didn't expect to find any Neanderthal bones."
In 2016, in one of the deepest parts of the trench, a rib emerged from the wall, followed by a lumbar vertebra, then the bones of a clenched right hand. However, metres of sediment needed carefully digging out before the team could excavate the skeleton.
During 2018-19 they went on to uncover a complete skull, flattened by thousands of years of sediment, and upper body bones almost to the waist—with the left hand curled under the head like a small cushion.
The bones of the Neanderthal's left hand emerging from the sediment in Shanidar Cave. Credit: Graeme Barker
Early analysis suggests it is over 70,000 years old. While the sex is yet to be determined, the latest Neanderthal discovery has the teeth of a "middle- to older-aged adult".
Shanidar Z has now been brought on loan to the archaeological labs at Cambridge, where it is being conserved and scanned to help build a digital reconstruction, as more layers of silt are removed.
The team is also working on sediment samples from around the new find, looking for signs of climate change in fragments of shell and bone from ancient mice and snails, as well as traces of pollen and charcoal that could offer insight into activities such as cooking and the famous 'flower burial'.
Four of the Neanderthals, including the 'flower burial' and the latest find, formed what researchers describe as a "unique assemblage". It raises the question of whether Neanderthals were returning to the same spot within the cave to inter their dead.
A prominent rock next to the head of Shanidar Z may have been used as a marker for Neanderthals repeatedly depositing their dead, says Pomeroy, although whether time between deaths was weeks, decades or even centuries will be difficult to determine.
"The new excavation suggests that some of these bodies were laid in a channel in the cave floor created by water, which had then been intentionally dug to make it deeper," said Barker. "There is strong early evidence that Shanidar Z was deliberately buried."
CT-scans in Cambridge have revealed the petrous bone—one of the densest in the body; a wedge at the base of the skull—to be intact, offering hope of retrieving ancient Neanderthal DNA from the hot, dry region where "interbreeding" most likely took place as humans spilled out of Africa.
Added Pomeroy: "In recent years we have seen increasing evidence that Neanderthals were more sophisticated than previously thought, from cave markings to use of decorative shells and raptor talons.
"If Neanderthals were using Shanidar cave as a site of memory for the repeated ritual interment of their dead, it would suggest cultural complexity of a high order."
The universe is permeated by a vast, invisible web, its tendrils weaving through space. But despite organizing the matter we see in space, this dark web is invisible. That's because it is made up of dark matter, which exerts a gravitational pull but emits no light.
That is, the web was invisible until now. For the first time, researchers have illuminated some of the darkest corners of the universe.
A long time ago, the universe was hotter, smaller and denser than it is now. It was also, on average, much more boring. There wasn't much variation in density from place to place. Sure, space was much more cramped overall, but in the young universe, no matter where you went, things were pretty much the same.
But there were tiny, random differences in density. Those nuggets had slightly more gravitational pull than their surrounding neighborhood, and so matter tended to flow into them. Growing bigger in this way, they developed an even stronger gravitational influence, pulling more matter in, causing them to be bigger, and so on and so on for billions of years. Simultaneously, as the nuggets grew, the spaces between them emptied out.
Over the course of cosmic time, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.
Eventually, the dense patches grew to become the first stars, galaxies and clusters, while the spaces between them became the great cosmic voids.
Now, 13.8 billion years into this massive construction project, the job isn't quite finished. Matter is still streaming out of the voids, joining groups of galaxies that are flowing into dense, rich clusters. What we have today is a vast, complex network of filaments of matter: the cosmic web.
A light in the dark
The vast majority of matter in our universe is dark; it does not interact with light or with any of the "normal" matter that we see as stars and gas clouds and other interesting things. As a result, much of the cosmic web is completely invisible to us. Fortunately, where the dark matter pools, it also drags along some regular matter to join in the fun.
In the densest pockets of our universe, where the gravitational whispers of dark matter have influenced enough regular matter to coalesce, we see light: The regular matter has converted itself into stars.
Like a lighthouse on a distant, black seashore, the stars and galaxies tell us where the hidden dark matter lurks, giving us a ghostly outline of the cosmic web's true structure.
With this biased view, we can easily see the clusters. They pop out like giant cities seen from a red-eye flight. We know for sure there's a tremendous amount of dark matter in those structures, since you need a lot of gravitational oomph to pool together that many galaxies.
And on the opposite end of the spectrum, we can easily spot the voids; they are the places where all the matter isn't. Because there are no galaxies to illuminate these spaces, we know that they are, by and large, truly empty.
But the grandeur of the cosmic web lies in the delicate lines of the filaments themselves. Stretching for millions of light-years, these thin tendrils of galaxies act like great cosmic freeways crossing black voids, connecting bright urban clusters.
Through a dim lens
Those filaments in the cosmic web are the hardest part of the web to study. They have some galaxies but not a lot. And they have all sorts of lengths and orientations; in comparison, the clusters and voids are geometric child's play. So, even though we've known of the existence of filaments, through computer simulations, for decades, we have had a hard time actually, you know, seeing them.
Recently, though, a team of astronomers made a major advance in mapping our cosmic web, publishing their results Jan. 29 to the arXiv database. Here's how they went to business:
First, they took a catalog of so-called luminous red galaxies (LRGs) from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) survey. LRGs are massive beasts of galaxies, and they tend to sit in the centers of dense blobs of dark matter. And if the LRGs sit in the densest regions, then lines connecting them should be made of the more delicate filaments.
But staring at the space between two LRGs isn't going to be productive; there isn't a lot of stuff there. So, the team took thousands of pairs of LRGs, realigned them and stacked them on top of each other to make a composite image.
Using this stacked image, the scientists counted all the galaxies that they could see, adding up their total light contribution. This allowed researchers to measure how much normal matter made up the filaments between the LRGs. Next, the researchers looked at the galaxies behind the filaments, and specifically, at their shapes.
As light from those background galaxies pierced the intervening filaments, the gravity from the dark matter in those filaments gently nudged the light, ever so slightly shifting the images of those galaxies. By measuring the amount of shifting (called "shear" by the scientists), the team was able to estimate the amount of dark matter in the filaments.
That measure lined up with theoretical predictions (another point for the existence of dark matter). The scientists also confirmed that the filaments weren't entirely dark. For every 351 suns' worth of mass in the filaments, there was 1 suns' worth of light output.
It's a crude map of the filaments, but it's the first, and it definitely shows that while our cosmic web is mostly dark, it's not completely black.
Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of Your Place in the Universe.
Two CubeSats, part of a constellation built and operated by Planet Labs Inc. to take images of Earth, were launched from the International Space Station on May 17, 2016.
Last month, SpaceX became the operator of the world's largest active satellite constellation. As of the end of January, the company had 242 satellites orbiting the planet with plans to launch 42,000 over the next decade. This is part of its ambitious project to provide internet access across the globe. The race to put satellites in space is on, with Amazon, U.K.-based OneWeb and other companies chomping at the bit to place thousands of satellites in orbit in the coming months.
These new satellites have the potential to revolutionize many aspects of everyday life — from bringing internet access to remote corners of the globe to monitoring the environment and improving global navigation systems. Amid all the fanfare, a critical danger has flown under the radar: the lack of cybersecurity standards and regulations for commercial satellites, in the U.S. and internationally. As a scholar who studies cyber conflict, I'm keenly aware that this, coupled with satellites' complex supply chains and layers of stakeholders, leaves them highly vulnerable to cyberattacks.
If hackers were to take control of these satellites, the consequences could be dire. On the mundane end of scale, hackers could simply shut satellites down, denying access to their services. Hackers could also jam or spoof the signals from satellites, creating havoc for critical infrastructure. This includes electric grids, water networks and transportation systems.
Some of these new satellites have thrusters that allow them to speed up, slow down and change direction in space. If hackers took control of these steerable satellites, the consequences could be catastrophic. Hackers could alter the satellites' orbits and crash them into other satellites or even the International Space Station.
Makers of these satellites, particularly small CubeSats, use off-the-shelf technology to keep costs low. The wide availability of these components means hackers can analyze them for vulnerabilities. In addition, many of the components draw on open-source technology. The danger here is that hackers could insert back doors and other vulnerabilities into satellites' software.
The highly technical nature of these satellites also means multiple manufacturers are involved in building the various components. The process of getting these satellites into space is also complicated, involving multiple companies. Even once they are in space, the organizations that own the satellites often outsource their day-to-day management to other companies. With each additional vendor, the vulnerabilities increase as hackers have multiple opportunities to infiltrate the system.
Hacking some of these CubeSats may be as simple as waiting for one of them to pass overhead and then sending malicious commands using specialized ground antennas. Hacking more sophisticated satellites might not be that hard either.
Satellites are typically controlled from ground stations. These stations run computers with software vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers. If hackers were to infiltrate these computers, they could send malicious commands to the satellites.
A history of hacks
This scenario played out in 1998 when hackers took control of the U.S.-German ROSAT X-Ray satellite. They did it by hacking into computers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The hackers then instructed the satellite to aim its solar panels directly at the sun. This effectively fried its batteries and rendered the satellite useless. The defunct satellite eventually crashed back to Earth in 2011. Hackers could also hold satellites for ransom, as happened in 1999 when hackers took control of the U.K.'s SkyNet satellites.
Over the years, the threat of cyberattacks on satellites has gotten more dire. In 2008, hackers, possibly from China, reportedly took full control of two NASA satellites, one for about two minutes and the other for about nine minutes. In 2018, another group of Chinese state-backed hackers reportedly launched a sophisticated hacking campaign aimed at satellite operators and defense contractors. Iranian hacking groups have also attempted similar attacks.
Although the U.S. Department of Defense and National Security Agency have made some efforts to address space cybersecurity, the pace has been slow. There are currently no cybersecurity standards for satellites and no governing body to regulate and ensure their cybersecurity. Even if common standards could be developed, there are no mechanisms in place to enforce them. This means responsibility for satellite cybersecurity falls to the individual companies that build and operate them.
Market forces work against space cybersecurity
As they compete to be the dominant satellite operator, SpaceX and rival companies are under increasing pressure to cut costs. There is also pressure to speed up development and production. This makes it tempting for the companies to cut corners in areas like cybersecurity that are secondary to actually getting these satellites in space.
Even for companies that make a high priority of cybersecurity, the costs associated with guaranteeing the security of each component could be prohibitive. This problem is even more acute for low-cost space missions, where the cost of ensuring cybersecurity could exceed the cost of the satellite itself.
To compound matters, the complex supply chain of these satellites and the multiple parties involved in their management means it's often not clear who bears responsibility and liability for cyber breaches. This lack of clarity has bred complacency and hindered efforts to secure these important systems.
Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory had to get creative to squeeze an antenna into a CubeSat called RainCube, scheduled to fly in 2017. (Image credit: Tyvak/Jonathan Sauder/NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Regulation is required
Some analysts have begun to advocate for strong government involvement in the development and regulation of cybersecurity standards for satellites and other space assets. Congress could work to adopt a comprehensive regulatory framework for the commercial space sector. For instance, they could pass legislation that requires satellites manufacturers to develop a common cybersecurity architecture.
They could also mandate the reporting of all cyber breaches involving satellites. There also needs to be clarity on which space-based assets are deemed critical in order to prioritize cybersecurity efforts. Clear legal guidance on who bears responsibility for cyberattacks on satellites will also go a long way to ensuring that the responsible parties take the necessary measures to secure these systems.
Given the traditionally slow pace of congressional action, a multi-stakeholder approach involving public-private cooperation may be warranted to ensure cybersecurity standards. Whatever steps government and industry take, it is imperative to act now. It would be a profound mistake to wait for hackers to gain control of a commercial satellite and use it to threaten life, limb and property — here on Earth or in space — before addressing this issue.
Up to four people could fly higher than any space tourists in history by 2021!
SpaceX and Space Adventures have signed a deal to launch up to four passengers into Earth orbit on a Crew Dragon spacecraft like the one seen here. This Crew Dragon will launch NASA astronauts to the International Space Station in 2020.
SpaceXjust inked its first deal to launch space tourists into orbit on a Crew Dragon spacecraft.
The private spaceflight company founded by billionaire Elon Musk has signed an agreement with the U.S. space tourism company Space Adventures to launch up to four passengers on an orbital trip aboard a Crew Dragon space capsule. The mission would last up to five days and could launch as early as late 2021, Space Adventures representatives told Space.com.
"This historic mission will forge a path to making spaceflight possible for all people who dream of it, and we are pleased to work with the Space Adventures team on the mission," SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell said in a statement from Space Adventures.
Under the agreement, Space Adventures will use a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon vehicle to fly up to four passengers to Earth orbit. The trip will not visit the International Space Station. Instead, it will remain in orbit as a free-flying spacecraft.
"This will provide up to four individuals with the opportunity to break the world altitude record for private citizen spaceflight and see planet Earth the way no one has since the Gemini program," Space Adventures representatives said in the statement. For comparison, the space station orbits the Earth at an average altitude of about 250 miles (400 kilometers).
"Honoring our combined histories, this Dragon mission will be a special experience and a once in a lifetime opportunity — capable of reaching twice the altitude of any prior civilian astronaut mission or space station visitor," said Eric Anderson, chairman of Space Adventures, said in the statement.
To date, Space Adventures has arranged eight orbital trips to the International Space Station for seven wealthy customers: Dennis Tito in 2001; South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth in 2002; American entrepreneurs Greg Olsen in 2005 and Anousheh Ansari in 2006; Microsoft co-founder Charles Simonyi (twice) in 2007 and 2009; computer game developer Richard Garriott in 2008; and Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte in 2009.
Those spaceflights all cost tens of millions of dollars, with Laliberte's flight costing a reported $35 million for his 11-day trip. The passengers, called "spaceflight participants," flew to and from the station on Russian Soyuz space capsules under agreements between Space Adventures and Roscosmos, Russia's space agency.
SpaceX or Space Adventures did not announce exact pricing for the Crew Dragon tourist flight, but the cost per seat is expected to be in the same range of other commercial spaceflight opportunities.
As for timing, it's likely that the free-flying Crew Dragon flight will launch only after SpaceX begins flying NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Those trips are expected to begin later this year.
SpaceX (and rival Boeing) have multi-billion-dollar contracts to fly astronauts on round trips to and from the space station. In 2019, SpaceX performed a successful uncrewed test flight to the station with Crew Dragon, following it up with a launch abort test last month.
The Crew Dragon spacecraft is a reusable space capsule designed to carry up to seven people on trips to and from Earth orbit. SpaceX missions for NASA will launch the capsule on a Falcon 9 rocket, visit the International Space Station for months, then return to Earth for a splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean.
In December, Boeing launched an uncrewed test flight of its own Starliner capsule, but it failed to reach the space station due to software and communications issues. Boeing and NASA are investigating that flight to determine if another uncrewed flight will be required.
Meanwhile, Space Adventures is also working with Roscosmos to fly two space tourists to the International Space Station on a dedicated Soyuz spacecraft in 2021. Roscosmos announced the agreement with Space Adventures last year.
"Creating unique and previously impossible opportunities for private citizens to experience space is why Space Adventures exists," Anderson said. "Since its maiden mission in 2010, no engineering achievement has consistently impressed the industry more than the Dragon/Falcon 9 reusable system."
Editor's note: This story, originally posted at 10 a.m. EST, has been updated to include mission duration, timing and cost details from Space Adventures.
Breakthrough Listen Scans Milky Way Galaxy for Beacons of Civilization
Breakthrough Listen Scans Milky Way Galaxy for Beacons of Civilization
Artist’s concept of a nearby civilization signaling Earth after observing our planet crossing in front of the sun. Astronomers have now scanned 20 nearby stars in the Earth transit zone in search of such signals.
Credit: UC Berkeley image courtesy of Breakthrough Listen
The Breakthrough Listen Initiative today (Friday, Feb. 14) released data from the most comprehensive survey yet of radio emissions from the plane of the Milky Way Galaxy and the region around its central black hole, and it is inviting the public to search the data for signals from intelligent civilizations.
At a media briefing today in Seattle as part of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Breakthrough Listen principal investigator Andrew Siemion of the University of California, Berkeley, announced the release of nearly 2 petabytes of data, the second data dump from the four-year old search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). A petabyte of radio and optical telescope data was released last June, the largest release of SETI data in the history of the field.
The data, most of it fresh from the telescope prior to detailed study from astronomers, comes from a survey of the radio spectrum between 1 and 12 gigahertz (GHz). About half of the data comes via the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia, which, because of its location in the Southern Hemisphere, is perfectly situated and instrumented to scan the entire galactic disk and galactic center. The telescope is part of the Australia Telescope National Facility, owned and managed by the country’s national science agency, CSIRO.
The remainder of the data was recorded by the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, the world’s largest steerable radio dish, and an optical telescope called the Automated Planet Finder, built and operated by UC Berkeley and located at Lick Observatory outside San Jose, California.
“Since Breakthrough Listen’s initial data release last year, we have doubled what is available to the public,” said Breakthrough Listen’s lead system administrator, Matt Lebofsky. “It is our hope that these data sets will reveal something new and interesting, be it other intelligent life in the universe or an as-yet-undiscovered natural astronomical phenomenon.”
“For the whole of human history, we had a limited amount of data to search for life beyond Earth. So, all we could do was speculate. Now, as we are getting a lot of data, we can do real science and, with making this data available to general public, so can anyone who wants to know the answer to this deep question,” said Yuri Milner, the founder of Breakthrough Listen.
Moonset, around 2:30 a.m., at the Very Large Array on the Plains of San Agustin, about 50 miles west of Socorro, New Mexico. The VLA is teaming up with the SETI Institute to capture data that can be searched for intelligent signals.
Credit: UC Berkeley
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the privately-funded SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, also announced today an agreement to collaborate on new systems to add SETI capabilities to radio telescopes operated by NRAO. The first project will develop a system to piggyback on the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico and provide data to state-of-the-art digital backend equipment built by the SETI Institute.
“The SETI Institute will develop and install an interface on the VLA, permitting unprecedented access to the rich data stream continuously produced by the telescope as it scans the sky,“ said Siemion, who, in addition to his UC Berkeley position, is the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute. “This interface will allow us to conduct a powerful, wide-area SETI survey that will be vastly more complete than any previous such search.”
“As the VLA conducts its usual scientific observations, this new system will allow for an additional and important use for the data we’re already collecting,” said NRAO Director Tony Beasley. “Determining whether we are alone in the universe as technologically capable life is among the most compelling questions in science, and NRAO telescopes can play a major role in answering it.”
Earth transit zone survey
In releasing the new radio and optical data, Siemion highlighted a new analysis of a small subset of the data: radio emissions from 20 nearby stars that are aligned with the plane of Earth’s orbit such that an advanced civilization around those stars could see Earth pass in front of the sun (a “transit” like those focused on by NASA’s Kepler space telescope). Conducted by the Green Bank Telescope, the Earth transit zone survey observed in the radio frequency range between 4 and 8 gigahertz, the so-called C-band. The data were then analyzed by former UC Berkeley undergraduate Sofia Sheikh, now a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University, who looked for bright emissions at a single radio wavelength or a narrow band around a single wavelength. She has submitted the paper to the Astrophysical Journal.
Australia’s Parkes radio telescope, 210 feet in diameter, conducted the most comprehensive survey yet of radio emissions from the Milky Way galaxy in search of technosignatures from advanced civilizations around other stars.
Photo courtesy of CSIRO
“This is a unique geometry,” Sheikh said. “It is how we discovered other exoplanets, so it kind of makes sense to extrapolate and say that that might be how other intelligent species find planets, as well. This region has been talked about before, but there has never been a targeted search of that region of the sky.”
While Sheikh and her team found no technosignatures of civilization, the analysis and other detailed studies the Breakthrough Listen group has conducted are gradually putting limits on the location and capabilities of advanced civilizations that may exist in our galaxy.
“We didn’t find any aliens, but we are setting very rigorous limits on the presence of a technologically capable species, with data for the first time in the part of the radio spectrum between 4 and 8 gigahertz,” Siemion said. “These results put another rung on the ladder for the next person who comes along and wants to improve on the experiment.”
Sheikh noted that her mentor, Jason Wright at Penn State, estimated that if the world’s oceans represented every place and wavelength we could search for intelligent signals, we have, to date, explored only a hot tub’s worth of it.
“My search was sensitive enough to see a transmitter basically the same as the strongest transmitters we have on Earth, because I looked at nearby targets on purpose,” Sheikh said. “So, we know that there isn’t anything as strong as our Arecibo telescope beaming something at us. Even though this is a very small project, we are starting to get at new frequencies and new areas of the sky.” Beacons in the galactic center?
The so-far unanalyzed observations from the galactic disk and galactic center survey were a priority for Breakthrough Listen because of the higher likelihood of observing an artificial signal from that region of dense stars. If artificial transmitters are not common in the galaxy, then searching for a strong transmitter among the billions of stars in the disk of our galaxy is the best strategy, Simeon said.
Breakthrough Listen, based at UC Berkeley, collects petabytes of data from the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia (right) and the Parkes radio telescope in Australia (left) and makes it available to the science community to analyze in search of signals from intelligent civilizations.
Graphic courtesy of Breakthrough Listen
On the other hand, putting a powerful, intergalactic transmitter in the core of our galaxy, perhaps powered by the 4 million-solar-mass black hole there, might not be beyond the capabilities of a very advanced civilization. Galactic centers may be so-called Schelling points: likely places for civilizations to meet up or place beacons, given that they cannot communicate among themselves to agree on a location.
“The galactic center is the subject of a very specific and concerted campaign with all of our facilities because we are in unanimous agreement that that region is the most interesting part of the Milky Way galaxy,” Siemion said. “If an advanced civilization anywhere in the Milky Way wanted to put a beacon somewhere, getting back to the Schelling point idea, the galactic center would be a good place to do it. It is extraordinarily energetic, so one could imagine that if an advanced civilization wanted to harness a lot of energy, they might somehow use the supermassive black hole that is at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.”
Visit from an interstellar comet
Breakthrough Listen also released observations of the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov, which had a close encounter with the sun in December and is now on its way out of the solar system. The group had earlier scanned the interstellar rock ‘Oumuamua, which passed through the center of our solar system in 2017. Neither exhibited technosignatures.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope took this photo of the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov in October 2019, two months before its closest approach to the sun.
Photo courtesy of NASA, ESA and D. Jewitt, UCLA
“If interstellar travel is possible, which we don’t know, and if other civilizations are out there, which we don’t know, and if they are motivated to build an interstellar probe, then some fraction greater than zero of the objects that are out there are artificial interstellar devices,” said Steve Croft, a research astronomer with the Berkeley SETI Research Center and Breakthrough Listen. “Just as we do with our measurements of transmitters on extrasolar planets, we want to put a limit on what that number is.”
Regardless of the kind of SETI search, Siemion said, Breakthrough Listen looks for electromagnetic radiation that is consistent with a signal that we know technology produces, or some anticipated signal that technology could produce, and inconsistent with the background noise from natural astrophysical events. This also requires eliminating signals from cellphones, satellites, GPS, internet, Wi-fi and myriad other human sources.
In Sheikh’s case, she turned the Green Bank telescope on each star for five minutes, pointed away for another five minutes and repeated that twice more. She then threw out any signal that didn’t disappear when the telescope pointed away from the star. Ultimately, she whittled an initial 1 million radio spikes down to a couple hundred, which she was able to eliminate as Earth-based human interference. The last four unexplained signals turned out to be from passing satellites.
Siemion emphasized that the Breakthrough Listen team intends to analyze all the data released to date and to do it systematically and often.
“Of all the observations we have done, probably 20% or 30% have been included in a data analysis paper,” Siemion said. “Our goal is not just to analyze it 100%, but 1000% or 2000%. We want to analyze it iteratively.”
Breakthrough Listen, based at UC Berkeley, is supported by a $100 million, 10-year commitment from the Breakthrough Initiatives, founded in 2015 by Yuri and Julia Milner to explore the universe, seek scientific evidence of life beyond Earth and encourage public debate from a planetary perspective.
Contacts and sources:
Robert Sanders University of California – Berkeley
I was having some fun with the Google Mercury map and found so many structure that I had to make a video about them. I only show about ten in this short video, but one day AI will run ramped through the internet and find thousands of structures in the same planet photo. AI is much better at finding and identifying such tiny details, and people might accept discoveries from AI more easily than a human like myself. Can you imagine the technology within one of these ships? It would advance tech on earth thousands of years in just a few days. The country that has one of these ships...will be the most powerful country on earth. Scott C. Wari
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
UFO Seen Shooting Across Sky Over Fremont, California, Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Seen Shooting Across Sky Over Fremont, California, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Source: MUFON Location of sighting:Fremont, California, USA Guys there is a close up before and at the end of this video I made to help you see it better. I hope it helps. This is an outstanding video of a circular disk craft shooting across the sky trying to make itself look like a meteor. Its not a meteor, its going too slow and at an angle that would be impossible for a meteor. 100% proof that aliens fly over cities in California. Scott C. Waring - Taiwan Eyewitness states:
Taking my dog for a walk when I saw this about 6pm. going north over Fremont, Ca. took video with iphone. this is an mp4 video.
BruceSeesall shows a UFO hurtling towards the moon. The footage was captured last year. We get in close in 5K strong magnification.
Other UFO sightings as shown in the video: Directional changes seen in infrared camera...UFO changing directions in the skies of Montreal Canada and UFO's plunging in and out of clouds on the moon seen in high quality 5K.
KLIMAATVERANDERING: ZOU DE ZON DE BOOSDOENER KUNNEN ZIJN?
KLIMAATVERANDERING: ZOU DE ZON DE BOOSDOENER KUNNEN ZIJN?
Caroline Kraaijvanger
De aarde warmt op. En volgens sommigen is dat het resultaat van de zonne-activiteit. Is dat denkbaar?
In de jaren zeventig ontdekt paleo-ecoloog Bas van Geel in een veenkolom uit Engbertsdijksveen een klimaatomslag. Veen dat ten tijde van het Subboreaal onder relatief droge omstandigheden was gegroeid, maakte ten tijde van het Subatlanticum (ca. 800 voor Christus) plaats voor veen dat onder zeer natte omstandigheden was ontstaan. De oorzaak bleef onbekend. Tot het eind van de twintigste eeuw. Dan ontdekt Van Geel dat de klimaatomslag samenvalt met een plotselinge afname in de activiteit van de zon. Een ontdekking die zijn professionele leven verandert. “Ik ontpopte mezelf tot een klimaatscepticus.”
Zonne-activiteit Van Geel is geen klimaatscepticus in de traditionele zin van het woord. Zo ontkent hij zeker niet dat de aarde de laatste eeuw is opgewarmd. Wel betwijfelt hij of de rol die CO2 hierin speelt, werkelijk zo omvangrijk is als momenteel wordt aangenomen. Een deel van de opwarming die nu aan CO2 wordt toegeschreven, is volgens hem namelijk niet te herleiden naar onze uitstoot van dit bekende broeikasgas, maar naar de activiteit van de zon. “Ik denk dat we de rol van de zon onderschatten.”
Activiteit op de zon.
Afbeelding: NASA / GSFC / Solar Dynamics Observatory.
Onze actieve moederster Wie wel eens plaatjes van het oppervlak van de zon heeft gezien, weet dat het er aldaar vurig aan toe kan gaan. Onze moederster kan zonnevlammen genereren en coronale massa-ejecties uitspugen. Kortom: onze zon is actief. Maar de mate van activiteit fluctueert. Daarin is – grofweg – een elf jaar durende cyclus te onderscheiden die gekenmerkt wordt door een zonneminimum (een periode met weinig zonneactiviteit) en een zonnemaximum (een periode met veel zonneactiviteit). “De verschillen tussen de energie die een actieve zon afgeeft en de energie die een inactieve zon afgeeft, zijn niet zo groot,” erkent Van Geel. Sterker nog: ze zijn te klein om de klimaatomslagen – zoals bijvoorbeeld die ten tijde van het Subatlanticum – te kunnen verklaren. “Er moeten dan ook versterkingsmechanismen zijn,” denkt Van Geel. Mechanismen die ervoor zorgen dat het geringe verschil tussen een actieve en inactieve zon toch een enorme impact heeft op ons klimaat. Maar wat voor mechanismen zijn dat dan? Er zijn twee hypothesen, aldus Van Geel. De eerste draait om kosmische straling. “Kosmische straling speelt een rol bij wolkenvorming: watermoleculen condenseren door kosmische straling. Als de zon heel actief is, is er weinig kosmische straling in het zonnestelsel.” En zouden dus minder wolken ontstaan. En omdat wolken zonlicht reflecteren (en het aardoppervlak koelen) zou een actieve zon – met enige vertraging – resulteren in een opwarming van dat aardoppervlak. “En dan is er nog een hypothese waar ik persoonlijk wat meer in geloof. Deze hypothese stelt dat de verschillen tussen de energie van een actieve en de energie van een inactieve zon misschien klein zijn, maar dat de veranderingen in de afgegeven UV-straling wel groot zijn.” Tijdens een zonneminimum neemt de UV-straling afkomstig van de zon sterk af en wordt minder ozon gevormd. En dat merken we op aarde, doordat ozon energie absorbeert en in die hoedanigheid dus gezien kan worden als een broeikasgas. Tijdens een zonneminimum wordt er minder van gegenereerd en koelt de aarde dus af.
Een kritische blik op de versterkingsmechanismen “Al achttien jaar proberen we een manier te vinden waarop de vrij kleine waargenomen solaire variaties van de afgelopen dertig jaar versterkt kunnen worden,” vertelt professor Werner Schmutz, directeur van het Physikalisch-Metorologisches Observatorium in Davos, aan Scientias.nl. “Fluctuaties in de hoeveelheid UV-straling die van invloed zijn op ozon in de stratosfeer lijken daarbij het meest veelbelovend.” Maar de hamvraag is natuurlijk: oefent een actieve zon via ozon daadwerkelijk invloed uit op ons klimaat? Schmutz en collega’s zochten dat in 2013 uit en moesten in het resulterende paper concluderen dat het vermeende versterkingsmechanisme eigenlijk geen naam mocht hebben. Oefent de zonne-activiteit dan misschien een effect uit op ons klimaat via kosmische straling? De hypothese klonk professor Terence Sloan, verbonden aan de University of Lancaster, plausibel in de oren. En dus besloot hij dat in 2008 eens uit te zoeken. Het leidde tot een serie papers, waarvan het laatste deel in 2013 gepubliceerd werd. “We ontdekten dat het effect te klein was om te detecteren,” zo vertelt Sloan aan Scientias.nl. “En dus sprake was van een verwaarloosbaar effect op de opwarming van de aarde.” De benodigde, hypothetische versterkingsmechanismen lijken in recente studies dus geen stand te houden.
“DE ZON KAN ZEER ZEKER UITGESLOTEN WORDEN ALS DE OORZAAK VAN DE OPWARMING DIE DE AARDE IN DE LAATSTE VIJFTIG JAAR HEEFT DOORGEMAAKT”
Stralingssterkte Speelt de zonne-activiteit dan helemaal geen rol in het klimaat? Zover willen de meeste onderzoekers ook weer niet gaan. Schmutz grijpt opnieuw terug op zijn studie uit 2013 die het versterkingsmechanisme omtrent UV-straling en ozon praktisch van tafel veegde, maar wel enige invloed van de zon op het klimaat bespeurde. “Als de zon inderdaad, zoals wij vermoeden, van invloed is, dan lijkt dat aan het einde van al onze studies simpelweg toe te schrijven te zijn aan variaties in de totale stralingssterkte van de zon (dus variaties in de hoeveelheid energie die de zon afgeeft).” Die fluctuaties in de intensiteit van het zonlicht dat de aarde bereikt, zijn klein. En het Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stelt dan ook dat recente zonne-activiteit geen noemenswaardige impact heeft gehad op het klimaat. Schmutz is het daarmee eens. “De zon kan zeer zeker uitgesloten worden als de oorzaak van de opwarming die de aarde in de laatste vijftig jaar heeft doorgemaakt, omdat de stralingssterkte stabiel was. En als we wat verder inzoomen, zien we zelfs dat de stralingssterkte sinds de jaren veertig ietsje is afgenomen en in de huidige elf jaar durende cyclus zelfs heel duidelijk is afgenomen.” Vandaar dat klimaatmodellen de huidige opwarming ook niet kunnen reproduceren als ze onze uitstoot van broeikasgassen buiten beschouwing laten en zich alleen laten leiden door natuurlijke fluctuaties, zoals veranderingen in de zonne-activiteit.
Het verleden en de toekomst Maar hoe zit het dan met die opmerkelijke perioden in het verleden, zoals het Maunder Minimum (1645-1715)? Een tijdvak waarin de zonne-activiteit uitzonderlijk laag was, net als de temperatuur op aarde? “Er was een minimale zonne-activiteit in de zeventiende eeuw en die viel samen met een historisch koude periode waarin zelfs de rivier The Theems bevroor,” vertelt Sloan. “Maar niemand kan je vertellen waarom een afname in zonnevlekken een koude periode op aarde veroorzaakt.” “We hebben eigenlijk alleen in het verleden maar goede correlaties gezien tussen zonne-activiteit en een dalende temperatuur,” voegt Schmutz toe. “Aangezien we de stralingssterkte van de zon pas sinds 1978 vanuit de ruimte meten, beslaan onze observaties nog maar een korte tijd. En in die tijd is de zon niet veel veranderd, in ieder geval duidelijk niet genoeg om van invloed te kunnen zijn op het klimaat. En dat betekent dat er op dit moment twee mogelijkheden zijn. De eerste: de zon heeft in ongeveer dertig jaar het volledige scala aan mogelijke variaties laten zien. In dat geval moet de zon uitgesloten worden als een drijvende kracht achter historische klimaatveranderingen.” Een andere optie is dat we in deze dertig jaar – een tijdvak van niks, als je spreekt over een ster die al 4,5 miljard jaar meegaat – eigenlijk nog niets gezien hebben en de zon op grotere tijdschalen tot veel grotere variaties in staat is. “Dan is de zon de belangrijkste verdachte op het gebied van historische klimaatveranderingen.” In andere woorden: op lange termijn zou de zonne-activiteit dus wel een effect kunnen hebben op het klimaat. Maar in welke mate, is onduidelijk. Schmutz en collega’s verkenden dat heikele vraagstuk recent in dit onderzoeksproject. Op basis van modellen – die speculatief van aard zijn en ervan uitgaan dat ons een periode van sterk verminderde zonne-activiteit te wachten staat “Niemand weet zeker of de zon de komende 50 tot 100 jaar in een Grand Minimum belandt, maar we verwachten het” – voorspellen ze dat de zon er de komende eeuw voor kan zorgen dat de temperatuur op aarde 0,5 graden lager uitvalt dan het geval zou zijn als de zonne-activiteit niet sterk zou verminderen. “Als hun model klopt, kan die 0,5 graad afkoeling de effecten van broeikasgassen verminderen,” merkt Sloan op. Maar wederom kan de zon niet het verschil maken. Want de door menselijk handelen aangedreven opwarming van de aarde gaat aanzienlijk sneller dan de voorspelde en zeer speculatieve afkoeling die de zon zou kunnen veroorzaken. Als we niks doen, zitten we aan het eind van de rit dus – ongeacht of de zon nu voor een beetje verkoeling zorgt of niet – met een planeet die enigszins over de kook is.
Van Geel wacht ondertussen rustig de komende jaren af. “De zonneactiviteit loopt nu terug en de vraag is: wat doet het klimaat? Ik denk echt dat we richting afkoeling gaan.” En als dat niet zo is? “Dan heb ik ongelijk en ben ik dom geweest. Maar als ik twijfelde, zou ik niet naar buiten treden.” Sloan en Schmutz zien het op basis van hun onderzoek allemaal heel anders. Het feit dat de aarde opwarmt, kunnen we volgens hen niet afschuiven op de zon. Als de zon al een rol speelt, dan is deze nihil in vergelijking met de rol die onze eigen activiteit speelt. Tegelijkertijd sluiten de onderzoekers nog niet uit dat de zon op lange termijn wel impact kan hebben op het aardse klimaat. Maar hoe dan precies en in welke mate: dat blijft voorlopig in nevelen gehuld. Het lijkt voor het klimaatdebat allemaal niet zo heel relevant, zo benadrukt Schmutz. “Het is in mijn optiek onmogelijk dat huidige, natuurlijke effecten de invloed van ons mensen domineren.”
Bronmateriaal:
Interviews met Bas van Geel, Werner Schmutz en Terence Sloan Afbeelding bovenaan dit artikel: PublicDomainPictures / Pixabay
NASA geeft toe dat de klimaatverandering natuurlijk is en veroorzaakt wordt door de zon
NASA geeft toe dat de klimaatverandering natuurlijk is en veroorzaakt wordt door de zon
Al meer dan 60 jaar weet de National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) dat veranderingen in de weersomstandigheden op de planeet volkomen natuurlijk en normaal zijn. Maar het ruimteagentschap heeft, om welke reden dan ook, besloten om de zogenaamde door de mens veroorzaakte opwarmingszwendel te laten voortbestaan en zich te laten verspreiden, ten koste van de menselijke vrijheid.
Activiteit op de zon.
Afbeelding: NASA / GSFC / Solar Dynamics Observatory.
Het was in 1958, om precies te zijn, toen NASA voor het eerst opmerkte dat veranderingen in de zonnebaan van de aarde en veranderingen in de helling van de aarde verantwoordelijk waren voor wat klimaatwetenschappers vandaag de dag “opwarming” (of “afkoeling”, afhankelijk van hun agenda) noemen. Met andere woorden, op geen enkele manier verwarmt of koelt de mens de planeet door verbrandingsmotor-voertuigen te rijden of rundvlees te eten.
In 2000 publiceerde NASA op zijn website van het Earth Observatory informatie over de klimaattheorie van Milankovich, waaruit blijkt dat de planeet in werkelijkheid door externe factoren veranderd die absoluut niets met menselijke activiteiten te maken hebben. Maar ook deze informatie is na 19 jaar nog steeds niet in de mainstream media terechtgekomen en daarom beweren “klimaatbeschermers” nu dat we eigenlijk nog maar 18 maanden of 12 jaar over hebben voordat de planeet sterft aan een overschot aan kooldioxide (CO2).
Maar de waarheid is veel meer in overeenstemming met wat de Servische astrofysicus Miloetin Milankovitsj, naar wie de klimaattheorie van Milankovitsj is genoemd, heeft gesuggereerd over hoe de seizoensgebonden en latitudinale variaties in zonnestraling, die de aarde op verschillende manieren en in verschillende tijden raken, de grootste invloed hebben op de veranderende klimaatpatronen van de aarde.
De volgende twee afbeeldingen (door Robert Simmon, NASA GSFC) helpen dit illustreren, de eerste toont de Aarde in een baan dicht bij nul (Excentriciteit: van excentrisch, afwijkend van het centrum) en de tweede toont de Aarde in een baan van 0,07. Deze orbitale verandering wordt weergegeven door de excentrische, ovale vorm in het tweede beeld, die opzettelijk is overdreven om de massale verandering in de afstand tussen de aarde en de zon te laten zien, afhankelijk van of het in het perihelium of het aphelium is.
“Zelfs de maximale excentriciteit van de baan van de aarde – 0,07 – zou niet representatief zijn bij de resolutie van een website”, merkt de Hal Turner Radio Show op.
“Desalniettemin, bij de huidige excentriciteit van 0,017 in het perihelium, is de aarde vijf miljoen kilometer dichter bij de zon dan in het aphelium.”
De grootste factor die het klimaat op aarde beïnvloedt is de zon
Wat betreft de helling van de aarde of de verandering in de axiale helling, laten de twee onderstaande afbeeldingen (Robert Simmon, NASA GSFC) zien hoeveel de aarde kan verschuiven, zowel op haar as als rond haar rotatieoriëntatie. Bij hogere neigingen worden de seizoenen van de aarde veel extremer, terwijl ze bij lagere neigingen veel milder worden. Op dezelfde manier kan de draaias van de aarde een sterke invloed hebben op de seizoensgebonden extremen tussen de twee hemisferen, afhankelijk van welke hemisfeer in het perihelium is uitgelijnd met de Zon.
Er moet worden vermeld dat “klimaat” in het Nederlands “gesteldheid” betekent. Het woord is gekozen omdat de hele dagzijde van de aarde gelijkelijk door de zon wordt bestraald, maar de opwarming hangt uitsluitend af van de invalshoek, de helling van de stralen ten opzichte van het aardoppervlak. Op de warme evenaar is de hoek ongeveer 90%; op de koude polen is hij veel vlakker.
Milankowitsch was in staat om uit deze verschillende variabelen een uitgebreid wiskundig model te ontwikkelen dat de oppervlaktetemperaturen op de aarde ver terug in de tijd kan berekenen, en de conclusie is eenvoudig: het klimaat op aarde is altijd al aan het veranderen geweest en is in een staat van constante verandering, zonder onze tussenkomst als mens.
Toen Milankovitsj zijn model voor het eerst presenteerde, werd het bijna een halve eeuw lang genegeerd. Vervolgens, in 1976, bevestigde een studie in het tijdschrift Science dat de theorie van Milankovich inderdaad juist was en dat deze overeenkwam met verschillende perioden van klimaatverandering die zich in de loop van de geschiedenis hebben voorgedaan.
In 1982, zes jaar na de publicatie van deze studie, accepteerde de National Research Council van de Amerikaanse National Academy of Sciences de theorie van Milankovich als reëel en verklaarde deze waar:
“… orbitale variaties blijven het meest grondig bestudeerde mechanisme van klimaatverandering op tijdschalen van tienduizenden jaren en zijn veruit het duidelijkste geval van een direct effect van veranderende zonnestraling op de lagere atmosfeer van de aarde.”
Als we het geheel in één simpele zin zouden moeten samenvatten, zou het zo zijn: De grootste factor die het weer- en klimaatpatroon op aarde beïnvloedt is de zon, of beter gezegd de periode van de zon. Afhankelijk van de positie van de aarde ten opzichte van de centrale ster op een bepaald moment, zullen de klimaatomstandigheden dramatisch variëren en zelfs drastische anomalieën veroorzaken die alles wat mensen dachten te weten over hoe de aarde werkt op de proef stellen.
Maar in plaats van dit feit te accepteren, dringen de huidige klimaat “wetenschappers”, samen met de linkse, en steeds meer rechtse politici, en natuurlijk de massamedia, erop aan dat niet-herbruikbare boodschappentassen in de supermarkt en geen elektrische voertuigen de planeet snel zullen vernietigen, en dat we absoluut een globale klimaatbelasting als oplossing moeten invoeren.
“Het klimaatdebat gaat niet over wetenschap. Het is een poging om de bevolking politiek en economisch te controleren door de elite”, schrijft een commentator op de Hal Turner Radio Show.
“En het is een andere manier om de bevolking te verdelen tegen zichzelf, waarbij sommigen geloven in de door de mens veroorzaakte opwarming van de aarde en anderen niet geloven, dat wil zeggen verdeel en heers.”
Het lijkt erop dat de woorden “opwarming van de aarde” onlangs zijn vervangen door “klimaatverandering”, en degenen die niet geloven in, of twijfelen over het verband tussen “klimaatverandering” en “kooldioxide” worden “klimaatontkenners” genoemd, wat naar mijn mening een heel slecht gekozen woord is, omdat ik denk dat niemand ontkent dat er een klimaat is. De … Meer lezen over Een nieuwe studie toont aan dat de klimaatverandering niet afhankelijk is van de menselijke CO2-uitstoot
The above graph compares global surface temperature changes (red line) and the Sun's energy received by the Earth (yellow line) in watts (units of energy) per square meter since 1880. The lighter/thinner lines show the yearly levels while the heavier/thicker lines show the 11-year average trends. Eleven-year averages are used to reduce the year-to-year natural noise in the data, making the underlying trends more obvious.
The amount of solar energy received by the Earth has followed the Sun’s natural 11-year cycle of small ups and downs with no net increase since the 1950s. Over the same period, global temperature has risen markedly. It is therefore extremely unlikely that the Sun has caused the observed global temperature warming trend over the past half-century.
Researchers find the planet may have had a dynamic past.
Jennifer Chu, MIT News Office
New observations from a spacecraft orbiting Mercury have revealed that the tiny, pockmarked planet harbors a highly unusual interior — and the craft’s glimpse of Mercury’s surface topography suggests the planet has had a very dynamic history.
The observations were taken by a probe called MESSENGER (short for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging), the first ever to enter orbit around Mercury. MESSENGER reached Mercury’s orbit in March 2011, and has since circled the planet twice a day, collecting nearly 100,000 images and more than four million measurements of Mercury’s surface.
A team of scientists from institutions including MIT, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center have analyzed the data and precisely mapped the planet’s topography and gravitational fields. From the gravity estimates, the team found that Mercury likely has a highly unusual interior structure — an exceptionally large iron core overlain by a solid layer of iron sulfide and a thin outer shell of silicate mantle and crust. From topographic measurements, the team mapped out a large number of craters on the planet’s surface, making a surprising finding: Many of these have tilted over time, suggesting that processes within the planet have deformed the terrain after the craters formed.
The researchers detail their findings in two papers published this week in the journal Science.
“Prior to MESSENGER’s comprehensive observations, many scientists believed that Mercury was much like the moon — that it cooled off very early in solar system history, and has been a dead planet throughout most of its evolution,” says co-author Maria Zuber, the E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics at MIT. “Now we’re finding compelling evidence for unusual dynamics within the planet, indicating that Mercury was apparently active for a long time.”
Mercurial mission
Getting into orbit about Mercury was no easy feat, mostly because of its proximity to the sun. Any spacecraft heading toward the planet speeds up, drawn in by the sun’s powerful gravitational field. To counteract the sun’s pull and slow MESSENGER down, the MESSENGER team programmed the probe to fly by Venus twice, and Mercury three times, before slowing down enough to be captured in Mercury’s orbit with the help of a main engine burn.
Video: Watch a color movie of Mercury’s surface captured by MESSENGER After entering Mercury’s orbit, the spacecraft began measuring the planet’s surface elevations via laser altimetry. Through radio tracking, the probe estimated the planet’s gravity field. Throughout the one-year mission, the MESSENGER spacecraft battled tides from the sun, which tugged the probe out of its optimal orbit, as well as what Zuber calls “sunlight pressure” — photons or packets of light from the sun that exerted pressure on the spacecraft. The team periodically adjusted the probe’s orbit and made precise corrections to its measurements to account for the sun’s effects, mapping out the gravity field as well as the elevation of the surface of Mercury’s northern hemisphere.
Inside and out
The team’s measurements revealed surprising findings both in the planet’s interior and on its surface. From the probe’s gravity estimates, the group inferred that Mercury likely has a huge iron core comprising approximately 85 percent of the planet’s radius. (Earth’s core, by comparison, is about half the planet’s radius in size.) This means that Mercury’s mantle and crust occupy only the outer 15 percent or so of the planet’s radius — about as thin as the peel on an orange, Zuber says.
The researchers also reasoned, given Mercury’s gravity field, that just above the outer molten layer of the planet’s core may be a solid layer of iron and sulfur — a type of layered structure not known to exist on any other planet.
“If the iron and sulfur model is correct, it would have implications for how the dynamo inside Mercury produces the planet's magnetic field,” says Gerald Schubert, professor of earth and space sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles, who did not participate in the research. “The dynamo generation process might work differently in Mercury compared with Earth.”
Co-author Dave Smith, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, says the scientific process that led to the team’s results was a journey in itself.
“We had an idea of the internal structure of Mercury, [but] the initial observations did not fit the theory so we doubted the observations,” Smith says. “We did more work and concluded the observations were correct, and then reworked the theory for the interior of Mercury that fit the observations. This is how science is supposed to work, and it’s a nice result.”
Through laser measurements of the planet’s surface, researchers mapped out multiple geologic features in Mercury’s northern hemisphere, finding the range of elevations to be smaller than that of Mars or the moon. They also observed something unexpected in Mercury’s Caloris basin, the largest impact feature on Mercury: Portions of the floor of the crater actually stand higher than its rim, suggesting that forces within the interior pushed the crater up after the initial impact that created it.
Zuber and her team also identified an area of lowlands approximately centered on Mercury’s north pole that could conceivably have migrated there over the course of the planet’s evolution. Zuber explains that a process called polar wander can cause geological features to shift around on a planet’s surface due to the redistribution of mass on or within a planet by geodynamical processes.
One such process of transporting mass in a planet’s interior is convection within the mantle. Viscous material within the mantle circulates and can push fragments of crust up and out, shifting terrain around the globe. Given Mercury’s extremely thin mantle, as revealed by MESSENGER, Zuber says it’s challenging to understand how convection operated to raise broad expanses of terrain to the elevations observed.
“It’s interesting to think what might be causing the observed deformation,” Zuber says. “It appears there are some very unusual dynamics going on inside Mercury.”
Canadian paleontologists have identified a new tyrannosaur species, identified from fossils found in southern Alberta. It’s a large bipedal carnivorous dinosaur that lived about 79 million years ago, making it the oldest known tyrannosaur in northern North America (the previous record holder was aged at 77 million years). Details about this new dinosaur and its evolutionary relationship to other tyrannosaurs were published in the journal Cretaceous Research.
John De Groot, a farmer and amateur paleontologist, found the creature’s fossilized jawbone in 2010 while he was hiking along the Bow River shoreline near the town of Hays, about 120 miles (200 km) southeast of Calgary. It had fallen to the ground from a nearby cliff. In a statement from the Royal Tyrrell Museum, De Groot said:
The jawbone was an absolutely stunning find. We knew it was special because you could clearly see the fossilized teeth.
John De Groot holding casts of Thanatotheristes degrootorum‘s jaw bones. The new dinosaur species was named after him.
Scientists named the new tyrannosaur Thanatotheristes degrootorum. They picked a genus name apt for an apex predator, Thanatotheristes, after Thanatos, the Greek god of death, and theristes, which means one who reaps or harvests.
The dinosaur’s species name, degrootorum, was in honor of John De Groot. Sandra De Groot, his wife, commented:
John always said that one day he would find a dinosaur skull. Finding the jaw was exciting. Hearing that it is a new species, and seeing it given our family name, was beyond belief.
The fossils – pieces of the tyrannosaur’s skull and its upper and lower jaw bone – stayed tucked away in a drawer at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, in Drumheller, Alberta, until the spring of 2019. That’s when University of Calgary’s Jared Voris began to study it.
In a statement from the University of Calgary, Voris, the paper’s lead author, said:
We found features of the skull that had not been seen before in other tyrannosaurs. The fossil has several physical features, including ridges along the upper jaw, which clearly distinguishes it as being from a new species.
Voris thinks that Thanatotheristes was about 26 feet (8 meters) in length, and likely preyed on large plant-eating dinosaurs like Xenoceratops and Colepiocephale.
Vertical ridges along the length of Thanatotheristes degrootorum‘s upper jaw indicated that it was a new tyrannosaur species.
When most people think of tyrannosaurs, it’s the iconic Tyrannosaurus rex that springs to mind. T. rex is engrained in our popular culture, in books and movies, toys and artwork, and lately, in people who run around in inflatable T. rex suits. T. rex lived in present day western North America, around 68 to 66 million years ago. But there are other tyrannosaur species as well, identified from fossils in North America, and paleontologists are trying to understand their evolutionary story.
In their study, the scientists found that Thanatotheristes degrootorum was closely related to two other tyrannosaur species, Daspletosaurustorosus and Daspletosaurus horneri. This trio had common skull features: they had deeper longer snouts and more teeth in their upper jaws than their southern relatives which Voris described as having shorter, bulldog-like faces.
The scientists think that differences in tyrannosaur species – in body shape and size – are adaptations to their environment. Voris said:
Some species are better suited to certain environments. This reduces competition and gives species a better chance at survival.
The next step is to test that hypothesis further and compare how tyrannosaur species from various geological regions differed.
Artist’s depiction of Thanatotheristes degrootorum.
Image via Julius Csotonyi.
Bottom line:Scientists have identified a new tyrannosaur species, Thanatotheristes degrootorum, from fossils found in southern Alberta, Canada. It lived about 79 million years ago, making it the oldest known tyrannosaur in northern North America.
A team of researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands have developed a neural network called “Hazardous Object Identifier” that they say can predict if an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth.
Their new AI singled out 11 asteroids that were not previously classified by NASA as hazardous, and which were larger than 100 meters in diameter — big enough to explode with the force of hundreds of nuclear weapons if they impacted Earth, potentially leveling entire cities. They also focused on space rocks that could come within 4.7 million miles of Earth, as detailed in a paper published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics earlier this month.
None are an imminent threat, however: not only are their chances of ever hitting Earth astronomically slim, but they are making their flyby between the years 2131 and 2923 — hundreds of years from now.
Using a supercomputer, the researchers fast-forwarded through a simulation of 10,000 years of orbital movements of the Solar System’s planets. The team then reversed the simulation, simulating future Earth-impacting asteroids by flinging them away from Earth and tracking their exact locations and orbits.
“If you rewind the clock, you will see the well-known asteroids land again on earth,” said co-author and astronomer Simon Portegies Zwart from Leiden University in a statement. “This way you can make a library of the orbits of asteroids that landed on earth.”
This simulation served as the training ground for their neural network, which then looked for patterns in the data common among the simulated asteroids that might eventually hit Earth.
To nail down whether their AI was actually good at spotting Earth-impacting asteroids in reality, the team tested it on known data of 2,000 asteroids listed by NASA. The neural network was 90.99 percent accurate in determining which ones were hazardous and which ones weren’t.
The team is now working on making its neural network even more accurate.
“We now know that our method works, but we would certainly like to delve deeper in the research with a better neural network and with more input,” Zwart said. “The tricky part is that small disruptions in the orbit calculations can lead to major changes in the conclusions.”
What is this mystery skull found on a Lincolnshire beach? ( Supplied )
A mysterious skull which appears to have no eye sockets has washed up on a beach in Lincolnshire sparking debate as to what kind of animal it might have belonged to.
The skull, which was discovered at the Gibraltar Point National Nature Reserve, was found by a woman who was walking her dog and picking up litter, according to the Lincolnshire Echo.
When she found the grisly specimen she reportedly “couldn’t believe her eyes”.
“I think it's definitely a washed up seal skull that's been bashed about by the tide,” the woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, said.
“The top part of the jaw is missing and the bottom jaw is out of place by the looks of it.”
She posted photographs of the grisly remains online, with several people trying to work out what it was.
Initial inquiries by The Independent included the suggestion from a London veterinarian that the skull could be the remains of a brachycephalic dog, such as a French bulldog or a pug, which have flat faces and short snouts.
They said from the photographs the creature appeared to have canines, indicating it was from a carnivorous animal. The lack of any discernible eye sockets, led to the suggestion it could have been a malformed puppy.
The plot thickened as the vet said the reddening of the skull could be due to haemorrhage which would suggest evidence of a head trauma, but she also noted the reddening of the skull can also happen after death if the body is left lying on one side so the blood pools.
However, the plot then thinned somewhat after experts from the Natural History Museum and the Grant Museum positively identified the specimen.
The mystery skull (Supplied)
The mystery animal from the sea is none other than a common seal.
A spokesperson for the Natural History Museum said: “According to our principal curator of mammals, Richard Sabin, it is a seal skull and it is missing the front part of the skull which holds the upper dentition.
“According to Richard, it’s tricky to identify species from the single photograph online, but the shape of the check teeth appears consistent with the common seal, Phoca vitulina. Common seals are known to occur at Gibraltar Point.”
Experts at UCL’s Grant museum concurred. Zoology curator Tannis Davidson said: "I’ve taken a look at this and its looks like a seal skull: Phoca vitulina.
“The front of the cranium is broken so only the posterior part of the orbit is visible with lack of post-orbital processes suggesting that it is a seal rather than a dog."
She added: “The alignment of the teeth in the mandible are typical of Phoca vitulina as well as the dental morphology.”
The woman who found the skull told The Independent: “I was litterpicking and just walking my dog on the beach. I do a lot of regular litterpicks.
“I suspected it was a seal skull and it does appear to be one.”
She added: “It's quite common for bones and strange things to wash up on our coast just not every day you find a seal skull but loads do get washed up.”
Discover the Mystery of a 9-Ton Slab of Glass Found in the Cave of Beit Shearim, Israel
Discover the Mystery of a 9-Ton Slab of Glass Found in the Cave of Beit Shearim, Israel
David again assembled all the picked men of Yisrael, thirty thousand strong (Samuel 2 6:1)
Bet Shearim (courtesy: Youtube)
Explore the ancient acropolis of Bet Shearim where Rabbi Yehuda Hanasi, head of the Sanhedrin was buried.
THE MYSTERY SLAB OF BETH SHE'ARIM
Beth She'arim was a cemetery located in Galilee. It was one of the most sacred places in the ancient Jewish world. Just adjacent to its catacombs is a natural cave that had long ago been made into a large cistern for storing water. It apparently fell into disuse at the end of the 4th century and filled up partially with four or five feet of clay-like silt.
In 1956 it was decided to convert the cave into a small museum. A bulldozer was taken in to clear the rubble and level off the surface. But, unexpectedly, the bulldozer bumped into something large—so large, that it wouldn't even budge. It turned out to be a large, rectangular slab that looked like concrete. Because of its size, it was left where it was, and the surrounding area was paved over with flat stone.
The slab measures 6½ x 11 ft. and is 18" thick. Its top is perfectly level.
In 1963, members of a joint expedition of The Corning Museum of Glass and The University of Missouri were surveying the region for possible remains of ancient glass factories. Someone suggested that the Beth She'arim slab might be made of glass. The suggestion was greeted with skepticism—indeed, one member of the team volunteered that if the slab was made of glass, he would eat it. A chemical analysis though, confirmed that it was, in fact, made of glass.
In the summers that followed there was a thorough examination of the slab; some of the adjacent paving stones were lifted up and excavation beneath it occurred in several places. Pottery remains found there indicated to Israeli archaeologists that the slab had been in place since about the end of the 4th century.
There was, of course, much speculation as to what this huge piece of glass was. But after the excavations began, the answer became clear. Whoever made this glass some 1600 years ago was not making a glass artifact; they were making glass as a material.
Glassmaking in ancient times was often carried out in two stages. The first was an engineering stage—the hot, hard, dirty work of heating the granular raw materials to a temperature of about 1100°C (around 2000°F) in order to bring about the chemical reactions that transformed them into a fluid melt. When the melt cooled down from this near white heat, it set up into a glass.
Having this work out of the way, the raw, unshaped chunks of glass could be transported to smaller factories where artisans would reheat the glass to soften it and fashion it into wares. The second stage could have been carried out 20 feet away or 500 miles away.
The Beth She'arim slab is a huge piece of glass meant to have been broken up and fashioned into objects somewhere else. But that never happened. Instead, the glass was abandoned right where it was made.
Limestone slab-floor of the melting tank.
Tank floor with built-up side walls.
A sketch of how the furnace may have looked. The chimney is highly conjectural, although there is a hole in the ceiling of the cave, which lines-up with where the chimney would have been erected.
Drawing of wood-fire locations and probable draught flow.
There are two truly astounding things about the slab. First its sheer size: remember it measures 6½ x 11 feet. That means it weighs about 9 tons—18,000 pounds. When discovered, it was the third largest piece of man-made glass in the world and it was made centuries ago. Its size is still rivaled only by the giant telescope mirrors of the 20th century. More astonishing still are the conditions under which it was made. It is estimated that about 11 tons of raw materials had to be heated to 1100°C (around 2000°F), and held at that temperature for perhaps 5 to 10 days. This could have required as much as perhaps 20 tons of wood for fuel. Imagine what it must have been like in that cave—a veritable inferno.
How was the slab made? Excavations showed that the glass still rests on a bed of limestone block that formed the floor of the stone tank in which it was melted. A few of the stones that formed the walls of the tank are said to have been in place in 1956, before the bulldozer arrived. From evidence of heavy burning alongside the slab, we know the fire boxes were located there. A top of some sort must have arched over the tank, so that the flames would have reflected down onto the top of the batch mixture.
We know the glass batch was heated from above. During the excavation, a pavement corer was used to remove an 18" cylinder of glass near the center of the slab. It took an entire day to drill it out. After grinding and polishing the piece was removed. A scientist showed that the glass was homogeneous from the top down, until it came within a few inches of the bottom on the tank floor, where there were partially reacted ingredients that had not completely melted. At the very bottom was some of the original batch, which looks today like coffee grounds. Coming from above, the heat had not penetrated all the way through.
The glass itself has blobs and bubbles and other evidence of its molten history, but the material does not look like glass--it is not transparent. We know why that is too. Chemical analyses have shown that whereas most of the glasses of that time contain about 8% lime—that is, calcium oxide—this glass contains twice that much.
Apparently, some of the limestone, or the plastered arch over the tank, had become disintegrated by the heat, and sifted down into the molten glass as a chalk-like powder. We know that when glasses with excess lime cool slowly—and this glass must have cooled very slowly—the glass becomes partially crystallized. The myriad tiny crystals, visible through a microscope, turn the glass opaque. That is probably why the glass was never broken up to be used for making vessels.
If the Beth She'arim slab had actually been put to its intended use, probably 50 to 60 thousand small vessels could have been blown from its glass.
While the mysteries of the Beth She'arim slab thus appear to be solved, its extraordinary lesson remains. Without it, who would ever have imagined that, at the beginning of the 5th century, glass technologists had the ability—and even more so, the boldness—to undertake such an astonishing adventure in pyrotechnology (watch: Beth She'arim Slab).
UPDATE MARCH 2019:
In 1999, Ian Freestone and Yael Gorin-Rosen posited that the great glass slab at Beth She’arim dates to the 9th century A.D. Therefore, rather than being an example of typical Roman period glassmaking, the slab represents a transitional phase at the beginning of early Islamic glass production, when glassmakers began to replace mineral natron with plant ash as a fluxing agent. The early Islamic date proposed by Freestone and Gorin-Rosen has been generally accepted by other scholars. To learn more, see The Great Glass Slab at Bet She’arim Israel: An Early Islamic Glassmaking Experiment?. — Katherine Larson, Assistant Curator of Ancient and Islamic Glass
Evidence of an unknown species of human ancestor has been found hiding in the DNA of West African people.
Experts made the finding by analysing the human genome, looking for strings of genetic information that were out of place.
This revealed an inheritance of markers from an unidentified human-like species, some of which may be of benefit to their descendants - including one which suppresses the development of tumours.
Researchers believe an ancient species of hominin, known as Homo heidelbergensis, may be the most likely candidate for the 'ghost' species.
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Mysterious evidence of an unknown species of human ancestor has been found hiding in the DNA of West African people. Homo heidelbergensis (artist's model) was an early human ancestor that experts believe may be the most likely candidate
The finding was made by Arun Durvasula and Sriram Sankararaman, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles.
They devised a statistical method able to highlight abnormal genetic code without needing the genome of the species it was inherited from.
This bypasses the need for DNA extracted from extinct African hominins as a basis of comparison.
The hotter and wetter climate on the African continent tends to destroy any preserved DNA, unlike samples of human-like species the Neanderthals and Densiovans uncovered in Europe and Asia.
The statistical technique was applied to the DNA of 50 modern Yoruba who had their genetic information sequenced as part of the 1,000 Genomes Project.
This established that roughly eight per cent of their DNA comes from a yet unknown 'ghost' species.
Ancestor species like the Neanderthals and Denisovans have been ruled out of the equation, as we already have their DNA and there is no evidence to suggest they lived in Africa. The journey of Neanderthals and the evolution of Homo sapiens was intertwined for thousands of years
While Homo sapiens may be the only hominin species alive today, tens of thousands of years ago the planet was home to a variety of human and protohuman species.
As the result of interspecies breeding, some of these species' DNA has been passed down to modern humans.
Traces of Neanderthal DNA are still found in people of non-African descent and Denisovan DNA lives on in people of Asian heritage.
Researchers also learned in 2016 that the DNA of an unknown population of archaic hominins continues to exist in Pacific Island peoples.
The Neanderthals and Denisovans have been ruled out of the equation, as we already have their DNA and there is no evidence to suggest they lived in Africa.
WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE HUMAN ANCESTOR SPECIES HOMO HEIDELBERGENSIS?
Homo heidelbergensis lived in Africa, Europe and western Asia between 600,000 and 200,000 years ago.
It was an early human ancestor that went extinct long before modern humans migrated to Eurasia from Africa.
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the ancestors of modern humans diverged from a lineage that gave rise to Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Research published by scientists from the University of Utah in August 2017 now suggests that Neanderthals and Denisovans diverged from each other around 744,000 years ago - around 300,000 earlier than previously believed.
This implies that Homo heidelbergensis may have been an early Neanderthal.
Researchers have previously suggested that, between 400,000 and 300,000 years ago, a group of heidelbergensis migrated into Europe and West Asia via yet unknown routes and eventually evolved into Neanderthals
Homo heidelbergensis' evolutionary tree has largely baffled scientists due to scarce fossil records.
The similarity between Neanderthal, Homo heidelbergensis and Homo sapien fossils means researchers previously thought heidelbergensis fossils were simply variants of Homo sapiens.
Modern-day pygmies, who may have interbred with the Yoruba people have also been eliminated from the process, as their DNA has been sequenced and it is not a match.
A small-brained hominin that could be found roaming around the South African plains 250,000 years ago, Homo naledi, is a possible but unlikely contender.
Researchers believe they were too different from us genetically to be able to mate and reproduce successfully
'I would be amazed if there was anything of them in us,' said Mark Thomas of University College London, who was not involved in the study, speaking to New Scientist about the finding.
Experts made the fining thanks to a statistical method which is able to highlight abnormal genetic code without needing the genome of the species it was inherited from. This established that 8% of Yoruba DNA comes from a yet unknown 'ghost' species
Homo heidelbergensis was a more advanced hominin living in Africa around 200,000 years ago and a more probable candidate.
It could also be that the mystery DNA came from an isolated group of Homo sapiens or population of hominins that are as yet unknown to researchers.
Whatever the answer turns out to be, the study is a reminder that our species did not emerge from a single founding population, Professor Thomas told New Scientist
The full findings of the study are available in a paper published in the online print repository bioRxiv.
WHEN DID HUMAN ANCESTORS FIRST EMERGE?
The timeline of human evolution can be traced back millions of years. Experts estimate that the family tree goes as such:
55 million years ago - First primitive primates evolve
15 million years ago - Hominidae (great apes) evolve from the ancestors of the gibbon
7 million years ago - First gorillas evolve. Later, chimp and human lineages diverge
A recreation of a Neanderthal man is pictured
5.5 million years ago - Ardipithecus, early 'proto-human' shares traits with chimps and gorillas
4 million years ago - Ape like early humans, the Australopithecines appeared. They had brains no larger than a chimpanzee's but other more human like features
3.9-2.9 million years ago - Australoipithecus afarensis lived in Africa.
2.7 million years ago - Paranthropus, lived in woods and had massive jaws for chewing
2.6 million years ago - Hand axes become the first major technological innovation
2.3 million years ago - Homo habilis first thought to have appeared in Africa
1.85 million years ago - First 'modern' hand emerges
1.8 million years ago - Homo ergaster begins to appear in fossil record
800,000 years ago- Early humans control fire and create hearths. Brain size increases rapidly
400,000 years ago - Neanderthals first begin to appear and spread across Europe and Asia
300,000 to 200,000 years ago - Homo sapiens - modern humans - appear in Africa
50,000 to 40,000 years ago - Modern humans reach Europe
The 'Ghosts' of 2 Unknown Extinct Human Species Have Been Found in Modern DNA
The 'Ghosts' of 2 Unknown Extinct Human Species Have Been Found in Modern DNA
MICHELLE STARR
When modern humans started emerging from Africa and spreading throughout Eurasia, they found many places already occupied by older hominins such as Neanderthals and Denisovans. As humans do, we got rather friendly with our new neighbours: evidence of that hanky pankylives on in our DNA today.
But we're also starting to find glimpses of something strange in our neighbourhoods - traces of ancient, unknown hominins that we've never seen before.
"These archaic groups were widespread and genetically diverse, and they survive in each of us. Their story is an integral part of how we came to be."
After closely analysing the existing literature, Teixeira and his colleague biologist Alan Cooper have identified two such 'ghost' ancestors in modern DNA. The first, identified in Eurasian DNA with the help of artificial intelligence, was widely reported earlier this year.
The second, however, was reported last year, a detail that flew under the radar in a larger paper: a mysterious, and inconclusive, genetic signature exclusively found in the population of Flores, Indonesia. It appears to be as divergent from modern human DNA as Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA is.
By carefully analysing these genetic signatures, the biologists have been able to trace when and where these interbreeding events may have occurred.
"For example, all present-day populations show about 2 percent of Neanderthal ancestry," Teixeira said, "which means that Neanderthal mixing with the ancestors of modern humans occurred soon after they left Africa, probably around 50,000 to 55,000 years ago somewhere in the Middle East."
As the modern humans moved farther east, across into islands of Southeast Asia, they seem to have run into more groups.
"At least three other archaic human groups appear to have occupied the area, and the ancestors of modern humans mixed with them before the archaic humans became extinct," Teixeira said.
One of those groups was the Denisovans. The other two remain a mystery.
The first unknown extinct hominin - 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.
(João Teixeira)
It's less strong now, but that genetic signal can still be detected in the DNA of Aboriginal Australians, East Asians and Andaman Islanders. This led the researchers to tentatively conclude that EH1 likely occupied a region in northern India, where a group of modern humans - the migration branch that went on to Asia, Australia and the Papuan islands - encountered them (1 on the map above).
Modern humans also seemed to have interbred with Denisovans in a number of locations, such as East Asia, the Sunda Shelf, and the Philippines (2, 3, and 4 on the map).
Evidence for EH2 - the extinct hominin that interbred with modern humans on Flores - is a little less clear. It only appears in short-statured people that live near Liang Bua Cave - where Homo floriensis was discovered. So it's highly localised, and has somehow remained contained for the roughly 50,000 years since the two groups met (5 on the map).
Further research is obviously required into this phenomenon. But it certainly seems to point to a very tangled human history.
"We knew the story out of Africa wasn't a simple one, but it seems to be far more complex than we have contemplated," Teixeira said.
"The Island Southeast Asia region was clearly occupied by several archaic human groups, probably living in relative isolation from each other for hundreds of thousands of years before the ancestors of modern humans arrived."
Sadly, it also looks like the arrival of modern humans was pretty closely followed by the extinction of the archaic hominins in each area. Talk about being ghosted.
On April 25 of 1977, a patrol of 6 soldiers in the desert badlands wilderness of a remote area of Pampa Lluscuma, near Putre, Chile, were settled down in their camp at approximately 4:15 AM when something caught their attention in the star-flecked expanse of sky above. The men watched in awe as two very bright lights descended from the heavens, with one of them silently approaching close to the camp to show that it was a brightly lit violet oval of light with two pinpoints of red light at either end, and another of the objects sinking down behind some foothills in the near distance, its violet glow still visible frosting the hills. The remaining light apparently then dropped down to a low altitude and seemed to just roam about over the desert, casting everything in that spooky glow. The men at first cowered under emergency blankets, but it soon became clear that there was no impending danger, and that these lights were simply hovering over the landscape. And thus would begin one of the strangest UFO encounter reports to ever come out of the country of Chile.
At the time this whole light show was odd enough that they felt it was worth investigating, and the leader of the patrol, a Cpl. Armando Valdez volunteered to venture out towards where the unknown light had sunk behind the hills to check things out. Valdez checked that his weapon was loaded and ready, and trudged out across the parched, scrub infested moonscape towards the unknown as his men warily gazed out towards that eerie glow in the distance. Valdez would not be gone for long, stumbling back into the camp a mere 15 minutes later, but something was obviously very wrong with him. He looked haggard, worn out, wild-eyed, and most oddly of all seemed to have accrued several days of beard growth in just that short span of time, when he had been clean shaven just minutes before. The patrol leader seemed to have some trouble walking, and when he sat down he merely stared off into the distance in a trance-like state and cryptically mumbled “You don’t know who we are or where we come from but we will be back soon” before passing out. When the men searched him, they found that the watch Valdez had been wearing inexplicably showed that a full 5 days had gone by, even though he had only been gone a few minutes.
Valdez and his men
Valdez would awaken from his stupor at 7 AM, and oddly his watch seemed to be frozen in time, still stuck at exactly the same point it had been when he had returned to camp. He was more lucid this time, but try as he might he could remember nothing of what had happened to him after he had left that camp, much less why his watch and beard growth seemed to indicate that he had been gone for 5 days rather than 15 minutes. He would later say of his bizarre ordeal:
The surprising thing was the way it approached us. As soldiers we are trained to deal with any situation. But this phenomenon didn’t seem to have any logical explanation. I would like to regain my memory of those fifteen minutes. I would even like to submit to hypnosis to draw out information about what happened.
The case became a media sensation in Chile, but there was some effort made to stem the notoriety of it all, with Chilean President and Commander in Chief Augusto Pinochet eventually putting a ban on any further interviews with the witnesses, and it then sort of slipped into obscurity until some researchers began digging into the story again. Notably journalist and researcher Patricio Abuselme went about reopening investigations into this strange UFO encounter, interviewing witnesses and Valdez himself for his 2010 book La noche de los centinelas (The Night of the Sentries), which he spent nearly 8 years compiling after extensive digging around. Abuselme says of the project:
This is the case that made Chilean ufology known worldwide. However, no one bothered to conduct a serious, in-depth investigation of the case. I took up the challenge in 2002, and it took me eight years to compile the protagonists’ accounts and reassemble this “impossible story.”
When I started this investigation, I did so in the secret hope of explaining the whole case in conventional terms. And I thought I was well on the way until the main protagonist of the story debunked the cases most controversial aspects – the growth of his beard and the wristwatch’s date change – by providing conventional explanations. The problem is that when I tried to corroborate it with the other witnesses, they provided a version that was mutually congruent, but at odds with the one offered by Valdés. For this reason, the book poses a controversy. If someone is looking for a story of mystics in direct contact with Martians, he or she won’t find it here. What they will find is information, information and more information. The outcome of a detailed journalistic investigation that enables the reconstruction of an intriguing real case that captured headlines over 30 years ago.
Interestingly, it has come to light in recent years that the story has indeed changed somewhat, with Valdez coming forward on an interview with Terra.cl. to claim during his research for his own book on the matter titled The Shadow of the Truth, that in retrospect he knew that he was never really abducted by aliens at all, although the strangeness with the watch and the beard was all true. Wait, what? Valdez, by this time retired from the military, would give some shocking comments on the affair that had kept people on their toes looking for answers for decades. However, he far from writes it all off as a fiction, rather being very cryptic about what actually happened. He would say in this interview about his hypnotic regression and the insights he gained:
I’ve been fully involved in developing my book and furthermore, looking into my experience, since I wish to be as factual as possible in my story. Truly, I wasn’t abducted. This is the reason for sensitive nature of what I’m putting forth in the book. Some important background details are being released. Look, it’s really complicated to explain all of a sudden. That’s the reason behind my trip to Putre, my scientific studies and the book I’m writing, because it’s all very complicated. I would say that I knew immediately how things had happened. What I’m explaining in my book [is making known] the reasons for which certain items went off on another track. Indeed. I didn’t think at first that I’d been abducted, although the matter of the growth of beard is true, as well as the subject of my wristwatch. But for this reason I have taken to writing the book to explain the reasons behind all of these things.
My story and explanations have been accepted to a certain extent, and I have told them certain things and in a certain manner. There are many who hold points of view different from my own and I don’t have to deny that there are contradictions. But as I said, the story is mine and they have not influenced me at all regarding my book. In fact, there are those who may agree or not agree with my book tomorrow, and will not stop what I’m doing. There are mixed items. The term UFO today is contaminated by another type of thing, and I prefer to speak in terms of FANI (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena). I think that in my experience there is a bit of everything–a good measure of paranormal phenomena, strange effects, lights, many things acting in unison and this is what I am showing in my book, although it’s been hard for me to convey on paper what I felt, what I experienced and what really happened.
It doesn’t make much sense to be honest, and making it even more confusing was an interview Valdez did with researcher Carlos Vergara, which was translated by Mexican UFO researcher Scott Corrales. It is a bit of a confrontational interview, with Valdez being typically cryptic and constantly plugging his book, and here is an excerpt:
– Were you abducted?
– In the context, I would say no…. In other words, had I been abducted, I would have been sucked up and taken by a spacecraft somewhere else. But I will make the truth known in my book.”
– Excuse me, Corporal Valdes. Cut the book talk and tell me something more solid.
– No, no, no. That’s not what its about. I’m not trying to promote myslef. All right, what do you want to know. Ask me and I’ll tell you.”
– Where the hell were you those fifteen minutes?
– I can tell you that I was always present and looking at my men. I even heard everything they said.
– So what’ll it be then? Were you abducted or not?
– I can’t tell you yes or no. I have a truth, but it’s a long story, son. The whole phenomenon must have transpired here on Earth. The truth is harder to explain than a lie. If I said that I went to another galaxy, it would be easier. This is harder to believe.
– I don’t believe you…
– You see? I only want to be at peace with myself. You want the truth? I was never abducted! But another phenomenon occurred.
– What phenomenon?
– Something very close to home, having to do with Earth. And it happened to me with a purpose I have just come to realize. I speak of future things in my book. They call it eschatology…
What in the world is he talking about? It seems in a sense that Valdez is just as confused about what happened as anyone else, and for all of this we are no closer to any real answers as to what he encountered out in that desert wilderness, if anything. was he abducted or not? What does he think really happened? What is the meaning of his beard growth, the weirdness with the watch, and the fact that five others all witnesses the UFOs that kicked off the whole thing? It is hard to say, but it is certainly known that Chile has been rather a hotbed of UFO sightings over the years, so it seems that there could be something genuinely strange going on here. As to what that might be is anyone’s guess, and the Valdez Chilean UFO Encounter remains just as enigmatic as it always has been.
DNA ancestry tests were a popular Christmas gift in 2018 but not so much during the 2019 holidays, according to the latest reports. While the general public (at least in the U.S.) have moved on to the next shiny object (concerned about the privacy and lack of real usefulness of the tests), a group of West Africans who participated in a worldwide genome project searching for evidence of ancient ancestors in modern humans learned that they possess a “ghost DNA” of a mysterious, ancient hominin … one who apparently had a lot of interbreeding relations with the ancestors of modern humans. Could this explain everything? Anything? Will it help sales of DNA tests?
“While introgression from Neanderthals and Denisovans has been documented in modern humans outside Africa, the contribution of archaic hominins to the genetic variation of present-day Africans remains poorly understood. We provide complementary lines of evidence for archaic introgression into four West African populations. Our analyses of site frequency spectra indicate that these populations derive 2 to 19% of their genetic ancestry from an archaic population that diverged before the split of Neanderthals and modern humans.”
In a study published in the journal Science Advances, Sriram Sankararaman, an assistant professor at UCLA in the Computer Science and Human Genetics departments, explains how he and his team examined the genomes of 405 West Africans currently living in Nigeria, Gambia, and Sierra Leone using DNA in collected between 2008 and 2015 as part of the 1,000 Genomes project to find genetic variants with frequencies of at least 1% in the populations studied. While they knew that modern West Africans do not have any Neanderthal or Denisovan ancestry, they were shocked to find a single mysterious ancient hominin whose DNA made up as much as 19% of the genes of those tested.
“We don’t have a clear identity for this archaic group. That’s why we use the term ‘ghost.’ It doesn’t seem to be particularly closely related to the groups from which we have genome sequences from.”
Sankararaman told NPR this interbreeding occurred about 50,000 years ago, after humans and Neanderthals split and the latter left for Europe. The ghost group then split of from humans and did some interbreeding before they disappeared, either becoming extinct or being completely assimilated into the human group. Some of the West Africans tested showed minute percentages of Neanderthal DNA, but the researchers believe this came from later Neanderthals who moved back to Africa or modern humans who have interbred with Neanderthals in Europe and then returned to Africa. That’s a LOT of interbreeding. Does it mean anything?
“Are they just randomly floating in our genomes? Do they have any kind of adaptive benefits? Do they have deleterious consequences? Those are all questions which would be fantastic to start thinking about.”
According to his interview in Inverse, Sankararaman isn’t sure. In fact, he’s uncertain if this was one ghost group or many, nor does he know what happened to them. Unlike the Neanderthals and Denisovans, fossil evidence of these species has not been found – even in fossil-rich Africa where so many remnants of ancient human ancestors have been discovered.
A skull would help
What’s known for certain from this ghost DNA Is that this mysterious group played a big part in the early history of at least four groups of modern West Africans. That’s the kind of information that made DNA testing interesting to begin with.
Would you want to find out your ancestors were a mysterious group that liked to play the ancient field?
DEFORMED OBJECT IN THE KUIPER BELT DEFIES PLANETARY FORMATION THEORY
DEFORMED OBJECT IN THE KUIPER BELT DEFIES PLANETARY FORMATION THEORY
Arrokoth is weird — it is also proving revelatory.
As it flew by Pluto in 2015, NASA’s New Horizons mission spotted something weird: An ancient, deformed planetary body the size of Seattle swam into view, perplexing scientists here on Earth.
This strange encounter turned out to be a scientific boon. Data from the object reveals new details about how planetary bodies, including our own Earth, formed in the early Universe, offering rare insight into the ancient cosmos.
Dubbed Arrokoth, this weird rock is the furthest, most primitive object ever visited by a spacecraft.
Located some billion miles from Pluto, the object lies in the Kuiper Belt, a region beyond the Solar System. The Belt is believed to contain the leftover remains of the Solar System's early formation.
On New Year’s Day, 2019, New Horizons approached Arrokoth at a distance of 2,200 miles, flying directly past it. For reference, New Horizons was four billion miles away from Earth at this point.
NASA's data from the close encounter were published Thursday in three studies in the journal Science. Together, the research supports an unlikely theory of how planetary bodies formed in the early universe.
CLOSE ENCOUNTER
Arrokoth is around 22 miles wide, and is a binary object made up of two lobes that sort of looks like a misshaped, red snowman. It is classified as a "planetesimal" — an object believed to have formed around 3.8 billion years ago, during the Solar System's infancy.
Arrokoth is not the only object that dates to the time. Ancient comets and asteroids which also date from this febrile time have come closer to Earth, but because their orbits bring them near the Sun, they have also been affected by the star's radiation. As a result, they have been severely altered, obscuring some of the data scientists might gain on how they formed. But the Kuiper Belt is cold, and far from the Sun's harmful rays. It also contains some of the first planetary bodies ever formed in the Solar System, making it a potential astrophysics goldmine.
This brief animation moves between two New Horizons spacecraft views of Arrokoth, the spacecraft's New Year's 2019 flyby target in the Kuiper Belt.NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Roman Tkachenko
“These Kuiper Belt objects are a much better preserved sample or window back into the formation stage of planets, or planetesimals,” Alan Stern, principal investigator of New Horizons, said during a press conference to announce the findings on Thursday.
Arrokoth not only reveals some of the secrets of this process, but the data also defy the conventional theory of how planets form.
SLOW AND STEADY
The argument over how planets form has various competing theories, but the two at the center of this new research are the theory of hierarchical accretion and the cloud collapse hypothesis. Hierarchical accretion is a process whereby planetary bodies formed through high speed collisions of small rocks and grains. Cloud collapse, by contrast, is an altogether more gentle process.
Cloud collapse suggests that particles were gradually drawn to each other, until they suddenly collapsed under their gravitational pull, forming massive bodies over time.
The uniform color and composition of Arrokoth’s surface shows the Kuiper Belt object formed from a small, uniform, cloud of material in the solar nebula, rather than a mishmash of matter from more separated parts of the nebula. The former supports the idea that Arrokoth formed in a local collapse of a cloud in the solar nebula.NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Roman Tkachenko
According to the new data dump, the science supports the second theory. Arrokoth's two lobes were formed from the same cloud of material — as separate entities, they orbited around each other before they fused together to form the binary shape, the scientists reveal.
To make the conclusion, the researchers looked at different numerical simulations of interacting bodies at different speeds and angles. The models suggest that an object of this size most likely came together at a low speed — consistent with cloud collapse theory, and not hierarchical accretion.
Other data collected during the flyby jibes with this result: Arrokoth has no signs of a violent origin, and no large craters or fractures — suggesting that it had a rather gentle birth.
“The only way to account for this body is the merger speed was very low,” William McKinnon, NASA's deputy leader of the Geology and Geophysics Investigation team for New Horizons, said Thursday.
“The shape is simply inconsistent with higher velocity accretion, but it does match what we expect to see in the low velocity merger.”
New Horizons launched in January, 2006. The spacecraft was designed to peer into the outskirts of the Solar System by flying by Pluto and venturing on into the Kuiper Belt. Arrokoth was not on the original agenda for the mission, but in this one flyby, the misshapen object ca now be added to its magnificent scientific legacy.
Orange Glowing UFO Moving Fast Over Charles Town, West Virginia, 6-15-2019, UFO Sighting News.
Orange Glowing UFO Moving Fast Over Charles Town, West Virginia, 6-15-2019, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: 6-15-2019 Location of sighting: Charles Town, West Virginia, USA
This was just reported today, but is from 6-15-2019, cool footage of a glowing red UFO. He said there was four in total and this is the only one he caught. I know this can't be a balloon or chinese lantern because they travel slowly. This object is glowing greatly, white, and moving much too fast. It moves and looks like a lot of UFOs from past sightings. Its a UFO. Scott Waring Eyewitness states:
i saw 4 flying orange fireballs disks flying in a loose 2x2 formation right outside my house. About 30 seconds behind them was the fifth flying orange disk which i got on video.
Glowing UFO Fleet Over Scottsdale, Arizona On 8-4-2016, VIDEO. UFO Sighting News.
Glowing UFO Fleet Over Scottsdale, Arizona On 8-4-2016, VIDEO, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: 8-4-20016
Location of sighting: Scottsdale, Arizona, USA
Source: MUFON
Now this is a cool sighting. A fleet of UFOs appears in the sky one by one and probably came from an underground alien base. They rotate in a triangle formation which shows that they are military...because even US military requires a squadron formation and even a wingman so they don't fly alone but with another jet. Here we see one of the UFOs begin to glow powerfully and then suddenly burst away. At this point the woman holding the camera gasps in fear. This was just reported to MUFON today, and I have never before seen it. This is 100% real, and it shows the UFOs flying in triangle formation, and shooting off in two different ways...one instant in a burst, the other slowly moving to the right.
Awesome and important footage because it shows so much in just two minutes.
Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
Three bright lights moving in formation, then one flashed and disappeared, the blue one zoomed down fast then out of site. Crazy, our jets don’t move like these.
Nimitz technician breaks confidentiality agreement to report his close encounter with Tic Tac UFO
Nimitz technician breaks confidentiality agreement to report his close encounter with Tic Tac UFO
Davy Beaty is the director of the Nimitz Encounter. He shares details of a meeting he had with a Navy technician who was aboard the E-2 Hawkeye plane supporting the F-18 jets sent out to intercept the Tic Tac UFOs seen on the Princeton radar system.
The technician stated that he could see a Tic Tac from the window of his plane which appeared to be flying at about the same altitude.
He also told Beaty about the non-disclosure agreement he and the others on the plane were required to sign after the incident. "It wasn't really a volunteer process, it was more a 'sign this and don't ever talk about what you saw'," he explained.
Beaty also reveals he has spoken to a second witness who saw men come aboard the Princeton to take all evidence of the encounter.
Mars took 20 million years to become the big rusty globe that it is today, according to a new study – almost 15 million years longer than previously suggested.
US scientists think up to three large asteroids around 620 to 1,240 miles (1,000 to 2,000km) in diameter may have hit the planet relatively early in its development.
They think the planet then formed gradually, accumulating mass by pulling particles into its gravitational field that bulked it up to reach its current 4,200-mile diameter.
The study contradicts previous theories that the Red Planet grew rapidly in the space of just 2 billion to 4 billion years after the Solar System started to form.
A Southwest Research Institute team performed high-resolution, smoothed-particle simulations of a large, differentiated projectile hitting early Mars after its core and mantle had formed. The projectile's core and mantle particles are indicated by brown and green spheres respectively, showing local concentrations of the projectile materials assimilated into the Martian mantle
There are around 200 Martian meteorites on Earth, thought to have been ejected from the Mars during collisions with large asteroids.
In the past, scientists have used these Martian meteorites to construct a timeline of the planet's formation and map its mysterious history.
But due to a limited number of meteorites available for research, the scientists think the 'prevailing view of Mars' formation may be biased'.
The team based their findings on computer modelling simulations of an asteroid hitting Mars that took place after the formation of its core and mantle – the layer surrounding the core.
'We knew Mars received elements such as platinum and gold from early, large collisions,' said lead author of the study Dr. Simone Marchi at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
'To investigate this process, we performed smoothed-particle hydrodynamics impact simulations.
'Based on our model, early collisions produce a heterogeneous, marble-cake-like Martian mantle.
'These results suggest that the prevailing view of Mars formation may be biased by the limited number of meteorites available for study.'
Scientists developed this illustration of how early Mars may have looked, showing signs of liquid water, large-scale volcanic activity and heavy bombardment from planetary projectiles. SwRI is modelling how these impacts may have affected early Mars to help answer questions about the planet's evolutionary history
Of approximately 61,000 meteorites found on Earth, just 200 or so are thought to be of Martian origin.
Samples show variations in elements such as tungsten, platinum and gold, which indicate Mars was bombarded by asteroids some time after its primary core formation ended.
'We knew Mars received elements such as platinum and gold from early, large collisions,' said Dr Marchi, whose study was published in Science Advances.
'To investigate this process, we performed smoothed-particle hydrodynamics impact simulations.
'Based on our model, early collisions produce a heterogeneous, marble-cake-like Martian mantle.
'These results suggest that the prevailing view of Mars' formation may be biased by the limited number of meteorites available for study.'
The previous estimate of rapid growth between two billion to four billion years was based on analysis of tungsten in the Martian meteorites.
Elements such as tungsten tend to migrate from a planet's mantle and into its central iron core during formation.
Evidence of these elements in the Martian mantle, as found in these meteorites, indicate that Mars was bombarded by rocky space debris sometime after its primary core formation ended.
Large, early collisions could have altered the balance of tungsten, which could support a Mars formation timescale of up to 20 million years, as shown by the new model.
'To fully understand Mars, we need to understand the role the earliest and most energetic collisions played in its evolution and composition,' Marchi said.
NASA's Mars 2020 Rover will pick up samples of rock and soil from the red planet, deposit them in tubes and leave them on the ground for a future mission to return them to Earth.
The next generation of Mars missions, including plans to return samples to Earth, could provide new information on the variability of iron-loving elements in Martian rocks and the early evolution of the Red Planet.
This July, NASA's Mars 2020 mission will take off with a touchdown on the Martian surface set for February 2021.
The six-wheeled robotic lander will anal;yse the dusty surface of the planet to seek signs of habitable conditions or microbial life in its past.
The Mars 2020 rover's drill can collect core samples of rocks and soils and set them aside in a 'cache' on the surface of Mars.
A future mission could potentially return these samples to Earth.
The European Space Agency and Russia's Roscosmos will also launch the 'Rosalind Franklin rover' this summer as part of the next stage of their ExoMars project to find signs of past life on Mars.
WHAT EVIDENCE DO SCIENTISTS HAVE FOR LIFE ON MARS?
The search for life on other planets has captivated mankind for decades.
But the reality could be a little less like the Hollywood blockbusters, scientists have revealed.
They say if there was life on the red planet, it probably will present itself as fossilized bacteria - and have proposed a new way to look for it.
Here are the most promising signs of life so far -
Water
When looking for life on Mars, experts agree that water is key.
Although the planet is now rocky and barren with water locked up in polar ice caps there could have been water in the past.
In 2000, scientists first spotted evidence for the existence of water on Mars.
The Nasa Mars Global Surveyor found gullies that could have been created by flowing water.
The debate is ongoing as to whether these recurring slope lineae (RSL) could have been formed from water flow.
Meteorites
Earth has been hit by 34 meteorites from Mars, three of which are believed to have the potential to carry evidence of past life on the planet, writes Space.com.
In 1996, experts found a meteorite in Antarctica known as ALH 84001 that contained fossilised bacteria-like formations.
However, in 2012, experts concluded that this organic material had been formed by volcanic activity without the involvement of life.
Signs of Life
The first close-ups of the planet were taken by the 1964 Mariner 4 mission.
These initial images showed that Mars has landforms that could have been formed when the climate was much wetter and therefore home to life.
In 1975, the first Viking orbiter was launched and although inconclusive it paved the way for other landers.
Many rovers, orbiters and landers have now revealed evidence of water beneath the crust and even occasional precipitation.
Earlier this year, Nasa's Curiosity rover found potential building blocks of life in an ancient Martian lakebed.
The organic molecules preserved in 3.5 billion-year-old bedrock in Gale Crater — believed to have once contained a shallow lake the size of Florida's Lake Okeechobee — suggest conditions back then may have been conducive to life.
Future missions to Mars plan on bringing samples back to Earth to test them more thoroughly.
Methane
In 2018, Curiosity also confirmed sharp seasonal increases of methane in the Martian atmosphere.
Experts said the methane observations provide 'one of the most compelling' cases for present-day life.
Curiosity's methane measurements occurred over four-and-a-half Earth years, covering parts of three Martian years.
Seasonal peaks were detected in late summer in the northern hemisphere and late winter in the southern hemisphere.
The magnitude of these seasonal peaks – by a factor of three – was far more than scientists expected.
Scientists believe early cosmic impacts may have influenced the evolution of Mars, and this suggests that the Red Planet formed much slower than previously thought.
This illustration shows how early Mars may have looked, with signs of liquid water, large-scale volcanic activity and heavy bombardment from planetary projectiles.
The early solar system was a violent, chaotic place, where planetesimals — small protoplanets measuring up to 1,200 miles (1,900 kilometers) in diameter — asteroids and other debris collided, shaping the planets and celestial bodies we know today.
A new study from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio shows that Mars was likely struck by planetesimals early in its history. These large, long-ago collisions introduced "iron-loving" elements to the Red Planet, and those elements, in turn, influenced how quickly the planet formed, according to a statement from SwRI.
Using Martian meteorite samples found on Earth, the researchers were able to model the mixture of materials that formed the early Martian mantle. The study revealed that Mars received a variety of elements — such as tungsten, platinum and gold — that are attracted to iron as a result of these collisions.
"To investigate this process, we performed smoothed-particle hydrodynamics impact simulation," Simone Marchi, lead author of the study from SwRI, said in the statement. "Based on our model, early collisions produce a heterogeneous, marble-cake-like Martian mantle."
The meteorite samples suggest that planetesimals bombarded the Red Planet sometime after the planet's primary core formed. That's because "iron-loving" elements like tungsten, platinum and gold generally migrate from a planet's mantle to its central iron core during formation, according to the statement. "Evidence of these elements in the Martian mantle as sampled by meteorites are important because they indicate that Mars was bombarded by planetesimals sometime after its primary core formation ended," SwRI said in the statement.
Earlier studies of the ratio of tungsten isotopes in the Martian meteorite samples suggested that Mars grew rapidly, within 2 million to 4 million years after the solar system began forming, about 4.6 billion years ago. Because tungsten isotopes are produced via radioactive decay processes over time, the ratio of these isotopes in the mantle of Mars provides a clue about the timeline of the planet's formation.
However, the new models show that early, large collisions could have altered the ratio of elements in the Martian mantle, meaning the planet may have formed over a period of up to 20 million years.
Researchers at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio performed high-resolution simulations of a large projectile hitting early Mars after the planet's core and mantle formed. The projectile's core and mantle particles are indicated by brown and green spheres, respectively, showing how the projectile's materials assimilated into the Martian mantle. (Image credit: SwRI/Marchi)
"Collisions by projectiles large enough to have their own cores and mantles could result in a heterogeneous mixture of those materials in the early Martian mantle," Robin Canup, co-author and assistant vice president of SwRI's Space Science and Engineering Division, said in the statement. "This can lead to different interpretations on the timing of Mars' formation than those that assume that all projectiles are small and homogenous."
The findings, published Wednesday (Feb. 12) in the journal Science Advances, provide insight on how Mars evolved and how early collisions affected the planet's formation. The Martian meteorites found on Earth are believed to be the result of more recent collisions with the Red Planet. These meteorite samples offer a unique view into Mars' past, as they contain a record of the planet's history, the researchers said.
"To fully understand Mars, we need to understand the role the earliest and most energetic collisions played in its evolution and composition," Marchi said in the statement.
The so-called Tic Tac UFO encounter off the coast of San Diego in November 2004 by two planes from the USS Nimitz that was only revealed in 2017 when visual footage of the incident and two others was released and confirmed by the Pentagon (and later dismissed) continues to raise more questions than answers. One big question revolves around whether any other planes saw the UFO and why haven’t those pilots come forward. An answer of sorts was given recently by a longtime investigator of the incident.
“The gentlemen I spoke to, I checked his history and he flew the Hawkeye. The reason he declined to appear was because he had to sign a document shortly after the incident telling him not to speak. Even exposing himself and talking to me was complicated for him.”
The Tic Tac UFO
In an extensive new interview on “The Hidden Truth with Jimmy Breslo” (watch it here) which was reviewed by The Daily Star, David Beaty, an Emmy-Award winning producer and cinematographer, UFO researcher and producer of the UFO documentary film “The Nimitz Encounters,” reveals details of his conversation with an unnamed Navy technician who was on an E-2 Hawkeye plane that took off to support the F-18 jets from the USS Nimitz which had encountered the Tic Tac UFOs after they were picked up on the radar of the USS Princeton. Beaty states that the technician saw the Tic Tac UFO through the window of the E-2 Hawkeye and related that all five members of the plane’s crew witnessed it.
So, why haven’t we heard about this encounter until now?
“It wasn’t really a volunteer process, it was more a ‘sign this and don’t ever talk about what you saw’.”
The witness told Beaty the crew was taken to a secure briefing room different to the normal one after training exercises forced to sign non-disclosure agreements. While it has long been an unwritten understanding among pilots to keep UFO sightings to themselves or face ridicule, discipline and possible discharge, this is one of the few actual reports of forcing witnesses to sign documents.
USS Nimitz
For those who haven’t heard the details about the Tic Tac UFO encounter and the subsequent controversies and conspiracy theories surrounding it, the interview provides excellent insights as well as this new information, including Beaty’s interview of yet another witness would claimed to see unidentified men board the Princeton and remove all evidence of the incident.
Did the crew member of the E-2 Hawkeye violate the non-disclosure agreement by talking to Beaty, even anonymously? Probably. Will he suffer consequences? Well, there were only five crew members on the plane – it won’t be hard for the Navy or the Pentagon to pressure any or all of them into revealing who it was. Since so much has already been released, will it matter? In these days of revenge and vendettas, what do you think? Will we hear any more about it? It’s a safe wager to say that the Tic Tac UFO isn’t going away.
One of Earth's premier instruments for studying nearby asteroids is back to work after being rattled by earthquakes, and its first new observations show that a newly discovered space rock is actually two separate asteroids.
The instrument is the planetary radar system at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The observatory was closed for most of January, after a series of earthquakes hit the island beginning on Dec. 28, 2019. The observatory reopened on Jan. 29. Meanwhile, on Jan. 27, scientists using a telescope on Mauna Loa in Hawaii spotted an asteroid that astronomers hadn't seen before. The team dubbed the newfound space rock 2020 BX12 based on a formula recognizing its discovery date.
Because of the size of 2020 BX12 and the way its orbit approaches that of Earth, it is designated a potentially hazardous asteroid. However, the space rock has already come as close to Earth as it will during this pass (2.7 million miles or 4.3 million kilometers); astronomers have calculated the asteroid's close approaches with Earth for the next century, and all will be at a greater distance than this one was.
Radar images show the binary asteroid 2020 BX12, which scientists discovered this year. (Image credit: Arecibo Observatory/NASA/NSF)
The asteroid's flyby wasn't a threat to life on Earth, but it was an opportunity for scientists who were hoping to learn more about space rocks. On Feb. 4 and 5, the radar station at Arecibo set its sights on 2020 BX12. Based on the observations, the scientists discovered that 2020 BX12 is a binary asteroid, with a smaller rock orbiting the larger rock. About 15% of larger asteroids turn out, on closer inspection, to be binary, according to NASA.
The larger rock is likely at least 540 feet (165 meters) across, and the smaller one is about 230 feet (70 m) wide, according to the observations gathered by Arecibo. When the instrument observed the two space rocks on Feb. 5, they appeared to be separated by about 1,200 feet (360 m).
Scientists couldn't gather enough data to be sure, but they suspect that the two rocks might complete an orbit of each other in 45 to 50 hours and that the smaller rock may be brighter than, and tidally locked with, its companion, meaning the same side always faces the larger object.
Existential dread is a key motivator for asteroid discoveries, and planetary defense experts hope that, by surveying nearby space rocks, they will identify a threat with enough time for us to protect ourselves. But asteroids are also scientifically interesting, since they represent rubble from the formation of the solar system.
Anonymous - Deep Space Signals! Something Shocking Is Happening
Anonymous - Deep Space Signals! Something Shocking Is Happening
SHOCKING: Something Is Happening In Deep Space.. (2020)
The biggest question of our time. Are we alone? Alien worlds and distant places in time and space, in search of where alien life might be hiding and what our place is within the history of life. After generations of wondering, the truth is finally within our reach. New research and technologies have brought us closer than ever to an answer – only a few decades in the eyes of some NASA scientists. The search has led to new discoveries that will blow your mind wide open and give a profound new perspective on human life.
The deeper we look, the deeper we see into nature’s imagination, and the more we learn about ourselves. I hope stewing on these thoughts tickles your brain as deeply as it does mine. Extraterrestrial life is hypothetical life which may occur outside of Earth and which did not originate on Earth. Such life might range from simple prokaryotes to beings with civilizations far more advanced than humanity.
The Drake equation speculates about the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Unidentified flying object is the popular term for any aerial phenomenon that cannot immediately be identified. Most UFOs are identified on investigation as conventional objects or phenomena. The term is widely used for claimed observations of extraterrestrial spacecraft.
A new study from the Planetary Research Institute suggests that briny water could temporarily form on Mars’ surface in the shadows of boulders for just a few days each Martian year.
Field of large boulders as seen by the Mars Pathfinder lander on Mars in 1997. A new study suggests that small pools of liquid water may be able to briefly form in the shadows of such boulders at mid-latitudes in the springtime.
Mars is a cold, very dry, desert world. Although it has ice caps of water ice (as well as carbon dioxide ice) and vast amounts of ice below its surface, no liquid water has been found on Mars’ surface. But there might be some. We might just need to look behind large boulders, in springtime.
A new study from the Planetary Science Institute (PSI) in Tucson, Arizona – announced on February 12, 2020 – adds to previous evidence that small amounts of briny (salty) water might be able to form on the Martian surface under just the right conditions.
The possibility of liquid water on present-day Mars has been debated for half a century. Melting is physically difficult under Martian environmental conditions, because with the total pressure of the atmosphere near the triple point pressure of water, evaporative cooling of ice is high near the melting point.
According to the study, the briny water might be possible for only a few days of each Martian year. The trick is that this can only happen under just the right circumstances. Schorghofer said:
Mars has plenty of cold ice-rich regions and plenty of warm ice-free regions, but icy regions where the temperature rises above the melting point are a sweet spot that is nearly impossible to find. That sweet spot is where liquid water would form.
Three-dimensional computerized view of the Martian surface temperature around a boulder at latitude 30° south. On the side opposite to the sun, temperatures are around -128 degrees Celsius. As the sun rises, this area heats up rapidly, melting frost on the salty ground. This could briefly create small amounts of briny water that later goes back into the atmosphere, via sublimation.
This sweet spot would involve protruding topography, such as boulders, at mid-latitudes. During the winter, a boulder might cast a continual shadow, where water ice can accumulate as frost. When spring came again, the temperature can increase quite quickly. In the computer models used, temperature would rise from -198° Fahrenheit (-128° Celsius) in the morning to -14° Fahrenheit (-10° Celsius) at noon. That is a short enough time that not all the frost would sublimate – pass directly from the solid to vapor state – as it normally does in the very thin, cold atmosphere. From the paper:
Protruding topography creates locations that experience a rapid transition from conditions where water frost accumulates to high solar energy input. Beyond the pole-facing side of a boulder, carbon dioxide and water frost can accumulate seasonally, and once the sun reemerges and the carbon dioxide frost disappears, the water frost is heated to near melting temperature within one or two sols [days on Mars].
The scientists said it is dust within the carbon dioxide frost that helps keep it from sublimating back into the atmosphere as temperatures rise. From the paper:
Overall, melting of pure water ice is not expected under present-day Mars conditions. However, at temperatures that are readily reached, seasonal water frost can melt on a salt-rich substrate.
The whole cycle would repeat, year after Martian year.
In 2008, what appeared to be small drops of briny liquid water were seen on the legs of the Phoenix Mars Lander. These images show changes in the drops over 36 days.
As mentioned above, carbon dioxide ice can also form behind large boulders on Mars. That ice, too, will sublimate in the spring. Scientists have a name for the first day in spring when the carbon dioxide ice disappears. They call it the crocus date.
Water ice melting also occurs either on or just after that date. Thus it is referred to as crocus melting. According to Schorghofer:
Answering the question whether crocus melting of seasonal water ice actually occurs on Mars required a slew of detailed quantitative calculations, the numbers really matter. It took decades to develop the necessary quantitative models.
Today, Mars’ atmosphere is too cold and too thin for water to last long on the surface, even briny water. But there have been other hints that it may occur when conditions are right.
The famous recurring slope lineae on Mars may be evidence of seasonal briny water on Mars. The slope linae are dark streaks that occur on steep slopes during the warmer months and keep recurring in the same locations each year. It still isn’t known exactly what causes them, but theories have ranged from small amounts of flowing briny water to dust slides. If water is involved – not a certainty yet – it could come from the atmosphere, ice pockets or subsurface aquifers.
Norbert Schorghofer at the Planetary Science Institute.
During the Mars Phoenix Lander mission, which landed near the north pole in 2008, images showed small droplets forming on the legs of the spacecraft. While not proven, they certainly looked like drops of briny water that later sublimated away.
Last year, NASA’s InSight lander found possible evidence of current reservoirs of liquid water below the surface. If confirmed, that would be an exciting discovery, in particular for the potential of subsurface life, which would be protected from the severe conditions on the surface. In 2018, it was announced that the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter had found evidence of a salty subsurface lake beneath the ice at the south pole.
If there really are brief pools of liquid water hiding behind Martian boulders at times, that also would be exciting, as Mars would then be the only place other than Earth in our solar system where water would be known to be able to exist on the surface. This could have significant implications for the possibility of microbial life on an otherwise dry and hostile world.
Bottom line: A new study from the Planetary Research Institute suggests that briny water could temporarily form on Mars’ surface under certain conditions.
Harvard-prof: Dit ruimtesignaal is mogelijk van een buitenaardse beschaving
Eerder deze maand kondigden Canadese onderzoekers aan dat ze een krachtig ruimtesignaal hadden ontdekt dat elke 16 dagen meerdere keren wordt uitgezonden vanuit een ver sterrenstelsel.
Volgens professor Avi Loeb van de Harvard-universiteit is er een mogelijkheid dat het ruimtesignaal afkomstig is van een buitenaardse beschaving.
“We weten op dit moment nog niet precies wat de herkomst is van deze signalen, zogeheten snelle radioflitsen,” aldus Loeb in een e-mail aan Futurism.
Kunstmatige oorsprong
“We moeten dus openstaan voor alle mogelijkheden, ook een kunstmatige oorsprong,” benadrukte hij.
“Eén concrete mogelijkheid is dat een buitenaardse beschaving een energiestraal gebruikt om een lading door de ruimte te vervoeren, en dat de Canadese onderzoekers de straling hiervan hebben opgepikt,” zei Loeb.
Je hebt hiervoor echter hele krachtige energiestralen nodig, voegde hij toe.
Totale hoeveelheid zonlicht
In een paper uit 2017 schrijft de professor dat er voor één zo’n straal net zoveel energie nodig is als de totale hoeveelheid zonlicht die de aarde raakt.
De Canadese onderzoekers reageerden in een persverklaring over hun onderzoek dat ‘niet-professionelen’ hebben gesuggereerd dat het gaat om boodschappen van aliens.
Niet uitsluiten
Professor Loeb vindt echter dat je deze mogelijkheid niet zomaar moet uitsluiten.
In 2018 zei hij dat het interstellaire object Oumuamua mogelijk een buitenaardse ruimtesonde was.
One strange area of the world of the weird is that of actual giants having once existed upon this earth. There are numerous reports of this throughout history, of which I have covered here before, on more than one occasion. Such tales really serve to stir up the imagination, the idea of these enormous beings living amongst us alluring to say the least, and one place that has a surprising number of accounts of evidence of supposed giants lumbering through the wilderness is the South American country of Peru.
Accounts of the giants of Peru date back to at east the 16th century, when Spanish conquistadors were penetrating into this uncharted, unknown land seeking to tame and control it. One such early account was written of by explorer and conquistador Pedro Cieza de Leon, in his tome Royal Commentaries of the Incas, volume I. He wrote that the natives of the region told of a time when massive giants came one day to their shores upon enormous and crude reed rafts to land at the peninsula of Santa Elena, after which they apparently set up a camp and dug extremely deep wells for water. These giants were said to be epically proportioned, and De Leon described them thusly:
Some were so big that an ordinary man of good size scarcely reached up to their knees: their members were in proportion to the size of their bodies, and it a monstrous thing to see their enormous heads and their hair hanging down about their shoulders. Their eyes were as large as small plates. They say they had no beards and that some of them were clad in the skins of animals, and others only in the dress nature gave them. There were no women with them. On reaching this point, they set up their camp like a village (and even in these times there is a memory of the site of their houses). As they found no supply of water they remedied the lack by making some very deep wells, a labor certainly worthy of record, being undertaken by such strong men as these must have been, to judge by their size. They dug these wells in the living rock until they came to the water, and afterwards they built the wells in stone from the water line upwards so that they would last for ages. In these wells the water is excellent and it is always so cold that it is very pleasant to drink.
He goes on to say that according to the natives these giants then went on a bloodthirsty rampage, raiding villages and devouring anything they could get their hands on, including human beings. It would have been a terrifying sight to see, these hulking colossi looming over the trees crashing through the wilderness to grab at the screaming, fleeing villagers, yet there was apparently little they could do in retaliation. And so the giants stayed, building gigantic houses, hunting, fishing, and marauding through villages whenever they liked. The story takes a turn into more mythical sounding weirdness when it was claimed that they were finally driven away by a bright, shining angel in the sky, but De Leon believed that the stories were real, as he saw these wells and houses for himself and could not fathom how any normal sized men could fashion them, and even claimed that remains of the brutes had been found by other conquistadors. He writes:
This is the account they give of the giants, and we believe that it happened, for it is said that very large bones have been found and still are found thereabouts and I have heard Spaniards say they have seen pieces of teeth which they thought must have weighed half a pound when whole, and who had also seen a piece of a shin-bone of wonderful size, all of which bears witness to the truth of the incident. In addition to this one can see the places where the sites of their villages were, and also the wells or cisterns they made. I cannot state whence or how these giants came there.
In the present year of 1550 when in the city of Lima, I heard that when his excellency Don Antonio de Mendoza was viceroy and governor of New Spain, certain bones of men as big as these giants, and even bigger, were found there. I have heard too that in an ancient sepulcher in the city of Mexico or somewhere else in that kingdom certain bones of giants have been found. Since so many people saw them and attest having done so, it can therefore be credited that such giants did exist and indeed they may all have been of the same race.
This fits in with other findings of the era, such as when in 1543 a Captain Juan Olmos supposedly conducted an excavation in the Trujillo valley and supposedly found various bones from extremely large individuals who would have stood 10 feet tall or more. There was also a giant’s skeleton found in the province of Tucumán and Tarija by Agustín de Zárate and his men, and there were frequent reports throughout the 16th century of these explorers coming across the graves of giants. This continued into the 17th century, and an intriguing account comes from Jesuit priest and missionary Pablo José Arriaga, who wrote of a curious finding in his 1620 manuscript The Extirpation of Idolatry in Peru, in which he says:
They took us to the other side of the village, about a quarter of a league, where a very large cave was, and in it many dead gentiles, and among them were three bodies of giants with deformed heads [elongated skulls] dressed in cumbi [ceremonial cloth], but rotted with time. These [giants] are the progenitors of all this people, whom they worshipped and revered; there were many traces of [human] sacrifices; they [the Official Inspectors] burned the bodies in the village.
Such findings are not solely confined to the mists of time and lost history, but have continued up into more modern times. One of most well-known of these is a finding supposedly made in 1928, according to author and researcher Brian Foerster. that in 1928 there were found bizarre elongated “alien” skulls and another mummified humanoid body in the desert of Paracas, on the southern coast of Peru and estimated as being up to 3,000 years old. The specimens were supposedly found by archaeologist Julio Tello, after which they were stored away for years before being coming to the attention of Foerster, who had DNA tests carried out on them and describes the amazing find as follows:
We were recently shown, and examined the above artefact that supposedly was found, along with many others, in a cave in the southern desert of Peru; exact location to be given, hopefully, in the future. The head appears to be made of bone with skin over the top. It has two eyes, but eyes it is nothing like a human, it is more amphibian or reptilian. The mouth seems to be so tiny that it does not even appear to be for feeding. It is a very mysterious thing and I can’t imagine how those two specimens could be fake.
Whatever the sample labeled 3A has came from – it had mtDNA with mutations unknown in any human, primate or animal known so far. The data is very sketchy though and a LOT of sequencing still needs to be done to recover the complete mtDNA sequence. But a few fragments I was able to sequence from this sample 3A indicate that if these mutations will hold we are dealing with a new human-like creature, very distant from Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Foerster claimed that these DNA tests on the remains conclusively showed that they are not human, but other than that no evidence of these tests or word on who performed them has been forthcoming. The so-called “Paracas Skulls” have gone on to be debated and held up as real evidence of giants, aliens, or the Biblical Nephilim ever since. In this case, scientists have come to the conclusion that these skulls are the result of intentional cranial deformation or modification carried out by the ancient native peoples of the region, but of course there are those that still believe these are not human and that Foerster’s own DNA tests were real. Much suspicion has been cast on his claims, as most of this information was released on social media, lacked any outside verification, and have been accused of being a way to promote his books, videos, and tours. It is unknown just how much the Paracas skulls constitute evidence of giants, aliens, or both, but they remain much discussed. Author and researcher April Holloway has stood against the idea that this resulted from skull deformation, writing:
The cranial volume is up to 25 percent larger and 60 percent heavier than conventional human skulls, meaning they could not have been intentionally deformed through head binding/flattening. They also contain only one parietal plate, rather than two. The fact that the skulls’ features are not the result of cranial deformation means that the cause of the elongation is a mystery, and has been for decades.
Anomalous skulls on display in Peru
Are the Paracas skulls the real deal? Who knows? Even more recent is a finding apparently made in 2013 in the Amazon region between Ecuador and Peru, and investigated by British anthropologist Russell Dement. It is claimed that they found massive skeletons measuring up to 3 meters (9 feet 10 inches) and thought to date back to between 1400 and 1500 AD. Dement claims that he travelled to the region where the remains were found and recovered a rib cage and skull, which he says he will have analyzed. In the meantime, the publication Cuenca Highlife has said of the remains:
The skeletons show no signs of diseases such as the hormonal growth problems that are common in most cases of gigantism. In all the skeletons, the joints seemed healthy and lung cavity appeared large. One of the skeletons that we have dated was of a female who was about 60 when she died, much older than typical cases of gigantism.
Did Peru ever have such giants inhabiting the wilds here? It is hard to say. All of the supposed evidence is anecdotal and not easily concretely verified, making the answers murky to say the least. If these creatures ever did exist here, then how can we explain them within the framing of our current understanding of evolution and the natural world, and where did they come from? Were these even creatures from this world at all, or perhaps something more alien in nature? There is no way to really know, and cases like this remain mere historical oddities and mysteries that may very well remain evasive for some time to come.
UFOs are often seen above silver, gold or other precious metal mines, leading some to believe they are harvesting the minerals for fuel or parts. UFOs are also seen over nuclear power plants, leading many to the same conclusion. Mexico’s active volcanoes seem to draw an unusual share of UFO sightings, prompting speculation they may somehow be harvesting the power of magma. UFOs weaving their wave through lightning storms suggest they may be run on electricity. UFOs are often seen over water, sometimes mysteriously connected to a waterspout, causing some to ponder whether they’re some kind of environmentally safe water-powered craft. This all leads us to recent sightings in Australia of a UFO hovering over … you’re not going to believe this … a coal mine. Was this some old Model T spacecraft powered by burning coal for steam? The SSS Space Stanley Steamer? Or something else?
“On Sunday July 28th and Monday 29th 2019 at a work site near Middlemount, Queensland, Australia, two workers spotted a strange object in the sky estimated at 500m (1500ft) altitude. The object was seen on two separate days and at one point was said to have a smaller piece break off and descend to the ground (beginning of clip 9).”
For a change, the two unnamed witnesses took long recordings of their UFO sightings on back-to-back days (you can see the original video here), which ended up in the hands of multiple UFO investigators who posted them on the Internet in both unadulterated and stabilized modes (you can see a stabilized and magnified video here). Somewhere in that process, the location of the unnamed mine (Middlemount, Queensland – home of three mines: Foxleigh, German Creek and Grasstree, which is said to be the world’s largest underground coal mine) was changed to Middleton, which is a nearly deserted town also in Queensland. What was said to be a third video was also posted (watch it here). There is also audio of the witnesses commenting on what they’re watching.
Fortunately, one of the UFO investigations groups to get its hands on the video was UFOs – Documenting The Evidence. The team of Brad Morris, Keith Basterfield and Paul Dean interviewed the witnesses extensively – their excellent report and summary can be read on their website. The sightings occurred in the morning at about the same time, and there was only one object in the sky, except for the occasion when a small piece appeared to break off and make a “controlled descent.” The witnesses (there were more who saw the UFO besides the two who took the videos) also saw the main pyramid-shaped UFO descend to the ground – there’s no indication that any of them ventured to the location to find it.
Based on the witness accounts, careful analysis of the videos and investigation of weather patterns and aircraft records, the UFOs – Documenting The Evidence team eliminated aircraft, helicopter and drone as possibilities. While it could have been a large parachute, a balloon seemed to be the best choice for a non-ET cause. While its movement and shape suggests either a hot-air or gas-powered balloon with a gondola, the team ended the report with the possibility of the UFO being a Google ProjectLoon balloon. However, they could not find enough evidence to support either balloon theory.
Which leaves us with an alien spacecraft looking for coal. The Appalachian UFO Research Society says there are many reports of UFOs over coal mines. In 2008, there was a famous UFO sighting (“… a craft as the size of a football field, while others said they were nearly a mile long, similar to the Phoenix lights mass sightings”) over the coal mining town of Stephenville, Texas. With carbon being the fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass (after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen), it’s certainly conceivable that other civilizations would use it as fuel, and those that are more advanced than us would have figured out how to use it efficiently for space travel – despite the efforts of Mad Mike Hughes, steam-powered rockets don’t get very far. One other possibly – like the theory that benevolent aliens hover over nuclear plants to protect humanity or possibly regulate its use of that fuel, this UFO could be dissuading humans from burning coal and destroying the planet.
Environmentally-friendly extra-terrestrials? It’s not the most far-fetched idea out there.
Glowing UFO Fleet Seen Over Pennsylvania On Feb 15, 2020, UFO Sighting News.
Glowing UFO Fleet Seen Over Pennsylvania On Feb 15, 2020, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Feb 15, 2020 Location of sighting: King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, USA Source: MUFON The eyewitness saw a fleet of glowing UFOs flying over the freeway in the city of King of Prussia yesterday. The UFOs were moving slowly, glowing and following the same path. I do not hear the objects over the sound of the cars on the freeway. This must have been recorded by others. Thousands of people must have seen this so I am expecting a few more videos to come in. Awesome sighting. There is no doubt that this video is real, but what those objects are...remains a mystery. Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
Personally observed with my family on the way home from the King of Prussia Mall, heading eastbound multiple bright lights in the sky remaining stationary. Have video taken in car while observing. This is unexplainable unless there is some type of unknown military aircraft I am unaware of.
UFOs Over Staford Upon Avon, Great Britain, Video, Dec 3, 2019, UFO Sighting News.
UFOs Over Staford Upon Avon, Great Britain, Video, Dec 3, 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Dec 3, 2019 Location of sighting:Staford Upon Avon, Great Britain Source: MUFON The eyewitness and his family were looking out from their back yard and saw two glowing objects over the distant hills. The shimmering glowing objects were large and hovering in place. The eyewitness said one of the glowing objects disappeared before he could record it. Still this is an amazing capture. I believe these UFOs came from an underground base directly below this area. Their technology allows them to transport entire ships from the underground base, directly into the sky. At this point the ships then hover to get their bering and then leave. Also, it looks like there is another third UFO...dark...not glowing at the center of the video. Amazing catch, just amazing! Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
Multiple lights were seen and filmed over Pennsylvania on 15th Februar 2020.
Witness report:
Personally observed with my family on the way home from the King of Prussia Mall, heading eastbound multiple bright lights in the sky remaining stationary. Have video taken in car while observing. This is unexplainable unless there is some type of unknown military aircraft I am unaware of.
Steve Quayle: Vatican UFO Disclosure - Light Orbs Phenomenon
Steve Quayle: Vatican UFO Disclosure - Light Orbs Phenomenon
Steve Quayle Interviews (02/01/2020) — The Responsibility Of The Vatican For The Flow Of Disclosure Information
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.
The government can’t keep its story straight about its involvement with UFO research. After a yearlong investigation, we bust open the files, break through the noise, and reveal the definitive, staggering truth.
As I sit in a small cafe in the shadow of the ancient Roman gates in Trier, Germany, talking to a person whose credibility seems beyond reproach, but who will only agree to talk to me if provide absolute assurances of anonymity, I can’t help but feel like I’m trapped in a Dan Brown novel. The Da Vinci Code, however, never dealt with unidentified flying objects.
“Was it about UFOs? Of course,” this person whispers with a grin of melodrama.
After almost a year of investigating the U.S. government’s interest in UFOs, what they’ve just said should neither be shocking, nor revelatory. Unbeknownst to them, they’ve only further confirmed what over a dozen other people with backgrounds inside the government and the now-defunct Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) have already admitted to me.
Just like the fictional Robert Langdon, the path to understanding these mysterious government programs has taken me through the catacombs of informal secret societies, whose surprising memberships include accomplished professionals from the military, aerospace, academic, medical, and intelligence communities.
Though diverse or abstinent in how they define exactly what it all means, each of these enigmatic characters shares one common belief: unidentified flying objects are neither myth nor figment of overactive imaginations. With absolute conviction, they’ve all told me that UFOs are real.
Now, after two years of scant details and a myriad of contradictory statements, Popular Mechanics is ripping open the U.S. government’s massive UFO problem. What follows is a deep, unprecedented well of information that’s only been known by a very small select group of insiders—until now.
PART I. THE DISCLOSURE
On December 16, 2017, the New York Times disclosed that the Pentagon had secretly funded research into UFOs through the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. As if the U.S. government quietly investigating UFOs wasn’t enough, for the first time, the public also got a chance to see three videos captured by the U.S. Navy showing what has been claimed to be “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” or UAP.
In an instant, UFOs were no longer relegated to society’s nihilistically curious, and for the first time in decades, droves of the mainstream public suddenly found themselves peering skyward with wonder.
But almost as quickly as the excitement of mysterious black budget UFO programs crashed ashore, so, too, came vexing waves of criticism, confusion, and controversy.
From the onset, disarray and debate raged on whether the second “A” in AATIP officially stood for Aerospace or Aviation, with the former “Aerospace” eventually proving to be correct. Adding to the chaos, an entirely different program moniker emerged: the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Applications Program, or AAWSAP. For over two years, no one has been able to adequately explain whether AAWSAP and AATIP were two separate programs, or the same intuitive under two separate names.
To muddle matters more, a revolving door of Pentagon spokespeople have successfully issued waves of contradictory statements about what the Department of Defense (DoD) did or didn’t do when it came to studying UFOs.
Initially, the Pentagon said, AATIP had indeed investigated UFOs under the leadership of Luis Elizondo, a former senior member of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (OUSDI). Eventually, in a complete reversal of official stances, the Pentagon’s newly crowned UFO point person, Senior Strategic Planner and Spokesperson Susan Gough, recently told The Black Vault, “neither AAWSAP nor AATIP were UAP related,” “Elizondo was not the director of AATIP,” and he didn’t have “assigned responsibilities” within the program.
In some consolation to the UFO faithful, the DoD has consistently been willing to say they consider the curious objects shown in the 2017 videos to be unexplained UAP. What exactly that means, however, has been open for interpretation and debate.
After months of conducting interviews and uncovering previously undisclosed materials, Popular Mechanics is revealing here that the U.S. government does indeed have a definite interest in UFOs.
Provided, of course, that nobody says it out loud.
The Bigelow Aerospace headquarters in Las Vegas, Nevada.
PART II. THE SEEDS
The path to truly understanding the Pentagon’s current UFO problems doesn’t begin in 2008 with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the AAWSAP, but rather, a decade earlier and some 2,000 miles from the nation’s capital at the doorstep of a billionaire Nevada entrepreneur.
Robert T. Bigelow, the owner of Budget Suites of America and founder of the space technology company Bigelow Aerospace, has never shied away from amplifying his interest in UFOs. In a 2017 interview, Bigelow told CBS’s 60 Minutes he was “absolutely convinced” aliens exist, before passionately declaring, “I don’t give a damn!” when asked if it was risky to publicly say he believes in UFOs and aliens.
In 1995, four years before founding his aerospace startup, Bigelow established the National Institute for Discovery Sciences (NIDS). From the company’s cached website, NIDS described itself as “a privately funded science institute engaged in research of aerial phenomena, animal mutilations, and other related anomalous phenomena.
The cached website of the now-defunct National Institute for Discovery Sciences.
Before ultimately disbanding in 2004, NIDS conducted research into a host of various paranormal topics, such as cryptid encounters, cattle mutilations, and especially UFOs. The group’s most recognized research was the investigation of a purported paranormal Utah homestead owned by Bigelow called Skinwalker Ranch, which would later play a significant role in the DIA’s UFO interest.
Robert Bigelow.
NASA/BILL INGALLS
In a 2018 interview with New York magazine, former Nevada Senator Harry Reid told an interesting tale about a curious letter Bigelow received from a senior official from a federal national-security agency. “I’m interested in talking to you, Mr. Bigelow. I have an interest in what you’ve been working on. I want to go to your ranch in Utah,” Reid recounted.
After vetting the letter’s author, the individual Reid described as a “very low-key scientist” was granted a pass to visit Bigelow’s ranch. In a lecture at “UFO MegaCon” in 2019, KLAS Las Vegas reporter George Knapp told the crowd these events occurred in 2007, and claims the person, described by Knapp as a “DIA scientist,” had an “experience” while visiting the supposed paranormal site.
In an interview with researcher Joe Murgia, former AAWSAP contractor and astrophysicist Eric Davis shared what colleagues had told him of the DIA scientist’s experience:
“In the living room of the former NIDS double wide observation trailer/staff quarters. A 3D object appeared in mid-air in front of him and changed shape like a changing topological figure. It went from pretzel-shaped to Möbius strip shaped. It was 3D and multi-colored. Then it disappeared.”
According to Reid, whatever happened at Skinwalker was enough to convince the DIA to seriously investigate paranormal and UFO phenomena. “‘Something should be done about this. Somebody should study it.’ I was convinced he was right,” Reid told New York.
In an interview with Popular Mechanics, Hal Puthoff, a former subcontractor for the AATIP, confirms the scientist’s visit, but was unsure how significant a role it played in the origins of AAWSAP.
“Reid is correct that early on there was a DIA scientist who expressed interest in hearing of the Skinwalker Ranch and did visit,” Puthoff says. “The degree to which this influenced initiation of the AAWSAP Program, however, or was just a side issue, I don’t know.”
While we don’t know how pivotal the Skinwalker visit was in the formation of the DIA’s UFO studies, we do know AAWSAP and AATIP were already taking shape almost a year before funding was established and the solicitation was issued.
Navy fighter pilot Cdr. David Fravor has arguably become the face of the famous UFO encounters by the Nimitz Strike Carrier Group, it was actually Marine Lt. Col. Douglas “Cheeks” Kurth who was first directed to investigate the strange airborne contacts that radar operators captured in November 2004.
On his LinkedIn profile, Kurth indicates he worked as a program manager for Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, LLC (BAASS) until June 2013. Interestingly, Kurth began working for BAASS in December 2007—a month before Bigelow officially established his LLC in January 2008. That might be because Nevada state records show BAASS was technically a subsidiary of another business owned by Bigelow: International Space Hardware Services (ISHS). According to the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office, ISHS was incorporated on October 31, 2007.
Hal Puthoff.
TO THE STARS ACADEMY OF ARTS & SCIENCE
Puthoff, who entered the BAASS fold in 2008, tells Popular Mechanics he was aware that Kurth was involved in the Nimitz events in 2004, but he didn’t believe BAASS specifically recruited Kurth because of it. “I think that it was just because of his experience he reached out to join [BAASS],” says Puthoff, who later founded and now runs the advanced concepts research
Puthoff says he believes the DIA had expressed a need for what would become AAWSAP in 2007, but isn’t sure if the organization ever made a formal request. “I think that anything from 2007 was likely quite informal—discussions, letters, emails—but I’m not certain,” he says.
Regardless, roughly six months after BAASS opened up shop, with the support of late senators Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye, Reid set up funding for AATIP and the AAWSAP contract in the Supplemental Appropriations Bill of July 2008. “It would be black money, we wouldn’t have a big debate on the Senate floor over it,” Reid told New York. “The purpose of it was to study aerial phenomena. The money was given, a directive was given to the Pentagon, to put this out to bid, which they did.”
On August 18, 2008, the contracting arm of the DIA issued a 32-page solicitation/contract/order for commercial items for the AAWSAP. When bidding closed three weeks later on September 5, as the sole bidder, BAASS was awarded $10 million dollars for the guaranteed first year, of a five-year option, for the contract.
On September 13, 2008, Bigelow Aerospace began listing career opportunities with BAASS in 14 different disciplines related to aerospace and research sciences.
A statement of objectives for AAWSAP.
BIGELOW AEROSPACE
Absent from the AAWSAP solicitation is any language related to UFOs or UAP. Instead, as originally outlined in the July Supplemental Appropriations Bill, the “primary focus is on breakthrough technologies and applications that create discontinuities in currently evolving technology trends. The focus is not on extrapolations of current aerospace technology.”
In past interviews, Reid has indicated the interested parties at the DIA felt it prudent to avoid any language that might cause someone to realize the underlying focus of the AATIP program was UFOs. According to Reid, a representative with the DIA told him, “What I will do is prepare something for you that anyone can look at it that wants to, it’s strictly science.”
On multiple occasions over the past two years, both the government and former contractors have used the terms AATIP and AAWSAP almost interchangeably. This has caused significant confusion of whether AATIP and AAWSAP were two separate programs, or the same activity under differing names. In a recent statement, Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough told longtime researcher John Greenewald, “[AATIP] was the name of the overall program. [AAWSAP] was the name of the contract that DIA awarded for the production of technical reports under AATIP.”
While all sources associated with the programs confirm Gough’s statement with Popular Mechanics—AAWSAP was the contract component of the broader umbrella program dubbed ATTIP—they dismiss the latter sentiment expressed by Gough that “neither AATIP nor AAWSAP were UAP related.”
The evidence collected here overwhelmingly suggests the government was indeed studying UFOs and not, as the Pentagon has said, “investigating foreign advanced aerospace weapons system applications with future technology projections over the next 40 years, and to create a center of expertise on advanced aerospace technologies.”
The cover of BAASS’s Ten Month Report, issued in July 2009.
PART III. THE REPORT
In July 2009, BAASS provided a comprehensive report to the DIA at the conclusion of the first-year option of the AAWSAP contract. The 494-page “Ten Month Report,” as it’s called, is chock full of strategic plans, project summaries, data tables, charts, descriptions of biological field effects, physical characteristics, methods of detection, theoretical capabilities, witness interviews, photographs, and case synopses—each one entirely, explicitly about unexplained aerial phenomena.
Throughout the report, “the sponsor” is mentioned, however, the DIA is never explicitly named.
The first pages list the names of every contractor working for BAASS with appropriate security clearances to have access to the program. Amongst dozens of credentialed names, some of those listed are very familiar to the UFO community, including Puthoff, Davis, Jacques Vallee, and Colm Kelleher. Regardless of one’s existing opinions of the UFO phenomena, the sheer volume of content in the BAASS Ten Month Report is astounding.
Some of the notable content of the 2009 BAASS Ten Month Report includes:
Overview of the BAASS Physics Division’s efforts to conduct research on advanced aerospace vehicles, including the development of standardization for measurement of physical effects and signatures associated with UAP.
Overview of BAASS research for measuring and gleaning the effects on biological organisms from UAP.
Mention of Skinwalker Ranch in Utah as a “possible laboratory for studying other intelligences and possible interdimensional phenomena.”
Strategic plans to organize a series of intellectual debate forums targeted to broad audiences pertaining to the “potential disclosure of an extraterrestrial presence.”
Plans to create a “medical physiological UAP effects program.”
Mention of BAASS program dubbed “Project Northern Tier,” which involved securing documents related to instances where dozens of UFOs flew over restricted airspaces of facilities housing nuclear weapons.
A possible UAP landing reported to BAASS by the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) and its STAR Team (rapid response field investigators funded by BAASS in March 2009).
Project databases of UAP-related materials compiled through various partnerships, and the intent to expand these databases by coordinating with foreign governments.
Summaries of multiple UAP events both inside the U.S. and in foreign countries.
Photographs of UAPs provided by various sources, including foreign governments.
Photograph of page 317 of the BAASS Ten Month Report.
BIGELOW AEROSPACE
From cover to cover, the BAASS report references the government’s new buzzword for UFOs: UAP. However, nowhere could Popular Mechanics find a single reference to foreign (terrestrial) advanced aerospace weapon systems, or projected technological innovations based on current industry trends.
Sources tell Popular Mechanics the BAASS Ten Month report was only a sample of the materials the organization provided to the DIA. “Monthly reports were being sent to the Pentagon, in addition to annual program updates, that were all about UAP or anomalous phenomena,” says one former BAASS contractor.
Chris Bartel, a security officer and investigator for BAASS (later Bigelow Aerospace) from 2010 to 2018, confirms the accounts of former BAASS and AATIP employees with Popular Mechanics. He says he indeed encountered some fairly dramatic paranormal events while working at the Skinwalker Ranch, and says he’d also heard mumblings of BAASS being interested in studying paranormal activity in hopes it could lead to technology research. However, Bartel says he didn’t know anything about AAWSAP or AATIP until last fall. “I was a bit taken back, to say the least,” he says.
Photograph of page 17 of the BAASS Ten Month Report.
BIGELOW AEROSPACE
Though unaware of any formal contract with the DIA, Bartel confirms that reports generated about paranormal events on the ranch were being faxed to both Bigelow and the Pentagon on a regular basis. (“I would hate to think my experiences up there were somehow manipulated by outside man-made forces,” Bartel says. “I truly believe the ranch to be hallowed Native land.”)
Some have suggested the “paranormal” events associated with Skinwalker Ranch or AAWSAP could be associated with secret and highly advanced weapons testing. While Bartel says it’s possible weapons were being tested, nothing he observed was consistent with his experiences of top secret testing.
Puthoff also says he saw no evidence that BAASS was involved in weapons testing during his tenure with the organization—“a statement I’m certain Mr. Bigelow would support,” he says. (Bigelow could not be reached for comment.)
Jesse Marcel, who initially investigated the Roswell UFO site 1947.
PART IV. THE SECRETS
The revelations in the BAASS report beg the question: Why is the government now insistent it never studied UFOs, and why aren’t these documents being discussed or made available through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests?
Individuals who worked on the AATIP program say the current uncertainty and confusion was by design and involved a dizzying shell game that’s entirely consistent with how black budget intelligence programs are run. “What you’re dealing with is the very core of government secrecy and how things they absolutely don’t ever want to discuss are kept hidden away,” one former AATIP contractor tells Popular Mechanics.
Sources say the key to understanding current denials of UFO studies in AATIP comes from a phrase stamped on each page of the BAASS Ten Month Report obtained by Popular Mechanics:
“The information is proprietary and cannot be disseminated or used without prior written consent from the Operating Manager of BAASS.”
According to several former AATIP contractors, the “product” being produced for the DIA was technical reports on exotic and potential “game-changing” aerospace technologies, and the manner of determining what areas these radical airborne breakthroughs might emerge was through the research of UFOs.
In exchange, not only would the DIA get the agreed-upon technical reports, but it would also gain access to the extensive research BAASS was gathering on UFOs. While the DIA had access to the volumes of UFO data, the materials were actually commercial property of BAASS, as a subsidiary of Bigelow Aerospace.
The idea of using an aerospace research project as a cover for a secret UFO program may seem unscrupulous. “But this all rings very familiar,” Neil Gordon, an investigator with the Project on Government Oversight, tells Popular Mechanics.
“WHAT YOU’RE DEALING WITH IS THE VERY CORE OF GOVERNMENT SECRECY AND HOW THINGS THEY ABSOLUTELY DON’T EVER WANT TO DISCUSS ARE KEPT HIDDEN AWAY.”
Gordon, whose area of expertise is in federal contractor misconduct, contractor accountability, and government privatization, says running the “commercial in confidence” program through AATIP is consistent with how the DoD deals with programs it wants to keep secret. “Whether it’s right or not is another story,” Gordon says, “but everything sounds very common for how black budget programs run.”
The DIA may have had extensive access to the UFO materials, but because all of the data technically belonged to BAASS, under the Economic Espionage Act of 1996, disclosing or releasing proprietary materials provided to the government in confidence is a federal crime. Essentially, the DIA’s UFO program was set up to circumvent FOIA requests and avoid having to discuss UFOs publicly.
Out of concern for providing Popular Mechanics access to the 2009 BAASS Ten Month Report, the person who made these materials available did so only under the guarantee of anonymity. It’s worth noting this person is not a current government employee, nor were they involved with BAASS or the AAWSAP contract.
“Unfortunately, the government attempting to evade FOIA by contracting out its responsibilities is nothing new,” Josh Budray, an attorney who specializes in FOIA and First Amendment cases, tells Popular Mechanics. “Both federal and state FOIA statutes strive to eliminate such obvious gamesmanship—avoiding transparency and disclosure obligations by contracting out functions—but whether they are successful in doing so is an entirely different story.”
Davis, the astrophysicist and former AAWSAP contractor, says his work on the AATIP program was entirely consistent with all of the technological intelligence programs he’d previously worked on over the last 30-plus years. “Indeed, science is applied, but right now there’s not enough data on UAP to make examining it a scientific endeavor. It’s an intelligence issue, not a scientific endeavor,” he says.
Puthoff, meanwhile, says BAASS produced “stacks of material to the ceiling,” but because of the way things were done, he was surprised to hear any of it had become public. “To be honest, I didn’t think this stuff would ever see the light of day,” he says.
“TO BE HONEST, I DIDN’T THINK THIS STUFF WOULD EVER SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY.”
When reached for comment, Colm Kelleher, the former Deputy Director of BAASS, said, “I am unable to discuss this topic.” Multiple other requests to Bigelow Aerospace for comment went unanswered.
The entire manner in which the DIA partnership allegedly operated raises an important question: Could the reason for the Pentagon’s recent denials of AATIP or AAWSAP conducting UFO research be the result of the current DoD administration being naive to the program’s underlying and commercially secret hidden purpose? It seems like a plausible theory … if it wasn’t for something else Popular Mechanics uncovered.
PART V. THE ADMISSION
Last year, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists obtained via FOIA request and published a January 2018 letter that the DIA Congressional Relations Division sent to members of Congress. In the letter, the DIA provided “a list of all products produced under the AATIP contract for the DIA to publish.” The referenced list includes 38 technical papers, called Defense Intelligence Reference Documents (DIRDs), which cover a range of advanced, exotic, and theoretical aerospace topics.
Given what’s been said about the commercially confidential nature of AATIP, the phrase “for the DIA to publish” may be a critical play on words. Nevertheless, a source with access to the materials provided Popular Mechanics with a copy of a previously unreleased technical paper listed as one of AATIP’s products.
While the DIA refers to the paper as “Field Effects on Biological Tissue,” the original title for the submitted paper appears to actually have been “Clinical Medical Acute & Subacute Field Effects on Human Dermal & Neurological Tissues.” According to the study’s introduction, the paper is an examination of “clinical medical signs and symptoms and biophysics of injury known and expected from near-field (mostly ultra-high), NIEMR Microwave, Thermal, from unintended exposure to anomalous systems.”
You can read the entire study below.
In light of the cumbersome clinical language, just a cursory scan reveals the entire focus was on examining injuries that may have occurred after contact with UFOs or UAP. In fact, the very term “UFO” appears 16 times in the report; the word “anomalous” is used 27 times (most often with the word “aircraft,” “aviation,” or “aerospace” immediately following); and the phrase “Advanced Aerospace Systems Applications Program” is mentioned in bold on four occasions.
Popular Mechanics spoke with the study’s author, Christopher “Kit” Green, a forensic clinician and neuroscientist. Green was surprised to learn his research paper had become publicly known, because he was under the impression it was never included in the distributed set, nor was it finally peer-reviewed.
Green confirms his paper wasn’t cited correctly in the letter to Congress, however, he says the 54-page document Popular Mechanics obtained appeared to be the same paper he was requested to provide as a product of AAWSAP.
“This focused on forensically assessing accounts of injuries that could have resulted from claimed encounters with UAP,” says Green. “I didn’t work for BAASS, other than as a contractor for my paper, and I wasn’t a part of AAWSAP. However, it is my understanding this program was a UFO study that outwardly was not supposed to look like it had anything to do with UFOs.”
“THIS PROGRAM WAS A UFO STUDY THAT OUTWARDLY WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE IT HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH UFOS.”
Green cautions some past speculations about his paper were inaccurate, including the claims it was an effort to understand or reverse-engineer UAP technology. Green also stresses that while his work focused on encounters with unknown or unidentified aerial objects, all of the injuries he assessed could be accounted for by known terrestrial means, and did not provide any evidence for extraterrestrial or non-human technologies.
Could the 38 technical reports BAASS produced for AATIP represent what it determined accounted for UAP?
“Many of the topics could be called ‘dual-use’ given that, say, papers on advanced plasma propulsion and invisibility cloaking could apply to our own advanced aerospace development as well as possibly some UAPs,” says Puthoff. But his “spacetime metric engineering paper, the warp drive and wormhole papers, and specifically the Statistical Drake Equation paper are essentially applicable only to UAPs.”
Davis, who worked with Puthoff and authored four of the DIRDs, offers a particularly intriguing detail about the DIA’s 38 reference papers.
“This wasn’t focused on whether or not [UAP] are real. It’s already been well established that UAP are real by a preponderance of evidence. Some classified and some proprietary [that] I can’t talk about,” he says.
Instead of investigating if UAP are real, the 38 technical papers for the AAWSAP contract were also an intelligence assessment to measure just how far advanced UAP could be from current and projected scientific understandings. “Me, Hal [Puthoff], and an aerospace executive who had access to materials worked on that assessment for the DIA,” Davis says.
Ultimately, aside from the wealth of BAASS proprietary evidence, Green’s study alone—which the DIA told Congress was a product of AATIP that it would “be happy to provide upon direct request”—seems to completely dispute the Pentagon’s recent claims that neither AATIP or AAWSAP were related to UFOs.
In an exchange of emails between Gough, the Pentagon spokesperson, and Swedish research Roger Glassal, which were provided and published by research analyst Keith Basterfield, Gough said AAWSAP commenced in the fiscal year (FY) 2008 with a designated $10 million dollars of funding. Since the bid solicitation wasn’t issued until August 2008, we now know that Gough was mistaken, and the program actually began in FY2009, which began October 1, 2008.
In the same email exchange, Gough indicated the first 26 technical reports were completed in late 2009 and an additional $12 million dollars was designated in the FY2010 Defense Appropriations Act for 12 additional reports. (Editor’s note: In the original email, Gough indicated “late 2008.” It’s assumed this was also said in error since BAASS didn’t receive the AAWSAP contract until September 2008 and Green’s technical paper is dated May 2009.)
“After an OSD/DIA review in late 2009, it was determined the reports were of limited value to DIA and there was a recommendation that upon completion of the contract the project could be transited to an agency or component better suited to oversee it.
Funding for the program at the DIA ended in 2012 and DoD elected not to continue the program after the work contracted under the FY2010 NDAA was completed.”
Indeed, every source Popular Mechanics spoke to for this story agrees the partnership between BAASS and AAWSAP had concluded by 2012.
But here’s where things get messy: Gough says when DIA funding dried up in 2012, the overarching AATIP program closed up shop as well. Every source we spoke to, however, says not only did AATIP not end in 2012, but the program is still ongoing to this day.
Core to the contention of whether or not the government maintained an interest after 2012 is the man the DoD says “had no responsibilities” with AAWSAP or AATIP: former senior Pentagon intelligence executive Luis Elizondo.
Who, exactly, is Elizondo? A patriotic whistleblower putting his reputation at stake for something he says the American public must know about? Or a huckster using his former position for his own benefit, as the Pentagon seemingly implies?
The government can’t keep its story straight about its involvement with UFO research. After a yearlong investigation, we bust open the files, break through the noise, and reveal the definitive, staggering truth.
Left: Luis Elizondo in South Korea in 1996. Right: Elizondo in Kandhar in late 2001.
PART VI. THE LEADER
After serving a stint as a counterintelligence agent for the U.S. Army, in the late 1990s, Elizondo would be recruited into the ranks of the enigmatic U.S. intelligence community.
Elizondo’s first stop as an intelligence operations specialist was running counterinsurgency and counternarcotics operations in Latin America. “We dealt with a lot of stuff, like coup d’etats, black market terrorism, violent drug cartels, all that kind of stuff,” Elizondo says.
Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, Elizondo was then redirected toward East Asia, where he served an advisor of a small intelligence unit assigned to support General James Mattis during his command of Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) Task Force 58 (TF-58) in the War on Terrorism. In a case study published by the Naval War College in 2016, Lt. Col. Damian Spooner describes the analysis and products produced by intelligence sections under Gen. Mattis as being “indispensable” in driving TF-58 planning and operations.
Later, while continuing to support the U.S.-led war on terrorism, Elizondo, the son of a Cuban exile, found himself in Cuba dealing with some of the most dangerous terrorists in the world at Guantanamo Bay’s infamous “Camp Seven,” the prison constructed for the sole purpose of housing 14 “high-value detainees.”
In early 2008, James Clapper, then the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, asked Elizondo to come to the Pentagon to help coordinate information sharing and partnership engagement being run by the Secretary of Defense’s Office. Though the promise of cutting his daily commute in half was one of the biggest selling points, Elizondo’s decision to set up shop at the Pentagon would end up putting him directly in the path of recruitment for a special program the DIA had just started running: AAWSAP.
Though the BAASS Ten Month Report includes an abundance of UAP information, nothing within the text contains any data or information provided by the U.S. government. Conversely, there are a number of requests made by BAASS for access to specific UAP information being held within the DoD and other U.S. agencies. Sources say this is key to understanding how Elizondo entered the picture.
“If they [BAASS] wanted access to info that I’m not saying does exist, but it might have been highly classified, you need someone who had the tickets to make sure the contractors weren’t actually looking at Special Access Program (SAP) stuff thinking it was UFOs,” says an intelligence official who is not authorized to speak on the record.
“Plus,” the official tells Popular Mechanics, “I’m not saying it was, but they might have been looking into something that was of significant interest to foreign advisories and a high-value target for espionage. Bottom line, you needed a counterintel guy.”
Elizondo tells Popular Mechanics that he never wanted to be a part of AATIP. However, as a senior official at OUSDI with a background in counterintelligence, he found himself being recruited into the ongoing UFO effort.
“In 2008,” Elizondo says, “two guys came by my office and said, ‘Are you Lue Elizondo?’ The first thing I thought was, ‘Oh no, what did I do?’ They told me, ‘You came highly recommended as a former senior CI guy with some background in advanced avionics.’ Which is true—I worked some on the Open Skies Treaty. I worked with Raytheon, Boeing, and some other stuff. That was my portfolio.”
Elizondo was told AATIP needed a counterintelligence support and security guy for a very special program. Within a month, after a series of meetings, Elizondo finally met with the then-director of AATIP, who asked him what seemed like a strange question at the time:
“What do you think about UFOs?”
Elizondo was flummoxed. “I was like, ‘What the hell?’ I thought it was a test or something. So I told the truth: I don’t. I don’t think about UFOs. I don’t know if they’re real or not. I don’t think about them. I’m too busy trying to catch terrorists and bad guys.”
Elizondo’s ambivalence was evidently exactly what those running the program wanted to hear. Soon enough, Elizondo joined AATIP. “Seriously, for awhile, I still didn’t know if it was a test,” he says. “It wasn’t until I started examining the security posture of the portfolio that I suddenly realized these things are really unidentified.”
One of Elizondo’s performance evaluations.
Not long after Elizondo was on board, in June 2009, Sen. Harry Reid submitted a letter to then-Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn III requesting AATIP be granted restricted SAP status. Though ultimately denied, had Reid’s request been granted, it would have further tightened security and secrecy around AATIP.
Last year, KLAS Las Vegas reporter George Knapp published Reid’s letter showing Elizondo’s name on the list of “preliminary government personnel” who would have had access to AATIP. In addition to Elizondo, Reid, and the late Senator Daniel Inouye, seven other names of government employees (which have not been released) would have had access to the proposed AATIP SAP. Notably, only three “contractor personnel” made the cut.
According to a source with knowledge of the letter, the three contractor personnel Reid wanted to grant preliminary access to were Bigelow, Kelleher, and Puthoff. Puthoff confirms with Popular Mechanics that he was one of the three approved contractors on the list. The Pentagon later confirmed the letter published by Knapp was authentic.
Sources say the limited number of contractors listed with access is yet another breadcrumb left on the trail of secrecy showing AATIP was indeed slightly different from the AAWSAP contract.
According to multiple sources, including individuals working within the Pentagon—and confirmed by Elizondo—in 2010, when the DIA cut off funding for AATIP’s contract, a DIA program manager asked Elizondo if he would keep the UFO project running. “I wasn’t a DIA employee,” Elizondo says, “so I’d have to run it wearing my OSD hat at the Pentagon. We all agreed this was the best thing to do, so that’s what we did.”
By all accounts, Elizondo was now “bootstrapping” AATIP from the OUSDI, meaning he added the program to the list of his existing intelligence portfolios.
Popular Mechanics has learned the post-BAASS era of AATIP was an even more closely guarded program and consistent with how highly classified intelligence projects are conducted.
“Ninety percent of people don’t understand how the general government runs, and even less understand the intelligence community,” a former senior Special Operations and Intelligence Officer tells Popular Mechanics. “Because this program would have now been out of the Front Office, your guy [Elizondo] would have had the ability to muster up people from various areas of the Intelligence Community. You would have wanted to include the least possible, but best people for the specific mission. You could have had people from the DIA, ONI [Office of Naval Intelligence], and OSI [Office of Special Investigations] all working separately, but together on the same mission.”
Elizondo says when he took over the AATIP, he ran it like a traditional government effort. “We greatly reduced the number of contractors to just what we might have needed, but this was going to be government to government, looking on government systems at government data,” he says.
According to Elizondo, unlike most of the BAASS personnel, the post-2012 AATIP crew did have access to highly classified government information to adequately assess the situation. While the Pentagon denies that AATIP continued after 2012, Elizondo says the post-BAASS AATIP was not unsanctioned, and not just a group of government UFO enthusiasts. “Very, very few people in the building knew what we were doing, but the Front Office (Office of the Secretary of Defense) was in the loop,” he says.
Popular Mechanics has learned the ONI was one of the major backers that wanted to see AATIP continued, which sources say is why the Navy has been so willing to take the most public lead on the UAP issue today.
Elizondo’s critics have repeatedly asked an important question: If AATIP was such a secret program, why is Elizondo now talking about it publicly?
By denying AATIP SAP status back in 2009 and not ever officially blanketing it under a security classification, Popular Mechanics has learned that the government effectively allowed for the program itself to now be discussed.
“There’s a lot they can’t talk about, like sources, methods, etc., but the program itself is unclassified and fair game for public disclosure,” a source with knowledge of the program tells Popular Mechanics. Elizondo confirms this is correct. “I’ve never once violated, nor am I willing to violate my security oaths, so anything I’ve discussed is indeed unclassified,” he says.
In one of Elizondo’s employee performance evaluations, which Popular Mechanics obtained, it lists his primary “mission goals” as managing and administering information, access controls, and security of national-level SAPs for the Secretary of Defense. Elizondo confirms his position allowed him access to the most highly secretive and reclusive programs being run by the U.S. “The stuff we were seeing was truly unidentified. It wasn’t related to anything we were doing,” he says.
In October 2017, Elizondo resigned from the DoD to join former Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge’s UFO research group To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science, which would soon release the Navy’s “Flir1” video to the world and properly kick off a ufological renaissance. Elizondo now works as the company’s Director of Global Security and Special Programs.
Why did Elizondo leave his government job? Because he realized the Pentagon’s top brass would never treat UAP with the importance they deserved. A senior Pentagon official tells Popular Mechanics they were aware that Elizondo briefed a White House intelligence aide and two senior aides to Mattis, then the Secretary of Defense, in the spring of 2017.
The official, who is not authorized to speak on the record, says the White House aide was uncomfortable with the prospect of UFOs being real. To their knowledge, the White House aide did not pass the information along. The aides to Mattis, meanwhile, acknowledged UFOs were a real issue, but they were concerned with the political optics should it ever come out that the Secretary of Defense had been briefed about them. Elizondo confirms the accuracy of these accounts. “I resigned only after multiple attempts to brief the Secretary [of Defense] failed,” he previously told Popular Mechanics.
Finally, while the Pentagon has denied AATIP’s existence after 2012 and that Elizondo was never involved in looking into UFOs, Popular Mechanics has obtained documentation that seems to unambiguously show AATIP was active after the closing of the BAASS AAWSAP contract, Elizondo was running this extension of AATIP, and the efforts to examine UFOs are still currently underway.
Though the documents were unclassified, they contained sensitive information, and the person sharing them did so only under the guarantee that Popular Mechanics would not make them publicly available. The person said they only were willing to share the materials to support Elizondo’s claims, which they say have been unfairly challenged over the last two years. The individual, who is not a government employee, did approve the release of a small section from one of the documents showing the changing of responsibilities before Elizondo left the DoD.
F-35Bs begin night flights on HMS Queen Elizabeth.
PART VII. THE UNKNOWN
In June 2019, the Office of Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s office, confirmed that closed door meetings on UAP have occured. More recently, last December, when asked by Conway Daily Sun reporter Daymond Steer about the Navy UAP encounters, recent presidential candidate and current member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sen. Michael Bennet, was cautious in saying he wouldn’t share anything he’d learned on the Intelligence Committee. However, Bennet said, “Our guys are seeing stuff that’s unidentified. They don’t know what it is, I don’t know what it is … We’re trying to learn more about it. The Air Force is trying to learn more about it.”
Popular Mechanics has since learned in October 2019, staffers with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Armed Service Committee were briefed on current UAP issues. According to people with knowledge of these briefings, some former BAASS contractors and current AATIP leadership were in attendance.
Insiders also say this past year, during a closed-door meeting with the Senate Intelligence Committee, Brigadier General Richard Stapp, Director of the DoD Special Access Program Central Office, testified the mysterious objects being encountered by the military were not related to secret U.S. technology. The Pentagon did not respond to requests by Popular Mechanics to confirm Stapp’s testimony before the Intelligence Committee.
In only the second time publicly discussing the event, Popular Mechanics spoke with the Navy fighter pilot who was Cdr. David Fravor’s wingman during the now-famous 2004 Nimitz UFO encounter. Agreeing to talk only under the condition of anonymity, the fighter pilot confirmed they testified in front of congressional leadership about their encounter. “I’ve been requested repeatedly to go to the Pentagon and asked, ‘Is this what you saw?’.”
During a series of email exchanges, Popular Mechanics provided specific information to Gough, the Pentagon spokesperson, in an effort to see if this might influence the DoD’s current position. Initially, Gough said she would examine the information and see if she could provide a statement in response. However, Gough has not responded to repeated follow-up requests from Popular Mechanics.
“IT WOULD BE HARD TO ARGUE THAT EITHER THE MILITARY OR THE PUBLIC GOT THEIR MONEY’S WORTH.”
On its own, the evidence showing the Pentagon is interested in UFOs is unlikely to change the minds of many who are skeptical of the idea that mysterious, apparently intelligent, and possibly otherworldly objects might be buzzing around the skies above Earth.
“The whole contracting process for this program was irregular from start to finish,” Steven Aftergood, Director for the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy, tells Popular Mechanics. “[The AAWSAP contract] sounds like it was a good deal for the contractor. But it would be hard to argue that either the military or the public got their money’s worth.”
Meanwhile, William Culbreth, an engineering professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas who authored two of the 38 technical papers provided in the AAWSAP contract, offers a different opinion. He says he was unaware of the UFO background of AAWSAP, but very familiar with BAASS’s UFO interest.
“I had some graduate students who worked for BAASS during that time and I know Bigelow has an interest in the topic, but no one mentioned anything about UFOs when they asked me to write the papers,” Culbreth says.
Regardless of where the underlying motivation may have come from, Culbreth says his work on the two papers—“Detection and High Resolution Tracking of Vehicles at Hypersonic Velocities” and “Aneutronic Fusion Propulsion II”—led to his examination of new approaches to nuclear propulsion technology, which might not have been inspired otherwise.
“We’re looking into these propulsion technologies today, and this area alone led to several of my students pursuing PhDs who I don’t think otherwise would have,” Culbreth says.
With the wealth of data collected by BAASS, and almost assuredly more information being gathered by AATIP, it raises the question: Is the UAP issue being closely guarded because we don’t believe it’s real, or because we’re afraid we can’t understand it?
Mick West, the author of Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect, suggests the public availability and confirmation of rigorous empirical studies by AATIP could change the entire UFO dynamic. “It would be fantastic if there was some good evidence of something new to science. So far there isn’t,” he tells Popular Mechanics.
While he faces considerable angst for trying to debunk UFOs, West says he’d be as thrilled as anyone else if he was able to actually come across something that was truly unexplainable and unknown. “There’s no hard feelings,” he says. “I understand people are passionate—especially experiencers.”
So was this a matter of the government discovering something it didn’t understand, and therefore opting to avoid it altogether? Nick Cook, the former aviation editor of Jane’s Defense Weekly and author of The Grid, tells Popular Mechanics this idea reminds him of a conversation he had with Ben Rich, the former director of Lockheed Skunkworks and the “father of stealth.”
Cook says Rich told him when the ability for stealth aircraft was discovered, but not yet understood, there was considerable debate on what to do next. “Do you put a bunch of money into developing something and end up not being successful because you don’t understand it, or do you table the entire idea until you have more science, which runs the risk of someone else figuring it out first?”
With stealth technology, the U.S. military ultimately made the decision to move forward, which led to the development of the world’s first stealth aircraft, the F-117 Nighthawk. “I guess it would depend on how wide a knowledge gap you thought there was and how high was the risk for success,” Cook says. “Could I see how something could come up, and the decision would be made to tuck something away like the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark? Yes, I could see how it could be possible.”
“Throughout history, many inventions have preceded an understanding of the science that makes them work,” Matthew Hersch, a history of science and technology professor at Harvard University, tells Popular Mechanics. “Engineers often ‘do science’ in the course of their work, just as scientists ‘invent.’ It’s inevitable that we as a species will continue inventing things without a real understanding of how they work, at least until our science catches up.”
Being unable to explain something with current science, Hersch says, is merely an invitation to do more science—not a rejection of the scientific worldview as a whole. “Suppressing good, non-fraudulent science because it challenges our beliefs is extremely dangerous,” he says. “Nobody has a right to do that, and it is contrary to the interests of humanity—that’s what science is for. Fortunately, there is no vast scientific conspiracy to suppress divergent ideas. More often, good science is suppressed by non-scientists for political reasons.”
Any discovery of extraterrestrial science or technology, then, is no reason to flush our political norms down the toilet, says Hersch.
“Human beings have believed in the existence of extraterrestrial life for millennia,” he says. “I suspect that any revelation that [UFOs] exist would be met with something close to a shrug.”
This week, NASA is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a sensitive spacecraft that has shown the world never-before-seen imagery of the sun.
The mission launched on Feb. 11, 2010, and during the spacecraft's first decade in orbit, it has viewed planets crossing in front of the sun, studied the activity of sun's scorching outer atmosphere (known as the corona) and witnessed nearly an entire 11-year solar cycle.
To celebrate 10 years of solar science from SDO, NASA has highlighted the top 10 most amazing discoveries to come out of the data and scientific imagery collected by the spacecraft over the past decade.
SDO has spotted raging solar flares erupting from the sun's surface. The spacecraft's cameras and science instruments are zeroed in on the sun to catch these scorching filaments of solar plasma when they appear. The $850 million observatory studies Earth's closest star through multiple wavelengths of light to produce incredible footage of the sun's activity. According to NASA, SDO saw nearly 200 solar flares in its first 18 months, allowing scientists to spot a "late phase flare" pattern and thus help them better understand how much energy the sun releases during a flare.
This image shows an M1.5-class solar flare (lower left) on July 3, 2013. The solar flare erupted at about 3 a.m. EDT (0700 GMT) and was spotted by SDO, which snapped a photo of that month's solar storm.
Though Earth tornadoes can reach powerful speeds of up to 300 mph (482 km/h),tornado prominences far outrank the terrestrial storms with speeds of up to 186,000 mph (300,000 km/h), according to NASA.
The video above shows a close-up view of a magnetic tornado in the sun's atmosphere, as seen by SDO in February 2012.
EIT waves are the peaks and valleys of hot and electrically charged gas, called plasma, that roll across the sun's surface, according to NASA. The waves are named after the instrument that discovered them: the Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope onboard an SDO predecessor called the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.
SDO's observations of EIT waves during its first year in space showed for the first time how the EIT waves move across the star's surface, according to NASA. Coronal mass ejections, or volatile stellar "burps" that carry solar plasma out from the sun and into the solar system, might be what triggers EIT waves, the space agency said.
4. Comets
(Image credit: NASA/SDO)
Icy comets that originate in the outskirts of the solar system sometimes swing by the sun, and scientists like to watch these approaches to see which comets survive the close encounters and which ones evaporate and disintegrate.
In December 2011, SDO caught images of Comet C/2011 W3 Lovejoy as it skimmed over the sun's surface. SDO's images of Lovejoy were the first to show a comet traveling so low in the sun's atmosphere, according to NASA, and SDO's instruments collected new information about how the sun interacts with comets.
5. Global circulation
(Image credit: Stanford)
SDO helps scientists learn more about the sun's plasma. The sun is more complicated than scientists once thought, SDO data suggest. The spacecraft's Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager instrument, which is operated by scientists at Stanford University, watches the motion of plasma waves, just like scientists study seismic waves that travel below the surfaces of Earth and Mars The observations revealed new details about the conveyor-like mechanism that transports plasma throughout the sun, called meridional flow.
The sun's meridional circulation is shown in this artist's illustration, which is based on research at Stanford's Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory. This circulation pattern is linked to sunspot production and may explain why one solar hemisphere might have more sunspots than the other at certain times, according to NASA.
6. Coronal mass ejections
(Image credit: NASA/SDO/GSFC)
SDO took this image of the sun on Jan. 28, 2011, as it fired off two solar flares. The midsize M-1 flare on the right was accompanied by a coronal mass ejection (CME) that blasted into space.
A CME is an outpouring of material that can be hazardous to astronauts and spacecraft if it erupts in Earth's direction. NASA researchers have used SDO data to predict how these blasts could affect Earth and to model the solar wind's three-day journey to Earth.
7. Coronal dimming
CMEs can be accompanied by coronal dimmings. CMEs, like the one depicted in this video from a solar storm in 2012, can send billions of tons of plasma particles into space, and this evacuation of solar stuff is linked to dimming regions on the sun.
To predict when this charged material might head toward Earth, scientists developed a statistical analysis of several events spotted by SDO. Researchers also hope to use the science of coronal dimming to view CMEs from stars that are too far away for scientists to directly measure the eruptions, according to NASA.
8. Almost an entire solar cycle
(Image credit: NASA/SDO/GSFC)
SDO has been in space for a decade, so it has viewed nearly a complete 11-year solar cycle. This year, the sun is exiting its dormant period, or solar minimum, and will slowly reawaken to its more active period, or solar maximum.
These side-by-side images, taken by SDO, show the sun when it's at almost opposite ends of its 11-year cycle of activity. Solar minimum is on the left, and solar maximum is on the right. SDO's years of observations are helping scientists understand the evolution of a solar cycle, according to NASA.
9. Polar coronal holes
(Image credit: NASA/SDO)
Massive coronal holes on the solar surface, like the one seen in this March 24, 2016, image taken by SDO, are interesting to scientists because charged particles can escape from these gaps in the sun's outer atmosphere.
Scientists also focus on these features because, when these holes disappear after forming near the sun's north or south pole, it can hint to scientists that the star's magnetic field has reversed, marking a more exact moment of solar maximum, according to NASA.
A previously unknown kind of solar process, called forced magnetic reconnection, was seen for the first time in SDO imagery. The spacecraft's Atmospheric Imaging Assembly instrument captured the X-shaped event that happened on May 3, 2012. It's a type of magnetic explosion caused by a solar prominence, a large loop of material that erupts over the sun's surface.
Although scientists had predicted over a decade before its discovery that forced magnetic reconnection did, in fact occur, SDO was the first to view it directly. This new finding was made just a few months ago, in December 2019.
NASA's automated asteroid tracking systems have their eyes on a potentially cataclysmic rock dubbed 163373 (2002 PZ39), which is estimated to measure up to about 3,280ft (one kilometre) across. The asteroid is barreling through space at speeds of more than 35,500mph (57,240km/h).
At this rate, NASA said the asteroid will make a "close approach" to Earth tomorrow before noon (Saturday, February 15).
According to the space agency, any rock this big has the potential to kill untold millions upon impact.
NASA said: “If a rocky meteoroid larger than 25m but smaller than one kilometre – a little more than half-a-mile – were to hit Earth, it would likely cause local damage to the impact area.
“We believe anything larger than one to two kilometres – one kilometre is a little more than one-half mile – could have worldwide effects.”
Asteroid alert: A potentially cataclysmic rock is heading past Earth next week
(Image: GETTY)
Asteroid alert: NASA is tracking the rock on an 'Earth close approach' trajectory
(Image: GETTY)
The destructive potential of such asteroids was also outlined in a 2018 White House report on so-called near-Earth objects or NEOs.
The National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan warned asteroids up to 3,280ft (1km) across can initiate a chain of devastating natural cataclysms.
The report reads: “Objects close to and larger than one kilometre can cause damage on a global scale.
“They can trigger earthquakes, tsunamis, and other secondary effects that extend far beyond the immediate impact area.
“An asteroid as large as 10 kilometres across is thought to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs when it struck the Yucatan peninsula some 65 million years ago.”
On February 15, Asteroid 2002 PZ39 is expected to approach the planet around 11.05am GMT (6.05am EST).
Objects close to and larger than one kilometre can cause damage on a global scale
National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan
When this happens, the rock will swing by the planet at speeds of about 15.19km per second or 35,567mph (57,240km/h).
Based on its observations of the rock’s trajectory, NASA estimates the asteroid measures somewhere between 1,443ft and 3248ft (440m to 990m) in diameter.
At both ends of the scale, any impact with the asteroid could be absolutely devastating.
NASA said: “Since their orbital paths often cross that of the Earth, collisions with near-Earth objects have occurred in the past and we should remain alert to the possibility of future close Earth approaches.
“It seems prudent to mount efforts to discover and study these objects, to characterise their sizes, compositions and structures and to keep an eye upon their future trajectories.”
But does the US space agency expect the asteroid to come crashing into Earth this week?
Thankfully the colossal rock will miss our planet by a safe margin of about 0.03860 astronomical units.
Leaked Documents Show Pentagon Was Studying UFO-Related Phenomena
Leaked Documents Show Pentagon Was Studying UFO-Related Phenomena
Newly leaked documents published by Popular Mechanics show that a shadowy Pentagon program produced reports investigating phenomena such as injuries from 'exotic' propulsion that mention UFOs.
Newly leaked documents show that the Department of Defense funded a study concerning UFOs, contradicting recent statements by the Pentagon.
In 2017, The New York Times revealed the existence of $22 million dollar UFO investigation program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. A twist came two months ago, however, when Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough told John Greenewald—curator of the Black Vault, the largest civilian archive of declassified government documents—that AATIP had nothing to do with UFOs. Greenewald also wrote that the Pentagon told him that another program, the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application Program or AAWSAP, was the name of the contract that the government gave out to produce reports under AATIP.
In a new Popular Mechanics article, journalist Tim McMillan acquired documents from Bigelow Aerospace’s exotic science division, Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, or BAASS, indicating that the organization did explore strange phenomena under the auspices of the AATIP program.
One BAASS report, leaked to McMillan by an unnamed source, previously appeared on a list of products produced under the AATIP contract "for DIA to publish" that was obtained via FOIA laws. The report was cited incorrectly on that list, but Popular Mechanics tracked down its author, who confirmed its authenticity. The report investigated "exotic" propulsion via injuries sustained by people who experienced "exposure to anomalous vehicles." The text mentions UFOs several times.
"What can not be overly emphasized, is that when one looks at the literature of anomalous cases, including UFO claims from the most reliable sources, the extent and degree of acute high but not necessarily chronic low-level injuries are consistent across patients who are injured, compared to witnesses in the far-field, who are not," the report states.
Notably, the report's author—Christopher “Kit” Green—told Popular Mechanics that he was not contracted by BAASS except to produce this report and that it provides zero evidence for extraterrestrial or non-human technologies.
Another BAASS report from 2009 and published by Popular Mechanics that doesn't mention DIA by name, only a "sponsor," is even more explosive. It shows that, around the time that BAASS would have been producing reports under AATIP, it explored a vast assortment of strange phenomena including “physical effects” of unknown aerial phenomena, or UAP; the “biological effects” of UAP encounters on biological organisms; a request for documents from the Air Force’s UFO investigation program, Project Blue Book; the mention of several UAP incidents, including violations of restricted airspace near a nuclear weapons facility; and that Utah’s infamous Skinwalker Ranch is a “possible laboratory for studying other intelligences and possible interdimensional phenomena.”
Last month, Motherboard was granted exclusive access to Skinwalker Ranch. Currently, the ranch is owned by an anonymous individual engaged in private scientific research. “Skinwalker Ranch continues to be one of the best locations to study and record UAP activity,” the owner told Motherboard in an interview. “Where else in the world do you have constant monitoring with instrumentation recording across a broad spectrum?”
A curious side note in this story is the role of Luis Elizondo, a former Pentagon staffer who claims to have run the AATIP program. In statements earlier this year, the Pentagon told Motherboard that Luis Elizondo was in no way involved in AATIP. McMillan received documentation from an unnamed source that allegedly supports Elizondo's claims, but did not publish them in full, only a snippet of a memo that alludes to responsibilities under AATIP but does not mention Elizondo by name.
In a statement to Motherboard, Elizondo claimed that while the AAWSAP and AATIP programs are no longer active, the Pentagon is still engaged in investigating sightings of and encounters with unknown aerial phenomena under a different program portfolio. He also said he believes the largely unpublished documentation is "vindication," adding, "the truth always prevails."
Motherboard reached out to the Pentagon for an official statement on the leaked documents and Elizondo's alleged role in the program. Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough told Motherboard that the Pentagon will release a new public statement in the following weeks concerning the AAWSAP/AATIP programs.
Ancient aliens? NASA’s Mars 2020 mission landing site could contain fossilized signs of life
Ancient aliens? NASA’s Mars 2020 mission landing site could contain fossilized signs of life
The landing site selected for NASA’s upcoming Mars 2020 rover could well be one of the best chances we have of discovering whether the Red Planet was once home to life and whether it could be again.
The 28-mile (45km) wide Jezero crater was selected as the landing site for the new rover in late 2018, and has been found to contain vast deposits of hydrated silica and minerals called carbonates, according to a newly published study.
Once the site of a lake more than 3.5 billion years ago, scientists now believe that Jezero, thanks to its carbonate supplies, will likely contain structures that can survive for billions of years, such as shells, coral and certain types of rock formed by microbial life.
Deltas here on Earth are known to be hubs for preserved biomarkers and signs of life, and the presence of the hydrated silica suggests Mars is likely to be even better in this regard.
“Using a technique we developed that helps us find rare, hard-to-detect mineral phases in data taken from orbiting spacecraft, we found two outcrops of hydrated silica within Jezero crater,” said the study’s lead author, Jesse Tarnas, a PhD student at Brown University in Rhode Island, US.
We know from Earth that this mineral phase is exceptional at preserving microfossils and other biosignatures, so that makes these outcrops exciting targets for the rover to explore.
The intel about the site, and the surrounding delta, replete with mineral deposits, was provided by data from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) instrument that flies aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
“The material that forms the bottom layer of a delta is sometimes the most productive in terms of preserving biosignatures,” explained Jack Mustard, professor at Brown and study co-author.
“So if you can find that bottomset layer, and that layer has a lot of silica in it, that’s a double bonus,” he added.
The rover will land on Mars on February 18, 2021 when it will begin taking rock core samples that will be deposited in metal tubes on the Martian surface, waiting to be shipped back to Earth for analysis during a later mission.
“I’m not saying it was aliens … but it was aliens” is the quote by Giorgio A. Tsoukalos that launched a thousand memes and will probably be on his tombstone. While Tsoukalos has somewhat backed away from the saying, another scientist has picked up the philosophy, if not the actual quote, and applied it to interstellar comets and asteroids, unexplained radio signals from deep space and other strange space phenomena. That scientist is Abraham “Avi” Loeb — theoretical physicist, Professor of Science and Chair of the Harvard Astronomy department.
Loeb has previously stated that he’s open to the idea that the cigar-shaped interstellar asteroid ‘Oumuamua could be an alien spaceship, saying ““the more I study this object, the more unusual it appears, making me wonder whether it might be an artificially made probe which was sent by an alien civilization.” More recently, he’s been studying the fast radio bursts that are being discovered at an accelerated pace now that astronomers have better equipment and no longer have to rely on after-the-fact analysis – they now know approximately where to look. In 2017, Loeb speculated that fast radio bursts are signs that extraterrestrials are using massive laser beams to propel some form of giant light sail-powered ships to traverse the stars. Loeb defends the idea like this:
“Science isn’t a matter of belief, it’s a matter of evidence. Deciding what’s likely ahead of time limits the possibilities. It’s worth putting ideas out there and letting the data be the judge.”
Not quite … but you get the idea
That sounds like a “throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks” kind of astronomy and astrophysics. But that hasn’t stopped Loeb when it comes to fast radio bursts, and the theory seemed to be reinforced when it astronomers recently discovered repeating radio burst coming from the same source were able to trace a few back to their galaxy. However, the patterns seemed to be random – not the kind one would expect when propelling a ship through space. That changed last week when astronomers revealed that FRB 180916, which had recently been traced to a medium-sized spiral galaxy, is sending its signals in a regular, predictable pattern of bursts and pauses in 16-day repeating cycles. All together now … it’s aliens!
“But at the moment we do not have a smoking gun that clearly indicates the nature of FRBs. So all possibilities should be considered, including an artificial origin.”
In an email to Futurism discussing the discovery, Loeb threw his alien stuff against the wall once again. He’s right – the regular repeating bursts from FRB 180916 are not a smoking gun, but they’re the kind of signals one would expect from a civilization sending propulsion power to a sailing ship traversing the galaxies.
Waiting for the next burst from home?
Avi Loeb is a highly respected theoretical physicist in the fields of astrophysics and cosmology, with an obvious emphasis on “theoretical.” Many of his theories have eventually been proven, such as his prediction that there are stars moving near the speed of light throughout the universe, He doesn’t have wild hair, a fake tan and his own television show … in other words, he’s not meme-worthy. But he just may be worthy of attention. At the rate new fast radio bursts are being discovered, he may be proven right on this one too.
If that happens, which will he change first – his hair or his tan?
What sank the lost continent of Zealandia? If you said its crust was too thin to support this land mass – only recently (2017) confirmed to be a continent and not a piece broken off of the ancient supercontinent original continent of Gondwana – then you’re a follower of the conventional wisdom shared by most modern geophysicists (a good crowd to be in). However, this conventional wisdom may have been upended by an unconventional new theory that the demise of Zealandia was actually caused by the birth of something we’re still dealing with – not to mention fearing – today … the circle of active volcanoes known as the Pacific Ring of Fire.
“We propose a “subduction resurrection” model in which a subduction rupture event activated lithospheric-scale faults across a broad region during less than ~5 m.y., and tectonic forces evolved over a further 4–8 m.y. as subducted slabs grew in size and drove plate-motion change. Such a subduction rupture event may have involved nucleation and lateral propagation of slip-weakening rupture along an interconnected set of preexisting weaknesses adjacent to density anomalies.”
Run that paragraph, from a new study published in the journal Geology, through Google’s Geophysicist-to-English translator, and you’ll find it means that one tectonic plate converged on another and sank it (subduction) back deep into the earth, causing violent plate movements that enlarged a ring of pre-existing small ruptures until they simultaneously created a string of new supervolcanoes that became the Pacific Ring of Fire. If your browser doesn’t support the Geophysicist-to-English translator, study authors Rupert Sutherland, Professor of tectonics and geophysics and Victoria University of Wellington, and Gerald Dickens, Professor at Rice University in Houston, do a nice job in The Conversation of explaining what happened next.
“The subduction rupture event included unique geological phenomena that that have no present-day comparison, and there may have been fewer than 100 such massive events since Earth formed. Our new evidence from Zealandia shows these events can dramatically alter the geography of continents.”
“Alter” in this case means turn a continent into a lost continent. Zealandia today is 94% submerged under the Pacific, making it difficult to study. This is why it took until 2017 to confirm it was actually a continent. That’s when Sutherland, Dickens and a team of 32 scientists formed the Tasman Frontier Subduction Initiation and Paleogene Climate International Ocean Discovery Program Expedition (try fitting that on a T-shirt) to obtain new fossil samples that might better explain what sank Zealandia. They drilled holes up to 864 meters (2835 feet) deep where the water was up to 5 km (3.1 miles) deep at six remote sites to collect sediment samples from the center of the lost continent. Those samples contained the birth announcement of the Pacific Ring of Fire.
“We don’t know where or why, but something happened that locally induced movement, and when the fault started to slip, like in an earthquake the motion rapidly spread sideways onto adjacent parts of the fault system and then around the western Pacific.”
As Sutherland explained in a press release, this movement caused portions of northern Zealandia to rise 1-2 km (.6 to 1.2 miles) while other parts dropped underwater by the same amount sections until the entire continent sank to twice that depth and more. The study shows that this event coincided with “the bend in the Emperor-Hawaii seamount chain, the reorientation of numerous mid-ocean ridges, and the onset of subduction—and the related volcanism and seismicity” – events that signified the birth of the Pacific Ring of Fire, where today about 90% of the world’s earthquakes occur and where all but three of the world’s 25 largest volcanic eruptions of the last 11,700 years have taken place.
If the Ring of Fire caused one continent to sink, can it happen again? Sunderland admits that similar subduction rupture events have not been found … yet. But, now that they know what kind of geological records to look for, that may change. In the meantime, his group will be studying Zealandia to determent precisely how and why it sank and “what the consequences were for animals, plants, and global climate.”
Sutherland has an excellent philosophy that we all should consider:
“Geologists generally assume that understanding the present is the key to understanding the past. But at least in this instance, this may not hold.”
In the farthest, most frigid region of our planet’s southern hemisphere, sprawls the highest, coldest, driest, and most isolated place on earth. Antarctica is a vast land of mountains, ice, tundra, and extreme, inhospitable cold that has kept it relatively unexplored and uninhabited even nearly 200 years after its initial discovery. Yet as technology improves and humankind’s ever growing desire to push at the boundaries of our understanding of our planet propels us forward, we are just starting to scratch at the surface of Antarctica’s myriad mysteries. What we are finding is that Earth’s most remote and extreme continent is even stranger than we had ever thought. All manner of weirdness, everything from Nazi bases, to crashed UFOs, to hauntings, to ghost ships that seem to have appeared from nowhere have been claimed in this remote place, and here we will look at the time alien skulls were apparently found here as well.
Before getting into it, it is perhaps important to first understand just how much of a vast, forbidden, inhospitable realm this is. Antarctica covers an area of 14.0 million km2 (5.4 million sq. mi), which is roughly twice the size of Australia or one and a half times the size of the United States, making it the fifth largest continent in the world. Although it is 98% covered with ice, which is well over a mile thick in most places, Antarctica is considered to be one of the driest places on earth, with only 200 mm (8 inches) of annual precipitation along its coast and even less inland. The cold in this wind-blasted land is staggering, with recorded temperatures reaching a deadly −89 °C (−129 °F). For this reason, human habitation of the continent is limited, and there are no permanent settlements. For the most part, the extent of human habitation consists of research stations representing many countries found peppered throughout the continent and engaged in various scientific pursuits.
For such a large landmass Antarctica long remained a mere myth, a lost land that was once known as Terra Australis Incognita, or the “Unknown Southern Land,” the existence of which for a long time remained almost a legendary quest and the doom of many failed expeditions to locate it. Although speculation and legends of its existence go far back, and there were discoveries of some of its satellite icebergs and islands, the Antarctic mainland was not really properly discovered until 1820, when a continental ice shelf was spotted by a Russian expedition led by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev aboard the Vostok and Mirny. Even upon this discovery, the icy continent remained mostly neglected and forgotten at the bottom of the world since no one was willing to brave the extremely hostile conditions of this uncharted, extreme wilderness. It wasn’t until 1911 that the first human beings successfully penetrated the interior of Antarctica, when Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and four other expedition members became the first to reach the South Pole after a perilous overland journey.
In the ensuing century, Antarctica largely remained an unexplored, poorly understood realm of cold and ice, and it has only been recently that improving technology and satellite imagery have helped us to really start scratching the surface of its frigid mysteries. Even so, Antarctica’s mysteries run deep, and what we are uncovering here at the very bottom of the world is mostly posing more questions than answers. As we look deeper into the ice and probe more thoroughly at the edges of what we know about this hostile and perilous place, Antarctica is proving to be much more than the enormous chunk of ice it was once thought to be. Yet among all of the genuine discoveries being made all of the time are the more fringe accounts, and here is where we come to the alien skulls.
In 2014 a seemingly amazing and shocking story began making the rounds when it was announced that out in this bleak frozen wasteland, supposedly in the area of what was called La Paille, Antarctica, there had been discovered three unusual skulls, described as having elongated craniums and enlarged eye sockets and as being possibly up to a thousand years old. Giving the story weight was that not only were these bizarre skulls dug up in the first place, but they had been discovered by respected Smithsonian archaeologist Damian Waters and his intrepid team. Waters was quoted in initial articles on the matter as excitedly proclaiming:
We just can’t believe it. We didn’t just find human remains on Antarctica, we found elongated skulls. I have to pinch myself every time I wake up, I just can’t believe it. This will redefine our view of mankind’s history as a whole.
As soon as the story got out into the open, there was immediate speculation as to what it could all mean. One idea was that these were the remains of ancient people who practiced skull deformation, a tradition present in some cultures in which the skull is bound or otherwise impeded in its growth to cause it to become misshapen for various religious or cultural reasons. If this were true, it was seen as a mind blowing discovery as the age of the mystery skulls would suggest that humans had visited Antarctica far before the earliest known human discovery of the frozen continent. Of course there was also the idea that these weren’t human skulls at all, but rather the remains of alien beings or even human-alien hybrids of some sort. This is a notion thrown around for a variety of anomalous elongated skulls that are discovered from time to time all over the world, in such far flung places as Peru, Egypt, Malta, the United Kingdom, and others, and the archeologist Waters himself supposedly believed this possibility, saying of the Antarctica skulls:
These elongated skulls are much, much larger than normal human skulls would be. Purposeful cranial deformation can change the shape of a skull, but it cannot increase the volume of the skull. In addition, these skulls have quite a few other important physical characteristics that greatly set them apart from normal human skulls.
Anomalous skulls on display in Peru
The bizarre story soon became viral and was being discussed all over the place, but if you are skeptical of the possibility of ancient alien skulls being found buried in Antarctica then you are not alone. While many on the Internet were buying the fantastical tale hook, line, and sinker, only helped along by the purported scientific pedigree of the one who discovered them and his seemingly authoritative statements on the matter, others were not satisfied and began to see cracks in the whole thing. One of the things that was noticed is that it is unclear whether the place where the skulls were claimed to have been found, La Paille, is even a real place at all. Jason McClellan of openminds.tv has said of this “Approximately ninety eight percent of the continent of Antarctica is covered by ice. Antarctica has research stations, but not cities, so it is unclear where La Paille, Antarctica is supposed to be.” Blunter still is an article on the site Skeptophilia, which dismisses it as a real place outright, saying,
There seems to be no region called La Paille in Antarctica. Paille is French for straw, something I haven’t seen much of in photographs I’ve seen of Antarctica, so it’s a little hard to see why someone would name a place down there La Paille.
If this is not a real place, then it already sends up a red flag on the veracity of the report. Perhaps more glaring still is that the story originates with an article titled “3 Elongated Skulls Found in Antarctica,” posted on April 2, 2014 on an entertainment news site called American Live Wire, which has been criticized for publishing fake news in the past, and this piece was followed by an almost identical article on World News Daily, which is also not considered to be the most reliable source. Both articles show the same pictures of the skulls and make the same claims, and neither one of them gives any concrete source for their information, which is made even more interesting in that it has been found that the Smithsonian itself has never published an account of the discovery. If it is such a groundbreaking discovery, then why would it only be published on these two questionable news sites and not in the Smithsonian’s Newsdesk? Instead every story on the Antarctic skulls can be traced back to these two original articles, the first of which was posted on April 2, right around April Fool’s Day.
There is more. When Skeptophilia did its own investigation into the story they did not have to do much digging to find out that not only were the pictures of the skulls in the two original articles actually pictures of completely different elongated skulls kept at the Regional Museum of Ica in Peru, but nowhere could they find any evidence of a Damien Waters with the Smithsonian. Taken with everything else that is off about the whole thing and it becomes easy to imagine that this was probably a completely fabricated account that managed to worm its way into people’s minds with the promise of alien mysteries in this far away frigid domain and then took on a life of its own. Skeptophilia would rather amusingly say of Waters and his Antarctica alien skulls:
I suspect that he (Waters) was made up, along with the skulls and La Paille and everything else about the story. It’s a shame, really. Given the cachet that Antarctica has, it would be cool if there was some kind of weird mystery down there, or at least something other than penguins and leopard seals and high winds and a crapload of ice.
Yes, it would certainly be cool, and Antarctica is one of those places that sparks the imagination on such things. Despite all of the skepticism, there are still plenty of people who entertain the idea that these skulls are the real deal, and one does not have to look far to find chatrooms and threads devoted to such talk, with accusations of cover-ups thrown around liberally. In the end, all of the evidence shows it is most likely that this was an elaborate hoax of some sort, yet it is curious to see how much the public is willing to latch on to such fake stories and hold them up as real without really checking the facts. Were there ever any alien skulls in Antarctica? Maybe, maybe not, but regardless of what the truth may be, this vast expanse of barren land far from civilization will no doubt continue to drawn to itself such tales for some time to come.
Puma Punku: een nog groter mysterie dan de piramides
Pumapunku of Puma Punku is onderdeel van een tempelcomplex in Bolivia waar de afgelopen tijd steeds meer aandacht voor is gekomen. De naam betekent volgens archeologen ‘deur van de poema’.
De enorme blokken steen waar Puma Punku uit bestaat, zijn met uiterste precisie vervaardigd.
De megalieten behoren tot de grootste die op aarde zijn gevonden. Sommige wegen enkele tonnen en zijn meer dan zes meter hoog.
Lego-doos
De meeste liggen verspreid over het complex, waardoor onderzoekers moeite hadden een beeld te vormen van hoe Puma Punku er vroeger uitzag.
Daar kwam verandering in toen wetenschappers van de Universiteit van Californië – Berkeley het complex met behulp van een 3D-printer en een virtuele reconstructie van archeoloog Alexei Vranich namaakten.
Vranich zei dat de ruïnes hem deden denken aan een gigantische Lego-doos.
15.000 jaar oud
Spaanse conquistadores die het complex in de 16e en 17e eeuw bezochten, omschreven het als een ‘wonderlijk bouwwerk met poorten en ramen die uit één blok steen waren gehouwen.
Vlak na de Tweede Wereldoorlog claimde de Oostenrijkse archeoloog Arthur Posnansky dat Puma Punku veel ouder was dan algemeen werd aangenomen.
Hoe is Pumapunku gebouwd en door wie? Wetenschappers hebben meer vragen dan antwoorden.
Een ander opmerkelijk aspect is dat de mummies van Puma Punku bewijzen dat de bewoners van het complex – van kinderen tot ouderen – geregeld psychoactieve, hallucinogene planten gebruikten.
Kan een bacterie die alleen op Paaseiland is te vinden veroudering genezen?
Kan een bacterie die alleen op Paaseiland is te vinden veroudering genezen?
In de jaren zestig reisden onderzoekers af naar Paaseiland, waar de mythische Moai staan, om bodemmonsters te verzamelen.
Eén van de onderzoekers ontdekte er de sleutel tot de genezing van veroudering.
De Canadese microbioloog Suren Sehgal bracht een bacterie genaamd Streptomyces hygroscopicusmee terug, die hij rapamycine noemde, naar de oorspronkelijke naam van Paaseiland: Rapa Nui.
Gesloten
Deze bacterie is alleen te vinden op Paaseiland.
Hij bestudeerde de monsters jarenlang en raakte geïntrigeerd door de eigenschappen van de bacterie.
Zijn laboratorium werd uiteindelijk gesloten en Sehgal moest al zijn onderzoek vernietigen.
Hij zette zijn onderzoek buiten het laboratorium voort.
Tegen kanker
Sehgal isoleerde uit één van zijn bacteriekweken een nieuw middel tegen schimmelvorming.
De stof bleek te helpen tegen afstootreacties tegen donororganen.
Hij wordt ook ingezet tegen kanker, aangezien hij de groei en vermenigvuldiging van kankercellen kan voorkomen.
Rapamycine onderbreekt namelijk de activiteiten van het enzym mTOR, dat kankercellen doet groeien.
Vijf jaar
De stof bleek bovendien de levensduur van vliegen, wormen en knaagdieren te verlengen.
Later in zijn leven werd Sehgal gediagnosticeerd met vergevorderde darmkanker. Artsen gaven hem nog twee jaar.
De microbioloog begon rapamycine in te nemen en leefde nog vijf jaar.
Hij besloot ermee te stoppen om te achterhalen of het de bacterie was die de kanker bestreed. Sehgal stierf twee maanden later.
De afgelopen tien jaar kom je het woord asteroïde steeds vaker tegen in het nieuws en dat is niet voor niets. In 2019 kwam er een record aantal van deze objecten richting onze aarde en het is een kwestie van tijd voordat er één ons gaat raken.
Het is misschien wel het meest onderschatte probleem van onze tijd, want het verdwijnt niet en wordt alleen maar ieder jaar groter wordt.
Grote en kleine stukken "ruimtepuin" die richting aarde stormen en ons soms op een haar na missen. Zolang een object nog in de ruimte verblijft en niet de atmosfeer van de aarde is binnengedrongen spreken we van een asteroïde of een meteoor en op het moment dat ze de dampkring binnenkomen worden ze meteorieten genoemd. De meeste meteorieten branden op in de atmosfeer en zijn dan zichtbaar als een soort vuurbol in de lucht.
Soms echter zijn de brokstukken dermate groot dat ze niet opbranden en inslaan op het aardoppervlak en dit zijn uiteraard de voor ons gevaarlijke situaties.
Steeds vaker komen asteroïden onze kant op en wij als mensheid merken sommigen op, maar ook velen worden totaal gemist, zoals dat bijvoorbeeld het geval was bij de explosie van een meteoriet boven Chelyabinsk in Rusland in 2015, toen NASA dit moest gewaarworden via Twitter.
Hoe meer vuurbollen wij in de lucht waarnemen, des te meer objecten komen er richting aarde. De waargenomen vuurbollen hebben dan geen schade veroorzaakt doordat ze zijn opgebrand in de atmosfeer, maar het geeft wel een goede indicatie van het aantal objecten dat richting aarde komt.
En wat dat betreft, was 2019 een absoluut recordjaar.
Wat opvalt bij de vuurbollen is dat er na eind 2012 een spectaculaire toename plaatsvindt van het aantal waarnemingen. Dit is vergelijkbaar met de ware explosie aan aardbevingen na eind 2012.
Eind 2012 was uiteraard ook de datum van de beruchte Maya voorspelling die door velen werd geïnterpreteerd als het einde van de wereld en waarbij iedereen dacht dat die Maya's het helemaal fout hadden, want er gebeurde "niets".
Er gebeurde wel degelijk heel veel en dat is dat eigenlijk vanaf dat moment alle heftige aardveranderingen in een stroomversnelling zijn terechtgekomen.
Er gaat tegenwoordig bijna geen week voorbij of je kunt wel berichten lezen over potentieel gevaarlijke objecten die richting aarde stormen en dan, gelukkig voor ons, langs onze planeet scheren. Zoals dat bijvoorbeeld gebeurde op woensdagochtend toen asteroïde 2020 CH langs kwam. Een asteroïde die pas op het laatste moment werd ontdekt en waarvan men eerst niet zeker was of deze wel of niet de aarde zou raken.
Enkele dagen daarvoor een vergelijkbare situatie met asteroïde 2020 BX12 die recht op de aarde leek af te koersen.
Zal het duren tot 2032 voordat de aarde werkelijk wordt geraakt zoals wij eerder schreven of zal dat toch eerder gebeuren omdat de kansen daarop ieder jaar nogal drastisch toenemen?
Echter, de dag dat één van de ons bekende asteroïden op aarde zal knallen, is al bekend.
In oktober 2013 wordt er in de wereldmedia melding gemaakt van het feit dat er een nieuwe asteroïde is ontdekt en dat de kans groot is dat deze in 2032 de aarde zal raken.
Het volgende is onder andere wat wij schreven in 2013:
Natuurlijk weet je dat wanneer iets dergelijks gebeurt NASA onmiddellijk zal ingrijpen en verklaren dat al die astronomen die dat hadden berekend het fout hadden en dat zij hebben gecalculeerd dat deze asteroïde niet of nauwelijks een gevaar zal opleveren.
Normaal gesproken is het dan een beetje einde verhaal, want NASA is voor de meeste mensen net de bijbel of de koran, wat zei zeggen, is waar.
Echter, er is nog een naar onze mening overtuigend argument om aan te nemen dat deze asteroïde wellicht de aarde wel degelijk zal raken in 2032.
En dat argument is afkomstig van een weblog dat in 2005 werd geschreven door een man die zei dat hij uit de toekomst kwam en op aarde was met een bepaalde missie en dat hij vanaf dat moment gerekend over enkele weken weer zou vertrekken naar waar hij vandaan kwam.
Al enkele jaren lang schrijven wij over een tijdreiziger uit het jaar 2063 die naar onze aarde is gekomen in het jaar 2005 op een speciale missie.
Die missie duurde niet zo gek lang en tijdens zijn verblijf in onze tijd schreef deze tijdreiziger onder de naam Scott op een blog waar hij diverse dingen onthulde betreffende onze toekomst.
Mijn codenaam is Qronos1 en mijn werkelijke naam is Scott. De eenheid waartoe ik behoor bestaat uit vier mensen die hier nu in deze tijd zijn. Wij zijn hier op een geheime missie. Er zijn in deze periode ook andere tijdreizigers en ongetwijfeld zullen er meer volgen in de toekomst. De wereld die ik ongeveer een jaar geleden verliet is anders en toch hetzelfde. De vooruitgang in tijdreizen heeft het mogelijk gemaakt dat we nu precies daar naartoe reizen waar we willen.
Er worden op dat blog berichten geplaatst in de periode van 10 september 2005 tot en met 21 september 2005. Daarna stopt het.
Het eerste wat men dan al snel roept is: “Ja, maar dat blog is net gemaakt en ze hebben de data veranderd om het oud te doen lijken”. Dit is echter niet het geval. Want al in de jaren 2006, 2007 etc. werd er op diverse fora al over dit blog gediscussieerd. Voor een voorbeeld van een forum uit 2007 klik hier. Als er dus in die jaren al over werd geschreven, mogen we aannemen dat het blog daadwerkelijk in 2005 is geschreven.
Als Scott geen tijdreiziger was dan wist hij toch heel nauwkeurig te voorspellen wat er de komende jaren zou gaan gebeuren.
Zo voorspelde hij dat 2007 een heel slecht jaar zou worden, dat er in 2009 in de VS een president zou worden geïnstalleerd die niet van Amerikaanse oorsprong was en dat er in 2010 een grote olieramp zou plaatsvinden in de Golf van Mexico.
Echter, iets dat hij ook voorspelt, is het volgende:
“Yes WW3 took allot from us and the asteroid that hit the earth in 2032 also did some bad things, but we have come out off all that ok”.
Het blog waarop dit geschreven is, stamt daadwerkelijk uit 2005, ver voordat asteroïde 2013 TV135 door astronomen werd ontdekt. Astronomen die hiervan schrikken en bekendmaken dat er een kans is dat deze asteroïde de aarde kan raken in 2032, hetzelfde jaar dat dit in 2005 door Scott de tijdreiziger wordt voorspeld.
In dit geval hopen we dat NASA een keer gelijk heeft, maar gezien de vele leugens die ze in de loop der jaren hebben rondgestrooid, houden we het er vooralsnog op dat onze tijdreiziger volkomen gelijk heeft.
Unknown Winged Creatures Angels Caught on Camera in Germany, Brazil and Argentina
Unknown Winged Creatures Angels Caught on Camera in Germany, Brazil and Argentina
A luminous apparitions tumbling to the ground and then soaring up again has been caught on a closed circuit television video in many countries. Mystics are claiming it to be an angels.
The “angels” appears for just a second but can be seen quite clearly.
The Big Ancient Egyptian Question... Time Travelers From the Future?
The Big Ancient Egyptian Question... Time Travelers From the Future?
Ancient Egypt excelled in construction, mathematics, and just about everything else they did. This evidence suggests that these advances were not independently achieved. Author Bruce Goldberg explains his findings that show people from the future, helped develop ancient civilizations.
The Big Ancient Egyptian Question…Time Travelers From The Future? What do you think about this theory? Sounds like they are definitely advanced but not so sure about time travelers.. Perhaps advanced souls from out there in the perimeter.
For someone who just stumbled upon this video, a short summary of the sources would be nice.Does he know this because of a dream, a book, a talk with aliens, an abduction or a LSD trip? NinjaDeathTrap
UFO Seen Heading To Mount Shasta, Holy Mountain, California, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Seen Heading To Mount Shasta, Holy Mountain, California, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Feb 13, 2020
Location of sighting: Trinity National Forest, California, USA
Source: Twitter
This was posted by a US gov worker at the national forest at Mount Shasta. The photo shows a glowing orange UFO near Shasta. The UFO even has a rim all around it. The forest around Mount Shasta is named after the Trinity. The father, son and holy ghost...three parts of got divided into three. Funny the forest is named after it. I too have heard the stories of the famous Saint Germain with a ultraviolet light glowing around him coming out of the caves entrances and speaking to hikers on the trail. There are dozens of huge caves that go deep below the mountain, some never explored and many people have gotten lost down there never to be seen again. I believe Saint Germain is just a person, an alien being who heads the alien city that resides 4-7km below this volcano.
Weird UFO lands in canyon near coal mining site in Australia
Weird UFO lands in canyon near coal mining site in Australia
This video was captured by mining workers over two consecutive days last year and shows at least two UFOs from which at least one seems to land in the canyon near a coal mining site in the Middleton Queensland in Australia.
Day 1 - The first sighting shows a craft which almost looks like an upside down pyramid and is a few miles away from the coal mine and probably a couple of hundreds feet width when it goes down in the canyon
Day 2 - The second sighting shows another weird craft surrounded by some sort of energy field. This craft remains motionless in the air for a while before it appears to descend into the canyon too.
Listen to the mining workers when they talk about the craft which apparently seems to land in the canyon.
The famed Tic Tac shaped craft captured on video and sighted by multiple US Navy pilots beginning in 2004 are advanced US Air Force spacecraft capable of traveling at 500 mph underwater and 24,000 mph into space according to a former intelligence specialist in electronic communications.
Mike Turber claims that he served with the USAF as an intelligence specialist and later with various defense contractors where he had Top Secret security clearance and access to various Special Access Programs (SAP’s) and Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) projects.
Turber came forward in two interviews he gave on November 4 and December 2, 2019, where he presented information he has received from “official government” sources that the Tic Tac sightings are USAF hybrid aerospace craft capable of traveling underwater, in the air and into outer space.
He says that the incredible speeds the USAF craft can achieve both in the atmosphere and underwater is due to its ability to utilize the principle of supercavitation [timestamp 39:40], where a cavitation bubble is created around a craft moving water molecules out of the craft’s flight path and eliminating friction as explained by Wikipedia:
A supercavitating object is a high-speed submerged object that is designed to initiate a cavitation bubble at its nose. The bubble extends (either naturally or augmented with internally generated gas) past the aft end of the object and prevents contact between the sides of the object and the liquid. This separation substantially reduces the skin friction drag on the supercavitating object.
According to Turber, the Tic Tac craft were assembled in Palmdale, California at a highly classified Air Force facility called “Plant 42”. According to Global Security, a number of major aerospace companies operate out of this enormous facility:
Air Force Plant 42 is at Palmdale, CA, north of Pasadena in Los Angeles County. It is operated by Lockheed, Rockwell International, Northrop, and Nero. AFP 42 is located in the northeastern portion of Los Angeles County, California, within the Antelope Valley of the Mojave Desert, approximately 80 miles north of Los Angeles. It has over 6,600 acres (the government owns 85%) and includes approximately 4.2 million square feet of floor space (the government owns 45%). The site includes multiple high bay buildings and airfield access with flyaway capability. The facility also has one of the heaviest load-bearing runways in the world.
The most well-known corporation is Lockheed Martin’s famed Skunk Works which moved to Plant 42 from Burbank, California, in 1989.
According to Turber, he worked at Plant 42 after his Air Force career and realized that some of the craft being secretly constructed there were related to the Tic Tac sightings which he first learned about in 2005. He says that at the time he worked with the Air Force and was analyzing radio communications from Navy pilots discussing their sightings of UFOs that could maneuver both in the air and sea.
Turber says that he knows of at least three models of hybrid air, sea and space vehicles that have been built at Plant 42. He asserts that at least 20 of these had been built and deployed during the time he worked at Plant 42. The largest is 46 feet long which allows it to be easily loaded onto trucks for easy transportation along California’s highway system.
He asserts that the USAF Tic Tac craft use advanced stealth and invisibility technology, and that the USAF deployed them near Navy ships to test pilot reactions, and to essentially “mess with the Navy”.
Turber says that the Navy has now developed similar craft, and that major nations such as China and Russia have developed the exact same craft [timestamp 17:50]. China’s hybrid spacecraft are more evolved than Russia’s and quickly catching up to the USAF craft.
The Tic Tac craft are not reverse engineered from extraterrestrial spacecraft, according to Turber. Instead they were first developed in the 1950s from civilian sources such as Dundee University, before finding their way to institutions such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (timestamp 32:25). In contrast, multiple insiders claim that advanced aerospace technologies were reverse engineered from captured extraterrestrial spacecraft.
Turber says that several of the Tic Tac shaped hybrid craft were deployed over North Korea in November 2017, to intimidate its paramount leader, Kim Jung-Un, and President Donald Trump was informed of the craft’s deployment and purpose.
Turber’s testimony is important since it explains the origins and performance of the Tic Tac UFOs that major media outlets began to report in detail back on December 16, 2017, after the New York Times and Politico covered the issue in major stories.
According to Turber, the media’s tepid response to the revelation was a major factor in him coming forward. He insists that rather than being a whistleblower, he has been encouraged to come forward by official sources to reveal his testimony and prepare the public for the major revelations that lie ahead.
Unfortunately, Turber has not shared any official documents confirming his Air Force career and work with different military contractors. This is puzzling since other former USAF personnel and corporate employees, such as Edgar Fouche, have publicly released such documentation when they have come forward to reveal their insider knowledge of the TR-3B and Aurora Project without suffering any repercussions.
What Turber did share with his interviewer, Jim Breslo, was data from the Google Maps timeline feature that showed that on November 18, 2017, his phone recorded a flight from Ontario, California to the US East Coast that lasted one hour and 24 minutes [timestamp 1:17:40]. Turber alluded to the incident as objective evidence that he was involved in a highly classified aerospace project at the time but was not able to reveal more details.
The phone data timeline indeed does corroborate his core claim of having worked on classified aerospace projects since it is difficult to explain how anyone using a conventional aviation transport can travel from the West to East coast in 84 minutes. Nevertheless, the Google Maps travel timeline isn’t sufficient to corroborate what his “official” sources told him, so hopefully Turber will share some of his documentation to substantiate his military and aerospace career.
Breslo brought up the remarkable similarity between the flight performance of the Tic Tac craft and a Navy patent for a Hybrid Aerospace Underwater Craft (HAUC) which I have previously discussed, and which Brett Tingley and Tyler Rogoway, writing for The Drive, have connected to the Tic Tac incidents.
The Navy patent explains how the craft is able to travel without friction under water and through the air by creating a quantum vacuum bubble around it: as explained by Tingley:
In the Navy’s patent application for the HAUC, it’s claimed that the radical abilities of propulsion and maneuverability are made possible thanks to an incredibly powerful electromagnetic field that essentially creates a quantum vacuum around itself that allows it to ignore aerodynamic or hydrodynamic forces and remove its own inertial mass from the equation. Thus, the ability to generate such high-frequency electromagnetic waves is key to the alleged abilities of this theoretical hybrid craft that can soar near effortlessly through air and water at incredible speeds with little to no resistance or inertia.
Turber dismissed the Navy patent as bogus [timestamp 36:18], yet the principle of a quantum vacuum around the craft being generated by electromagnetic energy makes for a compelling explanation for how such craft could achieve supercavitation when traveling through different mediums such as water, air, and space.
Turber’s testimony is very helpful since it directly points to the Tic Tac craft being part of a USAF secret space program, and that these assets are now in the process of being handed over to the new Space Force, just as predicted in the US Air Secret Space Program: Shifting Extraterrestrial Alliances and Space Force. That means exciting times lie ahead as Space Force unveils the secret space program it has inherited from the USAF.
[Special Note: I will be presenting the revolutionary Navy patents and their relevance to Secret Space Program disclosure at my upcoming Webinar with Portal to Ascension on March 21, 2020. You can register here.]
Earlier this month, Canadian researchers announced they’d discovered a powerful radio signal, emanating from a distant galaxy in bursts every 16 days.
And Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard University’s astronomy department, told Futurism this week that he thinks one possibility is that the signals are coming from an alien civilization.
To be clear, Loeb also acknowledged that the signals — “fast radio bursts,” or FRBs — could be generated by young neutron stars called magnetars, or by another, yet-undiscovered natural phenomenon.
“But at the moment we do not have a smoking gun that clearly indicates the nature of FRBs,” he wrote in an email. “So all possibilities should be considered, including an artificial origin.”
One concrete possibility, he said, is an extraterrestrial civilization using a beam of energy to propel cargo through space — and that the Canadian researchers picking up radiation leaking away from it.
Loeb pointed out that he previously examined that concept in a 2017 paper, however, and found that the energy required to move cargo with energy beams would be absolutely staggering. In fact, he said, such a beam would require about as much energy as the entirety of sunlight that hits the Earth.
“This would require a huge engineering project, far more ambitious than we currently have on Earth,” he wrote. “So the main technological challenge is in the huge power that the radio beam need[s] to carry.”
The Canadian researchers themselves acknowledged, in a followup press release about the findings, that “non-professionals have suggested they are messages from aliens.”
Loeb, though, thinks the possibility is worth seriously considering — in addition, of course, to natural causes. He also pointed out that different FRBs could conceivably be caused by different phenomena.
“An advanced technological civilization is a good approximation to God,” he told the New Yorker at the time. “Suppose you took a cell phone and showed it to a caveperson. The caveperson would say it was a nice rock. The caveperson is used to rocks. So now imagine this object — ‘Oumuamua— being the iPhone and us being the cave people.”
The first flight of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket and Orion crew capsule — and the first big step in putting astronauts back on the moon — was originally scheduled to launch this year, but the mission is now expected to slip to 2021.
A new document from NASA explaining President Donald Trump's fiscal year 2021 budget request for the agency lists the uncrewed test flight, known as Artemis 1, as scheduled to launch in 2021. Although NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and other agency officials have said they expect the mission to be delayed, an updated launch target has not yet been officially announced.
An updated timeline for that mission is currently under review, and NASA expects to present its new plan to Congress about six weeks from now, Doug Loverro, the director of NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, told reporters at a State of NASA event at the Johnson Space Center in Houston on Monday (Feb. 10).
This NASA infographic shows the timeline for the agency's Artemis program. (Click the top right corner to enlarge the image.) (Image credit: NASA)
Despite the delays, NASA is still aiming to put "the first woman and the next man on the moon by 2024" with its Artemis program, Bridenstine said during his State of NASA speech at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi on Monday, repeating a motto that he shares just about every time he has a microphone and an audience.
According to a graphic published in NASA's FY 2021 budget documents, the first crewed flight of SLS and Orion, called Artemis 2, is poised to launch on a lunar flyby mission in 2022, followed by a crewed lunar landing, Artemis 3, in 2024.
An artist's illustration of a lunar lander's ascent vehicle separating from the descent vehicle and departing the lunar surface. (Image credit: NASA)
While NASA prepares to put astronauts on the lunar surface, the agency will also be working to launch the various components of its Lunar Gateway, a small space station that will serve as an orbiting outpost near the moon. To reach the lunar surface, astronauts will first dock with the Gateway in their Orion spacecraft before boarding a lander that will ferry them the rest of the way down to the moon.
So, the Gateway — or at least a few vital components of it — will need to be assembled in lunar orbit before astronauts can land on the moon. The first piece of the Gateway, its power and propulsion element (PPE), is scheduled to launch in 2022. Then, in 2023, NASA plans to launch the habitation and logistics outpost (HALO) module, which will serve as the crew quarters for astronauts at the Gateway.
In this illustration, NASA's Orion spacecraft (left) approaches the Gateway in lunar orbit. (Image credit: NASA)
During the last few months before NASA launches Artemis 3, three additional components will join the Gateway via three separate commercial rocket launches. Those launches will transport a transfer vehicle that will ferry landers from the Gateway to a lower lunar orbit, a descent module that will bring the astronauts to the lunar surface and an ascent module that will bring them back up to the transfer vehicle, which will then return them to the Gateway.
Once all of those pieces are put together in orbit, NASA will have all the infrastructure it needs to send astronauts to the lunar surface, which Loverro said he is confident the agency will do by the end of 2024.
However, some continue to criticize NASA's ambitious timeline for the moon landing. Years of SLS delays aside, the agency has barely started constructing critical elements of the Gateway, and NASA has yet to begin building a human-rated lunar lander.
An artist's depiction of Blue Origin's lunar lander, called Blue Moon.
(Image credit: Blue Origin)
An artist's concept of a Boeing moon lander for astronauts for NASA's Artemis program. (Image credit: Boeing)
The agency solicited proposals for crew landers last fall, and so far Boeing and a team led by Blue Origin have revealed their ideas. Once NASA chooses which lander (or landers) it will use for the Artemis program, construction will begin at the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Meanwhile, Boeing is still working on building the first SLS rocket for Artemis 1, and NASA has requested that the company build at least 10 more SLS rockets for the entire Artemis program. With Artemis, NASA aims to build a sustainable human presence on the lunar surface after the landing in 2024.
New photos that have been released show the heavily-cratered Pallas and why it’s been nicknamed the “golf ball asteroid”. It actually does look like a golf ball because countless impacts created many craters on its surface that were probably caused by its highly unusual orbit.
Numerous large craters are visible on both hemispheres, and a bright spot reminiscent of salt deposits on Ceres is found on the southern one
In order to study the asteroid’s surface and shape, scientists used the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contract Exoplanet Research (or SPHERE) imager on the Very Large Telescope that’s located in the Atacama Desert in Chile.
By studying eleven pictures taken of the surface of Pallas, scientists found a large amount of craters that measured between 18.5 and 75 miles wide (Pallas’ diameter averages around 318 miles). In fact, it’s been impacted so many times that it has approximately twice as many craters as the largest asteroid Ceres and around three times as many as the second-largest asteroid Vesta.
According to the researchers (their paper can be read here), the two huge craters on Pallas, which are located near the south pole and by the equator, show that the asteroid was hit in a sideways impact with projectiles that measured between 37 and 65 miles in diameter. The impact near the equator was so strong that it could have possibly created a “family” of several hundred smaller craters that measure less than 12 miles in width.
Miroslav Broz, who is an astronomer at Charles University in the Czech Republic as well as a co-author of the study, told Space.com, “We performed numerical simulations to determine the most probable age of the family, which is 1.7 billion years, and this should correspond to the surface age of Pallas, or at least a substantial part of it.”
According to the researchers, since Pallas travels through space in a tilted and elongated orbit, that’s probably why it is being impacted by objects at an exceptionally high speed of around 25,725 mph compared to the average speed of approximately 12, 975 mph. Pallas’ odd orbit and fast impacts would explain why it is so heavily cratered. Pictures of Pallas can be seen here.
Pallas
The researchers found another interesting fact about Pallas. They created a 3D model of the asteroid and discovered that it is denser than Ceres but less dense than Vesta which indicates that it has a much bigger rock to ice proportion than Ceres. It also indicates that Pallas has a composition that is quite similar to a type of meteorite that’s called CM chondrite. Chondrites are meteorites that are composed of small round shaped pellets that are called chondrules and they are created when droplets of molten minerals cool off very fast while in space. This new information suggests that the interior of Pallas was never hot enough to create a silicon-heavy rocky core with a water-rich mantle so it probably contains a mixture of ice and rock instead.
Features tracked throughout multiple rotation phase angles are in yellow and named after ancient Greek names of weapons
IS EARTH DUE FOR A MAJOR ASTEROID IMPACT?
Researchers have discovered most of the asteroids that are about a kilometers in size, but are now on the hunt for those that are about 140m - as they could cause catastrophic damage.
Although nobody knows when the next big impact will occur, scientists have found themselves under pressure to predict - and intercept - its arrival.
Artist's impression pictured
'Sooner or later we will get... a minor or major impact,' said Rolf Densing, who heads the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt
It may not happen in our lifetime, he said, but 'the risk that Earth will get hit in a devastating event one day is very high.'
A new study was able to uncover why an asteroid that's big enough to wipe out an entire planet is covered in impact craters. The researchers attributed the massive asteroid's violent history to its natural orbit.
A study recently published in the journal Nature centred on Pallas, which is one of the largest known space rocks in the asteroid belt. It has an estimated diameter of 512 kilometres and is regarded as the largest asteroid that's not yet visited by a spacecraft.
Impact Craters On Pallas
Asteroid collisionNASA
Since it has not yet been observed up-close, researchers used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile to collect data on the asteroid. They discovered that the surface of the massive spherical asteroid is covered in craters that are about 29 to 121 kilometres wide. Based on computer simulations and data collected by the VLT, the researchers estimated that Pallas three times as many impact craters as Vesta, which is the second-largest known asteroid.
Due to the shape of the asteroid and the number of its craters, it looks like a giant golf ball floating in space. "Pallas is heavily cratered," the study's co-author Miroslav Broz told Space.com. "Its surface might resemble a golf ball."
Artist's rendering of asteroids and space dustNASA/JPL-Caltech
Pallas's Unusual Orbit
According to the researchers, most of the craters that collided with Pallas hit the asteroid while travelling sideways. Previous computer simulations revealed that the asteroids that pelted Pallas were travelling at speeds of over 40,000 kilometres per hour. This figure far exceeds the average speed of impacts in the asteroid belt, which is less than 21,000 kilometres per hour.
The researchers noted that Pallas' unusual orbit might have caused impact velocity and direction of the collisions. Through their observations, the researchers discovered that the massive asteroid travels at a tilted and elongated orbit.
The researchers explained that the asteroid's orbital inclination and eccentricity could be the main reasons why other space rocks are hitting it at high speeds. Since high-speed impacts are more likely to cause craters than slow ones, this could also explain why Pallas appears more pockmarked than other known asteroids such as Ceres and Vesta.
NASA Found Exotic Organic Molecules on Ancient Space Object 'Arrokoth'
NASA Found Exotic Organic Molecules on Ancient Space Object 'Arrokoth'
The latest data from ancient "Arrokoth," the most distant object ever visited by spacecraft, supports the idea that it's covered in organic molecules called "tholins" and gives us a window into deep cosmic time.
As NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft presses on into the dark and distant reaches of the Kuiper Belt, scientists have been exploring the trove of data collected during its recent encounter with Arrokoth, a mysterious and ancient space rock that, at 4.1 billion miles from Earth, is the farthest object ever visited by a spacecraft.
This week, three papers publishedin the journalScience report new findings on the ancient object that give us a unique window into deep cosmic time, including insights into how it formed and details on the exotic organic molecules that give it its red color.
With roughly ten times more data than was available for an initial report last year, the studies explore the distant rock’s geology, composition, and history in far greater detail. Among the highlights are a clearer picture of how Arrokoth formed in the early solar nebula, a cloud of gas and dust that surrounded the sun 4.5 billion years ago, and details of its chemistry, which seems to include both simple organic molecules and “tholins,” a class of carbon-based polymers that are believed to be prevalent throughout the Kuiper Belt.
The hazy ring is an artist’s view of the Kuiper Belt. The rocks that populate it revolve about the sun. They are known as KBOs, short for Kuiper Belt objects. The New Horizons spacecraft, which launched in 2006, has been bringing photos of the solar system’s outer reaches, including Pluto in 2015.
NASA; ADAPTED BY L. STEENBLIK HWANG
Overall, the new findings support the idea that Arrokoth is a primordial time capsule that can help lift the fog on the earliest chapters of our cosmic history.
Most of the new clues to Arrokoth’s origin story come from its outward appearance. As New Horizons approached Arrokoth in the lead up to the flyby, it became clear the object was bi-lobed; a “contact binary” that formed when two rocks touched. Using numerical models, a team led by astronomer Will McKinnon of Washington University in St. Louis has now fleshed out the picture further. Their results suggest the merger was less of a collision and more a very gentle joining of two objects that co-evolved as a cloud of nebula material collapsed under its own gravity.
According to McKinnon, the idea that objects like Arrokoth can form from collapsing dust clouds has been around for a while. But without seeing one up close, it was hard to rule out other theories, like a series of more violent collisions. With the alignment and shape of Arrokoth’s two lobes matching this calmer formation model, astronomers can be more confident that other Kuiper Belt Objects formed similarly.
Three images of the space rock. Methane or nitrogen ice may give the this Kuiper Belt object its reddish color.
SWRI/JHU-APL/NASA
A separate paper focused on Arrokoth’s geology argues that its cratering history is consistent with an object that formed over 4 billion years ago in the solar nebula. Finally, Arrokoth’s relatively uniform chemical composition and color support the idea that it evolved from a single blob of particles rather than a more jumbled assortment of rocks.
“All the characteristics of Arrokoth fit this theory,” McKinnon said. “And they don’t fit the other theory of something building up from small to large in a sequence of impacts.”
“I think Arrokoth is really neat because we’ve never seen an object that looks the way it would have right after forming by this mechanism,” said Lowell Observatory astronomer Will Grundy, who led up the analysis of Arrokoth’s chemistry.
But while Grundy’s results help solve the mystery of how Arrokoth formed, they also raise new questions about where the space rock’s exotic organic compounds came from.
As early as 2016 scientists had hints that Arrokoth was red. A study published last year confirmed this to be the case. At the time, the researchers’ best explanation was that Arrokoth was rich in tholins, complex organic polymers that are reddish in color and form in chilly outer solar system environments—including, scientists think, in Pluto’s atmosphere—when simpler carbon-bearing molecules interact with UV light or cosmic rays.
The new analysis, which examines far more of the data collected by the color camera and infrared spectrometer on New Horizons’ Ralph Instrument, supports the idea that Arrokoth is chock full of tholins. The study also found that Arrokoth is rich in methanol ice, a simpler organic molecule, and surprisingly little, if any, water ice.
Unpacking the history of Arrokoth’s exotic organics offers a different sort of window into deep time. Tholins, Grundy says, could have formed on Arrokoth’s surface or in the solar nebula. Or they could hail from even further back in time, to the giant molecular cloud that collapsed to form our Sun.
Ashley Walker, an aspiring astrochemist who did her senior thesis studying tholins on Saturn’s moon Titan with Johns Hopkins planetary scientist Sarah Hörst, said that even though we expect to these molecules to form in the outer solar system, “it’s really intriguing to see them in further out, colder places.” Sleuthing out their origins in the ancient proto-solar system, she said, “can give us clues to our very own Earth.”
While these latest papers “wrap up the [Arrokoth] encounter with a nice bow,” as McKinnon put it, the story isn’t over for New Horizons. The spacecraft continues to sail deeper into the Kuiper Belt on its way to interstellar space. And while there are no further encounters on the agenda for now, this summer, astronomers will use the Subaru telescope in Hawaii to scan the sky for any additional objects in the spacecraft’s vicinity. If they find one, they might be able to arrange a third rendezvous.
“It’s a low probability, but if we don’t look, the chances of us finding an object are zero,” McKinnon said. “So, we’re going to look, and we’ll tell you in a few months if we’ve found a target. It’s not over till it’s over.”
If you like to lie on an inflatable raft in your swimming pool and scan the night sky for UFOs, you may want to read this before you jump in again. A large triangular UFO was seen recently by multiple witnesses hovering over swimming pools at a sports and social club in Mechita, Argentina, on what was described as an extremely hot night (it’s summer in Argentina). The next morning, a club worker discovered that water had been splashed out of the pools and, despite an entire night of intense heat, had not evaporated. Was the UFO attracted to the pools? Did it splash the water? What could it have done to give the water such power?
“They were 10:30 pm on the last Friday 22nd, I was next to a friend kneading pizzas inside his house with tremendous heat so I decided to leave and when I leaned against a car, I looked up and saw a huge object in the form of black triangle darker than the sky and with red tips. It moved from left to right and made no noise, there was no engine or turbine sound and it was located about 50 meters above the trees. ” (Google translation)
Witness Diego Sarquís told La Trocha what he saw on that hot January night – a triangle “about 10 or 15 meters in diameter” (33 to 50 feet) hovering 164 feet above the club’s large pools and making no noise. He called for friends who came out but may or may not have seen it “traveling very slow and rotating with an apparent SE-NW heading, going toward Junín.” Junín is about 90 km (56 miles) from Mechita – both cities are in the province of Buenos Aires and Junín has had a number of UFO sightings, according to Luis Burgos, a UFO investigator for FAO (Argentine Foundation for Ovnilogy). He talked to both Diego and other witnesses he uncovered.
“In Diego’s observation, the object is completely silent and when this family sees it about 600 or 700 meters from the place, it already perceives a rather intense noise as if it were a helicopter. It is the only difference there would be between both visions. This is not a contradiction since it could have been a bit of propulsion or the escape of the object that Diego did not perceive, because he was completely silent when he could see it.” (Google translation)
The most intriguing witness by far was a manager in charge of the pools at the Mechita Swim Club. She gave Burgos a photograph taken the morning after the UFO appeared showing the concrete surrounding the pools. Something splashed water out of the pools and, despite this being many hours later and the temperature being extremely hot, none of the water had evaporated. (See the photo here) Burgos explained to Noticia Baires that Argentine UFO’s are most seen above water (70% of them are over water), particularly swimming pools.
“It happens that when objects approach land or produce a landing, they are looking for something . When we do a zonal survey, the first thing we look for, beyond the witnesses, the geographical location and the environment, are the poles of attraction . We find swimming pools, Australian tanks, mills, laurel trees, eucalyptus mountains, railways, power lines.” (Google translation)
The “Mechita triangle” appeared over and splashed water out of swimming pools, not nearby lagoons. Burgos also noted that this geographic area, particularly along nearby Route 5, has historically had “a lot of UFO activity.”
“There in Bragado people remember the observation that the famous director, composer and pianist José Basso had in 1958 , who traveled with his orchestra one night in the vicinity of Bragado and observed a flying plate practically perched on the ground . Some of his musicians approached because the bus driver stopped the march and saw an object practically landed in a field. On the way back they stopped at the same place and noticed that there was a large area of calcined grass that was where the device had been. That case became very famous because the witness was very well known, but cases like that there are a lot.” (Google translation)
“Ufos and Water: Physical Effects of Ufos on Water Through Accounts by Eyewitnesses” by Carl W. Feindt contains many accounts of UFOs above, below, entering and exiting water, and the recent Tic Tac UFOs seen by Navy pilots were over the ocean. One popular theory is that these spaceships are water-fueled. However, the only water that seemed to be lost in the “Mechita triangle” pool incident was that splashed out of the pool. Was the UFO spooked by Diego Sarquís and the other witnesses? Could it have accidentally dumped something during the process into the pool, causing the water to resist evaporation? None of the accounts say the water was sampled and analyzed, and there don’t appear to be any follow-up investigations.
That’s too bad. This is one of the closest and most unusual triangle UFO sightings. Was it alien or of Earth? Whichever caused it, what happened to the water in the pool? Is what Burgos found enough to make you quit watching for UFOs from your pool or hot tub? What about bathtubs under skylights? Standing in a puddle? Snow? Drinking a cold glass of H2O? Should astronomers double down on searching for water on other planets?
Ten things we’ve learned about the sun from NASA’s SDO this decade
Ten things we’ve learned about the sun from NASA’s SDO this decade
This image from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory on March 16, 2015, shows two dark spots, called coronal holes. The lower coronal hole, a polar coronal hole, was one of the biggest observed in decades.
Credit: NASA/SDO
In February 2020, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory—SDO—is celebrating its 10th year in space, reports Phys.org.
Over the past decade the spacecraft has kept a constant eye on the sun, studying how the sun creates solar activity and drives space weather—the dynamic conditions in space that impact the entire solar system, including Earth.
Since its launch on Feb. 11, 2010, SDO has collected millions of scientific images of our nearest star, giving scientists new insights into its workings.
SDO’s measurements of the sun—from the interior to the atmosphere, magnetic field, and energy output—have greatly contributed to our understanding of our closest star.
SDO’s images have also become iconic—if you’ve ever seen a close up of activity on the sun, it was likely from an SDO image.
SDO’s long career in space has allowed it to witness nearly an entire solar cycle—the sun’s 11-year cycle of activity.
Here are a few highlights of SDO’s accomplishments over the years.
SDO has witnessed countless astounding flares—giant outbursts of plasma released from the solar surface—many of which have become iconic images of the ferocity our nearest star. In its first year and a half, SDO saw nearly 200 solar flares, which allowed scientists to spot a pattern. They noticed that around 15% of the flares had a "late phase flare" that would follow minutes to hours after the initial flare. By studying this special class, scientists gained a better understanding of just how much energy is produced when the sun erupts.
Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
2. Solar Tornadoes
In February 2012, SDO captured images showing strange plasma tornados on the solar surface. Later observations found these tornadoes, which were created by magnetic fields spinning the plasma, could rotate at speeds up to 186,000 miles per hour. On Earth, tornadoes only reach speeds of 300 miles per hour.
3. Giant Waves
The churring sea of plasma on the solar surface can create giant waves that travel around the sun at up to 3 million miles per hour. Theses waves, named EIT waves after an instrument of the same name on the Solar and Heliophysics Observatory spacecraft that first discovered them, were imaged at high resolution by SDO in 2010. The observations showed for the first time how the waves move across the surface. Scientists suspect these waves are driven by coronal mass ejections, which spew clouds of plasma off the surface of the sun into the solar system.
This video, assembled from images taken by NASA’s SDO spacecraft, shows possible plasma tornadoes over a 30-hour period. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
4. Combustible Comets
Over the years, SDO has watched two comets fly by the sun. In December 2011, scientist watched as Comet Lovejoy managed to survive the intense heating as it passed 516,000 miles above the solar surface. Comet ISON in 2013 didn't survive its encounter. Through observations such as these, SDO has provided scientists with new information about how the sun interacts with comets.
5. Global Circulation
Having no solid surface, the entire sun is continually flowing due to the intense heat trying to escape and the rotation of the sun. Moving about at the mid-latitudes are large-scale circulation patterns called Meridonial circulation. SDO's observations revealed that these circulations are much more complex than scientists initially thought and are linked to sunspot production. These circulation patterns may even explain why at times one hemisphere might have more sunspots than another.
Comet Lovejoy is seen here exiting from behind the right side of the sun, after an hour of travel through its closest approach to the sun. By tracking how the comet interacts with the sun's atmosphere, the corona, and how material from the tail moves along the sun's magnetic field lines, solar scientists hope to learn more about the corona. This movie was filmed by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in 171 angstrom wavelength, which is typically shown in yellow. Credit: NASA/SDO
6. Predicting the Future
The sun's outpouring of material from coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, and the solar wind speed across the solar system. When they interact with Earth's magnetic environment, they can induce space weather, which can be hazardous to spacecraft and astronauts. Using data from SDO, NASA scientists have worked on modeling the path of a CME as it moves across the solar system in order to predict its potential effect on Earth. The long baseline of solar observations has also helped scientists form additional machine-learning models to try to predict when the sun might release a CME.
7. Coronal Dimmings
The sun's wispy superheated outer atmosphere—the corona—sometimes dims. Scientists studying coronal dimming have found that they are linked to CMEs, which are the main drivers of the severe space weather events that can damage satellites and harm astronauts. Using a statistical analysis of the large number of events seen with SDO, scientists were able to calculate the mass and velocity of Earth-directed CMEs—the most dangerous type. By linking coronal dimming to the size of CMEs, scientists hope to be able to study the space weather effects around other stars, which are too distant to directly measure their CMEs.
Forced magnetic reconnection, caused by a prominence from the Sun, was seen for the first time in images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO. This image shows the Sun on May 3, 2012, with the inset showing a close-up of the reconnection event imaged by SDO’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly instrument, where the signature X-shape is visible. Credit: NASA/SDO/Abhishek Srivastava/IIT(BHU)
8. Death and Birth of a Solar Cycle
With a decade of observations, SDO has now seen nearly a complete 11-year solar cycle. Starting near the beginning of Solar Cycle 24, SDO watched as the sun's activity ramped up to solar maximum and then faded to the current ongoing solar minimum. These multiyear observations help scientists understand signs that signal the decline of one solar cycle and the onset of the next.
9. Polar Coronal Holes
At times the sun's surface is marked by large dark patches called coronal holes where extreme ultraviolet emission is low. Linked to the sun's magnetic field, the holes follow the solar cycle, increasing at the solar maximum. When they form at the top and the bottom on the sun they're called polar coronal holes and SDO scientists were able to use their disappearance to determine when the sun's magnetic field reversed—a key indicator of when the sun reaches solar maximum.
Capturing an image in 10 different wavelengths of light every 12 seconds, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory — SDO — has provided an unprecedentedly clear picture of how massive explosions on the sun grow and erupt ever since its launch on Feb. 11, 2010. The imagery is also captivating, allowing one to watch the constant ballet of solar material through the sun's atmosphere, the corona. This year marks the 10th anniversary of SDO's launch and the start of its decade watching the sun. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
10. New Magnetic Explosions
At the end of the decade in December 2019, SDO observations enabled scientists to discover a whole new type of magnetic explosion. This special type—called spontaneous magnetic reconnection (versus previously observed more general forms of magnetic reconnection)—helped confirm a decades-old theory. It also may help scientists understand why the solar atmosphere is so hot, better predict space weather, and lead to breakthroughs in controlled fusion and lab plasma experiments.
In its 10th year, SDO will be joined by a new joint ESA-NASA mission, Solar Orbiter. With an inclined orbit, Solar Orbiter will be able to see the polar regions for which SDO has limited coverage. Solar Orbiter also has complementary instruments that will allow the two missions to work together to create 3-D images of structures below the visible surface of the sun, giving scientists an even greater understanding of solar activity in the years to come.
APReconstructie van een mannelijke en een vrouwelijke neanderthaler.
WETENSCHAP Wetenschappers hebben sporen gevonden van een onbekende voorouder van de mens in de genomen van West-Afrikaanse volkeren. Dat is bewijsmateriaal voor een ‘spookpopulatie’ die een half miljoen jaar geleden in Afrika leefde en waarvan de genen vandaag nog altijd terug te vinden zijn in de mens.
Onderzoekers University of California in Los Angeles ontdekten in de genomen van vier West-Afrikaanse populaties dat tot een vijfde van hun DNA afkomstig bleek van de ontbrekende, onontdekte voorouders. Genetici vermoeden dat de voorouders van de moderne West-Afrikanen tienduizenden jaren geleden zich genetisch vermengden met een archaïsche bevolking die nog niet bekend is en die zich nog voor de splitsing tussen neanderthalers en de moderne mens zou hebben afgescheiden. Net zoals de oer-Europeanen ooit paarden met neanderthalers.
Vandaag kennen we nog enkel de moderne mens, maar ooit liepen er op aarde verschillende mensensoorten rond. Als die elkaar tegenkwamen, waren seksuele contacten tussen beide niet uitgesloten. Als gevolg daarvan dragen wij hedendaagse Europese mensen in ons DNA nog altijd een beetje genen van de neanderthalers, zoals oorspronkelijke Australiërs, Polynesiërs en Melanesiërs die van de Denisovamens nog in kleine mate in zich hebben.
Eerdere studies wezen er al op dat een andere oude mensensoort ooit Afrika bevolkte, maar wetenschappers vonden nooit fossielen of DNA om het te bewijzen. Onderzoekers Arun Durvasula en Sriram Sankararaman lieten nu statistische technieken los op 405 genomen uit vier West-Afrikaanse volkeren om na te gaan hoe waarschijnlijk het was dat de aanvoer van genen door kruising in het verre verleden had plaatsgevonden. Uit hun analyse bleek dit wel degelijk in alle gevallen zo te zijn.
Daarna zochten ze in de Afrikaanse genomen naar stukjes DNA die er anders uitzagen dan de moderne menselijke genen. Zo konden ze er DNA-sequenties uithalen die heel waarschijnlijk van een of andere voorouder kwamen. Vergelijking met de genen van neanderthalers en van Denisovamensen leerde dat het DNA van een onbekende uitgestorven mensensoort moest komen.
Spookgenen met grote impact
“Ze hebben blijkbaar een behoorlijk grote impact gehad op de genomen van de moderne personen die we hebben bestudeerd”, aldus Sankararaman over die onbekende genen. “Ze vertegenwoordigen 2% tot 19% van hun genetische afkomst.” De vier bestudeerde volkeren kwamen uit drie landen: twee uit Nigeria, een uit Sierra Leone en een uit Gambia.
De wetenschappers schatten dat de spookpopulatie zich tussen 360.000 en 1 miljoen jaar geleden afsplitste van de voorouders van neanderthalers en van de moderne mens. De groep van misschien 20.000 individuen zou zich dan ergens tijdens de afgelopen 124.000 jaar voortgeplant hebben samen met de voorouders van moderne West-Afrikanen.
Sankararaman voegt eraan toe dat dit niet de enige verklaring is: “De kans is groot dat het ware plaatje veel ingewikkelder is”. Er kunnen ook verscheidene golven van voortplanting geweest zijn over een periode van duizenden jaren. Of misschien waren er verschillende populaties van tot nu toe onbekende prehistorische voorouders.
De onderzoekers willen zich nu storten op de functies van die oude genen. Mogelijk hebben moderne West-Afrikanen ze behouden omdat het hen hielp om te overleven en zich voort te planten.
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BUITENAARDS BEZOEK VOOR AMERIKAANSE LUCHTMACHTBASIS? ( VIDEO )
BUITENAARDS BEZOEK VOOR AMERIKAANSE LUCHTMACHTBASIS? ( VIDEO )
De Amerikaanse luchtmachtbasis in de buurt van Las Vegas is bij kenners beroemd vanwege de buitenaardsen die daar zijn gelegerd. Het is dan misschien ook niet zo vreemd dat er bij Nellis Airforce Base een groot ruimteschip opduikt.
Al heel lang doen er verhalen de ronde over buitenaardsen die zouden zijn gevestigd op de Amerikaanse luchtmachtbasis Nellis AFB, vlakbij Las Vegas in de stad Nevadea.
Grote ruimteschepen zouden enorm opvallen en wanneer er één van een kilometer lengte door talloze mensen zou worden waargenomen, dan zouden we een situatie krijgen die vergelijkbaar is met wat er in 1938 gebeurde door een hoorspel van Orson Welles waarin melding werd gemaakt van de landing van Marsmannetjes.
Dus, wat doen die schepen? Die verbergen zich, door zich onzichtbaar te maken, cloaken in het Engels. Een manier om dat te doen is om zich voor te doen als een wolk of zich verbergen in een bestaande wolk.
En dan krijg je iets wat er als volgt uit ziet:
Een beeld dat we al veel vaker hebben gezien: een wolkeloze lucht met daarin één (grote) wolk die daar niet thuis hoort.
Deze opname is gemaakt op een weg die men de "extraterrestrial highway" noemt, op een plek die ze noemen in "the middle of nowhere", op zo'n 150 kilometer afstand van Las Vegas, met daar vlakbij de Nellis AFB.
Volgens de berekeningen van Scott Waring is dit ruimteschip ongeveer een kilometer lang en volgt het de bergketen die je ziet in de achtergrond. En wanneer je dat doet, kom je rechtstreeks uit bij Nellis AFB.
Voor hen die denken dat zoiets niet kan, hierna nog even een voorbeeld uit een eerder artikel: van een wolk in een stralend blauwe lucht die geen wolk blijkt te zijn.
Een prachtig voorbeeld van een vermomming van een buitenaards ruimteschip vinden we in een waarneming dat is ingediend bij Mufon onder nummer 91551 door een man uit Ashburn in de Amerikaanse staat Virginia.
De man in kwestie is bouwvakker en stond op 15 maart van dit jaar op de vijfde verdieping van een gebouw in aanbouw, toen hij besloot een foto te nemen. Hij was het verder vergeten en pas op 21 april heeft hij de foto bekeken.
Tot zijn grote verbazing ontdekte hij een wel hele vreemde wolk in de lucht. De foto die hij nam ziet er zo uit.
Wanneer je de wolk dichterbij haalt, dan zie je de bekende UFO vorm en ook dat het allesbehalve een wolk is.
Ship Found On Mars Using Google Map, UFO Sighting News.
Ship Found On Mars Using Google Map, UFO Sighting News.
Date of discovery: February 12, 2020
Location of discovery: Mars
Source: Google Mars map
Google coordinates: 0°51'6.25"S 18°30'21.02"W
While searching Google Mars map, I found something that just was irritating...because it shouldn't be there and yet...it was. I found a ship with structures along it sailing through the sand. I am confident that these are structures sticking up from the ship. Its possible that this ship was taken from Earth and left here when they were done with it. Thousands of ships have been lost at sea, never again being seen. This would explain some of those loses. The ships metallic grey metal is shiny and stands out really well, much like a WWI or WWII battleship. The back part of the ship is partly buried under the sand, so it is pointy like the front...just partly hidden.
This could also be proof of an ancient ocean on Mars. This could be a sea vessel that they used long ago and it kept its shape. Perhaps they used some kind of rust proof material that cannot degrade.
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UFO Fleet Seen During Overcast Weather At Yuma, Arizona, Video, UFO Sighing News.
UFO Fleet Seen During Overcast Weather At Yuma, Arizona, Video, UFO Sighing News.
Date of sighting: Jan 20, 2020 Location of sighting:Yuma, Arizona, USA This video was posted by my friend on Youtube going by the name of Willease. He's a trustworthy guy who insures he posts original and authentic footage. This UFO fleet was recorded by a eyewitness who watch as one by one the lights in the sky disappeared. UFOs such as these have been seen around the world from Taipei city to Rapid City, South Dakota, similar sightings have occurred. However we have to take into account that there is a Marine Core Air Station in Yuma which could be dropping flares over their 3,000 acres of military land. Its hard to say unless the eyewitness went in that direction to find out. I really wish he did or gave us some indication of the exact location. Can these be UFOs? Oh hell yeah, such reports, videos and photos of this type of glowing alien craft exist going back many decades. I just cant see the military flying and dropping flares in such bad overcast foggy weather...so I'm calling it a UFO fleet. Also the fact that these lights are in triangle formation makes me confident its not flares. Flares are most often dropped in lines. Scott C. Waring
Star Wars Ship Seen About Taipei 101 Building, Taiwan, Feb 2020, UFO Sighting News.
Star Wars Ship Seen About Taipei 101 Building, Taiwan, Feb 2020, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Feb 2, 2020 Location of sighting: Taipei, Taiwan Source:Me Hey guys, sorry I forgot to post this on my site, but I did post it on my twitter feed. I was looking outside the window and took a picture of the famous Taipei 101 building, once the world 2nd tallest, and noticed a strangely shaped cloud above the building. The could resembles the Star Wars Tie fighter ship used by Darth Vader. After I took the photo, I realized the cloud may be a ship, so I switched my phone to video, but before I could aim...the cloud disappeared. Now I watched this area and never saw any other cloud disappear with such speed. I say I had less than 30 seconds before it was gone. I'm sorry, I just don't believe it. Its not a cloud at all. Only a cloaked alien ship could disappear that fast. As I have said before, UFOs often cloak and become invisible, but also make themselves look like clouds in order to get up close and personal...to see with their own eyes, instead of computer screens. Yet, time and time again, people catch this cloud cloaked UFOs. It appears that aliens are less intelligent than we give them credit for. Why would aliens want to visit Taipei? Its the capital of Taiwan, its 30 min flight from China, so they may be checking to see how neighboring countries deal with the threat of the coronavirus. Its an amazing city all around. Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
Fast moving V-shaped UFO caught on NASA live stream
Fast moving V-shaped UFO caught on NASA live stream
During NASA's ISS live stream on February 10, 2020 a glowing V-shaped UFO appears on the horizon and flies at high speed through space until it disappears.
It is certainly not a reflection or some sort of flare since the recording clearly shows that the UFO is moving at high speed from the right to the left on the screen.
It's always the question, whether this v-shaped UFO belongs to the secret space fleet or if it is of extraterrestrial origin.
Over 60 Percent of American People Want The Government To Make UFO-Related Information Public
Over 60 Percent of American People Want The Government To Make UFO-Related Information Public
The majority of American people want government information on UFOs to be released to the public. Piplsay study revealed that 61 percent of people want the U.S. government to release any information it might have on aliens and UFOs to the public.
The study also found that 58 percent of people believe the government investigates aliens and UFOs, and 27 percent think the sightings are real.
UFO enthusiasts express their support on what the Americans want on UFO disclosure. They want the government to release the files from Area 51 and elsewhere. They are excited for the information to flow through the streets and into the minds of the people.
People are becoming more interested in UFOs after the Navy videos showing a “tic-tac” UFO became public.
How about you? Do you think UFOs and aliens are real? Some people do not have a clue and others don’t know anything more than the general public does.
UFO does not naturally mean it is an alien. It just means an unidentified flying object. However, it is possibly ET-related as well.
Either way, the majority of the people want the government to live on the edge, declassify everything and embrace the chaos.
Zealandia, the world’s 8th continent, linked to the forging of the Pacific Ring of Fire
Zealandia, the world’s 8th continent, linked to the forging of the Pacific Ring of Fire
A map of Zealandia. Credit: Nick Mortimer et al.
In 2017, geologists made a convincing case that Earth has, in fact, eight continents if you also include Zealandia. Although it is mostly beneath the ocean, with the exception of New Zealand and New Caledonia, Zealandia is mostly made of continental crust rather than the magnesium- and iron-rich ocean crust. For this reason, many believe Zealandia qualifies as a continent.
Now, in a new study, researchers have revealed how the long-lost undersea continent evolved since its formation. In the process, they found that Zealandia’s upheaval may have been responsible for the birth of the Pacific Ring of Fire.
Forging the Ring of Fire
A new continent in the 21st century? Did it just pop overnight? “This is not a sudden discovery, but a gradual realization,” wrote 11 geologists who authored a 2017 paper published in GSA Today, recommending that ‘Zealandia’ be considered a continent.
The researchers claim that New Zealand and New Caledonia aren’t just some islands chains — they’re just 5 percent of what’s visible above the ocean’s surface, the rest of the 5-million-square-kilometer continent is submerged underwater. That makes Zealandia about as big as greater India. It would also be the ‘youngest, thinnest, and most submerged’ of the continents,’ according to the authors of the 2017 study.
Zealandia itself isn’t something new. It was coined by one of the authors of the 2017 paper, Bruce Luyendyk, a geophysicist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, back in 1995. However, originally, Zealandia was used to describe New Zealand, New Caledonia, and a collection of submerged pieces and slices of crust that broke off a region of Gondwana, the supercontinent from 200 million years ago.
“If we could pull the plug on the oceans, it would be clear to everybody that we have mountain chains and a big, high-standing continent,” said Nick Mortimer, a geologist at GNS Science.
Yet, we still know very little about the submerged continent. But a new study suggests that the story Zealandia is even more amazing than meets the eye.
An international team of researchers recovered sediments from drilling beneath the ocean floor during a 2017 expedition, then sent them to the lab for analysis. Some of the sediments below the Tasman Sea were laid down as long ago as 100 million years ago.
The entire expedition lasted nine weeks and involved 32 scientists from all over the world onboard the research vessel JOIDES Resolution. This wasn’t a walk in the park, though — the researchers had to drill as a deep as 5 km (3.1 miles) using a drill that weighed 300 tonnes.
Encased inside the sediments are tiny fossils, which the researchers used in order to determine the elevation of the sediments when they were deposited. This way, the researchers hoped, they might be able to find out why Zealandia is so different from all the other continents.
Sites where scientists with the International Ocean Discovery Program drilled for sediments in Zealandia. Credit: JOIDES Resolution Science Operator.
Three sites in the northern region of the continent had the kind of fossils that indicated a shallow reef ecosystem between 35 million and 50 million years ago. Perhaps, some of the areas were terrestrial during that time. Today, these sites are found smack in the middle of the Tasman Sea, close to the Lord Howe Rise deep-sea plateau.
Close to the New Caledonia Trough, the fossils contained plankton species known to inhabit deeper waters. This indicates that the elevation of Zealandia had dropped in the 35- to 50-million-year time frame.
The authors of the new study suspect that after northern Zealandia rose and the New Caledonia Trough subsided, the entire continent sunk another 1 km beneath the sea.
Since the 1970s, the prevailing theory of Zealandia’s formation claimed that its low profile is due to the thinning of its crust after it separated from the supercontinent Gondwana about 85 million years ago. However, these latest findings presented by the expedition of scientists show that portions of the Zealandia rose by 1-2 km while others subsided about the same amount.
Rupert Sutherland, geophysicist at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington and co-author of the new study, claims that this topographic upheaval may be due to the reactivation of ancient faults linked to the formation of the Pacific Ring of Fire — a region known for its relatively frequent earthquakes and volcanic activity
“Although subduction drives Earth’s plate tectonic cycle, scientists don’t yet understand how it starts,” Dr. Sutherland said.
“One of the amazing things about our observations is that they reveal the early signs of the Ring of Fire were almost simultaneous throughout the western Pacific,” he added.
“Because this timing predates the global tectonic plate reorganization, scientists need to find an explanation for how subduction began across such a broad area in such a short time.”
Sutherland and colleagues have proposed a radical new mechanism that explains these observations: a ‘subduction rupture event’ — a massive but super-slow earthquake, in the researchers’ words. This geological event essentially resurrected ancient subduction faults that had laid dormant for millions of years.
“We don’t know where or why, but something happened that locally induced movement, and when the fault started to slip, like in an earthquake the motion rapidly spread sideways onto adjacent parts of the fault system and then around the western Pacific,” Dr. Sutherland said.
“But unlike an earthquake, the subduction rupture event may have taken more than a million years to unfold.”
Although the ‘subduction rupture event’ is still a new theory, the evidence so far suggests that such events can quite possibly alter the geography of continents. What’s more, the same events that triggered changes in Zealandia may have to the formation of the Ring of Fire subduction zones around the western Pacific.
“Ultimately, Zealandia’s sedimentary record should help us determine how and why this event happened and what the consequences were for animals, plants, and global climate,” Dr. Sutherland said.
“The process has no modern analogue and because the subduction rupture event is linked to a time of rapid, global plate tectonic change, other instances of such change in the geologic record may imply that comparable events have occurred in the past,” Dr. Sutherland said.
“Geologists generally assume that understanding the present is the key to understanding the past. But at least in this instance, this may not hold.”
View the high resolution version of this incredible map by clicking here
For centuries, Mars has been mythically defined by its characteristic red appearance.
In Babylonian astronomy, Mars was named after Nergal, the deity of fire, war, and destruction. In Chinese and Japanese texts, the planet was known as 火星, the fire star.
Although this unique reddish hue has been a key defining characteristic of Mars in culture for centuries, today we now know that it’s the iron oxide soil of the Martian landscape that makes it the “Red Planet” – and that there is much more to Mars than its color upon closer observation.
Above, today’s map, posted and created by Reddit user /hellofromthemoon, brings together the data from centuries of observation and the numerous missions to the Red Planet to map out its geology on a grand scale.
A Red Dot in the Sky
Egyptian astronomers first observed the planet Mars four thousand years ago and named it “Horus-the-red.” Babylonian astronomers marked its course through the night sky to track the passage of time. But it was not until 1610, when Galileo Galilei witnessed Mars with his own eyes through a telescope, that Mars was revealed as a whole other world.
Over the centuries with improving technology, a succession of astronomers observed and crudely mapped out everything from polar ice caps to yellow clouds, and white and dark spots denoting varying elevations across the Martian surface. Some of the earliest maps of Mars date to 1831. But there is only so much you can accurately observe from the surface of the Earth.
On July 14, 1965, NASA successfully received the first up-close images of Mars from the Mariner 4 spacecraft, passing within 9,844 kilometers (6,117 miles) of Mars’ surface. Mariner 4 captured the image of a large ancient crater and confirmed the existence of a thin atmosphere composed largely of carbon dioxide.
Since then, four space agencies have successfully made it to Mars: NASA, the former Soviet Union space program, the European Space Agency and the Indian Space Research Organization. From orbital satellites to surface exploration with robots, each successful mission has brought back important data to develop an evolving picture of the planet.
Here is a complete list of both the successful and failed missions to Mars.
Martian Geology
On Mars, we see volcanoes, canyons, and impact basins much like the ones on Earth. The yellows scattered across the map indicate meteor impacts of varying size while the swaths of red indicate volcanoes and their associated lava flows. The varying colors of brown indicate the cratered highlands and midlands that make up most of the southern hemisphere.
The planet appears asymmetric. Most of the southern hemisphere is heavily cratered and resembles the moon’s highlands. In contrast, the northern hemisphere is sparsely cratered and has many large volcanoes.
Mars is approximately one-half the diameter of the Earth, but both planets have the same amount of dry land. This is because the current surface of Mars has no liquid water.
Mars and Earth are very different planets when it comes to temperature, size, and atmosphere, but geologic processes on the two planets are eerily similar. The sheer size of some landforms on Mars would shadow over similar features on Earth because of the lack of water erosion. This lack of erosion has preserved billion year-old geologic features.
The tallest mountain on Mars and in the solar system is Olympus Mons, and it is two and a half times taller than Mt. Everest. A Martian canyon system, called Valles Marineris, is the length of the entire continental United States and three times deeper than the Grand Canyon.
Mars Colony: Location, Location, Location
The first step to building a colony is to figure out where the best chance of survival is. For Mars, some researchers have identified the planet’s poles, which contain millennia-old ice deposits. These are thought to contain large amounts of ice, which mars settlers could extract and turn into liquid water.
The poles also host other natural resources, such as carbon dioxide, iron, aluminum, silicon and sulfur, which could be used to make glass, brick and plastic. Furthermore, the planet’s atmosphere contains enough hydrogen and methanol for fuel.
Closing the Distance
The map above represents the culmination of centuries of work which we are lucky enough to view here on a computer, conveniently online for us to appreciate and wonder what life’s like on the surface of Mars.
Huge, silent, black triangle or boomerang shaped craft have been reported and even filmed flying over populated areas all across North America and Europe for decades. In the early 1980s, hundreds of nighttime sightings were reported in rural New York. In 1989, ten thousand witnesses watched and photographed several huge black triangle craft fly silently over Belgium. Belgian Air Force F-16 jets couldn’t keep up with the triangles’ virtually impossible maneuvers. In 1997, thousands watched a gigantic triangle-shaped craft fly over the Phoenix night sky. Military officials first said they hadn’t seen anything, and then claimed that it had been a National Guard unit training with flares at night. The public didn’t buy it.
Large black triangle craft were seen over Russia as early as the 1970s. Recently, the mystery triangles have been seen in every US state, flying low and slow over cities. The National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), a private Las Vega organization, has a database of more than 1,000 black triangle reports. NIDS’ Dr. Colm Kelleher headed a four-year investigation of the black triangles. He notes that “These things are huge …football-field size. [S]ometimes they’re stealthy, but a lot of the times they’re flying with extremely bright lights. They’re always silent.” Radar have documented these craft dropping 20,000 feet in a matter of seconds. Said Kelleher, “Why would unacknowledged aircraft be flying at 500 to 1,000 feet over populated areas? …If they’re a classified military project, why are military jets scrambled to go after them?”
In 2019, Las Vegas journalist Cateland White watched as a dark behemoth flew over her backyard. Said White, “It was triangular shaped, and there were rectangular reflectors. There was no interior light coming out of it at all. …It was really slow. And I couldn’t figure out how it was staying in the air.” It seemed to be heading toward nearby Nellis Air Force Base. When White contacted the base, a base representative told her, ‘Ma’am, I’m going to tell you one more time and this is the last time I’m gonna tell you. You will forget what you saw. And you won’t tell anybody.’ “The man said, ‘I don’t want you to talk about this anymore’”.
These black triangles have often been seen near military installations. One huge craft was spotted on a runway at Groom Lake (Area 51), part of Nellis Air Force Base. Some speculate that these are secret advanced military blimps, capable of carrying large deployments of troops or tanks to remote locations. The Pentagon has awarded three contracts for the development of big airships. Others think that the Department of Homeland Security may be using them to spy on suspected domestic terrorists within the United States. A high tech airship could suck up every fax, phone call and email as it passes over.
The NIDS database shows that in the past two years sightings of giant triangles over major cities have skyrocketed. Whoever’s flying them isn’t worried about their existence being known. When NIDS posted its study online it was swamped with nearly 100,000 inquiries, mostly from the aerospace industry. “So there’s a tremendous amount of interest in this topic,” says Kelleher. “Are these aircraft ours are they somebody else’s?[And] if not ours, who’s?”
[Editor’s Note] In chapter 15 of Dr Michael Salla’s 2019 book: US Air Force Secret Space Program – Shifting Extraterrestrial Alliances & Space Force, he discusses the origin of the US Air Force’s top secret Aurora Program which developed the TR-3B triangle craft, able to perform both in the earth’s atmosphere and in near space. Salla cites Edgar Fouche who confirms that the TR-3B, code named ‘Astra’, was a tactical reconnaissance craft developed in the 1970s and built by private aerospace companies for the Air Force during the 1980s. Fouche served with the US Air Force from 1967 to 1987 and then spent another eight years with defense contractors working on a number of classified aviation programs at Groom Lake Area 51.
From November 1989 to April 1990, prototype black flying triangles, approximately 250 feet in length, were sighted and photographed in Scotland and Belgium by hundreds of witnesses including police officers. On March 30, 1990, the Belgium Air Force sent F-16 fighter jets to intercept a flying triangle. According to Fouche the 600-foot wide model TR-3B became operational in the early 1990’s, and three were flying by 1994.
The TR-3B employs a “Magnetic Field Disrupter” which rotates highly pressurized mercury-based plasma around a circular accelerator ring, reducing the craft’s weight by a factor of 89%. Three rocket engines using conventional fuel sources like hydrogen, oxygen and/or methane provide the thrust. The TR-3B is a high altitude, stealth, reconnaissance platform with an indefinite loiter time. Fouche claimed that the TR-3B was able to silently hover for at least 10 minutes and gave off “a corona of silver blue light” that glowed around it while hovering.
Corey Goode asserts that the TR-3B was a “hand me down” to the USAF’s military space program and to cabal “elites” from an even more highly classified space program controlled by NASA along with the Antarctic German Space Program.
Huge, silent, unknown craft have been reported flying over populated areas dating back decades. What are they?
Black triangles or boomerang shaped objects, some larger than any known aircraft, have been documented, even filmed, over cities all across North America, as well as in Europe. If they’re a classified military project, investigators wonder, then why are military jets scrambled to go after them?
Dr. Colm Kelleher
“They launched on several occasions top-of-the-line military aircraft against these things and they were left in the dust,” says Dr. Colm Kelleher of the National Institute for Discovery Science. “One minute they’re overhead, and the next they’re over the horizon.
Dr. Kelleher managed an investigation of the black triangles back in 2004, which coincidentally is the same year the U.S. Navy encountered a now-famous UFO known as the “Tic Tac.”
So what were those black triangles, and who, if anyone, was flying them? A special 2-Part report, only on mysterywire.com.
PART 1
MYSTERY WIRE — In 1997, thousands of eyewitnesses watched in awe as a boomerang-shaped formation of lights cruised slowly and silently over the city of Phoenix. “They’re lined up in a pattern,” one witness said as a camera recorded the event.
Cateland White
Witnesses first thought these were separate lights flying in formation, but quickly realized the lights were all part of a single gigantic something. Military officials were asked about the Phoenix lights but said they hadn’t seen anything.
Months later, they explained that a National Guard unit had been training with flares near the city. The public in general didn’t buy it.
Eight years earlier, the airspace over Belgium was repeatedly violated by huge unidentified black triangles. Ten thousand witnesses saw them. Several of the triangles were photographed. The Belgian Air Force dispatched F-16s to intercept and destroy the unknown intruders, but the triangles performed maneuvers that seemed virtually impossible.
Research scientist Dr. Colm Kelleher recounts the Belgium incident. “On several occasions they launched the top-of-the-line military aircraft against these things, and they were left standing. They were left in the dust.”
“One minute these things are overhead and the next minute they’re on the horizon,” Kelleher said.
Kelleher spent several years with the National Institute for Discovery Science, or NIDS, a private Las Vegas science organization. A four-year NIDS study of the mystery triangles has found that these craft have been seen for decades all over the world.
In the early ’80s, there were hundreds of nighttime sightings in rural New York. Belgium was inundated in the late ’80s. But more recently, the mystery triangles have really come out of the closet and have been seen in every state, including Nevada, flying low and slow over cities.
“These things are huge,” Kelleher said. “These things are football-field size, sometimes they’re stealthy, but a lot of the times they’re flying with extremely bright lights. They’re always silent.”
NIDS now has a database of more than 1,000 black triangle reports, 17 of them from Nevada. The witnesses often say the craft seemed to float like a blimp or airship. But they’re also capable of aeronautical magic.
Fossil of a 'weird' iguana-like reptile with a needle-sharp snout found in Alaska is identified as a 200 million-year-old species of thalattosaur previously unknown to science
Fossil of a 'weird' iguana-like reptile with a needle-sharp snout found in Alaska is identified as a 200 million-year-old species of thalattosaur previously unknown to science
Gunakadeit joseeae is the most complete thalattosaur found in North America
Thalattosaurs were a group of marine reptiles from over 200 million years ago
This species may have died out as sea levels dropped and it could no longer hunt
An iguana-like creature with a needle-sharp snout has been confirmed from a fossilised skeleton as a species of the extinct marine reptile thalattosaur.
The new species, previously unknown to science, roamed the coast of what is now Alaska some 200 million years ago.
The new creature has been named Gunakadeit joseeae, after a Native Tlingit name for a legendary sea monster.
It dates from the Triassic period more than 200 million years ago and has been identified from a lone fossil found in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska.
It is the only intact fossil from the thalattosaur group ever found in North America.
An artist's depiction of Gunakadeit joseeae, a species of thalattosaur that may have died out when waters became to shallow for them to hunt
'This animal is striking because it's got this super-sharp pointed snout,' said paleontologist Pat Druckenmller, director of the University of Alaska Museum of the North and lead author of the study.
'Literally, it´s needle-like.'
'Thalattosaurs were among the first groups of land-dwelling reptiles to readapt to life in the ocean,' said Neil Kelley from Vanderbilt University and co-author of the study, published in Scientific Reports.
'They thrived for tens of millions of years, but their fossils are relatively rare so this new specimen helps fill an important gap in the story of their evolution and eventual extinction.'
Thalattosaurs grew to lengths of up to 9 to 13 feet and lived in equatorial oceans worldwide until they died out near the end of the Triassic period when their distant relatives – dinosaurs – were first emerging.
WHAT ARE THE THREE GEOLOGIC ERAS?
The Mesozoic Era is a the name given to the period from 250 million to 65 million years ago.
The era is divided into three major periods: Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous.
The new species discovery dates back to the Cretaceous period – 145 million to 66 million years ago.
Mesozoic was the age of the dinosaurs and lasted almost 180 million years.
The Mesozoic Era followed the Paleozoic Era, during which arthropods, molluscs, fish and amphibians all evolved.
Mesozoic was followed by the Cenozoic Era, during which the continents assumed the configuration that we know today.
ThalattosaursWikimedia commons
The snout and the fine bones in the throat of this new species suggest a reptile that dug into cracks in submerged reefs to suck out food - mostly small crustaceans and squid.
Its fossil was uncovered through a stroke of luck, when an extremely low tide in 2011 exposed the typically submerged rock where it was embedded on an island beach as scientists happened to be surveying the area.
Fully separating the fossil from rock took years, said US Forest Service geologist Jim Baichtal, one of the scientists who found the specimen.
Positively identifying it as a new species included a trip by Druckenmiller to China, one of the few places where intact thalattosaurs have been discovered.
That work confirmed what was obvious to those who saw the fossil's skull and snout in 2011.
They could tell right away that it was something new because of its extremely pointed snout, which was likely an adaptation for the shallow marine environment where it lived.
'We knew right away that it was totally different,' Druckenmiller said.
'It was probably poking its pointy schnoz into cracks and crevices in coral reefs and feeding on soft-bodied critters.'
Once the sample was back at the UA Museum of the North in Fairbanks, a fossil preparation specialist worked in two-week stints over the course of several years to get the fossil cleaned up and ready for study.
Only now have the results been presented in a research paper as a new species.
The fossil of Gunakadeit joseeae, which was found in Southeast Alaska. About two thirds of the tail had already eroded away when the fossil was discovered
But its specialisation may have been what ultimately led to its extinction.
'We think these animals were highly specialised to feed in the shallow water environments, but when the sea levels dropped and food sources changed, they had nowhere to go,' Druckenmiller said.
At the time Gunakadeit joseeae was living, what is now the rugged temperate rainforest of southeast Alaska was a much warmer place – a coastal region only about 10-20 degrees north of the equator.
The newly identified thalattosaur is the latest among several important paleontological discoveries in the Tongass National Forest.
They include the 1996 discovery of a 10,300-year-old human skeleton in a cave in the southern part of the largest US national forest.
Those remains, of a young man with a fish-based diet, contributed to knowledge about people who migrated to North America by coastal routes rather than over the Bering Land Bridge.
WHAT WERE THE THALATTOSAURS?
Thalattosaurs are an extinct group of prehistoric marine reptiles.
They lived during the mid-late Triassic period around 200 million years ago.
They grew to lengths of up to 9 to 13 feet (around 3-4 meters) and lived in equatorial oceans worldwide
Thalattosaurs, translated as ‘ocean lizards’, had long, paddle-like tails and slender bodies.
The most unusual features of thalattosaurs are their narrow snouts.
They died out near the end of the Triassic period, which lasted from 252 million years ago until 201 million years ago, when it was succeeded by the Jurassic period.
Thallattosaur remains have been found in Europe, China and North America.
The Thalattosauria (and family Thalattosauridae) were named by American paleontologist John C. Merriam in 1904, at the time containing only the first known species, Thalattosaurus.
Scientists raced against a rising tide to recover a tantalizing fossil on an island in southeast Alaska. It turned out to be a species new to science.
From the left, Gene Primaky, Jim Baichtal, and Patrick Druckenmiller at the excavation site of the new fossil in the Keku Islands of southeastern Alaska. It was just after they’d extracted the fossil, minutes before the site was submerged by a rising tide. “We rock-sawed like crazy and managed to pull it out,” Druckenmiller said.
In 2011, scientists worked against a rising tide to excavate a remarkable fossil on an island in southeast Alaska. Subsequent studies revealed that the fossil was a new species of thalattosaur, a marine reptile that lived more than 200 million years ago. This specimen has since been named Gunakadeit joseeae (pronounced ghu-nuh-kuh-DATE JOE-zee-ay; the first syllable’s vowel sounds like the “oo” in “good”). It’s the most complete thalattosaur skeleton ever found in North America and has added substantial new information to this little-known group of extinct reptiles.
Details of the discovery were published in the journal Scientific Reports on February 4, 2020.
It’s a wonder the fossil was ever found; the specimen was in an intertidal area at the Keku Islands, near the village of Kake. It was submerged most of the time, except during very low tides that happened for a few hours on only a few days of each year.
On one such occasion, on May 18, 2011, Jim Baichtal, a U.S. Forest Service geologist with the Tongass National Forest, was out hunting for fossils with colleagues. With him was Gene Primaky, an information technologist, who first spotted the fossil on a rocky outcrop.
A month later, Druckenmiller and his team were on site to excavate the fossil. They had a narrow window for their work: two days when low tides were low enough, during daylight, to expose the fossil for about four hours on each day. The next opportunity would not come around for nearly another year. Druckenmiller said:
We rock-sawed like crazy and managed to pull it out, but just barely. The water was lapping at the edge of the site.
The fossil turned out to be a new thalattosaur species, now called Gunakadeit joseeae. The skeleton was fully intact, except for two-thirds of its tail that was lost to erosion.
It took several years at the University of Alaska Museum of the North for a fossil preparation specialist to clean the specimen and prepare it for study.
The first indication that this was a new species of thalattosaur was the shape of the fossil’s skull. It had a very pointed snout, which Druckenmiller suggested was a likely adaptation to the shallow seas in which the animal once lived. He thinks that shape may have ultimately led to the demise of the species, saying:
It was probably poking its pointy schnoz into cracks and crevices in coral reefs and feeding on soft-bodied critters. We think these animals were highly specialized to feed in the shallow water environments, but when the sea levels dropped and food sources changed, they had nowhere to go.
Today, the name of the newly found creature reflects both the place where it was found, and its discovery story. The genus name, Gunakadeit, is that of a sea monster from the lore of the Tlingit people, who were indigenous to the Pacific Northwest of North America. The species name, joseeae, is in honor of Joseé Michelle DeWaelheyns, mother of the fossil’s discoverer, Gene Primaky.
Thalattosaurs lived during the mid to late Triassic Period, about 247 to 201 million years ago. Found in tropical seas around the world, these marine reptiles reached lengths of 3 to 4 meters (10 to 13 feet). They became extinct at the end of the Triassic Period, about 201 million years ago.
Prior to the discovery of Gunakadeit joseeae, it had been 20 years since scientists had taken an exhaustive look at thalattosaurs. In paleontology, this involved studying the detailed anatomical characteristics of other thalattosaur fossils found around the world, and using computers to analyze the possible relationships between the different species. Patrick Druckenmiller, who led the study of this creature, said in a statement:
When you find a new species, one of the things you want to do is tell people where you think it fits in the family tree. We decided to start from scratch on the family tree.
In the study of living things, a “family tree” is a body of knowledge, represented as a diagram, that shows evolutionary relationships between related organisms, including their common ancestry.
Druckenmiller worked with Neil Kelley of Vanderbilt University on the analysis of the fossil’s place on the thalattosaur family tree. The results took them by surprise. Druckenmiller commented:
It was so specialized and weird, we thought it might be out at the furthest branches of the tree. Instead it’s a relatively primitive type of thalattosaur that survived late into the existence of the group.
Kelley added:
Thalattosaurs were among the first groups of land-dwelling reptiles to readapt to life in the ocean. They thrived for tens of millions of years, but their fossils are relatively rare so this new specimen helps fill an important gap in the story of their evolution and eventual extinction.
Artist’s depiction of the new thalattosaur species, Gunakadeit joseeae. It lived 200 million years ago.
Bottom line: Scientists have discovered a new species of thalattosaur, a marine reptile that lived more than 200 million years ago in warm tropical seas around the world. This specimen, named Gunakadeit joseeae, is the most intact North American thalattosaur ever found, and has helped scientists better understand how thalattosaur species are related to each other.
NASA Advances Plans to Bring Samples Back From Mars
NASA Advances Plans to Bring Samples Back From Mars
February 10, 2020
Collecting samples from Mars and bringing them back to Earth is a historic undertaking that starts with the launch of NASA's Mars 2020 rover. That rover will collect samples and leave them ready for a future mission to retrieve and return to Earth. The future stages of Mars Sample Return involve the collaboration of NASA and the European Space Agency to develop a lander, a fetch rover, an ascent vehicle to launch the sample container to Martian orbit, and a retrieval spacecraft for carrying the samples to Earth. In this video, visit some of the labs at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory where prototypes and engineering models involved in the Mars Sample Return campaign are being tested.
TRANSCRIPT
Raquel Villanueva: Hi, I'm Raquel Villanueva, here at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Now, it has been a dream of scientists for generations to bring back samples from the surface of Mars. Right now, the Mars 2020 rover is laying the groundwork for that to happen.
And, that's why I'm in the In-Situ Instrument Laboratory with Jessica Samuels. And, she's here to tell us what's going on here.
Jessica Samuels: Well, we use this facility to develop and design our hardware and software systems for our Mars missions.
Raquel: And, how does the sampling system work.
Jessica: So, we have a drill on the end of our robotic arm. And, as we are drilling the surface of Mars, we will be collecting pieces of Mars into the sample tube at that time. We'll then transfer that sample tube into the inside of the rover and then seal it for storage as we continue to explore the surface. After we've collected a diverse set of samples, we will drop them off onto the surface...
Raquel: Yeah.
Jessica:...and then have them there for a future sample return mission to continue.
Raquel: Well, I know you have some tests to keep doing and I'm actually gonna go check out the next phase at a different lab.
We're in a testing lab affectionately known as the "Sand Box" and I'm here with Austin Nicholas. Now, can you explain how we are gonna bring back samples from Mars?
Austin Nicholas: So, starting from after 2020 has deposited tubes on the surface, there are two more missions to go in bringing the tubes back to Earth.
The first is a lander mission. It carries three major elements: a Sample Fetch Rover and a Sample Transfer Arm that lets you transfer the samples from the Fetch Rover into the rocket, and a Mars Ascent Vehicle which is a rocket that brings the samples from Mars into space. Meanwhile, the orbiter has also launched from Earth in 2026 and is making its way towards Mars and it'll be in position by the time the rocket's fully loaded. The orbiter will then go to the sample container that the rocket's put into space and then capture it, ultimately bringing them to Earth in 2031.
Raquel: That sounds complicated.
Austin: It is complicated but fortunately we're not doing it alone. So, we have a great partnership with the European Space Agency and they're providing some major pieces of this mission. Within NASA, we've actually got a number of centers working on all of the different pieces. So, we're partnering with Marshall Space Flight Center for the Mars Ascent Vehicle, Langley and Ames for the Earth Entry Vehicle, Glenn for the Sample Fetch Rover wheels and we're partnering with Goddard for the orbiter payload. And so there's really a...it's a whole NASA effort to get Mars Sample Return done.
Raquel: Sounds like there is a lot of work to be done, but this all kicks off with the launch of Mars 2020 this summer in Cape Canaveral, Florida and there's lots of excitement here as we get ready to make history.
The oldest material on Earth has been found in a meteorite
The oldest material on Earth has been found in a meteorite
Ashley Strickland - CNN
After stars die, they expel their particles out into space, which form new stars in turn. In one case, stardust became embedded in a meteorite that fell to Earth. This illustration shows that stardust could flow from sources like the Egg Nebula to create the grains recovered from the meteorite, which landed in Australia.
(NASA/W. Sparks (STScI)/R. Sahai)
Fifty years ago, a meteorite fell to Earth and landed in Australia, carrying with it a rare sample from interstellar space. A new analysis of the meteorite revealed stardust that formed between five to seven billion years ago. That makes the meteorite and its stardust the oldest solid material ever discovered on Earth.
Our sun is around 4.6 billion years old, meaning this stardust existed long before our sun or solar system were even a reality. The stardust found on the meteorite are called presolar grains because they formed before our sun.
Stars are born when gas, dust and heat combine in just the right way. They can exist for millions or even billions of years before dying and expelling their key ingredients into space. This in turn helps new stars to be born, creating a space daisy chain.
Meteorites, if they don't knock into too many things, can act like time capsules of the materials trapped within them, like stardust. That's why the discovery of the presolar grains is such a rarity -- only 5% of meteorites found on Earth contain them. Their impossibly tiny size is difficult to fathom.
One hundred of the largest found presolar grains could fit on a period, according to a release by the Field Museum in Chicago.
A new study of presolar grains from the Murchison meteorite recovered in Australia published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.
"This is one of the most exciting studies I've worked on," said Philipp Heck, lead study author and a curator at the Field Museum. "These are the oldest solid materials ever found, and they tell us about how stars formed in our galaxy. They're solid samples of stars."
The meteorite was recovered in 1969 and presolar grains were isolated from it.
"It starts with crushing fragments of the meteorite down into a powder," said Jennika Greer, study co-author and a graduate student at the Field Museum and the University of Chicago. "Once all the pieces are segregated, it's a kind of paste, and it has a pungent characteristic. It smells like rotten peanut butter."
Dissolving the paste in acid reveals the presolar grains, allowing the researchers to determine their age and the type of star they once belonged to.
The researchers were able to measure the exposure of the grains to cosmic rays, highly energized particles zipping through our galaxy.
"Some of these cosmic rays interact with the matter and form new elements," Heck said. "And the longer they get exposed, the more those elements form. I compare this with putting out a bucket in a rainstorm. Assuming the rainfall is constant, the amount of water that accumulates in the bucket tells you how long it was exposed."
Many of the grains recovered were between 4.6 and 4.9 billion years old, while others were older than 5.5 billion years.
They also learned that seven billion years ago, more stars began forming.
"We have more young grains than we expected," Heck said. "Our hypothesis is that the majority of those grains, which are 4.9 to 4.6 billion years old, formed in an episode of enhanced star formation. There was a time before the start of the solar system when more stars formed than normal."
Astronomers have argued about the rate of star formation. Some believe it's steady and unchanging, while others believe there are peaks and dips.
"Some people think that the star formation rate of the galaxy is constant," Heck said. "But thanks to these grains, we now have direct evidence for a period of enhanced star formation in our galaxy seven billion years ago with samples from meteorites. This is one of the key findings of our study."
They also determined that the presolar grains have a habit of clumping together in granola-like clusters, which they didn't think possible, Heck said.
Understanding the grains has shed light not only on stars and how long their stardust can last but also more on galaxies and their timelines.
"With this study, we have directly determined the lifetimes of stardust. We hope this will be picked up and studied so that people can use this as input for models of the whole galactic life cycle," Heck said. "It's so exciting to look at the history of our galaxy. Stardust is the oldest material to reach Earth, and from it, we can learn about our parent stars, the origin of the carbon in our bodies [and] the origin of the oxygen we breathe. With stardust, we can trace that material back to the time before the sun."
The Space Force has been caught on camera training its fleet, conspiracy theorists have claimed after seeing footage of strange lights appearing over Arizona.
Footage taken above Yuma shows six bright UFOsseemingly hovering in formation in the sky.
As the camera rolls, the lights start to disappear and after several minutes they are reduced to three in a triangle formation.
When the clip comes to an end there is just one object in the sky.
The mysterious footage was posted to YouTube by Devil_Travels on January 23, before being picked up by popular conspiracy channel MrMBB333.
Thousands of people have seen the clip, with many noting that a large base belonging to the US Marines is stationed in the same region.
The mysterious lights over Arizona
(Image: YOUTUBE/DEVIL_TRAVELS)
And the unusual trajectory and formation of the sights led many to suggest it could be evidence of the Space Force in action.
One commented: “It’s US Space Force training.”
The training theory went down well with fellow viewers, with another adding: “You’ve nailed it.”
An image of the Phoenix Lights
And a third added: “An example of Space Force.”
But there may be another explanation for the mystery lights.
Our models of how things in the universe are supposed to work have a bad habit of turning out completely wrong. Recently astronomers tossed a few more models in the garbage after discovering an enormous, ancient galaxy, they’ve described as “the monster” due to its size, age and the incredible rate at which it formed stars—over 1,000 times faster than the Milky Way. But the confusing thing is that one day it just stopped making stars altogether. And astronomers have no idea what caused the death of this strange cosmic monstrosity.
The technical name for this galaxy is XMM-2599. It was discovered by astronomers using the W. M. Keck Observatory’s Multi-Object Spectrograph for Infrared Exploration, or MOSFIRE. Ben Forrest, postdoctoral researcher at UC Riverside, describes what makes this galaxy so strange and unique:
“Even before the universe was 2 billion years old, XMM-2599 had already formed a mass of more than 300 billion suns, making it an ultramassive galaxy. More remarkably, we show that XMM-2599 formed most of its stars in a huge frenzy when the universe was less than one billion years old, and then became inactive by the time the universe was only 1.8 billion years old.”
When XMM-2599 was active, it was producing stars 1,000 times faster than the Milky Way.
According to Gillian Wilson, a professor of physics and astronomy at UC Riverside, galaxies this old and this massive are predicted to exist by the numerical models, although rarely. The numerical models, however, predict that such galaxies should still be actively forming stars. The mysterious death of XMM-2599 throws a wrench into those models. Wilson says:
“The mere existence of ultramassive galaxies like XMM-2599 proves quite a challenge to numerical models. Even though such massive galaxies are incredibly rare at this epoch, the models do predict them. The predicted galaxies, however, are expected to be actively forming stars. What makes XMM-2599 so interesting, unusual, and surprising is that it is no longer forming stars, perhaps because it stopped getting fuel or its black hole began to turn on. Our results call for changes in how models turn off star formation in early galaxies.”
The astronomers don’t know, however, what XMM-2599 will do in the future. Or, rather, the rest of the past. The weird thing about observing a galaxy like XMM-2599 is, due to its distance from Earth, they are looking at this galaxy as it was 11.7 billion years ago. Wilson says:
“We have caught XMM-2599 in its inactive phase. We do not know what it will turn into by the present day. We know it cannot lose mass. An interesting question is what happens around it. As time goes by, could it gravitationally attract nearby star-forming galaxies and become a bright city of galaxies?”
Artist’s impression of what the strange, early galaxies looked like.
(Credit: James Josephides/Swinburne Astronomy Productions, Christina Williams/University of Arizona, Ivo Labbe/Swinburne)
According to Michael Cooper, professor of astronomy at UC Irvine, and co-author of the new study describing XM-2599, this outcome is a strong possibility:
“Perhaps during the following 11.7 billion years of cosmic history, XMM-2599 will become the central member of one of the brightest and most massive clusters of galaxies in the local universe. Alternatively, it could continue to exist in isolation. Or we could have a scenario that lies between these two outcomes.”
One of Russia’s top astronomers and the head of the SETI scientific and cultural center recently gave an extensive interview with RIA Novosti in which he shared some interesting observations, including that he believes one reason why we have not yet encountered extraterrestrials (in his opinion) is because they may be keeping us in a “reserve” where contact cannot interfere with our development – a kind of Russian version of the Star Trek “prime directive.” He also believes focusing on repeating fast radio bursts may be a mistake that could cause SETI researchers to miss other signals – signals that we may not yet recognize. Is he right?
“Of course we are not alone. The question is not whether they exist, but where they exist.”
Alexander Panov, a leading researcher at the Institute of Nuclear Physics of Moscow State University, head of the SETI scientific and cultural center under the Council on Astronomy of the RAS and chairman of the Life and Mind in the Universe section of the Council on Astronomy of the RAS (i.e. – someone who’s in the know) makes no bones about his believe in aliens. In fact, he says they’ve probably visited Earth before, although he doesn’t equate current UFO sightings to close encounters. Instead, he speculates that other intelligent civilizations, perhaps working together, keep Earth and its inhabitants in a “reserve.”
“It lies in the fact that highly humanized civilizations do not interfere in our development and have created a quarantine zone around us, a radio silence zone so as not to interfere with our independent development.”
However, Panov believes that this “radio silence zone” should not preclude us from searching for signals from other civilizations. One problem he has with current searches is their narrow focus. He is helping design the Russian space observatory Spektr-M, scheduled for launch in 2027, that will have a broad focus and mission – including looking for large artificial structures like Dyson spheres, black holes, cosmic rays, dark matter and laser signals rather than just fast radio bursts. He is also pushing for new technology which will allow telescopes to monitor the skies 24/7 and record and analyze what would then be ten-to-a-hundred times more data.
“Another method of searching for extraterrestrial civilizations is archaeoastronomy.”
Not content to look only in far corners of the universe for evidence of life, Panov supports searching closer – like on the Moon – for archeological evidence of advanced alien civilization that may have visited millions of years ago. He doesn’t believe that information of this kind has already been discovered and is being hidden from the public. If all of this sounds like pie-in-the sky, Panav agrees. He admits some of these projects could have been done before, but the driving force is budgets – not fear of alien contact.
“When you go outside, a brick may fall on your head, but this does not mean that you need to constantly stay at home. The potential benefits we can get from contacts are so great that they outweigh the risks. However, this does not mean that there is no need to think about possible risks. Scientists have defined a set of safety rules that must be followed if you received and decrypted the interstellar message. For example, if the algorithm for creating some device or computer program that we are offered to build and run is indicated there, then in no case should you do it without understanding. You never know, maybe this is something malicious. Safety rules must be observed, but not paranoid.”
Not paranoid?
“Observed but not paranoid.” Sounds like a good philosophy for a lot of things, not just SETI. And Alexander Panov sounds like an interesting person to invite over for dinner and conversation …. If he can pull himself away from searching for other life in the universe.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Melting snow reveals underground ancient city in Antarctica manufactured by advanced civilization
Melting snow reveals underground ancient city in Antarctica manufactured by advanced civilization
Does melting snow reveal an ancient settlement in Antarctica? Satellite images show unnatural looking markings in the snow which look manufactured by an advanced civilization.
These markings are clearly features of some sort of an ancient hexagon structure, which probably is the dome of a larger structure of building buried beneath the ice sheet and probably part of an underground ancient city. The dome is about 45 meters in diameter with visible walls of 8 meters high.
There are many artificial objects, structures and figures around the dome, a possible man-made entrance to the underground city and what looks like a military base or port in front of the dome, suggesting that the military and scientists already know this location which could mean that they are secretly exploring the underground city.
Click image to see the structure/dome in 1280x720 HD.
A quote taken from the book 'The Lost City of Antarctica, Civilizations of the Ancient World' reads as follows:
Satellite imaging shows evidence for the remains of an extensive Paleocene civilization existing under the ice of Antarctica, including “intelligently-made structures.
Also examines the ice-core derived, isotopic record from the Paleogene and Neogene geologic periods indicating that the infrastructure of an advanced civilization existed on the Antarctic continent approximately 55.5 million years ago, and may have been inhabited for 300,000 or more years.
Click image to see the structure/dome in 1280x720 HD.
Could the image of a dome leading to a possible underground city be proof that an advanced civilization or extraterrestrial race existed on the Antarctic continent millions of years ago?
When looking at sightings reports of strange creatures and mysterious entities every so once in a while one comes across something that just seems to exist out in its own sphere of bizarreness, something so incredibly odd that it falls outside of any known category and which leaves us utterly baffled. I have covered extremely bizarre cryptids of all shapes and sizes here at Mysterious Universe before, on more than one occasion in fact, as well as very unusual entities that are thought to be aliens, but at other times there is just no real classification to put some reports in, and it is not immediately clear if we are supposed to be dealing with a mystery animal, a ghost, a demon, an inter dimensional being, or what. These cases swirl about there on the outer edges of strangeness, seeming to defy us and challenge us to try and make sense of them. Here I bring you a selection of truly out there reports concerning humanoid creatures that lie squarely entrenched in the realm of the truly unexplained. From deer-headed men, to bizarre stick figures, to other less definable things and more, here are some of the weirdest.
One very odd humanoid creature of some sort that has been reported is what appears to be some sort of deer men, with various truly bizarre sightings of such creatures from all over the United States. One account was made in northeast Ohio by a witness who claims that he was at his cousin’s house playing hide and seek outside one day when he was 14 years old. It was reportedly around dusk, and they were playing near a wooded creek when it was the witnesses turn to search, and as he did he claims that he heard the sound of leaves crackling under foot. He turned to look expecting to see his cousin, but instead saw a deer through the brush that appeared to be oddly standing up on its hind legs, unusual for a deer but which would prove to be even stranger than that. The report reads:
It was getting dark and I was the one searching. I heard leaves crumpling, and when I turned to look, I saw what looked like a deer on its hind legs. I clearly remember seeing “dog legs” running, but the rest of the body was straight up. And it ran with incredible speed, and I knew it wasn’t either of my cousins hiding. I ran as fast as I could back to the house, and my one of my cousins was running in too, he saw the same thing. It still creeps me out to this day, because my uncle always told us how he saw weird things on that property.
A sighting of a similar creature that appears to have also had the ability of shapeshifting was made in the state of Delaware in 1993. The witness claims that he was around 8 years old at the time and he had been staying with his family at his grandparents’ house in a rural, forested area near the town of Hockessin. One morning he says he woke to a clear day with the sun shining in through the window and also the surreal sight of the silhouette of a deer with a huge rack of antlers standing just outside. Things would get bizarre rapidly, and the witness says of what happened next thus:
It was RIGHT there, like almost pressed against the window in profile. I stared in awe. And that is when it changed. In one smooth movement, it reared up on its hind legs and it was no longer a deer, but a man. There were only two men in the area, my grandfather and my dad, and it was clearly neither (not sure if that made it better or worse). Grandfather was very built for his age, dad had a gut. This silhouette was clearly younger, muscular but not in the “like a brick” way my grandfather was. It exuded strength. And scared the hell out of me. It stared to the side for a moment, and then strode off with purpose. Looking back, I want to tell myself it was just the imagination of a half-awake child, but I remember the awe and the utter fear I felt when the “deer” changed.
Yet another Deer Man sighting was made as recently as 2012, in the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma. In this account, a Kyle Heying claims that he was out at the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge in order to take photographs of the night sky there with a friend. On this evening at around 10 PM, the usual sounds of the forest suddenly became muted and the local wildlife started to display some decidedly bizarre and uncharacteristic behavior. First some elk came running by and then a herd of bison, which all came uncomfortably close before hurrying off, and it seemed almost as if these animals were trying to get away from something scaring them out in the dark forest beyond.
This was enough to spook the men into packing up their stuff and calling it a night, and as they did they allegedly felt a strange change in air pressure and all of the sounds of the woods just stopped to send a profound silence crashing down upon them. The two unsettled men then heard something rustling about out in some tall grass nearby, jarring in the otherwise void of silence that had blanketed the area, and it seemed like whatever it was was coming towards them. Heying claims that he and his friends had then picked up some rifles they had with them, wary of what was apparently approaching. They started the car and began to drive off when they saw something step out in front of the vehicle that they would never forget, a creature which Heying described as having a head like an elk but which stood upright on two human legs and which had two human arms and “dark red” eyes. As they passed it, the nightmarish creature lurched forward to hit the car, and Heying floored it away as fast as the vehicle would go until they were about 3 miles away, where they stopped their flight to regain their wits. Heying would say of what happened next thus:
We were scared shitless. Things got even quieter when we stayed there. While there we heard one ear-piercing screech or scream, almost a hunting screech of some sort that made my hair stand on end and gave me goose bumps even worse. With that we left the mountains completely, we felt as though we were not wanted there that night. The way the wildlife acted, the figure that we came across that the animals had to have ran from, and then the scream of which I can only find references to happens to be the Banshee. I cannot forget that figure we saw, as well as the scream. It was not human but it was not of any wildlife I am familiar with from out there.
What in the world could possibly account for what these witnesses saw? Just what kind of creature could these things possibly be and are any of these accounts connected in any way? No one knows. Deer men are not even the strangest of humanoid creatures to have been reported, and we’re just getting started. In summer of 2012 there was a head-scratching sighting near Washington Park, near Michigan City, Indiana, that is really hard to classify.
The witness claims that she had been staying at the beach house of a friend by Lake Michigan and that there had been a lightning storm at the time. At around 2 AM some of them went outside to smoke and watch the lightning, and that was when they noticed the beam of a flashlight scanning the tall grass by the shore nearby as if searching for something. Thinking this to be a bit odd, the group of friends watched on and saw that the beam had captured an elongated, grayish humanoid looking creature stretched out on the beach, and the witness would say:
The light sweeps by something in the grass, then it shines back onto it. What was illuminated was very strange. It appeared to be a naked guy crawling around on the grass. Although, it had elongated arms and legs. It was moving kinda fast crunched over. It only lasted a few seconds, long enough for all of us to see it. Then, after the thing ran off, the flashlight shines directly at us. It stayed pointing at us until it went out after a few seconds. Creepy. So, we’re all like WTF was that, we asked what each other saw. We all seen a weird stretched out naked guy. The only explainable thing it could have possibly been was a drunk gangly naked guy. But, I don’t think so because it looked abnormally stretched, the light pointed at us, and it freaked everyone out. It was something strange. I can’t say what the height of it was accurately, maybe around 7ft tall. My husband said it looked like something from a Marilyn Manson music video.I wanted to go down there. I wanted to see if we could find it. But, no one would go and they were creeped out and wanted to go back inside.
What on earth was the outlandish thing they saw? What was with that flashlight and why did it train itself on the observers of this surreal scene? Who knows? In August of 2017 there was a series of sightings of a very strange humanoid figure on a farm near Boca Raton, Florida. The witness, who originally posted his experience on Reddit, says that on the 14th he saw something very unusual one evening at dusk as he was eating dinner and staring out over the property, which he would continue to see for the next two nights as well. He said that a very tall, grey colored humanoid that looked like the character “Gumby” lurched out of the tree line, took a few steps, and then went back into the forest lining the property. The witness says:
It was flat but its legs bended in a way that looked like a plank bending. Like how a piece of wood bows when weight is put on it but springs back up when the weight is taken off. Its body, from where I could see it, was rigid. It didn’t look flexible aside from the legs and the limbs were fairly wide The next night, at the same time, the same exact thing happened except my parents were with me. It walked on two legs but it was more like lunges or arching steps than human walking. I asked them if they saw that and they just said “saw what?” Then it happened AGAIN the third night. So either my body is giving me random hallucinations in sync with my body’s time clock or there’s some weird Slendergumby demon living on the farm behind my house. I haven’t been home much recently so I haven’t been able to look for it again but if I’m able to. I haven’t seen whatever it was since those three times and was unable to get a photo of it due to how far away it was. This was in the middle of a very populated city so seeing something this outlandish in a human heavy area was quite strange.
If none of these are weird enough for you, then how about the disturbing number of reports of stick figures seen lurking in rural and deserted areas of the world? When I say stick figure I don’t mean simply something that is elongated and thin, but rather literally a stick figure, as if something a child might draw. This is what some people have apparently been sighting since at least 2008, and they are deeply bizarre to say the least. The Stick Figures are typically described as just that, tall and extremely thin dark beings with no discernible facial features and which move smoothly and fluidly, with some reports saying that they do not change dimensions no matter what angle they are observed from, as if they are actually 2D constructs, and others mentioning air pressure changes, static electricity, and a feeling of malevolence in their presence.
The tales of these creatures certainly have an urban legend vibe to them, but are nevertheless numerous enough across the Internet to deserve mention. One early account from a man named Simon Howes seems to originate from all the way back in 1982, when a witness says he was studying to be a nurse at Warley Hospital, Brentwood in Essex, England, where he saw what can only be described as a stick figure while he was walking home one night. The witness says:
I encountered a ‘stick person’ in the grounds of the Hospital as I was walking home one night. It lopped across the roadway having been, seemingly, pressed up against a wall. It stopped when it saw me and raised it’s arms in fright and quickly walked off into the undergrowth. It was very tall with very thin, extremely long arms and legs and a very small oval head. Totally black and no obvious clothing. I saw no face even though it emerged very near a street lamp and so was well illuminated. I was terrified and to this day, no-one believes me.
Another such report comes from a witness named Damien Castellione, who claims that his sister and cousin saw one of the creatures when she was a kid at their aunt’s funeral. The witness says:
You know my sister told me that she saw a stick man too when she was a kid. back then it was our aunt’s funeral and she was sitting outside the funeral when she noticed a strange “stick like person” walking back and forth above the electric wiring of the pole in front of the funeral that is (she is more or less 10 walking distance away from the pole). She got really frightened and she told our cousin to look at it, at first our cousin didn’t believe her but after a few minutes she saw the stick man too and both of them got terrified they told our cousin’s mom if she saw the stickman and she said no. it took several hours, it was noon – until dawn before it faded away. she told the story to me and I had doubts but when I saw this article I was like.. wow I never thought a lot of people saw a stickmen too from around the world.
Some of these unearthly creatures have even been apparently photographed, although the quality of this evidence leaves much to be desired. Such reports have actually pored in from all corners of the globe, and it seems to be a phenomenon for which there is no clear answer. Is this just an urban legend in the making? If these stick-like figures are actually real then what could they possibly be? Aliens? Inter-dimensional beings or ghosts? What? Whatever they are or aren’t, actual literal stick figures prowling darkened roads and woods at night have to rank right up there as among the oddest, most bizarre things anyone could expect to come across.
It seems that the world of strange sightings can often truly veer off into completely uncharted territory and things that seem unable to truly be classified, existing in their own fringe world of sheer, utter insanity. There they lurk in the dim confines of a realm we have no understanding of and of which many do not even know is there at all. These are things for which there is no easy way to classify, things which seem to have lurched out of some sort of horror story. What are these creatures, if anything? How can we explain these oddities and anomalies? If we can glean anything from this it is that these are some truly strange bizarre sightings out there that defy conventions, and which may never cease to puzzle.
COAST TO COAST AM -
Fortean and paranormal researcher Lon Strickler has written a number of books on unexplained, mysterious, and bizarre encounters. He discussed the 29 sightings this year in the Chicago area of a flying humanoid creature he calls the Chicago Phantom (view related map).
In 2011, there were three sightings of a bat-like Mothman creature, and then things died down, but starting in April of 2017, reports started to kick in. In the first case, a woman saw a 7 ft. tall creature with glowing red eyes. As she was watching, it shot straight up into the air, unfurled its wings and took off, he recounted.
WETENSCHAPVanuit een sterrenstelsel op zo’n 500 miljoen lichtjaren van de Aarde worden radiosignalen naar ons gestuurd. Dat gegeven op zich is geen primeur, maar voor de eerste keer zit er ook echt een patroon in. De mysterieuze signalen bereiken de Aarde om de 16 dagen. En nét dat houdt onderzoekers bezig.
Een team ruimtewetenschappers in British Columbia (Canada) observeerde tussen 16 september 2018 en 30 oktober 2019 de radiogolven met behulp van een radiotelescoop. De astronomen kwamen tot de ontdekking dat de signalen - afkomstig van een spiraalvormig sterrenstelsel - een regelmatig ritme hadden: een cyclus van 16,35 dagen om precies te zijn.
De golven waren steeds vier dagen lang actief, waarna er een radiostilte kwam van 12 dagen, om vervolgens volgens hetzelfde patroon te herbeginnen. De ontdekking kan helpen om het mysterie van de radiosignalen verder te ontrafelen, hopen de wetenschappers. Hun bevindingen werden gepubliceerd in een paper waarover CNN bericht.
De bewuste radiosignalen, in het vakjargon ‘Fast Radio Burst’ (FRB) genoemd, werden voor het eerst in 2007 ontdekt en behoren tot een van de meest fascinerende fenomenen in het universum. Het gaat om snelle uitbarstingen die maar enkele milliseconden duren. Maar zij genereren meer energie dan vijfhonderd miljoenen zonnen.
Hoewel FRB’s al herhaaldelijk zijn waargenomen, gebeurt het zelden dat zij repetitief zijn - laat staan dat ze een bepaald patroon volgen. Door wat ze worden veroorzaakt, is nog altijd niet bekend. Kortom, er is nog heel wat werk aan de winkel om de ware toedracht te achterhalen. Het is aan de astronomen om met dit nieuwe puzzelstukje verder aan de slag te gaan.
ESOEen illustratie van Betelgeuse en de gaspluim errond.
WETENSCHAPWetenschappers kijken met ingehouden adem naar Betelgeuse. De gigantische ster, zo’n 1.400 keer groter dan onze zon, vertoont abnormaal gedrag en staat mogelijk op springen. Een explosie van Betelgeuse zou de meest nabije supernova sinds de 17e eeuw zijn en een fenomenaal spektakel opleveren op aarde.
Astronomen schatten eerder dat Betelgeuse nog zo’n 100.000 jaar zou leven, een eeuwigheid voor ons maar een luttel moment voor het heelal. Maar intussen hebben wetenschappers bizar gedrag vastgesteld bij Betelgeuse. De snelheid waarmee de ster uitdooft, is plots hoger dan ooit tevoren. Dat betekent dat er mogelijk een supernova van ongeziene omvang zit aan te komen.
ALMABetelgeuse is zo groot dat de ster het grootste deel van ons zonnestelsel zou innemen, van Mercurius tot Jupiter.
Betelgeuse is een beetje te vergelijken met een kloppend hart: de ster dooft uit en wakkert weer aan in golvende bewegingen. Volgens nieuwe data van astronoom Edward Guinan van de Villanova University in de Amerikaanse staat Pennsylvania zit Betelgeuse mogelijk in een uitdoofperiode van 430 dagen. Op 21 februari loopt die periode af en zal Betelgeuse donkerder dan ooit tevoren zijn. Die dag wordt cruciaal, want als de ster daarna niet weer opwakkert en verder uitdooft, stevenen we mogelijk af op een supernova. Dan explodeert de ster.
Wat als Betelgeuse echt op springen staat?
Betelgeuse bevindt zich op 700 lichtjaren van de aarde. Ter vergelijking: onze zon ligt op ongeveer 8,3 lichtminuten van de aarde en dus bijna 5 miljoen keer dichter. Betelgeuse ligt dus ver genoeg om geen gevaar te vormen voor ons, maar wel dicht genoeg om de meest nabije supernova in 400 jaar te worden.
De kans blijft weliswaar gering dat wij Betelgeuse zien ontploffen. Betelgeuse is al vaak gedimd en de kans is klein dat het deze keer wel tot een supernova komt.
Mogelijk is Betelgeuse trouwens al lang ontploft, maar net omdat de ster zo ver van ons ligt, krijgen wij ze te zien zoals ze er 700 jaar geleden uitzag, want dat is de tijd die het licht nodig heeft om van Betelgeuse tot bij ons te geraken. Als wij de supernova ooit te zien krijgen, zal Betelgeuse al een eeuwigheid zijn uitgedoofd.
Hoe zal die explosie eruitzien?
Als Betelgeuse ontploft, krijgen we een prachtig spektakel te zien op aarde dat mogelijk tot enkele dagen kan duren. De supernova wordt zo helder dat hij zelfs overdag te zien zal zijn. Het licht wordt wellicht zelfs helderder dan dat van de Maan. De laatste keer dat mensen een vergelijkbaar fenomeen hebben meegemaakt, is ongeveer 400 jaar geleden.
Wetenschappers houden Betelgeuse nauwlettend in de gaten tot 21 februari, want dan weten we of de kans op een supernova echt groter wordt.
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UFO Caught At Space Station Using Infrared Cam, Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Caught At Space Station Using Infrared Cam, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Feb 7, 2020
Location of sighting: Space Station
Source: Live ISS Cam
This UFO was captured by a new UFO hunter on Youtube going by the name of UFOgent. He captured this orb on the space station live cam and its just mind blowing. The cam is in infrared at the moment. That is why its purplish pink in color. Nothing can escape infrared video, it cuts through cloaks, clouds, water and even reflections on water, windows and tinted glass. But you probably already know that. This orb is heading towards the space station. Probably some aliens deciding to take a closer look at what the astronauts on board are doing and thinking. Some might say this is the moon. That would come from an inexperienced person who has not used the live cam very much. I have used it for over 15 years...and me and Streetcap1 were the founding fathers at using this cam to find UFOs. The Russians killed him, so that just leaves me. So when I say this is not the moon, you can trust me. Its also too slow to be a meteor.
The same study found that 58% of people think the government investigates UFOs and aliens, and 27% believe the sightings are real.
I’m all in on this. I’m all in! Release the files from Area 51 and elsewhere, folks! Let the information flow through the streets and into the minds of the people!
Ever since the Navy UFO videos of the “tic tac” became public, it seems like people are becoming more and more interested in UFOs.
Do I think aliens and UFOs are real? Not a clue. I don’t know anything more than you guys do. Of course, a UFO doesn’t naturally mean it’s an alien.
It just means it’s a flying object that can’t be identified. Now, is it a lot more fun to assume it’s an alien spacecraft? Sure, but that’s not what it means by default.
Either way, I say live on the edge and declassify everything. Embrace the chaos. If the aliens are here and we need to get into some “X-Files” kind of stuff, then so be it.
At least let us know!
Sound off in the comments if you want the government to release their info!
In a cosmic ‘stellar fight,’ a red giant star engulfed its smaller binary companion star. The chaos, however, created a beautiful space image.
View larger. | This new image from the ALMA telescope in Chile shows the aftermath of a near-collision between stars in the binary star system HD101584. In this system, a red giant star is engulfing its smaller companion. The colors indicate velocities of gas moving toward or away from us. Blue indicates gas moving toward us. Red indicates gas moving away.
Image via ALMA/ ESO/ NAOJ/ NRAO)/ Olofsson et al./ Robert Cumming.
Stars like our sun die by expanding into huge, bloated red giants. Over time, some lose their outer layers gradually, leaving behind only a hot core called a white dwarf. Our sun is expected to end its life in this way. In the case of the binary star systemHD101584, however, the death process was interrupted prematurely, and the result was the beautiful image shown at top. The European Southern Observatory (ESO) released this new image from the ALMA telescope in Chile on February 5, 2020. It shows what can happen when one star swallows another.
Hans Olofsson of the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, who led a recent study of this object, commented in a statement:
The star system HD101584 is special in the sense that this ‘death process’ was terminated prematurely and dramatically as a nearby low-mass companion star was engulfed by the giant.
Here’s what’s happening in this image. The more massive star in the HD101584 system would have expanded into a red giant faster than its less massive companion. It eventually grew large enough to swallow up its smaller companion star.
As the smaller star became engulfed, it began to spiral in towards the core of the red giant, but never actually collided with it. Instead, the larger star experienced a massive outburst, shedding its outer gas layers.
Jets of gas formed during this process, blasting though material previously ejected from the star, which formed the rings of gas.
The double star system HD101584 is located in our sky in the direction of the constellation of Centaurus. HD101584 itself is highlighted with a red circle on this chart.
The nebula-like gas cloud in the new ALMA image is beautiful, and it can also provide scientists with valuable clues about how sunlike stars form and evolve. As co-author Sofia Ramstedt from Uppsala University in Sweden explained:
Currently, we can describe the death processes common to many sunlike stars, but we cannot explain why or exactly how they happen. HD101584 gives us important clues to solve this puzzle since it is currently in a short transitional phase between better studied evolutionary stages. With detailed images of the environment of HD101584 we can make the connection between the giant star it was before, and the stellar remnant it will soon become.
Hans Olofsson of the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden led the study of HD101584.
ESO said that it’s ALMA’s ability to see distant objects sharply – combined with data from the ESO-operated Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX) – that made this image possible. Elizabeth Humphries, another co-author from ESO in Chile, explained that the combination of ALMA and APEX was essential to being able to study “both the physics and chemistry in action” of the gas cloud.
Right now, the two stars in this gas cloud can’t be resolved separately as they are too close together and too distant. Only the colorful tendrils of gas now surrounding them can be easily seen. But, ESO said, its upcoming Extremely Large Telescope, now under construction, will be able to see them more clearly for the first time. As Olofsson said, it:
Will provide information on the ‘heart’ of the object.
The video below – also released February 5, 2020 – is also very cool. It starts by showing a wide-field view of a region of the sky in the constellation of Centaurus, then zooms in to show HD 101584, and the beautiful gas cloud surrounding the binary star.
Bottom line: A “stellar fight” – where a red giant star engulfed a smaller companion star – resulted in a beautiful and colorful gas cloud. Stars go through a process of birth, life, death – and even conflict – much as living things do. In this case, the cause of this cosmic display was chaotic and violent, but its result was beautiful.
In a cosmic ‘stellar fight,’ a red giant star engulfed its smaller binary companion star. The chaos, however, created a beautiful space image.
View larger. | This new image from the ALMA telescope in Chile shows the aftermath of a near-collision between stars in the binary star system HD101584. In this system, a red giant star is engulfing its smaller companion. The colors indicate velocities of gas moving toward or away from us. Blue indicates gas moving toward us. Red indicates gas moving away.
Image via ALMA/ ESO/ NAOJ/ NRAO)/ Olofsson et al./ Robert Cumming.
Stars like our sun die by expanding into huge, bloated red giants. Over time, some lose their outer layers gradually, leaving behind only a hot core called a white dwarf. Our sun is expected to end its life in this way. In the case of the binary star systemHD101584, however, the death process was interrupted prematurely, and the result was the beautiful image shown at top. The European Southern Observatory (ESO) released this new image from the ALMA telescope in Chile on February 5, 2020. It shows what can happen when one star swallows another.
Hans Olofsson of the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, who led a recent study of this object, commented in a statement:
The star system HD101584 is special in the sense that this ‘death process’ was terminated prematurely and dramatically as a nearby low-mass companion star was engulfed by the giant.
Here’s what’s happening in this image. The more massive star in the HD101584 system would have expanded into a red giant faster than its less massive companion. It eventually grew large enough to swallow up its smaller companion star.
As the smaller star became engulfed, it began to spiral in towards the core of the red giant, but never actually collided with it. Instead, the larger star experienced a massive outburst, shedding its outer gas layers.
Jets of gas formed during this process, blasting though material previously ejected from the star, which formed the rings of gas.
The double star system HD101584 is located in our sky in the direction of the constellation of Centaurus. HD101584 itself is highlighted with a red circle on this chart.
The nebula-like gas cloud in the new ALMA image is beautiful, and it can also provide scientists with valuable clues about how sunlike stars form and evolve. As co-author Sofia Ramstedt from Uppsala University in Sweden explained:
Currently, we can describe the death processes common to many sunlike stars, but we cannot explain why or exactly how they happen. HD101584 gives us important clues to solve this puzzle since it is currently in a short transitional phase between better studied evolutionary stages. With detailed images of the environment of HD101584 we can make the connection between the giant star it was before, and the stellar remnant it will soon become.
Hans Olofsson of the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden led the study of HD101584.
ESO said that it’s ALMA’s ability to see distant objects sharply – combined with data from the ESO-operated Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX) – that made this image possible. Elizabeth Humphries, another co-author from ESO in Chile, explained that the combination of ALMA and APEX was essential to being able to study “both the physics and chemistry in action” of the gas cloud.
Right now, the two stars in this gas cloud can’t be resolved separately as they are too close together and too distant. Only the colorful tendrils of gas now surrounding them can be easily seen. But, ESO said, its upcoming Extremely Large Telescope, now under construction, will be able to see them more clearly for the first time. As Olofsson said, it:
Will provide information on the ‘heart’ of the object.
The video below – also released February 5, 2020 – is also very cool. It starts by showing a wide-field view of a region of the sky in the constellation of Centaurus, then zooms in to show HD 101584, and the beautiful gas cloud surrounding the binary star.
Bottom line: A “stellar fight” – where a red giant star engulfed a smaller companion star – resulted in a beautiful and colorful gas cloud. Stars go through a process of birth, life, death – and even conflict – much as living things do. In this case, the cause of this cosmic display was chaotic and violent, but its result was beautiful.
After decades of poking around in the math behind the glue holding the innards of all matter together, physicists have found a strange hypothetical particle, one that has never appeared in any experiment. Called a sexaquark, the oddball is made up of a funky arrangement of six quarks of various flavors.
Besides being a cool-sounding character, the sexaquark could eventually explain the ever-maddening mystery of dark matter. And physicists have found that if the sexaquark has a particular mass, the particle could live forever.
Almost everything you know and love is made of tiny particles known as quarks. There are six of them, given the names, for various nerdy reasons, of up, down, top, bottom, strange and charm. The up and down varieties are the lightest of the bunch, which makes them by far the most common. (In particle physics, the heavier you are, the more likely you are to decay into smaller, stabler things.)
The protons and neutrons inside your body are all composed of trios of quarks; two ups and a down make a proton, and two downs and an up make a neutron. Indeed, due to the complicated nature of the strong force, quarks really enjoy hanging out in groups of three, and that is also by far the stablest and most common configuration.
Occasionally in our particle colliders, we create particles each consisting of a pair of quarks; these conglomerations are unstable and quickly decay into something else. Sometimes, when we try really hard, we can glue five quarks together and make them play nicely with each other — briefly — before they, too, decay into something else.
And to date, those are all the combinations of quarks that we've been able to manufacture.
After decades of poking around the mathematical corners of the strong nuclear force, physicists found a strange combination that has yet to appear in our experiments: an arrangement of six quarks, consisting of two ups, two downs and two stranges: the sexaquark.
Theories don't predict a mass for the sexaquark; this value would depend on the precise arrangement and interaction of the individual quarks inside that particle, so it's up to the experimental physicists to suss it out. And as for the sexaquark's stability? Calculations suggest that if its mass falls below a certain threshold, it would be absolutely stable forever, meaning it wouldn't ever decay. And if the mass is a little bigger than that, but still below a certain threshold, then the particle would decay, but over such long timescales that it might as well be stable forever.
So if it's stable, why haven't we ever seen it?
Curiously, the range of stable masses for the sexaquark falls below the threshold of what many particle collider experiments can create; these tools were designed to study much rarer, much heavier, much more fleeting particles. In other words, the sexaquark may be hiding in plain sight, having simply flown under the radar all these years.
But particle colliders aren't the only place to make sexaquarks. The earliest moments of the Big Bang were a frenetic hotbed of nuclear energies, with temperatures and pressures high enough to forge helium and hydrogen out of a raw soup of quarks. And that forge may have also flooded our cosmos with sexaquarks, along with all the more-familiar subatomic characters.
Preliminary calculations suggest that if the sexaquark is a real thing within the right range of masses, it could have been produced in ridiculous abundance in the early universe. And it could have survived that youthful inferno. In fact, sexaquarks may still exist, not really interacting with anything, not really decaying into anything else — just existing, creating extra gravitational pulls wherever they collect, due to their mass.
An invisible particle that's flooding the universe and that interacts only through gravity? Bingo. That's dark matter.
A light in the dark
In order for the sexaquark to make up dark matter, it has to actually exist. That is currently a subject of debate, because the object has never been spotted in a particle collider experiment. But like we saw earlier, the sexaquark's relatively light mass may mean it's been able to slip by unnoticed, simply because we haven't been looking for it.
But that's beginning to change. The BaBar Detector at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California is really good at producing lots of combinations of quarks, including some really heavy ones that decay into stabler and more reasonable arrangements. BaBar should also produce a bumper crop of sexaquarks, if they exist.
A paper published Jan. 2 to the arXiv database has reported the latest result: no sign of the sexaquark. But that finding is certain to a confidence level of only 90%. That means that if the more massive and less stable combinations of quarks do decay into stable sexaquarks, they do so very rarely, at a rate of only 1 decay in every 10 million.
Does this rule out the sexquark as a dark matter candidate? Not quite. It could be that the conditions of the early universe allowed enough sexaquarks to be made that they could account for the amount of dark matter that we estimate is in the universe. But the new result does make it challenging to use the sexaquark to explain dark matter.
Nice try, sexaquark, but no cigar — at least, not yet.
Will Humanity Achieve Interstellar Travel And Find Alien Life? - PART II
Will Humanity Achieve Interstellar Travel And Find Alien Life? - PART II
Live blog begins at 3:50 PM Pacific Time, with all timestamps below shown beginning from that starting point.
A representation of an alien invasion. This is not an actual extraterrestrial.
FLICKR USER PLAITS
4:00 PM: Aliens, on the other hand, are likely ubiquitous, based on what we know about the ingredients for life in the Universe, the workings of chemistry, and our measurements of exoplanets with the right conditions for life around other stars. We have literally billions and billions of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy alone, with similar conditions to early Earth. In many models, early Venus and Mars were similar to early Earth.
Are we supposed to believe that Earth, where life arose within the first ~3% of our planet's history, is somehow unique in that regard? Although winding up with something like human beings is a difficult proposition, winding up with no life at all, across billions and billions of other instances with similar initial conditions, seems far more unlikely, at least from a scientific perspective.
4:01 PM: Hooray for another on-time start, as Greg Dick, the executive director of Perimeter Institute, gets us started right on time with his introduction!
4:02 PM: Oh, before I forget, Bryan is Australian, so get ready for an accent, although his won't be the strongest Australian accent you hear by a long shot!
4:03 PM: And that's a pretty quick introduction! Here we go; curious what the scientific perspective holds, according to an astronomer/astrophysicist who isn't me!
4:05 PM: Spoilers: we don't have warp drive yet, and we haven't found the aliens yet. Love to hear this up-front, but I also love the optimism that he has that science can make pretty much all of our non-laws-of-physics-violating dreams come true. I think, at its best, this is the dream we all have for science.
4:07 PM: Bryan absolutely talks about an important aspect of being exposed to not just answers of what we do know, but what the frontiers of science are, what's unknown, at a young age. As a five year old, to discover that adults, parents, teachers, and even experts (libraries and encyclopedias) didn't know the answer to everything.
And that there are people who figure out the answers to those questions, and they're just ordinary people, and that he could be one of them.
Please note that this applies to everyone! You can do it, too, and you don't have to figure that out at age 5 to do it.
From inflation to the hot Big Bang, to the birth and death of stars, galaxies, and black holes, all... [+]
E. SIEGEL, WITH IMAGES DERIVED FROM ESA/PLANCK AND THE DOE/NASA/ NSF INTERAGENCY TASK FORCE ON CMB RESEARCH
4:10 PM: And this is a lot of fun, too: the fact that questions we didn't even know we needed to ask can be revealed by finding the answers to previous scientific questions. In the 1920s, we didn't know the Universe was expanding, but its discovery led to the idea of the Big Bang. In the 1960s, we didn't know that the Big Bang was true, but its confirmation led to questions about what came before it and what our Universe's ultimate fate would be.
And now, as you can see, we're talking about the mysteries of cosmic inflation and dark energy, which are where those frontiers now lie. And in any field, this is how it works: discovering an answer only reveals a deeper frontier that we haven't yet explored.
4:11 PM: I like Bryan's delineation between the difference between science and science fiction. Science is all about discovering and following the rules; science-fiction is about breaking those rules. I haven't explicitly thought about it in those terms, and I agree that this is pretty much how it usually works. I don't know that this is why I, personally, like or don't like various forms of science-fiction, but it's a new perspective to think about for me.
4:13 PM: We constantly have advancing technology, and science-fiction asks the question of how advancing technology will change our lives. He brings up the example of Westworld, which I like, but I really think he missed a golden opportunity to reference Black Mirror, which really highlights and elevates the dystopian aspects of our society in a new way in each episode.
An animation showing the path of the interstellar interloper now known as ʻOumuamua. The combination... [+]
NASA / JPL - CALTECH
4:15 PM: Alright, some science! Here we are, moving on to interstellar interloper 'Oumuamua, one of the things we've seen that wasn't particularly anticipated, even by science fiction. And yet, Bryan is correct to point out that Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, had a cigar-shaped alien asteroid in our own solar system.
It's not, of course, telling us to save the whales, and it's not a space probe, but it's remarkable that science fiction had this idea before astronomers or any scientists knew it was coming.
The Event Horizon Telescope's first released image achieved resolutions of 22.5 microarcseconds,... [+]
EVENT HORIZON TELESCOPE COLLABORATION
4:18 PM: This one is a little bit less fair. When you're talking about older movies that talk about black holes, it's really unfair to talk about how "we knew what black holes would look like" in science-fiction, because black holes have been astrophysically theorized for decades, going back to the 60s, 50s, or even 1916 in the context of General Relativity, and even earlier (the late 18th century) in Newtonian gravity.
Sure, it's fascinating, but visualizations, based on a mix of science and artistic license, have been around for as long as we've even known enough about science to imagine what could realistically be. Also, side note, the "interstellar" black hole is probably not very likely to be what we see when we examine our realistic black holes in supreme accuracy; there's a lot of artistic license and some likely unphysical assumptions that were made for Insterstellar.
Artist’s illustration of two merging neutron stars. Binary neutron star systems inspiral and merge... [+]
NSF / LIGO / SONOMA STATE UNIVERSITY / A. SIMONNET
4:22 PM: I also don't quite think it's fair to say "well, we simulated and visualized this astrophysical event," and then "we observed it," and "that's an example of science outstripping science fiction.
Yes, it's true that the entire Universe shook... but not every scientific event, including one that involves planet Earth "shaking" by less than an atom's width, makes for particularly good science fiction. He said earlier, remember, that science fiction was about investigating the human condition. It's hard to see how a tiny, subtle effect like that would make for a good sci-fi story.
The hyperdrive from Star Wars appears to depict an ultra-relativistic motion through space,... [+]
JEDIMENTAT44 / FLICKR
4:25 PM: Okay, this is a pet peeve of mine. Do you know why things like rockets and space shuttles have the shapes they do? That elongated, narrow-cone shape you're familiar with? It's because of atmospheric drag.
If you're going to build your ship in space, and fly it only in space, you don't need to factor in aerodynamic considerations at all! You'd be much, much smarter to build a structure with a good volume-to-surface-area ratio: a sphere. The Death Star, not the Millennium Falcon or an X-Wing, is going to be much more practical for structures we build in space!
The NEXIS Ion Thruster, at Jet Propulsion Laboratories, is a prototype for a long-term thruster that... [+]
NASA / JPL
4:28 PM: Ion drives are real, and they're very cool. But if you want to power a journey across large distances in a reasonable amount of time, ion drives won't get you far at all. They can take you ~6 billion kilometers over 11 years, as Bryan said, and can do so pretty efficiently. But if you factor that distance over that time as a "mean acceleration," you get something truly atrocious: 100 nanometers/second^2.
You're... not going to go very far very fast. ~100,000 years to the nearest star, same as conventional fuel. I'll pass, thank you.
Normally, structures like IKAROS, shown here, are viewed as potential sails in space. However, if a... [+]
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS USER ANDRZEJ MIRECKI
4:30 PM: Hey, solar sails! Yes, if you accelerate with a solar sail, you can decelerate with a solar sail! The "fuel" is simply radiation provided by a star, so as long as you visit a star comparable to the Sun, you could decelerate the same way you accelerated.
Unfortunately, this technology is inferior to ion drives not only in terms of distance reached, but in terms of acceleration and control over your spacecraft. It's a nice idea, but it's an idea that's in its infancy, at best, despite being proposed more than 400 years ago by Johannes Kepler!
4:32 PM: 75 years?! That's... that's going to assume a very light payload and a very, very large and efficient over a distance of 1.8 kilometers. Can we do that for ~4 light years, or 20 trillion kilometers. That's... well, good luck is all I'll say.
The EmDrive device, as originally displayed by Roger Shawyer's company, SPR Limited.
Quantum teleportation, an effect (erroneously) touted as faster-than-light travel. In reality, no... [+]
AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY
4:36 PM: Remember, what "quantum teleportation" is doesn't involve teleporting a particle, it involves teleporting the quantum state of a particle. And Bryan gets that right, but this doesn't solve the problem of teleporting an inanimate object, much less a person.
4:38 PM: Yes, you need a lot of information to encode a human being. Remember that there are around ~10^28 atoms in the human body, and that means something like 10^29 or 10^30 quantum bits of information. As Bryan says, "I don't think we'll be teleporting anytime soon."
The travel time for a spacecraft to reach a destination if it accelerates at a constant rate of... [+]
P. FRAUNDORF AT WIKIPEDIA
4:40 PM: Hey, don't be mad at time dilation! Time dilation is what could get us to the stars in a human lifetime. If you wanted to go more than ~100 light-years, it would always take you more than ~100 years (a human lifetime, at the far end) to get there from the frame-of-reference of a person remaining on Earth.
But if you continue to accelerate at 1 g, or 9.8 m/s^2, you'll get to wherever you want to go in a much shorter timescale from your frame of reference, as you travel close to the speed of light. Time dilation rules!
An artist's conception of a starship making use of the Alcubierre drive to travel at apparently... [+]
NASA
4:42 PM: Okay, really? From long, long-term technologies like ion drives and solar sails straight to warp drive, with nothing in between? In terms of not using fuel, Bryan is correct. But in terms of not using energy... well, good luck transforming your spacetime, where (reminder) spacetime's curvature is based on matter-and-energy, without expending energy!
The DEEP laser-sail concept relies on a large laser array striking and accelerating a relatively... [+]
4:43 PM: Wait, he's going to finish this part of his talk now, talking about Breakthrough Starshot (and the laser sail technology and a "starchip" spaceship) which we mentioned earlier, and cover "aliens" in... what, 10-15 minutes? We'll see!
4:45 PM: Nope; we're not onto the "aliens" part yet; we're talking about femtosatellites, which are still quite large and weigh a few grams, which is still too much for Breakthrough Starshot.
Tiny particles known as micrometeoroids will strike whatever they encounter in space, causing... [+]
NASA; SECURE WORLD FOUNDATION
4:48 PM: Yesss! This is something I'm excited to hear, because it's something that I've brought up that few people talk about: when you travel through space at relativistic speeds, you are going to smash into stuff in the interstellar medium! And that stuff is going to erode your spacecraft really fast, and there's nothing that's going to protect your "starship" (even if it's a microchip) from smashing into that dust.
Remember that a little piece of nerf-like foam was all it took, at high speeds, to cause the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. Remember that all of our spacecraft get hit by micrometeoroids. And remember that 20% the speed of light is about 100 times faster than our fastest spacecraft go, which means they have 10,000 times the kinetic energy from dust particle collisions. This is a harder problem to overcome than anyone has figured out a viable way to reckon with.
4:50 PM: Okay, it's onto the aliens part, and I have to disagree with what Bryan says. We don't want to go to planets around other stars to look for life; we want to find planets where life exists (or is likely) and then go there.
There are ~400 billion stars in our galaxy. Do you want to go on a wild goose chase, or do you want to know where you're going before you go on a decades-long journey across the great void of space?
(Pick the latter.)
When Hubble pointed at the system Kepler-1625, it found the initial transit of the main planet began... [+]
NASA’S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER/SVS/KATRINA JACKSON
4:53 PM: Using the transit method, we can find out properties of the planets that orbit around the stars, and they come in enormous varieties, just like we'd expect if we didn't assume the rest of the Universe was just like our little corner. We've found the planets that are easiest to find, and that means the largest planets relative to their star in close-in orbits. This, unsurprisingly, has skewed the population of planets that we've found.
Although more than 4,000 confirmed exoplanets are known, with more than half of them uncovered by... [+]
NASA/AMES RESEARCH CENTER/JESSIE DOTSON AND WENDY STENZEL; MISSING EARTH-LIKE WORLDS BY E. SIEGEL
4:55 PM: We have found waterworlds and lava worlds, but these are... well, likely not the best candidates for an "interesting" form of alien life. Nor are hot Jupiters (or any type of Jupiter), or any gas planet with a large hydrogen/helium envelope.
Just like in our own Solar System, most of the planets out there are not expected to have life on them.
4:56 PM: This is a totally unimportant point, but for an astronomer, it's a pet peeve for many.
The smallest stars in the Universe are red dwarfs. Always dwarfs, never dwarves. The plural of dwarf (for stars) is dwarfs; the plural of dwarf (for the fantasy race of short, stout, beard, axe-wielding characters) is dwarves.
If TOI 700d were a cloudless, dry-land planet with an atmosphere similar to modern Earth, there... [+]
ENGELMANN-SUISSA ET AL./NASA'S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER
4:59 PM: This is also an important point: what's happening on a world around a red dwarf star isn't so much about the irradiance from the star and day/night temperatures and the border between them, but how the atmosphere circulates and what it's composed of.
We also have to be very careful in distinguishing between "biosignatures," which is going to be a slam-dunk signal that tells us, "wow, that's a living planet right there," and a "bio-hint," which is what Bryan's referring to, which is pretty much guaranteed to get you false positives, over and over, before you actually get it right.
This diagram shows the novel 5-mirror optical system of ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT).... [+]
ESO
5:01 PM: This is really true: the ELT will be humanity's best chance, in the 2020s, for directly imaging an Earth-like (or potentially inhabited) planet of any type. This could lead us to a revolution, where bio-hints and bio-signatures could be abundant. Right now, planet-finders like TESS are giving us the best candidate planets for direct imaging, and while we'll have to get lucky, this is the high-reward science most of us dream about!
In this artist's rendition, NASA's Clipper spacecraft makes one of its many dozen close passes to... [+]
NASA/JPL-CALTECH
5:04 PM: Of course, this is the third possibility I haven't discussed for finding life: it could be right here in our Solar System! Do we have life in a subsurface ocean on Europa or Enceladus? Do we have subterranean, potentially seasonally active/inactive life on Mars? Do the outer worlds, like Triton or Pluto, have anything on them of interest?
We have missions going to look, and hopefully in the 2020s, we'll start to get answers that teach us whether our fantastical interpretations of signals like seasonal methane or organic molecules really hold up. They could be biotic in nature, and we won't know until we do the appropriate tests!
A small section of the Karl Jansky Very Large Array, one of the world's largest and most powerful... [+]
JOHN FOWLER
5:06 PM: This is a fun fact: you must not use a walkie talkie around radio telescopes; the interference is atrocious! Remember that people didn't know what "fast radio bursts" were for much longer than we realized, because the microwave oven in the break room of a giant radio telescope was causing interference? That's a true story; don't use walkie talkies near radio telescopes!
5:07 PM: So I think this 1 hour talk has taught me how you talk about two topics when you spend the first 50 minutes on the first topic: just keep talking over your talk's time!
5:10 PM: The present and the near future are incredibly exciting, and you don't need warp drive or actual aliens to make it so. But, that said, it would be pretty cool to achieve interstellar travel or to find any true signatures (not just hints + wishful thinking) of alien life.
This is why we do science and why we develop technology; these are our sci-fi dreams and we're making them come true!
5:12 PM: Alright, talk's over and we're into the Q&A. Hey, and the first question is "how do we go from that light of an exoplanet transiting" to "how do we extract all that useful information?" And the two answers are:
transit spectroscopy, and
direct imaging.
Bryan is only giving the first answer, but both matter!
5:14 PM: No to aliens in Roswell, New Mexico. Good answer, Bryan. I like the snark of, "why come all this way just to dissect a cow?"
Alright, everyone, that's all the time I've budgeted for today's talk; hope you enjoyed the live blog and Bryan's talk! We might not have found aliens yet and we might still be quite far from reaching another star, but our technology has brought us quite an impressive way already, and we're headed towards something even more spectacular as the 2020s begin to unfold. Stay curious and please join me in looking forward to all the wondrous discoveries that this decade is sure to hold!
The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it.
Although our dreams of making contact with an alien civilization have traditionally been rooted in... [+]
DANIELLE FUTSELAAR
For as long as human beings have looked up at the stars in the sky, two questions have captured our collective imaginations: are there other life forms out there on any of their worlds, and will we ever realize the dream of traveling to one of them? Although both tasks appear to have enormously daunting technical challenges, recent advances in science suggest that not only might humanity be capable of overcoming them, but we might even do so later this century.
While faster-than-light travel and visitations from aliens — whether benign or malevolent — are staples of our science-fiction stories, it's plausible that our real-life scientific advances may legitimately be more profound than any fictional stories humans have dreamed up. On the edge of both frontiers, humanity may be on the cusp of achieving a dream as old as humanity itself.
A logarithmic chart of distances, showing the Voyager spacecraft, our Solar System and our nearest... [+]
NASA / JPL-CALTECH
The biggest problem with the idea of interstellar travel is scale. The distances to even the nearest stars are measured in light-years, with Proxima Centauri being our nearest neighbor at 4.24 light-years away, where one light-year is approximately 9 trillion kilometers: some 60,000 times the Earth-Sun distance. At the speed of the fastest space probes humanity has ever sent on their way out of the Solar System (the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft), covering the distance to the nearest star would take approximately 80,000 years.
But all of this is based on current technology, which uses chemical-based rocket fuel for propulsion. The biggest downside of rocket fuel is its inefficiency: one kilogram of fuel is capable of generating just milligrams' worth of energy, as measured by Einstein's E = mc2. Having to carry that fuel on board with you — and requiring that you accelerate both your payload and the remaining fuel with that energy — is what's hamstringing us right now.
Position and trajectory of Voyager 1 and the positions of the planets on 14 February 1990, the day... [+]
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS / JOE HAYTHORNTHWAITE AND TOM RUEN
But there are two independent possibilities that don't require us to dream up Warp Drive-like technologies that would rely on new physics. Instead, we can pursue the routes of either using a more efficient fuel to power our journey, which could increase our range and speeds tremendously, or we can explore technologies where the thrust-providing source is independent of the payload that's going to be accelerated.
In terms of efficiency, there are three technologies that could vastly outperform chemical-based rocket fuel:
nuclear fission,
nuclear fusion,
and matter-antimatter propulsion.
Whereas chemical-based fuels convert a mere 0.0001% of their mass into energy that can be used for thrust, all of these ideas are far more efficient.
ll rockets ever envisioned require some type of fuel. Whether a plasma engine, a matter/antimatter... [+]
NASA/MSFC
Fission converts approximately 0.1% of the mass of fissile materials into energy; approximately one kilogram of fissionable fuel yields about one gram's worth of energy, via E = mc2. Nuclear fusion does a superior job; fusing hydrogen into helium, for example, is 0.7% efficient: one kilogram of fuel would yield 7 grams' worth of usable energy. But far-and-away the most efficient solution is matter-antimatter annihilation.
If we could create and control 0.5 kilograms of antimatter, we could annihilate it at will with 0.5 kilograms of normal matter, creating a 100% efficient reaction that produced a full kilogram's worth of energy. We could conceivably extract thousands or even a million times as much energy from the same amount of fuel, which could propel us to the stars on timescales of centuries (with fission) or even just decades (with fusion or antimatter).
An artist's rendition of a laser-driven sail shows how a large-area, light-weight spacecraft could... [+]
ADRIAN MANN / UCSB
On the other hand, we could work to achieve interstellar travel via a completely different route: by placing a large power source capable of accelerating a spacecraft in space. Recent advances in laser technology have led many to suggest that an enormous, sufficiently collimated array of lasers in space could be used to accelerate a spacecraft from low-Earth orbit to tremendous speeds. A highly reflective laser-sail, like a solar sail except specifically designed for lasers, could do the job.
If a large-enough, powerful-enough array of in-phase lasers were constructed, potentially reaching gigawatt power levels, it could not only impart momentum to a target spacecraft, but could do so for a long period of time. Based on calculations performed by Dr. Phil Lubin a few years ago, it's possible that speeds up to 20% the speed of light could be reached. While we don't yet have a plan for decelerating such a spacecraft, reaching the nearest star in a single human lifetime is within the realm of possibility.
The laser sail concept, for a starchip-style starship, does have the potential to accelerate a... [+]
BREAKTHROUGH STARSHOT
By the same token, the search for extraterrestrial life is no longer restricted to either waiting for an alien visit or searching the Universe with radio signals for intelligent aliens, although the latter is certainly still an active scientific field spearheaded by SETI. Although no signals have been found, this remains a stunning example of high-risk, high-reward science. If a positive detection is ever made, it will be a civilization-transforming event.
However, as exoplanet astronomy continues to advance, two techniques that have already been demonstrated could bring us our first signatures of life on other worlds: transit spectroscopy and direct imaging. Both of these involve using the light from a planet itself, with transit spectroscopy leveraging the light that filters through a planet's atmosphere and direct imaging taking advantage of the sunlight directly reflected off of the planet itself.
When a planet transits in front of its parent star, some of the light is not only blocked, but if an... [+]
ESA / DAVID SING
Transit spectroscopy relies on us having a serendipitous alignment of our observatory with both a target exoplanet and its parent star, but these alignments do occur. Whereas a small fraction of the star's light will get blocked by the transiting planet, an even smaller fraction of starlight will transmit through the planet's atmosphere, similar to the sunlight that gets transmitted through Earth's atmosphere and lights up the Moon (in red) during a total lunar eclipse.
This enables us, if our measurements are good enough, to decode what elements and molecules are present in the target planet's atmosphere. If we could discover biological signatures or even technosignatures which could be an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, complex biomolecules, or even something like a chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) molecule we would immediately have a strong hint of a living world that would tantalizingly await confirmation.
Left, an image of Earth from the DSCOVR-EPIC camera. Right, the same image degraded to a resolution of 3 x 3 pixels, similar to what researchers will see in future exoplanet observations.
NOAA/NASA/STEPHEN KANE
Direct imaging could provide exactly that sort of confirmation. Although our first image of an Earth-sized exoplanet likely won't be very visually impressive, it will contain a ton of information that can be used to reveal indicators of life. Even if the planet itself is just one pixel in a detector, we could not only break its light apart into individual wavelengths, but can look for time-varying signatures that could reveal:
clouds,
continents,
oceans,
plant life greening with the seasons,
icecaps,
rotation rates,
and much more. If there are light-emitting signatures at night, just as planet Earth has our light that illuminate the world at night, we could conceivably even detect those as well. If there's a civilization out there on a nearby Earth-like planet, the next generation of telescopes might be able to find them.
The Earth at night emits electromagnetic signals, but it would take a telescope of incredible... [+]
NASA'S EARTH OBSERVATORY/NOAA/DOD
All of this, together, points to a picture where a spacecraft or even a crewed journey to the stars is technologically within our reach, and where the discovery of our first world beyond the solar system with possible life on it could occur in a decade or two. What was once solely in the realm of science-fiction is quickly becoming possible due to both technical and scientific advances and the thousands of scientists and engineers who work to apply these new technologies in practical ways.
On February 5 at 7 PM ET (4 PM PT), Dr. Bryan Gaensler, director of the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, will be delivering a public lecture at Perimeter Institute on exactly this topic. Titled Warp Drive and Aliens: The Scientific Perspective, it's available to watch from anywhere on Earth, and I'll be following along with a live-blog in real time, below.
How close is humanity to achieving this dream that's spanned innumerable generations? The answer is closer than you might think, so tune in here and follow along below (updates every 3-5 minutes) to find out what lies just beyond the known frontier. It could be the revolution we've all been hoping for!
An illustration of the warp field from Star Trek, which shortens the space in front of it while... [+]
TREKKY0623 OF ENGLISH WIKIPEDIA
Okay, warp drive fans, here we go! The first thing you might be wondering is about whether warp drive itself is really feasible or not. And the answer, believe it or not, is maybe, but not unless we figure out a source of energy that goes well beyond anything we've got so far, including antimatter.
The reason is simple: to achieve warp drive, you need to bend the space in front of you so that it contracts, and that can only occur at the expense of expanding the space behind you. This takes an enormous amount of energy all localized in one spot, and you need to do it while still keeping the space where your spaceship will be not too severely bent, or you'll wind up destroying it with terrific gravitational tidal forces.
The Alcubierre solution to General Relativity, enabling motion similar to warp drive. This solution... [+]
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS USER ALLENMCC
But if you can do it, and it is something allowed in General Relativity, this requires not only the matter-and-energy we know, but also some form of negative energy: either matter with negative mass or a form of anti-energy itself. If we could harness this, it would mean we could travel through the contracted space (slower than light), but we could do something like contract a 40 light-year journey down to 6 light-months.
Even if we only traveled through that now-contracted space at half the speed of light, we'd get there in 1 year, rather than 40. That's pretty impressive!
The warp drive system on the Star Trek starships was what made travel from star to star possible. If... [+]
ALISTAIR MCMILLAN / C.C.-BY-2.0
That doesn't mean, however, that the plot devices or treknobabble cooked up by Star Trek's writers, which includes things like:
dilithium crystals,
warp nacelles,
Bussard ramjets
warp cores,
or anything else we might immediately refer to has any relevance. Science fiction provides us with possible outcomes, but only very rarely gets the path to that technological solution correct. We know enough about physics, today, to be certain that Star Trek's "solution" to this problem is not feasible. But, then again, that's part of what makes science so wonderful: it can take a fictional idea and make it a reality. Or, if we're really lucky, surpass our sci-fi dreams!
Christina Koch did not set out to break records on her first spaceflight, but with her return to Earth after nearly a year in orbit, her mission is now one for the history books.
Koch, a NASA astronaut, landed on the snow-covered steppe of Kazakhstan on Thursday (Feb. 6) with two of her International Space Station (ISS) crewmates, Expedition 61 commander Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency (ESA) and cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
Descending under a parachute and further slowed by braking thrusters, the three touched down aboard Russia's Soyuz MS-13 spacecraft southeast of the Kazakh town of Dzhezkazgan at 4:12 a.m. EST (0912 GMT or 3:12 p.m. local time).
NASA astronaut Christina Koch, newly back on Earth after a record 328 days in space, gives a "thumbs up" upon exiting the Soyuz MS-13 spacecraft on the Kazakh steppe on Feb. 6, 2020. (Image credit: NASA TV)
Russian recovery forces, as well as NASA and ESA medical personnel, arrived quickly at the landing site to assist Koch, Parmitano and Skvortsov out of the space capsule and to conduct brief physical exams as the three crewmates began adjusting to the pull of gravity again.
"Everyone says that getting back into gravity is such a surprise, because you suddenly have to work to raise your own arms and, of course, your legs," Koch said in a media interview a few days before experiencing her first landing. "I haven't even had to hold up my own body weight in a long time, so we will see how that goes."
Koch, Parmitano and Skvortsov all appeared to be in good spirits, as they felt the chill of the open air for the first time since leaving Earth.
"I'm so overwhelmed and happy right now," Koch said a few minutes after landing.
"There are many people on the ground [who] are taking counts of what we have done — how many EVAs [extravehicular activities or spacewalks], how many hours of work, how many experiments, how many days we have spent up here — none of those are important," said Parmitano, addressing his station crewmates during a change of command ceremony on Wednesday. "What is important is what you achieved. You, as the crew, made all of this possible. It has been your incredible, incredible dedication that has made it all possible."
Parmitano, Skvortsov and Koch undocked their Soyuz at 12:50 a.m. EST (0550 GMT). Their departure from the Poisk mini-research module (MRM-2) marked the official end of Expedition 61. Cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka and NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Andrew Morgan remained on the station to begin Expedition 62.
NASA astronaut Christina Koch, cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov of Roscosmos and European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Luca Parmitano rest in chairs after landing from the International Space Station on the steppe of Kazakhstan on Feb. 6, 2020. (Image credit: NASA TV)
Koch arrived aboard the orbiting laboratory on March 14, 2019, to join the 59th expedition crew. Originally slated to to return to Earth after just six months, her stay was extended to collect data about the physiological effects of long-duration spaceflight. In December, Koch surpassed the previous record set by a woman — 289 days by NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson in 2017 — and has now completed the second longest single spaceflight by an American astronaut after Scott Kelly, who logged 340 days in 2016.
During her time as a member of the Expedition 59, 60 and 61 crews, Koch participated in more than 210 science investigations, including research into how the human body adjusts to the stresses of spaceflight and protein crystallization growth in support of developing cancer treatments. She also assisted in the robotic capture of uncrewed resupply spacecraft, including SpaceX's 19th Dragon and Northrop Grumman's 12th Cygnus cargo vehicles.
In addition, Koch performed six spacewalks, totaling 42 hours and 15 minutes, to upgrade the batteries for two channels of the space station's solar arrays. She conducted three of the excursions with Meir, setting another record for the first-ever extravehicular activities by an all-women team.
"When we first got the go to come out of the airlock ... we were holding onto a handrail and we just caught each other's eye, we knew [then] how special that moment was and I'll never forget that," said Koch of her first spacewalk with Meir on Oct. 18, 2019.
Over the course of the 328 days, Koch orbited Earth 5,248 times, traveling 139 million miles (224 million kilometers), or the equivalent of about 291 round trips to the moon.
Russia’s Soyuz MS-13 spacecraft seen after landing in Kazakhstan with Alexander Skvortsov, Luca Parmitano and Christina Koch from the International Space Station on Feb. 6, 2020. (Image credit: NASA TV)
"Milestones are important, and I think they are important for a couple of reasons," said Koch. "They get the conversation going about where we are in the state of the art of human exploration."
"The second aspect is inspiration," she continued. "I think some people draw inspiration from milestones and from things they have seen someone work hard to achieve."
Koch, who now ranks seventh on the list of U.S. space travelers with the most time in space, was not the only record-setter who returned to Earth on Thursday. Completing his second mission, Parmitano has now logged a total of 367 days in space, more than any ESA astronaut in history.
Parmitano also now holds the record for the most time on EVA by a European at 33 hours and 9 minutes. Four of his six career spacewalks were devoted to the repair of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer cosmic ray detector, which involved the most complex EVA work since the servicing of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Russia’s Soyuz MS-13 spacecraft undocks from the International Space Station's Poisk mini research module to return crewmates Alexander Skvortsov of Roscosmos, Luca Parmitano of ESA and Christina Koch of NASA to Earth, Thurs., Feb. 6, 2020. (Image credit: NASA TV)
Skvortsov, who has spent 546 days off the planet on three missions, now ranks 15th on the all-time spaceflight endurance list.
From their landing site the three will be flown by helicopter to Karaganda, where they will be greeted by a traditional Kazakh welcome ceremony. From there, Koch and Parmitano will board a NASA jet for Cologne, Germany, where Parmitano will be met by ESA officials before Koch continues to Houston. Skvortsov will be flown by a Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center aircraft to his home in Star City, Russia.
Soyuz MS-13 was the 59th Soyuz to launch for the International Space Station. It traveled 85.2 million miles (137 million km) completing 3,216 orbits of Earth.
Astronomers don't know why the monster's star-birth engine shut down.
These three panels show, from left to right, what the galaxy XMM-2599's evolutionary trajectory might be, beginning as a dusty star-forming galaxy, then becoming a dead galaxy, and perhaps ending up as a "brightest cluster galaxy," or BCG.
Astronomers just discovered a rare monster galaxy that grew rapidly in the universe's early days — and then went quiet surprisingly fast.
The newfound giant, known as XMM-2599, lies about 12 billion light-years from Earth, meaning that scientists are seeing the galaxy as it existed when the universe was quite young. (The Big Bang that created the universe occurred 13.82 billion years ago.)
“Even before the universe was 2 billion years old, XMM-2599 had already formed a mass of more than 300 billion suns, making it an ultramassive galaxy," Benjamin Forrest, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California Riverside (UCR), said in a statement.
"More remarkably, we show that XMM-2599 formed most of its stars in a huge frenzy when the universe was less than 1 billion years old, and then became inactive by the time the universe was only 1.8 billion years old," added Forrest, the lead author of a new study reporting the discovery of XMM-2599.
Forrest and his colleagues used an instrument called the Multi-Object Spectrograph for Infrared Exploration (MOSFIRE), which is installed on a telescope at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The MOSFIRE observations allowed the team to nail down XMM-2599's mass and its distance from Earth.
The researchers also determined that the galaxy created more than 1,000 suns' worth of stars every year during its activity peak. (For comparison, our Milky Way is currently forming just one solar mass of new stars annually.) But that peak is in the rearview mirror for XMM-2599; its star-birth engine has shut down, for reasons that remain unclear.
"Even though such massive galaxies are incredibly rare at this epoch, the models do predict them," study co-author Gillian Wilson, a physics and astronomy professor at UCR who heads the lab in which Forrest works, said in the same statement.
"The predicted galaxies, however, are expected to be actively forming stars," Wilson added. "What makes XMM-2599 so interesting, unusual and surprising is that it is no longer forming stars, perhaps because it stopped getting fuel or its black hole began to turn on. Our results call for changes in how models turn off star formation in early galaxies."
The researchers will continue to observe XMM-2599 using Keck, in an attempt to better characterize the galaxy and investigate unanswered questions about it. The most prominent such question may concern the galaxy's fate.
"We do not know what it will turn into by the present day," Wilson said. "We know it cannot lose mass. An interesting question is what happens around it. As time goes by, could it gravitationally attract nearby star-forming galaxies and become a bright city of galaxies?"
Secret underground bases located near well known tourist attractions in North Carolina
Secret underground bases located near well known tourist attractions in North Carolina
Author and researcher, Mary A. Joyce, is the editor of the Sky Ships over Cashiers website which features cutting-edge and unusual topics.
She detailed her work investigating a variety of anomalous phenomena in her home state of North Carolina.
This includes underground military bases located near well-known tourist attractions in the state, yet, so well camouflaged that few people know they exist.
According to a source she interviewed, a city-sized secret base that is totally self-sufficient, is located underneath PARI, an astronomical education and research center, located about an hour from Asheville.
Mike Turber, who claims to be a former Air Force intelligence expert, revealed on
‘The Hidden Truth Show’ with Jim Breslo (see videos below) that the infamous ‘Tic
Tac’ UFO captured on video by Navy pilots with the USS Nimitz carrier group off of
San Diego in 2004 is actually technology created by the US military. However, the
Navy says that it is not able to identify the object, calling it a ‘UAP’ or ‘unidentified
aerial phenomena’.
Ever since the revelation in 2017 of the Nimitz’ UFO encounter, there has been an
overwhelming sense that there is more footage yet to be disclosed. In January, a US
Navy spokesperson confirmed that a longer video classified “secret” does exist.
Turber says that this footage would be at least 10 minutes long and is far clearer
than the first one. Turber noted that the FLIR video recorder is turned on when the
jet launches, so the entire beginning of the video seems to be missing.
Turber claims that in 2007 or 2008, a craft matching the description of the ‘Tic Tac’
UFO was spotted hurtling through the water at 550mph by a US Navy submarine. “I
thought it was just a torpedo,” said Turber, “but, apparently not.” Turber told
the Daily Star Online that this US military craft is capable of traveling at astonishing
speeds both in the air and under the sea.
A craft matching the description of the USS Nimitz UFO was spotted by a US Navy submarine hurtling at 550mph through the water in a previously unrevealed encounter, a former US Air Force intelligence expert has claimed.
Jim Breslo Mike Turbo
The sighting of a ‘tic-tac’ craft by two US Navy fighter jets in 2004 has become one of the most famous UFO videos of all time.
The US Navy is still unable to explain the object, previously identifying it as an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.
But Mike Turber, an intelligence expert who claims to have worked in the USAF, claims the craft was actually created by the US military.
He first made his bombshell comments on The Hidden Truth Show with Jim Breslo.
And in an exclusive chat with Daily Star Online, he suggested the craft is capable of hurtling at astonishing speeds in both the air and sea.
“There was a submarine situation – that report will probably come out further down the line,” he explained.
“It (the tic-tac object) was travelling at 550mph. As far as I know, it was a Los Angeles-class submarine.
1:13:23 length Part 1 video of Jim Breslo’s interview of Mike Turber (‘Hidden Truth Show’ YouTube)
1:23:51 length Part 2 video of Jim Breslo’s interview of Mike Turber (‘Hidden Truth Show’ YouTube)
Powerful Radio Signal From Deep Space Appears to Be Repeating in a 16-Day Cycle
MICHELLE STARR
One of the defining characteristics of the mysterious deep-space signals we call fast radio bursts is that they are unpredictable. They belch out across the cosmos without rhyme or reason, with no discernible pattern, making them incredibly hard to study.
Now, for the first time, astronomers have found a fast radio burst (FRB) that repeats on a regular cycle.
Every 16.35 days, the signal named FRB 180916.J0158+65 follows a similar pattern. For four days, it will spit out a burst or two every hour. Then it falls silent for 12 days. Then the whole thing repeats.
Astronomers with the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) Collaboration in Canada observed this cycle for a total of 409 days. We don't yet know what it means; but it could be another piece in the complicated conundrum of FRBs. The research has been uploaded to pre-print server arXiv, where it awaits scrutiny from other experts in the field.
It's easy to become somewhat obsessed with fast radio bursts, a fascinating space mystery that has so far defied any attempts at a comprehensive explanation.
To recap, FRBs are hugely energetic flares of radiation in the radio spectrum that last just a few milliseconds at most. In that timeframe, they can discharge as much power as hundreds of millions of Suns.
Most of them spark once, and we have never detected them again. This makes it rather difficult to track these bursts down to a source galaxy. Some FRBs spit out repeating radio flares, but wildly unpredictably. These are easier to track to a galaxy, but so far, that hasn't brought us a great deal closer to an explanation.
Last year, the CHIME collaboration announced they had detected a whopping eight new repeating fast radio bursts, bringing the then-total of repeaters to 10 out of over 150 FRB sources. (Another paper recently brought that total up to 11.)
FRB 180916.J0158+65 was among the eight repeaters included in last year's haul; apart from its repeat bursts, initially it didn't appear to be anything special. But as the CHIME experiment continued to stare at the sky, a pattern emerged.
This is exciting, because it offers new information that can be used to try and model what could be causing FRB 180916.J0158+65.
"The discovery of a 16.35-day periodicity in a repeating FRB source is an important clue to the nature of this object," the researchers wrote in their paper.
Other objects that demonstrate periodicity tend to be binary systems - stars and black holes. The 16.35-day period could be the orbital period, with the FRB object only facing Earth during a certain part of the orbit.
"The single constraint on the orbital period still allows several orders of magnitude range in companion mass amongst known stellar-mass compact object binaries: from so-called 'black widow' binary systems, consisting of a low-mass star and a powerful millisecond pulsar whose wind ablates the companion (albeit typically with few-hour orbital periods), to massive O/B stars with highly eccentric companion pulsar orbits," the researchers wrote.
Alternatively, winds from the companion object, or tidal disruptions from a black hole, may periodically somehow block the FRB radiation.
It also can't be ruled out that the FRB source is a single, lone object such as a magnetar or X-ray pulsar, although the researchers note this explanation is a little harder to reconcile with the data. That's because those objects have a wobbling rotation that produces periodicity, and none are known to wobble that slowly.
And radio pulsars that do have periodic intervals of several days are orders of magnitude fainter than FRBs. So it's still a mystery.
But remember that 11th repeater we mentioned earlier? It was found coming from an FRB astronomers had thought was a one-off; its repeats were simply too faint for the equipment that had initially been used to look for them.
This suggests that many more FRBs could be repeating, but outside our detection range. And the fact that FRB 180916.J0158+65 seemed more or less the same as other FRBs could mean that other repeating FRBs are also on a cycle - we just haven't detected those cycles yet.
So, the next step would be, of course, to continue staring at FRB 180916.J0158+65 for a bit. But it also would be pretty interesting to try and see if periodicity can be detected in other bursts as well.
"Future observations, both intensity and polarimetric, and at all wavebands, could distinguish among models and are strongly encouraged," the researchers wrote, "as are searches for periodicities in other repeaters, to see if the phenomenon is generic."
The research is available on arXiv ahead of peer review.
NASA scientists say a new study proves there are seven times as many big and potentially dangerous comets flying through deep space than previously thought.
The study analyzed data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft that tracks “long-period” comets (LPCs) that take at least 200 years to orbit around the sun. WISE data showed far more LPCs that potentially pose a serious impact risk to Earth.
“Previously the sense was that for every 100 asteroid impacts (of all sizes) we get 1 comet impact,” Dr. Joseph A. Nuth, a senior asteroid scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Now that we know there are more LPCs for every 100 asteroid impacts we might get 5 comet impacts.”
Astronomers previously gave broad estimates of the number of LPCs in the solar system, but researchers didn’t have a good way to detect them since they were obscured by clouds of gas and dust.
Gravitational forces can move LPCs back into the inner solar system, potentially putting them on a collision course with Earth. An LPC impact would be devastating.
“A comet impact is, on average, much more devastating than an asteroid impact, Nuth said. “Think BBs and Bullets vs. Howitzers and Nukes.”
Comets are rarer than asteroids, but can carry more than 100 times the energy of a typical asteroid. An LPC would likely impact Earth at a much higher velocity than other space objects.
“[A] higher velocity impact would release more energy and therefore would be worse,” Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told TheDCNF. “This is offset somewhat by the fact that comets are less dense than asteroids: the energy release of a comet impact would be less than that of a similarly sized asteroid impact if the velocities were the same.”
The study also determined that LPCs are more dangerous than more conventional asteroids or comets because they are twice the size on average.
“Yes, a body twice the size has eight times the mass of a smaller body and therefore delivers eight times the kinetic energy if all other factors are equal,” Nuth said. “The impact energy is proportional to the velocity squared. So a comet moving three times the average asteroid velocity would impact with nine times the energy.”
“The potential impact of a long-period comet would be more hazardous than that of a Jupiter family comet both because the long-period comets are more likely to be larger, and because they follow orbits that would impact at higher velocities,” Chodas said.
The final reason researchers think LPCs are dangerous is their relative stealthiness compared to other space rocks. Detecting an LPC on a collusion course with Earth would be more difficult that spotting a more conventional near-Earth asteroid.
“The larger distance of comets, and the long orbital periods affect the warning time more than higher velocities: the generally larger distance of comets make the tracking observations less effective (since they are angular measurements), and the longer orbital periods mean that we don’t have multiple opportunities to see these objects at closer ranges,” Chodas said. “The distance at which a comet is discovered depends largely on the activity level of the comet.”
The difficulties inherent in detecting LPCs mean that NASA would likely have far less warning that one was on a collision course with Earth. The comet Siding Spring was detected on a trajectory that would strike the planet Mars in October of 2014, just 22 months after its discovery.
“Since Comet Siding Spring was quite active, it was discovered at a distance of 7 AU, about two years before it passed very close to Mars,” Chodas said. “A less active long-period comet might be discovered only a year before entering the inner Solar System. Establishing a precise trajectory for the comet would be challenging and likely take several months, so the warning time would likely be less than a year.”
Twenty-two months warning is far less than NASA scientists think they’d need to intercept an incoming comet. The best way to stop an asteroid or comet from hitting the Earth on such short notice may be to send a spacecraft up to intercept it. But even then, NASA researchers think they would need at least five years to construct a reliable spacecraft and man it.
“The case of Siding Spring is a reasonable example: much less than 5 years is a good guess,” Nuth said. “Siding Spring came in from the celestial pole and was not spotted until it began to exhibit a coma. A larger body would show a coma at similar distances.”
Earth is just as vulnerable to LPCs and other space rocks as Mars nearly was to the Siding Spring Comet. Earths’ closer proximity to the Sun wouldn’t make it easier to detect a long-period comet on a collision course, according to NASA researchers.
“The discovery time is dictated mostly by the comet’s distance from the Sun and how active the comet is,” Chodas said. “If Comet Siding Spring were headed for an encounter with Earth, its discovery time would be the same.”
Apair of Russian satellites are tailing a multibillion-dollar U.S. spy satellite hundreds of miles above the Earth’s surface, a top U.S. military commander tells TIME, underscoring a growing threat to America’s dominance in space-based espionage and a potentially costly new chapter in Washington’s decades-long competition with Moscow.
Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, commander of the newly minted U.S. Space Force, says the Russian spacecraft began maneuvering toward the American satellite shortly after being launched into orbit in November, at times creeping within 100 miles of it. “We view this behavior as unusual and disturbing,” Raymond says. “It has the potential to create a dangerous situation in space.” Raymond says the U.S. government has expressed concern to Moscow through diplomatic channels.
The confrontation marks the first time the U.S. military has publicly identified a direct threat to a specific American satellite by an adversary. The incident parallels Russia’s terrestrial encounters with the U.S. and its allies, including close calls between soldiers, fighter jets and warships around the world. Observers worry that space is now offering a new theater for unintentional escalation of hostilities between the long-time adversaries.
Pentagon, White House and Congressional backers, say the incident demonstrates the need for the Space Force, which President Donald Trump established in December when he signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law. It became the first new military service since the Air Force was created in 1947.
The Space Force, for which the White House is requesting $15 billion in this week’s budget proposal, represents a strategic shift from passively operating and observing satellites to actively defending them. Space warfare doctrine remains a work in progress, but Raymond has spoken about the need to mobilize Space Command against perceived threats because other nations, especially Russia and China, have become increasingly sophisticated at building arsenals of lasers, anti-satellite weapons and state-of-the-art spacecraft designed to render the U.S. deaf, mute and blind in space.
At the same time, the expansion of military operations in space harks back to another hallmark of the Cold War competition between Washington and Moscow: massive spending on perceived threats, regardless of the cost.
For those monitoring waste, fraud and abuse in the military industrial complex, the Russian maneuver and the Pentagon’s response also portends a new front in the effort to keep real and potential threats from becoming a budgetary sinkhole. The history of U.S.-Russia military competition is full of examples of perceived threats that require costly responses.
“The initial costs of setting up the Space Force are likely a small down payment on an undertaking that could cost tens of billions of dollars in the years to come,” says William D. Hartung, director of the arms and security project at the Center for International Policy. “The last thing we need is more bureaucracy at the Pentagon, but that’s exactly what the Space Force is likely to give us. Creating a separate branch of the armed forces for space also risks militarizing U.S. space policy and promoting ill-advised and dangerous projects that could involve deploying weapons in space.”
The Russian embassy did not respond to requests for comment about the allegedly threatening maneuvers by its satellites. The Kremlin has previously stated they are not weapons, but rather “inspector” spacecraft engaged in an “experiment.”
U.S. military analysts first noticed something peculiar after Russia launched its spacecraft into orbit November 26 from Plesetsk Cosmodrome aboard a Soyuz rocket. The Russian satellite had been in orbit less than two weeks when, bafflingly, it split in two. As the analysts looked closer, they suspected that a second smaller satellite was somehow “birthed” from the first one. “The way I picture it, in my mind, is like Russian nesting dolls,” Raymond says. “The second satellite came out of the first satellite.”
The maneuver was later confirmed on Dec. 6 when the TASS news agency cited Russia’s Defense Ministry saying the two had separated. “The purpose of the experiment is to continue work on assessing the technical condition of domestic satellites,” the statement said.
However, the satellites, identified as Cosmos 2542 and Cosmos 2543, appeared to be carrying out another mission. By mid-January, they were sidling near the American satellite, identified as USA 245, known to space experts as a KH-11.
The U.S. satellite, part of a reconnaissance constellation codenamed Keyhole/CRYSTAL, is operated by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the secretive intelligence agency headquartered in Chantilly Va. Although the NRO refuses to comment on the large school bus-sized satellites, the KH-11’s capabilities are often compared by experts in the field to the Hubble Space Telescope. Instead of staring into the vast expanse of space, however, the satellites’ sensors and cameras are focused into the heart of foreign adversaries’ top-secret military installations
A KH-11 satellite, known as USA 224, is widely believed by analysts to have taken the image of Iran’s Imam Khomeini Space Center that President Donald Trump posted to Twitter in August. The photo was so detailed, you could make out the Farsi characters written along the edge of the launchpad. The KH-11 constellation, which consists of four satellites that maintain constant Earth observation, operate in a polar orbit above the rotating Earth, enabling them to cover its entire surface.
Russia’s curious space activities were first noted on Twitter last week by Michael Thompson, an amateur satellite tracker, who used publicly available data to speculate on what it was up to. “The relative orbit is actually pretty cleverly designed, where Cosmos 2542 can observe one side of the KH11 when both satellites first come into sunlight, and by the time they enter eclipse, it has migrated to the other side,” Thompson wrote in a series of tweets. “This is all circumstantial evidence, but there are a hell of a lot of circumstances that make it look like a known Russian inspection satellite is currently inspecting a known US spy satellite.”
President Donald Trump and General John "Jay" Raymond attend a ceremony marking the establishment the U.S. Space Command at the White House on Aug. 29, 2019.
Chen Mengtong—China News Service/VCG via Getty Images
Raymond says he’s concerned because Russia is demonstrating capabilities the U.S. first saw three years ago, when Moscow tested the “Russian nesting doll” technology. “In 2017, they launched a satellite, it launched another satellite,” he says. “The satellites exhibited characteristics of a weapon system when one of those satellites launched a high-speed projectile into space.”
Moscow’s intent with the current mission remains unknown, but the Russian spacecraft should be capable of capturing high-resolution imagery of the American satellite as it conducts its mission, spying deep into adversaries’ territory. It’s akin to handing over a state-of-the art spy satellite to Russian scientists for forensic analysis.
Brian Weeden, a former Air Force officer and expert in space security at the Secure World Foundation, says the Russian satellites’ positioning could allow it to determine things like where the KH-11 is “pointing—and thus what ground targets its taking picture of—as well as the general operating schedule and usage.”
Further, if the Russian satellites are outfitted with electronic emissions probes, they could listen for radio frequency signals to try figure out how the KH-11 communicates and even attempt to intercept those communications, which are likely encrypted, says Todd Harrison, director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “There are a lot of things it could be doing,” Harrison says. “They could simply be practicing on-orbit maneuvers or signaling to the United States that they have this capability.”
The Keyhole program is 44 years old and the satellites are widely known to have similar capabilities as the Hubble Telescope. The U.S., China and other nations have already shown the ability to launch spacecraft into close orbit with their own satellites. The Kremlin could be showing the U.S.—in a very obvious way—that it has joined the club.
From Raymond’s standpoint, however, maneuvering close to a foreign satellite for an “inspection” is virtually indistinguishable from staging an attack to damage, disrupt or destroy it. “It’s clear that Russia is developing on-orbit capabilities that seek to exploit our reliance on space-based systems that fuel our American way of life,” he says. Raymond wouldn’t comment specifically on Russia’s intentions with the shadowing satellites
Over the past decade, space weaponry has gone from the stuff of science fiction to reality. A flurry of advancements from the U.S., Russia and China has altered the image of outer space as a peaceful sanctuary and instead stoked fears that an arms race has extended into the heavens.
But even if the Russian satellites are doing the most intrusive things the Pentagon and outside observers imagine, none of them would violate treaties or international law. Absent binding agreements, the incident portends a growing a cat-and-mouse game in space. “We prefer space to remain free of conflict,” Raymond says. “We think that responsible space-faring nations need to have conversations about developing these norms going forward.”
It is a historical truth that where humans have ventured, violence has followed. But conflict in space isn’t in any nation’s interest. There are more than 1,000 American satellites circling the planet, enabling everything from commerce, banking, transportation and communications. Russia, China and other developed nations have also grown increasingly dependent on satellites for commercial as well as military purposes, which raise the risks for miscalculation.
The U.S. government’s space-based operations are among the most highly technical and classified secrets in its possession. Raymond’s willingness to go on the record about the ongoing event provides a glimpse into what military officials see as an increasingly congested and contested environment.
Robert Cardillo, the former director of the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, says space is a “messy environment,” which without established rules, could turn into the Wild West. An attack on a satellite constellation, such as GPS, which is owned and operated by the U.S. Air Force, could have far-reaching consequences like halting ATM banking transactions or causing a blackout in navigation applications on users’ smartphones, which occurs billions of times a day around the globe.
The developments hark back to military concept that helped keep the world safe from nuclear apocalypse during the Cold War. Mutual assured destruction (MAD)—the military doctrine that posited a nuclear strike from one nation would result in a full-scale counterattack from the other—helped prevent the U.S. and the Soviet Union from using the massive arsenals they each amassed during decades of armed standoff.
But MAD eventually became backstopped by a series of treaties and open lines of communication designed to avoid accidental escalation of conflict. The U.S., Russia and other nations have yet to establish a similar diplomatic structure for space, and experts warn of the dangers of weaponizing the cosmos without them. “Deterrence is something we just haven’t dealt with,” in space Cardillo says. “If you make it, you can break it.”
I found this black triangle UFO on our sun a few months ago and I am still watching it. I can see it daily using this special software designed by the ESA (european space admistration). Anyone can download it and use it. This shows me that the triangle UFO is still there. Its black, so we know its surface is heat resistant or has some kind of protective electronic shield around it. Its unbelievable that NASA has never even mentioned this triangle craft, but I guess they think the public would panic if they knew. Because admitting its a craft would mean admitting that intelligent aliens exist. Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
Hey, Google, Where Are the Aliens? How UFO Enthusiasts Utilize Tech Giant’s Services to Search ETS in Antarctica
Hey, Google, Where Are the Aliens? How UFO Enthusiasts Utilize Tech Giant’s Services to Search ETS in Antarctica
In December last year, UFO fans were engaged in debates over a large mysterious hole in Antarctica. Users believed the humongous structure was an entrance to a secret military facility, which first appeared in 2007. However, it vanished shortly afterwards. Twelve years later, it was found again on Google Maps.
It appears that Antarctica has long pulled in fans of conspiracy theories since wild stories surfaced that high-ranking Nazi officers could have escaped and gone to Antarctica. However, Antarctica has become the most famous place for hunting aliens using Google’s services. Here are the most exciting finds.
The Alien Face
One may believe that aliens want humanity to find them after seeing the alien image. A huge alien-like face on snow was discovered in Antarctica via Google Earth. Footage posted on Instagram by ufo_scandinavia quickly made the rounds on the internet with some social media users claiming the structure was left by aliens or an ancient civilisation that lived in Antarctica.
Alien Ship
UFO fans got baffled after YouTube user MrBB333 shared what he claims is a possible capsized ship in Antarctica. On his channel, he posted a man showing how he found a long cylindrical shape in the ground via Google Earth.
Strange Disc-Shaped Object on Mountain
It is another find that baffled conspiracy theorists. YouTube user Sandra Elena Andrade posted a video in December 2019 showing a massive black object that many commenters said was an alien ship. The woman discovered the mysterious object through Google Earth.
Ancient Alien City
YouTube channel thirdphaseofmoon co-author Blake Cousins claimed to have found an entrance to a hidden base, thought to be owned by aliens. He said that the dark shape on the snow looks like each one has a tunnel or cave that possibly connected underneath the show. Some social media users believed Blake’s version, while others thought this could be a hiding spot for a government project or Nazis.
Massive Hole
The YouTube channel thirdphaseofmoon stunned UFO followers again when they found a mysterious hole on Google Maps in December 2019. The humungous hole first appeared in 2007 but disappeared shortly afterward. According to Brett and Blake Cousins, this cave could potentially accommodate up to thousands of people. Brett added that it is big enough for flying saucers and spacecraft or even assets in our military to fly.
Ever since the space race, humankind has launched a lot of things into space and in the process have polluted our orbit. Sometimes experimental satellites went awry and turned to debris as soon as they launched, and other times space accidents created lots of space junk.
In some cases, the creation of space junk was the direct result of intentional exploding satellites, such as China destroying a defunct weather satellite with a missile that added more than 3,000 pieces to orbit. NASA estimates that there are more than half a million items larger than a marble currently floating in space. These are the ones that can be tracked! There may be millions more that cannot be tracked.
In 1963, the Project West Ford colloquially known as Project Needles, launched 500 million copper wires into orbit to form a dipole antennas so military messages could be sent coast to coast in the United States. These needles were only supposed to stay in orbit for three years, but they outlasted the initial project and remain in orbit to this day: in 2016 there were 38 clusters in existence. These items are all in constant movement and depending where they are in orbit have speeds that can reach to about 17,500 miles per hour.
The closer an object is to the Earth, the faster it travels. The debris can hit each other and other objects and lose energy, causing them to switch to lower orbits. This is potentially dangerous to active satellites, Hubble Space Telescope, and the International Space Station (ISS). In 1957, the United States Department of Defense started tracking space debris larger than a grapefruit. Presently in conjunction with NASA, they actively track approximately 21,000 items with a special satellite.
There are established protocols to address debris to protect the ISS, one is called the “Debris Avoidance Maneuver”, that moves the ISS out of the path of incoming debris. This is not as easy as it sounds, since the ISS is as big as a soccer field and weighs 450 tons. If time is to short, or the maneuver is not feasible, the ISS crew members move to the Soyuz spacecraft to prepare to return to Earth in an emergency. This has happened 3 times in history, but no space debris has caused an emergency Earth landing.
Also concerning is that even small, untraceable items can cause damage and impose danger on space activities. It is estimated that there are more than 100 million pieces smaller than 1.5 centimeters in our orbit. One of these pieces led to the the ISS to replace a window. It was determined that the damage on the window was caused simply from tiny paint flecks that were smaller than 1 millimeter.
The ISS has also sustained damage to thermal radiators and solar panels from small space debris. In late 2017, SpaceX Dragon cargo vehicle delivered the “Space Debris Sensor” that is allowing the ISS to monitor impacts caused by small-scale space debris for the following two to three years.
Obviously, this junk does not stay in orbit forever. Some will eventually lose energy due to collisions and enter Earth’s atmosphere. In fact, every week, 4400 pounds of debris uncontrollably re-enters our atmosphere.
Luckily for us on Earth, most of these objects burn up in the atmosphere upon reentry. Even if they survive beyond reentry, more than likely they will break down into smaller pieces and land in oceans. Because remember: Water covers 70 percent of the Earth’s surfaces. So, it’s unlikely that you will be hit with space debris, but the probability is not zero.
Some scientists classify our orbit as being at “critical density”. This means that “more fragments will be generated by collisions, than will be removed by atmospheric drag, even if no further objects are added.
How Will We Solve the Space Junk Problem?
There is research being done to help address this issue, such as improving detection methods and removal technologies that involve capture of space debris, laser beams to interfere with the orbit of the debris and promote decay or pushing debris further out away from satellites zones, and even upcycling old satellite parts.
Space Debris Sensor on the exterior of the International Space StationiGoal Animation/NASA
There has also been an active effort in space activities to limit or prevent additional debris from being added to the orbit that will only become more important as companies are wanting to launch their own satellites. For example, SpaceX have been launching satellites into our orbit to create broadband internet. They were first granted permission to launch up to 12,000 satellites from U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), but more recent requests from SpaceX indicate they want permission from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to launch up to 30,000 more satellites.
SpaceX's first 60 Starlink Satellites in OrbitSpaceX
However, given that the aerospace initiatives may allow us to surpass the limits of our Pale Blue Dot, and allow us to spread to the Solar System and maybe eventually to the Milkyway Galaxy… We don’t think this is a dream that we can let go, just because of space debris.
But hey… Who knows? Maybe one of you who is reading this will come up with the ultimate solution to space debris that allows us to limit or not create debris during our attempts to leave Earth, to study the universe, to communicate around the Earth, to connect to the Internet and so forth.
Researchers concluded that even a contained nuclear conflict would take a toll on Earth’s oceans and potentially disrupt the human food web. “The impacts are huge,” a scientist said.
A mushroom cloud erupts during the Castle Bravo nuclear weapon test at Bikini Atoll in 1954.
You’ve likely heard of nuclear winter, a hypothesis explored by decades of scientific research. It’s the idea that – following the firestorms produced in an all-out nuclear war – the soot lifted into Earth’s stratosphere would cause serious cooling, and subsequent crop failures and famines. Now a new study has looked at how even a relatively contained nuclear conflict – for example, a hypothetical war between India and Pakistan – might shift the chemistry of Earth’s oceans. The reasoning is reminiscent of that behind nuclear winter: soot lifted into the atmosphere would cause cooling. In the new study, the researchers concluded that even a contained conflict would “take a toll” on the oceans and potentially disrupt the human food web.
Nicole Lovenduski of University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) led the study. She commented in a statement:
The impacts are huge.
The journal Geophysical Research Letterspublished the new study in late January 2020.
These researchers used global climate models to conduct their simulations. They looked at four possible nuclear conflicts, including three in India/Pakistan of differing magnitudes (5 teragrams, 27 teragrams, and 47 teragrams of soot produced, respectively; a teragram is equal to one trillion grams or 1,000 kilotons), and one all-out U.S./Russia case with 150 teragrams of soot produced. Writing at LaboratoryEquipment.com, Michelle Taylor penned a succinct explanation of what would happen in even the “tamest” of the India-Pakistan simulations. She wrote:
… the researchers found that the conflict would likely generate huge amounts of black carbon high in Earth’s atmosphere, causing the globe to cool. Interestingly, the researchers found that the fallout from a nuclear detonation would come in two stages: the first within one year, and the second between three and five years post-bombing.
Soon after denotation and no longer than one year later, global climate models showed the acidity of the world’s oceans would likely dip. Years later, the world’s salt water would begin to suck up more carbon dioxide from the air. Supplies of carbonate in the oceans would shrink, removing the key ingredient that corals use to maintain their reefs and oysters use to sustain their shells.
Lovenduski told Taylor that – beyond taking a toll on crustaceans – a major disruption of the oceanic food web would undoubtedly severely impact the human food chain. Taylor wrote:
That’s because there are more than 3 billion people in the world today who depend on ocean fisheries for protein and/or income.
The shell of an ocean pterapod dissolves when exposed to acidic conditions in a lab.
Brian Toon, also of CU Boulder, was a co-author on the study. He commented in the team’s statement:
This result is one that no one expected. In fact, few people have previously considered the impact of a nuclear conflict on the ocean.
Lovenduski commented:
A lot of things would change in the oceans once you dim the lights [via soot in the atmosphere]. The way the water moves in the ocean, for example, is sensitive to how much heat it gets from the atmosphere …
It makes me question whether organisms could adapt to such a change. We’re already questioning whether they can adapt to the relatively slower process of man-made ocean acidification, and this would happen much more abruptly.
Lovenduski said it’s too soon to say for sure what the fate of shelled creatures in the oceans would be if nuclear war broke out. She said she hopes that her group’s findings will bring more attention to the wide-ranging devastation that would follow even a limited nuclear exchange. There’s no such thing, she said, as a minor nuclear war, adding:
I hope this study helps us to gain perspective on the fact that even a small-scale nuclear war could have global ramifications.
A U.S. Army nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, Micronesia, on July 25, 1946. The wider, exterior cloud is a condensation cloud, not a classic mushroom cloud. Read more about this image. A new study shows that even a limited nuclear conflict could have damaging effects on Earth’s oceans. The bombs would not have to explode over the ocean for the effects to take place.
Bottom line: Scientists used global climate models to study various scenarios involving limited nuclear conflicts. The researchers called the impacts “huge.”
These powerful storms can knock out satellites and power grids, and we may be due for one every 25 years.
On June 20, 2013, at 11:15 p.m. EDT, the sun shot out a solar flare (left side), which was followed by an eruption of solar material shooting through the sun's atmosphere.
The sun constantly bombards Earth with wispy belches of plasma called solar wind. Normally, the planet's magnetic shield soaks up the brunt of these electric particles, producing stunning auroras as they surge toward Earth's magnetic poles. But every so often, there comes a solar sneeze powerful enough to body-slam our atmosphere.
These severe space weather events — known as solar storms — compress Earth's magnetic shield, releasing enough power to blind satellites, disrupt radio signals and plunge entire cities into electrical blackouts. According to a study published Jan. 22 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, they may be much more common than previously thought.
In the new study, researchers analyzed a catalog of Earth's magnetic field changes going back to 1868; years that showed the strongest spikes in geomagnetic activity coincided with the most severe solar storms. They found that severe storms (those capable of disrupting some satellites and communications systems) occurred in 42 of the last 150 years, while the most extreme storms — "great" superstorms, which cause significant damage and disruption — occurred in six of those years, or once every 25 years.
"Our research shows that a super-storm can happen more often than we thought," study co-author Richard Horne, a space weather researcher at the British Antarctic Survey, said in a statement. "Don't be misled by the stats. It can happen any time. We simply don't know when."
Attack of the sun
For the new study, the researchers consulted the world's oldest continuous geomagnetic index, known as the aa index.
Since 1868, the index has recorded changes in Earth's magnetic field as observed by two research stations on opposite sides of the planet, one in Australia and the other in the U.K. Every 3 hours, ground-based sensors at each station record local changes in magnetic field activity; after combining the daily averages from each station, scientists get a general picture of magnetic field activity across the entire planet.
Because the study authors were concerned only with the most extreme solar events over the last 150 years, they focused on the top 5% of geomagnetic spikes recorded each year. With this data, the authors ranked the top 10 years with the most severe geomagnetic activity from 1868 to present day. Those years, from most to least active, were 1921, 1938, 2003, 1946, 1989, 1882, 1941, 1909, 1960 and 1958.
Unsurprisingly, most of those years were associated with powerful geomagnetic storms.
"The earliest ones would have been reported in terms of auroras ('northern lights') at low latitudes, and disruptions to telegraph communications," lead study author Sandra Chapman, an astrophysics professor at the University of Warwick in England, told Live Science in an email. "As aviation and radio came into widespread use, reports centered on disruptions to those."
A geomagnetic storm in May of 1921, for example, caused widespread radio and telegraph outages across the world, resulting in at least one telegraph operator's instrument bursting into flames and setting his office on fire, according to a report published in 2001 in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics. The northern and southern auroras (which intensify during solar storms) were also visible at far lower latitudes than usual, with one observatory claiming to detect the southern lights from the island of Samoa, just 13 degrees south of the geomagnetic equator.
More recent solar storms, such as a massive flare that swept over Earth on Halloween 2003, disrupted communications satellites and caused other spacecraft to tumble out of control. In March 1989, a gargantuan solar storm plunged the entire province of Quebec, Canada, into darkness and left millions of people without power for 12 hours.
Earth hasn't been hit with a solar super-storm in nearly two decades (though a large, potentially damaging solar ejection passed by us in 2012). Since then, our world has become more networked and satellite-dependent; the precise impacts the next superstorm will have on our society aren't well understood, Chapman said. Studies like this can help scientists predict the likelihood that a powerful space storm might hit Earth in a given year, which could lead to better preparedness, she added.
Powerful solar ejections occur more frequently when there are a lot of sunspots on the sun's surface. Sunspot activity tends to peak approximately every 11 years, during a period called the solar maximum. The last solar maximum occurred in 2014.
Researchers Find Presolar Grains in Unusual Inclusion from Allende Meteorite
Researchers Find Presolar Grains in Unusual Inclusion from Allende Meteorite
Scientists from Washington University, St. Louis, Caltech and the University of Chicago have found presolar grains — tiny bits of solid interstellar material formed before the Sun was born — in Curious Marie, a sample of the famous Allende meteorite.
Curious Marie is a sample of the Allende meteorite, which fell in northern Mexico in February 1969. The white, fuzzy-looking features in this fragment are calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions — some of the first solids to condense in the Solar System. Image credit: The Planetary Society.
Curious Marie is a notable example of an inclusion, or a chunk within a meteorite, called a calcium-aluminum-rich inclusion (CAI).
These objects, some of the first to have condensed in the Solar Nebula, help cosmochemists define the age of the Solar System.
“What is surprising is the fact that presolar grains are present. Following our current understanding of solar system formation, presolar grains could not survive in the environment where these inclusions are formed,” said Dr. Olga Pravdivtseva, a researcher in the Physics Department and the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University, Saint Louis.
In 2016, a research team from the University of Chicago discovered evidence in Curious Marie that a rare element called curium was present during the formation of the Solar System.
This fragment of the Allende meteorite and curium are named after the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and chemist Marie Curie, whose pioneering work laid the foundation of the theory of radioactivity.
In the new study, Dr. Pravdivtseva and colleagues used noble gas isotopic signatures to show that presolar grains of silicon carbide are present in Curious Marie.
That’s important because presolar grains are generally thought to be too fragile to have endured the high-temperature conditions that existed near the birth of our Sun.
But not all CAIs were formed in quite the same way.
“The fact that silicon carbide is present in refractory inclusions tells us about the environment in the Solar Nebula at the condensation of the first solid materials,” Dr. Pravdivtseva said.
“The fact that silicon carbide was not completely destroyed in Curious Marie can help us to understand this environment a little bit better.”
“Many refractory inclusions were melted and lost all textural evidence of their condensation. But not all.”
The scientists had 20 mg of Curious Marie to work with, which is a relatively large sample from a cosmochemistry perspective.
They heated it up incrementally, increasing temperature and measuring the composition of four different noble gases released at each of 17 temperature steps.
“Experimentally, it is an elegant work. And then we had a puzzle of noble gas isotopic signatures to untangle. For me, it is like solving a mystery,” Dr. Pravdivtseva said.
Other scientists have looked for evidence of silicon carbide in such CAIs in meteorites using noble gases before, but Dr. Pravdivtseva’s team the first to find it.
“It was beautiful when all noble gases pointed to the same source of the anomalies — silicon carbide,” Dr. Pravdivtseva said.
“Not only do we see silicon carbide in the fine-grained CAIs, we see a population of small grains that formed at special conditions.”
“This finding forces us to revise how we see the conditions in the early Solar Nebula.”
The results were published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
It's always sunny for heliophysicists, but especially so now.
The Solar Orbiter spacecraft, a collaboration between the European Space Agency and NASA, launched yesterday (Feb. 9), less than two weeks after the first public image from a massive new solar telescope showed off the structure of our star in more detail than humans have ever seen. On that same day, Jan. 29, NASA's Parker Solar Probe made its closest swing pass the sun to date — a record it will continue to break until 2025.
"It's a great time to be a heliophysicist; we're launching lots of new missions," Nicky Fox, head of NASA's Heliophysics Division, told Space.com. "It's a very strategic way that we're looking at this system [of instruments], as one large observatory."
Although the three missions weren't designed as a suite, they complement one another well. The Parker Solar Probe, which launched in August 2018, is flying closer to the visible surface of the sun than any spacecraft to date. That trajectory carries the spacecraft deep into the sun's atmosphere, called the corona, where the probe's instruments focus on the spacecraft's immediate surroundings, measuring magnetic fields and particles of plasma, the charged soupy state of matter that makes up the sun.
Solar Orbiter won't fly as close to the sun, but it brings unique skills. First, it carries two types of instruments. One set, like Parker's, will study the spacecraft's surroundings; the other, a set of telescopic instruments, will observe the visible surface of the sun itself at a distance. And partway through its mission, Solar Orbiter will leave the belt around the sun's middle, called the ecliptic, and begin circling the sun at a tilt, allowing the spacecraft to use those telescopic instruments to produce the first-ever images of the sun's poles.
The National Science Foundation's Inouye Solar Telescope is stuck here on Earth, and construction is still underway. But once all of its instruments are operational, there will be plenty more images like the "caramel corn" picture that scientists published in January — the highest-resolution solar image to date. "The Inouye Solar Telescope is a microscope on the sun," Valentin Martínez Pillet, director of the National Solar Observatory, which runs the facility, told Space.com. The observatory will also measure the wavelengths of light emitted by the sun and decipher the magnetic signature of light that is under the influence of the sun's magnetic field.
Although the three projects are separate endeavors, both scientists said they and their colleagues are awfully excited about pulling all the data together.
We have so few close-up observations of the sun that being able to compare two separate locations is automatically valuable, no matter where each spacecraft is. Solar Orbiter's final schedule was dependent on its precise launch date, but as mission personnel evaluated how each timetable aligned the spacecraft with the Parker Solar Probe's close approaches, they found intriguing opportunities regardless of the launch date, Fox said.
The Inouye Solar Telescope is even easier to integrate into an observational program, Martínez Pillet said; its personnel know precisely where the two spacecraft will be at any given time and can match up the telescope accordingly.
Combining the data from all three observatories is vital for scientists to accomplish the goal that drives the missions: to understand the sun and its influence throughout the solar system. The impacts of the sun's antics ripple across the solar system as a set of phenomena called space weather.
In Earth's neighborhood, space weather can interfere with the technology modern society is ever more reliant upon, particularly navigation and communication satellites. Space weather is also a hazard for astronauts traveling farther from Earth, as it can harm both their technology and their bodies. Ultimately, solar scientists want to be able to predict space weather in much the same way meteorologists predict terrestrial weather. "We are 50 or 100 years lagging from what terrestrial weather is in terms of prediction," Martínez Pillet said.
That's because scientists just don't know enough about how the sun works. "We're able to predict a single second on the sun," he said. "I'm exaggerating — well, no, I don't think I'm exaggerating. We're not able to have any realistic predictive capabilities today, but as soon as you get the physics right, then you start being able to develop predictive capabilities."
One particular challenge in understanding space weather is the sheer distance involved, and that's where the trio of missions will be valuable, Martínez Pillet said. "One space-weather event has a combination of scales," he said. "It's triggered at really small scales, and it's a huge thing that propagates all over the heliosphere and probably can hit several planets at the same time." But by the time space weather reaches Earth, it's been influenced by millions of miles of space; it's much fresher where the Parker Solar Probe and the Solar Orbiter can study it.
(Image credit: NSO/NSF/AURA)
There's another reason to understand space weather: It could tell scientists where to look for signs of life elsewhere in the universe. After all, while we humans have a soft spot for the sun, it's just a star like any other — which means that scientists can apply what these three missions discover to all the stars we'll never be able to see as clearly. And while space weather is vexing to Earth, it could be deadly in solar systems that surround smaller, more active stars.
And there should be plenty for the trio of projects to study in the coming years. Right now, the sun is pretty quiet, but over the next five or six years, the sun's activity will increase — and both the Parker Solar Probe and the Solar Orbiter will be on hand to see what happens during that period.
"They are really, truly voyages of discovery, and we're doing fundamental physics and understanding how a star works," Fox said.
Of course, even three high-powered missions won't solve every mystery about the sun.
"We know right now what we don't know, but we're going to find a whole lot more things that we don't know," Fox said. "That's why it's nice that these missions are so long, so you have time to develop these new questions, this new thirst for knowledge."
The Mars 2020 rover, which NASA will be launching in July, is packing serious heat.
Part of the rover’s mission is to search for fossils or other evidence that Mars once hosted life — and NASA decided that the best way to do that is to use a laser so strong it can vaporize rocks, according to Digital Trends. It’s a bizarre plan, but one that could finally determine whether the Red Planet ever hosted life.
Shoop Da Whoop
The plan is to use spectroscopic tools that can determine what those rocks were made of as they’re being blasted to kingdom come.
The laser can bring Mars rocks up to 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Digital Trends, at which point a camera would scan the resulting plasma to determine its chemical makeup.
Gratata
The goal is to spot specific minerals and compounds that are likely to form from exposure to water, like carbonates and sulfates, as they would help piece together crucial details about Mars’ former environments, such as whether the planet was ever hospitable enough for organisms to survive on the surface.
And if there’s life out there now, its first encounter with Earth be seeing a robot blasting rocks with a laser.
The full moon you’ll see this weekend will rise at sunset. It’ll be highest up in the middle of the night when the sun is below our feet. It’ll set when the sun rises. But why does it look full?
A full moon is opposite the sun. We see all of its dayside.
The coming full moon is February 9 at 07:33 UTC. That means the night of February 8-9, 2020, will bring the fullest moon for those in the Americas. The moon appears full to the eye for two to three nights. However, astronomers regard the moon as full at a precisely defined instant, when the moon is exactly 180 degrees opposite the sun in ecliptic longitude.
It’s that feature of a full moon – the fact that it’s opposite the sun as viewed from Earth – that causes a full moon to look full.
A kiss under the full moon of November 3, 2017, via our friend Steven Sweet of Lunar 101-Moon Book. He was at Port Credit, a neighborhood in the city of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada … at the mouth of the Credit River on the north shore of Lake Ontario.
Why does a full moon look full? Remember that half the moon is always illuminated by the sun. That lighted half is the moon’s day side. In order to appear full to us on Earth, we have to see the entire day side of the moon. That happens only when the moon is opposite the sun in our sky.So a full moon looks full because it’s opposite the sun.
That’s also why every full moon rises in the east around sunset – climbs highest up for the night midway between sunset and sunrise (around midnight) – and sets around sunrise. Stand outside tonight around sunset and look for the moon. Sun going down while the moon is coming up? That’s a full moon, or close to one.
Just be aware that the moon will look full for at least a couple of night around the instant of full moon.
Often, you’ll find two different dates on calendars for the date of full moon. That’s because some calendars list moon phases in Coordinated Universal Time, also called Universal Time Coordinated (UTC). And other calendars list moon phases in local time, a clock time of a specific place, usually the place that made and distributed the calendars. Translate UTC to your local time.
Want to know the instant of full moon in your part of the world, as well as the moonrise and moonset times? Visit Sunrise Sunset Calendars, remembering to check the moon phases plus moonrise and moonset boxes.
If a full moon is opposite the sun, why doesn’t Earth’s shadow fall on the moon at every full moon? The reason is that the moon’s orbit is tilted by 5.1 degrees with respect to Earth’s orbit around the sun. At every full moon, Earth’s shadow sweeps near the moon. But, in most months, there’s no eclipse.
A full moon normally passes above or below Earth’s shadow, with no eclipse.
Bottom line: A full moon looks full because it’s opposite the sun. Its lighted face is turned entirely in Earth’s direction. The next full moon is February 9 at 07:33 UTC. (Translate UTC to your time).
A multi-university team of researchers from Japan recently used the world’s fastest astrophysics-simulation supercomputers to develop an AI system capable of predicting the structure of the universe itself. The scientists hope that in doing so they’ll unlock the mysteries surrounding dark matter and dark energy.
Dubbed “Dark Emulator,” the AI system parses gigantic troves of astrophysics data and uses the information to build simulations of our universe. It taps into a massive database full of information gleaned from special telescopes and compares current data with what scientists expect based on theories surrounding the universe’s origin.
The simulation basically attempts to demonstrate what the universe might look like, including its edges, based on the big bang theory and the subsequent rapid expansion that continues to take place.
According to Phys.Org, the lead author on the team’s research paper, Takahiro Nishimichi, said:
We built an extraordinarily large database using a supercomputer, which took us three years to finish, but now we can recreate it on a laptop in a matter of seconds. I feel like there is great potential in data science.
Using this result, I hope we can work our way toward uncovering the greatest mystery of modern physics, which is to uncover what dark energy is.
The hope here is that by understanding the general cosmology of the entire universe, scientists will be able to from better theories on how dark matter works. We currently assume that most of the universe is made up of dark matter. The “void of space” as it were, isn’t a void but composed of energized matter that, so far, can’t be directly observed.
But we’re currently unable to prove dark matter exists through scientific rigor, observation, and measurement. And that leaves astrophysicists struggling to come up with a unified theory of the universe that encompasses all the different ideas in play. How do we reconcile the Big Bang, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principal, Einstein’s Relativity, and Newton’s Laws of thermodynamics with modern quantum mechanics and dark energy theories?
The team from Japan hopes we do so with the information we’re able to glean from Dark Emulator. The AI system doesn’t just analyze data for loose ends, it learns from each simulation it creates and uses the output to inform the next iteration.
It does this by analyzing the invisible tendrils between galaxies and performing astronomical (literally) feats of mathematics to create more precise simulations. According to a paper the team published in Astrophysical Journal, it’s incredibly accurate:
The emulator predicts the halo–matter cross-correlation, relevant for galaxy–galaxy weak lensing, with an accuracy better than 2% and the halo autocorrelation, relevant for galaxy clustering correlation, with an accuracy better than 4%.
Eventually, this technology could help flesh out our understanding of the universe and allow scientists to determine exactly what dark matter is and how dark energy works. For now, this means filling in some of the massive blanks we have in our understanding of what the universe actually looks like beyond our front porch.
But in the future, having a clear understanding of dark energy could bring about myriad far-off science fiction technologies such as warp drives, time-travel, and teleportation. That is, of course, if dark matter even exists.
We think of Uranus and Neptune almost as twins. In some ways, they are very similar. But a new study by researchers at PlanetS explains why, in some aspects, they are also radically different.
Uranus (left) and Neptune (right). While the 2 ice giant planets have similarities, they also have significant differences, which might be explained by impacts from other large bodies in the early solar system.
We tend to lump Uranus and Neptune together in our thoughts, almost as if they’re twin worlds. They are nearly the same size – bigger than Earth, but smaller than Jupiter or Saturn – and both are bluish or bluish-green, with deep atmospheres and icy interiors. But, though superficially similar, Uranus and Neptune are really quite different. They’re more different from each other than most people think. And, though their differences still haven’t been fully explained, it now seems that mighty collisions with careening planet-sized bodies – early in solar system history – might be the key.
Researchers of the National Centre of Competence in Research PlanetS (PlanetS) at the University of Zurich in Switzerland ran computer simulations to explore the role of collisions in shaping the differences between Uranus and Neptune. The findings were announced by PlanetS on February 4, 2020, with the associated research paper first published on November 22, 2019.
Uranus and Neptune are the two most distant known major planets in our solar system. Both are now considered ice giants. Both are fundamentally different from the larger gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, and from smaller rocky worlds like Earth. Uranus and Neptune have similar masses and internal compositions. Their outer atmospheres are composed of hydrogen, helium and methane, while their mantles are a combination of water, ammonia and methane ices, and their cores are a mix of rock and ice.
Uranus tends to have a blander appearance than Neptune and is mostly cloudless. Neptune’s atmosphere has darker bands than that of Uranus, with streaks and wisps of white clouds, as well as a large “dark spot.”
But there are also more significant differences between the two worlds, and the researchers wanted to know why. According to a statement by Christian Reinhardt, one of the PlanetS members:
… there are also striking differences between the two planets that require explanation.
Diagram depicting the the formation of both Uranus and Neptune, and how they evolved differently due to impacts from other large objects in the early solar system.
Image via Reinhardt & Helled/ ICS/ University of Zürich/ PlanetS.
Another team member, Joachim Stadel, pointed out that, unlike Neptune and Earth and most other major planets in our solar system, Uranus doesn’t rotate around an axis that lies nearly perpendicular with respect to the plane of its orbit. Instead:
… Uranus and its major satellites are tilted about 97 degrees into the solar plane, and the planet effectively rotates retrograde with respect to the sun.
Another key difference is that the larger moons of Uranus are in stable orbits that are aligned with the tilt of the planet. But Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, circles the planet at a very inclined orbit.
These differences suggest that Uranus’ moons formed from the same disk of dust and gas that the planet itself did, while Triton was probably once a separate object captured by Neptune’s gravity.
According to the researchers, these and other differences point to different kinds of impacts that affected the two planets long ago.
Size comparison of Earth and Neptune. According to the new study, objects with about 1 to 3 Earth masses collided with both Uranus and Neptune after they formed. Uranus was just grazed, while Neptune suffered a head-on impact.
The researchers ran computer simulations in order to explore a range of different possible collisions on both planets. From the paper:
Despite many similarities, there are significant observed differences between Uranus and Neptune: while Uranus is tilted and has a regular set of satellites, suggesting their accretion from a disk, Neptune’s moons are irregular and are captured objects. In addition, Neptune seems to have an internal heat source, while Uranus isin equilibrium with solar insulation. Finally, structure models based on gravity data suggest that Uranus is more centrally condensed than Neptune. We perform[ed] a large suite of high-resolution SPH simulations to investigate whether these differences can be explained by giant impacts.
For Uranus, we find that an oblique impact can tilt its spin axis and eject enough material to create a disk where the regular satellites are formed. Some of the disks are massive and extended enough, and consist of enough rocky material to explain the formation of Uranus’ regular satellites.
For Neptune, we investigate whether a head-on collision could mix the interior … We find that massive and dense projectiles can penetrate towards the center and deposit mass and energy in the deep interior, leading to a less centrally concentrated interior for Neptune.
We conclude that the dichotomy between the ice giants can be explained by violent impacts after their formation.
It is often assumed that both planets formed in a similar way.
But these results show that their formations – or at least their very early history – were not so similar as first thought.
Neptune and its largest moon, Triton, whose orbit is highly inclined. Triton’s orbit suggests it was captured by Neptune’s gravity. Meanwhile, the moons of Uranus likely formed in the same disk of gas and dust that Uranus did.
In one scenario, where Uranus and Neptune start off as being more similar, it was found that an impact with a body of one to three Earth masses could explain the differences we see today. If the object just grazed Uranus instead of a head-on collision, the planet’s interior would not be affected but the impact would still be enough to tilt the planet.
Conversely, if Neptune did experience a head-on impact, the collision would have affected the planet’s interior but would not form a disk of debris. This would explain why Neptune doesn’t have any large moons in regular orbits. A large heat flux on Neptune also points to the interior being remixed in a massive collision.
The simulations show how the two planets probably started off being much more similar, but the different kinds of collisions altered them significantly. As team member Ravit Helled said:
We clearly show that an initially similar formation pathway to Uranus and Neptune can result in the dichotomy observed in the properties of these fascinating outer planets.
Comparison of the interior structures of the 2 gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, and the 2 ice giants, Uranus and Neptune. Earth is to scale.
The results of this study show how random events – like planetary collisions with other large bodies in the early solar system – can decidedly affect the future evolution of a planet. Uranus and Neptune are the worlds we see today because of such events, this study says. What if neither planet had been hit? What if Neptune had just been grazed instead of Uranus? What would these ice giants be like today in such circumstances? We don’t know, but knowing more about how they could have been affected will help scientists better understand the formation of these types of planets, as well as the gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, and rocky worlds like Earth, Mars, Venus, and Mercury.
With a better understanding of how the planets in our own solar system formed and evolved, we can then also apply that knowledge to the study of worlds in distant solar systems.
Bottom line: A new study by researchers at PlanetS sheds light on why Uranus and Neptune are similar in some ways, but radically different in others. It seems collisions – early in solar system history – are the key.
The UFO phenomenon has many aspects that are all increasingly weirder than the last. It is often difficult to ascertain just what we are dealing with, and such accounts can really run the range from the merely odd to the downright absurd. Among all of these reports one can find certain strings of reports that don’t seem to really fit into any particular mold, and definitely one of these was a strange flap of anomalous green fireballs that appeared over a period of a couple of years over New Mexico, in the United States, which are mostly an obscure oddity but which still have never been solved.
The strange phenomena known as the “green fireballs” can best be tracked back to December 5, 1948, when a USAF C-47 transport plane crew was on their way from Lowry Air Force Base, Colorado, to Williams Air Force Base in Chandler, Arizona. It had been a fairly routine flight until they got near Las Vegas and observed an eerie green light described as a “green ball of fire” illuminating the sky to the west of the city, followed by another not long after. At around the same time, another plane in the vicinity reported the same thing, describing it as pale green with a pale green trail, and saying that the light seemed to be coming towards them, fast enough that they took evasive maneuvers to avoid a collision. The crew at first thought it might be a meteorite but they dismissed this due to the fact that the object was too low to the ground and not moving fast enough. One pilot would say of the object:
Take a soft ball and paint it with some kind of fluorescent paint that will glow a bright green in the dark… Then have someone take the ball out about 100 feet in front of you and about 10 feet above you. Have him throw the ball right at your face, as hard as he can throw it. That’s what a green fireball looks like.
Image by Steve Baxter
Interestingly, while it was mostly thought that this was clearly a meteorite, when a Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, head of the University of New Mexico’s Institute of Meteoritics was sent to the area where it was believed the object should have fell based on its reported flight path there was no sign of any impact and no trace of a meteorite. On December 8, 1948, sightings of these strange green lights would continue, when a Beech T-7 on its way from Kirkland AFB to Las Vegas when the pilot and co-pilot saw a brilliant green light about 2,000 ft above them, which was headed their way at high speed and with a trajectory described as “flat and parallel to the ground.” The researcher LaPaz would once again step in to investigate and learn that there had been several other sightings of these green balls of light, all of them near the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Sandia atomic-weapons laboratory, as well as at other key military and sensitive installations in the region such as radar stations, nuclear reactors, and fighter-interceptor bases around the country. Why? No one knows.
Making it all rather intriguing was that most of these sightings were being made by trained observers and reliable witnesses such as pilots, weather observers, scientists, intelligence officers and other military personnel, who were unlikely to be making this all up or making mistakes as to what they were seeing. During his investigation LaPaz was also unable to uncover any evidence of meteorite activity, nor that there had been ever any rocket or flare tests in the areas where these sightings were taking place during those time frames. He also was beginning to doubt the meteorite theory by this point, because of the horizontal trajectories of the objects and the fact that green was not considered to be a usual color for meteorites, with him saying of the strange phenomenon:
The fireballs are Kelly green, whereas meteors are red, yellow, blue, or white. A green color could be caused by large amounts of copper, but this element is rarely found in ordinary fireballs. It could also originate from certain man-made atomic fuels. They make no noise. None of the observers of green fireballs, nor persons in the area of the balls, have report any sound whatsoever. Also the fact that they disappear and no fragments have been found on the earth, may be evidence that their flight is controlled.
Sightings of the strange green balls of fire would continue coming in over the coming month, with LaPaz himself seeing one of them on December 12th near Santa Fe that due to its perfectly horizontal trajectory, color, speed, and the way it wobbled convinced him this was no meteor. He would later ascertain that the object had passed directly over the Los Alamos laboratory and had been seen by several other witnesses in the area. A particularly spectacular sighting was made on December 20, when a patrol at Los Alamos observed several luminescent green lights descend rapidly at an angle of 45 degrees, only to then level off and continue on a horizontal pathway out of sight. On this occasion there was even mention made of what looked like an exhaust trail, similar to that of a rocket. Making it more curious is that when these sightings were reported the Air Force was quick to keep it all under wraps, even going as far as to halt the press release on the incident because of “pressure from other agencies also investigating this occurrence.” The story still managed to get out, and in a Feb 29, 1949 edition of the local newspaper Skyliner it was written of the secrecy:
A call to El Paso, Tex., brought official denial from D. K. Brown, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation district that embraces Los Alamos, that his agency had not been called to deal with the matter. At the information or thought-control office officials indicated that they knew about the recurring green flame in the sky but indicated that it wouldn’t be wise to write about it. Capt. Carroll Tyler, project manager, said simply that all he knew about the lights was rumor — the same rumors that everyone is hearing.
Why was there so much official denial over these sightings? Who knows? Sightings would continue into the next year, when there were more reports into January. One notable account occurred on January 30, 1949, when an extremely bright green fireball was observed over New Mexico by over one hundred witnesses, including trained military personnel, oil workers, aircrew, control tower personnel, all of who described the same thing and noted that the object was completely silent. Sightings would keep on coming in right on into the following year, when pilot Captain A. Harvey and co-pilot Merrick C. Marshall saw a green fireball as they were approaching Albuquerque from Gallup, New Mexico. The Dec. 18, 1950 edition of the Albuquerque Journal would say of the encounter:
The two flyers reported that the light first appeared in the northeast, approximately over Las Vegas. They watched the light for ten minutes, they said, as it moved in the direction of Las Alamos. During that time the “greenish fireball” seemed to circle Los Alamos and then head directly toward Albuquerque. In turning, the light changed from green to a very bright white and passed over and to the rear of their plane — then near Albuquerque — at an estimated speed of over “700 miles an hour.” The time when the light was first sighted was at exactly 11:25 p.m. It remained in view until 11:35. Both pilots are experienced airmen and said it could not possibly have been another plane.
After this the sightings of the green fireballs sort of peter out and we are left to search for answers. Theories have abounded as to what could have caused the 1948-1950 green fireball flap of the Southwest. The meteor theory was largely put to rest by LaPaz, who could find no evidence whatsoever that meteorites were to blame and also pointed out time and time again that the objects displayed very uncharacteristic features for meteorites. Another idea is that it was caused by the phenomenon called ball lightning, which is in itself little understood and entails hovering orbs of electricity that appear and then blink out of existence. Still other ideas are that this was evidence of top secret aircraft or rocket tests, fallout-debris clouds associated with top-secret atomic testing, or Soviet spy technology, which might explain why they were always seen near these government installations. Of course there is also the idea that these were UFOs or even probes dropped from larger alien spacecraft. What was at the heart of the deluge of green fireball accounts reported by so many during this time span? Was this meteors, atmospheric phenomena, or visitors from another world? We didn’t know then, and we don’t know now. It remains a mystery.
ESA’s sun-exploring Solar Orbiter will be the first spacecraft ever to fly over the sun’s poles. It’ll study the origin of the solar wind, which has the potential to affect earthly technologies.
ESA’s new sun-exploring mission Solar Orbiter blasted to space this morning aboard a U.S. Atlas V 411 rocket from NASA’s spaceport in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Liftoff took place as expected at 04:03 UTC on Monday, February 10, 2020 (11:03 p.m. EST Sunday, February 9).
Solar Orbiter carries a set of 10 instruments for imaging the surface of the sun and studying its environment. It’ll get as close to the sun as 25 million miles (42 million km); that’s about a quarter of the distance between the sun and Earth. Solar Orbiter will be the first spacecraft to fly over the sun’s poles. It’s expected to shed new light on what gives rise to solar wind, which can affect earthly technologies including electric grids and communications satellites.
Solar Orbiter … will provide the first-ever images of the sun’s poles and the never-before-observed magnetic environment there, which helps drive the sun’s 11-year solar cycle and its periodic outpouring of solar storms.
Solar Orbiter will take the first direct images of the sun’s poles, but getting into the right orbit to do this means taking a loopy path through the inner solar system, borrowing thrust from the powerful gravitational fields of Earth and Venus.
The animation below,from ESA, shows the trajectory of Solar Orbiter around the sun, highlighting the gravity assist maneuvers that will enable the spacecraft to change inclination to observe the sun from different perspectives.
Bottom line: ESA’s sun-exploring Solar Orbiter mission lifted off successfully from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on February 10, 2020.
Something in Deep Space Is Sending Signals to Earth in Steady 16-Day Cycles
Something in Deep Space Is Sending Signals to Earth in Steady 16-Day Cycles
Scientists have discovered the first fast radio burst that beats at a steady rhythm, and the mysterious repeating signal is coming from the outskirts of another galaxy.
A mysterious radio source located in a galaxy 500 million light years from Earth is pulsing on a 16-day cycle, like clockwork, according to a new study. This marks the first time that scientists have ever detected periodicity in these signals, which are known as fast radio bursts (FRBs), and is a major step toward unmasking their sources.
FRBs are one of the most tantalizing puzzles that the universe has thrown at scientists in recent years. First spotted in 2007, these powerful radio bursts are produced by energetic sources, though nobody is sure what those might be. FRBs are also mystifying because they can be either one-offs or “repeaters,” meaning some bursts appear only once in a certain part of the sky, while others emit multiple flashes to Earth.
Pulses from these repeat bursts have, so far, seemed somewhat random and discordant in their timing. But that changed last year, when the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment Fast Radio Burst Project (CHIME/FRB), a group dedicated to observing and studying FRBs, discovered that a repeater called FRB 180916.J0158+65 had a regular cadence.
The CHIME/FRB team kept tabs on the repeating burst between September 2018 and October 2019 using the CHIME radio telescope in British Columbia. During that period, the bursts were clustered into a period of four days, and then seemed to switch off for the next 12 days, for a total cycle of about 16 days. Some cycles did not produce any visible bursts, but those that did were all synced up to the same 16-day intervals.
An animation shows the random appearance of fast radio bursts (FRBs) across the sky.
(Credit: NRAO Outreach/T. Jarrett (IPAC/Caltech); B. Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF)
“We conclude that this is the first detected periodicity of any kind in an FRB source,” the team said in a paper published on the preprint server arXiv in late January. “The discovery of a 16.35-day periodicity in a repeating FRB source is an important clue to the nature of this object.”
Scientists recently tracked down this particular FRB to a galaxy called SDSS J015800.28+654253.0, which is a half a billion light years from Earth. That may seem like a huge distance, but FRB 180916.J0158+65 is actually the closest FRB ever detected.
But while we know where it is, we still don’t know what it is. To that point, the beat of the FRB suggests that it might be modulated by its surroundings. If the source of the FRB is orbiting a compact object, such as a black hole, then it might only flash its signals toward Earth at a certain point in its orbital period. That scenario could potentially match this recognizable 16-day cycle
It’s also possible that we are witnessing a binary system containing a massive star and a super-dense stellar core known as a neutron star, according to a study published on arXiv on Wednesday by a separate team that looked at the same data. In that model, the neutron star would emit radio bursts, but those signals would be periodically eclipsed by opaque outflowing winds from its giant companion.
Another scenario is that the FRB rhythm isn’t tempered by another object, and is sending out the pulses directly from the source. Scientists have previously suggested that flares from highly magnetized neutron stars, called magnetars, might be the source of some FRBs. But since magnetars tend to rotate every few seconds, a 16-day cycle does not match the expected profile of a magnetar-based FRB.
Ultimately, the CHIME/FRB team hopes to find similar patterns in the handful of known repeating bursts to see if these cycles are common. The researchers also plan to keep a careful eye on FRB 180916.J0158+6 while it is active in order to spot any other details that might point to its identity.
FRBs have baffled scientists for more than a decade, but new facilities such as CHIME are revealing new details about these weird events every year. While we still don’t know what is blasting out these bizarre signals, the discovery of a clear tempo from one of these sources provides a significant lead for scientists to follow.
Iets of iemand stuurt vanuit de ruimte signalen naar de aarde, en wetenschappers weten niet waarom
Iets of iemand stuurt vanuit de ruimte signalen naar de aarde, en wetenschappers weten niet waarom
Astronomen hebben een mysterieuze radiobron ontdekt in een sterrenstelsel op 500 miljoen lichtjaar van ons zonnestelsel die periodiek signalen uitzendt.
Vier dagen lang produceert de bron ieder uur één tot twee zogeheten snelle radioflitsen. Vervolgens blijft het 12 dagen stil en daarna begint de cyclus weer opnieuw.
Sterrenkundigen hebben in de afgelopen 15 jaar al zo’n 150 radioflitsen ontdekt. Slechts 10 daarvan blijken zich te herhalen.
Patroon
In een enkel geval is ook de bron van de radioflits vastgesteld.
Het mysterieuze signaal, FRB 180916.J0158+65, is al in 2017 ontdekt, maar blijft zich nog altijd herhalen.
Wetenschappers hebben nu 28 flitsen bestudeerd die zijn waargenomen tussen september 2018 en oktober 2019.
Ze slaagden erin om een patroon te ontwaren, wat nog niet eerder is gelukt bij snelle radioflitsen.
Object
De flitsen zijn afkomstig uit SDSS J015800.28+264253.0, een sterrenstelsel op zo’n 500 miljoen lichtjaar van de aarde.
Er zijn verschillende mogelijke verklaringen voor het fenomeen.
Eén mogelijkheid is dat het gaat om een object dat rond een ster draait en dat af en toe signalen uitzendt.
Buitenaardse wezens
Het kan ook een signaal zijn van een neutronenster.
Daarnaast bestaat de mogelijkheid dat de signalen afkomstig zijn van buitenaardse wezens die proberen contact te maken met andere levensvormen.
De onderzoekers blijven het object nu in de gaten houden in de hoop meer te weten te komen over de bron van de signalen.
David Wilcock: Mystifying UFO Disclosure Cases via The Unknown
David Wilcock: Mystifying UFO Disclosure Cases via The Unknown
David Wilcock is a professional intuitive consultant who, since reading Richard C. Hoagland’s “The Monuments of Mars” in 1993, has intensively researched ufology, ancient civilizations, consciousness science, and new paradigms of matter and energy.
He is the author of a critically acclaimed trilogy of scientific research works, known as the Convergence series, which gives definitive support to the idea that a change in matter, energy and consciousness is now occurring on the Earth and throughout the solar system.
Wilcock has appeared on broadcast television, lectured throughout the United States and Japan, published a variety of magazine articles and appeared on numerous radio talk shows. He is the co-author of the book “The Reincarnation of Edgar Cayce,” now available in bookstores nationwide, and a summary of his latest scientific work appears therein, where a breakthrough case for mass, spontaneous DNA evolution on Earth is unveiled. David is also an accomplished musician and composer within a variety of styles, including jazz-fusion, meditative and world music.
This is a flying saucer hidden in a cloud over Nevada?
This is a flying saucer hidden in a cloud over Nevada?
This footage was taken in Nevada on January 29, 2020 on the break of dawn.The witness noticed a huge flying saucer shaped cloud which looks like a huge craft hiding in a cloud.
Lenticular clouds are often comparable in appearance to a flying saucer and probably it is just a regular cloud.
But I have my suspicions since there are undoubtedly man-made or extraterrestrial flying objects with cloaking capabilities that are kept secret from the public.
UFOs flying over Desert Hot Springs, California 7-Feb-2020
UFOs flying over Desert Hot Springs, California 7-Feb-2020
New footage of a bright unidentified flying objects in the sky above Desert Hot Springs, also known as DHS, a city in Riverside County, California, United States. This happened on 7th February 2020.
Witness report:
My wife and visiting desert hot springs for the mineral waters that we do every year this time of year. We where headed towards yucca valley to visit. On Indian Canyon road going west towards highway 62 that take you to yucca valley. My wife is a birdwatcher for decades. She spotted the string of lights that she first thought they where white pelicans. Based on the flight pattern and how the lights changed shape and direct we knew it wasn’t birds. The sighting flew over head while we where driving and passed us fast going northwest towards the mountains. I pulled over to get video and photos off my iPhone. The lights or more like different shaped orbs numbers changed from 20 to 35 objects every time it changed directions.
Listen to the eerie magnetic 'song' Earth sings during a solar storm
Listen to the eerie magnetic 'song' Earth sings during a solar storm
Scott Sutherland Meteorologist/Science Writer
Monday, November 18th 2019, 5:40 pm - As if auroras weren't eerie enough, satellites have recorded bizarre 'sci-fi music' as solar storms passed by Earth
Solar storms can result in some spectacular and bizarre effects here at Earth. Brilliant auroras splash colours across the sky, we can experience fluctuations in our power grids, and satellites can record amazing effects in space.
In a new paper, published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a team of scientists looking through old data collected by the European Space Agency's Cluster mission, discovered something remarkable.
Earth's magnetic field emits waves in response to space weather, and these waves become far more complex and energetic when a solar storm sweeps past the planet.
Converting the magnetic data from two of these solar storms to audio, the researchers are treating us to the 'eerie sci-fi music' that Earth 'sang' during these events.
The Cluster mission's four satellites were designed to orbit through Earth's magnetic field, taking readings to show how the field reacts to the solar wind and the passage of solar storms.
This artist's rendition of the ESA's Cluster mission shows the four satellites in formation as they orbit the Earth, observing how the planet's magnetic field reacts to space weather.
Credit: ESA
Combing through years of data from the mission, the researchers discovered six times when the satellites recorded a solar storm impacting on the foreshock region - the part of Earth's magnetic field that faces towards the Sun and the first region affected by a solar storm.
According to the researchers, as the constant flow of charged particles in the solar wind streams past Earth, it causes the foreshock to emit simple waves that can be likened to a low, single musical note.
When a solar storm passes by Earth, however, the impact of it hitting the magnetic field's foreshock causes that 'music' to rise in pitch and become far more complex.
"It's like the storm is changing the tuning of the foreshock," Lucile Turc, a space physicist at the University of Helsinki and lead researcher of this new paper, said in an ESA press release.
This simulation, produced by the Vlasiator computer model developed at the University of Helsinki, shows the complex waves produced between the foreshock and bow shock of Earth's magnetic field during a solar storm.
Credit: Vlasiator team, University of Helsinki
As shown in the image above, as a solar storm impacts (from the right), waves produced by the foreshock propogate in a complex pattern downwards (to the left) until they hit the bow shock.
According to the ESA:
"The collision of the magnetic waves modifies the behavior of the bow shock, possibly changing the way it processes the energy of the incoming solar storm. Behind the bow shock, the magnetic fields of Earth start to resonate at the frequency of the waves and this contributes to the transmission of the magnetic disturbance all the way to the ground. It is a fast process, taking around 10 minutes from the wave being generated at the foreshock to its energy reaching the ground."
Magnetic disturbances from the solar wind and solar storms manifest as a type of space weather known as a geomagnetic storm.
Geomagnetic storms often result in displays of auroras - the northern and southern lights - as solar particles become trapped along the magnetic field lines, and stream down into the upper atmosphere near the poles. While these are spectacular to behold, there can also be negative impacts from strong geomagnetic storms, such as power blackouts.
With this research adding to our knowledge of space weather, it may provide more clues that could help us avoid the worse impacts of geomagnetic storms, and possibly make better predictions of their effects.
As we wait in anticipation for future life-seeking missions to Mars, asteroids and other space bodies in our solar system, speculation that these probes will find life forms is increasing, but most scientists agree that it will be bacteria or other microorganisms. One who doesn’t is leading British space scientist Professor Monica Grady.
“If there is something on Mars, it’s likely to be very small—bacteria. But I think we’ve got a better chance of having slightly higher forms of life on Europa, perhaps similar to the intelligence of an octopus.”
In a recent speech at Liverpool Hope University (covered by Phys.org), her first as the school’s new Chancellor, Grady explained that she’s confident Europa is home to higher-level life forms, but they’re in lower-level realms than on the surface. It’s slightly smaller than Earth’s moon but covered with a 15-mile thick layer of ice. That ice would protect creatures living underneath it from deadly solar radiation and asteroids – Europa’s atmosphere is too thin to protect it or support life. On the other hand, it’s likely that underneath all of the ice is liquid water of the salty kind, and hydrothermal vents that could spark the creation of life and then provide an environment to support it. If this sounds like Earth, Grady agrees.
“”But I think it’s highly likely there will be life elsewhere—and I think it’s highly likely they’ll be made of the same elements. Humans evolved from little furry mammals that got the opportunity to evolve because the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid impact. That is probably not going to happen on every planet—but it’s at least possible based purely on a statistical argument.”
But octopuses?
“I’m fairly specified we’re all there is at our amount of intelligence in this planetary method. And even if there are octopuses on Europa, that does not give us a cause to damage our planet.”
Europa
Describing the chances for finding intelligent life at our level (we can debate the notion that we’re not so intelligent at another time) in the Milky Way as highly unlikely, Grady sees us as galactic environmentalists – protecting both our planet and any space body we set foot or probe on. Her choice of “octopus” to describe the highest level of life we might encounter may just be a backhanded reference to the movie ‘Europa Report’ in which the first mission to Europa discovers a tentacled, bioluminescent creature described as a cross between an octopus and a squid. On the other hand, many people believe that the mammal-like intelligence of octopuses is because they’re aliens on Earth. Could they be from Europa?
We’ll have to wait for the anticipated Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer, Europa Clipper or Europa Lander missions to find out.
Or, we could figure out a way to talk to an octopus.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
1KM Long UFO Seen Over Mountain Range Heading Towards Nellis AFB, Video, UFO Sighting News.
1KM Long UFO Seen Over Mountain Range Heading Towards Nellis AFB, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: January 29, 2020
Location of sighting: 45 Miles From Baker, Nevada
This video was taken on the extraterrestrial highway. An area famous for its UFO sightings in the middle of nowhere. This video is an awesome capture of an actual alien craft in the Nevada area. This object is 40 miles from Baker city and 132 miles from Las Vegas, Nevada...which is easy to find out by looking at the road sign at the 14 second mark in the video. Las Vegas has Nellis AFB which has given some land behind the old firing range to the Tall White Species, in exchange for friendship and technology. But this is also not far from Area 51. This UFO is about 1km across using the mountains to determine its size. Thats a mothership...and its following the mountain range...and guess what? The mountain range leads directly to behind Nellis AFB...the Tall White location. This is 100% proof that alien activity is still happening in Nevada. I love the detail on this one. It has an open payload door area at its top, lower center has a white shiny half dome...classic disk shape.
Commercial pilot César Murillo Pérez, who flies for Colombian airline company Viva Air, recorded a video of what appears to be a metallic, roughly spherical object while in the air over Medellín, the capital of Colombia’s Antioquia province. He immediately posted the video to Tiktok site and it began to go viral with over 820,000 views. The object is clearly not a balloon since its sides are not round but actually more cube with protruding edges. This UFO looks very similar to the UFO that was released by accident by the government in infrared. Also the person really is a pilot who has posted other videos of aircraft, and sunsets above places around the globe. He flies from South America to Europe. This is absolutly a UFO and its the most legitimate and close up focused view of a UFO of 2020 so far. Scott C. Waring
A “beating heart” of frozen nitrogen controls Pluto’s winds and may give rise to features on its surface, according to a new study.
Only one earthly spacecraft has ever visited Pluto. New Horizons gathered the data to create this composite image in 2015. The heart-shaped feature is now called Tombaugh Regio. It’s a large, bright plain – largest feature on the planet – named for Pluto’s discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh. New research has revealed that this heart of Pluto’s makes the planet’s winds blow.
Wasn’t it wonderful when – after all the disappointment surrounding Pluto’s loss of major planet status in 2006 – the New Horizons spacecraft made its historic sweep past the planet in 2015 and discovered a big heart on its surface? Last week (February 4, 2020), scientists announced something new and interesting about Pluto’s heart, which is called Tombaugh Regio, and which is a vast plain on the planet covered with nitrogen ice. The new research shows that Pluto’s renowned nitrogen heart rules its atmospheric circulation. It causes Pluto’s winds to blow.
This new research was published February 4 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. This journal is published by the American Geophysical Union (AGU). A statement from AGU explained:
During the day, a thin layer of [the nitrogen ice covering Tombaugh Regio] warms and turns into vapor. At night, the vapor condenses and once again forms ice. Each sequence is like a heartbeat, pumping nitrogen winds around the dwarf planet.
The new work suggests that this cycle pushes Pluto’s atmosphere to circulate in the opposite direction of its spin – a unique phenomenon called retro-rotation. As air whips close to the surface, it transports heat, grains of ice and haze particles to create dark wind streaks and plains across the north and northwestern regions of Tombaugh Regio. According to the study’s lead author, astrophysicist and planetary scientist Tanguy Bertrand of NASA’s Ames Research Center in California:
This highlights the fact that Pluto’s atmosphere and winds – even if the density of the atmosphere is very low – can impact the surface.
Before New Horizons visited Pluto, the Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the distant planet in 2010. Pluto’s heart hadn’t been revealed then, but it’s somewhat discernible in this image.
Pluto once was considered the outpost planet in our solar system, but no more. Now we know it’s one of many small bodies in the solar system’s frozen outer reaches, a realm now known as the Kuiper Belt. Pluto is located billions of miles from our planet Earth. It took New Horizons – one of the fastest spacecraft yet built by earthlings – nine years to get there. Once it did arrive, the information gathered by New Horizons required 4.5 hours to travel back to Earth, moving at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second).
In that distant realm of our solar system, nitrogen gas – the major component of Earth’s atmosphere – composes most of Pluto’s thin atmosphere, too. Most of the nitrogen ice on Pluto’s surface is confined to Tombaugh Regio, these scienists said. Describing Pluto’s heart, they said:
Its left ‘lobe’ is a 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) ice sheet located in a 3-kilometer (1.9-mile) deep basin named Sputnik Planitia – an area that holds most of the dwarf planet’s nitrogen ice because of its low elevation. The heart’s right ‘lobe’ is comprised of highlands and nitrogen-rich glaciers that extend into the basin.
This close-up image from New Horizons shows the center left of Pluto’s heart. It’s a vast, craterless plain, covered with nitrogen ice. It may be no more than 100 million years old and is possibly still being shaped by geologic processes. This frozen region has been named Sputnik Planitia (Sputnik Plain), after Earth’s first artificial satellite. The surface appears to be divided into irregularly-shaped segments that are ringed by narrow troughs. Features that appear to be groups of mounds and fields of small pits are also visible. Image acquired July 14, 2015. Features as small as 1/2 mile (1 km) across are visible.
Before New Horizons, everyone thought Pluto was going to be a netball – completely flat, almost no diversity. But it’s completely different. It has a lot of different landscapes and we are trying to understand what’s going on there.
To accomplish this, Bertrand and his team pulled from New Horizons’ data and then simulated Pluto’s nitrogen cycle with a weather forecast model. They then assessed how winds blew across Pluto’s surface. Their statement explained:
The group discovered that Pluto’s winds above 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) blow to the west – the opposite direction from the dwarf planet’s eastern spin – in a retro-rotation during most of its year. As nitrogen within Tombaugh Regio vaporizes in the north and becomes ice in the south, its movement triggers westward winds, according to the new study. No other place in the solar system has such an atmosphere, except perhaps Neptune’s moon Triton.
The researchers also found a strong current of fast-moving, near-surface air along the western boundary of the Sputnik Planitia basin. The airflow is like wind patterns on Earth, such as the Kuroshio along the eastern edge of Asia. Atmospheric nitrogen condensing into ice drives this wind pattern, according to the new findings. Sputnik Planitia’s high cliffs trap the cold air inside the basin, where it circulates and becomes stronger as it passes through the western region.
The intense western boundary current’s existence excited Candice Hansen-Koharcheck, a planetary scientist with the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, who wasn’t involved with the new study. She said:
It’s very much the kind of thing that’s due to the topography or specifics of the setting. I’m impressed that Pluto’s models have advanced to the point that you can talk about regional weather.
On the broader scale, Hansen-Koharcheck thought the new study was intriguing. She added:
This whole concept of Pluto’s beating heart is a wonderful way of thinking about it.
A map of the Tombaugh Regio area on Pluto, which includes the heart-shaped surface feature.
Bottom line: A heart-shaped feature on Pluto is partly covered in frozen nitrogen. During the day, nitrogen ice evaporates in the north, then condenses back to ice at night in the south. According to a new study, this process sets off winds in a westerly direction for most of the Plutonian year, which is opposite to the dwarf planet’s eastward spin. They also found fast and powerful near-surface winds along the western boundary of the Sputnik Planitia basin.
In the most extreme regions of the universe, galaxies are being killed. Their star formation is being shut down and astronomers want to know why.
The first ever Canadian-led large project on one of the world’s leading telescopes is hoping to do just that. The new program, called the Virgo Environment Traced in Carbon Monoxide survey (VERTICO), is investigating, in brilliant detail, how galaxies are killed by their environment.
Commissioned in 2013 at a cost of US$1.4 billion, ALMA is an array of connected radio dishes at an altitude of 5,000 metres in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. It is an international partnership between Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Chile. The largest ground-based astronomical project in existence, ALMA is the most advanced millimetre wavelength telescope ever built and ideal for studying the clouds of dense cold gas from which new stars form, which cannot be seen using visible light.
Large ALMA research programs such as VERTICO are designed to address strategic scientific issues that will lead to a major advance or breakthrough in the field.
Galaxy clusters
Where galaxies live in the universe and how they interact with their surroundings (the intergalactic medium that surrounds them) and each other are major influences on their ability to form stars. But precisely how this so-called environment dictates the life and death of galaxies remains a mystery.
Galaxy clusters are the most massive and most extreme environments in the universe, containing many hundreds or even thousands of galaxies. Where you have mass, you also have gravity and the huge gravitational forces present in clusters accelerates galaxies to great speeds, often thousands of kilometres-per-second, and superheats the plasma in between galaxies to temperatures so high that it glows with X-ray light.
In the dense, inhospitable interiors of these clusters, galaxies interact strongly with their surroundings and with each other. It is these interactions that can kill off — or quench — their star formation.
Understanding which quenching mechanisms shut off star formation and how they do it is main the focus of the VERTICO collaboration’s research.
The life cycle of interstellar matter stems from the hot diffuse gas that permeates much of the volume of the Galaxy (top of cycle). Through thermal instability, it can cool to form denser "clouds" of atomic gas that may be the building blocks of the still colder and denser molecular clouds that follow. As far as we know, all stars are formed from molecular clouds. Either through their formation or their eventual death, stars frequently destroy their natal or neighboring clouds (mechanically, or through their radiation), dispersing it back into the diffuse phase again, this time enriched with the heavy elements fused by the star during its lifetime.
The life cycle of galaxies
As galaxies fall through clusters, the intergalactic plasma can rapidly remove their gas in a violent process called ram pressure stripping. When you remove the fuel for star formation, you effectively kill the galaxy, turning it into a dead object in which no new stars are formed.
In addition, the high temperature of clusters can stop hot gas cooling and condensing onto galaxies. In this case, the gas in the galaxy isn’t actively removed by the environment but is consumed as it forms stars. This process leads to a slow, inexorable shut down in star formation known, somewhat morbidly, as starvation or strangulation.
While these processes vary considerably, each leaves a unique, identifiable imprint on the galaxy’s star-forming gas. Piecing these imprints together to form a picture of how clusters drive changes in galaxies is a major focus of the VERTICO collaboration. Building on decades of work to provide insight into how environment drives galaxy evolution, we aim to add a critical new piece of the puzzle.
An ideal case study
The Virgo Cluster is an ideal location for such a detailed study of environment. It is our nearest massive galaxy cluster and is in the process of forming, which means that we can get a snapshot of galaxies in different stages of their life cycles. This allows us to build up a detailed picture of how star formation is shut off in cluster galaxies.
Galaxies in the Virgo cluster have been observed at almost every wavelength in the electromagnetic spectrum (for example, radio, optical and ultra-violet light), but observations of star-forming gas (made at millimetre wavelengths) with the required sensitivity and resolution do not exist yet. As one of the largest galaxy surveys on ALMA to date, VERTICO will provide high resolution maps of molecular hydrogen gas — the raw fuel for star formation — for 51 galaxies.
With ALMA data for this large sample of galaxies, it will be possible to reveal exactly which quenching mechanisms, ram pressure stripping or starvation, are killing galaxies in extreme environments and how.
By mapping the star-forming gas in galaxies that are the smoking gun examples of environment-driven quenching, VERTICO will advance our current understanding of how galaxies evolve in the densest regions of the Universe.
Astronomers Find Huge Amount of Oxygen in Ancient Dwarf Star
Astronomers Find Huge Amount of Oxygen in Ancient Dwarf Star
Using high-resolution spectroscopic observations from the High-Resolution Echelle Spectrometer(HIRES) on the 10-m Keck I telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory, an international team of astronomers and astrophysicists has detected large amount of oxygen in the atmosphere of SDSS J081554.26+472947.5 (J0815+4729 for short), an ancient dwarf star located 5,000 light-years away in the constellation of Lynx. The finding provides an important clue on how oxygen and other important elements were produced in the Universe’s first generations of stars.
This image shows the ancient dwarf star J0815+4729 (center).
Image credit: Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg / SIMBAD / SDSS.
Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the Universe after hydrogen and helium, and is essential for all forms of life on Earth, as the chemical basis of respiration and a building block of carbohydrates. It is also the main elemental component of the Earth’s crust.
However, this element didn’t exist in the early Universe; it is created through nuclear fusion reactions that occur deep inside the most massive stars, those with masses roughly 10 times the mass of the Sun or greater.
Tracing the early production of oxygen and other elements requires studying the oldest stars still in existence.
“Stars like J0815+4729 are referred to as halo stars,” said Dr. Adam Burgasser, an astrophysicist in the Center for Astrophysics and Space Science at the University of California San Diego.
“This is due to their roughly spherical distribution around the Milky Way, as opposed to the more familiar flat disk of younger stars that include the Sun.”
Halo stars like J0815+4729 are truly ancient stars, allowing astronomers a peek into element production early in the history of the Universe.
Dr. Burgasser and colleagues measured the abundances of 16 chemical species in the atmosphere of J0815+4729, including oxygen.
“The primitive composition of the star indicates that it was formed during the first hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, possibly from the material expelled from the first supernovae of the Milky Way,” said Dr. Jonay González Hernández, a postdoctoral researcher in the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and the Universidad de La Laguna, Spain.
The HIRES data of J0815+4729 revealed a very unusual chemical composition.
While the star has relatively large amounts of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen — approximately 10, 8, and 3% of the abundances measured in the Sun — other elements like calcium and iron have abundances around one millionth that of the Sun.
“Only a few such stars are known in the halo of our Galaxy, but none have such an enormous amount of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen compared to their iron content,” said Dr. David Aguado, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge.
“Thirty years ago we started to study the presence of oxygen in the oldest stars of the Galaxy; those results had already indicated that this element was produced enormously in the first generations of supernovae,” said Dr. Rafael Rebolo, from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, the Universidad de La Laguna and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.
“However, we could not imagine that we would find a case of enrichment as spectacular as that of this star.”
The discovery is reported in a paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Jonay I. González Hernández et al. 2020. The Extreme CNO-enhanced Composition of the Primitive Iron-poor Dwarf Star J0815+4729. ApJL 889, L13; doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/ab62ae
Science fiction media has approached this question for decades. For those who die aboard spacecraft on the journey to Mars or some other cosmic destination (e.g., Spock'sdeath in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" and events in the recent film "Ad Astra"), the solution is always the same: toss 'em out of the airlock.
But what about burial? Burying people once we get to Mars seems like a decent option. But, if bodies were left out on the surface or buried on Mars, it's likely that they would only mummify over time, as the planet hosts no known bacteria that would decompose the body, and face the effects of radiation.
So, instead of throwing beloved crewmates out to freeze, float and eventually break apart in the vacuum of space or leaving friends out on Mars to mummify and get irradiated, it seems that, in real life, we might take more careful measures to mourn and dispose of our dead when off Earth.
J.J. Hastings practices dying on Mars with a Martian death garment specially designed and made by fashion designer Pia Interlandi. (Image credit: Chelsea Gohd/Space.com)
To date, three people have died in space. Following the Soviet Union's launch of the Salyut 1, the first space station, in 1971, the Soyuz 10 mission launched and returned back to Earth early following a problem in docking with the station. That crew made it back to Earth, but the next mission, Soyuz 11, faced trouble after it launched with cosmonauts Georgi Dobrovolski, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev. While this crew made it to the station, too, during their descent to Earth (which was also early, due to problems), a valve opened too soon and the crew died from decompression when exposed to the vacuum of space.
With the ship already on a return mission to Earth with no surviving crewmembers onboard, there were no people to follow any procedures following the tragic deaths.
Currently, space agencies like NASA have procedures for surviving crew members to follow if someone dies in space. In his book "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth" (Little, Brown and Co., 2013), retired Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield explained that astronauts conduct what are called "death sims." In these simulations, astronauts act as if a specific crewmember has died and work out what they should do.
They work through questions like "What are we going to do with his corpse? There are no body bags on station, so should we shove it in a spacesuit and stick it in a locker? But what about the smell? Should we send it back to Earth on a resupply ship and let it burn up with the rest of the garbage on reentry? Jettison it during a spacewalk and let it float away into space?" Hadfield wrote in the book.
But as it becomes more likely that humans will spend more time on off-Earth locations like the moon and Mars, it's important that we continue to heavily consider and develop plans for what should happen if and when someone dies.
What to wear to die on Mars
Now, just as we likely wouldn't zip our loved ones into a bag and just toss them out of an airlock if they were to die on a spacecraft, we'll likely have respectful approaches on other planets. Once on the surface of Mars, humans will likely have rituals and protocols surrounding death like those we have on Earth.
J.J. Hastings, a bioengineer and CEO of Analogs LLC who served as commander of Sensoria I (the first analog Mars mission as part of the Sensoria program), is exploring what it would be like to die on Mars alongside fashion design researcher Pia Interlandi. The project is made up of two main parts: a ritual death garment and a "human recycler" (my nickname for it, not the actual name of the process or technology).
Now, before we get to the "human recycler" aspect of the project, let's discuss the garment.
J.J. Hastings models the "Martian death garment" designed by Pia Interlandi inside the HI-SEAS habitat right next to the airlock. (Image credit: Chelsea Gohd/Space.com)
This project aims to conceptualize the process of death and grieving on Mars in a way that aligns with our human sensibilities, both Hastings and Interlandi explained to Space.com. Here on Earth, we have funerals, memorials, wakes, cremation, burial services and more. We have a litany of rituals surrounding death that give us an opportunity to say goodbye to our dead.
To create such a ritual for Mars, Hastings worked with Interlandi, who, along with her research, creates custom death garments on Earth for her work with "Garments for the Grave" and has exhibited her work all around the world at renowned institutions including the Museum of Modern Art. For this "Martian death project," Interlandi created a ritual death garment, which Hastings showed to Space.com at the HI-SEAS habitat during the Sensoria I mission. Throughout the mission, Hastings slept on a pillowcase with "Upon my death, here is everything you need" written on it. Inside the pillowcase were all of the pieces of the death garment.
Sleeping on the clothes they would wear after they die, the concept goes, would not only remind astronauts of their mortality, but also allow them to reflect in a unique way. The pillowcase would also provide a space-saving method for transporting the garment. It "needs to be transportable. It can't be interrupting things. It needs to be something that fits within your packing," Interlandi told Space.com.
The garment has four layers and is 100% biodegradable, so the body can decompose more easily without creating additional, synthetic waste. Interlandi's pieces are designed to be easy to put on a stiff corpse, she told Space.com. She further explained that the Martian garment, specifically, consists entirely of different types of silk (different weights and textures).
The project used silk because not only does it looks and feels nice, is lightweight, and is made out of protein from silkworms. That means that when the death ritual reaches the "human recycler" stage, the garment's proteins could be processed along with those from the human body. (Wool would also work for this reason, but silk was a better choice because of its feel, textures and weight, Interlandi explained).
J.J. Hastings "practices" dying on "Mars" just outside of the HI-SEAS habitat in Hawaii while wearing Pia Interlandi's "Martian death garment." (Image credit: Chelsea Gohd/Space.com)
The first layer of the garment is an undergarment, which lies directly against the body. It is a white tunic with ties on its sides.
Over this base layer is the second layer, which "is meant to be more decorative, and this would be if I was lying in the room so if there was a memorial or something else," Hastings told Space.com while wearing the flowing garment. This semi-translucent layer is made out of a light silk and features a gradual color fade from from the top to the bottom of the garment, white to dark gray.
Third, the garment features a light silk, gauzy piece that wraps around and covers the face.
J.J. Hastings practices dying on Mars, this up-close shot shows the gauze-y silk piece which covers the face as part of the "Martian death garment" designed by Pia Interlandi. (Image credit: Chelsea Gohd/Space.com)
Finally, the garment includes a large, blanket-like veil made out of a very simple silk that feels and looks almost like a large, thick web. This fourth piece wraps around the body over the other garments.
J.J. Hastings holding up the fourth and final layer of Pia Interlandi's "Martian death garment," which Hastings is wearing inside the HI-SEAS habitat. (Image credit: Chelsea Gohd/Space.com)
The pieces serve the practical purpose of covering the dead in biodegradable fabrics that are easy to put onto a stiff, dead body. But the act of dressing the dead in the different layers also creates a ritual that allows grieving parties to get close to the body. "The closing of the coffin is often too abrupt and too hard and too sudden. We need to have a process where we can slowly veil and conceal the body [so] that it's a softer, more gentle kind of fading out," Interlandi said.
At HI-SEAS, on the side of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, with Mauna Kea in the background, Hastings put on the garments. She demonstrated what a Martian death ritual might look like one day, as you can see in the video above.
A human recycler
Interlandi's thoughtful death designs serve as the first half of this "Martian death project." The garment facilitates a ritual. But following the ritual, humans living on Mars would need to dispose of deceased humans thoughtfully. And that's where the "human recycler" would come into play.
As an alternative, Hastings explained that this human recycler idea would work by composting the body and turning it back into its raw materials. These could then be repurposed and used on Mars.
When you're living off-Earth, whether on an orbiting space station, the moon, Mars or beyond, resources are everything. From food to water, energy and so much more, these resources are infinitely precious.
So, as Hastings explained, when people die in a location like Mars, the resources that are a part of their body cannot go to waste. From salt and other minerals to carbon, water and so much more, the human body is made up of an enormously long list of raw materials that could be valuable resources for living crewmembers.
Hastings said that the project can't yet reveal the specific details of this "human recycler." However, as Interlandi explained, the project members are exploring different options using existing technologies.
One such option would be compatible with the protein fabrics (silk) of the death garments. This method, alkaline hydrolysis, sometimes referred to as "green cremation," is an alternative to burial and cremation here on Earth that "has been used by the medical field and agricultural fields for the disposal of animals," Interlandi said. It works by essentially dissolving the proteins of the human body and leaving behind only liquid and bone.
As Interlandi suggested, the liquid could be used to, for example, provide nutrients to growing plants on Mars. She added that she and Hastings plan to conduct experiments in which they dissolve the fabrics used in the Martian death garments in this process, to see if there is any residue left over or if it poses any problems.
Solving for space solves for Earth
It might seem strange and even horrifying to some to simply dissolve their dead friends and family members. But, as both Hastings and Interlandi expressed, this work is yet another example of "solving for space solves for Earth."
Alkaline hydrolysis could be a suitable way to dispose of the dead on a place like Mars where sending the dead home may not be reasonable or even possible. And exploring how this disposal process would work under these extreme circumstances could inform us about whether it could be a useful and sustainable burial solution on Earth.
So, while it might seem like a far-out or even morbid topic, figuring out how to die on Mars could make life a little more sustainable here at home.
Professor Monica Grady from the Liverpool Hope University
(Image: Twitter)
A British space scientist says she believes it is “almost certain” that Europa - one of Jupiter’s moons - is home to octopus-like alien creatures.
Professor of Planetary and Space Science at Liverpool Hope University Monica Grady claims ice beneath the moon’s surface may have life forms that have a similar level of intelligence to octopuses.
Professor Grady also thinks deep caves on the surface of Mars could also contain alien life.
She said: “When it comes to the prospects of life beyond Earth, it’s almost a racing certainty that there’s life beneath the ice on Europa.
Europa could host aliens in its icy seas
(Image: The New Day)
“Elsewhere, if there’s going to be life on Mars, it’s going to be under the surface of the planet.
“There you’re protected from solar radiation. And that means there’s possibility of ice remain in the pores of the rocks, which could act as a source of water.
“If there is something on Mars, it’s likely to be very small bacteria.
“But I think we’ve got a better chance of having slightly higher forms of life on Europa, perhaps similar to the intelligence of an octopus.”
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope found evidence of sodium chloride, known to us as salt, on the planet’s surface last year.
Professor Grady believes that any life on Mars is likely to be very small bacteria
(Image: NASA / SWNS)
This suggests that there is likely to be a giant sea containing salty water underneath Europa’s icy surface.
Europa is thought to be one of the moon's closest to Earth as it is understood to also have a surface ocean of salty water.
Speaking of what could lie beyond the Milky Way, Professor Grady said conditions that led to the creation of life on Earth are “highly likely” to exist elsewhere.
She explained: “Our solar system is not a particularly special planetary system, as far as we know, and we still haven’t explored all the stars in the galaxy.
“But I think it’s highly likely there will be life elsewhere - and I think it’s highly likely they’ll be made of the same elements.
She also said she believes it's "highly likely" that there will be life elsewhere outside of our galaxy(Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
“Humans evolved from little furry mammals that got the opportunity to evolve because the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid impact.
“Whether we will ever be able to contact extraterrestrial life is anyone’s guess, purely because the distances are just too huge.
“And as for so-called alien ‘signals’ received from space, there’s been nothing real or credible I’m afraid.”
This year will see three separate missions to Mars in an effort to search for intelligent life.
Professor Monica Grady from the Liverpool Hope University
(Image: Twitter)
A British space scientist says she believes it is “almost certain” that Europa - one of Jupiter’s moons - is home to octopus-like alien creatures.
Professor of Planetary and Space Science at Liverpool Hope University Monica Grady claims ice beneath the moon’s surface may have life forms that have a similar level of intelligence to octopuses.
Professor Grady also thinks deep caves on the surface of Mars could also contain alien life.
She said: “When it comes to the prospects of life beyond Earth, it’s almost a racing certainty that there’s life beneath the ice on Europa.
Europa could host aliens in its icy seas
(Image: The New Day)
“Elsewhere, if there’s going to be life on Mars, it’s going to be under the surface of the planet.
“There you’re protected from solar radiation. And that means there’s possibility of ice remain in the pores of the rocks, which could act as a source of water.
“If there is something on Mars, it’s likely to be very small bacteria.
“But I think we’ve got a better chance of having slightly higher forms of life on Europa, perhaps similar to the intelligence of an octopus.”
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope found evidence of sodium chloride, known to us as salt, on the planet’s surface last year.
Professor Grady believes that any life on Mars is likely to be very small bacteria
(Image: NASA / SWNS)
This suggests that there is likely to be a giant sea containing salty water underneath Europa’s icy surface.
Europa is thought to be one of the moon's closest to Earth as it is understood to also have a surface ocean of salty water.
Speaking of what could lie beyond the Milky Way, Professor Grady said conditions that led to the creation of life on Earth are “highly likely” to exist elsewhere.
She explained: “Our solar system is not a particularly special planetary system, as far as we know, and we still haven’t explored all the stars in the galaxy.
“But I think it’s highly likely there will be life elsewhere - and I think it’s highly likely they’ll be made of the same elements.
She also said she believes it's "highly likely" that there will be life elsewhere outside of our galaxy(Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
“Humans evolved from little furry mammals that got the opportunity to evolve because the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid impact.
“Whether we will ever be able to contact extraterrestrial life is anyone’s guess, purely because the distances are just too huge.
“And as for so-called alien ‘signals’ received from space, there’s been nothing real or credible I’m afraid.”
This year will see three separate missions to Mars in an effort to search for intelligent life.
Siberia’s Lake Baikal holds a number of world records for lakes – oldest lake, deepest, largest freshwater lake by volume, and subjectively, the world’s clearest lake. Its remoteness and close proximity to China has given it many myths and legends – a dragon’s tail cracked the earth and its fire melted the snows to fill it; a dragon turned into a beautiful woman and became the mother of the local Buryat people; a dragon still lives in the lake. There are tales from both World War I and II of lost gold in the lake and many sightings of UFOs above it and alien encounters around it and even underwater. While those myths and legends remain unsolved, a more recent one involving giant ice circles visible only by air may have finally been solved. UFO ice-fishing platforms? Dragon skating rinks? Mysterious lost treasure indicators?
“To fully understand the evolution of water structure and dynamics, there is a need to have better temporal resolution and larger time span. Starting from 2016, we have changed our monitoring strategy—every winter we carry out not one, but two field surveys that take place in mid‐February and (as usual) in late March. During each survey we perform (1) surface measurements of ice thickness and snow depth, as well as ice structure and roughness, (2) vertical profiles of temperature and conductivity, and (3) direct and indirect estimation of current field. We also install temperature loggers and current meters that stay in place between the February and March.”
Ice ring on Lake Baikal
Lake Baikal’s giant ice rings were first seen in 1969 and have been studied ever since without an explanation being discovered. There have been no consistent sizes nor locations nor water depths for the formations. Visible from space, the massive ice circles lasted from days to months. From 2010 to 2017, Alexei Kouraev, an assistant professor at the Laboratory for Studies in Spatial Geophysics and Oceanography (LEGOS) at the Federal University in Toulouse, France, led a new expedition using different techniques to solve the dilemma. As he explains in the journal Limnology and Oceanography, the research team drilled though as much as 700 feet of solid ice to drop temperature recorders and flow detectors that were left in place for as long as 1.5 months. What they found was surprising.
“Our hydrographic surveys beneath the ice rings in Lake Baikal in 2012–2014 and in Lake Hovsgol in 2015 have shown the presence of warm lens‐like (double‐convex form) eddies before and during the manifestation of ice rings (Kouraev et al. 2016).”
Ah-ha! The sensors showed eddies flowing clockwise beneath the ice. The temperature sensors showed that these eddies were 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit (1 to 2 degrees Celsius) warmer than the surrounding water. That combination forms the giant ice circles.
“We have shown that giant ice rings are a surface manifestation of these intrathermocline lens‐like eddies. These eddies exist before and during the manifestation of the ice rings. They have an isolated circular form and radial symmetry, and their position corresponds to the location of ice rings.”
Ice rings (NASA image)
The lens-shaped eddies – a shape seen in oceans but not in lakes – actually formed in the fall before the lake froze over, possibly sent into motion by winds blowing from nearby Barguzin Bay. The researchers found current speed variations within the eddies – they were weak in the center and strong at the edges – which explains why the ice in the rings is thicker in the middle and thinner around the edge.
While the mystery of the ice rings appears to have been solved, the mystery of why people still try to drive on the ice – to sometimes disastrous results – has not. Calling themselves the Fellowship of the Ice Rings, Kouraev and his fellow researchers publish detailed warnings on their website, including:
If you see a route on ice, even if there are dozens of cars that drove safely before, know that nothing guarantees that this is a safe route
If you see a crack with open water – do not approach the rim of this crack
Avoid driving when it’s snowing or when strong wind is blowing
Do not drive after consumption of alcohol. Ice is even more dangerous than asphalt
Do not trust advices of local people – in 50% of the cases they are not reliable
If you can’t trust the advice of the Fellowship of the Ice Rings, who CAN you trust?
People tend to give more credibility to UFO sightings by airplane pilots than any other sort of person. There are a few likely reasons for this. One, both pilots and UFOs are in the sky. Pilots are, objectively, more similar to UFOs than farmers. And if there’s anyone that’s supposed to know what does and doesn’t belong in the sky, it’s a pilot. This brings us to reason two: we really, really want to believe that the people at the controls of our airplanes are reasonable, rational human beings. Now, I would submit that one would have to be clinically insane to want to pilot an airplane, but that’s neither here nor there. Let’s talk about UFOs.
A Colombian commercial airline pilot recently shared footage of a UFO he claims to have filmed over Medellín, Colombia. César Murillo Pérez, a pilot for the Colombian airline Viva Air, says he filmed this bizarre black sphere floating some 30,000 feet in the air over Colombia. According to Pérez, the sighting occurred on January 1, 2020, but he only recently posted the footage to the social media site TikTok.
Andrés Clavijo Rangel✔@ClavijoAndres83
Este video fue publicado por un piloto de Medellín ¿opiniones? ¿Real (Ovni) o Fake (Montaje)?
It’s a weird one for sure. Being that the UFO in the footage looks like a simple black sphere, it would be fairly easy to write it off as a balloon. Yet Pérez says that it’s doubtful that a balloon could reach 30,000 feet. There are balloons that do reach those heights, such as weather balloons or whatever weird stuff Google is launching into the atmosphere, but all of those balloons are fitted with detection systems that allow airplanes to identify and track them. At the start of the video, Pérez pans the camera to the plane’s monitors to show that the object is not showing up. Pérez says:
“I would think it was a balloon, but the conditions do not lend itself to it. I doubt it, above all, because of the altitude and the physical characteristics.”
It’s also hard to tell exactly what shape the UFO is when it passes by so quickly.
The UFO looks very similar to other claimed sightings, including some of the sightings reported by US Navy pilots.
But some have questioned the authenticity of the video. The Colombian Civil Aeronautics agency requires all pilots to report mysterious, unidentified objects in the sky where they shouldn’t be. Usually, these reports are rogue balloons or drones. But the agency says that no such report was filed for this incident.
Pérez maintains that the video is genuine and says that he still has the raw footage on his phone. He also says that he wouldn’t be capable of faking a video like that, because he simply doesn’t know how. He says:
“I have seen that they have said that it is a very well done [fabrication], but I am a pilot, I do not know about [fabrications] or anything like that.”
So is it a UFO? Who knows. If the footage is in fact genuine, then it’s a pretty good one. Of course, it’s still hard to tell exactly what is being shown in the video. And just because it didn’t show up on the plane’s monitoring system doesn’t mean it isn’t a balloon. The ID system may have malfunctioned, or it could just be something not following the rules. Either way, if I saw that thing hanging out at 30,000 feet, I’d be a little freaked out.
Proof Ancient Civilizations Knew the Secrets of Space, Time and Our Holographic Universe
Proof Ancient Civilizations Knew the Secrets of Space, Time and Our Holographic Universe
Laird Scranton explores the intersection of Egyptian, Dogon, Kabbalah and Vedic teachings to uncover the secrets of space, time and our holographic universe. By examining the mythological representations of what we now understand through geometry and science, he is able to suss out the main message for humanity which has been hidden before us, this whole time.
Laird Scranton is the author of a series of books and other writings on ancient cosmology and language. These include articles published in the University of Chicago’s Anthropology News academic journal, Temple University’s Encyclopedia of African Religion and the Encyclopedia Britainnica. He is featured in John Anthony West’s Magical Egypt documentary series and in Carmen Boulter’s documentary The Pyramid Code.
He is also a frequent presenter at conferences whose focus is on ancient knowledge. These include Walter Cruttenden’s Conference on Precession and Ancient Knowledge (CPAK), the A.R.E.’s Ancient Mysteries Conference, Scotty Roberts and John Ward’s Paradigm Symposium, the Fringe New Jersey Conference, and James Swager’s Megalithic Odyssey Symposium, in Marlborough, England.
A Legend That Turns Out To Be Real? Hibernating Alien Discovered Inside Secret Chamber In The Great Pyramid
A Legend That Turns Out To Be Real? Hibernating Alien Discovered Inside Secret Chamber In The Great Pyramid
A strange story about the Great Pyramid of Giza appeared in the March 2000 issue of the Egyptian magazine Rose El-Yussuf
According to the article, in 1988, French Egyptologist Louis Caparat, discovered this mummy in 1988 in a secret room of the Great Pyramid and, “was found in a crystalline transparent case. At first the alien appeared to be hibernating,” or in a state of suspended animation. It’s believed to be a “humanoid,” which is a mix between an extraterrestrial race and human DNA.
A papyrus found near the body tells of this being’s encounter with the Pharaoh Khufu. Apparently, it said that this convinced the Pharaoh to build the Great Pyramid as a tomb for this being after he had announced the future arrival of other beings of his species (Source: the Egyptian magazine “Rose El-Yussuf” relayed by “The World Of The Unknown” in Issue 283 April 2000).
It was also determined from the papyrus that the people whom lived in Egypt during the Neolithic period was already very mixed, mostly consisting of people from the Mediterranean and Negroid that were dolichocephalic (Greek word meaning to have an elongated head).
The last update on this was that “Caparat sent a message to a colleague in Spain, Francisco de Braga, a biologist, inviting him to come to Egypt” to take blood, cell, tissue and DNA samples from the dead alien.” But when Dr. de Braga arrived in Cairo, he was detained by the Egyptian Ministry of State Security and put on a plane back to Madrid. According to Rose El-Yussuf, the dead alien was taken to a laboratory at an undisclosed location by Egyptian military intelligence.
Editor’s Note: Please take this story with a grain of salt. Mysterious dead bodies have been turning up in the Great Pyramid since Abdullah Al-Mamun first broke into the Great Pyramid in 813 A.D. Abdullah, who was the son of the famous caliph, Haroun Al-Raschid, hired a crew of Egyptians who laboriously bored a hole right through the Pyramid’s wall.
According to author Peter Tompkins:
“Some Arabian authors have reported that Al-Mamun found in the sarcophagus a stone statue in the shape of a man. They say that within the statue lay a body wearing a breastplate of gold set with precious stones, an invaluable sword on his chest, and a carbuncle ruby on his head the size of an egg, which shone as with the light of day.” – Secrets of the Great Pyramid by Peter Tompkins
On the other hand, there have been a lot of strange goings-on at the Great Pyramid since 1996, including secret UNESCO teams visiting, unmarked military vehicles and black helicopters seen at Giza, and the recent round of heavy construction.. It’s anyone’s guess what is really going on out there.
Another mummified alien (5’ 3”) was also found buried in an ancient pyramid, but this time by the archaeologist, Dr. Viktor Lubek. This one was found near Lahun, when exploring a small pyramid south of the Dynasty doceaba of Senusret II, which contains the queen of the pharaoh. This of course was not revealed immediately to the public either, and dates back to about 1880 B.C. According to a source at the Egyptian Antiquities Department, “The mummy of what appears to be an alien, dates back (to about 1880 B.C.) and it seems it would be a humanoid.” Apparently this statement, along with details and photographs of the find, were made under the condition of remaining anonymous. Inscriptions on the tomb of the mummy showed that this being was a counselor to the pharaoh and was named Osirunet, meaning “star” or “sent from heaven.” The body was said to be buried with great respect and care, and was accompanied by a number of strange artifacts made of a synthetic material that is not found in any other Egyptian tomb. Also the source claimed, “It’s unclear what sex it was, but we do know it had unusual reptilian-type skin, no external ears and overly large, almond-shaped eyes.”
The anonymous person that provide this find’s details claimed that the discovery has caused great controversy among Egyptian officials, who want to keep it hidden until a “plausible explanation” for the strange mummy can be made. The Egyptian government has consulted a number of respected archaeologists, but to date none can explain the finding in ordinary terms. According to the source, “The Egyptians refuse to believe that their heritage came from outer space.” The last update on this was that the mummy was to be flown to a university in Florida where specialists will examine it more closely.
It turns out that the CIA has banned archaeologists to excavate in certain areas. Some journalists had already noticed that the CIA was very interested in making their own excavations before the ban was put in place. So far there are three “hidden” openings around the Sphinx that lead to underground tunnels that are prohibited. One opening is located in-between the two front paws, another on the south side, and one on the north side.
According to the British journalist Graham Hancock, the CIA has discovered not one, but 9 chambers under the Sphinx, some of which containing metal objects. These hidden underground chambers were actually recorded in the Emerald Tablets that were supposed to be written by Thoth/Hermes. The Emerald Tablets were said to be each molded out of a single piece of emerald (green) crystal, with its true origin (possible Atlantis) lost in legends that go back over 10,000 years. Its first known translation was made into Greek by Alexandrian scholars and was actually put on display in Egypt in 330 B.C. However, around 400 A.D. it was reportedly buried somewhere on the Giza plateau to protect it from religious zealots who were burning libraries around the world at that time.
If the intelligence agencies want to get their hands on a device or documents, it means they think that the civilization of ancient Egypt was, in some areas, much more advanced than ours. Two of the most well-known descriptions of aliens mating with humans, thereby creating humanoids, comes from Robert Temple’s “The Sirius Mystery” (which tells the story of the African Dogon Tribe) and Genesis in the Bible.
“The son of God saw the daughters of men were beautiful, and they took them wives which they chose among them. (…) There were giants in the earth in those days, and also later, because the son of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children: these are powerful men who, from ancient times, were men of renown “(Genesis 6: 2-4)
Greek mythology refers to these giants as Nephilim, or fallen angels who have taught men: math, writing, music, witchcraft/alchemy, astrology, etc. These lessons were also listed in the Kabbalah, which caused many crusades to chase these secrets in Jerusalem.
We live in world of technology and innovation, yet political leaders have caused the whole world to stop trusting our fellow man. Telling us that nothing is true and all is fake. But I'm here to tell you that psychology would say that those people are actually projecting how they see themselves onto others...as one would look into the mirror yelling fake. We UFO researchers around the world have dedicated ourselves to an area that few are brave enough to fully cover the facts.
I know the people visiting this site already believe intelligent beings exist out there, but would you trust me when I say that alien structures are on the surface and below the surface of every planet and moon in our solar system? Would you give me that? I speak from years of searching and from own UFO sightings I personally witnessed. I found the famous face at Cydnia 43 years ago and have been searching ever since.
Why don't they come down and introduce themselves right? They have asked world governments for that permission on several occasions and yet each time the response was...not yet. Most aliens follow the rules, but a few aliens...scientists and researchers are allowed to get close and even visit, walk among us, even abduct and then return people.
But our governments lie to us and tell us that they are searching for intelligent life out there, but never have they purposely given any evidence to the people. So I search...for me, for you, for all of us that NASA lies too, in hope that our evidence will crack and break the wall of lies of the governments. To do so we must unite as a people. Stop hating each other and open hearts and minds to new possibilities. Change is hard, because its a door to somewhere new. A door with a frame of fears of the unknown. The other side of that door is where you will find your true potential.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Again a huge unknown greenish anomaly approaching the ISS - NASA cut off live feed!
Again a huge unknown greenish anomaly approaching the ISS - NASA cut off live feed!
For the fourth time within 2 weeks a huge greenish anomaly has been recorded via the ISS live feed app. This time, Tyler Lame captured several images of the anomaly before NASA cut off the live feed.
These anomalies are alien craft or bioforms in space? Or could it be that these greenish anomalies are debris from a huge celestial body that approaches our planet?
Whatever it is, it is certainly something that needs to be monitored.
Like Tyler Lame said: Someone please help me find out what this is. And why it gets cut off right after seeing it? Just like when everyone saw the ship approaching the ISS then it cut off.
Hundreds of thousands of asteroids are lurking in the solar system, and space scientists believe that one of these rocks could inevitably hit the earth in the future. In order to prevent a potential collision, NASA, the United States space agency is apparently developing a planetary defence weapon.
The primary purpose of this weapon is to nudge an asteroid from its collision course, and if this method does not work, the space agency will be compelled to nuke an approaching space rock.
Outer space treaties could elevate chances of asteroid hit
Representative image of asteroid approaching earthPixabay
However, David Koplow, professor of law at Georgetown University believes that outer space treaties between nations could elevate the chances of a future asteroid hit. Koplow also does not believe in the effectiveness of the planetary defence weapon, and he claims that the weapon is not tested properly, and it has no proven track record.
"There are two important treaties, both long-standing and joined by most of the countries in the world, that specifically forbid the placement of nuclear weapons in orbit and the use of nuclear explosions in space. Suppose there is an asteroid coming and we do try to deflect it, but we are only partially successful, instead of hitting country A, it hits country B.
There's a treaty that imposes absolute liability if your space activity causes harm to another country. Overall, we're not quite there yet in terms of a solution to these issues, but it's better to think through these contingencies now, rather than later," said Koplow, Express.co.uk reports.
Which species will survive if a doomsday asteroid hit earth?
Around 66 million years ago, a giant asteroid hit the earth and resulted in the extinction of dinosaurs. Apart from dinosaurs, around 70 percent of all species on the earth was wiped off after this event. If such an asteroid hits earth again, millions or billions may die within a second without even knowing what had happened.
Space expert Lembit Öpik believes that humanity will not survive if a doomsday asteroid hits the earth in its full fury. As per Öpik, only cockroaches, certain deep-sea creatures, and other living beings that feed on dead meat will survive after the asteroid impact.
The ‘Impossible’ Quantum Space Engine That Breaks Laws Of Physics
The ‘Impossible’ Quantum Space Engine That Breaks Laws Of Physics
A couple of years ago, researchers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center proposed a thruster system which actually generates thrust, despite requiring absolutely no propellant. The implications of this discovery are far-reaching; applications for space flight and other technologies which require propulsion could one day become far cheaper, allowing space exploration to expand exponentially.
The existence of this technology also further validates the fact that energy can be derived from tapping into the quantum vacuum, also known as “zero-point.” Bottom line is that space is not empty, and the energy which lies within it can be used. This was experimentally confirmed when the Casimir Effect illustrated zero point or vacuum state energy, which predicts that two metal plates close together attract each other due to an imbalance in the quantum fluctuations(source)(source).
The propellant-less thruster is called the Cannae Drive, invented by Guido Fetta, and was tested by NASA over an eight day testing campaign that took place in August of 2013. It’s also known as the EM drive. It showed that a small amount of thrust was achieved inside a container, again, without the use of any fuel. The results were then presented at the 50th Joint Propulsion Conference in Cleveland, Ohio in July the next year. You can access the paper (titled “Numerical and Experimental Results for a Novel Propulsion Technology Requiring no On-Board Propellant”) that was presented at the conference here and inventor Guido Fetta’s paper here. Now, it’s about to be launched into spacee, and, according to many, like ScienceAlert.com, the EM “is as controversial as it gets, because while certain experiments have suggested that such an engine could work, it also goes against one of the most fundamental laws of physics we have. It’s a law that Issac Newton derived, called the law of conservation of momentum, which states that an equal and opposite reaction must stem from an action. In order for something to gain momentum it must expel some kind of propellent in the opposite direction, but not the EM drive, this invention taps into the ‘zero-point’ field of energy/electromagnetic waves, creating thrust by microwave photons bouncing around inside a cone shaped metal cavity. The cone shaped mental cavity is what accelerates it into the opposite direction. This is exciting, because it basically proves that we have a limitless resource of energy to tap into and utilize for space travel. This is currently the biggest barrier for modern day space travel and exploration.
A new type of engine that does not need propellant could help take astronauts to Mars.
IMAGE: FLICKR, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE
Science needs to be careful and stray far from getting caught up in the grip of scientific dogma. History has constantly shown us, especially within the realms of science, that what we accept as real always changes at another point in time. Our understanding and knowledge regarding the nature of our reality is constantly changing. “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.” This statement (worldview statement) was made by Lord Kelvin in 1900, which was shattered five years later when Einstein published his paper on special relativity. This one great, out of many. Today, engineers are inventing power generators that utilize these concepts, like Paramahamsa Tewari. These laws need to be refined to account for the fact that space is not empty, what we currently accept as fact is going to have to change, and developments like the EM drive, or electrical generators that used these concepts, are going to have to be acknowledged soon. Throughout history, new developments in fields such as energy have always taken their time to find it into the market place. In today’s world, there’s always a lot of Red Tape you’re going to have to go through, unfortunately.
In studying what's known as "flammable ice," researchers have discovered that microscopic bubbles within the strange material contain life. These findings could inform the quest to identify extraterrestrial life.
Flammable ice, also known as methane hydrate, is created when methane gas is trapped within ice's molecular structure. Sheets of this frozen gas and ice contain microscopic bubbles of oil and water. In a new study, scientists studying "flammable ice" in the Sea of Japan found microscopic, living creatures within these tiny bubbles.
The findings are derived from a study by professor Ryo Matsumoto of Meiji University in Japan, which aimed to find out if flammable ice might be used as a green energy source.
The researchers in this study came upon this discovery in a unique manner. While melting hydrate to study the methane gas it contains, Glen T. Snyder, a researcher at Meiji University and lead author of the new study, noticed a powder with little, microscopic spheroids in it that contained tiny spheres with dark centers in them. The finding was so strange that Snyder gathered a team together to probe further.
"In combination with the other evidence collected by my colleagues, my results showed that even under near-freezing temperatures, at extremely high pressures, with only heavy oil and saltwater for food-sources, life was flourishing and leaving its mark" inside these little bubbles in the "flammable ice," Stephen Bowden of the University of Aberdeen's School of Geosciences in Scotland, a co-author on this study, said in a statement.
To come to this conclusion, Bowden used analytic techniques developed at the University of Aberdeen that are specially designed for small sample sizes. Using these techniques, Bowden was able to show that the oil in this unique material was degrading in the tiny environments of the bubbles within the flammable ice.
So how does this work inform the search for extraterrestrial life? "The methane in 'methane hydrate' is known to form as microbes degrade organic matter on the seafloor. But what we never expected to find was microbes continuing to grow and produce these spheroids, all of the time while isolated in tiny cold dark pockets of saltwater and oil," Snyder said in the statement. "It certainly gives a positive spin to cold dark places, and opens up a tantalizing clue as to the existence of life on other planets."
"It certainly changes how I think about things," Bowden added, as he thought about what this discovery could mean for the search for life on cold exoplanets. "Providing they have ice and a little heat, all those frigid cold planets at the edge of every planetary system could host tiny microhabitats with microbes building their own 'death stars' and making their own tiny little atmospheres and ecosystems, just as we discovered here."
NASA's new experimental supersonic X-plane is on a fast track to flying.
The plane, officially named X-59 QueSST in 2018 and often referred to as just X-59, was greenlitfor final assembly during a critical design review in 2019. With this plane, NASA aims to create an ultraquiet craft that can travel over land faster than the speed of sound.
In 2020, Lockheed Martin, which NASA commissioned to build the plane, plans to mate the aircraft and completely finish the building process by the end of the year, a company representative told Space.com. "It's moving very fast on the shop floor in terms of manufacturing and production," the company said.
This follows a year of serious progress as the plane's wings have been assembled at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in Palmdale, California, and innovative systems for the craft continue to develop.
After the "mating of the aircraft and final assembly," the representative said, "we'll take the airframe to do some proof testing and get some other parts installed, do some test runs of the systems, and then roll it out."
Once the plane is all together, it will take its first flight in 2021, the representative added.
NASA_Langley✔@NASA_Langley
Shake shake shake, shake shake shake Shake your eXternal Vision System
To revolutionize flight, @NASAaero created a forward-facing camera & display system for X-59 pilots. Vibration testing will validate the system's structural integrity so it can fly: https://go.nasa.gov/2GrYqmo
Assembly of the X-59 continues @LockheedMartin Skunk Works! Seen here? The wing assembly is lifted by a crane and moved to another area of the manufacturing floor in preparation for wing skin installation. Learn more about our mission to quiet the boom →http://nasa.gov/X59
But will a plane that travels at supersonic speeds, or faster than the speed of sound, really be quiet enough to avoid causing a major disturbance? According to the representative, the team behind the plane is confident that the craft will be ultrafast and ultraquiet.
"We're very confident. All kinds of modeling simulations and predictions align, so we believe, based on these models and simulations we've run, that it will achieve that low-boom sound once it reaches supersonic speeds."
NASA Aeronautics✔@NASAaero
It's a bird... It's a plane... It's the Shock Sensing Probe! Wait, what?!
This instrument will be used to observe various characteristics of the X-59’s shockwaves and confirm whether they match models to reduce the sound of a sonic boom→
NASA Tests Supersonic Probe Using Old NACA Technique
NASA recently completed flight testing of a state-of-the-art instrument designed to capture high-quality measurements of shock waves created by supersonic aircraft in flight. It’s called the Shock...
To ensure that this is the case and that the plane not only works correctly and reaches these incredible speeds, but also remains quiet enough to not be a public nuisance, additional testing will follow the completion of the plane in 2020.
As the Lockheed Martin representative explained, building the plane is really only Phase 1 of the entire project. With Phase 2, further testing, certifications and acoustic (or sound) validation will occur. After that, in the third phase, community-response testing will ensure that, with a low-boom (a quiet sonic boom) demonstration, will validate how people respond to the craft flying overhead.
According to a NASA statement, in the community response testing, the team will "fly the X-plane over select U.S. communities to gather data on human responses to the low-boom flights and deliver that dataset to U.S. and international regulators."
It was a calm evening at around 9:20 PM on August 25, 1951, and some professors from the Texas Technological College, now Texas Tech University, were sitting around chatting in the backyard of geology professor Dr. W.I. Robinson’s home in Lubbock, Texas. Joining him were chemical engineering professor Dr. A. G. Oberg, physics professor Dr. George and Dr. W. L. Ducker, who was head of the petroleum-engineering department. As they sat around drinking tea and discussing various scientific subjects, something caught their attention in the sky above, and when they looked up it would begin one of the most famous and well-publicized UFO flaps in United States history.
What those professors saw up there crossing the darkened sky was a V-shaped formation of approximately 20-30 bright blueish-green lights like large stars, which were perfectly circular and quickly passed overhead to be then followed by yet another similar formation moments later. The professors, all esteemed and respected professionals, could not figure out what they had just seen, ruling out conventional aircraft and meteorites, and they excitedly discussed it amongst themselves before going to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal with their strange sighting. It made a lot of waves at the time, simply because these were trained scientists and considered to be very reliable witnesses, of which lead investigator on Project Bluebook, U.S. Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt would later say, “If a group had been hand-picked to observe a UFO, we couldn’t have picked a more technically qualified group of people.” Making it even more intriguing still was that they were apparently not the only people who had seen something outlandish in the sky that evening.
There would soon come a report from Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is located about 350 miles away from Lubbock, that supposedly occurred at dusk on that same evening. In this case, a high ranking employee at the highly secretive the Atomic Energy Commission’s Sandia Corporation had been sitting outside with his wife when they a massive, airplane-like object with an array of weird bluish lights along its wings cruise through the sky above. Almost immediately after this there had been a sighting made by a rancher who said he saw a similar V-shaped formation of lights that looked like “an airplane without a body.” Three women in Lubbock would also report having seen the same exact thing at around the same exact time as the professors’ sighting and there would be yet another sighting report from a Dr. Carl Hemminger, a professor of German at Texas Tech.
In the meantime, the professors who had made the original report launched an investigation of their own into the lights over the coming weeks, finding that over a dozen other people had seen them, and indeed they would make 12 more additional sightings of the strange lights themselves. These reports were meticulously detailed, mentioning altitude, direction of movement, wind speed, and angle of travel, and it was all enough to get the attention of Captain Edward J. Ruppelt with the Air Force, and by the time he got involved there had been hundreds of sightings of the lights in the region, with every witness describing the same thing. It was all over the news and captured the imagination of people all over the country, especially those in Lubbock.
One of these curious locals was a Texas Tech freshman named Carl Hart, Jr, who had taken to keeping a lookout through his window in the hopes of seeing the phenomenon for himself. On August 31 he finally got what he wanted, when formations of the lights passed near his house a total of three times. Hart had been keeping vigil with his camera at the ready, and was able to snap a series of photographs of the lights, which would become the public face of what were now being called “The Lubbock Lights.” The pictures received heavy circulation in newspapers and major publications such as Life Magazine, further propelling the mystery of the strange UFO phenomena gripping Texas at the time. The Hart photographs themselves would be analyzed numerous times over the years, and have proven to be frustratingly inconclusive and hotly debated to this day.
One of the Hart photos
Considering the nationwide sensation the Lubbock Lights were becoming, there were a lot of theories as to what they could be. Aircraft, weather balloons, birds reflecting street lights, the ever popular Venus, top secret experimental aircraft, satellites, meteorites, you name it and it was probably proposed at one point or another, yet nothing seems to really completely fit, and the witnesses continue to deny any of those explanations. Captain Edward J. Ruppelt himself would give a rather cryptic summation on what he thought of the lights, saying:
I thought that the professors’ lights might have been some kind of birds reflecting the light from mercury-vapor street lights, but I was wrong. They weren’t birds, they weren’t refracted light, but they weren’t spaceships. The lights that the professors saw…have been positively identified as a very commonplace and easily explainable natural phenomenon…I can’t divulge exactly the way the answer was found because it is an interesting story of how a scientist set up complete instrumentation to track down the lights. Telling the story would lead to his identity and, in exchange for his story, I promised the man complete anonymity… With the most important phase of the Lubbock Lights “solved”—the sightings by the professors—the other phases become only good UFO reports.
Curiously, it remains unknown just what he means by “solved,” or what exact the “answer” really was, and neither Ruppelt nor his Air Force handlers have ever divulged anything more on the matter, leaving it maddeningly ambiguous and murky. The strange case of Lubbock Lights has in the meantime remained unsolved, with little progress in ascertaining just what was going on here. Was this some atmospheric phenomena, experiments with aircraft or rockets, birds, meteorites, or what? What makes this case very perplexing is the sheer amount of very qualified individuals who saw it, and who still stand by the idea that this was something from beyond their conventional understanding. Whatever the Lubbock Lights were, they have gone on to become a much-discussed and puzzling mass UFO sighting that will probably make the rounds for some time to come.
Special thanks to Steve Baxter for the cover artwork.
It was right around Christmas 1980 when one of the most significant of all UFO encounters occurred in Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England – near to the twin-Royal Air Force Bases, Woodbridge and Bentwaters. A memo prepared by the Deputy Base Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt reveals the astonishing facts: “Early in the morning of 27 Dec 80 (approximately 0300L) two USAF security police patrolmen saw unusual lights outside the back gate at RAF Woodbridge. Thinking an aircraft might have crashed or been forced down, they called for permission to go outside the gate to investigate. The on-duty flight chief responded and allowed three patrolmen to proceed on foot. The individuals reported seeing a strange glowing object in the forest. The object was described as being metallic in appearance and triangular in shape, approximately two to three meters across the base and approximately two meters high. It illuminated the entire forest with a white light. The object itself had a pulsing red light on top and a bank(s) of blue lights underneath. The object was hovering or on legs. As the patrolmen approached the object, it maneuvered through the trees and disappeared. At this time the animals on a nearby farm went into a frenzy. The object was briefly sighted approximately an hour later near the back gate.” The notable encounter remains unresolved to this day.
In light of all the above, it’s interesting to note there is a UFO story – from the very same area – that dates way back to 1947. The account came from a man named Ronald Anstee, a long-time UFO researcher who died in November 2006. It transpires that Anstee had secured certain data that revolved around a flying saucer event in the summer months of 1947 – and very near to Rendlesham Forest, no less. The precise date was, and still is, unknown. What we do know, however, is that Anstee’s informant was a family member. Reportedly, the affair involved the sudden and brief appearance out of nowhere of a classic, saucer-shaped, metallic vehicle over RAF Bentwaters. It was said to have been around fifty feet in diameter. Such was the concern over what happened, senior military personnel were flown in and secret meetings were quickly arranged to try and figure out what had happened. The matter was never resolved to Anstee’s satisfaction: he fired off letters to the U.K.’s old Air Ministry, but failed to get meaningful answers. Anstee did, however, state that the presence of the UFO was somehow connected to a then-new radar system in the area. How he knew that, though, I don’t know.
In my 1997 book, A Covert Agenda, I wrote about radar-based research in that very area: “On January 28, 1935, the Tizard Committee, established under the directorship of Sir Henry Tizard, convened its first meeting, which ultimately led to the top secret development of a workable radar system of the type employed in the Second World War. Most pertinent of all, much of that highly classified research was conducted at Bawdsey Manor on the Deben Estuary. It’s just north of the town of Felixstowe, and a mere stone’s throw from what was for so many years the military bases of Royal Air Force Bentwaters and Royal Air Force Woodbridge.”
The reason why I know all of this is simple: I found the correspondence between Anstee and the Air Ministry at the National Archives in Kew, England. This was in 1994, when I spent significant time going through certain, newly-declassified UFO papers. I was able to see that Anstee had written a trio of letters to the Air Ministry – one of which concerned a 1954 UFO sighting of a Royal Air Force pilot named James Salandin. A deeper examination of the National Archives’ papers revealed that the office Anstee dealt with was called Secretariat 6, and whose staff were clearly not keen on getting into correspondence (or worse, into debate) with Anstee. This is made all the more clear by the fact that the only response from Secretariat 6 was to acknowledge they had received Anstee’s letters – and that was it!
It’s doubtful that today – more than seventy years later – we will ever get the answers to this intriguing (but short on data) case. It should be noted, though, that Anstee’s letters to the Air Ministry were written on January 30, March 7 and March 21, 1963. Nineteen-sixty-three was seventeen years before the Rendlesham Forest affair occurred. How intriguing it is then, that in the early 1960s, Anstee was digging into a story of a significant UFO encounter near RAF Bentwaters, which would go on to become known in relation to the Rendlesham case nearly two decades later. A connection? It all depends on how you put the pieces together. The best I can say right now is that one military base was involved in two incidents – and that’s it. Maybe there’s more to it all – but we’re certainly not there yet.
A type of black fungus that eats radiation was discovered inside the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.
In 1991, the strange fungus was found growing up the walls of the reactor, which baffled scientists due to the extreme, radiation-heavy environment.
Researchers eventually realized that not only was the fungi impervious to the deadly radiation, it seemed to be attracted to it.
A decade later, researchers tested some of the fungi and determined that it had a large amount of the pigment melanin -- which is also found, among other places, in the skin of humans.
People with darker skin tones tend to have much more melanin, which is known to absorb light and dissipate ultraviolet radiation in skin.
However in fungi, it reportedly absorbed radiation and converted it into some type of chemical energy for growth.
In a 2008 paper, Ekaterina Dadachova, then of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, noted that the fungi attracted to radiation are unlikely to be the first examples of their kind.
"Large quantities of highly melanized fungal spores have been found in early Cretaceous period deposits when many species of animals and plants died out. This period coincides with Earth’s crossing the “magnetic zero” resulting in the loss of its “shield” against cosmic radiation," the paper's introduction states.
The fungi indicate that there could be places in the cosmos -- which we are unaware of -- where organisms could live in radiation-filled environments.
In de kernreactor van Tsjernobyl is een schimmel ontdekt die straling eet. Tot verbijstering van wetenschappers
In de kernreactor van Tsjernobyl is een schimmel ontdekt die straling eet. Tot verbijstering van wetenschappers
In de kernreactor van Tsjernobyl is een zwarte schimmel ontdekt die straling eet, schrijft Fox News.
Al in 1991 troffen wetenschappers de vreemde schimmel aan op de muren van de reactor. Ze waren verbijsterd dat een organisme onder zulke extreme omstandigheden kon overleven.
Tien jaar later besloten onderzoekers de schimmel te testen. In de monsters vonden ze hoge concentraties melanine, dat ook in de huid van mensen zit.
Waarschijnlijk niet de eersten
Mensen met een donkere huid hebben meer melanine, dat licht absorbeert en beschermt tegen uv-straling.
Bij schimmels blijkt melanine straling te absorberen en om te zetten in een soort chemische energie voor groei.
In 2008 merkte Ekaterina Dadatsjova in een paper op dat de schimmels in Tsjernobyl die aangetrokken worden door de straling waarschijnlijk niet de eersten in hun soort zijn.
Schild
Er zijn bijvoorbeeld grote hoeveelheden schimmelsporen ontdekt uit het Vroege-Krijt die ook hoge concentraties melanine bevatten.
In deze periode stierven veel dier- en plantsoorten uit. In dezelfde periode verloor de aarde haar ‘schild’ tegen kosmische straling.
De vondst suggereert dat er plekken in de kosmos zijn waar organismen kunnen leven in gebieden met hoge stralingsniveaus.
UFO investigation launched by Irish aviation officials after pilots flying BA and Virgin Airlines jets report seeing mysterious bright lights 'moving fast' above the country
UFO investigation launched by Irish aviation officials after pilots flying BA and Virgin Airlines jets report seeing mysterious bright lights 'moving fast' above the country
BA pilot on flight from Canada to London reported 'very bright light' over Ireland
She said the object came up on the left side before it 'veered to the north'
Pilot of Virgin Airlines jet saw 'multiple objects following same sort of trajectory'
Irish Aviation Authority is investigating the UFO sightings after filing a report
A UFO investigation is under way in Ireland after pilots flying BA and Virgin Airlines jets reported seeing mysterious bright lights as they crossed the country.
The Irish Aviation Authority launched the probe after sightings on November 9 at around 7.40am.
The pilot of British Airways flight BA94 from Montreal to London contacted Shannon Air Traffic Control after seeing the object on the left-hand side of her Boeing 787.
A UFO investigation is underway in Ireland after pilots flying BA and Virgin Airlines jets reported seeing mysterious bright lights as they crossed the country
(stock image of a Boeing 787)
She asked whether military exercises were taking place, according to Airlive.
Air traffic control reportedly said nothing was showing on their radar systems, to which the unnamed pilot replied: 'OK. It was moving so fast.'
She added that after approaching on the left side, it 'rapidly veered to the north'. She described it as a 'very bright light' that 'disappeared at very high speed'.
The pilot of Virgin Airlines flight VS76 from Orlando to Manchester then reported seeing a similar thing, the website reports.
The pilot of Virgin Airlines flight VS76 from Orlando to Manchester then reported seeing a similar thing, the website reports
He described it as a 'meteor or another object making some kind of re-entry' and said it was 'multiple objects following the same sort of trajectory – very bright from where we were.'
Both planes were flying in high level airspace - an altitude from between 28,500ft and 42,000ft.
Airlive says a third pilot also saw the bizarre lights and that the Irish Aviation Authority has filed a report with the sightings due to be 'investigated under the normal confidential occurrence investigation process'.
Pilots observe a UFO over Ireland and communicate with ground control
Pilots observe a UFO over Ireland and communicate with ground control
The UFO sighting over Ireland took place two years ago. Skip right to 5:05 if you only want to hear the conversation between pilots and ground control.
Conversation between pilots and ground control.
BAW94: Shannon, Speedbird 94? EISN East ctr: Go Ahead. BAW94: Is there any military traffics up right now? EISN East ctr: There's nothing showing on either primary or secondary. BAW94: Okay, it was moving so fast and were just wondering what it was. Thank you. EISN East ctr: Alongside You? BAW94: It came up on our left hand side and then rapidly veered tot the north. We saw a bright light and then it disappeared at a very high speed. We were just wondering. We didn't think it was likely collision course. We were just wondering what that could be. IBK1768: ...Meteor or another object making some kind of re-entry. Appeared to be multiple objects followinf the same sort of trajectory and very bright where we were. EISN West ctr: Okay, that's copied. Is there a direction it was going or anything? IBK1768: (Answer not heard) VIR76X: Virgin 76 also saw that in our 11 o'clock position, 2 bright lights. EISN west ctr: Roger, that's copied, thank you. IBK1768: glad it wasn't just me. VIR76X: No, yeah, very interesting that one. Shannon, Virgin 76, we saw 2 bright lights 11 o'clock. Seemed to bank over tot the right. EISN west ctr: Okay, we are passing that on now, thank you. EISN east ctr: Speedbird 94, Shannon? BAW94: 94, go ahead. EISN east ctr: Okay, just so you know that other aircraft in the air have also reported the same thing. So we are going to have a look and see. BAW94: The thing was astronomical. EISN east ctr: Roger, thank you.
The Falcon Lake Close UFO Encounter in Manitoba, Canada (1967)
The Falcon Lake Close UFO Encounter in Manitoba, Canada (1967)
The Falcon Lake UFO Encounter tells the story of a UFO close encounter which occurred on May 20, 1967, near Falcon Lake, Manitoba, Canada. Stephen (Stefan) Michalak, a prospector was working alone searching for minerals in the wilderness when two strange crafts appeared in the sky. One craft landed nearby and the curious prospector ventured dangerously close to what he thought to be a spaceship. The resulting chain of events left him feeling lucky to survive. The Canadian police and military conducted an extensive investigation but never developed a conclusion. An extensive trail of paperwork related to the case was left behind. To this day there are many questions about what happened nearly 50 years ago at Falcon Lake, but no answers seem to be forthcoming.
Video – What does Cold War-era radar-tricking program have to do with recent UFO sightings? Area 51 & CIA veterans reveal
Video – What does Cold War-era radar-tricking program have to do with recent UFO sightings? Area 51 & CIA veterans reveal
There’s never a shortage of UFO stories, with arguments raging between skeptics and those who want to believe. But a pair of CIA and Area 51 retirees claims the mysterious sightings might have quite a prosaic explanation. The mystery behind the unidentified flying objects was highlighted again recently when leaked videos – filmed by the US Navy’s Super Hornet jets – popped up in the public domain, showing the military aircraft interacting with UFOs. The Pentagon had stirred up much hype among ufologists, officially saying that the viral clips actually depicted “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” (UAP).
But for veterans of two of America’s most secretive institutions, these sightings, at least, were not at all sensational. They claim the UFO encounters can be attributed to a top-secret radar-tricking program commissioned for the military, according to the Drive.
The website’s WarZone project, which covers military tech, examined the Navy’s top-secret project, awkwardly called ‘Netted Emulation of Multi-Element Signature against Integrated Sensors’ (NEMESIS).
It enables the Navy to trick enemy sensors and radars by giving the illusion of “ghost fleets” of vessels on and below the oceanic surface; the system can also simulate formations of aircraft in the sky. Incredibly, the tech resembles another secretive project developed at the height of the Cold War, as veterans of two of America’s most secretive institutions told the website.
The NEMESIS “takes me back to circa the 1960s when the CIA designed and was building the Mach 3 A-12 Blackbird to replace the U-2,” says T.D. Barnes, a retired engineer who worked at Area 51, referring to the top-notch spy planes used to collect imagery intelligence on the USSR and its allies.
The Soviet military couldn’t sit idle as it faced the threat of American spy aircraft snapping high-definition photos and flying away undetected. They commissioned a P-14 “Tall King” radar system that would be able to detect the A-12 flying over their airspace.
On their part, the CIA had responded by launching PALLADIUM – an audacious program to develop technology which could electronically produce “ghost aircraft,” thus tricking the Soviet radars into “seeing” what is actually non-existent.
The program used “submarine-launched balloon-based metallic spheres” that would simulate flocks of real jets, reveals a retired CIA executive officer, S. Eugene Poteat. The veteran, who founded and ran PALLADIUM, said descriptions of the “metallic spheres” sound somewhat similar to those of UFOs.
Barnes, in turn, said that many past UFO sightings in the Seattle and Southern California were actually advanced aerospace tests by Boeing or Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works. The companies usually carry out “proof of concept” flights over these areas before bringing their aircraft to Area 51 in a bid to sell them to the Air Force or Navy.
“These were definitely UFOs because they were so secret that they didn’t exist,” said Barnes.The publication recalled sightings that US Navy pilots saw off the East Coast in 2014 and 2015, describing them as bizarre floating “orbs with cubes inside.”
The flying objects “had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds,” the pilots told the New York Times at the time.
“I don’t have the answers to what the Navy aviators saw, but in my mind, I’m thinking, we are doing it again,” Barnes explained.
An emotionally intelligent AI could support astronauts on a trip to Mars
An emotionally intelligent AI could support astronauts on a trip to Mars
A digital assistant that recognized emotions and responded to astronauts with empathy might vastly improve space missions that take months or years. Astronauts are among the most physiologically and psychologically fit individuals in the world. They are trained to keep calm even in life-threatening moments and can work with extreme focus over long periods of time.
Nevertheless, living, working, and sleeping in confined spaces next to the same people for months or years at a time would be stressful for even the toughest recruit. Astronauts also have to deal with the unique physical strains of space travel—including the effects of microgravity, which whittles away at bone and muscle mass, creates fluid shifts that puts painful pressure on the head or other extremities, and weakens the immune system.
An AI assistant that’s able to intuit human emotion and respond with empathy could be exactly what’s needed, particularly on future missions to Mars and beyond. The idea is that it could anticipate the needs of the crew and intervene if their mental health seems at risk.
Thanks to Stanley Kubrick and HAL 9000, the idea of AI in space has unfortunate connotations. But NASA already works with many different kinds of digital assistants. For example, astronauts on the International Space Station recently greeted a new version of IBM’s medicine-ball-size emotional robot, called CIMON (for “crew interactive mobile companion”), to assist them in their various tasks and experiments for three years. (The results so far are mixed.)
These current robots are stunted by a lack of emotional intelligence, says Tom Soderstrom, CTO at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. That’s why JPL is now working with Australian tech firm Akin to develop an AI that could one day provide emotional support for astronauts on deep-space missions. “That’s the piece that excites me the most about Akin,” he says. “We want to have an intelligent assistant that can control the spacecraft’s temperature and direction, figure out any technical problems—that is also watching human behavior.”
Akin CEO Liesl Yearsley says the goal is not for the AI to simply run tasks and set reminders like Alexa or Siri, but to act as a companion that provides empathetic support. “Imagine a robot that’s able to think, ‘Mary’s having a bit of an off day today—I’ve noticed she seems a bit curt with her colleagues,’” she says. “The AI might then decide it’s prudent to make sure Mary’s on top of her agenda for the day, and find a way to be a little more nurturing and encouraging to mitigate some of the stress. Those are the sort of deeper layers we want to be able to process.”
Keeping track of a crew’s mental and emotional health isn’t really a problem for NASA today. Astronauts on the ISS regularly talk to psychiatrists on the ground. NASA ensures that doctors are readily available to address any serious signs of distress. But much of this system is possible only because the astronauts are in low Earth orbit, easily accessible to mission control. In deep space, you would have to deal with lags in communication that could stretch for hours. Smaller agencies or private companies might not have mental health experts on call to deal with emergencies. An onboard emotional AI might be better equipped to spot problems and triage them as soon as they come up.
The Akin partnership utilizes JPL’s new Open Source Rover project, which makes publicly available the basic designs of actual Mars rovers like Curiosity. Interested students and young engineers can learn to build their own six-wheel rovers for about $2,500. Over the past year, Yearsley and Soderstrom have been using Open Source Rover to test and develop Akin’s emotionally intelligent AI. The result is a rover dubbed Henry the Helper. Currently puttering around the JPL grounds and conversing with employees and site visitors, it demonstrates the AI’s ability to interact with humans and recognize human emotion.
Akin founder Liesl Yearsley (right) and her team working on Henry the Helper at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
COURTESY OF AKIN
Henry, like many other AI systems, uses deep learning to recognize patterns in human speech and facial expressions as they relate to emotional intent. It is then programmed to respond to those cues in appropriate, empathetic ways—such as offering directions or information to any tourists who seem lost or confused.
Later this year, the company will roll out two more prototypes: Eva the Explorer and Anna the Assistant. Eva’s mainly a more autonomous Henry, outfitted with more sensors that will allow the AI to pick up on subtle speech and facial expression cues as it participates in more complex conversations. Anna will be more like an autonomous lab assistant that anticipates the needs of JPL employees—taking notes, answering questions, handling objects and tools, and troubleshooting problems.
And in just a few years, Akin hopes to see Fiona the Future come to life. Fiona wouldn’t even necessarily be a physical robot, but rather a cross-platform system running on a spacecraft like Gateway (NASA’s upcoming lunar space station), or a habitat on the moon or Mars. There’s no commitment yet for this to be part of Artemis or Gateway, but the company is working actively with other players in the space industry to ink some sort of initiative. Yearsley says any hope of making Fiona a part of Gateway or Artemis means Akin must have reliable prototypes out by September. Should that fail, Akin will see if its AI can be tested in more isolated settings, like Antarctica, or in different contexts, such as assisting elderly or disabled people.
To make the AI work in the isolation of space, the system will rely on edge computing—moving computation and data storage away from large centers and relying more heavily on local storage and caching, with vastly reduced energy footprints. “There is no more literal edge than space,” says Soderstrom. Akin’s biggest obstacles are those that plague the entire field of emotional AI. Lisa Feldman
Barrett, a psychologist at Northeastern University who specializes in human emotion, has previously pointed out that the way most tech firms train AI to recognize human emotions is deeply flawed. “Systems don’t recognize psychological meaning,” she says. “They recognize physical movements and changes, and they infer psychological meaning.” Those are certainly not the same thing.
But a spacecraft, it turns out, might actually be an ideal environment for training and deploying an emotionally intelligent AI. Since the technology would be interacting with just the small group of people onboard, says Barrett, it would be able to learn each individual’s “vocabulary of facial expressions” and how they manifest in the face, body, and voice. It could come to understand how these expressions change in the context and environment of a space mission, under social settings involving other astronauts. “Trying to do this in a closed environment, for one or a few individuals, might actually be a more approachable problem than trying to do so in an open environment,” she says
The concept of what has become known as “perpetual motion” is simple at its core. It basically describes an object or body that remains in continuous motion forever without any external energy source. If a machine were to be built using some sort of perpetual motion technology, it would theoretically run forever without any needs of fuel, batteries, or power of any kind. This means basically unlimited energy, freeing us from the tethers of finite sources of fuel and giving us devices that will never wind down or die out. It has become a sort of holy grail for certain individuals, who continue to plug away at this seemingly unobtainable dream, and it is just how amazing how much the idea of perpetual motion has enthralled people over a large portion of history.
Such an invention would be groundbreaking, completely changing our world, and it is a fascinating thing to think about it, yet according to our current knowledge of physics it just simply isn’t possible, as such a machine would violate one or more of the laws of thermodynamics. To put it in simple terms, the First Law of Thermodynamics basically is about the conservation of energy, and says that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another, making the idea of a machine constantly creating its own energy without any outside influence impossible. There is also the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which in simple terms more or less says that an isolated system will always move toward a state of disorder, for instance heat will always dissipate and energy will be lost on any number of variables, including moving parts, friction, even sound, with the more energy formed meaning the more energy wasted. It is all much more complicated than this very basic explanation, but the gist is, a perpetual motion machine is impossible according to our current understanding of the universe and the laws of the conversation of energy. That is not to say that people haven’t tried, though.
Efforts to come up with a real life perpetual motion machine have been going on since way back into history. One of the first examples was built in the 12th century by Indian author and medieval mathematician Bhaskara, which was an off-balanced wheel that would supposedly keep spinning indefinitely through use of a system of containers of mercury on its rim that created imbalances that theoretically would keep bringing the wheel back around again and again for eternity. It didn’t really work, but it did display the ingenuity some were willing to produce in order to figure this conundrum out. Over the centuries there would come a stream of supposed designs, with various contraptions seeking to produce perpetual motion, including windmills, self-filling flasks, float belts, magnets, pulleys, gears, wheels, and many others, all equally impossible due to what we now know about physics, and none were ever successful, true perpetual motion machines, causing scientist Henry Dircks, author of Perpetuum Mobile: Or, A History of the Search for Self-motive in 1861 to lament:
There is something lamentable, degrading, and almost insane in pursuing the visionary schemes of past ages with dogged determination, in paths of learning which have been investigated by superior minds, and with which such adventurous persons are totally unacquainted. The history of Perpetual Motion is a history of the fool-hardiness of either half-learned, or totally ignorant persons.
However, the idea of perpetual motion is so alluring that even well into more modern times these machines have been proposed, physics be damned. Some of these proposed devices have even managed to create quite a bit of excitement in their time. One of the most infamous of these was first unveiled in 1812 by an until then rather unknown man named Charles Redheffer, who exhibited it in his home in Philadelphia, in the United States. His fantastical machine featured a gravity-driven pendulum with a large horizontal gear on the bottom, and a smaller gear that interlocked with the larger one, with the large gear and the shaft able to rotate independently. On the gear were two ramps that held weights, and it all supposedly worked by these weights pushing the large gear away from the shaft, which would create friction that would cause the shaft and gear to spin. This spinning gear would then power the interlocked smaller gear, and on and on it would go, supposedly forever unless the weights were removed.
Diagram of Redheffer’s machine
The machine was put on display and immediately became a smash sensation, drawing in droves of amazed spectators and scientists alike, all of whom were charged a hefty admission fee by Redheffer and none of who could figure out how it all worked. It was largely whispered that he had finally cracked perpetual motion, that he had achieved the seemingly impossible dream. Before long Redhefer was getting quite rich off of his oddball machine, and there was much excited speculation that he had actually done it and achieved true perpetual motion, despite raised eyebrows from the scientific community. Redheffer, emboldened by the response to his device, actually requested funding from the state of Pennsylvania to build a much larger version, and on January 21, 1813, state inspectors were sent to take a look at the machine before any money would be paid. Unfortunately for Redheffer, he had never let anyone ever take a good, close at his device, and it would soon become apparent why.
The inspectors arrived and were immediately suspicious when it turned out they could only view it through a window into a locked room. Even so, there were cracks appearing in Redheffer’s claims when it was noticed that the gear cogs were worn down in such a way as to suggest that the weights, shaft, and large gear were not powering the smaller gear, as Redheffer claimed, but rather the other way around. To them this was an obvious hoax, but the way they dealt with it is rather amusing. Rather than call out Redheffer on his scam, inspector Nathan Sellers hired a local engineer by the name of Isaiah Lukens to build a replica that was more compact and set within a solid baseboard with a square piece of glass at the top. There was no discernible way as to why it could work, yet concealed within the machine was a wind able motor that was wound through the covert use of a wooden decorative finial. With a little sleight of hand, the illusion was nearly perfect, and when he saw it Redheffer himself was so incredibly surprised to see what he took to be a real perpetual motion machine that he allegedly secretly offered Lukens a large amount of money to know the secret. After this, the news did the rest of the work and Redheffer was undone and exposed through a taste of his own medicine.
Amazingly, this did not put a stop to Redheffer. Undeterred, he simply moved to New York to set up shop there where his reputation hadn’t been as tarnished, once again enjoying some amount a fame and drawing in droves of curiosity seekers. One of these was an engineer by the name of Robert Fulton, who noticed something fishy as he observed the mysterious device in action. He could see a slight wobble to it, and also noticed a very slight unevenness to its speed and the sounds it made, both things that should not be present in a real perpetual motion device. A real device of this type would need to be frictionless and perfectly silent because friction and sound would be a loss of energy, so these were glaring clues that something was off, especially to his trained eye. Realizing that it was obviously being somehow powered by crank motion, Fulton confronted Redheffer on the spot, but the inventor amazingly held his ground, insisting that the machine was real.
Fulton then challenged Redheffer to allow him to search for any possible source of outside power, to which Redheffer foolishly agreed. After this, Fulton simply tore out a section of wall in full view of a gathered audience to find a concealed cable that led to an upstairs room, where an old man was found operating a crank. The spectators, who had all paid good money to see the amazing “perpetual motion machine,” were less than thrilled. They reportedly immediately took out their frustrations on the machine itself, smashing it to pieces, and might have done the same to Redheffer if he hadn’t already hi-tailed it out of there to later skip town. Unbelievably, Redheffer would claim several years later that he had created another machine, and that it was totally, for sure real this time, and he even got a patent for it in 1920, but since it was never put on display or examined and the patent was lost in a fire who knows if there was any truth to it.
Another notable perpetual motion machine was unveiled in 1979 by American inventor Joseph Newman. The machine was called the DC motor, and according to him worked by using “energy in a magnetic field consisting of matter in motion,” and which he claimed could produce more energy than was put into it. He even went about seeking a patent for his invention, but it was denied as the Patent Office could not see how it could feasibly work. When Newman appealed this decision, it was found in an investigation by the National Bureau of Standards that the device’s power output was never above 100% of the power supplied to it, which was not promising. Newman would continue to adamantly insist that his machine really worked, but he sort of fell into obscurity after making all manner of other crackpot claims over the years. Whether his supposed perpetual motion machine ever really worked or not remains unknown, but everything we know about science says probably not.
Interestingly, the United States Patent and Trademark Office gets a steady stream of proposals for perpetual motion machines even today, to the point where the whole patent system was changed because of it. Whereas previously a working model of an invention was not required, only that an examiner believe the concept could work or saw no reason why it shouldn’t, the USPTO Manual of Patent Examining Practice has been changed to refuse perpetual motion machine patents that do not have a physical prototype that can be examined. The United Kingdom Patent Office also has a policy against perpetual motion machines, stating “Processes or articles alleged to operate in a manner which is clearly contrary to well-established physical laws, such as perpetual motion machines, are regarded as not having industrial application.”
The reality of perpetual motion seems to be beyond us, and these patent offices realize this, yet people keep on trying, with new designs put out all of the time and not a single one of them that has been shown to actually work without some sort of trickery. The universe seems to be dead set on never allowing it to happen, so why do they keep trying? There are likely several factors. One is that the idea is so irresistible that for many it seems that it is worth pursuing no matter what the obstacles. Another is probably that for some it seems like a challenge, a way to break through long held paradigms like the revolutionary explorers, inventors and scientists of the past. After all many of the facts and laws of the universe that we take for granted now were once equally scoffed at and in some cases might as well have been magic. For these people there is a chance, no matter how small, that a way can be found to make perpetual motion work despite the physical limitations. On top of all of this is the unfortunate possibility that many of these would-be inventors simply don’t grasp the established impossibility of it all, and one Donald Simanek, a former physics professor at Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania, has offered his opinion on why people keep trying perpetual motion in an interview with Live Science:
My hunch is that they are motivated by their incomplete understanding of physics. The perpetual motion machine inventors’ view of physics is a collection of unrelated equations for specific purposes. They fail to grasp the greatest strength of physics — its logical unity. For example, the laws of thermodynamics do not arise by fiat. They are derivable from Newton’s laws and the kinetic model of gases and have been well-tested experimentally … You can’t simply discard one law you ‘don’t like’ without bringing the whole logical structure of physics crashing down.
Could there be some place where the geometry (and the physics) are different? Maybe, but we have no clue where to find that place, and one might wonder whether we could even go there, or exploit it for our purposes. That’s armchair speculation, and science-fiction, not science.
For now, the notion of a real working perpetual motion machine really does sit in the realm of science fiction, and it has mostly been a pursuit abandoned by most real scientists. It has come to be relegated to mad inventors working in their garages against all odds to try and make the impossible possible. There is little chance that there will ever be a practical solution to the physical hurdles in the way of achieving perpetual motion, but just as many have tried throughout history there are surely those who will still keep on trying. Whether it will ever gain any credence or results remains to be seen.
Just as you start to feel overwhelmed by all of the troubles going on in the world around you, NASA discovers events happening throughout the universe that give us a reassuring “Things could be worse.” The latest comes from astronomers who search the vast array of universal scans made by the Kepler space telescope for strange anomalies. In archival data they missed the first time around, researchers at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore and the Australian National University in Canberra found a white dwarf that showed a sudden, intense glow … a glow that came from a nearby brown dwarf that it was sucking the life out of. Vampire stars are a thing … should we be worried?
“The white dwarf is stripping material from the brown dwarf, sucking its essence away like a vampire. The stripped material forms an accretion disk around the white dwarf, which is the source of the super-outburst. Such systems are rare and may go for years or decades between outbursts, making it a challenge to catch one in the act.”
In a recent press release, NASA used the term “vampire” to explain what lead author and astronomer Ryan Ridden-Harper calls a less-descript “new WZ Sagittae-type cataclysmic variable” in his paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The Kepler space telescope has been retired since 2018, but its nearly decade-long scans of the universe to search for exoplanets left a huge database that astronomers continue to study for minute anomalies that could be major stellar events.
“At 25 days after the peak brightness a bump in the light curve appears to signal a subtle rebrightening phase implying that this was an unusual type-A outburst. This is the only WZ Sge-type system observed by K2/Kepler during an outburst.”
Whatever it looks like close up, it can’t be good
Anomalies like that one. Only Kepler could have detected this unusual super-outburst where a previously unknown dwarf nova suddenly brightened by a factor of 1,600 over less than a day before slowly fading. The cause was the white dwarf that the brown dwarf is orbiting at an extremely fast rate of once every 83 minutes at a distance similar to that between Earth and the Moon. The white dwarf is a dense dying star with sufficient gravity to suck what energy and matter is left in the dead brown dwarf … a kind of death dance where the partners swing around connected by an accretion disk of matter that causes the super-outburst.
A recreation of two stars in a death dance?
“This type of dwarf nova system is relatively rare, with only about 100 known. An individual system may go for years or decades between outbursts, making it a challenge to catch one in the act.”
Yet Kepler did, due to its relentless pace of taking a snapshot every 30 minutes with a view that only this space telescope could have. This discovery has astronomers enthused to go back through Kepler’s data and search for more of these rare vampire stars. To answer the question: no, we don’t have to worry. The vampire is in the Ursa Major constellation and our own Sun is a long way from being in either a vampire or dying state.
Kudos to Kepler and to NASA. It’s nice to see that NASA still respects the knowledge and experience of an old-timer … a lesson for us all.
Africa is not typically known by the mainstream for its UFO reports, but it is certainly ground zero for some of the strangest. It began as a calm, peaceful day at Ariel School in the small rural farming community of Ruwa, Zimbabwe, where on September 16, 1994 62 of the school children ranging in age from 5 to 12 years old and of mixed ethnic heritage were out playing in the playground during their break time as their teachers had a school meeting indoors. The air was filled with laughter and merriment, but this was soon to change to gasps of alarm when something very strange materialized out of the unknown. What would transpire next has become one of the most interesting UFO encounters to come out of the continent of Africa, and which has never really been satisfactorily explained.
There was allegedly a bright flash in the sky, and when the children looked up in bafflement, approaching the school were three or four silvery, disc-like objects with what appeared to be lit portals around their edges. These mysterious objects reportedly would vanish and reappear some distance away several times, suggesting that they were either moving very fast or teleporting, before one of the objects began to descend, following some electrical lines towards a brush choked patch of overgrown feral land adjacent to the school grounds, where it eerily descended to disappear behind the gnarled trees and tangled underbrush. At this point the kids were enthralled by what they were seeing, and one of the witnesses would later say of the object:
This thing, whatever it was, was beautiful. It had a circular-shaped bright light as the leader, and behind it were tails of light in beautiful colors: green, orange, and yellow. It moved slowly and looked as if it was just above the house. The amazing thing is that it moved absolutely silently.
The area into which the craft had come down in was off limits to the children, fenced off because it was deemed to be too dangerous, but they pressed as close as they could to this tangle of undergrowth and its barrier to peer within, and they saw only about 100 yards away the mysterious object. It was described as either sitting upon the gnarled weeds or hovering slightly over them, and at this point it still generated amazement in the gawking children. Yet this would change into alarm when the craft seemed to open to disgorge two strange beings, which were described as very thin, frail even, with slender neck and very large, outsized almond shaped, slanting black bug eyes, and dressed in tight-fitting shiny black and silver one-piece suits of some sort. Some witnesses would later say that the entities also possessed long, straight, black hair upon their heads. The enigmatic beings silently approached the children, although some of them would report having received telepathic contact during the encounter. One witness named Emily Trim would later explain of her version of events, saying:
All I can tell you is that two beings were hopping along beside Lisa and I. And … they were curious. They weren’t touching the ground [inaudible] … they were almost like mimicking us. All of a sudden they were in front of us. I describe them as being about arm’s reach. And we were frozen. Telepathic images started going across my face … communication through the eyes … that’s all I can really describe it as. It was just image after image after image. Those thoughts came from the man – the man’s eyes. One of the other girls standing beside me, she got more communication about the environment, and, for me, mine was more technology uses and [inaudible] uses of technology.
For many of the children, especially the younger ones, their astonishment and awe was turning to outright fear, and some of them began crying and screaming as these otherworldly beings frolicked and cavorted about. The creatures then apparently just vanished into thin air, after which the craft rose above the trees and shot off into the distance to leave them awestruck. The children then ran back to the school in a panic and explained the bizarre series of events to the adults, who were at first apprehensive and not a little skeptical about it all. The children were then asked to separately draw pictures of what they had seen, and spookily what was depicted on paper was eerily the same across the board. It was at this point that the adults began to believe that perhaps something really unexplainable had happened out on that rural schoolyard, and that it was not merely the imaginations of a bunch of scared kids.
One of the alien sketches
The incident began making the rounds in the news, helped along by local African UFO researcher Cynthia Hind, and when word got out into the open it attracted the attention of eminent American Harvard psychiatrist, Cambridge Hospital physician, and Pulitzer prize winning author Dr. John E. Mack, who made his way all the way to Zimbabwe to do an investigation. Along with Hind, Mack would spend several days meticulously interviewing witnesses and perusing the sketches the children had made, and they were both impressed with the calm sincerity with which these children told their tales. They came to the distinct conclusion that the kids at least truly believed that this had all happened, and that these were reliable witnesses, made even more remarkable due to the fact that many of these rural children had never even heard of UFOs before. Mack would become convinced that they were telling the truth, whatever that meant, and would say:
[The children] experienced a very powerful encounter with these beings and we’re left with a rather disturbing fact that this seems to be what it is and it seems to have no other psychiatric explanation. I would never say, yes, there are aliens taking people. [But] I would say there is a compelling powerful phenomenon here that I can’t account for in any other way. Yet I can’t know what it is but it seems to me that it invites a deeper, further inquiry.
This was pretty remarkable because Mack was far from some crackpot, being a highly respected psychiatrist at the top of his field, but it seems that it may have been detrimental to his career as his peers, who did not share his view that this was a real UFO event. Indeed, others in the psychiatric field looked upon the whole thing with raised eyebrows at best, and sheer scorn at worst, with one Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins Medical School calling Mack, “a brilliant fellow who occasionally loses it, and this time he’s lost it big time.” It probably didn’t help that Mack had written a book on alien abductions called, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, which had also somewhat tarnished his credibility among his peers and caused him to be labelled as a bit out there. It got to the point that Mack was actually investigated by a committee looking into whether he was really fit to provide clinical care and investigation for these people, the first time a tenured Harvard professor had ever been subjected to such an inquiry. Mack would say of the letter he received from the dean informing him of this:
One of the deans at the Harvard Medical School handed me a letter that called for the establishment of a small committee to investigate my work [on the alien abduction phenomenon]. After explaining vaguely that ‘concerns’ had been expressed to the university about what I was doing (although he told of no specific complaint, nor was any offered in the letter), he added pleasantly – for he had been a friend and colleague – that I would not have gotten into trouble if I had not suggested in the book [Abduction] that my findings might require a change in our view of reality, rather than saying that I had found a new psychiatric syndrome whose cause had not yet been established.
Mack would later be found by the Dean to be clear and free to “study what he wishes and to state his opinions without impediment.” Sadly, Mack would die in 2004 after being hit by a drunk driver in London, but his work lives on, and remains some of the best and deepest ever done into the Ariel School UFO encounter. In 2007, filmmaker Randall Nickerson travelled to Zimbabwe to make a documentary on the incident, interviewing witnesses further and sort of carrying on the torch from Mack’s work, yet it has still become a mostly rather obscure and forgotten case.
As for the witnesses themselves, it is interesting to note that even all of these years later, now adults, they still remember vividly that day and continue to stand by their stories. It is a remarkable case in that all of these kids, across ages and cultural and ethnic divides, managed to give the same exact story and stick with it well into adulthood when the case had already come and gone in the public conciousness. Along with the intrepid research of Hind and Mack, both of whom expressed genuine intrigue and cited the believability of the accounts, it certainly seems to be an obscure report that is deserving of consideration. No matter what happened on that day, the Ariel School incident had remained a little-known, but very pervasive UFO account in African UFO lore, and remains discussed to this day.
Orfeo Angelucci was a somewhat meek, fragile character who was blighted by ill-health and low-esteem from childhood. That is, until he had a series of life-changing UFO encounters that energized him and gave him a new lease on life. It’s fair to say that Angelucci was someone who very much rode on the coattails of the likes of the Contactees Georges one, two and three: that’s Adamski, Van Tassel, and Hunt Williamson. Angelucci never reached the stratospheric heights of Adamski. He was, though, one of the key players in the Contactee arena of the 1950s. In April 1952, Angelucci secured a good job with the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation in Burbank, California, specifically in the Plastics Unit. On May 23, 1952 Angelucci was working the late-shift at Lockheed. It wasn’t long after midnight when he finally hit the road, looking forward to seeing his wife. All was normal. That is, until it wasn’t.
While he drove along Los Angeles’ Victory Boulevard things became strange; very strange. Out of the corner of his eye, Angelucci saw a bright red light; it was moving low in the dark skies. Puzzled, he slowed down his car and kept his eye on the whatever-it-was. It didn’t appear to be a solid, nuts-and-bolts aircraft of some sort. Rather, it was a ball of light, around five times the size of an average traffic light. Somewhat disturbingly, and as Angelucci continued his drive, the light appeared to be shadowing him. Feeling nervous, he decided to keep driving and hoped that the light would vanish. It did not. Shortly after crossing a bridge over the Los Angeles River, and at an intersection which Angelucci described as a “lonely, deserted stretch of road called Forest Lawn Drive,” a pair of small lights – maybe around two feet in diameter – shot out of the larger light, which soared into the dark skies. Angelucci brought his car to the proverbial screeching halt. He could only sit and stare as the pair of lights bobbed in the air, like floating beach-balls. Suddenly, there was a development; an astounding one.
As Angelucci looked on, a voice emanated from one of the balls of light. According to the man himself, it was “a masculine voice in strong, well-modulated tones and speaking perfect English.” The voice assured Angelucci that he should not afraid; no harm would come to him. Stressing to Angelucci that he was in the company of friends, the voice said, in a typical, know-it-all Space Brother fashion: “Man believes himself civilized, but often his thoughts are barbaric and his emotions lethal. We do not say this as criticism, but state it only as fact. Thus it is best to approach all planetary visitors with friendly, welcoming thoughts.” The lights shot away, leaving Angelucci amazed and excited. Two months later, he would have yet another encounter.
It was the night of July 23, 1952 and Angelucci felt compelled to head out to the Glendale Hyperion Bridge, which crosses the Los Angeles River and Interstate 5. He did so on foot. In his own words, “dense, oblique shadows down below” transformed things into “a shadowed no-man’s land.” His breathing became shallow, his hands and legs tingled, and a rising panic-attack threatened to overwhelm him. Then, suddenly, a “huge, misty soap bubble squatting on the ground, emitting a fuzzy, pale glow” appeared before him. That soap bubble-type light suddenly transformed into what appeared to be a solid, metallic craft. Angelucci moved slowly towards it; entering the object through a small doorway and into a darkened room. It contained nothing but a chair. On sitting down, Angelucci soon felt unable to move; his body was suddenly weak and heavy. It was, he claimed, all due to the effects of G-forces: the craft was apparently high in the sky in no time at all. Peering out of a conveniently positioned window, Angelucci could see the bright lights of Los Angeles glowing far below him. The lights got fainter and fainter as the craft got progressively higher and higher: “I trembled as I realized I was actually looking upon a planet from somewhere out in space.”
Glendale-Hyperion Bridge
A booming voice suddenly filled the room: “Orfeo, you are looking upon Earth – your home! From here, over a thousand miles away, in space, it appears as the most beautiful planet in the heavens and a haven of peace and tranquility. But you and your Earthly brothers know the true conditions there.” He was warned that an “hour of crisis” was looming; that the human race was in a state of major uncertainty that just might lead to a disastrous atomic war between East and West. Instantly, and as the Lord’s Prayer boomed out of unseen speakers, Angelucci knew he had to do the bidding of the invisible entities on-board the spaceship: spread the word of friendly aliens from a faraway world. In minutes, he was returned to the shadow-filled bridge and left to make his way home. Angelucci’s life – which was to be filled with further encounters of the peace and love type – would never be quite the same again.
Like so many of the Contactees, Angelucci was soon on the lecture circuit, which included becoming a regular at George Van Tassel’s gigs out at Giant Rock, California. Angelucci also turned his attention to writing books; his most remembered one being 1955’s The Secret of the Saucers. He died in California on July 24, 1993 at the age of eighty-one.
The complex history of ET contact can be manipulated by mixing truth with fiction to cause confusion. Judy Carroll’s Extraterrestrial Presence on Earth: Lessons in History offers a unique perspective on the eons of ET contact–both genuine and falsified–and presents the hidden history of Earth, its hijacking by Reptoid “Controllers”, and their covert influence behind world governments and fundamentalist religions. This remarkable, groundbreaking book offers a greatly needed vision and hope.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Multiple UFOs over Sedona, Arizona
Multiple UFOs over Sedona, Arizona
Mass UFO sighting that was just submitted to MUFON. This was filmed over 20th July 2017 over Sedona, Arizona.
Witness report:
I didn’t think much of this until I saw another video recently on TV that looked just like this but it was in Mexico I think. I took the video because I couldn’t tell what these lights moving across the sky were and I thought if I had it on camera I could zoom in and get a better idea. I had no idea it might be UFO’s until I recently watched a show on TV with a video that had similar lights and they were identified as UFO’s. So here you go…hope it proves to be something of interest to you and that you might identify what these things are.
UFO Seen Flying Mysteriously Behind an Erupting Volcano
UFO Seen Flying Mysteriously Behind an Erupting Volcano
The moment the Popocatepetl volcano erupted with a fireball spewing from the crater, a UFO was spotted that appeared to float mysteriously in the background.
The volcano in central Mexico had two eruptions and exploded incandescent material on Monday.
But observers with eagle eyes were quick to point out the presence of a UFO in eruption footage.
The video shows the volcano erupting in a fireball and expelling incandescent material from the crater.
As the smoke starts billowing from the crater, a light appears streaking from left to right behind the volcano.
Many commented the light was a UFO. Some said everything was normal before the explosion, but UFO appeared after that.
Another one added that the scientists and media would say that it’s a meteorite.
One commented that the volcano served as an alien headquarter, and they closed the door to scare the people so that nobody goes there.
The authorities have cautioned citizens not to approach the volcano as it stays in the yellow alert phase two.
Volcanologists said that the volcano could erupt again at any time with potentially catastrophic consequences. They noted that it’s not known when this will occur or on what scale as volcanoes don’t erupt according to a schedule or timetable, and the next major eruptions could be far away in the future.
This is the missing massive Snow Cruiser in Antarctica?
This is the missing massive Snow Cruiser in Antarctica?
Satellite images from 1984, which we have received from third parties, show a massive vehicle in the snow of Antarctica. Could it be the infamous snow cruiser? The 1984 images have since been censored by Google Earth.
The Antarctic Snow Cruiser with a length of 17 meters and a heigh, wheels extended of 4.9 meters was a vehicle designed from 1937 to 1939 intended to facilitate transport in Antarctica during the United States Antarctic Service Expedition (1939–41). The Snow Cruiser also known as "The Penguin, arrived at Little America in the Bay of Whales, Antarctica in early January 1940.
The massive Snow Cruiser generally failed to operate as hoped under the difficult conditions, and was eventually abandoned in Antarctica.
During Operation Highjump in late 1946, an expedition team found the vehicle and discovered it needed only air in the tires and some servicing to make it operational.
In 1958, an international expedition uncovered the snow cruiser using a bulldozer. It was covered by several feet of snow but a long bamboo pole marked its position.
They were able to excavate to the bottom of the wheels and accurately measure the amount of snowfall since it was abandoned. Inside, the vehicle was exactly as the crew had left it, with papers, magazines, and cigarettes scattered all around. It later disappeared again due to shifting ice conditions.
Weird spot in Antarctica depicts a giant wolf-like creature bending over an ancient symbol
Weird spot in Antarctica depicts a giant wolf-like creature bending over an ancient symbol
Antarctica: A weird and unnatural looking spot in the middle of nowhere. What we see is an enormous overgrown spot of about 145 meters x 70 meters resembling a giant wolf like creature bending over an ancient symbol.
The wolf like creature and ancient symbol can only be seen from the sky, like the famous Nasca Lines in Peru, and are probably geoglyphs engraved in the soil of Antarctica thousands of years ago.
Click image to enlarge.
Apart from the question who made it and what it could mean, we may wonder whether this ancient design was created to attract aliens and was made big enough so that the aliens could see it from space or maybe the wolf and symbol stem from ritualistic behavior?
Europe has confirmed its participation in humanity's first full-on planetary-defense demo.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has officially approved the Hera mission, which will assess the results of NASA's asteroid-walloping Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART).
DART is scheduled to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in July 2021 and reach the Didymos two-asteroid system in October 2022. The NASA probe will then slam into "Didymoon," the 540-foot-wide (165 meters) satellite of the 2,540-foot-wide (775 m) space rock Didymos.
Telescopes here on Earth will document how the impact affects Didymoon and its orbit around Didymos, helping researchers gauge the effectiveness of the "kinetic impactor" asteroid-deflection strategy. The DART team had long hoped that such long-range data would be supplemented by up-close observations, and now that vision will become reality.
Hera will likely launch in 2023 or 2024 and get to the Didymos system two years later. The European spacecraft will gather a variety of types of data about the space rocks with the aid of two tiny cubesats, both of which will perform asteroid landings, ESA officials have said.
The Asteroid Prospection Explorer (APEX), which was provided by a Swedish-Finnish-Czech-German consortium, will investigate the interior structure and surface composition of both asteroids in the system. And Juventas, which was built by the Danish company GomSpace and the Romanian company GMV, will study Didymoon's structure and gravity field.
DART will also feature a cubesat. The Italian Space Agency's briefcase-sized Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIA) will separate from DART shortly before the big probe hits Didymoon; LICIA will observe the impact from a safe distance, beaming data and photos home to Earth.
Originally, by the way, an ESA craft was supposed to do this real-time impact-observing work. The Didymoon-whacking project, in its first incarnation, was a joint NASA-ESA effort called the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA). An ESA spacecraft called AIM (Asteroid Impact Mission) would have gotten to the Didymos system before DART arrived, collecting information both pre- and post-collision. But AIM was canceled in 2016, so AIDA was no more.
But the decision to approve Hera, which ESA announced last week at a gathering of European space leaders in Seville, Spain, means that NASA won't go it alone on this planetary-defense test.
"We are very pleased by the European Space Agency's decision to fund the Hera mission, a critical part of humanity's first attempt at deflecting an asteroid," the #SupportHera campaign, which has been advocating for the mission, wrote in a statement. "One day, the Hera mission could be crucial to protecting our planet from asteroids."
Kinetic impactors like DART aren't the only way to nudge dangerous asteroids away from Earth. For example, if the potential impact is far enough out in the future — a few decades, say — we could launch a "gravity tractor" probe out to the asteroid. This spacecraft would fly along with the rock, tugging it slightly but continuously onto a different trajectory.
And if the possible collision is just weeks or months away, we might be forced to go with the nuclear option, literally. Exploding nuclear bombs on or near the asteroid could blast the rock apart or at least push it off course, researchers have said.
DART won't be the first probe to smack an asteroid. Earlier this year, Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft sent an impactor barreling into the space rock Ryugu. That collision will likely help scientists better understand Ryugu's internal structure, so the Hayabusa2 mission could have planetary-defense applications. But that impact was designed primarily to unearth pristine material for sample collection.
The Mars Color Imager (MARCI) camera onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) shows the typical state of Mars, seen here in May 2018, and what the planet looked like during a planet-encircling dust storm in July 2018.
Massive dust towers on Mars that formed during global storms may be "space elevators" that contributed to the loss of the planet's ancient water, according to NASA's description of new research.
Dust towers can loom dozens of miles above Mars' surface and are part of larger dust storms that sweep up the planet's iconic reddish dirt, blanketing the world. One giant storm last year brought NASA's Opportunity mission to an end and masked Mars' features in a dull coating of dust, as seen in an incredible moving image from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The scientists behind the new research said they wanted to better understand how storms like these work.
During a global storm, dust towers "are renewed continuously for weeks,'' the lead author for both papers, Nicholas Heavens of Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia, said in a recent NASA statement about the dust towers. The space agency said that in some cases, it observed multiple towers for as long as 3.5 weeks. These structures stretch upward, much like thunderstorm clouds do on Earth, and the researchers said the dust towers may have played a part in the evaporation of Mars' ancient water into space.
The sight of an Earthly thunderstorm cloud is unmistakable: The tall formation is ominous, and people exercise caution after spotting one, as the cloud could bring dramatic atmospheric activity like a lightning strike. Thunderstorm clouds grow tall because of the sun; as the heat from the star warms the moisture in Earth's atmosphere, water particles ascend higher into the sky.
That heat also powers dust towers on Mars. The dust clouds, described in NASA's statement as "space elevators," lift particles of water and dirt that have hitched a ride on the rising dust streamers that create the cloud. The updraft carries water vapor and one of its gaseous building blocks, hydrogen, up to the planet's upper atmosphere; here, in Mars' ancient past, these particles may have then evaporated and disappeared from the Red Planet in large quantities.
To understand how Earthly thunderstorm clouds affect our daily lives, meteorologists study the larger phenomenon, known as deep convection, that produces them. Mars has a deep convection system as well, and the scientists behind the new research studied that system for answers about Martian dust storms.
The yellow-white cloud at the bottom center of this image is a "dust tower" on Mars as seen by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Nov. 30, 2010. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
The first of the two recent papers published by Heavens' team laid out a framework for how to study this Martian convection system. Researchers called the Red Planet's atmospheric conveyor belt "dusty deep convection."
In their more recent paper, the researchers studied the last two dust events that engulfed Mars, which occurred in 2007 and 2018, and how water molecules were moving around the planet at the time.
There are still some mysteries about dust towers and the role they play in massive dust storms. One idea is that the dust towers form randomly from lifted dust; another is that they come together as hurricane-like storms that then envelop the planet in dust.
The November 2019 study was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, and the October 2019 study was published in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences.
With a perfectly symmetrical ring circling a red sphere of stars, Hoag's object is one of the prettiest mysteries in the universe.(Image credit: NASA/ESA, Processing: Benoit Blanco)
Look closely at the serpent constellation slithering through the northern sky, and you might see a galaxy within a galaxy within a galaxy.
This cosmic turducken is known as Hoag's object, and it has befuddled stargazers since astronomer Arthur Hoag discovered it in 1950.
The object in question is a rare, ring-shaped galaxy measuring some 100,000 light-years across (slightly larger than the Milky Way) and located 600 million light-years from Earth. In a recent image of the oddball object taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and processed by geophysicist Benoit Blanco, a bright ring of billions of blue stars forms a perfect circle around a much smaller and denser sphere of reddish stars. In the dark gap between the two stellar circles, another ring galaxy — much, much farther away from us — peeks out to say hello.
What's going on here, and what tore Hoag's object in two? Astronomers still aren't sure; ring galaxies account for less than 0.1% of all known galaxies, and so they aren't the easiest objects to study. Hoag himself suggested that the galaxy's peculiar ring formation was merely an optical illusion caused by gravitational lensing (an effect that occurs when extremely high-mass objects bend and magnify light). Later studies with better telescopes disproved this idea.
Another popular hypothesis suggests that Hoag's object was once a more common, disk-shaped galaxy but an ancient collision with a neighboring galaxy ripped a hole through the disk's belly and permanently warped its gravitational pull. If such a collision occurred in the last 3 billion years, then astronomers looking through radio telescopes should have been able to see some of the fallout from the accident. No such evidence has been found.
If there was a cosmic crash at the core of Hoag's object, it must have happened so long ago that all the evidence has been swept away. With only a handful of other known ring galaxies available to study (none of which shows the perfectly symmetrical characteristics found in this one), Hoag's object remains a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma — you know, like a turducken.
Enigma of Alien Gargoyle Atop Ancient Scottish Church Now Solved
An ‘alien’ gargoyle carved on the exterior of a 12th-century Scottish abbey is causing waves on social media.
Believed to have been founded as a holy site in the 7th century by Saint Mirin (or Saint Mirren) the 12th century Paisley Abbey is a Scottish parish church of the Church of Scotland situated on the east bank of the White Cart Water in the center of the town of Paisley in Renfrewshire, about 12 miles (19 km) west of Glasgow.
A gargoyle carved high up on the abbey’s roof is making waves on social media because it mirrors the xenomorph creature from the 1979 movie Alien, and Glasgow Live reports photographs are going viral on Facebook and Twitter.
The outside of the Paisley Abbey in Scotland, where the alien gargoyle can be seen.
Architecturally, gargoyles are stonemasons’ tools, carefully carved with spouts, which are designed to take water away from the sides of buildings, therefore preventing rainwater from eroding masonry and its connecting mortar. Medieval architects sometimes created rows of ‘grotesques’ with water troughs cut in the backs of the gargoyle, and the reason these fantastical creatures often look ‘stretched’ is because the longer the gargoyle, the further rainwater was directed from walls.
Spiritually, however, the primary application of the gargoyle was to illustrate evil through the form of a tormented looking creature. Itself believed to frighten off evil spirits and protect those that it guards within the church. But the Paisley Abbey Alien gargoyle has a different story altogether. Now, before you get to thinking maybe Giorgio A. Tsoukalos from History Channel’s Ancient Aliens was right and start to think maybe a 12th century stonemason had travelled forward in time, watched the movie, and hopped back again, the answer is much simpler.
Alien Spotted At Paisley Abbey In 1990s
Reverend Alan Birss told BBC News that during a refurbishment project at the abbey in the early 1990s, 12 medieval gargoyles, which had been on the abbey for hundreds of years had been replaced and he thinks that one of the stonemasons must have been “having a bit of fun.” Only one of the original gargoyles remains outside the abbey today to demonstrate how they would have looked originally, before the alien took over. The building’s interior also features medieval grotesques.
12 Paisley Abbey gargoyles were replaced in 1991. The set includes ‘see no evil’, ‘speak no evil’, ‘hear no evil’ and the alien gargoyle.
Mr. Birss said a stonemason from an Edinburgh firm was contracted to create the new gargoyles when the film was “fairly new” but he thinks the mason wasn’t deliberately copying the alien in the film and it was just a “concept of an alien.” Mr. Birss also said that an internet search showed that someone had pointed out the similarity as far back as 1997.
From Alien Gargoyles To Treasure Filled Drains
Besides the carved alien on the roof of Paisley Abbey drawing attention, in the early 1990s an extremely finely constructed 13th century vaulted drain was rediscovered running from the abbey to the White Cart river. According to a Historic Environment Scotland document titled, Paisley Abbey , the drain measures at least 90 meters long (295 feet), up to 2 meters wide (6.5 feet) and up to 2.2m high (7 feet) and before archaeologists could access it they had to pump out water.
The walls of the ancient drain hold stonemasons’ marks, and it was found to contain many items, some of which are now on display in the abbey, including: a slate marked with musical notation, which is the oldest example of polyphonic music found in Scotland. According to Kenneth Elliot’s 2000 book Musical Slates: The Paisley Abbey Fragments, the drain also contained imported cloth seals, 15th century chamber pots, tweezers and carved bone handles. If you like you can take a virtual tour of the drain on YouTube.
Paisley Abbey Drain is designated by Historic Environment Scotland as a Scheduled Ancient Monument and as wonderful as it might be, perhaps the abbey’s most historically significant feature is the tomb in the choir incorporating a female effigy widely believed to be Marjorie Bruce , the mother of Robert II. Opposite Marjorie Bruce lie the tombs of Robert III of Scotland and Simon fitz Alan and furthermore, Paisley Abbey is also the burial place of all six High Stewards of Scotland and the wives of Robert II and King Robert III.
Marjorie Bruce statue on her tomb in Paisley Abbey, where the alien gargoyle can be seen.
Those visitors to Scotland on the trail of another 90s blockbuster, Braveheart , the Glasgow Live article reminds us of Paisley Abbey’s links with the legendary William Wallace , and that you can find out more by joining guided tours at the abbey on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 2pm.
Top image:The Paisley Abbey alien gargoyle (image had been cropped). Source: Colin / CC BY-SA 2.0
The Bosnian Pyramids: One of the Greatest Finds Ever?
In 2020, as we begin a new decade, Dr Sam Osmanagich and The Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun Foundation is celebrating its 15 th year since multidisciplinary investigations of the Bosnian Pyramidsbegan. This year’s upcoming summer excavation season promises to be the most active yet, with active archaeological excavations taking place across the pyramid valley, both above and below ground on the Bosnian Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, Vratnica Tumulus, Ravne Tunnels, Ravne3 Tunnels and the newly discovered Ravne4 Tunnels.
In 2005, Bosnian born anthropologist Dr Sam Osmanagich announced to the world’s media his discovery, that a group of hills in the vicinity of Visoko, a small town in central Bosnia, were not hills at all but were in fact buried and forgotten Pyramids of both monumental size and extreme age. The Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun, the largest of the Bosnian Pyramids, is estimated to be at least 300m (900ft) tall. The Bosnian Pyramid of the Moon, though smaller at 190m (600ft) tall, is still over 50m (150ft) taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza .
The response to his announcement was mixed, with equal amounts of excitement from those enthusiastic to esoteric ideas regarding the world’s ancient pyramids. But there was skepticism from many, including the local Bosnian population, and despite lack of any proper scientific investigation on their part, outright condemnation from academic circles intent on maintaining a crumbling paradigm.
When Dr Osmanagich first made his statement to the world press his pyramid hypothesis was based initially on several direct observations;
That a number of hills in the area local to Visokowere four sided with triangular faces.
The corners and slope angle of the triangular faces were regular.
Topographic map of the Bosnian Pyramid Valley showing the peaks of Sun (northwest), Moon (east) and Dragon pyramids (south) forming an equilateral triangle.
Like many other world pyramids and megalithic sites, the faces of these ‘hills’ were almost perfectly orientated towards the cardinal points, north, south, east, west.
The spatial arrangement of three of the largest pyramidal ‘hills’ (Sun, Moon & Dragon Pyramids) formed a near perfect equilateral triangle between their peaks.
The relative position and heights of the Sun and Moon Pyramids cause a shadow to be cast that marks the beginning of summer (Solstice) and the transition through to midsummer.
Photos show interaction between the shadow cast by the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun upon the Bosnian Pyramid of the Moon. Image left shows shadow on Summer Solstice matching height of Moon Pyramid, which by midsummer moves to totally cover the pyramid (right).
With these direct observations made by Dr Osmanagich, were also the countless anecdotal stories told to him by the local population. The older generations would speak of how they used to play as children in underground tunnels all around Visoko. Tunnels that later had their entrances sealed by authorities during the time of Yugoslavia. Knowing the association between subterranean passages, hollow spaces (chambers) and almost all known ancient pyramids around the world, Dr Osmanagich recognized the significance of these locally told stories and would soon set to work on rediscovering and thus confirming the existence of these underground tunnels.
2006: The Excavation Begins…
Beginning in 2006, Dr Osmanagich would self-finance investigations of the Bosnian Pyramids in order to obtain empirical evidence to support his controversial pyramid hypothesis. Using satellites, geo-radar, seismic surveys and topographic analysis, a total of five principle sites were identified for initial investigation (later named Pyramids Sun, Moon, Dragon, Love and Temple of Mother Earth). Archaeological trenches were excavated across all these principle sites and were overseen by Dr Osmanagich and other experts in the field of archaeology, geology and geophysics.
Archaeological excavations taking place on the northern face of the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun reveal blocks composed of an artificial geopolymer stronger than most modern-day concretes.
As well as the surface excavations, core drilling was also conducted, with samples undergoing geochemical and material analysis by several specialized university departments internationally. Results suggested the material was an artificial conglomerate geopolymer and though it looked like natural stone, it had dissimilar chemical and mechanical properties to the geological material found locally. Strength tests measured it to be considerably stronger than both the locally found conglomerates and even modern-day concrete.
The evidence obtained supported Dr Osmanagich’s original hypothesis, that these hills under investigation were not just regular hills, but were in fact either, at the very least, modified to look like pyramids, or were completely built from the ground up, by a civilization of great antiquity, unknown to the mainstream version accepted history, using methods of construction unknown to modern science.
Prof. Dr Khavroshkin & Prof. Dr Tsyplakov from Schmidt Institute of Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Moscow, conducted seismic surveys of the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun and concluded its seismic response matched that of the measurements they had made during a similar survey at the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Not long after the initial phase of investigations began, Dr Osmanagich would find an opening to the underground tunnel network spoken of, which would later be named the ‘Ravne Tunnels’. An opening to these tunnels was located approximately 2.5km northwest of the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun. At the time of discovery, the entranceway was known locally but was only suspected as being a small cave of no significance. Upon closer inspection, Dr Osmanagich realized at the rear of the cave was an infilled passage.
Digital render of the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun in relation to excavated and explored sections of the Ravne Tunnels.
In order to explore the passages at the Ravne Tunnels entrance, Dr Osmanagich began excavating the small cave. What was revealed was a shock to everyone, including the local historians. It was not simply the entrances to the tunnels that had been blocked up in more recent times. But seemingly the entire tunnel network, which is now known to run for thousands of meters, had been backfilled with loose rubble material, a painstaking task of such magnitude, it almost seems implausible to imagine that it could have been undertaken without being noticed and recorded by the local populations if it had occurred within the recent historic ages.
After only a few tens of meters of excavating, Dr Osmanagich had revealed multiple infilled passages heading in different directions, the junctions of which were marked by simple yet beautiful drywall constructions. They clearly indicated that the passages cutting through the solid rock, and their subsequent blockage, were not the work of nature but it was done so by intelligent and purposeful hands.
As work continued and more of the tunnel network was emptied of rubble, enabling hundreds of meters worth of tunnels to be explored, further intriguing discoveries were made. The existence of chambers with multiple passages leading to them were identified, shaped stones with possible proto-runic language inscribed on them. Also, large megalithic blocks clearly out of context with the surrounding geological material, now known as the Megaceramic blocks K1, K2 & K3 and the Egg-shaped Monolith, were found.
Once again, all these discoveries continued to support the initial statements made by Dr Osmanagich in 2005 regarding his prehistoric Bosnian pyramid hypothesis.
Top left; Dr Sam Osmanagich inside the Ravne Tunnels pointing to infilled passage with drywall construction in front of it. Top right; One of over 50 drywalls identified within the Ravne Tunnels. Bottom left; Excavation and subsequent removal of rubble blocking the Ravne Tunnels. Bottom right; Megaceramic block K2, estimated to weigh 8 tons.
Of course, none of these objective proofs brought to light by Dr Osmanagich were enough to convince the gatekeepers of the pre-existing historic paradigm. Authoritative critics of the project would make unfounded and somewhat preposterous accusations that Dr Osmanagich was shaping the hills to look like pyramids and that he was digging the tunnels himself ( we presume at night-time in total darkness ).
The European Association of Archaeologists called the Bosnian Pyramid Project a “hoax on an unsuspecting public,” whilst the publication ‘British Archaeology’ called the Bosnian Pyramids a “Great Scheme.” Disgraced Egyptian Minister of Antiquities, Dr Zahi Hawass, also had to have his say, undoubtedly from fear of losing tourist revenue, saying that Dr Osmanagich was suffering from “hallucinations” ( all be it persistent ones? ).
Slightly less preposterous was the unfounded conjecture that the tunnels were the product of a Yugoslavian army training exercise. Non-experts in this field also illogically concluded that the tunnels were the remains of a medieval gold mine, despite the fact there is no gold, or ever was, any mineral of economic importance within the rock unit the Ravne Tunnels cuts through.
Numerous websites and Wikipedia entries calling the Bosnian Pyramids a “pseudo-archaeological notion” were set up to misinform the curious public, sometimes through omission, other times through deceit, spin and outright lies. It seemed that while there were plenty of people ready to attack Dr Osmanagich on a personal level, no one was arguing directly against Dr Osmanagich’s raised proofs in an objective, scientific manor on a fair playing field.
Most Open and Transparent Site in the World
Besides the controversies generated by the Bosnian Pyramid Project, there is of course one other thing that differentiates the research taking place in the Bosnian Pyramid Valley to that of any other archaeological project. It is the most open and transparent archaeological site in the world. Unlike in Egypt for example, where it is almost impossible for anyone outside the clique of Egyptology to undertake independent or even cooperative research freely, the Bosnian Pyramid Valley is open to everyone.
Physicist Slobodan Mizdrak (left) and electrotechnical engineer Goran Marjanovic (center) are two of several independent researchers who came to measure the electromagnetic and ultrasonic emissions emanating from the structures within the Bosnian Valley of the Pyramids.
For example, since 2010, independent researchers have been coming to Visoko to investigate the electromagnetic and archaeoacoustic properties of the Bosnian Pyramids. Experts in their field from UK, Finland, Italy, Croatia and Serbia, each using different equipment and methodology, were all able to repeatedly detect and measure emissions being generated by the Bosnian Pyramids. Their investigations revealed that the Pyramid of the Sun produced both a focused and stable beam of resonating electromagnetic energy emanating from its peak, as well as accompanying diffusive sound at ultrasonic frequencies.
Poly-interference photography commonly used to photograph biological energy fields was also utilized across the Bosnian Valley of the Pyramids. The PIP camera was able to show how the Bosnian Pyramids manipulate the Earths naturally occurring EM-field. Imagery taken of nearby hills using the same technique showed a distinctly different EM-field pattern, clearly differentiating the energetic properties of the Bosnian Pyramids from that of the natural local landforms.
Independent researcher Harry Oldfield utilized his PIP camera at the Bosnian Valley of the Pyramids. Photo left is a natural hill with horizontal energy-fields above it. Photo right is taken of the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun. The Earths naturally occurring energy-fields have been turned almost 90 degrees.
2018 and 2019: New Openings Lead to More Tunnels and 1000s of Artifacts
A more recent landmark discovery, made largely in part by the assistance of volunteers during the 2018 summer camp, was significant enough that for the first time since archaeological work began, the local municipal museum and its staff are now working in cooperation with the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun Foundation. This partnership is a small but well-needed step in the development and acceptance of the research taking place within the Bosnian Pyramid Valley.
Groups of international volunteers during the summer 2018 excavation season working at the site now named ‘Ravne3’.
Surface excavations undertaken several hundred meters away from the known entranceway to the explored sections of the Ravne Tunnels revealed a completely new opening into the subterranean network. Like the tunnels before them, the entranceway had been blocked up with loose rubble and it was down to the volunteers to clear away this material. After two weeks of digging underground through the blocked passages, a large section of tunnels was revealed completely free of any loose blocking material.
Chambers and connecting passages were discovered and by the following spring of 2019 it was found that the raised floor within the open section was rich in archaeological material. Over the course of the 2019 summer season, over 3000 individual finds were recovered from the Ravne3 Tunnels. Pottery fragments, tiles, jewelry, coins, tools and lithic artifacts were excavated.
Left; A medieval pot partially reconstructed from fragments excavated from within the Ravne3 Tunnels. Right; A bronze pendant connector with Romanized Celtic motif recovered from the Ravne3 Tunnels.
Typological analysis conducted by archaeologists at the municipal museum indicated Neolithic, Roman and medieval periods were represented by these finds. By the end of the summer, as it seemed all the artifacts may had been recovered from within Ravne3. However, one last discovery of the season was made... two drywalls. By their form, material and context, the drywalls matched those discovered previously By Dr Osmanagich within the original Ravne Tunnels, linking the creation of the two tunnel sections together and inferring each being part of one large subterranean network.
At Least 6000 Years Old!
The work completed by the end of the 2019 summer season allowed for a minimum age to be given to the Ravne3 Tunnels, using both relative and absolute dating methods. Stratigraphically, the drywalls were found below the cultural layers containing artifacts and radiometric dating of geological material dated the creation of the Ravne3 Tunnels to being at least 6000 years old, with the expectation they are older. In summary, the work conducted at Ravne3 categorically disproved any notion that the Yugoslavian army, medieval miners or Dr Sam himself, were responsible for the creation of the Ravne Tunnels Network.
Left; A passage connecting two chambers within the Ravne3 Tunnels. Right; One of two drywalls found within the Ravne3 Tunnels.
For more information on the Ravne3 2018/19 excavations please see the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun Foundations Geoarchaeological Summery Report; https://bit.ly/2QAMIvC.
Stumbling Upon the Ravne4 Tunnels and Outlook for 2020
Most recently and by complete chance, in the winter of 2019, while landscaping and maintenance work was being conducted within the grounds of the Ravne Park Complex, workers of the foundation uncovered yet another opening into the Ravne Tunnels Network. This opening led to more tunnels free from blocking material and is the closest tunnel section to the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun yet located.
Top left; Small opening being enlarged to gain entry into Ravne4. Top right; The first chamber leads to several passages with one being free from blocking material. Bottom left; A drywall is identified, marking an infilled passage behind it. Bottom right; An open passage leads to a small chamber.
The discovery of the Ravne4 Tunnels has saved several years’ worth of excavations towards the Sun Pyramid and as such is now the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun Foundations excavation priority for 2020. Besides the initial prospecting, work has barely begun at this newly identified location. Numerous branching passages, chambers and drywalls have so far been observed inside the Ravne4 Tunnels, with several of these passages heading south, in the direction towards the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun, the biggest and oldest pyramid in the world.
Top image: Shot of the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun and the surrounding area including Visoko city
Richard Hoyle (UK) is the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun Foundation field geologist. For more information about the Bosnian Pyramid Volunteering program and how to apply please visit the official Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun Foundation webpage; https://bit.ly/2tgR0Py
From the early 1950s until 2009, a department in the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence (MoD) documented and investigated reports of UFOs. Now, more than a decade after the program ended, many of those formerly classified files about UFO sightings will be made available to the public for the first time.
Previously, some MoD files about UFOs had been published online at the U.K. National Archives website, The Telegraph reported. However, all of the agency's UFO reports will be released this year on "a dedicated gov.uk web page," a spokesperson for the British Royal Air Force (RAF) told The Telegraph.
The decision came after PA Media, a British news agency, filed a request for the UFO files under the Freedom of Information Act, according to The Telegraph. MoD officials decided "it would be better to publish these records, rather than continue sending documents to the National Archives," the RAF spokesperson said.
The U.K.'s fascination with UFOs spiked around 1950, prompting the MoD to form the Flying Saucer Working Party to address the phenomenon, according to the U.K. National Archives. UFOs in the early 1950s even captured the attention of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who sent a memo to his air minister in 1952 asking, "What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth?"
The flying saucer group concluded that UFOs were hoaxes, delusions or ordinary objects that were misidentified, recommending "that no further investigation of reported mysterious aerial phenomena be undertaken." Nevertheless, other MoD divisions continued the work of official UFO investigation in the U.K., ushering such efforts into the 21st century, The National Archives reported.
The last UFO report to be published online by the MoD dates to 2009, covering sightings that took place from January through the end of November of that year. These included "a silver disc-shaped light" (reported in January 2009), "up to 20 orange and red glowing lights" (reported in June), "a large bright silver/white ball/sphere" (reported in July) and "three blazing gold orbs in a diagonal line in the sky" (reported in September).
After MoD enacted a policy change on Dec. 1, 2009, the agency no longer recorded or investigated UFO sightings, according to the report. But what they did find — including many recent UFO reports that were previously available only as hard copies — will be published online within the next few months, said Nick Pope, a former UFO investigator for the MoD.
"There should be some interesting nuggets in these new files," Pope told The Express.
Ancient Worldwide Flood Evidence That Will Challenge the Way You View Human History
Ancient Worldwide Flood Evidence That Will Challenge the Way You View Human History
What if the ancient tales of a worldwide flood were true? Since the late 1800’s, geologists hold firm that the geological records show no indication of a deluge affecting the entire planet. Michael Jaye brings forward the evidence he has collected, which he believes proves the differ.
He states that the landscape of ancient Earth was vastly different from what it is today and was obliterated by a massive cosmic event which increased the world’s water by more than 90%.
Michael Jaye, Ph.D., recently retired as an associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. He previously spent fifteen years teaching mathematics and its applications at West Point, NY. His interest in the worldwide flood began with Google Map images of the Monterey Canyon system.
WETENSCHAP Nieuwe beelden van de Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA tonen hoe de Aarde er zou uitzien als alle oceanen werden drooggelegd. Op een wetenschappelijke animatie is te zien hoe over de hele wereld de zeebodem verschijnt naarmate de zeespiegel zakt en zo twee derde van het aardoppervlak wordt blootgelegd. En vanaf ongeveer 2 kilometer komen de eerste onderwaterbergen tevoorschijn.
NASA-wetenschapper Horace Mitchell maakte in 2008 al een animatie van een drooggelegde Aarde. Maar James O’Donoghue, voormalig NASA-wetenschapper en planetair onderzoeker aan het Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, ging opnieuw met die beelden aan de slag. O’Donoghue verhoogde de resolutie en vertraagde de animatie, zodat de oceanen geleidelijk aan worden drooggelegd. Een tracker toont met hoeveel meter de zeespiegel zakt.
Vanaf enkele tientallen meters komen de eerste onderwaterlandschappen al tevoorschijn en vanaf ongeveer 2 à 3 kilometer ligt het overgrote deel van de zeebodem bloot. Vanaf 6 kilometer is het meeste water verdwenen, maar het laagste deel ligt nog eens 5 kilometer dieper. De Marianentrog in de Stille Oceanen, onder het vulkanische eiland Guam, is liefst 11 kilometer diep. Het is de diepste krocht ter wereld. Op de bodem van de Marianentrog is de druk meer dan 1.000 keer hoger dan aan de oppervlakte.
Onze voorouders gingen te voet naar Engeland
Op een opgedroogde Aarde komen plots nieuwe vulkanen en tektonische platen bloot te liggen. Maar de animatie vertelt ons ook iets over het leven van onze voorouders. Omdat veel van het huidige oceaanwater nog vastgevroren zat op de polen, lag de zeespiegel 20.000 jaar geleden nog zo’n 130 meter lager. Door die lagere zeespiegel konden mensen nog gebruik maken van landbruggen tussen eilanden en zelfs tussen continenten. Zo zou bijvoorbeeld een tunnel tussen Europa en het Verenigd Koninkrijk toen nutteloos geweest zijn, want daar lag gewoon een landbrug tussen. Ook Alaska en Rusland waren verbonden, net als Noord- en Zuid-Amerika.
NASA20.000 jaar geleden lag de zeespiegel 130 meter lager, waardoor mensen van Europa naar het Verenigd Koninkrijk konden wandelen, of van Noord- naar Zuid-Amerika.
Photo NewsEr is een nieuwe variant van het noorderlicht ontdekt. (Illustratiefoto)
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETFinse onderzoekers hebben samen met amateurfotografen een nieuwe variant van het noorderlicht ontdekt. Dat heeft natuurkundige Minna Palmroth van de Universiteit van Helsinki woensdag gezegd. De hobbyfotografen noemden de nieuwe vorm van een aurora “De Duinen” omdat het groene patroon van golven lijkt op duinen aan een zandstrand.
Het noorder- of zuiderlicht ontstaat wanneer elektrisch geladen deeltjes van de zonnewind door het aardmagnetisch veld in de buurt van de noord- en zuidpool worden afgebogen. De deeltjes dringen vervolgens met hoge snelheid de atmosfeer nabij de polen binnen en botsen op verschillende gassen, in het bijzonder zuurstof- en stikstofmoleculen. Daarbij ontstaat het veelkleurige en prachtige licht dat als het noorderlicht of poollicht bekendstaat.
Het nieuw aan de nachthemel ontdekte fenomeen is het resultaat van interactie tussen aangrenzende gebieden met hogere en lagere zuurstofdichtheid, zegt Palmroth. Dit soort poollicht is nooit eerder gezien. “De Duinen” zijn ontdekt op een hoogte van 80 tot 120 km, waar er maar weinig observaties zijn. Onderzoekers noemen dat atmosferisch gebied soms de “ignorosfeer”.
De wetenschapster zegt al jaren met amateurfotografen samen te werken. Die hadden haar benaderd om meer te leren over de de fysica achter het noorderlicht. Sommige foto’s die Palmroth ontving klopten echter niet met de gekende vormen van noorderlicht, waarop het onderzoek van start ging.
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UFO Videos From 2020 – What Will Happen in the Next Five Years?
UFO Videos From 2020 – What Will Happen in the Next Five Years?
UFO Videos From 2020 – What Will Happen in the Next Five Years?
UFO Videos from 2020 might be the most fascinating news we have ever received. Well, we have also received a lot of interesting news, which is why we have never skipped from one news item to another, like this. It might be better for you to know the truth.
Have you heard about the “Grave Deeds” which have been reported by people’s perceptions? They are quite baffling, as they are appearing all over the United States. There are also sightings of strange bodies inside a huge hole. Many scientists have proposed that these may be from extraterrestrial bodies.
They also believe that these bodies may be buried in a huge hole with some kind of protection from outside. They even say that the body in the hole is still alive.
Scientists have conducted experiments and found out that these bodies come from the Indian origin. If you want to know the truth then the grave matters can be attributed to the events at Roswell. When the reports of the incidents at Roswell were coming, there was a big panic within the country. Many people have been missing or dead.
In late 1964 the U.S. Air Force set up a base in New Mexico to investigate the craft. It was a time when the unknown and the mythical were already prevailing. So many people believe in these weird and strange encounters that they were being reported everywhere.
UFO Videos from 2020 might contain some more bizarre accounts. However, it will be interesting to see what will happen in the next few years. The tension within the country will surely continue to grow and build. I am guessing that the government is concerned with the situation.
You can also watch UFO Videos from 2020 on the Internet. By now, you should not be wondering if there is anything strange going on.
Retired Colonel’s Photo Of An Alien Craft Over Arkansas
Retired Colonel’s Photo Of An Alien Craft Over Arkansas
JANUARY 9, 2007 …….VAN BUREN ARKANSAS
In the wake of reports of unidentified objects flying over Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, a retired Air Force pilot has his own mystery with a rash of bright, colorful lights he photographed hovering in skies over western Arkansas last week.
“I believe these lights were not of this world, and I feel a duty and responsibility to come forward,” Col. Brian Fields told WND. “I have no idea what they were.”
Fields, 61, was cooking chicken at his Van Buren, Ark., home Jan. 9 when just before 7 p.m., he observed two intensely bright lights as he looked to the southeast close to the horizon.
“At first I thought they were landing lights from an aircraft,” he said. “As I continued to observe them they began to slowly disappear, then suddenly one reappeared, followed by two, then three. On at least one occasion four or five appeared. Each time they would slowly fade and eventually disappear. This occurred several times and when they would reappear they might do so in differing numbers and in different positions, sometimes in a triangular shape, sometimes stacked on top of each other, sometimes line abreast, etc. When the objects appeared they might stay illuminated 10 or more minutes.”
Fields’ wife thought the lights may have been ground-based, but Fields says he’s certain they were airborne. The retired colonel spent close to 32 years in the military, flying F-16s as a member of the 188th Fighter Wing of the Arkansas Air National Guard.
“I’m certain it wasn’t an aircraft [from Earth],” said Fields, who also ruled out the possibility of flares, saying they didn’t descend like flares typically do. “It’s not anything I ever had any experience with . … They were some kind of energy or something.”
Fields grabbed his Canon digital camera with 6 megapixel resolution to document what he and his wife were witnessing, and snapped numerous images of the mysterious lights.
He says the phenomenon lasted an hour and 15 minutes, and local news agencies have not published or broadcast any reports of what the couple witnessed. WND surveyed local police and sheriffs agencies, as well as Fort Chaffee, a decommissioned Army base in the region, and no one reported anything out of the ordinary.
“I just can’t imagine other people didn’t see it,” Fields said, noting they appeared at times like a yo-yo at 5 to 10 degrees above the horizon.
Earlier this month, the Chicago Tribune reported workers for United Air Lines said they saw a flying saucerlike object hovering “low over O’Hare International Airport for several minutes before bolting through thick clouds with such intense energy that it left an eerie hole in overcast skies.”
That Nov. 7 sighting took place just before sunset about 4:30 p.m.
According to Tribune columnist Jon Hilkevitch, “All the witnesses said the object was dark gray and well defined in the overcast skies. They said the craft, estimated by different accounts to be 6 feet to 24 feet in diameter, did not display any lights.
“Some said it looked like a rotating Frisbee, while others said it did not appear to be spinning. All agreed the object made no noise and it was at a fixed position in the sky, just below the 1,900-foot cloud deck, until shooting off into the clouds.”
In the past, UFO sightings have often been regarded as a hoax. However, now many people are going on record to tell of their encounters with mysterious flying objects. So is there really a real flying saucer phenomenon?
Many UFO sightings are attributed to old space craft that have come back down to earth from outer space. There is a certain feeling of familiarity when you witness a “flying saucer” and a person have even mentioned it to you. It seems like some alien species who are visiting earth has been watching us for some time and a decision was made to observe our movements to see if we would be able to keep up. UFOs may look quite similar to ordinary planes, but in reality they are much different and much more secretive than normal planes.
Some have seen strange sounds, lights and even have been able to see or hear a “man in the moon”. So how does an unidentified flying object differ from a human-made flying craft? What is the difference? Does an unidentified flying object pose any danger to people on earth or is it just an interesting flight experience?
The UFO in fact looks just like a human body, and although the scientific process is trying to explain this discrepancy, the reality is that it just is not possible for a human body to create the same effect that the UFO could create. It simply does not work that way.
UFO sightings and strange sounds and even the strange feeling of otherworldly beings, may be different at the most superficial level. However, the real answer to the question “how do UFOs appear and disappear?” is actually quite simple.
In order for life to exist on earth, there must be an Earth-like planet around which life can grow and evolve, and we must have somehow transferred energy from another planet in order to enable life to evolve here. No one knows for sure what happened to give birth to life on this planet, but there is no doubt that a very important event took place to evolve life on earth. It’s called the Big Bang.
This event happened billions of years ago and the explosion of the star formed the solar system, and the planets around the star. Unfortunately, the existence of life cannot exist without oxygen. Without oxygen, the life form will not survive. We have already known that there are bacteria living in the oceans around the world and there is no way these organisms could possibly survive without oxygen. Therefore, the very first life forms on this planet came about because of some energy transfer from another planet, from another star.
Did Area 51 accidentally admit it reverse engineers UFOs? Maybe, Docs Show
Did Area 51 accidentally admit it reverse engineers UFOs? Maybe, Docs Show
Several government whistleblowers have claimed a secretive "Project Redlight" was carried out near Area 51 with an effort to reverse engineer extraterrestrial craft.
Now, never-before-noticed documents confirm a Project Redlight was real, and it was operated inside Project Oxcart, a program designed to test experimental aircraft.
No official definition stating Redlight's purpose (or the nature of its test vehicles) has been declassified, but interestingly, near the same time it was ongoing, a major defense contractor was researching propulsion methods behind unidentified flying object (UFO) data, and attempting to figure out how the craft worked, and how they could be controlled by a pilot.
The solar probe, launched in August 2018, is built to withstand the scorching temperatures of the sun's outer atmosphere, unraveling some of the mysteries lurking within. A suite of four instruments on board will help scientists understand how the sun's corona and solar wind affects the Earth and the rest of the solar system.
Besides the cool science, Parker is also in an orbit around the sun that makes it go really, really fast and gets it close enough to "touch" the sun.
Parker smashed its own records for speed and proximity to the blazing star, according to mission control at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory during its flyby on Jan. 29. The flyby was the probe's fourth close approach to the sun ("perihelion") and in the early hours of Feb. 1, the car-sized spacecraft beamed back a "status A" signal to Earth, the best of four possible signals. Basically, Parker gave a thumbs-up to say "I survived."
Closest spacecraft to the sun: 11.6 million miles (18.6 million kilometers)
Parker will continue to smash its own records all the way through to 2024 as it gets ever closer to the sun. Protected by a cutting-edge heat shield, the probe will eventually get within 4.3 million miles of the sun's "surface."
It's already turning out to be a good year for sun science.
On Jan. 29, another sun surveyor -- the Daniel K. Inouye telescope in Hawaii -- snapped the highest-resolution images of the sun's surface yet. The telescope, which is approximately 80-odd million miles further from the sun than NASA's Parker probe, is the most powerful solar telescope ever built, and it's not even online yet. Full operation should begin in July.
On Feb. 9, the European Space Agency will launch the Solar Orbiter. That spacecraft won't get as close to the sun as Parker, but it will help guide our understanding of how the star affects our solar system.
UFO sightings declassified: What is hidden in the RAF's secret UFO files? Full disclosure?
UFO sightings declassified: What is hidden in the RAF's secret UFO files? Full disclosure?
UFO sightings documented by the Royal Air Force are to be released to the public, promising to reveal "interesting nuggets" about Britain's history of possible alien encounters, a former UFO investigator told Express.co.uk.
The RAF will publish later this year the files and documents collected by its UFO unit over the last 50 years. Until 2009, the RAF investigated public reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and other aerial phenomena to asses their potential threat to Britain.
But after 50 years of seemingly fruitless investigations and no discernible alien-based threat found, the RAF ended its UFO-hunting efforts.
Now, after a Freedom of Information Act was filed with the RAF, the aerial brand of the armed forces revealed its plans to make its files public.
Nick Pope, a former UFO investigator for the Ministry of Defence, welcomed the move towards more transparency.
He told Express.co.uk: “The soon-to-be-released files are public correspondence ones, so there should be an interesting mix of Freedom of Information Act requests along with the MoD responses, and of course the UFO reports themselves.
UFO sightings: The RAF will disclose its UFO files later this year
(Image: GETTY)
UFO sightings: Could alien spaceships be flying over the UK?
“The MoD may have stopped investigating UFOs in 2009 when they axed their UFO project, but people didn't stop having sightings.
“While most FOIA responses are standard replies, some can be more revealing, if people ask smart questions.
“And while most UFO sightings are reports of lights in the sky, some cases can be truly spectacular, so all in all, there should be some interesting nuggets in these new files.”
Until recently, the RAF would hand its classified UFO files over to the National Archives.
The digitised files, however, will be published online and on a dedicated www.gov.uk website, accessible to all.
A spokesman for the RAF said “it had been assessed that it would be better to publish these records, rather than continue sending documents to the National Archives, and so they are looking to put them on to a dedicated gov.uk web page”.
After the files are cleared for publishing, they are expected to be go live online at later date in 2020.
We don't have a UFO hidden away at an RAF base somewhere
Nick Pope, former UFO investigator
Mr Pope argued the move will make it easer for people to access the declassified documents.
He said: “While some previously-released UFO files were digitised and made available online, the more recently released files were only available in hard copy, so people either had to go in person to The National Archives in Kew and sit in the reading room for hours, or order copies through the post - and pay for the privilege.
“These upcoming files should be posted on the www.gov.uk website, hopefully by the end of March, and maybe much sooner - perhaps literally within days.”
Unfortunately, the former UFO investigator does not think the RAF files will hold the “smoking gun” so many alien hunters and conspiracy theorists are hoping for.
Mr Pope said: “The UFO community always get excited about the MoD releasing batches of UFO files.
“They have a binary view of them, believing they either will or won't contain some sort of definitive smoking gun.
“The hopeful ones believe this sort of thing is a prelude to 'Disclosure', while the more cynical or conspiratorial ones think it's all disinformation and that the 'good stuff' is kept back.
“In reality, the files are not that black and white. They convey a more subtle truth about the UFO phenomenon, namely that while most sightings turn out to be misidentifications of ordinary objects and phenomena, some appear to defy conventional explanation.
“But despite the conspiracy theories, even those of us in government who looked at this officially didn't have all the answers.”
The UFO expert added: “Before people get too excited, they should bear in mind that all MoD documents and files - on any subject, not just UFOs - being prepared for public release will be carefully vetted.
“Subject matter experts go through papers line by line, word by word, to ensure that no information falling within the scope of the various FOIA exemptions is released.
“These exemptions are widely defined and cover categories such as defence, national security and intelligence matters.
“The bottom line - and I'm not being flippant here - is that we don't have a UFO hidden away at an RAF base somewhere, but if we did, it would probably be classified, exempt from disclosure, and not something that would be publicly released.”
Do supermassive black holes have friends? The nature of galaxy formation suggests that the answer is yes, and in fact, pairs of supermassive black holes should be common in the universe.
I am an astrophysicist and am interested in a wide range of theoretical problems in astrophysics, from the formation of the very first galaxies to the gravitational interactions of black holes, stars and even planets. Black holes are intriguing syste
ms, and supermassive black holes and the dense stellar environments that surround them represent one of the most extreme places in our universe.
The supermassive black hole that lurks at the center of our galaxy, called Sgr A*, has a mass of about 4 million times that of our Sun. A black hole is a place in space where gravity is so strong that neither particles or light can escape from it. Surrounding Sgr A* is a dense cluster of stars. Precise measurements of the orbits of these stars allowed astronomers to confirm the existence of this supermassive black hole and to measure its mass. For more than 20 years, scientists have been monitoring the orbits of these stars around the supermassive black hole. Based on what we’ve seen, my colleagues and I show that if there is a friend there, it might be a second black hole nearby that is at least 100,000 times the mass of the Sun.
At the center of our galaxy is a supermassive black hole in the region known as Sagittarius A. It has a mass of about 4 million times that of our Sun.ESA–C. Carreau
Supermassive black holes and their friends
Almost every galaxy, including our Milky Way, has a supermassive black hole at its heart, with masses of millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun. Astronomers are still studying why the heart of galaxies often hosts a supermassive black hole. One popular idea connects to the possibility that supermassive holes have friends.
To understand this idea, we need to go back to when the universe was about 100 million years old, to the era of the very first galaxies. They were much smaller than today’s galaxies, about 10,000 or more times less massive than the Milky Way. Within these early galaxies the very first stars that died created black holes, of about tens to thousand the mass of the Sun. These black holes sank to the center of gravity, the heart of their host galaxy. Since galaxies evolve by merging and colliding with one another, collisions between galaxies will result in supermassive black hole pairs – the key part of this story. The black holes then collide and grow in size as well. A black hole that is more than a million times the mass of our son is considered supermassive.
If indeed the supermassive black hole has a friend revolving around it in close orbit, the center of the galaxy is locked in a complex dance. The partners’ gravitational tugs will also exert its own pull on the nearby stars disturbing their orbits. The two supermassive black holes are orbiting each other, and at the same time, each is exerting its own pull on the stars around it.
The gravitational forces from the black holes pull on these stars and make them change their orbit; in other words, after one revolution around the supermassive black hole pair, a star will not go exactly back to the point at which it began.
Using our understanding of the gravitational interaction between the possible supermassive black hole pair and the surrounding stars, astronomers can predict what will happen to stars. Astrophysicists like my colleagues and me can compare our predictions to observations, and then can determine the possible orbits of stars and figure out whether the supermassive black hole has a companion that is exerting gravitational influence.
Using a well-studied star, called S0-2, which orbits the supermassive black hole that lies at the center of the galaxy every 16 years, we can already rule out the idea that there is a second supermassive black hole with mass above 100,000 times the mass of the Sun and farther than about 200 times the distance between the Sun and the Earth. If there was such a companion, then I and my colleagues would have detected its effects on the orbit of SO-2.
But that doesn’t mean that a smaller companion black hole cannot still hide there. Such an object may not alter the orbit of SO-2 in a way we can easily measure.
The physics of supermassive black holes
Supermassive black holes have gotten a lot of attention lately. In particular, the recent image of such a giant at the center of the galaxy M87 opened a new window to understanding the physics behind black holes.
The proximity of the Milky Way’s galactic center – a mere 24,000 light-years away – provides a unique laboratory for addressing issues in the fundamental physics of supermassive black holes. For example, astrophysicists like myself would like to understand their impact on the central regions of galaxies and their role in galaxy formation and evolution. The detection of a pair of supermassive black holes in the galactic center would indicate that the Milky Way merged with another, possibly small, galaxy at some time in the past.
That’s not all that monitoring the surrounding stars can tell us. Measurements of the star S0-2 allowed scientists to carry out a unique test of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. In May 2018, S0-2 zoomed past the supermassive black hole at a distance of only about 130 times the Earth’s distance from the Sun. According to Einstein’s theory, the wavelength of light emitted by the star should stretch as it climbs from the deep gravitational well of the supermassive black hole.
The stretching wavelength that Einstein predicted – which makes the star appear redder – was detected and proves that the theory of general relativity accurately describes thephysics in this extreme gravitational zone. I am eagerly awaiting the second closest approach of S0-2, which will occur in about 16 years, because astrophysicists like myself will be able to test more of Einstein’s predictions about general relativity, including the change of the orientation of the stars’ elongated orbit. But if the supermassive black hole has a partner, this could alter the expected result.
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image show’s the result of a galactic collision between two good-sized galaxies. This new jumble of stars is slowly evolving to become a giant elliptical galaxy.ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt
Finally, if there are two massive black holes orbiting each other at the galactic center, as my team suggests is possible, they will emit gravitational waves. Since 2015, the LIGO-Virgo observatories have been detecting gravitational wave radiation from merging stellar-mass black holes and neutron stars. These groundbreaking detections have opened a new way for scientists to sense the universe.
Any waves emitted by our hypothetical black hole pair will be at low frequencies, too low for the LIGO-Virgo detectors to sense. But a planned space-based detector known as LISA may be able to detect these waves which will help astrophysicists figure out whether our galactic center black hole is alone or has a partner.
Space researchers and amateur photographers in Finland have identified a new type of aurora, or northern lights. They call them “dunes.” Read more and see a video.
Something new under the sun! Working together with space researchers, Finnish amateur photographers have announced a type of aurora, or northern lights, never before described. They call the green-tinged aurora dunes, because, they said, it appears as an evenly spaced pattern of waves, resembling:
… a striped veil of clouds or dunes on a sandy beach.
The scientific community has acknowledged the newly categorized northern lights via the publication on January 28, 2020, of a study in a peer-reviewed journal, AGU Advances. The study tracked the origin of the dunes to the mesosphere and its boundary, the mesopause.
A statement from University of Helsinki explained how aurorae are made:
The sun releases a steady flow of charged particles, known as the solar wind. Reaching the Earth’s ionized upper atmosphere, the ionosphere, they create auroral emissions by exciting atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen atoms. The excitation state is released as auroral light.
Finnish nature photographer Matti Helin took some of the photos that led to the new categorization and understanding of the dune-like northern lights.
Like most scientific discoveries, the new form of northern lights came to be identified both serendipitously and also with some serious effort.Matti Helin, a northern lights and astronomy hobbyist who took part in the study, told EarthSky:
On October 7, 2015, there was a magnificent storm of auroras. One observer, Mikko Peussa, uploaded his photos and wondered what were these strange stripes in the picture. The same phenomenon was photographed by several people that night, including me.
He said the photos were posted at the website Taivaanvahti, which is an observation system maintained by Astronomical Association Ursa of Finland. A discussion began about the unusual lights. Helin said:
Taivaanvahti was the initial place where the seeds for this project were planted.
Aurora expert Minna Palmroth was writing a book – with the help of aurora photographers – when the hobbyists pointed out to her the new form of northern lights not previously categorized.
Then, in late 2018, Minna Palmroth, an aurora expert at the University of Helsinki, published a book titled Revontulibongarin opas (A guide for aurora borealis watchers):
The book was born out of Palmroth’s cooperation with northern lights enthusiasts and the answers she provided to questions about the physics of the phenomenon in the hobbyists’ Facebook group [the group is called Revontulikyttääjät or Aurora Stalkers). Thousands of magnificent photographs of the northern lights taken by hobbyists were surveyed and categorized for the book. Each auroral form is like a fingerprint, typical only of a certain phenomenon in the auroral zone.
During the classification, hobbyists pointed out that a certain auroral form did not fit into any of the pre-existing categories. Palmroth set aside these unusual forms for later consideration.
By an almost unbelievable coincidence, just days after the book was published, the hobbyists saw this unusual form again and immediately informed Palmroth.
Matti Helin commented:
One of the most memorable moments of our research collaboration was when the phenomenon appeared at that specific time and we were able to examine it in real time.
The new observations helped them all identify and categorize the new form. Helin said:
It was like piecing together a puzzle or conducting detective work. Every day we found new images and came up with new ideas. Eventually, we got to the bottom of it…
Palmroth and the citizen scientists believe that the dune-shaped auroral emissions are created when solar wind charges the oxygen atoms in a particular way. It happens when a rare gravity wave rising up in the atmosphere is filtered and bent to travel between the mesopause and an inversion layer intermittently formed below the mesopause. The mesopause and the inversion layer are colder than the other layers of the atmosphere. A wave channel is established between the two layers. In that channel, gravity waves coming from below can travel long distances without subsiding.
It’s gravity waves surging through the channel that create the dune-shaped northern lights.
Palmroth and the citizen scientists said this new auroral form provides researchers with a novel way to investigate conditions in the upper atmosphere.
How the new form of dune-like northern lights are created. A gravity wave rises up in the atmosphere and begins to travel between the mesopause and an inversion layer intermittently formed below the mesopause. A wave channel is established between the 2 layers. It’s gravity waves surging through the channel that create the dune-shaped northern lights.
The new auroral form – called “dunes” – appears as a green-tinged and evenly spaced pattern of waves resembling “a striped veil of clouds or dunes on a sandy beach.”
By the way, auroras on Earth are seen at high latitudes throughout each year, but – because they stem from activity on the sun – they are most intense and frequent when the sun is in an active part of its 11-year cycle. We’ve been at the low point of a cycle – with few spots seen on the sun’s surface, for example – but the sun should begin rising in activity soon, if it hasn’t begun already. The new cycle will be Cycle 25. It’s expected to be average in intensity, similar to Cycle 24. In the meantime, here’s a beautiful photo from Matti Helin of northern lights seen from Finland, captured in September 2019. It’s not the new form! But we know you’ll enjoy it …
In these images, the edge of the dunes are marked with numbered points in purple.
AGU
Bottom line: Finnish scientists and amateur photographers have identified a new type of aurora. They call it dunes, because, they said, it resembles wavy beach sand dunes.
With the potential to cause sea levels to rise by more than 11 feet and unleash the ice of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, the massive Totten Glacier has come to be known as the ‘sleeping giant.’
And now, scientists have discovered that strong winds over the Southern Ocean could be causing it to wake up.
A new study has found that East Antarctica’s largest glacier is melting from beneath, as winds transport warm water to the ice – and, these winds are expected to intensify with climate change, the experts warn.
Scroll down for video
The research revealed that the glacier’s flow speeds up when winds over the Southern Ocean are strong.These winds pull warm water up from the deep ocean, in a process known as upwelling.
EAST ANTARCTICA MORE STABLE THAN THE WEST
A recent study conducted by researchers based at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis has found that the central core of the East Antarctic ice sheet should remain stable even if the West Antarctic ice sheet melts.
The West Antarctic ice sheet is a marine-based ice sheet that is mostly grounded below sea level, which makes it much more susceptible to changes in sea level and variations in ocean temperature than the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.
By contrast the East Antarctic ice sheet has been considered relatively stable because most of the ice sheet was though to rest on bedrock above sea level, making it less susceptible to changes in climate.
In the study, led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, used satellite images and wind stress data to investigate the effect of wind on the water beneath the glacier.
While the glacier is known to speed up some years, it also slows down in others.
The research revealed that the glacier’s flow speeds up when winds over the Southern Ocean are strong.
These winds pull warm water up from the deep ocean, in a process known as upwelling.
The warm water climbs to the continental shelf – and, once it reaches the coast, it circulates beneath a floating chunk of the glacier, and causes the ice sheet to melt from below, according to the researchers.
‘Totten has been called the sleeping giant because it’s huge and has been seen as insensitive to changes in its environment,’ said lead author Chad Greene, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG).
‘But we’ve shown that if Totten is asleep, it’s certainly not in a coma – we’re seeing signs of responsiveness, and it might just take the wind blowing to wake it up.’
Wind strength varies from year to year, the researchers explain.
But, climate change is expected to intensify the winds over the Southern Ocean, which could, in turn, effect the melting of the Totten Glacier.
The process does not require the air or ocean temperatures to rise – instead, upwelling occurs as the wind displaces the surface water, making way for the deeper, warmer water.
‘It’s like when you blow across a hot bowl of soup and little bits of noodles from the bottom begin to swirl around and rise to the top,’ said Greene.
The new study follows up on previous research led by a team with the Australian Antarctic Division at the Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Cooperative Research Center.
That research found that the warm water below Totten causes the glacier to detach from the seafloor, and instead float.
This can cause the flow to further accelerate.
With the potential to cause sea levels to rise by more than 11 feet and unleash the ice of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, the massive Totten Glacier has come to be known as the ‘sleeping giant’
‘The remaining question was, why do the canyons beneath Totten get flushed with warm water some years and cold water other years,’ said Jason Roberts, a glaciologist who led the earlier study.
The findings suggest melting at Totten could become more extreme as winds grow stronger with climate change.
‘Ice sheet sensitivity to wind forcing has been hypothesized for a long time, but it takes decades of observation to show unequivocal cause and effect,’ said Donald Blankenship, a senior researcher at UTIG who contributed to this study and Roberts’ study.
‘Now we’re at the point where we can explicitly show the links between what happens in the atmosphere, what happens in the ocean, and what happens to the Antarctic Ice Sheet.’
Astronaut Screams At The Sight Of A UFO When Approaching The ISS
Astronaut Screams At The Sight Of A UFO When Approaching The ISS
It is very intriguing to note the automatic, conditioned reaction of the fellow astronaut who immediately calmed her with an apparent sense of urgency before she could even fully let out a scream.
Italy's first female astronaut, Samantha Cristoforetti can be heard shouting over the comms from her Soyuz spacecraft during docking maneuvers with the International space Station. What was the cause of her alarm?
Would or even could NASA tell us if they think E.T.'s may be monitoring our world? Wouldn't they have to withhold such information, if it were true as a matter of national and international security in fact?
An image from NASA's STEREO spacecraft shows an apparently quiet sun on Nov. 9, 2018, when NASA's Parker Solar Probe was studying a "stealth" coronal mass ejection.
Coronal mass ejections aren't known for being subtle: Each such event can fling huge amounts of the soup of charged particles called plasma off the sun and out into the solar system.
In November 2018, as seen from Earth and certain spacecraft, the sun seemed to be calm. But it wasn't: The sun was experiencing what scientists call a "stealth" coronal mass ejection. And conveniently, NASA's Parker Solar Probe was completing its first close pass behind the sun, putting its instruments in a perfect position to see what was happening on Nov. 11 and 12 during this usually cryptic event.
"If you've ever seen a coronal mass ejection image, you normally see a lot of activity in these images," Kelly Korreck, a solar physicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, said during a presentation last month at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu. "You would see a large blowout, you would probably see one of these exploding. But as you saw in this video, there wasn't much there."
Even in some of the Parker Solar Probe data, it wasn't obvious at first what was happening during the incident, Korreck said. "When we looked at this initially, just the thermal data, we didn't necessarily think that there was a coronal mass ejection there," she said.
But other observations targeting energetic particles did include the fingerprint of a shock, a phenomenon that usually accompanies a coronal mass ejection. Scientists could also confirm the probe was flying through a coronal mass ejection based on data its instruments were gathering about the magnetic field.
The Parker Solar Probe is flying closer to the sun than any spacecraft ever has, which means it can study coronal mass ejections earlier in their development than other probes can. That means scientists hope the probe's data could help better pinpoint where on the sun an individual coronal mass ejection is born.
But just seeing a stealth coronal mass ejection is a step in the right direction, according to Korreck. "They're something that we're not traditionally able to see in the ways that we've previously detected coronal mass ejections," she said. "We're starting to see hints of them with better and better telescope resolution. However, at the same time, we've kind of reached the end where we actually have to go in situ to do a better measurement." And there's nothing more in situ than Parker Solar Probe.
Within our solar system, coronal mass ejections are important because they can interfere with communications and navigation satellites orbiting Earth. And the farther astronauts venture from Earth, the more vulnerable they will be to the potential health impacts of such blasts. That's when learning to see coronal mass ejections we currently miss would become particularly important.
Such phenomena are also intriguing because our sun is a star like any other. Scientists have spotted coronal mass ejections produced by other stars, but they'll never be able to see all such distant events.
"This is another class that definitely can't be seen on other stars," Korreck said. "Is there a way that we can do this with Parker [Solar Probe] to better understand what's going on in other star systems?"
Ondanks dat er heel veel nepbeelden rondzwerven op internet komt er af en toe ook wat betrouwbaar materiaal bovendrijven.
En in enkele daarvan verschijnen vreemde piramidevormige objecten in de lucht.
We beginnen met een lezer die het volgende bericht stuurt (dank!):
Van de week was ik aan t rondkijken op Google Earth, ik zoomde zomaar ergens op in en kwam bij deze foto terecht. Jullie kunnen dit zelf vinden als je bv “half way across australia of kimba intikt” Ik merk wel meer foto’s op door de jaren heen met een ‘extra’ zon/ster Links boven de zon (ook op deze foto dus) en volg dan ook t verhaal rond niburu wel. Maar boven dat extra lichtpuntje zag ik tot mijn verbazing deze piramide in de lucht.
Het blauwe bolletje op de afbeelding is een lensflare, maar daarboven is heel duidelijk een piramidevormig object waar te nemen. Aangezien de opname afkomstig is van Google Earth nemen we aan dat er niet mee is geknoeid en dat zich daar wel degelijk iets bevindt.
Een object dat een beetje half "gecloaked" is, onzichtbaar voor het oog, maar dat er wel degelijk is. Dat cloaken/onzichtbaar maken vindt ook vaak plaats door de vorm van een wolk aan te nemen, maar daar is in dit geval geen sprake van omdat het een helder blauwe lucht is.
Om dat soort objecten toch zichtbaar te maken, maken ufo-spotters vaak gebruik van infrarood camera's zoals we eerder schreven.
Het toeval wil dat de bekende Youtuber Mr. MB333 ook een opname heeft van een gecloakte piramide in de lucht. Dit keer is het wel een wolk die een rol speelt en de foto is enkele dagen geleden gemaakt door één van zijn volgens in Tulsa in de Amerikaanse staat Oklahoma.
Op volgende foto zie je de piramide rechtsboven en het zwarte pijltje ernaast rechts is de cursor van Mr. MB333, dus geen ufo. Rechts onderin beeld, net boven het gebouw, is wel ook nog een schotelvormige gecloakte ufo te zien denken wij.
De volgende foto geeft een wat duidelijker beeld van de piramide vormige ufo.
Zoals een vrouw genaamd Venetia enkele dagen geleden overkwam in de buurt van de Amerikaanse stad Philadelphia. Ze zag een piramide in de lucht en terwijl normaal gesproken piramides ferm op de grond staan, was dat hier niet het geval.
Ook scheen er een soort verlichting van achter de piramide te zijn, waardoor het object goed zichtbaar was aan de avondhemel. Wat het is, weet tot op dit moment helemaal niemand.
In december 2018 schreven wij het volgende over piramidevormige ufo's:
Ondanks dat de waarneming boven Moskou negen jaar geleden plaatsvond, is niemand er nog is geslaagd om hier een verklaring voor te vinden.
Om te zien hoe het er in Moskou destijds uitzag, hierna nog eens de opname:
Nu zijn we negen jaar verder en wordt er boven het Pentagon in Amerika een vergelijkbaar object waargenomen.
Een lezer schrijft daarover het volgende:
Het is op 19 december al gebeurd, en ik dacht: jullie rapporteren er ook wel over, maar dat hebben jullie nog niet gedaan. Het gaat om een piramidevormige UFU boven het Pentagon. Eerder, in 2009 en opnieuw in 2013, is eenzelfde object ook al uitgebreid gefilmd boven het Kremlin in Moskou.
Omdat er meerdere opnames zijn, ook van de UFO boven het Kremlin, lijken filmbewerkingen in deze gevallen uitgesloten. Ook een Russische politicus ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksey_Pushkov ) heeft de UFO boven het Kremlin dus besproken in zijn politieke praatprogramma op de Russische televisie, en hij heeft het zeer serieus genomen.
De opname vanuit een auto, op 19 december, is naar mijn mening echt spectaculair. Ze rijden vlak langs het Pentagon en ze zeggen op een gegeven moment dat de UFO verdwenen is, terwijl op hetzelfde moment op hun opname, boven in beeld, je de gigantische UFO nog gewoon kan zien, maar ze kijken er onder door of ze herkennen de vorm even niet.
Volgens mij zijn deze beelden net zo spectaculair als indertijd de UFO boven de Rotskoepel op de Tempelberg in Jerusalem, alleen gaat het nu om een veel groter object dat ook veel langer is blijven hangen, met name indertijd in Moskou boven het Kremlin, en dit object is kennelijk geïnteresseerd in de beleidsmakers/machtscentra van de twee grootste kernmachten.
Tot zover de lezer.
Hier volgt een derde opname gemaakt van de vreemde ufo boven het Pentagon:
For those hoping to one day escape climate change on Earth before the polar ice caps melt and cover major cities with water, you can cross Mars off of your list of potential sanctuary planets. New videos from the Red Planet show white ice caps melting and that’s making some folks blue … although not at NASA.
“This animation shows where a section of the slope at right has collapsed since three Mars-years ago and deposited a field of ice blocks.”
Planetary geologist Alfred McEwen is referring to a HiRise image from Mars released on January 31, 2020. HiRise is the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which is taking extremely high resolution photographs — 0.3 m/pixel (about 1 foot). This is the camera which has picked up both the Mars Opportunity and Curiosity rovers. The “animation” (watch it here) switches between two photographs of the same spot – one taken on December 25, 2019, and the other three Martian years (2,61 days or 5.6 Earth years) ago.
Fallen ice blocks from polar cap collapsing
The images are from the Martian north pole and show a solid ice cap 5.6 years ago and a pile of ice block rubble today. Ice falling off of the ice cap can’t be good news … it’s terrible news in Antarctica, where the melting of the so-called Doomsday Glacier is quickly heading it to its own collapse, the global rising of the oceans and all of the negative consequences that will bring. Is Mars headed for the same fate … before humans can got here and cause it themselves?
“In contrast to shrinking ice caps on Earth, climate change is not to blame on Mars. This mesa in this cutout is shrinking over time as the frozen carbon dioxide turns to vapor. Pits in this sheet of dry ice (that give the deposit an appearance resembling Swiss cheese) are enlarging over time, exposing an older surface below that is likely made up of water ice.”
The HiRise camera before launch
Well, that’s a relief … in a good news/bad kind of way. More carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere is not necessarily good news, but water ice closer to or on the surface is good news for human explorers looking for water. On the other hand, melting ice also causes avalanches – something the HiRise also picked up at the Marian north pole last year. Again, NASA downplayed it as something expected to happen every Martian year when the sun hits the Martian cliffs, melting the ice and sending blocks crashing down steep slopes, eventually kicking up dust, not snow.
Nothing to worry about, says NASA. Go back to thinking about the problems that will be created AFTER humans settle to Mars.
How the Tiniest Particles in Our Universe Saved Us from Complete Annihilation
How the Tiniest Particles in Our Universe Saved Us from Complete Annihilation
Recently discovered ripples of spacetime called gravitational waves could contain evidence to prove the theory that life survived the Big Bang because of a phase transition that allowed neutrino particles to reshuffle matter and anti-matter, explains a new study by an international team of researchers.
How we were saved from a complete annihilation is not a question in science fiction or a Hollywood movie. According to the Big Bang theory of modern cosmology, matter was created with an equal amount of anti-matter. If it had stayed that way, matter and anti-matter should have eventually met and annihilated one to one, leading up to a complete annihilation.
Fig 1: Inflation stretched the initial microscopic Universe to a macroscopic size and turned the cosmic energy into matter. However, it likely created an equal amount of matter and anti-matter predicting complete annihilation of our universe. The authors discuss the possibility that a phase transition after inflation led to a tiny imbalance between the amount of matter and anti-matter, so that some matter could survive a near-complete annihilation. Such a phase transition is likely to lead to a network of “rubber-band”-like objects called cosmic strings, that would produce ripples of space-time known as gravitational waves. These propagating waves can get through the hot and dense Universe and reach us today, 13.8 billion years after the phase transition. Such gravitational waves can most likely be discovered by current and future experiments.
Original credit: R. Hurt/Caltech-JPL, NASA, and ESA
Credit: Kavli IPMU – Kavli IPMU modified this figure based on the image credited by R.Hurt/Caltech-JPL, NASA, and ESA
But our existence contradicts this theory. To overcome a complete annihilation, the Universe must have turned a small amount of anti-matter into matter creating an imbalance between them. The imbalance needed is only a part in a billion. But it has remained a complete mystery when and how the imbalance was created.
“The Universe becomes opaque to light once we look back to around a million years after its birth. This makes the fundamental question of ‘why are we here?’ difficult to answer,” says paper co-author Jeff Dror, postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and physics researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Since matter and anti-matter have the opposite electrical charges, they cannot turn into each other, unless they are electrical neutral. Neutrinos are the only electrical neutral matter particles we know, and they are the strongest contender to do this job. A theory many researchers support is that the Universe went through a phase transition so that neutrinos could reshuffle matter and anti-matter.
“A phase transition is like boiling water to vapor, or cooling water to ice. The behavior of matter changes at specific temperatures called critical temperature. When a certain metal is cooled to a low temperature, it loses electrical resistance completely by a phase transition, becoming a superconductor. It is the basis of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) for cancer diagnosis or maglev technology that floats a train so that it can run at 300 miles an hour without causing dizziness. Just like a superconductor, the phase transition in the early Universe may have created a very thin tube of magnetic fields called cosmic strings,” explains paper co-author Hitoshi Murayama, MacAdams Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, Principal Investigator at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, University of Tokyo, and senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Dror and Murayama are part of a team of researchers from Japan, US and Canada who believe the cosmic strings then try to simplify themselves, leading up to tiny wobbling of spacetime called gravitational waves. These could be detected by future space-borne observatories such as LISA, BBO (European Space Agency) or DECIGO (Japanese Astronautical Exploration Agency) for nearly all possible critical temperatures.
“The recent discovery of gravitational waves opens up a new opportunity to look back further to a time, as the Universe is transparent to gravity all the way back to the beginning. When the Universe might have been a trillion to a quadrillion times hotter than the hottest place in the Universe today, neutrinos are likely to have behaved in just the way we require to ensure our survival. We demonstrated that they probably also left behind a background of detectable gravitational ripples to let us know,” says paper co-author Graham White, a postdoctoral fellow at TRIUMF.
“Cosmic strings used to be popular as a way of creating small variations in mass densities that eventually became stars and galaxies, but it died because recent data excluded this idea. Now with our work, the idea comes back for a different reason. This is exciting!” says Takashi Hiramatsu, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, University of Tokyo, which runs Japan’s gravitational wave detector KAGRA and Hyper-Kamiokande experiments.
“Gravitational wave from cosmic strings has a spectrum very different from astrophysical sources such as merger of black holes. It is quite plausible that we will be completely convinced the source is indeed cosmic strings,” says Kazunori Kohri, Associate Professor at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization Theory Center in Japan.
“It would be really exciting to learn why we exist at all,” says Murayama. “This is the ultimate question in science.”
The paper was published as an Editor’s Suggestion in Physical Review Letters online on 28 January, 2020.
Contacts and sources:
Motoko Kakubayashi
Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU)
High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK)
Institute for Cosmic Ray Research (ICRR)
University of California Berkeley
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
TRIUMF
Publication:
Testing Seesaw and Leptogenesis with Gravitational Waves Authors: Jeff A. Dror(1, 2), Takashi Hiramatsu (3), Kazunori Kohri (4, 5, 6), Hitoshi Murayama (1, 6, 2, 7), and Graham White (8)
Antarctica & Human Cloning: What's Under the Ice? - Great Video
Antarctica & Human Cloning: What's Under the Ice? - Great Video
This is the stuff they were doing in the days of Noah. The bible says it will happen again in the end times. God will put a stop to it. They just want to corrupt Gods creation because they can not create anything. Only God can create life!
Trump signed a bill just before this year, NO CLONES ARE LEGAL NOW.
Mine was school system, beware speech class. Miller elementary school, Escondido CA . Tunnels under. Also hospitals. Died while getting my tonsils out at 6 years old, with my 2 older sisters. I wasn’t released until 3 weeks later. Bleeding internally, scars on face. I was beat to a pulp. I remember Heaven, I did not fracture. I was protected by the blood of the Lamb. God took me from my body and showed me amazing things. I’m not the only one with this story. We were taught how to fight supernaturally. Spiritual warfare.
On the cartoon Futurama, they have an episode where Hermes comes back from a trip with a plasma-like parasitic brain slug on his head. His personality is completely changed. He spends the rest of the show trying to recruit more victims for the brain slug. The writers are freemasons. Most of their shows reveal clues we are now learning with the great awakening. It’s worth a look-see.
What evil and demonic people we have within our government, our music industry, and in Hollywood (Pedowood). Sick and lunatic people everywhere.
They may have a body and soul ( thought, emotions) but they will never have a spirit. The Spirit is only from Almighty God. Unless it an evil spirit that possesses the body. Very evil! I would say guard your spirit. Make sure you don’t go too deep into this unless you know who you are in Christ. To be honest I have wondered about how much Q + knows about time travel. It has come to my mind. I have never taken it seriously.
Demon souls perhaps in these are genetically grown clones? they shortened the telomeres these guys are freaking evil! messing with the DNA man you are so give yourself a death sentence because God is not gonna be happy with this think about fallen angels hello?
This is a level of evil that is hard to believe and understand. BTW: The Rock just started introducing the Chief players. He said “It’s time to unleash hell” Cannot make this S**t up!!
think spiritual read the bible, all of it not just cannon and integrate it. it all makes sense, I study the bible all the time, I am about to become more than human the RIGHT WAY, through GOD’S grace. HE has given ME THE POWER to become a son of God…and I am BECOMING, and not like the Baphomet imitator, but like JESUS…
“So it’s like the consciousness of the person is there, but the personality is not.” HRC immediately comes to mind, when she was before some committee hearing on Benghazi, and when asked what she was doing on the night the Embassy was attacked, she couldn’t stop laughing! I don’t think I was watching an early model, as described, but it was like watching a demon coming through. Well, that may not have been her clone at that hearing. That’s probably just her. She had that same hideous laughter when she was a very young lawyer, bragging about getting an accused rapist of a young girl off the hook. Demons Inside. Naturally.
Conspiracy theorists believe they have found evidence of ruins on Mars which they believe is evidence of ancient aliens. In an image taken by NASA’s Curiosity Rover, what looks like a large structure can be seen on top of a hill. Some alien hunters believe this is proof that not only did aliens once live on the Red Planet, but perhaps even worshipped a higher power.
Prominent conspiracy theorist Scott C Waring, however, believes that NASA will refuse to investigate the ‘ancient structure’ as it wants to keep evidence of aliens under wraps.
Mr Waring wrote on his blog UFO Sightings Daily: “I was looking through this weeks uploads made by the Curiosity Rover and found that in the distance was a ancient temple structure built on a hilltop. The structure has five or more levels, each one getting smaller than the one before it.
“The top level being the highest. The main structure at the top of the levels looks like a pyramid with the top built flat.
Mars ancient temple found in NASA images is PROOF of alien civilisation - shock claim
(Image: UFO SIGHTINGS DAILY)
The supposed temple on Mars
(Image: UFO SIGHTINGS DAILY)
“Each level has a flat perfectly horizontal top so that someone or something can walk on it. I believe the rover will not investigate this because NASA’s true mission is to drop feed the public boring information about space so it satisfies them, but keeps the public in the dark about the true nature of the surface of Mars.”
However, sceptics and NASA would say the ‘temple’ and other similar findings are just the effects of pareidolia – a psychological phenomenon when the brain tricks the eyes into seeing familiar objects or shapes in patterns or textures such as a rock surface.
This would mean that the Martian ‘temple' could just be a misshapen rock or even a hilly area.
I found a temple on a hillside on Mars in a gigipan photo today. The temple is half buried, but still the doorway is visible and its facing us. The corners of the walls are still well preserved and easy to make out. Putting monuments on mountains and hilltops has always been a significant position for monuments of religious, cultural and historical significants. This appears to be a temple. I guess religion gives all species a certain comfort and purpose.
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UFO Seen During Day Over Leeds, England, Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Seen During Day Over Leeds, England, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Feb 2, 2020
Location of sighting: Leeds, UK
Source: MUFON
This moves very fast and smoothly, too much so to be a balloon or bag. However RC toys and drones could be in this shape, but they usually make a very loud hum noise. I hear nothing in the video. This object is silent. The object is a black oval shape, like a disk. It moves and shows us the bottom for a few seconds. This looks like its a UFO over the UK. Very cool video showing us its movement.
Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
Sat at home, from the corner of my eye I saw the usual birds flying outside and a black disc like shape started hovering and then floating on a straight path. It was high, above the trees. It was all black, disc shaped and moved with a tilting motion. Travelling in a straight line tilting until I lost sight of it past the window frame I was looking out of. I was shocked, and couldn’t think of what it could be… hoping it wasn’t just a drone or something but it had such a weird shape and movement. It definitely wasn’t a bird, or a weather balloon or a plastic bag.
UFO Seen During Day Over Leeds, England, Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Seen During Day Over Leeds, England, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Feb 2, 2020
Location of sighting: Leeds, UK
Source: MUFON
This moves very fast and smoothly, too much so to be a balloon or bag. However RC toys and drones could be in this shape, but they usually make a very loud hum noise. I hear nothing in the video. This object is silent. The object is a black oval shape, like a disk. It moves and shows us the bottom for a few seconds. This looks like its a UFO over the UK. Very cool video showing us its movement.
Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
Sat at home, from the corner of my eye I saw the usual birds flying outside and a black disc like shape started hovering and then floating on a straight path. It was high, above the trees. It was all black, disc shaped and moved with a tilting motion. Travelling in a straight line tilting until I lost sight of it past the window frame I was looking out of. I was shocked, and couldn’t think of what it could be… hoping it wasn’t just a drone or something but it had such a weird shape and movement. It definitely wasn’t a bird, or a weather balloon or a plastic bag.
Huge greenish anomalies and formation of bright lights moving in space
Huge greenish anomalies and formation of bright lights moving in space
On January 19 strange greenish anomalies have been recorded via the ISS live feed app. which you can see Here.
Now, for the second and a third time, another witnesses using the same ISS live feed app recorded a new group of these strange anomalies and something like a huge formation of bright objects moving next to the greenish anomalies on February 1 and on February 2, 2020.
What could it be? Moon fragments from a possible meteorite impact on the Moon, as some people suggested? It seems unlikely. So what is going on in space?
Viva Air Pilot Captured Cube-like UFO at High Altitude
Viva Air Pilot Captured Cube-like UFO at High Altitude
An airline pilot has shared incredible footage showing a cube-shaped UFO moving across the sky. The cockpit view shows what appears to be a metallic object flying at a hypersonic speed above Columbia, without any visible means of propulsion.
Reportedly shot by a commercial pilot with Viva Air, the incredible footage shows the cubic object shoot pass the aircraft at a distance.
When zooms in, the high altitude object resembles a cube and seems to glide down through the clouds like someone is controlling it.
TikTok user CesarinMP first posted the video before being published on January 31 to YouTube.
Some viewers of the footage observed the cube UFO resembled a Borg spaceship from the Sci-fi series Star Trek.
This is not the first time a cube UFO has been spotted as other cubes have been observed before by several witnesses, including NASA.
In January, UFO enthusiasts were sent into a frenzy after seeing a clip of block-shaped object hovering over Georgia, US. In the short video, the object seems to hang aimlessly in the clear sky and looks to move slowly and steadily.
In late 2018, NASA’s solar and heliospheric observatory (SOHO) captured an apparent massive cube-shaped object. The UFO appears to have a square shape with trails of gas or smoke following behind as it descends into the star. The mysterious object hung steadily above the clouds for a few minutes and at one point, ejected a red orb. The clip was uploaded to the YouTube account ‘The Tales From Out There.’
The warm water found flowing under Thwaites Glacier in western Antarctica helps explain its rapid melting. Thwaites is part of what’s described the “weak underbelly” of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Its melting has implications for sea-level rise around the world.
For the first time, scientists have measured the presence of warm water at a vital point underneath rapidly melting Thwaites Glacier – which the BBC once labeled as Doomsday Glacier – in western Antarctica. With Pine Island and Smith Glaciers, Thwaites is sometimes called the weak underbelly of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. At its surface, it moves at 1.2 miles per year (2 km per year) near its grounding line. The water below it was measured earlier this year, through a small but extremely deep hole drilled in Thwaites Glacier at the point where the bedrock underlying the glacier meets the sea.
A January 29, 2020, statement from New York University (NYU), which conducted the research, said this finding is:
… an alarming discovery that points to the cause behind the gradual melting of this ice shelf while also raising concerns about sea-level rise around the globe.
The recorded warm waters were more than two degrees above freezing.
On the way to the Thwaites Glacier research site – at an intermediate camp in West Antarctica (WAIS Divide Camp) – the researchers caught this solar halo, created by ice crystals in the air. The expedition took place in January, during the height of Antarctic summer, a period of 24-hour daylight.
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet – whose bed lies well below sea level and whose edges flow into ice shelves that jut out and float on the Amundsen Sea – has been watched carefully for some years. Scientists believe it has the potential to collapse suddenly, raising sea levels around the world. The new measurement of warm water under Thwaites Glacier is just a small piece of the puzzle of this region, one of many studies that have been conducted in recent years, as scientists try to determine the stability of the ice sheet. According to the scientists who conducted this study:
Thwaites’ demise alone could have significant impact globally.
It would drain a mass of water that is roughly the size of Great Britain or the state of Florida and currently accounts for approximately 4 percent of global sea-level rise. Some scientists see Thwaites as the most vulnerable and most significant glacier in the world in terms of future global sea-level rise. Its collapse would raise global sea levels by nearly one meter, perhaps overwhelming existing populated areas.
David Holland and Keith Nicholls led the expedtion to Antarctica in January 2020. Here they are operating a borehole winch to lower a turbulence device into the ocean cavity on Thwaites Glacier.
The new measurement was made at the glacier’s grounding zone; that’s the place at which the ice transitions between resting fully on bedrock and floating on the ocean as an ice shelf. The scientists’ measurements were made in early January 2020, after the research team used hot water drilling to create an access hole in the glacier. The hole was not very wide (35 cm or about a foot wide). But it was extremely deep – 600 meters (2,000 feet) deep – or about the depth of 6 1/2 American football fields laid end to end. The researchers then deployed an ocean-sensing device to measure the waters moving below the glacier’s surface. They said:
This device gauges the turbulence of the water as well as other properties such as temperature. The result of turbulence is the mixing of fresh meltwater from the glacier and salty water from the ocean.
[The new work] marks the first time that ocean activity beneath the Thwaites Glacier has been accessed through a bore hole and that a scientific instrument measuring underlying ocean turbulence and mixing has been deployed. The hole was opened on January 8 and 9 and the waters beneath the glacier measured January 10 and 11.
The scientists said they expected the data gathered in the field will enhance scientific understanding of how ocean conditions are affecting the melt rate of Thwaites Glacier. They said:
When this is combined with ice sheet models it will allow the glacier’s potential sea-level contribution to be more accurately predicted.
Warm waters in this part of the world, as remote as they may seem, should serve as a warning to all of us about the potential dire changes to the planet brought about by climate change. If these waters are causing glacier melt in Antarctica, resulting changes in sea level would be felt in more inhabited parts of the world.
Researchers dug out the drill site after a 3-day storm with winds reaching 50 knots (nearly 60 mph). Drifts of snow accumulated up to five feet (1.5 meters).
Bottom line: For the first time, scientists have measured the temperature and turbulence of warm water flowing underneath Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. The glacier is one of several in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet that is known to be melting rapidly, with the potential to cause dramatic sea level rise.
A newly found young star cluster on the outskirts of our Milky Way seems to be made of material from the Magellanic Clouds. It appears the collision between the Clouds and our Milky Way may already be starting.
View larger. | A newly found cluster of young stars (blue stars) sits on the periphery of our Milky Way. The stars in this cluster probably formed from material originating in neighboring dwarf galaxies, called the Magellanic Clouds. Note also the Magellanic Stream, extending almost halfway around the Milky Way.
Since the 1960s and ’70s, radio astronomers have been watching a long trail of gas extending from the Magellanic Clouds, the two famous dwarf galaxies visible in Southern Hemisphere skies. This gas trail is called the Magellanic Stream, and it extends across more than 180 degrees of our sky, almost halfway around the Milky Way. The gas in the Stream, and the Magellanic Clouds themselves, will someday collide with our Milky Way, astronomers say. Now – according to a January 8, 2020, presentation by astronomers at the AAS meeting in Honolulu – it appears that signs of this collision are already in evidence. Collisions and mergers between galaxies create new stars. And astronomers have now found a young star cluster on the outskirts of our Milky Way galaxy, near the Magellanic Stream, in a part of space inhabited by our galaxy’s oldest stars. The astronomers said the stars in this young cluster appear to be made of material from the Magellanic Clouds.
The discovery suggests that [the Magellanic Stream] is about half as far from crashing into the Milky Way as previously thought.
In other words, it suggests our Milky Way’s impending collision with the Magellanic Clouds is already beginning: it’s already birthing new stars.
Adrian Price-Whelan at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City led this research. He said the cluster now bears his name: Price-Whelan 1. Price-Whelan and his colleagues presented their findings on January 8 at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Honolulu. The work is published in two parts in the peer-reviewedAstronomical Journal: here and here.
A visualization of the position of the newly discovered Price-Whelan 1 star cluster (blue points) relative to our Milky Way galaxy (white points). The star cluster probably formed from material from the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (purple points).
Identifying clusters of stars is tricky because our galaxy is chock-full of the radiant orbs. Some stars may appear to be close together in the sky but actually sit at drastically different distances from Earth. Other stars may temporarily neighbor one another but move on in opposite directions.
Determining which stars are actually clustered together requires many precise measurements over time.
In this case, those measurements originated with the amazing Gaia spacecraft, which has already cataloged distances and motions for 1.7 billion Milky Way stars. Price-Whelan searched the Gaia dataset for:
… very blue stars, which are rare in the universe, and identified clumps of stars moving alongside them. After cross-matching with and removing known clusters, one remained.
The newfound cluster is relatively young at 117 million years old [very young in astronomical terms] and is on the far outskirts of the Milky Way.
It’s really, really far away. It’s further than any known young stars in the Milky Way, which are typically in the disk. So right away, I was like, ‘Holy smokes, what is this?’
EarthSky community member Lynton Brown captured this beautiful image of the Milky Way over Taylor’s Lake near Horsham, Australia, on April 22, 2019. The 2 objects on the right are the Magellanic Clouds. Thank you, Lynton!
The Price-Whelan 1 star cluster’s location near the Magellanic Stream is a clue to these stars’ origin. These astronomers said:
Gas in the Stream doesn’t contain much metal, unlike gases in the outer reaches of the Milky Way. David Nidever, assistant professor of physics at Montana State University in Bozeman, led an analysis of the metal content of the 27 brightest stars in the cluster.
Just like the Magellanic Stream, the stars contain meager levels of metal.
The researchers propose that the cluster formed as gas from the Magellanic Stream passed through the gases surrounding the Milky Way. This pass-through created a drag force that compressed the Magellanic Stream gas. This drag, along with tidal forces from the Milky Way’s gravitational tug, condensed the gas enough to trigger star formation. Over time, the stars zoomed ahead of the surrounding gas and joined the Milky Way.
The stars’ presence presents a unique opportunity, these astronomers said. They explained:
Gauging the distance of gas from Earth is tricky and imprecise, so astronomers weren’t sure how far the Magellanic Stream was from reaching the Milky Way. The distance of stars, on the other hand, is comparatively trivial. Using the current positions and movements of stars in the cluster, the researchers predict that the edge of the Magellanic Stream is 90,000 light-yearsaway from the Milky Way. That’s roughly half the distance previously predicted.
If the Magellanic Stream is closer, especially the leading arm closest to our galaxy, then it’s likely to be incorporated into the Milky Way sooner than the current model predicts. Eventually, that gas will turn into new stars in the Milky Way’s disk. Right now, our galaxy is using up gas faster than its being replenished. This extra gas coming in will help us replenish that reservoir and make sure that our galaxy continues to thrive and form new stars.
The updated distance to the Magellanic Stream will improve models of where the Magellanic Clouds have been and where they’re going, Price-Whelan said.
He said the improved numbers could even settle a debate over whether the Magellanic Clouds have crossed through the Milky Way before, adding:
Finding an answer to that question will help astronomers better understand the history and properties of our galaxy.
Astronomers have spotted a group of young stars (blue) on the outskirts of the Milky Way. The scientists propose that these stars formed from material from two dwarf galaxies known as the Magellanic Clouds.
Bottom line: Astronomers have discovered a young star cluster on the outskirts of our Milky Way. Its member stars appear to be made of material from the Magellanic Clouds. The work suggests that the impending collision between our Milky Way galaxy and the Clouds and the Magellanic Stream is already beginning.
OTHER PLANETS COULD HAVE EVEN MORE LIFE THAN EARTH DOES, SCIENTISTS SAY
OTHER PLANETS COULD HAVE EVEN MORE LIFE THAN EARTH DOES, SCIENTISTS SAY
'This is a surprising conclusion'
Other worlds could be filled with even more flourishing life than we have on Earth, scientists have said.
The new study could have significant implications for the way we search for alien life. It also suggests that search could be more likely to find life on exoplanets than we had thought.
"This is a surprising conclusion", said lead researcher Dr Stephanie Olson. "It shows us that conditions on some exoplanets with favourable ocean circulation patterns could be better suited to support life that is more abundant or more active than life on Earth."
In recent years, scientists have found huge numbers of exoplanets, or worlds orbiting around stars that are not our own. But they are all very far away – impossible to reach even with the fastest space probes, and difficult even to see in any detail.
Researchers are working on a variety of ways to learn about those worlds, including telescopes that will be able to "sniff" their atmospheres and learn more about what the planets could be made of. But to understand the information that comes back, scientists need to build detailed and complicated models of how planets form and their climates work.
By combining those observations with those models, scientists aim to understand which of those distant planets could be home to alien life.
Now Dr Olson and her team have combined that work to understand the conditions on those exoplanets, which will help inform that search. The work was presented at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry Congress in Barcelona.
"NASA's search for life in the Universe is focused on so-called Habitable Zone planets, which are worlds that have the potential for liquid water oceans," she said. "But not all oceans are equally hospitable – and some oceans will be better places to live than others due to their global circulation patterns".
To conduct the study, the team made models of those planets using Nasa software, which allows them to simulate the conditions on those exoplanets. Using that Nasa technology, they were able to create models of the possible climates and oceans that could be on those exoplanets.
They found that many of them seemed like more hospitable and flourishing places for life than even Earth is. They looked at the process in Earth's oceans that allows life to take root down here – and considered whether that same process could be happening elsewhere in the universe
"Our work has been aimed at identifying the exoplanet oceans which have the greatest capacity to host globally abundant and active life," said Dr Olson in a statement.
"Life in Earth's oceans depends on upwelling (upward flow) which returns nutrients from the dark depths of the ocean to the sunlit portions of the ocean where photosynthetic life lives. More upwelling means more nutrient resupply, which means more biological activity.
"These are the conditions we need to look for on exoplanets".
By modelling a variety of different exoplanets, the researchers were able to think about which types would be most likely to develop and then sustain life. And they were surprised to find that Earth is not the best kind – and that there may be other worlds out there that are a far better place for life to begin.
"We have used an ocean circulation model to identify which planets will have the most efficient upwelling and thus offer particularly hospitable oceans," she said. "We found that higher atmospheric density, slower rotation rates, and the presence of continents all yield higher upwelling rates.
"A further implication is that Earth might not be optimally habitable – and life elsewhere may enjoy a planet that is even more hospitable than our own."
The work is important because our technology means that we are unable to see everything: there is almost certainly more life than we will ever be able to see, even with the most advanced telescopes and other equipment. That means scientists will need to optimise their search by looking at the planets where life will find it easiest to find a home.
"We expect oceans to be important in regulating some of the most compelling remotely detectable signs of life on habitable worlds, but our understanding of oceans beyond our solar system is currently very rudimentary," said Chris Reinhard, from the Georgia Institute of Technology, who wasn't involved in the study. "Dr Olson's work represents a significant and exciting step forward in our understanding of exoplanet oceanography."
The new research could now help inform how new telescopes are built, since we now know what kinds of planets will be best to search for. "Now we know what to look for, so we need to start looking," said Dr Olson.
Wetenschappers: Op andere planeten is mogelijk veel meer leven dan op aarde
Wetenschappers: Op andere planeten is mogelijk veel meer leven dan op aarde
Op andere planeten zou weleens veel meer leven kunnen zijn dan op aarde, denken wetenschappers na een aantal computersimulaties. Hun bevindingen kunnen grote invloed hebben op onze zoektocht naar buitenaards leven.
De kans dat er leven wordt gevonden op exoplaneten, planeten buiten ons zonnestelsel, neemt toe door de nieuwe studie. “Het is een verrassende conclusie,” zegt hoofdonderzoeker dr. Stephanie Olson tegen The Independent. “Op sommige exoplaneten zijn er oceaancirculatiepatronen, die beter toegerust zijn op leven dan de oceanen op aarde. Daardoor zou er zelfs een rijker en actiever leven kunnen zijn dan hier.”
De wetenschappelijke consensus is dat oceanen een cruciale rol spelen bij leven op onze en op andere planeten. De afgelopen jaren is er een groot aantal exoplaneten ontdekt, maar ze zijn allemaal te ver weg om te kunnen bereiken of in detail te kunnen bestuderen.
Voor de studie heeft het onderzoeksteam daarom een aantal modellen ontwikkeld met behulp van software van NASA. Daarmee konden de condities op die exoplaneten worden nagebootst. Zo waren de wetenschappers in staat om mogelijke klimaatmodellen en oceanen te creëren, zoals die op die verre planeten zouden kunnen bestaan.
Ze ontdekten dat veel planeten beter geschikt waren voor leven dan de aarde. Daartoe onderzochten ze hoe leven zich ontwikkelt diep in de oceanen en of dat proces ook ergens anders in het universum plaats zou kunnen vinden. “Ons werk was erop gericht om planeten te identificeren met oceanen die de grootste capaciteit hebben om actief leven te herbergen,” aldus dr. Olson.
Ze kwam erachter dat de aarde niet eens het meest geschikt is en dat er andere werelden zijn in het universum die een veel betere plek vormen om leven te beginnen. “De aarde is niet optimaal. Er kan heel goed een planeet zijn waar leven veel makkelijker kan ontstaan dan hier,” klinkt het.
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2020 Daytime VIDEO! Flying saucer over Leeds, UK
2020 Daytime VIDEO! Flying saucer over Leeds, UK
This solid disc-shaped object was seen and filmed in the sky above Leeds, UK on 2nd February 2020.
Witness report:
Sat at home, from the corner of my eye I saw the usual birds flying outside and a black disc like shape started hovering and then floating on a straight path. It was high, above the trees.
It was all black, disc shaped and moved with a tilting motion. Travelling in a straight line tilting until I lost sight of it past the window frame I was looking out of. I was shocked, and couldn’t think of what it could be… hoping it wasn’t just a drone or something but it had such a weird shape and movement. It definitely wasn’t a bird, or a weather balloon or a plastic bag.
Scientists basically knew what happened here – but the full story that’s emerging beggars belief. The Chicxulub crater marks the point of contact made by an asteroid so enormous that it wiped out an entire planet’s worth of dinosaurs. Yet now experts have dug deep into the massive cavity, and they’ve finally realized precisely what occurred when the space rock actually struck the Earth. What’s more, the team’s findings paint a truly terrifying picture.
Of course, much was already known about the Chicxulub crater. It stretches 93 miles in diameter, for instance, and plunges a stunning 12 miles into the ground. And of all the known impact points on Earth, the crater is the second-largest in the world. Yet even though it appeared about 66 million years ago, its peak ring remains in one piece.
This particular detail highlights just how stunning the Chicxulub crater – and its long-term preservation – has already proven to be. It’s the only crater on the planet that has its peak ring still intact, in fact. The next available one for scientists to study sits, rather inconveniently, on the moon.
Still, all of this information has to do with the crater’s dimensions and exterior features. Now, though, scientists have gone beyond the topical details of the Chicxulub crater. Digging into the expanse, which sits more than half a mile beneath Mexico’s Yucután Peninsula, experts in fact uncovered the impact that an up to 50-mile-wide asteroid had on the planet.
To put the findings in context, though, it’s worth understanding a little about the crater’s background. So the Chicxulub crater derives its name from the nearby Mexican town of the same name. And experts estimate that an asteroid or comet, ranging in size from 6.8 to 50.3 miles in diameter, smashed into the Earth at this very spot.
It’s hard to imagine such a massive piece of space debris hurtling in the direction of our planet. But perhaps even more stunning is the abyss it left behind; the Chicxulub crater has an estimated diameter of 93 miles. For reference, that’s just 1.6 miles shorter than the drive between New York City and Philadelphia.
Experts have been able to calculate the strength with which the space rock smashed into the Earth, too. In fact, they estimate that the asteroid or comet had 21 to 921 billion times as much energy as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War II. Even the Soviet Union’s Tsar Bomba – the strongest human-made explosive to ever detonate – couldn’t compare. The Solar System body also released 100 million times the energy of Tsar Bomba upon impact.
So with that much power hitting the Earth, the size of the Chicxulub crater makes sense. It’s not just its width that’s extra-large, either; the crater reaches depths of up to 18.6 miles into the planet. These dimensions make the Chicxulub crater the second-largest impact crater on Earth, just behind the one near Vredefort in South Africa.
But the Chicxulub crater has one feature that no other known crater on Earth has: it’s a peak ring crater. This means that the impact site has no single central peak. Instead, the crater has a circle-shaped plateau encompassing its center. The rim of the crater encircles this ring, but it sits at a distance from the center.
Marine geophysicist Sean P. S. Gulick explained to The New York Times in 2016 just how rare the peak ring feature is. He said, “Chicxulub is the only crater on Earth with an intact peak ring that we can go sample… It’s ground zero of the Cretaceous extinction event.”
And yet scientists haven’t necessarily rushed to dig into the Chicxulub crater. That was partly due to the fact that the massive hole appeared approximately 66 million years ago. So over time, rock and water filled in the void and eventually more than half a mile of sedimentary rock covered the crater.
Also, scientists didn’t discover the Chicxulub crater until relatively recently – especially considering that it has been around for millions of years. It wasn’t until 1978, in fact, that geophysicists Glen Penfield and Antonio Camargo stumbled upon the crater. And they weren’t even looking for the asteroid impact site when they discovered it; the pair were searching for petroleum.
So Penfield and Camargo took to the skies to complete a magnetic survey that mapped any potential drilling locations beneath the Gulf of Mexico. As he pored over the resulting data, though, Penfield noted something particularly extraordinary: a 40-mile-wide “underwater arc” with impeccable symmetry.
Such a strange discovery inspired Penfield to dig deeper. He then sought out a gravity map commissioned by his employer, oil company Petróleos Mexicanos, in the 1960s. On it, Penfield noticed another arc – but this one curved over the Yucatán Peninsula itself. And when the geophysicist put that map and his magnetic survey together, he realized that the two arcs made a circle.
Penfield knew almost immediately that he had found something spectacular; the geophysicist hypothesized that he had pinpointed a cataclysmic event in the planet’s geological history. Petróleos Mexicanos then allowed him and Camargo to present their findings at the 1981 Society of Exploration Geophysicists conference. Unlike the asteroid they theorized had hit the Earth, though, their presentation made little impact at the time.
So eventually Penfield gave up on his research into the crater. Much of the evidence that he had sought was even destroyed or lost. Nevertheless, Penfield published all of the data he had and returned to work. Yet meanwhile other scientists had begun to theorize something similar – without having seen Penfield’s research.
Specifically, in 1981 a graduate student at the University of Arizona named Alan R. Hildebrand and his adviser William V. Boynton published their own Earth-impact theory. They just needed to find a crater that could corroborate their hypothesis. The pair had plenty of geological evidence, though, and their work got a bit more traction than Penfield’s.
Namely, a professor in Haiti named Florentine Morás uncovered evidence that an ancient volcano had once stood in his country. Hildebrand consequently realized that such a feature could have emerged when a major force of impact crashed nearby. And in 1990 he learned the precise spot of such a collision.
In that year, you see, a reporter for the Houston Chronicle named Carlos Byars clued Hildebrand into Penfield’s findings. The journalist also mentioned that the geophysicist had thought he had found an impact crater in the vicinity. So Hildebrand subsequently picked up the phone, and the two experts later started analyzing drill samples from the oil company’s storage unit.
What Penfield and Hildebrand found amid the drilling debris were shock-metamorphic materials. Such substances appear after an impact-related event causes deformation and heating. In normal cases, shock-metamorphism occurs along with a volcanic eruption – but, of course, Penfield and Hildebrand had uncovered something much bigger than that.
Since then, more research into the Chicxulub crater has transpired, and more theories about its origins have arisen. In September 2007, for instance, authors William F. Bottke, David Vokrouhlicky and David Nesvorny offered a theory to Nature magazine. The trio said that the rock responsible for creating the crater came from a specific cosmic family called the Baptistina asteroids.
Yet in spite of facts that seemed to corroborate Vokrouhlicky, Bottke and Nesvorny’s theory, new evidence released in 2011 negated their claim. What came to light? Well, researchers had pinpointed the Baptistina asteroid family’s formation to around 80 million years ago. This would make it nearly impossible for the space rock to reach Earth when the Chicxulub crater formed 66 million years ago. That’s because it takes multiple tens of millions of years for asteroids to collide and resonate.
But the discovery of the Chicxulub crater also lent credibility to a theory first formed by physicist Luis Alvarez and his geologist son, Walter Alvarez. Both men believed that between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods, a massive impact on Earth had triggered a series of animal and plant extinctions. And among them were all of the non-avian species of dinosaurs.
Some of the Chicxulub crater’s statistics do apparently fall in line with the Alvarez theory too. For one thing, initial dating of the crater estimated its formation happening about 66 million years ago. So this timing would have the asteroid or comet slamming into Earth just between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods – just as the father-and-son duo suspected.
Many people also subscribe to the Alvarez theory about the Chicxulub crater. Namely, that the impact that caused it also triggered a mass extinction of, among other species, land- and sea-dwelling dinosaurs. Yet still so much mystery surrounded the enormous undersea divot. So scientists would have to drill into it to learn more.
And in 2016 it finally came time for such an excursion. Marine geophysicist Gulick and geophysicist Joanna Morgan helmed a crew of over 30, who represented a dozen different countries. The researchers boarded a boat and sailed into the Gulf of Mexico. And there, they transformed their vessel into a drilling station.
The drilling station stood tall on three legs, rising about 40 feet above the Gulf of Mexico’s turquoise waters. The team then drilled incredibly far into the Earth. And after the tool delved 60 feet underwater, it met the rock below and continued to dig a stunning 2,000 feet into the crust.
Of course, over a 66-million-year period, the Chicxulub crater had filled with a sizeable amount of limestone and sediment. But the scientists’ machine worked its way past the new collection of rock to find what they were looking for: the material that made up the planet’s only peak ring crater.
Gulick, Morgan and their team actually discovered that a peculiar type of rock made up the peak ring: granite. Normally, you see, this variety of rock is found far deeper in the Earth’s crust than it appears in the crater. This means that the asteroid had such an incredible impact that it had pushed sediment from miles beneath the surface all the way to the top.
Geophysicist Morgan, who works for Imperial College London, told The New York Times, “These rocks behaved like a fluid for a short period of time, and rocks don’t tend to do that. It’s a very dramatic process when you form a large crater.” Apparently, such a chain reaction gave credence to something called the dynamic collapse model theory.
The dynamic collapse model theory hypothesizes that the asteroid’s impact pushed rocks deep into the Earth’s crust before forcing them back up and out of it. Then these rocks collapsed down again and settled to form the crater’s peak rings. And the fact that granite forms the crater’s central plateau apparently goes hand-in-hand with such a theory.
But drilling into the Chicxulub crater revealed more than one truth about this devastating geological event. The rocks also told the story of what had happened once the asteroid had smashed into the Earth. Scientists revealed this evidence in 2019. And the picture they painted of the world post-impact was a terrifying one, to say the least.
Gulick said he and the rest of the scientists could be so specific with their findings because they had an unprecedented amount of rock to work with. He explained to The New York Times, “We normally get to read rock records that give us centimeters per thousand years. We have 130 meters for a day.”
The rocks told a story that goes like this. First, an enormous chunk of cosmic rock slammed into the ground, instantly creating a crater 60 miles wide and 20 miles into the Earth. The initial impact created waves in the nearby gulf – quite literally. A tsunami formed, in fact, charging in the opposite direction of the new crater.
The asteroid’s impact also sent huge pieces of rock hurtling into the air, as far as the planet’s upper atmosphere – and likely beyond even that. Gulick theorized that “almost certainly some of the material would have reached the Moon.” Yet the largest bits flew up before crashing back down on the ground, still hot from the initial impact.
Some smaller pieces of hot rock took longer to fall – and had more time to cool. These geological wonders, called tektites, scattered across what is now the North American continent. Then water started rushing back into the crater after it waved outward. But refilling the geological depression would be tame compared to the next stage.
When the asteroid collided with the Earth, you see, it sent a tsunami speeding off in the opposite direction. And of course, water ebbs and flows. So, soon enough, those powerful waves returned back toward the crater. Multiple massive tsunamis with waves towering hundreds of feet in the air then came back over the gaping geological hole.
The rush of back-and-forth tsunamis quickly filled the peak ring with a four-inch coating of sand and gravel. And as the gulf raged, the land close by was also ravaged. The asteroid’s impact had, for instance, sparked wildfires across the area. Scientists know this because they pinpointed pieces of charcoal in the peak ring just above the tsunami sediments.
These wildfires could have started from the asteroid’s scorching thermal energy upon impact. The aforementioned shower of molten rock could have had something to do with it too. In any case, Gulick told The New York Times, “Probably not everything burned, but certainly there were global wildfires.” So altogether, the tsunamis, falling rock and fires wiped out a stunning number of Cretaceous-era species.
It’s hard to believe that scientists could conjure such haunting images from layers of rock hidden deep beneath the Yucatán Peninsula. Yet for planetary geologist Paul Byrne, the Chicxulub crater’s layers make palpable some long-standing scientific theories. He told The New York Times that it was one thing to develop and simulate such hypotheses, but it was “quite another to see it.” And, considering the size and scope of the crater, this could be just the beginning of the startling secrets uncovered there.
But the Chicxulub crater is far from the only crater to have yielded fascinating secrets. Deep in the heart of Siberia, for instance, there’s a giant chasm that’s constantly growing in size. And inside, archaeologists have made some jaw-dropping discoveries. The real cause of this huge hole, however, is rather unsettling.
Deep within a Siberian forest, just outside of a small town called Batagai, lies an ominous sight to behold. And for the past 25 years, it’s been growing – along with the superstitions of the local community. In fact, the land here is so disconcerting that the locals are literally terrified.
Need proof? Well, the people of the area have taken to calling the geological feature a “gateway to the underworld.” It’s easy to see why: there is a huge gouge in the landscape, after all. Plus, local religions believe in a three-tiered universe: an upper, a middle and a lower world.
Moreover, some people are so apprehensive of the startling abyss that they’re afraid to go near it. And that is before you even consider the loud and fearsome booms that can sometimes be heard emanating from within. But there’s a bigger question here.
The crater that has caused such fear stretches more than a mile through the landscape. At its deepest, it plummets almost 400 feet below the Earth. And there’s more: the crater is constantly growing, spreading around 60 feet a year by current estimates.
But beyond the superstitions and local legends, something even more terrifying is going on at the so-called Batagaika Crater. That’s because this huge hole in the ground could be a warning sign of future geographical change in the region and, indeed, the world in general.
Image: Research Institute of Applied Ecology of the North via Siberian Times
To understand what’s happening in Siberia we need to go back in time around 55 years to when the crater first began to develop. And how this massive scar in an ancient landscape first sprang into life could well come as a shock.
The major area of study at the crater has been the effects of climate change on permafrost. Fascinatingly, during excavations the mummified bodies of multiple ancient animals have been found in the layers of mud and rock that make up the crater walls.
Image: Research Institute of Applied Ecology of the North via Siberian Times
The group had unknowingly set in motion what scientists call a “megaslump.” Essentially, the fast-thawing permafrost turned into a mush of mud, compromising the stability of the ground above, which quickly slipped into the slurry below.
Surprisingly, these slumps aren’t that rare in Arctic climates. And since the Yakutia Republic – where the crater occurred – is one of the coldest places on Earth, some scientists believe this was just another of those bizarre but predictable happenings. Now it looks like they could have been wrong.
Flooding in 2008 increased the spread of the crater, which has now become a focal point for scientific researchers. And some of their findings have started to change the way we think about permafrost around the globe0
The major area of study at the crater has been the effects of climate change on permafrost. Fascinatingly, during excavations the mummified bodies of multiple ancient animals have been found in the layers of mud and rock that make up the crater walls.
But other findings are not so positive: research suggests that the Batagaika Crater is just the tip of a very worrying, and quickly melting, iceberg. Indeed, if you think the crater is a one-off event, then you’re sorely mistaken, because more sinkholes are springing up around the area.
Dr. Julian Murton is a professor of geology at the University of Sussex, and speaking to Vice, he revealed some alarming statistics. For instance, the last time a megaslump such as this occurred was 10,000 years ago, and the conditions the world finds itself in now are far more conducive to such events than they were then.
Image: Research Institute of Applied Ecology of the North via Siberian Times
In fact, at the end of the last ice age, when the slumps were more common, carbon dioxide levels were at 280 parts per million. Right now, on the other hand, they sit at the shockingly high rate of 400 parts per million. And that’s resulted in more than one megaslump.
Another researcher, Vasily Bogoyavlensky from the Oil and Gas Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, revealed to the AFP news agency last year that another crater, this one 0.6 miles in diameter, had emerged in Yakutia. He also said that there are another six confirmed megaslumps, with yet more likely to exist.
It’s not just enormous craters, either; a range of smaller sinkholes and collapses have been monitored across the Russian frontier. And many scientists reckon they’re all linked to the region’s increasing temperature, which is a result of climate change.
Studying the various layers in the now unlocked permafrost is key to understanding the potential changes that are likely to happen in the future. Murton told Vice, “If we can understand how the landscape was altered then, it helps us to anticipate what may happen to Siberian permafrost terrain in the next centuries.”
So while the crater may not be an entrance to the underworld as many of the locals seem to think, it could still be hugely important for the future of the planet. Plus, it performs another function.
The huge gash ripped in the landscape stands as a stark physical representation of the effects that we as human beings are having on our planet. It is, after all, a literal scar in the landscape that’s down to us.
Whether or not the superstitions of the local people are true, the Batagaika Crater still remains a stark warning. It may not be waiting to drag us all to hell, but there’s a real chance that it represents something much, much scarier. Why? Because this threat could be so very much on the horizon.
Visionary view of a Nuclear Thermal Propulsion enabled spacecraft mission outward bound to Mars.
Image: NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center
For Bill Emrich, working at NASA has been a life-long dream come true. “This has been my dream job, and something I thought about since I was a kid,” said Emrich, lead project engineer at the Nuclear Thermal Rocket Element Environment Simulator (NTREES). Not only is Emrich the lead project engineer at NTREES, he also conceived and designed the megawatt-class thermal simulator. And Emrich’s current project is to determine the best material and method of designing nuclear rockets for space travel to Mars and beyond.
The Nuclear Rockets of the 20th Century
Nuclear rockets are not a new idea. Since the beginning of the space program, nuclear rockets were considered as a possible way to send astronauts to the Moon. The nuclear research that’s been done post-World War II in the 1950s officially became the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application (NERVA) project in 1961, under NASA’s supervision. The program ran for almost two decades, designing the certified XE engine that even then satisfied all the requirements for a mission to Mars.
The 1960s NERVA engine designs are still used as the basis for modern nuclear rockets.
Photo: NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center
“When President Kennedy first proposed the space program, no one knew exactly what was the best way to accomplish space travel. People were aware of the advantages of nuclear power even back then, and I thought to myself, nuclear rockets is what we need,” Emrich said. “But as the space program went on, multi-stages rocket becomes the more accepted method of space travel, and NASA realized they didn’t need nuclear rockets to reach the moon.”
The NERVA program eventually shut down in 1973 due to political influences and growing costs. The program cost almost $2 billion in total—that would be equal to nearly $173 billion in today’s money.
However, the program is widely considered a success: To this day, any nuclear rocket engine’s design still uses the same concept as the NERVA NRX or Pewee rockets.
The Nuclear Rockets of the 21st Century
Fast forward to now, and there is a new sense of urgency for space travel. The current administration issued a mandate to return to the Moon by 2024 and NASA has partnered with commercial aerospace companies, such as Boeing and Space X, to reach that goal.
But besides going to the Moon, the current administration has asked NASA to explore nuclear power as an alternative means for space travel. A memo issued in August 2019 has tasked NASA to develop safety protocols for operating nuclear reactors in space. The first flight of a nuclear engine could happen as soon as 2024.
Emrich has worked at NASA since 1987 and wrote the book on nuclear rocket propulsion. He and his team at NTREES have been working on designing, optimizing, and testing nuclear rocket configurations for the last ten years at the Marshall Space Flight Center.7
There are two types of engines that can be used for nuclear rockets. The first is having a nuclear reactor generate electricity, which then powers the ion thrusters for electric propulsion.
NTREES engineers test different types of uranium-based fuels in hopes of finding the perfect source for deep space travel.
Photo: NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center
The second option is to have a nuclear reactor achieve high temperatures, then flowing cold hydrogen through the top of the rocket. Hot hydrogen exits the bottom of the rocket through a nozzle, acting as thrust just as a chemical engine would.
The advantage of using the second engine type is achieving higher thrust levels than with electric propulsion. Electric propulsion typically operates at thrust levels of a pound of thrust or lower. Nuclear thermal engines, where hydrogen is used, can produce tens of thousands of pounds of thrust and are much more efficient than chemical engines.
“Would you rather go from New York to Dallas in a car, which can get 100 miles per gallon, but your maximum speed is only two miles an hour? Or would you rather get a car that has a fuel efficiency of 40 miles per gallon, but your maximum speed is 65 miles per hour, and you arrive within the same day?” Emrich said. “It comes down to: The higher thrust that can be produced, the faster you will get there.”
Testing Different Nuclear Fuel Types
At the NTREES facility, engineers test nuclear engines with different uranium-based fuel types under the same conditions that would exist during space travel. The main stresses would be extreme high temperatures and pressures. A NERVA rocket’s highest temperature ever experienced was 2,250 degrees Kelvin or 3,590 degrees Fahrenheit.
The hotter you can make the rocket, the hotter you can make the hydrogen exit the nozzle to achieve higher thrust. The danger is that nuclear fuel has a maximum temperature limit before it melts or comes apart.
While the nuclear rocket design hasn’t changed much since the 1960s, the fuel materials have improved significantly and are stronger now—even for handling nuclear energy. The nuclear engines are still powered by uranium 235, just as they were back in the NERVA projects day, but are now embedded into different materials.
The uranium-based fuels are exposed to the same high temperatures and pressures in the test facility as they would experience during space flight.
Photo: NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center
Carbon-based fuels are graphite-based with embedded uranium. The fuel is shaped into hexagonal prisms with a hole stroke where the hydrogen flows through them. Graphite can withstand the high temperatures but still requires coating on the flow channels. Otherwise, the hydrogen will attack the graphite, causing cracking. Cermat fuels are a combination of ceramic and metallic materials. They are usually comprised of uranium, dioxide, and tungsten. Cermat fuels can better withstand the attacks from the hydrogen but have a lower tolerance against the high temperatures.
The third fuel types are dicarbide or tricarbide fuels. These fuels are alloy-based and made of uranium, zirconium, and niobium. These fuels can handle the high temperatures extremely well and do not get attacked by the hydrogen flowing through the engine. However, they are brittle and tend to crack. At NTREES, these different fuel types are shaped into different geometries to see which ones will perform the best. Even the smallest changes in the shape, or changing the way the graphite is coated, can lead to better rocket performance.
Nuclear Rockets and Travel to Mars
Determining the fuel for nuclear rockets is only the first step toward nuclear space travel. As Emrich points out, the work done at NTREES is only the beginning in a long process toward viable nuclear-powered rockets.
“Once the testing is complete, you have to take the fuel and put it into a nuclear reactor. Then that nuclear reactor has to work together with pumps, valves, hydrogen feed systems, nozzles, and so forth,” Emrich said. “You also have to test the fuel in a nuclear test reactor in the presence of a high radiation field, and ultimately perform an actual engine test powered by the nuclear fuel. So there's a lot that has to go on after the first step of testing the fuel.”
In order to travel to Mars, it will be necessary to perfect the design of nuclear-powered rockets. Those rockets not only have to reach Mars but also, more importantly, come back to Earth. “Elon Musk and others want to take people to Mars and start a colony there. If you want to go to Mars and leave people on Mars, you can do that with chemical rockets,” Emrich said. “It will be a difficult journey but possible. But if you want to bring people back to Earth, you are almost forced to use nuclear-powered rockets. And at NASA, we are more interested in bringing people back home.”
“It seems inevitable other life is out there, especially considering that life appeared on Earth so soon after the planet was formed."
The expert said if it is proved once and for all that humans are not alone it would change everything.
“A discovery, if it came, could turn the world of biology upside down,” said O'Connell.
“Bacteria, fungus, cacti and cockroaches are all our cousins and we all share the same basic molecular machinery.
“A second sample of life, though, might represent a ‘second genesis’ - totally unrelated to us.”
If signs of life are eventually found on Jupiter's moon Europa - it could mean the Universe is actually teeming with aliens.
“It would greatly increase the chances that, somewhere among those billions of habitable planets in our galaxy, there could be something we could talk to," said O'Connell.
In some ways, however, discovering similarities with human life would be even more radical, reports news.com.
It's hoped Jupiter's moon Europa may contain sign of extraterrestrial life
Credit: Wikipedia
The Europa Clipper is one of two probes being sent to the icy moon
Credit: NASA
It would mean panspermia – the theory the the formula for life was seeded via comets and meteorites – has genuine merit.
“As Mars was probably habitable before Earth, it is possible life originated there before hitchhiking on a space rock to here. Perhaps we’re all Martians, ” said O'Connell.
Either way, frozen Europa could well have all the answers.
And when the Voyager 1 space probe flashed past in 1979, scientists were stunned by what they saw.
It had shapely canyons, troughs and ridges and there were hardly any craters.
That sparked the theory that water regularly welled up from beneath, remoulding and refreshing the surface.
However, it wasn’t until the 1990s that some of Europa’s secrets were unlocked.
The Galileo probe found strong evidence there were oceans twice as big as Earth’s beneath the ice and they seemed salty.
Geologists were quick to point out that meant the water must be interacting with rocks and benefiting from nutrients and minerals from the moon’s solid core.
“This has important implications for the potential existence of life in Europa’s hidden depths.”
Both new space probes - Clipper and Juice - will carry a variety of sensors to peer beneath the ice and measure the minute fluctuations in the moon’s gravity.
These are caused by changes in the density of whatever is beneath – such as a mountain range, or a mineral deposit.
Planetary scientists expect the ice to be somewhere between 10 and 15 miles thick, however it is hoped it is much thinner in some places.
Mysterious object from interstellar space ‘approaching our solar system’
Artists conception of a future Martian base. Image: NASA/SEArch+/Apis Cor
A newly proposed House authorization bill would push back NASA’s deadline to land humans on the Moon to 2028 instead of 2024, while also calling for a crewed landing on Mars in 2033. Reactions to this proposal have been mixed, with NASA’s chief Jim Bridenstine unhappy about the way the agency is supposed to roll out this recommended plan.
The proposed authorization bill, called the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2020, was introduced by the House Committee on Science, Space, andTechnology on January 24, reports Spaceflight Now. The 102-page document recommends that the first crewed Artemis lunar landing take place in 2028 instead of 2024, which is the current, controversial deadline. At the same time, the House Committee is proposing a rather aggressive timeline for Mars exploration, in which American astronauts would arrive to Martian orbit in 2033, followed shortly thereafter by a mission to the surface.
The bipartisan legislation was introduced by Representative Kendra Horn (D-Oklahoma), who chairs the committee’s space and aeronautics subcommittee. A markup session is planned for tomorrow, at which point the document could undergo substantial changes. It’ll likely be months before a vote takes place to enact the proposed legislation, also known as H.R. 5666.
The overarching goal of the recommended changes is to position the Artemis lunar program as a stepping stone for the larger goal of sending people to Mars. America’s “human space exploration goal should be to send humans to the surface of Mars,” according to the proposed bill. At the same time, missions to the Moon will be required to reduce risk and to demonstrate the “capabilities and operations needed to support a human mission to Mars.”
Last year, NASA said a mission to Mars by 2033 was a distinct possibility, but this proposed authorization bill would turn speculation and wishful thinking into a concrete plan.
The specified goal of the pending “Moon to Mars program,” as it’s termed in the proposed bill, will be to “land humans on Mars in a sustainable manner as soon as practicable,” with the “interim goal of sending a crewed mission to the lunar surface by 2028 and a goal of sending a crewed mission to orbit Mars by 2033.”
Among other recommendations, the bill specifies that the Artemis lunar lander be launched as a single component, rather than a modular multi-piece vessel that would be constructed in space. NASA would retain full ownership of the Artemis lunar landing system, which would be a dramatic change in plans, given that the space agency is currently soliciting bids from the private sector.
Bill H.R. 5666 would renew NASA’s commitment to the Lunar Gateway project but proposes that the outpost be placed not in lunar orbit but in the Earth-Moon Lagrange point—a gravitational sweet spot between Earth and Moon. At this location, the habitable terminal could support missions to the Moon and Mars, according to the bill, which didn’t rule out a lunar orbit as a possibility.
The proposed bill calls for the establishment of a Moon to Mars program office, complete with its own director, and a Mars Enabling Technology Initiative for the “purpose of developing and testing the technologies and capabilities needed for a human mission to Mars.” Items on the prospective to-do list include the development of propulsion engines, Mars landing systems, protection against radiation, a Mars transport vehicle, life support systems, Martian habitats, and spacesuits for explorers, among other technological needs.
Given the aggressive timeline, NASA would need to set up its Moon to Mars office within 60 days of the bill being enacted, develop an overall mission architecture and plan within 120 days, and submit estimated budgets within 240 days, according to the proposed bill.
NASA would also have to provision for two crewed lunar missions each year following the inaugural landing in 2028, as well as create a plan to decommission the International Space Station (ISS) and consider potential replacements, including contributions from the private sector.
The bill also states that NASA must assure crew access to the ISS and upgrade and replace ISS spacesuits, including spares, to “accommodate the diversity of ISS crew,” in an obvious response to a debacle last year in which an all-women spacewalk was canceled because not enough suits were available to the female crew. Other items in the proposed bill included the development of tech for defense, the monitoring of climate change, new telescopes, and even the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
In a NASA statement issued Monday, January 27, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine expressed some reservations about the proposal.
“I am concerned that the bill imposes some significant constraints on our approach to lunar exploration,” said Bridenstine. “As you know, NASA has successfully fostered the development of a rapidly expanding commercial economy for access to space. We would like to continue building on this success as we develop the most efficient mission architectures and partnership approaches to accomplish our shared goals.”
In particular, Bridenstine is concerned about the proposed approach to building the lunar lander. A fully government-owned-and-operated lander system would be “ineffective,” he said. In its current form, the proposed bill would hinder NASA’s “ability to develop a flexible architecture that takes advantage of the full array of national capabilities—government and private sector—to accomplish national goals,” he said. Accordingly, the NASA chief is hoping for “some modifications” to the pending legislation.
As SpaceNews reports, some members of the private sector are also miffed by the proposed bill:
In a Jan. 27 letter to the bill’s four co-sponsors, Eric Stallmer, president of the [Commercial Spaceflight Federation], offered even stronger criticism, saying it “explicitly and unfairly excludes the participation of the American commercial spaceflight industry, irrationally barring fair competition from NASA’s deep space exploration initiatives.” Stallmer called on the committee to withdraw the bill and “engage in a fully transparent process” with all stakeholders.
That said, the bill does appear to have its supporters, including The Coalition for Deep Space Exploration (an organization that advocates on behalf of the private space industry) and Aerospace Industries Association (a U.S. trade association), according to SpaceNews.
We’ll be following the House markup session that’s scheduled for tomorrow to see how this bill might be modified and to learn next steps, such as when a vote might happen. Regardless, the U.S. government has big plans for NASA in the coming decades, as the next era of human space exploration appears to be imminent.
Advanced Technology and Anomalous Architecture of Our Predecessors Around the Globe
Advanced Technology and Anomalous Architecture of Our Predecessors Around the Globe
This lecture is a fast-paced and visual presentation taking us around the world look at all sorts of things from Ancient sites and then to the Moon and Mars.
David Hatcher Childress, known as the real-life Indiana Jones to the many fans of his books, is a captivating speaker and the author or coauthor of over 20 books. He has traveled the world several times over, seeking adventure and the answers to the mysteries of mankind’s past.
Born in France in 1957 and raised in the mountains of Colorado and Montana, David’s curiosity about the world was piqued at a young age. He attended the University of Montana where his studies in oriental culture and philosophy led him to a job teaching English in Taiwan. In 1976, David left the United States on what would become a six-year research and adventure odyssey. During this time, he studied first-hand the ancient civilizations of Africa, the Middle East and China, sometimes journeying into dangerous territory along the way (like Uganda during the overthrow of Idi Amin).
David is known for visiting remote islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, organizing expeditions to remote areas of Peru and Bolivia, and trekking through remote areas of the Himalayas and other parts of Asia. His interests are mainly historical, archeological or cryptozoological. He is a good swimmer and a certified scuba diver and has a special interest in underwater archeological discoveries.
UFO Shoots Past Plane That Drops Off Wuhan British Citizens In UK, Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Shoots Past Plane That Drops Off Wuhan British Citizens In UK, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of Sighting:Feb 2020
Location of sighting: UK
This UFO was noticed by Youtuber UFOvni2012. He spotted a long white rod UFO shooting past the area as British citizens disembarked a plane that just came from Wuhan, China. Its very possible that aliens have a high interest in this virus and how humans deal with the threat of catching it. So of course aliens send small drones to record it close up. These drones move so fast that usually we don't see it with the human eye, but cameras will catch them. Awesome catch, and absolute proof aliens are watching this virus and how we deal with it. But I wonder...are aliens going to step up and help us solve it, or just sit back and observer?
This is a great video by Youtuber Jean Ward. He found some incredible structures on Mars that is without a doubt absolute proof of an ancient civilization once living on its surface. The structures perfectly balanced on both sides, with some impossible 90 degree curves that would be found on most structures here on Earth. The structures look mostly intact and could probably be a great place for humans to start up a colony. This is amazing! This is 100% proof of an ancient alien race once living on Mars.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Strange Swarms OF Creatures Move Through Space Caught By NASA Satellite, UFO Sighting News.
Strange Swarms OF Creatures Move Through Space Caught By NASA Satellite, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Jan 17-20, 2020
Location of sighting: Earths sun
Source: NASA/SOHO images
Look at the image above. You see a blued out center...with a white circle...that white circle is how big the sun is and where it is. These objects are not going too or from the sun...but they should since the gravity of the sun is so strong. What this tells me is that these objects are self propelled. They are moving in all directions, but none seem to be coming to or from the sun. That should be impossible, yet there it is. I believe these objects are living creatures moving in swarms past the NASA SOHO sun satellite lens. These swarms of creatures are not rare, rather we see them every week on the viewer if we search carefully enough. NASA of course would not talk or report such things, for fear the public will find out the truth...that we are not alone in the universe...that the universe is teaming with life that we cannot yet imagine.
City Size UFO Caught Shooting Past Our Moon, Feb 2020, Video, UFO Sighting News.
City Size UFO Caught Shooting Past Our Moon, Feb 2020, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting:Feb 2020 Location of sighting:Earths moon This is an interesting video of an unknown object shooting past our moon. The object seems large and much too fast to be a jet or bird. An object this big should have been noticed on radar in the area. Very odd that UFOs the size of cities can fly past our moon without NASA saying a single word about it. Scott C. Waring
Unidentified Submerged Object emerging from the Hudson Bay in Antarctica
Unidentified Submerged Object emerging from the Hudson Bay in Antarctica
Commonly known as Unidentified Submerged Objects (USOs) there have been numerous reports over the last 4 decades of startling appearances of under water objects suddenly emerging from the oceans.
The infamous and embattled Julian Assange had made prior comments to the announced release of many of his controversial intelligence leaks that there would be UFO related materials.
Such was the case when Wiki Leaks revealed alleged compromised Department of Defense cable communications indicating that US armed forces may be in the midst of a secret war with UFOs.
According to ufodigest, the sources that were revealed, there was an all out alert issued by Air Force Space Command after the emergence of a large flotilla of airborne unidentified objects from the floor of the Southern Seas of the Antarctic. This armada of unknown objects headed toward Guadalajara, Mexico.
With US warplanes deployed and all radars intensified on the inbound targets, the massive UFO fleet supposedly dimensionally relocated themselves back to submerge in the antarctic oceans once again. The incident occurred 10 June 2004.
Images taken from Google Earth show a USO, with a diameter of 40 meters and a height of 15 meters, emerging from the ocean (Hudson Bay) in Antarctica and probably belonging to the flotilla of USOs that headed to Mexico in 2004.
Albert Einstein died in 1955 but his theories live on and continue to be proven correct. The latest piece of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity pie to be confirmed is his prediction that space and time can be twisted, bent and swirled by the fast rotation of a massive space object. Scientists recently discovered a dead-but-still-spinning binary star system whose gravity is causing a phenomena called frame dragging – dragging the spacetime frame surrounding it around fast enough to twist it. Is this another item to add to Einstein’s list of “This changes everything!” discoveries?
“Twenty years ago, CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope discovered a unique stellar pair consisting of a white dwarf (about the size of Earth but about 300,000 times heavier) and a radio pulsar (just the size of a city but 400,000 times heavier).”
That unique stellar pair, according to Space.com, would be PSR J1141-6545, a binary star in the constellation Musca (the fly) near the Southern Cross constellation (for those of you playing the astrophysicist game at home). PSR J1141-6545 is a unique binary in that one half of the pair is a pulsar – a fast-orbiting, young neutron that is the corpse of star killed in a supernova, whose gravity is still strong enough to mash protons and electrons to for neutrons. The other half is a white dwarf – another dead star that merely burned out.
White dwarf (NASA)
“We observed a temporal evolution of the orbital inclination of this pulsar that we infer is caused by a combination of a Newtonian quadrupole moment and Lense–Thirring (LT) precession of the orbit resulting from rapid rotation of the WD. LT precession, an effect of relativistic frame dragging, is a prediction of general relativity.”
In a paper published in the journal Science, Vivek Venkatraman Krishnan, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, describes how he and his team watched PSR J1141-6545 for 20 years since its discovery and determined the binary was a pulsar flying around a white dwarf at 620,000 mph (1 million km/h), with a maximum distance between them of the size of our Sun, making the length of the orbit an unfathomable five hours … all while the white dwarf itself spins 30 times an hour.
The Lense–Thirring precession or the Lense–Thirring effect is the relativistic correction to the precession (the slow movement of the axis of a spinning body around another axis due to a torque, such as gravitational influence, acting to change the direction of the first axis) of a gyroscope near a large rotating mass such as the Earth. On an earthly scale, it’s barely discernible. On a binary star scale – it causes the halves of this binary pair to move in a warped space-time way, something Einstein predicted … the reason many suggest it should be called the Einstein–Lense–Thirring effect. In PSR J1141-6545’s the gyroscope is the white dwarf spinning fast enough to cause frame dragging and warp spacetime. The pulsar provides the beam of radio waves monitored by Krishnan that shows the warping. In this case, the warping is a movement of the orbit, which should normally be stable.
Is this a big “This changes everything!” deal? Well, Einstein thought many of his relativity theories would never be able to be seen by humans, so this would be one for him. It’s a big deal for the field of extreme astrophysics (the realm of gravitational waves and black holes) and the owners of billion-dollar radio telescopes and the networks that allow them to work together. And it’s obviously a big deal for Vivek Venkatraman Krishnan and other astrophysicists seeking to understand fast-spinning neutron stars (there are plenty more) and what gives them the spin to warp spacetime.
Is it a big deal for us? We should want to better understand the universe we live in, how it began and grows and how we got there … so yes, it’s a big deal for us.
Laser technologie heeft meer geopenbaard over de Maya’s dan wat experten eerst wisten
Laser technologie heeft meer geopenbaard over de Maya’s dan wat experten eerst wisten
Men zegt dat de Maya-beschaving veel geavanceerder is dan onze moderne technologie. Wat kan deze beschaving die 1500 jaar geleden bloeide mogelijk hebben? Lasertechnologie helpt ons het antwoord te vinden.
Een van de beste architecten
De Maya-beschaving was een intrigerend geavanceerde beschaving die floreerde in Meso-Amerika, in wat nu bekend staat als het zuiden van Mexico en het noordelijke deel van Midden-Amerika. Het besloeg een groot gebied, waaronder Belize, Guatemala, het schiereiland Yucatán, Honduras en El Salvador.
Duizenden jaren nadat hun beschaving instortte, konden archeologen stenen structuren vinden met veel ingewikkelde ontwerpen. Men geloofde dat deze werden gebruikt als tempels, begraafplaatsen van woningen. Ingewikkeld ontworpen paleizen, piramides en binnenplaatsen werden ook ontdekt. Hoewel archeologen sommige structuren konden vinden, geloven ze dat er nog andere zijn. Als dat waar is, waar zijn ze dan?
Klein maar krachtig
Alle machtige rijken in de geschiedenis, zoals de Romeinen, de Spanjaarden, de Mongolen, enz. Werden krachtig gemaakt door hun territoria uit te breiden. Meestal worden soldaten, ridders en oorlogen gebruikt om hun claim in een gebied op te nemen.
Voor de Maya’s was het verbouwen van hun territorium geen prioriteit. Hoewel ze enkele van de meest indrukwekkende architecturale structuren hadden, geloven archeologen dat de Maya-bevolking relatief klein was.
Historici zijn het erover eens dat de maximale bevolking van de Maya’s slechts twee miljoen was of dat het zo laag kon zijn als een miljoen. Op basis van hun topografie is het onmogelijk om meer dan dit aantal te hebben.
Onder de jungle
Na zoveel jaren hebben archeologen letterlijk door de geschiedenis gekrast op zoek naar de waarheid achter de Maya-beschaving. Tot de moderne tijd hebben ze nauwelijks het oppervlak bekrast. Theorieën van alle vormen worden gegeven met betrekking tot de resterende structuren van de Maya-beschaving.
En omdat de onderzoekers van weleer niet over de technologie beschikten die we in het geavanceerde technologische tijdperk van vandaag hebben, speculeerden ze alleen dat er zoveel meer te ontdekken valt over de Maya-beschaving. Eerder grondonderzoek suggereert ook dat er nog veel meer te vinden is onder de jungle van Yutacan. Het lijkt erop dat de tijd is aangebroken om die mysteries te ontdekken.
Geschiedenis beveiligen
Een van de langetermijndoelen van PACUNAM is het behoud van alle plaatsen die het project vindt te waarborgen. Archeologen hebben verschillende kuilen onthuld die overvallers de afgelopen jaren hebben geproduceerd. Marianne Hernandez, president van PACUNAM, zei dat deze nieuw gevonden sites nieuw voor hen zijn, maar ze zijn niet langer nieuw voor de overvallers.
Het slechtste nieuws is dat de Guatemalteekse jungle elk jaar ten minste 10 procent wordt ontbost. Bedrijven lijken hiervoor vergunningen te krijgen. Om deze reden heeft PACUNAM, samen met zijn hele lidmaatschap, tot doel het bos van Guatemala te beschermen en te beschermen wat er nog over is van de Maya-beschaving.
Verborgen door het bos
Thomas Garrison, een archeoloog van het Ithaca College en een ontdekkingsreiziger voor de National Geographic, was een van de verrast door de bevindingen. Volgens hem was een groep archeologen, waaronder hij, in staat om een Maya-fort binnen te gaan, ver voordat het werd ontdekt via LiDAR-beeldvorming. Hoewel ze, toen ze er voor het eerst in struikelden, niet wisten dat het een fort was vanwege de dichte bosbedekking.
Garrison herinnerde zich dat ze in 2010 niet meer dan 150 voet van het fort stonden en ze het zelfs niet herkenden vanwege het gebladerte en de bomen. Het was echter niet alleen het fort dat LiDAR had ontdekt.
Overleving
H/onderden jaren geleden was de Maya-beschaving een wonder om te aanschouwen. Het Maya-volk van deze tijd had al naam gemaakt als een krachtige macht om rekening mee te houden. Ze deden dit meer dan 1000 jaar, zelfs vóór de bouw van de eerste stad die ze ooit hebben gebouwd.
De voortgang van hun beschaving zou door de kolonisatie tot stilstand komen. Spanjaarden kwamen naar hun verzwakte steden en namen hun rijkdommen en hun land over. En in 1967 werd de laatst bekende Maya-stad ingenomen door de kolonisators die het einde van een grote dynastie betekenden.
Klaar voor oorlog
Archeologen vonden het erg intrigerend dat de architectuur van de Maya-beschaving goed was voorbereid op oorlog. Eén ding dat ze in hun prachtige scans vonden, waren de vele hekken, loopgraven en forten. Dit bewijst dat het Maya-volk gewend was betrokken te zijn bij vele soorten oorlogen. Deze infrastructuren waren goed geschikt om zichzelf te verdedigen in tijden van strijd.
Zelfs Thomas Garrison was zich niet eens bewust van hoe goed voorbereid de Maya’s waren in de strijd. Ze kwamen er pas achter na de scans van de LiDAR-technologie. Ondanks dit nieuws was het niets vergeleken met de ongelooflijke ontdekkingen die ze onlangs hebben gedaan over de Maya-structuren.
Laserradar
Dus wat is er echt bekend over de technologie die wordt gebruikt om deze mysteries te ontdekken? Een hint komt uit de wereld “LiDAR.” Het klinkt als radar, toch? Nou, het is eigenlijk een soort radar. Dit type detector is van het type dat in een vliegtuig is ingebouwd. Wanneer het vliegtuig opstijgt en over zijn bestemming vliegt, vuurt de radar “laserpulsen”.
Volgens archeoloog Thomas Garrison van het Ithaca College is deze laserpuls honderdduizenden keren per seconde uitgestraald. Hij verklaarde ook dat elke keer dat een van de lasers een punt raakt dat weerstand geeft, het stopt. Daarna zendt het een meting terug naar het vliegtuig.
Jungle onderzoek
De nieuw gecreëerde technologie, LiDAR, werd door de onderzoekers genomen en gebruikt in het dichte bosgebied van Noord-Guatemala. De regio Noord-Guatemala is de afgelopen honderden jaren niet veel onderzocht. Het is meer dan 770 vierkante mijlen land bedekt door tropische regenwouden, moerassen en graslanden.
Thomas Garrison beschouwde de LiDAR als een game-wisselaar. Volgens hem heeft de ontwikkeling van LiDAR-technologie een revolutie teweeggebracht in het niveau van hoe onderzoekers Maya-archeologie uitvoeren. Verbazingwekkend, er was een ontdekking die ze hebben gedaan die technisch gezien iets was dat ze jaren geleden vonden.
Hoog en machtig
Een fascinerende ontdekking die de LiDAR-technologie aan het licht bracht, was dat veel Maya’s voornamelijk op hoge gronden leefden. Dit bleek uit de gegevens die de LiDAR heeft verzameld. De Maya’s bouwden verhoogde stenen platforms waar ze hun huizen bouwden.
Volgens Diane Davies, een specialist in de Maya-beschaving, was ze onder de indruk van het feit dat de Maya’s zeer bekwaam en artistiek waren. Ze dachten ook aan manieren om flash overstromingen, aanvallen van dieren in de jungle en aanvallen van vijanden te overleven. Het bewijst ook dat deze mensen ook behoorlijk milieubewust zijn.
Begraven structuren
Met behulp van de LiDAR-technologie konden archeologen minstens 60.000 Maya-structuren ontdekken! Deze ontdekkingen schokten de archeologen vanwege het grote aantal onbedekte, en verwonderen zich tegelijkertijd over hoe ingewikkeld de aard en de complexiteit van deze structuren. Het heeft ongetwijfeld zowel archeologen als historici verbaasd.
De ontdekking door de LiDAR-technologie werpt een nieuw idee op over hoe het Maya-volk zo geavanceerd was dan ooit tevoren gedacht. De bevinding suggereert dat er veel meer steden waren dan eerder werd gedacht. Het betekent ook dat de bevolking Maya’s mogelijk veel groter was dan voorheen werd vermoed.
Veel meer Mayans
Thomas Garrison was in staat om een vrij expliciete schatting te geven van hoeveel groter het aantal mensen is dat hij denkt dat de Maya-bevolking zou kunnen zijn geweest. Hij verklaarde dat de beelden van de LiDAR duidelijk maakten dat deze hele regio een hecht nederzettingssysteem was waarvan de bevolkingsconclusie totaal verkeerd was beoordeeld.
Op basis van hun bevindingen recent, heeft Garrison vertrouwen in het feit dat, anders dan de 1 of 2 miljoen die voorheen werd erkend, de bevolking van de Maya-beschaving waarschijnlijk het dichtst bij ongeveer 20 miljoen zou liggen.
Landbouwgronden
Het is zeer waarschijnlijk dat de belangrijkste reden waarom archeologen hun mening over de enorme bevolking van de Maya’s hebben veranderd, vooral was vanwege de vele structuren die ze hebben ontdekt. Deze specifieke structuren hebben alle tekenen die de onderzoekers doen geloven dat de Maya’s ze waarschijnlijk voor de landbouw hebben gebruikt. Maya’s staan bekend om de landbouw, het verzamelen en jagen op kleine dieren voor voedsel.
Er zijn perfecte suggesties die aangeven dat terrassen en irrigatiesystemen ooit in deze structuren aanwezig waren. Dit suggereert dat de Maya’s een zeer geavanceerde kennis hadden van hoe ze in grote aantallen voor hun mensen konden zorgen.
Tropisch Wonder
Gebaseerd op de verklaringen van Marcello Canuto, een archeoloog van Tulane University die ook deelnam aan het project, waren de huidige ontdekkingen inderdaad een technisch fenomeen en complete wonderen. Wat hem echter het meest verbaasde, was hoe sterk en vastberaden het Maya-volk was om al deze enorme objecten te verplaatsen om hun steden te bouwen.
Marcelo zei dat de Maya-beschaving letterlijk bergen aan het verplaatsen was. Hij voegde eraan toe dat mensen deze westerse verwaandheid hadden dat complexe beschavingen niet kunnen floreren in de tropen en dat beschavingen naar de tropen gaan om te sterven.
Het oerwoud
Canuto’s begrip van deze ontdekkingen is dat de eerste oude beschavingen misschien in de jungle zijn begonnen. Dit komt omdat archeologen de LiDAR-technologie hebben gebruikt om de oude ruïnes van Angkor Wat in Cambodja in kaart te brengen. Wat ze ontdekten, was dat het middeleeuwse Khmer-rijk uit de 13e eeuw, gebouwd door Jayavarman II, een gebied besloeg van 1.000 vierkante kilometer verborgen in de jungle van de Kulen.
Canuto voegde ook toe dat op basis van de LiDAR-gegevens veilig kan worden aangenomen dat uitgestrekte koninkrijken in de oudheid zijn gestegen. Maar deze megasteden werden ongedaan gemaakt door de complexiteit van hun waterwerken en klimaatverandering.
Veel gebruik
Omdat het succesvol was in het in kaart brengen van een deel van de verborgen Maya-ruïnes, zijn veel archeologen zoals Thomas Garrison enthousiast om deze nieuwe tool te gebruiken. Ze vermelden waarschijnlijk tonnen plaatsen die vervolgens in kaart moeten worden gebracht.
Garrison was er snel bij om andere mensen gerust te stellen dat de LiDAR veel gebruikt heeft. Hij zei dat de LiDAR-technologie die in de archeologie wordt gebruikt slechts het topje van de ijsberg is. Hij merkte op dat de gegevens die door de LiDAR-sensoren worden geproduceerd enorm zijn en op veel manieren kunnen worden gebruikt en geïnterpreteerd. Hij geeft toe dat zijn team slechts 8% van de verzamelde gegevens gebruikt om 3D-kaarten te maken. Hij zei dat andere industrieën die betrokken zijn bij de bosbouw ook gebruik kunnen maken van de andere beschikbare informatie.
Emotionele prestatie
Stephen Houston, Amerikaans antropoloog, archeoloog en Mayanistisch geleerde, wijdde jaren van zijn leven begrip aan de Maya-beschaving. Hij staat bekend om zijn onderzoek naar de Pre-Columbiaanse Maya-beschaving van Meso-Amerika. Hij werkt momenteel aan de Brown University als professor voor archeologie en antropologie.
Hij geeft toe dat de LiDAR-beelden hem in tranen brachten toen hij ze voor het eerst zag. Hij is er vast van overtuigd dat de ontdekking van de duizenden gebouwen onder de jungle van Guatemala een van de belangrijkste vooruitgang is geweest in de Maya-archeologie in de afgelopen 150 jaar.
Nog een eeuw te gaan
Vanwege de hoeveelheid gegevens die door de LiDAR-sensoren wordt verzameld, beweren onderzoekers dat het jaren, zelfs een eeuw zou duren om de gegevens volledig te verwerken. Hoewel de gegevens er zijn, is het moeilijk om deze te begrijpen en te interpreteren in bruikbare informatie.
Ze vergelijken het gebruik van de LiDAR-technologie met de archeologie met het gebruik van de Hubble-ruimtetelescoop in de astronomie. Zelfs met zijn uitgebreide gegevenscapaciteit zijn andere technologieën die worden gebruikt om deze gegevens te interpreteren niet beschikbaar. Francisco Estrada-Belli, een archeoloog van de Universiteit van Tulane, zei dat we een eeuw meer nodig hebben om de informatie die we zien echt te begrijpen. Helaas is dit niet het enige probleem waar LiDAR voor staat.
Grotere problemen
Volgens Thomas Garrison is de ontdekking van meer dan 60.000 begraven en verborgen structuren inderdaad aanzienlijk. Het vormt echter een groter probleem. Vanwege de enorme omvang van de ontdekking is het onmogelijk om er tegelijkertijd aan te werken. Onderzoekers moesten deze structuren opgraven en documenteren zonder het regenwoud zorgvuldig te vernietigen.
Een aanzienlijk deel van het ontdekte gebied is in werkelijkheid dicht begroeid met bomen. De Guatemalteekse regering moest beslissen hoe ze dit project voortzetten, of ze de structuren begraven wilden houden of de geschiedenis tot leven wilden brengen. Garrison voegde ook toe dat het lastig is omdat de vragen oneindig zijn.
Eenvoudiger of harder werken
De archeologen hebben misschien een doorbraak bereikt in de ontdekking van de verloren Maya-beschaving, maar de missie was nog lang niet voorbij. Het verzamelen en analyseren van LiDAR-gegevens was eigenlijk nog maar het begin.
De gegevens van de lasertechnologie waren slechts een kaart om hen te helpen de belangrijkste te zoeken gebieden te bepalen. Omdat de LiDar-technologie vrij nieuw is, moest een team van technici onder leiding van Albert Yu-Min Lin het harde deel van de controle van de gegevens doen. Ze liepen door kilometers bos om te bevestigen of de gegevens juist waren. Grondaudit betekent dat zijn team onderweg alle gevaarlijke dieren moest ontwijken om de LiDar-resultaten te verifiëren.
Het stap voor stap proces
De onderstaande afbeelding toont het driestappenproces dat door ingenieurs wordt gebruikt om te weten hoe de Lidar-technologie werkt. Lasersensoren zijn bevestigd aan een vliegtuig, het vliegtuig vliegt ongeveer 2000 voet boven de grond en LiDAR richt lichtpulsen naar de grond vanuit een vliegend vliegtuig. De lichtpulsen worden duizend keer per minuut afgeschoten en sommige stralen reflecteren misschien van bomen, maar sommige stralen bereiken de grond door de openingen van de bomen. Dit komt omdat de lichtstralen alleen op de hoogste punten van het oppervlak reflecteren.
Ten slotte gebruiken onderzoekers de meting van de afgelegde afstand licht om de kap digitaal te verwijderen en topografische modellen te maken. Geweldige dingen, nietwaar?
Baanbrekende technologie
Met de vooruitgang van onze technologie is het niet langer vergezocht om te denken dat opgravingen tot het verleden behoren. Het klassieke graven en zoeken zal over een paar jaar niet meer worden gebruikt. Voorlopig hebben archeologen een nieuwe vriend gevonden in LiDAR. Hiermee kunnen ze door dikke deksels van bladeren kijken en kunnen ze ook sneller meer informatie verzamelen.
Denk even na wat de LiDAR in een paar weken had bereikt. Stel je eens voor wat deze baanbrekende technologie kan doen als alle industrieën er gebruik van maken. De mogelijkheden zijn allemaal spannend en eindeloos.
Lowland Wonders
De Maya-beschaving omvat een gebied dat de noordelijke laaglanden van het schiereiland Yucatan, de Pacifische kust in het zuiden en de hooglanden van Sierra Madre omvat. In vroege ontdekkingen stonden de laaglandsteden Tikal en Calakmul bekend als grote rivalen.
Een van de dingen die de LiDAR-technologie aan het licht bracht, was het verschil in het ontwerp en de bouw van de steden. Sommige steden waren uitgebreider en groter dan de andere. Garrison gelooft dat ze misschien de ‘graanschuur’ van de oude Maya-beschaving hebben ontdekt.
Maya afstammelingen
Hoewel het Maya-rijk vele jaren geleden instortte, bleven sommige van hun nakomelingen in de moderne tijd leven. Ongeveer, er wonen momenteel 20 tot 30 miljoen Maya’s verspreid in Belize, Zuid-Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala en El Salvador.
Men gelooft dat ongeveer 42% van de 14,3 miljoen populaties in Guatemala directe afstammelingen zijn van de oude beschaving. Verschillende Maya-groepen wonen in verschillende gebieden, waaronder de Yucatan Jungle, Lacandon Jungle, Chiapas onder anderen. Sommige groepen zijn met succes geïntegreerd in mestizoculturen en sommige zijn bij hun traditionele cultuur gebleven.
Tegen alle waarschijnlijkheid in
De Maya-beschaving bloeide ondanks een uitdagende topografie. De hooglanden in het zuiden bestonden voornamelijk uit vulkanische bergen en de zuidelijke laaglanden waren bedekt met poreuze kalksteen en regenwouden. Sporadisch zie je savannes en moerassen. In het noorden zijn meestal bossen maar met een droog seizoen. Gevaarlijke dieren in overvloed hun regio met inbegrip van krokodillen, jaguars, giftige slangen en de stierhaai. Stenen uit de hooglanden worden verhandeld met de gewassen van het laagland, voornamelijk maïs.
Ondanks hun barre omgeving hielden de Maya’s vol en konden ze majestueuze structuren bouwen zonder metaal en geen modern transport.
Grote ontdekking
Er zijn veel dingen aan de Maya-cultuur die zowel intrigerend als interessant zijn. Archeologen zijn altijd verbaasd geweest over de structuren van de Maya-beschaving en hoe deze zijn gemaakt. Net als de piramides van Gizeh liet het gebruik van de Maya-piramides veel historici verbijsterd achter.
Met behulp van de nieuwe LiDAR-technologie heeft een team van archeologen iets ontdekt dat de realiteit van de Maya-beschaving zoals we die nu kennen zal veranderen. Hun ontdekking zal de informatie die door de jaren heen is verzameld volledig veranderen.
Geschiedenis wijzigen
Voor de langste tijd waren historici het erover eens dat de Maya-beschaving uit niet meer dan 2 miljoen mensen tegelijk bestond. Ze besloten dat op basis van de resterende structuren en grondonderzoeksgegevens de bevolking niet meer dan dit aantal kon zijn.
Vanwege de revolutionaire technologie LiDAR werd meer informatie gevonden. Toen boomluifels van luchtfoto’s digitaal werden verwijderd, werd ontdekt dat er meer dan 60.000 huizen, verhoogde snelwegen en paleizen met elkaar verbonden waren. De ontdekking van het complexe snelwegsysteem veranderde de manier waarop historici naar oude beschavingen keken.
Iets groters
Om het voor moderne mensen gemakkelijker te maken om te begrijpen hoe groot het Maya-koninkrijk was, gebruikten onderzoekers vergelijkingen met moderne landen. Tijdens de piek van de beschaving tussen 250AD en 900AD suggereren de nieuwe gegevens dat het rijk een gebied besloeg dat tweemaal groter was dan het middeleeuwse Engeland. De bevolking was ook veel dichter.
Het kan ook worden vergeleken met andere oude culturen zoals het oude Griekenland en het oude China. In plaats van de eerder gedachte verspreide stadstaten, is het meer onderling verbonden en verfijnd.
Cultureel behoud
De LiDAR-afbeeldingen tonen geavanceerde structuren zoals verhoogde snelwegen die steengroeven met de stedelijke gebieden verbonden. Het toont ook geavanceerde terrasvormige systemen en irrigaties die de landbouw in die tijd ondersteunden. Het was bekend dat de Maya’s geen wielen of beesten voor arbeid hadden gebruikt.
Met deze ontdekking zijn er ook veel ontwikkelingen gebeurd. De Pacunam, een Guatemalteekse organisatie, werkt aan het behoud van het culturele erfgoed van het land. Het doel is om meer te ontdekken uit de Guatemalteekse grond met behulp van de LiDAR-wetenschappers. Beiden hopen meer paleizen en structuren te ontdekken om het Maya-mysterie te verlichten.
LiDAR-technologie
De uitvinding van de Light Detection and Ranging, beter bekend als LiDAR, was de beste hulp die archeologie nodig had. De LiDAR-technologie is een externe meetmethode die licht van een gepulste laser gebruikt om afstanden of variabele afstanden te meten. De verschillen in laserteruglooptijden kunnen vervolgens worden gebruikt met golflengten om een 3D-beeld in kaart te brengen.
Gebaseerd op het succes van de LiDar-technologie met de Maya-ruïnes, is het mogelijk om alles te ontdekken dat onder de grond is begraven. Wie weet wat de Amazone en het Congobekken onder de bomen verstoppen?
Mysterieus einde
Zonder twijfel was het Maya-rijk vóór 900 na Christus de meest geavanceerde en meest dominante cultuur in Zuid- en Midden-Amerika. De eerste Maya-stad die nu op het schiereiland Yucatan werd ontdekt, was in 1 000 voor Christus. Dus wat gebeurde er met deze majestueuze megastad?
Tegen het einde van de achtste eeuw tot de negende eeuw werden steden in de zuidelijke laaglanden na elkaar verlaten. Geleerden hebben verschillende theorieën doorgestuurd, maar de reden voor het uiteenvallen van deze beschaving is nog onbekend.
Sommige geleerden geloven dat de middelen niet langer in staat waren om de behoeften van de inwoner te ondersteunen. Anderen beweren dat het kwam door constante oorlogvoering. Anderen geloven ook dat een langdurige droogte de oorzaak kan zijn geweest.
Bossen helpen
Naast het helpen van archeologen om verloren beschavingen te ontdekken, heeft LiDAR een ander doel. Deze technologie kan worden gebruikt bij het beoordelen van de omstandigheden in bossen. Afgezien van andere voordelen voor het milieu, zou LiDAR uiteindelijk kunnen helpen bij het voorkomen van bosbranden en de huidige boombedekking laten zien.
Thomas Garrison, een van de LiDAR-wetenschappers, zei dat ze zich vanaf nu richten op het gebruik van LiDAR voor archeologie, maar de voordelen houden daar niet op. Hij zei dat er een miljoen andere manieren zijn om deze technologie te gebruiken. Een daarvan is om de gegevens van LiDAR-afbeeldingen te gebruiken om te begrijpen hoe regenwouden herstellen van branden en wat de CO2-voetafdruk is.
Cultureel erfgoed behouden
Het doel van het LiDAR-project is om samen met de Guatemalteekse organisatie Pacunam alleen al in Guatemala meer dan 5000 vierkante kilometer regenwoud in kaart te brengen. Er wordt aangenomen dat het Maya-rijk dit uitgestrekte stuk land besloeg dat lange tijd onontdekt was gebleven.
Het hele project zal waarschijnlijk drie jaar duren vanwege het intensieve onderzoek dat nodig is. De eerste ontdekking is fascinerende en gemotiveerde wetenschappers om meer te doen. Pacunam streeft naar behoud van het rijke culturele erfgoed en alle ontwikkelingen die zij in deze onderneming zouden kunnen tegenkomen.
Nog steeds een mysterie
Hoewel de ontdekkingen met de LiDAR-technologie enorm zijn, is de Maya-puzzel verre van compleet. Hoe meer ontdekkingen er worden gedaan, hoe meer vragen worden gesteld. Pas nadat alle stukken zijn gevonden en aan elkaar zijn gekoppeld, kunnen wetenschappers concluderen over de reden voor het overlijden van de Maya-beschaving.
Tijd en meer technologieën zoals LiDAR zullen helpen de mysteries van de oude beschavingen bloot te leggen. De natuur heeft het Maya-rijk al teruggevorderd en is nu verloren onder de groei van bossen. Hopelijk helpt de LiDAR over drie jaar meer geheimen die helpen de reden voor de achteruitgang te beantwoorden.
Jungle mapping
Hoewel de ontdekkingen met de LiDAR-technologie enorm zijn, is de Maya-puzzel verre van compleet. Hoe meer ontdekkingen er worden gedaan, hoe meer vragen worden gesteld. Pas nadat alle stukken zijn gevonden en aan elkaar zijn gekoppeld, kunnen wetenschappers concluderen over de reden voor het overlijden van de Maya-beschaving.
Tijd en meer technologieën zoals LiDAR zullen helpen de mysteries van de oude beschavingen bloot te leggen. De natuur heeft het Maya-rijk al teruggevorderd en is nu verloren onder de groei van bossen. Hopelijk helpt de LiDAR over drie jaar meer geheimen die helpen de reden voor de achteruitgang te beantwoorden.
Anunnaki Advanced Civilizations That We Are Just Now Beginning to Understand
Anunnaki Advanced Civilizations That We Are Just Now Beginning to Understand
The Annunaki were major influences on biblical accounts of history. Chris Hardy explores major events from the Old Testament as machinations of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization. What was originally documented as divine intervention, becomes the work of advanced technology that we are just now beginning to understand.
The Anunnaki are a group of deities who appear in the mythological traditions of the ancient Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, and Babylonians. Descriptions of how many Anunnaki there were and what role they fulfilled are inconsistent and often contradictory.
Sumer is the earliest known civilization in the historical region of southern Mesopotamia, during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Ages, and one of the first civilizations in the world, along with Ancient Egypt, Norte Chico and the Indus Valley. Wikipedia
During a commercial flight over Medellin, Colombia, a pilot of Viva Air noticed a strange object flying towards the plane on which he decided to record it.
The UFO that looks like a cube then passes the aircraft at a safe distance.
What are these objects flying at hypersonic speed and the ability to fly with no obvious wings, tail or exhaust.
Baffling Video of a "UFO" Landing On Another Really Bizarre Stationary Big Cluster of Lights in Sky!
Baffling Video of a "UFO" Landing On Another Really Bizarre Stationary Big Cluster of Lights in Sky!
A video uploaded by Mrmb333 on February 1, 2020 shows besides two strange clusters of light that fly through the sky and come very close together, several rare sky phenomena from around the world.
But the most amazing image captured by a citizen from Tulsa shows a pyramid shaped cloud in the sky.
Lenticular clouds are often comparable in appearance to a flying saucer and even there are pyramid shaped lenticular clouds looking like the one depicted in the image below. But after checking various sources I could not find a cloud similar to the pyramid cloud.
I can be wrong, but in my opinion the strange looking cloud over Tulsa is not a normal cloud but more likely a cloaked pyramid shaped craft equipped with advanced technology, whether it is military or extraterrestrial.
The strange pyramid cloud comes days after a witness captured a giant metallic disc with portholes in the sky over Tulsa, Oklahoma on January 20, 2020.
Cloaked Pyramid Craft captured over Tulsa, Oklahoma?
Cloaked Pyramid Craft captured over Tulsa, Oklahoma?
Avideo uploaded by Mrmb333 on February 1, 2020 shows besides two strange clusters of light that fly through the sky and come very close together, several rare sky phenomena from around the world.
But the most amazing image captured by a citizen from Tulsa shows a pyramid shaped cloud in the sky.
Lenticular clouds are often comparable in appearance to a flying saucer and even there are pyramid shaped lenticular clouds looking like the one depicted in the image below. But after checking various sources I could not find a cloud similar to the pyramid cloud.
I can be wrong, but in my opinion the strange looking cloud over Tulsa is not a normal cloud but more likely a cloaked pyramid shaped craft equipped with advanced technology, whether it is military or extraterrestrial.
The strange pyramid cloud comes days after a witness captured a giant metallic disc with portholes in the sky over Tulsa, Oklahoma on January 20, 2020.
New footage of a bright unidentified flying object or orbs in the sky above Colorado town. This was filmed on 23rd June 2019 and just this weekend submitted to MUFON website.
Witness report:
Stationary UFO with multiple other UFOs flying around it. Large white orb shaped object in the south western sky. About 2pm June 23 2019. Object was far away but was stationary for over 1 hour. Once I began filming it I noticed several other orbs flying around it in different directions. At times forming shapes. There was no clouds. I couldn’t zoom in enough to get a clear picture.
James Fox is a longtime filmmaker who has created several excellent documentary treatments of the UFO subject. Now, he is about to release his latest treatment of the subject, simply named The Phenomenon. It is due for release later in 2020. Richard Dolan recently was able to view a screener of the documentary, and he interviews James about it.
Richard Dolan is one of the world’s leading researchers and writers on the subject of UFOs and believes that they constitute the greatest mystery of our time. He is the author of two volumes of history, UFOs and the National Security State, both ground-breaking works which together provide the most factually complete and accessible narrative of the UFO subject available anywhere. He also co-authored a speculative book about the future, A.D. After Disclosure, the first-ever analysis not only of how UFO secrecy might end but of the all-important question: what happens next?
Observational astronomy and astrophysics work together to further our understanding of the cosmos. Astrophysicists apply the laws of physics and physical theories to interpret the light gathered by observational astronomers.
Artist’s concept of a black hole. Astronomers use telescopes, both on Earth and in space, to gather radiation from space objects. Astrophysicists wield the laws of physics and physical theories to interpret that radiation. Ultimately, from the observations of astronomers, the minds and labor of astrophysicists – and the imaginations of space artists – we have images like this one.
Astrophysics is the science of physical processes in the cosmos. It uses data gathered by astronomers using telescopes on Earth and in space – combined with the laws and theories of physics – in order to interpret the universe around us. If astronomy asks what and where, astrophysics asks how and why. A sister science – planetary science – studies the planets in our solar system and distant solar systems in our Milky Way galaxy. Another sister science – cosmology – studies external galaxies and voids, and the large-scale structure and history of the universe.
For example, an astronomer might spend nights at the telescope gathering data on a star. Putting on his or her astrophysicist hat – and depending on which instruments were used in conjunction with the telescope (photometers or spectrometers, for example) – that scientist would then turn to the laws of physics to understand how that star produces its energy, whether it has a companion (or perhaps planets, or perhaps an encircling disk), and how the star moves through space.
Galactic astrophysicists would then ask how that star fits with what’s known about our Milky Way galaxy.
Cosmologists would then ask how the knowledge of the stars fits with that of the universe as a whole.
And by the way all of these labels – astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, for example – might describe a single person whose job is to study and understand the universe.
Plus this description is just a very, very simplistic view of what astronomers/astrophysicists/cosmologists actually do. They might, for example, bring many other sciences into their studies: chemistry, geology, biology and more. They’ll bring all of this knowledge into focus using a powerful and complex arsenal of theories, instruments and computational power that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. All of the tools of astronomy, all its various devices, data, theories and pathways of study, are seeking to answer humanity’s biggest questions. How did our universe get here? What’s its history? Where did we come from? Are there others like us, elsewhere in the cosmos?
Ultimately, astrophysics is a tool that helps humanity understand its place in the cosmos.
The history of astrophysics really begins in Europe with the Renaissance, when astronomy threw off the shackles of eons-old myths and became a true science. In Florence, in 1610, Galileo Galilei became one of the first to turn the telescope to the sky, revealing a universe at odds with the restrictive teachings of the Church. By 1633, this dangerous contradiction saw Galileo tried by the Roman Inquisition and confined to house arrest for the rest of his life until his death in 1642.
A painting by Giuseppe Bertini (1858), depicting Galileo (standing) showing the Doge or Duke of Venice (seated) how to use a telescope. Galileo is remembered as one of the first great observational astronomers.
In England in 1665, Isaac Newton, having fled Cambridge University to escape the Great Plague, settled back in the town of his birth, the rural community of Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire. Over the next several years, he developed calculus and revolutionary ideas about light. In 1687, he published his Law of Universal Gravitation, stating that every particle attracts every other particle in the universe with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. For the first time, scientists could calculate the force of attraction between objects in space. This was a giant step forward in scientists’ ability to understand the heavens.
Isaac Newton (1642-1726). He famously said in the year 1675: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
It can therefore be argued that Newton was the first astrophysicist, using the mathematical and physical tools he himself developed to ask questions about the nature of physical processes in the cosmos.
But the most important realization to emerge from Newton’s era was simply that the universe is governed by physical processes. Given the right tools, these processes can be understood by humans. No longer did the universe obey the whims of mystical and unfathomable powers: what was out there was just physics.
In the 20th century, Albert Einstein initiated a new revolution in our understanding of gravity with his general theory of relativity.
Now it’s estimated that what we know about the cosmos is doubling every 10 years.
A large part of that knowledge comes from the continued contribution of astrophysicists to our understanding of the laws of nature at work in the universe.
Einstein in 1947, at the age of 68. His special and general theories of relativity altered the way astrophysicists think about space, matter and time.
Bottom line: Observational astronomy and astrophysics work together to further our understanding of the cosmos. Astrophysicists apply the laws of physics and physical theories to interpret the light gathered by observational astronomers.
A mysterious cosmic event might have ever-so-slightly stretched and squeezed our planet last week. On Jan. 14, astronomers detected a split-second burst of gravitational waves, distortions in space-time … but researchers don't know where this burst came from.
The gravitational wave signal, picked up by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Virgo interferometer, lasted only 14 milliseconds, and astronomers haven't yet been able to pinpoint the burst's cause or determine whether it was just a blip in the detectors.
Gravitational waves can be caused by the collision of massive objects, such as two black holes or two neutron stars. Astronomers detected such gravitational waves from a neutron star collision in 2017 and from one in April of 2019, according to new findings that were presented at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Jan. 6.
But gravitational waves from collisions of such massive objects typically last longer and manifest in the data as a series of waves that change in frequency over time as the two orbiting objects move closer to each other, said Andy Howell, a staff scientist at Los Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network and an adjunct faculty member in physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was not part of the LIGO research.
The new signal was not a series of waves but a burst, Howell said. One more likely possibility is that this short-lived burst of gravitational waves comes from a more transient event, such as a supernova explosion, the catastrophic ending to a star's life.
Indeed, some astronomers have hypothesized that this could have been a signal from the Betelgeuse star, which mysteriously dimmed recently and is expected to undergo a supernova explosion. But the Betelgeuse star is still there so it's not that scenario, Howell said. It's also unlikely to be another supernova because they happen in our galaxy only about once every 100 years, he added.
What's more, the burst still "seems a little too short for what we expect from the collapse of a massive star," he said. "On the other hand, we've never seen a star blowing up in gravitational waves before, so we don't really know what it would look like." In addition, the astronomers didn't detect any neutrinos, tiny subatomic particles that carry no charge, which supernovas are known to release.
Another possibility is that the merging of two intermediate-mass black holes caused the signal, Howell said. Merging neutron stars produce waves that last longer (around 30 seconds) than this new signal, while merging black holes might more closely resemble bursts (that last around a couple of seconds). However, intermediate black hole mergers might also release a series of waves that change in frequency.
LIGO came across this signal while specifically looking for such bursts. But "that doesn't mean that what it found is an intermediate-mass black hole merger," Howell told Live Science. "We don't know what they found," especially since LIGO hasn't yet released the exact structure of the signal, he added.
It's also possible that this signal was just noise in the data from the detector, Howell said. But this burst of gravitational waves was found by all three LIGO detectors: one in Washington state, one in Louisiana and one in Italy. So the probability of the LIGO detectors finding this signal by chance (meaning it's a false alarm) is once every 25.84 years, which "gives us some indication that this is a pretty good signal," Howell said.
There could be other explanations for this mysterious burst, too. For example, a supernova could have directly collapsed into a black hole without producing neutrinos, though such an occurrence is very speculative, Howell said. Astronomers are now pointing their telescopes to that region to try to pinpoint the source of the waves.
"The universe always surprises us," he added. "There could be totally new astronomical events out there that produce gravitational waves that we haven't really thought about."
This artist’s impression shows the blast from a heatwave detected in a massive, forming star.Credit: Katharina Immer/JIVE
Here on Earth, we pay quite a lot of attention to the sun. It's visible to us, after all, and central to our lives. But it is only one of the billions of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. It's also quite small compared to other stars—many are at least eight times moremassive.
These massive stars influence the structure, shape and chemical content of a galaxy. And when they have exhausted their hydrogen gas fuel and die, they do so in an explosive event called a supernova. This explosion is sometimes so strong that it triggers the formation of new stars out of materials in the dead star’s surroundings.
But there’s an important gap in our knowledge: astronomers don’t yet fully understand how those original massive stars themselves are initially formed. So far, observations have only yielded some pieces of the puzzle. This is because nearly all the known massive stars in our galaxy are located very far away from our solar system. They also form in close proximity to other massive stars, making it difficult to study the environment where they take shape.
One theory, though, is that a rotating disc of gas and dust funnels materials into the growing star.
Astronomers have recently found that the funnelling of matter into a forming star happens at different rates over time. Sometimes the forming star swallows up a huge amount of matter, resulting in a burst of activities in the massive star. This is called an accretion burst event. It is incredibly rare: only three such events have been observed, out of all the billions of massive stars in the Milky Way.
This is why astronomers are so excited about a recent observation of the phenomenon. I was part of the team that recorded this observation. Now, our team and other astronomers will be able to develop and test theories to explain how high-mass stars gain their mass.
A global collaboration
After the first detection of an accretion burst, in 2016, astronomers from around the world agreed in 2017 to coordinate their efforts to observe more. Reported bursts have to be validated and followed up with more observations, and this takes a joint, global effort – which led to the formation of the Maser Monitoring Organisation (M2O).
A maser is the microwave (radio frequency) equivalent of laser. The word stands for “microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”. Masers are observed using radio telescopes and most of them are observed at centimetre wavelength: they are very compact.
A maser flare can be a sign of an extraordinary event such as the formation of a star. Since 2017 radio telescopes in Japan, Poland, Italy, China, Russia, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa (HartRAO, in the country’s Gauteng province) have been working together to detect a flare stimulated by a burst in the funnelling of materials into a massive star.
In January 2019, astronomers at Ibaraki University in Japan noticed that one such massive protostar, G358-MM1, showed signs of new activity. The masers associated with the object brightened significantly over a short period of time. The theory is that masers brighten when excited by an accretion burst.
Follow-up observations with the Australian Long Baseline Array revealed something astronomers are witnessing for the first time – a blast of heat-wave coming from the source and travelling through the surroundings of the forming big star. Blasts can last for about two weeks to a few months.
Burst of energy
Blasts like this were not observed in the previous two accretion bursts in massive stars. This may imply that it’s a different kind of accretion burst. There may even be a “zoo” of accretion burst types – a whole range of different types which act in different ways that may depend on the mass and evolutionary stage of the young star.
Although the burst activity has died down, the masers are still a lot brighter than they were before the burst. Astronomers are watching with interest to see whether a similar burst will occur again, and at what scale.
This experience shows how valuable it is to have lots of eyes on the sky, from different corners of the globe. Collaboration is astronomy is crucial for new, important discoveries.
OHIO UNIVERSITY HAS YET TO DENY PROFESSOR’S ‘BUGS ON MARS!’ CLAIM. SO.
OHIO UNIVERSITY HAS YET TO DENY PROFESSOR’S ‘BUGS ON MARS!’ CLAIM. SO.
IMAGES VIA PIXABAY/VICTOR TANGERMANN
KRISTIN HOUSER__FILED UNDER: OFF WORLD
SpaceBugs!
On November 20, Ohio University dropped a press release detailing professor emeritus William Romoser’s photo “evidence” that Mars is home to insect life. The claim sparked all sorts of backlash, and the next day, OU deleted the press release because, as university spokesperson Jim Sabin told Futurism, Romoser “no longer wishes to engage with media regarding this research.”
But according to a new Motherboardstory, the school still won’t say whether or not it actually believes in the existence of Martian bugs.
Entomologist William Romoser annotated this NASA Mars rover image to suggest it shows an insect-like form.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Annotations by William Romoser
Martian? I Hardly Knew Him!
Motherboard received a similar statement from OU regarding the removal of the press release — and that’s about all it could get out of the university.
“The Ohio University spokesperson did not answer specific questions such as whether the university believes there are insects on Mars, if it stands behind the research, and how it decides what press releases to write up,” Motherboard wrote.
OU might think this radio silence is the best way to minimize damage to its reputation and support its staff — but if it wants people to stop asking questions, it might want to admit that maaaaaaybe it shouldn’t have promoted Romoser’s bizarre claims in the first place?
Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our sun, may have a second planet, according to researchers from the National Institute of Astrophysics. If confirmed, it would be an ideal candidate for direct imaging by new upcoming space telescopes.
Artist’s concept of Proxima Centauri b, an Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting the nearest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri. Now researchers think there is a second, larger planet also orbiting the star.
In 2016, astronomers announced the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting the closest star to our solar system, Proxima Centauri. Exciting, since the planet appeared to be close to the same size as Earth and not too far away, cosmically-speaking, at 4.2 light-years. Could there be other planets in this nearby system? On January 15, 2020, another research team published its evidence for a second, larger planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. At this point, this second object is still considered a candidate. It is not confirmed. But researchers do make a compelling case for its existence.
The potential discovery was announced by Mario Damasso of the National Institute of Astrophysics and his colleagues on January 15. The new peer-reviewed paper appeared in Science Advances on the same day.
The planet – dubbed Proxima Centauri c – is a fair bit larger than the first planet, Proxima Centauri b, and is about six times more massive than Earth. This would make it a super-Earth, planets that are significantly larger and more massive than Earth but smaller and less massive than Neptune. It is estimated to orbit its star every 5.2 years. Proxima Centauri b, by comparison, is only about 1.3 times Earth’s mass.
Even though Proxima Centauri is the closest star, part of the Alpha Centauri three-star system, it has been difficult to detect planets orbiting it. That’s because most exoplanets discovered so far have been glimpsed via the transit method; that is, they’re detected because they lie edge-on to our line-of-sight to their host stars, and astronomers can detect a minute dip in the host star’s light when the planet crosses in front of it. No such dip in brightness has been seen for Proxima Centauri.
Instead, to find this star’s planets, astronomers have had to use a second planet-hunting technique, called the radial velocity method. Radial velocity refers to a slight wobble in the star’s motion as seen from Earth, caused by the gravity of unseen planets tugging on it. This is how Proxima Centauri b was found, and now, seemingly, Proxima Centauri c.
Two European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescope instruments, the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) and the Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph (UVES), were used to obtain the data from Proxima Centauri.
Damasso and his team analyzed the star’s light spectrum data, going back 17.5 years, to see if a previously reported light spectrum signal really was from a second planet. If the spectrum oscillates between the red and blue radial velocity, that typically means the star is moving slightly closer to and then farther away from Earth, due to the gravitational pull of a planet or planets. The researchers did find such a signal, occurring over a 1,900-day period. That would mean it is unlikely to be due only to other cyclical shifts in the star’s magnetic field. It would be more consistent with a second planet orbiting the star.
Our sun’s closest neighbors among the stars, including Proxima Centauri.
At this point, we just don’t know enough about them to answer that question. Proxima Centauri b is almost the same size as Earth, and is thought to have similar temperatures, but it orbits very close to its star, which is a red dwarf. Red dwarfs are known for being very active, emitting powerful solar flares. The radiation from those flares could strip away the atmosphere of any close-in planets. Proxima Centauri c is farther out, but may be too cold for life as we know it. It also may be more like Neptune, with a deep gaseous atmosphere and no real solid surface, rather than a super-Earth, which is rocky like Earth, but larger. We just don’t know yet.
Another exciting aspect of Proxima Centauri c, however, is that it is far enough from the glare of its star that it should be able to be photographed directly by upcoming space telescopes. So far, only a handful of planets that are much larger than this have been successfully photographed, and even then, they are still just blobs of light.
Mario Damasso of the National Institute of Astrophysics, whose team found the possible new planet.
Proxima c could become a prime target for follow-up and characterization with next-generation direct imaging instrumentation due to the large maximum angular separation of ~1 arc second from the parent star. The candidate planet represents a challenge for the models of super-Earth formation and evolution.
If scientists can learn more about both Proxima Centauri c and b, including direct imaging for at least c (b would be a lot more difficult), then that should give them a better idea of what both Earth-sized and super-Earth exoplanets are actually like, in particular ones that orbit red dwarf stars. That would then help them figure how many could be potentially habitable, and what conditions would make that possible, an exciting endeavor.
Bottom line:Researchers from the National Institute of Astrophysics have found new evidence for a second planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our sun.
The clarity of these images from the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii is thanks to the telescope’s 4-meter mirror, the world’s largest for a solar telescope. “It’s the biggest jump in our ability to study the sun since Galileo’s time,” a scientist said.
The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope – near the summit of Mount Haleakala on the Hawaiian island of Maui – released its first images of the sun this week. They’re said to be the highest-resolution images of the solar surface ever taken, and who can argue? We’ve never seen images of the sun that look like this. The imagery – released January 29, 2020 – shows cell-like structures roiling on the sun’s surface. We knew this structure existed. These cells are called granules, and they’re caused by convective currents of plasma on the sun. But these images are like nothing we’ve seen previously. Each one of these cells is the size of Texas!
Scientists say the Texas-sized granules are the result of heat carried from inside the sun outward to its surface. It’s as if we’re seeing the sun boil.
The clarity of the image is due to the telescope’s 4-meter (13-foot) mirror, which is the world’s largest for a solar telescope.
Thomas Rimmele is the director of the Inouye solar telescope project. He said:
These are the highest resolution images of the solar surface ever taken.
The U.S. National Science Foundation built the Inouye Solar Telescope, which has more than twice the resolution – double the ability to see clearly – of the next-best solar observatories. Construction of the telescope began in January 2013, and the primary mirror was delivered to the site in August 2017. The completed telescope has now provided its first images of the sun. From an NSF statement about the telescopes first images:
The images show a pattern of turbulent ‘boiling’ plasma that covers the entire sun. The cell-like structures – each about the size of Texas – are the signature of violent motions that transport heat from the inside of the sun to its surface. That hot solar plasma rises in the bright centers of ‘cells,’ cools, then sinks below the surface in dark lanes in a process known as convection.
View larger. | The Inouye Solar Telescope images the sun in more detail than we’ve ever seen before. The telescope can image a region of the sun 24,000 miles (38,000 km) wide. Close up, these images show large cell-like structures hundreds of kilometers across and, for the first time, the smallest features ever seen on the solar surface, some as small as 19 miles (30 km).
The motions of the sun’s plasma constantly twist and tangle the magnetic fields on the sun. Twisted magnetic fields can lead to solar storms that can affect systems on Earth. Magnetic eruptions on the sun can affect air travel, disrupt satellite communications, bring down power grids and disable technologies such as GPS.
It’s all about the magnetic field. To unravel the sun’s biggest mysteries, we have to not only be able to clearly see these tiny structures from 93 million miles [150 million km] away but very precisely measure their magnetic field strength and direction near the surface and trace the field as it extends out into the million-degree corona, the outer atmosphere of the sun.
Finally resolving these tiny magnetic features is central to what makes the Inouye Solar Telescope unique, says NFS. The telescope can measure and characterize the sun’s magnetic field in more detail than ever seen before and determine the causes of potentially harmful solar activity.
Bottom line:The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope has produced the highest resolution images of the sun’s surface ever taken.
Inside Skinwalker Ranch, a Paranormal Hotbed of UFO Research
Inside Skinwalker Ranch, a Paranormal Hotbed of UFO Research
Locals say the ranch has been plagued by strange creatures and cattle mutilations. It's also been used for government UFO research. So what's really happening there?
The long red mesas of Utah’s Uintah Basin greet us as my driver, an American real estate mogul and tech investor, pulls us into Fort Duchesne. Looking out my window, we are finally out of the mountains and in the valley. My mind is lost in thought about the legends here, the supposed curse that now haunts this land, and the men and women who have experienced that curse head on. I have monsters on my mind. Well, actually just one: the Skinwalker.
A quick right turn shakes me from my daze.
“We are almost there,” my driver tells me. “Are you excited?”
He has a childlike grin on his face. We had travelled for nearly three hours from Salt Lake City. A snow storm had interrupted our journey through the mountains, blinding us and covering the highway in a sheet of ice.
Safe in the valley, the sky is blue, a sharp contrast from the grey storm skies at higher altitudes. The sun bounced off the mesa that made the area famous for paranormal junkies and UFO enthusiasts alike. Local lore has always told that strange lights hover over this area and that strange creatures roam the wilderness here. One tale tells of the Ute, an Indigenous tribe from this valley and their uneasy alliance with the Navajo. Siding with American military forces in the late 19th century, the Ute helped force the Navajo people out of the area. Local lore suggests that the Navajo unleashed a Skinwalker, a shapeshifter who can possess animals' skin.
Two massive concrete blockades dotted with “No Trespassing” signs and a massive “STOP” sign loom at the end of the road. As we roll past, a 20-foot-tall black steel gate greets us. Standing on the other side is a guard carrying a black rifle. He gives us a friendly nod and the gate slowly opens.
My host gives me a smile: “Welcome to Skinwalker Ranch.”
IMAGE: MJ BANIAS
We hadn’t originally planned on driving. My host, who bought the ranch from hotel and aerospace magnate Robert Bigelow in 2016, planned to fly me there in his private helicopter.
Since he bought the ranch, he hasn't opened it up to too many people, but that’s slowly changing. A crew from the History Channel has been filming a new documentary series that will air this year. He agreed to let me visit on the condition that I not reveal his identity as part of this article. Few journalists have ever been on the ranch, and as a reporter who typically covers anomalies and weird news, it’s long been a place I wanted to visit. I decided to go.
As we took off in his helicopter, the owner of the ranch got philosophical about why he bought it.
“You know, facing the reality of our mortality is sobering. The anomalies at Skinwalker Ranch, the things that have been reported there over decades, if not hundreds of years. They seem to attest to the fact that we live in a strange universe. Perhaps we are not alone,” he said. Salt Lake City disappeared into the distance as we made our way into the narrow mountain passes.
“Perhaps there is more than meets the eye. The nature of our existence, our physical reality. It is much more complex. The nature of our consciousness and our place in the cosmos. It is funny to think that people are still asking the same questions that our species has been asking for thousands of years,” he told me.
“I think the opportunity to take a living laboratory like the ranch, a place that seems to be the center of gravity of so much of the unexplained, it is a unique experience,” he said. “I manage and lead an effort that I believe is the greatest science project of all time.”
Upon entering the mountains, the storm made it unsafe. We had to turn around and drive.
The Uintah Basin has always been home to strange tales of odd lights, sounds and visions. In the 1950’s, Joseph “Junior” Hicks, a local high school science teacher, began cataloging people’s stories of their experiences in the basin. With Dr. Frank Salisbury, Hicks published a book on the subject in 1974. Sightings of strange creatures and UFOs continued in the area and the mythology became entrenched.
Decades later, things came to a head when ranchers Terry and Gwen Sherman bought the property in 1994. Documented in the book Hunt for the Skinwalker, the Shermans alleged that their cows were mutilated with surgical precision in broad daylight and that their family was hunted by strange aerial objects and floating orbs of light. They heard disembodied voices, experienced poltergeist activity, witnessed horrible monsters emerging from portals, and claimed they encountered a wolf that, when shot several times by a high powered rifle at point blank range, did not die.
TOP: A ZOOMED OUT VIEW OF SKINWALKER RANCH'S LOCATION IN EASTERN UTAH. BOTTOM: A ZOOMED IN VIEW. THE RED LINE SHOWS SKINWALKER RANCH'S GATES AND FENCES.
In 2017, the New York Times broke the story of a secretive government UFO program run by Pentagon counter-intelligence staffer Luis Elizondo. According to the article, in 2007, a Defense Intelligence Agency official visited the ranch, and a short time later, met with Senator Harry Reid of Nevada. According to the New York Times, “Mr. Reid said he met with [DIA] agency officials shortly after his meeting with Mr. Bigelow and learned that they wanted to start a research program on UFOs.” That program, the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program, was given to Bigelow under government contract. His company received $22 million dollars to study and generate reports on exotic science, UFOs, and other anomalous phenomena. The strange events on the ranch, as well as other locations bearing purported paranormal anomalies, were involved in the study, according to the New York Times. AAWSAP was cancelled after two years and, in 2011, Bigelow’s government funding ran out. Attempts to secure more money for research was denied. Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s UFO investigation program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP, continued looking into unknown aerial encounters by the US military.
Bigelow has been silent as to what occurred on the ranch during his tenure as owner, and wild rumors have ranged from the ranch being a site of secret government weapons testing to hiding underground alien bases. Stories about shapeshifting monsters, interdimensional portals, UFO sightings, and poltergeists continue to this day. In 2016, Bigelow sold the ranch to a company called Adamantium Real Estate Holdings. In 2018, Las Vegas reporter and long time UFO researcher George Knapp and filmmaker Jeremy Corbell released a documentary film about the ranch which only added more to the enigma which surrounds it.
That documentary called it "the most scientifically studied site in paranormal history."
Just because it’s an infamous place for UFO and paranormal hunters doesn’t mean that everyone feels that way, or even knows what it is.
Louise Tsinijinnie, a spokesperson for the Navajo Nation Parks and Recreation Service, told me that Skinwalkers were not something that many Navajo will discuss. I asked her about her thoughts regarding Skinwalker Ranch and the curse allegedly placed there centuries ago.
“It is within the realm of possibility,” she said. “In times of great desperation or wrong doing, the oral storytelling does point to such events occurring.”
Tsinijinnie said that, mythologically and within oral tradition, the Navajo do have stories about Skinwalkers, and Skinwalker Ranch could fit into those narratives. She has heard of the ranch, but was unable to confirm with absolute certainty that such a curse was placed directly on the land.
Betsy Chapoose, the Cultural Rights and Protection Director for the Ute tribe, explained that in her 30 years of working in tribal administration, she had never had anyone come into her office to talk about the ranch. She said people who live near the ranch may have their own stories and traditions regarding the Skinwalker legend, and those were something that ought to be respected. But when I first asked her about the legend and alleged Navajo curse, she didn't know what to make of it:
“That is the first time I have ever heard that story,” her voice breaking into laughter. “It’s true that the Ute and the Navajo have had a strained relationship over land ownership, but I’ve never heard any stories about a curse.”
THE AUTHOR AND WILLIAM
As I hop out of the SUV the next day on the ranch, a black dog bounds towards me.
“Hey pup,” I put out my hand. The dog eagerly accepts a scratch behind the ears.
“That’s William,” the owner says. “He came with the ranch. He knows all its secrets.”
“Seen it all have you pup pup?” I ask. “You must be that big bad monster everyone keeps talking about. You don’t seem so scary.”
The dog accompanies me as I look around the main buildings. The first is a farmhouse, occupied by the live-in caretakers of Skinwalker Ranch, Kandus Linde, a published anthropologist, and her partner Tom Lewis, a freelance graphic artist.
“You hear a lot of stories about what goes on, but most of it is just stories. Do weird things happen? Yeah,” Linde explained to me. “The best way to describe it is that the ranch has a personality. It sounds crazy, I know.”
“It’s over 500 acres,” Linde explained. “It’s a beautiful place. It’s quiet. We literally live in the middle of nowhere, but it’s home. It does have ‘a feeling’ though, and every once in a while, we know we need to get away for a bit.”
More interesting is the second building, only a few steps away. This is the nerve centre of the ranch’s scientific project, known as the Command Center. This hub is the brainchild of Erik Bard, a plasma physicist and partner in a small company that designs and manufactures components for x-ray analytic systems that are used in U.S. national labs.
The new owner has heard all the bizarre stories and rumors, of course. He admits many are far-fetched, but if the ranch does hold strange secrets, he’s out to try his best to confirm them. Over the past several years, he and his staff have completely revamped the ranch, installing surveillance systems and scientific equipment all over in order to try to detect UFOs, paranormal activity, or otherwise explain some of the strange happenings that occur on Skinwalker Ranch.
THE COMMAND CENTER.
IMAGE: MJ BANIAS
The Command Center is the core of that effort.
Behind a locked door, accessible only by code, is a room about the size of a large bedroom. The Command Center, though designed by Bard, was built by the ranch’s superintendent, Thomas Winterton after it was purchased by the current owner. The Command Center has five 55-inch flat screen monitors showing live feeds from nearly a dozen cameras, workbenches, computer systems, microscopes, and just for a touch of fun, embedded green LED rope lights that give the room a cool sci-fi vibe.
"I've made consumer and scientific products in my career, but this ranch and the whole story connected with it are where I find a different and potentially important kind of meaning," Bard tells me.
The first screen that catches my eye monitors air traffic over the ranch. Bard is very clear that their aircraft transponder data feed was not relying on online services like FlightRadar24, an online flight tracking website.
“This data that we are receiving at the ranch is tracked by the equipment that we have here,” Bard explains. “We have receivers on the ranch that track both 1090 MHz ADS-B and 978 MHz UAT signals.” The vast majority of aircraft are required to use either ADS-B or UAT transponders to tell air traffic controllers who they are and where they are. The ranch system provides a live feed, but also stores historical data, so if several witnesses saw something strange in the sky, they could cross reference it with all known flights in the area. Bard explains that the system also creates a secondary historical log as a redundancy.
THOMAS WINTERTON AT LEFT AND ERIK BARD AT RIGHT IN THE COMMAND CENTER.
IMAGE: MJ BANIAS
“The local historical log gets compared against independent sources of what are supposed to be the same data, the latter being the secondary witness. In turn, these get compared against such things as our readings and surveillance footage. A secondary witness is helpful in the event that we have interference with our local equipment during some episode,” Bard says. “We have a lot of equipment problems here because of some strange electromagnetic interference.”
Over the last year, several strange cases of extreme electromagnetic fields have been logged on the ranch. According to Bard, these EM fields are transient, they come and go, move around and at times have reached levels dangerous to humans.
According to the ranch team, several times in the last few years, people on the ranch have become ill and some even required hospitalization. Thomas Winterton was hospitalized with a life threatening subgaleal fluid collection with associated subcalvarial inflammation, or in layman’s terms, swelling in the brain and the collection of fluid between the skull and the scalp, which the team believes occurred when he attempted to dig on the ranch.
I was able to confirm with medical records that some of the medical tests resulted in inconclusive results for common causes of such an injury. It seems the jury is still out and Winterton is currently being monitored by his doctors. Over the summer, three guests on the ranch reported strange skin inflammation, nausea, and extreme lassitude within a close period of time and several went to the local emergency room, according to the owner. I was unable to independently verify why they needed medical attention.
Another screen monitors the radio frequencies at which electromagnetic signals are detected on the ranch. Due to the ranch’s significant distance from radio and cellular towers, the radio signals typically remain at a very low level. On occasion, there are several anomalous occurrences of sudden bursts across a wide range of the RF spectrum, which is not typical of a single signal source or station.
A RADIO SIGNAL SCREEN IN THE COMMAND CENTER.
IMAGE: MJ BANIAS
“We have not been able to determine the origin of these,” Bard tells me as the screen suddenly became erratic with activity. A cell phone or walkie-talkie will only elevate the levels in one area of the RF spectrum, and would create a small peak on the band, he says. “It doesn't make sense when you see a very wide portion of the spectrum jumping up and down like this. My best guess, if I had to come up with a plausible explanation, these could be signals broadcast by automation on some of the oil and gas drilling equipment that’s around the ranch.” Bard has not yet been able to determine the actual cause.
The ranch is also equipped with a weather monitoring station, dozens of stationary and mobile HD camera systems, as well as infrared, night vision, and thermal imaging cameras. Large portions of the 512-acre ranch are under 24/7 surveillance. Bard can view all this remotely, with enough server space to store all those video feeds. Bard often jokingly refers to the ranch as Eden, and much like God, he has eyes everywhere.
Bard explains that any strange events require significant amounts of data to be considered actual anomalies by him and his team. If a strange event does occur, such as the sighting of an aerial anomaly or a sudden surge of electromagnetic frequency, the team examines data across all the monitoring systems to see if and how each device recorded the phenomenon.
Major events, the ones “that count,” not only end up getting picked up on video, but usually correlate to multiple readings on the various sensor platforms. Bard’s favorite system is something he designed and built himself. SATAN, or Sentinel Assignment Telemetry And Notification is a four-legged metal unit with a built in computer and screen. SATAN is equipped to detect vibrations in the ground and air at very low frequencies, transient magnetic fields, as well as infrasonic and seismic activity.
“Now this unit is inside because I am doing some upgrades, but normally, it sits way out on the ranch in a pit. We call it the SATAN pit.” Bard chuckles at his odd Biblical sense of humor, “I know.”
Typically, Bard considers an event anomalous when multiple sensors detect activity simultaneously, and, as yet, defies a straightforward explanation. While Bard is not prepared to say paranormal interdimensional entities or aliens are visiting the ranch, he does believe it’s strange when random electromagnetic frequencies bombard a localized area of the ranch, get logged by all the equipment, and then, a few minutes later, vanish.
AN OLD "BAIT PEN," USED TO MOUNT CAMERAS AND SENSORS. PREVIOUS OWNERS PUT ANIMALS IN THESE PENS TO SEE IF ANYTHING HAPPENED TO THEM. THE CURRENT OWNER DOESN'T DO THIS ANYMORE.
IMAGE: MJ BANIAS
“More has occurred on the property in the last two years than the two decades Bigelow’s group was here,” Bryant ‘Dragon’ Arnold, the ranch’s head of security, tells me rather gruffly as we leave the Command Centre. While that’s impossible to verify, many people on the ranch seem to believe it. “People talk about Bigelow Aerospace and NIDS and BAASS and the Pentagon’s $22 million. I’ll tell you right now, people would be surprised if they knew what we have seen and the money that has been spent since we took over.”
"I take my truck up the road, and as I start to get closer, I start to get really scared. Just this feeling that takes over. Then I hear this voice, as clear as you and me talking right now, that says, ‘Stop, turn around.’"
Arnold, Winterton, and I are touring the property in a black Jeep. The melting snow has turned the usually red dusty trails into a rough brown muck. As our vehicle is getting knocked around by the bumpy road, the two men explain that the ranch was in a state of disrepair in 2016, and significant time and money was spent into upgrading the facilities. Winterton says the septic tank was improperly installed, and the toilets barely worked. He did many of the repairs himself. The surveillance and data collection platforms have also been modernized and improved.
“Whatever the thing on this ranch is, it can drain your phone battery in a second, give people radiation burns, and generate insane levels of electromagnetic frequencies. When we first got here in 2016 after buying the ranch,” Arnold laughs shaking his head. “Shit, some of the gear and tests they left behind, well, let’s just say we’ve taken a more scientific approach.”
A licensed private security expert with significant experience as an outdoorsman, Arnold has known the ranch’s new owner since they were 19. They are basically brothers. He tells me that people show up at the gates all the time wanting to come onto the property. Some people can be belligerent, but most people just stand at the gate and leave when they are asked to.
“One time this guy pulls up to the gate and asks if he can see the ranch. He tells me he that he is from Australia and the ranch was on his Bucket List,” Winterton tells me. “I can’t believe that guy would fly all that way just to come here.”
As we slowly traverse the pothole-strewn roads, I ask Arnold if he has ever had any paranormal experiences on the ranch. He laughs.
A HOMESTEAD ON SKINWALKER RANCH.
IMAGE: MJ BANIAS
“Nothing at first. I thought it was all a bunch of crap. Then, one night, I’m in one of the bedrooms in the ranch house. I’m lying down trying to get to sleep, and then all of a sudden, BAM, something slams into my bed. It’s like when your kids jump into bed with you or someone big kneed the bed. I sit up and turn on the lights. Nothing’s there.”
Something else happened to Arnold this summer, he says. He explains that there was a large film crew on the ranch during the summer. They were filming the first season of the History Channel TV series.
“We all saw it. We were looking at the West field, and then there it was. I thought it was a drone for a second because I try to rationalize everything. It was just hovering there,” Arnold looks at me. “I don’t think I can talk about this. It sounds insane. All the sensors we have went crazy.”
The two men take me to the field where Arnold had his sighting. He tells me that he can’t talk about it. I decide to leave it alone as I look across the snow-covered field. It is quiet. Peaceful. In the distance are some old abandoned buildings.
Heading towards them, I know that these three decaying houses are what they call ‘Homestead 2.’ On the verge of collapse, these old homes housed ranchers and their families since the 1930s well before the ranch became the infamous paranormal hotspot it is now. Over time, these families slowly moved away and none lived on the ranch when the Sherman family bought it in 1994. Winterton hands me a Trifield meter, a handheld device that acts as a gaussmeter, electric field meter, and radio field strength meter in all in one. Grabbing my camera, I slowly walk through these old buildings which probably have countless stories to tell. Even in the middle of the day, they were dark and ominous. There is an odd feeling to these old peeling walls and empty wooden kitchen cabinets, a stillness and silence, and I feel nervous.
A HOMESTEAD.
IMAGE: MJ BANIAS
“We get a lot of weird events at these old homesteads,” Winterton tells me as I return to the Jeep.
“When we first took over the ranch, Bigelow had an older couple here who were the caretakers. They liked living on the ranch, so they stayed here until about a year and a half ago when they decided to leave for health reasons,” Winterton continues. “One night in 2016, they called me, it was probably 2 a.m, and said someone was on the ranch. There was this old basketball they kept by the front porch, anyway, they said someone was bouncing it against the house.”
Kids looking for kicks, overzealous paranormal enthusiasts, and UFO investigators occasionally try to trespass onto the ranch. Winterton, who only lives about 15 minutes from the ranch, jumped in his truck, pistol in hand, and sped to the property.
“When I got there, I made sure they were OK and I just walked through the house making sure no one else was there. I told them to stay inside and went out to see if anyone was walking around,” he says.
THE AUTHOR SITTING INSIDE HOMESTEAD 3.
IMAGE: MJ BANIAS
Using one of the thermal cameras they kept on the ranch, Winterton began going to all the sheds and outbuildings, scanning the fields and the mesa. Nothing.
“I had this feeling I was being watched, but no one was there. I get my shotgun from my truck and, just for good measure, I go to the front yard there, and blast a few shots into the air and yell a few obscenities. Just to scare them,” Winterton tells me with a chuckle.
He decided to search the old homesteads, since a lot of trespassers go to those buildings.
“I take my truck up the road, and as I start to get closer, I start to get really scared. Just this feeling that takes over. Then I hear this voice, as clear as you and me talking right now, that says, ‘Stop, turn around.’ I lean out the window with my spotlight out and start searching around. Nothing. So I get out and blast a few more shots and yell some more.”
The ranch’s bizarre history tends to get into people’s heads. Knowing the history of the ranch, I let my mind run wild. I feel like some invisible presence is watching me. Walking through these old homes, knowing the myths, my logical and rational brain are wrestling with the possibility that something may haunt this ranch like the stories say.
Thinking it was all in his head, Winterton told the couple everything was fine and went home. He had a similar experience six months later while he was plowing snow at the ranch. The same voice. The same feelings of fear and anxiety. He thought he was losing his mind.
One evening, Winterton and his wife went to the ranch because Bard told him that he wanted a hard backup of the video files due to some cameras failing. He asked Winterton to use one of the external hard drives to download the videos from that night. As Winterton began the backup, he and his wife heard a banging sound coming from one of the back bedrooms.
“It sounded like someone had an electrical cord and they were smacking it against a wall. So I jump up and run back there. Nobody was in there. I’ve spent tons of time in the Command Centre. I know the usual sounds that it makes, what the water heater sounds like when it turns on. This was different,” Winterton says. “So we are freaking out at this point. I sit down back at the computer and the download is taking forever. Then, all of a sudden, like someone was standing between us, I hear, ‘Leave now.’ I look at Melissa, she looks at me. Then it happens again, ‘You need to leave now.’”
Tom and Melissa Winterton both jumped up and did as they were told.
“We get into the truck and we got the hell out of there. I am trying to text and call Erik but my phone won’t respond. It’s all frozen. My wife is trying to get it to work. I try. It’s like 10 minutes goes by, and eventually, the phone responds then it just dies. It started to work for a second or two then the batteries are totally dead.”
Melissa Winterton later recounted the story to me in much the same way.
We continue down the road to another decaying house, ‘Homestead 3.’ Surrounded by a circle of old trees, this house is the end of the line. As I explore, the two men point to the west and the property line which separates the ranch from reservation land owned by the Ute.
Winterton and Arnold take me up to the southern side of the ranch which has us climb up a hill that overlooks the entire property. This high up, I can see the entire ranch, the mesas, and the snow covered mountains in the far distance and it truly is a majestic place.
“For all the weird shit that happens here, this is my favorite place in the world,” Arnold tells me as we stand there. “Some of the people here say the ranch is alive. Maybe. I don’t know. But when I’m not here, all I want to do is come back.”
“All I want to do is grab a tent and my camping bag. I could stay here for a week,” I say. “I just want to go exploring.”
“It’s like the ranch calls to you, you know,” Winterton gives me knowing smile.
I eventually have to leave the ranch, and as our SUV gets back on the highway, I can’t help but think that Skinwalker Ranch is so much more than the paranormal mythology that has been crafted around it. Perhaps it is too late to separate the ranch from the lore that has made it famous, but from my short time there, the ranch does seem to have an aura.
For the Defense Intelligence Agency, it was a national security and defense project. For the owner and his science team, it is a place for scientific research into questions that humanity has been grappling with since time immemorial. For the live-in caretakers, for Winterton and Arnold, the ranch is home. For locals, it is a place not spoken of and avoided. For me, a journalist, it is a story I will someday tell my kids around a campfire. For paranormal researchers and UFO enthusiasts, it is a place of myths and legends where unspeakable entities roam and unknown objects travel.
Whatever the truth is behind the strange events which plague Skinwalker Ranch, it is fundamentally a place one ought to respect. As our SUV enters the snow-covered mountain passes on the way back to Salt Lake City, I can’t help but smile. I avoided the curse of the Skinwalker, at least for now.
An unidentified object from outer space has been spotted shooting across the Los Angeles night sky on Wednesday and residents have been sharing footage of the bright light on social media.
Several locals reported seeing the blazing trail, claiming it was either a meteor, a fireball, or a "crazy looking shooting star."
The exact origin of the latest sighting has yet to be confirmed. Any matter illuminating on entry to Earth's atmosphere is considered a meteor. Asteroids are smaller matter orbiting the Sun.
"We have about 60 reports so far [of the sighting] and a trajectory estimate," Mike Hankey, a software developer and meteor observer at the American Meteor Society (AMS), told Newsweek. "We also caught it on one of our meteor camera stations outside of Los Angeles. From the video and also the report we can tell this was most likely NOT a natural fireball meteor. It appears to be 'space-trash', a man-made object re-entry of some type. We are not sure what the object is yet, but this information will probably come out soon."
Many residents in Southern California shared videos of the recent sighting on social media using the hashtag #meteor, which trended on Twitter.
"Meteor over Los Angeles, taken in the Mission Hills/San Fernando Valley area of LA. I got the last 13 seconds of at least a 20 second shooting star #meteor #LAmeteor #LosAngeles #LA #ShootingStar," wrote @StanMoroncini.
"I saw this massive meteor earlier tonight it seemed to fall for a long time and was so amazing to see #meteor," wrote @ColourMeMineBty.
"Y'ALL I was really thinking it was the end of the world.... This thing was huge #meteor," wrote @badddgalkeke
Stan Moroncini@StanMoroncini
Saw the most crazy meteor I’ve ever seen!! It blew into pieces and burned up in the atmosphere!! Oh My Lanta that was SO COOL!!!!! And I caught the end on camera!!#meteor
"Saw the most crazy meteor I've ever seen!! It blew into pieces and burned up in the atmosphere!! Oh My Lanta that was SO COOL!!!!! And I caught the end on camera!! #meteor," wrote @summerrabel.
"Residents in Southern California were treated to a meteor last night. The fireball streaked across the night sky & then broke into several pieces. #meteor #Fireball #ThursdayThoughts," wrote @MariettaDaviz.
Stan Moroncini@StanMoroncini
Meteor over Los Angeles, taken in the Mission Hills/San Fernando Valley area of LA. I got the last 13 seconds of at least a 20 second shooting star #meteor#LAmeteor#LosAngeles#LA#ShootingStar
The bright trail was also reported to be seen from San Diego. "I saw the same meteor here in San Diego. That was so dope! Didn't tell anyone to don't look crazy #meteor," wrote user @mathbjj.
"My boyfriend caught this video of the meteor shower in california and wanted me to post it!! #meteor #SanDiego," wrote @renfriiiii.
Matheus Oliveira@mathbj
I saw the same meteor here in San Diego. That was so dope! Didn’t tell anyone to don’t look crazy
"The majority of visible meteors are caused by particles ranging in size from about that of a small pebble down to a grain of sand, and generally weigh less than 1-2 grams," the AMS explains. "The brilliant flash of light from a meteor is not caused so much by the meteoroid's mass, but by its high level of kinetic energy as it collides with the atmosphere."
kimmy@renfriiiii
My boyfriend caught this video of the meteor shower in california and wanted me to post it!! #meteor#SanDiego
In November, a mysterious "large fireball falling to the earth" was spotted in Salem, Oregon. The incident was first reported as a plane crash, but the Federal Aviation Administration did not report any plane crashes in the area at the time. The AMS and the CNEOS also did not report fireballs in the area. In July, a large fireball was also spotted flashing across the South Florida sky and was reported to be space debris by the AMS, WPTV reported.
Newsweek contacted NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) for further comment on the latest incident.
A Perseid meteor is seen over Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado in the early morning hours of August 13, 2018.GETTY IMAGES
The lonely expanses of the world’s deserts seem to be devoid of much of anything. They are forbidding, arid wastelands where few tread and where even fewer care to spend much time. Yet, from these expanses of rugged, withered wilderness there have sprung some very weird accounts within the world of the weird, these remote locales and their bleak atmosphere seemingly a perfect recipe for tales of the truly outlandish. Here we will look at some accounts of very weird supposed encounters with what seem to be alien entities, which have occurred out in these moonscape deserts and which serve to perplex.
One of the most bizarre desert alien encounters I have ever seen comes from Timothy Green Beckley’s Strange effects of flying saucers, and supposedly happened in the summer of 1967 somewhere out in the moonscape of an unspecified California desert in the very dark early morning hours. According to the report, 18-year old Jerry James, his father, mother and younger sister were all driving through these badlands on their way from Colorado to a vacation home they kept in California, and the mood at the time was one of excitement and merriment. The drive had been an arduous, 18-hour-long ordeal, but despite their weariness they were in high spirits. They pulled their Chevrolet pickup and house trailer into a service area to get some rest and relax in their trailer before the last leg of their journey, and this is where their vacation would take a turn for the increasingly bizarre.
It began when one of them noticed an object in the sky that was pointed out to the others. Whatever it was soon proved to be no normal aircraft, about the size of a car, somewhat spherical, and sort of resembling a top in that that it was continuously spinning as it wandered about the area, and it suddenly emitted a bright beam like a searchlight down to the parched earth below, much to the family’s surprise. The craft and its inscrutable piercing, searching beam then circled around the area and they had the distinct feeling that it was looking for something down in the dust and scrub below it. They looked on in awe and bewilderment for a few minutes, but this turned to fear when that beam suddenly trained right upon them. The UFO then approached to hover directly above them, that blinding light making it as if it were broad daylight outside and the whole time completely silent. Just as they thought that they were perhaps in big trouble they were bathed in darkness again like a curtain coming down as the craft shot off into the night, leaving them quite shaken. But things were about to get even weirder still.
The next day the family was only a few miles from the service station when they stopped and got out to stretch their legs and noticed a silver-looking vessel or craft of some type come towards them to approach to such a close distance that they said they could even see the little rivets in its metallic surface. It was all rather terrifying, to the point that the mother fainted to crumple to the ground and had to be revived with smelling salts. They then retreated into their trailer and found a strange sight awaiting them there. Whereas moments before the trailer had been rather a mess, with unmade beds and dirty dishes in the sink, now everything was completely in order, cleaned up, and the entire trailer was pristine and spotless. Everything had been put away and it was as if someone had come in and cleaned it all, which was very odd considering they had all left the mess it has been in just minutes before. Just about the only thing out of place was a single kitchen dish lying on the counter, which held something weird within.
Sitting in the dish was what looked like a sprouting carrot, but it started to transform before their startled eyes, sprouting roots that were almost like tentacles in their mobility and the speed in which they fell down over the counter to spill to the floor below and writhe about. The family stared in puzzlement as the plant further bloomed outwards, taking steps back to avoid the ever expanding tangle of quivering roots at their feet. It was also noticed that the plant, the dish, and the cabinet it sat upon were covered with a slimy green-colored substance, of which Jerry would say:
It was a vile smelling substance, and other than that I can’t tell you much about it. One thing strange though. When I touched it with a pencil it ‘ate up’ the wood and lead in a matter of seconds.
The family continued their surreal odyssey when they took the truck out on the road again and found that the vehicle would accelerate and slow against their will as if it had a mind of its own. When they reached a service station and tried to put gasoline in, the cap was removed to belch forth a horrific stench and hissing noise. Making it all even more absurdly weird is that they would later find that the seat where the driver sat had inexplicably rotted away, and the ignition key had become malleable like rubber and now glowed in the dark. What in the world?
This is one of those cases that seems to transcend bizarre and firmly lodge itself into the realm of the truly fringe. Also from 1967 comes an odd report from the Vizcaino Desert of Baja California in Mexico. On the evening of July 2 of that year military intelligence units were reportedly called out to an isolated area of the desert to investigate an alleged UFO crash, and when they arrived at the scene they supposedly found what they were looking for in an unearthly oblong metal craft that had apparently broken in half and was surrounded by a “pungent odor.” Strangest of all were the four bodies of what could only have been the occupants, described as being very odd indeed.
Each of the enormous creatures was said to measure around 9-feet in height, covered with hair and with squashed, hairless ape-like faces with flat wide noses, and mouths twisted open in grimaces of agony that exposed smallish fangs, for the most part more or less looking every bit like what one imagines a Bigfoot would look like. The only thing they wore were a kind of sandals with very thick soles and a copper colored belts with huge buckles lined with small buttons, but other than that they were completely naked and carried no tools. Weirdly, one of the creatures was supposedly found to still be alive, but died soon after. According to the report, the U.S. military moved in and whisked away all of it to Yuma Air Base in Arizona. What happened then? Well, your guess is as good as anyone’s.
Moving into later years in May of 1980 there was a strange encounter described in Linda Moulton Howe’s book An Alien Harvest, and supposedly occurred in the remote desert near Cimarron, New Mexico. The witnesses were a woman and her 8-year old son, who were driving through the desert and spotted three odd lights out in the open landscape near a cattle ranch. They could see that one of the objects was larger than the others, with what looked like lit windows embedded within it. After that they apparently fainted, and it was only when the woman was hypnotically regressed that she would remember what had happened to her out there in that remote place.
According to the witness, she had been gripped by a stifling fear when she heard the cows “screaming in agony,” after which she was purportedly approached and captured by four inhuman entities, three of them troll-like and greenish in color and another, taller hairless pale being with a high forehead and large beautiful eyes and wearing a flowing white cape, which seemed to be the leader. The taller one apparently telepathically scolded the witness for being out there, and she claimed that his touch caused a tingling, burning pain as if it were a hot iron. She was then dragged kicking and screaming to their ship, where she would see her son fast asleep. The aliens then allegedly began a medical examination of her and brought her past a room where greenish shuffling creatures wearing brown clothing were dissecting a cow, horrifically as it was still alive and gurgling in pain, eventually bringing her to another room where there were more of the pale white entities. Her memory then jumps to standing in the desert again, and this time she was brought down to an underground facility populated by more of the ethereal pale beings and where she spies a vat of gelatinous liquid holding a horrific collection of animal and human body parts suspended within. The next thing she would remember after this would be sitting safely back in her car with her son, who would not remember any of it as he had peacefully slept through it all. Weird to say the least.
Another report from Phantoms and Monsters also apparently happened in 1980 in the desert wilds near Tucson, Arizona, where two friends were out exploring on a chilly October evening. They were making their way along a dry riverbed, the darkness pushed away by miner’s lights on their heads, when they came across a large, thick Palo Verde tree that appeared out of the night in the light of their lamps. As they approached, the branches of the tree allegedly started shaking violently, but they could not tell what was causing it. They at first thought it might be wild pigs, but then the shaking stopped and began again higher up in the tree. As they shone their lights and peered into the thick foliage they say they were startled to see two bright blue eyes spaced around a foot apart staring down at them, after which they withdrew and some heavy footfalls could be heard thumping off into the night. The witnesses claim that they would find enormous footprints there the next day, and that the area would have intense UFO activity for several weeks after.
Another strange case involving some sort of humanoid creature comes from the deserts of the Mexican State of Chihuahua. At the end of 1989 and the beginning of 1990, a group of teenagers were on a mission to explore the caves of a place called Cerro Pajarito when they came across something that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. As the group was exploring one of the caves, they came upon the discovery of a dead deer and a doe that were freshly killed and exhibited three odd perforations on their necks that formed a triangular pattern. In the surrounding area, there were footprints that looked like those of a puma, but it soon became apparent that no puma had done this. The group suddenly heard blood curdling squealing sounds and the air became pervaded by a stench described as smelling like burning wood. The terrified group of teenagers looked and saw a hunched over, humanoid figure crouched upon a rock outcropping about 15 meters away from them. The creature apparently started bounding towards them and one of the groups emptied his pistol at it, although the bullets seemed to have no effect. As the panicked group turned tail and ran for dear life, they reported passing yet another humanoid creature that was described as being metallic green in color and standing only 80 cm high. What could this have possibly been? Who knows?
It certainly seems that the isolated, inhospitable wilds of the desert are prime locations for some very strange encounters, and it leaves us to wonder what could be going on here. Are these genuine alien encounters with creatures from another world, interdimensional phenomena, or what? How can we comfortably fit the utter, sheer bizarreness of such reports into what we know? There is no way to be sure of the answer to these questions, but if you are ever out in the sun scorched desert wilderness, be sure to keep an eye out. You never know what you might find.
A special thanks to intrepid researcher and friend Albert S. Rosales for providing these accounts and sources.
You may scoff at the idea of or the need for a military branch devoted to defending or fighting in outer space. You may laugh at its uniform emblem’s obvious resemblance to the Starfleet Command emblem of the fictional fighters for the United Federation of Planets in the Star trek world. But … who are you going to call when a mysterious Russian spacecraft begins tailing an equally mysterious U.S. spy satellite? Space Force, we have a problem!
“This is all circumstantial evidence, but there are a hell of a lot of circumstances that make it look like a known Russian inspection satellite is currently inspecting a known US spy satellite. A pretty thorough look of the satellite catalog can’t produce another potential target that looks as good as this in terms of the orbits and viewing geometry.”
That’s part of what Purdue University astrodynamics grad student Michael Thompson tweeted after spotting Cosmos 2542 (also called Kosmos 2542), a Russian inspection satellite launched in late November 2019, enter a synchronized orbit with USA 245, a National Reconnaissance Office KH-11 image gathering spy satellites. Military watchers like The Drive quickly picked up on this and pointed out that Cosmos 2542 is one of many so-called space apparatus inspection satellites that the Russian space program has put into orbit over the past decade.
“Space apparatus inspector” is a benign description for satellites that have exhibited very non-benign orbital behavior. In a previous report by The Drive, the satellites were spotted tailing space debris very closely in a manner that suggests something more than them being robotic ‘space pickers’. (Note to self – pitch ‘Space Pickers’ to cable network.) The Pentagon expressed concerns about these “inspectors” at a 2018 meeting of the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, but Russia has continued to launch them. Cosmos 2542 appears to be the first to be ‘inspecting’ an active satellite – USA 245 is one of a number of leading-edge reconnaissance (spy) satellites utilizing electro-optical digital imaging to provide a real-time optical observation capability. In other words, a perfect vehicle for spying on other countries. Why does Thompson and The Drive think Cosmos 2542 is spying on OUR spy?
“As I’m typing this, that offset distance shifts between 150 and 300km depending on the location in the orbit.”
That means Cosmos 2542 has placed itself as close as 93 miles away from USA 245 while speeding at thousands of miles per hour. Even more sinisterly, Thompson observed Cosmos 2542 moving in orbit from one side of USA 245 to the other – giving it a full view of the satellite.
What’s the big deal, you may ask … isn’t this just a real-life playout of Mad Magazine’s iconic “Spy vs. Spy” Cold War cartoons? Maybe – it could just be a sinister game that neither side will win. Since USA 245 is highly classified, we don’t know what its true capabilities or ultimate mission are, nor do we know if it’s capable of its own evasive maneuvers (there haven’t been any yet) or if it’s armed and ready for these types of encounters. However, it’s easy to imagine that Cosmos 2542 is close enough to attack and/or destroy USA 245 or render it useless with electronic jammers, blinding lasers or even just by spraying chemicals on its camera lenses – a perfect ‘Spy vs. Spy’ setup.
Is it time for the Space Force?
“There may come a point where we demonstrate some of our capabilities so that our adversaries understand they cannot deny us the use of space without consequence.”
Then-Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson said this at the Space Foundation’s 35th annual Space Symposium in 2019. This sounds like what most people expect the Space Force to do. Can it? Will it live up to its fictional emblem inspiration or will it become one-half of Mad’s ‘Spy vs. Spy’?
“Activate paint shields and spray cans, Mr. Sulu.”
Steve Quayle: Vatican UFO Disclosure - Light Orbs Phenomenon
Steve Quayle: Vatican UFO Disclosure - Light Orbs Phenomenon
Steve Quayle Interviews (02/01/2020) — The Responsibility Of The Vatican For The Flow Of Disclosure Information
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.
Life on Mars or just a big rock? UFO hunters claim sketchy Nasa snap shows human-like alien but the space agency says it simply captures the landscape of the red planet
Life on Mars or just a big rock? UFO hunters claim sketchy Nasa snap shows human-like alien but the space agency says it simply captures the landscape of the red planet
UFO hunters claim Curiosity rover has captured image of a tiny alien
Figure said to be standing behind a rock on Mars, peering around corner
They claim it is six inches tall, and compared it to the 'Atacama alien'
But, DNA tests on Atacama remains found it was a human with a mutation
More than a decade ago, a bizarre six-inch skeleton was discovered in Chile’s Atacama Desert, spurring claims that extraterrestrial visitors had crash-landed on Earth.
Now, alien investigators of the internet have spotted what they say could be a living member of the same species.
Just feet away from Nasa’s Curiosity rover, YouTube user Paranormal Crucible claims a tiny humanoid alien can be seen spying from behind a Martian rock.
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Just feet away from Nasa’s Curiosity rover, Youtube user Paranormal Crucible claims a tiny humanoid alien can be seen spying from behind a Martian rock
The original image was captured by the Curiosity rover’s Mastcam, revealing the rocky landscape of the red planet.
But at the bottom-center of the photo, Paranormal Crucible claims to have found something strange.
‘Interesting anomolie [sic] found by the rover, which looks like a little Martian,’ the Youtuber wrote.
‘I have colorized the image and added eyes to the head so its easier to see, but everything is there in the original images, whatever it is it looks humanoid, reminds me of the Atacama Alien, about the same size too, this one is around 6 inches.’
The original image was captured by the Curiosity rover’s Mastcam, revealing the rocky landscape of the red planet. But at the bottom-center of the photo, Paranormal Crucible claims to have found something strange
WHY WE SEE STRANGE THINGS ON MARS
Pareidolia is the psychological response to seeing faces and other significant and everyday items in random stimulus.
It is a form of apophenia, when people see patterns in random, unconnected data.
There have been multiple occasions when people have claimed to see religious images and themes in unexpected places.
On the red planet, one of the most famous is the 'face on Mars' spotted by one of the Viking orbiters in 1976.
This was later proven to just be a chance alignment of shifting sand dunes.
Commenters have speculated that the small figure is likely a Martian woman, based on the shape of its ‘body.’
On UFOSightings Daily, editor Scott C. Waring added to the claims, writing that the figure in the photo is of a Martian species that is alive, but dwindling.
‘This human-like figure is peering around the corner of a rock wall and I can make out its head, chest, shoulders, arm, leg, knee, and foot from this one close up photo,’ Waring writes.
Due to the estimated size, Paranormal Crucible says it ‘could be the same species’ as the ‘Atacama alien.’ In 2013, however, it was revealed that DNA tests on the tiny skeleton found in Chile confirmed that the bizarre specimen was not an alien, but a human with an ‘interesting mutation’
‘Paranormal Crucible says its about 6 inches…I agree. This is one of the species that once lived on Mars and is still living there now, but in lower numbers. The mysteries of Mars just keep revealing themselves one by one.’
Due to the estimated size, Paranormal Crucible says it ‘could be the same species’ as the ‘Atacama alien.’
In 2013, however, it was revealed that DNA tests on the tiny skeleton confirmed that the bizarre specimen found in Chile was not an alien, but a human with an ‘interesting mutation.’
THE MYSTERIOUS 'ATACAMA ALIEN' SKELETON
The 'Atacama alien' remains were found on October 19, 2003 by a man named Oscar Munoz while he was looking for objects of historical value in La Noria – a ghost town in the Atacama Desert.
Near an abandoned church, Munoz found a white cloth containing ‘a strange skeleton no bigger than 15cm [the size of a pen],’ according to a local Chilean newspaper.
It was a creature with hard teeth, a bulging head with an additional odd bulge on top.
Its body was scaly and of dark color. Unlike humans, it had nine ribs.
A few years ago, researchers from Stanford University analysed DNA from bone marrow extracted from the specimen.
They concluded that it was an 'interesting mutation' of a male human that had survived post-birth for between six and eight years.
‘I can say with absolute certainty that it is not a monkey.
'It is human - closer to human than chimpanzees. It lived to the age of six to eight,’ Garry Nolan, director of stem cell biology at Stanford University's School of Medicine in California, said at the time.
Key point: It’s unlikely that the new UAV is capable of Mach-10 hypersonic flight—the Pentagon is still struggling to reach Mach five.
Iran is the only other country besides the United States to operate arguably history’s most powerful interceptor aircraft, the F-14 Tomcat. And the Islamic republic has worked the twin-engine, swing-wing fighters hard.
The F-14s played a major role in Iran’s war with Iraq from 1980 to 1988. Iranian Tomcat pilots were the only ones to successfully employ the F-14’s long-range, heavyweight AIM-54 Phoenix missile to shoot down enemy planes.
In the decades after the war, Tehran repaired and upgraded the surviving F-14s, scouring the globe for parts in defiance of a U.S. government embargo.
The Americans retired their F-14s in 2006, but around 40 of Iran’s Tomcats remain active. Their main role is defending Iran’s nuclear sites. It’s a mission that has brought the interceptors in close contact with some very mysterious aircraft, according to a bizarre and fascinating 2013 story in Combat Aircraft magazine by reporter Babak Taghvaee.
The Iranians believed the objects were spy drones belonging to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, sent to sniff out Tehran’s suspected atomic weapons program. But they attribute to these alleged unmanned aerial vehicles flight characteristics and capabilities far beyond what any known drone can achieve.
And in 2012 one of the alleged flying robots reportedly also shot down an F-14 attempting to intercept it. Or at least some Iranians seem genuinely to believe so.
Over the decades Tehran has built three major nuclear facilities that could, in theory, be used to assemble atomic weapons: reactors at Bushehr and Arak and an enrichment plant at Natanz.
This infrastructure became public knowledge in 2002. No doubt the CIA took a strong interest, potentially long before that date. “A number of reconnaissance UAVs were sent to collect intelligence to prepare for a possible attack” by Western forces, Taghvaee wrote.
To protect the nuke facilities, in 2004 Iran deployed a task force composed of eight F-4E fighters and eight F-14s plus a former 707 airliner and a C-130 cargo plane outfitted with sensors and radios for command and control. The task force encountered what it believed were CIA drones with “astonishing flight characteristics.”
The UAVs could jam radars and disrupt interceptors’ navigation systems. They flew “outside the atmosphere” at speeds of up to Mach 10. They could hover. Flying at night, they emitted a telltale blue light that led to their nickname: “luminous objects.”
“In several cases … F-14s faced them but were unable to operate their armament systems properly,” Taghvaee wrote. One Tomcat taking off to intercept a luminous object on Jan. 26, 2012 mysteriously exploded, killing both crewmen. Taghvaee implies the alleged UAV was somehow responsible, as the F-14 in question was “one of the fittest” of the 40 or so Tomcats then in service.
It should go without saying that the CIA and the Pentagon most likely fly reconnaissance aircraft near—and even over—Iranian nuclear sites. In 2012 and 2013, Iranian fighters tried to intercept American Predator drones outside Tehran’s airspace. In the 2013 incident, a U.S. Air Force F-22 stealth fighter blocked the intercept with some Top Gun-style theatrics.
In 2009, the Air Force copped to the existence of a new, previously secret drone operated in conjunction with the intelligence agency. The RQ-170 Sentinel was based in southern Afghanistan within short flying distance of Iran. In December 2011, a Sentinel crashed on the Afghanistan-Iran border and was captured by Iranian troops.
Neither the Predator nor the Sentinel is particularly high-flying nor can hover or glow blue. And neither has the electrical power to scramble radars and navigation gear.
Rumors abound that the Air Force and CIA operate a stealthy new drone that has not been disclosed to the public. Even if they do, it’s unlikely that the new UAV is capable of Mach-10 hypersonic flight—the Pentagon is still struggling to reach Mach five.
So if Iranian F-14s truly are chasing around super-fast, super-high-flying and lethal UFOs, what exactly are they? Who knows.
David Axe serves as Defense Editor of the National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels War Fix,War Is Boringand Machete Squad. This first appeared in August 2019 and is being republished due to reader's interest.
(CNN)Neutrinos, so-called "ghost particles" scattered across the universe, can be 10 million times lighter than the mass of an electron, according to a new study.
Neutrinos are referred to as ghostly because they are extremely volatile, or vaporous, cosmic particles that can pass through any kind of matter without changing. They have almost no mass -- but now scientists have calculated the mass of the lightest type of neutrino.
They can travel through the most extreme environments, like stars, planets and entire galaxies, and remain the same. But neutrinos, while highly energetic, have no charge. Not even the most powerful magnetic field can affect them.
Last year, scientists were able to trace the origins of a high-energy, tiny neutrino for the first time. It traveled 3.7 billion light-years to Earth. It was found by sensors deep in the Antarctic ice in the IceCube detector.
Scientists and observatories around the world were able to trace the neutrino to a galaxy with a supermassive, rapidly spinning black hole at its center, known as a blazar. The galaxy sits to the left of Orion's shoulder in his constellation and is about 4 billion light-years from Earth.
Different types of neutrinos appear as three different masses, but the lightest one was unknown until now. And astronomers still don't know much else about the differences in these three types.
"A hundred billion neutrinos fly through your thumb from the Sun every second, even at night," said Arthur Loureiro, study author and PHd student in the University College London's Physics & Astronomy department. "These are very weakly interactive ghosts that we know little about. What we do know is that as they move, they can change between their three flavours, and this can only happen if at least two of their masses are non-zero."
The mix of three different masses is like mixing ice cream flavors, he said.
"The three flavors can be compared to ice cream where you have one scoop containing strawberry, chocolate and vanilla," Loureiro said. "Three flavors are always present but in different ratios, and the changing ratio-and the weird behaviour of the particle-can only be explained by neutrinos having a mass."
The idea of neutrinos having mass garnered scientists Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics.
In order to calculate the low mass of the lightest neutrino, data from 1.1 million galaxies collected by particle physicists and cosmologists was used. This allowed them to measure the expansion rate of the universe. Neutrinos are prevalent in the universe, but hard to spot. The scientists required as much data as possible to have every advantage in their research.
"We used information from a variety of sources including space- and ground-based telescopes observing the first light of the Universe, exploding stars, the largest 3D map of galaxies in the Universe, particle accelerators, nuclear reactors, and more," Loureiro said."As neutrinos are abundant but tiny and elusive, we needed every piece of knowledge available to calculate their mass and our method could be applied to other big questions puzzling cosmologists and particle physicists alike."
The supercomputer, known as Grace, at University College London allowed the researchers to create a mathematical model. The supercomputer crunched half a million computing hours, which would have taken 60 years on a single processor.
The researchers discovered the mass to be 10 million times lighter than an electron. Calculating this mass can help researchers who are studying dark matter, dark energy and the structure of the universe.
INSLAGEN VAN PLANETOÏDEN – EEN VOORSPELBAAR RISICO?
INSLAGEN VAN PLANETOÏDEN – EEN VOORSPELBAAR RISICO?
Karel van der Hucht
Kraters onthullen dat de aarde in het verleden getroffen is door planetoïde-inslagen. En die kunnen zich ook in de toekomst voordoen. Maar kunnen we ze aan zien komen?
In het tijdsbestek 1980-1990 kwamen geologen en astronomen een prehistorische inslagkrater voor de kust van Yucatán (Mexico) op het spoor. De krater bleek even oud als de massa-extinctie van 66 miljoen jaar geleden waarbij ongeveer 75% van al het leven op aarde het leven liet, waaronder de dinosauriërs. Deze uitstervingsgolf wordt algemeen aan de Yucatán-inslag toegeschreven, waardoor het besef doorbrak dat onze kosmische omgeving invloed heeft op leven en evolutie op aarde. Inslagen van planetoïden en kometen op aarde hebben de evolutie niet alleen in het verleden op dramatische wijze beïnvloed, maar zulke inslagen zullen zich ook in de toekomst voordoen. Sindsdien wordt hard gewerkt om zoveel mogelijk potentieel gevaarlijke planetoïden en kometen te ontdekken, te volgen en te karakteriseren.
Dit artikel is oorspronkelijk verschenen in het blad ZENIT, waarin je elke maand alles kunt lezen over sterrenkunde, weerkunde en ruimteonderzoek.
NEA’s Een planetoïde wordt Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) genoemd als zijn baan hem binnen 1,3 Astronomische Eenheden (AE: de gemiddelde afstand aarde-zon, 150 miljoen km) van de zon brengt. Near Earth Asteroids en Near Earth Comets (NEC) vormen samen de categorie Near Earth Objects. Het aan de Internationale Astronomische Unie (IAU) gelieerde Minor Planet Center is sinds 1947 het internationaal erkende registratiecentrum en archief van alle waarnemingen – waar ook ter wereld gedaan – van objecten kleiner dan planeten. Tot januari 1980 had het MPC de banen van 51 NEA’s en 44 NEC’s geregistreerd. Inmiddels zijn dat 21.465 NEA’s en 108 NEC’s (stand van 29 november 2019), waarvan de gegevens publiekelijk beschikbaar zijn op het internet. Dit dankzij het werk van NEO-waarnemers wereldwijd (beroeps en amateurs), het NASA/JPL Center for NEO Studies (CNEOS) en het ESA-SSA NEO Coordination Center (NEOCC). Omdat het aantal geregistreerde NECs minder is dan 1% van het aantal geregistreerde NEA’s, beperken we ons in dit artikel tot NEA’s (aardscheerders).
Tot 29 november 2019 werden 556 passages van NEA’s met afmetingen van 1 tot 325 meter binnen 1 maansafstand (d ≤ 1 Lunar Distance, LD: 384.400 km) geregistreerd, waarvan 30 passages met d ≤ 0,1 LD. De huidige ontdekkingsfrequentie van zulke nabije NEA-passages is momenteel ongeveer 75 per jaar. Zeven recente NEA-inslagen vonden plaats in 1908 (Tunguska), 2008 (2008 TC3, Soedan), 2013 (Chelyabinsk), 2014 (2014 AA, West-Afrika), 2018 (2018 LA, Botswana, zie Beekman 2018a; en Beringzee) en 2019 (2019 MO, Caribische Zee). De inslagen boven Soedan, Chelyabinsk en de Beringzee kwamen onverwacht. In de andere vier gevallen werden de NEA’s kort voor de inslag gedetecteerd.
Het cumulatieve aantal waargenomen Near-Earth Asteroids (NEA’s) per 18 november 2019.
Afbeelding: CNEOS.
Beschikbare baanberekeningen van de thans bekende NEA’s voorspellen 48 NEA-passages met d ≤ 1.00 LD tot het jaar 2200, dus slechts 0,25 per jaar (minstens een factor 4 × 75 = 300 te weinig). Maar hoe compleet is de NEA-inventaris momenteel? Van het geschatte aantal van 942 NEA’s met afmetingen groter dan een kilometer zijn er tot op heden 901 waargenomen (96%), met een inslagfrequentie van eens per half miljoen jaar. In de categorie van 140 m tot 1 km zijn er van het geschatte aantal van ongeveer 24.000 NEA’s 8.875 waargenomen (37%), met een inslagfrequentie van eens in de tienduizend jaar. In de categorie van 40 m tot 140 m zijn er van het geschatte aantal van ongeveer 500.000 NEA’s tot op heden ~ 6300 waargenomen (< 1%), met een inslagfrequentie van eens in de duizend jaar. Momenteel worden er jaarlijks ongeveer 2000 nieuwe NEA’s ontdekt, met afmetingen van een paar meter tot enkele kilometers. Het risico van catastrofale NEA-inslagen op aarde is niet zo zeer geassocieerd met de tot op heden bekende, maar met het gigantische aantal nog toe onbekende NEA’s.
“DE NEA-INSLAG VAN 66 MILJOEN JAAR GELEDEN WAS NIET DE EERSTE IN ZIJN SOORT, EN ONGETWIJFELD OOK NIET DE LAATSTE”
Enkele inslagen De Earth Impact Database vermeldt 160 erkende inslagkraters, met diameters van 10 tot 300 km en een ouderdom van 50.000 tot 2 miljard jaar. De jongste ontdekking, gepubliceerd in november 2018, betreft een ~30 km grote inslagkrater onder Hiawatha Glacier in Noord-West Groenland, onder een kilometerdikke laag ijs. Ieder van deze prehistorische NEO-inslagen had ongetwijfeld een dramatische invloed op zijn omgeving. Maar ook de relatief kleine NEO-inslagen sinds 1908 tonen aan dat onze plaats in het zonnestelsel niet zo veilig is als wij tot voor kort dachten. In het kader hieronder volgt een select overzicht van relevante NEO-inslagen.
(Relatief) recente inslagen op een rij – 66 Mjr BC: de Chicxulub-krater (Mexico). Deze ~150 km grote en ~20 km diepe krater, deels begraven onder het Yucatán-schiereiland, werd veroorzaakt door de inslag van een NEA met een diameter van ongeveer 10 tot 15 km. De tijd van inslag correspondeert goed met de Krijt-Tertiairgrens (de K–T grens is de overgang tussen de geologische tijdperken Krijt (K) en Paleogeen (Pg)), iets minder dan 66 miljoen jaar geleden. De inslag veroorzaakte een wereldwijde verstoring van het aardse klimaat en het uitsterven van ruwweg 75% van alle levensvormen op aarde (massa-extinctie), inclusief de dinosauriërs. Was deze inslag onvermijdelijk? De aarde legt in haar baan om de zon een afstand gelijk aan haar eigen diameter af in ongeveer zeven minuten. Dus als de NEA die de massa-extinctie veroorzaakte zeven minuten eerder of later langs was gekomen, dan zou die de aarde gemist hebben. Dan waren de dinosauriërs toen niet uitgestorven en zouden wij er nu misschien helemaal niet zijn. De NEA-inslag van 66 miljoen jaar geleden was niet de eerste in zijn soort, en zeker ook niet de laatste. – 50.000 B.C.: Meteor Crater (Arizona, VS). Meteor Crater werd veroorzaakt door de inslag van een ijzer-nikkel-NEA met afmetingen van 40 tot 50 m ~50,000 jaar geleden, heeft een diameter van 1,2 km en is 170 m diep. – AD 1490: meteorietenregen in China. In februari-maart van het jaar 1490 regende het stenen van 1 kg tot 1,5 kg uit de hemel in het Chíng-yang-district van de provincie Shansi (China). Volgens toenmalige bronnen zouden hierbij meer dan 10.000 mensen zijn omgekomen. – AD 1803: meteorietenregen in L’Aigle (Frankrijk). In de vroege middag van 26 april 1803 regenden meer dan 3000 meteorieten neer op de stad L’Aigle in Normandië. – AD 1908: explosie boven Tunguska (Rusland). Op 30 juni 1908 explodeerde een NEA met een diameter van ~40 m op een hoogte van ~8,5 km in de omgeving van de rivier de Tunguska (Siberië), waarbij een energie van ~4 megaton TNT vrij kwam, die ~2.000 km2 bosoppervlak verwoestte. – AD 2008: inslag van NEA 2008 TC3 boven Soedan. NEA 2008 TC3, met een diameter van ~4 m, werd slechts 19 uur voor inslag ontdekt en ontplofte vervolgens boven de Nubische woestijn in het noorden van Soedan. Direct na de NEA-ontdekking en nog vóór de explosie ontving het MPC 570 waarnemingen van dit object, verricht door 27 waarnemers wereldwijd. Na de inslag werden in de woestijn 280 meteorieten gelokaliseerd met een gezamenlijk gewicht van ruim 4 kg. – AD 2013: inslag boven Chelyabinsk (Rusland). Op 13 februari 2013 explodeerde een NEA met afmetingen van 17-20 m en een massa van ~11.000 ton op een hoogte van ~23 km boven de stad Chelyabinsk (Rusland), waarbij een hoeveelheid energie van ~440 kT TNT vrijkwam. De drukgolf van de ontploffing arriveerde 88 sec. later in de stad, beschadigde meer dan 7.000 gebouwen en verwonde ~1600 personen als gevolg van gesprongen vensters (glaswonden). De NEA moet vlak voor de inslag van de 24ste magnitude zijn geweest en benaderde de aarde binnen 15° van de richting naar de zon met een snelheid van ~19 km/s. – AD 2018: inslag boven de Beringzee. In december 2018 ontplofte een NEA met een energie van bijna 200 kT TNT (meer dan 10 keer de Hiroshima-bom) onverwacht boven de Beringzee.
Het inslagrisico Het risico dat wij op de korte termijn lopen, op de tijdschaal van een mensenleven, komt voornamelijk van NEA’s met afmetingen van 20 tot 40 meter. Kleinere NEA’s, hoewel groter in aantal, verbranden bij inslag geheel in de aardatmosfeer; grotere NEA’s komen minder vaak voor.
Een NEA met Tunguska-afmetingen (~40 m) scheert een aantal keren per jaar binnen de maansafstand langs de aarde en slaat ongeveer eens in de 500 jaar in. Een NEA met Chelyabinsk-afmetingen (~20 m) scheert bijna eens per week langs de aarde binnen de maansafstand en eens per twee jaar binnen de gordel van de geostationaire satellieten (~36.000 km). Ongeveer 10 miljoen NEA’s met Chelyabinsk-afmetingen hebben banen die de aardbaan snijden; hun inslaginterval is van de orde van 50 jaar. Zie de tabel hieronder voor de gevolgen van NEA inslagen als functie van hun afmetingen.
Gemiddelde gevolgen van NEA inslagen als functie van hun afmetingen.
Afbeelding: Yeomans, 2013, p. 115.
NEO-surveys NEO waarneemstations bevinden zich voornamelijk in de VS en worden gefinancierd door NASA, daarin geleid door de George E. Brown Object Survey Act uit 2005, een initiatief van het Amerikaanse Congres. Die wet eist van NASA om vóór het jaar 2020 90% van alle NEO’s met afmetingen groter dan 140 m te ontdekken, te volgen en te karakteriseren om vast te stellen hoe groot de kans op inslagen van deze NEO’s is. Karakterisering (bepaling van hun fysische eigenschappen) is essentieel voor een goed begrip van het effect van NEO-inslagen en wordt verkregen met fotometrie, spectroscopie, radarwaarnemingen en metingen ter plaatse, zoals momenteel op de NEA’s Ryugu en Bennu plaatsvinden door de sample return-ruimtemissies Hayabusa2 en OSIRIS-REx. De meest productieve NEO-surveys zijn de Amerikaanse Catalina Sky Survey (CSS, sinds 1999) en het Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS, sinds 2011). De NEO-survey NEOWISE opereert vanuit de ruimte. CSS is onderdeel van het Lunar and Planetary Laboratory van de University of Arizona (Tucson, VS). De drie CSS-telescopen staan op het Santa Catalina-gebergte ten noorden van Tucson en behoren tot het Steward Observatory van de University of Arizona: een 1,5 m reflector, een 1,0 m reflector en een 0,7 m Schmidt-telescoop. Tot 2013 werd samengewerkt met de aanverwante Siding Spring Survey en diens 0,5 m Uppsala Schmidt-telescoop op het Siding Spring Observatory in Australië. De CSS 1,5 m survey-telescoop is een f/1,6 reflector met een 10.560 × 10.560 pixels CCD-detector in het primaire focus. Per nacht kan een gezichtsveld van 1000 vierkante graden worden waargenomen met een grensmagnitude van V ≈ 21,5 met een belichtingstijd van 30 sec. per opname.
Pan-STARRS op Hawaii.
Afbeelding: Rob Ratkowski.
Pan-STARRS is een observatorium van de University of Hawaï gelegen op Mount Haleakala (Maui, VS). Pan-STARRS heeft twee telescopen, PS1 en PS2, elk met een spiegel van 1,8 m diameter. Deze telescopen observeren gelijktijdig hetzelfde gebied aan de hemel. Elke spiegel heeft een gezichtsveld van drie graden en een CCD-camera met 1,4 miljard pixels. De resolutie aan de hemel bedraagt 0,3 boogseconden. Voor NEO-waarnemingen overziet men een gezichtsveld van 6000 vierkante graden per nacht. Met een belichtingstijd van 30 à 60 sec. kan Pan-STARRS objecten waarnemen tot een magnitude van V ≈ 26. NEOWISE maakt gebruik van de NASA Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) ruimtemissie. De sonde werd gelanceerd in december 2009 en maakte in vier infrarood-golflentebanden (3,4, 4,6, 12, 22 μm) een survey van de hele hemel, tot in september 2010 de koelvloeistof was uitgeput. De missie werd tot februari 2011 vervolgd als NEOWISE bij 3,4 en 4,6 μm, waarna de ruimtesonde in winterslaap werd gebracht. NEOWISE werd in september 2013 uit haar winterslaap gewekt en heeft tot midden oktober 2019 meer dan 860.000 infraroodwaarnemingen aan het MPC geleverd van 35.277 verschillende objecten in ons zonnestelsel, waaronder 1044 NEO’s en 179 kometen.
Geen zorgen om Apophis Zo af en toe duiken er planetoïden op die mensen (in eerste instantie) zorgen baren. Apophis is er eentje van. Apophis is een NEA met diameter van 370 meter, waarvan de eerste waarnemingen in december 2004 een golf van bezorgdheid veroorzaakte. Het leek erop dat Aphopis met een kans van 2,7% op vrijdag 13 (!) april 2029 met de aarde in botsing zou komen. Vervolgwaarnemingen leidden al spoedig tot minder zorgwekkende voorspellingen, maar het duurde nog tot 2013 voordat waarnemingen met de Goldstone-radartelescoop een al te groot risico uitsloten: de inslagkans in 2029 is hooguit 1 op 500.000. Recente berekeningen voorspellen dat Apophis die dag op 31.356 km langs de aarde zal scheren, zichtbaar met het blote oog als een object van magnitude +3,1. Niettemin is deze unieke close encounter van groot wetenschappelijk belang; plannen voor waarneemcampagnes zijn in de maak. Een inslag van een NEA met Apophis-afmetingen kunnen we eens in de 80.000 jaar verwachten. Een datum van grotere zorg is 16 maart 2880 wanneer NEA 1950 DA (afmetingen: 1,39 × 1,46 × 1,07 km) met een inslagkans van 1 op 8330 (0,012%) langs de aarde zal scheren.
Toekomstige surveys De huidige NEO-inventarisatie is marginaal, zoals hierboven gekwantificeerd. Daardoor is het nog niet mogelijk de risico’s van NEO-inslagen goed te bepalen. Twee ambitieuze projecten moeten op korte termijn enigszins soelaas bieden: LSST op aarde en NEOCam in de ruimte. De Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is een 8,4 m optische telescoop, in aanbouw op het Cerro Pachón-gebergte in het noorden van Chili en moet vanaf 2022 operationeel zijn. LSST zal echter slechts gedeeltelijk beschikbaar zijn voor NEO-waarnemingen. LSST wordt geacht om 62% van de potentieel gevaarlijke NEA’s groter dan 140 m in kaart te brengen in een tijdsbestek van 10 jaar. In 12 jaar zou dat mogelijk 90% kunnen worden.
De Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.
Afbeelding: LSST.org.
Alleen met permanente, optische en infrarood observatoria in de ruimte zal het ontdekken, volgen en karakteriseren van NEO’s kunnen leiden tot een zo volledig mogelijke inventarisatie. Het NASA-JPL NEOCam-project behelst een 50 cm telescoop met een groothoek-infraroodcamera voor waarnemingen bij 4 tot 10 μm, met passief gekoelde detectoren tot 40 K. NEOCam zal opereren in het zon-aarde Lagrange punt L1 (ongeveer vier keer verder dan de maan) gedurende minimaal vier jaar, om 66 % van de NEA’s groter dan 140 m te inventariseren en zo mogelijk 90% in 10 jaar. Veertien jaar heeft het NEOCam-voorstel moeten concurreren met andere ruimteonderzoek-voorstellen. Totdat het besef doorbrak dat NEOCam niet alleen van groot wetenschappelijk, maar vooral ook van groot maatschappelijk belang is: de bescherming van aarde en mensen tegen NEO-inslagen. In september 2019 werd het project goedgekeurd en heet nu NEO Surveillance Mission. De lancering is op zijn vroegst in 2025.
Tot slot NEO-inslagen zijn uniek onder de natuurrampen, omdat zij met grote nauwkeurigheid kunnen worden voorspeld, mits er een voldoende complete NEO-inventarisatie beschikbaar is. Omdat NEO-inslagen zich niets van nationale grenzen aantrekken, ligt internationale samenwerking in NEO-surveys voor de hand. De 100-jarige IAU kan hierin een belangrijke rol spelen. Er zullen grote investeringen gedaan moeten worden om een serie NEO-observatoria in de ruimte te installeren rond de zon tussen de banen van Venus en Mars, met als doel om 90% van alle NEOs groter dan 40 m te inventariseren. Alleen dan zal het mogelijk zijn om tijdig waarschuwingen uit te doen gaan voor NEO-inslagen van Tunguska-niveau en zwaarder. In Resolution 3B van de 28ste Algemene Vergadering van de IAU in 2012 wordt aanbevolen om een dergelijk International NEO Early Warning System te stichten. Als verzekeringspremie voor planeet Aarde tegen inslagen van Near Earth Objects, de ongeleide projectielen van de kosmos. In de woorden van oud-directeur van het NASA JPL Center for NEO Studies Donald K. Yeomans (2013, p. 153): “Near Earth Objects are among the smallest members of the solar system, but their diminutive size is in no way proportional to their importance… We better find them, before they find us.”
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
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Tantalising radar shadows have revived hopes that one of history’s most beautiful, and controversial, women — Queen Nefertiti — may indeed be buried in secret chambers within King Tut’s famous tomb.
British and Egyptian Egyptologists earlier this week conducted a three-day radar scan of the world-famous tomb discovered by Howard Carter in 1922.
Upon opening its still-sealed door, he declared he saw “wonderful things”. Everywhere was the glint of gold and priceless examples of some of history’s most exquisite art.
But, since then, the tomb has presented something of a mystery.
It was immediately odd that so many of the statues attributed as Pharoah Tutankhamun had hips and breasts. And more recent, closer, examination reveals a significant proportion of the artwork to have been rebadged, and repurposed, from previous rulers.
And that includes his iconic burial mask.
WHAT LIES BENEATH
In 2015, a ground-penetrating scan of the 3300-year-old tomb was conducted by controversial radar technician Hirokatsu Watanabe. He declared he had detected, with “90 per cent certainty”, several hollow spaces along with “metallic” and “organic” objects.
The world erupted in excitement.
Could another extraordinary discovery be tantalisingly within reach?
Would one of Egypt’s greatest mysteries finally be solved?
Egyptologists were immediately doubtful. His radar scan images seemed uninterpretable — just a mass of blue lines with the occasional red dot. Nobody other than Watanabe seemed able to determine what the scans revealed.
So, the Egyptian Antiquities department organised a second scan — this time with the assistance of National Geographic — in 2016. It found … nothing.
“If we had a void, we should have a strong reflection,” geophysicist Dean Goodman of GPR-Slice software told National Geographic News. “But it just doesn’t exist.”
The locations of speculative chambers have been supported by infra-red and radar scans of Tut’s tomb.
Source:Getty Images
THIRD TIME LUCKY?
The Egypt Independent reports the latest scan of Tut’s tomb concluded on Wednesday.
Egyptian technicians from the Centre for Sound Vibration and Smart Structures at the Faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams University, joined a team from the English Terravision Centre to scour the rock for any trace of hidden chambers.
It’s part of an assessment that is due to be completed by the end of the year.
Egyptian archaeologist Francis Amin told the Egypt Independent the most recent radar survey, conducted by the University of Turin, had revealed spaces behind the walls.
But the resolution of the images did not confirm if these were man-made or natural cavities in the rock.
“The results of previous radar surveys have found evidence of the existence of spaces and organic material behind the walls of the cemetery,” Amin said. He added that specialist chemists will need to help analyse the radar survey results.
BOY KING OR PR STUNT?
Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb doesn’t follow the well-established pattern applied to other Egyptian god-kings. It’s unusually small. And it is shaped more like a burial chamber intended for a queen. And why do so many of the statues and images attributed as King Tutankhamun have feminine hips and breasts?
Some have theorised Tutankhamun suffered from his royal inbreeding and had deformities such as breasts and female hips.
Source:Supplied
British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves put these clues together, including the discovery of partially erased royal names, to suggest the tomb — and much of its contents — was initially intended for Tut’s stepmother, Nefertiti.
Dr Reeves’ 2015 academic paper The Burial of Nefertiti quickly grabbed international attention.
About the same time, a high-resolution 3D laser scan made to help preserve the tomb indicated there may be “hollows” hidden behind the tomb’s plasterwork and paintings. Were these sealed doors?
“The implications are extraordinary: for, if digital appearance translates into physical reality, it seems we are now faced not merely with the prospect of a new, Tutankhamun-era storeroom to the west; to the north appears to be signalled a continuation of tomb … and within these uncharted depths an earlier royal interment — that of Nefertiti herself, celebrated consort, coregent, and eventual successor of pharaoh Akhenaten,” Dr Reeves wrote.
While the evidence was circumstantial, it was enough to pique the interest of the Egyptian Antiquities department to invite Dr Reeves — and others — to examine the tomb more closely.
“Each piece of evidence on its own is not conclusive but put it all together, and it’s hard to avoid my conclusion,” Dr Reeves said. “If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but if I’m right, this is potentially the biggest archaeological discovery ever made.”
British archaeologist Nicholas Reeves believes the new chamber could be the last resting place of Queen Nefertiti, King Tut's mother-in-law.
Source:Supplied
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Dr Reeves has been chasing Nefertiti’s ghost for almost two decades.
In 2000, Dr Reeves led a radar examination of the ground around Tutankhamun’s tomb in a search for Nefertiti’s burial. He reported finding a “void”. But digs failed to locate anything.
His continued enthusiasm, however, has proven contagious.
In 2016, Egypt’s tourism minister enthused: “We do not know if the burial chamber is Nefertiti or another woman, but it is full of treasures … It will be a ‘Big Bang’ — the discovery of the 21st century.”
An interior view of the King Tutankhamun burial chamber in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt.
Source:AAP
So far, the Big Bang hasn’t happened.
And Egyptian Antiquities Minister Khaled El-Enany has insisted no invasive exploration would be allowed to damage the priceless tomb. “It is essential to perform more scans using other devices and more technical and scientific methods,” Mr El-Enany said.
The challenge has since been one of developing the technology capable of achieving that task.
Former Egyptian antiquities minister and high-profile archaeological personality Zahi Hawass has long been a sceptic of the hidden chamber theory.
“If there is any masonry or partition wall, the radar signal should show an image,” he reportedly told National Geographic News.
“We don’t have this, which means there is nothing there.”
Jamie Seidel is a freelance writer. Continue the conversation @JamieSeidel